ABC News(TOKYO) -- A decked-out Pokemon train just popped up in Japan.



Banners hang from the ceiling of this train promoting a new Pokemon video game.



From the landscape setting on the floor to the characters on the windows, the company didnt miss a detail.



For a limited time, the Tokyo Metro Ginza and Marunouchi lines will be promoting two new Pokemon video games.



The commuter lines will feature the special train cars for a limited time.



Pokemon: Lets Go Pikachu! and Pokemon: Lets Go Eevee! launch Nov. 16.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.Political prisoner, activist, journalist, hymn-writer, emerging think tanker, aspiring novelist, hanger on of academia, parliamentary candidate for North West Durham, Shadow Leader of the Opposition, Speedboat, proudly banned from Twitter so officially more dangerous than the Taliban, eagerly awaiting the second (or possibly third) attempt to murder me.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.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.There is omerta within the criminal justice system: it seeks to disguise from the public the extent to which murders have been committed as a result of its own policies.

Unlike the Mafia, these murders  or other crimes of extreme violence  are not their own deliberate handiwork.

But they are still the direct consequence of state policy  and whats more, the state knows that they are.

That conspiracy of silence by insiders has now been broken  by someone who has spent his entire career within the criminal justice system, first as a probation officer and then as a criminal intelligence analyst within the National Crime Agency.

Stephen Unwin, right, and William McFall, left, robbed, raped and bludgeoned a mother of two to death in August 2017 having both previously been jailed for murder

The pair brutally murdered Quyen Ngoc Nguyen, pictured, by leaving her in a car and setting it alight before taking selfies at the scene

His name is David Fraser. He is the author of Licence To Kill: Britains Surrender To Violence, which has just been published by The Book Guild.

It is an insiders explanation of what the Mail, in recent days, has once again exposed: the way what is laughably referred to as our justice system repeatedly fails to impose custodial terms on habitual violent offenders  with the inevitable results.

Contempt

Last year, violent crime surged by over 20 per cent, with 1.5 million such offences recorded by the police, the most since the present system of crime reporting began 15 years ago.

David Frasers professional experience goes much further back  and his disillusionment, too.

As he writes: In 1967, I joined the probation service with the then commonly-held expectation that offenders, given help and support, could be persuaded to lead the straight life. It soon became obvious that this was a forlorn hope. The vast majority of the criminals on our caseloads never gave up crime, and treated the courts leniency with contempt.

The evidence of the failure of probation supervision, and other forms of lenient sentencing, has been recorded and stored by the government, but assiduously ignored . . . The criminals on our books were treating their periods on probation as a licence to offend and committed violence and mayhem wherever and whenever they liked. But few dared to speak up about this.

That sense of impunity is also based on the belief that they wont be caught.

Yes, our prisons are already crowded. But the proper response to such a situation cant be to find ever more reasons not to send repeat violent offenders to jail. Pictured is HMP Nottingham (file image)

As Fraser points out, the nature of modern policing gives them good reason: A report by the police inspectorate revealed that overall they spend 22 per cent of their time on support functions, while for 47 per cent of their time they were policing roads and carrying out community work. Only 31 per cent of their time was spent dealing with criminals, of which only 13 per cent was devoted to investigating crime.

The consequence of reducing crime investigation to a small fraction of the polices day-to-day work is obvious: last year, in only 4 per cent of robberies were the criminals concerned detected and convicted, less than half the rate of only a few years ago. And as the Civitas think-tank revealed last year, criminal insouciance can only be increased by the fact that just a third of those convicted of violent crimes are given custodial sentences.

David Green, the director of Civitas, pointed out in the Mail last week: Incredibly, even half of those with 11 to 14 convictions avoided a prison term.

Yes, our prisons are already crowded. But the proper response to such a situation cant be to find ever more reasons not to send repeat violent offenders to jail. This is to treat the prison estate like a hotel business: sorry, wed like to give you a room, but were full up. Actually, a good hotel business would see this as a reason to invest in more capacity, rather than turn customers away: the same should apply to our prison estate.

In fact, the longer the prison sentence, the less the reoffending rate.

As Fraser notes, there is a reoffending rate of 60 per cent among those who serve sentences of less than a year, 39 per cent for those sentenced to between one and two years, 34 per cent for two to four years, 25 per cent for ten years and 14 per cent reoffending by those who have served terms of ten years or more.

Violent

Given that the longer sentences would be served by more dedicated and dangerous criminals, this is striking: it demonstrates the deterrent effect of tougher sentencing.

And in turn, this suggests that while tougher sentencing would initially demand an expansion of the prison estate (and therefore public expenditure), it would, in the longer term, lead to a drop in violent crime and therefore reduce the pressure on jail space. Most importantly, it would protect the public, which is the essential purpose of the criminal justice system.

Frasers recommendation is for an introduction of a two-strikes system, under which, for example, those convicted of attempted murder who had already served time for earlier crimes of violence against the person, would be sentenced to life without prospect of parole.

The pair were convicted in Newcastle Crown Court (pictured) of the murder of 29-year-old Ms Ngoc Nguyen

This would have saved the life of my wifes cousin, John Monckton. In 2005, he was stabbed to death  and his wife terribly wounded  by Damien Hanson, only months after he had been released having served just six years of a 12-year sentence for attempted murder (with a machete). Hanson had a record of previous violent offences. Unbelievably, the parole board which took the decision to release Hanson designated him in the lowest category of danger to the public, even though it had assessed him as having a 91 per cent probability of reoffending.

Fraser discusses this case. But his book went to press too early to record the conclusion of a trial earlier this year, which more than any other justifies his demand that a life sentence for murder should mean just that (the average prison term actually served for murder is 16 years).

In March, two men were convicted in Newcastle Crown Court of the murder of a 29-year-old mother of two, Quyen Ngoc Nguyen. In a pre-meditated crime of unimaginable depravity, Stephen Unwin and William McFall robbed, raped and bludgeoned this 5ft-tall nail bar manager.

They dumped her  possibly still alive  in her own car, which they then set alight. They posed for ghoulish selfies at the scene.

Bizarre

Both men were already convicted killers, released as a result of parole board hearings.

McFall, now 51, had been freed after serving 13 years for battering to death with a hammer an 86-year-old woman whose home he had burgled.

Unwin, ten years younger, had been released after serving 14 years of a life sentence for stabbing to death a 73-year-old retired pharmacist in the course of a burglary  on Christmas Day, 1998. Unwin had sought to cover up his tracks by setting fire to his victims bungalow.

There is no parole board on earth which can know if someone is truly remorseful (pictured: Nick Hardwick, former Parole Board chair)

He was released in 2012, because the parole board had believed his claim to feel deep remorse.

In fact, there is no parole board on earth which can know if someone is truly remorseful. They can only know if a murderer says he is remorseful; and as it is obligatory to be penitent for parole to be considered, it is obvious to even the stupidest criminal that he should declare himself to be so.

Parole boards should not even have to make such decisions about murderers.

And if life meant life, they wouldnt be put in such a position  nor would probation officers be required to add such cases to their already impossible task of monitoring far too many released serious criminals.

As a retired judge, Lindsay Burn, observed when the parole board made a bizarre decision earlier this year to authorise the release of the multiple rapist Derek Worboys (this so-called Black Cab rapist, too, had expressed deep regret): I had a case in which I sentenced a rapist for imprisonment for public protection, and he was released and committed exactly the same offence afterwards. His risk clearly could not be managed. We should not pretend the public are safe when they are not.

Exactly so.

We should be grateful to those, such as Lindsay Burn and David Fraser, who reveal the way the system betrays the public it claims to protect.

But if the politicians do not listen and act, then they are also betraying these courageous whistleblowers.Whereas 100 years ago, the Suffragettes fought a noble battle to get women the vote, todays feminist sisterhood is mired in an unseemly squabble over a statue.

It involves plans to relocate a tribute to the Suffragette heroine Emmeline Pankhurst from its site near the Houses of Parliament to a spot in the grounds of Regents University a few miles away across London  sparking outrage from some and accusations of vandalism against womens history.

The idea of moving it comes from the Emmeline Pankhurst Trust. A replacement 12ft-high bronze Pankhurst statue would be installed on Canning Green overlooking Parliament, paid for by the trust.

A row has erupted over the moving of a statue of Suffragette heroine Emmeline Pankhurst

Among leading women politicians backing this arrangement are Theresa May, Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom and Baroness (Betty) Boothroyd.

The latters involvement is crucial. As Britains first, and only, female Commons Speaker, the baroness is one of the most formidable and respected parliamentarians.

Regents University is located where Bedford College, the countrys first higher education institution for women was sited, and Boothroyd, 88, enthusiastically backs the plans to move the Pankhurst statue there, while a prominent one is put up near Parliament.

With characteristic dignity and common sense, Boothroyd asks: What are these feminists so upset about? She points out that the current statue is off the beaten track.

She adds: Im sure Emmeline Pankhurst would have approved. We will also have an enhanced statue of Pankhurst, in full view of the Houses of Parliament. Feminists should celebrate, not carp about that. Bravo, Betty!

Theres a spaniel in the works

Semi-house-trained Labour attack dog Alastair Campbell was interrupted by sudden, unexpected growling while being interviewed last week on LBC radio by Nick Ferrari. Campbell butted in to say: Youll have to hang on a minute, the puppy is eating my glasses. A case of the biter bit as Blairs former rottweiler introduced his five-month-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel called Skye for his radio debut.

Alastair Campbell was interrupted on LBC radio last week by Nick Ferrari

The BBC is trumpeting its new drama, The Left Behind, on its yoof BBC3 platform. The programme, it says, explores how anti-immigrant sentiment lures a young white man to join a far-Right group. Will the producers follow up with a drama about how anti-Semite sentiment lures a young white woman to join the Labour Party?

Retort the week: Alan Dershowitz, Emeritus Professor at Harvard Law School, was scathing after being asked by correspondent Matt Frei on Channel 4 News if the U.S. has lost its moral backbone amid claims about Donald Trump ordering the payment of hush-money to alleged former mistresses. Where is the moral backbone of Great Britain? retorted Dershowitz.

Referring to Jeremy Corbyns alleged anti-Semitism  which the Labour leader denies  Dershowitz said: Dont lecture us about our political system as l long as you have Jeremy Corbyn who may potentially become the next Prime Minister.

Rent-a-quote Remoaner Lord Adonis, a former Labour minister, is musing about whether to emigrate if Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg become PM.

Saying he has considered France and his native Cyprus, he writes in the New Statesman that Ireland may be the ideal bolt-hole. As a former transport minister, he says he admires Irelands train network.

All suggestions of quaint stations gratefully received, he says, especially if theres an old stationmasters house for sale!From a hen nesting on a litter of kittens to a lion determined to squeeze into a wheelbarrow, these hilarious Snapchat images are sure to make you chuckle.

The images were shared on the app by users from around the world and compiled in an online gallery by Bored Panda.

Some of the snaps capture unlikely friendships between animals, including an affectionate deer who takes a shine to a decidedly unimpressed Boxer.

Another photo of a windswept pigeon is transformed by a caption describing it as a 'Marilyn moment'.

Here, FEMAIL shares some of the funnies examples...

Social media users from around the world shared their very best animal Snaps that were compiled in an online gallery. Pictured, a chicken takes the meaning of 'mother hen' to a new level as she tries to protect three tiny kittens from a storm. Posted by Reddit user Wine-weed-wednesday

This photo of a windswept pigeon on an air vent was transformed by a clever caption comparing it to Marilyn Monroe's iconic moment. Taken by Sarah Kavassalis from Toronto

An affectionate deer licks a decidedly unimpressed Boxer after taking a shine to its new friend. Poster unknown

Despite its size, this enormous lion managed to squeeze itself into a tiny wheelbarrow. Photo taken by Oaklawn Farm Zoo in Aylesford, Canada

A homeowner could see the funny side after they spotted a raccoon reclining in the gutter. Taken by Reddit user pew_pew_Lazoooorrr

A stag did his best to blend in by lying down on a soft bed next to a cat and a dog. Posted by Reddit user xBTFBx

This Snapchat user was delighted to receive this photo of two friends bonding in the tropics. Posted by Reddit user 0ff_Beat

A cheeky squirrel looked pleased with itself after it snuck onto a dinner table and stole a chip. Posted by Reddit user MrPuckett

Two of these birds were happy to pose for a picture, but the other one had to play up for the cameras. Posted R/Parrots

This pet owner came up with a clever trick to keep an eye on their turtle by tying a balloon to its shell so it wouldn't disappear from view. Posted by Twitter user Angela Brisk

This little crow looked thrilled after it was given its very own little woolly hat to keep it warm. Posted by Reddit user Bawookles

The person who bought this adorable bunny rabbit had meant to buy a fish, so called it Fish when they brought it home. Posted by Imgur user AtLeastMyInternetConnectionWorks

This little duck seemed to be feeling left out while standing in a flock of beautiful flamingos so decided to copy them by standing on one leg. Taken by Reddit user beccapizza

After an alpaca gave birth its owners decided to name their other pet, a chicken called Nugget, as the baby's godmother. Poster unknownLearning the gender of a baby is an emotional milestone for any couple - but for one pregnant California woman, the surprise proved to be more memorable than she ever could have guessed, thanks to the work of her husband.

Jennifer Jones-Prothro, 38, from Vacaville, is currently expecting her ninth child in December, and - having learned the gender of each child in advance with every other pregnancy - she was determined to keep the news a secret on this occasion, or at the very least ensure that the reveal was a truly meaningful moment.

So, her husband James, 43, arranged the perfect surprise, using the voice of her late father Charles - who passed away last year from cancer - in order to deliver the happy news that they are having a baby girl together.

Surprise! California mother Jennifer Jones-Prothro, 38, was surprised with a unique gender reveal by her husband James, 43, who used her late father's voice to reveal their baby's sex

Overjoyed: Upon hearing her father Charles's voice coming out of the speaker, the mother-of-eight, who is expecting her ninth child in December, burst into tears of joy

In a heart-rending video of the reveal, Jenny can be seen holding a speaker in her hands, grinning excitedly at the camera while sitting cross-legged on a couch as a recording of James's voice begins to play.

'Jenny, this is the most special, creative way that I could think of to tell you the sex of our child,' the recorded voice explains, before adding: 'But I couldn't do it without a little help.'

It is then that Charles's voice chimes in to deliver the all-important message, speaking to his daughter through a recording that was created using old voicemails he had left Jenny while he was still alive.

'I love ya!' Charles (pictured), who passed away from cancer last year, was described by James as his wife's 'everything'

'Hello Jenny, this is your father!' the recording exclaims, leaving Jenny with a look of total disbelief on her face, while people in the background are heard exclaiming their shock and awe.

'I want to let you know that it is a girl,' the voice continues, as the soon-to-be mother-of-nine breaks down into tears of joy, covering her face with one hand, while clinging onto the speak with the other.

'It is a girl,' the recording repeats, before signing off: 'I love ya, bye bye!'

The video ends with Jenny sitting on the couch sobbing, while her husband sits alongside her and simply says: 'I love you baby.'

James's decision to reveal the joyful news to his wife in such an incredible way came after she challenged him to surprise her with the news using a method that was creative - and had never been done before.

Jenny's husband had learned the sex of their baby months ago, but had kept it a closely-guarded secret at the request of his wife, who wanted to wait to find out the gender of their ninth child as a kind of tribute to her father, Charles, who would always want to be surprised with the news at the birth.

'My dad always wanted to be surprised by it,' Jenny explained to CNN. 'There are not many surprises left in the world these days.'

Special bond: Jenny, pictured with Charles, had decided to wait to find out the sex of her child in order to honor her father's love of surprises

Emotional: A video of the reveal shows Jenny weeping with happiness after hearing her father's voice, and learning the gender of her child

'Blessed': Jenny paid tribute to James on Facebook, praising him as 'the best and most creative hubby ever'

However, six months into the pregnancy - and with her friends eagerly awaiting the news so they could plan a themed baby shower - she decided that she wanted to know, but that she still wanted to honor her father's love of surprises. Hence her request to James to make the gender reveal a truly exceptional experience.

'He was her everything,' James said of his decision to use Charles's voice to deliver the news, explaining that he couldn't think of a better way to honor her beloved dad.

'My wife told me that if I revealed the sex of our baby it had to be creative,' he added while sharing the news on Facebook.

'I could think of no better way than to hear it from her Dad! Rip Mr J and thanks for your help!!!!'

James's heartfelt gesture certainly seems to have exceeded his wife's expectations - but it has also touched the hearts of millions of people around the globe.

After her daughter Ana shared the video of the emotional reveal on her Twitter account, it quickly went viral - racking up a staggering 7.36 million views in just three days.

And it's not just Twitter users that have been bowled over by James's creative tribute; both he and Jenny have shared the video on Facebook, where it has been met by thousands of kind comments from both family and friends, as well as strangers chiming in to congratulate the couple on their happy news.

'I am truly blessed beyond measure with the best and most creative hubby ever!!' Jenny wrote in her Facebook post, before explaining: 'For those of you who dont know, my dad passed away a year ago and hubby used the voicemails my dad left me to create this treasure.'Last week, people were horrified to learn of a mother's shock - after she uncovered significant amounts of mould hidden in a 'secret' compartment in her children's lunchboxes.

The New Zealand-based woman, Grace Bollen, posted photographs of the mould-filled containers on Facebook as a warning to other parents with similar lunchboxes, before receiving more than 1.5 thousand shares.

Since then, other mothers have revealed their tactics to help identify whether there is mould in their containers - without having to rip them open and ruin them.

Last week, people were horrified to learn of a mother's shock - after she uncovered significant amounts of mould hidden in a 'secret' compartment in her children's lunchboxes (pictured)

One such tactic to check for mould is the 'torch tactic', whereby you hold your container up to the light to see any mould (pictured)

One such tactic to check for mould is the 'torch tactic', shared on a parenting Facebook group.

'Don't smash your lunchboxes please guys,' one woman posted.

'Follow the care instructions. Hold it up to the light on a regular basis to put your mind at ease. Easy peasy [sic].'

When someone said this wouldn't work for them as their lunchbox is dark blue in colour, another said there is a way around this:

'If you shine a torch from behind you can see through the dark ones. I did this with my phone torch and could see through,' she said.

While this works for lighter-coloured lunchboxes (pictured), others said you might have to shine a phone light on those that are darker coloured

In order to prevent yourself from ripping them open (pictured), one person recommended slipping a piece of clean white paper between the cracks and conducting a 'sniff test'

If you want to try another tactic to find out whether your lunchbox has mould in it, one mother recommended getting a piece of paper.

'Take a clean piece of white paper and slide it down the gap between the glued section and the outer case to see if it comes out dirty,' she said.

She then said you can do a 'sniff test' with the piece of paper to see if it doesn't smell right.

Grace Bollen was sending her r kids to school with homemade snacks every day until she made a grim discovery behind the glued-on lid of her household cases (pictured)

Last week, New Zealand mother Grace Bollen shared a shocking social media post revealing a significant body of 'mould' lurking beneath the factory sealed compartment of her children's lunchboxes.

The mum was sending her kids to school with homemade snacks every day until she made a grim discovery behind the glued-on lid of her household cases.

Taking to Facebook, she expressed distress over her children eating lunch from mould-contaminated containers.

'This is what I found  I am absolutely appalled,' she wrote.

Sharing a series of three images to accompany the text, the dismayed mum expressed her disgust at the alarming volume of mould growing inches away from her kid's daily lunches.

'I feel awful that my children have been eating lunch out of these.

'The lunchboxes have been hand washed each night and left open to dry,' she added.

Taking to Facebook , she expressed distress over her children eating lunch from mould-contaminated containers, before receiving more than 1.5 thousand shares (pictured)

The worried woman said she had been using the blue lunchbox for roughly nine months while the yellow and green container had been used for about a year.

Sharing advice to other unsuspecting mothers, she urged shoppers never to buy 'any lunchboxes that you can't clean all the parts' of.

According to the mother, the retailers of the lunchboxes are Stuck On You and Lunch Box Inc. who she said are 'working to rectify the problem with manufacturers to make them water tight'.

Speaking to FEMAIL, the Director of LunchBox Inc. expressed his shock at the condition of the brand's container.

'It's terrible that this has happened - it's complete news to us, we had no idea this was happening before this lady contacted us.

'We've made attempts to speak with the manufacturers because this is awful and we want to find a solution as quickly as possible.

'We need to determine if this is just a bad batch or whether it's a recurring fault in the production process.'

Since the original post, the company said they have also received a number of emails from other concerned customers.

'We are also working with individual customers to rectify the problem on a personal basis.'

Daily Mail Australia also reached out to Stuck On You lunchbox provider for comment.Advertisement

Katie and Mark Sievers were only teenagers when they set an ambitious goal to retire at 30.

The New Zealand couple, who have two daughters named Poppie, five, and Lillie, two, have always been driven and worked extremely hard - Mark as a builder and Katie initially as an account assistant.

'The goal was not to be able to literally retire, stop working altogether and travel the world necessarily but to give us financial freedom and security to choose what we wanted to be able to do for work,' Katie, now 34, told FEMAIL.

Katie (pictured with her daughters Pollie and Lillie) and Mark Sievers were only teenagers when they set an ambitious goal to retire at 30

The New Zealand couple, who have two daughters named Poppie, five, and Lillie, two, have always been driven and worked extremely hard - Mark as a builder and Katie initially as an account assistant

In 2017 - just three years past their dream retirement age - the duo were able to stop working.

'It has taken us (particularly Mark) many years of hard work, second jobs on the weekend, working constantly on our own properties and businesses in the evenings to make happen,' Katie explained.

'Our plan was originally to just have a month off, rent a place by the beach somewhere warm and just finally relax and spend some quality time all together.

'That idea somehow snowballed into travelling full-time. We have had a really full-on and stressful last 10, particularly five, years and we wanted to have some fun together and focus on putting each other and our girls first.

'We felt we only had a few years until the girls are at school and we wanted to spend that time with them.'

In 2017 - just three years past their dream retirement age - the duo were able to stop working

'Our plan was originally to just have a month off, rent a place by the beach somewhere warm and just finally relax and spend some quality time all together,' Katie said

To finance their trip the family relies on the rental property Mark purchased when he was 20 and a number of other estates, including the funds from renting out their family home near Auckland.

And while travelling full-time might seem daunting for the average person it was even more so for Katie and Mark.

'Mark and I had never travelled before this, so it's been a real adventure. We aren't just traveling full-time, we are doing it with little kids too,' she explained.

'We've also learnt that we are not on holiday as such, traveling full-time means we can't have massively busy days everyday and eat out for all our meals. What works for us is to keep the routine - the naps, bedtimes and good healthy meals.

'We may be in different places every week but we keep the same routine most of the time. We achieve that by travelling slowly.

To finance their trip the family relies on the rental property Mark purchased when he was 20 and the funds from renting out their family home near Auckland

Budgeting is key for the family of four and so far they've spent time in many of the 'cheaper countries' or cities in Central America and Eastern Europe

'We try and stay a week in each spot and visit a couple of areas in each country. We can't do massive flights every week and ping pong around the world. Sometimes yes, we do have to do an overnighter or three nights here and there, a week in some places is a long time, but we try not to do a lot of that back to back.

'And we almost always rent a place with a kitchen and a separate bedroom - this is a biggie for us - healthy meals and good sleep are important.'

Budgeting is key for the family of four and so far they've spent time in many of the 'cheaper countries' or cities in Central America and Eastern Europe.

'We usually spend a few weeks in each country. That means we are not flying every week - plane tickets are our biggest expense - and the longer we stay in each place the more the cost per day goes down,' Katie said.

'It also means we can do a decent supermarket shop so again you can get more bang for buck out of staple items.

'We usually spend a few weeks in each country. That means we are not flying every week - plane tickets are our biggest expense - and the longer we stay in each place the more the cost per day goes down,' Katie said

They started their travels in Hawaii in August last year, before visiting Mark's family in Washington State

'If we can travel by bus, train or ferry we do as its generally cheaper than flying but with the girls so young we also have our limits so we weigh up easy vs the cost.

'Renting an apartment or holiday home we have found to be usually cheaper than staying at a hotel, plus there is a kitchen and a bit more space. That saves us money as we eat nearly all of our meals at "home" and gives us somewhere to just chill out, we don't always have to go out, lots of places have a yard or shared pool.

'Many places have great local markets or road side stalls which are great for in season fruits and veggies. We don't do activities every day, tours and boat trips. We do a lot of free things, exploring the city, hikes, museums, parks and just going to the beach.'

They started their travels in Hawaii in August last year, before visiting Mark's family in Washington State.

'We did six days in London, before getting a cheap flight to Crete, Greece, and from there we caught a nine-hour ferry to Athens before coming to Corfu,' Katie said

While many travelling families tend to sell their homes and worldly possessions to make the experience more permanent, the Sievers always wanted something to come back to

From there they've been to Mexico, Belize, Cost Rica, Panama and Colombia before eventually flying across to Europe.

'We did six days in London, before getting a cheap flight to Crete, Greece, and from there we caught a nine-hour ferry to Athens before coming to Corfu,' Katie said.

'We leave for Croatia in a few days, after that we plan to make use of the amazing Europe rail system and visit Hungary, Austria, Italy, before staying with friends in Ireland and then going to watch a friend compete in Spain.

'I am hoping to add Morocco in at the end too! After Europe we will reassess, but our thoughts are maybe Africa and then Asia.'

While many travelling families tend to sell their homes and worldly possessions to make the experience more permanent, the Sievers always wanted something to come back to.

'I guess that's why we have never travelled before... we really prioritised that over anything else. We would not have sold our house to travel, but that is just us,' she explained.

'And that would be our advice, set yourself up first.'

You can follow the family's adventures on their Instagram page Kiwi and Free.Q: Im post-menopausal with oily skin, but I can only find dry-skin products for my age group. Ive heard that Botox can tackle oiliness. Should I try it?

A: Cloudless skin is a South Korean phenomenon that involves tiny, superficial injections of Botox all over the face, blocking the neurotransmitter that sets off oil production.

But, says reconstructive surgeon Dr Marko Lens (markolens.com), clinical trials show underwhelming results.

Plus, in the wrong hands (i.e. not a qualified doctor), skin damage could be significant, so I would steer clear.

An anonymous reader asked Inge van Lotringen for advice on tackling oily skin (file image)

Dermatologist Sam Bunting (drsambunting.com) prefers professional skincare.

The prescription retinoid tretinoin is the best thing for refining thicker, oily skin with enlarged pores, she says.

It also addresses the diminishing collagen supplies you get when oestrogen levels drop.

For older skin, I adopt a gentle approach. I might pre-treat with niacinamide, which is great for pore clarity, pigmentation and fine lines, but also boosts the production of protective natural mole- cules called ceramides in the epidermis.

This improves skin hydration and makes skin less prone to retinoid-related dryness.

Add daily broad-spectrum sunscreen and you have a winning formula.

As for treatments, she rates microneedling (skin is punctured with a roller featuring 0.5-1mm needles, boosting collagen production) to strengthen skin further.

Inge van Lotringen (pictured) advised the reader to see a dermatologist such as Sam Bunting who recommends prescription retinoid tretinoin

Ingeborg van Lotringen is beauty director at Cosmopolitan. Email your questions to inge@dailymail.co.ukWhen Dianne Laurance was 'dumped' by her husband of 26 years, she decided to take revenge in a very public fashion: through an Instagram dedicated to life after divorce.

Hailed by American Vogue as 'the best Instagram account in all recorded history', Dumped Wife's Revenge was founded by the Western Australia based businesswoman in a bid to instill optimism and positivity around the world.

The lifestyle guru has been posting for the past 12 months with the aim of using her growing influence to empower and inspire women to 'always be their fabulous best'.

Hailed by American Vogue as 'the best Instagram account in all recorded history', Dumped Wife's Revenge was founded by the Western Australia based businesswoman in a bid to instill optimism and positivity around the world

Dumped Wife's Revenge was launched on the back of Ms Laurance's website of the same name; her Instagram now boasts more than 12,000 followers.

Ms Laurance decided to start a new, positive chapter in her life after her marriage broke down and her business was caught up in the divorce settlement.

She shares daily lessons about life after being dumped alongside images of herself wearing form fitting outfits in bright, bold colours and vibrant patterns.



Ms Laurance shares daily lessons about life after being dumped alongside images of herself wearing form fitting outfits in bright, bold colours and vibrant patterns

The straight talking singleton records social media videos from the comfort of her self-titled 'Dumped Wife's Chair'.

'Friends are always asking me why I put myself out there and let complete strangers know everything about your life?

'Well to be honest, I don't give a damn  I feel I'm inspiring people to get on with life when life dumps on them!' she said in a recent Instagram video.

'To be honest, I don't give a damn  I feel I'm inspiring people to get on with life when life dumps on them!' - Ms Laurance

Ms Laurance couldn't believe she had been featured by American Vogue, let alone lauded as a must-follow account

Appearing on The Morning Show, Ms Laurance said she couldn't believe she had been featured by American Vogue, let alone lauded as a must-follow account.

'All these emails started to come in [from American journalists] saying they loved and understood the message of Dumped Wife's Revenge,' she said.

The flamboyant influencer was so excited about the fashion giants' endorsement that she spelled Vogue incorrectly on her Instagram and said she 'nearly vomited' as a result.

The flamboyant influencer was so excited about the fashion giants' endorsement that she spelled Vogue incorrectly on her Instagram and said she 'nearly vomited' as a result

But instead of deleting the post and re-sharing, Ms Laurance showed her authenticity by simply writing 'apologies to Vogue for spelling mistake' in the caption, a realness her audience have come to love her for.

Ms Laurance has met influential figureheads including former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, actor Chris Hemsworth, politician Julie Bishop and even Lionel Richie.

Dumped Wife's Revenge is currently in talks for three reality television shows for the US market.It's fair to say that women are attracted to a man who puts time and effort into his appearance.

Whether that be trimming his beard before a date or keeping up with the latest fashion trends, these things amplify a potential partner's attractiveness.

But for those men hoping a lengthy spritz of musky cologne will seal the deal with their lady love, it might be easier if they just use her perfume.

It would be true to say women are attracted to a man who puts time and effort into his appearance (stock image)

'He doesn't put one squirt on but four squirts all over him,' Tanya told the hosts when she discussed her husband's secret weapon

A woman named Tanya called into the Kyle and Jackie O show to explain how her 'heavily tattooed' husband wears a Katy Perry fragrance to work each day.

'He doesn't put one squirt on but four squirts all over him,' she told the hosts.

'He goes to work and the women think he smells sexy. Now they buy his perfume for him.'

The conversation came just moments after Kyle Sandilands revealed he often wears The Real Housewives of Melbourne star Gina Liano's signature scent

'I'm wearing it today. I know it's a ladies fragrance but I think I smell good in it,' he told co-host Jackie 'O' Henderson

The latest 'Indi Visible' perfume by the pop songstress has top notes of pink pepper, purple plum and vanilla with middle notes of coconut.

The conversation came just moments after Kyle Sandilands revealed he often wears The Real Housewives of Melbourne star Gina Liano's signature scent.

'I'm wearing it today. I know it's a ladies' fragrance but I think I smell good in it,' he told co-host Jackie 'O' Henderson.

Kyle had the idea after Pamela Anderson's ex husband Tommy Lee (pictured) featured on their radio show and spoke about his love for Kai's roll on women's perfume

'I think I'll try the new Delta one next. I know it sounds a bit feminine but I like it.'

Gina Liano's self-named eau de toilette opens with 'citrus accords of mandarin and bergamot with a floral nuance of jasmine, geranium, violet and rose'.

Kyle had the idea after Pamela Anderson's ex husband Tommy Lee featured on their radio show and spoke about his love for Kai's roll on women's perfume.

Why are women attracted to certain male scents? In experiments where women have been presented with men's natural body odours, there are certain traits that tend to rate as smelling better. The potential scent attraction that's received the most attention is that women seem to favour the smells of men who have immune genes that differ from their own. The theory is that women might be sniffing out men's major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a group of genes that effect the immune system. Following evolutionary theory, this makes sense. Women would want to mate with men who have different genes because that's more likely to result in offspring who can weather more diverse threats. Advertisement

A forum on AskMen revealed that this is a far-reaching trend, with men more than happy to try out a woman's perfume brand.

Black Orchid by Tom Ford, Angel by Thierry Mugler and Portrait of a Lady by Frederic Malle have the 'uni-sex' scent men desire without being marketed as 'girly'.

Scientifically speaking the male scent is very important when it comes to attracting a woman.

Experiments show women tend to choose a partner by sniffing out those with 'immune genes' that differ from their own.

The theory is that women might be sensing men's major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a group of genes that effect the immune system.

Women would want to mate with men who have different genes because that's more likely to result in children who can weather more diverse threats and live longer.As workers across England enjoy the long Bank Holiday weekend, one businessman has called for a four-day week to replace the 9am-5pm - without dropping pay.

Andrew Barnes, who is based in New Zealand, has implemented the change in his own business, and claims his employees work even harder in their shorter weeks to earn the reward of a long weekend.

Speaking on Good Morning Britain, Mr Barnes argued the world had changed and the working week should change with it, as many families don't have one parent staying at home to look after the children.

GMB viewers backed the idea, with one tweeting that it will improve 'work/life balance and well-being'.

Mr Banes runs a trust management company called Perpetual Guardian, which claims staff stress levels have lowered from 45 per cent to 38 per cent after the trial, and work/life balance rose to 78 per cent from 54.

Andrew Barnes, who is based in New Zealand, implemented a four day week in his company Perpetual Guardian, a trust management firm, and claims it has made his staff more productive. Pictured on Good Morning Britain on ITV on Monday

He said: 'The reality is it really was a sensible conversation I had with the staff about if you deliver me the productivity I'm looking for, and if you can do it faster, if you can do it four days, then I'm happy.

'I'm getting the output for which I'm paying for you're getting a day off.'

He claimed that the five-day eight hours a day week is an outdated concept that doesn't fit with the modern world.

GMB viewers took to Twitter to backed the idea of companies reducing staff hours to just four days a week, with one tweeting that it will improve 'work/life balance and well-being' (pictured)

He continued: 'It's a construct of the 19th century. Our lives, how we work, how we interact, what causes distractions in a day, looking at social media, issues from home, one member of the family isn't always at home looking after the family  that's all changed.

'What I'm saying is let's have a conversation on productivity, let's have a conversation on working smarter and if we can therefore shorten the working week, that has significant broader social benefits.'

Viewers took to Twitter to call for four-day week to be implemented across the UK.

One tweeted: 'Great for people's work/life balance and well-being. I've worked a four day week since having my children and it has worked for my family really well. Yes it's a dip in income but our well-being is more important.'

Andrew Barnes, left, argued that the world has changed and the working week should be changed with it, as many families can't have one parent staying at home with the children. Pictured on GMB with Apprentice winner James White

'I think the 4 day week is a brilliant idea ! I'm a department leader myself and I believe it will Improve productivity!' another posted.

A third agreed: 'Me myself and I work 4days a week and it works for me 38hours .. 3 days off feels like a week #happydays.'

Other countries across Europe has shorter working weeks than the UK, including Germany, whose employees work 28 hours, and France, who do 35.

He said companies would go to other recruitment firms if he doesn't have staff in. Pictured right with Mr Banes (second right), Kate Garraway (second left) and Jeremy Kyle (left)

Mr Barnes was debating with last year's Apprentice winner James White, who said shorter weeks aren't practical for some firms.

He runs his own recruitment company called Right Time Recruitment and argued that he would lose out on work if he has to give employees an extra day off.

He explained: 'If I had a client who came to me on a Wednesday and sent me a job saying ''Could you work this?'' and my guy wasn't in on a Wednesday and they sent it to someone else, he could come back in on the Thursday could be already gone.'Jeremy Clarkson's daughter Emily has revealed why she decided to not go to university - describing how she's 'saved a fortune' by not having to pay 9,000-a-year fees.

Emily, 24, who lives in London, explained how she didn't get the three As she needed to study politics and sociology at the University of Leeds.

However, she decided not to re-sit her exams and re-apply, describing how the cost of university 'didnt seem worth it'.

Emily, whose father Jeremy has an estimated net worth of around 30million, added that she believes that she has had an advantage of 'jumping straight into work'.

Jeremy Clarkson's daughter Emily, 24, (pictured in August last year on Lorraine) has revealed why she decided to not go to university - describing how she's 'saved a fortune'

Writing in the Sunday Times Magazine, Emily - who is a writer and blogger - explained: 'I did not go to university, and have no regrets about it.

'By choosing to forgo a diploma and three years of stealing traffic cones and eating cereal, I got a head start on my life, jumping straight into work while saving a fortune.'

Emily recalled 'putting [her] head between [her] knees and sobbing' after she missed the three AAAs and a B she needed to secure her place at the University of Leeds, instead getting an A*, B and two Cs.

However, she insisted that she does not regret her decision to not go to university, meaning that she doesn't have the 50,000 debt many of her friends have.

Emily, who is a writer (above at her book launch in July last year), explained how she didn't get the three As she needed to study politics and sociology at the University of Leeds

It comes after her father Jeremy, who has an estimated net worth of 30million, sent his annual A-level results day tweet earlier this month, explaining how he only got a C and 2 Us

Emily, who has written a book entitled Can I Speak To Someone In Charge?, added: 'Neither of my parents went to university 0 they didnt get the grades. Theyve done just fine.'

It comes after her father Jeremy, the host of The Grand Tour, posted a tweet about his A-levels to re-assure other students getting their results earlier this month.

Writing on Twitter, he said: 'Dont worry if your A level grades arent any good. I got a C and 2 Us. And Im sitting here deciding which of my Range Rovers to use today.'

However, his tweet was mocked by other social media users, who have cottoned on to the fact that he posts a tweet about his A-levels every year.

Even before he posted, one Twitter user wrote: 'Jeremy Clarkson waiting for A Level results so he can tell us again he got a C and two Us but now he drives a Benz.'While many cringe-worthy trends come and (fortunately) go, some have a way of creeping their way back into fashion (hello neon, fanny packs and scrunchies).

This season, 'dad' trainers have surprisingly returned and they're taking no prisoners. High-end designer labels like Chanel, Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton have all incorporated the chunky 'ugly' sneaker into their collections and are charging over $800 for them.

If that weren't convincing enough, top influencers like Elsa Hosk, Josephine H.J. and Eva Chen have all embraced them. FEMAIL breaks down how the stars are wearing them, plus ways you can incorporate them into your own wardrobe.

Surprising trend: This season, 'dad' trainers (as seen on Elsa Hosk) have surprisingly returned and they're taking no prisoners

Victoria's Secret model Elsa Hosk (@hoskelsa) is no stranger to dressing sexy.

The 29-year-old Swedish beauty recently visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York wearing a slinky fuchsia slip dress by Dannijo.

Unexpectedly, Elsa accessorized the alluring garment with Balenciaga clunky white 'dad' sneakers ($895) that scream comfort over chic.

Ahead of the curve: Instagram star and H.J. Muse owner, Josphine H.J., has been rocking bulky sneaks for quite some time

They're versatile: While many would use them to complete causal ensembles, Josephine has been pairing them with atleisure gear, formal dresses and everything in between

Not afraid to take fashion risks, Instagram star and H.J. Muse owner, Josphine H.J.. (@josephinehj) has been rocking oversized sneaks that resemble orthopedic shoes for quite some time.

While many would use them to complete causal ensembles, Josephine has been pairing them with atleisure gear, formal dresses and everything in between.

To rock the trainers like Josephine, forget their bulky silhouette and treat them like you would any other shoe.

'Ugly' is in: To rock the trainers like Josephine, treat them like you would any other shoe

Trailblazer: Eva Chen is known for her uber fashionable ensembles and enviable footwear

Who hasn't seen the #evachenpose?

Snapped from the backseat of a New York taxi, Instagram queen Eva Chen (@evachen212) has been showing off her designer shoes on a regular basis for years.

The former Lucky editor-in-chief is known for her uber fashionable ensembles and enviable footwear from top labels like Aquazzura, Bally and Alberta Ferretti.

Recently the fashion icon has thrown chunky sneakers featuring thick soles into her stylish rotation.

Instagram sensation: The #evachenpose is a photograph of the former Lucky editor-in-chief's daily shoes and handbag taken from the backseat of a New York taxi cab

On trend: Recently the fashion icon has thrown chunky sneakers into her stylish rotation

Pricey trainers from Acne Studios ($470) have been completing social media influencer Sonia Lyson's (@soniafrancex) ensembles as of late.

And that's not the only designer pair the the street style star owns!

She posted a few #ootd snaps in Chanel's calfskin and patent calfskin version ($950), as well.

Your new pump: Forget heels, chunky trainers can be paired with suits

Head-to-toe: Pricey trainers from Acne Studios have been completing social media influencer Sonia Lyson's (@soniafrancex) ensembles as of late

Designer duds: She posted a few #ootd snaps in Chanel's calfskin and patent calfskin version ($950), as well

To pull off the bold trend, ease into it by opting for versatile all white trainers.

Keeping in mind that the shoe style looks like it came straight out of your father's closet, pair them with fashions you feel good in.

Walk with confidence and offset the 'ugliness' with feminine silhouettes. Think: tea-length skirts, slip dresses and minis.

While social media stars are spending a lot of money on their designer trainers, you don't have to. There are plenty of affordable options on the market. Plus, this trend won't last for very much longer. Fingers crossed!

Lo-fi Sneakers by Jeffrey Campbell, $145; shopbop.com

Suede sneakers by Unravel Project, $690; net-a-porter.com

Manhattan Sneakers by Acne Studios, $500; shopbop.comOreo has outdone itself with its most outrageous flavors yet.

While the cookie brand has introduced some controversial limited-edition flavors over the years, the reaction to their newest variety will likely be unanimously disgusted.

Parent company Mondelez International announced last week that it is now selling Wasabi and Hot Chicken Wing-flavored Oreos in China, with the brand describing the spicy varieties as 'BIG and BOLD flavors' on social media.

Would you dare? Adventurous eaters can now buy Wasabi and Hot Chicken Wing-flavored Oreos

Unfortunately for curious and daring taste testers in the US and Europe, the two new flavors can only be bought in China for the time being - but that hasn't stopped people around the world from expressing their surprise, and in some cases their horror, at the new additions to Asia's Oreo line-up.

'Noooooo is that real?!' one person responded to a tweet about the new launch, while another commented: 'They need to give up on this. Even good-sounding ones like Apple Pie are just not that great.'

One chimed in: 'Stop Oreo just stop.'

Anyone outside of China who is daring enough to try the new flavors, which launched on August 21, can turn to eBay, where a few packets of the peculiar new cookie are currently being sold.

Satisfying your spice craving will come at a cost, however: the Oreos available on eBay currently range in price from $13.99 to $23.99 per box.

Of course, these aren't the only unexpected flavors the brand has launched.

In China, in particular, there have been Oreos that taste like 'Milky Banana', a combination of Raspberry/Blueberry, a combo of Mango/Orange, and a mix of Grape/Peach.

Spicy meets sweet: The Chicken Wing flavor is only available in China

And dunk them in milk? However, both (including the Wasabi flavor, pictured) are popping up on eBay

Meanwhile, in the US, there have been a wife variety of sweeter options, including Cotton Candy, Limeade, Caramel Apple, Root Beer Float, Swedish Fish, Peeps, Waffles & Syrup, and Cherry Cola.

While the odd new spicy cookies are certainly sparking curiosity, Oreo has been in the news recently for far less favorable reasons.

Earlier this month, Hydrox  a competitor that came out with an earlier version of the sandwich cookie, which later inspired Oreo  accused parent company Mondalez of deliberately sabotaging them.

The brand announced on Facebook that it had filed an official complaint against Oreo with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that Mondelez has been 'undertaking a national program to damage our brand and stop us from competing'.

The statement said they 'have been very frustrated with the hiding of our cookies at major retailers by the folks @oreo.'

'We finally filed an official complaint with the Federal Trade Commission last week, in which we claim they have been trying to make it hard to find our cookies in stores nationally, in hopes of lowering sales volume and having us discontinued,' the post went on.

'We believe in competition and choice, but we firmly believe the folks @Mondelez (the owners of Oreo) have been undertaking a national program to damage our brand and stop us from competing.

Yikes! Mondalez made the announcement on social media last week

Ew: In case the peppers on the box don't make it clear, the fire does  these are hot!

Um, OK... They's certainly make for an odd sushi hybrid

'Many of you over the last few years have been great at taking pictures when you see #hydroxcookies being moved or blocked from store shelves and we really appreciate your help.'

And, in fact, they posted several of those images  and while it's possible there are other explanations, the evidence is certainly damning.

In several the Hydrox cookies are set up directly behind hanging displays, making them hard to see in grab.

In one picture, the cookies have been turned sideways, so the label is invisible.

And in another, the Hydrox cookies have been moved from their designated spot on the shelf (so visible because of the pricing label) and put higher up. In their original space? Oreos.

Captioning that picture, the people at Hydrox said that even the local store manager noticed the issue, yet every week the Hydrox are moved back to the incorrect space.

The Facebook post went on: 'Some of you have asked, "How can those guys hide Hydrox in so many stores?" The answer is quite simple.

'Mondelez uses what's called in the industry "DSD" or "Direct store distribution." What that means is, they have their own trucks and personally deliver and restock supermarket shelves nationwide a few times a week, versus Hydrox which are restocked by supermarket employees at night and moved from their own warehouses.

Uh oh! Earlier this month, Oreo competitor Hydrox (right) alleged Mondelez, which owns Oreo (left), had 'undertaken a national program to damage our brand and stop us from competing'

Damning: Hydrox alleges that Mondelez is instructing its delivery people to hide Hydrox cookies so they are less visible than the Oreo options

'We had no idea a competitor hiding our cookies was going to be a problem until a buyer for one of the largest store chains in the US sat us down and said, "We're going to bring Hydrox into our stores, but you're going to have a major issue to deal with.

'We then asked, "What's the issue?" The buyer responded, "Mondelez is going to hide your cookies all over our stores to make sure you don't get any sales, in hopes of being discontinued. They will see you as a major threat to their market and will do anything to ensure you're not successful. You're going to have to hire people to go into each of our stores and make sure Hydrox is not being hidden."'

Hydrox then called on customers for support, asking them to call the cookie buyers at their local supermarket's corporate offices to complain.

'We hope the Federal Trade Commission will start the investigation very soon. We understand there is already case law on this issue and we hope to utilize it in our case against Mondelez.'

A spokesperson for Mondelez told Today that the company had not yet been 'contacted' about the claim but 'are confident that this accusation has no merit.'

'Much of our shelf placement is due to the fact that Oreo is the #1 cookie in the U.S., and retailers typically align premium placement to the fastest selling products, based on consumer demand. We always operate with integrity, and we are proud to be Americas favorite cookie,' the spokesperson said.New mothers who smoke cannabis and breastfeed could be getting their babies high and affecting their brain development.

A study has revealed the chemical in marijuana which gives smokers a high can stay in women's breast milk for up to six days.

THC, which is the psychoactive part of cannabis, can stick to fat molecules in a woman's milk meaning it passes into the baby during breastfeeding.

And the experts who did the research say it is possible the drug could have an impact on an infant's brain development.

They recommend women quit using marijuana while breastfeeding to make sure their babies are not harmed.

Smoking cannabis could cause the psychoactive chemical THC to pass into breast milk and stay there for up to six days, suggesting babies might consume it, researchers say

The study by scientists at the University of California in San Diego tested breast milk samples of 50 women who smoked marijuana.

Of 54 samples taken, 34 of them  63 per cent  still contained THC up to six days after the milk was produced.

THC, scientifically named tetrahydrocannibinol, is the psychoactive ingredient of cannabis and is what makes the drug illegal in the UK.

And while it can make people feel relaxed or happy, the drug has also been linked to worse memory and learning abilities, and an increased risk of mental health problems like depression.

Cannabis in breast milk 'could influence normal brain development'

The authors of the said it is 'reasonable to speculate' that exposing infants to THC or another chemical called cannabidiol 'could influence normal brain development'.

'We still support women breastfeeding even if using marijuana but would encourage them to cut down and quit,' Dr Seth Ammerman in a recent report by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

SMOKING CANNABIS DURING PREGNANCY HARMS BABY'S BRAIN Pregnant women who smoke cannabis risk causing damage to their unborn baby's brain, experts warned in 2016. The drug is linked to abnormal brain structure in children, a study by the Erasmus University Medical Center in Holland revealed. Children exposed to marijuana in the womb were found to have a thicker prefrontal cortex region of the brain, when compared to children not exposed to the drug. The prefrontal cortex is a region of the brain that is linked to decision-making, memory and personality, and changes to the tissue could affect how the brain works. Scientists examined brain scans of 54 children exposed to cannabis in the womb, 96 children exposed to just tobacco, and 113 children with no exposure to either drug. They noted differences in the thickness of the prefrontal cortex  it was thicker in children exposed to cannabis, suggesting their memory and personality could be affected. The researchers said their findings, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, suggest cannabis exposure has different effects than tobacco. Advertisement

The researchers explained THC can pass to breast milk because marijuana's active compounds like to bind to fat molecules, of which there are a lot in breast milk.

This stickiness suggests the compounds can end up in breast milk, raising concerns about the potential effects on nursing babies.

It's not known if the amounts of THC detected in the study pose any risk but researchers are studying children whose mothers' were involved to try to find out.

'We don't know if there are safe levels for infants'

Dr Christina Chambers, the lead researcher in the study, said: 'We found the amount of THC that the infant could potentially ingest from breast milk was relatively low.

'But we still don't know enough about the drug to say whether or not there is a concern for the infant at any dose, or if there is a safe dosing level.

'The ingredients in marijuana products that are available today are thought to be much more potent than products available 20 or 30 years ago.'

Past research suggested developmental delays

Two small studies from the 1980s had conflicting results on whether pot use affects breastfed infants.

One found no evidence of growth delays, as the other found slight developmental delays in breastfed infants, but their mothers had used pot during pregnancy too.

And while cannabis use is likely to be lower in the UK and Australia where it is outlawed, the drug is legal in nine US states and available on prescription in 31 states.

According to US government data, about one in 20 women report using marijuana during pregnancy.

Estimates for use among breastfeeding mothers vary, but a study in Colorado, where recreational marijuana is legal, put the number at almost 20 per cent among women in a government supplemental food program.

'If women feel they have to choose they may stop breastfeeding'

Experts said it is important to not risk women choosing marijuana instead of breast feeding.

Dr Chambers added: 'We don't have strong, published data to support advising against use of marijuana while breastfeeding.

'If women feel they have to choose, we run the risk of them deciding to stop breastfeeding  something we know is hugely beneficial for both mum and baby.'

The University of California's findings were published in the journal Pediatrics.Scientists have identified changes to the DNA of glioblastoma patients that could allow them to predict how the aggressive brain tumor that killed John McCain grows, a new study reveals.

Even as cancer treatments improve, glioblastoma continues to elude medicine and kill half of patients within a year of diagnosis.

On Saturday, the vicious disease claimed the life of Senator John McCain, just over a year after he found out he had cancer.

These tumors are difficult to cure in part because they quickly become resistant to treatment, but researchers in Vienna have discovered patterns of genetic changes that could someday allow a 'simple test' to predict how the cancer will progress.

Scientists found epigenetic signals that help them identify different types of cells in glioblastomas, so they better know which ones will become treatment resistant

Brain tumors claim the lives of 13,000 Americans a year - and few are harder to fight than glioblastomas.

Scientists keep developing treatments meant to hone in and attack these specific tumors, but even those have failed time and time again over the last decade.

In part, novel approaches fail because glioblastomas are composed of too many different types of cells.

The cancer can essentially 'choose' which ones best withstand treatment so that those continue to multiply out of control while the replication of more treatment-reactive cells slows.

So scientists are working with a moving target when they try to develop new treatments or use existing ones.

We know that, to some extent, people inherit DNA traits - like genes that code for faster tumor growth, or a lack of genes that code for tumor suppression - but glioblastoma is more complicated than just genetics.

Senator John McCain died on Saturday after a year-long battle with the aggressive brain cancer

For the new study, published today in Nature Medicine, researchers at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences looked to the epigenetics, or the way that genes get turned 'off' and 'on,' of glioblastomas.

In particular, they studied the methylation of DNA, or the addition of these molecular groups to strands of DNA. Methyls that grab on to DNA can activate and DNA activate various segments of the genetic code.

They examined these patterns in more than 200 Austrian glioblastoma patients and found that certain epigenetic changes were linked to trajectories for the tumor's progression and even the patient's survival times.

Some of these epigenetic changes cued the selection of treatment resistant cells and gave the researchers new insights into the make up of these tumors, which could help them develop better treatments.

'DNA methylation sequencing - as a single test - can be used to predict a wide variety of clinically relevant tumor properties,' explained lead study author, Johanna Klughammer, a PhD student at CeMM who led the data analysis.

This gives clinicians and researchers 'a powerful new approach for characterizing the heterogeneity of brain tumors,' she said, and this could help them predict how glioblastomas morph to out-run treatments.

Meanwhile, another University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) research team found another possible way to block the cancer's growth, according to another study published today.

Tumors need to be fed by a blood supply full of oxygen and nutrients to grow.

One set of cancer drugs used against glioblastomas aims to cut off blood flow to them, but typically it doesn't do enough to improve survival times.

But, in experiments on mice, the UPenn team instead targeted cells that line the inside of blood vessels and can be corrupted by the tumor to resist treatment. Once those have been successfully disarmed, the cancer itself may be vulnerable to the attacks of the treatment.A 26-year-old police officer was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer just weeks after joining the force.

Shawn DePasquale was inducted into the Rollinsford Police Department in New Hampshire in December 2017.

But just three weeks later, doctors told him he had stage IV colon cancer and that it had spread to his liver.

Because DePasquale is a new hire, he has had to take unpaid time off to receive his treatments, which are not covered by insurance.

To help him out, his fellow police officers have been holding fundraisers - including raffles and T-shirt sales - in hopes of helping DePasquale pay his medical costs and spreading awareness of the disease.

Officer Shawn DePasquale, 26, with the Rollinsford Police Department in New Hampshire was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in January

Three weeks earlier, DePasquale (left and right) graduated from the New Hampshire Police Academy. Doctors told him that he needed to receive treatment quickly because the cancer had spread to his liver

Colon cancer is a cancer of the large intestine, which is the part of the digestive tract where the body removes water and salt from solid waste.

The cancer usually begins with growths called polyps. They are located on the innermost lining of the colon and become cancerous over many years.

A study published last year found that colon cancer cases diagnosed in adults younger than age 55 doubled from 1990 to 2013, although no one is sure why.

In response, the American Cancer Society updated its screening guidelines for colorectal cancer, now recommending people at average risk begin regular screenings at age 45.

Signs and symptoms of the disease include a change in bowel movements, rectal bleeding, abdominal pain or sudden weight loss.

Treatment options currently include surgery to remove any tumors as well as chemotherapy and radiation to kill cancer cells.

According to the American Cancer Society, colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer diagnosed in the US, among both men and women.

It is also the third leading cause of cancer deaths in both American men and women and is estimated to cause more than 50,000 deaths in 2018.

The five-year relative survival rate for those with stage I colon cancer is 92 percent, according to the National Cancer Institute's SEER database.

However, once the cancer has spread to other parts of the body such as the liver, it dramatically drops. The five-year relative survival rate for stage IV is about 12 percent.

DePasquale graduated from the New Hampshire Police Academy in December 2017 and joined the department in Rollinsford.

DePasquale (pictured with his mother, left, and his younger sister, right) has so far undergone radiation and chemotherapy to shrink the tumor and then surgery in July to remove it

Because DePasquale (far left) is a new hire, he has had to take unpaid time off to receive his treatments, which are not covered by insurance

Three weeks later, in January he was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, which had spread to his liver.

It's currently unclear what, if any, signs and symptoms DePasquale was exhibiting before he received his diagnosis.

'I mean I'm 26, I didn't expect to come down with this,' DePasquale told Boston 25.

'You hear you have stage four cancer and immediately everything just fades out.'

DePasquale underwent radiation five days a week for five weeks followed by chemotherapy to shrink the tumor, and then surgery in July to remove it at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover.

He is currently undergoing chemotherapy for the cancer cells in his liver, which will require at least eight rounds.

Because DePasquale is still new to the job, he has had to take time off without pay to receive his treatments, which are not covered by insurance.

The police department has held numerous fundraisers to try to help their new hire including raffles and T-shirt sales.

DePasquale (pictured, left) told the station he hopes that sharing his story will raise awareness so that people will get checked if they suspect they have symptoms

The police department has held numerous fundraisers to try to help their new hire including raffles and T-shirt sales (above) which have raised at least $3,000

One event held on Saturday raised about $3,000, according to the Foster's Daily Democrat.

Rollinsford Police Chief Bob Ducharme says the whole force was saddened by the diagnosis and wanted to do everything they could to help him.

'Being the new guy on the force, his vacation time, his sick time was quite limited,' he told Boston 25.

'I've just been so humbled by this whole experience that so many people have reached out to help, especially in this day and age where there's a lot of anti-law enforcement right now,' he said.

DePasquale told the station he hopes that sharing his story will raise awareness so that people will get checked if they suspect they have symptoms.

A GoFundMe page has also been set up to help DePasquale pay his medical bills.

So far, more than $40,500 has been raised out of a $50,000 goal.I would appreciate your views on the mesh used in hernia operations.

C. M. Watson, Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

Hernia repair is one of the most common operations performed by the NHS. A hernia  protrusion of an internal structure or organ through its coverings  can occur in many parts of the body.

For the sake of this discussion, I will restrict my comments to abdominal hernias, which are the most common, with the focus on inguinal hernias, which is the subject of your enquiry.

Did you know? Inguinal hernias present as a bulge in the groin area and become more obvious when coughing, straining or lifting

Inguinal hernias, where fatty tissue or part of the bowel pushes through a weak spot in muscles in the groin, like yours, are the most common, accounting for 70 per cent of all cases. The NHS spends 56 million treating this type of hernia each year.

Inguinal hernias present as a bulge in the groin area and become more obvious when coughing, straining or lifting.

They can be painful and, left untreated, there is a risk of strangulation, an acute emergency occurring when the contents of the hernia, usually the intestine, twist  meaning its blood supply is cut off, which can lead to gangrene.

Most hernia repairs involve synthetic mesh being inserted through a 10 cm incision in the groin to hold the previously bulging tissue in place.

There is no agreement about the best surgical treatment: in 90 per cent of cases, open, not keyhole, surgery is used, but, whichever technique is used, the hernia recurs in 10 per cent of cases.

Studies show that surgery using a mesh patch to repair the bulge (the most common option) has better results than non- mesh repairs  patients return faster to normal activities and have lower rates of persistent pain and recurrence.

If mesh is not used, the tissues are simply stitched together.

Treatment: Most hernia repairs involve synthetic mesh being inserted through a 10 cm incision in the groin to hold the previously bulging tissue in place

Neither method is perfect, hence the disagreement and controversy about which works best.

Mesh, positioned to allow healing once fibrous tissue forms over it, gives good strength to the repair.

The technique usually takes 30 to 45 minutes, is carried out under local anaesthetic and has been perfected over many years, with tens of thousands of operations. Recovery is rapid and the outcome is reliable.

The incidence of post-operative complications is low, but there have been reports of patients feeling pain after hernia surgery using mesh, which was only relieved when it was removed.

Write to Dr Scurr To contact Dr Scurr with a health query, write to him at Good Health Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT or email drmartin@dailymail.co.uk  including contact details. Dr Scurr cannot enter into personal correspondence. His replies cannot apply to individual cases and should be taken in a general context. Always consult your own GP with any health worries. Advertisement

I have discussed this with David Nott, an eminent general surgeon in London, who has carried out operations to remove mesh after unsuccessful hernia operations (performed elsewhere) in perhaps 20 patients over several years.

In these patients, the body seems to react to the synthetic mesh. Why it reacts in this way to an inert material is uncertain.

I liken it to contact lenses: while most people rapidly tolerate them, some are never able to adapt.

Mesh for hernia repair surgery may be the same or similar to that which has caused such concern in the treatment of women with prolapse or continence problems.

But I am not sure a comparison can be made between procedures using mesh for gynaecological complaints in women and mesh repair for inguinal hernias.

The point must also be made that inguinal hernia repair using non-mesh techniques also has, along with a recurrence rate, a small incidence of continuing post-operative pain. I must reassure you that by far the greater probability is that you will have a good outcome. Indeed, facing the same problem, I had a repair to a double hernia using mesh with full confidence.

Ive been told I have Bakers cysts in my knees, which are making the backs of my legs quite painful, and that physiotherapy is the answer.

But its not working well  is there an alternative?

Ron Davis, Bath.

A Bakers cyst, technically known as a popliteal cyst, is a swelling at the back of the knee and a common occurrence. They tend to occur in people between the ages of 35 and 70 and are a sign of a problem in the knee joint  typically osteoarthritis or damaged cartilage.

Bakers cysts are not usually painful, however some patients experience discomfort behind the knee or knee stiffness, particularly with prolonged standing, and this may worsen with activity.

The swelling is a pouch of fluid  known as a bursa  which may change in size and tension as the knee joint moves.

Its important to remember that the cysts are manifestations of whatever the problem is within the knee joint itself.

Cysts that are not causing any symptoms do not require further action, though finding out the cause through further examinations of the knee joint itself via X-rays or MRI scans should be considered.

Painful cysts can be aspirated  using a needle to withdraw the fluid  and, at the same time, a steroid known as a glucocorticoid can be injected into the joint, which will decrease the size of the cyst, as well as reduce discomfort and the likelihood of recurrence.

Treatment may fail if the accumulation of fluid in the knee, and, therefore, the cyst, is caused by a torn meniscus (the disc of cartilage in the knee) or significant arthritis, because as long as there is an internal problem  often known as an internal derangement  the knee will go on protesting by pumping out fluid, which will accumulate. In that case, the next steps will be decided by your orthopaedic specialist.

In response to your specific question about physiotherapy, it will not treat the cyst, but will have been prescribed to strengthen the leg muscles, to improve the support and function of the knee joint, as muscle wasting may well have occurred if the primary diagnosis is osteoarthritis of the knee joint or cartilage damage from a previous injury.

Im sure your physiotherapist will have been briefed and will be able to enlighten you about what has triggered the cysts to form.

IN MY VIEW...I FEAR RATIONING WILL NEVER END

AS a medical student, I was concerned about the length of NHS waiting lists for surgery.

My father, then a consultant anaesthetist, explained that funding in the NHS (just 20 years old at the time) was limited and waiting lists were a method to ration expenditure.

The crowning glory of the NHS was the concept of free healthcare for all at the point of delivery but, with the population pushing at an open door, there would inevitably have to be a way of controlling and limiting demand in a tax-funded, but notionally free, service.

The debate about waiting lists soon became toxic, politically unacceptable, and more subtle ways of reducing demand and capping costs gradually evolved. In this game of musical chairs, the music has now stopped though we see the sense of procedures being banned due to little evidence of benefit, such as injections for low back pain, surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome, arthroscopy for knee arthritis and removal of benign skin lesions, we now face the rationing of treatments that undoubtedly benefit patients.

Some have been permitted only to have one of two cataracts removed; others are declined funding for knee or hip replacement surgery.

And now, in some parts of the country, men are being told they cant have vasectomies. We should be concerned about this creeping form of rationing. Where it will lead? How long before we are told that, at a certain age, NHS care is not worthwhile?

My fear is that, just as now there are those using an electric buggy, rather than walking again, because the NHS will not fund a knee or hip replacement, some older patients will in future remain chair or bedridden, rather than undergo heart surgery or other restorative treatment, as the NHS prioritises treatment of younger, more productive, tax-paying members of the population.

It raises the question: will some of us be expendable?Miraculous: Michael English is living evidence that we may finally have discovered a powerful secret to beating cancer

Michael English is living evidence that we may finally have discovered a powerful secret to beating cancer. Astonishingly, this long-sought answer lies hidden inside our own bodies.

Michael, a 72-year-old retired electrical engineer from Surbiton in Surrey, was first diagnosed with advanced and aggressive stage 3/4 prostate cancer 13 years ago.

Each time doctors tried the latest treatment on him, be it hormones, drugs, radiotherapy or chemotherapy, his tumour was beaten back until it had apparently disappeared.

But four times since 2005 the cancer returned, as each time a few of his tumour cells managed to evade medicines best weapons.

They did this by mutating their DNA  adopting a new genetic guise that was resistant to all the therapies that had been tried.

Michael was allocated palliative care nurses, to make his seemingly inevitable death as painless as possible. Conventional medicine had waved the white flag.

For millions of cancer patients and their families, this is a familiar and tragic story.

But now the tables are being turned. For British scientists are discovering that the very thing that can make cancer cells so relentlessly lethal  their ability to mutate and evade our best treatments  may also be their Achilles heel.

Researchers are discovering that each time the cancer mutates its DNA, it creates a tell-tale biological fingerprint. Whats more, our own immune systems can be taught to recognise these fingerprints, and then to attack and destroy these enemies within, so that they never come back.

This new avenue is called cancer immunotherapy. There are several types of immunotherapy treatments, which either help the immune system attack cancer directly or boost it more generally.

Last year Michael was inducted into a medical trial of a new immunotherapy drug by Professor Johann de Bono, the head of clinical studies at the Institute of Cancer Research in London.

Not giving up: Michael was allocated palliative care nurses, to make his seemingly inevitable death as painless as possible. Conventional medicine had waved the white flag

This may have seemed beyond optimistic. Not only was Michael past last chances in terms of conventional therapy, his intestines had been left so ravaged by previous doses of radiotherapy to kill tumours there that his gut was perforated, causing him crippling stomach infections. He was so ill there was little point subjecting him to abdominal surgery to repair this.

Indeed, Michael was so ill that after only ten intravenous doses of the experimental drug pembrolizumab (branded as Keytruda), administered once every three weeks, he was taken off the trial. To complete the therapy he should have received a further 29 doses.

Nevertheless, Professor de Bonos team gave him MRI scans to check his progress  and found his tumour had disappeared.

That was in April last year. Destroying the cancer rendered Michael strong enough to receive the stomach surgery he needed. He had another cancer scan last week and hes still clear. It is absolutely incredible, he says.

Professor de Bono describes Michaels result as profound and spectacular.

Whats more, this science could be repeated in future for millions of patients, experts believe.

What made Michael, despite his frailty, such a good candidate for the trial is the fact that his cancer had aggressively mutated its DNA several times to evade conventional treatment  making it a good test for pembrolizumabs mutation-targeting powers.

Pain: Not only was Michael past last chances in terms of conventional therapy, his intestines had been left ravaged by previous doses of radiotherapy

Patients like Michael have a defect in a gene called CDK12, which controls how a cell can repair faults in its DNA, explains Professor de Bono.

This defect causes one in ten cases of prostate cancer. When the gene goes awry, DNA faults run rampant, causing cells to turn cancerous and replicate. The gene also gives tumours a deadly advantage  they change their DNA so quickly that they evade being wiped out by conventional drugs.

However, this could be an Achilles heel, because it also causes an increase in jumbled-up DNA that the immune system can more easily recognise as a threat, adds Professor de Bono.

To target the cancer cells, first you have to stop them from evading detection by the immune system by cloaking themselves in proteins that identify them as healthy tissues. A new class of drugs rolled out over the past seven years, called checkpoint inhibitors, which include pembrolizumab, unmask the cancer cells by blocking their fake cloaks.

Our immune cells can then identify them as dangerous and destroy them. The idea behind cancer immunotherapy is not new. Yet its taken more than a century to prove its worth.

New York surgeon William Coley first explored the theory of using a patients immune system to fight cancer in the 1890s, after hearing of a man who recovered unexpectedly from cancer following a serious skin infection. Mr Coley believed the infection provoked the patients immune system to attack anything that looked alien, including the cancer cells.

He vaccinated ten other cancer patients with cocktails of bacteria and claimed that, in several cases, this spurred their immune systems to destroy tumours. But the medical establishment refused to believe his patients had even had cancer.

Man-power: New York surgeon William Coley first explored the theory of using a patients immune system to fight cancer in the 1890s

Instead, cancer surgeons backed the new  and then highly dangerous  radiation therapy as their best hope of a cancer cure-all (the precursor to what we now know as radiotherapy).

Mr Coleys ideas languished for a century until an immunologist, Charles Janeway of Yale University, challenged a longstanding basic assumption  that our immune defences work simply by recognising things that havent been in the body before and attacking them.

But if that were true, Dr Janeway wondered, how could we ever eat a new food without suffering an allergic response? In the late Eighties, he realised that we must have two systems operating: one for detecting alien substances in our bodies; and another that learns to recognise which aliens are threats and flags them for attack.

The implications were revolutionary. If our immune system could learn in this way, then it may also be taught to destroy a another threat: cancer cells.

TEACHING IMMUNE SYSTEM TO ATTACK

But no one believed Dr Janeway. His idea was shunned until the early 2000s, when international scientists finally began to appreciate its potential. For this, others were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2011. The accolade should arguably have been Dr Janeways but he had died in 2003 of lymphoma.

A similar fate befell Ralph Steinman, who discovered the key biological mechanism behind Dr Janeways ideas  a spiky-looking cell that switches on our immune systems by identifying dangerous invaders.

Dr Steinman, an immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, christened his discovery the dendritic cell. But when he revealed his theories about the cells curative potential at medical conferences in the early 2000s, he was considered outlandish.

Nevertheless, Dr Steinman worked doggedly on using the cells to create cancer-killing vaccines. His colleague, Antony Rosen, now a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, recalls: He was confident enough that it didnt matter to him that nobody had seen it before and everybody rejected what he said.

Dr Steinmans investigations involved extracting dendritic cells from a patient, exposing them in the lab to the patients cancer cells  teaching them to recognise them as threats  then injecting the dendritic cells back into the patients body in order to prime their immune system.

Dr Steinman pursued his goal with deadly urgency. In 2007, with his work still at an early point, he was diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer and told he had only months to live.

He experimented on himself  trying three previously untested vaccines based on dendritic cells exposed to cells from his tumour.

NEXT BREAKTHROUGH MAY BE FOUND IN MILK Could having chemotherapy for cancer be as easy as drinking a glass of milk? Scientists in the U.S. claim they have found a way to turn the toxic tumour treatment, mainly given as an injection into a vein in the arm, into something patients can drink instead. It could mean cancer patients, who often need to attend hospital every day for a week for chemotherapy, can consume their medicine at home from a glass. Patients would have a daily dose of milk chemo as they would with injections. The unlikely new form of therapy is based on the science behind how mothers pass on infection-fighting antibodies to their babies through breast milk. Normally, anything that passes through the stomach gets broken down by the acidic environment so it can be digested. This means many drugs  including most of those used for chemotherapy  cannot be swallowed, as digestion would destroy them before they had a chance to get into the bloodstream. But scientists at the University of Colorado believe they may be able to smuggle chemotherapy medicine through the stomach using milk. Antibodies in a mothers breast milk do not get destroyed by the babys stomach acid, and pass unscathed into the babys bloodstream. Tiny particles, called exosomes, in the mothers milk seem to protect the antibodies. They bind to receptors in the tissue lining the babys intestines once they have passed through the stomach. These receptors allow the antibodies to penetrate into the bloodstream and trigger a reaction by the immune system, so that it is primed to attack an invading organism in the future. Cows milk is similar enough to human milk that the exosomes in it bind with these receptors in humans. The Colorado team has been given funding by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to incorporate chemotherapy medicine into exosomes in cows milk. Scientists are experimenting with chemo drugs in a lab to see which ones are able to attach to the milk particles. A separate study in 2017 by scientists at the University of Louisville in Kentucky found mice given milk containing the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel (used to treat breast, ovarian and lung cancers) saw a 60 per cent reduction in the size of their lung tumours after taking it daily for a week. The mice suffered fewer of the side-effects seen with chemotherapy treatment  including severe nausea, exhaustion and hair loss. Since paclitaxel is a licensed drug and milk is readily available the treatment could be used in the next three to five years if research proves it is safe and effective. Cancer Research UKs head information nurse Martin Ledwick said: Anything that makes the delivery of chemotherapy drugs easier for patients has to be a good thing. Some drugs can be given orally but many need to be through an intravenous drip. More work needs to be done to see if these experiments work in humans. But if they do, it could reduce the discomfort and other problems associated with having a drip. - PAT HAGAN Advertisement

He survived four years longer than doctors predicted, though it is impossible to know if his discovery extended his life, or if was just chance.

Dr Steinman was among the pioneering immunotherapy scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in 2011. The announcement came three days after his death.

Since then, one dendritic cell-based vaccine, Provenge, has been shown to increase the survival of prostate cancer patients by about four months. It is approved for use in the U.S.

Meanwhile in Britain, pioneering immunotherapy researchers also suffered derision and disbelief.

Professor Charles Swanton, now the chief clinician at Cancer Research UK, recalls how in 1995, he was planning to do a PhD in using dendritic cells as a therapy for cancer.

I was very strongly discouraged from going into this field, he says. In the Nineties it was unclear how this research would have any practical value. Research funders were sceptical.

Peter Johnson, a professor of medical oncology at Southampton General Hospital, has been working since 1998 to get the human immune system to attack cancers.

For a long time immunology was regarded as interesting, but did not deliver much, he says. It was a difficult field, because sadly the clinical trials of vaccines were mostly unsuccessful.

DRUGS THAT LEND A HELPING HAND

All of this is changing, however, with the advent of checkpoint inhibitor drugs  and their ability to unmask cancer cells to our immune defences.

With unabashed satisfaction, Professor Johnson describes as striking the cure rates these drugs have achieved in melanoma and tumours such as cancers of the kidney and cervix.

Checkpoint drug therapy works in clinical trials for between a quarter and a third of people with melanoma and lung cancer.

Beyond this, though, is the hope that these therapies may defeat cancers ability to return again, after seemingly lying dormant for months or years.

A third of patients with advanced melanoma who received the checkpoint-inhibitor drug nivolumab in a clinical trial at Bostons Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are still alive five years later. Previously the average survival time for advanced melanoma patients was 11 months.

PROTECTION THAT MAY LAST A LIFETIME

Professor Johnson believes that the immune system, once alerted to tumour cells, not only kills them but continues to search for them  and anything which looks like them that may be a surviving mutant strain.

He explains: If you can get the immune system to lock on to a cancer then, like a vaccination, the benefits may last for life.

However, there is work to be done if cancer immunotherapy is finally to achieve its promise.

The drug that saved Michael Englishs life, pembrolizumab, helps only one in ten men with prostate cancer, says Professor de Bono. Last month he published a study in the journal Cell which indicates that it may only save men with defects in the CDK12 gene.

The huge challenge is to discover why the drug only works for certain genetic types of tumour, and how to make immunotherapy work for the other nine in ten men with prostate cancer.

Professor Swanton, part of a British commercial collaboration of clinical experts, is pinning his hopes on developing a specific type of checkpoint inhibitor drug in the hope that it will be a one-size-fits-all cure.

This targets something that he calls a truncal mutation, the very first gene change that occurs in a cell before it turns cancerous.

Professor Swanton believes this single DNA mutation must be common to all cancers  unlike subsequent DNA changes which may all differ.

The team plans soon to start trials with lung cancer and melanoma patients to see if they can identify this single change and target it for attack by the patients own immune system.

If it works, it could be an astonishing breakthrough. The collaborations name is well chosen to explain its mission: Achilles Therapeutics. Cancer could finally be brought to heel.

Tumours had spread to Judy's liver. Now she's cancer-free

Fighting: Judy Perkins, 51, an engineer from Florida, also overcame aggressive cancer

Judy Perkins, 51, an engineer from Florida, amazed the world when her doctors revealed that her breast cancer, which had spread lethally to her liver, had been eradicated.

Two years ago she had been given only three years to live. But then she was given an intricate  and expensive  new cancer therapy.

I had given up fighting, Judy told reporters. After the treatment dissolved most of my tumours, I was able to go for a 40-mile hike.

Judy is living proof of the promise of immunotherapy. There is one massive problem: the expense. Judys treatment is estimated to have cost 400,000.

U.S. doctors treated Judy with an advanced form of immunotherapy called CAR-T cell therapy. This genetically alters a patients T-cells  the troops in the immune system  so that they recognise and attack specific proteins found on cancer cells. This treatment is already being used to treat a small number of patients with blood cancers such as leukaemia.

Doctors took tissue from Judys tumours and studied its DNA for mutations specific to her cancer and extracted immune cells that had invaded the tumour to try to kill it. After growing billions of these immune cells in the lab, the researchers screened them to find which would attack Judys mutated cancer cells.

The doctors reported in the journal Nature Medicine in June how they injected 80 billion of these immune cells into Judys body, along with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab. As it stands, this procedure is too expensive for the NHS. The drug rationing watchdog the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is expected to reject Yescarta  the first CAR-T drug to be assessed  due to the high cost.

Professor David Cunningham, a consultant oncologist at the Royal Marsden in London, says: Harvesting and modifying the patients T-cells can cost around 500,000 per patient. That is prohibitive.

However, in June U.S. researchers announced that they may have discovered a cheaper way of creating CAR-T cancer-killing cells. Rather than taking immune cells out of each individual patient, the scientists, from the Universities of California and Minnesota, say they may be able to mass-produce cancer-destroying immune cells from human stem cells.

In the journal Cell Stem Cell, they reported that they can produce a natural killer cell to identify and kill all tumours.

Dan Kaufman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who led the study, said: One batch of stem cell-derived natural killer cells can potentially be used to treat thousands of patients.

Professor Kaufman says that the new drugs have already shown considerable curative promise in experiments in mice.

Further trials will be needed before the worth of this approach is proven  so it is still, at best, several years before it is available to more patients. Even so, it is a tantalising hope.Near-fatal: Abby Doherty, from East Sussex, suffered a severe allergic reaction

The doctor in A&E who treated mother-of-two Abby Doherty when she was rushed in last month was blunt: had she arrived more than a few minutes later, she would have died.

For the first time in her life, Abby, 33, had suffered a severe allergic reaction  anaphylaxis  after eating a prawn and lobster starter, as part of a celebratory birthday meal out with her husband Leigh, 39. Her symptoms came on within an hour of the meal and rapidly escalated.

Id never experienced anything like it before  it felt as though someone was sitting on my windpipe, says Abby, a sales and marketing consultant.

My face felt as though it was on fire, and I was scratching so manically that I almost drew blood.

Leigh, a commercial property agent, drove her to a walk-in medical centre near their home in Hastings, East Sussex, where concerned staff called an ambulance.

I stumbled in, clawing at my face and scalp, she says. I was terrified. The receptionist took one look at me and shouted for the doctor.

Abby was immediately given a shot of the hormone adrenaline  which can help reverse the effects of a severe allergic reaction  and within seconds her breathing improved.

But minutes later, her airway started to close again. She was given another adrenaline injection and put into an ambulance. By the time she got to Conquest Hospital, just four miles away, a crash team had been put on standby because of the chance Abby might have a cardiac arrest.

She was treated with a third dose of adrenaline  which eventually helped to reverse the effects of her severe reaction  and opened her airways.

When Abby was discharged the next day, the doctor was adamant: in future she must always carry EpiPens  preloaded syringes that deliver a shot of adrenaline to help halt an anaphylactic reaction.

Out of stock: Doctors treated her with adrenaline, but she was lucky to get last of the supply

These auto-injectors, as they are known, hold a smaller dose of adrenaline  0.3 mg rather than the 0.5 mg or more used in hospitals  but the idea is that using them gives the person having the reaction time to get to A&E.

Official guidance is that those with a severe allergy should carry two in case one misfires or the reaction quickly recurs  as Abbys had been so violent and prolonged, the doctor wrote her a prescription for three.

But when she went to the hospitals pharmacy to collect them, she was told that not a single EpiPen was available.

On her return first thing the next day, she was given the same news  not one of the potentially life-saving devices was in stock.

The only EpiPen she could get was an EpiPen Junior, the childs version of the life-saving injection, which contains 0.15mg of adrenaline  half the adult dose, and an amount unlikely to help an adult.

It took Abby a month  during which time she rang all the pharmacies in her area on a virtually daily basis  before she was able to obtain two adult versions.

The whole time I was living in fear and I hardly slept with the worry, says Abby, who has two daughters, Madelyn, 12, and ten-year-old Ella-Rae.

I wasnt going to eat shellfish after what I had gone through, but I was worried about coming into contact with it accidentally. I had to warn my daughters that even kissing me after theyd eaten shellfish might set off a reaction.

Its a worrying situation and one that many of the 200,000-plus people in the UK who live with severe allergies also find themselves in. Due to a nationwide shortage, many chemists in some areas have no EpiPens at all and those that do are having to limit the number they dispense to a maximum of two per person  even in cases such as Abbys, where doctors recommend three.

Such has been the scramble for them that many online pharmacies that sell the pens at 48 each say they are out of stock, too.

Shocking: When she went to the hospitals pharmacy to collect an EpiPen, she was told that not a single one was available - even though it was essential to stop another potentially-fatal attack

It was in May this year that American pharmaceutical company Mylan, the main distributor of EpiPens, announced it would begin global rationing because of supply issues with its manufacturing partner, pharma giant Pfizer.

Pfizers Steve Danehy said in a statement that the problem related to the limited supply of certain third-party components.

And rather than abating, the problem appears to be worsening. In an update published earlier this month, Mylan admitted it would also be restricting global distribution of its EpiPen Junior product, putting children at risk, too.

It means that a maximum of two of these childs EpiPens can be dispensed at once  if the pharmacy even has any to dispense.Versions of the auto-injector pens are also produced by British pharmaceutical firm ALK Abello and Swedish company Emerade, but both admit they are struggling to make up the shortfall.

ALK has seen increased demand for its adrenaline auto-injector Jext and we clearly still see a shortfall in the adrenaline auto-injector market in the UK, the company said in a statement to Good Health.

It is not always easy to respond to very sudden spikes in demand. However, ALK is doing all it can to help in the current situation.

Robbie Turner, director of pharmacy and member experience at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, says pharmacists are struggling to keep up with demand. Even with pharmacists working flat out, it has become increasingly difficult to get hold of supplies of some adrenaline pens and it is patients who suffer, he says.

This is a global problem and will require international solutions. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration has taken the extreme measure of extending the expiration date on some batches of EpiPen by four months to help those hit by the shortage, although not the childrens version.

Those affected by a serious allergy will certainly hope other suppliers manage to fill the gap  according to the charity the Anaphylaxis Campaign, every year, around 20 people in the UK will die from anaphylactic shock.

Anaphylactic shock, or anaphylaxis, is a potentially life-threatening reaction to allergens including shellfish, nuts and bee stings, explains Adam Fox, a consultant allergist at Guys and St Thomas Hospital in London.

Whereas typically an allergy will cause a rash, sneezing and watering eyes, anaphylaxis is the most severe form of an allergic reaction and affects breathing and circulation.

HOW TO COPE IF YOU'RE HIT The Anaphylaxis Campaign has released the following guidelines for those affected by the EpiPen shortage: Check the expiry date on your medication regularly and remember that the expiry date given refers to the end of the month. If it expires in October, it can be used until October 31. Inform your GP well in advance that you will need a repeat prescription. Dont dispose of expired adrenaline auto-injectors until you have a new supply. And if the liquid in the device is not cloudy or discoloured, it is safe to be used in an emergency. Advertisement

Thats because whereas an allergy affects localised areas, anaphylaxis affects the whole body. As a result, the airways can swell and blood pressure can drop.

Cases of anaphylaxis have increased and so there is great demand for auto-injectors: according to NHS figures, 325,785 auto-injectors were prescribed in 2016, the most recent period for which figures are available.

The Department of Health and Social Care said that they are working with the manufacturer to try to solve the problem.

Limited supplies are available and are being closely managed to ensure pharmacies are able to obtain enough stock to fulfil prescriptions, a spokesman said.

They advise anyone unable to obtain a supply of their 0.3 mg EpiPen to talk to their doctor about using an alternative.

Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, who is chair of the Royal College of GPs, says it is crucial that patients living with anaphylaxis carry two auto-injector pens because they can deteriorate very quickly after being exposed to an allergen.

But, she admits some are unable to do that at the moment.

For those like Abby, its scant reassurance. Although she now has two EpiPens and a junior one, she is naturally worried about what will happen when they expire in October.

She has been warned she may start to have reactions to other allergens, and is facing a long wait for allergy testing at a specialist NHS unit.

These devices could literally make the difference between life and death for me and countless others. I really hope they sort this problem with EpiPens out  and fast, she says.A one-month-old baby boy is now thriving after doctors told his parents he wouldn't live hours past birth.

When Ariann Corpstein was 20 weeks pregnant, she and her husband Drew were told that their son's brain was malformed and he would likely die.

But after she had to undergo induced labor last month, their son Matthew started defying doctors' expectations - responding to voices, lights and sounds.

That's when Ariann and Drew discovered that Matthew had been misdiagnosed and what was believed to be a brain deformation was actually just fluid buildup

The couple, from Ankeny, Iowa, told The Des Moines Register that they were astounded at the news and that they couldn't believe that, after planning to bury their child, they were able to take him home.

One-month-old Matthew Corpstein is now thriving after doctors told his parents, Ariann and Drew, he wouldn't live hours past birth. Pictured: Ariann and Drew with Matthew

Ariann and Drew, from Ankeny, Iowa, first got pregnant in 2016 but suffered a miscarriage. In December 2017, they learned that they were expecting again. Pictured, left and right: Matthew

Ariann and Drew met in 2008 at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, when she was a sophomore and he was a junior.

They soon became a couple, eventually marrying in June 2013.

Ariann was an English teacher at Ankeny High School but eventually left to become the office manager at her husband's clinic, Embrace Life Chiropractic, in Ankeny.

They told the Register they became pregnant in 2016, but Ariann miscarried. After waiting a bit, they learned in December 2017 that they were expecting again.

But during their 20 week ultrasound, doctors noticed something strange and ordered an MRI.

Three weeks later, the Corpsteins were told that their baby's brain tissue was malformed and that he could die before birth or, if he was born, not live much longer than a few days.

The diagnosis was semi-lobar holoprosencephaly.

Holoprosencephaly is when the brain develops abnormally, not properly dividing into left and right hemispheres.

During their 20 week ultrasound, doctors noticed something strange and ordered an MRI. Three weeks later, Ariann and Drew (pictured, with Matthew) were told that their son had semi-lobar holoprosencephaly

This disorder occurs when the left side of the brain is fused to the right side at the frontal lobe and side lobes. Most children with this semi-lobar holoprosencephaly don't live past two years post-diagnosis. Pictured, left and right: Drew with Matthew

With semi-lobar holoprosencephaly, the left side of the brain is fused to the right side at the frontal lobe and side lobes, according to the National Center for Advancing Translational Diseases.

The cause of semi-lobar holoprosencephaly is unknown although studies have suggested it may be caused by mutations in the SHH gene, which is essential in embryonic development.

The National Organization for Rare Disorders says the incidence rate of holoprosencephaly is estimated at one in 16,000 live births.

Babies will usually have small eyes that are close together as well as a flattened bridge and tip of the nose and a cleft lip.

Most children with this disorder don't live past two years post-diagnosis.

The Corpsteins told the Register that they received the news during a call while they were driving to a chiropractic conference.

They said the pulled off to the side of the road and cried.

'We just held each other for about an hour,' Drew told the newspaper. 'It was one of the worst days of our lives.'

The couple visited a perinatologist, an obstetrician that has special training in high-risk pregnancies, and a specialist

Both told them that the baby had formed a brainstem, which connects the brain and the spinal cord, but not a full brain.

A perinatologist and a specialist said that the couple had two options: either abort or induce labor early to end the pregnancy. Pictured: Drew and Ariann with Matthew

However, the Corpsteins are devout Christians and told the Register they wanted to carry their child to term. Pictured: Ariann with Matthew

Around week 37, Ariann had to be induced and she was in labor for three days, giving birth to Matthew (pictured) on July 29

Their two options were to either abort or induce labor early to end the pregnancy,

However, the Corpsteins are devout Christians and told the Register they wanted to carry their child to term.

'[It] didn't feel like it was my decision to make,' Ariann said.

'We knew that our baby was probably not going to be born alive. Whatever happens, it's in God's hands.'

Around week 37, in July, the perinatologist told the Corpsteins that they needed to induce labor because the baby's head was growing abnormally large.

Ariann was in labor for three days at Mercy Medical Center's neonatal hospice unit in Des Moines and, on July 29, gave birth to their son Matthew.

Then Matthew started surprising doctors. He was able to latch and nurse when Ariann breastfed him.

He also had a slow heartbeat - but one nonetheless - and was responding to voices, lights and sounds.

Doctors in the neonatal unit convinced Drew and Ariann to order a follow-up MRI.

They learned that Matthew had been misdiagnosed. His brain was fully formed but he had a fluid buildup.

The fluid had been pushing the brain tissue to the side of the head, making it appear as if there was no tissue at all on scans.

A neonatal surgeon told Drew and Ariann that Matthew's condition was hydrocephalus and - although some babies have developmental delays - many have no abnormalities.

Matthew (left and right) started surprising doctors by being able to nurse and responding to lights, sounds and voices. An MRI revealed that he had been misdiagnosed and what he actually had was hydrocephalus, which could be fixed with a simple shunt to drain the fluid

The couple took Matthew home on August 4, but they will have to monitor him for potential neurological issues and learning disabilities. Pictured: Matthew

It could be fixed with a simple shunt to drain the fluid.

According to the Hydrocephalus Association, at least 700,000 Americans are believed to have normal pressure hydrocephalus, but less than 20 percent receive an accurate diagnosis.

The couple took Matthew home on August 4, still astounded at the news they had received just a few days prior.

'It's so amazing that a few days ago, he had brain surgery and he's just here in our house like nothing happened,' Ariann told the newspaper.

The couple still has to monitor their son for potential neurological issues and learning disabilities.

If he has a fever, they also have to make sure it's not due to the shunt as opposed to a typical virus.

Drew and Ariann one of their good friends named him 'Matthew The Great' for being 'a miracle'.

'A boy who wasn't supposed to be born alive, much less do anything else, has showed us that God is protecting us and blessing us beyond anything we can imagine,' his parents wrote in an online post.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help cover Matthew's medical bills. So far, more than $3,300 has been raised out of a $10,000 goal.A new treatment for the brain cancer that killed Senator John McCain over the weekend is showing great promise in its first patients: dogs.

Glioblastoma is a notoriously aggressive and difficult form of cancer to treat.

These tumors are made up of a wide variety of different kinds of cells, so drugs that effectively attack some are useless against others and the cancer 'learns' which types of cells are immune to the drugs, replicating these more prolifically.

A new injection being developed and tested in dogs by Wake Forest University and Virginia Tech, however, seems to 'cover' and attack all of the cancer's cells - a potential breakthrough for animals and humans alike.

A clinical trial at Virginia Tech is treating glioblastomas in dogs like Emily - and showing promise that could one day help humans suffering from the cancer that killed John McCain

Dogs diagnosed with glioblastoma face no better odds than their human counterparts.

Humans have about a 50 percent chance of surviving a year after being diagnosed with the cancer. John McCain lived just a little longer than that. Dogs will probably live only a few months longer.

But a team of veterinarians, bioengineers, doctors and multidisciplinary scientists is turning that around for animals.

A clinical trial based out of Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine has extended the lives of participating, cancer-ridden dogs.

The trial's early days showed so much promise that the National Institutes of Health awarded a $9.2 million grant to collaborators at the veterinary medical school and Wake Forest Baptist Medical in the hopes that they could continue to hone a treatment that might one day save human lives too.

In actuality, the trial is actually composed of four different approaches to fighting cancer.

One uses a tiny, targeted and powerful blast of energy to ablate or destroy the membranes of only the cancerous cells.

Another branch has been developing an extremely fine 'microneedle device' to inject chemotherapy directly into a tumor withut damaging other tissues.

WHAT IS A GLIOBLASTOMA? Glioblastomas are the most common cancerous brain tumours in adults. They are fast growing and likely to spread. Glioblastomas' cause is unknown but may be related to a sufferer's genes if mutations result in cells growing uncontrollably, forming a tumour. Treatment is usually surgery to remove as much of the tumour as possible, followed by a combination of radio- and chemotherapy (chemoradiation). It can be difficult to remove all of the growth as glioblastomas have tendrils that extend to other regions of the brain. These are targeted via chemoradiation. Glioblastomas are often resistant to treatment as they are usually made up of different types of cells. Therefore, medication will kill off some cells and not others. The average survival time is between 12 and 18 months. Only 20 per cent of patients live longer than a year and just three per cent survive over three years. Source: The Brain Tumour Charity Advertisement

A third part of the research is working on finding the direct route - and right vehicle to follow it - from the blood straight to the brain.

The last research sub-group is working on a drug that attacks the most problematic types of cells in the complex cancer.

These portions of the tumor can quickly become treatment resistant. The tumor has evolved mechanisms to identify its toughest sub-cells and divert energy to the replication of those, while letting the easier-to-target cells die off.

In the most recent iterations of the trial - still recruiting and being conducted in dogs - this last treatment has proven to be the central key to fighting back against gliogblastoma.

Laura Kamienski was devastated when she found out her Portuguese water dog, Emily had the deadly cancer, she told CBS Miami.

The best treatments already available to local vets was going to cost her $10,000 and probably wouldn't give Kamienski much more time with her beloved companion any way.

She splashed out for the clinical trial, enrolling Emily to get the hail-Mary injection.

Over the last six weeks, she has watched - quite literally - as Emily's tumor shrinks.

The veterinarians at Virginia Tech monitor the tumor using MRI as they treat it.

'We can watch the drug cover the tumor. And so we know weve achieved the treatment goals of actually targeting all the cancer cells,' Dr John Rossmeisl, Professor Neurology and Neurosurgery at Virginia Tech told CBS.

Emily has stopped seizing at home, and the doctors treating her have watched the camera string progressively.

'The only way this could have been better if it was totally gone. This is really good news,' Dr Rossmeisl toldCBS.

Dr Rossmeisl, his team and even the NIH are watching the ill animals more closely than ever, hoping against hope that the same treatment that has given Kamienski back her four-legged companion could some day save - or at least extend - the lives of glioblastoma sufferers like John McCain was.Tony Hetherington is Financial Mail on Sunday's ace investigator, fighting readers corners, revealing the truth that lies behind closed doors and winning victories for those who have been left out-of-pocket. Find out how to contact him below.

M.A. writes: I was looking to put 20,000 into an investment bond and gave my details to a website. I received a brochure and a sales call from Redcap Management offering a bond issued by Standard Chartered Bank. The paperwork has the banks logo and says the investment is protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. But I contacted Standard Chartered and was told this appears to be a scam.

You were right to be suspicious,  this is a scam. Redcap Management claims to offer a Standard Chartered Special Issue Bank Bond with a one-year yield of 6 per cent, or 10 per cent if you invest for three years.

Bogus: Redcaps address is actually the Credit Suisse HQ in Zurich

This is all supposedly asset backed, protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, and tax exempt. Well, who could not resist such a package? Anyone with an ounce of sense is the answer.

Redcap Management has a London telephone number  0203 411 6711  but where it rings is anyones guess. It also has a Swiss telephone number and gives its address as Paradeplatz 8 in Zurich. If it is there, perhaps it is hiding in a basement cupboard. This is actually the world headquarters of Credit Suisse.

According to its website, Redcap Management is authorised by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA). This means Redcap is permitted to offer the services of an asset management company in 27 countries of the European Union.

Oddly though, Redcap does not appear on FINMAs public register of approved financial sector businesses. The Swiss watchdog told me: The company has no authorisation for any activities in the financial market requiring an authorisation in Switzerland.

So is Redcap simply marketing Standard Chartered bonds without proper authorisation? Or do the bonds not exist?

When I let the bank know what was on offer from Redcap, it was crystal clear in describing this as a fraud. Officials told me: We are aware of the existence of fake bond scams and have reported cases of which we are aware to the Financial Conduct Authority. Anyone considering any investment should consult an independent financial adviser, they added.

What the UK regulator has done with this information is anyones guess. Probably nothing. There is not even a warning on its website about Redcap Management operating fraudulently and without authorisation, let alone a mention of fake Standard Chartered bonds being marketed.

It would have been nice to discuss all this with Redcap itself, of course. I called its London number during normal business hours but after ringing out for an unusually long time my call went to an answering service.

I left a detailed message and followed this up with an email offering to drop in at Redcaps London office if I could be given the address. Answer came there none.

After a six-month search, I admit defeat

Mrs V.R. writes: My husband took out two annuity policies in 1980 with Property Growth Pensions & Annuities Limited, based in Croydon. I understand Barclays Life took the company over and we have tried to contact it, but to no avail.

This is a classic case of companies merging, being bought out, changing name  and leaving customers downright confused.

The Croydon company did become part of Barclays Life. This in turn became BL Telford Limited, run by a different company called ReAssure, itself controlled by the giant Swiss Re. But not all policies followed this chain of events.

I traced your husbands annuity policies to yet another company, Phoenix Group. Phoenix helpfully dug through old records to find that in May 2000 both policies  worth 22,707  were transferred yet again, this time to MGM Assurance.

MGM Assurance no longer exists as such. Part of it is now called Retirement Advantage, but lots of the business was transferred to Scottish Friendly.

Nationwide said that as I had failed to supply my email address, my application for the 100 fee had failed.

This rang a bell and you found your husband is receiving 134 a month from Scottish Friendly. It told me this was just one of your husbands policies, so I tried Retirement Advantage which is now part of Canada Life.

It even engaged an outside firm to scour the databases of companies and policies it had absorbed, but we hit a dead end. There was no trace of your husband, so after six months of searching, I have to admit defeat.

It illustrates how important it is for all of us not to lose touch with any investment firm, or to rely on it still being in business decades after we trusted it with our cash.

No email address? Sorry, you dont qualify for the 100 fee

G.B.T. writes: My granddaughter and I booked an appointment at the Camberley branch of Nationwide Building Society under its refer-a-friend scheme which paid 100 for introducing a customer.

We were asked for email addresses and explained that only my granddaughter has one. We were told this was OK. A week or so later my grand-daughter received details of her new account, but I did not receive 100. Nationwide said that as I had failed to supply my email address, my application for the 100 fee had failed.

It is startling but true  you really did introduce a new customer to Nationwide but were refused the 100 reward simply because you do not have an email address.

When you protested, a Nationwide manager told you: Members need an email address as part of the refer-a-friend process. As you are not currently eligible for the 100, I am sorry to say we would not look to pay this to you. But as a consolation prize, you could have 50 in recognition of the service you provided.

Nationwides head office was more sensible. Staff there explained to me that normally an introduction form would have been emailed for completion by you and your granddaughter. As you have no email address, the correct procedure should have been to email the form to your granddaughter.

The society told me you were poorly advised by the branch. It added: We can see that his granddaughter has completed an account switch and it is clear it was their intention to make a claim under the scheme, so we have made an ex gratia payment of 100 to both him and his granddaughter.

If you believe you are the victim of financial wrongdoing, write to Tony Hetherington at Financial Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TS or email tony.hetherington@mailonsunday.co.uk. Because of the high volume of enquiries, personal replies cannot be given. Please send only copies of original documents, which we regret cannot be returned.A lingerie company catering for women with voluptuous figures says it will have to leave Britain ahead of Brexit.

The Big Bloomers Company was set up in 2007 by Laura Murray, 53, and her mother, Dianne Mannering, 76.

It sold 3 million of extra-large knickers, bras and tights this year, mostly in the UK, but the products are made in Italy. Big Bloomers  which has ten employees in Penryn, Cornwall  is planning to shift operations to the European Union ahead of the UK leaving next March, with Ireland its most likely destination.

Warning: Laura Murray, centre, says her lingerie firm will have to quit Britain because of Brexit

Murray, who plans to move with her firm, said the switch would go ahead barring a miracle in Brexit negotiations.

She believes a hard Brexit, and customs delays, would sink her business within two months so it will be safer to move to Ireland, which would allow her to import stock within the EU and then post garments to customers in the UK.

Mannering said: Sitting it out till the end of next March in the hope Theresa May negotiates favourable import terms is not an option.

We have to act now to secure an unrestricted flow of stock in 2019.

The Government last week began issuing guidance on how to cope with a no-deal Brexit.Big technology, telecoms and banking firms that handle data for millions of customers fear Brexit will create a digital wall, cutting off the UK from the EU.

Vodafone, Twitter, Snapchat and Dropbox are among the companies that are fretting about major disruption if the EU refuses to recognise the UKs data regime.

If the EU declines to do so, firms may no longer be able to store information about EU citizens in the UK, potentially forcing them to move data centres and large numbers of jobs to the Continent.

Vittorio Colao, the boss of British telecoms giant Vodafone: We need to get equivalency with the EU

David Richards, the British boss of data firm WANdisco, described data as a potentially huge problem and an iceberg-type issue that has not been fully recognised.

WANdisco works with businesses across several sectors that are worried about data protection and are having to start preparing for Brexit-related problems.

Banks, for instance, may lose the ability to store data on EU customers outside the region, and so are preparing to move it away from the UK.

To avoid this, Richards said, the UK needs urgently to secure a legal agreement under which its data protection rules are recognised by the EU.

It needs to get resolved now, he said. I think this is the most significant Brexit problem.

Vittorio Colao, the boss of British telecoms giant Vodafone, told The Mail on Sunday: We need to get equivalency with the EU, so data can sit in either place, otherwise we are creating a digital wall. That is not good for any company or entrepreneur, given the ambition of the UK to become a digital hub.

In a recent regulatory note to investors in the US, social media firm Twitter noted that the UKs new Data Protection Bill substantially implements EU standards  under newly-introduced General Data Protection Regulation.

However, Twitter added that it was not clear whether the EU would accept this, meaning requirements for data transfers between the United Kingdom and the EU are unclear.

In a separate filing, Snap  the owner of Snapchat, a photo messaging phone app popular among teenagers  said it remained unclear how data transfers to and from the United Kingdom will be regulated.

Online photo-sharing company Dropbox and News Corp, the international media company headed by Rupert Murdoch, have expressed similar concerns about the transfer and protection of data.BANK PAYOUTS

The UK's four largest banks  Barclays, RBS, Lloyds and HSBC  have had to shell out 71 billion in fines, legal fees and compensation since the financial crisis.

Lloyds has coughed up the most, paying at least 24.3 billion since 2008.

Hit hard: Lloyds has coughed up the most, paying at least 24.3 billion since 2008

NORTHERN EXODUS

The number of Londoners heading north to buy homes has tripled over the last eight years, claims estate agent Hamptons.

In the first half of 2018 Londoners bought 30,280 homes outside the capital, 21 per cent of which were in the north of England or the Midlands.

INSOLVENCY MOVE

Government ministers want to tighten insolvency laws to stop 'reckless' bosses dissolving their firms to avoid paying off staff or meeting pension commitments.

HOTEL BATTLE

Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, the billionaire owners of the Ritz and the Telegraph, have won a bidding war for the five-star Beaumont Hotel in London. The twins reportedly paid between 125 million and 140 million for the lease.

TROLL TACKLING

Social media company Pinterest is trying to oust trolls ahead of its public market float next year.

The website will create a new public misinformation policy, change its recommendation algorithm and expand its safety engineering team.

COLLEGE COLLAPSE

One of the UK's largest privately funded college networks, GSM London, is in talks with the Department for Education over securing an emergency funding line to save it from collapse.Heathrow airport has blown more than 6bn in interest on its debts over the past 12 years, a Mail investigation has found.

Europes busiest airport spends more than 500m a year on interest payments alone, accounts for Heathrow Airport Holdings show.

Meanwhile its debt pile has risen to 13.4 billion  about the cost of the controversial third runway.

Costly: Europes busiest airport spends more than 500m a year on interest payments alone

Heathrow is planning to spend around 14 billion on the project, but its mammoth debts reveal just how stretched the airport has become.

Airline bosses fear Heathrow may not be able deliver the runway on budget.

While it has paid more than 6 billion in debt interest over 12 years, shareholders have extracted 3.6 billion in dividends.

James Price, campaign manager at the TaxPayers Alliance, said the expansion of Heathrow will be good for taxpayers and good for trade and business.

But he warned against reckless spending and borrowing.

Heathrow makes money by charging landing fees to airlines, which are passed on to passengers  around 22 for each fare.

Airline bosses want Heathrow to guarantee not to increase these to pay for the runway.

But the airport is planning to spend 33 billion on infrastructure in coming decades  including the runway and terminals to serve an extra 52m passengers a year.

Most of the work is due to be completed by 2035, and there is growing concern that the airport will have to raise charges significantly to pay the bills. Heathrow was a listed company until 2006 when it was bought out by a consortium led by Spains Ferrovial for around 16 billion, including 10 billion in cash mostly financed by debt.

Its current owners, who receive dividends, are Ferrovial of Spain, Qatar Holding, Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec, the Alinda Capital Partners in the US, China Investment Corporation, and Britains Universities Superannuation Pension Scheme.

They have invested more than 10 billion in the airport over the past decade.

Last month, chief executive John Holland-Kaye, 53, said Heathrow was a national disgrace 12 years ago, but was now something to be proud of.

He told BBCs Radio 4 Today programme: We have fantastic investors  exactly the kind of people you would want in a big infrastructure project like this.

Its entirely privately funded and its right that they should earn dividends on the investment they have made. They have rebuilt the airport. Its now something we can all be proud of.

The Civil Aviation Authority regulates how much Heathrow can charge in landing fees and how much investors can earn.

It said Heathrows finances were low risk and stable and that investment-grade debt finance such as Heathrows could be low cost and efficient.

A Heathrow spokesman said: Heathrow is a strong, healthy business with an investment-grade credit rating which we will keep throughout expansion.

Since we were taken private, 90 per cent of the airports operating cash flows have been re-invested into transforming Heathrow into one of the worlds top airports.

Expanding Heathrow will make Britain the best connected country in the world at no cost to the taxpayer. To achieve this, an appropriate return must be provided to private investors and we will work with our regulator to determine the right level.Metro Bank has paid another 2.8m to a firm owned by its chairman's wife in a deal that casts doubt on its claim to be different to rivals.

The cash was pocketed by architecture business InterArch, which belongs to billionaire Metro chairman Vernon Hill's wife Shirley.

It means Metro has handed almost 24m to Mrs Hill's New Jersey company over the past seven years.

Keeping it in the family: Vernon and Shirley Hill with Sir Duffield II

The bank says the payments are for design services at branches, and no other architect could do as good a job. But shareholders and campaigners have slammed the deal.

Luke Hildyard, of the High Pay Centre, said: 'Doling out lucrative contracts to a director's wife's company doesn't do Metro Bank, or British business, any favours.

'Metro Bank has tried to portray itself as a bank that puts consumers first rather than the self-enrichment of bankers.'

The latest 2.8m was given to InterArch for its work during the first six months of 2018.

Hill  a flamboyant former fast-food tycoon always accompanied by his Yorkshire terrier Sir Duffield II  wants to shake up British banking. But he was forced to quit the board of US lender Commerce Bancorp in 2007 following a similar outcry over deals with relations.

Hill, who is not involved in the appointment of InterArch, receives 120,000 a year from Metro to cover trips to London from his US home so he can run the bank.

A Metro spokesman said: 'The audit committee has strong review and benchmarking processes, conducted by authoritative independent third parties, to ensure that the terms are favourable for the bank.'Advertisement

Legendary Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating appeared in a jovial mood as he was spotted out and about in Sydney on the eve of the Liberal Party leadership challenge that deposed Malcolm Turnbull.

Keating was the nation's 24th PM, serving from 1991 to 1996, and is regarded as a pillar of the Labor Party. The former Bankstown boy who quit school at 14 before being elected into the federal parliament at just 25 himself seized leadership of the Labor Party from Bob Hawke in 1991.

And on Thursday, as the Liberal Party tore itself apart, the 74-year-old seemed keen to celebrate the controversy in Canberra, sipping champagne in Sydney's trendy Paddington.

Legendary former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating appeared in a jovial mood as he was spotted out and about in Sydney last week amidst the events of the Liberal Party leadership challenge

As our exclusive pictures show the 74-year-old seem keen to celebrate, sipping champagne in the trendy eastern Sydney suburb of Paddington

Keating, dressed in a black wool coat and cap, headed to an antique store where he indulged in a glass of French champagne with the owner

The pictures emerged as Scott Morrison took over from Malcolm Turnbull in the nation's top job following a week of chaos in the Liberal Party.

The former Labor PM has previously commented that Malcolm Turnbull was 'brilliant' but 'lacked judgement' - a relevant description in light of his party's revolt over his policy decisions.

Keating, dressed in a black wool coat and cap, headed to an antique store where he indulged in a glass of French champagne with the owner.

Mr Keating has been a Sydney local his entire life, even advocating in 2007 for the city to become the nation's capital and for federal parliament to be moved there.

After his relaxing Thursday beverage, the former PM then hopped into his old-school Peugeot 205 GTi - a throwback to the 1980s.

The 205 model was extremely popular in Keating's heyday, winning the Car of the Decade award by CAR Magazine in 1990.

The manufacturer produced a limited number of the GTi variants which have become collector's items but are certainly not luxury automobiles, with the vehicles now available for $5000.

After his relaxing Thursday beverage, the former PM then hopped into his old school Peugeot 205 GTi - a throwback to the 1980s

The manufacturer produced a limited number of the GTi variants which have become collector's items but are certainly not luxury automobiles, with the vehicles now available for $5000

The former Labor PM has previously commented that Malcolm Turnbull was 'brilliant' but 'lacked judgement' - a relevant description in light of his party's revolt over his policy decisions

PAUL KEATING Australia's 24th Prime Minister from 1991-1996 Served as Treasurer from 1983-1991 with Bob Hawke PM Was ousted by John Howard in 1996 as Prime Minister Implemented tax reform and floated the $AUD in 1980s Advertisement

Keating joined the Labor Party as a teenager after dropping out of school and remained with the organisation until his retirement in 1996.

He was appointed Treasurer of Australia in 1983 before replacing Bob Hawke as Australia's 24th Prime Minister in late 1991.

Keating has long been regarded as one of Australia's most influential leaders.

He was Treasurer through much of the eighties before leading the country and is regarded as being highly influential in reinventing the modern Australian economy.

He has remained active as a commentator since leaving politics.

Keating was Treasurer through much of the eighties before becoming prime minister and is regarded as being highly influential in reinventing the modern Australian economy







Marcello Nello Casella, 58, is currently facing up to two years behind bars

The former director of the billion-dollar, family-owned Yellow Tail wine empire was imprisoned for his involvement in illegal marijuana plots decades before his most recent drug scandal.

Marcello Nello Casella pleaded guilty in June to concealing information about a plot to produce substantial fields of cannabis on a regional New South Wales farm.

The 58-year-old is facing up to two years behind bars.

The current charge is not the first for the youngest Casella brother, according to the Daily Telegraph.

In 1993, Casella was sentenced to five years in prison when he volunteered his services 'over a number of months' at a farm in Northern Queensland where police discovered 5,729 cannabis plants.

Marcello Nello Casella (pictured) pleaded guilty in June to concealing information about a plot to produce substantial fields of cannabis

A Supreme Court judge at the time found that although Casella was not one of the leaders of the operation, he was present from the plantation's inception and visited the site throughout the following month.

Crown Prosecutor Tarik Abdulhak told a sentencing hearing at Downing Centre District Court the prior conviction corresponds closely to the recent charges.

In February 2014, 2,750 cannabis plants were discovered during a police raid at Karoopa Farm, near Crowther about three hours west of Sydney.

Weeks after the discovery, Casella resigned from his role as a company director at his family's billion-dollar wine enterprise.

In late 2014, Casella was charged with concealing information about the Karoopa Farm.

Casella was the director at Casella Wines, parent company of popular Yellow Tail wine (pictured)

HOW THE CANNABIS PLOT UNFOLDED 1993 - Marcello Nello Casella was caught assisting a large-scale marijuana plant 1995 - Casella was sentenced to five years imprisonment for his involvement February 2014 - NSW Police raided a rural NSW property and discovered 2,750 plants February 2014 - Casella resigned as director of Casella Wines Late 2014 - Police interviewed Casella May 2018 - Casella went on trial for alleged involvement in scheme September 2018 - Casella due to be sentenced for concealing information Advertisement

Casella's defence team argued his youth at the time of the first offence and the isolated nature of the matter should be taken into consideration, in addition to his otherwise 'effectively bare' criminal record.

They also insisted his decision to conceal his knowledge of the illegal activity could be seen as a case of misplaced loyalty.

In a series of character reference letters penned to the courts, Casella and his family were described as a charitable bunch who have donated in excess of $7 million to the community.

Casella's involvement in both drug plots comes decades after his family established a humble winery when they emigrated to Australia from Sicily, Italy, in the 1950s.

When contacted for comment, Casella Family Brands said Marcello Casella was no longer tied to the company.

'Marcello Casella has no involvement in the management or operations of Casella Family Brands, having resigned as a director of the company in February 2014,' a company spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia.

'It is not appropriate for Casella Family Brands to make any further comment in relation to Marcello's private legal matters.'

Marcello Casella is due to be sentenced in September.

Three brothers Joe (left), John (centre) and Marcello (right) ran the globally successful company which has grown to become one of the largest wineries in Australia and the U.S.

Fillippo and Maria Casella - who had three sons, Joe, John and Marcello - founded the globally successful company in Griffith, NSW, initially so their family could work together.

The business eventually grew to be one of the largest wineries in Australia and the United States, turning over more than $500million in profit in 2017 alone.

One of the company's more successful brands, Yellow Tail, was founded in 2001 by the middle Casella brother, and more than 12 million cases of the product are now shipped to 50 countries each year.

The iconic brand, which is the biggest-selling imported wine in the U.S., has been touted the fifth Most Powerful Wine Brand globally as more than two million glasses of the beverage are consumed yearly.The PM (pictured at church in her Maidenhead constituency today) is taking a business delegation to South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya on a whirlwind three-day tour

Theresa May will bang the drum for post-Brexit Britain this week as she heads for Africa in a bid to boost trade ties.

The Prime Minister is taking a business delegation to South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya on a whirlwind three-day tour.

Amid mounting pressure over the deadlock in negotiations with the EU, Mrs May insisted the the trip demonstrates the UK's 'ambition' on the global stage.

It is the first visit by a British PM to sub-Saharan Africa since 2013 - and no premier has been to Kenya in 30 years. Mrs May herself has only been to Africa once before, when she travelled to Tunisia as Home Secretary.

Mrs May said she was determined to unlock the 'incredible potential' of the continent.

But while Mrs May is eager to focus on shared economic interests and security issues, she will struggle to leave domestic problems behind as she returns to the political fray after a summer break.

The deep Tory rifts over Brexit were demonstrated again over the weekend when Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab appeared to dismiss Treasury forecasts about the consequences of no deal.

Chancellor Philip Hammond was accused of renewing a 'dodgy Project Fear' last week when he suggested that failure to strike a trade agreement could cost the UK up to 10 per cent lower of growth over 15 years.

He highlighted the predictions in a letter to the Treasury Select Committee just hours after Mr Raab published a slew of documents designed to calm concerns about the consequences of negotiations collapsing.

In a thinly veiled rebuke to the Chancellor, Mr Raab told the Sunday Times: 'I'm always chary of any forecast because most of them have been proved to be wrong.'

Differences are also seemingly becoming more entrenched with Brussels.

The European Commission has been insisting the UK cannot be involved in the 8billion Galileo satellite network - despite having contributed 1.2billion of the funding.

The service aims to be up and running by 2020 and offer a rival to the US GPS system that powers smartphones and military systems.

Mrs May is now reported to have told officials to start work on Britain's own, with 100million set to be spent on 'mapping out how a sovereign satellite system would work'.

'We still want to be part of the Galileo project but we have got to prepare for all eventualities,' a Whitehall source told the Sunday Telegraph.

The funding is set to come from a 3billion pot for 'no deal' preparations that was allocated at last year's Budget.

The trip will kick off in Cape Town, where Mrs May will hold talks with President Cyril Ramaphosa (pictured)

Senior aides to Mrs May said the Africa visit would seek to build on Commonwealth links, looking at ways to enhance trade and security cooperation.

There are also expected to be announcements on increasing Britain's diplomatic presence in the region.

The trip will kick off in Cape Town, where Mrs May will hold talks with President Cyril Ramaphosa and present him with the bell from the Mendi - a ship that tragically sank in the Channel in 1917 killing over 600 troops, mainly black South Africans, who had been coming to join Allied forces.

In Nigeria the PM will meet President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja and spend time in Lagos meeting victims of modern slavery  a cause that she has long campaigned on.

Mrs May will meet President Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya and see British soldiers training troops in the techniques needed to identify and destroy improvised explosive devices before they go to fight Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab (pictured right last week) has issued a thinly-veiled rebuke to Philip Hammond after the Chancellor highlighted grim Treasury forecasts about the impact of no deal with the EU

Mrs May said: 'Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy, and as longstanding partners this trip is a unique opportunity at a unique time for the UK to set out our ambition to work even closer together.

'A more prosperous, growing and trading Africa is in all of our interests and its incredible potential will only be realised through a concerted partnership between governments, global institutions and business.

'As we prepare to leave the European Union, now is the time for the UK to deepen and strengthen its global partnerships.

'This week I am looking forward to discussing how we can do that alongside Africa to help deliver important investment and jobs as well as continue to work together to maintain stability and security.

'I am proud to be leading this ambitious trip to Africa and to become the first UK Prime Minister in over 30 years to visit Kenya.'Formula One driver Charles Leclerc was saved from potentially devastating head injuries by his halo safety device after a horror crash in the Belgian Grand Prix.

Just moments after the start of the race at the notoriously dangerous Spa Francorchamps racetrack on Sunday, Leclerc collided with McLaren's Fernando Alonso as they sped into the first corner.

With the force of the impact, Alonso's car was sent flying into the air and vaulted over Leclerc's Sauber before coming crashing down on the Monegasque's cockpit.

Luckily for Leclerc the halo safety device, a fiberglass scaffold structure designed to shield the driver from impacts, came to his rescue.

Mclaren driver Fernando Alonso of Spain, top, goes over the top of Sauber driver Charles Leclerc of Monaco on Sunday in the horror crash

Photos taken in the aftermath show tyre marks on Leclerc's halo device - indicating he would likely have been hit on the head by Alonso's car

'I don't know how it would have ended up without it. I am happy it was there,' said 20-year-old Leclerc.

'It all happened very quickly. At the time, I knew there was an orange car, I thought it was Fernando. I felt the impact, but it wasn't that big in the car. I was lucky.'

After the first corner crash both Leclerc and Alonso walked away unscathed, with the former waving to the crowd to indicate he was unhurt in the crash.

Motorsport governing body FIA made the head protective device mandatory in F1 this year in order to protect drivers from potentially fatal impacts such as loose tires barreling at high speed, other flying debris and - in this case - one car landing on another.

'What is clear is the significant tire marks on the chassis and the halo,' FIA race director Charlie Whiting said. 'It doesn't take much imagination to think the tire marks could have actually been on Charles' head.'

The FIA has been looking at ways to improve cockpit protection and limit the risk of head injuries, after French F1 driver Jules Bianchi - who was a close friend of Leclerc's - died in July 2015 and British IndyCar driver Justin Wilson died a month later.

During the high-speed crash at the fast-paced Spa Francorchamps racetrack Alonso's car hit Leclerc's going into the first corner

Charles Leclerc, 20, gives a thumbs-up to the crowd at Spa as he walks away unscathed from the incident

Leclerc took to Twitter after the incident to say that he had originally not been a fan of the halo but appreciated having it after Sunday's crash

'(Alonso's car) would probably have made contact with his head,' Whiting said.

Alonso, who was sent airborne by Nico Hulkenberg's Renault ploughing into the back of his car, was thankful no one was harmed.

'On the positive side we are all OK, with Charles, with the halo. It's good news all three of us are OK,' Alonso told television broadcaster Sky. 'It's good proof (for the halo). We didn't need any proof, but it's a good thing.'

The halo forms a semi-circular barrier around the driver's helmet in the front half of the cockpit, protecting the head without completely closing the cockpit.

When first tested ahead of 2016, drivers were split as to whether they liked it with some - such as four-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton - criticizing it on aesthetic grounds.

Others, like two-time F1 champion Alonso and four-time champion Sebastian Vettel were outspoken in backing its usage.

Former F1 champion Nico Rosberg tweeted: 'We can end the HALO discussion now. It will save lives.'

The halo device is a new measure introduced into F1 by motorsport's governing body the FIA for this seasonAn intense fire which destroyed an abandoned supermarket has sparked major peak-hour delays in Melbourne.

Firefighters are still battling the blaze, which engulfed the building on Lygon Street in Brunswick East at about 3.30am on Monday.

The supermarket's roof collapsed and emergency crews feared the fire would spread to neighbouring properties, but managed to contain it to the building.

Firefighters are still battling the blaze, which engulfed the building on Lygon Street in Brunswick East at about 3.30am on Monday

The abandoned supermarket's roof collapsed and emergency crews were worried that the fire would spread to neighbouring properties

Lygon Street is closed between Albion and Stewart Street and is expected to remain closed throughout the peak-hour commute.

Trams will be affected for some time and commuters are advised to avoid the area.

Motorists are advised to use Nicholson Street or Sydney Road to avoid the closure.

The cause of the blaze is not yet known however Metropolitan Fire and Emergency Services Board have said the fire is suspicious and Victoria Police are now investigating.

Metropolitan Fire and Emergency Services Board have said the fire is suspicious and police are investigatingAn Alabama man has been slapped with a $1,000 fine for touching a Hawaiian monk seal and harassing a sea turtle on Kauai, and then posting the videos documenting his exploits on Instagram.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, said the Alabama resident, who was vacationing on Kauai last year, agreed to pay the fine, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported on Friday.

NOAA's Office of Law Enforcement in Hawaii used the man's social media accounts to track down his home address. He has not been publicly named.

An Alabama man who posted a video on Instagram last year showing him touching a critically endangered Hawaiian monk seal (pictured) has been fined $1,000

Hawaiian monk seals are a critically endangered species and are protected by both state and federal laws (stock image)

The culprit, in the video posted on Instagram with the hashtag #monkseals, walks up to a sleeping monk seal on Poipu Beach at night, and strokes it with his hand.

The startled animal whips around to face the intruder, who then flees.

The man panned his camera to a sign from the NOAA urging beachgoers to maintain a safe distance from wildlife.

'Violations are usually the result of things like tourists wanting to get a good, close picture with a seal or a thrill-seeker trying to get a rush,' Adam Kurtz, NOAA Fisheries wildlife management coordinator, said in a statement. 'But it's really frustrating when you see people harass these animals.'

Hawaiian monk seals are a critically endangered species, with their population estimated to be around 1,400 in the wild. They are protected by both state and federal laws, including the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The tourist also has shared a video showing him aggressively pursuing a sea turtle (stock image)

The Alabama tourist could have been injured because Hawaiian monk seals, which weigh between 400-600lbs, are wild animals that can act unpredictably, Kurtz said. The seal could have lunged at the man instead of simply turning toward him.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials, while investigating the man's Instagram account, also found a video of him aggressively pursuing a sea turtle while snorkeling at Poipu.

All species of sea turtles in US waters are listed as either threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, according to NOAA.Julie Bishop has suggested her party used dirty backroom tactics to push her out of the bitter race for the Liberal leadership

Julie Bishop has suggested her party used dirty backroom tactics to push her out of the bitter battle for the Liberal leadership.

The former Foreign Affairs Minister, who has resigned from cabinet and will move to the backbench, questioned why her Western Australian colleagues didn't back her to take the top job.

Ms Bishop revealed the leadership spill had been 'personally devastating' for several key players - and said she was aware of a leaked WhatsApp thread which urged her supporters to vote for Scott Morrison in the ballot.

The bombshell messages, released by ABC's Insiders program, showed key party members - calling themselves 'Friends of Stability' - were told to vote with their heads, not their hearts.

'[Mathias] Cormann rumoured to be putting some WA votes behind Julie Bishop in round one,' Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher is said to have written to the group.

'Be aware that this is a ruse trying to get her ahead of Morrison so he drops out and his votes go to [Peter] Dutton. Despite our hearts tugging us to Julie we need to vote with our heads for Scott in round one.'

The messages accused Senator Cormann off trying to set up a two-way contest between Ms Bishop and Mr Dutton, which the Home Affairs Minister would likely win.

'You would have to ask the individuals involved but it appeared to be a tactic to promote Peter Dutton into the prime ministership, whatever the cost,' Ms Bishop told The West Australian.

Mathias Cormann is accused of attempting to set up a two-way contest between Ms Bishop and Mr Dutton

Leaked WhatsApp messages (pictured) appeared to expose the betrayal of Ms Bishop during her run for the top job

One Western Australian MP said they felt tricked into voting against Ms Bishop in an apparent bid to keep Mr Dutton out of the top job.

'We were forced to vote for Scott in round one. There was a lot of people on that [WhatsApp] list who would have voted for Julie,' they told the paper.

Senator Cormann, who backed Peter Dutton to become prime minister, said rumours that he tried to set up the Dutton-Bishop showdown were untrue.

'I can completely and categorically rule out any such tricks, as you call it,' he told ABC News on Monday.

'At all points in time, I've tried to make judgments based on what I believe to be the right way forward, and I've explained myself openly and transparently in private and in public.'

He said on Sunday the rumoured tactics were '100 per cent incorrect'.

The WhatsApp messages accused Senator Cormann off trying to set up a two-way contest between Ms Bishop (pictured) and Mr Dutton

Former Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop tendered her resignation from the cabinet on Sunday (pictured)

Members of the WhatsApp thread showed concern for Ms Bishop, with one suggesting: 'Someone should tell Julie'.

'I have... very respectfully,' messages purportedly sent by Christopher Pyne read.

Ms Bishop was knocked out of the first round of voting after receiving only 11 votes. No one from Western Australia voted for her.

Insiders host Barrie Cassidy said Ms Bishop was 'entitled to be both embarrassed and angry'.

'In the end she was a victim of tactics and I'm sure that helps to explain why she is less than impressed,' he said.

Mr Morrison said he had wanted Ms Bishop to stay on as foreign minister but accepted her decision to step aside.

Mr Morrison said he had wanted Ms Bishop to stay on as foreign minister but accepted her decision to step aside

Ms Bishop was knocked out of the first round of voting after receiving only 11 votes

Former Defence Minister Marise Payne, who worked closely with Ms Bishop, moves into the role.

Ms Bishop will now sit on the back bench as the member for the Perth seat of Curtin, but her political future is in doubt.

There is speculation she could become the next Governor-General, but Ms Bishop is yet to address the rumours.

'I have been pre-selected by the Liberal Party for the seat of Curtin and I have made no decision regarding the next election,' she said.

Since her resignation, supporters of the former deputy have paid tribute to her career.

Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong described her role as Australia's minister of Foreign Affairs as 'trailblazing'.

'For five years she has dedicated her life to our nation with a tireless work ethic and exhausting travel schedule.

'Ms Bishop's commitment to standing up for Australia both here and abroad has been been in question,' her statement said.

Pictured is a list of the ministers in the group 'Friends for Stability', which were purported to be told to vote against Ms Bishop

Greens MP, Sarah Hanson Young said Ms Bishop would 'have made a great Liberal Prime Minister'.

She said on Twitter, 'I've always respected her ability to cut through the bull-dust, work across the political divide and got on with her job.

'Proof the boys-club still have a stranglehold on politics,' Ms Hanson Young said.

Kevin Rudd, a former minister for foreign affairs, said: 'Julie Bishop has been a highly effective Australian foreign minister. It's a hard job. Much harder than it looks. We may not always have agreed on policy. That's normal.

'But she has earned, absolutely, the respect of foreign ministers around the world,' Mr Rudd said.

Federal member for Chisholm, Julia Banks said: 'In Julie Bishop our nation has been gifted with a fine leader and a standout role model for girls and women.'

WINNERS AND LOSERS IN THE MORRISON RESHUFFLE Pictured: Newly elected leader of the Liberal Party Scott Morrison alongside deputy leader Josh Frydenberg WINNERS Peter Dutton - Having unseated the prime minister but not seized the job himself he hangs onto Home Affairs but loses Immigration Melissa Price - Elevated to cabinet as Environment minister Angus Taylor - Elevated to cabinet as Energy minister Karen Andrews - From assistant minister to cabinet, overseeing Industry, Science and Technology Alex Hawke - From assistant minister to Special Minister of State but not cabinet David Coleman - Steps up to Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs from assistant minister for finance. LOSERS Julie Bishop - Quits frontbench, expected to retire from parliament Craig Laundy - No longer minister after asking not to be considered Keith Pitt - Resigned over energy prices concern John McVeigh - Resigned from ministry Jane Prentice - Retiring from parliament SIDEWAYS Marise Payne - Becomes Foreign Minister having done a solid job in Defence Christopher Pyne - Swaps his job as chief salesman for Defence Industries take take on Defence Michaelia Cash - The former Jobs and Innovation Minister takes on Small and Family Business, Skills and Vocational Training Alan Tudge - Swaps Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs to become Minister for Cities, Urban Infrastructure and Population Steve Ciobo - Becomes Defence Industry Minister, swapping out the Trade, Tourism and Investment portfolio Kelly O'Dwyer - Loses Revenue, Financial Services and Public Service to become Minister for Jobs, Industrial Relations and Women Dan Tehan - Gains the Education portfolio, loses Social Services. Paul Fletcher - The new Minister for Families and Social Services says goodbye to Urban Infrastructure and Cities Simon Birmingham - Will no longer advocate for the education sector, moves into the Trade, Tourism and Investment portfolio. Advertisement

Ms Bishop will now sit on the back bench as the member for the Perth seat of Curtin, but her political future is in doubtKevin Rudd has compared media mogul Rupert Murdoch and former prime minister Tony Abbott to a cancer on Australian democracy.

The former Labor PM accused News Corp executive chairman Rupert Murdoch of contributing to the 'orgy of political violence' that led to Malcolm Turnbull's ousting.

Rudd also pilloried Tony Abbott as a toxic influence on the national political landscape who doesn't care about policy at all.

Kevin Rudd (pictured) has compared Tony Abbott and media mogul Rupert Murdoch to cancer

The extraordinary spray was made in an opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday in the wake of last week's Liberal leadership crisis in Canberra.

Mr Rudd said Mr Murdoch's powers far exceeded the scope of his news organisation.

He said Mr Murdoch 'operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view'.

Mr Rudd added that politicians needed to toe the line on what Murdoch wanted or he would 'kill you politically'.

Mr Rudd also called for a Royal Commission into Murdoch's involvement in the political landscape.

'It's time for a Royal Commission into the abuse of near monopoly by Murdoch media in Australian politics and policy,' he said on Twitter on Monday.

'Including Murdoch and Abbott killing the NBN (FTTP) to protect Murdoch's commercial interest in Foxtel from real competition from Netflix and others.'

Mr Rudd also had some choice words for the former Liberal PM.

'Abbott has never cared about policy. He has only cared about politics and winning at any cost. I cannot remember a single positive policy initiative that Abbott has championed and then implemented,' Mr Rudd said.

'The entire energies of this giant wrecking ball of Australian policies has been focused on destroying his opponents within the Labor party and the Liberal party'.

Mr Abbott's 'unique negativity, toxicity and hatred' could not be underestimated, the ex-Labor leader continued.

Mr Abbott's 'unique negativity, toxicity and hatred' could not be underestimated, the ex-Labor leader continued

Rudd said Mr Murdoch (pictured) 'operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view'

Both Mr Rudd and Mr Abbott were ousted as prime minister by their parties before they had finished their first terms. Mr Rudd was ejected by Julia Gillard and Mr Abbott by Malcolm Turnbull.

Mr Abbott was last week accused of being a 'wrecker' by fellow Liberal MPs for laying the groundwork for the sudden and successful move by the party's conservative wing against Mr Turnbull.

Mr Abbott had backed fellow conservative Peter Dutton, who lost his chance at the top job when he was overtaken by Scott Morrison, who was sworn in as prime minister on Friday.

Mr Abbott is due to make a speech in Sydney on Monday on population and immigration.Refugee children as young as seven are taking anti-depressants amid a health crisis at Nauru Detention Centre where a ten-year-old tried to take their own life.

Documents compiled by employees at the centre have revealed how the young children are exhibiting signs of severe trauma, ABC reported.

A 14-year-old child attempted to self-harm, a report from June 2018 said.

An additional report from the same month said a 10-year-old tried to self-harm.

Refugee children as young as seven are taking anti-depressants amid a health crisis at Nauru Detention Centre (pictured) where a ten-year-old tried to self-harm

Ahoora, 7, arrived at Nauru over five years ago and has been prescribed anti-depressants to cope with trauma, reported The Guardian.

The young boy lives in a tent with his family and is unable to attend school due to severe bullying.

Both of his parents are suffering from depression with his mother attempting to take her own life on several occasions and writing blood soaked letters to Australian Border Force.

Video footage captures Ahoora's fragile mental state where he admits that taking anti-depressants makes him feel 'dizzy.'

'I want to go somewhere nice, but, we are stuck here for five years and five-six months. We are dying here,' he said.

Ahoora, who has spend most of his life at Nauru said he has regular nightmares: 'I hear noises that scare me. I feel like something bad is coming, a wild cat.'

Ahoora (pictured), 7, arrived at Nauru over five years ago and has been prescribed anti-depressants to cope with trauma

Compiled documents also reveal a 14-year-old child attempted to self-harm

He has visited a psychiatrist on numerous occasions who proposed he draws his nightmares instead of discussing them.

'During subsequent appointments, Ahoora spontaneously took colouring pens and began to draw. His drawings continued to express scenes seen in his nightmares: a sad child burning in a fire; children afraid of sharks while in the sea; a shark having its blood sucked by a ghost; blood and darkness,' said the psychiatrist.

Dr Vernon Reynolds was employed as a child psychiatrist at Nauru for almost two years and was one of the longest serving mental health practitioners on the island.

He was'Am I concerned that children could die in Nauru, that some of these refugee children could die? I'm absolutely concerned about that. I'm reasonably surprised that no-one has,' Dr Reynolds said.

Dr Vernon Reynolds, who worked at Nauru for almost two years, said the children begin to withdraw from life as they stop eating and stop looking after themselves, instead opting to stay in bed

Social worker Fiona Owens said the children are thinking about how to die and Google it on the internet

Dr Reynolds said the children begin to withdraw from life as they stop eating and stop looking after themselves, instead opting to stay in bed.

Dr Reynolds was expected to return to Nauru in April 2018 but the day before his scheduled departure he was informed that Australian officials asked him not to return.

He had become increasingly critical of the detention centre in his reports and argued the children were being neglected by authorities.

Social worker Fiona Owens, who worked as team leader on the island from May to July 2018, alleges the rates of self-harm among young children was alarming.

'The only thing a lot of the children are thinking about is how to die. They Google it on the internet,' she said.

Ms Owens said working at Nauru became an impossible job, despite previously working in difficult environments.

A spokeswoman for Australia's Department of Home Affairs said in a statement: 'Any transferee at risk of actual or threatened self-harm receives immediate and appropriate medical care and support.'

LIFELINE: 13 11 14 www.lifeline.org.au . Suicide Call Back Service: 1300 659 467A group campaigning to abolish jails and release all inmates, including terrorists and sex attackers, will be hosted by pro-Corbyn movement Momentum next month.

The Empty Cages Collective (ECC), which wants to bring an end to the prison system, appears in the programme of the Momentum event, which is being held alongside the Labour Party conference.

The ECC says: We identify as abolitionists because we believe the movement to reform prisons... can legitimise the prison system and the state.

The Empty Cages Collective, which wants to bring an end to the prison system, appears in the programme of the Momentum event, that is being held alongside the Labour Party conference (stock prison picture)

The event will include speeches from Mr Corbyn and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell.

The ECC is part of a wider movement to plan for a world without prisons and police which is gaining ground on the hard Left.

The group says freed prisoners should be given fulfilling roles in society to encourage them to behave better.

The event will include speeches from Mr Corbyn (pictured left) and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell (pictured right)

Tory MP Philip Davies said: If there was a pop chart for bad ideas, this would go straight to No 1. All the criminals would be out on the streets committing crimes.

Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said there should be fewer people in prison but added: You cant blow everything up and start again. Its just not going to happen.Lysette Anthony, 54, is the only British actress to speak out publicly about Weinstein

The first British actress to accuse Harvey Weinstein of rape has claimed that a dirty tricks campaign has left her as the only alleged victim in the UK to go public.

Lysette Anthony, 54, has questioned why she has been the only Briton with the guts to waive her anonymity and speak out about the alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of the movie mogul.

Last year she accused the 66-year-old producer of raping her at her west London home in the late 1980s.

Weinstein, who Miss Anthony first met in New York in 1982, allegedly turned up at her flat one morning and forced himself on her.

The actress said that after she went public, her 14-year-old son Jimi had been mocked by other boys who said his mother is Harvey Weinsteins b****.

She said there had been a huge backlash against women who have spoken out against Weinstein. He has denied all allegations of non-consensual sex.

Miss Anthony told The Sunday Times: I have waived my right to anonymity because it gave me a voice.

But people should ask themselves a very simple question: Why am I the only actress in Britain who has had the guts to use her name? Why the silence?

I know people have been sitting around dinner tables looking to find us complicit. [But] hes hurt a shocking number of women.

Please ask yourselves, What is the cost of owning up to being part of his bloody harem? Quite a lot.

The shame over years of degradation was enough to make me contemplate suicide at one point. A friend had to talk me down.

The actress, who has had a long film, TV and stage career and currently appears in the soap Hollyoaks, has given a statement to the Metropolitan Police.

Asia Argento and Harvey Weinstein during 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Argento paid a former child actor 300,000 after he accused her of sexually assaulting him while he was a teenager

The force has received allegations of sexual assault against Weinstein from ten other women.

Miss Anthony also defended Asia Argento, one of Weinsteins most prominent accusers, who alleged he raped her at the Cannes film festival when she was 21.

Last week it emerged that Miss Argento, now 42, paid former child actor Jimmy Bennett almost 300,000 after he accused her of sexually assaulting him while he was a teenager. Miss Argento had denied she had a sexual relationship with Bennett, now 22, before text messages from her stating she had slept with the actor emerged.

Miss Anthony said: She has been extraordinarily courageous standing up to Weinstein. And now shes being punished. The producer has now been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 80 women and charged with offences relating to three women in New York, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

Miss Anthony believes that black ops and dirty tricks are being used. She fears a journalist who approached her last year was in fact a spy seeking material to discredit her claims.

Weinstein paid former Mossad agents to obtain information, she said. I have also been battling against a little spy of my own whom I suspect may have been conducting a fishing operation. I got the budget version.

Weinstein denied her claims and said any allegations of involvement in dirty tricks are totally false. Benjamin Brafman, who leads his legal team, added: Neither Mr Weinstein nor any of his agents or representatives had anything whatsoever to do with exposing the hypocrisy and lies that will now and forever personify Asia Argento.A former bikie has claimed 'boiling water mixed with urine' was poured under his cell door after he quit the notorious Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang.

Alexander Victor Miller, who is an ex-member of the Australian gang, says he was forced into segregation after he handed back his colours, the Canberra Times reported.

The 28-year-old pleaded not guilty to charges which involve drug and firearm offences at the ACT Magistrates Court on Friday.

Miller was allegedly seen driving his mother's car past the home of rival faction leader Peter Zdravkovic on June 5.

Alexander Victor Miller, 28, (pictured) claims he had 'boiling water mixed with urine' poured under his cell door when he quit the the Comanchero

The court heard police allegedly moved him to 24-hour lockdown because he threatened another inmate.

Prison officers claim Miller called a fellow inmate a 'dog' and said that he knew their family.

In June, police are alleged to have found a sawn-off .38 rifle, ammunition, drugs, gloves, a black balaclava and cash in Miller's vehicle.

He pleaded not guilty to charges of possessing a prohibited firearm, possessing ammunition and possessing a drug of dependence.

Miller's Legal Aid Defence Lawyer, Hugh Jorgensen, argued the former member had left the gang to turn his life around.

Police allegedly found a sawn-off .38 rifle, ammunition, drugs, gloves, a black balaclava and cash in the vehicle Miller was allegedly driving past faction leader Peter Zdravkovic's home

The Australian bikie gang was reported to be split in two factions earlier this year.

After the gang split in two, Mr Zdravkovic was wounded in a shooting and arson attack just weeks before Miller was allegedly seen driving near his home.

Senior Constable Dale Ohlmus - who is attached to ACT Policing's anti-bikie unit Taskforce Nemesis - said there was no confirmation Miller had quit the bikie gang.

Magistrate Beth Campbell said she couldn't make a decision based on hearsay and whether his withdrawal from the gang was merely a 'severance of convenience'.

Ms Campbell also said no ordinary citizen drives a car while armed with illegal firearms and other criminal items in an area where gang activity and warfare had been taking place.

The Australian bikie gang was reported to be split in to two factions earlier this year, sparking internal fightsConvicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby has spoken openly about her special interest in mental health, but refused to discuss her new life and future plans in Australia.

Corby  who was convicted in Indonesia in 2005 for smuggling 4.2kg of marijuana inside her boogie board bag  has been raising money for Suicide Prevention Australia by participating in a charity run.

The 41-year-old allegedly looked away and appeared close to tears when reporters from The Gold Coast Bulletin questioned her choice of charity.

Schapelle Corby told reporters that mental health issues were 'very close to her heart', but refused to discuss her new life back in Australia

'That is a good question, it's really deep for me,' she eventually said.

'Mental health is something that is very close to my heart.'

Corby returned to Australia 15 months ago after nine years in an Indonesian jail and three years on parole, and has largely avoided speaking to the media.

Corby refused to discuss how she's settling back in to Australian life and any future plans

Her guarded response continued as she also refused to comment on how she was settling back in to Australian life, and whether she had any plans or projects in the pipeline.

Looking to her running partner Chelsea Kennedy, all Corby said was that she was 'really glad' she took part in the Bridge to Brisbane fun run.

She raised nearly $1,300 for the charity which she promoted to her 182,000 followers on Instagram, with one post stating: 'life is worth living'.

On a page linked to her fundraising efforts, Corby said that she'd created the page because she wanted 'to make a difference'.

Speaking to Woman's Day in March this year, Corby said she was living 'day by day' in Logan, South Brisbane, with her mother Rosleigh Rose.

She told the magazine that she spent most of her time reading and swimming at home at the pool at her home or at the beach, and had always struggled with her weight.

Corby allegedly attributed her weight gain to mental illness and anti-psychotic medication.Air Travel has gotten longer as airlines 'pad out' timetables to create the impression that planes arrive at their destination on time, it emerged last night.

In a bid to maintain punctuality targets, carriers are sometimes adding an extra twenty minutes to flight arrival times.

The research, by consumer group Which?, found that more than six of every ten flight routes are now advertised as taking longer than they did a decade ago, despite vast improvements in aircraft technology.

Carriers are sometimes adding an extra twenty minutes to flight arrival times. Stock picture

After comparing the average length of 125 flight times operated by large airlines from 2009 and this year, the study found that 76 routes, 61 per cent, now took longer, the Times reported.

It has led to criticism that schedules are being changed so airlines can avoid paying compensation to customers for delays. But this has been strongly denied by carriers.

The study has also led to claims that airlines including British Airways, Easyjet and Ryanair are increasing flight times so they can 'pat themselves on the back for being on time', the Times claimed.

Airlines last night blamed the slower flight times on congested skies, with air traffic controllers often keeping aircraft on the ground longer and leaving them in holding patterns before landing.

Some routes to the Far East have increased in recent years to avoid flying over dangerous countries.

It was also claimed that aircraft were flying more slowly to reduce fuel consumption, lowering the cost of fares.

Rory Boland, editor of Which? travel magazine, which published the findings, said passengers were 'likely to feel that schedule padding is another case of airlines pulling the wool over their eyes'.

He added: 'Longer scheduled flight times are likely to mean passengers spend more time sitting around at the gate or on the plane itself, just so the airline can pat itself on the back for being 'on time' It could also reduce the instances when an airline has to pay you compensation for a flight delay.'

Air Travel has gotten longer according to research by consumer group Which?. Stock picture

The research found 87 per cent of British Airways flights were official slower than a decade ago. The proportion was 82 per cent for Ryanair, 75 per cent for Virgin Atlantic and 62 per cent for Easy Jet.

Using figures from OAG, aviation data analysts, the study found that Ryanair's flight from London Stan-stead to Berlin Schonefeld now took 10 minutes longer. Easyjet's flight from Gatwick to Berlin took an extra 19 minutes.

Meanwhile, BA flights from Heathrow to New York, Bangkok and Singapore were extended by 20 minutes. The widest gap was a Virgin Atlantic flight from Heathrow to Newark Liberty airport, New Jersey, which on average takes 35 minutes longer than it used to.

Under EU rules passenger can claim up to 540 (600) for flights that have been delayed by more than three hours.

However, airlines are exempt from making payments for circumstances outside their control, such as poor weather. The system will stay in place after Brexit.

BA said: 'A wide range of factors beyond all airlines' control impact flight times, including air traffic control strikes, air space man-agement and security restrictions. We offer customers accurate information.'

Virgin Atlantic said: 'There are many reasons why schedules may vary, for example congestion at airports, more economical flying regimes, stronger jet streams or different aircraft types.'

Easyjet said: 'Our data shows Easyjet's network punctuality was at 80 per cent for 2017Only 0.8 per cent of our flights are de-layed by more than three hours and we will always pay compensation when it is due.'A mobile facility has been set up in response to violence between the teenage children of African immigrants.

The facility has been established in Taylors Hill, north Melbourne, with officers hoping it will aid their investigation into a violent brawl that broke out in the area two weeks ago.

The fight broke out at around 5.30pm on August 8 between Sudanese-Australian youths, reportedly over a dispute over 'girlfriends'. The youths threw objects believed to be rocks and damaged a nearby police car.

'Let them fight': Two rival Sudanese gangs met for an organised altercation at about 5.30pm on August 8

Terrified locals were instructed to stay indoors as a mob of around 30 people took part in the pre-organised fight.

Mobile phone footage emerged of two women brawling on the ground while onlookers cheered them on. Crowds can be heard chanting 'let them fight'.

A heavy police presence was required to break up the crowd, including the Operations Response Unit and the Public Order Response Team.

An investigation into the incident is ongoing. 'There has been a lot of work happening in the area since 8 August including highly visible patrols on foot, in cars and by the Mounted Branch as well as covert patrols,' Victoria Police told Daily Mail Australia.

'Brimbank Crime Investigation Unit detectives have spoken to a range of people as part of their investigation including residents, schools, and community leaders.

'Uniform police have also widely canvassed the Taylors Hill area speaking to residents.'

North West Metro Region Commander Tim Hansen said those who gathered in the area were primarily school-aged youths and included a significant number of females.

'It is clear that people were fearful of the youths' activities on the night, which is why we have committed significant time and resources into our investigation,' Hansen said.

According to police, the new mobile facilities are necessary as an 'extension' of their work in the area.

A heavy police presence was required to break up the fighting, including the Operations Response Unit and the Public Order Response Team.

The mobile facility will be open between 3pm and 7pm, and is located near Lonzo Park in Taylors Hill. Authorities are encouraging locals to drop in and talk through their concerns with the officers stationed there.

Police say that the facilities should be seen as an opportunity for locals to drop in to discuss any local policing concerns and pass on any information that may assist the investigation.

Melbourne mayors have since joined Sudanese leaders to denounce the use of the term 'African gangs' in the media.

Sudanese leaders have stated that the term 'gangs' unfairly vilified Sudanese communities. African-Australian community leader Maker Mayek denied that there was an African gang crisis in the Victorian city.

If anyone witnessed a crime that night or has any information which may assist police in their investigation, please contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or www.crimestoppersvic.com.au.

Local police patrolled the area on horseback following the fight and claim they have invested 'significant time and resources' into the investigation

.An Australian fugitive on the run from Thai authorities after allegedly assaulting two airline hostesses has completed an epic voyage to freedom.

Owen Van Duren, 37, with the help of his ex-special forces brother Shane, 43, sailed for six weeks through the treacherous waters of Southeast Asia before arriving in Darwin last Sunday.

Van Duren, who had been in a Thai jail for six months, made the daring escape while on bail over the alleged assault of airline staff on a flight from Sydney to Bangkok in August last year.

In early July this year, the brothers hired a 40ft 'Pina Colada' catamaran from the Yacht Haven Marina, north-east of Phuket, and were due to return it on the 21st of that month.

Owen Van Duren (left), with the help of his ex-special forces brother Shane (right) sailed for six weeks through the treacherous waters of Southeast Asia before arriving in Darwin last Sunday

A source who claims to be close with the yacht's owner said an insurance claim had been lodged after the brothers didn't return the boat, with beliefs it had sunk in monsoonal storms off the Thai coast.

'It is not clear if the boat was stolen, sunk or something else happened to the charter crew that made it impossible for them to return the boat,' the source wrote on an online forum before the brothers made it to Darwin.

'The weather situation in the past three to four weeks were very challenging in this area with a strong S/W monsoon, heavy winds and strong swells.'

The younger sibling was arrested by Northern Territory Police when he arrived in Darwin, but was soon released, NT News reported.

The brothers are believed to have taken the 40-ft yacht from a marina near Phuket, before making the dangerous voyage to Darwin

Australian authorities had also accused Van Duren of the mid-flight assault, but prosecutors withdrew the charges on Friday and sealed his freedom.

Thai prosecutors are believed to have prevented Australian authorities from proceeding with the charges, News Corp understands.

It is not clear if Thai authorities will apply to have Van Duren extradited to face the assault charges.

A Border Force spokesman said the catamaran had been tracked for weeks before it arrived in Darwin, adding: 'The vessel in question may have been stolen.'

The brothers hired a 40ft 'Pina Colada' catamaran (pictured) from the Yacht Haven Marina

Van Duren's brother Shane, a former Australian soldier, is currently serving a suspended sentence following a violent confrontation with police and the RSCPA.

He cut through three wire cages at RSCPA headquarters in Canberra in late 2015 and freed his Belgian Shepherd, Kalu, which had been seized by authorities.

Two police officers and two RSCPA inspectors went to Van Duren's house to retrieve the dog when the situation turned violent.

A police officer tried to grab Van Duren's arm when the former soldier punched him in the face and placed him in a headlock.

A source who claims to be close with the yacht's owner said it was believed it had sunk in monsoonal storms off the Thai coast. Above, an internal shot of the vessel

A court heard Van Duren then grabbed a female inspector by the throat as she approached him with capsicum spray.

'You're f****** dead b****, this is only 50 per cent of what I can do,' Van Duren said to the inspector after being taken down, the court heard.

The 43-year-old spent 46 days in custody, and later plead guilty to assault and strangulation charges.

Van Duren's brother Shane (pictured), a former Australian soldier, is currently serving a suspended sentence following a violent confrontation with police and the RSCPA

The dog was later returned to Van Duren, who received a two-and-a-half year suspended sentence.

'He's where he should be, he's where he belongs. He's good. The family are happy,' he told the ABC outside court.

Van Duren served in East Timor where he was confronted with traumatic experiences - including the death of personnel in 1999 and 2000, Chief Justice Helen Murrell said last year.

The dog was part of Van Duren's therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.Hope Stubbings, 27, said the England rugby legend persuaded her to turn a blind eye to him sleeping with other women

Danny Cipriani's girlfriend allegedly dumped him because of his 'controlling' behaviour which she claims left her suicidal.

Hope Stubbings, 27, said the England rugby legend made her feel that she 'belonged to him' and persuaded her to turn a blind eye to him sleeping with other women.

The mother-of-one told a friend their relationship was so unhealthy that she had considered 'ending it all', the Sun report.

Cipriani, 30, allegedly defended his behaviour by saying that his memory was very short given that he spent his career being hit in the head on a rugby pitch.

Hope, a mental health manager, confided in her friend: 'He's the most controlling person I have ever met.

'If you're like Danny and able to be with almost any woman you want, that becomes really boring so he finds other ways to get a kick.

'Just being with somebody for a night is not enough for him. He doesn't get the same sort of thrill.'

Hope, who is studying for a master's degree in neuroscience, began to question her sanity because Cipriani made her so reliant on him, she told the friend.

In one of her messages, she said their relationship was 'unhealthy', and that she had become an 'emotional wreck' and been robbed of her 'positive personality'.

'In my darkest hours, of which there have been many, I have thought about ending it all,' she wrote.

Hope and Cipriani allegedly began seeing each other after meeting on Instagram last November.

Gloucester's Danny Cipriani arrives for the pre-season friendly match at the Kingspan Stadium, Belfast, just days after his conviction after a nightclub brawl in Jersey

But three months into their relationship, he is alleged to have sent her a text which read: 'I've met someone, babe'.

Hope claims from then on he had a series of liaisons with other women, but begged her not to stop seeing him.

She told her friend: 'He established from the beginning that I belonged to him. I had to be available whenever he wanted to see me.'

Cipriani was fined 2,000 at Jersey Magistrates' Court this month after he admitted assaulting a bouncer and injuring a policewoman while resisting arrest.Every doctor's surgery in England is being encouraged to employ mental health therapists.

The therapists will focus on common mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, particularly in people with long-term physical illnesses like diabetes and heart conditions.

NHS England is encouraging GPs to bring mental and physical health services under one roof after a survey found two in five patient appointments are now for mental health.

Every doctor's surgery in England is being encouraged to employ mental health therapists (file image)

Bringing therapists into surgeries prevents patients having to travel for treatment, which can put them off seeking help.

Claire Murdoch, NHS England's national director for mental health, said: 'Joining up talking therapy services in primary care settings is another big step forward for our patients and a key plank in putting mental health at the centre of the long-term plan for the NHS.'

Dr Nikita Kanani, NHS England's acting director of primary care, said: 'General practice is the front door of the NHS. We continue to support the expansion of the workforce so patients have access to a range of different health professionals so that we can better support both their physical and mental health needs.'

Every week one in six adults in England suffers a common mental health disorder like depression, with one in five having considered taking their own life.

A survey of more than 1,000 GPs by mental health charity Mind found two in five appointments were for mental health, with two out of three doctors saying the proportion of people needing help with mental health had risen in the past year.

Bringing therapists into surgeries prevents patients having to travel for treatment, which can put them off seeking help (file image)

In-house therapists receive patients directly or through doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants and pharmacists.

Geoff Heyes, head of Health Policy and Influencing at Mind, said: 'It is essential that these therapists are fully integrated into the primary care team and that GPs feel confident about how to access them. I

't's also important that GPs and other primary care staff receive improved training in mental health.' The NHS has been accused by critics of decades of neglect and underinvestment in mental health.This year marks the 25th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence's murder. He was stabbed to death aged 18 in a racist attack in 1993

The voice of youth in architecture will come to the fore at this years lecture in memory of Stephen Lawrence at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Stephen had dreamed of becoming an architect before he was stabbed to death aged 18 in a racist attack in 1993.

An annual lecture is always held close to Stephens birthday on September 13, with next months talk taking place on the 20th.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of his murder and 20 years since the foundation of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, which helps disadvantaged students to pursue a career in architecture.

In a departure from previous years where there has been one keynote speaker, the event has been planned with The [204] Design Collective and features a panel discussion.

This includes young speakers such as Abigail Patel and Selasi Setufe, from the Future Architects Network.

An annual lecture is always held close to Stephens birthday on September 13, with next months talk taking place on the 20th, at the Royal Institute of British Architects headquarters

The RIBA website explains how this year alone the Trusts Building Futures programme is supporting over 250 young people through bursaries, work placements, industry workshops and mentoring.

Tickets for the event at RIBAs central London headquarters cost 25, including a welcome drink and food, with 100 available to students at 5.

They can be bought here.Defence Industry Minister Steven Ciobo said asylum seekers on the run in crocodile country should be sent to offshore immigration detention on Nauru.

Fifteen foreign nationals have been detained and authorities are searching for at least five more who abandoned an illegal fishing vessel that ran aground in the Daintree in Far North Queensland.

'Those people if we can find them, they should be taken into custody, so to speak, and they should be sent to Nauru,' Mr Ciobo told Sky News on Monday.

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Fifteen foreign nationals have been detained and authorities are searching for at least five more who abandoned an illegal fishing vessel (pictured)

One man arrested on suspicion of being an illegant immigrant was seen being taken by police to Cairns

More than 20 illegal immigrants are on the run after the fishing boat they were on ran aground in Far North Queensland

Mr Ciobo said that if Labour were in power that the potential illegal immigrants would be put into the community.

There are more people who were on the boat but have not been found by investigators.

A spokesperson for The Department of Home Affairs told Daily Mail Australia that the investigation of what they believe to be an illegal fishing vessel is ongoing.

Footage emerged of two men suspected of being illegal immigrants being detained after they were walking across the waterway towards a ferry

The Australian Border Force is on the scene and is being assisted by the Queensland Police Service.

The spokesperson said: 'We can confirm that a number of potential unlawful non-citizens have been located.

Defence Industry Minister Steven Ciobo (pictured) said asylum seekers on the run in crocodile country should be sent to offshore immigration detention on Nauru

'The ABF and Department of Home Affairs will undertake the necessary border processes to establish circumstances around the arrival.'

As investigations continue the department declined to comment further.

Footage emerged of two of the suspected illegal immigrants being detained earlier today.

One of the men can be seen sitting in a car while officers stand around the vehicle.

The men were walking across the waterway towards a ferry with a third man, according to the Cairns Post.

A third man was later arrested at 9.20am, according to The Courier-Mail.

If those in custody are confirmed as asylum seekers, the boat arrival would mark the first suspected illegal entry vessel on Australian land since 2014.

Some politicians, including MP George Christensen, used the vessel as an opportunity to call out the government's border patrol practices.

'Qld borders need to be made more secure esp (especially) given proximity of PNG & Indonesia, considering level of radical Islamism in Indonesia, Malaysia & Philippines,' Mr Christensen tweeted.

'With Peter Dutton back as Home Affairs Minister, I suspect this incursion will be dealt with swiftly and that there will be more focus on border security in North Queensland,' he later posted to Facebook.

Opposition immigration and border protection spokesman Shayne Newman said: 'Unlike the chaos and division inside the Government that has put the security of Australia's borders at risk, Labor is a united team.'

Paramedics in Mossman treated two people in custody for fever and chills while another three were assessed.Advertisement

Heartbreaking photos show the moment devastated family members try to fight back tears as they set up a memorial for the victims of an early morning Chicago fire.

Amber Ayala and Marcos Contreras shared photos of their siblings who perished in the fire Sunday morning.

Ayala and Contreras couldn't hold back their tears as they described how their siblings and cousins were at a sleepover when the Little Village apartment caught on fire.

Three-month-old Maya Almaraz, five-year-old Ariel Garcia, three-year-old Alanni Ayala, five-year-old Gialanni Ayala, 11-year-old Xavier Contreras, 13-year-old Nathan Contreras, 10-year-old Giovanni Ayala, 10-year-old and 16-year-old Victor Mendoza, were identified as the eight children killed in the blaze.

Chicago police said an adult and one child, Cesar Contreras, 14, were taken to the hospital in very critical condition after suffering from smoke inhalation.

Marcos Contreras (left) and his sister Amber Ayala mourn the loss of their siblings who were killed in an early-morning fire in the Little Village neighborhood

Ayala and Marcos Contreras shared photos of their siblings who perished in the fire Sunday morning

From bottom, l-r, are Ariel Garcia, five, Xavier Contreras, 11, Nathan Contreras, 13, their mother and Cesar Contreras, 14. Ariel, Xavier and Nathan, along with their three-month-old baby sister, Maya Almaraz, seen in the top photo, were all killed in the fire. Cesar is in the hospital in critical condition

Jessie Cobos leaned over a cross as he watched a local resident write the names of the victims who perished in the fire.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Cobos was a caretaker of Giovanni, Gialanni, and Alanni.

'I got a phone call stating that there was a fire on this block and the pastor wanted me to come pray for the family,' he said.

'I never knew I was going to come pray for my own kids,' he told the newspaper.

Another photo shows Cobos clutching a tiny Mickey Mouse plush toy as he tried to fight back his tears.

'Anything could happen from one minute or the next. If I could only go back to last night and give my kids one more hug, let them know that they are loved.'

Jessie Cobos (right) leaned over a cross as he watched a local resident write the names of the victims who perished in the fire

According to the Chicago Tribune, Cobos was a caretaker of Giovanni, Gialanni, and Alanni. 'I got a phone call stating that there was a fire on this block and the pastor wanted me to come pray for the family,' he said

Mourners surround Cobos and a wooden cross that holds the names of six of the eight victims

Another photo shows Cobos (right) clutching a tiny Mickey Mouse plush toy as he tried to fight back his tears

Cobos is seen writing the name of a victim on a white wooden cross, which will serve as a memorial outside a home in the Little Village neighborhood

The fire tore through the home in Chicago Sunday morning.

A dog was also killed in the fire, while a firefighter was hospitalized in good condition.

The cause of the fire has not been determined but no smoke detectors were found in the home, officials said.

A group of people were gathered outside the hospital, waiting for news of their loved ones, when they were told about the fatalities.

'I can't live without my babies,' one woman cried.

A memorial to victims rests on the sidewalk near the home where eight people perished, including six children, in an early-morning fire. Two additional victims of the fire remain in the hospital in critical condition

The fire tore through the home in Chicago Sunday morning. A dog was also killed in the fire, while a firefighter was hospitalized in good condition

The cause of the fire has not been determined but no smoke detectors were found in the home, officials said

Commissioner Jose Santiago said the city has not had 'this amount of fatalities and injuries in one location' for 'many, many years'

Commissioner Jose Santiago said the city has not had 'this amount of fatalities and injuries in one location' for 'many, many years'.

The fire started on the second floor of the building. The first floor was vacant.

Firefighters were called to the West Side building just before 4am and the fire was put out by 5.10am.

Those who were killed and injured were all transported to the hospital from the same residence.

Santiago revealed the fire could have taken even more lives if it wasn't for one quick-thinking woman who lived nearby.

'She had just gotten home from work. She smelled it. I think she saw it,' he said.

'And then she started immediately knocking on doors, ringing doorbells,' Santiago added.

Santiago said the woman 'saved a lot of lives' amid the horrific tragedy.

Chicago firefighters walk under tape at the scene of the fire on Sunday morning. Firefighters were called to the West Side building just before 4am and the fire was out by 5.10am

People carry items away from the scene of the fire. The fire also caused another structure two buildings down to catch alight

American Red Cross workers remain at the scene after a fire tore through the West Side building on Sunday

People stand around at the scene of the fire on Sunday morning. Those who were killed and injured were all transported to the hospital from the same residence

The building failed its last inspection in June due to electrical issues, according to the Building Department website.

The fire also caused another structure two buildings down to catch on fire. No injuries were reported in that building.

Red Cross workers were at the scene of the tragedy to provide support and hand out food and drinks to the grieving community.

Celena Roldan, the Chief Executive Officer for the Red Cross in Chicago and Northern Illinois, said the organization would provide mental health support and help the affected families find financial assistance.

It will also help organize funerals and community memorials in the next few weeks.

The Red Cross will work with the fire department to help install smoke alarms in the area.Hundreds of complaints alleging antisemitism in Labour are going unaddressed by party officials, it is claimed

Hundreds of complaints alleging antisemitism in Labour are going unaddressed by party officials, it is claimed.

Insiders say the party's internal investigations unit has collapsed as leader Jeremy Corbyn has promised to speed up the party's disciplinary process.

The party's former head of the compliance unit and at least two others have left, leaving only one staff member to investigate the mounting number of cases of alleged antisemitism, the Times reported.

A spokesman told the paper: 'We have robust processes for dealing with complaints we receive. We don't comment on staffing matters.'

It comes as Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger attacked Mr Corbyn for accusing British Zionists of having 'no sense of irony' despite having 'lived in Britain all of their lives'.

The former Shadow Minister for public health said she felt 'unwelcome' in her own party after Mr Corbyn's 'inexcusable comments' that were revealed by the MailOnline last week.

Volunteer charity Campaign Against Antisemitism started the petition to oust Jeremy Corbyn (pictured) on Change.org this week

Earlier today, campaigners renewed calls for Corbyn to step down as leader in an online petition.

Volunteer charity Campaign Against Antisemitism started a Change.org campaign this week calling for Labour MPs to issue a vote of no-confidence in the embattled leader.

Entitled 'For the many not the Jew', the petition has already garnered over 5,000 signatures.

A message accompanying the description reads: 'For weeks, events from Jeremy Corbyn's disturbing past have trickled into the light.

In a statement released on Friday evening Mr Corbyn said he had been defending the ambassador from 'what I thought were deliberate misrepresentations' by people 'for whom English was a first language, when it isn't for the ambassador'.

Mr Corbyn said: 'I described those pro-Israel activists as Zionists, in the accurate political sense and not as a euphemism for Jewish people - and that is made clear in the rest of my speech that day.

'I am now more careful with how I might use the term 'Zionist' because a once self-identifying political term has been increasingly hijacked by anti-Semites as code for Jews.'Matt Lauer has been spotted out and about with his estranged wife Annette Roque since he allegedly agreed to give her a multi-million dollar payout.

The disgraced former Today Show host, 60, who was axed following sexual misconduct allegations, reportedly agreed to go as high as $20million in their divorce settlement.

Despite ironing out the details of the very pricey divorce, Lauer and Roque, 51, made a public appearance at the Hampton Classic, one of the largest outdoor horse shows in the US, together on Sunday.

Although the pair didn't show physical affection, they seemed friendly as they kept up a low-key appearance sporting sunglasses and hats as they walked their dog and met up with friends.

Matt Lauer, 60, was spotted out and about with his estranged wife Annette Roque, 51, for the first time since he reportedly agreed to give her a $20million divorce payout

The couple attended the Hampton Classic together in Bridgehampton New York on Sunday

The duo kept it cool and casual sporting sunglasses and hats as they walked their dog

Roque, pictured in a red floral top, jeans, and a wide-brimmed hat, was all smiles as she and her estranged husband met up with friends at the outdoor horse show

Roque and Lauer (in navy top) kept a bit of distance between themselves at the Classic

The couple has attended the Hampton Classic for years. In 2015 they posed for pictures and seemed very much so in love with their arms wrapped around one another.

On Sunday Lauer seemed relaxed sporting a long sleeve navy sweater, khaki pats, and a New York Yankees cap.

Roque sported a wide-brimmed hat to shade her face, a floral top and jeans.

The two, who are co-parenting and will reportedly share custody of their three children - Jack, 17, Romy, 14, and Thijs, 11 - took turns caring for their pup at the Classic.

At the outdoor event they met up with friends to enjoy the New York sunshine and munch on hot dogs.

Lauer was spotted waiting in line for food at the Hampton Classic and chatting with a friend, pictured above in white

Lauer greeted friends with a hug and a kiss at the Classic, a socialite even he and Roque have been attending together for years

Lunch time: Lauer grabbed a snack at the Classic where he sported a navy top, khakis, and a New York Yankees cap. He's kept a low-profile since he was axed from the Today show in November for sexual misconduct

Lauer walked around and hung out with a friend (above) at the Classic where he was spotted with his wife for the first time since agreeing to a stunning multi-million divorce payout

The outing was just a mom and dad affair as Lauer and Roque's three children were no where in sight, but they did bring their dog out for the horse show

Roque and Lauer spent time apart at the Classic, the Dutch model pictured above chatting with a friend while her estranged husband hung out with another pal

As Roque was chatting to a friend at the show, Lauer took a stroll with a pal and his pup

Despite their social outing together, the couple is said to have an estranged relationship following Lauer's public sexual misconduct scandal.

Lauer reportedly felt so guilty about cheating on his Dutch model wife that he is was 'bending over backwards' to give her everything she wants in the divorce agreement, according to Page Six.

The couple seem to be getting a long as they spend time in their enormous 12-bedroom Hamptons home as they wrap up the final details of their divorce.

'Things really have settled down. Matt and Annette are getting on and they're both spending time with their kids. They hope to settle the divorce very soon,' a friend spilled to Page Six.

However divorce talk is nothing new for the couple who tied the knot in 1998.

Once upon a time: Lauer and Roque put their arms around one another at the 2015 Hampton Classic, a stark contrast from their 2017 appearance

Just months before the allegations came to light against Matt Lauer in November he attended Apollo in the Hamptons with a now soon-to-be ex-wife Annette Roque in August who reportedly stands to walk away from her marriage to Lauer with up to a $20million payout

The soon to be divorced couple are putting the finishing touches on the agreement while holed up together at their massive 12-bedroom Hamptons home

Back in 2006, Roque filed for divorce citing 'mental abuse, extreme mental and emotional distress, humiliation, torment and anxiety,' after learning of Lauer's infedelities.

However, she agreed to pull the divorce off the table and remain with him, as another source says because at the time, 'Matt agreed to pay Annette a lump sum of millions back in 2006 as an incentive to stay with him to help him maintain his squeaky clean image as 'America's Dad.'

Part of the incentive for her to stay was also a post-nup, which would make things smoother for her should she eventually divorce him again.

'She also got an allowance every year, plus it was agreed that she would get a share of the value of all their homes if they did split.'

Roque aquiessed in 2006, and pulled the divorce filing a few months later.

Lauer has been busy listing his properties since his massive fall from grace as the face of Today.

He recently sold his Upper East Side apartment for more than the $7.35million asking price.

He also has listed his Sag Harbor home for $12.75 million, which is a massive price slash from the original asking price of $18million.

Roque could walk away with a massive payment in the divorce as Lauer is said to feel guilty over his infidelities, pictured above at the 2014 Annual Hampton Classic

The couple are believed to be sharing custody of their three children: Jack Matthew Lauer, Romy Lauer, Thijs Lauer and Matt Lauer in January of 2016 at a New York Knicks game

The source added: 'Matt's bending over backwards to give Annette everything she wants because he feels so guilty. But he would love the Hamptons home.'

Lauer has spent a great deal of time at the property since he was sacked by NBC, taking refuge in the privacy the six-acre estate offers.

He bought the estate for $36.5million from Richard Gere in 2016.

The couple are believed to have agreed to share custody of their three children and a friend tells Page Six he remains a 'devoted dad.'

However he still resents his ultimate demise at the Peacock network.

The source added: 'Matt still maintains the relationships he had in the workplace were consensual. He does feel like the poster boy of the #MeToo movement when he sees other high powered men hanging on to their jobs despite allegations.'Electric breast pumps worth thousands of dollars have been stolen from chemist shelves, leaving police scratching their heads while they search for a motive.

CCTV footage of one of the brazen raids has captured two men stealing breast pumps and blood pressure kits by hiding them in large bags before casually exiting the Queensland store.

Police have revealed that $6,000 worth of products were shamelessly swiped from numerous retailers in the sunshine state in June alone.

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Two men (pictured) have been caught stealing breast pumps and blood pressure kits from chemists in Queensland

The men caught on security footage are believed to have visited the Gold Coast store on two occasions.

Only one of the men appeared to enter the store on the first visit.

He donned a disguise when he entered the store for a second time with an accomplice the following day.

'The unusual thing about this is the seem to be targeting electric breast pumps,' Gold Coast Police officer, Shane Rainger, told Nine News.

'We believe one of the males may have been wearing a disguise,' he said.

Authorities are now searching online to find the products and hone in on why they are targeting the pumps

Police are now searching online marketplaces to see whether the items are being sold at an inflated price and attempt to hone in on why they are targeting the pumps.

Anyone with information on these men are urged to contact Queensland police.

Last week, Lie Ke, 48, of Carlingford in Sydney's north-west was charged after she allegedly stole 4,000 tins of baby formula and vitamins from supermarket shelves.A woman stabbed in the street fled in her flat while covered in blood following the second knife attack in 48 hours.

A 57-year-old ran for her life after she suffered 'a number of stab wounds' in an attack in Parnell Road, Bow, east London on Sunday evening.

The attack happened just yards from a similar attack on a lone woman on Friday, when a victim in her 60s was knifed in nearby Chariot Close.

Women were urged to remain vigilant amid fears the incidents are linked, while police arrested a 36-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.

The attacks, in Parnell Road and Chariot Close were just yards apart form each other in Bow

Police have appealed for information to identify the suspected attacker after the women, aged in their 50s and 60s, were knifed two days apart in Bow.

Scotland Yard said a 57-year-old woman suffered 'a number of stab wounds' in an attack in Parnell Road on Sunday evening.

Officers were called to the scene just before 8.30pm and the woman was taken to hospital by the London Ambulance Service. Her condition has not been disclosed.

The incident came after a woman in her 60s was stabbed in nearby Chariot Close on Friday.

She required hospital treatment for her injuries, although they were not life threatening.

Detectives have appealed for the public's help to identify the knifeman.

A woman in her 60s was attacked in this residential street in Bow on Friday

Scotland Yard said: 'In both cases the suspect is described as a black male, aged around 40s, of large build with big hair who flees the scene of the attack on foot.

'Police in Tower Hamlets are appealing for help from local communities to identify the suspect and urge the public, particularly women, to be vigilant.'

A 36-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of two counts of attempted murder this morning.

A 51-year-old man was previously arrested on suspicion of GBH released under investigation pending further enquiries.

Anyone with information was asked to call 101 quoting CAD 6062/26AUG18 or tweet information to @MetCC. They can also contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.A heart-stopping video shows the moment a kayaker paddled off a 105-foot waterfall in Canada.

In the video, German kayaker Adrian Mattern is seen paddling toward the Alexandra Falls on the Hay River, in the Northwest Territories.

As the white water leads Mattern to the edge, he prepares to take the plunge.

A heart-stopping video shows the moment a kayaker paddled off a more than 105-foot waterfall in Canada

In the video, German kayaker Adrian Mattern is seen paddling toward the Alexandra Falls on the Hay River. As the white water leads Mattern to the edge, he prepares to take the plunge

In a matter of moments, Mattern is under water following the drop (pictured)

In a matter of moments, Mattern is under water following the drop. He then emerges unharmed and excited about his achievement.

Mattern was out kayaking with another kayaker who was waiting for him at the bottom of the waterfall.

The man is seen paddling over to Mattern and they share a high-five.

Before the men leave, Mattern captures a breath-taking shot of the actual waterfall.

The Hay River is located in the Northwest Territories of Canada.

Mattern is a pro kayaker who travels the world competing. Last month, Mattern was kayaking in India along the Paithalmala river.

He then emerges unharmed and excited about his achievement

The man is seen paddling over to Mattern and they share a high-fiveA heartbroken widow who lost her two sons in a tragic murder-suicide has opened up about moving forward and finding love again.

Melissa Little was 29 when her husband Damien, 33, shot four-year-old Koda and nine-month-old Hunter before driving off a wharf with the boys in the car.

Damien, who had not sought help for his severe mental illness, turned the gun on himself before steering the car into the sea at Port Lincoln, South Australia, in 2016.

'I was notified by the police. But when you love and trust someone, you never in your wildest dreams think that they are capable of such an event as this,' she told The Project.

'It's something that I've had to compartmentalise. I've had to put that day aside 'cause that's not how I want to remember my boys,' she said.

Melissa decided to tackle the Kokoda Trail, which Koda was named after, as part of her healing process.

A heartbroken widow has opened up about coming to terms with her grief after losing her sons in a shocking murder-suicide (pictured is the Little family)

It was during training where she met her new partner Lachy and they now have a four-month-old daughter called Lola.

'We connected on a level that I didn't know that I guess that I was ready to trust again,' she said.

Still devastated by the tragedy, Ms Little has written a children's book to help kids deal with grief, and is calling for mental illness to be taken more seriously.

Damien, who had not sought help for his severe mental illness, turned the gun on himself before steering the car into the sea at Port Lincoln, South Australia, in 2016 (pictured is the funeral)

'I would have never thought I would lose a child, let alone both children,' Ms Little told New Idea.

Melissa met her new partner Lachy and they now have a four-month-old daughter called Lola

The grieving mother said she reacted to the news of the horrific murders by asking why Damien had done it, but has since accepted she will never have an answer.

'I will never understand why and I will never accept what has happened. Even having a mental illness does not excuse this behaviour,' she said.

She said her husband was in denial, and really believed that he did not have a problem with his mental health.

Despite not knowing how people who don't think they need help can be convinced to get treated, she said it is clear that mental illness needs to be addressed.

'It's sad enough that people have to suffer these dreadful illnesses, but what is even sadder and unthinkable is when kids have to suffer,' Ms Little said.

After losing Koda and Hunter Ms Little witnessed her son's friends try to cope with their loss, which motivated her to write a children's book about grief.

She said her husband was in denial, and really believed that he did not have a problem with his mental health (pictured is a memorial card for Damien, Koda and Hunter Little)

After losing Koda and Hunter Ms Little witnessed their friends try to cope with loss, which motivated her to write a children's book about grief (pictured is a mourner laying a floral tribute)

Speaking out about mental illness, Ms Little said she still struggles to understand it, and wonders whether it is ever possible to know what another person is thinking

She hopes the book, titled Yesterday You Were Here, will help other children to deal with the loss of friends and siblings.

Speaking out about mental illness, Ms Little said she still struggles to understand it, and wonders whether it is ever possible to know what another person is thinking.

She believes Australia needs to get serious about mental health issues to prevent its devastating effects on the families and loved ones of sufferers.

Pictured is the car Damien Little drove into the ocean at Port Lincoln with his two sons inside

Damien Little drove off a wharf with his two young boys still in the car in South AustraliaPope Francis declined to address whether he knew about the sexual misconduct claims against former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick.

During a press conference on board an airborne plane Sunday, the leader of the Catholic church would not comment when an American reporter asked him what his thoughts were in response to an 11 page text by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, 77, that claimed he was aware in 2013.

The Vatican's retired ambassador to the United States claimed that despite the allegations, the pope rehabilitated McCarrick, but Francis brushed it off, simply saying the text 'speaks for itself'.

Pope Francis, flanked by Vatican spokesperson Greg Burke (right) listens to a journalist's question during a press conference aboard of the flight to Rome at the end of his two-day visit to Ireland, Sunday

Pope Francis refused to comment on whether he knew about the sex abuse allegations against McCarrick

Pope Francis asked journalists on board the plane to make up their own minds on whether he was aware of what was going on

'It's an act of trust,' he added. 'I won't say a word about it.'

In the document Vigano says the pair spoke about the McCarrick allegations five years ago and although the pope said he had read the papers, published by the National Catholic Register and LifeSiteNews, he asked journalists to come to their own conclusion.

It came at the end of two days in Ireland for Francis, a trip that was almost overshadowed by anti-gay Vigano, voicing that he thinks the reformist pope should resign, just a month after McCarrick did himself.

Pope Francis waves as he leaves from Dublin Airport back to the Vatican putting an end to his visit to Ireland

In the document Vigano says the pair spoke about the McCarrick allegations five years ago

When allegations of sexually abusing a minor turned out to be credible, an investigation by the US church prompted another man to come forward with claims McCarrick had molested him from the age of 11.

Now, several former seminarians have said they were abused and harassed by him when they were in seminary.

It's alleged to have been an open secret that McCarrick would often invite seminarians to his beach house in New Jersey and asked them to share his bed.

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (pictured November 2011) is the subject of investigation

The investigation looks into potential sexual abuse at two seminaries it hosts following misconduct allegations against ex-Cardinal McCarrick and other priests

Vigano's extensive letter names Vatican cardinals and US archbishops who apparently were aware of McCarrick's wrongdoings, and claims that documents in the Vatican archives can support his claim.

He claims Francis asked him about the McCarrick accusations in June 2013, three months after he was elected.

Vigano held his role from 2011 to 2016 and claims to have sent two memos about the accusations which allegedly began in 2000, 13 years before Francis was pope. Vigano suggests the last two people previously in his role let the Holy See know about accusations against McCarrick.

Vigano claims Pope Francis knew about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (pictured 2015)

Pope Francis gets ready to leave from Dublin Airport back to the Vatican on Sunday

Francis' predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, was said to have sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 and the letter says she was also told and to not travel or publicly celebrate Mass.

'Holy Father, I don't know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance,' the text reads.

He says the 'stormy' meeting in which the accused was told of the new rules can be backed up by a former counselor in the embassy who is 'prepared to testify'.

Vigano says that McCarrick went on missions on behalf of the church, regardless, notably to China and Cuba, the latter as recently as 2014.

'Archbishop McCarrick, like any other person, has a right to due process. He looks forward to invoking that right at the appropriate time,' McCarrick's civil attorney, Barry Coburn, said in a statement. He added the allegations were 'serious'.

The claims come just after allegations of sex abuse and a cover-up in a Pennsylvania grand jury report. It found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses.A property auction has ended in disaster after a house caught fire midway through an inspection.

Greg Hocking, owner of Greg Hocking Real Estate, confirmed to Daily Mail Australia that it had been a cold winter day in Melbourne's Middle Park suburb so the owner of the property had decided to light a fire to 'add atmosphere' to the viewing on Saturday.

However the plan quickly backfired as flames from the fireplace spread through the upper level of the house.

The owner was trying to 'add atmosphere' to the property in Middle Park when it caught fire

Hocking believes the fire spread due to material in the chimney catching fire

The property incurred heavy damage to its upper floor and requires reparations

The fire blazed on as the inspection opened to the public.

One of the viewers of the house noticed something wasn't right when they smelt smoke and raised the alarm to a member of staff.

Everyone inside the building ran outside onto the street. No one was harmed in the incident.

Potential buyers were inspecting the property as the upper floor slowly went up in flames

Everyone who was inside the building at the time ran out onto the street to avoid the fire

'It added a bit of excitement to their day,' Hocking joked.

The upper level of the property in Melbourne's inner suburb incurred some damage and repair work is required.

According to Hocking, the fire is believed to have spread due to material in the chimney, which caught fire.Three men were lucky to escape after their car exploded into flames after it collided with a kangaroo on Monday morning.

The trio were travelling along the Monaro Highway in New South Wales when they hit the marsupial at about 6.00am.

They quickly evacuated the vehicle and called emergency services who attended the scene shortly after.

Three men in their 20s were lucky to escape a fire engulfed car (pictured) after it collided with a kangaroo at the the Monaro Highway, New South Wales, on Monday morning

Michelago Fire Brigade Captain Brent Wallis said the kangaroo: 'Caused the engine bay to catch alight which caught the grass on fire.'

Captain Wallis said the brigade - which is made up of highly experienced volunteers - 'got on top of the situation' quickly and dispatched three fire engines.

The three men, who are all in their 20s, were a 'little bit shocked but all good.'

They walked walked away without injuries but the collision killed the kangaroo.

While it is not uncommon for vehicles to collide with kangaroos on the highway, the brigade was shocked the marsupial caused the car to catch fire.

The men were uninjured in the incident and Michelago Fire Brigade attended the scene to put out the car fire and grass fire

'Pretty funny situation how the car caught on fire,' said Capitan Wallis.

He said there is typically one accident every couple of days related to kangaroos on the highway - but this was the first of its kind in a long time.

Captain Wallis also urged motorists to keep an eye out for the marsupials who are known to bounce onto the road.

'Keep an eye out because wildlife are coming closer to the road because of the drier conditions,' he said.

'It's a bit dry at the moment, so we're all on edge.'Weather experts say a tropical storm has developed in the eastern Pacific Ocean that may be heading west near Hawaii.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says Tropical Storm Miriam has formed about 2,000 miles east of the Hawaiian islands.

Accuweather, a company that provides weather forecasting services, says Miriam has winds of about 50 mph and is moving west at 14 mph.

The formation of Miriam comes after Hawaii was hit earlier this week by near-record amounts of rain from Tropical Storm Lane.

That storm was at one point a Category 5 hurricane before it weakened considerably as it neared the state.

Forecasters are now tracking a tropical storm in the Eastern Pacific that's expected to strengthen into a hurricane on Monday which may pass close to the Hawaiian islands

Tropical Storm Miriam had maximum sustained winds of 65 mph with higher gusts and was moving toward the west at 14 mph

People look out over the ocean along Waikiki Beach in a light rain from Tropical Storm Lane

The estimated windspeeds of Miriam are projected in this graphic - although the storm is some considerable distance from Hawaii and may ultimately bypass the islands

A surfer walks along Waikiki Beach in a light rain from Tropical Storm Lane on Saturday

James Fujita, left, and Reid Fujita take down plywood boards that were to protect their store from Tropical Storm Lane along Waikiki Beach

The storm dumped feet of rain on Hawaii triggering flooding, water rescues and evacuations on the Big Island as rainfall totals exceeded 51 inches in some areas.

Severe flooding was reported on parts of the Big Island, like Hilo, where homes were swamped and dozens of residents had to be evacuated.

The island also saw big rainfall totals that triggered flooding and mudslides, some of which shut down roads.

On islands like Oahu and Kauai, officials were thankful that a worst-case scenario was avoided.

David Crocker, who is homeless, pushes his belongings past a puddle in Kihei on the Hawaiian island of Maui. He said he refused to go to a shelter during Hurricane Lane. 'I didn't have any problems at all,' Cocker said

Dan Wong, left, and Cassie Tarleton watch waves crash along the coastline ahead. As Lane approached Oahu, large ocean swells impacted local beaches and coastlinesA woman who kindly paid for a man's KFC meal after his card was declined may have sparked a sizzling romance between the fried chicken fans.

The man was visiting one of the fast food chain's New Zealand stores on Saturday when a 'beautiful girl' offered to pay for his lunch.

Stunned by the random act of kindness, the man polished off his chicken sandwich before launching a social media campaign to track down his benefactor.

A man was visiting one of the fast food chain's New Zealand stores on Saturday when a 'beautiful girl' offered to pay for his lunch

Stunned by the random act of kindness, the man polished off his chicken sandwich before launching a social media campaign (pictured) to track down his benefactor

In a last-ditch attempt to find the girl of his dreams, the man posted to Wellington Facebook group Vic Deals.

'To the beautiful girl who paid for my KFC tonight when my card declined thank you so much, I didn't get your name but if it was you please message me,' the post read.

'I get paid next week and would love to take you out.'

In a last-ditch attempt, he posted to the Wellington Facebook group Vic Deals - and struck gold when she replied

The post quickly garnered quite a bit of attention, including hundreds of comments.

After a few hours, the woman responded: 'Omg, that was me!'.

'Let's get Maccas for brunch tomorrow morning,' she said.

The man offered to buy her a McMuffin with $20 he found down the crack of his couch.

She responded: 'OMG I love McMuffins. You know the way to my heart.'

In a hilarious online transaction, the pair then began to organise their wedding.

'We will have our wedding at KFC to honour the place that brought us together Snack boxes for all guests, sounds great,' the romantics said.A Roman Catholic priest who was one of the earliest critics of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's deadly crackdown on drugs has gone into hiding due to what he says were signs he's being targeted by motorcycle-riding hitmen.

The Reverend Amado Picardal said he has gone into a 'more secure location' and out of the public view after workers in a Catholic monastery that he visits in central Cebu city reported seeing motorcycle-riding men watching the compound, including a pair who asked for his whereabouts.

'I couldn't go out for biking, running, walking due to security concerns,' Picardal said in an email in response to questions about his safety concerns, which he first disclosed in a personal blog.

Roman Catholic priest Amado Picardal, who was one of the earliest critics of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's deadly crackdown on drugs, has gone into hiding due to what he says were signs he's being targeted by motorcycle-riding hitmen

'I have left my hermitage in the mountain and transferred to a more secure location to continue my life as a hermit far away out of reach from the death squad,' he said.

The 63-year-old priest said that he helped document alleged extrajudicial killings under Duterte's campaign when Duterte was still mayor of southern Davao city and that he would continue criticizing the killings despite his safety concerns.

Picardal added that he is willing to testify if asked by the International Criminal Court, where a complaint against Duterte in relation to the drug killings is being examined.

Duterte has denied condoning killings under the crackdown, which according to official police pronouncements has left more than 4,500 suspects dead since he took office in mid-2016. International human rights watchdogs have cited far higher death tolls, which they said included innocent children and civilians.

The tough-talking president has often cited the killings and wounding of many policemen in anti-narcotics raids as proof of the fatal risks that prompt law enforcers to open fire on drug suspects. Human rights groups, which have looked into some of the killings, however, have reported cases where policemen killed unarmed suspects but later made them appear to have violently resisted.

The 63-year-old priest said that he helped document alleged extrajudicial killings under Duterte's campaign when Duterte (pictured) was still mayor of southern Davao city and that he would continue criticizing the killings despite his safety concerns

Presidential spokesman Harry Roque said Picardal should file for a so-called writ of amparo 'if there's basis for his fears,' referring to a high court petition that aims to protect the human rights of anybody who feels threatened by state forces.

Picardal gained public attention with his cross-country biking to protest the drug killings and promote peace talks with communist rebels.

When he was assigned in Davao, Picardal said he compiled a report on drug killings from 1998 to 2015, when Duterte served as mayor of the vast port city, and spoke for a nongovernment coalition that opposed extrajudicial killings and helped the Commission on Human Rights investigate the deaths.

Duterte has said none of those investigations turned up any evidence against him. Picardal said the investigations failed to pin down Duterte then because witnesses against him 'were scared to testify.' A number of witnesses linking Duterte to the killings, however, have turned up in Senate investigations after Duterte rose to the presidency, Picardal said, adding that he has helped provide sanctuary to former members of the so-called 'Davao death squads' who may testify before the ICC.

'This is most likely one of the reasons that I am being targeted by the death squad,' Picardal said.

In an interview with The Associated Press in May 2016, Picardal recounted how he helped poor families bury young men killed by gunmen in Davao after being linked to illegal drugs. He said then that a Duterte presidency was 'very frightening' and warned that human rights groups would need to keep a close watch and document any violations due to Duterte's threat to replicate his anti-crime style in Davao to the rest of the country.

Picardal said in his blog late Sunday that he was aware of the danger when he took up his human rights advocacy. 'I am ready to accept martyrdom if they catch up with me, but I do not seek it nor do I make myself an easy target,' he said.Julie Bishop's failed attempt to seize the Liberal leadership and her subsequent move to the backbench has fuelled speculation she is set for a plum new role

Julie Bishop's failed attempt to seize the Liberal leadership and her subsequent move to the backbench has fuelled speculation she is set for a plum new role - and it's got the republican movement fuming.

Last Friday, after a turbulent week in the Liberal Party that ended Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministership, the then-Foreign Affairs Minister put her hand up for the top job.

But she fell well short, winning only 11 votes - including her own - in the partyroom vote of 85 MPs, despite the polls consistently showing she is the public's preferred Liberal leader.

By Sunday, it emerged Ms Bishop never had a hope, with moderates urging each other to put their votes behind Scott Morrison in a bid to stop Peter Dutton becoming prime minister.

Hours later, Ms Bishop announced she would quit the cabinet and move to the backbench, but left open the question about how long she would stay in parliament.

There has been speculation she could succeed Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove when his five-year term finishes in March next year.

But that potential move has angered the Australian Republic Movement (ARM), which is campaigning for the next governor-general to be chosen by the public.

There has been speculation Ms Bishop could succeed Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove (pictured right after swearing in Scott Morrison) when his five-year term finishes next March

In June, ARM National Chair Peter FitzSimons (pictured with wife Lisa Wilkinson) wrote to then-Prime Minister Turnbull asking he give Australians a say over the next Governor-General

BILL SHORTEN ASKS SCOTT MORRISON TO EXTEND SIR PETER COSGROVE'S TERM On Monday, Labor leader Bill Shorten wrote to the new prime minister, congratulating him on his election at the partyroom meeting. Mr Shorten said he looked forward to meeting with Mr Morrison, before turning his attention to the Governor-General position. 'Given recent media reportage I wanted to write to you immediately to propose an extension to His Excellency General the Honourable Sir Peter Cosgrove's commission as Governor-General for a further six months, to September 2019. 'Given that a general election must be held in or before May of next year, an extension to his term would allow an incoming Prime Minister to nominate to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II an appropriate successor and new Governor-General following the next election.' Advertisement

'The Prime Minister should immediately rule out a ''captain's call'' on the next Governor- General,' ARM Director Michael Cooney said in a statement on Monday.

'Media reports speculating that former Foreign Minister Bishop might be considered for the role and represent the Queen in Canberra reinforce the worst perception that Australia is in decline from a parliamentary democracy to a spoils system.'

In June, ARM National Chair Peter FitzSimons wrote to then-Prime Minister Turnbull asking he give Australians a say over the next Governor-General through a vote of the Parliament or of the people.

'We suggest that you take the opportunity to involve the Australian community in this decision and to trial a method of selection for a future Australian head of state,' Mr FitzSimons wrote.

'You could open the process up to wide nominations before moving to a resolution of the House and Senate (moved by you and the Opposition Leader) to advise the Queen to appoint a Governor-General.'

'We suggest that you take the opportunity to involve the Australian community in this decision and to trial a method of selection for a future Australian head of state,' Mr FitzSimons wrote

But the Labor leader has taken the first step to shut down any potential aspirations for Ms Bishop and the Liberal Party, proposing a six-month extension to Sir Peter's term.

Mr Shorten has penned a letter to new Prime Minister Scott Morrison asking him to extend Sir Peter's commission until September 2019, taking it beyond the likely May 2019 federal election date.

He believes the move would allow the 'incoming prime minister' to nominate 'an appropriate successor' after the election.

Sir Peter has served as governor-general since March 2014, following on from Dame Quentin Bryce's near six-year stint.

Australian Republic Movement director Michael Cooney said the next governor-general should be at least in part chosen by the public.

General Sir Peter Cosgrove, the Governor-General of Australia, meets Queen Elizabeth II. His five-year commission ends in March next year

'Things need to change in Parliament House and it starts with the attitudes and behaviours of the most senior people,' Mr Cooney said.

'Choosing the governor-general should never again be a personal pick of the prime minister.'

Danielle Blain, a Bishop ally and former West Australian Liberal state president, said it was too soon to know what her next move would be.

'I'm still recovering from the extraordinary treachery shown by the WA members,' Ms Blain told The Australian.

Ms Bishop has also been linked to a possible job as Australia's ambassador to the United Nations, though she has denied interest in the position.

A Newspoll released on Monday showed she was the most popular of the Liberal leadership contenders, with 29 per cent the vote.

Ms Bishop has also been linked to a possible job as Australia's ambassador to the United Nations

Newly elected leader of the Liberal Party Scott Morrison is pictured alongside deputy leader Josh Frydenberg

Mr Morrison polled four points behind Ms Bishop, while Mr Turnbull ran third on 14 per cent, Tony Abbott with 11 per cent and Peter Dutton polled just 6 per cent.

Despite her popularity, Ms Bishop, who was deputy Liberal leader for more than a decade, only received the vote of just 10 other MPs in last Friday's leadership ballot.

On Monday, she slammed the Liberal Party's dirty backroom tactics which pushed her out of the leadership race, questioning why her Western Australian colleagues didn't back her to take the top job.

Ms Bishop revealed the leadership spill had been 'personally devastating' for several key players - and said she was aware of a leaked WhatsApp thread which urged her supporters to vote for Mr Morrison in the ballot.

Ms Bishop, who was deputy Liberal leader for more than a decade, received just 11 votes in last Friday's leadership ballot

Former Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop tendered her resignation from the cabinet on Sunday (pictured)

The bombshell messages, released by ABC's Insiders program, showed key party members - calling themselves 'Friends of Stability' - were told to vote with their heads, not their hearts.

'[Mathias] Cormann rumoured to be putting some WA votes behind Julie Bishop in round one,' Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher is said to have written to the group.

'Be aware that this is a ruse trying to get her ahead of Morrison so he drops out and his votes go to [Peter] Dutton. Despite our hearts tugging us to Julie we need to vote with our heads for Scott in round one.'

The messages accused Senator Cormann off trying to set up a two-way contest between Ms Bishop and Mr Dutton, which the Home Affairs Minister would likely win.

Mathias Cormann is accused of attempting to set up a two-way contest between Ms Bishop and Mr Dutton

Leaked WhatsApp messages (pictured) appeared to expose the betrayal of Ms Bishop during her run for the top job

'You would have to ask the individuals involved but it appeared to be a tactic to promote Peter Dutton into the prime ministership, whatever the cost,' Ms Bishop told The West Australian on Monday.

One Western Australian MP said they felt tricked into voting against Ms Bishop to keep Mr Dutton out of the top job.

Ms Bishop suggested her party used dirty backroom tactics to push her out of the bitter race for the Liberal leadership

'We were forced to vote for Scott in round one. There was a lot of people on that [WhatsApp] list who would have voted for Julie,' they told the paper.

Senator Cormann, who backed Peter Dutton to become prime minister, said rumours that he tried to set up the Dutton-Bishop showdown were untrue.

'I can completely and categorically rule out any such tricks, as you call it,' he told ABC News on Monday.

'At all points in time, I've tried to make judgments based on what I believe to be the right way forward, and I've explained myself openly and transparently in private and in public.'

He said on Sunday the rumoured tactics were '100 per cent incorrect'.

Mr Morrison said he had wanted Ms Bishop to stay on as foreign minister but accepted her decision to step aside

The WhatsApp messages accused Senator Cormann off trying to set up a two-way contest between Ms Bishop (pictured) and Mr Dutton

Members of the WhatsApp thread showed concern for Ms Bishop, with one suggesting: 'Someone should tell Julie'.

'I have... very respectfully,' messages purportedly sent by Christopher Pyne read.

Ms Bishop was knocked out of the first round of voting. No one from Western Australia voted for her.

Insiders host Barrie Cassidy said Ms Bishop was 'entitled to be both embarrassed and angry'.

'In the end she was a victim of tactics and I'm sure that helps to explain why she is less than impressed,' he said.

Mr Morrison said he had wanted Ms Bishop to stay on as foreign minister but accepted her decision to step aside.

Pictured is a list of the ministers in the group 'Friends for Stability', which were purported to be told to vote against Ms Bishop

Former Defence Minister Marise Payne, who worked closely with Ms Bishop, moves into the role.

Ms Bishop will now sit on the back bench as the member for the Perth seat of Curtin, but her political future is in doubt.

'I have been pre-selected by the Liberal Party for the seat of Curtin and I have made no decision regarding the next election,' she said.

Ms Bishop was knocked out of the first round of voting after receiving only 11 votes

Since her resignation, supporters of the former deputy have paid tribute to her career.

Mr Turnbull on Sunday described her as Australia's finest foreign minister and thanked her for her loyalty and friendship.

'She has been and remains an inspiring role model for women here and around the world,' he tweeted.

Western Australian Labor Premier Mark McGowan said it was disappointing Ms Bishop's WA colleagues did not back her in the leadership tilt.

'They were disloyal to Western Australia's interests and the fact that people like Christian Porter were prepared to support (Peter) Dutton indicates he wasn't acting in West Australia's interests,' Mr McGowan said.

'They should have supported a Western Australian candidate, it's not as though she didn't have enough experience.'

Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong described her role as Australia's minister of Foreign Affairs as 'trailblazing'.

Ms Bishop will now sit on the back bench as the member for the Perth seat of Curtin, but her political future is in doubt

One Western Australian MP said they felt tricked into voting against Ms Bishop in an apparent bid to keep Mr Dutton out of the top job. Ms Bishop is seen competing in the Perth City2Surf

'For five years she has dedicated her life to our nation with a tireless work ethic and exhausting travel schedule.

'Ms Bishop's commitment to standing up for Australia both here and abroad has been been in question,' her statement said.

Greens MP, Sarah Hanson Young said Ms Bishop would 'have made a great Liberal Prime Minister'.

She said on Twitter: 'I've always respected her ability to cut through the bull-dust, work across the political divide and got on with her job.

'Proof the boys-club still have a stranglehold on politics.

Kevin Rudd, a former minister for foreign affairs, said: 'Julie Bishop has been a highly effective Australian foreign minister. It's a hard job. Much harder than it looks. We may not always have agreed on policy. That's normal.

'But she has earned, absolutely, the respect of foreign ministers around the world.'

Federal member for Chisholm, Julia Banks said: 'In Julie Bishop our nation has been gifted with a fine leader and a standout role model for girls and women.'A six-year-old boy in Washington was brutally beaten after he confronted bullies attacking his friend.

Carter English, of Olympia, was attacked by the group of seven children who threw rocks and sticks at him and even rubbed sawdust into his eyes on Wednesday.

Carter, who is on the Autism spectrum, was left with a broken arm, cuts and bruises on his face, a lacerated eye, and a concussion.

The boy was jumped by children that lived in his apartment complex and now he's scared that he could be attacked once again.

Washington boy Carter English, six, was beat up by seven bullies in his apartment complex on Wednesday after he stood up to them for picking on his friend

The bullies threw rocks and sticks at him, left his face bloodied and bruised, and rubbed sawdust into his eyes. Carter suffered a broken arm and lacerated eye in the attack

'They were just bullying him and beating him up. I just told them to stop and then they did it to me,' Carter said to ABC7.

His mother Dana English was horrified to find her son in bloody and bruised.

Carter was taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle where he underwent emergency surgery to repair his eye and his arm was placed in a sling, which may still require an operation, according to KOMO.

Police are investigating the incident and say they found the five-year-old boy who instigated the attack and are planning to involve social services.

Dana was choked with emotion when she recalled the horrific bullying her son suffered.

Police are investigating the incident and tracked down the five-year-old boy who instigated attack. Carter, who has Autism, was jumped after defending a friend who was being picked on

Speaking on the traumatic attack Carter said: 'They were just bullying him and beating him up. I just told them to stop and then they did it to me'

'It's been hell. I haven't slept, I haven't ate, I mean I can't do anything. I can't even leave his side,' she said wiping away tears.

'I really dont know what Im hoping for other than for people to know that this is not acceptable. Bullying is not okay. Theres no reason to bully someone ever,' she added.

A GoFundMe page has been set up for English's hospital needs and has already raised $13,567.

'Carter has multiple hematomas on his forehead, a concussion, lacerations to his eyelid and eyeball (they had to pull beauty bark out of his eye), fractured elbow in 3 places and a broken arm and he has the possibility of loosing his left eye,' the page says.

'He is a very smart boy and loves video games, playing with his friends and being with his family. What happened to him wasn't okay and the police are not stopping until they catch the kids that did this to him,' the page adds.The shattered father of a man stabbed to death in a Bondi apartment after an alleged dispute over a love-triangle has told of his heartache at his son's 'senseless murder'.

Jordan Byrne, 26, was rushed to hospital after allegedly being stabbed by Milo Manu Felix Wild - a man known to him - in a friend's apartment about 12.30am on Sunday.

Mr Byrne was rushed by ambulance to hospital but died during surgery.

His heartbroken father Colum Byrne said he knew something terrible had happened when the phone rang early and it was the police.

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Jordan Byrne (pictured) was allegedly stabbed to death in an apartment in Bondi in the early hours of Sunday morning. His heartbroken father has spoken out about his 'senseless murder'

'He was our absolute pride and joy': Colum Byrne (right) relived the moment he and his wife Deborah (left) got a phone call at 5am telling them that their son Jordan (centre) had died

'Me and Deborah (his mother) just got that horrible phone call at 5am in the morning, the one that no parent should ever get,' Mr Byrne's father told Daily Mail Australia.

'They just said he'd been attacked in Sydney and that he'd had surgery but they couldn't save him.'

Mr Byrne's alleged murderer Milo Manu Felix Wild, 27, faced Waverley Local Court on Monday morning where he was refused bail.

Police reportedly believe Mr Byrne was murdered by Wild after a dispute over a girl who they had both dated.

But the murdered man's father said he had been told by police his son was a victim and had in no way sparked the dispute, with officers calling it a 'senseless murder'.

Mr Byrne's father said after school his son had left his hometown on the NSW Central Coast and moved to Sydney, chasing his dream of becoming a crane driver.

In a few short years he established a successful career working on construction sites across the city and saved up enough to purchase three investment properties.

One of four children, Mr Byrne's father said his son was living his dream right next to the beach - but never forgot his family or where he came from.

Milo Manu Felix Wild (pictured), 27, has been charged with the stabbing murder of Mr Byrne

'He was a kind loving kid who everyone loved,' Colum Byrne said of his son Jordan (pictured at Bondi Beach with his mother Deborah)

'He was a kind loving kid who everyone loved. Everybody knew Jordan, he was truly the funniest kid you'll ever come across,' Colum Byrne said.

'He was a normal kid in his 20s, but hed just accomplished so much. He was making plenty of money, he had apartments in Merrylands, Hillsdale and Bondi - he was our absolute pride and joy.

'He would come up and see us and tell us how good of parents we were - he never forgot us or his siblings.

'He was only 26 and he was on fire in life and I would just really like to share that with people.'

The two men had both dated the same woman, but detectives are trying determine exactly what sparked the fight. Pictured: paramedics rushing Byrne to hospital

'Everybody knew Jordan, he was truly the funniest kid you'll ever come across,' Colum Byrne said

Neighbours in the apartment complex reportedly heard the two men arguing loudly and told The Daily Telegraph they expected police to be called immediately.

'I heard someone in the block yell out 'shut up' but the argument kept going,' a man said.

Investigations into the alleged murder are continuing, with police reportedly set to re-interview the two women in the apartment at the time.Four Indiana teenagers have been killed after attempting to help push a broken down car outside the home of the slumber party in Jackson County Saturday.

The high school students died after a car collided with the vehicle they were trying to move around 11pm that night.

Naveah Law, 14, Jenna A. Helton, 14, and Brittany Watson, 15, died at the scene of the two-vehicle crash, while Martin Martinez, 16, was pronounced dead on arrival when he reached IU Health Methodist Hospital via helicopter.

Nevaeh Law and three of her friends were killed in a accident in Jackson County, Indiana

Nevaeh Law was helping to move a car outside a slumber party venue

They were some of eight youngsters involved in the tragedy; three others were airlifted to hospitals and one person received treatment at a medical center before being released, Jackson County Sheriff's Department said.

Law's mother, Torre Collins paid tribute on Facebook.

'God gained a beautiful angel tonight,' she wrote. 'My daughter, Nevaeh Law and 3 of her friends were killed in a accident.

'Please pray for all of the families involved. For the families who lost children, and for the families who's kids are still hanging on.'

The injured teens include Starlit Watson, 12, Victoria Burchard, 15, Victoria Valdivia, 15, Allerika Henline, 15.

Courtney Arthur was also hurt in the crash involving a Chevrolet Suburban driven Cara Selby, 37.

Elizabeth Watson, 24, crashed her Chevrolet Traverse into the vehicle, causing the cars to skid for 200 meters before they stopped.

Responders to the scene were said to have a difficult time working through the fragments that were left behind in the wreck.

Nevaeh Law's mother Torre Collins posted about the tragedy on Facebook

Jenna A. Helton, 14, was killed at the scene of the car crash on Saturday night

Brittany Watson, 15, died at the scene of the two-vehicle crash Saturday evening

Jackson County Sheriff Mike Carothers shared it was like nothing hed seen before in his 30 years of law enforcement.

Im really saddened by this, he said, adding: This is a brand new one.

The Tribune reports that Brownstown Central High School will help students cope with the deaths of their classmates by providing extra assistance in the form of youth ministers.

Principal Joe Schiffer planned to meet with administrators to figure out how to make the return to school on Monday as easy as possible. Meanwhile Seymour High School principal, Greg Prange added: We pray for peace, comfort and understanding as we all go through this together.

Police have asked anyone with more information on the crash to get in contact with Jackson County Sheriffs Office at 812-358-2141.Nineteen-year-old Eric Victorsen (pictured) pleaded guilty to two counts of culpable driving causing death in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Monday

A teenager has admitted to causing the deaths of a newlywed couple when he ran a red light in a stolen vehicle and collided with their car.

Eric Victorsen, 19, appeared before the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Monday where he pleaded guilty to two counts of culpable driving causing death, The Herald Sun reported.

Bita Zaeim, 32, and Matt Goland, 38, had been married just one year when they were killed in the fatal hit-run in Melbourne's east on April 21.

The couple were inside their vehicle when it was hit by a stolen four-wheel drive driven by Victorsen.

The grey $170,000 Lexus was travelling at speed south along Stud Road in Wantirna South when it collided with the couple's eastbound black Holden Commodore about 1am.

Bita Zaeim and Matt Goland (pictured) had been married just a year when they were killed

Mr Goland died at the scene and his wife passed away in hospital a short time after.

Victorsen fled the scene but was arrested by police 12 hours later.

The 19-year-old also pleaded guilty to single counts of car theft and failing to stop at the scene of an accident.

He has been remanded in custody.

Victorsen was driving a $170,000 Lexus south along Stud Road in Wantirna South when it collided with the couple's eastbound black Holden Commodore (pictured, emergency services at the scene)

Victorsen will appear in the County Court on December 6.

A 15-year-old girl - who cannot be named for legal reasons - was arrested alongside Victorsen.

She will face a children's court next month after being charged with a number of offences including being an accessory to culpable driving.Four people have been injured after a car being chased by police through London's West End ploughed into a pedestrian at a bus stop.

A member of the public and three people inside the car were rushed to hospital for treatment shortly after the crash at 4.30am this morning.

Eyewitnesses revealed how the car smashed through a shop window after hitting the pedestrian, after which police officers restrained those inside.

A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said: 'At approximately 4.30am on Monday, 27 August a car was in collision with a member of the public in Regent Street.

Four people have been injured after a car being chased by police through London's West End ploughed into a pedestrian at a bus stop

Eyewitnesses revealed how the car smashed through a shop window after hitting the pedestrian, after which police officers restrained those inside

A member of the public and three people inside the car were rushed to hospital for treatment shortly after the crash at 4.30am this morning

'The car was being pursued by police at the time of the collision. The London Ambulance Service and London Fire Brigade are in attendance.

'The member of the public and three people from the car have been injured - no further details at this time. All have been taken to hospital for treatment.

'A male has been arrested on suspicion of dangerous driving.'

Westminster Police added: 'Police are currently dealing with an incident on Regent Street.

'Road closures are in place at Piccadilly Circus and Vigo Street both directions. Please avoid the area.An Adelaide woman accused of being a member of the Islamic State terrorism group had bought a one-way ticket to Istanbul and intended to live in IS-held territory, a jury has heard.

Zainab Abdirahman-Khalif, 23, appeared in the South Australian Supreme Court on Monday after earlier pleading not guilty to membership of a terrorist organisation.

In opening the trial, Commonwealth prosecutor Chris Winneke QC said Abdirahman-Khalif was detained at Adelaide Airport carrying only hand luggage and less than $200.

Zainab Abdirahman-Khalif (pictured), 23, appeared in the South Australian Supreme Court on Monday

'The Crown case is that the defendant, in leaving Australia and going to Turkey, was ultimately going to make contact with Islamic State,' he said.

'(She was going to) commence to live in territory held by Islamic State as a member of that society and as a follower of the leader of that organisation.'

Mr Winneke said evidence in the case against Abdirahman-Khalif would be circumstantial.

'There's no such thing as a membership ticket,' he said.

Justice David Peek warned the jurors the evidence found on the defendant's mobile phone would be graphic and gruesome, ABC reported.

'Wounded persons and dead bodies are seen in various states and positions, most are obviously adult males, but some may be women and children,' Justice Peek said.

Justice David Peek warned the jurors the evidence found on the defendant's mobile phone would be graphic and gruesome

'That material that is to be shown is both graphic and gruesome, and you will see things like blood, brain fragments, severed heads placed on bodies,' Justice Peek said.

The court heard Abdirahman-Khalif was born to Somali parents in a Kenyan refugee camp, before moving to Australia with her mother and brothers when she was thirteen.

The trial, before Justice David Peek, is expected to last at least four weeks.The mother of a two-month-old girl who was shaken to death by her father has relived the moment she made the decision to turn off her baby's life support.

Stephanie Knibbs found her then-partner Joby Rowe standing over their daughter Alanah, who was lying injured on a changing table, in August 2015 after returning home from work.

Despite being rushed to the Royal Children's Hospital in Victoria by Paramedics, Alanah later died after her life support was turned off.

The mother of two-month-old Alanah has told a court of the moment she made the decision to turn off her baby's life support: 'I will never hear her laugh or giggle'

Alanah was 'violently shaken' by her father Joby Rowe in August 2015

In a victim impact statement, Knibbs told the Supreme Court that the decision to switch off life support was one of the hardest of her life, according to ABC.

'I will never hear her laugh or giggleI will never hear her say ''I love you'',' she wrote.

She said that she felt as though he heart had been ripped out and stood on.

Rowe, 26, had vehemently denied hurting Alanah, but earlier this month he was found guilty of child homicide.

Knibbs' statement added that she was hurt that Rowe 'wasn't honest from the start' and that she believed him for so long.

Statemets from Alanah's grandparents  Knibbs' mother and father  were also read in court, where they spoke of their grief and the pain of being the subject of unwanted media attention.

Rowe faces 20 years in prison after being found guilty of child homicide, and will be sentenced on Friday.Pope Francis has refused to comment on claims by the former Vatican ambassador to the US that he knew about sex abuse allegations against an American bishop as long ago as 2013.

Speaking on his flight home after a two-day visit to Ireland, the Pope said the allegation of a cover-up by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano 'speaks for itself'.

In Dublin the Pope repeatedly called for 'forgiveness' for past Catholic authorities involved in cover-ups, but on the plane he did not respond to the accusation that he himself had failed to address alleged misconduct.

Vigano, with whom the Pope has clashed in the past, claimed that Francis knew about allegations against Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, but rehabilitated him anyway.

Pope Francis leaves Ireland on his plane, where he told reporters he would not comment on a former Vatican ambassador's claim that he knew about accusations against a U.S. bishop

Vigano, 77, a conservative whose hardline anti-gay views are well known, urged the pope to resign over what he called Francis' culpability in covering up McCarrick's crimes.

Francis said the 11-page text by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano 'speaks for itself' and that he would not comment on it.

'It's an act of trust,' he said. 'I won't say a word about it.'

Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as cardinal last month, after a U.S. church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

On his trip to Ireland the 81-year-old pontiff repeatedly addressed the historic sex abuse which sparked protests during his visit.

At a Mass in Phoenix Park to finish his two-day trip, he said: 'We ask forgiveness for the times that, as a church, we did not show the survivors of whatever kind of abuse the compassion and the seeking of justice and truth through concrete actions. We ask for forgiveness.

'We ask for forgiveness for some of the church hierarchy who did not take charge of these situations and kept quiet. We ask for forgiveness.'

Vigano, who was posted to the U.S. from 2011 to 2016, said his two predecessors had told the Holy See about the claims against McCarrick and that Vigano himself sent at least two memos.

His letter names Vatican cardinals and US archbishops who he says were informed about the McCarrick affair, saying the Vatican archives support his claims.

He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer, and to no longer celebrate Mass in public or travel.

U.S. cardinal Theodore McCarrick (left) resigned amid allegations of misconduct which former Vatican ambassador Carlo Maria Vigano (right) has claimed that the Pope knew about

But he claims he was surprised to find McCarrick back on Church missions after Francis became pope in 2013, although the claim that Benedict sanctioned him is disputed.

It comes after the Vatican was blasted for its response to a Pennsylvania grand jury report which found more than 300 priests had abused children over 70 years.

Barry Coburn, McCarrick's civil attorney, said the allegations in the Vigano letter are 'serious'.

'Archbishop McCarrick, like any other person, has a right to due process. He looks forward to invoking that right at the appropriate time,' he said in a statement.

Vigano's letter also contains a lengthy diatribe about homosexuals and liberals in the Catholic church, targeting Francis's known supporters in the U.S. hierarchy.

Vigano, however, also has had his own problems with allegations of cover-up, and he and Francis had a major dust-up during Francis' 2015 visit to the U.S., which Vigano organized.

The cover-up accusation, which Vigano denied, concerned allegations that he tried to quash an investigation into the former archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis, Minnesota, John Nienstedt, who was accused of misconduct with adult seminarians.

Nienstedt was forced to resign over complaints about his handling of sex abuse cases.

In the 2015 clash a leading U.S. opponent of gay marriage, Kim Davis, was among those invited to meet with the pontiff at Vigano's Washington residence.

Francis was so enraged that Davis' supporters had leaked word of the meeting that the Vatican subsequently insisted he only held one private audience while there: with one of his former students, a gay man and his partner.Every member of a 28-strong group of African musicians has disappeared during a trip to a Swiss folk festival.

The performers had arrived in Switzerland from Burundi on a three-month Schengen tourist visa ahead of the event in the city of Fribourg.

But only 14 of them arrived at the festival and by their final show, just three were left with the others having disappeared. The remaining three then went missing after the event, according to local reports.

Every member of a 28-strong group of African musicians (pictured) has disappeared during a trip to a Swiss folk festival

The performers had arrived in Switzerland from Burundi on a three-month Schengen tourist visa ahead of the event in the city of Fribourg (pictured)

Festival chairman Jean-Pierre Gauch said: 'We do not know where they went.'

The members of the group had reportedly told the festival organisers that they were repressed and persecuted in their home country.

Gauch said: 'We told police that they might have filed for asylum.'

He added that it is 'important for us to show that taking part in the festival is not a ticket to Europe', but added that 'we do not monitor our guests'.

Swiss State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) Spokeswoman Emmanuelle Jaquet von Sury said that as long as their visa is valid the Burundians can move freely through the Schengen area.

Only 14 of them arrived at the festival and by their final show, just three were left with the others having disappeared

The members of the group had reportedly told the festival organisers that they were repressed and persecuted in their home country

She said: 'If the police or the border guards inspect one of the people and they still have a valid visa, nothing happens. Only for an illegal stay do the police or the border guard draw up a report and inform the migration authorities.'

Jaquet von Sury said that most of the time, people in such cases eventually appear again to file for asylum.

It is not the first time invited guests have disappeared in Switzerland.

Last April, two Algerian sportsmen who were set to compete in a tournament disappeared after their arrival at the airport in Geneva.Antonio La Torre, 62, is being held on remand in Italy after a series of police raids. Police claim they have evidence to suggest he and his brother threatened to kill two public prosecutors

A Scots Mafia boss is back behind bars over allegations involving guns and threats to kill prosecutors.

Aberdeen restaurateur Antonio La Torre  dubbed the Don on the Don  is being held on remand in Italy after a series of police raids.

La Torre, 62, moved to the North-East in 1984, allegedly to set up a money laundering operation for the mob. He was arrested in 2005 and jailed in Italy for extortion and racketeering before being freed in 2014.

He is the brother of Augusto La Torre, 55, who has admitted more than 40 murders and is believed to be kingpin in the Naples-based Camorra crime syndicate, although he now claims to be a reformed character.

Now, Italian police say they have evidence the siblings threatened to kill two public prosecutors, Alessandro DAlessio and his deputy, Maria Laura Lalia Morra. The plan was allegedly hatched from Augustos prison cell  he is serving 22 years for murder and extortion after being jailed in 2003.

The alleged targets were revealed via intercepted phone calls and authorities say wiretaps also caught discussions about where to hide guns.

In one taped conversation released to the Italian media, Augusto tells Antonio he kills people and orders him to call Mr DAlessio. The authorities argue this was a veiled threat.

Police said Antonio is in custody in Parma and will appear in court soon. He was arrested in the seaside town of Mondragone, near Naples, in the Campania region of Italy.

Campania Police Chief Commissioner Marta Sabino said: Antonio La Torre was arrested by anti-Mafia police. He is on remand and will be processed in the next months.

Antonio and three other men were arrested in a series of raids. They are being investigated for illegal possession of firearms, attempted extortion, attempted robbery and being involved in the Mafia. Antonio has denied any involvement.

He appeared to be a respectable businessman in Aberdeen until it emerged he had been laundering money through fitness clubs, catering firms, pubs and betting shops.

The father of three  who is divorced from his Scottish wife, Gillian Fraser opened two Italian restaurants, Pavarottis and Sorrento.

He and his brother are the sons of the late feared Mafia boss Tiberio La Torre.The reclusive Muslim sect building an illegal bush compound north of Sydney has been ordered to knock down every building on the site and not use it for religious worship.

The Diwan Al Dawla guild has previously said it will not obey Australia law and indicated it would refuse to abide by any court rulings over its religious retreat at Colo.

The Land and Environment Court found on Monday the sect had undertaken land clearing and earthworks in breach of planning laws and had built structures without approval.

The guild's founder, Dr Mustapha Kara-Ali, has previously refused Hawkesbury City Council officers access to the land, stating they are 'Cruasaders' and an affront to Islam.

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Dr Mustapha Kara-Ali is the founder of the Diwan Al Dawla Muslim guild which has set up a religious retreat on the Colo River, north of Sydney. He does not recognise Australian law

Hawkesbury City Council took civil action against Dr Kari-Ali alleging his group carried out illegal land clearing and earthworks on the site. Pictured is the frame of a horse barn

The entrance to the Diwan Al Dawla religious site (pictured) has to be demolished and removed within 28 days, along with four flagpoles, a shed and a party-built horse barn on the site

Dr Kara-Ali Dr Kari-Ali also refused to attend court because he did not recognise its authority.

'It's against our religion,' the imam said of the court action against him. 'It's against our religion to be subject to any other religion.'

'Because of the religious symbolism of the court, that contradicts with my religion. For my religion to be free I can't be dictated to by another religion.'

Justice Terry Sheahan ordered all structures on the site including an elaborate entrance, four flagpoles, three concrete slabs, a shed and a partly-built barn be demolished within 28 days.

A 'river entry ramp' which council submitted was for boats and Diwan Al Dawla said was for baptisms had to be removed in the same timeframe.

Justice Sheahan also restrained the group from 'carrying out of any and all religious activities of devotion, self-discipline, ritual baptism, inter-community prayers, contemplation and religious study or for the purposes of public worship.'

The order extends unless and until Diwan Al Dawla is granted appropriate development consent for the site.

Diwan Al Dawla bought the property for $670,000 in May last year and began building what it calls the Southern Chariot religious site.

Hawkesbury City Council says this structure is a boat ramp. The imam of the Diwan Al Dawla group says it is a walkway to the Colo River used for baptisms fashioned from an old spillway

The 12 hectare property is home to about 30 Arabian horses which the group intends to use to help troubled Muslim youth, particularly from western Sydney, engage with God.

A shed and two demountable buildings have been erected on the site and a barn is being built. There is also a grove of young trees including olives, figs and walnuts.

An elaborate structure described by council as a 'boat ramp' is in fact a walkway for people to be baptised in the Colo River, according to Dr Kara-Ali.

'It's not a boat ramp because we have no boats,' he said. 'The purpose of it is religious. The purpose of the horses is religious. The purpose of everything you see here is religious.'

On the other side of the road the group is carving a 1km hippodrome out of a hillside to train horses.

Mustapha (right) and Diaa Kara-Ali (left) pictured when confronted by Hawkesbury City Council officers at the gates of their 12 hectare property in the Hawkesbury region last month

The Diwan Al Dawla guild is carving a hippodrome out of this hillside at Colo so it can train Arabian horses. The group did not seek development approval from council to construct it

The council launched civil action against Dr Kari-Ali and his brother Diaa Kara-Ali alleging the men carried out illegal land clearing and earthworks and built gates, fences and driveways without approval.

The brothers agreed they had not sought approval for the work and said they had no intention of doing so because they did not recognise Australian law.

Dr Kara-Ali considers any government symbol which incorporated a version of a Christian cross - including the Southern Cross and the Cross of St George - to be an affront to Islam.

He cited a description of St George 'appearing at the head of an army of the Seven Champions of Christendom - a celestial knight who won a great victory over a Moslem host.'

He believes any authority which uses such a symbol - such as the police and the courts - to be religious, rather than secular.

'Any religious symbol, if they come to us by force it is a violation,' he said. 'It is a violation of our site.'

This shed on a concrete slab has been built without development approval by the Diwan Al Dawla guild at Colo, north of Sydney. The guild says it does not recognise Australian law

Two portable buildings have been erected on the Colo site but Dr Mustapha Kara-Ali says no one lives in them. They are used by workers on the property or sometimes for prayer

There are more than 30 Arabian horses on the Diwan Al Dawla religious site at Colo

He compared anyone who acted in government interests under a religious symbol to the Christian Crusaders who fought against Muslims in the medieval period.

'Crusaders, absolutely, by virtue of their use of Crusader symbols,' Dr Kara-Ali said.

'My main issue is the interference between the secular and the religious. What we are saying in a nutshell is the country of Australia is entrenched in secular symbolism and religious symbolism that stretches back to the time of the Crusades.

'This means that this government is not secular. It is religious because it carries these symbols.

'And we refuse for pagan symbols such as crosses to be on top of our lives.

'Remove these religious symbols and we can talk about secular government. But not now.

'For us, this is religious freedom.'

Dr Kara-Ali said if government bodies tried to enforce their rules upon him he would resist. 'I tell you what, people like us will say our God is supreme.'

The Kara-Ali brothers were due in court on Monday last week but did not attend. A hearing went ahead without them or a lawyer acting on their behalf.

Imam Mustapha Kara-Ali at the gates of the Southern Chariot religious site. Dr Kara-Ali says the Southern Cross is a corrupted Christian version of this celestial navigation diagram

The main entrance to the Southern Chariot religious site as seen from inside the retreat

The court heard the brothers had ignored repeated calls for them to stop developments on the site.

Lawyer Mark Cottom for the council said an officer had requested police accompany them on an inspection of the property because they might have required to force entry,' according to the ABC.

'The police appear to have significant concerns in relation to safety... wishing to have the riot squad and Polair available,' Mr Cottom said.

Dr Kara-Ali said that was 'just plain ridiculous'.

'There is no need for the police,' he said. All the police would find is 'a group of people praying and a few horses.'

'We are living our life like we desire. We desire to be separate from the secular. Is this too much to ask? And the secular wants to intimidate us with military might.'

'We are more powerful than their helicopters.'

Dr Kara-Ali believed his guild members were being treated as 'violent ragheads that know nothing about the world.'

Imam Mustapha Kara-Ali, pictured with one of the more than 30 Arabian horses on his Southern Chariot religious site at Colo, believes all government officials are 'Crusaders'

'We believe in our cause. We believe we are pioneers of religious freedom in this country.

'It is our way to disconnect. We want to disconnect. We want to be left alone.'

Dr Kara-Ali declined last Tuesday to say how many members of Diwan Al Dawla there were.

'That's not significant,' he said. We don't have to report that to anybody. It's not a matter of numbers. It's a matter of concepts. We're not short of numbers, let me assure you.'

The court heard the conflict turned ugly last month when three council officers attended the property to serve papers on the Kara-Ali brothers. A dashcam video tendered to the court showed the pair confront the officers.

'Both men were repeatedly yelling obscenities from the other side of the gate, calling out, "You dogs, I step on your cross", one of the council officers alleged.

No approval was sought or granted for the tree clearing and earthworks at the Colo site

The horses at the Southern Chariot site at Colo have their own religious meaning to adherents

However, Dr Kara-Ali said he and his brother were intimidated by the actions of the 'violent monkeys' and anyone could enter the site as long as they did not do so under a cross.

'This gate is open,' he said.

Dr Kara-Ali wrote to Hawkesbury City Council in March explaining another reason why he believed government had no authority over the group.

'The Colo Wilderness site is a religious site that is owned by the members of Diwan Al Dawla for the carrying out of religious activities of devotion, self-discipline, ritual baptism, inter-community prayers, contemplation and religious study, he wrote.

'The Land with its Colo River access serves as a reclusive place of worship.

'Members of Diwan al Dawla... live as a religious guild separated from secular lifetsyles to pursue a religious mode of worship to and an ascetic lifestyle under an oath of self-sacrifice and dedication to the purpose of Diwan Al Dawla.'

The planned hippodrome across the road from the religious site will be used to train horses

Dr Kara-Ali contended Hawkesbury City Council had no power to tell Diwan Al Dawla what to do because it is a 'basic religious charity' registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for profits Commission (ACNC).

'Charities who meet the definition of Basic Religious Charity do not have to submit annual financial reports, and they do not have to comply with the ACNC governance standards which include... "Compliance with Australian laws",' Dr Kara-Ali wrote.

According to the imam, that also puts his guild above the law.

'Religious activities, according to our ACNC registered governing rules... must remain independent of entities that represent secular socio-economic structures and modes of living,' he wrote.

'...Diwan Al Dawla, as a Basic Religious Charity, is not required to comply with Australian laws.'

That claim was not supported by the ACNC.A suspected killer is being sought by police after the fatal stabbing of his ex-girlfriend and her mother in a suburban street.

Emergency services rushed to the scene in Solihull, Birmingham shortly after midnight last night and found Raneem Oudeh, 22, and her mother, Khaola Saleem, 49, dying from stab wounds.

Detectives are desperately hunting 21-year-old Janbaz Tarin, Ms Oudeh's ex-boyfriend, and have appealed for help from the public.

Officers are urging people not to approaching Tarin, but to call 999 as soon as they see him.

Janbaz Tarin is on the run after he is believed to have stabbed his ex and her mother to death

Raneem Oudeh and her mother Khaola Saleem died after they were stabbed in Solihull

In a statement, the victims' family said: 'Our family is devastated with the loss of our loved ones.

'We would like to give thanks for all the love and support we have received. We kindly request that our privacy is respected at this difficult time.'

Det Insp Caroline Corfield, who is leading the investigation, said: 'We've been working flat out to apprehend Tarin since the early hours of this morning, following up a number of lines of enquiry.

'As we have so far not been able to locate Tarin, I'm now asking for the public's help in tracing him

'If anyone knows where he is or thinks they may have seen him, I'd urge them to ring 999 immediately.

'If there's anyone out there who may be shielding him through a sense of misguided loyalty, they need to be aware that they are committing an offence and will be prosecuted.

'My message to Tarin would be that it's vitally important that we get to speak to you as soon as possible, so please do the right thing and let us know where you are.'

Mr Tarin is wanted in connection with the deaths of two women in Solihull. Officers have warned the public not to approach him

Two women were found dead near to their home in Northdown Road in Solihul. Mr Tarin is wanted for questioning

Mr Tarin is believed to be the ex boyfriend of one of the two women found dead in Solihull

Relatives of a mother and daughter who died in a stabbing in Solihull visit the place where the attacks happened this afternoon

Devastated family members visited the victim's home today and declined to comment

Evidence cones, leading a trail from the crime scene, were put down by detectives today

Raneem Oudeh aged 22 has been named as one of the women found dead in Solihull

Janbaz Tarin is wanted for questioning after two women died in Solihull over the Bank Holiday

Police have taped off a section of this suburban street after two women were killed

Neighbours thought foxes were wailing after hearing the two women's screams before the victims tragically died just yards from the front door of a terraced house.

Police evidence tents were put up outside a 225,000 terraced home on the street this morning as forensics experts began their investigation.

Teary relatives have visited the scene. It is understood the victims came to the UK from Syria around 16 years ago.

Neighbours said they did not believe the mother and daughter lived in the house outside which the tents have been put up.

They say the two women lived in another house on the street, but ended up outside the home of a neighbour after the attack.

One local resident said she heard screaming and shouting outside late last night.

Police have cordoned off a green, which has five houses facing on to it. Neighbours believe the victims lived in a house on the green, but not that where police activity is focused

Police evidence tents have been put up outside the suburban property following the attacks

The woman, who asked not to be named, said: 'I thought it was foxes screaming. She was absolutely screaming her head off. The man wasn't speaking English, that's for sure. He shouted something and then ran off.

'There was a lot of screaming and shouting and then I saw a guy run off. About a minute later I saw him leave in a van.'

The neighbour, who said she was 'stunned' by what had happened, said she did not know the victims, adding that 'they kept themselves to themselves'.

A spokesman for West Midlands Police said: 'Detectives have launched a double murder investigation after a mother and daughter were stabbed to death in a Solihull street this morning.

'Police were called to Northdown Road at just after 12.30am and discovered the women, aged 22 and 49 with serious stab wounds.

'Despite the best efforts of emergency services they were tragically confirmed dead at the scene.'

Two strips of five terraced houses face on to the green where the police are working

Multiple tents covered the lawn outside a home in Solihull as officers stood guard in the area

Police erected a cordon around the garden of a home where two women died after screaming was heard

The spokesman added: 'Police have identified a suspect, who is known to the victims, and are making urgent attempts to arrest him.

'The area has been cordoned off while examinations are carried out and CCTV is being examined.

'Officers are also carrying out house to house enquiries and there will be a visible presence in the area over the coming days to provide community reassurance.'

Det Insp Caroline Corfield, from the force's homicide team, said: 'What has happened this morning is truly devastating and heart-breaking.

'Our thoughts go out to the two victims' family and friends at this traumatic time.

'Tragically there was nothing which could be done to save them and we are working to establish the circumstances behind what happened.

'We are still in the very early stages of our investigation but we believe the offender is known to the victims. We are appealing to him come forward as a matter of urgency.'

Anyone with information has been asked to contact 999.A man who beat a small dog to death and drove around with its body in the back seat has been spared jail.

Mare Tahau, 29, walked out of Adelaide Magistrates Court on Monday after pleading guilty to punching his neighbour's dog twice, killing it, and then drink-driving with its body in the back of his car.

He was handed down a suspended three-month jail sentence on a a one-year, $100 good behaviour bond, with Magistrate Simon Smart saying that the cruel and serious crime had other factors.

Rover, the fluffy, white terrier (pictured) was punched and killed in a violent attack in May 2017

Mare Tahau (pictured) faced court on Monday over the attack, and was given a three-month suspended prison sentence with a $100 good behaviour bond

Rover's owner, Remar Anson, had gone out with friends in Adelaide's CBD one night in May, 2017.

The fluffy, white terrier was left alone in the laundry, barking constantly.

Tahau went to calm the dog down, but he bit him.

The man then punched the 5.5kg dog twice, the second blow killing him.

Realising what he had done, Tahau called Anson, who told him to bring the dog to him and then to the vet.

Tahau was eventually pulled over and arrested for drink-driving, with police finding the dead dog in the back seat.

Last week, the RSPCA asked Tahau be sentenced to the maximum possible two-year prison term.

Rover's owner Remar Anson (pictured) says he is disappointed with the lenient sentence

The court heard as Tahau punched the dog twice, once for barking and another for biting him

Magistrate Smart said there was no need for such a penalty, calling the incident 'a big, massive accident'.

He said that Tahau had shown genuine remorse for the attack, and that the dog's actions had to be considered in sentencing, according to Adelaide Now.

'I accept, however, your actions followed having been bitten by the dog and accept you were grossly intoxicated by liquor,' he said.

Outside court, Rover's owner was disappointed with the leniency of the sentencing.

'It is what it is, it doesn't bring my dog back,' he said.

'Rover wasn't just a dog, he was really my son.'This is the astonishing moment migrants stormed a packed tourist beach and clambered up a cliff after jumping off their boat in southern Spain.

Holidaymakers watched open-mouthed as the semi-inflatable Zodiac carrying around 50 Moroccans - including about ten children - beached near a luxury hotel area on Spain's Costa de la Luz.

Footage shows refugees sprinting up the popular Barrosa Beach at about 3.30pm on Sunday before attempting to scale cliffs.

The incident happened near a purpose-built residential and tourist resort called Sancti Petri which boasts shops, restaurants and several four and five-star hotels.

A tourist filming the scene could be heard saying in Spanish as the migrants leapt from their boat: 'Look how they're running towards the Sancti Petri Melia Hotel. They're heading for the all-inclusive Melia Sancti Petri. Look, look, look.'

Astonishing footage captures the moment a group of African migrants stormed a packed tourist beach and jumped off their boat before clambering up cliffs in southern Spain

The incident happened around 3.30pm on Sunday at Barrosa Beach, considered to be one of the best beaches on Spain's southern coast

A witness, who told how beachgoers took mobiles that had been left in the boat, added: 'We thought they weren't going to reach the beach because it's not something that's normal in this area, but they leapt off the Zodiac very quickly and began to climb up the rocks.'

Civil Guard officers said this morning 25 of the migrants had been intercepted - 19 of whom were minors. They said all were Moroccans.

A spokesman for the force said the six adults would be taken to an adult migrant holding centre before being returned to their country of origin as part of an agreement with Morocco.

He said the 19 minors, whose ages he could not specify, would be taken to youth centres run by the regional Junta de Andalucia government.

He said: 'None of those intercepted have been arrested as they haven't committed a crime. They will be dealt with differently depending on whether they are adults or minors.

'The minors will be taken to youth centres and the adults to a secure migrant holding centre called a CIE.

'The return of the adults to their country of origin will be fairly quick.'

Sources said the minors would remain in Spain. One said: 'We don't know exactly how many people were on the boat but it's obvious a number of the migrants managed to get away undetected.

The incident happened near a purpose-built residential and tourist resort called Sancti Petri which boasts shops, restaurants and several four and five-star hotels

Tourists were swimming in the sea and sunbathing when the packed vessel arrived at the beach

Holidaymakers watched open-mouthed as the semi-inflatable Zodiac carrying nearly 50 Moroccans including about ten children beached near a luxury hotel area on Spain's Costa de la Luz

'The authorities are still looking for them.'

Last month around 50 migrants were filmed landing on a packed beach and sprinting up the sand at a beach in Zahora a half-hour drive away and close to the headland of Cape Trafalgar near where Horatio Nelson defeated Napoleon's combined Spanish and French fleet.

The men and women videoed jumping from the rickety wooden boat known as a patera in the July 28 arrival, were from sub-Saharan Africa.

Days earlier, dozens of migrants were filmed storming another southern Spanish beach as confused sunbathing nudists watched on.

The dramatic clip, taken on the beach at Tarifa, showed a group of more than 30 migrants landing in a dinghy before sprinting off into woodland surrounding the beach to evade the pursuing Spanish border guards.

Spain has overtaken Italy as the preferred destination for migrant arrivals in Europe this year after Italy's new hardline Interior Minister Matteo Salvini introduced a blanket ban on migrant boats entering the country's ports.

The number of migrants and refugees using the western Mediterranean route to reach Spain stood at 20,992 between January 1 and July 25 according to the IOM, close to the 22,108 people who used it during the whole of last year.

Coastguards rescued more than 60 migrants in the Gibraltar Straits yesterday - 28 less than on Saturday when 88 migrants were rescued.

Meanwhile, Spain last week sent 116 migrants back to Morocco after they entered the country illegally.

Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo said a 1992 agreement with Rabat had been activated to expel the migrants.

It came after the refugees used what she described as 'unacceptable' violence when storming fences separating Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco on Wednesday. Seven policemen were hurt in the incident.

Calvo said Spain would keep receiving migrants rescued in the Mediterranean in a 'safe and humanitarian' manner.

Sub-Saharan Africans living illegally in Morocco often try to enter Europe by scaling fences surrounding Ceuta and Melilla, Spain's other North African enclave.

Migrant arrivals in Spain have spiked in recent months, placing strain on public services and putting political pressure on the government.Andrzej Plawski, 38 (pictured outside Birmingham Crown Court) flew from Warsaw to Birmingham with Whizz Air on June 5

A drunken Polish fork lift driver who downed an entire bottle of vodka during his flight back to the UK and 'reached for the door' in mid-air has been fined 300.

Andrzej Plawski, 38, flew from Warsaw to Birmingham with Whizz Air on June 5 this year.

But staff and passengers soon became alarmed when he started walking around the cabin, refusing to sit down during landing and trying to open the door.

He claimed drinking vodka was a way to settle his fear of flying and he was particularly stressed after visiting his mother with cancer in Poland.

But Sally Cairns, prosecuting at Birmingham Crown Court said: 'About an hour into the flight the cabin manager noticed the defendant walking around.

'He was unsteady on his feet and he smelt strongly of alcohol.

'At that point the cabin manager warned the defendant about his conduct and asked him where he was getting his alcohol from, as drinks had not been served to him.

'He did not reply to that question but became increasingly animated.

'He was verbally and physically disruptive towards other passengers sat by him and was waving his arms about.'

Mis Cairns said due to safety concerns the defendant, who had been by an emergency exit, was moved to a different seat.

But when the plane started its descent and the seat belt signs came on, Plawski got up and started to get his bag out of the over head locker.

'He then proceeded to stand by the doorway of the plane despite requests from cabin staff to take his seat,' Miss Cairns said.

She added that eventually the cabin manager had to physically move the defendant back to his seat and put the seat belt on him because he seemed incapable of doing it himself.

On landing the police were called and arrested Plawski who was shouting and who punched the window of a police car.

He claimed drinking vodka on the Whizz Air flight was a way to settle his fear of flying and he was particularly stressed after visiting his mother with cancer in Poland. File image used

When interviewed he admitted being drunk and 'playing the cabin crew up.'

Nicholas Tatlow, defending, said: 'He has a long standing fear of flying and on this occasion and in the past dealt with that fear by drinking to excess before the flight.'

He said in the past he had normally fallen asleep and that was his intention when he drank almost a full bottle of vodka at Warsaw airport and then polished the rest off when he was in aircraft's lavatories.

Mr Tatlow said on this occasion he had been particularly stressed after going home to Poland to visit his mother who had cancer and that he was ashamed of his behaviour.

Plawski, of Walsall, who had previously admitted being drunk on an aircraft and using threatening words and behaviour, was fined 300 and ordered to pay 340 costs.

Recorder J Steel QC said he had caused 'anxiety and distress' to other passengers and that by going to the door he had caused alarm to the crew.Whitehall does not have enough skilled officials to get Britain ready for a no deal Brexit in March, senior officials warned today.

The claim that even if enough money is made available the country will not be prepared is will alarm Remain supporters and anger Brexiteers.

In other developments today, EU diplomats taunted the UK could face chaos within days if no deal is struck in time for Brexit day on March 29 next year.

Whitehall does not have enough skilled officials to get Britain ready for a no deal Brexit in March, senior officials warned today (file image)

Prime Minister Theresa May has ordered her Cabinet to meet on September 13 to work out a plan for critical areas not yet covered by no deal plans.

The chances of there being no Brexit agreement have risen dramatically in recent weeks amid a continued stalemate in the negotiations.

A deadline for an outline deal at October's EU summit is now widely expected to be missed despite continuing negotiations in Brussels.

The Prime Minister has ordered her Cabinet to meet on September 13 to work out a plan for critical areas not yet covered by no deal plans.

But a senior Government figure told The Times today: 'This isn't about the money it's about people.

'You can't take the sort of numbers you need out of the government's current operations without them falling over.'

Senior EU diplomats told the Sun that no would mean 'no flights to and from the UK, no ships, no economic activity and no financial transactions' within days of Brexit.

One ambassador predicted the chaos for businesses and ordinary people in the UK would get so bad the situation would quickly become untenable for the Government.

And a senior EU official said Brussels negotiators were banking on it being such a disaster that the 'cycle of negotiations and the political dynamics will be taken over by the real world'

The crisis meeting comes as Dominic Raab (pictured on August 23) risked a Cabinet row with Philip Hammond after questioning the worth of economic forecasts about Brexit, days after the Chancellor warned that no deal could cause major damage

Theresa May has called her no deal crisis summit amid fears the row between Brexiteers and Remainers is undermining negotiations with Brussels.

The meeting comes as Dominic Raab risked a Cabinet row with Philip Hammond after questioning the worth of economic forecasts about Brexit, days after the Chancellor warned that no deal could cause major damage.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, the Brexit Secretary said that some projections needed to be treated with 'a measure of caution', adding that GDP estimates for 2019 'have been revised up.

Mr Hammond was accused of launching a 'dodgy Project Fear' on Thursday when he suggested that GDP could fall and borrowing could be around 80 billion a year under a scenario in which Britain resorted to World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms after a no-deal Brexit.

Without naming Mr Hammond, Mr Raab told the Sunday Times: 'I'm always chary of any forecast because most of them have been proved to be wrong.'

Mr Hammond (pictured on June 6) was accused of launching a 'dodgy Project Fear' on Thursday when he suggested that GDP could fall and borrowing could be around 80 billion a year under a scenario in which Britain resorted to World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms after a no-deal Brexit

The newspaper also claimed that the Cabinet will meet to discuss no-deal Brexit preparations over fears that a row between Brexiteers and Remainers was undermining negotiations with Brussels.

Mr Hammond's comments in a letter to Conservative MP Nicky Morgan, chairwoman of the Treasury Select Committee, emerged hours after Mr Raab had attempted to play down the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit while outlining the impact of such a scenario via a series of technical papers.

The Chancellor said that his initial January analysis on GDP and borrowing was undergoing a 'process of refinement' ahead of a parliamentary vote on any deal, noting scenarios which have higher barriers to trade with the EU are expected to have a 'more damaging effect' on the economy and public finances.

He also defended the Government's preferred approach, which was outlined in a White Paper following a Cabinet summit at Chequers, by saying the economic and fiscal impacts of this would be 'substantially better' than no deal.

Meanwhile, a former European Council president Herman Van Rompuy, warned that a no-deal Brexit could cause the United Kingdom itself to collapse.

The ex-Belgian prime Minister told the Observer that crashing out without a deal was an 'an existential threat to the UK itself'.ABC/Randy HolmesNothing But Thieves has dropped a new single called "Forever & Ever More."

The track will appear on the English band's forthcoming EP What Did You Think When You Made Me This Way?, due out October 19.

The four-track EP, which is named after a lyric from "Forever & Ever More," also includes new songs called "Gods," "You Know Me Too Well" and "Take This Lonely Heart." The single and EP are the first new releases from Nothing But Thieves, following their 2017 sophomore album, Broken Machine.

Nothing But Thieves will embark on a U.S. headlining tour beginning September 7 in Washington, D.C.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.In 2014, Blue America endorsed Zephyr Teachout for governor. In a a guest post about trust-busting she wrote for DWT in August of that year she explained one reason why many of the Cuomo's most ardent supporters were "Republican donors and elected officials: he delivers Trickled-down Republican economic policies as well as any Republican Governor in the country." It hasn't gotten any better over the last 4 years.





That year low-info Democrats renominated Andrew Cuomo with 62% of the vote. He spent $60.62 per vote he received-- and spent over 40 times more than his opponent, Zephyr Teachout, who took 35%. Although Cuomo won all the big Machine counties, where men in back rooms decide on the totals in advance, Teachout won 30 of New York's 62 counties, some in absolute wipeouts:

 Putnam- 53.5%

 Dutchess- 57.5%

 Ulster- 70.0%

 Sullivan- 67.6%

 Delaware- 63.3%

 Greene- 62.1%

 Columbia- 77.9%

 Rensselaer- 63.4%

 Albany- 61.9%

 Schoharie- 71.7%

 Washington- 63.8%

 Saratoga- 67.3%

 Fulton- 54.3%

 Montgomery- 54.5%

 Otsego- 72.7%

 Chenango- 49.9%

 Madison- 46.8%

 Cortland- 60.6%

 Tompkins- 70.9%

 Tioga- 49.7%

 Schuyler- 60.7%

 Yates- 61.5%

 Ontario- 50.8%

 Seneca- 56.3%

 Wayne- 49.1%

 Warren- 56.7%

 Hamilton- 51.7%

 Essex- 48.6%

 Clinton- 49.4%

 St Lawrence- 54.6%

Daily News: Zephyr Teachout for attorney general: A standout in the Democratic field. On September 13, New York Democratic voters will nominate one of four primary candidates" Zephyr, Cuomo's candidate Letitia James, conservative Democratic Sean Patrick Maloney, a notorious Wall Street whore, and a former Hillary Clinton policy advisor Leecia Eve. The Democratic status quo establishment-- from Obama, EMILY's List and Cuomo to now defeated Rep. Joe Crowley and a shit-load of corrupt elected officials have endorsed James. Grassroots organizations and progressives like Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna are behind Zephyr. She was also endorsed by the NY Times and, yesterday, by the





Four years ago they were behind Cuomo. In their endorsement yesterday they noted that "Much has changed in four years... [It was] unimaginable then that Donald Trump would be the President, pursuing reckless policies while continuing to profit from his private business, an ethical monstrosity. What hasnt changed in four years is that Albany remains a pit of corruption with conflicts of interest everywhere."

So more than ever New York needs a smart, energetic, independent lawyer to lead the 700 professionals of the Law Department to defend the state; enforce labor, housing and consumer law; file suit against corporations that violate New Yorkers rights; take on Trumps official and personal predations, and root out Albany graft.



Teachout is a puzzle-piece fit of candidate and moment. An expert in state and federal anti-corruption laws, she would bring welcome sunlight to the Capitols dark corners.



It is Teachouts theory that Trump is a living, breathing violation of the U.S. Constitutions emoluments clause that is playing out in court. It is Teachout who promises to reanimate the Moreland Commission Gov. Cuomo hastily disbanded.



Clean as they come, of the four AG contenders, only Teachout has forsworn accepting contributions from corporate PACs or limited liability corporations, LLCs, which can completely subvert campaign donation limits.



Only Teachout welcomed last years referendum to convene a state Constitutional Convention to revise and amend the 52,500-word mess of a document that not only has she read, but that she teaches as a tenured member of Fordhams faculty.



What is outside her immediate wheelhouse, Teachout, a whip-smart lawyer, can easily learn by recruiting top talent.



Teachouts chief rival, Public Advocate Tish James, is a credible candidate, but shes the pick of party power brokers, and that should set off alarm bells. The second strike against James: After Schneiderman imploded, she was happy to play the inside game and get handed the job by the Legislature. The third: Her record of successfully filing suit as public advocate is spotty, to put it kindly.



While other contenders, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney and Leecia Eve, a former top aide to Gov. Cuomo and before that to Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, could do the job, they dont dazzle. And they too wanted the shortcut to incumbency. That ought to be a sign.



Vote for the one candidate who had sufficient respect for voters to keep Barbara Underwood as AG until Election Day. Who knows corruption laws inside out. Who is independent from the governor and the establishment.



Vote Teachout.

Please consider contributing to Zephyr's campaign by clicking on the thermometer above. Democratic voters in deep blue states often turn to Republicans for state office because of the corruption. In New York this year, it's time to turn to a progressive reformer instead. I'm sure the corrupt Democratic establishment fears Zephyr Teachout far more than they fear any Republican-- and they should.An Australian fisherman who spotted a pair of Vietnamese refugees clinging to mangroves in crocodile-infested waters has treated the two asylum seekers to a crabbing trip - complete with complimentary beers.

Cairns fisherman Justin Ward was on his boat at the mouth of the Daintree River in far north Queensland on Monday when he saw the two men, who had arrived in the country on a vessel which ran aground the day before.

'As we came around into the mouth of the river these two lads were hanging off the mangroves there looking severely worried,' Mr Ward told Nine News.

He picked the men up and took them crabbing. They were dehydrated and asked for water, but all Mr Ward had on board was beer.

Scroll down for video

An Australian fisherman who spotted a pair of Vietnamese refugees clinging to mangroves in crocodile-infested waters has treated the two asylum seekers to a crabbing trip

Cairns fisherman Justin Ward was on his boat at the mouth of the Daintree River in far north Queensland on Monday when he saw the two men

The men asked to be taken to the market, but Mr Ward told them it wasn't market day and instead the trio pulled in crab pots along the water and spotting crocodiles.

'They were taking photos and taking selfies. They weren't exactly sure what we were talking about, but everyone was laughing,' Mr Ward said.

Mr Ward said he felt empathy for the Vietnamese men but was obligated to contact the authorities.

Defence Industry Minister Steven Ciobo said the asylum seekers on the run should be sent to offshore immigration detention on Nauru.

Mr Ward said he felt empathy for the Vietnamese men but was obligated to contact the authorities

Fifteen foreign nationals have been detained and authorities are searching for at least five more who abandoned an illegal fishing vessel that ran aground in the Daintree on Sunday.

'Those people if we can find them, they should be taken into custody, so to speak, and they should be sent to Nauru,' Mr Ciobo told Sky News on Monday.

Mr Ciobo said that if Labor were in power that the potential illegal immigrants would be put into the community.

There are more people who were on the boat but have not been found by investigators.

A Department of Home Affairs spokesperson said the investigation of what they believe to be an illegal fishing vessel is ongoing.

The Australian Border Force is on the scene and is being assisted by Queensland Police.

There has been an outcry for better border security after a fishing boat carrying at least 20 suspected illegal immigrants crashed on Australia's coastline

A Department of Home Affairs spokesperson said the investigation of what they believe to be an illegal fishing vessel is ongoing

Some politicians, including MP George Christensen, used the vessel as an opportunity to call out the government's border patrol practices

The Australian Border Force is on the scene and is being assisted by Queensland Police

Some politicians, including MP George Christensen, used the vessel as an opportunity to call out the government's border patrol practices.

'Qld borders need to be made more secure esp (especially) given proximity of PNG & Indonesia, considering level of radical Islamism in Indonesia, Malaysia & Philippines,' Mr Christensen tweeted.

'With Peter Dutton back as Home Affairs Minister, I suspect this incursion will be dealt with swiftly and that there will be more focus on border security in North Queensland,' he later posted to Facebook.

Defence Industry Minister Steven Ciobo said the asylum seekers on the run should be sent to offshore immigration detention on NauruA survival expert wanted over the brutal 1998 killing of a young Dutch boy has been arrested in Spain after one of the most extensive murder investigations to date in the Netherlands.

Nicky Verstappen was 11 when he disappeared during the night of August 9, 1998, while at a summer camp at the Brunssumerheide nature reserve, near the German border.

His body was found the next evening, close to the camp site. He had been sexually abused before he was killed.

Suspect Jos Brech, a former scout worker who is believed to be a survival expert, was reported missing in April and police had thought he was hiding in France's mountainous eastern Vosges region, where he owns a chalet.

Survival expert Jos Brech, wanted over the brutal 1998 killing of a young Dutch boy, has been arrested in Spain after one of the most extensive murder investigations to date in the Netherlands. Pictures show the moment he was arrested

Suspect Jos Brech (left), a former scout worker who is believed to be a survival expert, has been arrested near Barcelona over the murder of Nicky Verstappen (right)

Brech, 55, was arrested (pictured as he lies face down in handcuffs) near Barcelona 'thanks to a witness who recognised him after seeing his picture in the media in recent days' investigators said

Nicky was found dead a day after he went missing from his tent (pictured) at a youth camp in Limburg

Brech, 55, was arrested near Barcelona 'thanks to a witness who recognised him after seeing his picture in the media in recent days' investigators added, hailing the 'good cooperation' with the Spanish police.

'Jos B, 55, a suspect in the death of Nicky Verstappen was arrested in Spain on Sunday afternoon. He was taken into custody and will be handed over to the Netherlands,' a police statement issued in Limburg, the southern district in which the boy disappeared, said.

Journalist Peter R. de Vries, spokesman for the dead boy's family, exclaimed on Twitter: 'We got him! Jos Brech was arrested in Spain near Barcelona!'

'The family is very relieved. Justice will be done!'

Police at the time of the murder mounted a massive search closely followed by local media and the Dutch public, but the 11-year-old boy's killer was never found.

As time ran out to catch the suspect, police earlier this year appealed to more than 20,000 men to donate DNA samples in a bid to close in on the perpetrator.

Police said new digital techniques helped them to develop a DNA profile in 2008, from traces found on Verstappen's clothing, but there had been no match.

Earlier this year, some 16,000 men living in the area where Verstappen was murdered volunteered to hand over DNA samples after a call by detectives.

Nicky Verstappen (pictured) was 11 when he disappeared during the night of August 9, 1998, while at a summer camp at the Brunssumerheide nature reserve, near the German border

Dutch crime reporter Peter de Vries (right), Nicky's father Peter Verstappen, sister Femke and mother Berthie Verstappen sit next to each other during an earlier press conference

However Brech, who was 35 at the time of the murder, was not among the volunteers but as he was previously interviewed as a witness, police became suspicious.

When his family reported him as missing, Dutch and French police searched his cabin in the Vosges region.

'We found traces of DNA on his personal belongings. It was a match,' chief prosecutor Jan Eland said last week when Dutch police announced they had identified a suspect.

A European-wide warrant for Brech's arrest was issued on June 12.

This timeline of the investigation shows how the number of people volunteering to give their DNA increased so police could compare it to DNA found on Nicky's clothes in a bid to find a suspectRoseanne Barr has told fans she is 'doing better' as she posted a pair of smiling selfies on Twitter.

The comedian, who had her show cancelled after she penned a racist tweet about Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, said switching doctors had led to the improvement.

'Got a new Dr and am doing better now. Thanks everyone!' she wrote in one tweet, while another was a picture of her smiling with the caption 'Hello'.

Barr has given many explanations for her tweet, and among them has hinted at mental health issues.

Roseanne Barr said she is 'doing better' after switching doctors, three months after her racist Twitter message about Valerie Jarrett got her fired

Barr also tweeted a second photo of her smiling face along with the caption 'hello'

At one point she blamed sleeping drug Ambien for her outburst, then told Sean Hannity that she was 'not in a good place' when she wrote the tweet.

Barr caused widespread outrage when she tweeted back in May that Jarrett looked like 'the Muslim Brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.'

Later the same day ABC pulled her show from the air in a move that cost Barr millions. It had been ABC's biggest hit of the year to that point.

Barr has apologized to Jarrett via Twitter, but has repeatedly denied she was being racist, saying that she thought Jarrett was Iranian, not African American.

Speaking on Hannity's show last month, she spurned several chances offered by the host to give a full apology, before giving a reluctant half-apology.

'Address her and not just her, but people in the community who are so outraged about it. Address them from your heart and tell them,' Hannity said.

The actress has given many explanations for her tweet and among them has hinted at mental health issues, saying she was 'not in a good place' when she penned it

In the message Barr said Valerie Jarrett, who was born in Iran and is of African American decent, looks like 'the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby'

'Here's what I have to say, let's talk about it,' Barr said as she turned to face the camera. 'Let's really turn this into a teachable moment.'

Hannity then once again tried to press Barr on what she would specifically say to Jarrett if she could speak to her directly.

'I would say this: Valerie, let's discuss this,' Barr said. 'Don't assume that you know what I meant because I think you don't know what I meant.

'I would like to make it clearer to you what I did mean and I would like to... find common ground between us.'

'Would you like to say sorry to her directly?' Hannity then asked Barr, trying once more to get the comedian to apologize to Jarrett.

'No, I already have,' Barr shot back. 'I have not called her.'

'I would think the first thing you would want to do is, I would want her to hear my voice and say I am so sorry,' Hannity said.

'I know you tweeted it. I know you said it. But now that you have a very different perspective on the comments, I would assume you would want to start there.'

'I'm so sorry that you thought I was racist,' Barr finally relented. 'And that you thought my tweet was racist. Because it wasn't, it was political.'

The tweet saw the reboot of Barr's sitcom Roseanne cancelled despite being a smash hit, with ABC president Channing Dungey saying the decision 'wasn't hard'

Roseanne has repeatedly refused to accept her tweet was racist, saying she thought Jarrett (pictured right) was white

'I'm sorry for the misunderstanding that caused - my ill-worded tweet - and I'm sorry that you feel harmed and hurt.'

Barr was last spotted at LAX earlier this month wearing a Trump 2020 Vision hat - she is one of the President's most avid supporters - where she told a photographer to 'f*** off' as she came out of the terminal building.

Channing Dungey, president of ABC, also spoke out this month to say that firing Roseanne was 'not hard' after a series of incidents.

'It was actually made very swiftly,' Dungey told Deadline. 'We knew what we wanted to do, and we did it.'

Dungey said the network wanted to act fast - which they knew would 'speak volumes' - rather than put Barr on leave and launch any sort of investigation.

'For us, we have had multiple instances with Roseanne, and certainly this tweet crossed the line that cannot be crossed, but it was for us a sense of enough is enough and something had to be done,' she said.

'It was nice that it was so clear to everyone that there wasn't a lot of debate and discussion about it.'A critic of Vladimir Putin says he fears he could be next on the Kremlin's hitlist and accused British intelligence firms of spying on him for the Russian regime.

Bill Browder has led criticism of the Russian leader after an investment fund he ran in Moscow was seized and he was kicked out of the country following his work exposing corruption.

After Britain accused Russia of carrying out the Novichok attack on former spy Sergei Skripal earlier this year, Mr Browder says he fears he could be next.

Businessman Bill Browder has told of his fears he could be next on Vladimir Putin's 'hitlist'

The 54-year-old businessman told The Daily Mirror: 'They are pursuing every way of getting to me. The most extreme way would be Novichok on my door handle.

'Or one that would cause the least consequences is to find a friendly country to extradite me to Russia, where they would torture me, have a show trial and then murder me, telling everyone I died of natural causes.'

Browder also used the interview to accuse private British intelligence firms of spying on him for the Kremlin.

He said the companies, who often employ retired MI5 and MI6 agents, have been producing reports on his 'whereabouts, activities and background' for Russian money.

Browder intends to make the same claims when he goes before a parliamentary committee next month, the Mirror reported.

Earlier this summer, Mr Browder told The Mail On Sunday how he was nearly 'kidnapped' by Putin's men during a trip to Spain.

The Novichok chemical weapons attack in Salisbury has led to fears over the killings of critics of Russian leader Putin

Mr Browder set up Hermitage Capital Management in Russia in 1996, when the country's markets were opening up to capitalist investment following the fall of Communism.

He was once Russia's biggest foreign investor and earned hundreds of millions of pounds from his funds.

But he fell foul of the Kremlin in 2005 and was black listed from Russia, while many of his assets were seized.

His Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who helped Browder's investigation into corruption in Russia, was jailed, beaten and died in custody.

He gave his name to the Magnitsky Act, a US move to make life more difficult for corrupt Russian officials.Pope Francis has said parents should seek psychiatric help for children who show signs of being gay at a young age.

Speaking on his flight home after his two-day visit to Ireland, the pontiff said parents should not 'condemn' gay children but said there was 'a lot that could be done' with professional medical input.

The 81-year-old pontiff has previously signalled a more tolerant attitude to gay people than some of his predecessors.

Asked what he would say to parents whose children showed homosexual tendencies, Francis said: 'I would say first of all pray, not to condemn, to dialogue, to understand, to give space to the son or the daughter.

Pope Francis, pictured arriving at his closing Mass in Dublin, said parents should not 'condemn' gay children but said there was 'a lot that could be done' by psychiatrists

'When it shows itself from childhood, there is a lot that can be done through psychiatry, to see how things are. It is something else if it shows itself after 20 years.

'Ignoring a son or daughter who has homosexual tendencies is an error of fatherhood or motherhood.'

In May this year the Pope won praise when he told a gay survivor of clerical sex abuse in Chile that 'God made you like this'.

Juan Carlos Cruz, who was abused by bishops, said Francis had told him: 'The pope loves you this way. God made you like this and he loves you.'

Shortly after taking office in 2013 he signalled a more tolerant attitude towards gay people by saying: 'Who am I to judge?'

Franics has also spoken of his own ministry to gay and transgender people, insisting they are children of God, loved by God and deserving of accompaniment by the church.

Church teaching says gays should be respected, loved and not discriminated against, but considers homosexual activity 'intrinsically disordered'.

Francis's predecessor Pope Benedict XVI took a more conservative line, calling for a 'conscientious effort' to resist same-sex marriage.

In May this year the Pope (pictured leaving Ireland on Sunday evening) won praise when he told a gay survivor of clerical sex abuse in Chile that 'God made you like this'

On his Irish visit the Pope met the country's first gay prime minister, Leo Varadkar, who told him Ireland had 'modernised' its laws by legalising divorce and same-sex marriage.

Greeting a country where the grip of the Catholic church has loosened since the last papal visit in 1979, Francis made repeated efforts to heal wounds caused by a series of clerical sex abuse scandals.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told him: 'One in six of us were not born here and there are more and more people who adhere to other faiths, or who are comfortable in declaring that they subscribe to no organised religion.

'We have voted in our parliament and by referendum to modernise our laws  understanding that marriages do not always work, that women should make their own decisions and that families come in many forms including those headed by a grandparent, lone parent or same-sex parents or parents who are divorced.'

During the trip protesters also demonstrated against the against the exclusion of gay people and their families from the World Meeting Of Families, which Francis was attending.Britain risks being forced into Greek-style austerity by the EU if Theresa May's Chequers plan is finalised, Boris Johnson warned today.

Renewing his attack on the Prime Minister's Brexit blueprint, Mr Johnson said the plans were an 'historic mistake' that would leave Brussels in charge.

The former foreign secretary said Mrs May's proposals - which say Britain should follow EU rules on goods - would mean the UK could not protect itself from EU punishment.

He said it was the same situation imposed on Greece in the aftermath of the financial crisis, when Brussels arranged loans for the government in Athens but only in return for huge reforms and swingeing cuts.

Britain will be forced into Greek-style austerity by the EU if Theresa May's Chequers plan is finalised, Boris Johnson (pictured in Oxfordshire earlier this month) warned today

Punishing reforms forced on Greece by the EU have provoked years of protests (file image in June 2015)

Mr Johnson made his latest attack on Mrs May in his weekly Daily Telegraph column.

The Prime Minister's proposals - agreed at a high stakes Cabinet in July that provoked the resignations of Mr Johnson and David Davis - call for a free trade zone between Britain and the EU after Brexit.

Britain would follow EU rules on goods to ensure existing trade could continue but would leave the single market and customs union.

Mr Johnson said: 'The tragedy of the Greeks was that they never had the nerve to tell their EU masters to get lost.

'They were never able to take back control, to run their economy in the interest of their electors.'

Mr Johnson added: 'That has a direct read-across for Britain.

Renewing his attack on Theresa May's (pictured yesterday in Maidenhead) Brexit blueprint, Mr Johnson said the plans were an 'historic mistake' that would leave Brussels in charge

'Under the Chequers proposals, we are about to make a historic mistake and turn this country into a rules-taker from Brussels, with no say on those rules - not just for industrial goods and agri-foods but across a wide range of economic activity.

'Look at the humiliation of Greece - an EU member - and ask yourself how the EU will legislate with the UK out of the room, and when we can no longer do anything to protect ourselves from the imposition of those rules.

'Will the EU act in our interests and the interests of UK jobs and growth, or the interests of the EU? The answer is clear. It is written in graffiti all over Greece.

'Why, then, are we proposing to turn the UK, in important respects, into the perpetual punk of Brussels? Chuck Chequers.'Dumped prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is reportedly set to quit federal parliament this week and spark a by-election in his seat on October 6.

Nine Network and the ABC report Mr Turnbull will quit parliament this week, after he promised he wouldn't stay on the back bench.

The move will leave the coalition one seat down for two sitting weeks, leaving new Prime Minister Scott Morrison in a precarious position with no majority in parliament.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (pictured) is expected to quit this week

The government will fall to 75 seats - one short of the majority needed to control the House of Representatives.

Just days after former prime minister Tony Abbott helped orchestrate the demise of his successor Mr Turnbull, he is now campaigning for his sister to replace him in his plum Sydney electorate.

Christine Forster confirmed on Monday she intends to run for Liberal pre-selection in Wentworth after being encouraged by several people within the party to replace the ousted prime minister.

Ms Forster also has the backing of her brother, who said she would be a good competitor in the impending by-election.

'She and I famously have had our differences but she is an outstanding individual,' Mr Abbott told reporters in Sydney.

'If she does put her hand up for Wentworth and if she is successful, I know she will be a wonderful, wonderful competitor in any by-election and she'd be a great local member if she were elected.'

Mr Turnbull is yet to announce his resignation from the harbourside seat but told reporters last week it won't be long.

'It's a difficult situation and I don't want to be seen to be disrespecting Malcolm - who I do respect,' Ms Forster told AAP.

Mr Abbott, was last week accused of being a 'wrecker' by fellow Liberal MPs for laying the groundwork for the sudden move by the party's conservative wing against Mr Turnbull.

He had backed fellow conservative Peter Dutton who lost his chance at the top job when he was overtaken by Scott Morrison, who was sworn in as prime minister on Friday.

It's not good news for new prime minister Scott Morrison (pictured) if the reports about Malcolm Turnbull quitting parliament are true

Ms Forster who is a City of Sydney councillor said she had a strong record of championing Liberal Party values at a local government level.

'I think as someone with local credentials and a strong track record of strong liberalism, I feel they are the types of candidates we want in any seat,' Ms Forster said.

'I've been strong in espousing and representing Liberal values in the city of Sydney.'

Christine Forster (pictured middle with wife Virginia and brother Tony Abbott) has put up her name in the ring to potentially replace Malcolm Turnbull

Earlier on Monday, Mr Turnbull's son-in-law James Brown ruled out running for the seat.

'Serving in the Australian parliament would be an enormous honour, but whenever Malcolm Turnbull resigns I will not be standing for preselection in Wentworth,' the NSW RSL president told the ABC.

'Thanks to those who have kindly suggested I should.'

Businessman and former Australian ambassador to Israel Dave Sharma is said to be the frontrunner to replace Mr Turnbull as the Liberal candidate.

NSW MP Alex Greenwich and GP Kerryn Phelps are also both considering running as independents.

Malcolm Turnbull (pictured with granddaughter Alice) has held the seat of Wentworth in Sydney's eastern suburbs since 2004

Waverley Deputy Mayor Dominic Wy Kanak has been announced as the Greens candidate for the seat.

Tamarama Surf Lifesaving Club president and local businessman Tim Murray will run as Labor's candidate.

The president of the state division, former attorney-general Philip Ruddock has cautioned against speculating about the timing of Mr Turnbull's resignation from parliament.

'The only advice I have is that he will not be seeking to nominate for the next election,' Mr Ruddock told Fairfax Media.

Mr Turnbull has held the seat Wentworth in Sydney's eastern suburbs since 2004 after he defeated then sitting MP Peter King during pre-selection.

Party sources have informed Fairfax Media that Mr King had told party members at the Liberal Party state council meeting on the weekend that he had the support of some branches in Wentworth.Andy Burnham today hit out at 'arrogant' campaigners who are demanding a second Brexit referendum - warning they risk fuelling anger and division.

The Labour Manchester mayor said the call 'further inflames' resentment among voters who already think London-based MPs fail to listen to them.

And Barry Gardiner, Labour's shadow international trade secretary, also said that demanding a second referendum would be 'dangerous'.

Their warnings comes as efforts are being stepped up to try force Labour to change its policy and back a second referendum at its conference next month.

The People's Vote campaign is working with MPs and activists to submit a motion to change policy so Labour backs a vote on the final Brexit deal.

Andy Burnham (pictured left at Labour Party conference in Liverpool in 2016) and Barry Gardiner (pictured right at the 2016 conference) have both warned that a second EU referendum would only exacerbate the gaping divisions in the UK

But Mr Burnham, a former Labour leadership candidate who was an MP until 2017, poured scorn on the bid.

In an interview with the Politico website, he said: 'My frustration with those leaping to a second referendum is it further inflames this idea of an arrogant political class, which isn't listening and isn't dealing with the issues that gave rise to the referendum in the first place.

'I've still been of the view that what we need is the most pragmatic, practical, bridge-building Brexit.'

Mr Burnham said the danger of a no deal Brexit could be disastrous for Manchester, which sends 58 per cent of its exports to the EU.

And he hit out at ministers for not giving him details about the risks of a no deal Brexit for his area.

He said: 'I know they have done impact assessments on Greater Manchester and the north west.

'They know what no-deal or other options would do to us  and they won't share it with us.

'They are pushing us ever closer to this cliff edge, but they won't tell us what it means for us so we can begin to mitigate those issues.

'Because it's potentially embarrassing, politically awkward, I don't know. But that's not good enough. This is a reality we have to prepare for.

'And so it really brings home to you the dysfunctional nature of British politics. The pettiness of Westminster is holding the country to ransom.'

The mayor said his region sends 58 per cent of its exports to the EU - far higher than the 44 per cent the UK sends.

He added: 'So yeah, it would hit us harder. And the idea we are going closer and closer to this cliff edge is pretty terrifying from where I sit.'

And Mr Gardiner also warned that demanding a second referendum would be 'dangerous'.

He told BBC Radio 4's Westminster Hour last night: 'We have in my party said no option should taken off the table.

'I think there are very good reasons why it is a dangerous thing to do. We've seen the referendum create huge divides  real, crunching divides  in our country.

'I think a second referendum will not heal those divides. I think it can only exacerbate them.'

Jeremy Corbyn (pictured at the Edinburgh International Television Festival last week) is facing an attempt by anti-Brexit campaigners to force a change in his party's policy at their conference next month so that Labour backs a second referendum

Meanwhile, in a leaked memo seen by MailOnline, the People's Vote campaign details plans to try to push through a motion at Labour conference to get the party to change its policy and back the vote.

In an internal email, campaign bosses stressed that they do not want their efforts to be seen as part of a bid to set up a new centrist party.

It states: 'We have had extensive discussions among key Labour people in the campaign and agreed it would be sensible to write and publish our own draft resolution for conference.

'But, in doing so, it is vital we do not allow this to become part of the more general debate about Labour.

'Not for nothing has much of the talk about the Peoples Vote being some kind of nascent party come from those most critical of what we are trying to achieve in fighting for a referendum on the final deal.'Australians are being targeted with scam phone calls from foreign countries which encourage you to ring the number back before charging you extortionate fees.

A dramatic increase in the 'wangiri' scam - which translates from Japanese as 'ring and cut' - was first flagged by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in February.

The 'wangiri' scam consists of an international number calling you, ringing once and then hanging up the phone.

Australian phone users are being targeted by scammers who ring once then hang up, particularly from the +371 Latvia calling code (pictured) - encouraging you to call them back at premium rates

Australians have lost more than $48,000 to the phone scam in the past year, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC)

If the call is returned, the scammers will try to keep you on the phone for as long as possible by playing music, reading a horoscope or simply putting you on hold.

According to the ACCC's ScamWatch, Australians have lost more than $48,000 to the calls in the last year - which are charged at a premium rate.

Social media users in Australia over the weekend complained in particular about receiving calls from Latvia - often several times a day.

Australians have taken to social media to complain about the calls - which were first flagged by the ACCC in February

One Twitter user asked his network provider why he kept receiving calls from Latvia, who told them the calls were likely part of a scam

One user said: 'I just got a call from someone in Latvia. Problem is I don't know anyone in Latvia.

Another added: 'Six phone calls from Latvia in 24 hours now. Someone is really keen for a chat, or this scam is very well funded.'

One tweeted at their network provider Telstra to ask why they had received so many calls from the Eastern European country.

According to SBS, the ACCC warned in February that migrants were most likely to get scammed.

Deputy chief Delia Rickard said: 'If you know people in the country they're calling from particularly if it's your home country and you've got family there - you're going to be more at risk.'

The federal government has released some tips to help people falling prey to these scammers.

The federal government has released some tips to help people falling prey to these scammers.

They advise that you should not call the number back if you don't recognise it and if they call you repeatedly to block the number.

The government suggests blocking international calls from children's phones to stop them becoming victims as well.

Another tip is to deal with interactions from unknown people via phone, tax or internet as a scam.

The ACCC announced in May that Australians had lost more money to scammers in 2017 than in any other year since the commission began reporting scam activity.An enormous carpet python sleeping in the roof of a pharmacy has captured the attention of dozens of shocked customers.

Filmed last Wednesday, Redland's Snake Catcher's Facebook page uploaded the footage of the snake in a Brisbane chemist.

More than 2000 people have watched the video online, with some locals speculating what brought the snake to the shop.

But local snake catcher Tony Morrison says the interesting part isn't why it's in the shop, but how it got there in the first place.

Crowds gathered in the video to film the massive python napping in roof of a local pharmacy

The footage pans through a crowd of customers who have their phones up to the camera.

It's unclear at first what they're filming, until the snake catcher brings the camera around to a two-metre python perched in the roof of the store.

Mr Morrison was the man behind the camera, telling Daily Mail Australia it was bizarre how the snake made its way into the roof.

'He's somehow picked up one of the roof tiles, and he's slid out of that and once he's in there, hasn't figured out how to get out,' he said.

The pharmacy is a central spot, in the middle of two major roads and busy carparks, making its move to the roof even more baffling.

'How he didn't get run over, I've no idea.'

The snake would have been in the roof for hours, Mr Morrison said.

The store opens at about 7am every morning, and with the python moving at night, it's unknown how long it was up there.

The snake was identified as a harmless python, and was captured by Redland's Snake Catchers

It was only brought to the catcher's attention at midday, when a shopper happened to look up and see a snake staring back.

'My boss told me to get out there quick,' Mr Morrison said.

But he says he was surprised to see a calm crowd, who quickly whipped out their phones to record the rescue.

'Mr snake up there has come for a prescription,' Tony says to the laughing crowd.

The carpet python, which is non-venomous, isn't considered harmful to the public.Advertisement

As technology has advanced and attitudes have changed many of Britain's jobs have been consigned to the history books.

No longer would you see street lamps being lit manually, or large cotton mills employing thousands.

The professions have simply died out.

Now stunning pictures have revealed some of these forgotten occupations.

The incredible images show a lift operator on the London Underground around 1910, children selling newspapers on the streets in London and workers operating machinery at a cotton mill in 1906.

Other striking shots show salt workers on a mine train, a group of pillow lace makers around 1900 and a lamp lighter in Warrington.

Some of these jobs died out over a decade, while others died out over a much shorter space of time. Electricity for instance, made lamplighters obsolete almost immediately.

A man pictured in 1936 using stilts for the stringing of hop holes. Hop stringing involves creating a framework of string for hops to climb and grow. The string is supported by a permanent structure of poles and wirework. Traditionally this would all be created by highly-skilled stilt walkers but as is typical with much farm work machines have now replaced the need for human manual labour

A lamp lighter pictured in 1912 on Lower Bridge Street in Warrington. To celebrate the birthday of King George III in 1807. Frederick Winsor, an engineer, lit a candle. Not just any candle, however. To gasping crowds, he instantly illuminated a line of gas lamps. Over the following decades, thousands of gas lamps went up across London. These were lit by teams of lamplighters across the capital. With the dawn electricity however, there was no need for lamplighters and the profession died out

A South Eastern Railway platform porter pictured in 1885 in London. Porters arose in the early days of railway companies and would handle passenger's luggage, assist on ticket barriers and in booking offices and carry out general cleaning duties on the platform. Many porters would work for free, but often customers would provide a tip for their service. During the 1970s the role went into decline as station attendants took on most of the responsibilities. Passengers now largely carry their own luggage on to trains

A group of pillow lace makers pictured in 1900. As with many professions involving fabric in the early 1900s, a lot of the design was created by hand. With the dawn of more modern machinery, however, it was no longer necessary to carry out every single step in this way

Printers at the Clitheroe Advertiser pictured in 1911. During this time words would have to be laid out on a page manually before the printing process could begin. Nowadays this is not necessary and the printing process can be carried out digitally

Workers at machinery in a cotton mill pictured in 1906. The industrial revolution led to the mechanised spinning and weaving of cotton fibre into fabric. By 1912 production had peaked in the United Kingdom with the country producing around eight billion yards of cloth. The industry was primarily based in Lancashire with around 2650 mills in the area employing 440,000 people. The outbreak of World War One led to a steep decline in the industry, however. Cotton could no longer be exported to foreign markets and those countries, such as Japan, set up their own factories. These countries were also able to produce it much more cheaply. In between the first and second world war 345,000 workers left the industry and 800 mills closed

A milkman with his cart pictured in 1923 in Norwood, London. During this time milk was delivered up to three times a day in churns. The milkman would fill customers' jugs by dipping a measure into one of the churns. Milk bottles would soon become the norm however, and later with the advent of refrigerators milk no longer needed to be delivered as frequently. It can now also be stored at and purchased from convenience stores

There has simply been no need for people to perform jobs that a machine could now do or where demand for that service has vanished.

A 2017 Oxford study found that all the developed nations on earth will see job loss rates of up to 47 per cent within the next 25 years.

This projected loss of jobs has been attributed to advancing technology where machines will continue to replace the jobs of humans.

Mechanisation has always cost humans their jobs. The mechanical loom for instance put weavers out of business, but its also created jobs. Mechanics had to keep the machines going, machinists had to make parts for them, and workers had to attend to them, and so on.

An open air barbers pictured in 1900. During this time visiting a barbershop was considered an experience for the wealthy. Instead common folk would have their haircut outside on a stool. Nowadays it is more common to visit a indoor barbershop given changing attitudes

Workers from Brock's fireworks factory pictured in 1930 holding giant fireworks in Cheam, London. Brocks was founded in Islington in 1698. It became world famous for presenting 'Brock's Benefits' in Crystal Palace, but eventually had to stop following a fire. As with many professions the need for hand-crafted fireworks died out with the invention of more sophisticated machinery

Left: Hop picking in Paddock Wood, Kent. These hop pickers were photographed in 1962. The county was well-known for its hop farming. It has a strong and fertile soil perfect for the growth of hops. In the past, during the hop harvest, tens of thousands of Londoners would take a holiday from London and come down to the Kent countryside to pick the hops. Now machines have largely replaced the task of hop picking. Right: A lift operator pictured on the London Underground in 1910. Being a lift operator was not a simple job. The operator would have to regulate the elevator's speed and ensure it came to a parallel stop of the chosen floor. With the advent of user-operated elevators, however, their profession largely became obsolete. There are now very few lift operators remaining

Salt workers on a mine train pictured in 1927. Salt was originally mined manually from the ground but in the 19th century it became uneconomical to mine salt. Instead the salt was extracted using water as a solvent. Hot water was instead pumped through the mines. This would dissolve the salt and create a brine that could be pumped out. Salt would then be extracted from this

A wheelwright at work pictured in 1890. This profession traditionally involved handcrafting or repairing wooden wheels. As time has gone on there has been less of a demand for wooden wheels and therefore less of a demand for wheelwrights

Fletchers pictured making arrows in 1948. The art of fletching traditionally involved adding three half-feathers to the back of an arrow or dart. These would be equally spaced around the circumference of the projectile. Originally this would be done by hand using glue or thread, but now with modern adhesives this is no longer necessary

The sight of children selling newspapers on the streets of London would have been common in the early 1900s. Changing attitudes have led to a decline in this

A lot of times those in one profession could pivot to another. At the beginning of the 20th century for instance, automobiles were putting blacksmiths out of business. Who needed horseshoes anymore? But they soon became mechanics.

The middle class is apparently most at risk in the coming technological revolution as computers will be able to perform those tasks more efficiently and at a cheaper cost.

According to The Economist, computers will be able to analyse and compare reams of data to make financial decisions or medical ones. There will be less of a chance of fraud or misdiagnosis, and the process will be more efficient.John McCain's former jailer has recalled how he was a 'stubborn and strong' POW  as numerous Americans and Vietnamese signed a book of condolence for the war hero at the US embassy in Hanoi.

McCain, a U.S. senator who ran unsuccessfully for president as a self-styled maverick Republican in 2008 and became a prominent critic of President Donald Trump, died on Saturday. He was 81.

In the decades following the Vietnam War, McCain forgave the enemies who once held him captive, and helped reconcile the two countries that today enjoy strong ties.

His five and a half years in prison began in October 1967 after his Skyhawk divebomber was shot down over Hanoi's Truc Bach lake.

McCain was dragged out of lake and thrown in the Hoa Lo prison - the infamous 'Hanoi Hilton' - where he said he and others were tortured. Vietnam says the American prisoners were treated well.

As a high-profile prisoner of war there, McCain was known as uncompromising, frank and an avid reader who fiercely debated the war with his Vietnamese jailers.

Scroll down for video

Tran Trong Duyet, the former director at the Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, shows a photo of John McCain (bottom right), who was held at the jail for more than five years after his jet was shot down over a Hanoi Lake in 1967

John McCain, a U.S. senator from Arizona and war hero, died on Saturday. He was 81

One of them, the former director of the infamous prison, recalls verbally sparring with the famous inmate and says McCain's refusal to budge on his views eventually earned his admiration.

'It was his stubbornness, his strong stance that I loved when arguing with him,' retired colonel Tran Trong Duyet told AFP.

McCain had been fished out of the lake with a broken leg and two broken arms and was shipped to the cold, crowded facility where some 500 prisoners of war were held.

His captors quickly learned McCain's father was a navy admiral, and the young prisoner soon developed the nickname 'Crown Prince'.

The early years were grim.

McCain was held in solitary confinement and suffered from dysentery. For months on end, he was fed only bread and pumpkin soup. He communicated with fellow inmates by tapping codes on the thick concrete walls.

Tran Trong Duyet, the former director at the Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, holds a photo in Haiphong of himself with US prisoners of war (POWs) at the jail dubbed the Hanoi Hilton

U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. John McCain, center, is escorted by Lt. Cmdr. Jay Coupe Jr., to Hanoi's Gia Lam Airport on March 14, 1973, after he was released from captivity

Mai Tran, an American of Vietnamese descent, grieves over the portrait of the late US Senator during a memorial tribute at the US embassy in Hanoi

In his memoirs, McCain wrote that solitary 'put me in a pretty surly mood' and that he would ward off depression by hollering insults at guards.

And then there were the interrogations and beatings.

'Ropes were put on me and I sat that night bound with ropes,' McCain wrote after his 1973 release, recalling one brutal session.

'For the next four days, I was beaten every two to three hours by different guards. My left arm was broken again and my ribs were cracked.'

Duyet denies McCain or others were mistreated and says he punished any fellow guards who stepped out of line.

'There was no torture, Vietnamese people saved him,' Duyet said in an interview earlier this year at his home in the port city of Haiphong, where he displays both photos of American POWs and more recent images of himself in military uniform posing with US officials.

Vietnam's Deputy Minister of Agriculture Vu Van Tam writes in a condolence book near a portrait of U.S. Senator John McCain at the US embassy in Hanoi

By the end of his long years in prison, Duyet said his relationship McCain started to warm.

'Out of working hours, we considered each other friends,' he said. 'He taught me English... he had good teaching skills.'

In his post-prison writings, McCain said things got easier for him in the early 1970s, which he called the 'coasting period'.

He read propaganda texts about Vietnam communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, and was allowed to roam the prison yard with fellow Americans, who named different sections of the compound after Vegas hotels.

Military Attache Ton Tuan from U.S. Embassy places incense while he pays his respects at the McCain Memorial in Hanoi

His former jailor preferred to focus on the rosier memories, recalling how they joked, shared stories about family and travel, and even dished about women.

'We laughed together and agreed that women are the same everywhere -- they like flattery, they like to sulk, and they're jealous,' he told AFP, smiling.

McCain left the navy in 1981 for a long career in politics, most notably as Republican Senator for Arizona.

But his 'Hanoi Hilton' experience resonated throughout his life.

Donald Trump said during the campaign for the presidency that McCain was 'not a war hero' because he was captured in Vietnam.

The controversial comments inflamed his throngs of supporters, many of whom saw his time as a POW as a defining experience.

'John McCain will always be America's prisoner of war, that experience is now inseparable from the name John McCain and the person that has been John McCain,' said Alvin Townley, author of 'Defiant' about American POWs held in Hoa Lo.

U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Daniel Kritenbrink (left) pays respects to the late U.S. Senator John McCain at the McCain Memorial in Hanoi, Vietnam

McCain was also celebrated for his role in reconciling the United States and Vietnam, which in the half century since the war's end have become close allies.

'(His) openness towards Vietnam and the willingness to revisit not only the country, but his experiences there have certainly helped heal a lot of wounds,' Townley said.

McCain visited the Southeast Asian country several times after the restoration of diplomatic ties in 1995, even returning to the 'Hanoi Hilton' - now a popular tourist attraction - for an emotional meeting with another former jailer.

Duyet never got a chance to reconnect with McCain, but imagined what he might say if he had.

'If he came to Vietnam, I would greet him, not as a former prisoner and a jailer, but as two veterans, from both sides of the battlefield, now meeting again in the spirit of reconciliation,' he said.

Pham Minh Chuc, an 81-year-old retiree, writes in a book of condolences for Senator McCain

US Ambassador to Vietnam Daniel Kritenbrink writes a note in a book of condolences for the late Senator John McCain

When informed of McCain's death, Duyet said Sunday he was 'so sad.'

'Please if you can, convey my condolences to his family for me.'

As news of McCain's death reached Vietnam, many headed to the US embassy in Hanoi to sign a book of condolences.

Among those paying their respects was Vietnam's Deputy Minister of Agriculture Vu Van Tam, 81-year-old war veteran Pham Minh Chuc and Mai Tran, an American of Vietnamese descent.

Others gathered to pay respects at a faded monument on the shores of the Truc Bach Lake on the edge of downtown Hanoi.

'On Oct 26, 1967, at Truc Bach Lake, the military and people of Hanoi arrested Major John Sidney McCain, a pilot of the American Navy's air force,' it says on the sculpture, which depicts an airman with his hands above his head in front of a broken plane wing.

McCain was flying one of 10 planes that were shot down by the North Vietnamese military on the same day, according to the inscription on the statue, which McCain himself visited on a return to Vietnam in 2009.

'I felt compelled to come out here and bring some flowers,' said Robert Gibb, an American in Hanoi who placed a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums at the foot of the monument after hearing the news of McCain's death on Sunday morning.

Gibb was one of several U.S. citizens living in the Vietnamese capital to visit the monument with tributes. Most brought flowers. One man offered a folded U.S. flag.

'He was the last guy I ever voted for president,' said Gibb. 'The moment he dropped in here changed his life forever.'

A statue marking the spot by the lake was erected in 1967, and renovated in the 1980s and 1990s.

The monument is easy to miss - the tree-lined street it stands on is now a popular tourist destination, dotted with cafes, ice cream parlours and vendors selling cotton candy from the back of bicycles.

Le Ma Luong, the former director of the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi who met McCain soon after 2010, told Reuters he remembered the late senator as an articulate and professional man who contributed greatly to building relations with Vietnam.

Luong said he felt sorry that in return Vietnam had been unable to locate the ring McCain was wearing on the day he was dragged out of the lake.

'That was the ring his wife gave him and it went missing after he was shot down and rescued. We have tried our best to find it but in vain,' said Luong. 'Anyone who lost a ring from their beloved would be devastated by it, not just him'.

'His contribution to the Vietnam-U.S. relationship will be remembered.'Jacob Rees-Mogg has sparked controversy after a video emerged of him suggesting the UK could introduce Irish border checks like 'we had during the Troubles'.

The Tory Brexiteer made the comments at a town-hall style meeting in April 2016 - just two months before the EU referendum.

His remarks contradict Theresa May who has repeatedly said that there will not be a return to a hard Irish border amid fears this could reignite the bloody violence that plagued the region for decades.

Simon Coveney, the Irish deputy Prime Minister, furiously tore into Mr Rees-Mogg's remarks which he said were 'ill-informed'.

In the video, the Tory MP is quizzed about what kind of border checks could be undertaken if the UK quit the bloc.

Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg (pictured at the town hall style meeting in April 2016) said border checks could be enforced to stop the creation of a backdoor into the UK

Mr Rees-Mogg, who is chairman of the European Research Group - the powerful group of Brexit-backing Tory backbenchers - said the UK could continue with 'historic arrangements' to prevent the creation of a backdoor into the UK.

He said: 'There would be our ability, as we had during the Troubles, to have people inspected.

'It's not a border that everyone has to go through every day. But of course for security reasons during the Troubles, we kept a very close eye on the border to try and stop gun-running and things like that.'

Mr Rees-Mogg stressed that the border checks would not be carried out on everyone but would be intelligence-led.

He said: 'Its not inconsistent to have a border that people can pass through but you can keep an eye on.

'The idea that this is suddenly going to be the way in for any EU member state citizen that wants to come to the UK is ridiculous.

'They would be able to come to the UK directly - they just have to show a passport, we would be able to do security clearance. It would be just like Americans coming into the UK  perfectly possible and easy for them to do that.'

Mr Coveney hit out at Mr Rees-Mogg on Twitter over the remarks.

He said: 'Its hard to believe that a senior politician is so ill informed about Ireland and the politics of the #Brexit Irish border issue that he could make comments like these.

'We have left the troubles behind us, through the sincere efforts of many, + we intend on keeping it that way.'

The Irish deputy PM tore into Jacob Rees-Mogg's comments on Twitter, branding them ill-informed

Politicians in the UK and Ireland have warned that a return to the hard border checks of the past could reignite sectarian violence and endanger the Good Friday Agreement.

The thorny issue has threatened to derail the entire Brexit talks as the UK and the EU have so far failed to come up with an agreement on it.

The EU wants Northern Ireland to stay in a common regulatory area for goods and customs with the rest of the EU.

But this has sparked fury in the UK among critics who say this would effectively annex Northern Ireland and create a border in the Irish Sea.

Mrs May has said this is something she could never agree to.

Mrs May's suggested solution, a complex customs arrangement that would see the UK collect duties for the EU, has been dismissed by Brussels.Vincent van Gogh gained significant recognition in his lifetime and had his work viewed by the President of France, it has emerged.

The Dutch painter is widely regarded as a tragic figure whose masterpieces were never appreciated until after his suicide at the age of 37.

But a letter from his brother Theo which has recently been discovered reveals that then-head of state Sadi Carnot was 'rather amazed' by an exhibition he attended in Paris just months before van Gogh's death.

Ten of van Gogh's works were apparently on display in a discovery which the researcher hopes will address the 'myth that Van Gogh was ignored', the Daily Telegraph reports.

Vincent van Gogh, pictured left in a self-portrait with a bandaged ear, had his work viewed by the President of France, a letter from his brother Theo, pictured right, has revealed

Theo van Gogh had reportedly visited the Salon des Independants exhibition where the French president said the artist's works were 'well placed' on the walls.

Author and curator Martin Bailey, who found the letter, said: 'I have long suspected it was a myth that Van Gogh was ignored.

'The Salon des Independants exhibition and the visit by the French president suggests that he was beginning to win some acceptance.

'Once one sees Van Gogh as an artist who was beginning to become appreciated, it is easier to understand why his work had such an influence on the artists to come.'

A newly-revealed letter indicates that van Gogh's work was gaining recognition during his lifetime and was viewed by the President of France (pictured: his work Cypresses)

The works on display included 'Cypresses', an 1889 work now held at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A report in a Paris newspaper at the time also mentions the French president being impressed with his visit to the exhibition.

Born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, Netherlands, van Gogh painted work which was notable for its beauty, emotion and color.

His most famous works include Sunflowers, Starry Night, Irises, Bedroom in Arles and his many self-portraits.

After struggling with mental illness and poverty throughout his life van Gogh died in France on July 29, 1890 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

He also became well known for allegedly severing his own ear although some historians believe it may have happened during an argument with another artist.

In further correspondence with his brother Theo he said he 'loved London' after spending three years in England as a young trainee art dealer.A woman who was pulled over for dangerous driving told police she was using one hand to steer while eating a soft serve ice cream and cheeseburger.

The 34-year-old woman, who was driving a silver Mazda van, was asked by police to pull over in Sydney's affluent north-west after they spotted her driving dangerously.

When police pulled her over just after 6pm last Wednesday, they also spotted a baby sitting unsecured in a capsule placed in the back of the car.

To make matters worse, the capsule was not properly locked in to the vehicle either, The Daily Telegraph reported.

A woman was fined after police found that she was driving with just one hand on the wheel while eating ice cream and a cheeseburger (stock images)

The woman was fined for driving without full control of her vehicle and for failing to properly restrain a child in the vehicle.

'Driving a car on our busy roads is hazardous at the best of times and requires full concentration and awareness of your surroundings,' Superintendent Rob Critchlow said.

Police remind the public that drivers must always ensure they have full control of the vehicle.

'Also not securing a child in a seat or seatbelt is unforgivable and will be dealt with most seriously'.Mathias Cormann was convinced Peter Dutton had the necessary support for the Liberal party leadership when he publicly retracted his backing for Malcolm Turnbull - but one phone call could've saved himself and his old boss from humiliation.

Mr Dutton's leadership bid ultimately failed and Scott Morrison became Australia's 30th Prime Minister.

The Home Affairs Minister convinced Mr Cormann that he would win Friday's ballot and become the party's leader - which led to the West Australian Senator telling the media that Mr Turnbull 'no longer enjoyed the support of the party room'.

Mathias Cormann (pictured) was convinced Peter Dutton had the necessary support for the Liberal party leadership when he publicly retracted his backing for Malcolm Turnbull

Turnbull supporters told the ABC if Mr Cormann had contacted them they would've proved Mr Dutton would not receive enough votes to become the new leader

Days after the ballot, it has been claimed Mr Cormann was misunderstood about support for Mr Dutton, and a simple phone call could've made all the difference.

Turnbull supporters told the ABC if Mr Cormann had contacted them they would've proved Mr Dutton would not receive enough votes to become the new leader.

'If only Mathias had called, we'd have shown him Dutton didn't have the numbers,' a Turnbull backer said.

Another claimed Mr Turnbull would still be the country's leader if Mr Cormann maintained his support for the incumbent.

'What I tried to do last week was to ensure that the leadership of the Liberal Party was properly resolved,' Mr Cormann said after the ballot.

Together with Mitch Fifield and Michaelia Cash, Mr Cormann publicly announced the day before the ballot that they no longer supported Mr Turnbull.

Mr Dutton's (pictured) leadership bid ultimately failed and Scott Morrison became Australia's 30th Prime Minister

A Cabinet minister told the ABC they believed Mr Cormann acted appropriately.

'In time, people will realise that Mathias did the right thing. The party needed a circuit-breaker and no-one else was prepared to do it.

'He did what he thought was in the best interests of the party room. If it hadn't ended for Malcolm on Friday, it would have ended in a fortnight's time.'Ross Hamilton from the British Horseracing Authority warned Irish and French horses could be banned from Aintree

Irish and French horses could be banned from taking part in the Grand National after a no deal Brexit, racing bosses have warned.

Currently there is a deal to allow horses to move easily between Britain, Ireland and France for races.

But the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) said foreign horses could be barred from the iconic event at Aintree next year if there is no replacement deal in place.

Many horses, jockeys and trainers are Irish - including this year's 8/1 winner Tiger Roll - with eight Irish-trained horses winning since 1999.

The timing of Brexit - just one month - before the Grand National, would give the BHA no time create a new 'equine passport' agreement in the absence of a Brexit deal.

Ross Hamilton from the BHA told Radio 5live's 'Wake Up To Money': 'If the position was that the UK government chose to immediately put up borders and tariffs then would make it extremely difficult for thoroughbreds to move.

'It would only be about a month ahead of the Grand National in 2019, which would be quite an impact.

'It would be a threat to potential Irish horses' and jockeys participation in the race and being able to compete in races over here if it was a really hard, no-deal Brexit.'

He added that, in that position, the main issue for Irish trainers would be animal welfare.

They would have to be 'comfortable' taking their horses over to the UK and being sure they get them back home again swiftly after the race.

Many horses, jockeys and trainers are Irish - including this year's 8/1 winner Tiger Roll (pictured at home in County Meath) - at the annual Aintree race

Mr Hamilton confirmed it has been working hard on its preparations for Brexit, examining the potential implications of all scenarios and taking preparatory action.

The BHA even went so far as to speak to the government before the 2016 referendum took place.

Mr Hamilton added that, based what has already been released in the Brexit papers, the BHA believes the government wants to maintain the status quo 'as far as possible after Brexit'.

But he fears it is not just down to the UK - as any continuation of the status quo would have to be agreed by the EU too.

Eight Irish-trained horses have won the iconic steeplechase (file image of the 2018 edition) since 1999

Mr Hamilton added: 'The big question will be - and this is a matter for our colleagues in Ireland and France to be representing to their own governments and the Commission - is whether the Commission chooses to reciprocate.'

If there were to be no deal, the BHA is prepared to put in place a number of measures, he added.

'We do get horses from further afield than France and Ireland to compete in our races and we have an established procedure in place to deal with those countries.'John Goodman has revealed how he struggled with depression for a month after the Roseanne reboot was canceled, while defending his on-screen wife over the racist tweet that got her sacked.

Goodman, who played father-figure Dan Conner alongside Roseanne Barr's titular character, said he was 'surprised' by ABC's decision to pull the series after just nine episodes in the wake of Barr's tweet about Valerie Jarrett.

'I know, I know, for a fact that she's not a racist,' he told The Sunday Times.

John Goodman (pictured left in March this year, right in May) has defended Roseanne Barr after her show was cancelled for a racist tweet, saying: 'I know for a fact she is not a racist'

Goodman, who played Roseanne's husband Dan Conner on the show, said he was depressed for around a month after the reboot was canned

Goodman also told how he struggled with depression for around a month after the show was canned on May 29.

'I was broken-hearted,' he said. 'I went through a period, about a month, where I was very depressed. That had a great deal to do with it, more than I wanted to admit.'

He said he jumped at the chance to take part in the reboot, despite being glad to see the series go when it ended its original run in 1997.

Goodman described filming the reboot as 'a gas', saying that he felt very close to everyone on the team.

The show will continue but will be rebranded The Connors and won't feature Barr.

Looking ahead to the new series, Goodman said the cast will have their work cut out to make the show a success without her.

Goodman said he did message Barr during that time, saying: 'She had to sign a paper saying that she relinquished all her rights to the show so that we could go on.

He revealed that he and Barr laughed a lot on set of the original series (pictured in 1989) but did not share much of a relationship, describing her as a 'work friend'

The show will continue following Barr's racist tweet but will be rebranded The Conners and will not feature Barr's character

'I sent her an email and thanked her for that. I did not hear anything back, but she was going through hell at the time. And she's still going through hell.'

Speaking about his relationship with Barr, he recalled that the two used to laugh a lot, and said his goal in life was 'to make her wet her pants'.

But it seems the pair did not share much of a relationship off set, as Goodman describes Barr as his 'work friend'.

Barr caused widespread outrage after she tweeted that Jarrett, who was born in Iran and is of African American heritage, looked like 'the Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes had a baby'.

She has repeatedly apologized for any offence that the tweet caused as well as to the cast and crew of Roseanne, but refuses to accept that it was racist.

Barr said Valerie Jarrett, and Obama adviser who was born in Iran and is of African American heritage, looked like 'if the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby'

Barr insists that she thought Jarrett was white and intended the tweet as a political jibe at Obama's nuclear deal with Iran.

On Sunday, Barr sent a message to fans on Twitter saying she was 'doing better' after changing doctors, having previously hinted at mental health issues.

Meanwhile ABC President Channing Dungey has revealed that the Jarrett tweet was just the last in a long line of problems with Roseanne that got her fired.

Speaking about the decision, she said: 'It was actually made very swiftly. We knew what we wanted to do, and we did it.

'For us, we have had multiple instances with Roseanne, and certainly this tweet crossed the line that cannot be crossed, but it was for us a sense of enough is enough and something had to be done.

'It was nice that it was so clear to everyone that there wasn't a lot of debate and discussion about it.'Lauren Southern and her promoters have refused to pay a $68,000 bill issued by police in Victoria who provided security on her Australian speaking tour.

The right-wing commentator, who told a crowd Melbourne should be 'nuked' and once claimed 'Allah was gay', was the target of regular protesting during her tour.

The company behind her Australian tour, Axiomatic Events, has slammed Victoria's police minister and refused to pay the bill.

Scroll down for video

Lauren Southern (pictured) is a Canadian YouTuber who rose to prominence in 2015 as an outspoken critic of illegal immigration, Islam and LGBTQ rights

In July violence erupted between protesters and supporters outside the Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux Live event in Melbourne.

Riot officers and mounted police were on the ground working to keep the protests at bay - but that came at a price.

A letter from Axiomatic's solicitor said an attempt by the Victorian Government to recover the bill would be 'vigorously resisted'.

The letter said such a penalty gives the appearance of enabling the protesters.

Axiomatic Events director David Pellowe said the 'crippling' bill would create a precedent, where event organisers around Australia would change or cancel their plans to hold political events that might attract attention of protesters.

'The Andrews government has the gall to call this 'user pays' policing, but the reality is that it's victim-blaming.

Protesters block the Hume Highway, stopping people from arriving at the controversial event in Melbourne for right-wing commentator Lauren Southern

'But if Police Minister Lisa Neville is looking for creative ways to fundraise for Victoria Police she can keep looking.'

He said that the fair and just way to go about it would be to issue a $1000 fine to every person who blocked the highway, who abused and intimidated the mums, dads and kids who came along, who damaged private property and turned Melbourne into a Berkeley war zone.

'Our event was a normal-sized crowd in a venue that routinely hosts such crowds. We broke no laws and went above and beyond to co-operate with police, and greatly appreciate the work they do,' he said.

Southern, a Canadian YouTuber, rose to prominence in 2015 as an outspoken critic of illegal immigration, Islam and LGBTQ rights.Women bared their breasts in parades around the world to demand the right to go fully topless in public.

They marched in Go Topless Day parades held in US cities including New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver and Minneapolis.

Events were also held abroad in Freiburg in Germany, Seoul in South Korea and Valparaiso in Chile.

But while some women who took part were fully exposed, many abided by the law and covered their nipples  with tape or body paint.

Some protesters marching in Venice, California, carried placards declaring 'it's boobs, not bombs!' and 'war is indecent, not my breasts.'

Held every year on the Sunday closest to Women's Equality Day, the aim is to question laws that make it illegal for women to not wear shirts while it is legal for men to do the same.

This year, it fell on Women's Equality Day  which is marked every year on August 26 after the date in 1920 when women got the right to vote in the US.

Women's rights protesters march down the beach boardwalk during Go Topless Day in Venice, California, on Sunday

A policeofficer (R) tries to clear a way for marchers during a parade marking International Go Topless Day in New York City

A topless women is seen during a parade marking International Go Topless Day in New York City on Sunday

Lia Steinman gets a message painted on her breasts during the Go Topless Day march in Venice, California, on Sunday

Lia Steinman (second from right) and other women's rights protesters march down the beach boardwalk in Venice, California

Sonoko Tagami plays with a balloon shaped like a woman's breast during the Go Topless Day march in Venice, California

Ouhi Freivogel grabs a pair of balloons shaped like a woman's breasts during the Go Topless Day march at Venice beach

A organizer of the Go Topless Day march in New York helps add a float to a truck before the during a parade on Sunday

New York City Police Department officers try to clear a way for marchers during a parade to mark International Go Topless Day

Topless men and women are seen holding balloons and waving placards during a parade for Go Topless Day in New York

Topless men and women are pictured before they march during a parade marking International Go Topless Day in New York

Women's rights protesters Ouhi Freivogel (R) and Lia Steinman pose under balloons shaped like a woman's breasts

A women's rights protester faces religious counter-demonstrators during the Go Topless Day march in Venice, California

Male supporters join women's rights protesters during the Go Topless Day march at the beach boardwalk in Venice, California

A topless woman (L) hands a small child a balloon a she marches through the streets of New York City during the parade

Topless women wrote phrases such as 'equal rights' and 'freedom' on their chests during a parade marking International Go Topless Day in New YorkA man who slammed the handbrake on his mother's car and pushed her head first onto the road before driving off in a rage has avoided a jail sentence.

Kaydin Peihopa, 26, was sitting in the passenger seat while his mother drove along a road in Huntly, New Zealand, on an afternoon in May, Stuff reported.

Peihopa became enraged after an argument broke out between the pair and pulled the handbrake, causing the car to skid and block the southbound lane.

His mother tried to reverse the car but he knocked it out of gear and punched the ceiling twice before throwing her out of the car.

A man pushed his mother head first onto Riverview Road (pictured) after a heated argument that caused him to lose his temper in the car (stock image)

Luckily, his mother was able to get up and walk to the other side of the road.

She is now suffering from bruises, grazing, a swollen lump on her forehead, a sore neck and headache.

'It's s... what I did to my mother,' Peihopa admitted to police after the incident.

Peihopa pleaded guilty to charges to assault and dangerous driving when he appeared in the Hamilton District Court on Monday.

Peihopa pleaded guilty to charges to assault and dangerous driving when he appeared in the Hamilton District Court (pictured)

'It's hard to disagree with those comments,' Judge Glen Marshall said in response.

Peihopa was sentenced to three months of community detention and a year of intensive supervision.

He was also prohibited from driving for six months.The family of a New Zealand woman who was placed in intensive care in Bali after suffering from a twisted bowel are facing a $137,000 bill to bring her home.

Mother-of-two Abby Hartley was on a well-deserved getaway to the Indonesian island when she started experienced severe pain shortly after arriving on August 1.

She was rushed to the nearest hospital, where she was placed into an induced coma - before being quickly transferred to the ICU at BIMC hospital Nusa Dua to be treated for the twisted bowel.

Mrs Hartley (pictured right) saw her holiday plans in Bali turn into a nightmare after she was admitted to hospital on the island but saw her insurance company refuse to pay her bills

New Zealand mum, Abby Hartley (pictured, centre), has been in hospital in Bali since August 1 after suffering severe pain from twisted bowel - and her family now say she will need to be flown home in a specialist aircraft at a cost of around NZD$150,000 (AUD$137,000)

The family was then forced to launch a desperate plea to raise money after her insurance company refused to cover her medical costs because of a pre-existing condition.

In a post on the Givealittle fundraising page, daughter Sophie said her mother had become resistant to the antibiotics in Bali and needed to be flown home.

She said her mother's condition was too unstable, though, to fly on a commercial plane and she would need a specialised aircraft to get back to New Zealand.

Mrs Hartley (pictured left) initially had her dead bowel removed, but her condition has been unstable since and is unable to fly home by commercial aircraft

Mrs Hartley's family said in a post on the Givealittle fundraising page on Sunday that she had become resistant to all the antibiotics in Bali and would need to be flown home to New Zealand to be treated properly

She said: 'An EVAC comes at a very big cost - $150,000. (AUD$137,000)

'Re-mortgaging our house we can come up with roughly $60,000 - and we are hoping with how amazing this page has been we can get a little more help to get mum home.

'We need her home - doctors are running out of options.'

Mrs Hartley was forced to undergo emergency surgery to remove her bowel a day after arriving in hospital.

Despite spending 48 hours in recovery, Mrs Hartley quickly took a turn for the worse and developed acute respiratory distress syndrome where she was only taking in 70 per cent oxygen.

'The doctors made the call to put her into an induced coma and keep her on an oxygen machine to avoid any further deprivation of oxygen to her brain,' said Mrs Hartley's daughter Sarah.

'Dad told us kids to get on the first plane over from NZ as things weren't looking too good and mum needed all the support she could get.'

The family of Mrs Hartley (pictured, centre-left) has raised around NZD$119,000 (AUD$109,000) after their insurance company refused to pay her mother's hefty medical bills

Mrs Hartley was in ICU at BIMC hospital Nusa Dua (pictured) before being moved to a public hospital in Badung

She was moved to a public hospital on the island on August 12 as doctors told the family her treatment would be cheaper.

The 'Help Abby Fight' page was created on August 9 and has already received more than NZD$119,000 (AUD$109,000) in donations.

'Our mum is fighting for her life in ICU in a hospital in Bali and unfortunately insurance company is refusing to cover any medical costs,' the campaign reads.France's Emmanuel Macron has called for greater integration between EU armies after President Trump repeatedly distanced himself from NATO.

The French President told diplomats that 'Europe can no longer rely on the United States for its security' as he returned from his summer break on Monday.

'It is up to us to guarantee European security, Macron added.

Emmanuel Macron has called for greater integration of Europe's defence forces because 'we can no longer rely on the US for security'

Mr Macron said making Europe self-reliant would put it on a footing with China and the US, who 'do not think of Europe as a power with similar independence to their own'

In the coming months, Macron said he will put forward new proposals for the EU to boost defence cooperation, as well as talks with Russia on their security relationship - an issue of concern for countries on Europe's eastern edge.

Trump has previously branded NATO 'obsolete', toyed with the idea of failing to ratify the mutual defence pledge which says an attack on one ally is an attack on all, and lambasted member states for failing to pay their way.

The alliance has underpinned European security since the end of the Second World War, and is seen as key to guarding Europe against an increasingly bullish Russia.

Macron's comments are likely to find support in Germany after Foreign Minister Heiko Maas made a similar call for boosted military cooperation last week.

Writing in the Handelsblatt newspaper, Maas called for Europe to 'take an equal share of the responsibility' and 'form a counterweight' to Washington as Europe-US relations cool.

France and Germany have both backed the idea of a small joint European response force over the last year, and have announced plans to develop a fighter jet together.

Macron came to power last year vowing to overhaul the EU and has pushed for deep political reforms - including a separate budget for the eurozone - which have so far met with lukewarm support.

Trump has branded NATO 'obsolete', toyed with the idea of abandoning the mutual defence pledge, and lambasted other leaders for failing to pay their way

British, French and Danish artillery troops take part in joint training for NATO's Very High Readiness Joint Task Force

His agenda has been hit in particular by the rise of a new eurosceptic and nationalist government in Italy, as well as resistance from leaders in Poland and Hungary.

He admitted that 'France seems sometimes to be on a solitary path'.

But Macron lashed out at the rising tide of nationalism and called for countries to heal divisions which have widened over how to tackle the ongoing influx of migrants in particular.

'France wants a Europe which protects, even as extremism has grown stronger and nationalism has awoken,' he said.

'Divisions between north and south over economics, between east and west on migration, too often fracture our European Union,' he added, urging a 'humanist' approach to the changes brought by globalisation.

As for the solution, he insisted his approach would be to 'give up nothing of the ambitions set out a year ago' when he came to office, which would mean creating a more integrated European Union with greater strategic autonomy.

'Do China and the United States think of Europe as a power with similar independence to their own? It is not the case,' he said.

He also took at a swipe at ruling populists in Hungary and Italy, drily noting that their anti-EU rhetoric seemed to vanish when it came to accepting economic development aid from the EU.

'There is a clear approach of European opportunism while claiming to be nationalist,' he said, calling out Hungary's Viktor Orban by name.

He did, however, acknowledge that a lack of European solidarity had played a role in prompting bitter disputes in recent months with Italy over migration.

'But does that excuse xenophobic comments?' he added in what appeared to be a veiled jab at Italy's far-right League.

'I don't think so, and I think these xenophobes bring no solutions to the problem they complain of.'

In a typically expansive overview of his foreign policy, Macron called for Europe to build 'strategic partnerships' with neighbours Turkey and Russia despite their differences.

Britain will also be in line for a 'strategic partnership' after its departure from the EU scheduled next year -- but Macron warned that Brexit must not come at the cost of the unity of the rest of the EU.Northerners do not fear Brexit and the rest of the UK should be inspired by their optimism about Britain's prospects, a minister has today said.

Jake Berry, the Northern Powerhouse minister, went on 739-mile road trip across the region to talk to hundreds of workers in dockyards and building sites to find out their thoughts on the UK's looming departure.

He said that they are not spooked by scare stories that quitting the EU could mean shortages of donated sperm and bacon, and economic hardship.

He said that many Northerners voted for Brexit because they feel disconnected from London-centric politicians and are 'impatient for it to come'.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, he said: 'Northerners are brave about Brexit. We can all learn from their optimism and spirit of resilience.'

Jake Berry, the Northern Powerhouse minister, said Northerners are not spooked by scare stories that quitting the EU could mean shortages of donated sperm and bacon, and economic hardship

Mr Berry chronicled his 739-mile road trip across the North on Twitter - posting pictures of himself at stop offs where he spoke to hundreds of workers in dockyards and building sites to find out their thoughts on Brexit

The minister, who voted remain in the 2016 EU referendum but now backs Brexit, made the three-day trip in his family Volvo.

Andy Burnham hits out at 'arrogant' second referendum campaigners The Labour Manchester mayor (pictured at Labour party conference in Liverpool in 2016) said the call 'further inflames' resentment among voters who already think London -based MPs fail to listen to them Andy Burnham today hit out at 'arrogant' campaigners who are demanding a second Brexit referendum - warning they risk fuelling anger and division. The Labour Manchester mayor said the call 'further inflames' resentment among voters who already think London-based MPs fail to listen to them. And Barry Gardiner, Labour's shadow international trade secretary, also said that demanding a second referendum would be 'dangerous'. Their warnings comes as efforts are being stepped up to try force Labour to change its policy and back a second referendum at its conference next month. The People's Vote campaign is working with MPs and activists to submit a motion to change policy so Labour backs a vote on the final Brexit deal. But Mr Burnham, a former Labour leadership candidate who was an MP until 2017, poured scorn on the bid. In an interview with the Politico website, he said: 'My frustration with those leaping to a second referendum is it further inflames this idea of an arrogant political class, which isn't listening and isn't dealing with the issues that gave rise to the referendum in the first place. 'I've still been of the view that what we need is the most pragmatic, practical, bridge-building Brexit.' Advertisement

He said that while civil servants and newspaper columnists in the south have sent themselves into a frenzied panic about the possibilities of shortages, Northerners are far more optimistic.

Mr Berry said: 'Port workers in the North East feel closer to Denmark than Westminster.

'They don't fear their Danish friends will stop selling them bacon or sharing their donated sperm.

'They perceive a deck loaded against them - geared towards London and the South East. They want change. They voted for it and are impatient for it to come.'

He said that workers in dockyards, steel mills and construction sites are more worried about Donald Trump's tariffs than leaving the EU.

'Port of Immingham dockworkers looked bemused as they told me that over 50 per cent of their trade already comes from countries outside the EU', he wrote.

'They reminded me that they already switch daily and seamlessly between EU regulations and the rest of the world, so they see no reason they cannot adapt calmly to the challenges Brexit may bring.

'In Saltburn, the team at British Steel are more engaged with President Trump's steel and aluminium tariffs than worrying whether rail tracks they have made to improve the French highspeed rail network will still be needed.

'As they see it: "We make them - they can't. We need them and they need us. And don't forget the World Trade Organisation steel tariff is zero."'

He said the Northern Powerhouse - a political project set up by George Osborne to hand money and new powers to the North to drive development - is reaping rewards.

And he said this devolution 'could be the golden thread of Brexit'.

He said: 'The people of the North want to see power returned from Brussels to the UK and through devolution to them.

'Handing back control of funds and powers directly to the North has already been shown to improve transport, increase skills, create better-paid jobs and more secure employment. Empowering the North means the whole UK succeeds.'

His comments come as dire warnings about the possible food and drug shortages and long border queues have been issued in recent weeks amid fears the UK could crash out of the Brussels bloc without a deal.

While anti-Brexit campaigners are stepping up their efforts to force a second referendum.

The Northern Powerhouse minister, who posted details of his trip on Twitter, said that many Northerners voted for Brexit because they feel disconnected from London-centric politicians and are 'impatient for it to come'

The group People's Vote is working with MPs and activists to table a motion at Labour party conference in Liverpool next month to get the party to change its policy and back a second vote.

But leading Labour politicians Andy Burnham and Barry Gardiner have warned that another vote would backfire and fuel bitter anger and resentment towards politicians.

Mr Burnham, who is Manchester mayor, told the Politico website, he said: 'My frustration with those leaping to a second referendum is it further inflames this idea of an arrogant political class, which isn't listening and isn't dealing with the issues that gave rise to the referendum in the first place.

'I've still been of the view that what we need is the most pragmatic, practical, bridge-building Brexit.'A Japanese rail firm has defended a safety exercise in which employees had to sit beside the tracks as bullet trains sped through tunnels at 186 miles (300km) an hour.

Almost 200 maintenance staff have had the bizarre training, the company said, in a bid to show them the potential dangers of the train and impress on them how seriously they needed to take their jobs.

The company, JR West, said it had no plans to alter the exercise despite complaints from some employees.

They introduced the training on Japan's renowned shinkansen bullet trains in 2016, after an accident in August 2015 in which part of a train's exterior fell off, a company spokesman said.

A diagram shows how workers were forced to sit by the bullet trains as they raced past at nearly 200mph in a bizarre training exercise teaching them to take their jobs seriously

He told AFP: 'The training aims to teach our maintenance staff the importance of every part of their jobs.

'We pay close attention to safety while doing the training. We will continue this training while ensuring it serves a purpose and is done safely.'

The purpose of the drill was reportedly to make clear to the staff how fast the train moved and therefore how seriously they needed to take their jobs.

But it has proved unpopular with some employees, local media reported.

'It was a horrible experience,' the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper quoted one employee as saying.

Almost 200 maintenance staff have had the training in a bid to show them the potential dangers of the train. Pictured: Passengers get on board a bullet train at Tokyo station

Another described the experience as 'just like a public flogging,' the Mainichi daily reported.

Japan's ultra-efficient shinkansen train network connects cities along the length and breadth of the country.

Despite the huge volume of passengers it serves, the network operates with an enviable punctuality rate.

It also has an unparalleled safety record, with no one ever having been killed in a crash in its half-century of service.This is the shocking moment a baggage handler is filmed hurling around luggage airline passengers had waited three hours for.

Daniel Mortimer was caught up in baggage delays at Manchester Airport over the Bank Holiday weekend after a series of Ryanair flight delays.

The Australian rugby league player, who was travelling from Rome, shared his footage from the reclaim area - in which a handler is seen throwing bags onto the carousel belt.

Daniel Mortimer captured footage of a baggage handler throwing bags in the reclaim area of Manchester Airport

He said: '5am this morning after waiting over three hours for our bags to make it from the plane to the carousel.

'At least they took good care of our luggage. Thanks.'

The 29-year-old had been delayed on his Ryanair flight and arrived at the airport at 2am on Saturday.

But baggage handlers Swissport said the footage was 'in line with manual baggage handling procedure'.

It came after hundreds of Ryanair customers were left waiting up to four hours for their suitcases due to a shortage of staff at the airport.

The airline said a fire alarm on Friday night caused eight outgoing flights to be delayed as passengers who had been evacuated needed to be re-screened through security.

That had the knock-on effect of several flights returning later than scheduled and into the early hours of Saturday in Terminal 3 which 'stretched' staffing resources.

Some angry holidaymakers slept on the floor while waiting for their bags and others abandoned their baggage completely saying they would fetch it later.

The Australian rugby league player had been waiting three hours for his bags after a delayed flight from Rome

Baggage handlers Swissport said the footage was 'in line with manual baggage handling procedure'

Passengers complained they were getting little or no information from the few airport staff still in the building.

Conditions were also said to be very hot with only a few hundred small bottles of water handed out to a crowd estimated to be anywhere between 500 and a thousand at its largest.

The airport's twitter feed was inundated with complaints from passengers who described the chaos as an 'absolute shambles'.

Addressing the delays, a Swissport spokesperson said: 'The flight schedule was disrupted on Friday evening at Manchester Airport causing a knock on impact to baggage reclaim for passengers.

'We always work closely with our airline and airport partners to mitigate the impact of these schedule disruptions to passengers but we understand these delays were frustrating to passengers during this busy bank holiday period.'

It comes after hundreds of Ryanair customers were left waiting up to four hours for their suitcases (pictured) due to a shortage of staff

Manchester Airport (pictured) has apologised for the lengthy Bank Holiday weekend delays

A Ryanair spokesman added: 'Following a fire alarm evacuation of the terminal building at Manchester Airport last evening (24 Aug), eight flights were delayed because of the need to rescreen through airport security all affected passengers and their checked-in luggage.

'This stretched the late night staffing resources of the Swissport handling company and led to further delays in the delivery of the baggage into the arrivals hall when these delayed flights returned to Manchester.

'MAG and Swissport are currently investigating these staffing issues and we are awaiting Swissport's reports to ensure that it does not recur.

'We apologise sincerely to any passengers who were inconvenienced by this delayed delivery of baggage which was caused by the fire alarm/evacuation of the terminal building last evening.'

Manchester Airport also apologised for the delays, a spokesman said: 'We are aware that some passengers experienced long waiting times to receive their baggage during the night.

'We have been in contact with Swissport, the handling agent responsible, and we will be carrying out a full investigation. We'd like to apologise for any inconvenience caused to passengers.'Russian pro-Kremlin media pulled no punches on Monday in condemning John McCain as a warmonger and Washington's 'chief Russophobe,' and expressing hope his soul is burning in the flames of hell.

McCain, who died of a brain tumor aged 81 on Saturday, irked Russia with his support for pro-Western leaders in ex-Soviet Georgia and Ukraine as well as his strong backing for sanctions over Moscow's annexation of Crimea.

'McCain became the chief symbol of Russophobia,' Rossiya 1 television said, adding that he 'couldn't stand Russia's independent foreign policy.'

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No love lost: Russian pro-Kremlin media painted Senator John McCain as Washington's 'chief Russophobe,' with one newspaper expressing hope that his soul is burning in hell

McCain 'adored war. If you haven't been killed yet, that's not McCain's fault. He tried,' wrote pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda in a no-holds-barred editorial.

Accusing the former Navy pilot of lying about being tortured while being held prisoner during the Vietnam War, the popular tabloid concluded with the hope that McCain is now burning in hell.

'Senator McCain loved the flames of war. Let us hope he'll have enough flames where his soul is resting now,' it wrote.

Life News, a pro-Kremlin tabloid news site, mocked the 'chief Russophobe' for his decision to publish a 2013 op-ed aimed at Russians on an obscure news site called Pravda.ru.

He apparently believed the website to be connected the once-powerful Soviet newspaper Pravda.

'Evidently no one told the senator that there had been certain changes in Russia since his time in captivity in Vietnam,' it wrote.

No love lost: Rossiya 1 TV channel described McCain as the 'chief symbol of Russophobia' who could not stand Russia's 'independent foreign policy'

The news show Russia 24 described McCain as a 'hawk' and a long-time foe of Russia

McCain was 'a committed hawk who pecked at Russia out of principle,' Rossiya 1 reported on its main news show on Sunday evening, devoting more than four minutes to the senator's life.

McCain 'firmly supported all the military operations and wars that America unleashed -- Kosovo, Iraq, Libya -- if he had not twice lost presidential campaigns, everything could have been even more catastrophic,' it reported.

The high-rating show included the detail that McCain 'was shot down in Vietnam by a Soviet SA 75-Dvina missile complex.'

While stressing McCain's contempt for President Donald Trump, the show predicted that US 'attempts to restrain and isolate Russia with harsh sanctions will continue -- just now without John McCain.'

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko issued a message of condolences, but none was forthcoming from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (left) issued a message of condolences to the family of the late senator, whom he met in 2015 (pictured together)

Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Senate's international affairs committee, wrote on Facebook that McCain's 'only ideology' was 'protect your own and beat up the others.'

However, some Russian politicians showed their respects.

Leonid Slutsky, head of the lower house of parliament's foreign affairs committee, told the RIA Novosti state news agency that McCain was a 'courageous and principled person.'

Oleg Morozov, a member of the Senate's foreign affairs committee, on Facebook praised McCain's frankness.

'An enemy died, salute him for honest enmity, for honest hatred, for refusal to reconcile. Others dissemble. He said what he thought,' he wrote. 'He taught us to better understand ourselves and the United States.'

Morozov concluded: 'Let God receive his dark soul and determine its future.'A brave little girl with a rare genetic condition who made Kate Middleton laugh on a Royal visit to her hospice has died aged nine.

Mia Murchison took her 'last little breath' in her parents' arms after a battle with Batten's disease which eventually robbed her of the ability to walk, talk, eat or see.

Wearing her favourite 'princess dress', she met the Duchess of Cambridge at a children's hospital in eastern Australia in 2014.

Mia Murchison (pictured far right in 2014) who met Kate Middleton at her hospice in 2014 has died after a battle with Batten's disease

On August 17 her family wrote on Facebook: 'Mia died this morning at home in our arms. So incredibly sad and beautiful. So very loved and adored'

Even though little Mia spent just a few minutes with the Duchess of Cambridge, it was reported she managed to make her laugh when she tried to steal a bouquet of flowers she was carrying in her hand

The Mirror reports that even though she spent just a few minutes with her, little Mia managed to make the Duchess laugh when she tried to steal a bouquet of flowers she was carrying in her hand.

On August 17 her family wrote on Facebook: 'Mia died this morning at home in our arms. So incredibly sad and beautiful. So very loved and adored.'

Her funeral, in New South Wales, was described by her mother Peta as 'the saddest and most beautiful day'.

Writing on Facebook, Peta said: 'Yesterday was the saddest and most beautiful day for our family. Mia's casket had a simple wooden name plate that we will keep forever.

In 2013 Mia (right) was diagnosed with batten disease at Sydney Children's Hospital

Mia (left) was first diagnosed with epilepsy but her memory and language then deteriorated and she began to suffer frequent falls

'I never thought you could like a casket but hers was so beautiful covered in flowers and so very Mia. I loved it.

'It was very special Hamish driving Mia to her funeral himself in his car with Toby and I - our final family adventure together with Mia.

'I was never going to ready for this goodbye but it was heavenly and more beautiful than I ever could have imagined. So raw and honest. Our family all coming together to cry, laugh, sob and honour our little girl.

Mia met the Duchess of Cambridge at a children's hospital in eastern Australia in 2014

'The most ethereal of flowers (by my beautiful friend George with the kindest of hearts) are in Mia's room. Pink ribbons and drawings by her friends pinned to her wall.

'It feels like we are being lifted up with all love pouring in to our little family.

'I can't believe we made it through yesterday but we did and now we are looking forward to celebrating Mia's life next Tuesday.'

Mia was born in Dublin, Ireland, a healthy, robust baby who walked at 12 months and passed all developmental milestones. But at the age of three, when her family was living in Singapore, she suffered her first seizure.

At first she was diagnosed with epilepsy, but the seizures started to become more regular.

Her language and memory deteriorated, and she began to suffer frequent falls.

In 2013, she was finally diagnosed with batten disease at Sydney Children's Hospital in Randwick.Aung San Suu Kyi has been blasted by UN investigators for failing to stop a brutal crackdown on Rohingya Muslims which they have called a genocide.

The UN report called today for six of Myanmar's top military bosses, including the head of the army, to face genocide charges in an international court after a campaign which has seen 700,000 Rohingya flee the country.

Today's developments prompted Facebook, which has been criticised for allowing hate speech against the Rohingya to flourish, to ban the army chief and remove other pages tied to the country's military.

The report took aim at Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's civilian leader, for failing to use her position to stop the crackdown.

She had 'not used her de facto position as head of government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events,' the report said.

Aung San Suu Kyi (pictured) has been blasted by UN investigators for failing to stop a brutal crackdown on Rohingya Muslims which they have called a genocide

The country denies claims of ethnic cleansing but the fact-finding mission has heard accounts of arson, murder and rape at the hands of soldiers and vigilante mobs in the mainly Buddhist country.

Investigators said civilian leaders including the Nobel Prize winner, who has been widely attacked for failing to stand up for the stateless minority, had contributed to atrocities through their 'acts and omissions'.

The UN-backed mission, which was denied access to the country, said 'top military generals, including Commander-in-Chief Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing, must be investigated and prosecuted for genocide in the north of Rakhine State.'

Some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fled northern Rakhine state to Bangladesh after Myanmar launched a brutal crackdown in August last year.

Myanmar has vehemently denied allegations of ethnic cleansing, insisting it was responding to attacks by Rohingya rebels.

Military chiefs should also be investigated and prosecuted for 'crimes against humanity and war crimes' against the Rohingya in Rakhine, as well as against other minorities in the northern Kachin and Shan States, the mission said in a report.

The army tactics have been 'consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats,' it said.

The head of the mission, Marzuki Darusman, insisted that 'the only way forward is to call for (Min Aung Hlaing's) resignation and stepping down immediately.'

Myanmar denies ethnic cleansing but the fact-finding mission has heard accounts of arson, murder and rape. Pictured: Rohingya children wait for food at a refugee centre in Bangladesh

Facebook takes down pages of top Myanmar officials after UN report by Reuters Facebook said on Monday it was removing several Myanmar military officials from the social media website and an Instagram account to prevent the spread of 'hate and misinformation' after reviewing the content. Facebook's action means an essential blackout of the military's main channel of public communication, with pages followed by millions of people in a country where the social media giant is virtually synonymous with the internet. The move places further pressure on the generals, coming hours after United Nations investigators said the army carried out mass killings and gang rapes of Muslim Rohingya with 'genocidal intent'. Their report said the commander-in-chief of Myanmar's armed forces and five generals should be prosecuted for orchestrating the gravest crimes under law. 'Specifically, we are banning 20 Burmese individuals and organizations from Facebook including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the military's Myawady television network,' Facebook said in a blog post. 'We're removing a total of 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook Pages, followed by almost 12 million people,' the Menlo Park, California-based company added. It is the first time Facebook has imposed such a ban on a country's military or political leaders, the company later said it response to a query from Reuters. Facebook spokeswoman Clare Wareing said by email that the social media site took this step, 'since international experts, including a UN-commissioned report, have found evidence that many of these officials committed serious human rights abuses in the country.' Advertisement

The mission, which was created by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2017, concluded in its report that 'there is sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the Tatmadaw (Myanmar army) chain of command.'

'The crimes in Rakhine State, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts,' it said.

The investigators, who were never granted access to Myanmar, said they based their findings on interviews with 875 victims and witnesses, as well as satellite imagery and authenticated documents, photographs and videos.

The report detailed a horrifying list of atrocities committed against the Rohingya, including murder, enforced disappearance, torture, as well as sexual violence 'perpetrated on a massive scale.'

The investigators said their information suggested that an estimate by Doctors Without Borders that up to 10,000 Rohingya had been killed in the 2017 crackdown was 'conservative'.

They also found that soldiers had carried out 'large-scale gang rape', sometimes of as many as 40 girls and women at once, in at least 10 Rakhine villages.

The investigators warned that the latest wave of violence was part of a 'history of abusive military conduct going back at least half a century'.

'The Rohingya are in a continuing situation of severe, systemic and institutionalised oppression from birth to death,' a spokesman told reporters.

The investigators called on the UN Security Council to refer the Myanmar situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC), or for the creation of an ad hoc international criminal tribunal.

They also recommended an arms embargo and 'targeted individual sanctions against those who appear to be most responsible.'

The Security Council has repeatedly urged Myanmar to halt military operations and to allow the Rohingya to safely return home, but its initiatives have been limited by council member and top Myanmar ally China, who could also thwart efforts to refer the case to the ICC.

The investigators also highlighted Facebook's role, describing it as 'a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate'.

Shortly after the UN report appeared, the tech giant announced it was 'banning 20 Burmese individuals and organisations from Facebook - including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.'

It stressed that it wanted to prevent them from using the service to 'further inflame ethnic and religious tensions'.Advertisement

Cosplay fans donned their best costumes to attend the final day of Wizard World Comic Con in Chicago.

Thousands of fans, young and old, descended on the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont on Sunday.

The final day saw excited fans dressed as popular characters from Ghostbusters to Guardians of the Galaxy.

Over the course of the convention, which ran from August 23 to 26, visitors were treated to group Q&A sessions from the stars of shows including The X-Files, Outlander and Smallville.

Celebrities who appeared at the event included The X-Files stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, Ian Somerhalder from The Vampire Diaries and Michael Rooker, who has appeared in Guardians of the Galaxy and The Walking Dead.

Wizard World Comic Con bills itself as an event to bring together fans of all ages to celebrate the best in pop culture.

It's also the place for cosplay  with fans showing off their best costumes throughout the convention and taking part in the famed costume contest.

Cosplay fans dressed up as Mercy (center) and Tracer (right) from the Overwatch video game at Wizard World Comic Con at Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Chicago, Illinois

Fans dressed as Gamora (left) and Peter Quill (right) from Guardians of the Galaxy at Wizard World Comic Con on Sunday

A cosplay fan dressed as Pennywise from Stephen King's It is pictured at Wizard World Comic Con in Chicago on Sunday

Fans in cosplay attend the 10th annual Wizard World Comic Con at Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Chicago, Illinois

Wizard World Comic Con bills itself as an event to bring together fans of all ages to celebrate the best in pop culture

A cosplay fan dressed as Yondu (pictured left) from Guardians of the Galaxy and The Bride from Kill Bill (right)

A group of fans - including a baby - dressed as Ghostbusters attend the Wizard World Comic Con in Chicago on Sunday

Thousands of fans, young and old, descended on the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont on Sunday

One fan wore dark contact lenses and an elaborate headpiece as part of her costume at Wizard World Comic Con

Fans, including this one dressed as Skeletor, showed off their best costumes throughout the convention and taking part in the famed costume contest

Another cosplay fan donned a red and black mask to portray a Star Wars character and wielded a lightsaber during the final day of Wizard World Comic ConA love-lorn dolphin has sparked a swimming ban in a French coastal town amid fears people may be hurt by the antics of the over-excited mammal.

Officials in Landevennec, Brittany, have outlawed bathing and diving from the district's beaches and told swimmers to keep their distance whenever the animal is spotted in local waters.

The move was made on the basis of advice from marine specialists after the visibly excited 10ft dolphin - nicknamed Zafar - started rubbing against boats and bathers.

A love-lorn dolphin has sparked a swimming ban in a French coastal town amid fears people may be hurt by the antics of the over-excited mammal

'I issued the decree to ensure safety... Several bathers were really afraid - he even lifted up a woman bather with his snout,' Landevennec mayor, Roger Lars, told the local newspaper Ouest France.

The ban took effect on August 20.

Sami Hassani, a specialist in marine mammals at the Oceanopolis sea park, said the dolphin could accidentally cause 'serious injuries' with its tail fin.

But the ban has run into legal problems.

Lawyer Erwan Le Cornec told AFP he plans to file a petition to overturn the restrictions on the grounds of administrative over-reach.

Officials in Landevennec, Brittany, have outlawed bathing and diving from the district's beaches and told swimmers to keep their distance whenever the animal is spotted in local waters

The move was made on the basis of advice from marine specialists after the visibly excited 10ft dolphin - nicknamed Zafar - started rubbing against boats and bathers

'How many accidents involving a dolphin and a human have occurred in the region of Finistere since the two species have lived side-by-side?' he asked scornfully. 'None.'

'With this decree the mayor is trying to make out that the dolphin is almost like a ferocious beast, something that is completely unpredictable, able to drown people.'

The mayor, he said, 'will overturn the rightly positive approach that people have towards dolphins into a fear of these intelligent animals.'The family of a pregnant Colorado mom have paid tribute to her in a moving obituary - which failed to mention her husband who is accused of murdering her and their two children.

Shanaann Watts, 34 and daughters Bella Marie Watts, 4 & Celeste Cathryn Watts, 3, were killed on August 16. Her husband Christopher Watts is charged with three counts of first degree murder, two of murdering children in his trust, one of terminating a pregnancy and three of tampering with bodies.

In her obituary, her parents Frank and Sandra Rzucek, described her as 'our pride and joy' and 'a true gift from God.'

'We were so blessed to have such a joyful and wonderful daughter whose beauty was that of a doll,' they wrote in the obituary, posted in the Sandhills Sentinel.

They wrote that Shanann was delighted to become a mother, especially because she was battling lupus.

Shanann Watts, 34 and daughters Bella Marie Watts, 4 & Celeste Cathryn Watts, 3, were killed on August 16 (they are pictured together with Shanann's husband Chris who is accused of killing them)

'She spent every minute thanking God and taking care of her precious gift that the Lord had blessed her with,' they said of Shanann after she gave birth to her first child, Bella. 'How she loved and cherished her.'

After the birth of Celeste, she was 'determined to stay healthy' and found that 'every moment with her was a blessing.'

'Shanann wanted one more child praying for a baby boy. She named him Nico Lee. With the anticipation of her son to join them she knew he would be loved by his sisters and family.'

Her funeral will be held at 1pm on September 1 at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church in Pinehurst. The family have asked for donations to the Lupus Foundation of America in lieu of flowers.

Meanwhile Chris Watts, 33, was in court last week as he was charged with the murders of his wife and children.

Christopher Watts, 33, was charged with nine felony counts - including three counts of first degree murder - on Tuesday morning

Frank Rzucek, 55, the father of murdered Shanann Watts broke down in tears as Judge Kopcow read the charges against his son-in-law

At the end of the 18-minute hearing in Ruczek, pictured with his son Frankie (right) stared down Christopher Watts as he was led from the court by prison officers

Watts is accused of murdering his 15-week pregnant wife Shanann and their two daughters, Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3, at their home in Frederick, Colorado.

Judge Kopcow told him that if found guilty of the murder charges he could face the death penalty and in any case will never see life outside of prison.

District Attorney Michael Rourke has nine weeks to decide whether to seek execution.

According to an affidavit unsealed on Monday, Watts claimed that he had been having an affair with a workmate at Anadarko Oil and he told his wife he wanted to separate after she returned home following a business trip to Arizona.

He claimed he then left the bedroom and when he returned he watched on the baby monitor as Shanann strangled Celeste. Bella, he claimed, was already lying on the bed, dead.

He became enraged, he claimed, and strangled Shanann. He then bundled the bodies into his truck and drove 35 miles to a windswept plain outside Roggen, Colorado, where he buried his wife in a shallow grave and dumped his two daughters into a tank filled with crude oil.

But investigators do not believe his version and say he killed all three.

Watts remained emotionless in court as the charges were read against him. He answered, 'Yes sir,' several times in a barely audible voice

A lone protester stood outside the court on Tuesday waving a placard. Andrew O'Connor, an attorney from Lafayette, Colorado, told DailyMail.com that Anadarko had to share the blame for the murders.

'Wherever Anadarko does business, murders, aggravated assaults, rapes, STDs and human trafficking all go up,' claimed O'Connor.

'What Chris Watts did to his wife and kids, Anadarko is doing to my community.'

According to the affidavit, Watts told cops he had seen Bella turned blue and sprawled out on her bed as Shanann was 'actively strangling' Celeste.

'Chris said he went into a rage and ultimately strangled Shanann to death,' the affidavit reads.

'Chris said he loaded all three bodies onto the back seat of his work truck and took them to an oil work site.'

After a two-day investigation, police discovered that Watts 'was actively involved in an affair with a co-worker' - something he had initially denied.

He later told police where he had hidden the bodies and they found a bed sheet near the oil tanks that matched other linens in the house.

A lone protester stood outside the court on Tuesday waving a placard. He told DailyMail.com that Anadarko, the petroleum company where Watts worked, had to share the blame for the murders

Christopher Watts was seen being taken in and out of court in a white van

Watts could face the death penalty and in any case will never see life outside of prison if convicted

His claim that it was Shanann who killed his daughters is likely the reason that his court-appointed defense lawyer Megan Ring had asked for DNA swabs to be taken from the girls' necks.

Police had originally been notified that Shanann was missing by her workmate Nickole Atkinson, who had been on a business trip to Arizona with her, returning early in the morning on August 13.

Christopher was formally charged Monday with nine felony counts - including unlawfully terminating a pregnancy.

He was also charged with three counts of first degree murder, two counts of first degree murder of a child under 12 while in a position of trust and three counts of tampering with bodies.

District attorney Michael Rourke said he had not decided on whether to seek the death penalty in the case that has shocked the nation. Watts, 33, is due in court in Greeley, Colorado, on Tuesday morning.

The charges come exactly one week after Watts had reported his wife and children missing.

Shanann Watts, 34, and her two daughters Bella, 4, and Celeste, 3, disappeared from their home in Frederick, Colorado last week.

He even went on local television to plead for them to return home even though he already knew they were dead, police say.

Since then, as inmate number 18-12255, he has been held at Weld County Jail on the outskirts of Greeley. He is being kept away from other prisoners for his own safety, according to Fox News.

Shanann's body was discovered on Wednesday two days after she disappeared from the family's five-bed, four-bath home in Frederick, Colorado, 30 miles north of Denver. She was 15 weeks pregnant with a boy the couple intended to call Nico.

She was in found in a shallow grave dug on land owned by the oil company Anadarko, where her husband worked as an operator.

The bodies of the couple's two daughters, Bella and her younger sister Celeste were found the following day submerged in cans of crude oil nearby.

Shanann's father made an emotional appearance Monday to thank everyone involved in arresting his son-in-law.

Shanann's father Frank Rzucek (right) spoke to reporters at a press conference. Rzucek's son Frankie, 32, (left) also appeared at the press conference but did not speak

In an affidavit unsealed late Monday, Watts claimed that he watched on the baby monitor as his pregnant wife killed one of the two daughters she had struggled so desperately to conceive

The case has drawn national media attention to the town of Frederick, as well as hundreds of flowers and toys from friends and strangers

Frank Rzucek teared up as he spoke briefly to reporters at a press conference in the courthouse in Greeley, Colorado.

'I'd like to thank everyone in the Frederick Police Department and all the agencies involved for working so hard to find my daughter, granddaughters and Nico,' Ruczek, 55, said between sobs.

'I'd like to thank everyone for coming to the candlelight vigil and saying all your prayers. They are gratefully appreciated  and keep the prayers coming for our family,' added Rzucek.

Rzucek's son Frankie, 32, also appeared at the press conference but did not speak.

Since the bodies were found, well-wishers have left several hundred soft toys, along with dozens of flowers, candles and balloons in the front yard of the $400,000 house on Saratoga Trail in Frederick that the couple bought in 2013.

Despite the image of a blissfully happy marriage that Shanann projected through frequent Facebook posts, in which she called her husband her 'rock', friends of the couple, who are both originally from North Carolina, have suggested they were having marriage problems.

Nick and Amanda Thayer said Shanann had told them she thought her husband was cheating and on Monday Atkinson, who had dropped Shanann off at her home after the two had been on a business trip to Arizona told Good Morning America that after his wife had disappeared, Christopher had told her they were planning to separate.

Mourners are seen Sunday at the family home where police say the murders were committed

Atkinson, 37, said in the weeks previous to her friend's murder the couple had not seemed quite so loving, but that Shanann had not told her they were considering splitting.

'I didn't find out that they were going to separate or anything like that until I called Chris that morning. When I called him and asked him where she was, that's when he told me and I basically told him that that wasn't my (concern) at that particular moment.'

Atkinson, who believes she is the last person apart from the killer to have seen Shanann alive, said she thought all along that Watts had killed his family as he did not seem concerned after she couldn't get in contact with her colleague and friend.

'He just kept saying that he didn't know where she was and that she was on a playdate,' she told ABC's Clayton Sandell. 'But he couldn't give us the name of the friend.

'I knew he had something to do with it the day I was at his house with him, but I didn't want to think that.

'Anyone in their right mind will start piecing things together and think something had happened, but you don't want to go there. You want to believe the best in people,' added Atkinson.

'He was defending himself, but it just didn't make sense. Like in that moment it is kind of surreal. He was just sitting there waiting for something to happen; it just didn't seem right to me.'

Chris and Shanann Watts were also known to live well beyond their means and have had money problems. They filed for bankruptcy in 2015 owing some $70,000, and were due in court on Friday this week after their homeowners' association had sued them for an unpaid bill of $1,533.80.

Shanann suffered from lupus, an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own healthy cells. Her brother Frankie said on Facebook that because of the disease she had had to 'beat the odds' to get pregnant.

But things had started to look up for them after Shanann landed a well-paid job with Le-Vel, a nutrition supplement company, which involved her making frequent business trips, leaving her husband at home with their children.

Investigators have said all along that they believe the 5ft 10in, 225lb, Watts had killed his family in their home and transported them to the windswept high prairie land that he had intended would be their final resting place.The heat wave that hit Chicago on Sunday is expected to continue through midweek, moving across the US through the Northeast to New York City.

A total of 11 states are under heat watches, advisories, or warnings, spanning from Arkansas to Maine, through Wednesday at this time.

With humidity, it will feel like it's over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in much of the eastern United States, as temperatures soar into the 90s.

'[Under a heat advisory] the combination of hot temperatures and high humidity will combine to create a situation in which heat illnesses are possible,' the National Weather Service (NWS) explains.

Under an excessive heat warning, 'the heat and humidity may cause heat stress during outdoor exertion or extended exposure. The very young, the elderly, those without air conditioning, and those participating in strenuous outdoor activities will be the most susceptible.'

Meanwhile, a cold front continuing to slowly move east could lead to more severe weather in the Midwest.

A total of 11 states are under heat watches, advisories, or warnings, spanning from Arkansas to Maine, through Wednesday at this time

Parts of Missouri are listed as under an excessive hear warning, through 7.00pm Central on Tuesday.

The states currently under a heat advisory include Vermont, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Tennessee, Maine, and Massachusetts, NWS reported.

'Drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room, stay out of the sun, and check in on relatives and neighbors. Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. when possible, reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Wear light weight and loose fitting clothing when possible and drink plenty of water.

'To reduce risk during outdoor work, the occupational safety and health administration recommends scheduling frequent rest breaks in shaded or air conditioned environments. anyone overcome by heat should be moved to a cool and shaded location. Heat stroke is an emergency. Call 911.'

It felt like it was 106 degrees with humidity at the Chicago Executive Airport in Wheeling, Illinois on Sunday, as the temperature tied a record high of 93 degrees, ABC News reported.

The New England states will receive the most intense heat wave, coupled with high humidity, by Wednesday.

An excessive heat watch has been issued for Hartford, Connecticut, and Boston, where heat indices could reach anywhere between 100 and 105.

The New England states will receive the most intense heat wave, coupled with high humidity, by Wednesday

An excessive heat watch has been issued for Hartford, Connecticut, and Boston, where heat indices could reach anywhere between 100 and 105

'Heat Advisories have been posted across much of Illinois and along the Mid and Lower Mississippi River, as well as across portions of the Northeast and northern Mid-Atlantic,' the NWS said.

'Special Weather Statements for heat are also in effect across portions of the Ohio Valley. Heat indices will exceed 100 degrees for many locations today and Tuesday, and some high temperature records may be broken as well.'

Over the weekend, severe weather struck the Midwest.

Over the weekend, severe weather struck the Midwest, with a tornado touching down in Indiana and over 100 damaging storms were reported from the Plains and into the Great Lakes

In addition to the heatwave in the Northeast, a cold front is expected to continue to move east, possibly creating more severe weather on Monday, between Iowa and Michigan

A tornado touched down in Indiana, while over 100 damaging storms were reported from the Plains and into the Great Lakes.

In addition to the heatwave in the Northeast, a cold front is expected to continue to move east.

This could create more severe weather on Monday, between Iowa and Michigan.

Damaging winds, hail and an isolated tornado are the most likely threats.

It's also possible flash flooding may occur in Wisconsin and parts of the Midwest.

Those dangers extend to the area between Kansas and Michigan on Tuesday, as the cold front slows down.

The biggest threat will be damaging winds, though hail is possible.

A few tornadoes are also possible in this area.French President Emmanuel Macron today warned the EU's unity was more important than ties with Brexit Britain.

Mr Macron insisted France wanted a 'strong, special relationship' with the UK after it quits the EU in March but said this could not be at the 'cost' of the bloc unravelling.

The intervention, in a major foreign policy speech at the Elysee Palace, are a blow for Theresa May who has fought for Mr Macron's support in the Brexit negotiations.

Mrs May cut short the first leg of her summer holidays for talks with Mr Macron at his holiday home in the south of France.

French President Emmanuel Macron (pictured today at the Elysee Palace) today warned the EU's unity was more important than ties with Brexit Britain

Mr Macron insisted France wanted a 'strong, special relationship' with the UK after it quits the EU in March but said this could not be at the 'cost' of the bloc unravelling

But in a 90 minute address to French diplomats today, the President said: 'France wants to maintain a strong, special relationship with London but not if the cost is the European Union's unravelling.'

Brexit, Mr Macron said, 'is a sovereign choice, which we must respect, but it can't come at the expense of the European Union's integrity'.

Outlining his diplomatic priorities for the year ahead, Mr Macron made no major policy shifts, but spoke forcefully on what he labelled the 'crisis of multilateralism' and the need to make Europe more 'sovereign'.

He called on Europe to be 'a trade and economic power', which defends its strategic interests and financial independence with tools that can fend off U.S. extraterritorial sanctions.

'Multilateralism is going through a major crisis which collides with all our diplomatic activity, above all because of U.S. policy,' he said.

'The partner with whom Europe built the new post-World War order appears to be turning its back on this shared history,' he said.

In a 90 minute address to French diplomats today, the President said: 'France wants to maintain a strong, special relationship with London but not if the cost is the European Union's unravelling.'

Prime Minister Theresa May has ordered her Cabinet to meet on September 13 to work out a plan for critical areas not yet covered by no deal plans.

The Prime Minister has ordered her Cabinet to meet on September 13 to work out a plan for critical areas not yet covered by no deal plans.

Mrs May has called her no deal crisis summit amid fears the row between Brexiteers and Remainers is undermining negotiations with Brussels.

The meeting comes as Dominic Raab risked a Cabinet row with Philip Hammond after questioning the worth of economic forecasts about Brexit, days after the Chancellor warned that no deal could cause major damage.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, the Brexit Secretary said that some projections needed to be treated with 'a measure of caution', adding that GDP estimates for 2019 'have been revised up.

Mr Hammond was accused of launching a 'dodgy Project Fear' on Thursday when he suggested that GDP could fall and borrowing could be around 80 billion a year under a scenario in which Britain resorted to World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms after a no-deal Brexit.

Without naming Mr Hammond, Mr Raab told the Sunday Times: 'I'm always chary of any forecast because most of them have been proved to be wrong.'Four teenagers were killed and five more were hospitalized after they were struck while pushing a stalled SUV on their way to a slumber party.

Nevaeh Law, 14, Jenna Helton, 14, and Brittany Watson, 15, all died at the scene after they were struck on State Route 258 in Cortland, Indiana on Saturday around 11pm.

Martin Martinez, 16, was pronounced dead after he was airlifted to Methodist Hospital.

Victoria Valdivia, 15, Courtney Arthur, 14, and Allerika Henline, 15, were all injured and airlifted to nearby hospitals for treatment. Their conditions remain unknown.

Nevaeh Law, 14, was one of four teens who were killed when they were struck while pushing a stalled SUV on a road in Cortland, Indiana on Saturday

Jenna Helton, 14, (left) and Brittany Watson, 15, (right) also died at the scene after they were struck on State Route 258

Victoria Burchard, 15, was treated and released from a local hospital. Starlit Watson, the 12-year-old sister of Brittany, was also treated and released following the crash.

Cara Selby, 37, was driving the nine children to a slumber party she was hosting for her daughter Victoria Valdivia when her car broke down just a block away from the home.

Martin Martinez, 16, was pronounced dead after he was airlifted to Methodist Hospital

The juveniles got out to push her SUV the rest of the way when they were struck by Elizabeth Watson, 24, who was driving a Chevrolet Traverse, according to WDRB.

Authorities are investigating the crash. It remains unknown if Watson will face charges.

The community gathered at Seymour High School, where Helton and Martinez were both students, for a vigil on Sunday night.

Torre Collins said her daughter Nevaeh was just days away from her 15th birthday.

'She was so loving, as were all the kids,' Collins told The Seymour Tribune.

'Nevaeh was an amazing young lady. She was so bright and was very dedicated to her friends.

Jackie Watson said her daughter Brittany was 'very smart and had big dreams'.

Cara Selby, 37, was driving the nine children, including Law (pictured), to a slumber party she was hosting for her daughter when her car broke down just a block away from the home

The juveniles got out to push her SUV the rest of the way when they were struck by Elizabeth Watson, 24, who was driving a Chevrolet Traverse. Pictured is Jenna Helton

'She had the biggest heart of anyone I had ever met,' she said.

Watson said her young daughter, Starlit, just suffered a few 'bumps and bruises' in the accident.

'But she is tore up about her sister,' Watson added.

The younger sister of Brittany Watson (pictured) was also injured in the crash

John Helton described his daughter Jenna as a 'good-hearted girl' who loved being with her friends.

'She was always joking and laughing,' he said. 'She loved her four-year-old sister with Down syndrome. She was sweet and caring.'

'She was my angel, and she will be terribly missed.'

Terri Martinez learned of her son's death while she was on vacation in Florida.

'It's way too soon for him,' she said. 'He was too sweet and would do anything for anyone.'

Friends and family members hugged and cried as they were led through a community prayer at the vigil on Sunday.

Pastor Andy Schroer read each victim's name out loud as the crowd lit candles and released balloons into the sky.

'We want to take some time to love and to hug and to encourage and to cry,' he told the crowd. 'And to just be there for each other.'An altar boy who stole $100,000 from the Catholic church in Pennsylvania says it was 'revenge' for years of sexual abuse by pedophile priests.

Mike McDonnell was abused from the age of 10 by two priests in the Diocese of Philadelphia, including on a vacation by a priest who forced him to share his bed.

The church eventually agreed to pay for therapy for McDonnell, who claimed he was going to counseling sessions six times a week.

Mike McDonnell was abused for years by pedophile Catholic priests in Philadelphia, and subsequently stole $100,000 that was supposed to be spent on therapy

In fact he was forging receipts for the vast majority of the sessions and ended up stealing $100,000 before he was caught.

In 2011, McDonnell was jailed for a year with five years of probation.

He is now speaking out about the abuse and his years of crime after a grand jury report exposed serial sexual abuse by more than 300 priests across Pennsylvania with more than 1,000 identifiable victims.

'I sought retribution in the form of submitting false invoices for a number of years,' McDonnell said.

'For me it's important to be honest and share that story. I didn't run from this issue.

I was held accountable for my actions in a court of law. Can we say that about the Catholic Church today?'

McDonnell said the abuse started at age 10, but he didn't really know what was happening to him at that age.

But at age 12 he woke up to find a priest molesting him while on vacation after the man forced McDonnell to share his bed. That episode 'broke' him, he said.

McDonnell did eventually sue two priests who he claimed abused him but were not covered by the most recent grand jury report, having been exposed in prior reports.

One of them was defrocked and the other moved from a public ministry, but the pair could not be criminally prosecuted because too much time had passed.

McDonnell, who was sentenced to a year in jail for the theft, said it was right for the courts to hold him responsible - but says the church has been allowed to avoid it

He is now calling on the statue of limitations to be lifted on child sex abuse cases because victims often aren't able to seek justice for years afterward (pictured, the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, in Philadelphia)

McDonnell, who also suffered through alcoholism and broken marriages as a result of the abuse, is now asking for the statute of limitations to be lifted on historic child sex abuse cases.

Youth advocates say a statute of limitations can block justice since it may take decades for children to realize they were victimized.

Some 41 U.S. states have eliminated statutes of limitations for criminally prosecuting child sex abuse.

In 2002, Pennsylvania was among the first to raise the age for reporting child sexual abuse when it lifted the age to 30 from 23. Five years later it raised the age to 50.

The grand jury report, released on August 16, detailed a decades-long litany of serious sexual abuse across Pennsylvania by priests and a campaign of cover-ups by some of the church's highest-ranking members.

The report details crimes such as vaginal and anal rape, abuse by an HIV-positive priest, and at least one case where a girl fell pregnant after being raped.

'Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all,' the report says.

'For decades. Monsignors, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops, cardinals have mostly been protected; many, including some named in this report, have been promoted.'

The grand jury said the church developed 'a playbook for concealing the truth'.

McDonnell added: 'These bishops and the dioceses and the Cardinals need to come clean. You need to tell the Catholic faith community what you did.

'How you covered it up, how you transferred one to another parish so that he would go on and abuse more children.

'No one knew more about these abuses and no one did less,' he said.President Donald Trump said Monday that a trade agreement had been reached with Mexico in an Oval Office announcement.

He called it a 'big day for trade' and a 'big day for our country' in remarks.

Trump said the North American Free Trade Agreement was a 'rip-off' for the U.S. and the new pact, which he called United States-Mexico Trade Agreement, will be 'incredible' for both countries.

The president said he was getting rid of the name NAFTA because it has a 'bad connotation' and the United States was hurt for many years by the trilateral deal between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. He claimed he was 'terminating' the previously established deal altogether.

His celebration, which featured a live telephone call with the Mexican president, may have been premature.

Canada had not signed onto the agreement as of Monday afternoon, although direct talks were due to continue, and the U.S. hoped the neighbor with which it shares its northern border would join in the new accord before the White House issues a mandatory notice to Congress. Officials said they hoped to be able to submit the necessary documentation by Friday.

President Donald Trump said Monday that a trade deal had been reached with Mexico in an Oval Office announcement

A senior U.S. official admitted on a call with reporters, however, that the Trump administration couldn't be certain that Mexico would move forward with an accord if Canada does not sign on.

The official said that for more 'clarity' on the matter reporters should 'maybe ask the Mexicans' while proclaiming that without support from Canada 'we'll move on bilaterally.'

Trump's top economic adviser also waved off journalists noting that the pact hadn't been signed yet. He told reporters as he was reentering the White House after a CNBC interview that it need only be formally drawn up.

A legal dispute was also raging on Monday over the United States' ability to replace the trilateral agreement with one that excluded Canada.

President Trump said in his Oval Office announcement he would give Canada a chance to 'probably have a separate deal' although they could also join the new pact.

'One way or another well have a deal with Canada. Itll either be a tariff on cars or itll be a negotiated deal,' he said. 'Frankly, a tariff on cars is a much easier way to go.'

It was not immediately clear what the newly-agreed upon deal actually said. Trump hinted that it included a security component, saying that Mexico is 'going to be helping us at the border,' but officials were unable to say Monday what the pact might say about illegal immigration.

A fact sheet provided by the U.S. trade representative's office did not mention the dispute over illegal immigrants flooding the United States' southern border by way of Mexico as part of what was said, either.

It mainly highlighted agreements in the agricultural sector such as labeling requirements for cheese, wine and spirits.

A letter to Congress notifying lawmakers of the deal was to be submitted on Friday. In 90 days, after a mandatory waiting period, Trump said he'd sign the new deal into law.

Trump said that he would be 'terminating' the existing, three-party accord that he's hammered for years once the new one is in place.

He also said he'd be speaking with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau 'in a little while' to discuss next steps.

Jared Kushner, a senior adviser to the president as well as his son-in-law, lauded the agreement as a 'win-win transaction' that will hopefully pave the way for a 'lot more to come'

ALL THE WAY UP: The Dow was up 259 points on Monday at closing bell

On a call with reporters, U.S. officials shared the broad contours of a deal, explaining that it would cover a period of 16 years. A formal review will take place every six years, with a provision to move to annual reviews if either party determines the deal needs reworking.

A U.S. official described it as 'a rolling forward of the agreement timeframe with real opportunity for review that will keep both modernizing on track and keep disputes from festering.'

'Ideally, Canada will be in, and we'll be able to notify that,' the senior official said. 'If Canada is not in, then we'll notify that we have an agreement with Mexico and that we're open to Canada joining it.'

Jared Kushner, a senior adviser to the president as well as his son-in-law, lauded the agreement as a 'win-win transaction' that will hopefully pave the way for a 'lot more to come.'

'The president obviously is fighting for America. Hes fighting for our workers, hes fighting for our companies. And hell be tough but end of the day hell be fair and we present this deal ultimately with his leadership that he thought was a fair deal that would make our country better,' Kushner said. 'And so he was happy to do it.'

Trump's long-awaited trade announcement, which the White House added to his schedule suddenly on Monday, was in disarray from the moment he appeared on camera, however. Not only was a formal accord still being hammered out, how exactly the deal would be married with existing U.S. trade law had not been laid out.

In a horrifying moment, Trump struggled to get Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on the phone to congratulate him on achieving a deal.

'Hello?' the U.S. president said repeatedly on camera, before the outgoing leader, whose term ends at the beginning of December, joined the line. 'It's a big thing. A lot of people waiting. Hello?' Trump again said.

Speaking in Spanish, Pena Nieto said he wants Canada to join the agreement and congratulated Trump on having the 'political will' to push an accord through

Speaking in Spanish, Pena Nieto said he wants Canada to join the agreement and congratulated Trump on having the 'political will' to push an accord through.

But Pena Nieto referred to the status as a 'point of understanding' between the two nations in an English translation.

'I wish -- that the part with Canada will be materializing in a very concrete fashion; that we can have an agreement the way we proposed it from the initiation of this renegotiating process, a tripartite,' he said in the White House's transcript. 'And I hope that in the following days we can materialize [on the understanding ] in the formalization of the agreement.'

Pena Nieto suggested that they have a 'good toast with tequila' - forgetting, perhaps, that the American president doesn't drink - and told him he sends an 'affectionate hug.'

Trump called him a 'friend' in response and said they got 'know each other quite well' when, as a candidate, he went to see Pena Nieto in Mexico.

The U.S. president said they 'had a good meeting,' despite subsequent claims of a rift between the two leaders, and teased at the end of the call that a 'hug from you would be very nice.'

On the call with reporters, a U.S. official claimed there's also no 'tension' between Trump and Trudeau.

'I don't know that there is any tension,' the senior administration official said. 'Leaders of nations tend to do what's in the interest of their nation.'

Trudeau and Trump have been at odds since the U.S. slapped countries, including Canada, with heavy steel and aluminum tariffs. The trade disagreement turned into a full-scale argument after a fight following this year's G7 summit

Trudeau and Trump have been at odds since the U.S. slapped countries, including Canada, with heavy steel and aluminum tariffs. The trade disagreement turned into a full-scale argument after a fight following this year's G7 summit.

Trump was enraged by a slap that Trudeau took at him after he'd departed. He sent his senior economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, on television to accuse the Canadian PM of 'betrayal' and has having 'stabbed us in the back.'

'We were very close to making a deal with Canada on NAFTA, bilaterally perhaps, and then we leave and Trudeau pulls this sophomoric, political stunt for domestic consumption,' Kudlow told CNN.

Since then, Washington had been suggesting that it could go it alone in a deal with Mexico and come back to Canada later. And on Monday, Trump was poised to do exactly that.

'Canada will start negotiations shortly. I'll be calling the Prime Minister very soon. And we'll start negotiation, and if they'd like to negotiate fairly, we'll do that,' he said. 'You know, they have tariffs of almost 300 percent on some of our dairy products, and we can't have that. We're not going to stand for that.'

Trump, who has said all along that he'd prefer two bilateral deals with Mexico and Canada over the trilateral deal that's currently in place, indicated on Monday over Pena Nieto's pushing that he wants to move forward on a deal with or without Trudeau.

'We can have a separate deal or we can put it into this deal. I like to call this deal the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement. I think it's an elegant name. I think NAFTA has a lot of bad connotations for the United States because it was a rip-off,' he said. 'It was a deal that was a horrible deal for our country, and I think it's got a lot of bad connotations to a lot of people.'

Trump said that he and Pena Nieto would put their heads together to come up with a new trade agreement name.

'We will see whether or not we decide to put up Canada or just do a separate deal with Canada, if they want to make the deal. The simplest deal is more or less already made. It would be very easy to do and execute,' he said.

Kudlow told reporters later that negotiations with Canada would 'restart' as a result of the agreement with Mexico and described the talk between Trump and Trudeau that took place in the afternoon as 'a good conversation.'

Canadian officials were due to arrive in Washington on Tuesday, Kudlow said.

'I hope they watch carefully, how these things can get done.'

The president hinted that a trade deal was imminent in a tweet on Saturday morning

The president said he was getting rid of the name NAFTA because it has a 'bad connotation' and the United States was hurt for many years by the trilateral deal between the U.S., Canada and Mexico in his morning announcement

Trump had hinted that a first draft of a pact was on the brink of emerging on Monday, saying in a morning tweet, 'A big deal looking good with Mexico!'

The White House said shortly after that Trump would be making an 11 am statement on the topic of trade.

The United States and Mexico were said to have reached partial agreement, with President Trump announcing Saturday that a 'big' deal could be going down soon.

'Our relationship with Mexico is getting closer by the hour,' he said. 'Some really good people within both the new and old government, and all working closely together....A big Trade Agreement with Mexico could be happening soon!'

Parties to the North American Free Trade Agreement have been negotiating for months to re-do the Clinton-era trade document.

Earlier this year, the president imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum, which angered allies and raised pressure for a new deal, as talks continued with Canada.

The Dow Jones Industrial average jumped 200 points on Monday in advance of Trump's announcement that negotiators had finally struck a deal with Mexico, and closed 259 points above where it had been at opening bell.

'Today is Mexico Day,' Kudlow announced on CNBC. 'The market loved it.'

He told reporters on the White House driveway after the interview that the 'expectation' is that Mexico will move forward with a bilateral agreement, even if Canada doesn't sign on.

'The indications are, we're going to sign this document with them, the end of the week, and they're fine with, it's going to go forward.'

A firm agreement remained elusive as Monday came to a close.

Kudlow admitted, 'It's an agreement in principle.' But insisted, 'That's pretty good.'

The apparent agreement included a provision requiring a greater share of auto manufacturing be done in high-wage factories  meant to insulate U.S. firms from cheaper Mexican labor, the Washington Post reported.

Pressure was on negotiators to finish a deal before Mexico's new president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is sworn in December 1.

Hello, hello are you there? Trump had difficulty getting Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on the line on Monday for their joint announcement

'Today is Mexico Day,' White House economic council head Kudlow announced on CNBC. 'The market loved it'

The Dow Jones Industrial average jumped 200 points on Monday in advance of Trump's announcement; the S&P was also up

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is close to Trump, said Sunday that the expectation is that Canada will be in a hustle to move, too.

'I believe we're very close. And also, remember, we make policy in the world of politics. Remember what politics were going on. Mexico was having a presidential election. So it's very hard for them to make an agreement at the time,' he told 'Sunday Morning Futures' on Fox News.

'That election is over, but the new president is not sworn in. First thing this administration did was go down there,' he said. 'It only makes us stronger, and you're going into a new election next year in Canada, it's beneficial to them to have this all agreed upon this year.'

Lopez Obrador issued optimistic statements about Trump following his election in Mexico, indicating the potential for a thaw between the two nations, after angry clashes over immigration issues.

Speaking fondly of the new Mexican president on Monday, Trump told Pena Nieto he he was 'impressed' at how the two presidents 'came together for your country.'

'So it's an incredible deal. It's an incredible deal for both parties. Most importantly, it's an incredible deal for the workers and for the citizens of both countries. Our farmers are going to be so happy,' the U.S. president said.

Trump campaigned on ripping-up NAFTA, and even as talks progressed, his administration clashed with both of its North American neighbors.

Negotiators appeared to lock down two provisions in recent days.

One related to the percentage of a car that that must be made in North America to receive duty-free treatment. This would jump to 75 percent from the current 62.5 percent. Another would set a percentage of vehicles that must be manufactured in high-wage factories.Theresa May denied being 'late to the party' in forging ties with Africa today as she revealed six countries have agreed to 'roll over' trade deals with the EU.

In the first trade pacts confirmed for after Brexit, Mozambique, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland will continue the existing terms of the European Partnership Agreement after the UK leaves the bloc.

Delivering a speech in Cape Town, the PM also announced a major expansion of Britain's diplomatic presence in Africa, unveiled billions more of investment in the continent, and said the foreign aid budget would be used 'unashamedly' to drive closer trade ties.

But she was forced to defend the government's level of engagement - after critics pointed out that she is the first UK premier to tour sub-Saharan Africa since 2011. Since 2010 French presidents have visited 27 times, while Xi Jinping of China has gone there 79 times since 2011.

Asked after the speech whether she accepted more could have been done, Mrs May said bluntly: 'No.'

She argued that former foreign secretary Boris Johnson had made a series of visits to the continent.

'We have been working with African nations and African governments in the past,' she said.

'What I'm talking about today is a new partnership for the future recognising the challenges that we both face.'

Mrs May has kicked off a three-day trip that will also take in Nigeria and Kenya. She told the audience that there were huge benefits to be had from investing in greater prosperity for the continent.

She was able to deliver some positive news on Brexit, with the first confirmation that some of the EU's existing trade deals will be rolled over once the UK has left.

Theresa May held talks with Cyril Ramaphosa (pictured right) at the Presidential Palace in Cape Town today

The Prime Minister told Mr Ramaphosa she wanted Britain to be a 'partner' for South Africa

Mrs May landed in Cape Town this morning on board the RAF Voyager following a 12-hour flight ahead of a three-day tour of South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria

Mrs May quickly leapt into action by showing off her dancing moves on a visit to a school in Cape Town

The Prime Minister is to make clear the 13billion annual development budget will 'unashamedly' be used for the UK's 'national interest' (file image)

Mrs May said: 'This agreement is a hugely positive step and will ensure that our important trade relationships in southern Africa will not be disrupted as we leave the EU, providing continuity for UK firms and consumers, and for our trading partners here - as well as paving the way for more exciting opportunities in future.'

The statement of intent is the most advanced yet from around 40 existing EU trade agreements that the UK hopes to continue.

The arrangements would be ready to come into force in March 2019 if negotiations with the EU fail.

The UK's trade with southern Africa is worth almost 10billion annually  including 5billion of exports.

Mrs May made clear the 2.6billion in aid the UK distributes in Africa annually would be used to drive economic growth that will help Britain thrive outside the EU.

PM gives South Africa president a 'small trout fishing bag' Theresa May brought a small trout fishing bag as a gift for Cyril Ramaphosa on her visit today. The bag was made by Farlows, which was in 1840 as a fishing shop in the City of London and now specialises in luxury goods. The Dalby trout bag, made by Malton-based company Croots, is a small shoulder bag. The gift is less bizarre than it might first sound - as Mr Ramaphosa is known to be a passionate trout fisherman. Advertisement

'The UK's role in international development is something of which I'm immensely proud as I believe the nation as a whole should be,' she said.

'We will remain a global champion for aid spending, humanitarian relief and international development.

'We will continue our commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on official development assistance and we will not falter in our work to deliver the sustainable development goals.'

She said: 'I want to be clear, foreign aid works.'

Mrs May said: 'I want to put our development budget and expertise at the centre of our partnership as part of an ambitious new approach  and use this to support the private sector to take root and grow.'

In a nod to the burgeoning influence of China, Mrs May said: 'While we cannot compete with the economic might of some foreign governments investing in Africa, what we can offer is long-term investment of the very highest quality and breadth, something that will deliver more for Africans for longer and which can only be achieved when the Government and private sector work together.'

The ambitious commitments come as the government scrambles to position Britain for a no-deal Brexit. Failure to strike a wide-ranging trade agreement is becoming an increasingly real prospect with the sides still deadlocked.

Mrs May's three day trip to South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya will focus on bolstering trade ties.

Under a law passed by David Cameron despite opposition from some Tory backbenchers, the UK is obliged to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on aid.

Mrs May chatted happily with students and staff at the I.D. Mkize school in Cape Town today

Mrs May delivered a speech in Cape Town today (pictured) pledging to help spread 'opportunity' in South Africa

International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt (file image) has been pushing for money to be used more creatively to help further the government's key objectives

Over a third is channelled through multilateral agencies like the UN, while the rest is allocated bilaterally.

International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt has been pushing for money to be used more creatively to help further the government's key objectives.

The new approach could mean pumping cash into technologies or growing industries where Britain could benefit.

Among the 29 businesses accompanying Mrs May on her visit is Sure Chill, which has developed low-power refrigeration technology that could be used to store vaccines and medicines more effectively in sub-Saharan climates.

May denies neglecting Africa as she bangs the drum for trade Theresa May denied she was 'late to the party' for forging closer trade ties with Africa today. The Prime Minister was challenged over the seven-year gap since a PM last visited sub-Sarahan Africa. But she batted away claims that the UK had ceded ground to countries like France and China. Mrs May is on a whirlwind three day tour of South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya with a business delegation. Asked whether she accepted more could have been done, Mrs May said bluntly: 'No.' She argued that former foreign secretary Boris Johnson had made a series of visits to the continent. 'We have been working with African nations and African governments in the past,' she said. 'What I'm talking about today is a new partnership for the future recognising the challenges that we both face.' Advertisement

Mrs May said that by 2022 the UK should have overhauled the US to become the biggest investor in Africa.

Britain is currently thought to be in second place, but has been fighting off a strong challenge from France.

'I can today announce a new ambition: by 2022, I want the UK to be the G7's number one investor in Africa, with Britain's private sector companies taking the lead in investing the billions that will see African economies growing by trillions,' Mrs May said in her speech.

'The challenges facing Africa are not Africa's alone. It is in the world's interest to see that those jobs are created, to tackle the causes and symptoms of extremism and instability, to deal with migration flows and to encourage clean growth.

'If we fail to do so, the economic and environmental impacts will swiftly reach every corner of our networked, connected world. And the human impacts  from a loss of faith in free markets and democracy as the best way to secure global growth and human rights, to greater conflict and an increased susceptibility to extremism  will be similarly global'

In a nod to the standoff in Brexit negotiations, Mrs May will say the UK's 'success depends on global markets'.

'I want to see strong African economies that British companies can do business with in a free and fair fashion,' she will say.

'Whether through creating new customers for British exporters or opportunities for British investors, our integrated global economy means healthy African economies are good news for British people as well as African people.'

After the speech she held talks with President Cyril Ramaphosa, and presented him with the bell from the Mendi.

The ship was tragically sunk off the British coast in 1917 killing 600 troops who were bound to join Allied forces.

She could visit Robben Island - where Nelson Mandela was held captive - later.

May presents South African president with bell from tragic First World War ship the Mendi A First World War relic linked to one of the worst maritime disasters in English waters has been presented to South Africa by Theresa May. The Prime Minister gave the Mendi bell to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in a ceremony at Cape Town's presidential office. More than 600 men, the majority of whom were black South Africans, drowned after the SS Mendi was rammed by a British merchant ship. The troop carrier was en route to the Western Front when the February 1917 incident occurred amid a pre-dawn fog. Theresa May gave the Mendi bell to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in a ceremony at Cape Town's presidential office (pictured) Mrs May said: 'I'm proud to be able to present the historic bell from the SS Mendi to President Ramaphosa and the people of South Africa. 'Six hundred and seven black troops from the South African Native Labour Corps who set sail from Cape Town just over a century ago sadly never reached their destination, and never served alongside many other Allied forces on the Western Front. 'Today is an important opportunity to commemorate this tragedy in our shared history and is yet another example of the close bonds, historical links and mutual respect which underpins the UK's very close relationship with South Africa.' The men were due to have helped build railways, trenches, camps and roads in support of the Allied war effort, according to Historic England. The SS Mendi shipwreck lies just off the Isle of Wight. The Mendi bell was found and restored last year after being lost from the shipwreck in the 1980s. Advertisement

It's the Maybot! Toe-curling moment PM joins in with dancing schoolchildren in South Africa during first day of her trade mission

Theresa May cemented her reputation as the 'Maybot' today with a cringeworthy attempt at dancing with schoolchildren in South Africa.

The Prime Minister was greeted by a beautiful display of traditional singing and dancing as she met youngsters in Cape Town this morning.

But her toe-curling bid to copy the children's movements had TV viewers watching through their fingers as she jerked and shuffled her way across the playground.

Appearing to copy the dance moves around her, the PM shuffled toward the children while grinning for the cameras

A video of her dance moves provoked hilarity online, with Twitter jokers comparing her to the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and footballer Peter Crouch doing his robot celebration.

Others were more forgiving, sympathising with Mrs May for being made to dance on TV, something which they said would terrify most British people.

Twitter user Andrew Jones joked: 'Theresa May has stolen my 'I should have gone to bed at least an hour ago' wedding dance.'Donald Trump's first campaign manager says he warned the president that Michael Cohen 'was going to become a problem' and that he personally tried to steer clear of him.

'I didn't like to work with Michael. I didn't like to interact with Michael,' Corey Lewandowski told 'Fox News Sunday' in an interview. 'Michael was not somebody who we wanted at the campaign.'

He said the president's ex-attorney 'would say things which were factually untrue' that the campaign would have to correct.

'I warned everybody at the organization that Michael was going to become a problem,' he asserted.

Donald Trump's first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, says he warned the president that Michael Cohen 'was going to become a problem' and tried to steer clear of him

Lewandowski suggested that Cohen acted as the Trump Organization's enforcer, saying Sunday that one of his strengths was 'intimidating people' into cooperating on the real estate company's behalf.

President Trump denied last week that he was close to Cohen, who plead guilty to eight felonies, including two crimes he says he committed at the direction of the president.

Trump said that Cohen was his so-called 'fixer' in an interview but he doesn't know where that term came from and the attorney for his company was 'not somebody that was with me that much.'

'Didn't do big deals, did small deals. You know, they make it sound like I didn't live with, without him,' Trump told 'Fox & Friends' in an interview that aired on Thursday. 'It turned out he wasn't a very good lawyer, frankly. But he was somebody that was probably with me for about 10 years and I would see him sometimes.'

Lewandowski indicated on 'Fox News Sunday' that Cohen played a larger role in Trump's operations than the president let on, although he too claimed that the attorney was not a full-time lawyer for the corporation.

'I didn't work at the corporation, to be clear, but when there was a problem from the corporation side, you know, if there's a problem with an airplane engine, Michael was tasked with the negotiation to make sure that that engine was fixed under the warranty procedures when companies didn't want to do that. I know that was one specific project,' he said.

Lewandowksi suggested that Cohen acted as the Trump Organization's enforcer, saying Sunday that one of his strengths was 'intimidating people' into cooperating on the real estate company's behalf

Trump's campaign manager until June of 2016, Lewandowski says that while he was in charge, he made sure that Cohen 'never' had a role in the operation that drew in the president's family, as well as staffers who were close to billionaire, real estate mogul, like ex-White House Communications Director Hope Hicks.

'Look, I was the campaign manager. I spent as little time with Michael Cohen as humanly possible. He was never part of the campaign when I was there. And what he has now pled guilty to, by and large, has nothing to do with the campaign or the Trump Organization. This is Michael Cohen not filing taxes,' Lewandowski asserted.

He told the Fox News program, 'Michael was very good at certain things. And one of the things that he was very good at, and we've now seen it, is intimidating people and pushing himself to fix -- he was the self-described fixer.'

'But I can tell you this, I didn't like to work with Michael. I didn't like to interact with Michael. And that's why he had no role in the campaign, even though he wanted one.'

Lewandowski said, 'I was very clear, when I was in charge of the campaign, Michael was not somebody who we wanted at the campaign. He would go out and make statements that we had to walk back afterwards because he would say things which were factually untrue. And I warned everybody at the organization that Michael was going to become a problem.'

Cohen has become a major problem for the president, implicating him in two campaign finance violations and other, potential crimes involving the Trump Foundation and Trump Organization. He also claims to have information on Russian hacking, and Trump's alleged knowledge of it, that he says would be of interest to the special counsel.

Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York's office subsequently granted immunity to Alan Weisselberg, chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, so he could talk freely about the claims that were made by Cohen.

Trump has denied all the allegations that Cohen has made against him either personally or through his attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Not only does he claim that he didn't not have affairs with two women who came forward before the election, he says he did not know that his former attorney was going to pay them off.

The president's lawyer said in response to Cohen's claims that Trump 'directed' him to buy the women's silence, 'There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the president in the governments charges against Mr. Cohen.

'It is clear that, as the prosecutor noted, Mr. Cohens actions reflect a pattern of lies and dishonesty over a significant period of time.'

Trump in a Twitter rant against his ex-attorney also slammed him and said, 'If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you dont retain the services of Michael Cohen!'House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is warning that Democrats will make impeaching President Trump one of their priorities if they capture the House.

McCarthy, the California Republican who is vying to succeed Rep. Paul Ryan as speaker, raised the impeachment issue in a Sunday appearance on 'Fox News,' after a week that featured the conviction of Trump's campaign manager, a guilty plea by his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen, and new revelations of key insiders cooperating with prosecutors.

McCarthy brought up the push by some Democrats to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an issue Trump also highlights at his campaign rallies.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republicans, is warning that Democrats will make impeaching President Trump one of their priorities if they capture the House.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (pictured far right) is warning that Democrats will make impeaching President Trump one of their priorities if they capture the House

'The other thing they want to do is impeach this president,' McCarthy said.

'They voted on it twice already forced the vote to the floor. [Billionaire activist] Tom Steyer spent more than $30 million and he brags that his list is bigger than the NRA list on impeaching this president,' McCarthy told host Maria Bartiromo on 'Sunday Morning Futures.'

McCarthy would be minority leader if Democrats succeed in taking control. If the GOP hangs on, he will be challenged by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio for the top post.

His statement comes after leaked document shows the raft of oversight investigations Republicans fear Democrats will jump-start  from probing Trump's tax returns to the Constitution's 'emoluments' clause and Trump family members like son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to an Axios report.

Democrats hold an eight-point lead in a recent 'generic' congressional poll by NBC that asked whether respondents favored one party of the other.

McCarthy's statement is the latest instance of the GOP  rather than Democrats vying for control  to raise the impeachment issue.

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi cautioned last week against any rush to impeach based on the current state of the Mueller probe.

'It's not a priority on the agenda going forward unless something else comes forward,' House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said of impeachment

Tom Steyer, co-founder of NextGen Climate Action Committee, cut a new video urging people to join his drive for impeachment following the stunning courtroom developments. McCarthy pointed to Steyer's impeachment campaign

'Impeachment has to spring from something else,' she said, hours after longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight charges and a Virginia jury found former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort guilty of eight charges.

Pelosi, who would stand for speaker if Democrats retake the House but is facing pushback from some Democratic candidates, would oversee any impeachment that gets put forward.

On Wednesday it was the White House that elevated the issue when press secretary Sarah Sanders teed off on on Democrats, faulting them for a 'sad attempt' at 'cheap political stunts.'

'The idea of an impeachment is frankly a sad attempt by Democrats,' she said. 'It's the only message they seem to have going into the midterms.'

The Michael Cohen plea immediately ignited questions about impeachment. Justice Department rules state that a sitting president cannot be indicted

McCarthy on Sunday listed impeachment alongside immigration and health care.

'First they are very clear they want to abolish ICE. So those MS-13 members that come across, those kids that have been trafficked that get stopped that ICE saves or what about the fentanyl that ICE saves in the process 167 voted present in the process,' he said. Host Maria Bartiromo responded: ''Wow.'

Although some Democrats wand to abolish the agency linked to the Trump administration's child separation policy, they aren't in favor of stopping law enforcement at the border.

McCarthy continued: 'And the last thing they want to do single payer healthcare, so 55% of Americans have healthcare through their employer. That would end, but the scary thing of this those who are on Medicare, you will end because they will bankrupt it before and put everybody into it and bankrupt Medicare,' he said.

Former Virginia Republican Rep. Tom Davis, asked whether it now makes sense for Democrats to start talking about impeachment, told DailyMail.com after the Cohen plea and Manafort conviction: ''Not yet. It certainly lays a predicate.'

Democrats 'have to ask themselves if this is 1998, where Republicans overplayed impeachment and lost seats, or 1974, where anger over Nixon and the pardon led to huge gains,' said Davis, who previously ran the GOP House campaign arm and now runs government affairs at Deloitte.

'The ominous weeks will tell, but Nancy Pelosi navigated 2006 successfully to lead to a House turnover and she knows if and when to pull the trigger. There is still a lot to play out and it's August. Remember Access Hollywood?' he concluded.A new genetic study reveals that a 'super snake' could be on the horizon in the Florida Everglades.

While studying the invasive Burmese python, which have been reproducing in the Florida Everglades for nearly four decades and slowly decimating its small mammal population, US Geological Survey researchers discovered that some of the snakes they tested contained both Burmese and Indian python DNA, indicative of crossbreeding between the two snake species.

In the study, published Sunday in Ecology and Evolution, the researches wrote, 'Our finding that the Florida python population is comprised of distinct lineages suggests greater standing variation for adaptation and the potential for broader areas of suitable habitat in the invaded range.'

Scientists studying Burmese pythons (shown) in the Florida Everglades discovered that some of the snakes tested carried DNA from Indian pythons, leaving the potential for super snakes

In other words, these apparent mixed DNA snakes have the potential to become an Everglades super snake adaptable to multiple terrains, as Indian pythons like high, dry ground, while Burmese pythons are swamp-dwellers.

The 400 snakes USGS researchers caught between the Big Cypress Swamp and the Everglades were found to be genetically related Burmese pythons, but 13 of them had genetic markers from Indian pythons, meaning that the Everglades snakes might eventually slither out to much more varied areas.

'If the Indian pythons have a wider range, perhaps these Everglades snakes now have that capability,' said study lead author and USGS geneticist Margaret Hunter told the Miami Herald.

Hunter said that the findings were 'quite surprising,' but said that they did not know how many of these Burmese-Indian python DNA snakes there were in the Everglades snake population.

It's estimated that there are several thousand pythons in the wetlands now, thought to be the result of snakes that either escaped or were released from the commercial pet trade.

Indian pythons (shown) prefer high and dry environments while Burmese pythons are swamp-dwellers. The apparent mixed DNA snakes have the potential to become an Everglades super snake adaptable to multiple terrains

The pythons have been decimating the Everglades' small mammal population since they were introduced in the 1980s.

Burmese pythons can grow to be more than 20 feet and weight over 100 pounds. The snakes are said to be posing a significant threat to indigenous birds, reptiles and mammals, including alligators and protected crocodiles

Because the python population is so large, they can 'rapidly adapt,' Hunter said. 'If some animals die out because of climatic issues, there are other animals that may not die out.'

It's unknown how or where the Burmese and Indian species bred, but one possibility is that they were bred to create more appealing colors and patterns for pet owners, although they could have bred in the wild, too.

In their native habitats, the snake species don't usually cross due to their preferred prey and habitats.

While it's not known yet how far-ranging these potential super snakes could be, scientists think that increasing temperatures around the globe could allow the super snakes to head north from Florida.

The giant pythons  which can grow to be more than 20 feet long and weigh more than 100 pounds  first made their appearance in the Everglades in the 1980s and have been slowly spreading north in the Everglades National Park and west into Big Cypress Swamp. They were found breeding in the Florida Keys in 2016.

The Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission has deemed the large and invasive python population to be such a problem that people are allowed to kill and remove the snake without a permit, particularly on private land, the Orlando Weekly reported.

The snakes are said to be posing a significant threat to indigenous birds, reptiles and mammals, including alligators and protected crocodiles.John McCain's death is overshadowing Tuesday's Senate primary in Arizona, when voters go to the polls to pick the party's nominees for the November election.

Their selection is for a replacement for retiring Sen. Jeff Flake, McCain's colleague in the Senate who decided not to seek another term in office this year.

The Republican primary has, for months, been a three-way tug of war between Rep. Martha McSally, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and former state Sen. Kelli Ward.

Kelli Ward is being criticized for a now deleted Facebook post on McCain

Rep. Martha McSally is seen as the frontrunner for the GOP nomination

Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio and McCain clashed on immigration

And McCain's death on Saturday brought the contenders' relationships with him under a microscope, the Arizona Republic reported.

In an ironic twist of fate, the GOP contest has been dominated by President Donald Trump as the contenders have emphasized their close ties to the man who has long feuded with McCain.

As a result, all the contenders have shunned the McCain name, particularly McSally who is being challenged from the right by Arpaio and Ward.

Trump's influence in the state and the deep-red conservative voting bloc that comes out in primary contests were part of the reason Flake opted not to run again. He has been a vocal critic of the president.

And while the primary voters tend to tilt toward Trump's view point, the state's general election voters tend to favor McCain's more center-right approach.

Additionally, the candidates now have to cope with how to campaign in the contest's final days when news coverage is devoted to McCain's legacy.

McSally notably did not invoke McCain's name earlier this month while witnessing the signing of the national defense authorization act with Trump.

Trump also failed to recognize McCain during the signing of the John S McCain National Defense Authorization Act, which lawmakers implemented to honor McCain's leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee and his years of service in the Senate.

But McSally's refusal to say McCain's name during her many media appearances around the signing drew her a stinging rebuke from McCain's daughter, Meghan.

McSally's 'inability to even mention my father's name when discussing the bill named in his honor is disgraceful (just as it was with Trump)  I had such higher hopes for the next generation of leadership in my home state,' she said.

Sen. McCain's shadow is looming large over Tuesday's Senate primary

Candidates are running for the nomination for retiring Sen. Jeff Flake's seat

Ward drew widespread condemnation for a Facebook post hours before John McCain died on Saturday, which seemed to suggested that his family's earlier announcement that he was ending cancer treatment had been timed to hurt her campaign.

Friday's announcement of McCain ending medical treatment for aggressive brain cancer came the same day Ward was launching a statewide bus tour as part of her final primary push.

A campaign aide to Ward wrote on Facebook: 'I wonder if it were just a coincidence that Sen McCain released his statement on the kickoff day of Kelli Ward's bus tour or if it was a plan to take media attention off her campaign?'

Ward, who lost a primary to McCain in 2016, said in response: 'I think they wanted to have a particular narrative that they hope is negative to me.

A screen shot of Ward's response was tweeted out, inciting backlash at the insensitive comment.

Arizona Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kelli Ward suggested the announcement that McCain was ending medical treatment was intended to hurt her campaign hours before Sen John McCain died on Saturday

The question was posed by aide Jonathan Williams and Ward's reply came within ours of McCain's death Saturday afternoon

Screen shots of Ward's response were taken and tweeted out, before she deleted it

Ward then edited her comment, blaming the media for a 'fake story'

Ward deleted the comment as the photo made its rounds online, instead replacing the post, saying the media is making up 'fake stories' to hinder her chances at gaining the Senate seat.

'I've said again and again to pray for Senator McCain & his family,' Ward wrote. 'These decisions are terrible to have to make. I feel compassion for him and his family as they go through this.'

'It's not the McCains creating a narrative - it's the media making something out of nothing,' she continued. 'The media, the left, the Establishment have the agenda. They've been attacking me for fake stories for a year on this issue.'

Also on Friday, Arpaio's campaign briefly posted on social media a message that McCain's wife, Cindy McCain, had blocked the former sheriff on Twitter.

Joe Arpaio has long ties to Trump and is seen with him here campaigning in Iowa in January 2016

President Donald Trump speaks as Rep. Martha McSally, left, and other lawmakers listen at a meeting on immigration reform

On the Democratic side, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema is expected to easily win the nomination

John McCain had poor relations with Arpaio, chiefly due to their clashing efforts on immigration reforms.

Trump pardoned Arpaio last August for his conviction for criminal contempt of court relating to a racial profiling case.

Arpaio has tied his long ties to the president, going back to when both men pushed a debunked theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Chad Willems, a long-time Republican consultant and former Arpaio campaign manager, said some voters will judge the candidates by how they handled McCain's death.

'Whether they see this as just an opportunity, or a conspiracy, or pining for an appointment, I think that's going to be a big, big turn-off to voters at large,' Willems told the Arizona Republic.

'And I think the candidates out there that try to turn this into a political thing are going to pay the price.'

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has spent months floating above the GOP competition and is expected to easily win the nomination against a token primary opposition.

Polls open Tuesday but past elections suggest more than 80 percent of the votes have been cast given voters' preference to using the state's early voting system.

As for McCain's Senate seat, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey will appoint a replacement. McCain's successor will face voters in 2020 for the right to finish the last two years of his term. Under Arizona state law, Ducey must appoint a Republican (a member of the same party as McCain) to the position.A group of at least 12 prison guards who were caught on camera pinning down an Indigenous inmate days before his sudden death are refusing to co-operate with police, an inquest has been told.

Wayne Fella Morrison, 29, was restrained by guards and transported face-down in a van from Yatala Prison to court in northern Adelaide in September 2016.

He was restrained after he attacked prison guards while he was on remand waiting for a home detention bail hearing, the ABC reported.

Three minutes after being loaded into the van, Morrison was pulled out 'blue and unresponsive', the court heard. He died in hospital three days later.

In CCTV footage, shown to the South Australia's Coroners Court, Wayne Morrison can be seen being pinned down by guards as a dozen swarm the room

Mr Morrison had a spit mask on his face and his legs and arms had been restrained before being put into the van, the court heard.

During the first day of an inquest, CCTV footage was shown to the South Australia's Coroners Court.

In the video, Morrison can be seen being pinned down by guards as a dozen swarm the room, moments before he is loaded into the van.

There was no CCTV footage recorded inside the car and seven of the eight guards who were in the van have refused to provide a statement to police, the court heard.

Wayne Fella Morrison, 29, (pictured) died three days after being restrained by guards and transported face-down in the prison van at Yatala Prison in northern Adelaide in September 2016

Morrison, 29, (pictured) became unresponsive while being transported, with guards noticing him change colour

Morrison became unresponsive while being transported, with guards noticing him change colour, the inquest heard.

CPR was performed three minutes after he was removed from the van.

He suffered a heart attack and multiple organ failure.

Multiple factors may have contributed to Morrison's death, according to medical experts.

Counsel assisting the court, Anthony Crocker, said: 'What occurred during that period of just under three minutes will be a matter of interest in this inquest.'

'Police were unable to establish a forward command just inside the prison for several hours after their initial request to do so,' Mr Crocker said.

'There is also concern that those DCS (Department of Correctional Services) officers who remained on site were grouped together after the incident,' he said.

The inquest is expected to go for five weeks. At least 70 people have been called to give evidence.

All the guards who refused to proved a statement to police have been summonsed.A man who was allegedly stabbed to death by his jealous friend after an argument over a woman was known for his party antics, and was photographed on nights out with John Ibrahim, stars from the Bachelor and inside Thai strip clubs.

Jordan Byrne, 26, was rushed to hospital after allegedly being stabbed by Milo Manu Felix Wild - a man known to him - at a friend's apartment in Sydney's east about 12.30am on Sunday.

Mr Byrne was rushed by ambulance to hospital but died during surgery.

Photos from Mr Byrne's social media accounts show him taking frequent trips to Thailand for tattoos and partying with stars from the 2016 season of the Bachelor.

Mr Byrne was also photographed alongside Kings Cross identity John Ibrahim.

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Photos from Mr Byrne's social media accounts show him partying with stars from the 2016 season of the Bachelor

Mr Byrne was also photographed alongside Kings Cross identity John Ibrahim

The heavily-tattooed crane driver grew up playing rugby league on the New South Wales Central Coast before moving to Bondi in Sydney's eastern suburbs six years ago

The heavily-tattooed crane driver grew up playing rugby league on the New South Wales Central Coast before moving to Bondi in Sydney's eastern suburbs six years ago.

In a statement, Mr Byrne's family said his death had 'shattered our family beyond belief', the Daily Telegraph reported.

'Jordan loved life, was a constant source of laughter, such a loveable character,' the statement said.

His heartbroken father Colum Byrne said he knew something terrible had happened when the phone rang early and it was the police.

'Me and Deborah (his mother) just got that horrible phone call at 5am in the morning, the one that no parent should ever get,' Mr Byrne's father told Daily Mail Australia.

'They just said he'd been attacked in Sydney and that he'd had surgery but they couldn't save him.'

Jordan Byrne (pictured) was allegedly stabbed to death in an apartment in Bondi in the early hours of Sunday morning

'He was our absolute pride and joy': Colum Byrne (right) relived the moment he and his wife Deborah (left) got a phone call at 5am telling them that their son Jordan (centre) had died

In a statement, Mr Byrne's family said his death had 'shattered our family beyond belief'

Mr Byrne's alleged murderer Milo Manu Felix Wild, 27, faced Waverley Local Court on Monday morning where he was refused bail.

Police reportedly believe Mr Byrne was murdered by Wild after a dispute over a girl who they had both dated.

But the murdered man's father said he had been told by police his son was a victim and had in no way sparked the dispute, with officers calling it a 'senseless murder'.

Mr Byrne's father said after school his son had left his hometown on the NSW Central Coast and moved to Sydney, chasing his dream of becoming a crane driver.

In a few short years he established a successful career working on construction sites across the city and saved up enough to purchase three investment properties.

One of four children, Mr Byrne's father said his son was living his dream right next to the beach - but never forgot his family or where he came from.

Milo Manu Felix Wild (pictured), 27, has been charged with the stabbing murder of Mr Byrne

'He was a kind loving kid who everyone loved,' Colum Byrne said of his son Jordan (pictured at Bondi Beach with his mother Deborah)

'He was a kind loving kid who everyone loved. Everybody knew Jordan, he was truly the funniest kid you'll ever come across,' Colum Byrne said.

'He was a normal kid in his 20s, but he'd just accomplished so much. He was making plenty of money, he had apartments in Merrylands, Hillsdale and Bondi - he was our absolute pride and joy.

'He would come up and see us and tell us how good of parents we were - he never forgot us or his siblings.

'He was only 26 and he was on fire in life and I would just really like to share that with people.'

The two men had both dated the same woman, but detectives are trying determine exactly what sparked the fight. Pictured: paramedics rushing Byrne to hospital

'Everybody knew Jordan, he was truly the funniest kid you'll ever come across,' Colum Byrne said

Neighbours in the apartment complex reportedly heard the two men arguing loudly and told The Daily Telegraph they expected police to be called immediately.

'I heard someone in the block yell out 'shut up' but the argument kept going,' a man said.

Investigations into the alleged murder are continuing, with police reportedly set to re-interview the two women in the apartment at the time.Iranian leader Hassan Rouhani is facing a fresh battle to stay in power after his economy minister was impeached yesterday, as critics said the president himself should be next.

Rouhani has come under fire from all sides since Donald Trump withdrew from the West's nuclear deal with Tehran, battering Iran's economy with fresh sanctions.

Lawmakers have summoned Rouhani to parliament to face questions over the collapsing value of Iran's currency, the country's stubbornly high unemployment and claims of corruption.

They have already impeached his labour and economy ministers this month and Rouhani's rivals are threatening to remove the president himself.

Hassan Rouhani (pictured) has come under fire from all sides since Donald Trump withdrew from the West's nuclear deal with Tehran, battering Iran's economy with fresh sanctions

Iran says it 'has full control of the Gulf' in warning to Trump Iran has full control of the Gulf and the U.S. Navy does not belong there, the head of the navy of Iran's Revolutionary Guards has said. Tehran has suggested it could take military action in the Gulf to block other countries' oil exports in retaliation for U.S. sanctions intended to halt its sales of crude. Washington maintains a fleet in the Gulf that protects oil shipping routes. General Alireza Tangsiri said: 'We can ensure the security of the Persian Gulf and there is no need for the presence of aliens like the U.S. and the countries whose home is not in here. 'All the carriers and military and non-military ships will be controlled and there is full supervision over the Persian Gulf. Our presence in the region is physical and constant and night and day.' Separately, the head of the Revolutionary Guards, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, said Iran's enemies would not prevail in a conflict. 'The enemies are strictly avoiding any conflict with Iran because they know that it will not be beneficial for them,' Jafari said, according to Tasnim. Senior U.S. officials have said they aim to reduce Iran's oil exports to zero. Advertisement

Yesterday Elias Hazrati, of the reformist Hope faction in parliament, said the president should have been impeached but economy minister Masoud Karbasian was 'the only person we could get our hands on'.

However Rouhani is protected by the fact that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said he should see out his term to 2021, despite his own harsh criticisms of the president's policies.

Many hardliners who opposed Rouhani's negotiations with the West have felt vindicated by the unravelling of the nuclear deal.

They have led the charge against Rouhani's cabinet, and were on Monday seeking enough votes for impeachment proceedings against his industry and transportation ministers.

Rouhani has also lost support among reformists who were key to his election victories in 2013 and 2017, after the movement was suppressed in the wake of mass protests in 2009.

The president has failed to deliver on his promises of easing civil liberties, particularly his vow to release political prisoners and reduce censorship.

Hazrati said yesterday: 'What have we done with this nation? We made them miserable and wretched.'

Rouhani won two emphatic victories with pledges to rebuild Iran's foreign standing and attract investment, but the nuclear deal - they key part of that strategy - now lies in ruins.

Many wealthier Iranians are trying to leave, while poorer areas have seen regular, low-level strikes and protests that have occasionally turned violent.

The prices of essential goods are rising rapidly, and worse pain is to come when US sanctions on Iran's vital oil sector return in November.

There had been talk of Rouhani as a possible successor to the ageing Khamenei.

But he looks increasingly likely to follow the path of his two predecessors in the presidency, Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who have been effectively silenced by the establishment.

Iran's Economy Minister Masoud Karbasian speaks in parliament before a vote by lawmakers which saw him impeached

Clement Therme, Iran research fellow for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: 'No one believes Rouhani will reform anything anymore.

'He was just a tool for the system, appearing to address people's demands for change without really changing anything.

'The supreme leader supports Rouhani going to the end of his second term because he wants stability

'But he thinks that if Rouhani delivers on his policies, it will mean the end of the system,' particularly by opening the country to Western cultural 'invasion'.Timothy Murray, 16, suffered fatal injuries and died while walking on Stac Pollaidh, north of Ullapool in Scotland on Sunday

A teenage boy has fallen to his death while walking in the Scottish Highlands.

Timothy Murray, 16, suffered fatal injuries after falling while walking on Stac Pollaidh, north of Ullapool in Wester Ross.

The teen had travelled to Scotland from his home in the Brighouse area of West Yorkshire.

It is believed Timothy became separated from his family on the mountain, who reported him missing in poor weather conditions on Sunday.

Donald MacRae, leader of Dundonnell Mountain Rescue Team, said 15 members searched in low cloud and darkness for five hours before finding Timothy's body.

'It was very challenging conditions - it was wet with low cloud and most of the search was in darkness,' he said.

'We think he has fallen about 150 metres (492ft) after reaching the summit. We found him on the west end of the mountain. It is a very sad outcome.

'It is more or less a sheer drop there. We searched on steep ground which was very wet underfoot.'

The tragedy comes as a 17-year-old from Stockport died after falling from cliffs in north Wales on Sunday.

It is believed Timothy became separated from his family on the mountain (pictured), who then reported him missing in poor weather conditions

In North Wales, police were called to a road on the Great Orme headland in Llandudno on Sunday afternoon after reports that a person had fallen from the cliffs.

North Wales Police today revealed the victim died at the scene and was a 17-year-old boy from Stockport. Investigations into how the incident happened have begun.

Timothy's devastated family issued a statement through Police Scotland after the news of his death.

They said: 'It is a very sad loss and Timothy was a lovely son. We would ask that our privacy is respected at this difficult time.'

Sergeant Kay MacRae said: 'Our thoughts are with Timothy's family and friends at this tragic time.

'We would like to thank our partners in Dundonnell Mountain Rescue for their assistance with this challenging incident.

'A report has been submitted to the Procurator Fiscal, as is standard procedure with sudden deaths.'

Facebook users left messages of condolence for Timothy on the Police Scotland page.

Sam West said: 'So sad. Rest in peace. My thoughts are with your family.'

Ian Craig Lockhart wrote: 'Very sad to hear this, thoughts are with the family.'

Christine Fraser added: 'Very sad thinking of all his loved ones at this sad time.'

Stac Pollaidh means 'peak of the peat moss' and is 2009ft in height.

It is nicknamed 'Stack Polly' and is a hugely popular peak with walkers visiting the northwest Highlands.A serving police officer has been arrested following an alleged sexual attack in Scotland.

Police taped off a street in Dumfries town centre last Thursday morning after a complaint of a serious sexual assault was made to them.

They have now confirmed a 39-year-old man held is a police officer, who has been suspended from duty while the investigation continues.

A serving police officer has been arrested and suspended over an alleged sex attack in Dumfries. Pictured: The town's police station

The development relates to an alleged incident in the town's St Mary's Street in the early hours of Thursday August 23.

In a brief statement, the force confirmed that the man arrested last week is a serving police officer.

A police spokesman said: 'He has been released on an investigative liberation.

'Inquiries are continuing.'A former Greens senator has been ridiculed after suggesting people are to blame for crocodile attacks.

Larissa Waters appeared on the ABC's Q&A program on Monday night alongside One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, Queensland MP Bob Katter, Nationals MP George Christensen and Labor representative Cathy O'Toole in Mackay, north Queensland.

The panel were asked by audience member Debbie Elwood if they would consider culling crocodiles in Queensland given the huge increase in their population and the fact they have no predators.

'Look, I think the notion that we can't learn to live with our natural environment...' Ms Waters said before the audience began to laugh and she was cut off by Mr Christensen, who said: 'When it's eating you, you can't'.

A former Greens senator has been ridiculed after suggesting people are to blame for crocodile attacks (Pictured: audience member Debbie Elwood during the show in Mackay, Queensland)

Larissa Waters (pictured) appeared on the ABC's Q&A program on Monday night

'The point I will make is that we have crocodile management plans that languish on the shelf and that are underfunded, we routinely underfund wildlife management plans, so we don't support culling crocs, it won't be everybody's cup of tea but that's where we stand,' Ms Waters continued.

'We are willing to listen to the expert advice on how to better manage them and how to learn to live with them - but killing them isn't the answer.'

Ms Hanson responded to the question saying 'cull them, you have to', which was met with applause and cheers from the audience.

'They don't have any predators themselves and the fact is they are actually encroaching on areas where animals are being taken by them, people are being taken by them, I pity those people who have come by the boat up in the Daintree at the moment - are those last two going to survive with the crocs up there... that's their problem,' Ms Hanson said.

Bob Katter was also on the panel for the Q&A show hosted in Mackay, north Queensland

'I think cull them... this is stupid. Larissa, you care more about that than caring about the animals, the dogs, the people that are out there that are being taken by crocs.

'The people don't feel safe to actually go out into the waterways.'

Ms Waters suggested alcohol may play a role in crocodile attacks.

'Many of the people who are taken by crocs have often had a couple to drink, and they're going in to the water after dark,' she said.

'So they deserve it, do they?' Mr Christensen asked.

'Goodness me, vote Greens and get eaten.' he said.A 13th suspect has been arrested in the gang-linked murder of an innocent teenager in New York City that was caught on video.

Lesandro Guzman-Feliz, 15, who was known as Junior, was dragged from a bodega in The Bronx and slashed in the neck with a machete on June 20.

Police have cast blame on the Trinitarios gang, who were purportedly looking for a man who made a sex tape with one of their relatives, mistaking that man for Lesandro.

They have arrested 13 men so far  and sources told the New York Daily News that a 14th suspect is expected to be arrested soon.

The 13th man arrested in the case  Ronald Urena  was taken into custody on murder charges on Sunday.

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Lesandro Guzman-Feliz (left), 15, who was known as Junior, was dragged from a bodega in The Bronx and slashed in the neck with a machete on June 20. Ronald Urena was the 13th suspect arrested on Sunday

Ronald Urena, the 13th suspect arrested for the gruesome assassination of Lesandro Guzman-Feliz, 15, told reporters outside a police precinct that he is innocent

Urena, 29, told reporters in Spanish that he is innocent as he was led out of the 48th precinct stationhouse in The Bronx, according to the Daily News.

Lesandro's funeral last month ended with a crowd of several hundred outside the church chanting 'Justice for Junior!' as pallbearers dressed in Yankees jerseys loaded his casket into a hearse.

'I need justice for my son. That's my junior, my little baby and that not happen anymore with any other kid,' his mother, Leandra Feliz, told reporters two days before his funeral.

'My heart is broken,' added his father Lesandro Guzman, who has tattooed a picture of his son's face onto the back of his hand as a permanent memorial.

'I need justice for my son,' Lesandro's mother Leandra Feliz (pictured with her son) has said

On Sunday, Ronald Urena became the 13th suspect in the machete slashing death of 'Junior'

The attack sparked outrage about the scourge of gang violence in the Bronx

Authorities said Guzman-Feliz, who dreamed of becoming a police officer and was a member of the NYPD's Explorers program, may have been mistakenly targeted by the gang.

The attack sparked outrage about the scourge of gang violence in the Bronx, unfair stereotyping of young Hispanic men, distrust in police and why seemingly no one helped him.

It devastated his parents and those who knew him, rocked the community to the core and prompted celebrities such as superstar Rihanna and rapper Cardi B to join the calls of justice.

He was stabbed in the neck a minute from his apartment, before being forced to run - alone - to St Barnabas Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The teenager was stabbed in the neck a minute from his apartment, before being forced to run to St Barnabas Hospital, where he was pronounced dead

Earlier this month, the owner of the bodega which Lesandro was killed outside, broke his silence, hitting back at critics who say he didn't do enough to save the teenager's life.

In an interview with NY1 Noticias, Modesto Cruz blasted 911 operators who he says wasted time by bombarding him with questions.

'Four minutes and a fraction of seconds asking me things, that's why I made the second call. That was to help out Junior,' he said.

'Unfortunately it wasn't enough to save his life, but I did try to help him.'

Cruz also blasted politicians and community leaders for being opportunists and turning the storefront into an 'altar' for 'Junior' for their own personal gain.

'I felt so much hate from the community upon listening to many interviews, so much politicians speaking without even knowing the truth about everything, which I was blamed for,' Cruz said.

'We live in an area where there's violence, where there's poverty, where we're probably yielding justice and finding the truth,' Cruz said.A young mother-of-two is dead after she was murdered by her boyfriend in a horrific murder-suicide, police said.

Nancy Garcia, 23, was found dead in the driver's seat of a car parked outside her home in Austin, Texas on Friday morning.

The body of Omar Garcia, 26, was found lying in the home's front yard near the car. A gun was beside him.

Nancy Garcia, 23, was found dead after she was murdered by her boyfriend Omar Garcia (pictured together) in a horrific murder-suicide, police said

Nancy was a mother to two young daughters (she is pictured here with one of her children)

Authorities said both had gunshot wounds. A motive is not yet known.

Police were called to the scene after someone spotted Omar Garcia's body while driving past the house around 7am on Friday.

Officials believe Omar Garcia first shot Nancy, who had two daughters, and then killed himself in front of their home.

Omar had previously been arrested for family assault.

Garcia was found dead in the driver's seat of a car parked outside her home in Austin, Texas on Friday morning. Omar's body was lying on the ground next to it with a gun by his side

Police were called to the scene after someone spotted Omar Garcia's body while driving past the house around 7am on Friday

Nancy was the victim, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

Although the couple share the same last name, they were not married.

Authorities said the couple's death is not connected to the body that was discovered just a block away from their home last month.

The body of Johnny Cardenas, 31, was found less than a mile away on July 11.The government's top official overseeing the $1.5 trillion student loan market resigned in protest on Monday, citing what he says is the White House's open hostility toward protecting the nation's millions of student loan borrowers.

Seth Frotman will be stepping down as student loan ombudsman at the end of the week, according to his resignation letter, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

He held that position since 2016, but has been with Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since its inception in 2011.

Frotman is the latest high-level departure from the CFPB since Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump's budget director, took over in late November.

But Frotman's departure is especially noteworthy, since his non-partisan office is one of the few parts of the U.S. government that was tasked with handling student loan issues.

Accusation: Seth Frotman, who has quit as student loan ombudsman, accused Mick Mulvaney (pictured) the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, of failing to protect students from being ripped off by financial instiutions

The office was at the center of the lawsuits against for-profit colleges like Corinthian Colleges and is currently heading up a lawsuit between the CFPB and Navient, one of the nation's largest student lenders.

The Navient lawsuit has been mired in bureaucratic red tape as the Department of Education, headed by Betsy DeVos, has been unwilling to help the CFPB with their lawsuit.

Since its creation, the student loan office has returned $750 million to harmed borrowers.

'You have used the bureau to serve the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America,' Frotman wrote, addressing his letter to Mulvaney.

'The damage you have done to the bureau betrays these families and sacrifices the financial futures of millions of Americans in communities across the country.'

Congress created the student loan ombudsman office when it established the CFPB, citing a need for a go-to person to handle student loan complaints nationwide.

One previous occupant of that position is Rohit Chopra , who was appointed by President Trump to be a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission.

The ombudsman's office is quite powerful, able to work with the bureau's enforcement staff to target bad behavior in the student loan market as well as act as a voice inside the government on behalf of student loan borrowers.

Under Mulvaney, the bureau has scaled back its enforcement work and has proposed revising or rescinding all of the rules and regulations it put into place under the Obama administration

The office processed tens of thousands of complaints from student loan borrowers and was among the first major government offices to raise alarms about the growing issue of students being unable to afford repaying their loans.

But despite its work, Mulvaney downgraded the mission of Frotman's student loan office earlier this summer and moved it under the umbrella of consumer education instead of enforcement.

While at the time Mulvaney's office said it was a minor organizational shake-up, consumer advocates saw the change as a move to downplay the CFPB's mission when it came to student loans.

Frotman also accused Mulvaney and his staff of deliberately hiding a report from the public that raised alarms that banks were overcharging student loan borrowers.

'When new evidence came to light showing that the nation's largest banks were ripping off students on campuses across the country by saddling them with legally dubious account fees, bureau leadership suppressed the publication of a report prepared by bureau staff,' Frotman wrote.

The student loan office is not alone. Under Mulvaney, the bureau has scaled back its enforcement work and has proposed revising or rescinding all of the rules and regulations it put into place under the Obama administration.

'Seth Frotman is a public servant who treated every student loan complaint with the seriousness it deserved,' said Debbie Goldstein, executive vice president at the Center for Responsible Lending. 'His departure raises concerns about the priorities of Mulvaney and CFPB leadership and whether they are fulfilling the mission of the CFPB to focus on protecting consumers from financial abuse.'

In a statement, a CFPB spokesman said it does not 'comment on specific personnel matters' but also said 'we hope that all of our departing employees find fulfillment in other pursuits and we thank them for their service.'A Victorian primary school is telling its students to leave Coles' collectable toys at home, saying they're leading to bullying, fighting and stealing.

Peter Adams, principal at Pascoe Vale Primary School in Melbourne's north, has slammed Coles over their Little Shop promotion, calling it 'genius and (an) absolute disgrace'.

In the school's most recent newsletter, he urged parents to prevent their children from bringing the plastic toys to school, citing a series of fights over them.

Other schools are also being forced to deal with instances of theft, organising swap meets to help students collect the full set, the Herald Sun reports.

A Victorian school is slamming Coles for their 'Little Shop' promotion, saying it is causing bullying on the playground

Peter Adams, principal of Pascoe Vale Primary School (pictured) says that teachers can't even tell the difference between a stolen and a lost toy anymore

Mr Adams says the toys are creating headaches for teachers, with students reporting theirs as being either lost or stolen.

He says it's gotten to the point where they can't tell which is stolen and which is lost.

Parents are concerned that their children are being bullied, which is why Mr Adams has put the toys in the same category as mobile phones and other valuables; safer left at home.

Other schools are embracing the toys, using them as teaching tools.

Creswick Primary is urging its students and parents to save any collectables that are not wanted and donate them to the office so they can be used for students to learn money and 'play shops' during maths lessons.

Other schools are embracing the promotion, using the toys (pictured) to teach maths

Similarly, an organisation in Victoria has urged shoppers to donate Coles Little Shop items to help disabled people with simple tasks.

Distinctive Options, a disability service provider in Melbourne, says the mini collectables are a perfect tool to help the disabled communicate.

The supermarket giant has embraced the collectables, which are said to be responsible for a recent uptick in their profits.

The scheme was launched after the plastic bag ban in July, and have since been wildly popular.

The collectables took Australia by storm after their introduction, following the plastic bag ban

Customers get one of the miniature collectables, representing regular, full-sized items, when they spend $30 on their groceries.

However, some members of the public have complained that it introduces young children to consumerism behaviour too early.

'Great promotion if you want to get young kids hooked on consumerism, produce useless plastic nonsense and work against the plastic free movement Australians are supporting,' one woman recently tweeted.

Alys Gagnon, executive director of The Parenthood, is also concerned that the scheme is marketing 'processed unhealthy food' to children.



Some love the promotion, while others are saying they're teaching bad habit to their children

Children aren't the only ones fighting over completing the set.

Within 48 hours of the promotion being released, someone was selling the entire set on eBay for $1,000.

Coles Chief Operating Officer Greg Davis said Little Shop is designed to be fun for customers while celebrating some of their favourite brands they buy each week.

'We know our customers love collectibles, so we have worked with our suppliers to launch a fun campaign in our supermarkets across Australia,' he previously said.

They were initially due to conclude on August 28, but were recently announced to have been extended until supply runs out.

Within 48 hours, the complete set has hit eBay, with a price tag of $999, warranty includedA young hijab-wearing Muslim woman has stolen the show after accusing Pauline Hanson of double standards in a bold declaration of Australian pride.

The One Nation leader was a panelist on ABC's Q&A when her polarising views on Muslim migration were challenged by audience member Khadija Fatima.

The young woman pressed Ms Hanson after she blamed Muslims and their 'totally different' ideologies for a lot of Australia's problems during a fiery debate.

'I will call out how I see it and a lot of other Australians see it the same way. So I'm sorry, I'm not out to offend people, I'm here to protect Australians, that we feel safe on our streets and don't want the problems here,' a defiant Ms Hanson said.

Pauline Hanson (pictured) got into a heated debate about Muslims with a member of the studio audience on Q & A on Monday night

Ms Fatima was then asked by program host Tony Jones if she was offended by Hanson's remarks before hitting back with an angry but powerful response.

'I'm as much an Australian as you are, Pauline,' Ms Fatima shot back.

Hanson responded with 'I'm not denying that. All I ask for is respect our laws and our culture and our way of life.'

But Ms Fatima wasn't finished.

'Our Sharia law says the first law is to follow the law of your country. Any Muslim in this room will tell you the same. I don't know where you get your beliefs from. Don't push it on all the Muslims across the world,' she said.

Earlier, Ms Fatima sparked the debate when she asked Ms Hanson why she was offended by comparisons with Queensland Senator Fraser Anning when she too called for immigration ban in her maiden parliamentary speech in 1996 when she claimed Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asians.

Her challenge to the One Nation leader received overwhelming applause from the studio audience.

'I'm as much an Australian as you are, Pauline,' Khadija Fatima (pictured) told the One Nation leader

'Fraser was calling for a white Australia policy and I've advocated you don't have to be white to be Australian. What our concern here in Australia by main Australians is that Muslims have a different ideology and belief and assimilating into our society,' Hanson responded.

Ms Fatima said she understood that point but asked Ms Hanson why she focused on Muslims 'every single time?'

Ms Hanson responded that a lot of Australia's problems were because of Muslims and that they do not appreciate Western society.The father of the newborn stuffed in a trash bag by its mother who concealed her pregnancy has spoken out for the first time at his baby girl's funeral Saturday.

Edwin Taylor said the daughter he named Kimberly would have been 'a loving little baby girl but nobody got a chance to meet her' as his family gathered in Lexington County, South Carolina to mourn the loss of the infant they never even knew.

His ex girlfriend Brennan Geller, 21, is charged with murder by child abuse after she concealed her pregnancy, gave birth to the infant inside her car and then allegedly placed the baby in a trash bag and left her on the floor of the vehicle earlier this month.

It was not until the next day, that Brennan, a part-time gym employee, was taken to the emergency room for blood loss, raising concerns by doctors which led investigators to recover the infant's lifeless body in her car.

Edwin Taylor said he never knew his girlfriend of a year and a half was expecting

The funeral was held Saturday for the baby who no one ever got to meet after her mother stuffed the infant in a trash bag immediately after birth

'I want everyone to remember Kimberly,' Edwin told WISTV. '[She]was taken away from all of us but just know she's up in heaven, in God's hands, the best hands possible just looking over all of us.'

Brennan Geller, 21, is facing 20 years jail for homicide by child neglect in the infant's death earlier this month

The parents had been dating for about a year and a half, but Brennan told neither Edwin nor her family and friends that she was pregnant.

He said Brennan showed no physical signs she was expecting, except a few weeks before she gave birth when the couple went to the beach with Edwin's family.

Edwin's mother Kathy Taylor said she had asked Brennan 'many times' if she was pregnant but she denied it.

'There's really no words for it, it was uncalled for,' Kathy told WISTV. 'It's a void we will have for the rest of our lives.'

The family says they still do not understand why Brennan would get rid of the child.

Edwin's sister, Katie Taylor-Fonte said she believes it was her intention to dispose of the child the entire pregnancy.

'All the support in the world wasn't going to change this, I think she knew what she was going to do and she worked to achieve that goal,' she said.

Katie added: 'Whether she wanted to parent or not parent, whatever her choice would have been we would have supported her through that and make the situation not end like that.'

Brennan allegedly gave birth in her car then put the baby in a trash bag and drove home with it on the floor where it died

Dozens of family and friends mourned the infant Edwin named Kimberly who they never had the chance to meet

Brennan was released from jail on $50,000 bond and awaiting trial.

According to WISTV, dozen of family members and friends attended the burial in West Columbia.

But they say they are grieving both Kimberly and Edwin who was not given a fair chance at being a father.

'In a lot of ways I feel like he's being punished more than she's been punished,' his sister said.

'I want people to know these entire nine months were robbed from him, he didn't get to support her, he didn't get to share in that excitement, he didn't get to give input, he found out when the public found out,' Katie added.

Brennan faces more than 20 years jail if convicted.

Kimberly was laid to rest Saturday in Lexington County, South Carolina

Edwin's mother (left) and sister (right) believe Brennan planned to dispose of the baby throughout the entire pregnancy

Brennan told doctors nothing about the baby when she arrived at the hospital and authorities only discovered what happened when officers found the body in her car.

Brennan was released from jail on $50,000 bail and awaits trial

'The medical team caring for Brennan told investigators she never told them the baby was in her car,' Lexington County Sheriff Jay Koon said.

A 2015 graduate of River Bluff High School, she worked at MUV Fitness and as a server at Travinia Italian Kitchen & Wine Bar, both in in Lexington, according to Facebook.

Brennan was largely raised by her mother Julie after her father Mike died in 2008.

Several of her friends expressed their shock online at the news she was pregnant, let alone an alleged murderer.

'And to think i was friends with her I didn't even know she was pregnant,' one said.

'I didn't even know she was like this or even pregnant. Jesus, I can't believe this. I'm, like, shook (sic) to the core,' another said.

'Known her since grade school and never thought in a million years she would do this, I feel so horrible for the baby and the dad. I wonder if he even knows'

South Carolina has 'safe haven' laws that allow mothers to legally abandon babies at fire stations, churches, and hospitals.Mourners have hit out a mother who showed up to a vigil for her baby boy after he was left to die in a hot car while in her care.

Nine-month-old Keyton O'Callaghan died after being left in the backseat of a hot car outside his home in Spring Hill, Florida on August 17.

The infant had been in his mother Cami Lee Moyer's care the night before he was found.

Moyer has not been charged and authorities say they are still investigating the circumstances surrounding the boy's death.

Nine-month-old Keyton O'Callaghan died after being left in the backseat of a hot car outside his home in Spring Hill, Florida on August 17

About a dozen mourners held a vigil for the little boy at a makeshift memorial on Sunday night.

The mourners, who were carrying signs and stuffed toys, quickly became agitated when Moyer showed up.

'It's infuriating to see,' one mourner told Fox 13 as they called for charges to be filed against the mother.

A tearful Moyer admitted to leave her baby in the car when she spoke to reporters at the vigil.

She insisted that she was a good person and that they angry mourners didn't know the full story.

A tearful Moyer admitted to leave her baby in the car when she spoke to reporters at a vigil held in her son's honor on Sunday night

Mourners, who were carrying signs and stuffed toys, quickly became agitated when Moyer (above on left) showed up to the vigil at the makeshift memorial

'May God be with them,' she said. 'I don't know what else to say to them, they don't know the whole story. They don't know the truth. I am a good person.'

Relatives of the boy have said he was left in the car all night before he was found.

Moyer refused to say where she was while her son was in the car but said: 'It wasn't all night, I'll tell you that much'.

Baby Keyton had been in his mother's car for several days in the lead up to his death.

He was found unresponsive in the backseat by his father Eric at about 11.30am the following morning.

The father performed CPR on his son until rescuers arrived. Keyton was rushed to hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Investigators have not said how long Keyton had been in the car or released any further details about his death.

Baby Keyton had been in his mother's car for several days in the lead up to his death. He was found unresponsive in the backseat by his father Eric at about 11.30am the following morningThe brewery behind some of Australia's most iconic beverages is about to launch a new drink that looks, tastes and smells like beer but is alcohol-free.

Carlton and United Breweries is bringing its first non-alcoholic beer, Carlton Zero, to the market this week, the Herald Sun reported.

The beer will be marketed to adults and found in supermarket aisles alongside soft drinks and waters, raising concerns that children could be targeted at an early age.

Carlton Zero, a non-alcoholic beer, has the same ingredients used in the regular beer. It looks and tastes like the regular brew, the company says

Michael Thorn, the chief executive of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, has raised concerns over how the beer will be marketed and its potential to normalise the consumption of alcohol to minors.

There will be no age restriction for the product that looks and tastes like the regular brew.

Carlton Zero uses the same ingredients used in Carlton Draught.

Sabine Wolff, of CUB, said the alcohol-free beer will be marketed to adults.

'Its release marks a long-term shift in Australias drinking habits: low- and mid-strength beers now represent 20 per cent of CUB sales, as people increasingly moderate their alcohol intake.'

'This is not a product that appeals to children,' Wolff said. 'Just as other non-alcoholic beers in Australia and overseas have not appealed to children.'

Sales of alcohol-free beer have surged 64 per cent within a year in Britian, with demand for low and no-alcohol beverages surging.

Drinking rates among adults in the UK are already at their lowest point since 2005, the Guardian reported earlier this year.A Tory MP has been accused of racism by the head of a gipsy and travellers charity after calling encampments a 'blight on our community'.

MP Conor Burns made the comments and vowed to push for more enforcement powers in parliament after several pubs and bars were forced to close early last week over reports of fights and anti-social behaviour linked to a travellers' site in Bournemouth, Dorset.

But Betty Smith-Billington, chairman of Kushti Bok, a Dorset gipsies and travellers cultural charity, has slammed Mr Burns for his comments.

Tory MP, Conor Burns, for Bournemouth west, has been branded a 'racist' for calling the Sandbanks encampments (pictured) a 'blight on our community'

She said: 'For Conor Burns to say that travellers are a "blight on our community", I would like to arrange a meeting with him because I feel that his remarks are racist, and to call an ethnic group a running sore is not the type of language an MP should use.

'This is happening all over the country, the government are trying to define travellers out of existence, something that will never happen.

'These incidents are sensationalised and blown out of proportion to raise hatred against our fellow men.

The caravan park, circled in red, has taken over a car park in Sandbanks as nearby residents claim the travellers wreaked havoc at their last site in nearby Bournemouth

The group of about 15 luxury caravans set up an illegal camp at a public car park in Glen Fern Road, Bournemouth, and are believed to have caused havoc in the local pubs.

It is thought the group were then moved on from the site but set up camp near Sandbanks, Poole, angering local residents there.

Locals believe the arrival of the travellers coincides with the popular Bournemouth Air Show event that will start on this Thursday.

Mr Burns said: 'The cry of 'racist' is the new way of shutting down debate, avoiding challenge and avoiding replying to legitimate concerns.'

Mr Burns said on Twitter: 'The cry of 'racist' is the new way of shutting down debate, avoiding challenge and avoiding replying to legitimate concerns'

Members of the public were quick to jump to his defence on social media too.

One said: 'Next time travellers leave a camp, this woman needs to be forcibly frog marched along and made to clean up after them.

'It is not racist to expect people to behave decently. The real problem with the racist card is that it tend to be wheeled out when any rational argument cannot be won any other way, as a way to close down any opposition.

'These people are actually the cause of underlying resentment as nobody can argue once the racist card is drawn.'

Another said: 'When Travellers start acting civilised (ie. not leaving a heap of rubbish everywhere they illegally camp) then maybe they will earn respect from the public.

'An MP describing the mess Travellers have left at every place they have illegally camped as a blight on our community is merely a fact. Being offended by that does not disqualify the truth in that statement.'A woman who was gifted a house after she was kidnapped and molested as a child is fighting to keep it for her cancer-stricken father.

Shasta Groene was just eight years old in May 2005 when Joseph Duncan beat her mother Brenda, stepfather Mark and 13-year-old brother Slade to death with a hammer in their Coeur d'Alene, Idaho-area home.

Duncan then took off with Shasta and her nine-year-old brother Dylan, and over the next two months he raped them repeatedly. Dylan was eventually killed but Shasta was rescued after a Dennys waitress spotted her with Duncan and called the cops.

Shasta Groene who was gifted a house after she was kidnapped and molested as a child is fighting to keep it for her cancer-stricken father (she is pictured as a child with father Steve)

Shasta Groene (left) was just eight years old in May 2005 when she was abducted by Joseph Duncan (right)

Following the ordeal, Shasta community members raised money to build a house for her, which has been held in a charitable trust on her behalf. She and her father, Steve Groene, moved in, in 2007, when she was 10 years old.

Now the trust is trying to evict Steve, who is battling throat cancer, because Shasta, now 21, moved out and is living in Boise.

One of the three trustees, Midge Smock, said Friday the trust has cashed out all of its other investments and need to sell the house to continue supporting Shasta. The trust also pays for Shasta's rent in Boise and her nursing school tuition in Nampa.

'She hasn't lived there for years,' Smock said. 'In order to provide for her, we have to cash in her only asset. It doesn't matter what her dad wants her to do.'

But in a notarized letter she signed and sent to her father for use in the eviction case, Shasta asked the trust to let her father remain at the property.

'I have always considered it to be our home, not just mine or the trust's, and it is my wish that my father continue to reside there as long as he wishes,' the letter states.

'In return I will release the trust and its trustees from any obligations it may have to me, as the trust's beneficiary, concerning the house. I am very grateful for the support the community, through the trust, has given me, but I am at a point in my life where I no longer need that support and would rather my father have a place to live.'

Her father Steve (pictured outside the home) who has been battling cancer, says he fears he'll be homeless after the trust threatened to kick him out the house

Steve Groene (L) holds up a message from family members after Joseph Edward Duncan III entered into a plea agreement during a hearing in the court room at the Kootenai County Jail October 16, 2006 in Coeur d' Alene, Idaho

'I could be homeless in three weeks,' her father added.

The 1,300sq ft home at 2323 E. French Gulch Road, is worth around $240,000.

Shasta is supposed to assume ownership of it when the trust expires on her 25th birthday, unless the trust have already sold it.

A judge is expected to rule on whether Steve, who lives on disability payments of less than $1,000 a month, will be able to stay in the home.

The trust has covered all property taxes, maintenance, utility and insurance costs for the house, according to court documents.

They asked Steve to start contributing $600 a month towards rent, or move out and allow the trust to rent out the home for $1,200 a month or sell it.

Shasta lived with Smock and her husband, Don 'Pepper' Smock, on a few occasions during her childhood. The couple, who have clashed in the past over Shasta's care, even became licensed foster parents to allow them to care for Shasta full time.

Steve argued 'I have always been under the impression that this house was built for me and Shasta.'

He also said that he hadn't been given enough time to prepare a defense - especially in the wake of his cancer battle. He said he suffers from a short attention span and other side effects of chemotherapy.

During a hearing last week, Judge Rich Christensen ordered Steve and the trust to submit closing arguments in writing.

The deadline is August 31.

The 1,300sq ft home at 2323 E. French Gulch Road, is worth around $240,000

Shasta got a taste of celebrity after her case came to light in 2005.

Her abductor, Duncan, was sentenced to death, a punishment he is currently trying to appeal.

She has revealed she struggled to cope with what happened to her, and her sudden fame, and turned to drugs and alcohol to deal with the trauma.

Shasta says that immediately after she was rescued, she became a well-known figure in the area for all of the wrong reasons.

'I couldn't really live my life or go out without someone recognizing me,' Shasta said.

'Everywhere I went it was 'Oh, there's Shasta Groene,' as if I were famous, and I didn't like that. I was like 'I'm a normal girl, treat me like a normal girl.''

Every time someone recognized her, it brought up the old memories and at the time she still felt responsible, which is common for the survivors of traumatic experiences.

'There were years and years where I felt that what happened was my fault,' she said. 'Like I could have done something to change what happened I had my innocence taken from me. I felt really ashamed of that.'

Shasta says her life took a turn at age 12, when she got drunk for the first time, and by 14 she tried meth and started getting high every day with a group of older teens.

The bodies of Shasta's mother Brenda, left, stepfather Mark McKenzie, center, and 13-year-old brother Slade, right, were found beaten to death with a hammer inside their home in May 2005

Nine-year-old Dylan James Groene was abducted with Shasta but eventually killed

Eventually, her addictions landed her in a juvenile detention center in February 2014, and she was sentenced to stay in the prison for a year - something she believes saved her life.

While in the detention center, Shasta says she was able to soberly process what had happened to her, all while making friends and meeting her future fiance.

Now 21, Shasta says she's finally moving in a positive direction in life. She knows that she will never be able to forget what happened to her, so instead she embraces it by celebrating her mother's and brothers' birthdays, trying to remember them for the good memories instead of the bad.

She also welcomed her child into the world in 2016.

Shasta says she considers her baby a miracle since she thought the injuries she sustained enduring weeks of sexual assault at the hands of Duncan may have prevented her from conceiving.

'I almost feel like this is a miracle baby.'

As for Duncan, she has a message for him as he rots behind prison walls.

'I'd want him to know that he doesn't control me, and he doesn't control how I feel,' Shasta said. 'He's the person who took away my family and my innocence, but I don't ever really think about him. It's just my family. And I want him to know he doesn't have any power right now, because he's the one sitting in prison while I'm out living my life.'Criminal charges stemming from at least six incidents have led to the resignation, suspension and termination of five Llano, Texas police officers, including the chief, in the past year; Former officer Mark Burke (shown) is the latest officer to be indicted

Another scandal has added two more law enforcement officials to the list of those charged with abuses of power in Llano, Texas, facing combined charges that include official oppression, evidence tampering, assaulting arrestees and deleting body camera video.

A grand jury indicted Sheriff's deputy Duncan Roberts and Llano Police Officer Mark Burke on August 13, who now both face three counts of official oppression.

They were seen on Roberts' bodycam on June 9, attempting to pick the lock of a residence without a search warrant to back it up, then kicking in the door and violently arresting the man inside.

In total, criminal charges stemming from at least six incidents have led to the resignation, suspension and termination of five Llano city police officers, including the police chief, in the past nine months.

One Lllano County Sheriff's Deputy has been reassigned pending the results of his criminal trial.

An improper arrest of a man in May 2017 led to the July conviction of former Police Chief Kevin Ratliff, and the indictment of three other officers.

At least one of those officers, Grant Harden, has been indicted on abuse of powers charges stemming from multiple incidents, dating back to at least December.

With regard to the latest round of indictments, Burke and Llano County Sheriff's deputy Duncan Roberts (pictured) arrived at a residence in response to a 911 call reporting domestic violence.

With regard to the latest round of indictments, Burke and Roberts arrived at a residence in response to a 911 call reporting domestic violence.

Body camera video then showed Burke attempting to pick an exterior door lock for about two minutes, before homeowner Clay Holley comes to the door.

It appears the officers and Holley go back and forth about he'll open the door for about two minutes, before Roberts kicked it in and violently arrested him.

Body camera video then showed Burke attempting to pick an exterior door lock for about two minutes, before homeowner Clay Holley comes to the door.

It appears the officers and Holley go back and forth about he'll open the door for about two minutes, before Roberts kicked it in and violently arrested him

Llano County Sheriff Bill Blackburn turned the video and case over to the county District Attorney, which led to indictments of deputy Roberts and officer Burke on charges of unlawful arrest, criminal trespass, and damaging property

Llano County Sheriff Bill Blackburn turned the video and case over to the county District Attorney, which led to indictments of deputy Roberts and officer Burke on charges of unlawful arrest, criminal trespass, and damaging property.

Sheriff Blackburn took Roberts' authority away following the indictment, and placed him on duty in the jail.

'He's just a really good man,' Blackburn said. 'He may have made a mistake, I can't say one way or the other. That's for a jury to decide now.

Burke is one of five in city's police force indicted on multiple charges of abuse of power over the last nine months.

Former Chief Ratliff was convicted in July on three separate charges related to the improper arrest of Cory Nutt, on May 2, 2017.

Nutt was arrested for being drunk in public despite being inside his home. That charge was later thrown out, and officers Aimee Shannon, Jared Latta and Grant Harden were charged with official oppression stemming from that improper arrest.

Ratliff and Harden were also charged with tampering with the police report.

Harden has indictments outstanding related to four other incidents, including allegedly tampering with video footage twice (from a DWI stop and a separate arrest), using excessive force against a woman who he is accused of unlawfully arresting, and allegedly assaulting another woman prosecutors said he 'unlawfully' charged with resisting arrest on April 26, 2016.

Former Llano Police Chief Kevin Ratliff (left) was convicted in July on three separate charges related to the improper arrest of Cory Nutt, on May 2, 2017; Former Officer Grant Harden (right) was charged with official oppression stemming from that improper arrest

Officers Aimee Shannon (left) and Jared Latta (right) have been suspended, and were also charged with official oppression stemming from the improper arrest of Nutt in May 2017

Llano City Manager has hired an interim police chief as the city works to fill the vacancies that have resulted from these scandals, but hasn't said much else as its investigation into possible police corruption remains underway.

Attorney Austin Kaplan, who represented the man whose May 2017 arrest was thrown out, viewed the footage of Burke and Roberts attempting to pick the lock and kicking in the door.

'I've never seen anything like this. Here, there's no permission to enter, there's no warrant, and the police are on video breaking in to someone's house. And they can't do it,' he said.

'Everyone should feel a little chill down their spine watching that, that the police are gonna break into your house next, and that there won't be any consequences for it.

Employment and conviction status of Llano, Texas law enforcement officers indicted on charges Terminated, convicted: Former Police Chief Kevin Ratliff Terminated, awaiting trial: Former Police Officer Grant Harden Resigned, awaiting trial: Former Police Officer Mark Burke Suspended, awaiting trial: Police Officer Aimee Shannon Police Officer Jared Latta Reassigned, awaiting trial: Sheriff's Deputy Duncan Roberts Advertisement

Kaplan said his client may file a federal lawsuit against the city.

Ratliff, although convicted, has maintained he was within his authority.

'When it's all said and done, I have a lot to tell,' Ratliff said. 'There's caselaw that justifies what we did.'

Ratliff was sentenced to one year of probation for his role in the May 2017 arrest. His attorneys plan to appeal his conviction.

The other officers have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.

Travis Williamson, attorney for Harden, told KXAN:

'The cases that were indicted recently in Llano County involve complicated constitutional and legal principles that lawyers, judges and constitutional scholars cannot even agree on.'

He added: 'When you start prosecuting police officers for official oppression based on gray or unsettled areas of law, they are not taught that law in the academy or subsequent training, or there are no policies or procedures available you are soon going to run into a situation where officers will hesitate to act. This will result in an innocent victim or officer being seriously injured or worse.'

To date, former Chief Ratliff and officer Harden have been terminated, Burke has resigned, and Shannon and Latta are suspended.

Deputy Roberts is currently reassigned.A grandfather has been sentenced to 32 years in prison for sexually abusing five of his own grandchildren.

The 71-year-old man from Sussex Inlet, on the New South Wales south coast, plied his grandchildren with drugs and alcohol and used them to make child pornography.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, did not make eye contact with his victims as the sentence was handed down, but held up his middle finger before being led from the courtroom at Penrith Courthouse.

A grandfather who sexually abused five of his own grandchildren has been sentenced to 32 years in jail (stock image)

The man had been in custody since his then 15-year-old step-granddaughter reported more than a decade of abuse to police in 2015, according to The Brisbane Times.

She told investigators how the 71-year-old subjected her to the production of child pornography in his attic, which contained lighting, cameras and a mattress.

She said she remembered the grooming and manipulation tactics happening before she started school.

Four more of the man's step-grandchildren and biological grandchildren then also reported being abused by him.

His step-grandson said he had been supplied with prescription drugs since the age of seven.

His grooming techniques included offering his grandchildren 'modelling contracts' to encourage them to pose in a sexual way.

The man's grooming reached 'Machiavellian proportions' when he persistently threatened the children by text message using three fictitious characters he created.

He was found guilty in March on 73 of 77 counts - having pleaded not guilty to all of them.

During sentencing on Monday, Judge Robert Sutherland called the abuse 'heinous' and 'depraved' - while investigators said the abuse was the worst they had ever seen.

The grandfather will be eligible for release in June 2039.An Ohio man has been charged with murder in the death of a 23-year-old woman whose body was found abandoned in a field last week.

West Chester police say 29-year-old Michael Strouse was arrested on Saturday, a day after police recovered the body off Millikin Road in Liberty Township.

The Butler County Coroners Office has yet to make a positive identification, but the county prosecutor told the Hamilton-Middletown Journal-News hes '100 per cent confident' the body is that of Ellen Weik based on evidence.

Michael Strouse (left), 29, has been charged with murder in the asphyxiation death of 23-year-old Ellen Weik (right)

Police found a body believed to be that of Weik dumped in this Ohio field on Friday

WLWT said the 23-year-old West Chester Township woman was reported missing on August 1 by her mother, which sparked a massive search involving the FBI, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, West Chester police and the Butler County Sheriff's Office.

Prosecutor Michael Gmoser said he made the decision to charge Strouse after police questioned the suspect.

Court documents that were filed on Monday morning indicate that Weik died of asphyxiation inside Stroure's home on Bluffs Drive in Liberty Township.

Strouse's residence is located not far from the farm where the missing woman's body was recovered on Friday.

The 29-year-old murder suspect was arraigned via video conference in Butler County Area II Court, where his bond was set at $2million.

Weik was reported missing on August 1 by her mother. More than three weeks later, the massive search ended tragically off Millikin Road in Liberty Township

The Butler County Coroners Office has yet to make a positive identification, but the county prosecutor said he is certain the deceased person is Weik

Strouse has an extensive criminal record going back a decade, including charges of identity fraud, theft, burglary, public indecency, possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, reported Cincinnati.com.

According to WCPO, in 2015, he was convicted of burglary and sentenced to three years of probation, which ended early in 2017 because Strouse had exhibited good behavior, according to records.

Strouse is scheduled to be back before the judge on Wednesday for a preliminary hearing.An undocumented immigrant mother tried in vain to get a long-awaited hug from her son after their family was reunited after four months, but the boy kept crawling away from her.

Heartbreaking footage from an American Civil Liberties Union video that was recently posted on the human rights advocacy group's Instagram account shows the sad moment when Mrs Reyes-Mejia breaks down in tears while she tries to hug her three-year-old son, who keeps putting up a fight.

'My love, I am your mommy, papi. I am your mommy,' she said before Sammy, as the boy is named in the ACLU report to protect his identity, manages to get out of his mother's embrace when the family of four was reunited at George Bush International Airport in Houston on July 14 after they had been detained and separated by the United States Customs and Immigration Enforcement.

Mrs Reyes-Mejia breaks down in tears when her son refused to hug her when they were reunited

Ever, Sammy's dad, holds on to his five-month-old daughter, who he had not seen since April when he left Honduras to seek asylum in the United States

As the little boy crawls away, the distraught mother questions her husband, Ever, as to why their son was rejecting her on the first day the family was being reunited.

'Ever, what's wrong with my son?' Mrs Reyes-Mejia says amidst tears before her husband, who is seen hugging his infant daughter, helps her up.

The sad mom then walks after a crawling Sammy, telling him, 'papi, I came for you my love. What happened? Papi come with me. I came for you. My son is traumatized, Ever.'

A teary-eyed mother struggles to hug her son, who keeps trying to escape her arms at Geroge Bush International Airport in Houston

Mrs. Reyes-Mejia cries as she wants to know why her son does not want to acknowledge her after the family is reunited after they arrived in the US and were detained by ICE

Eventually, Sammy relented and hugged his mother for the first time since he and his father left Honduras in April 2018. They fled the on-going violence to enter the United States to seek asylum.

Ever and Sammy made it to the US border station at McCallen Bridge in Texas where customs officials detained them.

While in detention, Ever was told he was required to complete legal documents before an immigration judge. The dad asked if he could wake up his sleeping son but officials told him it wasn't necessary. Upon coming back, his son was gone, on his way to an agency in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where undocumented immigrant children are being held and separated from their families.

Mrs Reyes-Mejia made it to the US in May and was also detained, but never separated for her daughter.

An emotional moment as Ever Reyes-Mejia (left) hugs his five-month-old daughter while his wife tries to hold back tears after her son refuses to hug her

Sammy is reunited with his mother but kept crawling away from her as she tried to hug him

Ever Reyes-Mejia looks on as his wife holds back tear in a hallway at the airport

During their time of separation, Sammy wouldn't talk to his dad each time officials opened up a line of communication before father and son were reunited on July 10 at an ICE center in Grand Rapids.

Shortly thereafter, they flew to Houston where the viral video captured the moment when then the family of four finally met up.

The U.S. government separated more than 2,500 children from their parents this year as the Trump administration adopted a "zero-tolerance" policy requiring anyone who crossed the border illegally to be prosecuted. That resulted in parents who had to go to federal court to face criminal misdemeanor charges of illegal entry to be separated from their children, often for months.

A federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against the government gave authorities until July 26 to reunite all families, although over 300 parents who were deported to their home countries have yet to be reunited with their children.

According to the ACLU, as of August 23, 528 immigrant children still remain in government custody.In the past three years, the anti-immigration Federation for American Immigration Reform  or FAIR  has achieved dramatic financial growth, fed top talent to the Trump administration and reached millions of new people through social media.

The Washington D.C.-based organization has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but in Trump's America it's achieving a new level of mainstream acceptance and success at pushing its message and agenda.

FAIR has 'been waiting for this political moment,' said Heidi Beirich, a spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center in an interview with DailyMail.com. 'White nationalist sentiments are at unprecedented levels. There is this reaction happening on the right to demographic change  and it's a negative reaction.'

FAIR has seen a dramatic uptick in grant funding since 2014, reaching $11.4 million in 2016, the most recent year for which data is available

FAIR rejects the 'hate group' label. Leaders say FAIR advocates for zero illegal immigration and very low levels of legal immigration  with a cap of 300,000 a year being an 'aspirational' target. The group also opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants and seeks to end the practice of granting citizenship to people born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents.

'The ideas have always been mainstream, it's just that we have reached a point that the American public is taking a stand on this issue,' FAIR spokesman Ira Mehlman told DailyMail.com.

People have been saying for a long time that they want to limit immigration and they've been accused of being bad people for that. -Ira Mehlman, spokesman for FAIR

FAIR's messages are resonating with more people  though its leadership believes many Americans have felt this way for decades, but were afraid to express it until now.

'People have been saying for a long time that they want to limit immigration and they've been accused of being bad people for that somehow  that they're not compassionate; they're xenophobic, racists, all these terrible things  when all they're saying is this (level of immigration) is harming our jobs, every aspect of life that is important to us,' Mehlman said.

While FAIR has been around a long time, 'this is their time to shine,' said Alex Nowrasteh, senior immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

'This is absolutely a unique case in their history,' Nowrasteh told DailyMail.com. 'Usually FAIR was cited by fringe people on the margins. It was never a mainstream organization  ever  until the 2016 election cycle. FAIR did not have that much influence with Republicans back in the day. This amount of influence is really new.'

Established in 1979, FAIR has been called a hate group, in part, for comments by its founder, John Tanton, expressing his desire to keep America a white-majority country.

The group was also widely criticized in the 1990s for accepting more than $1 million in grants from the Pioneer Fund, an organization established to support eugenics research for the purpose of 'race betterment' through promoting the genetic stock of 'white persons.' Much of its funding has supported controversial researchers, many of them associated with racist academic theories.

FAIR's president, Dan Stein, has distanced himself and the organization from Tanton and rejects the notion that their policy beliefs are racially driven. He said the negative label from Southern Poverty Law Center hasn't hurt the group.

'The more they go after us, the more money flows in (from donors),' Stein told DailyMail.com.

And the money is flowing.

FAIR's operating revenue grew by $4.8 million  nearly 73 percent  from 2014-2016 to reach $11.4 million, according to the most recent data available.

At the same time, the group has nearly doubled its spending on program services to reach nearly $10.9 million, according to the group's annual financial statements.

Program services spending includes media efforts, spending which nearly quintupled in two years: FAIR spent $6.3 million on media in 2016, compared to $1.3 million in 2014.

Dan Stein, president of Federation for American Immigration Reform, is interviewed in June 2018. FAIR has seen dramatic growth in its funding and social media following in the past three years

Most of that ($5.6 million) went toward advertising in 2016, compared with $676,468 in 2014.

The group launched a new ad campaign this month trying to shift the discussion on immigration from lost jobs (given the current low levels of unemployment), to the issue of wage stagnation.

One ad features a young man saying he did 'everything possible' to prepare for his career  but 'American companies prefer to hire immigrants. They come here on guest worker visas, crowding the labor force and driving down wages.'

Stein believes that message will resonate in the markets where people haven't seen meaningful raises in a decade or more.

'For wages to rise, immigration must fall,' Stein said. 'That is a much more complex messaging strategy targeted at moderates in key states (rather) than messaging opposed to sanctuary cities targeted among conservatives in the heartland.'

Pete Boogaard, communications director for the pro-immigration FWD.us organization, disputed that assertion. He pointed to a 2012 study by the Fiscal Policy Institute that found 18 percent of small business owners in the U.S. were immigrants  and they accounted for 30 percent of the growth in small businesses from 1990-2010.

'We believe that immigrants and immigration are good for our communities, good for our country and good for our economy,' Boogaard told DailyMail.com.

It makes sense they would be capitalizing on this moment. For the first time they have real access (to the White House). -Heidi Beirich, Southern Poverty Law Center

FAIR's success  and the addition of several of its former leaders to the Trump administration  is worrisome for those on the left who fear the organization is tapping into a darker element of the American psyche.

'Trump has presented them (FAIR) with that grand opportunity to pursue greatly restricted legal and illegal immigration,' said Beirich, of the Southern Poverty Law Center. 'People can disagree on immigration. Obviously, we just don't want it (immigration policy) decided by racist views.'

FAIR's exploding social media presence is further evidence of its growing influence.

The group now has 187,000 Twitter followers, compared with just 8,700 in 2015. FAIR has also reached 1.8 million Facebook 'likes,' compared to 351,000 in 2015. Its video content on YouTube has also grown in popularity, going from 609,000 views in 2015 to reach 6.6 million views by 2016.

FAIR leadership is aware of how much the conversation on immigration has changed.

'You have this incredibly valuable level of public engagement on an issue that in the 1980s was pretty much dominated by insiders and often took place out of view,' Stein said, adding that he doesn't think the opposition has made a successful argument for why more immigration is good for America.

In many ways, Trump has been the politician that FAIR has been waiting for. He's elevated discussions on things like chain migration  the process by which green card holders or legal U.S. residents can sponsor family members for immigration into this country.

Stein said it was once considered too wonky to be mainstream, but with the help of Trump it is now a topic on the tongue of many Americans.

Julie Kirchner, ombudsman to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services branch of the Department of Homeland Security, is the former executive director of FAIR. Robert Law, a senior policy advisor at USCIS is a former government relations director at FAIR

'Trump has amplified a lot of these important concepts to enhance public understanding in a way that hasn't been done before,' Stein said. 'Our donor base is very excited about any candidate that is going to make this a marquis issue.'

'You'd have to go back to probably Teddy Roosevelt for the last time you had a president in the White House and control of the Congress who made immigration control a major issue,' he added. 'Most of the time if it has come up it's a minor issue or a secondary issue. '

The 9/11 terrorist attacks were supposed to be a time when FAIR's message could have gripped the American public as it has now  and Stein said they did enjoy a measure of success at that time.

However, even Republican President George W. Bush was in some ways a disappointment to the group, particularly given his (failed) attempt in 2007 to extend amnesty to illegal immigrants.

Trump appears to be more closely aligned with the organization's philosophy than any other president since their founding.

'It makes sense they would be capitalizing on this moment,' said Beirich, of the Southern Poverty Law Center. 'For the first time they have real access (to the White House). That wasn't (previously) true under Republicans or Democrats.'

In fact, some of FAIR's former leaders are now in positions of power within the administration.

The organization's previous executive director, Julie Kirchner, was an advisor on Trump's campaign and later named ombudsman to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services branch of the Department of Homeland Security.

Robert Law, FAIR's former government relations director left the organization in October 2017 to become a senior policy advisor at the same agency.

The group also has a close relationship with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has spearheaded much of the crackdown on immigrants, giving him an award in 2007 to thank the then-senator for his efforts to kill the Bush bill that would have extended amnesty to immigrants in the country illegally. Sessions has also been a keynote speaker at at least one FAIR event.

'To be honest, I'm surprised they haven't hired more people out of the stable of our organization,' Stein said.Festival goers may have taken tablets made from industrial paint, belieiving they were ecstasy, at both Manchester Pride and Creamfields, it has been revealed.

Organisers have released urgent warnings after the rare substance, never before found in the UK, was detected by a drug testing laboratory after drugs were taken from amnesty bins and tested.

Scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University and GMP partnership MANDRAKE (The Manchester Drug Analysis & Knowledge Exchange) made the discovery.

The official Twitter feed for Manchester's four-day LGBT celebration posted a warning.

The 'UPS' pills were made from MMMP but revellers believed they were buying ecstasy at both Manchester Pride and Creamfields in Cheshire

It stated: 'WARNING! Harmful MMMP (Caccure 907) sold as crystal MDMA. MMMP is a potentially toxic substance. TAKE CARE! If unwell see medics.'

MMMP, a chemical known as a photoinitiator is normally used in the production of inks and in coloured coatings.

MMMP has never been discovered in drugs in this country before and its not classified as a psychoactive substance by the European Commission.

Very little is known about its effect on humans, however it is for example considered toxic to fish and aquatic life in water, and therefore dangerous to the environment.

Thousands of people dressed in every colour of the rainbow line the streets of Manchester for the annual Manchester Pride parade

The fact it is visually very similar to the crystal form of MDMA, or Ecstasy has prompted fears people may unwittingly take it thinking it is the popular party drug, hence the warnings.

Dr Oliver Sutcliffe, who works on the MANDRAKE team, said 'numerous bags' of the harmful substance being sold as MDMA had been found over the weekend.

This included at Creamfields in Daresbury, Cheshire. Organisers from the festival also tweeted saying: 'MMMP has been identified by our on-site Lab.

'There is no safe way to visually tell its strength and contents.

'If you have a substance of concern please drop into Welfare & use the amnesty bins provided. If you or a friend feel unwell seek help @ChillWelfare in the Campsite village.'

Charity The Loop, who carry out voluntary drug testing for festival goers where permitted, said on their Twitter feed: 'MMMP (aka MTMP) is an industrial dye hardening agent which the Loop identified thru front of house testing in 2016 & 17 being sold (very rarely) as MDMA - now detected @ManchesterPride & @Creamfields 2018.

The pills and powders contain a long lasting powerful stimulant called alpha-PVP. Festival organisers told people to seek help if they had taken it and were feeling unwell

'There is limited documentation about effects & risks.' Drug safety has been high on the agenda at Pride in recent years. Two people were taken ill after taking super-strength Green Rolex Ecstasy pills in 2016.

As well as MMMP, Creamfields also issued a warning about yellow coloured 'UPS' pills said to be in circulation at the festival.

Rather than MDMA they contain a long lasting powerful stimulant alpha-PVP.

The festival tweeted: 'Yellow UPS sold as MDMA have been tested by onsite lab and identified as a long lasting powerful stimulant alpha-PVP which can cause extreme anxiety, paranoia & unpleasant hallucinations.

'Dosage is much lower than MDMA so it's easy to take too much, seek help if you feel unwell.'A commuter bus and a semitrailer were accidentally hit by a flurry of gunfire while traveling along a Utah highway.

Davis County Chief Deputy Ty Berger said Monday that no one was injured after someone fired shots from a peach orchard, located off the highway between the city of Ogden and Salt Lake City.

Both the bus and the semitrailer were hit when between five and ten shots were fired.

A commuter bus and a semitrailer were accidentally hit by a flurry of gunfire while traveling along a Utah highway

Authorities haven't yet found the shooter.

Berger says investigators believe the shooting was accidental because authorities found what they believe was the point where the shots were fired and that thick and tall trees would have prevented the shooter from seeing the highway where the bus was taking commuters to Salt Lake City.

Investigators from multiple agencies try to determine where shots fired at a UTA bus and semi truck originated from in Fruit Heights, Utah

Investigators check the orchard where they believe the gunshots came from

Utah Transit Authority spokesman Carl Arky says one bullet went through a window, missing 12 passengers and the driver.

The passengers were transferred to another bus to finish the route.

The Davis County Sheriff's Office and the Utah Highway Patrol are investigating.The Statue of Liberty has been evacuated as a precaution after a propane fire erupted in a construction area on Liberty Island.

Park spokesman Jerry Willis says visitors were ushered to a plaza a safe distance from the fire, which started shortly before noon Monday.

Willis says a construction worker was treated at the scene for a minor injury.

The Statue of Liberty has been evacuated as a precaution after a propane fire erupted in a construction area on Liberty Island

Flames erupted from a nearby shed and three propane canisters caught alight

Visitors filed onto awaiting boats as the island was evacuated as a safety measure

The Fire Department of New York said it appeared three propane tanks were involved in the fire.

No other information has been made available.

There was no damage to the statue.

The Statue of Liberty, which attracted 4.44 million visitors last year, is a popular tourist destination.

A view from the top: Fire crews can be seen working on Liberty Island which was evacuated earlier today

The Fire Department of New York was called in after a fire at a nearby construction site

The Statue of Liberty has been evacuated as a precaution after a propane fire erupted in a construction area on Liberty Island (firefighters tackle the blaze)

The Fire Department of New York said it appeared three propane tanks were involved in the fireA Miami father is begging his wife to bring back their two-year-old daughter who has been missing for five days, saying that the mother is mentally unstable and has a history of running away.

Police in Miami say Rusell Alada, 27, took off with her daughter, Isabella, last Wednesday, and no one has seen or heard from them since.

The toddler was last sighted leaving her family's home at the Milagro Coral Gables apartment building in the area of Southwest 22nd Street and 37th Avenue.

Where is Isabella? Police in Miami are looking for Rusell Alada, 27, and her two-year-old daughter, Isabella, who have not been seen or heard from since August 22

Alada's husband, Aaron Lester (left), says his wife is mentally ill and has a history of running away. He also says Rusell took off with their child after a marriage counseling session

Lester shows a WPLG news crew his daughter's room and explains that his wife took off without any diapers for Isabella

Anguished Miami father gives a tour of his daughters room. He says his wife, who was diagnosed with a mental illness, took 2-year-old Isabella Alada without any toothbrush or spare clothes for the girl 5 days ago. pic.twitter.com/fWEeggNhHy  Madeleine Wright (@MWrightWPLG) August 27, 2018

Alada's husband, Aaron Lester, told WSVN his wife has been diagnosed with an unspecified mental illness, and that she left their home without any diapers, a toothbrush or a change of clothes for Isabella.

'Im sure that [Isabella] could be happier. Im sure that shes terrified,' he said. 'Im sure that she wants to be back in her bed and back in school.'

Lester told Local10 his wife and daughter vanished just hours after he and Alada had a tense marriage counseling session.

According to the husband, their therapist said some things that ran counter to his wife's point of view, and that on the ride home she was uncommonly quiet.

Isabella (pictured left with her mom and right) was last seen leaving her family's home in the area of Southwest 22nd Street and 37th Avenue with Alada

Some time later, while her husband was not home, Alada packed a small suitcase, but he says she failed to take her medication or additional clothing.

Lester also revealed that during her pregnancy, Alada went missing in her native country, the Philippines. She was found days later living in a 24-hour McDonald's.

The husband and father fears for the safety of his wife and daughter, and says he just wants them to come home.

The missing child stands at 3 feet in height, weighs about 30lbs and has black hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing a blue dress, pink shorts and a yellow hair bow.

Anyone with information on Isabellas whereabouts is being asked to call Miami Police at 305-603-6300.Attorney Alan Dershowitz, an ally of Donald Trump's, is warning that if prosecutors can come after the president than anyone can be targeted.

'If they can target President Trump, they can target you, they can target anyone,' he said on 'Fox & Friends' Monday morning.

'The biggest crime you can commit in America today is to a have been associated with Donald Trump,' he noted.

Attorney Alan Dershowitz, an ally of Donald Trump's, is warning that if prosecutors can come after the president than anyone can be targeted

'The biggest crime you can commit in America today is to a have been associated with Donald Trump,' Alan Dershowitz said

Dershowitz spent his six minutes on Trump's favorite morning cable news show weaving back-and-forth between tales of caution for the president and railing against the investigations.

He insinuated that Trump allies may stand down as they could find themselves in a situation like former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was convicted on eight counts of tax and bank fraud, and the president's former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to eight federal charges, including one of campaign finance violations.

'If you're associated with Donald Trump, they will Manafort you, they will Cohen you, they will do all of these things to you,' Dershowitz cautioned.

But he spent most of his time claiming that the greatest danger to the president is the probe of the Trump Organization being carried out by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Dershowitz argues that is a bigger threat to Trump than the Russia investigation being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller.

'I've said from day one that the greatest risk to President Trump, his presidency and his businesses are in the southern district of New York, not with Mueller,' he said.

The Southern District of New York is the office that prosecuted Cohen.

Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's chief financial officer, received an immunity deal from prosecutors in that investigation.

Weisselberg also has kept an eye on the president's personal finances and tax returns while he runs the business with Trump's two eldest sons.

The immunity deal led to speculation the Trump's business dealings may be come under a prosecutor's microscope.

Weisselberg had a front row seat to many of those deals.

Cohen also spent years at the Trump Organization before becoming the president's personal attorney.

Dershowitz said the difference between the two is that the Russia probe involves the constitutional powers of the presidency while the investigation of Trump's business offers 'fewer defenses' for the president.

'Remember the Mueller investigation all involves issues that have constitutional defenses,' Dershowitz said.

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen also has vast knowledge of the Trump Organization

Dershowitz said the Russia probe involves the constitutional powers of the presidency while the business probe offers 'fewer defenses' for Trump

'The problem is that with the southern district there are no constitutional defenses. These are business investigations. Of course the president can not be indicted but his businesses can be indicted. They can look into loans that he may have secured, foreign investments, foreign involvements. He has fewer defenses,' he added.

'If I were Trump's lawyers, I would be focusing all of my defense efforts on the southern district. Let the Mueller probe go. I don't think it is going anywhere but the southern district raises some real red flags for Trump's businesses,' he concluded.

Dershowitz, who's represented celebrity clients in high-profile cases, has argued against impeaching Trump and said his defense of the president has gotten him shunned on the liberal Democratic enclave Martha's Vineyard.

'I don't think there is all that much the president can do here to stop the investigation,' he said.Illegal migrants seeking to enter Europe use various long and perilous routes that are evolving as authorities attempt to stem the flow of new arrivals.

Here is an overview of how people are reaching the continent.

How do migrants reach Europe?

Most arrive by crossing the Mediterranean, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), with 172,000 entering through Greece, Italy and Spain last year.

The number of arrivals is down sharply from the peak in 2015, when 1.02 million entered Europe via the Mediterranean.

Since the start of this year there have been 44,370 arrivals; that is far below the 48,000 who entered Greece over just five days in October 2015.

Maltese paramedics aid migrants on board the Lifeline NGO rescue vessel stranded in the Mediterranean with more than 200 migrants as it finally berthed in Valletta, Malta, on 27 June 2018

What are the routes across the Mediterranean?

Most of the crossings last year were from Libya or Tunisia into Italy, known as the 'Central Mediterranean' route, says the EU's Frontex border agency.

It was used by 118,962 people, mostly Nigerians, Guineans and Ivorians.

But arrivals via this route have plunged 75 per cent since a controversial July 2017 deal between Rome and the Libyan coastguard.

Crossings have also dropped sharply from Turkey to Greece, the 'Eastern Mediterranean' route. After close to 900,000 migrants in 2015, Frontex recorded only 42,000 last year, essentially Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians.

The decline came after a 2016 deal between the EU and Turkey in which Ankara agreed to take back illegal migrants landing on Greek islands in exchange for billions of euros in aid and other incentives.

More recently there has been a sharp increase in the use of a route between Morocco and Spain.

Nearly abandoned until 2000, this 'Western Mediterranean' route saw 23,000 crossings last year, mostly of Algerians, Ivorians and Moroccans.

The number of migrants and refugees using the route to reach Spain stood at 20,992 between January 1 and July 25 according to the International Organization for Migration.

This compared to Italy, where just over 19,500 have arrived up to August 23, and at least 13,120 in Greece, according to UNHCR.

The renewed popularity of the route is straining Spain's law-enforcement response and its social safety networks.

Of the 972 who lost their lives at sea trying to make the crossing to Europe, nearly a third (292) died trying to reach Spain.

Other ways into Europe

The main secondary route into the EU is through the western Balkans into Eastern Europe.

Around 12,000 people entered this way last year, most of them Afghans, Iraqis and Pakistanis - a sharp reduction from the 760,000 in 2015.

But this path joins up with one used by migrants who have already passed through Turkey and Greece, meaning the actual numbers of new arrivals don't always add up.

Routes into Europe are constantly evolving: according to the French embassy in Slovenia, a new one is developing from Greece through Albania, Croatia and Slovenia, with nearly 1,800 crossings between January and May this year.

An 'Arctic route' was briefly in operation 2015 when about 100 migrants crossed a day from Russia into Norway on bicycle.

Getting through Africa

There are also several routes from African countries to departure points on the Mediterranean, some involving a dangerous crossing of the Sahara desert.

A Somali leaving from Mogadishu, for example, could travel via Addis Ababa, Khartoum, Cairo and then Tripoli, ahead of the sea crossing to Europe.

An Ivorian leaving from Abidjan might pass via Ouagadougou, Niamey and Agadez - Niger's renowned 'gateway to the Sahara' - to reach Libya.

The high human toll

The UNHCR says it has registered 16,607 migrants dead or missing at sea since 2014.

To this should be added the toll for the perilous Sahara crossing, which the International Organization for Migration says is probably as high as that for the Mediterranean.

United for Intercultural Action, a Dutch group which records the identities of victims of the crossings, says at least 34,361 migrants have died trying to reach Europe since 1993.

'Thousands of others have never been found,' it says.Advertisement

Vladimir Putin has shared his latest batch of summer holiday snaps showing the Russian President getting up close and personal with nature.

The Russian President typically seeks out rugged, often shirtless activities on his summer vacations. This year he seemed to go for a more laid back trip.

Russia's 65-year-old leader returned to one of his favorite holiday spots: the far-flung wilderness of Siberia's remote Tyva region at the picturesque Sayano-Shushenski Nature Reserve.

Dressed in combat trousers along with a jacket and a fisherman hat, Putin struck macho and brooding poses while pictured hiking, examining plants and riding in a boat on the Yenisey River.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday that Putin spent last weekend hiking in the mountains with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the head of Russia's main intelligence agency, FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov.

The Russian president recently insisted he felt no embarrassment over the many popular topless images paraded in his last collection of holiday snaps.

Speaking during a visit to Vienna in June this year, he said he saw 'no need to hide behind the bushes' while on vacation.

Photos of the Kremlin leader with his shirt off - sometimes fishing, holding a gun or riding of horseback - have been seen as an attempt to cultivate a powerful image as a man of action.

But he made light of a question about what was the 'true story' behind the 'half naked' pictures, saying: 'You said "half-naked" not "naked", thank God. When I am on vacation I see no need to hide behind the bushes, and there is nothing wrong with that,' he said.

Photos released by the Kremlin this time round capture the president with his shirt on as he opted for warmer clothing to combat the chillier weather.

Macho man: Vladimir Putin enjoying the great outdoors in Sayano-Shushenski Nature Reserve in the West Sayan Mountains in Tyva Republic, south Siberia

Inspecting the greenery: The Russian President and Russia's Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu both check out the vegetation on the Siberian hills

The president took advantage of the calm waters to appreciate the mountains in the south of Siberia from a better vantage point

The 65-year-old shared a collection of snaps from his summer holiday in the south of Siberia where he delighted in the great outdoors

Look out: The head of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov (left), and Vladimir Putin in the Sayano-Shushenski Nature Reserve

This year Russia's 65-year-old leader returned to one of his favorite holiday spots: the far-flung wilderness of Siberia's remote Tyva region

The Russian President taking part in a hike in Tyva Republic, south Siberia for his summer vacation this year

The director of Sayano-Shushenski Nature Reserve, Gennady Kiselev (pictured left) talking to the President of RussiaIt appears Georgina Chapman is leaving behind the one last relic of the life she once had with Harvey Weinstein.

Moving trucks could be seen outside the six-story West Village apartment Chapman and Weinstein once shared with their two young children on Monday.

Weinstein sold the apartment for $25.13million in March after Chapman filed for divorce in the wake of the disgraced mogul's #MeToo scandal.

More than 100 women have accused Weinstein of rape, sexual assault, or harassment since the New York Times expose was published in October.

Moving trucks could be seen outside the six-story West Village apartment Georgina Chapman and Harvey Weinstein once shared with their two young children on Monday

A man could be seen moving stacks of large boxes and crates outside the home, which Weinstein purchased for $14.95million in 2006, a year before the couple wed

A man could be seen moving stacks of large boxes and crates outside the home, which Weinstein purchased for $14.95million in 2006, a year before the couple wed.

A deed filed with the NYC Department of Finance Office that was obtained by DailyMail.com shows that Cheget LLC paid for the property.

It is not known who is behind Cheget LLC, which was set up in February in New York and lists a Manhattan law office as its address.

But Cheget LLC is the same Manhattan law office that previously worked with The Weinstein Company on a debt restructuring.

The date of the sale was March 19, which was also the first day that Chapman was spotted in Manhattan after fleeing the city with her two children at the height of the scandal.

Weinstein sold the apartment for $25.13million in March after Chapman filed for divorce in the wake of the disgraced mogul's #MeToo scandal

A deed filed with the NYC Department of Finance Office that had been obtained by DailyMail.com shows that Cheget LLC paid for the property

Chapman first found refuge in Los Angeles before spending an extended amount of time in London, where her parents live, once the allegations broke.

Weinstein has sold a number of properties in the last few months as his legal battles have continued to mount up.

Weeks after he offloaded the West Village townhouse, the former movie mogul sold his $1.8million mock-Tudor cottage in Hollywood.

Weinstein also sold one Westport, Connecticut home for $16.5million in October, and two neighboring properties in the same town for $10million and $6million earlier this year.

Chapman has been staying at the West Village townhouse since returning to New York from London, where she took her children in the wake of Weinstein's scandal

But in May Chapman revealed she planned to move her children to upstate New York, and weeks later she placed a bid on a property in Westchester

He put his Hamptons home on the market as well and it was sold in January for $10million.

The total price paid for all six properties was $70.9million. Weinstein made a profit off all the sales with the exception of his Hamptons home, taking a $2million loss.

Weinstein's West Village home was recently discussed in a Vogue profile about Chapman and her life following the enormous scandal.

Chpaman, who went in hiding for five months after the scandal broke, has maintained that she was never suspicious of her husband

Reporter Jonathan Van Meter noted that while the apartment had the designer's stamp 'all over it', it had been stripped of anything Weinstein-related.

'All evidence of the original occupant would appear to have been scrubbed away - except for a large piece of art hanging in the hallway,' Meter writes.

'At the bottom, it is signed, "For Harvey Weinstein"'.

It was in the Vogue profile that Chapman revealed her intentions of moving the couple's children upstate.

'As soon as this happened, I had this crazy vision,' she said. 'I know what I need to do. I need to move to a farm upstate.'

'My daughter loves riding, my son responds to animals. I need to build a farm.'

Just weeks after the profile was released, it was reported that Chapman had placed a bid on a property in Westchester, New York.

Sources reported that the residence is located in an 'A-list celebrity neighborhood'.

Chapman and Weinstein reached a divorce agreement back in January.

The prenuptial agreement she signed will reportedly pay her out between $15 and $20million after 10 years of marriage.

Chapman will also get custody of their daughter India, seven, and their five-year-old son Dashiell.

Chapman and Weinstein reached a divorce agreement in January. The prenuptial agreement she signed will reportedly pay her out between $15 and $20 million after 10 years of marriage

Chapman, who went in hiding for five months after the scandal broke, has maintained that she was never suspicious of her husband.

'That's what makes this so incredibly painful: I had what I thought was a very happy marriage. I loved my life,' she said.

Meanwhile, Weinstein has just lost a bid to have a new lawsuit accusing him of sex trafficking thrown out of court.

Earlier this month a judge gave permission for British actress Kadian Noble to continue with her suit, which accuses Weinstein of violating laws against sex trafficking by luring her to his Cannes hotel room with the false promise of a role for the purpose of sex.

US District Judge Robert W. Sweet agreed with Noble's lawyers that the exchange could constitute a 'commercial sex act', and rejected defense arguments that 'nothing of value' was exchanged during the encounter.

Weinstein invited Noble to his hotel room in February 2014 to watch her demo reel before allegedly molesting her and forcing her into a bathroom to watch him masturbate.The Canadian man charged with murdering two police officers and a couple has made his first appearance in court Monday.

Matthew Vincent Raymond, 48, was pictured entering the courtroom to face four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of officers Sara Burns, 43, and Robb Costello, 45, as well as Donnie Robichaud, 42, and Bobbie-Lee Wright, 32.

Earlier this month the two officers responded to a call to find Ribichaud and Wright dead before being shot themselves.

Monday's hearing was the public's first glimpse of Raymond, as he kept a low profile with very few photos of him circulating beside old fuzzy yearbook shots from his teenage years.

Matthew Vincent Raymond appeared in court Monday in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

He allegedly gunned down officers Sara Burns, 43, and Robb Costello, 45, earlier this month

About 70 members of the victims' families showed up to attend the hearing and watched as Raymond exited the police van in an orange jumpsuit.

Raymond's lawyer Nathan Gorham said he expects his client will plead not guilty at his next hearing in late September and is looks forward to 'vigorously' defending himself.

Gorham told reporters that the alleged shooter is in 'shock and poor physical condition.'

On August 10, the four were gunned down outside of an apartment complex in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.

Robichaud and Wright has been in a relationship before their death, according to Facebook.

Robichaud's cousin, Sean Callahan, said they had just got together at the beginning of August.

Fredericton's deputy police chief Martin Gaudet said the two officers were responding to calls of shots fired at the complex around 7am.

A motive is unknown and it is reported that Raymond had been living in the apartment building for about four months.

The officers were then shot and killed.

Donnie Robichaud, 42, (left) and Bobbie-Lee Wright, 32 were allegedly gunned down by Raymond

Raymond is charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the shooting death earlier this month at an apartment complex , pictured

Costello was a 20-year police veteran and father-of-four, while Burns was a married mother-of-three with the force for two years.

Raymond was arrested at the scene and taken to hospital with serious injuries after being shot in the stomach by police, according court documents.

Officers Burns and Costello showed up to find the two civilians dead.

The shooting came as Canada wrestles with a string of violent acts, including an incident in Toronto last month where a man with a handgun opened fire in a crowded part of the city, killing two people and wounding 13 before he died in the confrontation.

In April, a man who linked himself to a misogynistic online community used a van to run down pedestrians in a busy part of Toronto, killing 10 people and injuring 14.

Authorities are also still pursuing leads in an ongoing investigation of a serial killer who has been charged with killing eight men in the city in recent years.A makeshift memorial has been growing outside of the funeral home in Phoenix where Sen John McCain's body is being held ahead of a cross-country farewell later this week.

The 81-year-old died Saturday afternoon surrounded by loved ones at his family's ranch in Sedona, Arizona, following a year-long battle with aggressive brain cancer.

McCain's passing has been met with an outpouring of praise and gratitude for his decades of service to his country including in the Navy and as longtime US senator.

An Honor Guard has been stationed outside of the mortuary where McCain's body is resting as mourners of all ages visit to pay their respects - including one man who was photographed saluting the Guard's American flag.

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A makeshift memorial has been growing outside of A L Moore Grimshaw Mortuary in Phoenix where Sen John McCain's body is being held ahead of a cross-country farewell later this week

An Honor Guard has been stationed outside of the funeral home next to the memorial site

A touching photograph shows a man saluting the Guard's American flag on Monday morning

Dozens of small gifts including American flags, candles flowers and photographs have been piling up in front of the A L Moore Grimshaw Mortuary since McCain's passing.

A steady stream of mourners were photographed as they paused to reflect at the site and pay their respects to the American patriot.

The Honor Guard was holding a Navy flag and a Prisoners of War flag in honor of the Naval pilot who was held captive for five years during the Vietnam War.

An Honor Guard holds a Prisoner of War flag with the words: 'You are not forgotten'

Richard Means, a member of the POW/MIA/KIA Honor Guard, as well as National American Indian Veterans, stands guard outside the mortuary where McCain's body is held

A steady stream of mourners were photographed as they paused to reflect at the mortuary

A woman crouches down near the growing pile of gifts at the makeshift memorial in Phoenix

Several makeshift memorials have been set up throughout the city of Phoenix

On Wednesday McCain will lie in state at the Arizona Capitol, which would have been his 82nd birthday.

The following day his remains will be transported to Washington, DC, for his burial ceremony.

A private ceremony will take place inside the state Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday at 10am PST. The public is then invited to pay their respects to McCain from 2pm - 8pm PST.

On Thursday, there will be a memorial service celebrating his life and legacy at North Phoenix Baptist Church in Arizona at 10am PST. He will be flown to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland in the evening.

McCain died Saturday afternoon of brain cancer at his ranch near Sedona, Arizona, at age 81

His funeral journey will begin Wednesday in his home state of Arizona, at the Capitol in Phoenix (pictured), on what would have been his 82nd birthday

He will be lain in state in the U.S. Capitol rotunda in Washington DC on Thursday

Across the country in Washington, DC, McCain's former campaign staffers were photographed in tears outside the senator's office in the Russell Senate Building.

Ashley Harper and Michael Harper were seen with their two young sons Culhane and Fincher, gazing at a plaque bearing McCain's name.

Nearby at the Smithsonian National Museum visitors have been leaving notes next to a photo of the prominent politician.

McCain served as Arizona senator for more than four decades beginning in 1986 and ran for president two times, once in 2000 and a second time in 2008.

He has been remembered as a dutiful public servant who dedicated his life to the American people.

On Monday morning the New York Stock Exchange in Manhattan held a moment of silence for McCain.

McCain's former campaign staffers Ashley Harper and Michael Harper visited McCain's office in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, to pay respects on Monday morning

Ashley wipes away a tear while her husband talks to their young boys Culhane and Fincher

Visitors have left messages in a notebook next to a photograph of McCain on display at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC on Monday

An image of the late senator was displayed on a screen during a moment of silence for McCain prior to the opening bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange MondaySenator John McCain's final words included a rebuke to President Donald Trump and his ideas as he cautioned America is weakened 'when we hide behind walls'.

The late senator's last words were revealed on Monday in Arizona, when his longtime aide Rick Davis read a statement McCain dictated in his final days of life.

McCain's letter to America spoke of his love for the United States and his gratitude to his family and his nation.

But in his talk of patriotism were words of caution.

'We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe,' McCain's statement read. 'We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.'

Trump wants to build a border wall between the United States and Mexico.

Sen. John McCain's last words included a rebuke to President Trump

Longtime McCain aide Rick Davis choked up when he read McCain's last words

The senator died Saturday at the age of 81 after a long battle with brain cancer.

Davis choked up a several points as he read McCain's words:

'I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil.'

'Like most people, I have regrets. But I would not trade a day of my life, in good or bad times, for the best day of anyone else's.'

McCain noted: 'We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates.'

'But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.'

He concluded: 'Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history.'

Davis, before he began reading McCain's letter, warned: ''This will be somewhat difficult.'

McCain's final words came as Trump, for the second time on Monday, declined to answer questions about his thoughts on the senator's legacy.

The president was touting a new trade deal between the United States and Mexico in the Oval Office when he was asked about the late senator's legacy. And he was asked again later in the day when he welcomed the president of Kenya to the White House.

Trump was also criticized for not releasing a formal proclamation in the wake of the senator's death - as is traditional when a notable citizen dies.

The president instead issued a tweet offering prayers to the senator's family.

Additionally the flag at the White House was at full staff on Monday after being half staff on Sunday.

Davis declined to answer any question's about the flag or Trump's response to McCain's death.

'The entire focus of McCain family is on John McCain. There really is no room in the McCain family today to focus on anything but him,' Davis said. 'I think any discussion of what any one individual has done or said, if you look at the gravity of all he reactions around the world - world leaders our allies - it's been immense. They choose to focus on that.'

Twice on Monday President Trump declined to answer questions on McCain's legacy

John McCain (pictured December 2017) passed away after a battle with brain cancer

Davis, who worked on both of McCain's presidential campaigns, also offered a detailed schedule for McCain's memorial services and burial.

He said Trump will not be attending the memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. on Saturday.

'The president will not be, as far as we know, attending,' he said.

McCain will be honored in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday, which will be his 82nd birthday.

'Only John McCain could rig a big birthday celebration like this,' Davis said.

There will be a memorial service for him on Thursday at the North Phoenix Baptist Church.

At that service, Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona will give a benediction. And former Vice President Joe Biden will give a tribute.

There will be a bag piper as John loves bag pipe music," Davis said.

Additionally, McCain's adopted daughter Bridget McCain will give a reading as will Andy McCain, his son from his first marriage.

After the ceremony, the Arizona National Guard will act as honor guard during a dignified transfer of remains ceremony, during which McCain's casket will be taken aboard a presidential air lift and flown to Washington D.C.

McCain will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol building on Friday where lawmakers will hold a ceremony in his honor.

The flag is flying full staff at the White House on Monday - one day after it was lowered in tribute to the late Senator John McCain

The flag was lowed on Sunday

Vice President Mike Pence will be the administration's representative at that event and will lay a wreath.

House Speaker Paul Ryan will lay a House wreath and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer will lay a Senate wreath.

On Saturday, the McCain family will gather at the Capitol and escort McCain's remains to the Vietnam War Memorial. There, Cindy McCain and the family will lay a wreath.

McCain's funeral will take place at the National Cathedral with his daughter Megan giving the first tribute.

She will be followed by former Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former President George W. Bush, and former President Barack Obama.

Readings will be done by two of McCain's closest friends in the Senate: Sen. Lindsay Graham and former Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

Musical selections will include The Navy Hymn, The Battle Hymn of the Republic and American the Beautiful sung by the Cathedral Choir and Navy Choir.

Additionally, as specifically requested by McCain, who had worked on his funeral arrangements in the year before his death, "Danny Boy" will be sung by opera star Renee Fleming.

He will be buried on Sunday in a private ceremony at Hospital Hill at the U.S. Naval Academy surrounded by his family, friends and his fellow naval academy classmates from the Class of '58.A young boy has killed himself just four days into the new school year after being bullied for coming out as gay, his mother claims.

Jamel Myles, 9, was found dead at his family's home in Denver on Thursday. He only started fourth grade at Joe Shoemaker Elementary School on Monday.

'Four days is all it took at school,' his mother Leia Pierce told KDVR. 'I could just imagine what they said to him.'

'My baby killed himself,' Pierce's mother, she continued. 'He didn't deserve this. He wanted to make everybody happy even when he wasn't. I want him back so bad.'

Leia Pierce (left) found her nine-year-old son Jamel Myles (right) dead at their home in Denver last Thursday

Pierce says her son had come out to her as being gay a few weeks ago.

'And he looked so scared when he told me. He was like, 'Mom I'm gay.'

'And I thought he was playing, so I looked back because I was driving, and he was all curled up, so scared. And I said, I still love you,' Pierce said.

Pierce said her son wanted to tell his classmates that he was gay because he had accepted himself.

He also said he wanted to begin dressing more femininely.

'He went to school and said he was gonna tell people he's gay because he's proud of himself,' she added.

But within days of telling his classmates about his sexual orientation, Pierce discovered her son dead at home.

'I'm so upset that he thought that was his option,' Pierce said. 'My son told my oldest daughter the kids at school told him to kill himself. I'm just sad he didn't come to me.'

Jamel only started fourth grade at Joe Shoemaker Elementary School on Monday

Pierce says her son (left and right) had come out to her as being gay a few weeks ago

Pierce (pictured with her son) said her heart was broken over the loss of her son who loved dressing up in a dress and tiara, and dreamed of becoming a YouTube star

A coroner's report released on Monday confirmed the cause of death was suicide.

The Denver Police Department is investigating the death.

Denver Public School officials sent a letter to parents on Friday to inform them of the tragic death and said they will be providing grief counselors.

'It's always tough when a little one takes his life,' DPS spokesman Will Jones told The Denver Post. 'We have our crisis team there.'

Meanwhile, Pierce said her heart was broken over the loss of her son who loved dressing up in a dress and tiara, and dreamed of becoming a YouTube star.

'I'm dead inside. He was beautiful. He was magic. I lost my greatest gift,' she said.

She is calling for more 'accountability' over bullies.

'I think the child should (be held accountable) because the child knows it's wrong. The child wouldn't want someone to do it to them. I think the parent should be held (accountable) because obviously the parents are either teaching them to be like that, or they're treating them like that,' she said.

If you are experiencing suicical feelings, call National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 800-273-8255.Mexican Mormon parents have spoken of their heartache for the first time since their daughter's remains were found after her mysterious disappearance.

The skeletal remains of Elizabeth Elena Laguna Salgado, 26, were discovered in May by a hunter in a mountainous area outside Provo in Utah, where she had been staying.

Elizabeth disappeared in 2015 after traveling to the U.S. to learn English, against her parents' wishes.

Her father Julio Cesar Laguna told Univision that he tried to convince his daughter to stay in their hometown of Chiapas for at least a year before moving as the family was experiencing financial difficulties and he was worried for her safety.

Elizabeth pleaded with her dad, saying that she wanted to go to Provo because of its large Mormon population and told him it was 'the safest city in the world' and she would have better job prospects there. Her brother Julio Cesar Laguna-Salgado Jr had also visited before.

'She said she was going to come, she was determined,' Laguna said.

Elizabeth Elena Laguna Salgado wanted a better job after graduating college in 2015 and completing her Mormon mission. Learning English in Utah was key to her dream

Elizabeth's father (first front center) Julio Cesar Laguna did not want his daughter to travel to the United States to learn English because the family was struggling economically

Elizabeth with her mother, Libertad Salgado (left), and father, Julio Cesar Laguna, (right)

Holding back tears, her mother Libertad Salgado recalled a conversation she had prior to Elizabeth leaving Mexico. Her daughter asked her not to cry because she wanted to be assured that everything would be fine.

Salgado went missing 20 days after arriving in Provo.

She had just received her college degree in engineering and concluded a year-and-a-half missionary service in Mexico.

The Mexican student disappeared on April 16, 2015, three weeks after arriving in Provo, Utah. to study English at a learning center. Her decomposed body was found on May 18, 2018 about 30 miles from Provo

Elizabeth's family used different outlets to seek her return, including social media

Elizabeth arrived in Provo at the end of March 2015 to study at the Nomen Global Language Center, and shared a room with other students. She picked up a job waiting tables at a local Latino eatery.

Part of her daily routine included calling her parents after class but on the afternoon of April 16, the family received a text message from Elizabeth who wrote in Spanish 'I have already left school'.

It was the last time they would ever hear from her.

During the emotional sit down, the family spoke about how they traveled to the U.S. to try and find her, visiting the learning center she had enrolled at, plastering signs on street poles in the town and posting videos on social social media.

The family's hope were dashed in May when a local man out hunting came across her decomposed body in Hobble Creek Canyon, about 30 miles from Provo.

Authorities have still not captured her killer.

'Her destiny was calling,' Julio Cesar Laguna said.Cristhian Bahena Rivera, the 24-year-old Mexican migrant who confessed to killing University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, has fired his lawyer who defended him against President Trump's claims he was in the US illegally.

Two new lawyers are expected to replace attorney Allan Richards, who called President Trump 'sad and sorry' last week for publicly stating Rivera 'came in from Mexico illegally' and renewing his call for stronger border security.

Attorneys Chad and Jennifer Frese filed paperwork Sunday to represent Rivera, however Richards says the family hired him and he hasn't spoken with his client about being replaced.

Rivera faces first-degree murder charges after leading police to Mollie Tibbetts' lifeless body last week that had been left stabbed to death since her July 18 disappearance.

Cristhian Behana Rivera, 24, fired his defense attorney Allan Richards and has hired two new lawyers

Richards called President Trump 'sad and sorry' last week for publicly stating Rivera 'came in from Mexico illegally' and pushing for stronger border security

Rivera is charged with first-degree murder in the death of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts

Jennifer Frese confirmed Monday that the two have been privately retained to represent Rivera.

On Tuesday, Rivera led police to Mollie Tibbetts' body. She had been missing since July 18

Trump jumped at the opportunity to use Rivera as an example of why the US needs a border wall and stricter immigration policies - branding the current ones 'pathetic'.

The dairy worker was arrested last Monday when police traced him through surveillance footage that showed his car following Mollie.

When Rivera, a father-of-one, was approached by police he went willingly to participate in an interview where he confessed to attacking Mollie, putting her body in the trunk of his car and driving her to a field 10 miles away.

It was later revealed that Rivera was an illegal migrant farm worker from Mexico who used a fake ID to pass background checks, his employers say.

Dane Lang, co-owner of the farm, previously said that Rivera had worked there for four years and passed all background checks, despite police saying he had been in the US illegally the entire time.

Lang later revealed that Rivera used a fake ID and social security number to cheat the Social Security Administration verification system, which the farm used.

Richards is pictured defending his client in last week's hearing. Trump jumped at the opportunity to use Rivera as an example of why the US needs a border wall and stricter immigration policies

The news of his immigrant status prompted the president to immediately post a clip demanding tougher immigration rules.

In the video filmed on the White House lawn, he said that Mollie, 'an incredible young woman' had been killed by someone who 'came in from Mexico illegally.'

'We need the wall, we need our immigration laws changed, we need our border laws changed,' he said. 'We need Republicans to do it because Democrats aren't going to do it.

To that, Rivera's now-former lawyer Richards said: 'Sad and sorry Trump has weighed in on this matter in national media which will poison the entire possible pool of jury members.'A surveillance image has been released of a man suspected in the murder of a former Playboy model found strangled to death in her upscale Pennsylvania condo last week.

Authorities on Monday released video of a man they say had contact with 36-year-old Christina Carlin-Kraft in the area of Broad and Locust streets in Philadelphia the morning of her death.

Her body was found later Wednesday night at 9.15pm in the bedroom of her Ardmore condo she had moved into just one week prior.

Police say the unidentified man was captured on video at the entrance to a subway station and may have used a ride-hailing service to get from Philadelphia to Ardmore.

This still image from surveillance video made in Philadelphia shows a person of interest in the murder of Christina Carlin-Kraft

The model was found strangled to death in the bedroom of her apartment in the Philadelphia suburb of Ardmore, Pennsylvania

The man in the video appears to be a black man with facial hair, wearing a white durag and a black leather jacket.

Surveillance video near the 15th and Market entrance to the SEPTA in Philadelphia captured him.

Investigators said the person of interest possibly called a car service from 13th and Locust in Center City to Sibley Avenue in Ardmore, where Kraft lived.

Police say surveillance cameras at the apartment show a man following Kraft into the building the night before she was discovered.

However the man is not seen on surveillance footage leaving the apartment and cops believe he likely escaped by jumping off the balcony.

Lower Merion Township Police were called to Kraft's residence on Wednesday to perform a wellness check when she was found dead.

Police have not confirmed who initiated the wellness check.

An autopsy report revealed the lingerie model died by 'ligature strangulation.' As of Monday, police had not made any arrests.

She was found dead in the bedroom of her ground-floor apartment in Ardmore, Pennsylvania on Wednesday at 9.15pm

Police have not named any suspects in Kraft's murder. Aside from her stint with Playboy, the model appeared in Maxim Magazine, Vanity Fair, Victoria's Secret and Smashbox Cosmetics during her glamorous career

Kraft's modeling profile lists photo shoots for Vanity Fair, Victoria's Secret, Playboy and Maxim.

Three days prior to murder, Christina Kraft reported to police that jewelry had been stolen from her apartment.

Her father Stuart Kraft, who lives in Linwood, New Jersey, said that she had gotten in touch via text to tell him about the break-in.

'A few days before, somebody had broken into the apartment and stole all her jewelry,' he said.

'I didn't speak to her after that. She texted me a little bit. She didn't want to bother me with her troubles and how I wish she did.

Her father told DailyMail.com: 'She was a happy-go-lucky lady, she loved life. She loved to be around people and she liked to enjoy herself with people and that's what I think occurred. I think that somebody saw her happiness and took advantage of that.'

Prosecutors asked anyone who recognizes the man seen in the video to call Lower Merion police at 610-649-1000 or county detectives at 610-278-3368. Or submit tips through the STOPit app by using the code 'MONTCOPA.'A girl views a shoal of fish at Baotou Ocean World, July 27. A series of activities were organized in Baotou city to help keep children entertained during the long summer vacation. [Photo/Baotou Daily]

Baotou children participate in a painting activity hosted by Baotou Art Museum, July 25. The activity included studying famous paintings and then trying to make accurate copies of them. [Photo/Baotou Evening News]



A suspected shoplifter being chased by police was caught on camera shooting at the officer while running away from him.

Video has emerged of the moments when Charles Edward Purvis, 23, turned around and fired his gun at the officer pursuing him in the middle of an Albuquerque, New Mexico, Walmart parking lot.

The incident occurred on August 23 while police were responding to a report of a suspected shoplifter at the local Walmart, KOAT reported.

Suspected shoplifter Charles Edward Purvis, 23, faces charges after being caught on camera pulling out a handgun and shooting a police officer during a foot chase

The video, which was captured by an officer's lapel camera, shows police trying to talk to Purvis before he exited the Walmart.

Purvis immediately takes off running across the parking lot. The officer wearing the camera then chases him through the parking lot.

As the officer is close to catching up to him, Purvis pulls out a handgun and shoots at the officer. Purvis can be seen speeding off into the distance as the officer stops, recovers quickly and draws his gun.

Nobody was injured during the shooting.

It has since been revealed that the officer Purvis shot at had only graduated from the police academy 10 weeks prior.

In the body cam video, Purvis can be seen running away from police after they try to stop him

As the officer catches up to him, Purvis can be seen pulling out a gun and shooting at the cop

Police caught Purvis later in the day after setting up a perimeter and deploying a K-9 unit to search door-to-door in the neighborhood he disappeared into, KRQE reported.

Authorities eventually tracked him down to an empty home and used gas to force him outside.

Purvis now faces multiple charges including assault with a deadly weapon and assault with intent to commit a violent felony against a peace officer.

This is said to be the fourth time that Purvis has been arrested in 2018.

Earlier this year, he faced a felony stolen vehicle charge and shoplifting and battery charges, all stemming from different incidents.

He was also charged with felony burglary in 2014 and faced a variety of misdemeanor charges in 2016.Before the ordeal: Matthew and Leigh Hall on the beach in Cuba

A devastated bride spent her wedding night on a drip after a suspected salmonella outbreak on a Thomas Cook holiday in the Caribbean.

Leigh Hall, 29, spent 3,750 on her dream wedding at the luxurious Playa Pesquero hotel in Cuba.

But just hours after tying the knot in a romantic beach ceremony, she was barricaded in her hotel bathroom with diarrhoea and a fever.

The optical assistant then spent her honeymoon bedridden, unable to see her new husband or their baby.

Most brides get carried over the threshold on their wedding night, she said. But I got wheeled into hospital.

It is the latest blow to Thomas Cook following the deaths of a British couple last week.

John Cooper, 69, and his 63-year-old wife Susan died within hours of each other on a holiday with the tour operator in Egypt.

Their daughter has suggested they may have been poisoned by a funny smell in their hotel room.

Mrs Hall and her fiance, postman Matthew Hall, also 29, had invited 24 guests to Cuba.

But a month before the wedding, she spotted comments on the resorts Facebook group where guests complained they had fallen ill with salmonella.

She called Thomas Cook but was told there hadnt been reports of salmonella for a month and that everything would be fine by the time her party arrived.

The couple, from Bristol, flew out with their seven-month-old son Alfie on May 24.

But within a week, four guests, including the best man, had become sick with diarrhoea and were bedridden, with their ordeal lasting five days.

The optical assistant spent her honeymoon bedridden, unable to see her new husband or their baby (pictured on a drip in hospital)

On the day of the wedding, the bride and groom were taken on a horse and cart to their beach ceremony, where they married under a wooden gazebo surrounded by tropical flowers.

The newlyweds posed for photographs on the beach before returning to their hotel for a sunset dinner.

But at about 9.30pm, Mrs Hall felt unwell and her bridesmaid took her to her room.

My dream wedding turned out to be a nightmare

The party was in full swing and I started to feel really sick, Mrs Hall said.

I had diarrhoea and I was vomiting. My temperature was high and I kept shaking.

'Eventually, in the early hours, my mum and dad collected me and we went to the local medical centre in a buggy. I was put on a drip for three hours.

The treatment left us with a 600 bill which we are still trying to claim back with our travel insurance.

She added: The doctor in Cuba never told me what I had, but that [salmonella] is what the others at the resort had.

'It wasnt just the sickness and the bad belly  I still didnt feel right for days after I got home. I lost nine and a half pounds in that time.

Mr and Mrs Hall enjoying their wedding day on the beach in Cuba before disaster struck. Four guests, including the best man, became sick during their wedding getaway

Mr and Mrs Hall on their dream wedding day before their ordeal began. Mrs Hall felt unwell and her bridesmaid took her to her room at about 9.30pm

Hours after tying the knot in a romantic beach ceremony, Mrs Hall was barricaded in her hotel bathroom with diarrhoea and a fever (pictured with her husband before she fell ill)

At first Thomas Cook refused to provide compensation, instead demanding further evidence of her sickness.

The company eventually offered Mrs Hall 3,000 after being contacted by the Daily Mail.

She said: Instead of enjoying the start of married life with Matthew, I was alone in our hotel room because I was worried he would end up getting sick.

When I complained to hotel staff, they told me my illness was caused by heat exhaustion and drinking too much.

'But I have a seven-month-old baby  I was sitting in the shade the whole time.

Back home: Mr and Mrs Hall with their 10-month-old son Alfie. At first Thomas Cook refused to provide compensation, instead demanding further evidence of Mrs Hall's sickness

Thomas Cook eventually offered Mrs Hall 3,000 after being contacted by the Daily Mail

I wasnt drinking much alcohol at all, just lemonade and water.

My wedding was ruined and instead of being a joyful bride, I was locked in my hotel bathroom unable to see my husband.

My dream wedding turned out to be a nightmare.

Thomas Cook said: We want our customers to have the best possible experience with us on holiday and are sorry to hear that Mrs Hall became ill while in the resort.

We are investigating thoroughly and are in contact with Mrs Hall to try and put things right.Spanish police have seized 67 kilogrammes (148 pounds) of cocaine found inside hollowed-out pineapples discovered at Madrid's main fruit and vegetable market.

Dozens of drug-stuffed fruits were seized at the sprawling Mercamadrid market among a shipment of pineapples that arrived in the Portuguese port of Setubal by ship from Costa Rica.

The fruits, believed to have a street value of almost 250,000, are said to have then been transported overland to the Spanish capital.

Spanish police have seized 67 kilogrammes (148 pounds) of cocaine found inside dozens of hollowed-out pineapples at a bustling market in Madrid

Each pineapple was 'perfectly hallowed out and stuffed with compact cylinders' containing 800-1,000 grammes cocaine.

The fruit was coated with wax or yellow paraffin to conceal the 'odours of the chemical products which the drug contains and avoid its detection', the statement said.

Police arrested seven people as part of the operation - three in Madrid and four in Barcelona - who are suspected of playing a role in the cocaine smuggling operation.

Police said each pineapple was 'perfectly hallowed out and stuffed with compact cylinders' and coated with wax or yellow paraffin to conceal the 'odours of the chemical products which the drug contains

Spain, with its historic and linguistic links to South America, is the main entry point to Europe for cocaine from the continent, mostly from Colombia.

Smugglers often resort to creative methods to get drugs past Spanish customs.

In recent years, police have found cocaine inside breast implants, a wig, a wheelchair cushion, a plaster cast encasing a man's broken leg as well as inside a 42-piece crockery set.Police should dramatically increase the use of stop and search to combat spiralling gang violence, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith demands today.

A toxic cycle of serious violence fuelled by drug dealers who operate with impunity is spreading around the country, a major report by the Conservative MPs think-tank warns.

The 148-page blueprint  which will heap pressure on London Mayor Sadiq Khan just days after the number of killings in the capital this year reached 100  calls for a US-style crackdown on gang leaders.

Police should dramatically increase the use of stop and search to combat spiralling gang violence, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith demands today. Pictured: The scene in Camberwell where emergency services respond to a mass stabbing incident

The report advocates the Group Violence Intervention (GVI) model used in Boston, Cincinnati and dozens of other US cities, and which has successfully reduced gang crime in Glasgow. Pictured: a man is seen getting arrested at Notting Hill Carnival

The 148-page blueprint  which will heap pressure on London Mayor Sadiq Khan (pictured) just days after the number of killings in the capital this year reached 100  calls for a US-style crackdown on gang leaders

In what will be seen as a criticism of Theresa May, the report accuses senior officers of all but abandoning active policing  including stop and search  because they fear being accused of institutional racism.

Terrified pensioner stabbed on the way home from a London fish and chip shop was saved by her coat A mother-of-two stabbed by a knifeman targeting lone women at night was saved by her thick coat. The victim, in her 60s, was walking home with fish and chips on Friday night when a stranger leapt out and knifed her in the stomach  just yards from a childrens park in Bow, east London. The terrified pensioner thought she had been punched as her thick clothing stopped the blade from plunging deeper into her stomach. Yesterday her distraught daughter told how her mother might have been killed, but when her attacker went to stab her a second time, she saw the glisten of the knife and just ran. Bleeding, she managed to stagger back to her home as her daughter rushed to her aid. Police are linking the unprovoked attack to the stabbing of another single woman in the same area over the Bank Holiday weekend. Both women were recovering in hospital yesterday. A spokesman for Scotland Yard said: In both cases the suspect is described as a black male, aged around 40, of large build with big hair. Advertisement

As Home Secretary, Mrs May led moves to slash the use of police search powers, warning they were being misused and black people and other ethnic minorities were up to seven times more likely to be targeted.

But the report says the racial disparity is a myth.

The report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), entitled It Can Be Stopped, also says:

A gun is fired illegally every six to nine hours in London;

The Metropolitan Police used stop and search 700,000 times a year in 2008, but last year this figure stood at just over 100,000. As a result, about 54,000 fewer criminals have been arrested;

Almost half of Londoners say there are no-go areas near where they live that they cannot go to or travel through;

Nearly three-quarters support police stop and searches;

Ministers should provide more money for community policing;

The Government should introduce a new order which allows convicted gang leaders to be stopped and searched by the police after their release from prison, while they are on licence, even if there is no concrete evidence against them.

Mr Duncan Smith, the CSJs chairman and founder, told the Daily Mail: Stop and search does two things. It tells the gangs they cannot move their guns and drugs around, making their lives much more difficult.

People claim, its not fair, but who are the communities affected by this the most? Its the poorest communities in our country. It means shops close, people dont go on the street, kids who want nothing to do with the gang feel threatened.

CSJ chief executive Andy Cook added: If a gun were fired every day in rural Oxfordshire or leafy Surrey, every police resource in the country would be focused on bringing the violence to an end.

A toxic cycle of serious violence fuelled by drug dealers who operate with impunity is spreading around the country, a major report by the Conservative MPs think-tank warns. Pictured: Stop and search near Harrow Road entrance to the Notting Hill Carnival

Four people were arrested for assault on a police officer, one for drink driving, 25 for possession of an offensive weapon, one for theft, 68 for drug offences, two for sexual offences, one for robbery, six for psychoactive drugs, one for assault and 13 for 'other crimes'

The Met Police told MailOnline that as of 5.45pm on Monday night there had been 125 arrests and 25 knives seized

And yet because this epidemic of crime is happening in our poorest, often most ethnic diverse communities, politicians feel they can turn a blind eye and pray that it all just goes away.

Measures such as stop and search work. Young offenders we talked to say it acted as a very real deterrent to carrying knives.

The report advocates the Group Violence Intervention (GVI) model used in Boston, Cincinnati and dozens of other US cities, and which has successfully reduced gang crime in Glasgow. The plan involves zero tolerance enforcement by the police, increased use of stop and search, and providing support services including housing, education and jobs for young people involved in gangs.

In Glasgow  once dubbed the murder capital of Europe  violent crime fell by half and the number of criminals carrying weapons by 85 per cent, the report says.

Mrs May has cited figures suggesting that people from black and other ethnic minority backgrounds are up to seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than if they are white. But the report says the true racial disparity is in the victims of crime. The authors point to figures showing a non-white 15 to 25-year-old is four times more likely to be fatally shot and killed than a white person of the same age.

Stop and search, it concludes, is the single most effective and immediate action to increase the chances that those who carry knives and weapons on the street are caught. Pictured: The scene where a 23-year-old man was stabbed multiple times in Lambeth

Stop and search, it concludes, is the single most effective and immediate action to increase the chances that those who carry knives and weapons on the street are caught.

Mr Duncan Smith said the GVI model meant officers would harass the hell out of gang leaders and make their lives impossible, while voluntary groups and government agencies could help youngsters get off the streets and back on the straight and narrow.

One London police officer told the reports authors: It really is a tale of two cities. You can have bullet holes left in someones bedroom window. Half the estate know it happened.

The other half  young professionals and the like  live in their bubble and dont know anything even happened.

A Home Office spokesman said: Knife crime has devastating consequences on our communities, and our Serious Violence Strategy signals a step change in the Governments approach by working with a range of agencies to focus on early intervention alongside strong law enforcement.

We have been clear that stop and search is a vital policing tool and officers have the Governments full support to use these powers.

A spokesman for the Mayor of London said: 'Sadiq is leading the charge against violent crime, investing more in the Met police each year than any previous Mayor.

'Meanwhile the Government is focused on internal politics and Brexit and has completely failed to deliver the funding and leadership desperately needed to impact real change and keep Londoners safe - cutting both funding for the police and prevention services.

'Sadiq has overseen an increase in weapons-related targeted and intelligence-led stop and search as well as funded the new Violent Crime Taskforce which is making arrests and taking knives and weapons off our streets, particularly in high-crime boroughs.

'He is also determined to tackle the causes of crime by investing 45 million in a new Young Londoners Fund, contributing to a public health-led approach to violent crimeprevention.

'Sadiq knows we still have a long way to go in bringing down violent crime, and its not just a problem in London - violent crime is rising across the country and is a national problem which required national solutions.

'Progress in Scotland was mainly down to funding, a long-term strategy, and the willingness of key agencies to play their part. In London, government provides the funding and directs other agencies - which is why the Mayor has been calling on Ministers from day one to reverse the crippling cuts to the police and grant him more powers. Until they do, we will never be able to rid our streets of violent crime and turn the lives of vulnerable young people around.'

Stabbing next to knife free poster

On London's blood-soaked streets, it is a bitterly ironic image.

On the left, a poster aimed at reducing knife crime among young people. Yards away, a police officer mans a cordon after the senseless stabbing death of a 22-year-old man.

On the left, a poster aimed at reducing knife crime among young people. Yards away, a police officer mans a cordon after the senseless stabbing death of a 22-year-old man. Pictured: The scene on Creek Road in Deptford, south London, where a young man was stabbed to death

The striking photograph was captured after Scotland Yard launched their 101st murder investigation this year. The victim was attacked in Deptford, south-east London, late on Saturday night by a gang of men. Police found him collapsed by the side of a bus shelter at 11.45pm.

The poster is part of a 1.35 million Home Office campaign to target ten to 21-year-olds in cities where knife crime is particularly prevalent. The posters, featuring real-life stories of young men and women who nearly lost their lives, are intended to promote living knife free.From tearful interviews to dropping shares and a potential break-up, it's safe to say that Elon Musk has been having a very bad last couple of weeks.

And it appears the person who feels worst about it is, surprisingly, Azealia Banks.

The rapper took to Instagram to apologize to the Tesla CEO, weeks after she publicly wrote about watching him have a meltdown at his Los Angeles home.

Banks wrote in the letter, which she sent to Musk on August 19 but posted on Instagram over the weekend, that she felt 'terrible about everything'.

'This is a strange situation to be in, and I'm not sure how exactly to begin this letter,' she wrote.

Azealia Banks took to Instagram to apologize to the Tesla CEO, weeks after she publicly wrote about watching him have a meltdown at his Los Angeles home. She later deleted it

Banks wrote in the letter, which she sent him on August 19 but posted on Instagram over the weekend, that she felt 'terrible about everything'

'I guess I could start off by apologizing for all of the painful events you've endured over the past week, as I feel as though my actions have largely exacerbated them.'

Banks said she wanted Musk to know she only came to his home with the intention of recording a 'series of tracks'.

She does not specifically name Grimes, who is rumored to have broken up with Musk last week after the pair stopped following each other on Instagram.

Banks appeared to want to leave the musician's name out of her posts after claiming that Grimes had ditched their recording session to 'coddle' Musk after he tweeted about securing funding to take Tesla private.

But Banks had no issue telling Musk that she learned a 'lot of personal information' about him since she began her correspondence with Grimes earlier this summer.

Tesla shares slipped once again on Monday, dropping nearly 4 percent after Musk announced the company would stay public

'The stuff made me feel awkward and uncomfortable about being privy to, yet I never had any intention of ever using the information against you,' she wrote.

'What started off as a cat fight led to some seriously unexpected consequences and I sincerely apologize.'

Banks then went on to try and set up a meeting with Musk, saying she had heard he was a fan of her music.

'For what it's worth, I don't believe in coincidence and I'd like to believe, that somewhere in another dimension or on another plane, this interaction happened harmoniously and resulted in positive outcomes for the both of us,' she wrote.

'This was not how I wanted to say hello.'

'If you are up for it, I'd like to meet you in person to properly and formally introduce myself to you.'

'After all, we are now the co-star's of pop culture's latest fan fiction,' she added, throwing in a winking face emoji.

'I hope this letter finds you in the best spirits. Wishing you life, luck, love, health, peace, and prosperity,' she concluded at the end of the letter.

Banks' apology also comes a week after she publicly demanded that Musk return her phone so she could retrieve her 'quality nudes' and go home

Banks claimed last week that Musk's attorney had blackmailed her and demanded she turn in her phone so they could 'delete evidence'. That post (pictured right) has since been deleted

Tesla's value plunged by $5.5billion last week after Musk burst into tears during a New York Times interview and asked for someone to take his job.

The embattled CEO also admitted to a raft of personal problems and said he relies on Ambien to sleep.

And the bad news has only continued as it was revealed Tesla shares slipped once again on Monday, dropping nearly 4 percent after Musk announced the company would stay public.

Banks' apology also comes a week after she publicly demanded that Musk return her phone so she could retrieve her 'quality nudes' and go home.

In a series of now-deleted posts, Banks claimed that Musk's attorney had blackmailed her and demanded she turn in her phone so they could 'delete evidence'.

'@elonmusk you need to contact me,' Banks wrote in one post. 'I need my phone back now @elonmusk,' she added in a separate, now-deleted post.

'Elon got an attorney involved so I called one too. They came up with all these threats of blackmail and said I had to turn in my phone if I didn't want to go to jail,' Banks wrote in yet another deleted post.

'They paid my attorney off to take my phone and delete evidence. I just want my phone back with all of my quality Nudes on it, and I want to go f**king home.'

Banks claimed earlier this month that she spent a bizarre weekend at his LA home with his girlfriend Grimes watching him have a meltdown over a 'drug-induced' Twitter rant

Banks had apparently been invited to Musk's home by Grimes, who was planning to collaborate with the rapper

The rapper went as far as suggesting the couple may have invited her to the home for 'some weird threesome sex sh*t'

While Musk initially denied ever meeting Banks, he later told the New York Times that he did come across her at his mansion when she was leaving

Banks also recorded herself saying she didn't want to be in the 'middle of this sh*t' anymore and just wanted to leave Los Angeles and return home to New York.

'I've been in LA for two weeks and I didn't get no music done, I didn't get no trip to Mars, I didn't get sh*t out of this. Let me f**king go home,' Banks said.

'This is annoying. I'm at my wit's end. I feel imprisoned, I feel stuck - I want to go back to my regular normal black girl programming. Give me my f**king phone!

That recording was also deleted from her Instagram story shortly after being posted.

While Musk initially denied ever meeting Banks, he later told the New York Times that he did come across her at his mansion when she was leaving.

'I saw him in the kitchen tucking his tail in between his legs scrounging for investors to cover his ass after that tweet,' Banks said of Musk while posting from his house.

'He was stressed and red in the face. I waited around all weekend while Grimes coddled her boyfriend for being too stupid to know not to go on Twitter while on acid.'

Immediately after Banks' claims surfaced on social media, a representative for Musk dismissed it as 'absolute nonsense' and denied that he had ever met the rapper.

But after Banks publicly wrote about Musk's meltdown, it was rumored that he and Grimes (pictured together in May) had broken up

Musk issued an about-face days later and admitted that some of Banks' claims were true.

'I saw her on Friday morning, for two seconds at about a 30-foot distance as she was leaving the house,' he told the paper.

'I'd just finished working out. She was not within hearing range. I didn't even realize who it was. That's literally the only time I've ever laid eyes on her.'

Banks had apparently been invited to Musk's home by Grimes, who was planning to collaborate with Banks.

Grimes' representative said there was a miscommunication because Grimes and Musk had made arrangements to go out of town.

Banks was left alone in the house waiting for Grimes to return.

She said she arrived at one of Musk's homes in Los Angeles early on Friday, August 10, but was left alone for days while Grimes comforted her boyfriend.

Banks finally left on Sunday night.

'Staying in Elon musks house has been like a real like episode of Get Out, Banks wrote on Instagram.

'They bring me out there on the premise that we would hang and make music. But his dumb**s kept tweeting and tucked his d**k in between his a** cheeks once s**t hit the fan.'

In subsequent posts, Banks even suggested that the couple may have invited her to their home for 'some weird threesome sex s**t to begin with'.

She also went on a vicious rant about Grimes, who she branded an 'idiot', Musk who she called a 'beta male' and branded them both 'crackhead' in the rambling attack.A mother-of-two stabbed by a knifeman targeting lone women at night was saved by her thick coat.

The victim, in her 60s, was walking home with fish and chips on Friday night when a stranger leapt out and knifed her in the stomach  just yards from a childrens park in Bow, east London.

The terrified pensioner thought she had been punched as her thick clothing stopped the blade from plunging deeper into her stomach.

The attack happened just yards from a childrens park in Bow, east London

Yesterday her distraught daughter told how her mother might have been killed, but when her attacker went to stab her a second time, she saw the glisten of the knife and just ran.

Bleeding, she managed to stagger back to her home as her daughter rushed to her aid.

Police are linking the unprovoked attack to the stabbing of another single woman in the same area over the Bank Holiday weekend.

Both women were recovering in hospital yesterday.

A spokesman for Scotland Yard said: In both cases the suspect is described as a black male, aged around 40, of large build with big hair.An ex-Royal Marine commando who smashed his pelvis in a horror holiday accident has been stranded in a Bosnian hospital after his insurers refused to fly him home.

Tony Tennant, 51, was jumping into the sea while on holiday in Mostar with his wife Dora and their two young children.

He struck something in the water and suffered a broken pelvis and a ruptured bladder. The father-of-two needs immediate surgery to prevent long-term disability.

But insurance company AXA are refusing to fly him back to the UK or pay for any medical treatment.

Tony Tennant, 51, is stranded in a Bosnian hospital with a broken pelvis and ruptured bladder

An Axa spokesman said: 'After much consideration, our teams have determined that we are unable to cover Mr Tennant's claim due to him taking part in a dangerous activity while on holiday in Bosnia.

'However, we sympathise with the situation he and his family are currently in, and are offering non-financial assistance in the hope we can get them home as soon as possible.'

Mr Tennant, who now works as a rescue diver for Specialist Group International, is stranded in the foreign hospital with his 'panicked and stressed' family by his bedside.

His wife Dora and their two young kids are by his side but are said to be upset and panicked

His diving and rescue company colleagues are trying to raise around 20,000 pounds needed to cover his medical bills and get him back to his home in Farnborough, Hampshire.

A team of voluntary Bosnian medics were being contacted in the hope they could be put on standby to operate on him so that he would be stable enough to be transferred to the UK for treatment.

A Go Fund Me campaign has been set up and has already raised more than 12,000.

Tim Barnes, SGI operations manager, who was also a former Royal Marine Commando, said the main concern was that Tony was bleeding internally.

Mr Barnes said: 'The main priority is to get his pelvis stabilised and find out where the blood loss is coming from. This also needs to be done quickly to prevent long-term disability and problems.

'But moving him by road could be extremely dangerous without surgery to put essentially a Meccano set cage on the outside of his body fixing his pelvis in place.

'We have been advised there is a window of three days to get that done.'

Mr Barnes was in constant contact with Tony's wife Dora and their two young children as well as the British Embassy.

AXA insurance is refusing the fly the former Marine home or pay any of his medical bills

'He was swimming in an area where local families were swimming and he struck something in the water. He knew he had done something very wrong right away and as he surfaced he indicated to his wife on the bank he was hurt.

'He then managed to swim - by just using his arms - back to her and dragged himself out of the water before he collapsed.

'He has ruptured his bladder and broken his pelvis. It is dangerous to move him without his pelvis being stabilised.

'Axa have refused to deal with it as they said it was an activity that was undertaken which was outside their cover.

'We are contacting military organisations for volunteers to go out and operate on him but we still have to have the funds in place, and sort out getting them into a hospital.'

Tony has been part of the expert rescue team who helped recover seven bodies in just four week during the extreme high temperatures. He has also taken part in cold case murder reviews where searches have been taken out.Prosecutors in Florida announced Monday they will not seek the death penalty against a father accused of hurling his five-year-old daughter from a St Petersburg bridge in 2015, killing her.

Jon Jonchuck, 27, is scheduled to stand trial on September 24. He is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Phoebe Jonchuck.

'The state has elected to waive the death penalty in this case,' Assistant State Attorney Doug Ellis told Judge Chris Helinger during a hearing on Monday.

Death's off the table: Prosecutors in Florida have decided not to seek the death penalty against Jon Jonchuck (left), charged with throwing his 5-year-old daughter, Phoebe, from a bridge in January 2015

Prosecutors say the father dropped the five-year-old girl into Tampa Bay off the Dick Misener bridge (pictured) after a trip to a lawyer's office

Jonchuck, who has a history of mental illness, was deemed incompetent in February 2015, a month after officials say he dropped Phoebe into Tampa Bay off the Dick Misener bridge.

Another judge found Jonchuck competent to stand trial in March 2017.

Chief Assistant State Attorney Bruce Bartlett on Monday explained that they decided to drop the death penalty to focus their attention on the issue of the defendant's sanity and streamline the proceedings.

'It dispenses with a lot of the formalities with many of the motions that would have to be litigated as well as a lot of the obstacles you encounter when doing jury selection,' Bartlett told Tampa Bay Times. 'So it kind of lets you present a more orderly trial and you can focus on the issue at hand.'

If convicted of first-degree murder at trial, Jonchuck will automatically be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

According to previous reporting by the Tampa Bay Times, just hours before the deadly January 8, 2015, incident, Jonchuck brought his daughter to the office of an attorney - and he said he was the Pope, sought a DNA test, and wanted the attorney to read a Bible in Swedish.

Jonchuck, seen in a January 2015 file image, was found competent to stand trial in March 2017

That attorney contacted 911, and Jonchuck was located at a church by deputies who determined he wasn't displaying mental illness signs, the newspaper said.

Jonchuck's mother, Michele Jonchuck, told the paper last year the death penalty 'would be too easy on him.'

'My whole family and I have to deal with this every day, and I believe he should have to deal with it. But at the same time, I believe he needs help,' she said.BBC1s political thriller Bodyguard drew nearly 7million viewers on its first night  with many quick to point out the number of women in key roles.

The debut episode of the Keeley Hawes drama on Sunday attracted an audience of 6.8million, compared with 4.7million who watched the return of Poldark in June.

And the decision to cast women as high-profile characters won praise from viewers. The programme was applauded for the bold change and the exposure of women in traditional male roles.

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Many of the 7million viewers who watched the debut episode of BBC drama Bodyguard on Sunday night were quick to praise the number of women in key roles

One viewer wrote on social media: I admire the BBC for the blatant exposure of women in traditional male roles during Bodyguard intro.' Gina McKee (pictured) portrays the head of the Metropolitan Polices Counter Terrorism Command

The main female character, Home Secretary Julia Montague, is played by The Durrells star Miss Hawes.

Gina McKee portrays the head of the Metropolitan Polices Counter Terrorism Command and Pippa Haywood is the chief superintendent who is the boss of the titular bodyguard.

Other actresses take traditionally male roles such as police firearms officers, a bomb disposal agent and even a train guard.

One viewer wrote on social media: I admire the BBC for the blatant exposure of women in traditional male roles during Bodyguard intro.

Yes it looks and feels weird, but its a bold change of direction which I hope they maintain. Each time they do, the women will seem a little less ridiculous to people.

A second said: Great to see women taking most of the senior roles in Bodyguard.

A third added: I really loved Bodyguard with women running the country.

The debut episode of the Keeley Hawes drama on Sunday attracted an audience of 6.8million, compared with 4.7million who watched the return of Poldark in June

Not everyone was pleased with the casting. One person wrote on Twitter: 'Shame it had to be spoiled by BBC PC brigade.' Pictured is a female sniper aiming at the terror suspect bodyguard David Budd, played by Richard Madden, is trying to talk down

But not all viewers were as happy, with one writing on Twitter: Shame it had to be spoiled by BBC PC brigade. Female heads of just about everything... and I am female... PC gone mad.

Last nights second episode saw Miss Hawess character and her bodyguard David Budd, played by Game Of Thrones star Richard Madden, rip their clothes off for two steamy trysts.

Following an attempted assassination on the Home Secretary, as her car was repeatedly shot at by a sniper on the roof of an office building, the pair were then given adjoining rooms for security reasons.

Budd entered the Home Secretarys room, swiftly took off his shirt and removed her trousers while kissing her neck in an intimate embrace. As the passion continued, Miss Montague said: Your job and my job, it just makes things complicated.

Nothing complicates my job, its to protect you, Budd responded. Despite the intimate scenes, it is still unclear what will happen between the duo, as Budd secretly holds a political grudge against her because of his time as a soldier serving in Afghanistan.

Last nights episode saw Home Secretary Julia Montague get steamy with her bodyguard following an attempted assassination attempt

Monday's episode portrayed a horrifying attack on a primary school in South London attended by Budds two young children

The episode also portrayed a horrifying attack on a primary school in South London attended by Budds two children.

Two terrorists try to drive a white van towards the gates but heavily armed officers open fire as it approaches.

While the driver is killed instantly, the other assailant is still conscious.

Unknown to the police the van contains explosives which are then detonated, killing five people at the scene.

As the van explodes, children are seen screaming and running into a classroom to take cover as windows shatter and teachers try to shield them.

The scenes were shown less than two weeks after a car was driven at cyclists in Westminster, and a year after eight people died in the London Bridge terror attack.

The dramas creator Jed Mercurio has said of such scenes: Its very contemporary and obviously we want to handle that in the most sensitive way, but also in a way that does feel authentic.The Kushner family real estate company has been fined $210,000 by New York City regulators following an Associated Press investigation that showed it routinely filed false documents with the city claiming it had no rent-regulated tenants in its buildings when it, in fact, had hundreds.

The city buildings department on Monday fined the Kushner Cos. for filing 42 false applications for construction work on more than a dozen buildings when presidential adviser Jared Kushner ran the business.

The false documents allowed the company to escape extra scrutiny during construction that watchdog group Housing Rights Initiative has said led to harassment of low-paying, rent-regulated tenants to get them to leave.

The Kushner Cos. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The fine followed an Associated Press report earlier this year which uncovered how the Kushner Cos. filed false paperwork with New York City officials.

None of the documents during a three-year period when Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, was CEO bore his personal signature.

'It's bare-faced greed,' said Aaron Carr, founder of Housing Rights Initiative, a tenants' rights watchdog that compiled the work permit application documents and shared them with The Associated Press.

'The fact that the company was falsifying all these applications with the government shows a sordid attempt to avert accountability and get a rapid return on its investment.'

'Bare faced greed': A tenants' right group which compiled a dossier of the Kushner Companies' conduct rounded on it just after Jared Kushner, its CEO when it broke New York City rules, sat in the Oval Office

At the time of the disclosure, in April, the Kushner Cos. responded in a statement that it outsources the preparation of such documents to third parties that are reviewed by independent counsel, and 'if mistakes or violations are identified, corrective action is taken immediately.'

'Kushner would never deny any tenant their due-process rights,' it said, adding that the company 'has renovated thousands of apartments and developments with minimal complaints over the past 30 years.'

On one case the company bought three apartment buildings in Astoria, a gentrifying neighborhood of Queens, in 2015.

Most of the tenants were protected by special rules that prevent developers from pushing them out, raising rents and turning a tidy profit.

Two years later the company sold all three buildings for $60 million, nearly 50 percent more than it paid.

For the three Queens buildings, the Kushner Cos. checked a box on construction permit applications in 2015 that indicated the buildings had zero rent-regulated tenants.

Tax records filed a few months later showed the company inherited as many as 94 rent-regulated units from the previous owner.

In all, Housing Rights Initiative found the Kushner Cos. filed at least 80 false applications for construction permits in 34 buildings across New York City from 2013 to 2016, all of them indicating there were no rent-regulated tenants.

Instead, tax documents show there were more than 300 rent-regulated units. Nearly all the permit applications were signed by a Kushner employee, including sometimes the chief operating officer.

Had the Kushner Cos. disclosed those rent-regulated tenants, it could have triggered stricter oversight of construction crews by the city, including possibly unscheduled 'sweeps' on site by inspectors to keep the company from harassing tenants and getting them to leave.

Instead, current and former tenants of the Queens buildings told the AP that they were subjected to extensive construction, with banging, drilling, dust and leaking water that they believe were part of targeted harassment to get them to leave and clear the way for higher-paying renters.

'It was noisy, there were complaints, I got mice,' said mailman Rudolph Romano, adding that the Kushner Cos. tried to increase his rent by 60 percent. 'They cleaned the place out. I watched the whole building leave.'

Tax records show those rent-regulated units that numbered as many as 94 when Kushner took over fell to 25 by 2016.

In Kushner buildings across the city, records show frequent complaints about construction going on early in the morning or late at night against the rules, improper or illegal construction, and work without a permit.

At a six-story walk-up in Manhattan's East Village that was once home to the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the Kushner Cos. filed an application to begin construction in late 2013 that, again, listed zero rent-regulated tenants. Tax records a few months later showed seven rent-regulated units.

'All of a sudden, there was drilling, drilling. ... You heard the drilling in the middle of night,' said one of the rent-regulated tenants, Mary Ann Siwek, 67, who lives on Social Security payments and odd jobs. 'There were rats coming in from the abandoned building next door. The hallways were always filled with lumber and sawdust and plaster.'

A knock on the door came a few weeks later, and an offer of at least $10,000 if she agreed to leave the building.

'I know it's pretty horrible, but we can help you get out,' Siwek recalls the man saying. 'We can offer you money.'

Mary Ann Siwek is pictured in her apartment in the East Village neighborhood which she says she was offered $10,000 to quit after a false claim there were no rent-regulated tenants in the building

Pictured here is 170 East 2nd Street in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan

Siwek turned down the cash and sued instead. She said she won a year's worth of free rent and a new refrigerator.

New York City Council member Ritchie Torres, who plans to launch an investigation into permit applications, said: 'The Kushners appear to be engaging in what I call the weaponization of construction.'

Rent stabilization is a fixture of New York City that can bedevil developers seeking to make money off buildings. To free themselves of its restrictions, landlords usually have to wait until the rent rises above $2,733 a month, something that can take years given the small increases allowed each year.

Submitting false documents to the city's Department of Buildings for construction permits is a misdemeanor, which can carry fines of up to $25,000. But real estate experts say it is often flouted with little to no consequences.

Landlords who do so get off with no more than a demand from the city, sometimes a year or more later, to file an 'amended' form with the correct numbers.

Housing Rights Initiative found the Kushner Cos. filed dozens of amended forms for the buildings mentioned in the documents, most of them a year to two later.

'There is a lack of tools to go after landlords who harass tenants, and there is a lack of enforcement,' said Seth Miller, a real estate lawyer who used to work at a state housing agency overseeing rent regulations.

Until officials inspect every construction site, 'you're going to have this incentive for landlords to make life uncomfortable for tenants.'

Exactly how much money the Kushner Cos. earned from the buildings mentioned in the documents is unclear. Of those 34 buildings, only the three in Queens and a fourth in Brooklyn appear to have been sold.

The company also likely made money by reducing the number of rent-regulated tenants and bringing in those who would pay more.

Jared Kushner, who stepped down as CEO of the Kushner Cos. last year before taking on his advisory role at the White House, sold off part of his real estate holdings as required under government ethics rules.

He retained stakes in many properties, including Westminster Management, the Kushner Cos. subsidiary that oversees its residential properties. A financial disclosure last year showed he still owns a stake in Westminster and earned $1.6 million from the holding.Students at an Ohio middle school were given an assignment to rank who they would save and who they would leave behind if the the world - basing their decisions on a person's race, age, religion, sexuality and other factors.

The assignment entitled included descriptions of 12 hypothetical people, eight of whom could be brought on a spaceship to another planet and four would be left behind to face the end of the world.

Options included a 'militant African-American medical student', a '33-year-old female Native American manager who does not speak English' and a 'racist armed police officer who has been accused of using excessive force'.

Parents at Roberts Middle School in Cuyahoga Falls caught wind of the bizarre assignment entitled 'Whom to Leave Behind' and shared it on social media, sparking widespread outrage.

Parents are outraged after students at Roberts Middle School in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, were given an assignment to rank who they would save and who they would leave behind if at the end of the world - basing their decisions on factors such as race, age, religion and sexuality

One of the outraged parents, Bernadette Hartman, told WKYC that her son was uncomfortable with completing the assignment.

'What does her being Muslim have to do with it? What does being female have to do with it?' Hartman said.

'This paper divides. It doesn't pull anybody together.'

A copy of the paper was passed along to Ward 8 Councilman Russ Iona, who told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer: 'I was kind of surprised by all the stereotypes on this.

'I'm not sure of where they are going with this or what purpose it was to serve.'

District Superintendent Todd Nichols has said the assignment is under investigation, and that he has not personally received any complaints about it from students

Ward 6 Councilman Adam Miller shared a copy on Facebook last week, revealing that he had personally spoken to the teacher.

'Inappropriate project for young kids. In my view, it clearly uses conjecture which is suggesting this fictious [sic] behavior is somehow an accepted pattern,' Miller wrote.

'Additionally, it's implanting prejudicial thoughts in these young impressionable minds. This is NOT building a - "culture of caring" - this is building a culture of animosity, antagonism & hostility!

'Why can't kids be kids? Sad to see this indecent indoctrination forced upon our kids...'

The school district is now investigating the assignment, and Superintendent Todd Nichols planned to meet with the unidentified teacher Monday.

'We take the matter very seriously, we are investigating it and we expect it to be completed very early next week with a resolution,' Nichols told the Plain-Dealer.

He also said that he hadn't gotten complaints from any students in the classes where the assignment was handed out.A four-year-old girl in Canada will be starting Kindergarten next month in a wheelchair after breaking two bones due to a 'bad bounce' at a trampoline park.

The daughter of Sarah Villanueva and Jesse Charbonneau said their daughter, Maddie, underwent surgery on Sunday to set her injuries.

This incident occurred at Extreme Air Park in New Westminster, British Columbia.

'I'm going to be wheeling her in in a wheelchair,' Villanueva told CTV. 'She's going through so much pain but she's such a trooper.'

Maddie's parents said they don't fault the company for the accident, but are still joining others in calling for government regulations on trampoline parks, including another family that had a close call at a different location.

The owner of Richmond Extreme Air Park also wrote a letter to B.C. Premier John Horgan asking for regulations on trampoline parks, after Jason Jerome Greenwood, 46, died after injury at the location in January.

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Maddie, the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Villanueva and Jesse Charbonneau, will be starting Kindergarten next month in a wheelchair after breaking two bones due to a 'bad bounce' at a Canadian trampoline park in New Westminster

It's not clear exactly how Maddie was injured by what her father described as a 'bad bounce.'

'She caught a bad bounce and she wasn't getting up right away,' said Charbonneau said.

He was watching over his daughter and two other children at the trampoline park when the accident happened.

'Then she started screaming really loudly and I knew something was wrong.'

'She caught a bad bounce and she wasn't getting up right away. Then she started screaming really loudly and I knew something was wrong,' her father, Jesse Charbonneau said

'I'm going to be wheeling her in in a wheelchair,' Maddie's mother, Sarah Villanueva told CTV

Maddie was taken to Royal Columbian Hospital where she had surgery on Sunday morning, after which her parents said they were told she'd have to be in a wheelchair for the next several weeks.

The New Westminster location deferred comment on the incident to the Extreme Air Park's main office in Ontario, which did not immediately respond.

'I'm not blaming this place for her injury,' Villanueva said. '(Kids) do crazy things, they get in trouble and they get hurt and it's all a part of life.'

Another family recently spoke out about an incident at an Extreme Air Park in Richmond, British Columbia.

Maddie was taken to Royal Columbian Hospital where she had surgery on Sunday morning, after which her parents said they were told she'd have to be in a wheelchair for several weeks

The New Westminster Extreme Air Park location deferred comment on the incident to the Extreme Air Park's main office in Ontario, which did not immediately respond

Ravi Gill-Douglas wrote on August 20 about what she experienced the previous weekend.

'This facility's mandate is not safety for their customers nor customer service. My son took a 6 foot drop through their equipment and we had to track down an employee to come help, they were completely unequipped to deal with the situation and have yet to follow-up,' she shared on Facebook.

Gill-Douglas said her three-year-old son fell through the trampoline while playing with friends, in the few moments when she had looked away.

'We quickly ran over to where they were jumping and she pointed to where he fell through the trampoline. I started pulling away the velcro and yelling his name to try to find him. I could barely hear him over the noise and all the loud music. One of the other adults and another male jumper came over to help, while one of the mom's ran to the front desk to seek help.

'However, no one at the front desk seemed to be able to help, have a sense of urgency or know what to do. Meanwhile, we kept my son calm and talking to him until we were able to pull him out through the springs to safety. He was in shock and wasn't responding too much going on around him, which is unlike him.

'At this point an employee finally came to look at what was going on.Luckily we were able to get him out and there was no significant injury falling almost 6 feet down.

'The staff had no clue what to do and didn't even have keys to get access under the trampolines. We called the ambulance and had him checked out at the hospital, as he was in shock, but have yet to hear from Extreme Air Park - Richmond. My son is lucky and we are keeping a close eye on him.'

Ravi Gill-Douglas wrote on August 20 about what she experienced the previous weekend, involving her three-year-old son at the Richmond Extreme Air Park location

This mother was not as forgiving as Villanueva.

'As a mother, this situation was traumatic and I do not want any other parent or anyone to go through this kind of incident, therefore, this facility should be shut down,' she wrote.

Another family has sued Extreme Air Park, and specifically the Richmond location, over the death of Jason Jerome Greenwood, 46, in January, who suffered injury and cardiac arrest after somersaulting into a foam pit, according to CTV.

Weeks after Greenwood's death, Richmond Extreme Air Parks owner Michael Marti asked British Columbia to create safety regulations for the industry in a letter to B.C. Premier Horgan.

He wrote: 'I would welcome the opportunity work with your government to develop comprehensive regulations that give the public confidence that, in addition to the hard work trampoline parks put into ensuring the safety of their guests, there is Provincial oversight into trampoline park safety as well.'

There are currently no specific regulations for trampoline parks in B.C., while Technical Safety BC oversees amusement park rides.A man has died in a house fire after he re-entered the burning building to fight the blaze.

Emergency workers were called to Rodd Point in Sydney's inner west just before 2.30am on Tuesday, and arrived to find the house well alight.

The man woke up his mother and helped her out of the home, but rushed back into the home to fight the flames and suffered fatal injuries, police said.

His body was later found inside the home.

A man died in a Sydney house fire early on Tuesday morning after he re-entered the burning building to fight the blaze (pictured is the scene)

The man woke up his mother (pictured) and helped her out of the home, but rushed back into the home to fight the flames and suffered fatal injuries, police said

NSW Fire and Rescue duty commander Graham Moore told The Daily Telegraph the 'fire was through the roof' and 'quite fierce.'

'[It's] extremely sad circumstances for the family. It's a really timely reminder that once you manage to get yourself out of a fire, whatever you do, don't go in,' he said.

The blaze caused the home's roof to cave in.

Firefighters continued to battle the fire on Tuesday morning.

An investigation is under way.The two daughters of an airman who died in a helicopter crash in March have been given the puppy their father promised them before he deployed to Iraq.

Just before heading overseas, Master Sergeant Christopher Raguso, 39, of Long Island, New York, told his daughters  Eva, five, and Mila, seven  that he would get them a puppy when he returned home.

Raguso, a special missions aviation flight engineer assigned to the 106th Rescue Wing, New York Air National Guard, died on March 15 when the HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter he was in crashed in western Iraq. He was one of seven airmen who died in the crash.

Before deploying to Iraq, Master Sergeant Christopher Raguso, 39, promised his daughters Eva (left) and Mila that he would give them a puppy. He died in a helicopter crash in March

Paws for War surprised Raguso's daughters with the puppy he promised them on Friday

Five months after their father's death, Eva and Mila received the dog their father had promised them, thanks to Paws of War, an organization that pairs shelter dogs with military veterans and their families, CBS New York reported.

Paws of War turned up to the Raguso's Long Island home on Friday and surprised the two girls with Calvin, a black Labrador puppy.

'This is my dream! This is my dream!' Eva was heard shouting as she held the puppy's leash.

Raguso's widow, Carmela, told gathered media that Eva has been having a particularly hard time dealing with her father's death.

Raguso's wife said that she hoped the puppy would be youngest daughter Eva's new sleeping buddy as the child has been having a hard time sleeping since her father died

Puppy Calvin was set to be euthanized at a shelter before being rescued and given to Paws of War, who then matched the black Labrador up with the Raguso family

'She tosses and turns, and she's in bed with me every night. She sleeps in daddy's spot,' Carmela said, according to ABC 7. She added that she hopes that Calvin will be Eva's new sleeping buddy 'so maybe we'll get some peace.'

Raguso was a NYFD lieutenant who had been previously deployed to Iraq as a fire protection specialist, twice to Afghanistan with the 101st Rescue Squadron and once to the Horn of Africa, according to the Military Times.

Raguso was also sent to Texas and the Caribbean after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

Calvin was due to be euthanized at an overcrowded Louisiana shelter before being rescued and given to Long Island-based Paws of Rescue.Stanley McMurtry MBE, the Daily Mail cartoonist known by his pen name Mac

If youve ever dreamt of making others laugh for a living, now could be the time to pick up your pen and get drawing.

The Young Cartoonist of the Year competition is in its 23rd year and attracts thousands of entries, giving budding cartoonists the chance to have their work judged by the best in the business.

Run by the British Cartoonists Association, entries are now open for this years competition.

The prestigious panel of judges includes the Daily Mails Mac, who is celebrating his 50th year with Mail newspapers.

The panel has cartoonists from nearly all UK national newspapers and includes The Guardians Steve Bell, Private Eyes Nick Newman and Kathryn Lamb, The Daily Telegraphs Matt, Oliver Preston, chairman of the Cartoon Museum, and Martin Rowson, chairman of the British Cartoonists Association.

Mr Rowson said: If you can make us grumpy old lot laugh, youre in with a chance of winning. I always have a joke with the winners that the real reason we have the competition is so we can isolate the good ones, break their fingers and make sure theyre not a threat to us.

Mac, the pen name of Stanley McMurtry MBE, started his career as a cartoon film animator, then went freelance in 1965.

He joined the Daily Sketch  then a sister title of the Daily Mail in our owner Associated Newspapers stable  in 1968. The Daily Sketch was absorbed by the Daily Mail in 1971 and Mac has worked for the Mail ever since.

Private Eyes Nick Newman (pictured right with Private Eye editor Ian Hislop) is on the judging panel

Entries, which can be on any topic, must be submitted by October 14 to The Young Cartoonist of the Year Competition, The Cartoon Museum, 35 Little Russell Street, London, WC1A 2HH.

There are two categories  under-18s and under-30s. Entrants must supply an original cartoon drawn freehand up to A4 in size. Entries must include the artists name, age and contact details.

Winners will be announced at the Cartoon Art Trust Awards on October 25.

The judges decision is final and organisers cannot return artwork. Further details at cartoonmuseum.org.President Donald Trump was directly involved in meetings where officials decided to move forward with a controversial plan to build a new FBI headquarters in the nation's capital, according to a government report issued Monday.

The report from the General Services Administration inspector general cites two White House meetings in January and June of this year in which Trump participated.

In the first of those meetings, participants agreed to move forward on a proposal to demolish the existing J. Edgar Hoover building in downtown Washington and build a new headquarters in the same spot.

While there is widespread agreement that the Hoover Building - a crumbling, sprawling piece of Brutalist architecture built in 1974 - does not meet the FBI's needs, the plan to keep the FBI in Washington scraps a long held plan to move the FBI to the Maryland or Virginia suburbs.

Rep. Gerry Connolly, a northern Virginia Democrat who supports moving the FBI to the suburbs, called for additional congressional hearings to uncover the extent of Trump's involvement.

Donald Trump was directly involved in meetings where officials decided to move forward with a controversial plan to build a new FBI headquarters in the nation's capital, according to a government report

He said the project is rife with conflicts of interest for Trump, whose Trump International Hotel is essentially across the street from the FBI headquarters.

'When we began this investigation, the prospect that President Trump was personally involved in the government-led redevelopment of a property in close proximity to the Trump Hotel was dismissed as a conspiracy theory,' Connolly said.

Axios reported that Trump had ranted 'even the building is terrible', 'one of the ugliest buildings in the city', while it also reported that he was opposed to the Bureau leaving the Pennsylvania Avenue site, which he called 'prime real estate'.

The building is diagonally opposite the Trump International Washington D.C. hotel.

The extent of Trump's involvement in the decision is unclear. The report indicates that while GSA employees confirmed the White House meetings with Trump, they received instructions not to divulge any statements Trump made at those meetings.

The first meeting in which Trump's participation was documented, according to the IG report, came in January 2018.

That was before the GSA proposed a plan to raze the Hoover building and build a new headquarters in its place, but after the GSA announced in 2017 that it was scrapping its plans for a move to the suburbs.

The IG report also concludes that officials are greatly underestimating the cost of keeping the headquarters in Washington. In particular, the report concludes that GSA is not taking into account the money that could be realized by selling the land under the Hoover building to private developers.

The GSA issued a statement in response to the IG report saying its estimates 'are accurate, transparent, and more representative of the full costs of the project than the analysis put forth in the IG review.'

Trump property: Critics say the president's ownership of a Washington D.C. hotel is 'rife with conflicts of interest'.

There is also some question about whether GSA Administrator Emily Murphy was forthcoming about Trump's role when she testified about the relocation decision to Congress.

When Murphy was asked whether the White House or Trump specifically was involved in the decision to abandon the suburbs and rebuild in Washington, Murphy said it was the FBI that decided it wanted to stay in Washington.

She did not disclose the White House meetings and told the inspector general she was trying to answer the question as she understood it.

The IG's report concludes that Murphy's testimony to a House committee 'was incomplete and may have left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials in the decision-making process about the project.'

The GSA, in its response to the report, states, 'The IG review acknowledges an indisputable fact: the Administrator's congressional testimony was truthful.'Senators who knew John McCain well for his principled stances and even his occasional outbursts saluted their longtime colleague Monday, as President Trump finally relented and put the White House flag at half-staff.

Senators who served alongside McCain, an joined him on congressional delegations to global hotspots sang his praises  and some even allowed for criticism of his rebellious and confrontational streak.

'Until the very end he served his country. Until the very end,' said Sen. Jeff Flake, now the senior senator in McCain's home state of Arizona.

McCain's Senate desk was draped in cloth and marked by a white roses on Monday

Flake, who has become an outspoken critic of president Trump, used his floor remarks to ding Trump, who acknowledged 'differences' with McCain in a statement he finally released honoring the Vietnam hero. McCain asked for Trump not be present at his funeral.

'He was America's hero all along,' said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who clashed with McCain over campaign finance legislation that McCain championed and McConnell spent years trying to kill.

Sen. James Inhofe, a fellow Armed Services Committee member, noted the times McCain flew around Oklahoma to campaign for him in a non-airconditioned private plane that Inhofe flew.

'He was America's hero all along,' said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said of McCain

Minority Leader Sen. Charles Schumer of New York has called for renaming the Senate Russel Office Building after McCain

Speaking of his Senate career, Inhofe said, McCain was 'kind of a mean guy. A lot of people didn't like John McCain. He wasn't the most lovable person to be around. But he was the fighter. He never shied away from a good fight. He was passionate for the causes that he believed in,' Inhofe said.

McConnell observed: 'John and I stood shoulder to shoulder on some of the most important issues to each of us, and we also disagreed entirely on huge subjects that helped define each of our careers,' the Washington Examiner noted.

'John treated every issue with the intensity and seriousness that the legislative process deserves. He would fight like mad to bring the country closer to his vision of the common good, but when the day's disputes were over, that very same man was one of our most powerful reminders that so much more divides us, that we should be able to differ completely on policy and stay united in love of our country.'

Minority leader Sen. Charles Schumer has called for renaming the Senate Russel Office Building after McCain. McCain has an office there, and regularly used the short walk or subway ride from there to the Capitol to chat with reporters and button-hole colleagues. Russel was an avowed segregationist and longtime Senator.

An impromptu memorial of flowers and a U.S. Navy officers hat stands outside of the Russell Senate Office Building in honor of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) August 27, 2018 in Washington, DC

President Donald Trump noted the 'differences' with McCain in the statement he finally released Monday afternoon

The US flag flies at half staff over the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 27 August 2018. The flag was lowered to half staff yesterday in honor of the passing of John McCain, but was back to full staff this morning, and then lowered again

'We can honor him by trying to carry out the principles he lived by,' Schumer said on the Senate floor.

'We can try, as he did, to put country before party. We can try, as he always did, to speak truth to power. And we can try, as he summoned us to try, to restore the Senate to its rightful place in our national political life.'

McCain is to lie in state in the Capitol Friday. The tributes followed the perceived snub when the White House flag returned to full staff on Monday, following McCain's Saturday death, only to returned to half-staff later in the afternoon.

Trump has repeatedly faulted McCain for his dramatic 'thumbs-down' on the GOP Obamacare repeal bill, and mocked his Vietnam capture during the campaign. McCain also passed on a copy of the infamous golden showers dossier to former FBI Director James Comey after the 2016 campaign, and has been among the foremost critics of Russia and President Vladimir Putin.

Senate chaplain Barry Black, a Navy rear admiral, observed in his opening prayer that McCain had a 'sacrificial willingness to take the road less traveled, to rise above partisanship, to provide a profile in courage and to give his life in service.'Shawn Thomas Hallett, 38, is shown in an undated photo provided by the Greenville County, South Carolina jail

Law enforcement arrested and charged a Texas man with voyeurism after he posed as a woman to enter a public restroom and filmed a person using the toilet.

Shawn Thomas Hallett, 38, reportedly donned wig, lipstick and other makeup to gain access to the QuickTrip convenience store bathroom in South Carolina.

He went unnoticed until the victim heard a man's voice in the stall beside her, reports Associated Press.

According to Greenville law enforcement, a male spoke when she knocked on a door to see if it was vacant.

However, the woman continued to use the restroom after she spotted women's shoes underneath the divider.

Authorities say Hallett tried to capture the woman using his phone using the space between the two stalls and when the woman noticed the device she called emergency services to the South Academy Street location.

The Texas man reportedly donned wig, lipstick and other makeup to gain access to the QuickTrip convenience store (pictured) bathroom in South Carolina

Hallett went unnoticed in the restroom until the victim heard a man's voice in the stall

His Instagram account appears to show he has been active on Liveme.com, a live broadcasting application that give users access to a wide audience to share their talents, according to the website's safety page.

According to public information on his Facebook profile he holds several roles at family friendly venues.

His roles including being a carnie at Family Shows of Houston, and Game Operator at Wrights Amusements - a traveling fairground company.

The woman continued to use the restroom after she spotted women's shoes on Hallett underneath the divider

Hallett states many of his jobs to be at family friendly carnivals as a games operator

He states he used work at Davis Shows Northwest, another carnival that moves around, and lists 'family fun shows'.

One of Hallett's present roles according to the social media website, is an Independent Consultant at Legal Shield, which acts as a 'lawyer in your back pocket'.

The Levelland man remained in jail Monday and records did not indicate if he had a lawyer.

Authorities say Hallett tried to take a photo using his phone using the space between the two stalls and when the woman noticed the device she called emergency services

Hallett also says he is an Independent Consultant at Legal Shield but it's not clear whether he has a lawyer at the time when he remained in jail MondayFrom the Blitz to rationing and the threat of invasion, World War II was a torrid experience for the British people  and their pets.

From the start of the conflict, families up and down the country began to have their beloved cats and dogs put down.

Incredibly, over the course of the war, well over two million pets perished.

The government even plotted to get rid of all non-essential animals, launching a clandestine anti-dog hate campaign and backing the criminal prosecutions of those who gave cats so much as a saucer of milk.

From the Blitz to rationing and the threat of invasion, World War II was a torrid experience for the British people  and their pets

Its a miracle any survived at all, as I discovered while researching my book, Bonzos War, on what happened to the nations pets when bombs fell and food was rationed, so that every drop of milk and mouthful of meat really did matter.

For all their suffering, nowhere is the fate of all these animals commemorated. But with luck that might be about to change.

This summer, artist Nicola White found a corroded dog tag bearing the name Bonzo while she was searching for artefacts on the muddy banks of the Thames. As she traced the wartime Bonzo and his family via the address on the tag, she became fascinated with the story of what became of those millions of cats and dogs who paid the ultimate price for Hitlers aggression.

Together we have launched a campaign to raise 25,000 for a bronze memorial to commemorate the pets that suffered so much.

There is already a fine memorial to service animals in Londons Park Lane. But we hope a new War Pets Memorial can serve as a simple, dignified monument to remember ordinary, domestic pets.

Some may feel its all a little frivolous given the extent of the human suffering. But thousands of families forced to say goodbye to their beloved animals felt an intense sense of grief at the final parting.

So how did such a brutal cull  and on such a massive scale  come about?

A dog called Wendy teaches evacuee boys to catch moles in 1941

The initial stages of the war were the most dangerous for British pets. In the first week alone, 750,000 animals were killed  all because of the mistaken assumption that they would go barking mad at the first wail of an air raid siren.

On the eve of war, a National Air Raid Precautions Animals Committee was formed. It published advice to pet owners that said: If at all possible, send or take your household animals into the country in advance of an emergency. It added: If you cannot place them in the care of neighbours, it is kindest to have them destroyed. This alarmist advice was given validation when it was broadcast on the BBC.

There were, of course, practical concerns. A Home Office pamphlet stated that pets would not be allowed into public air raid shelters, which often became crammed with hundreds of desperate families.

The same pamphlet featured a do-it-yourself guide to putting animals down. It also carried an advert for the captive bolt pistols of the kind still used today to stun animals before slaughter.

One London vets account recalled the bloodletting on the day Britain came under attack: The sirens sounded . . . and West Ham Town Hall became besieged by panic-stricken people bringing their animals for destruction. The bodies were removed to a marshy field behind an animal welfare clinic in Ilford, East London, and buried in secret.

The animals who had survived the initial wave of deaths, faced a new threat when the Blitz started in the autumn of 1940.

One vet in the capital recalled streets inundated with cats abandoned by their owners to roam the blacked-out districts. Municipal parties set out on slaughtering campaigns, sometimes killing 100 animals a time with a mixture of chloroform, cyanide or even electric shocks.

My own family had direct experience of this ruthless campaign. When I was eight, I was horrified to discover, while eavesdropping on my parents, that my uncle had killed a dog. It was terrible to hear my mother describe how distressed her twin sister, Lena, had been during the early days of the war when her husband, Ernest, had put down her beloved wire-haired fox terrier, Paddy.

Then, as now, the emotional bond between most families and their pets was fierce. Every evening, Lena used to walk Paddy to meet Ernest off the train, the dog jumping up to greet him in joy. But when war was declared, he announced Paddy had to go.

A lucky escape! A live pet rabbit discovered in the bomb debris after a raid in Cambridgeshire in June 1940

When I discovered this, I decided my kindly uncle must be a monster. It was the war, my mother explained. Food was going to be rationed, and he decided Paddy was one more mouth to feed. Many wartime children still recall such traumatic memories.

Tony Weeden, a retired company director now 84 and living near Marlow, Bucks, was five when his pet dog, Fluffy, was killed in 1939.The family lived in Londons East End, and he remembers walking the Welsh Collie cross to the vet with his mother.

When they arrived, the waiting room was full of other owners and their dogs, all waiting for the animals to be destroyed.

He says now the horror of seeing a bucket of blood (so many animals were destroyed that vets cut their throats to save time) haunted him for years.

Clearly my parents had heard the government advice and thought it was the right thing to do, he said. But it is sad to think Fluffy need not have been killed.

Those deeply distressing scenes were repeated in thousands of British homes. Animal welfare charities were overwhelmed. Many more pets were simply turned out into the street.

However, to general surprise, most dogs stayed calm even as Britain was bombed. Meanwhile, the bravery of mother cats rescuing their kittens amid the carnage touched all who saw it.

Of course, the companionship between owners and their pets worked both ways. I found many stories of animals who brought aid and comfort to humans  and some humans who sacrificed everything for their pets in return.

One housewife wrote: I am suffering through raids and am am often alone till midnight, as my husband is a bus-driver . . . I find the little female pup, banging her little nose on my knee. She will not leave me until I am all right.

In October 1940 the story of Nelly, buried for five days in the rubble of her home, emerged: Underneath her, covered by her body were her five puppies, she whined now and then to guide the rescuers. Starving herself she had fed her puppies throughout.

But, despite the panicked slaughter that accompanied the start of the war, it was food (or lack of it) not bombs that decided the fate of pets.

In August 1940, the Waste of Food Order was passed. This Draconian directive, introduced a few months after the Dunkirk evacuation, meant giving animals food fit for human consumption could carry a sentence of two years in prison.

Pets had to be fed on scraps and fish-heads, if you could get them. Dog biscuits disappeared.

Indeed, dogs came to be portrayed as the enemy within, eating  so the public were told  an estimated 280,000 tons of meat a year. Anti-cat stories were fed to journalists. Too many of this countrys cats are given portions of meat and fish which, to a man, would be the equivalent of a 3lb joint every lunch time, it was duly reported. So-called official cats were granted a dried milk allowance if they were engaged in work of national importance, mostly hunting rodents in factories.

Winston Churchill was reported to feed his cat, Nelson, with salmon scraps off the supper table. By the letter of the law, he should have gone to prison.

The Canine Defence League (today called Dogs Trust) noted late in the war: Dogs have dug into wrecked homes looking for their owners. Cats have mewed for days outside piles of rubble, telling rescuers their owners are buried there. Animals have quietened frightened children. Yet when the history of the war is written, these things will not be recorded.

And that is exactly as it turned out. Thats why I believe a memorial to all those devoted cats and dogs would go some way to marking the lives snuffed out amid Britains fight for survival.

Did your family lose a beloved wartime pet? Write to warpets@dailymail.co.uk. To donate to the memorial, visit justgiving.com/crowdfunding/ww2petsmemorial. Bonzos War by Clare Campbell with Christy Campbell (Constable, 7.99)Mark Wilson/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Sen. John McCains greatest lesson was to forgive and to see the good in his opponents, said Sen. Jeff Flake of his fellow Arizona Republican, who died Saturday.



Flake in an interview on "This Week" Sunday was discussing McCain's legacy with ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos, who asked, What was the greatest lesson you learned from him?



Oh, to forgive, Flake said. You know, his people talk about [how] he had a temper, he was passionate. That was certainly the case, but he would quickly forgive and move on.



McCain was able to see the good in his opponents, Flake said.



That is something that particularly these days we could use a lot more of. That's a lesson that he taught everyone, the Arizona senator said.



McCain died Saturday evening after battling an aggressive form of brain cancer, glioblastoma. He was just four days shy of his 82nd birthday. A former Vietnam War hero who spent over five years as a prisoner of war, McCain went on to serve three decades in Congress, where he gained a reputation as a maverick conservative who bucked convention.



House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi on "This Week" Sunday spoke of McCain's practice of partnering with members of the opposing party to craft important legislation.



"So many of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle, whether they were in complete agreement with John McCain, were all in agreement that he was formidable, had enormous integrity and was acting on behalf of our country and what he truly believed," Pelosi said.



The House minority leader also said she supports Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer's proposal to rename the Russell Senate Building on Capitol Hill after McCain.



That would be a great tribute, Pelosi said. Then for decades to come, everyone who came to Washington would know the very special place that John McCain held, has held and will continue to hold in our country.



Ret. Gen. David Petraeus on "This Week" told Stephanopoulos that McCain was always one who felt that serving a cause larger than self was the greatest of privileges.



The general commented on McCain's commitment to U.S. military service members and veterans.



No one had the backs of Americas new 'greatest generation,' those who fought the wars of the post 9/11 period, more than McCain, Petraeus said. "No one did more to assure that they had what was needed to prevail on the battlefield."

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.A photograph of bikies standing arm-in-arm with their colours on has been posted on social media, in something of a show of defiance to anti-consorting laws.

Up to two dozen Nomads OMCG members gathered in Canberra at the weekend where the photo was taken.

The powerful Strike Force Raptor and its strict anti-consorting laws mean bikies can no longer gather together in NSW or Queensland, forcing them to head off to the nation's capital.

Moudi Tajjour, a former vice president of the group and convicted killer, posted the image and a series of others to Instagram from the weekend's celebrations.

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More than two dozen Nomads OMCG members gathered in Canberra for a national meeting at the weekend (Moudi Tajjour is seen standing to the right of national president Mick Clarke)

Anti-consorting laws in New South Wales mean bikies can not be seen together, but Tajjour (pictured) told Daily Mail Australia the weekend's gathering was not a taunt to police

A senior member of the NSW Police told The Daily Telegraph the bikie meeting would not have been allowed outside of Canberra.

'There is no way they would get away with taking a photo like that or riding around in Sydney,' the officer said.

It's understood Tajjour was invited as a guest of honour to the weekend's event and stood arm-in-arm with national president Michael Clarke for the large group photo.

Another photo showed the Nomads life member posing alongside the current vice president and a chapter sergeant at arms.

But the gathering of Nomads was in no way intended to be a symbolic taunt to NSW Police, the now retired bikie enforcer told Daily Mail Australia.

'We were not trying to taunt police at all... wtf?' Tajjour said.

'We seriously weren't. We were simply catching up with our brothers to party and get together.'

Tajjour has previously revealed how he is the youngest ever member to join Nomads OMCG, being taken into the group when he should still have been in school.

Last year he revealed how times had changed inside Australia's OMCGs, describing it as becoming more like professional sport as MCs buy members into the group.

Tajjour (centre) poses for a photo with the Nomads national vice president (right) and a North Coast chapter sergeant-at-arms (left). Tajjour is the youngest ever member of the Nomads having joined the MC at the age of just 15

Tajjour (left) smiles as he pans the camera around the Nomads OMCG headquarters in the ACT

'It's totally different. These days you get your colours straight away, back in my day it was a minimum 12 months as a nominee,' the heavily-tattooed bikie told Daily Mail Australia.

'I was 15 years old - the youngest bikie to ever join a club - but I was a nominee for 16 months because I kept punching on with members, so my cousin Sam Ibrahim kept taking my colours.

'You'd get put in a circle and have a crack with the boys for a few minutes, and if you didn't drop your guard and fought until you got knocked out, you'd get your colours.

'You'd come into the clubhouse and they'd say: "It's on now, are you sure you want to do this? How much do you want your colours?"... and you'd punch on with hard men, but you'd earn your colours the right way.'

Tajjour (right) briefly married Salim Mehajer's sister Sanaa (left) last year

Just hours earlier Turnbull had taken a selfie at the same lookout with his wife Lucy, son Alex and daughter Daisy

With all eyes in the nation's capital still fixed on politics last week, the group even bid a cheeky farewell to a departing Prime Minister at the weekend.

'Malcolm Turnbull we came to Canberra to say "bye to ya",' Tajjour laughed in one of his videos.

Just hours earlier Turnbull had taken a selfie at the same lookout with his wife Lucy, son Alex and daughter Daisy.A 29-year-old man suffered a serious head injury after being crushed by a huge 250kg runaway ball, which organisers of a Spanish fiesta used for the second year to replace dangerous bulls.

The Madrid district of Mataelpino considered it safer and more animal-friendly to use the giant ball, known as the 'boloencierro', instead of bulls for the festival.

But those efforts backfired in a tragic way on Sunday when one of the runners was struck by the runaway ball as it careered down a hill and flattened the man when he was trapped by the security fence.

The huge, 250kg polystyrene ball rolls down the slope towards the runners in Madrid

The ball can be seen approaching a man right in its path in the street, where there is no where to escape

In a video of the accident, the ball can be seen bouncing off the wooden slats and crushing the runner, who suffered a 'severe' head injury, and was taken by helicopter to the Hospital of La Paz, according to local media.

Another man was also wounded during the fiesta.

Although the giant ball was made with polystyrene, it is so big that it weighs 250kg - as much as some small bulls.

The ball continues rolling down the slope as people look on

Bulls were replaced with the 250kg ball in a bid to improve safety at fiestas in the town of Mataelpino in Madrid

The crowd is invited to test their running and dexterity skills by dodging the ball, just like other events do when using a live bull.

Mataelpino first tried the event last year and was praised for its initiative in protecting animals and people.

The runner's injuries were put down to 'bad luck' on Twitter

However, another person tweeted that the ball should be made from plastic

However, two people were also injured in 2017 - one of them seriously - and security measures were stepped up for 2018.

Video from yesterday's event shows how dozens of revellers run down the hill in front of and alongside the white ball as it gathers speed before the accident happens.

Medics rushed to the scene to treat the injured man before he was rushed to hospital in a very serious condition.

People have commented on social media about the crushing, with one man saying on Twitter that organisers had warned runners before the ball was released, but it was bad luck for the man who was caught in the rebound and [did not have] time to throw himself to the ground. I hope for a speedy recovery.

Another tweeted: I like the idea of the #boloencierro, but next year its plastic. Has crushed a kid [with] a 250kg ball, [hes in a] serious condition.

The local Mayor, Javier de los Nietos said the ball hit the fence before colliding with the man so the impact was less severe than it could have been.

However, local officials have said they would look again at security as a matter of urgency.

Organisers said ball runners should always remain aware of which direction the ball is travelling in, and if it starts heading towards them, they should throw themselves onto the ground.

The fiesta was able to continue as paramedics stationed at the event quickly treated him at the scene, the town council said.

Video footage from the weekend, and last year's festivals, are eerily similar to scenes in British television series The Prisoner, where inhabitants are kept in order by a floating white weather balloon called Rover, which could either disable or even kill prisoners, as shown in this YouTube video:

Above: order is kept by an intimidating white weather balloon called 'Rover' in The Prisoner, during the late 1960sMore than 2,000 years ago, the famous Roman politician Marcus Tullius Cicero once accused his enemy Clodius of incest with his brothers and sisters.

But far from being shocking to people living at the time, this type of insult was just a part of normal everyday life, according to one prominent historian.

Professor Dr Martin Jehne of the Technische Universitat Dresden says modern insults are nothing compared to those flung around ancient Rome.

According to the historian's findings, Romans could be even more cruel than the trolls of today and would often stoop to sexual slurs to insult their opponents.

Professor Jehne said withstanding and overcoming insults can ultimately have a politically stabilising effect in society, with those who exchanged vile taunts often working together in the near future.

Likewise, the common people were allowed to insult the elite  who could not retort  helping to curb their 'omnipotence fantasies', Professor Jehne claims.

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More than 2,000 years ago, the famous Roman politician Marcus Tullius Cicero (bust, pictured) once accused his enemy Clodius of incest with brothers and sisters. This type of insult was normal, according to one historian

Political debates in ancient Rome were conducted with great harshness and personal attacks, according to Professor Jehne.

Speaking ahead of his talk next month at the 52nd Meeting of German Historians, Professor Jehne said that vile insults and sexual slurs did not harm a Roman's standing in society  unlike today, when such behaviour will see users swiftly removed from social networks and banned from public office.



'The Romans didnt seem to care much. There was the crime of iniuria, of injustice  but hardly any such charges,' he said.

Slander in the Roman Republic (509-27 BC) was extreme, even by modern standards.

'The famous speaker and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), for instance, when he defended his supporter Sestius, did not shrink from publicly accusing the enemy Clodius of incest with brothers and sisters,' said Professor Jehne  a sexual practice that was also considered illegal in Rome.

WHAT INSULTS DID THE ROMANS USE? Slander in the Roman Republic (509-27 BC) was extreme, even by modern standards. During political debates, which were considered a relative free-for-all at the time, politicians often stooped to sexual slurs to insult their opponents. Topics included: - Incest - Acting like a king (royalty was frowned upon in the republic) - 'Common rent boy' - Vividly describing one another's genitals (which were considered shameful) - Threatening to perform irrumatio, or oral rape - Passivity in sex Advertisement

'Clodius, in turn, accused Cicero of acting like a king when holding the position of consul. A serious accusation, since royalty in the Roman Republic was frowned upon.'

This shows there were very few limits in political dispute, Professor Jehne said.

This differs from today, where intensive thought is given to the limits of what is permitted in debates and the limits of free speech.

Since investigating abuses in the Roman Republic, Professor Jehne says he is now much more relaxed about today's debates on social networks.

He says his research has led him to 'considerably reduce [his] level of excitement at new abuses in the present  at any rate, it was not the abuses that caused the downfall of the Roman Republic,' he said.

According to Professor Jehne, the highly hierarchical Roman politics sounded rough, but was not without its rules.

Clodius (bust, pictured) accused Cicero of acting like a king when holding the position of consul. This was a serious accusation, since royalty in the Roman Republic was frowned upon

Pictured is the Colosseum in Rome. It was used for gladiatorial contests and public spectacles. Since investigating abuses in the Roman Republic, Professor Jehne is more relaxed about today's debates in social networks

'Politicians ruthlessly insulted each other.

'At the same time, in the popular assembly, they had to let the people insult them without being allowed to abuse the people in turn  an outlet that, in a profound division of rich and poor, limited the omnipotence fantasies of the elite.'

Politicians and the public hardly took abuse at face value.

'A certain Roman robustness in dealing with abusive communities such as AfD [Alternative for Germany] or Pegida [Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West] could help to reduce the level of excitement and become more factual,' he claims.

According to the historian, Romans were proud of their ruthless wit at the expense of others.

'They considered this an important part of urbanitas, the forms of communication of the metropolitans, in contrast to the rusticitas of the country bumpkins.

'When you were abused, you stood it, and if possible, you took revenge,' he said.

The harsh words also had a politically stabilising effect.

Opponents at the receiving end of the invectives would often work together again soon afterwards and maintain normal contact  showing there were no hard feelings, Professor Jehne said.

In fact, these insults were an 'integral part of life' in the Roman empire.

The political climate remained reasonably stable: murders to avenge honour were only committed in the exceptional situation of a civil war.

At the 52nd Meeting of German Historians in Munster in September, Professor Jehne will speak about the culture of conflict in ancient Rome.Nordic countries may not be as happy as you think, new research has shown.

Countries like Finland and Norway regularly top world happiness polls, but a new report shows this reputation masks the struggles of many citizens.

The report found 13.5 per cent of young Nordic people say they are 'struggling or suffering'  a number that rises to 16 per cent for residents aged over 80.

Researchers say factors like loneliness, high stress and pressure to succeed are threatening the mental health of 18 to 23-year-olds, while high rates of illness are responsible for the poor wellbeing in elderly citizens.

Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland led the 2018 ranking of the World Happiness Report, followed closely by Sweden, which placed ninth.

But the report's authors argue the status of Nordic countries as 'happiness superpowers' disguises the sadness of significant portions of the population.

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Nordic countries may not be as happy as you think, according to new research. Countries like Finland and Norway regularly top world happiness polls, but a report shows this reputation masks the struggles of many residents (scroll down for video)

The report, authored by the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, looked at happiness data collected between 2012-2016.

It asked people to rate their satisfaction with life out of 10  with those above a seven ranked as thriving, fives and sixes as struggling, and anyone who placed themselves at a four or lower deemed to be suffering.

In total, 12.3 people of people living in Nordic countries marked themselves as either struggling or suffering.

At 13.5 and 16 per cent respectively, the young and elderly had higher-than-average rates of poor wellbeing.

General health and mental health were both closely linked with happiness ratings with income, unemployment and sociability also playing a part, researchers said.

Physical illness was the biggest barrier to wellbeing among the elderly, while mental health was a significant problem among the young.

The World Happiness Report, released in March, ranked 156 countries by happiness levels, based on factors such as life expectancy, social support and corruption. Finland topped the list, and was among five Nordic countries in the top 10

'More and more young people are getting lonely and stressed and having mental disorders,' one of the report's authors, Michael Birkjaer, told the Guardian.

'We are seeing that this epidemic of mental illness and loneliness is reaching the shores of the Nordic countries.'

More than 18 per cent of Danes aged 18 to 23 reported suffering from poor mental health  a number that rose to 23.8 per cent in young women.

In Finland, which ranked as the happiest country in the world in March, a third of all deaths in that age bracket were suicides.

Over the last five years, Norway saw a 40 per cent rise in the number of young people seeking help for mental health issues.

According to the report, young women consistently reported lower wellbeing than young men.

Happiest nations 1. Finland 2. Norway 3. Denmark 4. Iceland 5. Switzerland 6. Netherlands 7. Canada 8. New Zealand 9. Sweden 10. Australia Advertisement

Least happy nations 1. Burundi 2. Central African Republic 3. South Sudan 4. Tanzania 5. Yemen 6. Rwanda 7. Syria 8. Liberia 9. Haiti 10. Malawi Advertisement

The report highlights that while Nordic countries are frequently ranked the happiest in the world, significant parts of the population are still struggling.

The World Happiness Report, released in March, ranked 156 countries by happiness levels, based on factors such as life expectancy, social support and corruption.

While the Nordic countries of Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland topped the table, there was no place in the top ten for Britain, which was named 19th.

The UK was one place above the United Arab Emirates but behind the likes of Israel, Austria, Costa Rica, Ireland, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg.

The African nation of Burundi was at the bottom of the happiness index.

The United States fell to 18th place from 14th last year, despite the country becoming richer during that period.

Unlike past years, the annual report, which is published by the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, also evaluated 117 countries by the happiness and well-being of their immigrants.

Europe's Nordic nations have dominated the index since it was first produced in 2012.

In reaching number one, Finland nudged neighbouring Norway into second place, scoring 7.632 in the 0 to ten scale.

Rounding out the top ten are Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and Australia.

Propping up the table was the African nation of Burundi, with a score of just 2.905. The bottom ten also included Central African Republic, South Sudan, Tanzania, Yemen, Rwanda, Syria, Liberia, Haiti and Malawi.

Meanwhile Russia was 59th, France 23rd and China 86th.

For confidential support call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch, see www.samaritans.org for details.Dinosaur DNA is the same as modern birds, according to a new study.

Scientists have revealed that ancient reptiles may have come in such different shapes and sizes because their genetic code had 'a large number' of chromosomes.

This diversity helped them evolve quickly to changing climates, allowing them to dominate the planet for around 180 million years.

Using DNA from modern-day turtles and birds, researchers were able to piece together the history of DNA back more than 255 million years.

Scientists believe the way their DNA was organised may have provided dinosaurs with a 'blueprint for evolutionary success'.

This is because dinosaurs would have had around 80 chromosomes in total, like modern birds, which are the descendants of the ancient reptiles.

For comparison, humans have 23 chromosome pairs  for a total of 46.

Despite unlocking the pattern of dinosaur DNA, scientists say they have no plans to use the information to recreate the ancient beasts, like in Jurassic Park.

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Tyrannosaurus DNA would have been the same as modern birds, according to a new study. Scientists have revealed that dinosaurs may have come in such different shapes and sizes because their genetic code had a large number of chromosomes (stock image)

Dinosaurs ruled Earth from some 179 million years, before suddenly being wiped out in the CretaceousPaleogene extinction event around around 66 million years ago.

Researchers led by Professor Darren Griffin of the University of Kent's School of Biosciences recreated what the genome structure of dinosaurs, like the Tyrannosaurus, would have looked like under the microscope.

To recreate this long-extinct genetic code, the researchers traced how chromosomes changed over evolutionary time, from reptile ancestors to the present day.

The research, which is published in the journal Nature Communications, involved extrapolating the likely genome structure of a shared common ancestor of birds and turtles that lived around 260 million years ago.

This was around 20 million years before the first dinosaurs started to emerge.

Researchers now believe dinosaurs had around 40 pairs of chromosomes.

This is the same as modern birds, but almost twice the number found in a humans.

'We think it generates variation.

'Having a lot of chromosomes enables dinosaurs to shuffle their genes around much more than other types of animals', Professor Griffin told BBC.

Using DNA from modern-day turtles and birds, researchers were able to piece together the history of DNA dating back 255 million years (stock image)

The research, which is published in the journal Nature Communications, involved extrapolating the likely genome structure of a shared common ancestor of birds and turtles (stock image) that lived around 260 million years ago

'This shuffling means that dinosaurs can evolve more quickly and so help them survive so long as the planet changed,' he said.

Scientists say the latest research reinforces the long-held idea that birds and dinosaurs are one of the same.

However, according to Professor Griffin, we're 'not gong to have Jurassic Park anytime soon'.

Genetic material degrades over time and the longest it has ever survived is one million years  still some 65 million years before the dinosaurs perished.

Although scientists have mathematically predicted the structure of dinosaur's genetic code, they are unable to completely recreate the DNA needed to create one of the ancient reptiles today.

In February, it was revealed dinosaurs were so successful they may have contributed to their own demise.

The rapid expansion of the huge reptiles across the globe meant they were running out of space on Earth long before they went extinct, a study concluded.

Scientists believe that the way DNA was organised may have provided dinosaurs with a 'blueprint for evolutionary success'. However, they say they have no plans to recreate a Jurassic Park scenario (pictured)

HOW THE DINOSAURS WENT EXTINCT AROUND 66 MILLION YEARS AGO Dinosaurs ruled and dominated Earth around 66 million years ago, before they suddenly went extinct. The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event is the name given to this mass extinction. It was believed for many years that the changing climate destroyed the food chain of the huge reptiles. In the 1980s, paleontologists discovered a layer of iridium. This is an element that is rare on Earth but is found in vast quantities in space. When this was dated, it coincided precisely with when the dinosaurs disappeared from the fossil record. A decade later, scientists uncovered the massive Chicxulub Crater at the tip of Mexicos Yucatan Peninsula, which dates to the period in question. Scientific consensus now says that these two factors are linked and they were both probably caused by an enormous asteroid crashing to Earth. With the projected size and impact velocity, the collision would have caused an enormous shock-wave and likely triggered seismic activity. The fallout would have created plumes of ash that likely covered all of the planet and made it impossible for dinosaurs to survive. Other animals and plant species had a shorter time-span between generations which allowed them to survive. There are several other theories as to what caused the demise of the famous animals. One early theory was that small mammals ate dinosaur eggs and another proposes that toxic angiosperms (flowering plants) killed them off. Advertisement

Researchers suggest dinosaurs were already in decline long before the killer asteroid hit 65 million years ago because they had clogged up every possible habitat on Earth.

This seriously impeded their ability to produce new species, which left them vulnerable to extinction, researchers at the University of Reading found.

Fossil evidence shows dinosaurs originated in the late Triassic Period around 230 million years ago in South America, when the continent was part of the huge land mass called Pangea.

The origin of enormous reptiles closely followed the world's largest extinction event, known as the Great Dying.

The event killed roughly nine in 10 marine species and seven in 10 land species, creating a 'blank canvas' for the rise of the dinosaurs, researchers said.

During the next 150 million years a diverse range of dinosaur species evolved, from the Tyrannosaurus rex to the gigantic, long necked Diplodocus.

But after rapidly expanding across the globe from South America, the reptiles were unable to adapt as land ran out, scientists found.Killer robots must be banned to prevent unlawful killings, injuries and other violations of human rights 'before it's too late', according to Amnesty International.

The human rights non-profit is calling upon the United Nations to place tough new restraints on the development of autonomous weapon systems ahead of key negotiations in Geneva this week.

The development of automated weapons, which can pick out and eliminate targets without input from a human being, has proliferated over the past decade.

Countries including the UK, France, Israel and the US are known to be developing the technology for use in military and police operations.

Amnesty International argues humans should remain 'at the core of critical decisions' on the use of deadly force, such as the selection and engagement of targets.

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Killer robots must be banned to prevent unlawful killings, injuries and other violations of human rights 'before it's too late', according to Amnesty International. The non-profit aims to halt the development of autonomous systems, such as AI-controlled UAVs (file photo)

The call comes ahead of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, which is meeting in Geneva between 27 and 31 August.

During the meeting, states will discuss options for addressing the human rights, humanitarian, ethical and security challenges posed by killer robots.

'Killer robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction,' said Rasha Abdul Rahim, an advisor on artificial intelligence and human rights at Amnesty International.

'From artificially intelligent drones to automated guns that can choose their own targets, technological advances in weaponry are far outpacing international law.'

'A ban on fully autonomous weapons systems could prevent some truly dystopian scenarios, like a new high-tech arms race between world superpowers which would cause autonomous weapons to proliferate widely.

'We are calling on states present in Geneva this week to act with the urgency this issue demands, and come up with an ambitious mandate to address the numerous risks posed by autonomous weapons.'

Amnesty International is calling upon the United Nations to place restraints on the development of autonomous weapon systems ahead of key negotiations in Geneva this week (file photo)

At the last CCW meeting in April, the majority of the which 120 member states stressed the importance of retaining human control over weapons systems.

Twenty-six of these called for a total ban, including Austria, Brazil and Egypt.

China also called for a new CCW protocol to prohibit the use of fully autonomous weapon systems.

WHAT AUTONOMOUS WEAPON SYSTEMS ARE UNDER DEVELOPMENT? A number of countries are known to be developing autonomous weapon systems, which can select and eliminate targets without human help. They include France, Israel, Russia, South Korea, the USA and UK. Nations are racing to develop AI systems that can take control of unmanned military Reaper drones - UAVs that are currently piloted by humans from a ground control centre. The high-altitude craft could soon pick out targets and hit them with air-to-ground missiles without any human oversight. Rumours suggest military officials are also looking into the development of automated tanks. AI-assisted weapons systems are already in use in some countries, including Israel, which recently deployed semi-autonomous drones to fire tear gas at protesters in Gaza. Advertisement

But a number of key states oppose creating legally binding BANS, including governments who are already known to be developing autonomous weapons systems, such as France, Israel, Russia, South Korea, the USA and UK.

It is not clear what form autonomous weapons of the future could take, but experts warn they could eventually replace human decision-makers on the battlefield.

Amnesty International is calling for the creation of legally-binding standards to ensure that humans remain at the core of 'critical functions' of weapons systems.

Several countries, including the UK, France and United States, are already developing weapons that can eliminate targets without human help. The technology is reminiscent of the killer androids featured in the Terminator franchise (stock)

The non-profit argues humans must be involved in the identification, selection and engagement of targets to comply with International Law.

The call forms part of Amnesty International's Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which is seeking a total ban on the development, production and use of fully autonomous weapon systems.

'So far, the likelihood that autonomous weapons will be used in police operations, with all the risks that entails, has been largely overlooked,' said Mr Rahim.

WHAT IS THE AUGUST UN CONVENTION ON KILLER ROBOTS? Experts from scores of countries are meeting to discuss ways to define and deal with 'killer robots' - futuristic weapons systems that could conduct war without human intervention. The weeklong gathering is the second this year at UN offices in Geneva to focus on such lethal autonomous weapons systems and explore ways of possibly regulating them, among other issues. Some top advocacy groups say governments and militaries should be prevented from developing such systems, which have sparked fears and led some critics to envisage harrowing scenarios about their use. As the meeting opened Monday, Amnesty International urged countries to work toward a ban. Amnesty researcher on Artificial Intelligence Rasha Abdul Rahim said killer robots are 'no longer the stuff of science fiction,' warning that technological advances are outpacing international law. Advertisement

'But drones capable of shooting electric-shock darts, tear gas and pepperball already exist.

'The use of fully autonomous weapons in law enforcement without effective and meaningful human control would be incompatible with international human rights law, and could lead to unlawful killings, injuries and other violations of human rights.

'We are calling on states to take concrete steps to halt the spread of these dangerous weapons, both on the streets and on the battlefield, before it's too late.'Facebook has banned 18 accounts and 52 pages linked to the Myanmar military, including the country's top military official, to 'prevent the spread of hate and misinformation' on its platform.

The firm announced the move Monday after a United Nations report said the country's military generals had 'genocidal intent' against Rohingya Muslims and recommended they face prosecution.

The UN also accused Facebook of being 'slow and ineffective' in its response to the crisis, while noting that posts and messages on the site have led to 'real-world discrimination and violence.'

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Facebook has banned 18 accounts and 52 pages linked to the Myanmar military, including the country's top military official, to 'prevent the spread of hate and misinformation' on its site

In a blog post announcing the actions, Facebook admitted it had been 'slow to act' to the situation in Myanmar, which began to develop more than a year ago.

Earlier this month, Facebook hired an outside firm to investigate its role in the Myanmar violence.

It also blacklisted two firebrand Buddhist monks and an Islamophobic group notorious for spreading anti-Muslim propaganda.

But this is the first time it has touched the country's military.

'Today, we are taking more action in Myanmar, removing a total of 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook Pages, followed by almost 12 million people,' Facebook wrote in a blog post.

As part of the move, Facebook is banning senior general Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of Myanmar's armed forces and the military's Myawady television network.

As part of the move, Facebook is banning senior general Min Aung Hlaing (pictured), commander-in-chief of Myanmar's armed forces and the Myawady television network

'International experts, most recently in a report by the UN Human Rights Council-authorized Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, have found evidence that many of these individuals and organizations committed or enabled series human rights abuses in the country,' Facebook wrote.

'And we want to prevent them from using our service to further inflame ethnic and religious tensions.'

Hlaing had two active Facebook accounts, one boasting 1.3 million followers and the other 2.8 million.

Posts in both English and Burmese would refer to the Rohingya as 'Bengali', implying they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and helping reinforce the idea they do not belong in mainly Buddhist Myanmar.

His pages also featured denials of atrocities during the crackdown, which was justified by the army as a legitimate means of rooting out Rohingya militants.

Both accounts were taken down immediately as the explosive UN report circulated.

Posts in both English and Burmese would refer to the Rohingya as 'Bengali', implying they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and helping reinforce the idea they do not belong in mainly Buddhist Myanmar. Pictured is a sample of the posts from banned Pages and accounts

A total of 18 Facebook accounts -- not all the individuals listed in the ban had a presence on the network -- one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages were removed

The accounts of five other top military leaders specifically mentioned in the report were also blacklisted.

A total of 18 Facebook accounts -- not all the individuals listed in the ban had a presence on the network -- one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages were removed.

Facebook is the prime source of news and information for many in Myanmar - a country that only recently came online following nearly half a century of military rule.

But it has also been a platform for the army and Buddhist hardliners to spread hate speech and incendiary posts against the stateless Rohingya and other minorities.

The site aired support for the military's bloody "clearance operations" last year that forced some 700,000 Rohingya over the border into Bangladesh.

WHAT WAS FACEBOOK'S ROLE IN MYANMAR'S ROHINGYA CRISIS? People and groups in Myanmar also experienced real-world physical violence as a consequence of similar rumours spread on Facebook. Facebook use has grown exponentially in Myanmar since a quasi-civilian government opened up the telecoms sector in 2013, making it easier for people to access the internet in the largely Buddhist country. Nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since last August following a military crackdown in Rakhine state that has been likened to ethnic cleansing by the US and the UN, but which has been applauded by Myanmar nationalists online. Hardline monks gained notoriety for fanning anti-Muslim hatred through inflammatory posts. Back in February, Wirathu, a prominent face of Myanmar's Buddhist ultra-nationalist movement, had amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook. His tirades have been blamed for stoking sectarian violence, which have plagued Myanmar's transition to democracy. His page was removed in February. Advertisement

UN investigators lambasted the platform earlier this year, saying it had morphed into a "beast" in Myanmar.

In recent months the tech giant has embarked on a huge PR campaign, admitting it has often been too slow to take down inflammatory posts.

Facebook has some 18 million accounts in the country of 51 million people and is also relied on heavily by the government to make announcements.

Rights groups have long criticised the platform for taking days to delete malicious posts, by which time many had gone viral. These include calls for the killing of a Muslim journalist and the spreading of messages to both Buddhists and Muslims saying that the other community was preparing to attack them.

The UN report singled out Facebook for its "slow and ineffective" response.

It also strongly criticised civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to use her position and moral authority to stand up for the Rohingya against the military.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) has addressed the violence in Myanmar on several occasions including at a congressional hearing earlier this year

Neither the commander-in-chief nor the president's office could be reached for comment.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the violence in Myanmar on several occasions including at a congressional hearing earlier this year.

He told lawmakers Facebook planned to hire more native speakers to help monitor the situation and had partnered with civil society groups to identify perpetrators of hate speech.

'We're hiring dozens of more Burmese-language content reviewers, because hate speech is very language-specific,' he said at the April hearing in the US Senate.

'It's hard to do it without people who speak the local language, and we need to ramp up our effort there dramatically.'A German antitrust watchdog is taking its first steps towards a landmark probe against Facebook over its collection of personal data from its users without their consent or knowledge.

The Federal Cartel Office objects in particular to how Facebook acquires data from the other services it owns, including WhatsApp and Instagram.

The probe is being closely watched across Europe amid mounting concerns over how Facebook siphons data on its millions of users, as well as the extensive use of targeted ads by foreign powers seeking to influence elections worldwide.

The Federal Cartel Office, Germany's national competition regulator, said online tracking of people who aren't even members is also a chief concern for the probe.

Germany's antitrust watchdog is taking its first steps in its landmark probe against Facebook over its collection of people's data without their consent or knowledge. The Federal Cartel Office objects to how Facebook acquires data on people from third-party apps (stock image)

'We are conscious that this should, and must, go quickly,' Cartel Office President Andreas Mundt told a news conference on Monday, adding he hoped to take 'first steps' this year.

He declined to elaborate about the exact timescale of the operation.

The German probe is not expected to end in fines for Facebook  in stark contrast to European Union probes into Google that have ended in multi-billion-dollar penalties.

However, sources familiar with the matter say the cartel office could require Facebook to take action to address its concerns should the social network fails to do so voluntarily.

Facebook responded earlier this year to the cartel office's request for information.

The authority was reviewing whether new features  such as a 'clear history' option announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in May  would address its concerns.

The probe is being closely watched in Europe amid mounting concerns over leaks of data on tens of millions of Facebook users, as well as the extensive use of targeted ads by foreign powers seeking to influence US elections. Pictured is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

'We need to establish whether this affects our investigation and addresses our concerns,' Cartel Office President Mr Mundt said.

Separately, Mundt confirmed comments he made in a newspaper interview earlier this month that he may launch an investigation into the e-commerce industry under new powers that enable the FCO to launch sector-wide probes.

The focus would be on so-called 'hybrid' platforms such as US e-commerce giant Amazon which sell their own products and services in their store, but that also host third-party traders as well.

'Our question is: What is the relationship between the platform, which itself is a very powerful trader, and the traders who use the platform?' said Mr Mundt.

Amazon was the best-known of the e-commerce platforms, but his interest in the matter extended to other players, Mundt added.

The Cartel Office confirmed it will not be looking at suspected tax evasion by third-party traders on e-commerce platforms.

That issue, which German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has vowed to tackle, would be one for the economic policy makers, Mundt said.Amazon has opened a second location for its radical Amazon Go concept store.

The store, the second in Amazon's hometown of Seattle, will be a mile away from the original location near the Seattle Central Library at 920 Fifth Ave., and opened at 7 a.m. today.

The new store is slightly smaller than the original, at 1,450 square feet, and won't sell alcohol or staples like milk and bread.

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Amazon confirmed the new store in a statement, saying 'We are excited to bring Amazon Go to 920 5th Avenue in Seattle. The store will open in Fall 2018.' Pictured, the original store

It also forgoes an in store kitchen, and will have its fresh food supplied by an Amazon kitchen facility in Seattle.

Gianna Puerini, the Amazon vice president who oversees Go, told the Seattle Times she expects a higher portion of office workers among the clientele compared to the first store.

'The population here is a little different,' Puerini said.

The first store debuted one mile away at the base of Amazon's Day One tower in January, after more than a year of fine-tuning the concept.

Amazon customers scan their smartphones at a turnstile to enter the shop.

Cameras and sensors identify which products customers remove from the shelves and put into their backpack, or shopping trolley.

HOW DO AMAZON'S GO STORES WORK? In December 2016, Amazon unveiled a convenience store in downtown Seattle that replaced cashiers with technology found in self-driving cars. It opened to the public in January 2018. To start shopping, customers must scan an Amazon Go smartphone app and pass through a gated turnstile. Ready-to-eat lunch items greet shoppers when they enter. Deeper into the store, shoppers can find a small selection of grocery items, including meats and meal kits. An Amazon employee checks IDs in the store's wine and beer section. Amazon's first Go Store opened in Seattle earlier this year and are looking to expand and open stores in Chicago and San Francisco Sleek black cameras monitoring from above and weight sensors in the shelves help Amazon determine exactly what people take. If someone passes back through the gates with an item, his or her associated account is charged. If a shopper puts an item back on the shelf, Amazon removes it from his or her virtual cart. Much of the store will feel familiar to shoppers, aside from the check-out process. Amazon, famous for dynamic pricing online, has printed price tags just as traditional brick-and-mortar stores do. Advertisement

Since the system is tracking their purchases as they move around the store, customers simply leave when they're finished shopping, with Amazon billing the credit cards on file for any products its cameras identified.

Amazon Go, which is also set to open stores in Chicago and San Francisco, has sent rivals scrambling to prepare for yet another disruption from the online retailer.

It comes after claims Microsoft is working on technology that would eliminate the need for cashiers and checkout lines in supermarkets.

Other rival stores have purportedly tested programs where customers scan and bag each item as they shop, with mixed results.

In the UK, Waitrose already allows customers to scan products customers to scan purchases as they pick them off the shelf.

However, they still need to pay at a till.

For Microsoft, becoming a strategic ally to retailers has resulted in big business.

Amazon customers scan their smartphones at a turnstile to enter. Cameras and sensors identify what they remove from the shelves and Amazon bills their credit cards on file for everything on their person as they leave the store

In addition to developing retail technologies, it ranks second, behind only Amazon, in selling cloud services that are key to running e-commerce sites, for instance.

It is not clear how soon Microsoft would bring an automated checkout service to market, if at all, or whether its technology would be the answer retailers are looking for.

But some see the technology as the next big innovation in shopping, one that Amazon's competitors cannot afford to ignore.

'This is the future of checking out for convenience and grocery stores,' said Gene Munster, head of research at Loup Ventures in Minneapolis.

The venture capital firm estimates the US market for an automated checkout system is worth some $50 billion (37.2 billion).

Microsoft said it 'does not comment on rumours or speculation'.

Walmart and Amazon have declined to comment.

So far, Microsoft's attempt at developing the checkout-free supermarket has largely fallen under its Business AI (Artificial Intelligence) team, one source said.

A group consisting of 10 to 15 people have worked on a slew of retail store technologies, and they have presented their efforts to CEO Satya Nadella, the person said.

MICROSOFT TO TAKE ON AMAZON IN SMART SHOPS It comes after claims Microsoft is working on technology that would eliminate the need for cashiers and checkout lines in supermarkets. The company is looking to challenge Amazon, which has already opened a checkout-free store in Seattle, called Amazon Go, according to people familiar with the matter. Microsoft is working on technology that would eliminate cashiers and checkout lines from stores. The tech firm is looking to challenge Amazon's automated grocery shop, according to six people familiar with the matter (stock image) It is believed Microsoft is developing systems to track what shoppers add to their carts or basket as they move around the supermarket. The Redmond-based software giant has shown sample technology to retailers from around the world and is reportedly in talks with Walmart about a potential collaboration. Advertisement

In a meeting with the team several months ago, Mr Nadella recommended an 'intelligent edge' device that could manage connected gadgets such as cameras on site with minimum data transfers to the cloud, which would cut down on costs, they added.

Making its technology cheap enough so it does not shrink grocers' already thin profit margins is a major challenge for Microsoft, another person said.

Microsoft already showcases the basics for automated checkout at its Retail Experience Centre in Redmond.

It has half a dozen partners, including Redmond-based AVA Retail, that are building their own checkout-free or related services atop Microsoft's cloud, some of the people said.

Sales of partners' services result in cloud revenue for Microsoft, along with insight into the market for new retail technologies.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's internal team, including a computer vision specialist hired from Amazon Go, has worked on attaching cameras to shopping carts to track customers' items.

The secretive team has studied novel ways for smartphones to play a role in the shopping experience, people said.

Still, the industry is playing catch-up to Amazon.

The company spent four years building Amazon Go in secret, before launching an employee-only pilot on its Seattle campus in 2016.

It collected data for almost 14 months before opening its first Seattle store.

Amazon has said it has no plans to introduce checkout-free technology to its Whole Foods Market grocery chain, which it acquired last year.

The company is still hard at work improving the service.

Amazon Vice President Dilip Kumar told Reuters in an interview earlier this year that the company is training computers to identify items or activities with as little information as possible.

'It's a really hard problem,' said Scott Jacobson, managing director of Madrona Venture Group, adding it is 'one that Amazon is uniquely positioned to solve.'NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine says American rockets will finally launch Americans into orbit again next year.

Since the last space shuttle, Atlantis, carried a crew to the orbiting lab in 2011, NASA has been forced to pay Russia $82m a seat to ferry astronauts on Soyuz rockets.

Bridenstine told USA Today said he is now confident planned programmes by Boeing and Elon Musk's SpaceX will go ahead next year, despite numerous delays to the 'commercial crew' program.

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NASA has revealed the nine astronauts that will soon take to space aboard the Boeing CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX Crew Dragon. From left: Suni Williams, Josh Cassada, Eric Boe, Nicole Mann, Chris Ferguson, Doug Hurley, Bob Behnken, Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover

'Without question, by the middle of next year, we'll be flying American astronauts on American rockets from American soil,' he told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview at NASA headquarters.

'We're so close.'

SpaceX and Boeing are contracted under its Commercial Crew program to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.

However, both firms have been faced with delays.

Gwynne Shotwell, president of the aerospace manufacturing company, recently said an unmanned flight to the International Space Station (ISS) in November would pave the way for SpaceX's first manned mission in April 2019.

'Predicting launch dates could make a liar out of the best of us. I hope I am not proven to be a liar on this one,' she told journalists during a briefing in Los Angeles.

WHEN DID NASA LAST LAUNCH CREWED MISSIONS FROM THE US? Shuttle Columbia is shown during lift-off from the Kennedy Space Center in 2003 NASA launched its first space shuttle, Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-1), from the Kennedy Space Center on April 12, 1981. In the three decades that followed, the space agency deployed a total of 135 missions from US soil. Columbia was only the beginning; following in its footsteps, NASA launched Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavor to carry people to orbit. These launches also allowed for the construction of the International Space Station  the largest structure in space, thats now home to a revolving crew of astronauts from all around the world, conducting important experiments that continue to advance our knowledge of the cosmos. The shuttle missions came to an end with the Atlantis shuttle on July 21, 2011 after STS-135. In the years since, NASA has had to rely on Russian modules to send astronauts to the ISS, all of which launch from foreign soil. Now, the space agency has turned to the private sector to provide space taxi services, to take astronauts from US soil to the ISS. On August 3, 2018, NASA revealed astronauts would fly on the Boeing CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX Crew Dragon. So far only SpaceX has successfully taken astronauts to the ISS, but it is hoped the first Starliner flight will happen in 2022. The shuttle missions came to an end with the Atlantis shuttle on July 21, 2011 after STS-135. Above, Atlantis lands at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fl, marking the official end of the 30-year program Advertisement

The pledge from the firm, which is spearheaded by multi-billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, is in stark contrast to an independent report from the US government.

The government report, published in July, claimed it was highly unlikely SpaceX would be able to send astronauts to the ISS next year.

However, SpaceX president Ms Shotwell said the mission is scheduled to go ahead as planned as soon as SpaceX was 'ready to fly these folks safely.'

NASA recently revealed the nine astronauts that will soon take to space aboard the Boeing CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX Crew Dragon, to pioneer a new era in American spaceflight.

The space agency introduced the crew assigned to the flight tests of the two new capsules in a press conference held at the Johnson Space Center in Texas.

The move means NASA will finally be able to launch crewed missions from US soil for the first time in nearly a decade.

SpaceX and Boeing's first Commercial Crew flight tests will be led by astronauts: Eric Boe, Chris Ferguson, Nicole Aunapu Mann, Bob Behnken, Doug Hurley, Josh Cassada, Suni Williams, Victor Glover, and Mike Hopkins.

For astronauts Cassada and Mann, the milestone missions will also mark their first ever space flights.

It's set to be a major turning point for American space exploration; a crewed mission hasn't launched from US soil since 2011.

'For the first time since 2011, we are on the brink of launching American astronauts, on American rockets, from American soil, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during the conference.

Both Boeing and SpaceXs missions will begin with a crew flight test.

For Boeing, this will be led by astronauts Eric Boe, Chris Ferguson, and Nicole Mann, who will blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in mid-2019.

In this crucial test, the crew will dock and undock autonomously to the International Space Station before returning to Earth.

Boeing will then send astronauts Josh Cassada and Suni Williams to the ISS, where they will live and work for the rest of their mission before heading back to Earth at a later time.

SpaceXs crew flight test will be led by astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, with plans to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in April 2019.

As with Boeings test, the Crew Dragon will dock and undock to the ISS autonomously, before returning to Earth.

Then, SpaceX will send astronauts Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins to the ISS for their mission on the orbiting lab.

'We no longer have to rely on our Russian partners to get to the ISS,' Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana said in the press conference Friday morning.

'This is truly an exciting time for human space flight in our nation. And believe me, it's only going to get better as we charge off into our future.'

SpaceX President & COO Gwynne Shotwell said it was 'a sacred honor' to be taking part in the missions.

'Were not gong to let you down,' Shotwell said, bidding the group: 'Ad Astra' [to the stars].

From left: Eric Boe, Nicole Mann, Chris Ferguson Targeted to launch in mid-2019 aboard a Starliner spacecraft. The test will be Mann's first space flight

Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will launch in April 2019 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket

While Boeing initially planned to conduct its first crew flight test later this year, it confirmed earlier this week that an anomaly was detected during a recent test of the launch abort vehicles, forcing them to push back their target.

The firm will instead launch its first crewed test in 2019.

According to Boeing, the incident occurred during a hot-fire test of the engines used in the Starliner abort system.

Both companies have been conducting extensive testing campaigns ahead of the plans for human spaceflight.

SpaceX is currently eyeing November 2018 for its first crewed demonstration mission with the Crew Dragon, followed by its first flight to the ISS in April 2019, with two astronauts on board.

Boeing will send astronauts Josh Cassada and Suni Williams to the ISS, where they will live and work for the rest of their mission before heading back to Earth months later. This will be Cassada's first space flight

Then, SpaceX will send astronauts Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins to the ISS for their mission on the orbiting lab

WHAT IS ELON MUSK'S CREW DRAGON? The capsule measures about 20 feet tall by 12 feet in diameter, and will carry up to 7 astronauts at a time. The Crew Dragon features an advanced emergency escape system (which was tested earlier this year) to swiftly carry astronauts to safety if something were to go wrong, experiencing about the same G-forces as a ride at Disneyland. It also has an Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) that provides a comfortable and safe environment for crew members. Crew Dragon's displays will provide real-time information on the state of the spacecraft's capabilities, showing everything from Dragon's position in space, to possible destinations, to the environment on board. Those CRS-2 Dragon missions will use 'propulsive' landings, where the capsule lands on a landing pad using its SuperDraco thrusters rather than splashing down in the ocean. That will allow NASA faster access to the cargo returned by those spacecraft, and also build up experience for propulsive landings of crewed Dragon spacecraft.

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Boeing plans to fly a crewed test early next year as well, before sending crew to the ISS mid-2019.

While uncrewed flight tests were not required, both Boeing and SpaceX have volunteered to perform them before adding astronauts.

This was above and beyond the NASA requirement in the contract, said Kathy Lueders, Commercial Crew Program manager at NASA Kennedy.

Both partners said they really wanted to have an uncrewed flight test to make sure the integrated rockets, spacecraft and re-entry systems are all working as designed to be able to ensure the integrated system is functioning.

NASA launched its first space shuttle, Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-1), from the Kennedy Space Center on April 12, 1981.

In the three decades that followed, the space agency deployed a total of 135 missions from US soil.

Boeing (Starliner pictured left) plans to fly an uncrewed mission early next year, with plans to add crew mid-2019. SpaceX is currently eyeing November 2018 for its first demo mission with the Crew Dragon (right), followed by its first crewed flight to the ISS in April 2019

BOEING'S STARLINER SPACE TAXI The Starliner is part of NASA's operational Commercial Crew mission to bring astronauts to the International Space Station. It will be launched from a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, and crewed tests are set to begin in 2018. The missions will be able to take up to four astronauts at a time, with Eric Boe, Bob Behnken, Doug Hurley and Sunni Williams now in training. In February, it was revealed that Boeing has hired a small company to make about 600 3D-printed parts for its Starliner space taxis. The Starliner will be launched from a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, and is part of NASA's operational Commercial Crew mission to bring astronauts to the International Space Station, allowing it to grow to seven residents Advertisement

After the shuttle program was retired in 2011, the agency has relied on Russian modules to send astronauts to space.

With the upcoming tests, NASA is now closer than it has been in nearly a decade to launching astronauts from the US, aboard capsules made here at home.

'Im excited to be part of the future of space travel,' said Jon Cowart, acting deputy manager for the Commercial Crew Programs Mission Management and Integration office at NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

'When we get to this point the companies will have tested every piece of the spacecraft individually, but there is so much more learning that occurs when the spacecraft is actually operated in space.

'The systems will be operated in the actual environment to test it and ensure its ready for crew.'President Tran Dai Quang at the embassy (Source: VNA)



Greeting the President, representatives from the Vietnamese community in Egypt expressed wish to continue receiving support from the Party and State, especially in opening Vietnamese language courses to keep the mother tongue alive in the community.

President Quang informed the expatriates on Vietnams situation and external policy. He noted that Egypt was one of the first Arabian countries to establish diplomatic ties with Vietnam in 1963 and open the embassy in Hanoi in 1964, and the first Northern African country to recognise Vietnam as a market economy in November 2013.

In September 2017, President Al-Sisi paid a State visit to Vietnam, which was the first high-level visit between the two countries.

He said Vietnam and Egypt have good political ties, and they regularly share stances and support each other at the United Nations forums. The African country has expressed backing of Vietnams candidacy as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for the 2020-2021 tenure.

Egypt is Vietnams fifth largest trade partner in Africa with two-way trade hitting USD346 million in 2017. The two countries aim to raise their trade to USD1 billion in the near future.

The leader asked Vietnamese agencies in Egypt to keep close track of the situation in Egypt and propose specific measures to strengthen all-around ties between the two nations.

He committed all possible support to overseas Vietnamese to stabilise their lives, integrate into the host society and maintain cultural identities.

President Tran Dai Quang and his spouse arrived in Luxor city on August 25th afternoon (local time), beginning his State visit to Egypt, the first visit by a head of the State of Vietnam since the two countries established diplomatic ties in 1963./.Archaeologists have discovered an ancient stucco mask thought to depict the face of the Mayan ruler Pacal the Great.

The remarkable 7th century artifact is unlike most such treasures as it represents the king in his old age, with visible wrinkle lines.

Pacal ruled from the time he was just 12 years old, until his death at the age of 80.

Researchers unearthed the mask during excavations at the Palenque archaeological site in the Mexican jungle.

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient stucco mask thought to depict the face of the Mayan ruler Pacal the Great. The remarkable 7th century artifact is unlike most such treasures as it represents the king in his old age, with visible wrinkle lines

The 20-centimeter (7.8 inch) stucco mask was found by a team with the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) during an investigation of the temples ancient drainage system.

Palenque sits in the southern state of Chiapas, on the border of Guatemala.

According to Institute Director Diego Prieto, the mask appears to show the face of K'inich Janaab' Pakal  also known as Pacal the Great.

If it is, in fact, Pacal, the experts say it would be the first of its kind.

The mask includes wrinkle lines around the mouth and cheeks, which would make it the first representation we have of an old Pacal, Arnoldo Gonzalez Cruz from INAH said, according to Mexico News Daily.

If it is, in fact, Pacal, the experts say it would be the first of its kind. The mask includes wrinkle lines around the mouth and cheeks, which would make it the first representation we have of an old Pacal, Arnoldo Gonzalez Cruz from INAH

According to Institute Director Diego Prieto, the mask appears to show the face of K'inich Janaab' Pakal  also known as Pacal the Great

Palenque continues to astonish us with everything it has to offer archaeological, anthropological, and historical research, Prieto said.

Pacal ruled from 615 AD until 683 AD.

Alongside the mask, the researchers found ceramic figures, decorated bones, and the remains of several animals, including lizards, crabs, and tortoises.

The experts say these were likely offerings made for the completion of the buildings reconstruction.

Palenque (shown) continues to astonish us with everything it has to offer archaeological, anthropological, and historical research, Prieto said

The 20-centimeter (7.8 inch) stucco mask was found by a team with the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) during an investigation of the temples ancient drainage system

WHO WAS 'PACAL THE GREAT'? Known as Pakal the great, K'inich Janaab Pakal I was the ruler of the Maya city state of Palenque over 68 years until he died in 683AD. He is thought to have ascended to the throne at the age of 12 years old and during his rule managed to expand Palenques power in the western Maya states. Buildings erected under his rule are considered the civilisations finest architecture. The Temple of Inscriptions was only rediscovered by archaeologists around 200 years ago and was long suspected as a funerary monument to Pakal. However, his tomb was only discovered in the 1950s. Inside was a ornately decorated sarcophagus which depicts Pakal lying on top of the earth monster. Inside, archaeologists found his skeleton still intact. His death mask was made entirely of jade with eyes made from mother of pearl and obsidian. Five skeletons were found at the entrance of the crypt, though to be sacrificial victims intended to follow Pakal to the underworld. Advertisement

Research at the site is aided by the US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation, which provided roughly $500,000 to the effort.

In recent years there have been numerous discoveries that could help to shape our understanding of the Mayan civilization.

Researchers recently found evidence that the societys collapse was brought on by a long period of drought.

A team from the universities of Cambridge and Florida analyzed water samples from Mexico's Lake Chichancanab, where the Maya were based.

Researchers unearthed the mask during excavations at the Palenque archaeological site in the Mexican jungleApple's big iPhone launch event is less than a month away and new details have surfaced online about what the technology firm may have in store for the next iteration of its flagship handset.

Chief among the new details is that Apple is branding this year's lineup an 'S year' - meaning the new devices will mostly include internal improvements, instead of any major aesthetic overhauls, Bloomberg claims.

This tallies with previous reports that suggest Apple will launch three new models that resemble the existing iPhone X all-screen design on September 12th.

The three models are tipped to boast 5.8-inch, 6.1-inch and 6.5-inch displays.

All three models could have a battery charge that lasts for more than a day thanks to a new Apple-designed processor that is set to increase battery life by as much as 40 per cent.

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Apple's big iPhone launch event is less than a month away and new details have surfaced about what the tech giant may have in store for the next iteration of its flagship device

A 6.5-inch iPhone, referred to internally as D33, will feature Apple's largest screen yet, as well as new features like the ability to view content in a side-by-side view.

While it will be the biggest phone in the lineup, Apple is said to be mulling whether or not it should drop the 'Plus' label for the 6.5-inch device, Bloomberg noted.

The 6.5-inch and 5.8-inch models will both feature improved processing speed and upgraded cameras. It's unclear what specific changes will be made.

Apple will try to appeal to price-sensitive consumers with a 6.1-inch model that's most akin to the iPhone 8, aside from the addition of a bezel-less screen.

The devices are also set to have a new processor, expected to be called the Apple A12, that will significantly improve the battery life in all three models.

The next-generation chipset will have an increased number of transistors, which are tiny switches that allow electricity to pass through the processor.

Last year's iPhone chip had a gap of 10 nanometres between each transistor, however, this year Apple is tipped to shrink that to seven nanometres.

Smaller gaps between transistors mean the chip can work more efficiently and requires less power to work, resulting in more battery life.

TSMC, the manufacturer behind Apple-branded processors, estimates its 7nm chips require around 40 per cent less power than their predecessors.

If Apple adopts the new chipset design for its new models, as analysts predict, iPhone users can expect a significant bump in battery.

Apple is also expected to include a number of battery life optimisations that will help to reduce battery drain when the phone is asleep, writes MacWorld.

However, the latest estimates are subject to a number of other details about the phone. Real-world battery life is also affected by other factors, including the number of apps, type of display, and the efficiency of cellular and Wi-Fi radios in the phone.

Apple has been widely rumored to be prepping three new iPhones for later this year. A leaked image reportedly shows the glass panels that will be used in the iPhone models

Elsewhere, the three new iPhone models are tipped to launch in several colours, include an aluminium (rather than stainless steel) chassis, and sport an LCD display.

Since all three models will feature an edge-to-edge display, they'll also have the gesture-based control system used in the iPhone X, which replaces the need for a home button.

Apple's facial recognition system 'Face ID' will also be included in all three devices.

Keeping with earlier rumours, Apple is expected to introduce dual SIM technology for the two larger phones in some regions, Bloomberg noted.

Including dual SIM support would allow users to switch between mobile carrier plans more easily. This feature is likely to appeal to international users who frequently travel to different countries.

Since all three models will feature an edge-to-edge display, they'll also have the gesture-based control system used in the iPhone X, which replaces the need for a home button

Another detail that remains unclear is how Apple will brand its new smartphones.

It's unlikely to brand the new premium phones as the iPhone XS, as this is likely to be read by consumers as 'excess' or 'extra small'.

However, moving to the iPhone XI (iPhone 11) would signal a bigger aesthetic upgrade than the company might necessarily want, given that it is an 'S year'.

The iPhone isn't the only Apple device expected to get a facelift at this year's event.

Apple is also expected to release an Apple Watch with a bigger screen, as well as revamped iPad Pro models that feature slimmer bezels, Bloomberg noted.New details have emerged of the doomed voyage of Royal Navy officer, Sir John Franklin, in 1845.

Sir Franklin led two British ships, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, in search of the last section of the Northwest Passage.

When both ships became stuck in ice, Sir Franklin and all 129 crew members tragically died  but exactly how they met their end has long been a mystery.

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The expedition, consisting of two ships led by British Royal Navy captain Sir John Franklin, aimed to find a sea route linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But the crew was condemned to an icy death after their two ships got jammed in thick sea ice in the Canadian Arctic in 1846

The latest research into the mysterious deaths raised serious doubt about the popular belief that lead poisoning played a role in the death of members of the famed Franklin Expedition.

Previous analyses of bone, hair, and soft tissue samples from the remains of crew members found tissues contained elevated lead levels, suggesting that lead poisoning may have been a major contribution to their demise.

However, questions remained regarding the timing and degree of exposure to lead and, ultimately, the extent to which the crew members may have been impacted.

For the latest study, Synchrotron-based high-resolution confocal X-ray fluorescence imaging in partnership with scientists at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron at the University of Saskatchewan and the Advanced Photon Source was used to visualise lead distribution within bone and dental structures at the micro scale.

Researchers said the skeletal microstructural results 'do not support the conclusion that lead played a pivotal role in the loss of Franklin and his crew'.

It remains unclear exactly what killed the crews of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus.

THE DOOMED FRANKLIN EXPEDITION In command of the doomed was the 59-year-old Sir John Franklin (pictured) who sailed the Arctic three times before The expedition, consisting of two ships led by British Royal Navy captain Sir John Franklin, aimed to find a sea route linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But the crew was condemned to an icy death after their two ships got jammed in thick sea ice in the Canadian Arctic in 1846. The crew's final message before they were wiped out - sent April 25, 1848 - indicated that the survivors were abandoning their ships. They left the two vessels, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, north of King William Island and set out on a harsh journey south toward a mainland trading post. Judging by the bodies found so far, none of the remaining crew made it even a fifth of the way to safety. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were sent out in the summer of 1845 to find the Northwest Passage but they took a crucial wrong turn and ended up stranded and surrounded by pack ice Advertisement

DNA analysis of the remains of the crew suggests many of the sailors suffered with Addison's disease, a potentially lethal condition that occurs when the adrenal gland is damaged and no longer produces the hormones cortisol and aldosterone.

Symptoms include loss of appetite, unintentional weight loss, increased thirst, lack of energy and muscle weakness.

Addison's disease is often associated with tuberculosis (TB), since this causes damage to the adrenal gland, which is found on top of the kidney.

Scientists have previously found evidence of crew members suffering TB during the autopsies of three sailors who died and were buried on a nearby island before the ships were marooned.

Another likely explanation for the death of the crew is starvation, researchers say.

Scientists have taken the DNA from the skeletal remains of several sailors who died after getting stuck in Arctic ice on a doomed 1845 expedition. This image shows the mummified remains of one of the expedition's doomed crew members

Franklin and his crew were in the Arctic for some two to three years, and there is evidence that food supplies were dangerously short.

Previous studies have found evidence of cannibalism later in the expedition.

David Cooper, the Canada Research chair in Synchrotron bone imaging, said: 'It's not a stretch of the imagination to understand how people die after two or three years in the Arctic. This was a desperate situation, food supplies are running low, and there is evidence of cannibalism later on in the expedition.

'I think what's remarkable is that they survived as long as they did.'

Researchers took DNA from the skeletal remains of several sailors in April 2017 to identify who the lost souls were.

Marc-Andre Bernier setting a marine biology sampling quadrant on the port side hull of the Erebus

To their surprise, they discovered that four of the crew were women - a finding that goes against previous reports suggesting an all-male trip.

The women were found to have European DNA, meaning they couldn't be the remains of local Inuits.

While the results could simply be false identifications due to the age of the DNA, the researchers noted that women sometimes served in disguise in the Royal Navy.

'Some of these women were smuggled onboard [the] ship,' the authors, from the Douglas Stenton of Nunavut's Department of Culture and Heritage, a territory in northern Canada, wrote in their paper.

'Others disguised themselves as men and worked alongside the crew for months or years before being detected or intentionally revealing themselves to be female.'

The new study, Franklin expedition lead exposure: New insights from high resolution confocal x-ray fluorescence imaging of skeletal microstructure, was published in PLOS ONE.

A previous study found that tuberculosis, which resulted in adrenal insufficiency (Addison's disease), led to the deaths of some of the crew.

The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan and led by University of Michigan dentistry professor Dr Russell Taichman.

He said that for decades, historians and researchers have speculated on several generally accepted causes of death: exposure, scurvy, lead poisoning, botulism, tuberculosis and starvation.

During the Franklin expedition, the ships became trapped in ice pack in 1846 near King William Island, which is above the Arctic Circle in what is now northern Canada.

Stranded: In 1837 the HMS Terror became trapped by ice (pictured) while under the command of Admiral George Back. The ship remained stuck for 10 months. Eight years later it returned to the Canadian Arctic and this time it failed to escape the icy clutches of the Northwest Passage

The ship was well-stocked with canned food, and the crew spent two years on and around the remote island waiting in hard conditions for the ice to melt and free their ships.

Some of the clues left behind included Inuit accounts of emaciated crew members with 'hard, dry and black' mouths.

With this account in mind, Dr Taichman, also a cancer researcher, decided to look more closely at the various cause-of-death theories and how each condition impacts the mouth.

To conduct the research, Dr Taichman and Mark MacEachern, a librarian at U-M's Health Science Library, cross-referenced the crew's physical symptoms with known disease and analyzed 1,718 medical citations.

Dr Taichman was surprised when Addison's disease, which wasn't one of the generally accepted causes of death, kept coming up during the analysis.

'In the old days, the most common reason for Addison's in this country was TB,' Dr Taichman said.

'In this country now, it's immune suppression that leads to Addison's.'

The sailors died during the disastrous Franklin Expedition in which two vessels vanished along with all 129 people on board. This image released by Parks Canada in September 2014 shows a side-scan sonar image of HMS Erebus shipwreck on the sea floor in northern Canada

People with Addison's disease have trouble regulating sodium and can become dehydrated, and they can't maintain their weight even when food is available - two conditions of the crew as observed by the Inuit.

Addison's disease also leads to darkening of the skin, which could explain the Inuit accounts of the dark mouths.

While the idea of scurvy among the crew falls in line with the fact that sailors of that time had the disease, that alone does not explain the deaths.

A stronger clue than this was evidence of tuberculosis that was discovered during autopsies of three sailors who died and were buried on a nearby island before the ships were marooned.

Since the 1980s skulls and other remains of more than 20 sailors have been found by scientists after decades of fruitless searching in the Canadian Arctic. This skull, believed to belong to one of the crew members, was found back in 1993

Lead poisoning, which was confirmed to a degree by an analysis of recovered bones, could have come from lead solder used fork the food cans and from lead pipes that distilled water for the crew.

'Scurvy and lead exposure may have contributed to the pathogenesis of Addison's disease, but the hypothesis is not wholly dependent on these conditions,' Dr Taichman said.

'The tuberculosis-Addison's hypothesis results in a deeper understanding of one of the greatest mysteries of Arctic exploration.'

Dr Taichman's fascination with the Arctic began as a child in his native Toronto, when his father told him stories about the early explorers.

Dr Taichman has visited the Arctic 16 times, where he's led hiking trips and kayaked among the icebergs and proposed to his wife.Shelter dogs are often misidentified as the wrong breed - which can dramatically influence their chances of getting adopted, researchers have warned.

A new study collected DNA from over 900 shelter dogs in Arizona and San Diego.

It found just 5% of the shelter dogs were actually purebred - and that just 67% of the dogs had their breed correctly identified by shelter staff.

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Researchers found that dogs in the San Diego shelter with a pit bull-type ancestry waited more than three times as long as other dog breeds. Pictured, a Pit Bull Terrier puppy.

HOW TO GET A DOG'S DNA The Arizona State University team genotyped shelter dogs in Arizona and California and compared the genetic information to the breed labels assigned in shelters. They collected DNA from over 900 shelter dogs housed at the Arizona Animal Welfare League and Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (AAWL) in Phoenix, AZ, and the San Diego Humane Society and Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SDHS) in San Diego, CA. For the genetic testing, the researchers used the Wisdom Panel Canine DNA Tests from Mars Veterinary, which is a commercially available product. A small brush was used to collect cells from the dog's cheeks and gums, and the samples were sent to a lab for processing. At the lab, DNA was extracted from the dog's cells and compared to over 300 sites in the canine genome that have been matched to specific breeds. Advertisement

The three most common breeds at both shelters were the same: the American Staffordshire Terrier, Chihuahua and Poodle.

However, these three breeds accounted for less than half of the dogs in the two shelters, raising fears many animals are being misidentified.

Researchers found that dogs in the San Diego shelter with a pit bull-type ancestry waited more than three times as long as other dog breeds.

Assigned breeds are often just guessed from their physical appearance, the researchers say.

These assigned breeds are then used to infer how the dogs might behave and also often impact the length of time a dog waits to be adopted.

'Breed identification has quite an outsize role in people's perceptions of dogs,' said Clive Wynne, professor of psychology and head of the Canine Science Collaboratory.

''What breed is he?' is often the first question people ask about a dog, but the answer is often terribly inaccurate.'

The Arizona State University team genotyped shelter dogs in Arizona and California and compared the genetic information to the breed labels assigned in shelters.

'The level of genetic diversity in the shelter dogs exceeded our expectations: we found 125 distinct breeds,' said Lisa Gunter, who is a Maddie's Research Fellow in the ASU Department of Psychology.

'We also found that just 5% of the shelter dogs were purebred, even though it is commonly assumed that up to a quarter of dogs in shelters are purebred.'

The genetic testing gave the researchers information about three generations of ancestors for each dog.

The three most common breeds at both shelters were the same: the American Staffordshire Terrier, Chihuahua and Poodle. Pictured, Cheyenne, a Staffordshire terrier

On average, most dogs were comprised of three different breeds, with some dogs having up to five breed signatures identified at the great-grandparent level.

At the SDHS, shelter staff used the physical appearance of a dog and breed descriptions from the American Kennel Club Breed Identification Guides to identify a primary and secondary breed.

When the researchers looked at whether either the assigned primary or secondary breed matched the information from the genetic profile of a dog, they found the shelter staff accuracy was 67%.

The accuracy fell to 10% when staff identified more than one breed.

How a breed label impacts a shelter dog extends beyond identification, the researchers say.

The relationship between behavior and breed is murky except for certain behaviors that are breed-specific, like pointing.

How a breed label impacts a shelter dog extends beyond identification, the researchers say.

'The genetics of behavior is so complex that a dog who is a cross of two breeds might not behave much like the typical members of either of its parents' families,' Wynne said.

'Then you have a situation where breed-typing is worse than stereotyping members of our own species. Breed labels would be better dropped altogether.'

The behavioral diversity even within single breeds has led Gunter and Wynne to advocate for the importance of behavioral assessments instead of breed labels.

What really matters is a dog's behavior and how it might fit into an adoptive family, Gunter said.

'Shelter dogs are interesting and complex genetically,' Gunter said.

'They really are individuals, and labeling them with a single breed can minimize their uniqueness.'

'Everything about the life experience of a dog - where he was before coming to the shelter or any medical issues he might have - is what makes him who he is, not who his grandparents might have been,' said Michael Morefield, director of marketing and communications for the AAWL.

'When you adopt a dog, you are not adopting a bully, a German Shepherd or St. Bernard, you are adopting Jerry or Mo. When you love a dog, you don't love a German Shepherd. You love Jerry.'Google's next smartphone could be just a few months away from hitting the shelves.

The tech giant is expected to release the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones on October 9th, according to Bloomberg.

However, unlike previous years, the devices will be released at a New York City launch event, instead of San Francisco, like Google has done in the past.

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Google's next smartphone could be just a few months away from hitting the shelves. The tech giant is expected to release the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones on October 9th

The Pixel and Pixel 2 were launched on October 4th in 2016 and 2017, respectively, so this year's event would be slightly later in the month.

It comes as there have been weeks of leaks claiming to show off the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL's specs.

Last month, XDA-Developers shared images that purportedly show the yet-to-be-released Pixel 3 XL in a white colorway.

They reveal that the Pixel 3 XL is likely to include a large notch, as well as a sizable 'chin,' or space at the bottom of the phone's display.

The photos provide more details after another leak in early June claimed to show the Pixel 3 XL in black.

Like the photos shared earlier this year, these show off a Pixel phone with a larger form-factor, an orange power button on the right side of the device, single-lens rear camera, dual front-facing cameras and stereo speakers.

Critics of the notch on Apple's iPhone X are likely to be peeved by Google's next smartphone. New images claim to show the upcoming Pixel 3 XL with a massive notch and chin design

Additionally, the device shows a logo on the back panel that's different than the typical 'G', indicating that it's more than likely a prototype model.

The photos were leaked by XDA-Developers user 'dr.guru' on Sunday.

'Unfortunately the phone doesn't boot because it was remotely erased by Google,' the user wrote in a blog post.

The prototype Pixel device shows that it has 4 gigabytes of RAM, as well as 64 gigabytes of storage.

However, the feature that's generated the most attention is the XL prototype's 'deep notch' and massive chin.

Apple first popularized the notch, which houses facial recognition sensors and cameras, in the iPhone X.

Like the photos shared earlier this year, these show off a Pixel phone with a larger form-factor, an orange power button on the right side of the device, single-lens rear camera, dual front-facing cameras and stereo speakers. It has 4 gigabytes of RAM and 64 gigabytes of storage

At the time, the controversial design received feedback from users who both loved and hated the notch, with some claiming it was an ugly feature that distracted from the phone's edge-to-edge screen.

More and more smartphone vendors have worked to minimize the notch to make way for a truly bezel-less display, but if the prototypes prove accurate, the Pixel 3 XL will move in the opposite direction.

The large chin at the bottom of the device is expected to house dual front-facing stereo speakers.

It's also unclear whether the phone features an organic LED display or the Active Edge squeeze feature that's appeared on previous Pixel devices.

Active Edge first appeared on the Pixel 2 and can be used to activate Google Assistant, as well as other helpful features, such as silencing incoming calls.

Google is expected to release two new Pixel models at its October hardware event later this year.

Savvy Twitter user @PhoneDesigner created renderings of what the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL could look like based on leaked images of what claim to show their screen protectors

Google is expected to release two Pixel models at its October hardware event later this year. A nearly bezel-less Pixel 3 XL (pictured in a rendering) will be released, along with a Pixel 3

Along with the Pixel 3 XL, analysts have projected that Google will launch a smaller Pixel device that'll be reminiscent of the Pixel 2.

It will feature sizable bezels at the bottom and top of the screen.

Google typically features different designs for its base Pixel model and the XL model, so it's unsurprising that the notch may only make it onto the larger of the two devices.

It's also believed that Verizon will be the exclusive carrier of the Pixel 3 devices.

Unlike Apple, Google's next smartphones are expected to retain a single-lens camera design on the back panel.

It may take a page from the iPhone maker in other areas, however, as new leaked images show off a 'Pixel Stand.'

The device, also leaked by XDA-Developers, is believed to be a wireless charging device for some upcoming Google devices. It's unclear if that includes the new Pixel phones.A number of countries are known to be developing autonomous weapon systems, which can select and eliminate targets without human help.

They include France, Israel, Russia, South Korea, the USA and UK.

Nations are racing to develop AI systems that can take control of unmanned military Reaper drones - UAVs that are currently piloted by humans from a ground control centre.

The high-altitude craft could soon pick out targets and hit them with air-to-ground missiles without any human oversight.

Rumours suggest military officials are also looking into the development of automated tanks.

AI-assisted weapons systems are already in use in some countries, including Israel, which recently deployed semi-autonomous drones to fire tear gas at protesters in Gaza.Advertisement

This fascinating 'UFO landing pad' has been built in the middle of the Argentinian desert by a man who claimed aliens told him to construct it.

It's a collection of white and brown rocks in the shape of a star, known as an 'ovniport' - and it appeared in the small town of Cachi in the province of Salta.

It is believed to have been built by Swiss man Werner Jaisli, who travelled to the area in search of extraterrestrials.

The fascinating 'UFO landing pad' that has been built in the middle of the Argentinian desert

Visitors flock to the site - and no wonder. Because it's stunning.

A fact that's highlighted by aerial images.

After travelling to Argentina, Jaisli is reported to have claimed he received a 'telepathic message' from aliens telling him they needed a place to land on earth.

He told Argentine newspaper El Tribuno: 'They landed about 100 metres above our heads and projected on us a beam of light that made us both see their own brightness.

'The funny thing is that it did not affect our vision. Something began to bubble through my brain: it was an order. They asked me telepathically to build the airport.'

He is thought to have immediately got to work, making a large star in 2008 with 36 points that measures 48 metres in diameter.

It is believed to have been built by Swiss man Werner Jaisli, who travelled to the area in search of extraterrestrials and claimed they told him to build it

Visitors flock to the site - and no wonder. Because it's stunning. A fact that's highlighted by aerial images

Jaisli also made a smaller star and it took him until 2012 until his work was complete.

As well as tourists, the site is also popular with UFO enthusiasts, who believe they may be able to contact beings from another world from the site.

However, soon after the ovniport was built, locals around Cachi stopped seeing Jaisli, who had a large beard and would often wear a Druid outfit.

It is unclear where he travelled to but some locals joked that he may have been abducted by aliens.

However, it is thought he actually went to Bolivia - with another theory that he travelled back to Switzerland.Tourists. Theyre important. After all, they prop up economies in some parts of the world.

But that doesnt mean they cant be annoying, as one acerbic internet thread has been revealing.

In response to the question what do you hate most about tourists? the answers have been coming thick and fast, including 'they keep dying on desert hikes when its 45C', 'the cargo shorts' and 'claiming to be 1/65th Scotch.

Tourists who hike deserts when it's 45C have been winding up locals

The question was posted on Reddit and it was user AllMyBeets who kicked off proceedings, with this answer: They keep dying. Live in Arizona. 113 [45C] degrees is not hiking weather. One litre of water is not enough water for a three-hour hike in 113 degree weather! Stop dying in my desert!

On the other side of the world in Kyoto, its Chinese tourists that are winding up ext23.

They wrote: Due to proximity and number of tourist attractions, I honestly doubt there is a place on earth with more Chinese tourists per capita than here.

It is f*****g maddening. They come in massive groups - like three generations of the same family - and just... are there. Everywhere. They occupy space in a way that you would assume was geometrically impossible. They find a way to block entrances and walkways almost preternaturally. They don't understand - or more likely, do not even realise - that Japan is one of the quietest places on earth. People don't just shout at each other.

I can't even ride the bus outside my apartment anymore because the buses are always so full of tourists. Kyoto is turning into a place that is physically unpleasant to be in.

While for Connelly90, its Americans that irk.

This user wrote: As someone who lives near Loch Lomond, I hate when people (it's mostly Americans... sorry) come into the pubs shouting about how they're "1/65th Scotch" [though they probably meant 1/64th] and how it's "great to be back home".

We love people visiting, but don't try to claim to be from here unless you actually are. We'll just talk about you with accents you can't understand!

Cargo shorts are a big no-no as far as some locals are concerned

While for user FritoP, the worst tourists are simply the ones who refuse to adapt.

They wrote: For example, an American who won't yield to faster traffic (they should do that at home, but that's another topic)

Or the European who refuses to tip at customary rate when visiting the States.

OsirisRexx, meanwhile, just wishes tourists would relax into their role.

This user wrote: I hate being in a group of tourists who are obsessed to the point of being neurotic with not looking like tourists.

"We could do this, but it's soooo touristy."

"I have to take a picture of this super famous monument here, sorry if I look touristy as f***!"

It's so annoying, just enjoy your trip. There literally nothing more touristy than worrying about looking touristy.

But then, thats only going to annoy some locals.

Mostly the cargo shorts, was one users response to the question.Advertisement

Life as a wildlife photographer is a tough one, as one top professional has revealed in a stunning new book.

In Arctic Solitaire: A Boat, A Bay and the Quest for the Perfect Bear, Paul Souders, from Seattle, reveals how snapping the great outdoors and the creatures in it can be brutal.

The book charts four solo journeys he made in the Arctic between 2012 and 2015 and is packed with incredible pictures  many of which illustrate the dangers the 57-year-old faced.

One shows a Polar bear baring its teeth at the camera as it gets up close and personal. Another shows one lurking just beneath the surface of the water nearby  and in one picture a curious bear peers through the window of his ship.

This boat was lashed by storms and ground on rocks as Souders sought out the bears. He says: Think of this not as a how-to manual so much as a cautionary tale.

Below are a jaw-dropping selection of images from the tome.

In Arctic Solitaire: A Boat, A Bay and the Quest for the Perfect Bear, Paul Souders, from Seattle, reveals how snapping the great outdoors and the creatures in it can be brutal. This picture shows a polar biting an underwater camera in the Hudson Bay

The book charts solo journeys Souders made in the Arctic and is packed with incredible pictures  many of which illustrate the dangers the 57-year-old faced

Souders said: 'For years I've wanted to photograph polar bears, but rather than chartering a boat and captain or going on a tour, I wanted to see if I could do it independently'

The photographer added: 'I came up with a plan to pull my 22ft fibreglass boat on its trailer about 1,800 miles from my home in Seattle to the end of the road in Manitoba, in central Canada. I put the boat into the Nelson River and travelled 75 miles to reach Hudson Bay, then took her more than 600 miles north, fighting storms and ice, towards the Arctic Circle'

Mr Souders explained: 'Over the course of four summers I photographed dozens, maybe hundreds of polar bears living wild and unafraid near the Arctic Circle at the northern reaches of Hudson Bay. I spent vast amounts of time watching the bears as they moved along the melting sea ice and along the shore'

Souders said: 'I prefer to work around bears that are relaxed and curious. Although they are brutally effective hunters, polar bears are quite intelligent and are always curious about their surroundings'

Souders' 22ft boat is pictured here jammed in among blocks of floating ice in Nunavut territory

Ice one: A self-portrait showing Souders and his boats grounded in Hudson Bay

Mesmerising: Souders' boat - C-Sick - sitting in still waters off Marble Island in Hudson Bay

A polar bear with a young cub on sea ice in Repulse Bay in Nunavut, which lies to the west of the Northwestern Passage

Whalers' graves on Deadman Island in Nunavut. Arctic Solitaire comes from notes Souders kept during four solo boat trips to Canadas Hudson Bay

A polar bear skull in Hudson Bay. Souders' book is billed as a 'hilarious and evocative misadventure'. He said: 'There were times when the bears relaxed completely, and I was able to show them staring through the boat's window at me, or swimming through the water, or hunting on the ice. There were also a few times when they took a more active, even culinary interest in my presence, which was another matter entirely. I drifted too close to one big male polar bear, and he took an enormous bite of my inflatable dinghy. The air leaked out in one enormous "whoosh" and I had to limp back to C-Sick and try to patch up the hole'

'I wanted to share both the romance and tremendous difficulty of the day to day life of a wildlife photographer,' Souders said. 'A lot of folks imagine that it's an altogether glamorous and wonderful job. On good days, it really is. But there's also an incredible amount of hard work and frustration and disappointment. And, in my case anyway, a vast trove of ridiculous mistakes to be made'Matthew Newton was forced to step down as the director of Jessica Chastain's new movie Eve earlier this month following a backlash over his alleged history of domestic violence and assault.

And friends have become increasingly worried for the Australian actor since his big break in Hollywood was quashed one week after its announcement.

A concerned insider told New Idea on Monday: 'Matt hasn't been eating and has been really down - he isn't sleeping much, doesn't want to talk to anyone and it's a struggle to get him out of the house.'

'This latest blow could have a devastating effect': Fears are growing for troubled Matthew Newton (pictured in Melbourne on May 20, 2009) after he resigned from Jessica Chastain's new movie Eve in the wake of resurfaced domestic abuse claims

Haunted by the past: Matthew was forced to step down as the director of Jessica Chastain's new film Eve this month following a backlash over his alleged history of domestic violence and assault. Jessica (pictured) is a supporter of women's rights and the Time's Up movement

They claimed the embattled writer-director, 41, was making 'real progress' with his career and well-being, but this incident has the potential to become a major setback.

'Matt has been doing so well since he moved to New York, and especially since he started seeing Kat [Catherine Schneiderman, who he became engaged to in 2016].'

The source added that Matt's famous parents, Bert and Patti Newton, were becoming increasingly concerned.

'[Bert and Patti] have seen him suffer in the past and are panicking that this latest blow could have a devastating effect on him,' they claimed.

Troubled: An insider claimed the embattled writer-director, 41, was making 'real progress' with his career and well-being, but this incident has the potential to become a major setback. Pictured: Matthew leaving court in Sydney on March 2, 2011 after a brief appearance for breaching his apprehended violence order (AVO)

Jessica Chastain was criticised earlier this month for selecting Matthew - who has been accused of assaulting two of his ex-girlfriends - to write and direct her new film Eve.

The 41-year-old, who is an outspoken advocate for the Time's Up movement and women's rights, faced a backlash on social media for the decision.

Matthew has a long history of alleged assault and domestic violence claims in his home country of Australia, dating back to 2006.

'They've seen him suffer in the past and are panicking that this latest blow could have a devastating effect on him': The source also insisted Matthew's his famous parents Bert and Patti Newton (pictured on July 31, 2008 in Sydney) are becoming increasingly concerned

A week after his directing role was announced, Matthew released a statement confirming he had resigned.

'Yesterday I notified Jessica Chastain and the other producers on the film Eve that I will be stepping down as director' he said at the time.

'Since the announcement of this film, the responses, which are powerful and important, have not fallen on deaf ears. I am profoundly aware that I have a responsibility to lead where I have failed in the past,' he continued, adding that he wished to do the right thing and take responsibility for his problems.

'I can never undo the harm that Ive caused the people Ive cared about and I carry that shame and responsibility with me every day.'

Time's Up advocate: Jessica Chastain was criticised earlier this month for selecting Matthew - who has been accused of assaulting two of his ex-girlfriends - to write and direct her film Eve

'I can never undo the harm that I've caused... I carry that shame and responsibility': Matthew, who suffers from bipolar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder, explained in his recent statement announcing his resignation from Eve that he'd been seeking treatment for his issues

Matthew, who suffers from bipolar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder, went on to explain that he had been seeking treatment for his issues.

He said that over the past eight years he had been working extensively with healthcare professionals to help overcome his addiction and mental health illness, and had lived a 'quiet and sober life' for the past six years.

Sources told Woman's Day earlier this month that Matthew's mother Patti had been 'devastated' by the incident and was rallying behind her troubled son.

'In her mind, he's really tried to rehabilitate himself through therapy and taking time out of the spotlight... While she and Bert have never condoned what's happened in the past, they love him. And they believe he's changed and overcome his demons,' an insider said at the time.

'They love him and they believe he's changed and overcome his demons': Sources claimed earlier this month that Matthew's mother Patti had been 'devastated' by the Eve controversy and was rallying behind her troubled son. Pictured with Bert on April 3, 2006 in Sydney

History: Matthew, 41, has a long history of alleged assault and domestic violence claims. Pictured in a 2012 mugshot photo after a Miami hotel brawl

Jessica's initial decision to select Matthew as director of Eve was criticised by some.

The Australian filmmaker, who lives with his fiancee Catherine Schneiderman in New York's Upper West Side, was arrested for the alleged physical assault of his former partner Brooke Satchwell in 2006.

He pleaded guilty to 'common assault' after prosecutors withdrew three more serious charges, including assault occasioning actual bodily harm and stalking and intimidating Brooke. The conviction was later overturned by a court.

Arrest: Matthew was arrested for the alleged physical assault of his former partner Brooke Satchwell (pictured) in 2006. The couple are pictured in November 2003

In 2010, Matthew's then-girlfriend Rachael Taylor filed a protective order against him, alleging physical, verbal and emotional abuse, and he entered Sydney's Northside West Clinic for treatment.

He was also arrested twice in Miami, Florida, in 2012 - the first for trespassing and resisting officers, while a second incident saw him charged with battery and resisting arrest after he attacked a hotel receptionist.

Following the charges, Matthew checked into the Betty Ford Center in California for 90 days of alcohol and drug treatment. Both matters were later dismissed under the conditions that Matthew completes community service and writes a letter of apology to the hotel clerk.Illustrative image (Source: Vietnambiz.vn)



Vietnamese fruits face competition in quality, design and price with fruits from other exporting countries, according to experts.

For instance, Vietnam exports six kinds of fresh fruits to the US, including lychee, longan, rambutan, dragon fruits, star apple and mango, but those have occupied a very small market share at about 3 percent of total US fruit imports.

According to experts, the low export volume is due to high costs of transport, preservation, quarantine and irradiation treatment for Vietnamese fresh fruits, reducing their competitiveness.

Therefore, to expand market share in the coming time, Vietnam should focus on processed products such as juice, dried and canned products, and especially organic products.

Vietnamese fruits meeting international standards required at least five years of negotiation to enter the US market, according to Dao Tran Nhan, former Counselor of the Vietnam Trade Office in the US. Moreover, the US has required Vietnamese companies to pay for irradiation treatment for their fruit before shipping to the market, forcing Vietnamese fruit exporters to charge high prices in the US.

In addition, any shipment of local fresh fruits to the US must indicate the area in which the fruits was planted according to the code agreed on by the two parties. This is a hurdle because Vietnamese fruits are often planted on a small scale and tracking their origins is challenging.

Vietnams fruit products have been exported to the EU market but only at a small volume due to competition in price, quality and delivery time with fruits from countries located closer to the EU such as Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Panama, and from regional rivals such as Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia.

Meanwhile, the EU has regularly reviewed and adjusted food safety regulations as well as increased the frequency of inspections for Vietnamese vegetables and fruit because many batches have not met EU regulations. Those are disadvantage for efforts to increase the export volume to this market, according to the experts.

The Japanese market has increased demand for tropical fresh fruits like bananas, dragon fruits, mangos and lychees. Vietnam could promote exports of dragon fruits due to their good taste and quality, but it has faced obstacles in enhancing the export volume of other fruit because they are comparatively expensive.

Nguyen Quoc Toan, acting director of Agro Processing and Market Development Authority, said fruit and vegetable exports may hit a weak patch at the end of this year due to the influence of the rainy season and reduced output for some kinds of fruits.

The US-China trade war may cut Chinas demand for imported fruits, affecting the exports of Vietnamese fruits and vegetables to this market.

Therefore, businesses need to strengthen links in the production chain to ensure the quality of fruits and vegetables for export.

To link production chains, Nguyen Dinh Tung, general director of Vina T&T, said the businesses should convince farmers to cooperate with them and plant fruit trees in accordance with international standards.

In addition, the company must develop the process of harvesting, packaging and transport, especially the preservation technology that maintains the fruit quality until it reaches the consumer, he said.

Processing is an indispensable way to bring Vietnamese fruits to the world market and solve obstacles such as post-harvest preservation, price reduction due to over-supply and technical barriers in import markets.

The enterprises must maintain export markets that they have entered already. To do so, they must have production chains that ensure good quality, abundant quantity and competitive price.

On the other hand, to compete with fruit of other countries in demanding markets, enterprises have proposed the Government invest in cold storage, packaging facilities and irradiated facilities, reducing firms expenditures for exporting.

At the same time, the Plant Protection Department or the local authorities should provide information about importers quality standards for farmers.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Vietnams exports of fruits and vegetables in the first seven months of this year were valued at USD2.3 billion, an increase of 12.6 percent. China was the largest export market of Vietnamese vegetables and fruits, consuming 74 percent of the total national vegetable and fruit exports./.Advertisement

Sara Vale sensationally quit The Block on Sunday's episode after her bathroom was criticised by the judges as 'ugly' and 'dated'.

And stunning photographs reveal a look inside the jaw-dropping $75,000 renovation that Sara, 31, insisted 'did not deserve to be last'.

After scoring just 22 points, the Sydney mother tearfully explained that she and husband Hayden, 45, 'put their heart and soul' into the renovation and resented being bottom of the leader board 'three weeks in a row'.

Tears and tantrums: Sara Vale (right) and her husband Hayden (left) were left furious after finishing in last place because the judges did not like their bathroom renovation on Sunday night's episode of The Block

Judges Neale Whitaker, Shaynna Blaze and John McGrath were initially blown away by the spectacular golden brass bath tub - but it all went downhill when they turned their attention to other fixtures.

The modern bathroom featured a black and grey colour palette, which John described as overwhelming.

'There's too much black - black cabinetry, black tap ware, black basins. For me, it brings you down,' he said during the judges' critique.

Bold design: The modern bathroom featured a black and grey colour palette, which judge John McGrath described as overwhelming

Criticism: Furthermore, the judges said the layout of the bathroom was impractical and 'ugly'

Glowing reviews: Judges Neale Whitaker, Shaynna Blaze and John McGrath were initially blown away by the spectacular golden brass bath tub - but it all went downhill when they turned their attention to other fixtures

Unique: The bathroom also had three black walls, which Neale described as 'drab'. It also had white and grey tiles, an oversized glass shower screen, a visible toilet and two hand basins with round mirrors above

Too harsh? Judges Neale Whitaker (left), Shaynna Blaze (centre) and John McGrath (right) were unimpressed by Sara and Hayden's efforts and subsequently, the couple finished last

Poll Were the judges too harsh on Sara and Hayden? Yes No Were the judges too harsh on Sara and Hayden? Yes 490 votes

No 512 votes Now share your opinion





The bathroom also had three black walls, which Neale described as 'drab', white and grey tiles, an oversized glass shower screen, a visible toilet and two hand basins with round mirrors above.

The judges said the layout was impractical and 'ugly'.

'There's a lot of money in this bathroom,' said Shaynna.

'When we first walked in, I did see the toilet straight away.'

'[The shower screen] is a little bit too close you're like, 'Oh there's glass there, I have to move', so it felt a little bit uncomfortable to start with.'

Each team is renovating luxury apartment spaces at the infamous Gatwick hotel in Melbourne.

They are all competing to win $100,000, in addition to any profits made during auction.

Winning bathroom: South Australians Kerrie, 48, and Spence, 46, won with a total score of 27.5

Impressed: 'This feels spot on to me,' Neale said of Kerrie and Spence's renovation - which featured herringbone marble and a white and grey colour palette

The final scores were: Bianca and Carla - 27; Norm and Jess - 23; Hayden and Sara - 22, Courtney and Hans - 24; and winners Kerrie and Spence - 27.5.

After learning that they had come last, Sara and Hayden criticised the producers backstage and tearfully quit the show.

'I'll make it quick, I'm not coming back... Again, after everything... last?' Sara wept.

Second place: Bianca and Carla, both 35, were applauded for their 'sophistication'. They scored 27 points

Third place: Courtney and Hans scored 24 points and judges applauded the matching vanities

Fourth place: Norm, 40, and Jess, 33, scored a measly 23 points. Their bathroom had a marble feature wall

'You've got to be kidding me? This is f**king embarrassing. We put our heart and soul into that!'

She continued: 'I'm going, I'm not coming back... take your f**king mics. If we're gonna constantly come last and be embarrassed, why would I want to be here? That bathroom did not deserve to be last.'

Sara, who is a mother to toddler Harlow Rose, explained her shocking decision to quit in an interview with TV Week on Monday.

Last place: Sara and Hayden claimed their scores were excessively harsh

Shock exit: Sara, who is a mother to toddler Harlow Rose, explained her shocking decision to quit in an interview with TV Week on Monday. She said, 'I'd got to the point where if I'm going to be constantly insulted on national TV, I'd rather spend time with my family and daughter... It just broke us'

'As a person, you can get to a point before you explode,' Sara said.

'I'd got to the point where if I'm going to be constantly insulted on national TV, I'd rather spend time with my family and daughter... It just broke us.'

She added: 'I told the producers I wasn't coming back. I was really hurt and didn't want to be there. The judges weren't nice to us for three weeks. They were harsh. It got worse and worse, until that pivotal moment of the bathroom [judging] and I was like, 'I'm done.''Romy Poulier has made it very clear she's not on The Bachelor to make friends.

In a bombshell interview with NW on Monday, the 29-year-old 'bad girl' claimed her rival Shannon Baff - who she previously accused of having a 'colourful past' - is the show's real villain and has simply received a generous edit.

The sassy blonde alleged that Shannon, 25, even confronted Nick Cummins about his motivations for being on the show and accused him of 'doing it for the big bucks'.

'You're just doing it for the big bucks!' Bachelor star Shannon Baff (left) reportedly 'questioned Nick Cummins' (right) motives for being on the show in an unaired scene'

Recalling an incident that didn't make it to air, Romy claimed: 'She [Shannon] goes to Nick [and says], "You're just doing it for the big bucks, aren't ya? They pay you - you're just doing it for the big bucks!"'

The Terra Nova actress further alleged that Shannon received a glowing edit on the show, which she believes does not reflect reality.

'She does a very good job at portraying herself as a sweet, innocent girl who wants to spread love,' Romy said.

Battle of the blondes! Bachelor 'villain' Romy Poulier (left) has made several accusations about co-star Shannon (right), the most recent being that she confronted Nick about his salary on set

It's not the first time Romy has taken aimed at Shannon in media interviews.

Speaking with OK! magazine on Thursday, Romy hinted that her rival might have some skeletons in her closet.

Romy claimed she heard 'a few things' about Shannon during her time in the Bachelor mansion, but doesn't 'want to be the one to spill' the secrets.

Brazen: Romy (pictured) is regarded as one of the show's 'villains', thanks to her sassy remarks and cutting observations

'I'm sure it'll all come out in the wash,' she teased to the magazine.

'None of it is 100 per cent confirmed, but I think she just has an open mind and is open to experimenting'.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Shannon for comment.She spent the past few days in Mexico celebrating her 20th birthday.

And Sofia Richie still sported that holiday glow when she returned home to Los Angeles on Sunday.

Taking to Instagram, the birthday girl flaunted her ample assets in a sexy red dress while lazing around on a pool chair.

Stunner: Sofia Richie posted a photo of herself lounging around in a sexy red dress on Sunday following her trip to Mexico with boyfriend Scott Disick to celebrate her 20th birthday

'My fave @lulus dress,' she captioned the promotional post.

Sofia was dressed in a red mini dress with spaghetti straps.

The beauty accessorised her look with stylish reflective shades and had blonde longs slicked back.

Vacation time: The daughter of Lionel Richie's photo comes after she spent the past few days in Mexico celebrating her 20th birthday with her boyfriend Scott Disick, 34

Trip of a lifetime: The loved up duo were also seen enjoying an adventure on the Marietas Islands where they did some snorkeling on a private beach

Sofia flaunted her toned legs in a pair of minimalistic gold strappy heels.

The daughter of Lionel Richie's photo comes after she spent the past few days in Mexico celebrating her 20th birthday with her boyfriend Scott Disick, 34, and close friends.

The loved up duo were also seen enjoying an adventure on the Marietas Islands where they did some snorkeling on a private beach.

Baby Sofia: Sofia is the daughter of musician Lionel Richie

Pals: Some of Sofia's closest friends were also seen celebrating her birthday with her in Mexico

Along with Scott, his three children, Mason, eight, Penelope, six and Reign, three, were also on the trip.

Arriving back home on Saturday, Sofia took to Instagram to share a large bouquet of flowers she received from one of her friends.

'I love you so much! Came home to these!' she captioned.

Feeling the love: Arriving back home on Saturday, Sofia took to Instagram to share a large bouquet of flowers she received from one of her friendsEx On The Beach beauty Kayleigh Morris had the results of her recent nose job on full display on Sunday as she joined her reality TV peers to judge a Miss Swimsuit event.

The 30-year-old TV personality left little to the imagination in a golden yellow silk gown as she joined Zahida Allen and Helen Briggs for the event at Birmingham's Stories nightclub.

Zahida also showed off her cleavage in a low-cut semi-sheer white lace maxi dress, while Helen contrasted her long blue tresses with a nude minidress.

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Sizzling: Ex On The Beach's Kayleigh Morris (far right) showed off the results of her recent nose job on Sunday as she joined (L-R) Zahida Allen and Helen Briggs to judge Miss Swimsuit

Kayleigh shows off her jaw-dropping curves as she joined her gal pals to judge the competition, making a statement in a gold silk gown.

The brunette let her long legs do the talking as the dress boasted a statement thigh-high split accessorising with barely-there heels.

Keeping her glossy tresses loosely curled, Kayleigh had her brand new nose was on full display with a classic but dramatic makeup look.

Sexy: The 30-year-old TV personality left little to the imagination in a golden yellow silk gown with barely-there heels as she judged the event in Birmingham's Stories nightclub

New look: Last month Kayleigh unveiled the results of her nose job with a sizzling selfie, gushing to fans she finally felt proud to post an unfiltered snap

Meanwhile Zahida put on a sexy display in a plunging white lace maxi dress with her blonde tresses in dramatic curls, contrasting the look with a dark red lip.

Helen let her blue straight glossy locks command the attention by going for a simple nude minidress and clear heels, showing off her signature pout with a classic matching lip.

Earlier this month, Kayleigh took to Instagram to reveal the results of her nose job, revealing the cosmetic procedure had brought back her confidence.

Dramatic: Meanwhile Zahida put on a sexy display in a plunging white lace maxi dress with her blonde tresses in dramatic curls, contrasting the look with a dark red lip

The star, who was famously attacked for her 'wonky nose' by her co-star Jemma Lucy, proudly flaunted the rhinoplasty results as she praised the surgery for making her 'finally feel normal'.

She captioned the image: 'The weird feeling of being able to post a pic in 14 years without editing the Nose!!! 2 weeks after surgery @elitecosmeticsurgery Work of the miracle worker @dr.aliuckan'.

She shared another snap as she gushed: 'Finally can feel normal again'.She's the Oscar-winning actress who prides herself on being a hands-on mom.

And Sunday saw Gwyneth Paltrow share a rare shot of her two children Apple, 14, and Moses, 12.

Taking to Instagram, the 45-year-old posted a photo of the pair standing in their backyard dressed down in casual ensembles.

Dotting mom: Gwyneth Paltrow shared a rare photo of her kids Apple and Moses on Sunday and mourned the end of summer

'Nooooooo summer don't go,' captioned the doting mom.

Apple was dressed in an oversized yellow shirt and a pair of over-the-knee tights in the photo.

Her hands were on her hips and her blonde curls were left out naturally.

Casual Sundays: Apple was dressed in an oversized yellow shirt and a pair of over-the-knee tights in the photo

Standing next to her, brother Moses was seen in a white statement T-shirt and board shots.

The pair were photographed in an ultra green and thriving backyard with a table and chair swing set in the corner.

Gwyneth's sweet photo ahead of the new school year comes after she revealed last month to the New York Times that she 'really wanted' a third child.

Family: The Avengers star was married to Coldplay frontman Chris Martin between 2003-2016

'I really wanted another one,' she told the publication while discussing her family.

The Avengers star was married to Coldplay frontman Chris Martin between 2003-2016.

Speaking in 2013 about her desire to expand her brood, she revealed she had suffered from a miscarriage when trying.

Not meant to be: Speaking in 2013 about her desire to expand her brood, she revealed she had suffered from a miscarriage when trying

Longing for more: 'And you never know, I could squeeze one more in. I am missing my third. I'm thinking about it'

'My children ask me to have a baby all the time,' she told The Mail at the time.

'And you never know, I could squeeze one more in. I am missing my third. I'm thinking about it.'

'But I had a really bad experience when I was pregnant with my third. It didn't work out and I nearly died. So I am like, "Are we good here or should we go back and try again?"

Gwenyth is currently engaged to producer Brad Falchuck who also has shares two children, Isabella and Brody, with his ex-wife of ten years Suzanne Bukinik.Shauna Macdonald was effortlessly chic in a quirky checked blazer on Sunday as she attended the launch of her new film White Chamber.

The 37-year-old actress was stylish in the classic jacket with jeans and heels as she joined her co-stars for the launch at London's Arrow FrightFest.

Also attending the launch were Candis Nergaard, 34, and Sharon Maughan, 68, as they celebrate the film which tells the tale of a woman who wakes up in an empty cell who is tortured for information.

Stylish: Shauna Macdonald (far right) was effortlessly chic in a quirky checked blazer on Sunday as she joined her co-stars for the launch of her new film White Chamber

Shauna went for a casually chic look in a simple black top and printed checked blazer combo, along with light-washed blue jeans.

The Descent star added some height with black platform heels and had her blonde tresses in simple waves.

Along with her co-stars Shauna also posed with the film's director Paul Rashid, who also wrote the sci-fi thriller.

Perfect: The 37-year-old actress was stylish in the classic jacket with jeans and heels as she joined her co-stars for the launch at London's Arrow FrightFest

Pals: Shauna also posed with the film's director and writer Paul Raschid after they worked on the sci-fi film which tells the tale of a woman who wakes up in a padded white cell

In the film, Shauna takes centre stage as the female lead, with the official synopsis reading: 'Civil war rages. A woman wakes up in a blindingly white cuboid cell. Using its sophisticated functionality, her captor tortures her for information; information she claims not to have  or does she?'

She was also supported in the style stakes by Candis, who vamped it up in a black jumpsuit with matching plum lip.

The Grantchester star had her dark tresses in a voluminous bouffant as she attended the event.

Perfect: Shauna takes on the lead role in the film, which has already picked up traction at several festivals

Meanwhile Sharon showed off her ageless beauty in a tailored blue pinstripe jumpsuit and yellow undershirt.

The Acting thespian added some more comfort to her look with flat white boots, and kept her blonde tresses styled into simple waves.

The trio looked thrilled to be reunited as the promoted their latest acting venture, which has already picked up traction at several film festivals.She welcomed her son Max Mario to the world with her husband Tom Fletcher on Friday.

And Giovanna Fletcher was bursting with joy as she returned home with her newborn baby and introduced him to their two sons Buzz, four and Buddy, two on Sunday.

The author, 33, shared a sweet Instagram snap of the McFly star, also 33, cradling the latest addition to their family, while Buddy cuddled the tot.

Sweet: Giovanna Fletcher was bursting with joy as she returned home with her newborn baby and introduced him to their two sons Buzz, four and Buddy, two on Sunday

She wrote: 'When the baby of the house suddenly seems massive thanks to a fresh arrival... Buddy has given so many kisses and cuddles today... too cute! I mean, its been chaos, but wonderful too! Xxx'

The presenter of the Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast also took to her social media page to share an update on her return home from hospital.

The mother-of-three said: 'Thank you so much for the messages it's so lovely. We're home now. We came home yesterday, the boys meeting max has been absolutely gorgeous and delicious. So yeah we're just resting up.'

Special moment: Giovanna also took to her social media page to share an update on her return home from hospital saying the boys meeting Max was 'absolutely gorgeous'

Tender: Giovanna announced she gave birth to her third child with husband Tom Fletcher via Instagram on Saturday

It comes after the wife of McFly star took to Instagram on Saturday to share the first image of their newborn son with a caption reading: 'Welcome to the world Max Mario Fletcher!', in a nod to her TOWIE star brother Mario Falcone.

She continued: 'Born yesterday at 3:06pm weighing 7pounds...We cant wait to get home and introduce him to his big brothers... theyre very excited! Xxx'

Tom also shared a sweet snap of the tot with the caption: 'Our gorgeous son, Max Mario Fletcher was born yesterday afternoon. We are all totally in love with him and cant wait to take him home to meet his brothers. WE HAVE THREE BOYS!'

Sweet: Happy days: The wife of McFly star Tom Fletcher shared the first snap of Max Mario, saying: 'Welcome to the world Max Mario Fletcher!'

Tom and his wife Giovanna were expecting for the arrival in September but proudly shared the news over the weekend.

Giovanna's brother Mario also took to social media to share the sentiments, writing: 'Cannot wait to meet him... what a fantastic name', alongside a love heart emoji.

Overjoyed at Max's early arrival, Tom posted another sentimental snap of the sunrise from their hospital window via his Instagram page.

Gorgeous: Giovanna looked ready to pop ahead of the little one's arrival, sharing snaps of her blossoming bump ahead of giving birth

He wrote: 'Sunrise from the room where all three of our sons were born. It also overlooks the place we got married. I took this while Gi was still in labour in the pool behind me doing her thing.'

Giovanna and Tom revealed earlier this year baby preparations were well and truly under way as they transformed a room in their house into a nursery.

Sharing the love: Giovanna's brother Mario Falcone also took to social media to share the sentiments, writing: 'Cannot wait to meet him... what a fantastic name'

Welcome to the world: Overjoyed at Max's early arrival, Tom posted another sentimental snap of the sunrise from their hospital window

The married couple kept the nursery gender neutral because they kept the sex of their child a surprise.

The mother-of-three divulged more about why the couple had decided to redecorate the nursery and the guest bedroom ahead of the baby's arrival.

She shared on Instagram: 'With the arrival of baby number three looming, I decided it was time to get nesting and redecorate the nursery and guest bedroom, in the hope that my sister will come to stay and look after us!

Adding to the family: Tom and his wife Giovanna, are already parents to children two children - Buzz, four, and Buddy, two

'We focused on keeping the nursery "gender neutral" as baby no 3 is set to be a surprise. Now its ready I feel much calmer, so a bit of pregnancy nesting definitely played its part!'

The couple first met when they were 13 when they were pupils at the Sylvia Young School and started dating eight years ago.

Tom proposed to Giovanna at the school in April 2011 after he lured her there under the pretence he was filming a documentary about his life.

A year later the pair married, with Tom's McFly bandmates and Mario as best men at their intimate family wedding in London.

During their first two pregnancies, Fletcher and Giovanna took pictures every day throughout the 9 months to show her bump blossoming.

They created a YouTube video, called Bump to Buzz to announce the arrival of their first son Buzz, while they took pictures documenting their second pregnancy, together along with their son Buzz present.

And this pregnancy has been no different with the author documenting her growing bump with fans across her social media platforms.Former Married At First Sight star Nasser Sultan has issued a serious warning to trolls who have threatened his family online.

Appearing on KIIS FM's Kyle And Jackie 'O' on Monday, the 51-year-old announced he aims to bring the offenders to justice with the help of the New South Wales' police.

'I'm going to the police today and I've got a list of death threats, bomb threats, and stalking threats,' Nasser said of the seriousness of the hostile interactions.

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'The people sending death threats will be arrested!' MAFS star Nasser Sultan (PICTURED) enlists the police to investigate vile messages sent by online trolls

Nasser claims the death threats escalated after news broke of his decision to contact a 12-year-old's school principal for vile comments he received from the pupil.

'People are sending me pictures of guns and saying: "9mm - your family is going to get blown up. You're going to get blown up."'

Clearly angered by the brazen comments made by the public to his private inboxes, Nasser told the radio hosts: 'I'm not going to tolerate that.'

'I've got a list of death threats, bomb threats, and stalking threats': Nasser claims the threats escalated after news broke of his decision to contact a 12-year-old's school principal last week

'That's a jail-able offence!' Shock jock Kyle Sandilands (L) stood up for Nasser (R) in the interview and warned potential offenders that they could wind up in prison

'Regardless of what you think of Nasser or the MAFS, or him reaching out to that school's principal, when you do make death threats against someone the police will handle them seriously, and you will get arrested,' shock jock Kyle Sandilands said.

He continued: 'People think they can get on social media and say whatever, but there is a cyber crimes division of the New South Wales police and they will find you. You will be arrested for making death threats - that's a jail-able offence!'

Kyle, appearing to give a strong warning to any listeners who engage in the vulgar act online, added: 'You shouldn't' be sending anyone death threats or threatening someone's family unless you do want to get locked up, because that's what will happen.'

Taking his threats seriously! Under section 31 of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), documents containing threats are an offence that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment

Nasser ended his chat by saying: 'I don't mind you calling me a name, but when you threaten my family and threaten to come around my house and blow me up - that's not acceptable!'

Under section 31 of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), documents containing threats are an offence that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment.

Nasser appeared on the recent season of Married At First Sight, and was partnered with TV wife Gabrielle Bartlett.Ex Southern Charm star Thomas Ravenel explained his breakup with Ashley Jacobs, even hinting at infidelity in a series of tweets on Saturday, coming weeks after he quit the show amid sexual assault claims.

Ravenel, 56, took to Twitter Saturday and detailed the end of his yearlong relationship with Jacobs, a 33-year-old nurse.

'Today, my personal life just took a huge upward turn,' said Ravenel, a one-time treasurer for the state of South Carolina. 'I finally have more than enough information to move forward without any doubt or hesitation and I'll never look back.'

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Opening up: Ex Southern Charm star Thomas Ravenel, 56, explained his breakup with Ashley Jacobs, 33, subtly hinting at infidelity in a series of tweets on Saturday, coming weeks after he quit the show amid sexual assault claims

When a follower asked him if he was single, he replied, 'And ready to mingle!'

Jacobs opened up about the split in an Instagram Live post earlier this month, saying she was trying to handle the difficult situation 'privately' and still loved and cared about Ravenel.

'Im still trying to work it out, not work out getting back together, but Im still trying to figure it out,' Jacobs said on the social media site. 'I think everyones been through breakups before but its hard. Its not easy.

'Sometimes you just want to stay quiet and figure out what the next move in your life is going to be.'

Revelation: The one-time politician said that he felt strongly about a life decision he'd made

Something missing: Ravenel said he never got a sense that Jacobs' 'trust, faith, respect and love' was 'immovable'

Ravenel seemed to be hinting that Jacobs had two-timed him in bringing up a lyric from the 1987 Chicago song, If She Would Have Been Faithful.

'After 30 years I finally understand the lyrics from that wonderful Chicago tune: If she would have been faithful, if she could have been true, then I would have been cheated, I would have never known real love,' he wrote, later adding that he did not harbor hard feelings toward Jacobs.

'I hope the best for her,' he tweeted. 'And I do feel a bit sad now. But now I know that just around the corner, down the street, around the block, something magical is going to happen, not tomorrow not next week but perhaps tonight. Perhaps real love.'

It's over: Ravenel and Jacobs, a 33-year-old nurse, were together for about a year

Done: Ravenel quit Southern Charm earlier this month after releasing a statement saying he was taken advantage of, amid sexual assault claims by several women including his former nanny

Ravenel later said that he 'never for a second got [the] vibe' from Jacobs that her 'trust, faith, respect and love' was 'immovable.'

He added: 'I need to find the right woman with which to begin that journey.'

Ravenel also touched on Jacobs spat with his ex Kathryn Dennis that was seen on Southern Charm last month, saying he 'should have intervened immediately' when Jacobs called out Dennis for her parenting of her two kids with Ravenel, daughter Kensington, four, and son St. Julien, two. (Jacobs went on to apologize via Instagram for her 'reckless comments,' but Dennis, 27, blew off the mea culpa in a clip she posted to the site.)

Earlier this month, Ravenel took to Twitter to explain his decision to quit Southern Charm ahead of the show's sixth season, amid sexual assault claims made by two women three months ago, of which a law enforcement probe is ongoing.

Allegations: Earlier this year Ravenel was accused of sexual assault by two women, including his children's former nanny

Not guilty: Ravenel has denied accusations of sexual assault through his attorney

'I'm not doing the show anymore,' he tweeted. 'In the contract they have the right to fictionalize your story. They took advantage of me. I decided I've got too much to lose and informed them I'm not coming back.'

He then made his Twitter page private, which he subsequently opened back up in the past week.

Earlier this year Ravenel was accused of sexual assault by two women, including his children's former nanny.

Dawn Ledwell, known to fans of the Bravo reality show as 'Nanny Dawn,' was the second woman to come forward and accuse Ravenel of sexual assault following Ashley Perkins, who claimed Ravenel sexually assaulted her mother, Debbie.

Dawn was featured on the show caring for Ravenel's two children with Dennis; and claimed he attempted to kiss her after coming back from a night out with friends.

Additionally, real estate agent Ashley Perkins has alleged that Ravenel assaulted her mom Debbie Holloway Perkins after meeting him on Tinder in October 2015 and going on a last-minute first date.

Ravenel has denied the accusations through his attorney.She made her name with her 2014 hit All About That Bass.

But Meghan Trainor had everyone talking for a completely different reason on her latest red carpet.

The 24-year-old hitmaker was a wonder in white as she made a fashionable arrival at the iHeartRadio MMVAs in Toronto on Sunday night.

Stunner: Meghan Trainor was a wonder in white as she made a fashionable arrival at the iHeartRadio MMVAs in Toronto on Sunday night

She looked absolutely fantastic at the star-studded gala as she flashed her toned tum by sporting a lacy white bra on the outing.

Meghan kept up with her all-white theme as she sported a lacy jacket with flowy white trousers.

Her blonde locks were worn in a high ponytail which flowed down over her shoulders.

Wow factor: The 24-year-old hitmaker looked absolutely fantastic at the star-studded gala as she flashed her toned tum by sporting a lacy white bra on the outing

Gorgeous: Meghan kept up with her all-white theme as she sported a lacy jacket with flowy white trousers

Pretty: Her blonde locks were worn in a high ponytail which flowed down over her shoulders

She accentuated her natural looks with complimentary make-up as she struck her best pose on the red carpet.

It was a busy night for the star as she performed at the gala event rocking a metallic gold leather biker jacket over a bra top.

It is shaping up to be an exciting night as Madison Beer and Kristin Cavallari went all out for attention as they arrived on the red carpet of the star-studded event.

Talented: It was a busy night for the star as she performed at the gala event rocking a metallic gold leather biker jacket over a bra top

Showstopper: She really knew how to control the crowd

The pop star and the reality star each opted for revealing figure-flaunting ensembles for the red carpet in Toronto.

Madison, 19, stepped out in a strapless black mini dress with over-the-knee boots while Kristin, 31, flashed plenty of cleavage in a bright yellow coat dress.

In the spotlight: Madison Beer and Kristin Cavallari went all out for attention as they arrived at the 2018 iHeartRadio MMVAs in Toronto on Sunday in figure-flaunting outfits

Madison's thigh-skimming mini had silver buttons diagonally from hip to hem.

Her stiletto-heeled boots emphasized her legs.

The teen, who found fame on YouTube, left her long brunette locks loose and she accessorized with statement silver hoop earrings.

Former Laguna Beach star Kristin flaunted her legs in the shiny coat dress that she paired with sandal heels.

Eye-catching: Madison, 19, stepped out in a strapless thigh-skimming black mini dress with over-the-knee stiletto-heeled boots

The teen pop star, who found fame on YouTube, left her long brunette locks loose and she accessorized with statement silver hoop earrings

The frock was gathered at the waist and had an asymmetrical hem that made it very revealing.

She wore her blonde hair styled back from her face and falling down her back.

The iHeartRadio MMVAs are an annual award show presented by Canadian television channel Much to honor the best music videos much like last week's MTV Video Music Awards.

Peek-a-boo: Former Laguna Beach star Kristin, 31, flashed plenty of cleavage in a bright yellow coat dress gathered at the waist and with an asymmetrical hem

Looking good: She wore her blonde hair styled back from her face and falling down her back

iHeartRadio MMVAs 2018 Winners Artist for Change WINNER: Halsey Video of the Year Shawn Mendes, "In My Blood" Halsey, "Bad at Love" WINNER: Logic feat. Alessia Cara and Khalid, "1-800-273-8255" Drake, "God's Plan" Childish Gambino, "This Is America" Ariana Grande, "No Tears Left to Cry" Best EDM/Dance Artist or Group Sofi Tukker Loud Luxury Calvin Harris WINNER: Marshmello Zedd Kygo Best Director Shawn Mendes, "In My Blood" (Director: Jay Martin) WINNER: Drake, "God's Plan" (Director: Karena Evans) Drake, "Nice for What" (Director: Karena Evans) Childish Gambino, "This Is America" (Director: Hiro Murai) Justin Timberlake feat. Chris Stapleton, "Say Something" (Director: Arturo Perez Jr.) The Carters, Apeshit" (Director: Ricky Saix) Best Pop Artist or Group Meghan Trainor WINNER: Shawn Mendes Halsey Alessia Cara Ed Sheeran Camila Cabello Best Rock/Alternative Artist or Group Chvrches WINNER: Imagine Dragons Portugal. The Man Foo Fighters Arcade Fire Arkells Best Hip Hop Artist or Group The Carters WINNER: Drake Post Malone Cardi B Kendrick Lamar Childish Gambino Best New Canadian Artist WINNER: Elijah Woods x Jamie Fine The Beaches Ralph New City Bulow Johnny Orlando Artist of the Year Ed Sheeran Cardi B Drake Camila Cabello WINNER: Shawn Mendes Post Malone Song of the Summer Drake, "Nice for What" WINNER: Loud Luxury feat. Brando, "Body" Cardi B, Bad Bunny and J Balvin, "I Like It" Zedd, Maren Morris and Grey, "The Middle" Marshmello and Anne-Marie, "Friends" The Carters, "Apeshit" Best Collaboration Shawn Mendes feat. Khalid, "Youth" WINNER: Bebe Rexha feat. Florida Georgia Line, "Meant to Be" The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar, "Pray for Me" Kendrick Lamar and SZA, "All the Stars" Zedd, Maren Morris and Grey, "The Middle" Marshmello and Anne-Marie, "Friends" Fan Fave Video Drake, "God's Plan" WINNER: Shawn Mendes, "In My Blood" Childish Gambino, "This Is America" The Carters, "Apeshit" Logic feat. Alessia Cara and Khalid, "1-800-273-8255" Alessia Cara, "Growing Pains" Fan Fave Artist Ed Sheeran Camila Cabello WINNER: Shawn Mendes Taylor Swift Halsey Alessia Cara Fan Fave Duo or Group Soffi Tukker Imagine Dragons Maroon 5 The Chainsmokers 5 Seconds of Summer WINNER: BTS Fan Fave Single Ariana Grande, "No Tears Left to Cry" Post Malone feat. 21 Savage, "Rockstar" Shawn Mendes, "In My Blood" WINNER: Selena Gomez and Marshmello, "Wolves" Camila Cabello, "Havana" Ed Sheeran, "Perfect" Fan Fave New Artist Cardi B Billie Eilish Hayley Kiyoko WINNER: Chris Wu Why Don't We Dua Lipa Fan Fave Much Creator The Baker Twins The Mike On Much Podcast SneakerTalk Jaclyn Forbes Candage Leca WINNER: TheDanocracy The MMVAs air on Much, CTV and stream online. Advertisement



Officials and staff of embassy and representative agencies

of Vietnam in Russia raise fund to support Lao people (Photo: VNA)

At the event, Counselor Nguyen Quynh Mai highlighted the traditional friendly relations, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between Vietnam and Laos. She said that high-ranking leaders of the government as well as leaders and staff of ministries, sectors and localities of Vietnam have organized practical activities to support Lao people.

Each official and staff member of the embassy, and representative agencies of Vietnam in Russia, donated one days salary to help Lao people quickly overcome difficulties, stabilize their lives and restore production.

The sum of money raised will be quickly transferred to Lao people through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy hydropower dam collapse occurred on July 23rd, causing massive floods which submerged many villages downstream and completely isolated Sanamxay district./.She is considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.

And Kim Kardashian proved worthy of the title as she flaunted her enviable figure in a racy seaside snap posted on Sunday.

The 37-year-old reality star left little to the imagination in a skimpy black bikini as she posed with the beautiful sand and surf as a backdrop.

Seaside stunner: Kim Kardashian, 37, flaunted her enviable figure in a racy seaside snap posted on Sunday

Daring to impress, the makeup mogul flashed her toned tummy and ample assets as the bathing suit was low cut.

She kept her trademark raven tresses in a set of gorgeous braids that cascaded over her shoulders.

The posting comes as Kim treated herself to a cupcake on Friday.

The star flaunted her enviable fit figure in a silver metallic bikini as she captioned the cute pic: 'Cupcake Kimmy'

Just desserts: Kim Kardashian, 37, posted a snap of herself eating a cupcake on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Kim just received a $240k neon Mercedes G-Wagon from her husband Kanye West.

And she was planning to accessorize the lavish gift as she showed off her new collection of wigs via Instagram on Saturday.

The 37-year-old reality star posted a picture of six different hair pieces with the caption: 'New hair to match the whip!'

New car, new hair: Kim Kardashian, 37, showed off her new collection of wigs to match her new Mercedes via Instagram on Saturday; (pictured August)

The photograph featured the hair pieces with pastel shades of color and all featuring straight tresses.

Earlier in the day, Kim shared an adorable video of her receiving the luxury SUV from her rapper husband.

Kim fell in love with the car while driving the same make and model around Miami earlier this month at 2 Chainz wedding.

'Oh my gosh, I just got out of the gym and was surprised by this new baby. I loved it so much in Miami and I kept on talking about it,' she explained.

Hair story: The reality star posted a picture of six different wigs with the caption: 'New hair to match the whip!'

Big spender: She just received a $240k neon Mercedes G-Wagon from husband Kanye West

'Oh look who surprised me with this baby!' Kim said as she panned the camera over to the Famous hitmaker.

'You guys, I got the truck of my dreams because I was so excited in Miami,' she continued.

Later, the Keeping Up With The Kardashian star drove the vehicle over to her sister Kylie Jenner's house.

Surprise! 'Oh look who surprised me with this baby!' Kim said as she panned the camera over to the Famous hitmaker

The 21-year-old makeup mogul owns the same car but in a shocking shade of highlighter orange.

'Look when you just pull up to your sister's house to say good morning and you guys have matching neon trucks!'

'Kylie is schooling me on the stool I need [to get in]... because I can't have any mishaps,' Kim explained.Schapelle Corby has emerged as a surprise frontrunner in the race for next year's Bachelorette after viewers launched a viral social media campaign.

The 41-year-old convicted drug trafficker, who spent almost a decade behind bars in Bali's Kerobokan Prison after trying to smuggle marijuana to Indonesia, is being championed by fans as a representation of a 'true, everyday' Australian woman.

A Facebook page encouraging Network Ten and producers Warner Bros. to consider the Gold Coast native for next year's season has already amassed 12,000 supporters in a matter of days.

'She's ready to take back the years she lost': Schapelle Corby (pictured in Brisbane on Sunday) 'is a favourite for 2019 Bachelorette' after fans launched a campaign to get her on the show

The page's description reads: 'The Bachelorette needs to represent the true, everyday woman. A woman that knows the ups and downs of world travel.

'A woman that has a strong sense of family. A woman that is independent, strong and isn't afraid of getting her hands dirty.

'A woman that has experience in risk, small business ownership [and has] an entrepreneurial spirit. A woman that's ready to take back the years she's lost. A woman that is... Schapelle Corby.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Network Ten for comment.

Troubled past: The 41-year-old convicted drug trafficker, who spent almost a decade behind bars in Bali's Kerobokan Prison after trying to smuggle marijuana to Indonesia, is being championed by fans on Facebook as a representation of a 'true, everyday' Australian woman. Pictured: Schapelle during her appeal at Denpasar District Court in Bali on August 25, 2006

Schapelle returned to Australia in May 2017 after serving almost a decade behind bars and three years on parole for smuggling drugs into Indonesia.

She was arrested at Bali's Ngurah Rai Airport in October 2004 after customs officers discovered 4.1kg of marijuana wrapped in plastic inside her boogie board bag.

After being sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment at Denpasar District Court in 2005, she ended up serving only nine years after receiving sentence cuts.

The People's Bachelorette! A Facebook page encouraging Network Ten and producers Warner Bros. to consider the Gold Coast native for next year's season has already amassed 12,000 supporters in a matter of days. Pictured: Schapelle with her court translator Eka Sulistiowati (left) after being handed a 20-year sentence in Denpasar on May 27, 2005

Schapelle met her boyfriend Ben Panangian in 2006 during a church service in Bali's Kerobokan Prison, where they were both serving time for drug offences.

It was previously speculated that the couple would never be reunited, as Ben would not be allowed into Australia because of his criminal history.

But earlier this year they hooked up in Singapore before heading to a beach resort in Vietnam for a two-week holiday.

Ordeal: Schapelle returned to Australia in May 2017 after serving almost a decade behind bars and three years on parole for smuggling drugs into Indonesia. She was arrested at Bali airport in October 2004 after customs officers discovered 4.1kg of marijuana wrapped in plastic inside her boogie board bag. Pictured with the chief of Kerobokan Prison on March 11, 2008

It is unclear if Schapelle and Ben are still in a relationship.

Australia's current Bachelorette is 32-year-old account manager Ali Oetjen. Her season will air later this year, after The Bachelor finishes.

Previous leading ladies include Sam Frost, Georgia Love and Sophie Monk.

Will Renae be watching? If Schapelle is next year's Bachelorette, her former Kerobokan Prison cellmate Renae Lawrence (pictured together on April 22, 2008) will no doubt be watching from her home in Newcastle, NSW. The Bali Nine heroin trafficker will be released from prison before the end of the year after completing her 20-year sentenceHe has been working as an actor in Hollywood for almost half a century.

And recently wrapped production on his latest movie Angel Has Fallen opposite Morgan Freeman and Gerard Butler.

But on Sunday, Nick Nolte was just another father enjoying an outing with his wife and daughter.

Family man: Nick Nolte enjoyed a casual outing with his wife Clytie and daughter Sophie, 10, in Malibu on Sunday

The veteran star, who's 77, stepped out in Malibu where he lives with Clytie Lane and their 10-year-old daughter Sophie.

He was casually attired in a dark blue cotton shirt that he left untucked over loose-fitting white trousers.

Nolte sported a full beard and short gray hair and carried a large black bag.

Lane looked lovely in a burgundy sleeveless dress and a sloppy sunhat while Sophie opted for a stripy hoodie and blue patterned shorts.

Prolific actor: The veteran star, who's 77, has been working as an actor in Hollywood for almost half a century

relaxed: Nolte was casually attired in a dark blue cotton shirt that he left untucked over loose-fitting white trousers. He sported a full beard and short gray hair and carried a large black bag

Sunday outing: Lane looked lovely in a burgundy sleeveless dress and a sloppy sunhat while Sophie opted for a stripy hoodie and blue patterned shorts

Nolte and Lane welcomed Sophie in 2007.

They tied the knot in 2016.

The star of the Prince of Tides, 48 Hrs. and Down and Out in Beverly Hills was married three times previously and has a son Brawley, 32, from his third marriage.

In January, he published his memoir Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines in which he spoke about his childhood in the rural Midwest, his journey to fame in Hollywood, his relationships and struggles with addiction and his passion for his art.

Veteran star: The star of the Prince of Tides, 48 Hrs. and Down and Out in Beverly Hills was married three times previously and has a son Brawley, 32, from his third marriageDespite their hopes for redemption, Sara and Hayden Vale's $75,000 bathroom - the most expensive in The Block history - was given the lowest score on Sunday's episode.

And the couple have now set the record straight about their decision to make a $9,000 gold brass bathtub the centrepiece of the room, which the judges eventually described as 'ugly' and 'dated'.

'It was definitely an exaggeration when I said we based our whole apartment on the bath,' Sara told Nine Homes on Monday.

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'It was definitely an exaggeration': The Block's Hayden and Sara (pictured) have backtracked on claims they 'based their whole apartment on the $9,000 gold brass bathtub'... after their $75,000 renovation was slammed by the judges

Explaining the statement bathtub had to be shipped from overseas, she added: 'It was definitely a piece we had to have in our apartment. We thought that this bath would complement the apartment quite nicely.'

Hayden agreed with his wife, saying: 'Also the brass and the black went with well with our apartment and our overall colour scheme. It's nice to have something a little bit different, that looks a little more luxurious.'

Mother-of-one Sara sensationally stormed off The Block after her pricey bathroom was savaged by the judges, Neale Whitaker, Shaynna Blaze and John McGrath.

'It was definitely a piece we had to have': The couple (pictured in an interview with Nine Homes on Monday) claimed the bathtub was never intended as the centrepiece of their entire apartment, but stood by their decision to splash out on their bathroom area

The final scores were: Bianca and Carla - 27; Norm and Jess - 23; Hayden and Sara - 22, Courtney and Hans - 24; and winners Kerrie and Spence - 27.5.

Sara, 31, was heartbroken after the scores were revealed, ripping her microphone off as she walked off set.

She wept: 'I'm going, I'm not coming back... take your f**king mics. If we're gonna constantly come last and be embarrassed, why would I want to be here? That bathroom did not deserve to be last.'

Glowing reviews: Judges Neale Whitaker, Shaynna Blaze and John McGrath were initially blown away by the spectacular golden brass bath tub - but it all went downhill when they turned their attention to the other fixtures

Bold design: The modern bathroom featured a black and grey colour palette, which judge John McGrath described as overwhelming

Judges Neale Whitaker, Shaynna Blaze and John McGrath were initially blown away by the spectacular golden brass bath tub - but it all went downhill when they turned their attention to other fixtures.

Poll Were the judges too harsh on Sara and Hayden? Yes No Were the judges too harsh on Sara and Hayden? Yes 490 votes

No 512 votes Now share your opinion





The modern bathroom featured a black and grey colour palette, which John described as overwhelming.

The bathroom also had three black walls, which Neale described as 'drab', white and grey tiles, an oversized glass shower screen, a visible toilet and two hand basins with round mirrors above.

The experts said the layout was impractical and 'ugly'.

Each team is renovating luxury apartment spaces at the infamous Gatwick hotel in Melbourne.

They are all competing to win $100,000, in addition to any profits made during auction.

Too harsh? Judges Neale Whitaker (left), Shaynna Blaze (centre) and John McGrath (right) were unimpressed by Sara and Hayden's efforts and the couple eventually finished bottom of the leader board on SundayEliminated Bachelor contestant, Kayla Gray has returned to work as a flight attendant after being eliminated from the show last week.

The 25-year-old shared an Instagram photo onboard a Tigerair plane on Monday, while dressed in her work uniform, and joked that she has no choice but to return to old habits in an effort to find love.

'Back to reality - Look's [sic] like I have to go back to my old tricks and start giving out my number on a napkin to passengers again,' she captioned.

'I have to go back to giving out my number on a napkin again': The Bachelor's Kayla Gray (left) returns to work as a Tigerair flight attendant after getting booted by Nick Cummins

Despite being booted by former Wallabies star Nick Cummins last week, the Melbourne-based beauty looked to be in high spirits as she posed with a colleague.

Although she was only on the show for a short time, Kayla made a memorable debut when she infamously jumped in the pool while dressed up in evening wear.

She was trying to get Nick's attention but failed to do so as the rugby star didn't notice her antics.

Antics: Although she was only on the show for a short time, Kayla made a memorable debut when she infamously jumped in the pool while dressed up in evening wear

Last month, Kayla said she thought Nick was a 'bogan' upon meeting him for the first time.

'I thought he was a bit of a bogan... but that's not a bad thing,' she told Perth Now last month.

She told Adelaide Now on Thursday that other contestants weren't attracted to Nick.

Awkward: She was trying to get Nick's attention but failed to do so as the rugby star didn't notice her antics

'A lot of the girls acted in there like they absolutely loved him, they thought he was hot but I've spoken to a lot of them since we've been out and they're like, 'Oh, he's so gross, he's ugly,'' she said.

'They just said they (liked him) to go further on the show. I think probably 90 per cent of the girls in there are just there for the fame.

She added: 'It's funny how as soon as this (The Bachelor) has been on air, a lot of the girls are coming out with new products, websites  new brands of jewellery, clothing, everything.'She may be the host of America's Next Top Model.

But Tyra Banks proved that she still is the current top model;

The 44-year-old model was on the prowl on the red carpet of the iHeartRadio MMVAs in Toronto on Sunday.

Still stunning: Tyra Banks was on the prowl on the red carpet of the iHeartRadio MMVAs in Toronto on Sunday

She certainly turned heads in the vibrant look at the star-studded Canadian music event.

Tyra sported a clinging leopard-patterned top tucked into a bright yellow pencil skirt and a matching long jacket.

She contrasted the bright look with black including a leather belt with a large gold buckle, stockings, and thigh-high patent leather booties.

All eyes on her: The 44-year-old model certainly turned heads in the vibrant look at the star-studded Canadian music event

Gorgeous: Tyra sported a clinging leopard-patterned top tucked into a bright yellow pencil skirt and a matching long jacket

Vibes: Her blonde locks were worn down in a middle part as she put on her best vobue poses on the red carpet

Her blonde locks were worn down in a middle part as she put on her best vobue poses on the red carpet.

Tyra's evergreen looks were very much on display as she complemented them with smokey eye and shiny pink lip.

She even made a costume change during the event as she switched up her look before presenting the Best Collaboration award to Bebe Rexha.

Flaunting it: She even made a costume change during the event as she switched up her look before presenting the Best Collaboration award

Eye-popping: She donned a shimmering black dress with large shoulder pads and a low-cut neckline which showed off her cleavage

Stunner: Tyra's evergreen looks were very much on display as she complemented them with smokey eye and shiny pink lip

Double trouble: She presented the award to Bebe Rexha

She donned a shimmering black dress with large shoulder pads and a low-cut neckline which showed off her cleavage.

It is shaping up to be an exciting night as Madison Beer and Kristin Cavallari went all out for attention as they arrived on the red carpet of the star-studded event.

The pop star and the reality star each opted for revealing figure-flaunting ensembles for the red carpet in Toronto.

Madison, 19, stepped out in a strapless black mini dress with over-the-knee boots while Kristin, 31, flashed plenty of cleavage in a bright yellow coat dress.

In the spotlight: Madison Beer and Kristin Cavallari went all out for attention as they arrived at the 2018 iHeartRadio MMVAs in Toronto on Sunday in figure-flaunting outfits

Madison's thigh-skimming mini had silver buttons diagonally from hip to hem.

Her stiletto-heeled boots emphasized her legs.

The teen, who found fame on YouTube, left her long brunette locks loose and she accessorized with statement silver hoop earrings.

Former Laguna Beach star Kristin flaunted her legs in the shiny coat dress that she paired with sandal heels.

Eye-catching: Madison, 19, stepped out in a strapless thigh-skimming black mini dress with over-the-knee stiletto-heeled boots

The teen pop star, who found fame on YouTube, left her long brunette locks loose and she accessorized with statement silver hoop earrings

The frock was gathered at the waist and had an asymmetrical hem that made it very revealing.

She wore her blonde hair styled back from her face and falling down her back.

The iHeartRadio MMVAs are an annual award show presented by Canadian television channel Much to honor the best music videos much like last week's MTV Video Music Awards.

Peek-a-boo: Former Laguna Beach star Kristin, 31, flashed plenty of cleavage in a bright yellow coat dress gathered at the waist and with an asymmetrical hem

Looking good: She wore her blonde hair styled back from her face and falling down her back

iHeartRadio MMVAs 2018 Winners Artist for Change WINNER: Halsey Video of the Year Shawn Mendes, "In My Blood" Halsey, "Bad at Love" WINNER: Logic feat. Alessia Cara and Khalid, "1-800-273-8255" Drake, "God's Plan" Childish Gambino, "This Is America" Ariana Grande, "No Tears Left to Cry" Best EDM/Dance Artist or Group Sofi Tukker Loud Luxury Calvin Harris WINNER: Marshmello Zedd Kygo Best Director Shawn Mendes, "In My Blood" (Director: Jay Martin) WINNER: Drake, "God's Plan" (Director: Karena Evans) Drake, "Nice for What" (Director: Karena Evans) Childish Gambino, "This Is America" (Director: Hiro Murai) Justin Timberlake feat. Chris Stapleton, "Say Something" (Director: Arturo Perez Jr.) The Carters, Apeshit" (Director: Ricky Saix) Best Pop Artist or Group Meghan Trainor WINNER: Shawn Mendes Halsey Alessia Cara Ed Sheeran Camila Cabello Best Rock/Alternative Artist or Group Chvrches WINNER: Imagine Dragons Portugal. The Man Foo Fighters Arcade Fire Arkells Best Hip Hop Artist or Group The Carters WINNER: Drake Post Malone Cardi B Kendrick Lamar Childish Gambino Best New Canadian Artist WINNER: Elijah Woods x Jamie Fine The Beaches Ralph New City Bulow Johnny Orlando Artist of the Year Ed Sheeran Cardi B Drake Camila Cabello WINNER: Shawn Mendes Post Malone Song of the Summer Drake, "Nice for What" WINNER: Loud Luxury feat. Brando, "Body" Cardi B, Bad Bunny and J Balvin, "I Like It" Zedd, Maren Morris and Grey, "The Middle" Marshmello and Anne-Marie, "Friends" The Carters, "Apeshit" Best Collaboration Shawn Mendes feat. Khalid, "Youth" WINNER: Bebe Rexha feat. Florida Georgia Line, "Meant to Be" The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar, "Pray for Me" Kendrick Lamar and SZA, "All the Stars" Zedd, Maren Morris and Grey, "The Middle" Marshmello and Anne-Marie, "Friends" Fan Fave Video Drake, "God's Plan" WINNER: Shawn Mendes, "In My Blood" Childish Gambino, "This Is America" The Carters, "Apeshit" Logic feat. Alessia Cara and Khalid, "1-800-273-8255" Alessia Cara, "Growing Pains" Fan Fave Artist Ed Sheeran Camila Cabello WINNER: Shawn Mendes Taylor Swift Halsey Alessia Cara Fan Fave Duo or Group Soffi Tukker Imagine Dragons Maroon 5 The Chainsmokers 5 Seconds of Summer WINNER: BTS Fan Fave Single Ariana Grande, "No Tears Left to Cry" Post Malone feat. 21 Savage, "Rockstar" Shawn Mendes, "In My Blood" WINNER: Selena Gomez and Marshmello, "Wolves" Camila Cabello, "Havana" Ed Sheeran, "Perfect" Fan Fave New Artist Cardi B Billie Eilish Hayley Kiyoko WINNER: Chris Wu Why Don't We Dua Lipa Fan Fave Much Creator The Baker Twins The Mike On Much Podcast SneakerTalk Jaclyn Forbes Candage Leca WINNER: TheDanocracy The MMVAs air on Much, CTV and stream online. Advertisement



They announced their engagement in February, with reports circulating that they were set to tie the knot in December.

But a telling clue on social media has emerged that hints Karl Stefanovic and Jasmine Yarbrough may already be married.

Taking to Instagram on Monday, the TV host's 34-year-old fiancee shared a sweet photo of herself sitting on the backseat of a car with Karl's brother Tom's wife, Jenna Dinicola.

Just married? Jasmine Yarbrough shared this photo of herself with her future sister-in-law Jenna Dinicola, prompting reports she and Karl Stefanovic may already be married

But it was Jasmine's choice of caption on the photo with Jenna  who married Tom in 2015  that attracted the most attention.

'Sister sister,' she wrote, suggesting the two are already sisters-in-law.

Jasmine's other future sister-in-law, Sylvia Jeffreys  who is married to Karl's other brother, Peter  commented on the photo with a series of love heart emojis.

The photo appears to have been taken during a weekend getaway with Karl and other relatives in New South Wales' Griffith.

Romantic walks: The backseat photo appears to have been taken during a weekend getaway with Karl and other relatives in New South Wales' Griffith

In another photo, also featuring Jenna, Jasmine referenced her 'Griffith family'.

'The almond farm and our Griffith family in full blossom,' she captioned it.

A third photo shows Jasmine and Karl, 44, walking hand-in-hand in between rows of flowering trees.

Family outing: In another photo, also featuring Jenna, Jasmine referred to her 'Griffith family'. 'The almond farm and our Griffith family in full blossom,' she captioned it

'Always by my side,' she wrote.

The couple held a commitment ceremony in March at a private residence in Sydney's Palm Beach, just one month after announcing their engagement.

There have been reports the wedding will take place in Mexico in December, according to the Herald Sun.Tara Pavlovic, 29, has taken a thinly-veiled swipe at her ex-fiance Sam Cochrane, 34, weeks after their split made headlines across the nation.

On Monday, the former Bachelor In Paradise starlet took to her Instagram Stories with an impassioned message about 'fake people' who use others to gain attention and fame.

Tara began the post by admitting that she has struggled to remain positive in the month following the split, during which time Sam accused her of acting violently.

'Surround yourself with people who respect you behind closed doors': Tara Pavlovic, 29, (pictured) has taken a thinly-veiled swipe at her ex-fiance Sam Cochrane, 34, weeks after their split made headlines across the nation

'I often get messages from girls asking me how I am always so happy. I'm not going to lie and say life is never hard, but it can be. The last month for me has been tough,' she wrote.

The childcare worker, who has been travelling around Europe with her friends and new boyfriend Nick Sheperdson, went on to accuse society of 'judging' and 'bullying' her.

'Unfortunately I have realised that we live in a very fake world,' she continued.

'Unfortunately I have realised that we live in a very fake world': On Monday, the former Bachelor In Paradise starlet took to her Instagram Stories with an impassioned message about 'fake people' who use others to gain attention and fame

'Splitsville:' It comes after Sam (right), made extraordinary claims that Tara (left) subjected him to physical and verbal abuse before their break-up in June

'People use people to try and get places through faking friendships. I don't mean just in the media world, it happens everywhere. I've experienced its [sic] first hand. It's gross, and actually quite sad,' wrote Tara.

Tara then explained that the secret to staying positive is living a 'genuine life'.

'I don't have fake friends, and I don't pretend to be friends with people I don't like for attention. Yes I can be naive at times and have been fooled by people, but I have also had the strength to realise what is going on a walk away,' she added.

Her new squeeze! Tara (right) went public with new boyfriend Nick Shepherdson (left) last week

Tara concluded her post by urging fans to reject fake relationships and to surround themselves with 'people you can trust'.

'Surround yourself with people who respect you not only for others to see, but also behind closed doors,' she stated.

It comes after Sam made sensational claims that Tara subjected him to physical and verbal abuse before their break-up in June.

Sam accused Tara of violent behaviour leading up to their split in a bombshell interview with Woman's Day, prompting her to respond by branding him 'emotionally abusive'.

Tara later admitted on Instagram that she did hit Sam after their engagement party, but alleged he 'pushed her' to do it and insisted her actions were 'out of character'.She's known for her sartorial elegance both on and off the red carpet.

And Sofia Vergara put on yet another stylish display as she embarked on a casual stroll in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles on Sunday.

The Modern Family actress, 46, nailed casual chic in a stylish nude striped co-ords, with a layered crop-top which teased a glimpse of her taut stomach.

Chilled out: Sofia Vergara, 46, nailed casual summer chic in striped co-ords as she enjoyed a casual stroll through Beverly Hills on Sunday

Sofia elongated her statuesque frame in a pair of taupe wedge heels and carried her belongings in a glamorous grey shoulder bag.

The Hot Pursuit star shielded her eyes from the sunshine in classic tinted shades, and let her glossy brunette tresses cascade past her shoulders in a sleek straight 'do.

Sofia amplified her natural beauty with nude make-up while statement earrings polished off the sophisticated summer ensemble.

Stepping out: Sofia elongated her statuesque frame in a pair of taupe wedge heels and carried her belongings in a glamorous grey shoulder bag

Sofia has mastered a handful of roles across movies including Machete Kills to Happy Feet Two as well as television series.

Modern Family has won the Emmy for best comedy series five times. It was reported ABC is in talks with the cast and producers about a possible 11th season.

The series tells the hilarious story of three very different but related families who face everyday trials and tribulations.

Sofia has been starring on the sitcom for nearly a decade since it aired in September 2009.

The actress celebrated her part in the long-running series Modern Family as 'something so special' and a 'dream come true'.

Sofia told Now To Love magazine: 'It's a dream come true  it's not often an actress can say they're a part of something so special. It's really a pleasure to go to work every day.'The Wiggles' Lachlan Gillespie and Emma Watkins announced their shock split just three weeks ago.

And while performing on stage for the first time on Sunday, audience members claim they could cut the tension with a knife between the estranged couple, according to The Daily Telegraph.

Taking to the stage at St Mary's Rugby Leagues Club in Sydney, the duo plastered on a pair of pained smiles.

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Cut the air with a knife! Wiggles fans claim Lachlan Gillespie and Emma Watkins appeared 'tense' and 'awkward' during first performance...three weeks after shock marriage split

The Daily Telegraph reported the dynamic between Lachlan and Emma appeared 'tense' and 'awkward.'

While also claiming the body language during the performance was 'a little flat', the publication reported that at one point, Lachlan offered his hand to his estranged wife which she refused to accept.

And while going through cards, gifts and flowers collected from the audience, Emma was allegedly 'sharp' while correcting Lachlan on the type of flowers he was given.

Tense: Claiming the body language during the performance was 'a little flat', the publication reported at one point, Lachlan offered his hand to his estranged wife, which she refused to accept

Meanwhile, Emma was pictured leaving the venue on Sunday, with the redhead performer, 28, appeared all smiles for the waiting cameras.

Emma cheerfully chatted to a friend as she loaded her car, but there was no sign of Lachlan as she beamed during the animated conversation.

Their tense on-stage display comes mere weeks after Emma and Lachlan stunned fans when they announced the end of their marriage.

Feeling ok: Pictured leaving the venue on Sunday, the redhead performer, 28, appeared all smiles for the waiting cameras

'On set!' Lachie, 32 shared a selfie on Friday in which he and Emma beamed into the camera and showed no signs of strain after the split

Through it all however, they have insisted they are still good friends.

On Friday, Lachie took a photo in which he and Emma smiled into the camera and showed no signs of strain after the split.

'On set,' the 32 year-old captioned the snap, which saw the pair both dressed in costume for a video recording.She's currently enjoying a PA tour around the UK following her appearance on this year's Love Island.

And Georgia Steel, 20, looked incredible when she arrived at Vision nightclub in Weston-super-Mare for a personal appearance on Sunday night.

She wore a grey halter-neck mini dress which suited her figure perfectly, teaming it with killer heels which had a diamante ankle strap.

Love Island's Georgia Steel partied in a grey halter neck mini dress and embellished heels for a PA at Vision nightclub in Weston-super-Mare on Sunday night

All in the details: Her glossy brunette locks were tied in a half-up half-down style and styled a side fringe for some added glamour

Her glossy brunette locks were tied in a half-up half-down style and styled a side fringe for some added glamour.

Once inside the venue, she seriously let her hair down, holding on to sparklers and dancing the night away in a VIP section.

She had a couple of pals with her on her boozy night out, but her boyfriend, Sam Bird, was not with her.

That's one way to get attention: Once inside the venue, she seriously let her hair down, holding on to sparklers and dancing the night away in a VIP section

She tweeted during her weekend away: 'I leave @SamRobertBird for a day and hes having pot noodles BBQ flavour for breakfast'

Instead, she tweeted during her weekend away: 'I leave @SamRobertBird for a day and hes having pot noodles BBQ flavour for breakfast.'

Georgia has found plenty of time for her relationship with villa beau Sam.

She and Sam may have had a hiccup in the villa when they initially decided to split up to stay on the show but now they are stronger than ever.

Hey there: She had a couple of pals with her on her boozy night out, but her boyfriend, Sam Bird, was not with her

The couple - who only became official 30 days ago - have embarked on a whirlwind romance as they have already collected the keys to their new Essex home last week.

Already settled in, the pair shared a glimpse into their love nest via Instagram stories as they gave their fans a walking tour around their home.

Elsewhere, Georgia left her fans fretting over whether things had finished with her love after she posted a cryptic post on social media with a sultry snap.

Accompanied with the snap, she wrote: 'I'm a good believer in everything happens for a reason, and what is meant to be will be.

'Feeling so lucky and blessed. Goodnight and hold tight for the future.'

Georgia eased their fears in her Instagram story, however, where she shared a video of Sam enjoying a cocktail during a date night.

Together forever? She and Sam may have had a hiccup in the villa when they initially decided to split up to stay on the show but now they are stronger than ever

Going well, then: The couple - who only became official 30 days ago - have embarked on a whirlwind romance as they have already collected the keys to their new Essex home last weekHe's known for his blond, curly locks and boyish good looks.

But on Monday, Craig McLachlan was looking rather different as he loaded his car outside his Sydney home with a friend.

The 52-year-old was sporting a bushy grey beard and short grey hair under his black cap.

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Former Neighbours star Craig McLachlan, 52, spotted in casual cargo shorts and greying beard at his Sydney home... after he departed The Rocky Horror Show following sexual misconduct claims which he vehemently denies

Wearing sunglasses, the former Neighbours star looked casual in a pair of camouflage cargo pants that reached past his knee.

Despite the chilly winter weather in Sydney, he chose a pair of thongs for his footwear.

A black shirt and blue hoodie completed the casual look, and the actor looked distracted by the task at hand.

Who's that boy? The 52-year-old was sporting a bushy grey beard and short grey hair under his black cap

Chores: Craig was focused as he loaded his car outside his Sydney home with a friend

Hanging out: Wearing sunglasses, the former Neighbours star looked casual in a pair of camouflage cargo pants

Not cold? Despite the chilly winter weather in Sydney, Craig chose a pair of thongs for his footwear

He was seen loading a large, navy blue suitcase into the boot of his car, as well as what looked like a grey jacket.

Craig then gave his friend a hug before departing in the vehicle.

It appeared as though the stage and screen performer was off on a getaway of some sort and headed to the airport.

Packing it in: He was seen loading a large, navy blue suitcase into the boot of his car

See ya! Craig then gave his friend a hug before departing in the vehicle

On his way away? It looked as though the stage and screen performer was off on a getaway of some sort and headed to the airport

Almost a summery outfit! A black shirt and blue hoodie completed the casual look

What season is it? Sunglasses, a cap and thongs didn't suit the Sydney winter weather

In January this year, Craig withdrew from the production of the Rocky Horror Show in Adelaide after being accused of sexually inappropriate behaviour and bullying by a number of former female colleagues.

The show's producers, the Gordon Frost Organisation, say they have spoken with McLachlan and have agreed that it is not appropriate for him to continue in the current production.

'We will be conducting a full internal investigation and will cooperate fully with authorities,' GFO said in a statement in early January.

Changes: He's known for his blond, curly locks. Craig is pictured in 2015

Back in the day: The actor's boyish good looks made him a household name. Craig is pictured during his Neighbours days in the late 1980s

Stage star Todd McKenney, 53, replaced the embattled actor in the lead role as Frank N. Furter.

Craig vehemently denied allegations made by actresses Erika Heynatz, Christie Whelan Browne and Angela Scundi and called them 'baseless'.

'They seem to be simple inventions, perhaps made for financial reasons, perhaps to gain notoriety,' he was quoted as writing. 'These allegations are ALL made up.'They recently put on a show of unity on Instagram after Katie Price was seen getting close to Essex businessman, Alex Adderson, while out in Essex.

And recent pictures of the ex glamour model, 40, and her personal trainer boyfriend Kris Boyson, 29, show they still have a lot of attraction for one another.

Katie struggled to contain her curves in a skimpy leopard print bikini which had diamante details on the cleavage.

Hear her roar: Katie Price struggled to contain her ample assets in a leopard print bikini while on a recent break with boyfriend Kris Boyson in Thailand

On and off: The ex glamour model, 40, and her personal trainer boyfriend Kris Boyson, 29, show they still have a lot of attraction for one another despite her links to another man

She covered up a little, wearing a semi-sheer white cover-up which was tied at the waist and had thigh-high splits which flashed her inkings.

The mother-of-five stripped off before reaching down to straddle Kris, who was relaxing on a lounger, while sharing some special time together.

On Sunday night, Katie had put on an animated display with her man on Instagram during a reported make-or-break holiday in Scotland.

Just days before, Katie had shocked when she was pictured leaving a pub in Essex following a night out with hunky Essex businessman Alex, 25.

In tune: The mother-of-five stripped off as Kris toyed with her bikini bottoms

Close: At one point, Katie lay down on the bed next to her man and he couldn't keep his eyes off her

She reportedly met the high-flyer, who is friends with TOWIE stars Sam Mucklow and Jake Hall, weeks ago and they really 'hit it off'.

The duo reportedly went on several 'secret dates' before she was spotted leaving the pub on Wednesday night, seemingly hand-in-hand with Alex.

A source told The Sun: 'Katie met Alex through friends and they really hit it off.'

On Sunday, Katie also took to Twitter to express her worries that she hadn't been able to get hold of her children Princess, 11, and Junior, 13. who are on holiday in Florida with ex husband, Peter Andre. But they have since spoken.

Tender moment: The pair leaned in for a warm embrace amid a series of personal woes for the mother-of-five

On top of this, according to The Sun, her ex Kieran Hayler, 31, is 'worried' about Katie's 'erratic behaviour' following a series of wild nights out this week.

A source told the publication: 'Kieran is furious at Katie - he thinks she's going off the rails with all these nights out and mystery men.

'She's behaving really erratically - she asked him to pick up the kids a day early as she's going away - she didn't say where or when she'd be back.

'He's really annoyed at her but also worried as it's all very unlike her.' MailOnline have contacted Katie Price's rep for comment.

This comes amid reports Katie owes nearly half a million pounds to the tax office and creditors and has been given three months to pay it back.

Her mother, Amy has been diagnosed with terminal illness, Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, and hasn't got long to live.

Cosy display: Just days ago, pictures emerged of her leaving a pub in Essex following a night out with hunky Essex businessman Alex Adderson, 25Vicky Pattison joined the likes of Pete Wicks and Shelby Tribble for a night out in Essex on Sunday.

And while Shelby was seen on her feet dancing and twerking all night long, Vicky and Pete were far more engrossed in what appeared to be a deep conversation in the corner.

Pete was seen leaning in to Vicky to speak into her ear, so that she could hear him over the music pumping from the speakers of Faces nightclub.

Vicky Pattison joined the likes of Pete Wicks and Shelby Tribble for a night out in Essex on Sunday

Commanding attention: Shelby was seen on her feet dancing and twerking all night long

His girlfriend Shelby, meanwhile, showcased her frame in a crisp white crop top, flaunting her ample bust while twerking to the music.

She added mint blue trousers with a statement belt to the look, wearing her brunette locks loosely around her bare shoulders.

Also spotted at Faces on Saturday night were a number of reality stars including TOWIE's Yazmin Oukhellou and her boyfriend James Lock.

Vicky was enjoying herself at the Britney Spears concert earlier in the night at London's O2.

Wild weekend: Vicky kept the party going into the early hours of Sunday morning over the Bank Holiday weekend, hitting up Faces nightclub in Essex following the Britney Spears gig in London

Low-key look: The former Geordie Shore star was casually clad for her night on the town, donning a rock tee and jeans

Summer chic: Shelby added mint blue trousers with a statement belt to the look, wearing her brunette locks loosely around her bare shoulders

But she was sure to keep the party going into the early hours over the Bank Holiday weekend, with the former Geordie Shore star casually clad for her night on the town, donning a rock tee and jeans.

The TV personality embraced a casual vibe in a Metallica concert T-shirt and styled her hair in a bouncy blow dry.

Vicky showcased her recent weight loss following her juicing retreat in a pair of black skinny trousers.

She added some extra height to her petite frame thanks to a pair of black mules and carried a leather handbag.

Twerk it: Shelby showcased her frame in a crisp white crop top, flaunting her ample bust while twerking to the music

Bottoms up: The group sat in the VIP area of the club and were treated to cocktails and prosecco

Vicky, who is trying to get in shape for her wedding, was fresh from her recent juicing retreat in Portugal.

She put on another sizzling display as she writhed on an inflatable ice cream during her stay at the Jason Vale Juicy Oasis Health Retreat & Spa.

The star displayed her curves in a scanty bright green bikini, which highlighted her toned limbs and taut stomach during a poolside float.

Vicky paired the raunchy two piece with a pair of large shades to shield her eyes from the sun, completing the glamorous look as she put her curves on full display.

The TV star swept back her brunette tresses into a sleek bun and opted for a fresh-faced glow with minimal make-up as she put on a sultry pose while laying down.

Engrossed: Vicky and Pete appeared to have lots to catch up on

What's that? Pete whispered gossip into Vicky's ear

Laughs: The pals are close friends with former TOWIE star Ferne McCann

The I'm A Celebrity star looked in great spirits for the snap, and revealed in the caption that she 'never wants to leave @juicemasterretreats'.

Vicky stretched out her pins as she bathed in the glorious sunshine, with her incredible physique taking centre stage next to the glistening water.

The Jungle Queen looked in good spirits but poked fun at her juice cleanse as she revealed that the ice cream inflatable is 'as close as Im going to get to an ice cream this week'.

In another post, Vicky could be seen enjoying Iain Stirling's book Not Ready To Adult Yet as she continued to relax poolside.

Girls (and boys) night out: Vicky, who is trying to get in shape for her wedding, was fresh from her recent juicing retreat in Portugal

Chit chat: Shelby was joined by a female friend at the VIP table

The caption revealed: 'This book has had me rolling around laughing - my lovely mamma bear bought it for me to read when I was away and Ive honestly not stopped LOLing.'

Vicky elaborated: 'This hilariously relatable and self-depreciating book was written by my pal @iaindoesjokes.'

'If youve ever felt like you werent achieving enough or like the pressures of other peoples Instagram successes were all too much for you... then this fantastically funny book is the one for you.'

Poolside: Vicky, who is trying to get in shape for her wedding, was fresh from her recent juicing retreat in Portugal

Time to relax: The Geordie Shore star, 30, displayed her curves in a scanty bright green bikini, which highlighted her toned limbs and taut stomach during a poolside float

Stunning: The TV personality stretched out her slender pins as she bathed in the glorious sunshine, with her incredible physique taking centre stage next to the glistening water

The sizzling snaps comes a day after Vicky showed off her incredible physique once again as she tried out cryotherapy due to suffering a couple of 'very minor' injuries due to her intense fitness regime.

The reality TV star also shared a smiling selfie as she prepared to kick-start her journey at the health spa with a grueling workout.

With her glossy chocolate tresses pulled back into a messy ponytail, it was evident how hard the reality star has been working to maintain her enviable physique.

She captioned the post: '10k home to dornes done this morning with this little rascal and our 5k weighted vests - even got some uphill sprints in!! @juicemasterretreats you never fail to impress.'

Fitter than ever: The sizzling snaps comes a day after Vicky showed off her incredible physique once again as she tried out cryotherapy due to suffering a couple of 'very minor' injuries due to her intense fitness regime

Hard work pays off: The reality TV star also shared a smiling selfie as she prepared to kick-start her journey at the health spa with a grueling workout

The star's poolside snaps comes after she revealed she can hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet a lot closer than before as she got very candid about her plans for a baby once she's made it down the aisle with fiance John Noble.

In an interview with Now magazine, she admitted she feared being left behind while her friends all had children, but confessed that her businessman beau is actually 'broodier' than she is.

Vicky spoke about her close relationship with former TOWIE star Ferne McCann, 28, and how her adorable daughter Sunday, nine months, has left fiance John desperate to kick start their own brood.

Of her plans for babies, Vicky told the publication: 'Before I met John, I was scared I was being left behind! Now I have him, I know babies arent far off.'

What's to come: The star's poolside snaps comes after she revealed she can hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet a lot closer than before as she got very candid about her plans for a baby once she's made it down the aisle with fiance John Noble

Discussing her plans for a family, the reality TV star continued: 'Theres a running joke between my friends that Johns probably broodier than me. If I leave him for five minutes, Ill come back and hell have a picture with a kid'.

But despite the excitement surrounding baby plans, Vicky said she's still happy to wait until after their 2019 nuptials.

Vicky added: 'Well get married next year, enjoy a couple of years in that stage, and then well embrace the next one.'

The couple had previously postponed the special day in January as they didn't want to rush into married life, but Vicky recently revealed that plans are in full swing with a goal of tying the knot next summer.Kourtney Kardashian has already split from Algerian model Younes Bendjima.

But on Sunday's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashains, the 39-year-old beauty was still seeing the 25-year-old cover boy.

And the pinup told her ex beau Scott Disick - with whom she has three kids, Mason, Penelope and Reign - he better be nice to the young lad.

Don't be a jerk! Kourtney Kardashian tells Scott Disick to be nice to Younes Bendjima at Kris Jenner's annual Christmas party on Sunday's KUWTK

Not wanted: At first Kourtney didn't want Scott - who now dates Sofia Richie, 20 - at the soiree at all

At first Kourtney didn't want Scott, 35 - who now dates Sofia Richie, 20 - at the soiree at all.

Kourtney tells her mother Kris Jenner, who throws the annual bash on Christmas Eve in her Hidden Hills, California home, that she did not want Scott present because of the tension.

'I heard through the grapevine youre the one person who doesnt want me to go,' Scott said when he confronted Kourtney.

Kourtney had a respectable response.

She stuck up for this guy who is now her ex: 'I think that our lives are changing,' she said. 'If my boyfriend is going to the party, if youre there, I just dont want any disrespect. Ive been feeling super anxious  but I dont want the kids to not have their dad there.' Seen in May

Was he too tough? Younes has been accused of beating an employee at Delilah in West Hollywood

His new lady love: Scott has been seeing Sofia Richie who at 20 is nearly half his age

'I think that our lives are changing,' she said.

'If my boyfriend is going to the party, if youre there, I just dont want any disrespect. Ive been feeling super anxious  but I dont want the kids to not have their dad there.'

In the end, Scott and Younes both attended.

Bonded: Kris wanted Scott at the bash and said he is family even though he cheated on Kourtney multiple times

Also in the episode, Kim said she was not happy with the fights she has been having with Kourtney and said she feels like she is 'walking on eggshells' with her.

The stars have been feuding all season.

Kim took a low blow earlier this month when she told Kourtney she as the 'least interesting to look at' of all the sisters.

Bad blood? Kendall Jenner was left livid on Sunday night's episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians when her mom Kris refused to invite her dad Caitlyn to the annual Christmas Eve party

She said that before Kourtney showed off her killer body during a summer trip to Italy.

And ever since, Kourtney has been showing off her perfect frame on social media.

On Sunday's episode there were also issues with inviting Caitlyn Jenner to the annual Christmas Eve party.

Sitting around the kitchen table together, momager Kris, Kim and Khloe all ganged up on Kourtney when they slammed her for not wanting to invite her ex-boyfriend Scott, and then Kendall when they refused to invite her dad Caitlyn.

Drama: The hostilities began when Kourtney told her family she didn't want to invite Scott as her then boyfriend Younes Bendjima, 25, would be there - to which Kris insisted her baby daddy had to come as he was still part of the family

'What about my dad?' butted in Kendall - pointing out Kris' ex-husband also still had connections to the family.

'Scott has never done anything mean or said anything negative, so that's different,' shouted Kim across the table.

Not hearing her: The family refused to listen to Kourtney's wishes of not inviting her ex-boyfriend Scott Disick to the family party

If Scott's invited, why not Caitlyn? Not having a bar of it, a livid and insulted Kendall replied: 'Is that actually a joke? They have both done f**ked up things in different ways'

Not having a bar of it, a livid and insulted Kendall replied: 'Is that actually a joke? They have both done f**ked up things in different ways'.

And although Kendall continued to defend Cait and fight for her right to make the invite list, the Kardashian matriarch wasn't convinced.

'No-one would know how to respond to her because of all the things,' she began to explain.

Kris' reasoning: 'No-one would know how to respond to her because of all the things,' she began to explain

She got the last word: As Kris, Kim and Khloe continued to explain how the situations were different and at the end of the day it was the momager's choice, Kourtney was the only one with the Vogue model's back

And the drama didn't end there with Kendall continuing to convince the family that no matter what had happened it was still the nice thing to do and the situation was no different to that of Scott's.

'So the f**k what? Why are we so worried about anyone else, even if she doesn't come it is the nice thing to do,' she said angrily.

Kris replied sassily: 'Oh, she would come.'

Bonding: The episode saw Kendall and Kourtney spend much time hanging out as they felt they were the only ones who 'got' each other

As Kris, Kim and Khloe continued to explain how the situations were different and at the end of the day it was the momager's choice, Kourtney was the only one with the Vogue model's back.

'I am so over everyone and their b**chieness,' said the eldest sister to camera, adding that she didn't like the fact that her family didn't have her back and was appalled by the way they were treating Kendall.

However, the end of the episode saw Kim reveal not only did Kourtney have a change of heart and invite Scott, but Kris changed her mind and sent Cait an invite too. She however opted not to attend.

Party time: Kris changed her mind and sent Cait an invite too. She however opted not to attend

Time to celebrate! The Christmas Eve party is a long-standing Kardashian tradition

And whilst the elder sisters continued to bicker, with Kourtney even toying with the idea of not being at Christmas at all, the remainder of the episode featured on Khloe's anxiousness ahead of announcing her pregnancy.

Five-months at the time, the beauty confessed that she wasn't yet showing as 'pregnant' so worried that if she stepped outside people would just think she had put on weight again.

She added that she wouldn't be leaving the house until she had a 'cute baby bump' and until younger sister Kylie Jenner, 21, who was three months ahead, had made her pregnancy announcement.

Pregnancy nerves: Khloe said she wouldn't be leaving the house until she had a 'cute baby bump' and until younger sister Kylie Jenner, 21, who was three months ahead, had made her pregnancy announcement

Sister time: Affected by Khloe's desire not to go out, her elder sister Kim, who she was 'vibing' with at the time, took her out for a fun pizza run

Surprise! Kim and Khloe's sister date ended with them teepeeing mom Kris' home

Affected by Khloe's desire not to go out, her elder sister Kim, who she was 'vibing' with at the time, took her out for a fun pizza run that ended with the pair teepeeing Kris' house.

Waiting for the makeup mogul to reveal to her legions of followers her exciting news, she decided in the end she wanted to make the journey private and as stress-free as possible.

December 20 saw Khloe share an Instagram post of her baby daddy Tristan Thompson cradling her burgeoning baby bump.

'The response has been 99% positive,' she exclaimed in the interview.

'I'm now much for excited about having a baby.'He experienced highs in the acting industry, having won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the 1996 film Jerry Maguire.

But now, Cuba Gooding Jnr has reflected on the worst aspect of being an actor and the dark period that followed his win.

On Monday, the 50-year-old actor was candid in his remarks to Confidential about the downside of life as an actor in Hollywood.

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'That was a dark period': Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jnr, 50, has revealed the worst part of being an actor and reflected on his career downturn following the 1996 film Jerry Maguire

'The lows (of acting) are always the waiting for the work,' Cuba divulged to the publication.

'I remember I won the Oscar and it took almost a year to convince a director to put me in a movie and that movie was with Robin Williams, What Dreams May Come.'

He finished: 'That was a dark period because I had to wait.'

In the interview, the American actor also reflected on his time in the industry.

He revealed he turned down roles in blockbusters like the biopic Ray and the sleeper hit, Hotel Rwanda, which starred Don Cheadle.

The decisions led to a downturn in his career, until he scored a gig as the lead character of OJ Simpson in American Crime Story.

'I remember I won the Oscar and it took almost a year to convince a director to put me in a movie': The actor was candid in his remarks while discussing his career highs and lows

The actor was philosophical about his career, saying that while he was prepared for failure, he wasn't ready for success.

In addition, the Hollywood star confessed he passed on many jobs because he didn't think they were the right roles for him, explaining he was 'overwhelmed' at the time, which meant missed opportunities.

The actor, who has previously starred in a number of advertisements for Australian telco Optus, is back Down Under for a new project, directing advertisements for the company.She had skin cancer removed from her nose last year.

And Melanie Griffith posted a selfie showing her progress through the ordeal via Instagram on Monday.

The 61-year-old actress shared a snap of herself with a bandage on her face and the caption: 'Bandaged again after having dermabrasion, the final step to fix the now removed basil cell skin cancer.'

Update: Melanie Griffith, 61, posted a selfie showing her progress after having skin cancer removed from her nose via Instagram on Monday

In the brave photo, the Working Girl star wears a pair of glasses as she reveals a close up of the wounded area.

'If any of you have it, get it fixed. If you lay in the sun, are exposed to lots of sun, be CAREFUL. Use sun screen. Get checked out by your Dermatolgist,' she pleaded.

'If you dont have one, get one, or go to your nearest clinic and ask to be tested for it. More info to come!'

Earlier this month, the daughter of Tippi Hedron admitted her fear at the prospect of losing her livelihood in the wake of the surgery.

Final steps: She captioned the selfie: 'Bandaged again after having dermabrasion, the final step to fix the now removed basil cell skin cancer.'; (pictured in June)

Get help: 'If any of you have it, get it fixed. If you lay in the sun, are exposed to lots of sun, be CAREFUL. Use sun screen. Get checked out by your Dermatolgist,' she pleaded; (pictured July)

'Its a scary thing when youre an actress and you depend on your face for work,' the beauty told InStyle.

'But I realize I have to put a Band-Aid on it, and its fine.'

'I just look like a dork.'

During the interview, the starlet said that after four divorces she has no plans to marry again.

As seen in 2011: After four divorces across three husbands, most recently her fellow film star Antonio Banderas, Melanie has no plans to marry again

Of the institution of marriage, Melanie said: 'I really dont think it's relevant for anyone anymore. But especially if youre 60 and you have four kids and youre living the life youve always wanted.'

She mused: 'Then why get married? Its, like, I would love to fall in love and have a romance, a relationship, but I havent. I keep looking.'

Sharing: 'Ive had a couple of lovers but not a relationship,' she ruled out dating apps: 'Tinder or something would just be so tacky, I think.'

Nor do her children seek out men for her, inasmuch as 'I think I can find someone on my own. But if you know of anybody, please tell me.'

Throwback to 1989: Melanie's first and third marriages were to the same man - Miami Vice heartthrob Don Johnson (right), by whom she had Fifty Shades Of Grey star Dakota Johnson

If at first...: Don and Melanie's first go at matrimony lasted only a few months in 1976, but they married again in 1989 and welcomed Dakota before finalizing their divorce in 1996

Melanie's first and third marriages were to the same man - Miami Vice heartthrob Don Johnson, by whom she had Fifty Shades Of Grey star Dakota Johnson.

Don and Melanie's first go at matrimony lasted only a few months in 1976, but they married again in 1989 and welcomed Dakota before finalizing their divorce in 1996.

Melanie spent 1981 to 1989 married to actor Steven Bauer, who during that period featured in Scarface and with whom she shares 33-year-old son Alexander.

Second try: Melanie spent 1981 to 1989 married to actor Steven Bauer (left), who during that period featured in Scarface and with whom she shares 33-year-old son Alexander

She and Antonio Banderas met while filming their romantic comedy Two Much in 1995 - the same year she separated from Don and he from his first wife Ana Leza.

Antonio and Melanie married in 1996, the year both their prior divorces were finalized, and Melanie gave birth to their daughter Stella that September.

'All of my husbands, my three husbands - I love them all so much, and were all very close,' said Melanie.Advertisement

She was pictured visiting a Dubai gender selection clinic last week alongside her fiance Michael ONeill.

And following her visit, Danielle Lloyd, 34, decided to make the most of her time in the United Arab Emirates as she packed on the PDA with her long-term partner during a romantic day out on the beach on Sunday.

The mother-of-four showcased her incredible figure as she slipped into a jaw-dropping one-shouldered bikini for the sun-soaked outing.

PDA: Danielle Lloyd, 34, decided to make the most of her time in the United Arab Emirates as she packed on the PDA with her long-term partner during a romantic day out on the beach on Sunday

The former Miss Great Britain's choice of skimpy swimwear accentuated her taut midriff with it's daring one-shoulder strap and matching golden band around her slender torso.

Danielle, who was seen emerging from the Fakih IVF centre in Dubai last week, teamed her stomach-flashing garment with a pair of equally skimpy bottoms, which boasted matching bandage strap detail and hugged her hips.

Her tiny bottoms showcased her pert posterior and lean legs while she put on a passionate display with her other half in the crystal clear sea.

Danielle worked her waist-length brunette tresses in a wet tousled style and kept her mane in place with her kooky oversized shades.

Cosy: The mother-of-four showcased her incredible figure as she slipped into a jaw-dropping one-shouldered bikini for the sun-soaked outing

Passionate: The former Miss Great Britain's choice of skimpy swimwear accentuated her taut midriff with it's daring one-shoulder strap and matching golden band around her slender torso

Work it: Danielle, who was seen emerging from the Fakih IVF centre in Dubai last week, teamed her stomach-flashing garment with a pair of equally skimpy bottoms, which boasted matching bandage strap detail and hugged her hips

Complementing Danielle's beach attire, Michael flaunted her toned torso as he emerged from the sea in a pair of grey swimming shorts and donned a pair of reflective sunglasses.

The pair proved their romance is stronger than ever as they held hands walking along the shoreline and couldn't keep away from each other while they enjoyed a cooling dip.

Last week, Danielle was spotted emerging from Dubai gender selection clinic Fakih IVF centre with her fiance Michael.

The mother-of-four looked deep in thought following her medical consultation as she walked along with a plaster on her hand while toting literature on the process, which she has widely discussed in recent years amid her desire for a daughter.

Earlier this month, the TV star revealed to The Mail that she has received thousands of angry messages on Instagram and Twitter, the worst from women who admit they cannot have children of their own, about her decision to gender select.

Shore bliss: Her tiny bottoms showcased her pert posterior and lean legs while she put on a passionate display with her other half in the crystal clear sea

Mane attraction: Danielle worked her waist-length brunette tresses in a wet tousled style and kept her mane in place with her kooky oversized shades

Delight: The pair proved their romance is stronger than ever as they held hands walking along the shoreline and couldn't keep away from each other while they enjoyed a cooling dip

Danielle went low-key as she headed out of the clinic following an appointment with the experts in the practice which has been condemned by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and is illegal in Britain.

Relying on her beau for support, the couple emerged from the clinic hand-in-hand before locking lips in a tender embrace after triggering plans to have a girl.

Danielle shares three sons, Archie, Harry and George, with her ex husband Jamie OHara, the former Tottenham midfielder. The couple divorced in 2014. Her fourth son, Ronnie, is with her fiance, electrician Michael.

In her shockingly candid interview, the former WAG boldldy stated: I want a girl and if I can pay for it, then thats OK, I can get one.

Speaking of the backlash from her decision, she revealed: They called me a selfish, disgusting b**** who should be thankful for my four miracle babies.

The hurt star said: 'I didnt know what to say back. Id never even thought about that. It was all quite shocking. Im very honest and dont beat around the bush, but I didnt expect the amount of vitriol.'

Close: Complementing Danielle's beach attire, Michael flaunted her toned torso as he emerged from the sea in a pair of grey swimming shorts and donned a pair of reflective sunglasses

Focus: Last week, Danielle was spotted emerging from Dubai gender selection clinic Fakih IVF centre with her fiance Michael

Criticism: Earlier this month, the TV star revealed to The Mail that she has received thousands of angry messages on Instagram and Twitter, the worst from women who admit they cannot have children of their own, about her decision to gender select

The WHO says that sex selection raises serious moral, legal, and social issues and can lead to the devaluation of women and gender imbalance.

Danielle revealed she heard about the gender selection procedure in the wake of giving birth to Ronnie, now ten months old.

Enquiring further, she learnt that the treatment is accurate in 99% of the cases in which a baby is successfully born and started to investigate the possibility of arranging for a girl in Northern Cyprus, another state where it is legal.

After further questioning, however, she and fiance Michael settled on America, where they felt the overall safeguards would be stronger. The couple will marry next year, and she will travel to California.

Once there, a number of her eggs will be harvested and fertilised, and then one or two of the resulting female embryos will be re-implanted in the mothers womb. The rest will be stored for possible use in the future.

Focus: Danielle shares three sons, Archie, Harry and George, with her ex husband Jamie OHara, the former Tottenham midfielder. The couple divorced in 2014

Hopes: Her fourth son, Ronnie, is with her fiance, electrician Michael. In her shockingly candid interview, the former WAG boldldy stated: 'I want a girl and if I can pay for it, then thats OK, I can get one'

Gender: Danielle revealed she heard about the gender selection procedure in the wake of giving birth to Ronnie, now ten months old

Treat yourself: Enquiring further, she learnt that the treatment is accurate in 99% of the cases in which a baby is successfully born and started to investigate the possibility of arranging for a girl in Northern Cyprus, another state where it is legal

Stronger: After further questioning, however, she and fiance Michael settled on America, where they felt the overall safeguards would be stronger. The couple will marry next year, and she will travel to California

It will cost her about 12,000 plus flights and accommodation  and thats just for one round. But Danielle insists having a little girl is worth every penny.

Theres an urge inside me to have a girl. I just cant let it go, she explains. Ive got such an amazing relationship with my mum. I want to have that bond with my daughter. Why would anyone begrudge me that?...

I also want my boys to have that brother-sister relationship. Our family is not yet complete. Michael feels the same way. He really wants a girl. If I had four girls, wed be going off and getting a boy.

Realistically, if Im going to have one more, if this science is there, why not do it? I dont think its a selfish thing to do. I could be selfish and go on for years having more and more boys.

Ive got four lovely boys but I dont want to get to 50 or 60 and think I could have had a girl but didnt, she adds. The thought of not going to my daughters wedding or not having those chats I have with my mum. Girls always have that relationship with their mothers.

Hopes: Danielle insists having a little girl is worth every penny. Theres an urge inside me to have a girl. I just cant let it go, she explained. Ive got such an amazing relationship with my mum. I want to have that bond with my daughter. Why would anyone begrudge me that?...'

Admission: She added: I also want my boys to have that brother-sister relationship. Our family is not yet complete. Michael feels the same way. He really wants a girl. If I had four girls, wed be going off and getting a boy. Realistically, if Im going to have one more, if this science is there, why not do it? I dont think its a selfish thing to do'Golden Globe winner Bruce Willis went shopping in Manhattan on Sunday alongside his second wife Emma Heming and their young daughters Evelyn Penn and Mabel Ray.

The 63-year-old father-of-five married the Malta-born 40-year-old in 2009 after meeting at the gym in 2007 through their mutual fitness trainer.

The 5ft10in former teen model also brought their six-year-old brunette and four-year-old blonde to Central Park where they got wet and wild in a fountain fully clothed.

Family: Golden Globe winner Bruce Willis went shopping in Manhattan on Sunday alongside his second wife Emma Heming and their young daughters Evelyn Penn and Mabel Ray

Still going strong! The 63-year-old father-of-five married the Malta-born 40-year-old in 2009 after meeting at the gym in 2007 through their mutual fitness trainer

Also enjoying the hot summer day was Willis' bikini-clad daughter Tallulah with ex-wife Demi Moore, who brought her furry 'son' to Balboa Beach for his 'first sand.'

The 27-year-old doodle artist (named after Tallulah Bankhead) adopted her dog 'Merl' as a present to herself on her 26th birthday last year.

Bruce (born Walter) reunited with Tallulah, his 55-year-old amicable ex, as well as his 27-year-old daughter Scout at his eldest daughter Rumer's 30th birthday bash in LA on August 18.

'Summer': The 5ft10in former teen model also brought their six-year-old brunette and four-year-old blonde to Central Park where they got wet and wild in a fountain fully clothed

Puppy love: Also enjoying the hot summer day was Willis' bikini-clad daughter Tallulah with ex-wife Demi Moore, who brought her furry 'son' to Balboa Beach for his 'first sand'

Lion King moment: The 27-year-old doodle artist (named after Tallulah Bankhead) adopted her dog 'Merl' as a present to herself on her 26th birthday last year

'Bruce is super generous. When our daughter Rumer was a baby and it was his turn to change the diaper in the middle of the night, he would lean over and whisper to me, "I'll give you a thousand dollars right now if you change that diaper,"' the two-time Golden Globe nominee joked at his July 29th Comedy Central Roast.

'Scout asked me not to say anything, but just last week he offered her a thousand dollars to change his diaper. Some things never change.'

The German-born, Jersey-raised action star and Moore (born Guynes) have remained very friendly since ending their decade-long marriage in 2000.

Together again: Bruce reunited with Tallulah, his 55-year-old amicable ex, as well as his 27-year-old daughter Scout at his eldest daughter Rumer's 30th birthday bash in LA on August 18

The two-time Golden Globe nominee (2-R) joked at his July 29th Comedy Central Roast: 'Bruce is super generous. When our daughter Rumer (L) was a baby and it was his turn to change the diaper in the middle of the night, he would lean over and whisper to me, "I'll give you a thousand dollars right now if you change that diaper"'

The Death Wish actor next plays an ex-cop called James in Brian A. Miller's crime thriller Reprisal - hitting US theaters this Friday - alongside Frank Grillo, Johnathon Schaech, and Olivia Culpo.

Meanwhile, Emma owns a vegan coconut oil body care line called CocoBaba for the removal of stretch marks.

The Room to Grow ambassador also acted in two of Bruce's films - RED 2 in 2013 and Perfect Stranger in 2007.

Hitting US theaters this Friday! The German-born, Jersey-raised action star next plays an ex-cop called James in Brian A. Miller's crime thriller Reprisal alongside Frank Grillo, Johnathon Schaech, and Olivia CulpoJared Haibon has been told for years he resembles That 70s Show Ashton Kutcher.

And last week, the Bachelor In Paradise star finally met up with the actor. The two came face to face - and even posted for a photo together with their significant others - at a charity event inside Los Angeles' Dodgers stadium.

Ashton was with wife Mila Kunis. And Jared was with fiancee Ashley Iaconetti.

New pals? Jared Haibon has been told for years he resembles That 70s Show Ashton Kutcher. And last week, the Bachelor In Paradise star finally met up with the actor. Ashton was with wife Mila Kunis. And Jared was with fiancee Ashley Iaconetti

The group image was taken at Clayton and Ellen Kershaw's sixth annual Ping Pong 4 Purpose charity event.

'In 2015, Ashton Kutcher tweeted a side by side photo of our faces,' Haibon captioned the photo.

'In 2017, he said he got into watching The Bachelor because a guy named Jared looked like him. In 2018, we met and bonded over marrying our best friends.'

In 2015, Kutcher tweeted a picture of him standing next to a photo of Haibon's face.

'I'm trying to figure out why mila is making me take this picture,' he wrote. '@ashleyiaco who are you? And who is this guy?'

Haibon and Iaconetti were also seen kissing at the 6th annual PingPong4Purpose in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Kiss kiss! Iaconetti and Haibon packed on the PDA while attending the 6th annual PingPong4Purpose

Ashley, 30, had her hand wrapped around Jared's waist as they shared a kiss, looking the picture of bliss.

The Bachelor alum wore a white tank top that showed off a hint of her toned torso along with a pair of jeans.

She looked radiant with a perfect coat of makeup, and her raven tresses partially scraped back into a stylish updo.

Jared, meanwhile, kept it casual and comfortable in a matching white T-shirt and grey jeans.

It has been a whirlwind few months for Ashley and Jared, who became engaged in Junejust one month after taking their relationship public.

Jared proposed with a dazzling diamond and platinum ring that was designed by Neil Lane.

'Its so, so beautiful and its a symbol of our love and commitment, but Jared is my prize,' Ashley told People.

Now the couple are planning for their wedding, and Ashley has been sharing an array of snaps as she tries on dresses and checks out venues.Kim Kardashian is clearly not ready for summer to end.

On Monday the 37-year-old bombshell posted a flashback photo to her vacation in Miami where she was joined by Larsa Pippen and Jonathan Cheban.

The siren was in pink bikini bottoms and a white crop top with mirrored shades as she flashed double birds.

Flippin' the bird: Kim Kardashian flashes her middle fingers and a kiss for the camera in teeny bikini bottoms in a flashback shot she posted Monday from a trip to Miami

Instead of a bikini top, the mother of three, was a bit more covered up in a tight white crop top t-shirt.

The KUWTK star is still sporting her classic raven hued hair and she kept it long and flowing in the seaside photo with a tight half up pony.

It seems like the KKW mogul has spent her entire summer in the sunshine. Her social media feed has been full of shot after shot of the beauty in itty bitty bikinis.

On Monday she also shared a scantily clad shot of her glowing skin in a bronze rubber one-shoulder bra top and skin tight pair of sparkle leggings with wet blonde hair to promote three new shades in her KKW Beauty ultra light beams.

Glowing: The KKW mogul also shared this hot shot in a rubber one-shoulder bra top and sparkling leggings to share that her Ultra Light Beams will be back in stock in new shades

Couple goals: Kim and Kanye West cozy up together while on vacation

Hot shot: Kim called this one her 'fave beach pose'

Her sister Kourtney appears to be on the same page since she's been living her best life all summer.

Last week the eldest Kardashian - who Kim said was the 'least interesting' to look at - shared three striking images in a purple bathing suit,

In June, Kourtney seemed to be practically living on a yacht in Italy with her three children and now ex-boyfriend Younes Bendjima.

Summer fun: Kourtney Kardashian has been on permanent vacation all summer long

Wow! Since her split from Younes Benjima, the KUWTK star has been showing off her incredible body in swim suits

Throwing shade? People thought Kourtney's caption 'sometimes i take all the shine' was a clap back to Kim who called her the 'least interesting' of the Kardashian Jenner beauties to look at

Since her break up she's being non-stop living the single life and recently posted some hot swimsuit photos.

In her latest set of sultry shots, the 39-year-old captioned one of her showing off a toned physique in the shower in a high cut metallic purple one-piece 'sometimes I take all the shine.'

Fans interpreted the caption as a subtle dig at Kim who called her the 'least interesting to look at' of all the sisters this season on KUWTK.

While it's still summer on the Kardashian's Instagram feed, it's Christmas in Calabasas on KUWTK.

Season 15 just started and the gorgeous sisters are embroiled in drama during the holidays around the comment Kim made about Kourtney.

Kim, Khloe and Kourtney are in the center of the feud but appeared to have put things aside for the sake of saving Christmas.

Next week's episode brings on a whole new kind of feud when the family 'is determined to redeem themselves on Celebrity Family Feud.'

Keep up: Season 15 of KUWTK has the sisters embattled in drama over Kim's hurtful comments and it was threatening to impact the holidaysTeresa Giudice has gone from yoga fanatic to a body builder.

And during her vacation at Atlantis in the Bahamas with her four daughters last week, the 46-year-old star showed off her incredible curves.

The Real Housewives Of New Jersey even posed in a string bikini that highlighted her flat tummy and sculpted arms as she stood on the shore. 'Bahama vibes,' write the stunner.

In top shape: Teresa Giudice has gone from yoga fanatic to a body builder. And during her vacation at Atlantis in the Bahamas with her four daughters last week, the 46-year-old star showed off her incredible curves

Happy in the ocean: The Real Housewives Of New Jersey even posed in a bikini as she stood on the shore. 'Bahama vibes,' write the stunner

The 5ft8in reality TV queen took her girls Gia, 17, Gabriella, 14, Milania, 13 and Audriana, nine, on the dreamy trip as her husband Joe serves out his three year prison sentence for fraud.

The New Jersey native was also seen posing with daughter Gia when heading out for dinner on the island.

And the star stood next to mini me Audriana on the beach.

Like a single mom: The 5ft8in reality TV queen took her girls Gia, 17, Gabriella, 14, Milania, 13 and Audriana, nine on the dreamy trip as her husband Joe serves out his three year prison sentence for fraud

Her pride and joy: She was also seen posing with daughter Gia when heading out for dinner on the island

For a group photo with all four daughters she wrote: 'Having the best time with my girls in Paradise in the Bahamas.'

Giudice also fit in a product plug as she posed in a bathing suit, shorts and a straw hat in a cabana.

In July the TV darling was in Las Vegas.

She attended a meet and greet event at the World Market Center for interior designer Jimmy DeLaurentis with her co-star on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Dolores Catania, 47.

Buy this: Giudice also fit in a product plug as she posed in a bathing suit, shorts and a straw hat in a cabana

Guidice, who's spent long hours in the gym in as she's been involved with bodybuilding throughout 2018, wore a black skirt with a slit up the leg and a pattered midsection and plunging top.

The mom-of-four wore jeweled earrings and rings, and had her billowing blonde mane cascading past her shoulders as she posed for photographers at the posh corporate event.

Joe, 46, is still serving a 41 month sentence for mail, wire and bankruptcy fraud.

Reports circulated in July that ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had placed an immigration detainer on the father-of-four, and that 'removal proceedings' were underway.

So many pals with her: The siren also posed with three of her female friends

However his legal team shot down the story, branding it 'a cheap shot'.

'The immigration detainer that was referenced today is more than two years old,' they told DailyMail.com.

'It remains pending and no decision has been made by any judicial authority regarding its merits.

'The story was a cheap shot at Mr. Giudice's expense... while the topic of immigration is on everyone's mind in light of recent national events.'

The couple married in 1999 and have four daughters: Gia, Milania, Gabriella, and Audriana.

Teresa was allowed serve her 15-month sentence -which began in January 2015- for connected crimes before her husband, so the children would not be left parent-less.She garnered huge praise for her role as The Countess in American Horror Story.

And Lady Gaga appeared to be letting life imitate art in Paris on Monday as she emerged in the French capital looking as though she had borrowed her look from her gothic character - to dramatic and sensational effect.

The 32-year-old Poker Face hitmaker looked incredible in a sleek red dress with a pussybow neck and nipped-in waist while she sported cat-eye sunglasses while rocking white blonde tresses in an elegant chignon.

Blonde beauty: Lady Gaga emerged in the French capital looking as though she had borrowed her look from her gothic AHS character The Countess - to dramatic and sensational effect

Gaga looked simply sensational for the outing as she upped the glamour in the crimson gown comprising of a swishing chiffon material to show her frame.

The red dress nipped in at her tiny waist while skimming her ankles in a demure length, while the pussybow added a touch of retro glamour to the look.

Ever rocking a 'look', she sported the sharp cat-eye sunglasses over her flawless make-up despite the overcast weather and grey clouds.

Her white locks were scraped into an elegant chignon with a sweeping quiff pulled over to one side - with the whole look defining her bone structure.

A vision: The 32-year-old Poker Face hitmaker looked incredible in a sleek red dress with a pussybow neck and nipped-in waist while she sported cat-eye sunglasses while rocking white blonde tresses in an elegant chignon

Wow! She garnered huge praise for her role as The Countess in American Horror Story (right) as she appeared to be letting life imitate art by mirroring the look

Stunner: Adding to the stylised ensemble, she wore a pair of low-denier tights with staggering black stilettos while foregoing carrying her own bag for the trip

Adding to the stylised ensemble, she wore a pair of low-denier tights with staggering black stilettos while foregoing carrying her own bag for the trip.

Her make-up was perfectly applied as she sported a perfect slick of red lipstick to highlight her pout while also rocking flawlessly applied eyeliner.

Keeping her accessories extremely simple, she wore just dainty studs in a diamond frame while also rocking a flawless and neat manicure.

Blonde beauty: Gaga looked simply sensational for the outing as she upped the glamour in the crimson gown comprising of a swishing chiffon material to show her frame

Sizzling: The couple looked as loved-up as ever as they chilled out at the theatre while also obligingly posing for fans - no doubt some of her 'Monsters'

Shortly before her trip to Paris, the blonde beauty was keeping things uncharacteristically casual as she joined her fiance Christian Carino swung by the Cinepolis movie theater in Westlake Village, California.

The couple looked as loved-up as ever as they chilled out at the theatre while also obligingly posing for fans - no doubt some of her 'Monsters'.

Christian - who proposed to the songstress last year - is a 40-something talent agent who works at the famed CAA agency.Washington is going to look very different in the final season of House of Cards.

Netflix released four new photos from the set of the hit show and unveiled a first look at actors Diane Lane, 53, and Greg Kinnear, 55, who have joined the cast.

Lane and Kinnear will play opposite the show's star Robin Wright who took over as the headliner after Kevin Spacey was fired due to sexual misconduct allegations.

First look: On Monday, Netflix released four new photos from the final season of House of Cards giving a first glimpse at new characters played by Diane Lane and Greg Kinnear

Lord of the Ring: In this scene, Robin Wright holds the iconic 'FU' ring worn throughout the previous seasons by actor Kevin Spacey who was fired from the show after allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced

Girl power: Diane Lane, 53, and Robin Wright, 52, are seen here with arms locked at an American Red Cross disaster relief facility during the 6th season of House of Cards

Netflix newbie: Greg Kinnear, 55, has a tense scene with newcomer Cody Fern, 30, who will play his nephew in the series

The new photos don't give much away by way of plot. However, they do show Kinnear and Lane with the 52-year-old Robin Wright's character President Claire Underwood in the Oval Office.

In one shot, Wright is gesturing to Kinnear in the Oval with Frank Underwood's iconic FU ring from earlier seasons.

According to Netflix, 'Diane Lane & Greg Kinnear play Annette & Bill Shepherd, siblings who exert a powerful behind-the-scenes force in politics.'

The Shepherd siblings inherited a successful industrial conglomerate, Shepherd Unlimited, so fans can probably expect Lane and Kinnear's characters to be pulling the purse strings behind the newly minted President Underwood.

A photo of Lane's character arm in arm with Claire at a Red Cross disaster relief facility appears to show the Shepherds throwing their influence toward the first female President.

Also joining the cast is actor Cody Fern, 30, a relative newcomer who was recently featured in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.

In the newly released photos, Netflix included a tense looking scene between Fern, and Kinnear with Lane looking on so family drama is in the cards, so to speak.

Fern will play Lane's character Annette's son Duncan 'who represents the next generation of DC power players.'

#MyTurn: On July 4, Netflix released a teaser video of Robin Wright as Claire Underwood ready to take over the highest seat in the land. Off camera the actress was assuming the top role on the show too after Kevin Spacey was fired

Big change: The final season of House of Cards will be the only one with out star Kevin Spacey who was accused by multiple people of sexual assault and harassment

Since the political juggernaut never shies away from drama, Netflix said that the characters' past is intertwined with that of the Underwoods.

The 6th and final season of the Emmy winning series will center around Wright's character Claire now that she as assumed the role of the presidency.

Last year numerous people, including actors Anthony Rapp and Guy Pearce, came forward and accused the show's former star Kevin Spacey of sexual misconduct. The allegations prompted the streaming network to fire the 59-year-old actor.

The final season of House of Cards streams November 2, just in time for election day.It's the second largest street festival in the world, which both celebrities and the public alike flocked to celebrate.

And Lottie Moss proved she's not one to pass up a good party, as she headed to Notting Hill Carnival on Bank Holiday Monday to live it up with other festivalgoers.

The model, 20, was sure to set pulses racing at the event as she flaunted some serious underboob as she went braless in a black crop top.

Setting pulses racing: Lottie Moss flaunted some serious underboob in a minuscule crop top for a fun day out at Notting Hill Carnival on Bank Holiday Monday

Lottie's dark top had the word Angel written on it, and it sat high on her chest so that she could flaunt her toned abs.

Slipping her lithe legs into a pair of denim jeans, she added an extra dazzling touch to her look with sparking sequins encrusted across the front.

Styling her blonde locks into a sleek, straight style, the beauty accentuated her naturally pretty features by wearing light touches of make-up.

Stunning: Lottie's dark top had the word Angel written on it, and it sat high on her chest so that she could flaunt her toned abs

The socialite was in high spirits when she shared a glimpse of the festival with her 244k Instagram followers later that day.

Beaming as she turned around to show off her surroundings, Lottie tried to get her male pal's attention and shouted in glee.

Full of people in the streets all having a great time, the Notting Hill Carnival is a two day extravaganza, the second largest in the world after the Rio Carnival in Brazil.

Living it up: The socialite was in high spirits when she shared a glimpse of the festival with her 244k Instagram followers later that day

Stylish: Model Jouran Dunn also made her way to the carnival, and looked stunning in a semi-sheer yellow trousers which showed off a glimpse of her underwear

The music is set to stop for a 72-second silence in tribute to the 72 people who died following the fire at Grenfell Tower in June 2017 being within half a mile of the parade route.

The large party in West London is celebrated by many Caribbean cultures in places where West Indian people have migrated.

However, this year police will have the power to stop and search people at the Notting Hill Carnival in a bid to crack down on violence.

Having fun: Gal pals Jourdan and Emeli Sande posed up a storm at the eventHBO teased the first footage of several of their upcoming shows on Sunday, including the debut of three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep in the second season of Big Little Lies.

The 69-year-old acting legend portrays Celeste Wright's (Nicole Kidman) suspicious mother-in-law Mary Louise, who comes to town with questions about the death of her son Perry (Alexander Skarsgard).

'It's fantastic. I love having [51-year-old Kidman and Reese Witherspoon] as my bosses because they understand,' The Post actress told ET last month.

'New season!' HBO teased the first footage of several of their shows on Sunday, including the debut of three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep in the second season of Big Little Lies

'First day on the set with Meryl and "my" darling boys!' The 69-year-old acting legend portrays Celeste Wright's (Nicole Kidman) suspicious mother-in-law Mary Louise, who comes to town with questions about the death of her son Perry (Alexander Skarsgard)

'We have lots of big, fabulous, drunken meals together.'

As both stars and executive producers, the Oscar-winning duo earn an eye-popping $1M per episode for their expertise - according to THR.

In the preview, the Louisiana-born 42-year-old as outspoken housewife Madeline Martha Mackenzie screams in her car: 'I want more!'

Elsewhere, anti-bullying crusader Renata Klein (Laura Dern) could be seen smiling ecstatically as she embraces bookkeeper Jane Chapman (Shailene Woodley).

The Post actress told ET last month: 'It's fantastic. I love having [51-year-old Kidman (L) and Reese Witherspoon (R)] as my bosses because they understand. We have lots of big, fabulous, drunken meals together'

Powerful pair: As both stars and executive producers, the Oscar-winning duo earn an eye-popping $1M per episode for their expertise

In the preview, the Louisiana-born 42-year-old as outspoken housewife Madeline Martha Mackenzie screams in her car: 'I want more!'

Suddenly, Renata appears to fall down as both her executive husband Gordon (Jeffrey Nordling) and Jane attempt to catch her.

There's also a shot of mother-of-three Madeline giving someone the death stare, so perhaps there will be more than one ice-cream assault involved in the Sausalito soap, which starts streaming next year.

The highly-anticipated second season officially wrapped filming on August 17, and Witherspoon promised that it's 'more exciting' than the previous season.

'I can't wait for y'all to see it!' Reese (born Laura Jeanne) gushed on Instagram.

Happy: Elsewhere, anti-bullying crusader Renata Klein (Laura Dern) could be seen smiling ecstatically as she embraces bookkeeper Jane Chapman (Shailene Woodley)

Drunk? Suddenly, Renata appears to fall down as both her executive husband Gordon (Jeffrey Nordling) and Jane attempt to catch her

Starts streaming next year! There's also a shot of mother-of-three Madeline giving someone the death stare, so perhaps there will be more than one ice-cream assault involved in the Sausalito soap

'Feeling so grateful to my #BigLittleLies family on our last day of shooting Season 2! You have all inspired me, supported me, made me laugh & cry. Big love to my sisters @nicolekidman @lauradern @shailenewoodley @zoeisabellakravitz and #MerylStreep.'

The Hawaiian-born Australian called the second chapter 'a beautiful journey' with her 'Monterey 5 sisters' especially 'the one and only Meryl Streep for believing in us.'

And 51-year-old Laura celebrated wrapping by rocking a T-shirt bearing the name of Andrea Arnold, who directed all seven episodes penned by creator David E. Kelley.

'I can't wait for y'all to see it!' The highly-anticipated second season officially wrapped filming on August 17, and Witherspoon promised that it's 'more exciting' than the previous season

'That's a wrap!' The Hawaiian-born Australian called the second chapter 'a beautiful journey' with her 'Monterey 5 sisters' especially 'the one and only Meryl Streep for believing in us'She's been strutting her stuff for Victoria's Secret since she was 18.

And Angel Taylor Hill turned out to celebrate the brand's Tease fragrance and its newest offshoot, Tease Rebel, at the flagship 5th Ave store in New York City on Monday.

The 22-year-old showed off her stunning physique in a black leather boob tube with lacing up the front revealing her cleavage and her toned midriff.

Wild child: Victoria's Secret Angel Taylor Hill turned out to promote the brand's Tease fragrance and its newest offshoot, Tease Rebel, at the flagship 5th Ave store in NYC on Monday

She teamed it with a black leather jacket, high-waist red pants and black stilettos.

Taylor's long, brunette tresses cascaded over her shoulders in their natural curl.

With her make-up perfectly applied, she carried a bottle of Tease perfume in one hand and Tease Rebel in the other.

Flashing her flesh: The 22-year-old showed off her stunning physique in a black leather boob tube with lacing up the front revealing her cleavage and her toned midriff

Slender physique: She teamed her sexy top with a black leather jacket, trendy high-waist red pants and black stilettos

Making her point: She carried a bottle of the original Tease perfume in one hand and Tease Rebel in the other

A 1.7 fl. oz bottle of Tease Rebel eau de parfum will set you back $55 with the 3.4 fl. oz bottle retailing for $68.

Taylor was first discovered at the age of 14.

Since then she has appeared in numerous campaigns for Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, Fendi and Dolce & Gabbana among others, as well as Victoria's Secret.

Rebel look: The blue-eyed beauty's brunette tresses cascaded over her shoulder

Nothing to sniff at: A 1.7 fl. oz bottle of Tease Rebel eau de parfum will set you back $55 with the 3.4 fl. oz bottle retailing for $68.

Last month she joined Canadian beauty Winnie Harlow to promote Ralph Lauren's new fragrance, Polo Red Rush, at New York's Classic Car Club Manhattan.

The blue-eyed beauty posed at the event with beau Michael Stephen Shank

Taylor and the 32-year-old male model have been together for three years.She's become a fashion icon with her on-point sartorial choices.

And Sofia Vergara proved on trend once again as she was spotted in a lovely ensemble for a day out in Beverly Hills on Monday.

The 46-year-old Modern Family actress swathed her enviable figure in a breezy striped maxi dress as she arrives at the luxury Montage Hotel.

Stunner: Sofia Vergara, 46, was spotted in a lovely ensemble in Beverly Hills on Monday

Daring to impress, the Colombian-American beauty turned heads in the red, white, and blue gown that featured thin straps over her shoulders.

Her toned and tanned arms were on full display as the couture number boasted a sleeveless design.

She kept her trademark brunette tresses long and loose as they cascaded over her petite shoulders.

Throwing caution to the wind, the natural beauty went relatively makeup free as she opted for a subtle color palette.

Luxury: The Modern Family actress swathed her enviable figure in a breezy striped maxi dress as she arrives at the luxury Montage Hotel

Impressive: Daring to impress, the Colombian-American beauty turned heads in the red, white, and blue gown that featured thin straps over her shoulders

Sofia has been starring on the Modern Family sitcom for nearly a decade since it aired in September 2009.

The actress celebrated her part in the long-running series Modern Family as 'something so special' and a 'dream come true'.

Sofia told Now To Love magazine: 'It's a dream come true  it's not often an actress can say they're a part of something so special. It's really a pleasure to go to work every day.'

Toned: Her toned and tanned arms were on full display as the couture number boasted a sleeveless design

She will celebrate three years of marriage to husband Joe Manganiello in November.

The Magic Mike hunk recently gushed that being married to the Modern Family star was the 'greatest thing' to ever happen to him.

He said in April: 'The biggest adjustment in marriage? Coming to grips with the idea that someone who is not related to you could possibly love you that much. She was it for me.

Hair story: She kept her trademark brunette tresses long and loose as they cascaded over her petite shoulders

'People say things like, "Marriage and relationships are work". But it's not. Life is hard. Having somebody to help you deal with it is the greatest thing that ever happened.'

Joe isn't the only one who cannot believe his luck after Sofia recently admitted she must have done something good to 'get that reward'.

She shared last year: 'I'm very lucky. I must have done something really right in my life to get that reward ... I'm good but I'm not a very, very good person. But, he's better than me.They have a lavish lifestyle with a mansion in Beverly Hills, luxury cars and they go on dreamy vacations all over the world.

But it appears as if Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills star Dorit and her husband Paul Kemsley might be experiencing some financial problems.

On Monday The Blast claimed that the Bellagio Hotel And Casino in Las Vegas has filed documents accusing the music manager - who represents Boy George - of stopping payments on his $3.6M debt. And they may seize his assets, if need be, to get the remainder of their money back.

A judge has not yet ruled on the Bellagio's request.

Money struggle: Paul Kemsley, seen with wife Dorit in May, has been accused of failing to pay back the rest of his $3.6M debt to a Las Vegas casino, according to The Blast

A spokesperson for Dorit has not yet returned calls from DailyMail.com.

'Kemsley has breached his settlement obligations, and by violating his settlement obligations, he has violated the stipulated dismissal order. Accordingly, it is appropriate for the court to execute and enter the Stipulated Judgment,' it read in the filing.

That means if he does not continue to make payments toward the $3.6M debt, he could possibly get his home and cars taken away from him.

According to Celebrity Net Worth, he is worth about $50M.

His wife Dorit is reportedly worth a few million on her own as she stars of Bravo's The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills and is the owner of a swimwear line.

Playing tough: On Monday The Blast claimed that the Bellagio Hotel And Casino in Las Vegas has filed documents that the music manager has stopped making payments on his $3.6M debt and they will seize his assets, if need be, to get the remainder of their money back

The couple have two children and live in a home in Beverly Hills that they listed in August for over $12M. Then earlier this year they lowered the price to $9.75M.

His trouble with the Bellagio began in June 2009 when the star, who goes by PK, took out a $3.6M casino 'marker.'

From January 28, 2010, through August 23, 2011, he made five payments to the Bellagio totaling $850,000, according to the papers.

Living large: The couple have two children and live in a home in Beverly Hills that they listed in August for over $12M then earlier this year lowered the price to $9.75M

Fancy pad: The home is upscale with three floors and a stunning staircase

A great place to entertain: The living room is where Boy George - whom PK manages - plays the piano, far right

But in 2012, he filed for bankruptcy in the United Kingdom and was hoping to get all of his debt wiped away.

The Bellagio, however, maintained they were never told about the UK claim and they did not want to release him from his debt.

Paul then continued to make payments up until February 2013.

At this point his debt was still at over $2M due to interest.

When lawyers became involved again, the Bellagio and PK reached an agreement. He then reportedly made payments up until May 2018, according to the documents seen by The Blast.

But his payments should allegedly have been made until June 2018.

Family man: PK with his wife and son at home in a video shared on Sunday. She wrote in the caption, 'I cant believe this was six months ago when Jagger turned 4'

There is still a balance, but it is not known how much that balance is.

The Bellagio wants the court to order a judgment in the amount of the remaining balance. It was also revealed that they want to seize PK's 'assets' if need be.

The couple have more problems - they have also been sued by an alleged partner for her swimwear line.

Ryan Horne claims in legal documents that he's owed tens of thousands of dollars from a deal he struck with the couple in August 2017, TMZ reported Thursday.

Supermodel look: Dorit was comfortable showing off her lean frame as she slipped into a yellow bikini from her Beverly Beach By Dorit swim line last week

Horne claims Dorit and Paul agreed to partner with him to make bathing suits in a business split three ways and that he fronted them almost $130,000 in merchandise and $75,000 to cover other expenses, according to the website.

The businessman alleges the reality star and her property developer spouse sold the bathing suits he provided at a profit but have never reimbursed him for the initial outlay nor given him his share of profits from the sale of the bathing suits.

Horne is now suing to get his share.

You glow girl: The 42-year-old TV star looked incredible when at the Baha Mar Casino & Hotel

A good model: Kemsley started up her own swimsuit line on her own name Dorit. Her swimwear product line was showcased at Fashion Week which was held in 2013 and was sponsored by Mercedes-Benz

A source close to the Kemselys told TMZ that the couple were not fronted any money by Horne and that they 'will respond appropriately to his claims in court.'

Meanwhile, Dorit, 42, was seen last week modeling Beverly Beach By Dorit bikinis while in the Bahamas with her RHOBH cast mates Denise Richards, Camille Grammer, Kyle Richards, Teddy Mellencamp, Erika Jayne and Lisa Rinna.

The Connecticut-born star shared images in the same suit as she posed away in her hotel, The Baha Mar Casino & Hotel.

Kemsley started up her own swimsuit line on her own name Dorit. Her swimwear product line was showcased at Fashion Week which was held in 2013 and was sponsored by Mercedes-Benz.

In 2016, she joined Bravo TV's reality show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Ready to go! On Tuesday Kemsley posted a photo with three of her cast mates - Camille Grammer, Denise Richards and Lisa Rinna

Dorit who shared the eye-popping image of herself with Richards, Rinna and Grammer on Tuesday.

The ladies posed in bathing suits while arm-in-arm by a swimming pool in the Bahamas.

The caption read, 'Support your local girl gang #90210.'

Dorit seemed to bond Playboy cover girl Richards, 47, on the trip.Ashley Jacobs has denied she cheated on ex-boyfriend Thomas Ravenel after the former Southern Charm star Tweeted accusations over the weekend.

The 33-year-old nurse spoke out after a series of posts by Ravenel, 56, hinted at cheating as he quoted song lyrics about infidelity.

Jacobs wasted no time in denying the allegations as she insisted to Page Six on Monday that she was never unfaithful and only began to hang out with other men once she and Ravenel were no longer exclusively dating.

Ashley Jacobs has denied cheating on ex-boyfriend Thomas Ravenel after he hinted at infidelity in a series of Tweets over the weekend

She told the website she wasn't surprised at his allegations because she's blocked and 'he was trying to get a reaction from me that way'.

'He's hurting and he knew that would be the only way to get to me. I just laughed at it. I just laughed at it like, "Oh, God. So dramatic!"'

Ravenel made his Twitter account public before posting a message about his personal life.

'Today, my personal life just took a huge upward turn. I finally have more than enough information to move forward without any doubt or hesitation and Ill never look back.'

When a Twitter user asked him to clarify, Ravenel replied: 'After 30 years I finally understand the lyrics from that wonderful Chicago tune: If she would have been faithful, if she could have been true, then I would have been cheated, I would have never known real love,'

'He's hurting and he knew that would be the only way to get to me. I just laughed at it. I just laughed at it like, "Oh, God. So dramatic!"' Ashley told Page Six this week

He later added that he did not harbor hard feelings toward Jacobs.

'I hope the best for her,' he tweeted. 'And I do feel a bit sad now. But now I know that just around the corner, down the street, around the block, something magical is going to happen, not tomorrow not next week but perhaps tonight. Perhaps real love.'

Ravenel later wrote that he 'never for a second got [the] vibe' from Jacobs that her 'trust, faith, respect and love' was 'immovable.'

He added: 'I need to find the right woman with which to begin that journey.'

Jacobs confirmed the break-up earlier this month after dating the reality star for 15 months.

It's over: The duo's split was confirmed earlier this month after 15 months of dating

Opening up: Ravenel, 56, subtly hinted at infidelity in a series of tweets on Saturday, coming weeks after he quit the show amid sexual assault claims

Revelation: The one-time politician said that he felt strongly about a life decision he'd made in his first of numerous tweets

She opened up about the split in an Instagram Live post saying she was trying to handle the difficult situation 'privately' and still loved and cared about Ravenel.

'Im still trying to work it out, not work out getting back together, but Im still trying to figure it out,' Jacobs said on the social media site. 'I think everyones been through breakups before but its hard. Its not easy.

'Sometimes you just want to stay quiet and figure out what the next move in your life is going to be.'

Jacobs also publicly apologized to Ravenel's ex-girlfriend Kathryn Dennis, 26, last week after she criticized her parenting skills while dating the one-time politician.

Dennis did not accept the apology.

Ravenel and Dennis have 50/50 custody of their children Kensington Calhoun, four; and son St. Julien Rembert, two.

Something missing: Ravenel said he never got a sense that Jacobs' 'trust, faith, respect and love' was 'immovable'

Moving forward: Ashley is starting afresh and has a new Instagram account amid her split from Thomas

Allegations: Earlier this year Ravenel was accused of sexual assault by two women, including his children's former nanny

Earlier this month, Ravenel took to Twitter to explain his decision to quit Southern Charm ahead of the show's sixth season, amid sexual assault claims made by two women three months ago, of which a law enforcement probe is ongoing.

'I'm not doing the show anymore,' he tweeted. 'In the contract they have the right to fictionalize your story. They took advantage of me. I decided I've got too much to lose and informed them I'm not coming back.'

He then made his Twitter page private.

Earlier this year Ravenel was accused of sexual assault by two women, including his children's former nanny.

Dawn Ledwell, known to fans of the Bravo reality show as 'Nanny Dawn,' was the second woman to come forward and accuse Ravenel of sexual assault following Ashley Perkins, who claimed Ravenel sexually assaulted her mother, Debbie.

Dawn was featured on the show caring for Ravenel's two children with Kathryn Dennis; and claimed he attempted to kiss her after coming back from a night out with friends.

Additionally, real estate agent Ashley Perkins has alleged that Ravenel assaulted her mom Debbie Holloway Perkins after meeting him on Tinder in October 2015 and going on a last-minute first date.

Ravenel has denied the accusations through his attorney.Teen Mom 2 star Jenelle Evans Eason's ex-husband Courtland Keith Rogers is reportedly being held on $100K bond at the Brunswick County Jail following his arrest on Sunday for 'assaulting a woman.'

The 26-year-old reality star famously ended her 18-month marriage to the heavily-tattooed 32-year-old back in 2014, and things have certainly spiraled for the 'habitual felon.'

According to TMZ, the Leland Police Department executed an open warrant on Courtland, but it's unclear when the misdemeanor actually occurred.

In the slammer: Teen Mom 2 star Jenelle Evans Eason's ex-husband Courtland Keith Rogers is reportedly being held on $100K bond at the Brunswick County Jail following his arrest on Sunday for 'assaulting a woman'

Happier times: The 26-year-old reality star ended her 18-month marriage to the heavily-tattooed 32-year-old back in 2014, and things have certainly spiraled for the 'habitual felon'

It's been four months since Rogers posted $15K bond after being busted April 10 for 'selling/delivering schedule III substances,' and 'possession with intent to sell/distribute schedule III substances.'

This, after Courtland was arrested for possession of Buprenorphine-Naloxone (which treats opioid addiction) in November and he was also arrested for a third felony in 2013 - according to TMZ.

And last Wednesday, Jenelle's on/off ex-boyfriend Kieffer Delp - whom she dated between 2011-2013 - was sentenced to 18 to 36 months in state prison for operating a meth lab in his Pennsylvania apartment.

Mugshot: According to TMZ, the Leland Police Department executed an open warrant on Courtland, but it's unclear when the misdemeanor actually occurred

Four months ago: Rogers previously posted $15K bond after being busted April 10 for 'selling/delivering schedule III substances,' and 'possession with intent to sell/distribute schedule III substances'

Bad seed: This, after Courtland was arrested for possession of Buprenorphine- Naloxone (which treats opioid addiction) in November and he was also arrested for a third felony in 2013

According to Radar Online, the New Jersey-born 28-year-old copped a plea deal with Allegheny County prosecutors for the felonies and he'll remain on probation for three years after release.

On September 23, Evans will celebrate her first wedding anniversary with second husband David Eason, who was fired off Teen Mom 2 in February for a series of homophobic tweets.

The North Carolina native - who was arrested four times between 2010-2012 - and her 30-year-old bearded beau are parents of 19-month-old daughter Ensley Jolie.

She has a type: And last Wednesday, Jenelle's on/off ex-boyfriend Kieffer Delp - whom she dated between 2011-2013 - was sentenced to 18 to 36 months in state prison for operating a meth lab in his Pennsylvania apartment

Still going strong: On September 23, Evans will celebrate her first wedding anniversary with second husband David Eason, who was fired off Teen Mom 2 in February for a series of homophobic tweets (pictured August 1)

'Mama': The North Carolina native - who was arrested four times between 2010-2012 - and her 30-year-old beau are parents of 19-month-old daughter Ensley Jolie (pictured August 13)

Her mother Barbara has custody of Jace: The Read Between the Lines author is also mother to nine-year-old son Jace Vahn with ex-boyfriend Andrew Lewis; and four-year-old son Kaiser Orion with ex-fiance Nathan Griffith (pictured Sunday)

The Read Between the Lines author is also mother to nine-year-old son Jace Vahn with ex-boyfriend Andrew Lewis; and four-year-old son Kaiser Orion with ex-fiance Nathan Griffith.

Catch more of Jenelle on the second part of the eighth season Teen Mom 2 reunion airing Monday night on MTV.There's a lingering mood encircling Croatia, clinging to the air like a layer of pollution stratifying the top of a stagnant pond.

This is the aftermath of last week's dinner party from Hell, which saw Vegas Diana parachuted in by Jamie, landing smack-bang in the centre of the table, bottom-first in the taramasalata.

Attempting to cheer Sam up with bacon sandwiches, Miles grills him on what the situation is with Diana and Habbs after the aforementioned disaster.

Habbs clash: There's a lingering mood encircling Croatia, clinging to the air like a layer of pollution stratifying the top of a stagnant pond

Sam admits that he's not bothered in the slightest about Diana, and only kept in touch with her because Whatsapp is free across the globe. Had this been 1999, that poor girl wouldn't have received one single text.

Mark Francis and Victoria are sauntering around a 17th Century fortress, seemingly with the view to make a cheeky purchase. 'Its nice they have a prison here,' Victoria observes. 'You can lock up the people you don't like.'

Victoria isn't kidding anyone. She won't even go on RightMove to peruse a property unless there's a prison, dungeon and a dumb waiter.

Diana pops round to Sam's villa to ask him why he didn't leap to her defense when she was publicly shaming him and all his friends at the dinner party. She also wants to know why he has ignored her since. She also wants to know why he took her on a date the other night and hasn't asked her out again.

In the firing line: This is the aftermath of last week's dinner party from Hell, which saw Vegas Diana parachuted in by Jamie, landing smack-bang in the centre of the table, bottom-first in the taramasalata

Sam struggles to answer this, but informs her she got on whatever plane Jamie chartered for no real reason as he prefers Habbs.

'She seems like a shallow chick,' Diana declares, as if she is the sane one in all of this.

Elsewhere, Harry is admitting to Melissa that, yes, he did say that stuff about her being 'Miss Right Now' and 'Whatever happening in Vegas staying in Vegas'. Melissa isn't that bothered, more irked that he didn't admit to it around the dinner table to presumably wipe the slightly confused pout off Diana's face.

Tabitha's been chatting to Diana too. It transpires Sam promised her the world - London, Croatia, Mykonos... a glittering reality TV career with sponsored Instagram ads coming out of her ears.

Habbs is so furious that she simply has no other choice but to invite Diana to share an awkward bottle of rose. Diana uses the opportunity to tell Habbs that she and Sam were in 'constant contact' since Vegas and that he referred to her as his 'girlfriend' and his 'bird'.

Sam clearly meant this in a flirty, 'bants' kind of way, and Diana really needs to get a grip. But he gets the chance to clear matters up himself because Habbs has invited him to help them polish off that rose. 'Do you copy and paste your messages to girls?' asks Habbs, which, in this century, is just an effective way to romance people.

Sam insists that he only kept in 'constant contact' with Diana because it was the polite thing to do. Since when did dating become a polite practice?

Sam, you should have arranged to see Diana again, waited for the day to come and for her to message you asking where you're meeting, read the message, ignored it, left her crying hysterically over her iPhone and never spoken to her again, like a normal person.

Wow: Attempting to cheer Sam up with bacon sandwiches, Miles grills him on what the situation is with Diana and Habbs after the aforementioned disaster

Back at the villa, there's a volleyball game in full swing. Mytton and Miles are seen lifting themselves out of the water only to be totally, 100 percent, bone dry in the next shot. 10 points for effort to Miles, however, for at least trying to pat himself down a bit.

Harry stops by to have a word with Jamie and ask why, precisley, he wasted his BA club points to fly Diana over to ruin his life.

'Are you still chaperoning Diana?' Harry asks him, as if Jamie is keeping watch over her at Bring Your Child To Work Day.

Jamie explains that he wanted to 'create a stage for Harry's demise' and says he's sorry Melissa 'has to deal with him every day'. He then tends to his dangerously overdone fish.

They all go to some drinks party and Harrys looking gaunter by the second. The stress is really getting to him, only made worse when Melissa starts having a row with Habbs about the whole thing.

Scenic: Mark Francis and Victoria are sauntering around a 17th Century fortress, seemingly with the view to make a cheeky purchase. 'Its nice they have a prison here,' Victoria observes. 'You can lock up the people you don't like

She is so fuming with Habbs that she calls her Sophie. That's like calling Proudlock Oliver, you see.

Theres some sort of B-story going on about how Liv lost at volleyball and so has to do a forfeit. This makes no sense as she was on a team of at least four, so why she has to do the forfeit on her own is anyone's guess.

Even weirder is the decision that her forfeit should be to do a dance class. What happened to the days of making people eat a scotch bonnet? Or getting people to call a stranger, say 'it's done but there's blood everywhere' and then hanging up?

Sam asks Habbs over to his villa and tells her he wishes he could 'delete Diana' from his life - which sounds like it should be a Michael Jackson song.

Outrage: Back at the party, Melissa is having it out with Jamie who tries to clear the air with her by telling her that she 'hasn't had a voice in months' and that 'Harry speaks for her'

Oh dear: Jamie and Harry have a tense discussion during their break

Back at the party, Melissa is having it out with Jamie who tries to clear the air with her by telling her that she 'hasn't had a voice in months' and that 'Harry speaks for her.'

Diana and Miles seem to have hit it off. They're dancing as the sun beats down on the party. The sun then sets and they're still dancing in the precise same spot. This is shortly interrupted by Harry, who wants a word with her to suggest she and Melissa make friends. Really good idea that Harry.

Sam then reveals he'll be going back to England to think about what he's done (hopefully not on the same chartered aircraft as Diana) which at least one person always has to do during an MIC summer season so they can return again... having not changed at all.She has been busy filming her new Netflix comedy Murder Mystery in Lake Como.

But Jennifer Aniston and her co-star Adam Sandler were spotted shooting scenes for the new flick in Milan on Monday.

The actress, 49, who looked positively radiant in a white floral shift dress, got into character as she strolled the city's streets hand-in-hand with the 51-year-old actor.

Forever young: Jennifer Aniston looked positively radiant as she filmed scenes with her co-star Adam Sandler for Netflix comedy in Milan on Monday

The white mini-dress nipped-in Jennifer's trim waist while its pleated hemline drew attention to her tanned and toned pins.

She added a boost to her leggy frame with soft grey wedges and styled her honey-blonde locks in a sleek ponytail.

Toting a cream leather tote bag in hand, Jen looked every inch the tourist as the on-screen couple filmed a disagreement at a market place.

Latest film: The actress, 49, showcased her incredible figure in a white floral shift dress, got into character as she strolled the city's streets hand-in-hand with the 51-year-old actor

Arguments: Toting a cream leather tote bag in hand, Jen looked every inch the tourist as the on-screen couple filmed a disagreement at a market place

Leggy: The white mini-dress showcased Jennifer's nipped-in waist while its pleated hemline drew attention to her tanned and toned pins

Adam, who sported a full mustache, donned a pale blue Hawaiian shirt, stone grey shorts and blue plimsolls.

The Friends actress stars alongside Adam, Luke Evans and Gemma Arterton in the comedy series where Jennifer and Adam play a married couple, who go on a European vacation to reinvigorate their marriage.

A chance meeting on a flight leads to the pair being invited by a mystery man to an intimate family gathering on a super-yacht with an elderly billionaire. The wealthy man is later murdered on the vessel, making the couple prime suspects.

Stylish: She added a boost to her leggy frame with soft grey wedges and styled her honey-blonde locks in a sleek ponytail

Holiday-bound: Adam, who sported a full mustache, donned a pale blue Hawaiian shirt, stone grey shorts and blue plimsolls

Spicing up their marriage: Jennifer and Adam play a married couple, who go on a European vacation to reinvigorate their marriage

Principal filming for the movie began in Canada last month, and it is expected to premiere in 2019. Jennifer and Adam are something of a dream team on-screen, having already starred together in 2011's Just Go With It, which raked in a huge $215 million worldwide.

The Friends star is no doubt delighted to be spending some time in the European sunshine, after a difficult few months.

She recently delivered one of her most candid interviews to date about her personal life, hitting back at her critics and declaring her purpose on this planet may not be to procreate.

The Friends actress, who was interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel's wife Molly McNearney for the September issue of InStyle, also revealed she is not heartbroken after her split from Justin Theroux.

Jovial: The actress appeared to be in a jovial mood as she made her way through the streets

Under protection: Bodyguards were seen surrounding the actress as she got to work on the set

Travelling around Italy: The pair have spent the past few weeks filming the new Netflix comedy Murder Mystery in Lake Como

Jennifer also hinted that a 'medical' issue may have played a role in why she never got pregnant and said it is unfair that women who do not start a family are considered damaged goods.

The star does not stop there. The Emmy winner also touched on harassment in Hollywood and how she feels women are treated unfairly in the media.

She began: 'It's pretty crazy. The misconceptions are "Jen can't keep a man," and "Jen refuses to have a baby because she's selfish and committed to her career." Or that I'm sad and heartbroken. First, with all due respect, I'm not heartbroken.'

The Wanderlust actress added: 'And second, those are reckless assumptions. No one knows what's going on behind closed doors.' Here she is referring to starting a family.

Star-studded line-up: The Friends actress stars alongside Adam, Luke Evans and Gemma Arterton in the comedy series

Hydrated: The star kept herself hydrated with a bottle of water as she walked in the sunshine

All eyes on me: All eyes were on the actress as a bodyguard kept the growing crowd at bay

The Cake star has mercilessly been scrutinized for not having children, often being compared to Pitt's estranged wife Angelina Jolie, 43, who has six children.

'No one considers how sensitive that might be for my partner and me. They don't know what I've been through medically or emotionally,' she added, hinting she may have had trouble conceiving.

She and Theroux ended their marriage in February 2018 after just two years. They had been together a total of seven years, tying the knot at their Bel-Air estate in August 2015.

Jennifer was previously married to actor Brad Pitt. The pair split after five years, with their divorce being finalised in 2005.

Show must go on: Despite the minor chaos before her, Jennifer continued to walk undisturbedRyan Serhant and his wife Emilia Bechrakis are enjoying their two year wedding anniversary in Greece.

The New York-based couple looked to be having the time of their life as they soaked up the sun on a yacht anchored off the coast of an island.

The two wed in July 2016 in Greece and have since been trying to start a family with the help of IVF.

Gong strong: Ryan Serhant and his wife Emilia Bechrakis are enjoying their two year wedding anniversary in Greece

Swimming around: The New York-based couple looked to be having the time of their life as they had fun on a yacht anchored off the coast of an island

Goofy twosome: She threw up her arms as she posed shirtless on the yacht

Ryan, 34, looked to be in excellent shape as he posed in blue board shorts while on the back of the large yacht.

His spouse threw up her arms and kicked up her heels as she soaked up the sun while in a purple flamingo floatie.

He was also seen jumping off the yacht into the crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

In one of her Instagram captions, she wrote, 'Found me a Texan and a flamingo. Its a good life.'

Pure joy: The beauty wore a bikini as she rested on the purple floatie

She said she loved her floatie: Emilia joked that she had a boat of her own when she road in this blow-up bird

The star was also on vacation in April.

The cover girl traveled to Key Biscayne, Florida where she was again spotted on a yacht.

And the business woman looked very in shape as she modeled a green string bikini that made the most of her slender frame.

The yacht life: The star was also on vacation in April. The cover girl traveled to Key Biscayne, Florida where she was again spotted on a yacht

Party on: And the business woman looked very in shape as she modeled a green string bikini that made the most of her slender frame

The two have shared with their fans that they definitely want to start a family. On his show Million Dollar Listing New Year, the reality TV star asked his wife, 'Are you ready to go down the IVF steps?'

Emilia is seen saying, 'I've been looking forward to being a mom but I just always expected that it was going to be easy.'

That is when Serhant says, 'Are you ready to go down the IVF steps?'

Earlier this year Ryan told DailyMail.com exclusively that he and his wife 'talk about kids all the time.'

He loves to enjoy the money he earns: Ryan has become a millionaire from real estate; here he is seen at the table waiting for a meal

He also seemed clearly in love. 'I do it all for her, she is the love of my life,' said the real estate wiz. 'She is everything to me, she is everything I work for. She makes me better every day. She keeps me grounded and happy and pushes me. She is tough in all the right ways.'

And married life is turning out to be great. 'She a better wife than I ever could have imagined,' the Hamilton college graduate gushed.

They met at a Hannukah party and hit it off. And though she didn't even live in New York at the time, he pursued her.

Serhant proposed in Times Square in 2015, closing the busy NYC area for an hour. 'It's only happened once before, for the movie Vanilla Sky. It took six months to plan,' he said.

And they wed the following year in Greece.She is known for her stunning vocals and saucy stage outfits.

And Alexandra Burke dazzled as she took to the stage at Manchester Pride on Monday.

The Broken Heels hitmaker, 30, looked sensational as she took to the stage in a nude coloured and pearl-studded bodysuit, which teased at her toned abs with a saucy out-out section.

Shimmy: Alexandra Burke dazzled as she took to the stage at Manchester Pride on Monday

The plunging bodysuit flashed a hint of her cleavage while also revealing her toned legs.

Quirky champagne hued tassels added a touch of drama to the look as the X Factor winner pulled off a flawless performance.

The brunette beauty added height with patent leather biker boots.

Her raven tresses were pulled into a curly ponytail while her pretty features were enhanced with smoky shadow and pearlescent gloss.

Shake it: The Broken Heels hitmaker, 30, looked sensational as she took to the stage in a nude coloured and pearl-studded bodysuit, which teased at her toned abs with a saucy out-out section

Her gig comes after the songstress confessed 'hasn't even started' planning her wedding to fiance Joshua Ginnelly, seven months after announcing their engagement.

Appearing on This Morning recently, the star admitted she hasn't got past setting up a mood board for the big day, as both she and Joshua had been working non-stop.

Speaking to guest presenters Mollie King and Ben Shephard, Alexandra confessed that half a year after Joshua popped the question in Paris, she is yet to start planning her wedding.

Smile: Quirky champagne hued tassels added a touch of drama to the look as the X Factor winner pulled off a flawless performance

Yes! The star looked delighted to be back on stage

Raunchy: Alex pulled off some sultry dance moves during her performance

She said: 'Pinterest has formed yes, got the mood board going I started that, we recently had our engagement party a couple of weeks ago.

'He's on tour for a year, so the main thing is to enjoy being engaged, calling him my fiance, I want to travel with him more, and then focus on the wedding.'

Alexandra also reflected on the moment Joshua popped the question as they drove around Paris, confessing he had to wake her up in the car as she was exhausted from the Strictly Come Dancing final just days earlier.

She added: 'We were driving around Paris and I was so knackered, but then he woke me up with the ring.

'It's just magical being engaged it's so amazing.'She's started her single life with a bang.

And Kourtney Kardashian brought her Mexican girls' trip to a close with yet another spectacular figure-baring outfit on Sunday night, as she and her friends headed out for a final dinner.

The neon purple sheer dress, with orange accents, highlighted her gym-honed figure, clinging to her body as she led the way into Acre restaurant.

Pretty in purple: The 39-year-old was whisked away by her pals, including Kim Kardashian's former assistant Steph Shepherd, to get over her break-up

The 39-year-old was whisked away by her pals, including Kim Kardashian's former assistant Steph Shepherd, to get over her break-up.

She split from boyfriend Younes Bendjima, 26, just last month.

And having ditched the boy toy, Kourtney Kardashian is living her best life - with plenty of bikini belfies in the mix.

Here come the girls: Kourtney Kardashian puts her curves on parade in sheer dress as the girls head out for a final dinner in Mexico on Sunday night

Stand aside! Kourtney was the centre of attention as she gave the paparazzi a wave

Time of her life: The reality star has shared a constant stream of social media updates, from cheeky belfies to footage of herself downing shots while on holiday in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

Looking good: The neon purple sheer dress, with orange accents, highlighted her gym-honed figure, clinging to her body as she led the way into Acre restaurant

Looking her best: The neon accents highlighted Kourtney's deep tan

The reality star has shared a constant stream of social media updates, from cheeky belfies to footage of herself downing shots while on holiday in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

Memorably, Younes once commented disapprovingly on one of Kourtney's revealing bikini shots - writing on Instagram in July: 'Thats what you need to show to get likes?'

But his opinion is clearly now forgotten, with Kourtney moving quickly on from their two-year-long romance.

Living it up: Kourtney has made sure to share plenty of social media updates from her trip

Wild at heart: She's been downing shots and having fun with her pals

Another person who Kourtney will be hoping has seen her holiday snaps is Kourtney's sister Kim.

The 37-year-old slammed Kourtney as 'the new Rob' - in reference to their reclusive brother Rob Kardashian - on a recent episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

Angered that Kourtney couldn't fit in time to film their holiday Christmas card, Kim also ranted that she was 'the least exciting to look at'.Trial By Kyle is expected to be commissioned for a full season after smashing the competition in Network Ten's Pilot Week.

The Judge Judy-style show, hosted by KIIS FM's Kyle Sandilands, delivered the best ratings of all the programs in the schedule.

A total of 519,000 people watched Trial By Kyle nationally, with Radio Today reporting on Monday that Ten is now 'looking to move on a deal to commission it'.

Get ready! Trial By Kyle is expected to be commissioned for a full season after smashing the competition in Network Ten's Pilot Week. Pictured: Kyle Sandilands (left) and Anna Heinrich (right) on Trial By Kyle

Channel Ten chief content officer Beverly McGarvey didn't offer much information when approached for comment by the industry website.

He did confirm, however, that an announcement would be made after ratings for on-demand service Ten Play were finalised 'over the next week'.

McGarvey said the network was 'really happy with our Pilot Week experiment, and would like to thank everyone involved for their efforts.'

Back for more! A total of 519,000 people watched Trial By Kyle nationally last week, with Radio Today reporting on Monday that Ten is now 'looking to move on a deal to commission it'. Pictured: MAFS contestant Nasser Sultan on Trial By Kyle

He added: 'We've enjoyed bringing new programming ideas to audiences and are thrilled with the overall response through live audience numbers and via social.

PILOT WEEK RATINGS 1) Trial By Kyle: 519,000 2) Drunk History: 512,000 3) Kinne Tonight: 496,000 4) Skit Happens: 478,000 5) Taboo: 391,000 6) Dave: 337,000 7) Disgrace!: 301,000 8) Saturday Night: 297,000 Source: OzTam national ratings Advertisement

'We're listening to what people are saying, and are also looking at a range of other measures including timeslot and demographic performance to help us decide which programs we'll be commissioning to a full series.

'BVOD [broadcast video on-demand, i.e. Ten Play] numbers will also play an important role so we'll be gathering these over the next week. Stay tuned.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Kyle Sandilands' management and Network Ten for comment.

The second most popular Pilot Week show was Drunk History, which had a nationwide audience of 512,000.

The least-watched show of the week was Bring Back Saturday Night, hosted by Rove McManus.

The program drew 297,000 viewers nationally, however this can in part be attributed to the under-performing Saturday evening timeslot.Caroline Flack and on-off fiance Andrew Brady have allegedly jetted to St Lucia in a last ditch attempt to save their romance, reports The Sun.

The Love Island presenter, 38, and her former Apprentice star beau, 27, are said to have travelled to the Caribbean to see if they can mend their relationship.

Caroline has also deleted all traces of the CBB star from her Instagram account, with any photos of them together remaining absent from her social media.

Make or break? Caroline Flack and on-off fiance Andrew Brady have allegedly jetted to St Lucia in a last ditch attempt to save their romance... and all traces of him remain absent from her Instagram account

A source said: 'Caroline has had a really tough time but she really wants things with Andrew to carry on.

'She loves him and knows he has strong feelings for her, too. They both felt if they could get far away, they could properly work things out.

'They are laying low and deciding whether their relationship can be salvaged.'

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Caroline and Andrew for comment.

Happier times: The Love Island presenter, 38, and her former Apprentice star beau, 27, are said to have travelled to the Caribbean to see if they can mend their relationship (pictured in June)

This comes days after Caroline eportedly stormed out of a restaurant following a public row with her on/off fiance on Monday.

The beauty is said to have left diners at the Market Cafe in London Fields agog as she argued with her beau before branding him 'aggressive' and choosing to leave.

Onlookers told The Sun, that Andrew accused his fiancee of having 'never loved him' and only using him for marriage, which is said to have riled Caroline.

An eyewitness told the paper: 'Things got really intense very quickly. He told her that he thought she was using him so she could get married, but she insisted she loved him and mentioned the [make-or-break] Ibiza trip.

'He was being really argumentative and she said, 'You don't need to be so aggressive,' and he just kept going until she stormed out leaving him with the dog.

'After she left he just seemed exasperated.'

MailOnline has contacted Caroline and Andrew's representatives for comment.

Shocking scenes: The Love Island host, 38, is said to have left diners at the Market Cafe in London Fields agog as she argued with her beau, 27, before branding him 'aggressive'

Caroline and Andrew confirmed they were back together again on Sunday as they were spotted kissing during a date at Pizza East in Shoreditch, following a make-or-break getaway to Ibiza.

The outing marked the couple's third reconciliation since February, having called off their engagement in May amid claims Andrew was cheating and using her for fame.

The TV host is said to have given The Apprentice star another chance after they jetted abroad away from their friends and family, to work through their issues in private.

Andrew, who moved out of Caroline's house following the break up, is said to still be living elsewhere, but will likely return to help care for the puppy they share.

Rowing: Onlookers said that Andrew accused his fiancee of having 'never loved him' and only using him for marriage, which is said to have riled Caroline.

Despite their loved-up appearance over the last week, Caroline chose not to put her engagement ring back on during the Love Island reunion show.

The pair first split in March after a month of romance, amid claims of Andrew's infidelity and fears that he was using the presenter for her fame.

However, they soon reconciled - with Caroline even having his initials tattooed on her inner wrist, just weeks after their first meeting.

Following a whirlwind two-month romance, the pair then became engaged in April, and confirmed the news on their Instagram pages.

Yet, things turned sour once again the following month, with Caroline announcing their second break-up in a statement on social media.Her sizzling curves have taken her from Birmingham to Hollywood.

And Demi Rose showcased her hourglass physique once again on Monday night as she stepped out for dinner in Manchester in a glamorous one-shouldered dress.

The 23-year-old model looked effortlessly demure as she covered up her famous assets in the brown figure-hugging gown.

Killer curves: Demi Rose showcased her hourglass physique once again on Monday night as she stepped out for dinner in Manchester in a glamorous one-shouldered dress

Demi turned heads as she headed to celeb hotspot Neighbourhood restaurant in the show-stopping number, which cinched in her tiny waist with its ruched design.

She flashed a hint of her toned legs due to its sultry thigh-high split while complementing the look with a pair of cream strappy sandals.

The Birmingham beauty wore her long chestnut tresses in a high ponytail and accentuated her sun-kissed tan with a bronzed make-up look, fluttery eyelashes and a slick of nude lipstick.

Gorgeous: The 23-year-old model looked effortlessly demure as she covered up her famous assets in the brown figure-hugging gown

Sultry thigh-high split: She flashed a hint of legs in the number and complemented the look with a pair of cream strappy sandals

The stunning beauty recently revealed a move to LA could be in the works due to her acting desires and hopes to make onto the big screen.

Speaking to The Sun, she revealed: 'Movies have always been a passion of mine since I went to stage school. But another ambition is to become a Bond Girl, as I love the style and glamour of those films'.

Kylie Jenner lookalike Demi was first propelled into the spotlight when she was linked to the reality star's ex, rapper Tyga, after they split.

The star has since gained a huge following on Instagram and she is known to display her incredible curves in a number of risque ensembles.

So of course she was more than happy to divulge the secrets to her sensationally curvy figure in an exclusive chat with MailOnline.

In September, Demi told us: 'I try to keep as healthy as I can. With travelling, it's hard to work out, I travel across the world but try to keep my routine. Everyone says I'm the healthiest person they know. The fattiest thing I will ever eat is nuts and peanut butter.'She's the pround mom of three children.

And on Monday Reese Witherspoon shared a cute Instagram snap of her sons Deacon, 14, and five-year-old Tennessee playing on a sandy beach.

The 42-year-old actress captioned it: 'Last days of summer! Love my boys!'

'Last days of summer! Love my boys!': Reese Withspoon posted a cute snap of her sons five-year-old Tennessee playing with half-brother Deacon, 14, on a sandy beach on Monday

Reese shares Deacon with her ex Ryan Phillippe, 43, and Tennessee with her CAA agent husband Jim Toth, 48.

Her youngest looked adorable in green shorts as he sat next to his older half-brother, who donned blue shorts as he sat on a board.

Their sibling Ava, 18, didn't appear to be part of the fun.

Working mom: The 42-year-old actress celebrated the launch of her Shine On With Reese in Hollywood on August 6

Reese kept quiet about their location, but she had obviously moved on from the land-locked area of Nashville, Tennessee, where she dropped into her Southern lifestyle boutique, Draper James, at the weekend.

The Big Little Lies star, who opened the store three years ago, surprised a starstruck couple from Texas, according to the Tennessean newspaper on Sunday.

Dave and Katie Huber from Corsicana were walking in the neighborhood and happened to be at Draper James when Reese dropped by.

Well, there's a surprise: The Big Little Lies star posed with holidaymakers Katie and Dave Huber from Corsicana, Texas, who were at the Nashville, Tennessee branch of her Draper James store

The couple is in Nashville for the first time celebrating their 12th wedding anniversary. They also went to the Taylor Swift concert on Saturday night.

'Were meeting all the powerful women, thats what were doing here,' Dave told newspaper after taking a picture with Reese.

The Legally Blonde star looked her best in a sky blue Draper James dress, which retails for $195.

One of two bricks and mortar stores: The Legally Blonde star also has a branch in Dallas, Texas

Reese also has a store in Dallas, Texas, for her lifestyle and clothing brand.

Meanwhile, she joined her Big Little Lies co-star and pal Nicole Kidman, 51, at her country star husband Keith Urban's gig in Nashville on Friday night.

The two actresses posed on either side of the 50-year-old Kiwi rocker who is presently on his Graffitu U world tour.Charlie Hunnam and Jack O'Connell just started shooting their new film Jungleland.

The Hollywood hunks looked scruffy but handsome while spotted on set in Fall River, Massachusetts Monday.

Sons Of Anarchy star Charlie, 38, headed to film the Max Winkler directed project in costume, wearing a grey polo and jogging pants.

In character: Charlie Hunnam looked scruffy but handsome while on the set of his new project Jungleland with castmate Jack O'Connell on Monday

He had a wiry beard and wore dirty sneakers, carrying a sporty backpack at his side.

Jack, 28, also kept up a charmingly undone appearance for his role, first arriving on set in shorts and sandals before changing into a sand tee and jeans to film.

The English gentleman's jawline was covered in rusty stubble and he carried a blue windbreaker over one arm.

Deadline offered up details about the project Monday afternoon.

Action: Jack also kept up a charmingly undone appearance with an unshaved jawline

Easy-going: The English gentleman first arrived on set in shorts and sandals

In addition to Charlie and Jack the film will feature Jessica Barden, who had her breakout role on the Channel 4 series The End of the F***ing World.

Per Deadline, the film is about: 'A reluctant bareknuckle boxer (O'Connell) and his brother (Hunnam) who must travel across the country for one last fight.

'...But an unexpected travel companion (Barden) exposes the cracks in their bond along the way.'

The film is being helmed by director Max Winkler who has also been behind the film Flower and 2010's Ceremony.

Castmate: In addition to Charlie and Jack the film will feature Jessica Barden, above at Cannes in April, who had her breakout role on the Channel 4 series The End of the F***ing World

The feature is set to film in a number of locations.

After Fall River, Mass the production will move on to New Bedford, then Buffalo, New York, Gary, Indiana, Reno, Nevada, and San Francisco.

A release date is still forthcoming.The cost of bread, chicken and beer is expected to rise as Australia suffers through drought, the boss of the National Farmers Federation says.

"Anything to do with grain is in the firing line. There is very, very little grain on the eastern seaboard at the moment. We are bringing it around from the west already so that is adding significant cost. If grain is short ... the cost is going to go up too," President Fiona Simson told 3AW radio on Monday.

The price of chickens could also go up as they eat grain, while beer drinkers could be hit with sorghum and barley in shorter supply, she added.

"You would expect when the price does go up for the price of the raw product you would expect to see a corresponding price increase in the markets," Ms Simson said.Labor has attacked new Prime Minister Scott Morrison for making Barnaby Joyce a special drought envoy, calling the decision a slap in the face for farmers.

The opposition's agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon said the position would allow the former Nationals leader to campaign across Australia at public expense.

"The prime minister has failed our farmers on day two," Mr Fitzgibbon said on Monday.

"The appointment of climate change denier Barnaby Joyce as his drought envoy is a joke and a slap in the face for all in the sector who want meaningful drought policy reform."

Mr Morrison has nominated the drought as his top priority, travelling to some of the worst-affected areas in western Queensland on Monday.

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, who replaced Mr Joyce as Nationals leader earlier in the year, will be alongside drought commissioner Stephen Day and Mr Morrison in Quilpie.

Mr McCormack said the government would contribute more money on top of the already announced $1.8 billion worth of measures to tackle the drought.

"We need to do more and we will do more," he told ABC radio.

"We're going out today to do more listening and we'll do more acting."

He is delighted Mr Joyce accepted the new role, which he says won't cut across Agriculture Minister David Littleproud's job.

"We need every resource we've got on the ground. It's all hands on deck," Mr McCormack said.

Mr Fitzgibbon said Mr Morrison had made a bad start, accusing the prime minister of using drought as a play thing to improve his image.

"To add insult to injury media reports suggest the prime minister's drought tour tomorrow is all about him rather than our drought affected farming families," he said.Refugee children on Nauru are deliberately harming themselves and researching ways to die, three whistleblowers have warned.

Leaked documents compiled by immigration workers and obtained by the ABC's 7.30 program reveal a spate of self-harm incidents on the island.

One incident report from June 2018 said a 14-year-old refugee child poured petrol over herself and had a lighter.

Another report from June showed a 10-year-old refugee attempted self-harm by ingesting some sharp metal objects, which were consistent with fencing wire.

Former child psychologist Vernon Reynolds, who was employed on the island by the Australian government's healthcare contractor from August 2016 to April 2018, is concerned that some refugee children could die.

"I'm reasonably surprised that no-one has," the former International Health and Medical Services worker told 7.30.

"I certainly hope that nothing fatal happens, I am deeply concerned that we will see that."

Dr Reynolds said the children were exhibiting signs of severe trauma.

"They stop eating much, they stop drinking much, they stop looking after the day-to-day self cares."

There were 939 refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru as of May 2018, including 137 children. Refugees on Nauru live in the community and are not held in the regional processing centre.

Social worker Fiona Owens was employed by IHMS as the child mental health team leader from May to July 2018.

Ms Owens alleged she witnessed alarming rates of self-harm among refugee children.

"The only thing a lot of the children are thinking about is how to die. They Google it on the internet," she told 7.30.

Jacinta O'Leary, who was a nurse and midwife on the island from June to September 2017, spoke of the difficulties for pregnant refugees seeking terminations in a nation where abortions are illegal.

A spokeswoman from the Department of Home Affairs said Australia provided significant support to Nauru to provide health and welfare services, with various providers contracted to offer age-appropriate care.

A spokeswoman the Government of Nauru declined to answer the program's questions, while an IHMS spokeswoman said it was not at liberty to discuss the issues raised.

Lifeline 13 11 14Dylan Napa will miss the start of the Sydney Roosters' NRL finals campaign after pleading guilty to a dangerous contact charge on Brisbane hooker Andrew McCullough.

Napa entered an early guilty plea on Monday, meaning he will be sidelined for three games instead of four as a result of the charge.

He will only play again this year if the Roosters play a third match in the finals series, requiring them to reach either week three or the grand final depending on their result in the opening week.Tony Abbott says Peter Dutton was reluctant to challenge Malcolm Turnbull for the leadership of the Liberal Party.

Mr Abbott - who backed Mr Dutton's failed bid for the top job - said he was confident Australia was in "better shape" this week than before Scott Morrison took over as prime minister.

"He (Dutton) was a most reluctant challenger ... just as I was," Mr Abbott said, in reference to his deposing of Mr Turnbull as leader in 2009.

In a speech in Sydney on Monday Mr Abbott said Mr Morrison had strong character and expected him to install a "sharper difference" between the Liberal and Labor parties ahead of the next federal election.The Queensland government has launched a campaign to remind people to pay attention around crossings as the state experiences one of the worst years on record for pedestrian deaths on roads.

So far this year 22 pedestrians have died after being hit by cars across Queensland.

Transport Minister Mark Bailey on Monday launched the "Be Aware - Cross with Care" campaign, which will see people wearing billboards walking through Brisbane's CBD in peak periods to remind people to take care when crossing.Scott Morrison's first international trip as prime minister will be to Indonesia to sign a free trade deal, but Labor says he's abandoning foreign aid to the Pacific.

Mr Morrison appointed Anne Ruston as Assistant Minister for International Development, moving the position off the front bench.

Labor also criticised Mr Morrison for not confirming whether he will attend the Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru next month.

"Mr Morrison's decision to axe International Development Assistance and the Pacific from his front bench can only further worsen Australia's already diminishing influence in our region," Labor frontbencher Penny Wong said on Monday.

"(It) sends a terrible signal to our Pacific neighbours about just how little this government cares for the region."

Mr Turnbull was due to go to Nauru for the forum, but so far it is unclear whether Mr Morrison will visit the island.

He is due to leave this week for Indonesia to sign a landmark free trade deal.The prime minister has handed energy policy over to the conservatives of the Liberal party to "get square" after they opposed the defunct national energy guarantee, Labor says.

Energy has been severed from the environment portfolio under Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who labelled new Energy Minister Angus Taylor as the "minister for getting electricity prices down".

"I have been wondering whether Scott Morrison has almost done this as a bit of a get square with the conservative wing ... he's basically said: 'well you break it, you own it,' by putting one of their people in charge of it," Labor senator Murray Watt told Sky News on Monday.Australia's new Foreign Minister Marise Payne plans to meet with Chinese officials in New York to work on the relationship between the two countries.

China's relationship with Australia has been strained over allegations of spying and attempted political interference, but Senator Payne says she will meet with Chinese officials next month.

"I'm looking forward to attending the UN general assembly leaders week and I'm sure that there will be engagements through that process," she told Sky News on Monday.

Australia has also opposed the militarisation of the South China Sea, which China promised not to do until it recently landed military aircraft on artificial islands it created in the shipping zone.

"It's most certainly my view that the actions of all of us who participate in that part of the world, the South China Sea, a critical transit area, should be contributing to security and stability," Senator Payne said.

"It has long been Australia's concern that militarisation of those features doesn't contribute to security and stability for all users and all parts of the region.

"I have articulated that view and it's one that we have held consistently."Australian filmmaker James Ricketson has testified in his espionage trial that his films were made to inform the world about the plight of poor Cambodian children.

Confronting excerpts of his documentary Sleeping with Cambodia, detailing child exploitation, were screened inside the court, with Ricketson noting his work had upset non-governmental organisations (NGOs) tasked with handling the problem.

He said too many NGOs were run by foreigners who created more problems than they solved. That included orphanages filled with children who were not orphans, to make up numbers

"I have been a vocal critic of that for the last 23 years and have made many enemies within the NGO community," he said.

Ricketsons's defence has been built around his sometimes controversial work as a filmmaker, a legal strategy aimed at convincing a bench of three judges that he is not a spy.

His trial has entered its third week, following a long detention and delays attributed to police investigations, a lack of access to evidence by Ricketson's legal team and bail hearings.

He was detained almost 15 months ago, with his computers, smartphones and cameras seized with authorities.

He was subsequently charged with espionage under Article 446 of the Cambodian penal code for crimes allegedly dating back to 1995.

He earlier produced a copy of his press passes granting him permission to film in Cambodia.

He also said he was arrested a day after flying a drone over a political rally, adding "I believe police were concerned I was filming something I should not have been".

But it took another 11 months before he was handed a dossier of evidence.

"Nowhere in the 1600 pages is there any suggestion that I am a spy but there is a lot of evidence that I am a journalist," he told the court.

The trial is continuing.A report calling for this year's NAPLAN results to be thrown out is under-researched and has no sound basis, advisers of the school tests say.

This year was the first of a three-year online testing rollout, with one in five students in years three, five, seven and nine taking the standardised tests online.

Two US experts say the online trial has left data incomparable and are calling for the results to be disregarded.

The review, commissioned by the NSW Teachers Federation and led by Les Perelman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says publishing test results would be "inappropriate and misleading".

"The design and execution of the 2018 NAPLAN make it so flawed that its results are of very limited use to students, teachers, parents, and schools," the report says.

But with interim results due for release on Tuesday, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority maintains the concurrent online and paper tests are comparable.

Chair of the advisory group that provides technical advice to ACARA, Ray Adams, rejects the findings of the critical report and questioned Professor Perelman's expertise in the field.

"Professor Perelman's report is under-researched and lacks the technical understanding required for the analysis of NAPLAN tests and results," Professor Adams said in a statement on Monday.

"Technical comments about scaling and branching suggest a misunderstanding of NAPLAN procedures and analysis, and have no sound basis."Malcolm Turnbull's son has blasted the Liberal Party for giving into the interests of the coal industry.

Alex Turnbull has spoken out in an interview with ABC radio just days after his father was ousted as prime minister.

Mr Turnbull, a Singapore-based fund manager, says any push towards renewable energy is being hijacked by the coal industry's stranglehold over the Liberals.

He believes it makes no sense, economically or environmentally, to build a new coal-fired power station in Australia.

"You cannot buy a tonne of coal for the 2002 price anymore easily than you can send your kids to a private school for 2002 school fees," Mr Turnbull told ABC's PM program.

"There are plenty of large government projects that you could do to create a tonne of jobs but the singular fixation upon those particular assets in the Galilee Basin leads me to believe there are other forces at work here.

"There is an undue level of influence on Liberal Party policy by a very small group of miners who have some assets that they probably regret purchasing, which don't make a lot of sense anymore and are trying to engineer an outcome which makes those projects economic."

Mr Turnbull went onto say he was proud of his father's political career but doesn't believe he would've been better suited to another party despite the recent turmoil.

"I don't think you can easily imagine my dad working with CFMEU or similar," he said.

"It's just there is a lack of a sensible centre in Australia right now and it's very sad."Online testing has had little effect on initial NAPLAN results, with no significant change from last year in the literacy and numeracy tests.

However, the initial results released on Tuesday suggest some Australian schoolchildren are more proficient at typing than handwriting.

This year was the first of a three-year online testing rollout, with one in five students in years three, five, seven and nine taking the standardised tests online.

There may have been no significant change in any areas compared with last year, but writing test results for students in years five, seven and nine were "well below" the 2011 standard.

Outgoing Education Minister Simon Birmingham has praised the online roll-out and said future reforms in the sector should focus on equipping teachers with the right tools in the classroom.

Mr Birmingham says the eventual uptake of the online system will provide faster turnaround of results and more detailed feedback for students.

"The best way for each teacher, parent or school to get the most out of NAPLAN in the future will be for all schools to move to the online format," he said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority says online and paper testing results are comparable, but note the method of testing can affect results.

ACARA points to writing test results from year nine students, with those who completed the test online producing higher results on average compared with those who took the paper version.

Students at this level could be more confident writing online than on paper and online writing tests could be easier to review and edit, ACARA suggests.

The structure of the new online system has faced ongoing backlash, with US experts calling for this year's results to be disregarded as they believe the two methods cannot be compared.

Final national results for the standardised tests are set to be released towards the end of the year.

INITIAL NAPLAN RESULTS:

* No significant changes compared with last year

* Areas significantly above the 2008 average:

- Years five and nine: Numeracy

- Years three and five: Reading

- Years three and five: Spelling

- Years three and seven: Grammar

* Areas well below 2011 results:

- Years five, seven and nine: Writing.An advocacy group has called on the federal government to take a tough stance against Vietnam's human rights record at a bilateral summit.

The Australia-Vietnam Human Rights Dialogue will be held in Hanoi on Tuesday.

Human Rights Watch are urging the government to pressure Vietnam to end its alleged systematic abuse of basic civil and political rights.

"Over the past year, we've seen a surge in lengthy prison sentences handed down to people peacefully calling for democracy and an end to one-party rule in Vietnam," HRW's Australian director Elaine Pearson said in a statement.

HRW said eight members of the Brotherhood of Democracy were sentenced to between seven and 15 years in prison in April.

The organisation has called for the release of political prisoners and an end to the curtailment of freedom of expression, association, assembly, movement and religion.

In March, Australia and Vietnam upgraded bilateral ties under a new strategic partnership without making any mention of human rights.A boat believed to be carrying suspected asylum seekers should have been detected before it ran aground off the far north Queensland coast.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton says it's clear there were failures in the border security process that led to the boat making it so close to Australian soil.

"Clearly there's been a problem that's taken place in relation to the surveillance of this vessel," he told reporters on the Gold Coast.

"Clearly there's been a failing where surveillance hasn't worked as it should."

The boat is understood to have come from Vietnam before running aground off Cape Kimberley, near the Daintree River, on Sunday.

Mr Dutton said it was the first time in almost four years a people smuggling boat had made it to Australian shores.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she was surprised the boat had made it that far south without detection.

"If there is a need for further resources here in the far north, then I want to see those resources and that's why I'll be speaking with the prime minister once the investigation is completed," Ms Palaszczuk told reporters in Cairns.

Locals raised the alarm after witnessing a large group of people fleeing the sinking vessel and swimming to a nearby beach.

Queensland police said they had detained 12 people by Monday evening and were looking for a further two people.

Two men were detained after being rescued from mangroves by local fishermen.

Barry Preston and Justin Ward invited the two men on to their boat after spotting them hiding in mangroves.

"When they got in the boat ... there was a croc on the bank and we pointed it out and they said 'oh geez' - it (was) probably a 14-footer," Barry Preston told the Cairns Post.

"Lucky they didn't make a dash for it."

Local tour operator David White said those missing would only be at risk if they unknowingly waded into crocodile habitat.

Local federal MP Warren Entsch said containing a slick of diesel that had drifted from the stricken vessel was also a concern.

"My concern is about 300 to 400 metres of oil slick, diesel, that's got to be cleaned up," Mr Entsch said.

"It's right along the edge of the reef. That needs to be a priority."Cyclists will ride in honour of Dutchwoman Gitta Scheenhouwer who was killed as she rode her bike down Melbourne's Chapel Street.

Hundreds will meet on Alexandra Avenue at 7am on Tuesday before riding down Chapel Street to the South Yarra site where the 27-year-old was hit on August 12 by a stolen car, with the driver fleeing the scene.

"Bike riding is an activity we associate with fun, joy and good health, that's why when tragedy strikes and a rider is killed, it hits us all so hard," Bicycle Network chief Craig Richards said ahead of the ride.

"My deepest sympathies go to Gitta's family and friends. She came to Australia to make lifelong memories. To lose her life in such horrific circumstances is just so tragic."

Ms Scheenhouwer's family spoke of their pain in an earlier statement.

"We can hardly put into words the deep pain and feelings of overwhelming sadness and sorrow at the loss of Gitta Scheenhouwer who was taken from all of us," they said.

"She will always be in our hearts as the sweet, spontaneous, cheerful girl who was always busy with all of the things she wanted to do whilst smiling from ear to ear."

Ms Scheenhouwer and her boyfriend Thomas had left the Netherlands to follow their longtime wish of living Down Under for a couple of years.

After studying and working hard, they arrived in May, visiting Sydney and Brisbane before settling in Melbourne.

She had just landed her dream job as a graduate architect and the couple planned to make Melbourne their home.

Police say the fatal crash happened after a white Mercedes swerved into a bike lane.

Michael Panayides, 26, of no fixed address, is charged with culpable driving and failing to stop or render assistance. He will face court on December 4.A man has been charged over the alleged assault of a taxi driver in central Sydney during what is believed to be a road rage incident.

The cabbie, 36, was changing lanes on Market Street in the city on Monday evening when he became involved in an argument with a van driver. When the vehicles stopped at a red light, the van driver allegedly jumped on the bonnet of the taxi and smashed the windscreen before punching the driver through his window. Members of the public intervened and the van driver drove off.

The driver later presented himself at a Mt Druitt Police Station where he was charged with assault and malicious damage. He was bailed to appear in Mt Druitt Local Court on September 19.Western Australia's Burrup Peninsula, home to ancient rock art believed to be 40,000 years old, is being proposed for UNESCO World Heritage listing.

Traditional owners and Premier Mark McGowan on Monday signed an agreement to take the proposal to the federal government for forwarding to UNESCO, which, if successful, would make it the state's fifth heritage-listed area.

"The Burrup Peninsula is of great spiritual significance, a vital part of Western Australia's cultural heritage and the site of internationally significant petroglyphs," Mr McGowan said in a statement, adding the listing would represent a "game-changing opportunity" for tourism in the area and the state.Prime Minister Scott Morrison is reportedly resisting calls to ditch the government's commitment to the Paris climate change targets because it could harm Australia's prospects of a free trade deal with Europe.

Mr Morrison is under internal pressure to abandon the emissions reduction targets after last week's controversial Liberal leadership turmoil.

The Australian Financial Review reported on Tuesday the coalition will maintain the Paris commitment, despite uncertainty over how it will reach the goal to cut emissions to 26 per cent, from 28 per cent on 2005 levels, by 2030.

Internal division over the coalition's National Energy Guarantee was one of the catalysts for the successful challenge to Malcolm Turnbull's leadership, even after the former prime minister withdrew the Paris targets from the policy in a failed effort to placate rebel MPs.Dozens of businesses and landlords will file a class action lawsuit against the NSW Government over the embattled Sydney light rail project.

Transport for NSW will be accused of undertaking the light rail project in Sydney's CBD in a way that caused "substantial" loss and damages, Mitry Lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday.

The class action, which is expected be filed on behalf of 60 clients in the NSW Supreme Court on Tuesday morning, will seek compensation from the government over "poor" planning decisions.

Angela Vithoulkas, late last week, announced she had been forced to close her business, Cafe Vivo, after 16 years of trade.

"If we can't make it on the corner of what is supposed to be the CBD's busiest street, how do the other businesses cope," the cafe owner and independent city councillor told reporters on Friday.

On Tuesday she invited others to join her in the Mitry class action.

The lawsuit is the latest in a string of legal actions hanging over the rail project.

Spanish sub-contractor Acciona is seeking an extra $1.2 billion saying it was misled over the complexity of the project.

Queensland-based contractor VAC Group, in May, announced it was seeking $4 million plus damages from the government because of alleged misleading and deceptive conduct.

Despite the issues NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, earlier this month, pledged to bring the light rail completion date forward a year to 2019.Two men have been charged with dozens of offences after police car rammings in Melbourne's north.

The duo, 21 and 22, were arrested at a Preston car wash alongside a 17-year-old boy on Monday after two police cars were rammed.

The men where charged with a combined 66 offences including intentionally ramming police vehicles, motor vehicle theft, burglary and conduct endangering serious injury.

They were remanded to appear in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Tuesday, while the 17-year-old was released from custody to be charged on summons with handling stolen goods and drug possession.Iran's representative Mohsen Mohebi (left) branded US sanctions 'naked economic aggression' as Tehran opened its case at the International Court of Justice

Iran demanded Monday that the UN's top court order the United States to suspend nuclear-linked sanctions against Tehran, but Washington vowed to "vigorously" fend off the legal challenge.

The Islamic Republic launched a suit at the International Court of Justice over US President Donald Trump's decision to reimpose sanctions that were lifted in a landmark 2015 accord.

Trump says the sanctions are needed to ensure Iran never builds a nuclear bomb. But Iran's representative Mohsen Mohebi branded them "naked economic aggression".

His team of lawyers told the court in The Hague that the measures were already devastating Iran's economy and threatening the welfare of its citizens.

"The United States is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran's economy and Iranian nationals and companies," Mohebi said.

"Iran will put up the strongest resistance to the US economic strangulation, by all peaceful means."

US President Donald Trump has described the 2015 Iran agreement as a 'horrible one-sided deal'

US lawyers are due to give their response in arguments before the court on Tuesday, with experts expecting them to challenge the ICJ's jurisdiction.

"We will vigorously defend against Iran's meritless claims this week in The Hague," said US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

He said Iran's lawsuit was "an attempt to interfere with the sovereign rights of the United States to take lawful actions, including re-imposition of sanctions, which are necessary to protect our national security".

- 'Irreparable prejudice' -

ICJ judgements are binding, final and without appeal.

However, whether any decision will be implemented remains unclear, with both Iran and the US in the past ignoring ICJ rulings against them.

The US measures have added to Iran's economic woes, fuelling strikes and protests across the country and political spectrum.

US sanctions have fuelled economic trouble in Iran

The sanctions target financial transactions and imports of raw materials, cars and aircraft among other sectors.

A second wave of punitive measures is due to hit the OPEC member state in early November, targeting its vital energy sector including oil exports.

Iran's lawyers said the sanctions would cause it "irreparable prejudice". They urged the court to order the suspension of the sanctions pending a definitive ruling.

London-based lawyer Samuel Wordsworth, for Iran, told the court the measures were threatening Iranians' access to medicines as well as disrupting business deals.

- 'One-sided deal' -

The ICJ is expected to take a couple of months to decide whether to grant Tehran's request for a provisional ruling. A final decision could take years.

After years of diplomacy, the 2015 deal was signed by Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

Sanctions were lifted in return for Iran committing not to pursue nuclear weapons.

Trump, who took office in 2016, called it a "horrible one-sided deal".

He said it "failed to achieve the fundamental objective of blocking all paths to a Iranian nuclear bomb."

- Business deals scuppered -

Iran's lawyers said the US sanctions had disrupted tens of billions of dollars' worth of business deals with foreign companies.

Iran's currency the rial has lost around half its value since April.

International companies including French oil firm Total and Germany's Siemens have suspended operations in Iran since Trump announced the US withdrawal in May.

Air France and British Airways have said they will halt flights to Tehran

Trump said the sanctions would turn up the financial pressure on Tehran to come to a "comprehensive and lasting solution" regarding its activities such as its "ballistic missile programme and its support for terrorism".

The case is the second brought by Tehran against Washington since 2016. That year it brought a suit at the ICJ against the freezing of around $2 billion of Iranian assets abroad which US courts say should go to American victims of terror attacks.

Hearings in that case are due to start on October 8.

In both cases Iran is basing its claim on the obscure 1955 Treaty of Amity and Economic Relations, signed long before the country's Islamic revolution.

Despite the treaty, the two countries have not had diplomatic ties since 1980. Iran routinely refers to the US as "the enemy" and its officials chant "Death to America" at official functions.John McCain, who died Saturday, was known as a rare voice for civility in the US Senate

He was a hero, a statesman who cut a towering figure in Washington. But for many in the increasingly angry world of American politics, John McCain will be missed for a far humbler virtue -- simple civility.

As Americans and others paid tribute to the late Republican senator, who died Saturday of cancer aged 81, some cited a 2008 interaction with a voter as symbolizing his famous insistence on fair and civil discourse.

As McCain was campaigning against Barack Obama for the presidency, a gray-haired woman in a red McCain T-shirt told the senator at a townhall meeting that she could not trust Obama because he was an "Arab."

McCain politely but firmly corrected her.

"No, ma'am," he said, taking the microphone back from her. Instead, McCain described Obama as a "decent family man (and) citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues."

The video has gone viral, a seemingly quaint reminder in today's famously combative political world that opponents can clash fiercely on policy while remaining respectful, collegial, even friendly.

"This voice for civility, to put the country above your party, these are things he taught for years, and never more important than the last year," his fellow Arizona Senator Jeff Flake said on CNN, fighting back tears.

As one commenter put it on Twitter: "McCain's passing feels like the end of a far from perfect, but more stable and civil era in American politics."

- Smackdowns and insults -

The decline in civility -- with the endless political smackdowns and full-throated insults -- is not entirely new.

Nor can it be pinned on Donald Trump alone, although he seems to take pride in coining unflattering descriptions of political foes.

McCain himself was known occasionally to snarl at rivals or to tell off-color jokes. He could be snippy, telling reporters, "that's a dumb question" -- but then taking the time to offer a full and thoughtful response.

McCain "had a temper the size of a volcano," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. But "you almost always got an apology, followed by quality time with him."

And, while voting most often with his fellow Republicans, he "didn't hesitate a minute to work with Democrats," Sabato added.

"A large part of civility is the ability to admit when you are wrong... McCain never held back on that score."

McCain acknowledged in his recently published memoir, "The Restless Wave," that he had "disagreed, sometimes too heatedly, with all of" the six presidents with whom he had served.

Still, he added, if Americans lose all humility, "we will tear our society apart."

The increasingly poisonous discourse has left a mark across the political landscape.

In a CBS News poll last year, a lopsided 68 percent of voters said the "tone and civility of US political debate" was growing worse, against only seven percent saying it was getting better.

It was a rare result upon which people across the political spectrum agreed.

- Feeding the gridlock -

If incivility -- with the political gridlock that it fuels -- is nothing new, analysts say it is amplified by the angry talking heads of cable television, radio and the Internet who make a living by provocation.

McCain targeted that group in July 2017, when, in a rousing speech from the Senate floor, he urged his colleagues to "stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them!"

More than anyone, Trump tested the limits of McCain's civility.

It was Trump who once said McCain was a "war hero (only) because he was captured," adding, "I like people that weren't captured."

The fact that McCain suffered broken bones and was bayoneted after his US Navy jet was shot down over North Vietnam was not relevant, Trump said later.

McCain largely shrugged off the insult, while saying Trump did owe an apology to the families of those lost or captured.

But the senator's exasperation with Trump erupted in full view over the president's appearance in July in Helsinki with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

- Just 'show up' -

"The damage inflicted by President Trump's naivete, egotism, false equivalence and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate," the senator said in a blistering statement.

Even plans for McCain's funeral brought reminders of the two men's profound differences.

As McCain fought the ravaging brain cancer that ultimately killed him, he asked two former political rivals -- ex-presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- if they would speak at his funeral.

According to reports, he explicitly asked that Trump not be invited.

Trump's tweeted condolences on Saturday were notably terse.

But in his memoir, McCain said the fault for incivility reaches beyond Washington.

It is up to voters, he said, to elect people of integrity.

"If you want politics to be more civil," he wrote, "if you want Congress to argue less and get more done, then show up. Represent... It's important."Reuters journalist Wa Lone (C) arrives in court in Yangon

A Myanmar court postponed ruling Monday on whether two Reuters journalists violated a state secrets law while reporting on the Rohingya crisis, with a new date set for next week.

"The verdict will be announced on September 3," said district judge Khin Maung Maung in a swift hearing at a courthouse in Yangon, adding that the presiding judge was sick.

The decision delays the long-anticipated ruling for Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, who have been in Myanmar's Insein prison for some eight months.

They were arrested in December after being invited to a dinner with police in Yangon and pounced on as they left the restaurant, accused of possessing classified material.

Authorities charged them with violating a colonial-era state secrets act, which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years.

But the claims were undercut by a police witness who said his superior had ordered a set-up and by arguments that the allegedly secret documents had been published in state media.

The case has sparked fears of eroding press freedoms under civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Reuters has robustly denied the charges and the newswire launched a global advocacy campaign that included diplomats, celebrities and the legal assistance of prominent rights lawyer Amal Clooney.

"Whatever they decide for us, we will not be afraid," Wa Lone told reporters as he left the courthouse and was led back into a police van.

Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone were probing the September 2017 massacre of 10 Rohingya men and boys in Myanmar's Rakhine state a week after the military launched a sweeping crackdown on members of the stateless Muslim minority.

The United Nations and Washington have called the campaign "ethnic cleansing", after some 700,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine for Bangladesh, bringing with them testimonies of rape, arson and killings in the northern part of the state.

Myanmar rejects the charges but has admitted the killings investigated by Reuters took place.

burs-joe/faAustralian authorities are searching crocodile-infested waters and mangrove forests for people seen fleeing their boat after it ran aground

An asylum-seeker boat has reached Australia for the first time in almost four years, the government said Monday, with many of those on board the Vietnamese vessel fleeing into a crocodile-infested mangrove rainforest after running aground near the coast.

Locals said passengers from the rickety vessel disappeared into the dense forest near the Daintree River, north of popular tourist city Cairns, in the tropical far north of Queensland state on Sunday.

They will have to avoid crocodiles, venomous snakes, ferocious sandflies and giant cassowaries -- one of the world's deadliest and most aggressive birds -- that all call the ancient Daintree rainforest home.

Queensland Police Minister Mark Ryan told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation 15 passengers had been found so far.

The ABC added that two others, including the boat's captain, were still missing. The Brisbane Courier Mail reported that up to 20 were unaccounted for. It said those detained were well dressed and in good health.

State Emergency Service area controller Peter Rinaudo said earlier his crews were searching through the mangroves and near the mouth of the river, reportedly with dogs.

"It'll be a hard slog, it's still quite warm in there and it'll be tough conditions for the guys," he told the ABC.

"I hope the people, however many there are, get located -- it's not a nice area for them to be in."

A fisherman who spotted two asylum-seekers hiding in the mangroves said he took the pair on a tour of the Daintree River.

"We gave them a ride up the river and had a few laughs and we got them to help us pull in the crab pots", fisherman Justin Ward told television broadcaster Channel Nine, adding that they were taking photos and selfies.

He later broke it to the men that he would hand them over to the police.

- Tough policy -

Home affairs minister Peter Dutton said the partially sunk vessel had come from Vietnam and was the first boat of asylum-seekers to reach the country since 2014.

"Australia, we believe, has received the first... people-smuggling venture in over 1,400 days," he told reporters.

"We will work with the agencies to make sure we can repatriate these people back to their country of origin, once we understand the facts of the matter."

Dutton did not confirm how many passengers were on board or their nationalities.

Under Canberra's tough immigration policy, asylum-seekers who try to reach Australia by boat are either turned back or sent to remote Pacific camps where conditions have been widely criticised. They are blocked from resettling in Australia.

The United Nations and human rights advocates say the policy violates the 1951 Refugee Convention of which Australia is a signatory.

Dutton reaffirmed the government's stance on Monday, saying the boat's arrival was "a reminder that people-smugglers have not gone out of business".

"We've had a very proud record, over the course of the last few years, and we aren't going to take a backward step. The people-smugglers... will not succeed in putting people on to boats to get to Australia."

Most asylum-seeker boats that have arrived in Australia in recent years embarked from Indonesia, though some originated in Sri Lanka.

Former Border Force chief Roman Quaedvlieg tweeted Monday that Vietnamese fishing boats "have been illegally fishing in fleets" off the far north Queensland coast in the past two years due to their own depleted fishing stocks.

"Possible the Daintree vessel & crew have used this activity as a staging point to make Oz landfall & avoid returning to VN (Vietnam)," he added.The pair are on trial at the high court over the killing of a Malaysian in the lobby of a Kuala Lumpur hotel in August last year

Two Chilean tourists facing the death penalty in Malaysia for allegedly murdering a man in a hotel are innocent and acted in self-defence, their lawyer said Monday.

Felipe Osiadacz and Fernando Candia are on trial over the killing of a Malaysian in the lobby of the Kuala Lumpur hotel in August last year, less than 24 hours after they arrived in the country on holiday.

The young men have pleaded not guilty. Malaysia has a mandatory death penalty for murder, and if convicted the pair will be hanged.

"It was all an accident. A person went into the hotel and demanded money from them," their lawyer Venkateswari Alagendra told reporters at the Kuala Lumpur High Court after a hearing.

The Malaysian man then attacked the Chileans and they fought back in self-defence, before calling the police, she said.

She said she was confident that the pair, who went on trial earlier this year, would be acquitted.

Two women were seen hugging the men after Monday's court hearing, but declined to speak to reporters.

The trial resumes on September 24.North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un (L) and South Korea's President Moon Jae-in agreed plans for a liaison office at their summit in April

South Korea said Monday it may delay the imminent opening of a liaison office in North Korea, after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's trip to Pyongyang was abruptly cancelled by Donald Trump.

Trump on Friday pulled the plug on the visit, blaming a lack of progress in denuclearisation efforts since his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June.

The sudden cancellation has put the brakes on Seoul's plans to open a liaison office in North Korea following a rapid diplomatic thaw on the Korean peninsula.

"I can't say it won't have any impact," Kim Eui-kyeom, the South's presidential spokesman, told reporters.

"We were considering the opening of the liaison office as part of a smooth series of events including Pompeo's visit to the North and the inter-Korean summit, but there is a need to review it since a new situation has arisen," he added.

Blue House officials told AFP he was referring to the timing of the opening rather than the project as a whole.

The setting up of the inter-Korean liaison office was agreed between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and the North's Kim at their summit in April.

Moon favours engagement with the North and has pressed for a resumption of cross-border cooperation, potentially risking differences with Washington.

The South Korean leader is due to visit Pyongyang next month for what will be his third meeting with Kim this year.

But the office, to be located in the North's border city of Kaesong, has raised concerns that the transfer of material there could violate UN sanctions against North Korea.

Seoul's unification ministry on Monday brushed off the accusations, saying that all goods were being transferred to build and operate the office and "not for the economic benefit of North Korea".

During their summit in Singapore in June, Trump and Kim signed up to a vague commitment to denuclearisation, which the US leader touted as a historic breakthrough.

But Pyongyang has since criticised Washington for its "gangster-like" demands for complete, verifiable and irreversible disarmament and the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency recently reported there were no indications that North Korea has stopped nuclear activities.

After the cancellation of Pompeo's trip, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the mouthpiece of the North's ruling party, accused Washington of "double-dealing attitudes".

"The US is hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK" (North Korea) if it fails in its efforts to secure the North's "unjust and brigandish 'denuclearisation first'", it said in a weekend commentary that recalled the rhetoric of the past.India's tourist hotspot of Kerala suffered its worst floods in nearly 100 years

More than 1,200 people have been killed across South Asia in monsoon storms so far this year, according to figures collected by AFP as India counts the rising toll from floods that have devastated southern Kerala state.

The monsoon, which lasts from June to September, causes widespread death and destruction across South Asia each year, with the tourist hotspot of Kerala suffering its worst floods in nearly 100 years.

Kerala has reported 445 deaths with more bodies discovered each day as a massive cleanup gets underway. The floods forced more than a million people to seek shelter in temporary relief camps and 15 others were reported missing up to Monday.

Kerala accounted for nearly half of the more than 1,000 deaths reported across India, with over 160 killed in neighbouring Karnataka state, more than 200 fatalities in Uttar Pradesh state, and 195 in West Bengal, according to official figures.

The monsoon also battered Nepal, with 87 people killed since June, according to the home ministry, including a woman and eight children swept away by a landslide in a remote village.

But in Sri Lanka, where authorities organised the early evacuation of 750,000 people in threatened areas this year, the death toll from monsoon floods fell to 24 from 224 killed in May and June last year, official figures showed.

In Bangladesh, floods and landslides killed at least 29 people, according to official figures.

In the deadliest monsoon-induced disaster in recent years in South Asia, flooding and landslides killed around 5,800 people in India's northern Uttarakhand state in June 2013.ABC News(WASHINGTON) -- After months of negotiations, President Donald Trump on Monday announced the United States and Mexico have agreed on revisions to key parts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) -- a trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico.



"It's a big day for trade. It's a big day for our country," Trump said.



Trade negotiations with Canada are still ongoing. "We'll see if Canada can be part of the deal," he said. Trump cast the agreement as the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement, saying he wanted to do away with the NAFTA name because it had "bad connotations."



It's unclear if Trump intends to keep the trilateral framework in place. The president said he's also open to a separate deal with Canada, and said he will terminate the existing NAFTA agreement once there is a deal with both countries. Any changes to NAFTA would require congressional approval before taking effect.



In an interview with ABC News, the president's top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, said Trump has directed U.S. Trade Ambassador Robert Lighthizer to immediately begin negotiations with the Canadians.



"The best-case scenario, they'll join the deal in a three-part deal in the way the discarded NAFTA was," said Navarro.



"It is our wish, Mr. President, that now Canada will also be able to be incorporated in all this," said Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto, via speakerphone during the Oval Office announcement.



During the announcement, Trump threatened to put tariffs on all cars made by Canada, likely in an effort to add pressure on America's northern neighbor.



Still, Navarro said that the president would be making a call to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Monday.



Trump, who has had a strained relationship with Enrique Pena Nieto over his demands that Mexico pay for a border wall, cited "closer" ties to America's southern neighbor on Saturday.



"Our relationship with Mexico is getting closer by the hour. Some really good people within both the new and old government, and all working closely together ... A big Trade Agreement with Mexico could be happening soon!" he tweeted.



The agreement between the U.S. and Mexico Monday mostly focuses on automobile manufacturing.



The two main provisions include a requirement that 40-45 percent of all automobile components be made by workers earning $16 or more per hour, aimed at helping the U.S. compete against low wage auto workers abroad, and also new rules requiring a significant portion of automobile parts -- 75 percent -- be made in the U.S. and Mexico.



"This is going to be a great day for Detroit," Lighthizer said in a briefing call with reporters.



Administration officials said the border wall and immigration were not a part of negotiations with Mexico.



"That was not part of the discussion today or part of this negotiation. That's a separate matter," Navarro told ABC News. On a briefing call with reporters, Trump administration officials declined to say how the new deal pays for the wall. In the past, Trump has said Mexico would pay for the border wall indirectly via NAFTA.



Following the July election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Trump predicted that he will have a "very good relationship" with the newly-elected Mexican president.



Trump told reporters in July that he had a 30-minute phone call with Lopez Obrador, who assumes office on Dec. 1, about trade, border security and a potential U.S.-Mexico trade deal.



"I think the relationship will be a very good one. We'll see what happens," Trump said, adding that Mexico's election was "better than anticipated."



Lopez Obrador, a leftist, thanked Trump on Friday for treating Mexicans with more respect.



"For some time now, (Trump) has been very prudent in referring to Mexicans, or he hasn't said offensive things," Lopez Obrador said. "I have to thank him for that. ... Up to now, things are going well. There has been respect."



Trump's inflammatory rhetoric about Mexicans began the day he launched his campaign in June 2015.



"When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best...theyre bringing those problems with us," he said at a campaign rally. "Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.



Trump made border security a cornerstone of his campaign for president and has repeatedly threatened to rip up NAFTA, blaming the trade agreement, which came into effect in 1994 while Bill Clinton was president, for the loss of manufacturing jobs in America's Rust Belt.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.Malaysian national Khaw Kim-sun, 53, leaving the High Court in Hong Kong where he is facing charges of murdering his wife and daughter

The daughter of an anaesthetist accused of gassing his wife and another daughter to death using a yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide described her dead sister as her "soulmate" in a Hong Kong court Monday.

Prosecutors have accused Khaw Kim-sun of leaving the inflatable ball in the boot of a car where the gas leaked out and killed his wife and 16-year-old daughter Lily.

Khaw, 53, was having an affair and his wife would not grant him a divorce, prosecutors said.

They accused him of hatching a deliberate plot to murder her, but said it was likely he had not intended to kill his daughter.

Khaw's eldest daughter May-ling, 19, spoke of her sister at the High Court trial Monday.

"Lily was two-and-half years younger than me. She was probably my soulmate. We were very close and we had a lot in common," she told the court.

She described her sister as brave and a "free spirit" but also said she was impulsive and quick to anger, without giving further details.

May-ling said she was aware of her father's affair with Shara Lee, who was her Chinese tutor and also taught Lily.

"At first I felt slightly betrayed but at the same time my parents hadn't been getting along well. I could understand my father would find someone and I felt bad for my mum," she told the court.

Khaw's wife Wong Siew-fung and Lily were found on a roadside in a locked yellow Mini Cooper in 2015, in a case which initially baffled police.

The pair were certified dead at the same hospital where Khaw worked and a post-mortem concluded they had died from inhaling carbon monoxide.

Police found a deflated yoga ball in the back of the car.

A professor from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Khaw was based, told the court Monday that he had seen the anaesthetist fill two yoga balls with carbon monoxide, saying he was taking them to the chemistry department for tests.

The court heard earlier in the trial that Khaw had told colleagues he planned to use the gas on rabbits, but later told police that he had taken it to get rid of rats at home.

Asked by the defence whether there were animals in the family home in Sai Kung, a largely rural area in the north of Hong Kong, May-ling said there had been mosquitoes, cockroaches and rats.

The case continues later Wednesday.The UN investigators named Min Aung Hlaing and five other top military commanders in their report

United Nations investigators on Monday called for an international probe and prosecution of Myanmar's army chief and five other top military commanders for genocide against the country's Rohingya minority.

"Myanmars top military generals, including Commander-in-Chief Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing, must be investigated and prosecuted for genocide in the north of Rakhine State, as well as for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan States," a UN-backed fact-finding mission said.

Some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fled northern Rakhine state to Bangladesh after Myanmar launched a brutal crackdown last August on insurgents amid accounts of arson, murder and rape at the hands of soldiers and vigilante mobs in the mainly Buddhist country.

Myanmar has vehemently denied allegations of ethnic cleansing, insisting it was responding to attacks by Rohingya rebels.

But in Monday's report, the UN mission insisted the army tactics had been "consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats."

The mission, which was created by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2017, concluded in a report that "there is sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the Tatmadaw (Myanmar army) chain of command."

"The crimes in Rakhine State, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts," the report said.

The investigators named Min Aung Hlaing and five other top military commanders, adding that a longer list of names could be shared with "any competent and credible body pursuing accountability in line with international norms and standards."

Criticism was also directed at Myanmar's civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been the target of global vitriol for a perceived failure to stand up for the stateless minority.

The report found that she had "not used her de facto position as head of government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events."

While acknowledging that she and other civilian authorities had little influence on military actions, it said that they "through their acts and omissions... have contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes."

The investigators called on the UN Security Council to refer the Myanmar situation to the International Criminal Court, or for an ad hoc international criminal tribunal to be created.

They also recommended an arms embargo and "targeted individual sanctions against those who appear to be most responsible."Palestinians pass through the Erez crossing with Israel, near Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip, on August 27, 2018

Israel reopened its only crossing for people with the Gaza Strip on Monday, a week after shutting it over violence along the border with the Palestinian enclave.

The reopening, following days of relative calm, comes as Egypt holds talks with Palestinian officials as part of efforts to reach a long-term truce with Israel.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli defence ministry unit that oversees the Erez crossing confirmed it had opened as planned on Monday morning.

On Sunday night, Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the crossing was being reopened due to "calm that has been maintained over the past week."

Israel closed the crossing except to humanitarian cases on August 19, after another round of protests and clashes on the border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

It has enforced an air, land and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip for more than a decade, but grants permission to a limited number of people to cross for various reasons.

An average of around 1,000 Gazans cross through Erez each day, mostly those in need of medical care but also businesspeople, students and others, Israeli authorities say.

A second crossing with Israel, Kerem Shalom, is for goods.

There have been months of tension along the border and several military-flare ups, but recent weeks have seen relative calm.

Egyptian and United Nations officials have been mediating indirect talks on a long-term truce between Israel and Islamist movement Hamas, which have fought three wars since 2008.

Egyptian officials have held talks with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah this week in a renewed bid to reconcile the movement with Hamas.

The two factions have been deeply divided for more than a decade and Abbas is opposed to any truce with Israel that bypasses his Palestinian Authority, based in the occupied West Bank.

Mass protests and clashes erupted on the Gaza border on March 30 and have continued at varying levels since.

At least 172 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli fire since the protests began. One Israeli soldier has been killed during that time.

Gaza's only other border is with Egypt, but the Rafah crossing with the enclave had largely been kept closed in recent years. Cairo opened it in mid-May and it has mostly remained so since.French President Emmanuel Macron came to power last year vowing to overhaul the EU

French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that he would put forward new proposals for the European Union to boost its security, saying the bloc must stop depending on American might.

"Europe can no longer rely on the United States for its security. It is up to us to guarantee European security," he said in a speech to relaunch his diplomatic agenda.

His proposals will be unveiled "in the coming months", Macron told an audience of some 250 diplomats, lawmakers and international relations experts gathered to mark the return from the summer break.

"I want us to launch an exhaustive review of our security with all Europe's partners, which includes Russia," he added.

Macron's comments came after a string of gestures from US President Donald Trump distancing himself from traditional NATO allies.

Macron came to power last year vowing to overhaul the EU and has pushed for deep political reforms -- including a separate budget for the eurozone -- which have so far met with lukewarm support.

The French president, who will head to Denmark and Finland for a three-day trip from Tuesday hoping to shore up support for his EU shake-up, called for redoubled efforts to reform the bloc.

"We need to take new initiatives, build new alliances," he said.

"France wants a Europe which protects, even as extremism has grown stronger and nationalism has awoken," he said.May will be joined by several ministers and 29 business representatives from various industries on her trip

Prime Minister Theresa May will make a three-nation visit to Africa this week, her first to the continent since becoming British leader in 2016, aimed at boosting post-Brexit trade ties.

May, joined by several ministers and 29 business representatives from various industries, will visit South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya during the three-day trip, Downing Street said Monday.

She will be the first British prime minister to set foot in Kenya since Margaret Thatcher in 1988.

"As we prepare to leave the European Union, now is the time for the UK to deepen and strengthen its global partnerships," May said in a statement.

"Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy," she added.

"As longstanding partners this trip is a unique opportunity at a unique time for the UK to set out our ambition to work even closer together."

The delegation will land in Cape Town on Tuesday, where May will meet South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as well as business leaders and young people.

She will use a speech on the opening day to set out how Britain can bolster its partnership with Africa, "particularly by bringing the transformative power of private sector trade and investment from the UK", her office said.

May will present Ramaphosa with the bell from the troopship Mendi, which sank in the English Channel in 1917 drowning more than 600 mainly South African troops set to join the Allied forces fighting in World War I.

It was the worst maritime disaster in the African country's history, and has become a symbol of its WWI remembrance.

The prime minister is also expected to visit Robben Island where former president Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for decades to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth.

May will head to Nigeria on Wednesday for meetings with President Muhammadu Buhari in the capital Abuja and with victims of modern slavery in Lagos.

On Thursday she will meet Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, shortly after his return from seeing US President Donald Trump in Washington and before he travels to China to meet President Xi Jinping.

The prime minister will then see British troops in training action and tour a business school, before concluding the trip at a state dinner hosted by Kenyatta.

Among those joining May are representatives of the London Stock Exchange, the Scotch Whisky Association and manufacturing firm JCB.Iran's President Hassan Rouhani, who has come under attack from all sides, gives an interview to Iranian television

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani is clinging to power but finds himself under attack from all sides -- conservatives, reformists and the street -- as he prepares for a grilling in parliament on Tuesday.

The US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers and Washington's reimposition of sanctions have already battered the Iranian economy, and critics say it has exposed the failures of Rouhani's five years in power.

For the first time, lawmakers have summoned Rouhani to parliament to face questions over the collapsing value of the Iranian currency, over stubbornly high unemployment and corruption.

Lawmakers have already impeached his labour and economy ministers this month, and are seeking further scalps.

They have the power to impeach Rouhani himself, though he is protected by the fact that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said he should see out his term to 2021, despite his own harsh criticisms of the president's policies.

- Conservatives -

Despite his dim prospects, Rouhani still has the backing of moderate conservatives, including powerful parliament speaker Ali Larijani.

But many in the hardline establishment opposed his negotiations with the West and feel vindicated by the unravelling of the nuclear deal.

They have led the charge against Rouhani's cabinet, and were on Monday seeking enough votes for impeachment proceedings against his industry and transportation ministers.

"The best outcome for them is a lame duck president, as their chances will go up for (the next election) in 2021," said political journalist Fereshteh Sadeghi.

- Reformists -

As for the reformist faction, it was key to Rouhani's election successes in 2013 and 2017, seeing him as its best option after the movement was suppressed in the wake of mass protests in 2009.

But Rouhani has failed to deliver on his promises of easing civil liberties, particularly his vow to release political prisoners and reduce censorship.

Reformists now fear being tarnished by their association with Rouhani and some have broken ranks to slam the government's performance.

"What have we done with this nation? We made them miserable and wretched," said reformist MP Elias Hazrati as he voted in favour of impeaching Economy Minister Masoud Karbasian on Sunday.

"No one believes Rouhani will reform anything anymore. He was just a tool for the system, appearing to address people's demands for change without really changing anything," said Clement Therme, Iran research fellow for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

- The street -

On the back of popular support, Rouhani won emphatic victories in the past two presidential polls.

Even with the Guardian Council barring almost all candidates, there was genuine enthusiasm for his plans to rebuild Iran's foreign standing and attract investment.

With the key part of that strategy -- the nuclear deal -- in tatters, the sense of disillusionment on the streets of Tehran is now palpable.

Many wealthier Iranians are trying to leave, while poorer areas have seen regular, low-level strikes and protests that have occasionally turned violent.

The prices of essential goods are rising rapidly, and worse pain is to come when US sanctions on Iran's vital oil sector return in November.

"Look at my breakfast. I can't afford fruit anymore," a motorbike delivery man told AFP, holding up a can of lemonade and a piece of bread.

"We are afraid of this government, but there will be more protests."

- What next? -

Rouhani's problems reflect a basic contradiction of the Islamic republic, said Therme of IISS: elections are crucial to its legitimacy, but the Iranian people vote for reforms that cannot be delivered.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (C) leads prayers near President Hassan Rouhani at the Imam Khomeini grand mosque in the capital Tehran

"The supreme leader supports Rouhani going to the end of his second term because he wants stability," said Therme.

"But he thinks that if Rouhani delivers on his policies, it will mean the end of the system," particularly by opening the country to Western cultural "invasion".

There had been talk of Rouhani as a possible successor to the ageing Khamenei, but he looks increasingly likely to follow the path of his two predecessors in the presidency, Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who have been effectively silenced by the establishment.

"There's nothing he can do. His hands are tied. All the focus will now go on 2021," said political journalist Sadeghi.Beijing considers calls for self-determination in Hong Kong as tantamount to demands for independence

A Hong Kong pro-democracy group led by high-profile activist Joshua Wong said Monday two of its members had been detained and questioned in mainland China.

The pair were released within hours but were warned not to publicise their experiences, the Demosisto party said in a statement.

Hong Kong has rights unseen on the mainland but concerns are growing that those liberties are under serious threat as China tightens its grip on the semi-autonomous city.

Wong described the detentions as a "clear signal" that Chinese security forces were trying to suppress the democracy movement.

Demosisto campaigns for self-determination for Hong Kong, a concept which Beijing considers intolerable and a challenge to its territorial integrity.

The pair, who according to the statement were not key members of the party, were allegedly picked up at train stations in the southern Chinese towns of Shenzhen and Guangzhou in March and August.

Both members were asked about their participation in recent protests and for information about Demosisto, the group said.

The first was questioned at a police station and released around three hours later, according to the statement.

The second was taken to a hotel, where they were attached to what the group said resembled a lie detector and accused of "trying to stir up trouble in the mainland".

Demosisto said the member was offered payment to provide information after returning to Hong Kong, before being asked to sign an apology and released after five hours.

Beijing considers calls for self-determination in Hong Kong as tantamount to demands for independence.

The emergence of an independence movement in the last four years has led to a crackdown in the city, with some activists jailed and others barred from office.

It also comes as Hong Kong prepares to launch a high-speed rail link to the mainland at the end of September.

The new line will see China's security staff operating on the city's turf for the first time, prompting fresh fears over citizens' freedoms.

Demosisto founder Wong said the rail link could enable Chinese state security to "fully review and follow... every citizen" who visits the mainland.Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) is the biggest backer of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad (L)

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that a "return to normal" in Syria that left its leader Bashar al-Assad in power would be a "grotesque error", in comments seemingly directed at his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

"We can see those who would like to return to normal as soon as the war against Daesh (the Islamic State group) is finished: Bashar al-Assad would stay in power, the refugees... will return and Europe and few others would help with reconstruction," Macron said.

But "such a scenario would be a grotesque error", he added.

After coming to power in May last year, Macron shifted French policy towards prioritising the destruction of the Islamic State group rather than ousting Assad, warning of a "failed state" if the leader were forcibly removed.

But he has previously called the Syrian leader an "enemy of the Syrian people" who should ultimately face a war crimes court.

Macron's latest comments during a major foreign policy address to French ambassadors appeared to be a rebuke to Putin, who is Assad's biggest backer.

On August 18, Putin called on Europe to financially contribute to the reconstruction of Syria to allow millions of refugees to return home.

French President Emmanuel Macron accused Assad of "creating thousands of refugees" and "massacring his own people"

After more than seven years of brutal war, Macron warned in Monday's speech that Assad was on the verge of creating a fresh humanitarian crisis in Idlib province.

The regime says it is determined to retake the northwestern province on the Turkish border -- Syria's last major rebel stronghold -- amid speculation of a looming Russian-backed assault.

"The situation is alarming because the regime is threatening to create another humanitarian crisis in Idlib province and until now has shown no desire to negotiate the slightest political transition," Macron said.

"This means reinforcing pressure on the regime and its allies, and I expect Russia and Turkey to take account of their roles and the commitments they have made," he added.

"Since day one I have considered Daesh to be our principal enemy, and I have never made the ousting of Bashar al-Assad a condition of our diplomatic or humanitarian action in Syria," he said.

But he accused Assad of "creating thousands of refugees" and "massacring his own people".An Iranian woman raises her fist in a cloud of tear gas during a protest at the University of Tehran on December 30, 2017

A 21-year-old student in Iran has been sentenced to seven years in prison for taking part in university protests, her lawyer and Iranian media said on Monday.

Parisa Rafei, an arts student at the University of Tehran, was convicted of "assembly with the intention of acting against national security, propaganda against the system and disrupting public order", according to reformist newspaper Shargh.

Her lawyer, Saeed Khalili, described the sentencing as "unfair and unreasonable" on Twitter.

He was also quoted by Shargh as saying: "In my view, none of these charges are logical or a legally sufficient reason to indicate that she has committed a crime."

Khalili said the alleged crimes were focused on a student union demonstration in early December over issues such as dormitory opening hours.

"All these actions are within the framework of law and rights stated in the constitution," Khalili added.

A total of 45 of her fellow students are also behind bars for their part in much broader unrest that swept the country later in December, according to an article in the reformist Etemad newspaper.

It said at least two of the students have been given sentences of eight years, without providing details, and that all the cases were due to be completed within the next month.While tributes have poured in from the US and abroad highlighting the Arizona Republican's lifetime of service, Donald Trump issued a single, terse tweet on Saturday that sent his "deepest sympathies and respect" to the bereaved family, without any kind words for McCain himself

Donald Trump's conspicuous failure to pay tribute to the late John McCain Monday underscored the isolation of the US leader -- seen by critics as incapable of bringing a divided nation together even as it mourns a political icon.

The US flag at the White House was back at full staff Monday morning -- in contrast to the US Capitol -- after being lowered over the weekend to mark McCain's death Saturday of brain cancer at age 81.

A war hero who endured torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, the Arizona Republican was an uncompromising voice on issues of war and peace in the US Congress and a two-time candidate for the presidency.

But Trump, who bypassed military service himself, has had only words of contempt for the senator, famously dismissing him during the 2016 presidential campaign as "not a war hero."

"He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured," Trump said.

The bad blood was mutual and on display even in death. Battling cancer, McCain reportedly excluded Trump from his funeral arrangements.

Trump's only comment so far has been a single, terse tweet, even as the US Congress prepares to give McCain a statesman's send-off.

Trump sent his "deepest sympathies and respect" to the bereaved family Saturday, but offered no words for McCain himself.

- No White House statement -

The US flag above the White House returned to full staff two days after the death US Senator John McCain

The Washington Post reported that White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, Chief of Staff John Kelly and other senior staff had urged a statement be released referring to McCain as a "hero."

The statement was given to Trump for his approval, but according to the paper, which cited current and former White House aides, the president said he preferred to tweet instead.

The absence of a formal White House statement has underscored Trump's isolation in a city where McCain's death otherwise has been a rare occasion for bipartisan praise for his lifetime in public service.

He will lie in state at Arizona's capitol on Wednesday, before a public viewing Friday at the Rotunda of the US Capitol, an honor reserved for the likes of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and civil rights champion Rosa Parks.

A national funeral service will be held Saturday at the National Cathedral in Washington, with lawmakers, foreign leaders and other dignitaries in attendance.

Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- a Republican and a Democrat -- have been asked to deliver eulogies. The current president's likely absence could not be more conspicuous.

Tributes have poured in from every living former president, honoring the former Navy aviator for his courage, integrity and decency.

Vice President Mike Pence and First Lady Melania Trump offered their condolences and thanks "for your service to the nation."

Obama hailed his former rival for the US presidency in 2008 as a man of courage who showed what it meant "to put the greater good above our own."

The New York Stock Exchange observed a moment of silence in McCain's memory.

- At bitter odds -

A flag flies at half staff on Capitol Hill in Washington on August 27, 2018 following the death of Senator John McCain

From the day the billionaire former reality TV star announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination with an attack on Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, Trump and McCain have been at bitter odds.

McCain denounced Trump for using language that "fired up the crazies," while Trump said McCain was a "dummy" who barely managed to graduate from the US Naval Academy.

In the years since, McCain has been Trump's loudest -- and often a lonely -- Republican critic, especially as the president disrupted America's longtime alliances.

In McCain's eyes, Trump's meeting in Helsinki with Russia's President Vladimir Putin earlier this year was "one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory."

McCain meanwhile won the president's undying enmity last year, by casting a dramatic thumbs down vote -- only one of three Republican senators to do so -- against a Trump-backed effort to repeal Barack Obama's signature health care law.

Trump, who regularly denounces that vote at his rallies, earlier this month repaid his nemesis by signing the John McCain National Defense Authorization Act without ever speaking the name of the person it was meant to honor.John McCain, who died aged 81 on Saturday, irked Russia with his support for pro-Western leaders in ex-Soviet Georgia and Ukraine as well as strong backing for sanctions over Moscow's annexation of Crimea

Russian pro-Kremlin media pulled no punches on Monday in condemning John McCain, who died of a brain tumour at the weekend, as Washington's "chief Russophobe".

McCain, who died aged 81 on Saturday, irked Russia with his support for pro-Western leaders in ex-Soviet Georgia and Ukraine as well as his strong backing for sanctions over Moscow's annexation of Crimea.

"McCain became the chief symbol of Russophobia," Rossiya 1 television said, adding that he "couldn't stand Russia's independent foreign policy".

McCain "adored war. If you haven't been killed yet, that's not McCain's fault. He tried," wrote pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda in a biting editorial.

Accusing the former Navy pilot of lying about being tortured while being held prisoner during the Vietnam War, the popular tabloid concluded with the hope that McCain is now burning in hell.

"Senator McCain loved the flames of war. Let's believe he'll have enough flames where his soul is resting," it wrote.

Life News, a pro-Kremlin tabloid news site, mocked the "chief Russophobe" for his decision to publish a 2013 op-ed aimed at Russians on an obscure news site called Pravda.ru.

He apparently believed the website to be connected the once-powerful Soviet newspaper Pravda.

"Evidently no one told the senator that there had been certain changes in Russia since his time in captivity in Vietnam," it wrote.

McCain was "a convinced hawk who pecked at Russia out of principle," Rossiya 1 reported on its main news show on Sunday evening, devoting more than four minutes to the senator's life.

McCain "firmly supported all the military operations and wars that America unleashed -- Kosovo, Iraq, Libya -- if he had not twice lost presidential campaigns, everything could have been even more catastrophic," it reported.

The high-rating show included the detail that McCain "was shot down in Vietnam by a Soviet SA 75-Dvina missile complex".

While stressing McCain's contempt for President Donald Trump, the show predicted that US "attempts to restrain and isolate Russia with harsh sanctions will continue -- just now without John McCain".

- 'Irreconcilable enemies' -

Russia's reaction contrasted starkly with that of Ukraine, where McCain was a frequent visitor and top politicians expressed condolences.

President Petro Poroshenko said the senator was "a great personality" and recalled how, during a 2016 visit to eastern Ukraine, he had refused to duck out of visiting troops in an area under artillery fire.

"Ukraine has many friends, but no one will replace John McCain," wrote Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin on Twitter.

Ukrainians including an aide to the interior minister backed the idea of renaming a street in Kiev after McCain.

By contrast, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not issued any message of condolence and some Kremlin-loyal officials gave extremely hostile reactions.

"About McCain's death, I can say the following: as a good Christian I wish all irreconcilable enemies of my Motherland peace and calm -- in the afterlife, naturally," editor-in-chief of Kremlin-funded RT television Margarita Simonyan wrote on Twitter.

Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Senate's international affairs committee, wrote on Facebook that McCain's "only ideology" was "protect your own and beat up the others".

However some Russian politicians showed their respect.

Leonid Slutsky, head of the lower house of parliament's foreign affairs committee, told the RIA Novosti state news agency that McCain was a "courageous and principled person".

Oleg Morozov, a member of the Senate's foreign affairs committee, on Facebook praised McCain's frankness.

"An enemy died, salute him for honest enmity, for honest hatred, for refusal to reconcile. Others dissemble. He said what he thought."

He added: "Let God receive his dark soul and determine its future".Egypt's military in February launched a major operation centred on the Sinai to wipe out jihadists, including members of the Islamic State group

Egyptian police on Monday killed five suspected jihadists in a raid on their hideout in a mountain creek in southern Egypt, the interior ministry said.

A statement said security personnel clashed with the alleged militants during an operation to comb a remote area some 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of Cairo.

Five "terrorist elements" were killed after they opened fire on security forces, the ministry said.

There was no mention of any losses among the security personnel.

Jihadists launched an insurgency in Egypt after the 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, who was forced out by the military in the face of mass protests against his rule.

Attacks have largely been concentrated in the Sinai Peninsula in eastern Egypt, but have also taken place elsewhere across the country.

The army in February launched a major operation centred on the Sinai to wipe out jihadists, including members of the Islamic State group.

The military says that over 250 suspected jihadists and at least 35 soldiers have been killed in the "Sinai 2018" operation.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has made the fight against terrorism a priority, but rights groups accuse the government of also using it as cover to crack down on dissent.Yemenis dig graves on August 10, 2018 for children allegedly killed in a Saudi-led coalition air strike in the rebel stronghold of Saada

The Saudi-led military coalition fighting in Yemen on Monday accused the United Nations of "biased" reports on air strikes that allegedly killed dozens of children in rebel-held areas.

"The coalition is surprised by the ... biased positions of some reports," said coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki, adding that the information was "prejudiced" and based on "rebel stories".

The coalition has not confirmed or denied it carried out two air raids on Thursday that the UN said killed at least 26 children and four women south of the flashpoint rebel-held city of Hodeida.

The UN Security Council had already called for a "credible" investigation into a strike blamed on the coalition in northern Yemen on August 9 that the Red Cross said killed 40 children.

The coalition has announced its own probe into that raid.

Two UN officials have made public statements condemning the attacks.

"We all know that UN bodies are under pressure by the Huthi militias ... and these reports may have come in response to that pressure," Maliki said.

"There is no war without collateral damage."

Saudi Arabia and its allies have fought the Huthis since 2015 in an attempt to restore Yemen's internationally recognised government to power and push back the rebels, who still hold the capital Sanaa.

The war has left nearly 10,000 people dead and unleashed what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.File picture of Jean-Pierre Bemba, speaking to the press after filing his candidacy for the elections on August 2

Former warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba was expected to appeal to the Democratic Republic of Congo's top court on Monday after he was banned from running in upcoming presidential elections.

Bemba and five other candidates, including three former prime ministers, were barred by the National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI) late Friday.

The move sent shock waves through the country's volatile politics ahead of the twice-delayed elections, triggering angry accusations of a fix.

A major rival to President Joseph Kabila, Bemba returned to the DRC on August 1 to file his candidacy after he was acquitted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on war crimes charges.

But he remains convicted by the ICC for bribing witnesses -- a crime for which he was handed a year-long prison term and a 300,000-euro ($350,000) fine.

It was this conviction that CENI invoked as a reason to bar him from the December 23 vote.

Bemba -- who once headed a powerful militia since transformed into a political party, the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC) -- indicated he would take the legal route to contesting the election.

"Let's see what happens at the Constitutional Court," he told France 24 television, adding, however, "as long as the court is independent".

But a pro-democracy campaign group, Lucha, mocked the chances of success, branding the Constitutional Court as stacked with Kabila loyalists. "The Constitutional Court's verdict is known in advance," it said on Twitter.

- Excluded -

Three of Kabila's former prime ministers -- Samy Badibanga, Adolphe Muzito and Antoine Gizenga -- were also banned from running, as was the sole woman candidate, Marie-Josee Ifoku Mputa.

Gizenga, a 92-year-old figure from the time of the DRC's independence from Belgium in 1960, was ruled out on the grounds that he had not signed the candidacy forms.

Muzito was excluded because he was a dissident member of a party, Palu, which contested that he was its candidate.

Badibanga and Ifoko Mputa were banned because they had acquired foreign nationality -- dual citizenship is illegal under DRC law.

In a statement signed by Bemba and exiled politicians Moise Katumbi and Felix Tshisekedi, opposition groups urged Kabila to free up the electoral process and "stop giving directives to the election commission".

Government spokesman Lambert Mende dismissed any idea of interference, saying that "legal norms" determined CENI's decisions.

- Instability -

A country of some 80 million people, DR Congo has never known a peaceful transition of power since gaining independence in 1960.

A long tradition of coups and wars has stirred fears of a plunge back into war if the December vote goes awry.

Kabila, 47, has held office since 2001, taking over from his father, Laurent-Desire Kabila, who was assassinated by a bodyguard.

He has stayed in office since reaching the end of his two-term limit in December 2016 thanks to a caretaker clause in the constitution.

He kept the country in suspense for months over his political plans, ending the uncertainty on August 8 by saying he would not run again.

Kabila has thrown his support behind close ally Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, a former interior minister and loyalist -- a move that has stoked accusations that he wants to remain the power behind the throne.President Trump said he would scrap the name NAFTA, which he claimed had bad "connotations"

After months of intense negotiations, the United States and Mexico agreed Monday on a thoroughly overhauled free trade pact, while talks with Canada are to begin Tuesday.

The uncertainty around the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement now revolves around whether it can remain a three-nation deal, as President Donald Trump suggested he could cut Ottawa out.

"It's a big day for trade. It's a really good deal for both countries," President Donald Trump said in announcing the agreement from the Oval Office, with Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto participating by telephone.

With the outlines of a NAFTA 2.0 now on paper, including provisions on auto trade, tougher worker protections and a provision to review the deal every six years, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke to Trump and said the aim is to reach a new agreement.

The leaders "had a constructive conversation" on NAFTA, and "look forward to having their teams engage this week with a view to a successful conclusion of negotiations," Trudeau's office said.

Canada's top diplomat and trade negotiator Chrystia Freeland cut short her trip to Europe to travel to Washington on Tuesday to rejoin the talks.

Negotiators have worked for a year to update and rewrite NAFTA, but in the last five weeks, Washington and Mexico City had worked to resolve their own differences without Ottawa.

Trump stressed that he could go ahead without Ottawa in the new agreement.

"We could have a separate deal or we could put it in the same deal," Trump said.

The president indicated he would take a tough line with Canada on autos and dairy tariffs, long a source of tension between the neighboring countries.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow added this warning: "My message to Canada is look carefully."

"We hope Canada is watching carefully on how successful negotiations can go," he said.

- Not a sunset clause -

Mexican officials have insisted all along that NAFTA must be a trilateral deal, but also acknowledged that either way it will have free trade commitments with both nations.

President Trump suggested he could cut Ottawa out of a final agreement.

"It is our wish, Mr President, that now Canada will also be able to be incorporated in all this," Mexico's Pena Nieto told Trump.

Pena Nieto said on Twitter he had spoken with Trudeau, urging Ottawa to rapidly rejoin the talks with the goal of reaching a final NAFTA rewrite this week.

Freeland's spokesman Adam Austen said Canada "will only sign a new NAFTA that is good for Canada and good for the middle class. Canada's signature is required."

The Canadian team could be more amenable to the talks now that the United States has backed away from a controversial and strenuously-opposed provision to require the three nations to renegotiate NAFTA after five years.

Instead, senior US officials told reporters the agreement had been extended for 16 years but would be reviewed every six years. If the parties agree to continue with no changes, it will be renewed for another 16 years.

However, if the governments want to make changes, they will negotiate while the agreement remains in place, giving them a longer time horizon of 10 years to make changes, which is less likely to spook investors and businesses.

"It's an alternative to sunset which we think works," another senior official said.

And in fact, financial markets were delighted by the news with the S&P 500 and the tech-dominated Nasdaq stock indexes hitting fresh records.

Mexico's peso strengthened against the US dollar, as did the Canadian dollar, while the US dollar index weakened slightly.

- NAFTA 2.0 -

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told reporters in a call that the agreement was "historic" and provided the "highest standards" of any existing agreement on digital trade, financial services and labor rights.

"We had a NAFTA agreement that had gotten seriously out of whack, that led to large trade deficits and needed updating," Lighthizer said.

The labor protections are "stronger and more enforceable than any agreement by a mile. It's not even close." And he said the new pact would create jobs in the United States and Mexico.

Lighthizer said the administration would notify Congress by Friday of the new agreement, which would allow the required 90 days' notice so that Pena Nieto could sign the deal before handing over the Mexican presidency to President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on December 1.

A senior administration official said the notification would highlight the US-Mexico deal with the hope that Canada would join.

However, it was unclear whether the administration had the authority to substitute NAFTA with a bilateral trade agreement.

Mexico's Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray told reporters that if the United States and Canada fail to agree to the new terms, Mexico would still benefit from an existing pact with Ottawa through the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- the deal Trump withdrew from as soon as he took office.

A key element of the US-Mexico talks has been content requirements for autos, which Mexico agreed to increase to 75 percent from North America to get duty-free NAFTA treatment.

The sides also agreed that 40-45 percent of cars must be made at "high wage" factories where workers are paid $16 an hour in order to receive duty-free treatment, something that could deter US factories from offshoring to Mexico.Esther Utjiua Muinjangue (L), chairwoman of Namibia's Ovaherero Genocide Foundation and delegation members pose outside Berlin's Justice Ministry on the sidelines of the restitution of remains from Herero and Nama people after 1904-1908 massacres

Indigenous Namibians urged the German government Monday to finally apologise for the genocide of their peoples a century ago, to help "heal the emotional wounds" of Germany's brutal colonial past.

The appeal by representatives of the Herero and Nama people in Berlin came ahead of a ceremony this week where Germany will formally hand back human remains that were spirited away from Namibia after the 1904-1908 massacres.

Esther Utjiua Muinjangue, chairwoman of the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, said the handover would have been "the perfect opportunity" for a long-awaited apology.

"Is that asking too much? I don't think so," she told a press conference in the German capital.

An official expression of regret would make it possible to "heal the emotional wounds" and find closure, she added.

The German occupiers of what was then South West Africa killed an estimated 60,000 Hereros and 10,000 Nama people after they rose up against colonial rule, in what historians call the first genocide of the 20th century.

Indigenous Namibians have urged Berlin to finally apologise for the genocide of their peoples a century ago during a brutal colonial period past. Germany will this week hand back human remains spirited away from Namibia after 1904-1908 massacres

The German government said in 2016 that it planned to issue a formal apology as part of discussions with the Namibian government on coming to terms with the dark chapter.

The negotiations are still ongoing however.

- 'Pay compensation' -

Crucially, although Germany has acknowledged that atrocities occurred at the hands of colonial authorities, it has refused to pay reparations.

Berlin has argued that its development aid worth hundreds of millions of euros since Namibia's independence from South Africa in 1990 was "for the benefit of all Namibians".

Herero and Nama representatives have rejected this reasoning, and filed a class-action suit against the German government in a US court.

"There has to be compensation," Namibian lawmaker Ida Hoffmann, representing the Nama Genocide Technical Committee, told reporters in Berlin.

The New York judge in the case has yet to rule on whether to hear the lawsuit.

Aside from financial compensation, the plaintiffs also want to be included in the Namibian government's discussions with Berlin aimed at reaching a joint declaration on the massacres.

Germany wants the lawsuit thrown out on the grounds of state immunity for prosecution.

The German foreign ministry said Wednesday's ceremony to return some of the human remains unlawfully taken from Namibia -- including 19 skulls, five skeletons and a scalp -- marked another step in Berlin's reckoning with its colonial history.

The remains were used for discredited "scientific" experiments at the time to prove the racial superiority of white Europeans.

But activists have criticised the handover proceedings, which will see a German minister of state return the remains to a Namibian government delegation at a Berlin church service, as too low profile.

German historian Christian Kopp of the non-governmental group Berlin Postkolonial told AFP that the ceremony should take place "in the German parliament and be accompanied by an official apology".Jet Airways stock has plunged more than 60 percent this year

India's embattled Jet Airways posted a first-quarter loss on Monday, blaming high fuel prices and a weak rupee.

The carrier, India's second-largest by market share, said it had recorded a loss of 13.23 billion rupees ($189 million) for the three months ended June 30 compared with a profit of 535 million rupees for the same period a year earlier.

"The rise in the price of Brent fuel, a depreciating rupee and a resulting mismatch between high fuel prices and low fares have adversely impacted the Indian aviation industry, including Jet Airways," CEO Vinay Dube said in a statement.

The airline's financial situation has been the subject of intense speculation in Indian media in recent weeks.

Jet Airways denied a report in the Economic Times in July that it needed to make major cost cuts or face having to shut down operations within 60 days.

Speculation intensified when the airline failed to release its Q1 earnings as scheduled earlier this month, before finally releasing them on Monday.

Jet's stock has plunged more than 60 percent this year as it grapples with intense competition from a host of low-cost airlines, rising fuel prices and a weak Indian currency under pressure from a strong dollar.

Chairman Naresh Goyal told the company's annual general meeting in Mumbai recently that he felt "guilty and embarrassed" by the losses.

In Monday's statement, Jet said it would make cuts of more than 20 billion rupees over the next two years.

"We are implementing a host of measures to reduce costs and grow revenue, while retaining our focus on our guests," said Dube.

India's aviation market is witnessing a boom with passenger numbers increasing six-fold over the past decade as customers take advantage of better connectivity and cheaper fares.

But it is also a tumultuous time, with profits being eroded by the poorly performing rupee and high crude prices.

Airlines are navigating a fiercely competitive market and are unable to pass on rising operating costs to cost-conscious customers, according to analysts.Facebook has banned Myanmar's military chiefs

Facebook banned Myanmar's army chief and other top military brass on Monday after a UN investigation recommended they face prosecution for genocide for a crackdown on Rohingya Muslims.

The world's biggest social network is the prime source of news and information for many in a country that only recently came online following nearly half a century of military rule.

But Facebook has also been a platform for the army and Buddhist hardliners to spread hate speech and incendiary posts against the stateless Rohingya and other minorities.

The site aired support for the military's bloody "clearance operations" last year that forced some 700,000 Rohingya over the border into Bangladesh.

Facebook acknowledged this was the first time it had banned a state or military actor, noting it was a "unique" situation.

"We've taken this step in Myanmar following findings by international experts, including a recent UN-commissioned report, that many of these officials committed serious human rights abuses in the country," Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja said.

As to whether this could set a precedent, the spokeswoman said: "We recognise that people in other parts of the world face devastating violence on a daily basis, and we will continue to investigate and take action when we have enough facts to do so."

UN investigators lambasted the platform earlier this year, saying it had morphed into a "beast" in Myanmar.

In recent months, the tech giant has embarked on a huge public relations campaign, admitting it has often been too slow to take down inflammatory posts.

It blacklisted two firebrand Buddhist monks and an Islamophobic group notorious for spreading anti-Muslim propaganda.

But this is the first time it has touched the country's military.

"We are banning 20 Burmese individuals and organizations from Facebook -- including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the armed forces," the platform said, adding that it wants to prevent them from using the service to "further inflame ethnic and religious tensions".

Facebook has some 18 million accounts in the country of 51 million people and is also relied on heavily by the government to make announcements.

- Millions of followers -

Myanmar's Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing was among those banned by Facebook after a UN report blamed military leaders for inciting violence against the Rohingya minority

Army chief Min Aung Hlaing had two active Facebook accounts, one boasting 1.3 million followers and the other 2.8 million.

Posts in both English and Burmese would refer to the Rohingya as "Bengali", implying they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and helping reinforce the idea they do not belong in mainly Buddhist Myanmar.

His pages also featured denials of atrocities during the crackdown, which was justified by the army as a legitimate means of rooting out Rohingya militants.

Both accounts were taken down immediately as the explosive UN report circulated.

The accounts of five other top military leaders specifically mentioned in the report were also blacklisted.

A total of 18 Facebook accounts -- not all the individuals listed in the ban had a presence on the network -- one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages were removed.

The accounts were followed by a total of almost 12 million people, Facebook said, adding that data had been preserved.

Rights groups have long criticised the platform for taking days to delete malicious posts, by which time many had gone viral.

These include calls for the killing of a Muslim journalist and the spreading of messages to both Buddhists and Muslims saying that the other community was preparing to attack them.

The UN report singled out Facebook for its "slow and ineffective" response.

It also strongly criticised civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to use her position and moral authority to stand up for the Rohingya.

In Yangon, government spokesman Zaw Htay said it was asking Facebook for more information on the blocking.

"Community standards must be balanced," he told local media, referring to the company's content guidelines. "The government would like to know the exact reason."

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the violence in Myanmar on several occasions including at a congressional hearing earlier this year.

He told lawmakers Facebook planned to hire more native speakers to help monitor the situation and had partnered with civil society groups to identify perpetrators of hate speech.Former interior minister Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary (C) is pictured at the Electoral Commission in Kinshasa on August 8, 2018: DR Congo President Joseph Kabila, ending months of speculation, has chosen him be his successor in upcoming elections

Several members of the UN Security Council, including Britain, France and the Netherlands, said Monday that the UN was ready to offer logistical aid for presidential elections this December in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has rejected all offers of support.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, said many questions remained about the country's electronic voting infrastructure.

"Will there be enough voting machines, or will authorities extend voting by days or even weeks? Can the authorities recharge voting machines with only a 12-hour battery life? Have election organizers widely tested the machines?" Haley asked.

"Will voters, many of whom have never used a touchscreen, know how to use them? Are organizers preparing paper ballots as a back up if the electronic voting machines fail?" added Haley, who has previously voiced unease about the unprecedented use of electronic voting machines in the DRC.

The DRC has declined offers of advice, oversight and funding to help organize the election in the impoverished country nearly five times the size of France.

"It does not insult the DRCs sovereignty for [the electoral committee] to accept logistical support from MONUSCO," the UN stabilizing mission in the country, Haley said.

"Instead, the DRC is wasting precious resources to buy capabilities that are already available to them," she said.

"The Congolese authorities should permit MONUSCO to provide logistics and transportation support," she said.

The DRC's ambassador to the UN, Ignace Gata Mavita, came to the defense of his country's electoral committee, known as CENI.

"The results achieved so far by CENI should allow us to trust in the institution and allow it to carry out its mission without interference in its work based on considerations which owe more to speculation than reality," he said.

He said the DRC "remains open to contributions by other partners, provided that these are made without conditions and with respect to its sovereignty."

He said, however, the country rejected "the numerous external interventions and interferences" which he said continued to the present day.

"Respect for the electoral timetable is indispensible," said Anne Gueguen, the French deputy ambassador to the world body, who said that MONUSCO stood ready to "provide logistical support" to aid "free, credible, transparent and inclusive elections."

She called for a "climate of trust and peace" for the general elections, which are scheduled to take place on December 23.

"The credibility of the electoral process remains a key concern," Leila Zerrougui, the UN envoy to the DRC, told the meeting via video uplink.

The former Belgian colony has not seen a peaceful transition of power since 1960. The current president, Joseph Kabila, who has held office since 2001, has said he will not run again.NFL Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt, seen here loading relief supplies for people impacted by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, initially appealed for $100,000 to help victims of the disaster

J.J. Watt's relief effort in the wake of last year's Hurricane Harvey raised $41.6 million (35.6 million euros), the Houston Texans star confirmed in a statement on Monday.

Watt's crowd-sourced fundraiser had initially appealed for $100,000 to help victims of the disaster but ended up becoming one of the most successful appeals of all time.

In a statement on Monday to mark the one-year anniversary of the fund's launch, Watt said the relief effort following Harvey had served as an inspiration.

"As I reflect on the events of Hurricane Harvey one year ago, the memories of destruction and devastation remain, but they are accompanied by memories of hope, selflessness and the beauty of the human spirit," Watt said.

"The actions of professional first responders and everyday citizens alike were an inspiration to the world and a shining example of the inherent good that lies within us all."

Watt provided details of how the millions raised through his appeal had helped to rebuild areas affected by the devastating flooding.

More than 600 homes had been repaired and rebuilt with money from the fund, which also helped over 420 childcare centres for 16,000 children get up and running.

The fund also helped pay for 26 million meals while covering the cost of physical and mental health services for around 6,500 people.

Watt, a 29-year-old defensive end, is one of the NFL's biggest stars, winning the Defensive Player of the Year award three times in his first five seasons after joining the Texans in 2011.

He is the only player in history to have scored more than 20 sacks in two separate seasons.A picture released by the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) on August 26, 2018 shows Iranian Defence Minister Amir Hatami (2nd L) signing a defence and reconstruction deal with his Syrian counterpart Abdullah Ayoub (2nd R) in the capital Damascus

The defence ministers of Iran and Syria have signed an agreement on military cooperation and reconstruction in the war-torn country, Iranian media reported on Monday.

"Syria is passing through the crisis stage and entering the reconstruction phase," said Iran's Defence Minister Amir Hatami, according to the Tasnim news agency.

Hatami is on the second day of a two-day visit to Damascus, during which he held "detailed negotiations" with his counterpart Ali Abdullah Ayoub and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to Tasnim.

The "defence and technical agreement" provides for the continued "presence and participation" of Iran in Syria, added Hatami.

Tehran has provided steady political, financial, and military backing to Assad as he has fought back a seven-year uprising.

In an interview Monday night with the Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen television channel, Hatami said the agreement included the rehabilitation of Syria's defence industry and assured Iran would provide "good service".

"With this accord, we have paved the way for a reconstruction of the Syrian military industries," he said.

"The most important element of the deal is the rebuilding of the Syrian armed forces and defence industries so that they can regain their full capacity."

On Tuesday last week, Iran unveiled its first domestic fighter jet, just days after releasing a next generation short-range ballistic missile.

Since Russia military intervened on Assad's behalf in 2015, the regime has regained much of the territory lost to rebels and jihadists in the early years of the war.

Syria's war has left more than 350,000 people dead and displaced millions since it broke out with the brutal repression of an initially peaceful uprising in 2011.A handout picture released by the official Algerian Press Service (APS) shows Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika arriving for the inauguration of a mosque and the extension of the Algiers metro in Algiers on April 9, 2018

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika flew Monday to Switzerland for a medical check-up, his office said, months ahead of an election with no clear successor in sight for the ailing 81-year-old.

The statement, carried by the APS news agency, gave no further details about the "routine medical check-up" in Geneva, nor did it say how long Bouteflika was expected to be out of the country.

Bouteflika has been frail since suffering a stroke in 2013, which weakened his mobility and forced him to work from his residence in Zeralda, west of Algiers.

Bouteflika has since travelled abroad several times to undergo medical examinations in Paris, the southeastern French city of Grenoble and in Geneva.

Rumours often swirl in Algeria about the state of the president's health, with opposition leaders quick to express concerns about a possible "power vacuum" if he were to die.

But with a presidential election due to take place in April 2019, politicians have already been preparing for a fifth term under Bouteflika, who has been in power since 1999.

In April, the secretary general of his National Liberation Front, Djamel Ould Abbes, asked him to run for re-election.

And in June, Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia said his Rally for National Democracy (RND) party would support the president "continuing his mission and his sacrifice in the service of Algeria".

In 2014, the year after his stroke, Bouteflika's decision to seek a fourth term sparked criticism from those who questioned his ability to rule.

Bouteflika only makes rare public appearances, during which he is usually seen sitting in a wheelchair.The suspect, "Mohammed G," is accused of contacting a top Islamic State group official

A suspected Dutch jihadist is believed to have been involved in the deadly kidnapping of a British couple in South Africa and of contacting a top Islamic State group official, Dutch media reported Monday.

The 29-year-old man, only identified as "Mohammed G.", briefly appeared in the Rotterdam District Court where he was accused of "belonging to a terrorist organisation," Dutch news reports said.

Earlier this year the bodies of renowned British botanists Rachel Saunders, 63, and her husband Rodney Saunders, 74, were discovered after they went missing during a trip to look for rare seeds in South Africa's northeast KwaZulu-Natal province.

The two are believed to have been kidnapped by suspected jihadists, who raised an IS flag in a reserve in the region where the Saunders disappeared.

Mohammed G., from Limburg province in the south of the Netherlands, is "suspected of involvement in the fatal kidnapping in South Africa," Dutch national news agency ANP said.

Dutch prosecutors alleged Mohammed G. "tried to buy bitcoins" using Rachel Saunders' credit card details, ANP said.

"He also had contact with the highest ranking IS spokesman in Africa," the Dutch public broadcaster NOS reported, naming the official as Abu Fida, also known as Mohammed Abdi Ali.

Abu Fida was arrested in Kenya in 2016 and according to information from the FBI, received direct instructions from the IS leadership in Syria, the NOS said.

Prosecutors said Mohammed G. knew two of the Saunders' kidnappers in South Africa and also worked with a Somali-based suspect.

"The four wanted to raise funds to set up a training camp in Somalia and buy weapons," the NOS said.

"They also controlled social media accounts" and advised prospective jihadists wanting to travel to Libya.

Rodney Saunders's body was found by fishermen on February 17 in the Tugela river in the province and was positively identified several weeks later.

Police gave no details of where Rachel Saunders's body was found, but positively identified her in June.

South African police arrested four suspects alleged to be part of the group behind the Saunders' kidnapping after an intensive manhunt in KwaZulu-Natal in February.

A multi-country investigation was still ongoing and Mohammed G. was remanded in custody, the ANP said.A picture taken on August 2, 2018, shows a general view of the Azraq camp for Syrian refugees in northern Jordan

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said Monday his country has exceeded its capacity to host refugees from Syria and is backing their voluntary return home.

Amman estimates that it has taken in close to 1.3 million refugees from its war-torn neighbour and says it has already spent more than $10 billion to host them.

It has repeatedly complained that hosting Syrian refugees is a burden on the country's infrastructure and limited resources.

"The kingdom encourages the voluntary return of Syrian refugees to their homeland. It is inevitable," Safadi said during a meeting with UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi in Amman, according to his office.

In the statement, Safadi said Jordan had "exceeded its capacity" to host any more refugees from Syria and that the international community should shoulder its responsibilities.

In a tweet, Safadi also said that the "voluntary return of Syrians" is "an ultimate goal all must support".

Some 650,000 Syrian refugees have registered with the United Nations in Jordan since fleeing their country's conflict, which started with anti-government protests in 2011, although Amman gives a higher figure.

Earlier Monday King Abdullah II told Grandi that hosting hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees is putting "increasing pressure" on Jordan's infrastructure.Israel -- whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (C) is seen here in Lithuania -- has peace treaties with only two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan

Israel's prime minister says he sees a path to peace with Palestinians through the "normalisation" of relations with Arab states which, like his country, are also facing an emboldened Iran.

"Many Arab countries now see Israel not as their enemy but as their indispensable ally in pushing back Iranian aggression," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview with Lithuania's LRT public broadcaster which aired on Monday.

"This has created normalisation which can lead to peace. I believe that if we have peace with the broader Arab world, it will help us get to peace with the Palestinians," he added in the interview taped during his visit to the Baltic state -- the first-ever by an Israeli premier -- that ended on Sunday.

Israel has peace treaties with just two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan, while others insist on an agreement with the Palestinians as a prerequisite that would pave the way to formal relations.

Earlier this year Saudi Arabian King Salman reaffirmed "steadfast" support for the Palestinian cause after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman signalled a shift in the country's approach.

Prince Mohammed in April said in a magazine interview that Israelis, as well as Palestinians, "have the right to have their own land".

Both Israel and Saudi Arabia have opposed the Iran nuclear deal and pushed for tougher action against Iran's spreading influence in the Middle East.

In July, the Saudis slammed a controversial Israeli law as "perpetuating racial discrimination" against Palestinians by defining the country as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Arab citizens account for some 17.5 percent of Israel's more than eight million population and have long complained of discrimination.

The Israeli legislation was also condemned by the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, comprised of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

At least 171 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire during demonstrations near the border with Israel that began in March amid a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke with counterparts in South Korea and Japan last week to discuss "next steps" with North Korea, as his trip to Pyongyang was scrapped, officials said Monday.

Pompeo had planned a short trip to North Korea last weekend but on Friday, President Donald Trump pulled the plug, saying he had not seen "sufficient progress" toward Pyongyang denuclearizing.

In descriptions of Pompeo's two calls, which were made Friday, the State Department said he had spoken about "next steps" on engagement with North Korea.

Pompeo and South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha "reaffirmed the United States and the Republic of Korea remain committed to the final, fully verified denuclearization of" North Korea, the State Department said.

It provided a similar readout of Pompeo's call with Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono.

Pompeo and Kono "agreed that pressure must continue until (North Korea) denuclearizes," the statement read.

Trump scrapped Pompeo's visit amid independent reports that North Korea has done little or nothing to roll back its nuclear program, despite promises made at a historic summit in June with Kim Jong Un.

Trump also blasted China for not doing enough to help push denuclearization, but left open the possibility of a Pompeo trip to Pyongyang when the US-China trading relationship is "resolved."In his final message to the nation, late US senator John McCain launched a last broadside at Donald Trump

Late US senator John McCain took a final swipe at Donald Trump in his farewell message to the nation delivered posthumously Monday, denouncing "tribal rivalries," as an aide confirmed the president will not attend the lawmaker's funeral.

The message came as Trump found himself mired in controversy over his rather conspicuous failure to pay tribute to McCain, who died Saturday at 81 after a year-long battle with brain cancer.

The flag at the White House was at full-staff Monday, and no formal statement came from Trump beyond a brief tweet.

On Monday, McCain offered his final thoughts, in a message read by his former campaign manager Rick Davis -- and he did not spare the Republican president.

"We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe," McCain said in the statement.

"We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been," he added -- an apparent reference to Trump's plans for a border wall.

"I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil," the former prisoner of war, two-time Republican presidential candidate and titan of US politics said.

"Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here," he said, adding that the country "will get through these challenging times."

That appeared to be a reference to Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan.

McCain's death has left many American mourning the loss of a national hero who repeatedly challenged the status quo and consistently sought bipartisan solutions to the country's problems.

The longtime senator clashed repeatedly with Trump despite being from the same party, and the president -- who in 2016 famously dismissed McCain as "not a war hero" -- has paid scant tribute to the senator in the wake of his death.

With bad blood between them at the boil, McCain reportedly excluded Trump from his funeral ceremonies -- a development that Davis confirmed on Monday.

"The president will not be, as far as we know, attending the funeral. That's just a fact," Davis told a press briefing in Arizona.

The two men who defeated McCain in his White House campaigns, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, are expected to deliver eulogies at a Saturday service at the National Cathedral in Washington, a day after McCain's body lies in state in the US Capitol.

McCain will be buried Sunday at the US Naval Academy in nearby Annapolis, Maryland in a private funeral service.File picture of Jean-Pierre Bemba, speaking to the press after filing his candidacy for the elections on August 2

Former warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba lodged an appeal with the Democratic Republic of Congo's top court on Monday after he was banned from running in upcoming presidential elections.

Bemba and five other candidates, including three former prime ministers, were barred by the National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI) late Friday.

The move sent shock waves through the country's volatile politics ahead of the twice-delayed elections, triggering angry accusations of a fix.

But by Monday night four of the six banned candidates had taken their case to the Constitutional Court, the highest in the land. The other two were expected to follow by Tuesday.

A major rival to President Joseph Kabila, Bemba returned to the DRC on August 1 to file his candidacy after he was acquitted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague on war crimes charges.

But he remains convicted by the ICC for bribing witnesses -- a crime for which he was handed a year-long prison term and a 300,000-euro ($350,000) fine.

It was this conviction that CENI invoked as a reason to bar him from the December 23 vote.

Bemba -- who once headed a powerful militia since transformed into a political party, the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC) -- indicated he would take the legal route to contesting the election.

"Let's see what happens at the Constitutional Court, as long as the court is independent," he told France 24 television before an AFP correspondent watched his supporters arrive at court to file the appeal.

Pro-democracy campaign group Lucha mocked the chances of success, branding the Constitutional Court as stacked with Kabila loyalists. "The Constitutional Court's verdict is known in advance," it said on Twitter.

- Excluded -

Three of Kabila's former prime ministers -- Samy Badibanga, Adolphe Muzito and Antoine Gizenga -- were also banned from running, as was the sole woman candidate, Marie-Josee Ifoku Mputa.

Gizenga, a 92-year-old figure from the time of the DRC's independence from Belgium in 1960, was ruled out on the grounds that he had not signed the candidacy forms.

Muzito was excluded because he was a dissident member of a party, Palu, which contested that he was its candidate.

Badibanga and Ifoko Mputa were banned because they had acquired foreign nationality -- dual citizenship is illegal under DRC law.

The electoral commission accepted 19 candidates out of a total of 25.

In a statement signed by Bemba and exiled politicians Moise Katumbi and Felix Tshisekedi, opposition groups urged Kabila to free up the electoral process and "stop giving directives to the election commission".

Government spokesman Lambert Mende dismissed any idea of interference, saying that "legal norms" determined CENI's decisions.

- Instability -

A country of some 80 million people, DR Congo has never known a peaceful transition of power since gaining independence in 1960.

A long tradition of coups and wars has stirred fears of a return to war if the December vote goes awry.

Kabila, 47, has held office since 2001, taking over from his father, Laurent-Desire Kabila, who was assassinated by a bodyguard.

He has stayed in office since reaching the end of his two-term limit in December 2016 thanks to a caretaker clause in the constitution.

He kept the country in suspense for months over his political plans, ending the uncertainty on August 8 by saying he would not run again.

Kabila has thrown his support behind close ally Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, a former interior minister and loyalist -- a move that has stoked accusations that he wants to remain the power behind the throne.

The United States meanwhile voiced regret Monday that the DRC had spurned UN logistical support for the elections while South Africa said Kabila had rejected an offer to send in former president Thabo Mbeki as a special envoy.Burkina Faso's President Roch Marc Christian Kabore promised during the 2015 election campaign to bring in a new constitution to replace the 1991 version put in place by Blaise Compaore who had seized power in a 1987 coup

The Sahel state of Burkina Faso will hold a referendum to usher in a "semi-presidential" constitution on March 24 next year, the election commission announced Monday.

The electoral rolls would be updated ahead of the vote, said commission chairman Newton Ahmed Barry.

President Roch Marc Christian Kabore promised during the 2015 election campaign to bring in a new constitution to replace the 1991 version put in place by Blaise Compaore, who had seized power in a 1987 coup.

Compaore was ousted in a popular revolt in October 2014 after he tried to extend his 27-year grip on power.

If adopted, the new constitution would limit the president to two mandates and include a procedure to remove the president via the constitutional court.

Presidential and legislative elections are scheduled for 2020 when citizens living outside the country will be able to vote for the first time.

The country has a population of 18 million with another 11 million Burkinabians living abroad, according to the foreign ministry.

Under a new electoral law only holders of a passport or a national identity card will be registered to vote.

Ouagadougou has been battling an escalating wave of jihadist attacks over the last three years.Kaia Kanepi on the way to victory over world number one Simona Halep in the first round of the US Open on Monday.

World number one Simona Halep was swept aside 6-2, 6-4 by 44th-ranked Kaia Kanepi on Monday, the first top-seeded woman ever to lose in the US Open first round.

It was the kind of Grand Slam history Halep could have done without as she tried to expunge the memory of her first round loss to Maria Sharapova at Flushing Meadows last year.

But the Romanian, who broke through for a first Grand Slam title at the French Open this year, had no answer for Kanepi's power.

The Estonian fired 26 winners to Halep's nine, and even her 28 unforced errors weren't enough to derail her challenge as she cut the rallies short and remorselessly punished Halep's second serve.

"I thought I just have to be aggressive and try to stay calm," said Kanepi, whose run to the quarter-finals last year is just one of her six trips to the last eight in majors -- although she has never gone farther.

The victory let some light into a tight quarter of the draw that also includes 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams, seven-time Slam winner Venus Williams and two-time major winner Garbine Muguruza.

Serena, seeking her first major title since the birth of daughter Olympia last September 1, was to launch her campaign in a star-studded opening night session on Arthur Ashe Stadium against Poland's Magda Linette.

Venus faced a potentially trickly opener against former champion Svetlana Kuznetsova, with the sisters looking at a possible third-round meeting.

Defending champion Sloane Stephens, the third seed behind Halep and Caroline Wozniacki, opens her title defense against Russian Evgeniya Rodina.

- Not much to say -

For Halep it was a swift end to the dream of a second major title to go with the French Open she won in June.

The Romanian, whose number one ranking is not in jeopardy, had no excuses.

"I cannot say much about this match, just that I didn't really feel the ball," Halep said. "But also, she played really strong and pushed me back, so it was tough."

Kanepi took the match by the throat with a run of five straight games in the opening set. She was up 3-0 in the second before Halep dug in to force it back to 4-4.

"I think I didn't go that much anymore for my shots. That's why it came to 4-4," Kanepi said. "So I thought I have to hit more aggressive again, and I tried to do that."

It worked. Up 40-15 in the ninth game, Halep was unable to hold serve and Kanepi efficiently served out the match, earning a standing ovation from a fickle crowd on the new Louis Armstrong Stadium court that had been chanting for Halep as she mounted her comeback challenge.

"It felt really good," Kanepi said of the ovation, admitting she was a little miffed by the earlier support for Halep.

"I was thinking about that, why they cheer so much for her, because normally they cheer for the underdog."

Halep said she wasn't caught off guard by Kanepi, who beat Caroline Wozniacki in Tokyo back in 2011 when the Dane was ranked number one in the world.

"I expected her to play like that, without fear and hitting the balls really strong," said Halep, whose defensive posture gave Kanepi all the room she needed.

"I can be aggressive when I want to, because she defends a lot. I had time to be aggressive," said Kanepi, who earned a second-round meeting with Swiss qualifier Jil Teichmann, a 6-3, 6-0 winner over Dalila Jakupovic in her first appearance in a Grand Slam main draw.While tributes had poured in from the US and abroad highlighting John McCain's lifetime of service, Donald Trump has only sent a single tweet until Monday, when he switched tack and ordered national flags to half-staff

Donald Trump on Monday bowed to pressure to honor the late John McCain, ordering the lowering of flags across the country to half-staff, as the late senator fired a parting shot at the president in a farewell message to the nation.

Trump's about-face came after he found himself mired in controversy over his rather conspicuous failure to pay tribute to McCain, who died Saturday at 81 after a year-long battle with brain cancer.

When veterans' groups launched appeals for a more fitting salute to McCain, a Navy veteran who was imprisoned for more than five years in Vietnam, the Republican leader -- who had no love lost for the Arizona senator -- blinked.

"Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain's service to our country," Trump said in a statement as he ordered the flag atop the White House and elsewhere to fly at half-staff until McCain's burial on Sunday.

The White House flag was lowered after McCain's death on Saturday -- but it was once again at the top of the flagpole on Monday morning.

Trump's initial silence about McCain underscored the isolation of the US leader and fueled criticism that he is incapable of bringing a divided nation together even as it mourns a man widely seen as an American hero and a political icon.

In Phoenix, where a week of tributes to McCain was soon to get underway, Rick Davis, the two-time presidential candidate's former campaign manager, confirmed that Trump would not be attending the funeral.

The president himself said Vice President Mike Pence would speak at a ceremony honoring McCain at the US Capitol on Friday.

White House chief of staff John Kelly, Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Advisor John Bolton would represent the administration at his services, he added.

- 'Tribal rivalries' -

In Phoenix, Davis read a posthumous statement from McCain that did not spare Trump.

"We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe," McCain said.

Rick Davis, a former campaign manager for John McCain, reads the Arizona Republican's final message in Phoenix

"We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been," he said -- -- an apparent reference to Trump's plans for a border wall.

"I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil," McCain continued.

"Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here," he said, adding that the country "will get through these challenging times."

- 'Not a war hero' -

John McCain at the 2008 Republican convention, where he accepted the party presidential nomination

McCain, who served as a senator from Arizona for more than 30 years, clashed repeatedly with Trump even though they were both Republicans, and the president initially paid scant tribute to the senator after his death.

The Washington Post reported that White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, Chief of Staff Kelly and other senior staff had urged a statement be released referring to McCain as a "hero" -- but Trump opted to tweet instead.

"My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain," Trump tweeted. "Our hearts and prayers are with you!"

That had been the extent of Trump's remarks on McCain's passing until the White House statement on Monday.

McCain's remains will lie in state at Arizona's capitol on Wednesday, before a public viewing Friday in the rotunda of the US Capitol -- an honor reserved for the likes of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and civil rights champion Rosa Parks.

The two men who defeated McCain in his White House campaigns, Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, are expected to deliver eulogies at a Saturday service at the National Cathedral in Washington.

McCain will be buried Sunday at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in a private funeral service.

- Bipartisan praise -

In Washington, McCain's death has been a rare occasion for bipartisan praise for his lifetime in public service.

The US flag above the White House returned to full staff Monday -- only to be lowered again later on in the day in honor of McCain

Tributes have poured in from every living former president, honoring the former Navy aviator for his courage, integrity and decency.

On Capitol Hill, his desk on the Senate floor was draped with a black cloth, and adorned with a bowl of white roses.

The enmity between Trump and McCain dates from the day the real estate tycoon announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination with an attack on Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump said of McCain: "He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured."

In the years since, McCain was Trump's loudest Republican critic, especially as the president disrupted America's long-time alliances.

After Trump met in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin, McCain called it "one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory."Facebook's ban on Myanmar military leaders raises questions on how the social network will handle repressive regimes using the platform

Facebook's ban of Myanmar's military leaders marks a new step for the leading social network against state "actors" -- and raises thorny questions on how the company deals with repressive regimes using the platform.

The move against Myanmar's army chief and other top military brass on Monday -- which came on the heels of an explosive UN investigation -- was the first time Facebook has barred members of the military or state actors, the company confirmed.

Facebook's actions came after repeated complaints that the platform was being used to spread hate and incite violence against the Rohingya.

The UN report, which recommended that military leaders face prosecution for genocide over their crackdown on the Muslim minority, said Facebook had become "a useful instrument" for those seeking to spread hate.

Facebook and other social networks have been under pressure to curb the spread of disinformation, especially when it can be seen as "hate speech" that may incite violence. Governments themselves can be the sources of such false information.

Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University professor who studies social media, said while the move in Myanmar was "a significant development," the company "has a lot more work to do."

She added that Facebook had to "find a balance" between addressing how state entities are using the platform -- and making sure governments do not block the service.

Several countries have already banned Facebook while others use the platform as part of efforts to reinforce control.

Oxford University researchers said in a report this year they found "organized social media manipulation" in 48 countries.

"A range of government agencies and political parties are exploiting social media platforms to spread junk news and disinformation, exercise censorship and control," they said.

- More 'proactive' move -

Facebook said its ban on Myanmar military leaders stemmed from "fairly unique" circumstances

Irina Raicu, director of the internet ethics program at Santa Clara University, said Facebook appeared to go further than in the past by banning 20 individuals and organizations even if they had no prior presence on the network.

"That seems to be a much more proactive stance than Facebook has taken before -- and it raises the question about what criteria are applied in determining which individuals and groups are prevented from using the platform in the first place, rather than in response to terms of service or community guidelines violations," Raicu said.

Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Institute, a Washington think tank, said Facebook could face more questions on its approach to hate speech.

"Social networks are getting better at enforcing their codes of conduct, but it is harder for them to make these distinctions when it comes to government leaders, since their use of violence may be seen as legitimate under certain circumstances," Castro said.

Castro said it was notable that Facebook relied on the report from the UN Human Rights Council's investigators rather than act on its own because "the average company is not well-suited to investigate each case for themselves," he said.

"However, the downside is that (the Council) likely moves too slow for the digital era. But that suggests the UN, or some other body, should update its processes for the digital era, not that social networks should take on these additional roles."

Facebook said its move Monday was based on exceptional circumstances following the release of the report.

"We've taken this step in Myanmar following findings by international experts, including a recent UN-commissioned report, that many of these officials committed serious human rights abuses in the country," said Ruchika Budhraja, a Facebook spokeswoman.

"And we believe that their use of Facebook may have fueled ethnic and religious tension in Myanmar."

Budhraja said that because so many people rely on Facebook for information in Myanmar, the situation is "fairly unique."

"That said, we recognize that people in other parts of the world face devastating violence on a daily basis, and we will continue to investigate and take action when we have enough facts to do so," she added.BROOKLYN, Iowa (AP) - The father of the 20-year-old Iowa woman whose body was found in a cornfield last week wants people to remember her by "celebrating something wonderful" __ not by the way she died.

Mollie Tibbets' father, Rob Tibbetts, urged the hundreds of people at his daughter's funeral on Sunday afternoon to remember her passion for life and her desire to help others. Her body was found last Tuesday after a suspect lead police to the field where her body had been since July 18.

To highlight his call to celebrate "wonderful" things, Rob Tibbetts recognized a couple who had just married the day before during his eulogy inside the gymnasium at Brooklyn-Guernsey-Malcom High School. Tibbetts graduated from the school in 2017.

A ribbon for missing University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts hangs on a light post, Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2018, in Brooklyn, Iowa. Tibbetts was reported missing from her hometown in the eastern Iowa city of Brooklyn in July 2018. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

"Today, we need to turn the page. We're at the end of a long ordeal," he said. "But we need to turn toward life __ Mollie's life __ because Mollie's nobody's victim. Mollie's my hero."

Davenport Bishop Thomas Zinkula led the funeral Mass.

More than 1,000 people filled the gymnasium for Tibbetts' funeral in the central Iowa city of 1,500 where she grew up. Tibbetts had been staying in Brooklyn during a summer break from her studies at the University of Iowa.

Cristhian Bahena Rivera is charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts' death. Authorities have said Tibbetts was abducted while running in July, and an autopsy showed that she died from stab wounds.

Rivera is being held in lieu of a $5 million cash-only bond, and he is suspected of being in the United States illegally. He faces life in prison without the possibility of parole, if convicted.TOKYO (AP) - Japanese government officials said Monday that they were trying to ensure the safety of a Japanese tourist whom North Korea said it had expelled after detaining him on unspecified charges.

The official Korean Central News Agency said late Sunday that Japanese tourist Tomoyuki Sugimoto had been "kept under control" for questioning about "his crime," without specifying what he had been accused of.

In a two-sentence report, the news agency said the authorities decided to "to leniently condone him" and expel him on the principle of humanitarianism.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters that Japan's government was doing its "utmost," but refused to give further details, citing the sensitivity of the issue.

Japan's government confirmed about two weeks ago that it was looking into reports that one of its citizens was being held in North Korea, but has not identified the person by name.

Japan's Kyodo News agency, citing a government source, said the person was believed to be a videographer in his 30s and may have been suspected of shooting video of a military facility while on a group tour to Nampo, a port city in western North Korea.

The government had sought his release through the North Korean Embassy in Beijing, Kyodo said. Japan does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea.

North Korea has also arrested other foreign nationals. Three Korean-Americans accused of anti-state activities and detained for more than a year were released and returned home in May with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when the two sides were preparing for the June summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. American college student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested by North Korean authorities in January 2016 after being accused of stealing a propaganda poster and sentenced to 15 years in prison, died in June 2017, days after he was repatriated to the U.S. with severe brain damage.

Their arrests were widely seen as politically motivated and had compounded the dire state of relations over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

If the Japanese man's release is confirmed, his repatriation will have come quicker than some of earlier cases. A Japanese correspondent for the Nikkei newspaper was detained in North Korea for more than two years after being taken into custody on spying charges in Pyongyang in December 1999. His release was seen as an attempt by North Korea to get Japan to make concessions ahead of their planned normalization talks.

Japan and North Korea have also had disputes over abductions of Japanese citizens decades ago. Japan says North Korea abducted at least 17 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train agents in Japanese language and culture to spy on South Korea. Pyongyang has acknowledged abducting only 13 of them and said eight of them had died. Five others allowed by the North to visit Japan in 2002 stayed.

___

Associated Press writer Ken Moritsugu contributed to this report.

___

Follow Mari Yamaguchi on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mariyamaguchi

Find her work at https://www.apnews.com/search/mari%20yamaguchiHARRISON, N.J. (AP) - Alejandro Romero Gamarra scored in the 56th minute and the New York Red Bulls held off Wayne Rooney and D.C. United 1-0 on Sunday night to win the Atlantic Cup competition.

Gamarra, better known as Kaku, scored on a left-footed shot from just above the top of the box and Luis Robles made two saves to help New York snap D.C. United's winning streak at three games.

New York (16-6-4) moved a point ahead of New York City FC for second place in the Eastern Conference, five points behind MLS-leading Atlanta United. D.C. United (7-10-6) is tied for eighth.

Rooney missed a chance to tie it in the 66th minute, firing a close-range shot off the crossbar.

New York leads the season series 2-0, with the Atlantic Cup finale set for Sept. 16 in Washington.SYDNEY (AP) - Former Wallabies prop Ben Alexander has announced his retirement from top-level rugby at the age of 33.

Alexander played 72 tests in a six-year international career, making his debut against France in 2008 and playing his last test against England in 2014. He also played a club-record 154 Super Rugby matches for the ACT Brumbies.

Alexander was valued for his ability to pack on both sides of the scrum.

Brumbies chief executive Michael Thomson paid tribute to Alexander as "a loyal club man and incredible talent."KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - Lawyers for two Chilean tourists who could face death sentences if convicted of killing a man in Malaysia say the duo acted in self-defense and should be acquitted.

The two men pleaded not guilty Monday to killing a 28-year-old Malaysian at a Kuala Lumpur hotel on Aug. 4, 2017, less than 24 hours after arriving in Malaysia.

Lawyer Venkateswari Alagendra says the Malaysian demanded money from the duo at the hotel lobby and tried to attack them with his shoes.

She says the men acted in self-defense and called the police but the Malaysian had by then died.

She says she is confident the duo will be acquitted as it was "an accident." The court set trial to resume Sept 24.PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) - Ostrich skin ready for tailoring, huge flat-screen TVs, "Neo-Viagra" and a cure for cancer?

North Korea's official shopper's guide is glossy and full of testimonials from satisfied customers and phone and email contact information for the dozens of companies pitching their latest products - though good luck reaching any of them.

The "2018 Korea Commodities" catalog, produced by the North's Committee for the Promotion of International Trade, reflects a side of North Korea often lost in the shadow of its nuclear weapons. Leader Kim Jong Un and many other North Koreans firmly believe their country needs to make more and better consumer goods and sell them to the outside world if it is ever going to have a strong - or even sustainable - economy.

In this Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, photo, a page showing energy drinks of the "2018 Korea Commodities" catalog, produced by the North's Committee for the Promotion of International Trade, is seen at a hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. North Korea now has an official shopper's guide that's glossy, is full of testimonials from satisfied customers and even lists phone numbers and email contact details for the dozens of companies pitching their latest products - though good luck getting through to any of them. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

More goods with the "made in North Korea" label are available than ever before, though international sanctions mean most can't be sold abroad.

A look at what North Korea sees as some of its most promising products:

___

ENERGY DRINKS AND CHEESE-FLAVORED ESKIMO PIES

Coke and other foreign brands are relatively rare and expensive in North Korea.

But the O-Il General Processing Factory has tried to fill the gap.

A surprising amount of shelf space in Pyongyang grocery stores, and increasingly stores elsewhere, has been taken over by sugary soft drinks, much of which is produced by O-Il and other well-known brands. Air Koryo, the country's flagship airline, also has its own line of drinks.

O-Il, which means May Day, has 12 pages in the 207-page 2018 commodity catalog introducing its line of nine energy drinks. Two are sold in plastic bottles shaped like barbells. A happy boy is shown lifting them over his head, while a rainbow-colored list of the drinks' benefits includes the "stimulation of growth in height" and "greater spiritual exertion."

O-il also produces dozens of yogurt and milk-flavored drinks, fruit juices, tea, jellies and dozens of flavors of ice cream cones, popsicles and ice cream sandwiches, collectively known here as "Eskimo." There's chocolate and strawberry, of course, but also cheese, fermented bean and lactobacilli. One of O-Il's latest offerings is "Hydrogen Water," which it calls the "wonder health water of the 21st century."

"With an antioxidant power 176 times that of vitamin C, 431 times vitamin E and 863 times more than coenzyme Q10," its ad claims, "the hydrogen water is effective in avoiding mental and physical fatigues, retarding the aging process, neutralizing all kinds of poisons, preventing radioactive and oxidant damages, improving immunity, fighting cancer and treating arteriosclerosis through purification of blood."

___

MIRACLE CURES FOR CANCER?

Traditional "Koryo" medicines dating to ancient times are widely used in North Korea, in part because of the scarcity of modern Western medicines, and have long been popular with Chinese tourists.

North Korea sees big potential for exports.

Leading the charge is the Pugang Pharmaceutic Co., Ltd, a pioneer both in making health supplements and in using advertising to sell them, a tricky undertaking given that such capitalist practices are still officially frowned upon. Posters for its best-known product - Royal Blood-Fresh - can be seen in department stores in Pyongyang and at souvenir shops catering to foreigners. It's also featured in infomercials on Air Koryo flights from Beijing.

So what is it?

According to the catalog, Royal Blood-Fresh is a supplement made primarily from beans that's recommended for long flights to help prevent or cure deep vein thrombosis. Posters targeting foreign tourists say, "Fly safe with Royal Blood-Fresh" and "Who says you can't grow younger and cleverer?"

Another heavily hyped supplement is Pugang's "Kumdang-2 Injection," a vegetable-based medication its producer says is exported to a dozen countries. It caused a buzz in the Western media a few years ago when it was advertised as an effective treatment for both cancer and tuberculosis, with no side effects, no less.

Some of the best testimonials in the catalog come from the medicines section.

"When I was diagnosed at the hospital, I knew I had a tumor of 3x4 centimeters in size in the left lung," reads a testimonial for the Tongbong Anticancer Drug by satisfied customer Ri Kum Jon, identified as a Pyongyang resident. "After I took three cartons for three months my appetite returned to normal - and more - I got weight by 3 kilograms (5 pounds). The tumor was killed ... I had cured cancer using the single remedy of Tongbong Anticancer Drug. It is the greatest of the elixirs that brings life back to people."

___

BOOM BOXES, CEMENT BAGS AND NANODIAMONDS

Sony, Samsung and Huawei don't need to lose any sleep over it, but North Korea has several brands of electronics.

The Hana Electronics Trading Co., which began in 2003 as a joint venture with Phoenix Commercial Ventures in Britain, is one of the best known. It is promoting karaoke boom-boxes, flat-screen TVs and DVD players. Other well-known brands, like Achim and Pyolmuri, are pitching TVs - 3D compatibility appears to be a hot extra these days - along with laptops and tablets.

It's unclear if the products are fully produced in North Korea or just assembled and rebranded.

But they do basically work.

Some of the guidebook's ads - for bags of cement, for example, and medicinal stone tiles for use in saunas - are clearly directed at industrial buyers.

But it also has sections for lipsticks and skin creams by the Pyongyang Cosmetics Factory, lingerie from the Korea Ponghwa General Group, herbal toothpaste, brassware and Neo-Viagra-Y.R., which is touted as "the best sexual function activator at the moment."

The Kangan Trading Co. is advertising nanodiamonds, useful for quantum computers and for chemotherapy.

Purity: 99-plus percent.

___

Talmadge is the AP's Pyongyang bureau chief. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter: @EricTalmadge

This Aug. 15, 2018, photo shows the "2018 Korea Commodities" catalog, produced by the North's Committee for the Promotion of International Trade, at a bookstore in a hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. North Korea now has an official shopper's guide that's glossy, is full of testimonials from satisfied customers and even lists phone numbers and email contact details for the dozens of companies pitching their latest products - though good luck getting through to any of them. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

In this Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, photo, a page of the "2018 Korea Commodities" catalog, produced by the North's Committee for the Promotion of International Trade, is seen at a hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. North Korea now has an official shopper's guide that's glossy, is full of testimonials from satisfied customers and even lists phone numbers and email contact details for the dozens of companies pitching their latest products - though good luck getting through to any of them. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

In this Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, photo, a page showing viagra of the "2018 Korea Commodities" catalog, produced by the North's Committee for the Promotion of International Trade, is seen at a hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. North Korea now has an official shopper's guide that's glossy, is full of testimonials from satisfied customers and even lists phone numbers and email contact details for the dozens of companies pitching their latest products - though good luck getting through to any of them. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - In a story Aug. 26 about affirmative action and Asian-Americans, The Associated Press erroneously reported Karthick Ramakrishnan's place of employment. He is a public policy professor at the University of California, Riverside, not the University of California, Irvine.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Race-based school criteria roils Asian-Americans - again

Race-based affirmative action in education has polarized Asian-Americans for decades, with critics feeling demonized and advocates chagrined by the attention to what they call minority within minority views

By JANIE HAR

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Time and again, Chinese-American students consistently delivered top academic scores, only to be denied admission to their dream school. Parents bemoaned what they saw as an unfair racial advantage given to black and Latino children while their own children were overlooked.

"Every year hundreds of Chinese-American parents would be in anguish," said Lee Cheng, a 46-year-old intellectual property attorney, who sought to end the practice. "I remember the disappointment in some of my friends who were the kids of immigrants, of very, very poor people who worked in Chinatown."

This may sound like the fights going on today over testing in elite public schools in New York City or lawsuits against prestigious universities such as Harvard over affirmative action.

But the scenario played out more than three decades ago on the other side of the country over a public high school, demonstrating the enduring nature of a controversy in which Asian-Americans have played a key role despite some feeling shut out of the broader conversation.

In the 1980s, San Francisco's prestigious Lowell High School required Chinese applicants to score higher on an admissions index than whites, blacks and even other Asians as part of a legal mandate to diversify its schools.

Cheng, a Lowell graduate, couldn't believe that was fair or even legal. But when he turned to Asian-American civil rights groups, they were of no help.

"These organizations, which all came of age largely as the 'yellow' affiliates of the NAACP and civil rights establishment, they said, 'Hey there's nothing to see here,' " Cheng said.

So he helped form a legal foundation and sued.

Race-based affirmative action has long polarized Asian-Americans, with critics feeling demonized and advocates chagrined by the attention to what they call minority-within-minority views.

Now, critics of the policy sense an opening for change, led by a White House hostile to the idea of considering race in admissions.

The U.S. Department of Justice is backing a 2014 lawsuit against Harvard University by Asian-American applicants, who say the Ivy League college unlawfully suppresses the number of Asians admitted. The DOJ also said last year it would investigate a May 2015 complaint filed against Harvard by a coalition of Asian-American groups.

The 2014 lawsuit, led by conservative strategist Ed Blum, is being closely watched as it goes to trial in October. It could wind up before a more conservative U.S. Supreme Court that only narrowly affirmed the use of race in school admissions in a case that Blum lost two years ago.

Other cases have raised the ire of Asian-Americans, even ones who consider themselves progressive allies. In 2009, the University of California plowed ahead with new admissions criteria that analysts said would boost white enrollment at the cost of Asian students.

More recently, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to get more blacks and Latinos into specialized public high schools where Asians make up the bulk of students. Asian-American politicians said they were blindsided by the June announcement.

New York Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Democrat, said conservatives pigeonhole Asians as the "model minority," but progressives on the left, such as de Blasio, vilify Asian-Americans instead of seeing them as partners.

"They rank us at the bottom of what it means to be a minority. They don't consider us as minorities," Kim said. "They're shunning us from right and left, and we're stuck in this dreadful space where we're always questioning ourselves: Where do we belong?"

Advocates of affirmative action say bias against Asians doesn't make it OK to abandon policies meant to counter longstanding systemic disparities. The agitation also sidesteps the legacy of privilege given whites, they say.

"No one is entitled to put other communities down," says Vincent Pan, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action in San Francisco. "Of course we are entitled to be free of discrimination, but we are not entitled to perpetuate discrimination against others."

Surveys have shown broad Asian support for affirmative action policies, says Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy professor at the University of California, Riverside and founder of AAPI Data, which provides data on Asian-Americans.

But overall support dropped to below two-thirds in 2016, he said, driven by changing attitudes of one demographic in particular: Asian America's largest ethnic group, Chinese-Americans.

In 2012, 78 percent of Chinese-Americans said they supported race-based affirmative action; in 2016, the figure was 41 percent.

Ramakrishnan says the newer immigrants moving public opinion are active on Chinese-language social media. They are wealthier and better educated than previous generations.

"They look down upon prior waves of Chinese immigration as well as other Asian immigration," he said. "They somehow believe that the most significant racial discrimination that exists is not getting into Harvard."

The Asian American Coalition for Education, the nonpartisan organization that filed the complaint against Harvard, disputes the surveys as vague.

Swan Lee, a founder of the organization, said she got involved after the brother of her daughter's friend was rejected by what she described as basic four-year colleges despite his high test scores and grades.

He ended up employed as a waiter at the Chinese restaurant where his father worked, a victim of the "Asian tax," she said.

"I said, 'This cannot be right.' We came here for opportunities, but this young man, our society is not doing him justice," says Lee, who moved to the United States in 1996 for graduate school. "What happened to his American dream?"

After Cheng graduated from Harvard, he helped found the Asian American Legal Foundation and sued San Francisco schools in 1994.

At issue was a 1983 consent decree aimed at desegregating San Francisco schools, the result of a lawsuit filed by the local NAACP. The parties agreed to settle in 1999, and the quota system was eventually dropped.

Cheng recalls the fight as a lonely one.

"We never really wanted to be the leaders in the fight," he said. "It's just that nobody wanted to do it."NEW YORK (AP) - For Michael Cohen and Donald Trump, it's always been about money and loyalty.

Those were guiding principles for Cohen when he served as more than just a lawyer for Trump during the developer's rise from celebrity to president-elect. Cohen brokered deals for the Trump Organization, profited handsomely from a side venture into New York City's real estate and taxi industries and worked to make unflattering stories about Trump disappear.

Money and loyalty also drove Cohen to make guilty pleas this past week in a spinoff from the swirling investigations battering the Trump White House.

FILE - In this Dec. 16, 2016, file photo, Michael Cohen, then an attorney for President-elect Donald Trump, arrives in Trump Tower in New York. For Cohen and Donald Trump, it's always been about money and loyalty. Those were guiding principles for Cohen when served as more than just a lawyer for Trump during the developer's rise from celebrity to president-elect. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Feeling abandoned by Trump and in dire financial straits, the man who once famously declared that he would "take a bullet" for Trump now is pledging loyalty to his own family and actively seeking to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

The unraveling of their relationship was laid bare Tuesday when Cohen pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges and said in federal court that he broke campaign finance laws as part of a cover-up operation that Trump had directed.

In the days after Cohen's guilty plea, two close associates - the magazine boss who helped him squash bad stories and the top financial man at the president's business - have been granted immunity for their cooperation. These moves could have a ripple effect on the legal fortunes of Cohen and, perhaps, Trump.

For years, Cohen was a fixture in Trump's orbit.

Working alongside Trump and Trump's three adult children - Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric - in Trump Tower, Cohen took on a number of roles for the developer, including emissary for projects in foreign capitals and enforcer of Trump's will. At times a bully for a family-run business, Cohen was known for his hot temper as he strong-armed city workers, reluctant business partners and reporters.

He was there in the lobby of Trump Tower in June 2015 when his boss descended an escalator and changed history by declaring his candidacy for president. But Cohen's place in Trump's political life ended up being peripheral.

Cohen did become a reliable surrogate on cable TV - he created a viral moment by repeating "Says who?" when told Trump was down in the polls - and founded the candidate's faith-based organization. But Cohen was never given a prominent spot in the campaign.

And despite telling confidants that he thought he had a shot at White House chief of staff after the election, Cohen was never given a West Wing job. He remained in New York when Trump moved to Washington.

Cohen found ways to profit from the arrangement, making millions from corporations by selling access to Trump, but felt adrift and isolated from Trump, according to two people familiar with his thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private conversations.

But early one April morning, more than three dozen federal agents raided Cohen's home, office and hotel room.

A chief focus for investigators was Cohen's role in making payments during Trump's campaign to women who claimed they had sex with Trump, and whether campaign finance laws were violated. In the fall of 2016, weeks before the election, Cohen had set up a limited liability company in Delaware to hide the deal he made to silence the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels about an affair she said she had with Trump.

Worry grew within the White House about what had been seized. That April day, Trump berated the raid as "an attack on all we stand for." But then, in a "Fox & Friends" interview, Trump began to dramatically play down his relationship with Cohen.

"I have nothing to do with his business," Trump said, asserting that Cohen was just one of many lawyers and was responsible for "a tiny, tiny fraction" of Trump's legal work.

A dispute soon broke out between Cohen and Trump over who would pay the former fixer's mounting legal bills. Holed up in a Park Avenue hotel after his apartment flooded, Cohen began to worry about his financial future, according to the two people.

By all appearances, Cohen's lifestyle was lavish.

He bought a $6.7 million Manhattan apartment last fall, though the sale didn't close until April and no one could move in until the summer. With bills piling up for his team of expensive lawyers, the suddenly unemployed Cohen began to tell confidants that he was worried about his job prospects and ability to support his family.

Meanwhile, the broadsides from the White House kept coming.

Trump and Cohen had long stopped speaking, but word would get back to the lawyer that the president was belittling him. The president's attorney and frequent attack dog Rudy Giuliani went from calling Cohen "an honest, honorable lawyer" in May to deriding him as a "pathological liar" in July.

Cohen began wondering to friends whether loyalty with Trump had become a one-way street, the people said.

Eager to hit back and attempt to regain some hold on the story, Cohen hired Lanny Davis, a former Bill Clinton attorney, to be his public relations lawyer. Davis began striking back at the White House and lobbed a clear warning shot at the president when he released a secret recording of a conversation in which Trump appears to have knowledge about hush-money payments to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also alleged an affair with the developer.

Cohen was embraced by the cable news networks as an irresistible foil to Trump. Some on the left styled him as a star of the resistance. Cohen's camp made some effort to play into the role, reaching out to Watergate whistleblower John Dean and, after Cohen's plea, establishing an online fundraising tool that seemed to predominantly receive backing from liberals.

Cohen, who could get about four years to five years in prison, is due to be sentenced Dec. 12.

Davis has strongly telegraphed that Cohen is willing to cooperate with Mueller's investigation. But a deal has yet to be struck and there are doubts about what Cohen can prove or whether the special counsel would want to rely on an untrustworthy witness.

Cohen has stayed out of sight and has remained emotional since his plea, according to the people close to him.

The attacks from Trump have continued.

"If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Michael Cohen!" Trump tweeted Wednesday.

___

Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemirePHOENIX (AP) - Sen. John McCain's death in office has handed Arizona's governor an empty Senate seat to give out - and a difficult political puzzle to solve before he does.

Arizona law requires only that Gov. Doug Ducey name a replacement who is a member of McCain's Republican Party and who will fill the seat until the next general election in 2020. But in a state with a deeply divided Republican Party, where McCain was a towering but divisive figure, the choice is far more complicated.

Ducey is balancing the demands of the many conservative Arizona Republicans who have soured on McCain due to his dovish immigration stance, criticism of President Donald Trump and vote against a rollback of President Barack Obama's health care law. They are wary of Ducey appointing a moderate. But naming someone with dramatically different views from McCain could be viewed as disrespectful to McCain's legacy, carrying its own risks. In either case, Ducey wants to set the party up to hold the seat two years from now, no easy task given the turmoil in his party.

As flags fly at half-staff at the Arizona Capitol in memory of the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, television crews broadcast live Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018, in Phoenix. McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, has died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

The decision is under close scrutiny in Washington. While McCain has been treated for cancer in Arizona and unable to vote in Washington, his party's already narrow Senate majority had shrunk from two votes to one. With the confirmation of Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, scheduled for next month the GOP needs every reliable vote it can get. Ducey's office has heard from Vice President Mike Pence's aides about the choice, a person familiar with the discussions said Sunday. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter and asked for anonymity.

A day after McCain's death, political types from Arizona to Washington were buzzing with options. The senator's wife, Cindy McCain, was viewed as a possibility, as was former Sen. John Kyl and former McCain chief of staff, Grant Woods. Another group of former lawmakers and state officials were floated as middle-ground options - including Ducey's chief of staff Kirk Adams - who might not anger the right wing of the party.

"If he picks someone too far left, we're going to have a primary in two years," said Constantine Querard, a conservative Republican strategist.

Ducey himself faces a weak primary challenge from his right in the state's primary elections Tuesday, and spokesman Daniel Ruiz said on Sunday that the appointment will not be made until after McCain's funeral, which will likely be next week.

"Now is a time for remembering and honoring a consequential life well lived," Ruiz's statement said.

Doug Cole, a former McCain staffer and veteran Arizona strategist, said one of Ducey's key choices has to be whether he wants to name someone who wants the job for the long term. "Do I appoint a caretaker or do I appoint someone who will stand for election?" Cole asked. "Does he choose from the family?"

Some observers predict the governor will be solicitous to the McCain family's wishes. That's led to widespread speculation that Cindy McCain could be selected, likely under the assumption that she would not run for the seat in 2020. But Cindy McCain's politics are largely unknown.

Another caretaker option would be Kyl, now a Washington lobbyist viewed as a safe, uncontroversial choice. But Kyl already is tasked with shepherding the Kavanaugh nomination and Republicans may be loath to upend that process.

Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Phoenix, said that if Ducey opts for someone with long-term designs on the seat, "he has to pick someone who can galvanize voters in 2020."

Woods, a former Arizona attorney general and McCain aide, is another possibility. But he is known for sharing McCain's stances on immigration, which could be anathema to the state's conservative voters.

Arizona operatives speculate that one of two former congressmen from the state, John Shadegg and Matt Salmon, could fill the seat. They're both GOP stalwarts who don't have a history of feuding with the base, as is Adams, Ducey's top aide and a onetime speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives. State Treasurer Eileen Klein could also be a strong candidate in 2020 if Ducey wants to pick someone who'd run for election rather than a caretaker, according to Republican operatives.

The person who was previously seen as McCain's most likely successor is Arizona Rep. Martha McSally. Like the late senator, she's a former fighter pilot - one of the first women to fly in combat and an air force colonel. But she is running for the Senate seat vacated by Sen. Jeff Flake, who, like McCain, outraged the state's conservative base for bucking Trump on immigration and other issues.

Like Ducey, McSally faces a primary on Tuesday, but her challenge from the right has been stiffer than the governor's. It's also illustrated how fraught the McCain issue is for Arizona Republicans.

One of her rivals, former state senator Kelli Ward, ran against McCain in the 2016 GOP primary. On Saturday, hours before McCain died, Ward speculated on Facebook that the McCain family announced the senator was ending medical treatment on Friday to distract from her final push in the primary.

In a sign of how hostile many GOP primary voters are to the state's late senior senator, earlier this month McSally had avoided mentioning McCain's name while boasting that she'd been with Trump at the signing of the defense bill named in McCain's honor. McCain supporters and the senator's daughter Meghan lacerated McSally for following the president's lead in not mentioning McCain.

McSally said she didn't intend to snub McCain and went on to praise him.

___

Associated Press writer Ken Thomas contributed from Washington.PHOENIX (AP) - Sen. John McCain expressed his deep gratitude and love of country in his final letter and implored Americans to put aside "tribal rivalries" and focus on what unites.

Rick Davis, former presidential campaign manager for McCain who is serving as a family spokesman, read the farewell message Monday at a press briefing in Phoenix.

In the statement, McCain reflected on the privilege of serving his country and said he tried to do so honorably. He also touched on today's politics.

The desk of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is draped in black on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, on Capitol Hill in Washington. McCain died at the age of 81, on Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (Senate Television via AP)

"Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here," McCain wrote. "Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history."

McCain died Saturday from an aggressive form of brain cancer. Plans taking shape called for McCain to lie in state Wednesday in the Arizona State Capitol on what would have been his 82nd birthday. A funeral will be conducted Thursday at North Phoenix Baptist Church with former Vice President Joe Biden speaking.

In Washington, McCain will lie in state Friday in the Capitol Rotunda with a formal ceremony and time for the public to pay respects. On Saturday, a procession will pass the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and arrive for a funeral at Washington National Cathedral. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama are expected to speak at the service.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell paid tribute to John McCain on Monday by recalling their own legislative battles while echoing the late senator's belief that there's more that unites than divides Americans.

Speaking from the Senate floor, McConnell says that while McCain served the state of Arizona in Congress, "he was America's hero all along."

He spoke near McCain's desk in the Senate, which has been draped in black and adorned with white roses in his honor.

McConnell and McCain tangled over several issues, including McConnell's attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which failed on McCain's surprise "no" vote. McConnell says serving with McCain "was never a dull affair."

McCain will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda on Friday.

A private funeral is planned for Sunday afternoon at the Naval Academy Chapel followed by a private burial at the academy cemetery.

President Donald Trump was not expected to attend any of the services.

McCain was a noted critic of Trump, and Trump's response to McCain's death has been closely watched.

The flag atop the White House flew at half-staff over the weekend in recognition of McCain's death but was raised Monday and then lowered again amid criticism.

Trump said Monday afternoon that he respects the senator's "service to our country" and signed a proclamation to fly the U.S. flag at half-staff until his burial.

When asked about Trump's response to McCain's death after the flag was raised Monday, Davis said that the family is focusing on the outpouring of support from around the world instead of "what one person has done or said."

"The entire focus of the McCain family is on John McCain," Davis said. "There really is no room in the McCain family today to focus on anything but him."

In Arizona, high-profile campaigns announced that they have suspended some activity this week.

McCain was just one of 11 U.S. senators in the state's 116-year history, and on Tuesday, primary voters will decide the nominees in races across all levels of government. There's also the sensitive question of who will succeed McCain.

Arizona law requires the governor of the state to name an appointee of the same political party who will serve until the next general election. Since the time to qualify for November's election is past, the election would take place in 2020, with the winner filling out the remainder of McCain term until 2022.

Possible appointees whose names circulate among Arizona politicos include McCain's widow, Cindy McCain, former U.S. Senator Jon Kyl and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey's chief of staff Kirk Adams.

Throughout the weekend, Arizona politicos across all levels of government offered remembrances of McCain. Noting McCain's death, several candidates, including Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema and Republican Rep. Martha McSally, who are expected to win their party's races for the state's other U.S. Senate seat, on Sunday evening said they would suspend their campaigns on Wednesday and Thursday. Ducey, whose office is coordinating services at the Arizona State Capitol for McCain, will not attend any campaign events between now and when McCain is buried.

In Phoenix, a memorial outside McCain's office drew James Olsen, who was on a business trip from Columbia, South Carolina.

"I'm all the way here. I need to pay my respects," Olsen said.

Tributes poured in from around the globe. French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted in English that McCain "was a true American hero. He devoted his entire life to his country." Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said McCain's support for the Jewish state "never wavered. It sprang from his belief in democracy and freedom." And Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, called McCain "a tireless fighter for a strong trans-Atlantic alliance. His significance went well beyond his own country."

McCain was the son and grandson of admirals and followed them to the U.S. Naval Academy. A pilot, he was shot down over Vietnam and held as a prisoner of war for more than five years. He went on to win a seat in the House and in 1986, the Senate, where he served for the rest of his life.

"He had a joy about politics and a love for his country that was unmatched," Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., told CNN's "State of the Union." ''And while he never made it to the presidency, in the Senate, he was the leader that would see a hot spot in the world and just say, we need to go there and stand up for that democracy."

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Kellerman reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Ken Thomas contributed to this report.

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, reacts as he speaks to the media during a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Flags flying a half-staff in honor of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., frame the U.S. Capital at daybreak in Washington, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018. McCain, 81, died at his ranch in Arizona after a yearlong battle with brain cancer. (AP Photo/J. David Ake)

Joe Gruber, of Anthem, Ariz., holds an American flag at an overpass along Interstate 17 as he and dozens of others wait for the procession with the hearse carrying the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, in Anthem, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

FILE - In this Oct. 11, 2008, file photo, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., speaks at a rally in Davenport, Iowa. Arizona Sen. McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, has died. He was 81. His office says McCain died Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018. He had battled brain cancer. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., speaks about Sen. John McCain on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, on Capitol Hill in Washington. McConnell paid tribute to McCain by recalling their own legislative battles while echoing the late senator's belief that there's more that unites than divides Americans. Speaking from the Senate floor, McConnell says that while McCain served the state of Arizona in Congress, "he was America's hero all along." (Senate Television via AP)

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, leaves after a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, reacts as he speaks to the media during a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, reacts as he speaks to the media during a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, and who died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, reacts as he speaks to the media during a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, and who died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Flags frame David Carrasco, a member of the POW-MIA-KIA Honor Guard, as he stands watch in honor of the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain at a local mortuary where McCain is being kept Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, reacts as he speaks to the media during a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, on Aug. 25, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, reacts as he speaks to the media during a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, on Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Members of the POW-MIA-KIA Honor Guard stand watch in honor of the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain at the local mortuary where he is being kept Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, reacts as he speaks to the media during a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, on Aug. 25, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Ted Olsen, of Phoenix, looks to place an American flag at a makeshift memorial in honor of the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain at McCain's office Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Thu-Van Cunningham, of Phoenix, reads messages left by well-wishers as she visits a makeshift memorial in honor of the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain at McCain's office Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

James Olsen, left, of Columbia, S.C., places flowers at a makeshift memorial in honor of the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain as he visits the site with his brother Ted Olsen, right, of Phoenix, at McCain's office on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

People on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange observe a minute of silence to honor Sen. John McCain, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

A wooden spike and an orange traffic cone mark the spot, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018 where Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., will be buried on the grounds of the U. S. Navel Academy in Annapolis, Md. McCain is set to be buried next to his best friend, Adm. Chuck Larson, from his days at the U.S. Naval Academy _ and not in Arlington National Cemetery with his father and grandfather. (AP Photo/Laurie Kellman)

The official placard marking the office of Arizona Sen. John McCain is seen in the Russell building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. McCain, a Vietnam War hero, two-time Republican presidential contender and towering figure in Congress known for his bipartisan deal-making during six terms as an Arizona senator, died Saturday at age 81 of brain cancer. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The official placard marking the office of Arizona Sen. John McCain is seen in the Russell building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. McCain, a Vietnam War hero, two-time Republican presidential contender and towering figure in Congress known for his bipartisan deal-making during six terms as an Arizona senator, died Saturday at age 81 of brain cancer. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

A statue of Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia stands in the rotunda of a Senate office building named after him, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. After the death of Sen. John McCain of Arizona this weekend, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said he will introduce a resolution to rename the Russell Senate Office Building to honor McCain. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)BEIJING (AP) - Faced with plunging U.S. orders, surgical glove maker Ren Jiding is hunting for new markets amid Chinese government calls to reduce reliance on the United States. But none can absorb the 60 percent of his sales that went to American customers last year.

"Other countries import much less than the United States," said Ren, a co-owner of Hongyeshangqin Medical Science and Technology Co., Ltd. in the eastern city of Zibo.

From medical products to smartphone chips to soybeans, Beijing is responding to President Donald Trump's tariff hikes by pushing companies to trade more with other countries. But there are few substitutes for the United States as an export market and source of technology for industries including telecom equipment makers Chinese leaders are eager to develop.

In this Aug. 8, 2018, photo, a worker stands near a container ship at a port in Qingdao in eastern China's Shandong Province. Beijing is responding to U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff hikes by pressing companies to find more non-U.S. suppliers and customers. But there are few substitutes for the United States as a market and technology supplier. (Chinatopix via AP)

Beijing has announced tariff cuts and other changes while rejecting U.S. demands to scale back plans such as "Made in China 2025," which calls for state-led creation of Chinese champions in robotics, biotech and other fields. American leaders say those violate Beijing's market-opening promises and might erode U.S. industrial leadership.

The response highlights the cost the ruling Communist Party is willing to pay in lost sales and jobs to stick to plans that are fueling conflict with Washington, Europe and other trading partners.

"China sees its technology and industrial policies as fundamental to its growth," Tianjie He of Oxford Economics said in an email. "It is thus hard to see China's leadership committing to significant changes."

Trump has raised duties on a total of $50 billion of Chinese imports including ultrasound scanners and industrial components that Washington says benefit from improper policies. China retaliated with similar penalties.

The U.S. is poised to raise duties on $200 billion of imports including the gloves made by Ren's company. Beijing has issued a list of American goods for retaliation.

The impact on China is "small and is containable, at least for the time being," said Vincent Chan of Credit Suisse. He said the "worst case" outlook if all threatened U.S. tariff hikes go ahead would cut China's growth by 0.2 percentage points this year and 1.3 percent in 2019.

Chinese leaders have tried to cushion the blow to their own economy by targeting American goods its importers can get from other countries - soybeans from Brazil, gas from Russia, cars from Germany and fish from Vietnam.

Beijing has promised to use revenue from the higher tariffs to help struggling exporters and has ordered banks to lend more freely to them.

The biggest jolt so far came from Beijing's cancellation of orders for soybeans, the biggest American export to China at $21 billion last year. That hammered farm states that voted for Trump in the 2016 election. It also pushed up prices for Chinese farmers that use soybeans for animal feed and food processors that crush them for cooking oil.

That could be a windfall for Brazil. But China already is its top market and consumes two-thirds of the global supply. Chinese total imports last year of 95 million metric tons were 50 percent more than the South American giant's entire exports.

"The Chinese can talk all they want about finding other sources of soybeans," but 80 percent come from the United States, Brazil and Argentina, said Michael Cordonnier, president of Soybean & Corn Advisor, Inc., a U.S. research firm.

"If you want to import soybeans, it generally must be from one of those three countries," said Cordonnier in an email.

Regulators also cut import duties on automobiles on July 1 but raised them on vehicles from the United States. That helps luxury brands that import from Germany and Japan.

Replacing markets for Chinese exporters that support tens of millions of jobs will be harder.

The United States bought $430 billion of China's exports last year, or 20 percent of the $2.2 trillion total. The No. 2 market was the 28-nation European Union at $370 billion.

"We can't afford to lose the U.S. market," said David Hu, general manager of Sinohood Bags Factory Ltd. in the southeastern city of Yiwu.

Americans bought 40 percent of his canvas tote bags last year, including the most profitable customized versions with Christmas and other designs.

"What we export to Europe is lower-end products with lower prices," said Hu. "We could explore the Indian, Vietnamese or Philippine markets. But the prices they offer would be too low."

Chinese officials point to potential markets in the "Belt and Road," a multibillion-dollar initiative led by President Xi Jinping to boost trade by building ports, railways and other infrastructure across Asia to Europe.

That has brought a flood of contracts to Chinese state-owned builders but complaints about costs have hurt its appeal. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia announced this month the cancellation of plans for Chinese-built projects including a $20 billion rail line.

"There is potential for development in areas such as central Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and South America. But their problems are development imbalance and economic instability," said Li Yong, a senior fellow at the China Association of International Trade, an industry group.

Local officials have met with exporters to exhort them to "diversify markets," according to the state press.

Authorities in the central city of Jingzhou visited exporters to help with customs forms, financing and other details, the website China Industry and Commerce News said.

Ren, the surgical glove maker, said his 300-employee company was looking at Europe and developing countries but demand was sluggish.

Some companies are confident of keeping their U.S. market share. That reflects the possible success of official efforts to develop higher-tech goods instead of competing on price alone.

The general manager of Yihua Electronic Equipment Co. in southern China's Guangdong said the tariffs should not affect sales of its digital soldering guns, one fifth of which are sold to the United States.

"With the 25 percent tariffs, ours still are cheaper than similar German- or Japanese-made products," said the manager, who would give only his surname, Gou. "We are not producing something like shoes and clothing that could be easily replaced."

Trump's pressure is likely to backfire by encouraging Beijing to throw even more resources at nurturing its own technology creators.

China's search for non-U.S. suppliers could help companies such as Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek Inc. But redesigning a phone or network gear and then gaining regulatory and customer approval can take a minimum of three to five years.

"For now," said He of Oxford Economics, "China remains technologically dependent on the U.S."

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AP researcher Yu Bing contributed to this report.BEIJING (AP) - A look at recent developments in the South China Sea, where China is pitted against smaller neighbors in multiple disputes over islands, coral reefs and lagoons in waters crucial for global commerce and rich in fish and potential oil and gas reserves:

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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a weekly look at the latest developments in the South China Sea, the location of several territorial conflicts that have raised tensions in the region.

FILE - In this Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, file photo, a Taiwan Coast Guard ship, left, and cargo ship take part in a search-and-rescue exercise off of Taiping island in the South China Sea as part of Taiwan's efforts to cement its claim to a key island in the strategically vital waterbody. Taiwan's coast guard said annual live-fire exercises conducted at Taiping island in the Spratly island group were routine and didn't endanger shipping. Neighboring countries were informed in advance of the exercises carried out on last week, the coast guard said. (AP Photo/Johnson Lai, File)

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VIETNAM UPSET AT CHINESE GLOBE

Vietnam's government stated its concerns to Ukraine over plastic globes being sold in the country that showed the Vietnamese province of Quang Ninh as Chinese territory.

The state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper quoted the Ukrainian company that sold the globes as saying they were purchased from Chinese traders in Kharkov, Ukraine's second-largest city. It said Vietnam's embassy in Ukraine had sent letters to the Ukrainian foreign ministry and the company involved and that sales had been discontinued.

The issue was reported in a briefing paper produced by a consultancy run by Carlyle Thayer, an expert on Southeast Asia and emeritus professor at Australia's University of New South Wales.

Quang Ninh borders China and is home to the famed Ha Long Bay scenic area.

China's military seized islands claimed by Vietnam in the Paracels group in a bloody 1974 battle and the two continue to feud over the chain and other South China Sea territories.

In May, Vietnamese anger was sparked by a group of Chinese tourists who arrived in the country wearing T-shirts featuring the so-called "nine-dash line" demarcating Beijing South China Sea claims, many of which overlap with Vietnam's own.

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TAIWAN REASSURES OVER DRILLS

Taiwan's coast guard said annual live-fire exercises conducted at Taiping island in the Spratly island group were routine and didn't endanger shipping.

Neighboring countries were informed in advance of the exercises carried out on last week, the coast guard said.

Taiping island, also known internationally as Itu Aba, is Taiwan's sole possession in the highly contested Spratly chain. It is the largest naturally occurring islet in the group but has been dwarfed by China's construction in the area of seven man-made islands atop coral reefs equipped with airstrips and other military infrastructure.

China, the Philippines and Vietnam also claim Taiping, and Vietnamese foreign ministry spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Tra last week had said her country "resolutely opposed" the drill. Tra said the exercises violated Vietnam's sovereignty and posed a threat to navigation and aviation security in the region, Vietnam's official news agency reported.

Taiwan's formal claim to virtually the entire South China Sea mirrors that of China's, but it has limited its activities to Taiping and the Pratas group to the north.

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PHILIPPINES CONCERNED ABOUT DEPLOYMENTS

The Philippines says it is concerned about possible Chinese nuclear deployments in the South China Sea following the issuing of a Pentagon report warning Beijing could use nuclear energy to provide power to man-made islands.

Presidential spokesman Harry Roque said last week that Manila was "concerned about the entry of any and all nuclear weapons into the Philippine territory because our constitution provides that we are a nuclear-free zone."

Roque also cited an Association of Southeast Asian Nations treaty designating the entire region a nuclear-free zone.

"We are concerned about the possibility that any foreign power, be it American, Russian, Chinese may bring nuclear warheads into our territory and into ASEAN," Roque said.

In its 2018 annual report to Congress on military and security developments involving China, the Pentagon said China's plans to use floating nuclear power plants to power its islands "may add a nuclear element to the territorial dispute.

"In 2017, China indicated development plans may be underway to power islands and reefs in the typhoon-prone South China Sea with floating nuclear power stations; development reportedly is to begin prior to 2020."

The report said nothing about the possibility of China deploying nuclear weapons in the South China Sea.

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MALAYSIA CANCELS CHINESE PROJECTS

Malaysia has suspended a multibillion-dollar raft of construction projects financed by Chinese loans, possibly stymieing Beijing's drive to strengthen its hold over Southeast Asia's economy.

China has sought to downplay the move announced by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad on the final day of a visit to Beijing on Aug. 20, but it is still seen as a blow to Chinese President Xi Jinping's signature "Belt and Road" initiative.

Mahathir said he was seeking support from China's leaders over Malaysia's situation as it deals with a mass of debt and other economic problems created under previous administrations.

Mahathir is a vocal critic of large-scale investment in his country backed by loans from Beijing and has tested Malaysia's ties with China by suspending Chinese-financed infrastructure projects. The suspended projects comprise a Chinese-backed $20 billion East Coast Rail Link and two energy pipelines worth $2.3 billion.

Malaysia has claims to territory in the South China Sea that overlap with those of China, but under Mahathir's predecessors, took a low-key approach to asserting those in deference to strongly positive ties with Beijing.

Mahathir is seen as possibly taking a firmer approach.

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Associated Press writer Tran Van Minh contributed to this report from Hanoi, Vietnam.

FILE - In this Wednesday, March 23, 2016, file photo, provided by Taiwan's Ministry of Defense, shows an aerial view of Taiwan's Taiping island, also known as Itu Aba, in the Spratly archipelago, roughly 1600 kms. (1000 miles) south of Taiwan. Taiwan's coast guard said annual live-fire exercises conducted at Taiping island in the Spratly island group were routine and didn't endanger shipping. Neighboring countries were informed in advance of the exercises carried out on last week, the coast guard said. (Taiwan's Ministry of Defense via AP)BANGKOK (AP) - Thai authorities this week are expected to step up their investigation of a financial scam involving the alleged theft of about $25 million worth of bitcoins from a Finnish investor who police say was bilked with promises of high returns from investments in a casino in Macau and in another cryptocurrency.

The case, which surfaced with the arrest in a shopping mall parking lot of a young soap opera actor suspected of colluding with his sister and brother, has prompted Thailand's central bank to warn investors against bitcoin-related scams, underscoring the challenge for regulators trying to keep up with fast-growing cryptocurrency markets.

Police have issued arrest warrants for several other people, including actor Jiratpisit Jaravijit's elder brother, Parinya Jaravijit, who has left the country. Police have indicated they will question more suspects this week. On Monday, they questioned the siblings' parents about money they had received in their bank accounts suspected of having come from the alleged scam. Jiratpisit turned himself in Monday to formally hear fraud charges.

In this Aug. 10, 2018, photo, actor Jiratpisit Jaravijit, center, is escorted by Thai police officers to leave the Crimes Suppression Division in Bangkok, Thailand. Thai authorities are expected to step up their investigation of a financial scam involving the alleged theft of about $25 million worth of bitcoins from a Finnish investor who police say was bilked with promises of high returns from investments in a casino in Macau and in another cryptocurrency. The case, which surfaced with the arrest in a shopping mall parking lot of a young soap opera actor suspected of colluding with his sister and brother, has prompted Thailand's central bank to warn investors against risks of bitcoin-related scams, underscoring the challenge for regulators trying to keep up with the fast-growing cryptocurrency markets. (AP Photo/Khanathit Srihirundaj)

Court documents say the siblings and others are suspected of conspiring to commit fraud and engage in money laundering with 5,564.4 bitcoins - worth roughly $25 million at the time - obtained from 22-year-old Finnish investor Aarni Otava Saarimaa.

The police arrest warrant says Saarimaa and a Thai business partner, Chonnikarn Kaewsalee, filed a complaint in January over having not received any return on the promised investment.

Saarimaa did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

According to court documents cited by Thai newspapers, Parinya Jaravijit and an associate convinced Saarimaa and his partner to transfer their bitcoins to an e-wallet of one of the suspects on several occasions, promising the funds would be invested in a company called Expay Software Co. and in a new cryptocurrency called Dragon Coin. The documents say that the three, along with a prominent local stock investor, were supposed to have formed a partnership.

Instead, the bitcoins were cashed into Thai baht and deposited into 51 bank accounts belonging to seven people, with some of the money used by the Jaravijits to buy land in and near Bangkok, the court documents say.

Police and financial documents showed that in some cases Saarimaa did gain ownership of shares in those companies. But he complained to police that he did not obtain the investments or returns promised to him. The status of the promised investments in Dragon Coin - cryptocurrency to be used at the casino in Macau - remains unclear.

The Thai government has stepped up efforts this year to control the largely unregulated field of digital currency.

In March, it enacted a decree aimed at imposing controls and stipulating rules on taxation of bitcoin transactions. But experts say there are loopholes and it's been loosely enforced.

Anti-money laundering officials say bitcoin are attractive for scams because encrypted transactions can be hard to trace, although officials have emphasized that this case did not involve that kind of cybercrime.

"In every investment, it's very important to understand what type of asset you are investing in and what types of risks are associated with that asset," Veerathai Santiprahhob, Thailand's central bank governor, told reporters after the case became public. "It's crucial that anyone who wants to invest in high-risk assets such as digital currencies and bitcoin educate themselves and fully understand it."KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - A U.S. strike over the weekend killed a senior Islamic State commander in eastern Afghanistan, Afghan and U.S. officials said Monday.

The strike in Nangarhar province killed Abu Sayeed Orakzai, a senior leader in the extremist group, according to Shah Hussain Martazawi, deputy spokesman for the Afghan presidency. He said the operation showed the government's "determination to fight terrorism."

Lt. Col. Martin O'Donnell, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said American forces launched a counterterrorism strike in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday that targeted a "senior leader of a designated terrorist organization." He did not provide further details.

"These efforts target the real enemies of Afghanistan, the same enemies who threaten America," he said.

Orakzai, who also known as Abu Saad Erhabi, was the head of the Islamic State group in Afghanistan, according to a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters. Erhabi was killed alongside nine other members of the militant group in the attack, the official said.

An IS affiliate that emerged in Afghanistan in 2014 has carried out scores of attacks targeting security forces and the country's Shiite minority. Even with U.S. and NATO support, Afghan security forces have struggled to combat IS and the more well-established Taliban.

Separately in northern Faryab province, three Afghan army soldiers were killed and five others wounded after their convoy was ambushed by Taliban insurgents, said Hanif Rezaie, an army spokesman for the country's north.

Several army vehicles were damaged in the attack and dozens of insurgents were killed during air strikes conducted by the army, Rezaie said. He added that an army unit has been deployed to Qaisar district to prevent further Taliban attacks on Faryab province.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack. He said that in addition to "killing and wounding tens of troops" and setting several military vehicles on fire, their fighters also seized munitions from the army convoy.

Less than two weeks ago the Taliban attacked the Camp Chinaya army base in Ghormach district. Spokesman for the Defense Ministry Ghafoor Ahmad Jawed confirmed at the time that 17 troops were killed and at least 19 others wounded.

The Taliban had besieged the base, which housed about 140 Afghan troops, for three days before their assault, according to the local provincial council chief, Mohammad Tahir Rahmani.

Taliban spokesman Mujahid claimed responsibility for that attack.

Also Monday, two military pilots were shot and killed by unknown gunmen in the capital Kabul, according Mohammad Radmanish, deputy spokesman for the Defense Ministry.

The attackers were able to flee and an investigation is underway, added Radmanish.THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - The main suspect in the slaying of an 11-year-old Dutch boy 20 years ago has agreed to be extradited from Spain to The Netherlands, where he is being sought for murder and sexual aggression, among other charges, Spanish authorities said Monday.

National Court Judge Carmen Lamela issued a ruling Monday sending 55-year-old Jos Brech to prison without bail until the Spanish government gives the final approval for his extradition. Police in Spain distributed photos showing Brech's arrest Sunday in a rural area near Barcelona.

Dutch police had said the arrest was possible after Brech's DNA matched samples taken from the clothes of the slain boy, Nicky Verstappen.

In this image released by the Spanish National Police on Monday Aug. 27, 2018, alleged suspect Jos Brech is detained by Spanish police officers in the countryside of the province of Barcelona, north-eastern Spain. Dutch police say a suspect in the slaying 20 years ago of an 11-year-old boy has been detained in Spain following an appeal to the public for help tracking him down. Police say in a written statement that the suspect, 55-year-old Jos Brech, was detained Sunday afternoon and is being held pending his transfer to the Netherlands. (Spanish National Police via AP)

Brech, who police have described as an outdoor survival expert, was an instructor at the summer camp in The Netherlands where Verstappen went missing in 1998. About a day after the boy's disappearance, Brech was stopped by military police close to the scene but was not considered a suspect.

Family members in the Netherlands reported Brech missing in April.

Lamela says Brech had been in Spain since March. In her ruling, the judge said the charges Brech faces can be punished with up to 30 years behind bars.HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - Sen. John McCain's Vietnamese jailer said he respected his former inmate and felt sad about his death, as others in Vietnam paid their respects to the former U.S. Navy pilot who became a prisoner of war and later was instrumental in bringing the wartime foes together.

McCain's Skyhawk dive bomber was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and he was taken prisoner and held in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison for more than five years.

Former Col. Tran Trong Duyet, who ran the prison at the time, said he met with McCain many times while he was confined there.

Pham Van Khanh, a 62-year-old retiree, lays flowers at the monument of Senator John McCain in Hanoi, Vietnam, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. The monument was erected by Vietnamese authority to mark the day when McCain's plane, a Major in the U.S. Navy was shot down in 1967. Vietnam has been paying respect to McCain who died on Saturday. (AP Photo/Tran Van Minh)

"At that time I liked him personally for his toughness and strong stance," he told the newspaper Vietnam News, published by the official Vietnam News Agency.

"Later on when he became a U.S. senator, he and Sen. John Kerry greatly contributed to promote Vietnam-U.S. relations so I was very fond of him," Vietnam News quoted Duyet as saying Sunday.

"When I learnt about his death early this morning, I feel very sad. I would like to send condolences to his family. I think it's the same feeling for all Vietnamese people as he has greatly contributed to the development of Vietnam-U.S. relations," Duyet was quoted as saying.

Duyet could not be reached for comment on Monday. McCain died of brain cancer on Saturday at age 81 in his home state of Arizona.

Meanwhile, scores of people in Hanoi paid their respects to McCain at the U.S. Embassy and at a monument by Truc Bach lake, where he landed after parachuting from his damaged plane.

Speaking to reporters after writing in a book of condolences, U.S. Ambassador Daniel Kritenbrink said McCain was "a great leader and real hero" who helped normalize relations between the former enemies.

"He was a warrior, he was also a peacemaker and of course he fought and suffered during the Vietnam War, but then later as a senator, he was one of the leaders who helped bring our countries back together and helped the United States and Vietnam normalize our relationship and now become partners and friends," Kritenbrink said.

McCain and former Sen. Kerry played important roles in the normalization of bilateral relations in 1995.

The Vietnam News Agency said Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan sent messages of condolence to McCain's family and U.S. Senate leaders, while Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh paid respects to McCain at the embassy.

Pham Gia Minh, a 62-year-old businessman who signed the condolence book at the embassy, said he witnessed Vietnamese civilians being killed by the U.S bombings of North Vietnam, including the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972, but he admired McCain for overcoming the difficult past to build better ties between the two countries.

"War is losses and suffering," he told the AP. "But the will of a brave nation is to go beyond that to look to the future. The Vietnamese people have that will and Mr. John McCain has that will. ... We both have that will to overcome the painful past, overcome the misunderstanding to together build a brighter future."

Hoang Thi Hang, a Hanoi resident who also signed the condolence book, said he had great respect for McCain's compassion. "He had compassion for everyone, whether they were rich or poor, whatever their background. And that is important in life."

The U.S. Embassy announced it will launch a McCain/Kerry Fellowship in which a young Vietnamese leader committed to public service will be chosen each year to travel to the U.S. on a study tour to deepen ties between the two peoples.

A woman pays respect at the monument of the late U.S. Senator John McCain in Hanoi, Vietnam, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. The monument was erected by Vietnamese authority to mark the day when McCain's plane, a Major in the U.S. Navy was shot down in 1967. Vietnam has been paying respect to McCain who died on Saturday. (AP Photo/Tran Van Minh)

U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Daniel Kritenbrink writes a note in a book of condolences for the late U.S. Senator John McCain in Hanoi, Vietnam, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. Vietnam has been paying respect to McCain who died on Saturday. (AP Photo/Tran Van Minh)

Pham Minh Chuc, an 81-year-old retiree, writes a book of condolences for Senator John McCain in Hanoi, Vietnam, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. People in Vietnam are paying their respects to U.S. Sen. John McCain who was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and later was instrumental in bringing the wartime foes together. McCain died on Saturday. (AP Photo/Tran Van Minh)FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - The trade cease-fire between the European Union and U.S. President Donald Trump boosted optimism among German business executives heavily dependent on trade for their profits, a closely watched economic index showed Monday.

The Ifo institute index rose to 103.8 points from 101.7 in July. The result was better than the 101.8 expected by market analysts.

Ifo President Clemens Fuest said Monday that "aside from a strong domestic economy the cease-fire in the trade conflict with the U.S. contributed to the better mood."

Trump had threatened to impose new tariffs, or import taxes, including on new cars and car parts. That raised fears of a cycle of retaliation that could hurt trade and growth. But Trump agreed to hold off after talks with European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker.

Germany, Europe's largest economy, gets much of its growth from exports. Its strength is one reason the European Central Bank remains confident it can end its bond-purchase stimulus program at the end of the year. The monetary stimulus involves the central bank for the 19 countries that use the euro purchasing government and corporate bonds from banks with newly printed money, a step which is aimed at increasing credit, growth and inflation.

Fuest said in a statement that the August reading was consistent with third-quarter growth of 0.5 percent quarter on quarter. That would match the 0.5 percent figure from the first quarter.CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - The first asylum seeker boat has reached Australia in more than four years, a government minister said Monday, as new concerns were raised about the psychological state of children who arrived earlier and were banished by the government.

Australia has virtually stopped such boat arrivals by using the navy to turn them back and sending asylum seekers who arrive by ship to immigration camps on the poor Pacific island nations of Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

But a group of people recently arrived in northeast Australia on a fishing boat from Vietnam, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said.

"We will work with the agencies to make sure we can repatriate these people back to their country of origin, once we understand the facts of the matter," Dutton told reporters.

Vietnamese asylum seekers have been accepted by Australia as legitimate refugees in the past. But Vietnamese have also been intercepted at sea by Australian authorities, had their refugee claims rejected at sea and been sent back to their homeland.

Dutton blamed a failure of surveillance for the boat reaching Cape Kimberley in the World Heritage-listed Daintree Rainforest north of Cairns in Queensland state.

Queensland Police Minister Mark Ryan said 15 asylum seekers had been detained and authorities were searching for others from the Vietnamese boat, which was reported on Sunday.

A previous government announced on July 19, 2013, that any asylum seeker who arrived by boat would not be allowed to settle in Australia. Single men were sent to Papua New Guinea and others were sent to Nauru. The boats, mostly from Indonesian ports, were at the time arriving at a rate of more than one a day carrying asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The United States has agreed to accept up to 1,250 of the refugees.

Asylum seeker children on Nauru are now deliberately harming themselves and researching ways to die, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported on Monday.

Leaked documents compiled by immigration department workers and obtained by the ABC reveal a spate of self-harm incidents on the island.

One report from June said a 14-year-old refugee poured gasoline over herself and had a lighter.

Another report from June showed a 10-year-old refugee attempted self-harm by ingesting some sharp metal objects similar to fencing wire.

Former child psychologist Vernon Reynolds, who was employed on the island by the Australian government's health care contractor from August 2016 to April 2018 said he was concerned that some refugee children would die.

"I'm reasonably surprised that no one has," he told the ABC.

Reynolds said the children were exhibiting signs of severe trauma.

"They stop eating much, they stop drinking much, they stop looking after the day-to-day self-care," she said.

The Department of Home Affairs said Australia gives significant support to Nauru to provide health and welfare services, with various providers contracted to offer age-appropriate care.

The last asylum seekers to reach Australia by boat were 157 Sri Lankans. They were aboard an Indian-flagged ship from the southeast port of Pondicherry when they were intercepted by an Australian customs vessel in late June 2014 and were brought to Australia.

___

This story has been corrected to fix gender from "she" to "he" in 14-15th paragraphs.LONDON (AP) - The Russian hackers indicted by the U.S. special prosecutor last month have spent years trying to steal the private correspondence of some of the world's most senior Orthodox Christian figures, The Associated Press has found, illustrating the high stakes as Kiev and Moscow wrestle over the religious future of Ukraine.

The targets included top aides to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who often is described as the first among equals of the world's Eastern Orthodox Christian leaders.

The Istanbul-based patriarch is currently mulling whether to accept a Ukrainian bid to tear that country's church from its association with Russia, a potential split fueled by the armed conflict between Ukrainian military forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

FILE - In this May 4, 2004 file photo, a full moon rises above the golden domes of the Orthodox Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, Ukraine. Ukraine is lobbying hard for a religious divorce from Russia and some observers say the issue could be decided as soon as September 2018. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

The AP's evidence comes from a hit list of 4,700 email addresses supplied last year by Secureworks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies.

The AP has been mining the data for months, uncovering how a group of Russian hackers widely known as Fancy Bear tried to break into the emails of U.S. Democrats , defense contractors , intelligence workers , international journalists and even American military wives . In July, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, a U.S. grand jury identified 12 Russian intelligence agents as being behind the group's hack-and-leak assault against Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

The targeting of high-profile religious figures demonstrates the wide net cast by the cyberspies.

Patriarch Bartholomew claims the exclusive right to grant a "Tomos of Autocephaly," or full ecclesiastic independence, sought by the Ukrainians. It would be a momentous step, splitting the world's largest Eastern Orthodox denomination and severely eroding the power and prestige of the Moscow Patriarchate, which has positioned itself as a leading player within the global Orthodox community.

Ukraine is lobbying hard for a religious divorce from Russia and some observers say the issue could be decided as soon as next month.

"If something like this will take place on their doorstep, it would be a huge blow to the claims of Moscow's transnational role," said Vasilios Makrides, a specialist in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Erfurt in Germany. "It's something I don't think they will accept."

The Kremlin is scrambling to help Moscow's Patriarch Kirill retain his traditional role as the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and "the more they know, the better it is for them," Makrides said.

The Russian Orthodox Church said it had no information about the hacking and declined comment. Russian officials referred the AP to previous denials by the Kremlin that it has anything to do with Fancy Bear, despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko flew to Istanbul in April in an effort to convince the patriarch to agree to a split, which he has described as "a matter of our independence and our national security." Moscow's Patriarch Kirill is flying to Turkey later this week in a last-ditch bid to prevent it.

Hilarion Alfeyev, Kirill's representative abroad, has warned that granting the Tomos could lead to the biggest Christian schism since 1054, when Catholic and Orthodox believers parted ways.

"If such a thing happens, Orthodox unity will be buried," Alfeyev said.

The issue is an extraordinarily sensitive one for the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Reached by phone, spokesman Nikos-Giorgos Papachristou said: "I don't want to be a part of this story."

Other church officials spoke to the AP about the hacking on condition of anonymity, saying they did not have authorization to speak to the media.

Bartholomew, who is 78, does not use email, those church officials told AP. But his aides do, and the Secureworks list spells out several attempts to crack their Gmail accounts.

Among them were several senior church officials called metropolitans, who are roughly equivalent to archbishops in the Catholic tradition. Those include Bartholomew Samaras, a key confidante of the patriarch; Emmanuel Adamakis, an influential hierarch in the church; and Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, who heads a prestigious seminary on the Turkish island of Halki. All are involved in the Tomos issue; none returned recent AP messages seeking comment.

___

Spy games have long been a part of the Russian Orthodox world.

The Soviet Union slaughtered tens of thousands of priests in the 1930s, but the Communists later took what survived of the church and brought it under the sway of Russia's secret police, the KGB, with clerics conscripted to spy on congregants and emigres.

The nexus between Russia's intelligence and religious establishments survived the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and the KGB's reorganization into the FSB, according to Moscow-based political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin.

"Our church leaders are connected to the FSB and their epaulettes stick out from under their habits," Oreshkin said. "They provide Vladimir Putin's policy with an ideological foundation."

That might make one target found by the AP seem curious: The Moscow Patriarch's press secretary, Alexander Volkov.

But Orthodox theologian Cyril Hovorun said he wouldn't be surprised to see a Russian group spying on targets close to home, saying, "they're probably checking him out just in case."

Volkov did not return AP emails seeking comment.

Hovorun is unusually qualified to speak on the issue. In 2012 he - like Volkov - was an official within the Moscow Patriarchate. But he resigned after someone leaked emails showing that he secretly supported independence-leaning Ukrainian clergy.

Hovorun has since been targeted by the Russian hackers, according to the data from Secureworks, which uses the name Iron Twilight to refer to the group.

Hovorun said he believes that those who published his emails six years ago weren't related to Fancy Bear, but he noted that their modus operandi - stealing messages and then publishing them selectively - was the same.

"We've known about this tactic before the hacking of the Democrats," Hovorun said, referring to the email disclosures that rocked America's 2016 presidential campaign. "This is a familiar story for us."

The Russian hackers' religious dragnet also extended to the United States and went beyond Orthodox Christians, taking in Muslims, Jews and Catholics whose activities might conceivably be of interest to the Russian government.

John Jillions, the chancellor of the Orthodox Church in America, provided the AP with a June 19, 2015, phishing email that Secureworks later confirmed was sent to him by Fancy Bear.

Fancy Bear also went after Ummah, an umbrella group for Ukrainian Muslims; the papal nuncio in Kiev; and an account associated with the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, a Byzantine rite church that accepts the authority of the Vatican, the Secureworks data shows.

Also on the hit list: Yosyp Zisels, who directs Ukraine's Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities and has frequently been quoted defending his country from charges of anti-Semitism. Zisels said he had no knowledge of the attempted hacking. Vatican officials did not return messages.

Protestants were targeted too, including three prominent Quakers operating in the Moscow area.

Hovorun said Protestants were viewed with particularly intense suspicion by the Kremlin.

"There is an opinion shared by many in the Russian establishment that all those religious groups - like Quakers, evangelicals - they are connected to the American establishment," he said.

___

Secureworks' data shows hacking attempts on religious targets that took place in 2015 and 2016, but other material obtained by the AP suggests attempts to compromise the Ecumenical Patriarchate are ongoing.

On Oct. 16, 2017, an email purporting to come from Papachristou, who was just being appointed as spokesman, arrived in the inboxes of about a dozen Orthodox figures.

"Dear Hierarchs, Fathers, Brothers and Sisters in Christ!" it began, explaining that Papachristou was stepping into his new role as director of communications. "It's a very big joy for me to serve the Church on this position. Some suggestions on how to build up relations with the public and the press are provided in the file attached."

The file was rigged to install surveillance software on the recipients' computers.

The email's actual sender remains a mystery - independent analyses of the malicious message by Secureworks and its competitor CrowdStrike yielded nothing definitive.

Church officials told the AP they were disturbed by the hacker's command of church jargon and their inside knowledge of Papachristou's appointment.

"The one who made this is someone who knows us," one official said.

Priests and prelates don't make obvious targets for cyberespionage, but the stakes for the Kremlin are high as the decision on Tomos looms.

Granting the Ukrainian church full independence "would be that devastating to Russia," said Daniel Payne, a researcher on the board of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University in Texas.

"Kiev is Jerusalem for the Russian Orthodox people," Payne said. "That's where the sacred relics, monasteries, churches are ... it's sacred to the people, and to Russian identity."

___

Francesca Ebel and Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow contributed to this report.

_

The October, 2017 malicious email:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4784794-Papachristou-Email.html

___

Online:

Raphael Satter can be reached at: http://raphaelsatter.com

FILE - In this Saturday, July 28, 2018 file photo, Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill, left, leads a religious service as Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa Theodoros II, second right, attend a ceremony marking the 1,030th anniversary of the adoption of Christianity by Prince Vladimir, the leader of Kievan Rus. The loose federation of Slavic tribes preceded the Russian state. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - In this early Sunday, April 16, 2017 file photo, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, leads the Easter Resurrection Service at the Patriarchal Cathedral of St. George in Istanbul, Turkey. The Russian hackers indicted by the U.S. special prosecutor in July 2018 have spent years trying to steal the private correspondence of some of the world's most senior Christian Orthodox figures, including top aides to Bartholomew, The Associated Press has found, illustrating the high stakes as Kiev and Moscow wrestle over the religious future of Ukraine. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File)

This image shows a portion of an October 2017 email made to look like it was written by Ecumenical Orthodox Church spokesman Nikos-Giorgos Papachristou. The email was booby trapped, suggesting that attempts to digitally compromise the Ecumenical Patriarchate are ongoing. Parts have been redacted to protect sensitive information. (AP Photo)

FILE - In this April 9, 2018 file photo, Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I, right, speaks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Istanbul, Turkey. Poroshenko visited in an effort to convince the patriarch to agree to a split, which he has described as "a matter of our independence and our national security." Moscow's Patriarch Kirill is planning to fly to Turkey in late August 2018 in a last-ditch bid to prevent it. (Mikhail Palinchak/Presidential Press Service Pool Photo via AP, File)

This image shows a portion of a June 2015 phishing email sent to John Jillions, the chancellor of the Orthodox Church in America. Although designed to look like it came from Google, an examination of the email using data supplied by the cybersecurity firm Secureworks shows that it was sent by the group of hackers indicted in July 2018 by the United States. Parts have been redacted to protect sensitive information. (AP Photo)

FILE - In this Sunday, April 8, 2018 file photo, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest blesses worshippers as they collect traditional cakes and painted eggs for an Easter celebration at the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, in Kiev, Ukraine. Ukraine is lobbying hard for a religious divorce from Russia and some observers say the issue could be decided as soon as September 2018. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

FILE - In this Friday, Aug. 3, 2018 file photo, a woman walks toward the Russian Orthodox Church headquarters in the St. Daniel Monastery in Moscow, Russia. The Kremlin is scrambling to help Moscow's Patriarch Kirill retain his traditional role as the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and "the more they know, the better it is for them," says Vasilios Makrides, a specialist in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Erfurt in Germany. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin, File)DURRES, Albania (AP) - Prime ministers of the Western Balkan countries on Monday pledged at an informal meeting in Albania to speed up efforts to create a joint economic zone ahead of their integration into the European Union.

The main topic of the one-day meeting in the western port city of Durres is "regional economic integration," including discussions about developing a joint vision for aligning with the European Union, the implementation of a regional economic zone and other issues.

Host Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama hailed "a different level of political will and cooperation in the region," adding "that is not accompanied with the same level of economic cooperation."

Kosovo Prime Minister Raush Haradinaj, left, speaks with EU Ambassador to Tirana Romana Vlahutin, second left, EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn, center, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, and Albanian Foreign Minister Ditmir Bushati, right, at the Albanian western port city of Durres, 33 kilometers (20 miles) from the capital Tirana, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. Prime ministers of the Western Balkan countries have gathered at an informal meeting at the Albanian western port city of Durres to discuss regional issues. (AP Photo/Hektor Pustina)

EU enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn, who was present at the meeting, said that "It is important to promote the region as a brand for tourism, agriculture, further improvement in the energy sector where there is unexploited potential."

Prime ministers of Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina did not come, sending senior officials instead.

Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev was forced to cancel his trip "because of poor weather conditions," according to the government's spokesman.

Suma Chakrabarti, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, pledged to intensify investment in the region.

The bank will hold a summit on the Western Balkans in Sarajevo, Bosnia in May next year.

Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina are at different stages in the process of joining the EU.

A similar meeting was held last year at the same place.

-----

Semini contributed from Tirana; Konstantin Testorides from Skopje, Macedonia.

-----

Follow Semini on twitter: https://twitter.com/lsemini

Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama, right, welcomes the arrival of his Montenegro counterpart Dusko Markovic at the Albanian western port city of Durres, 33 kilometers (20 miles) from the capital Tirana, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. Prime ministers of the Western Balkan countries have gathered at an informal meeting at the Albanian western port city of Durres to discuss regional issues. (AP Photo/Hektor Pustina)LONDON (AP) - Even men and women of the cloth aren't safe from 21st-century cyberspies.

The Associated Press has found that the same hackers charged with intervening in the 2016 U.S. presidential election also spent years trying to eavesdrop on Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, often described as the first among equals of the world's Eastern Orthodox Christian leaders.

The spying illustrates the high stakes as Kiev and Moscow wrestle over the religious future of Ukraine, where many are trying to tear that country's church away from its association with Russia. It would be a religious split fueled by harsh on-the-ground realities: Fighting between Ukrainian military forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine has claimed more than 10,000 lives since 2014.

FILE - In this early Sunday, April 16, 2017 file photo, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, leads the Easter Resurrection Service at the Patriarchal Cathedral of St. George in Istanbul, Turkey. The Russian hackers indicted by the U.S. special prosecutor in July 2018 have spent years trying to steal the private correspondence of some of the world's most senior Christian Orthodox figures, including top aides to Bartholomew, The Associated Press has found, illustrating the high stakes as Kiev and Moscow wrestle over the religious future of Ukraine. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File)

Evidence of the espionage comes from a hit list of 4,700 email addresses supplied to the AP last year by Secureworks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies.

The AP has been mining the data for months, uncovering how a group of Russian hackers widely known as Fancy Bear tried to break into the emails of U.S. Democrats , defense contractors , intelligence workers , international journalists and even American military wives . In July, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, a U.S. grand jury identified 12 Russian intelligence agents as being behind the group's hack-and-leak assault against Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

The targeting of religious figures demonstrates the wide net cast by the cyberspies.

Patriarch Bartholomew claims the exclusive right to grant the "Tomos of Autocephaly," or full ecclesiastic independence, sought by the Ukrainians. It would be a momentous step, splitting the world's largest Eastern Orthodox denomination and severely eroding the power and prestige of the Moscow Patriarchate, which has positioned itself as a leading player within the global Orthodox community.

Ukraine is lobbying hard for a religious divorce from Russia and some observers say the issue could be decided as soon as next month.

"It would be a huge blow to the claims of Moscow's transnational role," said Vasilios Makrides, a specialist in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Erfurt in Germany. "It's something I don't think they will accept."

The Russian Orthodox Church said it had no information about the hacking and declined comment. Russian officials referred the AP to previous denials by the Kremlin that it has anything to do with Fancy Bear, despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary.

The issue is an extraordinarily sensitive one for the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Reached by phone, spokesman Nikos-Giorgos Papachristou said: "I don't want to be a part of this story."

Bartholomew, who is 78, does not use email, church officials told AP, speaking on condition of anonymity because they did not have authorization to talk to journalists. But his aides do, and the Secureworks list spells out several attempts to crack their Gmail accounts.

The Russian hackers' religious dragnet also extended to the United States and went beyond Orthodox Christians, taking in Muslims, Jews and Catholics whose activities might conceivably be of interest to the Russian government.

John Jillions, the chancellor of the Orthodox Church in America, provided the AP with a June 19, 2015, phishing email that Secureworks later confirmed was sent to him by Fancy Bear.

Fancy Bear also went after Ummah, an umbrella group for Ukrainian Muslims, the papal nuncio in Kiev and Yosyp Zisels, who directs Ukraine's Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities and has frequently been quoted defending his country from charges of anti-Semitism, the Secureworks data shows.

Material recently obtained by the AP suggests attempts to compromise the Ecumenical Patriarchate are ongoing.

On Oct. 16, 2017, an email purporting to come from Papachristou, who was just being appointed as spokesman, arrived in the inboxes of about a dozen Orthodox figures.

"Dear Hierarchs, Fathers, Brothers and Sisters in Christ!" it began, explaining that Papachristou was stepping into his new role as director of communications. "It's a very big joy for me to serve the Church on this position. Some suggestions on how to build up relations with the public and the press are provided in the file attached."

The file was rigged to install malicious software on the recipients' computers.

Priests and prelates don't make obvious targets for cyberespionage, but the stakes for the Kremlin are high as the decision on Tomos looms.

Granting the Ukrainian church full independence "would be that devastating to Russia," said Daniel Payne, a researcher on the board of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University in Texas.

"Kiev is Jerusalem for the Russian Orthodox people," Payne said. "That's where the sacred relics, monasteries, churches are. ... It's sacred to the people, and to Russian identity."

___

Online:

Raphael Satter can be reached at: http://raphaelsatter.com

FILE - In this Saturday, July 28, 2018 file photo, Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill, left, leads a religious service as Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa Theodoros II, second right, attend a ceremony marking the 1,030th anniversary of the adoption of Christianity by Prince Vladimir, the leader of Kievan Rus. The loose federation of Slavic tribes preceded the Russian state. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

This image shows a portion of an October 2017 email made to look like it was written by Ecumenical Orthodox Church spokesman Nikos-Giorgos Papachristou. The email was booby trapped, suggesting that attempts to digitally compromise the Ecumenical Patriarchate are ongoing. Parts have been redacted to protect sensitive information. (AP Photo)

FILE - In this May 4, 2004 file photo, a full moon rises above the golden domes of the Orthodox Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, Ukraine. Ukraine is lobbying hard for a religious divorce from Russia and some observers say the issue could be decided as soon as September 2018. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

FILE - In this April 9, 2018 file photo, Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I, right, speaks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Istanbul, Turkey. Poroshenko visited in an effort to convince the patriarch to agree to a split, which he has described as "a matter of our independence and our national security." Moscow's Patriarch Kirill is planning to fly to Turkey in late August 2018 in a last-ditch bid to prevent it. (Mikhail Palinchak/Presidential Press Service Pool Photo via AP, File)

This image shows a portion of a June 2015 phishing email sent to John Jillions, the chancellor of the Orthodox Church in America. Although designed to look like it came from Google, an examination of the email using data supplied by the cybersecurity firm Secureworks shows that it was sent by the group of hackers indicted in July 2018 by the United States. Parts have been redacted to protect sensitive information. (AP Photo)

FILE - In this Sunday, April 8, 2018 file photo, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest blesses worshippers as they collect traditional cakes and painted eggs for an Easter celebration at the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, in Kiev, Ukraine. Ukraine is lobbying hard for a religious divorce from Russia and some observers say the issue could be decided as soon as September 2018. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

FILE - In this Friday, Aug. 3, 2018 file photo, a woman walks toward the Russian Orthodox Church headquarters in the St. Daniel Monastery in Moscow, Russia. The Kremlin is scrambling to help Moscow's Patriarch Kirill retain his traditional role as the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and "the more they know, the better it is for them," says Vasilios Makrides, a specialist in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Erfurt in Germany. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin, File)LONDON (AP) - As Kiev and Moscow clash on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, a new front has opened up in the religious sphere.

Earlier this year Ukrainian's president launched a campaign to persuade Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, seen by many as the first among equals of Eastern Orthodox leaders, to grant Ukrainian clerics full ecclesiastical independence from the Russian Orthodox Church to which they have been tied for hundreds of years.

Ukrainian politicians see such a declaration, known as a "Tomos of Autocephaly," as a key step in consolidating their country's national identity. Russian religious leaders see it as an attack on Christian Orthodox unity and are fighting to stop it.

FILE - In this Sunday, April 8, 2018 file photo, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest blesses worshippers as they collect traditional cakes and painted eggs for an Easter celebration at the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, in Kiev, Ukraine. Ukraine is lobbying hard for a religious divorce from Russia and some observers say the issue could be decided as soon as September 2018. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

It's in the midst of this religious tussle that The Associated Press has discovered a Russian digital espionage campaign targeting Bartholomew's top aides.

Here's a look at what autocephaly means, why it's so important and whether it's likely to happen.

___

WHAT'S AT STAKE?

To hear the religious leaders in Moscow tell it, separating the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Russia would spark the worst schism since Orthodox and Catholic Christianity parted ways nearly 1,000 years ago.

"This wrong step can only be compared to the division between East and West in 1054," senior Moscow Patriarchate official Hilarion Alfeyev said earlier this year. "If such a thing happens, Orthodox unity will be buried."

More immediately, the move would dramatically shrink the size and influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Even though Ukraine's population is several times smaller than that of its large Slavic neighbor, it is widely considered the more observant of the two and accounts for something like a third of the Russian Orthodox Church's approximately 35,000 parishes.

Perhaps just as important, the Russian Orthodox Church would lose its link to centuries' worth of tradition tied up in Ukraine's shrines and monasteries - a heavy symbolic blow.

Losing Ukraine "would be humiliating," said Katja Richters, an independent researcher who writes about the Russian Orthodox Church. "The Moscow Patriarchate would lose about 600 years of history."

___

SHOULDN'T EVERY COUNTRY HAVE ITS OWN CHURCH?

That's what many Ukrainians argue.

"When a new state appears, when it becomes stable, it's a normal procedure for the Orthodox church believers to separate their church from the others," said Ukrainian historian Kyrylo Halushko. "This happened a few times in the 20th century: in Bulgaria, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, etc. So it's a very logical step for independence to be given to Ukrainian Orthodox Church."

It may be logical, but it's not simple.

Leaving aside the theological wrangling over who has the authority to declare a church independent, there are important philosophical reasons for keeping the Ukrainian church in communion with its Russian counterpart.

Christians are enjoined to unity (Galatians 3:28 says , in part, "Ye are all one in Christ Jesus.") The global Orthodox community is already fragmented and few leaders relish the prospect of cutting the world's largest Orthodox denomination in two. Even within Ukraine, some Orthodox clergy are leery of a process driven in part by secular politicians and the pressure of armed conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

"Some of them say that it is difficult to have it done in a time of war and military confrontation with Russia," said Thomas Bremer, a professor of Eastern Churches Studies at the Faculty for Catholic Theology of the University of Muenster in Germany. "There is also a group of priests and bishops who would prefer to stay as a self-administering part of the Russian Orthodox Church.'"

The Ecumenical Orthodox Church also faces countervailing pressures. Bartholomew is 78 and some doubt he wants to cloud his legacy with a schism.

"I do not believe that Bartholomew wants to enter church history as the patriarch who has split his Church," said Bremer.

___

WHAT WILL HAPPEN?

Anticipation is building on the Ukrainian side that Bartholomew will take the bold step of issuing a Tomos. Writing earlier this month for the Atlantic Council, an American think tank, Ukrainian commentator Kateryna Kruk said the ecclesiastic divorce "is almost a done deal."

Richters, the independent researcher, urged caution.

"The Ukrainians seem very excited and they seem to think there will be a Tomos on Autocephaly in early September," she said. "They were fairly convinced 10 years ago and it didn't happen then."

Many read a trip by the Moscow patriarch to Istanbul planned for this week as a sign that the Russians are worried.

"This visit is not accidental," said Vasilios Makrides, a professor of religious studies at the University of Erfurt in Germany. "They must be nervous."

It's not clear whether the AP's spying revelations will have any impact on the debate over autocephaly, but Richters said it could heighten emotions that are already running high on both sides.

"(The hacking) would definitely be seen as hostile and tasteless and immoral," she said.

___

Online:

Raphael Satter can be reached at: http://raphaelsatter.com

FILE - In this May 4, 2004 file photo, a full moon rises above the golden domes of the Orthodox Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, Ukraine. Ukraine is lobbying hard for a religious divorce from Russia and some observers say the issue could be decided as soon as September 2018. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

FILE - In this early Sunday, April 16, 2017 file photo, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, leads the Easter Resurrection Service at the Patriarchal Cathedral of St. George in Istanbul, Turkey. The Russian hackers indicted by the U.S. special prosecutor in July 2018 have spent years trying to steal the private correspondence of some of the world's most senior Christian Orthodox figures, including top aides to Bartholomew, The Associated Press has found, illustrating the high stakes as Kiev and Moscow wrestle over the religious future of Ukraine. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File)

FILE - In this Saturday, July 28, 2018 file photo, Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill, left, leads a religious service as Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa Theodoros II, second right, attend a ceremony marking the 1,030th anniversary of the adoption of Christianity by Prince Vladimir, the leader of Kievan Rus. The loose federation of Slavic tribes preceded the Russian state. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - In this Tuesday, May 25, 2010 file photo, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, shields his eyes from the sun as he stands on a roof overlooking the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia. Bartholomew claims the exclusive right to grant the "Tomos of Autocephaly," or full ecclesiastic independence, sought by the Ukrainians. It would be a momentous step, splitting the world's largest Eastern Orthodox denomination and dealing a body blow to the power and prestige of the Moscow Patriarchate, which has positioned itself as leading player within the global Orthodox community. (Dmitry Astakhov/Sputnik Government Pool Photo via AP, File)ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) - Algeria's government is rejecting trade union calls to delay the start of the new school year because of a cholera outbreak that has caused two deaths and infected dozens.

Health Minister Mokhtar Hasbellaoui insisted that "the situation is completely under control."

Speaking after a hospital visit on Sunday, he said the outbreak would be eradicated within days.

He said he understood the concerns of education-sector unions but added that he does not share them and that the school calendar would be respected.

Classes resume on Sept. 5.BANGKOK (AP) - Thai police said Monday that they have formed a committee to investigate a rape allegation made by a British tourist who claims that Thai police refused to file charges on her behalf when she initially reported the crime.

Police Col. Krissana Pattanacharoen, deputy police spokesman, said an independent committee was established on Sunday to investigate claims that police on a Thai resort island had failed to file charges when the tourist reported she had been raped. Krissana said the committee would take seven days to come to a conclusion.

According to a report in the local online newspaper Samui Times, an unidentified 19-year-old British national claimed that she was drugged, robbed and raped on the island of Koh Tao on June 26. The report claimed that Thai police "were happy to make a report of the robbery but refused to take any details of the rape" when the teenager told police on a nearby island what had happened.

Thai officials claim that she never included allegations of rape in her initial report.

"They (police) have already said before that the person filing the charges did not include this (rape) charge," Defense Minister Prawit Wongsuwan said Monday. "They only reported that they lost their belongings, so what can we do? Police have already talked about it. She didn't file charges saying she was assaulted or raped or anything."

Prawit also denied speculation that there were influential people behind the alleged police cover-up. He said "influential people have all been arrested already."

A number of unexplained tourist deaths have taken place in recent years on Koh Tao. The most notorious case of late was of the murders of British nationals Hannah Witheridge and David Miller, who were beaten to death in 2014. That case has been plagued with speculation that the arrested suspects were made scapegoats.MOSCOW (AP) - Security officials in Tajikistan said on Monday that two people have been killed and one injured after men stormed the border from Afghanistan.

Tajik Border Guards said in a statement that they are looking for a group of 10 to 12 armed men who crossed the Panj River separating the country from Afghanistan on Sunday. The men, armed with a hand-held grenade launcher and automatic rifles opened fire on three forest rangers, killing two of them and injuring one.

Tajikistan has a long, porous border with Afghanistan, and the area across the Panj is currently under Taliban control.

The incident comes a week before Moscow hosts a Taliban delegation for Afghanistan talks.

Russia's Defense Ministry later on Monday denied reports that it carried out airstrikes on nearby Taliban-controlled territory in retaliation.

Officials in Russia and Tajikistan have long been worried about a potential spillover of militant activities from Afghanistan. The chief of Tajikistan's Border Guard Forces earlier this year raised the alarm about an estimated 7,000 Afghan militants roaming the border area.PARIS (AP) - French President Emmanuel Macron has called for trade discussions to be held between the U.S., Europe, China and Japan in November in Paris.

In a speech to French ambassadors Monday, Macron said world trade rules aren't currently working but "unilateralism and trade war is the worst response."

He proposed to organize a meeting on the issue on the margins of World War One commemorations on Nov. 11 in Paris, since he has invited dozens of world leaders to the event including U.S. President Donald Trump, who said he would come.

FILE - In this Friday, July 20, 2018 file photo, French President Emmanuel Macron looks after meeting President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev at the presidential Elysee Palace, in Paris, France. French President Emmanuel Macron is back from vacation and plans to launch a new push for economic changes as he faces growing criticism at home. The 40-year-old leader holds a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Aug. 22 at the Elysee presidential palace. (AP Photo/Francois Mori, file)

"I think we can build a fairer and more efficient system. I think we should not give in to one's hegemony and everyone's division", Macron said in a reference to Trump's trade policies to impose tariffs on countries like China.WASHINGTON (AP) - Glowering in public and near-silent for two days, President Donald Trump relented under pressure Monday by tersely recognizing Sen. John McCain's "service to our country" and re-lowering the White House flag.

While much of the nation remembered McCain's record as a war hero, longtime senator and presidential nominee over the weekend, Trump had nursed his grievances. McCain had been an infuriating foil in a long-running feud over style and policy that did not end with the senator's illness and death.

Trump's reluctance to participate in the national remembrance was awkward and uncomfortable, even by the standards of a leader who acknowledges he doesn't act like a typical president. The episode highlighted the outsider president's impulse to harbor personal resentments regardless of political repercussions.

President Donald Trump crosses his arms after speaking with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on the phone about a trade agreement between the United States and Mexico, in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Washington. Trump has bowed to widespread pressure from veterans groups and others to do more to honor John McCain's death. Trump on Monday ordered flags at the White House and elsewhere lowered to half-staff until the six-term senator is buried Sunday. He also proclaimed "respect" for McCain, with whom he feuded bitterly for years. It was a marked reversal from Trump's refusal to comment on McCain. Earlier Monday, the White House flag had been raised. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Before Trump's Monday afternoon statement, his only commentary on McCain's death had been a perfunctory tweet Saturday. The lack of a formal statement - combined with the fact that White House flags were flown at half-staff only briefly - drew strong criticism from Republicans and veterans' groups as well as Democrats.

When he finally did comment, in a printed statement, Trump was sparing with his praise for the six-term senator: "Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain's service to our country."

Later, at an evening dinner honoring evangelical leaders, he said "our hearts and prayers" are going to the family "and we very much appreciate everything that Senator McCain has done for our country."

Earlier in the day, a stone-faced Trump sat mute as reporters at several photo sessions invited him to comment on McCain. As he was peppered with questions about McCain's legacy, the usually talkative president made no response.

Publicly, Trump has frequently railed against McCain's dramatic thumbs-down vote against the president's efforts to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law. Privately, he has groused about such slights as his belief that McCain did not appreciate his endorsement in the senator's 2016 re-election bid. McCain, for his part, recently slammed Trump's Helsinki meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin as "one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory."

Against that backdrop, the flag above the White House spoke volumes.

The Stars and Stripes were briefly lowered to half-staff over the weekend, then went back up to full height Monday while flags at the U.S. Capitol and elsewhere stayed at half-staff. Shortly before Trump issued his written statement, the flag was lowered again to half-staff.

That was after complaints had risen all day from both right and left, and then from a group the president assuredly does not want to offend.

"On the behalf of The American Legion's two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCain's death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nation's flag be half-staffed through his interment," said a statement directed to him from Denise Rohan, the organization's national commander.

While the president's statement sought to defuse the controversy, the upcoming weeklong celebration of McCain's life is likely to bring new awkwardness. Former presidents will speak at McCain's funeral Saturday, but the senator's family made clear they did not want Trump to attend.

Trump said he had asked Vice President Mike Pence to speak at a ceremony honoring McCain at the Capitol on Friday and said other administration officials would attend memorial services. He also said he'd agreed to the McCain family's request for military transportation of the senator's remains from Arizona to Washington. Burial will be Sunday at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

In death, McCain himself had more to say. In a final letter released Monday, McCain appeared to repudiate Trump's politics one last time, saying, "We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe."

Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma allowed that McCain "was partially to blame" for the rift with Trump, saying, "He was very outspoken that he disagreed with the president in certain areas and wasn't too courteous about it."

As Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, a Trump friend, put it, "I think there's a lot of hard feelings on both sides."

Just a few weeks ago the president signed into law a defense bill named in honor of the senator without a single mention of his name.

Back in 2015, McCain had gotten under then-candidate Trump's skin by saying he had "fired up the crazies" at a rally in Phoenix. Trump later told a crowd in Iowa that McCain was only a war hero "because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."

McCain said Trump owed veterans an apology for that, but he continued to back the celebrity businessman as the Republican nominee. He later withdrew his support after the release of the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape in which Trump bragged about groping women.

After Trump took office, McCain established himself as a leading critic, opposing Trump's immigration-limiting order, warning him against coziness with Moscow and lecturing him on the illegality of torture.

Friction increased earlier this year after word surfaced that a West Wing aide had been dismissive of McCain during a closed-door meeting. The aide told colleagues they should disregard McCain's opposition to Trump's CIA nominee because "he's dying anyway."

In death, McCain attempted a last word in his farewell letter.

"Do not despair of our present difficulties," he wrote. "But believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here."

___

Associated Press writers Laurie Kellman and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

The American flag files at half-staff at the White House, Monday afternoon, Aug. 27, 2018, in Washington. Two days after Sen. John McCain's death, President Donald Trump says he respects the senator's "service to our country" and has signed a proclamation to fly the U.S. flag at half-staff until his burial. The flag atop the White House flew at half-staff over the weekend but was raised Monday and then lowered again amid criticism. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

The American flag files at half-staff at the White House, Monday afternoon, Aug. 27, 2018, in Washington. Two days after Sen. John McCain's death, President Donald Trump says he respects the senator's "service to our country" and has signed a proclamation to fly the U.S. flag at half-staff until his burial. The flag atop the White House flew at half-staff over the weekend but was raised Monday and then lowered again amid criticism. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

An American flag above the White House flies at full-staff less than 48 hours after the death of Sen. John McCain, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The American flag flies at half-staff at the Capitol in honor of Sen. John McCain of Arizona who died Saturday of brain cancer, in Washington, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. McCain will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda on Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) - It will be a fitting final resting place for a man who prized military service, cherished friendship and had little patience for formalities.

Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who died Saturday of brain cancer, will be buried on a grassy hill at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, right next to a lifelong friend, within earshot of the next generation of midshipmen and within view of the banks of Severn River.

The senator's choice was another that showed his trademark individuality. McCain, who died Saturday after battling brain cancer, selected the out-of-the-way spot over the grandeur and solemnity of Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where his father and grandfather - both admirals -are buried. Instead, the decorated Vietnam War veteran, former prisoner of war and six-term senator opted for a front-row position next to his friend Chuck Larson, himself an admiral and ally throughout McCain's remarkable life.

A wooden spike marks the spot, Saturday, Aug. 26, 2018 where Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., will be buried on the grounds of the U. S. Navel Academy in Annapolis, Md. McCain is set to be buried next to his best friend, Adm. Chuck Larson, from his days at the U.S. Naval Academy _ and not in Arlington National Cemetery with his father and grandfather. (AP Photo/Laurie Kellman)

"Near, where our paths first crossed," McCain wrote in his memoir of the site.

McCain's office said on Sunday that Larson, who died in 2014, had reserved four plots at the site - for himself, McCain and their wives, both now widows.

From the grassy spot, the grunts and shouts of dozens of exercising midshipmen on Forrest Sherman Field float up to the grave site. Beyond that, crew teams row by and around the peninsula that since at least 1868 has served as the Naval Academy's cemetery. Boats sail past, and occasional car horns from the nearby Baltimore Boulevard bridge interrupt the peace.

On Saturday, as McCain spent his final hours surrounded by family at his ranch in Arizona, his grave was already marked. "Sect 8 1704 McCain," read a handwritten sign on a wooden post, noting the section and grave number, adjacent to Larson's grave.

In between two wooden stakes sat an orange traffic cone, a sentry that might have amused McCain with its unceremonious placement for a former presidential candidate amid the elegant, weathered gravestones.

McCain and Larson's friendship began at the academy, where McCain ranked near the bottom of the class of 1958. His best friend, Larson, finished near the top, receiving his diploma and personal congratulations from President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

They were roommates through flight school. Larson went on to become commander in chief of military forces in the Pacific. He was the second-youngest admiral in history. Larson also was named superintendent of the Naval Academy twice, the last time in 1994 with a mission to restore morale after the largest cheating scandal in its history.

McCain was shot down over Vietnam and tortured for five-and-a half years as a prisoner of war. After his return to the U.S., he was elected to the House in 1982 and the Senate in 1986. He ran unsuccessfully for president in 2000 and 2008.

His rebellious nature sometimes frustrated his political allies and strained friendships. But Larson and McCain stayed "the closest of friends," McCain wrote.

McCain spoke at the academy as Larson, who died of leukemia at age 77, prepared to leave in 1998.

During the speech, McCain told the midshipmen that the friendship was "one of the great honors of my life." But then McCain noted that he doesn't like to dwell on the differences between them, such as the fact that Larson was "destined for greatness." McCain said he preferred to think about a night during their last year at the academy, during which Larson was serving in a leadership capacity and McCain was "as usual, engaged in the kind of officially prohibited activity that (Larson) was expected to report."

Specifically, McCain was hosting a secretive party at which his crew watched a fight on television. Larson attended. When an officer approached, the partiers stuffed Larson in a crawl space.

"I always like to remember Chuck that way, cringing in my closet, dressed in his formal blue uniform, his sword at his side...." McCain reminisced in public.

Then McCain turned serious.

"Neither I nor the Navy nor the academy say goodbye today," McCain said, according to the speech posted on his Senate website. "Goodbyes are impossible. We have been too close for too long to part company now."

___

Follow Kellman on Twitter at www.twitter.com/APLaurieKellman

A wooden spike and an orange traffic cone mark the spot, Saturday, Aug. 26, 2018 where Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., will be buried on the grounds of the U. S. Navel Academy in Annapolis, Md. McCain is set to be buried next to his best friend, Adm. Chuck Larson, from his days at the U.S. Naval Academy _ and not in Arlington National Cemetery with his father and grandfather. (AP Photo/Laurie Kellman)BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) - Moldovan border police have refused entry to a group of Romanians who were marching to Moldova's capital to rally for reunifying the country with Romania.

Organizer George Simion told Moldova's Radio Chisinau on Monday the border shouldn't exist and that officials "wanted to separate Moldovans from Romanians, as if we weren't the same country, the same people."

Moldova united with Romania in 1918 and was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1940. It gained independence in 1991.

Border police spokeswoman Raisa Novitchi said authorities banned the marchers because "they would have disturbed public order."

The Romanians began their "Centenary March" march in Romania on July 1. Simion says the group is determined to reach the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, in time to hold the reunification rally on Saturday.BROOKLYN, Iowa (AP) - The Latest on a University of Iowa student who was stabbed to death and dumped in a cornfield in central Iowa (all times local):

11:40 a.m.

The father of slain Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts has thanked the Hispanic community for its support during the long search for his daughter.

People leave Mollie Tibbetts' funeral at Brooklyn-Guernsey-Malcom High School, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018, in Brooklyn, Iowa. Cristhian Bahena Rivera is charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts' death. Authorities have said Tibbetts was abducted while running in July, and an autopsy showed that she died from stab wounds. (Kelsey Kremer/The Des Moines Register via AP)

A Mexican farmworker suspected of being in the U.S. illegally has been charged in Tibbetts' death.

Speaking Sunday at a ceremony for his daughter, Rob Tibbetts didn't directly address comments by President Donald Trump and others who seized upon the suspect's citizenship to argue for changes in U.S. immigration laws.

However, The Des Moines Register reports Tibbetts said that in the weeks he was searching for his daughter, he encountered Hispanics in Brooklyn, Iowa, who were sensitive and kind.

He says members of the Hispanic community have "the same values as Iowans," and that he considers them "Iowans with better food."

The body of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts was found Aug. 21. Authorities believe she was abducted while out running July 18.

___

10:20 a.m.

A brother of slain Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts played through his grief and led his high school football team to victory in the season opener.

The Des Moines Register reports that Scott Tibbetts threw for two touchdowns and ran for another as Brooklyn-Guernsey-Malcom High School beat Lisbon High 35-24 on Friday night in Lisbon. The win came less than 48 hours before a memorial service Sunday for his 20-year-old sister.

Authorities say a 24-year-old suspect, Cristhian Bahena Rivera, led investigators to her body in a cornfield last week about 12 miles (19 kilometers) southeast of her hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa. She had been missing since July 18.

Lisbon officials complied with their opponents' wishes that there be no displays or tributes regarding Mollie Tibbetts. The visitors wore jerseys with a small honor: teal wings with the initials "MT" in a heart. The wings will remain there all season.

Scott Tibbetts declined to comment after the game.

___

10:05 a.m.

An immigrant charged in the fatal stabbing of an Iowa college student has hired new defense lawyers.

Attorneys Chad and Jennifer Frese filed paperwork Sunday to represent Cristhian Bahena Rivera, who is accused in the killing of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts. They're expected to replace attorney Allan Richards, who called President Trump "sad and sorry" for labeling his client guilty before trial.

Rivera, a dairy worker suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, was charged with murder last week.

Richards says Rivera's family hired him and that he hasn't spoken with Rivera about being replaced. Richards says he understands if Rivera wants attorneys with more criminal trial experience.

Jennifer Frese confirmed Monday that the two have been privately retained to represent Rivera.

___

9 a.m.

The father of Mollie Tibbetts, whose body was found last week in a central Iowa cornfield, asked hundreds of mourners to remember the 20-year-old by "celebrating something wonderful" rather than focusing on how she died.

Tibbetts was memorialized Sunday afternoon at a ceremony in the gymnasium of Brooklyn-Guernsey-Malcom High School in her hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa.

Rob Tibbetts urged congregants to remember his daughter's passion for life and her desire to help others. To highlight his call to celebrate "wonderful" things, Tibbetts recognized a couple who had just married the day before during his eulogy.

Cristhian Bahena Rivera has been charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts' death. Authorities have said Tibbetts was abducted while running July 18. An autopsy shows she died from stab wounds.

People walk several blocks to attend Mollie Tibbetts' funeral at Brooklyn-Guernsey-Malcom High School after the parking lot outside the school had been filled, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018, in Brooklyn, Iowa. Cristhian Bahena Rivera is charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts' death. Authorities have said Tibbetts was abducted while running in July, and an autopsy showed that she died from stab wounds. (Kelsey Kremer/The Des Moines Register via AP)KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Russia postponed indefinitely a meeting on the Afghan peace process planned for next week, Afghan officials said.

A statement released Monday by the office of the Afghan presidency said that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani have decided to postpone the meeting and hold it at a later date.

President Ghani insists the peace talks should be "Afghan owned and led," according to the statement.

Lavrov said Russia agrees the peace process should be under the auspices of the Afghans and it is "ready to cooperate," the statement added.

Russia's Foreign Ministry, which had extended the invitation to the Taliban despite the group's official designation as a terrorist organization in Russia, also confirmed in a statement Monday that the talks have been postponed after Lavrov's conversation with Ghani.

"(Ghani) supported the idea of a Moscow meeting in principle and suggested postponing it in order to come up with a consolidated position," the ministry's statement said.JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel's Supreme Court has ruled that five critically ill women from Gaza may enter Israel for urgent medical treatment despite a government decision preventing relatives of Hamas members from doing so.

The five women appealed to the court last month after their requests to enter Israel were rejected on the grounds of their relation to Hamas members.

The government decision denies entry for health care to relatives of Hamas members and is meant to exert pressure Gaza's rulers who currently hold the remains of two Israeli soldiers.

The court ruled late Sunday that the government decision was unreasonable and could not stand up to a legal test.

Four human rights groups representing the women said the government was using them and others seeking care unavailable in Gaza as "bargaining chips."WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on a U.S. trade agreement with Mexico (all times local):

2:50 p.m.

Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is cutting short her diplomatic trip to Europe to head to Washington for trade talks with the United States.

Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland speaks at a meeting of German ambassadors in Berlin Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. (Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa via AP)

Freeland will fly to Washington on Tuesday after the Trump administration and Mexico said they have reached a preliminary accord to end the North American Free Trade Agreement and replace it.

The administration still needs to negotiate with the third partner in NAFTA, Canada, to become part of any new trade accord. Without Canada, America's No. 2 trading partner, it's unclear whether any new U.S. trade agreement with Mexico would be possible.

A spokesman for Freeland says Canada will only sign a new trade deal that is good for Canada.

___

1:15 p.m.

The Trump administration says an "understanding" to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement omits a provision Canada and Mexico opposed after the U.S. proposed it.

Instead, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer (LYT'-hy-zur) says periodic reviews will be required once a new agreement is signed.

Lighthizer says the agreement will be in force for 16 years. But every six years will bring an opportunity to resolve issues or modernize aspects of the agreement. The parties then would agree to continue the agreement for another 16 years.

Mexico is on board with that process; Lighthizer says he hasn't discussed the new proposal yet with Canada.

The U.S. had proposed that a renegotiated NAFTA die after five years unless all three countries agree to continue it. Canada and Mexico objected.

___

11:55 a.m.

President Donald Trump says he intends to terminate the North American Free Trade Agreement and call its replacement "the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement" - a name that would exclude the third NAFTA partner, Canada.

Trump made the comments after announcing an "understanding" with Mexico that could lead to an overhaul of the 24-year-old trade pact, which Trump has called a job-killing "disaster." Details of the U.S.-Mexico agreement were expected to be unveiled later Monday.

The president says he will be calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Trump says, "If they'd like to negotiate fairly, we'll do that." He also threatened to tax Canadian auto imports to increase the pressure on Canada's government.

Trump says: "We could have a separate deal (with Canada) or we could put it into this deal."

___

11:45 a.m.

President Donald Trump says he'll be "terminating" the North American Free Trade Agreement as he pursues a deal with Mexico and starts negotiations with Canada.

Trump said Monday during an Oval Office event that he'll be calling the emerging agreement the "United States-Mexico Trade Agreement." He says it will mark the end of the NAFTA name.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto was on speakerphone and says he hopes NAFTA partner Canada will eventually be incorporated into the deal.

Adam Austen, a spokesman for the Canadian Foreign Minister, says Canada had been in regular contact with the NAFTA negotiators.

He says, "We will only sign a new NAFTA that is good for Canada and good for the middle class," adding that, "Canada's signature is required."

___

11:25 a.m.

President Donald Trump is announcing a trade "understanding" with Mexico that could lead to an overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Trump made the announcement Monday in the Oval Office, with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto joining by speakerphone.

Canada, which is part of NAFTA, is not participating in the announcement. Trump says negotiations with Canada have yet to begin and is calling on the country to negotiate fairly. He's threatening anew to slap tariffs on Canadian cars if they fail to do what he wants.

Trump says the call is being held to "celebrate the understanding" the U.S. and Mexico have reached on trade.

He says, "It's an incredible deal for both parties."

___

10:25 a.m.

President Donald Trump says the prospects are "looking good" for an agreement with Mexico that could set the stage for an overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Trump tweeted Monday morning: "A big deal looking good with Mexico!"

U.S. and Mexican negotiators worked over the weekend to narrow their differences. Once they reach an agreement, the third country in NAFTA - Canada - would be brought back in to finalize a revamp of the 24-year-old pact.

NAFTA reduced most trade barriers between the three countries. But Trump and other critics say it encouraged U.S. manufacturers to move south of the border to exploit low-wage Mexican labor.

The Trump administration wants a higher percentage of auto production to come from within the NAFTA bloc before qualifying for duty-free status.

President Donald Trump hangs up the phone after talking with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Washington. Trump is announcing a trade "understanding" with Mexico that could lead to an overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump made the announcement Monday in the Oval Office, with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto joining by speakerphone. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

FILE - In this Aug. 16, 2017 file photo, the national flags of Canada, from left, the U.S. and Mexico, are lit by stage lights before a news conference, at the start of North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations in Washington. President Donald Trump says the prospects are "looking good" for an agreement with Mexico that could set the stage for an overhaul of the NAFTA. "A big deal looking good with Mexico!" Trump tweeted Monday, Aug. 27. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, left, and Mexican Secretary of Economy Idelfonso Guajardo, right, walk to the White House on Monday August 27, 2018. President Donald Trump says the prospects are "looking good" for an agreement with Mexico that could set the stage for an overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement. (AP Photo/Luis Alonso Lugo)

United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, left, and Mexican Secretary of Economy Idelfonso Guajardo, right, walk into the White House on Monday August 27, 2018. President Donald Trump says the prospects are "looking good" for an agreement with Mexico that could set the stage for an overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement. (AP Photo/Luis Alonso Lugo)

United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, front left, and Mexican Secretary of Economy Idelfonso Guajardo, front right, walk to the White House on Monday August 27, 2018. President Donald Trump says the prospects are "looking good" for an agreement with Mexico that could set the stage for an overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement. (AP Photo/Luis Alonso Lugo)WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on President Donald Trump's response to the death of Sen. John McCain, and the events commemorating the Arizona Republican and Trump critic (all times EDT):

7 p.m.

President Donald Trump has broken his silence on John McCain, saying he appreciates everything the late senator has done for the country.

An American flag above the White House flies at full-staff less than 48 hours after the death of Sen. John McCain, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

It was Trump's first public comment about McCain since the Arizona senator's death Saturday from brain cancer.

Trump spoke Monday evening at a White House dinner for evangelical leaders.

The president offered prayers and condolences to those slain in a Jacksonville, Florida, shooting, before pivoting to McCain, a critic with whom he has feuded.

Says Trump: "Our hearts and prayers are going to the family of Sen. John McCain. We appreciate everything McCain has done for our country."

The 81-year-old McCain served six terms in the Senate. He also served in the House and in the Navy, was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and ran for president twice.

___

4:05 p.m.

Two days after Sen. John McCain's death, President Donald Trump says he respects the senator's "service to our country" and has signed a proclamation to fly the U.S. flag at half-staff until his burial.

The flag atop the White House flew at half-staff over the weekend but was raised Monday and then lowered again amid criticism.

Trump and McCain have feuded for years. Trump tweeted about McCain after his death Saturday but has passed up several chances to comment publicly on the Arizona senator.

Trump says in a written statement Monday that he has asked Vice President Mike Pence to speak at a ceremony honoring McCain at the Capitol on Friday.

The president also says he's agreed to the McCain family's request for military transportation of McCain's remains from Arizona to Washington.

__

3:20 p.m.

The American Legion is demanding that President Donald Trump issue a proclamation honoring Sen. John McCain's heroism, and order the nation's flags to be flown at half-staff.

The nation's largest veterans' service organization urged Trump in a statement Monday to follow longtime protocol following the deaths of prominent government officials.

The group noted that Trump issued presidential proclamations commemorating the deaths of first lady Barbara Bush and pastor Billy Graham. McCain, who died Saturday at 81, is a decorated Vietnam War hero who spent more than five years as a prisoner-of-war and served in the Senate for six terms.

Trump tweeted condolences to McCain's family, but did not mention McCain or issue any statement.

The American flag at the White House was lowered to half-staff on Sunday. But it flew at full staff on Monday.

___

11:45 a.m.

In a contrast with the White House, Senate leaders of both parties have formally requested American flags at government buildings remain at half-staff to honor Sen. John McCain.

That's standard procedure when a member of the Senate passes away. McCain served in the chamber for six terms, most recently as chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

The request contrasts with the White House, which raised its flags back to full staff on Monday after lowering them on Sunday.

McCain was a frequent critic of President Donald Trump on everything from his leadership style to his Russia policy. Trump questioned the decorated veteran and six-term senator's heroism and chafed at McCain's vote to kill the health care law repeal.

McCain died on Saturday. Trump tweeted condolences to his family but made no reference to the Arizona senator.

___

9:10 a.m.

The flags at the White House, which were lowered over the weekend to mark the death of Sen. John McCain, are back at full-staff.

The flags at the U.S. Capitol, meanwhile, remained at half-staff on Monday to honor the Arizona Republican, who died Saturday of brain cancer.

President Donald Trump offered his condolences on Twitter to McCain's family but hasn't issued a presidential proclamation with an order lowering the flags. The two had a long-running feud.

U.S. Flag Code states that flags be lowered "on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress."

After Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts died in 2009, President Barack Obama ordered flags at the White House be flown at half-staff for five days.

The White House didn't immediately respond to questions Monday.

An American flag above the White House flies at full-staff less than 48 hours after the death of Sen. John McCain, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The American flag flies at half-staff at the Capitol in honor of Sen. John McCain of Arizona who died Saturday of brain cancer, in Washington, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. McCain will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda on Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The American flag flies at half-staff at the Capitol in honor of Sen. John McCain of Arizona who died Saturday of brain cancer, in Washington, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. McCain will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda on Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The American flag flies at half-staff at the Capitol in honor of Sen. John McCain of Arizona who died Saturday of brain cancer, in Washington, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. McCain will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda on Friday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) - Romania's Foreign Ministry has summoned the country's ambassador to the United States to explain his negative remark about a letter U.S. President Donald Trump's lawyer sent Romanian leaders.

In the letter published by Romanian media on Monday, Rudy Giuliani told President Klaus Iohannis and Premier Viorica Dancila he was concerned about "continued damage to the rule of law in Romania, committed under the pretext of law enforcement."

The former New York mayor specifically criticized the "excesses" of Romania's anti-corruption agency and the Romanian Intelligence Service, which signed secret protocols with the agency to wiretap suspects.

FILE - In this May 5, 2018, file photo, Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for President Donald Trump, speaks at the Iran Freedom Convention for Human Rights and democracy in Washington. In the letter published by Romanian media on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Giuliani told Romania's President Klaus Iohannis and Premier Viorica Dancila he was concerned about "continued damage to the rule of law in Romania, committed under the pretext of law enforcement." (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

Ambassador George Maior, who formerly led the Intelligence Service, said Giuliani's letter resulted from "a lobby initiated by people interested in defending figures who have problems with the justice system."

The ministry insisted Romania's government has "the necessary political will" to safeguard the rule of law.CHICAGO (AP) - EDITOR'S NOTE: On Aug. 28, 1968, the delegates to the Democratic National Convention voted down a peace plank by a tally of 1,500 to 1,000. It put the match to the Chicago powder keg.

Hours after the afternoon vote, hundreds of demonstrators waged war with police on the streets of Chicago. "The whole world is watching," the protesters chanted. Presidential campaign watcher Theodore H. White, surveying the carnage, wrote simply: "The Democrats are finished."

An investigatory commission later described the scene as a "police riot." The young demonstrators taunted the police, "Oink, oink," and the police responded with swinging nightsticks and flying wedges.

FILE - In this Aug. 28, 1968, file photo, a demonstrator with his hands on his head is led by Chicago Police down Michigan Avenue during a confrontation with police and National Guardsmen who battled demonstrators near the Conrad Hilton Hotel, headquarters for the Democratic National Convention. During the convention, hundreds of demonstrators waged war with police and National Guardsmen on the streets of Chicago. (AP Photo/File)

Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey was nominated for the presidential race, but it was the hollowest of victories. The polls showed Republican Richard Nixon with a commanding lead. Humphrey himself observed: "I have pursued impossible dreams before, and maybe I am now."

Fifty years after the bloody confrontation, The Associated Press is making its story written that day by James R. Peipert available with photos.

___

Some 3,000 anti-war demonstrators fought a bloody, open battle with an equal contingent of police and Illinois National Guardsmen Wednesday night in an assault on the downtown headquarters of the Democratic National Convention.

There were mass arrests and some 300 injuries as police clubbed at the demonstrators, who have massed in Chicago by the thousands to protest against administration war policies.

Rocks and bottles were thrown, car windows broken, trash cans overturned and set afire, and heads were beaten in a five-block stretch along fashionable South Michigan Avenue, main street of Chicago's showcase front yard.

Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey was in his 25th-floor suite of the Conrad Hilton, which fronts on Michigan Avenue, awaiting an appearance before the convention at the International Amphitheatre, five miles south. A Humphrey aide said tear gas could be smelled in his room as police battled demonstrators in the hotel ground floor lobby.

Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, candidate for the presidential nomination, also was in the hotel. His wife, ready to leave for the amphitheater, was detained by the Secret Service for security reasons.

The whereabouts of Sen. George S. McGovern, another candidate, was unknown.

Later Wednesday night, two miles north of the downtown area, some 30 youths were taken into custody in Lincoln Park after they threw rocks at passing police cars. Police fired two or three shots into the air, and the youths stopped the rock fusillade.

Deputy Superintendent James M. Rochford told the anti-war leaders that the group could stay in Grant Park as long as they wanted if they remained peaceful.

The youths - some bearded and sandaled, others clean-cut - have been in Chicago since last weekend to demonstrate their displeasure over Johnson administration policies concerning the Vietnam War.

They chose Wednesday - the day the presidential candidate was to be selected - for their major movement. More than 100,000 anti-war demonstrators had been promised by the administration opponents. About 10,000 showed up.

The rush on the Hilton came after guardsmen, using tear gas, foiled an anti-war march on the amphitheater, where a dovish Vietnam plank was rejected by delegates.

The demonstrators broke through police and military lines in Grant Park across from the Hilton, and stormed the hotel, where they were beaten back and went rampaging through the streets.

Police met any rush head-on, clubbed the demonstrators and threw them in vans headed for the central detention lockup.

Central Police Headquarters said it could give no estimate of those arrested. The staff was too busy, a spokesman said.

Several spectators were also seen beaten as police moved into a crowd and dispersed them. The spectators joined the demonstrators jeering police.

Many of the injured suffered, hand, arm and head fractures. One policeman was bitten on the neck.

One young man entering the Hilton, which was closed to all persons except those having their room keys with them, said, "Wait till they bust up a delegate."

About 1,200 guardsmen reinforced police, some of them driving in wire-covered jeeps. Almost all had their bayonets unsheathed.

As the police wielded clubs, clearing the area in front of the Hilton, guardsmen moved in fast and set up skirmish lines. The demonstrators scattered and ran, with police chasing.

Hotels flanking the Hilton closed their doors. All traffic along and near Michigan Avenue in the battle area was stopped.

The mass of demonstrators broke into smaller groups and continued to fight police, who repeatedly called for help.

At Michigan and Jackson streets, north of the Hilton, 150 police armed with shotguns stopped all traffic and forcibly cleared the area. One hundred of them, not wearing gas masks, were stricken by their own tear gas and went down to their knees, choking.

The groups filtered into the main downtown district, and headed for the Civic Center at Randolph and Clark streets. Squads of police in groups of 100 and 200 followed them, making mass arrests.

Demonstrators swarmed on a police van, rocked it and broke a headlight. They set on police defending themselves with clubs and scattered wen a line of shotgun-armed police reinforcements struck the group with rifle butts.

The demonstrators shouted, "Shoot, shoot, shoot!" Others said, "Go ahead, pig, shoot me." Several of the demonstrators were arrested before fleeing. "Pig" is the hippie term for policemen.

As police moved into the downtown district after the demonstrators, a young Negro standing in the doorway of the Greyhound bus station on Randolph Street was arrested. He told them he was not part of the crowd.

Police forced the groups north, toward the Chicago River, where the Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building and Equitable Building are clustered on Michigan Avenue.

Two newsmen were arrested in the Conrad Hilton melee. Tom Corpora of United Press International reported he was arrested when he demanded the name of a police officer who, he said, verbally insulted him.

The consul-general of France confirmed that, Jean Vasal, an accredited photographer, was arrested at the Hilton and forcibly thrown in a police van.

The Medical Committee for Human Rights reported treating more than 300 persons for injuries suffered in police confrontations throughout the day.

National Guardsmen tossed tear gas canisters in the crowd as it moved out of the rear of the park toward the hotel. Police using clubs chased demonstrators through the hotel lobby.

The tear gas floated across Michigan Avenue and into the Conrad Hilton, causing discomfort to occupants in the building.

The demonstrators broke through the line of guardsmen and joined a mule train sent down Michigan Avenue by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Some 3,000 demonstrators massed in front of the Hilton as police tried to divide the group and drive them back into Grant Park.

Eight blocks to the south, between the Coliseum, where protesters threw an anti-birthday party for President Johnson on Tuesday, and the Conrad Hilton, another skirmish was reported by police.

The demonstrators had planned earlier to march to the amphitheater but were stopped by 2,000 guardsmen and police. The police and the guardsmen surrounded the demonstrators, who had seated themselves on the grass in the rear of Grant Park.

Dave Dellinger, chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam - organizers of the march - negotiated with police commanders, then talked to newsmen.

Dellinger said he wanted Mayor Richard J. Daley or John M. Bailey, Democratic national chairman, to come to the park and talk to him, and they would stay until they did.

"Baby sitting on the sidewalks ain't too bad either," he said. "We will sit here, come what may, because we are making our case before the world."

An hour earlier, police in wedge formations, moved into the crowds swinging clubs in unison in a bloody clash with protesters.

Then plainclothes men made a sweep through the mass of demonstrators. They broke picket sticks and singled out individuals, who, they warned, would be watched closely.

Demonstration marshals at the rear told the crowd through bullhorns that the police had informed them they could no longer stay in the park.

Most of the loosely bunched group at the rear, about 200 who never had actually joined the body of the march, quietly left.

The park lawn was littered with handbills plumping for various reasons.

One of the early casualties of the later afternoon skirmish with police was Rennie Davis, coordinator of mobilization, who was taken to Michael Reese Hospital for treatment of scalp and arm and back wounds.

The policemen were showered with rocks, trash cans and sticks as they moved into the crowd in wedge formations, swinging their sticks in unison.

Police moved the crowd to rescue several policemen who were surrounded by the crowd after they arrested a protester who lowered the United States flag to half-staff near the park band shell.

The crowd of protesters assembled in the park in preparation for a march on the fortresslike amphitheater despite police warnings that the march would not be permitted.

Police distributed notices among the crowd - estimated by police at 7,000 persons - gathered at the band shell in Grant Park, just east of the downtown Loop.

FILE - In this Aug. 28, 1968, file photo, Mayor Richard J. Daley stands at the microphone as shouts resound through the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, demanding the Democratic National Convention adjourn until later in the day before considering the party platform. During the convention, hundreds of demonstrators waged war with police and National Guardsmen on the streets of Chicago. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell, File)MOSCOW (AP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin typically seeks out exciting, rugged, sometimes shirtless activities on his summer vacations. This year he was more laid back.

One summer Putin took a dive in the Black Sea only to allegedly discover an ancient amphora. Another time he galloped on a horse bare-chested across a mountain creek.

This year Russia's 65-year-old leader returned to one of his favorite holiday spots: the far-flung wilderness of Siberia's remote Tyva region.

In this photo taken on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin rests during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday that Putin spent last weekend hiking in the mountains and taking in the views with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the head of Russia's main intelligence agency, FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov.

Photos released by the Kremlin showed Putin hiking, examining plants with Shoigu and riding in a boat on the Yenisey River.

In this photo taken on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu rest during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo taken on Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin rests on a boat on Yenisey river during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo taken on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin rests during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo taken on Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin rests on a boat on Yenisey river during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo taken on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin poses for a photo during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo taken on Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin rests on a boat on Yenisey river during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo taken on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin, second left, looks through a binocular as he rests during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo taken on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin rests during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo taken on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin poses for a photo during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo taken on Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin sits inside a boat on Yenisey river during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo taken on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin walks with a mushroom in his hand during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin's spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia's far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)GENEVA (AP) - China is challenging the latest round of U.S. tariffs against Chinese goods through the World Trade Organization.

The Chinese government on Monday formally requested "dispute consultations" with the United States over the Trump administration's imposition of $16 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods last week. China has responded with similar taxes on U.S. goods.

Its request to the World Trade Organization opens a 60-day period for the two countries to hold talks.

China already is holding talks with the U.S. about its previous tariffs on both Chinese steel and aluminum products and over alleged Chinese violations of U.S. intellectual property protections.

All told, the administration is preparing tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese products. China has vowed to retaliate on American goods worth $60 billion.

Separately, the U.S. ambassador to the WTO, Dennis Shea, told a WTO body that the United States would not support the reappointment of Shree Baboo Chekitan Servansing as a member of the WTO's appellate body, according to a transcript of his remarks in the closed-door session.

If that holds up, the appellate body will fall to three members when Servansing's term expires on Sept. 30. Three is the minimum number of members for the appellate body to rule on cases.

Critics say the United States is trying to asphyxiate the appellate body. The next expiration of a member's term looms in December next year, and the appellate body would become inoperable if new appointments or reappointments aren't made before then.

Shea says the U.S. has long believed the appellate body has operated beyond the terms of its original mandate, and blasted "persistent overreaching" with its decisions on issues like subsidies and antidumping duties, and by "restricting the ability of the United States to regulate in the public interest or protect U.S. workers and businesses against unfair trading practices."

He said U.S. concerns about the appellate body have not been addressed.UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Catholic leaders who mediated a compromise on elections in Congo warned Monday that the credibility of the long-delayed vote scheduled in December depends "to a great extent" on the presence of national and international observers - and that "bias" will keep the country in crisis.

Monsignor Marcel Utembi, president of the National Episcopal Conference known as CENCO, encouraged the government to implement all provisions of the Dec. 31, 2016 agreement that it mediated - especially de-escalation measures - and to take into account concerns of opponents and civil society.

"If elections are biased, they will keep us in a crisis ... and the lack of clarification in the situation will cause grave problems," he warned.

In this photo provided by the United Nations, Ignace Gata Mavita Wa Lufuta, Permanent Representative of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the UN, addresses the Security Council on the situation in Congo, Monday Aug. 27, 2018, at UN headquarters. Catholic leaders who mediated a compromise on elections in Congo are warning the Security Council that the credibility of the long-delayed vote scheduled for December depends "to a great extent" on the presence of national and international observers. (The United Nations/Manuel Elias via AP)

The vast, mineral-rich nation is under pressure to ensure free and fair elections.

President Joseph Kabila, who became Congo's leader in 2001 after the assassination of his father, former President Laurent Kabila, by law could not run again after his mandate ended in December 2016. But he remained in office because of delays in holding elections, which sparked deadly protests.

Kabila announced last month that he would not try to stay in office, giving one of Africa's most turbulent nations the opportunity for what could be its first peaceful, democratic transfer of power. But there are concerns, raised not only by CENCO but by U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley and other council members, that Kabila will try to ensure that his chosen candidate, former interior minister Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, will win.

Utembi outlined a series of recommendations from CENCO to the government and the Independent Electoral Commission known as CENI to ensure fair elections including: agree to facilitate national and international observation of the elections; reach consensus on whether to use voting machines; and prevent "arbitrary application of rules to certain candidates who wish to run."

The opposition and some in the international community, including the United States, are objecting to the planned use of electronic voting machines despite warnings from watchdog groups that transparency and credibility could suffer. In response, Congo's government declared it will fund the election itself and has not asked for help from the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the country.

Haley raised a series of "red flags and unanswered questions" at Monday's council meeting including about the voting machines.

She asked: Will there be enough machines? Can authorities recharge them with only a 12-hour battery life? Have election organizers widely tested them? How is the electoral commission going to transport election materials to more than 90,000 polling places? Will voters know how to use touchscreens? Are organizers preparing paper ballots as a back-up?

"Paper ballots were good enough to get president Kabila elected, and they should be good enough as a fail-safe to elect his successor," Haley said, adding that if the president was at the U.N. today she would ask whether self-financing the election and doing it without help from the U.N. peacekeeping mission is possible.

"It can't help but raise suspicion when the Congolese government refuses the assistance that would help make free, fair and credible elections a reality, but continue to take the humanitarian assistance that so many of us continue to give them," she said.

Haley said other "red flags" add to U.S. suspicions including the electoral commission's Aug. 24 decision "to disqualify some opposition presidential candidates for what appear to be political reasons."

Opposition candidates must be allowed to speak freely, without fear or harassment so that all parties compete "on a level playing field," she said.

With 118 days left before the election, Haley said, "these problems are fixable," and the hopes of 80 million Congolese citizens for a free and fair vote rest on the decisions the government and electoral commission make in the days and weeks ahead.

Leila Zerrougui, the U.N. envoy for Congo, told the council by video from Kinshasa that the lack of consensus on using voting machines and the absence of a definitive list of candidates because of appeals to the Constitutional Court are causing discord, she said. The list is expected on Sept. 19 after appeals are heard.

The court's review and appeals process "will be key to the legitimacy of the electoral process going forward," Zerrougui said. "A lack of confidence or a perceived lack of credibility in the CENI or in the decisions of the Constitutional Court would only serve to heighten tensions in this process."

She warned that any indication that CENI went beyond its mandate in interpreting the electoral law and determining the eligibility of candidates "would only undermine confidence in the process as a whole."

Congo's U.N. Ambassador Ignace Gata Mavita responded to skepticism and questions saying CENI has been carrying out an awareness-raising campaign on the use of voting machines, is working on the issue of 6 million voters registered without fingerprints, and the government remains determined to finance the elections.

"Our country remains open to support from other partners as long as this support comes without preconditions and respects the sovereignty of the country," Gata Mavita said.MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexican marines killed an alleged gang leader and seven of his bodyguards, authorities in the central Mexico state of Puebla said Monday.

State prosecutor Gustavo Huerta said the gang leader, known as "Comandante 30," was responsible for the death of six municipal police officers executed in Puebla in June.

He also said the leader and his bodyguards were escorting a truck carrying stolen fuel on Sunday when they opened fire on a Marine patrol that spotted them. There were no casualties among troops.

State police chief Jesus Morales said Comandante 30 had been posting videos in recent weeks claiming to represent the Jalisco drug cartel.

A campaign of attacks on his rivals were "destabilizing the state of Puebla," Morales added.

Puebla has been a flashpoint for violence related to fuel thefts from government pipelines.Rick Davis, Sen. John McCain's former presidential campaign manager and a family spokesman, read the following farewell statement from the senator at a news conference at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix on Monday:

"My fellow Americans, whom I have gratefully served for sixty years, and especially my fellow Arizonans,

Thank you for the privilege of serving you and for the rewarding life that service in uniform and in public office has allowed me to lead. I have tried to serve our country honorably. I have made mistakes, but I hope my love for America will be weighed favorably against them.

FILE - In this June 3, 2016, file photo, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., greets the audience as he arrives to deliver a speech in Singapore. McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018. He was 81. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E, File)

I have often observed that I am the luckiest person on earth. I feel that way even now as I prepare for the end of my life. I have loved my life, all of it. I have had experiences, adventures and friendships enough for ten satisfying lives, and I am so thankful. Like most people, I have regrets. But I would not trade a day of my life, in good or bad times, for the best day of anyone else's.

I owe that satisfaction to the love of my family. No man ever had a more loving wife or children he was prouder of than I am of mine. And I owe it to America. To be connected to America's causes - liberty, equal justice, respect for the dignity of all people - brings happiness more sublime than life's fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth are not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.

'Fellow Americans' - that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process.

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.

Ten years ago, I had the privilege to concede defeat in the election for president. I want to end my farewell to you with the heartfelt faith in Americans that I felt so powerfully that evening.

I feel it powerfully still.

Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history.

Farewell, fellow Americans. God bless you, and God bless America."

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, reacts as he speaks to the media during a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, reacts as he speaks to the media during a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, on Aug. 25, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, reacts as he speaks to the media during a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, on Aug. 25, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Rick Davis, spokesperson for Sen. John McCain's family, reacts as he speaks to the media during a news conference Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Phoenix. Davis discussed the memorial arraignments for McCain, the war hero who became the GOP's standard-bearer in the 2008 election, died at the age of 81, on Aug. 25, 2018, after battling brain cancer. (AP Photo/Matt York)AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) - Gov. Paul LePage was released from the hospital Monday and plans to return to work soon, his spokesman said.

LePage, 69, is back in his official residence, according to spokesman Peter Steele. The Republican governor experienced unspecified discomfort on Saturday while visiting family in New Brunswick and was eventually taken to a Bangor hospital.

"Gov. LePage is back in the Blaine House today, resting and getting ready to return to work in the next couple of days," Steele said.

FILE - In this Sept. 21, 2010 file photo, Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Paul LePage speaks in Waterville, Maine. Maine Gov. Paul LePage is in stable condition and under observation at a Bangor hospital after experiencing discomfort. Peter Steele, a spokesman for the Republican governor, says the 69-year-old LePage experienced discomfort on Saturday, Aug, 25, 2018 while visiting family in New Brunswick, Canada. He says LePage was taken by ambulance to Presque Isle in northern Maine, and then transported to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor(AP Photo/Pat Wellenbach, File)

LePage was taken by ambulance from a hospital in New Brunswick to Presque Isle in northern Maine, and then to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, where he arrived late Saturday.

Doctors decided to keep him in Bangor overnight on Sunday, Steele said. He has not provided more details about the nature of the discomfort.

LePage was elected in 2010 and is nearing the end of his second and final term as governor. The state limits governors to two terms.

Steele said LePage and his family appreciate the "concerns and well wishes" they have received over the past day.

LePage's Chief of Staff Holly Lusk told Republican Senate President Michael Thibodeau's office Saturday that the governor was hospitalized, according to Thibodeau spokesman Jim Cyr. Thibodeau would serve as acting governor if LePage was incapacitated.

The governor has often kept quiet about his medical issues, and has previously brushed off questions about his health by saying it's "none of your business."

LePage had bariatric surgery in Lewiston in September 2016 and lost at least 50 pounds, but waited to reveal the weight-loss operation until a January 2017 interview with Maine talk radio station WLOB-AM. The governor said his doctor had warned him he could develop diabetes.

And this May, LePage disclosed at a public event that he was hit by a car while bicycling in Florida on Nov. 22, 2017. LePage said the accident left him needing surgery, which he said could complicate his hopes of leading a trade mission to Taiwan before leaving office in January.NEW YORK (AP) - Ben Kingsley said he didn't portray Adolf Eichmann out of love or admiration. Rather, he wanted to "nail him to the gates of Auschwitz."

The Oscar-winning Kingsley, who has tackled historical figures before, including Mahatma Gandhi, Otto Frank and Simon Wiesenthal, said playing Eichmann in "Operation Finale" produced an entirely different feeling in him.

"With Gandhi, I loved him. With Simon, I loved him. With Otto, I loved him. With Itzhak (Stern), I loved him. But him - I'll nail you to the gates of Auschwitz. I'll put you up there so everyone can see what you did, what you stood for and who you are," Kingsley told The Associated Press in a recent interview.

FILE - In this Aug. 16, 2018 photo, Ben Kingsley attends the premiere of "Operation Finale" at the Walter Reade Theater in New York. Kingsley portrays Adolf Eichmann fifteen years after the end of World War II. A team of Israeli agents travel to Argentina with the extremely dangerous mission of smuggling Eichmann out of the country to bring him to justice. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

The story takes place fifteen years after the end of World War II. A team of Mossad agents travel to Argentina with the extremely dangerous mission of smuggling Eichmann out of the country to bring him to justice in Israel.

Eichmann, wanted for war crimes, was living in the South American country after escaping Germany at the end of the war. He was the main architect of the Final Solution, the Nazi plan to exterminate Jews that led to more than six million deaths.

"I put him into the camera for you to judge him, for you to see. I've let go of him and I dedicated my performance to Elie Wiesel and the millions who lost their lives under his command," Kingsley said.

"Rather than saying to the man that I portrayed, 'I am doing this for you,' because I certainly wasn't, I used to say to Elie Wiesel, 'I'm doing this for you,' because I know that Elie and other survivors said quite rightly that if we forget the six million, we are murdering them all over again."

In the film, the rhetoric spoken by Eichmann bares an eerie similarity to the vicious debates currently surrounding the immigration issue in the United States and across the globe. Kingsley sees the film as a cautionary tale and hopes that audiences "will have thoughts after the seeing the film that they did not have before."

After protests by neo-Nazis and white supremacists last year in Charlottesville, Virginia, Kingsley thinks it's important to not forget the lives lost in the Holocaust, so it doesn't happen again.

"Memory is vitally important, truth and memory. I'm quoting now Elie Wiesel, whom I met on several occasions. I loved his company. It was definitely being in the company of what I would say would be comparable to an Old Testament prophet. I felt that also when I was in the presence of Simon Wiesenthal for all those months when I portrayed him. And Simon, quite clearly said that it could happen again. And so did Elie in his heroic pessimistic moments."

"Star Wars" star Oscar Isaac took a break from shooting the latest installment in the franchise to attend the recent New York premiere of "Operation Finale."

"I flew in from a galaxy far, far away where we're shooting in London," he said.

Isaac plays Nazi-hunting Mossad agent Peter Malkin. He also drew parallels between the rhetoric of Eichmann and the vicious debates of today on immigration.

"You start to hear a lot of similar language, and it's so, so powerful what a demagogue can do. How he can whip up just normal people, not monsters, not psychopaths - just regular people to hate," Isaac said.

Isaac is also an executive producer on the film.

Nick Kroll, who plays a Mossad administrator, agreed the film is a cautionary tale.

"We have to be aware of the fact that holocausts are still going on and that we must do our part to protect people from genocide," he said.

The film hits theaters Aug. 29 and also stars Melanie Laurent, Lior Raz and Joe Alwyn.SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) - A hand-written document called "Phases of a Terrorist Attack," was seized from a remote New Mexico desert compound where authorities found 11 children living in wretched conditions, and later a dead 3-year-old boy, prosecutors said.

The document, cited in a court filing Friday by state prosecutors, included vague instructions for "the one-time terrorist" and mentioned an unnamed place called "the ideal attack site."

Prosecutors wrote that new interviews with some of the children taken from the site revealed that one of the adults, Lucas Morton, stated he wished to die in jihad as a martyr, and that defendants Jany Leveille and defendant Subhannah Wahhaj joked about dying in jihad.

FILE - In this Aug. 10, 2018, file photo, is a makeshift living compound in Amalia, N.M. Prosecutors seeking to keep two men and three women jailed on child-abuse charges in northern New Mexico now say they seized a document entitled "Phases of a Terrorist Attack" at the filthy desert compound where 11 children and a dead boy were found. In a court filing Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, prosecutors said the hand-written document had instructions for "The one-time terrorist" and mentioned an unnamed place called "the ideal attack site." (AP Photo/Morgan Lee, File)

Morton's attorney did not respond immediately to requests for comment. Megan Mitsunaga, who represents Subhannah Wahhaj, said the she has not seen any evidence to support the accusation against her client. Leveille's attorney could not be reached.

The document was filed Friday as part of the prosecutors' fight to keep all five adults found at the compound jailed. They are challenging a judge's ruling earlier this month that would release the adults to house arrest with ankle bracelets. They remain in custody amid death threats against the judge and concerns for the defendants' own security.

Leveille and the father of the dead boy, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj (see-DAHJ' IBN wah-HAJ'), are confronting additional barriers to release. Federal immigration officials say Leveille, a native of Haiti, is detained on accusations she unlawfully overstayed a visitor visa for 20 years.

Both were charged Friday with child abuse resulting in death in connection with Wahhaj's 3-year-old son Abdul-ghani, whose remains were found inside a tunnel at the compound three days after an initial law enforcement raid this month.

A warrant outlining the charges contends the couple denied proper medical care to the severely disabled boy even as he appeared to go through seizures and heart failure.

Wahhaj and Leveille have yet to appear in court on the new charges or enter pleas. Leveille's attorney, Kelly Golightley, said her client maintains her innocence.

The documents referenced in Friday's filing did not make clear whether there was an actual attack plan, or merely an aspirational desire for violence, and no terrorism-related charges have been filed.

Prosecutors said Monday the hand-written document was mentioned briefly at a hearing in which District Court Judge Sarah Backus rebuffed prosecutors, saying they "completely failed to establish its origin."

Mitsunaga has said she hasn't seen any evidence that supports her client's continued detention.

"I think that Judge Backus already made it perfectly clear that she didn't think the accusations were well founded and that they were not grounds to hold them preventively," she said. "And I don't see any new evidence to rebut her findings."

Thomas Clark, the attorney for Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, said Monday that he has not received new information from prosecutors about his client and declined comment.

All five defendants have been pleaded not guilty to child neglect charges.

In the documents filed Friday, prosecutors quote an extensive account of the Abdul-ghani's death as written in a journal entry that they attribute to Leveille, indicating that Abdul-ghani died in late December 2017 as the exhausted boy's heartbeat faded in and out during a religious ritual aimed at casting out demonic spirits.

The boy initially was reported missing last year from Jonesboro, Georgia, by his mother after Siraj Ibn Wahhaj said he was taking the child to a park and didn't return.

The ritual and the boy's death were described at earlier court hearings by an FBI agent who drew on information from interviews with teenagers who lived at the compound. The descriptions conform with aspects of an alternative, meditative Islamic healing ritual called ruqya.

Prosecutors have alleged that older children were trained to handle firearms to potentially participate in possible attacks on teachers, schools and banks - plans that would go into effect after Abdul-ghani's anticipated resurrection.

Prosecutors say that children from the compound told investigators that corrupt institutions or individuals would be confronted after the resurrection - and that those who did not believe Leveille's message would be shot or otherwise attacked by Siraj Ibn Wahhaj.

One child named an Atlanta hospital as a specific "corrupt institution," prosecutors said in the new court filings. Prosecutors also say that Leveille mentioned the hospital in a personal journal seized by authorities on a thumb drive.PARIS (AP) - French President Emmanuel Macron laid out his roadmap for the country's diplomatic priorities in the year to come during a 90-minute speech to France's ambassadors Monday.

Notably, Macron appeared to be shifting his approach to the United States and President Donald Trump, with whom he has had such a demonstrative relationship the two leaders were teased about their "bromance."

His speech focused on strengthening the European Union to face today's challenges rather than counting on the U.S. support that had two world wars as a crucible.

French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during the annual French ambassadors' conference at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. (Philippe Wojazer/Pool Photo via AP)

Since his election last year, Macron repeatedly tried to convince Trump not to pull out of the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. France's 40-year-old pro-EU president also urged Trump not to impose tariffs on European steel and aluminum.

Bromance or not, his efforts were in vain.

On Monday, Macron urged the European Union to take more responsibility for its own defense .

A look at other issues on his roadmap:

EUROPE

The continent's future was Macron's major focus. Nine months before the next European parliament election, he stressed the need to make the EU more "sovereign." He has pledged to redouble efforts to counter rising nationalism in Europe.

He closed the door to further talks about Turkey's accession to the EU and proposed instead a "strategic partnership" with Russia and Turkey.

To promote his proposals, Macron plans to visit Denmark and Finland this week and to meet with counterparts from Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands next week. After that, he is scheduled to host German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Paris.

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BREXIT

In line with France's position, Macron said he wants the EU to reach an agreement with Britain on the terms of its departure from the bloc and future relations with it by the end of the year.

"Brexit is a sovereign choice that we must respect, but it is a choice that cannot happen at the expense of the European Union's integrity," he said.

Macron added: "France wishes to maintain a strong, privileged relationship with London, but not at the expense of the European Union dissolution."

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MULTILATERALISM

Macron's comments weren't new to the French ambassadors. He often advocates the value of multilateralism over each country pursuing what might be best for it alone.

During his speech, he specifically criticized what he described as the current "aggressive and unilateral trade policy" of the United States.

"Multilateralism is, in effect, going through a major crisis, which is striking all of our diplomatic relationships, above all because of American policy," Macron said in his pointed remarks. "The partner with whom Europe had built the order of post-war multilateralism seems to turn his back on this common history."

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SYRIA

No major shift. Macron said France's main priority is to fight the Islamic State and that he does not consider Syrian President Bashar Assad's departure a pre-condition of ending the country's long civil war.

Yet maintaining Assad in power would be a "fatal error," Macron said. He stressed the importance of a negotiated political transition.

"It is not up to France to appoint the future leaders of Syria," the president said. "But it is our duty and our interest to ensure that the Syrian people will be in a position to do so."

Macron also called on Russia and Turkey to use their influence in the region to help bring the war to a close.

French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during the annual French ambassadors' conference at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. (Philippe Wojazer/Pool Photo via AP)A one-year-old girl died after she caught a lung infection while being held at an immigration detention facility in Texas with her mother, it has been revealed.

Mariee was 21 months old when she died in May, just weeks after she was released from the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley with mother Yazmin Juarez.

The toddler was in perfect health when she and Juarez, 20, arrived at the center in March.

Juarez had crossed the border with her young daughter searching for a better life than the one that was plagued with violence in their native Guatemala.

But when Juarez and Mariee arrived at the Dilley center they were put in cages for three days in a 'very cold room', with only space blankets to give them warmth.

After three days they were moved into a cell with six beds for six mothers and their children. Four days later, Marie had a fever of 104 degrees F.

One-year-old Mariee died after she caught a lung infection while being held at an immigration detention facility in Dilley, Texas with her mother Yazmin Juarez (pictured together)

The toddler also had a cough, diarrhea, and a rapid heart rate, according to medical records obtained by VICE News.

She was diagnosed with bronchiolitis and an ear infection and treated with Tylenol, Pedialyte, and the antiobiotic Augmentin.

At one point it appeared Mariee was getting better, but soon her health took a turn for the worse.

Juarez took her to get treatment at the center for the third time, once again waiting all day in a cold room with 200 other detainees before she was seen.

Mariee had since lost two pounds, nearly eight percent of her body weight. She was still coughing and her nose was running as well.

A physician assistant's once again treated the child with Tylenol, Augmentin, and Pedialyte, this time throwing in a probiotic as well.

The next day, Mariee couldn't keep the Augmentin down and her fever once again spiked to 103.3. Now her lungs were wheezing as well.

A pediatrician treated the child with Vicks Vaporub and the allergy medicine Zyrtec.

Juarez was becoming so desperate to get Mariee to a hospital that she begged the center to let her return to Guatemala.

The toddler and Juarez were detained in March and held for weeks when Mariee began to develop a cough. She then developed a fever that reached 104 degrees F

She even sneaked out salt from the cafeteria, hoping she could help her daughter by rubbing it on her belly.

Juarez finally got the news she passed her credible fear interview and was released on March 25. Mariee was deemed healthy enough to travel.

Two days later, after flying to New Jersey to stay with Juarez's mother, she was back in the ER.

She was diagnosed with pneumonia and transferred to the ICU, where she was put in a medically included coma and given a breathing tube.

Mariee was eventually transferred to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and, on May 10, suffered a hemorrhage that led to irreversible brain and organ damage.

'She couldn't wake up,' Juarez told Vice. 'I couldn't touch her, because I could damage her with the tubes she had.'

'She had like 20 little bags injected into her. She was in really bad shape.'

Juarez watched her baby girl's skin turn from purple to black. Doctors asked if they could take Mariee off the ventilator.

'It was the most difficult decision of my life,' Juarez said.

Mariee died shortly afterward of viral pneumonitis, an inflammation of lung tissue.

The law firm Arnold & Porter is now blaming US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for detaining Mariee and her mother in a facility 'with unsafe conditions.'

Law firm Arnold & Porter blames US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for detaining Mariee and her mother in a facility 'with unsafe conditions. Pictured is the Dilley center

It is accusing ICE of releasing a 'gravely ill' child 'without medical treatment or guidance,' and said it was considering a lawsuit.

'Instead of offering safe harbor from the life-threatening violence they were fleeing, ICE detained Yazmin and her baby in a place with unsafe conditions, neglectful medical care, and inadequate supervision,' said partner R. Stanton Jones.

'While there, Mariee contracted a respiratory infection that went woefully undertreated for nearly a month. After it became clear that Mariee was gravely ill, ICE simply discharged mother and daughter. Yazmin immediately sought medical care for her baby, but it was too late.'

Advocates for immigrants have long complained about problems with accessing medical care in immigration facilities like the one at Dilley, one of two family detention centers in Texas.

But five pediatricians who reviewed details of Mariee's care say that after contracting the illness, she received treatment that was consistent with what they would have done.

All five doctors believed Mariee's 'recommended course of treatment would have been the same had she not been in ICE custody.'

'It's reasonable care,' said Dr Ewen Wang, associate director of pediatric emergency medicine at Stanford University Medical Center.

Advocates for immigrants have long complained about problems with accessing medical care in immigration facilities like the one at Dilley (pictured)

'It didn't sound like she was in the best of health, but not something you anticipate dying from.'

But in July, two doctors who were contracted by the Department of Homeland Security found that Dilley and detention centers like it were an 'assault on the dignity and health of children and families'.

And a review by the DHS also found that ICE did not properly address the required treatment for sick children.

'Parents and children should not have to wait 24 hours for treatment and should not have to wait for their healthcare needs to become urgent to receive quicker attention and treatment,' the report stated.

Juarez decided to have Mariee buried in their native Guatemala. Her asylum case is pending.

'I had the illusion of making a new life with her, because my life in Guatemala was unbearable,' she said.

'I wanted to happily with her, to go to the park with her and to work hard for her. She was everything to me, but unfortunately that didn't happen.'

Texas child welfare officials have opened an investigation into the death.

ICE said in a statement that it 'takes very seriously the health, safety and welfare of those in our care.'

'Comprehensive medical care is provided to all individuals in ICE custody,' the agency said.MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Students from a private school in Alabama's capital got a surprise visit from actor Michael B. Jordan, who dropped in when he spotted them exercising in the midday heat.

The Montgomery Advertiser reports that Jordan was in Montgomery on Monday to begin filming "Just Mercy," which is based on the memoir of attorney and criminal justice advocate Bryan Stevenson.

The "Creed" and "Black Panther" star was instantly recognized when he surprised the 15 students from Valiant Cross Academy.

FILE - In this June 16, 2018 file photo, Michael B. Jordan arrives at the MTV Movie and TV Awards in Santa Monica, Calif. Jordan was in Montgomery, Ala., on Monday, Aug. 27, to begin filming "Just Mercy," which is based on the memoir of attorney and criminal justice advocate Bryan Stevenson. He made an impromptu visit with some students from Valiant Cross Academy who were exercising in the midday heat. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

One asked if he was, indeed, Michael B. Jordan. Another shouted: "You're from 'Black Panther'!"

Jordan said in an Instagram post he was driving when he spotted the students doing jumping jacks. He wrote: "The sight of them inspires me & reminds me why I do what I do!"NEW YORK (AP) - The Kushner family real estate company was fined $210,000 by New York City regulators on Monday following an Associated Press investigation earlier this year that showed it routinely filed false documents with the city claiming it had no rent-regulated tenants in its buildings when, in fact, it had hundreds.

Separately, a watchdog group said Monday that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has engaged in the same practice, perhaps in a more brazen way, by telling the city that buildings he owned were empty, though tax records showed they were filled with tenants, many rent-regulated.

The city's buildings department fined the Kushner Cos. for filing 42 false applications for construction work on more than a dozen buildings when presidential adviser Jared Kushner ran the business. The AP report showed that the false paperwork allowed the Kushners to escape extra scrutiny designed to stop landlords from using construction to make living conditions for low-paying, rent-regulated tenants unbearable and get them to leave.

FILE - In this Thursday, Aug. 16, 2018 file photo, President Donald Trump's White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner attends a cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House, in Washington. The Kushner family real estate company was fined $210,000 by New York City regulators on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, following an Associated Press investigation earlier this year that showed it routinely filed false documents with the city claiming it had no rent-regulated tenants in its buildings when it, in fact, had hundreds. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

The Kushner Cos. said it relied on "third party consultants" to prepare its applications for construction permits and the errors "have been corrected or will be."

"In no case did the company act in disregard of the safety of our tenants," said spokeswoman Christine Taylor. "We look forward to presenting the facts before an administrative law judge and until then no amount is due."

After the AP report in March, the New York City Council and the New York state attorney general said they would look into the issue. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn issued a subpoena to the company for documents.

The AP found that in three Kushner buildings in Queens for which false construction applications were filed, tenants believed the banging, drilling, dust and leaking water during construction were part of a targeted campaign to get them to leave. Many tenants did just that, and the number of protected rent-regulated units fell sharply in a little over a year, clearing the way for higher paying renters and making the buildings far more valuable.

The Kushners sold the Queens buildings in 2017 for $60 million, nearly 50 percent more than they had paid for them two years earlier.

In Monday's report about Cohen, the watchdog Housing Rights Initiative said the former Trump lawyer and his partners submitted more than 20 false applications for construction at three buildings claiming they were unoccupied and there were no rent-regulated tenants when, in fact, there were dozens. Housing Rights Initiative said tenants were posting complaints to the city about living conditions during construction, proof that there were indeed people living there.

"In order for Cohen to substantiate these claims, he would need to prove that ghosts exist," said Aaron Carr, executive director of Housing Rights Initiative, which also compiled the false filings by the Kushners earlier this year that led to the AP report.

Carr said that Cohen eventually sold the three buildings for $27 million, nearly triple what he had paid for them a few years earlier.

"Cohen commenced a deliberate campaign to systematically harass tenants out of their apartments using destructive, hazardous and illegal construction practices, so he could dramatically raise rents," he said.

Cohen's lawyer, Lanny Davis, declined to comment.

In one building at 237 Henry Street in Manhattan, tenants filed complaints about excessive noise and dust and construction beyond the scope of what was permitted by the city, according to the Housing Rights Initiative report. All 20 units in the building were protected by special rent regulations limiting rent increases and preventing tenants from getting pushed out, the report said, but once construction was done that number fell to five, which made it much more attractive to potential buyers.

In December 2014, about a year and a half after buying the building, Cohen sold it for $9 million, nearly triple what he and his partners had paid for it. That is gross profits, however, without subtracting for construction costs.

The other Cohen buildings in the report were at 172 Rivington Street and 235 East 27th Street, both in Manhattan.

Department of Buildings spokesman Joseph Soldevere said the agency "aggressively investigates" all complaints of improper construction.

Soldevere said nearly all of the permit applications for the Cohen properties include "tenant protection plans" designed to safeguard residents during construction.

He added that the agency issued a "stop-work" order at the Henry Street building and imposed fines of $16,090. He said six complaints at the other two buildings were investigated but no violations of city construction rules found.

___

This story has been corrected to show the building on Henry Street sold for $9 million, not $10 million.

A pedestrian crosses the street in front of an apartment building at 235 East 27th Street, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in New York. The building is one of three in New York City once owned by former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and business partners in which they filed false documents to the city claiming they were empty. A tenants watchdog group says the false filings helped Cohen avoid strict oversight of construction work and allowed him to chase tenants out. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Cars sit parked outside an apartment building at 237 Henry Street, second from left, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in New York. The building is one of three in New York City once owned by former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and business partners in which they filed false documents to the city claiming they were empty. A tenants watchdog group says the false filings helped Cohen avoid strict oversight of construction work and allowed him to chase tenants out. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)NEW YORK (AP) - Ancient periods of cold and dry climate helped our species replace Neanderthals in Europe, a study suggests.

Researchers found that such cold periods coincided with an apparent disappearance of our evolutionary cousins in different parts of the continent, followed by the appearance of our species, Homo sapiens.

"Whether they moved or died out, we can't tell," said Michael Staubwasser of the University of Cologne in Germany.

In this 2013 photo provided by Bogdan Onac, researcher Vasile Ersek stands in the Ascunsa Cave in Romania. Scientists say ancient shifts in climate helped our species replace Neanderthals in Europe. Researchers used data from this cave and another to document two lengthy cold and dry periods. The report, released Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found these periods coincided with the disappearance of Neanderthals and the arrival of our species in specific places. (Bogdan Onac via AP)

Neanderthals once lived in Europe and Asia but died out about 40,000 years ago, just a few thousand years after our species, Homo sapiens, arrived in Europe. Scientists have long debated what happened, and some have blamed the change in climate. Other proposed explanations have included epidemics and the idea that the newcomers edged out the Neanderthals for resources.

Staubwasser and colleagues reported their findings Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They drew on existing climate, archaeological and ecological data and added new indicators of ancient climate from studies of two caves in Romania.

Their study highlighted two cold and dry periods. One began about 44,000 years ago and lasted about 1,000 years. The other began about 40,800 years ago and lasted six centuries. The timing of those events matches the periods when artifacts from Neanderthals disappear and signs of H. sapiens appear in sites within the Danube River valley and in France, they noted.

The climate shifts would have replaced forest with shrub-filled grassland, and H. sapiens may have been better adapted to that new environment than the Neanderthals were, so they could move in after Neanderthals disappeared, the researchers wrote.

Katerina Harvati, a Neanderthal expert at the University of Tuebingen in Germany who wasn't involved in the study, said it's helpful to have the new climate data from southeastern Europe, a region that H. sapiens is thought to have used to spread through the continent.

But she said it's unclear whether Neanderthals disappeared and H. sapiens appeared at the times the authors indicate, because the studies they cite rely on limited evidence and are sometimes open to dispute.

Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London said he thought the paper made a good case for an impact of the climate shifts on Neanderthals, although he believes other factors were also at work in their disappearance.

Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution called the study "a refreshing new look" at the species replacement.

"As has been said before, our species didn't outsmart the Neanderthals," Potts said in an email. "We simply outsurvived them. The new paper offers much to contemplate about how it occurred."

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Follow Malcolm Ritter at @MalcolmRitter His recent work can be found at http://tinyurl.com/RitterAP

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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.MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - An appellate court has upheld most of the convictions against former Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard for ethics violations, including using his public office to drum up clients and investments for his businesses.

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed 11 of the 12 counts against Hubbard on Monday.

Hubbard was for years one of the state's most influential Republicans, but his political career came to an end with his 2016 conviction.

The court ruled there was sufficient evidence to convict Hubbard on most counts, including that he improperly asked lobbyists and company executives for work and investments in his printing business.

The court reversed one count that Hubbard had a conflict of interest when he voted on a budget bill.

A judge sentenced Hubbard to four years in prison, but he is free on bond as he appeals.NEW YORK (AP) - The Latest on the Kushner family real estate company being fined by New York City regulators (all times local):

7:20 p.m.

The Kushner Cos. says it will appeal fines imposed by New York City for filing false documents on more than a dozen of its apartment buildings.

FILE - In this Thursday, Aug. 16, 2018 file photo, President Donald Trump's White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner attends a cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House, in Washington. The Kushner family real estate company was fined $210,000 by New York City regulators on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, following an Associated Press investigation earlier this year that showed it routinely filed false documents with the city claiming it had no rent-regulated tenants in its buildings when it, in fact, had hundreds. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

Spokeswoman Christine Taylor says the real estate company once run by presidential adviser Jared Kushner relied on "third party consultants" to prepare its applications for construction permits and the errors "have been corrected or will be."

Kushner Cos. was fined $210,000 by city regulators following an Associated Press investigation that showed it routinely filed false documents with the city claiming it had no rent-regulated tenants in its buildings when it had hundreds.

Taylor says that "in no case did the company act in disregard of the safety" of its tenants.

___

4:25 p.m.

The Kushner family real estate company has been fined $210,000 by New York City regulators following an Associated Press investigation that showed it routinely filed false documents with the city claiming it had no rent-regulated tenants in its buildings when it, in fact, had hundreds.

The city buildings department on Monday fined the Kushner Cos. for filing 42 false applications for construction work on more than a dozen buildings when presidential adviser Jared Kushner ran the business.

The false documents allowed the company to escape extra scrutiny during construction that watchdog group Housing Rights Initiative has said led to harassment of low-paying, rent-regulated tenants to get them to leave.

The Kushner Cos. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A pedestrian crosses the street in front of an apartment building at 235 East 27th Street, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in New York. The building is one of three in New York City once owned by former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and business partners in which they filed false documents to the city claiming they were empty. A tenants watchdog group says the false filings helped Cohen avoid strict oversight of construction work and allowed him to chase tenants out. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Cars sit parked outside an apartment building at 237 Henry Street, second from left, Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in New York. The building is one of three in New York City once owned by former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and business partners in which they filed false documents to the city claiming they were empty. A tenants watchdog group says the false filings helped Cohen avoid strict oversight of construction work and allowed him to chase tenants out. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)Pope Francis has declined to confirm or deny claims by the Vaticans retired ambassador to the United States that he knew in 2013 about sexual misconduct allegations against the former archbishop of Washington.

Francis said the 11-page text by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano speaks for itself and that he would not comment on it.

Francis was asked by a US reporter during an airborne press conference on Sunday if Mr Viganos claims that the two discussed the Theodore McCarrick allegations in 2013 were true.

The pope was also asked about Mr Viganos claims that McCarrick was already under sanction at the time, but that Francis rehabilitated him.

He said he had read Mr Viganos document and trusted journalists to judge for themselves.

Its an act of trust, he said. I wont say a word about it.

The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published Mr Viganos text on Sunday as the pope wrapped up a two-day visit to Ireland dominated by the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Mr Vigano, 77, a conservative whose hard-line anti-gay views are well known, urged the reformist pope to resign over what he called Francis own culpability in covering up McCarricks crimes.

Francis accepted McCarricks resignation as cardinal last month, after a US church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

Since then, another man has come forward to say McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary.

The accusations have created a crisis of confidence in the US and Vatican hierarchy.

Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report  which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses  the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.

Pope Francis aboard a flight to Rome at the end of his two-day visit to Ireland (Gregorio Borgia/AP)

Mr Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions.

His letter identifies by name the Vatican cardinals and US archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair. He said documents backing up his version of events are in Vatican archives.

The Vaticans ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2016, Mr Vigano said his two immediate predecessors did not fail to inform the Holy See about accusations against McCarrick, starting in 2000.

Mr Vigano said he himself sent at least two memos on him.

He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer, and to no longer celebrate Mass in public or travel.

He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on June 23, 2013, at the Vaticans Santa Marta hotel where the pope lives, three months after Francis was elected pope.

Mr Vigano wrote that he told Francis: Holy Father, I dont know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.

Soon thereafter, Mr Vigano wrote, he was surprised to find that McCarrick had started travelling on missions on behalf of the church, including to China.

McCarrick was also one of the Vaticans intermediaries in the US-Cuba talks in 2014.

Mr Viganos claim that McCarrick had been ordered by Benedict to stay out of public ministry and retire to a lifetime of prayer is somewhat disputed, given that McCarrick enjoyed a fairly public retirement.

But Mr Vigano insisted the sanctions had been imposed, and said a former counsellor in the embassy at the time was prepared to testify about the stormy meeting when McCarrick was informed of them.

Barry Coburn, McCarricks civil attorney, said the allegations in the Vigano letter are serious.

Archbishop McCarrick, like any other person, has a right to due process. He looks forward to invoking that right at the appropriate time, he said in a statement.Warmer temperatures and spells of sunshine rolled in for Bank Holiday Monday after a blanket of rain put a dampener on the long weekend.

Mumbles Head, near Swansea, had 40.2 millimetres of rain and Cardiff saw 38.2 millimetres as Wales bore the brunt of the downpours on Sunday, according to Met Office meteorologist Craig Snell.

There were many parts which saw a decent amount of rain with the south west of England getting 30 millimetres while the the south east had 10 millimetres.

Heavy rain on Sunday had forced the cancellation of the Silverstone GoPro British Grand Prix MotoGP.

Are you making plans for this afternoon? It will be dry for most with some bright or sunny spells , just the odd shower possible in the northwest  pic.twitter.com/Y6niXnjepe  Met Office (@metoffice) August 27, 2018

Silverstone managing director Stuart Pringle made a personal apology, in an online post, after race fans were subjected to the most extraordinarily long wait in the foulest of British weather conditions which ultimately resulted in no race at all.

He said that a hoped for break in the weather did not arrive and the riders decided not to race as the conditions were not going to be right to race.

Revellers were also soaked at the Notting Hill Carnival in London.

Dancers brave the heavy rain during the Childrens Day parade at the Notting Hill Carnival (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Top temperatures may be 21C (69.8F) in the south east on Monday and all in all, it is going to be better than Sunday.

Mr Snell said: It is not going to be a completely dry day.

There is still going to to a scattering of showers across the northern and central parts of the UK but it will be a vast improvement.

Meteorologist Helen Roberts said Monday is looking like a much better day in comparison, with temperatures expected to reach the high teens and low 20s for many.

She added: Certainly the feel of things will be much better, it will certainly feel warmer.

There will be a fair amount of cloud around but with bright spells as well. A few showers possible, but a good deal of dry and fine weather for many.Burmese military leaders should be prosecuted for genocide against Rohingya Muslims, investigators working for the UNs top human rights body say.

The call, accompanying a first report by the investigators, amounts to some of the strongest language yet from UN officials who have denounced alleged human rights violations in Burma since a bloody crackdown began last August.

918,000 Rohingya now live around the city of Coxs Bazar, in Bangladesh.

80% of them depend on humanitarian assistance.

1,068 learning centers serve more than 100,000 children in the camps.



Ten numbers to understand the #Rohingya crisis  https://t.co/clXomWaro5 pic.twitter.com/hi1EFv9kmD  World Food Programme (@WFP) August 24, 2018

The three-member fact-finding mission working under a mandate from the UN-backed Human Rights Council meticulously assembled hundreds of accounts by expatriate Rohingya, satellite footage and other information to assemble the report released on Monday.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh (Altaf Qadri/AP)

The Human Rights Council created the mission six months before a rebel attack on security posts set off the crackdown that drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fleeing to neighbouring Bangladesh.Jeremy Hunt has given the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe greater priority than his predecessor as Foreign Secretary, the imprisoned charity workers husband has said.

Richard Ratcliffe praised Mr Hunt for being clear and critical about his wifes case, after she voluntarily returned to prison in Iran following an emotional family reunion over the weekend.

The British-Iranian mother was released from Evin prison in Tehran on Thursday and has been staying with family outside the capital.

However, the request for an extension was not granted and she was told she must return by sunset, her husband said.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe with her husband Richard Ratcliffe and their daughter Gabriella (Family handout)

Mr Ratcliffe suggested there had been a change in the relationship with Iran since Mr Hunt replaced Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary last month.

And he said he had sensed a change in the way he has prioritised Nazanins case.

I think one of my complaints with the Government was that it didnt feel like it was sort of treating her case with the public severity that I thought it deserved, he told BBC Radio 4s Today programme.

Hes been great in that sense: hes been clear and critical and hes said listen, shes innocent and she shouldnt be in prison, her treatment has been appalling, and all the things that weve been asking the Government to do.

Mr Ratcliffe added: In terms of how the relationship with Iran has changed, well clearly she got out for a few days, thats a pretty good sign and there have been some other improvements.

On Sunday, Mr Hunt said he had spoken to Irans foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Friday but that it clearly wasnt enough.

Looks like Iranian legal system is impervious to the simple fact at the heart of this: an innocent woman is desperate to be reunited with her family. Spoke to Foreign Minister Zarif on Fri but that clearly wasnt enough. The fight goes on #FreeNazanin https://t.co/fknbIRC2lb  Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) August 26, 2018

Vowing to continue the fight, he tweeted: Looks like Iranian legal system is impervious to the simple fact at the heart of this: an innocent woman is desperate to be reunited with her family.

Mr Ratcliffe, who told the programme he has been unable to get an Iranian visa, said his wifes temporary release initially appeared to be a very good sign, but said it felt pretty cruel at the end of it.

He added: It was a slight surprise that she was released but it felt consistent with positive noises, so it wasnt just a bump, it was a proper brick wall yesterday that she was brought back in.

Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, from Hampstead, north London, was sentenced to five years in jail after being accused of spying by Tehrans Islamist regime.

She denies the allegation and said she was on holiday in Iran to allow her daughter to spend time with relatives there.

Her four-year-old daughter Gabriella has been staying with family since Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was detained at Imam Khomeini airport in April 2016.A man suspected of involvement in the killing of an 11-year-old Dutch boy 20 years ago has been detained in Spain following an appeal to the public for help tracking him down, police said.

Dutch police said in a written statement that the suspect, 55-year-old Jos Brech, was detained on Sunday afternoon and is being held in a Spanish police cell pending his transfer to the Netherlands.

Police distributed photos of Brech on Wednesday, saying that his DNA matches samples taken from the clothes of the boy, Nicky Verstappen.

Jos Brech was detained following an appeal to the public for help tracking him down, police said (Spanish National Police/AP)

About a day after Verstappen went missing while at a summer camp in 1998, Brech was stopped by military police close to the scene but was not considered a suspect.

Family members reported Brech missing in April.Hotels group Hyatt is on track to grow its UK footprint, with plans to open a new site at Great Scotland Yard as part of major brand launch.

The US companys UK presence is small compared with its global footprint, with just five sites in the country  four in London and one in Birmingham.

But it is expanding rapidly, having recently confirmed the opening of one of its so-called Unbound Collection sites, based in the former home of the London Metropolitan Police at Great Scotland Yard for next year.

The Press Association understands a second UK location is also in the pipeline but details of its exact location and sub-brand under the Hyatt umbrella has yet to be publicly confirmed by the company.

Despite having recently backed off from a potential offer for Spains NH Hotels, Hyatts president and chief executive, Mark Hoplamazian, earlier this month said Europe remains a key focus for the business.

We see a lot of opportunity here in the UK, we feel were under-represented. Thats why the team is working extremely hard at exploiting these opportunities, Peter Fulton, an executive vice president for Hyatt hotels, told the Press Association.

We dont see the development pipeline slowing down over the next five years.

Hyatt has bolstered its London-based development team  which serves the whole of Europe and was previously located in Zurich  with three new appointments and an internal transfer.

We increased our development presence here in London to be closer to where the capital is and thats proven to be a bit of a godsend as well, so thats really helped stimulate this whole pipeline, he said.

Peter Fulton, is an executive VP for Hyatt hotels and its president covering Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South-West Asia (PA)

Day-to-day Mr Fulton  who also oversees Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South-West Asia  said the team is talking to potential operators, independent hotel and land owners across the region, as well as capital partners and sovereign wealth funds looking for investment opportunities.

That is in addition to a fresh push into franchising.

Weve been in the UK for 30 years plus, but because we werent franchising and so forth we didnt really see the growth that chains have, and now we have that growth coming through, Mr Fulton said.

He sees a particular need to be in Edinburgh  a location where he says Hyatt customers want to go.

So not being in Edinburgh is a problem for us.

In the meantime, the company is trying to extend its reach by launching a loyalty programme with 500 small luxury hotels across the world, many of which will be based in Europe.

Mr Fulton explained that more than 87% of those locations  many of which are yet to be announced  are in places where Hyatt has yet to set up shop.

Theres the innovation that comes in  how do we fight above our weight and give  opportunities to our loyalty partners?

When asked whether Edinburgh sites were in the mix, Mr Fulton hinted at a potential partnership.

I was speaking to one of the owners there yesterday and it was about exactly that, so that will come out towards the end of the year when thats all finally dotted and crossed.

However, he stressed that a Hyatt hotel is still on the cards for Edinburgh.

That will not preclude us from going and opening a hotel there on our own. So this is a placeholder.Senator John McCains former Vietnamese jailer has said he respected his former inmate and felt sad about his death.

He spoke as others in Vietnam paid their respects to the former US Navy pilot who was a prisoner of war, and was later instrumental in bringing the wartime foes together.

Mr McCains Skyhawk dive bomber was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and he was taken prisoner and held in the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison for more than five years.

Floral tributes at the monument of Senator John McCain in Hanoi (Tran Van Minh/AP)

Former Colonel Tran Trong Duyet, who ran the prison at the time, said he met Mr McCain many times while he was confined there.

At that time I liked him personally for his toughness and strong stance, he told the newspaper Vietnam News.

Later on when he became a US senator, he and Senator John Kerry greatly contributed to promote Vietnam-US relations so I was very fond of him.

When I learnt about his death early this morning, I feel very sad. I would like to send condolences to his family. I think its the same feeling for all Vietnamese people as he has greatly contributed to the development of Vietnam-US relations.

Mr McCain died of brain cancer on Saturday aged 81 in his home state of Arizona.

US ambassador to Vietnam Daniel Kritenbrink pays tribute in Hanoi (Tran Van Minh/AP)

Meanwhile, scores of people in Hanoi paid their respects to Mr McCain at the US embassy and at a monument by Truc Bach Lake, where he landed after parachuting from his damaged plane.

Speaking to reporters after writing in a book of condolence, US ambassador Daniel Kritenbrink said Mr McCain was a great leader and real hero who helped normalise relations between the former enemies.

He was a warrior, he was also a peacemaker and of course he fought and suffered during the Vietnam War, but then later as a senator, he was one of the leaders who helped bring our countries back together and helped the United States and Vietnam normalise our relationship and now become partners and friends, Mr Kritenbrink said.

Mr McCain and former Senator Kerry played important roles in the normalisation of bilateral relations in 1995.

Pham Gia Minh, a 62-year-old businessman, said he witnessed Vietnamese civilians being killed by the US bombings of North Vietnam, including the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972, but he admired Mr McCain for overcoming the difficult past to build better ties between the two countries.

War is losses and suffering, he said after signing the book of condolence.

But the will of a brave nation is to go beyond that to look to the future. The Vietnamese people have that will and Mr John McCain has that will We both have that will to overcome the painful past, overcome the misunderstanding to together build a brighter future.The Catholic church should contribute substantially to the cost of addressing the legacy of a mass grave at a former mother and babys home in Ireland, the Government told the Pope.

It was a shameful chapter in Irish history and the church must take real action, quickly and unconditionally, to make reparation to those who lived at its Tuam residence in Co Galway, Childrens Minister Katherine Zappone said.

Between 1925 and 1961 around 800 infants were buried in a septic tank at the home for unmarried mothers.

The minister raised the issue with the pontiff on Saturday and on Monday released the contents of a letter she gave him.

Childrens Minister Katherine Zappone has told the Pope the church should contribute substantially to the cost of whatever the Government decides to do about the mass grave at Tuam (Niall Carson/PA)

She wrote: It is my strong conviction that given the role of the church in this shameful chapter of recent Irish history it must play a practical role in addressing the hurt and damage.

I believe that the church should contribute substantially to the cost of whatever option is decided by the government.

This should be done willingly, unconditionally and quickly.

Nothing less will demonstrate remorse.

She added: I am writing to you in the hope that the church will accept its responsibilities and make reparation for its part in a very shameful chapter of Irish history.

Mother and baby homes came to public attention in Ireland during the summer of 2014 following a series of disturbing reports of high mortality rates and claims of possible burials of children on the grounds of the former residence in Tuam.

The then government decided to have these matters investigated and an official Commission of Investigation was established in February 2015.

People gather clay baby shoes at the end of the protest at the site of the former Tuam home for unmarried mothers in County Galway. The Irish Government has called for the Pope to intervene (Niall Carson/PA)

The Commissions excavations which confirmed the presence of remains on the site of the former Bon Secours religious order home.

The Commission believes that there are a significant number of childrens remains there, the minister said.

An expert team is considering options to fulfil what the minister called the duty to these children.

They include a complete excavation of the site and DNA analysis of the hundreds of remains contained.

The minister added: There was little compassion shown to children and their mothers in this home.

We cannot change what happened to them. For the little ones whose remains are in a sewage system, we owe them dignity in death.

For their mothers, siblings and families we need to give them some peace.Authorities in eastern Germany are bracing for rival protests amid tensions over the killing of a man in what police described as a dispute between several people of various nationalities.

Three men in their thirties were injured in the incident in Chemnitz early on Sunday, according to police.

A 35-year-old German citizen later died of his injuries.

Police officers run during protests in Chemnitz, Germany (Andreas Seidel/dpa via AP)

Police said two men were detained but could not confirm if they were involved in the incident.

The killing sparked spontaneous protests by hundreds of people late on Sunday in Chemnitz, a city where almost a quarter voted for the far-right Alternative for Germany party last year.

Videos posted on social media appeared to show far-right protesters threatening and chasing passers-by during Sundays demonstration.

German government spokesman Steffen Seibert condemned the violence.

What was seen yesterday in parts of Chemnitz and what was recorded on video has no place in our country, he told reporters in Berlin on Monday.

People ganging up, chasing people who look different from them or who come from elsewhere () is something we wont tolerate, he said.

This has no place in our cities and I can say for the German government that we condemn this in the sharpest possible manner.

Mr Seibert also criticised a far-right politician who had suggested German authorities were unable to protect citizens.

There is no place in Germany for vigilantism, for groups that want to spread hatred on the streets, for intolerance and racism, said Mr Seibert.The car used by Pope Francis during his trip to Ireland is to be donated to help homeless families.

It will be given to the social care agency of the Catholic church in Dublin, Crosscare, a statement on behalf of Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said.

Each week, Crosscare staff assist families in trying to move on from a temporary emergency facility in the Mater Dei hub to more secure, long term accommodation.

A statement from the Archdiocese of Dublin said: The now famous blue Skoda Rapid will be used by Crosscare staff to take families who are moving to view their next accommodation.

It will be in daily use.

The Skoda car used to transport Pope Francis in Ireland is to be donated to help the homeless. Brian Lawless/PA.

Conor Hickey, director of Crosscare services, said they were delighted with the gift from the Pope.

He hoped struggling families would find this gesture from the pontiff of some comfort, because they were constantly remembered by him.

Archbishop Martin decided that the vehicle would be donated to Crosscare.

At any one time 50 families are in the Mater Dei hub seeking housing.

Since it opened, 100 families have moved through the temporary system, facilitated by Crosscare workers.

Homelessness is a major political and social issue in Ireland and critics have sharply attacked the Governments response.

The Government has put in place measures aimed at releasing State land for housing developments.

The diocese said: Unfortunately, as the homeless crisis continues, as each family moves on, there is another waiting to move in and the family hub is constantly full.

Mr Hickey has said the citys crisis had reached huge proportions and a level unheard of three years ago.

The Skoda will be given over to Crosscare in the coming days.

It will not be able to keep the number plate, SCV 1, which means Stato della Citta del Vaticano, Vatican City.

The former Mater Dei College was given over to Dublin City Council by the Archdiocese of Dublin last year and operated by Crosscare.

It was completely refurbished to a very high standard into apartments to allow families to move out of hotel accommodation and live and eat together in a more family-friendly environment, with appropriate support services in place.Charles Leclerc would have required a miracle to avoid a potentially fatal injury if the halo, Formula Ones controversial new safety device, had not been on his car in Belgium.

That was the verdict of the FIA, motorsports world governing body on Monday, after fresh television footage emerged of the terrifying opening-corner accident.

The slow-motion video, captured from the on-board camera on Brendon Hartleys Toro Rosso, clearly shows the front-right wheel of Fernando Alonsos car smashing into Leclercs halo. The three-pronged design, which sits on the drivers cockpit and became mandatory this year despite fierce opposition, deflected Alonsos out-of-control McLaren away from Leclercs head.

Fernando Alonsos McLaren goes over the top of Charles Leclercs Sauber on the opening corner at Spa (Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP)

The crushing force of the impact was enough to break the Spaniards McLaren suspension. Alonsos black tyre marks were visible on Sauber driver Leclercs white halo.

It doesnt take much imagination to think that the tyre marks would have actually been on Charles head, FIA race director Charlie Whiting said.

It would have been a miracle if they werent, had the halo not been there.

What is clear is the significant tyre marks on both the chassis and the halo. It looks like it has had a fairly hefty whack.

Renault driver Nico Hulkenberg will serve a 10-place grid penalty at the Italian Grand Prix on Sunday for his role in the terrifying accident.

The German, also hit with three penalty points on his licence by the stewards, crashed into the back of Alonso to send the McLaren car hurtling towards Leclerc.

Monegasque Leclerc, 20, insisted that Hulkenberg does not deserve to be suspended for causing the accident, but believes the FIA must consider banning drivers for dangerous driving.

If something is done deliberately or dangerously then a ban should occur, Leclerc, who was competing in only his 13th grand prix, said.

Nico is not a driver who has a past, and you can see that his actions were not deliberate. It was just a pure mistake.

DRIVER STANDINGS: 8 RACES TO GO



Battle at the top 



Battle between two Finns 



Battle between the Red Bulls 



Battle for P7 



So much to play for over the next few months #BelgianGP #F1 pic.twitter.com/c97oH9w1S3  Formula 1 (@F1) August 26, 2018

The F1 grid will reconvene in Monza on Sunday with Lewis Hamilton now just 17 points ahead of rival Sebastian Vettel following the Ferrari drivers unchallenged victory at Spa-Francorchamps.

After the race, Hamilton cryptically suggested that Vettels dominant win had been aided by tricks on his Ferrari machinery. Hamilton, 33, insisted he did not believe Ferrari were acting illegally.

Race director Whiting added: Im quite amused about it really because we know quite a lot about Ferraris car and there is no way Lewis would know about anything about it.

If Lewis says theyve got a few tricks going on in that car, well clearly Ferrari have got things going on which are giving it performance and all of us in the FIA are aware of and obviously are happy with.

They are doing a good job at the moment and Mercedes have got to try to counter that.Opposition parties have called for full transparency from the Scottish Government over the investigation of sexual harassment allegations against Alex Salmond.

The Scottish Conservatives and Scottish Labour have urged the SNP administration to release more information on the circumstances surrounding two complaints against the former first minister.

Mr Salmond strongly denies the allegations  which were raised in January  and has launched legal action against the Government over the probe.

Alex Salmond spoke to the media last week (Jane Barlow/PA)

The claims about his conduct towards two staff members in 2013, while he was in office, have been handed to Police Scotland.

Tory equalities spokeswoman Annie Wells has written to Scottish Government Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans seeking to clarify whether complaints had been raised against Mr Salmond before January.

She said: I believe we need to know whether these allegations were ever brought to the attention of the Scottish Government prior to January 2018.

There is a clear public interest in getting a definitive answer as to whether any complaints against the former first minister were made in this period and whether any Scottish Government officials or ministers were informed about them.

The Scottish Government should instigate an independent review in order to find out the answer.

This would show the Scottish Government was being fully transparent about its knowledge of any complaints of alleged misconduct.

Meanwhile, Labour has tabled a series of Freedom of Information requests seeking more detail on three meetings that Mr Salmond said had taken place between himself and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon after he was informed of the allegations.

The party is requesting any correspondence relating to the meetings as well as any notes or minutes from them.

Labours Rhoda Grant MSP said: The people of Scotland expect full transparency over this most serious of matters, but the SNP government has so far not been forthcoming.

It is understood that Alex Salmond met the First Minister on multiple occasions to discuss the investigation into allegations of sexual assault made against him.

It would be completely unacceptable if the details of those meetings remain hidden from the Scottish people.

Members of the public understand that the Government will be restricted in some regards due to Mr Salmonds legal action against them, but basic details surrounding these meetings should be released to them.Jeremy Hunt has said he will visit Burma at the earliest opportunity to seek answers after a UN report called for military leaders to be prosecuted for genocide against Rohingya Muslims.

The Foreign Secretary described the report as deeply disturbing and said there should never be a hiding place for those who commit these kind of atrocities.

Investigators working for the UNs top human rights body took the unusual step of identifying six military leaders by name among those behind what they called deadly, systematic crimes against the ethnic minority.

Jeremy Hunt is to visit Burma (David Cheskin/PA)

The call amounts to some of the strongest language yet from UN officials who have denounced alleged human rights violations in Burma since a bloody crackdown began last August.

Mr Hunt tweeted: Deeply disturbing to read UN report on crimes against Rohingya people.

There must be never be a hiding place for those who commit these kind of atrocities. Have decided to visit Burma to seek answers at the earliest opportunity.

Deeply disturbing to read UN report on crimes against Rohingya people. There must be never be a hiding place for those who commit these kind of atrocities. Have decided to visit Burma to seek answers at the earliest opportunity  Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) August 27, 2018

The three-member fact-finding mission and their team, working under a mandate from the UN-backed Human Rights Council, meticulously assembled hundreds of accounts from expatriate Rohingya, as well as satellite footage and other information to assemble the report.

The militarys contempt for human life, dignity and freedom, for international law in general, should be a cause of concern for the entire population of Myanmar (Burma), and to the international community as a whole, fact-finding mission chair Marzuki Darusman, a former Indonesian attorney-general, told a news conference.

The council created the mission in March last year, nearly six months before a string of deadly rebel attacks on security and police posts set off a crackdown that drove Rohingya to flee into neighbouring Bangladesh.

More than 700,000 people are thought to have fled, according to UN estimates.

The team compiled accounts of crimes including gang rape, the torching of hundreds of villages, enslavement, and killings of children, some before the eyes of their own parents.

But it was not granted access to Burma and has decried a lack of co-operation or even response from the government, which received an early copy of the report.

The UKs ambassador to the UN, Karen Pierce, said she was not confident the UN Security Council would unanimously back referral to the International Criminal Court.

To date Russia and China have taken a different view of ICC referral and without acceptance by them of a referral then Im afraid it will be very difficult for the Security Council to take that step, she told Channel 4 News.

Ms Pierce said Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi had not been as bold or as firm as she could have been in dealing with the violence, but added: The responsibility does not primarily lie with the Burmese government but with the Burmese military, and it is their role that needs a proper judicial investigation and accountability mechanism.

Minister for the UN Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon will use a speech at the UN Security Council on Tuesday to urge the international community to increase financial support for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

Lord Ahmad, who is set to call for the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing to be brought to justice, said: The UK is playing a leading role in bringing an end to this crisis. We need an international political consensus to bring the appalling humanitarian situation to an end.

Bangladesh has done more than its fair share to help the refugees. Now its the turn of other countries to step up, and provide the money that will help support both refugees and the communities that support them, and for international partners to act together to ensure justice for the victims of the crisis.Australias former prime minister has said he will resign from parliament this week in a move that could cost the government its single-seat majority.

Malcolm Turnbull told supporters he will resign from parliament on Friday, a week after he was forced from office by MPs in his conservative Liberal Party because he had lost their support.

Thank you. Its been an honour to serve you as PM. pic.twitter.com/fwNqxUJIVG  Malcolm Turnbull  (@TurnbullMalcolm) August 24, 2018

That could set the stage for an October 6 by-election. Prime Minister Scott Morrison could also call general elections, although he has said he plans to hold polls close to when an election is due in May.

Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull will also be quitting parliament (AP Photo/Andrew Taylor)

Mr Morrison visited the drought-stricken Outback on Monday in a demonstration that he has turned his focus away from his governments internal drama to the problems of the nation.

We know that people like Annabel and Stephen are doing it tough in drought-stricken areas such as Quilpie. Our mission is to listen to them before we plan and act. pic.twitter.com/YuDrGs51kg  Scott Morrison (@ScottMorrisonMP) August 27, 2018

Mr Morrison selected drought assistance as a top priority along with national security and economic growth when he was chosen by Liberal Party MPs on Friday to replace Mr Turnbull.

Mr Turnbull became the fourth prime minister to be dumped by his or her own party since 2010 in response to poor opinion polling.

Mr Morrison flew to rural western Queensland state, where crops are failing and ranchers are struggling to feed sheep and cattle after six years of drought. He has not yet announced any new initiatives to help farmers.

Mr Morrison is working to heal a bitter rift between conservative and moderate MPs in his conservative government to present a united front to voters.

The hard-right MP who led the charge against Mr Turnbull but lost the leadership ballot to Mr Morrison was sworn in as home affairs minister on Monday. Peter Dutton had quit that post so he could publicly challenge Mr Turnbull.

It was an honour to be resworn in as the Minister for Home Affairs this morning. I look forward to continuing the important work with the men and women of our security and intelligence agencies to keep Australia safe and secure. pic.twitter.com/hwplBKXJow  Peter Dutton (@PeterDutton_MP) August 27, 2018

Tony Abbott, who was prime minister before Mr Turnbull and is a key ally of Mr Dutton, declared on Monday that the government would not turn against Mr Morrison.

The era of the political assassin is over and thank God for that, Mr Abbott told Sydney Radio 2GB.

Mr Morrison welcomed Mr Abbotts comments.

Its been a pretty tumultuous time and I think Australians would welcome the fact that that period of time is over and it should be over, Mr Morrison told reporters in the town of Quilpie.

The age of bitterness has come to a close and the age of working together and focusing on the future has come.

NOW | "I think our country is in a better shape today, than it was a fortnight ago."

Tony Abbott joins Ray Hadley in the studio. pic.twitter.com/wpAOFrnWOw  2GB 873 (@2GB873) August 26, 2018

Mr Abbotts sister, Christine Forster, said she wanted to be the Liberal Party candidate in Mr Turnbulls Sydney electorate which is the wealthiest in Australia.

Mr Abbott supported his sister, who is a lesbian and clashed with her former seminarian brother in lasts years debate about whether Australia should legalise gay marriage. Parliament legalised same-sex marriage and Mr Abbott attended his sisters wedding in February.

Mr Morrison, whom Mr Turnbull described as a loyal treasurer, excluded Mr Abbott from his first cabinet but has offered him a newly-created role of special envoy for indigenous affairs. Mr Abbott has yet to decide whether he will accept it.The Trump administration and Mexico have reached a preliminary accord to terminate the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

US President Donald Trump made the claim after announcing an understanding with Mexico that could lead to an overhaul of the 24-year-old trade pact, which he has called a disaster.

Mr Trump said he would replace it with a deal more favourable to the United States called the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement.

Donald Trump says he will `terminate Nafta (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President @realDonaldTrump: It is an incredible deal for the workers and for the citizens of both countries. pic.twitter.com/qOSRfPyMeU  The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) August 27, 2018

But the Trump administration still needs to negotiate with the third partner in Nafta, Canada, to become part of any new trade accord.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto was on speakerphone as Mr Trump made the announcement in the Oval Office and said he hopes Canada will eventually be incorporated into the deal.

pic.twitter.com/Bbr8zqkvsj  The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) August 27, 2018

Without Canada, Americas second biggest trading partner, it is unclear whether any new US trade agreement with Mexico would be possible.

Mr Trump said that he will be calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

If theyd like to negotiate fairly, well do that, Mr Trump said.

Mr Trump put pressure on Canada by threatening to tax Canadian auto imports and to leave Canada out of a new regional trade bloc.

Nafta reduced most trade barriers between the three countries. But Mr Trump and other critics say it encouraged US manufacturers to move south of the border to exploit low-wage Mexican labour.

Talks to overhaul the agreement began a year ago and have proved contentious.

US and Mexican negotiators worked over the weekend to narrow their differences. The Office of the US Trade Representative said that Mexico had agreed to ensure that 75% of automotive content would be produced within the trade bloc (up from a current 62.5%) to receive duty-free benefits and that 40% to 45% be made by workers earning at least 16 US dollars an hour.

Adam Austen, a spokesman for Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland, said: Canada is encouraged by the continued optimism shown by our negotiating partners. Progress between Mexico and the United States is a necessary requirement for any renewed Nafta agreement.

Mr Austen said the Canadians had been in regular contact with the Nafta negotiators.

President Trump: "They used to call it NAFTA. We're going to call it the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement. We'll get rid of the name NAFTA."



Full video here: https://t.co/FOE9Wt1Hem pic.twitter.com/Km8yVDip9n  CSPAN (@cspan) August 27, 2018

We will only sign a new Nafta that is good for Canada and good for the middle class, he said, adding that Canadas signature is required.

Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas, hailed the positive step but said Canada needs to be party to a final deal.

A trilateral agreement is the best path forward, he said, adding that millions of jobs are at stake.Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.

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Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349Flags at the White House were back at full-staff on Monday as Senate leaders of both parties formally requested they remain lowered to honour John McCain.

US President Donald Trump also passed up several chances to comment on Mr McCain, with whom he had frequently traded criticism.

The flags at the White House had been lowered a day earlier but were back up on Monday in a break with tradition. That brought complaints from both right and left, including the American Legion.

The US flag above the White House flies at full-staff less than 48 hours after the death of John McCain (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

On behalf of The American Legions two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCains death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nations flag be half-staffed through his internment, said a statement to Mr Trump from Denise Rohan, the organisations national commander.

Aides to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic leader Chuck Schumer requested that the Department of Defence keeps flags at government buildings lowered until the sunset after Mr McCain is buried in Annapolis, Maryland, next Sunday.

That is standard procedure when a member of the Senate passes away. Mr McCain served in the chamber for six terms, most recently as chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Mr McCain was a frequent critic of Mr Trump on everything from his leadership style to his Russia policy. Mr Trump questioned the decorated Navy pilots Vietnam heroism and was angered by Mr McCains vote to kill the presidents Obamacare repeal.

Mr McCain died on Saturday at 81 after a 13-month struggle with brain cancer. Mr Trump tweeted condolences to Mr McCains family but made no reference to the Arizona senator.

US Flag Code states that flags be lowered on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress.

After Democrat Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts died in 2009, then-president Barack Obama ordered flags at the White House flown at half-staff for five days.US President Donald Trump has said he respects John McCains service to our country and has signed a proclamation to fly the US flag at half-staff until the senators burial.

The flag at the top of the White House flew at half-staff over the weekend but was raised on Monday and then lowered again amid criticism.

Mr Trump and Mr McCain have feuded for years. Mr Trump tweeted about Mr McCain after his death on Saturday but has passed up several chances to comment publicly on the Arizona senator.

The US flag over the White House has been lowered to half-staff again after criticism (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Mr Trump said in a written statement on Monday that he has asked vice president Mike Pence to speak at a ceremony honouring Mr McCain at the capitol on Friday.

The president also says he has agreed to the McCain familys request for military transportation of Mr McCains remains from Arizona to Washington.President Donald Trump has ordered American flags at US buildings lowered to half-staff for senator John McCain until his burial on Sunday.

Mr Trumps proclamation came just hours after the White House flag had been returned to full-staff, drawing complaints from right and left.

Mr Trump, who had traded bitter criticism with Mr McCain since before the election, declared his order a mark of respect.

The American flag files at half-staff at the White House (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

At the same time, he said it would be vice president Mike Pence and other officials who would represent the administration at Mr McCains funeral services.

Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCains service to our country and, in his honour, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment, Mr Trump said in a statement.

The statement came two days after Mr McCain died at 81 from brain cancer  and after objections at Mr Trumps silence from politicians and others, including the American Legion, which demanded that he do more to honour the Vietnam War hero and six-term senator.

Mr Trump initially tweeted condolences to Mr McCains family, but made no mention then of the Arizona Republican with whom he feuded for years.

pic.twitter.com/8wmi9ExUhU  The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) August 26, 2018

Even as flags remained at half-staff on Monday at the capital, the Washington Memorial and elsewhere, the White House flag was raised. That seemed to be the breaking point for a key Trump constituency, veterans.

On the behalf of The American Legions two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCains death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nations flag be half-staffed through his internment, said a statement to Mr Trump from Denise Rohan, the organisations national commander.

By the end of the day, Mr Trump had done just that, with no immediate explanation from the White House.

But evidence of Mr Trumps feud with Mr McCain remained. People close to Mr McCain and the White House said the family had requested that Mr Trump stay away from the weeks services and ceremonies, which will culminate with Mr McCains burial at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Mr Trump said vice president Pence would address a ceremony at the US capital on Friday. Others in the administration  chief of staff John Kelly, defence secretary James Mattis and national security adviser John Bolton  will also represent the administration.

With the proclamation and statement, Mr Trump was conforming to standard protocol when a prominent member of government dies.

Mr McCain was a frequent critic of Mr Trump on everything from his leadership style to his Russia policy. Mr Trump questioned the decorated Navy pilots Vietnam heroism and angered by Mr McCains vote to kill the presidents Obamacare repeal.

Mr McCain died on Saturday at 81 after a 13-month struggle with brain cancer. Mr Trump tweeted condolences to Mr McCains family but made no reference to the Arizona senator.

US Flag Code states that flags be lowered on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress.

After Democrat Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts died in 2009, then-president Barack Obama ordered flags at the White House flown at half-staff for five days.Police made more than 260 arrests at Notting Hill Carnival over the bank holiday weekend.

As of 5.45pm on Monday 125 arrests had been made on the day, including 25 for possession of an offensive weapon and 74 for drugs offences.

On Sunday officers made 133 arrests and recovered 16 knives at the event in west London, Scotland Yard said.

They detained 42 people on drugs offences, 20 on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon and seven on public order offences.

Police search people at the carnival in west London (Yui Mok/PA)

Two were arrested on suspicion of sexual offences, three for common assault and 12 on suspicion of possessing psychoactive drugs.

British Transport Police said its officers made nine arrests on Sunday.

On both days the festivities came to a halt as thousands of people paid tribute to Grenfell Tower victims.

At 3pm on Monday, revellers marked 72 seconds of silence in memory of the 72 people who died following the fire in June last year.

The tower block is within half a mile of the parade route.

A Section 60 order will be in place on Monday, 27 Aug across the #NottingHillCarnival geographical area for a further 15 hours, between 09:00hrs until 23:59hrs. https://t.co/AVULQ5S520 pic.twitter.com/FXp7g12e2g  Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) August 27, 2018

Police were operating with enhanced stop-and-search powers in a bid to crack down on violence.

Scotland Yard imposed a Section 60 order across the carnival area between 9am and 11.59pm on both days.

The order allowed officers to search people if they believed they were carrying offensive weapons or in anticipation of violence.

On Monday the police presence was very visible, with officers wearing high-visibility vests stopping and searching men and women of all races as they walked along the pedestrianised streets.

But the police seemed in good spirits, stopping from time to time to high-five revellers, and acting as guides.

The bank holiday weekend event was policed by the highest number of officers in six years (John Stillwell/PA)

Notting Hill Carnival Gold Commander Dave Musker said: On Sunday, my officers along with colleagues from the British Transport Police arrested 133 individuals for a range of offences and 20 weapons were seized, including knives.

I am confident that the Section 60 order imposed yesterday prevented these dangerous items being brought to carnival, and based on the intelligence at my disposal, I consider it proportionate and necessary to ensure a safe carnival today.

The bank holiday weekend event was policed by the highest number of officers in six years.

Almost 7,000, some from the Metropolitan Polices newly formed Violent Crime Task Force, were policing Mondays event to combat the threat of violent crime.

This was up from 6,100 at the less busy family day on Sunday.

Undercover police and officers from firearms and dog units were in place.

After a wave of violent crime in the capital in recent months, Scotland Yard announced knife arches had been placed at strategic points along the route to help reassure people about their safety.Michael Gove has been accused of making a complete 180 after letters from his department suggested there was insufficient evidence for banning electric shock collars for dogs and cats, weeks before plans to ban their use were announced.

The Environment Secretary confirmed on Monday that the Government would outlaw what he described as punitive shock collars which cause harm and suffering to our pets, following a consultation on the proposals in March.

Used as training devices, the remote controlled collars can trigger an electric pulse of varying strength, or spray noxious chemicals at the animal.

However, a letter sent from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in February, seen by the Press Association, suggested that there was insufficient evidence for supporting a ban.

The document, sent to the Royal Veterinary College, noted scientific research that it had commissioned was not strong enough to support a ban on electronic training aids for dogs.

A similar statement was made by Defra Minister George Eustice in a 2014 letter, in which he said the department did not consider that there was evidence that the use of such devices causes unnecessary suffering.

Dogs on a street in Russia (David Davies/PA)

Dog trainer and campaigner Jamie Penrith said Mr Gove had made an abrupt policy turnaround with no additional evidence.

He told the Press Association that in February the Government had insufficient evidence to conclusively support the suggestion that the collars have a negative impact on welfare, but that two weeks later at the beginning of March these barbaric, punitive devices need to be stripped from the market.

Its a complete 180, Mr Penrith added, saying it was not a welfare move.

Ian Gregory, a lobbyist for pet collars, said: The Secretary of State should desist from feeding the nations pets to the wolves of Twitter.

The anecdotal problems reported with pet collars can be resolved by product standards rather than by banning a proven technology.

The hundreds of thousands of dog owners using remote trainer do not deserve to be criminalised.

The ban on remote controlled electronic training collars will not be extended to invisible fencing systems which can keep pets away from roads and within a boundary without receiving a static pulse, the Government announced.

Environment Secretary Michael Gove (Philip Toscano/PA)

Mr Gove said: We are a nation of animal lovers and the use of punitive shock collars cause harm and suffering to our pets.

This ban will improve the welfare of animals and I urge pet owners to instead use positive reward training methods.

The announcement was welcomed by the Dogs Trust, whose director of canine behaviour and research, Dr Rachel Casey, said: Scientific research has demonstrated that electronic devices which deliver an aversive stimulus have a negative impact on dog welfare, so this ban will have a major positive impact for dogs in the UK.

However, we are saddened that the Government hasnt gone a step further and used this opportunity to ban the use of containment fences, to ensure that all UK dogs are protected from this outdated approach to training.

Use of the collars has been banned in Wales, and earlier this year Scotland began moves towards prohibiting dog owners using them.

But it is only the UK Government which can ban their sale across the country.MOSCOW, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Russia accused Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) of intercepting its military aircraft over the Black Sea in a dangerous fashion designed to provoke Moscow after the RAF made two such interceptions in a single week.

The accusation, levelled by Russia's embassy in London, came after the RAF intercepted a Russian maritime patrol aircraft over the Black Sea on Friday and scrambled to intercept two suspected Russian fighter aircraft on Wednesday.

".... What kind of threat to Britain or even its allies does a Russian patrol aircraft hypothetically pose while conducting flights near Russia's own coastline, more than 2,000 km (1242.74 miles) from the British Isles," the Russian embassy said in a statement released on Saturday.

"Instead of strengthening anyone's security, the British authorities are using such a military presence (in the Black Sea area) for provocative actions. Not just by making verbal statements, regrettable as they are, but also in real military terms, which is simply dangerous."

The British defence and foreign ministries declined to comment on Sunday.

Three countries bordering the Black Sea - Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey - are NATO allies of Britain.

Britain's Minister of State for the Armed Forces, Mark Lancaster, spoke about "an ever more assertive Russia" in a speech in London in July. He said the RAF had been forced to intercept Russian military aircraft more than 80 times over the last decade.

Relations between London and Moscow are languishing at a post-Cold War low after the poisoning by nerve agent of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March in the English city of Salisbury.

London holds Moscow responsible for the attack, something Russia denies.

Britain's RAF maintains a presence in the Baltic countries and in Romania to deter potential Russian military action after Moscow's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimea. Moscow says its activity in the Black Sea region is routine and compliant with international law. (Reporting by Polina Devitt and Andrew Osborn in Moscow and by Andrew MacAskill in London; Editing by Gareth Jones)TOKYO/SEOUL, Aug 27 (Reuters) - A Japanese man arrived in China on Monday after North Korea expelled him for allegedly breaking the law during a visit there, Kyodo news agency said, citing a Japanese diplomatic source.

North Korea had decided to expel the tourist, who had been detained and investigated for an unspecified crime, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said at the weekend.

"There are various procedures to complete till his return to Japan," Kyodo quoted a Japanese government source as saying. The man was expected to return home soon, the agency added.

Tomoyuki Sugimoto, who is believed to be a videographer from the prefecture of Shiga in central Japan, had apparently been caught filming a military facility in Nampo city, Kyodo and other Japanese media have said.

"The relevant institution of the DPRK decided to leniently condone him and expel him from the DPRK on the principle of humanitarianism," KCNA said in its weekend report, using an abbreviation of the North's official name.

Earlier on Monday, Japan said it was aware of the KCNA item.

"The government is putting in all its effort, but we refrain from commenting on details due to the nature of the issue," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference.

In Bejing, when asked if she could confirm the man had arrived in China, Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, said she had "no understanding" of the case.

In early August, Japanese media said government officials were trying to gather information on a man who had been detained in North Korea.

Japan has demanded that North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons and missile programmes and has also sought the return of citizens kidnapped by the isolated state during the 1970s and 1980s.

It has said it will not provide economic aid to Pyongyang until that issue is resolved and normal diplomatic ties established. (Reporting by Josh Smith in SEOUL and Kaori Kaneko in TOKYO Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in BEIJING Editing by Darren Schuettler and Clarence Fernandez)A caravan of trucks bearing flags similar to that of the LTTE and a banner with the picture of the slain LTTE Leader Velupillai Prabhakaran had arrived in Kottayam, Kerala with flood relief material, Indian media reported today.

According to the Manorama online, the police had questioned the volunteers and sent them back as they realised the latter were members of the Tamil nationalist party Naam Tamilar Katchi (NTK) which is headed by Tamil Nadu filmmaker and actor Seeman.

The NTK members had off-loaded relief materials at the Armed Reserve Police Camp in Kottayam town on August 25 evening, prompting several officials including the Additional District Magistrate to reach the spot.

They were questioned in detail at Kottayam East police station. They revealed that they had earlier distributed relief materials at camps in Idukki and Munnar too last week. The activists, who belong to Madurai, Theni, Kambam and Kumily, had arrived here in 25 vehicles loaded with relief materials.

Though the materials they delivered were examined by the bomb detection and disposal squad and sniffer dogs, nothing suspicious were found.The results of 2018 Advanced Level Examination could be delayed due to a shortage of teachers to serve at answer script evaluation supervisory board, the Chairman of the All Ceylon United Teachers Union (ACUTU) Ven. Yalwela Pagnasekera Thera said.

This year there are only eight teachers in each supervisory board, where 14 teachers are necessary for each board, he said.

Lower payments paid to teachers on the supervisory boards, failure to inform in advance about holding the boards on regional basis and dejection among teachers have resulted in the fewer number of teachers, he said.

The holding of Supervisory Boards in the outstations began this year.

Meanwhile, JO Parliamentarian Sisira Jayakody had lodged a complaint with Minister Akila Viraj Kariyawasam, on the shortage, it is learnt. (Dayaseeli Liyanage)Seen here are customers and officials from the recent proposed gravity sewer system project conducted in Colombo by the Anhui Shui'an Construction Group Co Ltd

With Sri Lanka experiencing a significant growth in infrastructure development coupled with increasing tourist arrivals, the local office of Anhui Shui'an Construction Group Co Ltd (ASCG) recently held a project completion event for its innovative gravity sewer system at the Shangri-La Hotel Colombo.

ASCG, a leading China-based enterprise focusing on general contracting of construction works and integrating commercial investment, real estate development, hospitality, tourism, scientific incubation, factory building leasing and international businesses, will lay new sewer lines to cater to the new developments with no dig (micro tunneling) technology for newly-built and upcoming hotels based in the citys Slave Island area.

Micro tunneling is a modern tech that is new to Sri Lanka when it comes to constructing sewers and ASCG has taken up the Colombo Municipal Council sewer project as its entry point to sustainable development in the country. Thissewer technology will immensely benefit the large scale hotel developments in the area.

With the enormous support by the Deputy Municipal Commissioner Eng Lalith Wickramaratne, Directors of Engineering Division EngNihal Wickramaratne and Eng Salim including others, ASCG through challenging difficulties and unforeseen congestions was able to successfully complete a micro tunneling project on time to Shangri La Hotel Colombo which was opened immediately after its construction.

The pipe jacking by micro tunneling involved pipes of different sizes and materials. The pipes used were Vitrified Clay jacking pipes up to diameter 600mm and Reinforced Concrete jacking pipes up to diameter of 1200mm.

Eng Niha lWickramasinghe, speaking at the event, said It was a difficult task considering the site conditions, especially without sufficient details of underground structures inside the army camp along Baladaksha Mawatha. During the micro tunneling process the machine even struck a concrete pile foundation which we thought was a draft foundation. It was really a highly challenging task and I take this moment to thank ASCG for all their efforts to complete this.

ASCGs motive in Sri Lanka is to share and merge modern technology in China with locally available ones to implement projects in the best cost effective and sustainable way. With a registered capital of RMB 560 million and a competitive edge in the global construction marketplace, ASCG today has around 16 immediate subordinate departments including IT, survey and design, investment management, overseas business development amongst others.

ASCG has been granted by Chinese government the super grade qualification for general contracting of water, hydropower and building works and grade-I for general contracting of municipal works. The group has been certified as class-I for safety standardization and rated by China Construction Industry Association as an AAA-Credit enterprise.

With its corporate philosophy honesty, fine works, initiative, innovation and social contribution, ASCG consistently pursues its development strategy of reform to advanced development, innovate operation and to drive lean management, strengthening its construction initiatives throughout China and heading to the world.

ASCG will continue to forge ahead with determinations, continuous innovations, excellent equipment, start-of-the-art technologies, scientific management and utmost sincerity to cooperate with all sectors of society to share win-win developments and target for fruitful achievements.IRCSL Director General Damayanthi Fernando and FIU Director D.M. Rupasinghe signed the MoU on behalf of the respective institutions in the presence of Central Bank Governor Dr. Indrajit Coomaraswamy and IRCSL Chairman Mano Tittawella

The Central Banks Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) early this month entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Insurance Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (IRCSL) to fight money laundering and terrorist financing in the insurance sector.



The FIU has already entered into MoUs with 37 foreign counterparts as well as six domestic government agencies such as the Sri Lanka Customs, Immigration and Emigration Department, Inland Revenue Department, Registration of Persons Department, Sri Lanka Police and Securities and Exchange Commission to fight money laundering and terrorist financing.

The Financial Action Task Force has put Sri Lanka on a grey list from November, last year, on money laundering and terrorist financing.



Following this development, the European Parliament blacklisted Sri Lanka along with Tunisia and Trinidad and Tobago as countries at risk for acts of money laundering.Plantation Industries Minister Navin Dissanayake cuts the ribbon to launch the new Finite Element Analysis Simulation Centre (FEASC) at Rubber Research Institute (RRI) in the presence of Colombo District MP Hirunika Premachandra (extreme left), State Minister of Plantation Industries Champika Premadasa (left) and State Minister of Finance, Eran Wickramaratne (right)

Pic by Damith Wickramsinghe

By Nishel Fernando

Chinese firms are in negotiation with Sri Lankas Plantation Industries Ministry to set up joint ventures with local firms to infuse substantial capital into rubber, tea and coconut plantations and production value chains to boost production and to produce higher-value added products.



Plantation Industries Ministry officials told Mirror Business that Chinese firms have particularly expressed a strong interest in investing in Sri Lankas rubber production value chains as China has identified that natural rubber would become the most strategic material in the world during the next 7-10 years.



Launching Finite Element Analysis Simulation Centre (FEASC), the first project under the Rubber Master Plan, last week, Plantation Industries Minister Navin Dissanayake said his ministry recently signed an agreement with provincial government of Hainan province of China for technical assistance.

Hainan province is among the top three rubber producing regions of China, home to some of the largest rubber manufacturing companies in the world. The provincial government has also expressed the interest to transform Sri Lanka as one of the rubber manufacturing hubs in the world and already submitted a proposal to Sri Lankas Ministry of Plantation Industries to invest in finished rubber product segment.



Dissanayake also announced that the Chinese central government approached him and promised to invest US $30-40 million to assist Sri Lankas rubber industry. He said the ministry officials are preparing feasibility reports to receive these investments.

However, according to ministry sources, the US $30-40 million investments are a fraction of the overall investments planned. The initial investments would expect to come as catalytic start-up investments and R&D investments.



The Ministry officials pointed out that the investment requirement for a modern tyre plant might go up to around US$800 million.



China Hainan Rubber Industry Group Co., a subsidiary of Hainan State Farms Agribusiness Group Co. Ltd., the Hainan provinces top rubber producer, who has been on a buying spree acquiring stakes in international companies, has also come on board to invest in Sri Lankas rubber production value chains. The Ministry officials said that they would facilitate the match-making between local and Chinese firms to establish joint ventures, which are targeted at setting up new plants and acquiring new technologies to boost rubber yields and production.



Ministry officials revealed that the Ministry is currently working with interested local firms to establish an investment model for a Chinese investor to invest in, which would be used as a benchmark for other Joint Ventures.



Sri Lankas DSI Samson Group is among the local rubber manufacturing companies that joint ventures with Chinese firms are currently being considered.



Several cash-stripped Regional Plantation Companies (RPCs), who have been replacing rubber plantations with oil palm due to low prices of natural rubber in the world market, have also expressed their keenness to partner up with Chinese firms. The Ministry noted that the Chinese firms can investin RPCs through setting up of new subsidiaries and sub leasing.



Minister Dissanayake and his ministry officials also recently held record three hour discussion round with a Chinese delegation led by Chinas Sinoshine Group CEO, Amy Lin, on long-term investments in Sri Lankas rubber production value chains linking to Chinas Belt and Road initiative.



Dissanayake asserted that Sri Lankas plantation sector has a bright future despite various claims that the sector is on the decline. He said the plantation sector needs to move on to an innovation-led growth model rather than depending on state subsidies. Plantation Industries Ministry expects Chinese investments would assist Sri Lanka to increase low rubber yields from the current 800 kg/ha to minimum of 2000 kg/ha while venturing into high value added products.



China has also recognised the Rubber Master Plan as a good platform to develop Sri Lankas rubber industry and expressed its interest to take part in the Rubber Master Plan.



The Ministry expects that the investments in Rubber master plan would catalyse crucial private sector investments.



The ministry officials said that they would also explore possibilities to obtain low-interest loans for smallholder sector from China to boost replanting and productivity through mechanisation and new technologies.



Although Sri Lankas value addition has increased significantly since 1980s, the average value addition in rubber is still almost half of the global average value addition in rubber, which is mainly due to lack of high-end technologies.



Dissanayake was optimistic that Sri Lankas rubber product exports would climb up to US $5 billion in another 3-4 years, easily backed by implementation of the projects in the Rubber Master Plan. The ministry in collaboration with the private sector plans to carry out investments in the rubber industry to the tune of US $ 1.5 billion during the programme period.



Chinas natural rubber plantation history is 60 years old. But today, the country is a leading rubber powerhouse in terms of both production and consumption of both natural and synthetic rubber and is the worlds second largest producer of tyres.

China aims to build houses, roads in North to extend sway

(Colombo) REUTERS: China wants to build houses and roads in Sri Lankas north, much of which is in a state of disrepair nearly a decade after the end of civil war, Chinese and Sri Lankan officials said, in a bid to expand it influence beyond the islands south.

Chinas latest push in the Indian Ocean island nation comes despite criticism that a big Chinese port project and related infrastructure in the south are dragging the country of 21 million people deep into debt.



Luo Chong, chief of the political section at Chinas embassy in Colombo, said China wanted to help with reconstruction in Sri Lankas north and east, the centre of a 26-year war between the government and ethnic minority Tamil separatists that ended in 2009.



Since the situation is different now, we are willing to have more projects in remote areas in the north and east with the support of the Sri Lankan government and from the Tamil communities, he told Reuters.



In April, state-run China Railway Beijing Engineering Group Co Ltd won a more than $300 million project to build 40,000 houses in the northern district of Jaffna. Chinas Exim bank was to provide the financing. But the project has been halted after residents demanded brick houses instead of the concrete structures planned by the Chinese firm, saying they preferred their traditional dwellings.

That has given an opportunity for Chinas old rival India to step in. M.A. Sumanthiran, a legislator from the regional Tamil National Alliance, said authorities had opened negotiations with India for the housing project.



India has already built 44,000 houses in the north in the first phase of reconstruction through a grant to Sri Lanka and has planned to rebuild Palaly airport and Kankesanthurai harbour, both of which were heavily damaged in the war which ended with the defeat of the guerrillas.



Two senior ministers in the Sri Lankan cabinet told Reuters that China had offered to build houses, roads, and water storage facilities at a cost lower than offered by its competitors. They are willing to take up even rural infrastructure projects like road networks and water projects and expressed their willingness to complete them faster, said one of the ministers who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of engagement with China.



India has longstanding ties with Sri Lanka, located just off the tip of southern India, bound by cultural and ethnic links with Sri Lankas Tamils, many of whom live in the islands north and east.



But in recent years China has swept in, building ports, power plants and highways in the island that sits near busy international shipping lanes and is seen as part of Chinas String of Pearls strategy of building a network of friendly ports across Asia.EDB Chairperson Indra Malwatte addresses the media in the presence of (from left) SLASSCOM Chairman Jeevan Gnanam, SLASSCOM Board Member Haridhu Abeygoonaratne, FITIS Chairman Dr. Kithsiri Manchanayakke and ICTA Project Manager Sachindra Samararatne

Pic by Pradeep Dilrukshana

By Shabiya Ali Ahlam

The Export Development Board (EDB) yesterday announced the relaunch of the 1000 start-up initiative, an effort taken towards diversifying Sri Lankas export basket and market.



The 1000 start-up effort is expected to help the IT/PBM industry reach US $ 5 billion by 2022, alongside creating 200,000 direct jobs.



While the said project was initially announced to be launched in 2016, the outcome, which was to trigger the youth population to establish start-ups, was not as expected.



With the original scheme, which was open only for graduates, failing to reach and attract the target audience across the country, the EDB said a newer scheme has been conceptualized.



The new scheme has been made available not only to graduates but is also open to diploma and certificate holders in the IT/BPO field.



Not requiring collateral, selected projects will receive funding up to Rs.1.5 million payable within five years with zero interest.



The project is a public-private partnership and will see Bank of Ceylon and Peoples Bank as funding sources.



A new feature of this scheme is its mentoring programme that will be facilitated for selected projects by industry leaders.

EDB Chairperson Indira Malwatte asserted that the target set for the IT/BPM industry can only be achieved by empowering the IT professionals and entrepreneurs in the regional cities while supporting the existing businesses in Colombo towards higher growth trajectories.



It was shared that already 400 applications have been received and are in the midst of being reviewed.



Malwatte shared that by end-2018, the EDB together with its partnering agencies, expects to fund at least 25 projects.



Sri Lankas IT/BPM sector contributed US $ 1.2 billion to export earnings in 2017 and is expected to contribute US $ 1.8 billion this year.



IT/BPM is one of the six focus sectors highlighted in the recently released National Export Strategy.Sri Lanka is committed to establishing a National Single Window (NSW) for international trade as a policy priority, with the support of the private sector. A NSW allows exporters and importers to submit documents at a single location or entry point, to fulfil all trade-related regulatory requirements, thereby facilitating cross-border trade.



While Sri Lanka is still at the preparatory stage of a NSW project lifecycle, it is important to consider the different options for its operational model as soon as possible. A policy decision in this regard will help determine the sources of funding for the project, its implementation, budget and fees to be charged for the services provided by the NSW operator.



A specialised government agency, government corporation or public-private partnership (PPP) should be explored as possible options for the NSW operator. The operator will be responsible for every step, from obtaining and establishing the technology and infrastructure, to the management, operation and provision of services through the NSW.



Government agency

One option for Sri Lanka is to hand over the NSW operations to a specialised government agency. This could be an existing government agency or an entirely new entity established by the government.



Relying on an existing government agency (for example, the Customs) as the operator is a common practice among the existing NSWs in the Asia-Pacific region (see chart). For example, the operator of the Philippines NSW is the Bureau of Customs, which deals with the customs processes required for the export and import trade. This approach is attractive because the Customs are often advanced in terms of IT resources and skills, have an independent budget and control all trade transactions.



The challenge is to ensure the participation of other government agencies in the NSW that will not only cater to improving the efficiency of the Customs clearance process but also to fulfil the objectives of other agencies.



Alternatively, a new and neutral agency could be set up. However, this is not a popular option, given that it potentially requires additional resources and time for its creation.



Government corporation

Another possibility is to establish a government corporation, whereby the operator is similar to a private sector company, except that the government will own it. Again, this can be an existing entity or an entirely new corporation created just for the NSW operations. For example, a dedicated government corporation called the INSW Operating Agency is established in Indonesia.



In the case of a government agency or corporation, the funding for the implementation, operation and evolution of the NSW is provided solely by the government and/or the donor. The Philippines National Single Window (PNSW) is a fully government-funded project and is free to all registered users. The only costs involved are the agency charges for insurance permits, licenses and clearances. In Indonesia, the government funds the NSW, including its building and operation. There is no usage fee as all costs are covered by the government.



While the government may want to fund the NSW project to improve the business environment, a major risk lies in the possible absence of adequate resources to upgrade the operation. This situation can adversely impact the performance of the NSW. Very often, donors support the implementation of the NSW, while the government provides funding for its operation. However, donors can come on board ultimately to upgrade the NSW.



Public-private partnership

A PPP is a popular operational model around the world, especially in the Asia-Pacific. Some of the major and emerging economies in the region, such as Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, have implemented a PPP model for NSW.



PPP is a contract - often of medium to long-term duration - between a private company and a government. The goal of the partnership is to provide a public service and/or infrastructure. Under a PPP, the private company bears the risks, while its remuneration is linked to delivery and performance of the infrastructure and the services provided.



Generally, the NSW services established under a PPP are payable. The user fee is expected to cover at least the costs of operation and maintenance and any incremental costs to government agencies participating in the NSW. The PPP model has the advantage of being complementary to the other sources of funding, with the possibility to call on the government or donors if required.



Singapores NSW is often cited in literature as one of the earliest and most successful examples of a PPP. Crimson Logic (Pvt.) Ltd was selected through an open competitive tender to develop, operate and maintain the NSW systems. The PPP model enabled Singapore Customs to leverage the capabilities and expertise of the IT company to build and operate the systems, while Crimson Logic was able to recover its capital investments and operating expenses through collecting processing fees from users.



Private ownership

While private ownership in the NSW is another option, it is not popular. When the private sector provides funding for different stages of the NSW project (for example, Germany and Guatemala), its prime motivation is profit maximisation. This can result in high cost for the services offered through the NSW, which is not in the best interest of facilitating trade.



International experiences and stakeholder consultations

Of the 46 countries in Asia and the Pacific, 10 states (32 percent) have fully or partially developed NSWs (see chart). About 60 percent of the NSWs in operation is publicly owned and funded through grants, while the rest is established as PPPs, with partial funding by private companies.

While the NSWs operated by government agencies or corporations rely on the state for their operational budget, other NSW operators have secured their funding from commercial operations. International experience illustrates the different options to introducing NSW but it is difficult to pick one as the best.



While taking international experience into account is important, the government of Sri Lanka must decide the appropriate operational model, in consultation with individual government agencies and other stakeholders, including the private sector. The strengths and weaknesses of each option, specifically within the local context, should be considered when deciding on the NSW operator.

(Janaka Wijayasiri is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka (IPS). The author can be reached at janaka@ips.lk. To view this article online and to share your comments, visit the IPS Blog Talking Economics - http://www.ips.lk/talkingeconomics/)The Minneriya National Park has been temporarily closed following a tense situation between villagers and forest rangers yesterday.

Minneriya Police said that angry villagers had vandalized the office of the Wild life officers demanding the release of a fisherman who was taken into custody by rangers while he was fishing at the Minneriya tank.

At least three wild life officers were injured during the clash and were admitted to the Habarana Hospital.

A source told the Daily Mirror that an investigation has been launched into the incident, while another confirmed that special discussions were underway amongst the high ranking officers of the Department.

Minneriya is one of the 70 Important Bird Areas (IBAs) declared as a wildlife sanctuary in 1938. (Thilanka Kanakarathna)THE HINDU, 26th AUGUST, 2018-Emmerson Mnangagwa took the oath as Zimbabwes President in front of a stadium crowd on Sunday after a divisive election, as U.S. observers of that vote questioned the countrys democratic credentials.



The Constitutional Court confirmed Mr. Mnangagwa as President in a ruling released on Friday, dismissing a challenge by the man he defeated in the July 30 ballot, opposition leader Nelson Chamisa.



Thousands of people, some bussed in from outside the capital, and foreign leaders gathered at Harares national stadium for the swearing-in of Mr. Mnangagwa, who just secured the 50 percent of votes he needed to avoid a runoff against Chamisa.



He took the oath before Chief Justice Luke Malaba who, together with eight other Constitutional Court judges had dismissed Chamisas petition.



The election was touted as a crucial step towards shedding the pariah reputation Zimbabwe gained under Mr. Mnangagwas predecessor Robert Mugabe, and securing international donor funding to revive a crippled economy.



But hours before Mr. Mnangagwas inauguration, the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute said the country lacked a tolerant democratic culture in which political parties were treated equally and citizens allowed to vote freely.



The election was marred by procedural lapses and followed by an army crackdown against opposition supporters, undermining promises that Mr. Mnangagwa made during campaigning to break with the corruption and mismanagement that become endemic under Mr. Mugabe.President Maithripala Sirisena said today that the present government has taken steps to establish a strong foundation for the free and fair elections in the country through the 19th amendment to the Constitution by ending the corruption that prevailed in the election system before January 8, 2015.

He made these remarks while addressing the inauguration ceremony of the Asian Electoral Stakeholder Forum (AESF) held in Colombo today.

The President said that the objective of the present government is to ensure the democracy in the country by holding all the elections of the country independently in a free and fair manner.

President Sirisena recalled prior to January 8, 2015, the election system of the country was corrupted and mentioned how the state media institutions were used violating the election rules in the 2015 Presidential Election and the way public funds were destroyed by using the Treasury for the victory of the election.

President Sirisena said that today Sri Lanka is a country which has a strong democratic foundation as well as a country which strengthened the fairness and unbiased nature of the judiciary and further said that according to the latest reports of the Asian countries Sri Lanka has reached a high position when considering the impartiality in the judiciary.

Video by D RuwandiREUTERS, 26th AUGUST, 2018-The United States will continue to hold accountable those responsible for what he described as the abhorrent ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Saturday.



Pompeos statement came on the one year anniversary of the conflict in western Myanmars Rakhine state that drove more than 700,000 Rohingya from their homes into neighbouring Bangladesh.

A year ago, following deadly militant attacks, security forces responded by launching abhorrent ethnic cleansing of ethnic #Rohingya in Burma, Pompeo said on Twitter, using an alternative name for Myanmar.



The U.S. will continue to hold those responsible accountable. The military must respect human rights for #Burmas democracy to succeed.



The military ruled Myanmar for nearly 50 years after seizing power in a 1962 coup and retains considerable powers under a 2008 constitution.



Myanmar government spokesmen Zaw Htay was unavailable for comment on Sunday.



The government, led by Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has denied refugees allegations of atrocities, saying security forces lawfully suppressed Muslim militants in Rakhine. Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh held demonstrations and prayers on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict.



Thousands of refugees marched prayed and chanted slogans in events across the sprawling camps in southern Bangladesh. Many wore black ribbons to commemorate what they said was the start of the Rohingya genocide.Sunil Shantha was one of Tissa Abeysekaras icons. In his opinion, an unsung hero. Even a brief perusal of his biography confirms this, from his forays into Indian music and his later repudiation of the raghadari tradition, acts which cost him support at the top and reduced him to a pauper. Over the years, all that has been written on, delved into, examined, done justice to, and in more ways than one, settled.



But Abeysekaras adulation of Shantha did not end there. In article after article, he explored what he considered to be the most shameless act committed to Sinhala music, at least in the 20th century: the cleansing of a promising horde of vocalists and instrumentalists who sought to go beyond the ragadhari sampradaya. One name, more than any other, crops up here. Ratanjankar. S. N. Ratanjankar.



The Sinhala people did not possess a musical tradition of their own. This was especially so after the 12th century, when Sinhalese poetry entered its Classical Period, which as Martin Wickramasinghe pointed out spelt out an era of decadence rather than of renaissance. The only real musical tradition we could claim, given this point, was the jana kaviya. Madawala Ratnayake, in his Gee Sindu Sahithya, contends that uncultured as he would have been, the rural peasant in Sinhalese society was able to musicalise these kavi as he went about his daily work. This was the common mans poetry, more rooted than what was being written at the kings court. Despite their divergent points of view, then, both Cumaratunga Munidasa and Martin Wickramasinghe went on to criticise the Sasadavata and the Muvadevdavata on the grounds that they were decadent and uprooted (Wickramasinghe in Sinhala Sahitya Nageema reserved his harshest criticism for the Muvadevdavata).

Probably the biggest issue to resolve after Radio Ceylon was founded (in 1925) was how to musicalise the folk tradition. It was over this issue that the Ratanjankar episode raged. Initially, both sides of the divide - the administrators at Radio Ceylon and the traditionalists - believed in going back to the past to replenish modern music. But then the controversy raged, and as it raged, one of the biggest ironies that made itself evident was the fact that these two camps were led respectively by a teacher and his student. For Ratanjankar had been Principal at the Marris Collegeof Music at Lucknow when Sunil Shantha had studied there. The guru had groomed the chela; now the chela was rebelling against him.

The trajectory of the Sinhala music in the 20th century confirms this: Sunil Shantha gave way to Amaradeva, Victor Ratnayake, and Sanath Nandasiri, all of whom, without reservation, have spoken warmly of Ratanjankar and Edirisinghe



Abeysekara does not mention this fact in any of his assessments of the Ratanjankar episode. Nor does he point out that this conflict, rooted as it was in a rift between two different cultures, was not a conflict as far as the objective each side harboured, i.e. that contemporary Sinhala music needed to be salvaged from our folk tradition, was concerned. They did not disagree over the objective, rather over the way in which it was to be achieved. And so, just as Munidasa himself had rebelled against the employment of a German, Wilhelm Geiger, to compile A Grammar of the Sinhala Language, so Shantha rebelled against employing an Indian to decide on what music should and should not be broadcast. The parallels between these two conflicts can be gleaned from Shanthas own words: I do not believe that we should wish for a foreigner to come to Sri Lanka to advise us on how to create a national music just because we brought a German to advise us on the Sinhala language.



Abeysekara is correct in his portrait of Shantha as a lone crusader against the pothe guras (his term, not mine) at Radio Ceylon. But as Victor Ratnayake told me, and as Rohana Baddage explained later, what he missed out was the fact that there was no schism as such between these two camps. I am not inclined to agree with Baddages assertion that it amounted to a clash of personalities and nothing more, but I subscribe to his view that to indict those who were on the side of the willing, which included Lionel Edirisinghe, was patently unfair. To do that, as Victor aptly put it, would be to discount the contributions that the likes of Edirisinghe made to our music. The reality would therefore have been more complex, more multifarious, than the pothe-guras-versus-lone-crusader conflict it was reduced to. To be sure, it is true that Ratanjankar would not have possessed the requisite knowledge of the people and their customs, customs which Shantha returned to in song after song. But it is equally true that the efforts of the Hela Havula in forging a hela-fied mother tongue, though in concert with nationalist sentiments, were doomed to be the preserve of a few gifted writers, well beyond the reach of the multitude. The trajectory of the Sinhala music in the 20th century confirms this: Sunil Shantha gave way to Amaradeva, Victor Ratnayake, and Sanath Nandasiri, all of whom, without reservation, have spoken warmly of Ratanjankar and Edirisinghe.



Besides, if Shantha was emphatic in his opposition to Ratanjankar, not many of the lyricists and writers at Radio Ceylon (can be seen to have) shared his views. When Ratanjankar visited Sri Lanka for the second time in 1952, for instance, he delivered a lecture in English at the Royal Asiatic Society on The Place of Folk Songs in the Development of Music, where he argued that the proper local music of Sri Lanka lay in its villages (Field, page 102). The speech was pivotal in that it spurred a lyricist to try through Radio Ceylon to transform folk poetry into contemporary song.



That lyricist was Madawala Ratnayake, whose contributions to Sinhala music cannot be discounted regardless of language politics. Musical nationalism in Sri Lanka of the 20th century has no real starting point, and it differs from one persons perspective to another. I can, however, point at a year: 1957, when Ratnayake commenced a program with Amaradeva, Jana Gayana. That programme had been commenced and stopped five years before: 1952, when Ratanjankar arrived here, and when Sunil Santha was expelled from Radio Ceylon.



Where Abeysekara was correct in his assessment is his point that it quickly led to the annihilation of musicians seen as pandering to a lesser tradition. Annihilate is of course a strong word, and it is hardly used in administrative parlance, but appears in a report dated May 1956 attributed to the then Controller of Music at Radio Ceylon, Dunstan de Silva: I started a campaign against artistes singing westernized music and completely annihilated it (Abeysekaras translation). The campaign had (been) turned into an inquisition, when an inquisition had not been its aim. And yet, even here, I have my reservations: it is difficult to ascertain why this process of annihilation was allowed to run its course, or whether it was needed at that point of time given the virtual absenting of folk music from the local music scene (which was composed for the most, with the notable exception of Ananda Samarakoon, of gramophone records and the hybridized theatrical exercises of John de Silva). In any case, there was a bigger conundrum: just what was westernised music? From C. T. Fernando to P. L. A. Somapala, from the early baila masters to the later pioneers of popular music, westernized was a term invoked to disparage music that existed outside what was officially sanctioned. His name is associated in my mind forever with the sad story of contemporary popular music in this country, Abeysekara wrote of Lionel Edirisinghe, and while he may have telescoped the issue, I do concur that Edirisinghes efforts may (inadvertently) have bifurcated our music industry into two strands which were to meet only intermittently thereafter: the jana and the janapriya.

When Ratanjankar visited Sri Lanka for the second time in 1952, for instance, he delivered a lecture in English at the Royal Asiatic Society on The Place of Folk Songs in the Development of Music, where he argued that the proper local music of Sri Lanka lay in its villages



To be sure, they did meet, significantly, somewhere in the eighties, when Amaradeva, the exponent of the sarala geeya, sang for Clarence Wijewardena, the exponent of popular music. The song was Sasara Gewa Yana, and it still symbolises, for me, a fusion of sorts. But then thats another story.



In April 1991, Abeysekara gave a speech at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute. He talked of Shantha and how his songs found their way to the most unlikely of places: weddings, parties, Big Matches. I think the reason why those songs evolved into ditties to be performed at such events was their quaint, poignant base. They were the ruminations of a soul that which had rediscovered its roots, which was going back to the village, constantly, in search of fresh material. In Shantha we find an entire musical tradition that sought to vocalize both the melody and language. That it gave way to a tradition which brought together our folk poetry and classical Indian music is another issue. What is important is that musical traditions are never cast in stone. Sure, we can condemn those who did away with what might have been. But history is made up of art forms which might have been giving way to what they eventually become. 66 years after S. N.Ratanjankar arrived here, Sunil Shantha was expelled from Radio Ceylon, and Madawala Ratnayake began Jana Gayana, are we then any worse off, as a nation of music lovers?



In many ways, yes, but that begs the question: could it have been otherwise? The arts are never predicated on firmly set traditions. They evolve on their own. Given that, it is impossible to infer what might have been. And it is even more impossible to reduce those conflicts which make up their evolution to one reason, much less one person.Moodys Investors Service (Moodys) continued to flag Sri Lankas weakened foreign debt affordability and increased roll-over risks as the emerging and frontier markets remain highly vulnerable to the tightening financing conditions globally.



In a report released last Friday, Moodys analyzed the contagion risks stemming from the slump in Turkish currency, bonds and stocks, which sparked a renewed asset sell-off in the emerging and frontier economies with twin current account and budget deficits.



Early this month the United States ramped up pressure on Turkeyan emerging market, which depends heavily on exports to the USby doubling tariffs on Turkish steel and putting curbs on Turkish bank over a detention of a US pastor, who was arrested three months after a failed military coup in July 2016, to oust the Turkish President Recap Tayyip Erdogan.



This resulted in strengthening of the US dollar and plummeting of the Turkish lira.



Sri Lanka last week witnessed its highest weekly outflow from government securities, which amounted to Rs.7.5 billion, as foreigners continued to dispose frontier market bonds in the light of rising US treasury yields.



So far this year, foreigners have net sold Rs.47.4 billion worth of government securities. Sri Lankan rupee has depreciated by 4 percent year-to-date against the US dollar.



Under these conditions, Moodys said Sri Lankas debt affordability would weaken further if the cost of new debts continue to rise and stay at elevated levels for a prolonged period.

It was only last week citing a Moodys report Mirror Business said Sri Lanka could face tighter external borrowing conditions as it seeks to roll-over a mammoth US $ 17 billion debt over the next five years.

Sri Lankan governments gross borrowing requirement is about 18.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and foreign currency composition of outstanding debt is at about 46 percent. According to Moodys, these indicators contribute to making Sri Lanka one of the sovereigns that are most vulnerable to tightening external financing conditions.



Mitigating this exposure somewhat, the average maturity of government debt at 5.7 years implies moderate rollover risk.



However, similar to Pakistan, we find that Sri Lankas debt affordability would weaken further should the cost of new debt rise and stay at higher levels, Moodys said.



Among the other sovereigns most exposed to sudden and sustained rise in cost of debt are in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia Pacific, particularly Lebanon, Egypt, Bahrain, Mongolia and Jordan.



Meanwhile, Moodys also has identified Sri Lanka among Argentina, Ghana, Mongolia, Pakistan, Zambia and Turkey as emerging and frontier markets that are most vulnerable to dollar appreciation. Argentina and Pakistan remained outliers with sharp depreciations of their local currencies by as much as 40 percent and 10 percent, respectively year-to-date and the International Monetary Fund approved a US $ 50 billion bail-out package for Argentina recently to rescue the fragile Latin American nation.Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh have stressed the need to establish peace and prosperity in the Indian Ocean Region, sources said.

They had met in Hanoi prior to the third edition of Indian Ocean conference on Monday.

The two leaders had also agreed to enhance trade between the two countries through traditional bilateral relations enjoyed during the past years and to increase the value of trade between the two countries to US$1 billion by 2020.

The Prime Minister thanked the Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister for hosting the Indian Ocean conference while Mr. Minh has said frequent visits of the Sri Lankan Prime Minister to Vietnam would enhance the ties between the two nations. (Yohan Perera in Vietnam)Firaz Markar, Manager-Digital Advisory at STAX, addresses the SL-SG Business Council board and representatives of companies with business ties with Singapore.

To raise awareness on current and future investment potential in Sri Lanka, leading management consulting firm STAX delivered a presentation on the SL-SG FTA and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) dynamics and opportunities, at the recently concluded Annual General Meeting of the Sri Lanka-Singapore Business Council.

The meeting, which took place at the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, was attended by the board of the SL-SG Business Council, together with representatives of companies maintaining business ties with Singapore.

Drawing on STAXs extensive research capabilities and experience operating in the Singaporean market, Manager Firaz Markar presented an overall view of key challenges in investment, potential opportunities for investment and growth, and the significance of the SL-SG free trade agreement to council member companies.

Singapore and Sri Lanka continue to share significant cultural and economic affinities, and over the past year, this relationship has manifested in increasing trade. Today, Singapore ranks as Sri Lankas 8thlargest trading partner, and at present, there are over 90 Singaporean businesses  including major multinationals  that operate in the country, generating approximately 241 million dollars in investment in 2017.

Many of these companies choose to invest in Sri Lanka to take advantage of regional and relationship-driven benefits. Sri Lanka has the benefit of positive relationships with some of the largest economies in the Asian region, as well as access to trade routes and markets. However, while FDI has been improving over the recent past, we still attract investments at a much lower rate and scale than its regional counterparts.

He further explained how most of Sri Lankas FDI had been generated through the telecommunication, manufacturing, and tourism sectors, while the IT sector had also shown improved potential with export growth of 18-19%.

Citing the results of a recent study carried out by STAX among foreign companies that have invested in Sri Lanka, he noted that the most pressing concerns for foreign investors remained a shortage of qualified labour, the high cost of setting up business, insufficient levels of productivity, and policy instability.

However, given the potential of Sri Lanka as a hub for regional trade, Firaz stated that a positive conclusion to the SL-SG FTA would serve as a signal for other nations to also enter into similarly liberal agreements with Sri Lanka to take advantage of reductions in tariff lines, labour movement and government procurement.

Such a transformation would enable Sri Lanka to serve as a gateway for global firms to gain access and negotiate deals with the ASEAN bloc, potentially expanding the scope of Sri Lankas economy by several orders of magnitude.

Liberalization of labour movement is of course a complex issue, but if policies stipulate that companies that have invested and set up businesses may be allowed, within specific criteria, to have some movement of labour, the Sri Lankan economy as a whole will benefit strongly, Firaz stated.

He advocated for the establishment of a clearly defined and articulated national value proposition across industries, moving forward. This is in parallel to financial incentives geared to sustainably attract capital into key industries keeping with a portfolio approach to FDI.Ideally, all this would be managed under a single umbrella organization tasked with setting and enforcing rules and guidelines.

In that regard, he noted that the 50% reduction in tariff lines - which will grow to 80% over the next 12-15 years - together with the first ever inclusion of government procurement will enable unprecedented opportunities for Sri Lankan businesses to compete for government contracts in Singapore. Similarly, it would incentivize Singaporean companies to engage in similar projects locally, enabling the country to benefit from the introduction of improved standards, international best practices and knowledge transfer opportunities.Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has ignored a request by Northern Province Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran to boycott the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on the development of the Northern and Eastern Provinces and would participate in a meeting of the task force scheduled for today (27).

The Northern Chief Minister had made the above request claiming that the government was attempting to undermine the long-awaited political solution to the ethnic problem by increasing economic activities in the region.

It would not affect the Tamils in any manner if the TNA joins the Presidential Task Force, PLOTE Leader cum Parliamentarian Dharmalingam Siddarthan said.

He said that the TNA had decided to join the Presidential Task Force with the consent of the Tamils as well as with the goal of fulfilling the needs of the Tamils.

"There would be no harm caused to the impending political settlement nor other matters that pertain to the Tamils by being part of the task force mooted by the government. This is not a decision taken to oppose the NPC Chief Minister either," the PLOTE Leader re-iterated.

He said that when the Parliamentary committee meeting of the TNA was held recently, the view expressed by Wigneswaran to the effect that the TNA should not join the Presidential Task Force was discussed at length. Thereafter, the TNA decided to take part in the process for the sake of the people.

"The decision was made jointly by the constituent parties of the TNA, namely, TELO, PLOTE and the ITAK. Although I was absent, our party members were present," he said.

Mr. Siddharthan said that it was decided that there was no point keeping away from the development work that had started but to forge ahead with the political settlement whilst taking part in the activities of the task force.

"By not attending the meeting of the task force there is not going to be an immediate political solution and hence it was decided to take part in it while fulfilling many projects as much as possible. This decision was not made for personal wealth or influence, but with the desire for development," he said. (S. Nitharshan)India, US and Japan are making a beeline to Trincomalee and trying to convince the Sri Lankan government to accept their presence in Sri Lankas interest

Japanese destroyer Ikazuchi in Trincomallee

The port town of Trincomalee in Eastern Sri Lanka is known for its scenic beauty eminently qualified to be featured in the National Geographic Channel.



But historically,it has been noted for something very different - its strategic value as a naval base.



Trincomalees military value had been grasped by world powers from the time of the Portuguese in the 17th Century. The Dutch, British, French, Indians, Americans and the Japanese have eyed it in succession.



As on date, India, US and Japan are making a beeline to Trincomalee and trying to convince the Sri Lankan government to accept their presence in Sri Lankas interest, citing a potential maritime security threat to it from expansionist China. This stems from the worry that China could threaten the present free and rule-based international maritime commerce in the Indo-Pacific region.



In August, Trincomalee saw the USS Anchorage of the US Seventh Fleet with Marines on board drop anchor there to hold humanitarian exercises with the Sri Lankan Navy. Coinciding with the first ever visit by a Japanese Defence Minister to Sri Lanka (including Trincomalee), the Japanese sent a destroyer Ikazuchi to berth there. Asked why this is happening now, Sri Lankas leading maritime security expert, Adm. Dr. Jayanatha Colombage, said that with the Chinese exclusively ensconced in Hambantota port with a 70% stake and a 99 year lease on it, and having a container terminal at Colombo port also, the only port of value still available in Sri Lanka is Trincomalee.

Although the British gave independence to Sri Lanka in 1948, they held on to the RAF base in Katunayake and the Royal Navy base in Trincomalee till 1957



Trinco Ports Advantages



Trincomalee port has many advantages, Adm. Colombage said. It has been universally recognized as one of the finest harbours in the world. It was Admiral Nelson who said that for the first time in 1775 when he sailed into it from Madras as a young midshipman on board the Royal Navy frigate HMS Seahorse. Trincomalee port has a natural depth of 25 metres and does not have to be dredged. This is a huge advantage in comparison with Hambantota and Colombo ports, Colombage said.

According to independent marine researcher, Howard Martenstyn, Trincomalee harbour with 2000 hectares, is ten times larger than Colombo harbour. During World War II,Trincomalee protected the British Seventh Fleet. This proved invaluable after the British lost their principal Asian naval base at Singapore in 1942.



Ideal for nuclear submarines



Trincomalee has immense significance in this age of nuclear weaponry and nuclear submarine-based missile systems also, points out Romesh Somasundaram, who has written on the strategic value of Trincomalee. Given the depth of the harbour, nuclear submarines are able to dive low within the inner harbour, he says. Furthermore, Trincomalee has been functioning as naval base since colonial times. According to Martenstyn, in the 18th Century, the British believed that from Trincomalee a strong naval force could secure control of Indias Coromandel Coast (the Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh coastlines).



The Dutch had built a fort, and in the 20th. Century, the British built an airfield, a naval base, a naval dockyard and also a huge oil storage facility with 101 giant oil tanks to supply both peacetime and wartime needs.



During World War II, the Japanese knew the role that Trincomalee was playing in the defence of British interests in Sri Lanka and the Bay of Bengal and bombarded it in 1942. Over 700 people were killed when carrier based Japanese aircraft struck in April 1942. Sri Lanka tasted its suicide attack when one of the Japanese bombers plunged into an oil tank setting it ablaze. The fire raged for a week melting the tank which had a one inch thick protective steel wall.



Trincomalee is nearest to the countries on the shores of the Bay of Bengal such as India (Southern and Eastern part of it), Bangladesh and Myanmar. Trincomalee commands the entrance to the Bay of Bengal which is now gaining economic and strategic importance with the entry of China as an economic power in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Bangladesh, points out Adm.Colombage. Trincomalee rather than Hambantota is nearer South East Asian ports ,he adds.



Somasundaram shows how a lot of Sri Lankan history revolved around control over Trincomalee. It was the Portuguese Admiral, Alfonso Albuquerque, who first saw the value of Trincomalee and made it part of his grand design of having bases in far flung areas to control the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean and protect Portugals maritime and imperial interests.



The Dutch took over Trincomalee from the Portuguese, beating the French to it though the latter had the sanction of the Kandyan King to possess Trincomalee. Subsequently, the British spent much time and energy seizing it from the Dutch.



In the 18th century, when the King of Kandy wanted to get rid of the oppressive Dutch, he sent word to the British in Madras seeking help, and offering Trincomalee harbour as a bait. Though the British wanted Trincomalee and sent emissary John Pybus to the Kandyan court, they were reluctant to take on the Dutch because they were at peace with the Dutch in Europe at that time. This reticence led to bad relations between the Kandyan King and the British.



But by 1780, Britain itself was at war with Holland and also with the French. This time, every effort was made to seize Trincomalee from the Dutch. When the British did seize Trincomalee, it became Britains first territorial possession in Sri Lanka.



Interestingly, Trincomalee was also the last place in the island they gave up. Although the British gave independence to Sri Lanka in 1948, they held on to the RAF base in Katunayake and the Royal Navy base in Trincomalee till 1957. The nationalist government of SWRD Bandaranaike had asked

them to leave.

Trincomalee is nearest to the countries on the shores of the Bay of Bengal such as India (Southern and Eastern part of it), Bangladesh and Myanmar. Trincomalee commands the entrance to the Bay of Bengal which is now gaining economic and strategic importance with the entry of China



India Enters



By 1954, India was beginning to show an interest in Ceylon, albeit very tentatively. Somasundaram quotes an early Indian strategic thinker, R. R. Ramachandra Rao, as saying as early as in 1954, that India has very real interest in ensuring that no hostile power should establish itself in Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

More pointedly, Ramachandra Rao said:  Foreign airstrips and naval control of Trincomalee would unbearably expose the Indian peninsula to air and sea bombardment and assault along her extensive coasts. Ceylon is within Indian defence area, at the very heart centre of the Indian Ocean defence.



In the 1980s, India feared encirclement by hostile forces. It had contradictions with China and the US, besides Pakistan. India feared that the pro-Western J.R. Jayewardene (JR) regime would soon make Sri Lanka a part of the anti-Indian Western alliance. Indias support for the minority Tamils in the island had alienated JR from India.



To add to Indias fears, in 1985, JR reminded British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that the Defence pact the British had signed with Sri Lanka in 1947 was still there, not having been abrogated formally.



These were among other reasons why India appended to the India-Sri Lanka accord of July 1987, an Exchange of Letters between President JR Jayewardene and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi which mentioned Trincomalee.



Through the letters, the two leaders agreed that:(1) Trincomalee or any other port of Sri Lanka, would not be made available for military use by any country in a manner prejudicial to Indias interests. (2) the work of restoring and operating the Trincomalee oil tank farm would be undertaken as a joint venture between India and Sri Lanka.



However, the tanks were handed over to India only in 2003 in exchange for supporting the Norwegian-brokered peace process in Sri Lanka to end the war with the separatist Tamil militants.



India has now been offered to chance to join Japan in developing the Trincomalee harbour and partner Singapore and Japan in developing the hinterland as an Economic Zone.Last week, the Japanese Defence Minister was in Sri Lanka on a two-day visit, a first by a Japanese politician of that capacity to the island. Pacifist Japan did not have a habit of sending their defence top brass and warships to every other country, until very recently. In the same week, the Japanese naval ship Ikazuchi arrived in the Trincomalee harbour on a goodwill visit. The vessel was part of a dispatch of three ships sent on a month-long tour to India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines; a modest manoeuvering by Tokyo to assert the maritime role, as China is expanding its influence in the region.



During his visit Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera toured all three major ports, Colombo, Hambantota and Trincomalee, a gesture one would feel a bit too intrusive, and later he told Japans NHK television, that Tokyo expects that the Hambantota port would be free of military activities. Japans emphasis on a free and open Indo Pacific is rooted in much more than the freedom of navigation, Tokyos own rivalry with China over the contested Diaoyu/Senkaku islands and Chinas expansive maritime posture in the region - according to some estimates China is building a 300 vessel strong fleet with 75 submarines which could contest American superiority in the region. Japans interest in Sri Lanka coincides with Japans own security interests, emanating from Chinas rise, and the expansion of the Chinese influence in the region. The rising China is espousing revisionist grievances, simultaneously, while exerting its influence through an unrivaled infrastructure building binge across the world. It is coaxing countries with its cheque book, at the same time bullying others who refused to kowtow. Chinas rise and still untested intentions generate reactions from regional states, mainly India and Japan and reigning super power, America.



Their collective response towards China has evolved into a soft balancing strategy of sort. Some other countries such as Vietnam and at times, Philippines and Singapore are playing a complementary role. Soft balancing is a mixture of collective security measures such as ad hoc military exercise, security partnerships, intelligence sharing, and collective behaviour at international forums built on shared strategic interests. Those measures can be converted into more overt hard balancing strategies of kinetic display if the security uncertainties in the international system heat up.



However, with the presidency of Mr. Trump, who has a special penchant for picking fights with both allies and foes, and debasing and humiliating Americas treaty partners, Japan, for the first time since the World War II, has to find its own security. Recently, Japan was a mere observer of Mr. Trumps romance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Now that the American president has reinforced sanctions on Iran, Japan which had geo-strategic interest in taking part with India in the development of Irans Chabahar port, which in someways is a rival for the Chinese funded Gwadar port, finds its strategic concerns are in conflict with mercurial Mr. Trump.



Japan has pinned hopes on India as a counterweight to China, and has been a permanent member of the Malabar naval exercise, also involving America to which it sent its largest helicopter carrier last year. Japan and India have also offered an alternative to Chinas one belt one road strategy. Dubbed Asia-Africa growth corridor, the Indian and Japanese economic balancing initiative aims to build, just like OBOR, an infrastructure corridor, facilitating connectivity in the region. Though the intention has been to cynic Japans technological sophistication with Indias scale, the initiative has made little headway, and is more likely to be a victim of inherent bureaucratic lethargy in India, and economic pickiness of Japan.



Also during the last week, an American naval ship, one of the many that came recently, arrived in Trincomalee port for a joint exercise. Those visits though modest are part of a broader American strategy to deepen its footprint in Asia Pacific, which it has re-christened as Indo-Pacific to highlight the strategic importance in the Indian Ocean region. Sri Lanka cannot insulate itself from these systemic forces. They take their own course, with or without our participation. The only difference would be, if you shun systemic forces, you deprive yourself even the remotest possibility to make use of them to advance ones interests.



Some local commentators tend to view this increased international attention as a disturbance to our idyllic solitude. Foreign policy pundits describe the government policy as an aberration of the traditional foreign policy of non-alignment. Naysayers warn that the government is auctioning strategic assets to foreign powers. Others forewarn Sri Lanka would become a Chinese colony. And no surprise, there are enough fools in this country to believe all of that.



There are two ways to view the on-going power transition and fickle systemic conditions courtesy of Chinas meteoric rise.

Naysayers and traditional non-aligned types see a danger in this systemic uncertainty. Others of the realist pragmatism sense an opportunity . Sri Lanka should listen to the latter type. Unfortunately, we and many countries of similar cultural and colonial heritage are full of the former, who espouse the old garbage of an insular and reactive foreign policy as received wisdom . This foreign policy tradition which often went hand in glove with a far more disastrous economic policy of statism, sometimes dubbed a middle path, was the bane of much of the post independent colonial states. Their leaders from Nehru to Kenneth Kaunda, to Sirimavo, build a larger than life personal image at the expense of their countries, and left their people swollen bellied, miserable, often living in hand-to-mouth off the American food aid.



However, the long association of this outlook with foreign service officials, politicians, and academia plus the inherent poverty of that ideology to reform, have blinded the foreign policy of those countries. Thus the rot is self-regenerating.



On the other hand, countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Chile, that exploited those systemic conditions of the cold war, have not only secured their security, but also economic prosperity.



Chinas rise has also created unparalled systemic opportunities, unseen since the hey days of the cold war of the 1960s. And unlike the cold war rivalry, where two distinctive ideologies were at logger heads, the difference in the unfolding competition is much more nuanced. Liberal market policies have prevailed over the rest. And China is not keen on exporting its brand of political system. Its expansion is subtle and is primarily economic, though economic power is generally the reservoir of all other forms of power resources.



China wants the countries to acknowledge its new found clout, and is willing to pay in gold for their solidarity - though its unremitting loan tap itself has created a debt trap when it is unleashed on states which lack internal economic accountability, like ex-President Mahinda Rajapaksas vestige projects have proved to be.

However, it was also Mr. Rajapaksa who decisively exploited the systemic opportunity when it just emerged. Without that manoeuvering, we could still be looking for a lender for the Katunayake Expressway or the Southern Expressway.



It was also the Chinese interest in the island, and later the leasing of the Hambantota Port, that generated the international attention and their desire to pro-actively engage with Sri Lanka. Otherwise, this country was a backwater which, nobody cared. That lack of interest was hardwired to our proximity to India and Indias extended interest in its sphere of influence which none of the other major powers wanted to contest. However, for most part of its recent history, India has been abysmally poor, and not only did it reign over a sphere of partly self- inflicted poverty, it also prevented other countries from escaping poverty, as the Indian funded insurgency did to Sri Lanka just after Colombo embraced free market economic policies.

The rising China is espousing revisionist grievances, simultaneously, while exerting its influence through an unrivaled infrastructure building binge across the world.



Mr. Rajapaksa broke that mould, and since then the Sri Lankan foreign policy has been much bolder.



This does not mean that Sri Lanka should bandwagon with China. Nor does it, that it should shun the American, Indian or Japanese strategic interests in the island. The current power competition is nuanced to the extent that Sri Lanka can pick and choose where it can cooperate and where it would not. At the end, the emerging China-led economic system, if it ever materializes, would have more in similarity with the prevailing US led system than differences. Both are rooted in the free trade -- though Chinas implementation of that may be problematic, those aberrations are more likely to wither way as the country socializes with the trading systems.

Sri Lanka should also not overstate its strategic significance. Strategic importance of small countries is only to the extent that they are willing to play a role in the strategic power play. Sri Lanka should play that role with its long term national interest in mind. National interest for a country like Sri Lanka is first and foremost of its long-term economic wellbeing. Imaginary security implications of such economic interests should not be exaggerated. In the current international system, sovereignty is, by and large, given. Whereas, economic prosperity should be acquired through hard work and ingenuity.



The greatest challenge for Sri Lanka in exploiting those systemic conditions to advance its national interest, is other than the Indian sensitivities, is its own internal lethargy and discord. Sri Lanka has failed to exploit the opportunities of trade integration. Proposed free trade agreements are mired in protracted and often pointless negotiations. Land acquisition and regulatory approval for infrastructure projects are painstaking to obtain. The government has failed to create a predictable environment for investment. Instead, it has gone back on a number of large-scale agreements, and has shown a serial addiction to re-negotiate agreements for an umpteenth time. Unless the country fixes this rotten internal system, Sri Lanka is more likely to be a mere observer of the current flow of systemic opportunities.

Naysayers and traditional non-aligned types see a danger in this systemic uncertainty. Others of the realist pragmatism sense an opportunity . Sri Lanka should listen to the latter type. Unfortunately, we and many countries of similar cultural and colonial heritage are full of the former, who espouse the old garbage of an insular and reactive foreign policy as received wisdom . This foreign policy tradition which often went hand in glove with a far more disastrous economic policy of statism, sometimes dubbed a middle path, was the bane of much of the post independent colonial states. Their leaders from Nehru to Kenneth Kaunda, to Sirimavo, build a larger than life personal image at the expense of their countries, and left their people swollen bellied, miserable, often living in hand-to-mouth off the American food aid.



However, the long association of this outlook with foreign service officials, politicians, and academia plus the inherent poverty of that ideology to reform, have blinded the foreign policy of those countries. Thus the rot is self-regenerating.



On the other hand, countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Chile, that exploited those systemic conditions of the cold war, have not only secured their security, but also economic prosperity.



Chinas rise has also created unparalled systemic opportunities, unseen since the hey days of the cold war of the 1960s. And unlike the cold war rivalry, where two distinctive ideologies were at logger heads, the difference in the unfolding competition is much more nuanced. Liberal market policies have prevailed over the rest. And China is not keen on exporting its brand of political system. Its expansion is subtle and is primarily economic, though economic power is generally the reservoir of all other forms of power resources.



China wants the countries to acknowledge its new found clout, and is willing to pay in gold for their solidarity - though its unremitting loan tap itself has created a debt trap when it is unleashed on states which lack internal economic accountability, like ex-President Mahinda Rajapaksas vestige projects have proved to be.

However, it was also Mr. Rajapaksa who decisively exploited the systemic opportunity when it just emerged. Without that manoeuvering, we could still be looking for a lender for the Katunayake Expressway or the Southern Expressway.



It was also the Chinese interest in the island, and later the leasing of the Hambantota Port, that generated the international attention and their desire to pro-actively engage with Sri Lanka. Otherwise, this country was a backwater which, nobody cared. That lack of interest was hardwired to our proximity to India and Indias extended interest in its sphere of influence which none of the other major powers wanted to contest. However, for most part of its recent history, India has been abysmally poor, and not only did it reign over a sphere of partly self- inflicted poverty, it also prevented other countries from escaping poverty, as the Indian funded insurgency did to Sri Lanka just after Colombo embraced free market economic policies.



Mr. Rajapaksa broke that mould, and since then the Sri Lankan foreign policy has been much bolder.



This does not mean that Sri Lanka should bandwagon with China. Nor does it, that it should shun the American, Indian or Japanese strategic interests in the island. The current power competition is nuanced to the extent that Sri Lanka can pick and choose where it can cooperate and where it would not. At the end, the emerging China-led economic system, if it ever materializes, would have more in similarity with the prevailing US led system than differences. Both are rooted in the free trade -- though Chinas implementation of that may be problematic, those aberrations are more likely to wither way as the country socializes with the trading systems.

Sri Lanka should also not overstate its strategic significance. Strategic importance of small countries is only to the extent that they are willing to play a role in the strategic power play. Sri Lanka should play that role with its long term national interest in mind. National interest for a country like Sri Lanka is first and foremost of its long-term economic wellbeing. Imaginary security implications of such economic interests should not be exaggerated. In the current international system, sovereignty is, by and large, given. Whereas, economic prosperity should be acquired through hard work and ingenuity.



The greatest challenge for Sri Lanka in exploiting those systemic conditions to advance its national interest, is other than the Indian sensitivities, is its own internal lethargy and discord. Sri Lanka has failed to exploit the opportunities of trade integration. Proposed free trade agreements are mired in protracted and often pointless negotiations. Land acquisition and regulatory approval for infrastructure projects are painstaking to obtain. The government has failed to create a predictable environment for investment. Instead, it has gone back on a number of large-scale agreements, and has shown a serial addiction to re-negotiate agreements for an umpteenth time. Unless the country fixes this rotten internal system, Sri Lanka is more likely to be a mere observer of the current flow of systemic opportunities.



Follow @RangaJayasuriya on TwitterTransforming your one-time buyers into lifetime customers  Part 22

If you have followed carefully throughout the previous instalments, by now, you would be able to create a good CRM strategy.



Youve learnt specific topics like e-commerce and handling conflict. And also, youve been told that if you want to be successful, your CRM initiative needs to keep moving forward. Whats now left are some how-to-dos for sustaining your CRM effort.



In this instalment, well apply a process for assessing, aligning, and continually renewing your CRM strategy.



The purpose of this process is to check for your business plans, and find whether it works well as a CRM strategy. We will check the alignment between what customers want, what your strategy tells you to do, and the tactics youve chosen to implement that strategy.



Sometimes you are right on track, but usually one of two things would have happened. Either customer needs have shifted, so your strategy no longer points you in the best direction. Or, there has been drift in what your employees are doing to implement the strategy. A corporate reset ensures that everyone is implementing the right strategy for the right reasons. Let us customise your process for use in resetting your CRM Strategy.



Resetting your CRM strategy

The process for resetting your CRM strategy has three phases. As in an earlier instalment, where we looked at a process for creating your CRM strategy, the way that you implement this process will vary with the nature and complexity of your customer relationships. However, the basic roadmap remains the same.



First, let us take a look at how your CRM strategy is impacting your target customers.

Is it working to create the experiences, the buying patterns, the recommendations, and the expanded business opportunities you originally sought to create? Phase 2 requires you to look internally. How well is your CRM strategy understood, received, and implemented by the employees responsible for creating and managing your customer relationships? In Phase 3 we take the information learned by looking outward and inward and use it to reset the CRM strategy.



Phase 1: Are you hitting your target?

The ultimate test for your CRM strategy and the tactics youre using to implement it is customer satisfaction. Go back to your ideal customer service/sales profile. Are you getting the number of initial/stand-alone transactions that you want or need to give your profile a strong foundation? How about repeat customers? And customer advocates? Are the percentages of each of the three levels of customer relationship right for your business?

There are at least four questions you need to ask in Phase 1 of your CRM strategy reset.

Are your CRM strategy measures in place?

You will typically have CRM measures at two levels. The first measure the overall CRM strategy and often look specifically at how well the CRM strategy contributes to the larger organizational business goals and objectives. The second measure the individual tactics you implement.

For example, measures of customer retention or customer churn address overall business goals. Measures of length of time on hold or in line address tactics.

Is the data from your measures being collected, analysed, and shared with the right people in your organization?

For example, comparing the two types of measures cited in the paragraph above can tell you which tactics contribute to your overall goals, which are neutral, and which may actually detract.

Are the measures accurate?

Just because you have a system in place to capture CRM performance data, doesnt mean that that system is working.

Are your measures an appropriate reflection of your CRM strategy? If, for example, your CRM strategy stresses creative and innovative solutions to customer problems and needs that implies that you will value creative and innovative employees.



However, a local organisation known for innovative services tracked these creative and innovative solutions by asking employees to fill out exception reports every time they had to create a special solution.



The tone of the measurement and tracking process made employees feel defensive and a bit concerned that they were going to get in trouble for working outside the box. This is not the way to encourage creative responses tocustomers.



Phase 2: Does your CRM strategy work for your people?

This phase is about checking in with the employees responsible for creating, managing, and expanding customer relationships. Is your CRM strategy working for them? If they do not feel aligned with your CRM strategy, it wont matter how carefully you crafted it, and it will never live up to its potential.



We find that internal focus groups are a terrific tool for this phase. In a small department or functional area, you may want - and be easily able to - involve all employees. For larger areas or for a company-wide CRM strategy, look to talk with a representative sample of employees. Create a discussion guide of the topics you wish to cover and the questions you will ask. Your discussion guide should also include:

Introductions. Usually, you will ask someone outside your department, or even a professional focus group facilitator, to guide the discussion. The facilitator, often called the moderator, should introduce himself or herself and provide an opportunity for the participants to introduce themselves.



A statement of purpose. Explain that you are working on resetting your CRM strategy and that their feedback is vital to the process.



A statement of confidentiality. If you are recording the session, how will the audiotape be used? Usually, you will explain that the focus group report or summary will include participant comments, but that no participant will be identified by name.



Housekeeping about the process. Tell the group how long the focus group will last. Plan for 90 minutes as an average length. You may want to ask participants to turn off pagers and cell phones.

Discussion questions for a CRM strategy reset may include: (a) Its important for any business to create, maintain, and expand customer relationships. What approach or approaches does your department or functional area use to accomplish this? (The moderator may use a flip chart to capture a list of comments.) (b) Do you believe (a particular approach) is working? Has it been helpful to you in your contacts with customers? Why or why not? (c) What do you think your organization should do to create, maintain, and expand customer relationships?



One of the things that we often find is that support employees feel out of the loop when it comes to your CRM strategy. They may be focused on their specific job tasks but often feel disconnected about how and why their job duties are important to the company and its ability to serve and retain customers.



Phase 3: Time for change

Now, youre ready to create the reset for your CRM strategy. Pull together the information you gathered in Phase 1 and Phase 2. It may be helpful to display your key findings in two parts. First, list the CRM strengths and successes you uncovered. Its important to acknowledge and celebrate what youre doing well.



The second part of your key findings identifies weaknesses. Prioritize this list. If your findings show that you need a major CRM strategy reset, use that process you have already learnt once again.

More often, your list of weakness or opportunities will focus on specific CRM tactics and tools. You can address these in a working session with a group of the individuals responsible for customer relationships. Again, use some of the brainstorming processes described in earlier instalments.

And remember those Post-it notes - the ones that your team used to create your initial list of potential CRM strategies. Now is the time to pull them out, dust them off, and use them to jump-start your new discussions.



(Lionel Wijesiri is a retired company director with over 30 years experience in senior business management. Presently he is a freelance journalist and could be contacted on lawije@gmail.com)New Photo of Kowsar, Irans New Indigenous Fighter



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By Melissa Healy

24 August 2018

(Los Angeles Times)  When the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal this week to give states more latitude in regulating pollution from power plants within their borders, it came with a sobering forecast of its likely impact on Americans health.By 2030, adoption of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule could lead to 470 to 1,400 additional premature deaths each year because of an increase in tiny airborne particles. Children with asthma could wind up missing 21,000 extra days of school annually, and up to 48,000 more people could experience exacerbated asthma as air quality deteriorates.Those estimates were made possible by decades-old studies that linked the rise and fall of microscopic airborne particulates  smog and other emissions from automobile tailpipes, factories, and other industrial sources  to predictable patterns of premature death. Its the kind of analysis that federal regulators will be barred from considering if the EPA adopts a controversial plan ostensibly designed to enhance the quality of research.The Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science initiative would allow rulemakers to base their decisions only on studies whose raw data is available to the public. That way, anyone who doubts the findings can make their own attempt to validate, or discredit, them.The era of secret science at EPA is coming to an end, former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said when he unveiled the initiative in April. Americans deserve to assess the legitimacy of the science underpinning EPA decisions that may impact their lives.Who could possibly be against that?Nearly 70 medical societies and public health groups, including the American Medical Assn., the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Lung Assn. and the American Assn. for Cancer Research. In their view, its a backhanded attack on the key air pollution studies that forced companies to spend billions of dollars on cleaner factories and better equipment.I cant come up with any explanation other than that they want to make this data available to vested interests by making it available to everyone, said George Thurston, an environmental medicine researcher at New York Universitys Langone School of Medicine who opposes the EPA initiative. The problem is that people with an agenda can statistically manipulate the data and come up with really inappropriate conclusions. And if they have a profit motive, thats likely to happen.Even the EPAs own Science Advisory Board is skeptical. The board, which was not consulted on the transparency proposal, voted in May to review the initiative itself.To Thurston, the tactic has a familiar ring.Twenty years ago, he said, the EPA was examining research on the health effects of secondhand smoke and whether they warranted new restrictions on smokers. In a bid to gain access to the research and cast doubt on the findings, tobacco-industry allies pressed the agency to adopt transparency measures. The measure found its way into a House appropriations bill in 1998, but never made it into law.If you challenge the fundamentals, you challenge the finding, said Janice Nolen, assistant vice president of policy for the American Lung Assn. Thats why youre seeing this proposal. [more]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.Architect Jon C. Jackson made places more humane'

Jon C. Jackson, retired principal of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, died on Aug. 17 at age 67.

The highly respected architect was instrumental in establishing the Seattle office of the Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania-based firm, BCJ said in a statement.

Jackson

Jackson was a big part of the projects the firm did at the University of Washington in the 1990s and early 2000s, which helped it gain a foothold in Seattle. Among those projects are the School of Fisheries Building and the Ocean Sciences Building.

Ray Calabro, a principal in the Seattle office, said Jackson enjoyed designing science buildings. Those type of buildings were typically not human-centric, so he was really interested in making those places more humane with elements such as access to natural light and fresh air, so the inhabitants could also appreciate what was going on outside.

Calabro said Jackson hired him, and was a wonderful mentor to him and many others at BCJ.

Under Jackson's leadership, BCJ's Pittsburgh studio came of age, and he was instrumental in establishing the San Francisco office.

Many of the firm's current West Coast-based principals began their careers with Jon in Pittsburgh, following his lead to take BCJ's ethos to new levels, BCJ said in the statement.

The firm's projects locally include Ballard Library and Neighborhood Service Center, Soma Towers in Bellevue, Seattle City Hall, and the Peace Arch U.S. Port of Entry in Blaine.

The firm said, Jackson, a Pittsburgh-area native, was highly respected in the Western Pennsylvania and national design communities, and his life's work was a major influence in BCJ's rise.

Much of Jackson's career was devoted to technically complex projects. Besides science labs, the American Institute of Architects fellow was especially skilled in designing academic spaces.

Among the academic institutions he designed buildings for are the University of Pittsburgh, Dartmouth, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Caltech, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Yale, and the University of California.

BCJ said many of these projects, including the Software Engineering Institute and the Intelligent Workplace at Carnegie Mellon University  both AIA National Award winners  helped inform the firm's workplace designs, and set the stage for collaborations with innovative companies, such as NeXT Computer, Pixar, Adobe, Disney, and Apple.

His buildings were envisaged as humane workplaces, thoughtfully shaped by his concern for individual and social well-being, the firm said. He valued the exploration and invention that occurred within these spaces, and often commented that his role  improving humanity through thoughtful design  inspired him far more than awards or accolades. This concern for human nature, embodied in many of the projects he led, has become one of the pillars of the creative workplace movement.

People who want to honor him may contribute to their favorite charitable or nonprofit organization dedicated to design and architecture, the firm said. No information was available on services.



Subscriber content preview

SAN FRANCISCO (AP)  In a settlement with environmental groups, the Trump administration has agreed to designate critical Pacific Ocean habitat for endangered humpback whales.

The animals face threats from getting tangled in fishing gear, oil spills and being struck by ships. Federal authorities have designated three groups of West Coast humpbacks as endangered or threatened.





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Pakistan to increase poultry exports worthUS$40 million to UAE



In an attempt to be one of the top ten exporters of Middle Eastern markets, Pakistan will boost poultry product exports to the United Arab Emirate (UAE).



According to Pakistan Today, UAE is forecasted to import poultry products worth US$1.1 billion in 2018 and Pakistan targets a US$40 million share.



The decision was manifested during a meeting chaired by Younus Dagha, secretary of commerce, and attended by the Pakistan Poultry Association (PPA) and officials from other ministries.



During the meeting, the PPA called for a reduction of import duties on machinery and equipment, sales tax and regulatory duty on poultry inputs. Dagha shared that the consideration for the demands would be expedited to facilitate boosting exports to the UAE market.



It was further decided in the meeting that a comparative chart of incentives given by other countries would be drawn to assess the negative impact on local industry and required tax relief.



14 units were approved for exports to the UAE. Nearly 70% of the exports were made by K&N, a local company, which has invested heavily in value-added products over the last few years.



The PPA also explained that if the issues of competitiveness were resolved rapidly, Pakistan could export up to US$200 million per year to the UAE alone.



With the massive demand for halal poultry products in the Middle East markets, the local industry is unable to compete internationally due to a high ratio of taxes in the country. Therefore the Middle East governments are looking for alternative international suppliers to meet the demand of poultry and poultry based products in the country.



In February of 2017, the UAE lifted the ban on poultry product imports from Pakistan after eight years and has allowed Pakistan to export day-old chicks and hatching eggs from the companies with attached health certificates from the ministry.



Source: Far Eastern AgricultureTurkish defense industry sparks Chinese medias interest

Along with the developments that Turkish defense industry achieves, Chinese media also started to talk over the sectors developments.

Despite the ongoing crisis between Turkey and the United States, Turkeys successful economic performance continues making a strong impression on the international defense market.

The sales increase of the products was brought to the Chinese medias agenda. China, which has one of the most powerful military power in the world, expressed that the US artificial agenda on Turkey will have a positive effect on the defense industry.

According to Chinese Feng Huang TVs news, it was mentioned that Turkeys defense industry exports are markable popular in the international area and a refreshing for Turkey to get over the US crisis. It was also mentioned that the new powerful 105-millimeter lightweight towed howitzer weapon system will be an important product in the international defense market.Pollution and health have always been directly linked, both environmentally and medically, but few people consider the economic impact felt by countries afflicted with poor outdoor air quality. The World Health Organization estimates that the cost of disability and premature death from air pollution in Europe totalled close to $1.6 trillion USD in 2015 . Each form of pollution presents its own unique challenges, while resulting in a hefty expense and posing a threat to human health.

Particle pollution is a major air quality concern. Microscopic fibers from combustion, dust, and debris are spread through the air in a mix of solids and liquid droplets. Activities like industrial processes, construction, and burning emit particles that are easily inhaled or consumed. Particle pollution becomes increasingly dangerous when it includes harmful toxins like asbestos, which has direct ties to cancerous conditions including peritoneal mesothelioma . Natural disasters, demolition, and climate change can all contribute to particle pollution, sometimes causing levels to spike during certain times of the year.

Due to worsening conditions, gaseous air pollution like ozone and carbon monoxide have been hot topics in recent years. Levels often increase during the summer when higher temperatures and sunlight stimulate chemical reactions in the lower atmosphere. Gases like ozone can aggravate the respiratory system , resulting in conditions such as chronic obtrusive pulmonary disease (COPD) and worsening asthma and emphysema. Although urban areas are often the most affected, the impact of air pollution reaches far into the rural and natural world.

The toll air pollution takes on the environment is costly. Heightened levels of smog or haze can prevent plants from receiving needed sunlight exposure, while certain chemical emissions, like halons, deplete the upper ozone level that protects us from harmful UV rays. Crop and forest damage are a result of air pollution as well, causing land fertility issues and stunted growth .

Economic Impact

Although some headway has been made in terms of sustainability and cutting back on toxins, pollution from energy production continues to cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year. According to a report by the World Bank , this rounds out to about $5 trillion in welfare expenses annually, with developing countries seeing some of the worst effects. Much of this is attributed to healthcare costs, as more people are being exposed to harmful airborne toxins. Additional financial burdens can develop from labor productivity and insufficient crop yields.

A number of studies surrounding the economic result of air pollution recommend policy change. One report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) encourages the use of local policies to directly target and break down the issue. Certain global cities like Beijing or Dubai are experiencing increasingly dangerous air quality levels, sometimes resulting in city-wide smog warnings that bring businesses to a halt. Although there may be fears that industrial-centric jobs may be lost while attempting to reduce pollution, the economic model suggests those positions will be balanced out by gains made in other industries, including green building and architecture. Environmentally conscious policy will benefit and stimulate the economy by encouraging efficient use of resources while lessening healthcare costs.

Participating in clean air initiatives and sustainable development are attractive markets for many countries. Those that enter into clean technologies have the advantage of growing and leading the industry, all while improving national health and increasing GDP. Perhaps if those financial gains were highlighted, countries like the U.S. would feel more incentivized to adopt green and non-toxic technologies to help reduce the effects of air pollution.

Emily Walsh

Community Outreach Director

Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance5,000 jobs and 250m annual tourism revenue to be generated by 5,400 new hotel bed rooms in the city but supply still 1,100 rooms short of expected demand

After almost a decade of inactivity and as the cost of providing new accommodation now is more aligned with its earnings potential, a strong pipeline of new hotel accommodation stock is expected to improve tourism capacity pressures in Dublin by 2020. However, this activity is still being outpaced by growing demand and an expected shortfall of at least 1,100 rooms is still predicted for the city by then. These were the headline findings in An Analysis of Tourism Accommodation in Dublin, a new report published today by Failte Ireland.



Commissioned by the national tourism body, the analysis was carried out by Fitzpatrick Associates Economic Consultants and they estimate that, from 2018-2020, a total of 5,436 hotel rooms will come on stream, including over 3,000 already under construction, representing - by Failte Irelands own estimates - private sector investment in Dublin of 815m.



Amongst those developments expected up to 2020 two out of three of the additional rooms will be in new hotels, approximately 40% will be in the Dublin 2 and 4 area, and one in seven in the Dublin 1 prime area (the North Docks and along the route of the Luas extension in OConnell Street and Parnell Square). The rest of Dublin 1 and Dublin 8 account for over 1,500 of the projected new rooms. Another 460 rooms expected at or close to the airport, an area that experienced the highest levels of occupancy across the entire Dublin region in 2017.



Failte Ireland estimates that every additional 200 bed hotel generates tourism revenue of 9m, creates 180 jobs and contributes 2m per annum to Exchequer earnings. The additional hotel bedrooms expected to 2020 should generate approximately 5,000 jobs, 250m in tourism revenue and 55m annually for the Exchequer.



Speaking today, Failte Ireland CEO, Paul Kelly said:



Dublin is the gateway to Ireland with most visitors choosing to spend part of their stay in the city. Therefore, if visitors cannot access Dublin, it is highly likely they may not visit the country at all. That is why capacity in Dublin is not just an issue for the city but affects all who work in tourism  whether in Kerry, Louth, Waterford, Donegal or any point in-between.



While it is great to see such positive capacity increases in Dublin accommodation we need to ensure that our capital can cater for future demand if we are to sustain tourism growth. Growth in international visitor numbers and revenue is not only great news for employment but also for government finances, with 23 cent in every Euro of tourism spend finding its way to the exchequer. The tax take from tourists is now the equivalent of over 1,000 for every household in Ireland  generating 1.6bn in all which helps fund education, and other important sectors. There is still a huge opportunity to further grow the contribution of tourism but, amongst other things, we need to ensure that Dublin can cater for more visitors.



Todays report indicates that we will continue to have supply and demand pressures in the city. Given current and projected levels of visitor demand, there is certainly still a strong incentive for more investors and businesses to move into the sector. Importantly, any additional rooms and capacity in Dublin will not just benefit tourism but the economy as a whole.

An info-graph summarising the report can be accessed HERE and the full report is available HERE.

Jump to topAUSTRALIAs dependence on China as its largest agricultural export market could backfire if tensions between the East Asian country and the United States continue to escalate.

That was part of the message delivered by Rabobanks head of financial markets research Asia-Pacific, Michael Every, to an intimate group of the banks clients in Perth last week.

As part of Mr Everys presentation  titled A New Cold War  the Hong Kong-based analyst detailed the rising political and economic tensions between China and the US and the potential fallout for Australia and its trade environment.

Tensions have been mounting between the two powerhouse nations throughout the year, with both countries imposing import tariffs of 25 per cent on about $US50 billion of goods each.

Mr Every said as politics, economics and the military became more integrated in the two countries, global markets would be placed on increasingly shaky grounds.

Basically, weve got a cold war as far as I can see between two of the most important countries in the world and the trade war is just a little bit of it, Mr Every said.

As a result markets are going to get a lot more volatile and globally everything gets a lot more volatile.

You may think you dont want to choose a side  the risk is at some point you are picked.

According to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARES), China is Australias biggest agricultural export market, with exports in 2015-16 valued at $8.2b

Australias top three agricultural exports to the worlds most populous country include wool, beef and veal and barley.

With iron ore, dairy, education, tourism and housing industries also relying heavily on the Chinese market, Mr Every said Australia would be placed in a vulnerable position if the new cold war amplified and it was forced to align with either its economic partner China, or its cultural partner America.

Basically most of the economy in one way or another is in China to a certain degree, so youve got all of your eggs in one basket economically, Mr Every said.

Culturally and from a defence perspective, youve got all of your eggs in a completely different basket.

Regardless of the future of the relationship between America and China, Australian exports to China were in insecure territory, according to Mr Every.

He said if a trade war was to escalate and the Australian government chose to support its historic allies in America, China was likely to threaten a consumer boycott of Australian goods.

Mr Every said alternatively, if the US and China resolved its trade conflict, Australia could lose some of its market share of Chinese agricultural imports to America.

If we dont see this trade war we have been given a clear indication that if they (America and China) make friends, the deal is that America sells more agricultural products to China, he said.

China already said when the last deal was on the table a few months ago if that happens well stop buying from Australia, well just switch to America.

Its a pretty unstable situation.

To decrease its export vulnerability, Mr Every told the crowd Australia should consider diversifying its markets.

He said while diversification may result in a loss in premium prices on exported goods in the short-term, it would shield Australia against market insecurity in future years.

Im wondering how long until you have politicians here are suggesting to you that you should accept a loss of premium to sell to markets other than China as a national security briefing, Mr Every said.

A portfolio diversification would make sure no one ever phones you and says I dont like what your Prime Minister said yesterday so youre out of business tomorrow, which is a realistic threat unless you want to live in a country where your Prime Minister is dictated to by another country.

This is a world many countries are moving towards already.

Mr Every said there were plenty of opportunities in alternative markets, including neighbouring countries such as Indonesia which boasted huge population growth.

While the future of the American-Chinese relationship remained unclear, he said it was in Australias best interests to plan ahead to ensure its high quality produce had a market, regardless of international trade challenges.

If your whole business model is only selling to China and something goes wrong, you might not have a balance sheet that can get you through the re-adjustment, Mr Every said.

The product is not the problem, the issue is just making sure you get the product to someone whos going to pay you reliably over the longer term with no strings attached.

If the world does change, its really good if you have a Plan B.The Wheatbelt community started its relentless Save Moora College campaign in December last year following the State governments decision to shut the residential facilitys doors in 2019 due to budgetary constraints.

State opposition leader Mike Nahan threw his support behind the MRC  the only country residential facility between Perth and Geraldton  at the WA Liberal conference this month, vowing to re-open the residential facility if it won the next election.

After Labors backflip on its cuts to community resource centres (CRC) two weeks ago, Dr Nahan urged Premier Mark McGowan to reconsider his decision to close the college.

The McGowan government has been doing its level best to take the education sector backwards with its cuts to community kindergartens, cuts to funding for the Landsdale Farm School and Herdsman Wildlife Centre, cuts to funding for a range of high schools across the State and closing the Moora Residential College, Dr Nahan said.

Education Minister Sue Ellery said parents should be able to choose where they send their children to school, while (Regional Development) Minister (Alannah) MacTiernan claimed the government had listened to regional community concerns about the future of community resource centres.

Its time for the McGowan government to listen to the parents of the students of Moora Residential College, reverse their rushed decision and announce it will be kept open.

Central Midlands Senior High School P&C president Tracey Errington welcomed Dr Nahans election promise, and said while the campaign was not aligned with any political party, it was pleasing to have support from the opposition.

However, Ms Errington said the decision was ultimately in the hands of the Labor Party, with the State election still several years away.

Its a good thing, at least were getting support from the other parties in keeping it open, Ms Errington said.

Obviously they can see what a ridiculous decision it is to close it in the first place.

But were not pinning our hopes on that because thats virtually three years down the track; if they get re-elected its a promise that may or may not eventuate in three years time, but to come out publicly and say that theyre going to commit that now is great.

We still have to get the government to overturn the decision, to make sure its still there through continued funding.

Ms Errington said the State governments decision to continue funding CRCs had given Moora campaigners some hope for MRCs future.

With the cost to maintain the college open estimated to be in the vicinity of $500,000, according to Ms Errington, she hoped the government could find the funds to keep it open.

It is housing 25 students.

It does give us hope, the CRC decision has taken 12 months to overturn and there are other decisions that have been overturned a lot quicker than that, Ms Errington said.

They really dont have any arguments left to close it.

Ms Ellery hit back at Dr Nahan, blaming the WA Liberals Party for not investing in the college when it held government.

She said it would cost between $7 million and $11m to keep the MRC open, a price the government was not willing to pay.

Mike Nahans costings are out of whack, his policy is out of whack, he is out of whack, Ms Ellery said.

Mike Nahan and the Liberal/National government had more than eight years in which they could have funded and upgraded Moora Residential College, but it wasnt considered a priority.

He was happy to throw cash around  in fact his spending left us with the worst set of finances in history  but when it came to Moora Residential College he turned a blind eye.IN addition to the usual hustle and bustle of the annual Rabobank WA Sheep Expo and Sale, the Great Southern Merino Sheepbreeders Association booked in another perk for attendees at this years event.

Three special guests were invited to speak at a Merino development seminar at Katanning on Friday, which was well attended by about 30 people.

Speakers included Rabobank commodity analyst Georgia Twomey, Planfarm consultant Paul Omodei and well-known sheep nutrition expert John Milton.

The discussion was kicked off by Ms Twomey, who works as part of the Rabobank research team based in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, specialising in fibre (wool and cotton).

Her presentation looked at international wool market dynamics and trends, with Ms Twomey saying bottom line, the Merino industry was looking positive.

The export outlook is positive from the demand side, Ms Twomey said.

China, India and Europe all want Australian wool but China remains your key story as both a processor and a consumer.

Ms Twomey said the growing population in China and its ability to buy luxury goods and fashion which utilises wool means good things for domestic demand for Australian wool in China going forward.

There are always risks and things to look out for when prices have been going one way for two and a half years and Chinese reactions to (United States president) Donald Trumps trade decisions are certainly something to watch, she said.

With high wool prices keeping producers excited about demand, Ms Twomey said demand for natural fibres in general was positive and another good sign for Australian woolgrowers.

Paul Omodei, Planfarm, focused on identifying opportunities for producers to expand their sheep enterprises.

He used results from interviews with top performing producers to provide a list of attributes successful sheep farmers share, including flexibility, timeliness, resilience, passion and attention to detail.

Theres no better time than now to be investing in productivity in your sheep enterprise, Mr Omodei said.

Thats what the profitable farmers are doing.

They are investing in productivity grains right now, when prices are good, to help them achieve their long-term goals.

That is a really important point  dont let go of long-term goals when youre seeing strong prices.

Think about investing that money back into your business for the future.

Mr Omodei said strong prices offered a great opportunity for producers to interrogate their farming systems.

Farm productivity analysis is really important and we know those who measure, analyse and then make changes are the most profitable producers, he said.

Mr Omodei gave a list of 10 one per centers that can make 10 per cent differnece, including the importance of measuring, recording, analysing and adapting, as well as conducting farm productivity analyses, culling poor performers at every opportunity, having a clear breeding objective, keeping ground cover over summer and having seasonal strategies based on analogue production years.

Its important to remember that no one system fits all, which is why its important to regularly interrogate your operating system and ask where changes can be made for the better, Mr Omodei said.

Dr Milton concluded the seminar by speaking about management strategies for Merino ewes and weaners, as well as feeding for production.

He said producers needed to be feeding for production, not for maintenance, which means planning to have adequate feed resources.

You shouldnt just be maintaining your weaners, you should be feeding them to grow, Dr Milton said.

When youre feeding breeding ewes, you need to be feeding them with a plan to wean quality lambs and that means giving them enough nutrients to produce plenty of colostrum and milk.

You know your farms best, so you need to have a think about what you can do on your land to achieve the best results.

But there are a lot of options out there  confinement feeding works, edible shelter works for lambing ewes, perennial pastures are a good long-term option, high sugar hay, lupins and so many others.

Dr Milton gave a list of grazing options other than pasture suited to a range of set-ups and situations, including summer crops such as SS Sudan and millets, autumn sown oats on the back of an early break, crop grazing, lucerne, saltbush, new variety perennials such as Tedera, roughage options such as chaff dumps, crop straws and silage and, of course, cereal grains, lupins/pulses and pellets.

Its about meeting the need with feed and were dealing with biology folks  no one size fits all so you need to be thinking about what options suit your system best, Dr Milton said.

He also spoke about managing ewes for a high conception rate.

Ewes need to be at condition score three at joining for them to conceive plenty of lambs, he said.

Its very important for producers to learn how to condition score and then use that skill to get the most out of their sheep.

Given the show judging was on-going during the seminar, it was very well attended with lots of questions from the room following each presentation.WOOLPOLL levy options that woolgrowers will vote on next month have been labelled biased within hours of being released by Australian Wool Innovation (AWI).

Pingelly wool and grain grower John Hassell, WAs representative on the national WoolPoll 2018 panel which helped prepare for the triennial vote on the proportion of wool cheque woolgrowers will pay to part-fund AWI for the next three years, is angered by the options range, describing it as disgraceful.

We had some good people on that committee, Mr Hassell said on Monday.

We worked very hard to make sure that the information pack that will go out to voters this year is the best theres been and that there was no bias, no influence in the information it provided, he said.

Mr Hassell and peak body Wool Producers Australia (WPA), of which Mr Hassell is a director, have accused AWI of manipulating choices offered to voters to improve chances its preferred option  maintaining a two per cent levy  gets most votes and is ultimately approved at the annual general meeting in November.

Earlier Monday AWI board member and AWI representative on the WoolPoll 2018 panel, Jock Laurie, announced voters would have options of 0pc, 1.5pc, 2pc, 2.5pc and 3pc from which to choose a levy rate.

Mr Laurie confirmed AWIs recommended option was 2pc.

Under a funding agreement with the Federal government, which matches a levy contribution to AWIs research and development budget, the regulations governing WoolPoll require AWI to offer woolgrowers an option of 0pc  no levy.

Any other options put forward are at the AWI boards discretion.

Previous WoolPolls offered levy options of 0pc, 1pc, 2pc, 2.5pc and 3pc.

Federal Agricultural Minister David Littleproud has already approved the WoolPoll 2018 information pack and ballot paper to be sent to voters, having signed off on the range of levy options decided by the AWI board, so unless his approval is withdrawn, the options cannot change.

Mr Hassell, an outspoken critic of AWI in 2015 for not offering woolgrowers an option of a 1.5pc levy, said the WoolPoll 2018 panel had no say in what range of options was offered.

At the very first (panel) meeting the question was asked whether we as panel members would have some say in what the options to choose from would be, Mr Hassell said.

It was made very clear to us that we would have no say in the options.

I said to some of the other panel members then that we were wasting our time.

Why would you put an option of 3pc, or even 2.5pc, in there and not offer growers the option of 1pc when wool prices are where they are currently and even (AWI chairman) Wal Merriman says they arent coming down.

In earlier submissions to AWI, the WPA supported by WAFarmers and at least four other industry representative bodies, argued woolgrowers should be given the option of a 1pc levy because of record wool prices and the amount in revenue those prices will generate for AWI from compulsory wool cheque deductions.

The information pack to be sent out before WoolPoll voting starts Monday, September 17, shows AWI revenue and expenditure trends and capital reserves over several years, as well as projections for several coming years.

Farm Weekly understands the trends and assumptions calculations are based on an Eastern Market Indicator (EMI)  an indicative weighted wool price determined by Australian Wool Exchange (AWEX) from prices at Perth, Melbourne and Sydney selling centres  of 1750 cents a kilogram clean.

The EMI is at a record 2116c/kg after last week and its average for the year so far is 1878c/kg.

Its average last year was 1538c/kg and in 2015 when the last WoolPoll was held the EMI average for the year was 1192c/kg, according to AWEX.

In 2012, when woolgrowers also elected to maintain the levy at 2pc, the EMI average was 1088c/kg.

In my opinion, they (AWI board members) are ignoring what woolgrowers want and are trying to ensure what they want is selected instead, Mr Hassell said.

I think its disgraceful.

I dont think the EY recommendations (82 of them from a statutory performance review of AWI earlier this year) go far enough to ensuring that the AWI board is responsible to woolgrowers like the CBH board (is to WA graingrowers), Mr Hassell, a former CBH Group director, said.

Also, levy payers shouldnt be fooled into thinking that WoolPoll 2018 gives them a say on how the money is spent  it doesnt, its all about the amount.

If you want a say on how the money is to be spent then you have to become a shareholder.

WPA president, Richard Halliday said inclusion of options above 2pc makes no sense.

In the 2012 and 2015 WoolPolls the combined percentage of votes supporting 2.5 and 3pc options did not exceed 7pc, Mr Halliday pointed out.

WPA made this point in a letter to the WoolPoll panel chairman (Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, Merino woolgrower Syd Lawrie) when we were approached to provide our preferred levy rate options earlier in the year, Mr Halliday said.

It is illogical in the current environment to only provide woolgrowers with the opportunity to reduce the levy rate by half a per cent or cease it all together, but to then provide two options above status quo.

WPA believes that the reason that AWI has chosen this option range, is to utilise the centre-stage effect whereby there is an inherent bias to choose the middle option.

There is absolutely no other justification in including 2.5pc and 3pc.

Mr Halliday said the WPA believed it is inappropriate for AWI, the beneficiary of the levy, to be the only one to decide the options for levy payers, while also being able to lobby for a particular option during the WoolPoll process.

Despite their claims, the AWI board (members) have not listened to growers and have put forward option rates to pursue their own interests.

This is unacceptable, Mr Halliday said.

Announcing the levy options on Monday, Mr Laurie said AWIs WoolPoll preparation included extensive modelling of investment and forecasting of production and income at the various rates and at the request of the WoolPoll panel this would be part of the information pack for the first time.

The (AWI) board is focused on building resilience within the industry, particularly through AWIs investments, while times are good, Mr Laurie said.

We believe 2pc is the optimum level to balance our financial responsibility with our capacity to deliver benefits for growers.

The levy is so critically important to enable us to collectively invest in research, development and marketing, and therefore enabling industry to collectively benefit  from on-farm research right through to educating the consumer about the benefits of Australian wool.

With the 2pc levy, we can keep marketing Australian wool and building global demand  if we take our foot off the pedal, well leave a gap in the market that will undoubtedly be filled by another fibre.

Its a conscious choice and we want to ensure wool is the final choice, right along the supply chain through to consumers, Mr Laurie said.Ein radikaler Akt? Das Schwenken einer EU-Flagge in Berlin. Bild: dpa

Im told a rock band is at its best when its a little transgressive: when it pushes the bounds of so-called good taste, when it shocks, when it surprises. Well, U2 is kicking off its tour in Berlin this week, and weve just had one of our more provocative ideas: during the show were going to wave a big, bright, blue EU flag.

Im guessing that even to a rock audience, waving an EU flag these days is either an annoyance, a bore, a kitsch reference to the Eurovision Song Contest but to some of us it has become a radical act. Europe, which for a long time triggered a yawn, today sparks a kitchen-table screaming match. Europe is the theatre of powerful, emotional, clashing forces that will shape our future. I say our future, because there is no way to deny that we are all in this boat together, in seas churned up by extreme weather and extremist politics.

Europe is a hard sell in Europe these days

Europe is a hard sell in Europe these days. This is true even though there has never been a better place to be born than in Europe during the last 50 years. Though we have to work a lot harder to spread the benefits of prosperity, Europeans are better educated, better shielded from abuses by big corporations, and leading better, longer, healthier, and flat-out happier lives than people in any other region of the world. Yes, happier. They measure these things.

Ireland is a place with a special emotional connection to Europe, and the idea of it. Maybe its because Ireland is a tiny rock in a big sea, eager to be part of something larger than ourselves (for most things are larger than ourselves). Maybe its because we used to feel closer to Europe than we did to some of the people on our island.

Belonging to Europe enabled us to become a better, more confident version of ourselves. We stand a bit taller among friends. Also, the closer the north and the south of Ireland got to Europe, the closer we got to each other. Propinquity crossed the border and brought the barriers down.

For sore historical reasons, we do not take sovereignty lightly. If the definition of sovereignty is the power of a country to govern itself, Ireland saw that working with other nations gave us a greater power than we could wield on our own, and a greater agency over our own fate.

As a European I feel proud thinking back to when Germans welcomed frightened Syrian refugees (Id feel prouder had more countries stepped up); proud of Europes fight to end extreme poverty and climate change; and, yes, extraordinarily proud of the Good Friday agreement and how other countries have rallied behind Ireland on the border issue, revived by Brexit. I feel privileged to have witnessed the longest stretch of peace and prosperity ever on the European continent.

Mehr zum Thema 1/

But all these achievements are under threat, because respect for diversitythe premise of the whole European systemis being challenged. As my countryman John Hume has said: All conflict is about difference, whether the difference is race, religion or nationality. The European visionaries decided that difference is not a threatDifference is of the essence of humanity, and should be respected, celebrated, and even cultivated.

Zero-sum game was a suicide pact

Were seeing a spectacular loss of faith in that idea. Fueled by the unevenness of globalization, and a failure to manage the migration crisis, nationalists say diversity is a danger. Seek refuge, they tell us, in sameness; drive out the different. Their vision for the future looks to me a lot like the past: identity politics, grievance, violence. Nationalism is an equal opportunity discriminator.

The generation that endured the world war saw the deadly toll of that way of thinking. They found a path out of the rubble, over concrete walls and razor wire, to draw back the Iron Curtain sketched on Stalins easel, and rejected the idea that our differences are all that define us.

They understood that zero-sum thinking was a suicide pact.

I love our differences: our dialects, our traditions, our peculiarities, the essence of humanity, as Hume put it. And I believe they still leave room for what Churchill called an enlarged patriotism: plural allegiances, layered identities, to be Irish and European, German and European, not either/or. The word patriotism has been stolen from us by nationalists and extremists who demand uniformity. But real patriots seek unity above homogeneity. Reaffirming that is, to me, is the real European project.

Can we get put our hearts into this struggle? There may be no romance to a project or sexiness in a bureaucracy, but as the great Simone Veil said, Europe is the grand design of the 21st century. Its values and aspirations make Europe so much more than just a geography. They go to the core of who we are as human beings, and who we want to be. That idea of Europe deserves songs written about it, and big bright blue flags to be waved about.

To prevail in these troubled times Europe is a thought that needs to become a feeling.

The author, Bono (Paul David Hewson), is lead vocalist of U2 and co-founder of ONE, an international organisation that fights extreme poverty.The Securities and Exchange Commission issued an administrative order Monday that completed the feds earlier $64 million FCPA enforcement action against investment manager Legg Mason Inc.

On June 4, Maryland-based Legg Mason entered into a non-prosecution agreement with the DOJ to resolve FCPA violations in Libya.

The NPA required Legg Mason to pay $64.2 million, consisting of a criminal penalty of $32.6 million and disgorgement of $31.6 million.

To avoid piling on, the DOJ said the disgorgement would be credited against disgorgement paid to other law enforcement authorities within the first year of the [non-prosecution] agreement.

Mondays SEC order (pdf) said Legg Mason violated the internal accounting controls provision of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

The firm agreed to pay $34 million to settle the civil offenses, with $27.6 million in disgorgement and $6.9 million in prejudgment interest.

After applying the credit for $31.6 million as set out in the June 4 NPA, Legg Mason will pay the SEC $2.4 million for the resolution.

The SEC said it didnt impose any other penalties because the DOJ had already fined Legg Mason $32.6 million in the June 4 criminal action.

Legg Masons FCPA violations in Libya were caused by its partner there, Paris-based Societe Generale S.A.

Between 2004 and 2010, Legg Masons subsidiary, Permal Group Ltd., teamed with SocGen to win business from Libyan state-owned funds and banks.

SocGen paid $90 million in bribes through a Libyan broker in return for 14 investments.

SocGen settled its own FCPA offenses on June 4. It agreed with the DOJ to pay $585 million in criminal penalties, with half the penalties payable to French enforcement agencies.

In seven transactions, the DOJ said, SocGen paid commissions to the Libyan broker to benefit Legg Masons Permal unit.

____

Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog.A federal appeals court ruled Friday that a non-resident foreign national cannot be charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or with aiding and abetting a violation of the FCPA, unless the government can show that he acted as an agent of a domestic concern or while physically present in the United States.

The Second Circuit largely affirmed a lower court ruling in U.S. v. Hoskins from March 2016 that rejected the DOJs argument for expansive personal jurisdiction in FCPA cases.

Lawrence Hoskins, a British national and former Alstom UK executive based in Paris, was charged in 2013 with FCPA and money-laundering offenses.

The allegations tied Hoskins to a scheme to win a $118 million project to build power stations for Indonesias state electricity company. As a senior vice president for Alstom, he allegedly approved payments to consultants retained to bribe Indonesian officials.

In August 2015, the federal district court in Connecticut dismissed one count of the indictment against Hoskins, holding that he couldnt be held criminally liable for conspiring to violate or aiding and abetting a violation of the FCPA.

In a March 16 ruling, Judge Janet Bond Arterton wrote a 21-page decision rejecting the governments request for reconsideration. The DOJ appealed.

On Friday, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit said the central question of the appeal is whether . . . a person [can] be guilty as an accomplice or a co-conspirator for an FCPA crime that he or she is incapable of committing as a principal?

In mostly affirming the lower court, the Second Circuit said since Hoskins was never a U.S. citizen, national, or resident, and wasnt accused of having acted in furtherance of the bribery scheme while in the United States, he could only be charged as an agent of a domestic concern.

The DOJ can still pursue FCPA charges based on the factual issue of whether Hoskins was an agent of a domestic concern, the appellate court said.

Hoskins, 67, also still faces money laundering charges.

* * *

Alstom SA pleaded guilty in December 2014 to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by bribing officials in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Bahamas.

It paid the DOJ $772 million in criminal penalties to settle charges that it violated the FCPA by falsifying its books and records and failing to implement adequate internal controls.

Three Alstom executives have pleaded guilty in the United States to bribing officials in Indonesia.

In the UK, seven individuals have been charged in the Alstom case, along with two Alstom business units.

____

Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog.SACRAMENTO, Calif.  The states New Motor Vehicle Board sided with a California Chevrolet dealership in a case that calls into question the way automakers measure and enforce sales expectations, ruling that General Motors violated state statutes when it terminated Folsom Chevrolets franchise in late 2016.

The board ruled against GMs use of a retail sales index (RSI) as bases for terminating Folsom Chevrolets franchise agreement, determining that the automakers reliance on the sales efficiency metric violated state law because it failed to account for a number of the dealership's market circumstances. The law firm representing the dealership, Scali Rasmussen, said the decision puts GM and all other manufacturers on notice.

This decision is a phenomenal victory for all California dealers and will have ripple effects across the country, said Christian Scali, the firm's founder and managing partner. For example, this outcome provides not only a shield as used in this case but potentially a sword for recovery of damages caused by GMs application of the faulty metric,

Previous cases in other states have come out in favor of dealers facing termination over RSI and other metrics that fail to account for market nuances, most notably the 2016 case involving Beck Chevrolet in New York. But the Folsom Chevrolet case is the first in California to call the use of such metrics a violation of that state's vehicle code.

The sales efficiency metric divides the dealers reported number of retail sales by the number of expected sales and multiplies the outcome by 100. An RSI of 100 means the dealership made its expected sales number exactly, while a score of 50 means it made only half that number of its expected sales.

According to the ruling, Folsoms RSI in 2013 was 40.9, leaving it with a rank of 129 of the 133 Chevrolet dealers in California. For 2014, the dealerships RSI was 44.4, giving it a rank of 124 out of 128 California Chevrolet dealers.

In May 2015, GM notified the dealership it was in breach of its dealer agreement because it failed to hit its sales and customer satisfaction obligations. Folsom Chevrolet was then given an opportunity to raise its RSI and CSI scores between July 2015 and December 2015. The automaker, however, said Folsom failed to correct its sales or customer satisfaction deficiencies during the period. A notice of termination was issued to the dealership on Nov. 3, 2016. Folsom then filed its protest of the termination with the board seven days later.

According to its ruling, the board found that GMs RSI failed to account for the impact of circumstances unique to Folsoms market, including demographics, geography, and brand preferences. The board also noted that a GM expert said Toyota and Honda are stronger brands in the dealerships area and agreed that the more local the benchmark, the more sensitive it will be to local conditions.

Accounting for brand bias by controlling for demographic variables of age, income, education level, and population density, as well as whether the dealership is in the five-county area, results in a reduction of the RSI requirement for Folsom of approximately 30%, the board noted in its decision.

While it may be a legitimate concern that General Motors would like to measure its dealers in a uniform method across the country and manufacturers do have a legitimate interest in monitoring the sales outcomes and effectiveness of its dealerships and addressing weaknesses in its sales force, the General Motors RSI and the assigned [area of geographic sales and service advantage (AGSSA)] in this case are flawed, the board said in its ruling, noting that the RSI overstates sales opportunity by assigning 100% of the registrations despite Chevrolet dealerships in California and in the Sacramento area make less than 41% of their sales within their AGSSA.

RSI also does not include any calculation of the opportunity to sell outside Folsom Chevrolets AGSSA, and does not account for local conditions, such as demographics, market characteristics, and local economic circumstances, the board stated in its ruling. As for Folsom Chevrolets AGSSA, it was assigned an unfair AGSSA in size and distances of registrations from the dealership location, with required absorptions of portions of two poorly or underperforming terminated dealerships, the fact that it is part urban and part rural, and is an AGSSA which grew over 80% in registrations between 2010 and 2014.

In a statement issued to F&I and Showroom, GM spokesperson Jim Cain said the automaker strongly disagrees with the boards decision. He added that a decision to appeal the ruling will be announced at a later date.

The Retail Sales Index is currently calculated in California and elsewhere is one of multiple metrics and other sources of information considered by GM in evaluating its dealers compliance with their obligations, Cain said in an emailed statement. There are no plans at this time to revise the RSI calculation for California dealers.Harbour BioMed, a Shangai, China-based biopharmaceutical company that is developing therapeutics for oncology and immunological diseases, completed a Series B round financing of $85m.

GIC Private Limited, Singapores sovereign wealth fund, led the financing round, with participation from new investors, including China Life Private Equity Investment Company and Vertex Ventures, and Series A investors AdvanTech and Legend Capital.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate the growth of its innovative therapeutic pipeline, including both clinical and discovery stage programs.

Led by Dr. Jingsong Wang, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Harbour BioMed is a global biopharmaceutical company discovering and developing innovative therapeutics for oncology and immunological diseases. The companys discovery and development programs are built around its two patented transgenic mouse platforms for therapeutic antibody discovery. Iy is building its proprietary pipeline through its innovative internal discovery programs, and through in-licensing clinical stage assets that strategically fit its internal portfolio. Harbour BioMed also licenses the platforms to companies and academic institutions through its Harbour Antibodies subsidiary.

The company was established in December 2016 around a Series A round of $50m and the acquisition of the Netherlands-based fully human transgenic antibody technology company, Harbour Antibodies BV and its subsidiaries.

The company has integrated the Harbour Mice technologies into its newly built antibody technology and discovery biology, preclinical and clinical development operations, entered into multiple license and collaboration agreements for its Harbour Mice, and established an innovative therapeutic pipeline based on internal discovery and in licensing activities.

In early 2018 Harbour raised an A+ Round from CDH and AdvanTech to support its in-licensed clinical programs for Greater China. Harbours development programs include:

 An anti-FcRn based antibody against multiple autoimmune diseases, including myasthenia gravis and neuromyelitis optica, and a biologic against inflammatory dry-eye disease, among other potential indications. Harbour, which in-licensed these assets in 2017, is developing them for the Greater China market. Harbour recently filed two INDs for three different indications in China to conduct clinical trials with these assets.

 A CD3-based bi-specific antibody therapy against Her-2 overexpressed cancer in clinical development, acquired in August 2018, which Harbour is developing for the Greater China market.

 A clinical stage, anti-PD-L1 antibody for the treatment of multiple solid tumors and hematological cancers, acquired in August 2018, that Harbour is developing worldwide outside of China.

FinSMEs

27/08/2018Kodit.io, a Helsinki, Finland-based proptech company, closed a 1.7M seed funding round.

The round was led by Speedinvest x and Norwegian international media group Schibsted, with Icebreaker.vc providing additional funding.

The company intends to use the funds to expand into new EU cities.

Led by Kalle Salmi, CEO, and Martti Suomela, Kodit.io is a PropTech startup and an iBuyer providing instant offers for apartment owners. The AI-powered real estate data platform that allows home sellers to receive instant cash offers on their homes to lease back their old home and buyers to get aceess to renovated homes and to trade in their old home for a data-based market price.

Kodit.io has more than 80 properties purchased and more than 40 exited over the past 8 months. It currently operates in 7 cities in Finland and Estonia, with now potential markets to be opened in Southern and Eastern Europe.

FinSMEs

27/08/2018Steep Hill, a Berkeley, Calif.-based provider of cannabis testing and analytics solutions in the U.S. and internationally, received further funding from Merida Capital Partners.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed. Merida has increased its stake in the company and has selected Dr. Andrew Rosenstein to assume the role of interim CEO for the company effective immediately.

Dr. Rosenstein replaces Jmichaele Keller, who has retired for health reasons.

A board certified Gastroenterologist and the Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology at University of Maryland Saint Joseph Medical Center, with experience building and operating cannabis testing laboratories in two of the most regulated states in the U.S., Dr. Rosenstein has served on the Steep Hill Board and is a licensee of the company. He currently operates Steep Hill Maryland, Steep Hill Pennsylvania, and Steep Hill Washington, D.C.

As part of Meridas increased investment, Jeffrey Monat, a partner at Merida, has joined the Steep Hill Board of Directors. He is joined by recently appointed board members Brett Finkelstein of Phyto Partners and entrepreneur and investor Stephen Finfer.

Steep Hill is a cannabis science and technology company providing lab testing, research and development, licensing, genetics and remote testing. The company also provides expert consulting services to legislators and regulators in many countries, states and municipalities around the world.

The company operates corporate owned labs in California, New Mexico and Washington State, U.S. licensees in Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., and global licensees in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

FinSMEs

27/08/2018.    .      .           .       3 ,           10 .          ,        ...Carol Burnett star Tim Conway is reportedly battling dementia.

According to court documents obtained by People magazine Friday and first reported by The Blast, the 84-year-olds daughter, Kelly, is asking to be appointed as the conservator of her father and be in charge of his medical treatments.

Kelly Conway filed the documents in Los Angeles on Friday, claiming Conways wife, Charlene, is planning to move him out of the excellent skilled nursing facility he is currently at and instead, place him in one that wont give him access to registered nurses at all times and his 24-hour caregiver and speech therapist (to help with swallowing).

Kelly, 56, added that due to the disorder, which impacts memory and judgment, Conway cannot properly provide for his personal needs for physical health, food, and clothing and is almost entirely unresponsive. She hopes to be granted guardianship so she can also administer her fathers medications herself.

A rep for Conway did not immediately respond to Fox News request for comment.

Conway had zero experience when he first embarked on his journey to Hollywood. His first credited role was 1964s McHales Navy as Ensign Charles Parker.

He continued working in both film and television before he made his mark in The Carol Burnett Show as various beloved characters, including the Oldest Man and Mr. Tudball from 1975 until 1978. He won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Conway, who was a frequent guest, ultimately became a regular in later seasons by popular demand.

Conway continued acting and even voiced the character of Barnacle Boy on the animated series Spongebob Squarepants. He made a special appearance on the second season of 30 Rock, which earned him an Emmy.

Some of his other TV credits include guest appearances on hit shows, such as Married With Children, Mad About You, Glee and Two and a Half Men, just to name a few.

His last credited role was that of Dorf in the 2016 comedy Chip and Bernie Save Christmas with Dorf.

I had no professional training, Conway told The Interviews: An Oral History of Television in 2004. I had a sense of humor and had been in front of a microphone."

Conway shares seven children with his first wife Mary Anne Dalton. The couple was married from 1961 until 1978. He remarried in 1984 to his current wife Charlene.An emotional video shows the moment an 11-year-old Drake fan found out she's going to get a heart transplant.

A clip of Sofia Sanchezs reaction to the news was posted on Facebook Sunday.

My birthday wishes are - and it did happen, well one of them did - to meet Drake, the youngster explained, calling their meeting at a Chicago hospital great.

My other wish is to get a heart, she said. Which is gonna happen soon.

A voice off-camera then told her the big news: It happens today. Youre getting a heart.

TIFFANY HADDISH SAYS DRAKE ASKED HER OUT BUT STOOD HER UP

Im getting a heart Mom?! Sanchez asks. Oh my God.

The video has already been viewed more than 80,000 times as of Monday afternoon.

Try to watch with out crying ... thank you lord baby jesus ! Sofia gets her second wish #godsplan, Sanchez's cousin, Joshua Virgen, captioned the video  referencing the Drake song of the same name.

Drake visited Sanchez at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago on Aug. 20  two days after she turned 11.

The rapper had seen a video of Sanchez dancing to his famous song In My Feelings, which has become host to a viral dance craze. The video, posted by the hospital on Aug. 15, quickly went viral.

DRAKE SURPRISES 11-YEAR-OLD GIRL AWAITING HEART TRANSPLANT AFTER SHE DOES 'IN MY FEELINGS' CHALLENGE

In the viral clip, Sanchez is seen dancing alongside her cousin in a hospital hallway while "tethered to her IV pump." In a follow-up video, the young girl asked Drake to visit her, as he was performing in Chicago at the time.

Drake met the young girl, and marked the occasion with a sweet selfie of the pair. He also apparently gifted her a hat with the word "Scorpion," the title of his fifth studio album.

The children's hospital wrote online Sanchez was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a condition which makes it difficult for the heart to pump blood and can lead to heart failure, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Earlier this summer, the 11-year-old underwent open heart surgery to connect a mechanical pump to support blood flow.

Fox News Nicole Darrah contributed to this report.Embattled NBC News Chairman Andy Lack is facing the boot from the once-prestigious news division over his mishandling of a series of #MeToo scandals and the Megyn Kelly debacle, sources exclusively confirmed to Page Six.

Comcast chiefs have been seeking a replacement for Lack, 71, who is on the ropes after the downfall of his once close-friend Matt Lauer, the Brian Williams wreckage and allegations against legendary anchor Tom Brokaw.

And theres still-lingering questions about why NBC News sat on the infamous Access Hollywood Grab em by the p - - - y Donald Trump tape, and why they refused to run Ronan Farrows expose on Harvey Weinstein before he went to the New Yorker.

Plus, theres Kellys $20 million-a-year deal personally made by Lack for the ex-Fox News star to host the soft third hour of Today. Despite a recent improvement in ratings, her numbers are still down 30 percent in the key demo compared to 2017, when Tamron Hall and Al Roker co-hosted.

And ABCs rival GMA reigns supreme as the most-watched morning show, costing Comcast millions in ad dollars. One insider told Page Six, Comcast execs are tired of the scandals and talent troubles at NBC News. They want to establish a new tone at the division, and start to win back its former prestige. A media outlet is working on an expose of Lacks management in the #MeToo era, but it is not yet clear what damage that could cause. Megyns deal is also a big problem, because her contract states she cant be assigned to hard news against her will, so a move to a new slot would be difficult.

An NBC spokesman said, That is absurd.

Other insiders say ABC News President James Goldston has been eyed for the NBC job as his predecessor, Disney/ABC TV Group president Ben Sherwood, is tipped to become worldwide head of news in a leadership overhaul.

But an ABC source insisted that Goldston is tied to ABC News because he is in his first year of a two-year contract. One added, The big question is who could take over  or who would want  Andys job? #MeToo has basically seen everyone off.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.A 4-year-old girl in Canada is the latest victim to suffer serious injuries allegedly while jumping around at a trampoline park. Sarah Villanueva and Jesse Charbonneau said their daughter, Maddie, underwent surgery to correct a broken leg and fractured ankle, and will now have to start kindergarten in a wheelchair.

She caught a bad bounce and she wasnt getting up right away, Charbonneau, who was present at the Extreme Air Park in New Westminster on Saturday, told CTV News. Then she started screaming really loudly and I knew something was wrong.

Charbonneau said staff at the park were slow to respond, with one employee allegedly offering an ice pack while they waited 25 minutes for the paramedics. He claims that there were no trained staff members to help him, and that there was no first-aid kit available. Guests are required to sign a waiver before entering the park.

The company did not respond to the outlets request for comment.

CANCER SURVIVOR LEFT CRIPPLED BY TREATMENT UNDERGOES LIFE-SAVING SURGERY

Villanueva said she doesnt blame the park for her daughters accident, but believes there should be more regulation. Maddies injuries are the latest in a number of incidents to occur at Extreme Air Parks locations, including a child who fell through the springs of a trampoline, and a 46-year-old man who died.

According to a 2016 study, emergency room visits in the U.S. jumped twelvefold for park-related injuries over a five-year period. Injuries included broken legs, neck sprains and concussions. The American Academy of Pediatrics went so far as to recommend against children using trampolines at home or parks and said injury rates at the parks should be monitored.

Im not blaming this place for her injury, Villanueva told CTV News. [Kids] do crazy things, they get in trouble and they get hurt and its all a part of life.

In response to the 2016 study, the International Association of Trampoline Parks said the rate of injury remains low and that safety is always a priority.A Michigan teen will forgo attending her junior year of high school with friends and instead be homeschooled so that she can help take care of her paralyzed mother, who was recently diagnosed with two different types of breast cancer.

Emma Burkholder, whose 42-year-old mother Jennifer is also paralyzed from the waist down due to a car accident at age 18, said its a small price to pay for her best friend.

I would gladly give up this little piece of my life to help my mom, Burkholder, 17, told 9 and 10 News, of her decision.

Jennifer Burkholder, who has two other children in addition to Emma, was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer and invasive ductal carcinoma in July. Inflammatory breast cancer is a rare, aggressive disease in which the cancer cells block lymph vessels in the skin of the breast. According to the National Cancer Institute, the cancer accounts for 1 to 5 percent of all breast cancers in the U.S., and leaves patients with a swollen and red, or inflamed breast. Invasive ductal carcinoma is the most common type of invasive breast cancer, and begins in the lining of the milk ducts before spreading to the surrounding tissue.

Her husband, Army veteran Kevin Burkholder, said the family was told Jennifers cancer had spread to her lymph nodes.

CANCER SURVIVOR LEFT CRIPPLED BY TREATMENT UNDERGOES LIFE-SAVING SURGERY

To help the family maintain an income and pay for Jennifers medical care and associated travel costs, Emma decided to stay home and help care for her mom. This way Kevin could keep his job.

The family also said that because of Jennifers ailments, which also include the removal of her large intestine after complications from a prior surgery led to sepsis, its helpful that Emma knows her moms medical history.

Just to have somebody here like Emma, that knows Jennifer and knows all her ailments and thats that happen, its peace of mind, he told the news outlet.

On Monday, Jennifer arrived at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Chicago. The trip had been jeopardized after Jennifers white blood cell count dipped on Friday and she was admitted to the hospital. But in a video posted to her Facebook page on Monday, Jennifer had let her supporters know that she had arrived and was going in for battle gear.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

With their coffee mugs and laptops at the ready, over 20 million students are expected to start college in the U.S. this year. They offer a stark back-to-school contrast to the 31 million people in this country who started working on a degree but never completed it.

The 31 million figure may be surprising, but the reasons behind it are not. A recent Harris Poll survey , conducted in collaboration with University of the People, offers important insights.

First, money is a primary factor. Even with financial aid, many students dont have the means to continue, and may already be burdened with significant educational debt.

According to the survey results, nearly 60 percent responded that they would continue their education if it were affordable. Likewise, almost 60 percent said they would resume their education if class schedules were flexible. Many people who want an education have family obligations, and the need to work and take care of family can make getting to class impossible.

Life presents seemingly insurmountable obstacles for many of these students, but by stopping their education they risk the loss of the significant lifetime benefits of a degree: better jobs and socioeconomic mobility (those with a bachelors degree have median earnings that are about 65 percent higher than those with a high school diploma), more engagement with their communities, a greater sense of satisfaction with their lives, and even better health. Institutions of higher education must help these students overcome these roadblocks for those who want to earn their degrees.

Our own experiences include attending, leading and teaching at institutions where in-person classroom interactions among students and faculty are the cornerstone of education. A campus environment with all of the attending resources offers students extraordinary opportunities. We have advocated for this kind of education, yet we know it simply is not possible for all.

Those who want a college degree and have the talent to obtain one, but who cannot pursue their dreams in the traditional way, deserve strong academic programs as much as any other student. For them, we must invest in models offering greater flexibility and affordability.

One bold approach is University of the People, the first accredited, non-profit, tuition-free online American university. We both are volunteer members of its Presidents Council, along with current and former college and university leaders from this country and abroad. Other quality non-profit universities such as Arizona State University, Southern New Hampshire University, University of Maryland University College, and Western Governors University can attest to the demand for the flexibility and broad access that online education offers.

The opportunity of being given a chance to complete ones college degree can be transformative. As one graduate said after earning her bachelors degree in business administration, despite poverty and a period of homelessness, I will no longer be held back by my lack of education. Where there wasnt a way, I found one. For the millions hoping to finally earn their diplomas, lets show them there is a way.

John Sexton is president emeritus of New York University.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

President Trump should award John McCain, who died on Saturday, the Medal of Honor. The posthumous award would recognize the senators extraordinary heroism during his five years of captivity in North Vietnam, when he was tortured mercilessly, leaving him disabled for life. The compassionate and respectful gesture might also help to heal some deep wounds in the Republican Party.

McCain was a Navy fighter pilot when his plane was shot down on a mission over the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi in 1967. He fractured both arms and one leg when he was ejected from his jet and nearly drowned when he parachuted into a lake. North Vietnamese pulled the badly injured McCain from the lake and attacked him. One bayonetted him and crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt.

McCain was routinely beaten by his captors once he was imprisoned, in part because he refused to accept early release, offered once the North Vietnamese realized he was the son of a Navy admiral and wanted to appear merciful for propaganda purposes. McCain refused to leave until the U.S. POWs captured before him went home first.

Because of his 23 bombing raids over North Vietnam and the leadership he showed in the infamous so-called Hanoi Hilton  McCain received the Silver Star, Legion of Merit, three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.

John McCain deserves the Medal of Honor, our nations highest military award. President Trump would acknowledge the senators extraordinary service to our country and at the same time demonstrate his respect by bestowing it on one of his fiercest critics.

John McCain deserves the Medal of Honor, our nations highest military award. President Trump would acknowledge the senators extraordinary service to our country and at the same time demonstrate his respect by bestowing it on one of his fiercest critics. It is by honoring our adversaries that we ourselves gain in stature.

The 81-year-old senator from Arizona and former Republican presidential candidate was a true American hero, one who by turns elevated the countrys discourse and exasperated his friends and foes alike.

Though he regularly sparred with Democrats  including President Obama, whom he once dismissed as a celebrity, and Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton  those on the left forgave him when he became one of President Trumps most damaging political adversaries.

The enemy of my enemy

The death of John McCain is a tragic loss for his family and for the millions who revered his old-style politics, his occasional forays across the aisle, his downright cussedness and his extraordinary wartime valor and patriotism.

There are far too few people in the public eye today who have earned our respect, and even fewer willing to buck their party by standing up for principle.

It is also a tragedy that McCain died at a time when his antagonism toward President Trump and his opposition to a seven-year effort to repeal ObamaCare had caused him to lose the admiration of millions.

Arguably, Donald Trump initiated the bad blood. As a candidate during the GOP presidential primaries, Trump said that McCain was not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people that werent captured.

It was an appalling comment. Many thought the inexcusable remark would end Trumps run for the White House, but it instead became one of many outrages overlooked by voters fed up with the status quo and looking for a brawler to fight for their interests.

Still, it turned out to be a costly comment for Trump, the GOP and the country.

In the early hours of July 28, 2017, McCain delivered his famous thumbs-down on the Republican effort to repeal most elements of ObamaCare, causing the measure to fail on a 51-49 vote.

At the time, McCain tweeted: Skinny repeal fell short because it fell short of our promise to repeal & replace Obamacare w/ meaningful reform.

The bill McCain toppled was indeed a terrible piece of legislation. Many in the Senate voted for it only after House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., promised it would never become law, but rather would be reworked through a House-Senate conference committee into a better bill.

Nonetheless, McCains last-minute vote was a stunning blow to his party, his voters and, certainly, to his president. It was a shock to his close friend, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who had patiently spearheaded the repeal effort.

McCain also voted several months later against the Cassidy-Graham bill, which was a much better approach to replacing ObamaCare, targeting the bloated federal government and sending health-care dollars back to the states. The proposed law was crafted in part by his best friend in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

Not only did McCain torpedo his colleagues efforts to follow through on a campaign promise, he voted twice to preserve ObamaCare, which was especially harmful to his own state. As he himself wrote, in my home state of Arizona  premiums are skyrocketing and health care providers are fleeing the marketplace.

In that statement, McCain called for hearings to consider legislative alternatives, and in particular urged his colleagues to heed the recommendations of (the) nations governors. But by being responsible for the defeat of two GOP alternatives to ObamaCare, McCain did just the opposite.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a fellow Republican, supported the Graham-Cassidy bill  in part because in 2016 his state suffered what The New York Times reported was the biggest average (health insurance) rate increase in the country. The news was even worse in Phoenix, the nations sixth-largest city, where the price of a midlevel plan  increase(d) by 145 percent on average.

Because ObamaCare was falling apart in Arizona, with all but two providers pulling out, McCain campaigned for re-election to the Senate promising to get rid of it.

Though McCain seemingly acted out of spite, so eager was he to hit back at President Trump, at other times he balked at GOP priorities because they were wrong, as in his opposition to ethanol subsidies and the use of torture. On several occasions he drove the Republican leadership to despair; many voters, though, prized his independence.

Over the past two years, McCain became a thorn in Trumps side, most recently when he called out the presidents performance at the Helsinki press conference with Vladimir Putin disgraceful. The president has returned the favor, often singling out McCains vote against repealing ObamaCare at rallies. Recently, when the president signed the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act  so named by colleagues to honor the terminally ill senator  Trump refused to mention McCains name. That was petty, and like all such pettiness, made President Trump seem small.

With McCains passing, the president has a chance to do something grand and magnanimous. It would be another Trump shocker, but could win him many friends among McCains enduring supporters. He should give his former rival for the nations highest military accolade, the Medal of Honor.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

The Earth is about to blow up and theres only room on the spaceship for eight passengers. So who gets left behind?

Seventh graders at Roberts Middle School in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio were assigned the task last week of deciding who got to live and who was doomed to be blown to smithereens.

The Whom To Leave Behind lesson has caused quite a lot of outrage among moms and dads who believe the assignment sends the wrong message to their children.

For the assignment students were asked to choose between a list of 12 hypothetical people. Four would be left behind because tomorrow the planet Earth is doomed.

This is what identity politics looks like  when you determine a persons value based on their sexuality or their skin color or the bank account.

There was an accountant with a substance abuse problem, a militant African-American medical student, a 33-year-old Native American manager who does not speak English, the accountants pregnant wife, a famous novelist with a physical disability, a 21-year-old female Muslim international student, a female movie star who was recently the victim of a sexual assault, a homosexual male professional athlete, an Asian orphaned 12-year-old boy, a 60-year-old Jewish university administrator, and a Hispanic clergyman who is against homosexuality.

I wonder how many kids gave the homophobic reverend a seat on the politically correct spaceship?

But the list also included an ugly stereotype  describing the final choice as a racist, armed police officer who has been accused of using excessive force.

Who wrote this garbage?

Some of the language that was used within the assignment I felt that some of the kids might not even understand what it even means, City Councilman Adam Miller told Fox 8 News.

Mr. Miller said parents should have been consulted before such a lesson was presented to students.

He said some of the language used could lend to a lot of confusion and in my opinion just kind of implant certain stereotypes and judgments within these young kids minds that they shouldnt be having at this young age, the city councilman said.

The school district tells local reporters they are investigating the incident and the teacher is reportedly remorseful.

This is what identity politics looks like  when you determine a persons value based on their sexuality or their skin color or the bank account.

We used to sing a song in Sunday school  Jesus Loves the Little Children of the World. As they lyrics tell us, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.

Of course, the idea that every human life matters is a bit controversial and politically incorrect.

But if I was forced to choose whom to leave behind  I would go with the propaganda-spewing, left-wing, school teacher.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

President Trump won a major victory on trade on Monday, supplanting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and replacing it with something far more beneficial. The new deal will help American workers and manufacturers. Its also a win for Mexico.

One of the most fundamental parts of Trumps campaign for president was his promise to change Americas deeply flawed trade arrangements. These deals left us with massive $500 billion trade deficitsa huge drag on the economyand devastated forgotten communities across America that are dependent on manufacturing jobs.

Second only to the booming economy, Mondays announcement of a deal with Mexico is the most visible manifestation of Trumps fulfilment of his campaign promises. Last year, the USA had a large $71 billion trade in goods deficit with Mexico, owing in part to much lower worker pay. This new deal will limit Mexicos ability to take U.S. manufacturing jobs by underpaying workers.

Another key part of the new trade deal increases the percentage of a car that must be made in North America to qualify for lower-tariff import into the USA. This will be a major boon to American automotive workers and that industrys domestic supply chain.

Trump understood the simple math that countries with which we have trade deficits would have to come to the negotiating table.

More broadly, the deal vindicates Trumps approach to trade, which has been lambasted by voices ranging from Wall Street to the national security establishment to the Chamber of Commerce, as well as mavens from both political parties.

They said nothing could come from Trumps unilateral imposition of tariffs in order to get foreign governments to negotiate seriously. They said a trade war would be self-defeating.

On Monday, they have been proved wrong by an unmitigated victory for the USA.

Trump understood the simple math that countries with which we have trade deficits would have to come to the negotiating table. By definition, we buy more from them than they buy from us, which gives us the power any major consumer has over a seller. These countries also cannot afford to lose access to our $20 trillion economythe worlds largest. Trump realized the power this gives us and decided to use it to level the playing field for American workersunlike other recent presidents.

This victory will lead to others. The leftwing government of Canada, the other member of NAFTA, had refused to negotiate seriously, perhaps believing their friends in the progressive commentariat predicting Trumps demise.

Canadas foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, spent most of her time on visits to the U.S. lobbying governors and congressmen rather than talking seriously to our trade negotiators. Her boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, even though it was a good idea to antagonize Trump at his failed G7 summit in June.

Canada must now return, hat in hand, for a deal. If not, Trump will advance the deal with Mexico and leave Canada behind. Today he again vowed to raise car tariffs on Canada if it refuses to revise unfair levies of nearly 300 percent on some American goods, among other unfair practices.

The European Union and China will also be greatly concerned about the Mexico dealand more likely to negotiate seriously.

Europe last year had a $151 billion surplus with the USA. When combined with the fact that we pay for most of their defense through NATO, Europe has benefited greatly from past U.S. administrations willingness to let Europe leach off of American workers and taxpayers.

The deal with Mexico and Canadas likely about-face puts pressure on Europe to level the playing field for trade or face higher tariffs. This is especially true of Germany, one of the worlds most export-dependent major economies.

The same factors apply to China, which is dependent on selling goods to the USA and stealing our companies intellectual property.

Trump has utterly flipped the script with China, which our elite effectively told us would supplant us economically and strategically, and with which we had to accept unfair trade factors. Now, China is reeling and American is ascendant. Those who bet on China over the USA chose poorly.

Looking ahead to Trumps reelection fight in 2020, the win on Mexico and other likely victories will position him extremely well. Trump flipped states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio from Democrat to Republican in 2016 by promising economic prosperity in part by improving trade deals. Delivering on that promise with plenty of time to convey facts to voters means his prospects for reelection look excellent.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

Some people become experts in the criminal justice system by going to law school, getting a job as a police officer, or studying criminology in college. I became an expert involuntarily in 1995 when I went from being a highly paid starting cornerback for the Los Angeles Rams to become a federal prison inmate. And I remain a prisoner today.

I was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison on drug trafficking charges and later an additional 21 years for solicitation of murder. Entering prison as a young man, I wont be eligible for release until Im 61, after spending over half my life behind bars.

In the nearly 23 years Ive spent as a prisoner Ive learned a lot about prison reform from the inside. I know firsthand that true reform must address both public policy and personal identity.

And Ive learned that far too many people in prison today dont belong there, or belong there for fewer years. You might think that only convicts or far-left Democrats hold this view, but in fact a lot of Republicans do. And right now theyre trying to get the U.S. Senate to give final passage to prison reform legislation that has already passed the House. Id like to add my voice of support to this important legislation.

In the nearly 23 years Ive spent as a prisoner Ive learned a lot about prison reform from the inside. I know firsthand that true reform must address both public policy and personal identity.

The bill is called the First Step Act, which includes provisions from the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, sponsored by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa  hardly anyones idea of a leftist radical.

As Grassley wrote in a Fox News op-ed in April, his bill focuses law enforcement resources on violent career criminals and drug kingpins instead of non-violent, lower level offenders.

By eliminating mandatory minimum penalties for low-level nonviolent criminals the legislation gives judges more discretion in sentencing.

As Grassley wrote in his op-ed: Judges would still be free to impose stiff criminal penalties, but they could also take into account individual circumstances to ensure that the punishment fits the crime. This approach would prevent prisons from being overcrowded with lower-level, nonviolent criminals serving unnecessarily long sentences.

Recently, family members of my fellow inmates met with over half of the members of the U.S. Senate to urge senators to support the bipartisan First Step Act. The legislation has been called the best opportunity in decades to improve the outdated prison policies that contribute to a high level of recidivism and an epidemic of prolonged family separation.

As a man who has been separated from my daughter for almost 23 years, I am heartened by these efforts. Coupled with the continuing initiatives led by White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner  who contributes his own peerless understanding and maintains an open door to inner city faith leaders  there has arisen much hope that comprehensive bipartisan-backed reform is on the horizon.

Through decades of service as a prison educator, I have witnessed firsthand the harmful effects of current prison policy: limited educational and vocational opportunities; extensive family separation and estrangement; and a mass incarceration epidemic that has resulted from harsh sentencing guidelines and the detrimental application of the RICO statute that was created to go after organized crime figures.

In my experience, at least 90 percent of the men incarcerated in federal prisons receive limited or no visitors, and have infrequent or non-existent contact with family and friends on the outside.

Together with all other challenges, the effects of this isolation have created an additional epidemic that can be addressed and conquered while we wait for legislative reform: the epidemic of personal identity. In order for any prison reform to take hold in a meaningful way, inmates need to address the biggest lie that has infiltrated these walls: the lie of worthlessness.

A few weeks ago, I was privileged to receive visit from two members of the clergy. The Rev. Johnnie Moore  spiritual adviser to the White House  and Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center came to see me at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles.

For almost two precious hours, these men listened to me share about my hopes and fears, my failures and regrets, and my setbacks and growth. We then spoke of the importance of faith and the messages of truth that so greatly impact men in the solitude of their lives.

Rev. Moore and Rabbi Cooper provided me one of the greatest gifts that day  one of the most effective tools for endurance and hope. They confirmed to me that I have worth and that there is a God who sees me, cares and doesnt hold me in a prison of eternal condemnation.

If that were not enough, several days later former Washington Redskins cornerback the Rev. Darrell Green spent time on the phone with me, offering me hope through the word of God and reminding me that I am a man of great value whose past does not define me and whose future is in the powerful hand of God.

Words fail to express the impact of these men on my life, and the lives of those around me, as I repeat this message to fellow inmates who are crushed by a sense of hopelessness and despair.

One of these inmates was just released after serving his 10-year drug sentence and has been employed by the Miami Dolphins, thanks to the broader business response to the White House initiative to loosen hiring practices and benefit qualified people with criminal records. The encouragement he received from clergy, coupled with the broad, bipartisan response in society, has paved the solid ground towards the fruitful, crime-free life he is determined to live.

While the nations urgent need for prison reform ebbs and flows in public discourse, I appeal to all clergy members and people of faith. You offer reform that does not need to wait for legislative approval  a transformation of identity.

Your acts of kindness through visitations, letters, radio messages, chaplaincy volunteerism and dedicated prayer offer an individualized reform that is greatly needed as a compliment to legislative reform.

Blaise Pascal  a 17th century French scientist, mathematician and theologian  once wrote: All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

One can say that most of an incarcerated mans problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in his cell alone and believe he has worth. Lets keep the faith in prison reform, by keeping people of faith involved in prison reform.Voters in North Carolina will be asked this November whether or not the right to hunt, fish and harvest wildlife should be enshrined in their states constitution.

The ballot measure, which easily passed through the Republican-controlled state Senate in June in a 44-4 vote, has become an unexpectedly divisive issue in North Carolina. Supporters argue the amendment would protect certain hunting practices, but opponents claim it's little more than a ploy to draw Republican voters to the polls.

If it passes in November, the measure would not change state hunting regulations or modify any existing provisions in state law. But it would  particularly the language protecting the right to use traditional methods, to hunt, fish and harvest wildlife  help ward off any legal challenges to certain hunting methods and the hunting of certain animals.

The bills sponsors say that with North Carolinas changing demographics and a population shift to cities like Charlotte and Raleigh, they worry anti-gun and animal rights activists could impinge on the rights of hunters and fishers.

This change creates a situation that in the future could bring conflict between those who enjoy hunting and fishing and those who dont, North Carolina state Sen. Norman Sanderson, who co-sponsored the bill to have the measure put on the ballot, told Fox News. We dont want the rights of hunters and fishers to be infringed upon.

In a message to the state Senate Agriculture/Environment/Natural Resources Committee, John Culclasure, the coordinator of the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation, said the amendment would act to preemptively halt restrictions like those for bear hunting in Maine and dove hunting in Michigan.

Constitutionally safeguarding the right to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife is critical to the future of North Carolinas outdoor heritage, Culclasure said.

Many Democratic lawmakers in Raleigh, however, argue that there is currently no push in North Carolina to restrict any type of hunting and fishing and that the ballot measure is simply about Republicans playing politics ahead of the hard-fought midterm elections.

There are no threats to the right to hunt and fish in North Carolina, state Sen. Floyd McKissick told Fox News. This is just a move by Republican lawmakers to motivate their base to go the polls on Election Day because theyre worried they are at risk of losing power.

McKissick pointed to three other measures slated to be on the upcoming ballot in the Tar Heel State  a voter ID requirement, an amendment on judicial seats and a measure to make the legislature responsible for appointments to state commissions  as similar attempts by Republican lawmakers to increase turnout among conservative voters.

While Sanderson admitted that anything I can do to increase voter turnout is a good thing, he brushed off the idea that this, and other ballot measures in the state, are just a way to increase Republican turnout.

Ive enjoyed hunting and fishing since I was six years old and I dont want to have that threatened, he said. Having this in the states constitution would mean it would need to be taken into consideration every time someone wants to take a rifle out of the hand of a hunter.CNN is standing by its scoop that Michael Cohen had information that President Trump knew in advance about the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian officials despite the source for a related story walking back the claims.

A CNN report from July 27 headlined, Cohen claims Trump knew in advance of 2016 Trump Tower meeting, was co-bylined by Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein and Marshall Cohen. It cited sources with knowledge and noted that the ex-Trump lawyer is willing tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that Trump knew of the meeting in advance, contradicting repeated denials by Trump and his surrogates. CNNs report resulted in countless cable news segments and sent other news organizations scurrying to match.

Among them was The Washington Post, which has since outed Cohens high-powered attorney Lanny Davis as its source -- while publishing an interview in which Davis backpedals.

Davis told The Washington Post Sunday that he should have been more clear that he could not independently confirm what happened. Davis even told the Post he regrets his error.

The newspaper's original version was not as damaging as CNNs and didnt mention Donald Trump Jr. allegedly telling his father that the meeting was with Russians, which CNN reported. The latest Davis interview, though, raised questions about a slew of related stories.

Daviss latest comments cast doubt on what Cohen may know, including about a June 2016 meeting in New Yorks Trump Tower attended by Trumps eldest son and a Russian lawyer, the Post wrote on Sunday night. Davis told The Washington Post that he cannot confirm media reports that Cohen is prepared to tell special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that Trump had advance knowledge of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting.

While the Washington Post outed Davis as its source and essentially issued a quasi-correction, CNN is standing by its reporting.

Pro-Trump web sites are claiming that the CNN story was a lie, and that it's been debunked. They might want it to be debunked, but it's not. The critics don't know who CNN's sources were, CNNs media newsletter stated in a blurb that referred to the original story as a scoop.

Trump has denied knowledge all along and fired back following CNNs report last month.

I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr. Sounds to me like someone is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam (Taxi cabs maybe?). He even retained Bill and Crooked Hillarys lawyer. Gee, I wonder if they helped him make the choice! Trump tweeted on July 27.

"We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it," a CNN spokesperson told the Post.

Davis began walking back the allegations last week, when during an interview with CNNs Anderson Cooper, he was asked whether there was evidence that Trump knew about the meeting before it happened.

No, theres not, Davis said.

Axios reported last week that Cohen even told Congress he doesnt know if Trump knew about the meeting in advance. Trump, again, maintained that he knew nothing of the meeting beforehand, and blasted the reports as fake news.

On Sunday, Trump Jr. blasted CNN as literal fake news, saying it was Comical to watch CNN covering for its reporters who obviously got [the] story wrong.

CNN has been slammed by critics since Davis backpedaled. Daily Caller media editor Amber Athey said the new information puts CNNs reporting on shaky ground and The Daily Wire wrote that there is mounting evidence debunking CNN's report.

Fox News Brooke Singman contributed to this report.As the campaign speeches and bus tours draw to an end, all five of the Democratic candidates vying for Florida GOP Gov. Rick Scotts seat are scrambling for every last vote ahead of Tuesday's primary.

The crowded race has, to an extent, been overshadowed by the Republican primary where Rep. Ron DeSantis is wielding a Trump endorsement against Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam.

But Fox News rates the race for the open seat a "toss up" in November, as Democrats eye a potential pickup.

This is a premier race, one of the top three races in the whole country, said Susan MacManus, a veteran political analyst and former political science professor at The University of South Florida. I think the Democratic primary election will be very close  the whole country is going to be tuned in.

Heading into the last weekend of early voting, more than 1.6 million ballots had been cast, already surpassing 2014 totals, when 1.2 million people cast primary ballots before Election Day.

MacManus says this is one the most expensive and exciting gubernatorial primaries the Sunshine State has ever seen.

On the Democratic side, former U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham has held a steady lead over former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine, Palm Beach billionaire Jeff Greene, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum and Orlando businessman Chris King.

The diversity of the Democratic candidates is incredibleyou have race and age and gender and religion and geographyall kinds of mixes among the candidates which makes it fascinating to follow, MacManus said.

Despite being significantly outspent by both Greene and Levine, Graham is leading by over 7 points on average, according to Real Clear Politics.

But MacManus said Grahams lead doesnt necessarily guarantee a win on Tuesday.

There are five well-known, credible candidates  each of them has to try to carve out the winning percent, which could be very low, she said. With that many candidates close together, you might secure the nomination with thirty-some percent of voters.

Fellow frontrunner Levines outspokenness against President Trump and ability to self-fund his campaign have made him a close competitor for Graham, whose family has deep political roots in the state. She is the daughter of Bob Graham, a two-term governor, three-term U.S. senator and a 2004 candidate for president.

I will continue in that same vein of public service as my father to work hard for the people of Florida, Graham said at a Saturday campaign event in Orlando, Fla.

She is positioning herself as a check on the Republican-controlled legislature of a swing state that hasnt seen a Democrat win the governors mansion since 1994 and has yet to elect a female governor.

I think this is a year when being a woman candidate is an advantage  people are looking for change, Democratic strategist and former Florida gubernatorial nominee Jim Davis said.

Graham wants to de-emphasize standardized testing in public schools and increase environmental standards, while making opposition to the president a campaign centerpiece. Levine has waged an issues-oriented campaign based on his reputation as a businessman and experience in municipal government, pledging to ban assault rifles, raise the minimum wage, boost public education spending and aggressively deal with climate change.

With Floridas congressional redistricting approaching in 2020 -- over which the elected governor will have veto power -- the effects of the 2018 election could be felt in Washington for the next decade or more.

The next governor of Florida will play a big role in the 2020 presidential election, MacManus said.

MacManus said because of the large number of voters registered as no party affiliation, both parties' nominees will have to shift gears between Tuesday and the general election in November.

Whoever wins the primary election has suddenly got to change gears and start to think about general election outreach, she said. Since Florida has this history of people winning by just one percent, you cant win with your own party alone ... the attention has to be how can I reach the 28 percent of Floridians who arent registered as a Democrat or a Republican?"

The Democratic nominee will face off in November against either Putnam or DeSantis.Arizonas Republican governor is navigating a political minefield as he weighs whom to appoint to the late Sen. John McCain's seat.

Required by state law to name a replacement to fill the seat until the 2020 election, Gov. Doug Ducey will have to balance the demands of state conservatives  some of whom have soured toward McCains criticisms of President Trump and his immigration stance  with the desire to respect the legendary GOP senator's legacy and family by appointing a successor in his image.

And he has to do this while the state is in the middle of a heated midterm race to fill the seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Jeff Flake. Primaries for both parties are being held Tuesday.

Duceys job is both simple and complex at the same time, Jason Rose, a political consultant and founder of Rose + Moser + Allyn Public Relations in Scottsdale, told Fox News. It needs to be someone who can step into McCains very big shoes, and that wont be easy.

While talk of McCains replacement has been churning since he was diagnosed with brain cancer more than a year ago, Ducey has refused to discuss possible successors out of respect for McCain and his family. Duceys office also noted on Sunday that he will make no announcement of a replacement until after McCains burial at his alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy, later this week.

Out of respect for the life and legacy of Senator John McCain and his family, Governor Ducey will not be making any announcements about an appointment until after the Senator is laid to rest, Daniel Ruiz II, a senior adviser to Ducey, told PBS. Now is a time for remembering and honoring a consequential life well lived.

Duceys silence on the matter, however, has not stopped analysts from weighing in on who could make the shortlist to replace McCain in the Senate, with everyone from former U.S. Senate Republican whip Jon Kyl to former Rep. Matt Salmon to former ambassador to Finland Barbara Barrett to McCains widow, Cindy, being floated.

Other names being mentioned: Maj. Gen. Michael McGuire, who heads the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs and is the adjutant general of the state's Army and Air National Guards; Karrin Taylor Robson, whom Ducey appointed to the state Board of Regents in 2017; and Kirk Adams, the former state House speaker who now serves as Ducey's chief of staff.

Some analysts say the choice by Ducey boils down to whether he wants to appoint someone for the long-term or a caretaker who would step aside during the next general election in 2020, in case Ducey himself decides to run for the seat.

"Do I appoint a caretaker or do I appoint someone who will stand for election?" asked Doug Cole, a former McCain staffer and veteran Arizona strategist. "Does he choose from the family?"

Some observers predict the governor will be solicitous to the McCain family's wishes. That's led to widespread speculation that Cindy McCain could be selected, likely under the assumption that she would not run for the seat in 2020. But Cindy McCain's politics are largely unknown.

Despite his role shepherding the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh into the Supreme Court and Republican reticence to upend that process, another caretaker option would be Kyl, now a Washington lobbyist viewed as a safe, uncontroversial choice.

McCain was an exception to the rule is so many ways, Rose said. You cant really fill his shoes so you have to get someone as close to him as possible. And that would be Jon Kyl. You cant go wrong with Kyl.

Arizona operatives speculate that one of two former congressmen from the state, John Shadegg and Matt Salmon, also have a chance to fill the seat. They're both GOP stalwarts who don't have a history of feuding with the base. State Treasurer Eileen Klein could also be a strong candidate in 2020 if Ducey wants to pick someone who'd run for election rather than a caretaker, according to Republican operatives.

If Ducey decides to appoint a moderate senator, that could help him in the long-term, Rose said, adding that the governor faces a weak primary challenge from his right in the state's primary elections Tuesday.

The person who previously was seen as McCain's most likely successor is Arizona Rep. Martha McSally. Like the late senator, she's a former fighter pilot  one of the first women to fly in combat and an air force colonel. But she is running for the Senate seat vacated by Flake, who, like McCain, riled the state's conservative base by bucking Trump on immigration and other issues.

Like Ducey, McSally faces a primary on Tuesday, but her challenge from the right has been stiffer than the governor's. It's also illustrated how fraught the McCain issue is for Arizona Republicans.

One of her rivals, former state senator Kelli Ward, ran against McCain in the 2016 GOP primary. On Saturday, hours before McCain died, Ward speculated on Facebook that the McCain family announced the senator was ending medical treatment on Friday to distract from her final push in the primary.

Earlier this month, McSally even avoided mentioning McCain's name while boasting that she'd been with Trump at the signing of the defense bill named in McCain's honor. McCain supporters and the senator's daughter Meghan lacerated McSally for following the president's lead in not mentioning McCain.

Whomever gets the nod from Ducey will be in office until the next general election in November 2020. The interim senator would not be obligated to run in that election. The candidate who is then elected to the Senate seat in November 2020 would complete McCain's term, which expires in January 2023.

If Ducey chooses one of the states current congressional members to fill the seat, then a special election would need to be held to fill that empty spot. According to the Arizona State Legislature, that election would have to be held not less than 120 nor more than 133 days after the vacancy occurs.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Sen. John McCains longtime campaign manager got emotional on Monday while reading the late lawmakers farewell message to the American people.

Speaking at a press conference in Arizona, Rick Davis held back his emotions and frequently needed to pause, while reading the late Arizona Republicans final statement in which McCain stayed true to his reputation for straight talk and encouraged Americans not to despair of our present difficulties.

I have often observed that I am the luckiest person on earth. I feel that way even now as I prepare for the end of my life, Davis read. To be connected to Americas causes  liberty, equal justice, respect for the dignity of all people  brings happiness more sublime than lifes fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth are not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.

Davis served as McCains campaign manager during his 2008 presidential bid, when McCain won the Republican nomination but ultimately lost to Barack Obama, and also was the senators campaign manager for his 2000 Republican Presidential Primary campaign.

McCains farewell message mixed his deep gratitude and love of country, with veiled shots at President Trump and words of wisdom to his fellow Americans.

The late senator said in his letter that the United States is weakened when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries, and when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down.

Trump has made building a wall on the southern border one of his signature issues.

McCain and Trump never had an easy relationship.

While the senator stuck by the partys 2016 presidential nominee, Trump, at times seemingly through gritted teeth  until the release a month before the election of a lewd audio in which Trump said he could kiss and grab women.

Declaring that the breaking point, McCain withdrew his support, and said he would write in some good conservative Republican whos qualified to be president.

By the time McCain cast his vote against the GOP health bill, six months into Trumps presidency, the two men were openly at odds. Trump railed against McCain publicly over the vote, and McCain remarked that he no longer listened to what Trump had to say because theres no point in it.

In his final months, McCain did not go quietly, frequently jabbing at Trump and his policies from the remove of his Hidden Valley family retreat in Arizona. He opposed the presidents nominee for CIA director, Gina Haspel, because of her past role in overseeing torture, scolded Trump for alienating U.S. allies at an international summit, labeled the administrations zero-tolerance immigration policy an affront to the decency of the American people and denounced the Trump-Vladimir Putin summit in Helsinki as a tragic mistake, in which Trump put on one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.

While McCain in his farewell statement made overtures to Americans to cast aside their partisan divides  noting we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement  he closed by urging the public not to not despair about the countrys current status, but to believe in the country and the American experiment.

Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here, McCain wrote. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.In a rare show of bipartisanship, John McCains colleagues paid tribute to the late lawmaker and his legacy Monday on the Senate floor as leaders from both parties fondly recalled the Arizona Republicans fighting spirit and unwavering dedication to the United States.

In his speech before the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., recalled how a scrappy pilot who barely graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy became a decorated war hero and one of Washingtons most respected leaders.

America will miss her dedicated son, her stalwart champion, her elder statesman, McConnell said as McCains desk on the Senate floor sat draped in black cloth and adorned with vase of white flowers.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who called himself "the other senator from Arizona," said during his time on the floor that it would serve the country well if people acted more like McCain.

"We owe it to his memory to be more like him," Flake said. "We would do well to honor him by emulating his example."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., joked that he and McCain did not get along when Schumer first entered the Senate, but that the two formed a lasting friendship working to pass immigration reform.

Schumer also cited McCains bravery and dedication to the armed forces, before calling on lawmakers to rename the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington after the late lawmaker. The Russell Building currently houses the Senate Armed Services Committee offices.

Johns dedication to the country and to the men and women who served it was unwavering, Schumer said. His life is a story of American heroism personified.

Senate Rules Committee Chairman Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said he was open to a proposal to rename the building, saying lawmakers should discuss it. Such a proposal would go through his panel for consideration.

Public viewings will be held at the Arizona Capitol on Wednesday and the U.S. Capitol on Friday, where he will lay in state before being buried at the Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Md., on Sunday.

John McCain has fought his last battle and cast his last vote, McConnell said. But the nation that he loved is not done with him yet.

Rick Davis, McCain's former presidential campaign manager, said fellow Arizona lawmakers including Sen. Jeff Flake, former Sen. John Kyl and Gov. Doug Ducey will be among those speaking at services in Phoenix.

Former Vice President Joe Biden will pay tribute at a Thursday service at North Phoenix Baptist Church. The service is set to include choir performances and a bagpiper as well.

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama will speak at a Saturday memorial service at Washington National Cathedral. The program also includes a tribute from McCain's daughter Meghan, plus a performance of "Danny Boy" by opera star Renee Fleming.

President Trump on Monday issued a statement acknowledging that he and McCain had vast differences but adding that he respected the senator's "service to our country" and signed a proclamation to fly the U.S. flag at half-staff until his burial.

The flag atop the White House flew at half-staff over the weekend but was raised Monday and then lowered again amid criticism.

Trump and McCain have feuded for years. Trump tweeted about McCain after his death Saturday but has passed up several chances to speak publicly on the Arizona senator.

Trump added in his statement that he asked Vice President Mike Pence to speak at a ceremony honoring McCain at the Capitol on Friday and agreed to the McCain family's request for military transportation of McCain's remains from Arizona to Washington.

Fox News' Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.A Democratic Socialist candidate for New York Senate faces questions after reports emerged that she falsified her biography, including claims about being an immigrant and Jewish, while her previous work shows she was a Christian conservative advocate.

Julia Salazar, a progressive Democrat affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, has been touted as the next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young and hip socialist who would move the party further to the left. She also received an endorsement from the New York governor candidate Cynthia Nixon.

But Salazar came under fire last week after an expose in Tablet magazine, which examined Salazars claims about her biography.

The candidate for state office previously told multiple outlets that shes an immigrant from Colombia and noted that her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was young. Her father, she said, was Jewish but the family had little contact with the American Jewish community after they arrived to the country.

I immigrated to this country with my family when I was very little. In Colombia, my mom raised me as a single mother, she also said during one of her events on the campaign trail.

As a proud immigrant myself, I know how important it is to protect the rights of immigrants and ensure that everyone can fully participate in the life of New York State, Salazars campaign website read just last month, before it was recently changed to as a proud daughter of an immigrant father myself.

According to Tablet, the candidate is not an immigrant. She was born in Miami and her mother had U.S. citizenship. Her brother, Alex Salazar, confirmed to the magazine that both he and his sister were born in the U.S.

Salazar, despite being caught on camera saying shes an immigrant, pushed back against the expose, saying she made it crystal clear that I had been born in Miami. She blamed a campaign staffer for the error on her website.

Her claims about being Jewish also came under scrutiny. She claimed Jewish blood through her father, saying his Jewish ancestors were expelled to Latin America from medieval Spain. But her fathers 2009 funeral service notes that the service was held in a Catholic Church in Florida, Tablet reported.

There was nobody in our immediate family who was Jewish  my father was not Jewish, we were not raised Jewish, the brother said. He added that one of their fathers brothers was a Jesuit priest.

'There was nobody in our immediate family who was Jewish  my father was not Jewish, we were not raised Jewish.'  Alex Salazar

The magazine also obtained messages from her university years that show Salazar claiming her mothers family was from Israel and describing herself as a descendant of Christian Israelis. The New York Senate candidate also once wrote that her grandfather moved from Mandatory Palestine to Colombia 10 years before the state of Israel was founded.

The Tablet reports that some of her acquaintances said that Salazar had undergone conversion to conservative Judaism in just two months, though such a process could take much longer.

Salazar called the questioning of her religion a long history of bigoted policing of the identity of Jewish people of color, particularly people with patrilineal Jewish heritage or Jews who converted. Im sad to see that brought into my campaign.

The candidates progressive credentials were also called into question after revelations that she was actually a conservative Christian activist on campus who worked on pro-Israel and pro-life initiatives.

In 2012, Salazar appeared on Glenn Becks show, claiming there are probably several professors at the Columbia University who are using using the classroom as their podium to spread lies about the State of Israel, to delegitimize the State of Israel, and to spread propaganda to Columbia students.

The candidate has since come out against the Jewish state and supported organizations that campaign for boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions against Israel.

In 2012 and 2013, she was the president of Columbia Right to Life, the campus' top anti-abortion group. Her now-deleted social media posts often alluded to her Christian faith.

Salazar didnt address her change in political views.Adult film star Stormy Daniels came to the defense of First Lady Melania Trump over the weekend, saying people should stop speaking for her and making speculations about her feelings.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, told the British tabloid The Mirror: Everything we say about her is a projection. Some people misplace sorrow and pity on another person, while noting that maybe the first lady is happy.

The media has drummed up rumors and conjecture regarding the first ladys feelings toward her marriage with President Donald Trump since she was thrusted into the national spotlight during the 2016 presidential election.

The entire world would be interested to know what she feels, Daniels told the outlet. But if we never know, that is her right and I support it.

Daniels is suing the president and his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen over a nondisclosure agreement she signed to keep mum about an alleged affair she claims to have had with Trump in 2006.

Trump has denied the accusation.

Omarosa Manigault-Newman claimed in her tell-all book Unhinged: An Insiders Account of the Trump White House, that Melania Trump wants a divorce when he is out of office, among other accusations against the first lady.

The first ladys spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, called the former White House aides claims disappointing and said that the duo rarely, if ever, interacted" during her time at the White House.

Its disappointing to her that she is lashing out and retaliating in such a self-serving way, especially after all the opportunities given to her by the President, Grisham said, according to The Hill.President Trump on Monday said he plans to terminate the existing North American Free Trade Agreement, as he announced a new tentative agreement between the United States and Mexico that he described as "one of the largest trade deals ever made."

"I'll be terminating the existing deal and going into this deal," the president said in the Oval Office, calling it a "big day for trade."

But the president said Monday well see if Canada can still be part of the trade pact, leaving open the possibility of separate agreements.

"We are starting negotiations with Canada pretty much immediately," Trump said.

Trump, sitting at the Resolute Desk, put Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on his speaker phone as the press watched in the Oval Office. The Mexican president, speaking through a translator, congratulated the negotiators on both sides and expressed hope the United States and Canada would come to an agreement.

Later, the White House said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulated Trump. "The leaders discussed US - Canada trade and agreed to continue productive conversations," White House officials said.

Earlier in the day, Trump said he wanted to get rid of the name NAFTA because it has bad connotations. He said he planned to call the deal the "United States-Mexico Trade Agreement" instead.

The United States Trade Representative called the U.S.-Mexico deal a preliminary agreement in principle, subject to finalization and implementation.

They used to call it NAFTA, we are going to call it the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement, and we will get rid of the name NAFTA, Trump said. It has a bad connotation because the United States was hurt very badly by NAFTA.

Trump on Monday called it "one of the largest trade deals ever made." The U.S. and Mexico have been working to resolve key differences on issues ranging from automobiles to energy.

According to a fact sheet from the United States Trade Representative, the agreement includes new rules of origin to incentivize manufacturers to source goods and materials in North America  including requiring 75 percent of auto content be made in the United States and Mexico.

Officials in Canada, though, on Monday still expressed optimism over a deal.

Canada is encouraged by the continued optimism shown by our negotiating partners, a spokesman for Canada's minister of foreign affair, Chrystia Freeland, said Monday. Progress between Mexico and the United States is a necessary requirement for any renewed NAFTA agreement.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump often railed against the trade pact as the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere.

Trump and Pena Nieto have been working for the past five weeks to iron out their bilateral differences so Canada can rejoin the talks to update NAFTA. The U.S. and Mexico wanted to finalize an agreement this month so that it can be signed ahead of Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obradors inauguration in December.

One of the biggest issues on the negotiating table deals with car manufacturing jobs, as the Trump administration pushes for a deal that would boost factory employment in the U.S.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Mexican Secretary of Economy Idelfonso Guajardo were seen walked together Monday into the White House without talking to reporters. The delegation also included Jesus Seade, a World Trade Organization veteran tapped by Lopez Obrador as his future chief trade negotiator.

The U.S. on Thursday agreed to keep the 2.5 percent tariff currently applied under World Trade Organization rules if the cars are made at factories that already exist, which leaves open the possibility that automobiles that are built at new plants could face tariffs of 20 percent to 25 percent.

Trump has also signaled that he is open to negotiating trade deals with Mexico and Canada separately, while both countries have said they want to keep the three-nation trade deal that dates back to 1994.

Earlier in August, Trump threatened Canada with auto tariffs if the U.S. and Canada can't forge a deal.

"Canada must wait," Trump tweeted. "Their Tariffs and Trade Barriers are far too high. Will tax cars if we can't make a deal!"

Canada responded with a statement Friday night, saying: "Our focus is unchanged. We'll keep standing up for Canadian interests as we work toward a modernized trilateral NAFTA agreement."

Adam Austen, a spokesman for Canada's foreign minister, added: "We're glad Mexico and the U.S. continue to work out their bilateral issues. It's the only way we'll get to a deal."

Fox News John Roberts, Susan Li, Mike Arroyo and The Associated Press contributed to this report.President Trump announced Monday he ordered the American flag to fly at half-staff through this coming Sunday to honor the late Sen. John McCain.

"Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCains service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment," said Trump, who added that Vice President Mike Pence would make remarks at Friday's ceremony honoring McCain at the U.S. Capitol.

McCain will lie in state at the Capitol on Friday, officials have said. A memorial service will be held at the National Cathedral in Washington the following day before McCain is laid to rest at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Md., on Sunday.

Trump said White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser John Bolton would represent the administration at the services.

The president made his first public comment on McCain's death Monday night at a dinner with evangelical leaders at the White House.

"Our hearts and prayers are going to the family of Sen. John McCain," Trump said. "We appreciate everything McCain has done for our country."

Trump's initial statement was made public moments after the White House flag was returned to half-staff Monday afternoon following complaints from two of America's most prominent veterans' groups.

The White House flags had been lowered Sunday, the day after the Arizona Republican succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 81. However, they were back to full height on Monday, breaking with tradition.

In a statement directed to Trump, American Legion National Commander Denise Rohan wrote: "On the behalf of The American Legion's two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCain's death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nation's flag be half-staffed through his interment."

VFW spokesman Joe Davis said in a statement the organization had "asked the White House if the honor of lowering the flag to half-staff could be extended through Senator McCain's interment."

Aides to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. R-Ky., and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., previously requested the Defense Department keep flags at government buildings lowered until the sunset after McCain is buried. McCain served in the chamber for six terms, most recently as chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

U.S. Flag Code states that flags be lowered "on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress."

McCain was a frequent critic of Trump on everything from his leadership style to his Russia policy. Trump questioned the decorated Navy pilot's Vietnam heroism and chafed at McCain's vote to stop the president's proposed "ObamaCare" repeal.

After Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts died in 2009, President Barack Obama ordered flags at the White House flown at half-staff for five days.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

EDITORS NOTE: A previous version of this report stated that under standard procedure, the U.S. flag remains at half-staff until after a senators burial. U.S. Code states that the flag shall be flown at half-staff on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress, including U.S. senators.German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump share concerns about developments in Syria, especially the humanitarian situation in the region around Idlib, Merkel's spokesman said after the two leaders spoke by telephone.

"Russia is called upon to act in a moderating manner on the Syrian government and prevent a further escalation," Steffen Seibert said in a statement on Monday evening.

Seibert said the two leaders also spoke about Ukraine, the Western Balkans and trade, he said, without elaborating.

The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Moscow, says it aims to recapture the rebel-held enclave of Idlib in northern Syria, a refugee for civilians and rebels displaced from other areas of Syria, as well as jihadist forces.

The region has been hit by a wave of air strikes and shelling this month in a possible prelude to a full-scale government offensive.

Merkel had also raised concerns about the situation in Idlib during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin just over a week ago.

Turkey's foreign minister on Friday said it would be disastrous to seek a military solution in the region. Turkey, which has backed some rebel groups there, is trying to avert an attack by forces loyal to al-Assad.

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President Donald Trump on Monday welcomed the president of Kenya to the White House, where the two leaders talked trade, security -- and Trump's accomplishments.

Trump hosted President Uhuru Kenyatta as Kenya is emerging from a period of election turmoil. He's the second African leader to meet with Trump at the White House, following a visit by Nigeria's president earlier this year.

Trump has been criticized for paying too little attention to the continent and faced demands for an apology earlier this year after his private comments about "shithole countries" in Africa and other regions were leaked to journalists.

U.S. first lady Melania Trump, who helped welcome Kenyatta and his wife to the White House, is planning a solo trip to Africa this fall.

Trump and Kenyatta, during remarks to reporters in the Oval Office and Cabinet room, said they would be discussing a series of topics, including cooperation on terrorism and building trade and investment ties.

Later, Trump trumpeted a preliminary trade deal with Mexico he'd announced earlier in the day as well as recent stock market gains.

"Well, you were here on a very special day," Trump told Kenyatta, adding: "Everything I said is going to happen, it ends up happening, so you picked a good day to come. We're in a very good mood."

Kenyatta said he hoped Trump would share the wealth with his country.

"We'll bring that over to Kenya," Trump joked.

Trump did not respond to repeated questions about Sen. John McCain, who died Saturday at 81 after a 13-month struggle with brain cancer. Trump tweeted condolences to McCain's family but has made no reference to the Arizona senator, with whom he had a bitter feud.

Kenyatta has been trying to bolster his image following a crisis in which Kenya's Supreme Court overturned the August presidential election, citing irregularities, and the opposition boycotted the fresh vote.

Kenya is the third highest recipient of U.S. security aid in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Security Assistance Monitor. Both Kenya and the U.S. have troops in Somalia, and the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group has crossed the border to carry out dozens of attacks inside Kenya, calling it retribution for sending troops. Nearly 100 Kenyan police officers have been killed since May 2017 in bombings and ambushes.

The Kenyan leader is also meeting with U.S. business leaders to promote investment in his country while in Washington. He'll host British Prime Minister Theresa May in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, on Thursday.Once upon a time, Supreme Court nominees stood a good chance of garnering broad bipartisan support.

Those days are gone.

As Brett Kavanaugh, President Trumps nominee for the Supreme Court, prepares for hearings on Capitol Hill, he can expect a far more polarized and partisan confirmation process than even the grueling nomination fights of recent administrations.

Dating back to Gerald Fords presidency, most Supreme Court nominees  even when facing ardent opposition  eventually won some bipartisan support during a final confirmation vote.

Kavanaugh, if confirmed, is facing the possibility of an airtight party-line vote. This, after Justice Neil Gorsuch won confirmation on a relatively narrow 54-45 vote.

To be sure, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell shares responsibility for setting the intensely partisan tone over court nominees, by refusing to consider then-President Barack Obamas nomination of Judge Merrick Garland in 2016.

But the Trump era has witnessed perhaps the most consistently polarized judicial confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees in modern times.

Supreme Court confirmation votes since 1975

Neil Gorsuch -- 54-45

Merrick Garland -- NA

Elena Kagan -- 63-37

Sonia Sotomayor -- 68-31

Samuel Alito -- 58-42

Harriet Miers -- NA

John Roberts -- 78-22

Stephen Breyer -- 87-9

Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- 96-3

Clarence Thomas -- 52-48

David Souter -- 90-9

Anthony Kennedy -- 97-0

Robert Bork -- 42-58

Antonin Scalia -- 98-0

William Rehnquist -- 65-33

Sandra Day O'Connor -- 99-0

John Paul Stevens -- 98-0

Before Kavanaugh was even announced, some Democratic senators made clear they would not consider voting for him.

Hes a deeply, deeply conservative justice, way out of the mainstream, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor after it was made official.

Conservatives have pushed back, suggesting Democrats are against anyone Trump nominates. To make that point, they pounced on a mistake by the Womens March, an organization that sent out a press release slamming Trumps nominee as extremist but forgot to replace the placeholder XX in the text with Kavanaughs name.

This was in some cases quite literally a fill-in-the-blank opposition, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a floor speech. They wrote statements of opposition only to fill in the name later.

But uncompromising opposition to high court nominees may be the new norm under the Trump administration.

Trumps first pick for the court, Gorsuch, won just three votes from Democrats last year.

It hasnt always been this way: Under Ford, John Paul Stevens was confirmed 98-0. Under then-President Ronald Reagan, Sandra Day OConnor was confirmed 99-0; William Rehnquist was confirmed 65-33; Antonin Scalia was confirmed 98-0 and Anthony Kennedy was confirmed 97-0.

Under then-President George H.W. Bush, David Souter was confirmed 90-9. Under Bill Clinton, Stephen Breyer was confirmed 87-9, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed 96-3.

PENCE 'VERY ENCOURAGED' BY REACTION ON CAPITOL HILL TO KAVANAUGH

Under George W. Bush, John Roberts was confirmed 78-22 and Samuel Alito was confirmed on a tighter 58-42. Under President Barack Obama, Elena Kagan was confirmed 63-37 and Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed 68-31.

Of course, during that time period, there were a few high-profile examples of polarizing picks who faced ardent opposition, including those barely confirmed or who never made it out of the confirmation process.

Aside from Garland, Robert Borks nomination was famously rejected by the Senate in 1987. Clarence Thomas squeaked by in 1991 by in a 52-48 vote.

Harriet Miers withdrew her 2005 nomination amid questions about her qualifications.We live our whole lives wandering from one cloud of dust to the next. The air is full of the stuff: salt wafting in from the sea, black carbon soot from wildfires and all sorts of dusty emissions from heavy industry.

Usually, all that aerosolized gunk is invisible to us  but not to NASA's satellites and ground sensors. In a stunning new illustration, shown above, NASA's Earth Observatory reveals the invisible, tiny particles swirling around us.

NASA combined data from multiple sensors on satellites such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors on Aqua and Terra, as well as ground based sensors, to create a colorized image of the aerosol plumes. [Earth Pictures: Iconic Images of Earth from Space]

Some of these dust clouds are the result of weather events. Hurricane Lane near Hawaii and typhoons Soulik and Cimaron off the coast of Japan have all kicked sea salt into the atmosphere. Over the Sahara Desert in northwest Africa and the Taklamakan Desert in northwest China, landlocked winds have similarly formed clouds of fine particles.

Western North America and south-central Africa reveal signatures of another sort of aerosol: the smoke from wildfires, which are often set by humans  either intentionally, as part of annual agricultural cycles in Africa, or through carelessness as in North America. Some of that smoke from North America appears to have drifted east over the Atlantic Ocean in the image.

NASA noted that this image wasn't shot by a single camera and isn't even a composite of a group of images directly taken by satellites or ground sensors. Instead, NASA used some careful mathematics to bring together data from a range of different types of sources in order to figure out where the densest concentrations of loose particles in the atmosphere are right now.

Originally published on Live Science.We now know where a Japanese asteroid-sampling probe's lander will touch down this October.

The Hayabusa2 spacecraft's Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) will land at a site in the asteroid Ryugu's southern hemisphere dubbed MA-9, mission officials announced today (Aug. 23).

MA-9 won out over nine other finalists because it offered the best combination of scientific potential and accessibility, MASCOT team members said. [Japan's Hayabusa2 Asteroid Sample-Return Mission in Pictures]

"From our perspective, the selected landing site means that we engineers can guide MASCOT to the asteroid's surface in the safest way possible, while the scientists can use their various instruments in the best possible way," MASCOT project manager Tra-Mi Ho, of the DLR Institute of Space Systems, said in a statement. (DLR is the German Aerospace Center, which operates MASCOT with support from the French space agency, CNES.)

MA-9 features relatively fresh, pristine surface material that hasn't been exposed to cosmic radiation for long compared to other parts of the 3,000-foot-wide (950 meters) asteroid, team members said. And Hayabusa2 will drop three small rovers onto patches of the space rock's northern hemisphere, so a southern site for the 22-lb. (10 kilograms) MASCOT will give the mission greater coverage of the space rock, they added.

In addition, MA-9 isn't quite as boulder-studded as most other Ryugu regions. That doesn't mean landing there will be a breeze on Oct. 3, however.

"But we are also aware: There seem to be large boulders across most of Ryugu's surface and barely [any] surfaces with flat regolith," Ho added. "Although scientifically very interesting, this is also a challenge for a small lander and for sampling."

The $150 million Hayabusa2 mission launched in December 2014 and arrived at Ryugu on June 27 of this year. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will study the big asteroid from orbit for another 16 months and also drop down several times to grab samples of Ryugu material.

Meanwhile, MASCOT and the three tiny, hopping rovers  known as Minerva-II-1a, Minerva-II-1b and Minerva-II-2  will gather a variety of information about the asteroid from its surface. (Minerva-I flew aboard Japan's first asteroid-sampling mission, the original Hayabusa, which returned grains from the space rock Itokawa to Earth in 2010.)

The Hayabusa2 orbiter is scheduled to depart from Ryugu in December 2019. The capsule containing the mission's asteroid samples will come down to Earth a year later, in December 2020.

Hayabusa2 isn't the only asteroid-sampling project underway. NASA's $800 million OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission is on its final approach toward the asteroid Bennu, and should arrive in orbit around the 1,650-foot-wide (500 m) rock this December. OSIRIS-REx's samples are due to land on Earth in September 2023.

Both Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx aim to help scientists better understand asteroid composition and structure, the early history and evolution of the solar system, and the role space rocks may have played in helping life get a start on Earth.

Bringing pristine samples of asteroid material back to Earth will allow researchers to tackle such questions efficiently and effectively, team members from both missions have said. Scientists can perform many more experiments and investigations using well-equipped labs around the world than a robotic probe could conduct all by itself in deep space.

Originally published on Space.com.It may not rise to the level of Josh Haders or Sean Newcombs uncovered tweets, but J.D. Martinez is finding himself in a social media controversy of his own.

The Red Sox slugger channeled a Boston star of yesterday, Curt Schilling, with a 2013 Instagram in which he used Hitler to illustrate his apparently pro-gun stance.

The post, from when Martinez was 25 and early in his MLB career, is making the rounds and attributes the German dictator as saying, To conquer a nation, First disarm its (sic) citizens.

This is why I always stay strapped! #thetruth, he captioned it.

Martinez, who has not deleted the Instagram and has not commented about it, grew up in Florida, having attended Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale before getting drafted.

The now-31-year-old has grown into a star, his .337 batting average and 110 RBIs this year best in the league.

This article was first published in the New York Post.A judge in Seattle extended a ban on publishing instructions for 3-D printed guns during state litigation over the controversial practice, handing a procedural victory to gun-control advocates.

The ruling, handed down in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, marks the latest chapter in the ongoing battle over 3D-printed weapons.

Defense Distributed, a non-profit defense firm, had planned to offer the blueprints for download starting Aug. 1 following a multiyear legal battle with the federal government.

However, in late July U.S. District Court Judge Robert Lasnik stopped the release of the blueprints. President Donald Trump has also voiced his concern over the weapons.

Advocates for gun control have argued that 3D-printed guns could also pose security challenges as they pass through airport X-ray machines.

Speaking to Fox News in July Defense Distributed director Cody Wilson described current 3D-printed guns as mostly curiosities, and said that the big and bulky characteristics of the weapons would help identify them. I doubt seriously that its a real problem, he added. If it is a problem, then the [security] norms will have to change.

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued the federal government, alleging it reached a "covert" settlement with the company, Defense Distributed, without notifying Congress or the Department of Defense about changes it made to an export act that prohibited 3D gun plans from being posted online.

Previously, Lasnik said that his court is not the proper venue to decide this issue.

You know, its a little bit frustrating to be sitting in this chair as a United States District Court judge and seeing this is an issue that should be solved by the political branches of government, Lasnik said, reports the Seattle Times. And I really hope and wish that the executive branch and Congress would face up to this and say, its a tough issue, but thats why you got into public service to begin with.

The states suing are Washington, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.When Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 character says "I'll be back" in 1984's sci-fi hit "The Terminator," few, if any, thought the line would be a prescient look into the future.

Fast-forward to 2018 and humanity is trying to figure out what to do with and how to define "killer robots" and their inevitable role influencing humanity.

Experts from several countries are meeting at the Geneva offices of the United Nations this week to focus on lethal autonomous weapons systems and explore ways of possibly regulating them, among other issues.

EXPERTS IMAGINE HOW ROBOT-LED AI APOCALYPSE COULD PLAY OUT

In theory, fully autonomous, computer-controlled weapons dont exist yet, UN officials say. The debate is still in its infancy and the experts have at times grappled with basic definitions. The United States has argued that its premature to establish a definition of such systems, much less regulate them.

Some advocacy groups say governments and militaries should be prevented from developing such systems, which have sparked fears and led some critics to envisage harrowing scenarios about their use.

As the meeting opened Monday, Amnesty International urged countries to work toward a ban.

Amnesty researcher on artificial intelligence Rasha Abdul Rahim said killer robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction, warning that technological advances are outpacing international law.

The meeting follows a new report from researchers saying autonomous weapons would breach international law and that there is a "moral imperative" to ban them.

A new report published by Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law Schools International Human Rights Clinic claims that such autonomous weapons would violate the Martens Clause  a provision of humanitarian law that's widely accepted worldwide.

It requires emerging technologies to be judged by the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience when they are not already covered by other treaty provisions.

HOW HACKERS CAN USE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AGAINST US

The idea of delegating life and death decisions to cold compassionless machines without empathy or understanding cannot comply with the Martens clause and it makes my blood run cold, Noel Sharkey, a roboticist who wrote about the reality of robot war as far back as 2007, told The Guardian.

Research firm IDC expects that global spending on robotics and drones will reach $201.3 billion by 2022, up from an estimated $95.9 billion in 2018.

Over the years, several luminaries, including Elon Musk, legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and a host of others have warned against the rise of artificial intelligence.

In September 2017, Musk tweeted that he thought AI could play a direct role in causing World War III. Musk's thoughts were in response to comments made by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said that the country "who becomes the leader in this sphere [artificial intelligence] will be the ruler of the world."

In November, prior to his death, Hawking theorized that AI could eventually "destroy" humanity if we are not careful about it.

The AP and Fox News' Christopher Carbone contributed to this report. Follow Chris Ciaccia on Twitter @Chris_CiacciaSearchers have located the wreck of a P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft buried deep within a glacier in Greenland, more than 70 years after a lost squadron of U.S. warplanes crash-landed on the ice there during World War II.

The search team plans to dig and melt the rediscovered warplane out of the glacier next summer  and the searchers hope that their techniques can locate other World War II air wrecks in the region, including some that carried MIA (missing in action) U.S. airmen. [Photos: WWII Battleship 'USS Juneau' Discovered]

The search leader, California businessman Jim Salazar, told Live Science that the team found the wrecked P-38 on July 4 beneath more than 300 feet (91 meters) of ice using a ground-penetrating radar antenna fitted to a heavy-lift aerial drone. The drone was scanning a part of the glacier where hints of the buried warplane were detected in 2011.

A ground team then used a thermal probe to melt through the thick ice  it came up covered in hydraulic oil from the buried aircraft.

Salazar said that the radar-equipped drone had located the warplane beneath the ice in a few minutes of flight time, while a ground crew would have taken 6 or 7 hours to cover the same area with a radar sled.

The buried plane was in a remote region made dangerous by hidden ice crevasses, sudden storms and hungry polar bears. "This is a very cold-weather region and an inhospitable location," Salazar said.

Snowball Route

This latest find echoes the 1992 recovery of another P-38 fighter from the same "Lost Squadron" of U.S. warplanes in Greenland. That fighter was eventually restored to flying condition under the name "Glacier Girl".

Both aircraft were part of a group of two B-17 bombers and six P-38 fighters flying from the U.S. to Britain in July 1942. They were traveling through a chain of secret airbases in Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland known as the Snowball Route.

Hundreds of U.S. aircraft flew this route during World War II as part of Operation Bolero, which delivered warplanes, pilots, equipment and supplies for the planned Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.

But after flying into a severe blizzard, the eight aircraft from the lost squadron were forced to crash-land on the surface of the glacier beside Kge Bay in southeastern Greenland.

Salazar said that the area was known to pilots as Piteraq Alley because of its tendency to spawn severe snowstorms that can arise in minutes  called "piteraq" in the Greenland Inuit language.

A similar storm kept the search team in its tents on the glacier for three days during this summers expedition, Salazar said.

Greenland's Bermuda Triangle

The rediscovered fighter has been identified from its crash site as P-38 "Echo", piloted by Army Air Corps Lt. Col. Robert Wilson.

Wilson and the other airmen from the lost squadron warplanes were rescued from the ice, but other U.S. servicemen whose planes crashed in the same area were not so fortunate.

"It's Greenland's 'Bermuda Triangle'  the weather there shifts in a matter of minutes," Salazar said. "As a pilot, you can clearly understand why there were so many difficulties in that area." [Gallery: Lost in the Bermuda Triangle]

Salazar has led searchers to the Greenland glacier in search of the Lost Squadron planes since 2011, through a nonprofit he co-founded with colleague Ken McBride called Arctic Hot Point Solutions.

The summer expeditions, each consisting of a team of about six searchers, had cost between $300,000 and $450,000 apiece, Salazar said. Most of that money has come from Salazar himself, who owns a machinery business in Pasadena, California.

The team now hopes to recover the newly found P-38 fighter from its icy tomb and restore the plane to flying condition.

The twin-tailed P-38 Lightning was an iconic World War II aircraft, but only about 10 remain in museums around the world and only a few are still flying, Salazar said.

Aircraft graveyard

Salazar now hopes that aerial drones equipped with ground-penetrating radar can help the team find the wreck of a Grumman J2F-4 amphibious "Duck" aircraft, operated by the U.S. Coast Guard. That plane crashed on the same glacier in Greenland in November 1942, just a few months after the lost squadron went down.

The Duck aircraft had been part of a search effort for the surviving crew of a C-53 Skytrooper aircraft, operated by the U.S. Army Air Corps, that also crash-landed on the glacier in bad weather, Salazar said.

The bodies of the crew from the crashed C-53 were never recovered; nor were the bodies of three U.S. serviceman on board the Duck aircraft recovered, in spite of a multimillion-dollar search effort funded by the U.S. government's Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA.

In 2013, the DPAA announced that it had found the Duck crash site, but the reported discovery turned out to be a "false positive," Salazar said.

If all goes well, and the weather in Greenland permits it, Salazar's team will work on three aircraft wrecks next summer: melting and digging through the ice to recover the newly found P-38, searching for the wreck of the U.S. Coast Guard Duck, and searching for the wreck of the C-53.

Although radio contact established that about five of the U.S. servicemen on board the C-53 had survived the crash, bad weather and the subsequent crashes of the search-and-rescue aircraft meant the crewmen were never brought back  eventually they would have starved or frozen to death. "Our intention is to repatriate these men," Salazar said.

Original article on Live Science.Aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, anti-satellite weapons, drones, cyber attack technology and a growing arsenal of ballistic missiles are all among a series of Chinese weapons said to present serious concerns for Pentagon leaders and weapons developers, according to DoDs annual China report.

The Pentagon 2018 report, called Military and Security Developments Involving the Peoples Republic of China, details a broad spectrum of risks to include global economic expansion, massive military modernization and breakthrough weapons technology able to threaten US superiority.

While of course the report emerges within the context of a complicated, multi-faceted and stressed US-China relationship which includes growing tensions, military rivalry and some measure of cooperation as well. A recent DoD news report, for instance, was careful to mention China as a potential adversary, not enemy.

Nevertheless, the Pentagon assessment is quite detailed in its discussion of the fast-growing military threat posed by China. A few examples, for instance, include the reports discussion of Chinas short, medium and long-range ballistic missile arsenal. China is believed to possess as many as 1,200 short-range missiles and up to 300 intermediate range missiles, according to the report. With this in mind, the report specifies that some of Chinas longer-range, precision-guided ballistic missiles are able to reach US-assets in the Pacific region.

The Pentagon report, along with previously released Congressional assessments of Chinas military, catalogue information related to Chinas nuclear arsenal and long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles - such as the existing DF-31, DF-26 and DF-31A along with the DF-41. In fact, the Pentagon report specifically cites the DF-26 as presenting a particular threat; the intermediate range ballistic missile, the report says, can carry both conventional and nuclear explosives out to ranges of 4,000 kilometers.

US bases in Japan are in range of a growing number of Chinese MRBMs and LACMs. H-6K bomber flights into the Western Pacific Ocean demonstrate Chinas ability to range Guam with air-launched LACMs. The DF-26, which debuted publicly in 2015 and was paraded again in 2017, is capable of conducting precision conventional or nuclear strikes against ground targets that could include U.S. bases on Guam, the 2018 report says.

The Chinese are believed to already have a number of road-mobile ICBMs able to carry nuclear weapons, the report says. The DF-41 is reported to have as many as 10 re-entry vehicles, analysts have said.

China is known to have conducted several hypersonic weapons tests. Not surprisingly, US Air Force leaders are currently accelerating prototyping, testing and development of hypersonic weapons.(To Read Warrior Maven's Report on Air Force Fast-Tracked Prototyping of Hypersonic Weapons - CLICK HERE)

In addition, China's well-documented anti-satellite, or ASAT, weapons tests have inspired international attention and influenced the Pentagon and US Air Force to accelerate strategies for satellite protection such as improving sensor resiliency, cyber hardening command and control and building in redundancy to improve prospects for functionality in the event of attack.

China's rapid development of new destroyers, amphibs, stealth fighters and long-range weapons is quickly increasing its ability to threaten the United States and massively expand expeditionary military operations around the globe, according to this years Pentagon report as well as several previous Congressional reports from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

In recent years, the Chinese have massively increased their foreign presence around the globe, in a transparent effort to rival the US as a global superpower. The Chinese have made large incursions into Africa, and even set up a military base in Djibouti, Africa, right near a strategically vital US presence.

Chinas military strategy and ongoing PLA reform reflect the abandonment of its historically land-centric mentality. Similarly, doctrinal references to forward edge defense that would move potential conflicts far from Chinas territory suggest PLA strategists envision an increasingly global role, the report cites.

Many of the details of the Pentagons 2018 report are aligned with similar claims made in a 2016 US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a Congressional report which also specified China's growing provocations and global expeditionary exercises.

Additional instances of Chinese provocation in recent years include placement of surface-to-air-missiles and fighters in sensitive areas of the South China Sea, along with its announcement of an "air exclusion zone" in recent years. While the US military flew B-52 bombers through this declared zone in a demonstration of defiance, the move did demonstrate China's growing willingness to be aggressive. In addition, Chinese "land reclamation" and territorial claims in the South China Sea continue to prompt US "freedom of navigation exercises" to unambiguously challenge China's claims.

Chinese Navy

While Chinese naval technology may still be substantially behind current U.S. platforms, the equation could change dramatically over the next several decades because the Chinese are reportedly working on a handful of high-tech next-generation ships, weapons and naval systems.

China has plans to grow its navy to 351 ships by 2020 as the Chinese continue to develop their militarys ability to strike global targets, according to the Congressional reports.

Also the Chinese are building their own indigenous aircraft carriers; their first self-built carrier was launched last year and is expected to enter service by 2019, the Pentagon report says. More are being built to joint Chinas first carrier, the Ukrainian-built Liaoning.

Looking to the future, the 2016 report says "future Chinese carriers are likely to be flat deck ships, like U.S. aircraft carriers, that utilize steam or magnetic catapults and would enable the PLA Navy to employ aircraft armed with heavier munitions intended for maritime strike or land attack missions. According to DOD, China could build several aircraft carriers in the next 15 years. China may ultimately produce five shipsfor a total of six carriersfor the PLA Navy."

The report also cites the LUYANG III, a new class of Chinese destroyers are engineered with vertically-launched, long-range anti-ship cruise missiles. The new destroyers carry an extended-range variant of the HHQ-9 surface-to-air missile, among other weapons, the report says.

As evidence of the impact of these destroyers, the reports point out that these new multi-mission destroyers are likely to form the bulk of warship escorts for Chinese carriers - in a manner similar to how the US Navy protects its carriers with destroyers in "carrier strike groups."

"These 8,000 ton destroyers (the LUYANG III) . . . have phased-array radars and a long-range SAM [surface-to-air missile] system which provides the [navy] with its first credible area air-defense capability," the 2016 report states.

The Chinese are currently testing and developing a new, carrier-based fighter aircraft called the J-15.

Regarding amphibious assault ships, the Chinese are now adding more YUZHAO LPDs, amphibs which can carry 800 troops, four helicopters and up to 20 armored vehicles, the report said.

"The YUZHAO can carry up to four air cushion landing craft, four helicopters, armored vehicles, and troops for long-distance deployments, which DOD notes provide[s] a . . . greater and more flexible capability for far seas operations than the [PLA Navys] older landing ships., according to the report.

The Chinese also have ambitious future plans for next-generation amphibious assault ships.

"China seeks to construct a class of amphibious assault ships larger than the YUZHAO class that would include a flight deck for conducting helicopter operations. China may produce four to six of these Type 081 ships with the capacity to transport 500 troops and configured for helicopter-based vertical assault," the report says.

Some observers have raised the question as to whether this new class of Chinese amphibs could rival the US Navy's emerging, high-tech America-Class amphibious assault ships.

The Chinese are also working on development of a new Type 055 cruiser equipped with land-attack missiles, lasers and rail-gun weapons, according to the review.

Chinas surface fleet is also bolstered by production of at least 60 smaller, fast-moving HOBEI-glass guided missile patrol boats and ongoing deliveries of JIANGDAO light frigates armed with naval guns, torpedoes and anti-ship cruise missiles.

Pentagon and Congressional reports also say that Chinese modernization plans call for a sharp increase in attack submarines and nuclear-armed submarines or SSBNs. Chinese SSBNs are now able to patrol with nuclear-armed JL-2 missiles able to strike targets more than 4,500 nautical miles.

The Chinese are currently working on a new, modernized SSBN platform as well as a long-range missile, the JL-3, the commission says.

Chinese Air Force

A 2014 Congressional report states that the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army currently had approximately 2,200 operational aircraft as far back as four years ago, nearly 600 of which were considered modern.

Regarding stealth aircraft, the Chinese now operate their first 5th Gen stealth fighter, the J-20. The aircraft is reported to be more advanced than any other air platform currently deployed in the Asia-Pacific region. The Chinese are also testing a smaller stealth fighter variant called the J-31 although its intended use is unclear, according to the report.

In 2014, China displayed the Shenyang J-31 stealth fighter at Chinas Zuhai Air show, according to various reports. However, several analysts have made the point that it is not at all clear if the platform comes close to rivaling the technological capability of the US F-35.

At the same time, the 2014 Congressional report specifically cites a Defense Science Board finding that Chinese cyberattacks resulted in the theft of significant specs and technical details of a range of US weapons systems - to include the F-35. In fact, the Pentagons recent news story about the 2018 mentions that apparent similarities between the F-35 and Chinese J-20 could very well be a result of espionage.

Overall, the U.S. technological advantage in weaponry, air and naval platforms is rapidly decreasing, according to all the assessments. To illustrate this point, the Congressional review cites comments from an analyst who compared U.S.-Chinese fighter jets to one another roughly twenty years ago versus a similar comparison today.

The analyst said that in 1995 a high-tech U.S. F-15, F-16 or F/A-18 would be vastly superior to a Chinese J-6 aircraft. However today -- Chinas J-10 and J-11 fighter jet aircraft would be roughly equivalent in capability to an upgraded U.S. F-15, the review states. For this reason, the Air Force is now moving aggressively on a range of upgrades to its fleet of F-15s, to include new computer technology, electronic warfare, radar and weapons systems. (To Read Warrior Maven's Report on F-15 Upgrades - CLICK HERE)

Alongside their J-10 and J-11 fighters, the Chinese also own Russian-built Su-27s and Su-30s and bought Su-35s from Russia as well.

The Su-35 is a versatile, highly capable aircraft that would offer significantly improved range and fuel capacity over Chinas current fighters. The aircraft thus would strengthen Chinas ability to conduct air superiority missions in the Taiwan Strait, East China Sea, and South China Sea as well as provide China with the opportunity to reverse engineer the fighters component parts, including its advanced radar and engines, for integration into Chinas current and future indigenous fighters, the review writes.

In addition to stealth technology, high-tech fighter aircraft and improved avionics, the Chinese have massively increased their ability with air-to-air missiles over the last 15-years, the review finds.

All of Chinas fighters in 2000, with the potential exception of a few modified Su-27s, were limited to within-visual-range missiles. China over the last 15 years also has acquired a number of sophisticated short and medium-range air-to-air missiles; precision-guided munitions including all-weather, satellite-guided bombs, anti-radiation missiles, and laser-guided bombs; and long-range, advanced air-launched land-attack cruise missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles, the review says.

The review also points to the Y-20 aircraft, a new strategic airlifter being developed by the Chinese which has three times the cargo-carrying capacity of the U.S. Air Forces C-130. Some of these new planes could be configured into tanker aircraft, allowing the Chinese to massively increase their reach and ability to project air power over longer distances.

At the moment, the Chinese do not have a sizeable or modern fleet of tankers, and many of their current aircraft are not engineered for aerial refueling, a scenario which limits their reach.

Until the PLA Navys first carrier-based aviation wing becomes operational, China must use air refueling tankers to enable air operations at these distances from China. However, Chinas current fleet of air refueling aircraft, which consists of only about 12 1950s-era H6U tankers, is too small to support sustained, large-scale, long-distance air combat, the review states.

The Pentagon annual review also raises concerns about Chinas acquisition of Russian-built S-400 surface to air missiles.

The S400 more than doubles the range of Chinas air defenses from approximately 125 to 250 miles, the previous Congressional review writes. This new range would create a weapons with enough reach to cover all of Taiwan, the Senkaku Islands, and parts of the South China Sea, the review says.

More Weapons and Technology - WARRIOR MAVEN (CLICK HERE)--France said on Monday it had killed a top official from Islamic State group's affiliate in West Africa in an operation in Mali that also killed another member of the group and two civilians.

The defence ministry, in a statement, named him as Mohamed Ag Almouner and said he was one of the top officials of the Islamic State group in the Greater Sahara. It did not name the second member of the group who was killed.

The ministry said two civilians - a woman and a teenager - were killed in the operation which was carried out on Sunday. Two other civilians and a member of the Islamic State group's affiliate group were also injured, the statement said.

It said it regretted the civilians' death.

France has deployed around 4,000 French troops in the West Africa's Sahel region as part of Operation Barkhane aimed at combating Islamist militants in the region.

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A man was taken into custody at Los Angeles International Airport Monday after he jumped a fence, ran onto a runway and did pushups, according to police.

The man, who has not yet been identified, was spotted by an airport police officer just after 1:30 p.m. local time, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Airport Police confirmed to Fox News.

He was taken into custody within two minutes after being spotted on the runway.

Police said the airfield the man traveled to, as well as nearby aircraft, underwent a security sweep, and the airfield was closed for roughly 20 minutes.

The man is being held by authorities as they investigate the situation.An Alabama man was fined $1,500 for touching a Hawaiian monk seal as well as harassing a sea turtle on Kauai and then posting the videos on social media.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, said the Alabama resident, who was vacationing on Kauai last year, agreed to pay the fine, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported on Friday.

NOAAs Office of Law Enforcement in Hawaii used the mans social media accounts to track down his home address.

The Alabama man, in the video posted on Instagram with the hashtag #monkseals, walks up to a sleeping monk seal on Poipu Beach at night and strokes it with his hand. The startled seal quickly turns toward him and he runs away.

The man panned his camera to a sign from the NOAA urging beachgoers to maintain a safe distance from wildlife.

Violations are usually the result of things like tourists wanting to get a good, close picture with a seal or a thrill-seeker trying to get a rush, Adam Kurtz, NOAA Fisheries wildlife management coordinator, said in a statement. But its really frustrating when you see people harass these animals.

Hawaiian monk seals are a critically endangered species. They are protected by both state and federal laws, including the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The man could have been injured because Hawaiian monk seals are wild animals that can act unpredictably, Kurtz said. The seal could have lunged at the man instead of simply turning toward him.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials, while investigating the mans Instagram account, also found a video of him aggressively pursuing a sea turtle while snorkeling at Poipu.

All species of sea turtles in US waters are listed as either threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, according to NOAA.Police in New York City on Sunday arrested a 13th suspect in connection with the "brutal" stabbing death of Lesandro "Junior" Guzman-Feliz in June.

Ronald Urena, 29, was charged with murder, manslaughter, criminal possession of a weapon, gang assault and conspiracy, according to the New York Police Department. His arrest marks the 13th in connection with Guzman-Feliz's killing.

THE GANG JUST AS VICIOUS AS MS-13 BUT WITHOUT THE NOTORIETY: SAVAGE TRINITARIOS RETURN TO THE SPOTLIGHT AFTER YEARS IN THE SHADOWS

Guzman-Feliz, 15, was stabbed to death at a bodega in the Bronx on June 20. In an apparent case of "mistaken identity," members of the Trinitarios street gang have said that their intended target was not the teen they allegedly attacked.

Kevin Alvarez, 19; Luis Cabrera Santos, 25; Danel Fernandez, 21; Elvin Garcia, 29; Antonio Hernandez-Santiago, 24; Jonaiki Martinez-Estrella, 24; Jose Muniz, 21; Danilo Payamps Pacheco, 21; Gabriel Ramirez Concepcion, 26; Manuel Rivera, 18; Diego Suero, 29, and Jose Taverez, 21, have also been arrested in Guzman-Feliz's death, according to police.

On the night of June 20, the NYPD said officers responded to a 911 call about an assault in progress just before midnight.

Surveillance footage showed Guzman-Feliz being dragged from the store by his attackers, who were seen repeatedly stabbing the teen with a machete.

Guzman-Feliz, according to investigators, had been in an argument with a group outside the bodega on East 183rd Street and was stabbed in the neck. The suspects bolted and Guzman-Feliz ran over to the hospital across the street, where he died.

The department said in July that those responsible for Guzman-Feliz's death would "feel the wrath of the NYPD."

"Were not going to rest until anyone responsible, having any role whatsoever in that tragic incident, is brought to justice," Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said at the time.

MULTIPLE ARRESTS MADE IN STABBING DEATH OF 15-YEAR-OLD BOY IN NYC

Guzman-Feliz was enrolled in the NYPD Explorers youth program and his dream was to be a detective for the city, his family said after his death. A scholarship fund was created in his honor, and two teens who are leaving the program for college this fall received their awards last week.

Nahomi Zambrano, one of the recipients, told WABC that, "Some of my friends, they've been through a lot, and I want to change that."

"That is something that I always wanted to do, especially gang violence. That is something Junior went through, and I feel so sad about that," Zambrano said.

A street in the Bronx was renamed in Guzman-Feliz's honor in June, so that his "name and legacy will never be forgotten," New York City Council Member Ritchie Torres said.A California man was caught Friday with an unusual haul: 800 pounds of stolen lemons, cops said.

Dionicio Fierros, 69, of Los Angeles, was taken into custody for theft of agricultural products, the Riverside County Sheriff's Office stated in a news release.

The lemons were spotted during a traffic stop in Thermal, southeast of Palm Springs. Deputies said they found "800 pounds of freshly picked lemons in the vehicle," and that they'd been swiped from a nearby farm.

Fierros' arrest comes as authorities have been investigating recent agricultural thefts from local farms in the cities of Thermal, Mecca and Oasis.Two women in Chicago's Near North Side district are allegedly targeting ride-share passengers and robbing them at gunpoint, police warned on Sunday.

The offenders pick up passengers who have ordered rides on ride-sharing apps  such as Uber or Lyft  and "subsequently [rob] them by force or gunpoint."

The suspects are believed to be two African-American females between 20 to 30 years old. They are between 5'5" to 5'9" in height and weigh somewhere between 120 to 150 pounds.

Since June 24, investigators said in a community alert that six incidents  all on weekend days and at early hours of the morning  have been reported in the Near North Side.

Police ask that anyone with information contact Area Central detectives of the Chicago Police Department at 312-747-8380.A former Pennsylvania altar boy who was molested by a priest as a child admitted in an interview Friday to stealing thousands of dollars in what he called payback for the abuse.

Mike McDonnell, now 49, said he was abused starting when he was just 10 years old. But the incident that changed him came when he was 12, McDonnell said, when he woke up to a priest molesting him in a bed he was forced to share with a clergyman, he told Reuters.

From that day forth, I would never be that same child, he said. I went into shock mode and shut down. I would hold onto those secrets for 20-plus years.

McDonnell, now a peer counselor at a drug and alcohol treatment facility, survived multiple broken marriages, alcohol addiction and jail time. He said the Archdiocese of Philadelphia paid for counseling sessions, but he would forge receipts and ended up pocketing more than $100,000 from the church.

I sought retribution in the form of submitting false invoices for a number of years, he told Reuters.

McDonnells revelation comes days after hundreds of priests were said to have molested more than 1,000 children since the 1940s and senior church officials, including the current archbishop of Washington, D.C., allegedly covered up the abuse. One priest McDonnell accused was defrocked and another was removed from the public ministry, according to Reuters.

These bishops and the dioceses and the Cardinals need to come clean. You need to tell the Catholic faith community what you did. How you covered it up, how you transferred one to another parish so that he would go on and abuse more children. No one knew more about these abuses and no one did less, he said.The Latest on services for Sen. John McCain and other related activities after his death (all times local):

5:05 p.m.

The Senate chaplain is thanking God "for the gift" of the late John McCain.

Chaplain Barry Black, a retired Navy rear admiral, is giving thanks for McCain's "profile in courage." He says in his opening prayer that McCain had a "sacrificial willingness to take the road less traveled, to rise above partisanship, to provide a profile in courage and to give his life in service."

He says McCain had an "awareness that humanity is wrapped in a blanket of mutuality" and is citing the senator's favorite novel in reminding, "so we should not ask, for whom the bell tolls."

The chaplain says McCain's "consequential, patriotic and heroic legacy" should challenge the Senate "to leave the world better than we found it."

___

4:45 p.m.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell paid tribute to John McCain by recalling their own legislative battles while echoing the late senator's belief that there's more that unites than divides Americans.

Speaking from the Senate floor, McConnell says that while McCain served the state of Arizona in Congress, "he was America's hero all along."

He spoke near McCain's desk in the Senate, which has been draped in black and adorned with white roses in his honor.

McConnell and McCain tangled over several issues, including McCain's championing of campaign finance reform and McConnell's attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which failed on McCain's surprise "no" vote. McConnell says serving with McCain "was never a dull affair."

McCain will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda on Friday.

___

3:55 p.m.

Memorial services for Sen. John McCain will include tributes from his children and fellow politicians.

Rick Davis, McCain's former presidential campaign manager, says U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, former U.S. Sen. John Kyl and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey will be among those who speak at services in Phoenix.

Former Vice President Joe Biden will pay tribute at a Thursday service at North Phoenix Baptist Church. The service also will include choir performances and a bagpiper.

Formers Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama will speak at a Saturday memorial service at Washington National Cathedral. The program also includes a tribute from McCain's daughter Meghan, plus a performance of "Danny Boy" by opera star Renee Fleming.

Public viewings will be held at the Arizona Capitol on Wednesday and the U.S. Capitol on Friday.

___

3:20 p.m.

The Senate has draped John McCain's desk in black fabric and placed a vase of white roses on top.

McCain died Saturday at age 81 from an aggressive form of brain cancer. Monday was the Senate's first day back in session since his death, though McCain had not been back to Washington since December.

He served in the Senate for more than three decades, most recently as chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee.

The black fabric stands roughly where McCain last year delivered a desk-pounding speech urging the Senate to return to a bipartisan and more civil way of doing business.

The chamber also is where McCain delivered a dramatic thumbs-down that sank the GOP's effort to repeal former President Barack Obama's health care law.

___

2:50 p.m.

True to his reputation for "straight talk," John McCain encourages Americans not to "despair of our present difficulties" in a farewell letter that takes veiled shots at President Donald Trump.

In his final message, read aloud in Arizona, the late senator says the United States is weakened "when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries" and "when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down." Trump has made building a wall on the southern border one of his signature issues.

Trump feuded with McCain and has refused to talk about him since his death on Saturday.

The president tweeted his condolences to McCain's family but made no reference to the Arizona senator. Flags at the White House were lowered to half-staff for McCain on Sunday but are now flying at full-staff.

___

2:15 p.m.

A final letter from Sen. John McCain expressed his deep gratitude and love of country, and offered words of wisdom to his fellow Americans.

Rick Davis, former presidential campaign manager for McCain who is serving as a family spokesman, read the farewell message at a press briefing in Phoenix.

In the statement, McCain reflected on the privilege of serving his country and said he tried to do so honorably. He also touched on today's politics.

"Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here," McCain wrote. "Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history."

McCain will lie in state at the Arizona State Capitol and at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. before his burial on Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy.

___

9:10 a.m.

The flags at the White House, which were lowered over the weekend to mark the death of Sen. John McCain, are back at full-staff.

The flags at the U.S. Capitol, meanwhile, remained at half-staff on Monday to honor the Arizona Republican, who died Saturday of brain cancer.

President Donald Trump offered his condolences on Twitter to McCain's family but hasn't issued a presidential proclamation with an order lowering the flags. The two had a long-running feud.

U.S. Flag Code states that flags be lowered "on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress."

After Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts died in 2009, President Barack Obama ordered flags at the White House be flown at half-staff for five days.

The White House didn't immediately respond to questions Monday.

___

7:25 a.m.

U.S. Sen. John McCain is being remembered in Romania for a letter he sent to the government urging the East European nation not to backtrack on fighting corruption.

The Aug. 2 letter sent by the Arizona Republican and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut to Premier Viorica Dancila was republished Monday after McCain's death Saturday of brain cancer.

The senators urged the government "not to retreat in the important fight against corruption."

They said they regretted that the former chief anti-corruption prosecutor Laura Codruta Kovesi had been dismissed in July amid government claims of mismanagement.

The letter said recent judicial reforms and proposed legislation to decriminalize certain corruption offenses "raises troubling questions," about the government's commitment to "hold high-level officials accountable. "

___

4:45 a.m.

People in Vietnam are paying their respects to U.S. Sen. John McCain who was held as prisoner of war in Vietnam and later was instrumental in bringing the wartime foes together.

McCain died of brain cancer Saturday in his home state of Arizona, which he had served over six terms in the U.S. Senate.

People paid tribute to McCain at the U.S Embassy in Hanoi on Monday and also at the monument built where he parachuted from his Navy Skyhawk dive bomber in October 1967 and was taken prisoner of war. He was held more than five years at the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison.

McCain and former Sen. John Kerry played an important role in the bilateral normalization of relations in 1995.

___

12:30 a.m.

Sen. John McCain's service to his country began more than six decades ago at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and will end there in a cemetery overlooking Maryland's Severn River.

A private burial service next Sunday will conclude nearly a week of events honoring the Navy aviator, prisoner of war, congressman, longtime senator and presidential contender. The Arizona Republican died of brain cancer Saturday at 81 at his ranch near Sedona.

Plans taking shape called for McCain to lie in state Wednesday in the Arizona State Capitol on what would have been his 82nd birthday. Services will be held at a Phoenix church, and in Washington and Maryland.

In Washington, McCain will lie in state Friday in the Capitol Rotunda with a formal ceremony and time for the public to pay respects. On Saturday, former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama are expected to speak at a service at Washington National Cathedral.Two children were found dead in Chicago early Monday in an apparent murder-suicide at the hands of their father, police said.

The children, a boy and a girl who were both 10 years old, were found with gunshot wounds to their heads in a home in the city's North Side, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

CHICAGO RIDE-SHARE PASSENGERS BEING TARGETED BY ARMED ROBBERS, COPS WARN

A 45-year-old man, identified by police as the children's father, was also allegedly found dead in the West Rogers Park neighborhood home with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his face.

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department, tweeted condolences to family members "affected by the senseless murder suicide" Monday evening.

He said the man had no criminal history with the department.

The medical examiner's office has not yet released any official details regarding the deaths, though Area North investigators are reportedly investigating the three deaths as homicides and a suicide.Students at an Ohio middle school were asked to decide who they would leave behind if the world was about to end, using age, religion and other descriptions as markers for their decisions.

The assignment sparked widespread uproar.

Whom to Leave Behind asked students at Roberts Middle School in Cuyahoga Falls to choose eight out of 12 people to put into a space ship and take to a different planet because the world was ending, according to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

Choices included a homosexual pro athlete, a militant African-American medical student and a female movie star who was a victim of sexual assault.

Parents of some of the students called the assignment insensitive.

What does her being Muslim have to do with it? Bernadette Hartman, referencing another description, told WKYC-TV. What does being female have to do with it?

Hartman added the assignment made her son uncomfortable.

This paper divides. It doesn't pull anybody together, she said.

Superintendent Todd Nichols planned to meet with the unidentified teacher Monday, he told the Plain-Dealer.

We take the matter very seriously, we are investigating it and we expect it to be completed very early next week with a resolution, Nichols said, adding he didnt hear any reaction from any students in the classes where the assignment was given.Italian Economy Minister Giovanni Tria said on Monday, during a visit to the Chinese capital, that the goal of his trip is not to find new buyers for Italian debt, denying recent speculation in the Italian media.

"The objective of the mission is to strengthen economic cooperation between our two countries," Tria said in an interview with China's Guangming newspaper translated into Italian by China Radio International's website.

"Chinese investors will evaluate whether to buy Italian debt just like any other foreign or Italian investor," Tria added. "I'm confident that the Italian government's budget will strengthen the positive view on Italy's financial stability."

Italy's populist government has roiled financial markets in recent weeks by promising to go on a spending spree next year to cut taxes and boost welfare without yet saying how it plans to rein in its debt, Europe's second-biggest after Greece as a percentage of output.

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A Montana judge tossed out a mans methamphetamine possession conviction Thursday after it was revealed an expert witness who testified against him likely stole meth from a crime lab and was under the influence while he was speaking in the courtroom.

James Donald Bachtell was arrested in June 2017 after an officer found meth residue in a glass pipe in his pocket, the Great Falls Tribune reported. Derrick Thrush, a forensic chemist for the state, was called to present his expert testimony at Bachtells trial in Feb. 12, 2018.

Bachtell was convicted of felony criminal possession of dangerous drugs after Thrushs testimony, according to the Great Falls Tribune.

However, Cascade County Attorney Josh Racki called Bachtells lawyer Vince van der Hagen two days after the conviction to tell him that Thrush ingested meth on his way to the trial, the newspaper reported, citing a public defenders office filing.

More than a week after the conviction, Scott Larson, the Montana Department of Justices Forensic Science Division, said an internal investigation revealed Thrush removed drug evidence submitted to the crime lab. Larson wrote in a letter that Thrush was fired and the office "not aware of any inaccuracies with the results in our final reports, but we will have to complete our investigation before we know the full parameters of this situation."

Thrush pleaded guilty to three felony drug possession charges and misdemeanors for theft and official misconduct on Aug. 14. Thrush told a co-worker he had ingested meth on his drive to the courtroom for his testimony on Feb. 12, the newspaper reported, citing defense filings.

Thrush reportedly admitted to taking leftover meth from evidence bags 5 to 6 times in the past year, but never used the drug in the lab.

District Court Judge John Parker determined that Thrush impeded Bachtells right to a fair trial.

The court heard credible testimony indicating that Mr. Thrush stole items of physical evidence, namely meth, from the custody of the Montana State Crime Lab, Parker determined. The evidence proved that Mr. Thrush, by his own admission, ingested meth into his system while en route to the trial. Mr. Thrush was likely under the influence of meth at the time that he, through his testimony, helped ensure the criminal conviction of Mr. Bachtell for the offense of methamphetamine possession.

A new trial date was set for Nov. 19.A Texas middle school scrubbed and replaced a sexist quote from a hallway before the first day of school, after an image of it was posted on social media  sparking widespread backlash.

Houston-area resident, Lisa Beckman, tweeted out the photo, writing that the quote in the Gregory-Lincoln Education Center was sexist, mysogonitic[sic], and discriminatory.

The controversial quote, which has been attributed to Sydney Biddle Barrows, a businesswoman known as the "Mayflower Madam" in New York City and was convicted of promoting prostitution through an escort service in 1985, read: The more you act like a lady, the more hell act like a gentleman.

Its perpetuating horrible gender stereotypes, shaming women, and relinquishing boys of all responsibility, Beckman tweeted, with many agreeing on social media.

MISOGYNISTIC QUOTE PRINTED ON TEXAS SCHOOL WALL GETS BLASTED ONLINE AFTER GOING VIRAL

The Houston Independent School District removed the quote within 10 hours of Beckmans tweet and issued a statement, saying the district acted swiftly to remove a quote at one of our schools that does not support our values. The input of our community is invaluable, and we appreciate that this was brought to our attention.

According to KTRK, the quote had been above the lockers for five years, but two days later the school replaced it with a new quote by Nobel Prize Laureate, Malala Yousafzai.

Today, students coming in on their first day of school will walk past an even bigger image, with a different message: Do not wait for someone else to come and speak for you. Its you who can change the world.A German shepherd who Utah firefighters found huddled under a tree during the California wildfires has found a new home.

A Draper City firefighter, only identified as Patrick, adopted the dog after rescuing him while battling the Mendocino Complex fire, the Mendocino County Animal Shelter said Saturday. The firefighters from Utah immediately befriended the dog, who they named Mendo.

After receiving excellent care by the staff at Mendocino Animal Hospital, this dog now named Mendo by his firefighting friends, came to the Ukiah Shelter. It was clear from the start, if not found by his guardian, Draper City fire fighter Patrick wanted to adopt him, the shelter wrote on Facebook.

Mendo passed all health tests and was neutered before two volunteers took the dog to Reno, Nev., to start his new life.

Draper Fire Department lost fellow firefighter Matthew Burchett on Aug. 13 while fighting the Mendocino Complex Fire, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Mendo has been reunited with fire fighter Patrick who found him while battling the Mendocino Complex fires. The Draper Fire Department team from Utah lost their co-worker Matt during this fire. We know Mendo will help them heal, the shelter wrote in a second post.Pope Francis told reporters Sunday that he "won't say a word" about claims by a former Vatican ambassador to the U.S. that the pontiff had rehabilitated the former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, despite being made aware of sexual misconduct claims against him.

In an 11-page memo made public Saturday evening, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano called on Francis to resign over his handling of the McCarrick matter. The most eye-opening claim by Vigano was that Pope Benedict XVI had sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 -- in essence prohibiting him from public ministry and ordering him to carry out a life of prayer and penance -- only for Francis to re-instate him, "cover" for him and advance him to the role of a "trusted counselor."

Returning to Rome from a two-day visit to Ireland, Francis said that he had read Vigano's memo and thought it "speaks for itself."

Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as cardinal last month, after a U.S. church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

FORMER VATICAN DIPLOMAT CALLS FOR POPE FRANCIS TO RESIGN, SAYS HE IGNORED SEX ABUSE ALLEGATIONS

Since then, another man has come forward to say McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary. The accusations have created a crisis of confidence in the U.S. and Vatican hierarchy, because it was apparently an open secret that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house, and into his bed.

Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report  which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses  the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.

Vigano, the papal ambassador -- or nuncio -- to Washington between 2011 and 2016, identified the Vatican cardinals and U.S. archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair by name, an unthinkable expose for a Vatican diplomat to make. He said documents backing up his version of events are in Vatican archives.

He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on June 23, 2013, at the Vatican's Santa Marta hotel where the pope lives, three months after Francis was elected pope.

Vigano wrote that he told Francis: "Holy Father, I don't know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance."

Soon thereafter, Vigano wrote, he was surprised to find that McCarrick had started traveling on missions on behalf of the church, including to China. McCarrick was also one of the Vatican's intermediaries in the U.S.-Cuba talks in 2014.

Vigano's claim that McCarrick had been ordered by Benedict to stay out of public ministry and retire to a lifetime of prayer is somewhat disputed, given that McCarrick enjoyed a fairly public retirement. Vigano provides no evidence that such sanctions were imposed by Benedict, saying only that he was told they were.

Vigano, however, also has had his own problems with allegations of cover-up, and he and Francis had a major dust-up during Francis' 2015 visit to the U.S., which Vigano organized.

In that incident, a leading U.S. opponent of gay marriage, Kim Davis, was among those invited to meet with the pope at Vigano's Washington residence. Francis was so enraged that Davis' supporters had leaked word of the meeting that the Vatican subsequently insisted he only held one private audience while there: with one of his former students, a gay man and his partner.

The cover-up accusation, which Vigano denied, concerned allegations that he tried to quash an investigation into the former archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis, Minn., John Nienstedt, who was accused of misconduct with adult seminarians.

In 2016, the National Catholic Reporter said Vigano allegedly ordered the investigation wrapped up and a piece of evidence destroyed. The report cited a 2014 memo from a diocesan official that was unsealed following the conclusion of a criminal investigation into the archdiocese. No charges were filed.

In a statement provided to the Associated Press Sunday about the Nienstedt case, Vigano said a Vatican investigation of the allegation found no wrongdoing on his part.

He said the allegation that he destroyed evidence was false and that his efforts to have the archdiocese correct the record have been met with silence.

Nienstedt was forced to resign in 2015 over complaints about his handling of sex abuse cases.

Vigano's name also made headlines during the 2012 "Vatileaks" scandal, when some of his letters were published. In them, he begged not to be transferred to the Vatican embassy in Washington from the administration of the Vatican City State.

He claimed he was being punished for having exposed corruption in the Vatican. The letters showed a clash with Benedict's No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who is also a target of his McCarrick missive.

The document's authenticity was confirmed to The Associated Press by an Italian journalist, Marco Tosatti, who said he was with Vigano when the archbishop wrote it Wednesday.

"He was very emotional and upset at the end the effort," Tosatti told AP, adding that Vigano left Tosatti's home afterward without saying where he was going.

Fox News' Hollie McKay and The Associated Press contributed to this report.The daughter of a British couple who died at an Egyptian resort hotel last week under mysterious circumstances said Sunday that she believes something in her parent's room killed them.

John and Susan Cooper died last Tuesday morning while on vacation at the Steigenberger Aqua Magic Hotel in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Hurghada. The deaths of the couple, ages 69 and 63, prompted travel company Thomas Cook to evacuate 300 guests from the hotel as a precaution.

The couple's daughter, Kelly Ormerod, said she is suspicious because her parents had been in perfect health hours before they died. She told Sky News that her father, John Cooper died in his room while her mother died after she was taken to the hospital.

"I think when they went back to that room that evening there was something in that room that's actually killed them - whether they've inhaled something that poisoned them, I don't know," she told Sky News. "I can only have my opinion on what's gone on, but there's something that happened in that room that killed my parents."

On Sunday, Thomas Cook Group CEO Peter Fankhauser told Sky News the company has brought in experts to test food, water, and air conditioning systems at the Egyptian resort hotel.

"There is no evidence that it is a carbon monoxide poisoning. We have no evidence but I don't want to rule out anything before I really know the cause," he said.

Fankhauser told Sky News that experts have taken "probes of the food, of the hygienic systems, of water, as well as the air conditioning systems and all those probes are now in Egypt," and that tests should take 10 days to complete.

THOMAS COOK TAKES ITS GUESTS OUT OF EGYPT HOTEL AFTER 2 DIED

Besides the deaths of the couple, it has emerged that 13 other customers at the hotel had food poisoning. The hotel told The Associated Press in an email that there was no increased level of illness there and attributed the couple's deaths to "natural causes."

Prosecutors in Egypt on Saturday dismissed speculation that toxic gas fumes in the Coopers' hotel room killed the couple. An official inspection of the room found no harmful gas leaks and all the devices worked properly, they said.

The Egyptian prosecutor's office said it is awaiting a forensic analysis of samples taken from the bodies to provide more details, according to the AP.

Egyptian authorities dismissed criminal motives as being behind the deaths. An official statement by the Red Sea governorate on Friday said an initial medical examination of John Cooper showed he had suffered acute circulatory collapse and a sudden cardiac arrest. It said Susan Cooper later fainted and was rushed to a hospital, where resuscitation attempts continued for a half-hour.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Fourteen anti-government activists were given pardons Monday that will free them from long prison terms, the latest in a series of releases engineered by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen after his party's election sweep last month.

The 14, including at least 11 former members of the now-dissolved opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, were convicted of insurrection in connection with a street protest four years ago that turned violent.

A court spokesman said King Norodom Sihamoni signed the pardons at the request of Hun Sen, and the group would be released Tuesday.

The group includes three former opposition members who were sentenced to 20 years in prison for allegedly leading the protest.

At least eight other former party members received seven-year sentences for taking part in the July 15, 2014, protest in Phnom Penh that came as opposition lawmakers were boycotting parliament to demand political reforms, saying the previous year's election had been rigged by Hun Sen's ruling Cambodian People's Party.

Their arrests were widely criticized as politically motivated.

Hun Sen's party swept this year's July 29 general election after pro-government courts dissolved the Cambodian National Rescue Party, the only credible opposition grouping.

The release appeared to be carefully orchestrated, as Hun Sen last week suggested it would come very soon. He said the releases were acts of mercy and not a response to foreign criticism of his authoritarian rule and the election, which was generally seen as unfair.

The 11 opposition members had sent a letter on Friday to Hun Sen, posted on social media, asking for pardons in order to help their families.

"After having been jailed for more than three years, we regret very much that we had joined the protest at Democracy Square without full consideration, causing serious effects on national security and public order," the letter sid.

"We are promising that from today on, we will not join any protest or any activity without consideration and we will fully respect the law," they wrote.

At least eight other people held on political charges have been freed with pardons or on bail since the beginning of last week.

Hun Sen, who has been in office since 1985 and has held a tight grip on power since ousting a co-prime minister in a bloody 1997 coup, has a record of cracking down harshly when facing a serious challenge, then effecting reconciliation when he no longer feels threatened.A top navy general in Iranian said Monday the country took full control of the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, a major shipping route that the Iranians threatened to block in the past amid worsening American-Iranian relations.

The Tasnim news agency reported the announcement by the head of the Revolutionary Guards navy, General Alireza Tangsiri, according to Reuters.

The Strait of Hormuz has long been the target of the Iranians as its a major shipping route where around 20 per cent of oil traded worldwide passes through the waterway.

The Iranian officials recently threatened to block the waterway in retaliation for any hostile action by the U.S. government amid President Trumps remarks in July, which were prompted by the Iranian President Rouhani saying the U.S. risks the mother of all wars" with Iran.

Trump called for Rouhani to stop the rhetoric or  in caps lock  suffer the consequences the like of which few throughout history have ever suffered before. We are no longer a country that will stand for your demented words of violence and death. Be cautious!

The comment prompted Iran to undergo a major naval exercise near the passage earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported.

There were more than 100 boats and ships participating in the military drill in a bid to send a message to the U.S. that Iranians can simply close down the passage, said U.S. officials.

According to Reuters, U.S. officials aim to economically isolate Iran and reduce its oil exports  one of the few regime-saving industries  to zero.

Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reportedly said that if Iran isnt being allowed to export its oil, then no country in the region will be allowed to export oil from the Gulf.A major shipping route located between Oman and Iran where nearly one-third of the world's sea-traded oil passes through daily may become a new flashpoint after a top Iranian Navy general said Monday that the country has taken full control of the Strait of Hormuz.

The head of the navy of Irans Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Alireza Tangsiri, said that Iran had full control of both the Persian Gulf itself and the Strait of Hormuz that leads into it, Reuters reported.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded Monday night: "The Islamic Republic of Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait is an international waterway. The United States will continue to work with our partners to ensure freedom of navigation and free flow of commerce in international waterways."

The strait, which at its narrowest point is 21 miles wide, has shipping lanes that are 2 miles wide in each direction and is the only sea passage from many of the world's largest oil producers to the Indian Ocean.

"It's a very contentious area," retired Lt. Col. Bob Maginnis told Fox News' "Your World with Neil Cavuto" earlier this month.

The Strait of Hormuz is where most of the oil from Saudi Arabia passes through, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The Saudis have constructed pipelines to bypass the strait, but a majority of crude oil is shipped by sea, meaning that any action by Iran to halt shipping may impact consumers across the world.

"The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, even temporarily, could lead to substantial increases in total energy costs," the agency said in a 2012 report.

At the beginning of August, Iran began a large-scale exercise in the Strait of Hormuz involving more than 50 small boats, practicing swarming operations that could potentially shut down the vital waterway if ever deployed for real. The drill came after President Trump pulled the U.S. out of a landmark nuclear accord with Iran and leaders of both countries exchanged fiery rhetoric.

The country routinely operates small boats in the Strait of Hormuz and the surrounding area, and has often threatened to shut down the highly traveled waterway. A check of conditions on MaritimeTraffic.com on Monday showed that conditions appeared to be normal, with heavy maritime traffic through the strait.

In recent weeks Iranian President Hassan Rouhani renewed the threat, saying that if sanctions threatened Iran's crude oil exports, the rest of the Middle East's exports would be threatened as well.

"They're causing problems once again, as predicted, in the Strait of Hormuz," Maginnis said. "This is something we've grown accustomed too."

IRAN SAYS IT HAS CONTROL OF GULF AND STRAIT OF HORMUZ: REPORT

But if Iran were to follow through with any bluster to close down the vital shipping channel, a potential U.S. response would be swift.

"The U.S. and our partners provide and promote security and stability in the region on a daily basis," Lt. Chloe Morgan, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command spokesperson, said in a statement to Fox News on Monday. "Together, we stand ready to ensure the freedom of navigation and the free flow of commerce wherever international law allows."

Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, said earlier this month that Iran was showcasing its military capabilities and has the ability to plant mines and explosive boats in the waterway, as well as use missiles and radar along the coast. He stressed the U.S. and allies routinely train for that possibility and are prepared to insure that freedom of navigation and commerce continues in those waters.

"We are aware of what's going on and we remain ready to protect ourselves," he told reporters.

Fox News security analyst Walid Phares told Fox Business Network's "Varney & Co." that the Iranians can damage the international passage "if they want," but that the U.S. can easily "intercept them, stop them, and damage their own capacity."

"It's kind of a brinkmanship capacity of gaming with us," Phares said. "I think the United States is very much attentive to what they are doing, and will respond if the Iranians will cross that red line."

IRAN DEPLOYS 50 SMALL BOATS TO STRAIT OF HORMUZ FOR LARGE-SCALE 'SWARMING' EXERCISE

President Obama's former National Security Adviser Jim Jones, a four-star general, said in an interview earlier this month the Iranian Navy should be "wiped out" if any action is taken to block maritime traffic.

I personally would like to see, if they ever did something in the Strait of Hormuz, I would like to see their navy disappear," Jones told The National.

Jones, who served as national security adviser for Obama from 2009 to 2010, also told the National that Iran's government is an "an existential threat to the region."

Iran has been active in Syria, backing the government of President Bashar Assad, while also stoking violence in the southern part of the country and triggering military counterattacks from Israel. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia have condemned Iran repeatedly for providing missiles to Yemeni Houthi rebels, who have fired toward Riyadh.

The Iranian officials recently threatened to block the waterway in retaliation for any hostile action by the U.S. government amid President Trumps remarks in July, which were prompted by the Iranian President Rouhani saying the U.S. risks the mother of all wars" with Iran.

Trump called for Rouhani to stop the rhetoric or  in caps lock  suffer the consequences the like of which few throughout history have ever suffered before. We are no longer a country that will stand for your demented words of violence and death. Be cautious!

Just over two weeks ago, Iran test-fired a ballistic missile as a brazen display of defiance, which coincided with the naval exercise, three U.S. officials with knowledge of the launch told Fox News at the time.

While the U.S. military publicly acknowledged the naval activity, the missile test from an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps base in Bandar-e-Jask in southeastern Iran has not been previously reported. The launch was detected by U.S. spy satellites.

Fox News' Nicholas Kalman, Lucas Tomlinson, Lukas Mikelionis and The Associated Press contributed to this report.The official Twitter account of the NEOM project announced on Sunday that the Advisory Board, which will include "a team of the world's leading minds and experts combining the best and brightest global experts to develop the future," will be announced soon.

"NEOM is ensuring that the foundations, plans, and people are in place before construction," the official Twitter account of the project said.

The statement added that the master plan of the project is in the development phase, along with the assessing environmental conditions, and evaluating bids for the construction of the accommodation and offices for engineers and supervisors.

NEOM is a planned 26,500 square kilometre economic and transitional zone slated to be constructed in northwestern Saudi Arabia, extended along the Aqaba Gulf with 468 km of coastline with coral reefs and beaches, as well as mountains up to 2,500 metres high. The industrial and business city will also link Egypt and Jordan.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi accepted the invitation of King Salman bin Abdulaziz to have a meeting in the area of the NEOM project on 14 August 2018.

During the meeting, they discussed the recent developments in the region, its national security, and the mutual interests between both countries. The meeting was also attended by several ministers and princes including the Head of the Egyptian General Intelligence, Abbas Kamel.

The city was announced by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman at the Future Investment Initiative Conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on October 24, 2017, stating that the city will operate independently from the existing governmental framework with its own taxes, labor laws, and autonomous judicial system.

The initiative is part of Saudi Vision 2030, which seeks to reduce the dependence of Saudi Arabia's economy on oil and move towards a highly technologically driven economy, especially after the recent decrease of oil prices. The first phase of the project is scheduled for completion by 2025.

The project will be funded by $500 billion from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia and international investors.

The city, which has an attractive location between three continents, along with potential use of renewable energy from the sun and wind, and a temperate Mediterranean climate, is projected to be a global hub for trade, innovation, and knowledge by bringing professional experts in fields like energy, technological and digital sciences, and biotech together.

NEOM is expected to rival the worlds most prominent cities in quality of life metrics and standards of living upon its completion.

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The Vietnamese man who ran the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison, where the late Sen. John McCain was held as a prisoner of war for more than five years, paid respect to the former U.S. Navy pilot who later was instrumental in bringing the wartime foes together.

At that time I liked him personally for his toughness and strong stance, former Col. Tran Trong Duyet, told Vietnam News on Sunday. When I learnt about his death (Sunday), I feel very sad. I would like to send condolences to his family. I think its the same feeling for all Vietnamese people as he has greatly contributed to the development of Vietnam-U.S. relations.

McCain, who was taken prisoner after his Skyhawk dive bomber was shot down over Hanoi in 1967, died of brain cancer on Saturday at age 81 in his home state of Arizona.

Duyet, who said he was very fond of McCain during his service as a U.S. senator, was among the scores of people in the former communist country paying respects to McCain.

At the monument by Truc Bach lake, where McCain landed after parachuting from his damaged plane, dozens paid their respects, leaving flowers and tokens.

Robert Gibb, an American living in Hanoi, visited the monument in the Vietnamese capital, telling the Daily Sabah that he felt compelled to come out here and bring some flowers.

He was the last guy I ever voted for president, he added. The moment he dropped in here change by life forever.

The countrys foreign minister said McCain was a symbol of his generation who helped heal the wounds of war.

Pham Binh Minh wrote in a condolence book at the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi: For both the government of Vietnam and its people, Senator McCain was a symbol of his generation of senators, and of the veterans of the Vietnam War. It was he who took the lead in significantly healing the wounds of war, and normalizing and promoting the comprehensive Vietnam-U.S. partnership.

Speaking to reporters after writing in a book of condolences, U.S. Ambassador Daniel Kritenbrink said McCain was "a great leader and real hero" who helped normalize relations between the former enemies.

"He was a warrior, he was also a peacemaker and of course he fought and suffered during the Vietnam War, but then later as a senator, he was one of the leaders who helped bring our countries back together and helped the United States and Vietnam normalize our relationship and now become partners and friends," Kritenbrink said.

McCain and then-Sen. John Kerry played important roles in the normalization of bilateral relations in 1995.

Pham Gia Minh, a 62-year-old businessman who signed the condolence book at the embassy, said he witnessed Vietnamese civilians being killed by the U.S. bombings of North Vietnam, including the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972, but he admired McCain for overcoming the difficult past to build better ties between the two countries.

"War is losses and suffering," he told the AP. "But the will of a brave nation is to go beyond that to look to the future. The Vietnamese people have that will and Mr. John McCain has that will. ... We both have that will to overcome the painful past, overcome the misunderstanding to together build a brighter future."

Hoang Thi Hang, a Hanoi resident who also signed the condolence book, said he had great respect for McCain's compassion. "He had compassion for everyone, whether they were rich or poor, whatever their background. And that is important in life."

The U.S. Embassy announced it will launch a McCain/Kerry Fellowship in which a young Vietnamese leader committed to public service will be chosen each year to travel to the U.S. on a study tour to deepen ties between the two peoples.

McCain will be buried on a grassy hill at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, right next longtime friend Chuck Larson, himself an admiral and ally throughout McCains remarkable life.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.North Korean state media accused the U.S. on Sunday of preparing for an invasion at the same time it is pursuing dialogue with the regime with a smile on its face.

An opinion piece in Rodong Sinum, the official newspaper of the Workers Party of Korea, alleged U.S. military drills in the region were extremely provocative and dangerous and threatened to derail any dialogue between the U.S. and North Korea.

The propaganda outlet cited a South Korean broadcast claiming that U.S. flew in special units from the Philippines simulating an infiltration into Pyongyang. The broadcast also claimed the USS Michigan nuclear submarine transported Green Berets, Delta Force and other special units from Japan to a South Korean naval base, according to The Washington Post.

The piece went on to accuse the U.S. of hatching a criminal plot to unleash war against North Korea and the crime would deserve merciless divine punishment.

We cannot but take a serious note of the double-dealing attitudes of the U.S. as it is busy staging secret drills involving man-killing special units while having a dialogue with a smile on its face, the piece said. The U.S. would be sadly mistaken if it thinks that it can browbeat someone through trite gunboat diplomacy which it used to employ as an almighty weapon in the past and attain its sinister intention.

The U.S. military called the accusations far fetched.

Col John Hutcheson, U.S. Forces Japan director of public affairs, told The Washington Post he wasnt sure what drills the newspaper was talking about.

U.S. aircraft routinely fly from Japan to the Philippines and other nations around the region for a variety of training and operational reasons, so the notion that any single flight is related to North Korea is a bit far fetched, he said.

Cmdr. Clay Doss, U.S. Seventh Fleet public affairs officer, told The Washington Post the report was completely false.

The accusations come days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeos trip was called off. President Trump said Friday he directed Pompeo to delay the trip because of a lack of progress in nuclear disarmament talks with North Korea, which he blamed on a lack of support from China.Japanese government officials said Monday that they were trying to ensure the safety of a Japanese tourist whom North Korea said it had expelled after detaining him on unspecified charges.

The official Korean Central News Agency said late Sunday that Japanese tourist Tomoyuki Sugimoto had been "kept under control" for questioning about "his crime," without specifying what he had been accused of.

In a two-sentence report, the news agency said the authorities decided to "to leniently condone him" and expel him on the principle of humanitarianism.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters that Japan's government was doing its "utmost," but refused to give further details, citing the sensitivity of the issue.

Japan's government confirmed about two weeks ago that it was looking into reports that one of its citizens was being held in North Korea, but has not identified the person by name.

Japan's Kyodo News agency, citing a government source, said the person was believed to be a videographer in his 30s and may have been suspected of shooting video of a military facility while on a group tour to Nampo, a port city in western North Korea.

The government had sought his release through the North Korean Embassy in Beijing, Kyodo said. Japan does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea.

North Korea has also arrested other foreign nationals. Three Korean-Americans accused of anti-state activities and detained for more than a year were released and returned home in May with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when the two sides were preparing for the June summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. American college student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested by North Korean authorities in January 2016 after being accused of stealing a propaganda poster and sentenced to 15 years in prison, died in June 2017, days after he was repatriated to the U.S. with severe brain damage.

Their arrests were widely seen as politically motivated and had compounded the dire state of relations over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

If the Japanese man's release is confirmed, his repatriation will have come quicker than some of earlier cases. A Japanese correspondent for the Nikkei newspaper was detained in North Korea for more than two years after being taken into custody on spying charges in Pyongyang in December 1999. His release was seen as an attempt by North Korea to get Japan to make concessions ahead of their planned normalization talks.

Japan and North Korea have also had disputes over abductions of Japanese citizens decades ago. Japan says North Korea abducted at least 17 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train agents in Japanese language and culture to spy on South Korea. Pyongyang has acknowledged abducting only 13 of them and said eight of them had died. Five others allowed by the North to visit Japan in 2002 stayed.

___

Associated Press writer Ken Moritsugu contributed to this report.

___

Follow Mari Yamaguchi on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mariyamaguchi

Find her work at https://www.apnews.com/search/mari%20yamaguchiPolice officers in Paraguay doing inventory of the armory were surprised to find that thieves had taken 42 powerful rifles and replaced them with wooden and plastic replicas.

The inventory of the armory in the city of Capiata, about 15 miles south of the capital Asuncion, was ordered after FN FAL battle rifles used by police started appearing in the black market, BBC News reported. The rifles can fetch up to $10,000.

ABC Digital reported the rifles had been placed in the armory storage as the police force was replacing them for newer models. They were in good working condition.

The police officer in charge of the armory has been replaced, but no arrests have been made, BBC News reported.

Authorities believe the rifles may have been smuggled into Argentina or Brazil, who have been complaining that many illegal weapons seized had been smuggled in from Paraguay. Others could have been sold to gangs or local criminals, Infobae reported.A gunman opened fire at a Madden NFL tournament Monday morning in Jacksonville, Florida, killing three people and wounding several.

According to the Jacksonville Sheriffs' Office twitter account, one suspect has been found dead at the scene, with multiple fatalities reported. They are urging those near the scene to stay away at this time.

In a press conference held later in the afternoon, Jacksonville sheriff Mike Williams stated that 3 people were killed, including the suspect. Nine people were transported to the hospital, seven of them with gunshot rooms.

Sheriff Williams also identified the suspected shooter as David Katz, a 24 year-old man from Baltimore. Williams also confirmed Katz was attending the event as a competitor.Fortnites recent Android release made headlines for skipping the Google Play Store and instead launching through an installer downloaded from Epics website, but it now looks like a significant security issue was present in the early days of that installers release.

As spotted by Android Central, Google flagged a significant security vulnerability in the Fortnite Android Installer released earlier this month, though the company notably first disclosed the issue to Epic and ensured the vulnerability was fixed before publicly detailing the flaw.

The issue itself came from the first version of the Fortnite Installer that would-be players must first download from Epic Games website to get the Fortnite app itself to their devices.

That APK came with a specific permission that opened it up to being easily hijacked by other applications seeking to download files to an Android device without the owners knowledge or permission. As Android Central explains, this specific vulnerability opens Android users up to a man-in-the-disk attack where an app already installed on their phone keeps an eye on requests from other apps on the device, and uses that flaw in apps like Epics Fortnite installer to smuggle its own malicious files onto the device.

Googles full breakdown of the issue can be found on the Issue Tracker page for the vulnerability itself, along with the exchange between Google and Epic about the flaw itself. In that exchange, Epic notably requested that Google refrain from publishing the vulnerability publicly for 90 days to give its users time to patch their devices. However, while Googles policies allow for 90 days for the developer to respond and pursue a fix before publicly revealing the error, a Google rep noted that it is standard procedure for the company to disclose the issue 7 days after it had been patched out of the offending app and posted the notice despite Epics request.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney criticized that very policy in a statement given to Android Central, saying that, while Epic appreciated the security assist from Google, it was irresponsible of the company to disclose the flaw so soon and accused Google of using the vulnerability as fuel in a PR war.

Epic genuinely appreciated Google's effort to perform an in-depth security audit of Fortnite immediately following our release on Android, and share the results with Epic so we could speedily issue an update to fix the flaw they discovered. However, it was irresponsible of Google to publicly disclose the technical details of the flaw so quickly, while many installations had not yet been updated and were still vulnerable, said Sweeney. An Epic security engineer, at my urging, requested Google delay public disclosure for the typical 90 days to allow time for the update to be more widely installed. Google refused.

Google's security analysis efforts are appreciated and benefit the Android platform, he continues. However a company as powerful as Google should practice more responsible disclosure timing than this, and not endanger users in the course of its counter-PR efforts against Epic's distribution of Fortnite outside of Google Play.



[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource Games Press.]

PARIS  Aug. 27, 2018  Publisher Dotemu (Wonder Boy, Windjammers) and developers Lizardcube (Wonder Boy) and Guard Crush Games today revealed Streets of Rage 4, an all-new continuation of SEGAs iconic arcade brawler series known for its radical fights, jammin 90s beats and dashing sparring gloves and bandanas. Featuring hand-drawn visuals from the team behind 2017s gorgeous Wonder Boy: The Dragons Trap remake, Streets of Rage 4 builds upon the classic trilogys gameplay with new mechanics, a fresh story and a gauntlet of dangerous stages with a serious crime problem. Streets of Rage 4 recalls classic gameplay but it stands as an entirely original arcade-style romp thanks to the expertise of Guard Crush Games and Dotemu. Whether players gang up with a friend or clean up the city solo, Streets of Rage 4 is a skull-bashing, chicken-chomping delight all set to a thumping soundtrack sure to get your blood pumping. To keep up to date on all things Streets of Rage 4, punch your keyboard until it types www.streets4rage.com, go to www.facebook.com/StreetsofRage4 and slice that follow button on Twitter @Dotemu, @Lizardcube and @Guard_Crush. # # # About Dotemu Dotemu is a french video game company specializing in modern releases of beloved retro games. Our mission is simple: give every gamer access to yesteryears classic video games on today's platforms, including PC, mobile, console and more. Working alongside the worlds most cherished and recognized publishers, the Dotemu team has published a number of global top-sellers across both PC and console, including Wonder Boy: The Dragons Trap, Windjammers, several games in the Ys series and more. Founded in 2007, Dotemu leverages its considerable technological know-how to maintain the original spirit of classic games while giving them a second life as rediscovered gems for a new generation of gamers. About Lizardcube Lizardcube is a Parisian games studio founded by game industry veteran Omar Cornut (Pixeljunk Shooter, Tearaway, Soul Bubbles, Dear ImGui) and traditional comic/animation artist Ben Fiquet (Soul Bubbles). It is best known for the acclaimed remake of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, praised for its gorgeous art style and retro engineering marvel. About Guard Crush Games Guard Crush Games was founded in 2009 by Jordi Asensio and Cyrille Lagarigue based on their passion for classic beat-em-up and sidescrolling titles. The team is best known for its XBox 360 release, Streets of Fury, and follow-up on PC Streets of Fury: Extended Edition in 2015, which revel in over-the-top action and capture the studios love for fun sidescrolling brawlers..



[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource Games Press.]

MADRID -- August 27th, 2018 -- Publisher Sindiecate Arts and developer Brainwash Gang invite you to experience an extraordinary simulation sandbox game examining occidental culture and its different social classes: Damnview: Built From Nothing. Coming in 2019 to PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, Damnview: Built From Nothing is told through the exploration of a decadent urban sprawl, all while working precarious jobs where you will either be absorbed into the system or cast out of societys machine. Damnview: Built From Nothing is a game about despair, the hostility of capitalism and the need for seeking a better future. The city takes on the role of an enormous monster to defeat only with your life and hard work - or maybe also with your fists and dirty money. How far youre willing to go to survive and succeed in a place like this is in your hands and sometimes being smarter, meaner or just not giving a damn is the pathway to success. Featuring a rich city teeming with different societal classes and cultures, players will discover the city through its people. Each character has its own story and purposes in life. The decisions you make in your relationships will help to determine how well you fare as you do what you need to survive. Take on a variety of occupations: drive a cab; work in a video store or a laundromat; smuggle all sorts of goods or sell drugs in the alleyways. Through the money you earn youll manage your income, build your home from nothing and try to maintain your lifestyle. However, no matter how hard you work, society may have other plans for you. Damnview: Built From Nothing arrives in 2019, but attending media are invited to book appointments to get hands on at PAX West Friday, August 31st and Saturday, September 1st.Thank you so much to all the families that stopped by the Grunion for the Belmont Shore Business Association's Trick-Or-Treat on Second Street! We saw some fantastic costumes this year, did we catch you on the Grunion camera? Check out our photo gallery below.Lebanon is third after only Morocco and Afghanistan as global supplier of cannabis resin, U.N. figures show

Locked away safely in an academics study in Lebanon is a plant that researchers hope to transform from one of the countrys most notorious exports into a lucrative pharmaceutical.

Cannabis is cultivated openly, but illegally, in parts of Lebanon, especially the Bekaa Valley where a Roman temple in the ancient city of Baalbek bears an engraving of a cannabis leaf. Today, Lebanon is third after only Morocco and Afghanistan as global supplier of cannabis resin, U.N. figures show.

While Lebanese cannabis might be prized by smokers of the narcotic, little is known of its medicinal value, something that Professor Mohammad Mroueh, who believes the plants local strain might prove particularly beneficial, hopes to change.

The government has permitted Mrouehs research, but has not yet formally approved the establishment of his Medicinal Cannabis Research Center, which opened in May and aims to join the ranks of 10 institutions worldwide studying the drug.

Mroueh is examining the medicinal properties of the local cannabis which is a hybrid between two strains: Indica and Sativa.

My impression is that it will have a different medical value because of the climatic conditions in the Bekaa Valley especially if youre talking about the amount of the rainfall, sunlight and type of soil, said Mroueh at the Byblos campus of the Lebanese American University where the center is based.

It is a beginning of the road for us. We havent even determined the genotype of the plant. We have to start from zero, he said, adding that he expected to find different percentages of the active chemicals that may help in treatments of cancer, epilepsy, diabetes and other diseases.

Medicinal Plants

In the laboratory, Dr. Wassim Shebaby, one of Mrouehs research partners, injects pink-stained leukemic cells with different concentrations of cannabis oil as a group of students huddles behind him watching.

We are studying the effect of cannabis oil on (cancer) cell growth ... This is the first time this has been done (in Lebanon), Shebaby said.

The laboratory tests on cancer cells from local patients is the first step before the team is able to expand to clinical trials and economic impact studies.

The project began in 2015 when two graduate students approached Mroueh to supervise a thesis about the plant. It took him three years to convince the universitys board as well as the ministry of health and the drug enforcement agency.

The center still needs final approval from a new government, but the country has been unable to form one since elections in May due to political squabbling over positions.

The government has indicated it is considering legalizing cannabis for medicinal use after a consulting firm it hired to advise on how to reform the economy touted it as a money-maker.

Mroueh expects hurdles but hopes the government will quickly approve the use of cannabis in palliative care.

The professor often stops by the side of the road to pick up seasonal medicinal plants he believes are unique to Lebanon, and villagers regularly call seeking advice on treatments.

When they call to ask about using cannabis to alleviate pain, Mroueh says he does not know what to tell them.

It is still a sensitive subject and you cant talk about it freely. Unfortunately, it makes me feel helpless, he said.

It is a humanitarian and moral issue. Why should a cancer patient die in pain?

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Bonn group commemorates Indian independence : Collection for flood victims at independence celebration

Bonn The Lord Mayor spoke of tolerance between cultures at the German-Indian Associations celebration. The Indian street food festival will also be used to help victims.

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The Indian Association Bonn celebrated Indias 72nd Independence Day on Saturday with a cultural programme in the Sankt Georg clubhouse. The programme was planned to take place outside but wind and rain intervened. As soon as we were inside, we realised that not everyone would fit in, explained Ranjit Singh Wadhawa, general secretary of Bonns German-Indian Association. Over 130 people had come together to celebrate India gaining independence from the British Empire 71 years ago on 15 August 1947.

Bonns Lord Mayor, Ashok Sridharan, whose father comes from south India, addressed the assembled German-Indian Association in his opening speech: the significance of Independence Day was an important sign of open-mindedness and tolerance between different cultures and religions.

He and the oldest person at the event raised the Indian flag. This Indian tradition is borne out of respect for age, explained Singh Wadhawa. This year, it fell to the general secretarys father, Iqbal Singh Wadhawa. The 86-year-old personally witnessed Independence Day in India. Sometimes he talks about it, but he cant do that every year, Singh Wadhawa stressed. This year the catastrophe in south India overshadowed the festival. 324 people have died in the floods in Kerala this month.

Indian Street Food Festival in Bonn

More than 223,000 people have had to leave their homes, explained Singh Wadhawa. It is the worst flood in the last hundred years. Together with the Andheri-Hilfe, we were able to collect 832 Euros for the victims, said Singh Wadhawa.

On Sunday 23 September, the German-Indian Association is holding an Indian Street Food Festival in front of the Old Town Hall in Bonn to collect further donations for those affected by the flood disaster. At the event An evening in Rajasthan at the Bruckenforum in Beuel on Wednesday 3 October, two Euros from each entrance ticket will go to the people of Kerala. The eight person dance and music group Khatu Sapera from Rajasthan will appear there on 3 October to mark 65 years of German-Indian relations and German Reunification Day.SEATTLE, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TiE Seattle, the local chapter of the largest entrepreneur network in the world, is expanding its programs that focus on ideation and funding to special domains and industries with its first-ever Travel and Hospitality Technology Panel on Thursday, September 6, starting at 6:30 pm at Soma Towers, Bellevue, Washington.



Top executives from the travel and hospitality industry - Aman Butani, President at Expedia, Carla Murray, SVP at Marriott International and Charu Jain, CIO at Alaska Airlines - will share their insights on how technology is fundamentally changing this $2.3 trillion dollar a year industry, including how the industry is poised at the cusp of major change, fueled by new and emerging technologies that offer tremendous opportunities for the tech entrepreneurs, investors and business suppliers. Charter member Malay Verma, EVP of Zensar Technologies, will moderate the event.

Panel attendees will have the opportunity to connect with these industry experts, as well as other entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders.

Topics to be covered include:

How the travel and hospitality industry is rapidly changing, with new entrants challenging and disrupting traditional businesses

The impact of changing demographics and tastes on travel businesses and how they can leverage new technologies to provide personalized services to keep disruptors at bay

The importance of balancing technology with the customer experience and how to accomplish it

Keeping an eye on privacy and security while offering personalization and convenience

The panel is one in a series that TiE regularly hosts on industries where innovation is rife and wealth is being created. They are designed to create dialog between the entrepreneur, enterprise and investor as well as develop relationships beyond the event.

If you have an idea, a startup or a fund serving the travel and hospitality industry, you want to attend this event, said Sharmilli Ghosh, president of TiE Seattle.

Cost is $15 for non-TiE members and $5 for TiE members. To register, please visit https://hub.tie.org/e/industry-spotlight--travel-technology-copy-2 .

About TiE Seattle

TiE is the largest global non-profit, with 61 chapters in 17 countries, aggregating a network of over 15,000 entrepreneurs, startup advisors and venture capitalists.

TiE operates on five pillars: education, mentoring, networking, incubation and funding. The TiE network provides entrepreneurs the support needed to go from ideation to funding.

The TiE network is 26 years old. TiE Seattle was founded in 2000 by a group of successful entrepreneurs to support entrepreneurship in the greater Seattle area. TiE Seattle hosts numerous programs and events throughout the year, to bring together entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, mentors, advisors, service providers and investors and thereby grow the network and strengthen the platform. TiE events are sponsored by the leading VCs, enterprises and law firms fostering entrepreneurship in the Seattle startup ecosystem.An Egyptian archaeological mission discovered a Ptolemaic necropolis in Alexandrias western cemetery while carrying out a preliminary archaeological inspection before erecting an iron gate around a workshop at the Gabal Al-Zaytoun railway station in Alexandria.

Mostafa Waziri, the secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Ahram Online that the ministry has allocated money for an excavation and to uncover the remaining part of the cemetery. He added that the mission found a collection of rock-hewn tombs with stairs leading to a small hall that may had been used as a resting area for visitors, as well as another open court surrounded by burial recesses.

Aymen Ashmawi, the head of the Ancient Egyptian Antiquities Sector, said that the mission also unearthed a collection of lamps decorated with animal scenes and a cistern for funerary rituals, along with a number of clay and glass pots. A collection of skeletons and human bones were also uncovered.

Early studies show that this necropolis had been used across several historical periods and that it was dedicated to impoverished citizens, Ashmawi explains. He added that some of the tombs featured coloured and decorated layers of plaster, while other parts were coloured less.

Regretfully the tombs are in very poor condition due to a lack of conservation during the British colonial period when the railways were constructed, as well as the deterioration suffered as a result of the military invasion in World War II.

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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.For years, Illinois universities have watched as thousands of the state's best and brightest students headed elsewhere for college.Lured by generous scholarship offers, and spooked by the state's budget stalemate and rising tuitions, Illinois students have increasingly pursued their higher education in other states. Enrollment has slid, and Illinois is losing far more local students to other states than it is attracting nonresidents to attend college here.Now, the University of Illinois and a bipartisan group of lawmakers want to change that.On Monday, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is announcing a free tuition and fees program for admitted Illinoisans whose family income meets or falls below the state median. That follows several bills signed recently by Gov. Bruce Rauner aimed at persuading local students to choose Illinois colleges. One new measure sets aside $25 million for public universities to match and create a pool of merit-based scholarships, not based on financial need.Education officials have spent years warning that the state's problems with enrollment, infrastructure, tuition and funding -- all of which were exacerbated by the yearslong budget impasse -- were giving higher education in Illinois a black eye. Universities in other states have, in turn, aggressively courted top students from Illinois with generous, merit-based financial aid packages. But in a shift, many now see signs that state politicians are embracing the same urgency to retain local students and are willing to back it up with new public policy."We've been making this case as strongly as we could for quite a while, and we're very happy to see the state legislators and the governor and the Higher Education Working Group start to focus on this issue," said Tim Killeen, president of University of Illinois. "It's not just for U. of I. but for the whole state."Sen. Pat McGuire, D-Crest Hill, is among the legislators who formed that working group last year; its 12 members come from both houses and parties. After months of research and collaboration with university experts, the group listed a half-dozen immediate initiatives.Rauner signed four bills born out of that group, all of which generated near unanimous support in Springfield."Yes, we feel urgency. We have a sense of common purpose," McGuire said. "I hope that it will help students and families gain a sense of confidence about Illinois higher education.""This is the first we've seen in a long time, a public policy interest in higher education in Illinois," said Joni Finney, director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania. "Now it's about finding the set of public policies that you have to put together to be in place for the long term to turn this ship around."U. of I.'s new program, Illinois Commitment, launches in fall 2019 for freshmen and new transfer students under 24 years old.The program pledges to pay tuition and basic fees for in-state residents accepted to U. of I. and whose family income is $61,000 or less. The family must also have less than $50,000 in assets to be eligible. Posted tuition and fees for in-state students this year are between $16,000 and $21,000, according to U. of I.'s website. Illinois' truth-in-tuition law requires tuition to remain the same for students for four years.The funding is good for up to four years of uninterrupted enrollment for new students and three years for transfer students, provided they make satisfactory progress toward a degree.Illinois Commitment covers tuition for any program -- areas like engineering typically charge more -- but not room and board, books, course or laboratory fees, all elements that comprise a sizable chunk of the cost to attend college.U. of I. is spending $4 million each of the next four years to support the initiative, officials said.Illinois long has shouldered a reputation for being too expensive, particularly for low- and middle-income families, Chancellor Robert Jones said in an interview. While the three Illinois campuses have frozen base tuition for four years, first-time undergraduate costs at Urbana-Champaign are higher than many schools of similar enrollment and research activity, according to school officials and federal data.U. of I. devotes the majority of its financial aid based on need, and the majority of students do not pay the full published price of attendance. But that has not done enough for some prospective students, Jones said."We know firsthand there are far too many students who have worked hard that really don't bother about applying because of the optics out there that they can't afford it," Jones said.Jones said officials want more applicants from underrepresented geographic and socioeconomic groups. But Illinois also loses ground on affordability when admitted students enroll elsewhere for better financial aid."It's a key part of the overarching process -- accessibility to a world-class education," Jones said. "We have not been in a very competitive position in the two years I've been here, and this will be a course correction that we think is going to have a tremendous impact."While Illinois invests more heavily in income-based financial aid, state legislators also focused in on merit-based aid -- a tool other states have successfully wielded to lure high-achieveing Illinoisans to their institutions. The University of Alabama, for example, has nearly quintupled its merit scholarship pool over the past decade. Illinois students have followed. Alabama awarded 203 full-tuition scholarships, out of 305 total, to freshman Illinoisans in 2017, defraying more than $100,000 in costs per student.In response, lawmakers established the AIM HIGH Grant Pilot Program, a merit-based scholarship program for Illinoisans. Starting in 2019, schools can apply to the Illinois Student Assistance Commission for a share of $25 million, which the schools must match with institutional funds. Universities then may award scholarships covering whatever costs the schools determine for admitted full-time students.The provision establishing the grant will be repealed in October 2024. It is not clear how much money the state legislature will allocate to it in upcoming years."It makes sense, given competition from out-of-state schools, to offer additional merit-based scholarships so that more families see our universities as affordable," Al Bowman, executive director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, said in a statement.Another new policy establishes a priority system in 2020 for the Monetary Award Program, which distributes state-funded grants for low-income students. Returning students who previously received MAP grants can jump to the head of the line to receive funding. Students must reapply for MAP each year and submit a federal student aid application by an early deadline to take advantage.The goal is to provide better year-over-year assurance of grants. It does not guarantee grants because it relies upon the state renewing and timely providing MAP funding. Grants were severely delayed during the budget impasse, and some universities picked up the tab to help students stay enrolled.Two higher education experts pointed to these issues in evaluating some of Illinois' recent moves.Finney of UPenn consulted with Illinois legislators on their policy development. She said she was concerned about increasing merit-based aid and said Illinois instead should devote more resources to MAP. State data show MAP is persistently underfunded and can support neither the total number of eligible students nor the full cost of tuition for recipients.Thomas Harnisch, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, had similar reservations."Merit-based aid has traditionally benefited wealthier students who would likely go to college anyway," Harnisch said. "The best response would be sufficient and sustained funding of the state's public colleges and universities along with robust financial aid for the state's needy students. "Other new laws endorsed by Rauner allow students to use any state university credits toward a community college associate's degree; set new requirements for academic advising; and establish a statewide task force to collect and analyze high school and college student data.McGuire, the state senator, said the working group is gearing up again with plans to tackle another Illinois bugaboo: public university funding. State dollars comprised three-quarters of university income as recently as 2002. Now tuition and fees dominate, driving up the prices for families.Overall, leaders and experts agree the signs are auspicious."I think some political leaders are starting to realize the extent of the damage the budget impasse did to Illinois and its higher education system," said Harnisch, of AASCU. "These bills won't undo that damage, but it's a step in the right direction."Maine's high court ruled on Thursday that Gov. Paul LePage's administration must follow an earlier court order to submit a Medicaid expansion plan to the federal government, even as the justices sent significant constitutional questions about implementation back to a lower court.The 6-1 ruling from the Maine Supreme Judicial Court is procedural, but it is nonetheless a boon to advocates' court fight to expand Medicaid eligibility to an estimated 70,000 Mainers. Still, the issue will assuredly continue to wend its way through the state's legal system for weeks.Thursday's ruling leaves key questions unresolved but may continue the slow march that Medicaid expansion has faced in Maine since before it passed in a 2017 referendum. The Republican governor vetoed expansion bills five times before then. Last month, House Republicans sustained a veto of the Legislature's start-up funding plan.While lawmakers have squabbled over that and other issues, two key deadlines under the expansion law have come and gone. By April 3, the state was to file a simple expansion plan with the federal government. Mainers were to be eligible for expanded coverage as of July 2.The LePage administration has argued it doesn't have to file the plan because the Legislature hasn't successfully appropriated any money to fund expansion, but advocates have argued that the money could come from the state's surplus, which stood at $175 million at June's end.Maine Superior Court Judge Michaela Murphy agreed with advocates in early June, ordering the state to submit the plan within a week. The LePage administration quickly filed a notice of appeal for that decision and asked the high court to put it on hold at least until arguments were heard in Portland earlier this month.The high court did that until Thursday, when six members of the court joined a decision by Justice Joseph Jabar directing the Maine Department of Health and Human Services to file the plan while sending unresolved questions back to Murphy. Justice Donald Alexander dissented.Importantly, Jabar's decision charged Murphy with resolving "any issues that may have arisen" now that the July 2 deadline for coverage under the voter-approved law has passed. Any decision she makes could then be appealed to the high court again."That's a very important step forward and we think the other questions will be satisfactorily resolved in due course and that people will start getting health care who haven't had it," said Charlie Dingman, a lawyer for the progressive Maine Equal Justice Partners, which is leading the lawsuit that was filed in late April after the state missed the plan deadline.LePage spokesman Peter Steele said the governor's legal team is "studying the decision and considering the options," but that the decision didn't address LePage's stance that an appropriation from the Legislature is required before expansion moves forward.Connecticut resident Caitlin Clarkson Pereira has always shown a "minor" interest in politics, she says. Like many other women, though, she became more politically active after the 2016 presidential election.Her civic engagement began with protests. She participated in the 2017 Womens March and an airport protest in New York City against President Trumps travel ban. By December, she decided to run for the Connecticut state House of Representatives.While campaigning, and working a full-time job at Southern Connecticut State University, child care for her 3-year-old daughter quickly became an issue. Many state and local candidates are prohibited from using campaign funds for child care, says Richard Briffault, a government ethics expert and professor at Columbia Law School.But with an unprecedented number of women running for office, some are rethinking that rule.In May, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) ruled that congressional candidates can use campaign funds for child care. Since then, Clarkson Pereira and other state and local candidates across the country, many of them running their first campaign, have been petitioning to get their child care covered.They have received mixed responses.Child care expenses in campaign ethics had not received much national attention prior to the FEC decision, says Briffault. To him, the reasoning behind campaign expenses and personal expenses "is pretty straightforward.""[A campaign expense] is incurred because you are in a campaign versus an expense you would be incurring whether or not you are in a campaign," Briffault says. "If you had previously hired outside help for child care [prior to running for office], its not clear why you should be able to have a tax-exempt fund for this." But if a person suddenly needs to hire more outside help "because she is in a campaign, then that is a legitimate thing to do."In the case of Jenn Gray, a candidate for the Alabama House, the state's Ethics Commission in June determined that candidates may use campaign funds for child care "if tied to a specific campaign event." Gray has a remote job that allows her to look after her 10-year-old daughter who is on the autism spectrum. But since the campaign started, she does not have the same flexibility to care for her daughter.The decision is an important victory for all parents, she says. Alabama Ethics Commission Chair Jerry Fielding described it as a logical request and recalled his familys need to provide child care during his run for circuit judge in 1982.Catie Robinson, who is running for commissioner in Wichita County, Texas, also received positive news. The Texas Ethics Commission in June said it will allow candidates to use political contributions for campaign-related child care. The first-time candidate says she initially took up a part-time job as a Starbucks barista to help with the child care costs incurred due to her campaign. The ruling was a big relief.There are so many more women running for office now.  Its matter of the law catching up hopefully, Robinson says.Not all candidates have received such happy news.Last month, the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board ruled against Reyma McCoy McDeid, who lost her bid for state House but incurred child care costs during her campaign.The board thought this matter was "best left to the legislature," said Megan Tooker, the board's executive director and legal counsel, in an emailed statement. In its opinion, the board cited the Iowa code, which states that candidates "shall not use campaign funds for personal expenses or personal benefit."In Connecticut, Clarkson Pereira also faces an uphill battle. The compliance unit of the Connecticut Elections Enforcement Commission issued an opinion on Thursday advising her against using campaign funds to cover child care."The Citizens' Election Program regulations provide that funds are not to be spent on items that are personal in nature, even if some use may be campaign-related," the opinion reads.This opinion, however, is not a formal decision, says Joshua Foley, a staff attorney with the commission, and Clarkson Pereira can appeal to the commission itself for a "declaratory ruling."Despite the setback, Clarkson Pereira says she will continue to advocate for changes that benefit working families."This is exactly why we have unequal representation in Hartford," she wrote in an email. "The system precludes many residents from running. ... This opinion is certainly disappointing, but it also fuels my passion to keep pushing forward."Gov. Paul LePage was hospitalized at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor over the weekend after experiencing unspecified "discomfort" while visiting family in New Brunswick, according to the governor's office.LePage, 69, was taken to a New Brunswick hospital Saturday evening when he felt some discomfort. After an examination, he was transported by ambulance to a Presque Isle hospital, and was in "good spirits" during the ride, Peter Steele, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement Sunday afternoon. His wife, Ann, accompanied him.LePage was later transferred to Eastern Maine Medical Center late Saturday night."Doctors said he is very strong and healthy. But they are keeping him in the hospital overnight for further observation. The Governor is stable and is expected to make a full recovery," Steele said in a statement.LePage, elected 2010, is nearing the end of his second and final term in office, as Maine limits governors to two terms. He previously served as the mayor of Waterville, a central Maine city of about 16,000 people. LePage did not exceed 50 percent of the popular vote in either gubernatorial election, both of which were multi-candidate races.LePage's time in office has been tumultuous, and he has sparred with Democrats, the media, the Maine NAACP, advocates for immigrant rights and others. He has touted his record as a staunch fiscal conservative, including guiding the state to a surplus of more than $175 million at the end of the most recent fiscal year.Maryland House Speaker Michael E. Busch stripped Del. Curt Anderson of his legislative leadership posts Friday after an ethics committee ordered the Baltimore Democrat to undergo sexual harassment training following the completion of its investigation into multiple allegations against him.Busch's action came two days after Anderson, a Baltimore Democrat, appeared before the Joint Committee on Legislative Ethics to answer allegations of misbehavior from female lawmakers and staffers.The panel decided unanimously that Anderson must undergo "one-on-one intensive" sexual harassment awareness and prevention training, Busch said in a statement.In a brief interview, Anderson, 68, said he believed the actions by the committee and Busch were "fair" but said any further remarks would have to come from the speaker's office.The veteran lawmaker, who has chaired the Baltimore House delegation since 2007, declined to say whether he will continue to seek re-election in November. He has faced pressure to drop out of the race.Busch said he decided on his own to relieve Anderson of his positions as a subcommittee chairman on the Judiciary Committee and as deputy majority whip."The House of Delegates has zero tolerance for sexual harassment or misconduct," Busch said in a statement. "My goal has been and continues to be to make Maryland the safest legislative workplace in the country."Busch spokeswoman Alexandra Hughes said the speaker's office had not yet received the committee's full report.Maryland lawmakers spent seven hours behind closed doors Wednesday as a legislative ethics panel met to consider allegations against Del. Curt Anderson, who has been accused by several women of sexual misbehavior.Anderson, a Baltimore Democrat, arrived in Annapolis a few minutes after the scheduled...The panel has the authority to recommend far harsher penalties, including expulsion, censure or reprimand. That it did not make such recommendations could indicate the panel did not have evidence to substantiate certain allegations.The ethics panel normally has 12 members, half delegates and half senators. For now its ranks are down to 11 because of one Republican vacancy. The committee's deliberations are confidential by law. After Wednesday's hearing, members declined to discuss what happened behind closed doors.In June five women -- two former staffers and three lawmakers -- told The Baltimore Sun that an investigator hired by the ethics committee had interviewed them about their experiences with Anderson.The accusations ranged from an alleged sexual assault 14 years ago to an unwanted kiss and inappropriate comments about women's appearance.While Anderson won the nomination for one of the three delegate seats from the 43rd District in the June primary, some of his fellow Democrats have urged him to drop his candidacy before Tuesday's deadline for the party to replace him on the ballot. He already was expected to relinquish his delegation chairmanship.In his statement, Busch said he sent a referral to the ethics committee in January regarding accusations of a "pattern of conduct" in Anderson's interactions with female staffers and members. Busch said it was the first time he had used his statutory authority to refer a matter to the panel.Baltimore Del. Mary L. Washington on Wednesday questioned the pace of the ethics investigation into Del. Curt Anderson's alleged sexual misconduct and challenged legislative leaders to explain why they kept the inquiry quiet for so long.Washington, who represents North Baltimore's 43rd District...Busch, an Anne Arundel County Democrat, said the committee, as required by law, referred the matter to a law enforcement agency before beginning its investigation. He said that once the agency gave its permission to proceed, the panel hired an independent investigator.The speaker said the committee and the investigator interviewed 22 witnesses and spent over 430 hours examining the allegations.In previous cases involving ethical violations, Busch has added to other penalties by removing members from longtime committee assignments. In some ways, it is an even sterner sanction than losing leadership posts because members develop an expertise and comfort in dealing with their committee's subject area -- as Anderson has on Judiciary.Hughes said Busch has not made decisions on committee assignments for the term that begins next January.Anderson, a lawyer and former TV broadcaster, served three years in the House between 1983 and 1995. He returned in 2003 and is now in his seventh term.Busch said in the statement that the legislature is "still working to ensure that every victim feels safe coming forward" to discuss any inappropriate behavior in the workplace. He said the process established by sexual harassment legislation passed this year has worked."We try to strike the careful balance of the need for public transparency with the necessity of protecting the victims," he said.Busch noted that a commission set up to make additional recommendations for handling allegations among the General Assembly staff and workforce is expected to report its findings this fall.Del. Ariana Kelly, past president of the legislature's women's caucus and lead sponsor of the legislation, took a mixed view of the actions taken on Anderson."There's little to no evidence that remedial sexual harassment training works, but what does speak to people is power," Kelly said. "Stripping people of their leadership positions sends a message to the body that sexual harassment won't be tolerated."Failed bill

Landmark case

CPAN disagrees

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan is turning to the courts to lower Michigan's highest-in-the-nation auto insurance rates after failing to get the state Legislature last year to back an overhaul of the no-fault insurance system.Duggan, joined by eight motorists across the state who are also plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court in Detroit that seeks to have Michigan's no-fault law declared unconstitutional.The lawsuit, against Michigan's insurance director, asks the court to declare the 1973 no-fault law unconstitutional for failing to produce car insurance rates that are "fair and equitable."It then wants the court to give the state six months to amend the law so that rates will fall. And if the state can't fix no-fault in that time, Duggan's lawsuit says the court should declare no-fault "null and void" and revert Michigan into a tort-based insurance system, similar to Ohio, Indiana and 36 other states where auto insurance is much cheaper.Under a tort system, the Democratic mayor said he thinks auto insurance rates in Detroit would be cut in half.Duggan's lawsuit reads as an indictment against the no-fault system for leading to runaway medical costs, unchecked greed and fraud and a surge in recent years of auto accident-related litigation.Under Michigan's unique no-fault system, all motorists must buy coverage for potentially unlimited medical benefits. Benefit payouts are capped in the other 11 no-fault states, and motorists in tort states get minimal health care through car insurance.The costs to Michigan consumers for no-fault's medical benefits go beyond the $192 annual per-vehicle fee charged by the Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association to reimburse insurance companies for accident victims whose medical bills exceeded $550,000.A spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Insurance and Financial Services, the defendant in the lawsuit, declined comment because the department has yet to see the lawsuit.For Duggan, the lawsuit could be considered a Plan B for lowering car insurance rates for Detroiters after the proposed no-fault overhaul bill that he championed was voted down in November by a 63-45 vote in the state House of Representatives."I thought it was so obvious that the trial lawyers and the hospitals were ripping us off, that I would have no trouble convincing legislators to have a conscience and fix it," Duggan said Thursday at a news conference. "I no longer have faith in Lansing to do the right thing."That bill called for numerous controversial changes to no-fault, including restraints on medical provider pay and giving all Michigan motorists a first-ever choice in the amount of health insurance they are required to buy as part of their auto insurance.These health insurance benefits in no-fault policies, known as "personal injury protection," now represent the biggest portion of auto insurance premiums in Detroit. The no-fault system allows lawyers who represent people in accidents to get 33 percent of their client's total medical bills as a retainer fee."My friends over at DMC and Henry Ford (hospital systems) are getting paid triple their normal rates. The lawyers take a third, they still get double," Duggan told reporters Thursday. "So the hospitals make out, the lawyers make out and people in Michigan are paying the highest rates in America."Critics of last fall's Duggan-backed insurance overhaul bill said it could have led to the end of the no-fault system and its valuable safety net for catastrophically injured people, who might otherwise end up in Medicaid-paid nursing homes instead of receiving the quality in-home care now available.Under the bill, those who exhausted their no-fault coverage options would have had to fall back on regular health insurance.The lawsuit filed Thursday hinges on a 1978 Michigan Supreme Court decision in a landmark case called Shavers v. Kelley that upheld the concept of no-fault insurance, but found the law "unconstitutionally deficient" for lacking mechanisms to ensure that insurance -- a product all Michigan motorists are required to buy -- is available at "fair and equitable rates."The state Supreme Court in that case gave the Legislature and governor 18 months to correct no-fault's problems. The Legislature went on to pass reforms in 1979. Three years later, the Supreme Court kept no-fault in place because there was no further challenge to the law -- not specifically because of the 1979 reforms.Duggan's lawsuit says the car insurance rates problem has only grown worse since then, and is therefore unconstitutional.A report by The Zebra, an insurance comparison website, found that Michigan had the nation's most expensive auto insurance rates at $2,610 per year. The analysis was done late last year and based on a 30-year-old single male with a good driving history driving a 2013 Honda Accord EX.The city of Detroit had the highest rates of any city in the insurance comparison: $5,414 per year.Last year, the Detroit Police Department issued 23,087 citations to motorists for driving without insurance. The department has estimated that 60 percent of Detroit drivers go without insurance, largely because of the high cost.The Coalition Protecting Auto No-Fault, a group of medical providers, patient advocates and trial lawyers known as CPAN, issued a statement that called Duggan's lawsuit a political stunt that wrongly blames no-fault instead of insurers for the high premiums."CPAN is deeply concerned about the lawsuit that aims to make sweeping and potentially devastating changes to Michigan's auto no-fault law, a move that will allow insurance companies to sell worse plans with no guaranteed reduction in rates," coalition President John Cornack said.Attorney George Sinas, a no-fault expert who teaches auto insurance at Michigan State University College of Law and is general counsel for CPAN, said a major flaw in Duggan's lawsuit is its disregard of the role insurance companies have in setting rates, using factors such as credit scores, professions and whether or not someone has a college degree."The mayor's lawsuit doesn't in any way attack the real problem here, which is a rate-making structure that allows rules to be utilized by the insurance industry that are inherently unfair and discriminatory," Sinas said. "The mayor doesn't say anything about that, and by not saying anything, he implicitly blesses the practices of the insurers."Sinas also said that he suggested to a top Detroit official several years ago that the city file a lawsuit about unaffordable insurance rates that was based on the Supreme Court's 1978 Shavers decision, but focused instead on the questionable ways that insurance companies calculate motorists' premiums."This lawsuit could have asked for the insurance bureau to conduct a hearing and determine whether all of the rate-making practices being used by insurance companies today are fair and equitable," Sinas said. "I suggested that, but was essentially laughed at."Duggan's lawsuit contends that no-fault became unconstitutionally unaffordable in Michigan for several reasons, including the unlimited medical benefits, overpriced medical services and "no effective protections against those auto accident attorneys who encourage over-treatment and who pursue large (no-fault) recoveries for minor injuries."Speaking with reporters, Duggan said that his policy preference is for no-fault insurance to completely go away."Ohio and Indiana haven't dropped off into the ocean because they have a tort system," Duggan said. "In all the other states, once your car insurance runs out, you're covered by your normal health insurance -- that might be Blue Cross, it might be Health Alliance Plan, it might be Obamacare, it might be Medicare, it might be Medicaid."The only place in America that says no matter what other health care you already have, you have to pay double when you buy your car insurance, is Michigan, and that's what has to stop," the mayor said.The other eight plaintiffs in the lawsuit are:* Carrol Lockett, 69, of Oak Park, who pays $329 per month for auto insurance, despite a clean driving record and no accidents in more than 20 years.* Joseph Vaughn, 53, of Detroit, who is currently uninsured and recently received a price quote of $4,000 for six months of coverage, which was unaffordable for him.* Gladys "Peggy" Noble, 76, of Detroit, a retired social worker with a good driving record who pays $219 per month for basic coverage on her 2002 Chevy Impala.* Stephanie Huby, 49, of Eastpointe, who pays $250 per month.* Ian Davis, 27, of Oak Park, who pays about $200 per month for his 2012 Honda Civic.* Haley Roell, 20, of Ann Arbor, a University of Michigan student.* Jacintha Pittman, 39, of New Haven, who pays $325 per months for her 2008 Saturn VUE.* Clayton Wortmann, 25, of Detroit, who pays $280 per month for his 2015 Chevy Cruze.Description

GIS 27 August, 2018: A delegation led by the Minister Mentor , Minister of Defence and Minister for Rodrigues, Sir Anerood Jugnauth , and comprising of the Chairman and Leader of the Chagos Refugees Group, Mr Olivier Bancoult, as well as other members of the Chagossian community, will participate in the public hearings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which will be held from 03 to 06 September 2018 in The Hague, Netherlands.

The Prime Minister, Minister of Home Affairs, External Communications and National Development Unit, Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mr Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, made this announcement on Friday 24 August 2018 during a press conference at the New Treasury Building, in Port Louis.

He reiterated that the denial of the right of Mauritians, particularly those of Chagossian origin, to settle in the Chagos Archipelago is a manifest breach of international law and a violation of their human rights. In the light of this issue, he recalled, the United Nations General Assembly had sought for an advisory opinion of the ICJ on the legal consequences of the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965, to which some 94 countries reacted favourably.

The request, he pointed out, was based on two legal questions pertaining to whether the process of decolonisation of Mauritius was lawfully completed when the country was granted Independence in 1968, following the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius; and the consequences under international law, arising from the continued administration by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of the Chagos Archipelago, including the resettlement of Chagossians on their native place.

The Prime Minister highlighted that in this context, Mauritius along with the African Union and nine countries have already submitted their written comments to the ICJ in absolute confidentiality. Mauritius, he added, will be the first State to intervene at the hearings and will make its oral statement on Monday 03 September 2018 from 12 00 hrs to 15 00 hrs (Mauritius time). The oral statement of Mauritius will be followed by that of the UK in the afternoon of the same day. Other States will make their oral statements during the sittings which will be held over the remaining two days.

Prime Minister Jugnauth underlined that Government is determined to improve the welfare of the Chagossian community and support their legitimate right to resettle in the Chagos Archipelago while adding that the country has reached a crucial phase in its efforts to complete the decolonisation process. He thus called for national unity and expressed great hope for fruitful outcomes at the ICJ.

For his part, Mr Olivier Bancoult, emphasised that the public hearings of the ICJ mark a milestone moment in the long-lasting struggle of Chagossians against the disrespect of their rights to resettling on their native place. He reaffirmed the full support of the Chagos community to Government's pursuit for the completion of the decolonisation process of Mauritius and excision of sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago.

On this score, he urged all Mauritians irrespective of their religious and political belonging, to join efforts in the fight against the violation of human rights as this matter concerns each and every one.Description

GIS  27 August, 2018: Government is committed to combat the social scourge of domestic violence by revising laws and coming up with new ways to support the economic empowerment of women who are victims of domestic violence, said the Vice-Prime Minister, Minister of Local Government and Outer Islands, Minister of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare, Mrs Fazila Jeewa-Daureeawoo.

The Vice-Prime Minister made this statement today during a site visit at Passerelle, a Non-Governmental Organisation based in Highlands. She was accompanied by the Minister of Family Affairs of the Republic of Seychelles, Mrs Mitcy Marise Larue.

Government, Mrs Jeewa-Daureeawoo recalled, has put in place several programmes such as Womens Economic Empowerment, Victim Empowerment and Abuser Rehabilitation Policy, and Integrated Support Service, to provide victims of domestic violence with a comprehensive and integrated service. This service will allow victims to benefit from an immediate, consistent, coordinated and timely support and counselling as well as enable them to become economically independent and self-sufficient, she pointed out.

Furthermore, the Vice-Prime Minister underpinned the necessity for families to bring about a change in mindset as well as the importance to give equal and same treatment and facilities to both boys and girls. She called on each and everyone to participate actively to help combat domestic violence by inculcating the right values from childhood itself and help to address the issue of gender equality.

For her part, Minister Larue spoke of the importance of the exchange of information with regards to tackling domestic violence cases both in Seychelles and Mauritius. Adequate education and the collaboration of government are prerequisites in this endeavour, she stated.

The Minister also expressed a keen interest to deepen the existing bilateral ties between Seychelles and Mauritius by strengthening collaboration on issues pertaining to gender equality and women emancipation.

The Seychellois Minister is currently in Mauritius to participate,on 28 and 29 August 2018, in the Indian Ocean Rim Associations Ministerial Conference on Womens Economic Empowerment: A pre-requisite for Sustainable Development.

The Ministerial Conference aims at identifying and formulating gender-responsive initiatives and strategies on Womens Economic Empowerment in a bid to address gender gaps; and, fostering information and knowledge-sharing on policies, programmes, initiatives and best practices that promote the economic empowerment of women.(TNS)  Late last month, a Toyota Corolla crashed into a Savannah, Ga., home after the driver lost control of the vehicle on DeRenne Avenue and hit a car parked outside the residence, resulting in the Corolla's owner being transported to Memorial Health University Medical Center with serious injuries.Two weeks earlier, SWAT unit rushed inside a business on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and apprehended a barricaded gunman after failing to get the suspect to exit the building.And on June 27, a group of Savannah police cadets located a missing 2 year old during a mass search in the woods near Savannah Highlands.All three incidents represent times when officers could have benefited from having an eye in the sky, according to interim Savannah Police Chief Mark Revenew.That is why the department is moving forward with a plan initially proposed by former Chief Joseph Lumpkin to use small unmanned aerial systems, commonly referred to as drones, to aid in searches for missing persons, barricaded gunman incidents and accident investigations, Revenew said."You take a picture and you know what you see in the lens, but what prints out is just a piece of paper," he said. "Having that whole aerial view is amazing."On Monday, the city issued a bid request for the purchase of three of the drones, each with their own specialized features for the type of assistance they are meant to provide. High-resolution cameras will provide a full picture of the accident scenes that can be documented and cleared more quickly with the use of the technology, Revenew said, while thermal imaging can be used to pick up the heat signatures of missing people that could go unnoticed by the eye alone. The drone that will be used during SWAT calls will have the ability to snake through the building to help locate suspects and identify innocent bystanders, in addition to closely examining potential bombs, Revenew said."You'd be able to get a better view of the package without putting officers at risk," he said.Savannah will be joining at least three other police departments in Georgia that that use drones, including the city of Duluth and Gwinnett and Henry counties.Gwinnett Master Police Officer Michael Niziurski said his department has benefited from using the devices since late 2015 mostly by providing improved documentation of accident scenes, but also assisting in the occasional SWAT operation. There has also been some cost savings achieved by not having to call in a helicopter when an accident called for a higher vantage point, Niziurski said."You've got everything in one picture," he said. "For some people it's hard to piece everything together versus with this everything is held together in one shot."State legislation governing drone usage, which was adopted last year, follows the regulations of the Federal Aviation Administration, which includes restrictions regarding hovering heights and where the devices can fly, said Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Savannah."The police are well within their right as long as they are within the federal guidelines," Stephens said.As part of the bid request, the vendor is to train officers on properly operating the drones, in addition to FAA training already being provided to some officers by the Georgia Public Safety Training Center, and the department will also develop a policy outlining the limited ways the technology will be used, Revenew said."We'll have a community meeting to address the public's concerns and to assure them publicly that these are not going to be used for any kind of surveillance or spying or anything like that," he said.Confiscated funds will be used to purchase the devices that Revenew said he expects the department to put to use within six months.CHAdeMO Association and the China Electricity Council (CEC) will jointly develop a next generation Ultra-Fast charging standard. CEC is Chinas official association of utilities in charge of their national regulations and standards related to electricity.

The two entities will sign a Memorandum of Understanding on 28 August in Beijing to launch their collaboration.

The CHAdeMO protocol, a Direct Current fast charging standard recognized by the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) (earlier post) and the most popular international standard with more than 18,500 charging points covering the EV market worldwide, set its specification at 500V and 125A when it was initially defined in 2009.

CHAdeMO Version 1.2 (published in March 2017) enabled high-power charging up to 200kW (400A x 500V).

CHAdeMO 2.0, released in May 2018, now allows for up to 400kW, making high-voltage charging up to 1kV possible using liquid-cooled cable assemblies (still with the exact same CHAdeMO plug shape) or via pantographs.

CEC, a Chinese Government-approved association in charge of standardization of EV charging equipment, is evaluating high-power charging technologies and promoting demo projects and pilot studies for the creation of a new, Ultra-Fast charging standard to prepare for the expected market needs in the future. CHAdeMO Association and CEC reached an agreement to proceed jointly with such development.

This joint development is intended to lead to a next-generation Ultra-Fast charging technology that is safe and versatile. As the new Ultra-Fast charging standard aims to ensure interoperability with existing CHAdeMO and GB/T fast charging standards, the partners expect that the new standard will be adopted not only in Japan and China but also in many other EV markets worldwide, and to contribute to the further roll-out of EV charging network.

We are pleased to work together with CEC to develop an ultra-fast charging standard to prepare for the future charging needs, while ensuring safety and interoperability, which is a core value of CHAdeMO protocol. We believe the outcome of this joint development will pave the way towards a single harmonised standard in the future. CHAdeMOs Secretary General Dave Yoshida

This joint development falls into one of the strategic categories defined as Enhancing international harmonization in vehicle electrification policies in the Japanese governments New Strategy for the automobile industry, which was recently announced by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and will be strongly supported by both the Japanese and Chinese governments.News

Man drives sports car over 300km per hour in Abu Dhabi, shares video on social media

The Public Prosecution stated that a video clip was monitored depicting a person on social media driving a vehicle at a speed of up to 300 kilometers per hour on one of the main streets in the city of Abu Dhabi, and the owner of the account used was identified.



Haiti - FLASH : Results of the BAC 2018 Extraordinary session for 10 departments





After having published the results of the baccalaureate exams for the 2017-2018 academic year, Extraordinary Session (August 13 to 17, 2018) for the Southeast, Northeast, West and North-West, the Ministry of Education National Education has just made available the results for the remaining 6 departments :



Results according to the National Bureau of State Examinations (BUNEXE) :



Results Bac extraordinary session 2018 :



Grande Anse: Success rate 77.16%, ie 1,108 candidates admitted out of 1,436 participants;



Nippes: Success rate 67.25% or 581 candidates admitted out of 864 participants;



North: Success rate 53.98% or 2,481 candidates admitted out of 4,596 participants;



Center: Success rate 53.02%, ie 1,061 candidates admitted out of 2,001 participants;



South-East: Success rate 42.83% or 433 candidates admitted out of 1,011 participants;



South: Success rate 42.35% or 670 candidates admitted out of 1,582 participants;



West: 53.02% success rate, ie 1,061 candidates admitted out of 2,001 participants;



Artibonite: Success rate 26.38% or 1,097 candidates admitted out of 4,158 participants;



Northeast: Success rate 18.38% or 248 candidates admitted out of 1,349 participants;



North West: Success rate 17.58% or 518 candidates admitted out of 2,946 participants.



According to the data available for the ten school departments, the national success rate is 38,20%, 14,187 candidates admitted out of 37,134 participants. Grande Anse has the highest success rate at 77.16% and the Northwest has the lowest success rate at 17.58%.



Heads of schools are invited to remove the list of their school from the Departmental Education Directorate concerned.



NOTE : The Ministry of National Education has not yet made available online access to results per student. HaitiLibre will inform you as soon as access to the database is possible and will make available on its website the access to results per student form as each year.



HL/ HaitiLibre

















Sweden in April implemented an aviation tax that effectively imposes an additional charge of 640 euros on air passengers depending on their destination in an attempt to reduce the impact of air travel on climate and the environment.

Petteri Orpo (NCP), the Minister of Finance, has expressed his cautious support for adopting an aviation tax in Finland.

The Finnish Green League demanded last week that a similar tax be introduced in Finland.

It deserves some serious consideration, Orpo told Talouselama on Friday. Itd be best if we found a common solution at the EU level.

He estimated that the next tax policy priority should be to reduce the income taxation of middle-income earners, as the tax treatment of low-income earners is already lenient in comparison to other Nordics. The progression of income tax rates, he highlighted, is steep already for individuals earning 3,000 euros a month.

We must urgently tax environmental detriments, such as fossil fuels, he added to the business-oriented weekly.

Finnish political parties convened last week for the summer meetings of their parliamentary groups, the agendas of which indicate that climate and the environment are likely to be among the major talking points in the run-up to the parliamentary elections held in April 2019. For example, Prime Minister Juha Sipila (Centre) said Finland should become a global power in the fight against climate change.

Both the Centre and Social Democrats commented on the aviation tax to Uusi Suomi on Friday.

The Social Democrats is calling for a value-added tax for sustainable development that  contrary to narrow individual taxes [such as] the aviation, plastic or sugar taxes  takes into account the environmental impact of all activity, responded Timo Harakka (SDP).

The effects of an aviation tax must be examined thoroughly, he added. Lets first at least examine the effects carefully.

Antti Kaikkonen, the chairperson of the Centre Parliamentary Group, was similarly reluctant to express his support for the aviation tax.

Its important to have good flight connections both within Finland and out of Finland, he reminded. Flying is expensive as it is, and there is no need to raise the price significantly. Its also important that we continue to strengthen Helsinkis position as a key hub for international air traffic. The new tax could be counter-intuitive in this regard.

We doubt that an aviation tax is needed at this point in time, but it is good to monitor the experiences in Sweden. You also shouldnt downplay the climate effects of air traffic, added Kaikkonen.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

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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.The Hub is part of the Siemens Urban MindSphere Application Center. This is where experienced engineers, together with young, ambitious data and software experts put ideas into practice using MindSphere, the cloud-based operation system from Siemens for Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things.

There are 36 MindSphere Application Centers all over the world, from Austin to Perth and from Oslo to Sao Paulo, but Singapore stands out. While the other centers are assigned to specific business units and primarily develop applications associated with those units, their technologies and products, the Singapore center is the first regional hub to focus mainly on urban infrastructures. In most cases it deals with real problems faced by the companys customers. Whenever possible, the issues are solved with existing Siemens products or through ideas from other Siemens centers. You don't need to constantly reinvent the wheel, says Steffen Endler, who heads the Hub and its associated Urban MindSphere Application Center. But wherever there are gaps between whats available today and what is required, thats where we come in.Planners tell us smart-city initiatives will improve our lives, for example by smoothing traffic flow. But a dense web of sensors, meters and cameras allied to facial recognition programs means our every move can be tracked

by Rachel Cheung

When Eva Blum-Dumontet, a research officer for London-based non-profit Privacy International, attends conferences, she likes to ask people she meets if they live in a smart city.

The answer is often no, she says, and that is because respondents are unaware that they are from one of the many cities pouring money into such initiatives. A smart city is an urban area that uses different types of electronic data collection sensors to supply information which is used to manage assets and resources efficiently.

This response is worrying, Blum-Dumontet says, because it means they are ignorant of the potential risks to their privacy and security.

Metropolises around the world  including Hong Kong, which unveiled its blueprint last December  are racing to become smart cities, building an intelligent infrastructure geared towards greater efficiency. But what does it take to make a city smart?

Smart city is a concept born in the late 90s describing the digitalisation of urban information and the potential to apply artificial intelligence to information collected through sensors, to give timely responses to metropolitan problems, says Dr Sara Degli-Esposti, a research fellow at the Centre for Business in Society at Coventry University in Britain.

The technology offers a wide range of solutions in areas such as traffic control, pollution and waste management, and effective use of energy.

According to a McKinsey report published in June, the worlds smartest cities are New York, Singapore and San Francisco. However, the Chinese cities of Shenzhen, Beijing and Shenzhen, and the South Korean capital Seoul, are catching up quickly, the US consulting firm said.

Another report, released by Deloitte earlier this year, found that China has 500 smart city pilot projects under way  half of the worlds total.

One such initiative is under way in the eastern city of Nanjing, which is collaborating with Germany-based software company SAP to create an intelligent traffic system.

They are taking data from taxis and buses  their GPS location, their speed  and using the data from video cameras, traffic signals, plotting them into a traffic control system and using that to make decisions on roadworks, re-routing of buses and traffic deviation, says Max Claps, who leads the companys Future Cities team.

Despite the obvious benefits, however, experts warn that, around the world, citizens are woefully unaware of the impact smart city initiatives could have on their personal privacy. Smart technology also hands governments and their law enforcement agencies powerful tools to monitor citizens, control their behaviour and take surveillance to a whole new level, they warn.

Smart cities go hand in hand with this idea of smart policing, says Blum-Dumontet. With facial recognition, you can easily follow a citizen step by step using a citys cameras and sensors  where theyre going, with whom theyre meeting. Tracking an individual becomes extremely easy because its impossible to escape the gaze of the state.

That could be a serious concern for citizens of authoritarian states, and in China facial recognition systems are becoming a way of life. The technology is being used for a range of commercial applications in the retail, banking and travel industries, but also for security purposes, including identifying criminals and jaywalkers.

It is also being used in the restive, Muslim-majority Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, ostensibly to curtail protests by detecting where crowds are gathering.

A UN panel this week heard credible reports that a million Uygurs are being detained in internment camps in the region, in the name of combating Islamic extremism and separatist sentiments. Beijing strongly denied the claim.

Singapore, which is striving to become the worlds first smart nation plans to install more than 100,000 CCTV cameras on lamp posts, linked to facial recognition software. The government says they will help catch traffic violators and letterers, people smoking in prohibited spaces, and combat other illegal activities.

Increasingly, surveillance is occurring not just in public areas but also in private spaces. Wireless sensors have been fitted in homes for the elderly in Singapore to monitor the movements, sleeping patterns and even bathroom use of residents.

Blum-Dumontet writes in the report, Smart Cities  Utopian Vision, Dystopian Reality: While these initiatives have obvious intended positive aims, they are also highly intrusive, and open to potential misuse or diversion towards less altruistic ends.

Under current legislation, law enforcement agencies in Singapore are permitted access to the data without seeking court approval or citizen consultation, she adds.

Singapore has partnered with French software company Dassault Systemes to create Virtual Singapore, a 3D city model and platform that aggregates all the real-time city data collected by the nations sensors and camera. It is almost a real-world version of the video game SimCity. It will allow the government to zoom in on any flat and scan it for information  its size, number of residents, energy consumption and more.

Blum-Dumontet cautions that whereas once our behaviour could be tracked only when we are online, we can now be under surveillance permanently.

Having your energy monitored [by smart meters] means 24/7, what youre doing in the house is being monitored by the energy companies and the government. You enter a world where you can no longer escape the surveillance, says Blum-Dumontet. This is particularly pertinent to citizens of countries with poor human rights records and no legal framework in place to protect citizens data.

The Big Brother effect is not confined to authoritarian regimes. Even in democratic countries where people have the rights to protest and organise, smart technology could erode peoples capacity to dissent, she says.

Youre not alone when you protest. Youre part of a crowd and it gives you strength. You find a form of anonymity by being in a crowd, says Blum-Dumontet. Yet extensive use of facial recognition software enables law enforcement to identify every participant.

You enter a world where you can no longer escape the surveillance

Eva Blum-Dumontet, research officer for Privacy International

Digital technology lowers the cost of surveillance and increases the imbalance of power between people  the surveilled subject  and corporations or the state and their almighty vigilant eye, says Degli-Esposti, whose research focuses on the ethical implications of digital technology.

Claps, from SAP, acknowledges that it is becoming increasingly difficult to protect privacy in an interconnected world. One way of doing so, he says, is to increase transparency, offer layers of consent, and establish detailed rules on collection, access and use of data. However, such a framework is unlikely to become a reality in more authoritarian countries.

Concerns about smart utilities  designed to generate more accurate billing information  go beyond the fact that they can track our behaviour.

The more we replace non-automated objects with automated ones, the more we become vulnerable to malware attacks, data exfiltration, ransomwares, denial-of-service attacks ironically produced by IoT [Internet of Things] botnets, says Degli-Esposti. As long as you have an operating system, which these days are mostly Android, iOS or Microsoft, the more you can be subject to fairly common forms of attack.

With smart sensors and cameras detecting citizens every move, and collecting large amounts of data, what will happen if it falls into the wrong hands, or hackers hijack our smart infrastructure?

Past cyberattacks illustrate how vulnerable even the most hi-tech infrastructure can be. For example, the computer systems of a nuclear plant operator in South Korea were breached in 2014. Though the authorities insisted no critical data was leaked, the incident prompted security fears.

Also worrying is that most regional governments and city councils rely on private companies to realise their smart vision.

Private companies are subject to strict confidentiality agreements, and terms of service and use, which prevent the client from running third-party penetration testing and getting a sense of actual risks, Degli-Esposti says. Its important to have in-house talent to write detailed public procurement specifications and maintain the software over time, she adds.

Officers buying smart city solutions today will probably not be in office in 10 or 15 years, when these solutions will have to be replaced or deeply updated.

Such a scenario played out in May last year when the Wannacry ransomware cyberattack infected an estimated 200,000 computers worldwide, including those belonging to Britains National Health Service trusts. An investigation revealed that the incident could have been prevented if the trusts has patched or upgraded older software.

Although experts have spoken out on the risks inherent in smart cities, some argue that the issues are still not being discussed by the wider public, partly because of a lack of consultation when these initiatives are introduced.

Blum-Dumontet sees an obvious irony: Governments claim that theyre creating smart cities to offer better quality of services, and yet, if the general public is not involved in the discussion, who do we make smart cities for?The newly formed PHS Alumni Association looks to raise money to improve the school.

PHS Graduates Form Alumni Association to Improve School



The directory has records of thousands of PHS graduates and what they're doing now. PITTSFIELD, Mass.  There are areas in Pittsfield High School that could use some refreshing.

The building on East Street has rooms that need repainting or new carpet, and the theater seats could be replaced, and textbooks updated. There are new programs that could be developed and implemented.

And there is also a lot of pride among those who spent years in that building -- the thousands of Generals who list PHS as their alma mater.

Since the city's dollars are tight, a group of alumni decided that it will make those improvements. On Friday, these PHS graduates joined together at Patrick's Pub to launch the PHS Alumni Association. The newly formed non-profit will fundraise and bring years of graduates together to make Pittsfield better now and in the future.

"There is a lot of history to the building. There is a lot of history of the graduates. And there is a lot of pride," former PHS student and teacher Tom Dillon said.

The idea started back in 2001 or so when Dillon and others joined together to create a directory. A list of all of the graduates in the school's history was put together and a company took on the process of tracking people down, asking for updated information, and published a book detailing who graduated, where they are now, and what they are doing. That was updated in 2009 and then again in 2017.

That is now serving a the base for bringing alumni together. Dillon was joined by current PHS staff members Brendan Sheran, class of 2002, and Kellie O'Hagerty, class of 1986, to create the new non-profit. They crafted a charter and got the legal 501(c)3 designation.

"They can donate money and it would go to PHS. It isn't an organization that is going to slide money to people, it is going to the building and the teachers," O'Hagerty said.

O'Hagerty compared the project to the Boston Latin School Association that has been able to make a significant number of donations to improve the school there. Dillon noted the former St. Joseph High School's annual dinners that honored distinguished alumni had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the school. The three believe PHS graduates care about their school now and are looking to tap into that.

"It was this idea of let's start a group where we can take all of these reunion people and put them under one roof and say what can we do to help teachers and programs," O'Hagerty said.

Dillon said right now there are a number of groups which organize reunions. The new association can also serve as a reference for those groups and vice versa. They can help each other connect with former graduates.

"There are alumni out there that would be willing to support sustained programming," Dillon said. "People want to plan class reunions, they need information on graduates. So we are hoping we can share information."

Now that the organization is formed, the three are looking to expand the board, which will make determinations on how to spend donations and plan fundraising events.

The effort is also somewhat of a response to the building of the new $120 million Taconic High School. The alumni still believe in the two-school system and want to see PHS be sustainable for the long term. They say since the city hasn't taken on a massive renovation project on East Street, they'll chip away little by little on making improvements.Letter: Judith Knight Best Fit for District Attorney

To the Editor:

Andrea Harrington has spunk. But spunk is not enough for the job of district attorney. Ms. Harrington is entering the fray for the Democratic DA nomination with limited knowledge and experience of the workings of the office. This was evident in some of her debate responses, especially those dealing with our county court system. Sliding into the DA position is not the time for on-the-job training.

In her quest for the state Senate seat in 2016, she failed to fully comply with campaign finance law. While the violations were relatively minor for the first-time candidate, and remedial action was taken, she referred to the episode as a learning experience.

In commenting on the report citing her financing missteps, issued in November 2017, she said she had no immediate plans to run for office again and was interested in helping other women run for political office. If only ...

Paul Caccaviello, the anointed candidate of the outgoing (really?  see below) DA [David] Capeless and Republican Gov. Baker, has perhaps too much experience, of the wrong kind.

His reluctant acceptance of the Justice Reform Act of 2018 may be another landmark on his march back to the future.

DA Capeless in his resignation announcement stated he "... will stick around and be appointed as a special assistant DA ... ." To complete still open cases? Or will he hold on to the reins of power as the eminence grise behind Caccaviello?

Judith Knight with her challenge to DA Capeless in 2006, earlier successful defense of marijuana sting victim and then Otis resident Kyle Sawin in 2005, other pro-bono work for those in need, and her performance in this year's debates has convinced me that she, and her curriculum vitae (and spunk), would be the best fit for a new and improved office of the district attorney.

Ms. Knight, during her 30-plus years as an attorney, has served as an assistant DA and a public defender/defense attorney demonstrating her knowledge of the Massachusetts court and legal system. Her proven enterprise management and certified mediation skills will also prove invaluable.

Judith's enthusiastic support for a diversion (second chance) program and the positive use of some drug forfeiture funds (for community centers, eg) is something I, my family and my neighbors support.

In the apocryphal words of Cary Grant it's got to be "Judy, Judy, Judy."

Frank Tolopko

Otis, Mass.A view from the top of Maple Drive, a dead-end road off Route 116. Although not a heavily traveled road, it is in bad condition.

Cheshire May Not Be Able to Pave Maple Drive

CHESHIRE, Mass.  The town may not be able to pave Maple Drive because the state currently does not see it as an accepted road.

Town Administrator Mark Webber told the Selectmen last Tuesday that Maple Drive may have to be nixed from the fall Chapter 90 reimbursement project list because even though the town voted to accept the road, this information never made it to the state.

"I was told today that there was little likelihood that Boston will process the paperwork by the time we seek Chapter 90 project reimbursement," Webber said. "There is no guarantee and it makes me nervous if we go out to bid and they don't approve it ... we won't get reimbursed."

Earlier this month, Highway Superintendent Blair Crane said he planned to spend $250,000 from Chapter 90 to pave and improve Maple Drive, a section of Wells Road and West Mountain Road.

These roads are considered to be in the worst condition.

Webber said the latter two roads are a go but not Maple Drive. In the 1970s, the town meeting voted to accept Maple Drive as a town road, however, this information never made it to the state.

He said there is no issue correcting this communication breakdown of the past, but it would likely take time and paperwork would be complete long after the bid opening date of September 4.

Webber said moving the bid opening date really is not possible if they want to have the roads paved before snowfall. He said the town could "gamble" and just go out to bid in hopes that the paperwork is filed in time. He said this was unlikely.

The other options are to pay for the road out of pocket or add an addendum to the bid documents backing out Maple Drive.

Selectman Robert Ciskowski said although this would likely free up cash for another priority project in the future, it could alter the bids.

"By having the three of them there is an economy to bringing your equipment out," he said. "It is not like they are just going to cross out Maple. The other two might get more expensive."

Webber said part of the issue is the longtime Chapter 90 "guru" at the state Department of Transportation's District 1 office has been out of the office. He said she could probably speed up the process.

Webber said he believes she may return this week and if he could get a guarantee that she could push the paperwork through, he would be comfortable going out to bid as planned.

Selectwoman Carol Francesconi asked Webber to see if this is possible and if not they will release the addendum.

"I am for taking the chance," she said. "I know it is on the edge, but I rather be on the edge."

Crane agreed and said as long as there is an addendum ready in the hopper, it should not be a big deal to inform potential bidders in a week's time if Maple Drive is not an option.

"There is really no harm in waiting a week," Crane said. "If it is in the can all we have to do is pull the trigger."

Many Maple Drive residents attended the meeting at which Crane announced that he wanted to pave the residential road to support the project

The road is currently rippling, and another winter would likely further damage it.

In other business, Crane said he may have found a new roller that the town could afford.

"I did find a replacement roller within our budget so I am going to delve into that a little deeper before committing anything," he said.

A few weeks ago, a vehicle ran into the parked loader. Both vehicles were totaled. The town will collect more than what they purchased the roller, but until now Crane could not find a suitable roller for the town.

He said this roller will be slightly narrower and run on gasoline instead of diesel.

Crane said he would bring more details to the board in time.



iciHaiti - DR : Denial of the new Commander General of the Dominican Army





Defense Minister Ruben Paulino Sem proceeded to the installation of General Estanislao Gonell Regalado as the new Commander General of the Dominican Army. He replaces General Alberto Braulio Alcantara as Deputy Minister of Defense.



In his speech, the new Commander of the Dominican Army said that during his tenure he will guarantee the security of the borders, a strategic priority of his road map. He also assured that he will implement a culture of human rights and that under his command the training and professionalization of his staff will be strengthened.



On the sidelines of the ceremony, he said that the calm was maintained at the border crossing of Carrizal (Province of Elias Pina) and Belladere (in Haiti) and that the binational market had been reopened after the incident of 18 August https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-25292-haiti-flash-shootout-at-the-border-the-details.html . He also had to formally deny the Haitian rumor that suggests that drivers of Dominican trucks have been kidnapped and would be held against their will in Haiti.



In addition, Defense Minister Ruben Paulino Sem also said that following this incident, the Dominican Ambassador to Haiti had met several times with the Haitian authorities and that relations were good between the two Nations.



This week the new Commander of the Dominican Army will tour the border area.



SL/ iciHaiti

















IDF Raids Terrorist Propaganda Centers

The Fellowship | August 27, 2018

The IDF began the week by carrying out a raid in the West Bank that will leave the Holy Land safer. Arutz Sheva reports that the early morning mission by Israeli security not only led to the arrests of wanted terrorists, but the shutting down of facilities that produce anti-Israel incitement materials, as well:

Israeli security forces nabbed eight wanted terror suspects in Judea and Samaria in a series of raids early Monday morning.

The arrests were conducted jointly by the IDF, Shin Bet internal security agency, Border Police, and Israel Police.

The suspects captured overnight included individuals wanted for various terrorist activities, including violent attacks on Israeli civilians and security personnel. The eight suspects captured Monday morning were transferred for interrogation.

In addition, Israeli security forces operating in Judea and Samaria overnight raided facilities used for the production and distribution of anti-Israeli propaganda, used to incite locals to commit acts of terror.

Among the facilities closed was a printing house in the city of Hevron, south of Jerusalem, which had been used to produce flyers, posters, and other materials used to promote terrorismWe're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on!

Go to formBy Chen Hanghui

In mid-August 2018, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2019 was signed by US President Donald Trump and officially went into effect. As the first NDAA promulgated following the newly released National Defense Strategy (NDS), the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2019 has specially allocated US$716.3 billion military spending, and made adjustments in military policies, the setup of national defense organs, and foreign military relations. These changes signal the new mindset and measures of the US to build up its military and advance war preparedness against the background of strategic competition between major powers.

Developing overwhelming strengths by both increasing combat readiness and preparing for future war

No involvement in a fair combat is the strategic guideline of the US military for military development and war preparedness. Within a period of time after the Cold War (1947-1991), the US military once had incomparable advantages. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, the US military has been bogged down in the global war on terrorism. Especially since 2012, the US defense budget had been declining for successive years, which reduced the strengths of the US military. To reverse such a trend, the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2019 adopted a US$716.3 billion military spending bill, of which US$639 billion is the basic defense budget for army building, up by 22% over fiscal year 2017.

According to William Thornberry, chair of the US House of Representatives Committee on Armed Services, restoring the level of war preparedness is the main purpose of the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2019. It will significantly increase the training funds for all services and arms, and allocated US$21.8 billion for equipment maintenance to ensure the combat readiness of all weapons and equipment. In addition, the 2019 NDAA emphasizes the quarterly combat readiness reporting system, requiring commanders of all theater commands to give detailed reports on their combat readiness for integrated joint operations by army, navy, air force, space force and cyber warfare force.

The 2019 NDAA supports the US military to accelerate its purchases of new-type equipment and increase its investments in future technology to win tomorrows war. The US Army will advance its brigade combat team (BCT) modernization programs, which involve the purchase of 135 new-type Abrams main battle tanks (MBT), 60 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (IFV), 197 armored multi-purpose vehicles (AMPV), and 3,390 joint light tactical vehicles (JLTV). The US Navy will spend US$24.1 billion purchasing 13 new warships, including 2 Virginia-class fast-attack submarines and 3 littoral combat ships (LCS). The US Air Force will purchase 77 F-35 fighter jets.

The 2019 NDAA also encourages the US military to advance its weapon R&D targeting opponents weak points, such as Columbia-class nuclear-powered submarines and B-21 long-range strike bombers. It will fully fund US$150 million for developing the US militarys conventional prompt strike capability. Particularly, the 2019 NDAA will add US$1.2 billion funds for the R&D of supersonic speed, artificial intelligence (AI), and directed energy (DE) technologies, to maintain the US militarys long-term competitive advantages.

Improving combat effectiveness by military buildup and staffing optimization

To reduce deployment frequency caused by insufficient number of troops, the 2019 NDAA will increase 15,600 US forces in active service, adding the total number to 1.3381 million. This is the second arms expansion of the US for two successive years, which is consistent with Trumps plan on rebuilding the US military. However, compared with the size of last years troop increase, this figure is not catching. Staffing optimization, other than military buildup, is the true highlight of the 2019 NDAA.

The US believes that talent is the biggest asymmetrical advantage of a military force. Summarizing the experience and lessons from the Gulf War (1990-1991), the US military has reached a conclusion: The gap between the US and Iranian militaries mostly lines in personnel qualities and combat theories, in addition to weapons and equipment. To attract, train, and maintain outstanding professionals, the 2019 NDAA has issued a sequence of staffing reform measures.

First, greatly increasing staff wellbeing. In fiscal year 2019, the US military will raise the basic salaries of its staff by 2.6%, the biggest increase over the last nine years. Accordingly, their basic living allowances and basic housing allowances will increase by 3.4% and 2.9%. Other wellbeing policies include increasing the coverage of special salaries and bonuses, improving housing conditions of military households, and supporting the employment of military dependents by US federal agencies.

Second, adjusting officers promotion system. The 2019 NDAA will change the conventional model of promotion in the military (either promotion or retirement), allowing service life extension for officers serving in certain fields and abandoning mandatory retirement after two failures in promotion evaluations. The 2019 NDAA will change the tradition of promotion based on seniority, allowing promotion evaluation committees to adjust promotion rankings according to performance. The 2019 NDAA will diversify officers professional development approaches, allowing pilots, cyberwar officers, and other specialized professionals to continue the work in their own fields.

Third, tightening discipline. The 2019 NDAA requires the US Department of Defense (DoD) to increase effort to combat sexual assault and protect victims, to establish a centralized supervision mechanism for crimes by military staff, and to improve information sharing with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to ensure the recording of crimes by military staff into FBIs weapons ban database.

Focusing on Indo-Pacific and Europe by adjusting garrisons and rebuilding alliances

According to the NDS promulgated in January 2018, the current national security threats of the US have a 4+1 pattern: China and Russia are its major opponents, followed by DPRK and Iran, and terrorism lastly. The newly released NDS identified Indo-Pacific and Europe as two major theater commands that require priority in defense resource supply. To put in place the new NDS, the 2019 NDAA has authorized a number of corresponding measures towards Indo-Pacific and Europe.

Concerning the Indo-Pacific theater command, the 2019 NDAA requests that the US Department of Defense shall maintain its garrison size in this region, and shall not reduce its garrison troops in South Korea without the approval of the US Congress. The 2019 NDAA supports joint military drills with Japan and Australia to enhance security cooperation. It also encourages building new partnership, by renaming Southeast Asia Maritime Security Initiative into Indo-Pacific Maritime Security Initiative that included India as a member state, and by providing military aid to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka to improve the maritime control capacity of countries within the region.

Concerning the European Theater of Operations, United States Army (ETOUSA), the 2019 NDAA, based on the European Deterrence Initiative, will allocate US$6.3 billion to strengthen multilateral security cooperation with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies and European Union (EU) partners, and enhance defense against Russia. This number is almost two times that of fiscal year 2017.

The 2019 NDAA will reverse the trend of reducing US garrison troops in Europe, and enhance the US military presence in the European Theater of Operations by increasing one combat aviation brigade (CAB) and some service units (SUs). The 2019 NDAA has proposed to improve the strategic preset of weapons and equipment by purchasing PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) missiles, Javelin anti-tank guided missiles, and 155 mm howitzers. The 2019 NDAA will authorize a two-year extension of effectiveness for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which will provide US$250 million worth of weapons and equipment, including lethal weapons, to Ukraine.

On the whole, the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2019 has pointed out the direction and approaches for the future military reform and military strength escalation of the US. It also reflects a resurgence of the Cold War mentality in the US government.

(The author comes from Chinese PLA Nanjing Army Command College)Brandon Figueroa (left) and Jonathan Rivera-Gunera are accused of the 2015 murder of Indian American student Schiharia Aila Sai Kiran. Both suspects have ratted out the other, according to the Miami, Florida police department. (Miami-Dade Department of Corrections mug shots)No, The UN Did Not Report China Has Massive Internment Camps For Uighur Muslims





Media outlets from Reuters to The Intercept falsely claimed the UN had condemned China for holding a million Uighurs in camps. The claim is based on unsourced allegations by two independent commission members, US-funded outfits and a shadowy opposition group.





By Ben Norton and Ajit Singh

August 27, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Numerous major media outlets, from Reuters to The Intercept, have claimed that the United Nations has reports that the Chinese government is holding as many as 1 million Uighur Muslims in internment camps. But a close examination of these news stories, and of the evidence behind them  or the lack thereof  demonstrates that the extraordinary claim is simply not true.

A spokesperson from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) confirmed in a statement to the Grayzone that the allegation of Chinese camps was not made by the United Nations, but rather by a member of an independent committee that does not speak for the UN as a whole. That member happened to be the only American on the committee, and one with no background of scholarship or research on China.

Moreover, this accusation is based on the thinly sourced reports of a Chinese opposition group that receives funding from foreign governments and is closely tied to exiled pro-US activists. While there have been many on-the-ground reports highlighting discrimination that Uighur Muslims have faced at the hands of the Chinese authorities, information about camps containing one million prisoners has originated almost exclusively from media outlets and organizations funded and weaponized by the American government to turn up the heat on Beijing.

A blatant falsehood introduced by Reuters and echoed across mainstream media

On August 10, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination conducted its regular review of Chinas compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The review, which is conducted periodically for all 179 parties to the Convention, has generated a frenzied response by the Western corporate press  one which is uniformly misleading.

On the day of the review, Reuters published a report with an explosive headline: U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter

The claim was feverishly reproduced by outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post to denounce China and call for international action. Even The Intercepts Mehdi Hasan belted out the breathless headline, One Million Muslim Uighurs Have Been Detained by China, the U.N. Says. Wheres the Global Outrage? The impression readers were given was that the UN had conducted an investigation and had formally and collectively made such charges against China. In fact, the UN had done no such thing.

The headline of Reuters report attributed its explosive claim to the UN; yet the body of the article ascribed it simply to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. And this committees official website makes it clear that it is a body of independent experts, not UN officials.

Whats more, a look at the OHCHRs official news release on the committees presentation of the report showed that the only mention of alleged re-education camps in China was made by its sole American member, Gay McDougall. This claim was then echoed by a Mauritanian member, Yemhelhe Mint Mohamed.

During the committees regular review of China, McDougall commented that she was deeply concerned about credible reports alleging mass detentions of millions of Uighurs Muslim minorities in internment camps. The Associated Press reported that McDougall did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the hearing. (Note that the headline of the AP news wire is much weaker than that of Reuters: UN panel concerned at reported Chinese detention of Uighurs.)

Video of the session confirms that McDougall provided no sourcing to back up her remarkable claim.

This is to say, one American member of an independent UN body made a provocative claim that China was interning 1 million Muslims, but failed to provide a single named source. And Reuters and the Western corporate media ran with it anyway, attributing the unsubstantiated allegations of one US individual to the UN as a whole.

In an email to the Grayzone Project, OHCHR spokesperson Julia Gronnevet confirmed that the CERD was not representative of the UN as a whole. You are correct that the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is an independent body, Gronnevet wrote. Quoted comments were made during public sessions of the Committee when members were reviewing State parties.

Thus the OHCHR implicitly acknowledged that the comments by McDougall, the lone American member of an independent committee, were not representative of any finding by the UN as a whole. The report by Reuters is simply false.

Credible reports from a government-funded opposition group with zero transparency

In addition to this irresponsible misreporting, Reuters and other Western outlets have attempted to fill in the gaps left by McDougall, referring to reports made by so-called activist group the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). Conveniently left out of the story is that this organization is headquartered in Washington, DC.

CHRD, which receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from unnamed governments, advocates full-time against the Chinese government and has spent years campaigning on behalf of extreme right-wing opposition figures.

CHRD is not at all transparent about its funding or personnel. Its annual reports contain notes stating, This report has been produced with the financial support of generous donors. But the donors are never named.

Publicly available 990 IRS filing forms reviewed by the Grayzone show that the organization is substantially funded by government grants. In fact, in 2015 virtually all of the organizations revenue came from government grants.

CHRDs 2015 form 990 discloses that $819,553 of its $820,023 revenue that year (99.94 percent) came from government grants. A measly $395 came from investments, with another $75 from other sources. According to its 2016 form 990, CHRD received $859,091 in government grants in that year.

Which government provided these grants is not clear. The Grayzone did not receive a response to several emailed interview requests sent to the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

However, it appears likely that CHRD could be receiving funding from the US government-backed National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

A search of the NEDs grants database shows funding from 2014 and 2015 totaling approximately half a million dollars to support the work of Chinese human rights defenders. It is not clear if this is a reference to the organization specifically, but the description accompanying the grants matches that of CHRD.

CHRD has used its generous funding to provide grants to opposition activists inside China, bankrolling dozens upon dozens of projects in the country.

On its tax forms, CHRD lists its address as the Washington, DC office of Human Rights Watch. HRW has long been criticized for its revolving door with the US government and its excessively disproportionate focus on designated enemies of Washington like China, Venezuela, Syria, and Russia.

Human Rights Watch did not respond to an email from the Grayzone inquiring about its relationship with CHRD.

CHRDs forms 990 also reveal that the board of the organization is a Whos Who of exiled Chinese anti-government activists.

The chair of the group is the US-based activist Su Xiaokang, who proclaimed that the Chinese public supposedly wants the U.S. to watch over activists, and is disappointed when Washington fails. Fellow US-based dissident Teng Biao is a CHRD director who has sarcastically boasted of how the Chinese communist party dubbed him a reactionary.

CHRDs secretary is the American academic Perry Link, who has built his public reputation on winding up on the Chinese governments academic blacklist. Link testified for the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 2014, claiming that the Chinese government is threatening academic freedom in the US.

In his congressional testimony, CHRD secretary Link insisted the US government should crack down on the Chinese governments Confucius Institute organization and instead fund its own pro-US Chinese-language programs. Link characterized Chinese-language programs as a potential American weapon against the Chinese communist party, arguing they could very arguably do more to blunt the CPCs advance than the [B-2 Spirit Bomber] airplane could.

These are some of the pro-US, anti-Chinese government figures who lead the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

Otherwise, there is very little publicly available information about CHRD. It appears to largely be the brainchild of its international director, Renee Xia, an opposition activist who has publicly called for the US government to impose sanctions on Chinese officials under the Magnitsky Act.

Support for the non violence advocate who loves Americas wars

CHRDs founder, Xia, was a strong supporter of the imprisoned hard-right neoconservative Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, and she campaigned years for his release.

An archived version of the groups website shows that as far back as 2010, CHRD was vociferously advocating on behalf of Liu, while likening the Chinese government to Nazi Germany.

While Liu Xiaobo became a cause celebre of the Western liberal intelligensia, he was a staunch supporter of colonialism, a fan of the most blood-soaked US military campaigns, and a hardcore libertarian.

As writers Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong reported in The Guardian in 2010, Liu led numerous US government-funded right-wing organizations that advocated mass privatization and the Westernization of China. He also expressed openly racist views against the Chinese. To choose Westernisation is to choose to be human, Liu insisted, lamenting that traditional Chinese culture had made its population wimpy, spineless, and fucked up.

While CHRD described Liu as an advocate of non-violence, he practically worshiped President George W. Bush and strongly supported the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq, as well as the war in Afghanistan. Non-violence advocate Liu was even a fan of Americas wars in Korea and Vietnam, which killed millions of civilians.

CHRDs most recent China report  the one cited by Reuters and other outlets to give credence to the allegations of Uyghur re-education camps  further highlights the organizations links to Washington and compromised impartiality.

Most sources on the Uighur camps story are US government-linked

The most-cited source in the CHRD report, accounting for more than one-fifth of the 101 references, is Radio Free Asia (RFA), a news agency created by the US government. Along with Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Television Marti, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia is operated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a federal agency of the US government under the supervision of the State Department. Describing its work as vital to U.S. national interests, BBGs primary broadcasting standard is to be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.

The near-total reliance on Washington-linked sources is characteristic of Western reporting on Uighurs Muslims in China, and the country in general, which regularly features sensational headlines and allegations. In addition to CHRD and RFA, it is common for reports to cite the World Uighur Congress, an organization funded by the NED. At a recent NED event, Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal interviewed World Uighur Congress chairman Omer Kanat, who took credit for furnishing many of the claims of internment camps to Western media.

Another favorite congressional and mainstream media source for information about China is the Jamestown Foundation, a neoconservative think tank founded during the height of the Cold War by Reagan administration personnel with the support of then-CIA Director William J. Casey. Former Jamestown board members include Dick Cheney and Zbigniew Brzezinski.



The latest incident of misreporting by Reuters is part of a trend of increasingly hostile, Cold War-like coverage of China by the Western press that coincides with Washingtons push for conflict with Beijing. In a series of policy statements, the Trump administration has repeatedly identified the threat posed by economic and military ascendance of China, with Defense Secretary James Mattis declaring that Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.

Growing anxious about its diminishing global dominance, the United States seeks to forestall the rise of of an alternative node of international power. A longstanding component of US imperialism is the use of ostensibly impartial civil society groups and think tanks to promote narratives in the media supportive of US foreign policy goals. Often under the guise of humanitarian concern, such stories aim to stir up public outrage and weaponize it to advance imperial ambitions.

This time-tested program is at the heart of the intensifying campaign against China, and as the latest raft of bogus stories demonstrated, the corporate media is eager to play along.By David Fleshler

August 27, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Florida  A group whose symbol is a clenched fist holding a carrot won a legal victory over the city of Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday, when a federal appeals court found that its weekly events to feed homeless people were protected under the Constitution.

Food Not Bombs, which grew out of an anti-nuclear protest in New England, now has chapters around the United States, which promote the shift of funding away from the military to address hunger, poverty and other problems.

The Fort Lauderdale chapters weekly feeding events at Stranahan Park generated opposition downtown, where a growing homeless population had led to tensions with businesses owners and visitors. The city passed a law imposing restrictive regulations on outdoor food-distribution operations, as part of a suite of ordinances aimed at the homeless, such as limits on panhandling and sleeping on public property.

In a ruling that invoked Shakespeare, the Bible and the history of Thanksgiving, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the sharing of food is a richly expressive activity throughout human history and that Food Not Bombs work followed in this tradition, constituting conduct protected under the First Amendment.

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The significance of sharing meals with others dates back millennia, stated the appellate courts opinion. The Bible recounts that Jesus shared meals with tax collectors and sinners to demonstrate that they were not outcasts in his eyes. See Mark 2:1317; Luke 5:2932. In 1621, Pilgrims and Native Americans celebrated the harvest by sharing the First Thanksgiving in Plymouth. President Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863, proclaiming it as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father in recognition of blessings.

The appellate court did not rule on the case as a whole. It simply found that the trial judge was wrong to dismiss it on the grounds that the First Amendment didnt apply. The appellate court sent the case back to the trial court to determine whether the citys ordinances violate the First Amendment.

Kirsten Anderson, director of litigation for Southern Legal Counsel and lead attorney for Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs, said in a news release that the case addressed the national trend toward the criminalization of homelessness through such measures as local bans on the distribution of free food.

The courts opinion recognized sharing food with another human being is one of the oldest forms of human expression, Anderson said. We think this decision strengthens our message to cities across the country that they need to invest in constructive solutions to homelessness instead of wasting government resources on punishing people who seek to offer aid.

Nathan Pim, a member of Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs and one of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said we look forward to continuing our community organizing in Fort Lauderdale.

We hope we are one step closer to something weve fought for over many years  simply being able to help people without being threatened with arrest by people who should be working with us. he said.

Fort Lauderdale Interim City Attorney Alain Boileau declined comment.

Although the city suspended enforcement of the law restricting outdoor food distribution, Food Not Bombs in 2015 filed suit to overturn it. The group lost in federal district court, where Judge William Zloch ruled that distributing food was not constitutionally protected expressive conduct.

But the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday said that the groups food distribution events were peaceful political direct action, and therefore enjoyed First Amendment protection.

The group does not serve food as a charity, but rather to communicate its message that society can end hunger and poverty if we redirect our collective resources from the military and war and that food is a human right, not a privilege, which society has a responsibility to provide for all. Providing food in a visible public space, and partaking in meals that are shared with others, is an act of political solidarity meant to convey the organizations message.

Sun SentinelHome Search ICH The American War Machine Continues to Grow and Seek Confrontation



By Vijay Prashad August 27, 2018 " Information Clearing House " -On July 26, the United States House of Representatives passed the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which will then go on to the U.S. Senate and finally to the U.S. president. It is worthwhile to note that 139 Democrats, including the entire Democratic Party leadership, voted for this bill. This Act provides the U.S. government with $717 billion for a years military spending. This is $100 billion more than was spent last year (which is itself more than half of the annual Chinese military budget). No country spends money on its military like the United States. Its not long now before the annual U.S. military budget will cross the $1 trillion mark. In fact, many suggest that if the covert parts of the budgetfor the CIA, for military intelligence, for the National Security Agency and for the ongoing warsare added in, the $1 trillion threshold has already been crossed. Jack Ma, the Chinese billionaire, recently told CNBC that the United States has wasted $14 trillion over the past 30 years in its many, many wars. A modest estimate suggests that the U.S. war on Afghanistanwhich is ongoing since 2001has itself cost over $1 trillion. After all this time and money, and after all the human suffering, it is now certain that the United States, Imran Khans government in Pakistan and the Chinese will seek a compromise with the Taliban. Mas statement about waste should be taken very seriously. A foreign policy that sows disorder and chaos, which increases human suffering, is a wasteregardless of the benefits it might produce for the arms dealers. Power Through the Barrel of a Gun On July 30, the United States militarys African Command (Africom) admitted that it was flying armed drones out of a U.S. base in Niamey, Nigers capital. Africoms spokesperson Samantha Reho said that the government of Niger gave the U.S. permission to do so in November 2017, and that the U.S. began to fly these armed drones in early 2018. There was no admission that the U.S. has fired any of these drones. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter Very soon, these lethal drones will move from Air Base 101 in Niamey to the newly constructed Air Base 201 in Agadez. This new base is one of the largest drone bases in the world. The drones from here can travel from one end of West Africa to cover most of North Africa. Another U.S. drone base in Djibouti is able to send its lethal machines across East Africa and deep into Central Africa. In sum, with these two bases, the U.S. is able to strike targets across most of the African continent. All this with no debate in the U.S. Congress and with little care for the sensibilities of the African people. The question of sensibility should not be sniffed at. In late March, the government of Ghana signed a military agreement with the United States. Ghanas military would get a paltry $20 million to train its troops, while the U.S. would get access to Ghanas airports and to Ghanas radio spectrum and the U.S. would be able to bring in military hardware duty-free. Eager to set up a military base in Ghana, the U.S. miscalculated the residue of anti-colonial sentiment in the country. This sentiment is the reason why the U.S. African Command is based in Stuttgart, Germany, rather than in any African country. No leader can afford to be seen to allow the United States to encroach so brazenly on the sovereignty of an African country. It is important to underline the fact that no U.S. command headquarters is located outside Western Europe and the United States. The Southern Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in Latin America, was based in Panama from 1963 to 1997. Now it is based in Doral, Florida, having been ejected by the governments that followed the ouster of the old CIA asset Manuel Noriega. The Central Command headquarters, which monitors and directs U.S. operations in the Middle East, is located 200 miles north in Tampa, Florida. The headquarters of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, which oversees operations in Asia, is located in Hawaii. The people of Africa, Asia and Latin America do not want the United States footprint to be placed so heavily on their soil. It is one thing to have to tolerate bases and joint exercises. It is another to allow the full weight of U.S. imperialism on ones soil. Threats of One Kind or Another Theres an old adage: if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The sheer scale of the U.S. military arsenal gives its political leaders a rush. They feel that they can intimidate the rest of the planet to suit their needs. Peace does not define U.S. foreign policy. Everything is geared toward intimidation and war. Heres a scanner of recent maneuvers by the Trump administration that are contrary to a policy of peacemaking. Korea. A great feat of humanity pushed the two Koreas to renew their dialogue toward a normal future. The United States has consistently attempted to spoil this process, with Trump being churlish about the good feeling between the Norths Kim Jong-un and the Souths Moon Jae-in. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is on a march across Southeast Asia, pushing ASEAN countries to continue to sanction North Korea despite the consensus within ASEAN to lighten the burden on the North as a way to open the road to peace. The United States indicated that North Korea is continuing with its missile program, just when senior military leaders of the North and South met at the border on July 31. These mischievous statements by the U.S. did not deter the Koreans. Lieutenant General An Ik San of North Korea and Major General Kim Do-gyun of the South continued with their dialogue. Artillery will be withdrawn from the shore of the West Sea and military exercises will cease. The people of the North and South regard our talks as important, said Lieutenant General An. The military leaders are committed to peace and do not want Korea to be the battlefield for U.S. aggression. Iran. On July 22, Trump woke up and wrote a tweet in all capsNEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. Threats of this kind are routine. The Iranian leadership shrugged them off. In the military spending bill that just passed the U.S. House of Representatives, there is a sentence that bears notice: nothing in this act may be construed to authorize the use of force against Iran. But in another part of the act, there is license for the Trump administration to pursue cyber-war against Iran, North Korea, Russia and China. The bill gives Trump carte blanche to escalate against these four countries. These are the dramatic threats. In the shadows linger worse atrocities that have become normal. The U.S. drone base in Salak, in the north of Cameroon, houses a Rapid Intervention Battaliona Cameroonian detachment, which has been filmed executing civilians. Last year, the Intercept reported that U.S. operatives of one kind or another had tortured prisoners at this base. There is no human rights agenda here. Threats of the Imagination The United States claims that it requires such a massive military and deployment in places such as Niger because of the threats not only to the U.S., but to the world. In the belt of countries that make up the Sahel region of Africawith Niger at their centerthere is a claim made by the West of the threats of al-Qaeda and other assorted groups. Many of these groups are indeed a threat to the people of the region, but many of them are also merely gangsters (al-Qaeda is largely a smuggler of cigarettes and weapons across the Sahara Desert). The real threats that have brought in the United States and France are elsewhere. It is worthwhile to make a list of these (based on my reporting from last year). China. The United States has made it clear that Chinas presence in Africa is unacceptable. Unable to best China in a straightforward bid for resources and markets, the U.S. has turned to the use of force and intimidation to threaten countries to provide advantages to less supple Western firms. The ring of bases along the Sahel and downward toward South Africa is plainly to throttle Chinas interests in the continent. Resources. The countries of the Sahel are home to very important resourcesgold in Burkina Faso and Mali, uranium in Niger and iron ore in Mauritania as well as proven reserves of coal, cobalt, diamonds, fluorspar, manganese, platinum, rare earth minerals and a host of other minerals. European and American mining companieswith old colonial rootsare eager to protect their investments here and protect their future profits as the mining laws in this region are slowly being dissolved in favor of the large corporations. Drugs. It is now clear that South American drug smugglers, exhausted by the difficulties posed along the U.S.-Mexican border and along the U.S. coastline, have now turned toward Africa as a pathway to the United States. Large quantities of cocaine are flown into the Sahel, where they are then carted at considerable risk across the Sahara into Europe. From Europe, these drugs are shipped across the Atlantic to the United States and Canada. Drug enforcement is the task of the phalanx of troops that are now in the region. Migration. Europe has been eager to move its border from the northern edge of the Mediterranean Sea to the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. French troops and European Union funds, alongside the U.S. presence, are in operation to block the traffic of migrants who are fleeing economies destroyed by IMF-driven policies. There is ugliness here. Tired liberal motives drift away into the shadows as the harder motivations flourishto control and to appropriate. This is our world. But beneath this world are people who have better ideas, better dreams. This article was originally published by " Common Dreams " - ==See Also== Joe Rogan - American War Machine Note To ICH Community We ask that you assist us in dissemination of the article published by ICH to your social media accounts and post links to the article from other websites. Thank you for your support. Peace and joy Search Information Clearing House === Click Here To Support Information Clearing House Your support has kept ICH free on the Web since 2002. Click for Spanish , German , Dutch , Danish , French , translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.August 27, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Has Israel been covertly fuelling claims of an anti-Semitism crisis purportedly plaguing Britains Labour Party since it elected a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, three years ago?

That question is raised by a new freedom of information request submitted this week by a group of Israeli lawyers, academics and human rights activists.

They suspect that two Israeli government departments  the ministries of foreign affairs and strategic affairs  have been helping to undermine Corbyn as part of a wider campaign by the Israeli government to harm Palestinian solidarity activists.

The Israeli foreign affairs ministry employs staff of the countrys embassy in London, which was at the centre of suspicions of meddling in UK politics provoked by an Al Jazeera undercover documentary aired last year.

Eitay Mack, an Israeli lawyer, has written to both ministries requesting information on Israels contacts and possible funding of anti-Corbyn activities by pro-Israel lobby groups in the UK. The letter specifically seeks information on possible ties with the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Community Security Trust, Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel.

It also requests information on any efforts by the two Israeli ministries and the Israeli embassy to influence journalists and civil society groups in the UK.

The move follows an outburst by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on social media last week, in which he accused Corbyn of laying a wreath at a cemetery in Tunisia in 2014 for a Palestinian faction that took hostage Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Eleven Israelis were killed during a bungled rescue bid by the German security services.

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Netanyahus high-profile intervention followed days of similar claims in the British media against Corbyn.

The Labour leader has insisted that the wreath was laid for Palestinian and Tunisian victims of an Israeli attack on Tunisian soil in 1985, an operation that was denounced by most Western leaders at the time.

War against the Jews

The suggestion that Corbyn supported Palestinian terrorists is an escalation in long-running allegations of a dramatic rise in anti-Semitism in the Labour Party since he became leader. Such claims have been rife despite statistics showing that the party has less of a problem with anti-Semitism than both the ruling Conservative Party and British society generally.

While initial charges of anti-Semitism in the party targeted mostly Corbyn supporters, the focus has increasingly shifted to the Labour leader himself.

This week Labour MP Joan Ryan, who heads Labour Friends of Israel, wrote a commentary in the Jewish Chronicle newspaper directly blaming Corbyn for the partys so-called anti-Semitism crisis. She said the partys problems had grown out of his past associations with Holocaust deniers, terrorists and some outright anti-Semites'.

Fellow MP Margaret Hodge had earlier called Corbyn an anti-Semite and racist.

Marie Van Der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies, appeared this week on i24, an Israeli English-language channel, to berate Corbyn: Its like Jeremy Corbyn has declared war on the Jews.  We as the Jewish community are spending our time fighting the leader of the opposition.

A recently created British group, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, solicited testimony this week from British Jews in a case it has submitted to the UKs Equality and Human Rights Commission alleging institutional racism in the Labour Party.

Meddling by Israel

Netanyahus tweet is far from the first example of public meddling by Israel in Labour politics. Last December Gilad Erdan, Israels strategic affairs minister and a close ally of Netanyahus, all but accused Corbyn of being an anti-Semite.

He was reported saying: We recognise and we see that there are anti-Semitic views in many of the leadership of the current Labour Party.

An Israeli app developed by Israels strategic affairs ministry was reportedly used this month to amplify erroneous criticism of Corbyn on social media for making supposedly anti-Semitic comments at a 2010 meeting.

A mission issued to Israel lobbyists urged them to spread claims that Corbyn had compared Israel to Nazi Germany, based on a misreading of a report in Britains Times newspaper. In fact, Corbyn had attended an anti-racism event at which a Holocaust survivor, Hajo Meyer, made such a comparison.

But while these interventions have angered Corbyn and many of his supporters, there are suggestions that, behind the scenes, Israel has been playing a much larger role in helping to stoke the partys anti-Semitism crisis, as the freedom of information request suggests.

Dirty tricks unit

The main source of Labours current woes looks to be Israels strategic affairs ministry, which has been headed by Erdan since 2015.

It was set up in 2006, mainly as a vehicle to prevent far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman from breaking up the governing coalition. Lieberman and his successors used it chiefly as a platform from which to stoke concerns either about Iran building a nuclear bomb or about a supposed problem of Palestinian incitement.

But more recently, Netanyahu has encouraged the ministry to redirect its energies towards what he terms delegitimisation, chiefly in response to the growing visibility of the international BDS movement, which promotes boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel.

As a result, the strategic affairs ministry has moved from being a relative backwater inside the government to playing a starring role in Israels struggle on the world stage against enemies damaging its image.

It is hard to determine precisely what the ministry is up to, so sensitive is its work. Even the names of many of its staff are classified.

In the summer of 2016, it advertised a position for an intelligence operative to head a tarnishing  or dirty tricks  unit. Its role, according to Amir Oren, a commentator on Israels security services, was to establish, hire or tempt nonprofit organisations or groups not associated with Israel, in order to disseminate the sullying material.

The ministry now has an annual budget of tens of millions of dollars, and there are clues aplenty that it is playing a leading, if covert, role in shaping public perceptions of Israel around the world.

Civil targeted eliminations

Erdans number two, Sima Vaknin-Gil, a former military intelligence officer, told a parliamentary committee in 2016 that most of the ministrys activities had to stay under the radar because of sensitivities.

I cant even explain in an open forum why there are such sensitivities, she said.

The ministrys job, she added, was to build a community of warriors.

Yossi Melman, a veteran Israeli analyst who has spent decades covering Israels intelligence services, reported at the time that the ministry was receiving help from a special unit of military intelligence to run black ops that might include defamation campaigns and harassment.

The ministrys underhand methods were alluded to two years ago, at a conference in Israel against BDS. A colleague of Erdans, intelligence minister Yisrael Katz, called for targeted civil eliminations of high-profile proponents of BDS.

That could be achieved, he suggested, by drawing on information provided by the Israeli intelligence services he oversees.

Katz used language intended to play on the term targeted assassinations  how Israel describes its extrajudicial execution of Palestinian leaders. Katz appeared to be calling for black ops designed to character-assassinate Israels leading critics.

Plan to marginalise critics

If Israel regards it as necessary to go to such lengths against BDS activists, it seems reasonable to ask: what is it prepared to do to undermine Corbyn, who heads the largest political party in Europe and was in sight of winning last years British general election?

If Corbyn eventually becomes prime minister, he would be the first European leader to prioritise the cause of justice for Palestinians over Israels continuing occupation.

Clues are provided in a report written last year by two prominent pro-Israel lobby groups, the Anti-Defamation League and the Reut Institute, in collaboration with Israeli government experts and endorsed by the ministry of strategic affairs. The report was leaked to the Electronic Intifada website.

It warned that solidarity with Palestinians had migrated into mainstream left-wing parties in Europe. The damage could be curtailed, according to the report, by driving a wedge between what it termed harsh critics and soft critics of Israel.

It proposed professionalising the existing network of pro-Israel lobby groups and improving information-gathering to target Palestinian solidarity activists  or what it called a delegitimisation network. Such work needed to be done covertly and uncompromisingly, the authors stated.

Harsh critics, the report concluded, could then be marginalised to a point where it [their criticism] is considered socially inappropriate.

The report praises the Israeli ministry of strategic affairs for having inserted a great degree of sophistication and creativity to the pro-Israel network.

Vaknin-Gil, the ministrys director-general, is quoted in the document as endorsing its findings: I am glad to see that we share a very similar point of view regarding the challenge and desired strategy.

Sowing divisions

Whether connected or not, much of the report reads like a playbook for what Israel lobbyists have been doing to promote the idea of an anti-Semitism crisis in the Labour Party. The issue has indeed driven a wedge between harsh critics of Israel  Corbyn and his supporters  and much of the rest of the party bureaucracy.

Asa Winstanley, an investigative journalist who has extensively covered the claims of an anti-Semitism crisis in the Labour Party for the Electronic Intifada, argues that Corbyn is viewed by Israel as effectively the figurehead of the delegitimisation network.

They hope that by taking action against him, they can decapitate what they see as the most powerful figure in this network, he told Middle East Eye. By making an example of him, they can sow division, spread fear and suppress speech on Israel.

Certainly, Israels fingerprints look to be present in the current claims of an anti-Semitism crisis supposedly revolving around Corbyn.

Active interference by the Israeli government in British politics was highlighted last year in a four-part undercover documentary produced by the Qatari channel Al Jazeera. It secretly filmed the activities of an operative in Israels embassy in London named Shai Masot.

The Al Jazeera investigation provoked numerous complaints that it breached broadcasting rules relating to anti-Semitism, bias, unfair editing and invasions of privacy. However, Ofcom, the British broadcasting regulator, cleared the programme of all charges.

What little coverage there was of the documentary in the British media focused on Masots meetings with pro-Israel activists in the Conservative Party. Masot is shown plotting to take down a junior foreign office minister, Alan Duncan, who was seen by Israel as too sympathetic to the Palestinians.

But the documentary itself concentrated on Masots much more extensive meetings with pro-Israel activists in the Labour Party. One of his main efforts was to establish a front organisation, a youth wing of Labour Friends of Israel that would have been opposed to Corbyn.

Complaints of bias

Masot was also filmed collaborating with two key Israel lobby groups within the party, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) and Labour Friends of Israel  membership of the latter includes dozens of Labour MPs.

Winstanley, of the Electronic Intifada, observed that the JLM had in recent years become a largely defunct organisation until it was revived in February 2016  just as claims of an anti-Semitism crisis in Labour took off.

Those who have tried to investigate how the JLM expanded its operations so rapidly say its funding sources are completely opaque.

Shortly after the JLM became more active, a new director, Ella Rose, was appointed. It was Winstanley who revealed that Rose had been recruited straight from Israels London embassy, where she worked as its public affairs officer.

Although the JLM has argued it represents the diversity of Jewish opinion in the Labour Party, that has come under challenge since the Al Jazeera investigation. A new faction, Jewish Voice for Labour, has since been established with a declared intention to show that many of the partys Jewish members are supportive of Corbyn.

It looks suspiciously like the JLM has become a proxy of the Israeli state, Winstanley said.

It is not an organic grassroots movement, as it likes to claim. And it is no accident that it has been the driving force behind the claims of an anti-Semitism problem under Corbyn.

Both Ella Rose and the JLM were contacted for comment on these allegations, but neither had responded at the time of publication.

Turf war in London

Who was Masot working for? Perhaps not surprisingly, Israeli officials and the Israeli media have downplayed his significance, portraying him as a minor player at the embassy who pursued a rogue, personal policy.

That view appeared to be accepted by the British government and the British media, which allowed the controversy to quickly die down after Masot was sent back to Israel.

But there is considerable evidence that Masots collaborative work with British pro-Israel organisations against Corbyn was being carried out at the direction of the Israeli ministry of strategic affairs.

In September 2016, as Al Jazeera was filming its undercover documentary, Haaretz reported on a growing turf war in Britain between the Israeli foreign ministry and the ministry of strategic affairs, the two groups targeted in the freedom of information request.

In a leaked cable sent to the Israeli foreign ministry and obtained by Haaretz, its senior staff at the London embassy complain that Erdans strategic affairs ministry is operating British Jewish organisations behind the embassys back.

The embassys apparent concern is that such operations are likely to break British law and could have dangerous repercussions for the embassys work. Britain isnt the US! the cable states.

Haaretz explained the concern behind the cable: The potential legal problem stems from the fact that most British Jewish organisations are defined as charities. As such, they are barred from activity of a political nature unless it is directly connected to the organisations charitable goals.

According to the Haaretz report, strategic affairs minister Gilad Erdan had visited Britain two weeks earlier to try to iron out differences. His advisers in the UK had promised not to pose as the embassy, though the cable identifies an incident shortly afterwards when one such adviser did so.

Was Masot another of Erdans advisers in the UK, operating out of the embassy? His covert operations  caught on camera  are of precisely the kind his own embassy was complaining about.

At one point during Al Jazeeras many weeks of secret filming, Masot dramatically changes direction. He announces to the undercover reporter that he can no longer be directly involved in creating a Labour youth movement and must remain in the background. He is seen winking at the reporter.

His sudden change of tune appears to coincide with the spat between the embassy staff and the strategic affairs ministry.

Problems over anti-Semitism

One Labour activist, who did not wish to be named given the purges taking place inside the party, told MEE: Corbyn is up against an unholy, ad hoc alliance of right-wing MPs in both the Labour and Tory parties, the Israeli government and its lobbyists, the British security services and the media.

They have settled on anti-Semitism as the best weapon to use against him because it is such a taboo issue. Its like quicksand. The more he struggles against the claims, the more he gets sucked down into the mire.

That has been all too evident in months of wrangling inside Labour about how to define anti-Semitism. Under pressure from Corbyns critics, the party approved a new code of conduct in July based on a highly controversial working definition drafted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

The adoption of the IHRA definition, however, did nothing to placate Jewish leadership organisations, such as the Board of Deputies, or the JLM. They objected because Labours code of conduct excluded four of the IHRAs 11 possible examples of anti-Semitism  the main ones that relate to Israel.

Labour officials feared that including them would severely curtail the partys ability to criticise Israel.

Experts agree. David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Birkbeck College, London University, has warned of a danger that the overall effect will place the onus on Israels critics to demonstrate they are not anti-Semitic.

Under pressure from pro-Israel groups, however, Labour looks close to adopting all of the IHRA examples.

Creating a new definition

Israels fingerprints are evident in these recent efforts to redefine anti-Semitism in a way that moves the centre of gravity away from hatred of Jews towards criticism of Israel.

That shift inevitably ensnares any political leader who, like Corbyn, wishes to express solidarity with Palestinians.

The IHRAs definition is itself based on one proposed in 2004  and discarded after much criticism  by a now-defunct European Union body called the Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC).

That definition was derived from the work of Israeli academics such as Dina Porat, who was part of an Israeli foreign ministry delegation to an anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. At that time Israel was facing a barrage of criticism for its use of lethal force to put down a Palestinian uprising.

Nathan Thrall, an analyst in Jerusalem with the International Crisis Group, has noted that the aim of Porat and others was to create a new definition of anti-Semitism that would equate criticisms of Israel with hatred of Jews. They were largely responsible for the way the EUMCs working definition was formulated.

But Israel and its lobbyists were frustrated by the definitions failure to gain traction. That began to change in 2015.

A conference in Jerusalem sponsored by the Israeli foreign affairs ministry, the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism, recommended that year that the working definition of anti-Semitism be reintroduced into the international arena with the aim of giving it legal status.

The task was taken up by a senior pro-Israel lobbyist, Mark Weitzman, of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre. As chair of the IHRAs committee on anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, he lobbied on behalf of the discredited EUMC definition. The IHRA formally adopted it in 2016.

In a new book, Cracks in the Wall, analyst Ben White points to an Israeli government document that approved the change of emphasis in the definition. The document states: The main innovation in the working definition is that it also includes expressions of anti-Semitism directed against the state of Israel, when it is perceived as a Jewish collective.

Open season on Corbyn

A tool originally intended to suppress student debates about Israel and block Israel anti-apartheid week on campus has now been successfully pressed into service against the leader of a major British political party.

According to Winstanley, if the full IHRA definition is approved by Labour: It will be open season on Corbyn and his supporters in the party.

He added that the strategy outlined in the report by the Anti-Defamation League and the Reut Institute was being closely followed. Well-tested disinformation strategies are being used to isolate Corbyn from his base of support, he said.

The Israeli academics and lawyers seeking access to information on the activities of the two Israeli ministries  foreign affairs and strategic affairs  believe that official documents could help to expose a role played by Israel in fomenting the current problems facing Corbyn.

The foreign ministry has demonstrably been at the centre of efforts to expand the definition of anti-Semitism from hatred of Jews into a catch-all for criticism of Israel  a definition that Corbyn and his supporters are bound to fall foul of.

The role of the strategic affairs ministry, given its covert nature, is harder to assess. But the existence of a dirty tricks unit points towards a strategy to vilify and isolate high-profile Palestinian solidarity activists such as Corbyn.

There is evidence that, in cooperation with the foreign affairs ministry, it has run at least one agent out of the London embassy assisting and possibly directing pro-Israel lobby groups to amplify a supposed anti-Semitism crisis in the Labour party.

Given his long track record of being at the forefront of anti-racism initiatives that have emphasised Palestinian solidarity and criticism of Israel, Corbyn may find there is an endless supply of readily mined scandals the two ministries can keep digging up.Why US Imperialism Loves Afghan Quagmire

By Finian Cunningham

August 27, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - It may seem paradoxical that any American interest would seek to deliberately prolong the Afghan quagmire. Costing trillions of dollars to the national debt, one would think that US planners are anxious to wind down the war and cut their immense losses. Not so, it seems.

Like the classic 1960s satire film, Dr Strangelove, and how he came to love the A-bomb, there are present-day elements in the US military-security apparatus that seem to be just fine about being wedded to the mayhem in Afghanistan.

That war is officially the longest-ever war fought by US forces overseas, outlasting the Vietnam war (1964-75) by six years  and still counting.

After GW Bush launched the operation in October 2001, the war is now under the purview of its third consecutive president. Whats more, the 17-year campaign to date is unlikely to end for several more years to come, after President Donald Trump last year gave the Pentagon control over its conduct.

This week saw two developments which show that powerful elements within the US state have very different calculations concerning the Afghan war compared with most ordinary citizens.

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First there was the rejection by Washington of an offer extended by Russia to join a peace summit scheduled for next month. The purpose of the Moscow conference is to bring together participants in the war, including the US-backed Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani, as well as the Taliban militants who have been fighting against American military occupation.

Washington and its Afghan surrogate administration in Kabul said they would not be participating because, in their view, such a dialogue would be futile.

The US refusal to attend the Moscow event, after previously showing an apparent interest, drew an angry response from Russia. Russias foreign ministry said the refusal to attend the Moscow meeting on Afghanistan shows Washington has no interest in launching a peace process.

One suspects that US reluctance is partly due to not wanting to give Moscow any additional international standing since Russias successful military intervention in Syria and its leading role in mediating for peace there.

It also seems incongruous that only last week the US-backed Ghani administration offered to call a ceasefire with the Taliban to mark the Muslim religious festivities of Eid al-Arafat. If President Ghani can see fit to call a truce with the militants, then what is so objectionable about sitting down with them in Moscow?

Another, more sinister, development was the disclosure this week by the Russian foreign ministry that it had tracked large-scale weapons supplies to militant groups in Afghanistans northern region. The foreign ministry said the weapons were dropped off by unidentified military helicopters.

Whats more, the helicopters were apparently given flight clearance by the US military forces and their Afghan national army charges. There can be only one conclusion: the Pentagon or the CIA are complicit in arming insurgents whom they are supposed to be trying to defeat. This is not the first time that such clandestine trafficking of weapons by US forces in Afghanistan has been reported by the Russian foreign ministry.

Similar skulduggery involving US military with terror groups in Syria has also been documented.

Recall too an interview given at the end of last year by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai who said categorically that US military commanders were responsible for cultivating Islamic State (IS, ISIS or Daesh) terrorist networks in his country. These groups seem to be separate in intent from the Taliban factions.

Ironically, US commanders have recently accused Russia of supplying weapons to Taliban fighters. Moscow and the Taliban have both separately denied any such link.

Such claims by Washington seem more plausibly an attempt by the Pentagon to muddy the waters of their own complicity in arming illegal militant groups in Afghanistan.

The question is: why would US forces want to aid and abet militants and prolong a war that has cost the American taxpayer trillions of dollars? Why would Washington spurn an opportunity to participate in the Moscow-convened summit scheduled for September 4, which is aimed at finding a peaceful settlement to the conflict?

In short, what US interests are there in prolonging this appalling war?

While the occupation of Afghanistan by US troops is a deadweight for the American national economy and citizen-taxpayers  adding up to $5 trillion to the countrys total debt load of $21 trillion  we have to bear in mind that for weapons manufacturers and suppliers, the war is a boon. It keeps the military-industrial complex humming with super profitable business. Companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, which are among the top lobbyists to Congress, using a coldly rational logic would not want this war to stop. Ever. Their corporate interests are starkly divergent from ordinary US citizens and foot-soldiers on the ground. So what if the nation is $21 trillion in debt when mega profits are being scooped up by executives and shareholders of the weapons companies?

It is also well-documented that the CIA depends on lawlessness in Afghanistan to run its trillion-dollar opium drugs racket. As with the notorious Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war, the CIA uses global drugs trafficking as a way to fund its black operations in others parts of the world, finances that are kept hidden from political oversight by Congressional lawmakers.

A third incentive for American imperial planners to keep Afghanistan in turmoil is that it allows the US to mobilize and weaponize proxy armies for the purpose of harrying Russia and Iran. Afghanistan has a border with Iran to its west and it is a spearhead into Russias southern flank. For the US, having a base for militants with which to penetrate and destabilize either Iran or Russia is a strategic asset, not at all a strategic loss. Especially now given that Iran and Russia have succeeded in routing the US-backed jihadist bases in Syria.

Indeed, Russia has already explicitly expressed the concern that a lawless Afghanistan presents a direct security threat to its national interests.

So, yes, by any normal reckoning, Afghanistan has been a catastrophe for US citizens, as well as of course for millions of Afghanis who have lost loved ones, homes, jobs, and livelihoods only to eke a subsistence in grinding poverty.

But in a more sinister reckoning, there are powerful American interests which view the suffering and calamity of Afghanistan as a lucrative, strategic venture that must be kept going.

Afghanistan may be a seething swamp of suffering. But its a swamp that is at the same time spawning immense advantages for a select few overseeing US imperialist interests. That makes the tragedy of the country more poignant. Heinously, crucial incentives are not to stop the war, but to keep it going.August 27, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Under apparent government pressure, big tech corporations in the United States have tightened their social media grip, censoring accounts that criticize the US government and its allies.

Under the spell of Russiagate hysteria promoted incessantly by the US government and corporate media, social media accounts that were identified by shady private cybersecurity firms as supposed Russian trolls were targeted first. Then pro-Venezuelan government websites like the state-funded media outlet TeleSUR English and even the independent Venezuela Analysis had their Facebook pages temporarily removed.

Now Silicon Valley has set its sights on Iran. While the Donald Trump administration is banning Iranians from traveling and imposing suffocating sanctions on their country, Big Tech is banning them from using social media.

Google (which owns YouTube), Facebook (which owns Instagram), and Twitter have removed hundreds of Iranian social media accounts that have been accused  without any evidence  of being linked to the government in Tehran. These suspensions were based on a questionable, thinly sourced report by the American cybersecurity firm FireEye, which is led by former US military officers.

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But contrary to what numerous corporate media reports are claiming, some of the Iranian accounts being banned are in fact not operated by the government. In fact, many are average Iranians whose opinions do not fit into the tightly managed, pro-war Washington consensus.

An Iranian student and independent journalist whose social media account was suspended is now speaking out.

Sayed Mousavi ran a fairly popular Twitter account under the handle @SayedMousavi7, where he reported factually on Iranian affairs and dispelled propaganda about his country.

After being banned, he recorded a video that was tweeted by iranmilitaryvlog, a political economist who reports on Iran.

Sayed Mousavi ran a fairly popular Twitter account under the handle @SayedMousavi7, where he reported factually on Iranian affairs and dispelled propaganda about his country.

After being banned, he recorded a video that was tweeted by iranmilitaryvlog, a political economist who reports on Iran.

SeyedMousavi7 was banned from Twitter after a major censorship campaign claiming he is part of a "propaganda ring." He's actually a student from #Iran and came to discuss politics just like everyone else. When it comes to voicing opinions, he says the platform is rigged. pic.twitter.com/StSI8caMp7  iranmilitaryvlog  (@irmilitaryvlog) August 23, 2018

This is just the tip of an iceberg

Twitter is rigged; Facebook is rigged, Mousavi said. Weve heard a lot of news recently about different pages and groups being banned out of Facebook, banned out of Twitter. I woke up yesterday seeing my page was taken down on Twitter, announcing that theyve dismantled this Iranian network of disinformation.'

What worries me is that, I was just a student doing my bit of what I can do to journalism to counter just a little bit of the huge amount of disinformation being put about my country, he continued.

Mousavi pointed out that Twitters second-largest shareholder is the billionaire Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who in fact owns more stocks than Twitters own co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey.

He also noted that Facebook works with the Israeli government, censoring Palestinian social media accounts at its request.

I believe that this is just the tip of an iceberg of what we have to expect in the near future on social media and the media, Mousavi said.

Its really a burden upon us, different anti-Zionist, different anti-imperialist groups, to make our voices heard. We need to diversity our platforms. We need to popularize our struggle to get our side heard, he added.

Mousavi is appealing his suspension, but noted that even if Twitter accepts my appeal, I think they have made their message quite clear, loud and clear.

Growing threat of US government-backed social media censorship

Since the 2016 presidential election, the US government has heavily pressured corporate tech giants to crack down on social media. While Russia, Venezuela, and now Iran have been targeted for censorship, US allies like Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey have continued running their own notorious troll propaganda campaigns on social media, completely unabated.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald warned in December 2017, Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments. Since then, the repression has only grown.

Grayzone Project editor Max Blumenthal addressed the growing threat of US government-backed social media censorship in an interview with journalist Abby Martin on our podcast Moderate Rebels. Martins own show, The Empire Files, was forced off air due to US sanctions on Venezuela, which have prevented her and her team from being paid.

=====Former Crossriver state governor Donald Duke, who is aspiring to lead Nigeria come 2019 was On the couch with music star Folarin Falana aka Falz and Laila Johnson. The presidential aspirant who spoke on a couple of things he would do, if he is elected as president and we thought you might want to know. Read below;

Personal life

Donald Duke is married and has 3 daughters, and two are married. He grew up in Lagos and went to school in Lagos, Zaria, Sokoto and United states and he is Lawyer.

His greatest passion

He says seeing people living up to their greatest potential. Seeing individuals in Nigeria, being given the opportunity to rise to their greatest potential, as many right now are even frustrated on thinking of it, let alone acting on it. That is why he says he wants to lead Nigeria.

His greatest mantra

Try to do unto others what you what them to do unto you

What he wants to do for Nigeria

He says he wants to give the same opportunity he was given by Nigeria to Nigerians. According to him, Nigeria has been good to him, through education, exposure and opportunities that have been afforded to him, so he says most people do not have those opportunities, so he wants to give people that platform to succeed.

His first 100 days

-Right now Nigeria is embroiled in a civil war in the Northeast and some parts of Nigeria, so he says he will deal will the assault on our people like the herdsmen and farmers crisis

-Deal with economy: every sector is in dire need of touch and people are facing a lot as regards the economy.

On Education

He will redress the curriculum to fit the digital age, as what he have now is outdated. He also says he will train teachers to deal with digital curriculum, motivate them, tie teachers career to students passage.

On police

He says Nigeria is under-policed with the most of them available policemen escorting VIPs.

He believes in state policing and would enforce it.

He doesnt think school cert shouldnt be the minimum entry qualification for joining the police but should either be an HND or a Degree.

He also plans to remunerate them accordingly. The take home pay of the police should really take them home.

On N13.5m running cost for Senators

He says that is a lot. He says he has spoken to some senators who told him the money isnt entirely theirs and that, they have to pay people who do research for them and all that. However, he says he knows that is just a story they came up with.

He says the amount has been growing from 1999 and that when every senate comes in, they up it. He says a president should sit with the leadership of the National Assembly and cut it down.

On electricity

On giving 24hrs electricity, he says he plans to make power generation local as oppose to the present situation where power is generated from one end and it diminishes before it gets to the other end. He says he will make sure that there is affordable gas all over the country.

On corruption

He says people have written petitions against him, lots have come up with accusations but it is convictions that matters and he has never been convicted for any. He says he has never intentionally misappropriated public funds and has no case with any anti-graph agency.

And he would make sure corrupt acquaintances wont make any way into his government if elected president. As his loyalty is to Nigeria.

On Gay rights

He doesnt understand what gay peoples emotions are but he wouldnt criminalised them and would ensure that they get protection of the law but in the event where they try to exhibit their sexuality that would be an affront to the norms of society.

And he wouldnt have a problem with have a gay person being in his cabinet because he has no business with his personal life but what he cares about is, can he deliver the assignment he has been given.

On what party he would be running

He says he would make an announcement as regards that this week. So keep watch!

See full interview belowThis love story is quite unusual. Both are from wealthy backgroundsToyins parents Otunba Kunle and Erelu Ojuolape Ojora, while Bukolas father is the late strongman of Kwara politics and Senate leader in the Second Republic, late Olusola Saraki. But their pedigree never hindered their building a wealthy union for their kids to emulate.

For Nigerias Senate President, Senator Bukola Saraki and his wife, Toyin, marital life has been on a roller-coaster. They have been together for almost 27 years and still counting.

Revealing in an interview to Kemi Ashefon, Toyin Saraki, who is the founder of the Wellbeing Foundation Africa said even as the Kwara State Governors wife, where she spent eight years at the Governors Lodge, she never felt superior to others.

She said, I never for one moment felt like a governors wife because when my husband and I got married, he most certainly was not a governor and I reminded myself of this whenever I felt things were getting out of hand! Being a governors wife then and now a Senate Presidents wife, was/is a responsibility, not a lifestyle, for a finite term of years, and with it, for me, came huge sacrifices which I was honored and humbled to make in support of my husbands political leadership. I have always defined myself as exactly what I am a woman, a human being, with rights and obligations, who cares about the people around her, the environment she lives in, the community with which she interacts.

There is no level, no matter how high one may attain that will ever shake my conviction that one must cling to the basic truths of life. With blood in my veins and a heart that loves truth, I have absolutely no hesitation in defending myself on any matter of personal integrity. I was brought up, as an Ojora, to face battles squarely, I dont run away from issues. Of course there were times that I was under attack because often, people judge by their own standards and misconceived assumptions. The fact is that while position may protect, position can also render the occupant more vulnerable.

Amazingly, the duo still share gifts and a bouquet of flowers the Senate President sent to his wife during a Valentines Day rocked the Internet.

How is a day in the life of the Sarakis?

Toyin replied, My daily life has always been an interesting mix of contrasts, the daily challenge of balancing my purpose as a mother and wife with the derivative duties imposed by marriage to a spouse in high office.by Zhang Yongxing, Jiang Shan

SUVA, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- The free medical service offered recently by Chinese naval hospital ship Peace Ark has won praise from Tongans, who have described Ark Peace as the ship of peace, life and friendship.

Currently, Peace Ark is heading for the countries in Central and South America for goodwill visit after wrapping up an eight-day visit to Tonga from Aug. 13 to Aug. 20.

During her stay in Nukualofa, capital of Tonga, Peace Ark fulfilled consultation and treatment for 5,532 persons, conducted auxiliary examinations for 2,598 persons, hospitalized 28 inpatients and performed 34 surgeries.

Coincidentally, the date of Peace Ark's current visit was the same as the first visit to the South Pacific island nation by her four years ago. This is a reunion of friendship and a get-together of happiness as well.

For James Latu, a 26-year-old military doctor in Tonga, it was lucky to reunite with his Chinese teachers in Nukualofa.

On Aug. 13, Peace Ark arrived at Port of Nukualofa. Amidst those greeting the ship on the wharf, a handsome young man, dressed in Changhai Hospital's doctor overall, was extremely excited.

It was Latu, who used to be a trainee of the Chinese Navy's Naval Medical University from 2011 to 2017, majoring in clinical medicine science. He was the first military trainee from Tonga who studied at the Chinese naval university and also the first undergraduate trainee from the South Pacific island nations.

"What a surprise, I could meet with my teachers from China in Tonga," Latu said. He met with his Chinese teachers and told them about his study, life and work after returning to Tonga.

As there is no military hospital at present in Tonga, Latu can only be employed at a local civilian hospital as a military doctor.

"I have a dream to establish the first military hospital in Tonga so that the men and women of His Majesty's armed forces can have their own special hospital like China," he told his Chinese teachers.

"This patient has asthma. Wheezing rale can be heard from the auscultator when expiration," Shang Yan, a doctor with the respiratory medicine department continued to instruct her trainee while treating the local patients. As a medical volunteer from Tonga, Latu was quite busy not only as interpreter but also as assistant doctor.

"I am reminiscent of the days as an intern doctor at Changhai Hospital when working with my teacher shoulder over shoulder to provide consultation and treatment for the public of Tonga," said Latu, showing a photo from his mobile phone taken when he was in China.

The photo depicts that he was treating a Chinese patient under the instruction of his Chinese teacher, Shang Yan. "I quite cherish the memory of good times as a trainee in China. I always take a look at the photos when missing you."

How time flies and it's time to bid farewell again. "I don't know whether or not the next reunion with you is available and when we have the reunion after this meeting," said Latu, who presented his teacher a special gift, a heart-shaped ornament engraved with his teacher's name.

"You are the most welcome to Tonga forever!" Latu bade farewell to his teachers.

Katonga, a 48-year-old accountant at Tonga High School, was given a new life after a successful operation onboard Ark Peace on Aug. 17.

"Thank you, Peace Ark, for giving me rebirth," she said to the Chinese military doctors after receiving a successful invasive chest closed-drainage.

Two years ago, Ikatonga accepted two surgeries at a local hospital as hydrops took place due to pulmonary infection. Unfortunately, the surgeries didn't cure her disease but left a psychological shadow, which is extremely painful, and the scar left after surgery is very conspicuous.

"When I almost lost my confidence, my daughter told me that the hospital ship from China was coming to Tonga for the medical service and that the Chinese military doctors must be capable." As encouraged by her daughter, Ikatonga went to Peace Ark for treatment.

Following embarkation, physical examination, hospitalization, surgery and so on, Ikatonga had her consultation and treatment completed within half a day onboard Peace Ark.

"For this time, I didn't feel any pain from the surgery and there is no scar left," said Ikatonga. Honestly, there is still a great risk on minimally invasive chest closed-drainage. Doctor Han Qinqi with the department of cardiothoracic surgery made deliberate examinations prior to her operation and repeatedly elaborated on the operation plan.

"This letter cannot express my gratitude yet. I will pray for you forever!" Ikatonga recovered quite well following the operation. She wrote a letter of appreciation. "After I am totally recovered, I will go to China to convey my sincere thanks."

Tonga is the fourth stop of Peace Ark's current mission and the ship paid her first successful visit to the South Pacific Island nation in 2014.Barely a day after her sold-out show at the London O2, it appears Tiwa Savage is unhappy and frustrated .

According to the star,she wondered if it is a sin to be a woman in Africa .She said she is tired of proving herself and sometimes feels like giving up.Nollywood actor, Jim Iyke in a telephone conversation with PULSE, has denied the viral reports going around that he was arrested at the airport.

According to him, he only had a delayed flight and was only being escorted by his two personal assistants and police escort.

I am surprised at this news. I am presently seating at the Dana Air office about to board my flight. I missed my flight and when I got to the airport, I wanted to try and see if I could make it because the plane hadnt gone, they even tried speaking to the pilot but it was late. They had to put me on the next flight.

My sister just called me to ask this same question because she said her old school friend called her and told she held about my arrest. I have been at the airport for two hours. I dont know why people will come up with stories like this, he said.

Recent photo of leah

Leah Sharibu, one of the 112 girls of Dapchi Government Girls Science Technical College, GGSTC, Dapchi, Yobe State abducted by the Boko Haram terrorist group on February 19, 2018 has given her family and supporters, a beam of hope.

Sharibu, who was held back for refusing to denounce Christianity, as others were later returned has now spoken from captivity to the delight of many, praying and hoping for a release. TheCable has exclusively obtained her latest picture as well as the audio of her plea to Buhari as proof of life

Leah, who spoke in Hausa, in the 35secs audio, had this to say;

I am Leah Sharibu, the girl that was abducted in GGSS Dapchi. I am calling on the government and people of goodwill to intervene to get me out of my current situation I also plead to the members of the public to help my mother, my father, my younger brother and relatives. Kindly help me out of my predicament. I am begging you to treat me with compassion, I am calling on the government, particularly, the president to pity me and get me out of this serious situation. Thank you.

Listen to audio belowA model identified as Rhian Sugden has had a 250,000 Indecent Proposal from a mystery businessman. Rhian, 31, was contacted by a Russian who offered the cash to spend the night with her after seeing her sexy modelling shots in The Sun

Photos like these drove the Russian business man offer an obscene amount of money to the glamour model

The man, claiming to be a banker and Bitcoin trader, emailed his proposal to her agent.

A source told The Sun: Rhian is used to getting gifts from kind-hearted fans, but this blew her away.

The offer seems genuine but shes happily engaged and not in the habit of selling her body.

Rhian is due to marry ex-Corrie hunk Oliver Mellor, 37, next month.Shortly after the April 30th meeting of Nigerias president, Muhammadu Buhari and US president Donald Trump, shocking reports have emerged that the later referred to Buhari as lifeless. The US president was quoted to have told his aides, he never wanted to meet someone so lifeless again.

According to Financial Times, in an article titled Africa looks for something new out of Trump, The first meeting, with Nigerias ailing 75-year-old Muhammadu Buhari in April, ended with the US president telling aides he never wanted to meet someone so lifeless again, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Here is a screenshot of the article

We have gone through comments on social media as to what Nigerians think about the statement, here are a few with came up with.

Trumps alleged remarks is something to worry about  we might not like our Presidents Policies but jubilating that a man that is almost same age as him even if he was younger but to refer to the Nigerian President as Lifeless is rather unfortunate  Buhari represents us all.  Mercy (@AbangMercy) August 27, 2018

Buhari went abroad to call us criminals and lazy. So, if Trump calls him lifeless, nothing spoil.  Jamal (@JajaPhD) August 27, 2018

https://twitter.com/Burmese_Tyga/status/1034022454870634497

You all remember when Buhari was abroad and he labelled us Fantastically corrupt and lazy youths? Yes Trump just did a clap back on our behalf to call him lifeless. Game on.  Adeeko Kehinde (@Adeekehinde) August 27, 2018Daniel Emori has spent nearly half his life on a bed since he was gored by a cow in Onitsha. At 35, his condition shows no sign of improvement as our reporter finds out.

Friday evening is not for clubbing. Not for Daniel Emori. It is not for anything except lying in bed, in his urine. This has been his life since he was 20, when an injury to his spine put him in bed in 2003. Fifteen years later, hes 35 and still bedridden.

I thank God for everything, but nothing has changed, he says. Nothing has changed. I am still lying down.

In 2003, Emori had finished secondary school and got a job supplying packaged water in Onitsha, Anambra state. He had his eyes firmly on the future when he stepped out of his delivery truck on one of his supply runs. He never expected that a stray cow would sweep him onto its horn and speed away with him.

It was running with me on top [of its horns], he recalls. People were shouting. It threw me off. From the moment I fell down, I found myself in this condition.

Bones snapped in his neck, leg and hips, x-rays later showed. Since then, hes been on his back, in a bed, and has never left a bed in the last 15 years.

He constantly is attached to a catheter that collects his urine

Three years into his injury, his condition worsened. Bed sores ate into his back and buttock. A pressure sore also ate into his Pen!s. An infection left a hole there. And it leaks urine, despite the catheter.

It disturbs me. Now [the catheter] doesnt even last a week, Emori says. I dont even know what is happening in that area. It doesnt last at all. If I just put it in, it starts leaking. Even as I am talking to you, Im lying on top of urine.

Hes been through a number of surgeries and treatment for his spine. A local charity funding the surgeries and upkeep relocated him into a single-room apartment in Karu on the outskirts of Abuja to keep him close to Primus Specialty Hospital.

Later he was relocated to Dutse Makaranta and got only two weeks of physiotherapy at Optimal Health. He was billed to undergo years of treatment, according to physiotherapist Chibuike Mbamalu who tended him for two weeks at optimal.

In addition to the infection under his Pen!s, osteoporosis [weakening of the bones] set in, making his bones fragile. His knees and joints are stiff from lack of use. His feet have also swollen as fluid collected there.

A treatment regime was proposed and discussed with hospitals outside the country. It was estimated to cost N7.762 million. He couldnt afford it in 2015. Three years on, his treatment is now valued at more than N16 million.

The treatment plan is to begin with infection control, followed by a surgery to replace his knees, allowing him to bend his legs to some degrees. A separate procedure will elongate his Achilles tendon to give him some movement. Another is to scR@pe away dead tissue from the pressure sores on his buttocks.

Only the last bit of treatment has been done to some extent. The sores have healed, he says. But they open up when he sits on them. And he has to sit in a wheelchair now and again to go to hospital.

Optimal was optimistic about his treatment. Its director Emma Udoji signed a letter enabling Emori to seek public assistance to raise funds. The good news was that Emori still had sensation in his toes.

So there is very good hope that with proper management and intensive therapy, we hope to see some good changes, Udoji said then.

That was in 2015. The swelling in his feet got treated. Shortly after, the outfit shut shop and relocated to Port Harcourt.

In the last two years, I stopped the physiotherapy due to financial challenges, says Emori.

They referred me to India. Since there was no sponsor showing up, they just left me.

The treatment plan developed with Indias Saket Hospital hasnt changed. Physiotherapy and rehabilitation will depend on how well his bones and muscles respond to surgeries that the hospital has proposed. They were to cost $25,000.

After that, the plan is to ensure he gets some independence. That would mean putting him in a motorized wheelchair, so he can move and stand.

He would need at least six months of physiotherapytwo hours per session three times a day, six days a weekto strengthen his trunk an upper limb muscles before going into rehabilitation to regain mobility. That was to cost $20,500.

The plan also includes a robotic exoskeleton to help him walk but that will depend on how strong his trunk and upper limbs become.

The entire plan remains suspended until he is able to raise funds. His bank details [Daniel Emori, UBA, 2072008766] have been broadcast on television and across social media seeking help for him.

Presently I am not receiving any treatment or medication. Since last year I have taken any medication or done any check-up, he says.

Hes fast becoming weary but his hopes havent dimmed, he says. A carer lives with him in Garam, Niger State, where he now lives, some 15 minutes from Bwari. A local charity takes care of his rent and feeding. His family pays a carer N15,000 monthly to be with him 24 hours a day. They took that up after the charity stopped paying for carer duty.

The carer helps replace the catheter. But thats a task the 35-year-old Emori wishes he could one day do for himself. Even better, he wishes he could stand up, walk into the bathroom and take a leak.

But that is not happening any time soon, not if he cant raise the total $44,250thats nearly N16 millionthat his treatment is estimated to cost.

I appeal to fellow Nigerians, NGOs, government agencies to come to my rescue, he says from his sick bed.

He cant leave his bed without help from his carer. The catheter running into his Pen!s is changed weekly but isnt helping much. The collection bag attached to the catheter fills up. The next spout of urine doesnt go into the bag. It spills out of the infected hole and sprays down his thighs, right onto the bed. Emori remains lying right in it.

Unless something happens, Emori may rot in his own piss while the stray cow that killed his dreams has been since forgotten by most. But in his mind, that terrifying encounter with the animal will live forever.

***

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Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.The opening ceremony of the SCO "Peace Mission2018" joint anti-terrorism military exercise takes place in the training center located in Chebarkul, Chelyabinsk Region in the Urals, Russia, on the morning of August 24, 2018.

By LuoShunyu, Pan Kai, Zhang Haijing

URALS, RUSSIA, Aug. 27 (ChinaMil) -- Lieutenant General Alexander Rabin, director general of the joint director department and commander of the Russias Central Military District, announced the start of "Peace Mission 2018" joint anti-terrorism military exercise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and delivered a welcome speech during an opening ceremony on Aug. 24.

Subsequently, seven representatives from participating troops, including Senior Colonel Ma Qixian, Chinese director of the joint director department and assistant of the chief of staff of the Joint Staff Department under the Chinese PLA Western Theater Command, also delivered speeches respectively.

Thereafter, a military parade was held and all participating troops took part in the parade.

Senior Colonel Ma Qixian said in his speech that the "Peace Mission 2018" is a crucial exercise held amid an increasingly complex international and regional anti-terrorism situation and an important part of the SCO's deepening cooperation in the field of defense and security, and it serves as an important platform reflecting the mutual trust and cooperation among SCO member states.

It will play a positive role in enhancing the ability of all member states to work together to cope with new threats and challenges, promoting the SCO's defense and security cooperation to go further both in substance and depth, and safeguarding regional peace and stability, Ma Qixian added.

The "Peace Mission 2018" exercise is the seventh joint anti-terrorism military exercise under the SCO framework. It is also the first joint military exercise organized by all member states of the SCO.

The main type of the exercise is "Mountain Joint Anti-Terrorism Action", containing three stages: strategic consultation, joint anti-terrorism operations preparation and war implementation.

The exercise, involving a total of over 3,000 troops, will use more than 500 weapons and equipment, including fighters, helicopters, tanks, Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs), self-propelled weapons systems and so on.

The first joint training was held after the opening ceremony and the whole exercise will finish on August 29, 2018.

Lieutenant General Alexander Rabin, director general of the SCO "Peace Mission 2018" joint anti-terrorism military exercise and commander of the Russias Central Military District, delivers a welcome speech.In less than a month from now, Apple will be unveiling its 2018 iPhone XS lineup. And if you have already decided that you are going to upgrade to a new iPhone this year and want to make the upgrade as cheaply as possible, the smart thing to do will be to sell your existing iPhone right away.

The Perfect Time to Sell your Old iPhone

As soon as Apple releases new iPhones, prices of existing iPhones are going to come crashing down. This means that your current iPhone is also going to lose its value in the second-hand market by at least a few hundred dollars. By selling your current iPhone at a good price, you can upgrade to one of Apples 2018 iPhone by paying just a few hundred dollars more.

Apple is expected to unveil its 2018 iPhone XS on September 12. So you will have to use a spare phone for only around three weeks if you get around to selling your existing iPhone right away.

Before you go ahead and sell your iPhone though, there are a few things you should keep in mind. Lets have a look at them below.

What to Do Before Selling Your Old iPhone?

1. Unlock your iPhone

Many carriers lock the iPhone so it can be used only on that single carrier, limiting the number of people who can purchase your iPhone. If you want to expand your pool of potential customers, then you should look into unlocking your phone, which allows the phone to operate on multiple carriers. You should check with your current wireless service provider to see how they handle unlocking a device. Some will do it for free if the phone has been on your line for a certain amount of time while others will charge you a small fee.

2. Backup All Data

It is important to create a backup of all the data on your existing iPhone unless you want to start from scratch on your new iPhone. With all your data backed up, you will be able to restore all your apps, their associated data, contacts, photos, and other data to your new iPhone in no time and start using it almost immediately.

Since Apple only offers a paltry 5GB of free storage space on iCloud, most users will be unable to back up their device to the cloud. It is a different story if you are paying for iCloud storage space. If thats the case, you should follow the steps in these guide to backup your iPhone to the cloud. iCloud backups are recommended for people who have access to a high-speed internet connection.

You can also use iTunes to create a backup of your iPhone data. This process will be faster and ideal for people who dont have access to a high-speed internet connection.

Read: How to Backup Your iPhone and iPad with and without iTunes

3. Disable Find my iPhone and Erase Your iPhone

Apples anti-theft system is pretty darn good. But when you are selling your iPhone, you need to ensure that it is turned off otherwise the buyer will not be able to get around to using the phone.

Read: How to Turn Off Find My iPhone

With Find my iPhone disabled, it is now time for you to erase your iPhone to wipe it clean of all your data. You obviously dont want to hand over your iPhone to a stranger with all your data on it.

Read: How To Erase Your iPhones Data Before You Sell It

Switching to an Android Device?

Just in case you are looking to sell your existing iPhone to switch to an Android device, you should turn iMessage off. In case you dont do so, you will not receive text messages sent from iPhone users. If you have already sold your iPhone, worry not as theres still a way for you to deregister your number from iMessage.

Read: How to Deregister Your Number from iMessage

Where to Sell Your Old iPhone

Where you sell your iPhone decides how much you will get for it. If you want the most from your old iPhone, you are going to work slightly hard on selling it off. If you go with the easiest and safest route, you are not going to get a good price for it.

Carrier Stores

You can always take your iPhone to your carrier and trade it in towards a new iPhone.

Sometimes carriers do offer an attractive trade-in offer but in most cases, you are going to get a far lower value for your iPhone from your carrier compared to selling it on eBay, Craiglist, or any other similar site. T-Mobile, for example, offered its existing iPhone 6s owners a free upgrade to iPhone 7 in 2016 and then in 2017, it offered iPhone 7 owners a free upgrade to iPhone 8. If you are on T-Mobile, you should probably wait for the un-carrier to unveil its trade-in deal.

If you are on any other network though, dont expect your carrier to offer such a lucrative deal. For such cases, it will be better if you simply sell your iPhone on Craiglist.

Classifieds

If you are willing to take the risk, Craigslist and other classifieds, like Uncle Henrys in Maine, are a convenient way to sell your old iPhone. Not only will you get a higher price, but you will also be paid in cash with almost little to no service fees. However, you pay for the lack of service fees by trading in your safety. It is relatively common for scamsters to use classifieds to arrange a sale meeting where they will simply take your iPhone and run away.

To minimize your risk, you should arrange to meet in a public place during the daytime and bring a friend if needed. You also should keep sales local and not send off your device as most of those offers are scams.

Depending on the condition of your iPhone and its age, you can get a pretty good value for it  up to $400 for an iPhone 7 Plus in good condition.

It is important that before you try sites like eBay, you check their service fees. With eBay particularly, you will end up paying a lot of money in service fees so it is better to try other similar services.

Amazon

Did you know that you can trade-in your existing iPhone with Amazon? Yep. The online retailer has a pretty good trade-in program and even offers a 28-day lock-in price which means that if you get an estimated trade-in value for your iPhone now, you can ship it to Amazon after you get your hands on the new iPhone.

You can trade-in any iPhone that you like irrespective of where it was purchased from. However, like other trade-in programs, the value of your iPhone will be on the lower side. An unlocked iPhone 7 Plus, for example, will fetch you up to $300 from Amazons trade-in program, though this can be on the lower side as well if your device has a lot of scratches and dents.

Theres also another catch: you will have to use the credit you get to buy products from Amazon itself.

 Trade-in iPhone at Amazon

Trade-In Websites

You can also try reseller websites like Gazelle, Orchard, or NextWorth if you want to avoid going through the headache of selling your iPhone through Craiglist or eBay. However, these reseller websites will offer you a far lower price than what you will get by directly selling your iPhone on eBay or other similar sites.

Swappa is among the more renowned smartphone trade-in website and it is known to give a better trade-in value than other competing websites. If you trade-in your iPhone X, you can get up to $620 for it, while an iPhone 8 Plus will fetch you nearly $495. Unlike eBay, it charges a flat fee irrespective of how much you sell your phone for.

Best Buy, Walmart, Target, and other retailers also offer a trade-in program but the usual caveat applies with them  the trade-in price is going to be on the slightly lower side.

Family or Friends

Giving your old phone to your family and friends is an easy way to sell your device with minimal risk of theft or fraud. The recipients likely will be happy to get a new used phone and you can help them with the transition process if needed.

Apple

You can trade-in your existing iPhone to Apple as well. The company has its own trade-in program called Apple GiveBack. Under this program, you essentially trade-in your existing iPhone at your nearest Apple Store or through the companys online store. After assessing your device, Apple will give you a value of your device. If you approve the value, the company will issue you an Apple Store Gift card of the same value. You can then use this gift card towards the purchase of your next iPhone.

While this is among the easiest and safest way to sell your iPhone, the value you are going to get for your iPhone is going to be on the lower side. The company will give a maximum of $290 for trading in an iPhone 7 Plus in good condition.

 Apple GiveBack

iPhone Upgrade Program

If you upgrade to the latest iPhone every year, you might want to consider joining Apples iPhone Upgrade Program. Under the program, you buy your iPhone from Apple on a 2-year contract where you will pay for the iPhone through monthly installments. Once the first 12 months are up, you can upgrade to a new iPhone by simply trading in your existing iPhone and paying the additional monthly installment for that device.

iPhone Upgrade Program is better than similar contracts offered by carriers since Apple bundles AppleCare+ for the handset for free with the program.

Read: iPhone Upgrade Program FAQ

Do drop a comment and let us know how you ended up selling your iPhone and for how much. It might just help our readers!A visitor looks at a helicopter exhibited at the ARMY-2018 International Military-Technical Forum in Moscow, Russia on August 21, 2018. (Photo by Xinhua News Agency)

By Luan Hai

MOSCOW, August 27 (ChinaMil) -- The ARMY-2018 International Military-Technical Forum was opened at the Patriot Expocenter in the suburbs of Moscow, Russia on August 21, 2018. The arms exhibition, as one of the forums major events, was held in an indoor exhibition zone covering 65,000 sq. m. A dozen Chinese companies showcased combat equipment, information and communications equipment, and logistics equipment which attracted visitors from various countries.

The booth of China Shipbuilding & Offshore International Co., Ltd. (CSOC) resembled a mini task fleet. Fu Yongcai, general manager assistant of CSOC, said, We have brought 11 product models and 3 physical exhibits to expand the Russian market. The models include dock landing ships, frigates for export, littoral mission ships (LMS), submarines fitted with an air-independent propulsion (AIP) system, submarine-launched large torpedoes, surface ship-launched or warplane-launched small torpedoes, marine power propulsion systems, unmanned patrol boats for shadowing, rescue and strike missions, and the manned deep-sea submersible Jiaolong. The physical exhibits include a shipborne photoelectric reconnaissance system and two day-and-night thermal imagers.

China North Industries Corp. (Norinco) presented exhibits in the following four categories  suppressive fire, armored assault, air and missile defense (AMD), and fortification assault and armor penetration. Exhibits included models of artillery, rocket guns, intelligent munitions, tanks, armored cars, mine-protected vehicles, all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), anti-aircraft missiles, missile-artillery integrated air defense systems, and Red Arrow anti-tank guided missiles, as well as the physical exhibits of two infrared thermal imagers and multiple small weapons shown on video.

Talking of the Chinese participants aspirations for this exhibition, Fu Yongcai said, As China currently has less exports of naval equipment to Russia, we hope to expand the markets in Russia and other CIS countries. Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up, Chinas defense industry and technologies have made enormous progress, especially in electronic technology with the potential of complementary cooperation with Russia. Moreover, Chinas advanced naval vessels, known for their swiftness, are becoming light-weighted and more attractive to Russia and other CIS countries.

A market representative of Norinco said that their participation was aimed to showcase the strength and image of Chinas defense industry and promote Chinese military products. Military and enterprise representatives from more than 100 countries have participated in the ARMY-2018 forum. Many of their home countries are good partners of China, and their related institutions and firms are potential buyers of Chinese military products.

This is the first group debut of China Electronics Corporation (CEC) in a Russian arms exhibition, meeting clients from CIS countries, said a CEC representative. We are able to provide systematic options independent from the Western arms system for overseas clients. These options may prevent product monopoly by Western enterprises. Besides, Chinese R&D personnel are striving to replace part of the overseas electronic products in complete series, in case of backdoor attacks by computer viruses.

Visitors attend the ARMY-2018 International Military-Technical Forum in Moscow, Russia on August 21, 2018. (Photo by Xinhua News Agency)Shortly after McCain's death was announced, President Donald Trump tweeted his condolences. "My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!"

"In the thirty-three years we shared together, he raised me, taught me, corrected me, comforted me, encouraged me, and supported me in all things. He loved me, and I loved him. He taught me how to live. His love and his care, ever present, always unfailing, took me from a girl to a woman -- and he showed me what it is to be a man," she wrote.

One of McCain's five children, daughter Meghan, also posted a statement on Twitter, saying "I was with my father at his end, as he was with me at my beginning."

His wife, Cindy, said on Twitter, "My heart is broken. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the the place he loved best."

U.S. Senator John McCain died Saturday at age 81 after a battle with brain cancer that robbed America of a revered statesman, proud patriot and self-sacrificing warrior.

 War Hero

Best known for having survived as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam and winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, John Sidney McCain remained an ardent and unapologetic believer in American exceptionalism.

"We are blessed. We are living in the land of the free, the land where anything is possible," McCain said in October, months after his cancer diagnosis, at the National Constitution Center, where he received the Liberty Medal. "We are blessed, and we have been a blessing to humanity in turn."

In the same speech, he also warned of the perils he saw in the era of President Donald Trump. "To refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain the last best hope of earth for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history," the senator said.

"John McCain represented public service," American University political historian Allan Lichtman said. "He was a genuine American hero, not a phony, hyped-up media hero."

 Military Family

The son of a U.S. admiral, McCain became a Navy aviator and flew bombing missions during the Vietnam War. Shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese in 1967, he endured more than five years of torture and depravation as a prisoner of war.

Decades later, as a Republican senator, McCain would return to Vietnam and champion the restoration of ties between Washington and Hanoi, as he told VOA, leave the past behind. "Look, there are some individuals that mistreated me in prison, and I hope I never see again," he said. "But, that does not change my opinion that the Vietnamese people are wonderful and dear friends, and we need them and they need us."

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, McCain decried torture tactics against terror suspects while backing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"John McCain's weakness over the years was [that] he was perhaps too willing to seek a military solution to problems," political historian Lichtman said. "Some of his critics even called him a war monger. But it [military intervention] was something he genuinely believed in, not something he cooked up for political purposes."

 Gracious in Political Battle

On Capitol Hill, McCain was known for a short temper and a sharp tongue. "Get out of here you low-life scum," McCain once growled at anti-war protesters who were disrupting a Senate committee hearing.

The senator also displayed graciousness in the heat of political battle. McCain ran twice for president as an independent-minded Republican, securing his party's nomination in 2008. On the campaign trail, he defended his democratic opponent, Barack Obama.

"He's an Arab," one woman declared of Obama at a McCain town hall campaign event one month before the election. McCain took the microphone from her and said, "No, ma'am. He is a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with."

 Return to the Senate

McCain lost the presidential contest but returned to the Senate, where he continued to advocate robust U.S. engagement around the world and a strong U.S. military as chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee.

He did not respond when then-candidate Trump questioned his war hero status. "He is a war hero because he was captured," Trump said on national television in July 2015. "I like people that were not captured, OK? I hate to tell you."

McCain did, however, become a persistent critic of Trump's governing style and policies, as well as hyper-partisanship in Washington, culminating with a decisive vote scuttling a Republican health care plan President Trump had championed. In December, he was the lone senator not to cast a vote on final passage of the Republican tax overhaul, returning Arizona to rest after cancer treatment.

 Liked on Both Sides of Aisle

McCain was revered by Democrats and Republicans alike. "Courage and loyalty," former vice president Joe Biden said in introductory remarks at the National Constitution Center. "I can think of no better description of the man we are honoring tonight, my friend John McCain."

"John McCain, perhaps above all other politicians of recent years, was willing to reach across the aisle to try to do things that were good for the country, like immigration reform, like campaign finance reform," Lichtman said.

Many will mourn his passing, but McCain remained upbeat until the end. "I am the luckiest guy on earth. I have served America's cause," he said.

The number of illegal immigrants has surged since a hefty minimum wage hike was announced in July last year.

After rising and falling marginally for a decade, the number of illegal immigrants has surged by around 100,000 since July 2017. The Justice Ministry estimates that there were 323,267 illegal immigrants at the end of June this year, up 42 percent on-year.

The number had been falling slightly until July last year, when the government announced a 16.4-percent minimum wage hike. That seems to have sent the number soaring by 23,000 in the second half of 2017 and around by 72,000 in the first half of this year, when the hike took effect.

The vast majority came on tourist visas or under a short-term visa waiver and ended up staying. The number of illegal aliens has tended to rise and fall according to fluctuations in the minimum wage.

One owner of a small business outside of Seoul said, "Businesses like us constantly suffer from a shortage of workers, so we have no choice but to hire foreigners even if we're suspicious of their visa status. Foreign workers talk to each other on the grapevine and stay away from businesses that pay less than the minimum wage."

A Justice Ministry official said, "The number of illegal aliens rises and falls according to a complex set of conditions, including employment conditions and pay levels."Reuters journalist Wa Lone, center, speaks as he leaves a court Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, in Yangon, Myanmar. The Myanmar court delayed the verdict against two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, on the charge of possessing official documents illegally in a case that has drawn attention to the faltering state of press freedom in the troubled Southeast Asian nation. The verdict that was to be delivered Monday was postponed to Sept. 3. (AP Photo/Thein Zaw)Indigenous student Olson Crow is pictured on the Ryerson University campus in Toronto on Monday, August 27 , 2018. This summer, as students prepared to go back to school some post-secondary institutions did preparing of their own to make changes that they say address a legacy of colonialism and respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris YoungSebelum Anda bermain, Anda perlu mengetahui apa yang Anda butuhkan untuk masuk ke dalam permainan roulette kasino online ini. Jika Anda sudah mendaftar di situs judi casino online dan sudah memberikan user ID, login terlebih dahulu dan pilih menu live casino yang tertera di situs judi tersebut. Pertama pilih dealer dan putuskan sendiri, lalu pilih meja atau kursi di dalam ruangan. Jika namanya tertera dan berwarna coklat, maka kursi tersebut sudah ditempati oleh pemain lain, dan pilihlah kursi kosong berwarna hitam.

Kasino Roulette adalah salah satu permainan paling populer di situs perjudian kasino. Jadi dalam permainan ini kamu harus menebak angka berapa yang akan keluar. Ada 36 nomor berbeda dalam permainan populer ini di mana sebuah bola kecil diputar dan dilemparkan ke dalam mesin roulette. Anda harus menebak dari mana bola kecil itu masuk dan di nomor berapa ia berhenti. Ada banyak jenis pilihan angka dari 0-36, dan mereka dihitung secara berbeda. Sebagai agen casino terpercaya, panduan permainan roulette ini juga memberikan informasi tentang jenis pilihan dan nama permainan roulette casino online sebagai berikut:

Jika Anda ingin bermain roulette di situs kasino online, caranya sangat sederhana. Anda dapat bermain di Kasino ION, Kasino Sbobet, dan Situs Kasino. Di bawah ini adalah artikel panduan bermain di mana Anda dapat mempelajari roulette langsung dan memainkannya di situs judi online mana pun.

tangkapan layar

Sebelum Anda bermain, Anda perlu mengetahui apa yang Anda butuhkan untuk masuk ke dalam permainan roulette kasino online ini. Jika Anda sudah mendaftar di situs judi casino online dan sudah memberikan user ID, login terlebih dahulu dan pilih menu live casino yang tertera di situs judi online tersebut. Pertama pilih dealer dan putuskan sendiri, lalu pilih meja atau kursi di dalam ruangan. Jika namanya tertera dan berwarna coklat, maka kursi tersebut sudah ditempati oleh pemain lain, dan pilihlah kursi kosong berwarna hitam.

Panduan Bermain Online Kasino Roulette

Kasino Roulette adalah salah satu permainan paling populer di situs perjudian kasino. Jadi dalam permainan ini kamu harus menebak angka berapa yang akan keluar. Ada 36 nomor berbeda dalam permainan populer ini di mana sebuah bola kecil diputar dan dilemparkan ke dalam mesin roulette. Anda harus menebak dari mana bola kecil itu masuk dan di nomor berapa ia berhenti. Ada banyak jenis pilihan angka dari 0-36, dan mereka dihitung secara berbeda. Sebagai agen casino terpercaya, panduan permainan roulette ini juga memberikan informasi tentang jenis pilihan dan nama permainan roulette casino online sebagai berikut:

1. Straight Up: Penempatan angka tunggal dari 0 hingga 36. Contoh perhitungan straight up adalah mengalikan taruhan dengan 35. Ini adalah jenis taruhan tertinggi dalam permainan roulette kasino, jadi 50 dikalikan dengan 35 memberi Anda 1750, mengapa jenis taruhan ini menghasilkan pengembalian yang begitu tinggi? Hal ini karena tidak mudah untuk memenangkan pilihan nomor dengan memilih hanya satu nomor dari banyak.

2. Taruhan split: Jenis taruhan yang ditempatkan pada dua angka atau di antara dua angka yang berbeda. Misalnya, menempatkan di sela-sela angka 9 dan 12 atau 13d dan 14 dihitung sebagai jenis taruhan split. Setiap nomor dapat ditempatkan dalam jenis ini selama nomor tersebut berdekatan dan persis seperti Gambar A dan B. Untuk taruhan ini, jika Anda memenangkan contoh dan mengalikannya dengan 850, Anda akan menerima jumlah taruhan yang dikalikan dengan 17. .

3. Taruhan jalanan: bertaruh dengan 3 angka ke bawah, misalnya 1,2,3 atau 10,11,12. Semua taruhan jalan akan menerima kemenangan dikalikan dengan 11. Misalnya, 50 dikalikan 550.

4. Taruhan sudut: Jenis taruhan di mana empat angka ditempatkan saling berhadapan, seperti 13,14,16,17 atau 19,20,22,23. Semua angka valid karena terdiri dari 4 angka yang diisi seperti kotak dan taruhan dikalikan 8 (misalnya 50 kali 800).

5. Taruhan baris: Atau, Anda dapat mengatakan bahwa ada 6 jenis taruhan yang terdiri dari 2 baris, tetapi 6 poin dengan 2 peregangan, seperti taruhan jalanan. Misalnya, jika Anda memilih angka 7 hingga 12 dan 13 hingga 18, taruhan 50 adalah 5 kali dan kemudian dikalikan dengan 250 kemenangan.

6. Kolom Inner Bet: Jenis taruhan vertikal dengan 12 poin berturut-turut, seperti kolom numerik 1,4,7,10,13,19,22,25,25,28,22,24,34 atau kolom lainnya. Dan jika dia memenangkan kolom, 50 taruhan digandakan dan 100 taruhan.

7. Lusin : Jenis taruhan menempatkan 12 angka tetapi menempatkannya pada kotak berbentuk seperti contoh Kolom A dengan angka 1 sampai 12 dan odds dengan kolom lain untuk dipilih dengan memilih 1 kotak pertama untuk Kolom A. Kalikan dengan 2, 50 taruhan 100.

8. Zero part : Cara bertaruh 0.1,2,3 sama persis seperti di gambar, karena berdekatan dengan angka 0, anda hanya bisa bertaruh 0.1,2,3. Menempatkan taruhan ini mengalikannya dengan 50. hingga 8.

9. Zero Corner: Bertaruh pada angka 0.1,2 atau 0.2,3 adalah dua pilihan karena Anda hanya bertaruh mendekati angka nol. Jenis taruhan ini dikalikan 11 jika taruhan menang.

10. Two Dozen: Jenis taruhan dengan hanya dua pilihan: 1-18 atau 19-36. Jika taruhan Anda adalah 50, itu dikalikan dengan 1 hingga 50 jika Anda menang.

11. Merah atau Hitam: Masukkan taruhan Anda dengan memilih Merah atau Hitam sebagai warna angka yang muncul saat taruhan 50.

12. Genap/Ganjil: Pilih angka yang menghasilkan jumlah jenis taruhan ganjil.Some U.S. experts say South Korea should have applied to the UN for exemptions from sanctions against North Korea before setting up a liaison office in the North Korean border city of Kaesong.

The South sent around 80 tons of petroleum and diesel and around 115 tons of steel, copper and nickel to the North between June and July of this year to set up the office.

Cheong Wa Dae says the materials were designed to accommodate South Korean staff and do not benefit the North Korean regime in any way.

But Joshua Stanton, a lawyer who helped the U.S. House of Representatives draft the bills North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, told Voice of America on Friday, "It's a violation because those are the economic resources and can be support for trade with North Korea. If you look at the UN Security Council Resolution..., it requires you to get permission."

Stephan Haggard, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, said, "Whether South Korea [feels it needs] to be exempted is another issue, but at least for political reasons I would suggest that the South Korean government [applies] for the exemption to show that [it intends] to work through the international sanctions regime processes."

The charges were brought by the priest's nephew because Cho died in 2015. Korea is one of a few countries that recognize a charge of defaming the dead.

But Lee Soon-ja said in a statement issued through a lawyer, "Judging by the physical health of my husband, who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, attending a trial will be impossible."

In his memoirs published last year, Chun claimed that the activist priest Cho Chul-hyun was lying when he said he witnessed soldiers firing at citizens from helicopters during the bloody suppression of the Gwangju Uprising against Chun's military regime in 1980.

The wife of ex-president Chun Doo-hwan on Sunday said her husband is unfit to stand trial for defamation because he has advanced dementia.

There were rumors that Chun would appear in court in Gwangju on Monday, but Lee said her husband "was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2013 and has been taking medication." She claimed Chun (87) "has problems remembering things that just happened."

"The public probably does not want to see a former president of this country appearing in court and repeating incoherent comments and giving irrelevant answers," she speculated.

More implausibly, Lee also claimed that her husband's Alzheimer's disease was caused by his hunger strike when he was jailed years ago and due to prosecutors investigating him. Lee said Chun went on hunger strike for 28 days when he was jailed in 1995 for his role in the Gwangju massacre and was hospitalized. She added that a doctor told her Chun may have suffered brain damage from fasting.

She said he suffered memory loss and mental distress when prosecutors raided his house and the homes of his family in 2013 to confiscate his assets to pay for the hundreds of billions of won he owes in fines.

"He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease after that incident," Lee said.

The Gwangju District Court decided to proceed with the trial as he failed to submit a letter of excuse or request to reschedule, and may compel him to attend.

AUSTIN, Minn. - Austin shut its streets down so art could go up for it's 7th annual Austin ArtWorks Festival.

The weekend event is put on to celebrate the arts. Over 60 artists displayed their art for sale.

Art was also heard with over 40 live performances throughout the weekend, which some hope will create a momentum for the music scene in Austin.

"I think the music scene is definitely on the rise again in austin and we're happy to be part of that," Laura Helle, Executive Director of Austin Area Arts, said.

Val Johnson grew up playing music at different venues in the town. She said over the years many places to play shut down.

"It is kind of hard to find that niche again so it's good to see it's opening up in areas so we can play again," she said.

Johnson came to the festival with her grandaughters and spent a lot of time in the 'family art tent.'

"They all came with me because they really enjoy it," she said. "I think it's the creative part of coming out and finding all the stuff they put out here and let them go to town."

And they weren't alone. Kids all over the festival were painting, dying silk, and singing, creating art.

"We really like to encourage that creativity in the youngest ones, we know they're the next generations that will be the artists exhibiting in years and decades to come," Helle said.

Johnson said she's proud to be part of a community that celebrates art and encourages kids to celebrate it too.

"If they don't have the arts, it's not, there's no way to express," she said.

"These are the things that make you smile or make your day brighter whether it's music or a beautiful painting, or seeing a kid create something, they're kind of paychecks for the heart," Helle said.

To learn more about the festival, click here.NORTHWOOD, Iowa  A Freeborn County man arrested after a truck crash in North Iowa is pleading not guilty.

Jonathan David Anderson, 21 of Emmons, MN, is charged with 2nd degree criminal mischief, serious injury by vehicle, operating a vehicle without the owners consent, and OWI-1st offense. Hes accused of stealing a truck on June 17 and crashing it by going into the ditch along 475th Street in Worth County and hitting a field driveway.

Law enforcement says multiple witnesses stated Anderson was obviously intoxicated the day of the crash.

His trial has been scheduled for December 12 in Worth County District Court.CEDAR FALLS, Iowa  A former Mason City teen now attending UNI is accused of trying to extort sex from a woman.

Christian Albert Gossweiler, 18 of Cedar Falls, is charged in Black Hawk County District Court with one count of extortion.

According to court records, the Scott County Sheriffs Office notified the UNI Police Department on August 21 of a possible extortion case involving a student. The victim said she had been communicating with Gossweiler via Snapchat while he was on the UNI campus. The victim says she sent Gossweiler nude photos and videos after he requested them, then he demanded more or he would post the images online.

Authorities say the victim believed Gossweiler would carry out his threat if she did not comply.

The victim said Gossweiler then told her he would stop demanding videos and photos if she had sex with him.

UNI police say they used the victims phone to communicate with Gossweiler and set up a time and place on the UNI campus for sex. Court documents say Gossweiler showed up at the appointed time and place and was taken into custody on August 22.

Gossweiler graduated from Mason City High School in 2018.NORTHWOOD, Iowa  Two men from Carpenter will stand trial after authorities say they drove through a corn field.

Blake Aaron Peterson, 25, and Cody Richard Peterson, 22, were arrested on August 1 after the Worth County Sheriffs Office pulled over a vehicle it says was seen driving erratically and dragging corn stalks behind it. The traffic stop happened around 1:30 am at 12th Avenue South and Highway 65.

Blake Peterson, the driver, is charged with OWI. The Sheriffs Office says Cody Peterson, a passenger, admitted to swallowing  gram of methamphetamine prior to the traffic stop. He is charged with possession of meth-2nd offense.

Blake Petersons trial is set for November 7. Cody Peterson is scheduled to stand trial on December 12.WASHINGTON (AP)  The Trump administration and Mexico have reached a preliminary accord to end the North American Free Trade Agreement and replace it with a deal that the administration wants to be more favorable to the United States.

President Donald Trump, in announcing the tentative agreement Monday at the White House, said a new deal would be called "the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement. Trump has frequently condemned the 24-year-old NAFTA trade pact as a job-killing "disaster" for the United States.

Iowa's junior U.S. Senator Joni Ernst issued the following statement on the trade deal: Mexico, Canada and the United States make up one of the most competitive and successful regional economic platforms in the world. Saddled with low commodity prices and escalating trade disputes, todays announcement that the United States and Mexico have reached a two-way deal on trade is huge news for Iowas farmers and ranchers, and is a monumental step to help restore both market certainty and confidence across rural America.

While I am still reviewing the deal, the Presidents fulfillment of a core promise to revamp trade deals brings more certainty to our markets, more money in our pockets, and more confidence to Iowa  and American  farmers, ranchers and manufacturers.

Any new agreement is far from final. The administration still needs to negotiate with the third partner in NAFTA, Canada, to become part of any new trade accord. Without Canada, America's No. 2 trading partner, it's unclear whether any new U.S. trade agreement with Mexico would be possible.

The president said that he will be calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

"If they'd like to negotiate fairly, we'll do that," Trump said.

Trump put pressure on Canada by threatening to tax Canadian auto imports and to leave Canada out of a new regional trade bloc.

NAFTA reduced most trade barriers between the three countries. But Trump and other critics say it encouraged U.S. manufacturers to move south of the border to exploit low-wage Mexican labor.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds had this to say about the announced deal: I am encouraged by the announcement today from the White House that a preliminary trade agreement has been reached with Mexico. I look forward to seeing the final agreement. I believe todays announcement is a step in the right direction to bring certainty to the business and farming communities. I am hopeful this agreement with Mexico will prompt Canada to rejoin negotiations.

Iowa farmers want free trade and open markets. As trade negotiations proceed, Iowa farmers will continue to do what they do best  produce. Our farmers are the most productive in the world and will always win when they have unrestricted access to markets. We are proud of our states ability to feed and fuel the world. I will continue to work tirelessly to make sure their voices are heard.

On behalf of Iowa farmers and businesses, I want to thank the president and his administration for taking the necessary steps to reach a deal with Mexico.

Talks to overhaul the agreement began a year ago and have proved contentious.

U.S. and Mexican negotiators worked over the weekend to narrow their differences. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said Monday that Mexico had agreed to ensure that 75 percent of automotive content be produced within the trade bloc (up from a current 62.5 percent) to receive duty-free benefits and that 40 percent to 45 percent be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour.

It remain unclear where Monday's announcement leaves Canada.

Adam Austen, a spokesman for Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, said: "Canada is encouraged by the continued optimism shown by our negotiating partners. Progress between Mexico and the United States is a necessary requirement for any renewed NAFTA agreement."

Austen said the Canadians had been regular contact with the NAFTA negotiators.

"We will only sign a new NAFTA that is good for Canada and good for the middle class," he said, adding that "Canada's signature is required."

The No. 2 Senate Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, hailed the "positive step" but said Canada needs to be party to a final deal. "A trilateral agreement is the best path forward," he said, adding that millions of jobs are at stake.Fall is in the air  or at least in your cup!

It's still technically summer, but Starbucks is releasing the autumnal season classic, Pumpkin Spice Latte, early.

The annual beverage usually launches in September, but the coffee chain announced last week that customers can get their favorite fall fix as soon as Tuesday.

This is the 15th anniversary of the Pumpkin Spice Latte, and the beverage has been a fan favorite over the years.

The decision to launch early could be the company's attempt to boost its reputation.

The coffee chain took a big hit after two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia location in April. As a result, most Starbucks locations held an anti-bias training for employees.ELBA, Minn.  A tiny town is coming together to raise money for two things those in the community are passionate about.

The small Minnesota town of Elba, with a little more than 150 people, wants to build a veterans memorial and park.

Andrea Kieffer is spearheading the effort. Shes hoping a raffle, silent auction, and bean bag tournament will help get them closer to their goal of $30,000.

She thinks the site will benefit two major populations in their community.

Get the kids outdoors, get them moving, keep them in a safe area so they're not running around all over town, Kieffer said. And then honoring our veterans, people who served and give us our ability to do as what we do, have our freedom.

Krystal Marking is another organizer, and said a park would definitely be utilized in their community.

Currently we have to travel, take our kids out of town if we want to go to a park, Marking said. So I think it will bring people into town. It gives the kids in town outdoor activity, physical activity, so I think it will be a great amenity.

Mark Loftus served in Vietnam and Desert Storm. He and his wife Patty are big advocates for a veterans memorial being in a town like Elba.

I hear about them being in big towns and cities, Patty Loftus said, and I think a lot of vets came from small towns, small farming communities and I'd like to see them in the smaller towns too.

Organizers are also asking for donations on their GoFundMe page.U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday canceled Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's scheduled visit to Pyongyang next week. The announcement came just one day after Pompeo told reporters he was heading to the North with his newly appointed special representative.

Trump announced the cancellation after meeting with Pompeo, White House National Security Adviser Mike Bolton and Chief of Staff John Kelly.

"I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to go to North Korea at this time because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," Trump told reporters. Trump seems to have been afraid that Pompeo could return empty-handed again from his fourth trip to the North, which would make him look bad ahead of midterm elections in the U.S.

The cancellation suggests that North Korea is refusing to accept any of the denuclearization steps the U.S. is calling for. "Additionally, because of our much tougher trading stance with China, I do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearization as they once were," Trump added. "Secretary Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future, most likely after our trading relationship with China is resolved."

There are signs that international sanctions against North Korea are crumbling now that China has eased off on banning trade with the North, and the trade with the U.S. gives it little incentive to Washington's bidding.

This is an unfortunate development. Things have deteriorated to this state because North Korea refuses to abide by its denuclearization pledge with the U.S. So far, the North has merely demolished a nuclear test site and missile launch facility that are no longer needed, and sent back a few remains of U.S. soldiers killed during the Korean War. But it insists that it is now Washington's turn to show some goodwill by declaring a formal end to the Korean War.

There is no doubt that Trump wants to score some major points ahead of the midterm elections. But if North Korea keeps dragging its heels, even Trump has few options at his disposal. The American public has grown extremely skeptical of any progress in denuclearization talks with North Korea, which is why both Republican and Democratic lawmakers are praising Trump for canceling Pompeo's trip to North Korea. If North Korea continues to think it has Trump wrapped around its little finger, the situation could return to the tension-filled days prior to the U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore.

If U.S.-North Korea talks hit a stalemate, inter-Korean relations will also be impacted negatively. The U.S. has already publicly warned South Korea that a liaison office it plans to open in North Korea's Kaesong Industrial Complex could violate UN Security Council sanctions.

Now Pompeo's trip has been canceled, President Moon Jae-in will have nothing to offer North Korean leader Kim Jong-il at their next summit. Pyongyang's lack of enthusiasm for denuclearization has ended up dashing the hopes of a better future for the North Korean people. Kim will have to think seriously about the ramifications of Pompeo's canceled trip and change his approach.

NEW YORK, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Twelve unarmed security contract workers at Tahoe Resources Inc's Guatemalan unit were abducted late on Friday and held for hours before being released, the gold- and silver-mining company said.

"After several hours of being abducted, injured and held at gunpoint, the contractors were eventually released and escorted by the Guatemalan Civil National Police (PNC) back to Jalapa where they were treated for their injuries and trauma," the Nevada-based company said in a statement on Saturday.

It did not elaborate on the nature of the injuries.

Tahoe added that the abductors of the contract workers at its Minera San Rafael Guatemalan unit identified themselves as the "Peaceful Resistance Group of Mataquescuintla."

It said the group earlier last week set up an illegal blockade on a public road at the entrance to the municipality of Mataquescuintla in the department of Jalapa, about 3 miles (5 km) from the Escobal mine.

"We are treating these developments with the utmost seriousness and are taking appropriate measures to ensure the safety and security of all of our employees and contractors, their families, and local community members," Tahoe Chief Executive Jim Voorhees said.

Tahoe's flagship Escobal silver mine in Guatemala has been inactive since last year after Guatemala's top court suspended Tahoe's operating license after an anti-mining organization alleged that the Xinca indigenous people were not properly consulted by the country's Ministry of Energy and Mines.

Voorhees said this month that his top priority was ending the dispute that has stopped all of the mining company's silver production. Last week, the company terminated employment for about 200 additional Minera San Rafael workers, bringing the number of total dismissals to about 70 percent of the unit's workforce. It has said it will seek to restore the workforce when operations resume.

(Reporting by Devika Krishna Kumar in New York; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Messaging: devika.kumar.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net))

BEIJING, Aug 27 (Reuters) - * China's Ministry for Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said on Monday the quota for rare earth smelting and separation in the country had been set at 115,000 tonnes.

* The total, set jointly with China's Natural Resources Ministry, is up 15 percent from 100,000 tonnes in 2017.

* China is the world's top producer of rare earths, a group of 17 elements used in magnets and consumer electronics that have been threatened with U.S. import tariffs.

* The Natural Resources Ministry said in late July China's rare earth mining output quota had been set at 120,000 tonnes for 2018, up 14.3 pct from 105,000 tonnes in 2017. (Reporting by Tom Daly; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.(Kitco News) - Gold and silver prices are slightly lower in early U.S. trading Monday. The world marketplace is quieter to start the trading week, with little risk aversion among traders and investors. Thats a bearish element for the safe-haven gold and silver markets. Gold prices are also seeing a mild corrective pullback following strong gains Friday that produced a technically bullish weekly high close, to further suggest a near-term market bottom is in place for the yellow metal. December gold futures were last down $1.40 an ounce at $1,212.80. December Comex silver was last down $0.031 at $14.87 an ounce.

World stock markets were mostly higher overnight. U.S. stock indexes are pointed toward firmer openings when the New York day session begins. U.S. stock indexes are at multi-month highs, to underscore the keener risk appetite in the marketplace at present.

Asian markets were supported overnight by moves by Chinas central bank to stabilize its currency, the yuan. The yuan in recent weeks had depreciated against the U.S. dollar.

Reports over the weekend said the U.S. and Mexico could reach a deal on trade (NAFTA 2.0)as soon as today.

In other overnight news, the closely watched German Ifo business sentiment survey rose more than expected in August, at 103.8 versus 101.7 in July.

The key outside markets today find the U.S. dollar index slightly lower. Meantime, Nymex crude oil prices are near steady and trading around $68.50 a barrel.

U.S. economic data due for release Monday includes the Chicago Fed national activity index and the Texas manufacturing outlook survey.

Technically, gold bears still have the overall near-term technical advantage but a price downtrend on the daily bar chart is now in jeopardy. Gold bulls' next upside near-term price breakout objective is to produce a close in December futures above solid resistance at $1,226.00. Bears' next near-term downside price breakout objective is pushing prices below solid technical support at the August low of $1,167.10. First resistance is seen at last weeks high of $1,215.40 and then at $1,220.00. First support is seen at the overnight low of $1,209.30 and then at $1,200.00. Wyckoff's Market Rating: 2.5.

December silver futures bears have the overall near-term technical advantage. Silver bulls' next upside price breakout objective is closing prices above solid technical resistance at $15.50 an ounce. The next downside price breakout objective for the bears is closing prices below solid support at $14.00. First resistance is seen at last weeks high of $14.965 and then at $15.00. Next support is seen at last weeks low of $14.555 and then at the August low of $14.405. Wyckoff's Market Rating: 2.5.(Updates after start of hearings, quotes from Iran and judge's statement)

By Stephanie van den Berg and Toby Sterling

THE HAGUE, Aug 27 (Reuters) - Iranian lawyers asked the International Court of Justice on Monday to order the United States to lift sanctions imposed by the Trump administration against Tehran.

The presiding judge of the U.N. body informally known as the World Court began the hearing by calling on Washington to respect its outcome. During their decades of animosity, both the United States and Iran have ignored some rulings at the court.

The lawsuit filed with the ICJ says the U.S. sanctions, which are damaging the already weak Iranian economy, violate terms of a little-known friendship treaty between the two countries. "The U.S. is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran's economy and Iranian national companies, and therefore inevitably Iranian nationals," said Mohsen Mohebi, representing Iran, at the start of four days of oral hearings. "This policy is plainly in violation of the 1955 Treaty of Amity."

He said Iran had sought a diplomatic solution to the countries' dispute but was rejected.

The United States said in an initial written reaction displayed in court that it believes the ICJ has no jurisdiction in the case, and that Iran's assertions fall outside the bounds of the treaty.

U.S. lawyers led by State Department adviser Jennifer Newstead, appointed by Trump in 2017, are due to respond on Tuesday. A ruling is expected within a month, though no date has been set.

The ICJ is the United Nations tribunal for resolving international disputes. Its rulings are binding, but it has no power to enforce them.

U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of a 2015 pact between Iran and major world powers under which sanctions were lifted in return for Tehran accepting curbs on its nuclear programme. The Trump administration then announced unilateral plans to restore sanctions against Tehran.

Although Washington's European allies protested against Trump's move, most Western companies intend to adhere to the sanctions, preferring to lose business in Iran than be punished by the United States or barred from doing business there.

The United States and Iran have clashed at the court in the past since they became enemies after Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran ignored a 1980 U.S. suit at the ICJ over the seizure of American diplomats in Tehran, which the court found to be illegal.

In another suit and countersuit, the ICJ found that the 1955 treaty was still valid even though it was signed before the revolution. However, the court found in 2003 that neither actions by the United States against Iranian oil platforms nor Iranian attacks on American shipping violated the treaty.

At the start of Monday's hearing, the court's president, Abdulqawi Yusuf, leading a 15-judge panel, urged the United States to adhere to any provisional decision the court may make.

Writing by Toby Sterling Editing by David Goodman and Peter Graff)SF Holding net profit rises 19% in H1

From:ChinaDaily | 2018-08-26 16:46

BEIJING - Chinese express delivery giant SF Holding posted a 18.6 percent year-on-year increase in net profit in the first half of the year amid rapid expansion of the country's courier sector, according to a company statement.

SF Holding's net profit attributable to shareholders stood at 2.2 billion yuan ($320 million) in H1, said the statement, which was filed to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

The company's operating revenue surged 32.2 percent year-on-year to 42.5 billion yuan, with revenue from the express delivery business up 31.7 percent to reach 42.2 billion yuan.

The revenue growth was well above the 25.8 percent revenue increase for the country's overall courier sector.

"A stable macro economy with a positive outlook effectively supported the sustained and healthy development of the courier sector."

As of the end of June, SF Holding's international standard and economy express delivery services covered 53 countries and regions including the United States and the European Union, while its small-parcel service for cross-border e-commerce sellers covered 225 countries and regions.

Revenue excluding taxes from international business reached 1.2 billion yuan in H1, up 40.8 percent year on year.Boat Carnival becomes part of Belgrade's developing tourist offers

From:Xinhua | 2018-08-26 17:29

A police orchestra perform at the opening of the Belgrade Boat Carnival in Belgrade, Serbia, on Aug. 25, 2018. Hundreds of boats greeted crowds gathered on Saturday at the Belgrade Waterfront at the traditional boat carnival that marks the ending of the summer tourist season. (Xinhua/Nemanja Cabric)

BELGRADE, Aug. 25 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of boats greeted crowds gathered on Saturday at the Belgrade Waterfront at another traditional boat carnival that marks the ending of the summer tourist season, bringing it closer to the wished reputation of a regional tourist hub.

The 14th Belgrade Boat Carnival traditionally organized by the Tourist Organization of Belgrade (TOB) took place at the Sava River in downtown Belgrade, attracting hundreds of tourists, visitors and locals.

Over the years, the carnival turned into a tradition, and lots of visitors come here to enjoy in its recognizable charm, spokeswoman of the Tourist Organization of Belgrade (TOB) Jelena Stankovic explained to Xinhua.

It promotes the life on Belgrade's two rivers -- Sava and Danube -- points to the importance of protecting the environment, especially the littoral zone of the city, she said.

"This is an interesting and an important segment of the life of our city. Among the participants at the carnival are also tourist boats that carried the city's visitors to sightseeing tours throughout the summer season," she said.

Besides the procession of boats, the carnival program also brought performances of children choirs, popular musicians and a police orchestra -- mostly to suit the taste of manifestation's most eager visitors -- families with kids.

She said that the idea is to build upon the fact that Belgrade lies on two major international rivers, and that this is a major segment of its tourist potential that deserves attention within the plans to develop Belgrade's infrastructure.

So far this season, Belgrade had received 15 percent more tourists comparing to the same period of last year.

"Structure of guests also changed a lot. While in the past years most tourists came from regional countries, now among top ten are those from China, Russia, the United States and Israel," Stankovic told Xinhua.

According to her, thanks to the direct flight between Belgrade and Beijing, it is much easier for Chinese tourists to visit Belgrade, as well as the rest of Serbia and the region.

"We worked for several years to make a regional tourist offer for tourists coming from far destinations, results are starting to show," she concluded.

1 2 3 4 Next 1 2 3 4 NextThe Karnali region of western Nepal has huge hydropower potential and significant development needs. But with a large number of proposed hydropower projects, how can we decide which projects should move forward and which should not?

Researchers from the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) carried out a survey of communities across the Karnali basin to explore the social and cultural importance of rivers for local people, as part of USAIDs Digo Jal Bikas (DJB) project. They carried out 260 social surveys and 5 focus group discussions across six sites in the Karnali Basin. The insights from these interviews can be used to develop tools to help policymakers make better decisions about dam building at a local level.

One such tool is an environmental flow assessment (EFA), which determines the quantity, timing, and quality of water that is necessary to leave in the river to maintain river health.

EFAs in the Karnali basin must also account for the importance of water flow for livelihoods and daily activities and socio-cultural aspects, such as household activities, fishing, irrigation, rituals, and tourism. This is particularly important as the growing number of planned dams and hydropower projects in the region raise concerns about the undue strain on rivers.

In Nepal, developers are required to conduct an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) before building hydropower projects, but this does not necessarily include an environmental flow assessment.

This photo story shows some of the findings of the IWMI survey.

When you have no other options, this is the best you have. I have seen men and women washing clothes or occasionally using the bathroom upstream while I have sat by the riverbanks to brush my teeth or drink, what can I do? I turn away and just hope that the water I am using here isnt contaminated by what I see, said a man from Bajhang district.

Fishing is important to Karnalis riparian communities, primarily for household consumption but also, in some cases, as a source of supplementary income. Almost 60% of respondents had an immediate family member who partook in fishing.

Children sometimes fish and sell their catch too. They then buy stationary for school.

In recent decades, erratic rainfall and a limited ability to exploit river water resources has substantially reduced the agricultural production within the Karnali Basin. Insufficient water levels mean that some families havent sown wheat this year and several water mills in the hilly regions have shut down.

Could water infrastructure reduce seasonal variability and ensure adequate flow for agriculture? Given the heavy reliance on the river for food security and livelihoods, we have to consider irrigation needs.

Originating in the Himalayas, most of the rivers that run through Nepal are considered holy. The holy water from these rivers, better known as jal, is a vital part of various religious ceremonies and festivals, such as Dahasanskar, where Hindus require flowing water to wash away the ashes of a deceased family member once the cremation is complete.

83% of respondents use water from the rivers surrounding their village for religious purposes. They believe the water is holy as the Karnali and its tributaries continue on to merge with the Ganga in the south. The purity of the river is embedded in the religious beliefs but requires the river to flow continuously.

Many holy sites and temples are located next to rivers. Festivals like Chatt Parva and Teej are often celebrated near the river, and the act itself of travelling together to perform these rituals is an important opportunity for women, who rarely occupy public space in these communities, to strengthen communal ties.

The Karnali is home to the Gangetic dolphin, an endangered animal that requires deep-water channels to swim. When water levels rise during monsoon rains, these river dolphins attract local and international tourists alike. However, lowered water levels in the Karnali can limit the dolphins mobility, further reducing their already depleted habitat within the Nepali river basin.

Whitewater rafting also attracts backpackers and tourists. The Karnali River is still a popular choice, but decreasing water levels in the basin are making it difficult to sustain the associated tourism, and a dam could have further implications.

Rivers add to the biodiversity of the area, enriching local lives with diversified food sources and building materials, as well as improved air and water quality. Families have been enjoying picnics by the riverbanks during festivals and holidays for generations and wish to continue this in the future. Respondents described how they feel a sense of happiness at the sight of the calm river and at the sound of it flowing. They believe it enriches their environment and improves their general wellbeing.

If the environmental flow assessments do not consider how much water flow is needed for ceremonies, ritual gatherings or for bathing and feeding livestock, for instance, how can we say with reasonable confidence that a project will not have significant impacts on human livelihoods in the process?

Claire Swingle is a Partnerships and Knowledge Management Fellow and Akriti Sharma is a Consultant at IWMI.

This story was first published on The Third Pole. Read the original story here.Major Nepali and English broadsheet dailies published from Kathmandu on continue to highlight stories about the rape and murder of Nirmala Pant in Kanchanpur district of far-western Nepal. Most of the newspapers have narrated the progress reported from the fresh investigation. Nepal is hosting the fourth BIMSTEC summit on Thursday and Friday later this week, and reports about preparations for the grand meeting have also been a part of the front page coverage. Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Hearing Special Committee has issued a notice seeking complaints from members of the public against Supreme Court Justice Om Prakash Mishra, who has been recommended for the top judicial position; and it has also made front page headlines.

Few other sociocultural, political and financial issues have been featured on the front page of major newspapers today.

Important

Parliamentary hearing process begins for CJ appointment

Gorkhapatra, Rajdhani and Nepal Samacharpatra report that the Parliamentary Hearing Special Committee has given a period of 10 days for members of the public to file complaints against Mishra as it will conduct a hearing with the Chief Justice nominee after that.

The Constitutional Council had forwarded Mishras name for the position last week after the parliamentary panel rejected the name of Deepak Raj Joshee for the position on August 3.

Rajdhani informs that complaints can be registered about his performance, personal and academic details among others.

The complaints can be registered at the Federal Parliament Secretariat, or sent via email. Likewise, the District Administration Offices will also receive the complaints and forward them to the Secretariat, Gorkhapatra reports.

Probe blames pilot for US-Bangla crash

An exclusive long report in The Kathmandu Post informs that an investigation conducted by Nepali professionals has concluded that the pilot of the US-Bangla plane that crashed at the Tribhuvan International Airport in March appears to have lied to the control tower during the landing procedure; and was smoking continuously inside the cockpit during the one hour flight from Dhaka to Kathmandu.

Captain Abid Sultan had tremendous personal mental stress and anxiety and a series of erroneous decisions on his part led to the crash that killed 51 persons, according to the report.

The report adds that the pilot had told the copilot once during the flight that he did not care about safe flight or whatever, and he made abusive statements toward a female colleague.

Ignored

Madhav Kumar Nepal not happy with district leadership selection

Senior leader of the Nepal Communist Party, former Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, and leaders close to him have objected to the proposed names to lead district committees of the new party claiming they were selected unilaterally, Naya Patrika reports. A meeting of the camp held in Kathmandu yesterday has also warned of forming parallel committees if the names were not corrected, the report adds.

Disqualified combatants demand govt assistance

The Himalayan Times in its lead story reports that former disqualified child combatants have demanded that the government provide them with financial or other support. The combatants are frustrated that years after being disqualified by the United Nations Mission in Nepal, hence want the government to provide vocation training, enough financial assistance to support their self help schemes and scholarship to their children.

Narayanhiti Museum to get extension

A four column story in Nepal Samacharpatra reports that a master plan has been prepared to extend the Narayanhiti Museum. The master plan proposes using an 80-room building of the palace premises to exhibit unique cultural aspects of each of 77 districts, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the committee formed to prepare the plan has also requested the government to delineate the museums boundary.

Govt undecided about BIMSTEC retreat venue

The government has just two days to prepare for the fourth summit of the Bay of Bengal Initiatives for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, but it not yet decided about where it can take the dignitaries for a retreat, reports The Himalayan Times reports.

Earlier, it had reported that the government cancelled the plan of hosting the retreat at Gokarna Forest Resort after Thai Prime Minister objected to the plan.

Interesting

Budhigandaki project to be handed over to China again

The government is preparing to hand over 1,200 megawatt Budhigandaki Hydropower Project to China again, reports Abhiyan in its anchor story.

Quoting an anonymous source at the Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation, the report claims Minister Barsha Man Pun has already decided to hand over the project to a Chinese company. The source, however, did not reveal the companys name.Doctors and officials from government and non-governmental organizations attend a symposium on North Korea's healthcare and medical situation at Seoul City Hall, Thursday. Korea Times photo by Jung Da-min



Doctors urge medical exchanges come first in inter-Korean projects



By Jung Da-min



When discussing the economic outlook, many believe AI (artificial intelligence) and inter-Korean joint economic projects will be the driving forces of the Korean Peninsula's future.



However, doctors and officials who have been studying North Korea's health system say cross-border medical exchanges should come before joint economic projects.



Among them is Park Sang-min, a professor of family medicine at Seoul National University Hospital. During an interview with The Korea Times on Thursday, he said there are two major reasons why medical issues matter.



The gap between the two Koreas



Before the 1990s, when the former Soviet republics started to collapse, medical treatment and people's health were not much different in the two Koreas.



North Korea's medical situation, however, deteriorated in the 1990s as the country suffered a lack of medicines when supply chains in the Soviet republics dried up.



According to United Nations Population Fund data, the life expectancy of North Koreans is recovering, reaching 72.1 in 2014, up 2.8 years from 69.3 in 2008. It was 73.4 in 1993 before the country suffered the so-called Arduous March in the mid-1990s.





Park Sang-min

"The North's life expectancy is recovering but the country is still going through a state of confusion seen in other transition countries," Park said.



"A series of natural disasters like floods and famine in the 1990s caused an overall reduction in social resources and the national healthcare budget was also reduced. This led to the formation of informal medical markets, bringing side effects such as weakening national control over residents' healthcare and abuse of drugs among people."



In particular, North Korea suffers a high incidence and mortality from infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. According to the World Health Organization's (WHO) 2017 Global Tuberculosis Report, the number of cases detected in North Korea in 2016 was 130,000, up 20,000 from the previous year. About 11,000 people died, more than double the 5,000 in the previous year.







By Jung Da-min





Monday's edition of the North Korean Workers' Party mouthpiece Rodong Sinmun highlighted the tensions between China and the U.S.







In an editorial titled "Deteriorating China-U.S. relations," the newspaper dealt with the U.S. 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which restricts Chinese investments in the U.S. and prohibits government organizations from using some services provided by Chinese mobile communication firms like Huawei and ZTE.







The publication also highlighted the Chinese government's strong protest of the U.S. definition of China as a "threat."







Although the North's position was not stated in Rodong Sinmun, the regime's propaganda website Uriminzokkiri on the same day criticized the NDAA for "breaching" the June 12 joint statement following the summit between the U.S. and North Korea.







The Uriminzokkiri article also criticized the U.S. military presence in the South, mentioning that the bill calls for a minimum of 22,000 U.S. troops to be stationed in South Korea. The article also slammed the U.S. plan to establish a new missile defense system.







Meanwhile, tension between China and the U.S. surrounding the peninsula is also increasing, with Trump canceling U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo's visit to the North, blaming China for "changing" attitudes toward the peninsula nuclear issue.







Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang slammed the U.S. on Saturday, saying the Chinese side was "gravely concerned about this irresponsible act."







Lu also said China supported the U.S. and North Korea seeking settlement of inter-Korean issues in accordance with the consensus reached at the June 12 Singapore summit.

The Seoul metropolitan government said Monday it will introduce a new safety rule this month to prevent children from dying or suffering injuries after being left alone aboard school buses.

The "sleeping child check" system, to be mounted on 53 buses of the city's public elementary schools, forces the driver of a school bus to walk to the back of the vehicle to check whether all passengers have disembarked.

Under the system, which utilizes a near field communication (NFC) technology, the driver tags his or her smartphone to three NFC-enabled terminals installed on the far rear seat, interior and exterior of the bus after checking the bus for any remaining passengers. The information is also delivered to the passengers' parents and an administrator at the school.

If the driver fails to do the tagging, an alarm goes off on the smartphones of the driver and the parents and the administrator.











African swine fever virus has been confirmed in foods brought in from China early this month, but the possibility of its spread is low because the foods were cooked, officials said Monday.



Minister Hong Nam-ki, chief of the Office for Government Policy Coordination, made the remark during an interagency meeting held to discuss preventive measures following the discovery of a gene of the virus in dumplings and other foods brought in on Aug. 3 on a flight from the Chinese city of Shenyang, one of the regions affected by the virus.



"As the result of an antigen test on the livestock products brought in by a tourist to China, it has been confirmed to be African swine fever," Hong said at the start of the meeting. "It will take a few more day to confirm the exact strain of the virus, but it will be coming soon."



Despite the confirmation, agriculture ministry officials said that the virus is unlikely to have spread because it isn't believed to have been alive when it was brought in and the foods were cooked.



Monday's meeting, which will be attended by officials from the agriculture ministry, the interior ministry, the foreign ministry, the environment ministry and other related agencies, was expected to check the situation and discuss measures to deal with the disease.



"African swine fever is spreading in China. As China has a great deal of exchanges of people and goods, there is a possibility of the virus flowing into the country," Hong said. "We have to further strengthen preventive quarantine at borders.



The virus does not affect people, but virulent strains are often fatal to pigs of all ages, leading to cullings of the infected animals. No cure or vaccine has been developed for the virus so far.



A breakout could lead to massive damage to the country's livestock industry. (Yonhap)



By Carl Bildt





STOCKHOLM  After a suspiciously sudden conversion, Russian President Vladimir Putin now claims to be worried about the fate of millions of refugees who have fled the carnage in Syria.



In a recent meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin expressed his hope that the European Union would help to rebuild Syria so that its displaced people could start to return home. And in recent weeks, Russian diplomats have been hawking the same message across European capitals.



To be sure, now that Bashar al-Assad's regime has reclaimed most of the country's territory, Syria's civil war is clearly winding down. But that outcome was not inevitable. On the contrary, the Syrian army was very close to collapsing at one point. Only with the crucial help of Iranian-backed militias and Russian air support did Assad manage to turn things around.



Meanwhile, U.S. efforts to establish a "moderate" armed opposition achieved little, apart from giving the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG)  an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)  control of the strip of northern Syria abutting the Turkish border. The only thing left to do now is to destroy Al Nusra's remaining enclave in Idlib and broker some kind of settlement between the YPG and Assad.



Assad has survived at a horrible cost. More than half of the Syrian population has been displaced internally or forced to flee to nearby countries or to Europe. Much of Syria's infrastructure  from housing blocks to hospitals  lies in ruins. And, needless to say, the country's economy has been shattered, owing to the direct effects of the conflict and to sanctions that were imposed as part of the failed effort to force Assad into a political settlement.



No other country in the past half-century has suffered so heavy a toll in human lives and physical destruction. There can be no doubt that the responsibility for this tragedy rests with the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian sponsors.



Of course, they will say they were fighting terrorism, as if that excuses their indiscriminate methods and reckless disregard for civilian lives. But future generations will remember the true source of the terror that was visited upon the Levant over the past seven years.



The estimated cost of rebuilding Syria varies widely. While a 2017 World Bank study puts the price at around $225 billion, more recent assessments suggest a total closer to $400 billion; others expect the sum to approach $1 trillion. And that does not even count the human costs of the war.



It is clear from Putin's European charm offensive that Russia has no intention of footing even a small part of the bill. Apparently, the Kremlin does not feel as though it has a duty to rebuild the cities and restore the livelihoods that its bombs destroyed.



Nor is the United States particularly eager to help. Just last week, the Trump administration canceled $230 million in funding for the reconstruction of Raqqa and other areas liberated from ISIS. It is now hoping that Saudi Arabia will foot the bill instead. If there is any wisdom in that move, it remains to be seen.



With the U.S. stepping back, it is obvious why Putin suddenly wants to talk to the Europeans about the plight of Syrian refugees. He didn't care about them when his bombs were falling on their neighborhoods and forcing them to flee. But now that he wants Europe to bail out Assad, he has found some compassion.



But it is not clear that Assad even wants displaced Syrians to return. If anything, he seems ready to exploit the situation to reengineer the country's ethnic and political composition, making it safer for his own minority sect, the Alawites. Hence, a new law grants refugees just one year to reclaim their property before the government seizes it; and other bureaucratic requirements seem designed to allow Syrian authorities to refuse reentry to anyone they don't like.



Moreover, Assad has stated explicitly that European companies are not welcome to help with the reconstruction, and that preference should be given to Russian firms.



Clearly, the regime is preparing to profit from any rebuilding assistance that comes its way. For all of these reasons, the last thing that Europeans should do is send money directly to Assad. A far better option is to offer direct financial support to individuals and families that are willing and able to return to their country.



At the same time, the EU should not lift sanctions until a credible political settlement between the regime and opposition forces has been reached. The question is whether such a settlement is even possible. So far, every realistic proposal has been torpedoed by Assad's insistence that he remain in power.



Assad would do well to remember that he now rules over the wreckage of a country. Even when the guns fall silent, his regime will not be secure. His inability to revive Syria will leave him vulnerable in the same way that his refusal to countenance political reforms did eight years ago.



Europe has no interest in saving Assad from that dilemma. Help for Syria must await a genuine political solution. After the destruction that the Assad regime has wrought, there is no other way forward.





Carl Bildt is a former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden. Copyright belongs to Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).

By Andrew Salmon





A filmic phenomenon is currently sweeping the American popular cultural space. Talk shows, newspaper columns and online chat are all a-buzz with hit rom-com, "Crazy Rich Asians."



It portrays Asian-Americans  long considered a serious and successful, but not particularly cool or interesting ethnic group, given its propensity for elite education and professions like finance, law and medicine  as fun and glamorous. Suddenly, it is cool to be Asian-American.



However, the movie and the novel upon which it is based have generated some angst in Asia, most notably in Singapore, where it is largely set. Some Singaporeans complain that the "Asians" of the title are "East Asians." While that ethnicity is economically and politically dominant in the island state, it is not the only one: Singapore also hosts minorities of South Asian and Malay descent. An Indian colleague has already expressed irritation at the movie's title.



So while Americans of East Asian descent applaud the movie, Asians of different ethnicities are out of the picture. Hence an irony: A movie that has won bouquets for diversity in the U.S., is earning brickbats for overlooking the diversity of its setting, Singapore.



Perhaps those making similar movies in the future should be more specific about the ethnicities they are portraying. Let me the first to suggest a new rom com: "Mad Wealthy Koreans."



Set in Los Angeles and Seoul, it covers a well-to-do Korean-American maiden, with corporate familial connections, who journeys to Seoul. The audience will see the city on the Han through her eyes as she experiences the delights of galbi barbeque, the jollity of so-maek, the excellence of Gangnam cosmetic surgery and the good-natured fun of the noraebang.



As a travelogue goes  so far, so good. The tricky part is her well-to-do beau. As a member of the 0.1 percent, this privileged gent inhabits a fortress-like mountain-side residence overlooking the city. Each morning, he is driven to his corporate boardroom in a tinted-window black saloon. There, he instructs slavish executives on corporate strategy and familial enrichment (though not necessarily in that order) while crunching macadamia nuts. He is a modern royal: a chaebol scion.



The scenario offers abundant comic potential. Chuckle as our hero abuses helpless subordinates! Guffaw as he shamelessly embezzles funds! Cheer as his lawyers pull strings to keep him out of jail! Weep, as he falls for the heroine, turns a virtuous leaf, and everyone lives happily ever after!



It could work, no? It is not too far removed from the plot of many a K-soap. But generally, heroes do not arise among the ultra-privileged. If we are talking Hollywood, let us focus on Korean Americans. Their experience deserves filmic treatment.



The Korean-American population first expanded under authoritarian governance in South Korea, suggesting many were fleeing. Others moved Stateside with a plan, commercializing elements of Korean culture, such as cuisine and martial arts.



Korean socio-cultural mores may be responsible for much success. A Cambridge professor in China two years ago made the point to me that Korean migrants customarily do far better, economically, than locals anywhere. This is due to their prioritization of diligence, educational attainment and cooperative associations and networks. The only ethnic minority in China wealthier than Han Chinese, per capita, are Korean Chinese, he said.



While some Korean-Americans refute the "model minority" stereotype, there is some truth in most stereotypes. And rags-to-riches stories have universal appeal.



In America, Korean migrants were strangers in a strange land. Often with no English, they banded together in communal groups and churches. Many worked hard in menial jobs with the sole goal of investing in their children's education.



For many, it was no easy path. During the LA riots, Korean-Americans became targets for disaffected minorities in the communities they worked in. Like other minorities, some suffered prejudice at the hands of the white majority. And mass success in Ivy League colleges even led do affirmative action programs calibrated against them.



Much here bespeaks modern America, both good and ill. If "Crazy Rich Asians" spawns a trend of similarly themed films  a typical Hollywood process  the Korean-American experience offers compelling stories.





Andrew Salmon (andrewcsalmon@yahoo.co.uk) is a Seoul-based reporter and author.

Ha Jong-sun of Barun Law, who is leading a class action suit against BMW over fire-prone engines, speaks during a press conference at the law firm's office in Seoul, Monday. The lawyer said BMW drivers in Korea would file lawsuits against government officials and send letters to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Donald Trump. / Yonhap



By Park Jae-hyuk



BMW drivers in Korea sent letters to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Donald Trump to urge the German and U.S. authorities to investigate the cause of engine fires in BMW vehicles, an attorney for the drivers said Monday.



The so-called "BMW fire victims group" consisting of 1,000 BMW car owners in Korea also said they are considering filing lawsuits against government officials at the transport and environment ministries for their alleged dereliction of duty.



"We decided to send letters to Merkel via German Ambassador to Korea Stephan Auer to ask the German government and prosecutors to investigate BMW headquarters for its alleged concealment of the defect," Ha Jong-sun of Barun Law told reporters at the law firm's office in Seoul.



The lawyer added the victims would send letters to Trump to call on him to issue an executive order to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board to initiate its own investigation into potential defects in exhaust-gas recirculation (EGR) valves and coolers in BMW's SUVs.



"Accordingly there is an immediate need to check the safety of EGR valves and coolers in X3, X5 and X6 diesel SUVs sold in the U.S. to prevent fatal car fires and save innocent lives on U.S. highways and roads," Lee Gwang-deok said in the letter.



Darchula, August 27

Security officials from districts in western Nepal near the border with China and Chinese personnel based in the Tibetan Autonomous Region have reached a six-point understanding during an informal cooperation meeting in Taklakot, Tibet.

The two-day meeting, which took place after an interval of six years, concluded with officials reaching an agreement on closer cooperation on information exchange, combating international crime and smuggling of narcotics and persons.

The two sides also agreed to hold regular meetings and allow Nepal nationals to travel to Taklakot from Darchula by issuing passes, informed Darchulas Assistant Chief District Officer Shiva Raj Joshi. He added that the Chinese side was requested to provide easier access to Man Sarovar and Kailash.Kathmandu, August 27

Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli says members of regional organisations such as Saarc and BIMSTEC could not make the groups active.

PM Oli, who was talking to editors of major media outlets in the country on Monday, said that Nepal should make the most of the BIMSTEC grouping as it could not help re-vitalise the South Asian grouping.

Olis comments come as Kathmandu prepares to host the heads of government of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Sri Lanka Thailand and Myanmar for the BIMSTEC Summit. BIMSTEC cannot work the way it has worked in the last 20 years, said the Prime Minister adding that it was time the grouping took momentum.

He indicated that BIMSTEC cannot replace Saarc as Nepal was one of the founding members of the grouping. We havent been able to revitalise Saarc. It could not happen with our lone efforts. During my visit to Indiaeven during Modijis visit to Nepal I have been been saying that we need to revitalise Saarc.

PM Oli told the editors that Nepals priority in BIMSTEC is related to regional connectivity.A Denver mother is pleading for parents to teach their children to love everyone after her 9-year-old committed suicide because he was bullied.

Leia Pierce

says weeks before school started, her son, Jamel Myles, told her he was gay.

"And he looked so scared when he told me. He was like Mom I'm gay. And I thought he was playing, so I looked back because I was driving, and he was all curled up, so scared. And I said, I still love you," she said.

Jamel started fourth grade on Monday, but on Thursday, Pierce found him dead in their home.

She said Jamel to his sister the kids at school told him to kill himself.

"I'm just sad he didn't come to me."

Denver Public School said extra social workers and its crisis team would be available for students. It also said it would continue to provide support for the family.

Pierce said she now wants to raise awareness about the effects of bullying so that no other child or parent has to go through the pain she's endured.

Remember, if you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, help is available. You can call 1-800-273-8255 or

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Former Vice President Al Gore will be in Los Angeles starting Tuesday to lead a summit, with the mission to train the next generation of environmental activists.

His organization, The Climate Reality Project, will bring together scientists, filmmakers and other environmentally-focused researchers to teach more than 2,200 people how to push for green policies on the local and federal levels. It comes as California releases its fourth Climate Change Assessment, which predicts more intense wildfires, snowpack water supply decreasing by a third and a rise in heat-related deaths -- among other startling projections.

A Martinez, host of KPCC's Take Two, talked with Mr. Gore ahead of this week's events. (This interview has been edited for clarity.)

A Martinez: In the span of a few months, California had its No. 1 and No. 2 biggest fires in its recorded history. Do events like this in California make you feel vindicated or validated for everything you've talked about for the last decade or so?

Al Gore: The fact that the scientists have been proven correct really has no meaning other than that we should listen more carefully to what they're telling us now. I don't think any of the scientists take any pleasure of any kind in their ability to say, "I told you so." They're still deeply concerned that we fix our democracy to the point where we can start making the changes necessary to prevent even worse damage and loss in the future.





AG: I think it's because Californians treasure the environment and have a tradition of making changes that the rest of the nation belatedly sign on to. I give a lot of credit to Gov. Jerry Brown, who really understands this thoroughly and has been courageous in proposing policies to help lead the nation. And a lot of mayors and county leaders -- Eric Garcetti right here in Los Angeles is a great example of a mayor who's been providing great leadership to solve the climate crisis.





AG: That's a challenge in many parts of our national life, and the Climate Reality Project has been extremely active in reaching out to diverse communities of color and every demographic of our country. We will have a very diverse group of more than 2,200 new activists here in Los Angeles starting tomorrow.



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On any given night in California there are about 134,000 people without a home, according to annual data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That's nearly equivalent to the population of Pasadena or Roseville sleeping on the street, on a bench or in a shelter.

California's homeless population jumped 13.7 percent between 2016 and 2017.

And those 134,000 Californians without a place to call home are the visible edge of a much larger, much deeper housing problem in the state. "We now know that there is a very close connection between housing costs and homelessness," said Margot Kushel, director of the University of California San Francisco Center for Vulnerable Populations.

The sky-high costs of renting and buying a home means many residents are just getting by. People are being forced to choose between paying their rent and buying food. They are selling their belongings, working 7 days a week, doing whatever it takes to keep their home.

For many, the California Dream has been shrunk down to keeping a place to live.

According to analysis by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, California has only 22 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 extremely low-income households. Affordability in this case means total housing costs are at or below 30 percent of area median income.

Put another way, the state is short more than a million rental units that are affordable and available to extremely low-income Californians. "That probably describes more than any other reason why we have a homelessness crisis in California," said Kushel.

About 29 percent of California renters spend more than half their income on rent, according to a study from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. Paying more than about a third of income on housing can make it hard to afford basics like food, clothing, transportation and health care, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In Sacramento, households making half of the median income or less spend 62 percent of their income on rent, according to the California Housing Partnership Corporation, an agency created by the state Legislature to help preserve affordable housing.

In San Diego, that rises to 69 percent. In Orange County, people making half of the median income or less spend 78 percent on housing.

For very low-income Californians, budgeting gets bleaker. In Los Angeles County, there are 600,000 residents who spend 90 percent or more of their income on housing, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Economic Roundtable. The group found similar rates of extreme rent burdens in Santa Clara County.

"These are areas where housing is expensive and incomes are polarized, and people at the bottom of the income distribution are having a really tough time keeping a roof over their heads," said Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable, a research group based in Los Angeles.

"They probably are on food stamps, they probably get Medicaid, they may get food from food banks as well," said Flaming. "But it's extremely difficult. Virtually all of the liquid resources of the family are going to pay for rent. And if a shoe drops, if someone gets sick or someone loses a job or if someone leaves the household that's contributing to paying rent, then that family can easily find itself on the street."

According to UCSF's Kushel, many cities have had some successes getting people who are homeless into housing, but "what we've done much less of a good job is preventing new people from falling into homelessness."

Over the next two weeks, the California Dream collaboration will explore why people fall into homelessness and the innovative ways municipalities are trying to help people keep their own place.

"The first and most important thing," said Kushel, "is to act and act quickly and aggressively to create more housing that's affordable."

Building in California can be a lengthy and expensive process. According to the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, the cost of building a 100-unit affordable housing project in the state was almost $425,000 per unit in 2016. That's up from $265,000 per unit in 2000.

At the same time the cost of building has jumped, redevelopment and state funding for affordable housing development have shrunk. According to the California Housing Partnership Corporation, redevelopment and state funding declined by about $1.6 billion between 2008 and 2016.

So some California cities are trying innovative ways to prevent and curb homelessness. In June, San Francisco voters approved a proposition to provide legal assistance to tenants facing eviction. There's a pilot program underway in Los Angeles -- also focused on protecting residents from eviction. Santa Monica is in the middle of a pilot program that provides rent assistance to low-income seniors. Oakland is considering taxing vacant properties in an effort to help increase housing supply.

Much of the focus in the last decade has been on getting homeless people housed, according to Steve Berg from the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Today, "there's a lot more interest in prevention," said Berg. "More people are wanting to know what they can try out and what they can do."

MORE ON CALIFORNIA'S HOUSING AND HOMELESSNESS CRISIS >>

Santa Monica Is Offering Cash To Seniors Struggling To Pay Their Rent

Officials Vs. NIMBYs In Venice, LA's Latest Homeless Shelter Battleground

How To Keep People Off The Streets? Help Them Before They Get Evicted

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.

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.Freely accessible local news is vital. Please power our reporters and help keep us independent with a donation today.

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Rumors of seniors straining to pay their rent started making the rounds at Santa Monica City Hall two years ago, so officials surveyed the town's elderly residents.

"We had one household where the participant was eating every other day," said Lisa Varon, senior analyst with the city of Santa Monica. "We had another household where the participant was trading her parking space for protein powder. We had people who were forgoing medical or dental care that they needed and making really difficult choices. They were all managing to hang on by just a tiny thread, and they were doing it with a lot of dignity the last quarter of their lives."

Aging in California is becoming less about cruises, the pursuit of hobbies and time with the grandkids under the sun and more about survival. One in five seniors in the state lives in poverty, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Half of the state's single seniors don't have enough money to cover basic expenses. And regions like Los Angeles County are seeing a spike in homelessness among seniors.

Santa Monica hopes to stem that trend.

In November, it launched a 14-month experiment by giving cash to nearly two dozen senior men and women struggling to pay their rent in a city that has rent control.

"You would think their rents would be low, but even the 3 to 5 percent increases allowed a year outstrip the increases in the cost of medical care and other costs combined with the limited increases in Social Security," said Steven Wallace, associate director of UCLA's Center for Health Policy Research.

Before Kaye, who only wanted her first name used, was admitted into Santa Monica's pilot program, she said she had to pay all her expenses from her $1,000 monthly Social Security check.

Kaye, who asked that we not use her last name, receives a monthly rental subsidy from the City of Santa Monica as part of a pilot program to help seniors stay in their homes. (Photo By Amita Sharma)

"If I didn't have money to eat after paying my monthly bills, I just didn't eat," Kaye said. "There was literally nothing for nothing."

That meant no money for partial dentures.

"I had to have 12 teeth pulled out of my head in one day so that I could get dentures because they [Medi-Cal] wouldn't pay for partials," she said.

It also meant no money for gas for the 70-year-old's car or any other transportation.

"There were many times I would have to say to someone, 'I don't even have money to take a bus to get to you,'" she said.

Kaye said Santa Monica's monthly subsidy has saved her.

"If it weren't for the city of Santa Monica helping me, I would probably by now have been evicted and on the street," she said.

Outside of helping seniors remain in their homes, city officials say the goal is to preserve Santa Monica's diverse population.

"This is not just the fancy shining city by the beach," said Andy Agle, Santa Monica's director of housing and economic development. "This is a city that is for everyone. It should be accessible to anyone. There are people living in $10 million houses here, but there are people living on Social Security, and all of that is part of Santa Monica."

Officials said Santa Monica may be the first city in the United States to subsidize rent for seniors. Though other cities like Denver and Detroit are offering rental subsidies to low-income families. Stockton also plans to offer a basic income of $500 to some of its neediest residents in the fall as part of an 18-month project.

"We are human beings," said 70-year-old Pierre Devillandry. "We have to help each other."

Devillandry, a 30-year Santa Monica resident, is a painter who laughs easily. But just one year ago, he was wracked with anxiety because he consistently fell short $500 each month on his bills. He was dogged by one thought: "How am I going to live tomorrow?"

Then came the letter from the city of Santa Monica informing the painter that he was accepted into the pilot program for a monthly subsidy.

"It was something that came down from Heaven," he said.

Wallace said single seniors like Devillandry are hurting the most.

"About half of them don't have enough money to pay those basic expenses," Wallace said. "And so, you don't see people dying on the street but you do see people in dire circumstances and making do in various ways that I think none of us would consider adequate in a wealthy, civilized society like we're in."

Wallace consulted on Santa Monica's elderly subsidy program. He said the true test of its success will be if seniors in the pilot project stay in their homes longer than those who are not receiving help. Another indicator will be if the city saves money.

Santa Monica admitted seniors making $14,000 a year or less into the program.The city used UCLA's Elder Index to calculate how much it costs for seniors to cover their basic expenses and has sought to raise the income of each of the participants to $22,098 annually.

Varon said Santa Monica has set aside $300,000 in general fund and sales tax money for the pilot project. She said the alternative could be even more expensive.

"When somebody becomes homeless, their expenses become astronomically higher because they're on the street, and they are sick and possibly we are calling paramedics for them," Varon said. "They are ending up at the hospital because they are so sick, so how can we afford not to keep them housed?"

Santa Monica's Agle views the city's subsidies as part of its social contract with seniors.

"In most of California, Social Security is barely going to pay your rent," he said. "Are we -- as a state, as Californians -- going to say, 'Let's add everybody over 65 as homeless.' Is that really who we want to be as a country, as a state?"

Correction: In an earlier version of this story, we misidentified UCLA's Elder Index as UCLA's Elderly Index.

Editor's note: A version of this story was also on the radio. Listen to it here on KPCC .

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.

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.John McCains book The Restless Wave appeared on bestseller lists following the Arizona senators death on Saturday.

The book, which was released in May by Simon & Schuster, was ranked No. 2 on Amazons list of bestselling books, and No. 3 on the Barnes & Noble website as of Monday morning.

The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations was McCains seventh book, all of which were co-written by his former chief of staff, speechwriter Mark Salter.

McCain, a Vietnam War hero, U.S. senator and Republican nominee for president in 2008, died Saturday after a year-long battle with brain cancer. He was 81.

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In The Restless Wave, McCain reflects on his mortality, writing, I dont know how much longer Ill be here. Maybe Ill have another five years. Maybe, with the advances in oncology, theyll find new treatments for my cancer that will extend my life. Maybe Ill be gone before you read this.

The book was mostly well-reviewed by critics. In the Washington Post, James Hohmann called it thoughtful, writing, "[H]is book will be remembered for its genuine concern about the future of our republic and the West.

And in the Boston Globe, David M. Shribman called the book remarkable, writing, John McCains valedictory message... is a 400-page reflection on hardship, a homily on purpose, a celebration of life  and a challenge to Americans to live up to their values and founding principles at a time when both are in jeopardy.

McCains funeral will be held on Saturday at the Washington National Cathedral. Hell be buried on Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.Susan Watanabe, a television writer and the wife of SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director David White, has died. She was 49.

Watanabe died Sunday of a brain tumor, according to the guild.

As a TV writer, Watanabe contributed to the UPN series One on One and Girlfriends, the latter of which also aired on the CW Television Network. She also worked as a strategist supporting the candidacies of numerous Los Angeles City Council members, as well as African American candidates in the Midwest and South.

Born in Chicago in 1968, Watanabe attended Whitney M. Young Magnet High School and later attended the University of Illinois. She earned a graduate degree from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, where she was elected president of the student union.

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She was also well-known in L.A. for her support and fundraising for progressive candidates and causes, new authors, young professionals and community groups.

Watanabe married White in 2000. White was named national executive director of the Screen Actors Guild in 2009. The union, which represents approximately 160,000 screen actors and media professionals, merged with AFTRA three years later.

In addition to her husband, her survivors include their 9-year-old daughter, Sophia; her parents Don and Ida Watanabe; and brother Scott.

A memorial service has been set for Sept. 15 at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park Hollywood Hills. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to Susans Circle, a foundation established by friends in her name and housed within the Liberty Hill Foundation.

david.ng@latimes.com

@DavidNgLATNine months after a mysterious new company bought LA Weekly, one of the companys owners is suing the rest, alleging they have mismanaged the alternative weekly, pillaged it for their own gain and improperly kicked him out of the management team.

In addition to damages and other compensation, David Welch is seeking to dissolve the company, which could leave LA Weekly searching for another new owner.



For the record: An earlier version of this article said LA Weeklys union was broken in the November sale. LA Weekly copy chief Lisa Horowitz, president of the local, said that there was no interruption in unionization and that seven editorial and production staff members are in the union.

Welch, a Los Angeles cannabis attorney, filed his lawsuit Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Welch, along with LA Weekly Publisher and Chief Executive Brian Calle, were the only members of the ownership group identified shortly after the Oct. 18 announcement that Voice Media Group was selling LA Weekly to a fledgling company called Semanal Media.

The suit blames Calle for decisions that created and fueled public backlash against LA Weekly, such as slashing the editorial staff. It describes Calle as the leader of a group of core investors who, the suit alleges, have worked to enrich themselves at the papers expense  for example, by planning a competing alt weekly, creating an advertising agency that competes with LA Weeklys advertising arm and diverting LA Weekly opportunities and resources to fuel those outside ventures.

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Calle called the lawsuit frivolous. We believe the allegations in this complaint are categorically unfounded, he said in a statement. Everyone at the Weekly has been working hard to ensure that this well-loved cultural institution continues to provide its loyal readers with the quality content they expect.

The other defendants could not be reached for comment.

LA Weekly has been cutting costs, staff and coverage for years as news publications struggle to make money in the internet age. But its sale last fall sparked an energetic boycott campaign against the paper, led by some of its own former writers.

The boycott, led in part by music writer Jeff Weiss, arose shortly after nearly all of LA Weeklys journalists were laid off as the paper changed hands in November. The campaign paints the new owners as self-interested men with ties to Orange County and to conservative causes who dont value or understand journalism, journalistic ethics, progressive alt-weekly culture or Los Angeles.

The boycott has aggressively lobbied advertisers, event participants and journalists to sever ties with the paper. Big advertisers such as Amoeba Music have pulled out, and LA Weekly has canceled moneymaking events such as its Essentials food party.

Calle  who previously ran the Orange County Registers historically libertarian editorial page and a decade ago spent about a year working for the conservative Claremont Institute  has rebutted the boycott campaigns characterization of the ownership group, saying he has progressive stances on social issues and noting that the owners include men of color, that he himself is gay and that several have lived in Los Angeles.

In his suit, Welch accuses his fellow owners of violating journalistic ethics as well as business ethics, severely damaging LA Weeklys legacy of strong journalism and diverting resources from the company into their own pockets.

Calle, the suit says, has been making $120,000 a year as chief marketing officer of Orange County marijuana firm Kurvana even as he retains full editorial control of LA Weekly, and has arranged for Kurvana to be promoted in LA Weekly at the papers expense. Calle let Kurvana run ads in the Weekly even after racking up a balance due of tens of thousands of dollars, the lawsuit says. Further, it says, LA Weekly ran a glowing review of a Kurvana product July 26 without disclosing that Calle is in charge of Kurvanas marketing.

The suit also says Calle and two fellow LA Weekly owners  Wayne Gross, a litigator from Huntington Beach, and Steve Mehr, an attorney who is chief executive of Irvine business development consulting firm WebShark360  funded a company called Vanguard that sells advertisers the opportunity to promote their products via people who are popular on social media. That encroaches on a way LA Weekly has earned money, and they have used LA Weekly staffers to conduct Vanguard business from the LA Weekly offices without compensating the company, the suit alleges.

The trio also have been working to establish an Orange County-focused publication that would not be owned by LA Weeklys parent company and would divert business from it, the suit alleges.

The suit also alleges that Calle and fellow LA Weekly owner Kevin Xu, the CEO of regenerative medicine firm Mebo International, committed LA Weekly to joint ventures while also being paid by the ventures other party. And it says Calle pressured Welch to sign a compensation agreement under which LA Weekly would pay Calle $135,000 a year, plus a $135,000 bonus upon the completion of tasks such as signing a new office lease and restaffing the editorial team. Welch refused, the suit says.

The lawsuit claims that Welch objected to the other owners actions and that they then pushed him out of the management team, violating a contract.

Tensions came to a head, the lawsuit says, after Calle and Xu falsely told employees in April that local laws required the company to reduce the employees paid time-off benefits. The suit says Welch sent Calle an email taking him to task for the false statements.

On May 14, the suit says, Calle and Xu convened a meeting of all the owners except one  Nyjah Huston, a professional skateboarder who was the subject of an effusive LA Weekly cover story in March  and they agreed to remove Welch from the management team. It says Mehr moved to remove Welchs name from the companys operating agreement and replace it with that of fellow owner Andy Bequer, who owns an addiction treatment center in Fountain Valley.

Those moves violated an oral contract that guaranteed Welch a year on the management team when he invested in the company, the suit says.

If the lawsuit succeeds, LA Weekly could be up for sale again or its assets dispersed.

The boycott group initially hoped to buy LA Weekly from its current owners, but no longer, music writer Weiss said. Along with several others who used to work for LA Weekly, including culture writer Jenn Swann and former food editor Sarah Bennett, Weiss is planning to launch a new publication, titled the LAnd, by years end.

Welchs lawsuit also offers a peek into the ownership structure of LA Weeklys parent company. It says Semanal Media is wholly owned by and the sole asset of Street Media, a Delaware company.

Xu and his mother, Lily Li, are listed as together owning 26% of Street Media; Calle, 17%; Welch, 13%; Mehr, 12%; Bequer, 8%; property developer Michael Mugel, 6%; Gross, 5%; hotel developer Paul Makarechian, 4%; Huston,  who previously had not been publicly identified as an owner  2%; and attorney Alan Greenberg, 1%.

There are additional shares in the company that have not yet been issued to anyone, according to the lawsuit.

Welch is being represented in the case by Patricia Glaser and Rory Miller of the law firm Glaser Weil.

UPDATES:

7:45 p.m.: This article was updated with a statement from Calle and a comment from Weiss.

2:05 p.m.: This article was updated to mention that Huston was the subject of an LA Weekly cover story and the names of Welchs attorneys.

This article was originally published at 11:20 a.m.More than any other Los Angeles Philharmonic music director, maybe more than any other conductor before, Gustavo Dudamel loves the Hollywood Bowl. And he probably loves Tchaikovsky  the favorite composer of his late mentor, Jose Antonio Abreu  the most, as well.

Even so, the Bowls annual Tchaikovsky Spectacular, which Dudamel led in an incomparably spectacular fashion Friday night (and repeated Saturday), is no time for such sergeants. Its the fireworks that have made this an annual sellout sensation. The formula remains unchanged since Zubin Mehta led the first Tchaikovsky Spectacular in 1969. Stick to the most popular Tchaikovsky, then let loose the fireworks for the 1812 Overture, replete with marching band.

I, on the other hand, hate the Tchaikovsky Spectacular, despite loving fireworks. It has always represented the worst of the Bowl. As Karen Monson wrote in these pages, reviewing the 1969 Spectacular: Five airplanes  babies crying; people screaming somewhere in the hills  and one unidentified hooting object.

The best way to deal with all that has been to play up the cheesy factor. At this late date, camp works best. Conductor and soloist arent what fill the seats, and this is one occasion where it is legal for the orchestra to use autopilot. But what if  just a hypothetical  someone tried to take it seriously?

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For Dudamel that was no hypothetical. He followed the formula fairly closely with a program that, like that first one that Mehta gave, began with the soldierly Marche Slave and included the ever-chestnut Fantasy-Overture, Romeo and Juliet. Where Dudamel departed from the familiar was to replace another favorite, say Tchaikovskys First Piano Concerto, with the seldom-heard Shakespearean Fantasy-Overture, Hamlet.

With that, Dudamel had a Shakespeare theme, and his soloists were three actors introducing the fantasy-overtures with a few famous lines from the plays that the works evoke. This is something Dudamel has done twice before at Walt Disney Concert Hall with the L.A. Phil and the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. As on those earlier occasions, Kate Burton was the stage director.

Nice as the gesture was, classing up the Bowl with a little Shakespeare wasnt really the point. Tchaikovsky was. Marche Slave begins as an ordinary funeral march, timpani and lower strings tolling four-four time. Yet somehow Dudamel found depth even in, especially in, those first four bars.

What that depth was proved hard to determine at first. But as the march progressed, as Dudamel penetrated into the soul of Hamlet and released the musical hormones of Romeo and Juliet, the something special became increasingly apparent. Every note mattered, nothing for Dudamel was extraneous.

The L.A. Phil may know this music well (if not Hamlet so much), but the quality of playing, and the character, was hard to believe with so little rehearsal and in a busy week that had included two other programs. The intensity did not, for a moment, let up. The amplification was turned up to the bold setting, which made every detail vivid (and had the power to augment every mishap). Close your eyes and you could imagine the brilliance of the Berlin Philharmonic.

Asia Kate Dillon, the Billions cast member who identifies as nonbinary, introduced Hamlet by giving a new, brilliant meaning to To be, or not to be. The roiling storminess of Tchaikovsky suddenly seemed relevant, however peculiar the inclusion of what sounds like a Russian folk song in the middle.

Unlike Dillon, who lithely liberated Hamlets unmoored melancholy, Anika Noni Rose and Ioan Gruffudd were both moored, gracelessly reading from scripts and trying to find their way around the stage at the same time. Whats all the more curious is the unusual credit in the program for a casting director. Surely such accomplished actors (Rose had been the Juliet in Dudamels 2011 Disney Hall concert) might have brushed up on their Shakespeare.

There was no credit for the fireworks, and they were glorious. This really does require preparation, since there is no rehearsal. But the synchronization with the music was mostly on and, if corny at times, corny in a way that brought a wide smile to ones face.

Nor did Dudamel take the 1812 for granted. He might have been conducting Beethovens Ninth, such was the magnificence and grandeur of the performance, though not, necessarily the intent of a score commissioned by Tsar Alexander, a notorious bigot. The USC Trojan Marching Band entered for the final bit of Tchaikovskian triumph with the joyfulness of winning the Rose Bowl.

The Tchaikovsky Spectacular was never meant to represent the Hollywood Bowl at its best. Whatever you do, dont tell Gustavo.

mark.swed@latimes.comPassionate vintage film fans are ready to make their yearly trek to the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood this week for the Cinecon 54 Classic Film Festival. The five-day fest has become widely known for screening rare and obscure films and shorts from the silent era and the Golden Age of Hollywood.

This years fest, which kicks off Thursday, is no exception, featuring such rarely seen films as 1924s Helens Babies, 1937s Blonde Trouble and director William Wylers 1929 treat The Shakedown.

But the show nearly didnt go on two years ago. Robert S. Birchard, the film historian and longtime Cinecon president, had expressed a desire to stop the festival because he wasnt feeling well. It turned out he had heart issues that led to his death.

I started to get people to give us money, so I had money to work with [for the festival], said Stan Taffel, a TV and film historian who took over as president of Cinecon in 2016. Visiting him in the hospital before his death, he told Birchard,  Dont worry about a thing. Ill take it from here. 

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He barely had time to mourn. Taffel had three months to make Cinecon 52 a reality.

I wanted to make sure that everybody understood that its going to be taken care of, said Taffel. I am going to continue the good traditions that we established, but I wanted to make the festival work better.

So he started calling his friends who shared his passion for films. Instead of just Bob and me and [current vice-president] Jim Harwood doing the festival, I established a team of 12 amazing people. And each one I put in charge of a certain faction of the festival. Within 85 days we put the festival back on its feet. We got through that first festival, and what was wonderful was that we had a memorial for Bob.

Taffel wanted to increase the scope of Cinecon, so he added things he was passionate about, like kinescopes. Those television films from live TV before the advent of videotape, he noted. I have a substantial collection of them.

To show these kinescope films, Taffel last year added Kinecon to Cinecon, showing at the smaller Spielberg Theater at the Egyptian. I didnt want anyone to say, Oh, you took away movie time in the big theater,  he explained.

Ollie and Fran Allison during a taping of one of their 39 color episodes of Kukla, Fran and Ollie. (EML Library Partnership)

This year, Kinecon will focus on comedians such as Jackie Gleason, Burns and Allen, Jack Benny and Sid Caesar and also show one-of-a-kind prints of episodes of such 50s-era kiddie shows as The Pinky Lee Show and Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

Also a big success last year was Saturday Nitrate Fever, which showcases a nitrate feature and short subject. (Films with a nitrate base were made in the early part of the 20th century to 1952. They are highly unstable, so special equipment is needed to show them.) This year, Cinecon is screening the 1937 Merrie Melodies cartoon September in the Rain and the 1933 Stu Erwin comedy He Learned About Women.

The festival itself opens with the Library of Congress restoration of the 1924 comedy Helens Babies, starring Diana Serra Cary, then known as the massively popular child star Baby Peggy, Edward Everett Horton and a young Clara Bow.

Diana Serra Cary a.k.a. child star Baby Peggy (wearing a vintage Baby Peggy pin) on her 90th birthday in 2008. (Larry Telles / UCLA Film & Television Archive)

Helens Babies survived, but not well, said Taffel. The Library of Congress found new material and a longer version of the film with other sequences. So, they restored it and are allowing me to run it as the premiere of the restoration. And I have Scott Lasky and the Famous Players Orchestra accompanying the film. Scott has a score that hes assembled from original silent-film music and has spent the better part of the year putting it together.

Cary, who will be 100 in the fall, may attend, depending on her health. Definitely scheduled to appear is 91-year-old former child star Cora Sue Collins. She will do a Q&A Saturday after the screening of her first film, 1932s The Unexpected Father with Slim Summerville and Zasu Pitts.

Taffel explained that for 20 years, at every event and festival Cora Sue goes to, she asked, Does anybody have or know the whereabouts of my first movie? So, I made a phone call to somebody over at Universal who said, We actually have it, and weve made a new print. 

Taffel said Collins cried when she learned that not only did the film survive, but that it was booked at Cinecon. Wed like you to honor us by bringing your family to come see it at the Egyptian, Taffel told the actress.

Oscar-winning actress Eva Marie Saint (On the Waterfront) will also be doing a Q&A Friday with a screening of That Certain Feeling, a 1956 comedy she made with Bob Hope.

Taffel noted that while watching the 94-year-old actress at the Oscars this year, I just thought, One of the greatest actresses, one of my favorites. I would love to honor her. But I didnt want to honor her by running On the Waterfront or North by Northwest. If you want to go to the TCM [Classic Film Festival], you go to see North by Northwest. We found out that there was a movie that she has long wanted to see. It was That Certain Feeling. We called over to Paramount, and they pulled their prints. We inspected them, and were going to run the film for Eva.

Cinecon 54 is also honoring the legacy of film preservationist Robert Nudelman, who died a decade ago, with a screening Monday morning of the classic 1932 W.C. Fields-Jack Oakie comedy Million Dollar Legs.

Cinecon was built by friends who loved this stuff, said Taffel. Robert Nudelman was a big champion of preservation in Hollywood. For years, he kept asking Bob to run a W.C.Fields film, and Bob would say, Its too common. Were not going to do it. But one year he did, and Robert was thrilled, and the audience went nuts. So on this sad 10th anniversary I wanted to put W.C. Fields on the Cinecon screen.

Cinecon 54

Aug. 30  Sept. 3  various times

Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. (Two programs will take place at the Loews Hollywood Hotel, 1755 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood

Admission for five-day pass is $200 and daily passes are $40-$55

For more information go to https://www.cinecon.org

For tickets go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cinecon-54-classic-film-festival-august-30-to-september-3-2018-tickets-46595903602

calendar@latimes.comThey sang Scott Watson to the stars until the wee hours of the night along Sunset Boulevard, aboard the roving karaoke RV that he helped transform into an oasis on wheels for creative souls.

Watson, who died Aug. 12 when the single-engine plane he was piloting crashed in Sylmar, was well-known on the RVIP, a state-of-the-art mobile karaoke bar based in Los Angeles and a popular fixture at SXSW and other tech-meets-art festivals.

He served as its chief technology officer  that is, when he wasnt working his dedicated day job as CTO and senior vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering. The accident, currently under federal investigation, cut short a life filled with remarkable behind-the-scenes innovations that reached millions during his 30-year career at Disney.

On Saturday, family, friends and Disney colleagues past and present gathered in Los Angeles, first at Disney Imagineering in Glendale and then outside the El Cid restaurant in Silver Lake to remember Watson and his contributions to the many artist communities he championed, paying tribute all night long with beloved Scott songs and toasts to the late innovator and engineer.

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[Morrisseys] Suedehead was probably his No. 1 favorite song, and its the song thats been running through my head, said RVIP cofounder Jonathan Grubb of Watson, whom he first met at a dinner party years ago.

When Grubb and partner Kestrin Pantera took the fledgling project on its maiden voyage to SXSW, Watson stayed until sunrise and became part of the family; when they later made a business out of it, he officially signed on as CTO, creating an onboard talking karaoke robot and song-picking applications still in use today.

Watson, a prolific inventor who held dozens of patents, also designed the programmable external LED light display that welcomes visitors like a beacon to the RV, an extension of his longstanding interest in tinkering with lights and lasers.

While he loved a good party, he was equally happy spending a full day debugging software on his laptop, his daughter Katie Watson said via email, remembering a father who made grilled cheese sandwiches with a blowtorch, loved to snowboard, longboard and paraglide and never flagged in his patience and passion for science.

Friends dubbed him the Wizard of Awes, the kind of genius whose achievements behind the curtain often go unsung.

Leading technological explorations at Disney Imagineering Research and Development, the creative engineering arm of Disney, Watson helped create iconic theme park attractions, including the cutting-edge Aladdin VR experience that predated the current wave of immersive virtual reality storytelling and Soarin Over California, which became Soarin over the World.

Jon Snoddy, a senior vice president at Disney Imagineering, knew Watson for 30 years and worked closely with him, once spending three months experimenting with junkyard parts for a new project, the scrappy prototype that would become the iconic Indiana Jones ride.

Watson was often ahead of his time, said Snoddy, spearheading technology that would later become popular; its thanks to Watson that the Mouse House was an early adapter of the internet.

Scott registered the domain on his company credit card, Disney.com. Nobody even knew what that was, it was so early! said Snoddy, who remembers Watson programming the first-ever page on the companys website  a yellow page with Mickey Mouse in the middle of it  on a computer that sat beside Watsons desk for years. It is crazy, but somebody from every company has to be that person.

He described a fearless innovator unafraid of technical problems to which solutions didnt yet exist. He would go around like a little bee, pollinating projects, and they would always come out better, Snoddy said. He was the same Scott that [other friends] know, just as loose, spontaneous, full of energy and creative. And creativity is water  its what we run on.

Watson found kindred spirits in the Southern California arts scene and at Burning Man, where he served as a green dot community ranger helping individuals suffering extreme emotional experiences during the festival.

At Saturdays memorial and in interviews, friends, family and colleagues describe a tenacity and kindness of spirit that rubbed off on everyone he knew. Some, like Mark Trammell and Portia Wells, traveled from out of state to attend the memorial, remembering how Watson had helped orchestrate their own engagement on the RVIP.

A common refrain, even in a moment as hard as this one, is Well figure it out,  wrote son Shane Watson via email. And we do. And he did. He dreamed wildly and pursued those dreams with everything he had. And why not? He would figure it out.

Watson is survived by daughters Elizabeth and Katie, son Shane, grandson Pascal and fiancee Maraya Cornell, who lived with Watson in Los Feliz and Marina del Rey.

Plans are being formulated to send his ashes to the moon via SpaceX-adjacent services  or rather, back to the moon, as Shane Watson says, because anyone with such a clear-eyed vision of the future must be from the future.

I really fell in love with him because he was kind, caring and faithful, said Cornell, a day after friends celebrated his memory until 3 a.m. with songs, shiny capes, and champagne. It was a spirited tribute he would have appreciated, she said. He was larger than life. He would talk about going to the moon. He wasnt afraid of big things, crazy things  things most people think are impossible.

Disney Imagineering CTO Scott Watson, being celebrated by those close to him, lent his innovative acumen and generosity of spirit to arts communities he loved, including Burning Man and the LA-based RVIP. (Nick Agro / For The Times)

Photographs of the late Scott Watson circulate at the Aug. 25 karaoke memorial in his honor outside the El Cid restaurant (Nick Agro / LA Times)

jen.yamato@latimes.com

@jenyamatoFamily, friends and fans of Jonathan Gold gathered in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday evening to celebrate the life of the late restaurant critic, who died July 21 of pancreatic cancer.

The event began at 5 p.m. with the dedication of a plaque and a pair of yellow lampposts honoring Gold outside the Broadway entrance to Grand Central Market, one of the writers favorite spots to grab lunch and pick up cheese and meats. The top of the newly painted lampposts feature medallions with a silhouette of Golds profile.

Grand Central is the perfect place to honor an icon, Councilman Jose Huizar said in his remarks. In addition to the plaque and lampposts, he said, the sidewalk outside the market will be extended to form a small plaza and will be flecked with gold sparkles.

A plaza memorial to #JonathanGold outside #GrandCentralMarket on Broadway, where #LA 's diverse food & culture intersect under one century-old roof in the heart of Downtown, is the perfect place to honor an LA icon. #SidewalkofGold #DTLA pic.twitter.com/4qQtvGRXhd  Jose Huizar (@josehuizar) August 27, 2018

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Gold was the Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic, writing about the citys dining scene for The Times, L.A. Weekly and other publications since the 1980s. He was 57.

I take solace in the fact that through this tribute, Jonathan Gold will continue to be at the market in spirit, Grand Central Market owner Adam Daneshgar said.

Golds wife, Laurie Ochoa, as well as their children, 23-year-old Isabel and 15-year-old Leon, also briefly took the small stage to thank attendees.

The festivities then moved to the Grand Park performance lawn a few blocks away, where hundreds of people grabbed dinner from food trucks including Kogi BBQ, Carnitas El Momo and Los Originales Tacos Arabes de Puebla, and listened to remembrances as the sun set.

Hosted by The Times culture columnist Carolina Miranda, the roughly 90-minute free event featured speakers including KCRWs Evan Kleiman, whose Good Food show Gold appeared on weekly; Mark Gold, one of his younger brothers; Bricia Lopez, co-proprietor of Oaxacan restaurant Guelaguetza; and chefs Michael Cimarusti of Providence and Sang Yoon of Lukshon.

Ill never forget the first time he came to review Lukshon, Yoon said, recalling that Gold arrived for a 9:45 p.m. reservation on a Wednesday night in September 2011 under the name George Green. As soon as his feet crossed our threshold, our entire staff went into full sphincter-clench mode. Nobody breathed for two hours.

Yoon went on to say that Gold was a pioneer, a leader and a crusader for our city who dined in every neighborhood and represented all of us equally.

Jonathan understood the strength of our city was because of  and not in spite of  our diverse, strong immigrant communities, he said, eliciting cheers and sustained applause from the crowd. Jonathan showed us that a city without prejudice is a delicious place to be.

Celebrating the life of the legendary @thejgold in Grand Park tonight. #LAGold pic.twitter.com/Q8bT0pxj9G  Andrea Chang (@byandreachang) August 27, 2018

One of the highlights was a screening of about 25 minutes of previously unseen footage from City of Gold, Laura Gabberts 2015 documentary that followed the legendary critic as he ate his way through Los Angeles and reflected on the city where he was born and raised. In one scene, Gold expounded on his longtime dislike of eggs, an aversion that began in childhood.

Gold will also be honored at The Times annual Taste food festival held over Labor Day weekend. Details on those special tributes can be found here.

andrea.chang@latimes.com

Twitter: @byandreachang

Instagram: @byandreachangFacing a federal indictment for misuse of campaign funds, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine) is still the front-runner in the race for the 50th Congressional District  although with a shrinking advantage over Democratic challenger Ammar Campa-Najjar.

According to a Survey USA poll released Monday, Hunter has an eight-point lead over his opponent, 47% to 39%, with 13% undecided.



For the record: 50th Congressional District race: An Aug. 28 California section story said Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine) and Ammar Campa-Najjar are vying to represent the district, which includes the cities of Poway, Ramona, Alpine and Borrego Springs. Poway is in the 52nd District, represented by Scott Peters (D-La Jolla).

In the June primary, the top two finishers were Hunter, with 47%, and Campa-Najjar at 18%.

However, as the field of candidates has narrowed, Campa-Najjar appears to have consolidated support among Democrats and even potentially picked up backing among some swing voters.

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The district, which Hunter has represented since it was redistricted about five years ago, covers much of East San Diego County, including Poway, Ramona, Alpine and Borrego Springs.

Support for Hunter was strongest among Republicans: 77% among polled voters, compared to 7% for Campa-Najjar.

Independents, however, favored Campa-Najjar by 44% to Hunters 41%. About 14% of those with no party preference are still undecided. Democrats support Campa-Najjar 85% to Hunters 8%.

Hunter and his wife, Margaret, were indicted in federal court Aug. 21 for using more than $250,000 in campaign cash for personal purchases.

The couple pleaded not guilty on Thursday. Hunter and his legal team have called the charges a politically motivated witch hunt. According to the poll, 64% of Republicans and 41% of Independents say the charges are motivated by politics.

According to the poll, about 42% of voters polled said they were less likely to vote for Hunter as a result of the charges.

About 41% said the charges against Hunter will not affect their vote, and 11% said they are more likely to vote for him as a result of the indictment.

Hunter  who has reportedly been stripped of his committee assignments  faces dozens of counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, falsification of records, and aiding and abetting in the prohibited use of campaign contributions.

Questions about the use of campaign funds have swirled around Hunter since 2016 when the Federal Election Commission and the San Diego Union-Tribune began looking into expenditures such as private school tuition, oral surgery, video games and airfare.

The SurveyUSA poll, conducted for the Union-Tribune and 10News, surveyed 539 registered voters between Aug. 22 to 26 who said they were likely to cast ballots in the 50th Congressional District race.Police arrested a man suspected of battery after he barricaded himself in a home for nearly six hours, prompting the evacuation of the surrounding neighborhood, Long Beach police said Sunday.

Officers responded about 7:45 a.m. to a report of a battery occurring in the 900 block of Gaviota Avenue, said Long Beach Police Department Det. Jennifer Arzola. Police found two victims, identified as the father and brother of the suspect. One had minor injuries and the other was taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Police confronted the suspect, who pointed a gun at an officer before fleeing inside a home, authorities said. A SWAT team was then called to the scene.

Residents in the neighborhood were evacuated during the hours-long standoff and officials closed streets from Rose to Walnut avenues and 8th to 10th streets.

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The suspect was arrested about 1:25 p.m. but was taken to a local hospital after he was bitten by a police dog, authorities said.

The incident remains under investigation.

alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com

Twitter: @r_valejandraIn a remarkable and scathing recrimination, the Vaticans former ambassador to Washington accused Pope Francis and his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday of knowingly hiding sexual abuse allegations involving a now-disgraced American cardinal, further convulsing a church in crisis.

The former envoys 11-page broadside rocked the Roman Catholic world as Francis finished a two-day visit to Ireland, where he faced demonstrations and begged forgiveness in the once-fervently Catholic country for the scandal and betrayal done by decades of clerical sex abuse, and an elaborate cover-up by church authorities.

In his letter, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who was papal nuncio, or ambassador, in Washington from 2011 to 2016, accused Francis and Benedict of being aware of and tolerating the transgressions of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop in Washington, for years.

Bishops and priests, abusing their authority, have committed horrendous crimes to the detriment of their faithful, minors, innocent victims, and young men eager to offer their lives to the Church, Vigano wrote, or by their silence have not prevented that such crimes continue to be perpetrated.

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He added: Now that the corruption has reached the very top of the Churchs hierarchy, my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths.

McCarrick resigned on July 28 after news reports disclosed that he had a 50-year history of sexual relations with male seminarians and young priests, some consensual, some forced. He also allegedly had attacked an 11-year-old altar boy. Francis stripped McCarrick of his title as cardinal, a rare punishment.

By accusing the churchs top leadership of being directly complicit in the cover-up of widespread sexual abuse, Viganos bombshell claims  which are still unproven  have raised the stakes sharply as Francis tries to regain trust of the worlds 1.2 billion Catholics.

Vigano, 77, is a controversial figure in the church and may have his own agenda. A longtime critic and political enemy of Francis, he was recalled from Washington two years ago amid allegations that hed become embroiled in the U.S. political battle over same-sex marriage, which he bitterly opposed.

In his letter, he accused Francis and several senior prelates of a pro-gay ideology that tolerated homosexual priests. He also called on Francis to resign, a stunning demand in the staid, centuries-old institution that generally closes ranks around the Vatican.

Speaking to reporters on his flight home from Dublin late Sunday, Francis declined to comment on the letter, saying it speaks for itself. He said he would trust journalists to judge its veracity. The Vatican offered no other comment.

The letter, which was sent to conservative Catholic news sites, may have been timed to overshadow the pontiffs visit of reconciliation to Ireland, a Catholic country where anger has mounted over growing reports of abuses by clergy.

Vigano accused the church leadership under Francis, the first pope from the Americas and a Jesuit, of having favored promoting homosexuals into positions of responsibility.

He said Francis initially attempted to rehabilitate McCarrick by relaxing penalties that Benedict had previously imposed on the cardinal for his misdeeds. Senior church leaders knew of McCarricks crimes as long ago as 2000, Vigano claimed.

Vigano also wrote that he told Francis in 2013, several months into his papacy, that the Vatican had a thick dossier on McCarrick, and that Benedict had ordered the cardinal to remove himself from public life several years earlier.

He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance, Vigano said he told Francis. The Pope did not make the slightest comment about those very grave words of mine and did not show any expression of surprise on his face, as if he had already known the matter for some time, and he immediately changed the subject.

Vigano claimed that Francis, Benedict and McCarricks successor, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, all knew of the disgraced former cardinals sins but failed to act. Wuerl has said he was unaware of McCarricks misconduct.

Supporters of Francis cautioned that Viganos accusations echo complaints from the most conservative wing of the church against Francis, his efforts to promote reform, his priority for the poor and his demand that the Catholic faith be more inclusive  including for gays and women.

Michael Sean Winters, who writes about the intersection of politics and religion for the National Catholic Reporter, questioned why Vigano came forward now and said his accusations were presented without substantiation.

Vigano is a disgruntled former employee, Winters said. But, make no mistake: This is a coordinated attack on Pope Francis. A putsch is afoot and if the U.S. bishops do not, as a body, stand up to defend the Holy Father in the next 24 hours, we shall be slipping towards schism. The enemies of Francis have declared war.

Austen Ivereigh, an expert on the church who has written a biography of Francis, called Viganos letter a hit job.

Since his selection as pontiff in 2013, replacing the staunchly conservative Benedict XVI, who became the first pope in modern times to resign, Francis has faced a backlash from traditionalists who feared a loss of strict doctrine as well as their power.

In October 2015, Vigano sparked controversy during the popes visit to Washington when he arranged a papal audience for Kim Davis, a former county clerk in Kentucky who defied a Supreme Court order and refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

After conservative groups used the meeting to claim Francis opposed gay unions, the Vatican clarified that the pope had no idea who Davis was.

But coinciding with the right-wing mutiny, Francis  like his predecessors  has faced criticism that he bungled the handling of the abuse scandal and acted belatedly.

The decades of unpunished crimes, which Francis has called repugnant, has gravely eroded confidence in the church among Catholics, especially in the United States and once-fervently religious Ireland.

The convergence seems to have plunged the Catholic Church into its most devastating crisis in decades.

In a swing through his native South America in January, Francis enraged many when he said survivors of abuse were slandering a Chilean bishop whom they accused of protecting a notorious priest who had been found guilty by the Vatican of sex crimes.

Facing the backlash, Francis later apologized, and several Chilean prelates were forced to step down from their clerical positions. From then on, Francis took a more active role in confronting the sordid history.

But this month, more shame befell the church. Culminating a two-year investigation, a grand jury in Pennsylvania chronicled a ghastly half-century of rape and sexual assault by 301 predator priests with more than 1,000 victims, including boys as young as 7.

Even as Viganos letter was circulating, the pope begged for forgiveness in his final appearances Sunday in Ireland.

In an afternoon Mass in Dublin, the pope told tens of thousands of faithful that he wanted to see justice for those who suffered abuse, were robbed of their innocence and left scarred by painful memories.

The remarks, which appeared to depart from his prepared homily, repeated the themes of sin and forgiveness in the first papal visit to Ireland in nearly 40 years. Francis also met with eight survivors of abuse and, according to one, promised action.

As the pope left the country, Irelands Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said on Twitter that he welcomed the popes call for firm and decisive action and for forgiveness, adding a demand that from words flow actions.

Attendance at the Dublin Mass and a later ceremony in Knock, the site of a Marian shrine marking what the church certified was an 1879 apparition of the Virgin Mary, was lower than expected.

At rival events elsewhere in Ireland, several thousand protesters honored victims of church abuse. In addition to rapes and molestation by priests and occasionally nuns, Ireland also bore witness to decades of punishment and beatings of unmarried pregnant women and girls who were forced to relinquish their babies.

Mary Straffan who traveled an hour to the ceremony in Knock, said the popes visit could spark renewed interest in religion in a country where the once-mighty Catholic Church has shed much of its influence  in part because of the scandals.

You can see there are a lot of young people here this morning, so maybe the visit will help, she said.

tracy.wilkinson@latimes.com

For more on international affairs, follow @TracyKWilkinson on Twitter

Roughneen is a special correspondent.When Adam Putnam stepped off his campaign tour bus in bluejeans and cowboy boots and sauntered into a sprawling cattle ranch in Floridas rural heartland, it was hard to imagine anything had changed in Republican politics.

Inside a corrugated metal barn, the affable GOP candidate for Florida governor  considered a shoo-in for the position ever since he won a state house seat at the age of 22  shook hands with sheriffs in uniform, exchanged pleasantries with cattle ranchers in broad-brimmed hats and cracked wise with a tobacco-chewing county commissioner.

But it didnt take long for him to broach what he called the elephant in the room:President Trumps endorsement of his rival, Ron DeSantis, the U.S. representative for Floridas 6th Congressional District who moonlights as a frequent talking head on Fox News.

You know, when President Trump ran for office, he ran on a plan, Putnam said to supporters who gathered last week in Glades County, a sparsely populated land of cattle ranches and sugarcane fields about 100 miles northwest of Miami. My opponent is just running on an endorsement. Florida deserves better than someone who is just going to tug at Trumps coattails.

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After amassing a wealth of political experience, local connections and campaign funds, Putnam now finds himself something of an unlikely underdog.

The 44-year-old stalwart conservative has served two decades as a state lawmaker, U.S. congressman and state agriculture commissioner. He has toured every nook and cranny of the state, making connections with farmers, garnering support from nearly 50 county sheriffs, and raised more than $37 million in campaign funds. Still, he appears to be trailing DeSantis.

With only days to go to the Tuesday primary, a Florida Atlantic University poll of likely Republican voters released last week has the races two leading candidates almost neck and neck, with DeSantis at 32% and Putnam at 31%. About 22% were undecided.

Putnam is just the latest well-connected establishment Republican to struggle after Trump backed a rival in a state primary race. Already, Trumps Twitter posts have helped push longshot GOP candidates to victory in a string of Southern and Midwestern states.

Some traditional Republicans in Florida, a swing state Trump won by just 1.2% in 2016, have watched in dismay. Putting a Trump-endorsed candidate on the ballot, they fear, could turn off moderate and centrist Republicans and ensure a Democratic victory in the November general election.

Hes basically a Trump hologram, said Mac Stipanovich, a veteran Florida GOP strategist who identifies as a Never Trumper. Trump just projects him on the screen and the Republican faithful go stumbling in his direction like lemmings heading towards a cliff.

Donald Trump himself barely carried Florida running against a terrible candidate, Stipanovich added. What if somebody who is not Donald Trump, but is carrying all his baggage, faces a decent candidate?

Whoever wins the Republican race is likely to go up against one of two Democrats: Gwen Graham, a moderate and U.S. representative who hopes to be the states first female governor, or Philip Levine, a wealthy, self-financed former Miami Beach mayor.

R. Bruce Anderson, an associate professor of political science at Florida Southern College in Lakeland who has endorsed Putnam, said DeSantis would probably not fare well against a moderate Democrat.

DeSantis has a long way to come back toward the center and begin to look like a reasonable choice for governor to most people, he said.

But although many Democrats relish a race against a polarizing, Trump-aligned GOP candidate, some urge caution.

To those who say this is going to be a referendum on the president, my response is: Is that a directive youre getting from the Hillary Clinton White House? said Steve Vancore, a Democratic pollster. That doesnt always seem to work out.

Putnam, a fifth-generation Floridian who hails from a long-established citrus-farming family in Bartow, Fla., has mocked DeSantis as a glib, superficial opportunist, who is quick to parrot Trumps talking points but knows little about the complexities of local politics.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis talks with Martie Mees, right, during a campaign event in Miami on Aug. 14. (Lynne Sladky / Associated Presss)

Florida needs somebody who knows our state, who can get from Perdido Key to Key West without a GPS, Putnam said to supporters in Glades County. Not somebody who tries to run for office from an out-of-state television studio.

Born in Jacksonville and raised on Floridas Gulf Coast, DeSantis, 39, is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, an Iraq veteran and Navy reservist, who touts endorsements not just from Trump, but from Fox News pundits Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.

Branding himself as #1 conservative in FL, DeSantis criticizes Putnam as an inauthentic career politician and casts himself as a disruptive yet principled conservative who will drain the swamp in Tallahassee.

In a tongue-in-cheek, 30-second television ad, DeSantis and his wife, Casey, poke fun at critics who say he is nothing but a Trump loyalist.

Everyone knows my husband, Ron DeSantis, is endorsed by President Trump, but hes also an amazing dad, Casey says as the video shows DeSantis handing toy building blocks to his daughter, Madison, encouraging her to build the wall.

While much of the campaign has focused on style and loyalty to the president, both candidates stand for stronger immigration enforcement, gun rights and local choice in education. A key disagreement has centered on Floridas water quality.

In a significant turn from Republican tradition, DeSantis has attacked Putman as a candidate too dependent on campaign cash from the sugar industry to clean up Floridas waterways  a timely dig as a vast swath of the states Southwest coast suffers from a severe algae bloom known as red tide that has killed masses of fish, dolphins, manatees, sea turtles and devastated local economies.

Adam is basically the errand boy for U.S. Sugar, DeSantis said in a televised debate this month.

In turn, Putnam countered that DeSantis is hardly an environmental advocate and has little knowledge of the causes of the ecological crisis, which Putnam attributes to a mixture of agriculture, industry and sprawling residential development as 21 million people set up residence on a peninsula that used to be 60% wetlands.

Theres no unicorn and rainbow pixie-dust solution, Putnam said.

Although Putnam carries endorsements from Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, some leading Florida Republicans argue that the current moment in local and national politics calls for a fresh candidate who is not weighed down with traditional baggage. A Trump loyalist, they argue, is more able to energize the grass-roots base.

Adam Putnam has a long resume, but at a time when people are looking for fresh ideas, I believe thats a disadvantage, said Don Gaetz, the former president of the Florida Senate, who has endorsed DeSantis. He doesnt have the new car smell that many Republicans find attractive.

With Floridas population booming, he added, politicians cannot expect to win elections just by going to the firemans picnic or the Chamber of Commerce dinner.

Putnam has spent a lot of time driving around the state, but I dont think thats the sole qualifier to be an experienced governor, said Jose Oliva, the Florida House speaker-designate. I think you have to have, first and foremost, a very strong ideology of how you will govern and you must be able to move people and inspire them.

As primary day looms, some Florida Republicans say a DeSantis primary victory, and a subsequent Democrat win in November, could be a necessary, if painful, step to thwart Trumps outsize influence on the party.

These right-wing populist candidates who are basically Trump clones or wannabes need to be beaten, Stipanovich said. They have to lose in the general elections and decide that maybe, just maybe, I shouldnt be such a right-wing nut.

jenny.jarvie@latimes.com

@jennyjarvieAfter the scientists step safely out of the airtight lab in the biocontainment plant, and after their spacesuit-like protective wear is disinfected, the room is flooded with chlorine dioxide gas.

We make sure anything thats in there stays in there, said Robert Brackett, director of the Institute for Food Safety and Health.

The sterilizing gas and claustrophobia-inducing suits are mandatory in the lab, where researchers from the Food and Drug Administration and Illinois Tech come together to conduct research on foodborne bacteria.

Once a 5-gallon bucket of salmonella-infected peanut butter splattered all over the researchers. The impervious suits were well-warranted then, Brackett said.

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This year alone, consumers have been sickened by cyclospora linked to salads at McDonalds, salmonella connected to pre-cut melon sold in grocery stores and to Kelloggs Honey Smacks cereal, and E. coli bacteria on romaine lettuce, to name a few incidents. With human lives and billions of dollars on the line, researchers at the facility in Bedford Park, just a half-hour outside Chicago, work with the FDA and food companies to test the technology that could help prevent outbreaks.

Americas food industry has a major stake in the research conducted at the institute, a unit within the Illinois Institute of Technology. The annual economic impact of foodborne illness in the U.S. is estimated to be between $55.5 billion and $93.2 billion, according to a 2015 Ohio State University study.

At the Bedford Park facility scientists study all the big-name bacteria: salmonella, listeria, E. coli. They infect foods and test the bacterias resistance. They validate technology and processes the food industry might use to prevent contamination.

In July, Mondelez International, which makes Ritz, and Campbell Soup Co., which makes Goldfish, recalled several of its products over fears of salmonella. News that a dry product could have contained salmonella shocked some, as traditional wisdom taught the bacteria grow in wet foods, Brackett said.

But research and experience have shown that salmonella can survive for years in a dry state, he said. At the Bedford Park facility, researchers are testing technology that could kill the resilient bacteria on dry goods, such as nuts, grains or spices.

When I went to school, no one ever thought the dry ingredients would be a problem, Brackett said. Beside him, a piece of machinery rained down cool plasma gas like a waterfall of blue fire on the food moving along its belt.

Sanjana Potluri, left, and Sargun Malik use high-intensity light to kill foodborne pathogens at the Institute for Food Safety and Health. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)

The energized gas kills the bacteria in the food  or at least thats the idea. A nearby glass-walled chamber housed flour and peanut butter in containers marked with the dates they were contaminated. Researchers will monitor those substances after subjecting them to the bacteria-killing technology.

Sometimes bacteria can be injured, Brackett said. If you keep them around long enough, they can come back.

Another machine nearby tests how high-intensity light kills bacteria. Though the machine is fairly compact, the light it emits could be powerful enough to strip paint off an airplane, Brackett said. Of course, its not used at such high levels in the lab.

As the researchers at the lab test the technology, the science behind it will be validated for the FDA. They re-create the environment in which foodborne bacteria would survive and figure out how to kill them. Findings are published in scientific journals for the food-safety community to learn from. Meanwhile, scientists closely monitor outbreaks in the wild  like the salmonella-infected Honey Smacks  to inform their research.

At first glace, the labs at the facility look like any other  safety googles and lab coats by the entrance, sinks and racks of equipment lining the walls. The occasional researcher moves from one lab to another or tests a piece of equipment.

But visitors to these labs are met with stark warning signs. DANGER: Hazardous chemicals, one reads. Restricted Access Area, Authorized Personnel Only, says another. A bright orange warning screams, BIOHAZARD, and another has a skull and crossbones.

A loud industrial area at the facility substitutes the lab coats by its door for hard hats. Some of the machinery towers above the people who run it. A cylindrical piece of equipment that targets botulism spores in soup cans requires the user to turn a wheel that wouldnt be out of place on a pirate ship.

A nearby machine applies pressure equivalent to that at the bottom of the ocean onto foods. Pressurizing kills bacteria such as listeria, salmonella and E. coli without compromising the freshness or flavor with heat, Brackett said.

The potentially fatal listeria has been the focus of several recent recalls, including one this year in which Whole Foods Market voluntarily recalled Explorateur French Triple Creme cheese from nine stores in Illinois, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Connecticut and New Jersey.

It is common to process products like fresh guacamole, deli meats and juices with high pressure, Brackett said. It maintains the quality of the product better because it doesnt subject it to such high heat as other processing methods. The process isnt new, but as consumers demand fresher food with fewer ingredients, its gaining popularity as a way to kill bacteria in fresh products.

Theyre trying to reduce the number of ingredients in the food, Brackett said. Many of those ingredients were antimicrobial.

In the facility, a white board next to the high-pressure processor tracks other products that were recently tested: apple sauce, Crisco, mashed potatoes and peanut butter, which has been the source of the highest-profile foodborne illness outbreaks in recent decades.

In 2016, Conagra agreed to pay an $8-million fine plus $3.2 million in cash forfeitures for its role in an outbreak that sickened hundreds in the mid-2000s. The culprit was Peter Pan peanut butter contaminated with salmonella. It was the largest criminal fine to date in a U.S. food safety case.

Fortunately, the peanut butter sitting on store shelves now is much safer than it was a decade ago, Brackett said. Technology has advanced and new protocols have been established. The Food Safety Modernization Act, which became law in 2011, requires food producers to create better safety measures. Companies and regulatory agencies are paying more attention to products like peanut butter that previously posed high risks.

Besides the testing and tracking the researchers do at the institute, companies also can come to be trained on good manufacturing processes. Some Kraft Heinz employees, for example, are trained at the institute on how to identify and control the risks of ingredients and processes.

In many cases, the outbreaks can be prevented if everyone just did what we knew they were supposed to be doing, Brackett said.

Marotti writes for the Chicago Tribune.To the editor: While I didnt agree politically with Sen. John McCain, who died Saturday, I have a great amount of respect for him, something I will never have for President Trump.

My first glimpse of Trumps moral turpitude came in 2015 when he said this about McCain: Hes not a war hero. Hes a war hero because he was captured. I like people who werent captured. This came from someone who sought and received five draft deferments and famously told Howard Stern that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was his personal Vietnam.

On Thursday, McCain the American hero will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol  juxtaposed with Trump, the American embarrassment who will just lie.

Ron Diton, Upland

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..

To the editor: Few Republicans have inspired me, a lifelong Democrat, like McCain, whose courage, integrity and bipartisan spirit made him a true legend. In this era of lies, deceit and alternative facts, he stood in stark relief.

In contrast to our draft-dodging president, who actually criticized the Arizona senator for being a prisoner of war, McCain showed what it meant to love and defend our country.

I am hurt by McCains death. I am hurt that his passing leaves a void that will not be filled by those in Congress. I am hurt that this America voted for a man who is not fit to lick McCains boots.

Paula Petrotta, Rancho Palos Verdes

..

With McCains passing, I feel this bottomless pit of nostalgia for the past. Someone like McCain made me feel proud and privileged to live in America. Lynn Lorenz, Newport Beach

To the editor: Why do I mourn the death of McCain as much if not more than someone I might know personally?

With McCains passing, I feel this bottomless pit of nostalgia for the past. Someone like McCain made me feel proud and privileged to live in America. As a lifelong Democrat, I certainly didnt always agree with his decisions and at times I was very disappointed in his politics. But maybe that is part of the reason I admired him so.

Despite these differences, he had an indelible quality of humanity and strength.

He must have learned these valuable lessons as a POW  that being human was the most important quality of all.

Lynn Lorenz, Newport Beach

..

To the editor: We as a nation mourn the loss of a great American in McCain. But we must not forget that the best of us have made bad choices in life.

In 1987, the so-called Keating Five group of senators, which included McCain, urged federal investigators to back off Charles Keating and his Lincoln Savings and Loan. These senators did so after receiving a combined $1.3 million in campaign contributions from Keating.

Ultimately, regulators did back off. In 1989, taxpayers were put on the hook for $3.4 billion in bailouts.

Manuel S. Reynosa, Ventura

..

To the editor: I had never read how McCain responded during the 2008 presidential campaign to someone saying about then-Sen. Barack Obama that hes an Arab.

McCain responded: No maam. Hes a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and thats what the campaign about.

Reading about that brought home the difference between this astute man that we have lost and our current president, who, during his campaign, led audiences in lock her up chants about his opponent.

Im crying that the last stalwart of the Republican Party is gone, and the GOP has succumbed to this reality-star president who has maligned our greatest allies, cozied up with autocrats, antagonized our free press, degraded women and immigrants, failed to condemn white supremacists and cares nothing for the truth.

McCains death is a sad occurrence indeed.

Amy Siroky, Arroyo Grande

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and FacebookNewsoms budget proposes $3 million for Alzheimers research, brain task force By Melody Gutierrez Amyloid plaques, shown here in human brains, are a hallmark of Alzheimers disease. (UCLA School of Medicine) Gov. Gavin Newsom will call for the creation of a brain health task force and dedicate $3 million annually from the states general fund to Alzheimers disease research in the budget proposal he will release Thursday, a source close to the administration said. The money for Alzheimers research would target the new grants at understanding why the disease is more prevalent in women and people of color. Former California first lady and Alzheimers activist Maria Shriver pushed for the funding to be included in the state budget. Shriver said in a statement Wednesday that the funding would make California the first state to make understanding our brains a priority. The states former first lady, whose late father Sargent Shriver was diagnosed with Alzheimers, founded the Womens Alzheimers Movement, an advocacy group raising awareness about womens increased risk for developing the disease. In 2011, she wrote a comprehensive assessment on the disease, to which Newsom  then mayor of San Francisco  contributed a portion called What one city is doing. This is personal to me, just like it is to millions of California families, Shriver said. Alzheimers is one of the largest medical, social and economic crises in our state, and of our time. I am so proud that, once again, California is leading the way. Wiping out Alzheimers is going to require bold thinking, and there is no doubt in my mind that California is home to bold thinkers who can make this happen. Facebook

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Gov. Gavin Newsom orders reinvention of troubled California DMV By Patrick McGreevy A line of people stretches around the South L.A. location of a California Department of Motor Vehicles Office on Aug. 7. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday ordered an overhaul of the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which has been plagued by hours-long wait times at field offices, computer crashes and voter registration errors involving tens of thousands of customers. Just a few days after taking office, Newsom appointed a top advisor to a new DMV Reinvention Strike Team to revamp the beleaguered agency over the next six months. By any metric, California DMV has been chronically mismanaged and failed in its fundamental mission to the state customers it serves and the state workers it employs, Newsom said in a statement, adding Its time for a reinvention. The governor appointed state Government Operations Agency Secretary Marybel Batjer to lead the strike team with a goal of modernizing the agency and enacting changes that improve customer satisfaction, employee performance and transparency. Newsom also ordered an accelerated review of initial findings of an ongoing audit ordered last year by Gov. Jerry Brown. The action was welcomed by lawmakers who have been critical of the DMV, including Assemblyman Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield). The egregious management failures of the DMV have been self-evident, which is why I have been calling for new leadership and a comprehensive independent audit of this troubled state agency over and over again as the problems grew significantly worse, Fong said. Last summer, Californians seeking new driver licenses complained of wait times of four to six hours at DMV offices, which the agency blamed partly on snafus caused by a rush of people trying to get Real IDs, a new identification card design required for airline passengers starting in late 2020. Delays were also blamed on computer crashes at DMV offices as the agency struggled to update its aging automation systems. The DMV also admitted that there were an estimated 23,000 errors as people either were unknowingly registered to vote or mistakes were made in their registration status as part of the states new motor voter program. The agency registered to vote as many as 1,500 people with legal U.S. residency but no citizenship. Last month, DMV Director Jean Shiomoto retired from the agency. Legislators were angered earlier this week when the DMV said it needed an additional $40 million to prevent the return of long lines at its field offices. In addition, the agency has been under fire for issuing driver licenses in the last year that do not comply with the federal Real ID standards requiring two forms of identification by applicants. Facebook

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California police unions are preparing to battle new transparency law in the courtroom By Maya Lau Just as a landmark police transparency law is going into effect, some California police agencies are shredding internal affairs documents and law enforcement unions are rushing to block the information from being released. The new law, which begins to unwind Californias strictest-in-the-nation protections over the secrecy of law enforcement records, opens to the public internal investigations of officer shootings and other major uses of force, along with confirmed cases of sexual assault and lying while on duty. But the lawsuits and records destruction, which began even before the law took effect Jan. 1, could tie up the release of information for months or years, and in some instances, prevent it from ever being disclosed. The fact that police unions are challenging this law is on some level not surprising, said Peter Bibring, director of police practices at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, one of the principal supporters of the new law. They have a long history of fighting tooth and nail against transparency. Read More Facebook

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Secretary of State Alex Padilla begins second term with challenge to ensure every Californian is counted By Jazmine Ulloa Secretary of State Alex Padilla takes the oath of office as his family stands by his side on Monday in Sacramento. (Jazmine Ulloa / Los Angeles Times) Secretary of State Alex Padilla was sworn in for a second term on Monday, saying he would continue the battle to protect the right to vote at a time when voter suppression efforts, online disinformation campaigns and interference from foreign adversaries have polarized the public and threatened to undermine trust in U.S. elections. I am doubling down on our fight here in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C., to defend our democracy, he said. Working on the front lines with so many of you, I know that our collective resolve has never been stronger. But the loudest applause came when Padilla promised to fight back against the Trump administrations changes to the U.S. census, saying he will ensure every Californian gets counted. Padilla, a former state senator and Los Angeles City Council member from the San Fernando Valley, led the cause for a new motor voter registration law in 2015, and a new system for online business registrations. But the programs have had experienced problems: More than 23,000 Californians were registered to vote incorrectly by the state DMV, the agency reported last year. On Monday, Padilla said he would continue to push back against false claims of voter fraud in California and pointed to the states voter turnout as proof that his office was involving more people in the democratic process, a promise he made when he was first sworn in four years ago. More than 12.7 million voters cast ballots in the Nov. 6 midterm election, representing roughly 65% of the states registered voters, the highest number of any midterm election since 1982, according to state certified results. I made that promise based on a shared belief that we are a stronger democracy and a better California when we hear all voices from all corners of California, and when those voices are not just heard but counted, Padilla said. Facebook

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Ricardo Lara, Californias first statewide officeholder to come out as gay, sworn in as insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara on the floor of the state Senate in 2016. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times) Ricardo Lara took the oath of office as California insurance commissioner on Monday, pledging action to boost healthcare coverage and combat climate change. Lara, a Democrat from Bell Gardens, is the first elected statewide officeholder in California who has come out as gay. He began his speech in downtown Sacramento by thanking LGBTQ leaders who came before him and celebrated the occasion. Today, because of you, weve shattered the pink ceiling, Lara said. In his inaugural speech, Lara announced the creation of an executive position in his office to address climate change. There is no other industry that has the necessary expertise to ensure that California is prepared to mitigate and reduce risk to our communities and our environment, Lara said. Our planet cant wait. Im ready, and I hope you are too. Lara served as a state legislator and in 2017 introduced a bill to create a single-payer healthcare system in the state. He promised to work with new Gov. Gavin Newsom to expand coverage across California. Lara was sworn in by retired U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who declared unconstitutional Californias Proposition 8 gay marriage ban. State Sen. President Pro Tem Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) was on hand for the ceremony along with multiple other state lawmakers. Facebook

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New California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis says she will help expand access to universities in the state New Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, center, is shown in June talking with attendees at the Power to the Polls rally in Sacramento. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) More Californians should be given access to public universities, Eleni Kounalakis said as she took the oath of office Monday to become the states first woman elected lieutenant governor. Kounalakis was given the oath of office by Gov. Gavin Newsom, her predecessor in the job, who pledged they would work together. As lieutenant governor, Kounalakis serves on the University of California Board of Regents and the California State University Board of Trustees, she noted in a speech at her swearing-in ceremony at the main Sacramento Library. In that role, she said, she will be committed to expanding access to affordable public higher education here in our state. Its wise, its smart and it is the best way to address our rapidly changing digital economy. Kounalakis is former president of a development company founded by her father, Angelo Tsakopoulos, and served during the Obama administration as the U.S. ambassador to Hungary. In November, she won her first run for statewide office. Also attending the ceremony were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Facebook

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California meets Dutch Newsom, who steals the show at his fathers inauguration By Taryn Luna Gov. Gavin Newsom gives his inaugural address while holding his youngest son, Dutch. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) In the California political world, all eyes were on Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday until his 2-year-old son stole the show. Dutch, the youngest of four children in the Newsom brood, climbed onstage in the middle of his fathers inaugural address in a tent outside the Capitol on Monday. The unplanned moment saw the 51-year-old governors big day interrupted by the toddler, bringing levity to the ceremony. Newsom was recounting Gov. Jerry Browns last inaugural speech and reference to the Sermon on the Mount, a biblical story about two men who built separate homes on sand and rock, when Dutch approached his father, a pacifier in his mouth and blanket in hand. Now more than ever we Californians know how much a house matters and children matter, Newsom said, improvising as he scooped the boy into his arms. The governor kissed Dutch on the cheek and held him for several minutes as he continued with the speech. This is exactly how it was scripted, Newsom joked. Newsom eventually put his child down and Dutch walked to the edge of the stage before retreating behind the podium to hide from his mother, First Lady Jennifer Siebel Newsom. The crowd roared. Siebel Newsom was able to briefly divert her son only for him to return to the stage minutes later. She grabbed him again and this time, the crying toddler did not reemerge. When fires strikes, when kids cry and the earth shakes, well be there for each other, Newsom said. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who said the moment humanized Newsom, threw cold water on any theories that Dutchs cameo was planned. No, I know it was not, Garcetti said with a laugh after Newsoms speech concluded. I could see that look of absolute abject terror [on Newsoms face]. Weve all been there. Kids always think its about themselves and theyve proved it. California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) agreed. I worked in early childhood education for 20 years and theres no way you can ever get a child to do anything when you want them to do it, Rendon said. Facebook

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Fiona Ma takes oath as Californias new treasurer By Liam Dillon State Treasurer Fiona Ma. Fiona Ma took the oath of office in Sacramento on Monday as the states 34th treasurer, promising to boost Californias economy. Ma previously served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, in the state Assembly and on the California Board of Equalization. I want to thank everyone for entrusting me with this important job. I understand my role here as your state treasurer is to build that financial wall around California so that we will remain the fifth-largest economy, Ma said in brief remarks. That is my promise to you. California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye administered the oath to Ma. Following the ceremony, Ma held an ice cream social for guests. On Wednesday, she will host a public event in San Francisco to celebrate her swearing-in. State Treasurer Fiona Ma takes the oath of office. (Liam Dillon / Los Angeles Times) Facebook

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Expectations are high for newly sworn-in state schools chief Tony Thurmond Tony Thurmond shakes hands with retired Alameda County Superior Court Judge Gordon Baranco after taking the oath of office. (Melody Gutierrez / Los Angeles Times) Tony Thurmond took the oath of office as Californias state superintendent of public schools on Monday, promising a labor-friendly agenda before the teachers, students and Democratic officials who filled an auditorium at McClatchy High School in Sacramento to watch him being sworn in. We cant close the achievement gap without a great teacher at the head of every class, Thurmond said Monday to applause. We have to make sure we provide quality compensation and support to our teachers and our classified staff and all the educators who support our kids. Thurmond, a Bay Area Democrat who served in the state Assembly, won a hotly contested and expensive race with the help of labor leaders against charter school executive Marshall Tuck. The race took several days to sort out after Tuck held an initial lead in early returns on election night before falling behind thereafter. Thurmond was sworn in Monday by retired Alameda County Superior Court Judge Gordon Baranco. He was joined on stage by labor rights leader Dolores Huerta and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount). Thurmonds former colleagues in the state Assembly took turns praising him and promising to be an ally in improving schools. Many said they expected Thurmond would be a strong leader focused on improving student outcomes. We know we are going to work hard to give you the money you need and the budget you need to fully fund education and our schools so we can put our money where our mouth is and make sure our children have everything they need, Assemblywoman Connie Leyva (D-Chino Hills) said. As state superintendent, Thurmond will oversee the education of 6.2 million students at 10,000 schools. Thurmond was a member of the West Contra Costa County School Board and a Richmond city councilman before he was elected to the state Assembly. Tony is the right man at the right time to fight the federal, Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos anti-child, anti-education, anti-civil and -human rights agenda, U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said. Tony is going to do that for us. Facebook

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State Controller Betty Yee takes oath of office with call for more affordable housing and healthcare State Controller Betty Yee California Controller Betty Yee took the oath of office Monday for a second term, saying she still has work to do addressing problems that include a lack of affordability in housing, healthcare and higher education. A San Francisco native, Yee is the chief financial officer of California  the fifth-largest economy in the world  having first won election to the post in 2014 before winning reelection in November. No region is spared from the widening inequality and increased poverty that plague our state, fueled by the lack of affordable, stable housing, the cost of healthcare and transportation, limited educational opportunities, student loan debt, displacement caused by disasters and more, she said. Yee was administered the oath of office by California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento before an overflow crowd that included state Senate leader Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), state Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra and San Francisco Mayor London Breed. As a public official it is about governance that delivers results and stays accountable while upholding the underlying value of dignity for all, Yee said. Facebook

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California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra begins new term promising to fight Trump policies California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra ( (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)) California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra on Monday took the oath of office for a new term, saying he would continue his role as a leading challenger to Trump administration actions that he believes are counter to the states interests. Becerra, a former 12-term congressman, has become a national opposition figure to Trump, having sued the federal government 45 times since he was appointed as the states first Latino attorney general in 2017. Weve been a little busy stopping the dysfunction and insanity in Washington, D.C., from infecting California, Becerra told an audience during a swearing-in ceremony at the California Museum in Sacramento. Whether its the criminals on our streets or the conman in the boardrooms or highest office of the land, Becerra said, the California Department of Justice, well, weve got your back. Becerra won his first statewide election as the states top cop in November, two years after he filled the post vacated when predecessor Kamala Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate. He has peppered the Trump administration with lawsuits challenging federal policies on healthcare, the U.S. census, the environment and immigration. Our state builds dreams, not walls, he said in a direct criticism of Trumps proposal to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Just last week, Becerra led a coalition of 17 Democratic attorneys general in announcing an appeal of a federal judge in Texas that ruled the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. The ACA has been the law for nearly a decade and is the backbone of our healthcare system, Becerra said last week. This case impacts nearly every American  workers covered by employers, families, women, children, young adults and seniors  so we will lead the ACAs defense as long and far as it takes. Facebook

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California Democratic Party Vice Chairman Daraka Larimore-Hall announces bid to lead group By Christine Mai-Duc Daraka Larimore-Hall. (Dominic Parisi / Courtesy of Daraka Larimore-Hall) Daraka Larimore-Hall, a top official at the California Democratic Party, said Monday hes running to replace former chairman Eric Bauman, who resigned abruptly in November after being confronted with allegations of sexual misconduct. Larimore-Hall, a longtime state party activist and former chairman of the Democratic Party of Santa Barbara County, was one of the party leaders who urged Bauman to resign following the allegations. In an email to supporters announcing his bid, he urged both structural and cultural change at every level of our Party. He also repeated his call for a top-to-bottom investigation of the allegations, the party and its culture. In a Times investigation, 10 party activists and staff members said Bauman made crude sexual comments and engaged in unwanted touching and physical intimidation in professional settings. In order to be where we need to be for 2020, we have to confront the culture of abuse and fear that allowed someone to behave in such a vile way for so long, Larimore-Hall said in an interview. We cant brush it aside or think that our activists or our candidates or our donors are going to forget about this overnight. Larimore-Hall said his first priority would be to fully investigate the allegations and restore rank-and-file confidence in the partys leadership. The second would be to refocus the party on political priorities as the 2020 presidential election nears. The Bauman episode, Larimore-Hall said, threatens to derail the Democrats plans to help defeat President Trump and keep the seven congressional seats gained in the midterm elections. Its definitely a crisis, Larimore-Hall said. But the component parts  the energy, the enthusiasm, the volunteers, the infrastructure  its still there. We just need to direct it toward something. Larimore-Hall was elected vice chairman of the state party in February following Baumans razor-thin victory over Bay Area activist Kimberly Ellis. Ellis has announced another bid for the chairmanship and former state Senate leader Kevin de Leon is also mulling a run. The vote will take place at the partys May convention in San Francisco. Facebook

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Newsom will vow to seize this moment, and swipe at Trump in Monday inaugural address By Melanie Mason Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom and his family attend an Inauguration Family Event at the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento on Jan. 6. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) Building on the theme of California exceptionalism that defined his campaign, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom will depict the state as a guardian of progressive values and a counterweight to President Trump in his inaugural address Monday, according to excerpts of his prepared remarks. What we do today is even more consequential, because of whats happening in our country, read the excerpts obtained by The Times. Peoples lives, freedom, security, the water we drink, the air we breathe  they all hang in the balance. The country is watching us. The world is waiting on us. The future depends on us. And we will seize this moment. The speech casts Californias political stakes in a decidedly national scope, promising an agenda that will unify and be an example to the rest of the country. It contrasts the governing goals of Newsom, a Democrat, with that of Trump, the incoming governors perennial foil. We will offer an alternative to the corruption and incompetence in the White House, the excerpts say. Our government will be progressive, principled, and always on the side of the people. Newsom campaigned on an ambitious and wide-ranging platform, promising sweeping solutions on housing, healthcare, education and other issues that rank among Californians top concerns. In the weeks after his election, he struck a more muted tone, taking pains to emphasize his fiscal caution and need for patience in achieving those goals. The inaugural excerpts indicate a return to lofty pledges. While Newsom will vow to prepare for uncertain times ahead by building budgetary reserves and paying down debt, the prepared remarks quickly turn to a vow to be bold. Newsom has already floated several proposals for his first budget that carry significant price tags, including a nearly $2-billion plan to boost early childhood development for low-income families and a dramatic expansion of paid family leave from six weeks to six months. When asked for a preview of his inauguration speech during a news conference Sunday evening, Newsom predicted pundits would criticize his address as short on specifics. Well, of course, Im at an inaugural, Newsom said. But Ill be very detailed in the budget, a few days later. And then we will architect, in much more nuance and detail, in state of the state. I really see this as three opportunities  to communicate over the next few weeks our agenda, our vision for the state. Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report. Read More Facebook

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Newsom-hosted benefit concert raises nearly $5 million for wildfire victims By Taryn Luna Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom speaks at a concert to benefit wildfire victims at the Golden 1 Arena in Sacramento on Jan. 6. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) On the eve of the gubernatorial inauguration, Californias political class rubbed elbows in Sacramento for a benefit concert hosted by Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom and headlined by the rapper Pitbull. Newsom told the crowd gathered at the Golden 1 Center on Sunday evening that the fundraiser brought in nearly $5 million for the California Wildfire Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that supports the families of fallen firefighters and communities affected by wildfires. You know, a lot of folks feel anxious about not just politics, but government, Newsom said on stage before introducing the rapper and activist Common. But those firefighters, they are the antidote to the fear and cynicism; they are the manifestation of why government matters and why you should care. Top sponsors, including Salesforce, Kaiser Permanente and other interest groups, paid up to $1 million each to support the cause and curry favor with the new administration. Nathan Click, a spokesman for Newsom, said organizers sold more than 7,000 tickets. Several state lawmakers attended the concert alongside Capitol staff, lobbyists and business types, who mingled on the floor of the arena and offstage in private VIP areas. The rock band X Ambassadors and a duo called the Cold Weather Sons from the town of Paradise, which was destroyed by fire in November, were among several performers who entertained the crowd during the four-hour event. The California Rises concert is the final in a series of festivities held Sunday to celebrate the inauguration of Californias 40th governor. Earlier in the day, Newsom attended a private brunch at Sacramentos Crocker Art Museum and his inaugural committee hosted a free party for families at the California State Railroad Museum at the Old Sacramento Waterfront. Newsoms inauguration is set to begin at 11 a.m. Monday on the steps of the Capitol. Facebook

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Inauguration fever hits Sacramento as Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom prepares to take office By Phil Willon Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom holds his son, Dutch, as he and his family attend an inaugural event at the at the state Railroad Museum Sunday. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) Incoming Gov. Gavin Newsom doesnt officially take the oath of office until Monday, but the parties celebrating his inauguration were in full swing all day Sunday. Newsom and his family were mobbed by well-wishers at the California State Railroad Museum at the Old Sacramento Waterfront in the afternoon, where his inaugural committee hosted a free party for families. He just has charisma. Hes able to really connect with people, said Rosielyn Pulmano, an attorney from Elk Grove who came to see Newsom with her husband, two sons and her niece. I think he cares about working Californians and a lot of their issues. Newsom arrived with his wife, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and their four young children, and the governor-elect spent a good deal of his time wading through crowds, taking selfies with supporters and signing autographs as music boomed in the background. As the family toured the inside of the museums locomotives and the bevy of exhibits, Newsoms two-year-old son, Dutch, was wide-eyed, impressed by all the train cars and seemingly a little overwhelmed by the crowd. Newsom said that for his son, all that was missing from the museum was Thomas the Train, popular fictional locomotive in childrens books and cartoons . If theres one thing I can contribute to Sacramento maybe its getting a Thomas the Train exhibit for the two years olds, Newsom joked when talking with reporters afterward. Newsom said he wanted to include such an event in his inaugural festivities to highlight families and children, whose wellbeing will be among the top priorities of his administration. Youll see that not only as a preamble to the inaugural and the budget that well be submitting next week, but I think itll be a big part of the administration, Newsom said. The museum event followed a private, high-dollar brunch at Sacramentos Crocker Art Museum. A steady rain failed to dissuade as many as 200 guests who sipped wine and dined on chicken and salmon while waiting for a photo with Californias new first couple. Seen at the event were representatives of some of the states most powerful political interests, among them organized labor, healthcare companies and tribal gaming interests. A few other high-profile guests attended, too, including Larry Baer, CEO of the San Francisco Giants, and Erika Jayne, a singer and cast member of the reality TV show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Im excited to see someone like Gavin  young, vibrant  taking over the state and leading us into the future, Jayne said after attending the brunch with her husband, attorney Tom Girardi. Hes got a lot of great plans. Attendees said the event, which was closed to reporters and held under a tent in the museums outdoor atrium, did not include prepared remarks by Newsom. Among those seen leaving the event were representatives of AT&T, the California Medical Assn., Uber, Kaiser Permanente and the State Building and Construction Trades Council. A fundraising invitation obtained by The Times offered bundled tickets to all of the inauguration events, including those on Sunday and the Monday ceremony, ranging in price from $25,000 to $200,000. The money will be collected by a committee specifically organized to pay for Newsoms inaugural weekend. Sundays festivities are scheduled to end with a benefit concert headlined by Pitbull at the Golden 1 Center, home of the NBAs Sacramento Kings, to raise money for the victims of Californias recent deadly wildfires. Among the attendees at @GavinNewsoms pre-inaugural leadership brunch: Real Housewife of

Bev Hills @erikajayne. Im excited to see someone like Gavinyoung, vibranttaking over the state and leading us into the future. Hes got a lot of great plans. pic.twitter.com/561NHiy2XQ  Melanie Mason (@melmason) January 6, 2019 Facebook

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As Newsom inaugural events begin, he unveils more state budget promises on education and paid family leave Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, seen here last April, will propose new state budget efforts on paid family leave and education subsidies. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) Californias incoming governor, who must send his first state budget plan to the Legislature this week, has already signaled a significant new focus on programs to help families and children from infancy to college. Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom campaigned on a platform that included a number of child-focused efforts specifically aimed at helping lower-income families. The price tag for the initial efforts is expected to approach $2 billion  a cost paid out of an unrestricted tax revenue windfall that could be one of the largest in state history. Newsom may also seek help for families through new subsidies paid by California employers. The governor-elect is expected to propose a dramatic expansion of paid parental leave  from six weeks to six months  according to an internal document provided by a source close to the Newsom transition team, first reported on Sunday by the New York Times. The document doesnt offer a full explanation for how the program will be funded, saying instead that the budget will set a goal of ensuring that all newborns and newly adopted babies can be cared for by a parent or a close family member for the first six months. Employers across the state are currently assessed a payroll tax that helps offer a subsidy to parents who temporarily leave their job to care for a newborn. Newsoms plan, according to the document, would pay for some of the new costs by shrinking the mandated cash reserve of the state fund that administers the program, allowing more of the money to be paid in benefits. The increase in paid leave would not all happen at once but instead be phased in over a multi-year period. A task force to help implement the expanded care plan is also envisioned, according to the document. It would determine whether two parents could split the six months of paid leave and whether an extended family member could be enlisted to help care for the child of a single parent over the six-month period. The incoming administrations focus on young children will also include $1.8 billion in new spending on early childhood education programs, with a particular focus on training childcare workers and pushing for more California schools to offer full-day kindergarten. Those costs, according to an overview memo obtained by the Los Angeles Times, are considered to be a one-time expense while leaving the long-term costs of the effort to be determined later. More community college students would get free tuition under a third initiative expected in the new governors budget plan. Newsom will propose spending $40 million to offer a second year of tuition-free college to California students, according to an outline provided by a transition official, first reported by Politico. Students are already eligible for a single year of paid tuition under a plan agreed to by Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers in 2017. The incoming governor embraced the idea of free community college during the 2018 campaign as part of a broader focus on additional investments in higher education. Education is an economic development strategy, Newsom said at a higher education forum last spring. We need to significantly increase the investment from the general fund of this state on higher education. Theres no greater higher return on investment. Whether the proposal would be targeted to students based on a familys financial need is unclear. Many low-income students are already eligible for fee waivers at community colleges. The new governor must submit his full state budget plan to lawmakers no later than Thursday. Facebook

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Gavin Newsom and his family decide Sacramento is the place to be The Old Governors Mansion State Historic Park in Sacramento. Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom will move his family into the mansion. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom and his family will give up the Marin County life and move to the Victorian-style governors mansion in Sacramento after he takes the oath of office Monday. Newsom and his wife, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, had debated whether or when to relocate to the state capital since his election in November. The couple have four young children and expressed reservations about moving in the middle of a school year. To best serve the people of California while also maximizing family time together, the Newsoms have therefore decided to move to Sacramento, said Newsoms spokesman, Nathan Click. On Monday, they will move into the Governors Mansion  along with their four children, their two family dogs, and their family bunny rabbit  and reside there for the immediate future. The Newsoms currently live in Marin County. Gov. Jerry Brown and his wife, Ann Gust Brown, moved into the grand house in 2015 after it underwent $4.1 million in renovations to update electrical and plumbing systems, as well as to remove lead-based paint and install a fire sprinkler system and other security features. The mansion was built in 1877 and has been home to 14 governors, but before Brown it had not housed a California governor for nearly half a century. The state bought the mansion from a wealthy Sacramento hardware merchant, Albert Gallatin, in 1903 for $32,500. It was one of the few California homes at that time to have indoor plumbing. Facebook

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Newsom announces top labor, business liaisons as he prepares to take office Julie Su will be secretary of the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency for Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times) Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom on Friday named two advisors on issues related to the California economy, each recognized for their expertise on business and labor. The incoming governor will appoint Julie Su as secretary of the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency and Lenny Mendonca as chief economic and business advisor and director of the Governors Office of Business and Economic Development. Su, 49, has served as state labor commissioner under Gov. Jerry Brown since 2011 and has led an office tasked with the enforcement of Californias labor laws. She won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant in 2001 and previously worked as a civil rights attorney representing low-wage workers. In her new position, Su will be tasked with coordinating the work of several workforce departments in state government, including those that administer unemployment benefits and oversee the relationship between agriculture workers and employers. Mendonca, 57, has been a longtime advocate for rethinking government operations as co-chairman of the nonprofit organization California Forward. Previously, he was partner at McKinsey & Co., a global management consulting firm. While he will be a key advisor to Newsom on the states economy, Mendonca will also lead the office often referred to as Go-Biz, designated as a high-level way to encourage job growth and economic development. In his new role, Mendonca will help ensure that California is rolling out the welcome mat to current and future California businesses and growing a sustainable economy for every Californian, said a statement from the Newsom transition team. Newsom will take the oath of office as governor Monday. He has previously selected key advisors on the state budget, legislative affairs and the executive branchs wide array of agencies and departments. Facebook

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Joshua Groban, aide to Gov. Jerry Brown, sworn in to California Supreme Court By Taryn Luna California Supreme Court Justice Joshua Groban gives remarks after he is sworn into the court by Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday. (Taryn Luna) California Supreme Court Justice Joshua Groban, a lawyer and longtime aide to Gov. Jerry Brown, was sworn into the states highest court Thursday in Sacramento. The ceremony marked Browns fourth appointment to the state Supreme Court and gave the seven-member bench a Democratic majority. We live in a highly chaotic, ever-changing and ever-confusing world, Groban said in prepared remarks at the Stanley Mosk Library and Courts Building. But Im happy to report that Im joining an institution whose fundamental purpose, at core, is to provide stability and consistency amidst this chaotic place we live. I look forward to doing that with a sense of reflection, respect, fidelity to the law and compassion. None of Browns appointees, Groban included, have judicial experience. Groban served as legal counsel to Browns 2010 gubernatorial campaign and joined the administration as a senior advisor to the governor, overseeing the appointments of some 600 judges over the last eight years. Prior to working with Brown, Groban, 45, practiced law for more than a decade. In perhaps his final public appearance before his successor, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, takes office next week, Brown pushed back on notions that he stacked the court. I dont want this to be known as a Brown court, the governor said before administering the judicial oath of office. First of all, the so-called Brown appointments do not agree with themselves and nor should they. They are individuals. They will differ. Its not anybodys court. The governor called the court a high calling and said Groban possesses the values for the job. Probably, next to my wife, Ive talked to no person as much as Ive talked to Josh Groban, Brown said. I think youve talked to him more, Californias First Lady Anne Gust Brown interjected. I cant tell you what the hell hes going to do, Brown later quipped. I warned him, dont screw up, at least not at first. Facebook

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California campaign watchdog agency seeks law barring use of campaign funds to fight harassment claims Former state Sen. Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia). ( (Steve Yeater / Associated Press)) Elected officials accused of harassment or discrimination would be barred from using political contributions to cover their legal defense costs under legislation proposed by Californias campaign watchdog agency. The state Fair Political Practices Commission has agreed to pursue a law change to clear up confusion after an attorney for one former state lawmaker argued political funds could be used in such legal defenses. Commission Chairwoman Alice Germond said putting a prohibition into the law would provide some much needed clarity. As chair, I would like to show the public their lawmakers are held to a standard that is above reproach, Germond said in a statement. People dont give money to campaigns for lawmakers to use it to defend their own bad behavior, so lawmakers shouldnt be able to use it in that manner. The issue came up a year ago when an attorney for former Sen. Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia) sought a formal opinion from the FPPC after the Senate launched an investigation that later concluded Mendoza likely engaged in a pattern of harassment against female aides. Mendoza resigned in February under threat of expulsion by the Senate. In a Jan. 10, 2018, letter, Cassandra Ferrannini, an attorney for Mendoza, wrote to the FPPC that she believed Mendoza should be allowed to establish a legal defense fund able to defray his legal expenses in defending himself against the allegations. The use of campaign funds for attorneys fees under these circumstances would fall squarely within the scope of legislative matters, since it involves the alleged conduct of a legislator with regard to legislative staff that he supervised, Ferrannini wrote. The commission staff originally issued an advice letter that said Mendoza may use campaign and legal defense funds to defend himself from claims of sexual harassment that arose directly out of his activities or status as a candidate or elected officer. But the panel later rescinded the letter after some members questioned using campaign funds to fight sexual harassment claims. That left uncertainty about what was allowed, which Germond said could be cleared up by a new law. The FPPC is still looking for a legislator to carry the bill, a spokesman said. Facebook

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Californias landmark police transparency law takes effect after court denies police union effort to block it California Supreme Court building (Eric Risberg / Associated Press) A new state law allowing the public disclosure of internal police shooting investigations has gone into effect after the California Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a bid by a police union to block it. The law opens to the public for the first time internal investigations of officer shootings and other major uses of force, along with confirmed cases of sexual assault and lying while on duty. The San Bernardino County Sheriffs Employees Benefit Assn. challenged the law last month, asking state Supreme Court justices to decide that the law only apply to incidents that occur in 2019 or later. The court rejected that request Wednesday, allowing members of the public to seek all applicable records held by police departments. Union president Grant Ward said in a statement that his organization was disappointed with the decision and is now seeking other legal options. We feel this is a statewide issue and should be considered accordingly, Ward said. Last month, the city of Inglewood authorized the destruction of more than 100 police shooting investigations and other records in advance of Jan. 1, when the disclosure law was scheduled to take effect. California law requires police departments to keep such records for five years, and Inglewood City Council voted to destroy records older than that. Mayor James T. Butts has said the decision had nothing to do with the new law. In Los Angeles, Police Chief Michel Moore has said that complying with the new disclosure rules could take hundreds of thousands of hours of work. State Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), the author of the transparency law, has said she has no immediate plans to propose changes to it. Facebook

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Few complaints of racial profiling are sustained by police agencies in California, state panel finds CHP Officer J. Nelson stands outside the office of Gov. Jerry Brown as activists in 2015 support requiring the tracking of police stops. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Law enforcement agencies in California sustain few citizen complaints of racial or identity profiling, according to a report Wednesday by a state panel set up to help reduce bias in policing. The states Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board recommended in its annual report that law enforcement agencies improve training and adopt clear guidelines for tracking and reporting data on who is stopped by officers. The panel said that 453 law enforcement agencies in the state received 9,459 civilian complaints in 2017, including 865 complaints alleging racial or identity profiling. Of the racial and identity complaints that reached a disposition that year, 1.5% were sustained, 14.6% resulted in officers being exonerated and 83.9% of complaints were not sustained or were determined to be unfounded, the report said. A clearer picture of the issue is expected from a 2015 law that requires police agencies to report demographic data on all detentions and searches. The first reports by the eight largest agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department, are due to be submitted in April. California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra, whose office oversees the board, said tracking of all detentions and searches will be helpful to understand the scope of the issue. The Boards recommendations will help make our law enforcement agencies more transparent and promote critical steps to enhance, and in some cases, repair the public trust, Becerra said in a statement Wednesday. Facebook

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California housing crisis podcast: What Minneapolis decision to end single-family zoning might mean for California A view of downtown Minneapolis in 2014 (Stephen Maturen / Getty Images) Theres a national movement brewing to roll back zoning rules in cities that only allow one house on a plot of land. The epicenter of that movement is Minneapolis, which passed a plan last month to eliminate single-family zoning citywide and let landowners build duplexes and triplexes on residential property. On this episode of Gimme Shelter: The California Housing Crisis Podcast, we talk about the reasons why Minneapolis leaders took this action, including their desire to combat a history of racial exclusion and spur more housing density to fight climate change. We also debate how Minneapolis decision might affect housing politics in California. Our guest is Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender, who helped shepherd the new zoning rules to passage and a former San Francisco city planner. The episode also crowns 2018s Avocado of the Year  the most ridiculous story exemplifying Californias housing woes  and includes our predictions for the most under-the-radar important themes in housing politics in 2019. Gimme Shelter, a biweekly podcast that looks at why its so expensive to live in California and what the state can do about it, features Liam Dillon, who covers housing affordability issues for the Los Angeles Times Sacramento bureau, and Matt Levin, data and housing reporter for CALmatters. You can subscribe to Gimme Shelter on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Google Play and Overcast. Facebook

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How young immigrant Dreamers made flipping control of the House a personal quest By Jazmine Ulloa Gabriela Cruz, who was brought to the U.S. illegally when she was 1, couldnt vote, but in the final hours before the Nov. 6 election, she was making one last run to get people to the polls. The sun was setting in Modesto when she found Ronald Silva, 41, smoking a cigarette on a tattered old couch behind a group home. He politely tried to wave her off until she reminded him he had a right that she as an immigrant without citizenship didnt have. It could really make a change for us, said Cruz, 29. Read More Facebook

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Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom will propose almost $2 billion for early childhood programs (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Seeking to frame his new administration as one with a firm focus on closing the gap between children from affluent and poor families, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom will propose spending some $1.8 billion on an array of programs designed to boost Californias enrollment in early education and child-care programs. Newsoms plan, which he hinted at in a Fresno event last month, will be a key element in the state budget proposal he will submit to the Legislature shortly after taking office Monday, a source close to the governor-elects transition team said. The spending would boost programs designed to ensure children enter kindergarten prepared to learn, closing what some researchers have called the readiness gap that exists based on a familys income. It would also phase in an expansion of prekindergarten and offer money to help school districts that dont have facilities for full-day kindergarten. The fact that hes making significant investments with his opening budget is really exciting, Ted Lempert, president of the Bay Area-based nonprofit Children Now, said Tuesday. Whats exciting is the comprehensiveness of it, because its saying were going to focus on prenatal through age 5. A broad overview document reviewed by The Times on Tuesday shows that most of the outlay under the plan  $1.5 billion  would be a one-time expense in the budget year that begins July 1. Those dollars would be a single infusion of cash, an approach favored by Gov. Jerry Brown in recent years. Most of the money would be spent on efforts to expand child-care services and kindergarten classes. By law, a governor must submit a full budget to the Legislature no later than Jan. 10. Lawmakers will spend the winter and spring reviewing the proposal and must send a final budget plan to Newsom by June 15. Though legislative Democrats have pushed for additional early childhood funding in recent years  a key demand of the Legislative Womens Caucus  those actions have typically come late in the budget-writing season in Sacramento. Quite frankly, to start out with a January proposal that includes that investment in Californias children reflects a new day, state Sen. Holly J. Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) said. The governor-elect will propose a $750-million boost to kindergarten funding, aimed at expanding facilities to allow full-day programs. A number of school districts offer only partial-day programs, leaving many low-income families to skip enrolling their children because kindergarten classes end in the middle of the workday. Because the money would not count toward meeting Californias three-decades-old education spending guarantee under Proposition 98, which sets a minimum annual funding level for K-12 schools and community colleges, it will not reduce planned spending on other education services. Close behind in total cost is a budget proposal by Newsom to help train child-care workers and expand local facilities already subsidized by the state, as well as those serving parents who attend state colleges and universities. Together, those efforts could cost $747 million, according to the budget overview document. An expansion of prekindergarten programs would be phased in over three years at a cost of $125 million in the first year. The multiyear rollout would, according to the budget overview, ensure the system can plan for the increase in capacity. Lempert said the Newsom proposal is notable for trying to avoid the kinds of battles that in recent years pitted prekindergarten and expanded child care against each other for additional taxpayer dollars. The reality is we need to expand both simultaneously, he said. Another $200 million of the proposal would be earmarked for programs that provide home visits to expectant parents from limited-income families and programs that provide healthcare screenings for young children. Some of the money would come from the states Medi-Cal program, and other money from federal matching dollars. Funding for the home visits program was provided in the budget Brown signed last summer; the Newsom effort would build on that. Emphasizing a policy area with broad appeal in his first state budget could reflect Newsoms political sensibility about the challenges ahead. Democratic lawmakers and interest groups will be especially eager to see how Newsom addresses the demand for an overhaul of healthcare coverage in California  especially after a 2017 effort to create a single-payer, universal system fizzled. The path forward on healthcare is complex and costly, making early childhood education a more achievable goal in the governor-elects early tenure. Newsom is likely to face considerable demands for other additional spending. In November, the Legislatures independent analysts projected that continued strength in tax revenues could produce a cash reserve of some $29 billion over the next 18 months. Almost $15 billion of that could be in unrestricted reserves, the kind that can be spent on any number of government programs. Kim Belshe, executive director of the child advocacy organization First 5 LA and a former state health and human services secretary, said the initial Newsom budget proposal suggests the next governor will focus on a comprehensive approach to improving outcomes for children from low-income families. School-ready kids deserve quality early learning, strong and well-supported families, and access to early screening services, Belshe said. Newsom understands the whole child, multifaceted needs of our kids and is clearly ready to lead. Mitchell, the chair of the Senate budget committee, said shes eager to see the details of the governor-elects proposal to determine whether it might signal the beginning of an even broader expansion of early education efforts. Similar efforts have been hindered by a lack of money and ongoing debate over which services to help children 5 and younger need state funding the most. Universal preschool, in particular, has been debated for more than a decade. California voters rejected a ballot measure to fund a full prekindergarten system in 2006. Its clear theres a new movement afoot trying to engage on investment for universal preschool, Mitchell said. How we invest, and how we prioritize that investment, is going to be a great conversation for the coming months. Facebook

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California Politics Podcast: A final conversation with Gov. Jerry Brown No Californian has served longer as governor, signed more laws, granted clemency to more felons or waged more high-profile campaigns than Gov. Jerry Brown. Brown will leave behind a unique legacy when he packs his last belongings for the trip from the governors mansion in Sacramento to his Northern California ranch. His final two terms in office could be his most consequential. The governor reviewed some of the more notable moments from the past eight years in a far-reaching interview with The Times on Dec. 22. This weeks podcast episode includes extended portions of that conversation. Facebook

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A sagging economy could doom a 2020 ballot measure to raise commercial property taxes, Gov. Jerry Brown says Gov. Jerry Brown, at his Colusa County home on Saturday, said a ballot measure to raise commercial property taxes could struggle in 2020. (Randall Benton/For The Times) An effort to remove commercial property in California from the tax limits imposed by the landmark Proposition 13 could be felled by an economic slowdown, Gov. Jerry Brown said. In a Saturday interview with The Times at his Northern California ranch, Brown said liberal activist groups that have successfully placed the proposal on the November 2020 statewide ballot shouldnt read too much into early poll numbers showing support for the plan. That isnt as easy as you think, Brown said. Because youre going to be in a downturn of the business cycle. And youre talking many kinds of business. And the cost of doing business in California is already high. The ballot measure would allow counties to more frequently assess the market value of commercial property in California than allowed under Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot initiative that amended the state constitution to place strict limits on assessing property values and taxation for both homeowners and businesses. An analysis of the new measure, which qualified in October for the 2020 ballot, estimates it could bring in some $10.5 billion a year in new tax revenue. The business community will fight it, Brown said. And the minimum wage, the family leave, the environmental rules  business[es] have left California, thats going to be the big argument. And I think thats something you really have to think a lot about. The governor, who leaves office early next month due to term limits, declined to either endorse or oppose the ballot measure. He said Californias economic health in two years time could be a key factor in how voters weigh the proposal. Well be in a recession by then, Brown said. So its anybodys guess. Facebook

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Inglewood to destroy more than 100 police shooting records that could otherwise become public under new California law By Jack Dolan Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts (Maria Alejandra Cardona / Los Angeles Times) The city of Inglewood has authorized the shredding of more than 100 police shooting and other internal investigation records weeks before a new state law could allow the public to access them for the first time. The decision, made at a City Council meeting earlier this month, has troubled civil liberties advocates who were behind the state legislation, Senate Bill 1421, which takes effect Jan. 1. The law opens to the public internal investigations of officer shootings and other major uses of force, along with confirmed cases of sexual assault and lying while on duty. The legislature passed SB 1421 because communities demanded an end to the secrecy cloaking police misconduct and use of force, Marcus Benigno, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said in a statement. Inglewood PDs decision to purge records undermines police accountability and transparency against the will of Californians. California law says police departments must retain records of officer shootings and internal misconduct investigations for five years. The city of Inglewood, however, had kept records longer than that, including case files of police shootings dating to 1991. State Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), the author of SB 1421, intended for her bill to allow public access to all qualifying records held by a department, no matter the date of the incident. Inglewood City Council approved the destruction of records that have been in the police departments possession  more than 100 cases  longer than required by law. The city staff report and council resolution describing the action makes no mention of the new police transparency law. Instead it says the affected records are obsolete, occupy valuable space, and are of no further use to the police department. It added the traditional method of destroying such records is to shred them. It is unclear whether the records have since been destroyed. A spokesman for the Inglewood Police Department along with Inglewoods city manager, attorney, clerk, four council members and Mayor James T. Butts, a former Santa Monica police chief, did not respond to requests for comment. Inglewoods City Hall is closed the last two weeks of December. The Inglewood Police Department has a reputation for secrecy and using excessive force. In 2008, the departments officers fatally shot four men in as many months, three of whom turned out to be unarmed. The U.S. Department of Justice launched a civil rights probe and found significant flaws in the way the department oversaw use-of-force cases and investigated complaints against officers. Civil rights advocates still question why Inglewood police opened fire on a couple found sleeping in a car in 2016, killing them both. California police have a long history of shredding records to avoid scrutiny of their actions. In the 1970s, the LAPD famously destroyed more than four tons of personnel records after defense attorneys began requesting them as part of criminal cases against their clients. The move resulted in the dismissal of more than a hundred criminal complaints. In response, the Legislature demanded that records be preserved but then took other measures, supported by police unions, to ensure the public had very little access to them, making California the most secretive state in the nation when it comes to police misconduct. Skinners legislation begins to unwind those laws, which have been on the books since 1978. No video or audio of the Dec. 11 council action is available on the citys website and neither are meeting minutes or any record of the decision. A city spokeswoman, Courtney Torres, confirmed that the council had voted in favor of the police records purge, and said all the relevant reasons for the decision were included in the city staff report. The Jan. 1 implementation for SB 1421 has prompted other police officials to act. A police union in San Bernardino is asking the state Supreme Court to determine that Skinners bill only applies to incidents that occur in 2019 or later. Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore sent a letter to Skinner earlier this month warning that complying with the law in regard to older records in the departments possession could take hundreds of thousands of work hours. Facebook

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Federal officials question California DMVs process for issuing Real IDs (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has notified the California Department of Motor Vehicles that its process for providing residents with federally recognized identification cards is not adequate. DMV spokesman Armando Botello said Friday that 2.3 million residents who received Real IDs under the current process will have to submit additional documentation when their cards are renewed in five years but will be able to use them in the meantime. The DMV is developing a way for residents to submit more documentation online or via email to comply with the stricter federal requirement, he said. But some state legislators are upset about delays in notifying them of the problem and say Homeland Security could eventually require additional documentation provided by current holders. The DMV has known for a month that millions of Real IDs theyve been dolling out are potentially invalid, Assemblyman Jim Patterson (R-Fresno) said. The DMVs only hope is that the Department of Homeland Security takes pity on California and gives the DMV more time to fix this mess. Real IDs are a new kind of driver license and identification card that federal law will require legal residents to present when boarding domestic flights or visiting military bases and other federal facilities starting Oct. 1, 2020. The DMV has only been requiring one form of documentation, including a current lease or utility bill, to verify the residence of a card applicant. But the federal government said in a Nov. 21 letter to the agency that two such documents are needed. On Friday, DMV Director Jean Shiomoto released a letter defending the current process but said her agency will start requiring a second document to prove residency in April. In order to minimize confusion among our customers, the CADMV will work to inform individuals who have been issued a Real ID under the current process that their card will be accepted for official federal purposes, even if their renewal occurs after the October 1, 2020, final enforcement date for Real ID, Shiomoto wrote to the federal agency. Legislative officials worry there is still a possibility that those issued Real IDs in the past might be required to present a second document to have their cards designated as compliant. The more complex process for obtaining Real IDs has led to hours-long waits for customers at DMV field offices this year, although wait times have been reduced recently by an increase in staffing. Shiomoto last month announced that she is retiring amid problems with the motor voter registration system and after the governor ordered an audit of her agency in response to the long wait times. On Friday, Assembly Republican Leader Marie Waldron of Escondido blasted the DMV for waiting a month to tell legislators of the problem. This is unacceptable and flies in the face of security for our citizens, which is what Real ID was created for in the first place, she said in a statement. Facebook

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Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom taps Keely Bosler to be his finance director Keely Bosler, the director of the California Department of Finance, will continue in that role under Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom. (California Department of Finance) Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom on Friday appointed Keely Martin Bosler as director of the California Department of Finance, continuing the role she has served under Gov. Jerry Brown since August. Bosler will become Newsoms chief fiscal advisor, and will play a pivotal role in shaping Newsoms spending plan for the state that will lay the foundation for his top policy priorities. Newsom must roll out his first budget plan within days of taking office on Jan. 7. Californias brighter future depends on a strong, stable fiscal foundation, Newsom said in a statement released Friday afternoon. Keely is an accomplished public servant of sound fiscal judgment. She understands that state budgets are more than numbers on a page  they are value statements affecting the fate and future of millions of families reaching for the California Dream. We are fortunate to have her on our team. Prior to being appointed finance director, Bosler served as Browns cabinet secretary for two years and, before that, as the chief deputy director for budget in the Finance Department for three years. Earlier this year, Brown picked Bosler to lead an audit of the Department of Motor Vehicles, which had come under fire for long wait times at DMV field offices and numerous computer problems, including errors in the new motor voter program that registered Californians to vote. As we have discussed, long wait times at the Department of Motor Vehicles do not reflect the high standards of service that Californians expect from their state government, Bosler wrote in a letter in September to DMV Director Jean Shiomoto. The audit is still ongoing, but Shiomoto has since announced she will retire at the end of the year. Facebook

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Californias legislative analyst, after decades of nonpartisan research for lawmakers, calls it a career Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor, who has led the state research unit since 2008, will retire on Dec. 31. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Only five people have led the independent research office of the California Legislature since its creation in 1941. And each of them has had a pretty simple mantra to live by in reviewing public policy proposals and government programs: Call it like you see it. The job of any analyst, to me, is you maintain that nonpartisanship, Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor said. Taylor, 65, will retire from the post at the end of December after a four-decade career with the research team that began, as he likes to tell it, just after the passage of the landmark property tax rollback, Proposition 13, in 1978. He became the leader of the office, with the title of legislative analyst, in October 2008. Two months later, state government found itself in arguably the worst fiscal crisis in its history  a projected shortfall that ultimately grew to $42 billion by the following winter. There were forces beyond our control, Taylor said of that time. But dont underestimate the policy changes that were made afterward. Those changes, most notably a boost in taxes paid by high-income earners and a robust state budget cash reserve fund, have helped lead to successive years of fully funded government services. The state is projected to have some $24 billion in reserves by the end of the current fiscal year. Taylor announced his intention earlier to step down this year. Leaders from both houses of the Legislature select the analyst, who leads a staff of almost five dozen researchers. The office provides in-depth reports on pending legislation, as well as on broader policy topics like education and healthcare, and produces an independent analysis for every proposed ballot measure. A succession of lawmakers and governors alike have praised or panned the work of the Legislative Analysts Office based on their own political worldview. Taylor said his staff is mindful that they work for legislators, but try to ignore the rhetoric that follows the release of a major report. People are going to do what theyre going to do with our information, he said. They dont always like it, but they appreciate that we give them our best advice. Taylor oversaw a transformation in the way the Legislative Analysts Office distributes its information, embracing the release of research reports through social media instead of relying on traditional printed copies and journalist roundtable events. But he said the work of the researchers has remained largely unchanged through the decades. Having an independent take on things, I think, is good for the Legislature, he said. No replacement for Taylor has been announced, which means a short transition for his eventual successor before Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom sends his first budget proposal to lawmakers in early January. Taylor, who lives in the Sacramento suburbs, said he will honor the tradition of his predecessors in stepping away from public policy debates in order to give the new analyst space to lead the team as he or she sees fit. He said he hopes to travel in the coming years and spend time with his children who have moved to the East Coast. Forty years in state government, Taylor said in why he was stepping aside now. Isnt that enough? Facebook

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Gov. Jerry Brown sues to save California sentencing laws By Don Thompson, Associated Press (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Outgoing Gov. Jerry Brown sued Thursday to protect one of his signature actions in office, a voter-approved measure that allows most prison inmates to seek earlier release and participate in rehabilitation programs. His administration filed a lawsuit challenging a pending 2020 initiative that seeks to toughen criminal penalties as part of an effort to roll back reforms adopted by voters within the last decade. Browns lawsuit in Sacramento County Superior Court contends the measure lacked enough valid signatures to overturn a previously approved constitutional amendment. County officials and California Secretary of State Alex Padilla certified the signatures in July but said they were submitted too late to qualify for last months election. The lawsuit names Padilla and the ballot measures official proponent, Nina Salarno Besselman, president of the advocacy group Crime Victims United. Padilla said the measure exceeded the required roughly 366,000 valid signatures, equal to 5% of votes cast for governor in 2014. Browns lawsuit says he used the wrong threshold. It says changing the state Constitution requires 8%, or more than 585,400 signatures. That makes the pending initiative more than 150,000 signatures short, the lawsuit says. Hes wrong, said Jeff Flint, a spokesman for the campaign backing the measure. He predicted a judge will be reluctant to reject a measure that already has qualified for the ballot. The secretary of state told us how many signatures are required, and thats how many we collected, Flint said. Padillas office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The measure would reverse reforms adopted by voters through Proposition 47 in 2014 and Proposition 57 in 2016. Proposition 57 allows most inmates to seek earlier paroles, and Proposition 47 reduced some drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. The combination has helped keep Californias inmate population below a population cap set by federal judges. Corrections department spokeswoman Vicky Waters said the measure gives corrections and parole officials broad discretion to protect our communities and fashion a rational system of rehabilitation and punishment. This new initiative unlawfully seeks to supplant the departments constitutional authority to implement these critical reforms to our criminal justice system. The pending initiative would shorten the list of crimes that qualify for earlier parole and change some theft crimes from misdemeanors back to felonies. It would also increase the number of crimes for which DNA is collected, a list that was limited when some crimes went from felonies to misdemeanors. Those supporting the tougher penalties say easing criminal penalties has increased the number of dangerous criminals on the streets, but those backing the changes say they have helped reduce mass incarceration and rehabilitate convicted criminals. Facebook

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California Supreme Court orders records unsealed in pardon of ex-state Sen. Roderick Wright Former state Sen. Roderick Wright (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times) The California Supreme Court has granted a request to unseal court records involving Gov. Jerry Browns decision last month to pardon former state Sen. Roderick Wright for felony convictions involving lying about living in his legislative district, officials said Thursday. The court order was in response to a request by the nonpartisan First Amendment Coalition, which argued that the public has a right to know what information went into the governors decision to grant clemency to Wright. This is an important victory for public access to court files involving the exercise of executive clemency, said coalition spokesman Glen A. Smith. We are gratified the court has recognized that these decisions should be subject to the same public access rules that apply to other judicial records under California law. The court gave Browns office until Jan. 2 to redact confidential material before giving the court documents that can be released to the public. The court files submitted by the governors office include letters of support for a pardon and an internal review of Wrights case. The court denied a motion to unseal the records of all clemency cases but left open consideration of requests on other individual cases. Browns office is currently evaluating the courts decision, said spokesman Brian Ferguson. The governor argued against unsealing records in a recent court filing that said confidentiality is consistent with historical practice and is supported by state law. In pardoning Wright on Nov. 22, the governor wrote: He has shown that since his release from custody, he has lived an honest and upright life, exhibited good moral character, and conducted himself as a law abiding citizen. Facebook

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California political watchdog agency fines BART, urges prosecution over using public funds for campaign A Bay Area Rapid Transit train leaves the station in Oakland in this 2013 file photo. (Ben Margot / AP) Californias state political watchdog agency on Thursday imposed a $7,500 fine against the Bay Area Rapid Transit District and called for a possible criminal or civil prosecution over allegations the district used public resources to campaign for a 2016 bond measure. The state Fair Political Practices Commission levied an administrative fine against BART for its failure to disclose spending on YouTube videos, social media posts and text messages to promote Measure RR, which authorized $3.5 billion in general obligation bonds. Though the panel lacks authority to seek criminal charges over the misuse of public funds, it also urged county district attorneys in the BART service area and the state attorney general to pursue possible criminal or civil charges over the spending of taxpayer dollars for campaign purposes, Commission Chairwoman Alice Germond said. It is the concept of misusing public funds that I think we all here are very disturbed about, and we want to send a warning and not create a precedent that is a minor, little slap on the wrist, Germond said, adding that the referral to criminal prosecutors would further send a message that this is wrong. Commissioner Brian Hatch also called for the state Legislature to consider granting the FPPC power to go after public agencies that spend taxpayer money on campaigns. Sen. Steve Glazer (D-Orinda) called on the agency to increase the fine to the maximum level of $33,375. The proposed $7,500 fine represents a slap on the wrist for a very serious violation of the law and the publics trust, Glazer said in a letter to the panel. In supporting the fine recommended by the staff, Germond said BART has agreed to pay the penalty. Somebody did something wrong and they have admitted it, she said. A staff report said there were factors in favor of a fine below the maximum. Although the Commission considers BARTs violations to be serious, the absence of any evidence of an intention to conceal, deceive, or mislead; the voluntary filing of the delinquent campaign statement; and the absence of a prior record are mitigating, the report said. Facebook

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California police union seeks state Supreme Court review of new law disclosing internal investigation records Los Angeles Police Department officers. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) A police union is asking the California Supreme Court to block the release of internal officer investigations before a new state law takes effect next year. The San Bernardino County Sheriffs Employees Benefit Assn. filed a petition Tuesday asking justices to rule that only investigations of incidents that occur after Jan. 1 would be available under the law  and not those the department has on file from years prior. The litigation comes after this years passage of Senate Bill 1421, which opens to the public for the first time internal investigations of officer shootings and other major uses of force, along with confirmed cases of sexual assault and lying while on duty. The law goes into effect Jan. 1, and the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department has told the union it intends to make available in response to public records requests all the information it has. The union is very concerned about any plans to retroactively apply Senate Bill 1421, Grant Ward, the unions president, said in a statement. We believe retroactive application violates our members rights and we hope the California Supreme Court will consider the serious issues raised by our legal challenge. The bills author, Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), does not agree with the unions interpretation. She has said her legislation should apply to all the records in a police departments possession because the law simply declared that affected records were no longer confidential. If the record exists, its disclosable, Skinner said. A decision on what records will be available under the law is key to how far-reaching it will be. If the court restricts access to incidents that occurred prior to 2019, those cases will not be subject to public scrutiny. The police union in San Bernardino County is not the only one raising concerns about the law. Earlier this month, Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore sent a letter to Skinner expressing concern that his agency would be overwhelmed if the law required the department to disclose older incidents. Even if the law only applied to the previous five years, Moore wrote, it could take nearly 300,000 hours of work to comply with its provisions. The LAPD operates with a guiding principle of Reverence for the Law; as such, we will diligently comply with SB 1421, Moore wrote. We maintain, however, that a retroactive implementation of SB 1421 will be exceptionally burdensome and would require significant reallocation of front-line investigative personnel. Skinner said if complying with the law becomes untenable for law enforcement agencies that maintain records for a long time, she would consider modifications. But she said agencies did not raise this concern during discussion over the bill. SB 1421 went through multiple committee hearings, multiple floor debates, extensive opportunity for all parties to weigh in on concerns with its structure, she said. That was not an issue that was raised by law enforcement at the time. Facebook

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Gov. Brown warns of backlash for Republicans in 2020 if Obamacare repeal is upheld Gov. Jerry Brown at the National Press Club in April. (Alex Wong / Getty Images) Gov. Jerry Brown warned Republicans on Tuesday that repeal of the Affordable Care Act would devastate the partys political chances in the 2020 election. Brown, speaking at a Sacramento Press Club event moderated by Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton and Brown family historian Miriam Pawel, said a federal judges ruling last week to strike down the 2010 law  if upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court  will build such a backlash that the Democrats will not only take over the Senate, theyll win the presidency and will win with the kind of momentum, particularly on the issue of healthcare, that [the law] will be replaced probably with something even better. The governor, who leaves office in less than three weeks, said he did not believe the ruling by a Texas judge would ultimately prevail. I think the decision will probably be overturned, Brown said. Few states have embraced the law championed by former President Obama more than California, both through its healthcare exchange, Covered California, and by expanding access to government-funded services under Medi-Cal. Some 12 million Californians now receive healthcare through Medi-Cal, and Brown said a final ruling affecting the federal dollars that subsidize that care would be a serious blow. California would not be able to afford it without the subsidy, the governor said. Facebook

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Bars in Los Angeles, San Francisco could stay open until 4 a.m. under new bill A bar in Sherman Oaks (acuna-hansen) For the third year in a row, a California lawmaker is trying to keep bars open until 4 a.m. State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) is reintroducing legislation that would allow Los Angeles, San Francisco and seven other cities to extend the sales of alcohol in bars, clubs and restaurants by an additional two hours. Nightlife brings people together, fosters creativity and innovation, supports small businesses, and creates middle-class jobs, Wiener said in a statement. Its time to embrace our nighttime economy and give our cities the tools they need to foster the best nightlife possible. Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a similar bill by Wiener, writing: I believe we have enough mischief from midnight to 2 without adding two more hours of mayhem. Should this years measure, Senate Bill 58, advance through the Legislature, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom would decide whether to sign it into law. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has endorsed SB 58, saying the city should have more flexibility than it does now. Every community has its own needs, and cities should be able to make informed decisions about what nightlife hours make sense for residents, visitors, and neighborhoods, Garcetti said in a statement. The bill would create a five-year pilot program where Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, West Hollywood, Long Beach, Coachella, Cathedral City and Palm Springs could decide to allow restaurants and bars within their cities to serve alcohol until 4 a.m. with the approval of the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Facebook

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Bars in Los Angeles and San Francisco could stay open until 4 a.m. under new bill A bar in Sherman Oaks. (Acuna-Hansen) For the third year in a row, a California lawmaker is trying to keep bars open until 4 a.m. State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) is reintroducing legislation that would allow Los Angeles, San Francisco and seven other cities to extend the sales of alcohol in bars, clubs and restaurants by an additional two hours. Nightlife brings people together, fosters creativity and innovation, supports small businesses and creates middle-class jobs, Wiener said in a statement. Its time to embrace our nighttime economy and give our cities the tools they need to foster the best nightlife possible. Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a similar bill by Wiener, writing: I believe we have enough mischief from midnight to 2 without adding two more hours of mayhem. Should this years measure, Senate Bill 58, advance through the Legislature, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom would decide whether to sign it into law. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has endorsed SB 58, saying the city should have more flexibility than it does now. Every community has its own needs, and cities should be able to make informed decisions about what nightlife hours make sense for residents, visitors and neighborhoods, Garcetti said in a statement. The bill would create a five-year pilot program where Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, West Hollywood, Long Beach, Coachella, Cathedral City and Palm Springs could decide to allow restaurants and bars within their cities to serve alcohol until 4 a.m. with the approval of the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Facebook

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Californias DMV director announces retirement amid problems with motor voter program (Kent Nishamura/Los Angeles Times) The director of the California Department of Motor Vehicles will retire at years end with a number of questions unanswered about the implementation of a major voter registration system and long wait times experienced by customers for much of the past summer. Jean Shiomoto will not continue in her current role as Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom takes office, and announced to staff several weeks ago her intent to retire at the end of the year after 38 years in state service, spokesman Armando Botello said in an email to The Times on Friday. Newsoms transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment on who might lead the department in 2019. Shiomoto was appointed DMV director by Gov. Jerry Brown in the fall of 2013, having served in prior leadership roles with the department. DMV officials have been sharply criticized by lawmakers in recent months for delays in serving customers at its field offices across the state. Last week, DMV officials revealed errors in registering California voters for the November election  mistakes that followed a series of problems in the rollout of the states new motor voter registration system. Secretary of State Alex Padilla last week said he had lost confidence in Shiomotos leadership as a result of the voting registration problems. Facebook

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New law could break the stalemate over housing on the site of a near-vacant Cupertino mall By Liam Dillon For more than a decade, developers have tried to build new housing on the site of an all-but-empty mall in Cupertino, a city in the heart of Silicon Valley and home to Apple headquarters. A well-organized group of neighbors, upset about traffic, building heights and the potential loss of the communitys suburban lifestyle, turned away every plan. Now, for the first time, the stalemate might be broken  thanks to a decision made in the state Capitol. In an effort to address Californias housing affordability problem, legislators passed a law last year that requires cities and counties to approve housing projects if they comply with local zoning rules and other standards, forcing some resistant communities to agree to new homebuilding. In September, the city of Cupertino, citing the state law, approved developer Sand Hill Property Co.s proposal to build an office park and more than 2,400 homes where the Vallco Shopping Mall sits. Read More Facebook

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Local government was a last bastion for struggling California Republicans. Not anymore By Mark Z. Barabak Theres no shortage of watery metaphors to describe the disaster that befell California Republicans this midterm election. A blue wave. A Democratic tsunami. But the most apt may be a flood, with the casualties steadily rising as the vote count climbed in the days and weeks following Nov. 6. Eventually half the GOP congressional delegation was washed away, along with the entire slate of statewide Republican candidates. In Sacramento, Democrats claimed 29 of 40 state Senate seats and seized three-quarters of the 80-member Assembly  the largest number since 1883, when Chester A. Arthur was serving in the White House. Read More Facebook

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For the Republicans left in Californias Legislature, fewer lawmakers will have to do more work By John Myers From January to late summer every year, the California Legislature is a perpetual motion machine. And in the new year, the people most likely to struggle in keeping up will be Republicans, vastly outnumbered but still responsible for representing millions of the states residents. There are 22 standing committees in the state Senate, plus at least a dozen more subcommittees or special committees. And after Novembers election, only 11 Republican senators will be left to divvy up the work. To the victors go the spoils. To the vanquished go the extra assignments. Read More Facebook

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Californias DMV failed to finish registering 329 new voters before November election (Los Angeles Times) Officials at the California Department of Motor Vehicles said Friday that the agency failed to send information for 329 new voters to state elections officers in time for the November election, the latest revelation in a string of mishaps regarding voter registration. Secretary of State Alex Padilla responded with a blistering letter, calling on Gov. Jerry Brown or Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom to replace Jean Shiomoto, the DMV director. The Director of DMV has lost my confidence and trust, Padilla wrote. In all, the agency revealed that 589 mailed voter registration records that should have been processed under election deadlines werent sent to Californias secretary of state until late November, including forms from 260 drivers who had intended to update their address on existing voter registration records. The DMV had been instructed to not send registration forms that came in after Oct. 22, but the voters in question had forms that were postmarked before the deadline. In some cases, when the postmark wasnt legible, the agency said, documents inside indicated the voter had intended to finish their registration in time for the Nov. 6 election. The DMV recognizes the pause in transmittals was an error and affected the timing of the registration of the 589 individuals referenced above relative to the November election, Shiomoto wrote in a letter to Padilla on Friday. The pause was due to a misunderstanding on the part of the department, for which we take responsibility. Those who were trying to update their address for voter registration would not have been blocked from casting ballots. But officials said its unclear whether any of the 329 new voters were able to participate in the election. Shiomoto said in her letter that DMV will work with elections officials. The errors were not related to previous DMV mistakes about registering voters, problems associated with the rollout of the states new motor voter law. In those cases, multiple registration forms were sent to local elections offices for some voters, some people were assigned the wrong political party preference and others who are noncitizens were incorrectly placed on the list of registered voters. DMV officials have yet to respond to questions posed by The Times over the last several weeks about who knew of those mistakes and when. Facebook

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Newsom appoints a labor advocate and a former staffer as his chief deputy Cabinet secretaries By Taryn Luna A labor advocate and a San Francisco political operative have accepted positions in Gov.-elect Gavin Newsoms new administration. Angie Wei, a Capitol insider with deep ties to organized labor in California, will serve as a chief deputy Cabinet secretary with a focus on policy development. As a legislative director and chief of staff at the California Labor Federation, Wei has represented more than 1,200 unions and 2.1 million workers in Capitol fights over a host of policy issues, including drug-pricing transparency and paid family leave. The governor-elect also tapped Jason Elliott, a policy advisor to Newsom during his time as mayor of San Francisco and a chief of staff to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, as another chief deputy Cabinet secretary overseeing executive branch operations. Elliott and Wei will serve under Ana Matosantos, Newsoms previouslyJohn McCain, with his irascible grin and fighter-pilot moxie, made a name for himself as an outspoken politician. He was at times bitingly funny, ruthlessly self-deprecating and eloquently patriotic.

Here are some quotes from the senator and former U.S. presidential candidate.

May 6, 1999, speech to the American Red Cross:

War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.

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From the 1999 book Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir by Sen. John McCain:

Steady strain, buddy, steady strain, we cautioned each other whenever we began to take a short view of our lives. It was best to take the long view. We would get home when we got home.

John McCain shakes hands while signing copies of his book Faith of My Fathers in Pasadena in September 2000. (Michael Caulfield / AP)

Feb. 19, 2000, after losing the South Carolina Republican primary:

I will not take the low road to the highest office in this land. I want the presidency in the best way, not the worst way.

July 2007, in response to a reporters question about his struggling bid for the Republican presidential nomination:

In the words of Chairman Mao, Its darkest before its totally black.

Sept 4, 2008, speech to the Republican National Convention accepting the partys presidential nomination:

I dont mind a good fight. For reasons known only to God, Ive had quite a few tough ones in my life. But I learned an important lesson along the way: In the end, it matters less that you can fight. What you fight for is the real test.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain acknowledges the crowed as he goes on stage at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., in 2008. (Paul Sancya / AP)

October 2008 at a town hall to a questioner who asked if his opponent for the White House, then-Sen. Barack Obama, was an Arab implying he was not American:

No, maam. No, maam. Hes a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and thats what this campaign is all about.

Aug. 2, 2017, interview on KFYI radio in Phoenix after his cancer diagnosis:

Look, I am the luckiest person that you will ever have on your show, ever. And I am very aware of that, and I am very happy. For a guy who stood at the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, weve come a hell of a long way.

Sept. 12, 2017, interview on how he hopes hes remembered:

He served his country, and not always right  made a lot of mistakes, made a lot of errors  but served his country, and I hope we can add, honorably.

Oct. 17, 2017, speech at National Constitution Center:

We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil. We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we dont. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldnt deserve to.

View all our coverage of John McCain (1936-2018) John McCain lived most of his life in the public eye, surviving war, torture, scandal, political stardom and failure, the enmity of some colleagues and the election of President Trump.

Even brain cancer didnt seem to scare McCain so much as it sobered and saddened him.

The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it, McCain wrote in his memoir, referencing a line from his favorite book, the Ernest Hemingway war novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. I hate to leave.

Heres a look at public moments that made McCain.

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PRISONER OF WAR

McCain became a public figure at age 31 when his bed-bound image was broadcast from North Vietnam in 1967. The North Vietnamese had figured out that he was the son and grandson of famous American military men  a crown prince, they called him. He was offered an early release, but refused. McCains captors beat him until he confessed, an episode that first led to shame  and then discovery. McCain has written that thats when he learned to trust not just his legacy but his own judgment  and his resilience.

Less than a decade after his March 1973 release, McCain was elected to the House as a Republican from Arizona. In 1986, voters there sent him to the Senate.

In this undated file photo, Navy Lt. Cmdr. John McCain lies injured in North Vietnam. (CBS via AP)

THE KEATING FIVE

He called it my asterisk and the worst mistake of his life.

At issue was a pair of 1987 meetings between McCain, four other senators and regulators to get the government to back off a key campaign donor. Charles Keating Jr. wanted McCain and Democratic Sens. Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, Alan Cranston of California, John Glenn of Ohio and Don Riegle of Michigan to get government auditors to stop pressing Keatings Lincoln Savings and Loan Assn. All five denied improper conduct. McCain was cleared of all charges but found to have exercised poor judgment.

His honor was being questioned and thats nothing that he takes lightly, said Mark Salter, McCains biographer and coauthor of his new memoir, The Restless Wave.

THE SENATE

McCain became his partys leading voice on matters of war, national security and veterans  and eventually became chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He worked with a Democrat, Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, to rewrite the nations campaign-finance laws. He voted for the Iraq War and supported the 2007 surge of forces there even as his own sons served or prepared to serve. But there was one thing that wasnt as widely known about him: McCain, owner of a ranch in Arizona that is in the flight path of 500 species of migratory birds, became concerned about the environment.

People associate John with defense and national security, as well they should. But he also had a great concern for and love of the environment, said Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who traveled to the ends of the earth with McCain  to the Arctic Circle in 2004 and Antarctica two years later  on fact-finding missions related to climate change. Back on McCains Arizona ranch, the senator gave Collins an extensive nature tour of the property. I particularly remember his love for the birds, Collins said. He loved the birds.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) holds up an article from the Washington Times during a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs on Capitol Hill in Washington in June 1992. (John Duricka / AP)

THE STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS

McCain in the 2000 election did something new: He toured New Hampshire on a bus laden with doughnuts and reporters that stopped at town hall meetings where voters were invited to exchange views with the candidate. The bus was called the Straight Talk Express, and thats what he promised to deliver at the town halls. The whole thing was messy, unscripted and often hilarious. And ultimately the events reintroduced McCain to voters as candid and authentic, just a year after President Bill Clinton was acquitted of lying to Congress and obstruction.

In New Hampshire that year, McCain defeated George W. Bush in an 18-point blowout, only to be pushed out of the race in South Carolina. But the town halls remained a fond McCain memory.

The town halls were festivals of politics, Salter said. They were so authentic and open and honest.

Confetti falls on Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his wife, Cindy, at the end of their 114th New Hampshire town hall meeting with voters in Peterborough, N.H., in January 2000. (Stephan Savoia / AP)

NO MAAM

McCain, in 2008 making his second run for president, quickly intervened when a woman in Lakeville, Minn., stood at a town hall event and began to make disparaging remarks about Democratic presidential nominee and then-Sen. Barack Obama. Hes an Arab, she said, implying he was not an American.

No maam, McCain said, taking the microphone from her. Hes a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and thats what this campaign is all about. Hes not.

It was a defining moment for McCain as a leader, a reflection of his thinking that partisans should disagree without demonizing each other. But it reflected McCains reckoning with the fear pervading his party of Obama, who would go on to become the nations first black president.

Bad blood between McCain and Trump lingered, even as Arizona Republican neared the end of his life 

CANCER

McCain last year was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the same aggressive cancer that had felled his friend, Sen. Edward Kennedy, in 2009.

Friends and family say he understood the gravity of the diagnosis  but quickly turned to the speech he wanted to give on the Senate floor urging his colleagues to shed the partisanship that had produced gridlock. Face scarred and bruised from surgery, he pounded the lectern. Some of the sternest members of the Senate hugged him, tears in their eyes.

Of all of the things that have happened in this mans life, of all of the times that his life could have ended in the ways it could have ended, this (cancer) is by far one of the least threats to him and thats kind of how he views it, his son, Jack McCain, told the Arizona Republic in January.

HEALTHCARE VOTE

Republicans, driven by Trump, were one vote away from advancing a repeal of Obamas healthcare law. Then McCain, scarred from brain surgery, swooped into the Senate chamber and, facing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, dramatically held up his hand.

The thumb flicked down. Gasps could be heard throughout the staid chamber. McConnell stood motionless, arms crossed.

Trumps campaign promise  and the premiere item on his agenda  was dead.

TRUMP

McCain tangled with Trump, who never served in the military, for years.

As a candidate, Trump in 2016 claimed the decorated McCain is only considered a war hero because he had been captured. Hes not a war hero, Trump said at an event in Iowa. I like people who werent captured. Shortly before election day in 2016, McCain said he would rather cast his vote for another Republican, someone whos qualified to be president. Trump fumed, without using McCains name, that the senator is the only reason the Affordable Care Act stands.

McCain responded: I have faced tougher adversaries.Shared moments in the American conversation often revolve, when not around tragedy or triumph, around some sort of moment of nostalgia  some sense that time is marching on.

Time, and the end of an important era in politics, certainly seems present in so much of whats being said about the death of Arizona Sen. John McCain.

AUTHENTICITY

McCain, the heir to a naval familys proud history who found his calling in the Senate but not the nations highest office, died Saturday at the age of 81. Few can dispute that the self-described Republican maverick became a political icon.

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As irascible and curmudgeonly as he could be, he was real, said Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan campaign analyst. There was an authenticity.

It took little time for political leaders across the spectrum to offer their praise for the late senator.

That historic moment on the Senate floor last summer  a dramatic moment that resulted in the defeat of President Trumps healthcare bill  was only one of a number of memorable moments in the McCain story. Remember, too, his polite but firm rejection of a supporter in 2008 calling former President Barack Obama an Arab.

Longtime politics watcher Doyle McManus summed up the war hero-turned-politicians legacy this way: The test of character, he argued, was whether you owned up to your errors and spurred yourself to do better.

AND NOW

The frosty relationship between McCain and Trump was well chronicled  and the presidents brief Saturday tweet of condolence was the extent of his comments  but what happens next will be important.

McCains passing raises the question of whether any other Senate Republicans will take up his cause in challenging the president.

The senior senators seat will be filled, until the next election, through an appointment by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. But the states other seat in the Senate will be filled in an election that now swirls with the memory of McCain and the thorny problem of Trump.

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POLITICS LIGHTNING ROUND

-- The Trump administration is appealing a judges preliminary injunction against family separation, saying it would not derail the effort to reunify hundreds of migrant children who remain apart from their parents or guardian as a result of the zero-tolerance immigration policy.

-- Shelters serving immigrants often lock horns with immigration authorities, but El Pasos Annunciation House and Customs and Border Protection have formed an unusual partnership.

-- Trump stepped up his attacks against Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions on Saturday and appears to be laying the groundwork to fire the nations top law enforcement official.

-- Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, the embattled Orange County congressman, said Friday that Sessions should resign.

-- On Saturday more than 100 activists in Chicago gathered to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the antiwar protests, and the brutal police response, at the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

-- In a move aimed at getting past the acrimony from the 2016 presidential primary, the Democratic National Committee voted Saturday to dramatically reduce the role of superdelegates in choosing its next presidential nominee.

-- A federal judge has blocked key provisions of a series of Trump administration executive orders aimed at making it easier to fire federal employees and weaken their labor unions.

SACRAMENTO: FIVE DAYS TO THE FINAL GAVEL

When the two houses of the California Legislature convene in a few hours, theyll be up against the ultimate deadline: Friday night marks, by law, the end of the two-year session in Sacramento.

There are hundreds of bills left to weigh  and a key deadline on Tuesday night for final bill language, thanks to a voter-approved change to the process  but keep an eye on three topics above all others.

First, no topic seems higher on the list than some kind of changes to wildfire preparedness regulations. While some lawmakers want to focus on quickly and effectively removing trees and fire-prone brush, the real fight is an effort to allow electric utility companies to include money from their customers in the final solution for cash damages when companies equipment is involved. Well see actual legislative language by Tuesday.

Next, theres police accountability. Legislation to address the killing of civilians by law enforcement officers was significantly scaled back on Friday, but the proposal still faces a tough slog to get onto Gov. Jerry Browns desk.

Finally, theres the battle of powerful interest groups over an effort to impose California-based net neutrality rules. Two proposals by California legislators would establish the strongest such rules in the country, and telecommunications companies are fighting tooth and nail to stop them before the final gavel falls on Friday night.

One other major topic  an end to cash bail in courtrooms across the state  was settled by the Legislature last week and now is on its way to the governors desk.

Our team in the Sacramento bureau will be watching these and a number of other bills all week; follow the latest action on our Essential Politics news feed.

TODAYS ESSENTIALS

-- The saga of Rep. Duncan Hunter played out on so many fronts in recent days, after a federal grand jury indicted him and his wife, Margaret Hunter, on charges of illegally using campaign cash for personal expenses. Hunter has since laid some of the blame on his wife, while the San Diego Republicans fellow military veterans are now taking a second look at his action.

-- And no, the fact that Hunters constituents cant write in a replacement candidate on Nov. 6 isnt an unintended consequence of the states top-two primary. It was a planned change to the law almost a decade ago.

-- Republican state Sen. Joel Anderson is facing a legislative investigation after a female lobbyist accused him of threatening to bitch slap her and harassing her at a Capitol-area bar, sources say.

-- Immigrants living in California who are not U.S. citizens could be appointed to public boards and commissions under a bill passed in the state Legislature Friday.

-- With marijuana legalized by the states voters, Californians with past convictions for cannabis-related offenses would get state help in expunging their records under a bill sent by lawmakers to the governor.

-- Brown must soon take action on a bill that would require water or milk as the primary choices for childrens meals in some California restaurants, an effort designed to combat the health effects of sugary drinks.

-- And yes, the governor must also weigh in on whether plastic straws in many restaurants should only be provided only upon request.

LOGISTICS

Essential Politics is published Monday and Friday.

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Please send thoughts, concerns and news tips to politics@latimes.com.

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john.myers@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter at @johnmyers and listen to the weekly California Politics PodcastAn Assembly committee has rejected former Assemblyman Matt Dababnehs appeal of a legislative investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, upholding the probes original findings that he more likely than not exposed himself to a lobbyist in a hotel bathroom.

Sacramento lobbyist Pamela Lopez said in December that Dababneh forced her into a Las Vegas hotel suite bathroom during a party in 2016, masturbated in front of her and urged her to touch him. Dababneh denied the allegation but resigned days later, saying the accusation damaged his ability to work effectively in the Legislature.

Preliminary findings by an independent investigator hired by the Assembly Rules Committee substantiated Lopezs allegation in June. The conclusion was based on interviews with Lopez and more than 50 witnesses. Dababneh also participated in the investigation.

Dababneh appealed the conclusion days later, according to documents reviewed by The Times. He argued that he had been denied a fair evaluation of the complaint made against him. The appeal lodged a number of objections to the investigation and its findings, including that Dababneh did not have the chance to respond to evidence against him, and that witnesses who could attest to his character had not been contacted.

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The Assembly Rules Committee denied Dababnehs appeal Friday, according to documents released Monday.

So far, it seems like the process has worked as it should, Lopez said. I was sexually harassed by Dababneh. The Legislature substantiated that claim and then denied his appeal. The Legislature has opined twice that my claim is substantiated.

A spokeswoman for Dababneh, Elana Weiss of public relations firm the Rose Group, said the Assembly investigation lacked transparency.

We received a one-sentence explanation as to why the appeal was denied, Weiss said. We are completely perplexed why the investigation report will not be publicly shared. Mr. Dababneh calls on the Assembly to release the full report because he has nothing to hide. From the beginning, he has always said he welcomed a transparent and open investigation, and thats why he wants the report released immediately.

Two weeks ago, Dababneh filed a defamation suit against Lopez in Sacramento County Superior Court, accusing the lobbyist of making false allegations and intentionally inflicting emotional harm.

Ex-Assemblyman Matt Dababneh, under legislative investigation on sexual misconduct allegations, sues lobbyist for defamation 

Dababneh was one of several lawmakers accused of sexual misconduct last fall, as the #MeToo movement propelled complaints of harassment in California politics into the limelight.

Two other legislators, Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra (D-Pacoima) and state Sen. Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia), stepped down after public allegations of inappropriate behavior. A third lawmaker, Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles) had been the subject of two sexual harassment complaints when he stepped down in December, citing health reasons.

California assemblyman accused of forcing lobbyist into bathroom and masturbating 

melanie.mason@latimes.com

Follow @melmason on Twitter for the latest on California politics.

UPDATES:

4:45 p.m. This article was updated with comments from Lopez and Dababneh.

This article was originally published at 3:45 p.m.Skies have been sooty over the state Capitol for weeks, soiled by Northern California wildfires. Its a daily reminder for legislators and Gov. Jerry Brown about what their top priority should be.

Its to enact laws that vastly improve Californias ability to prevent wildfires, and to douse them before they roar out of control.

Governments No. 1 responsibility, after all, is public safety.

From The Times news bureau on the 17th floor of an office building near the Capitol, one normally can clearly see intriguing Mount Diablo 54 miles to the southwest. But we havent spotted it since mid-July because a dirty blanket of smoke has covered everything between us and the San Francisco Bay Area.

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So far this year, wildfires have blackened 1.1 million acres in the state, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. A hellish Mendocino Complex fire burned across four counties and became the largest in state history, charring 422,000 acres.

Wildfires this year have destroyed or damaged nearly 2,200 structures, mostly homes, and killed at least 12 people.

And we havent even reached what traditionally has been Californias peak fire season, September and October, when devilish Santa Ana winds whip up blazes that scorch the Southland.

Fire season has become almost year-round in California, were told by experts. They say this will be the new normal because of global warming, aggravated by the recent four-year drought that parched woodlands and turned vegetation into kindling.

Therefore the Legislature needs to pass bills that substantially improve Californias fire prevention and firefighting capabilities beyond modest steps taken in the current state budget. Lawmakers and the governor have been working on it, but are still debating.

Now time is running out. They face a Friday midnight deadline for adjournment of the two-year legislative session.

The expectation is that were going to have legislation thats meaningful and productive, says Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara), who sits on a two-house conference committee that is writing the Legislatures centerpiece bill. Everyone wants to see this happen.

For Jackson its personal, as it is with several legislators touched by fire. Decembers Thomas fire, which until this summer was the largest in state history, stopped one mile short of her Santa Barbara home.

More from George Skelton 

We were evacuated for six days, she recalls. We breathed smoke for 40 days. I had trouble breathing. It took quite a lot of time to be able to breathe normally.

Jackson has four bills awaiting action on the Assembly floor.

One would allow homeowners and businesses to use property tax payments to finance replacement of fire hazards such as wood shingle roofs. People already can do that to pay for energy or water efficiency upgrades.

Another measure would assure that homeowner insurance policies cover mudslides, such as the ones that devastated Montecito after the Thomas fire.

Jackson also has a bill to prod federal, state and local agencies into closer cooperation on forest management. And one of her proposals would allow counties to automatically enroll all residents in a mobile phone emergency alert program. Now people must voluntarily sign up.

Sen. Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg), whose district was charred last year by the wine country fires, has a bill on the Assembly floor to require a statewide, uniform alert system to warn citizens of rampaging wildfires. Hed use not only cellphones, but landlines, television, radio and electronic billboards  like Amber Alerts.

We have the technology, McGuire says. Now we need the will to get this legislation passed. We still have some fight in front of us.

Coverage of California politics 

The Legislatures big bill  its most comprehensive  is the conference committees product. A co-chairman is Sen. Bill Dodd (D-Napa), another wine country lawmaker who is under hometown pressure to produce. On Friday, he proposed an outline of legislation.

For weeks the committee has focused on private utilities efforts to reduce financial liability when fires are ignited by their equipment, such as falling power lines. The utilities finally gave up, but Dodds proposal offered a little help.

Under the plan, the California Public Utilities Commission could allow a utility to raise customer rates to repay long-term bonds sold to finance liabilities from a catastrophic wildfire.

Dodd and committee members asserted they empathized with ratepayers, but needed to protect utilities from bankruptcy. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has warned it could go bankrupt because of billions of dollars in wildfire liabilities.

We want to protect ratepayers, but we dont want the utilities to go broke, Assemblyman Chad Mayes (R-Yucca Valley) said. Theres a balance.

Lawmakers repeatedly insisted they werent bailing out the utilities. But ratepayer interests werent buying it.

This looks like a bailout, smells like a bailout and certainly feels like a bailout, Michael Shaw of the California Manufacturers and Technology Assn. told the committee.

The proposed legislation has a lot of other meat in it.

Theres regulatory streamlining for landowners who want to remove dead trees and flammable underbrush. Theres also financial incentives for burning wood waste in biomass energy plants.

The state would spend $250 million annually from its greenhouse gas reduction fund for forest management.

And theres money to more quickly move firefighters, helicopters and other equipment into blazes when they first erupt in an effort to douse them early.

Legislators will probably pass some modestly significant stuff.

Theyre starting to see the light through the soot.

george.skelton@latimes.com

Follow @LATimesSkelton on TwitterMarijuana may be losing its image as a dangerous drug, but mounting research suggests women should steer clear of it if they are pregnant or breastfeeding, according to new recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The advice comes as more than half of the states, including California, have legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use. Growing acceptance of the drug has made it seem harmless, or even beneficial. As a result, doctors fret that more and more babies are being exposed to the drug.



For the record: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that no states require marijuana to carry safety warnings for pregnant women. At least six states do require such labeling.

The march toward legalization has outpaced scientific research about marijuanas health effects. Because it is a Schedule 1 drug  one with potential for abuse and no approved medical use  studies have been limited by federal law.

But in a detailed review of existing safety data, researchers cited concerns about marijuanas effect on childrens short-term growth and long-term neurological development. Their findings were published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

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Women should definitely be counseled that its not a good idea to use marijuana while pregnant, said Dr. Seth Ammerman, a clinical professor of pediatrics at Stanford who worked on the report.

In addition, he said, if youre breastfeeding, we would encourage you to cut back or quit. However, if a new mother is not able or willing to do so, she should continue nursing. The benefits of breastfeeding would outweigh the potential exposure to the infant, he said.

A second report, also published in Pediatrics, found that THC, the molecule responsible for most of marijuanas psychoactive effects, accumulates in breast milk for up to six days after the mothers last use.

The findings come as marijuana use among pregnant women is rising. Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health show that the proportion of pregnant women who said they used marijuana in the past month increased from 2.4% in 2002 to 3.9% in 2014, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. A separate JAMA report of pregnant women treated at Kaiser Permanente medical offices in Northern California found that marijuana use by pregnant women jumped from 4% in 2009 to 7% in 2016.

In studies of urban, young and socioeconomically disadvantaged pregnant women, 15% to 28% reported using the drug, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Unlike for alcohol and cigarettes, marijuana may not carry a safety warning for pregnant women, even when it is sold legally. California requires safety warnings, but many other states do not.

Theres a myth out there that its benign. And for many adults who are sporadic users, thats probably true, Ammerman said. But when its used by women who are pregnant or nursing, it may be harmful.

Of particular concern, he said, is that the potency of THC in marijuana has more than quadrupled since 1983. Several of the largest studies on marijuana and health were conducted when potency was much lower, according to the academys new report.

Scientists have found that THC can cross the placenta and accumulate in the brain and fat of a growing fetus. The limited studies available suggest that prenatal exposure to marijuana could interfere with childrens executive functioning, causing problems with concentration, attention, impulse control and problem-solving.

Nonetheless, online mothers groups are filled with women touting the benefits of using marijuana during pregnancy, citing the drug as a remedy for the nausea of morning sickness.

Cannabis dispensaries are another source of dubious information. A study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, for example, found that nearly 70% of dispensaries in Colorado recommended marijuana to treat morning sickness during the first trimester despite a lack of evidence that marijuana use is safe or indicated for morning sickness. The worst nausea occurs during the first trimester, when the developing fetus might be most vulnerable to the effects of substances like THC.

As health professionals, we need to educate women that there are a lot of concerns both for the fetus and for later development, said Kelly Young-Wolff, a research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, who was not involved in the new Pediatrics reports.

But convincing women of the dangers of cannabis use during pregnancy can be challenging  especially when theyve already decided that using it is safe.

On Facebook, the group Stoner Moms has more than 22,000 followers. And the Glow Nurture pregnancy app has several community groups devoted to marijuana users, including 420 Friendly, Ganja Mommies and CannaMoms.

The conversations are filled with women asking not whether marijuana could be harmful, but whether smoking it could lead to a visit from Child Protective Services.

A lot of the public equates legalization with some kind of endorsement of safety, said Dr. Dana Gossett, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UC San Francisco. Of course, thats not true.

When she counsels patients to avoid marijuana, Gossett said, she runs into a fair amount of indifference.

Pregnancy is often a time when women are receptive to changing their habits for the sake of their growing baby. But while they generally accept that cigarette smoking is dangerous  thats been clear since the 1960s  they often view marijuana as natural, and therefore harmless.

Just because something is plant-based or natural doesnt make it safe, Gossett said. Arsenic, she added, is also a natural substance.

Gold is a senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent publication of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

karen.kaplan@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter @LATkarenkaplan and like Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.A 19-year-old man who died after a crash with a semi-truck on the 405 Freeway last week was identified as Bryan Omar Herrera of Huntington Beach, the Los Angeles County coroners office said Monday.

Herrera was heading north in the No. 3 lane at an unknown speed when his 2017 Honda Accord hit the rear of the trucks trailer at 12:41 a.m. Thursday north of the Goldenwest Street exit, according to the California Highway Patrol.

He was taken to Long Beach Memorial Medical Center with major injuries and died soon after.

The driver of the 1998 Kenworth semi-truck, a 31-year-old Pomona resident, was uninjured, the CHP said.

Daily Pilot staff writer Miranda Andrade contributed to this report.

Priscella.Vega@latimes.com

Twitter: @vegapriscellaIt stands as a vivid marker of my childhood: the 1952 Kern County earthquake.

In those days we called it the Bakersfield quake. At the time, my family lived on Balboa Island, approximately 159 miles south of the epicenter, but we felt it.

The quake struck at 4:52 a.m. July 21. It registered 7.3 on the Moment Magnitude Scale (MMS).

My dad, a milkman, left for work 90 minutes before the quake hit. I was 7, my brother, Bill, 5, and our sister, Judi, 8 months. We lived in a second-story apartment behind our grandparents home.

Things began to rock and roll and we flew from our beds and met in the living room. With things still shaking, we ran out to the front porch (who knows why?).

Sitting on the islands sandy alluvium, our apartment swayed as though intoxicated.

The small town of Tehachapi, near the epicenter, was heavily damaged. Eleven people died. Though the quake was felt throughout Orange County, damage was minimal. Still, it was my introduction to quakes, and Ive never forgotten it.

We had duck-and-cover drills throughout my elementary and junior high years, but not for earthquakes. They were intended to protect us from Russian nukes.

I personally experienced hundreds of small and moderate tremors over the years.

At some point during high school I recall the emergence of a new expression, The Big One. The term was applied to an inevitable massive California quake with a magnitude of 8-plus  situated somewhere along the San Andreas Fault.

As an Orange Coast College freshman in 1962, I went to the library to do research for a term paper. I sat down and noticed a book about earthquakes sitting on the table.

I picked it up and, for the next four hours, read it cover to cover. It was like eating un-shelled peanuts. I couldnt stop. When finished, I wished I hadnt read it at all. I felt a prisoner to earthquake country.

Ive thought about quakes virtually every day since the Kern County temblor of 52. Thats 66 years.

Some scientists are hinting that the recent increased seismic activity along the Pacifics Ring of Fire  a 25,000-mile ring that produces 90% of the worlds earthquakes  suggest a quake may be in the offing for California. Were told were overdue. It could, at long last, be our Big One.

Or not.

For 66 years authority figures have pounded into my skull the propinquity and inevitability of The Big One. Good intentions aside, Ive grown weary of their yammering. I no longer want to waste time jumping at shadows.

I remember the 1960s, when alarmists predicted California would break off into the Pacific. A guy I worked with packed his wife and kid in a V.W. and moved to Utah. Hope it worked out for him.

Newspaper maps regularly show fault lines running beneath my house. I refuse to fret. Why waste energy obsessing about events that could  but likely wont  happen?

I have a few exceptions to my contrarian views. Whenever I attend a game at the Coliseum, Angel Stadium or Rose Bowl a single thought pops into my consciousness: What if things begin to shake?

I spend maybe 10 seconds planning an exit route. Its only prudent.

I remember a concert Hedy and I attended in a crowded hall. Early in the program I glanced about planning our escape route when suddenly it dawned on me: What am I doing? This is Vienna. Were 10,000 miles from the San Andreas.

I could relax, though the rickety 19th century structure could have collapsed in a heap anyway.

Whenever the media trot out seismologist Lucy M. Jones, I roll my eyes. Time to scare us again. Known as The Earthquake Lady, Jones is reputed to be one of the top earthquake experts on the planet.

God love her, but she frightens me.

Im an inherent optimist, she told a Los Angeles Times reporter, and then ballyhooed the prospect of a giant California quake  coming sooner rather than later.

No comfort there.

Can you appreciate the fact that forecasters have been badgering me for 66 years?

Im done.

The only problem?

One day theyll be right.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.A nonprofit run by two brothers has delivered more than 250 bicycles to orphans across the globe and on Wednesday brought their efforts home with the donation of bikes, helmets and locks to 17 local foster youth.

Bikes 4 Orphans, created by brothers Shawnt and Sebouh Bazikian while attending St. Francis High School in 2012, was founded on the wish to raise enough money to purchase and deliver new bicycles to orphans in six different countries, including Kenya and Armenia.

When a supporting member associated with the All Saints Church Foster Care Project in Pasadena suggested the brothers direct their work toward American foster youth  who often struggle with basic transportation daily  Shawnt Bazikian said he had to act.

We thought that this was kind of a similar situation with the orphans in the other countries [that weve previously helped] and there is a real problem here, Shawnt Bazkian said. The more research we did, the more we wanted to help out these foster students.

According to the Alliance for Childrens Rights, there are 28,000 foster children in Los Angeles County and only about 58% make it out of high school. Of those, just 3% graduate from college.

The brothers were referred to CSU Northridges Resilient Scholars program, which helps emancipated foster youth succeed during their enrollment at the school. Seventeen students there were identified as in need of the wheeled transportation and given new bicycles, helmets and locks.

The kids were unbelievably grateful and appreciative, you could really see the smiles on their faces, Shawnt Bazikian said. One of the students birthdays was the day before, so it was like a special treat for him.

There were 15 students at the event and the remaining two who could not attend were later delivered their bikes.

Kevin Taylor, representing Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcettis office, awarded the nonprofit group with a certificate of appreciation at the delivery event.

The money for the bicycles came from year-round fundraising during events such as a bike-a-thon, as well as from general donations. Bikes were purchased at cost from Velo Pasadena Bicycle Shop, which helped with delivery and also donated funds to the nonprofit. Bike manufacturer Felt Bicycles also sold the group some bikes at a discounted cost.

The nonprofit Focus on Children Now, based in Reseda, donated locks and helmets.

We think the bikes can really help with a means of transportation and give them the motivation and independence they might need to continue with their education, Shawnt Bazkian said. Not too many of these students have much and we think that if they really own something and they can really care for it, it becomes a part of their daily lives.

For more information and to learn about future events the nonprofit plans, visit bikes4orphans.com.

jeff.landa@latimes.com

Twitter: @JeffLandaMembers of a local business womens organization brought their flair for creativity to the groups recent installation luncheon.

A handful of members took part in a cake-decorating competition during the Verdugo Glen Chapter of the American Business Womens Assn.s 54th Night of Celebration at the Glendale Elks Lodge.

After President Ardis Bazyn welcomed everyone, member Lori Hartwell described the contest rules.

Contestants were to design a cake recognizing someone who inspires them.

Those competing were Teri Chandler, Lisa Swain, Cindy Cadell-Isaac and Marty Preciado.

Chandler won with her design inspired by Avon Products founder, David H. McConnell.

He inspired me because he believed that women in the 19th century needed a chance at financial freedom, she said. He gave women the opportunity to create and operate their own businesses, which would be later known as direct sales.

Sharon Jaeger-Eklund conducted the ceremony to install the officers. They are Barbara Williams, president, Torrey Bogest, vice president, Linda Hammell, recording secretary, Swain, corresponding secretary, and Chandler, treasurer.

Bazyn expressed her appreciation to the outgoing board members for another successful year.

Preciado introduced the 2017 scholarship winners. They are Christina Leon, Elizabeth Leon, Adrianna Ochoa, Jennifer Ochoa and Daniela Ruvalcaba.

Anne Marie Johnson, outgoing vice president, presented the Woman of the Year pin to Kandice Astamendi and the chapter Top Ten Woman of the Year nominee plaque to Bazyn.

Night of bingo games is paradise

Members and friends of the Kiwanis Club of Glendale enjoyed a mini-island adventure during the recent Bingo in Paradise fundraiser that meshed perfectly with President Patricia Larrigans year-long theme, The Spirit of Aloha.

Most guests were dressed in Hawaiian attire, and the decorations were appropriate as well throughout the Glendale Elks Lodge.

Each of the more than 200 attendees was greeted with a lei as they entered paradise.

The evening began with sandwiches, chips, cookies and camaraderie before the bingo games began.

Members of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars volunteered to run the event as a thank-you to the Kiwanis Club of Glendale for all it does in the community.

Ten games were called using a high-tech electronic bingo system with a large lighted board, and bonus mini-games were inserted in between to add to the fun.

Big winners were Jenny Schwing, Ramon Marquez, Carvel Gay, Norm Leduc, Jane Karageorge, Kathy Van Houten, Becci Neville, Cathy Keen and Marietta Mora.

Kiwanis International has clubs in 80 countries around the world. The Kiwanis Club of Glendale supports the Glendale Salvation Army, the Glendale YWCA, Ascencia homeless services, Glendale Educational Foundation, the Campbell Center, Glendale Unified School District, Crescenta Valley Special Olympics and many other organizations.

For membership information, contact Miryam Finkelberg, Division 3 membership chair, at villamirylou@gmail.com.

JOYCE RUDOLPH can be reached at rudolphjoyce10@gmail.com.Church Women United of Glendale promoted a further-reaching take on peace during the annual World Community Day observance earlier this month at Salem Lutheran Church.

The organization is made up of women from different church denominations in Glendale, Montrose and Burbank, said Karil Drake, recording secretary.

The groups purpose is to help those in need while providing members a place to build friendships and share their spiritual journey.

In addition to the local city unit, there are state and national levels. The national organization came up with the ecumenical service theme Kindling New Fires for Peace with the philosophy that in todays world of digital technology and social media, members have an increased ability to communicate with people of denominations other than Christian, such as Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish.

The thought is to create an inclusive community and work toward kindling new fires toward peace.

Guest speaker Sharon Heck, a member of the Regional Lutheran Womens Board, talked about her passion for many years, which is Peace with Justice. She said she believes in taking action to bring peace and justice to everyone.

This can be accomplished through direct service to feed the hungry and shelter and clothe those in need as well as advocate by writing to elected officials to create just laws that help the neediest in society.

The highlight of the day was the presentation of a check for $1,995 to the Salvation Armys Meals on Wheels program. The funds were raised during the 40th annual Salad Bar Luncheon held in July at the First United Methodist Church of Glendale.

Lillian Simons, president of Church Women United of Glendale, presented the check to Glendale Salvation Army Lt. Jennifer Shiflett.

Additional projects of the Glendale unit are making financial donations to the American Leprosy Mission, providing paper goods to YWCAs domestic violence shelter and collecting magazines for waiting rooms at Olive View Hospital.

A special guest attending was the Rev. Mildred Butler, state president of Church Women United.

The groups future events are May Friendship Day at 10:30 a.m. on May 11 at Crescenta Valley United Methodist Church; Meals on Wheels Salad Bar Luncheon from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on July 24 at First United Methodist Church; and the World Community Day at 10:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 at Salem Lutheran Church.

The group also donates funds to the CropWalk, which will be on March 4. It begins and ends at Incarnation Catholic Church and travels in a circle along Brand Boulevard. The CropWalk was started by Church World Services to raise funds for local and national charities.

Tree lighting held in memory of Jack Kabateck

Adventist Health Glendale Foundation is dedicating its annual tree-lighting ceremony to the memory of dedicated community volunteer, the late Jack Kabateck.

The event will be held at 5:30 p.m. Dec. 7 in the West Tower Lobby of Adventist Health Glendale, 1509 Wilson Terrace.

Kabateck passed away in 2014. Along with his wife, Glady, Jack Kabateck had served with the Glendale Symphony Orchestra Assn., Glendale-La Crescenta chapter of the American Red Cross and Glendale Rotary Noon Club.

The annual Light Up a Life event is a tradition celebrated throughout the country to increase the awareness and support of hospice care.

Funds raised during this local observation will go to Adventist Health Glendales hospice services and Beyond Loss bereavement support programs.

The public can honor or memorialize a loved one by donating at one of four tribute-gift levels.

For more information, call (818) 409-8055.

Boy Scout Council honors Hometown Heroes

Four local residents will be recognized during the annual Hometown Heroes Dinner, presented by the Verdugo Hills Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

The event will be on Dec. 7 at the La Canada Country Club.

Those being honored are Robin Goldsworthy, publisher of the Crescenta Valley Weekly; Glendale police officer Michele Gonzalez; retired Lt. Col. David Worley of the U.S. Air Force, who is the administrator of the Crescenta Valley High Schools Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program; and Burbank resident and Vietnam War veteran Mickey DePalo, who is president of the Burbank Veterans Committee and was named the 2017 Veteran of the Year for the state 43rd Assembly district.

Tickets are $60. Reservation deadline is Monday.

To purchase tickets or become a sponsor, call (818) 243-6282, Ext. 114, or email Dede.Mueller@Scouting.org.

JOYCE RUDOLPH can be reached at rudolphjoyce10@gmail.com.The new planned community of Montrose was such a success that, in 1915, two years after it opened, homeowners presented the developer with a silver cup to thank him for his vision in laying out the hillside streets.

Those same streets were the setting for the well-known 1950 film noir Gun Crazy.

Heres the back story: On Feb. 22, 1913, 4,000-plus prospective buyers arrived on horseback  or on horse-drawn vehicles  for the opening of the 300-acre project developed by Robert A. Walton and J. Frank Walters.

Walton, a Southerner who moved to this area after serving in the Army, had previously been a junior partner in the Frederick A. Holmes real estate company.

After Holmes retired, Walton continued the business as Holmes-Walton Co.

He and his new partner, Walters, placed a large display ad in the Feb. 21, 1913, Glendale News to inform readers that Montrose, a few minutes ride up Foothill Boulevard from Glendale, is right at the junction of the Verdugo, La Crescenta and La Canada valleys.

The ad was also directed to land speculators: Be prepared to buy a lot or two. Youve made money on your holdings in Glendale. Youll make a bigger profit if you buy at the opening prices of Montrose.

The streets, laid out in a circular pattern leading from the broad curve of Montrose Avenue, were built wide to accommodate planned street-car tracks that were to extend an existing line from Verdugo Park in Glendale to La Crescenta Avenue.

Although Montrose was to be the main shopping street, the shops never really materialized.

Carroll W. Parcher wrote in the 1957 Glendale Area History that an age-old law regarding the preferences of shoppers was rediscovered  shoppers dont care to walk uphill to visit stores.

Instead, level Honolulu Avenue became the main shopping street.

Later, those small, individually owned shops on Honolulu provided the perfect location for the 1950 movie, Gun Crazy. (Read more about the movie below.)

After his success with Montrose, Walton developed parts of La Crescenta and Oakdale (later Verdugo City).

In 1915, he was honored by the citizens with a silver cup, thanking him for making their town and their railroad a reality, as noted in the June 2017 issue of the Crescenta Valley Historical Societys Ledger.

Flash forward to May 2017 when the Crescenta Valley Chamber of Commerce was contacted by an antique dealer in Maine who had just purchased the cup.

Recognizing its historic value, the dealer offered to return the artifact to its geographical home. After local experts verified the cups authenticity, members of the community  along with members of the Valley Automotive Group  raised the necessary funds.

Upon arrival, the cup was displayed at a historical society meeting and a Silent Movie Night at Two Strike Park in August.

It will be placed in a protective case after some necessary conservation measures are completed.

Society President Michael Morgan, who provided much of the information about the cup, emailed his thoughts on the outcome.

This story has been embraced by the community. It meant a lot to them to bring this 102-year-old cup back home. Each week, people would come up and ask how close are we to reaching our goal. he wrote. Not much up here in Montrose in 1915, so this artifact is very important.



Readers Write:

The streets of downtown Montrose provided the setting for the 1950 film, Gun Crazy, best known for its three-minute, one-take shot of a bank robbery, filmed without cuts from the back seat of the bank robbers car.

It gives a great glimpse of what the village looked like then, according to information provided by film historian Paul Ayers for a March 2, 2007, Verdugo Views column about the movie.

The scene opens on Verdugo Road, with the car going north, then turning onto Broadview Drive.

A fast right up Market Street, past the back of the Anawalt (ex-Montrose Railway) shed, left onto westbound Honolulu, then to park at the corner of Honolulu and Ocean View Boulevard, where the bank is located. The male lead goes in to rob the bank and the female waits, Ayers said.

During this time, Ayers added, a street sign with the words Ocean View can be seen through the windshield. The female lead encounters a policeman, knocks him down as the male emerges and they take off, left onto southbound Ocean View, left on Broadview, then right onto Verdugo Road, where the scene ends.

Gun Crazy, part of this years Jewel City Noir film series, will be screened at 2 p.m. on Oct. 21 in the auditorium at the Downtown Central Library, 222 E. Harvard St. The free event is co-sponsored by the Friends of the Glendale Public Library and the Museum of Neon Art.

To RSVP, visit eventbrite.com and search for Jewel City Noir.

KATHERINE YAMADA can be reached at katherineyamada@gmail.com. or by mail at Verdugo Views, c/o Glendale News-Press, 202 W. First St., Second Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Please include your name, address and phone number.Ten Years Ago

Members of Flintridge Riding Club announced they were gearing up for its 85th birthday party, which would feature a picnic and family movie for members and their guests. The film selected for the event was The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit, a comedy featuring Dean Jones and Kurt Russell. The Disney flick was filmed at the local riding club in the 1960s.

Twenty Years Ago

Despite a nationwide fervor for the hit film Titanic, fewer than two dozen copies of the movies video sold at a midnight promotion held in conjunction with its release at the Blockbuster video store then located in the Trader Joes shopping center in La Canada. Happy with his experience that night, though, was 11-year-old Jerry Walsh, who told a reporter it felt good to be the first in line to make the late-night $27.05 purchase while his mom waited nearby in her car.

Thirty Years Ago

The citys public works director reported to the La Canada Flintridge City Council that Southern California Edison was on schedule under-grounding power lines in the commercial section of town, with all poles to be down along Foothill Boulevard between Verdugo Boulevard and Crown Avenue by the end of 1988.

Forty Years Ago

The missing i in the Paradise Canyon Elementary School letter signage mounted on the wall outside the main building, which had vanished three years earlier, was recovered by school secretary Ruth Magoffin. She found it in the planter directly underneath the sign.

Fifty Years Ago

Bill Berger, 13, a seventh-grade student at Foothill Intermediate School, was featured on the cover of the Valley Sun riding his unicycle and carrying a poster in support of the tongue-in-cheek 1968 presidential candidacy of comedian Pat Paulsen.

Sixty Years Ago

Vandals broke into the La Canada Junior High School library (a few years before the school was reconfigured and named Foothill Intermediate School) and ransacked the librarys main office, spilling books on the floor and pouring glue on the floor, in desk drawers and on a typewriter.

Compiled from the Valley Sun archives by Carol Cormaci.Monday morning found employees of La Canadas Coldwell Banker still in cleanup mode  after a senior citizen lost control of her vehicle Friday and drove through the businesss glass storefront  and feeling grateful no one got hurt in the incident.

Crescenta Valley Sheriffs Station deputies and members of Los Angeles County Fire Department responded to the 600 block of Foothill Boulevard after receiving a call from an informant at around 3:55 p.m. Friday, according to Lt. Gary Harman, a watch commander with the station.

An elderly female driving on a suspended license lost control of her vehicle and crashed into the window, Harman said Monday of the non-injury collision. It caused significant damage to the business.

Associate Manager Jo VonTiehl said she was working alone in the office when the car careened through the window and rammed into the reception area.

I just heard this thunderous roar  I thought it was an earthquake, she said Monday. Then I look out my door and see a car sitting in the reception area.

An employee who would have normally been at the reception desk was attending a staff appreciation event at the time of the crash, VonTiehl said.

It would have been horrific if shed been sitting there, she added.

An Infiniti G35, occupied by a 79-year-old driver and her friend, crashed into the La Canada Coldwell Banker office Friday, hitting a reception desk that would have been occupied had an employee not attended a special event that day. (Courtesy of Kathy Seuylemezian)

The Infiniti G35s 79-year-old driver, and a friend whod been in the passenger seat, exited the vehicle and remained on the scene while authorities checked them for possible injuries, according to VonTiehl, who said the driver seemed very alert throughout the process.

By Monday, most of the large pieces of glass had been disposed of and the storefront had been boarded up for safety. Lori Martinez, branch manager for Coldwell Bankers La Canada and Pasadena offices, responded to the scene and helped VonTiehl make cleanup arrangements through the corporate office.

It was a process Martinez became familiar with a little over a year ago, when a different driver crashed a car through the window of the Pasadena office after mistaking the gas pedal for the brake pedal.

Although employees worked late into the night Friday to secure the La Canada location, they were relieved the damage was confined to the property.

Were just extremely grateful no one was injured  the stars were aligned, Martinez said.

sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardineViolence erupted in the eastern German city of Chemnitz late Monday when right-wing demonstrators clashed with an eclectic group of anti-fascists and migrants after the arrests of an Iraqi and a Syrian as suspects in a fatal knife attack on a German man.

Police said the two sides hurled pyrotechnic devices and bottles at each other  over the heads of helmet-clad riot police separating the rival groups  just after sunset in the poor eastern city near the Czech border in clashes between a group of about 2,000 right-wingers who showed up to commemorate the slain German man and 1,000 leftists who chanted, Nazis out.

Some of the right-wing marchers were captured by TV news cameras giving the outlawed Hitler salute. Tensions in the region have smoldered for the last three years as more than 1.4 million refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East have migrated to Germany.

The pushback over the arriving immigrants has been most acute in the eastern state of Saxony, where the anti-migrant Alternative for Germany party has far more support than elsewhere in the country. During the protests Monday in Chemnitz, those on the right shouted slogans such as, The national resistance is here, and, This is our country.

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Groups of leftists and migrants gathered under the slogan Nazi-free Chemnitz were photographed just before the eruption of violence making obscene gestures at the opposition marchers, who turned out in far larger numbers than police had anticipated.

Right-wing groups throughout the region appealed on social media for nationalists to march in Chemnitz in the wake of Sundays stabbing death of the 35-year-old man. A 23-year-old Syrian and a 22-year-old Iraqi were arrested Monday in connection with the attack, which also left two other Germans badly injured, the state prosecutors office in Chemnitz said.

Its disgusting to see how right-wing extremists are using the internet for calling for violence, said Michael Kretschmer, governor of Saxony, in a Twitter statement. Were not going to allow the image of our state to be tarnished by such radicals.

Earlier Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkels spokesman, Steffen Seibert, condemned a smaller number of right-wingers for their attempted vigilante justice on Sunday. They were captured on video that was posted on social media showing them chasing down and attacking people in Chemnitz who appeared to be foreigners. Several people were injured in Sundays attacks.

We will not tolerate such mob rule and hunting down of people who look different or come from another country or any attempt to spread hatred on our streets, Seibert told a government news conference in Berlin.

Theres no room for that in a state based on the rule of law. And speaking on behalf of the German government, I can say that we condemn that with the strongest possible language.

Kirschbaum is a special correspondent.Investigators working for the United Nations top human rights body said Monday that Myanmar military leaders should be prosecuted for genocide against Rohingya Muslims, taking the unusual step of identifying six by name among those behind deadly, systematic crimes against the ethnic minority.

The call, accompanying a first report by the team of investigators, amounts to some of the strongest language yet from U.N. officials who have denounced alleged human rights violations in Myanmar since a bloody crackdown began last August.

The three-member fact-finding mission and their team, working under a mandate from the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council, meticulously assembled hundreds of accounts from expatriate Rohingya, as well as satellite footage and other information to assemble the report.

The militarys contempt for human life, dignity and freedom  for international law in general  should be a cause of concern for the entire population of Myanmar, and to the international community as a whole, said fact-finding mission chair Marzuki Darusman, a former Indonesian attorney general, at a news conference.

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The council created the mission in March last year  nearly six months before a string of deadly rebel attacks on security and police posts set off a crackdown that drove Rohingya to flee into neighboring Bangladesh. The U.N. estimates that more than 700,000 have fled.

The team compiled accounts of crimes including gang rape, the torching of hundreds of villages, enslavement, and killings of children  some before the eyes of their own parents. The team was not granted access to Myanmar and has decried a lack of cooperation or even a response from the government, which received an early copy of the report.

The team cited a conservative estimate from aid group Reporters Without Borders that some 10,000 people were killed in the violence, but outside investigators have had no access to the affected regions  making a precise accounting elusive, if not impossible.

Above all, the investigators said the situation in Myanmar should be referred to the International Criminal Court, and if not, to a special tribunal. Last week, Myanmars government rejected any cooperation with the ICC, to which it is not a party. China, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council with veto power over whether the issue will be brought before the ICC, has been reticent about condemning Myanmars government during the crisis.

U.N. leaders, foreign government officials and human rights watchers have for months cited evidence of genocide in Myanmar, and the United States late last year said that ethnic cleansing was occurring in Myanmar. But few experts have studied the issue as in-depth, and in such an official way, as the fact-finding mission with a mandate from the 46-nation council.

The United Nations does not apply the word genocide lightly. The teams assessment suggests crimes against the Rohingya could meet the strict legal definition, used to highlight and condemn state-supported abuses in places like Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudans Darfur region.

The investigators cited six Myanmar military leaders as priority subjects for possible prosecution, including Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing. A longer list of names is to be kept in the office of the U.N. human rights chief for possible use in future judicial proceedings. The United States and European Union have already slapped sanctions on some Myanmar military leaders, though Min Aung Hlaing is not among them.New funding for public libraries

The New South Wales (NSW) Government has announced $60 million to fund public libraries.

Local Government NSW (LGNSW) President, Linda Scott, said further clarification was needed and the long-term funding model for the States libraries needed fixing.

We welcome this announcement to better fund our public libraries across NSW as a positive first step in the right direction.

I want to thank all of the councils and over 6,000 supporters who have signed up to support Renew Our Libraries.

Our libraries face a funding crisis due to decades of underinvestment and this funding will help our public libraries deliver the services our communities need.

That said, it is critical that any commitment of extra funding be recurrent, to ensure our public libraries can continue to grow and provide those valued services with certainty well into the future.

NSW Public Libraries Association (NSWPLA) President, Councillor Dallas Tout, welcomed the commitment, but said he would be seeking further clarification from the Government.

We need to understand exactly how, and over what time period, this funding boost will be rolled out, he said.

Well also be seeking further detail on where the funding is going to ensure it meets the needs of the community.

Additionally, we still need to fix the current funding model which sees local governments provide 92.5 percent of public library funding in NSW.

We continue to call on all political parties to commit to properly funding public libraries across NSW.Stock Market News

IHG News - Only 2 Days Left Before InterContinental Hotels Group PLC (LON:IHG) Will Start Trading Ex-Dividend, Should Investors Buy? 27-08-2018 00:16



Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.ukDownload Image: Web

Lycoming College welcomed the class of 2022 and transfer students to campus during its annual New Student Convocation on Friday, Aug. 24. The traditional ceremony, which marks the beginning of each academic year, was held on the Colleges upper quad near Clarke Chapel.

The ceremony began with the opening of the David B Sykes gates by the student senate officers, followed by a procession of the new class to the quad, where they joined friends and family, the Colleges president, and faculty and staff in academic regalia. This years incoming class represents 21 states, and 12 countries, including such faraway places as China, Liberia, India, Vietnam, and Sweden. Twenty-two percent were among the top ten percent of their high school class, and twenty-five percent are first-generation college students.

The Lycoming College Brass Ensemble, directed by William Ciabattari, Ph.D., conductor and associate professor of music, performed several selections for the prelude and the processional. The Lycoming College Choir, under the direction of assistant professor of music Daniel Hall, Ph.D., sang the alma mater and performed Brad Richmonds arrangement of Ipharadisi.

Michael Panczyszyn 19, an astrophysics major from Linden, Pa., and president of the student senate, addressed the new students on behalf of the student body. He spoke to the class about the inevitable change they will experience during their four years at Lycoming, and challenged them to embrace it.

President Kent Trachte, Ph.D., spoke about Lycoming being a place for students to think deeply and act boldly. He noted that the students who do so are those who achieve the most success, and find their college experience the most fulfilling. Trachte stated, They seize the opportunity to design their education. They shape and author a plan for success. By following their example, you, too, will be prepared to find success and meaning in your college experience.

The faculty address was delivered by Kerry Richmond, Ph.D., associate professor of criminal justice and criminology. Richmond made the case that Lycomings liberal arts degree will not only prepare students for their careers, but for a lifetime of learning.

Dean of First-Year Students, Andrew Kilpatrick, concluded the event by congratulating the class. He invited the audience to attend the reception for new students and their families hosted by President Trachte, which immediately followed the ceremony.Remembering Thousands of Children that Died Because John McCain Advocated Bombing Them

Lets try a different angle. How about the world through the eyes of childrens? I dont want to dwell on John McCain, too many people already do today, but I would suggest that your thoughts and prayers are with the souls of the hundreds of thousands of children that died because McCain advocated bombing them. Or, indeed, 50-odd years ago, were bombed by him personally. I wanted to leave him be altogether, dont kick a man when hes down, but I cant get the image out of my head of him singing Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.

To remember that, perhaps the most vile and infamous thing hes ever done (its in the top ten), and then see someone like Ocasio-Cortez say he was an unparalleled example of human decency, its almost comedy. But not as funny as when in the 2008 campaign the woman in the red dress asked him if Obama was an Arab, and he responded: No, maam. No, maam. Hes a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and thats what this campaign is all about.

That is full-blown hilarious. And hardly a soul caught it, which makes it many times worse. It made him a decent man in the eyes of Americans to defend Obama by declaring that Arabs are per definition neither decent nor family men. Yeah, well, you might as well bomb them all then. But enough about McCain: its about the children, and their souls, not his.

The Pope is visiting Ireland this weekend. There is really just one subject on peoples minds, even though the leaders say this is one of Irelands biggest events in 40 years. Whats on their minds is -child- sex abuse by Catholic clergy. And its been -and probably still is- rampant in the country. Like its been everywhere the Catholic church is an important force. Which is in many countries, there are 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide. The man claimed he was begging for Gods forgiveness. Not sure that will do it, there, Francis.

The Roman Catholic religion, and the Church, are fronts for the worlds biggest business empire, a multinational at least 1500 years older than the next one, Hollands VOC -which existed maybe 100 years-. It has played power politics for longer than anyone else, all over the world. Its real estate portfolio alone is worth more than many a country. For that matter, it effectively owns many a country.

There would have to be a huge outcry over the child abuse before there could ever be an investigation. Multiple popes have promised exactly such investigations, and nothing has happened. It would upset the business model too much. And most faithful still believe their priests are decent men, anyway. Yes, theres that word again, decent.

If a priest can no longer be maintained in a specific church because hes been too obvious, too perverted and too greedy, he simply gets transferred to another parish. Theyve been doing this for 1,500 years, they got it down. And when things heat up, they beg god for forgiveness. While the Church gets ever richer.

At a 2% annual growth rate, wealth doubles every 34-35 years. The Catholic Church has been at it for 1,500. Do your math. Or look at it this way: real estate prices have been surging over the past few decades. And thats the Vaticans main industry. Anyone want to venture a guess at how much money they have made?

The Vatican is a facade hiding behind a facade hiding behind Francis Ford Coppola tried tackling the topic in The Godfather III, but he was only mildly successful and not many people believed his portrayal. But, again, this is not about the Pope playing Kabuki theater like all his predecessors, its about the children.

In the US, some 500 children are still separated from their parents, if theyre still in the country. Havent heard much from Judge Dana Sabraw, according to whose ruling they should have been reunited weeks ago. Where is the Judge? Where are the children?

At the same time, we learn that about 52% of Americans under 18 -i.e. children, some 40 million of them- live in households that depend on some form of welfare. And Americans want to chide European nations for being socialist. Thats humor too.

But again, its about the children. How can they ever reach their potential if theres a constant cloud of financial worry hanging over their heads, if many of them still dont enough to eat, if much of what they eat is junk food, which is full of glyphosate to boot, and if it takes $100,000 or so in debt just to get a degree?

And thats just the kids at home. Abroad, Americans treat children even a lot worse than they do their own. With the shining example of John McCain in mind, they have supplied the Saudis with much of the weaponry needed to murder many thousands more children in Yemen. 1.2 million human beings are estimated to have died in Iraq alone. Thanks John. Thats what, half a million children there alone?

In Greece, numbers came out this week that said the number of refugees on the islands is presently 16,000, vs 10,000 a year ago. And yes, many of them are children. Still in overcrowded camps, nothing has changed. Its like the Catholic Churchs promising investigations. Nothing ever happens. Nobody cares. Well, nobody who has the power to make things happen.

The politicians all think about their careers. If it helps them in the next election to help refugees, children, countries, they will. If not, not. In the case of Greece, people are waking up to what actually happened to this country. Just too late. Matthew Klein wrote in Barrons:

There was no political will in 2010 to spend hundreds of billions of euros to bail out Dutch, French, and German banks. To Greeces eternal misfortune, however, there was enough solidarity to launder that Northern European bank bailout through the Greek government.

What does that have to do with children? Apart from the thousands of refugee children stranded on Greek islands and the mainland, Greek children themselves often no longer have access to sufficient food, healthcare, education, no matter how hard parents and others try. But at least Germany and Holland et al can boast about their growing economies.

Were getting this wrong, were getting it all upside down. Children are not objects to treat and use to further political and corporate agendas. They are the future. Abuse them, maim them, kill them, under-feed them, under-educate them, and you end up with a screwed-up, abusive, underfed and under-educated world.

In that report about US children living in welfare dependent households theres an interesting number: while 52.1% of under-18s live in such a household, only 18.8% of over 75s do. In other words, wealth is heavily skewed towards baby boomers and older. And that is somewhat defensible, since people need money for retirement, but its not if it means condemning others to food stamps.

This paints the portrait of a broken society, and -predictably- the weakest are the victims. Children. But the most heartbreaking, even if that is a hard point to make when weve already seen how many have been bombed, comes from Nauru, Australias private prison island for refugees. As Australians think about how much their property has surged in price this week, their government(s) are responsible -in their name- for this:

Begging To Die: Succession Of Critically Ill Children Moved Off Nauru

A girl suffering resignation syndrome and who is refusing all food and water has been ordered off Nauru by an Australian court, as a succession of critically ill children are brought from the island. At least three children have left the island since Thursday, and reports from island sources say at least three more children, as young as 12, are on FFR  food and fluid refusal. The current crisis on the island is overwhelming medical staff, who are referring dozens of children for transfer off the island, only to have their decisions rebuffed by Australian Border Force officials on the island or department of home affairs bureaucrats in Canberra. Two children were moved off the island with their families on Thursday. Early on Friday morning, a 14-year-old refugee boy suffering a major depressive disorder and severe muscle wastage after not getting out of bed for four months, was flown directly from Nauru to Brisbane with his family. There are concerns, doctors say, he may never be able to walk normally again. Later on Friday, in the federal court, Justice Tom Thawley ordered another girl  given the designation EIV18 by the court  to be moved to Australia for urgent medical treatment. Court orders prevent publication of the girls age  other than the fact she is a child  her name or country of origin. [..] The girl has been inside the supported accommodation area of the regional processing centre for three weeks, and has been refusing food and water for much of that time. Before she, too, fell into acute depression and resignation syndrome, and refused to eat or drink anything, she had been one of the brightest and most articulate of the refugee children on Nauru. Before she got sick, she was the best-performing student, a source familiar with the girl and her condition told the Guardian. She had a dream to be a doctor in Australia and to help others. Now, she is on food-and-fluid refusal and begging to die as death is better than Nauru.

Can you be a worse human being than John McCain was? Its not easy. But some people are still trying. Hard to fathom how Australians can be so silent about this. Where are the protests in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney?

Caring only about your own children while throwing the rest away with the bathwater is neither feasible nor viable. Youre bringing up children destined to fight and hate each other. For no reason that I can see at all. Do you enjoy the world of John McCain, where children were bombed for 50 years in two dozen or so countries? Or do you think thats not such a good idea?

McCain could succeed only because his country, and the world around him, failed. Dont set up your children, and all children, to fail in the same way he did.

By Raul Ilargi Meijer

Website: http://theautomaticearth.com (provides unique analysis of economics, finance, politics and social dynamics in the context of Complexity Theory)

 2018 Copyright Raul I Meijer - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

Raul Ilargi Meijer Archive

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.



We received this appeal for solidarity from the French postal workers of Hauts-de-Seine (Paris) who are fighting against the victimisation of their shop steward.

SUPPORT THE 150 POSTAL WORKERS OF THE HAUTS-DE-SEINE DEPARTMENT IN FRANCE ON STRIKE SINCE MARCH 26TH!

150 postal workers in the Hauts-de-Seine department (92) are on strike since March 26th 2018, which represents 20% of the personnel. They are fighting against job cuts, against precarity, against the repression and against the dehumanization of the public postal service.

The authorization delivered by the Labor Minister to layoff Gael Quirante, secretary of SUD Poste 92, triggered the strike. This authorization was given even though the Labor Inspection recognized that Gael has been unjustly discriminated against due to his union activities for more than 10 years.

It is the political layoff of a class-struggle militant that is largely known and supported that sparked this strike. The first reason for why this strike goes beyond just a postal conflict: the strike impoed the right for Gael to intervene in the workplace and the recognition by La Poste as him being a union representative even with his layoff. This is an important win against an employers capacity to get rid of combative militants whenever they want and their ability to choose workers representatives for them.

The postal workers of the Hauts-de-Seine region have been able to stop job cuts for several consecutive years. If the strike wins, it will be clear that it is possible to apply and why not extend nationally a strategy that allows job cuts to be stopped, in one ofthe largest companies in the country. In response to the strike, draft legislation has been filed to reduce the right to strike at La Poste: proof that the company like politicians linked to the dominant class are taking this conflict very seriously and at a national scale.

The determination of strikers resonates the anger that a large part of the working class and the youth are feeling. An anger that is being expressed in the streets at the same time as the massive train workers and student strikes this spring. At the height of the vacation period, at the same time that Macron is undergoing political hurdles, a victory of the postal workers in the Hauts-de-Seine region would contribute to destabilizing the situation by encouraging other sectors to enter into their own struggles.

The strikers have a strategy that is diametrically opposed to the strategy of the union leadership, which are only bringing struggles to defeat by participating in the obscene masquerade of the social dialogue and doing everything to divide the resistances temporally and geographically. On the other hand, the postal workers of the Hauts-de-Seine are openly contesting the power to lead of the employer. Their strike is self organized: strikers decide in daily General Assemblies the direction the movement will take and they elect every day a strike committee to apply the decisions taken by the General Assembly. The strikers systematically build ties with other professional sectors (train workers, GEODIS Calberson, New Look...), with the youth, and also with struggles against racism, LGBT oppression and against police violence. These links are precious to prepare the necessary counter-offensive by the working class, which will be necessary to remove Macron and the capitalist world he represents.

If the strikers win, their strategy anchored in working class struggles and convergence of different struggles will be reinforced.

To maintain the strike, the strikers need money due to the La Poste leadership putting all of their pays at 0 euros since the beginning of the conflict: if they are unable to fill the strike fund enough they will be unable to continue the indefinite strike. Collecting money is even more difficult during the vacation period. It is now that they need the money the most.

This is why we are urgently addressing all of the international organizations and political currents of the workers movement, and anybody who would be willing to support this exemplary strike so that they can contribute to the strike fund. A call for financial support to the strike was given by Ken Loach, Olivier Besancenot, Nathalie Arthaud (LO), Francois Ruffin (France Insoumise MP)... but also political organizations : the NPA, the PG (Melenchon), ANTARSYA, also union organizations like Solidaires, the CGT Labor Ministry... (See the tribune published in the french press here : https://blogs.mediapart.fr/les-invites-de-mediapart/blog/230718/ depuis-100-jours-150-facteurs-des-hauts-de-seine-se-battent-contre-la-deshumanisation).

The postal workers need to collect 150,000 before the end of August

To contribute to the Hauts-de-Seine postal workers' strike fund :

https://www.lepotcommun.fr/pot/be0v4537 (in Europe)

Or Bank transfer to SUD POSTE HAUTS DE SEINE (IBAN : FR76 4255 9100 0008 0033 2571 214) and please send an email to sud-poste-92@wanadoo.fr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.KABUL  Acting and Deputy Foreign Minister Dr. Nasir Ahmad Andisha met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Uzbekistan H.E. Abdulaziz Kamilov.

Mr. Kamilov, who is heading a high level delegation of his country, deemed the commitments of Uzbekistan as steady and progressive towards expanding political, security, and economic cooperation.

Dr. Andisha called Uzbekistan as a good friend and neighbor of Afghanistan, and emphasized joint investments.

Both sides discussed and exchanged views on bilateral ties, regional cooperation, and the peace process.[August 27, 2018] In a changing climate progress in China remains stable BEIJING, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report by China.org.cn on China's economy: The recent conference held by the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee focused on the analysis of China's current economic situation. It pointed out that China's economic performance "has remained stable despite some changes, with new problems and challenges emerging amid notable changes in the external environment." The "notable changes in the external environment" mainly refers to the escalating trade tensions between China and the United States. In a trade war, no one can win and both sides will suffer losses. The data shows that in the first half of this year, the U.S. trade deficit with China has not narrowed as expected, but actually increased by nine percent over the same period last year - surpassing US$185.7 billion. It is expected that the trade deficit will further increase by the end of the year. As for China, the trade war may take it 5 to 10 years to deal with the consequences. There is an old Chinese saying that "every man in the street is aware of Sima Zhao's intent," meaning that the bad intentions are obvious to all. The United States started the trade war, putting rules, morality, its dignity as well as its own interests aside, solely in an attempt to stop or at least slow down China's progress. This intent is clear to both countries and to the rest of the world. Since the trade war has started and continues to escalate, there is no way to turn back. The most important thing for China is to maintain its resolve, be aware of its strengths and weaknesses, and have a clear understanding of the problems its economy faces, or, as Chinese Preident Xi Jinping put it, we should "focus on running our own affairs." China has huge potential in its economy, boasting a wide-ranging domestic market, a large population, and a total consumption value of US$5.2 trillion, close to the United States' US$5.6 trillion. China also has a considerable presence in global markets and partners across the world. Based on all these strengths, China will continue to open wider to the outside world and develop diversified markets rather than "putting all the eggs into one basket." China will contribute to global cooperation and development by strengthening cooperation with other BRICS countries, boosting trade and investment with countries along the "Belt and Road," as well as stepping up bilateral, multilateral and regional free trade agreements through further opening up. Greater openness also requires further reforms. Therefore, China will improve development and innovation capacities for key technologies, enhance protection of intellectual property rights, shut down outdated production facilities, accelerate industrial restructuring, build a rule-based legal business environment and tackle inefficiencies in administrative departments and the public sector. Through substantive reforms, China will further open up and embrace the whole world. China Mosaic

http://www.china.org.cn/video/node_7230027.htm In a changing climate progress in China remains stable

http://www.china.org.cn/video/2018-08/27/content_60508650.htm About China.org.cn Founded in 2000, China Internet Information Center (China.org.cn/China.com.cn) is a key state news website under the auspices of the State Council Information Office, and is managed by China International Publishing Group. We provide round-the-clock news service in ten languages. With users from more than 200 countries and regions, we have become China's leading multi-lingual news outlet introducing the country to the outside world.

We are one of the country's authoritative outlets for government press releases and are authorized to cover various major events. "Live Webcast" is our online webcasting service to present State Council Information Office press conferences in both Chinese and English languages. We are reputed for timely and accurate delivery of news and information, and wide interactions with audiences. In addition, we are authorized to publish and live broadcast major events and press conferences of ministries, local government agencies and institutions as well as enterprises.

In the era of mobile internet, we endeavor to create an array of products for mobile devices headed by the multilingual WAP platform and the mobile APP. We also use Chinese and international social media to publish information for different user groups.

In the future, CIIC will continue to offer authoritative information about China, tell China's stories, voice China's opinions, and introduce a vivid, panoramic and multicultural China to the world through multi-language, multi-media and multi-platforms.

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/in-a-changing-climate-progress-in-china-remains-stable-300702519.html SOURCE China.org.cn

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- MWEBThe New York Times published a series of reader letters in response to its magazine cover story War Without End.

Among the letters was one from John E. Stafford of Rye. Stafford seems to be prolific in his letters to The New York Times (see a couple of other examples)

"No politician, especially an American president, wants to be blamed for losing a war. Lyndon Johnson was haunted by the fate of President Harry S. Truman, who was accused of losing China by his Republican enemies. So Johnson agreed to keep sending more troops to Vietnam, knowing that victory in any meaningful sense was impossible, but hoping to keep the lid on until after the 1968 presidential election. Of course, President Johnsons plan didnt work out. The Tet Offensive began in January 1968, and it was all downhill for his presidency from there. Chivers makes clear that the same lack of political leadership accounts for the endless wars in which the United States is still engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its instructive to recall that the war in Vietnam only ended when the United States Congress refused to continue to fund it. John E. Stafford, Rye, New York"

Se the other letters.Jayanth Pamaraju By

Express News Service

VIJAYAWADA: The Amaravati Bonds have been listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange on Monday with Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu ringing the ceremonial bell at 9.15 am in Mumbai. With the bonds now listed, the institutional investors, who bought the Amaravati Bonds issued on the Electronic Bidding Platform of the BSE on July 14, will be able to trade the bonds.

It may be noted that the AP Capital Region Development Authority (APCRDA) issued bonds worth Rs 2,000 crore, with a face value of Rs 10 lakh each, at a fixed coupon rate of 10.32 percent for a period of 10 years. The money thus mobilised would be utilised for infrastructure development in Amaravati.

Speaking on the occasion, Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu outlined his grand vision to make Amaravati one of the top five cities in the world. He said that Andhra Pradesh was taking support from Singapore to construct the capital. "The Singapore Consortium is developing the Start Up Area in the capital by bringing in an investment of Rs 1.15 lakh crore and create 2.5 lakh jobs. The GSDP contribution of Amaravati will be Rs 1.2 lakh crore a year in 25 years. Our aim is not just to build a world class capital, but to build one of the best cities in the world," he said, adding that the capital city would also host Olympics for India in the future.

The Chief Minister assured the investors of their investments made in AP, and told them that early investors would have an advantage. "If we have a vision and an ability to make quick decisions, raising money is not a problem. I assure you that we won't betray your trust and will prove our sincerity in delivering what we promised. I also request you to not just invest in the project, but also to become an integral part of it by visiting Amaravati," he added.

Terming the oversubscription of Amaravati Bonds by 1.53 times a historic event, Naidu obsrrved that the overwhelming response to the bonds indicated the confidence of investors in the capital project. He also requested the CEO and MD of BSE Ashishkumar Chauhan to setup an innovation center in the new capital of AP.

Earlier, the CEO and MD of the BSE observed that the oversubscription of Amaravati Bonds reposed the faith of the investors in CM Naidu's vision and efficient governance. He also made a proposal inviting AP government to promote listing Small and Medium Enterprises on BSE. "We will soon take the proposal forward and we can visit Amaravati to sign an MoU in this regard," he said.

Principal secretary (CRDA) Ajay Jain also told the investors to not worry about their investments. "We have a land Bank of 5,000 acres for monetisation purpose," he said.

Ministers Yanamala Ramakrishnudu and Np Narayana, AP Planning Board vice chairman C Kutumba Rao, and others were also present.

After the bonds listing, CM Naidu participated in a round table conference with the heads of Tata Sons. He will also meet other top industrialists including chairman of Reliance Mukesh Ambani.By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: The pronouncement of the final verdict in the sensational twin blasts case of 2007, scheduled for today, was postponed to September 4.

The IV Metropolitan Sessions Court at Nampally, conducted the final proceedings in the case on Monday.

Five of the eight accused in the case presently lodged at the Cherlapally central prison were produced before the court through video conferencing facility from the prison.

Gandham Gurumurthy, Defence Counsel said that the Magistrate had postponed the judgment, as the evidence is in voluminous quantity, due to which the verdict could not be prepared.

He further added that a verdict is expected in the next hearing on September 4.

It may be recalled that the blast at Gokul Chat and Lumbini park that rocked the city on August 25, 2007, had claimed 43 lives and left 72 persons injured.

TNIE had reported that the verdict which was expected today was likely to be first of its kind for Telangana as it was decided to be over video conferencing.Sadaf Aman By

Express News Service

HYDERABAD: Affiliation continues to be a thorn in the flesh for private junior colleges with over 60 such colleges across the state still awaiting clearance from the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBIE). As many as 40 of these colleges are in Hyderabad district. Elsewhere in the state, another 42 colleges are also waiting for approval from the board to shift premises.

With no decision on the fate of these colleges forthcoming, it has given college managements another opportunity to allege discrimination at the hands of TSBIE.

Refuting allegations that the government institutions get any leeway in getting affiliations, B Jayaprada, District Intermediate Education Officer (DIEO), said that they too have to abide by the regulation and apply for the affiliation like others. Since most colleges have single-storeyed buildings, several norms pertaining to certifications and NOC are not required and this makes the process easier and faster, she said.

A Satyanarayana, secretary, Telangana Residential Institutions Education Society (TRIES) which upgraded 27 schools to Intermediate level, said affiliation process was a mere formality as most of them had relatively new buildings and there was no need for structure fitness certificate or corpus fund.

Unlike private colleges, where a zoology lecturer could teach botany in case of staff crunch, in government institutions the recruitment process is stringent and is done only after proper verification. This simplifies the affiliation process and reduces the need for in-depth verification, explained Md Abdul Khalik, joint secretary (academic) of TSBIE.

On August 10, a high-level meeting was at which deputy chief minister (education) Kadiam Srihari, IT minister KT Rama Rao and officials of the Intermediate Board and fire department discussed the affiliation issue. Even though a fortnight has elapsed, the board has not received any official communication from the government on the issue.

A TSBIE official said that it was decided that since most colleges had started operations way before the board started demanding various certifications and NOCs, only two aspects _ sufficient number of exit and entry points and fire extinguishers _ would be considered for the Fire NOC. Fire NOC has been the most controversial aspect of the affiliation process this year. The third criterion _ to allow easy access for fire tenders to enter school premises _ has been done away with and replaced with a declaration from the school management stating that it would be responsible for any fire accident, reveals the official.

Bandh today by Pvt Jr colleges

Meanwhile, private junior college managements claim that they are disappointed that there is no positive response or even assurance from the high-level meeting. Gouri Satish, president of Telangana Private Junior Colleges, said that the discrimination being meted out to private colleges forced them to give a call for bandh on August 27. The future of 32,000 students of 62 colleges that have not got login is in peril. Already, 890 colleges have been shut down in the state on account of TSBIEs regulations,

he saidMouli Mareedu By

Express News Service

HYDERABAD: The city police have, of late, been knocking on the doors of certain denizens in a bid to identify whether they are victims of terror attacks. This is with respect to a circular from Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) directing educational avenues for such persons.

The MHA has allocated MBBS/BDS seats from the Central pool for relatives of such for the academic year 2018-2019.

However, as of now, the police have reportedly found no one eligible.

The city police were recently issued a circular in which the MHA stated that it would provide assistance to victims in securing medical seats if he/she has qualified the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET)- 2018.

Officials further clarified that they wont be conducting any examinations, but that it would only be through NEET exam.

The police have started the verification process by visiting their residences and collecting details.

A senior police official said, There were several bomb blast incidents in the city and a number of persons were killed and several were injured. We have data of victims and their addresses.

Those who can apply for the seats include children whose parents were killed by terrorists, those families whose sole bread-earners were murdered in the incident, and wards of victims with permanent disability.

Based on the information, we are verifying details. If any person from a victims family is found eligible, we will send their details to MHA , the police official said, adding that the details of the eligible candidates have to be sent to officials by August 27.

In the application form for eligible candidates, the city police would have to provide the details of the terrorist attack including the name of the organisation, nature of injury, disability caused to the victim, the data and place of terror incident. Police would also give details of ex-gratia obtained by the victims family in the application.By Express News Service

KOCHI: In a bid to provide relief to Puthenvelikara residents who were the worst hit by the flood, the Indian Army is providing medical facilities at Puthevelikara Taluk Hospital round the clock.

In the flood, the equipment of the government hospital was damaged. As a result the Indian Army decided to provide medical service from there. A medical car from Secunderabad arrived at Puthenvelikara. There are eight doctors and 47 paramedical staff in the car. The out-patient facilities are provided from 9 am to 5 pm.

Even after the water receded from the hospital, it could not be opened due to slush accumulated inside and damaged equipment. The Army team first cleaned the entire hospital and surroundings. Apart from attending patients in the hospital, the Army doctors are also attending patients at various relief camps and providing required medicines. There are 12 camps functioning in Puthenvelikara.By PTI

MUMBAI: The work on the proposed Rs 1-trillion expressway connecting Delhi with Mumbai will begin from December and will be completed within three years, Union road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari said today.

The government had announced the ambitious project this April.

The road was to originally run parallel to the existing highway (NH-8) but due to high land acquisition cost, the alignment was changed to run it more eastwards.

The new alignment will see the expressway beginning from Gurugram on the Delhi outskirts and running parallel to the existing highway up to Jaipur, from where it will turn eastwards to Alwar, the tribal district of Jhabua and Ratlam in western MP and then move westwards to Baroda, the minister said.

"We will begin the work on the Rs 1-trillion Delhi-Mumbai expressway from end-December and it will be completed within 30-36 months.

Money is not a problem at all.

NHAI can raise plenty of cheap money from the market," Gadkari told reporters at JNPT near here.

On the land acquisition cost, he said, the new alignment has saved government over Rs 16,000 crore.

While an acre is coming in at Rs 7 crore according to the original alignment, the new alignment has brought it down to Rs 80 lakh a hectare.

The land alone will cost around Rs 6,000 crore.

"The expressway will stretch across the states covering two of the nation's most backward districts, Mewat in Haryana and Dahod in Gujarat.

The whole route will be: Delhi-Gurugram-Mewat-Kota-Ratlam-Godhra-Vadodara-Surat-Dahisar -Mumbai," he said.

The expressway will cut the travel time by half between the two metros from 24 hours to 12 hours for cars, and from 44 hours to 22-22 hours for trucks.

The distance will come down from 1,450 to 1,250 km as well, the minister said.

Gadkari said the biggest objective of the project is to decongest Delhi-NCR as with all the truck traffic which now pass through the outskirts of Delhi will ply past the already congested and polluted national capital.

About three lakh vehicles daily ply on the NH-8. He had earlier said, to speed up the work, the construction will start at 40 different locations simultaneously.

But the minister did not say how much of the land is already acquired.

On the Ganga clean-up, Gadkari, who also holds the water resources and Ganga rejuvenation portfolios, said already 80 per cent of clean-up is over and his ministry has collected Rs 250 crore from the public.

The target is to collect donations from as many as one crore public.By Express News Service

VIJAYAWADA: Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu exuded confidence that Amaravati, the new greenfield capital of Andhra Pradesh, would contribute Rs 1.2 lakh crore per year to the States economy in 25 years. Raising funds for the construction of the city would not be a problem as his government had won investors trust, Naidu said after ringing the ceremonial gong at Bombay Stock Exchange to mark the listing of Amaravati bonds, in Mumbai at 9.15 am on Monday.

Institutional investors who bought the bonds issued on the Electronic Bidding Platform of the BSE on July 14, can now trade them in the secondary market. It may be noted that the AP Capital Region Development Authority (APCRDA) issued bonds worth Rs 2,000 crore, with a face value of Rs 10 lakh each, at a fixed coupon rate of 10.32 per cent for a period of 10 years. The money thus mobilised will be utilised for infrastructure development in Amaravati. Speaking on the occasion, the Chief Minister outlined his vision of making Amaravati one of the top five cities in the world. The Singapore Consortium is developing the startup area in the capital with an investment of Rs 1.15 lakh crore creating 2.5 lakh jobs. The GSDP contribution of Amaravati will be Rs 1.2 lakh crore a year in 25 years. Our aim is not just to build a world-class capital, but to build one of the top five cities in the world, he said, adding that his government was working to make Andhra Pradeshs $124-billion economy worth $1 trillion by 2029.

The Chief Minister, who credited himself for having developed Hyderabad, said Olympics would soon be hosted in Amaravati. India has never hosted Olympics, which is very sad, but I am developing Amaravati in a way that we will soon host the Olympics, he asserted. He further assured the investors of their investments made in Amaravati. People ask me where is the money to develop such infrastructure. If the investors have trust in the government and the government has the ability to make quick decisions, mobilising funds is not a constraint. I assure you that we wont betray your trust and will prove our sincerity in delivering what we promised.

Terming the oversubscription of Amaravati bonds by 1.53 times a historic event, Naidu observed that the overwhelming response to the bonds indicated the confidence of investors in the capital project. He also requested the CEO and MD of BSE Ashishkumar Chauhan to setup an innovation centre in the new capital of AP. Earlier, the CEO and MD of the BSE observed that the oversubscription of Amaravati bonds reposed the faith of investors in Naidus vision and efficient governance. He also made a proposal inviting the AP government to promote listing Small and Medium Enterprises on BSE. We will soon take the proposal forward and visit Amaravati to sign an MoU in this regard, he said. He observed that raising funds through municipal bonds was the only way forward.By PTI

LOS ANGELES: Tom Hardy has said that he is ready to play Marvel antihero Venom in more than one film as he is contracted with Sony for three movies.

The 40-year-old actor is all set to debut as the character in Ruben Fleischer's "Venom", which also stars Riz Ahmed and Michelle Williams.

In an interview with Total Film Magazine, Hardy said he would be open to reprising his role as Eddie Brock and his alter-ego, Venom, should the film be a success.

"I'm open to whatever you want to do with it. We've signed up for three of them. So it's very much an open case. We'll see what people's responses are to it," Hardy said.

"I think it's an awesome character. I love playing both of them. It's an amuse-bouche, and for Sony, it's the Venom-verse launched in isolation, as it were," he added.

The British star also hinted that the Spider-Man spin-off will serve as a standalone trilogy.

"We all prepped for it to be a standalone universe. So whatever Sony want to attach to it at a later date, it's a fulcrum piece. But let's see what happens when it lands," Hardy said.By Express News Service

Debutant director Mahesh Kumars excitement about his recently-released film, Ayogya, which has been declared a blockbuster hit, seems to be dampening for the film is battling for screen time in Hyderabad.

Since the recently-released Telugu and Tamil films are doing well in Hyderabad, exhibitors are not interested in releasing Kannada films."Yashas Nag, the distributor, who has taken the rights for the film for other regions, claims that neither the single screens nor multiplexes are ready to screen Ayogya," says Mahesh, adding that this is the fate of all Sandalwood films in the neighbourhood region.

The distributor said that only if they are no good Telugu films will they consider screening Kannada one. Even representatives at the Hyderabad Film Chamber have no say in this matter, he adds.

On the other hand, the director rues that Telugu films not only get a warm welcome in Karnataka, but also earn big bucks."We will be holding a protest in front of Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce today and take their help to sort out the issue," he says. The film made under Crystal Park Cinemas stars Sathish Ninasam-and Rachita RamSajin Shrijith By

Express News Service

During a recent event in Kochi, actor Kamal Haasan brought up a point on the rising intolerance in the country, and mentioned the name of two films which, if made today, would most likely get banned. One was his own Hey Ram (also directed by him) and the other was MT Vasudevan Nair's Nirmalyam.

Though it has been a while since I've seen Nirmalyam  I had forgotten some of the images from the film  Kamal's statement compelled me to revisit it. The second viewing gave me a jolt. I don't remember experiencing the same thing during my first viewing. I guess it's the awareness of the fact that our country's present climate doesn't encourage filmmakers to do something this bold and groundbreaking. And Kamal's question kept repeating in my mind: Would a film like this get made today?

It's a miracle that Nirmalyam exists today, that too without a single cut. It's incredible to think that people were more tolerant back then (it was released in 1973). Imagine the furore this film would create if it were made in this day and age, when a filmmaker was forced to change the title just because it has the word 'Sexy' along with 'Durga' in it; when author S Hareesh was forced to withdraw his novel Meesha because a piece of dialogue in it hurt someone's sentiments. You would probably hear about the manhandling of MT Vasudevan Nair by some right-wing Hindu activists on the film's set. Unlike Padmaavat, I bet this film wouldn't even see the light of day.

And if MT were asked to release the films with cuts -- especially the two crucial scenes that would be deemed offensive by the nationalists today -- it would completely rip out the soul of the film. If that were the case, it would be better to release it online. One scene has a couple making love inside the premises of a temple; and another has the lead character, a velichapaadu (oracle), played by PJ Antony, spitting at the statue of a goddess.

Maybe, if released today, we can imagine the film with a shorter version of the lovemaking scene, in spite of the fact that it's not explicit. But what about the spitting? Is there another way to photograph that scene? Maybe there is; but would it carry the same impact? The film is about a man whose self-destruction is brought on by his staunch devotion to his deity.

First, the velichapaadu's son (Sukumaran) turns into an atheist because he hasn't been able to secure a job; and his father is unable to send him anywhere else because he doesn't have the means to cover his travel expenses. Naturally, the son can't stand the sight of his father. With no other option, he prepares to sell his father's sickle-shaped sword, chilambu, and aramani -- an action which greatly upsets his father. And in the final scenes, the velichapaadu learns that his wife has slept with his Muslim money lender -- her only solution to compensate for her husband's mounting debts. The man finally breaks.

And what better way to convey the devastating after-effect of this distasteful turn of events than to show him desecrating his place of worship with a remarkably disturbing ferocity. And who better than PJ Antony to play the velichapaadu? Antony was one of those few actors who possessed that rare ability to convey a lot even while sporting a blank expression. Throughout the film, there is an unpredictability to his performance that makes the finale much more terrifying and haunting than it actually is.By IANS

LONDON: Pregnant women with heart disease should give birth at no later than 40 weeks gestation, beyond that harm can be caused to the mother, new guidelines by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) recommends.

Besides pre-pregnancy risk assessment and counselling, a delivery plan should be devised at 20-30 weeks, specifying vaginal or caesarean delivery, whether an epidural or forceps will be used, and the duration of hospital stay after delivery, the guidelines said.

"Pregnancy is a risky period for women with heart disease because it puts additional stress on the heart, so the guidelines advise inducing labour or a caesarean section at 40 weeks," said Jolien Roos-Hesselink, Professor at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

"Beyond 40 weeks, pregnancy has no added benefit for the baby and may even have negative effects," Roos-Hesselink added.

Heart disease is the main reason women die during pregnancy in western countries, because they have a 100-fold greater risk of death or heart failure than their healthy peers.

An estimated 18-30 per cent of the offsprings have complications and up to 4 per cent of neonates die.

The new guidelines, published in the European Heart Journal, also recommended against in vitro fertilisation (IVF), contraception, and termination of pregnancy for women with heart disease.

It is because IVF often uses high doses of hormones, which increases the risk of thrombosis and heart failure, so women with heart diseases need a cardiologist's confirmation.

"Since carrying more than one baby puts more stress on the heart, women with heart disease undergoing IVF are strongly advised to transfer a single embryo," the guidelines said.

While women with heart disease can have a healthy pregnancy, they should be aware of a higher risk of obstetric complications including premature labour, pre-eclampsia, and post-partum bleeding.

Moreover, girls with congenital heart disease should take advice before using contraceptives because some methods are contraindicated in patients with certain types of heart disease, the guidelines noted.By ANI

WASHINGTON: Turns out, a single pill with two drugs has the ability to change the treatment of a patient with fluctuating blood pressure.

A recent study by European Society of Cardiology has confirmed it.

The research has confirmed that a major reason for poor rates of blood pressure control is that patients do not take their pills. Non-adherence increases with the number of pills, so administering two drugs (or three if needed) in a single tablet could transform blood pressure control rates.

Previously, doctors recommended a step-wise treatment, which meant starting with one drug then adding a second or third if needed. This only resulted in "physician inertia", where doctors are reluctant to change the initial strategy despite its lack of success.

Researchers claim that at least 80% of patients should have been upgraded to two drugs, but most remained on one.

"The vast majority of patients with high blood pressure should start treatment with two drugs as a single pill. These pills are already available and should massively improve the success of treatment, with corresponding reductions in strokes, heart disease, and early deaths," said lead researcher, Professor Bryan Williams.

More than a billion people have hypertension worldwide. Around 30-45% of adults are affected by it, and more than 60% of those are over 60 years of age.

High blood pressure is the leading global cause of premature death, accounting for almost ten million deaths in 2015, of which 4.9 million were due to ischaemic heart disease and 3.5 million were due to stroke.

High blood pressure does not usually cause symptoms, but people suffering from very high blood pressure may have headaches, blurred or double vision, regular nosebleeds, difficulty in breathing, chest pain, irregularity in heartbeat, blood in the urine, confusion, or pounding in the chest, neck, or ears.

Researchers recommend that people suffering from the aforementioned symptoms should immediately get it checked by a doctor.

"Many more millions of people, particularly in the older age groups, should be receiving treatment for high blood pressure. See your doctor if you are 65 to 80 years old and your blood pressure is above 140/90 mmHg. The evidence suggests that treatment would reduce your risk of stroke and heart disease," Williams added.

It is increasingly recognised that frailty, independence and biological, rather than chronological, age determine the tolerability and likely benefit of blood pressure lowering medications. For people over 80 years, who have not yet received blood pressure treatment, therapy should be done if the systolic blood pressure is 160 mmHg or above, according to the study.

Researchers have even recommended that people already taking medication should not withdraw at 80 years of age if it is well tolerated.

Systolic blood pressure ranging from 120 -129 mmHg for patients under 65 years of age, and 130-139 mmHg for patients over 65 years of age should be immediately treated. Blood pressure below 120 mmHg should not be the target for any patient since the risk of harm outweighs the potential benefits.

When blood pressure is not controlled by three drugs given in a single pill, a condition known as resistant hypertension, a second pill containing a diuretic such as spironolactone should be added. Device-based therapy is not recommended for routine treatment of these patients and should only be administered within clinical trials.

The doctors recommend a healthy lifestyle for all patients, regardless of blood pressure level, as it can delay the need for drugs or complement their effects. The advice includes salt restriction, alcohol moderation, healthy eating, regular exercise, weight control, smoking cessation, and a new recommendation to avoid binge drinking.

The study appears in the European Heart Journal.By Express News Service

PATNA: Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Monday submitted a report on its ongoing probe into the Muzaffarpur shelter home sexual abuses case to Patna High Court in a sealed envelope.

The report was submitted before a Bench comprising Chief Justice Mukesh R Shah and Justice Ravi Ranjan by CBI counsel Sanjay Kumar. The high court, which is monitoring the probe, had on Thursday pulled up the central agency for failing to submit before it a report on the progress of the probe and for transferring the SP heading the probe.

Even though the report submitted to the court contained an explanation regarding the transfer of the SP in the middle of the probe, the high court asked CBI to present before it the full details about the transfer and the official correspondence around it. The court posted the matter for a hearing on Tuesday.

While the Bench had, in its last hearing on August 23, prohibited the media from publishing or telecasting any news regarding the CBI probe into the shelter home sexual abuses case, the media was praised by the Bench on Monday.

The media has played an important role in bringing out the facts related to the shelter home case. I am not against the media or freedom of speech, but sometimes restrictions have to be imposed in the larger interest. Media trial is not proper, observed Chief Justice Mukesh R Shah while hearing CBIs reply in the case.

The high court may issue a set of guidelines about media coverage of the case and the ongoing probe on Tuesday, said court sources. The prohibition imposed by the Bench earlier has sparked protests from the media fraternity and the Opposition parties.

The sudden transfer of the SP, JP Mishra, who was investigating officer of the shelter home case since it was taken over by CBI on July 29, was suddenly shifted from CBIs Special Crime Branch unit and attached to the office of the DIG in Patna on August 21.

While CBI said it was a routine transfer, the Opposition parties decried the move, saying it raised suspicion that the direction of the probe was being influenced in order to protect powerful people linked to the case.By Express News Service

BHOPAL: Eyeing a fourth consecutive term in Madhya Pradesh, the ruling BJP will blow the poll bugle at Karyakarta Mahakumbh (grand assembly of party workers) at Bhopals Jamboree Ground on September 25  the 102nd birth anniversary of Jan Sangh ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya  where party president Amit Shah will address the booth-level party workers.

This will be the third Karyakarta Mahakumbh after similar gatherings of party workers before the 2008 and the 2013 Assembly polls, where workers from every nook and cranny of MP will take a vow to ensure that the party comes to power for the fourth time, state BJP chief and Jabalpur MP Rakesh Singh said on Monday.

We also expect to get the blessings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the massive event. Several other senior national and state BJP leaders, including the chief minister, will be present at the Mahakumbh, he added.

In both 2008 and 2013, the BJP formally launched its poll campaign at the Karyakarta Mahakumbh, which also saw the conclusion of statewide Jan Ashirwad Yatra of CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan. But this time, we will ensure that the CMs ongoing statewide Jan Ashirwad Yatra, which is drawing huge crowds everywhere, continues to connect with people till the elections, said Singh.

The Bhoomi Pujan (foundation ceremony) for the Mahakumbh will be held on Krishna Janmashthami on September 3, while the online registration for the Mahakumbh will be done by workers on September 17, he added.

Exuding confidence about winning the year-end elections with many more seats than in 2013, Singh said that 207 out of the total 230 Assembly seats in the state have been won at least once by the party. So, we are targeting to win 200-plus seats this time, which will be much more than 165 seats won in 2013 polls.By PTI

JAIPUR: Curfew was relaxed for four hours today in violence-hit Malpura town of Rajasthan's Tonk district where fifteen kanwariyas were injured in a clash with local people, police said.

Curfew is in force in Malpura town from the last four days and 30 people have been arrested so far, they said.

No fresh incidence of violence occurred in curfew-hit areas and considering the law and order situation, the clampdown was relaxed for four hours from 10 am to 2 pm today.

However, mobile internet services remain suspended, Station House Officer at Malpura Police Station, Navneet Bihari Vyas, said.

He said a few accused have been arrested under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Tension gripped the area after some miscreants hurled stones on kanwariyas while they were passing through a Muslim-dominated area on August 23.

The attack was followed by arson in which a vehicle was torched, forcing the authorities to impose Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which prohibits an assembly of more than four persons in an area.By PTI

NEW DELHI: A Delhi Court today imposed a cost of Rs 7,000 on Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) activist Medha Patkar for seeking adjournment for cross-examining a witness in a defamation case lodged against her by KVIC Chairman V K Saxena.

Patkar and Saxena, the Khadi Village and Industries Commission (KVIC) chief, have been embroiled in a legal battle since 2000 after she filed a suit against him for publishing advertisements against her and the NBA.

Saxena was then the head of an Ahmedabad-based NGO, National Council for Civil Liberties.

Saxena, in turn, had filed two cases against her for making derogatory remarks against him on a TV channel and issuing a defamatory press statement against him.

Metropolitan Magistrate Nishant Garg passed the order after Patkar sought adjournment in the case as her lawyer was not available to cross examine a journalist who had deposed as a witness to support Saxena's case.

The court took exception to this observing that despite giving a date of convenience to the parties, Patkar's lawyer was absent.

"The counsel submits that the main lawyer will not be able to appear in the court today. Clearly, today's date was given at the convenience of parties. Even otherwise, the ground furnished for non-appearance is not accepted. Accordingly, the opportunity to cross examine is deferred subject to payment of Rs 7,000 to the witness," the court said and posted the matter for hearing on November 26.

At the outset, one of the witnesses, Dilip Gohil, told the court that he had received a press note levelling allegations against Saxena in November 2000 from Patkar after which a news was published on a website.

He also told the court that he had enquired with the Saxena on the issue which he has outrightly refuted.

The witness told the court that Saxena has been associated with water conservation programme in Saurashtra as also with the rehabilitation of people living near the Narmada dam.

The court on July 9 had framed defamation charges against Patkar in a case lodged against her by Saxena in a complaint for allegedly defaming him on a TV news channel in 2006.

The court had framed the notice against the activist under sections 499/500 (defamation) of the IPC and fixed the matter for recording of Saxena's evidence.

It entails a punishment of up to two years.

The notice was framed in one of the defamation cases filed against Patkar by Saxena in which she had allegedly made a statement in April 2006 on a panel discussion on a news channel claiming that Saxena had received civil contracts from Gujarat-based Sardar Sarovar Nigam, which manages the Sardar Sarovar Dam.

The allegation was denied by Saxena.

Soon after the defamation complaint was lodged by Saxena against Patkar, Sardar Sarovar Nigam Ltd, in a letter to the Gujarat Police, had said that "V K Saxena, neither in his personal capacity, nor as President of National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), ever applied to the Nigam for the award of any civil contract and/or for any supply contract in the past, nor the Nigam has ever given any civil or any other contract to him or to his NGO-- NCCL.

The court has separated the three ongoing defamation cases -- one filed by Patkar and two by Saxena, considering that these were pending since long and needed to be expedited.

The activist, in her complaint, has alleged that she was defamed by an advertisement published by Saxena in November 2000 and the imputations made in the publication affected her reputation and fame and caused her immense harm.

The court had on April 9 begun the cross-examination of Patkar in this case during which she had denied having deliberately concealed facts to tarnish Saxena's image.

Patkar and Saxena had earlier refused the suggestion of the court to settle the matter through mediation.By ANI

NEW DELHI: External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj is likely to meet her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi in New York next month, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly's (UNGA).

Both the foreign ministers will be present at the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) which will begin on September 18.

The development comes days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Imran Khan on being sworn-in as the new Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Last week, Pakistan signaled that Imran Khan may not be able to attend the meet in order to cut down government expenses. However, senior Pakistani diplomats urged him to reconsider the decision, saying that representing Pakistan was not a waste of funds, particularly on key issues like Kashmir and Afghanistan, Dawn reported.

Earlier on August 22, Khan expressed interest with regards to a meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi, stating that both the countries must engage in dialogue to resolve their differences.By PTI

RAJKOT: A nationalised bank in Rajkot district 'shut' its operations for half-day today, apparently at the behest of a state minister who accused the officials of not processing the crop insurance payment of farmers.

Local police said the minister only "requested" the bank authorities to speed up the processing of the payment.

In videos of the incident broadcast by news channels, Civil Supplies Minister Jayesh Radadiya of BJP, who represents Jetpur seat, purportedly told the officials of the Jetpur branch of the SBI to close their operations for the remaining day.

Radadiya approached the bank in Jetpur, 75 kms from Rajkot, this afternoon with some farmers who had claimed that their crop insurance payments were delayed by the bank, sources said.

"The bank is not processing the money it had received last year from insurance firms into the accounts of farmers," Radadiya told reporters before the incident occurred.

He claimed an insurance company had last year cleared claims of around 150 farmers in the area and approved payment of Rs 1.75 crore.

"The bank is not releasing the money to the farmers. Officials are also not giving any satisfactory reply when farmers approach them," the minister alleged.

The bank officials were not available for comment.

Jetpur police said the bank officials shut their branch in afternoon after Radadiya's visit.

According to police, the minister only requested the bank officials to speed up their work regarding crop insurance.

"Radadiya came to the SBI branch in Jetpur to make a representation about the non-payment of crop insurance money to some farmers. After Radadiya's visit, the bank shut its operation for the day. The minister only requested the officials to speed up their work related to crop insurance," said Jetpur police inspector M N Rana.

In one video, Radadiya purportedly told the officials not to open the bank till further orders.

"I will not allow any of your branches to run in entire Jetpur. Last year's insurance for groundnut crop is not paid yet. I don't care if it was not done by you or by the insurance firms," Radadiya purportedly told the bank staff.

"Do not open this (branch) without my order. Now wind up your operation," the minister told a bank official.

Radadiya didn't respond to the calls made to him after the alleged incident.By IANS

SHIMLA: Days after a heavy rainfall that led to landslides and snapping of several road links, the hills of Himachal Pradesh will see subdued rainfall activity the coming week, the Met office here said on Sunday.

Most of the rivers that were in spate would see a decline in water levels as there was no major rainfall in the state in the past 24 hours.

"There will be no heavy rainfall in the state but precipitation will occur at a few places in the state till August 30," an India Meteorological Department official told IANS.

Shimla experienced no rain, while Kangra town received 64 mm, Palampur 55 mm and Dharamsala 23.6 mm.

The state capital recorded a low 15.8 degrees Celsius, while the maximum settled at 24.4 degrees.Anand ST Das By

Express News Service

PATNA: Union minister and RLSP chief Upendra Kushwaha on Monday sought to put to rest fresh speculations that he was getting ready to quit NDA and ally with RJD, saying his statements about delicious kheer were misconstrued.

What I suggested by the delicious kheer statement was that we are trying to gather the votes from every section of society so that Prime Minister Narendra Modi wins a second term after the 2019 polls, said the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) chief.

His words brought relief to NDA, but RJD, Bihars main Opposition party, insisted that Kushwaha was feeling suffocated in NDA and would switch over to the RJD-led grand alliance right before the Lok Sabha polls next year.

If milk from the Yaduvanshis (Yadav community) and rice from the Kushwahas get mixed, kheer can be prepared, Kushwaha had said in his address at a function on Sunday to mark the birth centenary of BP Mandal, a former Bihar CM who also headed the Backward Classes Commission (Mandal Commission) that recommended 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in jobs.

Kushwahas words were widely viewed as his sly indication that he may disassociate his party from NDA and join the grand alliance. Speculations about a political realignment in Bihar have been doing the rounds since the time JD(U), led by CM Nitish Kumar, rejoined NDA after snapping ties with the grand alliance in July 2017.

The RLSP chief is understood to be unhappy with top BJP and JD(U) leaders because they have refused to fulfill his demand for eight seats for his party to contest in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Known for his antipathy towards Nitish Kumar, Kushwaha had said on July 25 that he does not want the JD(U) president to be projected as NDAs next CM candidate for the Assembly polls in Bihar due in 2020. Kushwaha had questioned Bihars law and order system earlier this month after a local leader of his party was shot dead.

Even as he asserted that his reference to Yaduvanshis did not mean RJD, Kushwaha displayed his soft corner to RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, saying: I am not among those who criticise even Prasad's shadow and create tension in the society.By PTI

NEW DELHI: Former prime minister Manmohan Singh has expressed concern over attempts to change the "nature and character" of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, saying Jawaharlal Nehru did not just belong to the Congress but to the entire nation.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he urged him to leave the Teen Murti complex "undisturbed" and said this would be respecting both history and heritage.

The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) was established in the memory of India's first prime minister and the museum at the Teen Murti House has preserved some rooms as they were at the time of Nehru's death.

Singh said during former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's tenure there was no attempt to change the nature and character of the NMML.

READ HERE | Despite Congress' opposition, all Prime Ministers to find space in Jawaharlal Nehru's Teen Murti Bhavan

The former premier had described Nehru in Parliament as a "vibrant personality" and said "such a resident may never grace Teen Murti again", the senior Congress leader said.

"Let us respect this sentiment and keep Teen Murti as a memorial to our first prime minister Pandit Nehru and leave the Teen Murti complex undisturbed as it is.

This way we will be respecting both history and heritage," Singh said in the letter.

"Jawaharlal Nehru belongs not just to the Congress but to the entire nation.

It is in this spirit that I have written to you," he said.

The letter comes amid reports of dedicating the NMML in the memory of all former prime ministers, an idea strongly opposed by the Congress.

Singh said the NMML is dedicated to the memory of the country's first prime minister and prime architect of the Indian nation-state.

Nehru has left behind an incredible imprint on our country and the world, he said.

His distinctiveness and greatness have been acknowledged even by his political opponents and rivals, Singh said.

Recalling the six-year tenure of Vajpayee as prime minister, he said there was no attempt made to change the nature and character of the NMML and the Teen Murti complex.

"But sadly, that seems to be part of the agenda of the Government of India now," the former prime minister said.

Singh said the NMML must remain a centre of first-rate scholarship and professional excellence and the museum itself must retain its primary focus on Nehru and the freedom movement.

"No amount of revisionism can obliterate that role and his contributions," he said.

Singh also said Vajpayee had said in Parliament that Nehru took the opposition along and was a refined gentleman and said such "greatness we may not again see in the near future".By UNI

THANE: Palghar district rural police has arrested a total of 13 persons, including seven women, from village Bilosi of Wada taluka on the alleged charges of preventing the local police from performing their duties, police said on Sunday.

Keeping in with the direction of the District Collector and to adhere to the safety norms, police decided to carry out repair work on the gas pipeline at Bilosi village of the taluka, said a statement issued here.

Accordingly, a meeting of the villagers was held with senior police officials of the district, but the villagers refused to listen.

At around 1400 hrs on Saturday, when the Gas company officials and the police personnel went to Bilosi, a group of around 35-40 villagers prevented them from carrying out the work.

Some members of the mob even attacked Additional Superintendent of Police Yogesh Chavan and the Deputy SP of the Zone.

Police booked the members of the irate mob under Sections 109, 143, 353, 452 and 504 of IPC and Section 15 (1) of the Petroleum and Mineral Pipeline Act 1962, Wada police said.

The hunt is on for other accused, it added.Fayaz Wani By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Major Leetul Gogoi, who used a youth as a human shield against stone pelters in Kashmir last year, is likely to face a court-martial as Army's Court of Inquiry (CoI) has indicted him and ordered disciplinary action against him in a Srinagar hotel case, where he was caught with a young local girl by police in May this year.

Sources said the Army's CoI that was ordered after Major Gogoi was caught with a local girl and another soldier in a Hotel Grand Mamta at Dalgate, Srinagar on May 23 has held the officer accountable for -"fraternising-" with a local woman in violation of instructions and guidelines and being away from the place of his duty while in operational area.

Gogoi, who was posted with army's 53 RR at Beerwah in central Kashmir Budgam district, had not informed his superiors before leaving the camp on May 23.

Sources said the CoI headed by a Brigadier-level officer, which submitted its findings to the Convening Authority earlier this month, has ordered disciplinary action against Major Gogoi for breaching discipline and leaving the camp without intimidating his seniors.

Major Gogoi, who had in April 2017 used a youth as a human shield and tied him in front of bonnet of an army vehicle in central Kashmir's Budgam during bypolls to Srinagar Lok Sabha seat, had booked a room in the Srinagar hotel online for a night for two guests in the name of businessman on May 23.

However, the hotel staff denied accommodation to him after they found a local girl accompanying him. After being denied accommodation, he and another army man had an altercation with the hotel staff and locals.

After the altercation, the cops detained Major Gogoi, the girl, and another army man and lodged them in Police Station Khanyar. They were later set free after questioning.

An army official told New Indian Express that ordering of disciplinary action against Major Gogoi is the first step towards his court-martial.

"Now he will have to face Summary of Evidence during which he will be given opportunity to prove himself not guilty. "Summary of Evidence will be conducted by a board" he said.

The official said after Summary of Evidence is completed and depending on evidence against him, the court-martial proceedings can be initiated against the officer.

He said if court-martialled, punishment to Major Gogoi could range from dismissal from service to severe reprimand.

According to the official, now that disciplinary action has been initiated against him, Major Gogoi could be shifted from his present place of posting in Valley.

Army Chief Gen Bipin Rawat, who had backed him for using youth as a human shield against stone pelters last year and honoured him with Army Chief's 'Commendation card', showed no mercy against him after he was caught with a girl by a police.Gen Rawat had warned that exemplary punishment would be given to Gogoi if he was found guilty of any offenceBy Express News Service

RAIPUR: Ahead of the Assembly polls in Chhattisgarh, the outlawed CPI (Maoist) on the back-foot, are changing their strategy to counter the onslaught of the security forces in the conflict zone of Bastar.

The documents seized in the recent encounter at south Bastar's Timenar (in Dantewada) sketched-out the rebels' devised plan of action the Naxalites embarked upon as the state gears up to prepare for the elections in the state.

The TNIE had earlier reported how the Maoists extended their Tactical Counter Offensive Campaign (TCOC) beyond June that led the Chhattisgarh police strategically continue their anti-Maoist aggression as 'Operation Monsoon' in the Bastar zone. The rebels during their TCOC attempt to regain their military strength, infuse confidence among their cadres, recruit people and simultaneously mount pressure on the forces. Besides increasing TCOC till the polling gets over, the Naxals have stressed upon to engage women and children more to gather inputs and strengthen their intelligence network. Women and children usually least seen with suspicion in the tribal habitats. -"The security forces of late are often getting close to the camps of Naxalites, inflicting heavy losses and casualties. More and more women and children by Maoists are taken on to gather intelligence inputs fast to minimise their losses-", said a senior journalist Manish Gupta based in Bastar. Each Area Committee of the CPI (Maoist) have been asked to dig at least 500 ditches in tract having a high probability of troop movement in their region. The pit dug in the ground are used to plant booby trap, sharp iron crude spikes or improvised explosive devices by Naxals to inflict fatalities on the forces. Barring their military members, all other cadres even those who are engaged in gunfight will no longer wear Naxal uniform and remain in a civil dress that might pose difficulty in easily identifying them. To create panic and terror, the cadres have been asked to target public transport like buses and the rebels who surrendered. The area committees of the rebels have been given the responsibility to arrange weapons and explosives. In the villages located in the strife-torn region, the diktat has been issued to keep tribal wind instrument 'turahi', dhol-mandhar (traditional drum or percussion) and crackers to be used as alert when any threat is anticipated. The rebels have conceived haunting sound (tone) for villagers to play up to convey as forewarning. The Bastar police cited the Maoists' strategy as desperate attempt to safeguard their existence. -"We accordingly evolve our plan against them. The change in their strategy speaks high of their apprehensions they nurture regarding their survival. Our forces always remain on alert and the villagers are deeply disillusioned with the Maoists-", the Dantewada deputy inspector general of police Ratan Lal Dangi told the Express.

Naxals revise strategy:

1. TCOC extended by six months (for the first time)

2. Engage women, children to gather intelligence inputs

3. Naxal uniforms only for military cadres

4. Dhol, turahi and crackers in villages as a forewarning for naxals

5. Each Naxal Area Committee to dig 500 pits in their region6.Create terror targeting public means of transport and the surrendered NaxalitesBy Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Amidst the growing chorus by many political parties for the use of ballot papers in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, the poll panel on Monday said that it would provide satisfactory solutions to the concerns raised by the political parties.

Chief Election Commissioner O P Rawat said, We will definitely look into all the suggestions given by them (political parties) and there will be a satisfactory solution to them. Rawat said this after a meeting with political parties representatives on Monday.

The Election Commission convened the meeting ahead of elections to several state assemblies later this year and the Lok Sabha polls scheduled for early next year. In the meeting, several opposition parties raised the issues of EVM tampering and technical glitches in the voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) system.

About 17 political parties including the ally Shiv Sena and Congress have pitched for returning to ballot papers on several occasions. Sources said that representatives many parties including Congress, Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Trinamool Congress raised the issue related to faults with EVMs and VVPATs and many of them also suggested going back to the ballot paper system.

Though EVM tampering and VVPAT glitches were not on the agenda, parties raised these issues. Some parties also suggested that the number of constituencies where results of EVM and paper audit trail device are matched be increased to enhance the confidence of voters and parties in the reliability of the voting mode.

Responding to repeated questions on EVMs, Rawat said the EC takes a comprehensive view. Some of the parties said going back to ballot is really bad as it will bring back booth capturingwe dont want (that)."

Rawat also voiced his disagreement over the concept of One Nation, One Poll, saying several opposition parties have opposed the idea and expressed concerns. Rawat also said that it is important to hold an all-party meeting to discuss the simultaneous polls issue.

"Many parties opposed One Nation, One Poll while there were some who made some valid points in favour of simultaneous elections," he said.

The BJP contends that holding polls at the national and state levels together will cut down on the cost of holding the elections.

Political parties urged the Commission to link Aadhar numbers with electors detail for better electoral roll management.

Officials said that Rawat urged the representatives of political parties to put forward their views on important issues such as transparency in political funding, media management including that of social media, bringing in trust and confidence of all stakeholders in the voting and counting process and as such strengthening democracy in our country while setting an example globally.

The Chief Election Commissioner mentioned about the challenges faced by all the democracies globally in view of the new media and advancements in information technology. He said the Commission is taking initiatives to prevent such interference.

Some political parties requested the Commission to fix a certain percentage of VVPAT slips-count to enhance the trust in EVM. Commission assured them that it is being looked into with the expert inputs of Indian Statistical Institute.By Express News Service

CHANDIGARH: The Justice (Retd) Ranjit Singh Commission's report which was tabled in the state assembly today, has indicted former chief minister Parkash Singh Badal for the police action on anti-sacrilege protesters at Kotkapura about three years ago.

A five-page supplementary report of the commission submitted on August 16 to the state government. Earlier the commission had in its report observed that the facts might indicate the involvement of the CMO, but it is now clear that the Chief Minister (Parkash Singh Badal) and the CMO were apparently kept in the dark about the action proposed by the police and the action finally taken at Kotkapura.

This supplementary report may be read in conjunction with the findings and observations recorded by the Commission from pages 50-55. The report states, "the earlier view expressed by the Commission on page 50 to 52 of Part-1 of the report, needs to be clarified... chief minister Parkash Singh Badal was in touch with the DGP as well as the district administration and cannot be considered ignorant about the action which was finally taken by the police at Kotkapura.''

ALSO READ: Punjab CM Amarinder Singh eyes poll gains with decisions on sacrilege, police firing

The second part of the report states, "The witnesses disclosed before the Commission that the police took action to lift the dharna by using force upon directions given by the DGP (Sumedh Singh Saini) sufficient evidence available in the form of telephone calls between the Deputy Commissioner and MLA Mantar Singh Brar with the CM's Special Principal Secretary Gagandeep Singh Brar. It is on record that contact was established with Gagandeep Singh Brar who made the Chief Minister speak to Mantar Singh Brar. Soon after Mantar Singh Brar spoke to DGP Sumedh Saini, that too on being asked by Gagandeep Singh Brar. The chain is, thus, complete and it is clear that Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal was not only in touch with the district administration, but was in touch with the DGP as well, and was quite aware of the situation developing at Kotkapura and also about the proposed action by the police.''

Justice Ranjit Singh Commission report states, "It's clear that Parkash Singh Badal wasn't only in touch with district administration, but was in touch with DGP as well, & was quite aware of the situation developing at Kot Kapura & also about the proposed action by the police" pic.twitter.com/QXtYG7ODO1  ANI (@ANI) August 27, 2018

"Sufficient material is available with the commission that when the district administration was asked to speak to the then DGP, he (DGP) had conveyed in no uncertain terms that they (district administration and MLA) should not bother much and that he will get the dharna site cleared within 10 minutes,'' the report states.

Thus it is clear from the report that the commission indicted former Chief Minister Badal on the basis of a written statement submitted to it by then DGP Saini. Interestingly Saini was then removed from his post after this incident. The Congress-led Punjab Government has today accepted the supplementary report of the commission and then tabled the whole four-part report in the state assembly.

In the report the recommendations of the Commission has been accepted, as it states, "Since it has already been decided to refer the matter to the CBI, the investigation agency shall also ascertain whether any act of omission and commission was committed by any other person.-" Earlier Shiromani Akali Dal MLAs held a protest demonstration outside the Punjab Vidhan Sabha ahead of the tabling of the report in the Assembly. As the report was tabled by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Brahm Mohindra, all the Akali legislators staged a walkout from the house. Later Navjot Singh Sidhu had a verbal clash with Sukhbir Singh Badal and dared him to be present in the house tomorrow. The debate on the four-part report would be held on Tuesday.

The Justice (Retd) Ranjit Singh Commission was formed by chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh when Congress came to power last year to probe the sacrilege incidents and subsequent events, including the killing of two Sikh protesters in police firing at Behbal Kalan in 2015.

Report of Zora Singh Commission

During the SAD-BJP regime the then CM Badal had formed Justice (Retd) Zora Singh Commission to inquire into these incidents, the 51-page report of the then commission had then not indicted any officer for the firing. It only gave certain recommendations regarding compensation to be paid to the families of victims. It has recorded statements of 206 witnesses. The report had stated that the victims were defenseless and unarmed and were killed in a sitting position as the police fired on them from close range. It had recommended action as per law against the erring officials who fired gunshots and they should be identified.By PTI

AHMEDABAD: As his hunger strike entered the third day today, Patidar leader Hardik Patel vowed to continue his fast till his demands for quota for his community members and loan waiver for Gujarat farmers were met.

The Patidar quota stir spearhead, who received more support for his agitation today, hit out at the BJP government, alleging the prevailing situation in Gujarat is "worse than what it was during the British Raj".

Apart from some local Congress leaders and MLAs, Kapil Patil, a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Council, met Hardik Patel at his residence near here, where he is on an indefinite fast, and extended their support to him.

Patil is a leader of the Loktantrik Janata Dal.

Talking to the media, Hardik Patel claimed a large number of his supporters were trying to reach his residence, but the police were preventing them from coming here.

"Even sitting MLAs are being prevented from coming to my residence. This BJP government and its police are trying their best to stop this agitation. This situation is worse than what it was during the British Raj," he alleged.

"I know the police are working at the behest of the BJP government. But, I want to tell you that no one can stop us now. I am still fit and my hunger strike will continue till both my demands are met," he said.

The 25-year-old Patidar leader urged his supporters to sit on fast at their respective villages and towns if they are unable to reach his residence.

Hardik Patel started his hunger strike on August 25, the third anniversary of his mega pro-quota rally in Ahmedabad that had turned violent.

He is demanding a loan waiver for Gujarat farmers and inclusion of his community in the OBC category to facilitate reservation for its members in government jobs and education.

Hardik Patel launched his fast from his residence after authorities in Ahmedabad as well as Gandhinagar refused to allot a place for the hunger strike.

Yesterday, former railway minister and TMC leader Dinesh Trivedi, representatives of the Lalu Prasad Yadav-led Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Hindustani Awam Morcha of former Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi had called on him to extend their support.Prasanta Mazumdar By

Express News Service

GUWAHATI: Widespread protests made the BJP in Nagaland to clandestinely immerse the ashes of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on Monday.

The immersion was to have taken place at Doyang river in Wokha district. However, protests by various organisations in the district made the BJP leadership to conduct the ritual at a river in Dimapur district.

The tribal organisations, as well as opposition Congress and the Church, were opposing immersion in the Christian-majority state by locals on the ground that it was an alien ritual.

ALSO READ: Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut questions whether Vajpayee died on August 16

The Lotha Hoho, which is the apex organisation of Lotha tribe, had earlier said the immersion of the ashes was neither a cultural practice nor religious belief. It said the Nagas distinct culture should not be diluted.

BJP Nagaland unit chief Temjen Imna Along Longkumer said despite the opposition, the immersion was performed in a very proper manner without hurting the sentiments of any.

People are making a mountain out of a molehill without knowing the reality. Ataljis issue is not a religious issue but a national issue. It is an issue of an icon. The minority morcha of BJP Nagaland took the lead in immersing the ashes in my presence and in the presence of party workers and leaders. As Christians, we all prayed. The priests did what they had to do, Longkumer told TNIE.

He, however, refused to disclose the site or the river where the immersion took place. He said he had asked BJP workers to congregate at party office in Dimapur at 9 am on Monday and the protestors started gathering by 8 am. They were shouting slogans that they would not allow the immersion to take place, he said.

In my conscience, I have done what I thought was right. Trouble may come and go. We should be ready to face brickbats along with kudos. There are talks going on social media that I may be killed. However, I am clean in my conscience. All states, including Mizoram, performed the immersion. Whats wrong in Nagaland? Social media is being misused here, Longkumer said.By Express News Service

Continuing his attacks on the Modi government in London, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi slammed the Centre for denigrating public institutions, ignoring the poor and insulting citizens by saying no development happened before 2014.

Institutions such as the Supreme Court, the Election Commission of India and the Reserve Bank of India are being torn apart now, Rahul said addressing a gathering of the Indian Overseas Congress in London. He cited last Januarys presser by four senior-most judges of the SC to say they were not being allowed to work.

Alleging that Dalits, farmers, tribals, minorities and the poor in India are beaten up if they raise their voice, Rahul charged that the SC/ST Act has been destroyed and scholarships discontinued.

When the farmers of Karnataka and Telangana ask for loan waiver, PM Modi says this is not our policy. Indias few richest businessmen have NPAs of Rs 12.5 lakh crore, but the prime minister says nothing.

Rahul said Prime Minister Narendra Modi insulted every Indian by saying that no development took place for 70 years before he assumed office.By PTI

NEW DELHI: The RSS may invite Congress president Rahul Gandhi to attend a three-day lecture series by Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat here next month, sources in the organisation said today.

The idea is to invite people from different ideologies for the event, a source in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh said, adding that the list is being prepared and may also include CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury.

Indications that Gandhi could be invited came on a day the RSS criticised him for drawing parallels between the Sangh and Islamic radical outfit Muslim Brotherhood.

ALSO READ | Rahul Gandhi ignorant about India and Sangh: RSS after Congress chief's Muslim brotherhood remark

Giving details of the September event, RSS prachar pramukh Arun Kumar said the Sangh was for the first time organising a three-day lecture series of its chief Mohan Bhagwat on the theme, 'Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective'.

"Bhagwatji will address and interact with select audience comprising prominent citizens on 'Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective' in a three-day lecture series," Kumar told reporters.

The event will be held at Vighan Bhavan from September 17 to September 19.

Kumar said people across the country wanted to know and associate with the RSS.

"This lecture series has been organised in this context - sarsanghchalak (RSS chief) Mohan Bhagwatji will present the Sangh views on various contemporary issues of national importance," Kumar said.

Replying to a question on whether Gandhi will also be invited, Kumar said the list had not been finalised.

"It is our prerogative to choose who to invite or not. Leave this to us. But people from all walks of life, including from different political outfits, ideologies and religions, will be invited," he said.

In June this year, Congress veteran and former president Pranab Mukherjee attended an event at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur on the Sangh's invitation, for which he was criticised by the party leaders.

The RSS, an ideological mentor of BJP, was the focus of Gandhi's attack during his recent visit abroad.

Last week, at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Gandhi had said the RSS' idea is similar to that of Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world.

He had also alleged that the RSS was trying to "change" the nature of India and "capture" its institutions.

The Sangh said the Congress chief cannot understand the saffron outfit as he does not know India.

He had also alleged that the RSS was trying to "change" the nature of India and "capture" its institutions.By UNI

LUCKNOW: A united Opposition created ruckus in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly on Monday over the Deoria shelter home controversy.

The House took up the agenda amid pandemonium and the supplementary budget was also tabled during the noisy scenes with Opposition staging protest in the Well of the house, raising anti-government slogans.

The Legislative Council also witnessed similar scenes where the Opposition, who are in majority, did not allow the Upper House to function over law and order issue and was also adjourned for the day after tabling of the supplementary budget.

The Opposition led by the Samajwadi Party and the Congress members were on their foot when the house assembled for the day at 1100 hrs.

The Members trouped into the Well when Speaker Hridya Narain Dikshit refused to admit an adjournment motion under rule 311 over the Deoria Shelter home issue.

The opposition raised anti-government slogans and demanded resignation of the state minister concerned.

Leader of the Opposition Ram Govind Choudhury while demanding a probe by a sitting Supreme Court judge in the entire matter, said the incident has earned a bad name to the state.

"Connection of BJP leaders have been found in the Deoria incident and it has been linked with Gorakhpur," he said while showing photographs of BJP leaders with the accused.

Congress leader Ajay Kumar Lalu and BSP leader Lalji Verma too demanded a debate on the matter, suspending the Question Hour and other agenda of the house.

State Parliamentary Affairs Minister Suresh Kumar Khanna said the government was serious on the matter and a CBI probe has been recommended to probe the matter.

"The government has already sent the accused in jail and other culprits would not be spared," he said.

Mr Dikshit tried to pacify the Opposition members and even warned them that their statements and activities would not be recorded.

But still when they refused to budge, he adjourned the house first time till 1220 hours and then after completing the entire agenda of the house.

During the pandemonium, the government tabled six ordinances and a Bill and completed the agenda.

The house was adjourned for the day thereafter.By PTI

CHANDIGARH: The legislators of opposition SAD today dumped the Justice (retd) Ranjit Singh Commission report on sacrilege incidents outside the Assembly complex, even before it was tabled in the Punjab Vidhan Sabha.

The one-man commission was set up by the Congress government in April 2017 to investigate the various incidents of sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib and other religious texts.

Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal rejected the report, describing it as "waste paper".

"The report has no sanctity," Badal said.

He alleged that it was prepared at the residence of chief minister Amarinder Singh.

READ STORY HERE: Dera Sacha Sauda had a hand in Bargari sacrilege, murder of Sikh preachers: Commission report

The SAD has accused the Congress of defaming the Akalis by blaming them for the sacrilege incidents.

Legislators of the opposition party also raised anti-government slogans.

SAD MLA Bikram Singh Majithia alleged that Amarinder Singh, Justice (retd) Ranjit Singh and Sikh preachers Baljit Singh Daduwal -- parallel jathedar of Damdama Sahib -- and Dhian Singh Mand -- acting jathedar of Akal Takht in 2015 -- had "colluded" to prepare the report.

He blamed Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI for the sacrilege incidents.

Pakistan's ISI is bent upon disturbing the peace and communal harmony in Punjab, Majithia said.

He demanded the arrest of Justice Ranjit Singh, a former judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, and cabinet minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa for allegedly fabricating evidence and leaking a top secret document before its submission in the Vidhan Sabha.

The first part of the 182 page report was leaked online earlier this month.

The SAD and its ally BJP have submitted a notice for breach of privilege motion to the Speaker K P Singh against those who leaked the report.

Majithia accused Justice Ranjit Singh of going beyond the terms of reference to conspire to "weaken" the SAD as well as the hallowed institutions, including the Akal Takth, Sikh's highest temporal seat, and Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC).

The government will table the report along with action taken report in the House today, officials said here.

The report dealt with incidents of sacrilege at village Burj Jawahar Singh Wala, Bargari and firing incidents at Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan in 2015.Aishik Chanda By

Express News Service

KOLKATA: At least four persons were killed and several injured in violent clashes between BJP and Trinamool Congress and factional feuds within TMC over the formation of panchayat boards in West Bengal on Monday, prompting Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to issue orders to her ministers to maintain peace in the districts.

BJP claimed that two of its supporters were killed in police firing in Ghaghra gram panchayat in Joypur block of Purulia district on Monday.

"TMC cadres attempted to capture Ghaghra gram panchayat by force and lobbed crude bombs. When BJP cadres resisted, police acted at the behest of the ruling party and opened fire on our workers in which two of them were killed. One worker has been identified as Narayan Gope. The identity of the other worker is yet to be ascertained," Purulia district BJP President Vidyasagar Chakraborty said.

The incident comes after two BJP workers Trilochan Mahato and Dulal Kumar were found hanging in Balarampur of Purulia district in June after the BJP won a large number of seats in the district.

BJP is hopeful of forming boards in 59 gram panchayats of the district.

On the other hand, two TMC cadres were killed in clashes between two TMC factions in Gopalpur gram panchayat in Manikchak of Malda district on Monday. The deceased have been identified as Salam Sheikh and Azhar Sheikh. One three-year-old boy was also injured in the incident.

The factional feud erupted between Savitri Mitra and Gour Mondal factions of TMC over the nomination of panchayat pradhan. However, TMC secretary general and education minister Partha Chatterjee called the clash as 'individual fighting'.

"Individual interests play at the panchayat level. This is not TMC infighting," he said. Violence erupted across West Bengal from Saturday onwards after Supreme Court on Friday ordered the formation of panchayat boards in the state, turning down BJP's petition for re-election to over 20,000 uncontested panchayat seats in the state.

TMC worker Lal Mohammad was killed in the factional feud in Panditpota 1 gram panchayat of Islampur in Uttar Dinajpur district on Saturday.

Taking note of the violence, Chief Minister -- also the Home minister -- Mamata Banerjee, during a cabinet meeting at state secretariat Nabanna on Monday, ordered her ministers to maintain peace in their respective districts during panchayat board formation.

On the other hand, Malda district Congress extended support to TMC to form boards in 146 gram panchayats of the district.

"We have decided to support TMC in forming panchayat boards to stop BJP. We have been told by the high command to do this," Malda Uttar MP Mausam Benazir Noor said.

However, West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee President Adhir Ranjan Choudhury said he was in the dark over the development. "This alliance was never discussed at the state level and is a very local affair," he said.

Defying established alliances, local cadres of major parties TMC, BJP, CPM and Congress are forming unusual alliances at local levels to form panchayat boards including reports of TMC, CPM and Congress forming alliance to keep off BJP from forming boards.

On the other hand, ruling party's Uluberia Dakshin MLA Pulak Roy was stone-pelted allegedly by BJP workers at Uluberia's Shyampur in Howrah district during a clash between TMC and BJP workers on Monday. Several persons were arrested.By Express News Service

BENGALURU: The political ripple caused by former Chief Minister Siddaramaiahs statement of returning as the chief minister again is showing no sign of dying down even after his efforts to play down the episode. Meanwhile, Kumaraswamy put the onus of saving the government on Congress top brass.

Determined to ensure the stability of the H D Kumaraswamy-led JD(S)-Congress government at least till the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections, the Congress high command has swung into action by sending a strong message to its state leaders in this regard.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi is said to have assigned the task of keeping the partys MLAs together and foiling any attempts to destabilise the coalition government to party strongman D K Shivakumar and Deputy Chief Minister G Parameshwara.

Siddaramaiahs recent statement at a public programme in JD(S) supremo H D Deve Gowdas political turf Holenarasipur has triggered speculations of a possible Operation Lotus 2 of about 12 to 14 disgruntled Congress MLAs resigning from their seat to bring down the Kumaraswamy government. The speculated move could enable BJP, with its strength of 104, to form an alternative government.

Not in a mood to take things lightly, Rahul Gandhi is said to have sent a strong message to Siddaramaiah as well to desist from any move that could upset the coalition government. Siddaramaiah was quick in taking the cue and he had to go the extra mile to clear the air.

My statement of becoming the CM again, which was in response to the demand from the gathering at a public function, has been misconstrued and misinteperted by the media. The crowd wanted me to be the Chief Minister again and I just said I will if the people bless me with the mandate, Siddaramaiah said.

Aware of attempts to destabilise govt

Clarifying further, Siddaamaiah said, I was referring to possibilities only after the next election 5 years away. Not now.However, Kumaraswamy put the onus of saving the government on Congress top brass. I am aware of the attempts to destabilise the government. I will not worry about retaining my seat. My focus is only on doing some good work for the people, he said.

However, Congress high command is not in a mood to let its guard down and has instructed Shivakumar and Parameshwara to manage the situation.Siddaramaiah is our senior leader and a shrewd politician. He will not indulge in any act that would put the coalition government in trouble. It is natural for any politician to have ambitions. Sometimes one will have to issue such statements to boost the morale of the party cadres, Shivakumar said here on Sunday trying to put an end to the speculations.

Former minister H M Revanna, a close confidant of Siddaramaiah, was emphatic as he dismissed speculations of an impending fall of the Kumaraswamy government as a joke.It is ridiculous to read speculations of this government collapsing within the next 15 days and forming alternative government. Rahul Gandhi has taken a decision to see that this coalition government last its full term of five years. Kumaraswamy will remain the CM for five years. There is absolutely no trouble in the coalition government, Revanna said.

Municipal Administration Minister and a staunch Siddaramaiah loyalist Ramesh Jarkiholi met Siddaramaiah in Mysuru on Sunday and held a prolonged discussion which lasted for over two hours. His arrival without police escort added to the curiosity towards the political drama.The entire episode is being seen as part of BJPs attempts to bring down the coalition government before the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls as it could deliver a big blow to Rahul Gandhis attempts to forge a mega alliance with regional parties against Narendra Modi ahead of the Lok Sabha election.By IANS

KODAGU: Flood-hit Kodagu district in Karnataka is limping back to normalcy as hundreds of people returned to their homes from relief camps, said an official on Sunday.

"Kodagu is getting back to normalcy. A total of 1,800 people returned from the relief camps to their villages wherever the houses are intact," state Relief Commissioner Gangaram Baderia said in a statement.

The 51 temporary relief shelters, which housed 5,041 people across the district last week, have come down to 32, with 3,227 people residing in them.

The relief camps were set up a week ago in the district after torrential rains caused floods and landslips in the hilly district during the southwest monsoon from August 14-22.

The district's Deputy Commissioner P. Sreevidya had asked to relieve all the rescue teams, including the Army, Air Force, Navy and other agencies while keeping one team of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), the statement added.

The torrential rains have claimed 17 lives while damaging more than 2,200 homes and public buildings.

The Karnataka government has sought Rs 2,000 crore interim relief to rehabilitate the flood affected in the district, about 270 km from state capital Bengaluru.

The district received moderate to heavy rainfall on Sunday, and is likely to continue to see moderate to heavy rains for the next two days, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said.Harsha By

Express News Service

BENGALURU: She came, she saw and, instead of fleeing from the place, she conquered the hearts of Keralites put up in relief centres though she cant speak a word of Malayalam. Yoga ambassador of Bahrain, Fatima Al-Mansoori (35), has travelled 120 km covering relief centres set up in Kerala post the floods to offer help in the best possible manner, comfort and solidarity.

Fatima, from Muharraq in Bahrain, had reached India on August 11 to conduct a five-day course at the Department of Human Yogic Sciences in Mangalore University on August 21. As an adjunct professor at the Yogic Sciences Department, I keep coming to India every semester to deliver special lectures, she told Express. Prior to conducting the short course, she decided to visit a friends house in Kerala and participate in the inauguration of the largest bird sculpture in the world, Jatayu (the event was later cancelled).

When heavy rains triggered landslides, Fatima, instead of packing her bags and heading to Mangaluru, plunged headlong into the task of offering solidarity. I just felt a pressing need to go to the flooded areas and help in any way I could, even if it meant providing emotional support or listening to the stories of victims, she elaborates on her gut feeling that prompted her to stay behind. Visiting flood relief centres with the help of Noufal, a volunteer from an NGO, the yoga therapist realised that survivors had lost everything they possessed and entire communities had collapsed under the floods. During the time, friends, the Indian expatriate community and well-wishers in Bahrain, on learning about her initiative, had begun seeking information to understand the gravity of the crisis in flood-hit areas.

I was also anxious to highlight the reality of this harsh and painful disaster, so that the suffering could be felt and better understood and make people fully aware, in real time, the needs of the survivors, she recollected and added that she achieved this through live feeds Instagram and Twitter posts. Her initiative was also highlighted in Bahrain by Gulf weekly newspaper. There was even one elderly woman who wanted to share with me the little food that she had. She had nothing left but the clothes she was wearing, said the yoga therapist who visited Pyramid Valley on the citys outskirts before returning to Kochi on Sunday.

Due to her efforts, people in Bahrain quickly rallied around to offer assistance. As a result, expatriate associations involved in the relief drive were flooded with calls with offers of help. Bahrain king Hamad also had assigned the Royal Charity Organisation (RCO) to dispatch relief material to flood-hit areas. A special Pray for Kerala meet was also held at the National Evangelical Church a week ago.

Fatima, who had recovered from a disorder known as fibromyalgia through a yogic lifestyle, said she found herself again on the path of humanitarian action as it was a God-guided mission. All I had to do was respond, she said. She intends to stay a few more days to produce a documentary and raise more aid.By Express News Service

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Connectivity of 98 per cent of telecom towers in flood-hit areas has been restored. The remaining 2 per cent - those falling in Kuttanad - will be restored once water recedes, said Department of Telecommunications (DoT) officers.

A review meeting chaired by Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan pegged the losses to different telecom service and infrastructure providers at Rs 350 crore.

More than 20 per cent of the states telecom network was affected due to floods and landslides. Alappuzha, Pathanamthitta, Idukki, Ernakulam and Thrissur districts were the worst-affected.

Restoration activities were carried out by the DoT, BSNL, telecom service and infrastructure providers in association with the state government.

The secretary asked service providers to give top priority to Kuttanad. Connectivity issues will be resolved by the end of the month, she said.

More than 400 tower sites in flood-hit areas are functioning on diesel generator support due to power outage.

168 out of 190 optical fiber cable cuts have been restored and the remaining will be restored as soon as the sites become accessible. Out of 85,900 Base Transceiver Stations (BTS), 23,552 were affected. 22,217 BTS were restored as on August 24. 131 of the affected 153 telephone exchanges have been restored.

The secretary thanked the state government for its support to service providers, including diesel supply and transportation of technicians.

LESSONS FROM KERALA

DoT will refine its standard operating procedure (SOP) for responding to disasters considering Keralas experience as a best practice. Authorities have been asked to review the existing SOP and suggest improvements based on their lessons from Kerala. A national workshop involving all states and stakeholders will be held to evolve the SOP.

DoT will upgrade the early warning facility to help State Disaster Management Authorities (SDMAs) to send alerts in vernacular languages. The Common Alert Protocol - Early Warning Platform (CAP - EWP) developed by DoT and C-DOT helped the Kerala SDMA to send out early warnings to the public through mobiles. CAP enables dissemination of messages to the target population without the intervention of service providers.

DoT will formulate a comprehensive Public Protection and Disaster Relief procedures, which can be implemented across India involving all stakeholders.

Relief during distress

At present, location identification of missing persons is done through a standardised common number, which helps customers get the location of missing family members and friends for further tracing. This will be integrated with the common distress number like 112.By Express News Service

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The armed forces on Sunday announced a formal end to active rescue and relief operations in flood-hit areas, but added medical assistance and other forms of support will continue.

Addressing a joint press conference by the services here, Air Marshal B Suresh, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Southern Air Command (SAC), said the post-flood rehabilitation phase has now started, which, essentially, is the responsibility of the state government. As rehabilitation starts, Army medical teams and IAF mobile hospitals have been deployed in various regions. Kuttanad is still an area under stress. We will continue to support the efforts, he said.

Every aspect of the relief operation will be studied in detail to emerge as a better response force, Suresh said. He declined to comment on the possibility that the simultaneous opening of dams may have caused the floods, but said it was for the government or the KSEB to say.

Also read | Despite Kerala flood woes, people celebrate Onam with gaiety in Alappuzha relief camp

The armed forces have been actively supporting the governments rescue and relief efforts since August 8 when they were alerted to the looming disaster. However, the inclement weather, the terrain and topography, the population density and the intensity of operations offered unique challenges. The IAF had christened its mission Operation Karuna, the Navy, Operation Madad, Army, Operation Sahyog and the Coast Guard, Operation Rahat.

This was also one of the most high-intensity relief operations undertaken by the IAF, Suresh said. Here, everything was packed into a short span of time. But there was close coordination and cooperation from all sides. All agencies worked in unison, he said. On the first day, IAF flew 10 sorties, but subsequently mobilised more resources including 26 helicopters. On a comparative scale this was the largest disaster-related induction exercise ever conducted in the country in terms of load wherein 1,200 tonnes was airlifted at a short notice, IAF said.

In all, the Army had deployed 70 composite teams which included infantry, engineer task forces and medical units, said Brigadier C G Arun, Commander, Pangode Military Station. The troops opened roads, cleared landslides and constructed temporary bridges utilising the natural resources available in the area. So far, approximately 26 temporary bridges have been constructed/repaired and approximately 50 roads have been opened/cleared for the general public, he said.By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: BJP MLA Raja Singh made use of Raksha Bandhan to send an appeal to Hindu women, on Sunday. He asked them to promise not to marry outside their religion and become a victim of Love Jihad. In message posted on YouTube, he said: My Hindu sisters have to promise that they are a Hindu first. And hence, their religion and country should take first preference. They have to be cautious as Hindu women are being targeted by Muslims and terrorists and their lives are being destroyed through love Jihad.

The Goshamahal MLA went on to allege that Hindu women are being transformed into terrorists through such marriages. The video ends with him talking about the evils of Muslim men and their ways of wooing Hindu women saying, Jihadis are going to enter are our homes. They will be very handsome and they will pretend to love you. Later, they will win over your hearts which would prevent you from enquiring about their true identity. That is because they are not humans.By Associated Press

DUBLIN: The Vatican's retired ambassador to the United States accused senior Vatican officials of knowing as early as 2000 that the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, regularly invited seminarians into his bed but was made a cardinal regardless.

The letter, an extraordinary allegation from a one-time Holy See diplomat, also accuses Pope Francis of knowing about McCarrick's behavior in 2013 but rehabilitating him  a claim of cover-up against the pontiff himself.

The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published the letter attributed to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano on Sunday as the pope wrapped up a two-day visit to Ireland dominated by the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Vigano, 77, a conservative whose hard-line anti-gay views are well known, urged the reformist pope to resign over the issue and what he called the "conspiracy of silence" about McCarrick. He and the pope have long been on opposite ideological sides, with the pope more a pastor and Vigano more a cultural warrior.

The Vatican did not immediately comment. The document's authenticity was confirmed to The Associated Press by an Italian journalist, Marco Tosatti, who said he was with Vigano when the archbishop wrote it Wednesday.

"He was very emotional and upset at the end the effort," Tosatti told AP, adding that Vigano left Tosatti's home afterward without saying where he was going.

In the letter, Vigano accused the former Vatican secretaries of state under the previous two popes of ignoring detailed denunciations against McCarrick for years. He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer.

Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as cardinal last month, after a U.S. church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

Since then, another man has come forward to say McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary. The accusations have created a crisis of confidence in the U.S. hierarchy, because it was apparently an open secret that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house, and into his bed.

Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report  which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses  the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.

Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions. His letter identifies by name the Vatican cardinals and archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair, an unthinkable expose for a Vatican diplomat to make. He said documents backing up his version of events are in Vatican archives.

The Vatican's ambassador to the U.S. from 2011 to 2016, Vigano said his two immediate predecessors "did not fail" to inform the Holy See about accusations against McCarrick, starting in 2000.

He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on June 23, 2013, at the Vatican's Santa Marta hotel where the pope lives, three months after Francis was elected pope.

Vigano wrote that he told Francis: "Holy Father, I don't know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance."

Soon thereafter, Vigano wrote, he was surprised to find that McCarrick had started traveling on missions on behalf of the church, including to China. McCarrick was also one of the Vatican's intermediaries in the U.S.-Cuba talks in 2014.

Vigano's claim that McCarrick had been ordered by Benedict to stay out of public ministry and retire to a lifetime of prayer is somewhat disputed, given that McCarrick enjoyed a fairly public retirement. Vigano provides no evidence that such sanctions were imposed by Benedict in any official capacity, saying only that he was told they were.

The letter also contains a lengthy diatribe about homosexuals and liberals in the Catholic church. It often reads like an ideological manifesto, naming all of Francis' known supporters in the U.S. hierarchy as being complicit in a cover-up of McCarrick's misdeeds.

"Now that the corruption has reached the very top of the church's hierarchy, my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths regarding the heart-breaking case of the archbishop emeritus of Washington," Vigano wrote.

Vigano, however, also has had his own problems with allegations of cover-up, and he and Francis had a major dust-up during Francis' 2015 visit to the U.S., which Vigano organized.

In that incident, a leading U.S. opponent of gay marriage, Kim Davis, was among those invited to meet with the pope at Vigano's Washington residence. Francis was so enraged that Davis' supporters had leaked word of the meeting that the Vatican subsequently insisted he only held one private audience while there: with one of his former students, a gay man and his partner.

The cover-up accusation, which Vigano denied, concerned allegations that he tried to quash an investigation into the former archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis, Minnesota, John Nienstedt, who was accused of misconduct with adult seminarians.

In 2016, the National Catholic Reporter said Vigano allegedly ordered the investigation wrapped up and a piece of evidence destroyed. The report cited a 2014 memo from a diocesan official that was unsealed following the conclusion of a criminal investigation into the archdiocese. No charges were filed.

In a statement provided to the AP Sunday about the Nienstedt case, Vigano said a Vatican investigation of the allegation found no wrongdoing on his part.

He said the allegation that he destroyed evidence was false and that his efforts to have the archdiocese correct the record have been met with silence.

Nienstedt was forced to resign in 2015 over complaints about his handling of sex abuse cases.

Vigano's name also made headlines during the 2012 "Vatileaks" scandal, when some of his letters were published. In them, he begged not to be transferred to the Vatican embassy in Washington from the administration of the Vatican City State.

He claimed he was being punished for having exposed corruption in the Vatican. The letters showed a clash with Benedict's No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who is also a target of his McCarrick missive.By AFP

YANGON: Facebook banned Myanmar's army chief and other top military brass today after a UN investigation recommended they face prosecution for genocide for a crackdown on Rohingya Muslims.

The site is the prime source of news and information for many in a country that only recently came online following nearly half a century of military rule.

ALSO READ | Myanmar generals had 'genocidal intent' against Rohingya, must face justice: UN

But it has also been a platform for the army and Buddhist hardliners to spread hate speech and incendiary posts against the stateless Rohingya and other minorities.

The site aired support for the military's bloody "clearance operations" last year that forced some 700,000 Rohingya over the border into Bangladesh.

UN investigators lambasted the platform earlier this year, saying it had morphed into a "beast" in Myanmar.

In recent months the tech giant has embarked on a huge PR campaign, admitting it has often been too slow to take down inflammatory posts.

It blacklisted two firebrand Buddhist monks and an Islamophobic group notorious for spreading anti-Muslim propaganda.

But this is the first time it has touched the country's military.

"We are banning 20 Burmese individuals and organizations from Facebook -- including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the armed forces," the platform said, adding that it wants to prevent them from using the service to "further inflame ethnic and religious tensions".

Facebook has some 18 million accounts in the country of 51 million people and is also relied on heavily by the government to make announcements.

Army chief Min Aung Hlaing had two active Facebook accounts, one boasting 1.3 million followers and the other 2.8 million.

Posts in both English and Burmese would refer to the Rohingya as "Bengali", implying they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and helping reinforce the idea they do not belong in mainly Buddhist Myanmar.

His pages also featured denials of atrocities during the crackdown, which was justified by the army as a legitimate means of rooting out Rohingya militants.

Both accounts were taken down immediately as the explosive UN report circulated.

The accounts of five other top military leaders specifically mentioned in the report were also blacklisted.

A total of 18 Facebook accounts -- not all the individuals listed in the ban had a presence on the network -- one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages were removed.

The accounts were followed by a total of almost 12 million people, Facebook said, adding that data had been preserved.

Rights groups have long criticised the platform for taking days to delete malicious posts, by which time many had gone viral.

These include calls for the killing of a Muslim journalist and the spreading of messages to both Buddhists and Muslims saying that the other community was preparing to attack them.

The UN report singled out Facebook for its "slow and ineffective" response.

It also strongly criticised civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to use her position and moral authority to stand up for the Rohingya against the military.

Neither the commander-in-chief nor the president's office could be reached for comment.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the violence in Myanmar on several occasions including at a congressional hearing earlier this year.

He told lawmakers Facebook planned to hire more native speakers to help monitor the situation and had partnered with civil society groups to identify perpetrators of hate speech.

"We're hiring dozens of more Burmese-language content reviewers because hate speech is very language-specific," he said at the April hearing in the US Senate.

"It's hard to do it without people who speak the local language, and we need to ramp up our effort there dramatically."By AFP

GENEVA: A UN probe has called for Myanmar's military leaders to face justice for alleged genocide and crimes against humanity against the Rohingya, but the road to a tribunal will be long and complex, with China likely to block any prosecution of its ally at the International Criminal Court.

On Monday a damning report by a UN fact-finding mission said members of Myanmar's armed forces, including military chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, should be prosecuted for their roles in violently expelling some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims into neighbouring Bangladesh.

ALSO READ | Births, marriages and deaths: Rohingya lives playing out as refugees

Refugees have recounted widespread stories of rape, murder and arson by security forces as they were driven from their homes.

Rohingya refugees burst into tears during a protest march after attending a ceremony to remember the first anniversary of a military crackdown that prompted a massive exodus of people from Myanmar to Bangladesh, at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Ukhia on August 25, 2018. (Photo | AFP)

The report was the most serious step towards accountability in the crisis to date but experts warn of major legal and diplomatic obstacles ahead.

What's the quickest route to justice for the Rohingya?

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. For proceedings to begin, the United Nations Security Council needs to refer Myanmar to the court.

But geopolitics is likely to get in the way with China and Russia -- which last week hosted Min Aung Hlaing -- able to veto any referral.

China has consistently refrained from condemning Myanmar for its treatment of the Rohingya, describing it as an internal matter.

ALSO READ | Rohingya mark 'black day' one year after Myanmar violence

"Rakhine State has very complex historic, ethnic and religious background," Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told reporters on Tuesday.

"So how to resolve this problem? Through negotiation and dialogue," she said, adding: "I think that blame on any side, or pressure, does not help resolve anything."

The Security Council is set to discuss Myanmar later Tuesday in New York.

What about Plan B?

If legal moves for the ICC stall at the Security Council, it could consider an ad hoc or mixed tribunal similar to ones created for Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Lebanon and Cambodia.

This would in theory require the cooperation of national authorities in Myanmar.

Another possibility stems from an unprecedented request by the chief prosecutor at the ICC, Fatou Bensouda, to extend its jurisdiction to Myanmar, which has not signed up to the court.

That's "uncharted territory", according to Kingsley Abbott of the International Commission of Jurists, who says the move may be possible because they crisis spilled over into Bangladesh, a member of the ICC.

Rohingya refugees perform prayers as they attend a ceremony organised to remember the first anniversary. (Photo | AFP)

If the court agrees, the prosecutor could launch a preliminary investigation and ultimately issue arrest warrants for Myanmar nationals.

But this would take time, requiring participation from Bangladesh in the investigation and -- somewhat implausibly -- Myanmar to hand over suspects.

Who could be prosecuted?

The court targets individuals, not countries. On Monday the UN probe named six senior members of the armed forces including military chief Min Aung Hlaing.

Investigators argue they bear responsibility because of their direct command over troops that carried out "clearance operations" in northern Rakhine state.

But the ICC cannot forcibly bring suspects from Myanmar, and would have to rely on member states to detain them in the event they travel abroad.

IN PICTURES | Thousands of Rohingya Muslims flood across the border in search of help

This has been problematic in the past.

In December 2017 war crimes judges criticised Jordan for failing to act on the Hague's warrant to arrest Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir.

Could Aung San Suu Kyi face trial?

Highly unlikely. The current calls are aimed at the upper echelons of Myanmar's security forces, and the Nobel laureate has no control over the military.

But the UN probe did call her out for not using her position as leader of the civilian government or her "moral authority" to try to stem the violence.

It also accused her administration of denying any wrongdoing, blocking the UN investigation, and spreading false narratives.

IN PICTURES | Associated Press investigation: Myanmar security force rapes Rohingya women; finds the report

"Through their acts and omissions, the civilian authorities have contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes."

How is this playing out inside Myanmar?

Myanmar has long denied accusations it committed ethnic cleansing or genocide.

It has reserved particular scorn for the ICC prosecutor's request on jurisdiction.

In August the government branded it "meritless" and called for it to be dismissed.

Myanmar says it has also established its own independent commission of inquiry -- a panel critics say is toothless.

The stateless Rohingya garner little empathy inside Myanmar and Min Aung Hlaing's military campaign has enjoyed support from the public, many of whom see it as a defence of the country from militants.By PTI

ISLAMABAD: Two presidential candidates were today chosen by Pakistan's warring factions of the Opposition alliance which failed to reach a consensus on fielding a joint nominee, giving an upper hand to Prime Minister Imran Khan's pick for the post of the President, according to a media report.

Pakistan Peoples Party's (PPP) Aitzaz Ahsan and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI-F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman emerged as the two candidates who will challenge Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf's (PTI) Dr Arif Alvi in the election of September 4, Dawn newspaper reported.

The Election Commission of Pakistan had announced on August 16 that the presidential election will be held on September 4 - five days before the expiry of the five-year term of President Mamnoon Hussain.

The failure of the opposition parties to field a joint candidate will virtually provide a walkover to the ruling PTI's Alvi for the president's office, the report said.

While Ahsan filed his papers for the presidential election hours before the 12-noon deadline today, a JUI-F spokesperson claimed that Fazl would be the single nominee of the opposition parties, with the exception of the PPP.

The JUI-F chief will submit his nomination papers shortly as the joint candidate of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), Awami National Party, Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party and National Party, the spokesperson was quoted as saying by the report.

The PPP and the PML-N representatives directly and with the help of mediators remained in touch throughout yesterday in their bid to reach an understanding, but all their efforts failed after the PPP's refusal to withdraw Ahsan's name, the report said.

The PML-N's acting secretary general Ahsan Iqbal, however, said that they had been still making all-out efforts to bring a joint opposition candidate, expressing the hope that the PPP might show "flexibility".

PTI nominated Alvi as its candidate hours after party chief Khan was sworn in as the 22nd prime minister of the country on August 18.

A dentist by profession, 69-year-old Alvi is one of the founding members of PTI.

He served as the party's secretary general from 2006 to 2013.

Pakistan's president is elected indirectly by the members of Parliament and the four provincial assemblies.

The final list of contesting candidates will be issued on August 30.

The polling will be held in the buildings of the federal parliament and provincial assemblies.

In Pakistan, the President is considered as a symbol of the federation and head of the state and exercises all powers on the recommendations of the prime minister.

Hussain, elected in September 2013, was a nominee of the PML-N led by jailed former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.By PTI

LAHORE: In an unusual move, a top Pakistan Railways official has requested for a 730-day full pay leave, saying the attitude of the new minister for railways Sheikh Rasheed is "extremely non-professional and ill-mannered".

Hanif Gul, a Grade-20 officer, said in his application letter that as an honourable member of the Civil Services of Pakistan, it is not possible for him to continue to work under him, Geo news reported.

The application letter has since gone viral on social media in the country.

"With due respect, it is submitted that the attitude of new Minister is extremely non-professional and ill-mannered.

"As an Honourable member of the Civil Services of Pakistan, it is not possible for me to continue to work under him. The Minister is fully entitled to work with a team that shares his vision. It is, therefore, submitted that 730 days leave may kindly be allowed to the undersigned," the letter reads.

Rasheed recently chaired a meeting of railways officials where he reportedly admonished them for telling "stories" about the department's better performance, the report said. The minister also asked them not to praise "any minister" in front of him. Rasheed has often criticised former railways minister Saad Rafique's performance.By AFP

ROME: Pope Francis has declined to comment on a claim he personally ignored sexual abuse allegations against a senior clergyman, after a visit to Ireland dominated by Church scandals.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican envoy to the United States, said he had told Francis of the allegations against prominent US cardinal Theodore McCarrick in 2013.

Conspiracy of silence: Letter says Vatican knew about disgraced archbishop's behaviour

But rather than punish McCarrick, who was forced to resign last month, Vigano said Francis had lifted sanctions imposed on him by his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI.

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (File | AP)

Vigano called on Francis to resign in a letter published Saturday in the National Catholic Register.

He said the pope "knew from at least June 23, 2013, that McCarrick was a serial predator," adding that "he knew that he was a corrupt man, he covered for him to the bitter end".

But the pope refused to address the brewing scandal on Sunday.

"I will not say a word about that. I think that the communique speaks for itself," Francis said on his plane as he flew back from Dublin to Rome.

He had "begged for God's forgiveness" for past clerical abuse scandals during his landmark trip to Ireland, where they have badly damaged the image of the Catholic Church. He said he was demanding "firm and decisive" measures to find "truth and justice".

- 'Nope to the pope' -

Before 45,000 supporters at the rain-soaked Knock shrine in the west of Ireland on Sunday, the pope spoke of the "open wound" of the scandals.

He later said mass to tens of thousands of flag-waving worshippers before heading back to Rome after his two-day visit.

Pope Francis waves as he leaves from Dublin Airport back to the Vatican putting an end to his visit to Ireland, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018. (Photo | AP)

He also acknowledged other abuses by the Irish church, including at its so-called "mother and baby" homes for unwed mothers.

In the Irish capital, about 5,000 abuse victims and supporters braved the weather to attend a "Stand for Truth" rally.

A woman dressed as a nun, with fake blood on her hands, and a man handing out homemade placards reading "The church protects pederasts" were among those protesting.

Protesters at the Dublin gathering (Photo | Twitter)

It was the first papal trip to Ireland since John Paul II spoke in front of 1.5 million people during a visit in 1979.

"I think it's obviously causing quite a lot of distress," abuse victim and campaigner William Gorry said of the visit.

"Healing is something that's going to take a long, long time if it's going to happen at all," he told AFP.

At another "Nope to the Pope" demonstration, protesters called for gay and transgender recognition, a clearer separation of religion and state in Ireland and the acceptance of contraception by the Vatican -- as well as action on abuse.

The pope went to Ireland to close the 2018 World Meeting of Families -- a global Catholic gathering that addressed issues including the treatment of gay people in the Church.

On the plane back to Rome, the pope recommended parents seek psychiatric help for children who show homosexual tendencies.

"When it shows itself from childhood, there is a lot that can be done through psychiatry, to see how things are. It is something else if it shows itself after 20 years," he said.

- 'Stain' on the Church -

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar on Saturday urged the pope to take action against abuses and ensure justice for abuse victims worldwide.

"Holy Father, I ask that you use your office and influence to ensure that this is done here in Ireland and across the world," he said, calling the scandals a "stain" on the Church and state.

The pope met eight abuse victims on Saturday, including a woman assaulted by a priest when she was in hospital aged 13.

On the plane to Rome, Francis said he "suffered a lot" at the meeting. He also said he was particularly moved by the plight of unmarried girls forced to give up their children for adoption.

"I had never heard of it," he said. "It was painful for me, but accompanied by the consolation of being able to help clarify these things."

The Church's standing has been badly dented by the abuse scandals and the Irish have shed traditional Catholic mores, voting earlier this year to legalise abortion after approving same-sex marriage in 2015.

Multiple probes in Ireland have found Church leaders protected hundreds of predatory priests and former Irish president Mary McAleese revealed this month that the Vatican had sought to keep Church documents inaccessible to government investigators.

The abuse scandals in Ireland are part of a worldwide crisis for the Vatican. A devastating report earlier this month accused more than 300 priests in the US state of Pennsylvania of abusing more than 1,000 children since the 1950s.By PTI

HANOI: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today unveiled the bust of Mahatma Gandhi at the Embassy of India in the Vietnamese capital here.

Swaraj is in Vietnam on the first leg of her four-day two-nation tour which aims at deepening India's strategic cooperation with Vietnam and Cambodia -- the key countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region.

The bust was unveiled in the Chancery building of the Indian mission.

External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Ravish Kumar said in a tweet: "Paying respect to the Father of the Nation! EAM @SushmaSwaraj unveiled the bust of Mahatma Gandhi in the Chancery building at the Embassy of India in Hanoi".

Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang, on his State visit to India in March, had paid tributes to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat in New Delhi.By AFP

LONDON: Prime Minister Theresa May will make a three-nation visit to Africa this week, her first to the continent since becoming British leader in 2016, aimed at boosting post-Brexit trade ties.

May, joined by several ministers and 29 business representatives from various industries, will visit South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya during the three-day trip, Downing Street said Monday.

She will be the first British prime minister to set foot in Kenya since Margaret Thatcher in 1988.

"As we prepare to leave the European Union, now is the time for the UK to deepen and strengthen its global partnerships," May said in a statement.

"Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy," she added.

"As longstanding partners this trip is a unique opportunity at a unique time for the UK to set out our ambition to work even closer together."

The delegation will land in Cape Town on Tuesday, where May will meet South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as well as business leaders and young people.

She will use a speech on the opening day to set out how Britain can bolster its partnership with Africa, "particularly by bringing the transformative power of private sector trade and investment from the UK", her office said.

May will present Ramaphosa with the bell from the troopship Mendi, which sank in the English Channel in 1917 drowning more than 600 mainly South African troops set to join the Allied forces fighting in World War I.

It was the worst maritime disaster in the African country's history, and has become a symbol of its WWI remembrance.

The prime minister is also expected to visit Robben Island where former president Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for decades to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth.

May will head to Nigeria on Wednesday for meetings with President Muhammadu Buhari in the capital Abuja and with victims of modern slavery in Lagos.

On Thursday she will meet Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, shortly after his return from seeing US President Donald Trump in Washington and before he travels to China to meet President Xi Jinping.

The prime minister will then see British troops in training action and tour a business school, before concluding the trip at a state dinner hosted by Kenyatta.

Among those joining May are representatives of the London Stock Exchange, the Scotch Whisky Association and manufacturing firm JCB.By AFP

RIYADH: The Saudi-led military coalition fighting in Yemen today accused the United Nations of "biased" reports on airstrikes that allegedly killed dozens of children in rebel-held areas.

"The coalition is surprised by the biased positions of some reports," said coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki, adding that the information was "prejudiced" and based on "rebel stories".

The coalition has not confirmed or denied it carried out two air raids on Thursday that the UN said killed at least 26 children and four women south of the flashpoint rebel-held city of Hodeida.

The UN Security Council had already called for a "credible" investigation into a strike blamed on the coalition in northern Yemen on August 9 that the Red Cross said killed 40 children.

The coalition has announced its own probe into that raid.

Two UN officials have made public statements condemning the attacks.

"We all know that UN bodies are under pressure by the Huthi militias and these reports may have come in response to that pressure," Maliki said.

"There is no war without collateral damage."

Saudi Arabia and its allies have fought the Huthis since 2015 in an attempt to restore Yemen's internationally recognised government to power and push back the rebels, who still hold the capital Sanaa.

The war has left nearly 10,000 people dead and unleashed what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Rain. High near 45F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy early, then clearing overnight. Low 29F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph.Young people can apply to join the Hong Kong/Hungary bilateral Working Holiday Scheme from September 1.

Holders of the working holiday visa can stay in the host economy for up to 12 months.

They can work to finance their stay or take up a short-term study course.

Hong Kong has established working holiday schemes with New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, Germany, Japan, Canada, Korea, France, the United Kingdom, Austria, Hungary, Sweden and the Netherlands, benefiting more than 88,000 local youths.

Click here for details.AN opportunity to study and work abroad, is one that is never missed or compromised as pastures are considered greener out there, but for ...(Newser)  For the first time since Kiera Bergman vanished three weeks ago, Phoenix police are saying they suspect foul play in her disappearance, the Arizona Republic reports. A visibly upset Bergman, 19, reportedly left work early on the morning of Aug. 4; police later said she was last seen that day at her Phoenix apartment and has not been heard from since. Bergman moved to Arizona from the San Diego area in March to live with her boyfriend, 23-year-old Jon-Christopher Clark, her parents have previously said. She moved in with a friend a few weeks later after breaking up with Clark, but Clark says he then moved in with the two in mid-June after reconciling with Bergman. Clark, who says he was the last person to see Bergman, was arrested Aug. 17 on suspicion of identity theft and forgery; he was released a week later, NBC San Diego reports.

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Police say the investigation into the other, unrelated crimes began after a search of Clark's vehicle, though authorities have said he is not a suspect in Bergman's disappearance. Clark has said in an interview with the Republic that he was questioned by police in the disappearance, but that he was not involved and just wants her to come home. Bergman's parents, however, have said they believe he may have had something to do with their daughter's disappearance. The day she vanished was Clark's birthday, and Clark says she asked him to pick her up from work in the morning. He says they later argued because he was sad they weren't doing anything for his birthday and she left the apartment upset (and reportedly without her money, purse, or car). A GoFundMe has been set up for her family. (Read more missing woman stories.)(Newser)  The father of the 20-year-old Iowa woman whose body was found in a cornfield last week wants people to remember her by "celebrating something wonderful"not by the way she died. Mollie Tibbetts' father, Rob Tibbetts, urged the hundreds of people at his daughter's funeral on Sunday afternoon to remember her passion for life and her desire to help others. Her body was found last Tuesday after suspect Cristhian Bahena Rivera led police to the field where her body had been since July 18. To highlight his call to celebrate "wonderful" things, Rob Tibbetts recognized a couple who had just married the day before during his eulogy inside the gymnasium at Brooklyn-Guernsey-Malcom High School. Mollie Tibbetts graduated from the school in 2017, reports the AP.

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"Today, we need to turn the page. We're at the end of a long ordeal," he said. "But we need to turn toward lifeMollie's lifebecause Mollie's nobody's victim. Mollie's my hero." Davenport Bishop Thomas Zinkula led the funeral Mass. More than 1,000 people filled the gymnasium for Mollie Tibbetts' funeral in the central Iowa city of 1,500 where she grew up. Tibbetts had been staying in Brooklyn during a summer break from her studies at the University of Iowa. Rivera is being held in lieu of a $5 million cash-only bond, and he is suspected of being in the United States illegally. He faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted. (A woman told the New York Times Rivera sent her messages online for months.)(Newser)  The rhetoric from North Korea toward the US is creeping back toward levels that existed before the June summit between Kim Jong Un and President Trump. An editorial in a state-run paper claims the US is staging air drills that simulate an invasion of Pyongyang in case denuclearization efforts fail, reports Reuters. "Such acts prove that the US is hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK and commit a crime which deserves merciless divine punishment," says the editorial. One US military official tells the Washington Post that the claim of such drills taking place in the Philippines is "far-fetched" and another uses the term "completely false." The harsh editorial comes two days after Trump canceled a visit to North Korea planned by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in part because Trump said he hadn't seen enough progress on denuclearization.

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We cannot but take a serious note of the double-dealing attitudes of the US as it is busy staging secret drills involving man-killing special units while having a dialogue with a smile on its face, says the opinion piece in Rodong Sinmun. The issue is dove-tailing with another foreign policy concern of the White House: Last week, Trump said one reason North Korea wasn't making enough progress is that China isn't helping as much as it once didbecause it's angry with the US over the two nations' trade dispute. Over the weekend, China's foreign ministry said the accusation shows a "total disregard of the facts." One impasse in US-Pyongyang talks: North Korea wants a declaration of peace from the US before denuclearization takes place, but the US says any such declaration will come after North Korea makes more progress in abandoning its arsenal. (Read more North Korea stories.)(Newser)  In August 1998, 11-year-old Nicky Verstappen disappeared from his summer camp tent; his body was found the next day. Now, an arrest in a case that has been major news in the Netherlands and that involved a massive DNA undertaking. The Guardian reports that as the 20th anniversary of Nicky's death approached, Dutch officials in May 2017 put out a request: that roughly 20,000 men in the Limburg area where Nicky was killed submit their DNA that October as part of a mass testing program. More than 14,000 did, reports the BBC. Jos Brech was not among them: The NL Times reports he left in October to hike in France's Vosges mountains, reportedly telling his family he'd submit his DNA upon his return. Except he didn't return, and his family reported him missing in April. But the DNA trail still led to the 55-year-old survivalist and former scout leader.

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DNA that Brech's relatives provided showed the killerwho left his DNA on Nicky's pajamaswas related to one of the donors, which helped authorities zero in on Brech. They were able to recover a sample of his DNA from his home and confirmed it was a match, which earned him a spot on Europol's most wanted list last week. The Guardian reports police received a tip from a Dutch national who had seen the police photos and was visiting a commune-like community on the outskirts of Castelltercol, Spain, some 30 miles north of Barcelona, that Brech was there. He was arrested Sunday and will be extradited to the Netherlands. Brech's name was known to police: He was stopped two days after the murder while in the area and was questioned, but police deemed him no more than a passerby. (Cops say this serial rapist was also sunk by family ties.)(Newser)  It's a safe bet this will end up being Monday's strangest twist in the Robert Mueller investigation: Politico explains how the unrelated case of a professor who disappeared in 1956 could prevent Mueller from making his report public. It takes some unpacking: More than six decades ago, a Columbia university professor and political activist named Jesus Galindez went missing, and a leading theory is that he was kidnapped, brought to the Dominican Republic, and murdered. (Sound Hollywood-esque? See the 2003 film The Galindez File.) Attorney and author Stuart McKeever has been digging into the case, and he wants a judge to release testimony given to a grand jury that investigated the professor's disappearance. And that brings us to the Mueller connection.

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Such testimony is usually kept secret, and an appeals court is expected to rule next month whether judges have a right to release it to the public. If the court sides with the Justice Department and says the testimony must remain under wraps, the same principle could apply to Mueller: He might not be legally able to publish his report, which draws from grand jury testimony. The story notes that if Democrats win control of the House in November, it's largely a moot point, because the House Judiciary panel could subpoena the report as part of an impeachment inquiry. But if the GOP retains control, the precedent becomes an issue. It is a sleeper case, says Harvard professor Alex Whiting, and it could "have potentially enormous implications for the future of the information from the Mueller investigation." Read the full story by Josh Gerstein at Politico. (Read more Robert Mueller stories.)(Newser)  The word genocide has been used by critics to describe the Myanmar military's brutal crackdown on Rohingya Muslims, but a team of UN investigators has just brought the allegation to a whole new level. The three-member team says the actions of the nation's army meet the strict legal definition of the term and recommends that military leader Gen. Min Aung Hlaing and five generals be prosecuted, reports the AP. The panel cites a "conservative" estimate of 10,000 dead, the forced evacuation of 700,000 people, gang rapes, the murder of children in front of their parents, the torching of villages, and enslavement, reports the New York Times. The investigators, working under a mandate from the Human Rights Council, also criticize Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyia Nobel Peace Prize laureatefor doing nothing to stop the genocide.

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The crimes in Rakhine State, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts, declares the 20-page report, which will be presented in Geneva next month. Another 400 pages that include eyewitness accounts are annexed. Myanmar has maintained that its crackdown was a necessary response to rebellion, but investigators say the military action was "grossly disproportionate to actual security threats," per Reuters. Most of the 700,000 Rohingyas who fled Myanmar remain in refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh. As for Suu Kyi and other civilian leaders, they "contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes by failing to use their positions to stop them, say the investigators. (Rape survivors share their stories.)(Newser)  Iran went to the United Nations' highest court Monday in a bid to have US sanctions lifted following President Trump's decision earlier this year to re-impose them, calling the move "naked economic aggression." Iran filed the case with the International Court of Justice in July, claiming that sanctions the Trump administration imposed on May 8 breach a 1955 bilateral agreement known as the Treaty of Amity that regulates economic and consular ties between the two countries. At hearings that started Monday at the court's headquarters in the Hague, Tehran asked judges at the world court to urgently suspend the sanctions to protect Iranian interests while the case challenging their legality is being hearda process that can take years. The AP has much more:

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Background: Trump said in May that he would pull the United States out of a 2015 agreement over Iran's nuclear program and would re-impose sanctions on Tehran. Washington also threatened other countries with sanctions if they don't cut off Iranian oil imports by early November.

Trump said in May that he would pull the United States out of a 2015 agreement over Iran's nuclear program and would re-impose sanctions on Tehran. Washington also threatened other countries with sanctions if they don't cut off Iranian oil imports by early November. US response: In a written statement, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the legal move an attempt by Tehran "to interfere with the sovereign rights of the United States to take lawful actions, including re-imposition of sanctions, which are necessary to protect our national security." The United States, which argues that the court does not have jurisdiction in the case, is to present its legal arguments to judges on Tuesday.

In a written statement, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the legal move an attempt by Tehran "to interfere with the sovereign rights of the United States to take lawful actions, including re-imposition of sanctions, which are necessary to protect our national security." The United States, which argues that the court does not have jurisdiction in the case, is to present its legal arguments to judges on Tuesday. More on Iran's argument: Iranian representative Mohsen Mohebi told the court the US decision was a clear breach of the 1955 treaty as it was "intended to damage, as severely as possible, Iran's economy." Mohebi said the re-imposition of sanctions was unjustified as Iran was abiding by the terms of the 2015 deal. He said sanctions are already having damaging effects on Iran's economy and society and threaten to further destabilize the volatile Mideast.

Iranian representative Mohsen Mohebi told the court the US decision was a clear breach of the 1955 treaty as it was "intended to damage, as severely as possible, Iran's economy." Mohebi said the re-imposition of sanctions was unjustified as Iran was abiding by the terms of the 2015 deal. He said sanctions are already having damaging effects on Iran's economy and society and threaten to further destabilize the volatile Mideast. More background: The 1955 treaty was signed when the US and Iran were still allies following the 1953 revolutionfomented by Britain and the USthat ultimately cemented the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Iran and the US have a history of litigation at the International Court of Justice, in cases covering crises including the Tehran embassy hostage-taking and the shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet mistaken by a US warship for a fighter jet. Rulings by the world court, which settles disputes between nations, are final and legally binding.

The 1955 treaty was signed when the US and Iran were still allies following the 1953 revolutionfomented by Britain and the USthat ultimately cemented the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Iran and the US have a history of litigation at the International Court of Justice, in cases covering crises including the Tehran embassy hostage-taking and the shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet mistaken by a US warship for a fighter jet. Rulings by the world court, which settles disputes between nations, are final and legally binding. The gulf: Reuters separately reports a top Iranian naval official on Monday said Iran now fully controls the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz that connects the gulf with the open ocean, and "there is no need for the presence of aliens like the US and the countries whose home is not in here." Reuters notes the country has indicated that it could choke off other countries' oil exports as a sort of payback for the US curtailing its own foreign oil sales via sanctions.

(Read more Iran stories.)(Newser)  The Trump administration and Mexico have reached a preliminary accord to end the North American Free Trade Agreement and replace it with a deal that the administration wants to be more favorable to the United States, per the AP. President Trump, in announcing the tentative agreement Monday at the White House, said a new deal would be called "the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement." Trump has frequently condemned the 24-year-old NAFTA trade pact as a job-killing "disaster" for the United States. Still, any new agreement is far from final. The administration still needs to negotiate with the third partner in NAFTA, Canada, to become part of any new trade accord. Without Canada, America's No. 2 trading partner, it's unclear whether any new US trade agreement with Mexico would be possible. Trump said he'd be calling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

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"If they'd like to negotiate fairly, we'll do that," said Trump. "We could have a separate deal (with Canada) or we could put it into this deal." Trump put pressure on Canada by threatening to tax Canadian auto imports and to leave Canada out of a new regional trade bloc. Among other things, Mexico has agreed to ensure that 75% of automotive content be produced within the trade bloc (up from a current 62.5%) to receive duty-free benefits and that 40% to 45% be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour. It remained unclear where Monday's announcement leaves Canada. "Canada is encouraged by the continued optimism shown by our negotiating partners," says a foreign ministry spokesperson. "Progress between Mexico and the United States is a necessary requirement for any renewed NAFTA agreement."

(Read more NAFTA stories.)(Newser)  Seth Frotman, the federal government's top student loan watchdog, resigned Monday, accusing the White House of serving "the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America" and abandoning consumers. Frotman, student loan ombudsman with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will step down at the end of the week, reports the AP, noting that he is "the latest high-level departure" from the organization since White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney took over as acting director in November. "The damage you have done to the bureau betrays these families and sacrifices the financial futures of millions of Americans in communities across the country," Frotman wrote in his resignation letter, which was addressed to Mulvaney.

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The CFPB's loan ombudsman office, created nearly a decade ago in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, has handled more than 60,000 student loan complaints, per NPR, returning more than $750 million to borrowers. The student loan market is worth $1.5 trillion, according to the Washington Post. Recently, though, Mulvaney moved the student loan office into the category of consumer education, rather than enforcement, the AP reports. Reducing enforcement work is a bureau-wide trend under Mulvaney, who has proposed changing or eliminating any rules or regulations established during the Obama Administration. Frotman's "departure raises concerns about the priorities of Mulvaney and CFPB leadership and whether they are fulfilling the mission of the CFPB to focus on protecting consumers from financial abuse," Debbie Goldstein of the Center for Responsible Lending tells the AP. (Read more Mick Mulvaney stories.)(Newser)  Four Indiana teens are dead after they were struck from behind while pushing an SUV that had broken down near the home where they were attending a slumber party. Jenna Helton, 14; Nevaeh Law, 14; Brittany Watson, 15; and Martin Martinez, 16, were among eight kids who were helping to push the disabled Chevy Suburban along State Road 258 near Cortland around 11 p.m. on Saturday, the Seymour Tribune reports. They were killed when Elizabeth Watson, 24, slammed her 2018 Chevrolet Traverse into the back of the Suburban. The Suburban had stopped running a block from 37-year-old Cara Selby's home, where the family was hosting a sleepover to celebrate the birthday of Selby's daughter, Victoria Valdivia. The kids had come outside to help push it home.

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The other four teens pushing the Suburban sustained injuries of varying severity. Three of them were airlifted to hospitals, per WDRB. The teens who were killed attended two high schools in the area. Principals at both schools tell the Tribune that they plan to make help available to grieving students. "We pray for peace, comfort, and understanding as we go through this together," Seymour High School Principal Greg Prange said. The crash is still under investigation, and no charges are pending against Elizabeth Watson (who is not related to Brittany Watson, who was one of the teens killed) at this time. A memorial of flowers and balloons has been erected near the accident scene. (Read more Indiana stories.)New Delhi:

A sales executive from Delhis crowded Laxmi Nagar area, who earned Rs 25,000 per month, was shocked to know that his name was listed as director in 13 firms and transactions of over Rs 20 crore were made in his name.

Twenty-year-old Anuj Kumar Srivastav, who owns a WagonR car and lives in a rented apartment, claimed that his pan card details were stolen and fake financial transactions were carried out with the stolen data.

According to The Indian Express, Anuj came to know about the data theft when Income Tax Department sent him a notice earlier this year. Initially, he didnt take the notice seriously and thought it was sent to him mistakenly.

Also Read | TRAI Chief's Aadhaar details leaked after he challenged hackers to prove its vulnerability

When he was charged with heavy amount on his tax, he tried to approach the investigating agencies. Then only he came to know that he was made the director of 13 companies and fake transactions of more than 20 crore were made in his name.

"I got a call from an IT official who informed me that the transaction was carried forward from Janakpuri branch of a national bank. The payment was made allegedly in lieu of import of software where I was made as a proprietor of Maxkart Impex Company, the English daily quoted Srivastav as saying.

Srivastav had also filed a police complaint but no action was taken. However, on July 31, a Delhi court ordered the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Delhi Police to investigate the matter and file a detailed report by September 1.

Also Read | Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 draft submitted by Justice Srikrishna Committee; Know what it says

The 27-year-old victim of data breach said that he was denied a personal loan of 5 lakh by the banks after examining his IT documents. He, however, now hopes that IT department will correct the error and he will be out of the economic mess.New Delhi:

As earlier predicted by India Meteorological Department, rains lashed parts of Delhi and NCR on Monday bringing down the mercury level and providing much-needed relief from the humid weather condition in the city.



ALSO READ | Ahmedabad: Four-storey building collapses in Odhav area



While on one hand a cyclonic circulation has developed over south-east Uttar Pradesh, the monsoon trough is also located very close to Delhi. We are expecting some light rain on Monday and light to moderate rain on Tuesday, said an IMD official.

Earlier on Sunday the maximum temperature was recorded to be 34.9 degrees Celsius, the minimum temperature stood at 27 degrees Celsius, both of which were one degree above normal.



ALSO READ | Maharashtra: 3 dead, 2 kids injured after motorcycles collide inKolkata:

The BJP on Sunday came down heavily on Amartya Sen, likening him to people who have always misled the society, a day after the Nobel laureate called for an alignment of non-BJP, non-communal forces for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Intellectuals like Sen, who had always professed Left ideology, are losing touch with reality. Sen had said CPI(M) is getting invisible. Nothing can be truer than this, nothing can be truer than the fact that people like Sen, a Marxist, have little relevance in the present times, West Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh told reporters on the sidelines of a party programme here.

Also Read | Killings of Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dabholkar linked: CBI to court

On Sens call for defeating BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP leader said people like him have always taken the society on the wrong path.

He had always given wrong direction to the society, it is no surprise he is again doing the same thing, Ghosh said.

Sharply reacting to Ghoshs diatribe against Sen, Trinamool Congress Secretary General Partha Chatterjee said, One has to be a reader of books to acquire the right to speak on Amartya Sen.

Read More | Judge me based on my capability, not surname: Rahul Gandhi

Chatterjee said, Those people, who wield lathis at processions, should refrain from making comments on a person of Sens stature as they cant appreciate the words spoken by an erudite person like him.

Criticising the BJP government at the Centre, Sen had said on Saturday that a party having got 31 per cent votes and ill motives in politics came to power in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.New Delhi:

The University Grants Commission (UGC) had warned 21 Delhi University (DU) colleges, including Hindu College, Jesus and Mary College, Kamala Nehru College and Gargi College, that their financial grants would be withheld if they don't appoint regular principals in their institutions.

After the issuance of the notice, only one college has appointed a regular principal while some others are in the process of doing the same. If they do not do so in the given time frame, then their grants and benefits will be stopped. A full-time Principal ensures having a good administration and maintaining an academic environment. UGC as an apex body is regularly focusing on the quality of higher education," UGC Secretary Rajnish Jain told ANI.

Also Read | UGC bans junk food sale in all campuses of colleges and universities

On August 13, 2018, the UGC sent notice to the colleges stating that many colleges had not complied with the directives of MHRD/UGC to appoint regular principals, adding interviews had not been held in most of the colleges showing lack of commitment on the part of college authorities for strengthening the administrative and academic atmosphere in the colleges.

The UGC had asked the colleges to expedite the appointment process and to inform the date of interview for the post of the principal latest by August 31, 2018.

Also Read | DUSU elections 2018 to be held on September 12

"It is once again requested to expedite the process of selection of a full-time regular Principal in your college. Further, you are hereby requested to inform the date of interview for the post of the Principal latest by 31st August 2018, failing which the UGC will be constrained to withhold the release of further grants, the notice read.

(With ANI inputs)Los Angeles:

Tom Hardy has said that he is ready to play Marvel antihero Venom in more than one film as he is contracted with Sony for three movies.

The 40-year-old actor is all set to debut as the character in Ruben Fleischer's Venom, which also stars Riz Ahmed and Michelle Williams.

In an interview with Total Film Magazine, Hardy said he would be open to reprising his role as Eddie Brock and his alter-ego, Venom, should the film be a success.

Also Read | Harry Potter series trained Domhnall Gleeson for Star Wars films

"I'm open to whatever you want to do with it. We've signed up for three of them. So it's very much an open case. We'll see what people's responses are to it," Hardy said.

"I think it's an awesome character. I love playing both of them. It's an amuse-bouche, and for Sony, it's the Venom-verse launched in isolation, as it were," he added.

Also Read | Joaquin Phoenix not bothered about fans expectations for Joker

The British star also hinted that the Spider-Man spin-off will serve as a standalone trilogy.

"We all prepped for it to be a standalone universe. So whatever Sony want to attach to it at a later date, it's a fulcrum piece. But let's see what happens when it lands," Hardy said.

For all the Latest Entertainment News, Hollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Monday said the Congress was not connected with the 1984 anti-Sikh riots but admitted that few party leaders were involved in the genocide. Amarinder said he had visited camps and some Gurdwaras in Delhi after the riots happened.

The incident (1984 Sikh riot) took place when Indiraji was killed, at that time Rajiv Gandhi was at an airport in Bengal. There was no Congress involvement other than some people. I have named few people, Sajjan Kumar, Dharamdas Shastri, Arjun Das and two more people, Amarinder was quoted by ANI as saying.

Also Read | Judge me based on my capability, not surname: Rahul Gandhi

I have been naming these people for the past almost 34 years, Amarinder said, while clarifying that he had named the people who were mentioned to him, and not out of any personal knowledge.

On Monday, the Punjab Assembly session was marked by chaos over the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Minutes before the Justice (retd) Ranjit Singh Commissions report on incidents of sacrilege in 2015 in the state was tabled in the Assembly, opposition Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) raised the 1984 anti-Sikh riots issue during the Zero Hour.

On Friday, Congress President Rahul Gandhi in London, said that Congress, as a party, was never involved in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Amarinder, defending Rahul, hit out at SAD leader Bikram Singh Majithia that he was just about eight-years-old at the time of riots.

Also Read | Support punishment to those involved in 1984 anti-Sikh riots: Rahul

Amarinder accused the Akalis of taking up the riots issue when it suited them and asked, What do you know about the issue?, while warning the Akalis against playing with the sentiments of the Sikhs on the sensitive matter.

Amarinder also slammed SAD President Sukhbir Singh Badal saying, he was in California in a University when the riots broke out.

Meanwhile, Sukhbir Singh Badal said that Amarinder should write to the Supreme Court that he is the main witness in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and added Amarinder did not take Jagdish Tytler he had a soft corner for Tytler.

He (Amarinder Singh) took five names, but he has a soft corner for Tytler (Jagdish Tytler). So he didn't take his name: Sukhbir Singh Badal, SAD President on Punjab CM taking names of 5 people including Sajjan Kumar, Dharamdas Shastri, Arjun Das involved in 1984 anti-Sikh riots pic.twitter.com/SWpQP6vToD  ANI (@ANI) August 27, 2018

(With inputs from agencies)

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

The Supreme Court on Monday will resume its hearing on a batch of petitions, seeking the scrapping of Article 35 A in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Earlier on August 6, the apex court adjourned its hearing after the state government moved an application to defer hearing of the case, citing upcoming panchayat and urban local body polls. The SC, however, will hear only lawyer and BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay's fresh plea against Article 35-A and postponed the main hearing to August 31.

Article 35-A, incorporated in the Constitution by a 1954 Presidential Order, gives a special status to the people in Jammu and Kashmir, preventing non-locals from buying and owning any immovable property in the state.

The high-pitched socio-political drama started back in 2014 after We the Citizens, a non-governmental organisation filed a petitioned in the apex court, asking to abolish Article 35-A, stating that the law was "unconstitutional".

#TopStory Supreme Court to today hear petition seeking scrapping of #Article35A in Jammu and Kashmir, three weeks after the case was adjourned.Jammu and Kashmir had moved application and sought to defer hearing of the case, citing upcoming panchayat and urban local body polls pic.twitter.com/sTEzXp4UE6  ANI (@ANI) August 27, 2018

Read | Section 377: Supreme Court reserves verdict on gay sex law

Meanwhile, there is unrest in parts of the Kashmir Valley as a three-judge bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A M Khanwilkar and Justice D Y Chandrachud will be resuming the crucial hearing, which may tinker the special status of Jammu and Kashmir.

Separatist group - the Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL), comprising Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mohammad Yasin Malik called for a two-day strike over the legal challenge against Article 35-A and warned of a mass agitation across Jammu and Kashmir in case of any untoward decision by the apex court.

In early August too, the normal life in Kashmir was thrown out of gear on a shutdown call by separatists, who have been protesting the government's alleged move to tamper with Article 35-A.

Read | Adultery law violates right to equality; treats men, women differently: Supreme Court

Various organisations, including the state bar association, transporters and traders' bodies also extended their support to the shutdown call. Different religious and social organisations gave nod to the separatist strike with an aim to "safeguard" the constitutional provision.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar, who, along with Mamata Banerjee, is making all-out efforts to stitch an anti-BJP alliance for 2019 Lok Sabha elections, has suggested a solution to the spiky issue of Oppositions prime ministerial candidate.

Addressing party leaders at a meeting in Mumbai, Pawar on Monday said that first let the elections happen and the issues of prime ministership can be resolved easily  let the party getting more seats claim the top post.

"Let elections take place, remove these people (BJP) from power. We will sit together. Whichever party has got more seats can claim the prime minister's post," Pawar said.

Also Read | RSS likely to invite Rahul Gandhi, Sitaram Yechuri for 'Future of India' event

The 78-year-old NCP leader also expressed his happiness over Congress president Rahul Gandhis remark that he was not too eager for the PM post and will rather fight the ideological battle with the BJP.

"I am happy that the Congress leader (Rahul Gandhi) has also said he is not in the race for the prime minister's post," the NCP chief added.

On Sunday, the Congress president had said that he didnt have prime ministers post in his mind and he was only defending the Indian state from divisive forces.

"I don't have these visions. I view myself as fighting an ideological battle and this change has come in me after 2014. I realised that there's a risk to Indian state, to Indian way of doing things and I'm defending that," the Gandhi scion had said.

Also Read | Judge me based on my capability, not surname: Rahul Gandhi

The Opposition parties led by the likes of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee, NCP chief Sharad Pawar, BSP Supremo Mayawati and SPs leader Akhilesh Yadav are trying to form a grand-alliance to take on the BJP in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

However, the question  who will be the Oppositions face for the prime minister's post  has kept the formation of the anti-BJP front in disdain.

While Banerjee and Mayawati have expressed their wish to play a bigger role, the Congress party has remained low-profile with the Congress president even willing to sacrifice the post for a woman candidate to keep the possibilities of an anti-BJP alliance alive.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

As 2019 Lok Sabha election is around the corner, the Election Commission on Monday convened an all-party meeting, where the issue of vulnerability of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) is likely to remain in focus. According to sources, close to the poll panel, the meeting, which will discuss preparations for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, is also a part of its annual calendar to meet stakeholders.

The Election Commission has extended invitations to as many as seven national and 51 regional parties, including the Congress, Trinamool Congress (TMC), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S), Telugu Desam Party (TDP), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Samajwadi Party, CPI-M, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), DMK, CPI, YSR Congress, Kerala Congress-Mani (KCM) and AIUDF.

#Delhi: All party meeting called by Election Commission to begin shortly pic.twitter.com/3UWYOugXCC  ANI (@ANI) August 27, 2018

Read | Anti-BJP Grand Alliance formed in Uttar Pradesh; Congress-SP-BSP to contest 2019 elections together

The all-party meeting was announced days after several opposition parties reached out the Election Commission, demanding the upcoming Lok Sabha elections be conducted on ballot paper instead of EVMs. The opposition has accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of tampering the EVM machines in a bid to tilt poll results to their favour.

Ahead of the all party meeting called by the Election Commission later today,Congress has once again appealed to EC that the next Lok Sabha polls be held on ballot paper: Sources pic.twitter.com/ahPEMiNxzy  ANI (@ANI) August 27, 2018

Though the meeting agenda, does not include a discussion on simultaneous polls, suggested by the Modi government, the political parties are expected to raise the idea of 'one nation one election'. However, the present strength of the EVMs does not permit the commission to nod for 'one nation one poll', Election Commissioner OP Rawat informed earlier.

Other significant issues that will come up in the all-party meeting are - the place of electoral rolls, placing a ceiling on political parties expenditure, procedural and timely submission of annual audited reports by parties, demand for paper ballots, linking of Voter ID with Aadhaar, adding print media to the definition of mediums on which vote appeals cannot be made prior to election and also how to curb the use of social media just a few days before the polls.

Read | Will Rahul Gandhis She card turn the tables on BJP?

The agenda note, sent to all political parties, also mentions the issue of the social media campaign and said - in case a party is using social platforms for their respective campaigns, they should stop it just 48 hours before the election.

Besides that, the commission will also formulate strategies to handle the voting by domestic migrants and absentee voters in a bid to take maximum voters into the fold.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) may invite two of its staunch critics  Congress president Rahul Gandhi and CPI-M leader Sitaram Yechuri. As per the information available on RSS website, its chief Mohan Bhagwat will interact with intellectual citizens of the country during Sanghs 'Future of India' programme scheduled to be held in September. According to the reports, the RSS is mulling to send invites to several Opposition leaders, including the Congress President and Yechuri from the Left.

The reports of Sanghs likely invitation to Gandhi came days after the Congress president likened the RSS to radical Islamic outfit Muslims Brotherhood during his two-day visit to Europe.

Also Read | Nagpur exercise  Pranab-RSS move to dampen Congress spirits

Speaking at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a London-based think-tank, Gandhi had on Friday said that the idea of RSS is similar to the idea of Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world.

Reacting to Gandhis remark last week, RSS prachar pramukh (publicity in-charge) Arun Kumar today (Monday) said that the Congress president was unaware of the concept of Muslim Brotherhood and didnt understand the saffron outfit.

"The entire world today is facing the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. He is unaware... he does not understand the gravity of the situation that's why he is making such statements," PTI quoted Kumar as saying.

Also Read | Intolerance will only dilute our national identity: Highlights of Pranab Mukherjee speech at RSS HQ

Earlier in June, RSS had invited former president and Congress veteran Pranab Mukherjee for an event at its headquarters in Nagpur. The Congress party was upset with Mukherjee for attending the event.

RSS is a Hindutva outfit and the ideological mentor of the BJP. The Congress president had even claimed that RSS people killed Gandhiji. He is also facing a defamation case for his allegations against the Hindutva outfit.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

The Supreme Court on Monday issued a notice to instant messaging platform WhatsApp, along with the IT and Finance Ministry, seeking a detailed report on the reason behind not appointing a grievance officer in India till the time.

"Supreme Court today issued a notice to WhatsApp, IT and Finance ministry and sought a detailed reply from them within four weeks as to why a grievance officer in India has not been appointed yet by WhatsApp," the news agency ANI reported.

Supreme Court today issued a notice to #WhatsApp, IT and Finance ministry and sought a detailed reply from them within four weeks as to why a grievance officer in India has not been appointed yet by Whatsapp pic.twitter.com/iqxaiIi5AP  ANI (@ANI) August 27, 2018

Read | Building traceability would undermine end-to-end encryption: WhatsApp

The notice came days after IT and law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad dialled WhatsApp CEO Chris Daniels, asking the messaging company to immediately appoint a grievance officer in India, who will be in charge of addressing concerns over fake messages, which has allegedly triggered incidents of mob-lynching across India.

The Centre also asked WhatsApp to set up a local corporate entity and find a technology solution to trace the origin of fake messages circulated through its platform that led to a series of horrific crimes in the past few years. The messaging platform was also warned of abetment charges in case action is not taken to tackle circulation of fake messages.

Read | Mob-fury cases: WhatsApp building India team to check for fake news

Though, WhatsApp has given nod to the government's most of the demands, the social media platform will not be able to add a feature that will trace the origin of messages. According to WhatsApp, the company has no access to users' data and tampering with it may breach the privacy of the user.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.Hanoi:

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Sunday night arrived at Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, on the first leg of her four-day two-nation tour, which aims at deepening Indias strategic cooperation with Vietnam and Cambodiathe key countries in the ASEAN region.

Swaraj was received by Ambassador P Harish, Indian children who greeted the minister with flowers and senior officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Vietnam, the Indian Embassy here tweeted.



ALSO READ | Article 35-A: SC to hear plea seeking omission 1954 presidential order

Indias ties are on an upswing with Vietnam and Cambodiathe two major countries in the powerful Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) grouping.

India has been particularly scaling up its cooperation with Vietnam in areas of maritime security and energy.

A strategic partner and an important friend in ASEAN! EAM @SushmaSwaraj arrives in Hanoi, Vietnam to a warm welcome. Two days of packed programme on 27-28 August during EAMs first leg of the two-country visit to South East Asia, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Ravish Kumar tweeted.

In Vietnam, Swaraj will co-chair the 16th meeting of the Joint Commission, along with the countrys Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh.

She will also call on Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. Swaraj will also inaugurate the 3rd edition of the Indian Ocean Conference.

The External Affairs Ministers visit to Vietnam and Cambodia will provide an opportunity to hold in-depth discussions with the political leadership on a wide range of global, regional and bilateral issues, and advance our strategic engagement with these countries and the ASEAN region, the MEA had said in a statement on Sunday.

Swaraj will visit Cambodia on August 29.

In her first official visit to Cambodia, Swaraj will hold extensive talks with her counterpart Prak Sokhonn, covering the entire expanse of bilateral and regional issues of mutual interests.

She will call on Prime Minister Hun Sen and President of the Senate Say Chhum. During Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quangs visit to New Delhi in March, both the sides had vowed to join hands for an open and thriving Indo-Pacific, besides ensuring an efficient and rules-based regional security architecture.

ALSO READ | Gandhis gaffes ahead of LS elections to cost Congress party dear

Vietnam and several other ASEAN member countries have territorial disputes with China over the resource-rich South China Sea.

China has been opposing Indias Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) exploring oil in areas claimed by Vietnam in the South China Sea (SCS). India has been asserting that the ONGCs exploration is a commercial operation and not connected with the dispute. Oil exploration in the SCS is a sensitive issue in the Vietnam-China relations.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.Cyprus:

Coffee bars serving masala chai, Indian restaurants and grocery stores in abundance, Bollywood movies screened in mainstream cinemas  Indian migrants have certainly made a deep impact on Australian society.

Government figures show that India remains the main source of skilled migration to Australia while Indian migrants have contributed significantly to the Australian economy.

The scale of Indian skilled migration  shows no signs of abating to Australia, researcher Lesleyanne Hawthorne says in a recent discussion paper for the Australia India Institute, based at the University of Melbourne.

In 2016-17 an additional 14,899 primary applicants were awarded permanent skilled category visas, compared to 12,649 the previous year and 9,825 in 2008-09, Hawthorn says in the paper, entitled The Recent Transformation of Indian Skilled Migration to Australia.

Indian skilled migrants, she says, are characterised by high labour market participation, earnings and employment rates. They have the potential to offer a productivity premium given their relative youth, level of English, tertiary training  and acculturation.

In other words, Indians have been and still are in demand in Australia.

Read | Rajnath Singh inaugurates worlds largest visa centre in Bangladesh

Figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that Indian-born taxpayers have generated billions for the Australian economy  in the year 2011-12, for example, they accounted for $7.9 billion of the $53.4 billion income generated by migrant taxpayers.

And still they keep coming. During the period 2008-09 to 2016-17, Hawthorn says, 114,640 Indians were granted visas under Australias permanent skilled migration programme, far exceeding the scale awarded to Australias other top source countries (the UK, China, the Philippines, Ireland and Malaysia).

Within this same period, India also became Australias second top source of temporary visa applicants, with 96,212 of new grants, just behind the UK, but far exceeding the scale of grants to Ireland, the US, the Philippines and China.

But while India is likely to remain the primary source of skilled migration to Australia, there will be a significant drop in numbers due to changes in Australias immigration policy, which came into effect in March this year.

The changes will affect the future migration of Indian applicants very significantly, especially in the IT and engineering sectors, says Hawthorn.

Read | UK launches monthly visa cap review to ease entry for professionals

The main changes affect those applying for temporary visas, which are generally used as a springboard by would-be migrants wishing to convert their temporary status into permanent residency.

Under the previous 457 visa, successful applicants were allowed to stay in Australia for four years, during which time they could apply for an extension of stay and, if they played their cards right, convert onshore to permanent residence status.

Under the new policy, explains Hawthorn, Australias 457 temporary visa has been abolished and replaced by two eligible skilled migration lists.

Additionally, a total of 215 occupations have been banned from temporary labour migration. And the measure that will affect temporary Indian workers the most is the new Short-Term Skilled Occupation List, which permits just two (rather than four)-year entry for applicants in 253 occupations. While successful applicants can apply for one extension of stay, there is no scope to convert to permanent residence status.

Hawthorn says that eight IT, seven professional engineering, one nursing and multiple business/commerce fields feature have been deleted from Australias temporary labour migration list. And the number of fields for which four-year permanent visas are granted have been also drastically reduced.

Read | PM Modi urges Indonesian citizens to experience 'New India', announces 30-day free Visa

But she points out that jobs for foreign workers are being slashed in the US, where President Donald Trump is enforcing a US Jobs for US workers policy, and in the UK, where third country skilled worker numbers have been capped.

Australia will remain a magnet for skilled Indian workers, even though fewer will be allowed in. Masala chai will continue to be served in coffee bars, more and more Indian restaurants will open their doors, Bollywood films will continue to be shown in Canberras Manuka cinema  and new Indian arrivals will continue to be shocked when they misinterpret the Aussie greeting Gday mate (good day mate), as go die mate.New Delhi:

Congress president Rahul Gandhis four-day visit to Germany and United Kingdom has been eventful as his overseas visits normally are, with his penchant for putting his proverbial foot in his mouth. His latest speech at an interaction with British parliamentarians in London, however, took the cake.

A good 34 years after the unfortunate anti-Sikh riots in New Delhi and many other parts of the country in the wake of Indira Gandhis assassination, Rahul has woken up to claim that the Congress party was not involved in the riots. This is after mounds of evidence pointing at the involvement of Congress leaders like Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Singh, late H K L Bhagat and Kamal Nath, among others, and the fact that it was the Congress party that was in power at the Centre at that time.

In 2005, the Nanavati Commission report had named several Congress leaders for responsibility in the riots and soon after the report was tabled in Parliament the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had apologised to the Sikh community on behalf of the government.

Read | Modi government is lenient to people like Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi: Rahul Gandhi

Rahul acknowledged in London that the anti-Sikh riots were a tragedy and a painful experience, but strangely added that the Congress party was not involved in them. It is no surprise that Rahuls statement drew an immediate response from the Akali Dal which accused the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family of rubbing salt into the wounds of the Sikh community.

With the Lok Sabha elections due in a few months, Rahuls gaffe would become a stick to beat the Congress with for the Akalis and the BJP, especially in Punjab where tempers run high among Sikhs for the fact that justice has eluded them despite 34 years having elapsed since the riots.

Rahuls is indeed a classic case of indiscretion which will cost the Congress dear.

Former Finance Minister P Chidambarams defence of Rahul, saying that he was a mere 13 or 14 years old at that time, cuts no ice because of the shocking statement of Rahul at this point when he is expected to know what he must say and what he should not.

Read | Sukhbir Singh Badal slams Rahul Gandhi over remarks on 1984 riots; Congress defends

The other major bloomer by Rahul Gandhi in Hamburg, Germany was distinguishable by its audacity. In reference to terror group ISIS, he linked it with the BJP which he said had excluded sections like tribals, Dalits and minorities from the development narrative in India. Was he trying to rationalise the misdeeds of a terror outfit like ISIS?

The BJP would indeed be chuckling with glee at Rahuls indiscretions.

Read more OpinionNew Delhi:

NASA is gearing up to launch a laser-armed satellite that will spend three years studying earths melting ice from above. The Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission is currently scheduled to launch on September 15 this year. The satellite will be able to measure the changing thickness of individual patches of ice from season to season, registering increases and decreases as small as half a centimetre.



ALSO READ | Earth's magnetic poles prone to flip can cause satellite crashes

"The areas that we're talking about are vast  think the size of the continental U.S. or larger  and the changes that are occurring over them can be very small," Tom Wagner, a NASA scientist studying the world's ice, said during a news conference. "They benefit from an instrument that can make repeat measurements in a very precise way over a large area, and that's why satellites are an ideal way to study them" he said.



ICESat-2 will follow two previous major NASA projects to monitor ice thickness.



"ICESat-2 really is a revolutionary new tool for both land ice and sea ice research," said Tom Neumann, NASA's ICESat-2 deputy project scientist.



Sea ice is particularly complicated, since the laser must measure the difference between ice surface and ocean surface, which can be just a few centimetres apart. "It really is an incredible engineering feat, but it's one that the science critically depends on," he said.



ALSO READ | NASA probe captures first images of asteroid Bennu



The spacecraft is planned to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Sept. 15. ICESat-2's launch will be the last voyage of United Launch Alliances Delta II rocket, which has seen more than 150 launches over its nearly 30-year career.

For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

Google is all set to launch its new handset Google Pixel 3 XL. The smartphone features a 6.2" (15.75 cm) display with a screen resolution of 1440 x 3120 pixels and runs on Android v9.0 (Pie) operating system. The Google Pixel 3 XL has everything to be a flagship smartphone also being from one of the highly rated brands across the world. Google Pixel 3 XL has been nicely designed for user satisfaction. Its performance is superior with an amazing display. Google provides a decent storage and the presence of features like quick charging cannot stop users from admiring it. However, Google hasnt provided the expandable storage feature in the smartphone.



ALSO READ | Samsung Galaxy A8 Star sale starts today; Know everything about it



Google Pixel 3 XL Specifications:



1. Display: 6.2 inches (15.75 cm) 1440x3120 px, 554 PPI P-OLED



2. Processor: Octa core (2.8 GHz, Quad Core + 1.8 GHz, Quad core) Snapdragon 845



3. Operating system: Android v9.0 (Pie)



4. RAM: 6 GB



5. Internal storage: 64GB of onboard storage



6. Rear Camera: 12.2-megapixel with Dual LED flash

ALSO READ | Xiaomi Redmi Note 6 Pro revealed; Everything you need to know



7. Front Camera: 8+8-megapixel sensor



8. Battery: 3,600mAh with USB Type-C port



9. Colours: Jet Black, Black & White



10. Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, hotspotAfter facing difficulties in selling robbed cars, a car theft gang introduced an innovative robbery method, where they were disassembling vehicles and their parts, it was revealed.

The gang was eventually held thanks to security cameras installed across the Kingdoms roads. This was disclosed by a detective, who was in charge of investigating their case, during the court hearing of the gang members. We received several complaints about stolen cars at Hidd Police Station.

We reviewed security cameras close to the area and saw one of the reported vehicles on a tow car heading towards Isa Town. We noted the registration number of the tow car. Thus, we arrested the owner who uncovered to us that there were other three men helping him, the officer explained to judges at the High Appeals Court. According to court files, the gangs activities lasted for two years, from 2017-2018, during which they stole several cars from all around Bahrain.Special teams deployed to send warning messages to tourists by highlighting fake reports of violence

Qatar is putting in best efforts to target the Kingdoms flourishing tourism sector by highlighting bogus reports of violence, it emerged. Tourists to the Kingdom are being contacted with alarming photos and fake news regarding safety across Bahraini streets, according to findings of a study.

Specially-assigned teams contact them privately and announce to the visitors that conflicts and violence are common in some of the most popular areas of Bahrain, which is totally against the real situation.

This was revealed to Tribune by The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, which conducted the study. The study revealed that groups have intentionally targeted tourists to harm Bahrains reputation in the international community.

The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies regional director Amjad Taha said that it is part of a larger campaign to destabilise the nation. The tourists are sent misleading messages and disturbing photos by these groups. They would tell them that certain streets are engulfed in violence and that they should be careful.

They would even send pictures of violence insinuating that those are happening in Bahrain at the time. But in reality none of this is true; none of the violence or the incidents that they are claiming has any truth in them. Those are fabricated; they have made it all up for their agenda. This is being done to scare people from coming to Bahrain and to taint the reputation of the country.

Use of such tactics shows that people of Bahrain has won against them. They have to resort to such tactics on social media means that they have been helpless in other ways. The tourists that we surveyed said that they were contacted out of nowhere by people they had never seen or interacted with before.

They told us that they received photos of people throwing Molotov cocktails and engaging in other forms of violence, and telling them not to go to areas such as Juffair and City Centre as they were hotspots of violence.

From our research, we found that these claims were lies. The tourists, upon learning that these were untrue claims, went to those locations anyway and found out for themselves that no such violent activities were going on there.Reno Omokri, former aide of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, has accused Suleiman Abba, a former inspector-general of police, of lying agai...

Reno Omokri, former aide of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, has accused Suleiman Abba, a former inspector-general of police, of lying against the Nigerian leader.





Omokri said this in response to an interview Abba granted Daily Trust on Sunday.





The former number one police officer had said he was pressurised by a top Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) member to rig Osun governorship election of 2014.





Abba also said the former president showed him the way out because he refused to do the bidding of the PDP.





But Omokri dismissed the allegations, saying they do not reflect the situation on ground.





My attention has been drawn to recent comments by former Inspector General of Police, Suleiman Abba, who alleged that he was sacked by ex President Goodluck Jonathan because he refused to rig elections in favour of the Peoples Democratic Party during the gubernatorial elections in Osun State, Omokri said in a statement.





IGP Suleiman Abba is proof of the fact that liars need a very good memory otherwise they would contradict themselves with their lies.





Let us examine some facts. The Osun State gubernatorial election held on Saturday August 9, 2014. The results of that election was declared the next day on Sunday, August 10, 2014.





Mr Suleiman Abba claims to have been sacked because he failed to rig that election for the Peoples Democratic Party.





However, Suleiman Abba was appointed acting Inspector General of Police on Friday August 1, 2014 and sacked from office on Monday April 20, 2015.





If it was true that Mr Abba was sacked for refusing to rig the Osun State election, which held on August 9, 2014, why would former President Jonathan wait for 7 and a half months before sacking him?





If it was true that Mr Abba was sacked for refusing to rig the Osun State election, which held on August 9, 2014, why would former President Jonathan keep him in office to preside over the Nigerian Police Force during the more important 2015 Presidential election which was even more crucial to the then President and the PDP?





When juxtaposed with these facts, the accusation of the former IGP of Police makes no sense to reasonable men and women.





Omokri said Jonathan relieved Abba of his duty because of the death of the resident electoral commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Kano state where President Muhammadu Buhari got the highest votes in 2015.





For the avoidance of doubt, Mr Suleiman Abba was sacked for dereliction of duty, because under his watch, the Resident Electoral Commissioner of Kano State, Alhaji Mukaila Abdullahi, was burnt to death with his wife and two children on Friday, April 3, 2015, under suspicious circumstances after he had reported incidents of severe electoral fraud in his domain, Omokri said.





When confronted with this suspicious death, the then acting IGP of Police gave contradictory and unsatisfactory answers. As a leader who valued the sanctity of human life, former President Jonathan ordered the sack of the then acting IGP and appointed Deputy Inspector General of police, Solomon Arase, to act in his stead and get to the bottom of the suspicious death.



Yinka Ayefele, a musician, says the meeting with Abiola Ajimobi, governor of Oyo state, on Thursday was more or less a set-up by the gover...

Yinka Ayefele, a musician, says the meeting with Abiola Ajimobi, governor of Oyo state, on Thursday was more or less a set-up by the governors team.





In an interview with PUNCH, the musician said he demanded a private meeting with the governor but was shocked when pictures of his team and that of the governor surfaced online a few minutes into the meeting.





The pictures drew the ire of Ayefeles supporters who felt he succumbed to begging over the demolition of his Music House.





But Ayefele, who spoke through David Ajiboye, his publicist, said he had to come to the public to set the records straight.





Ajiboye said Ajimobi told them that he could have saved the situation if only they had come to beg him.





On Thursday, we were at a meeting organised by the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria (BON) at Golden Tulip when we got a call from one of the governorship aspirants in the state. He told us that the governor would like to see us, he said.





I was at the BON meeting with Yinka Ayefele and his younger brother . We felt that since they were the ones that invited us, we should honour the governors call; so we excused ourselves from the BON meeting and went to the governors office.





We got there at about 12pm but the governor did not get to his office till about 4pm . We did not leave the governor s office until about 7pm. I was at the meeting with Yinka Ayefele and his younger brother.





When the governor came into the office, we all prostrated to greet him being that he is older than us and we told them that we did not want cameras. We wanted a closed-door meeting with the governor so he asked the pressmen to excuse us but his private photographer did not leave the room. We noticed that while we were talking with the governor, the photographer was taking our pictures and uploading them on their Twitter handle immediately.





The governor later invited his team to come and join us in the meeting; his team comprised the commissioner for information, a governorship aspirant in the state and about four special assistants. The governor told us his grievances. He told us that he could have saved the situation if only we had come to see him. He felt we ought to have come to beg him, and our chairman, Yinka Ayefele, pointed it out that we had since told the commissioner for information to book an appointment with the governor . He further said that he called the SSG to help him book an appointment with the governor even before this incident happened and the commissioner corroborated his claims but said that the governor was unavailable at the time.





Ajiboye said role of traditional rulers in the meeting was a coincidence as they were in the governors office as of the time Ayefele and Ajimobi met.





Coincidentally, there were about ten monarchs who were also waiting to see the governor as at the time we were waiting for him, he said.





They were led by the alaafin of Oyo; so when the obas saw Ayefele, they decided to rally round him. After they had met with the governor, they came back to meet Ayefele and possibly plead on his behalf to the governor.





That was when they allowed the cameramen to enter and we felt it was more or less a set-up because we wanted a close -door meeting. We did not want cameras but there was nothing we could do because we were at the governor s office.





The monarchs appealed to the governor to help Ayefele rebuild the music house. After the monarchs left, the governor also left us with his team and told us to iron things out with them. They claimed that they wrote several letters to us but that we ignored them; they went ahead to say that we did not have a certificate of occupancy for the building and we showed them all the proof.





They all agreed except one commissioner who said that we have to do damage control because we have dented his personality and that of Oyo state government. We had to tell him that it was beyond us because we did not ask people to abuse their government. If they had not demolished the Music House, people would not lay curses on the government.



The National Assembly Joint Committee on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has approved N143 billion for the 2019 electio...

The National Assembly Joint Committee on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has approved N143 billion for the 2019 elections.

The committee adopted the amount which President Muhammadu Buhari presented to the legislature earlier in the year but refused to approve N45.6bn proposed to be vired from the 2019 budget.

In a letter to the senate, Buhari requested that N189.2 billion be released to INEC. He asked that N143.5 billion be released this year and N45.6 billion in 2019.





Udoma Udoma, minister of budget and national planning, had said the president requested the approval of N143 billion because he did not want an increase in the overall size of the 2018 budget.





According to him, if the joint committee wish to approve the entire N189billion without resulting into increase in the N9.12trillion 2018 budget size, so be it and would be appreciated by the executive.





Mr President will have no objection to the national assembly approving the entire N189billion INEC budget as long as it does not in anyway, lead to increase in the overall size of the 2018 budget, he had told the committee.





If this is to be done, the N45.6billion the president in his letter proposed to be provided for in the 2019 budget, would also have to be vired along with the N143billion from the N578billion fund appropriated for in the 2018 budget by the national assembly for the additional 1,403 projects included in the budget.





The budget consideration had divided the lawmaker along party lines as those in the All Progressives Congress (APC) argued for the approval of N189 billion while their Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) counterparts demanded that N143 billion be adopted.





After a closed-door session on Monday, Suleiman Nazif, chairman of the committee, said the panel explained why the budget was adopted.





He said the electoral body had been asked to return to the national assembly to present the budget.





The joint committee sat and has come up with the resolution to adopt the N143 billion presented by Mr. President. It is also the wish of this committee that INEC present their budget of N143 billion as requested by Mr. President, he said.





Therefore, INEC has an opportunity to prioritise its expenditure on the N143 billion and this committee is ready to receive them tomorrow.



The Ogun Youth Consultative Vanguard has warned the ruling All Progressives Congress against welcoming into its fold the Peoples Democratic Party senator, Buruji Kashamu, representing the Ogun East Senatorial District.The youth claimed to have got wind of a move by Kashamu to defect to the APC, following his expulsion from the PDP.They claimed that the move was so that the ruling APC would shield the senator from being extradited to the United States of America where he is said to be wanted for alleged drug-related offences.But Kashamus media aide, Austin Oniyokor, refuted the claim that his principal had any plan to defect from the PDP.Oniyokor, who said KashamHowever, in a statement jointly signed by its Chairman, Adesina Ezekiel, and Secretary, Johnson Adetoun, the OGYV said it had it on good authority that Kashamu had intensified his moves to leave the PDP for the APC.In achieving his desperate obu remained a chieftain of the PDP, challenged the OGYV to come up with concrete evidence to back their claim that Kashamu was nursing any defection plan.jective, he (Kashamu) has already secured the assistance of a governorship aspirant of the ruling APC in Ogun State, who is also his very close ally, to help him to reach out to the powers that be in the Presidency in Abuja, to apprise them of his desire to move over to the ruling party and convince them to facilitate his defection.Also, we have it on good authority that the recent show of force by Kashamu in Ogun State was actually organised by the APC governorship aspirant and some party chieftains to convince the party (APC) leadership in Abuja and the Federal Government that Kashamu is still very relevant in Ogun State politics and that he controls a large number of the electorate.These are all part of the deceit and mischief by Kashamu to infiltrate Aso Rock and the national leadership of the APC to facilitate his defection, the OGYV said.According to the group, all the moves by Kashamu were to the ultimate end that the Federal Government would influence the outcome of his extradition case now before the Supreme Court.The youth, however, warned the APC-led Federal Government against giving Kashamu refuge from prosecution for the allegations made against him by another country.It warned that by accepting Kashamu, the APC and the Federal Government would be portraying themselves as mere hypocrites paying lip service to the fight against corruption.But in a telephone interview with our correspondent, Kashamus media aide, Oniyokor, described his principals alleged defection move as baseless, noting that only last Thursday Kashamu still joined other PDP members to welcome the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, to Ogun State for the Ojude Oba festival.Oniyokor said, There is no iota of truth in the statement or allegation that these people are making. It is not enough for people to sit in the comfort of their rooms, formulate lies and dish to the public. If anybody is saying Mr Kashamu is planning to defect, the person must provide facts and possibly pictures  facts of any meeting he has held with any APC chieftain anywhere. Senator Kashamu remains a PDP senator and he is not contemplating defecting. He has never defected since he joined politics in 2009.The case in court would be decided on the facts before the court; it has nothing to do with joining or not joining any party. When the NDLEA stormed his house, he was a strong PDP chieftain and he is still a strong PDP chieftain. So, saying that someone wants to join the APC so that he would be protected does not add up, because we have seen that even under the PDP government, his house was besieged. So, it doesnt add up. It is cheap blackmail from desperate politicians from Ogun State.Femi Fani-Kayode, a former minister of aviation, has faulted the invitation extended to him by the police for alleged conspiracy, criminal...

Femi Fani-Kayode, a former minister of aviation, has faulted the invitation extended to him by the police for alleged conspiracy, criminal and inciting publication.





He said the police failed to mention the parties involved in the case as well as the issue being investigated.





In the letter signed by Habu Sani, commissioner of police in charge of the IG monitoring unit, force headquarters, the police had said the former minister was being invited purely for fact finding.





But responding, Fani-Kayode said the invitation letter is vague and ambiguous, demanding that it be extended because of short notice.





In the letter dated August 27 and signed by Kayode Ajulo, his counsel, the former minister said he would honour the invitation and possibly respond to questions on all facts that may be limited to his knowledge.





Fani-Kayodes read: It Is essential to unequivocally state that the invitation letter under reference appears vague and ambiguous in its form. Your office (the inspector general of police), for reasons best known to them did not mention the name (s) and person(s) complaining against our client and on what particular subject matter his presence is required.





Therefore, in view of the short notice apparent in your letter under reference, our client is constrained to politely request for a rescheduling of the interview date and also that he be furnished with essential particulars of the purpose of his visit to your office so as to adequately prepare for the said interview.





Our client shall in the circumstance be requesting that the appointment be rescheduled to either the 4th or 5th day of September, 2018, subject to the convenience of your office and officers.



Tunde Bakare, the serving overseer of the Latter Rain Assembly (LRA), says he worked with former president Goodluck Jonathan and President...

Tunde Bakare, the serving overseer of the Latter Rain Assembly (LRA), says he worked with former president Goodluck Jonathan and President Muhammadu Buhari to ensure Nigeria escaped disintegration in 2015.





Speaking in Glasgow, UK, to the African forum Scotland and the Association of Nigerians in Scotland, the fiery preacher warned that Nigeria was on a collision course again as the 2019 elections draw near.





Unknown to many observers, in 2015, following the lifting of the embargo, I worked closely behind the scenes with the two leading candidates in the presidential elections at the time, then President Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP and General Muhammadu Buhari of the APC, towards ensuring that the election results were upheld and that the transition was smooth, he said.





I saw at close quarters how the fate of a nation could hang on a single decision. Therefore, believe me when I tell you that we escaped disintegration by the whiskers.





Now, four years after that escape, our nation is once again headed on a collision course with probable instability unless the tense atmosphere associated with our four-year electocratic insanity is managed with utmost wisdom.





Once again, I have found myself in the inner workings of the chaotic political process and I can tell you that we live in precarious times. How long can our nation stand if we continue along this path? Is it not time to address the foundations once and for all?





What, then, is the way forward and what is the role of the diaspora? Answers to these questions will constitute the concluding aspects of this address.





He told the Nigerians in the diaspora to observe what he called the Nehemiah model in fixing Nigeria, and the rest of Africa.





Bakare shared his Distinct Nationhood Agenda (DNA) and his political family, which is propelled by one agenda  Restructuring for a United Nigeria (RUN).





BAKARE: OBASANJO ASSEMBLED ARGUABLY THE BEST TEAM IN NIGERIAS HISTORY, BUT

Bakare added that former president Olusegun Obasanjo assembled arguably the most competent team by any government in Nigerias history till date but left a lame, limping legacy.





He said Obasanjo could have given priority to this team rather than hand Nigeria over to a legacy of lame and limping successor governments that first sunk Nigeria into a constitutional crisis.





Between May 1999 and March 2007, Nigerias external reserves compounded from 4.98 billion dollars to 59.37 billion dollars, he said.





Aside opportunistic factors such as the oil windfall, these results were the outcome of astute economic management by an economic team comprised of the likes of Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, Dr. Charles Chukwuma Soludo and Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, among others.





That economic team was arguably the most competent ever assembled by any government in Nigerias history till date. Credit must be given to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo for assembling that team.





One would have thought that this brilliant team that oversaw the Nigerian dimension of Africa Rising would be given priority in the succession plan of then President Olusegun Obasanjo.





Instead, after a botched third term agenda, the Obasanjo administration bequeathed to Nigeria a legacy of lame and limping successor governments that first sunk Nigeria into a constitutional crisis and then oversaw the plundering of the nations wealth in a free-for-all corruption jamboree.



President Muhammadu Buhari has fired back at the United States President, Donald Trump over alleged claims by the American leader referring to the Nigerian president as lifeless.The reaction which came through the Buhari Media Organisation BMO was in response to Mondays report by the Financial Times that the American President had made disrespectful comments imputing ill health on President Buhari.President Muhammadu Buhari is fit and capable to run for the 2019 elections and oversee the affairs of the country for four more years President Donald Trumps hate speech notwithstanding, the group said.The BMO in the statement signed by Niyi Akinsiju and Cassidy Maduekwe, its Chairman and Secretary respectively, noted that this was not the first time the US President was heard to make such derogatory remarks at World leaders, and thus President Buhari would not be distracted by such.We are aware that President Trumps disrespect for World Leaders is not new; his comments on Canadas Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, calling him meek and mild; his reference to Germanys Leader, Angela Merkels actions as insane, or his outlandish Tweet at the UKs Theresa May, and more recently, the alleged remarks he made after meeting President Buhari.It is indeed not the first time President Trump would be heard to lower the standards of respect for his colleagues on the World Stage. We are not surprised, we know that this age-long character of the US President would not change anytime soon. But it is important that we put it on record that President Buhari remains fit and sprightly, even for the next decade, they added.We recall that during President Buharis visit to Trump in the White House, the US President commended the successes that the Buhari administration had recorded especially in the fight against insurgency and the war on corruption. The US President was full of admiration for Nigerias President during the visit, thus such outlandish remarks as reported by the Financial Times are not just to be taken with a pinch of salt but are untrue in themselves.The group noted that President Buhari has continued to show fitness and capacity to run the country post-2019; it went further to highlight that though the Presidents 800 metre walk, where he acknowledged the cheers of members of his constituency, was not intended at showboating, it was an unscripted reference point that further proves a fit and lively President.The BMO noted that President Buhari would not be distracted by this report, whether it was indeed said or in fact unsaid, but would in his character continue to remain focused on his mandate to deliver on his promises to the Nigerian people.Leah Sharibu, the only Christian among the abducted 119 students of Government Girls Secondary School, Dapchi, Yobe state, has asked Preside...

Leah Sharibu, the only Christian among the abducted 119 students of Government Girls Secondary School, Dapchi, Yobe state, has asked President Muhammadu Buhari to save her from captivity.





As a proof of life amidst speculations on her fate, TheCable has exclusively obtained her latest picture as well as the audio of her plea to Buhari.





Leah, who was kidnapped in February, also appealed that her family members be assisted.





All the girls who were captured were subsequently released, except five who reportedly died in detention, but Sharibu was held back for refusing to renounce her faith.





The Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), a breakaway faction of Boko Haram, has kept her in captivity for seven months, sparking public outrage.





The federal government had said it was making efforts to secure her release.





Clad in hijab, sewn from a pink material and seated alone on a mat patterned in orange, Sharibu spoke with measured calmness.





She spoke in Hausa in a 35 seconds audio, reproduced here:







I am Leah Sharibu, the girl that was abducted in GGSS Dapchi. I am calling on the government and people of goodwill to intervene to get me out of my current situation, she said. I am Leah Sharibu, the girl that was abducted in GGSS Dapchi. I am calling on the government and people of goodwill to intervene to get me out of my current situation, she said.





I also plead to the members of the public to help my mother, my father, my younger brother and relatives. Kindly help me out of my predicament. I am begging you to treat me with compassion, I am calling on the government, particularly, the president to pity me and get me out of this serious situation. Thank you.





Sources revealed that the audio as well as pictures were part of the proof of life requirement in a possible renewed negotiation efforts between the government and ISWAP members.

The release of Sharibus school mates on March 21, 2018 reportedly followed what sources said had to do with the intervention of IS in Iraq and Syria.





Insurgent leaders were said to have upbraided ISWAP for abducting Muslim schoolgirls.





Thereafter, the 110 Muslim schoolgirls were brought back under an elaborate ceremony that had the community cheering.





Lai Mohammed, minister of information, and Lawal Daura, the sacked director-general of the Department of State Services (DSS), had said the release was part of a wider ceasefire talks with the insurgents.



Senior legal practitioners in the country, on Monday, condemned President Muhammadu Buharis statement that he would continue to place the nations security and national interest above the rule of law.The lawyers who spoke to Vanguard in separate interviews maintained that President Buharis position was a clear recipe for executive lawlessness and anarchy.President had in an address he presented at the opening ceremony of the 2018 Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, in Abuja, insisted that individual rights of alleged offenders would not be spared when national security and public interest are threatened.He said his government adopted the stance on the basis of subsisting decisions of the Supreme Court.According to him, Rule of Law must be subject to the supremacy of the nations security and national interest. Our apex court has had cause to adopt a position on this issue in this regard and it is now a matter of judicial recognition that; where national security and public interest are threatened or there is a likelihood of their being threatened, the individual rights of those allegedly responsible must take second place, in favour of the greater good of society.However, among Senior Advocates of Nigeria, SAN, that faulted the Presidents speech included a Professor of Law, Mr. Ernest Ojukwu and human rights activist, Chief Mike Ozekhome.Prof. Ojukwu, SAN, said: It is unfortunate that our President made that speech. I think there is a fundamental problem which we need to address on that issue.If our President says that rule of law must be subject to national interest then it is an ominous sign that our democracy has failed. The civil society needs to rise to reverse that speech whether it is in substance, in form or reality, otherwise we will be in trouble.According to Ozekhome, SAN: He is dead wrong. Rule of law predominates over national interest. Without rule of law, there can be no nation state.Without nation state,there can be no national interest.Rule of law is father of national interest. As proposed by Prof A.V.Dicey, it means equality before the LAW by all persons,observance of all laws by persons and authorities and of course,obedience to court orders made by competent courts of law.Once a court of law has made an order for the release of a citizen on bail,the president,government and all authorities must obey the order of court.It is not for the government to pick and choose which order to obey and which not to obey ,in the so called name of national interest.This is because in arriving at a decision to release an individual on bail,the court must have first heard the facts and argument of the case of both the government and the citizen.It tantamounts to executive lawlessness and governmental capriciouness and whimsicality to sit on appeal over a court decision to determine what amounts to national interest.Such a stance is a clear descent into anarchy and chaos.Abeny Mohammed, SAN, said: What is national interest that rule of law must be sacrificed for? Rather it is in the national interest for any government to obey and subject Nigeria to the rule of law. Where there is rule of law, every interest, including that of the nation is safeguarded. A country without rule of law is a lawless jungle.I dont know who wrote that speech, it is the first time in our jurisprudence that I will hear a President complaining that the rule of law must give way for national interest. The first national interest of a country is to subject itself to the rule of law. That implies not doing things to soothe the whims and caprices of anyone. That stops any leader from doing what he likes as he is doing today in Nigeria.Unless he want to take Nigeria back to 1984 when he was military head of state, when his words were law.Likewise, another human rights lawyer, Dr. Kayode Ajulo said: The ultimate National interest is codified in the Constitution. Fundamental Human Rights are hinged on the rule of law and if the rule of law is now to play second fiddle, then there is a potential to trample on these rights protected under our constitution!The Presidents statement ultra vires our constitution and every tenets of his claim as the President of our Federation and therefore the statement has no legs to stand on! No serious citizen would take him serious on it.On his part, a constitutional lawyer, Mr. Ugochukwu Ezekiel, said: The process of ensuring National Security is guided by law. All structures and institutions for enforcing and safeguarding the Country are creations of law including the office of the commander -In -Chief.It is therefore not correct that National Security is superior to the rule of law. Rule of law is sacrosanct and it is the basis upon which citizens surrender their rights to the state. There is ample difference between individual rights and rule of law for individual right is anchored on rule of law.President Muhammadu Buhari must have mistaken the Supreme Court decision in Asaris case on right of private citizens being subject to public safety and security to mean that rule of law is subject to National Security.Once rule of law is subjected to perceived need for National Security which is determined by one man or group of men without the requisite checks and balances as provided in our Constitution and other extant legislations, dictatorship is born and democracy takes flight.The Senior Pastor of Latter Rain Assembly, Tunde Bakare, has said that former President, Olusegun Obasanjo assembled the most competent ec...

The Senior Pastor of Latter Rain Assembly, Tunde Bakare, has said that former President, Olusegun Obasanjo assembled the most competent economic team in Nigerias history but handed over Nigeria to a legacy of lame and limping successor governments.





Bakare said this while delivering a lecture titled Transforming Political Dynamics in Africa: The Role of the Diaspora in Glasgow, Scotland.





The clergyman noted that the action by the Obasanjos administration first sunk Nigeria into a constitutional crisis and then oversaw the plundering of the nations wealth in a free-for-all corruption jamboree.





He, however, applauded the former President for his developmental strides recorded between May 1999 and March 2007 by the economic team, comprising the likes of Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Dr. Oby Ezekwesili; Dr. Charles Chukwuma Soludo and Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, among others.





Bakare described Obasanjos team as, The most competent ever assembled by any government in Nigerias history till date.





The clergyman also expressed dissatisfaction with what followed, stating that, one would have thought that this brilliant team that oversaw the Nigerian dimension of Africa Rising would be given priority in the succession plan of then President, Olusegun Obasanjo.





Instead, after a botched third term agenda, the Obasanjo administration bequeathed to Nigeria a legacy of lame and limping successor governments that first sunk Nigeria into a constitutional crisis and then oversaw the plundering of the nations wealth in a free-for-all corruption jamboree, he stated.





He said, Unknown to many observers, in 2015, following the lifting of the embargo, I worked closely behind the scenes with the two leading candidates in the presidential elections at the time, then President Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP and General Muhammadu Buhari of the APC, towards ensuring that the election results were upheld and that the transition was smooth. I saw at close quarters how the fate of a nation could hang on a single decision.





Therefore, believe me when I tell you that we escaped disintegration by the whiskers. Now, four years after that escape, our nation is once again headed on a collision course with probable instability unless the tensed atmosphere associated with our four-year electocratic insanity is managed with utmost wisdom.



Following the release of the 114 pro-Biafra women who were arrested and detained in Owerri Prison after a protest, the Imo State Governor, Rochas Okorocha and the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, are claiming glory for the womens freedom by the court.Immediately after the women were freed by a high court in Owerri unconditionally, the police issued a statement claiming that the release of the women who were arrested and detained for protesting over the whereabouts of the missing IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu was effected following Okorochas intervention.According to the statement, The Imo State Governor, Owelle Anayo Rochas Okorocha, in collaboration with the Commissioner of Police, Imo State CP, Dasuki Galadanchi has graciously intervened in the immediate and unconditional release of the over 100 IPOB women who were remanded by the court in Owerri for unlawful assembly and breach of public peace.The magnanimous intervention for the release was sequel to appeals by concerned individuals who had promised that there will be no repeat of such public disorder in the state by the proscribed group.The Commissioner of Police warned that the Police Command will not accommodate lawlessness and attempts by any person or group of persons whose stock in trade is to cause mischief and breakdown of law and order in the State.However, in what seemed like putting the record straight, Counsel to the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Ifeanyi Ejiofor said: the attention of IPOB legal team has been drawn to the falsehood circulating in the social media platforms and news prints, to the effect that some people have represented themselves.As IPOB lead Counsel, I played active role in the release of the IPOB women who were discharged by Imo State Chief Magistrate Court.As IPOB general Counsel, I led other IPOB lawyers throughout the proceedings at Owerri Magistrate court, filed necessary processes before the High Court of Imo state for their release through which medium the AG, Imo State became fully aware of the facts of the gross violation of the fundamental rights of our mothers and inhuman treatment meted out to them by the Nigerian Police.Suleiman Abba, former inspector-general of police, says the police under him forced former President Goodluck Jonathan to concede the 2015...

Suleiman Abba, former inspector-general of police, says the police under him forced former President Goodluck Jonathan to concede the 2015 election to President Muhammadu Buhari.





Jonathan had congratulated Buhari while the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was still collating results of the election.





This earned him accolades from far and wide.





But in an interview with Daily Trust, Abba said the police should be given credit for making that happen.





Thank God that in our own case, we forced those who lost elections to accept the results. The Nigeria police forced those who lost elections to accept the outcome, he said.





I said the Nigeria Police, I didnt say Suleiman Abba. It was the action of the police that made them to have a change of mind and accept the results. The heroes of that election should have been the police.





Abba also said he was under pressure from the stalwarts of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to compromise the 2015 elections.





He said before then, a top member of the then ruling party had asked him to deliver the 2014 governorship election in Osun state to the PDP.





The election was between Iyiola Omisore of the PDP and Rauf Aregbesola of the All Progressives Congress (APC) who eventually won.





Believe me, I have always counted myself lucky. I think because of the little background I gave you about the strength of discipline in me, both personal and professional, I received my sack as a normal development, he said.





I was not shocked for a reason that I knew it would happen. Right from the time I started work as inspector-general of police, I knew that I may not reach the date of my retirement, which would have been 2019, by which time I would have been 35 years in service and 60 years of age.





I am saying this because the very first week I took over, we had the elections in Ekiti; that was August 2014. Arrangements had been made for the election by my predecessor and I think it was the same team that also did the Osun election, it was the same AIG.





One of the leading stalwarts in the PDP then said to me: IG (you know I was acting then) deliver Osun to us and we will confirm you quickly.





I was shocked! That was when I knew that I may not last long in the office. Immediately, I said to myself, How could I deliver when I am not an electorate? The voters are the ones to deliver, my own was to protect the whole process. Of course I said to myself that what happened to one of my predecessors (may his soul rest in peace), Adamu Suleiman, was going to happen to me, maybe I would never be confirmed. He was inspector-general of police and till he left office he was not confirmed.





So that is my approach; I accept things the way they come. I said to myself that I was going to leave that office without confirmation; but then, I went to Osun and did what I was supposed to do. Of course, having made up my mind that I wasnt going to take the dictates of someone on what I had been doing for decades, I went to Osun, addressed the police officers who were very cheerful because they were seeing their IGP for the first time. I told them to go and do what the law protect the electorate, all other stakeholders, INEC officials, observers, and of course, any other person that had the right to be around the polling areas, collation areas.





I also told them to go and protect the outcome of the election itself. I warned them also that if they allowed themselves to commit any offence against the electoral act, their punishment would be double because they would lose their jobs and may be charged to court. They heeded my warning and did exactly what was expected of them and the outcome was that a winner emerged.





That was exactly what happened. From then on I knew that, perhaps, I was not going to get confirmed or last long in office. So it didnt come to me as a surprise at all. I also think it was a blessing from the Almighty God, so I wasnt shocked or disturbed.





I lost an office I should have held for four years, but that was my destiny. And that was why I refused to go to court, even when people were prompting me to do so.





Abba also debunked the allegation that he went to receive President Muhammadu Buhari at the airport after the 2015 election.





The former IGP said nothing of such happened, explaining why he witnessed the ceremony where Buhari was presented with his certificate of return by INEC.





The only time I met the president-elect was like all the other service chiefs did, to go and congratulate him. It was a common agreement that we were going to congratulate him, he said.





I attended the presentation of certificate to the president-elect. Let me tell you why I did that. One, it is only the police that had a seat at that function. Let me also draw your attention to the fact that if you check the electoral act, the police are clearly mentioned as the custodians of security of the elections.



The Nigeria police force has invited Femi Fani-Kayode, a former minister of aviation, for alleged conspiracy, criminal and inciting public...

The Nigeria police force has invited Femi Fani-Kayode, a former minister of aviation, for alleged conspiracy, criminal and inciting publication.





The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain was given up till Tuesday to appear before one Usman Garba, a police officer.





In a letter reportedly seen by PUNCH, the police said the invitation was based purely on a fact-finding mission.





The letter dated August 20, 2018, has Ref. No CR/3000/IGP.SEC/MU/T.G/ABJ Vol.54/226.





This office is investigating the above mentioned case reported to the Inspector-General of Police in which your name featured, read the letter signed by Habu Sani, commissioner of police in charge of the IG monitoring unit, force headquarters.





In view of the above, you are requested to interview the undersigned through SP Usman Garba on 28/08/2018 by 10.00hrs to shed light on the allegations raised.





You are to, however, note that the invitation is purely for fact findings and your cooperation in this regard is highly solicited. Please.





PUNCH quoted Fani-Kayode as saying he would not be cowed into silence.





I am not in the least bit intimidated and I cannot be silenced. They would have to kill me first. I received the letter today without any details of the allegations or who the complainant is, he reportedly said.



Dino Melaye, senator representing Kogi west, has alleged there is a plan by the police to kill him.

Dino Melaye, senator representing Kogi west, has alleged there is a plan by the police to kill him.

Writing via his Twitter handle on Monday, Melaye said the police and Kogi government want to forcefully take me to Lokoja and kill me afterwards.





The senator has been having a running battle with the police.





Among the cases against him currently pending in court are culpable homicide, gun running and criminal conspiracy.





Recently, the senators relative raised an alarm he was kidnapped on his way to a court in Kogi regarding one of the cases.





In the tweets, the senator described as ludicrous claims the purported kidnap was fabricated.





He wrote: Nigerian police working with Kogi state government in trying to frame me up again with culpable homicide and illegal possession of fire arm.





This is going to be the 6th arraignment of police against me. They want to forcefully take me to Lokoja and kill me afterwards. cc: UN,EU,USA,AU





I was the one attacked by the police, they tried to kill me, AIT reporter and other journalists were there  To turn around and accuse harmless me of lies is rediculous.





He added that those behind his ordeal will be shocked because I know too much.





TheCable reached out to Jimoh Moshood, police spokesman, to react to the allegation but he did not pick calls and has not responded to a text message sent.

Nigerian police working with Kogi State Govt is trying to frame me up again with culpable Homicide and illegal possession of fire arm. This is going to be the 6th arraignment of police against me. They want to forcefully take me to lokoja and kill me afterwards. cc: UN,EU,USA,AU  Senator Dino Melaye (@dino_melaye) August 27, 2018Mr. Mustapha Lecky, the South-South Commissioner, Independent National Electoral Commission says the commission would redesign the structures of all polling units to curb vote buying during the 2019 general elections.Lecky disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria at Auchi, in Etsako West Local Government Area of Edo State, on Monday.We are taking measures to ensure that it would be difficult for political parties and their candidates to buy votes.We are going to re-design our polling area in such a way that people cannot exhibit their ballot and show it to people in order to collect money.So those kinds of structural re-design of the polling area is what we are going to do, he said.Lecky urged the media to expose political parties and candidates found engaging in vote buying during the election, to enable INEC to prosecute the culprits.We need the media to help us reveal those who are buying votes and call them to order.We are not yet apprehending them, that is the work of the police, but we can provide information to prosecute them; the needed investigation will be done by the police, he said.On the establishment of more polling units, Lecky said the INEC would create additional polling units after the elections as doing so now would be misinterpreted by politicians.He said, however, that the commission would decongest polling units and create voting points close to the original polling unit.Lecky said, Unfortunately, we are not going to create them before the 2019 election because it is very political.Even before we start to gather information so that we can take a decision, people are already saying that INEC has created 30,000 polling units and distributed some to some parts of the country to the detriment of other parts of the country, so it becomes very political.We dont want to have that as part of our burden ahead of 2019 election.I am sure that after the 2019 elections, there will be sanity, we will then take time to study all the things we have collated and go about the issue of creating more polling units, but not before 2019 election.We can decongest a polling unit and create a voting point not far away from the mother polling units, that is much we can do, but actual polling unit would be after the election.#North Korea Seoul urges Pyongyang to accept proposed visit by pope The South Korean government on Monday urged North Korea to respond positively to a suggestion that the pope visit there, expressing hope for progress in efforts to promote regional...

#People Power Party Main opposition party enters final stretch of presidential primary with polling The main opposition People Power Party (PPP) kicked off the final week of its presidential primary Monday as the two front-runners appeared to be locked in a tight race for the nom...Gongbang is the name of a growing live-streaming trend in South Korea, where people broadcast themselves studying in almost total silence for hours on end to dozens, sometimes hundreds of viewers who love nothing more than to watch them do it.

Ask most popular streamers and theyll tell you that the keys to a successful live-streaming career are providing entertaining and exciting content, and viewer engagement. Thats what makes the Gongbang live-streaming trend, which has been growing in the Asian country over the last decade, so fascinating. Gongbang streamers almost never connect with their audience, and as for providing exciting content, the most excitement they offer is turning a page every once in a while. They simply broadcast themselves studying for many hours at a time, and, for some reason, people love watching them do it.

Photo: Terre ASMR/YouTube screengrab

A couple of months ago, we wrote about Bot-No-Jam, a South Korean streamer who found success on YouTube by broadcasting himself studying for up to 7 hours at a time. Many people attributed his success  342,000 subscribers and millions of views on YouTube  to his good looks, but it turns out that he is just one of many successful Gongbang streamers whose dedication to studying have earned them legions of fans online.

So what makes people tune in and watch an average joe studying for hours on end? Or, better yet, how did Gongbang streamers come up with this idea of broadcasting what most people would consider incredibly boring content? Well, it turns out that some of them did it as a way to prove to their parents that they were studying, instead of wasting their time, while others decided to use it as a self-motivation tool, as one is less likely to become distracted when he/she knows they are being watched.

But we would probably not be writing about Gongbang streams if people didnt watch them. The popularity of these seemingly boring streams is closely tied to South Korean culture. Studying is not a joke in this Asian country, with some students studying for up to 18 hours a day for important exams, like university admission. Some of them just leave Gongbang streams open while they study themselves, as motivation. Every time they get distracted, the dedicated streamer reminds them that they need to get back to work.

While Gongbang streams differ from channel to channel, they all share the same general concept  a streamer who studies diligently for several hours at a time, with a timer showing how much they have been studying for always appearing on screen. Some show their faces, while others choose to only show their hands, and some play music, while other prefer white noise to help viewers concentrate.

In an era where social media, mobile phones and the internet in general provides countless distractions for students, Gongbag streams have become a sort of online support platforms that keep students motivated and focused on their studies, but also prevents them from feeling lonely.

Solo test-takers constantly battle against the feeling of loneliness while studying alone, Gongbang streamer Man Sitting Next to Me told The Korea Herald. By watching Gongbang and engaging in real-time chatting, people can stay motivated and feel a sense of belonging. They can also share their study tips and test information through the comments.

I feel a sense of rivalry when I see streamers sitting down and reading books for a long time. Whenever I feel like giving up on studying, I watch gongbang and recharge my motivation, Yoon Min-young, a 23-year-old college student recently told the Korean newspaper. At the same time, I feel relieved especially when I see those live videos on quiet, lonely nights. They make me feel Im not the only one who stays up all night for studying. Ive never met the Gongbang streamers in person, but they have already become my good study buddies and pacemakers.

Would Gongbang streams ever work in the western world? You would think not, as we dont take studying so seriously as students in South Korea do. We also dont feel the same pressure from or families and peers to get into the best universities and earn a great position in todays competitive job market. However, there are a few western Gongbang channels on YouTube, with Study Vibes being the most popular Ive found.

Over 4,000 South Korean Gongbang videos have been uploaded to YouTube this year alone, and their number continues to grow. That doesnt include the broadcasts on Korean live-streaming platform Afreeca TV.Despite the amazing scientific advances we have made in the last century, there are still many medical cases that cant be fully explained. Vanishing Bones Syndrome sounds like something straight out of an episode of House MD, but doctors at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in Scotland encountered a case of this bizarre condition in a 44-year-old woman.

Also known as Gorham-Stout disease, this extremely rare condition causes the sufferer to experience progressive bone loss. The disease is so uncommon that there has only ever been 64 recorded cases in medical literature since it was first described in 1838. In a healthy person, bones are constantly rebuilding themselves to help maintain their strength, and Gorham-Stout disease is believed to be a malfunction of this process; the bone breaks itself down faster than it can repair itself.

Photo: rawpixel/Pixabay

Because the condition is so rare, it can be very difficult to diagnose. In the case of the woman in Edinburgh, she first went to the doctor complaining of pain in her left shoulder. An X-ray was performed, revealing a lesion on her humerus bone. This led doctors to believe that she might have cancer; however, her biopsy results proved to be inconclusive.

Over the next year and a half, her symptoms got progressively worse, but doctors were still stumped and unable to provide a concrete diagnosis. The woman experienced pain and swelling in her arm, and even so much as a minor bump could result in an agonizing fracture.

After 18 long months, doctors were finally able to provide some answers. By carefully looking at her X-rays, doctors noticed that both her humerus and ulnar bone were becoming progressively fainter after each scan. Additional testing confirmed that her bones were literally disappearing; strangely enough, blood vessel growths were replacing her bone tissue.

Photo: BMJ Case Reports

However, the long road to this womans diagnosis wasnt down to incompetence; this rare disease is incredibly difficult for doctors to detect. Our current, limited understanding of the condition is that it can affect any bone in patients of any age or gender. To make matters worse, we still have no idea what causes the disease.

Due to its rarity, there is no standardized treatment for Gorham-Stout disease. Doctors may choose to take a surgical approach by either removing the affected areas of bone or by grafting new bone to help encourage it to repair itself. Other treatment options include radiation therapy or drug prescription.

Despite the terrifying nature of this affliction, there is some good news: Not only is the condition incredibly unlikely to afflict you, but it is also usually benign. The disease is only fatal if it spreads to the vertebra.



Strange conditions such as Gorham-Stout disease highlight just how little we actually understand about the human body and disease. Sure, we can cure previously lethal illness with a single pill, but there is still so much that we dont grasp. IBM estimates that there are over 12,000 different diseases out there, and so far, we have only been able to eliminate one of thosesmallpox. Future generations will likely look back on 21st century medical practices with amusement, just as we do when looking at the techniques and presumptions of the past.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.Valmet to Supply Paper Machine Grade Conversion Rebuild for Burgo Group in Italy PM 9 (pictured above), which currently has the capacity to produce 400,000 tonnes per year of coated mechanical papers, will be rebuilt to produce recycled liner and fluting grades with an annual capacity of 600,000 tonnes. Aug. 27, 2018 - Valmet will supply an extensive paper machine grade conversion rebuild and a wide scope of automation for Burgo Group S.p.A. at its Verzuolo Mill in Italy. In the project, originally Valmet-supplied paper machine PM 9 and related stock preparation systems currently producing lightweight coated (LWC) paper grades, will be rebuilt to produce recycled containerboard grades. The value of the order will not be disclosed. The total value of an order of this type is typically around EUR 40-60 million. The project is following Burgo Group's plan to keep the focus on containerboard grades and to continue its diversification strategy, ranging from publishing to packaging, from printing paper to paper for corrugators. The start-up of the rebuilt machine is scheduled for the end of 2019. "Valmet and Burgo have had a long and successful cooperation over the years at the Verzuolo mill. By having all the process equipment, process automation and mill engineering from one supplier, binds it all into a one. This assures a very good flow of information, a reliable project schedule, short installation time and an energy-efficient operation. Valmet's long expertise on grade conversions is essential for this project. It is also a great asset for Burgo, that this paper machine was originally supplied by Valmet in 2001, so we know it well," says Jari Vahapesola, President of Paper Business Line, Valmet. Valmet's delivery includes a completely new Old Corrugated Containers (OCC) line and major modifications in the existing paper machine. The OCC line, which is called an OptiRefiber recycled fiber line, contains two bale handling and vertical pulper systems, extensive cleaning and screening systems with fractionation and disc filters for short and long fiber lines. The scope includes also new reject handling system for OCC rejects. Also, the existing broke system and approach flow system are modified. The delivery in the existing paper machine includes a headbox rebuild, modifications to forming section, press section and pre dryer section, a new after dryer section with a high humidity hood, modifications to the size press, a continuous cooking system for surface size starch, and relocation of the existing reel. The delivery also includes related air systems, a large Valmet paper machine clothing package, and changes and improvements in the automation including machine control, quality management, and process control and condition monitoring systems. The delivery includes mill engineering for both the OCC line and board machine. All the equipment will be delivered with installation and an additional production support package after start-up. PM 9 will be producing recycled liner and fluting grades at a trim width of 9,800 mm and with a basis weight range of 70-160 g/m2. The annual capacity will be 600,000 tonnes. About Burgo Group Burgo Group is one of Europe's leading producers of graphic and specialty paper. The Group employs 3,663 people and has 11 plants in Italy and 1 in Belgium, and in total 16 continuous machines. In 2017, Burgo Group produced 2,057,000 tons of paper and had a consolidated turnover of EUR 2,008 million. Valmet is a leading global developer and supplier of process technologies, automation and services for the pulp, paper and energy industries. To learn more, please visit: www.valmet.com SOURCE: Valmet  Go to a related article at PrintWeek.com:

More magazine paper tonnage to be taken out - Aug. 10, 2018Iranian Journalist Recounts "Inhumane" Living Conditions at Great Tehran Penitentiary

08/27/18

Source: Center for Human Rights in Iran

An Iranian journalist who was detained at Iran's Great Tehran Penitentiary (GTP) has written about the jail's "inhumane" conditions, stating in a Facebook post that day to day life there is "beyond the limits of human tolerance."

"The sign above the entrance to the prison in Fashafouyeh says, 'Great Tehran Penitentiary,' but the fact is that psychological and physical pressures on the prisoners are so intense that you essentially don't have the opportunity to 'contemplate and repent,'" wrote Nader Fatourehchi on August 21, 2018.

With an official capacity of 15,000 inmates, the GTP, located in Tehran Province's Fashafouyeh district, 20 miles southeast of Tehran, is the largest detention facility in the country. It was built in 2015 primarily for holding suspects and inmates convicted of drug-related offenses, but the judiciary has also used it to incarcerate dissidents and anti-state protesters.

Since February 2018, more than 200 Sufi Muslims belonging to the Gonabadi Order have been transported to the penitentiary after being arrested at a street protest in Tehran that month. In late August, human rights lawyer Arash Keykhosravi and former MP Ghasem Sholeh Sa'di were also taken there in handcuffs and prisoners' uniforms that are only used for inmates convicted of violent crimes.

Both men were detained for attending a peaceful protest rally.

Fatourehchi, a freelance film critic and author, was arrested on August 19 and held at the GTP for one day after he was sued by producer Mohammad Emami for criticizing the "suspicious" financial backers of Emami's popular historical drama series, "Shahrzad."

In November 2017, Fatourehchi published an article on the Amsterdam-based Radio Zamaneh news website, titled, "Shahrzad: 10 Questions Journalists Are Not Asking," questioning where the film's huge budget had come from. He also leads the "No to Shahrzad" campaign on social media.

Fatourehchi, who was released on bail on August 20, wrote about his experience the next day.

"Paying attention to the living conditions and welfare of ordinary prisoners in Fashafouyeh is a very pressing and urgent matter," he wrote. "In Iran, nobody is more helpless and destitute than they are. Their conditions are the exact definition of 'inhumane.'"

"What they are experiencing is beyond the limits of human tolerance, even it were for just a day, and I have no doubt that it is leaving an irreparable impact on their bodies and souls every day," he added.

According to Fatourehchi, about 40 new prisoners are admitted into the facility each day. The new inmates are first kept for four days in the quarantine unit, which he described as a "sewer" without ventilation or washing facilities, and fed "cold macaroni or uncooked yellow rice."

Fatourehchi continued: "More than 80 percent of the prisoners in quarantine are homeless drug addicts who are too weak to stand on their feet. They should be hospitalized, not imprisoned. The stench from body odor and infected wounds is unimaginable and what makes it worse is the vomit left by drug addicts who don't have the strength to go to the toilet."

Fatourehchi also noted that many of the inmates, who come from poor backgrounds, are rarely able to see their relatives who cannot afford to travel to the prison's remote location. When their relatives do show up, they have to wait outside for long periods and sit on dirt.

In his Facebook post, Fatourehchi included a photo of three cigarettes he had been given during his encounters with detained Sufis in the jail.

"As I was leaving the prison, I bumped into some Gonabadi dervishes, including the dear Kasra Nouri, Mr. Entesari and others whose kindness, stature and affection were so deep that it felt like I was looking at familiar faces filled with light that brightened the surrounding darkness."

"I will never forget their loving smile," he added.

Nouri, who was a graduate student in human rights at the University of Tehran before he was arrested, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison, 74 lashes, two years of exile in Salas Babajani county in Kermanshah Province, a two-year ban on traveling abroad, and a two-year prohibition on political and social activities including social media.

Entesari, who was an editor of the Gonabadi-run Mazjabroon website, has been sentenced to seven years in prison, 74 lashes, two years of exile in the northeastern city of Khaf, a two-year ban on leaving the country and a two-year ban on political and media activities.At Least Two Dead After Strong Earthquake Strikes Kermanshah in Western Iran

08/27/18

Untitled 1

Source: RFE/RL's Radio Farda

At least two people were killed and more than 240 others were injured after an earthquake of magnitude 6.0 and at least two strong aftershocks struck western Iran, local media report. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake struck southwest of the city of Javanrud in Kermanshah Province early on August 26.



Quake damage in Tazehabad, Kermanshah

photo by Islamic Republic News Agency

Two aftershocks measuring above 4.0 on the Richter scale were also reported in the area.



Reports said the town of Tazehabad was the worst hit and that rescue teams were on their way there.

The earthquake was felt as far away as Iraq's capital, Baghdad, hundreds of kilometers further west, according to Iraqi state television. However, no injuries were reported there.



Saeb Sharidari, the head of the emergency department at Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences, said the dead included a pregnant woman and a 70-year-old man who suffered a heart attack. He added that six of the injured were in critical condition.



Quake damage in Tazehabad, Kermanshah

photo by Islamic Republic News Agency

Kermanshah Governor Houshang Bazvand said that electricity had been temporarily cut to several villages.



And the provincial head of the Red Crescent, Mohammad Reza Amirian, warned there were potential problems with drinking water due to damaged infrastructure in villages.



However, the situation was "under control" and no request for help had been sent to neighboring provinces, said Reza Mahmoudian, the provincial director-general of crisis management.



Quake damage in Tazehabad, Kermanshah

photo by Islamic Republic News Agency

Iran is often hit by damaging earthquakes as it sits on major fault lines.



In November, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake hit villages and towns in Kermanshah Province along the mountainous border with Iraq, killing at least 620 people and injuring thousands of others.



And in 2003, a 6.6-magnitude quake destroyed the historic city of Bam, killing 26,000 people.



With reporting by Reuters, dpa, IRNA, Mehr, and AFPSomewhere in Washington this week, I boarded a taxi home from a Shopping Mall. I decided to have a conversation with the taxi driver who coincidentally was a Ghanaian. I got to find out that he was an NDC sympathizer which made the conversation interesting.



However, I was surprised to hear from him that he was utterly disappointed with John Dramani Mahama. I probed further to ask him why and it was at this point he made it clear to me that he does not see himself voting in favour of corruption and grand display self acquiring wealth of cronies of John Dramani Mahama during his time as President of Ghana.



Because of that he is informing his family back home in Ghana not to go out to vote at all if John Dramani Mahama is elected the flagbearer of the NDC even though he is an NDC supporter.



With that marinated, it reminds me of Charles Foster Kane, there are some people who can be good at anything other than the running of a nation. They can have the best of ideas when they are in opposition and may appear to have some of the most appealing campaign slogans prior to an election but winning is a different ball game altogether.



May the soul of our late Prof. Evans Atta Mills rest in peace and glory be to his name, this should be the only constant words that should be coming out of the mouth of John Dramani Mahama because it was through the demise of the late professor that most Ghanaians voted him into power in 2012.



In as much as we fail to admit, we Ghanaians are sentimental people and a stroke at our emotions will most likely have us swaying to the direction of whoever was doing the stroking.



Fortunately and unfortunately, JDM was given mandate and we all saw how the nation retrogressed. Almost all the sectors had recorded no growth when he handed over power after 2016.



Almost all sectors failed woefully when he handed over power in 2016  agriculture, education, health, finance and anything you can think of.



Unity walk in its sense is good but if you cannot unite all these nation building factors (agriculture, education, health and finance) for the benefit of Mother Ghana, then you can only be united in shame with whoever joins you in the unity walk.



As for picking of forms, anyone can pick forms just as JDM has done. At the same time, one of the elements that separate patriotic citizens from mercenaries is conscience and if JDM still has the confidence to pick up forms with the intention of leading this beloved nation again after what he did in his first term, then he fits the description of a mercenary.



Forward ever and backwards never. As for his competition with the NPP, it will be like snatching candy from a child. It is a non-starter because my 19 year old cousin has a better chance of winning the 2020 polls than JDM leading the NDC.



As democratic as they portray themselves, the NDC should have been a bit dictatorial (not as if they do not have a history of dictatorship in Ghana) in barring JDM from picking the forms. The honourable Alban Bagbin was right in all his bluntness  how do you expect someone who led a party to opposition through incompetence to lead the party again?



Our focus as a nation should be on how to make Ghana a better place which His Excellency Nana Addo Danqua Akufo Addo through the NPP has incessantly demonstrated. We owe our future generation a better Ghana through competent leadership.



This is a feat we cannot joke with. It was with total seriousness that Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah climbed the podium to declare that Ghana, our beloved country is free forever. We dare not disrespect the efforts of our forefathers who toiled to bring us to where we are as a people.



We cannot once again be enslaved to incompetence. We cannot be slaves to corruption. We cannot be slaves to poor roads and we cannot be slaves to a poor economy.



It is the right of JDM to contest as future president of Ghana, but it is also the responsibility of all Ghanaians to protect the public purse and the credibility of our country by electing someone who has what it takes to lead.



For the NPP, it will be extremely fortunate for JDM to emerge as flag bearer for NDC because winning will be as easy as riding a bicycle downhill.



For JDM to ever lead Ghana again, it will be the biggest misfortune our dear nation can ever endure.



Edmund Kyei

First Vice Chairman Asokwa Constituency

A member of the Communication Team of the NPP

Source: Edmund Kyei









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured VideoIn 2014, the United States and six countries  Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Niger, Mali, and Tunisia, agreed to partnerships to improve the security sector of their respective Countries.



To this end, the Security Government Initiative (SGI) was launched. In 2016, Ghana and the United States signed a Joint Country Action Plan (JCAP), which indentified three priority areas of the partnership which are: maritime Security, Boarder Security, and Cyber Security. A fourth cross-cutting focus area, Administration of Justice, was later added to provide holistic coverage on the range of issues that impact these sector.



The SGI approach is based on the recognition that sustainable solutions to security-sector challenges require the vision and commitment of multiple stakeholders. The approach focuses on the partner countries priorities where U.S. assistance can have the most impact, and where it can complement and leverage other efforts in the country.



In Ghana, threats impacting border security were from cross-border crimes, smuggling, transnational criminal organizations, human trafficking, and the lack of collaboration, coordination, and lapses in the integrity and transparency of operations.



Through SGI, the Government of Ghana established a national Border Security Technical Working Group (NBSTWG) to work with a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Advisor and experts to address and resolve these challenges. The team has undertaken many constructive steps towards the following stated goals:



1. Develop and adopt an integrated approach to border management, through a unified, collaborative, and sustainable concept;



2. Enhance command presence at the border through better operations, coordination, and communication;



3. Increase operational capacity of border agencies actors through improved professionalization, integrity, and interagency cooperation; and



4. Increase capacity to manage border enforcement cases.



The Border Focus Area of SGI is focuses on achieving these strategic objectives and has convened Ghana border security strategic partners to share its border enhancements concept and experiences, and also to identify opportunities for collaboration. Ghana recognizes the Economic Community of West Africa States protocols that affect borders, as well as the mutual benefits through the shared border communities. Ghana also strongly endorses and advances policies that reinforce the principles of the Africa Union relating to greater integration, improves cross-border trade, and safe and secure legitimate movement of people across the borders.



It also supports the regional and global efforts to combat and deny transnational criminal organizations from exploiting the borders and cause harm to citizens of all nations.



The Regional seminar which takes place from 27th to 31st August, 2018 involves security chiefs from Ghana, Togo, Cote DIvoire, Burkina Faso, Nigeria and Kenya. The regional character of the seminar demonstrates Ghana understanding that border security is inherently a regional issue that requires multi-lateral cooperation, robust intelligence, information sharing, efficiency, and appropriate information technology tools in order to achieve and maintain success.



The National Security Coordinator of Ghana, Joshua Kyeremeh is scheduled to deliver the keynote address, Africa, more than any other region of the world, is most positioned to exemplify best practices in border security and management that are rooted on our common development desires and respect of the unique conditions at its borders.







Signed



Osei Bonsu Dickson, Esq



Chief Legal Advisor, and Ghana SGI Coordinator

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Government of Ghana through the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources (MoSWR) is saddling up to receive a whopping $2 Billion loan from China to address certain challenges in the sector.



Taking his turn at the Meet the Press Series held in Accra, last Friday, the outgoing Minister of Sanitation, Mr. Kofi Adda said the Loan would be used to undertake seeming important sanitation and water projects in various parts of the country.



The yet-to-be received fund according to the minister, would only be of benefit to Ghana if the country had a specific road map that would guide their actions.



We therefore set to developing this strategic road map that would span the short, medium and long-term periods, including quick impact measures in the immediate, he said.



Mr. Adah added that the set plans have successfully been drawn to support the ministrys work.



These plans include the drilling and mechanisation of 5,000 and 3,000 boreholes in two different instances and the estimated costs for these proposals stand at about $1.5 million.



Plans are also far advanced to procure 2,000 solar pumps from an Indian manufacturer through the Indian Eximbank, the minister disclosed.



A proposal to improve the quality of water through a filtration system to be financed by the United Kingdom Export Agency has also been channelled to Cabinet for approval.



To ensure that the country meets the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6which anchors on clean water and sanitation, the government of Ghana has completed the drilling of 1,000 boreholes which was undertaken in 2017.



Broken Boreholes



Mr. Adah further disclosed that though the country is doing all it can to achieve its target of Water for All set by government, 30% of already drilled boreholes are broken down.



Aside that, The quality of water has also been a serious case of worry not just because of illegal miningbut also our inability to treat the water coming out from our boreholes, he noted.



The Sanitation Dream



Touching on sanitation, the minister indicated that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addos dream of making Accra the cleanest city in African would only happen quickly if government continuously provides the funds needed to fight the menace of filth.



He said that the late release of funds coupled with a cumbersome procurement process denied the ministry the successes it wished to chalk.



Despite the challenges, the minister said the sanitation dream is still attainable.



According to him, the finance ministry would in no time release GH100 million to the ministry of sanitation for proper execution of plans.



This coupled with a capital expenditure allocation of GH59 million for the 2018 fiscal year would go a long way, the minister said with gratitude.



He further announced the launch of the Sanitation Brigade which would take place next month.



The brigade would see to it that the laws guiding sanitation are duly enforced.

Source: The Publisher









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Featured VideoMinister for Food and Agriculture (MoFA), Dr. Owusu Afriyie-Akoto, has hinted that four officials under his ministry are currently under investigations for their inability to account for all the inputs under their care for the Planting for Food and Jobs programme.



Even though Dr. Afriyie-Akoto said the four MoFA officials are in the Upper East Region, he didnt mention their names and their districts. Rather, he gave the assurance that they were under investigations by the police in the region after an audit had found them liable.



The minister explained: The investigations are not about smuggling; its about officers who have mishandled the stocks which are already in. We have sent auditors to have a physical count and check against what are on the records and their shortages. The immediate action is to retrieve government moneys, and if there are criminalities, the police will handle that according to the law.



He gave the hint in an interaction with some journalists in Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region after his meeting with district directors and other senior officers of the MoFA in the region on progress the region had made so far in the agric sector since the Planting for Food and Jobs programme started in the region, as well as this farming season.



The minister and his regional and district officers identified some challenges the programme is faced with, including the fall armyworm infestation and inadequate agric extension officers in the region.



Asked when government would be rolling out the rearing for food and jobs programme under the agric sector, Dr. Afriyie-Akoto announced all is almost set and government is expected to commence it in 2019, when some citizens of Ghana will be supported to go into livestock rearing as economic ventures and also for domestic consumption.



He looks forward to the start of the programme and urged all Ghanaians who are capable not to politicise the programme or the ongoing Planting for Food and Jobs but join to create more jobs and food to improve Ghanas food security.



Earlier, DAILY GUIDE had visited some districts in the Upper East Region to assess the effect of the fall armyworm infection on the Planting for Food and Jobs.



A crop and desk officer in charge of fall armyworm in the Builsa North District, Moro Sumaila, said the effect is reducing as farmers now know the worms and how they survive, hence their commitment to spray at the right time.



Mr. Moro gave the assurance that there are some chemicals in the district, but urged farmers to keep looking out for the worms and get them killed as soon as they are sighted on a farm.



In his view, this approach would help to reduce their numbers as well as the rate of infection on a farm.



Like other districts, the Builsa North District, also need more agric extension officers to cover a bigger proportion of farmers in the area with information on good practices, and also help to attain a good outcome from the Planting for Food and Jobs.

Source: Daily Guide









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Featured VideoMr Richard Quayson, Deputy Commissioner of the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), has said public expenditure exaggeration by people entrusted with power to execute government intervention projects has crippled governments effort to improve the lives of the people.



He said it was unacceptable for people assigned the responsibility to implement safety nets such as the National Health Insurance Scheme, School Feeding Programme and subsidised fertiliser distribution to misuse the mandate given to them to enrich themselves, depleting the national kitty at the expense of the masses.



The CHRAJ Commissioner expressed worry that value for money analysis showed that public expenditure was often overstated such that most expenditure items could get three times more value, adding that such practices are inimical to the countrys development and undermined the impact of laudable interventions to enhance their living conditions, must stop.



He was speaking at a corruption sensitisation forum held in Kumasi under the National Anti-Corruption Action Plan (NACAP), to educate identifiable groups in the Ashanti Region on the need to reject corrupt acts in all its forms.



It formed part of activities under the Integrity, Mobilisation, Participation, Accountability, Anti-Corruption and Transparency (IMPACT) Ghana Project supported by Global Affairs, Canada.



It is being implemented jointly by the Commission on Human Rights and administrative justice (CHRAJ), Ghana Integrity International (GII)  the local chapter of Transparency International  and the Ghana News Agency.



Put together by the implementing bodies, the workshop was attended by representatives from civil society organisations, security services, faith-based organisations, National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies, and the media.



The Deputy Commissioner of CHRAJ said corruption, lawlessness and indiscipline had taken over both public and private institutions, wreaking havoc in every sector of the economy.



He blamed weak political will to invest in and pursue anti-corruption measures, high tolerance of corruption, political interferences in corruption fight efforts, public cynicism and apathy towards anti-corruption efforts as the causes for the endemic canker.



NACAP, he noted, was a national strategy for battling corruption in Ghana over a period of 10 years, as an adopted transformational and human rights-based approach to stem the social evil.



He said the expectation was that in 10 years, NACAP would have institutionalised efficiency, accountability and transparency in public, private and not-for-profit sectors.



Madam Mary Addah, Programmes Manager of GII, said NACAP was a strategy designed to comprehensively fight corruption at all levels of national endeavours.



She said there would be intermittent reviews of the programme to gauge the progress and make the necessary adjustments going forward.



She disclosed that only 87 institutions across the country reported corrupt activities under NACAP last year, and stressed the need to create more awareness about the programme.



Mr Simon Osei Mensah, the Ashanti Regional Minister, in a speech read on his behalf, said Ghana had made great strides in tackling corruption, but perceptions of corruption were progressively increasing in society.



He said with the increasing reports of corruption in recent years, attempts to address the problem had intensified, with Ghana developing and implementing several anti-corruption initiatives and ratifying international conventions to arrest it.



He said NACAP was one of such initiatives as it enjoined and brought together various stakeholders to collectively fight corruption through education and awareness creation, prevention and investigation, as well as enforcement.

Source: GNA









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Featured VideoArchbishop Nicholas Duncan-Williams has urged Christians not to join a worldly campaign to crucify popular pastor, Mensa Otabil, over his role in the collapse of a bank.



He said unlike unbelievers, Christians are under God's constitution "to judge not that you may not be judged".



"So shut your mouth. Stop talking about things you don't understand," he directed his message to Christians.Founder and Head Pastor of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC), Mensa Otabil, who was chairman of the Ghanaian-owned Capital Bank, has been under strong criticisms after the bank collapsed.



The Bank of Ghana which revoked the bank's licence said it had become insolvent.



Since the August 2017 collapse of the bank, several stories about the poor management of the bank and weak supervisory role of the bank's board have emerged.



Its founder, William Ato Essien, is under investigation as are other shareholders and directors. Pastor Otabil has said he is cooperating with investigations.



Some Christians run the #istandwithotabil on social media in solidarity with the pastor and explained, it is about protecting the revered pastor's honour against ungodly and unsavoury attacks.



But the hastag also faced severe critcisms and was deemed insensitive to the plight of the workers who had lost their jobs at Capital bank.



Speaking on the saga, the founder of Action Chapel International, Archbishop Duncan-Williams, told Christians, "you talk too much".



The charismatic Christian leader said he has taken a personal position to "let the authorities handle the situation" because he does not know the full details of Otabil's involvement.



The Archbishop urged Christians to do same.



He led the congregation in prayer and asked that "truth and justice" prevail in the matter as well as "mercy".



"Father, we do not rejoice at the hurt of any one of your children. We commit the whole situation in your care," he said with the congregation joining in "amen".













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Featured VideoTwo Nigerian women have reportedly been killed by their employers in Saudi Arabia.



The women were trafficked to Saudi Arabia to work as maids in different households. They were both killed within a space of two weeks after being physically assaulted by their respective bosses.



According to Satellite Times, the first Nigerian girl to be murdered was by name Omotayo who until her death in June 2018 worked as a migrant domestic worker in Riyadh. Before her death in June 2018, Omotayo sent photos of her battered self to a group she belonged to called Strong Nigerian Ladies  a solidarity group created by Nigerian migrant domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. She narrated to them the latest incident of battery in the hands of the Saudi family she worked for. She opened up to the group that she was being owed salaries and made to eat leftover food and when she protested, she was beaten.



In the same month that she sent the message to the group, she died, allegedly in the hands of her employees.



Another Nigerian named Shola, was also allegedly killed by her boss in Saudi Arabia, according to Adeola Oladipo, another housemaid in the Strong Nigeria Ladies Group.



Adeola narrated:



Shola has been constantly assaulted and starved by her sponsor in Saudi Arabia. Whenever she demands for food they would always beat her up and she became so slim like somebody with HIV.



One day her male boss came as usual to beat her while she was doing chores in the kitchen. The beating became so severe she had to defend herself with a knife. In the process the knife cut her boss and her sponsor hit her on the neck and she collapsed. When the boss saw that Shola was dying, he rushed her to the hospital where he said she suddenly fell ill. A few days later, the Nigerian gave up the ghost in the hospital.

Source: lindaikejisblog









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Featured VideoThe State of Israel has appointed Shani Cooper as the new Ambassador to Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone.



Ambassador Cooper replaces Ami Mehl, who ended his term of service in July 2018.



Ambassador Cooper comes to Ghana with 12 years of diplomatic experience having served in Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey and Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs.



Representing Israel in Ghana will be her fourth diplomatic posting.



In a video released by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote her appointment, Ambassador Cooper mentions that, she was born in an agricultural village in Israel, where farming was not easy, but the Israeli spirit proved that where there is a will, there is a way and hard work and agricultural innovation made it possible to grow fruits and vegetables on a difficult land.



Ambassador Cooper is married and has two daughters.



Her appointment is part of the framework to invest and strengthen relations between Israel and Africa, during which a new commercial office has been opened within the Israeli Embassy in Accra.



Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has visited Africa three times and was the first non-member state leader to speak at the ECOWAS Summit in Liberia.



Israel has a long-term diplomatic and bilateral partnership with Ghana  Ghana was the first African country to establish diplomatic relations with the State of Israel, the second state in Africa to have an Israeli embassy and the first African state to have a state visit by Israels former Foreign Minister Golda Meir in 1958.



In 2011, the State of Israel reopened its Embassy in Accra, which has since strengthened the relations between Israel and Ghana.



In the video, Ambassador Cooper mentions that being the only female Ambassador among the ambassadors representing Israel in Africa, she is proud to represent the land of innovation, Israel, in Ghana, and is committed to promote and share knowledge in fields such as medicine, water, agriculture, and high-tech.



Ambassador Cooper hopes her arrival in Ghana will help to establish an even stronger bilateral cooperation between Israel and Ghana that will ensure mutual benefits for both states.

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<iframe width="470" height="416" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CAxm5sDTspA" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Source: 3news.com









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Featured VideoNana Asiedu Kweku Donkor, an Nkosuohene (Development Chief) of the Kwahu Traditional Area has said that Mr Alban Bagbin, Second Deputy of Parliament had been spot on with the observation that the appointment of a Person with Disability to the Chieftaincy Ministry was misplaced.



He said the Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament was not only speaking the truth, but was also speaking the minds of many offended chiefs.



In Ghanaian tradition, Chiefs are not allowed to deal with people who are physically challenged in anyway, including; people who suffer blindness, and so Mr Bagbin had spoken the truth when he said the appointment of somebody like that as Minister for Chieftaincy Affairs had courted anger from the chiefs.



Nana Kweku Donkor made the statement during a funeral reception of his mother, Maame Abena Afi at Kwahu Mpraeso on Saturday, who died at a ripe old age of 110.



Mr Bagbin graced the funeral as a special guest of honour and was mobbed by enthusiastic fans, supporters, and townsfolk, who apparently thronged the funeral grounds to show him support.



Some Ghanaians took the Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament to the cleaners for allegedly making some unsavoury comments about some of Former President Mahamas appointments that might have hindered the orderly progress of their 2016 campaigns and subsequent loss.



Among others, he had said that the former Presidents appointment of Dr. Seidu Danaa, a visually challenged man, as the Minister for Chieftaincy Affairs was a decision that had courted hatred for the NDC from Ghanaian chiefs, since in Ghanaian tradition, chiefs are not allowed to deal with visually impaired persons.



Mr Bagbin also observed that Dr. Danaa was a respectable and learned person who could have fitted into any other Ministry, apart from the Chieftaincy Ministry, since his appointment went against Ghanaian culture.



He added that even though President Mahama meant well, the appointment of Dr. Danaa had ended up courting anger among the chiefs for the NDC government, which contributed greatly to the unprecedented defeat of the NDC in 2016.



In the same statement, Mr Bagbin also said that President Mahamas appointment of Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa as Deputy Minister of Education, in charge of Tertiary Education, was a miscalculation as he had had issues with University authorities back in his days as a student at the University of Ghana.



He added that President Mahama had also gotten it wrong when he appointed Dr Omane Boamah as the Minister of Communication since he stammered and his speech challenges had a bearing on his eloquence.



It is while this brouhaha is still on-going that a royal has come out to tell the whole world that the Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament had spoken the plain truth.



I am not NDC, I speak as a Ghanaian Mr Bagbin spoke the absolute truth. In this our part of the world, we, excuse me to say, do not appoint people who are disabled as chiefs, neither do we allow our chiefs to associate with them, Nana Asiedu Kweku Donkor said.



The chief said the appointment of Dr Danaa had offended Ghanaian chiefs and the national House of Chiefs, but that the chiefs had kept mute over the issue because it was not in the character of chiefs to openly lament.



Mr Bagbins statement he said was therefore a vent for the Chiefs of Ghana.



According to the Nkosuohene of the Kwahu Traditional Area, Mr Bagbin deserved to be commended rather than condemned, adding that Ghana needed honest people like the Nadowli-Kaleo MP.



Meanwhile, a member of the Communication Team of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Saaka Salia, has also defended recent comments by Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament affirming that in Ghanaian culture, visually challenged persons were kept at arms length from chiefs and traditional rulers and therefore it was a miscalculation by President Mahama to appoint Dr. Danaa as Chieftaincy Minister.



Mr Salia said the backlash at Mr Bagbin was unfounded because the man had spoken the truth, especially in the matter of appointment of Dr Seidu Danaa to the Chieftaincy Ministry.

Source: GNA









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Featured VideoFounder and 2016 flag bearer of the All Peoples Congress (APC), Hassan Ayariga, has said the man, Awal Adams, who was arrested by the police in Bawku for entering his house, did not come there because of the formation of the APC.



Contrary to neighbours account and that of DAILY GUIDEs source in Bawku, Hassan Ayariga said Awal Adams did not slap him. Besides, he did not fall as a result of a slap from the man who entered his house uninvited.



According to him, Awal Adams, whom he described as a mad man, entered his 15-plot-fenced house uninvited on Monday, August 20, a day before the Eid-ul-Adha prayers to disturb him.



How can this man slap me, even to the extent that I fell? Its not true; whoever told you that lied to you. I have security men around me hence that man couldnt have done what you were told. He entered my house and was becoming a nuisance so the police picked him up; that is all, Hassan Ayariga explained.



When asked what the man did to merit an arrest and a lockup in a police cell, Ayariga responded go and ask your source or the police. All I can say is that the man is a mad man and neither did he slap me nor ask me why I formed APC.



Checks from the police indicated that the man, Awal Adams, was surprisingly released because he seemed not to be of sound mind, thereby bringing an end to whatever led to his arrest.

Source: Daily Guide









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Featured VideoPrincess Shyngle, a Gambian actress based in Ghana has named some Ghanaian celebrities she has dated and former Black Stars midfielder, Michael Essien is one.



She made this revelation in an interview with Delay on the Delay Show.



I dated him. I had no idea he was married. I had no reason to ask him because I never saw wedding ring on his finger and there were obviously no pictures of him and any woman on a social media so I assumed that he was a single man, she told Delay.



When asked if she was still in a relationship with Essien she answered in the negative. Technically, no! What happened was I got to know that he was married and that was a deal breaker for me. Obviously we were out in public which was a dumb move and I got contacted by some people that he was married and then I decided to google and I found out that he was really married, she said.



According to her, they dated for a year.



She also said that she dated rapper D-Black for two years. She broke up with him because he was not always faithful to her.



Shyngle recently claimed that 99.9% of her former partners could not satisfy her sexually but she declined to respond to the question of whether D-Black fell within that percentage.



Michael Essien who was reported to have dated Ghanaian actress Nadia Buari in the past, is married to his manager Akosua Puni.



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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Nollywood actor, Jim Iyke, was, this afternoon Monday August 27, 2018, arrested by the policemen at the Lagos airport, after he slapped a staff of Dana Air.



According to Instablog9ja, the badboy actor got angry after discovering he had missed his flight to Abuja.



According to sources at the Lagos airport the actor had missed his flight to Abuja, after arriving at the airport late and he got angry. However, when a security staff of the airline was trying to profile him (search him), Iyke gave him a slap, perhaps because he thought the security officer was delaying him further after he arrived late.



The management of Dana airline immediately called in the airport policemen and Iyke was whisked away.

Source: Nkonkonsa.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GULU- The jailed Kyadondo East Mp Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine and 32 others will today appear before the Gulu High Court judge for the hearing of their bail application.

The group that is facing charges of treason are set to appear this morning before Justice Stephen Mubiru.

According to one of their lawyers Mr Asuman Basalirwa, some of the grounds that were listed for bail include; bail as the constitutional right for the accused people, some are of advanced age while some were badly beaten and need immediate medical attention outside the confines of prison.

Other grounds include; some are legislators with responsibilities and their continued incarceration will continue to deny their people representation in parliament among others.

This court has discretion in the matters of this nature, Mr Basalirwa said.

The group that are on charges of Treason are said to have allegedly connived with others still at large to stone the presidential motorcade at Arua during a political rally to fill the vacant post of Arua municipality MP following the murder of former legislator Ibrahim Abiriga .

The Grade one magistrate Yunus Ndiwalana has since stopped the accused from pleading to the grave offense whose jurisdiction only lies under the High Court.

Last week the General Court Martial chaired by Lt. Gen. Andrew Gutti withdrew the charges regarding to unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition against Bobi Wine.

RelatedKAMPALA  The Electoral Commission has finally gazetted the independent candidate Kassiano Wadri as the Arua municipality Member of Parliament.

This comes barely two days after the embattled MP-elect asked parliament to fast-track his swearing in.

Wadri was declared winner of the Arua Municipality by-election while in detention together with over 30 other people including four members of parliament following the chaos that erupted on the last day of the campaigns in Arua Municipality.

He polled 6,528 votes, beating NRMs Nusura Tiperu who came second (4,763 votes) followed by Independent candidate Robert Ejiku in the August 15 ballot. Forum for Democratic Change partys Bruce Musema came fourth with 1,372 votes.

The by-election followed the June 8 brutal killing of the then Arua Municipality MP Ibrahim Abiriga in Kawanda, Wakiso.

The former Terego county legislator will take the seat previously occupied by late Col Ibrahim Abiriga who was gunned down in June this year.

In the August 23 letter seen by PML Daily, the EC has communicated the development to the Clerk to the Parliament clearing the way for Mr Wadris swearing-in if court in Gulu grants him bail today.

Mr Wadri was voted MP in absentia and did not cast his vote after security forces arrested him and more than 33 others following chaos in Arua on the last day of campaigns and whisked them to Gulu.

They were relocated overnight to Gulu Town where they have since been charged with treason.

Mr Wadri along with 34 others including other lawmakers were charged with offences related to the alleged attempt to harm President Yoweri Museveni, during a campaign rally chaos in Arua district.

High Court in Gulu granted bail to Mr Wadri and 11 others today in Northern Uganda. Mr Wadri was freed alongside others who are similarly charged with treason for their alleged roles in an incident in which the presidential motorcade was pelted with stones.

RelatedPARLIAMENT  Speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga has asked President Museveni to order the arrest and prosecution of security officers who took part in the torture of MPs and other civilians following the chaos ahead of the Arua Municipality by-election on August 13.

In a strongly worded letter dated 27th August, Ms Kadaga revealed that whereas there was clear evidence that the accused and journalists were tortured during the protests, there is no sign that security officers from SFC, Military Police and Ugandan Police Force who were involved in the violent actions have been punished.

I am constrained to address you following the sad events since August 13th when several MPs namely Hon Kassiano Wadri, Hon. Robert Kyagulanyi, Hon. Francis Zaake, Hon. Gerald Karuhanga and Hon. Michael Mabiike Ex. MP Makindye together with a number of civilians and journalists were beaten, assaulted, tortured and thereafter incarcerated in Military custody as well as other places of custody- a civilian was also shot dead, Kadagas two-page letter reads in part.

It adds: Hon. Zaake remains gravely ill while Hon. Kyagulanyi has visible signs of torture and beatings.  Your Excellency, I am concerned that no effect has been made to arrest the security officers from the SFC, Military Police and Ugandan Police Force who were involved in the violent actions against unarmed civilians, the latter adds.

The letter is also copied to the Vice President, Prime Minister and Deputy Speaker of Parliament.

This is, therefore, to demand that the officers concerned be apprehended at the earliest opportunity and presented in court. Unless this is done, it will be very difficult to conduct government business in Parliament. The Uganda parliament will not condone or acquiesce in acts of torture. I, however, hasten to add that Parliament equally does not condone acts of lawlessness by any leader or members of the public, she added.

Kadaga said the security officers conduct is in breach of the Prevention and Prohibition of the Torture Act 2012 which is in force in Uganda.

RelatedNAKAWA  Former presidential candidate and Makerere University Vice-Chancellor Prof. Venansious Baryamureeba has had his nomination to the Makerere University Business School (MUBS) council revoked following his failed attempts to block the renewal of the contract of the school Principal Prof. Waswa Balunywa early this year.

In an August 14 letter issued by Mr Francis Yosa the Secretary to the MUBS Council, Prof. Baryamureeba powers as MUBS governing council member were withdrawn with immediate effect by members who cited lack of confidence in his leadership.

Accordingly, you hereby cease to be a member of the MUBS council with immediate effect, Mr Yosa wrote adding that I have been asked by MUBS Council to thank you for your service.

Quoting sections in the Universities and other Tertiary Institution Act 2001, Mr Yosa quoted the powers to withdraw Prof. Baryamureeba as vested into the Council via section 40 (2) (d) of the Universities and Other Tertiary Institutions Act 2001 (as amended).

(The Council) resolved to withdraw its mandate given to you as its member representing the public appointed under section 38(1) of the Universities and Other Tertiary Institutions Act, 2001 with immediate effect, Mr Yosa wrote.

In a meeting chaired by Prof. Sam Luboga and attended by all the 24 Council members including the Defence and Veterans Affairs state minister Col. Bright Rwamirama, Kitgum woman MP, Beatrice Anywar and Guild President Julius Ntende, members decided to sack the Council Chairman citing.

In May, Prof. Baryamureeba was on the spotlight as he tried to force Prof. Balunywa out of MUBS after the latters contract expired but in a major slap on his face, President Museveni directed First Lady and Education Minister Janet Museveni to renew the contract.

President Musevenis unequivocal directive arrived on May 29, a day after Prof. Baryamureeba had convened a Council meeting that replaced Prof. Balunywa with his deputy Prof. Moses Muhwezi.

Mr Museveni in his directive said the amiable Professor Balunywa has always been on the right side of the liberation ideology and has given the MUBS institution good leadership without strikes.

I have never found him averse to advice the few times I have interacted with him. Such a person is always good to work with, Mr Museveni wrote.

The new term extended Prof. Balunywas tenure at the helm of the government institution to more than two decades.

Mr Isaac Ngobya, the deputy Council Chairman has since replaced Prof. Baryamureeba as the new Chairman.

RelatedBUSHENYI  President Museveni over the weekend toured four projects in Bushenyi and thanked the leaders including Bushenyi woman MP Mary Karooro Okurut for mobilising wealth creating initiatives in the district.

The President first presided over the graduation of 756 girls trained in various vocational courses, under the tutelage of Ms Karooro, who Minister for General Duties.

I commend Hon. Karooro for the initiative and for bringing trainers from Kampala to help the girls get various skills. My guidance is that the skills should look at critical service provision and import substitution, the president said.

The President then toured Swazi Highland Tea Company Limited in Kisingo village, Kyamuhunga Sub-county owned by Africano Bakeihwahenki. The factory produces 50,000kgs of tea daily and employs about 350 staff.

He then commissioned Global Village Tea of Hassan Bassajabala. The factory employs 620 workers and produces 20,000kgs of tea per day in a peak season. 60% of the production is got from the out growers while 40% is from the factorys tea estate.

I thank Bakeihwahenki and Bassajabala for understanding and implementing the gospel of wealth creation. Tea production has gone up. From one factory, you can now get the total tonnage of the amount of tea Uganda used to produce when the NRM had just come into power, the president said.

He later visited Bushenyi Demonstration Farm in Mazinga village run under the management of Edmund Bashaasha. According to Mr Bashaasha, the facility has been used to teach the youth how to implement the four-acre model of farming and also provided inputs such as seedlings, poultry and cattle.

The President donated a truck to the farm to help the youth transport their produce such as eggs to the various markets including the Democratic Republic of Congo.

RelatedKAMPALA- Business tycoon Sudhir Rupareria has maintained his position at the top of the pack in Forbes Africa latest released the list of the top 10 rich people in Uganda.

According to the list, there no surprises in the top 10, dominated by Ugandans of Asian origin with Karim Hirji, returning as number two while Mr Alykhan Karmali of the household Mukwano Group is number 3. Businessmen Charles Mbiire, Gordon Wavamuno, and Patrick Bitature, who is in No. 10 position make the company of the indigenous Ugandans on the list.

Mr Rupareria has consistently remained top of the list ever since Forbes starting publishing it a few years ago.

The city businessman has from scratch, built his empire that spans from hotels and hospitality industry, real estate, floriculture education and schools to media, insurance and forex and until recently banking before his Crane Bank was controversially transferred to DFCU bank by the Central Bank

RICHEST PEOPLE IN UGANDA 2018 AND THEIR NET WORTH (ACCORDING TO FORBES LIST)

1. Sudhir Ruparelia

Through the influence of his massive net worth which hovers around $1.2 billion, Sudhir Ruparelia has emerged into great fame as the wealthiest person in Uganda and in the entirety of East Africa. Moreover, Sudhir Ruparelia is regarded as a renowned and fortunate tycoon who rose from a mere business enterprise which he set up with a meagre sum of $25,000.

As he remains the richest Ugandan, he is largely associated with investment dealings in sectors including real estate, broadcasting, education, insurance, and banking.

2. Karim Hijri

Regarded as the main force behind the presence of Dembe Group of Companies, Karim Hijri has attained an impressive feat as Ugandas second wealthiest person. As the Dembe Group of Companies continually thrives through its subsidiaries such as Imperial Group of Hotels, Karim Hijri is declared to be worth $750 million.

3. Alykhan Kharmali

Under the aegis of Mukwano Family, Alykhan Kharmali has claimed a notable position amidst the richest Ugandans, especially as he remains the main force behind one of Ugandas famous companies Mukwano Group of Companies. With his investments largely centred on banking and manufacturing, Alykhan Kharmali is currently worth $700 million.

4. Mohammed Hamid

Having emerged into Ugandas class of richest personalities at a youthful age, Mohammed Hamid is considered a fortunate business colleague with huge investments in areas such as transportation, real estate, and manufacturing.

As the owner and originator of the Aya Group, which forms part of Ugandas thriving companies, Mohammed Hamids net worth swirls around $400 million.

5. Charles Mbiire

Since many of the richest Ugandans are of foreign descents, Charles Mbire claims a notable position as the wealthiest native Ugandan. With his entire worth valued at $350 million, Mbire is well known for his diverse business investments which span across transportation, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, real estate, energy, and finance.

6. Sikander Lalani

Other than his investment dealings which largely centre on the manufacturing sector, Lalani is the vital force behind the existence of Roofing Groups. Having established himself as an entrepreneur for a very long time, Sikander Lalani has acquired a sum of $300 million as net worth.

7. Aaron M Mukooza

With regard to his large investments which heavily span across the media together with the banking sector, Mukooza has amassed some net worth valued at $200 million.

8. Gordon Wavamunno

As the best part of his wealth is believed to have stemmed from his automotive business, Gordon Wavamunno is immensely linked with the ownership of Spear House together with Spear Motors his automotive company. Meanwhile, he has the sum of $100 million as his overall worth.

9. Mukesh Shukla

Shukla is reported to have acquired $100 million as net worth mainly from his ownership of Shumuk Group of Companies a successful company concerned with cooking utensils.

10. Patrick Bitature

Bitature is a wealthy personage who acquires the largest portion of his money through a giant telecom company, Simba Telcom, which he presides over. As Simba Telcom Ltd is regarded as Ugandas biggest seller/merchant of MTN airtime, Bitatures wealth has surged perpetually and as the chairman of the giant telecom company, his current net worth hangs around $100 million.

Source: http://www.forbes10.com/breaking-forbes-releases-top-10-richest-people-in-uganda-in-2018/7/

RelatedIGANGA Fifty five- year-old Patrick Kiyimba was arrested by Police over the weekend for allegedly exhuming the remains of the late Mikayiri Nakalanga and selling them to Saleh Kazira, another witchdoctor at Shillings 50,000.

Kiyimba, a traditional healer in Buyebe village, Ibulanku Sub County in Iganga district was arrested for disturbing the dead people.

Timothy Wabutwa, the Iganga District Police Commander, says this is the second time Kazira is being found with human remains.

This is the second time this man is being arrested on the same matter in a period of three months the last time being in June, Wabutwa says.

This follows a recent Kayunga scandal where Police arrested four witchdoctors for alleged ritual killing.

A disappearance report of Mirembe Zuraika was filed at Naggalama Police Station on August 11 and Police mounted a search leading to the arrest of the witchdoctors.

The DPC Naggalama ASP Jessica Naawe confirmed that the relatives of Mirembe reported a case of the disappearance of their daughter and tipped off police that she had talked of having an appointment with a one Owen Sebuyungo, a 24-year-old witch doctor.

Following leads, police conducted further investigations leading to the arrest of a syndicate of witch doctors that are believed to have participated in the heinous act.

Upon thorough questioning, the four confessed to having welcomed Mirembe at the shrine and at dawn, beheaded her and buried the head in the shrine.

RelatedAlameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley is seeking the death penalty for 24-year old Mark Estrada, who is accused of killing Hayward Police Sergeant Scott Lunger during a traffic stop in 2015. Image courtesy of ODMP.

Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley is seeking the death penalty for 24-year old Mark Estrada, who is accused of killing Hayward Police Sergeant Scott Lunger during a traffic stop in 2015.

Lungera 15-year veteran and father of twowas fatally shot in the head and thigh after he approached the suspect's vehicle.

The other officer on scene returned fire as the vehicle fled. The subject vehicle was found abandoned a short time later. The wounded subject was located and taken into custody.

HOUTONG CAT VILLAGE

RUIFANG DISTRICT





Houtong Cat Village I hastily popped a couple of antihistamines as I set off for my next destination. Someone who is allergic to cats should know better than to visit, but I couldnt resist. Houtong Cat Village capitalised on their booming cat population by setting up with cat-themed shops and cafes to entice tourists. The cats here are very much the stars of the show, with concessions made for their comfort: a bridge over the railway for the safe crossing of the felines and advising visitors not to bring their dogs.

It all seems twee, but an astute move, really. Houtong Cat Village cats birds with one stone, about a decade ago cat lovers organised efforts to care for the strays, which in turn attracted outsiders to arrive at Houtong Train Station was a former coal-mining village that wouldve been doomed to become yet another ghost town had they not reinvented themselves. Traditionally, the villagers kept cats to keep away the rats that run rampant on the hillside. After the closure of the coal mines, the area went into decline and many villagers left, leaving their cats behind. Killing twobirds with one stone, about a decade ago cat lovers organised efforts to care for the strays, which in turn attracted outsiders to arrive atto bring their unwanted cats to the village. The media paid attention, social media happened, and now Houtong Cat Village is the place to pussyfoot around.



Co-Organized by The National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore and HPC-AI Advisory Council, The Competition Brought Together 18 Student Teams from 7 Asia Pacific Countries and Regions for a 5-Month Challenge

The Competition Yielded Winning Solutions that Can Improve The Real-Life Accuracy for Weather Forecasts and Image Recognition

Participants Utilized NSCC Singapore's ASPIRE 1 (Singapore's Only Petascale Supercomputer) and Were Able to Perform Multiple and Complex Calculations and Simulations, Processing ImageNet Dataset and CONUS 2.5km Data in Under Ten Minutes

SINGAPORE, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The HPC-AI Advisory Council, a leading community benefit organization dedicated to high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) research, education and outreach, in collaboration with NSCC Singapore, today announced the winning teams of the first Asia-Pacific HPC-AI Competition during a live award ceremony in Singapore. The award ceremony recognized the top three winners and meritorious performers from amongst 18 teams representing prestigious universities throughout Asia-Pacific.

The competition kicked off at Supercomputing Asia 2018, NSCC Singapore's flagship HPC annual conference, on the 27th of March, 2018 by Dr. Janil Puthucheary, the then Senior Minister of State for Communications and Education, and ended on the 13th of August, 2018. The competition saw intense, but healthy, rivalry among 18 university teams from seven countries and regions, and yielded winning solutions for improving the real-life accuracy of weather forecasts and image recognition. Tasked with demonstrating the highest performance on a range of complex HPC and AI applications, Mainland China's Tsinghua University team was awarded First Place. Second and Third Place were awarded to the two Taiwanese teams from National Cheng Kung University.

The two primary focuses of the competition were High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. For the HPC applications, teams were challenged to achieve the highest simulation speed of the CONUS 2.5km benchmark using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model, a very popular weather forecast tool used in by weather research institutes around the world. This application reduces forecasting time while maintaining its level of precision. For AI applications, the competition focused on multi-node distributed training of the ImageNet dataset. Participating teams were challenged to optimise the AI framework and neural network architecture. This is aligned with what the world is now doing in AI, turning technology into real-life applications including smart city and security-related initiatives.

To collect the winner's trophy, the top winning team from Mainland China's Tsinghua University had to analyse, evaluate and optimise the performance of multiple nodes, and each node with multiple GPUs, over an intense five-month period. The top winning team also gets to participate in the 2019 International HPC-ISC Student Cluster Competition, to be held in Germany, June 2019.

The second and third trophy-winning teams were the two teams represented by Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University. The fight to the wire was very tight, with all winning teams demonstrating a high level of performance. To further encourage the teams throughout the competition, a special prize for creativity was announced. Teams submitted a video of their five-month journey and were graded based on the video's level of creativity. The special prize-winning team was from Thailand's Thammasat University.

Chief Judge and Chairman of the HPC Advisory Council Mr Gilad Shainer said, "The judges were really impressed with the high levels of skill and strategy that participants evidenced throughout the competition period. This made the judging committee's job that much harder, as each team proved to be an equal match with one another. Ultimately, what impressed us most was how such a student competition could yield results to improve the lives of ordinary individuals the world over. The competition proved once again that the availability of HPC resources can empower universities, research laboratories and commercial vendors to develop tomorrow's products and services, from safer cars and airplanes, to more accurate weather and storm predictions, as well as finding new cures. Since HPC and AI applications share the same underlying technologies and infrastructures, new developments in HPC are being adopted immediately for AI, and vice versa, and could also extend to commercial areas including security and smart nation initiatives."

Mr Shainer added, "We commend all the teams for their tremendous efforts and achievements demonstrated throughout the months of this competition, and extend our sincere appreciation to NSCC Singapore for their partnership and managing this important region-wide competition. We also thank the competition committee for its support of the competition throughout. It's an incredible opportunity to contribute to the development of the core knowledge and critical skills for the region's new generation of HPC and AI researchers, scientists and professionals, and the council's mission in continuous outreach and education."

NSCC Singapore's Chief Executive Prof Tan Tin Wee shared, "If you think that supercomputing competitions are but an exercise conducted in an ivory tower, offering no practical benefits to mankind - think again. This competition supports NSCC Singapore's mission to use HPC to power innovation and champion Asia as a regional supercomputing centre. The winning solutions show clearly how supercomputing can align research, university work and commercial considerations to drive innovation that benefits all. It has been our privilege to be the co-organiser of this event."

About the 2018 HPC-AI Competition

The 2018 APAC HPC-AI Competition was managed by the HPC-AI Advisory Council and NSCC Singapore in March to encourage students throughout Asia Pacific to showcase their education and hone their expertise in a friendly, yet spirited region-wide competition, comprised of two parts; HPC and AI. The HPC teams were tasked to benchmark the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model and were scored based on performance and scalability. The AI teams were tasked to run the benchmark based on ImageNet dataset and were scored based on their performance improvement.

AI has rocketed from an emerging idea to a critical domain across industries, interests, disciplines and technologies for its extensive capability and promise - from better and more accurate decision-making from massive amounts of data to enabling deep intelligence and innovation - from science, manufacturing, security and finance to self-driving cars and smart cities.

In parallel, continuous advances in HPC disciplines and technologies are enabling academia, government and commercial industries to develop breakthrough discoveries in new products and services - from safer transportation, accurate storm prediction and weather forecasting, to finding new lifesaving cures, and much more. By sharing the same underlying methodologies, technologies and infrastructures, new developments in HPC and AI are being adopted immediately in both domains.

Supporting Resources:

For more information and general questions please email [email protected]

About the HPC-AI Advisory Council

Founded in 2008, the non-profit HPC-AI Advisory Council is an international organization with over 400 members committed to education and outreach. Members share expertise, lead special interest groups and have access to the technology center to explore opportunities and evangelize the benefits of HPC and AI technologies, applications and future development. The council hosts multiple annual conferences and STEM challenges worldwide including the RDMA Student Competition in China and the Student Cluster Competition in Germany. Membership is free of charge and obligation. More information: www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com.

About National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore

The National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore was established in 2015 and manages Singapore's first national petascale facility with high performance computing (HPC) resources to support science and engineering computing needs for academic, research and industry communities. Funded by its stakeholders, including Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), National University of Singapore (NUS), and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), with substantial funding from the Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI), NSCC Singapore aims to democratise access to supercomputing. NSCC Singapore works with local and international organisations to catalyse collaborative HPC projects and programmes which support national research and development initiatives, attract industrial research collaborations and enhance Singapore's research capabilities. For more information, please visit https://nscc.sg.

Related Links

http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com



SOURCE HPC-AI Advisory CouncilSINGAPORE, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Frost & Sullivan Singapore hosted its 13th annual corporate run 'Frost the Trail 2018' on Saturday, 25 August 2018 at MacRitchie Reservoir Park, raising S$90,000 for its chosen beneficiaries: The Bright Hill Evergreen Home, an accredited non-profit nursing home for the aged sick, and Peace Connect Neighborhood Link. 100% of the proceeds raised will go directly to the charities.

Denise Phua, Member of Parliament for Jalan Besar GRC (Kampong Glam) graced the event, which also featured a lively carnival onsite and a dance performance by the residents of Peace Connect.

Featuring races in two categories to cater for runners of various fitness levels; 560 runners competed in either the 4km (Team) or 8km (Individual) events. The winners for Frost the Trail Singapore Corporate Challenge 2018 are as follows:

4km race (Team)

First Place: Dell

1st Runner-Up: Ascendas Funds Management (S) Ltd

2nd Runner-Up: Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Asia Pte Ltd

8km race (Overall Male)

First Place: Jacek Marek Brodniewicz, Aedas Pte Ltd

1st Runner-Up: Tan Jie Sen, Jackson, Ernst & Young LLP

2nd Runner-Up: Lennard Foo, MSD International GmbH

8km race (Overall Female)

First Place: Fredalyn M. Japson, Whampoa Kang Fishhead Steamboat

1st Runner-Up: Joan Ng, MSD International GmbH

2nd Runner-Up: Sim Lay Peng, MSD International GmbH

"We are delighted to work with the corporate community to raise funds for our beneficiaries and awareness for this worthy cause. Through our annual effort, we are glad to bring together members of the public and the corporate community to champion a cause that we strongly believe in," noted Mr Satish Lele, organizing chairman for Frost the Trail Singapore.

This year's Frost the Trail Singapore recognizes the Platinum Donors  Teleperformance, Huawei and RSM Singapore and the Gold Donors, Jabra, Urah, Citic Telecom International and MSD. Notable executive donors include Tetherfi, JMC Corporation and PCCW Global whilst supporting partners include Alpen, Duracell, Sunrice, Eagle Brand, Zenxin Organic, and Dell EMC. Ultron is named the official apparel partner and Spritzer as the official bottled mineral water.

To find out more about Frost the Trail Singapore Corporate Challenge and its beneficiaries, please visit http://www.frost-apac.com/ftt/sg/index.html

Frost the Trail 2019 is scheduled for August 2019 and advance expressions of interest from corporate companies for sponsorship, donations, runners and contributions in kind are welcome.

About Frost & Sullivan

For over five decades, Frost & Sullivan has become world-renowned for its role in helping investors, corporate leaders and governments navigate economic changes and identify disruptive technologies, Mega Trends, new business models and companies to action, resulting in a continuous flow of growth opportunities to drive future success. Contact us: Start the discussion.

Contact:

Melissa Tan

Corporate Communications  Asia Pacific

P: +65 6890 0926

F: +65 6890 0999

E: [email protected]

http://ww2.frost.com

Tags : #FrostandSullivan, #FTT

Related Links

http://www.frost.com



SOURCE Frost & SullivanWASHINGTON, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Latest addition to Helsinki's cultural quarter opens with "teamLab: Massless" a major international exhibition by the Tokyo-based art collective teamLab filling its 2,200 sqm gallery space with digital art.

Finland's capital Helsinki has gained a major new cultural institution and a striking new public space with the completion of Amos Rex. The art museum opens after a five- year, 50 million project designed by architecture firm JKMM, which has seen the refurbishment of the landmark 1930's Lasipalatsi building in Central Helsinki. At the heart of the museum, 13,000 cubic metres of rock has been excavated to create a new 2,200 sqm world-class flexible gallery space topped with a series of domes and skylights that form the new undulating landscape of the Lasipalatsi Square.

Amos Rex's exhibition programme extends from the newest, often experimental, contemporary art to 20th-century Modernism and ancient cultures. Amos Rex aims to present captivating and ambitious art refreshingly and exuberantly. The goal is for the past, present and future to produce unique experiences and surprising encounters beneath and above ground, and on the screen.

Amos Rex opens with Massless, an exhibition by the Tokyo-based digital art collective teamLab, which will run until 6 January 2019. In the early half of 2019, Amos Rex will present a retrospective of the Dutch art collective Studio Drift as well as Rene Magritte: Life Line, the first major exhibition of this pioneer of the surrealist movement in Finland. These exhibitions will run in parallel from 8 February to 19 May.

Kai Kartio, Director of Amos Rex, said:

"The opening of Amos Rex is one of the biggest events to occur in the cultural life of Helsinki for a generation and will offer unrivalled facilities for the display of art, exhibitions, film and performance.

Art used to be something you hung on the wall and went respectfully to contemplate. Today art is increasingly interactive and conversational. It is something people make and experience together. Contemporary art finds all the time new forms and new media and this is exemplified in the work of our first artistic contributor, teamLab. teamLab's immersive and participatory digital artwork is a fantastic way to demonstrate the expressive possibilities opened up to us by our new galleries."

Jan Vapaavuori, Mayor of Helsinki said:

"The City of Helsinki is delighted to partner with Amos Rex to create this world-class cultural facility located right in the heart of Helsinki city centre. The refurbishment of the 1930's landmark together with the new museum extension are remarkable additions to our urban culture.

Helsinki's goal is to champion world-class culture, arts and education opportunities for all of our citizens and people visiting our city. Access to the most exciting examples of cultural production from around the world allows us to grow our minds beyond the confines of everyday experience, giving our citizens a global outlook, educating and entertaining in equal measure."

Asmo Jaaksi, Founding Partner of JKMM said:



"Integrating one of Finland's architecturally pioneering 1930s buildings - Lasipalatsi - as part of the Amos Rex project has been a moving experience. By adding a bold new layer to Lasipalatsi, we feel we are connecting past with present. We would like this to come across as a seamless extension as well as an exciting museum space very much of its time"; The square adjacent to Lasipalatsi is one of the most important public spaces in Helsinki. We hope the newly landscaped Lasipalatsi Square with its gently curving domes will be received as a welcome addition to Helsinki's urban culture; a place everyone and anyone in the city can feel is their own."

Toshiyuki Inoko, Founder of teamLab said:

"We are very excited to have the opportunity to participate in the inaugural exhibition at Amos Rex. teamLab aims to explore a new relationship between humans and the world, and between people and nature through art. Digital technology has allowed art to liberate itself from the physical and transcend boundaries, and we believe digital art can turn the relationship between people in the same space into a positive experience.

Our work Vortex of Light Particles, which we are creating especially for this occasion, will be the largest installation in the exhibition. We will create a digital simulation of water pouring upward in reversed gravity towards the uniquely and beautifully domed ceiling, flowing from this underground space to the skylight above. The trajectories of these simulated water particles will form a series of lines, which will in turn create waterfalls and vortex all along the walls and ceiling of this space. We hope everyone in Finland is as excited as we are to experience this piece."

Amos Rex is the latest addition to the buzzing cultural quarter of Helsinki, which already includes the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki Music Centre, Alvar Aalto's Finlandia Hall, the National Museum of Finland, the Finnish Museum of Natural History, the Ateneum Museum, Helsinki Art Museum (HAM) and the soon-to be completed Oodi Central Library.

The centrepiece of the new museum is a 2,200 sqm gallery space created beneath the Lasipalatsi square which will offer the curators of Amos Rex the opportunity to accommodate large scale works of art and performance, and to stage exhibitions, installations and performance in a hugely flexible space with a high degree of technical control.

Photo: Mika Huisman/Amos Rex

Photo: Tuomas Uusheimo

Further information:

ING Media

helsinki@ing-media.com

+44 (0)20-7247-8334

Timo Riitamaa

Head of Communications and Marketing, Amos Rex

timo.riitamaa@amosrex.fi

+358-41-529-2620

Amos Rex Media Kit

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/helsinki-marketing/r/amos-rex--a-new-cultural-powerhouse-for-helsinki,c2601010

The following files are available for download:

http://news.cision.com/helsinki-marketing/i/amos-rex-art-museum-c-tuomas-uusheimo-13,c2473527 Amos Rex Art Museum c Tuomas Uusheimo 13 http://news.cision.com/helsinki-marketing/i/amosrexsquare-credit-mika-huisman-and-amos-rex,c2473528 AmosRexSquare CREDIT Mika Huisman and Amos Rex http://news.cision.com/helsinki-marketing/i/amos-rex-art-museum-c-tuomas-uusheimo-8,c2473529 Amos Rex Art Museum c Tuomas Uusheimo 8

SOURCE Helsinki MarketingThe Tourism Industry in Hangzhou's Xiaoshan District Embarks on its New Journey of Transforming the Area into the World's Next "Go-To" Travel Destination

HANGZHOU, China, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Recently, a promotion from the Tourism Bureau of Xiaoshan Hangzhou, with the slogan of "Tourism improves the world and life", has become a highlight on the large screen overlooking New York's Times Square. Passers-by took notice of the promotion and stopped to take in the beautiful scenery of Xiaoshan on the digital screen overhead. They observed an aerial view of Xianghu, a scenic area in China surrounded by mountains, with the reflection on the water of the lake, mirroring the sunset glow in the sky. Siting Bridge, with its oriental charm, straddles the lake, telling the story of the area's 8,000-year culture built up around the bridge. At Times Square, Xiaoshan was sincere in its invitation to visitors from all over the world.

With abundant tourism resources and a long history, Xiaoshan is known in China as the place of "heaven and treasure". In 2016, the G20 Hangzhou Summit was held nearby, at Hangzhou International Expo Center. It was also the year that Xiaoshan climbed onto the international stage for its beauty.

In December 2017, the World Tourism Alliance (WTA) established its headquarters in Xianghu, the "Mother's Lake" of Xiaoshan, creating an important platform through which Hangzhou was able to demonstrate its brand to the world. It was also a milestone event in the development of the district, accelerating the growth in tourism. This September, WTA will hold its 2nd annual meeting, the board of directors event and the "WTA - Dialogue in Xianghu" series of campaigns in Xiaoshan, where business and tourism leaders will gather. Accordingly, the international tourism community will have a brand campaign named after Xianghu.

With a focus on three priorities including the establishment of the WTA headquarters, the development of Xianghu as a key national tourism destination and the building of A-rated scenic villages, Xiaoshan has accelerated the pace of the growth of its tourism sector this year with the goal of attracting international visitors, promoting the district's development through a combination of tourism, conventions and exhibitions.

Xiaoshan is home to one National Tourist Resort and five national scenic spots that have received AAAA ratings from the China National Tourism Administration. The Xianghu-rim region has already developed several scenic spots that have received the coveted rating including Hangzhou Paradise Park, Polar Ocean Park and Oriental Culture Park. Other key tourism projects including Kaiyuan Forest Xianghu Resort and Xianghu Carefree Manor will soon open their doors to travelers from around the world. With the establishment of the WTA headquarters there, Xianghu is well on its way to becoming a world-class tourism destination.

In line with Zhejiang province's goal of converting 10,000 villages into tourist attractions, Xiaoshan has put in place a five-year action plan for implementing a rural revitalization strategy and transforming Xiaoshan, aiming to have available an array of authentic redeveloped villages by the end of the five-year period. For the first time, this year's Xiaoshan International Tourism Festival will feature a variety of events with local characteristics including the Waxberry Festival, the Cherry Festival, the Sanqing Tea Culture Festival and the Nian Gao (New Year Cake) Festival.

Taking advantage of the opportune period between Hangzhou's hosting of the G20 summit and its hosting of the Asian Games, Xiaoshan has embarked on a new journey to take its place on the international stage.

SOURCE The Tourism Bureau of Xiaoshan HangzhouIf you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this





Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found hereThe impact of UC Berkeley entrepreneurs extends far beyond the companies covered in the report, which is limited to startups specifically incubated at UC Berkeley. According to PitchBook data, more than 1,000 graduates have launched more than 880 new companies over the years

How do UC Berkeleys entrepreneurs stack up in the Bay Areas ecosystem of venture-backed startups?

Quite nicely, according to a report released by Startup@BerkeleyLaw. Venture capitalists have poured an impressive $790 million into 320 UC Berkeley-incubated startups over the past five years.

These high-profile businesses include San Francisco-based Flexport, which is developing the software to efficiently ship containers around the globe.

The report, titled Startup and Venture Capital Trends at the University of California at Berkeley, was released to mark Mondays kickoff of Startup@BerkeleyLaws Venture Capital Deal Camp. This intensive four-day on campus program covers the nuts and bolts of how to execute venture capital deals.

UC Berkeley has emerged as a hotbed of entrepreneurship where founders, students, and faculty put forward-thinking ideas into action, said Deborah Kang, director of Startup@BerkeleyLaw. This pursuit to bring about meaningful improvements to the global economy is one of our greatest strengths.

Kang emphasized that the impact of UC Berkeley entrepreneurs extends far beyond the companies covered in the report, which is limited to startups specifically incubated at UC Berkeley. According to PitchBook data, more than 1,000 graduates have launched more than 880 new companies over the years.

These companies include several so-called unicorns venture-backed firms valued at $1 billion or more, like Cloudera, Nextdoor and Warby Parker, as well as towering legacy tech giants like Apple, Intel and Qualcomm.

Even within the narrow definition for a UC Berkeley-incubated startup used in our report, its obvious that Berkeleys culture of entrepreneurship is on fire, Kang added.

Some key findings of the report:



Healthcare companies head the list by industry over the past five-years, followed by businesses in the consumer, education, biotechnology and energy sectors.

Among professional investors funding UC Berkeley startups, seed accelerator Y Combinator tops the list with 16 investments. This was followed by 500 Startups, First Found Capital and Founders Fund, which had four investments each.

Many of UC Berkeleys startups spin out of campus research projects and labs. Instead of turning to venture capital, they pursue government grants in the early stages of business formations. For example, 53 Small Business Innovation Research Grants, or SBIRS, have been awarded to campus-based entrepreneurs. The large number of federal awards underscores UC Berkeleys historic role in R&D leading to next-generation products and services, said Sterling.

Women were involved in nearly a fifth, or 19% of the campus-connected startups that received some amount of investment funding. However, companies with at least one female founder made up just 5% of the total venture funding. Kang said Startup@BerkeleyLaw as well as other accelerator and incubator programs on campus are dedicated to improving that percentage.

About Startup@BerkeleyLaw

Startup@BerkeleyLaw is an initiative of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business (BCLB) in collaboration with the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. BCLB is UC Berkeley Laws hub for rigorous, relevant, and empirically-based research, education, and programming on the interrelationships of the law and business. Areas of focus include venture capital and entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, capital markets, and mergers and acquisitions.Former deputy governor of Russias Kursk Region sentenced to 2 years for corruption

 photo by the Investigative Committee

13:53 27/08/2018

MOSCOW, August 27 (RAPSI)  Ex-deputy governor of the Kursk Region Vasily Zubkov has been sentenced to 2 years in a high security penal colony for receiving a large-scale bribe, the press-service of the Investigative Committee has stated.

Other defendant in the case, founder of the construction company Own apartment Alexander Filimonov has been sentenced also to 2 years. The companys manager Natalya Kretova has been fined 500,000 rubles ($7,400). Former deputy chief of the Regional firefighting service Andrey Zanin has been sentenced to 2.5 years.

Investigators found that in the autumn of 2015 Filimonov contacted Zubkov with Zanin acting as an intermediary. The businessman asked the official to provide his firm with an examination report allowing to commission a house in Kursk. In exchange, the official requested that a car garage evaluated at over one million rubles ($14,800), which served as a bribe, was registered in the name of his daughter. The documents were prepared by Kretova and transferred to a registration office.

Earlier, Zubkov announced that he pleaded guilty and told the court that he had chronic illnesses requiring treatment.Businessman charged with bribing penitentiary official denied $15,000 bail

 RIA Novosti, Vladimir Pesnya

16:53 27/08/2018

ST. PETERSBURG, August 27 (RAPSI, Mikhail Telekhov) - Petroinvest company CEO engaged in the construction of a detention center Ruslan Khamkhokov, who stands charged with bribing a Federal Penitentiary Services (FSIN) official, has been denied 1-million-ruble bail ($15,000), the United press service of St. Petersburg courts has told RAPSI.

A court refused to release the defendant from house arrest on bail because of its disproportion to the sum of alleged bribes.

According to investigation, in March 2010, then deputy chief of the FSIN St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region directorate Sergey Moiseyenko promised Khamkhokov, to assist in execution of necessary documents on rendered services during the construction of a local pretrial detention center for the money reward in the amount of not less than 10% each transfer of funds allocated for the work performance to the Petroinvest accounts.

Investigators claim that from March 2010 to August 2015, Khamkhokov gave about 350 million rubles ($5.2 million) to Moiseyenko through intermedia.

Moiseyenko stands charged with taking bribes from Khamkhokov and other businessmen Viktor Kudrin and organizing the murder of his subordinate, Colonel Nikolay Chernov.



Museum of Canadas Oldest Regiment

London, Ontario, named of course for the British capital city, is home to the Royal Canadian Regiment Museum. Housed in the west wing of the historic Wolseley Hall, the first building to be built by the Canadian government especially for its new standing army in 1886, this museum chronicles the history of one of Canadas oldest military units.

First settled by Europeans between 1801 and 1804, London, Ontario, is situated along the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, the most densely populated and heavily industrialized region of Canada. Approximately halfway between Toronto and Detroit, its also home to the former Canadian Forces Base London, which was the first purpose-built infantry training school erected by the Canadian federal government. It served as an early symbol of the establishment of a permanent military force in Canada, and part of the base was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1963.

Named for British Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley and used for training regular and reserve units of the Canadian Army since it was established in 1888, the 150-year-old barracks are the oldest building in the Canadian Forces Base (CFB) London. It has been continuously occupied by some element of the regiment since the completion of construction.

At various times, the Wolseley Barracks have been the home of the Regimental HQ for the 1st and 2nd Battalions, and today it remains the home of the 4th Battalion.

The original architectural drawings for Wolseley Hall from 1886 actually allocated space for a museum, but in the past five years the museum completed an expansion. As a result, it now includes two floors with galleries that chronicle the regiments exploits throughout its history.

Within the building are many artifacts, but the building itself is also ripe and rich with its own history. The U-shaped barracks were designed by architect Henry James, who eventually became the official designer for many other barracks and armories throughout Southwestern Ontario, says Georgiana Stanciu, Ph.D, director of the Royal Canadian Regiment Museum. What is interesting to note is that the plans of the building included a room designated as a museum.

Today, the museum covers the history of the Regiments military heritage, including the history of the The London and Oxford Fusiliers (The Canadian Fusiliers  City of London Regiment, and The Oxford Rifles of Woodstock, Ontario).

Touring the Galleries

Its hard not to feel the history as soon as you enter the main entryway, where a wooden cross from Flanders Field from WWI is presented. From here, visitors enter the museum via the Colonel Tom and Miggsie Lawson Foyer, which features gold bricks that adorn the walls, each meant to serve as a memorial of a loved one or mark a momentous event.

The Foyer features a pair of stained glass windows on either side. These were created by Canadian artist Christopher Wallis of Grand Bend, Ontario, each a memorial to a past Royal Canadian, both of whom gave much of themselves for their country.

The inscriptions on the windows read: Stained glass window in memory of Colonel Tom F.G. Lawson, Colonel of the Regiment 1981-85. A Tribute to his Regimental Family from his wife and children, and Stained glass window in memory of Brigadier T.E.DO. Snow, Commanding Officer of The RCR 1941-43 and Colonel of the Regiment 1978-81. On it are the words that best denote this much beloved Brigadier, Gallant Soldier, Modest Gentle Man, Trusted Friend.

The window for Colonel Lawson was designed and installed in 1991, while Brigadier Snows was completed in 1997.

The Colonel D.B. Weldon Library and Museum Quiet Room (Chapel) offers historical references collected by the RCR Museum, available to onsite researchers with permission from the curator. This part of the museum is named in honor of Colonel Douglas Black Weldon, who served with the 47th (Western Ontario) Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I, and later was appointed Second-in-Command and then Commanding Officer of the Canadian Fusiliers (MG) (City of London Regiment) during WWII.

The chapel now houses many past Regimental Colours, with the oldest dating back to WWI. We preserve the history of the regimental colours, Stanciu noted. These colours are laid out in perpetuity in a church or chapel for the regiment.

The Centennial Gallery includes various helmet and cap badges from Canadian Military Forces from the 19th century to the modern day. This includes history on the Regiment Cap Badge, consisting of an eight-pointed diamond cut star  upon the star a raised circle surmounted by the crown; within the raised circle, the block letters VRI, the Imperial Cypher of Queen Victoria.

While its typically common that when a Royal or Imperial Cypher forms part of the badge of a regiment its normal for it to change with each succeeding sovereign, this is not the case with the badge for the RCR.

While from 1901 to 1919, which saw the reign of King Edward VII and later King George V, the regiments cap badge featured the latter cipher, but the regiment continued to use the earlier VRI badges throughout this period as well, and there was even a formal petition to return to the previous cipher.

In 1919, the King (George V) granted The Royal Canadian Regiment permission to wear VRI in perpetuity, explained Stanciu. This is a very unique privilege for the regiment.

The RCR Museum features several memorials to those who gave their lives in service of their country, beginning with memorials for the North West Rebellion and continuing to those who sadly died in so-called peace keeping duties. The museum further chronicles the sacrifices made, beginning with a gallery devoted to its early years (1883-85).

There are specific and specialized galleries for the Northwest Rebellion, the Yukon Field Force, the South African (Boer) War, WWI, the Interwar Years, WWII, the Korean War, the Cold War, UN and NATO operations, plus galleries devoted to the Infantry and even the regimental band.

Key pieces in the collection include the WWII-era uniform of Brigadier Milton F. Gregg, awarded the Victoria Cross for his service during the Battle of Canal du Nord in France in 1918. Unfortunately, Greggs Victoria Cross, which had been donated to the museum in the late 1970s, was stolen and never recovered.

Within the museums displays are several dioramas showcasing the RCR on various campaigns. The model of the Battle of Paardeberg depicts the monumental battle, remembered every February to this day. Also exhibited is a replica of Private Thompsons scarf of honour. The scarf, crocheted by Queen Victoria, is one of the rarest honors bestowed on a soldier of the Empire. Awarded to Private Thompson, it represents a unique distinction for a Canadian soldier.

The Gallery to WWI includes a Vimy Ridge diorama showing the progress of the unit, while a full-size replica trench allows visitors to get a feeling for what it mustve been like for the young men who traveled so far from home. This battle has been remarked upon as the event that bought Canada her independence. It was the first large-scale operation carried out completely by the Canadian Corps of four divisions, and the first offensive carried out by the Allies during the war that was truly a success.

Visitors can see the evolution in dress and service uniforms that soldiers serving in the RCR experienced, including helmets, tunics, and boots soldiers may have worn throughout the past century

or more.

Various items captured from The Hun on the Western Front during the Great War, as well as British and Commonwealth small arms, make up the current collection on display. These include a rare Ross rifle, a straight-pull bolt-action .303-caliber rifle that was produced in Canada from 1903 to 1918, and original period recruiting posters.

WWII items include Enfield rifles and a British-made PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti Tank) gun, as well as numerous captured items, such as items from General Charles Foulkes, commander of the Canadian forces, who accepted the German surrender on May 6, 1945 from German General Johannes Blaskowitz at the Hotel de Wereld in Wageningen, Netherlands. This effectively ended WWWII.

The Luger pistol that we have is reportedly the sidearm that belonged to General Blaskowitz, said Stanciu. However, we have no proof so it may just be a story, but it was given to the museum directly by General Foulkes, so there is really no reason to question it. Upon his return to Canada, General Foulkes was appointed Chief of the General Staff.

The Cold War and peacekeeping galleries have been recently updated and here visitors can find interesting artifacts, including the original Commando Post used by the 1st Battalion of the RCR during the Korean War, as well as uniforms, small arms, and other items from not only the Regiment but also from around the world.

A display dedicated to Afghanistan allows visitors to enter a sentry post, while a near life-size mural depicts a RCR team in Afghanistan. The artist wanted this to look as lifelike as possible, explained Stanciu. This isnt based on any particular incident and it isnt taken from a photo, but the faces are very much meant to be a close approximation of soldiers who may have served in Afghanistan.

Beyond the Walls

While far too small a building to house large pieces of artillery or armored vehicles, several notable examples are on the grounds outside Wolseley Barracks. These include a Sherman M4A2E8, which saw service in the Korean War; a Bren Gun or Universal Carrier from the Italian campaign; a 25 pounder (Ordnance QF 25-pounder cannon), the main British field gun from WWII; and a more modern Lynx reconnaissance vehicle of the type used during peace-keeping operations in the Cold War era.

Theres also a captured Japanese Type 41 75mm Mountain Gun that was presented to the museum, despite the fact that the regiment saw action in Europe not the Pacific area of operations in WWII. Outside the museum is also the Regimental Memorial of The Royal Canadian Regiment.

Preserving the History

Many of the artifacts in the collection have been preserved thanks to the efforts of the regiments Association of Old Comrades, formed following WWI. This was created to take care of the traditions of the regiment, said Stanciu.

Following WWII, the museum was still open just through private tours, but began to take shape in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was officially designated a Canadian Forces Museum in 1973.

This is very important to note, because this is when the Canadian Military Forces also established a military museum network, added Stanciu.

While not the largest museum in this network, it does offer a fine collection that preserves the artifacts that tell the story of the regiment and remind visitors of the sacrifices it has paid over the past 150 years.

The Royal Canadian Regiment Museum

Address

701 Oxford St. E

London, ON N5Y 4T7

Hours

Tue, Wed & Fri: 10 to 4

Thu: 10 to 8

Sat & Sun: 12 to 4

Closed on Mondays and on statutory holidays except for Remembrance Day

Admission

Free

Phone

(519) 660-5275 ext. 5102

URL

www.thercrmuseum.ca'The three tycoons I deal with in the first chapter -- Ambani, Mallya and Adani -- in their own way represent the change that has come over India.'

'Of the three of them, Mallya is the most fun. He was terrific.'

'And I don't say that because I tell the story in the book of his golden toilet.'

IMAGE: Vijay Mallya leaves the Westminster magistrate's court in London, July 31, 2018. Photograph: Simon Dawson/Reuters

"Raghuram Rajan represents the very best of India. Nonetheless, one man can't do everything. You need to have good institutions that work well, even without fantastic, world-class leaders. And that's the challenge," James Crabtree, author of the well received book, The Billionaire Raj, tells Rediff.com's Vaihayasi P Daniel in the concluding segment of an eloquent four-part interview.

"In the end," says Crabtree, the Financial Times' former correspondent in India, "we need a State that has the capacity to make the decisions that are necessary. You don't want to rely on suddenly some miraculous figure -- sort of dropping from the sky. That is not a good way to run your country."

About political funding you said at the discussion on your book at the Nehru Centre: "It was a great disappointment. I really tried to get people to open up about this. It remains the black box of Indian politics. There were little kinds of snatches and shadows of it."

"Can guess who some of the people were who told me this stuff. Even the good people are corrupt. You can't be a politician..."

How will a change ever come in this worrying area? What is your sense?

The only possible option is a variant of the US system, where India has a very expensive system with lots of corporate money in politics, but at least it's transparent

IMAGE: James Crabtree posted this tweet titled 'The nation deserves a tailor' and wrote: 'One of the nice things about India: Even people who you write about moderately critically are nice to you. Yesterday I popped in to see the star of Chapter 10 of The Billionaire Raj, and India's muckraker in chief, Arnab Goswani.'

'This was at the exceedingly fancy new offices of his new TV station, Republic, in an old converted mill in Lower Parel. Photograph: Kind courtesy @jamescrabtree/Twitter

In the course of writing this book who was the most interesting person you interviewed?

The most interesting person I met, hands down, was (businessman) Vijay Mallya.

He was such a phenomenal character and the four hours I spent with him in his house in London, which make up the second chapter of the book, were gold, if you are a journalist.

And I don't say that because I tell the story in the book of his golden toilet.

He is very talkative, very thoughtful and told me a lot of interesting things. But (his) story -- in a way the three tycoons I deal with in the first chapter, Ambani, Mallya and Adani -- in their own way represent the change that has come over India.

It just happens of the three of them, Mallya is the most fun. He was terrific.

WATCH James Crabtree speak about his meeting with Vijay Mallya in London. Video: Afsar Dayatar/Rediff.com

The people I regret not meeting, the one who stands out is (the late Tamil Nadu chief minister) Jayalalithaa. Would have loved to have met Jayalalithaa. She never gave interviews to anyone. So I tried very hard, but it was just impossible.

I wanted to write about her more than anyone because she is such a fascinating figure and I would have loved to have had some insight into what made her tick.

You seemed very impressed with former Reserve Bank of India governor, Raghuram Rajan.

Almost the danger, for the people like me, the Western foreign correspondent, is that we like people like Raghu too much.

In the end Raghu is very -- Governor Rajan as he was known -- is very impressive. He is very clever, an immensely thoughtful guy.

I think he represents the very best of India.

Nonetheless, one man can't do everything.

You need to have good institutions that work well, even without fantastic, world-class leaders. And that's the challenge.

In the end we need a State that has the capacity to make the decisions that are necessary.

You don't want to rely on suddenly some miraculous figure -- sort of dropping from the sky. That is not a good way to run your country.

You should be able to have normal people and good institutions is better than spectacular people and bad institutions. That's where you want to be.

I am a big admirer of Governor Rajan and I owe an intellectual debt to him. Many of the ideas that are in the book came from his speeches. His speeches were full of interesting ideas, in a way that most central bankers simply aren't.

WATCH: How did India turn into a Billionaire Raj? Video: Kind courtesy James Crabtree

IMAGE: During his posting in Mumbai James Crabtree was delighted to star in the Bollywood film Kick.

'The casting call came one Wednesday morning in early February, from a writer friend in Mumbai: "Would you like a part in a Bollywood movie?" "Of course," I said, "but you know I've never acted?"

"Not a problem: They just need a tall English guy, for an office scene. Are you free on Friday?"' Crabtree recalled in an FT article.

'I was to play British Diplomat #2, and had precisely two lines. There was to be neither singing nor dancing, and (Salman) Khan himself was not involved; an immediate double disappointment,' he said at the time about his debut to IB Times. Photograph: Kind courtesy jamescrabtree2000/Instagram

How come the 'tycoons' of Bollywood didn't figure in The Billionaire Raj?

None of them are really worth serious money. I profiled Ronnie Screwala when I was at the FT. Great guy.

Any political figure from your book that you admired the most? And why?

I admire many Indians in public life who stand up for good governance and high quality public administration.

Raghuram Rajan and Vinod Rai (the former IAS officer who served as the comptroller and auditor general of India) both fit this mould.

IMAGE: James Crabree with Sir Mark Tully at his Delhi book launch. Photograph: Kind courtesy @jamescrabtree/Twitter

In your book you spoke about the three fault lines India is facing. At the Nehru Centre and in The Billionaire Raj, the importance of building good institutions was stressed.

People are often critical about civil servants, but often it is civil servants maintain the continuity in India.

Who are the people who you think are going to build these institutions, bring in health care and education?

Who are the actual people who are going to do all this?

Finally, it is in the hands of these politicians and civil servants.

To some degree, you need a well-functioning political and bureaucratic elite. You need big businesses that can build infrastructure.

But democracies are responsive to their people. Politicians want to give the people what the people want and so, to some degree, things like India Against Corruption was a very powerful moment and it had a huge effect.

Corruption hasn't been driven out of the Indian political system, but that outpouring of anger in 2011 and 2012 made a big difference in the way that the country runs, some for the good, some for the bad.

In addition to the fact that India needs a government that has greater capacity to reform and a business elite that moves beyond some of the fault lines, that I identified in the book, the democratic impulse from a larger, more prosperous middle and lower middle class in particular will have quite a powerful impact on Indian politics.

IMAGE: James Crabtree with economist Jagdish Bhagwati. Columbia professor Bhagwati and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen were interviewed in the book.

Both distinguished econmic thinkers, who are known for their dislike for each other, praised Crabtree's book offering review lines for the blurb, which Crabtree considers a special achievement. Photograph: Kind courtesy @jamescrabtree/Twitter

So you feel citizens movements influence?

Simply the act of voting in an election. In the end, politicians are responsive to their voters.

By sheer dint of their vote? And a voter being aware of the issues facing him?

Not just that. In the end, reform movements come from lots of different places, some of them are driven by technocrats and some of them are driven by ordinary people who are pissed off.

India will have both of those things I think.

If it is going to modernise in a way that it needs to, and most of its people want it to, then, in a sense, all of those things are going to have to work together.'I feel more like a chess player, thinking for long hours how to make the next move," Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan tells Surajeet Das Gupta.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com

She says her job in the telecom ministry is unconventional -- in fact, she does not feel she is a bureaucrat after all.

"I feel more like a chess player, thinking for long hours how to make the next move," she says with a chuckle.

That is because, in most other ministries the focus for an IAS officer is making public policy, but in the telecommunications ministry it is more about "commercial arbitration", says Aruna Sundararajan, its soft spoken secretary.

I am meeting Sundararajan at The Deck in the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. She has spent over a year in the hot seat, under scrutiny for every step she takes.

"I make it a point to read the leading newspapers every morning because there is always some controversy related to the sector in one of the pages."

Her tenure has witnessed a bitter battle between Reliance Jio and incumbent operators on a range of regulatory and policy issues, many of which have landed in the courts.

Sundararajan's first choice was the popular Lodi restaurant; unfortunately, it is closed for renovation. So we are at the restaurant that used to be a favourite hunting ground for the calorie conscious. Not anymore. It now serves Italian fare designed by celebrated chef Sabrina Gidda of Bernardi's, London.

It is a lazy Saturday afternoon and as we settle down I ask her why she thinks her stint at the telecom ministry is different from her stints at, say, the steel, IT or even the defence ministry.

There are few other ministries that touch the lives of a billion-odd Indians, day after day, minute by minute, and can even change lives, Sundararajan says with evident pride. That is what makes it so fascinating.

Not that it's all hunky-dory. Many of the problems in the sector have arisen because of the way laws are made, she says.

"Given a chance, some of the regulation should be rewritten as they are opaque and full of gaps."

For the uninitiated, most of the regulation governing the sector are not laid down by her ministry, but by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.

That said, the lower rungs of bureaucracy have a lot of power, she says, but in a domain like telecom, which is complex, the need for specialised knowledge is immense.

She is in favour of lateral entry -- something the government has just initiated.

The table attendant comes with a menu card and we decide to place our order. A vegetarian, Sundararajan wants roasted vegetables with olive bruschetta, a quinoa-based salad accompanied by some hard crust bread and a basil garlic dip.

I make a dash for some tiger prawns to start with, followed by a seared fillet of salmon, sauce vierge and spinach. And to wash all of that down, a lemonade.

Though not a techie (she has degrees in economics and philosophy), Sundararajan has been in the technology world for many years.

As a young officer she pushed the Kerala government to set up an IT department in the state. And in 2003, she kicked off the country's first Internet kiosk project in the backward district of Malappuram, which would become the precursor to the government service centres across the country.

She followed it up with a stint in IL&FS, where she was on deputation as CEO overseeing IT projects like the launch of the country's first mobile banking undertaking for truck drivers in Delhi's Kapashera region.

As an IAS officer she has worked in two states -- in Tamil Nadu, her original cadre, till she took a transfer to the Kerala cadre to be with her husband who was from that state cadre.

Despite being neighbours, the culture of the two states could not be more different, she says.

In Tamil Nadu, the structure was imperial and feudal, the DM had to just order and everyone would scramble to do a job.

"In Kerala there used to be endless debates and consultations before a decision was made, but developmental debates were so much richer," she says.

The reason, she says, must be the long Left movement in the state that brought awareness among people of their rights.

She also believes that the Kerala model, wherein 40 per cent of the government funds devolved to the panchayat, is a very effective way of empowerment.

She worked on Kudumbashree, a programme that brought women to the decision making table.

Our starters arrives and they look impeccable. The prawn is subtle so no complaints. I steer the discussion towards the telecom industry and her priorities, one of which is making India 5G-ready.

She laments that Indian industry has not woken up to the paradigm shift this technology can bring with speed that is 100 times more than what we get currently.

She says her visit to Barcelona during the GSMA conference was an eye opener -- the 5G technology that was showcased there... take autonomous vehicles for instance... was clearly geared to meet the needs of advanced countries.

The challenge is to make that technology inclusive.

"The challenge is how do we use 5G to fulfill our developmental objectives in areas like agriculture, health care or smart cities. And how can we become one of the leaders in the development of this core technology," she says.

The main course is served and again what stands out is the presentation. The salmon is well done, and Sundararajan seems happy with her quinoa salad.

So what are the challenges ahead of the 5G rollout? For one, fiberisation in India is very low. "That has to go up dramatically," she says.

Sundararajan is also agitated by the way states look at telecommunication -- as a cash cow rather than an instrument for economic change.

"States welcome new infrastructure like a new road or a new airport because they can publicise it. But telecom is an invisible infrastructure, so they say don't put in towers, and impose Rs 20 million for right of way even though fibre goes inside the ground. That's like penalising the telcos. I find that puzzling," she rues.

Her targets are ambitious, to say the least.

Come September, she promises to start trials of a few pilot projects to showcase 5G applications relevant to India; she has set up test beds (like in IIT Chennai) and is encouraging the big boys in the private sector to help make this vision a reality.

I really like the salmon which is smeared with some interesting sauces; Sundararajan orders more bread which she insists is delicious. She wants some chilly sauce because her vegetable dish is too sweet.

How come India is still some way from becoming a hub for mobile device manufacturing, I ask. Have we missed the bus already? Sundararajan is not quite as sceptical as I am.

"A window of opportunity still exists with global companies still looking at China plus one other country to manufacture devices."

But this window might not be there for long -- the impediments in the way of doing business in India, such as delays in land acquisition and getting infrastructure support, must be removed.

Skilling of manpower is another area where India needs to focus on.

"In short, we must be smarter."

The other mistake, she says, has been that big Indian companies that have the muscle to invest and scale up have not been pushed into mobile manufacturing.

After a quick scan of the dessert menu, Sundararajan settles for a salted caramel while I go for my all-time favourite, the tiramisu.

With such a hectic schedule does Sundararajan get time to do anything else? She admits her reading habit is flagging, but she does pick up an occasional P G Wodehouse when she is stressed out.

Shyam Saran for Indian diplomacy and contemporary authors like Pawan Varma are among her other favourites.

She firmly believes that women make good administrators. "We don't have time as we have hundreds of things to do, so we have a pragmatic approach -- we just want to resolve a problem and move on."

The dessert is too big for her to finish, and as we part ways I wonder what would be Sundararajan's next challenge.'To deny our people help in the time of their greatest need is cruelty,' says Aakar Patel, winner of the 2018 Prem Bhatia Award for Political Reporting.

IMAGE: A woman weeps as she holds her son after they were evacuated from a flooded area in Aluva. Photograph: Sivaram V/Reuters

There is controversy over whether or not India should accept foreign aid during a disaster.

There is even confusion about what the official policy is and it is an important enough issue to be examined so let's have a look at it.

The Kerala government says it needs Rs 2,600 crore (Rs 26 billion) in aid to counter the effects of the recent flooding that killed hundreds of people and severely damaged the state's infrastructure and private property.

The Centre says it will give Rs 600 crore (Rs 6 billion).

The Kerala government says the United Arab Emirates (which includes Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah) has offered Rs 700 crore (Rs 7 billion) which the government in Delhi said it would not accept.

The policy of the earlier Manmohan Singh government on this was cited as the reason for the refusal.

Perhaps under pressure from Delhi, the UAE government now says that no specific aid was offered. However, the Thailand ambassador to India has himself written that Delhi is refusing foreign assistance.

His exact words are: 'Informally informed with regret that the Government of India is not accepting overseas donations for Kerala flood relief. Our hearts are with you, the people of Bharat.'

Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi on August 18 after speaking to Dubai's ruler tweeted: 'A big thanks to Sheikh Mohammad for his gracious offer to support people of Kerala during this difficult time. His concern reflects the special ties between governments and people of India and UAE.'

This indicates that the offer was indeed made, and that it was refused.

So what does the policy say?

The Manmohan Singh government had intervened in this in 2004. Till that year, India accepted aid from foreign nations.

After the tsunami in 2004, it was decided that India would not accept relief and rescue assistance from foreign nations, but it would accept aid for rehabilitation.

Relief and rescue has to do with the immediate help that is required. This includes the teams of people on the ground who are helping those affected and are the people in first contact with the victims.

What could be the reason for saying that no foreign assistance on this would be accepted? It could be several things.

For example, it is the local authority that is familiar with the area and outsiders would be coming into a disaster zone with no knowledge of it or the local language.

The second reason could be that in these matters, the Indian State is already reasonably strong and linked through a permanent bureaucracy.

It also has a large military and paramilitary force that is often deployed for civilian duty (as it was in Kerala).

The third reason could be that visually it is problematic to have foreigners rescue Indians and it dents national pride. The same concern does not hold for long term rehabilitation, which is faceless.

There could be other reasons for why Manmohan Singh and his team decided this, but they are not mentioned in the National Policy on Disaster Management.

My view is that if the concern was the first and the second, it seems reasonable. However, if the UPA strongly felt that the third reason, national pride, was the determining factor, then it is problematic.

Now let us look at the refusal even of rehabilitation, which is what is indicated by India's refusal to accept the UAE's and Thailand's offer.

The possible reasons one can think of for doing this are as follows:

First, that we don't need their money. That we have enough resources in India to take care of our citizens in the long term when they are affected.

Second, that we do not want to take money from some specific countries (for example, China and Pakistan) and because of this we cannot take it from anyone, to be consistent.

Third, again, that taking assistance dents the national honour and it in some way diminishes the way we are seen by the outside world because we are aid-takers and not aid-givers.

Again, here there might exist other reasons that we are not aware of, but the government has not told us what they are.

To me, the first reason is obviously false. We are a poor country, by any definition. To pretend we are not is to be blind to what is around us.

To me, the second and third are again problematic. It should be the person and the community that is affected by disaster that should determine whether their honour is dented in accepting assistance.

An individual has feelings, not a nation.

There is no real thing as national pride. It is imaginary, while the aid and assistance is real.

The Kerala government says the UAE is not any ordinary place and cannot be seen as just a foreign place. It is a country which Indians, particularly Malayalis have helped build with their hands. They have a strong stake in it and any aid from that country cannot be seen as charity alone.

It is difficult to disagree with this. Even if Manmohan Singh had a different policy, there is no reason for us to not see the flaws in it and correct it.

To deny our people help in the time of their greatest need is cruelty.

Aakar Patel is Executive Director, Amnesty International India. The views expressed here are his own.'Like General Patton, possibly the greatest exponent of the art of war, Vajpayee had the ability to be always on the offensive,' assesses Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).

IMAGE: Then prime minister P V Narasimha Rao, left, and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee at an event in New Delhi in the early 1990s where an anthology of Vajpayee's poems was released.

Since 1947 most Indian prime ministers have had to cope with conflicts.

Nehru, the first PM, faced Pakistani aggression in Kashmir in 1947 and the Chinese attack in 1962.

In Kashmir, Nehru prevented the army from finishing the job when he diverted the military efforts from General K S Thimayya when we were on the verge of capturing Muzaffarabad. Strategically, the Pakistan link to Gilgit and Hunza is only possible through this area.

If India had followed geographical logic, today we could have had land access to Russia and Central Asia.

In 1962, Nehru and with him India suffered a major debacle as he followed aggressive diplomacy that was not backed by force. The end result was to diminish India's image in the world and help the West equate India with Pakistan.

In his brief tenure, Lal Bahadur Shastri, who succeeded Nehru, fought a war in September 1965 against Pakistan. Shastri learned from the 1962 disaster and did not interfere in operational matters.

The 1965 war was a stalemate but given American aid, Pakistan actually had a qualitative edge over India and even a stalemate was indeed a great achievement.

But an India that was economically weak, living from 'ship to mouth', could not resist the pressures and gave up the strategic Haji Pir Pass in Kashmir.

Tashkent was a diplomatic disaster.

Indira Gandhi was by far the most successful war leader that India has seen.

In 1971, with astute diplomacy, shrewd strategy and iron will, she demolished Pakistan and created a new nation of Bangladesh.

But in the aftermath of the war, at the Simla peace conference, she failed to cash in on the advantage.

One could also attribute her failure to correctly gauge the depth, persistence and rigidity of the Pakistani national psyche.

Rajiv Gandhi in his five-year tenure went into Sri Lanka where India suffered more losses than in the 1971 war.

In the end, we ended up annoying the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam without any corresponding gain in Sri Lanka. Ultimately, Rajiv Gandhi lost his life to his faulty reading of the deeply entrenched historical forces that were at the root of the Lankan conflict.

Vajpayee was a witness to all these events during his over four decades of political life, and learning from it managed to win both war and peace.

Notice how he conceded very little in all his peace moves. While a genuine peace-monger, he was also a pragmatist.

His ambition to go down in history as the peace-maker of South Asia is legitimate and in the interests of all.

Vajpayee was a pragmatist with a heart of a poet.

An American diplomat marvelled at Vajpayee's ability to be a war leader and peace champion in such quick succession.

This often earned him criticism for flip-flops or inconsistency. But in the rapidly changing world of the 21st century, being static is a virtue of morons.

Vajpayee managed to rapidly change from war to peace and yet retain his leadership due to the relationship of trust that he has established not just with the people of India, but also Pakistan. An index of his appeal is that Kashmiris invited him to contest elections from the state.

Obviously, many others contributed to this success that India achieved as a nation. But as a leader it is Vajpayee that gets the credit, for if there was a failure, that would have also been his and his alone.

One of the greatest abilities he showed in his six years in office is to constantly seize the initiative in even the most impossible situations.

Thus, like General George S Patton, possibly the greatest exponent of the art of war, Vajpayee had the ability to be always on the offensive.

RIP Atalji!

Extensive use for this five-part series has been made of research conducted at the ministry of defence, war studies division, where Colonel (Dr) Anil A Athale served as a joint director from 1986 to 1990.

Anil A Athale, a former colonel of the Indian Army, has a doctorate in defence studies and is the author of books on the history of the Arab-Israeli War, the 1962 India China War, the Sri Lankan conflict, Kashmir, nuclear strategy and Maratha history.India and Pakistan will resume their talks on various aspects of the Indus Waters Treaty in Lahore on Wednesday, the first bilateral engagement since Prime Minister Imran Khan took office.

India's Indus Water Commissioner P K Saxena is expected to reach Islamabad on Monday to begin the two-day discussions with his Pakistani counterpart Syed Mehr Ali Shah on Wednesday, Dawn quoted a government official as saying.

The last meeting of the Pakistan-India Permanent Indus Commission was held in New Delhi in March during which both the sides had shared details of the water flow and the quantum of water being used under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty.

The talks will be the first official engagement between India and Pakistan since Khan became prime minister on August 18.

In a letter to Khan on the day he was sworn in as Pakistan's 22nd prime minister, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed India's resolve to build good neighbourly relations between the two countries.

India and Pakistan would also finalise the schedule of future meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission and visits of the teams of the Indus commissioners, the official said.

He said the water commissioners of both the countries are required to meet twice a year and arrange technical visits to projects' sites and critical river head works, but Pakistan had been facing a lot of problems in timely meetings and visits.

The meeting is also expected to discuss ways and means for timely and smooth sharing of hydrological data on shared rivers.

On July 30, Modi telephoned Khan to congratulate him on his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party's victory in the general elections and expressed hope that both countries will work to open a new chapter in bilateral ties.

The report said that the Pakistani side will reiterate its objections over two water storage and hydropower projects being built by India during the two-day talks scheduled for August 29-30.

The World Bank, a signatory to the Indus Waters Treaty, said in May that it could not reach an agreement with Pakistan to address its concerns after two-days of talks in Washington, days after India inaugurated the 330 MW Kishanganga hydroelectric project in Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan had protested the inauguration of the project by Prime Minister Modi, claiming it will disrupt water supplies to Pakistan.

As a signatory to the treaty, the World Bank's role is limited and procedural, the Bank had said.

The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank and signed by then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan's president Ayub Khan, administers how the water of the Indus river and its tributaries that flow in both the countries will be utilised.

Under the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty 1960, waters of the eastern rivers -- Sutlej, Beas and Ravi -- had been allocated to India and the western rivers -- the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab -- to Pakistan, except for certain non-consumptive uses for India.

Islamabad had been raising objections over the design of the Kishanganga hydroelectric project, saying it is not in line with the criteria laid down under the Indus Waters Treaty between the two countries.

However, India said that the project design was well within the treaty's parameters.

The Kishanganga project was started in 2007 but on May 17, 2010, Pakistan moved for international arbitration against India under the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty.

The Hague-based International Court of Arbitration allowed India in 2013 to go ahead with construction of the project in North Kashmir and upheld India's right under the bilateral Indus Waters Treaty to divert waters from the Kishanganga for power generation in Jammu and Kashmir.

The international court, however, decided that India shall release a minimum flow of nine cubic metres per second into the Kishanganga river (known as Neelam in Pakistan) at all times to maintain environmental flows.IMAGE: Flood victims collect food packets inside SDVP school classroom converted into a temporary relief camp, in Alappuzha on Sunday. Photograph: PTI Photo

As relief and rehabilitation work is on in flood ravaged Kerala, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Sunday urged all Malayalis to donate one month salary to rebuild the state, where the death toll has now touched 302 and over four lakh are still in relief camps.

In many districts, people have started moving from camps to their homes after cleaning work has been completed.

The receding flood waters had left mounds of mud and debris in their homes and surroundings.

The toll on Sunday climbed to 302 with more bodies being recovered, a government press release said in Thiruvananthapuram.

Vijayan also reviewed ongoing relief operations and later saluted the services of the various central forces which had played a vital role in relief and rescue operations.

At a formal farewell function on Sunday night, he handed over citations to various senior officials and men in uniform and said 'We could directly witness the bold initiatives they took to rescue those who were stranded in the flood waters'.

Kerala Governor P Sathasivam met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Delhi on Saturday and apprised him of the situation in the state.

The prime minister assured the governor that Kerala would get more central funds from the National Disaster Response Fund as per laid down procedure and that the Rs 600 crore central aid released so far was only the advance assistance.

There are still 4.62 lakh people in 1,435 relief camps. At least three lakh houses have been cleaned so far.

Modi in his monthly 'Mann ki Baat' radio address on Sunday, hailed the humanitarian assistance rendered to victims of Kerala floods by people from all walks of life, saying irrespective of age group or area of work, people are contributing for the cause.

He also put on record his appreciation for the role rendered by the Army, Air Force, Navy, National Disaster Response Force, Border Security Force, Central Industrial Security Force and the Rapid Action Force in relief and rescue operations.

"Yesterday was the festival of Onam. We pray for Onam to provide strength to the country, especially Kerala, so that it returns to normalcy on a newer journey of development," he said.

IMAGE: A woman showcases her documents damaged due to floods at Annamanada in Thrissur. Photograph: PTI Photo

As Kerala struggles to stand on her feet, water logging of homes in various places, especially in Kuttanad region of the worst-hit Alapuzha district continues to be a worrying factor.

Huge pumps will be used to flush out water from homes and premises, after which the cleaning process will be taken up by removing the accumulated silt, authorities said.

Vijayan, who had accompanied Modi and Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh during the aerial surveys, said they were touched by the intensity of the devastation and he hoped that the Centre would provide more funds.

Opposition leader in the assembly Ramesh Chennithala said more central funds are needed for Kerala and there was nothing wrong in accepting foreign aid to help rebuild the state.

With the floods having left a trail of massive destruction and rehabilitation and reconstruction requiring huge financial resources, Vijayan wanted Keralites, both in the country and outside, to exhibit their generous self and contribute one day's salary to the state.

"We need to find our strength. It will be difficult to contribute one month's salary at a stretch. But Keralites, including from outside, can at first contribute three days salary a month and over a period of 10 months, donate the remaining sum," Vijayan told Malayalam TV channels in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday.

In the coming days, relief camps in schools and colleges will be wound up and people, whose homes were fully waterlogged even now, would be shifted to marriage halls and convention centres, Finance Minister Thomas Isaac told reporters in Alapuzha.

Meanwhile, the defence personnel would continue to support the state authorities in flood hit areas in relief and rehabilitation initiatives, a spokesperson said.

As on date a total of 10 Columns and 12 Engineer Task Force of the Army are carrying out continuous rescue and relief operations in the area.

The troops are involved in road opening, clearing of landslides and construction of temporary bridges, utilising the natural resources available in the area.

So far approximately 26 temporary bridges have been constructed, repaired and approximately 50 roads cleared for the general public, a defence press release said.

At least 3.64 lakh carcasses of birds and over 17,000 of big animals have been retrieved and buried so far.IMAGE: People are airlifted by the Indian Navy soldiers during a rescue operation at a flooded area in Kerala. Photograph: Sivaram V/Reuters

The Indian Navy rescued nearly 17,000 people caught in gushing waters in flood-ravaged Kerala, a Defence spokesperson said in Kochi on Monday.

Navy personnel who were part of the rescue mission code named 'Op Madad' in Kerala, displayed their skills and courage in rescuing thousands of people, Commander Sridhar Warrier, the spokesperson in Kochi, said.

In all, the Indian Navy rescued a total of 16,843 people, of which 1,173 were airlifted while 15,670 were rescued by teams using Gemini boats after Kerala experienced unprecedented rainfall, which resulted in widespread flooding, he told PTI.

"Such was their efficiency that in fact, no deaths by drowning were reported in any area where Naval teams systematically organised their rescue efforts," he said.

Commander Warrier said a robust and efficient Command, Control and Logistics Organisation of the Southern Naval Command, coordinated by Joint Operation Centre, ensured naval personnel deployed in the worst-hit areas were utilised efficiently to rescue maximum number of people.

Based on inputs from the state administration, as well as feedback from the teams on ground, careful planning of the utilisation of resources available with the Command was done and teams were deployed in the general areas where distress calls were most concentrated, he said.

"Once the resources available with the Southern Naval Command in terms of Gemini boats and divers were found to be falling short, additional resources were sought and promptly received from other Naval commands," Commander Warrier said.

SNC Headquarters also coordinated with the Air Force headquarters for airlift of personnel and equipment from Mumbai and Visakhapatnam to Kochi.

He said deployment of teams to inaccessible areas was mostly done by airlift and even this was extremely difficult as landing grounds for the aircraft were not readily available due to inundation of most areas.

The teams were dropped off at the closest locations and, thereafter, they moved by boat/road to the affected areas.

Naval aircraft operated from the Naval Air Station INS Garuda and were deployed from Chalakudy, Thrissur to Ayroor, Pathanamthitta to airlift survivors from locations inaccessible by road, the spokesman said.

Some of the rescued people were relocated to safe sites and the rest were brought to Naval relief camps set up in the T-2 Hangar and Naval KG School inside the Naval Base, he said.

As the waters receded, de-induction of 92 teams and over 500 men began after obtaining clearance from the state government.

He said Wayanad district was the first to be severely hit as a result of the incessant rains, which resulted in flooding and landslides.

Consequently, on August 9 in view of the worsening situation and the challenges faced by the state administration, the Southern Naval Command launched 'Operation Madad' to facilitate rescue and relief efforts to the affected areas, the spokesman said.

Initially, Op Madad State III was executed on August 9, which was raised to State II on August 10, wherein majority of rescue and relief teams were brought to full readiness and kept on standby for immediate deployment, he said.

The rains intensified considerably from August 14 which resulted in waters in major dams crossing the danger levels and forcing the state government to order opening of the shutters of some 35 of these 39 dams.

"This resulted in major flooding at Ernakulam, Kottayam and Pathanamthitta districts mainly due to opening of shutters of four dams in Idukki district and Kakki Dam in Pathanamthitta district and led to massive increase in water levels and flow in Periyar and Pamba rivers," he said.

Since the situation developed over a period of ten days, the naval deployments were also carried out in phases.

The Joint Operations Centre (JOC), Kochi became the nerve centre during the conduct of Operation Madad.

The JOC was augmented with a Planning and Coordination Section, rescue coordination cell within the operations room and a team muster and kitting up point at the ground floor of the JOC building, in order to quickly deploy teams as per requirement, the spokesman said.

Deployment of rescue teams peaked on August 19, wherein a total of 92 teams were deployed simultaneously across all affected areas, he added.

JOC was also the nerve centre for planning and coordination with all other Services and state agencies, and carried out this task seamlessly to maximise rescue efforts on the ground.

Over 300 people have died and lakhs displaced in the floods and landslides caused by the monsoon rains since August 8 across Kerala.Stating he was happy Congress president Rahul Gandhi has made it clear he was not driven by prime ministerial ambitions, Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar on Monday said the aim should be to vote out the Bharatiya Janata Party and that any party in the Opposition getting the maximum seats after the 2019 polls could claim the top post.

Let elections take place, remove these people (BJP) from power. We will sit together. Whichever party has got more seats can claim the prime ministers post, Pawar, 78, said.

And I am happy that the Congress leader (Rahul Gandhi) has also said he is not in the race for the prime ministers post, he said at a party meeting in Mumbai.

Pawar pressed for forging alliances of anti-BJP parties at state level and favoured picking up the prime ministerial candidate after the election results, as happened after the 1977 and 2004 general polls.

Raising concerns over the alleged instances of EVM tampering, Pawar asked the Election Commission to revert to using ballot papers during polling.

Congress leaders Ashok Gehlot and Ashok Chavan and NCP leaders Praful Patel and Jayant Patil would discuss seat sharing between the two parties in a week or two, he said.

Pawars remarks come a day after the Congress president said he was not driven by an ambition to become prime minister.

I dont have these visions. I view myself as fighting an ideological battle and this change has come in me after 2014. I realised that theres a risk to Indian state, to Indian way of doing things and Im defending that, Gandhi had said.

Lok Janshakti Party leader and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan said on Saturday said that there was no vacancy for the post of prime minister in 2019. The united opposition front should start worrying about the 2024 elections, as Modi faces no challenge in 2014, he had said.

Pawar recalled how parties came together in a post-poll arrangement to dislodge incumbent parties from power in 1977 and 2004. In 1977, Congress tasted defeat and non-Congress parties had come together to form government led by Moraraji Desai. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was formed in 2004 after elections against the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance.

In 2004, no (non-BJP) party had majority. No leader or party was projected (as prime ministerial face). The BJP had then launched a massive India Shining campaign but was defeated, Pawar said.

Similarly, Narendra Modi is a strong competitor (now). But dont worry, the common man of this country is more aware and smarter than us, Pawar said.

The Maratha strongman said he would try to go to each state and make regional parties which are not with the BJP to join us (the opposition alliance).

He noted that Congress is strong in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

In Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajawadi Party headed by Akhilesh Yadav are strong, he said.

Situation is different in each state. Hence, we will have to get along with parties which are strong in each state, the former Union minister added.

hen asked if the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena would be part of the anti-BJP alliance, Pawar said this issue hasnt been discussed.

Pawar said MNS chief Raj Thackeray met him on Sunday and expressed strong views about the alleged misuse of EVMs.

There is substance in what he (Thackeray) says. He insisted the (non-BJP) parties should take a stand on this, Pawar said.

Meanwhile, Congress leader Sanjay Khodke, who was expelled from the NCP in 2014, formally rejoined the party. Khodke was expelled for anti-party activities after he opposed party decision to field Navneet Rana as the candidate from the Amravati Lok Sabha constituency.The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh may invite Congress president Rahul Gandhi to attend a three-day lecture series by Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat in New Delhi next month, sources in the organisation said on Monday.

The idea is to invite people from different ideologies for the event, a source in the RSS said, adding that the list is being prepared and may also include Communist Party of India-Marxist General Secretary Sitaram Yechury.

Indications that Gandhi could be invited came on a day the RSS criticised him for drawing parallels between the Sangh and Islamic radical outfit Muslim Brotherhood.

Giving details of the September event, RSS prachar pramukh Arun Kumar said the Sangh was for the first time organising a three-day lecture series of its chief Mohan Bhagwat on the theme, 'Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective'.

"Bhagwatji will address and interact with select audience comprising prominent citizens on 'Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective' in a three-day lecture series," Kumar told reporters.

The event will be held at Vighan Bhavan from September 17 to September 19.

Kumar said people across the country wanted to know and associate with the RSS.

"This lecture series has been organised in this context... sarsanghchalak (RSS chief) Mohan Bhagwatji will present the Sangh views on various contemporary issues of national importance," Kumar said.

Replying to a question on whether Gandhi will also be invited, Kumar said the list had not been finalised.

"It is our prerogative to choose who to invite or not. Leave this to us... But people from all walks of life, including from different political outfits, ideologies and religions, will be invited," he said.

In June this year, Congress veteran and former president Pranab Mukherjee attended an event at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur on the Sangh's invitation, for which he was criticised by the party leaders.

The RSS, an ideological mentor of BJP, was the focus of Gandhi's attack during his recent visit abroad.

Last week, at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Gandhi had said the RSS' idea is similar to that of Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world.

He had also alleged that the RSS was trying to 'change' the nature of India and 'capture' its institutions.

The Sangh said the Congress chief cannot understand the saffron outfit as he does not know India.

He had also alleged that the RSS was trying to 'change' the nature of India and 'capture' its institutions.'Modi loves to keep others guessing and basks in the media glare, both traits that are politically helpful but are inimical to stable relations, especially in the fragile Indo-Pak equation.'

An exclusive excerpt from Pakistan Adrift: Navigating Troubled Waters by Asad Durrani.

IMAGE: Imran Khan with Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi in New Delhi, December 2015. Photograph: @MEAIndia/Twitter

Both the countries (India and Pakistan) took covert as well as overt measures to prevent unintended reactions.

During the Pakistan army's multi-corps exercise in 1989, Zarb-e-Momin, India did not move its troops to the borders since its ambassador and military attaches in Islamabad were informed and observers invited.

Similarly, when India mobilised its troops in Punjab at the end of 1992 to ensure that there was no revival of Sikh militancy, Pakistan was duly informed, perhaps even invited, to do ground checks.

Post-nuclearisation, to prevent false alarms over their nuclear alert statuses, both Islamabad and Delhi developed a reasonably functional system of exchanging information, including prior warnings on missile testing.

Some of our ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) heads have also met their Indian counterparts to assess the chances of intelligence cooperation.

The JATM (Joint Anti-Terrorism Mechanism), though not operationalised, could be improved to ensure the sharing of intelligence, at least on groups operating from either side of the international border.

In case of an incident, it could provide for joint actions like investigation and the interrogation of suspects.

Bureaucratic and political reservations are expected, some of which might even be legitimate, such as concerns about 'sovereignty' and intrusion into sensitive matters.

However, if these are not overcome, the endless exchange of dossiers, a la post- Mumbai (the 26/11 terror attacks), becomes unavoidable.

Even if it were established, the system would work primarily, if not solely, on the basis of the threat being mutual.

Initially, we could be content with this. As the two sides develop trust and rapport, its canvas would expand.

One day, even joint trials might become possible.

Soon after I retired from the (Pakistan) army, I was involved with a few Track Two circuits.

This was partially due to my stint in intelligence, but essentially because of our toxic relationship with India.

I could therefore be counted amongst the beneficiaries of this circus that performs around the globe.

After the two national security advisors, Ajit Doval of India and Naseer Janjua of Pakistan, met in Bangkok in December 2015, some of our prominent colleagues from one of these tracks had reason to feel gratified.

Only a few weeks earlier, they had been charged with conveying to their respective sides that a covert channel between the two governments was strongly advised.

Their role might have made a difference, but one would do well to remember that the establishment was not holding its breath for some wiseacres to return from a Track Two yatra to enlighten it on issues that the incumbents in office believed was their turf.

At times, they might actually gang up against these spent cartridges who, having royally messed up on their own watch, were now pretending to know better.

Those of us who have access to the decision makers or have a voice in the public domain (through the media or open discourse) could still contribute by sharing their Track Two experience.

Even the most stubborn of governments, when it has exhausted all options or come to a dead end, might recall an odd piece of advice given by an old-timer, who himself might have learnt a thing or two from his former adversary, now a worthy colleague in this confessional league.

The real benefit of this track accrues when a participant is willing to shed some of his prejudices and admit mistakes.

Of course, these tracks also facilitate the formation of new 'old boys' clubs', trans-national in their composition.

I, too, gained by reflecting deeply on my service experience and from some exchanges with my counterparts, even writing joint papers with them, and coming up with what seemed to be 'breakthrough' strategies.

IMAGE: Indian and Pakistan troops exchange sweets on the occasion of Eid-al-Azha at the Chakan Da Bagh crossing point near Poonch. Photograph: PTI Photo

I did not come to the conclusions right away. Rather, as events unfolded, one tried to make some sense of them and adjusted one's assessment accordingly.

Some things seemed to make sense in theory, but when there was no movement even on the most mundane of matters, like the easing of visa and trade regimes, I was forced to reflect again.

The conclusion was that the Indo-Pak relationship was frozen in time, and that there were good reasons for that.

The status quo, if not too inconvenient, is the establishment's preferred option. If it proves to be of advantage vis-a-vis the adversary, so much the better.

If the price one has to pay to improve relations seems to be more than the cost of conflict, one would do one's best, or worst, to prevent change.

Since India has, during the last two decades, achieved a greater level of comfort compared to Pakistan, it would rather manage the present state than risk a transformation whose dynamics it may not be able to control.

Pakistan might like to break the stalemate in its own favour, but has, in the meantime, become reconciled to the situation in the belief that it can not only live with the present state of affairs but can also deal with any aggravation.

It is too soon to assess how Prime Minister Modi will handle the Indo-Pak relationship.

All the steps he has taken so far -- inviting Nawaz Sharif to his oath-taking, and then reading him the riot act; heating up the Line of Control between the two countries; calling off the foreign secretaries' symbolic meeting on a fabricated pretext (our high commissioners used to routinely meet the Hurriyat leaders, including before such visits); the Ufa non-event; the 167-second huddle in Paris; melodramatically crash-landing in Lahore after giving an earful to Pakistan in Kabul; the 'nuanced' reaction to Pathankot -- each of these can be rationalised in an individual context.

Taken together, they reflect a persona that loves to keep others guessing and basks in the media glare, both traits that are politically helpful but are inimical to stable relations, especially in the fragile Indo-Pak equation.

I had believed that India would defend the status quo at all cost, but must admit that I had not considered including a caveat: What if there was a revolt in Kashmir that India was unable to contain with the methods that had worked in the past?

When that happened in the 'post-(Burhan) Wani awakening' of 2016, even the status quo became tenuous.

Considering that such events could recur, we have to be prepared for more explosive times.

I still think that all our earlier efforts to service this relationship were useful and conflict management efforts will be resumed in due course.

If the lessons we learnt, some of them 'on the job', are only kept in mind and the urge to find 'final solutions' checked, then the next rounds of negotiation could be more productive.

Excerpted from Pakistan Adrift: Navigating Troubled Waters by Asad Durrani, with the kind permission of the publishers, Westland Books.'Never forget children,' UNICEF warns of escalating violence in Central African Republic

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 14 May 2018 Cite as UN News Service, 'Never forget children,' UNICEF warns of escalating violence in Central African Republic, 14 May 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c5faa.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

14 May 2018

At least 350,000 children in the Central African Republic (CAR) are out of school and lack access to health and other basic services, including nearly 29,000 who have fled escalating violence this year, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has warned, urging warring parties to stop the fighting.

"Children are paying the highest price for this new surge of violence," UNICEF Regional Director for West and Central Africa, Marie-Pierre Poirier, said over the weekend, adding: "All actors should stop violence against children now. The world must not forget the children of the Central African Republic. Protection of children should come first."

The already precarious humanitarian and security situation in the country has deteriorated over the past year, worsening even further since the start of 2018. An estimated 687,400 people are displaced within the country, up from 440,000 in 2017, including more than 357,400 children.

This year alone, at least 55,000 people  including 28,600 children  have fled their homes because of escalating brutality and violence.

UNICEF said that a third of children are currently out of school. Close to half of all children are not fully immunized and 41 per cent of children under the age of five suffer from chronic malnutrition.

The agency is providing children with life-saving assistance. "UNICEF and our partners are achieving encouraging results focusing on four key priorities: scaling up immunization, ending malnutrition, providing education, and protection; including in emergency situations," said Ms. Poirier.

In 2017, UNICEF and partners vaccinated more than 800,000 children under-five against polio, representing 98 per cent coverage, and treated more than 26,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

Also last year, UNICEF supported the release of 2,969 children from armed groups, and helped set up 315 child-friendly and temporary learning spaces in displacement camps, helping around 56,600 children.

However, up to the end of April, only 15 per cent of UNICEF's 2018 humanitarian appeal for the country has been funded. The agency needs an additional $48 million.

"With significant investment in targeted interventions, we can make a real difference for children both in internally displaced sites and host communities," said Ms. Poirier.



Link to original story on UN News websiteStep up humanitarian support to 7.1 million people and invest in Sudan's development: UN relief chief

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 14 May 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Step up humanitarian support to 7.1 million people and invest in Sudan's development: UN relief chief, 14 May 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c5fc4.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

14 May 2018

The United Nations humanitarian chief urged the international community to step up life-saving humanitarian support to 7.1 million vulnerable Sudanese on Monday, and invest more in the country's social-economic development.

"Millions of people face serious and growing humanitarian needs," said UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock, at the end of a three-day visit to Sudan, stressing the importance of unimpeded, sustained humanitarian access.

"Many have suffered for the past 15 years, but we cannot let them slide back into a situation where they become completely dependent on humanitarian assistance," he added, underlining the need to scale up longer-term development aid to help the country make itself more resilient.

During his mission, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs met Government officials, welcoming their efforts to improve humanitarian access to remote areas, including those controlled by non-State armed groups.

Mr. Lowcock also spoke with humanitarian partners and visited settlements for those internally-displaced in Murta and Kulba, in South Kordofan.

While unilateral ceasefires have improved security across Darfur, South Kordofan and the Blue Nile, recent skirmishes between armed groups in pockets of Darfur's Jebel Marra region have caused a wave of internal displacement, said the relief chief.

"It is critical to strengthen social protection mechanisms for the most vulnerable, including returnees, internally displaced people and host communities," he said, highlighting his particular concern for the protection of women and children who are vulnerable to sexual violence.

Mr. Lowcock commended the Sudanese Government and people in hosting some 1.2 million refugees this year, including over 770,000 from war-torn South Sudan. Price increases mean that many cannot afford to buy food, while recent fuel shortages have impacted the ability of aid convoys to reach many in need.

He urged the international community to provide more support to the 2018 UN-coordinated Humanitarian Response Plan, which is appealing for $1.4 billion. So far this year, donors have provided some $229 million.

Link to original story on UN News websiteGaza medics 'struggling to cope with influx of wounded': UN agencies

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 15 May 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Gaza medics 'struggling to cope with influx of wounded': UN agencies, 15 May 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c5fe4.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

15 May 2018

Medical teams inside Gaza are running out of supplies to cope with the wounded, following the deadliest day of protests against occupation along the border with Israel so far this year, UN aid agencies warned on Tuesday.

Speaking after 58 Palestinians lost their lives and more than 1,300 were injured by Israeli security forces on Monday, the World Health Organization's Tarik Jasarevic said that life-saving drugs were "urgently needed".

These include antibiotics and adrenaline, according to the WHO spokesperson, who explained that more than 10 years of blockade had already undermined Gaza's healthcare capacity.

Two in every five essential drugs were "completely depleted" already this month, Mr Jasarevic explained, adding that essential life-saving medicines for chronic illnesses such as cancer were also "critically low".

Jens Laerke from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reiterated the difficulties faced by health teams in the enclave: "Medical facilities in Gaza are struggling to deal with the number of casualties and the humanitarian coordinator there, Jamie McGoldrick, has expressed his deep concern by the tragedy unfolding in Gaza after visiting the Shifa Hospital," he said.

He added that Mr. McGoldrick  who is also UN Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process  had reported that medical teams at Shifa, in Gaza City, "are overwhelmed, dealing with hundreds of cases of injured, including women and children."

"They are stretched to the limit and running out of essential medical supplies. He stressed that public hospitals in Gaza have less than a week of fuel reserves to continue their operations", Mr. Laerke told journalists in Geneva.

The situation has not been helped by the stop-start delivery of humanitarian supplies.

These usually arrive via Gaza's main supply point, Kerem Shalom, but it was closed after being damaged, although an aid convoy had been allowed in by Israelis in recent days, Mr Laerke said.

"It has been closed indefinitely following extensive damage to the Gaza side of this crossing by Palestinians on 11 May. However, Israeli authorities have indicated that this crossing will be opened for, 'select humanitarian needs' on a case-by-case basis and the day before yesterday they allowed seven trucks to enter Gaza and I understand that six of those trucks were carrying medical supplies."

Following Monday's developments in Gaza, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, called for Israel to mount an independent investigation into the deaths and injuries sustained along the border.

OHCHR spokesperson Rupert Colville told journalists in Geneva on Tuesday that six children and a health worker were among the dead and that more than 150 people were in a critical condition.

The rules on the use of force under international law "appear to have been ignored again and again", Mr Colville said, adding that "it seems anyone is liable to be shot dead or injured: women, children, press personnel, first-responders, bystanders  and at almost any point, up to 700 metres from the fence".

Ten journalists had also suffered gunshot injuries by the end of the day, Mr Colville said.

A reported 35,000 people took part in Monday's demonstrations, according to OCHA.

During the protests some Palestinian demonstrators threw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers, according to OHCHR's Mr Colville, who added that others had flown kites laden with "petrol-soaked material" over the fence that separates the two communities.

The response from the Israeli side  with tear gas, plastic bullets and live ammunition  had caused "horrific wounds and lifelong disability", Mr Colville said, before calling for "credible investigations" by Israel.

"Latterly we only seem to be seeing investigations carried out when there's a very clear bit of video evidence becoming public through witnesses and bystanders," he said. "And the official statements simply say this is all Hamas's fault and . . . just ignore the fact that the children are being killed, women are being killed, unarmed protesters are being killed in large numbers."

So I think with the State of Israel it's very important for credible investigations into these very serious, very serious events and very possibly, very serious crimes as well."

Confirming that Israel had a right to defend its borders, the OHCHR spokesperson said that its soldiers should do so in accordance with international norms on the use of lethal force.

"You just have to look at the casualty figures on both sides to see that it's not being used as a last resort," he said, adding that Israel was obliged "under international law, to handle these demonstrations in a way that preserves life, unless they own lives are very clearly directly threatened, which has not been the case."

UN human rights experts also condemned the killings and Israel's use of live ammunition against mostly-unarmed protesters.

"Despite Israel's commitment to investigate the events of the past few weeks, security forces continue to use live ammunition and rubber bullets against the protesters, killing and wounding dozens of mostly unarmed protesters, women, men and children alike," said a group of six Special Rapporteurs, in a joint statement.

"We express our outrage over these shootings that may have resulted in unlawful killings and the incomprehensibly high number of injuries sustained," the statement added.

Link to original story on UN News websiteUN rights office urges restraint over intensifying violence in northern Myanmar

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 15 May 2018 Cite as UN News Service, UN rights office urges restraint over intensifying violence in northern Myanmar, 15 May 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6004.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

15 May 2018

The United Nations human rights arm has voiced deep concern over escalating conflict between the military and armed groups in Myanmar's Kachin and Shan provinces that has displaced over 100,000 civilians and trapped many in the midst of active fighting.

"The protracted conflict in Kachin and northern Shan states has already caused immense suffering, and we urge all sides to work to resolve the situation through a genuine, meaningful dialogue," Rupert Colville, Spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday.

On Saturday, at least 14 civilians were reportedly killed and over 20 injured in attacks by armed groups, along with a counter-offensive by government troops in Shan province. There are also reports that Myanmar's military, known as the Tatmadaw, has used heavy weaponry and aerial bombing in the region.

In addition, at least 7,400 people have been displaced in Kachin since early April, adding to the 100,000 already displaced. About 2,000 of these civilians, who were trying to flee the fighting were trapped in dense jungle, before they were reportedly relocated to other towns in the province.

"Many more remain trapped in areas of active fighting, with extremely difficult escape routes through mountains and forests, and in need of humanitarian support," said Mr. Colville.

"We urge all sides to exercise restraint and to fully respect human rights and international humanitarian law, ensuring the protection of civilians at all times," he added.

At the news briefing, the OHCHR spokesperson also raised alarm over reports that peaceful demonstrators calling for an end to hostilities, had been arrested in Kachin.

"We call on the authorities in Myanmar to respect the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression," said Mr. Colville.

The escalation of conflict in Myanmar's northern Kachin and eastern Shan provinces (bordering China) comes a few months after widespread violence against the minority Muslim Rohingya community in the country's Rakhine province, drove more than 700,000 civilians across the border of southern Bangladesh where they are living in overcrowded camps, facing the onset of the approaching monsoon season.

Link to original story on UN News websiteEmergency meeting called as Ebola spreads to Congolese city  UN health agency

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 17 May 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Emergency meeting called as Ebola spreads to Congolese city  UN health agency, 17 May 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6024.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

17 May 2018

The World Health Organization (WHO) is convening an emergency meeting on Friday to "consider the international risks" of the latest outbreak of the deadly disease Ebola, which has now moved to an urban area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

One new case of Ebola virus disease has been confirmed in Mbandaka, a city with a population of about 1.2 million, WHO confirmed on Thursday, raising fears that despite a rapid response by authorities, the outbreak has not been contained.

So far, 23 have reportedly died. Until Thursday, the more than 40 suspected or confirmed cases were all located in the area around Bikoro, close to the Congo River, and around 150 kilometres (about 95 miles) from the provincial capital Mbandaka, which is a busy port city.

"This is a concerning development, but we now have better tools than ever before to combat Ebola," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of WHO.

"WHO and our partners are taking decisive action to stop further spread of the virus," he added.

"The arrival of Ebola in an urban area is very concerning and WHO and partners are working together to rapidly scale up the search for all contacts of the confirmed case in the Mbandaka area," WHO Regional Director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, said in a statement.

The meeting of the Emergency Committee will decide whether to declare an official public health emergency, which would trigger more international involvement and free up more resources to deal with the outbreak.

Apart from WHO and other UN agencies, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), as other humanitarian organizations, have teams on the ground, working to contain the outbreak.

Response scaled up

The UN health agency is deploying around 30 experts to conduct surveillance in Mbandaka and is working with the DRC's Ministry of Health advising communities on prevention, treatment and reporting of new cases.

WHO-partner, MSF, has also deployed its teams and is working with UN agencies to strengthen health capacity to treat Ebola patients.

Isolation zones have been set up in Mbandaka's main hospital, and in Bikoro. Special Ebola treatment centers are also being established in Mbandaka and Bikoro, which will have capacity to treat 20 patients each.

In the next few days, MSF plans delivery of several tons of supplies, including medical kits; protection and disinfection kits; logistic and hygiene kits; and palliative drugs to Mbandaka.

Ninth outbreak in the country

This is the ninth outbreak, since the discovery of the Ebola virus in the country in 1976.

The virus is endemic to DRC, and causes an acute, serious illness, which is often fatal if untreated. The virus is transmitted to human through contact with wild animals and can then be passed from person to person. Ebola is fatal in about 50 per cent of cases.

An outbreak in West Africa that began in 2014 left more than 11,000 dead across six countries, and was not declared officially over by WHO until the beginning of 2016.

First symptoms generally include the sudden onset of fever, fatigue, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. This is followed by vomiting, diarrhoea.

Link to original story on UN News websiteSyria: Civilians bear brunt of unilateral sanctions, exacerbating 'unparalleled suffering, destruction,' says UN expert

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 17 May 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Syria: Civilians bear brunt of unilateral sanctions, exacerbating 'unparalleled suffering, destruction,' says UN expert, 17 May 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6044.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

17 May 2018

Syrian civilians are frequently being denied live-saving humanitarian support  an unintended consequence of unilateral sanctions, that are exacerbating an already dire situation, according to a United Nations rights expert.

"I am deeply concerned in the way that sanctions are being implemented," Idriss Jazairy, the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, said on Thursday.

At the invitation of the Government, Mr. Jazairy visited Syria from 13 to 17 May, witnessing first-hand how the crisis, among other things, has severely affected the economy.

The gross domestic product has fallen by two thirds, half of working-age Syrians are unemployed and the currency value is one-tenth of what it was in 2010.

To make matters worse, the cost of food has increased eight-fold since the crisis began in 2011, leaving about one-third of the population food-insecure.

Sanctions on the Government and its members include a European Union arms embargo; a ban on dealing with the Syrian central bank; travel bans and asset freezes affecting military personnel, business people and scientists accused of developing chemical weapons, according to media reports.

"I do not wish to diminish the role of the conflict in creating this terrible situation," Mr. Jazairy said, "but I emphasize that restrictive measures are only making the situation worse."

"The Syrian people should not have to suffer for what has become an international conflict of unbelievable complexity. All those seeking to meet basic human rights require our help, not our red tape," he concluded.

Special Rapporteurs and independent experts are appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a specific human rights theme or a country situation. The positions are honorary and the experts are not paid for their work.

Link to original story on UN News websiteCentral Africa Republic: Violence drives thousands of refugees into neighbouring DR Congo, says UN agency

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 May 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Central Africa Republic: Violence drives thousands of refugees into neighbouring DR Congo, says UN agency, 18 May 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c605a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

18 May 2018

The United Nations refugee agency is calling for urgent support for thousands of people arriving in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) after fleeing conflict in south-eastern Central African Republic (CAR).

According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at least 7,000 people  most of them women and children  have reached DRC over the past week.

"The speed of arrivals and the very limited humanitarian presence in the area mean that people urgently need increased support," said William Spindler, a UNHCR spokesperson, told media at the regular news briefing in Geneva.

The latest numbers are an addition to more than 180,000 people who have sought refuge in the remote Kanzawi village in DRC's northern province of Bas-Uele.

Of particular concern, said Mr. Spindler, is the situation of elderly people, pregnant women and others with specific needs. There is only one water source in the village, forcing people to drink from the river. Most of the refugees are sleeping in the open, others in public buildings.

In response, UNHCR has worked to improve community infrastructure in some villages and towns that have taken in a large number of refugees, including drilling new wells, supporting local schools and health centres and providing shelter to the extremely vulnerable CAR refugees

It is also supporting the registration of refugees and providing them with necessary documents.

This response, however, has been hit by lack of resources.

"Our own capacity for an emergency response is severely stretched, with our DRC operation funded at $1.6 for every $10 needed," said Mr. Spindler.

Link to original story on UN News websiteTeenage girl's death sentence spotlights Sudan's failure to tackle forced marriage, gender-based violence  UN rights office

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 May 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Teenage girl's death sentence spotlights Sudan's failure to tackle forced marriage, gender-based violence  UN rights office, 18 May 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c607a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

18 May 2018

The case of Noura Hussein Hammad Daoud, a Sudanese teenager convicted of fatally stabbing the man she was forced to marry, after he had allegedly raped her, highlights the country's failure to tackle the tragedy of early and forced marriage, marital rape and other discrimination and violence against women and girls, the United Nations human rights office said on Friday.

"We have received information that Hussein's forced marriage, rape and other forms of gender-based violence against her were not taken into account by the Court as evidence to mitigate the sentence, and that the most stringent guarantees of a fair trial and due process were not fulfilled in this case," Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the High Commissioner for Human Rights told the press in Geneva.

As the case has drawn international attention, the UN Human rights office said that it has become increasingly concerned for the teen's safety and that of her lawyer and other supporters.

"We urge the authorities to ensure full protection for Hussein's physical and psychological integrity during her detention, as well as full respect for her rights to a fair trial and appeal," Ms. Shamdasani stressed.

In trials of capital punishment, scrupulous respect for fairness is particularly crucial.

The UN expert on summary executions has argued that imposing the death penalty against clear evidence of self-defense constitutes an arbitrary killing, particularly where women have been charged with murder when defending themselves.

"We call on the authorities to fully take into consideration Hussein's claim of self-defense against the attempt by the man to rape her, after he had reportedly already raped her on a previous occasion with the help of three other people," Ms. Shamdasani continued.

With only 15 days to appeal the Court's decision  which was announced last week  the right for a conviction and sentence to be reviewed by a higher tribunal is particularly important.

"A review that is limited to the formal or legal aspects of the conviction  without any consideration of the facts  is not sufficient under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Sudan has ratified," the spokesperson reminded the press.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the UN Human Rights Committee have expressed serious concern about the situation of women's human rights in Sudan.

"Hussein's tragic case is an opportunity for Sudanese authorities to send a clear message that gender-based violence will not be tolerated in the country," concluded Ms. Shamdasani, adding that the office would remain in contact with Sudanese authorities.

Link to original story on UN News website'Highly explosive' escalation of conflict and displacement across Syria's Idlib, says top UN official

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 11 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, 'Highly explosive' escalation of conflict and displacement across Syria's Idlib, says top UN official, 11 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6e0a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

11 June 2018

The situation inside Syria's Idlib threatens to become "highly explosive" amid an uptick in conflict between armed groups and a spike in the number of people displaced inside the war-torn country, a top UN aid official said on Monday.

Panos Moumtzis, Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syria Crisis, told journalists in Geneva that 1.2 million of the governorate's more than 2.5 million population are now displaced; many of them multiple times.

The situation was "heartbreaking" and complicated by the fact that Idlib has become a haven for belligerents forced out of former strongholds by government forces and their allies, said the UN official.

He told journalists in Geneva that every part of Idlib had been in constant upheaval with fresh waves of fighters being forced to seek refuge there.

"We have seen in the last few weeks an escalation of even fighting between these groups that has taken place," he said, noting that fighting had been occurring around health facilities and other civilian areas.

"A special solution needs to be found for all these groups inside Idlib, because the current composition makes it highly explosive."

The first four months of the year have seen more than 900,000 people flee their homes inside Syria.

This is "the highest displacement number since the conflict started", Mr. Moumtzis said, adding that eight in 10 people had come from Rural Damascus and Afrin in the north, while others had been displaced within Idlib governorate itself.

Across Syria, more than two million people are in so-called hard-to-reach areas and around 11,000 are still under siege in three opposition-controlled locations.

Some 6.2 million people are internally displaced and a further 5.6 million have fled the country amid ongoing conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and destroyed basic infrastructure.

Response to the seven-year conflict 'at a breaking point'

With the $1.8 billion appeal for Syria only 26 per cent funded, the UN Regional Humanitarian Coordinator said on Monday that the international response to the seven-year conflict was "really at a breaking point".

The shortage of funding meant that aid teams could not deliver "basic life-saving" aid where it was needed, despite having full access to areas such as Idlib, Mr. Moumtzis added, while calling for pledges made at a recent EU-hosted conference in Brussels, Belgium, to be disbursed promptly.

In an appeal for the belligerents  and international Member States with responsibility for preventing an escalation of conflict  the UN official stressed that every effort needed to be made to prevent the situation in Idlib deteriorating further and turning into a repeat of the devastation experienced in East Aleppo and East Ghouta:

Across the governorate, he said, "protection of civilians is of major concern, in particular given the composition; given the fact that there is a sizeable number of women, children, families living there."

Link to original story on UN News websiteRohingya refugee shelters 'washed away' in Bangladesh monsoon rains: UN agency

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 11 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Rohingya refugee shelters 'washed away' in Bangladesh monsoon rains: UN agency, 11 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6e2a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

11 June 2018

Two days of heavy monsoon rains have caused severe structural damage to camps in Bangladesh hosting one million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported on Monday

So far, more than 9,000 have been affected and the number is expected to rise as the rains continue.

Meanwhile, more than 30,000 camp residents are still living in areas considered to be at high risk of deadly flooding and landslides.

"The situation in the camps is growing more desperate with every drop of rain that falls," said Manuel Pereira, IOM's Emergency Coordinator in Cox's Bazar, the district in south-east Bangladesh where the refugees have settled.

"You have close to one million people living on hilly, muddy terrain with no trees or shrubs left to hold the ground in place. People and their makeshift shelters are being washed away in the rains."

For months now, UN agencies and their partners have been warning of the threat posed by the monsoon season, which runs from June to September.

The rains began on Saturday and within 24 hours incidents including landslides, water logging, extreme wind and lightning strikes were recorded.

IOM said it is "working against the clock" to secure road access and drainage, and to improve preparations for more heavy rain to come.

The UN agency and its partners are also ensuring the refugees will continue to receive assistance such as access to water, sanitation and health.

However, it warned that risks remain huge, given the vast size and the nature of the makeshift camps.

The Rohingya are a Muslim minority community in Myanmar, where most citizens are Buddhist.

The majority of those in Bangladesh began arriving in the wake of violence in Myanmar's Rakhine state which began last August.

An agreement signed last week between the Myanmar government and UN agencies is expected to pave the way for scores of Rohingya to return to home, once their safety and rights are guaranteed.

It will also allow the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) to access Rakhine state.

Link to original story on UN News websiteWith realities shifting in Darfur, operations on the ground 'must change', urges UN official

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 11 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, With realities shifting in Darfur, operations on the ground 'must change', urges UN official, 11 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6e4a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

11 June 2018

The African Union-United Nations Hybrid Mission in Darfur "must change" in accordance with the shifting realities on the ground, the Organization's top peacekeeping official said on Monday, highlighting the need to "closely link" the mission's drawdown to the scaling up of both peacekeeping and development activities.

"The peacekeeping mission (UNAMID) should be directed to the area where it is most needed, namely at the site of continued conflict in the Jebel Marra," Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the UN Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping operations, told the Security Council on Monday.

"In the rest of Darfur, the UN system should leverage the capabilities of the agencies, funds and programmes best suited to tackling the problems that remain there."

Presenting a special report from the UN Secretary-General and the AU Commission Chairperson, Mr. Lacroix outlined two "central concepts" behind a new two-year strategy  each supporting the other.

The first, dealing with peacekeeping, would focus on protection of civilians, humanitarian support and mediation of local conflict.

The second central tenet, would, in effect, bridge the evolution from peacekeeping to early recovery and development, in collaboration with the UN country team serving Darfur, he added.

"The whole-of-system transition concept focuses on addressing the critical drivers of conflict and preventing relapse," explained Mr. Lacroix.

For the roadmap to be realized, the senior UN official underscored the need to have longer-term funding arrangements in place and increase voluntary contributions from donors.

In addition, funds from the assessed budget would need to be used during the transition and in close collaboration with the Peacebuilding Support Office, to access sufficient resources, he added.

Also vital is the need for continued engagement and partnership with the AU and backing of the Government of Sudan and UN Member States, he said.

"We believe that, working together, this new approach can help establish a future of UN and AU support to Darfur that will help to improve the lives of the Darfuri people now and in the long-term," concluded Mr. Lacroix.

Link to original story on UN News websiteAt least 2.5 million migrants were smuggled in 2016, first UN global study shows

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 13 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, At least 2.5 million migrants were smuggled in 2016, first UN global study shows, 13 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6e8a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

13 June 2018

According to the first ever Global Study on Smuggling of Migrants, released by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on Wednesday, at least 2.5 million migrants were smuggled during the course of 2016.

Migrant smuggling occurred in all parts of the world, generated an income of up to $7 billion  equivalent to the amount the United States or the European Union spent on humanitarian aid that year  according to the UN agency that fights drugs and crime.

"This transnational crime preys on the most vulnerable of the vulnerable," said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, UNODC Director of Policy Analysis and Public Affairs.

"It's a global crime that requires global action, including improved regional and international cooperation and national criminal justice responses," he added.

The study describes 30 major smuggling routes worldwide and finds that demand for smuggling services is particularly high among refugees who, for lack of other means, may need to use people-smugglers to reach a safe destination fleeing their countries of origin.

Data suggests that many smuggling routes include unaccompanied or separated children, who might be particularly vulnerable to deception and abuse by smugglers and others.

According to the UN migration agency IOM, smuggling results in thousands of deaths each year.

Many smuggled migrants die from drowning, whereas others perish due to accidents or extreme terrain and weather conditions. The Mediterranean appears to be the deadliest route, statistically, accounting for around 50 per cent of the total number of deaths.

Not only have some migrants been murdered along smuggling routes, they are also vulnerable to a range of other crimes, including violence, rape, kidnapping and trafficking in persons.

Turning to the gender composition, the study found that smuggled migrants are often influenced by the conditions they faced at home. Although most on the move are relatively young men, in parts of South-East Asia a large proportion are women.

According to the report, smuggling networks often engage in systematic corruption ranging from the local to the international level, and operate a range of schemes, including fake marriages or employment rackets; counterfeiting travel documents and the corruption of senior officials.

Smugglers often advertise their business in diaspora communities, refugee camps or through various social networks online, involving migrant groups.

Smaller-scale smugglers are either ethnically linked to their operating territories, or share ethnic or linguistic ties with the migrants they smuggle. Moreover, some successfully smuggled migrants, then become smugglers themselves.

Moving forward

When it comes to better strategies for reducing migrant smuggling, the report recommends that a holistic approach must go beyond geographical measures, and include making legal migration opportunities more accessible in origin countries and refugee camps; tackling smuggling networks; and raising awareness in origin communities are just a few ways to combat the scourge.

While data collection, analysis and research on migrant smuggling remain in their infancy, there is a clear need for a solid international body of knowledge to support policy making on migrant smuggling, along with improved data collection systems at the national, regional and international levels, according to the study.

Link to original story on UN News websiteINTERVIEW: Development is the long-term solution to Sudan's humanitarian crises, outlines top UN relief official

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 13 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, INTERVIEW: Development is the long-term solution to Sudan's humanitarian crises, outlines top UN relief official, 13 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6eaa.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

13 June 2018

Even though conflict  the major driver of the crisis in Sudan  is subsiding and there is improved access for relief workers, humanitarian assistance "is not the answer" to the challenges plaguing the country, the United Nations top relief official has said.

Concluding his first visit to the country as the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Mark Lowcock underscored that development is ultimately the key to breaking the cycle of humanitarian emergencies in Sudan.

Across the African country, about 7.1 million people depend on humanitarian assistance  many of them displaced due to fighting, but also other factors such as chronic poverty and food insecurity; together with a lack of basic services and livelihoods.

In Part 2 of our exclusive interview with Mr. Lowcock, who is also the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, he describes what he saw on the ground in Sudan, and what the UN needs to do going forward.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

UN News: You have just come back from a visit to Sudan. Can you tell us about the situation on the ground? What are the most pressing humanitarian concerns?

Mark Lowcock: This is my first visit to Sudan as the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator. It is a country I have been visiting, one way or another, for more than 35 years and the thing I was most struck by in this visit [...] is that the humanitarian situation is getting more difficult in a way that  I think, most people in the world, in the decision-making community, if you like  have not really understood.

The conflict which was the driver of many of humanitarian problems for most of the last 15 years in Sudan has died down quite a lot and certainly there has been quite a lot of progress in calming things down in Darfur and other parts of the country as well. It is not all over, but that is no longer the biggest problem. Access for aid agencies used to be a big problem, no longer the case.

The issue now is  for a variety of reasons, including economic challenges that Sudan faces and because other crises are absorbing more of the attention  humanitarian needs are growing and our resources, available to deal with them, is slowing.

We have a growing gap between the needs and our ability to meet them. My biggest takeaway was that we need to draw the attention of the world to this problem and try and get more support for the Government of Sudan in dealing with it.

UN News: The humanitarian response plan for Sudan requires $1.4 billion, but with almost half the year gone less than 20 per cent has actually been pledged. What are the implications if there is a massive resource shortfall?

Mark Lowcock: More children will be hungry; fewer will go to school; fewer will get the life-saving medical help they, and especially their mothers, need; and our ability to sustain livelihoods will be eroded.

So, there is a very real and direct cost in terms of human suffering if we cannot for the rest of the year do better in raising resources to help those people.

UN News: Sudan has been facing waves after waves of humanitarian crises. What role can development actors play to break this recurrent cycle of emergencies?

Mark Lowcock: Humanitarian assistance can reduce the suffering and stabilize the situation, but ultimately for solutions, humanitarian assistance is not the answer.

There are three things that need to happen:

We need to deal with conflict, and as I say there has been good progress on that in the recent past in Sudan; We need to promote political processes and help countries develop political systems so that Governments are able to be accountable and responsive to their own people; and then crucially, the most important thing of all we need to help countries develop faster.

Richer countries are able to deal, obviously, better than poorer ones with the needs of their most vulnerable citizens and Sudan's biggest problem is that there are very large number of people right on the margins of existence, suffering enormously  who the Government does not have enough resources to provide health care, education, livelihoods for and other sorts of support for.

So, development is the long-term solution to Sudan's humanitarian problem, as it is in many other places.

Link to original story on UN News website'Much more' can be done to raise awareness about the plight of persons with albinism: UN chief

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 13 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, 'Much more' can be done to raise awareness about the plight of persons with albinism: UN chief, 13 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6eca.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

13 June 2018

On the international day to raise awareness on albinism  a rare genetic condition that results in the lack of melanin in the body  United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for greater solidarity with people living with albinism, so they can live more empowered lives.

"Albinism is a genetic condition that affects people throughout the world, regardless of race, ethnicity or gender," Mr. Guterres said on Wednesday.

"Yet, tragically, people with albinism continue to suffer widespread discrimination, stigma and social exclusion," he added, stressing also the importance of enabling people with the condition to enjoy their full human rights.

In many countries, grossly erroneous beliefs and myths, heavily influenced by superstition, put the security and lives of persons with albinism at risk of constant violence and abuse; especially children and women, and other vulnerable groups.

In his message on the International Albinism Awareness Day, the UN chief also noted the endorsement of a regional action plan on albinism in Africa by the African Commission on Human and People's Rights and by the Pan African Parliament, as "a key step forward."

"But much more can be done globally to raise awareness about the plight of people with albinism," urged Mr. Guterres.

The Secretary-General underscored the importance of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the promise to "leave no one behind."

He said the day was an opportunity "to declare solidarity with people with albinism and strive together so those who are often left furthest behind are able to live free from discrimination and fear, and empowered to enjoy their full human rights."

The UN General Assembly designated 13 June as the International Albinism Awareness Day, in 2014.

The action by the General Assembly followed a resolution by the Human Rights Council  the highest UN intergovernmental body on human rights  that called for greater protection for persons with albinism against discrimination and violence.

Link to original story on UN News websiteElections serve up food for thought, for Afghan youth

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 14 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Elections serve up food for thought, for Afghan youth, 14 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6ee4.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

14 June 2018

By Philip Smucker

At the newly-established "50/50" fast food restaurant on the tree-lined streets of Herat, in the west of Afghanistan, business is brisk as deliveries are whisked away, on the back of motorbikes to hungry customers across the ancient city.

But for the people of Herat, it's more than pizza and sandwiches that are on their minds; the real food for thought is whether to participate in key parliamentary and district elections in October later this year. Many Afghans say they are weary of politics and politicians, and many will not cast their ballots in the upcoming polls.

The 50/50 restaurant owner, 26-year-old Farhad Majidi, said he is now convinced of the need to be part of the democratic process. "I've decided I will register. It is a developing situation, but we are crossing from old generation to the next; in some cases from warlords to well-informed youth. This generation, of which I am a part, believes wholeheartedly in democracy. And we are the Afghan generation that increasingly has the power to build the future."

In a country that is still recovering from years of conflict and in which extremist groups regularly carry out attacks against civilians, these elections, and a presidential vote that will take place in 2019, are considered an important step in Afghanistan's path towards peace, reconciliation, democracy and a future that includes all Afghans.

United Nations support

Afghan candidates will contest 249 seats in the National Assembly, whose representatives serve five year terms. Crucially, district-wide voting will also take place, offering local representation for even the most remote regions of the country. Despite the ambitious plan, many registration centres remain closed due to security concerns.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), along with the broader international community, is supporting the Afghan-led elections process in various ways, including through the provision of technical assistance and procurement support.

Although the Independent Election Commission (IEC) says that more than three million Afghans have registered to vote, challenges remain, particularly outside large urban centres. In remoter areas, the process of registering to vote remains hindered by constant threats from insurgent groups, who have boasted about their interference locally and nationally.

Social media chatter

There is evidence that young people like Farhad Majidi are now more committed to the democratic process. "We are seeing lively chat on social media about these elections, particularly from young Afghans," said Fraidoon Poya, who works in UNAMA's Herat regional office. "We also see educated youth, including many women, putting their names forward as candidates. The young are quite hopeful, and we do our best to support public debate and dialogue from candidates and voters by supporting events through the media."

Afghan officials had said in April that they hoped to register as many as 14 million voters, an ambitious target "Right now, registration is going well in Herat City, but there are continuing threats from insurgent groups keen up upend the democratic process," said Fraidoon Poya.

Security challenges

Despite the optimism, security remains a challenge across the country. In 2014, insurgent groups warned voters not to vote in the presidential election and the subsequent run-off, later admitting to cutting off the index fingers in eleven instances in one province, where citizens did not heed their demand.

Nearly two decades of international economic assistance has not brought stability, and the past decade has seen a deterioration of the security situation in some regions of the country. Although President Ashraf Ghani has presented an open offer for peace talks with the country's main insurgent grouping, the Taliban, no official peace process has taken shape.

The democratic process has been marred again this year by violence, prompting UNAMA's chief, Tadamichi Yamamoto, to caution in early May that fresh attacks on registration stations were "nothing less than an assault on democracy."

In eastern Afghanistan, the registration process improved following the banning of motorcycles, which are sometimes used for hit-and-run attacks.

Efforts, led by the IEC, to create voting measures that prevent fraud and help protect every citizen's right to vote are also underway, a process which has progressed with stops, starts and rethinks, eliciting intense public criticism.

Despite those concerns, United Nations officials familiar with the efforts to register and get out the vote in Afghanistan, say that enthusiasm and interest has grown in one key demographic segment of society  that of Afghanistan's younger generation.

Link to original story on UN News websiteUN rights chief calls for international inquiry into Kashmir violations

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 14 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, UN rights chief calls for international inquiry into Kashmir violations, 14 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6f04.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

14 June 2018

Decades of rights violations on both sides of the Line of Control in Kashmir have "claimed or ruined numerous lives" and should be the subject of a high-level international probe, the UN's human rights chief said on Thursday.

Flagging the launch of the first UN human rights report on the disputed territory separating India and Pakistan, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein noted his intention to ask the Human Rights Council in Geneva to set up a commission of inquiry at its next session, beginning on Monday.

The High Commissioner  whose mandate ends this summer  highlighted what he called the "chronic impunity for violations committed by security forces" and said that the political nature of the conflict had masked the "untold suffering" of millions of people.

The main focus of the 49-page report is the use of reported "excessive force" by soldiers in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, although it also examines a range of rights violations in Pakistan-Administered Kashmir.

In Indian-Administered Kashmir, the report details how large demonstrations erupted in Jammu and Kashmir two years ago after Indian security forces killed the leader of an armed group.

It notes how "excessive force" led to the deaths of an estimated 145 civilians from mid-2016 to April this year.

Victims' lack of access to justice remains a key challenge in Jammu and Kashmir, the report from the UN human rights office, OHCHR, continues.

It details how bespoke legislation gives security personnel "virtual immunity" against legal redress unless the Indian government authorizes it, and says that "there has not been a single prosecution" in the nearly 30 years that the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act has been in force.

This "almost total impunity" has also hindered inquiries into enforced or voluntary disappearances, the report continues, citing allegations of mass graves in the state and the alleged mass rape of 23 women by soldiers in Kunan-Poshpora nearly three decades ago.

Turning to Pakistan-Administered Kashmir, the OHCHR report describes rights violations there as being "of a different calibre or magnitude".

It details restrictions on freedom of expression and people's right to peaceful assembly in two territories  Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and in Gilgit-Baltistan  and expresses concern at the "very broad definition of terrorism" amid reports that hundreds of people have been detained under Pakistan's anti-terrorism legislation in Gilgit-Baltistan alone.

Any resolution of the political situation in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Indian-administered Kashmir "must entail a commitment to end the cycles of violence and ensure accountability for past and current abuses by all parties", Zeid said.

Link to original story on UN News websiteAfghanistan extends ceasefire with Taliban; UN urges both sides to work towards lasting peace

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 16 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Afghanistan extends ceasefire with Taliban; UN urges both sides to work towards lasting peace, 16 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6f24.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

16 June 2018

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the UN mission in Afghanistan welcomed on Saturday the Afghan Government's extension of the unilateral ceasefire with the Taliban, amid an outpouring of support for the truce from war-weary people all across the country.

"The Secretary-General urges the Taliban to heed the call for peace from the Afghan people and also extend the ceasefire," according to a statement issued by a UN spokesperson.

Following an initial truce announced by both sides that was to run through the Eid-ul-Fitr festival period, which began this past Friday, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Saturday announced that the Government would extend indefinitely its ceasefire, which had been due to end on Tuesday.

"[Mr. Guterres] believes that the only solution to the conflict in Afghanistan is through an inclusive political process," said the UN spokesperson's statement, adding that the world body stands ready to work with the Afghan people and Government, and all stakeholders to achieve lasting peace in the country.

Reportedly, celebrations in support of the announcement continued in the country even as a deadly bombing in the eastern Afghan province of Nangahar targeting Eid celebrations claimed more than two dozen lives. That attack was reportedly carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Through the statement, the UN chief condemned the attack in Nangahar and urged the Afghan Government and the Taliban "not to allow those who try to derail peace efforts to prevail."

Mr. Guterres extended his condolences to the families of the victims and wished those injured a swift recovery.

In a separate statement, Tadamichi Yamamoto, the top UN official in Afghanistan and head of the UN Assistance Mission there known as UNAMA, commended the Government and the Taliban for honoring the ceasefires.

"The Government's extension of the ceasefire provides a clear opportunity for initiating a negotiated solution to the conflict," he said, adding: "This opportunity cannot be missed."

Mr. Yamamoto noted the outpouring support for the ceasefires and peace on the part of the Afghan people.

"UNAMA highly appreciates the decision of President Ghani responding to the overwhelming voice of the people of Afghanistan to extend the ceasefire," he said, adding that the Mission called upon the Taliban to respond positively to the "desire and yearning of the Afghan people for an end to the conflict."

"I have repeatedly stated that a negotiated settlement to the conflict is possible. Now I believe it can be imminent," he stressed, calling for concrete steps to initiate direct talks between the Afghan Government and the Taliban.

Link to original story on UN News websiteRohingya babies conceived out of 'incomprehensible brutality'

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Rohingya babies conceived out of 'incomprehensible brutality', 18 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6f44.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

18 June 2018

A photojournalist has been talking of the "incomprehensible brutality" described to him by Rohingya refugees who are carrying babies after being raped.

Brian Sokol travelled with the UN Children's Fund, UNICEF, to Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh to interview and photograph Rohingya refugee women who had fled Myanmar over the last year fearing violence and persecution.

He met 14 pregnant women who had been raped, including a 16-year old girl who he calls Maryam.

He tells her story in a personal blog from the field: https://blogs.unicef.org/blog/rohingya-shrouded-maternity/

Link to original story on UN News websiteUN rights chief slams 'unconscionable' US border policy of separating migrant children from parents

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, UN rights chief slams 'unconscionable' US border policy of separating migrant children from parents, 18 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6f63.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

18 June 2018

As part of his final global update, the United Nations human rights chief on Monday 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.

Mr. 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 thought that any State would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable," he said, calling on the United States to immediately put a stop to the policy, and ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In a statement issued on Monday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres defended the rights of migrant and refugee children, but did not single out the US.

"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 a statement issued by his Spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

"Children must not be traumatized by being separated from their parents. Family unity must be preserved," said the statement.

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 6 July.

Mr. Zeid also expressed his deep concern about a bill presented to Parliament in Hungary last month which, if adopted, would effectively criminalize human rights monitoring at borders and within border zones, as well as criminalizing the provision of information, legal aid and assistance to migrants.

The High Commissioner stressed that "people do not lose their human rights by virtue of crossing a border without a visa".

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."

"Is it not the case, for example," he asked, "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."

He said that the UN had been conceived to prevent the rebirth of chauvinistic nationalism, which was a primary cause of The Second World War.

"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?" he exclaimed.

"The UN's raison d'etre 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," he added.

Mr. Zeid said that that over the last few years, he and his Office had rightly lived by the motto that "only fearlessness is adequate to our task at this point in time", adding that they were "not ducking for cover, or using excuses or resorting to euphemisms" but displaying "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," he said.

On Syria, he said that the horrific violations and abuses committed since the conflict began  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.

On Myanmar, he said, 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.

On North Korea, he said that "making human rights part of peace talks contributes to meaningful and sustainable peace in the long-term."

Reflecting on how being in the top UN human rights job had affected him personally, Mr. Zeid said that it had been "the hardest, most challenging, most fulfilling responsibility I have held". He noted that it had affected his relationship with the country of his birth, Jordan, which he had previously represented as UN Ambassador, for seven years up to 2007.

"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," he said.

Link to original story on UN News website'Worst devastation I have seen,' says UN refugee envoy Angelina Jolie, as she visits West Mosul

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 18 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, 'Worst devastation I have seen,' says UN refugee envoy Angelina Jolie, as she visits West Mosul, 18 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6f83.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

18 June 2018

After visiting the shattered streets of West Mosul over the weekend, the long-standing United Nations Refugee Agency envoy, Angelina Jolie, said that she had never seen such devastation, in her 17-years of working in the field.

Mosul was liberated by an Iraqi government-led coalition last July, just over three years after the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL (also known as Da'esh) seized Iraq's second city, and following an intense battle which lasted for months.

"This is the worst devastation I have seen in all my years with UNHCR," Ms. Jolie lamented, which is saying a lot, considering that this is her 61st mission  and fifth to Iraq  since she started representing the agency in 2001.

She arrived in the city on the second day of Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan. After walking among the bombed-out buildings and meeting families beginning to return, she urged the world not to forget their agonies nor ignore the struggles they continue to face.

"These people have lost everything, and the trauma and the loss that they have suffered is unparalleled," the Special Envoy said in front of the ruins of al-Nuri Mosque in the Old City.

She marveled at the ability of residents to carry on: "I have no words for the strength it must take to rebuild after loss like this," Ms. Jolie asserted. "They are clearing their homes with their own hands, and volunteering and helping each other. But they need our assistance," she added.

One local family showed Ms. Jolie the damage to their ancestral home, built a century ago. Mohamed, 47, spoke of how he was born and married there, and how a mortar tore through the roof one morning last June, gravely injuring his 17-year-old daughter. When they carried her to get medical care, he said, they were turned away and she bled to death.

"I want to rebuild the house and come back here," Mohamed said. "Even if I have painful memories in this house, where else would I go? I have to come back home."

Throughout Mosul, some 40,000 homes need rehabilitation. UNHCR and its partner, Human Appeal, have begun providing cash assistance to the returning families who are overwhelmed by the lack of shelter, infrastructure, services and jobs  at risk for sliding deeper into poverty.

In the al-Zanjely district, Ms. Jolie met Hassan, a 33-year-old vegetable vendor who spoke of losing his home twice: first when militants confiscated it, and then when an air strike reduced it to rubble. He finished the first phase of rebuilding, in time for Eid, erecting several new walls, windows and doorways. Soon he will begin work on the roof, he told UNHCR.

He, his wife and their three young children now rent space in a modest house with another family and the children are back in school.

"This is my country, my people, my neighbours. Why would I go? One doesn't leave his home." Hassan said.

Such resolve may be a crucial element in building a stable future in Mosul, Iraq and the region. But people like Hassan will need more support from a world that has turned its eyes away.

"It is deeply upsetting," Ms. Jolie said, "that people who have endured unparalleled brutality have so little as they try, somehow, to rebuild the lives they once had."

Link to original story on UN News websiteRise in violent conflict shows prevention 'more necessary than ever': UN chief

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 19 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Rise in violent conflict shows prevention 'more necessary than ever': UN chief, 19 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6f9a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

19 June 2018

With the number of people killed in armed conflict rising tenfold since 2005, preventive action is "more necessary than ever," United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday.

The UN chief was speaking to journalists in Norway, where he is attending an annual retreat for international conflict mediators and other high-level decision makers.

Mr. Guterres gave compelling reasons why the international community must do everything to prevent and solve conflict.

"The number of countries with violent conflicts is the highest in the last 30 years. If we compare with 2007 and consider the number of violent situations that can be qualified as war according to the number of casualties, they have tripled," he said.

"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. That means that prevention is more necessary than ever, and the more difficult conflict resolution is, the more important prevention becomes."

For Mr. Guterres, mediation is "an absolutely fundamental instrument" in this regard.

This includes formal interventions but also what he called "backdoor mediation", as well as initiatives that involve affected communities.

The Secretary-General is among more than 100 participants taking part in the two-day Oslo Forum, which wraps up in the Norwegian capital on Wednesday.

Attendance is by invitation only, and the informal discussions will cover peacemaking issues and challenges, including the situations in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Mali.

Mr. Guterres has made conflict prevention a cornerstone of his tenure and has consistently pushed for "a surge in diplomacy for peace," even before taking office in January 2017.

His establishment of a High-Level Advisory Board on Mediation later that year underlines this priority.

The Board's 18 members  nine women and nine men  include former global leaders, renowned experts and internationally recognized personalities will support the UN in working more effectively with regional organizations, non-governmental groups and others involved in mediation around the world.

Mediation meeting in Finland

The Secretary-General joined members at their second meeting, held in Finland's capital, Helsinki, on Monday.

Mr. Guterres also delivered an address at Kulturanta, the summer residence of the country's President, where he again highlighted his concerns about conflict, including its relation to global terrorism.

He also touched on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation and the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Turning to climate change, Mr. Guterres described it as "a main accelerator of many other problems around the world."

He reported that the level of greenhouse gas emissions rose in 2017: the first time in recent years.

"It is clear that we are far from doing enough in relation to the risks that we face due to climate change," he said.

Link to original story on UN News websiteSiege of Syria's eastern Ghouta 'barbaric and medieval', says UN Commission of Inquiry

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 20 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Siege of Syria's eastern Ghouta 'barbaric and medieval', says UN Commission of Inquiry, 20 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6fba.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

20 June 2018

The siege of eastern Ghouta in war-torn Syria, which lasted more than five years, has been labelled "barbaric and medieval"  "amounting" to war crimes, and crimes against humanity, a high-level UN inquiry said on Wednesday.

In a 23-page report on the siege mounted against the densely populated suburb close to the capital Damascus, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic details the events that led to its recapture by pro-Government forces in April this year, following a "dramatically escalating" military campaign.

Neighbourhoods suffered aerial and ground bombardments "which claimed the lives of hundreds of Syrian men, women and children", the report notes, with "numerous homes, markets and hospitals all but razed to the ground".

These indiscriminate, "widespread and systematic bombardments" and the act of deliberately attacking protected objects, amounted to war crimes, it continues.

Commenting on the events in eastern Ghouta, Commission of Inquiry Chair, Paulo Pinheiro, condemned the civilian deaths as "abhorrent".

In addition to the deadly violence they faced, families were denied food and medicine, the veteran rights expert noted, before adding that "no warring party acted to protect the civilian population" during the last phase of the siege.

According to the report, between February and April this year, besieged armed groups and terrorist organizations based inside eastern Ghouta "relentlessly fired" unguided mortars into Damascus city and nearby areas, "killing and maiming" hundreds of Syrian civilians.

Insisting that "there can be no justification" for the indiscriminate shelling of inhabited areas, Commissioner Hanny Megally said that this, too, amounted to a war crime.

According to the report, by the time Government forces declared eastern Ghouta recaptured on 14 April, some 140,000 individuals had fled their homes and up to 50,000 were evacuated to Idlib and Aleppo governorates.

"Tens of thousands" of people have been unlawfully interned by Government forces in what the report's authors call "managed sites" in rural Damascus, which includes Ghouta.

Their number includes women and children, which is "reprehensible", Commissioner Karen Koning AbuZayd said.

The report is scheduled to be formally presented next week, on 26 June, during an interactive dialogue at the current session of the Human Rights Council.

Link to original story on UN News websiteUN agency chiefs issue 'call to action' on behalf of refugee children

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 20 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, UN agency chiefs issue 'call to action' on behalf of refugee children, 20 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6fda.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

20 June 2018

Protecting refugee children is "a test of our shared humanity," two top United Nations officials said on Wednesday.

The statement by Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and Henrietta Fore, Executive Director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) came in an editorial published on the website for CNN, the US-based cable and online news network.

Wednesday is World Refugee Day, which is marked annually, each 20 June, when the UN system highlights the strength, courage and perseverance of refugees across the world, and calls on the public to show support for families forced to flee.

"Here is our call to action: refugee children, whether on our doorsteps, or in remote borderlands, must be protected, sheltered and equipped for their futures," wrote the agency chiefs.

"Our ability to make a difference in their lives  between despair and hope, and being left behind and building a future  is a test of our shared humanity."

Globally, more than 68 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes, with children making up more than half the world's refugee population.

Furthermore, nearly 174,000 refugee and asylum-seeking children have been separated from their families or forced to flee on their own.

With conflicts multiplying and intensifying in recent years, thus creating millions more refugees and displaced people, "governments seem to have overlooked their duty of care to children," the UN agency chiefs stated, adding "perhaps it is because the statistics can be so staggering that they harden us to the human suffering that underpins them."

They stressed that all "children on the move" should receive the same care and compassion as any other child.

"Children are first and foremost children  and regardless of their nationality, their legal status, or that of their parents, their welfare and rights must be at the center of our actions," they said.

The UN officials recalled the "unthinkable suffering" refugee children endure in their quest for safety, only to face hostility and rejection when they arrive.

"Turned away by border guards and impenetrable barbed wire fences, kept in detention centers, or separated from their parents  the violence that propelled them from their countries is perpetuated by the hostile reception they receive," they said.

However, if young refugees are provided with a safe environment, an education and opportunities, they will flourish and contribute to their host countries and help rebuild their homelands when conditions allow, the UN officials added.

They looked to the implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees, which will be presented to world leaders meeting at the UN later this year.

It calls for investments in communities hosting refugees, fair and humane asylum policies, and more opportunities for resettlement and family reunification, among other proposals.

Link to original story on UN News websiteFirst-ever global conference of national counter-terrorism chiefs will strengthen cooperation, build 'resilient' States, says top UN official

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 21 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, First-ever global conference of national counter-terrorism chiefs will strengthen cooperation, build 'resilient' States, says top UN official, 21 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c6ffa.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

21 June 2018

Heads of counter-terrorism agencies from across the world will be meeting at UN Headquarters in New York next week for the first time, to pool expertise, resources and ideas to fight back against the growing scourge of international terrorism.

In an interview with UN News ahead of the landmark forum, the official who heads up the world body's Office of Counter-Terrorism  which came into being just a year ago  said that it would give those leading the fight from a local to international level, the chance to "show our unity" and speak with "one professional voice".

Under-Secretary-General of the Office of Counter-Terrorism, Vladimir Voronkov, said that defeating terror groups such as ISIL, otherwise known as Dae'sh, which has been mostly driven out of Iraq in the past year, must involve "the family level  the level of local communities, the level of State, and the level of international cooperation. Only this kind of approach can be comprehensive."

The High-Level Conference on Counter-Terrorism, takes placed next Thursday and Friday, and will focus on strengthening cooperation "to combat the evolving threat of terrorism."

Civil society representatives and experts in the field will be joining "the majority of heads of agencies from all around the world" said Mr. Voronkov; which was vital to ensure a united front on how best to move forward, and build resilience.

"It's important to have capacity-building projects," said the UN counter-terrorism chief, adding that it would be a major help to countries which need help to expel terrorist groups, and shut down terror cells, "to build this resilient environment."

"So I think after the defeat of ISIL, the building up of this resilient society, the resilient State; this is the main task for counter-terrorism activities," he said.

Asked about the importance of taking the fight to terrorists in cyberspace, and to view online recruitment and propaganda, as the new frontline, the Under-Secretary-General said that cooperation with the private sector  and especially global internet-based companies such as Facebook and Google  was essential.

They are doing a "very important job in this regard" he said, adding that expanding the number of countries which are actively involved in championing specific areas of the counter-terror effort, was also important.

Next week, different Member States are organizing sessions on countering terrorism financing; preventing violent extremism and incitement; standing up for the rights of those who have survived terror attacks; and combating terrorists' use of the internet, among other meetings on the margins.

In his interview with UN News, Mr. Voronkov also highlighted the importance of reaching young people who are vulnerable to the lure of extremism, saying that young people in areas of high militant activity such as northern Mali, need to be reached on the grassroots level, to counter terrorist propaganda.

"I think it's very important from this human rights angle, and from the angle which could show that these human beings are not in a very easy situation, because their lives were put in danger" by terrorists and recruiters from militant armed groups, he said.

Link to original story on UN News websiteHungary's laws on helping vulnerable foreigners are 'blatantly xenophobic': UN rights chief

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 21 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Hungary's laws on helping vulnerable foreigners are 'blatantly xenophobic': UN rights chief, 21 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c701a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

21 June 2018

Hungarian legislation that criminalizes anyone who supports asylum seekers and other vulnerable individuals is "blatantly xenophobic", "shameful" and "disgraceful", the UN human rights chief said on Thursday.

Commenting on the Hungarian Parliament's decision to vote in Government proposals on Wednesday, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein described it as "an attack on fundamental human rights and freedoms", as it "makes illegal the act of helping those who may be in dire need".

The new legislation could enter into force by the beginning of July, soon after a European Union Heads of State summit, in which discussions on finding solutions to migration pressures on the 28-Member bloc are expected to feature prominently.

This Sunday, the European Commission President is convening an "informal working meeting" of government ministers, according to reports, on migration and asylum, aimed at finding solutions to growing concerns over the issue across the continent.

Under the Hungarian legislation, it will be possible to jail "any lawyer, adviser, volunteer or legally resident family member" who helps vulnerable foreigners and to ban organizations that do the same, the High Commissioner noted in a statement.

He added that the authorities also announced this week that they would introduce a 25 per cent tax on funding for non-governmental organizations which "support immigration".

While stressing that there was no question that Hungary's border management was its own responsibility, Zeid said that the new law nonetheless "strikes at the heart of the European Union's values of pluralism, tolerance and solidarity".

The development "continues and deepens the Hungarian Government's assault on civic space", Zeid contended, saying that it threatened those "who work on behalf of the most vulnerable, and in defence of our highest human rights values".

According to UN refugee agency, UNHCR, since January, Hungary has effectively closed its borders to almost all people wishing to seek international protection.

On average, only two asylum seekers per day are allowed to enter the country through the two "transit zones" at the border with Serbia, it said in a recent statement.

Any asylum seeker who attempts to cross the razor-wire border fence "is automatically removed".

Prior to the new Hungarian legislation becoming law, UNHCR called on the Hungarian Government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban to withdraw its proposals.

"Seeking asylum is a fundamental human right, it is not a crime," Pascale Moreau, Director of UNHCR's Europe Bureau, said at the time of the UNHCR appeal.

She added that there was particular concern that the Government "is targeting those who, in a purely humanitarian role, help people who are seeking asylum", before urging the authorities "to halt any measures that would further increase the vulnerability of people who are simply looking for a safe haven".

UNHCR estimates that among the millions of stateless people worldwide, around 570,000 now live in Europe.

Link to original story on UN News websiteUN chief welcomes 'positive steps' towards peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 21 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, UN chief welcomes 'positive steps' towards peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia, 21 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c7036.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

21 June 2018

The United Nations has announced its readiness to support Eritrea and Ethiopia following recent peace overtures between the two neighbouring States in the Horn of Africa.

Ethiopia this month announced its readiness to accept and implement a 2002 border agreement that ended two years of bloody conflict, in which thousands died. Without a deal, skirmishes continued at the border, with Eritrea reportedly remaining on a war-footing.

In a speech delivered this week, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki announced plans to send a delegation to Addis Ababa "to gauge current developments directly and in depth, as well as to chart out a plan for continuous future action", according to media reports.

In a statement released by his Spokesperson on Thursday, the UN Secretary-General welcomed the "positive steps" taken to resolve outstanding issues regarding the normalization of relations between the two countries.

Antonio Guterres also commended efforts by their leaders "to achieve sustainable peace and good-neighbourly relations which, in turn, will have positive repercussions in the entire Horn of Africa region".

The UN chief also underlined his readiness to provide "all support that may contribute to advancing and consolidating" engagement between the two countries, the statement continued.

Tens of thousands of people were killed in the two years of war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which began in 1998 over a border dispute.

The UN deployed a peacekeeping mission to the region, UNMEE, whose mandate included monitoring the cessation of hostilities, providing mine action assistance and coordinating humanitarian and human rights activities.

The operation was established in 2000 and was terminated by the Security Council eight years later following "obstructions" by Eritrea that undermined the mission's mandate.

Link to original story on UN News websiteUN Envoy 'confident' deal can be reached to avert further violence around key Yemeni port city

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 21 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, UN Envoy 'confident' deal can be reached to avert further violence around key Yemeni port city, 21 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c7054.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

21 June 2018

The United Nations envoy for Yemen expressed confidence on Thursday that a solution can be found to prevent further violence in and around the port city of Hodeida.

Fighting between Houthi rebels who control the city, and government forces backed by a Saudi-led military coalition, has put hundreds of thousands of civilian lives there at risk.

Martin Griffiths, the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for Yemen, was in the capital, Sana'a at the weekend, for talks to try and resolve the crisis.

"My priority now is to avoid a military confrontation in (Hodeida) and to swiftly return to political negotiations," he said, according to a statement issued in Amman to correspondents.

The envoy said he was encouraged by the "constructive engagement of the Ansar Allah leadership", referring to the official name of the Houthis.

He also looked forward to upcoming meetings with the country's President and Government of Yemen, based in the south of country.

"I am confident that we can reach an agreement to avert any escalation of violence," the statement continued.

Meanwhile, aid workers continue to mobilize to support residents of the city. Lise Grande, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Yemen, said they have been off-loading food at the port and rushing in emergency stocks.

Partners have also been distributing food boxes and emergency kits to displaced families, among other measures. Conditions in Hodeida were already among the worst in the country, even before the fighting began, according to Ms. Grande.

She reported that one quarter of children there are suffering from acute malnutrition, while the city was an epicenter of last year's deadly cholera outbreak: among the worst in recent history. "Of all the things we are worried about, cholera is top of the list," she added.

"It wouldn't take much to start an unstoppable outbreak. If the water system in just one neighbourhood breaks down, and if nothing can be done to immediately address the situation, cholera could spread with lightning speed."

Link to original story on UN News websiteHuman rights chief calls for international probe on Venezuela, following 'shocking accounts of extrajudicial killings'

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 22 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Human rights chief calls for international probe on Venezuela, following 'shocking accounts of extrajudicial killings', 22 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c7074.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

22 June 2018

In Venezuela, "credible, shocking accounts of extrajudicial killings" and impunity for perpetrators, indicate that the rule of law "is virtually absent", the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said on Friday, in a call for an international inquiry into the alleged violations.

Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein's appeal to the UN Human Rights Council to mount a high-level investigation, follows the publication of a new report by his office into the Latin American country, detailing serious abuse allegations.

"For years now, institutional checks and balances and the democratic space in Venezuela have been chiseled away," the High Commissioner said in a statement.

Briefing journalists in Geneva, OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani confirmed that the new OHCHR report provides an update on alleged abuses committed amid bloody demonstrations held against constitutional reforms, proposed by the government of President Nicolas Maduro.

"This report . . . spotlights the failure of Venezuelan authorities to hold accountable perpetrators of serious human rights violations that include killings, the use of excessive force against demonstrators, arbitrary detentions, ill-treatment and torture," Ms. Shamdasani said.

On the subject of extrajudicial killings since 2015, the OHCHR spokesperson said that the report contained "credible, shocking accounts" that young men in poor neighbourhoods had been targeted "who fit the profile (of) so-called criminals".

In some cases, they had been killed in their home, Ms Shamdasani noted, adding that the OHCHR report detailed how security forces "will tamper with the scenes, so that the killing would appear to have occurred in an exchange of fire".

The report also highlights the grave impact of the social and economic crises gripping Venezuela.

Families are "having to search in rubbish bins", Ms Shamdasani said, adding that 87 per cent of the population is now affected by poverty.

"The human rights situation of the people of Venezuela is dismal," she continued. "When a box of blood pressure pills costs more than the monthly minimum salary and baby milk formula costs more two months' wages  but protesting against such an impossible situation can land you in jail  the extreme injustice of it all is stark."

The High Commissioner's call for an international Commission of Inquiry will be heard by the Human Rights Council  the UN's principal human rights organ  which is currently in session in Geneva.

It has previously created two such probes following allegations of serious rights violations in Syria and Burundi.

Beyond the Human Rights Council, Zeid said that there was also a "strong case" for the matter to be passed to the International Criminal Court (ICC), "given that (Venezuela) appears neither able nor willing to prosecute serious human rights violations".

Spokesperson for the Human Rights Council, Rolando Gomez, confirmed that no State is immune from scrutiny of its rights record "regardless of whether they are a member of the Council or not".

Although there have been no special sessions on Venezuela at the Council, States and NGOs have delivered no fewer than 40 statements during general debates at the Council since last March sharply criticizing the human rights situation there.

The issue of Venezuela's rights record overlapped into a presentation of a report on extreme poverty by Council-appointed Special Rapporteur Philip Alston.

He told Member States: "I and several other Special Rapporteurs reported earlier this year that 'vast numbers of Venezuelans are starving, deprived of essential medicines, and trying to survive in a situation that is spiralling downwards with no end in sight'."

Link to original story on UN News websiteUN chief calls for 'immediate end' to escalation of fighting in southwestern Syria, as thousands are displaced

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 22 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, UN chief calls for 'immediate end' to escalation of fighting in southwestern Syria, as thousands are displaced, 22 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c7094.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

22 June 2018

The UN Secretary-General on Friday expressed his grave concern for thousands of civilians caught up in an escalation of fighting across southwestern Syria, close to the border with Jordan.

In a statement released by his Spokesman, Antonio Guterres, said that an uptick in conflict involving both ground offensives and aerial bombardments, "had resulted in the displacement of thousands of civilians, the majority of whom are moving towards the Jordanian border."

"The Secretary-General is also concerned at the significant risks these offensives pose to regional security", the statement continued.

According to news reports, Syrian government forces went on the offensive against opposition held territory on Friday in the region, which is of major strategic concern, close to the border of both Jordan and Israel, where tensions over the Golan Heights provoked clashes between Israeli defence forces and Syrian troops just a few weeks ago.

The UN chief called for "an immediate end to the current military escalation" and urged all parties to the more than seven-year war, "to respect their obligations under international law and international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure."

"Recalling the de-escalation and ceasefire arrangements that have provided relative calm in southwestern Syria over the past year, the Secretary-General urges all to exercise restraint and uphold these commitments as a matter of priority," the statement concluded.

Link to original story on UN News websiteUS migrant children policy reversal, still 'fails' thousands of detained youngsters: UN rights experts

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 22 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, US migrant children policy reversal, still 'fails' thousands of detained youngsters: UN rights experts, 22 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c70b4.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

22 June 2018

The United States government decision to end its border policy of forcibly separating migrant children from their parents, does not help thousands of youngsters already in detention, who should be released and reunited with their families, a group of UN rights experts said on Friday.

The group of 11 independent Special Rapporteurs, and other experts, insist that the detention of the migrant children  "most" of whom are asylum-seekers from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras  inside the US, "severely hampers their development and in some cases, may amount to torture".

Their statement issued to reporters in Geneva, follows President Donald Trump's decision to sign an Executive Order ending the practice of forcible separation on Wednesday, two months after the so-called "zero-tolerance" policy was introduced.

The order calls for detaining family members together, who are caught attempting to enter the US, mostly at the southern border with Mexico.

The experts, appointed by the Human Rights Council in Geneva, said that the Order simply "does not address the situation of those children who have already been pulled away from their parents."

"We call on the Government of the US to release these children from immigrant detention and to reunite them with their families based on the best interests of the child, and the rights of the child to liberty and family unity," the statement added.

The group of experts had already expressed their grave concerns to the US government over the impact of the zero-tolerance policy in early April. The policy made all adults and children trying to cross the border liable to criminal prosecution as a punitive deterrent, the experts noted.

"The separations have been conducted without notice, information, or the opportunity to challenge them. The parents and children have been unable to communicate with each other," said the statement, adding: "The parents have had no information about the whereabouts of their children, which is a cause of great distress."

"Moreover, we are deeply concerned at the long-term impact and trauma, including irreparable harm that these forcible separations will have on children."

Echoing that point of view, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday that it was opposed to separating children from their families for the purposes of migration control.

Spokesperson Christophe Boulierac, added that the agency would also be opposed to unconfirmed media reports that children could stay with their families if all of them had to remain in detention.

An alternative would be to take a non-custodial community approach, Mr. Boulierac added.

Last Monday, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said in a statement that "as a matter of principle" refugees and migrants should always be "treated with respect and dignity, and in accordance with existing international law," although he did not single out the US in this regard.

UN Human Rights chief, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein told the opening of the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, that the practice of child migrant separation, amounted to "government-sanctioned child abuse" which may cause "irreparable harm" with "lifelong consequences".

Special Rapporteurs address either specific country situations or thematic issues, across all parts of the world, and work on a voluntary basis, without any salary or remuneration for their work.

Link to original story on UN News websiteUN chief condemns explosion at election rally in Zimbabwe that injured dozens, including senior politicians

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 24 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, UN chief condemns explosion at election rally in Zimbabwe that injured dozens, including senior politicians, 24 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c70d4.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

24 June 2018

The UN Secretary-General has condemned an explosion which took place at an election rally in Zimbabwe on Saturday, not long after President Emmerson Mnangagwa left the stage after addressing the crowd, according to news reports.

The President, who also leads the ruling party, Zanu-PF, reportedly described the bombing in Bulawayo as an attempt on his life, and appealed for peace and national unity ahead of elections due to take place on 30 July. He vowed that the explosion would not derail the vote.

Mr. Mnangagwa took over the Presidency last November, following the resignation of Robert Mugabe, who ruled Zimbabwe for 37 years. The country's main opposition leader, Nelson Chamisa of the Movement for Democratic Change, also condemned the attack, saying that any political violence was "totally unacceptable", according to media reports.

In a statement released by his Spokesperson on Sunday, UN chief Antonio Guterres said he was "disturbed" by news of the attack

"The Secretary-General condemns such acts of violence and calls for the perpetrators to be brought to justice. He wishes the injured a quick recovery," said the statement.

Two of the country's Vice Presidents was among the more than 40 reportedly hurt by the blast, as well as the Zanu-PF chairperson, together with members of a television crew from the state broadcasting network, and security personnel.

Link to original story on UN News websiteResettlement needs set to rise to 1.4 million people in 2019, UN refugee agency reports

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 25 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Resettlement needs set to rise to 1.4 million people in 2019, UN refugee agency reports, 25 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c70f4.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

25 June 2018

Close to 1.4 million people will need resettlement in countries free from war and persecution in 2019, the UN refugee agency, said on Monday, citing growing forced displacement across the globe.

Resettlement  the transfer of refugees from the country where they have claimed asylum to a safe "third country"  is the responsibility of international agencies, including Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Noting a 17 per cent projected overall increase in needs next year, the UN agency's Projected Global Resettlement Needs 2019 report warns that access to this "key, durable solution" for those in need of international protection is extremely limited.

Refugees from 36 nationalities are in need of resettlement out of a total of 65 international operations, the UNHCR report states.

For the third year in a row, refugees from Syria are set to have the highest resettlement requirements, at more than 600,000 people.

This represents a 26 per cent increase on current needs.

Regionally, Africa is likely to remain the region with the highest projected resettlement needs next year, led by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

According to the UNHCR report, 163,000 people from DRC will be in need of international resettlement in 2019  a 10 per cent increase on 2018.

In South Sudan, meanwhile, continued instability and violence are behind a 71 per cent increase in needs, with 158,000 individuals out of more than 2.4 million refugees expected to require shelter in a third country next year.

Elsewhere on the African continent, protracted instability will continue to affect "Congolese, Somalis, Sudanese and Eritreans".

In Asia, meanwhile, resettlement needs stand at 102,146  a one per cent increase from 2018.

The picture is very different in Europe, where those in need of shelter in a third country is set to increase by almost 40 per cent next year, from more than 300,000 this year, to some 420,750 in 2019.

Over 95 per cent of this requirement is represented by Syrian refugees in Turkey.

In the Middle East and North Africa region, resettlement needs are projected at 271,297 people in 2019  a slight decrease from this year.

Reflecting the inclusion of "high-risk protection cases" from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, projected resettlement needs in the Americas region in 2019 are forecast to rise 123 per cent in 2019, to just over 4,000 people.

The need to expand resettlement was acknowledged by all UN Member States in the September 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants.

Despite this, the UNHCR report notes recent "fluctuations" in State resettlement quotas which have seen quotas grow from 2012 to 2016, only to see a "steep reversal" in 2017, when only 75,200 refugees were offered resettlement globally.

Because of this development, the UN refugee agency is preparing to focus on three major crises in 2019: countries hosting large numbers of refugees; central Mediterranean migration: and resettlement out of Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt linked to the Syria conflict.

Link to original story on UN News website'Crimes against humanity,' 'war crimes' and risk of new ethnic violence in DR Congo, warn UN experts

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 26 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, 'Crimes against humanity,' 'war crimes' and risk of new ethnic violence in DR Congo, warn UN experts, 26 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c710a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

26 June 2018

Defence and security forces along with the Kamuina Nsapu and Bana Mura militias have committed "crimes against humanity and war crimes" in the of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Kasai region, United Nations experts said on Tuesday following an investigation.

"We are shocked by this disastrous situation that has claimed the lives of several thousand people and continues to rage in the region, without provoking national or international attention," said Bacre Waly Ndiaye, President of the Team of International Experts appointed by the Human Rights Council.

The experts believed that following an upsurge in violence, which has swept the Kasai region since 2016, civilian killings, including children, and atrocities  such as mutilations, rapes and other forms of sexual violence, torture and exterminations  were committed in a generalized and systematic fashion, constituting crimes against humanity.

"It is high time for justice to put an end to impunity if we do not want the ethnic dimension of the conflict to worsen," he added.

The experts revealed that two years after the conflict began, the crimes and destruction continue  resulting in some 1.4 million people internally displaced, and another 35,000 who have fled to Angola. Women have been enslaved and some abuses may also amount to ethnic persecution.

While warning of an alarming humanitarian situation that has been particularly harsh on children, the team flagged that the Kamuina Nsapu militia also recruited boys and girls.

According to the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization, about 3.2 million people continue to be severely food insecure, and malnutrition rates, especially for children, are high.

Among other recommendations, the experts demanded that the militias be disarmed and that a reconciliation process be implemented to avoid another wave of violence and allow the return of the displaced and refugees.

They emphasized that the responsibility to prosecute those guilty of international crimes  and to end the impunity that persists  lies first and foremost with the Congolese authorities.

The team proposed that the capacity of military investigative entities be built up so that the perpetrators of the international crimes committed in Kasai since 2016  including by officials in the highest positions  can be investigated and prosecuted.

It also called for proper care to be provided to the survivors of rapes and sexual violence.

Meanwhile, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, which is already investigating the situation, has expressed her concern about the acts of violence committed in the Kasai region and that she intends to monitor the situation closely.

Link to original story on UN News websiteGuterres condemns killing of Bangladeshi peacekeeper in South Sudan, during armed attack on UN convoy

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 26 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Guterres condemns killing of Bangladeshi peacekeeper in South Sudan, during armed attack on UN convoy, 26 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c712a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

26 June 2018

The UN chief on Tuesday condemned the killing of a peacekeeper from Bangladesh, who was supporting the delivery of humanitarian aid to vulnerable civilians in South Sudan.

In a statement released by his Spokesman, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres offered his deepest condolences to the bereaved family, and to the Government of Bangladesh.

"The Secretary-General recalls that attacks against United Nations peacekeepers may constitute a war crime," stressed the statement, adding that the UN chief reaffirmed his "unwavering support to the brave men and women serving in the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) in their efforts to protect civilians and stabilize South Sudan."

UNMISS named the fallen "blue helmet" as Military Liaison Officer, Lieutenant Commander Ashraf Siddiqui, who was part of a convoy being led by Nepalese peacekeepers, providing protection to humanitarians who were travelling from Yei to Lasu.

Several shots were fired at their vehicles by unknown gunmen, said the statement, and the peacekeeper "was hit and died from his injuries shortly afterwards", said the UNMISS Spokesperson.

"It is a tragedy that he lost his life in such an appalling act of violence, while working to help those in need and to protect the lives of others", said the UN Special Representative and head of UNMISS, David Shearer.

"Peacekeepers and aid workers should be able to carry out their work freely and safely and not be subjected to the kind of senseless attack we have witnessed today," he added.

Link to original story on UN News websiteMali: UN chief calls for calm as clashes leave over 20 dead in Mopti

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 26 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Mali: UN chief calls for calm as clashes leave over 20 dead in Mopti, 26 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c714a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

26 June 2018

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has appealed for calm and restraint in the Mopti region of central Mali, where over 20 people are reported to have been killed in intercommunal clashes over the weekend.

In a statement, on Tuesday, issued by his spokesperson, Secretary-General Guterres also called on all parties in the region "to seek a peaceful resolution" of differences and pursue reconciliation through dialogue.

The UN chief also voiced concern over reports of human rights violations committed against the population by Government forces, including in the village of Nantaka, on 13 June.

"He underlines the need to hold perpetrators of all crimes accountable and to bring them to justice," read the statement, noting that Mr. Guterres welcomed the investigations announced by the Malian authorities and the disciplinary measures taken.

"The United Nations stands ready to assist the authorities," added the statement.

The Secretary-General also underscored the "urgent need" to address ongoing instability in the central Mali, including through the Government's integrated security plan for the central regions, with a view to creating conditions conducive to the holding of peaceful presidential elections in July.

Link to original story on UN News websiteOpponents of constitutional change in Burundi face torture and execution: UN investigators

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 27 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Opponents of constitutional change in Burundi face torture and execution: UN investigators, 27 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c716a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

27 June 2018

In Burundi, opponents of constitutional reform supported by the Government have faced torture and execution amid a "continuing environment of threats and intimidation", senior UN investigators said on Wednesday.

Reporting to the Human Rights Council, the Commission of Inquiry on Burundi delivered its findings based on more than 380 interviews, in addition to 500 testimonies collected last year.

The dossier compiled by the three-member panel encompasses events surrounding the national referendum last month on constitutional reform which could extend President Pierre Nkurunziza's term in office well beyond 2020.

Noting a presidential declaration made in support of his successor after the referendum, the report reiterates the view of some observers that Mr. Nkurunziza's comments were "by no means a clear and firm commitment not to run" in future elections himself.

It also notes "difficulties" faced by international media outlets in covering events in the country amid the suspension of broadcasters including the BBC and Voice of America, following reports that were deemed "biased" by Burundian authorities.

On the alleged rights violations committed in the country, the report highlights "numerous arrests" of people who called for a "no" vote in the referendum, including members of opposition parties who were then allegedly executed or abducted.

It states that "unidentified bodies" have continued to be found "in various parts of the country" after their arrest by "individuals in police uniform" or National Intelligence Service (SNR) agents.

Victims were also targeted by the Imbonerakure  the youth wing aligned to the ruling CNDD-FDD party  whose influence is said to have risen "in the repressive machinery which has developed since 2015".

Describing how the Imbonerakure "cover the country", the Commission of Inquiry's findings detail how their members inform the authorities about "real or perceived opponents in each locality", all the while "harassing, controlling or intimidating the population", with the approval of State officials.

This collaboration extends to putting pressure on people to collect contributions for elections in 2020, the report states, before detailing how civil servants are required to pay the equivalent of 10 per cent "or more" of their salary to an election fund.

This levy extends to households and others above voting age on an "ad hoc basis at the local level", the report continues, citing eyewitness reports of "roadblocks set up throughout the country" by the Imbonerakure to check whether people had receipts for the tax.

Such developments have contributed to the "continuing deterioration" of the Burundian economy that has left the country's people among the very poorest in the world, according to per capita earnings, the report continues.

Referencing the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), it states that 3.6 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance in Burundi today.

The deteriorating economic situation will be included in the Commission of Inquiry's final report to the Human Rights Council in September.

Link to original story on UN News websiteRise in number of children killed, maimed and recruited in conflict: UN report

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 27 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Rise in number of children killed, maimed and recruited in conflict: UN report, 27 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c718a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

27 June 2018

More than 10,000 children were killed or maimed in conflict last year while more than 8,000 youngsters were recruited or used as combatants, the United Nations reported on Wednesday.

These violations contributed to the overall rise in the number of children globally affected by fighting in 2017, as documented in the annual report of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC).

UN chief Antonio Guterres has expressed outrage over the numbers, according to a statement issued by his spokesperson.

"Boys and girls have once again been overly impacted by protracted and new violent crisis. Despite some progress, the level of violations remains unacceptable," the statement said.

"The Secretary-General reiterates that the best way to address this horrific situation is to promote peaceful solutions to conflicts. He calls on all parties to exert maximum efforts in this regard."

The report covers 20 countries, including hotspots such as Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, but also situations in countries such as India, the Philippines and Nigeria.

Virginia Gamba, the UN's expert on Children and Armed Conflict, said 66 parties to conflict are listed this year  three more than in the 2016 report  with nine government forces and 57 armed groups named.

"Among the most significant violations registered in 2017 were killing and maiming, recruitment and use and attacks on schools and hospitals, all of which registered a rise in comparison to the previous year," she told journalists at UN Headquarters.

Overall, the UN verified more than 21,000 grave violations of children's rights between January and December 2017, compared with 15,500 the previous year.

Government forces committed at least 6,000 of these crimes while the majority involved various non-state armed groups.

Ms. Gamba said crises in the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Myanmar, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen were the main reason for the "serious increases" reported.

She provided examples, including what she described as the "despicable trend" of turning children in Nigeria into "human bombs", where nearly half of the 881 verified child casualties resulted from suicide attacks.

Also worrying is the number of children detained for their alleged association with armed groups. For example, more than 1,000 children in Iraq were held due their suspected affiliation with the terrorist group ISIL, also known as Daesh.

Ms. Gamba also reported positive developments, such as the formal release of more than 10,000 child soldiers from armed groups and forces, while four armed groups in Myanmar have agreed to work with her Office.

Link to original story on UN News websiteSaudi Arabia: UN experts push for prompt release of women human rights defenders

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 27 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Saudi Arabia: UN experts push for prompt release of women human rights defenders, 27 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c71aa.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

27 June 2018

A ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia may have officially ended at the weekend, but on Wednesday, nine United Nations experts called for the immediate release of a number of women's rights defenders who were imprisoned following a government crackdown which began in mid-May.

"In stark contrast with this celebrated moment of liberation for Saudi women, women's human rights defenders have been arrested and detained on a wide scale across the country, which is truly worrying and perhaps a better indication of the Government's approach to women's human rights," said UN Human Rights experts in a joint statement.

"We call for the urgent release of all of those detained while pursuing their legitimate activities in the promotion and protection of women's rights in Saudi Arabia," added the Special Rapporteurs and experts.

The crackdown began on 15 May with a spate of prominent women's rights defenders' arrests. Over the following three weeks, some 12 other human rights defenders, including both women and men, were also arrested.

The majority of detainees were advocating for lifting the driving ban and for improvements in women's rights within Saudi Arabia. Many of those detained face extremely serious charges, such as 20 years in prison, according to reports.

Although charges have not been confirmed, the experts' statement said that some of those imprisoned have been reportedly accused of undermining national security, and of acting against religious and national foundations inside Saudi Arabia.

"Women human rights defenders face compounded stigma, not only because of their work," added the statement, "but also because of discrimination on gender grounds."

While noting that Saudi Arabia has won acclaim for its recent programme of modernization under Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the experts said that "these arrests portray a contradictory stance in policy regarding women's rights."

"We reiterate our long-time concern over others detained in Saudi Arabia on the basis of their activism and the exercise of their right to freedom of expression as well as their right to freedom of association," the experts stated, urging the Government to improve its human rights record, "especially with regards to women's rights."

"The first step in demonstrating such commitment is to free the human rights defenders who remain in prison solely as a result of working to advance the enjoyment of rights for all," the experts concluded.

Special Rapporteurs and other UN rights experts are appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council, as honorary positions, to examine and report back on a specific human rights theme or country situation.

Link to original story on UN News websiteWe must stop a devastating 'battle to the end' in southwest Syria, declares UN envoy

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 27 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, We must stop a devastating 'battle to the end' in southwest Syria, declares UN envoy, 27 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c71ca.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

27 June 2018

A "full-scale" ground and aerial offensive in southwest Syria could inflict an even heavier toll on civilians than the suffering caused by previous devastating battles in the war-ravaged country, the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria has warned.

"Let us be aware of what this would mean, if the southwest sees a full-scale battle-to-the-end: it could be like eastern Aleppo and eastern Ghouta combined together," Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura, told the Security Council on Wednesday.

"We . . . cannot allow . . . this to become another Ghouta, another Douma, or another Aleppo, where so many civilians were sacrificed and died. And yet I see things moving in this direction," he said.

Speaking via video link from Geneva, Mr. de Mistura also cautioned that such fighting could increase tensions across the region and risk compromising momentum in political talks to reach a lasting peace deal.

In his briefing, Mr. de Mistura told Council members that intensified efforts were on-going "to find a way ahead" for the implementation of a deal and for the establishment of a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned, UN-facilitated committee on a new constitution, within the framework of the Geneva process and in accordance with Security Council resolution 2254.

"I will continue on my side to facilitate further movement in this direction to seek the support, counsel and advice of many  which is why I anticipate inviting the Sochi co-convenors back to Geneva in the coming weeks . . . and then, of course, report to you, to the Security Council," he said.

Concluding his briefing, the UN Special Envoy urged the Security Council as well as the Syrian Government to support efforts on the political front to put Syrians themselves in charge of their own future, because "no country or no organization can simply impose a fait accompli on the Syrian people."

He also called on all parties to the conflict and on those who have influence over them to help find a solution that will "spare civilian suffering", prevent more people from being displaced, and "reduce potential tensions."

Worsening fighting could jeopardize aid efforts  UN relief official

Also briefing the 15-member Council, John Ging, the Director of Operations at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), detailed the humanitarian consequences of the fighting in the southwestern Governorate of Dara'a, saying that to date, an estimated 45,000 to 50,000 people have been displaced due to hostilities.

The number, he added "could nearly double" if fighting continues to escalate, and most hospitals and medical facilities there have already closed, he told Council Members.

UN cross-border relief operations from Jordan, bringing much needed aid to hundreds of thousands in need across southern Syria, could also be jeopardized if violence worsens, said Mr. Ging.

"I call on all stakeholders to ensure that cross-border humanitarian deliveries continue in a sustained, safe and unimpeded manner to reach all those in need, including the newly displaced people," said the senior OCHA official.

Link to original story on UN News websiteAction needed to end deadly clashes between African herders and farmers: UN chief

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 28 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Action needed to end deadly clashes between African herders and farmers: UN chief, 28 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c71ea.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

28 June 2018

The United Nations stands ready to support efforts to resolve deadly clashes between farmers and nomadic herders in areas of West and Central Africa, the head of the global organization said on Thursday.

More than 80 people in central Nigeria were killed in land disputes between the two sides this week. However, this has been a long-standing issue with similar incidents occurring in other countries in Africa, causing more than 1,000 deaths over the past year alone, according to media reports.

In a statement issued by his spokesperson, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed deep concern over the mounting violence, as well as the resulting banditry, extortion and cattle rustling.

"He condemns the resulting loss of life, property and livelihoods, as well as population displacement, which undermines peaceful coexistence between communities in many of the affected countries. It is also detrimental to regional stability," the statement said.

The UN chief urged all concerned governments, regional organizations, civil society and other parties to work together to find solutions to the conflicts.

He underlined the readiness and commitment of the UN to support national and regional efforts in this regard.

Link to original story on UN News website'Agile', multilateral response vital to combat terrorism  UN chief Guterres

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 28 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, 'Agile', multilateral response vital to combat terrorism  UN chief Guterres, 28 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c720a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

28 June 2018

The complex and evolving nature of terrorism necessitates a response that is as agile and multifaceted as the threat itself, the United Nations Secretary-General said on Thursday.

Addressing a high-level conference on counter-terrorism, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres underscored that working together must be the "top priority."

"We must strengthen the capacities of our counter-terrorism structures and institutions and we must complement our counter-terrorism efforts in the security realm with concerted efforts to identify and address the root causes."

He also highlighted the need to strengthen resilience and build cohesion in societies.

"Communities and the State need to be joined with the common purpose of rejecting terrorist ideologies and challenging those who espouse them," stated the UN chief.

Support should also be provided to civil society which has a major role to play in preventing violent extremism and there should be more engagement with women and young people, so they can play "meaningful roles" in combatting the scourge, he added.

Mr. Guterres also cautioned that the "frontline" against terrorism is increasingly in cyberspace, with terrorists exploiting social media, encrypted communications and the so-called "dark web" to spread propaganda and coordinate attacks.

There has also been a shift towards "less sophisticated attacks" against "softer targets" that are more difficult to detect and prevent, he said; noting that following military defeat in one region of the world, foreign terrorist fighters are likely to move elsewhere  either returning home or relocating to other conflict zones.

The transnational nature of terrorism "means we need multilateral cooperation," he highlighted.

Convened by the Secretary-General on 28-29 June, under the overarching theme of "strengthening international cooperation to combat the evolving threat of terrorism", the high-level conference aims to forge a new partnership for multilateral cooperation to strengthen the international community's counter-terrorism efforts.

"Terrorism is a grave and complex threat. Ending it demands that we work together flexibly, intelligently and openly," said Mr. Guterres.

In his remarks, the Secretary-General outlined the goals of the conference.

These include:

A strengthened international counter-terrorism cooperation.

A renewed and sustained focus on preventing terrorism.

Full respect for human rights while tackling terrorism.

The need for "strategic investment" in young people to counter terrorism and prevent violent extremism.

Recognizing the "tragic human cost" of terrorism.

And strengthening the role of the United Nations in assisting its Member States to tackle terrorism.

Also on Thursday, Michele Coninsx, the Executive Director of the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, highlighted the need for timely access to critical information for effective counter-terrorism efforts.

She, however, added that there are many "potential barriers" to sharing information at the national, regional or international levels, but the "central issue" is trust.

"No-one will share information without trust, or if they believe that doing so may have negative consequences. That is why it is imperative to respect human rights when sharing information," she said.

In her remarks, Ms. Coninsx also spoke of the importance of cooperation at all levels as well as of the full and effective implementation of laws and policies by competent State officials.

Link to original story on UN News websiteUN's top official in North Korea foresees 'surge' in humanitarian aid

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 28 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, UN's top official in North Korea foresees 'surge' in humanitarian aid, 28 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c722a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

28 June 2018

Following the recent positive political developments on the Korean Peninsula, the top United Nations official in North Korea envisages a surge in global humanitarian support for the millions there who are fighting malnutrition and living in poverty.

"For the UN, obviously it would mean a lot," Tapan Mishra, the UN Resident Coordinator in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), told UN News, explaining that the 12 June summit between the leaders of DPRK and the United States not only opens up new opportunities for denuclearization and global peace, but would also help UN agencies to raise more funding to meet the country's humanitarian needs.

He said that humanitarian funding for North Korea has declined dramatically since 2012. In 2017, only 31 per cent of the requested funding has been received. In 2018, the funding situation is even more alarming. Today, only 9 per cent or $10 million of the requested $111 million has been received to assist 6 million vulnerable people in DPRK through the 2018 Needs and Priorities Plan.

The lack of funding has already forced UN agencies to prioritize and scale down lifesaving programming. Chronic food insecurity and malnutrition remains widespread. Around 10.3 million people, or 41 per cent of the total population, are undernourished.

In this exclusive interview, Mr. Mishra talked about how the UN aid operations have continued to deliver despite the operational constraints, how economic sanctions have had unintended consequences for the lives of ordinary North Koreans and how the recent breakthrough to the political deadlock is giving rise to optimism among the people there.

Mr. Mishra leads the UN Humanitarian Country Team, consisting of six agencies on the ground  the UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the World Health Organization (WHO); international non-governmental organizations and other international organizations engaged in humanitarian activities  with many other agencies supporting from outside.

UN News: All eyes are on the Korean Peninsula right now. So, what do you think the implications are of the recent US-North Korean summit for the work of the UN?

Tapan Mishra: It's a very important time. Regarding the recent summit that happened in Singapore between the leaders of DPR Korea and the US: it opens up new opportunities for global peace and hopefully stability and denuclearization. And for the UN, obviously, it would mean a lot. This is what we've been looking forward to: to have a diplomatic dialogue replace the possible threats of confrontation. And therefore, we hope to see a lot of support of the United Nations in DPRK to serve the people who are most needy and vulnerable, especially from a humanitarian perspective, right away.

The work of the UN could change depending on the "asks" that are made on the UN. The Secretary-General mentioned that the UN stands ready to serve. I see immediately there'll be a huge surge in terms of humanitarian support that is needed.

As the Secretary-General has noted in his statement, relevant parts of the UN system stand ready to support this process in any way, including verification if requested by the key parties. If there are other opportunities in the future moving from humanitarian to development, we would be able to look forward to making adjustments in our presence and our work in the future as well.

UN News: Can you describe what the UN country team does now to provide support to ordinary people there?

Tapan Mishra: At the moment, the United Nations Humanitarian Country Team in DPRK is primarily focused on providing humanitarian support to the most needy and vulnerable people. Of the 25.1 million people that are there, we are targeting in 2018 to support about 6 million people who need support  in terms of food security, nutrition, health, water, sanitation and hygiene. That's what the UN country team and various agencies are providing in DPRK, with the support of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

UN News: There is a UN strategic framework for DPRK that looks ahead to 2021. So, does that have to be changed according to the recent evolving diplomatic situation?

Tapan Mishra: We, all UN agencies, have signed the strategic framework with the Government of DPRK for the five years from 2017 to 2021. This strategic framework is the equivalent of the UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) in a normal country. The situation in DPRK is quite unique. We could expand from humanitarian to possibly development in the future when the opportunity is right.

The strategic framework is more towards food and nutrition; security; social development services, which includes health, education, water, sanitation, hygiene, et cetera; and resilience sustainability, which includes energy, environment, climate change and disaster risk management.

So, when this scenario changes in terms of moving away from the humanitarian, which is our primary work currently, it may need to be adapted accordingly.

UN News: Do you mean that the recent political situation will be reflected on the strategic framework in the future?

Tapan Mishra: It depends. As you see, the Secretary-General has very clearly stated that the relevant UN agencies stand ready to serve, whether it's for the verification, or for other support required. If there are adjustments that need to be made, it will be made at the appropriate time.

UN News: Can you describe what life is like for average citizens in North Korea?

Tapan Mishra: The humanitarian situation remains grim for millions of civilians in the country. There are children who are affected by acute malnutrition. Chronic food insecurity and malnutrition remains widespread, driven by the limited availability of arable land  only 17% of land is arable  lack of access to modern agricultural equipment and fertilizers, and recurrent natural disasters. Chronic malnutrition is devastating to young children. A staggering number of children  over a quarter (27.9%) of children under-five  are stunted.

This will affect them for the rest of their lives. And we have programmes for supporting kindergartens, children, infants, as well as pregnant and lactating mothers, the elderly, and people with disability. So, for them, life is challenging and difficult. There are gaps that need to be met with humanitarian assistance. Therefore, we are  you may have seen the needs and priorities document for 2018  looking for support from donors to provide us financial assistance to be able to provide humanitarian aid to the people in need.

UN News: How much have economic sanctions affected everyday life in North Korea?

Tapan Mishra: I have raised this issue, not only with the Chair of the UN Sanctions Committee (1718 Committee) that there are unintended consequences of the sanctions that are being seen in terms of the work that we do in the UN and other humanitarian agencies. And we have received good support from the Committee to look into these issues.

UN News: Looking over the last two decades, how has the UN humanitarian operation coped with the fluctuating political situation on the Korean Peninsula?

Tapan Mishra: That's a very insightful question. In the last two decades, there has been ups and downs. Right now, we're on a down. In the last three years, the receipt of humanitarian funding has been between only 20 and 30 per cent of the funding that we have requested. And this year, despite all these positive political directions, the funding currently is only at 9 per cent of the $111 million we are seeking.

UN News: So, do you expect that if the positive political development continues, more humanitarian funding will come?

Tapan Mishra: I really hope so. Now that the positive political doors are opening, the summit that perhaps opened the door of complete and verifiable denuclearization, we are hoping that Member States will support the UN and other agencies in providing humanitarian support to the most vulnerable population. And again, hopefully, that will lead to a new increase in the humanitarian support that we are receiving.

UN News: How does a deterioration in the political situation impact the humanitarian operation?

Tapan Mishra: Two or three things. First, humanitarian funding was very badly affected. That really impedes our ability to provide the support needed. So, agencies had to cut down on their programmes because there has been no funding. Second, we've had unintended consequences of sanctions. Even humanitarian aid has got affected. Third, the banking channel that we had for getting money in the country completely collapsed. We don't have an option right now and we are looking for one. So, these three have been major challenges for us if we are to be able to provide the humanitarian assistance in the most effective manner.

UN News: Have you seen any changes in the level of cooperation or contact you have with the Government since last year?

Tapan Mishra: Over the past years, the UN and partners have invested heavily in building confidence and understanding by the government for humanitarian actors and humanitarian interventions. Agencies work according to "no access, no aid", an approach which is understood and accepted by the authorities. This continued, principled and robust engagement has translated into better access, better monitoring, better programming, and better cooperation.

UN News: Have you seen any optimism among the ordinary North Koreans recently?

Tapan Mishra: Certainly. I haven't been to DPRK after the summit but I will be going there soon. But what I hear from people, and I've been noticing there is a visible optimism and I'm sure everybody is looking forward to moving towards a better and more prosperous future with peace and stability ahead. So, I'm sure there is optimism, not only among the people in DPRK, but among the people in the world. So, this is an era of new peace and stability on the Peninsula, which will bring in hopefully global peace and development.

UN News: Any message you'd like to convey?

Tapan Mishra: The UN has been working there for a long time and, despite all the challenges, we have been serving on the mandates that we've had. We stand ready on the ground to do more as needed and we look forward to the support of all Member States in carrying out our mandate, by helping us get more humanitarian funding support, by helping us ensure that the unintended consequences of sanctions is reduced or completely overcome. And hopefully, peace and development will come in the future on the Peninsula. And hopefully, we will have a much better situation globally.

Link to original story on UN News websiteIran: UN rights chief 'deeply disturbed' by continuing executions of juvenile offenders

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 28 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Iran: UN rights chief 'deeply disturbed' by continuing executions of juvenile offenders, 28 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c7246.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

28 June 2018

Following the execution of a 15-year-old in Iran on Wednesday  the fourth juvenile to be put to death in the country this year  the United Nations rights chief condemned the practice, citing the strict prohibition of such executions under international law.

"I am deeply disturbed that Iran continues to implement the death penalty against juvenile offenders, with some 85 others reportedly on death row," UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said on Thursday.

Fifteen-year-old Abolfazi Chezani Sharahi was executed after being found guilty of fatally stabbing a man. A total of five juvenile offenders were executed in the country during 2017.

"We understand that the execution of at least one more juvenile offender, Mohammad Kalhori, is imminent and urge the authorities not to carry it out, but instead to commute the sentences of all juvenile offenders on death row," urged Zeid.

Executing juvenile offenders is in violation of Iran's obligations as a State party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The youth was moved into solitary confinement four times before his eventual execution, further opening up the possibility that he suffered torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

The High Commissioner also expressed concern over the lack of transparency prior to implementing the death penalty.

When authorities fail to provide relatives with adequate information about the timing of executions, it not only imposes acute mental distress on the convicted person, but also on their family.

Zeid also reiterated the UN Human Rights Office's willingness to assist Iran in complying with its international human rights obligations regarding juvenile justice.

Link to original story on UN News website'Bleakest period yet' in Occupied Palestinian Territory: UN human rights expert

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 29 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, 'Bleakest period yet' in Occupied Palestinian Territory: UN human rights expert, 29 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c726a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

29 June 2018

Reports of the indignities faced by people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory have "painted the bleakest picture yet" of the human rights situation there, a United Nations expert has said.

Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk was in Amman, Jordan, this week where he met with civil society and other representatives to gather information for his latest report, which will be presented to the General Assembly in October.

Mr. Lynk monitors the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory but has been prohibited by Israel from travelling there.

"This is my third mission to the region since I assumed the mandate in May 2016, and the reports I received this week have painted the bleakest picture yet of the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory," he said in a statement issued on Friday.

The rights expert listed concerns such as Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and the ongoing crisis in Gaza.

"After years of creeping Israeli de facto annexation of large swathes of the West Bank through settlement expansion, the creation of closed military zones and other measures, Israel appears to be getting closer to enacting legislation that will formally annex parts of the West Bank. This would amount to a profound violation of international law, and the impact of ongoing settlement expansion on human rights must not be ignored," he said.

Mr. Lynk also reported that the situation continues to worsen in Gaza, which has been crippled by a blockade for more than a decade. Furthermore, an electricity crisis that began last June has yet to be resolved.

"Residents are deprived of their most basic rights, including the rights to health, to education, and most recently, in attempting to exercise their right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, they were deprived of the right to life," he said, referring to recent demonstrations along the border fence, in which more than 100 Palestinians were killed and thousands wounded.

The UN expert was also worried about how funding cuts will affect the work of UNRWA, the UN agency that assists Palestinian refugees.

Nearly one million people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory depend on it for health care, education and social servic

Link to original story on UN News websiteUN condemns deadly attack against G5 Sahel force headquarters in Mali

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 30 June 2018 Cite as UN News Service, UN condemns deadly attack against G5 Sahel force headquarters in Mali, 30 June 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c728a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

30 June 2018

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has strongly condemned the attack against the G5 Sahel joint force Headquarters in Mali's restive Mopti region.

Several people were killed in the "complex" attack in Sevare, including troops belonging to the G5 Sahel joint force  a military task force composed of armed forces of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. Members of the Malian armed forces were also killed.

In a statement issued by his spokesperson on Friday, Mr. Guterres underscored the "important role" the G5 Sahel joint force is playing in countering violent extremism and terrorism in the Sahel region and called on the international community to step up its support to the joint force.

He also said that the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) continues to provide logistical support to the joint force in line with the relevant Security Council resolution.

In the statement, the UN chief also offered his condolences to the families of the victims and wishes a speedy recovery to those injured

In a separate statement, the Security Council also condemned the attack and underscored the need to bring the perpetrators and sponsors of such "reprehensible acts" of terrorism to justice.

The members of the Council also welcomed the "continued determination" of the G5 Sahel States to unite their efforts to address the impact of terrorism and transnational organized crime in the Sahel region, including through the development of the joint force.

They also expressed that they would "continue to monitor closely the situation" as well as the support to the joint force, in parallel to progress made in its operationalization.

Link to original story on UN News websiteLatest tragedy in the Mediterranean claims over 100 lives  UN refugee agency

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 1 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Latest tragedy in the Mediterranean claims over 100 lives  UN refugee agency, 1 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c72aa.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

1 July 2018

Expressing "deep sadness" over the deaths of more than 100 refugees and migrants when their boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea, the United Nations refugee agency has called for greater international efforts to avoid further tragedies.

"[We are] concerned about the increasing number of people dying on the central Mediterranean route and [are] calling for concerted international efforts to avoid further tragedies," said the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in a news release on Saturday.

According to the UN agency, about 123 individuals were on board the rubber boat  which survivors said was "unseaworthy and overcrowded"  when it sank off the coast of Tajoura in Libya on 29 June.

Only 16 people could be rescued by the Libyan coast guard.

"This is the hardest day of my life. I didn't know whether to save myself, my children or my friends," a survivor told UNHCR once safe.

Among those deceased are 70 men, 30 women and three babies. Over 80 bodies are said to remain at sea.

In the news release, UNHCR also said that on the same day, some 300 refugees and migrants were disembarked by the Libyan coast guard at the Tripoli Naval Base, including 15 children and 40 women.

UNHCR and its partners were present at both disembarkation points and provided urgent medical and humanitarian assistance to the survivors, before they were transferred to detention facilities by the authorities.

According to estimates, in the first half of 2018, over 1,130 people have perished trying to make the perilous sea crossing from North Africa to Europe.

Link to original story on UN News websiteAfghanistan: Bring 'architects' of latest 'appalling' suicide bombing to justice, says deputy UN mission chief

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 2 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Afghanistan: Bring 'architects' of latest 'appalling' suicide bombing to justice, says deputy UN mission chief, 2 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c72ca.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

2 July 2018

In the wake of dozens of civilian deaths  the most recent, a suicide attack in Jalalabad on Sunday  a high-level United Nations representative on the ground called for "the architects of this appalling crime" to be brought to justice.

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) condemned the suicide attack that left at least 19 civilians dead, and expressed concern over a recent spate of incidents targeting schools and medical centres. More than 20 others, including children, were injured in the blast.

"The architects of this appalling crime must be brought to justice," said Ingrid Hayden on Monday, the deputy head of UNAMA, and Deputy Special Representative.

According to a statement from the mission, most of the suicide bomber's victims were from Afghanistan's small Sikh and Hindu community  part of a delegation on its way to meet President Ashraf Ghani, who was visiting the capital city of Nangarhar province, in the Khogyani district.

Media reports noted that among the dead in the overwhelmingly Muslim nation, was the only Sikh candidate who was standing in upcoming legislative elections.

UN chief, Antonio Guterres also condemned the attack, in a statement, extending his deepest condolences to the families of the victims.

"Any attack deliberately targeting civilians is unjustifiable and in clear violation of international law," said the UN chief, calling on "all parties to uphold their obligation to protect civilians, including minority communities, and cease targeting civilians and civilian facilities."

Elsewhere in Nangarhar, two civilian night watchmen were beheaded, a third killed and a school torched on Saturday in an attack by a local affiliate of the ISIL terrorist group, known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), which has been carrying out a campaign against schools and educational workers in the region.

And on Monday, missiles were fired into Jalalabad  hitting the Najmuljihad high school, with other projectiles landing nearby. There were no reports of casualties.

UNAMA also expressed concern over recent incidents impacting health facilities. On 25 June, a mortar hit the Andar district hospital in Ghazni province killing a doctor and a vaccination worker, and on 1 July, in the northern province of Faryab, three civilians, including a woman and child, were killed. Several others, mainly women and children, were injured in an Afghan National Army helicopter attack in the Pashtun Kot district.

The attack allegedly targeted Taliban combatants at a health clinic where civilian patients were also receiving treatment, said UNAMA.

The UN stressed that all parties to the conflict must at all times uphold their obligations to protect civilians and reiterated its call to immediately cease targeting civilians and civilian objects, including schools and health facilities, in compliance with the international humanitarian law.

The UN in Afghanistan expressed its condolences to the loved-ones of all those killed and wished a full and speedy recovery to the injured.

Link to original story on UN News websiteAs many as 330,000 displaced by heavy fighting in south-west Syria  UN agency

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 3 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, As many as 330,000 displaced by heavy fighting in south-west Syria  UN agency, 3 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c72ea.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

3 July 2018

Intense air and ground-based strikes at multiple locations in Syria's south-western Dara'a governorate has resulted in the "largest displacement" in the area since the conflict began more than seven years ago, the United Nations refugee agency has reported.

A number of civilians are also reported to have been killed in the hostilities and many more injured, said Andrej Mahecic on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

He said the agency was "deeply concerned by the escalation of fighting" and called on those involved "to take all necessary measures to safeguard civilian lives, protect civilian infrastructure and allow freedom of movement as required under international humanitarian and human rights laws."

Among those displaced by the fighting  estimated to number between 270,000 to 330,000  are some 60,000 at the Nasib/Jaber border crossing, between Syria and Jordan, forced to live with sweltering heat, pounded by dusty desert winds.

According to reports, at least twelve children, two women, and one elderly man, have died in the past few days close to the Jordanian border due to scorpion bites, dehydration and disease.

Elizabeth Throssell, a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), appealed for the safety of those trapped at the border.

"We call on the international community, in particular countries of the region with the financial ability to host large numbers of refugees, to take in fleeing civilians from Syria ... We call on the Jordanian Government to keep its border open and for other countries in the region to step up and receive the fleeing civilians."

She also called on all parties involved in the conflict to "ensure safe, sustained and unimpeded humanitarian access to those in need, in line with their obligations under international law.

UN agencies on the ground are preparing to scale up their response, prioritizing life-saving assistance and protection services for those with emergency needs.

The World Food Programme (WFP), the organization's emergency food and nutrition relief agency, has delivered enough food for around 200,000 people and stands ready to deliver more as soon as security improves and conditions allow.

However, violence has also displaced hundreds of staff of WFP-partner organizations, "leaving few people on the ground to manage aid distribution and limiting possibilities to intervene," said Bettina Luescher, a spokesperson for the UN agency. She added that "other distribution solutions" were currently being examined.

Link to original story on UN News websitePalestinian Bedouin community faces demolition after Israeli court ruling, warns UN rights office

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 3 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Palestinian Bedouin community faces demolition after Israeli court ruling, warns UN rights office, 3 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c730a.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

3 July 2018

A Palestinian Bedouin community is under threat from a demolition order within days, to make way for Israeli settlement expansion, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, warned on Tuesday.

Spokesperson Liz Throssell said that the imminent destruction of buildings used by Khan al Ahmar al Helu residents comes after the Israeli High Court ruled against any further delay.

"The community is home to 181 people  more than half of them children," Ms Throssell told journalists in Geneva, noting that it is "at high risk of forcible transfer" owing to Israeli practices and policies "that coerce people and communities to move".

The Khan al Ahmar al Helu community has spent the last decade opposing the move in a part of the central West Bank called Area C.

In total, around 7,000 people from 46 Bedouin communities live there "and we are concerned about all of them", the OHCHR spokesperson said, noting that the community is located near existing "large Israeli settlements".

Describing Israel's planning policy as "discriminatory" and incompatible with international law, Ms Throssell explained that "most properties are considered illegal" because planning permits are not granted to Palestinians in the area.

In an appeal to the Israeli authorities, the OHCHR spokesperson said that if the demolitions went ahead, "people would lose their homes, children would lose their schools" and residents "would lose their community".

Such a development would "likely amount to forced evictions" and violate the community's right to housing, Ms Throssell said.

She added that once demolitions take place, the community is expected to be encouraged to move about 10 kilometres away to a suburban area on the outskirts of East Jerusalem.

Such a move is "not really appropriate for a community that has animals and needs grazing", Ms Throssell said, adding that this had happened before, affecting 150 Bedouin Palestine refugee families between 1997 and 2007.

"The demolition itself may not amount necessarily to forced eviction  the people may try to stay in the area," she said. "But as you can imagine, it really increases the risk of forced transfer, so our main call to the Israelis, is not to proceed with the demolition of this community."

Ms Throssell added that international humanitarian law prohibits the forced transfer of the population of an occupied territory, regardless of the motive.

Link to original story on UN News websiteYemen: 'No justification for this carnage,' says UNICEF chief, as children in need now outnumber population of Switzerland

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 3 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Yemen: 'No justification for this carnage,' says UNICEF chief, as children in need now outnumber population of Switzerland, 3 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c7334.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

3 July 2018

The relentless conflict in Yemen has pushed a nation already on the brink "deep into the abyss," said the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) chief on Tuesday, after returning from a four-day visit to the war-torn country.

"Social services are barely functional. The economy is in ruins. Prices have soared. Hospitals have been damaged. Schools have turned into shelters or have been taken over by armed groups," UNICEF Executive Director Henriette Fore told journalists in Geneva on Tuesday, describing her trip to the key cities of Aden and Sana'a.

Having witnessed first-hand the effects of three years of intense war, after decades of underdevelopment and chronic global indifference can do to children, Ms. Fore spelled out some of what children there are going through.

She said that they were routinely "taken out of school, forced to fight, married off, hungry, dying from preventable diseases," she began, adding that "today, 11 million children in Yemen  more than the entire population of Switzerland  need help getting food, treatment, education, water and sanitation."

Since 2015, health facilities have been cut by more than half; 1,500 schools have been damaged by airstrikes and shelling; and at least 2,200 children have been killed with around 3,400 injured, according to the UNICEF chief.

"These are only numbers we have been able to verify. The actual figures could be even higher," she said. "There is no justification for this carnage."

Ms. Fore described some of the individual children she met, such as a young girl receiving psychological support after fleeing violence in the port city of Hodeida  which is living under the threat of a major offensive  who presented her with a drawing of the world she wished to live in.

"It was the opposite of the world surrounding her, one of displacement, destruction and fear," Ms. Fore said.

She described visiting health facilities, and a ward for malnourished children where an eight-month old child weighed that of a newborn. In a neonatal intensive care unit, she heard how a pair of conjoined twins simply could not get the surgery they needed to survive. She said she had met committed, overstretched health staff who had not been paid in two years: "And yet the conflict goes on," said the UNICEF chief.

She explained that around 5,000 families had fled Hodeida over the past two weeks, where basic commodities including flour and cooking gas were dwindling, electricity was unavailable in most of the city and damage to the water supply had caused severe shortages

The Executive Director called it "critical" that families be allowed to voluntarily leave and that infrastructure be kept safe. "The protection of children  from landmines, recruitment, exploitation and attack  should remain paramount at all times," Ms. Fore added

Since January, more than 250 UNICEF staff have remained in Aden, Sanaa, Idlib, Hodeida and Saada  serving children while dealing with life in a war zone.

"We are committed to doing all we can to help the children and young people of Yemen but there should be a political solution to the conflict," she stressed. "We all need to give peace a chance. It is the only way forward," concluded the UNICEF chief.

Link to original story on UN News websiteMali facing 'alarming' rise in rights violations, warns UN expert

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 4 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Mali facing 'alarming' rise in rights violations, warns UN expert, 4 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c7354.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

4 July 2018

In Mali, a senior United Nations rights expert on Wednesday described an "alarming" deterioration of the security, human rights and humanitarian situation in northern and eastern areas of the country.

Alioune Tine's comments follow two deadly attacks in recent days on international forces in Mali, including one suicide bombing in Gao, that left at least two civilians dead and more than 15 injured.

In Menaka, to the east, more than 120 people were also allegedly murdered in a three-week period in April and May, he said in a statement, noting that that violent extremists had taken advantage of the lack of basic services "to exploit communities and pit them against each other".

Some attacks have been attributed to armed groups including the Azawad Salvation Movement (MSA) and the Touareg IMGHAD Self-Defense Group and Allies (GATIA), the UN expert noted.

Amid ongoing insecurity, which has been characterized by kidnappings and targeted killings, according to the Senegalese expert, communities have been displaced and more than 650 schools have been forced to close in central and northern regions, affecting nearly 200,000 children.

There have also been an increasing number of allegations of "serious human rights violations" against the Malian armed forces, Mr. Tine said, echoing concerns about anti-terrorist operations "that do not respect international human rights standards".

In an appeal to the Government of Mali to bring the perpetrators of rights abuses to justice, Mr. Tine underlined the "very limited State presence", adding that in some central areas there is "none at all".

The Independent Expert  who visited the country at the end of June  also commended the country's Prime Minister for reaffirming that the Government will not tolerate any wrongdoing against civilians.

Turning to the humanitarian emergency in the central region and warning that it "is getting worse", the UN expert said that 4.1 million people need food aid.

The number of people suffering from severe acute malnutrition in 2018 is also set to increase from 163,000 to well over a quarter of a million  including more than 11,000 children under five  he added.

Moderate acute malnutrition is a massive and chronic problem too, with numbers expected to increase from 470,000 to 582,000, including more than 45,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women.

"This is an emergency to which we cannot close our eyes," Mr. Tine said, before appealing to armed groups to respect humanitarian workers as they carry out their work.

Ahead of Presidential elections at the end of this month, he urged all those engaged in it "to ban hate speech and calls to violence" during campaigning which begins in three days.

The rights expert also stressed the need to respect freedom of assembly and association, and freedom of access to the media, and appealed for the forthcoming presidential election to be "truly free, transparent and peaceful", and to meet international standards.

Mr. Tine  who took office as Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Mali on 1 May  will present his report to the Human Rights Council in March next year.

Among its findings, it's expected to include an appraisal of a UN Security Council resolution agreed last year which established a targeted sanctions regime on the country.

Link to original story on UN News websiteMillions denied citizenship due to ideas of national, ethnic or racial 'purity': UN rights expert

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 5 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Millions denied citizenship due to ideas of national, ethnic or racial 'purity': UN rights expert, 5 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c7374.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

5 July 2018

Ideologies which define nationality as being determined by ethnicity or bloodline are denying millions of people of their right to citizenship, a UN expert has charged.

E. Tendayi Achiume, Special Rapporteur on racism, focused on the issue of ethno-nationalism in her first report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, whose current session ends on Friday.

In it, she highlighted the plight of millions of stateless people worldwide  often members of minority groups  who are victims of long-standing discrimination which sees them as "foreign", even though they have been resident in a country for generations or even centuries.

Meanwhile, several countries continue to enforce "patriarchal laws" which make it impossible for women to pass down citizenship status to their children or foreign-born spouse.

In some cases, women are even stripped of their nationality upon marrying a foreigner and cannot regain it if the marriage ends.

"This is gender-based discrimination often deployed by States to preserve notions of national, ethnic and racial 'purity,'" she said.

Ms. Achiume believes prejudice rooted in ethno-nationalism is behind racial discrimination, whether in citizenship or immigration laws.

She recalled that in the past, European colonial powers used the ideology to exclude local populations within colonies from gaining citizenship, while Jews and Roma were targeted on the same grounds, in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Today, she said, migrants are the target of political hate speech and intolerance, again often under the pretext of ethnic purity and religious, cultural or linguistic preservation.

"Countries that have long celebrated immigration as central to their national identity have taken steps to vilify and undermine immigration, with a disproportionate effect on certain racial, religious and national groups," Ms. Achiume pointed out.

"Islamophobic or anti-Semitic ethno-nationalism undermines the rights of Muslims and Jews irrespective of citizenship status . . . the case of the Rohingya Muslims offers a chilling example."

The Rohingya are a mostly Muslim minority in Myanmar, which is a predominantly Buddhist nation.

Though resident there for centuries, Ms. Achiume said many Rohingya have been rendered stateless following a 1982 nationality law that discriminates on the basis of ethnicity.

Waves of violence and discrimination have driven scores of Rohingya to neighbouring Bangladesh. More than 700,000 have arrived in the past year alone in the wake of a violent military crackdown that began in late August.

Link to original story on UN News websiteSyria: Civilians caught in crossfire, UN refugee chief urges Jordan to open its border

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 5 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Syria: Civilians caught in crossfire, UN refugee chief urges Jordan to open its border, 5 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c7394.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

5 July 2018

The head of the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, appealed on Thursday for Jordan to open its border with south-west Syria to help protect around 750,000 civilians who are "caught in the crossfire", amidst airstrikes and heavy shelling.

"More than 320,000 people are now displaced and most are living in dire and insecure conditions, including some 60,000 people camped at the Nasib/Jaber border crossing with Jordan,"UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi said, in a statement.

Although local communities in Syria have opened their doors to take in many of the displaced, most are forced to live in open spaces or in makeshift shelters that offer little safety and protection from the elements, he added.

"There are large numbers of women and children among the displaced, as well as elderly, injured and sick people and I am especially concerned about them," he continued, adding that among the displaced are local humanitarian workers who have "selflessly served the civilian population throughout the duration of the conflict."

Mr. Grandi underscored the immediate priority of finding a political solution to the conflict to spare civilians further suffering. Fighting between pro-Syrian government forces and opposition militia, has been intensifying for weeks across Dara'a Governorate, close to the Jordanian border, as well as the Golan Heights border area with Israel.

He said that while the UN and partners are doing what they can to deliver life-saving aid to the people of south-west Syria  both from within the country and across the Jordanian border  the security situation is hindering efforts to reach many people in dire need.

"I call on all parties to redouble efforts to cease hostilities, to allow humanitarian actors to deliver life-saving assistance, shelter and evacuate the wounded," Mr. Grandi said, spelling out that civilian protection, safety and security along with that of humanitarian workers is of "utmost importance."

It is "a core principle of international humanitarian law that needs to be guaranteed by all parties to the conflict and the international community at large," he stressed.

"I commend Jordan for generously providing protection to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees since the beginning of the crisis and for providing and facilitating assistance to those in need inside Syria," he said.

But, "given the immediate dangers," added Mr. Grandi, "I am advocating for granting temporary refuge in Jordan to those in need of safety and for the international community to provide immediate and substantive support to Jordan, in a spirit of solidarity and responsibility sharing."

Underscoring that UNHCR is prepared to immediately scale up its assistance inside Syria and to Jordan, the High Commissioner concluded: "Thousands of innocent lives are going to be lost, once again, if urgent action is not taken."

In a statement issued by his spokesperson later on Thursday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that he was "gravely concerned by the resumption of the military offensive in southwest Syria and its continued devastating impact on civilians."

"The Secretary-General fully supports today's statement by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi," said Stephane Dujarric, adding that there needed to be an "immediate suspension" of hostilities and the resumption of negotiations.

"He calls on all parties to take all necessary measures to safeguard civilian lives, allow freedom of movement, and protect civilian infrastructure, including medical and educational facilities, at all times, in accordance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law," the statement continued.

"The Secretary-General further reiterates his call for the United Nations to be allowed to conduct cross-border and cross line humanitarian deliveries to resume without further delay for the benefit of people in need within Syria," it concluded.

Link to original story on UN News websiteGirls groomed for suicide missions fight back against the extremists of Lake Chad

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 6 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Girls groomed for suicide missions fight back against the extremists of Lake Chad, 6 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c73b4.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

6 July 2018

Halima Yakoy Adam won't forget 22nd December in 2015, the day she was supposed to carry out a suicide bomb attack in the Lac Region town of Bol, 200 km north of N'Djamena, the capital of Chad, in Central Africa.

"It was market day in Bol and I was with two other girls who like me carried explosives," the young woman told UN News. "I was just 15 years old. I was given drugs and had been trained by the extremist Boko Haram terrorist group to be a suicide bomber."

The local authorities detected the three teenage girls and tried to arrest them, but the two other girls detonated their explosive vests, killing themselves and seriously wounding Halima Yakoy Adam. She survived but had both legs amputated below her knees.

Halima is one of the extraordinary young women, introduced to the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General in Chad on Thursday. UN News is accompanying her and other senior women from the world body, and the African Union, on a high-level visit that will include neighbouring Niger this weekend.

Boko Haram has been active in north-east Nigeria and the neighbouring countries of Cameroon, Chad and Niger for several years. Its chief aim is to create an Islamist state in the north of Nigeria. Its campaign of terror has caused the displacement of some 10 million people as of 2017, and led to the widespread destruction of basic infrastructure, such as health and educational facilities, as well as agricultural land and machinery.

Coordination among the affected countries including through the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) has led to what the UN described last year as "encouraging progress in the fight against Boko Haram." But to compensate for that success, the group has changed its tactics, increasing the use of suicide attacks. In June and July 2017, the United Nations recorded some 130 attacks attributed to Boko Haram, leading to the deaths of 284 civilians in the four affected countries.

Raising Awareness

Speaking in Bol after talking to Halima, Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told UN News: "This is one of many stories I have heard, as this is where I come from. I come from Nigeria. This is sadly the story of many girls; but unlike Halima many did not survive."

Ms Mohammed praised the young woman's resilience, adding: "I think there is more awareness of suicide bombing today than there was before. There is nothing more powerful than a victim who tells her story. Halima has moved from victim to survivor because she is using that experience to educate other girls."

Although the incidence of suicide bombing appears to be increasing in Chad, it is a relatively new development for women to be involved, according to Clarisse Mehoudamadji Nailar from CELIAF, a Chadian association of women leaders.

"Extremism amongst women didn't exist in the past in Chad. This seems to be a new phenomenon," she said. "The Government is making a big effort to fight the extremists and meanwhile non-governmental organizations in Chad are trying to educate and sensitize women about the dangers of extremism."

A joint United Nations-African Union mission has been in Chad for two days. The visit which also included the Foreign Minister of Sweden, Margot Wallstrom, has focused on the importance of women's meaningful participation in promoting peace, security and development.

The Executive Director of the UN's gender agency, UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka- also part of the mission  said that groups like Boko Haram aim to manipulate young girls to carry out terrorist acts. "What is common to these terrorist groups is the subjugation of women and girls and a denial of their rights", she told UN News.

"These groups manipulate and exploit inequality. It is for this reason that our efforts to prevent violent extremism need to prioritize gender equality." She added that "Halima's story epitomizes the relationship between the lack of power of women and terrorism  a young woman who had no choices over decisions relating to her own life."

Back in Bol in Chad's Lac Region, Halima has finished her training as a paralegal. Today she considers herself an agent change of who sensitizes "my sisters against radicalism and extreme violence," she said adding: "I am happy to have a second chance in life and now I want to give back to my community."

Link to original story on UN News websiteLibya urged to end migrant detention amid warnings over threat to Mediterranean search and rescue

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 6 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Libya urged to end migrant detention amid warnings over threat to Mediterranean search and rescue, 6 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c73d4.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

6 July 2018

The head of UN Migration Agency (IOM), William Lacy Swing, has urged Libya to stop detaining migrants who have been returned to the country's shores after trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

That appeal coincided with a call from the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, to boost search and rescue facilities in the region, amid concerns about a toughening stance in some European Union (EU) countries, against volunteer boats disembarking people plucked from the water.

Speaking to journalists in Geneva, IOM's Leonard Doyle explained that Ambassador Swing had made a personal appeal to Libya's Prime Minister, Fayez al-Sarraj.

On this third official visit since 2016 to the North African nation, which is a major migrant hub, Ambassador Swing also met some of those in detention.

"One after another, he heard absolutely awful personal stories of human grief in these detention centres," Doyle said. "His call, really, is not to send migrants back into detention."

Of more than 50 detention centres in operation last year in Libya, only 17 are still open, Mr Doyle explained, adding that the bulk of migration happened in and around Tripoli, where the internationally recognized Government is located.

Concerning the management of the detention centres, in which the UN Human Rights Office, OHCHR, has highlighted grave rights abuses in the past, Doyle said there is "government oversight" in some, "but it is far from comprehensive".

He added that when Ambassador Swing had met the Libyan Prime Minister, he had recommended the construction of separate centres for women and children.

The development follows a sharp increase in Libyan anti-smuggling operations in 2018, backed by the EU.

Last month alone, almost 4,000 people were rescued in the country's territorial waters, IOM said in a statement, noting with concern that migrants are placed in detention, often in overcrowded and poorly-monitored centres.

On the potential impact of the IOM chief's request, Mr Doyle noted that "we are already seeing vast improvements in many areas, the support with the coastguard is really impressive, despite occasional  from what we understand  rogue issues, there generally seems to be a desire by the coastguard personnel to save lives."

Alternatives to detention include "speeding up repatriation," the IOM spokesperson said. "So, we support them in voluntary repatriation, voluntary return, humanitarian return from Libya. It sometimes takes a while because they don't have papers and documents; the only embassies in the country really full-time are African embassies and even they have very low capacity."

Also in Geneva, UNHCR spokesperson Charlie Yaxley highlighted concern over the high number of vulnerable people who continue to perish in the Mediterranean Sea.

For the fifth year in a row, more than 1,000 people are dead or missing, he said, while nearly 48,000 asylum-seekers and migrants have reached Europe's shores in the first six months of 2018  five times lower than in 2016, when arrivals peaked in the EU.

The high loss of life illustrates the need to strengthen search and rescue at sea, Mr Yaxley insisted, reiterating that the "key, key priority has to be saving lives at sea" and preventing people from "putting their lives in the hands of smugglers and taking these often-fatal journeys".

Between January and April, non-governmental organisations have been responsible for around 40 per cent of rescue operations for those disembarked in Italy, UNHCR said in a statement.

And amid a recent decision by Italy to refuse docking rights to vessels carrying migrants, the agency reiterated the potentially fatal impact, if boats are discouraged from responding to distress calls.

"If we have any threats of legal action or the hint of repercussions of hanging over boats rescuing people at sea, then the very principle itself will potentially come under risk" Yaxley said. "You may see ship masters wavering over responding to distress calls and that is a dire situation not only for migrants and refugees, but for anyone who is in distress at sea," he added.

Link to original story on UN News websiteNew identity cards deliver recognition and protection for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 6 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, New identity cards deliver recognition and protection for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, 6 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c73f4.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

6 July 2018

Rohingya refugees sheltering in Bangladesh will soon have credit card-sized plastic IDs  many possessing, for the first time ever, an individual identity document  providing another level of protection, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

The exercise, which began at the end ofJune, is expected to take up to six months to complete.

It "will help consolidate a unified database for the purposes of protection, identity management, documentation, provision of assistance, population statistics and ultimately solutions for an estimated 900,000 refugees who have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh in successive waves of forced displacement," Charlie Yaxley, spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told reporters on Friday in Geneva.

Since August of last year, more than 720,000 have fled in what was one of the world's largest and fastest growing refugee emergencies in decades.

"The verification will play a key role in establishing refugees' identities and their declared places of origin in Myanmar," he continued. "It will help preserve their right to voluntarily return home, if and when they decide that the conditions are right to do so."

The exercise will also help to boost accurate refugee data  supporting the Government and humanitarian partners to better understand their specific needs; plan, target and deliver protection and assistance; and avoid duplicating services.

"Biometric data, including iris scans and fingerprints as well as photographs, are used in the exercise to confirm individual identities for all refugees over the age of 12," Mr. Yaxley explained.

The credit card-sized plastic IDs, issued jointly by the Bangladesh Government and UNHCR, contain a number of anti-fraud features.

Since the start of exercise on 21 June, some 4,200 refugees have been verified  despite heavy monsoon rains in recent days  most attending their verification appointments, aware of the significance of having an identity card.

In addition to providing laptops, servers, wireless routers, biometric hardware and printing equipment, UNHCR is also making available special biometric registration software.

"Following his visit to Bangladesh this week, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, said greater resources must be found to develop education, healthcare and infrastructure to build a more sustainable life for Rohingya refugees and their hosts," said the spokesperson.

Ten months into the Rohingya refugee crisis, the response continues to remain focused on addressing the massive humanitarian needs, and on mitigating the impact of monsoon rains in refugee settlements.

To date, the UN's Joint Response Plan for the Rohingya refugee situation in Bangladesh is only 26 per cent funded.

"Additional international support is needed to step up the assistance from purely humanitarian and day-to-day support towards medium-term and developmental assistance" said Mr. Yaxley, echoing the High Commissioner's message.

Link to original story on UN News websiteThree-quarters of South Sudanese children have known nothing but war, says UNICEF

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 7 July 2018 Cite as UN News Service, Three-quarters of South Sudanese children have known nothing but war, says UNICEF, 7 July 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b83c7414.html [accessed 1 November 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

7 July 2018

Since South Sudan became the world's youngest country in 2011, 2.6 million of the 3.4 million babies have been born in war, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) revealed Saturday.

"As South Sudan turns seven, a seemingly endless war continues to devastate the lives of millions of children," said Henrietta H. Fore, UNICEF's Executive Director who visited Juba, Ganiyel and Bentiu in the war-ravaged country earlier this year.

Conflict and underdevelopment have plagued the area for decades, leaving its children out of school, malnourished and vulnerable to disease, abuse and exploitation.

"Warring parties can and must do more to bring back peace," she continued, "The children of South Sudan deserve better."

After gaining independence in 2011, a civil war erupted in 2013  rendering short-lived the prospect of a better future.

Although 800 children have been released from armed groups since the beginning of the year, an estimated 19,000 others continue to serve as fighters, porters and messengers and to suffer sexual abuse, which is up from 500 since the war broke out.

The proportion of people who do not know where their next meal is coming from jumped from 35 per cent in 2014 to nearly 60 per cent at present, with some areas of the country just one step away from famine, especially during the lean season.

Malnutrition rates are at critical levels, as more than one million children are malnourished, including 300,000 on the brink of death.

With one-in-three schools destroyed, occupied or closed since 2013, the conflict has also left some two million children without an education, earning South Sudan the distinction of having the highest proportion of out-of-school children in the world.

Moreover, efforts to aid those in greatest need are being hampered.

Since 2013, more than 100 aid workers have been killed in the violence, including a driver for UNICEF just last week.

While a massive number of refugees had returned when the country first gained independence, sinde . However, since 2013, more than 2.5 million, including over one million children, have again fled for safety in neighboring countries.

On a brighter note, the signing of a permanent ceasefire between the two main warring parties in Khartoum last month was a positive step  offering a flicker of hope in what has been a faltering peace process.

"We now count on the leadership and commanders to respect it while ensuring that aid workers are given unrestricted access to those in need," said Ms. Fore.

Flagging that South Sudan was the first country she visited as UNICEF chief, she concluded by saying: "I saw for myself how harmed children have been by the war. They simply cannot endure anymore."



Link to original story on UN News websiteBusiness confidence from Germany is due on Monday, headlining a light day for the European economics news.

At 2.00 am ET, Statistics Finland publishes consumer confidence survey results.

At 3.00 am, Slovakia's consumer confidence survey results are due.

At 4.00 am ET, Germany's Ifo confidence data is due. The business climate index is seen rising to 101.8 in August from 101.7 a month ago.

The current conditions indicator is forecast to remain unchanged at 105.3, while the expectations index to rise to 98.5 from 98.2 a month ago.

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.Berkshire Hathaway is reportedly planning to buy stakes in India's digital payment platform Paytm. The Economic Times reported that the talks are on and Warren Buffett's company is planning to invest up to $357 million. Paytm, owned by One97, is probably the largest e-commerce payment and digital wallet platform in India.

According to ET, the deal might value Paytm at more than $10 billion.

The digital wallet platform was founded in 2010 by Vijay Shekhar Sharma. The payment app that uses bar code is highly popular in India and was downloaded in more than 218 million devices by March 2018.

The parent company One97 Communications Ltd reported a revenue of INR 813.88 crore in 2017, however it has not revealed whether it made a profit or loss in the financial year. In February,2018 it has reported more than $20 billion in gross transaction value compared to $5 billion in the previous year.

With the support of Alibaba, Paytm has raised $1.4 billion from Softbank of Japan.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business NewsThe European ended the first day of the new trading week in the green. Traders continued to react positively to dovish comments from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell last week. Investors were also encouraged by the stronger than expected German confidence data.

France's government reduced its growth projection for next year and the 2019 budget will be based on the new forecast, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche.

The government forecast the to expand 1.7 percent in 2019 instead of 1.9 percent projected earlier.

Nonetheless, he said France is committed to cut taxes and rein in public spending. The government unveils its 2019 budget at the end of September.

The pan-European Stoxx Europe 600 index advanced 0.52 percent. The Euro Stoxx 50 index of eurozone blue chip stocks increased 0.84 percent, while the Stoxx Europe 50 index, which includes some major U.K. companies, added 0.40 percent.

The DAX of Germany climbed 1.16 percent and the CAC of France rose 0.86 percent. The SMI of Switzerland finished higher by 0.51 percent and the FTSE 100 of the U.K. was closed for a holiday.

In Frankfurt, Metro soared 12.23 percent after Ceconomy announced that it is considering selling a stake in the German retailer to an investor group.

Evotec advanced 3.12 percent after it joined hands with Centogene AG for joint drug discovery projects to treat rare genetic diseases.

Germany's business confidence strengthened to a six-month high in August, weathering geopolitical risks and trade tensions.

The business sentiment indicator rose more-than-expected to 103.8 in August from 101.7 in July, survey results from the Mannheim-based Ifo Institute showed Monday. This was the highest score since February and well above the expected score of 101.8.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market AnalysisThe Swiss stock market got off to a positive start Monday, but pared its gains during the first half of the session. However, the market staged a recovery in the afternoon and finished just shy of its intraday high.

Traders continued to react positively to dovish comments from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell last week. Investors were also encouraged by the stronger than expected German confidence data.

The Swiss Market Index increased by 0.51 percent Monday and finished at 9,098.70. The Swiss Leader Index climbed 0.66 percent and the Swiss Performance Index added 0.52 percent.

The index heavyweights all finished with small gains. Roche advanced 0.6 percent and Nestle added 0.1 percent. Novartis also gained 0.1 percent after it received approval from the European Commission for its leukemia treatment Kymriah.

Sika was the top performing stock of the session, with an increase of 2.4 percent. Geberit gained 1.5 percent and Adecco added 1 percent.

ABB finished higher by 1.1 percent. Swiss newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft reported over the weekend that ABB will not sell its power grid unit.

Richemont climbed 1.1 percent and rival Swatch Group added 0.9 percent.

Credit Suisse increased 0.8 percent and UBS rose 0.7 percent. Meanwhile, Julius Baer slid 0.3 percent.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market AnalysisArmy inflicts on Saudi-paid mercenaries heavy losses during 24 past hours [27/August/2018] PROVINCES, Aug. 28 (Saba)  The army supported by the popular forces during the 24 past hours inflicted on the Saudi-paid mercenaries heavy losses in various fronts-lines during Yemeni drones airstrikes, shelling on the gathering and repelling infiltration, a military official told Saba.







In Bayda, the air force of army launched several drones airstrikes on the a meeting of the leadership of the mercenaries in Jouribat.







In Jawf, dozens of the Saudi-paid mercenaries were killed and injured during their failed infiltration in Ham area.







In Khaba wa Shaaf district, the artillery shelled the mercenaries' fortifications and gatherings and destroyed a military vehicle of the mercenaries in Khalifeen area, killing its crew's members.







In Lahj, the army's snipers units killed and injured at least seven Saudi-paid mercenaries in Karesh district.







In Najarn, the army missile forces launched a Zizlal-1 ballistic missile on the gathering of the Saudi soldiers and the military vehicles in Housn Hamad.







The rocketry fired on the mercenaries' gatherings in Rakabat al-Khashba and inflicted among their ranks heavy human and material losses.







The army captured several hills in Ajasher desert, killing and wounding dozens of the mercenaries and destroying two military vehicles belonging to them, which led to kill its crew's members.







The artillery shelled the mercenaries gathering and their mercenaries in Ajasher.











Ahmed Al-Mutawakel













SabaNational Alliance Parties calls for international action against Saudi aggression on Yemen

[27/August/2018]

SANAA ,Aug 27 (Saba)  The National Democratic Alliance parties, parliaments, Arab, Islamic and international have called for international community's intervention to stop Saudi-led coalition's aggression on Yemen.



The Saudi war and its blockade have left 22 million people in need of humanitarian aid.



The Arab and Islamic parties and international human rights organizations demanded to condemn the crimes of Yemen and uncover the perpetrators.



The statement also called the international and humanitarian organizations, the United Nations to break their silence.



The National Alliance parties praised the steadfastness of the Yemeni people, stressing the importance of continued the steadfastness and supply the fronts with money and men.











Mona Zaid

SabaPresidential bureau director visit army's, popular forces' fighters in Dhalea [27/August/2018] DALEA, Aug. 27 (Saba)  Presidential bureau director Ahmed Hamed on Sunday paid visit to the fighters of the army and the popular forces in the fronts-lines of Mouris of Dhalea province.







He inspected their condition praising their legendary steadfastness in confortation with the forces of the US-backed Saudi-led aggression coalition, until achieving the Homeland victory.







Hamed congratulate the heroes fighters on the occasion of Eid al-Adha, and transmitted those of the political and revolutionist leadership to them.







Ahmed Al-Mutawakel



Presidential bureau director visit army's, popular forces' fighters in Dhalea



DALEA, Aug. 27 (Saba)  Presidential bureau director Ahmed Hamed on Sunday paid visit to the fighters of the army and the popular forces in the fronts-lines of Mouris of Dhalea district.







He inspected their condition praising their legendry steadfastness in confortation with the forces of the US-backed Saudi-led aggression coalition, until achieving the Homeland victory.







Hamed congratulate the heroes fighters on the occasion of Eid al-Adha, and transmitted those of the political and revolutionist leadership to them.











Ahmed Al-Mutawakel





SabaIn the lead up to Miss Samoa pageant, Savaii will kick-start the Teuila Festival with some tropical glamour by holding a fashion market day at Amoa Resort.

Manager for Amoa resort, Elisabeth Siaosi, said that Savaiians love fashion and when they need something special to wear, it usually involves a trip to Apia.

But this time, they want to bring town fashion to the big island in the spirit of celebrating the 2018 Miss Samoa pageant.

Amoa is proudly Savaiian and we want just as much as the next person for Savaii to have access the quality food & hospitality that is now on offer in Samoa.

For special events such as the Miss Samoa Pageant coming to town naturally we wanted this to include top fashion too. Agreed the fashion market day its a little different to a normal day in the resort but it will be lots of fun we are all looking forward to it.

Who wouldnt want to spend a day amongst Samoas top labels in fashion and accessories? she said.

The confirmed designers who will be heading over to Savaii for the Fashion Market Day are Mareko (tropical wear), Kuki Samoa (hand printed fabric), House 888 boutique (formal wear) and Nelly Samoa (Samoan-made jewelry and seis).

Founder of Kuki Samoa, Maria Leota, said this was an opportunity for their company to meet and greet their Savaiian following. Typically, Savaii is not considered a significant market for fashion, but Maria said they are excited to attend,

Its not about the money. I have had so many Facebook fans from Savaii messaging me asking when are we coming to Savaii and saying we are too far away. I think its not fair on them and my husband is from Savaii so my heart is always there.

To the people who have been following us from the beginning, so this event will give them an opportunity to rock up on a Saturday and finally meet the creator and have a chat and a chance to buy material, she said.

The makers of bespoke island jewelry, Nelly Samoa, also jumped at the opportunity to meet and cater to their Savaiian fan base.

People always comment under pictures of our jewelry on Facebook and they say that they wish we could come to Savaii. Its definitely an idea we have had before and there were plans to go around Savaii but we got so busy with our customers here, said Arlene.

Arlene says that Nelly while they anticipate a small market in Savaii, it has not deterred them from going all out with special pieces especially designed for the event and that they can expect some unique pieces on the day.

We are always testing new markets so we dont mind if we dont sell as much as we do here. We are definitely looking forward to going over and we have been working hard with our items we will taking with us.

Maria Leota said she hopes the fashion market becomes an annual event for the big island,

I hope that the others will join next time and if they hold another fashion market next year I hope that it will grow and kick start something for Savaii.

Im looking forward to meeting everyone and its the first time for us to be in Savaii so Im actually quite excited to go over, she added.

The Savaii Fashion market will be held at Amoa Resort on Saturday September 1 from 8.00 am to 5.00 pm and has a $5 cover charge.The new location for the Miss Samoa Pageant 2018 has sparked hope for the people of Savaii.

Meet Eni Too, a business woman from the villages of Sapapalii and Samata, who said that this is a great platform to market her products as well as profiling other businesses on the big island.

Too is certain that such event inspires business people like herself to be more creative and also to build local talents with the materials they make.

Having the Miss Samoa to be hosted here in Savaii, it is a bonus for our people. It is a good exposure for business people like me to be able to earn more than what we usually make on the daily basis.

It is very rare for businesses, in Savaii, to earn much income for the reason that there are barely any customers. The only time which will be very busy for us is during special occasions such as white Sunday. Most of the people live far away from Salelologa and it is only during those events they will come here.

I sew clothing for a living and make handicrafts on the other hand. It is something that I love to do as a business woman.

Most importantly for her, the Miss Samoa will make a difference to the livelihoods of the people of Savaii to be able to provide for their families.

All of the money that we make is distributed to the welfare of our children, the commitment we have to the village, church and what is left will be spent on buying what we need for the business.

Most of the people here rely on the plantation, homemade goods such as cocoa and handicrafts that they make to earn a living. Searching for job opportunities in Savaii is difficult and it is the reason most people migrate to Upolu.

Having the pageant held here will be noticed by most business people and want to expand here or so, we would never know, Too said.

For seven years she has worked to develop her block at the market but this has been the very first big event to happen and she is excited to be a part of it.

On second thought it also helps me build contacts in the sense that people will be aware of what I sell and to be able to export things to Upolu. This is not only going to benefit my business but also other consumers that are based in Savaii, it is a way to develop and expand what we have established.

In my opinion it will be good if we are going to be able to set up our stalls somewhere close to the venue market our goods and to attract as many buyers. Savaii is slow in terms of having our goods being sold. In a day when there are buyers we would make $300 but on special occasions the income which we receive is around $2,000.

I worked for a sewing business in Apia and then returned to Savaii in 2013. It was the year when everything began for me. Humble beginnings and it was not easy.

She adds the Miss Samoa will be an eye opener for not only the people of Savaii but also those who will be visiting their homeland.

There is a cliche that is often used which that goes whats good for Upolu is good for Savaii but that has not been the case for us in the past years. To have the Miss Samoa here it makes that saying true.

Everything that I sell here portrays our culture and the people of Samoa through the patterns of the clothing that I have made, the handicrafts that have been carved and painted. I could even make tablemats and mats.

This allows people to get a clear understanding of us as Samoans and also witness many of the historical sites in Savaii.

Mrs Too mentioned some of the challenges that some of the people in Savaii undergo due to the lack of advertisement.

We are hearing people say that the Miss Samoa will be held here and it is time for us to start preparing more clothing and handicrafts for I know there will be more buyers and people coming here to our island.

I dont have a television which is the reason we are behind with everything that is happening in Apia. I am aware that the Miss Samoa is held here but with what will be happening over the time that they will be here I am not so sure.Five Prime Ministers in five years. Thats an interesting statistic folks, whichever way you look at it.

While it makes for some great headlines and one-liner jokes, from the perspective of an outsider looking in, the revolving door that is the Australian Prime Minister role is nothing but a bizarre game of musical chairs.

You blink and you miss it.

Australia is without a doubt becoming far more famous for changing their Prime Minister than anything else. Who was the previous one again? Goodness weve already forgotten. I just hope also we remember the name of the new one after a few years.

The constant changes at the top are certainly far more interesting than the Wallabies poor form of late, but then lets not go there.

From what weve been told, differences over finding an effective approach to tackle global warming go to the heart of the divisions between the conservative and moderate sections within the Liberal Party, which led to the change last week.

Here in this part of the world, we keep a very keen eye on the issue of climate change and global warming since its an issue that directly affects all of us. And as we continue to highlight our plight in terms of climate change, we look to our bigger neighbours like Australia for leadership and assistance.

Which is why the developments in Canberra during the past few weeks have certainly been interesting.

Still, the idea that Australia changes its Prime Minister just about every other year is fascinating. The trend started in 2010 when then Prime Minister Kevin Rudds deputy, Julia Gillard, called a challenge and garnered enough support from Labor Party to take the job. Since then, our poor children who learn general knowledge in school, are having a hard time trying to keep up with ever changing answer to the question of who is Australias Prime Minister?

Another interesting fact is that not a single prime minister has succeeded in serving a full term since John Howard, who lost the 2007 election to Rudd. Incredible.

The questions surrounding the issue of political stability, let alone party stability, cannot be ignored. Why is it that Australian politicians appear unable to keep it together?

An article titled Why Australia has had 6 prime ministers in the last 8 years written by one Eric Stober makes some interesting points. One reason Australia seemingly has a revolving door for prime ministers is because of the nature of its parliamentary system, the article says.

In Australia it is the old British system, where if your caucus members want to undo you, they can and they can appoint whoever they want, Nelson Wiseman, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, is quoted as saying.

As opposed to Canadas parliamentary system, in which the partys members elect the partys leader, in Australia it is the caucus that determines the leader. The process to replace the leader is as simple as having a petition signed by the majority of the partys lawmakers, which triggers a leadership ballot.

This is exactly what happened last week. Whats more, the process has allowed a series of political coups over the past decade, with three other sitting prime ministers undone by party rivals.

Today, Scott Morrisons name is in the history books as Australias newest Prime Minister. He won a leadership contest within the ruling Liberal Party, beating Peter Dutton to become Australias 30th Prime Minister and their sixth in 11 years. How long will he last? And can he hold on until the country goes to the polls? Who knows. Given the fragile nature of Australian politics today, anything can happen.

Which brings us to Samoa. Perhaps Mr. Morrison might want to find some time this week to have coffee with our Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, who can give him some tips on political stability and how to remain Prime Minister for a long time. That coffee appointment can happen, as Tuilaepa is travelling to Australia mid-week and will be addressing the Lowy Institute this Thursday.

You see, not only has the H.R.P.P. governed Samoa for close to 40 years, but Tuilaepa has held the Prime Ministers job for 20 of those years. Its an incredible feat, one Mr. Morrison should get some tips from Tuilaepa on how to achieve.

Thats of course if Australia doesnt change its Prime Minister again tomorrow!

Have a great Tuesday Samoa, God bless!Samoans have been urged to take advantage of the free specialist medical services offered by a visiting Interplast plastic and reconstructive surgery team from Australia and New Zealand.

The team of medical specialists will be based at the Tupua Tamasese Meaole hospital and can treat patients with medical conditions such as cleft lip and palate, scarring from burns, hand injuries and tumours.

Patients with these medical conditions should contact the surgical unit at the T.T.M hospital for an appointment.

The interplast medical teams trip to Samoa is funded by the Australian government and Rotary clubs in Australia and New Zealand and has been visiting Samoa since 1983.

According to the senior programme coordinator for Interplast organization, Thomas Loporto, their teams have encountered urgent and extreme cases in Samoa in the past, which are rarely seen in Australia.

He added that it is important for their message to reach the rural areas, where based on their experience most of the cases came from.

One example is scrotum filariasis which in some patients in Samoa is left unattended for many years.

These sort of cases tend to be of patients that come from the rural areas, and the main reason cases become urgent and extreme is that treatment is sought late, and often those in the rural areas are not made aware of our visits.

The message of our visits just doesnt always reach those in the more remote parts of Samoa and having our visit promoted through the local media is one way of addressing this problem, he said.

The Interplast medical team relies on their partners at the T.T.M hospital to ensure that the visit is promoted sufficiently across the country and that the patients seen on prior visits are contacted and re-booked for follow-ups.

In the past, Mr Loporto said they performed 30 plus operations with more than 50 people consulted and reviewed during the one-week visit.

When asked whether their team is able to meet the demand, he said there were times when they had to postpone the operations to the next day. But the team will strive to work hard and to attend to as many patients as possible, he added.

At times our teams have had to postpone operations until the next visit due to the high demand. They are there to serve the patients of Samoa as well as possible. It is important to bear in mind that the type of cases that are present during the week also impacts the total number of operations carried out, as the more complex cases generally take up more operating time than some of the simpler procedures.

In addition to the surgical tasks, the Interplast team will also provide theatre training to local staff and work closely with their local counterparts (surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses and physiotherapists) to ensure that the skills transfer occurs.

The Interplast medical team will conduct a consultation clinic next Monday September 3 at 8.30 a.m. at the outpatient clinic at the T.T.M hospital. Plastic and reconstructive surgery will be done at the T.T.M hospital September 4-7.

To make an appointment to see the Interplast team at the hospital contact Dr. Aleki Fuimaono or Dr Petueli Emose at the surgical unit on telephone +685 66600.Two nurses charged in connection with the deaths of two toddlers in Savaii last month appeared before the Supreme Court yesterday.

Luse Emo Tauvale and Leutogi Teo appeared before His Honour Chief Justice, Patu Tiava'asue Falefatu Sapolu.

Leone Sua-Mailo, of the Office of the Attorney General, made an application to the Court for a one-week adjournment to enable the prosecution to finalise the charges.

Chief Justice Patu granted the application and said the bail conditions will remain the same.

The matter against you has been adjourned to next week Monday at 10 in the morning upon application from the prosecution.

They have asked for a one-week adjournment to finalise the charges. Therefore, this matter is adjourned to next week Monday 3rd of September."Two visiting surgeons have claimed that some of their prized possessions have been stolen in just over 24 hours  among them a laptop holding over 20 years of medical records.

Doctors David Weber and Panaia Junior Faumuina landed in Samoa last Friday to hold open ear, nose and throat clinics and to give an educational talk to local general practitioners.

But on their first night in Samoa, Dr. Weber claimed that his laptop bag was stolen.

He claims it was stolen from his hotel room located on the outskirts of the Apia Township.

The hotel declined to comment last night but confirmed that the matter is being investigated by the Police.

It was not possible to get a comment from the Police yesterday.

But Dr. Weber told the Samoa Observer the bag contained not only all his valuable electronics, but the most important thing a doctor holds  his medical diploma, certification with the American Medical Board and the New Zealand Medical Council where he currently practices.

Dr. Weber says his laptop also holds more than 20 years of medical records, case photos from his time in the military, and close to 100 hours of medical lectures and educational materials.

His voice trails off as he lists his stolen belongings.

Oh my goodness there is just so much stuff on there.

When he realised his bag was missing, Dr. Weber went to reception for help, and was asked if he was sure the laptop bag even made it to the hotel room.

What can you say? said Dr Weber.

Dr. Weber, Dr. Faumuina and his wife Norma Ryan drove out to the airport to confirm the bag came with the doctor to the hotel room.

And sure enough, airport security reviewed their C.C.T.V. footage and the group watched Dr. Weber carry his laptop bag to the car.

The next night, Dr. Faumuina went to a local restaurant with his brother for dinner. When they returned to the car, the doctors bag was gone, and with it his passport, wallet, phone and $2,000 tala cash.

Im not scared, but it is annoying. It is quite an experience, said Dr. Weber.

Everything that really matters got stolen in a 24-hour period. I have my socks, but I dont have my electronics.

Mr. Weber is offering a reward of $500 tala to anyone who returns the laptop to him.

They can call the cellphone 759-9279.Malele Paulo popularly known as King Faipopo on Facebook has challenged Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi to come and get me.

Responding to a statement issued last week by the Office of the Prime Minister for the authorities to begin the process to bring him back to Samoa, Malele said he is not afraid of the actions taken by the Prime Minister.

I aint scared of anyone on this earth Tuilaepa Sailele. Dont try and scare me because I am not afraid of you and I have said it so many times I am only scared of God.

I have apologised to the country but you did not reply to my apology. I apologise to the country not you and you did not respond.

You said the police will come and arrest King Faipopo so come and get me I am waiting, he said in a video, which was sent to Samoa Observer.

Malele said he is also ready to face the Prime Minister in court.

I only ask God for my forgiveness. Im not hiding but Tuilaepa come and get me. Whether you are not happy or angry but the truth hurts and I am ready to come Tuilaepa, send me those police or you come with your government and handcuff my hands and lets go.

The Prime Minister, in a statement last week, said he has directed the Office of the Attorney General and the police to begin the process to extradite Malele from Australia.Photo: The Minister of Shipping, Hon, Asi Eikeni, (right) with shipping officials pose for the camera on the deck of the Puleono upon the barges arrival on Monday afternoon. From left: Mr. Rasmus Sieg, general manager of Samoa shipping services; Mr John Bardsley, the Australian captain who brought the barge over; Pule Lameko, manager of WSSC; and a government official.

To mark the 40th Anniversary of the Samoa Observer, a series of selected articles printed over the last 40 years will be re-published in the next two weeks, to show our readers the issues covered by this newspaper over the years and the personalities that made the headlines.

First Published: 14 September 1978.

The ever talked about queen of the Pacific, the Queen Salamasina, will begin a regular once-a-week trip to Salelologa starting next Tuesday. At last! Poor queen, she has roughly been pulled out of her Tuesday voyage to American Samoa so that she could ply east.

She retains her Thursday and Sunday runs to Pago and this has been aptly made to coincide with the arrival of the WSSCs new barge, the Puleono. The Puleono arrived on Monday. On Saturday it begins ferrying to Salelologa alongside her sister, the Limulimutau.

So next week on Tuesday, Salelologa will marvel that all the WSSCs three ships sail right up its doorstep one after the other.

When the multi-million tala Salamasina arrived, a gift from Australia for the Savaii service, a lavish feast was put on at the Salelologa wharf . So it came as no surprise that the arrival of the Puleono was heralded with no fanfare. Who would entertain the knowledge that the Puleono might be later on pulled out for some other service like for instance, delivering nuts to the South Pole?

As it turned out, only the Minister of Shipping, Hon. Asi Eikeni, Pule Lameko, manager of WSSC, and a few other were at the wharf to welcome the Puleono Monday afternoon when it arrived.

My guess is that Pule was there for one other reason: to make sure his name was splashed across the ships bow. Quipped Asi to Pule: Hadnt been for the ono at the end of the barges name, you would have a ship all for yourself.

The comment was naturally well-received with a giggle, an embarrassed laugh and more giggles.

No doubt Asis other concern while awaiting the barge on the wharf was to make sure that two containers containing his furniture from Singapore were on the barge. The containers, red and huge, were on the barge alright. They were released Monday night at about ten.

So all in all, the ferry service to Savaii might now be slightly better. Lets hope so. And with the opening soon of the ramp at the Apia wharf which would load and unload vehicles, the ferry service would be even vastly improved. Lets hope so.

Starting next week, the Queen Salamasina would be bringing vehicles over from American Samoa. The vehicles would have to be steamed clean on arrival here, said Pule.

Who would pay the steam-cleaning costs? We are, said Pule. But the idea is that steam-cleaning costs go into the freight charge, so at the end, the customer is the ignorant payer. But business is business, so the business people say.

I wonder what the small man is allowed to say?

Since I, a true lout, has allowed himself to have a say in the matter, I assure that I wont rest easy until someone steps up to be patted on the back.At the age of 14, Zozo Palolosekope of Maota is keen on helping her family with their everyday survival.

In an interview with the Samoa Observer, she said she usually sells bongo and cans of soda at the Salelologa Wharf with other children, some who are younger than her, to support her family, especially her mother.

She has seven siblings and shes the sixth child.

I attend school at Salelologa but this is our way of earning money and also for me and my siblings to go to school. I do this before and after school. I would come as early as 3 oclock in the morning to sell my Koko Samoa and bongos, Zozo said.

When I know I have enough on that day for our lunches at school then I go home and get ready for school and after school I will bring bongos and cans of soda.

She said none of her family members is employed and the $200 she makes every day she gives to her parents to financially support them.

Zozo explained her father, who used to be a fireman in Apia, now works their plantation while her mother goes fishing.

Im not ashamed to do this because I started selling this when I was just six years old, said Zozo.

If Im lucky enough to get a ride I would catch a ride with someone in the morning, but if not I would ride my bike with my older brother who attends Don Bosco School from Maota to Salelologa.

Then when the 6 oclock ferry leaves, I go home, get ready for school and after school I go home, change and come again here to sell bongos and cans of soda to get money for the next day of school.

I go home after the six oclock ferry arrives and by that time my mother had already come back from fishing then we go home together.

Zozo understands that it is not right for someone her age to sell on the streets, but she said her love for her parents drives her to sell.

I want to work as an engineer at the Samoa Water Authority, she said.

I want to get a lot of money so that I can build a house for my family, especially my parents and its good to work there so my family can get access to water as well without any problem.

I always hear my parents say no pain no gain and that is what I am experiencing at the moment without pain there is no good ending.

Asked for the meaning of her name, Zozo said she was named by their pastor and his wife.

They told me the meaning of my name is happy and I think thats why Im always happy even when I dont like what Im doing, but as long as I am able to help my parents especially my mother I am happy, she said.

I have never been to Upolu and I hope and pray one day I will get a job at the Samoa Water Authority so that I can be able to travel to Upolu and come visit my family in Savaii.Ensuring future media practitioners and journalists are exposed to covering community development in the rural areas has always been the aim of the N.U.S. Media and Journalism class field trip every year.

Ranging from finding good sources to writing news about certain events or profiling a community are some of the key elements to connecting student journalists of what is being taught in the classroom and the real world.

The study field trip of the Media and Journalism has exposed students to the challenges that they face while being a journalist.

A report of different news items are to be prepared by all students and to be submitted before every deadline  which is immediately after an assignment on site or for production materials to be submitted on the same week.

The tour programme of the media and journalism department was planned for weeks. It is a journey from Upolu to Savaii. For the first time, the trip is held for four days due to a range of topics being covered by both diploma and degree students.

On the 24th August 2018, we went around the island collecting news items and witnessing each scene.

We covered stories at Tafua about the Coconut Oil and the Crater in between. Everyone participated in both events even though few students are responsible to write news about it.

It was a great experience for the students to actually broaden their knowledge and ability of writing news in a form of print news and filming. The aim of choosing the stories of Tafua was to find out how the economy of Savaii grows from small family business and how the village benefits from the crater.

The second story we covered was at Salelologa, interviewing owners of small business owners on their thoughts of Savaii hosting the Miss Samoa Pageant and how it impacts on them.

It was recalled that everyone was excited and looking forward to attend the Miss Samoa Pageant. It also motivates them to produce more to cater for the tourist and people of both islands, with the intention to earn more income.

It was a long day interviewing people and taking shots at particular scenes and the tour decided to have a lunch break at Jet Over Hotel. We had a great time sharing experiences while enjoying our delicious meal. After an hour break we headed to Asaga village for an update on the launching of Asagas new beach fale. We discover different culture businesses and how they can contribute in the economy growth of Savaii.

It has come to the end of the last story for the day and we headed back to Silias Lagoon Motel where the tours are camping. It was an enjoyable moment to erase classroom boredom and creating bond with people we meet on the way.

The expected outcome for this tour includes students being enthusiastic in what they do and be comfortable in approaching their source. On the other hand, the student is also expected to write stories of their own that can influence the mind of the public. At the end of the field trip everyone should be aware of what to do in a real life situation as a journalist, reporting on different types of news story. The field trip also helps enhance communication skills of each media students and prepared them for future career.MOSCOW (AP)  A Moscow court sentenced Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Monday to a month in jail for an unsanctioned protest, a move that puts President Vladimir Putin's most prominent political rival behind bars and not in the streets for the next nationwide anti-government protest.

Navalny's arrest Saturday outside his home came as a surprise, since police were detaining him over a protest rally held in January. Navalny has been jailed multiple times for organizing demonstrations, but that typically happens soon after the event.

Navalny has called for nationwide rallies on Sept. 9 to protest the Russian government's plans to raise the retirement age for both men and women. The issue has created widespread outrage, uniting Russians with widely varying political views against the proposal.

After the Tverskoy district court ruled Monday to put Navalny in custody for 30 days, he urged his supporters to still take to the streets for the pension protest. In a tweet posted shortly after the ruling, Navalny said the Kremlin "shouldn't think that my arrest changes anything."

Navalny rose to prominence thanks to his investigations into official corruption. On Friday he published another investigation, alleging that at least $29 million had been stolen in procurement contracts for Russia's National Guard, which is headed by Putin's former bodyguard, Viktor Zolotov.The bill that would revise how California regulates the state power grid was amended late last week, prompting a fresh round of debate over the fate of the legislation.

The new language posted online Saturday gives lawmakers nine months to consider how specifically the California Energy Commission would expand the electric grid to as many as 14 western states.

The amendments also do away with a requirement that additional renewable-energy sources be constructed in California, a section that was added early this year to win support from organized labor.

The changes came as the state Legislature scrambles to consider hundreds of bills before the legislative session expires Friday. They also came even though a Senate analysis is unable to say whether the proposal would raise or lower utility rates.

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Sen. Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, the Senate leader who will decide whether the bill will advance to a floor vote, did not respond Monday to questions about the changes. Assemblyman Chris Holden, D-Pasadena, who authored the bill, also did not respond to questions.

But supporters of the expanded-grid concept said the amendments will help convince wavering lawmakers to support the so-called regional grid.

We think the amendments are improvements to the bill and will improve its prospects further, said Ralph Cavanagh, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. The amendment guarantees that the California Legislature will have a full opportunity to review and evaluate the final governance proposal.

Cavanagh and other supporters say expanding the state power grid into a multistate network will improve efficiency and allow California to sell excess solar and wind power to other states.

Opponents say the plan is fatally flawed because it would do away with Californias direct oversight of its own power grid and turn regulation over to Trump administration appointees who are less committed to renewable energy sources.

The nine-month review provision does little to give lawmakers control over what the Energy Commission eventually develops as a new governance model for the proposed regional grid, they said.

The new proposal is just a heads up -- we filed a report, said Barry Moline of the California Municipal Utilities Association. It shuts out forever the California Legislature from future grid decisions. These amendments do nothing beneficial, may be misleading, and are like putting lipstick on a pig.

The multistate grid will permit power industry insiders to import less climate-friendly electricity like coal and natural gas-generated power into California and bill ratepayers the cost of new transmission lines, Moline said.

This will allow private companies outside California to build thousands of miles of transmission lines to benefit other states and hand Californians billions of dollars in higher bills, he said.

Jon Wellinghoff, a former federal energy regulator who has been lobbying to pass the regional-grid plan, called the 270-day provision a fair compromise for lawmakers worried about not being in a position to respond to the energy commission plan.

I know the legislature was concerned that the energy commission could act alone, he said.

But Loretta Lynch, who served as the California Public Utilities Commission president during the 2001 energy crisis, said the nine-month notification provision does not resolve the issue of turning over control of the power grid to out-of-state special interests.

It does not actually give legislators a full and fair opportunity to review what the energy commission comes up with, Lynch said. It puts a ticking clock on the legislature and it will jam up the new governor.

The western grid idea has been a top priority of Gov. Jerry Brown for the past three years. Similar bills were defeated in 2016 and 2017 because lawmakers were afraid of unintended consequences related to giving up state authority to appoint board members of the grid manager, known as the California Independent System Operator or CAISO.

Under the Holden bill, Assembly Bill 813, CAISO would join a regional body that would manage electricity flow across as many as 14 states. The California governor would lose the ability to appoint CAISO board members.

The bill directs the energy commission to develop a governance model over the next two years, then notify the Governors Office and legislature. No additional vote would be required.

The energy commission said it would cost $37,500 to implement the law  an amount opponents said showed that the review would be perfunctory. Supporters said any additional costs could come from the existing energy commission budget

Earlier this month, a state Senate analysis concluded that there was not enough detail in the legislation to determine whether the proposal would save utility consumers money -- or raise electricity rates like the time state lawmakers deregulated the California electricity market.

In the near term, the costs associated with implementing this bill for involved departments are fairly straightforward, the analysis concluded. However, the ultimate fiscal effect on the state as a utility ratepayer is less clear. Various studies exist that suggest both utility rate increases as well as potential savings.

The bill faces a Friday deadline to pass or fail.

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Horton Plazas 900,000 square foot downtown retail center was purchased for $175 million, according to information filed with the county assessors office.

The plaza, which opened in 1985, was sold Thursday to real estate investment firm Stockdale Capital Partners, as first reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Four deeds were recorded, transferring portions of the property to four different LLCs  SCP Horton Owner 1, 2, 3 and 4 LLC  according to county records, which were filed late Friday afternoon.

The sales price was not disclosed by Stockdale, but a total purchase price can be calculated using the documentary transfer tax paid by the developer.

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As the centers new owner, Stockdale envisions the plaza as an ultra-modern office campus geared toward top technology firms. The developer is calling the future work site, The Campus at Horton and plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars more into its transformation.

Stockdale paid a reasonable price for the property, said Nathan Moeder, principal of London Moeder Advisors. Moeder based his assessment on the total development potential, which includes the 900,000 square-foot plaza and a 1.5 million square-foot tower that the real estate firm may consider for future phases.

Its a fair price given how much you can develop on the property and its location, he said.

The existing site contract, which stipulates that the plaza maintain 600,000 square feet of retail space, likely wouldnt have factored too much into negotiations, according to Moeder. He anticipates that Stockdale will be able to successfully work with the city to alter the retail requirements in favor of the firms office ambitions.

Its such a special piece of property in the heart of downtown, Moeder said.

Horton Plaza debuted with an insular Disneyland-meets-Italian-hills vibe that separated it from the surrounding neighborhood, which was considered unsafe at the time. It was seen as a model of urban development until its fortress-like design proved to be a barrier to residents who arrived after the regions urban renaissance. In 2015, Horton drew 9.6 million customers, 27 percent less than the average of previous owner-operator Westfields five other local malls,

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jennifer.vangrove@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1840 Twitter: @jbruin

UPDATES:

3:30 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details.

This article was originally published at 10:50 a.m.Tesla Inc. stock faltered in the first day of trading since Chief Executive Elon Musk announced that the maker of electric cars would remain a publicly traded firm, capping a 2-week saga.

On Friday night, Musk said in a post on Teslas website that major shareholders told the Palo Alto automaker it was better off as a public company and encouraged him to call off his plan to take Tesla private. Musk also said he met with Teslas board of directors Thursday, whose members indicated that they agree.

Tesla stock finished down 1.1% Monday, at $319.27.

Musk tweeted Aug. 7 that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share and that he had funding secured, a bombshell announcement that sent the companys stock soaring. But questions soon arose about who would supply that funding and just how secured it was.

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New details emerged over the weekend about the decision to reverse course.

News reports said members of Teslas board of directors met with financial advisors from Goldman Sachs and private equity firm Silver Lake on Thursday in a conference room at Teslas auto factory in Fremont, Calif. The financial advisors told the board they were confident a deal to take the company private could be made, then left the room, reports said. Musk then told the board he was withdrawing the proposal, according to the Wall Street Journal. It reported that in response, one board member cheered, Woohoo.

Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman was interested in taking part in a Tesla privatization deal, but the Saudis never made a formal proposal, the Journal reported, citing unnamed sources. And people had pointed out to Musk that Saudi Arabias reliance on fossil fuels could clash with Teslas stated mission of expanding clean-energy use, according to the New York Times.

The financial presentation by Goldman Sachs and Silver Lake identified other potential investors, including German automaker Volkswagen, but Musk was suspicious of rival car companies, according to the Journal.

Musk was also concerned about shutting out smaller investors. A photo sent to him this month by an elderly shareholder couple wearing Tesla gear and holding a handwritten sign congratulating him on a production milestone had stuck with him, the Journal reported.

Musk had said earlier his tweet about funding was based on meetings with Saudi Arabias sovereign fund that left him with no question they could strike a deal. But he also said the Saudi support was subject to financial and other due diligence and their internal review process for obtaining approvals, among other conditions.

About a week after the initial announcement, a Fox Business reporter tweeted that the Securities and Exchange Commission sent subpoenas to Tesla about the plans to take the company private, with special emphasis on Musks declaration about securing funding. Legal experts said the issuing of subpoenas could indicate the SEC had opened a formal investigation.

Musk told the New York Times in a tearful interview that the last year was the most difficult and painful of his career. He said that he was working up to 120 hours a week and that friends were really concerned about his health.

Speculation grew that Teslas board of directors would look to hire an executive to run daily operations at Tesla, similar to the role Gwynne Shotwell occupies at Musk-led SpaceX as company president and chief operating officer.

But on Friday night, Musk showed no indication of wanting to diminish his control of the automaker. He said in his blog post that he was incredibly excited to continue leading Tesla as a public company, calling the role a privilege.

samantha.masunaga@latimes.com

Twitter: @smasunaga

UPDATES:

2:05 p.m.: This article was updated with a closing stock price.

11:05 a.m.: This article was updated to include details about a Thursday meeting of the Tesla board of directors.

8:45 a.m.: This article was updated to include more background about Elon Musks plan to take Tesla private and the companys updated stock price.

This article was originally published at 7:10 a.m.In front of a few dozen visitors, Meatball the bear celebrated his sixth year living the good life at Lions Tigers & Bears on Saturday with special recognition, gifts and a cake. .

In late August 2012, Meatball arrived at the Alpine sanctuary following a rescue during which he was found eating a bag of frozen meatballs in the La Canada Flintridge neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Meatball had been filmed in at least two locations and seen swimming in a homeowners pool previously. Meatballs behavior meant he would be captured and placed permanently at a sanctuary  or be put down.

According to Bobbi Brink, who runs Lions Tigers & Bears, euthanasia is often the fate of what U.S. Fish & Wildlife officials call a habituated bear, one that is not afraid to enter areas of human habitation.

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Six years later, Meatball continues to get visitors weekly, including some from his old stomping grounds who come to wish him well, Brink said. Meatballs likeness was even the star of a Rose Bowl Parade Float in 2014.

Brink said that because all the animals at the sanctuary are rescues, their exact date of birth is not known, so birthdays are celebrated on the day of the animals arrival in Alpine.

Lions Tigers & Bears is a federally and state licensed nonprofit rescue facility that provides a safe haven to abused and abandoned exotic animals. The group also tries to educate the public about the exotic animal trade.

Lions Tigers & Bears is a no-kill, no-breed, no-sell facility that allows the animals in its care the opportunity to live out their lives with dignity in a caring and safe environment, Brink said.

karen.pearlman@sduniontribune.comSan Diego has plenty of music festivals, but none are as stylistically diverse as The Carlsbad Music Festival. Friday and Saturday, I heard old time fiddling from Clinton Davis, the genial solo guitar musings of Gyan Riley, and festival organizer Matt McBanes groove-based pieces that fell into the cracks between popular and classical music.

However, the generous portions of contemporary classical music distinguishes Carlsbad Music Festival from everyone else. It was those works on Saturday that left the biggest impressions.

Foremost was a Donnacha Dennehy concert. This Irish composer has an East Coast presence  hes a professor at Princeton  but his compositions are infrequently heard in California.

Three of the four works on the program at The Mission Church explored harmonic overtones that clash with standard piano tuning. In Stainless Staining, pianist Andrew Anderson played against a recorded part in which sampled piano notes were adjusted to these unusual tunings. Propulsive rhythms in both parts locked together in a jubilant dance as the recording moved in and out of tune with Anderson.

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Bulb accomplished a similar mix of high energy and unusual harmonies, but here Dennehy used a violin (Isaac Allen) and cello (Alex Greenbaum) to sound those non-tempered pitches against the piano (Tina Chong). The trio gave Bulb a spirited performance.

The most recent work on Dennehys concert was from 2016, The Weather of It for string quartet. San Diegos Hausmann Quartet brought its usual precision and interpretive zeal to Dennehys substantial composition. It too reveled in the discrepancies between equal-tempered notes and pitches tuned to strange overtones. Unlike Bulb or Stainless Staining, The Weather of It had contrasting sections of slower-paced material to balance out the frenetic sections. The bold energy of Dennehys fast music, with its oscillations of two or three pitches in each part, seemed a musical equivalent to Irish stepdancing  theres lots of motion, but the dancer stays in place.

Accordionist Isaac Schankler premiered his work, Repeat Substance. With the aid of a laptop, Schankler played drones against an almost danceable sprinkling of clicks. His playing was processed through the computer, and in the reverberation of St. Michaels Church, it soon was hard to tell what was electronic and what was unprocessed accordion. For 30 minutes, Repeat Substance alternated between music that flirted with electronica and contemplative ambient washes. It ended intriguingly with Schankler expanding and contracting his accordion  no pitches, just the sound of air blowing through the bellows.

Trumpeter Stephanie Richards and drummer Andrew Munsey debuted a new quintet featuring Joshua White on piano, Brian Walsh on bass clarinet and Dave Tranchina on bass. They were so tight that youd never guess this was their first gig together.

They shifted smoothly from free improvisation to post-bop jazz and back. Richards was an inspiring leader, urging her sidemen on by imparting an edge to her tone, blowing crescendos or with repeated calls. Their compositions were all engaging, including an arrangement of the Lento from Stravinskys beginner piano work, The Five Fingers. Stravinskys rhythms and D major-minor conflicts went out the window, but the melody was transformed into rhapsodic lines that accelerated and slowed down but left the original theme recognizable.

Putting a trumpet and bass clarinet in front of a rhythm section invites comparisons to the Booker Little/Eric Dolphy Quintet. The Richards/Munsey Quintet proved a worthy 21st-century successor, one that already merits more bookings and recordings.

Hertzog is a freelance writer.Heat waves will grow more severe and persistent, shortening the lives of thousands of Californians. Wildfires will burn more of the states forests. The ocean will rise higher and faster, exposing California to billions in damage along the coast.

These are some of the threats California will face from climate change in coming decades, according to a new statewide assessment released Monday by the California Natural Resources Agency.

The projections come as Californians contend with destructive wildfires, brutal heat spells and record ocean temperatures that scientists say have the fingerprints of global warming.

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This year has been kind of a harbinger of potential problems to come, said Daniel Cayan, a climate researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and one of the scientists coordinating the report. The number of extremes that weve seen is consistent with what model projections are pointing to, and theyre giving us an example of what we need to prepare for.

State leaders vowed to act on the research, even as the Trump administration moves to unravel climate change regulations and allow more pollution from cars, trucks and coal-fired power plants.

In California, facts and science still matter, Gov. Jerry Brown said in a statement. These findings are profoundly serious and will continue to guide us as we confront the apocalyptic threat of irreversible climate change.

The states assessment draws on the latest science, including more than 40 new peer-reviewed studies, to project the effects of the continued rise in greenhouse gases on Californias weather, water, ecosystems and people and offer guidance on how officials across the state might adapt.

Its the fourth such report since 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered a climate change assessment as precursor to the Global Warming Solutions Act, the pioneering law California adopted that year to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels.

This latest one for the first time scales down global climate models to project climates effect at the regional level or smaller. That approach is intended to provide local officials on the ground with more relevant, community-level information they can use to prepare.

The difference between the San Joaquin Valley and the nearby coastal or Sierra Nevada mountains is enormous, so we have to have ways to unpack the large-scale global model calculations, Cayan said.

Rising temperatures, deadlier heat waves

California has already warmed 1 to 2 degrees since the beginning of the 20th century as a result of the human-caused buildup of greenhouse gases. That figure could rise to between 5.6 degrees and 8.8 degrees by 2100, depending on the amount and rate of pollution spewed into the atmosphere, according to the report.

Those climbing temperatures could cause 6,700 to 11,300 more heat-related deaths annually in California by midcentury, the assessment found. Such fatalities will dominate economic damage to the state from climate change, costing up to $50 billion a year by midcentury.

Scientists have long projected more intense and longer-lasting heat waves by midcentury but have observed those changes occurring faster than anticipated.

Something that used to happen every 10 years is happening every year, said Rupa Basu, chief of air and epidemiology for the states Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

Reginaldo Ramirez gulps cold water after working in heat that reached 111 degrees in San Bernardino in August 2017. Heat waves will become more persistent, severe and health-threatening in California if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the states report warns. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Adding to the risks, scientists say, are trends toward higher humidity and warmer nights. Such conditions hinder peoples ability to recuperate and raise the likelihood of hospital and emergency room visits for a variety of illnesses, from heat stroke and dehydration to heart attacks, kidney disease, gastrointestinal illness and preterm births.

The report also highlights shortcomings in how authorities classify heat waves and alert the public.

In one study cited in the assessment, researchers identified 19 heat waves that landed more than 11,000 people in the hospital between 1999 and 2000. The National Weather Service issued heat advisories for just six of the events.

That led researchers to devise a new way of identifying heat spells that may fall below established temperature thresholds but pose similar health risks. Such episodes, called heat-health events, are defined not by temperature readings but on the public health effects they cause at the local level, particularly to the elderly, young children and other populations most prone to falling ill or dying from the heat.

Modeling by researchers found those health-threatening heat spells will become a persistent fixture in summer months within a few decades, lasting two weeks longer on average in the Central Valley by midcentury.

More air conditioning could attenuate some of the harm, at least for those who can afford it.

Somewhat counterintuitively, researchers expect the health damage from higher temperatures to be worse in coastal areas with historically milder climates, where people are less acclimated to extreme heat and fewer have air conditioning. Researchers have found heat-related deaths to be less common in hotter, inland regions where more people have air conditioning units in their homes.

Seas rise higher than anticipated

As the ocean continues to warm, Californias coast will face more beach erosion, flooding and storm damage.

Until recently, scientists and state policymakers worked with a projection that sea level rise by the end of this century could amount to about 5.48 feet in California under the worst case scenario. But the latest reports and state policies are now accounting for the extreme possibility that sea level rise could exceed 9 feet.

These broader projections incorporate the potential rapid melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

Even if the sea rose 6.56 feet rather than the higher possible extreme now adopted by the state, more than 250,000 residents, $38 billion in property and 1,400 miles of roads along the coast are at risk of flooding during a severe storm in Southern California, according to a study led by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Among the most vulnerable communities:

San Diego, Coronado, Imperial Beach and National City in San Diego County

Huntington Beach, Seal Beach and Newport Beach in Orange County

Long Beach, Los Angeles and Malibu in Los Angeles County

Almost all of those areas are at lower elevation and were built on former marshes, researchers said. San Diego County has the most wetlands prone to permanent flooding, and Ventura County is most prone to flooding of agricultural land.

Sea level projections are often presented at a global scale thats too abstract, said the researchers, who hope their localized projections help the public better understand whats really at stake when it comes to critical roadways and utilities, businesses and high-value properties.

It highlights the urgency to act now and to manage the coast appropriately, said Patrick Barnard, research director of the USGS Climate Impacts and Coastal Processes Team and a co-author of the study.

One such response is the creation of natural shoreline infrastructure, such as vegetated dunes, native oyster reefs or seagrass beds that help buffer wave action and hold back the encroaching sea, according to a report led by the Nature Conservancy.

At Surfers Point in Ventura County, officials turned an eroding parking lot and collapsing bike path into a cobble beach backed by vegetated dune. It has fended off erosion, widened the beach and become the most visited beach in Ventura County, the report said. During high wave conditions in the winter of 2015-16, no damage occurred at the project site: Wave run-up reached the bike path only where dunes were absent.

Other parts of the local shorelines were not so lucky: Ventura Pier was damaged in the storm and the Pierpoint neighborhood suffered inundation, the report said.

Water supply shifting

Northern California  the source of much of the states water supply  is likely to grow a bit wetter with climate change. But global warming will alter the timing and form of precipitation, making it tougher for the state to hold on to it.

Warmer temperatures mean mountains will get less snow and more rain and the state snowpack  natures reservoir  will melt earlier. That will shorten the season of high stream flows, giving water managers less time to capture the additional water.

Rising sea levels also will increase salinity levels in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the states main transfer point for Northern California supplies headed south. As a result, more freshwater must move through the delta to maintain water quality. And higher temperatures will drive up agricultural water use north of the delta.

Taken together, those effects could reduce delta exports to San Joaquin Valley agriculture and Southland cities by 10% by 2060, researchers found. The amount of water stored in key Northern California reservoirs at the end of the summer season could decline by a quarter.

The good news is that we may have the same amount of water. But it may come in a different form and a different time, said John Andrew, assistant deputy director of the Department of Water Resources. Were going to have to be a much better manager of the resource.

Stand-up paddle boarders at Tioga Lake west of Lee Vining in July 2017. Warmer temperatures from climate change mean Californias mountains will get less snow, more rain and snowpack will melt earlier, making it tougher to capture the water. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

The water world has proposed various responses to expected shifts in Californias hydrology.

Those include modifying reservoir operating rules to allow dam managers to hold on to peak winter flows, which they must now sometimes release to create space for spring snowmelt. Floodwater could be used to recharge the San Joaquin Valleys over-pumped groundwater basins. Existing reservoirs could be expanded and new ones built.

Southern California water agencies want to construct two massive tunnels under the delta to divert high flows from the Sacramento River and transport them to pumping operations that send supplies south. Water districts are also moving to develop more local resources, such as recycled water.

Everybody has their favorite solution, Andrew said. [But] there is no favorite solution. Its all of them in some amount.

The study found that computer modeling showed a wetting trend in Northern California and part of Central California, while most of Central California and Southern California would experience a drying trend by 2060.

Another study released as part of the climate assessment found that, on average, annual precipitation was expected to increase in most parts of the state but that the projected changes were small compared to natural variability  Californias year-to-year precipitation levels swing up and down more than any other state in the lower 48.

More destructive wildfires

As rising temperatures drive more wildfire in California, the greatest increase is expected in the forests of the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascade mountain ranges.

Forest area burned every year could more than double by the end of the century, according to research by UC Merced professor Anthony Westerling.

Climate change will have more of a wildfire effect in mountain forests in the northern two-thirds of the state than in other parts of fire-prone California because those regions are cooler and moister. When mountain regions grow hotter, soil and vegetation dries out more quickly in the summer, fostering conditions conducive to the spread of wildfire.

Sources: Anthony Westerling, UC Merced,International Panel on Climate Change. (Kyle Kim / LA Times Graphics)

Westerling modeled increases in fires of more than 1,000 acres based on two scenarios of global greenhouse gas emissions. Under one scenario, emissions peak and then begin to decline in midcentury. In the second, they continue to climb until late in the century. Under the first scenario, annual average burned forest in much of the Sierra increased by 48% by midcentury and by 120% by centurys end. Under the higher emissions scenario, burned area could surge by as much as 400% by centurys end.

In recent years, bark-beetle infestations killed more than 100 million drought-stressed trees in California. But contrary to conventional wisdom, the study found that in the near term, those dead trees would not significantly increase wildfire.

Westerling cited two reasons for that. When dead needles fall from trees within a few years of a fire, the risk of them fueling an intense blaze drops. And while the dieback is extensive, it is patchy and intermixed with green trees.

Decades from now, when beetle-killed trees fall, the heavy fuel load of downed logs and limbs could increase the risk of mass fires. But Westerling said the effects cant be quantified because there is no historical analogue on which to base the models.

More air conditioning, but lower gas bills

Rising temperatures will increase demand for electricity across the state as more people install and use air conditioners  even in coastal areas where people have traditionally gone without them.

If San Francisco with its pleasant coastal climate gets Fresnos hot climate by end of century, even cool San Franciscans will install window units in existing apartments and new construction will be built with central air conditioning, according to one study included in the states climate assessment.

UC Berkeley environmental economics professor Max Auffhammer, who authored the study that analyzed utility bills for households across the state, found a silver lining: increased electricity demand will be more than offset by reductions in natural gas use for heating as a result of milder winters.

Electricity consumption is going to go up in the summer, he said. But it looks like climate change is going to save many California consumers a bunch of money on their heating bills in the winter.

George Gonzalez, left, and Hector Maldonado, install a solar system on home in Van Nuys in 2016. Higher temperatures and more air conditioning will increase peak electricity demand, according to Californias latest climate assessment. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

More air conditioning will place added strain on the electrical grid by increasing peak demand. To avoid blackouts, utilities will have to make costly upgrades, such as additional generating capacity, substations and energy storage facilities, to meet demand during hot months.

State energy officials said the assessment underscores the urgent need not only for swift global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions but also local actions to protect California from warming thats already threatening people, natural resources and infrastructure.

Were seeing that in the fire situation, were seeing that in sea level rise, were seeing that in heat spells, in declining snowpack, said California Energy Commission Chairman Robert Weisenmiller. The climate is changing now so we need to be adapting our communities.

Read the full assessment 

Read the states summary of the assessment 

tony.barboza@latimes.com

Twitter: @tonybarboza

bettina.boxall@latimes.com

Twitter: @boxall

rosanna.xia@latimes.com

Twitter: @RosannaXiaOlivia Vela sat in the courtyard of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on Sunday as she waited for the 10 a.m. Mass to begin. After a decades-long absence, she said she returned to the church a year and a half ago after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Vela said she is now in recovery and started attending services again because she is so grateful to be alive.

But the 52-year-old nurse is still struggling to reconcile her beliefs with the sex abuse scandals that continue to plague the Catholic Church and the latest news that Pope Francis may have knowingly hid allegations about the now-disgraced American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop in Washington.

Im trying to come back. Im trying to come back, Vela said, sounding weary.

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On the day the clergy sex abuse scandal roiling the Catholic Church lapped at the innermost sanctum of the Vatican, Vela was just one of many Catholics across Southern California wrestling with their personal faith and disappointment with the failings of the institution.

In churches around the Southland, many parishioners said the latest allegation against Pope Francis  leveled by a longtime critic of the pope over his call for social reforms  was capping an already taxing month after revelations in a Pennsylvania grand jury report about decades of abuse and cover-up by predator priests and church officials.

Archbishop Jose Gomez, addressing a crowd of youngsters during a World Youth Day event at the cathedral Sunday, acknowledged that the scandals were causing many believers, especially the young, to consider leaving the church. He assured parishoners that he and other church leaders were committed to reform.

There are young people who have been hurt by many in the church, he said. We are all committed to protecting our young people in all our churches, schools and ministries. But we need your help.

Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu, a theology professor at Loyola Marymount University, said that in the last week, students had been stopping her on campus and messaging her on Facebook from around the country to ask for guidance.

She said she encouraged students to voice their opinions, engage with their parish priest and find their own roles in loving our church and at the same time making it accountable.

Its been a very painful period, playing out in our classrooms and parishes, she said. We are a family that has a broken heart right now, that is in pain.

Melisa Cedillo was one of the students who turned to Gonzalez-Andrieu. The day the Pennsylvania grand jury report was released, Cedillo, a recent graduate, said she furiously started typing a letter to send to the bishops to urge reforms and warn that the church was risking losing young Catholics.

If youre a young Catholic woman, youre seeing the power and impact the #MeToo movement is having in other realms, and you see your own church, and you dont see that, she said.

In his Sunday homily at Our Mother of Good Counsel in Los Feliz, Father Mark Menegatti spoke about priests disappointment with church leadership. His parishioners seemed to appreciate the frank expression, he said.

They want to be good faithful Catholics and still speak up about this, and be upset about this, he said. They want to know that we as the clergy are with them.

Menegatti said he spoke to church-goers about how as Catholics they should not brush this off but struggle with it, however messy and challenging it may be.

Jose Alvarado, 53, was busy browsing the news on his cellphone in the courtyard of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels before Sundays 12:30 p.m. Mass. He said he had read earlier about the allegations against the pope.

Alvarado said he wished Pope Francis had spoken out and taken action sooner against McCarrick, who had a decades-long history of sexual relations with male seminarians and young priests and allegedly attacked an 11-year-old altar boy.

If you dont do anything about it, its going to keep happening, he said.

Alvarado said he was also disgusted by the findings of the Pennsylvania grand jury report, which cited more than 1,000 cases of abuse by priests. But he also said he believed Pope Francis was doing his best to hold the church together and that he hadnt lost his faith.

These kinds of problems wont make me turn my back on the church, he said. Because Im Catholic.

Vela, the nurse, said she felt less secure in her trust in the church she grew up in, attending Mass every Sunday. She said she felt the churchs problems stem from its long history of being a male-dominated organization that for centuries has covered up mens indiscretions and was in need of radical change.

We just dont know how deep the problem lies, she said.

soumya.karlamangla@latimes.com

victoria.kim@latimes.comPolice are searching for a driver suspected of hitting and killing a woman late Sunday or early Monday in Fountain Valley.

The womans body was found at 12:14 a.m. Monday on Warner Avenue west of Bushard Street, according to the Orange County Coroner.

Fountain Valley Police Sgt. Kham Vang said the woman, who has not been identified, was struck by a motorist who fled the scene.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Fountain Valley Police Department at (714) 593-4485.

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hannah.fry@latimes.com

Twitter: @HannahnfryStudents in more than 1,700 classrooms in the San Diego Unified School District wont have air conditioning today, for the first day of school.

As of last week, about 24 percent of classrooms in San Diego Unified, including charter schools, did not have air conditioning, according to the district.

In 51 out of 187 district schools, less than 80 percent of classrooms have air conditioning, said Drew Rollands, San Diego Unifieds chief of physical plant operations. About 20 of those schools are under construction now for air conditioning, he added.

Every San Diego Unified School District classroom will get air conditioning by the end of next summer if construction keeps on schedule, said Samer Naji, a spokesman for the district. Thats slightly earlier than the districts previous estimate of fall 2019.

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Were going as quickly through it as we can, Naji said.

The whole air conditioning effort will end up costing the district $429 million by its completion, Naji said.

It has taken the district this long to install air conditioning partly because it is such a large school system, Naji said. The districts average school building is 48 years old, so many buildings were constructed in a time when air conditioning wasnt considered necessary, Naji said.

It certainly feels like the climate has changed, Naji said. Weve realized weve had a lot more warmer days.

The average San Diego summer temperature has risen 5 degrees since records started being kept in 1874.

San Diego has weathered more hot days in the past four years. In 2014, there were 14 days when temperatures broke 90 degrees. In each of the past two years, there were six days that broke 90 degrees. Prior to 2013, it was the norm to have fewer than three days in a year that broke 90 degrees.

The districts plan used to be that every new classroom built or renovated would get air conditioning. But complaints about hot days in recent years spurred the district to expedite installing air conditioning in every classroom. The districts plan has been to put air conditioning in schools further inland and in the east first, then work westward. The district says it pays for air conditioning installation with bond money from two voter-approved bond measures, Propositions S and Z.

While they wait for air conditioning, students in hot classrooms are asked to bring water bottles and wear lightweight clothes, according to district guidelines.

The district tells teachers that they can use spray bottles to mist students, rearrange class schedules and teach in cooler parts of campus. In some cases, the superintendent can decide to end school early if temperatures reach above 95 degrees and the heat index surpasses 103 degrees during a heat wave. But the district will not call an entire school day off for heat reasons.

Deciding whether to end school early due to hot temperatures is tricky, Rollands said. The district must weigh multiple factors, such as the likelihood that students may be returning to homes that are not air conditioned and the safety and logistics of students going home earlier than scheduled.

We always approach this with a dose of judgment, Rollands said.

Most school districts in San Diego County have had universal air conditioning for a few or more years, typically having used bond money to finance the renovations.

In addition to San Diego Unified, Coronado Unified School District is still working on air conditioning projects. Despite its coastal location, Coronado Unified, too, has had to end school early in the past because of hot temperatures.

The district previously estimated it would cost $21 to $27 million to install air conditioning districtwide. A district committee that was formed to evaluate air conditioning needs will meet next on Sept. 4 to discuss construction work in progress and potential future projects.

Coronado Unified officials did not respond to requests for information about the committee.

Kristen Taketa

Email: kristen.taketa@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @Kristen_TaketaAn Oregon man was arrested for punching an ex-youth pastor during a sex abuse sentencing  and now supporters are raising money in support of the mans heroic actions.

Kevin Patrick Smith, 45, was charged Wednesday with obstructing governmental or judicial administration, disorderly conduct, and fourth-degree assault.

The ex-pastor, 40-year-old Donald Courtney Biggs, was punched in the face and fell to the floor in fetal position, according to the Mail Tribune.

Biggs pleaded guilty to one felony count in February after being accused of secretly recording dozens of underage victims changing, showering and using the bathroom during summer camps and church trips.

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Most of those young women attended the sentencing where the attack took place.

Before Smiths punch in U.S. District Court in Medford, victims opened up on how Biggs actions resulted in a fear of using others bathrooms.

Supporters have launched a GoFundMe praising Smith for doing what every person in that room wanted to.

The Hero punches pedophile GoFundMe has raised over $3,500 and was created to cover any charges he may face and just a good ol thanks for being a hero!

The federal courthouse  the Jackson County courthouse  they do a good job of checking people for weapons and so forth when they enter the facility. However you can never really predict for these things, Medford Police Lieutenant Justin Ivens said of the unexpected courtroom attack.

Ivens said Biggs was sent to the hospital to be medically cleared and checked for injuries.

Prosecutors want Biggs to get more than 15 years of prison time for the secret camera recordings.

The case will be reviewed by the Jackson County District Attorneys office and Biggs sentencing hearing was scheduled to resume Thursday.University of San Diego School of Law has a new scholarship fund for unauthorized immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

Though the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program protects these immigrants from deportation, it does not give them access to federal funding for higher education. USD School of Law hopes that having such a scholarship will enable more DACA recipients to go to law school.

What were trying to do is make sure theyre completely on a level playing field, said Dean Stephen C. Ferruolo.

He noted that DACA recipients can receive some funding for school through the state of California. That aid is limited, he said.

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For many DACA recipients, gathering enough money to get a bachelors can be challenging, let alone a graduate or professional program. In a recent survey of DACA recipients, just over 21 percent said they were working on a degree beyond a bachelors.

If their parents are in the U.S., they are generally not authorized to work, meaning they are often paid under the table with low wages. That limits the amount that their parents can contribute towards their education.

Many DACA recipients use the work permits that come with the deferred action program to pay their way through school.

The law school scholarship is part of a university-wide effort to provide more support to DACA recipients, according to USD.

When the university asked donors to help start a fund for law students with DACA, San Diego attorney John Gomez, who graduated from USD, stepped forward.

I feel compelled as a Christian  and my dad is from Mexico  to offer opportunities and acceptance to kids who through no fault of their own just didnt happen to have been born here, Gomez said. As we look back about the importance of education in our lives, I think we have to recognize that but for the help of others or the support of others, we wouldnt be here today.

No one becomes an attorney alone, he added.

The scholarship will have a minimum of $35,000 over the next six years, accord to USD.

Ferruolo said he hopes the scholarship will grow in coming years to offer more support.

The DACA program itself has an unclear future. The Trump administration moved to end the program last year, but DACA recipients are able to renew their permits as they battle with the federal government in court over the programs fate.

Immigration Videos On Now New developments in family separation case 9:53 On Now A San Diego woman volunteered as a medic in Texas helping migrant families 2:35 On Now Immigration policy protests in Carlsbad nearly cancelled after permit issue 1:38 On Now When children are separated from their parents at the border, here is where they go next On Now Prospects of a deal for 'Dreamers' may hinge on separating Trump from hard-liners on his staff On Now What is DACA? On Now Border wall prototype contractors selected On Now Video: Ukrainian boxer wins asylum in U.S. On Now 30 apprehended after Border Patrol agents discover tunnel On Now Video: Kurdish diaspora prepare to vote on independence

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kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.com, @bgirledukate on TwitterPresident Trump caved to widespread criticism on Monday, ordering all White House flags be flown at half-staff in honor of late Arizona Sen. John McCain after flying them at full-staff earlier in the day.

Trump issued the customary flag proclamation first after veterans groups, Republicans and Democrats rebuked him for failing to honor McCain, who passed away Saturday at 81 after a long battle against brain cancer.

Despite our difference on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCains service to our country, Trump said in his first non-Twitter statement about the Republican war hero.

Trump said he had ordered Vice President Pence to speak at a ceremony honoring McCain at the U.S. Capitol on Friday. He didnt say whether he plans to attend, but McCains family made it clear earlier in the day that the President is not welcome to the funeral on Sunday.

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Flags generally remain at half-staff for someone of McCains stature until the day of burial, but Trump at first didnt issue such a proclamation.

The White House lowered the flags to half-staff on Saturday night, but, without explanation, the flags were back to normal on Monday morning, drawing the ire of McCains supporters.

Remember this image the next time this President talks about disrespecting veterans, former CIA Director Michael Hayden tweeted along with a photo of the White House flag at full-staff.

The flags at other Washington, D.C. landmarks, such as the Capitol and the Washington Monument, were still at half-staff Monday.

The American Legion, one of the nations largest veterans organizations, ripped Trump over his initial flag failure.

On the behalf of The American Legions two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCains death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nations flag be half-staffed through his internment, National Commander Denise Rohan said.

The acrimony between Trump and McCain was well documented.

The President infamously claimed during the 2016 campaign that McCain wasnt a war hero because he likes people who werent captured. McCain spent over five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Over the weekend, Trump turned down a suggestion from White House officials that he release a statement referring to McCain as a hero, The Washington Post reported.

Following the April death of Barbara Bush, Trump had the flags at federal buildings  as well as on public properties  lowered to half-staff, but did not initially lower the flag at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.Facing a federal indictment for misuse of campaign funds, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine) is still the frontrunner in the race for the 50th Congressional District  although with a shrinking advantage over Democratic challenger Ammar Campa-Najjar.

According to a Survey USA poll released Monday, Hunter now has an eight-point lead over his opponent, 47 percent to 39 percent, with 13 percent undecided. The margin of error is plus or minus 5.5 percent.

Rep. Duncan Hunter and wife indicted on fraud and campaign finance charges 

 Facing a federal indictment for misuse of campaign funds, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine) appears to be maintaining his lead over Democratic challenger Ammar Campa-Najjar in the race for the 50th Congressional District  although with an advantage tha

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In the June primary, the top two finishers were Hunter, with 47 percent, and Campa-Najjar at 18 percent.

As the field of candidates has narrowed, Campa-Najjar appears to have consolidated support among Democrats and even potentially picked up backing among some swing voters.

If youre Hunter, you take heart in the finding that most Republicans are standing by you. If youre a Democrat, you take heart that its so close, said Jack Pitney, political science professor at Claremont McKenna College. A lead like this is not very strong.

The findings seemed to bolster the hopes of Campa-Najjars campaign, which released this statement in response to the poll numbers: Polling has consistently found this to be a close and competitive race and we are gaining ground every day as voters learn more about Hunters corruption and egregious behavior.

Hunters campaign didnt immediately return a request for comment.

Hunter, and his wife Margaret, were indicted in federal court Aug. 21 for using more than $250,000 in campaign cash for personal purchases.

The couple pleaded not guilty on Thursday. Hunter and his legal team have called the charges a politically motivated witch hunt.

Hunter  who has reportedly been stripped of his committee assignments  faces dozens of counts for everything from conspiracy to commit wire fraud and falsification of records to aiding and abetting in the prohibited use of campaign contributions.

Still, Campa-Najjar, the son of a Mexican-American mother and a Middle Eastern father, doesnt appear to be an obvious fit for the deeply conservative district.

A staunch environmentalist, hes also the grandson of Muhammed Yusuf al-Najjar, the head of the intelligence wing of the Palestinian political party Fatah, whose members planned the murder of Israeli Olympians in 1972. Yusuf al -Najjar was subsequently assassinated by the Israeli government.

Rep. Duncan Hunter points to his wife and whatever she did in campaign finance scandal 

50th Congressional District candidate Ammar Campa-Najjar spoke outside of Federal Courthouse where his opponent representative Duncan D. Hunter was being arraigned in Federal Court in San Diego (John Gibbins / San Diego Union-Tribune)

The Hunter campaign will likely run attack ads pointing out his opponents family history in coming months, which could siphon away party resources from other close races, such as for the 49th Congressional District, said Thad Kousser, chair of the political science department of UC San Diego.

The Republicans will now have to drop some money on this, Kousser said. Democrats might not win, but it could help them flip the 49th. The mostly likely impact is outside the district.

The 50th district, which Hunter has represented since it was redistricted about five years ago, covers much of East San Diego County, including Ramona, Alpine, Borrego Springs and stretches up to Temecula.

Among Republicans, 77 percent said they were standing behind Hunter, with 72 percent saying the indictment either made no difference or actually increased their support for him.

An indictment is not a conviction, so his supporters are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt while Democrats wont. Carl Luna, a political science professors at San Diego Mesa College

Sixty four percent of Republicans said the charges against him are politically motivated and that they would vote for him even if he were to step down but his name appeared on the ballot.

An indictment is not a conviction, so his supporters are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt while Democrats wont, said Carl Luna, a political science professor at San Diego Mesa College. The mantra of the age is deny and castigate accusers. Hunters playing that game plan.

Questions about the use of campaign funds have swirled around Hunter since 2016 when the Federal Election Commission and the San Diego Union-Tribune began looking into expenditures such as for private school tuition, oral surgery, video games and airfare.

Most people polled said they had known about the allegations of corruption since before last weeks indictment, including 84 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of Democrats.

Allegation of corruption have been here for a while, said Stephen Goggin, political science professor at San Diego State University. Its not sudden, so the indictment itself doesnt change all that much.

Democrats support Campa-Najjar 85 percent to Hunters 8 percent. Independents, also favored Campa-Najjar by 44 percent to Hunters 41 percent. About 14 percent of those with no party preference are still undecided.

Many political analysts agreed that the election could hinge on the level of voter turnout among the political parties.

The Survey USA poll, conducted for the Union-Tribune and 10News, surveyed 539 registered voters, from Aug. 22 to 26, who said they were likely to cast ballots in the race for the 50th Congressional District.

Twitter: @jemersmith

Phone: (619) 293-2234

Email: joshua.smith@sduniontribune.comA sailboat lost its mast and had to be towed away after crashing into the USS Midway Museum on Sunday afternoon, police said.

Someone on the 38-foot vessel as well as a number of witnesses called 911 to report the collision about 2:15 p.m.

Harbor Police officials who investigated the crash said it appeared the boat, called the Sea Esta, got caught on some netting near the top of the old aircraft carrier, which is now a maritime museum.

None of the eight people on the sailboat and no one visiting the museum was injured, Harbor police Sgt. Scott Ferraioli said.

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Craig Wiener, who was visiting San Diego from Orange County specifically to tour the Midway, told an OnScene TV reporter that he was in the anchor room near the bow of the ship when one of his kids said a sailboat was headed straight toward them.

With that, we heard a loud crash and the water splash, he said.

Wiener said he initially thought something fell from the ship. It wasnt until he looked out the window himself and saw a sailboat missing a mast that he realized the crash had happened.

I dont think he realized how tall his mast was. He was too close to the boat and it was too late, Wiener said. It was definitely an exciting day on a tour on the Midway. This was our first time coming here, and what an ending.

Officers do not suspect any criminal behavior led to the crash, and no one on the sailboat was arrested, Ferraioli said.

Twitter: @LAWinkley

(619) 293-1546

lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.comA fire at a two-story mixed-use building early Monday caused an estimated $300,000 of damage in Mission Hills, authorities said.

The fire was reported shortly after 1:15 a.m. at the two-story building on Ibis Street near West Washington Street, San Diego Fire-Rescue spokeswoman Monica Munoz said.

The blaze broke out in what appeared to be a laundry room on the first floor of the structure, SDFD Battalion Chief Mike McBride said. The fire then spread to the second story before crews were able to knock down the flames in around an hour.

The building consists of a residential space on the top floor and a commercial space on the bottom floor, Munoz said.

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No injuries were reported and no other structures were threatened.

The blaze caused an estimated $200,000 in damage to the structure and $100,000 in damage to the contents, Munoz said. The cause of the fire was under investigation.

Twitter: @LAWinkley

(619) 293-1546

lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.comAn elementary school near San Diego State University was locked down Monday morning  the first day of school  while police searched for three carjacking suspects, police said.

The chase started near Broadway and Park in downtown San Diego about 8:15 a.m. when officers tried to pull over a white Prius they suspected of being stolen, police Officer Billy Hernandez said.

The driver of the Prius fled onto north state Route 163, eventually stopping near San Diego State Universitys Tony Gwynn Stadium about 20 minutes later.

The driver and two passengers bolted into a nearby canyon, and Hardy Elementary School on Montezuma Road was locked down while police searched for the suspects.

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The suspects were all located and arrested, one with the assistance of a police dog, police said.

The lockdown at the elementary school was lifted about 9:15 a.m.

A high school and elementary school in National City were also shut down for a short period Monday afternoon due to police activity.

Sweetwater High School was placed on secure campus status and nearby Olivewood School was locked down around 1:25 p.m. as a police helicopter and National City patrol officers searched for a suspect.

Students are being held from release until all is clear, the Sweetwater Union High School District tweeted.

Around 1:50 p.m., the police activity was resolved and both schools resumed as normal, police and school officials said.

Staff writer Alex Riggins contributed to this report.

Twitter: @LAWinkley

(619) 293-1546

lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.com

UPDATES:

3:10 p.m.: This article was updated with details about a lockdown in National City.

This article was originally published at 9:20 a.m.Three people were taken to hospitals, including a sheriffs deputy, after a patrol car and an SUV collided in Vista on Sunday afternoon.

The crash happened at the intersection of East Vista Way and East Bobier Drive about 3:05 p.m.

The deputy, who was headed north on Vista Way, was on his way to a stabbing and had his lights and siren on when he collided with a 2017 Lexus NX 200t, sheriffs officials said.

The deputy was taken to a hospital to be evaluated. The couple in the Lexus, a 53-year-old driver and his 51-year-old passenger, complained of pain and were also taken to hospitals.

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Alcohol and drugs werent suspected factors in the crash.

Twitter: @LAWinkley

(619) 293-1546

lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.comOrganizers have until December to raise enough money to start construction on a House of Mexico in Balboa Park before construction permits expire.

The House of Mexico nonprofit is one of 34 organizations representing countries, territories or cultures in the House of Pacific Relations, which oversees cultural programming at the parks historic international cottages. Twelve of those organizations, including the one representing San Diegos neighbor to the south, dont have their own cottages and rotate hosting weeks in the House of Pacific Relations Hall of Nations.

House of Mexico organizers have been fundraising for years to build a cottage of their own. Though the city of San Diego owns the buildings, organizations wanting to add to the current 19 cottages and Hall of Nations annex home to the House of Italy have to cover construction costs. The city must approve all construction plans.

Sonia Ruiz, current president of the House of Mexico, said having a cottage would enable the organization to do more community outreach.

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Many people are shocked when she tells them that there is no actual house for the House of Mexico, she said. Others have suggested that Mexico doesnt need a house because San Diegans already have easy access to Mexican culture.

For Ruiz, the pervasiveness of Mexican culture in San Diego is more reason to have a house, not less.

This community is enriched by the ongoing contributions of Mexico, she said, reading from a message that member Pablo Palomino sent her. A cottage would be an appropriate tribute to Mexicos legacy in San Diego.

In late 2016, the city granted permission for construction of five buildings  four duplexes and a single  to accommodate nine of the house-less Houses, including Mexico.

The Houses learned that because building costs had gone up, they needed to raise more money than they had initially budgeted.

Earlier this year, the House of Mexico launched a campaign to raise $100,000 by June 1. According to Art Castro, who represents the House on a construction committee for the project, the House of Mexico raised about $40,000 from individual donors and $20,000 from the county through Supervisor Greg Coxs office.

Supervisor Ron Roberts will also ask the county board in September to approve a $20,000 grant to the House.

The House will likely need still more funding beyond the $100,000 since recent tariffs on steels have further raised construction costs, Castro said.

Ruiz thinks that because there are so many Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in San Diego, many may expect that the House will get enough money without their help, a variation on the bystander effect.

If everyone who is Mexican, or is Mexican American, or who loves Mexican food and Mexican culture gave us $1, we would have our house, Ruiz said at a recent member meeting.

Mexico used to have a cottage. It was among the countries represented in the original 15 cottages that were built for the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition.

According to a book published by House of England member Frances Weekley, many of the other countries represented were European  Germany, Norway, the Irish Free State, Sweden, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, the British Empire and Jugoslavia.

Japan, the U.S., and China were also part of the original group, and one cottage for Latin America combined 19 countries into the remaining house.

From 1935 to 1940, the House of Mexico occupied what is today the House of Israel. Then, Finland took over that cottage, and Mexico moved into the Latin America house, according to Weekleys book.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the military took over Balboa Park and turned the cottages into barracks for Naval officers.

When the House of Pacific Relations returned to the park in 1948, it doled out the cottages based on the number of current members, according to Weekleys book. The final cottage was shared by all of the remaining Houses, including Mexico.

Soon after, the House of Mexico disappeared from the House of Pacific Relations. According to a 1968 article from The San Diego Union, the House of Mexico closed because there were too many close-to-the-border activities competing for the members time.

The House resurfaced briefly in the 50s and again in the 70s without enough momentum to stay.

Many houses similarly came and went over the years, said James Vaughn, a historian who wrote about the House of Pacific Relations during his time at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Local activist Enrique Morones resurrected the House of Mexico and formed a nonprofit in 2003 that was voted back into the House of Pacific Relations in 2004.

I was stunned to learn that there was no House of Mexico, Morones recalled.

The vote itself was not an easy win.

Morones said several members from other Houses stormed out to protest the number of votes against Mexico. He said racism played a role in the no votes.

According to a San Diego Union-Tribune article at the time, the House of Pacific Relations denied discriminating against Mexico. Some members who spoke with the Union-Tribune said they were concerned about Morones as a leader because of his vocal political activities.

Recently, Morones argued that House of Mexico should get the standalone cottage rather than a duplex with another country. The House of the Philippines, which has seniority in the House of Pacific Relations, is currently slated for the standalone.

Though Morones is no longer the president of the House of Mexico, he is active in its fundraising. He said last week that he is confident that Mexico will get its own cottage soon.

The House of Mexico is not the only one struggling to raise enough money for construction. Leaders for the House of Peru are also pushing to raise more money for a cottage.

Raising hundreds of thousands of dollars is difficult for an entirely volunteer-based organization, said Marisol Meyer, treasurer for the House of Peru.

The House of Panama reached its goal in part with a donation from the Panamanian government.

Oscar Urteaga, spokesman for the New International Cottage Committee, said that all of the Houses are collaborating to make sure the construction goes forward.

We dont want to leave anyone behind, Urteaga said. Were evaluating all options to make sure that [construction] happens.

The House of Lebanon had money for a cottage, according to spokesman Joseph Sfeir, but didnt want to give the funds to the committee before the city approved the project, saying that the committee improperly imposed different requirements for the House of Lebanon than other houses.

Lebanon ended up getting dropped from the list and then sued over the issue. That lawsuit is not yet resolved.

The recent drama over cottages is not uncommon in the history of the House of Pacific Relations. Weekleys book alludes to internal and inter-house disputes.

In 1941, the House of Pacific Relations fielded complaints about the House of Germany displaying images of the countrys leader at the time, Adolf Hitler.

When the House of Japan moved into a tea house gifted from sister-city Yokohama in the 1960s, some Houses objected to the building because it didnt match the cottage design. The tea house remained for about four decades.

Other moments, like the House of Israel casting the first vote in favor of a House of Palestine, illustrate why officials worldwide have held up the cottages as a symbol that even people who disagree politically can find harmony through culture.

Through his research, historian Vaughn said, he realized that bickering evident in archives from the House of Pacific Relations was not contrary to its mission of peace but rather part of what happens when humans work together toward democracy.

For Ruiz, the current House of Mexico president, the mission to build a cottage is much farther-reaching than any of the bumps the organization has hit along the way.

Its about culture and bringing people in and educating people, Ruiz said. Im excited about the possibilities.

The House of Mexico will celebrate Mexican Independence Day with its Arte, Color, y Fiesta event in September.

Immigration Videos On Now New developments in family separation case 9:53 On Now A San Diego woman volunteered as a medic in Texas helping migrant families 2:35 On Now Immigration policy protests in Carlsbad nearly cancelled after permit issue 1:38 On Now When children are separated from their parents at the border, here is where they go next On Now Prospects of a deal for 'Dreamers' may hinge on separating Trump from hard-liners on his staff On Now What is DACA? On Now Border wall prototype contractors selected On Now Video: Ukrainian boxer wins asylum in U.S. On Now 30 apprehended after Border Patrol agents discover tunnel On Now Video: Kurdish diaspora prepare to vote on independence

Follow me on Facebook for live updates about immigration news

kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.com, @bgirledukate on TwitterThe FBI and Capitol Police want to talk with Rep. Maxine Waters 2018 Republican opponent about a fake letter he posted to Twitter that falsely indicated the congresswoman wants to resettle tens of thousands of refugees in her Los Angeles district.

The Republican candidate, Omar Navarro, said he will meet with FBI agents at his California campaign office Wednesday at their request.

In December, Waters formally asked the FBI and Capitol Police to investigate the letter, which appears to be on Waters House office stationery and includes her signature.

It is a federal crime to impersonate a federal official and misuse a federal seal.

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Navarro told The Times after Waters filed the December complaint that someone he did not know sent his campaign the letter on Facebook, and he did not vet whether it was real before putting it online.

I dont know why they are looking into me since Im not the one who fabricated the letter, Navarro said Monday. He said he has not had contact with the person who sent him the letter since December.

Navarro has not deleted the tweet from his account and it continues to be retweeted, totaling more than 800 times as of this week.

He reacted online to the FBI meeting Monday, tweeting, Lets get this straight I tweet a letter which says Maxine Waters wants to bring 41,000 Somali refugees. I only tweet according to this document asking a question. Now the FBI is on me for her complaint. She threatens the president and his supporters and no investigation on her.

Navarro said hed like to have an attorney present at the meeting and may have to postpone it. He also said he is not the only person who shared the letter online, and said Waters complaint was meant to divert attention from real issues of the district and create a false narrative about him.

The letter says the congresswoman wants to bring refugees to her congressional district after the 2018 election and perhaps even once I have secured the Speaker of the House position.

The letter contains several inaccuracies. It references multiple committees and subcommittees that Waters does not serve on, and lists an address for a district office that has been closed for nearly a decade.

In December, Waters chief of staff, Twaun Samuel, called it a forgery and a fake. In Waters complaint, the congresswoman said she had not communicated with the person the letter was addressed to  Teri Williams, president of the Los Angeles-based OneUnited Bank  about any refugee resettlement program. Samuel did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Navarro tweeted the letter, along with a message: According to this document, Maxine Waters wants more terrorists, like the one who bombed NYC, in Californias 43rd District. As Congressman of CAs 43rd District, I will oppose such policies.

This is Navarros second bid for Waters seat. He is a popular conservative media figure on the far-right, drawing attention and campaign help from prominent conservative figures, including Herman Cain and Roger Stone.

Conservatives accused Waters of inciting violence against Republicans earlier this year when she said  after White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was kicked out of a restaurant  that Trump administration officials should be confronted while leading their everyday lives.

Waters is serving her 14th term. Navarro received 14% of the vote in the June primary, coming in second to Waters, who received 72.3%.

The latest from Washington 

More stories from Sarah D. Wire 

sarah.wire@latimes.com

Follow @sarahdwire on Twitter

Read more about the 55 members of Californias delegationShe boozed and she cruised.

One of the worst drunk driving offenders in the U.S. who has been arrested in seven states was somehow able to avoid prison time following her latest bust earlier this year.

Tasha Schleicher was slapped with 24-months probation despite the fact that she had attempted to fill her vehicle with kerosene at the time of her arrest in Illinois in April. She was found passed out behind the wheel at a Riverside gas station and the keys were in the ignition.

One class of DUI offenders in particular continues to drive while intoxicated with disregard to the legal, social, and personal ramifications and that is the habitual DUI offender, Riverside Police Chief Thomas Weitzel said in a statement. Ms. Schleicher falls into this category.

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The 41-year-old Schleicher also told cops she had 11 children, but did not know their whereabouts.

Yet she avoided time behind bars. Chief Weitzel said he was disappointed by the sentence handed down by Circuit Court Judge Ramon Ocasio in Cook County following last weeks guilty plea.

The police chief previously dubbed the incident one of the worst impaired driving arrests our agency has ever made.

This continues to demonstrate that as a nation that drunk driving and drugged driving are not treated as a serious criminal offenses, Weitzel said. Societys views need to change and habitual DUI offenders need to be held accountable for their actions.

Schleicher falls under the habitual category with prior DUI-related arrests in Kentucky, Wisconsin, Indiana, California, Oregon and her home state of Minnesota.

When she was arrested in Minnesota in September, five of her children were in the vehicle, according to the Star Tribune. After she drove into a barrier, she was seen breast-feeding her baby, according to the newspaper.

She is wanted on warrants in Nebraska, Idaho and Oregon, according to the Star Tribune, so she may land in prison anyway.The jailer at the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison in Vietnam said he feels sad about Sen. John McCains death as he praised the former Navy pilots toughness and the strong stance he had during his five-plus years in confinement.

Former Col. Tran Trong Duyet, who was in charge of the prison, said he met McCain many times after his Skyhawk dive bomber was shot down over Hanoi in 1967.

When I learnt about his death early this morning, I feel very sad, Duyet told the Vietnam News newspaper on Sunday. I would like to send condolences to his family. I think its the same feeling for all Vietnamese people as he has greatly contributed to the development of Vietnam-U.S. relations.

McCain was tortured often while he was in the prison, and has admitted he tried to commit suicide during his confinement. The son of a four-star admiral, McCain was offered his release from the Hanoi Hilton after a year, but would not abandon his fellow prisoners who had been there longer.

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He was a dear friend; I loved him like a brother, cellmate Orson Swindle told Time. We came home [from Vietnam] and we had a long friendship. We had our differences. On many occasions wed fight and argue, and then 10 minutes later be laughing about it.

McCain was in a full-body cast for six months after his capture after breaking both arms and his right leg. He was treated in a hospital only because of who his father was, according to Time.

President Richard Nixon shakes John McCains hand after the POW pilots release in 1973. (Ho/AFP/Getty Images)

He came within a heartbeat of dying, fellow prisoner Paul Galanti told Time. He was put in a full plaster body cast and he couldnt take it off for six months. His body just was becoming unglued.

McCain, the longtime Arizona senator, lost his battle with brain cancer on Saturday night. He had been diagnosed with glioblastoma more than a year ago.

Many in Hanoi paid their respects to McCain at the U.S. Embassy and at a monument by Truc Bach lake, where the pilot landed after parachuting from his plane.

Daniel Kritenbrink, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, said McCain was a great leader and real hero who helped normalize relations between the U.S. and Vietnam.

Vietnam Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan sent messages of condolence to McCains loved ones.

With News Wire ServicesIn the 13 months since Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor, the appreciation that Americans held for one of their most remarkable public figures just kept building. When McCain died on Saturday, the nations sorrow was immense and palpable.

Those who served with him in the Navy, the House and the Senate, who covered him as journalists and who encountered him in campaigns offered near-unanimous praise of his charismatic style.

It wasnt just that as the son and grandson of four-star admirals, McCain was hard-wired to serve his nation. It was the honorable and graceful way he did so that left such deep impressions. After he broke both arms and his right knee upon being shot down over North Vietnam as a naval aviator in 1967, McCain was racked with pain for the rest of his life. Yet he refused the offer of his captors  seeking a propaganda victory  to send him home early, before his fellow U.S. prisoners of war, and he was tortured as a result, only winning his freedom in 1973.

No less famously, McCain honed his maverick reputation during a political career that began in 1982. He pushed back at partisans who would caricature his opponents as un-American, as happened repeatedly in 2008 when he was the Republican nominee for president running against then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. And he never viewed political disagreements as poisonous, memorably reaching out to the scion of Arizona liberal politics  former Rep. Mo Udall  on his deathbed in the late 1990s, remembering Udalls early kindnesses to him.

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McCains push for bipartisan solutions to big problems also made him unusual. He worked with Democrats to reform deeply flawed campaign finance laws, to overhaul a broken immigration system and to end a Senate crisis that had frozen Obamas judicial nominations. After Donald Trump became president, McCain once again displayed his independence. Indelibly turning his thumb downward an hour after one midnight more than a year ago, he short-circuited his partys repeal of the Affordable Care Act, saying the GOP had failed in its obligation to devise a responsible replacement. And even as he underwent treatment from his Arizona home, he remained one of the harshest critics of Trumps shocking decision to pull away from traditional U.S. allies while drawing closer to Russia.

Yet McCain was also admired for his scathing self-appraisals. The 1958 Naval Academy graduate flayed himself for his role in the Keating 5 credit union scandal, his decision to pander to Confederate sympathizers in the 2000 GOP primary in South Carolina, and his selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, an inexperienced populist rabble-rouser, as his 2008 presidential running mate.

But what should not be lost amid the impulse to lionize McCain and laud the courageous way he dealt with cancer is that America would be a better place if he had looked at some of his policy choices  especially on foreign policy  with such candor.

Over the past two decades, McCain emerged as a relentless proponent of global military adventurism  in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere. Even as U.S. war deaths ballooned  even as Americas reputation plunged globally  even as the evidence grew that U.S. goals were going unachieved  McCain seemed to see war not as hell but as ennobling, as The American Prospect wrote in 2008.

It was only in May that McCain admitted the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.

McCain was a great American. The Senate is already discussing renaming its office building for him. Even in this divisive age, Americas most august body should be able to win unanimity for that.

Before dying, McCain asked George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the two people who thwarted his presidential runs, to speak at his funeral. Losing to Obama in 2008, McCain told supporters, And though we fell short, the failure is mine, not yours.

Such humility is sorely missing in national politics where service to party drives debate. McCain mostly flew above that fray, where others dared not.

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion

Editorial cartoonist Steve Breens tribute to Sen. John McCain (The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & OpinionThe death of Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, on Saturday brought with it moving words and displays of admiration and appreciation for his life and service to the country, including the lowering of flags across the nation.

Want to listen instead? Check out The Conversation podcast.

Of course all eyes were on President Donald Trump to see how he would honor the senator  especially in light of their tense and complicated relationship. While some took issue with the brevity of his tweeted tribute, it was the returning of the White House flag to full staff that saw continued outrage on Monday  two days after the senator died surrounded by family at his home in Arizona.

After calls from veterans groups and other lawmakers to do more, the White House flag was seen being lowered to half-staff again at about 3:45 p.m. local time in Washington, D.C..

Heres what led to such a high-profile reversal.

How did Trump originally pay tribute to McCain?

The White House indeed lowered the flag to half-staff on the day of McCains death and kept it there until just after midnight, early Monday morning, reported CNN. It returned to full-staff on Monday, but the adjustment to lower it again was made later in the afternoon.

Heres the tweet from Trump sent over the weekend in response to McCains death.

The Washington Post reported that a other White House staff advocated for an official statement on McCains life and legacy but Trump nixed that suggestion for a short tweet addressed to his family, not saying anything about him specifically.

Here's what Vice President Mike Pence, First Lady Melania Trump and Trump adviser Ivanka Trump said via Twitter on the day McCain died.

How did the situation change on Monday?

Later Monday, the White House flag was seen being lowered to half-staff. The White House released an official proclamation and the president released a statements respecting McCains public service and requesting flags remain at half-staff until Sunday.

What does the law say about honoring McCain?

The U.S. legal code actually does outline the way in which the American flag should be used to honor a deceased government official, and its very specific. It even goes so far as to require that the flag be hoisted to the peak for an instant before being lowered to half-staff, and then be again raised to the peak before it is lowered for the day after a half-staff tribute.

Most importantly, it gives the power to the president to make the order for half-staff.

By order of the president, the flag shall be flown at half-staff upon the death of principal figures of the United States government and the governor of a state, territory or possession, as a mark of respect to their memory, it says.

Then it outlines the amount of time the flag shall remain at half-staff depending on the title of the government official.

30 days  president or former president

10 days  vice president, chief justice, retired chief justice or speaker of the House of Representatives

From day of death to internment  associate justice of the Supreme Court, a secretary of an executive or military department, a former vice president, or the governor of a state

On the day of death and following day  member of Congress

What is the precedent?

Because the duty of lowering government flags falls to the president, its up to him or her to follow the code but other presidents than Trump have gone beyond the minimum requirements it sets.

President Barack Obama signed official proclamations for the deaths of Senators Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts; Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia; and Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii and the proclamations included instructions to lower flags to half-staff until the day of their burials, according to USA Today.

Some lawmakers and veterans groups were calling for Trump to follow this example.

A spokesperson for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, said on Monday that he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, have requested flags be flown at half-staff.

The American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars also released statements calling on Trump to release an official proclamation and keeping the flag at half-staff until McCains interment on Sunday.

Some governors of U.S. states were also taking the step to keep flags at half-staff until McCains burial.

The New York Times and other outlets are reporting that McCain asked before his death the Trump not attend his funeral. Instead, former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush have been asked to eulogize the senator.

McCain also wrote this public statement to the American people that was released on Monday.

Email: abby.hamblin@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @abbyhamblinThe green flash.

For years, newcomers to San Diego have been advised to be on the lookout at sunset for the elusive burst of green that sometimes appears just as the sun dips below the ocean horizon.

Jim Grant has made a hobby of finding and photographing green flashes for the past two decades  ever since the professional deck designer couldnt find a really good picture of one. Today, his Shelter Island home has green flash photos everywhere.

I got hooked on it 18 years ago. Its my heroin, laughs Grant, who grabs his Nikon D7100 and 330-mm telephoto lens and heads to Sunset Cliffs or Ocean Beach on most evenings. He says he has taken more than 200 images of different green flashes.

Definitely, opines Grant. Pollution, moisture, smoke  those all play a factor in how big, how large and how clearly defined a green flash is going to be.  Particles get trapped close to the horizon and, when the sun sets, filter out all of that harsh light, and you get a lot of nice greens and blues.

(Jim Grant)

The Weather Channel aired two photos Grant considers his most spectacular  one taken a couple of weeks ago over the OB pier and the other at 4:54 p.m. on Dec. 13 off Sunset Cliffs as a wildfire was burning across the border in Baja. Sky & Telescope magazine is running a full-page print in its September edition.

He admits that his conclusion isnt based on scientific analysis but on observation. Along with the frequency, the intensity and duration also have increased. A recent green flash in Ocean Beach lasted as long as six seconds, exhibiting five or six layers of green flashes like peeling an onion, he says. It was really sensational.

Grant says he doesnt color enhance or doctor his photos, other than straightening an image and perhaps increasing contrast. He often posts them on his Facebook or Instagram sites where they are passed on to others. He rarely gets paid for his hobby. He says his reward comes when people thank him for brightening their day in Idaho or Kansas or in the hospital or for cheering up their father in a wheelchair.

I am more than happy to share our gorgeous city with anyone who wants to see it, he says.

Read more from Diane Bells column here.

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.Pune, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 08/27/2018 -- Global Cardiac Catheterization Market - Overview



Cardiac Catheterization is a widely used procedure in different cardiovascular surgeries. This procedure involves insertion of a small tube into a chamber or vessel of the heart. It is the most commonly used technique for the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac diseases.



According to a recent study published by the Market Research Future analysts, the Global Cardiac Catheterization Market is growing at a moderate growth rate; mainly due to increasing number of people suffering from cardiac diseases leading to the requirement of surgical procedures. The factors that are responsible for driving the growth of the market are rising occurrence of cardiovascular diseases, growing number of cardiac surgeries, a high number of diabetic and obese population, huge geriatric population, and changing living standards leading to development of cardiac disorders.



Get Sample Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/972



On the other hand, availability of alternative therapies, and the higher cost of the surgeries are some of the obstacles in growth of this market. Moreover, high risk of development of infection due to the catheterization procedures is further hindering the growth of the market.



Global Cardiac Catheterization Market  Top Players



Boston Scientific Corporation



Coloplast



Dispocard GmbH



Becton



Dickinson and Company



St. Jude Medical



Abbott



Johnson & Johnson Private Limited and more.



Global Cardiac Catheterization Market - Segments



Global Cardiac Catheterization market has been segmented on the basis of types and applications. By types which majorly include Angiographic Balloon Catheter, Arterial Embolectomy, Bipolar Pacing Shrouded Pin, Hexapolar Balloon Pacing, Optical Fiber Scope, Semi Flotating Electrode and Others. Whereas by applications includes Coronary angiogram, Right heart catheterization, Heart biopsy, Balloon angioplasty, Valve replacement and others.



Cardiac catheterization is a widely used procedure in different cardiovascular surgeries. This procedure involves insertion of a small tube into a chamber or vessel of the heart. It is the most commonly used technique for the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac diseases.



Get Discount @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/972



Industry News:



In November 2017, Abbott announced the approval of its MitraClip device for treatment of people with mitral regurgitation (MR) from Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW).



In May 2017, Abbott announced the CE Mark of the "TactiCath Contact Force Ablation Catheter, Sensor Enabled". The product is developed to make it easier for physicians to more effectively treat atrial fibrillation (AF).



In March 2017, Abbott announced U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the "FlexAbility Ablation Catheter, Sensor Enabled" designed to improve the versatility and precision during cardiac ablation procedures to treat atrial flutter, a type of irregular heartbeat.



In January 2017, Abbott announced the U.S. launch and the first commercial uses of the new "EnSite Precision cardiac mapping system" and "Advisor FL Circular Mapping Catheter, Sensor Enabled" to map cardiac arrhythmias during ablation treatments.



Global Cardiac Catheterization Market - Regional Analysis



Owing to the presence of huge patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases, America dominates the global cardiac catheterization market. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 28.4 million adults were suffering from heart diseases by January 2017. Increasing number of patients suffering from heart diseases and increasing healthcare expenditure have driven the growth of the market.



Europe accounts for the second largest market due to continuously increasing patient population, well-developed healthcare sector, high healthcare expenditure, and government support for the research and development.



Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market; according to the World Health Organization (WHO), 60% of total world diabetic population lives in Asia Pacific region. Diabetes is one of the major risk factors for causing heart diseases. Increasing patients suffering from diabetes and heart diseases have stimulated the growth of the market.



The Middle East & Africa has the lowest market for the cardiac catheterization; however, the Middle East is the major contributor in this region due to the presence of well-developed economies like Kuwait and Qatar. On the other hand, because of limited development in the field of medical science and existence of economically poor countries, the market is limited in Africa.



To Know More Enquire @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/972



About Market Research Future

At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.



In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 08/27/2018 -- Humorous and entertaining advertisement content is expected to offset declining interests in advertising in Ireland, thereby reshaping positive attitudes towards advertising content in Ireland. To evaluate the implications of ongoing development endeavors on attitudes towards advertising in Ireland, Market Research Hub (MRH) has collated a new research report titled, 'Attitudes to Advertising - Ireland - August 2018' to its burgeoning repository.



Lack of Apt Social Media Advertising Regulations Hamper Millennial Attitudes towards Advertising in Ireland



Proliferation of online advertising to entice audience response as attained traction in the recent past. Novel advertising content with a dash of humor has spelled wonders in attitudes to advertising in Ireland in contrast to conventional advertising media. However, off-late, unregulated online advertising on social media has attained much public glare. Evolving millennial attitudes towards advertising in Ireland will likely encourage stringent regulations towards social media advertising in Ireland. Changes in advertising content published in online media is expected to incur positive attitudes to advertising in Ireland.



Request Report Sample: https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1876675



In the light of the recent abortion referendum in Ireland, Google has taken firm steps to curb all advertisements published on its digital platform pertaining to the aforementioned recent development. The step is in compliance to restrict undesirable foreign influence on the referendum that can affect the course of the longstanding decision to repeal the act. Owing to overt influence of social media and online advertising as a whole, on government policies and election procedures, Google has decided to evade all foreign advertising campaign that can influence pivotal activities such as referendum. This revolutionary step undertaken by Google is expected to positively affect Irish attitudes to advertising.



In similar lines, social media veteran Facebook has also reserved broadcasting of all advertisement content pertaining to the referendum to align with Irish interests to repeal abortion laws. With this historical step to opt social obligations over monetary benefits is expected to reflect favorable on attitudes to advertising in Ireland.



TV Continues to Boast as a Revenue Generator in Irish Advertising Spectrum



Influx of online advertising media in the recent decade has garnered ample eyeballs. However, its growing success poses no threat to the steady success of TV commercials as well as cinema ads. Surged investments in TV and cinema ads is expected to hone growth triggers in Irish advertising thereby effectively influencing attitudes to advertising in Ireland. Emergence of on-demand as well as smart TV are paving new avenues in TV advertising thereby encouraging increased expenditures on TV advertising.



Further, to strike the chords with emerging next generation of music lovers in Ireland, noted rum producer Bacardi has come up with its immensely popular #DoWHatMovesYou campaign feature on IGTV channels incurred record response from viewers. With this campaign, the company aims to not only position its rum brand lucratively, but also intends to mold the attitudes of the next Irish generation towards advertising in Ireland.



Browse Full Report with TOC- https://www.marketresearchhub.com/report/attitudes-to-advertising-ireland-august-2018-report.html



Mobile and In-app Advertising a Powerful Driver of Attitudes to Advertising in Ireland



In a significant attempt to empower online advertising, noted TV commercial ad of Director's Special has debuted its online entry with the TV ad being re-released. This recent development is expected to aid Irish tourism besides casting a lasting impression towards Irish attitudes to advertising. Inclusion of famous TV commercials has emerged as a potent means to strike a rapport with Irish populace thereby favorable impacting their attitudes to advertising.



Competition Landscape: Irish Advertisement



This section of the report provides crucial insights on the development activities undertaken by leading advertising giants to influence positive attitudes to advertising in Ireland. Based on these insights, market players can carry out detailed analytical study to imbibe pertinent perspectives that aid new and existing market players to incorporate novel initiatives to influence positive attitudes to advertising in Ireland.



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Read Industry News at - https://www.industrynewsanalysis.com/Hyderabad, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 08/27/2018 -- In the Report "Brazil Professional Hair Care Market: By Categories (Coloring, Perming & Straightening, Shampoo & Conditioning & Styling); Sales Channel (Back Bar and Take Home) & By Company - (2018-2023)" published by IndustryARC, the market is driven by the growing awareness of special functionalities of products, boosting the sales of treatment and hair conditioning market.



South East Brazil growing with major share in the Brazil Professional Hair Care Market



The Northern region accounts for 5% of the salons in Brazil, this region holds potential for growth in the coming years and is currently witnessing an increase in number of hair salons. The north East part of Brazil has cities like Rio Grande, Maranhao and Piaui. These regions are big tourist attractions and has a population of 53 million and comprise of 15% of the total hair salons. The South Eastern region comprise of 63% of salons because the most popular cities like Sao Paulo and Rio De Janerio are a part of this region. The previous stated regions are the biggest GDP contributor for Brazil.

Selected Category Analysis done in the full Report:



Professional hair care market for product is categorized into four parts. Shampoo and conditioner is the leading one in terms of revenue. Shampoo and conditioners is estimated to occupy the largest share of 44.7% in professional hair care market. The market is growing at a CAGR of 2.4% and to gain a revenue of BRL 578.78 million (USD 169.25Million) in 2023. Professional hair care styling products is the fastest growing segment which is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 4.2% during the forecast period of 2018-2023. It is followed by hair coloring market in Brazil which is valued at BRL 490.28 million (USD 143.37Million) in 2018. It is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 2.1% to reach BRL 555.4 million (USD 162.42Million) by 2023. Professional Hair straightening and perming products market of Brazil is valued at BRL 155.66 million (USD 45.52Million) in 2018 and is poised to grow at a CAGR of 1.9%, and to reach BRL 174.27 million (USD 50.96Million) during the forecast period 2018-2023.



To purchase or browse the table of contents of the report follow the link below:

https://industryarc.com/Report/7394/brazil-professional-hair-care-market-report.html



Excerpts on Market Growth Factors



Beleza Natural has come with new super hair relaxing technique for Afro hair. Using this volume in hair stands can chemically make curly and wavy hair more manageable. The products and services related to this service is expanding at a great pace.

As the demand for styling and care market for hair is increasing day by day, other major international players will be entering the Brazilian hair treatment market. Collaborating with the local manufacturer and distributors as compared to entering the market via importing, would substantially increase the cost of their products.

Increasing strong technical expertise of hair stylists is an origin for many innovative hair treatments which are trending worldwide such as Brazilian blowout, Brazilian keratin treatment and Velaterapia which is driving the adoption market.



Talk to one of our sales representative about the full report by providing your details in the link below:

https://industryarc.com/support.php?id=7394



Key players of the Brazil Professional Hair Care Market



Boticario, Contem 1g And Natura are the main players in the Brazil cosmetic market. Some of the international players like Avon, L'Oreal, Unilever and P&G are also present in the market and are generating good revenues from Brazil. The findings say Brazil is close to 20 companies having 73% market share of domestic cosmetic sales. L'Oreal Group is the market leader which accounted for a share of 39.8% in professional shampoo and conditioner market. L'Oreal and Henkel together hold 46.8% in hair spray styling market. In Brazil, P&G is the dominant player in the professional hair coloring market. In hair straightening and perming products, companies whose products are widely used include L'Oreal, Wella, Truss, Maturi, Keune, Inoar, Beleza, Le Charmes, Cadiveu professionals and Phytobelle Cosmeticos.

Brazil Professional Hair Care Market report is segmented as below



The Global Coil Coatings Market study across various end user industries is incorporated in the report.



A. Brazil Salon Landscape

1. Category

2. Price

3. Location



B. Brazil Product Category

1. Coloring

2. Perming & Straightening

3. Shampoo & Conditioning

4. Styling



C. Brazil Professional Hair Care Market by Distribution Channel

1. Direct

2. Distributor / Wholesalers

3. Others



D. Brazil Professional Hair Care Market by Geography (covers 10+ countries)

E. Brazil Professional Hair Care Market Entropy



Companies Cited / Interviewed



1. Alfaparf Group

2. Itallian Hairtech

3. Ricardo Santos

4. Procter & Gamble Co.

5. Company 5

6. Company 6

7. Company 10+



Related Report:



A. Asia-Pacific Professional Hair Care Distribution Market Analysis

https://industryarc.com/Report/18136/asia-pacific-professional-hair-care-distribution-market.html



B. France Professional Hair Care Market

https://industryarc.com/Report/7402/france-professional-hair-care-market.html



What can you expect from the report?

The Brazil Professional Hair Care Market Report is Prepared with the Main Agenda to Cover the following 20 points:



1. Market Size by Product Categories & Application 11. Demand Analysis (Revenue & Volume)

2. Market trends & Relevant Market Data 12. Country level Analysis

3. Manufacturer Landscape 13. Competitor Analysis

4. Distributor Landscape 14. Market Shares Analysis

5. Pricing Analysis 15. Value Chain Analysis

6. Top 10 End user Analysis 16. Supply Chain Analysis

7. Product Benchmarking 17. Strategic Analysis

8. Product Developments 18. Current & Future Market Landscape Analysis

9. Mergers & Acquisition Analysis 19. Opportunity Analysis

10. Patent Analysis 20. Revenue and Volume Analysis



Frequently Asked Questions:

Q. Does IndustryARC publish country or application based reports in Brazil Professional Hair Care Market segment?

Response: Yes, we do have separate reports as mentioned below:



1. Americas Brazil Professional Hair Care Market (2018-2023)

2. Asia Pacific Coil Brazil Professional Hair Care Market (2018-2023)

3. Europe Brazil Professional Hair Care Market (2018-2023)

4. Category Brazil Professional Hair Care Market (2018-2023)

5. Distribution Channel Brazil Professional Hair Care Market (2018-2023)



Q. Does IndustryARC provide customized reports and charge additionally for limited customization?

Response: Yes, we can customize the report by extracting data from our database of reports and annual subscription databases. We can provide the following free customization:

1. Increase the level of data in application or end user industry.

2. Increase the number of countries in geography chapter.

3. Find out market shares for other smaller companies or companies which are of interest to you.

4. Company profiles can be requested based on your interests.

5. Patent analysis, pricing, product analysis, product benchmarking, value and supply chain analysis can be requested for a country or end use segment.



Any other custom requirements can be discussed with our team, drop an e-mail to sales@industryarc.com to discuss more about our consulting services.



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About IndustryARC

IndustryARC is a Research and Consulting Firm that publishes more than 500 reports annually, in various industries such as Agriculture, Automotive, Automation & Instrumentation, Chemicals and Materials, Energy and Power, Electronics, Food & Beverages, Information Technology, Life sciences &Healthcare.



IndustryARC primarily focuses on Cutting Edge Technologies and Newer Applications in a Market. Our Custom Research Services are designed to provide insights on the constant flux in the global supply-demand gap of markets. Our strong team of analysts enables us to meet the client research needs at a rapid speed, with a variety of options for your business.



We look forward to support the client to be able to better address their customer needs, stay ahead in the market, become the top competitor and get real-time recommendations on business strategies and deals. Contact us to find out how we can help you today.After an almost two-year journey through space, NASAs Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) caught its first glimpse of Bennu, a carbonaceous asteroid whose makeup may record the earliest history of our Solar System, last week and began the final approach toward the asteroid. Using its multipurpose PolyCam camera, the spacecraft obtained the image of Bennu from a distance of 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km), or almost six times the distance between the Earth and Moon.

OSIRIS-REx, led by the University of Arizonas Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, is the first U.S. mission to retrieve a sample from an asteroid and return it Earth for study. The material it returns will be the largest sample brought back from space since the Apollo era.

The spacecraft has traveled approximately 1.1 billion miles (1.77 billion km) since its September 8, 2016 launch, and is scheduled to arrive at Bennu on December 3, 2018.

Now that OSIRIS-REx is close enough to observe Bennu, the mission team will spend the next few months learning as much as possible about Bennus size, shape, surface features and surroundings before the spacecraft arrives at the asteroid, said OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Professor Dante Lauretta, of the University of Arizona.

After spending so long planning for this moment, I cant wait to see what Bennu reveals to us.

To boost itself onto Bennus orbital plane, OSIRIS-REx performed a slingshot maneuver, or gravity assist, around Earth 11 months ago.

The spacecraft is now zipping along at almost 32,000 mph (51,500 km per hour) relative to Earth, while catching up with Bennu at a little over 1,200 mph (1,931 km per hour) relative to the asteroid.

Right now, Bennu just looks like a star, a point source, said Dr. Carl Hergenrother, a scientist at the University of Arizonas Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and leader of the OSIRIS-REx astronomy working group.

That will change in November, when we will begin detailed observations and well start seeing craters and boulders. You could say thats when our asteroid will transition from being an astronomical object to an actual geological object.

After arrival at Bennu, OSIRIS-REx will spend the first month performing flybys of Bennus north pole, equator and south pole, at distances ranging between 11.8 and 4.4 miles (19-7 km) from the asteroid.

These maneuvers will allow for the first direct measurement of Bennus mass, as well as close-up observations of the surface.

These trajectories will also provide the missions navigation team with experience navigating near the asteroid.

Bennus low gravity provides a unique challenge for the mission. At roughly 0.3 miles (500 m) in diameter, Bennu will be the smallest object that any spacecraft has ever orbited, said OSIRIS-REx project manager Dr. Rich Burns, of NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center.

OSIRIS-REx will briefly touch Bennus surface around July 2020 to collect at least 60 grams of dirt and rocks. It might collect as much as 2 kg.

It will then pack the sample into the Sample Return Capsule and travel back to Earth, dropping the capsule into Utahs west desert in 2023, where scientists will be waiting to collect it.

The story of this asteroid is the story of the Solar System. When we understand Bennu, we will understand something fundamental about our Solar System, said Dr. Bashar Rizk, of the University of Arizonas Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.Keynote speaker at NZCA 2018, Stuart Allison, svp Asia Pacific for Princess Cruises, said New Zealand attracts more repeat passengers than any other destination.

New overland excursions, exclusive tours

He said the company has significantly expanded its Across the Ditch programme and will take passengers to places less travelled with the launch of two industry-first overland excursions in the North Island and more than 20 exclusive shore tours this summer.

He said under the cruise lines global Local Connections programme passengers will experience the destination through the eyes of local expert partners, visiting their favourite food, wine and art galleries in every New Zealand port.

A new overland excursion takes passengers to Great Barrier Island, one of only four International Dark Sky Sanctuaries in the world, for a stargazing experience.

Noted Maori chef Eru Tutaki

In the other new excursion passengers will join award-winning Maori chef Eru Tutaki in a forest near the port of Tauranga where he will harvest bush food and create a three-course degustation menu.

As an extension of the work already under way, Allison said Princess Cruises will explore opportunities to partner with organisations to help support New Zealands unique landscape and its culture.

The companys new flagship, Majestic Princess, arrives in New Zealand in October.Sales calls to agents in six countries

As in previous years, the line's sales representatives are going to visit 800 travel agents in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands over the coming weeks, providing latest information about TUI Cruises' products along with a package of new promotion material.

In addition to these visits, another 2,700 travel agents are going to receive the promotion package by post.

The campaign spotlights the future Mein Schiff Herz ('herz' means heart in German), which will remain in TUI Cruises' fleet until 2022 but will give up its Mein Schiff 2 name to TUI's newbuild, coming next spring.

Free cruises will be awarded

Additionally, TUI Cruises launched a sales competition for agents. Each Mein Schiff Herz booked between Aug. 27 and Sept. 28 will accrue points for the respective agent. Agents with the most points will be entered into a drawing for three free seven-day cruises in a balcony cabin aboard Mein Schiff Herz in June next year.Shareholders vote on the $3.5bn debt restructuring of the Hong Kong commodities company at meeting that starts in Singapore at 2-30pm local time. Shareholder support is being sought for a debt  equity swap that will leave shareholders owning just 20% of the company.

Read more: Noble reaches restructuring agreement with key creditors

The $3.5bn restructuring aims to bring to an end a three-year long financial crisis at Noble, a one-time giant of the commodities business valued at $6bn in early 2015. Noble has been hit hard allegations that it overvalued its businesses, in particular by a former employee under the guise of Iceberg Research.

Founder Richard Elman will not be taking up a previously announced post of executive director in Noble if the restructuring is approved.Press Release

August 26, 2018 De Lima celebrates birthday in detention anew; thanks colleagues, supporters For the second time, Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima has celebrated her birthday in detention today in a simple gathering attended by families, friends and colleagues such as Sen. Risa Hontiveros and Sen. Sonny Trillanes. During her speech in the gathering, De Lima thanked her visitors for attending the celebration, which happened on the eve of her birthday (Aug. 27), even as she expressed gratefulness for their unwavering support for her. "There are a lot of things that can be agonizing or can leave us feeling exasperated and frustrated, especially with the many injustices happening in our country, but I want to consider this day -- the eve of my birthday -- as a day of thanksgiving," she said. "Despite my unjust detention, there are a lot of things to be grateful about. I remain to be grateful for the unwavering support from my family, staff members, lawyers, supporters, former colleagues in the Aquino Cabinet, and my colleagues in the minority both from the Senate and House of Representatives who continue to fight with me and for me," she added. De Lima's birthday celebration was marked by a Holy Mass officiated by Bishop Pedro Arigo, along with Fathers Robert Reyes, Flavie Villanueva and Albert Alejo inside the Custodial Center of the Philippine National Police, in Camp Crame, Quezon City. Aside from Hontiveros and Trillanes, De Lima's visitors include other prominent personalities including Reps. Gary Alejano, Edgar Erice and Erin Tanada, lawyers Florin Hilbay and Barry Gutierrez, former Commission on Elections chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr., former social welfare secretary Dinky Soliman, and former peace adviser Ging Deles, among others. A smiling De Lima made sure to commend her colleagues in the minority for tirelessly fighting for justice and the rule of law in her speech, saying "saludo ako sa tapang at determinasyon ninyo." The former justice secretary said she appreciated how her former colleagues from the Aquino Cabinet never left her side no matter the cost. "To my former colleagues in the Cabinet, I am grateful that in your little ways, you continue to show to the public how important it is to have an ethical kind of leadership. I am also thankful na andiyan kayo, still fighting with me," she said. De Lima, who continues to file meaningful bills and resolutions even in detention, commended her lawyers and other staff members for not letting the challenges of working for the staunchest critic of the administration get in the way of their job. "I commend my staff members, that in spite of my situation -- it is not easy to work for a principal who is the object of vilification by the government-- they still function properly. I owe them a lot," she said. "To my lawyers, I thank them for aiming to secure my freedom early despite it being really challenging because there justices and judges who refuse to see the merits of our causes," she added. De Lima did not forget to thank her supporters as well. "I know that is a struggle just to get a glimpse of me during my Court appearances knowing that the police do their best to block me from the public's view. Malaking sakripisyo ang pagpunta niyo sa mga hearings ko. To that, I am thankful." Saying that she does not see an end to her oppression by the government anytime soon, De Lima said she decided that her life henceforth should be defined by two words: "defiance and resistance." "I will continue to defy my oppressors. I shall defy any lure of hopelessness. I will resist the breakdown of the rule of law. I shall defy the enemies of truth and democracy. I will resist the rise of a culture of impunity," she said. To mark her 2nd birthday in detention, De Lima will also launch her 2nd book which she dedicates to the Filipino people who believe in her innocence despite the trumped-up charges hurled against her tonight. The book, entitled "Fight for Freedom and Other Writings," contains a collection of writings, speeches, letters and notes about De Lima and her quest for freedom, which she and other prominent personalities supportive of her plight wrote.Press Release

August 26, 2018 Colleagues and supporters extend warm wishes on De Lima's birthday Senator Leila M. de Lima, together with colleagues, supporters, friends and family, heard Mass inside the Custodial Center in Camp Crame and had lunch together on the eve of her 59th birthday. Senators Sonny Trillanes and Risa Hontiveros were among those who took turns to greet De Lima a happy birthday as they shared stories about her. Trillanes revealed that De Lima beat her by a day in filing a Senate resolution to investigate the extrajudicial killings under the Duterte administration's war on drugs. To those who think De Lima spoke out too soon against a popular President, Trillanes said De Lima "always had the full resolve to do the right thing with no regard for political calculations." Hontiveros, for her part, admired how De Lima, despite her detention, remains among the most hardworking senators for constantly filing bills and resolutions. Alluding to the Maguindanao mass murder suspect who was recently allowed to leave jail to attend a wedding, Hontiveros also lamented the double standard when it comes to De Lima who was denied her plea to attend her son's law school graduation and to argue for the Senate Minority's petition in the Supreme Court on the Philippine withdrawal from the International Criminal Court. Former Solicitor General Florin Hilbay, meanwhile, said that his decision to become De Lima's legal counsel in her drug-related cases was borne out of a "moral compulsion to do the right thing" after studying and finding the charges against the Senator to be "pure garbage". Hilbay said the 9-6 vote by the Supreme Court to dismiss De Lima's petition to nullify her arrest may have been a legal defeat, but it was also a moral victory because the six justices who voted in favor of De Lima strongly asserted his client's innocence. Former presidential peace adviser Ging Deles said she is grateful at "how seriously De Lima took the peace process," saying that even from detention she asked for a briefing on the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) and relayed to Senators her position in support of the BOL. "She needs to be out there," Deles said. "The peace process owes Senator Leila," she added. Former Congressman Barry Gutierrez said that De Lima has "proved her courage and determination" as Commission on Human Rights chair, especially when she investigated then Mayor and now President Rodrigo Duterte over the Davao Death Squad killings. Gutierrez also said that the integrity of the Department of Justice and the citizen's trust in the agency was restored when De Lima became its secretary. "It is not just her courage or bravery, but her seriousness and commitment to do a good job," Gutierrez said about De Lima, adding that the Senator "sees public office not as a privilege but as a civic duty." "For doing her job right, this is what she gets," People Power Volunteers for Reform Secretary General Aleta Tolentino said about the political persecution against De Lima. Tolentino also said that visitors of De Lima are sad that the Senator remains detained, but upon seeing the "joy in her face" they are "enlivened, enlightened and inspired" by her. Turning to the Senator, she said: "They can imprison you, but they can never imprison your spirit. Your spirit is free and your voice is heard."Press Release

August 27, 2018 AI renews call for De Lima's release on her 59th birthday Amnesty International (AI) has renewed its call for the Philippine government to immediately drop all trumped-up drug charges against Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima and release her from continued unjust detention, in time for her 59th birthday today, Aug. 27. In an official statement, AI said the present administration should clear De Lima of all the politically-motivated charges based on unsubstantiated statements of convicted felons to allow her to fulfill her vital work as duly-elected Senator of the Republic and human rights defender. "Amnesty International calls on the Philippine authorities to drop all charges against Senator de Lima and ensure she is released immediately and unconditionally as she is a prisoner of conscience solely detained for peacefully exercising her human rights," AI wrote. "Amnesty International considers the targeting of Senator de Lima by the authorities as a blatant attempt to silence one of the most prominent critics of the violent 'war on drugs' and bar her from participating in public life," it added. AI maintained that De Lima was deliberately accused of allowing the proliferation of drugs in the National Bilibid Prison during her term as justice secretary, based solely on questionable statements of inmates who may also have received benefits after providing their testimony. Note that the Senator from Bicol has been in arbitrary detention for 550 days to date at the headquarters of the Philippine National Police (PNP) in Camp Crame, Quezon City after she surrendered to arresting authorities over bogus drug charges on Feb. 24, 2017. "Amnesty International believes there has been no substantial evidence on record that can so far sustain such allegations. Prosecutors have recently amended the charges against her - from illegal drug trading to 'conspiracy' to trade drugs - in what seems an attempt to delay the court proceedings in light of the absence of evidence to sustain the original charges," AI said. The rights watchdog reiterated that De Lima was targeted by the vindictive Duterte regime because she initiated a Senate investigation into the spate of extrajudicial killings in the country in July 2016. "The charges against her clearly stem from her criticism of President Duterte's 'war on drugs', which has resulted in the extrajudicial execution of thousands of suspected drug offenders and other human rights violations," AI wrote. AI warned that human rights defenders like De Lima are vulnerable to harassment and intimidation by the government who consider them as threats instead of allies. "The political persecution of Senator de Lima continues in an increasingly dangerous context where human rights defender and civil society organisations face intimidation and obstruction in their attempts to investigate and raise concerns about human rights in the country," AI said. In its statement, AI also urged the authorities to ensure that no arbitrary restrictions, including denial of visits, are imposed on De Lima. On Feb. 23, ahead of the anniversary of De Lima's surrender, AI already called on the government to release her "immediately and unconditionally," with AI Director of Southeast Asia and the Pacific James Gomez describing the charges against her as "pure fiction." AI also awarded De Lima with the "Most Distinguished Human Rights Defender" recognition for her unwavering fight to defend human rights and for opposing the abuses under the government's bloody war on drugs, during its 1st Ignite Awards for Human Rights last June 2. De Lima, who continues to receive awards and citations from various organizations and leaders here and abroad, was also cited as one of the notable Women Human Rights Defenders by AI, in 2017.MESSAGE: NATIONAL HEROES DAY

We commemorate National Heroes Day recognizing the sacrifices of Rizal, Bonifacio and all those long gone who gave us the freedoms and liberties we enjoy today.

Equally important is the need to celebrate heroism in its smaller everyday forms. The office worker, local entrepreneur, teacher, artist or OFW who toils hard to earn a decent living for one's family while also assisting others is no less a hero as a soldier who dies for flag and country. Being a diligent student, a dependable parent or a law-abiding citizen requires equal parts nobility of character and determination to achieve either a personal or collective goal, which are no less heroic acts.

We should honor heroism every day because the Filipino performs heroic feats, big and small, every day.Metlifecare, New Zealand's second-largest listed retirement village operator, reported a stronger underlying profit on improved revenue in 2018, though its headline profit weakened as its property portfolio made smaller revaluation gains as the housing market moderated.

In the year to June 30, Metlifecare reported underlying profit before tax of $87.5 million, from $82.1 million a year earlier. Revenue rose 7 percent to $115 million. Net profit dropped to $125.1 million from $251.5 million in 2017, as the change in fair value of its property portfolio fell to $134.9 million from $258.7 million a year earlier. The value of Metlifecare's investment properties lifted 10 percent to $3.18 billion.

Chief executive Glen Sowry told BusinessDesk the company expects current housing market conditions, which have driven lower revaluation gains in the latest year, will remain.

"We believe the market conditions that have now established themselves, which are more reflective of long-term averages after a period of strong growth, are likely to remain like this for a year or two," Sowry said.

He said the company was pleased with the result and had made improvements in the things it can control, including gains from re-selling units of $62.3 million, up 13 percent from the prior year. The company's margin for resales was 34 percent in the year, the same as 2017, with an average price of $544,600 per unit. Its margin for new units was 27 percent, up from 23 percent, with an average price of $645,000.

Total sales volume for the year was 441, with 343 coming from resales - up from 322 in 2017- and 98 from new sales, from 130 the year earlier. In 2019, Metlifecare expects higher sales volumes for new units and resales, weighted to the second half. They include a number of new sales which were contracted by the end of 2018 but won't be settled until the first half of 2019.

Metlifecare plans to complete 145 new homes and 70 new care beds in the year, down from 2018's 254 new homes and beds. Sowry said the company had made a conscious decision to defer construction and completion of one care home beyond the current financial year "because we didn't want to be opening three care homes simultaneously. That's a pretty heavy workload, and we need to be very careful to ensure standards are maintained."

In the 2020 financial year, Sowry said the pipeline for new homes and beds was "comfortably north of 300." It is targeting another 300-plus new homes and care beds in 2021, and has four villages currently in the planning and design phase, all in Auckland.

Like many New Zealand building owners, Metlifecare has been hurt by the country's leaky building crisis and expects to spend $44 million to remediate five of its villages, with the bulk of the work to be done between the current financial year and FY21.

In the latest year, it spent $13 million on buying back units for regeneration and remediation. It bought back 12 units in 2017 and 44 in 2018, and plans to buy back three more in 2019, before it begins returning units into circulation in 2020. Metlifecare said holding buyback stock had depressed its resale gains in 2018 but it will catch up when the units are sold.

The board declared a 6.75 cent final dividend, payable on Sept. 21 with a Sept. 14 record date. That lifts the full-year payout to 10 cents per share, from 8.05 cents in 2017.

The shares rose 1.6 percent to $6.35 and have gained 2.5 percent this year.

(BusinessDesk)

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The New Zealand dollar was higher against the greenback as risk appetite was buoyed by news the US and Mexico had agreed to a trade deal, with Canada set to rejoin the talks later in the global trading day.

The kiwi traded at 67 US cents at 8am in Wellington from 66.87 US cents at 5pm in Wellington. The trade-weighted index was unchanged at 72.20.

Global risk appetite got a lift when the US and Mexico reached a trade agreement that will replace a soon-to-be-terminated NAFTA bill, according to both presidents in a joint announcement. At this stage, public details are still scant and Canada has still not been made privy to the deal. Talks between the US and Canada are expected to start Tuesday (US time) with Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland travelling to Washington.

However, both the New Zealand dollar and the Australian dollar "were somewhat reluctant participants in this risk rally," said Philip Borkin, senior macro strategist for ANZ Bank. According to Borkin, there is likely one reason: China.

"Both NZ and Australia are far more leveraged to that story and while the PBoC is perhaps taking a more conciliatory tone here, visible progress on trade between the US and China is yet to be seen," he said.

Borkin expects the kiwi to remain subdued and said it has support around 66.30 US cents and resistance at 67.10 US cents.

The kiwi traded at 91.09 Australian cents from 91.32 Australian cents late yesterday. It was at 4.5650 Chinese yuan from 4.5558 Chinese yuan and traded at 74.41 yen from 74.31 yen. It was at 57.33 euro cents from 57.55 and at 51.95 British pence from 52.03 pence.

Investors will be digesting a speech from Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern this morning, aimed at the business sector. However, the key risk for the kiwi this week is the ANZ Business Confidence survey later in the week given the concerns around waning business confidence.

(BusinessDesk)

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The governments decision to stop issuing offshore exploration permits has convinced many overseas investors that the country is closed for business, New Zealand Oil & Gas says.

Chief executive Andrew Jefferies said the company is working hard to turn around that perception. The firm has continued to market its two permits off the lower South Island at oil and gas events in Australia, Singapore and London but firms are wary that any discovery made may be harder to consent then previously.

They also dont see how they can build a long-term business here if further acreage is not going to be available.

Unfortunately the perception is that New Zealand is closed for business, Jefferies told BusinessDesk.

We are working really hard to change that, but thats the headline they have received overseas.

The Labour-led coalition shocked the industry in April when it said it would stop offering new offshore exploration permits. It also restricted onshore exploration to Taranaki in what it called a long-term transition away from fossil fuels.

Ironically, Energy and Resources Minister Megan Woods cited NZOGs Barque prospect off the Oamaru coast as the sort of asset that could still be developed within the existing acreage to ensure on-going gas supplies for the countrys heavy industry and power generation.

Today Jefferies said the policy decision was a poor one, and poorly announced. Its timing was also ironic given the increasing demand for gas out of Asia and the increased capital available for exploration worldwide now that oil prices have recovered.

NZOG has already spent several years seeking partners to drill Barque and has had several drilling extensions for the Clipper permit it lies in  PEP 52717.

The venture, which includes Adelaide-based Beach Energy, has until April to commit to drilling a well or it must surrender the permit. Any well to be drilled must be started by late 2020.

Barque lies about 60 kilometres off the coast. The structure covers 150 square-kilometres and could hold the equivalent of 530 million barrels of gas and condensate.

NZOG has promoted its potential for starting a reticulated gas industry on the South Island where heavy industry  particularly dairy processing  currently relies on coal. Shipping gas to shore to make fertiliser or methanol are also considered viable options.

Jefferies noted that the government has committed in writing that the ventures exploration permits are protected and that, in the event of a discovery at Barque, development proposals would be assessed under the existing rules.

Jefferies said hand on heart that he believes the company would have signed up a partner for the project had the government not changed the rules.

Things are tougher now, but thats not to say we wont.

Jefferies said demand for gas in Asia, particularly in China, has outstripped expectations. The expected supply glut from recently completed LNG projects in Australia has evaporated overnight as countries around the region look for lower-carbon alternatives to coal.

Where the tendency of New Zealand fields to produce gas was once a negative, now its a positive, he said.

Theres a good story here to tell.

NZOG, 70 percent-owned by Singapore-based Ofer Global Group, today reported net profit of $4.8 million for the year ended June 30, up from a loss of $32.7 million, excluding asset sales, the year before. Revenue fell about 3 percent to $35.8 million, reflecting reduced revenue from its stake in Melbourne-based Cue Energy Resources.

In late 2016 NZOG sold a 15 percent stake in the Kupe gas field to Genesis Energy to profit from its long-term involvement in the project and free up capital for other investment. In early 2017 it sold its interest in the declining Tui oil field to avoid potential decommissioning liabilities.

NZOG subsequently bought back a 4 percent interest in Kupe, New Zealands fourth-largest gas producer, from Mitsui & Co. It also increased its holding in Cue, which has producing assets in Indonesia and a 5 percent interest in the Maari oil field off the Taranaki coast.

Kupe accounted for $9.2 million of NZOGs revenue in the past year; Cue delivered $26.6 million. After excluding minority earnings from Cue and other ventures NZOG shareholders shared in a net profit of $762,000, compared with a $22.6 million loss the year before, excluding gains from asset sales.

Jefferies said that while the Kupe investment is small, its earnings are reliable and cover the firms corporate overheads. Cues revenues also covered that firms much-reduced corporate overheads.

The firm has a $98 million war chest. Ofer is also a very supportive shareholder which provides scope for investment beyond what NZOG's own balance sheet could manage, he said.

Were in a pretty good place to be looking at growth.

NZOG is in the process of taking over operatorship of the Toroa permit east of Stewart Island from partner Woodside Petroleum and is marketing that project alongside Barque.

Earlier this year it took a stake in a venture with Mitsui, AWE Exploration and Ofer Global in the onshore Kohatukai well south-east of New Plymouth. It is scheduled for drilling next month.

Jefferies said the company is still looking for other potential investments  particularly in piped gas markets where demand is increasing and earnings are less sensitive to movements in oil prices.

He cited Australia as another market where domestic demand is high. Indonesia, where the NZOG recently rationalised its acreage, is also an area of interest. He noted that Cue will drill a well at its Sampang permit in October.

Jefferies noted the increased sovereign risk the governments announcement has created has reduced the investment it is likely to make locally in future.

We will be spending money overseas that we would otherwise have looked to spend in New Zealand.

NZOG shares rose half a cent to 57.5 cents today. They reached 77 cents late last year during Ofers bid for control of the business and have fallen about 19 percent this year.

The company, which last year returned $100 million of capital to shareholders, opted not to pay a dividend, citing the new growth phase it is in. Last November it paid a 4 cent final dividend.

(BusinessDesk)

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SLI Systems says it won't stop chasing high margin growth overseas to keep its books in the black.

The Christchurch-based software developer reported a maiden profit of $4 million in the 12 months ended June 30, turning around a loss of $1.9 million a year earlier. Revenue rose 7 percent to $33.8 million, buoyed by foreign exchange gains. SLI accelerated cost-cutting, trimming 9.9 percent from operating expenses to $11.8 million and reducing its wage bill 9.3 percent to $18.6 million.

Annual recurring revenue, a favoured measure among software-as-a-service companies, was flat at $33.6 million in constant currency terms. Gains in the Asia Pacific region and the UK offset declines in North America and South America. The company generates about half its revenue from the US, and over the course of the year the kiwi depreciated 7.9 percent against the greenback.

"We are pleased with the progress we have made building the financial strength of the company and making good our commitment not to seek new equity from investors," chief executive Chris Brennan said in a statement. "We are achieving this by scaling back spending on sales and marketing and closely aligning any expenditure not linked with new product development to our immediate growth expectations and customer retention."

The e-commerce software seller changed strategy to a greater self-service model where customers can more easily build their own capabilities as retailers facing the pinch refrain from deploying a number of different technologies at once.

SLI is still chasing high margin customers overseas, and Brennan said that means short-term profit will remain uncertain.

"The company is focused on delivering its new product range and our goals are long-term growth in high margin recurring revenue rather than short- to medium-term profit," he said.

The software developer will release new cloud-based products in the 2019 financial year, but is running "slightly later than originally expected" due to the European Union's new data protection regulations and the company's own shift in strategy.

SLI generated an operating cash inflow of $3.7 million, compared to an outflow of $792,000 a year earlier. That helped boost cash and equivalents to $9.1 million as at June 30.

SLI shares fell 9.1 percent to 30 cents, trimming their gain this year to 50 percent. It is the sixth-biggest gainer on the S&P/NZX All Index, but still well down from the $1.50 sale price in its 2013 initial public offering.

(BusinessDesk)

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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wants to win over business leaders with a new working group headed by Air New Zealand chief executive Christopher Luxon and sought to ease fears over sector-level collective agreements, saying no more than two will completed this term.

Ardern said flagging business confidence was "a flashing great neon sign with giant lights and fireworks going off behind it" and it would be wrong to ignore the sharp decline as simply party politics. The Labour-led government has been at pains to talk up its pro-business credentials in the face of growing pessimism in business surveys, even as firms' own activity remains robust. Ardern said that decline was probably capturing the lack of certainty firms feel.

"From a business perspective, I understand the desire for certainty in order to make decisions big and small, ranging from the risk of taking on an extra hire through to multi-million dollar investment decisions, and you need to understand that the climate you operate in today will be broadly the same tomorrow," she said. "But certainty shouldnt be confused for stasis and complacency, which are the enemy of progress, and for that matter the enemy of innovation."

The government has faced strong criticism from business lobbies over its planned industrial law changes, such as the proposal to introduce Fair Pay Agreements for sector-wide collective bargaining. That work is currently before a 10-member group headed by former PM Jim Bolger and is expected to make recommendations to Workplace Relations Minister Iain Lees-Galloway in November.

Ardern today played down the impact such agreements will have on the wider business community, saying "they are not here to fundamentally disrupt our employment relations landscape, and they will not for instance be accompanied by the ability to take strike action" and will target areas where there is entrenched low pay and slow growth.

"Thats why I am confirming today that there will be no more than one or two fair pay agreements concluded during this term. They will be in industries and sectors that have low pay and in which the workers are vulnerable and regularly exploited," Ardern said.

"The vast bulk of you in this room will remain unaffected by these agreements, but you will have a chance to see how they work, the benefits that they bring, and I hope, that some of the speculation around them is unfounded."

Ardern also offered her ear to business leaders with a new working group headed by Air NZ's Luxon to advise on economic matters and the government's strategy and agenda.

"Members of the group will be tasked with working alongside us to assist with addressing some of the big challenges we face," she said. "I want the council to report to me on the issues and opportunities they see and identify emerging challenges like skills, training and migration and the challenge of scaling New Zealand businesses up and growing our export-led wealth."

The government has previously lauded Air NZ's workplace relations and its use of the High Performance, High Engagement process with the E Tu union as a success. Meanwhile, Luxon has strong credibility among business leaders, presiding over record profits at the national carrier and being linked as a potential candidate to head dairy giant Fonterra Cooperative Group, a rumour he later quashed.

"The council will supplement the work that business is already doing on initiatives like the tri-partite forum on the future of work, but it is fair to say that there is no formal advice stream such as this, and its time that changed," Ardern said.

She again ruled out greater borrowing to achieve the government's programme, saying the budget responsibility rules are an "important part of ensuring long-term fiscal sustainability".

The government also released what it called its business partnership agenda, bringing together its line-up of programmes aimed at redirecting the economy to "work within the limits of our environment, shape it to deliver on the hopes and aspirations of all our people, and for our economic purpose to be bigger than just profit".

Topping Ardern's list of priorities is growing and sharing more fairly New Zealand's prosperity, which "means the gap between the highest and lowest income and wealth deciles reduces, real per capita income increases; the value and diversity of our exports grows and home ownership increases".

She also wants "to support thriving and sustainable regions that benefit from an equitable share of sustainable economic growth" with increased regional employment and income distribution.

Ardern said she also wants a broader measure of success for the government, where ministers will "bid for funding not just on the basis of what they think they need, but on how it will provide intergenerational benefits for New Zealanders."

She reiterated the government's commitment to a "clean, green carbon neutral New Zealand", saying "we are actively talking to groups like the farming community about what we can do to reduce emissions while keeping industry profitable."

(BusinessDesk)

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It is common for companies to organize various informal events where workers can come with their partners. One of those...Bigg Boss 2 Telugu had seen another celebrity leaving out from the show. Pooja Ramachandran, the actress who joined the show as celebrity contestant through the wild card, got evicted leaving everybody in shock this week.

Pooja came into the house of Bigg Boss unexpectedly. She was taken to spice up the show with her glamour. No one was expecting her to join the show. Her eviction also took place in a sudden manner. Pooja Ramachandran had acted in several Telugu films that including Swamy Raa Raa. Her team on social media promoted her aggressively but she didnt receive many votes from the public.: Major Leetul Gogoi, who was detained by police in a Srinagar hotel after he was seen with a local woman in May, has been found guilty of fraternising with a local and being away from his place of duty while in an operational area by a Court of Inquiry, army sources said on Monday.

Orders have been issued to initiate disciplinary action against him, they said.

The court has held him accountable for "fraternising" with a local in spite of instructions to the contrary and "being away from the place of duty while in operational area", the sources said.

On May 23, police detained Gogoi following an altercation when he was allegedly trying to enter a Srinagar hotel with an 18-year-old woman. Days later, the Army ordered the CoI into the incident.

Army chief Gen Bipin Rawat had said in Pahalgam that exemplary punishment would be given to Gogoi if he was found guilty of "any offence".Page Content

While sharing his vision for the future of his Ministry, Minister of Tourism, Economic Affairs, Traffic & Telecommunication Stuart Johnson made it clear to over 100 civil servants on Wednesday afternoon, that he was ready to roll up his sleeves, and "put on my sneakers and get to work.





Johnson outlined his strategic plan for the ministry of TEATT for the coming four years, which includes Instituting the current Philipsburg revitalization plan as a priority. His projects will also involve developing community-based tourism and developing a sustainable agricultural policy to maximize the potential of farming and fishing.

The ministry will make significant investments to improve the island's road network and reduce traffic congestion. During the presentation, Johnson also explained that the Ministry will finalize a public infrastructure development plan and establish a clearly defined policy on public transportation and infrastructure.





He referred to the more than one hundred civil servants in attendance as the "heart of the entire government" and told them they would be called upon to play a critical role in the sustainable redevelopment of St. Maarten, especially in revitalizing its Tourism product and the economy.

According to Minister Johnson, It is not going to be business as usual for TEATT. During the special presentation, held at the Government Administration Building, many of the staff posed questions to the Minister regarding his future plans for St. Maarten. Some also expressed concerns over longstanding issues within their departments that were left unresolved and asked whether the Minister would give these issues the attention they deserve.





While much of the issues mentioned have been lingering long before Johnson's time, he has pledged his commitment to addressing them. One such concern came from Casino Controllers expressed the need for mandatory increases in security at casino entrances based on the spate of violent criminal activities in recent times.

The Minister, whose father served for several years as a Casino Controller, acknowledged that the security of the Controllers is a top priority for his ministry. He commended one of the Controllers who suggested that one measure that can be taken is to encourage casino operators to install double doors at the entrance to their establishments, similar to those at most banks, but with the addition of a metal detector.





The young Minister Johnson impressed the attendees with his quick responses and showed a keen understanding of the challenges within each ministry. He shared his strategic objectives, which include urgently reopening the Princess Juliana International Airport and finalizing the US Pre-Clearance for St. Maarten, as short-term goals. The Simpson Bay Lagoon will be cleaned as part of the short-term objectives for TEATT.





The Ministry will also work towards increasing the "basket of goods and will initiate and enforce a fair price control during the recovery period. However, Johnson said measures such as price control would be only as effective as the effort our civil servants put into ensuring strict controls are done.

During the question and answer session, one of the attendees said he agreed that the reopening of PJIA should be a priority, but asked the Minister about the plans for reopening hotels.





During his first month in office, Johnson has spent a significant portion of his time meeting with hoteliers large and small to discuss their plans for rebuilding and finding ways to strengthen the public-private partnership in the interest of moving St. Maarten forward. He mentioned meeting with the Sunwing Airlines who will soon start construction of the 450 room five-star Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino at the location of the former Great Bay Beach Resort & Casino which was demolished after being destroyed by hurricane Irma.





He said more investments were forthcoming and he also made clear that we will need to improve efficiencies to create a climate that is conducive to generating investor interest. This includes proper and timely processing of information that is pertinent to new developments and expansions. "As civil servants, you are in control of your creative thinking, and I welcome innovative thinking and ideas," said Johnson.

Amongst the plans for TEATT were short-term objectives for the St. Maarten Tourist Bureau, such as combining resources between French and Dutch St. Maarten for destination marketing and other joint venture projects geared towards product enhancement.

His mid to long-term goals for the ministry include managing the parallel imports and counterfeit market and strengthening maritime facilities and services. Johnson said TEATT will revisit and reinstate the Economic Development Cooperation and evaluate the feasibility of making Winair a national airline.





The Ministry will review the possibilities of restructuring the development of Civil Aviation, and Shipping & Maritime Affairs into two separate and Independent Administrative Bodies.

TEATT will also concentrate much of its resources on stimulating entrepreneurship amongst the local population, and also provide support to small hotels to ensure that they can continue to provide service to our regional visitors. In preparation for the celebration of 50-years of Carnival on St. Maarten, the STB will work closely with the St. Maarten Carnival Development Foundation SCDF to increase awareness through special joint venture promotions. However, Johnson says promoting carnival and promoting the destination as a preferred vacation spot should go hand in hand each year.





Pic:

Minister of Tourism, Economic Affairs, Traffic & Telecommunication TEATT, Stuart Johnson, sharing his vision for the next four years with the civil servants in the various departments of TEATT.



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/var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd58c9048)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd594de48)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd58c9048)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd594de48)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd5989118)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd594de48)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd594de48)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd53e97c0)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fd58c9420)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fd58c9420)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0System error

error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.

context: ... 21: </%method> 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: </%perl> 28: <table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> 29: <tr> ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25

/usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:951

/var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd5cb4a48)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fda5f2818)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd5cb4a48)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fda5f2818)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd5d18200)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fda5f2818)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fda5f2818)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd53e9748)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fda79dc68)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fda79dc68)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0System error

error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.

context: ... 21: </%method> 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: </%perl> 28: <table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> 29: <tr> ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25

/usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:951

/var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd58bbfb8)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd57d9e88)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd58bbfb8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd57d9e88)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd58cb5d8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd57d9e88)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd57d9e88)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd53eaa90)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fd53e9250)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fd53e9250)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0System error

error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.

context: ... 21: </%method> 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: </%perl> 28: <table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> 29: <tr> ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25

/usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:951

/var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd58bc028)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd653f2a8)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd58bc028)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd653f2a8)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd58cb138)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd653f2a8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd653f2a8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd53e95c8)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fd6545d08)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fd6545d08)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0System error

error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.

context: ... 21: </%method> 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: </%perl> 28: <table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> 29: <tr> ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25

/usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:951

/var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd5d19f60)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd62488f0)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd5d19f60)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd62488f0)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fd5cb6820)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd62488f0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd62488f0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fd53e8790)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fd5cb88b0)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fd5cb88b0)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0Iran urges UN court to halt 'economic strangulation' by US



The Hague, Aug 27 (AFP) Aug 27, 2018



Iran on Monday demanded the UN's top court suspend US nuclear-linked sanctions against Tehran, accusing Washington of plotting its "economic strangulation".

The Islamic Republic launched a suit at the International Court of Justice over US President Donald Trump's decision to reimpose the sanctions that had been lifted in a 2015 accord.

Iran says Trump's move breaches a 1955 treaty.

Trump says the sanctions are needed to ensure Iran never builds a nuclear bomb. But Iran's representative Mohsen Mohebi branded them "naked economic aggression".

His team of lawyers told the court in The Hague the measures were already devastating Iran's economy and threatening the welfare of its citizens.

"The United States is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran's economy and Iranian nationals and companies," Mohebi said.

"Iran will put up the strongest resistance to the US economic strangulation, by all peaceful means."



- 'Irreparable prejudice' -



The US measures have added to Iran's economic woes, fuelling strikes and protests across the country and political spectrum.

The sanctions target financial transactions and imports of raw materials, cars and aircraft among other things.

A second wave of punitive measures is due to hit Iran in early November, targeting its vital energy sector including oil exports.

Iran's lawyers said the sanctions would cause it "irreparable prejudice". They urged the court to order the suspension of the sanctions pending a definitive ruling.

British lawyer Samuel Wordsworth, for Iran, told the court the sanctions were threatening Iranians' access to medicines as well as disrupting business deals.

Jean-Marc Thouvenin, law professor at University of Paris Nanterre, added: "It is urgent that the court indicate provisional measures that safeguard Iran because the purpose (of sanctions) is to strangle the Iranian economy within a few months."



- 'One-sided deal' -



The ICJ is expected to take a couple of months to decide whether to grant Tehran's request for a provisional ruling. A final decision could take years.

The 2015 deal was signed by Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany.

Sanctions were lifted in return for Iran committing not to pursue nuclear weapons.

Trump, who took office in 2016, called it a "horrible one-sided deal".

He said it "failed to achieve the fundamental objective of blocking all paths to a Iranian nuclear bomb."

To the horror of the other signatories, he pulled out of the accord and announced in May that he would reinstate sanctions.



- 'Neither war, nor negotiations' -



Iran's lawyers said the US sanctions threatened tens of billions of dollars' worth of business deals with foreign companies.

Iran's currency the rial has lost around half its value since April.

International companies including French oil firm Total and Germany's Siemens have suspended operations in Iran since Trump announced the US withdrawal in May.

Trump said the sanctions would turn up the financial pressure on Tehran to come to a "comprehensive and lasting solution" regarding its activities such as its "ballistic missile programme and its support for terrorism".

The case is the second brought by Tehran against Washington since 2016. That year it brought a suit at the ICJ against the freezing of around $2 billion of Iranian assets abroad which US courts say should go to American victims of terror attacks.

Hearings in that case are due to start on October 8.

Despite the 1955 Treaty of Amity and Economic Relations between Iran and the United States, the two countries have not had diplomatic ties since 1980.

The court adjourned after Monday's hearing, with Washington's lawyers scheduled to present their case on Tuesday. Experts expect them to challenge the ICJ's jurisdiction.

A second round of arguments follows on Wednesday and Thursday.

jhe-rlp/nla

SIEMENSSaudi-led coalition accuses UN of bias in Yemen



Riyadh, Aug 27 (AFP) Aug 27, 2018



The Saudi-led military coalition fighting in Yemen on Monday accused the United Nations of "biased" reports on air strikes that allegedly killed dozens of children in rebel-held areas.

"The coalition is surprised by the ... biased positions of some reports," said coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki, adding that the information was "prejudiced" and based on "rebel stories".

The coalition has not confirmed or denied it carried out two air raids on Thursday that the UN said killed at least 26 children and four women south of the flashpoint rebel-held city of Hodeida.

The UN Security Council had already called for a "credible" investigation into a strike blamed on the coalition in northern Yemen on August 9 that the Red Cross said killed 40 children.

The coalition has announced its own probe into that raid.

Two UN officials have made public statements condemning the attacks.

"We all know that UN bodies are under pressure by the Huthi militias ... and these reports may have come in response to that pressure," Maliki said.

"There is no war without collateral damage."

Saudi Arabia and its allies have fought the Huthis since 2015 in an attempt to restore Yemen's internationally recognised government to power and push back the rebels, who still hold the capital Sanaa.

The war has left nearly 10,000 people dead and unleashed what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.S.Africa drops Zuma's nuclear expansion dreams



Johannesburg, Aug 27 (AFP) Aug 27, 2018



South Africa confirmed on Monday it had scrapped plans to build a series of nuclear power stations, burying one of former president Jacob Zuma's most controversial policies.

Zuma's nuclear expansion plan was a key battleground for control over South Africa's finances, with his opponents accusing him of seeking a deal that could have bankrupted the country to enrich his allies.

Zuma, whose nine-year reign was engulfed by corruption scandals, was forced to resign in February and was replaced by his former deputy Cyril Ramaphosa.

Ramaphosa had said that the nuclear expansion plan was on hold, and Energy Minister Jeff Radebe on Monday announced that more nuclear power was not part of the government's energy policy.

"There will be a study to determine if more nuclear is needed after 2030... but until then, there is no increase in nuclear generation envisaged," Radebe told reporters at the government's latest energy review.

Zuma had wanted to build eight new reactors to end South Africa's reliance on coal.

But the procurement process and the price tag of about one trillion rand ($73 billion) drew sharp opposition.

The reactors would have supplied an additional 9,600 MW of electricity, more than five times current nuclear output.

Russia was seen as leading the race to win the huge construction contract with China, South Korea, the US and France also in the running.

South Africa's power demand has declined and is currently at levels last seen more than a decade ago, according to the energy department.

Radebe said the country would move away from coal by generating more energy from wind and natural gas.Iran fights US sanctions at UN court



The Hague, Aug 27 (AFP) Aug 27, 2018



Iran demanded Monday that the UN's top court order the United States to suspend nuclear-linked sanctions against Tehran, but Washington vowed to "vigorously" fend off the legal challenge.

The Islamic Republic launched a suit at the International Court of Justice over US President Donald Trump's decision to reimpose sanctions that were lifted in a landmark 2015 accord.

Trump says the sanctions are needed to ensure Iran never builds a nuclear bomb. But Iran's representative Mohsen Mohebi branded them "naked economic aggression".

His team of lawyers told the court in The Hague that the measures were already devastating Iran's economy and threatening the welfare of its citizens.

"The United States is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran's economy and Iranian nationals and companies," Mohebi said.

"Iran will put up the strongest resistance to the US economic strangulation, by all peaceful means."

US lawyers are due to give their response in arguments before the court on Tuesday, with experts expecting them to challenge the ICJ's jurisdiction.

"We will vigorously defend against Iran's meritless claims this week in The Hague," said US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

He said Iran's lawsuit was "an attempt to interfere with the sovereign rights of the United States to take lawful actions, including re-imposition of sanctions, which are necessary to protect our national security".



- 'Irreparable prejudice' -



ICJ judgements are binding, final and without appeal.

However, whether any decision will be implemented remains unclear, with both Iran and the US in the past ignoring ICJ rulings against them.

The US measures have added to Iran's economic woes, fuelling strikes and protests across the country and political spectrum.

The sanctions target financial transactions and imports of raw materials, cars and aircraft among other sectors.

A second wave of punitive measures is due to hit the OPEC member state in early November, targeting its vital energy sector including oil exports.

Iran's lawyers said the sanctions would cause it "irreparable prejudice". They urged the court to order the suspension of the sanctions pending a definitive ruling.

London-based lawyer Samuel Wordsworth, for Iran, told the court the measures were threatening Iranians' access to medicines as well as disrupting business deals.



- 'One-sided deal' -



The ICJ is expected to take a couple of months to decide whether to grant Tehran's request for a provisional ruling. A final decision could take years.

After years of diplomacy, the 2015 deal was signed by Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

Sanctions were lifted in return for Iran committing not to pursue nuclear weapons.

Trump, who took office in 2016, called it a "horrible one-sided deal".

He said it "failed to achieve the fundamental objective of blocking all paths to a Iranian nuclear bomb."



- Business deals scuppered -



Iran's lawyers said the US sanctions had disrupted tens of billions of dollars' worth of business deals with foreign companies.

Iran's currency the rial has lost around half its value since April.

International companies including French oil firm Total and Germany's Siemens have suspended operations in Iran since Trump announced the US withdrawal in May.

Trump said the sanctions would turn up the financial pressure on Tehran to come to a "comprehensive and lasting solution" regarding its activities such as its "ballistic missile programme and its support for terrorism".

The case is the second brought by Tehran against Washington since 2016. That year it brought a suit at the ICJ against the freezing of around $2 billion of Iranian assets abroad which US courts say should go to American victims of terror attacks.

Hearings in that case are due to start on October 8.

In both cases Iran is basing its claim on the obscure 1955 Treaty of Amity and Economic Relations, signed long before the country's Islamic revolution.

Despite the treaty, the two countries have not had diplomatic ties since 1980. Iran routinely refers to the US as "the enemy" and its officials chant "Death to America" at official functions.



jhe-rlp/txw

SIEMENSJihadist leader killed in Mali French airstrike: army



Paris, Aug 27 (AFP) Aug 27, 2018



A top jihadist leader of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara group, an aide and two civilians have been killed in northeastern Mali by a French airstrike, the French command centre in Paris said Monday.

"Commandos deployed on the ground (after the airstrike) confirmed the death of Mohamed Ag Almouner and one of his bodyguards. They also found the bodies of a woman and a teenager," an army statement said.

Another member of ISGS was wounded, along with two other civilians.

The jihadist leader who was killed at an isolated camp in the Menaka region was "a lieutenant to the ISGS chief", army spokesman colonel Patrik Steiger told AFP.

He added that "the link between the civilians and the jihadist leader is not yet known."

The statement expressed regret at the civilian deaths and said an investigation was under way to determine how they got caught up in the attack.

The French operation overnight Sunday to Monday involved two Mirage 2000 aircraft, followed up by ground forces.

ISGS, based on Mali's border with Burkina Faso and also active in Niger, is just one of several jihadist groups in the country where French forces have been fighting for several years to help restore government control.

It is led by Adnan Abu Walid Sahrawi who was formerly a member of the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) group and also co-led Mujao, a Malian Islamist group.

ISGS had claimed a series of attacks, including one in October 2017 in Niger that killed four US army speical operations soldiers and four Nigerien troops.

Around 4,000 French soldiers are deployed in five Sahal countries (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Chad) as part of the anti-terrorist Barkhane operation.

The north of Mali fell under jihadist control in 2012 until they were pushed out of the cities by France's military intervention in 2013.

But Mali, a landlocked nation home to at least 20 ethnic groups, continues to battle jihadist attacks and intercommunal violence, which often spills over to neighbouring countries.The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2018 - Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principals for news reporting and research purposes. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA news reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement, agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement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.A frequent source of military defeats, especially in peacetime, are weapons development projects. In the United States, one a project gets to a certain point it is unstoppable until a decade or more of failure and rising costs to fix the problems finally prove fatal. Case in points is the more than 20 years of effort the U.S. Army put into getting its XM25 smart shell weapon to work and be accepted by the troops. In 2018 the army finally gave up on this.

The U.S. Army is keeping the XM25 patents and might resurrect the concept later, especially in light of South Korea and China producing similar designs which are still in service. The XM25 is the only one of three to have been tested extensively in combat but because of a misfire during a 2013 demonstration, the XM25 was withdrawn from service for a three year effort to redesign. This was successful and solved the misfire problem and a few more minor ones. But this resulted in an XM25 that cost $93,000 each rather than $41,000. Meanwhile, there were Department of Defense budget cuts and troops finding there were not really that many situations calling for the XM25. Then there was the weight problem. Typically the complete system (XM25 and 36 25mm rounds) weighed 15.9 kg (35 pounds) and some SOCOM troops refused to take it along because of that. Then there was a legal problem with German firearms manufacturer Heckler and Koch, which controlled key patents used in the M25. Heckler and Koch cited one of the laws of war (Hague Conventions) which, technically, made the explosive 25mm shells of the M25 illegal. The U.S. government refused to get involved in expensive and time-consuming litigation over this matter and the XM25 project was canceled in early 2017. A year later the Army lost the will to keep the XM25 in service at all. The U.S. could always buy the similar South Korean K11, but American resistance to purchasing foreign weapons has always been strong, even if the foreign stuff is the best, or only, solution to a problem. It sometimes happens, but like the Heckler and Koch lawsuit, it is often seen as one problem too many. Besides, the South Koreans were not thrilled with their K11 anyway. During its brief combat career, troops nicknamed the XM25 the Punisher. That name was apt in other ways, as in how the project was run over more than two decades.

Even if kept in service the XM25 was still a heavy and bulky weapon, with the final version coming in at 5.5 kg (12 pounds). The 25mm shells weigh over half a pound each (270 grams). On the plus side, there is already a 25mm armor piercing round (using a shaped charge capable of penetrating over 50mm of armor) available. This makes the XM-25 (along with many other lightweight weapons) capable of knocking out light armored vehicles. Then there are the proposed types of 25mm ammo, like fuel-air explosive (or "thermobaric"). This shell would cause greater blast effect in an enclosed space, and actually, suck most of the oxygen out of a cave or closed room long enough to make surviving troops at least a bit groggy. This gives the attacking troops an opportunity to rush in and kill the enemy or take prisoners. In combat, every little advantage helps, if you can afford to equip the troops with a weapon that is affordable and works. When facing the XM25, hiding behind rocks, trees, walls or in caves will no longer protect you. The XM-25 also has a 4x thermal sight which made the XM-25 at night useful for just the sight. None of these real or promising features was enough to save the XM25.

The U.S. began working on what became the XM25 back in the 1990s as the XM29 OICW (Objective Individual Combat Weapon) and that mutated into the simpler and lighter XM25 (the X in XM25 designates a system that is still in development) as well as inspiring the South Koreans and Chinese to develop similar weapons that were lighters, simpler, cheaper and more useful in combat. The OICW survived as the XM25 when it got rid of the assault rifle element and upped the caliber to 25mm. Thus an XM25, with a four round magazine, weighs 5.5 kg while the loaded South Korean K11 weighed 7.2 kg. The Chinese QTS-11 weighed from 5 to 7 kg (depending on accessories).

The initial spectacular success and popularity of the XM25 in Afghanistan led the army to request that the weapon enter regular service as the M25 in 2014. But Congress, looking for ways to reduce military spending in 2013 cut all money for the M25. The army managed to scrounge enough cash to keep the M25 on the books as the XM25 and hoped to get the money to build 1,100 of them. In 2011 the XM25 cost $35,000 each with the 25mm ammo going for $55 per round. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) had some XM25s but with few American troops in combat, there is not a lot of demand for a weapon like this. Then came the 2013 accident and it was irretrievably downhill from there.

When the first evaluation models of the XM25 arrived in Afghanistan in 2011 the weapon became much sought after by infantry troops. There were never more than a few dozen XM25s in Afghanistan and limited supplies of ammunition. Despite that, the weapon quickly developed a formidable reputation. The Special Forces have priority on the weapon because it is very useful for special operations missions. The army planned to buy enough so that they could issue one per infantry squad. There are 27 squads in an infantry battalion but the army never had enough cash to pay for this and also fix problems that developed with the XM25.

In the beginning the XM25 went through several major design changes and it wasnt until 2005 that the first XM25s were delivered to the U.S. Army for troop testing. In 2007 a few were sent overseas for testing in combat situations. While the troops have been very enthusiastic about the new weapon, there were a lot of suggestions, mostly about minor items. So the army kept tweaking and refining the weapon. It appeared that the XM25 was a success after only 55 of the 25mm rounds were fired in combat. The users protested having to give them up after the few months of field testing. All this was because the XM25s worked as advertised, firing "smart rounds" that exploded over the heads of Taliban hiding behind rocks or walls, or hiding in a cave or room. Enemy machine-guns have been quickly knocked out of action and ambushes quickly disrupted with a few 25mm shells. Encounters that might go on for 15 minutes or longer, as U.S. troops exchange fire with hidden Taliban, end in minutes after a few 25mm, computer controlled rounds were used. But over time it was found that there were not that many situations in combat calling for an M25 and troops left them behind most of the time if they were going out on a foot patrol and had to carry everything.

The XM25 was originally one of two weapons (the other being a 5.56mm rifle) incorporated in the 8.2 kg (18 pound) XM29 OICW. The OICW was originally developed as a replacement for the 40mm grenade launcher attached to the M16 used by the squad grenadier as well as providing a more accurate and capable grenade launcher. Didn't work out as intended. The big problem was effectiveness. The older 40mm, unguided, grenade rounds weigh 540 grams (19 ounces) each while the original 20mm OICW round weighed half that. This was one of the several major problems with the OICW. It was too heavy and ungainly, and the 20mm "smart shell" it fired did not appear capable of effectively putting enemy troops out of action consistently, especially compared to the 40mm shell it was replacing. So, in August 2003, it was decided to take the 5.56mm portion out of the OICW and develop it as a separate weapon (the XM8) while the grenade launcher part that fired the "smart shell" continued development as the XM25. But the XM25 would now use a 25mm shell, which would generate 50 percent more fragments (and heavier ones at that) than the 20mm shell of the OICW. China and South Korea insist that their 20mm grenades inflict sufficient hurt on the enemy to be effective. The U.S., with lots of combat testing, believes that 25mm is the only way to go. China disagrees and insists its 20mm shell is quite lethal in part because they have more compact electronics in the shell and more space for explosives.

The 20mm and 25mm "smart shells" both use a computer controlled fuze. The XM25 operator could choose one of four different firing modes via a selector switch on the weapon. The four modes include "Bursting" (airburst). For this to work, the soldier first finds the target via the weapons sighting system. The sight includes a laser range finder and the ability to select and adjust the range shown in the sight picture. For an air burst, the soldier aims at an enemy position and fires a round. The shell is optimized to spray incapacitating (wounding or killing) fragments in a roughly six meter (19 foot) radius from the exploding round. Thus if enemy troops are seen moving near trees or buildings at a long distance (over 500 meters), the weapon has a good chance of getting them with one shot. M-16s are not very accurate at that range, and the enemy troops will dive for cover as soon as M-16 bullets hit around them. With smart shells, you get one (or a few) accurate shots and the element of surprise. The smart shells can be used out to 700 meters, but not as accurately. At those longer ranges, you can't put a shell through a window, but you can hurt a crowd of gunmen standing outside the building.

The other modes are "PD" (point detonation, where the round explodes on contact), PDD (point detonation delay, where the round detonates immediately after it has gone through a door, window or thin wall) and "Window", which is used for firing at enemy troops in a trench, behind a stone wall or inside a room. The round detonates just beyond the aiming point. For buildings, this would be a window or door frame, cave entrance or the corner of a building (to get enemy troops thought to be around the corner.) All these options were more than the troops needed.

Meanwhile, South Korea developed the K11 had it ready for service in 2010. The K11 was identical in concept of the XM29 OICW. The South Korean version weighed less than the XM29 and still combined a 5.56mm rifle with one firing 20mm computer and laser controlled shells. Then there was China, which in 2015 began arming its troops with the QTS-11, a weapon that combines a 5.8mm assault rifle with a computer controlled, laser rangefinder assisted 20mm grenade launcher (with a max range of 700 meters). In late 2017 the Chinese had over two years experience with the QTS-11 and found that the most commonly used 20mm ammo was the air-burst round. That was the American experience with their XM25 in Afghanistan a decade earlier. Another popular feature was the lightweight. Unloaded the QTS-11 weighed 4.27 kg (9.4 pounds). Loaded with a 20 round magazine for the assault rifle and one 20mm round the QTS-11 weighed 5 kg (11 pounds) and with a high-end electronic scope the QTS-11 weighed 7 kg. This simplicity and flexibility proved to be a major factor in the success of the QTS-11 compared to similar weapons from South Korea and the United States.

The South Koreans noted this and are upgrading their similar K11 weapon to reduce weight from 6.1 kg (13 pounds) to about 5.5 kg. Another popular feature of the QTS-11 is that the computerized electronic sight can be easily removed and replaced with a lighter and smaller optical sight. The 20mm grenades can still be used but only those that detonate on impact. Apparently, infantry commanders and troops believe this is a useful option. Another useful option, which has been tested but not yet issued to the troops, is an eyepiece that connects, via a cable, to the computerized sight and enables the soldier to fire around corners.

The QTS-11 was first seen in public during 2015 when Chinese marines assigned to warships working with the international anti-piracy patrol off Somalia. Chinese special operations troops also had the QTS-11 and the army ordered several thousand of them so that each four-man infantry fire-team would have one. That puts China ahead of the United States and South Korea. The Chinese version is lighter, simpler and cheaper and the Chinese feel the QTS-11 is worth buying and issuing to the troops. Theres not been similar enthusiasm with the American and South Korean versions.

One reason for that is the way the Chinese handled the fact that the QTS-11 had three types of 20mm ammo and only one of those types was really essential. The impact detonation shell is useful, especially when not using the computerized sight. The air burst shell is unique and really only available with the QTS-11 when equipped with the computerized sight. The third type of round is a shotgun type shell that uses the computerized sight, which only provides for the user to select at what range the air burst or shotgun round will detonate. Because these 20mm rounds have fewer electronics in them they carry more fragments and the Chinese believe (but dont know from combat experience) that this supplies adequate wounding capability. Tests show that the airburst round wounds out to seven meters and is apparently as effective as a hand grenade.

China was able to learn from South Korean experience because in 2009 South Korea revealed it had developed (since 2006) the K11, a $14,000 20mm/5.56mm weapon which appeared to be identical in concept to the U.S. Army XM29. The South Korean version weighed 6.1 kg (13.4 pounds) empty and combines a 5.56mm rifle, with one firing 20mm computer and controlled shells. The South Korean weapon operated the same way as the 20mm shell of the XM29. The South Koreans planned to issue the K11 on the basis of two weapons per squad (an infantry unit containing 10-12 men). The K11 was both cheaper and lighter than the XM29 but not as cheap or as light as the QTS-11. Eventually, South Korea issued fewer K11s and treated it as a specialist weapon, not a standard one.

The South Koreans found solutions to the problems American encountered with the XM29 and XM25. South Korea used some K11s in Afghanistan and there were lots of complaints about reliability and effectiveness. This did not result in the K11 being cancelled but the weapon did not have a good reputation among the troops. The South Koreans found that their 20mm smart shell was effective out to about 500 meters. South Korean troops began receiving the K11 in 2010 but in 2011 production was halted for a while because nearly half of those already distributed to the troops had design or manufacturing problems. Some of the problems were encountered during combat in Afghanistan. The K11 problems were fixed and so far over 4,000 have been built. The K11 manufacturer insists that problems are a thing of the past but troops and many commanders are not so confident. By 2017 the K11 was considered reliable but not a particularly spectacular new weapon. Thats why the manufacturer has redesigned it to make the K11 lighter and address a rather long list of suggestions and complaints from users. Even the Chinese and Americans do that and it usually pays off.Mali has been relatively quiet lately with a lot more Islamic terrorist activity occurring in eastern neighbors Burkina Faso and Niger. The newly active G5 Sahel Joint Force was designed for situations like this because the five Sahel nations (Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad) each contributed troops best able to deal with Islamic terrorism throughout the Sahel. That is no instant solution because there is a lot of Islamic terrorist activity in the Sahel. G5 began operations in early 2018 and so far has demonstrated the ability to move and fight and make a difference. Mali is still the most troublesome Sahel nation but also has the most outside assistance, including a peacekeeping force along with a separate French counter-terror forces that also covers much of the Sahel along with the G5 force. The Mali contingent of the G5 is considered the least capable and that has to be taken into account while the training program for the Mali military slowly improves the quality of leadership and troop reliability. With Mali secured by all these foreign troops the G5 has been able to deal with Islamic terror problems elsewhere, especially Burkina Faso and Niger.

The G5 force consists of 5,000 soldiers and police that are stationed in three operational areas along with troops familiar with local conditions. Thus Sahel East consists of troops from Chad and Niger. Sahel Central is staffed by troops from Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso while Sahel West uses troops from Mali and Mauritania. Some of the G5 force was operational by the end of 2017 and by early 2018 the G5 force had already taken part in several counter-terror operations, one of them in the area where the borders of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso meet.

A successful G5 Force would enable France to shrink and eventually disband the force of 4,000 French troops it has deployed in the Sahel since 2013 and reduce the 13,000 strong UN peacekeeper force in Mali. The recent appearance of ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) in the area and the October 2017 attack on American Special Forces troops in Niger encouraged local and international support for the G5 Force. The peacekeepers in Mali are mainly African and mainly stationed in the north and, increasingly central Mali where there is more Islamic terror group activity, not all of it violent.

Yet most of the recent Islamic terrorist violence has not been in Mali. That was one reason the Mali Army was successful in keeping things peaceful for the recent (July 29-August 13) presidential elections (the first round then a runoff). Most of the violent threats to the voting were in the north but thats where most of the foreign troops were deployed. The Islamic terrorists are still operating in Mali but they have been embarrassed by their inability to disrupt the elections (as they said they would) or inflict many casualties on the local and foreign troops confronting them. The Islamic terrorists did make an effort to disrupt the elections but the most they were able to do was fire on voting places with machine-guns or mortars, rarely causing any casualties. Sometimes groups of armed Islamic terrorists would show up at voting locations in person but no matter what they did troops and police were quick to respond and it was the Islamic terrorists who found themselves more off balance than those running the elections. Over 96 percent of the 23,000 voting locations were able to function during the voting.

This election security effort success should not have been a surprise. In mid-July the Mali army cooperated with G5 forces in Burkina Faso during a ten day operation that captured sixty Islamic terrorists and destroyed several bases near the central Mali border. In April a similar eight day counter-terror operation sealed the Mali border and over a hundred suspected Islamic terrorists on the Burkina Faso side of the frontier were arrested. Some of those arrested were known Islamic terrorists and in other locations explosives and weapons were seized. Not surprisingly the Burkina Faso based Islamic terrorists did not seek safe haven in Mali because they knew that effective troops (mostly foreign) were more numerous in Mali than in Burkina Faso. Moreover the Islamic terror problems in Burkina Faso were, as is often the case, caused by local unrest and organized by local leaders. The Islamic terror groups in Mali are still there and constantly working to carry out successful, and hopefully headline worthy, attacks. The Islamic terrorists need the publicity to help with recruiting and efforts to intimidate local populations to cooperate (and not fight back or report Islamic terrorist activity to security forces).

August 12, 2018: President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was reelected in the second (runoff) round of voting today, with 67 percent of the votes. Only about 27 percent of registered voters cast a ballot (compared to the more common 40 percent). About two percent of the polling places (mostly in the north) were shut down by Islamic terrorist threats. Keita won 41 percent of the votes in the first round and opinion polls showed him winning the second round by a wide margin. His opponent Soumaila Cisse claimed fraud but foreign election monitors and the UN certified that the voting was generally free and untainted and corroborated what polling had predicted.

In the north (near Timbuktu) Islamic terrorists attacked a polling station and killed one of the election workers there. This was the only fatality during the runoff election.

August 11, 2018: In the north, across the border in Algeria (Tamanrasset) Sultan Ould Bady, a veteran Mali al Qaeda leader, surrendered to an Algerian army patrol. Since May Algeria has publicized border zones where Islamic terrorists seeking to surrender can cross while armed and not be shot on sight. Islamic terrorists seeking to surrender are advised what to do when they encounter troops. After the surrender of Bady was revealed there were rumors he had actually surrendered in late June (when a group of unidentified Mali Islamic terrorists surrendered) and that was kept secret while Bady was interrogated and what he revealed was acted on. Intelligence indicates there are a growing number of Islamic terrorists in northern Mali who want to get out of the terrorism business. Algeria has about 80,000 troops guarding its 3,000 kilometer long border with Mali and Libya and has been effective in detecting, if not always stopping. Those crossing illegally.

August 7, 2018: In central Mali (Mopti) there was another clash between tribal militias that left 11 Fulani dead. This happened at a cattle market when the Fulani were confronted by a Bambera militia who took the Fulani away and killed them. In July a similar clash left at least 17 dead. Over the last few months about 70 have died in this militia violence. The non-Moslem tribesmen traditionally form hunting groups called Dozo which can also function as a tribal militia and have proved formidable adversaries for the often violent Fulani.

July 31, 2018: In central Mali (Segou) Ansar Dine Islamic terrorists ambushed a military convoy. Four soldiers and eight of the attackers were killed. So far this year Islamic terrorist violence in Mali has left nearly 300 people dead in 99 incidents.

July 30, 2018: The results of the first round of the presidential election (held yesterday) are in and no one got a majority of the vote so there will be a runoff in two weeks. The two leaders in the first round are the same two candidates (Keita and Cisse) who faced each other in the 2013 elections. Cisse consistently gets half (or less) as many votes as Keita.Mike Pearce.

MIKE Pearce was born on 6th June 1932 in Wood Street, Stratford, to Noah and Mollie Pearce, well-known proprietors in the town of Pearce's Tearoom & Delicatessen.

The elder of two sons, he attended Broad Street school & KES where he played rugby, was a keen fencer & competed successfully in the First Four.

Mike trained as a hotel manager at the prestigious Westminster School in London and after graduation worked at the Savoy, the Dorchester and the Westbury in the 1950s.

He met his French wife Ginette in London and they were married in Toulouse, France, in 1957. Their four children were all born in Stratford. Mike & Ginette subsequently became successful hoteliers starting at the Plymouth Arms in Wood Street, Stratford, then in Hereford and later in Coventry.

Returning to live in Stratford in 1969 Mike worked at the University of Warwick as Catering Manager until his retirement in 1991. Not willing to rest idle he embarked on his second career as a Blue Badge tourist guide thus incorporating two of his loves, history and Shakespeare. He lectured in French in which he was fluent.

In this role with The Heart of England he covered seven counties in the Midlands, often guiding in historical houses, castles and places of interest. His knowledge was prodigious.

After retirement he shared his time between England & France where he died on 9th August after a short illness.

Mike was a historian and an avid collector of books, owning thousands in both English & French. He was an internationally recognised authority on WW1 aviation & was the treasurer for many years of the historical society Cross & Cockade.

Mike was an elected member of the Mousquetaires D'Armagnac and an active member of the Anglo-French society in Stratford.

Mike was much loved by his family and friends & is survived by his wife Ginette, nee Expert, his brother Paul and his wife Nina, & his children Caroline, Nicholas, Isabelle & Catherine, grandchildren Noah, Alexander, Camille & Charles.Hatcher goes for win number four in the Watch Racing UK On BT Novices Hurdle. Photo: David Pratt

IT'S the last evening meeting of the year at Stratford on Tuesday and, after the recent rain, the runners will find ground conditions a little different to those at the height of the summer, writes David Hucker.

Since finishing runner-up over the course to Yensir, Dan Skeltons Hatcher has run up a hat-trick of wins by a combined margin of 67 lengths and goes for win number four in the Watch Racing UK On BT Novices Hurdle over two and a quarter miles, which gets the six-race card underway at 5.10pm.

He hasnt run on soft ground since being beaten here by Clondaw Castle in a bumper back in March 2017, so whether he will be as effective on the surface this time remains to be seen.

As well as the going, Hatcher also has to contend with conceding weight to all his rivals, with Ffos Las winner Francky Du Berlais, who will be ridden by champion conditional jockey James Bowen, likely to provide the stiffest opposition.

Wilmcote trainer Olly Murphy has chosen Fontwell Park winner Walk Waterford, owned by The Dream Big Syndicate, from his two entries in the following Rio Gold Syndicate Novices Handicap Chase over two miles and five furlongs and, even with a 7lb penalty, he looks to have every chance with champion jockey Richard Johnson in the saddle again.

Walk Waterford was eased down to beat Newton Abbot winner Eric The Third by six lengths and may have most to fear from Polished Rock, who stepped up on his previous form to score over hurdles at Southwell and makes his chasing debut from the same handicap mark of 94.

The first of three races to carry a prize fund of 11,800 is the Visit The All New racinguk.com Handicap Hurdle over three and a quarter miles, which has attracted six runners including GuerrillaTactics, who hasnt been seen over the smaller obstacles since beating Lord Topper at Warwick eleven months ago, but who is guaranteed to see out the trip.

The runner-up has scored twice over hurdles since, including from a rating of 121 at Newton Abbot last week, so Guerrilla Tactics must have a chance from a mark of only 106, with Wincanton chase winner Gamain, owned and trained by Jane Williams, another for the short-list.

In the absence of Nachi Falls, nine line up for the Racegoers Club 50 Anniversary Handicap Hurdle in which Dan Skelton relies on Miss Spent from his three entries.

Auld Sod put in a good effort in a novice hurdle at Newton Abbot recently, finishing close up behind Delirant, but his mark of 110 on his handicap debut looks harsh on the balance of his form.

Cleni Wells and Richard Johnson were well-supported at Newton Abbot last week when only finishing fifth to Passing Call and they race off the same rating here.

His last win came on good to soft ground from a 4lb higher mark and he could be in the mix along with course winner Cillians Well, who stayed on into fourth behind Billy My Boy on his first run after a 339-day break.

GDay Aussie followed up his course win with success over fences at Newton Abbot and trainer Dave Roberts had him entered in two races here as well as at Worcester on Wednesday evening.

He must think that the Bet At ruk.com Handicap Hurdle over two miles gives the best chance of bringing up the hat-trick, but GDay Aussie has gone up 8lbs in the ratings and needs to improve again.

Over Norton trainer had Charlie Longsdon was another to look at all the options, with Jamacho entered in three races on the card and, with Brian Hughes travelling from the north for his only ride of the night, will be cheered on by the members of the Stratford Racecourse owners group.

Romanor sprang a 20-1 surprise when beating Regulation over the course in June in receipt of 11lbs and, following another win at Fontwell Park last week, he will be getting just 2lbs this time, swinging the weights in favour of the runner-up.

Another who has taken a hike in the weights is Tamarillo Grove, but he has found a new lease of life at the age of eleven and will give them all a race.

Peppay Le Pugh has finished runner-up in his last five outings, but could get his head in front in the concluding Racing UK HD On Sky 426 Handicap Chase over two miles and a furlong on his first start for the Skelton yard, although has to give a lot of weight to Mountain Of Angels, who was runner-up over the course earlier this month.Endocrine Congress to discuss latest developments View(s):

The Endocrine Congress of Sri Lanka 2018 (ESCL 2018) will be held from August 31 to September 2 at the Shangri-La Hotel, Colombo.

The congress is organised by the Sri Lanka College of Endocrinologists in collaboration with the European Association for Study of Diabetes (EASD).

The chief guest will be EASD Vice President Prof. Chantal Mathieu, while speakers from Britain, other European nations, Australia and Asia along with the local faculty will be part of the congress.

The comprehensive academic programme of the congress will focus on the latest developments in diabetes, obesity and endocrine and other metabolic diseases. The Pre-Congress Programme will deal with Type 1 Diabetes.

Meanwhile, the congress will create a platform for local and foreign scientists to disseminate original research through the scientific abstract competition and display, which has reviewed over 100 abstracts from around the world.

The Endocrine Society established in 1979 has grown in strength and currently functions as the Sri Lanka College of Endocrinologists which is the academic body that provides multi-faceted educational opportunities on diabetes and endocrinology.A former Ukrainian ballet dancer is about to host her second textile festival on the Costa del Sol. Oksana Mader, who came to live in Benalmadena Costa in 2000, took up the art of patchworking after winning first prize in the World Quilting Festival in the NEC in Birmingham in 2016. Overjoyed with the event in Birmingham, she decided to organise her own festival in Benalmadena the following year. Such was the success of the event that she has now organised the second edition of the International Art Textile Festival, which will be held in Benalmadena next month.

INFORMATION Inauguration. The inauguration of the festival will be held in Castillo Bil Bil at 7pm on Friday 7 September. Amateur exhibition. An amateur quilting exhibition will be held in the Parque La Paloma on Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 September . Cushions for cancer. An exhibition of heart-shaped cushions for women who have undergone breast cancer surgery will be on display in Bil Bil Castle.

The inauguration of the festival will be held in Castillo Bil Bil at 7pm on Friday 7 September, followed by an exhibition of amateur quilting and patchworking in the Parque La Paloma between 6pm and 9pm on Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 September.

The main exhibition will continue in the Bil Bil castle until Sunday 16 September and will include work exhibited by artists from Spain, Russia, Poland, France and the UK. These will include Ann Hill, the vice-president of the Scottish Quilters Association; Amparo Ruiz, delegate of the Spanish Association of Patchwork; and Anna Slawinska, owner of the first School of Patchwork in Poland.

All of the participating artists will be on hand to talk about their work and to offer advice on the secret of their techniques.

Charity prize raffle

This colourful festival will be used to promote the art of patchworking while raising money for cancer sufferers. A fundraising raffle will include prizes of a silk quilt made by Lyubov Lezhanina, an artist from the Russian School of Master Patch Workers, plus an embroidered patchwork quilt made by the Lucky Quilters Association, a group formed by Oskana. There will also be a 1,000-euro-voucher donated by the Benalmadena-based Vithas Xanit Hospital. All proceeds from the raffle will be donated to the Cudeca Hospice. Winners of the raffle will be announced on Friday 14 September in the Castillo Bil-Bil and will be published on the official website of the Cudeca Foundation.

There will also be an exhibition of colourful heart-shaped cushions that help in the rehabilitation of women who have undergone surgery to remove breast cancer. The cushions, which were made by a group of women of 20 nationalities, will be donated to the Kolner Herzkissen e.V. Association in Koln, Germany.

"The festival is designed to create a mutual understanding of both amateur and professional quilters. People can admire their colourful creations while raising money for, and awareness of, those who suffer with cancer," organiser, Oksana Mader, explained to SUR in English.

The festival, which is free, can be visited Monday to Friday between the hours of 10am until 1pm and from 5pm until 9pm.What began in June and July as an unusual flu epidemic (for that time) had, by early August, become a major health problem which put the whole population of Malaga on alert. The illness called 'Spanish flu', which arrived in Malaga in the summer of 1918, a century ago now, began at the end of the spring and lasted until the autumn. Between April and August 1918 and October 1918 and April the following year, the devastating epidemic took the lives of over 200,000 people in Spain and millions of others all over the world.

In Malaga, the figures in studies differ because detailed records were not kept at the time. It is said that there were 1,500 deaths but in reality there could been many more. At least ten times that number caught Spanish flu in this province, but the lack of reliable statistics makes it difficult to give an exact figure.

In the first period of the epidemic the health authorities reacted quite quickly, but in the second one, which started in the autumn of 1918 and lasted until the spring, the consequences were much more relevant and devastating, possibly because once the first epidemic was over, those in charge hadn't expected the Spanish flu to return.

Part of Donald Trump's fortune today, is a direct result of the Spanish flu of 1918

An excellent piece of research on 'Illness and social crisis; the flu in Malaga (1918)' which was published by Malaga university in 1985, explains in detail what that pandemic in the province actually signified. It is the work of Juan L. Carrillo, Jesus Castellanos and Maria Dolores Ramos.

The illness known as Spanish flu (1918-19) was the worst pandemic in memory, and was even more virulent than the Black Death of 1349. The flu, which seems to have started in Kansas (USA), spread rapidly around the world and resulted in at least 50 million deaths. It arrived in Spain in the spring of 1918, left behind a long list of fatalities (between 150,000 and 300,000, according to researchers) and affected eight million other people.

The epidemic began in Malaga in the first week of June. A second one began in October and lasted until the spring of 1919. The first one was the most serious, and affected 3,000 people.

The illness became known as Spanish flu not because it started in this country, but because Spain published more information about it in the press than any other. As Spain was a neutral country in the First World War, the news about the epidemic was not censored. The nations involved in the war censored their press in order not to discourage their people any further, after so many lives had been lost during the fighting. The continual movement of troops from one place to another also favoured the transmission of the flu virus.

Where did it originate, exactly? Kansas, Peking? Nobody really knows, but if anything is certain about one of the most deadly pandemics in history, and despite the name it was given, 'Spanish flu' did not start in Spain.

The name "was due to rumours that the flu was caused by German agents who introduced pathogenic bacillus in Spanish tinned foods. This ignorance and the lack of real information during the fighting reinforced the fear," according to the French newspaper 'Liberation' at the time. It did Spain no favours, especially as the country suffered the after-effects of the pandemic for a number of years.

In Malaga, the virus especially affected the poor people and most disadvantaged. Bad nutrition and lack of hygiene resulted in the infection causing more havoc. Most of the sick were treated at the Civil Hospital. The doctors there did their best to contain the contagion but couldn't stop the epidemic taking the life of about 1,500 people in Malaga.

The authorities reacted late to the second epidemic. It was only when the number of people infected rose sharply that they set a budget for dealing with the flu, printed a leaflet with information about how to prevent contagion, created a police force specifically for health matters and set up a register of those affected.

The Great War was not the direct cause of the 'Spanish flu', but it did have a lot to do with it starting and spreading, because the proximity between barracks, "the promiscuity of the soldiers and the massive movements of troops and civilians due to the conflict could have increased it," according to the aforementioned French newspaper 'Liberation'.

On the same lines, some researchers link the profile of the victims with the incidence of the Spanish flu virus among soldiers fighting on the front, because they believe that their immune systems were weakened by the stress of combat, inadequate nutrition and lack of hygiene, which increased the probability of contracting the lethal virus.

As is always the case, some people benefited from the poverty and misery of Spanish flu, and in this case many, especially in the USA, who had brought the new life assurance policies suddenly found themselves among the wealthy.

The companies paid out around 100 million dollars - the equivalent of 20 billion in today's money - in compensation after the pandemic. One significant case is "the death from flu of a German immigrant in the USA", as described in the book. His widow and son received a sum of money which they invested in property, and today his grandson is said to be worth billions of dollars. That grandson is also one of the most powerful people on Earth: his name is Donald Trump.

A twist of fate back in the early 20th century contributed in its own way to the fact that now, in 2018, he has one of the most dazzling fortunes on the planet and enormous political power as well.

Professor Silvia Garcia Barrios, who has studied the history of the Civil Hospital and that of Dr Jose Galvez Ginachero, says that in the early 20th century there were hardly any hospitals in Malaga city or province. In the years between 1900 and 1915 the precarious sanitary infrastructure was the main cause of the high mortality rate, which was greater than the national average.

A very scarce water supply, deficient drainage, narrow streets, the lack of trees, overcrowded population, rubbish accumulating in the streets and economic crises meant that begging and destitution increased.

As a result, there were repeated epidemics, illnesses such as smallpox, typhus, malaria, Malta fever, tuberculosis, flu and and infectious illnesses in general. The continual movement of people from the countryside to the city aggravated the existing major housing problem, and the flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919 caused more than 1,500 deaths in Malaga.

To alleviate this difficult situation, Malaga had some important hospitals which still exist today, such as that of Santo Tomas, in the city centre, which was founded in 1507 and rebuilt between 1888 and 1891. It is now a protected building and due to be restored.

Others have disappeared now, such as the Hospital Real de San Lazaro, founded in 1492 to attend to people suffering from leprousy, which was demolished in the early 20th century and of which only the chapel remains; the Convalescents' Hospital, which was privately owned, in the square of the same name, founded in 1571 and demolished in 1848; and the Hospital de Santa Ana, in the Plaza de la Merced, founded in 1502 and demolished in 1913.

Hospitals

One of the oldest charitable institutions of the city, which still remains today, was known first of all as the Hospital Real de la Caridad; it was created by the Catholic Monarchs in 1487. It later became the Provincial Hospital of San Juan de Dios, and nowadays we know it as the Civil Hospital.

It was the most important in Malaga in the 19th century, and was the answer to the deficiencies at the old hospital of San Juan de Dios, in the city centre. It was run by the provincial government, and supported by members of the Malaga middle-class, including the Larios, Loring and Heredia families. At the time it received great praise, for example in an article published by La Tribuna in December 1918 which said: "The Provincial Hospital of Malaga can be said to be, without deviating from the truth in any way whatsoever, the best hospital in Spain after that of Bilbao".

Also very important for the city was the Noble Hospital, founded by the Noble family in 1870. At first it was run by a Board of Ladies, and it assisted people living in the area and sailors of all nationalities. This is where those injured in the incidents in Melilla (1893), those repatriated from Cuba and the Philippines (1898) and the victims of the shipwrecked frigate Gneisenau (1900) were treated.

At the time, these two were the only hospitals in the Malaga region and they played a vital role during the time of the epidemics.

Dr Galvez Ginachero was a key figure in organising the fight against the Spanish flu epidemic in Malaga, together with a group of other local doctors. It should be remembered, however, that in 1918 Jose Galvez Ginachero was not yet the director of the hospital; he was not appointed to that post until 1923.

The director of the Civil Hospital during the time of the Spanish flu was Alfonso Hurtado Janer, who had to deal with the epidemic a year after being appointed. Fernanco Ruiz de la Herranz took over from him, but resigned after two weeks and it was then, in February 1923, that Galvez Ginachero became the director.The attempted "balance" which the government has promised to achieve between taxis and private cars with drivers (known as VTCs in Spain) is looking rather complicated, at least with regard to the ratio of one VTC for every 30 taxis which is stipulated under transport regulations.

Although the regional governments will not be granting any new licences for these services, which are provided by digital platforms like Uber and Cabify, courts all over Spain are still dealing with claims against the change in the rules. This includes Malaga, which is now the province with the most competition between these two forms of transport.

According to the latest figures from the Ministry of Public Works, which regulates the sector although the licences are managed regionally, there are currently 1,066 VTC licences in Malaga, compared with 825 in July, 796 in June and 571 a year ago. Also, of the 280 new licences activated in Andalucia in the last two months, 270 are in Malaga.

Looking back still further to 2014, there were only 240 VTC licences, but that was before this sector (which has been operating on the Costa del Sol for years, mainly transporting tourists from the airport to hotels) was revolutionised by the arrival of the two multinationals, Cabify and then Uber. Their black saloons can often be seen driving along the Malaga coast, and they are only permitted to operate if their services are pre-booked. In other words, they are not allowed to tout for business.

After this new batch of licences, Malaga now comes below only Madrid in numbers (4,955 compared with 3,927 in June) and Barcelona (1,813 compared with 950 two months ago), but when compared with the 2,741 taxis which operate in the province according to the National Institute of Statistics (the Public Works figures only show the 2,646 which are authorised to operate between towns), the reality is that this province is furthest from the ratio of 1/30 because at present there is one VTC for every 2.5 taxis. In other words, to comply with the ratio set down by law, there should only be 86 VTCs in operation or, looking at it the other way round, 31,980 taxis. In Madrid the rate is 1/3.2, and in Barcelona 1/6.5, the same figure as nationally.

Why is this ratio not being applied? The answer lies in the opening up of the sector which was approved by the previous socialist gobernment. It cancelled this restriction between 2009 and 2013, which opened the way to numerous licences being granted. When the PP government came into power in 2013, it tried to put a stop to this by changing the law, but it took two years for the regulations to be drawn up so the 1/30 ratio did not come into force again until November 2015.

Since then, anywhere which did not comply with this ratio was unable to grant new licences, but the problem has arisen with applications which were made in the intervening period. During that time the companies saw a great opportunity and applied for thousands of licences (the application costs 35 euros, but the licences can be sold for around 50,000).

Concessions in the courts

Because of this proliferation, the Junta de Andalucia turned the tap off, but the courts have been finding in favour of those who lodged an appeal. According to estimations from the taxi sector, 10,000 applications all over Spain which were made before November 2015 are awaiting a decision from the courts, more than 1,000 of them in Malaga. Will the 1/30 ratio ever be possible again? The only way would be for the VTC licences to be cancelled, but that would involve a great deal of public money being spent on compensation, and legal action could also be taken against the administrations.

In addition to this situation, which is not occurring in other tourist destinations, is the fact that in Andalucia there are another 644 licences (197 of them in Seville and 117 in Granada) which can operate freely anywhere in Andalucia as long as the service is pre-booked. For example Cabify, which also operates in Seville, Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia, has over 200 drivers who move around the two Andalusian provinces depending on demand.

A further 9,021 VTCs in Spain can work in other reg ions, as long as their takings do not exceed 20 per cent of their three-monthly turnover.In the past, he has been Georgia's ambassador to Spain and three other countries, but since January this year Zurab Pololikashvili has been the head of the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO). Now aged 41, his CV is impressive and he speaks seven languages, as we found out when we spoke to him during a private visit he made to the Villa Padierna hotel.

In recent years tourism has been under threat from terrorism and many destinations have been hit by attacks. The threat appears to have reduced now. The last attack was in Barcelona, a year ago.

In some countries the number of visitors dropped by about 40 or 50 per cent after the terrorist attacks, and they were countries for whom tourism is the most important part of their economy. It is a good thing for the whole world that there have been none since Barcelona; there were some terrible attacks over several years. Our strategy is to take advantage of tourism to promote peace and improve the relationships between countries. Last year the number of tourists all over the world went up by more than one billion. There was growth of at least three per cent in every region. The world economy is growing, and that gives us hope that tourism is going to grow as well. When there is growth in the economy, it directly affects our sector.

During those years some southern Mediterranean countries were affected by terrorism and that had a positive repercussion for Spanish destinations. Now it looks as if that tourism was only 'loaned' to us and it is leaving.

I didn't want to mention any specific country, but now you have said that I will give you an example. Last year tourism in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia grew and returned to the 2010 figures, but Spain also received a record 32 million tourists. There was a period during which countries like Egypt and Turkey, which had developed their beach tourism, suffered problems and their tourists came to Spain instead, but the return of tourists to those countries hasn't affected Spain. This year the figures are very positive in those countries and we are very pleased, because it is good for their economies and also for peace.

Low-cost airlines have been a significant factor in the rise in tourism because they have enabled more people to travel. Now we see that these companies are having difficulties. Are we looking at a giant with feet of clay?

I believe the low-cost situation is a question of management. In the past there have been strikes in companies which aren't low-cost, as well. There can be strikes anywhere, not just airlines. What is good is that connectivity has increased a great deal, in fact it has nearly doubled within the continents. There is still plenty of space for development, for the number of flights and tourists to increase. There are three factors to tourism: connectivity, infrastructures and service. Education and professionalism among staff is very important. That's where we want to grow and are investing. We are creating academic centres in every region because we want this to be a competitive sector. In one or two years we will have centres which will help other regions to develop.

Does the UNWTO use its own funds for these centres?

Yes. In some cases we have partners, such as business schools, who want to do it with us, or universities.

"You have to invent something new to attract tourists all year-round" For years the Costa del Sol has been trying without success to attract year-round tourism. How can it do that? I believe there are many opportunities here. Marbella and the Costa del Sol have fantastic infrastructure. It needs to grow with new tourism products, maybe festivals or sales periods in the shops. You have to invent something to attract tourists at other times of year. There are very good connections with European countries, with direct flights. Marbella and the Costa del Sol have luxury tourism. The weather is fantastic and I'm sure tourists would come at all times of year. What help can the UNWTO give in this case? If the government is interested and asks us, we will collaborate. This present visit of mine is private, but at the FITUR tourism fair we can talk about ways in which we could help.

Does that only apply to emerging destinations?

No, we have done it in Portugal, for example. There is also demand in Switzerland, and other regions like Africa, Latin America and China. We want to set up a model, develop it and then copy it with a programme and platforms. Some regions live from tourism and need qualification.

Competition

As well as the low-cost airlines, there is another factor which has appeared recently: holiday rental properties. They are creating coexistence problems and are also competition for hotels.

Yes, there have been some quite strong protests in many places, because of the effect on the domestic population, the culture, the buildings. It needs to be well-managed. I believe Airbnb is holding talks with the authorities in different countries and cities to try to reach agreements and draw up rules of business. Holiday rentals have grown a great deal. This is a product and a business model which cannot be stopped. Our aim is to regulate, to achieve coexistence. Many countries have managed to do this and I hope that very soon Airbnb will have its own place in the sector.

In Spain this hasn't happened yet and one of the controversies here is who should do it, the government, the regional authorities or local councils.

I believe the state and town halls can come to an agreement over numbers, taxes and regulations.

Has any country found a formula yet?

We are working with them, to assist and see how the holiday rental sector can be managed. There is a high demand.

But has any country achieved it?

Yes, yes. It has been regulated in some countries.

Can you give me an example?

I don't want to single out any particular country, but in Portugal, for example, it has been regulated very clearly.

In some Spanish destinations, this type of invasive tourism has created a type of phobia about tourism. Does that worry the UNWTO?

Yes, it worries us when a region doesn't want to receive any more tourists. You always have to find a point of balance and agreement. We have several of those cases, especially in cruise destinations, or places like Venice, but with good management there is a way out of that situation. Some cities have always wanted tourists, invested in promotion and infrastructure and now need to find a balance. There are ways of doing it. Smart cities and destinations, with the new technology we offer, can manage tourist traffic in towns and cities. We always recommend that new destinations invest in promotion, in the image of their brand. The idea is that tourism should grow in every season of the year. Our role is to note the good examples and make recommendations to the other destinations.Rincon de la Victoria councillors agreed during a plenary session last Monday that they would ask the regional government, the Junta de Andalucia, for 438,000 euros towards pedestrianising three roads in the town centre.

Calle Frigiliana, Calle Ronda and Carril de Dominguez make up a major part of the shopping area of Rincon de la Victoria and the aim of this project is to encourage "traditional commerce" in the town.

According to town hall sources, the money from the Junta de Andalucia would top up European Union Regional Development funding (ERDF) already received by Rincon de la Victoria last year.

President of the town's trade and commerce association (ACERV), Jose Antonio Villodres, said that the town had been waiting for "many years" for this kind of initiative.Take A Mulligan: The Big 7-0

Here is the $64,000 question. Just exactly how old is old? In my teens, I figured it was about 35 but when I was getting close to that age, it ...A World On Fire







Greenbelt MD (SPX) Aug 24, 2018





The world is on fire. Or so it appears in this image from NASA's Worldview. The red points overlaid on the image designate those areas that by using thermal bands detect actively burning fires. Africa seems to have the most concentrated fires. This could be due to the fact that these are most likely agricultural fires. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to cle ... read morePHOENIX, Ariz., Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EVIO Inc. (OTCQB:EVIO) (the Company) announced CEO, William Waldrops interview on Uptick Newswires Stock Day Podcast.



Everett Jolly began the interview by welcoming back EVIOs CEO William Waldrop for a Company update. Jolly spotted this Company about a year ago and loves it for a variety of reasons. Theyve been busy since last being on the show in April 2018, having completed some acquisitions, agreements, retiring convertible debt and adding a new Board member.

Waldrop said, We have a commitment to our shareholders and to the industry. Were here to provide compliance testing. . .Were working to position ourselves to ensure that we have sufficient labs so that the supply chain doesnt get bottlenecked.

Some key issues are how we can consolidate in a market thats beginning to mature. EVIO Labs acquired MRX Labs, an award-winning lab in Tigard, Oregon. By combining the EVIO Labs Portland location to the Tigard location, theyll be able to save over $300,000 per year on the bottom line.

Along with their Berkeley and Humboldt locations in Northern California, EVIO Labs has three locations in Southern California for which they have signed leases: Palm Desert, Los Angeles and Costa Mesa, but Palm Desert is their number one focus right now and theyre in the final licensing phase and will continue to move forward through the 4th Quarter of this year.

Canada is looking to improve its rules to mandate independent testing for all the license producers with recreational cannabis becoming legal in October 2018. EVIO Canada has partnered and acquired Edmontons Keystone Labs, with the goal of becoming the premier testing provider up in Canada.

In closing, Jolly said he believes the Company is grossly undervalued. Waldrop restated that the key element is that theyre in a growth industry and opportunities are abundant.

For more information about the Companys financial details, listen to the full interview at the link below.

https://upticknewswire.com/featured-interview-ceo-william-waldrop-of-evio-inc-otcqb-evio-2/

About EVIO Labs Inc. (EVIO):

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. The Company's EVIO Biosciences Division is dedicated to the scientific, medical and psychosocial exploration of clinical cannabis, cannabinoids and the endocannabinoid system.

Contact:

EVIO Labs Inc.

62930 O. B. Riley Rd

Suite 300

Bend, OR 97703

(541) 633-4568

http://eviolabs.com/

info@eviolabs.com

Safe Harbor Act and Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ from expectations and, consequently, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Words such as expect, estimate, project, budget, forecast, anticipate, intend, plan, may, will, could, should, believes, predicts, potential, continue, and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from the expected results. Additional information concerning these and other risk factors are contained in the Companys most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company cautions readers not to place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. The Company does not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in their expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except as required by law.

About Uptick Newswire and the Stock Day Podcast

Founded in 2013, Uptick Newswire is the fastest growing media outlet for Nano-Cap and Micro-Cap companies. It educates investors while simultaneously working with penny stock and OTC companies, providing transparency and clarification of under-valued, under-sold Micro-Cap stocks of the market. Uptick provides companies with customized solutions to their news distribution in both national and international media outlets. Uptick is the sole producer of its Stock Day Podcast, which is the number one radio show of its kind in America. The Uptick Network Stock Day Podcast is an extension of Uptick Newswire, which recently launched its Video Interview Studio located in Phoenix, Arizona.

Investors Hangout is a proud sponsor of Stock Day, and Uptick Newswire encourages listeners to visit the companys message board at https://investorshangout.com/Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Yulius Purwadi Hermawan and Awidya Santikajaya (The Jakarta Post) Bandung/Jakarta  Mon, August 27, 2018 17:12 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df552452b 3 Opinion UNSC-non-permanent-seat,UNSC,peace-and-conflict-resolution,peace-building,Indonesia,diplomacy Free

Indonesia has been elected as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for 2019  2020 and will serve its tenure beginning from January 2019. The membership is a good momentum for Indonesia to contribute to maintaining and promoting international peace. While there are expectations that Indonesia can create peace in hotspots such as conflicts in Middle East and Korean Peninsula, one area where Indonesia could potentially play a pivotal role is in promotion of a holistic approach to peace and security. Indeed, one priority of Indonesias UNSC membership is to forge global partnership in addressing security implications of economic, health and environmental challenges.

As the premier international body for maintaining global peace and security, the UNSC has mainly focused on hard power politics, where inter-state war is perceived as threat to peace. Nonetheless non-traditional security issues such as environmental degradation, energy shortage, disease outbreak and refugees, can evolve into increasingly difficult security challenges if not addressed wisely.

Proposing initiatives on non-traditional security issues in the UNSC will contribute to more preconditions for conflict resolution and peacebuilding. This does not necessarily mean Indonesias attention to non-traditional security issues will replace its focus and involvement on issues such as situations in Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa, and non-proliferation of North Korea. Rather, Indonesias effort to bring non-traditional security issues to the table will complement its contributions in solving traditional security issues.

The UNSC has indeed paid increasing attention to non-traditional security issues. For example Antonio Gueterres, the UN Secretary General, has reminded UNSC members to pay more attention on non-traditional security issues that constitute serious threat to peace and security. The earthquake and subsequent floods in Haiti in 2010, among others, brought complete chaos to the country, hampering the peacekeeping operation by the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti.

Despite being discussed in several UNSC meetings, non-traditional security issues have not yet been put into a wider context of conflict resolution and peace building. Factors which seem to restrict productive and frank discussion on non-traditional security issues are overlapping between UNSC and other UN institutions which deal with the issues such as health or climate change. Secondly, there are some worries that some of the issues would be politicized for the interest of certain countries.

Thus Indonesia could bring to the table issues where UNSC members can find common ground and show least reluctance. Moreover, these non-traditional security issues should not be regarded as stand-alone matters. Instead, they must be treated as a part of the way to find peace. Three issues which may fit these criteria are refugees, disaster management, and gender.

As conflicts grow in number and coverage and as conflict resolutions are lagging, the number of refugees constantly rises. The presence of these refugees in the already densely populated countries with limited sources, creates a heavier burden for the countries including Indonesia itself.

In that context, Indonesia may urge the UNSC to underline the importance of high commitment to build strong international cooperation in providing humanitarian assistance in transit and destination countries through more coordinated regional initiatives, including the multilateral diplomatic proceedings called the Bali Process.

On disaster management, Indonesia needs to participate in strengthening the capacity of UN peacekeeping personnel to deal with humanitarian crisis and disaster situations. The role of peacekeepers is crucial to provide the emergency needs of the victims, to set up critical facilities, to provide protection to the people, and to maintain environmental stability. Therefore, using its Sentul-based Indonesia Peace and Security Center in West Java, Indonesia could host a training program for peacekeepers on principles, concepts, and procedures of international military aid in disaster relief operations.

Such training and exercises would strengthen disaster preparedness and response capacities of peacekeepers operating in countries such as Haiti and Somalia which are still struggling to recover from natural disasters in addition to prolonged conflicts.

Regarding gender issues, Indonesia could initiate a resolution or presidential statement to call for immediate measures to protect women and children in conflict areas. There must be standardization for peacekeepers to protect women and children as a highly urgent priority in all such operations. Furthermore, Indonesia could take the initiative to ensure a better gender-responsive approach in sustaining peace, among others by organizing pre-deployment gender training sessions for peacekeeping personnel and encouraging a special unit in peacekeeping missions that promotes a gender mainstreaming approach in peacebuilding.

A two-year stint in the UNSC is actually very short. Thus, a smart and realistic strategy is needed. The holistic approach to peace, which sees non-traditional security issues as an integral part of the creation of global peace, could become Indonesias strong legacy as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council.

***

Yulius Purwadi Hermawan is vice dean at the University of Parahyangans Faculty of Social and Political Science in Bandung, West Java. Awidya Santikajaya heads the multilateral affairs section at the Foreign Ministrys Policy Analysis and Development Agency. This article is extracted from a report on suggested positions of the Indonesias tenure at the United Nations Security Council, written by the University of Parahyangan for the Foreign Ministry.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Michelle Limenta (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 27, 2018 10:16 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df550eff2 3 Opinion Palestine,Indonesia,WTO,bilateral-relations,international-trade,trade-agreement Free

On the sidelines of the 11th World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in December 2017, Indonesia and Palestine signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on trade facilitation for certain products originating from Palestine.



Indonesia subsequently ratified the MoU on April 11, 2018 through Presidential Regulation No. 34/2018 and at the beginning of August, Indonesia and Palestine signed an implementing agreement (IA) of the MoU. The IA document, according to a Trade Ministry media release, gives technical guidelines of the MoU on zero percent import duties for Palestinian dates and pure olive oil.



The IA and MoU indeed demonstrate the countrys strong commitment to supporting Palestines economic development. An intriguing question then arises as to whether Indonesia as a WTO member will be in breach of WTOs nondiscrimination principle, known as the most-favored nation (MFN) obligation, by providing favorable treatment to Palestine, which is neither a member nor an observer of the WTO.



The MFN treatment obligation prohibits WTO members from discriminating against products originating in or destined for different countries. MFN treatment as provided under Article I:1 of the WTOs General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) refers to any favorable treatment granted by any WTO member to any product originating in or destined for any other country. The phrase any other country indicates any third party irrespective of its membership in the WTO. Therefore, favorable treatment granted by a WTO member to a non-WTO member is subject to the MFN treatment obligation.



For instance, Indonesia currently imposes a 5 percent MFN tariff on fresh and dried dates (Harmonized System/HS Code 080410). By offering zero percent import duty on dates from Palestine, other major exporters of dates to Indonesia such as Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Israel could demand the same favorable treatment be accorded to their products. In short, Indonesia could be in violation of the MFN treatment obligation if the favorable treatment given to Palestinian products is not accorded to the same goods of other WTO members.



WTO rules, however, are not so rigid or inflexible as to leave no room for Indonesia to regulate. Indonesia could justify its favorable treatment for certain Palestinian products under exceptions to the MFN obligation available under WTO law.



For example, Article 24 of the GATT provides an MFN exception for custom unions and free-trade areas (FTAs) that meet specific conditions. Article 24:10 in particular establishes a procedural aspect if WTO members conclude FTAs with non-WTO members.



The provision states that WTO members may by a two-thirds majority approve proposals [] provided that such proposals lead to the formation of a customs union or a free-trade area in the sense of this Article.



By referring to the drafting history, the GATT panel in EEC  Bananas II noted that paragraph 10 was included in the GATT to allow contracting parties to establish a customs union and FTA that include non-contracting parties. The question is that whether the MoU between Indonesia and Palestine can be classified as an agreement or interim agreement to establish a regional trade agreement in the sense of Article 24:10.



However, in practice, the procedure stipulated in Article 24 has been invoked only twice, for the Nicaragua-El Salvador FTA and the Nicaragua-Central American FTA. The GATT (WTO predecessor) contracting parties had practically abandoned paragraph 10 procedure in the 1960s and no approval procedures have taken place to this day. Won-Mog Choi in Legal Problems of Making Regional Trade Agreements with Non-WTO-Member States explains that the paragraph 10 mechanism had become insignificant due to the fact that the number of WTO members had constantly increased.



When the WTO Committee on Regional Trade Agreements evaluated the FTAs between the European Community and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1997, the non-WTO member status of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was not the issue in the evaluation. Much of the discussion focused on the quality of the agreement.



Another exception to explore is special WTO provisions that give developing countries special rights, often referred to as special and differential treatment [S&D] provisions.



One of S&D provisions for developing countries is called the Enabling Clause. This is the WTO legal basis for the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). Under the GSP, developed countries are able to offer non-reciprocal treatment, such as zero or lower import duties on products that originate in developing countries.



A provision in the Enabling Clause (Paragraph 2(d)) also allows special treatment for least-developed countries.



The provision emphasizes special treatment for least-developed countries as a subcategory of developing countries, and allows distinct preferences for these poorest-of-the-poor countries. Therefore, preference-granting countries do not need to establish that differentiating between developing and least-developed countries is non-discriminatory. The words of this provision also suggest that the S&D treatment for non-WTO members that are least-developed countries may be justified under Paragraph 2(d).



As of March 2018, 47 least-developed countries were on the United Nations list, and Palestine was not one of them. It is important to note that Palestine has a unique status at the UN and to date it is still fighting to win UN recognition as an independent state.



But recently, the UNs biggest bloc of developing nations, the G-77, has selected Palestine to be its next chair starting from January 2019. The G-77 is a coalition of 134 countries of the developing world, including least-developed countries.



Even if Palestine is not on the UN list of least-developed countries, the Economic Outlook of Palestine Territories issued by the World Bank in April 2018 shows that it looks worrying. Unemployment continues to be high and, based on 2011 data, 21 percent of population the live below the US$5.50 per day poverty line.



In conclusion, WTO rules recognize the link between trade and development and contain provisions aimed at increasing developing countries and least-developed countries trade opportunities. Palestines non-WTO member status should not be a major issue preventing greater economic relations.



The IA and MoU designed to facilitate and promote trade between Indonesia and Palestine should be welcomed as concrete action to improve the lives of Palestinians. Above all, this also shows that we still believe in trade as a tool for development.

***

The writer is a law lecturer and director at the Center for International Trade and Investment, Pelita Harapan University. The views expressed here are her own and do not reflect those of the center or the university.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin - (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia  Mon, August 27, 2018 10:03 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df550d2b9 4 Inforial Free

Online booking is becoming increasingly popular among internetsavvy Indonesian travelers, and the growing lifestyle is also expected to include cashless payments.

Rudianto, an executive working in Jakarta, for example, has a habit of traveling abroad either for business or leisure and always books airline tickets and hotel room online because you can do it at anytime and anywhere. This means it is more efficient in terms of time and cost, said the 40-year-old.

But when it comes to making financial transactions, he acknowledged that initially he was in doubt about using his credit card, but the benefits that the card provides has prompted him to use it with confidence, especially when traveling to Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and other places where cash-based transactions are becoming less common.

I always pay with my credit card, even when I pay for a taxi or bus fare in Korea. By holding a credit card, I do not have to convert my money into local currency, he said.

He added that if he paid a taxi fare in local currency and had small change, then the small change cannot be converted into rupiah when I am back home.

Rudianto is one of the many Indonesians from the middle class with travel becoming part of their lifestyle. Being internet savvy, many are accustomed to booking airline tickets and hotel rooms digitally, with some also becoming familiar with digital payment.

Indonesia is one of the 27 countries and territories that Visa, the worlds leader in digital payments, has recently surveyed through its Global Travel Intentions (GTI) study.

Visas GTI study, which was conducted between June and July 2017, has revealed some very interesting travel insights, including how travelers have become increasingly familiar with technology to plan their trips and navigate to their destinations.

For example, Indonesian travelers rely heavily on online information sources at every stage of travel, 91 percent while planning, 82 percent while booking, and 82 percent gained online access while traveling overseas, the study revealed.

The study further said in the past two years, Indonesians traveled internationally for leisure an average of five trips, while in the next two years, the average will be higher at 5.4 trips. The most common trigger for Indonesian travelers to take a trip is family vacation during holidays, as mentioned in the study.

The study also revealed that when it comes to travel destinations, in the next two years, 20 percent of Indonesians will go to Japan, followed by Singapore, which accounts for 12 percent.

Another recent study by Visa on consumer payment attitudes disclosed that the influx of new technology and innovation has inspired Indonesian consumers to use electronic payments in their daily lives as opposed to using cash because they are using electronic payments more often [57 percent], the feel using cards is safer than cash [61 percent], and they would like to eliminate the physical process of paying [60 percent].

PT Visa Worldwide Indonesia president director Riko Abdurrahman said, as technology and electronic payments become integral in our daily lives, we can expect more Indonesian travelers to rely on digital or mobile payments when planning, booking or traveling.

As our mobile and contactless payments have become increasingly popular all over the world, we hope Indonesian travelers will use their Visa cards to enjoy hassle-free payments anywhere they go, he said.

To further accelerate electronic payments acceptance in Indonesia, Visa has recently teamed up with Cashlez to distribute 5,000 mobile point of sale (mPOS) contactless-enabled devices in popular tourist cities, including Bali,Lombok, Yogyakarta, Solo, Surabaya, Malang, Medan and Bandung, Riko pointed out.

More Indonesians are familiar with technology when it comes to traveling, but many, perhaps, are still in doubt about the safety of cashless payments when taking a trip.

Following are some tips on having a safe, cashless trip, no matter where you go, which will hopefully be useful:New VMware vSphere Platinum Edition Incorporates AppDefense to Offer Customers Simple and Powerful Way to Better Secure Applications, Infrastructure, Data and Access

VMware Introduces vSAN Update to Ease HCI Adoption with Further Simplified Operations, Efficient Infrastructure and Rapid Support Resolution

New Enhancements to VMware vRealize Cloud Management Platform Enable Developers to Build Applications in Any Cloud with More Secure and Consistent Operations

LAS VEGAS, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today at VMworld 2018 US , VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) announced innovations across its hybrid cloud portfolio of infrastructure and management software to help customers digitally transform their businesses. VMware is introducing the new vSphere Platinum Edition to better secure customer applications and infrastructure, a new release of vSAN to further ease HCI adoption, and new updates across the VMware vRealize cloud management platform (CMP) to help customers deliver developer-friendly infrastructure from any cloud with more secure and consistent operations.

VMware is at the epicenter of innovation forces that are reshaping IT and business and believes a successful digital business requires a secure, flexible digital foundation. VMwares interoperable cloud, mobility, and security software solutions form a more secure and flexible digital foundation that enables customers to respond to new opportunities and threats and to deliver any app, on any device, on any cloud.

While our customers needs and priorities stretch far and wide, were focused on driving innovations that will provide them with a digital foundation to meet their future IT needs while creating critical linkage that will help them get the most out of their existing IT investments, said Rajiv Ramaswami, chief operating officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware. We continue to invest in infrastructure software for compute, networking, storage, and management that customers can count on to more securely and efficiently support the apps, data, people, and processes that will impact and power their businesses for decades.

vSphere Platinum to Deliver Integrated Application Security

As both security threats and regulatory pressure to control risks increase, organizations are moving from point security tools to embedded infrastructure solutions. To help businesses address these threats, VMware will introduce vSphere Platinum Edition to deliver comprehensive, intrinsic security to protect applications, infrastructure, data and access across customers digital foundations. This new edition will combine vSpheres native security capabilities with VMware AppDefense  resulting in the delivery of advanced application security features fully integrated into the hypervisor. Using machine learning and behavioral analytics, the new solution will enable vSphere administrators to deliver more secure applications and infrastructure by enabling virtual machines (VMs) to run in a known good state. It will offer direct visibility into VM intent and application behavior as well as fast and more accurate threat detection and response capabilities. This will enable vSphere admins and security teams to better collaborate to protect the business. To provide a fast path for on-premises vSphere customers to get started with VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), customers that purchase a minimum of five vSphere Platinum Edition licenses will also be eligible to receive credits that can be applied against the service.

VMware will also unveil vSphere 6.7 Update 1 which will deliver new features and enhancements, most notably the fully-featured HTML5-based vSphere Client to help admins manage their virtual infrastructure. Additionally, vSphere 6.7 Update 1 will increase support for intelligent workloads by introducing vMotion and snapshot capabilities for NVIDIA Quadro vDWS powered VMs. This will enable admins to migrate vGPU-powered VMs to other compatible hosts while performing maintenance operations to completely eliminate any disruption to end-users and their applications.

VMware Eases HCI Adoption with New vSAN 6.7 Update 1

VMware will launch vSAN 6.7 Update 1 to make it easier for customers to adopt HCI through simplified operations, efficient infrastructure and rapid support resolution. The new release will reduce maintenance operations time with built-in intelligence capabilities. It will also enable admins to spin up new HCI clusters faster than ever by introducing a Quickstart guided cluster creation and extension wizard that guides the user through the deployment process for both vSAN and non-vSAN clusters. The new release will deliver improved efficiency due to automated capacity reclamation and will help admins anticipate data needs with new predictive tools. vSAN 6.7 Update 1 will also decrease time-to-resolution with granular diagnostic tools and historical data to better support HCI environments. Additionally, VMware continues to invest in new areas of HCI innovation by unveiling a new private beta program for vSAN to gather feedback on potential ways to further simplify the data center through native data protection, file services, and cloud-native storage capabilities. To request access to the private beta, go here .

vRealize to Deliver Self-Driving Operations and Developer-Friendly Infrastructure

VMware will unveil new releases across its comprehensive vRealize Cloud Management Platform to help customers automate and standardize how their digital foundation is operated across hybrid cloud environments and consumed by developers for VM- and container-based application development. The platform helps customers address three key use cases: self-driving operations, programmable provisioning, and application operations.

vRealize Operations 7.0 will augment self-driving capabilities by introducing automated host-based placement driven by business intent. This feature will help customers control workload placement both within and across clusters to save costs and capacity or to assure performance.



Additional new and enhanced capabilities for fully automated performance optimization, right-sizing workflows, capacity planning, enhancements to UI and dashboard creation in vRealize Operations 7.0 will further enable customers to adopt a self-driving approach to monitor and manage their data centers and cloud environments. This release will also provide full integration between vRealize Operations 7.0 and the new vRealize Automation 7.5 for initial and ongoing placement of workloads across clusters based on operational and business intent (e.g., utilization, compliance, license cost).

vRealize Automation 7.5 will help customers adopt a programmable provisioning and application operations approach to deliver developer-friendly infrastructure. With a new UI, vRealize Automation 7.5 will enhance configuration management use cases with Ansible Tower integration and offer Kubernetes cluster management via VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) integration. vRealize Automation 7.5 will also feature enhanced AWS and Azure support, enabling IT to better serve broader developer team skill sets and application types.

VMware will also announce vRealize Suite 2018 to provide enterprises with enhanced agility, efficiency, and control across both traditional and cloud-native applications on- and off-prem. The suites vRealize Lifecycle Manager 2.0 will enable a DevOps approach for managing the CMP across its lifecycle, making private cloud easier to operate and consume. Additional new features will include certificate management, content support for vRealize Operations including dashboards, monitors, reports and alerts, and simultaneous release of content across the full vRealize Suite.

VMware NSX and Virtual Cloud Networking Connect and Protect Apps, Data, and Users

A digital business demands a new type of network  a Virtual Cloud Network  that connects and protects applications, data, and users wherever they are located, independent of the underlying cloud or physical infrastructure. The VMware NSX networking and security portfolio delivers consistent, pervasive connectivity and security for apps and data across software-defined data center, branch, cloud, and telco environments, and empowers customers to build a Virtual Cloud Network today through a software-based digital business fabric that is open, programmable, and inherently more secure.

VMware has now extended NSX multi-cloud networking and security to more clouds and environments, with support for workloads running in AWS, Azure, VMware Cloud on AWS, and on-premises software-defined data centers, and both Linux-based and containerized workloads running on bare-metal servers without a hypervisor. With new support for NSX-T Data Center in vRealize Network Insight 3.9 , customers can accelerate micro-segmentation planning and deployment, plan application migration, and gain operational views to manage scale and compliance for VMware NSX deployments across clouds. This solution is available as both on-premises software and as a SaaS offering, with full feature parity across both versions. Read this news release for more details on the VMware NSX updates.

VMware Skyline Bolsters Proactive Support with New Features & Availability

VMware announced new features and broadened availability to VMware Skyline , its innovative proactive support technology to help customers operate VMware environments with increased reliability, security, and performance. Launched at VMworld 2017, VMware Skyline is now available globally for Production Support and Premier Services customers at no additional cost, in English. VMware Skyline supports vSphere, NSX and now vSAN with other products expected to be added in the future. To learn more about the new features Skyline Advisor & Skyline Log Assist, please visit here .

Supporting Quotes

Our customers count on us to manage their entire employee lifecycle through our Dayforce HCM platform. To meet our customers needs, we're continually evolving our platform to deliver an enhanced service including how we secure our applications. VMware vSphere Platinum Edition offers a compelling value proposition to help us comprehensively secure our applications by focusing on their known good state and monitor for and respond to any deviations.  Warren Perlman, executive vice president and chief information officer, Ceridian

DNV GL uses vRealize Operations for performance management and troubleshooting to keep our data centers running optimally. The new automated workload optimization capabilities in vRealize Operations 7.0 will help us further reduce time and effort to meet our SLAs. We have stretch clusters in our main data centers and automated workload optimization with host-based business intent in vRealize Operations 7.0 will help us balance clusters at each site while still maintaining geographic isolation. It will also allow us to save money by enabling license enforcement at the host level across our environment. At the cluster level, it will also allow us to drive SLA tiering across clusters, which is currently a tedious manual process.  Werner Moss Totland, service manager, Global Virtualization Team, Data Centre Services, DNV GL A

At the US Senate Federal Credit Union, we are focused on introducing new products and services to help meet our members evolving needs in this era of rapid technological change. We are rolling out hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions powered by VMware vSAN and vSphere to help us deliver new applications and services in a more secure, efficient and quick fashion at our branches. As we expand our use of HCI solutions at additional branches we look forward to the simplified upgrade experience capabilities expected in vSAN 6.7 Update 1 to upgrade vSAN clusters including vSphere drivers and firmware across sites in an effortless fashion.  Douglas Haines, senior vice president, technology, US Senate Federal Credit Union

Product Availability

VMware vSphere Platinum Edition, VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 1, VMware vSAN 6.7 Update 1, VMware vRealize Suite 2018, VMware vRealize Operations 7.0, VMware vRealize Automation 7.5, and vRealize Network Insight 3.9 are expected to become available by the end of VMwares Q3 FY19 (November 2, 2018).

vSphere Platinum customers will receive a special promotional offer of $10,000 USD VMware Cloud on AWS credits to apply against VMware Cloud on AWS usage. All Platinum customers that purchase a minimum of five licenses will be eligible for the promotion. Terms and conditions apply.

For information on all news announcements issued at VMworld 2018 US, please visit the Online Press Kit .

Additional Resources

About VMware

VMware software powers the worlds most complex digital infrastructure. The companys compute, cloud, mobility, networking and security offerings provide a dynamic and efficient digital foundation to over 500,000 customers globally, aided by an ecosystem of 75,000 partners. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, this year VMware celebrates twenty years of breakthrough innovation benefiting business and society. For more information please visit https://www.vmware.com/company.html.

VMware, VMworld, vSphere, vSAN, vRealize, AppDefense, VMware Cloud, vMotion, vRealize Operations, vRealize Automation, NSX, Network Insight, and VMware Skyline are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. This article may contain hyperlinks to non-VMware websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites.

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Linkedin . (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia  Mon, August 27, 2018 13:47 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df5518b91 4 Inforial Free

PT HM Sampoerna recently has become the proud recipient of a Tempo Country Contributor Award 2018 and a Most Tax-Friendly Corporate recognition. These two awards do not just represent a form of appreciation toward the company as one of the nation's biggest tax payers, but also, more importantly, as a way of paying tribute to the company's commitment in fulfilling all aspects and standards of tax compliance in Indonesia.

With its Rp 60.4 trillion in taxes and excise that it paid in 2017, Sampoerna has further strengthened its commitment to prioritizing good corporate governance in its operations and business activities. Not only that, Sampoerna believes that attaining work performance that is sustainable requires regulatory compliance in all aspects, including in taxes. This is Sampoerna's real contribution in playing a role in the nation's development.

Its accomplishment in compliance is not separate from the government's efforts to establish fair and balanced policies, including quality tax services. Sampoerna also appreciates the Tempo Country Contributor Award initiative, as it pushes companies to go further in their compliance towards national tax policies. The company has expressed hopes that improvements in taxes won't just be a company effort, but rather, one that goes alongside government efforts to continuously improve the quality of tax services. That is why Sampoerna supports the Finance Ministry's attempts to push for better socialization and for the implementation of compliance, fairness and efficiency in tax services in order to accommodate a more dynamic business world.

The company's contributions under the "Sampoerna for Indonesia" umbrella program

For Sampoerna, investing in the public's welfare has the same level of importance as investing in its business future. That is why the company is also committed to implementing its Corporate Social Responsibility programs that focus on Economic Opportunities, Women's Empowerment, Disaster Preparedness and Mitigation, Educational Access and other social activities. Throughout 2017, the contributions of Sampoerna and its parent company for its Corporate Social Responsibility programs in Indonesia valued in at Rp 87 billion.

Together with the tens of thousands of business partners gathered under its Sampoerna Retail Community (SRC) program, the company has provided tremendous opportunities for economic development and entrepreneurial growth in ways that are in line with the government's nine-point Nawa Cita vision. SRC members were given guidance and training not only in entrepreneurship, but also in marketing strategies, human resource development and corporate social responsibility programs. As a result, SRC throughout Indonesia has managed to grow to become a champion of people's development that can withstand generational changes.

For tobacco farmers in Indonesia, Sampoerna has offered its Integrated Production System (IPS) that can serve as a solution to one of the problems of tobacco in Indonesia, namely, the lack of maximized local tobacco absorption. This IPS program was implemented through a partnership contract between tobacco supplier companies and tobacco farmers. This program currently has reached out to more than 27,500 farmers responsible for more than 27,000 hectares of land.

Once again, Sampoerna appreciates the joint work of stakeholders including regulators who have always been at the forefront of Indonesia's progress.

. (Courtesy of PT HM Sampoerna/.)Being smart can definitely be an advantage in drawing a potential partner, but being overly smart may actually backfire, according to a recent research.

Conducted by Gilles Gignac and Clare Starbuck from the University of Western Australia, the research involved 214 young adults where 70 percent of them were female with an average age of 19.

The participants were required to rate how attracted they would be if their potential partners characteristic level was more than a certain percentage of the population. A six-point scale was provided from extremely unattracted to extremely attracted. Among the characteristics were intelligence, kindness, physical attractiveness and easygoingness.

Published in the British Journal of Psychology, the research indicated that both male and female respondents viewed four characteristics as desirable in their possible partner. However, female participants showed an interesting result when it came to intelligence and easygoingness. They believed both qualities were attractive as long as they are more than 90 percent of the population compared to more than 99 percent of the population.

Read also: Intelligent dating app pairs singles based on smarts

The study also suggests that high level of intelligence is related to disorders and negative traits, meanwhile extreme easygoingness is perceived to lead to less confidence and ambition.

Its well established that several characteristics are valued highly in a prospective partner, Gignac told The British Psychological Society. But the sort of continuous measurement used in our research is making it clear that several of these characteristics are associated with a threshold effect -- in other words, you can have too much of a good thing." (wir/kes)Many parents like social media platforms because they can keep track of their childrens growth in photos. There may also be some sentimental reasons, for instance when older photos pop up thanks to the "memories" feature. And while some parents may wish to show off their cute, good-looking offspring, others just post for the sake of their own pleasure.

Whatever the reason, parents must consider the dangers of sharing photos of their children.

Device-to-cloud cybersecurity company McAfee addresses the matter, in line with back-to-school season being in full swing in the United States and other parts of the world.

McAfee recently announced the results of its latest survey, 'The Age of Consent', involving 1000 parents of children aged one month to 16 years in the US. It found that 30 percent of parents posted photos or videos of their child at least once a day on their social media accounts, with 12 percent posting four or more times per day.

Most parents understand the risks associated with sharing photos of their children online, but somehow the understanding does not translate into action. Many of them even include their childrens personal information and private details in online images, according to a press release from McAfee.

A photo of a child wearing school uniform, shared online, holds the risk of personal information exposure. Meanwhile, information such as birth date, home address, school or even a childs full name could lead to cyberbullying or identity theft if it gets into the wrong hands.

To make sure childrens photos are shared in the safest way possible, below are a few tips:

Ensure that the geotagging feature is turned off when uploading a photo. Many social networks tag a users location when a photo is uploaded.

Only share photos and other social media posts with their intended audience. Privacy settings could also be locked down, and services like Facebook and Instagram have features that restrict posts to confirmed connections only. However, reminds McAfee, everything posted on a social network should be treated as if it is public.

Set ground rules that friends, family and children themselves can only share photos with explicit permission. Only images that do not lead to embarrassment, anxiety or cyberbullying can be posted.

Protect identity and keep personal information secured from misuse. Parents can use an identity theft protection service, which McAfee also offers.

Read also: Seven parenting tips in the digital era

Above all, parents must also consider whether their child consents to their image being posted online. Parents may think that the children are too young to decide, but it is best to ask first whether or not they mind if their photos are posted. (mut)Several members of Japanese idol group AKB48 are scheduled to perform at the Indonesia-Japan Music Festival at Plaza Tenggara Gelora Bung Karno (GBK) stadium in Senayan, South Jakarta.

The festival is set to be held for two days from Sept. 8 to 9.

As of press time, there has been no official announcement yet regarding which members will attend the event. However, based on information circulating among fans, festivalgoers can expect to meet 12 members at the show, including Yokoyama Yui and Omori Miyuu.

The idol group previously performed in Jakarta in 2015.

Read also: Jokowi's Twitter account accidentally tweets about JKT48

Serving as part of the 60th anniversary of Indonesian-Japanese diplomatic relations, the festival will present other musicians as well, such as Japanese duo Sukima Switch and AKB48s sister group JKT48.

The Indonesia-Japan Music Festival also coincides with the annual Jak-Japan Matsuri 2018, which will be held at the same date and venue. Tickets start at Rp 40,000 (US$2.73) per day, and can be bought at the venue. (wir/kes)Apple Inc. is not only doubling down on the iPhone X, its tripling down.

The worlds most valuable company plans to launch three new phones soon that keep the edge-to-edge screen design of last years flagship, according to people familiar with the matter. The devices will boast a wider range of prices, features and sizes to increase their appeal, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced products.

However, none of the three iPhones will be wholly new designs like the iPhone X was last year or the iPhone 6 in 2014, with some inside Apple labeling the launch as an "S year," a designation the company has given to new handsets that retain the previous design but add new internal features. The company is planning more significant changes for next year, they added.

The iPhone X wasnt as big a hit as some Wall Street analysts hoped for before it was released last November. However, it still sold strongly and helped Apple gain share in a smartphone market that has almost stopped growing.

The upcoming phones, planned to be unveiled in September, show the company is adjusting its strategy. Rather than luring millions of new iPhone users, Apples goal these days is to steadily raise average prices, while expanding the total number of active devices to support sales of accessories and digital services like streaming music and video.

"The iPhone is entering a period of 0-to-5 percent annual growth, and the things theyre doing this fall will keep them on that path," said Gene Munster, a veteran Apple analyst and managing partner of Loup Ventures. The "real sizzle" for investors remains the iPhone because its the hub for almost all Apples other offerings like the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple Music, Munster added. Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller declined to comment.

In early 2016, the company reported a new milestone: 1 billion active devices. By early this year, that number had grown to 1.3 billion. The three new iPhones due next month have a good chance to add to this important foundation of the companys future.

Therell be a new high-end iPhone, internally dubbed D33, with a display that measures about 6.5-inch diagonally, according to the people familiar with the matter. That would make it the largest iPhone by far and one of the biggest mainstream phones on the market. It will continue to have a glass back with stainless steel edges and dual cameras on the back. The big difference on the software side will be the ability to view content side-by-side in apps like Mail and Calendar. It will be Apples second phone with a crisper organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, screen.

Read also: iPhone disabled by Chinese toddler for next 47 years

"Having a bigger screen is always a plus for demand," Munster said, while noting the device should help Apple boost iPhone selling prices, which has supported revenue growth in recent quarters. The average price of iPhones sold in Apples most-recent quarter was $724, up 19 percent from a year earlier.

Apple also plans an upgrade to the current iPhone X with a 5.8-inch OLED screen, which is internally dubbed D32, the people said. The main changes to the new OLED iPhones will be to processing speed and the camera, according to the people familiar with the devices.

Perhaps the most significant phone will be a new, cheaper device destined to replace the iPhone 8. Codenamed N84, it will look like the iPhone X, but include a larger near 6.1-inch screen, come in multiple colors, and sport aluminum edges instead of the iPhone Xs stainless steel casing. It will also have a cheaper LCD screen instead of an OLED panel to keep costs down.

The cheaper versions aluminum edges wont necessarily be the same color as the colored glass back, simplifying production, one person familiar with the matter said.

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. will assemble the two high-end OLED iPhones, while the LCD phone will be split primarily between Hon Hai and Pegatron Corp., the people said. Hon Hai began assembling the OLED devices in late July and only started on the LCD phones this month, partly due to minor challenges with the LCD panels, one person said. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will remain sole supplier of the main processor for the new iPhones, while primary iPhone camera lens supplier Largan Precision Co. is expected to see sales rise with the launch of new Apple phones.

All three will have the gesture-based control system Apple introduced last year to replace the iPhone home button. They will also feature Face ID, Apples system for unlocking the phones by glancing at them. Bloomberg reported several details of the new phones earlier this year.

The lower-end device will be Apples second attempt at differentiating its phones partly by color. In 2013, Apple launched the iPhone 5c, which was essentially an iPhone 5 in plastic casing. The strategy flopped with iPhone users preferring Apples metal phones. This years lower-cost iPhone will use aluminum edges, retaining a premium feel.

"Colors always give Apple a little near-term bump, but it doesnt change the iPhones trajectory," Munster said.

Read also: How Samsungs new Galaxy S9 compares to the iPhone X

Apple is planning dual-SIM card slots for the two larger phones in at least some regions, people with knowledge of the plans said. That feature would let travelers easily switch between a local carrier plan and a new country or coverage area.

The new iPhones come at an important time for the company. Apple is facing growing rivalry outside of the U.S., especially in developing markets where many people prefer less expensive phones with larger screens. The new low-end iPhone with the larger screen will give Apple a way to compete there.

The launch comes on the heels of Samsung Electronics Co. introducing its larger Note 9 smartphone. Alphabet Inc.s Google also plans to debut new Pixel phones on Oct. 9 at a media event in New York City, other people familiar with the plans said. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

The new iPhone lineup has presented Apple with a naming conundrum, according to a person familiar with the deliberations. The company will be selling three phones that look similar and all have Face ID. But the cheapest model will be larger than the mid-range version, potentially confusing consumers.

While planning the new devices, Apple has altered the names multiple times. It has at least considered branding the new premium phones the "iPhone Xs," indicating that theyre an upgrade to last years iPhone X, the person said. The company has also weighed eschewing the "Plus" label for the larger model, which it has used since the iPhone 6 Plus launched with a larger screen in 2014. The final names could be different, the person noted.

Beyond the iPhones, Apple has been working on updated AirPods, an AirPower wireless charger, a new Apple Watch, and revamped iPad Pro tablets for this year.

The Watches will look similar to current models, but will include larger screens that go nearly edge-to-edge. Their overall size will remain similar, making them compatible with existing straps, people familiar with the product said.

The new iPad Pros will come in sizes around 11-inches and 12.9-inches and include slimmer bezels. Theyll remove the home button and fingerprint sensing in lieu of an iPhone X-like gesture interface and Face ID for unlocking the tablet, people familiar with the plans said. The iPad mini, which was last upgraded in 2015, and the 9.7-inch iPad, last refreshed in March, wont be upgraded, a person familiar with the companys plans said.A community of weavers across Indonesia keeps alive the art of weaving, with its intricate designs and techniques.

When talking about Indonesian textiles, world-renowned batik immediately comes to mind. However, there is more to Indonesian textiles.



Hand-woven tenun, with its stunning designs and intricate techniques, is found across Indonesia, from the islands of Nusa Tenggara to the mountains of Sulawesi.



Toraja Melo, a fashion brand specializing in tenun, has made it its mission to promote and preserve tenun while helping out the community of weavers.



Established in Toraja, South Sulawesi, in 2008, the brand was founded by Diana Iriana Jusuf, a former banker and secretary-general of the National Commission on Violence against Women (Komnas Perempuan).



Dinny, as Diana prefers to be called, said she decided to call it quits in late 2007, feeling burned out by her work and the high number of cases of violence against women she had to handle during her time at the commission.



My husband is from Toraja and I asked him to build a house there so that I could relax and write about my experience with Indonesian women, Dinny told The Jakarta Post at the ongoing Asian Textiles Exhibition. The exhibition, which runs until Sept. 9 at the Textile Museum in Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta, is also being held to share the spirit of the Asian Games.



With the houses construction ongoing in Batutumonga village, Dinny often visited her in-laws in Sadan subdistrict, home to many weavers in the area. In 2008, I noticed that Torajas tenun wasnt selling and the weavers were impoverished, but I still felt tired, she says.

Tell me more: Toraja Melo founder Diana Iriana Jusuf (third left) speaks on the current state of weavers during the exhibition. (JP/P.J. Leo)

The turning point for Dinnys initiative came when she saw elderly women near the village taking care of babies who looked Chinese.



It turned out the babies were the children of Torajan women who worked in Malaysia and had fallen pregnant and returned home to give birth. The children could not be raised in Malaysia as they had been born out of wedlock and the mothers had returned to Malaysia to work after giving birth.



I put two and two together, with tenun and the fact that many Torajan women experienced this phenomenon. I thought if they could earn money as weavers without having to work abroad, it would help them a lot.



She then bought some textiles and took them to Jakarta, where her friend, designer and batik expert Obin encouraged her to continue buying the fabrics to keep the art of weaving alive.



With the success in Toraja, it soon expanded to Mamasa, West Sulawesi, in 2013 to work with the regencys weavers.



The brand also collaborated with the Association of Women-Headed Households (PEKKA) in 2014 to further expand to include weavers on Adonara and Lembata islands in East Nusa Tenggara.



So far, Toraja Melo works with some 1,000 weavers across the four regions.



PEKKA executive director Nani Zulminarni said her organization did not necessarily organize women weavers, but rather worked with women who had been forced to become heads of their households due to various reasons, such as domestic violence and armed conflict.

Cultural heritage: The Asian Textiles Exhibition also displays tenun from Toraja Melo founder Diana Iriana Jusuf's personal collection. (JP/Dhoni Setiawan)

Nani said weaving tenun was an activity in which these women had complete authority over their lives, down to deciding on each thread to be used in the fabric.



For example, there is a custom in East Nusa Tenggara that women must present a sarong for members of the family whenever there is an event, such as a death or a marriage. This is an arduous task for women who are the head of their households, [...] which is why they advocate for change in their responsibility, Nani says.



It is precisely these intricacies behind each textile that drove Dinny to preserve Torajas tenun, as there were only two elderly women left who knew the weaving techniques by the time Dinny started out.



The women also did not want to teach the younger generation, as their own offspring worked abroad and they felt that teaching others would create competition, Dinny said, adding these women only agreed to teach after she started a cooperative in the area.



The rising popularity of tenun has also presented a new problem  it is becoming an industry in which weavers are constantly expected to churn out textiles to sell, which can drive down prices and put pressure on the artisans.



For its part, Dinny said, Toraja Melo could fulfill large orders by negotiating with the customers on time and textile diversity, as each piece is painstakingly woven by the weavers according to their own preferences.

Fashion statement: Tenun handwoven fabrics are turned into beautiful fashion items, from garments to footwear. (JP/P.J. Leo)

Dinny said the weavers were paid fairly for their creations, which affected the price of each product sold. We cant lower the base price [of the tenun]. So instead of paying the weavers less or cutting production costs, we create smaller items that are less expensive, she says.



The problem, she added, lay in the value chain, where Indonesia imports the raw materials necessary from countries like China and India.



I cant criticize others approach in buying tenun as is from the weavers because at least someone is buying it.



However, she insisted that each Indonesian textile must be preserved for future generations. If one Indonesian tenun disappears, then we are Indonesians no more, Dinny said.Competition for high-end mirrorless cameras is intensifying, as Nikon Corp. and Canon Inc. are entering the market to challenge Sony Corp. and other digital camera makers.

Entering the market for mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras marks a strategic shift for the two major Japanese camera manufacturers. Nikon and Canon had been concerned that mirrorless cameras could eat into sales of single-lens reflex cameras that they have long concentrated on.

But the two companies are now looking to respond to a shift in demand to mirrorless cameras from SLR cameras, capitalizing on their advanced technology and brand power.

Unlike SLR cameras that use a mirror and prism system to enable the photographer to look through the lens, mirrorless cameras show an image through an electronic viewfinder and are smaller and lighter than SLR cameras. They also feature silent shutters that can be used in a quiet environment.

The overall digital camera market has been sluggish, with sales of compact digital cameras dropping on the back of a surge in demand for smartphones equipped with cameras.

But global shipments of mirrorless cameras by Japanese makers grew 29.2 percent in 2017 from the previous year, while those of SLR cameras fell 10.1 percent in the same year, according to the Camera and Imaging Products Association.

Nikon is re-entering the market with its first full-frame mirrorless camera after pulling out of the business in 2017.

The company said last Thursday it will release the Nikon Z7 in late September with a price of 440,000 yen ($3,950). Another high-end mirrorless camera, the Z6 model, will also debut in late November.

Read also: Sony's new super-fast cameras are winning over the pros

"We want to take advantage of our leading optical technology and deliver new value to the mirrorless market," Nikon President Kazuo Ushida said at a press conference in Tokyo.

Ushida said Nikon is looking to grab the biggest share of the market which he expects to grow for the time being.

Canon plans to introduce a high-end mirrorless camera later this year following the successful launch of the EOS Kiss M in March. The entry-level mirrorless camera became the best-selling model in the first half in 2018.

Sony -- the maker of the world's first full-frame mirrorless camera rolled out in 2013 -- has seen strong sales of the a7 III mirrorless camera since its release in March.

Other camera makers are also ramping up production of mirrorless cameras and widening their lineups to meet increasing demand.

Fuji Film Corp. plans to invest more than 1 billion yen to nearly double its production capacity for interchangeable lenses for mirrorless cameras at a plant in Miyagi Prefecture.

Panasonic Corp. and Olympus Corp. have been expanding their lineup of mirrorless cameras costing more than 100,000 yen.Londons famous Notting Hill Carnival transformed the streets into a sea of color and sound on Sunday as revelers joined one of Europes largest open-air parties in their thousands despite heavy rain in the British capital.

The carnival featured steel bands, dance troupes and elaborate floats, with many among the crowds hurling paint and colored powder at each other while dancing on the citys streets.

Read also: Solo Batik Carnival highlights diversity, creativity

A celebration of Afro-Caribbean community, the two-day event has its roots in a 1964 London procession to bring people together despite racism and a lack of opportunity that blighted day-to-day life.

Police deployed metal-detecting arches to counter potential knife crime and have been additional stop-and-search powers at this years carnival based on intelligence and after a spate of violent crime in London over the past week.Neil Simon, the prolific and Pulitzer Prize-winning US playwright celebrated as the king of comedy who won more Oscar and Tony nominations combined than any other showbiz writer, died on Sunday. He was 91.

The brains behind more than 30 plays, 20 screenplays and five musicals, Time magazine dubbed him the "patron saint of laughter".

Many of his works are classics of 20th century American theater and Simon has been credited with playing a seminal role -- along with film director Woody Allen -- in re-crafting US humor in the 1960s and 1970s.

His influence has been felt through the generations, The New York Times drawing a line between Simon's early comedies and the character-based comedy in the 1990s hit sitcom Seinfeld.

Longtime friend Bill Evans announced his death early Sunday in a New York hospital of complications from pneumonia.

His wife, a daughter and grandson were at his bedside, Evans told AFP. He had represented Simon for three decades from 1976 to 2006.

Simon was the author of critically acclaimed and commercial hits such as Barefoot in the Park (1963) The Odd Couple (1965) The Sunshine Boys (1974) and Lost in Yonkers (1990).

Much of his work, peppered with witty one-liners, explored the everyday struggles of the middle-classes and inter-family conflict, influenced by his troubled upbringing during the Great Depression.

"The good mechanic knows how to take a car apart; I love to take the human mind apart and see how it works. Behavior is absolutely the most interesting thing I can write about. You put that behavior in conflict and you're in business," Simon told The Paris Review in 1992.

Read also: Tony Award nominations honor best of New York Broadway

- 'Odd couple' -

Barefoot in the Park turned Robert Redford into a star. Redford also appeared in the 1967 hit movie version opposite Jane Fonda.

Other plays that went on to become major Hollywood movies included The Goodbye Girl in 1977 that won Richard Dreyfuss an Oscar for best leading actor and The Odd Couple in 1968 about two friends sharing an apartment starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.

"Dilemma is the key word. It is always a dilemma, not a situation," Simon told The Paris Review.

Born on July 4, 1927 in the Bronx, he grew up in northern Manhattan, the son of a skirt-chasing salesman who left the family home multiple times, forcing his mother to rent out her room to make ends meet.

Simon served in the military and then worked with his older brother Danny on producing jokes for television and radio scripts.

Barefoot in the Park, about a bickering couple inspired by his first marriage, and The Odd Couple that followed, were credited with capturing the zeitgeist of the 1960s.

"He was a writer and an artist who couldn't stop going inside of himself and finding new things. Like any creative artist, there was a compulsion to explore and go deeper," Evans told AFP.

"He found a connection in all of us," he added.

"The phrase 'odd couple' is now used in so many different contexts. It was a privilege knowing him."

Read also: Broadway 'The King and I' revival comes to London

- 'Americana' -

In the 1960s, at the height of his success, with four plays running on Broadway, Simon was earning about $60,000 a week and easily double that thanks to royalties, The New Yorker reported in 2010.

In the 1980s, he produced the semi-autobiographical trilogy of plays Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound starring a young Matthew Broderick as the playwright's alter ego Eugene Jerome.

Broderick is now a celebrated stage actor married to film star Sarah Jessica Parker. Evans called the trilogy a "slice of Americana".

Simon described his craft as catharsis.

"It's like analysis without going to the analyst. The play becomes your analysis," he told The Paris Review.

In 1991, Simon achieved the highest honor in US drama, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Lost in Yonkers, an autobiographical comedy about a mother and her daughter that was his last big splash on Broadway.

Such was his wealth that he produced many of his plays and in 1983 he was given the rare accolade of having a New York stage, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honor.

In addition to his Pulitzer, he won a Golden Globe and three Tonys. He chalked up 17 Tony nominations and four Oscar nods.

He was married five times to four different women -- he married his third wife twice -- and had three children.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Fadli and Rizal Harahap (The Jakarta Post) Batam/Pekanbaru  Mon, August 27, 2018 08:34 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df55088e1 1 National Pekanbaru,Riau,Riau-Islands,MR-immunization,vaccine,MUI,haram Free

The target of a 95 percent coverage rate for the second stage of the measles-rubella (MR) vaccination campaign in Pekanbaru, the provincial capital of Riau province, and in another province, Riau Islands, is unlikely to be met because of parents opposition.

The campaign is scheduled to run until September. However, nearly four weeks into the campaign the coverage rate is slightly under 20 percent.

Only 39,236 out of 196,848 children, or slightly under 20 percent, had been vaccinated as of Friday, said the acting head of Pekanbaru Health Agency, Zaini Rizaldy Saragih.

The number of students who want to get MR immunization has dropped dramatically day by day. We guess the target wont be achieved even if the campaign continues, he added.

Furthermore, the agency decided to halt the MR immunization on Friday in relation to Clause 2 of the recent Indonesian Ulemas Council (MUI) edict No. 33/2018, which stated that the vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII) contained haram substances.

Zaini said the agency would wait for further action by the central government before proceeding further.

However, we wont refuse parents or schools who want their children or students to get vaccinated as long as they declare it a voluntary action in a statement letter, he added.

In neighboring province, Riau Islands, the MR immunization coverage rate was also recorded at around 20 percent, according to the provinces health agency.

The head of Riau Islands Health Agency, Tjejep Yudiana, told The Jakarta Post on Sunday that the statement by the Riau Islands chapter of the MUI urging Muslims to refrain from using the MR vaccine, had affected the number of students looking to be vaccinated.

Currently, around 120,000 out of 604,000 children in Riau Islands have been vaccinated. The impact [of the Riau Islands MUI edict] is substantial, he said.

He said, however, that he was optimistic the MR vaccines coverage rate target within the province would be achieved within the remaining timespan if Riau Islands MUI followed the latest edict issued by the central MUI, which stated that the MR vaccine was mubah (permitted for Muslims). (sau)WEST PALM BEACH, Fla, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rennova Health, Inc. (OTC: RNVA), (OTC: RNVAW), (Rennova or the Company) a vertically integrated provider of industry-leading diagnostics and supportive software solutions to healthcare providers that acquired its second rural hospital in Tennessee on June 1, 2018, announces completion of installation and training for a state of the art GE LightSpeed VCT 64 slice CT Scanner.



The high image resolution and acquisition speed of the new CT scanner is ideal for angiography, cardiac neuro, pediatric, pulmonary and trauma when freezing of cardiovascular motion, pure arterial phase imaging, and superior Multiplanar reformats are key features. The new CT Scanner will substantially improve both patient care and revenue streams.

In keeping with our motto, better service for my community, said Hal Leftwich, CEO, Big South Fork Medical Center, we are proud to offer this step forward in technology, with the additional studies and enhanced diagnostic capabilities. This investment by Rennova will now enable us to attract outside patient referrals, and in doing so boost revenue at Big South Fork Medical Center.

Big South Fork Medical Center opened on August 8, 2017, with services that include a 24/7 emergency department along with radiology services that include X-ray, CT scan, ultrasound, nuclear medicine and MRI. Other available services include a laboratory, respiratory therapy, physical therapy, a medical/surgical unit and swing beds.

About Rennova Health, Inc.

Rennova provides industry-leading diagnostics and supportive software solutions to healthcare providers, delivering an efficient, effective patient experience and superior clinical outcomes. Through an ever-expanding group of strategic brands that work in unison to empower customers, we are creating the next generation of healthcare. For more information, please visit www.rennovahealth.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ from expectations and, consequently, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Words such as expect, estimate, project, budget, forecast, anticipate, intend, plan, may, will, could, should, believes, predicts, potential, continue, and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from the expected results. Additional information concerning these and other risk factors are contained in the Companys most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company cautions readers not to place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. The Company does not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in their expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except as required by law.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 27, 2018 14:39 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df5519bde 1 Business CPO,zero-tariff,exports,weakening,price,Trade-Ministry Free

The Trade Ministry has issued a crude palm oil (CPO) reference price for September of US$603.94 per metric ton (MT), which is 4.46 percent lower than the reference price in August, which was set at $632.17 per MT.

Now, the CPO reference price has weakened again. The government will impose a zero CPO export tariff in September, said Trade Ministrys International Trade Director General Oke Nurwan in a press statement received on Monday.

This means the government will maintain the zero export tariff for CPO that was imposed in August.

The export tariff for CPO was stipulated in Trade Ministerial Regulation No. 89/2018 on the export reference price for agriculture and forestry products that are subject to export tariffs.

Indonesia is among the largest producing countries of CPO. Because of the weakening price of the product in the global market, Indonesia, starting next month, will impose mandatory usage of 20 percent blended biodiesel (B20) for transportation, military vehicles and the mining and heavy equipment sectors.

Meanwhile, the reference price for cacao beans also weakened in September to $2,163.67 per MT, 12.08 percent lower than the price in August, which was $2,461.02 per MT, according to the Trade Ministry's press statement.

The government, however, maintained the export tariff of 5 percent on cacao beans.

The government will also not change the reference prices and export tariffs for both wood and leather products. (bbn)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Severianus Endi (The Jakarta Post) Pontianak  Mon, August 27, 2018 15:29 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df551d141 1 National haze,#Haze,forest-fires,#ForestFire,Pontianak,#Pontianak,flight-delay,#flights Free

National flag carrier Garuda Indonesia has said that haze from forest fires had disrupted its operations for several days at Supadio International Airport in Pontianak, West Kalimantan.

Garuda Pontianak general manager Susanna Saragih said at least one flight on Monday to Jakarta and another flight to Ketapang, also in West Kalimantan, had been delayed due to poor visibility at Supadio airport.

Supadio airport recorded a decreased visibility of 450 meters on Moday, much lower than the 700 m minimum visibility standard for safe landings and takeoffs.

"No one can predict when the visibility will return to normal again. It depends on the wind and rain, Susana said on Monday.

Garuda passenger Slamet Riyadi said he was already on board his scheduled Pontianak-Ketapang flight on Monday for takeoff at 6 a.m. local time. Thirty minutes later, however, the cabin crew announced that the flight was delayed and requested all passengers to disembark and wait in the airport lounge until further notice.

The aircraft was finally cleared for takeoff at around 8:50 a.m.

Susana added that Garuda's Pontianak service had also suffered a series of delays the previous Monday on Aug. 20, when the region had very low visibility of 200 m.

The visibility returned to normal the following day.

Haze also disrupted flights to Pontianak on Friday evening. The morning flights on Saturday were also canceled.

Authorities have been struggling to combat forest fires as the province enters the peak of the dry season. (sau/ipa)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 27, 2018 14:42 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df551b1ae 1 National orangutan,#OrangUtan,#illegal-mining,#WestKalimantan,deforestation,illegal-mining Free

A joint team of Environment and Forestry Ministry investigators and West Kalimantan Police personnel has uncovered an unlicensed bauxite mine inside a protected habitat for orangutans in Ketapang regency, West Kalimantan.

Investigators believe the mining activities in the Sungai Tulak area were carried by bauxite miner PT Laman Mining without a forest area utilization permit, according to the ministrys forest protection director Sustyo Iriyono.

Sungai Tulak is located in the buffer zone of Mount Palung National Park, an orangutan habitat in West Kalimantan.

The investigation started when the ministry received information about the alleged illegal mining from locals.

On Aug. 20, the ministry, in collaboration with the police, raided the mining site and found three excavators operating and four others in a nearby location.

Investigators have named the company a suspect in the case and charged it with illegal mining under the 2013 Law on deforestation, which carries a maximum fine of Rp 50 billion (US$3.43 million).

The team is currently closely investigating the possible roles of the companys board of directors and commissioners, who are suspected of being among the masterminds of the illegal mining activities.

"These activities not only harm the country, but also damage the ecosystem and animal habitat and pose serious threats to the livelihood of the [local] people, the ministrys Law Enforcement Director General Rasio Ridho Sani said in a press release on Sunday, adding that the ministry was also considering whether to press money-laundering charges. (ris/ipa)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 27, 2018 17:19 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df5527d45 4 Business rice-imports,market-intervention,Bulog,Trade-Ministry Free

Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita said on Monday that the government had reaffirmed its plan to import 2 million tons of rice this year to assure the availability of the commodity in the market.

He said the decision to import 2 million tons of rice was made during a coordination meeting among relevant ministries and the State Logistics Agency (Bulog) in April.

Meanwhile, the Monday coordination meeting was decided to talk Bulog into carrying out market penetration to assurance a balance between supply and demand.

If the supply declines, we see a price increase trend. If the stock decreases, we have to add the stock, said Enggartiasto after the meeting as quoted by kontan.co.id.

According to Statistics Indonesia (BPS), Indonesia imported 844,164 tons of rice in 2014, 861,601 tons in 2015, 12 million tons in 2016 and 305,275 tons in 2017.

He said the release of more rice stock was to maintain the market price of the commodity below the ceiling price of Rp 9,450 (65 US cents) per kilogram in Java, Lampung and South Sumatra as well as Rp 10,250 per kg in Papua and Maluku.

According to food price website hargapangan.id, the rice price in many parts of the country has exceeded the ceiling prices. (bbn)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) Tehran, Iran  Mon, August 27, 2018 14:42 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df551a1ea 2 World #Syria,#Iran,Syria,reconstruction,Iran Free

The defence ministers of Iran and Syria have signed an agreement on military cooperation and reconstruction in the war-torn country, Iranian media reported on Monday.

"Syria is passing through the crisis stage and entering the reconstruction phase," said Iran's Defence Minister Amir Hatami, according to the Tasnim news agency.

Hatami is on the second day of a two-day visit to Damascus, during which he held "detailed negotiations" with his counterpart Ali Abdullah Ayoub and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, according to Tasnim.

The "defence and technical agreement" provides for the continued "presence and participation" of Iran in Syria, Hatami added.

Tehran has provided steady political, financial, and military backing to Assad as he has fought back a seven-year uprising.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Jon Afrizal (The Jakarta Post) Jambi  Mon, August 27, 2018 16:53 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df552275f 1 National Jambi,rape,Incest,high-court,child-protection Free

A 15-year-old rape victim who was convicted of abortion can walk free after the Jambi High Court acquitted her of all charges on Monday.

Her case has garnered global attention after a lower court landed her in prison for abortion earlier this month. Child protection as well as women and human rights activists criticized the decision, saying she was a victim of rape by her brother and should have been treated as one.

The decision was made after the girl and her lawyer, Damai Idianto, appealed the Muarabulian District Courts decision, which sentenced her to six months in juvenile detention to the high court. The detention was based on the evidence of a badly decomposed baby boy found on an oil palm plantation in Pulau village, Muara Tembesi district, Batanghari regency, Jambi.

Read also: Jambi villagers welcome banished jailed rape victim to return after uproar

In the appeal, the girl's legal team argued against Article 75, Paragraph 2b of the 2009 Health Law, which stipulates that a woman who aborts her pregnancy due to rape that resulted in psychological trauma is exempted from criminal punishment.

The panel of judges stated that [the girl] was proven to have had an abortion, but the action was done under forced circumstances, Jambi High Court spokesperson Hasoloan Sianturi said, adding that the judges would clear her name of any wrongdoing and would be exempt from all court fees.

Some of the figures in her village also regarded her as an "incest perpetrator", and a customary council decision banished her and her brother from the village. However, after the case resulted in national uproar, some of the village authorities, including village head Daman Huri, held a more sympathetic view toward the girl.

Save Our Sister (SOS) spokesperson Zubaidah said the ruling showed a change in the once rigid legal effort and reminded that judges and prosecutors should be more careful in determining a case.

She also said the courts ruling would positively influence other rape victims to have faith in the legal system.

Jambi Womens Consortium (KPJ) spokesperson Mirna Novita Amir added that her organization, along with many others, like the Jambi chapter of the Indonesian Planned Parenthood Association (PKBI), the Indonesian Women Coalition, the Sikok Foundation, the Legal Aid Foundation of Indonesian Women's Association for Justice (LBH APIK) and the Foundation of the Indonesian Legal Aid (YLBHI), have declared their commitment to helping the girl by paying for her school outside of her district to assist the girl in recovering from her trauma. (ris/evi)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) On Board the Papal Plane, Holy See  Mon, August 27, 2018 08:48 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df5509cb5 2 World #PopeFrancis,sexual-abuse,Priest,scandal Free

Pope Francis on Sunday declined to comment on a letter by a former Vatican official that he had ignored sexual abuse claims against US cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was forced to resign last month.

"I will not say a word about that. I think that the communique speaks for itself," the pontiff said when questioned by journalists on his plane, flying back to Rome after his visit to Ireland.

A former Vatican envoy to Washington, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano wrote in a letter published in the National Catholic Register that he had told Francis of the allegations in 2013, but that he had responded by lifting sanctions imposed on McCarrick by his predecessor pope Benedict.

"He (Pope Francis) knew from at least June 23, 2013, that McCarrick was a serial predator," wrote Vigano," adding that "he knew that he was a corrupt man, he covered for him to the bitter end."

"I read the communique this morning," Francis told reporters, referring to Vigano's letter.

"Read the communique attentively and make your own judgement," the pope added.

"You have sufficient journalistic capacity to draw conclusions," he went on.

"When a little time has passed and you have the conclusions perhaps I will talk..," he added.

The scandal in the Catholic Church over child sexual abuse by clergy dogged the pontiff's visit at the weekend to Ireland where he said he "begged for God's forgiveness" for the damage done to the victims.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 27, 2018 17:52 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df552ac95 1 City Sandiaga-Uno,resignation,Jakarta-council Free

Jakarta Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno read out his resignation letter to the Jakarta Legislative Council on Monday, coming one step closer to being officially dismissed as he will run as a vice presidential candidate.

I, Sandiaga Salahuddin Uno, officially resign as Jakarta deputy governor, he said at the City Council building in Central Jakarta.

Sandiaga added that he had submitted his resignation letter to Governor Anies Baswedan, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo and Home Minister Tjahjo Kumolo for due process. As per Article 79 of the 2004 Regional Administration Law, the Jakarta Legislative Council now has to recommend Sandiaga's resignation to the President via the home minister.

Sandiaga would be officially dismissed as deputy governor after the President signs the resignation letter.

He added that he would not be taking leave until the official dismissal, even for the campaign period, in order to avoid bureaucratic maladministration and political intrigue.

I will miss the waiting room [at City Council], because the food there is delicious and the room always smells of cigarette smoke, he joked.

Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan, who will work single-handedly until a new deputy is appointed, expressed well wishes for Sandi.

Meanwhile, we here in Jakarta will continue to execute what we have planned and committed to, he said.

Sandiaga, a Gerindra Party politician, resigned on Aug. 9 after declaring himself a vice presidential candidate to party leader Prabowo Subianto. (nor)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 27, 2018 17:30 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df5527fbd 1 City teenagers,arrest,brawl,Depok Free

Police arrested three teenagers who were allegedly were planning a brawl in Cipayung, Depok, West Java. The officers confiscated three swords in the arrests.

First Insp. Winam Agus, the chief of Depok Polices Jaguar team, a team tasked with combating street crime, said his team members had seen the three detainees and some other juveniles riding motorcycles on Jl. Raya Citayam before the arrests on Sunday.

And then we immediately chased them. Three people were arrested while the others fled, he said as quoted by wartakota.tribunnews.com.

They have been reprimanded not to repeat such behavior, which can create public unrest, Winam added, noting that the three teenagers had been returned to their respective families. (vla)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 27, 2018 11:01 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df5511ca1 1 Business telkom,Lombok-earthquake,infrastructure,repair Free

State-owned telecommunications company PT Telkom Indonesia is repairing its infrastructure that was damaged by the recent earthquakes in Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara.

The company has gradually restored its local service after it was disrupted by an undersea cable that snapped during the disaster, Telkom corporate communications vice president Arif Prabowo said in a press statement The Jakarta Post received on Monday.

Ten backbone links and the metro ethernet are functioning normally after they were rerouted to the Ende link []. Meanwhile, the broken Mataram-Sumbawa connection is now being repaired, and is estimated to be completed by the end of August, said Arif.

He said Telkom had also deployed a crisis management team to monitor its telecommunications service in the earthquake-hit region and to coordinate with the government's disaster aid team.

Earthquakes are still occurring in Lombok. Therefore, Telkom Group is continuing to monitor the condition of the infrastructure. We are trying [our] best so that the victims are able to communicate with their relatives, Arif added.

Telkom enterprise and business service director Dian Rachmawan said that, apart from trying to reconnect the broken optic cable, the Telkom Group had also initiated a digital donation facility called PinPay (http://finpay.id/jgt79qn), through which people could contribute to the disaster relief aid for earthquake victims.

He said that PinPay was provided as an immediate solution for donating relief aid, because nearly all people owned smartphones with Internet access.

We will channel the assistance donated through PinPay to the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BPBD) and the main emergency post that state-owned enterprises have established, said Dian. (bbn)VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Not for distribution to U.S. news wire services or dissemination in the United States

Western Atlas Resources Inc. (Western Atlas or the Company) (TSXV: WA) is pleased to announce that following the recent completion of the VTEM survey of its Meadowbank Project, it has initiated a 35 line kilometres ground induced polarization (IP) survey over specific targets located in Block B ("Block B"), and has now mapped over 75% of the Meadowbank Project (scale ranging between 1:10,000 to 1:5,000). The Companys Meadowbank Project is located in the prime mining jurisdiction of Nunavut, Canada and is adjacent to Agnico Eagles Meadowbank producing gold mine and Amaruqs gold deposit. The Companys 100% owned Block B is fully permitted for exploration and is part of the 580 square kilometers of mining claims forming the Companys Meadowbank Project.

We continue to be very enthusiastic about our Meadowbank Project and view it as one of the most exciting projects in Nunavut. These preliminary results show targets that have significant strike length and potential, commented Fabio Capponi, Chief Executive Officer of Western Atlas.

Mapping and Traverses:

Due to other gold discoveries in Meadowbank, the geological and structural framework as it relates to gold mineralization in the area is well understood and generally associated, among other, with Banded Iron Formation (BIF) and shear zones. Provisionary results of Block Bs field traverses and related mapping have allowed the Company to highlight geological formations such as BIF and shear zones with a current total strike length as shown below and figures 1 and 2:

Meadowbank Project  Block B

Block B, South Target Block B, North East Target Over 15 Km BIF Over 3 Km BIF Over 13 km Shear zones Over 2 km Shear zones

Bended iron formations and shear zones appear either overlapping or separated.

Figure 1: Meadowbank Project  Block B, South Target is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/cb4e3e56-e687-42b7-bff5-e49a2fd9b6b1

Figure 2: Meadowbank Project  Block B, North East Target is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/8868a12c-97c7-4610-9b55-ce544529b00b

IP Survey:



The primary objective of this geophysical program is to survey multiple known and newly delineated geological trends. The results of the IP, as they will be received, reviewed and interpreted together with the results of the VTEM and geochemical work currently being conducted in the field will serve as a guide for the identification of priority drill targets. Geophysics grids and underlaying geology are outlined in figures 1 and 2.The final results for the VTEM survey are expected by mid-September, while the IP survey is expected to end in late September.

Appointment of Roscoe Postle Associates:

On August 15, 2018 Western Atlas retained Roscoe Postle Associates to carry out a review of the current exploration program and to serve as an independent qualified person (Independent QP) for the technical information on Western Atlas' Meadowbank Project.

Paul Chamois, P.Geo., Principal Geologist, will carry out the review and site visit, and will serve as the Independent QP for the technical aspect of Western Atlas' Meadowbank Project. Mr. Chamois is a Qualified Person under the requirements of Canadian National Instrument 43-101.

Corporate Update

Stock Options Grant

The Company announces that pursuant to the Companys Stock Option Plan, a total of 900,000 incentive stock options have been granted to its Directors. Each Director (excluding the CEO), was granted 300,000 options. The stock options are exercisable at a price of C$0.20 per share for a period of 5 years, subject to regulatory approval.

Issuance of Shares

Due to the successful closing of the reverse take over on June 18, 2018 and following the contracts signed with Western Atlas on April 9, 2017 and April 21, 2017, Davisa Consulting and Susan Rubin are owed a success fee of $50,000 and 31,025 shares respectively. Davisa Consulting has agreed to the payment of 250,000 common shares of Western Atlas (at a deemed value of $0.20), to be issued in lieu of the $50,000 success fee.

About Western Atlas

The Company is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol WA. Western Atlas is focused on the acquisition and development of scalable precious metals projects in premier mining jurisdictions. WAs wholly-owned subsidiary, 5530 Nunavut Inc., which was incorporated under the laws of Nunavut and registered under the Business Corporations Act (Northwest Territories) on November 24, 2016, holds its interest in the Meadowbank and the Committee Bay Projects located in Nunavut, Canada.

Western Atlas Meadowbank and Committee Bay Projects include approximately 170,000 hectares of highly prospective and strategically located mining claims. In the Meadowbank area, WAs properties are along trend with Agnico Eagles Meadowbank gold mine, Amaruqs gold deposit, and Aura Silvers Greyhound deposit. In the Committee Bay area, Western Atlas properties are along trend with Auryn Resources Three Bluffs deposit. Please visit the Companys website at www.westernar.com for maps of the Companys properties. Western Atlas properties benefit from existing local infrastructure and labour market. In the Meadowbank area, Baker Lake provides summer shipping access via Hudson Bay and year-round airport facilities. Agnico Eagle maintains an 1,100 m gravel airstrip and 110 km all-weather road, which passes through certain of Western Atlas claims, from Baker Lake to Agnicos mine site. In the Committee Bay area, Baker Lake and Rankin Inlet are hubs for mining activities in the region, and Western Atlas looks forward to both accessing and enhancing labour and employment opportunities in these districts.

Paul Chamois, P.Geo, is the Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and is responsible for reviewing the technical content of this news release.

For further information, please visit our website at www.westernar.com or contact:

Fabio Capponi, Chief Executive Officer

604-256-4777

info@westernar.com



Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This news release includes certain forward-looking statements under applicable Canadian securities legislation that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results, performance, prospects, and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the Companys objectives, goals or future plans; the receipt of the requisite approvals with respect to the business and operations of the Company. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based on a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: general business, economic and social uncertainties; litigation, legislative, environmental and other judicial, regulatory, political and competitive developments; delay or failure to receive board, shareholder or regulatory approvals; those additional risks set out in Western Atlass public documents filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com; and other matters discussed in this news release. Although Western Atlas believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on these statements, which only apply as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. Except where required by law, Western Atlas disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

Reader Advisory

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.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 27 2018

Indonesian boxers displayed tireless efforts in their preliminary bouts at JIExpo in Kemayoran, Central Jakarta, on Friday, thanks in part to the support of dozens of policewomen seated in the right stand of the arena.

The cops were seen joining other Indonesian supporters in cheering on the national pugilists, particularly between rounds.

Their enthusiasm gave me the courage. They were extraordinary, light flyweight Mario Blasius Kali said of the policewomen after his victory over his Sri Lankan opponent Thiwankan Muturanwellige.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 27, 2018 12:06 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df5513d9e 1 National Lombok-earthquake,#LombokEarthquake,Lombok,#Lombok Free

The Transportation Ministry, in cooperation with Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University (UGM), will build post-disaster transitional housing for earthquake victims in Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara (NTB).

Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said on Monday that the temporary structures, which allow for a quick design and building process, would be built in a cluster of 50 houses.

We want the Lombok people to start to recover [from the disaster] and return to their daily activities as soon as possible, he said, as quoted by Antara.

Dean of the UGMs school of engineering Nizam said the team would combine the use of earthquake-resistant steel frames and light aluminum roofs with either woven bamboo or reused timber. Each house is estimated to take two days to build at a cost of Rp 10 million (US$684.70).

He added that the transitional housing would provide a better alternative to tents for the earthquake victims. The transitional design, he added, would also allow people to renovate and turn the houses into more permanent structures in the future.

Under their plan, these houses will be built around Pemenang Port, which connects Lombok Island with Bali to revive tourism in the area.

The Public Works and Housing Ministry also plans to build 11,000 earthquake-resistant houses for displaced Lombok people.

The government will now start the reconstruction and recovery phase in Lombok after the emergency response period ended on Saturday. (ris/ipa)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Kharishar Kahfi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Mon, August 27, 2018 13:55 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df55196bd 1 National KPK,#KPK,zumi-zola,#corruption,corruption-case,Jambi,#Jambi Free

While graft suspects are commonly found to have spent the money they gained illicitly on expensive items like fancy cars and luxury houses, the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) suspects non-active Jambi governor and former actor Zumi Zola Zulkifli of spending the gratuities he had received on a relatively unusual collectible: Marvel action figures.

Zumi was indicted last week for accepting unlawful gifts of more than Rp 40 billion (US$2.7 million) in connection with the province's infrastructure projects from 2016 to 2017.

According to the indictment, a copy of which The Jakarta Post obtained recently, Zumi had reportedly ordered his aide, Asrul Pandapotan Sihotang, to use some of the illicit money to purchase several Marvel action figures between June and November 2017 worth Rp 52 million and S$11,750 from XM Studios, a Singaporean licensed producer of premium collectible statues.

Zumi had also used Rp 36 million of the illicit money for his wife's online shopping, Rp 300 million for umrah (minor Islamic pilgrimage) and Rp 400 million for qurban (Idul Adha sacrificial animals), the indictment said.

The KPK also suspected that Zumi had also used the unlawful money to help his younger brother, Zumi Laza, secure a leadership position in the National Mandate Partys (PAN) Jambi office. The KPK suspected Zumi of spending Rp 274 million to purchase two ambulances for his brother to give to PANs Jambi office.

We must be able to prove our suspicion later [during the trial], KPK spokesman Febri Diansyah said as quoted by tribunnews.com.

Zumi was also indicted of channeling Rp 16 million in bribes to dozens of Jambi Legislative Council members in order to influence deliberations of the 2017 and 2018 provincial budgets. (ipa)PT Kereta Api (KA) Pariwisata, a subsidiary of state railway operator PT Kereta Api Indonesia (KAI), launched a new priority class service for KA Argo Muria traveling from Jakarta to Semarang in Central Java on Monday.

The KA Argo Muria KA14 train is scheduled to depart from Jakarta's Gambir Station at 9 a.m., and KA Argo Muria KA13 will leave Semarang's Tawang Station at 4 p.m.

Read also: Presidential train now available for Jakartans traveling to Bandung

The priority class train, which can accommodate 28 people per trip, costs Rp 480,000 (US$33) on weekdays and Rp 700,000 on weekends, reported kompas.com. Tickets can be purchased at the train station as well as the operator's distribution channels.

The priority class train will make stops at Cirebon, Tegal and Pekalongan stations. Available as a regular service every day, it is hoped to offer a new alternative for travelers seeking to enjoy a more comfortable journey.

The priority class service was first introduced in August last year. (kes)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (Reuters) London  Mon, August 27, 2018 20:08 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df5531004 2 News school,Education,clean-water,toilets,hand-washing Free

Nearly half the worlds schools lack clean drinking water, toilets and handwashing facilities, putting millions of children at risk of disease, experts warned on Monday.

Almost 900 million children have to contend with a lack of basic hygiene facilities during their education, putting their health at risk and meaning some have to miss school.

You cant have a quality learning environment without these basics, said Dr Rick Johnston of the World Health Organization, a lead researcher on the project.

Children may not come to school at all if theres no toilets ... Then, when they are at school, they are not going to at their very best if they not able to use a decent toilet or if they are not properly hydrated.

World leaders have signed up to global pledges to provide safe water and hygiene facilities for all and ensure every child gets a comprehensive education by 2030 under the UNs sustainable development goals.

A lack of safe water and sanitation facilities can cause dehydration, illness, and even death.

But many children are forced to risk their health to take part in classes, according to the report produced jointly by the United Nations Childrens Fund UNICEF and the WHO, the first to look specifically at provision in schools.

It found nearly a third of primary and secondary schools lacked a safe and reliable drinking water supply, affecting nearly 570 million children. Nearly 20 percent of schools had no safe drinking water at all.

Just over a third of schools lacked adequate toilet facilities, affecting more than 620 million children. Almost one in five primary schools and one in eight secondary schools were considered to have no sanitation.

Nearly half lacked proper handwashing facilities, essential for helping prevent the spread of infections and disease. Nearly 900 million children were affected, the report found.

Sub-Saharan Africa, East and Southeast Asia had some of the worst facilities.

Its deeply shocking, Tim Wainwright, the chief executive of charity WaterAid, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Read also: Indonesia needs 'nearly 1 million' new teachers for state schools

The consequences are very broad in terms of childrens access to education, general health and state of nutrition.

Adolescent girls in particular are often forced to miss classes when they are on their periods if there are no proper cleaning and sanitation facilities, he said.

More than a third of girls in South Asia miss school during their periods, often because they lack access to toilets or pads, according to a WaterAid and UNICEF study earlier this year.

The World Bank last year warned countries needed to quadruple spending to $150 billion a year to deliver universal safe water and sanitation.

However, experts say they are optimistic the situation can be quickly improved if leaders treat water, sanitation and hygiene as a priority.

With political will, it really is possible to deliver good quality services, said Johnston.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (Kyodo News) Tokyo, Japan  Mon, August 27, 2018 16:03 1162 b147f6715e2195e5246e701df551fc1d 2 News Japan,Science,STEM,student,Education,university,research Free

Japan aims to help talented math and science students grow into leading researchers by integrating education programs at some high schools and universities from next academic year, sources familiar with the matter said Monday.

The move comes as concerns grow over Japan's faltering scientific research performance in recent years amid a decline in budget.

Under the envisioned system for providing consistent specialized education, university professors can teach at high schools and high school students can visit university laboratories, the sources said.

In university admissions, special slots for talented students may be created based on common standards established by high schools and colleges, they said.

The project will start as a part of the existing framework of Super Science High Schools that offer advanced math and science education. At present, about 200 institutions have been designated by the education ministry as such schools and they develop education materials and have close links with universities and private companies.

Shinichi Mizokami, professor of education at Kyoto University, welcomed the planned integration of high school and university programs at some institutions, saying starting early is the key to raising top-level researchers.

He said under the current system, even students who go through special math and science education programs at designated high schools cannot immediately move on to full-fledged research upon entering universities as they would be initially required to take liberal arts courses.

Mizokami attributed such a problem to a "lack of the universities' readiness to accept" promising students. The professor urged the education ministry to ensure the new system will cover talented students who are not studying at designated institutions as well.

Read also: Indonesian students win awards at 2016 ICYS

The new system could possibly allow students to skip grades and enter universities before graduating high schools in the future and will be beneficial for universities that seek to secure talented researchers from an early stage.

The ministry aims to secure the necessary budget for fiscal 2019 and solicit participating institutions from across Japan, select a model case in the first year and expand the scheme to several locations over the following years, according to the sources.

The education ministry plans to have core universities and local high schools form a council to decide on a consistent education program and require high schools and universities to jointly apply for the project.

In university admissions, the ministry also envisions selecting students based more on interviews and recommendations from high schools rather than the conventional entrance exams.

While Japan has produced many Nobel-prize winners in recent years, they were recognized for research carried out decades ago and the laureates themselves have repeatedly voiced their concern for the future course of Japan's science research.

British science journal Nature said in 2017 that Japan's scientific output has failed to keep pace with other leading nations, risking its position among the world's elite.

Publications by Japanese authors in 68 high-quality natural science journals fell more than 8 percent between 2012 and 2016, in contrast with a 48 percent increase by Chinese authors and a 17 percent rise by British authors, it said.Scanning the scene at Delancey and Essex streets this morning, you wouldnt think the new Essex Street Market is scheduled to open to the public in just seven weeks. Even though it looks like theres a lot of work left to be done on the facility at 115 Delancey St., the marketing push has begun for the monumental move from the existing 78-year-old market building.

In the New York Times today, Florence Fabricant reported on the pending relocation. She noted that all of but one of the vendors will be making the move in the fall (while she did not mention that vendor, its Santa Lucia Religious Articles).

The new market is part of the big Essex Crossing project. The developers, Delancey Street Associates, are building the glassy 37,000 square foot facility and turning it back over to the city, which will continue to run the public market. Theres no official opening date, although vendors have been told it will be Oct. 15. The Times reported, however, that 14 new merchants wont make their debut until January of next year.

The newbies include: Samesa, a contemporary Middle Eastern takeaway counter from sibling chefs Max and Eli Sussman; Josephines Feast!, a New York-based producer of artisanal jams and preserves; Saffron, a Fort Green-based florist; Flower Power Herbs and Roots, a branch of the herbal apothecary shop located on East Ninth Street; Chinatown Ice Cream Factory; Essex Shambles, an offshoot of the butcher shop Harlem Shambles; Zerza, a new concept from the owner of the defunct Moroccan spot Zerza on East Sixth Street); Roni-Sues Chocolates, returning to the market after losing a stall there two years ago; Sugar Sweet Sunshine, the Rivington Street bakery; and Local Line by Exit9, an outpost of the longtime Avenue A gift shop.

The city has yet to announce two full-scale restaurants that will be part of the market.

The Wall Street Journal also has a piece today on the move. The report references the current, drab redbrick buildings with no street-level windows, and declares that the, descendants of (the former) pushcart merchants (forced inside by the city in 1940) are about to move back into the limelight. Reporter Josh Barbanel writes that the move, reflects the shifting fortunes of the neighborhood, where more affluent residents are now moving in.

In the article, Anne Saxelby, vendor association president, said her fellow merchants are both worried and excited about the move.NEW YORK, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Attorney Advertising -- Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC reminds investors that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Sibanye Gold Limited (Sibanye or the Company) (NYSE: SBGL) and certain of its officers, on behalf of shareholders who purchased or otherwise acquired Sibanye securities between April 7, 2017 through June 26, 2018 (the Class Period). Such investors are encouraged to join this case by visiting the firms site: www.bgandg.com/sbgl .



This class action seeks to recover damages against Defendants for alleged violations of the federal securities laws under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

The Complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Sibanyes culture places short-term profits over safety; (2) consequently, almost half of South Africas 2018 mining fatalities occurred in Sibanye mines; and (3) as a result, defendants statements about Sibanyes business, operations, and prospects were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times.

On June 26, 2018, Bloomberg reported that another worker was killed at [Sibanyes] Driefontein operation in South Africa, bringing the total deaths at the companys mines this year to 21. The article continued to say that Sibanye accounts for nearly half of the 46 people reported killed at South African mines in 2018 and is already the subject of an investigation by the chief inspector of mines. Following this news, Sibanye stock dropped.

A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to review a copy of the Complaint you can visit the firms site: www.bgandg.com/sbgl or you may contact Peretz Bronstein, Esq. or his Investor Relations Analyst, Yael Hurwitz of Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC at 212-697-6484. If you suffered a loss in Sibanye you have until August 27, 2018 to request that the Court appoint you as lead plaintiff. Your ability to share in any recovery doesn't require that you serve as a lead plaintiff.

Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC is a corporate litigation boutique. Our primary expertise is the aggressive pursuit of litigation claims on behalf of our clients. In addition to representing institutions and other investor plaintiffs in class action security litigation, the firms expertise includes general corporate and commercial litigation, as well as securities arbitration. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

Contact:

Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC

Peretz Bronstein or Yael Hurwitz

212-697-6484 | info@bgandg.comKEMP, Texas, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Larson Electronics LLC, a leading industrial lighting company, announced the release of a new hazardous location camera designed for discreet monitoring and remote observation in indoor and outdoor industrial environments. This weatherproof and tamper resistant camera has 4.0MP resolution and a low light IR array for nighttime applications.



The HAL-CMR-CRNM-IP-POE-4MP-IR remote inspection camera offers operators in hazardous work environments discreet and high-resolution live feed. This camera features a built-in 1/3 inch progressive-scan CMOS image sensor that delivers 4.0MP at 20 fps. The lens provides viewers with an 83-degree field of vision, which covers large areas. Also featured with this network camera is a fully integrated IR array that automatically switches on when visible light falls below a specific level. The IR LED array provides low light and nighttime visibility up to 45 feet.

The HAL-CMR-CRNM-IP-POE-4MP-IR includes a variety of high-tech add-ons including: Advanced Infrared Technology, 120dB true Wide Dynamic Range, 3D Digital Noise Reduction and a true day/night IR-Cut filter Removal to produce clear images in variable and low light conditions.

Housing is constructed of waterproof, corrosion and chemical resistant polycarbonate with a polycarbonate cover. Electrical connection is easily made with an ethernet cable (not included) using PoE technology that saves time and money. Operators can connect the camera to their own NVR system to record live streams. Larson Electronics has a full line of explosion proof and hazardous location NVRs that will work directly with the HAL-CMR-CRNM-IP-POE-4MP-IR.

"This hazardous location network camera is perfect for discreet remote monitoring, said Rob Bresnahan, CEO of Larson Electronics. "It can be mounted inside vessels and tanks for real time viewing, or on building walls and ceilings to observe workplace operations. The addition of a low light IR array allows operators to use the camera 24 hours a day in any lighting condition."

About Larson Electronics LLC: Larson Electronics LLC is a manufacturer of industrial lighting equipment and accessories. The company offers an extensive catalog of industry-grade lighting and power distribution products for the following sectors: manufacturing, construction, food processing, oil and gas, military, marine and automobile. Customers can benefit from the companys hands-on, customized approach to lighting solutions. Larson Electronics provides expedited service for quotes, customer support and shipments.

For further information, please contact:

Rob Bresnahan, President and CEO

Toll-free: 1-800-369-6671

Phone: 214-616-6180

Fax: 903-498-3364

E-mail: sales@larsonelectronics.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/76e3f8af-c721-4006-b428-425ae67fb82aPaco Diaz will assist on #4 and #5.

Source: A

For most artists, it's difficult to draw five comic issues in five months. Marvel Comics is learning that it's even harder for an artist to draw five issues of a weekly series, like say the weekly series Venom: First Host.

A couple weeks ago, Ron Lim was enlisted to draw parts of issues #2, #3, and #5 of Venom: First Host, alongside originally solicited artist Mark Bagley. It's now been announced that Paco Diaz will also assist on the mini-series for issues #4 and #5, taking over for Lim on the last issue.

Venom: First Host is set to release August 29 and run for five weeks.

Updated solicit info is below.Highlights include Hot Lunch Special #4, The Lollipop Kids #2, and The Last Space Race #2.

Source: Aftershock Comics

WITCH HAMMER OGN / 19.99 / 64 pages / Full Color/ ON SALE NOVEMBER 28th

Writer: Cullen Bunn

Artist: Dalibor Talajic

Colorist: Seb Camagajevac

Letterer: Marshall Dillon

Cover Artist: Dalibor Talajic

Witch. The word conjures images of hags in black robes and crooked hats, standing over cauldrons of bubbling brew. But witches are among us, and we do not realize it. They are our friends and neighbors. They are our family members. They are our idols.

And someone is murdering them.

A killer is stalking witches, hunting them down mercilessly. Agents Frontenac and Guinness are on the killer's trail. But as they delve deeper into the hidden, magical world around them, they are haunted by a terrifying question. Is the killer doing the right thing?

A WALK THROUGH HELL vol 1 TPB / 14.99 / 120 pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 28th

Writer: Garth Ennis

Artist: Goran Sudzuka

Colorist: Ive Svorcina

Letterer: Rob Steen

Cover: Andy Clarke w/ Jose Villarrubia

So these two FBI agents walk into a warehouse...

Special Agents Shaw and McGregor handle the routine cases nowadays, which is just the way Shaw likes it. She's pushing 40, a borderline burnout, the ghastly memories of her last investigation still clinging like shadows. McGregor is younger, more dedicated, hanging onto some measure of idealism whatever the world might throw at him.

When two fellow agents go missing inside a Long Beach warehouse, Shaw and McGregor are sent to investigate. But what they find waiting is far from routine, as the local police have already discovered to their cost. Before the night is out, our heroes will encounter terror beyond their most appalling nightmaresin a place where the night may never end at all.

A new kind of horror story for modern America, written by Garth Ennis (Preacher, The Boys, Crossed) and drawn by Goran Sudzuka (Y: The Last Man, Hellblazer).

A WALK THROUGH HELL #6 / 3.99 / 32 pages / color / on sale NOVEMBER 21st

Writer: Garth Ennis

Artist: Goran Sudzuka

Colorist: Ive Svorcina

Letterer: Rob Steen

Cover: Andy Clarke w/ Jose Villarrubia

As deputy-director Driscoll attempts to discover what happened to her missing agents, Shaw and McGregor find their reality twisting once more, plunging them into an entirely new dimension of horror. Leaving the familiar world even further behind, the pair begin to understand the true scale of the nightmare that has enmeshed them.

So begins A Walk Through Hell book two: The Cathedral.

A new kind of horror story for modern America, written by Garth Ennis (Preacher, The Boys, Crossed) and drawn by Goran Sudzuka (Y: The Last Man, Hellblazer)

THE LOLLIPOP KIDS #2 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Full Color / On Sale NOVEMBER 7th

Writers: Adam and Aidan Glass

Artist: Diego Yapur

Letterer: Sal Cipriano

Cover by Robert Hack

Nick knows he's no hero, so he says thanks to the Lollipop Kids for all of the bad memories, and heads out of the park, back to his old, safe, boring life.

But something follows Nick, a GREMLIN named EXPO. Nick almost kills Expo, but FRESNO stops him and explains that the Gremlin is on their side, not all monsters are evil. Fresno gives Nick one last chance to join their ranks and to fulfill his destiny, but Nick's soiled pants tell him all he needs to know.

Nick leaves again, but soon he stumbles upon something much worse than a gremlinand this time NOBODY is coming to his rescue.

Brought to life by Adam and Aidan Glass (ROUGH RIDERS, THE NORMALS, DC COMICS TEEN TITANS) with art from Diego Yapur (The Night Projectionist, Priest: Purgatory), THE LOLLIPOP KIDS is an epic tale of the nightmares that haunt Central Park after dark...

THE NORMALS vol 1 TPB / 14.99 / 120 pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 14th

Writer: Adam Glass

Artist: Dennis Calero

Colorist: Adriano Augusto

Cover: Juan Doe

Think about your "life" for a moment...the people you've known, the one's you've loved, and all the stuff in between. Now imagine you learned that everything YOU believed, everything YOU lived, everything YOU felt actually never happened...it was ALL not real. But it is REAL to YOU and you now must fight to save it and everyone you love. But to do that, you first have to save the world. Welcome to "THE NORMALS."

Created and written by Adam Glass (executive producer of Supernatural and writer of Suicide Squad and Teen Titans) with art by Dennis Calero (X-Men Noir).

THE LAST SPACE RACE #2 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 7th

Writer: Peter Calloway

Artist: Alex Shibao

Colorist: Natalia Marques

Letterer: Marshall Dillon

Cover: Alex Shibao w/ Natalia Marques

It started as an anomalyan outlier in the noise that's so common in astronomical data. But the truth sends the United Statesand the worldcareening into what will become humanity's LAST SPACE RACE.

A challenger appears!

Sasha Balodis isn't the only one that desires to discover the secrets waiting beyond the orbit of Saturn. His business rival Roger Franklin wants inand if he doesn't get what he wants he'll tear the whole thing down.

Written by Peter Calloway (TV's Legion, Cloak & Dagger, Under the Dome) and drawn by Alex Shibao (Independence Day), THE LAST SPACE RACE is an imaginative investigation into wonder, hope and humankind's grandest purposea truly original story AfterShock couldn't be more fired up to tell.

DEAD KINGS #2 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 21st

Writer: Steve Orlando

Artist: Matthew Dow Smith

Colorist: Lauren Affe

Letterer: Thomas Mauer

Cover: Matthew Dow Smith

FOLKLORE...WRITTEN IN OIL AND IRON!

Sasha Vasnetsov would do anything to free his brother Gena from a work camp for the socially degenerate, including using a suicide bomb hidden in the last place any man would look. Sasha didn't want to use it. He wanted to use Maria Kamenaya, a warrior from a bygone apocalypse. Too bad she's more interested in flesh: eating it or laying with it, depending on the source. Sasha's on his own, out of luck, on a one-way trip...to the wrong detention camp. ????. Am I right?

From Steve Orlando (Batman/Shadow, Crude, Midnighter, Virgil) and Matthew Dow Smith (October Girl, Suicide Squad, X-Files) comes a vision of humanity after a disastrous World War of Mechs and Magic.

ANIMOSITY #18 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 21st

Writer: Marguerite Bennett

Artist: Rafael De Latorre

Colorist: Rob Schwager

Letters: Marshall Dillon

Cover: Rafael De Latorre w/ Marcelo Maiolo

What has been seen cannot be unseen. What has been known cannot be unknown. The survivors gaze upon a changed world of grief, rage, love, and remorsea world where, win or lose, they will forfeit the blissful ignorance they once held dear.

From creator/writer Marguerite Bennett (INSEXTS, DC Comics Bombshells, Batwoman) with artwork by Rafael De Latorre (SUPERZERO).

DARK ARK #11 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 14th

Writer: Cullen Bunn

Artist: Juan Doe

Letterer: Ryane Hill

Cover: Juan Doe

NEW ARC STARTS HERE!

At long last, the rains have stopped. But the flood waters have yet to recede. Still, new lifeboth human and monsteris born into the world. And as the Manticore Kruul learns what it means to be a father, Shrae's newborn grandchild is dying from a supernatural ailment. The secret of a cure lies with one of Shrae's most bitter enemies!

From writer Cullen Bunn (UNHOLY GRAIL, X-Men Blue, Deadpool, Venom) and artist Juan Doe (ANIMOSITY: THE RISE, AMERICAN MONSTER, WORLD READER) comes a sinister tale of biblical proportions!

MOTH & WHISPER #3 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 7th

Writer: Ted Anderson

Artist: Jen Hickman

Letterer: Marshall Dillon

Cover Artist: Jen Hickman

Everyone knows the two greatest thieves in the city are the Moth and the Whisper, but few know that they're missing. And what nobody knows is that the new Moth and Whisper are actually one person pretending to be both of them: Niki, their teenage child.

With the help of an unexpected ally, Niki gets closer to Wolfe than ever. But they have no idea what's in store for themand what they don't know will end up hurting them...

A Young Adult cyberpunk thriller starring a genderqueer super-thief, MOTH & WHISPER is the brainchild of Ted Anderson (My Little Pony, Adventure Time) and Jen Hickman (Jem and the Holograms, The Dead)a socially significant and engaging story that AfterShock is proud to tell.

PATIENCE! CONVICTION! REVENGE! 3 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 14th

Writer: Patrick Kindlon

Artist: Marco Ferrari

Colorist: Patrizia Comino

Letterer: Jim Campbell

Cover Artists: Marco Ferrari w/ Patrizia Comino

Disregarded, disrespected and dismissed, Renny has a chip on his shoulder.

Once a partner in the criminal syndicate that rules Las Vegas, he's been banished to a shack in the desert. But Renny's been busy building a robot armyand now it's time to march into the neon hell of a cyberpunk Vegas and retake his seat at the table.

Old friends better run, because Operation PATIENCE! CONVICTION! REVENGE! is underway.

While Renny and Marisol argue over which of them is the captive and which is the kidnapper, Robot Paul takes a job at the casino. His manager's name is Death By Torture Bot, so it'll be a difficult first day of work. Plus: The Organization answers Renny's transgression with explosive violence!

Written by Patrick Kindlon (There's Nothing There, We Can Never Go Home) and drawn by Marco Ferrari (Famous Monsters Presents), PATIENCE! CONVICTION! REVENGE! continues Kindlon's exploration of difficult characters and irreverent themes.

BEYONDERS #4 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 28th

Writer: Paul Jenkins

Artist: Wesley St. Claire

Letterer: Marshall Dillon

Cover Artist: Wesley St. Claire

Imagine that you were a teenager who had embarked on a treasure hunt of the most epic proportiona search through mysteries thousands of years in the makingonly to discover that the stakes were quite literally the survival of humanity.

Now, imagine that you were accompanied by a brilliant young woman with the power to predict the future using just calculus, and a one-eyed Welsh Corgi with a farting problem. Imagine that by solving the riddles of the treasure hunt, you had the potential to save the world. Is that cool, or what?

Well, imagine that the very book you were enjoying this story in contained its own awesome treasure hunt, hidden inside every panel, and you'd have BEYONDERS #4! Even cooler.

From Paul Jenkins (ALTERS, Wolverine: Origin, Sentry) and Wesley St. Claire (FU JITSU, Teen Titans) comes the mystery series that can be summed up in one word of its ownAfterShock!

RELAY #5 / 3.99 / 32 pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 28th

Writer: Zac Thompson

Story: Zac Thompson & Donny Cates

Artist: Andy Clarke

Colorist: Jose Villarrubia

Letterer: Charles Pritchett

Cover Artists: Andy Clarke w/ Jose Villarrubia

In the future, the galaxy is united under the Galactic Relay. The towering monument is meant to inspire conformity of ideas, technology and progress, but many have begun to resent the foreign structure. And now, Jad Carter, a Relay employee, has found the Relay's mythological creator.

In the deep reaches of space, the truth behind the Monolith is revealed! The electrifying finale to the first arc is here...but who will survive and will the universe ever be the same?

Written by Zac Thompson (The Dregs the co-writer of Cable) and art by Andy Clarke (REPLICA, Batman). Story by Zac Thompson and Donny Cates (BABYTEETH, Venom, Thanos, Doctor Strange, God Country).

HOT LUNCH SPECIAL #4 / $3.99 / 32 Pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 14th

Writer: Eliot Rahal

Artist: Jorge Fornes

Letterer: Taylor Esposito

Cover Artist: Jorge Fornes

A midwestern noir series set in the harsh landscape of the northern Minnesota Iron RangeHOT LUNCH SPECIAL is all about family, food and the fight for survival. Only one question is worth asking...is blood thicker than sandwiches?

Dorothy Khoury has accidentally created two more dead bodies.

The number one problem with most corpses is...they're super hard to get rid of. Now, the frightened Khoury family must cover up the trail of blood they're leaving behind, while also projecting strength. They finally have a hostage they can use to negotiate an end to the war with the Moran Family Mafia.

From Eliot Rahal, the writer of Cult Classic, The Paybacks and Quantum & Woody comes HOT LUNCH SPECIAL, with art by Jorge Fornes (Amazing X-Men, Wolverine, Magnus)!

CLANKILLERS #5 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Full Color/ ON SALE NOVEMBER 28th

Writer: Sean Lewis

Artist: Antonio Fuso

Colorist: Stefano Simeone

Letterer: Dave Sharpe

Cover Artists: Antonio Fuso w/ Stefano Simeone

Like the demented stepchild of Game of Thrones, Braveheart and Mark Millar's Kick Ass, CLANKILLERS brings readers into an ancient Ireland filled with clans, mystics, warriors and monsters of mythic proportion!

The first arc of your favorite medieval bloodbath comes to an end.

Finola's final face off with her sisters and her friend Cillian's discovery of Finola's true self converge to graphically violent and heart-rending conclusions! Grab your sword and prepare for the epic conclusion!

From writer Sean Lewis (BETROTHED, The Few) and artist Antonio Fuso (James Bond, G.I. Joe) comes a revenge thriller that's sure to become a fan-favorite.

DARK ARK vol 2 TPB / 14.00 / 120 pages / Full Color / On Sale November 21st

Writer: Cullen Bunn

Artist: Juan Doe

Letterer: Ryane Hill

Cover: Juan Doe

The wickedness of mankind has moved the Creator to destroy the world by way of the flood!

Two arks sail this flooded world. On one, Noah tends the animals of the natural world. On the other, the sorcerer Shrae stands watch over the monsters that haunt the night. But in order for Shrae's charges to thrive in the World That Waits, Noah's Ark must also survive. And when Noah's vessel encounters trouble, Shrae's monsters must work in secrecy to ensure that their would-be prey find land.

From writer Cullen Bunn (X-Men Blue, Deadpool, Venom) and artist Juan Doe (AMERICAN MONSTER, WORLD READER) comes a sinister tale of biblical proportions that HAD to be told at AfterShock Comics.

BROTHERS DRACUL vol 1 TPB / 14.99 / 120 pages / Full Color / ON SALE NOVEMBER 7th

Writer: Cullen Bunn

Artist: Mirko Colak

Colorist: Maria Santaolalla

Letterer: Simon Bowland

Cover: Mirko Colak w/ Maria Santaolalla

The legend of Vlad the Impaler is the stuff of nightmares. The inspiration for the most iconic of monstersDraculaVlad tortured and murdered thousands of victims. But what turned him into such a depraved killer? The truth lies in his teenage years, when Vlad and his brother Radu were held hostage by the Ottoman Empire. During this time, the brothers learned many thingsarchery, riding, the art of combat, matters of court...and how to stalk and slay vampires.

From writer Cullen Bunn (DARK ARK, UNHOLY GRAIL, X-Men Blue, Deadpool, Venom) and artist Mirko Colak (UNHOLY GRAIL, The Punisher) comes a tale of brothers and blood that HAD to be told at AfterShock Comics.Highlights include Archie #700, Jughead The Hunger #10, and Archie: 1941 #3.

Source: Archie Comics

THE BLACK HOOD VOL. 3

A ruthless assassin known as The Nobody considers the Black Hood a loose end, and he's willing to slaughter dozens of innocent people to flush him out of hiding. How high must the body count rise before Philadelphia's former vigilante Greg Hettinger steps forward to face an opponent he can't possibly beat? THE BLACK HOOD VOL. 3 collects THE BLACK HOOD SEASON 2 #1-5.

Script: Duane Swierczynski

Art: Greg Scott, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Rachel Deering

Cover: Greg Smallwood

978-1-68255-883-6

$14.99 US/$16.99 CAN

6 5/8 x 10 3/16"

TR

136 pp, Full Color

Direct Market On-Sale Date: 11/28

CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA #1 **REPRINT**

Relive the horror in this special reprinting of CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA #1, to celebrate the brand new NETFLIX series, at a new low price! Terror is born anew in this dark reimagining of Sabrina the Teenage Witch's origin. On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, the young sorceress finds herself at a crossroads, having to choose between an unearthly destiny and her mortal boyfriend, Harvey. But a foe from her family's past has arrived in Greendale, Madame Satan, and she has her own deadly agenda. For TEEN+ readers.

Script: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

Art: Robert Hack, Jack Morelli

Cover: Provided by Netflix

On Sale Date: 11/7

32-page, full color comic

$1.00 U.S.

ARCHIE #700

A brand new era of ARCHIE begins in this landmark 700th issue of our flagship series! Join the new creative team of writer Nick Spencer (The Amazing Spider-Man) and artist Marguerite Sauvage (DC's Bombshells) as they take a trip to Riverdale and bring Archie, Betty & Veronica, Jughead, and the rest of the town along for a wild ride complete with new mysteries, new relationships, and much more!

Script: Nick Spencer

Art: Marguerite Sauvage, Jack Morelli

ARCHIE #700 CVR A Reg: Marguerite Sauvage

ARCHIE #700 CVR B Var: Mike Allred, Laura Allred

ARCHIE #700 CVR C Var: Matthew Dow Smith

ARCHIE #700 CVR D Var: Francesco Francavilla

ARCHIE #700 CVR E Var: Robert Hack

ARCHIE #700 CVR F Var: David Mack

ARCHIE #700 CVR G Var: Audrey Mok

ARCHIE #700 CVR H Var: Thomas Pitilli

ARCHIE #700 CVR I Var: Paul Renaud

ARCHIE #700 CVR J Var: Michael Walsh

On Sale Date: 11/21

32-page, full color comic

$3.99 U.S.

ARCHIE: 1941 #3 (of 5)

Basic training has begun and Archie's surprised with a familiar faceReggie Mantle! Meanwhile, the teens back in Riverdale that haven't enlisted are dealing with different woes on the Homefrontfrom anxiety worrying about their friends and families, to feelings of inadequacy and racial tensions in a changing world.

Script: Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn

Art: Peter Krause, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Jack Morelli

ARCHIE: 1941 #3 CVR A Reg: Peter Krause, Rosario "Tito" Pena

ARCHIE: 1941 #3 CVR B Var: Derek Charm

ARCHIE: 1941 #3 CVR C Var: Ray Anthony Height, Rosario "Tito" Pena

On Sale Date: 11/28

32-page, full color comic

$3.99 U.S.

BETTY & VERONICA: VIXENS VOL. 2 (TR)

The Vixens are being followed by a sinister former foe, but he claims to come in peacecan he be trusted? Meanwhile, a young woman's mysterious disappearance has the Vixens' questioning if their actions are having unintended consequences. BETTY & VERONICA: VIXENS VOL. 2 collects BETTY & VERONICA: VIXENS issues #6 - #10.

Script: Jamie L. Rotante

Art: Sanya Anwar, Jen Vaughn, Eva Cabrera, Elaina Unger, Matt Herms, Rachel Deering

Cover: Sanya Anwar

978-1-68255-879-9

$14.99 US/$16.99 CAN

6 x 9"

TR

136 pp, Full Color

Direct Market On-Sale Date: 11/14

JUGHEAD THE HUNGER #10

Whoor whatis behind the creation of FrankenMoose? Whatever it is, it may pose the greatest threat to Jughead Jones yet-- and considering this is a guy who's fought bloodthirsty werewolves and armed to the teeth werewolf hunters, that's saying something!

Script: Frank Tieri

Art: Joe Eisma, Matt Herms, Jack Morelli

Jughead the Hunger #10 CVR A Reg: Adam Gorham

Jughead the Hunger #10 CVR B Var: Matthew Dow Smith

Jughead the Hunger #10 CVR C Var: Tracy Yardley

On Sale Date: 11/14

32-page, full color comic

$3.99 U.S.

ARCHIE AND ME COMICS DIGEST #12

BRAND NEW LEAD STORY: "Santa Sleighed!" When Santa's sleigh breaks down on Christmas Eve, the only place big enough to harbor Santa and all his reindeer is the Lodge mansion! How will this affect Christmas? And more importantly, will the gang get their gifts on time?

Script: Dan Parent

Art: Jeff Shultz, Jim Amash, Glenn Whitmore, Jack Morelli

Cover: Jeff Shultz, Rosario "Tito" Pena

On Sale Date: 11/7

128-page, full color comic

$6.99 U.S.

ARCHIE GIANT COMICS BASH (TR)

Archie and his pals 'n' gals are throwing GIANT-SIZED PARTYand you're invited to laugh along with the gang with some of Archie's best and brightest stories!

Script: Various

Art: Various

Cover: Dan Parent

978-1-68255-877-5

$9.99 US/$10.99 CAN

4 7/8 x 6 9/16"

TR

416 pp, Full Color

Direct Market On-Sale Date: 11/7

ARCHIE JUMBO COMICS DIGEST #294

BRAND NEW LEAD STORY: "Holi-dazed!" With Betty and Veronica both busy on the night of the school's Christmas ball, Archie accepts a date from Sugarplum the fairyAND with Noelle, Santa's daughter! Archie's made this mistake before, but never with two of the North Pole's most popular girls! He'll need some Christmas magic to get out of this jam!

Script: Dan Parent

Art: Pat and Tim Kennedy, Bob Smith, Glenn Whitmore, Jack Morelli

Cover: Bill Galvan, Rosario "Tito" Pena

On Sale Date: 11/28

192-page, full color comic

$6.99 U.S.

BETTY & VERONICA JUMBO COMICS DIGEST #268

BRAND NEW LEAD STORY: "Who's Chicken Now?" When Veronica's nervous about her new job at her father's chicken fast food franchise, Betty offers to be her wing womanbut even with Betty's help, can Veronica make it, or will she get fried?

Script: Bill Golliher

Art: Dan Parent, Rich Koslowski, Glenn Whitmore, Jack Morelli

Cover: Jeff Shultz, Rosario "Tito" Pena

On Sale Date: 11/14

192-page, full color comic

$6.99 U.S.

B&V FRIENDS JUMBO COMICS DIGEST #265

BRAND NEW LEAD STORY: "If the Shoe Fits!" Betty's new job at a fancy department store has been hard workbut it's about to get harder when she encounters her toughest customer: Veronica Lodge!

Script: Bill Golliher

Art: Dan Parent, Rich Koslowski, Glenn Whitmore, Jack Morelli

Cover: Pat and Tim Kennedy, Bob Smith, Rosario "Tito" Pena

On Sale Date: 11/21

192-page, full color comic

$6.99 U.S.

EVERYTHING'S ARCHIE VOL. 1 (TR)

Back in the days of Saturday morning cartoons, The Archies ruled both TV and radio. While "Sugar, Sugar" was on the airwaves, you could also read the band's adventures in this classic seriesreprinted here again for fans young and old alike!

Script: Various

Art: Various

Cover: Dan DeCarlo

978-1-68255-881-2

$10.99 US/$11.99 CAN

5 1/4 x 8"

TR

224 pp, Full Color

Direct Market On-Sale Date: 11/21You have permission to edit this article.

Edit CloseMINNEAPOLIS, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Starkey Hearing Technologies has reinvented both the hearing experience and the hearing aid with Livio AI. Livio AI is the worlds first Healthable hearing aid to utilize integrated sensors and artificial intelligence and the first device to track physical activity and cognitive health as measured by hearing aid use in social situations.

The launch also includes a brand-new mobile appThrive Hearing; and three new wireless accessoriesthe Starkey Hearing Technologies TV, the Remote, and the Remote Microphone +. With the Remote Micorophone+, Livio AI is also the first hearing aid to feature Amazon Alexa connectivity.

First and foremost, Livio AI is the best performing and best sounding hearing aid we have ever made. What makes today a pivotal moment in the hearing industry, is that with Livio AI, we have transformed a single-use device into the worlds first multi-purpose hearing aid, a Healthable with integrated sensors and artificial intelligence. Livio AI is so much more than just a hearing aid, it is a gateway to better health and wellness, Starkey Hearing Technologies President Brandon Sawalich said.

The new Hearing Reality technology provides an average 50-percent reduction in noisy environments, significant reduced listening effort, and newly enhanced clarity of speech, while the use of artificial intelligence and integrated sensors enabled it to optimize the hearing experience. Livio AI has revolutioned what hearing better means.



Artificial intelligence and advancements in hearing technology enabled Livio AI to provide following unique features and benefits:

Understand and see the real-time health benefits of using hearing aids - NEW

Overall health and wellness tracking through the apps combined brain and body health score (Thrive Wellness Score) - NEW

Integration of the physical activity data measured by inertial sensors of the hearing aids with Apple Health and Google Fit apps - NEW

Personalized Control for customizable adjustments to sound and programs

Remote programming by users hearing professionals to put hearing healthcare in the hands of the users - NEW

Natural user interface with tap control - NEW

Unprecedented, natural listening and speech clarity in the noisiest environments with the new Hearing Reality technology  NEW

technology  Integrated language translation  NEW

Dual-radio wireless platform: 2.4GHz radio for streaming of phone calls, music, media, apps, and connecting with various devices including TVs and Amazon Alexa; near-field magnetic induction technology for true ear-to-ear communication and binaural noise reduction

Fall detection with inertial sensors integrated within the hearing aids (App support coming soon) - NEW

Designed to help users live their healthiest life, Livio AI is available as a RIC 312 and BTE 13 in a variety of colors. In addition to the above unique features, Livio AI also includes Starkeys best-in-class feedback cancellation, high-definition music prescription, advanced Multiflex Tinnitus Technology and Surface NanoShield pioneering water, wax and moisture repellant system to protect and ensure durability and dependability.

How integrated sensors and AI helped Starkey transform the hearing aid

Artificial intelligence, coupled with advanced sensing devices, is rapidly changing the world around us, Starkey Hearing Technologies Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering Dr. Achin Bhowmik said. We are proud to introduce these transformational technologies into the world of hearing aids to both optimize the users hearing experiences and enable them to continuously monitor and improve their overall health besides treating hearing loss, reducing the associated risks of dementia, anxiety and social isolation.

The integrated 3D motion sensors inside Livio AI enable the hearing aids to detect movement, track activities, and recognize gestures. The hearing aids communicate with each other and compatible mobile accessories to deliver meaningful, real-time feedback about users overall body and cognitive health and fitness.

This cutting-edge technology allows people to take a proactive and personal approach to treating hearing loss, which has been linked to various health issues including dementia, cognitive decline, anxiety, stress, social isolation and an increased risk of falling.

Livio AI is the first device utilizing the ears to help users better understand not only how to improve their overall health and wellness, but also the deep connection between treating hearing loss and reducing health risks. This helps to improve key areas of well-being by reconnecting users to the people, places and activities they love.



Livio AI is available in the United States and Canada at this time, with a global roll out to more than 20 countries in 2019. For more information about Livio AI hearing aids, the Thrive mobile app and new Starkey Hearing Technologies accessories, please visit www.starkey.com



About Starkey Hearing Technologies

Starkey Hearing Technologies is a privately held, global hearing technology company headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Founded in 1967, the company is recognized for its innovative design, development and distribution of comprehensive digital hearing systems. The company develops, manufactures and distributes hearing aids via three distinct brands  Audibel, NuEar and its original brand, Starkey. As the only American-owned and American-operated provider of hearing technologies, Starkey Hearing Technologies is proud to support veterans and active military service personnel with the best in American innovation, including a suite of revolutionary hearing technologies and other resources. Starkey Hearing Technologies currently employs more than 5,000 people, operates 22 facilities and conducts business in more than 100 markets worldwide. For more information, visit www.starkey.com.

# # #: H               ...Bob Bamberg has been in the pet supply industry and writing about pets, livestock and wildlife for three decades. He can be reached at petsap@comcast.net.

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.ROUBAIX, France, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On 24 August 2018, Octave Klaba apppointed Michel Paulin as Chief Executive Officer of the OVH group. Michel Paulin has spent most of his career in the IT, telecoms and internet industries. He was CEO of Neuf Cegetel, for which he led the IPO, Meditel (now Orange Maroc) and SFR. His nomination comes as OVH embarks on a new stage in its development. Michel Paulin will lead the execution of this Smart Cloud strategic plan, which aims to consolidate OVHs role as an alternative leader in Cloud. This plan will be presented at the forthcoming OVH Summit, on 18 October 2018.

Octave Klaba commented: With the benefit of his experience and his leadership, Michel Paulin will help us to accelerate the implementation of our new strategic plan - with him as CEO and myself as Chairman of the Board. I am convinced that his personal qualities, combined with the strong corporate culture of our teams, will ensure the groups development.

Michel Paulin commented: It is a great honour for me to join OVH. I am looking forward to lead this team of 2,500 women and men on four continents, with its strong and unique culture of innovation at the service of its clients. I am delighted to work with Octave; everyone knows his vision, his entrepreneurial strength and his great humanity.

In February 2017, Octave Klaba took on the role of CEO again, to implement the Next Level plan. Growth in OVHs business was reinforced through its first major acquisition (of vCloudAir, from VMware), the groups new business in the US and in Asia Pacific, the creation of 12 new datacentres and the introduction of an innovative Cloud product and services strategy. OVH thereby rises to the challenges of data sovereignty and the frontal competition of the GAFAM and Chinese players as Alibaba or Tencent.

With management of the OVH group entrusted to Michel Paulin, Octave Klaba will henceforth be able to devote himself fully to the role of Chairman of the Board. The market for Cloud will experience worldwide consolidation in the coming years and I want OVH, the European leader, to play its role to the full. The Group is only just starting its expansion outside Europe and I will bring all my experience to bear to accelerate its development. As an entrepreneur, I also want to work on promoting our culture, our values and our methods to create collaborative businesses. I am utterly convinced that Europe needs to build and develop an ecosystem of European companies, to retain digital independence against the Americans and the Chinese.

About

Specializing in the cloud and internet infrastructure, OVH offers innovative products and services based on three universes: Web, Dedicated and Cloud. Since its founding in 1999, OVH has established itself as a partner for hundreds of thousands of professionals worldwide. OVH owes its success to a development model based on innovation and complete control of the supply chain, from server production and the maintaining of their own infrastructure, to customer assistance. For each service and solution proposed, OVH is able to ensure stable and reliable offers to its customers at the best quality to price ratio.

Europe Contact

Heloise KADDOUR - +33 680 069 995 - heloise.kaddour@corp.ovh.comA decade on from the financial crisis, finally a senior regulator has shown the courage to speak out on the failure of UK authorities to make bankers pay the price of bringing the system down.

The greatest damage was done to families who saw returns on savings wiped out and incomes squeezed.

In a forthright interview with the Mail on Sunday, Financial Conduct Authority chief executive Andrew Bailey expressed annoyance about a lack of accountability.

Frustrated: Financial Conduct Authority chief executive Andrew Bailey expressed annoyance about a lack of accountability

Bailey is frustrated that bankers at the vortex of the crisis, such as Sir Fred Goodwin of Royal Bank of Scotland and Andy Hornby of HBOS, escaped without censure.

They should at the very least have been banned as directors. As a leading contender to be the next governor of the Bank of England, it should be in Bailey's own hands to adopt a more robust approach.

When the weather let Britain down over the holiday weekend I caught up with the Danish TV series Follow The Money. The plot bears an uncanny resemblance to what went on at RBS subsequent to the crisis.

The grasping behaviour of RBS's Global Restructuring Group sent small and medium-sized enterprises to the wall. It then grabbed the assets on the cheap  a theme mimicked by the Focus arm of fictional Nova Bank in the Danish show.

The big difference between the UK and the fictional Danish approach to a far-reaching scandal was the determination in Denmark of two low-ranking fraud officers to spend every waking hour making sure those responsible for appalling behaviour were brought to justice.

Contrast this with the feeble way in which the FCA let individuals involved in running GRG off the hook on narrow legal grounds, claiming it lacked powers to do more.

What Bailey and the FCA do have is moral authority and a platform to hold those responsible to justice. The least the FCA could have done was to pass files to other competent authorities for further investigation. Many of the bankers involved in restructuring at RBS hold high office in other banks and have avoided punishment.

Moreover, we still await detail of who knew what at Lloyds Banking Group about the fraud at HBOS's Reading branch. The public has a right to be told if there was a cover-up to save the reputations of all those involved in the Lloyds-HBOS merger.

City regulators often tie themselves in legalistic knots and go on the defensive rather than seek a path through the thicket. In the US, federal prosecutors often use obscure legislation such the Wire Act to bring perceived offenders to justice.

All it requires is imagination and willpower. These are characteristics sadly missing from UK financial justice.

Bankrupt rules

Theresa May arrived at Downing Street determined to combat the image that the Tories were soft on capitalism.

Instead, disgraceful abuses have continued in Britain's boardrooms.

The construction and outsourcing group Carillion went to the wall leaving employees, the pension fund and suppliers up a creek without a paddle in a giant Ponzi scheme. Directors and shareholders filled their boots. At housebuilder Persimmon, a Government subsidy in the shape of Help to Buy enabled chief executive Jeff Fairburn to earn rewards worthy of Russian oligarchs. Meanwhile, overpaid directors at Melrose swallowed old-established engineer GKN and will in all probability break it up for vast sums.

The Government's response to abuse is to tighten up insolvency laws. It wants to punish bosses who dissolve firms to avoid paying staff properly or pension obligations.

Ministers want the Insolvency Service to check why companies are paying dividends and fat salaries to directors, as at Carillion, as they drive companies into the buffers.

Reforms to insolvency laws and governance are long overdue. But as is the case with the bankers, it is not much use having tough laws if weak regulators are unwilling to fight the good fight.

Melrose betrayal

No surprise that Chris Miller and his merry band at Melrose are ready to ditch GKN's powder metallurgy division for 1.8bn.

After all, that is what indebted asset- strippers do. But it should be remembered that the powder coatings applied by GKN to advanced military aircraft protect against detection by the enemy. If an overseas sale is planned, then Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson should intervene.Bean counters face the prospect of a full-blown parliamentary inquiry in the wake of the collapse of builder Carillion and a host of other scandals.

KPMG has come under fire over the collapse of Carillion with debts of more than 3 billion just months after it gave the accounts a clean bill of health.

MPs probing the demise of Carillion  last week dubbed a giant Ponzi scheme by the former head of the National Audit Office  slammed the cosy relationship between auditors and firms they are supposed to be checking.

Bean counting: KPMG has come under fire over the collapse of Carillion with debts of more than 3 billion

KPMG, Deloitte, PwC and EY dominate the market, raising worries too little competition stifles scrutiny. Peter Kyle MP, who sits on the parliamentary business committee, said: I am pushing very hard for a full inquiry into the audit and accounting market.

I want this to be a parliamentary inquiry because I dont think the regulators have got the stomach for this kind of fight.

I would go so far as to say that the market as it exists now is done. Its only a matter of whether the Big Four will play a part in reforming themselves or whether it will take parliament to reform it. MPs have already asked the competition watchdog to look at the market.

The Government has also launched a review of audit regulator the Financial Reporting Council. Bosses of the nine biggest accounting firms have reportedly agreed a cap on the number of FTSE 100 companies they can each audit, to try and stave off action by watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority.

American bosses were leaning on their UK counterparts over a list of proposals to send to the CMA, in last-ditch conference calls on Friday. International bosses are said to be concerned a full-blown inquiry in the UK could harm their business.

And in a fresh sign of how uncompetitive the industry has become, Lloyds bank could be forced to hire Deloitte as its next auditor with no other choice.

It is thought the other three big players cannot do the work due to conflicts of interest such as working for rivals. Carillion had around 450 government contracts maintaining schools, hospitals, roads and railways. It also helped build major projects such as part of the HS2 high-speed railway, Battersea Power Station.

But when it collapsed critics said it had been continually chasing new contracts to bring in the cash it needed to pay suppliers. Sir John Bourn, head of the National Audit Office between 1988 and 2008, said: It was all rather like a Ponzi scheme.More than 200 MPs have backed a campaign to crack down on construction firms paying suppliers late in the wake of the Carillion collapse.

The construction giant owed around 800 million to thousands of sub-contractors when it collapsed in January.

The Aldous Bill, named after the MP Peter Aldous who is leading the campaign, is pushing to prevent large building firms from delaying payments.

Carillion owed around 800 million to sub-contractors when it collapsed in January

It aims to put supplier payments into safety deposit schemes so that if major firms go bust, sub-contractors are not left out of pocket.

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable are among the politicians who have backed the bill, which will be debated in Parliament in October.

Maria Caulfield, Tory member for Lewes who was the 200th MP to sign up, said: I have constituents who were impacted by Carillion.

Even my father and my husband work in the building trade, so I am all too aware of late payment and the issues with cash retentions.

Labour MP James Frith said: Government should heed the calls to pick up the pieces since Carillion went pop, to ensure damaging practices that led to this collapse arent repeated.WHILE the Kingdom of Eswatini is signatory to most, if not all, international conventions, there is little evidence on the ground to show any appetite to not only respect but also to domesticate and operationalise these.

This much could be gleaned from reports of international observer missions to successive Eswatini elections staged since the adoption of the Constitution as the supreme law of the land in 2005. As it turns out, none of the findings of these international missions was complimentary, perhaps with the exception of that of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).



The Election Experts Mission, from the European Union, wrote this of the 2013 elections: Freedom of association should be respected as provided in Swazilands (since renamed Eswatini) international commitments, by allowing the participation of political parties in the electoral processes as well as the adoption of national legislation for the registration of political parties. It further added: The existence and participation in elections of political parties can take place without affecting the current Tinkhundla, or Monarchial democracy and electoral system.



The African Union (AU), which is traditionally an old boys club and routinely protects and shelters despotic African leaders, was bold enough to condemn the country for proscribing political parties. Specifically, the AU Election Observer Mission (AUEOM) wrote in its report: AUEOM recommends that the Kingdom of Swaziland (now read Eswatini) should implement the African Commissions Resolution on Swaziland of the April 18, 2012 taken in Banjul, The Gambia, calling on the government of the kingdom to respect, protect and fulfill the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of assembly by repealing the relevant laws restricting political party participation in the electoral process.



As I see it, a resolution on an AU member State signifies gravity of a transgression and is not necessarily a routine action. That same was taken by the African Commission on the kingdom impresses on the severity of the transgression either caused by commission and/or omission. In the instance of the Banjul Resolution, it means the African Commission found that the kingdom was in serious violation apropos human rights of the people and needed to repeal or reform those pieces of legislation that infringed on the peoples human rights and by progression restricted political party participation in elections.



The Commonwealth observer mission was also not impressed, writing: We considered that, in both 2003 and 2008, Commonwealth Observers had concluded that the entire process could not be deemed credible, due to major democratic deficits. As one of the 32 small States in the Commonwealth, the achievements of Swazilands (Eswatini) development objectives were being constrained by a system where, firstly, Parliament did not have power due to prevailing inconsistencies and contradictions  and secondly, political parties were proscribed 



Of significance is the recognition by the Commonwealth that the obtaining political hegemony was negatively impacting the kingdoms economic development potential. With heads apparently buried in the sand, those entrusted with the leadership of the kingdom continue to sing praises of the Tinkhundla political system in apparent disregard of the grim realities on the ground.

The fact is the countrys economy is in the doldrums and the worst performing within the SADC region and beyond. But the leadership is blind to this reality ostensibly because it is in the pound seats of and enjoying the trappings of the political economy while the majority of compatriots are wallowing in abject poverty.



But not only is the political hegemony compromising the kingdoms development imperatives but also carries with it the burden of costly elections, since there are three phases, outside voter registration, of the process that inevitable pose logistical challenges to international observer missions. These are the nominations, primary then secondary elections when under multiparty democracy there is only one phase.



As it were, the country continues to hold elections in complete disdain to the observations and recommendations of international bodies such as the EU, Commonwealth of Nations and AU. The kingdoms failure to comply with its international obligations as represented by international conventions it has not only signed but proceeded to ratify, speaks to the leaderships inherent propensity to act extra-Judiciary as manifested by the rule of law crises that has beset the kingdom since when the independence constitution was overthrown by the Kings Proclamation to the Nation of April 12, 1973.



In the circumstances, international observer missions to the elections currently underway, have their jobs cut because they will simply cut and paste because nothing has changed to the obtaining Eswatini polity that warrants either subtractions and/or additions to observations made during the last elections in 2013. Political parties remain illegal and are not allowed to contest elections or even campaign for and on behalf of their members as articulated by last weeks Supreme Court judgment in the matter involving the Swaziland Democratic Party (SWADEPA) and the Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC).

SWADEPA, with the backing of both the Peoples United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO) and the Ngwane National Liberatory Congress (NNLC), had challenged the EBC to allow political parties to campaign for and on behalf of their members. The case was initially dismissed by a full bench of the High Court on a technicality, which was subsequently endorsed by the Supreme Court.

Consequently, the same flows observed and recorded in the 2013 elections and before will define the current elections. Incidentally, the international organisations to which the kingdom is affiliated, do not appear to be armed with a mechanism that could force compliance with international norms and conventions to which the kingdom is a signatory.MBABANE  Geneva should brace itself for another Eswatini showdown in the next International Labour Organisation (ILO) meeting.



The Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) has issued a statement regarding the shooting of one of its members by a police officer last Friday.

In the statement, the association states that it would take the matter to the Trade Union Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA), which would in turn pursue the issue in Geneva.



SNAT Secretary General Zwelithini Mndzebele confirmed in an interview yesterday that the statement was authentic and was from his office. SNAT stated that it would not take the matter lightly and described it as an evil act by government.

The version of how events unfolded according to the statement was that, the associations members were allegedly blocked by the police as they were entering their headquarters.

The association alleged that the police suddenly opened fire towards the unarmed teachers.



It added that the police used live rounds of ammunition to shoot at the teachers.

The association also said the shooting resulted in one of their members sustaining two gunshot wounds, adding that he was critically wounded and hospitalised.

SNAT added that the commotion that resulted from the shooting led to many other injuries.



The main crime of the teachers was to demand a cost-of-living Adjustment of 6.55 per cent for the current year. The act by the police is in conflict with several international instruments on Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Association, to name a few, reads the statement.

The SNAT statement stated that the brutality that was exemplified by the security forces on the day was not different from the decades long treatment and trade union bashing that workers were subjected to in the past.



According to the statement, it was the associations paramount belief that economic development was dependent upon the salaries that were given to employees who in turn were expected to inject same into the national economy.

The none remuneration of workers accordingly, militates against the upliftment of the country into the much talked about First world status by 2022, the statement reads.



The union made it known that it resolved to scale up its efforts in pushing the government of Eswatini to cede to their demands.

It stated that the erosion that happened to their salaries could not be bearable any longer.



Mndzebele, when asked whether the police shot at teachers after they pelted them with stones or if they pelted them after the law enforcers shot at them, responded to the latter.

He alleged that teachers pelted the police with stones as a response to shots fired by the law enforcers.

National Commissioner of Police Isaac Magagula is expected to address the matter today.CALGARY, Alberta, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Blackline Safety Corp. (TSXV: BLN) welcomed the Honourable Kent Hehr, Member of Parliament (MP) for Calgary Centre to visit its Calgary-based headquarters. In August and September, Aerospace Industries Association of Canada (AIAC) is coordinating Bring Your MP to Work Days with companies across Canada to engage with their MPs and talk about the contributions these industries bring to Canadas economy.



Its a real pleasure to meet with Blackline Safety, who is a global leader that represents Canada on the real-time safety stage, said Mr. Hehr. Chatting with the staff at Blackline Safety shows the talent and innovation we have here in Calgary. I enjoyed sitting down for a round-table discussion about their work and technology, including the 24/7 Safety Operations Center that offers an immediate response to incidents that could be faced by aerospace or other industries.

We appreciate AIAC for making this event possible and giving us the opportunity to showcase the impact of connected safety that Blackline brings to the world, said Cody Slater, CEO and Chairman for Blackline Safety. From aerospace to the energy sector, refineries and utilities  our advanced connected safety technologies make a critical difference to safety programs that keep personnel safe in the workplace. Its these contributions that have made Blackline one of the fastest-growing businesses in Canada over the past five years.

Blackline Safety is an internationally-recognized designer, manufacturer and service provider of leading connected safety technology. Its new G7 product line is the first and only cellular-connected gas detection system to combine a live compliance dashboard with data analytics in one, easy-to-use platform. Providing gas detection, lone worker monitoring, evacuation management and cloud-hosted software, Blackline overcomes the shortcomings of traditional solutions and addresses the challenges faced by businesses in rapidly evolving industries like aerospace.

To learn about Blackline Safety, visit www.blacklinesafety.com and follow on Twitter @blacklinesafety .

About AIAC: AIAC is the national association representing Canadas aerospace manufacturing and services sector. As the worlds fifth-largest aerospace industry, Canadas aerospace sector contributes nearly $25B to the economy in GDP, exports 75% of its output, and dedicates over 20% of its activity to research and development (R&D). Aerospace is responsible for the employment of 190,000 Canadians.

About Blackline Safety: Blackline Safety is a global connected safety technology leader. Providing comprehensive live-monitoring and wireless gas detection, we help teams working in hazardous environments respond to emergencies in real-time and manage efficient evacuations, accounting for everyones safety along the way. With millions invested in technology research and development, Blackline Safety is recognized for quality and innovation. Our talented team of designers and engineers create and manufacture in-house  from wearable technology and personal gas detectors to cloud-hosted infrastructure and web-based interfaces for global industry. We deliver the worlds first turn-key, work-anywhere, connected safety monitoring solution with gas detection, 3G wireless, satellite communications, two-way speakerphone, employee messaging and live monitoring to meet the demanding safety challenges of organizations in over 100 countries. For more information, visit www.BlacklineSafety.com .

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cody Slater, CEO

cslater@blacklinesafety.com

Blackline Safety Corp.

Unit 101, 1215 13 Street SE

Calgary, AB Canada T2G 3J4

Telephone: +1 403 451 0327

Fax: +1 403 451 9981

www.BlacklineSafety.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4e05397c-66b7-4314-aa16-bce43ad2b111By Trend





Uzbekistan is ready to consider the proposal of partners to reform the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS), Uzbekistans President Shavkat Mirziyoyev said at the summit in Turkmenistan, the UzA news agency reported.

The fund is the only regional organization that has undergone a test of durability and today it can become an effective mechanism for cooperation," the president said.

"I am confident that we will be able to achieve a balance of interests of all regional countries within the organization, our common future is in our hands," Mirziyoyev said.

The president stressed that only with the full participation of all countries in the activity of the fund, it will be possible to solve common problems and challenges.

"In this regard, we are ready to consider the proposals of our partners to improve the regulatory and legal framework and organizational structure of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea," he said.

The summit of the heads of the founding states of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS) was held in Turkmenistans Turkmenbashi. Leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan took part in the event.

In 2016 Kyrgyzstan suspended its participation in the activity of the fund as it did not meet the interests and vital needs of the country. In 2009, Bishkek insisted on the need for reform to equalize the interests of all Central Asian countries.Bahrain's Housing Ministry has announced that the distribution of the residential units at Salman Town, the largest under-construction town in the kingdom, is progressing as per schedule.



The move follows the order of His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and First Deputy Prime Minister, to deliver 5,000 housing units of Salman Town to comply with the directives of HM King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa to meet citizens housing needs, said a statement from the ministry.



The handing over of these residential units to the beneficiaries will continue till the end of this week, it stated.



The Ministry said the Salman Town residential projects is among the main projects implemented within the current action plan in which the government had pledged to construct 25,000 units, in line with the royal directives to build 40,000 housing units.



In another development, the ministry distributed the residential units at the Bloc 609 Housing Project in Sitra to the beneficiaries during Eid Al Adha holidays.



"The ministry was keen to hand over the keys to citizens on the third day of Eid Al Adha to share with them the joy of the occasion," remarked Housing Minister Bassim bin Yaqoob Al Hamar.



The units in the Phase One of the project have already been distributed, said Al Hamar, adding that now the homes in the second and last phase were being handed over.



The smooth handover of the units of various projects proves that the ministry is on the right track towards achieving the royal directives of building and distributing the 40,000 units, the minister added.-TradeArabia News ServiceJulphar, a top pharmaceutical manufacturer in the Middle East and Africa, has signed an agreement with leading global medical technology company, BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), to supply disposable insulin pens in the UAE.



BD develops innovative technology, services and solutions that help advance both clinical processes for healthcare providers and clinical therapy for patients, including a wide variety of insulin delivery devices for diabetics.



Through this agreement, Julphars human insulin formulations including Jusline R, Jusline N and Jusline 30/70 will be available for administration through BDs portfolio of BD Vystra disposable pens. In addition, the same device will be used for insulin analogues (insulin glargine and insulin lispro), which are still under development.



Jerome Carle, general manager of Julphar, said: The global diabetes market is large and growing. Through our agreement with BD, we will be able to keep pace with the growth and further improve our position in this lucrative market placing us among the top three players in the world.



Many people in the UAE are suffering from what, in some cases, is a preventable condition. As a global leader in the manufacture of insulin, Julphar has a responsibility to not only raise awareness of the risk factors but to provide affordable, effective solutions that help diabetes sufferers live healthy, normal lives.



An insulin pen offers more accuracy, convenience and confidence to diabetes sufferers and we look forward to launching these high-tech devices here in the very near future, he added.



Insulin pens are small, disposable, lightweight plastic handheld devices containing prefilled insulin cartridges that are convenient and more versatile than some traditional methods for insulin injection.



Almost one in five people in the UAE have diabetes, making it one of the country's biggest health concerns. The UAE has some of the highest rates of diabetes in the world, with 2017 figures showing 17.3 per cent of the population have the condition, positioning it 15th on a World Diabetes Federation list.



Julphar launched its $150 million biopharmaceutical facility in 2012, which has the capacity to produce 1,500kg of recombinant human insulin and insulin analogues crystals (rDNA), equivalent to a combination of 30 million vials & 25 million cartridges & pens of insulin per year.



The disposable insulin pens are now in the final stages of the approval process and are due to be launched as soon as they have been officially registered by the Ministry Of Health.  TradeArabia News ServiceKITCHENER, Ontario, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- James E. Wagner Cultivation Corporation (JWC or the Company) (TSX VENTURE: JWCA) announced today the achievements, financial and operational results for the three and nine months ended June 30, 2018. The Companys wholly owned subsidiary is a licensed producer of cannabis under the Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations (the ACMPR). The Company is pleased to report that its interim financial statements and managements discussion and analysis for the three and nine months ended June 30, 2018 are available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. All amounts expressed are in Canadian dollar unless otherwise noted.



Third Quarter Ended June 30, 2018 Highlights:

Completed a qualifying transaction on June 7, 2018 (the  Transaction ) under the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange (the  TSXV ), and began trading under the ticker JWCA on June 11, 2018;

) under the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange (the  ), and began trading under the ticker JWCA on June 11, 2018; Completed an $18 million brokered private placement financing conducted by a syndicate of agents co-led by Haywood Securities Inc. and Eight Capital and including AltaCorp Capital Inc., INFOR Financial Inc., Beacon Securities Limited and Mackie Research Capital Corporation;

Entered in to an agreement with MediPharm Labs Inc. to create a cannabis oils program;

Continued to build out its 345,000 square foot second facility to support the Companys growth strategy and prepare for the implementation of Canadas recreational market; and

Made its first sales under the ACMPR, after acquiring a sales license amendment at the end of the second quarter.

Selected Summary of Quarterly Results:

June 30, 2018 ($) September 30, 2017 ($) % change Cash and cash equivalents 18,049,416 6,858,659 163 % Agricultural produce and biological assets 2,003,320 249,843 702 % Other working capital 794,834 278,276 186 % Non-current assets 3,465,498 928,872 273 % Long-term debt 718,404 31,073 2,212 % Shareholders equity 21,484,567 5,792,106 271 %





Q3 2018 ($) Q3 2017 ($) % change Q3 2018 YTD ($) Q3 2017 YTD ($) % change Revenues 34,373 776 4,330 % 60,960 889 6,757 % Operating expenses 4,161,245 561,648 637 % 7,441,251 908,709 719 % Other items 521,166 - - 684,574 - - Net and comprehensive loss 4,648,038 560,872 729 % 8,064,865 907,820 788 % Net and comprehensive loss per share (basic and diluted) 0.06 & 0.05 0.01 491% & 401% 0.12 & 0.12 0.02 498% & 413%

For the three and nine months ended June 30, 2018, the Companys net and comprehensive loss was $4,648,038 and $8,064,865, respectively.

The Company experienced higher than usual expense during the three months ended June 30, 2018 (Q3), as it completed the Transaction. Listing expense was $1,795,724. Other significant charges during the quarter were for professional fees, $596,186, as legal and accounting fees increased to support the Transaction and activity supporting the Transaction. The Company also incurred a fair value charge related to contingent shares issued on June 1. That charge was $462,657. Year to date professional fees were $1,475,231 and the fair value charge for contingent shares was $1,482,337.

The Company ended Q3 with just over 138kg of dried cannabis in its storage area. Sales to patients began during Q3, and the Company is focused on building out its patient roster during Q4, and is working with several clinics locally, to that end.

The Company is also looking to leverage its relationship with Canopy Growth Corporation, and has begun shipping product for inclusion on their Craft Grow store shelves. Once the shipments have been cleared, patients should see them available sometime in September 2018.

The Company has also begun shipping product to MediPharm Labs Inc. as part of its agreement with MediPharm to support its cannabis oil program.

The Company is currently operating out of a 15,000 square foot facility in Kitchener, Ontario. Construction is underway at a second, 355,000 square foot facility also in Kitchener. This facility is expected to have its first set of grow rooms and all support areas, ready to begin production in Q1 of fiscal 2019. Once the first set of grow rooms is operational, the Company will be bringing additional rooms on line every six to eight weeks, and expects to increase total capacity by nearly 600% by the third quarter of fiscal 2019.

The Company also recently announced that it has entered in to an offer to lease two retail properties for use as cannabis retail outlets, upon receipt of the necessary regulatory approvals. The Company is very excited to signal its desire to participate directly in the sale of legal cannabis products to Canadians.

About James E. Wagner Cultivation Corporation

JWCs wholly-owned subsidiary is a licensed producer under ACMPR and JWC is a premium cannabis brand, focusing on producing clean, consistent cannabis. JWC uses an advanced and proprietary aeroponic platform named GrowthstormTM. JWC was founded as a family Corporation, based on family values. JWC began as a collective of patients and growers under the Marihuana Medical Access Regulations (the precursor to ACMPR). Since its inception, JWC has remained focused on providing the best possible patient experience. JWCs operations are based in Kitchener, Ontario.

For additional information about JWC, please refer to JWCs profile on SEDAR ( www.sedar.com ) or the Corporations website: https://www.jwcmed.com/home.html

Notice regarding forward-looking statements:

This press release contains statements including forward-looking information for purposes of applicable securities laws (forward-looking statements) about JWC and its business and operations which include, among other things, statements regarding JWC and any information with respect to the potential growth of the Company and increasing production capacity at its facilities and the proposed shipment of its products and the benefits of the arrangements entered into with customers and partners. The forward-looking information contained in this news release are based on JWCs current internal expectations, estimates, projections, assumptions, and beliefs and views of future events which management believes to be reasonable in the circumstances, including expectations and assumptions regarding: general economic conditions, the expected timing and cost of expanding the Companys production capacity, the internal opportunities, the development of new products and product formats, the Companys ability to retain key personnel, the Companys ability to continue investing in its infrastructure to support growth, the impact of competition, trends in the Canadian medical cannabis industry and changes in laws, rules, and events, performance or results, and will not necessarily be accurate indications as to whether, or the times at which, such events, performance or results will occur or be achieved. The forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of such words as anticipated, will, expected, approximately, may, could, would or similar words and phrases. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results to differ materially from those implied in the forward-looking statements. For example, risks include risks regarding the cannabis industry, economic factors, the equity markets generally, funding and grant related risks and risks associated with growth and competition as well as the risks identified in the Companys Filing Statement available under the Companys profile at www.sedar.com . Although JWC has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release and are based on current assumptions which management believes to be reasonable. 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, future events or otherwise.

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.

For more information about this release, please contact:

Nathan Woodworth, the President and Chief Executive Officer

Email: nathan@jwcmed.com

Phone: (519) 594-0144 x421Omans Assarain Concrete Products Duqm (ACPD), part of the reputed Assarain Group, has signed a 25-year renewable lease agreement for a plot of 60,000 sq m with Duqm Industrial Land Company (DILC), a subsidiary of Port of Duqm Company, a media report said.



DILC has been granted a concession to manage 2,000 hectares of land earmarked for medium heavy, heavy and petrochemical industrial land in Duqm, reported Oman Observer.



Assarain Group has decided to put up a large, technologically most advanced, state-of-the-art German plant, the report said.



The plant can produce high-quality building blocks, interlocking tiles and special products while another proposed plant under ACPD will produce a wide range of kerbstones, paving slabs, etc.



The company will supply to all the high-profile projects, housing and tourism sectors of Duqm and the Al Wusta Governorate, both showing remarkable industrial growth under the leadership of Sezad.



Khalid Al Wahaibi, managing director, said that the initiatives of Sezad and Port of Duqm for creating such a mega hub in Duqm, facilitating further inclusive growth of the region and the country as a whole.



ACPDs general manager, Alok Varma, said: This agreement consolidates and expands the scope of Assarain to reach a wider customer segment in a more effective way using the strategically located land which is near the Port of Duqm.Chinese investors are planning a major blankets and carpets manufacturing project worth about $98 million in the upcoming China-Oman Industrial Park at the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Duqm, Oman, a media report said.



The giant plant, envisaging a total of six production lines, will manufacture and supply blankets and carpets made from synthetic fibres that are a value-added product associated with the petrochemicals and refining industry, reported Oman Observer.



Raw material for the project will be initially procured from China, but subsequently sourced locally when a world-class downstream petrochemicals industry materialises in the SEZ, it added.



Ali Shah, chairman of Oman Wanfang LLC, the main developer of the China-Oman Industrial Park, said the proposed blankets and carpets plant will come up on a 20-hectare site within the Park. Output is estimated at 12 million pieces of blankets and carpets per annum.



The synthetic fibres constituting the raw material for the project are manufactured only by a handful of countries in the region that possess the requisite technology, Shah added.



Oman Wanfang has also reached an agreement with SEZAD for the construction of a power plant and a desalination plant at the SEZ, Ali Shah added.Four signature Avani Hotels will be introducing a new Meet Our Friendly Neighbours initiative, which will offer guests the opportunity to interact with wildlife.



Each programme invites guests to add a fun and imaginative learning experience to their Avani stay.



Avani+ Luang Prabang, located in the Unesco World Heritage Site of Luang Prabang in northern Laos, is partnering with Laos Buffalo Dairy. They are currently on target to help local farmers raise 200 buffalos, thereby educating the local community about the importance of milk nourishment for children, how to breed healthy buffalo and building a sustainable and economically viable dairy or farm. Guests can visit the dairy on the way to Kuang Si Waterfall to try some homemade buffalo-milk ice cream, cheese and yoghurt. Avani+ Luang Prabang will also be working with Laos Buffalo Dairy to incorporate these homemade products such as cheese and milk into the Honest Food menu at Bistro & Bar.



Avani Victoria Falls Resort connects the wild side of travellers to Zambia's wondrous landscapes and big game thrills. With the iconic Victoria Falls on its doorstep, Avani evokes a contemporary vibe with essential comforts surrounded by dramatic nature. To maintain this vibrant environment, the resort is an active custodian of the wildlife living on its grounds, such as giraffes, impalas and zebras. Guests participating in the programme assist local expert caretakers in tending to and feeding the resident wildlife, especially during dry season when vegetation is scarce.



Avani Pattaya Resort & Spa's grounds and pond serves as an ideal home for Peter Pan, Big, Baitoey and Baibua  the in-house macaw and geese resident of the resort. Baibua (female) and Baitoey (male) are the latest addition to the Pattaya resorts family. The Emden pair is always looking forward to interacting with guests and enjoy lettuce from the resorts own hydroponic farm. The two blue and gold Macaw are treated like royalties and reside in the resorts own aviary. They also interact with guests every morning near the restaurant al fresco area.



At the contemporary Avani Hua Hin Resort & Villas that just opened at the end of 2017, a specially built lagoon has been stocked with over 500 fish seeds to further connect the local ecosystem with the resorts landscaping. A local fishery expert will tend to numerous local marine life varieties such as Nile tilapia, striped catfish and java barb. Guests, young and old, can learn about these different fish species making the resorts lagoon home and also join in the scheduled fish feeding programme.



We know that Avani guests realise that travel is not just about seeing the destination but is also about appreciating how we are all an integral part of this planet, explained Alejandro Bernabe, vice president of operations for Avani Hotels & Resorts. We hope to share our understanding, through Meet Our Friendly Neighbours, of how every life, big or small, has an important role in our local communities.



Avani Hotels & Resorts currently operates 23 properties in Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Europe, most recently debuting in Australia, New Zealand and Laos. The brand is planning to launch more new properties in Australia, Tunisia and Thailand before the end of the year. - TradeArabia News ServiceThe venue of the fourth Middle East Hospitality Excellence Awards, set to take place in November, has been shifted to the luxurious Hilton Dubai Al Habtoor City.



The awards were previously supposed to be held in Queen Elizabeth 2 but due to some unforeseen circumstances, the venue had to be changed.



Talking about the awards, Fredrik Reinisch, complex general manager, Habtoor Complex, said, "We are very excited that these Popular Choice Awards are being held at our hotel. This would be an opportunity for us to showcase the amazing facilities and services we have to offer to the industry and to the world, especially after the rebranding which happened earlier this month."



Commenting on the venue change, Raj Bhatt, CEO, Hozpitality Group, commented: "We would like to thank Al Habtoor Group for this opportunity and we are very excited for the upcoming awards in November."



"Online voting for the fourth Middle East Hospitality Excellence Awards is going on in full swing and with over 70,000 votes already received in the first round of voting. Round 1 of voting ends on August 31 where top finalists per category will be chosen who would further continue to collect votes. The final result will be based on results of the online voting and judges votes. Gold and Silver winners will be awarded at the Award ceremony on November 28," added Bhatt.



The Middle East Hospitality Excellence Awards will be presented to recognise top industry organisations and individuals which have shown skill, creativity, ingenuity and success in the Middle East & Africa's growing hospitality industry. - TradeArabia News Service

This press release is issued pursuant to National Instrument 62-104  Take-Over Bids and Issuer Bids and National Instrument 62-103  The Early Warning System and Related Take-Over Bid and Insider Reporting Issues in connection with the filing of an early warning report dated the date hereof.



TORONTO, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Michael Wekerle (Wekerle) filed an early warning report today in connection with the acquisition by Difference Capital Financial Inc. (DCF), which is an associate of Wekerle, of 496,400 common shares (the Shares) in the capital of Mogo Finance Technology Inc. (Mogo) through the facilities of the Toronto Stock Exchange at a price of $4.60 per share (the Transaction). Wekerle relied upon the private agreement exemption contained in Section 4.2 of National Instrument 62-104  Take-Over Bids and Issuer Bids to make this purchase.

Prior to the acquisition of the Shares, Wekerle held an aggregate of 2,550,972 Shares directly and DCF held 1,952,463 Shares. Wekerle also held an aggregate $1,550,000 principal amount of 10% senior secured convertible debentures of Mogo (the Debentures) and DCF held $172,000 principal amount of Debentures. Each Debenture is convertible into Shares at a price per Share equal to $5.00. Assuming the conversion of all of the Debentures held by Wekerle and DCF, the two parties collectively had control or direction of an aggregate of 4,848,135 Shares, representing 20.8% of the issued and outstanding Shares. Following the acquisition of the Shares and assuming the conversion of all of the Debentures held by Wekerle and DCF, the two parties collectively have control or direction of an aggregate of 5,344,535 Shares, representing 23.0% of the issued and outstanding Shares.

The Shares were purchased by DCF for investment purposes. Wekerle expects to evaluate on an ongoing basis Mogos financial condition, results of operations, business and prospects, the market price of the Shares, conditions in securities markets generally and in the market for shares of companies like Mogo, general economic and industry conditions and other factors that Wekerle deems relevant to his investment decisions. Based on such evaluations, Wekerle may at any time or from time to time determine to acquire additional Shares, or securities convertible into or exchangeable for Shares or derivatives relating to Shares, or to dispose of Shares or securities convertible into or exchangeable for Shares or derivatives relating to Shares that Wekerle owns or may hereafter acquire, through open market or privately negotiated transactions or otherwise, at such prices and on such terms as he deems advisable. Wekerle intends to monitor his investment in Shares. Wekerle and his representatives and advisers may communicate with other shareholders, industry participants and other interested parties concerning Mogo. In addition, based on Wekerles continuing evaluation of the foregoing factors, Wekerle reserves the right to change his plans and intentions at any time or from time to time, as he deems appropriate.CBI files charge sheet against pvt company based in Kolkata in chit fund scam 01 Nov 2021 | 11:21 PM New Delhi, Nov 1 (UNI) The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed a supplementary chargesheet before the Court of District and Session Judge in Agartala, Tripura against a private company based in Kolkata in chit fund scam, the agency said on Monday. see more..

14 Delhi Police personnel awarded Union Home Ministers Special Operation Medal 01 Nov 2021 | 11:19 PM New Delhi, Nov 1 (UNI) On the National Unity Day, the government announced the prestigious Union Home Ministers Special Operation Medal. Around 14 Delhi Police personnel have been awarded the medal for rendering extraordinary services this year, police said on Monday. see more..

35 pc of 18+ population fully vaccinated, 78 pc partially: Union Health Minister 01 Nov 2021 | 9:33 PM New Delhi, Nov 1 (UNI) Over eight months into the roll-out of the nationwide COVID-19 vaccination programme, India has achieved full immunisation of 35 per cent of its adult population with both the doses of COVID vaccines, Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya announced on Monday. see more..

NIA conducts searches in Punjab in bike IED blast case in Jalalabad 01 Nov 2021 | 9:17 PM New Delhi, Nov 1 (UNI) National Investigation Agency (NIA) conducted searches at multiple locations in Punjab in the bike IED blast case in Jalalabad, the NIA sources said on Monday. see more..Gold Coast, Australia will host the Manhunt International 2018 Pageant

"To God be the Glory".GLO.ACT supports workshop on shelter homes and shelter alternatives for women in situation of trafficking in persons

Brasilia, Federal District, Brazil - 27 August 2018 - The Global Action against Trafficking in Persons and the Smuggling of Migrants ( GLO.ACT) organized, alongside the National Secretariat of Policies for Women of the Presidency of the Republic, a two and half day workshop on shelter homes and shelter alternatives for women in situation of Trafficking in Persons (TIP), between 19 and 21 July 2018 in Brasilia.

The objective of the meeting was to discuss the development of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for shelter homes in line with the already existing national guidelines for shelters in general, national legislation, national and international experiences in sheltering women in situations of violence, as well as discuss the alternatives to shelters for female victims of TIP.

On the first day, besides the Protocol of Attention to Women in Situation of International Trafficking in Persons of the Meeting of Women's Ministers and High Authorities of Mercosur, the workshop participants discussed shelter homes in the context of the Maria da Penha Law, aimed at reducing domestic violence, the femicide law, as well as sheltering women in situations of TIP. During the second day, participants were divided in working groups to discuss the provision of assistance, shelter homes, and alternatives to shelters. On the last day Ms. Gill Hague, Emeritus Professor of Violence against Women Studies of the University of Bristol, gave a master class on "Conceptual and Political Aspects of Shelter Homes". She is one of the founding members of the Domestic Violence Research Group set up in 1990, which has had a pioneering role in establishing violence against women (VAW) research in the United Kingdom, later becoming the Violence Against Women Research Group and the present Centre.

During the workshop the difficulties and risks of lodging victims of trafficking in persons in shelters for women victim of domestic violence were raised, especially regarding the security of other women at the shelters. Also, questions were raised concerning women whose lives are under threat and the lack of security and protection of most shelters. Even though shelters set up for victims of domestic violence are not ideal for TIP victims, the fact that Brazil has no specialized shelters for female TIP victims poses the question on how to best provide adequate shelter for TIP victims. A question that will need to be addressed soon in order to ensure victims are placed in appropriate shelters and receive the assistance they are entitled to.

The Global Action to Prevent and Address Trafficking in Persons and the Smuggling of Migrants (GLO.ACT) is a four-year (2015-2019), 11 million joint initiative by the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The project is being implemented in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). GLO.ACT aims to provide assistance to governmental authorities and civil society organizations across 13 strategically selected countries: Belarus, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Kyrgyz Republic, Lao PDR, Mali, Morocco, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, South Africa, Ukraine. GLO.ACT works with the 13 countries to plan and implement strategic national counter-trafficking and counter smuggling efforts through a prevention, protection, prosecution, and partnerships approach. It supports the development of more effective responses to trafficking and smuggling, including providing assistance to victims of trafficking and vulnerable migrants through the strengthening of identification, referral, and direct support mechanisms.

For more information, please contact:

Ms. Fernanda Patricia Fuentes Munoz

National Project Officer

Liaison and Partnership Office in Brazil

fernanda.fuentes@unodc.org

https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/glo-act/

Email: glo.act@un.org

Twitter: @glo_act"We have about 1,400 children just in our practice that will become eligible. If you imagine a third of that population calling us Monday to schedule the appointment as soon as possible, then you understand."I dont have a son, so this is my legacy, said Roy Pierre last Thursday night as he showed a small busload of visitors the elaborate costumes he was preparing for JOuvert. Pierre is an institution at JOuvert, the celebration that kicks off the West Indian Day Parade in Crown Heights. His organization, Roy Pierre & Associates, have created elaborate costumes with themes like Running of the Bulls, Arabian Nights, and Jolly Roger (Pirates Meet Mermaids) over the years. This year, he'll continue the nautical theme with All Hands on Deck," an allusion to the 1961 musical motion picture of the same name. The navy uniform costumes mix the films aesthetic with the spirit and vibe of JOuvert.

Roy Pierre is one of most important masquerade designers and thought leaders in the community, Christopher Mule, the Folk Arts Director at the Brooklyn Arts Council, told Gothamist. Last Thursday, Mule and the Brooklyn Arts Council, in collaboration with JOuvert City International and City Lore, led the first ever bus tour as a way to bring New Yorkers closer to the artists and musicians who are preparing like crazy for JOuvert, now one week away. Roy Pierres mas (short for "masquerade") camp, held inside of Creme & Cocoa Creamery, an ice cream and dessert shop with flavors like sour sop and sorrel ice cream, was the first stop.

The bus tour is one of the ways the Council is trying to steer the narrative around JOuvert towards the artists who contribute to it, and away from the headlines about violence that have overshadowed JOuvert in recent years. Two people were killed at JOuvert in 2015, including Carey Gabay, Governor Andrew Cuomo's first deputy counsel. Mayor Bill de Blasio promised a massive police presence at the 2016 JOuvert. Nevertheless, a man and woman were killed and four others were injured. Last year, security was heightened further with checkpoints and the start time was moved to 6 a.m. There were no deaths last year, but some participants said the celebrations were dampened by overbearing security measures, ones that will remain in place this year.

While violence is a serious problem plaguing JOuvert, there's another issue that threatens the celebration: money, or lack of it. Almost all of these artists pay everything out of pocket to keep their mas camps and steelpan yards alive, said Mule. He noted that in the five years he has been awarding artistic grants, there has only been one application from a steel band. One reason that the Brooklyn Arts Council created this bus tour was to see if increasing exposure to these camps and bands can bring in fresh sources of funds for their work. Mule is trying to find out if there a market for cultural tourism through programs like these.

After Roy Pierre finished his presentations, the tour proceeded down Nostrand Avenue to the Carenage mas camp. Their theme is Wakanda, complete with spears, thrones and suits of armor. After showing off the costumes, the Carenage members uncovered a buffet of food and drink, which included stewed chicken, lo mein, coconut rolls, accra (a saltfish fritter) and a spicy and hearty fish broth. The food was optional, but the broth, I was told, was mandatory, as it was pushed into my hands. It was slightly spicy and richly flavored but still felt lightthe perfect thing after too many saltfish fritters.

Other mas camps on the tour included Republic of John John, whose theme was Panama, with Kendell Julien, one of the leaders of the camp, dressing up as Manuel Noriega himself. Then to the panyards of Kutters Rhythm Section, where instruments included a 2-note drum made from a steel barrel, iron drums made from car and truck hubcaps that were tuned by ear, and a large wooden shaker.

At the Despers USA panyard practice session, at least 30 musicians played the steel drums in unison, while the bandleader orchestrated the group. People from all over the neighborhood watched the practice, as the musicians synchronized in perfect harmony. Meanwhile, police cars and fire trucks appeared outside the practice session, and a woman who was arrested last year after continuously calling 311 during the bands practice sessions was seen speaking to police officers.

Gentrification is a big problem for groups practicing for JOuvert, Mule told Gothamist. Crown Heights rents are going up, lots that were formerly used as panyards are now construction sites, and fewer landlords want to rent out to these groups. In some gentrifying neighborhoods, 311 calls for noise complaints increase. But on Thursday night, the police and firefighters eventually left, and Despers USA continued to practice past 11 p.m.

J'Ouvert begins at 6 a.m. Monday September 3rd on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights.

Police in Fergus Falls are trying to track down an EpiPen thief.

On August 16th, 2018 at approximately 6:00pm an unknown subject broke into a White Chevy Tahoe parked in the Kennedy Secondary School student parking area. The suspect stole expensive and hard to replace medications including EpiPens.

If anyone has information on this or witnessed the theft please contact Det. Sgt. Andrew Miller at 332-5526 or amiller@co.ottertail.mn.us- information will be handled confidentially.One of B.Grim's solar power projects in Thailand

B.Grim, through subsidiary B Grimm Renewable Power 2 Ltd., has acquired an 80 per cent stake in Phu Yen TTP JSC, the project company investing and developing a 257MW PV scheme in Phu Yen province on the south central coast of Vietnam.

The purchase of 80 million shares in Phu Yen TTP is part of SET-listed B.Grim's rapid expansion of power generation equity in Thailand and overseas.

Phu Yen will particularly contribute to B.Grim's growing renewable power portfolio as well as strengthening its presence in Vietnam, according to B.Grim president Preeyanart Soontornwata.

Also in June, B.Grimm has teamed up with one of the largest Vietnamese conglomerates, Xuan Cau Group, to develop the biggest solar power plant in Southeast Asia, with a combined capacity of 420MW.

Located in the southern province of Tay Ninh, the $420 million project is expected to be operational by next June.

Brims ambition is to raise the proportion of energy generated by renewable power plants in its portfolio to 30 from 12 per cent. B.Grimm aims to have 53 projects with 2,938MW in capacity by 2022, and is seeking another 2,000MW in additional projects. The new projects are going to be in South Korea, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand.Can Tho City has completed its smart-city development plan.  Photo tcnn.vn

Nguyen Van Hong, director of the municipals Department of Planning and Investment, said the department had been examining the citys infrastructure and related issues since 2017 with the Viet Nam Post and Telecommunications Group (VNPT).

The development plans first phase (201820) will focus on establishing a technological foundation for a smart city, building a digital government, and working on smart solutions for city planning.

In addition, agriculture and tourism will be among the areas that will be developed first.

The second phase of the plan (202123) will carry out solutions concurrently and build on the foundation.

The third phase (2024 25) will see the continued development of systems and solutions applied to more areas of the city, which will provide more efficient processing capability, storage and security.

The citys Department of Transport has already launched ICT applications for traffic management and services, which aims to improve drivers satisfaction and reduce the number of accidents.

In addition, the citys Department of Agriculture and Rural Development has been building a digital database on agricultural activities, and has also been developing geographic indicators for farmers to improve management and planning.

Farmers have also been provided with tools and opportunities to connect with businesses and local government to improve product quality and their brands.

Vo Thanh Thong, chairman of the Peoples Committee, said that co-operation between citizens, businesses, government and other organisations would be important to successful implementation of the plan.

He said that authorities should gather practical feedback and concerns from citizens and businesses, and keep them informed of progress.

Showrooms and online models on smart cities could be used to educate citizens on the benefits of smart cities, he said.

Thong also suggested that authorities should gather data from smart services and systems to improve forecasting ability and help decision-making.

Can Tho is a centrally governed city with developing infrastructure and one of the leading areas listed on the Viet Nam ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Index, with numerous investments from domestic and foreign sources.This photo shows an external view of Malaysia High Court building in Kuala Lumpur on February 6, 2010. (Photo: AFP/Saeed KHAN)

Felipe Osiadacz and Fernando Candia are on trial over the killing of a Malaysian in the lobby of the Kuala Lumpur hotel in August last year, less than 24 hours after they arrived in the country on holiday.

The young men have pleaded not guilty. Malaysia has a mandatory death penalty for murder, and if convicted the pair will be hanged.

"It was all an accident. A person went into the hotel and demanded money from them," their lawyer Venkateswari Alagendra told reporters at the Kuala Lumpur High Court after a hearing.

The Malaysian man then attacked the Chileans and they fought back in self-defence, before calling the police, she said.

She said she was confident that the pair, who went on trial earlier this year, would be acquitted.

Two women were seen hugging the men after Monday's court hearing, but declined to speak to reporters.

The trial resumes on Sep 24.Petroleum exploration and extraction firms anticipates a shortfall in their exploitation output during 2018-2020

According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA)s July 2018 report, the price of Brent Crude oil is expected to fetch around $73 per barrel in the years second half and will go down to $69 per barrel next year.

Brent Crude price averaged $71 per barrel in the first half, a 35 per cent jump on-year and 23 per cent more than in early 2018. It was also up 29 per cent compared to the base price of $55 per barrel most petroleum firms applied when working on their 2018 business plans.

KIS Vietnam Securities JSC estimated that by virtue of rising oil prices, the revenue and profit figures of most petroleum firms listed on the Vietnamese stock exchange went up by 26-36 per cent in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2017.

Hoang Huy, KIS Vietnams head of Research, said that the current oil price has surpassed the break-even point of state-owned oil and gas group PetroVietnam, which is the parent company of many petroleum firms operating in the sectors upstream, medium, and downstream areas.

With upbeat performance, PetroVietnam contributed more than VND61.8 trillion ($2.73 billion) to the state coffers in the first seven months of this year, a 46 per cent jump over the projection.

Albeit the oil price is expected to hold on to this growth momentum in the second half, market analysts, however, expect divergence in the profit pictures of listed petroleum firms based on their fields of operation.

Upstream firms who engage in exploration and extraction activities, anticipate a shortfall in exploitation output during 2018-2020.

Besides, falling service price and modest work volume would also exaggerate the situation. KIS Vietnam figures show that in the first half of this year, PetroVietnam reported 7.13 million tonnes of exploitation output, down 9.7 per cent on-year, and the fall would continue in the second half.

Meanwhile, the situation is expected to be more upbeat for businesses involved in the medium and downstream segments.

For instance, in the downstream segment Southern Gas Trading JSC (PGS) said that at $55 per barrel, the company has set VND5.92 trillion ($262 million) revenue and VND135.9 billion ($60 million) pre-tax profit targets for this year.

In the first half, PGS reached VND3.01 trillion ($133 million) in revenue and VND61.3 billion ($2.7 million) in pre-tax profit, equal to 51 and 45 per cent of its full-year projection. In the second half, the company aims to reach VND3.28 trillion ($145.3 million) in revenue and VND74.9 billion ($3.3 million) in pre-tax profit, up 6 per cent against the revenue target and reaching the pre-tax profit target set for the whole year.

An executive at PetroVietnam Oil Corporation (PV OIL) said petroleum distribution firms like them could only post positive business results once the oil price was high and stable.

The exchange rate also impacts petroleum firms performance, especially when it is trending upwards, as it is doing now.

The exchange rate also impacts petroleum firms performance, especially when it is trending upwards, as it is doing now.

Analysts assumed that firms borrowing dollar-denominated loans without dollar income sources will be at a disadvantage amidst the rising exchange rate, whereas the implications will be insignificant to firms having dollar income sources.

Trinh Duy Viet, head of Research at DongA Bank Securities JSC, assumed that upstream businesses will directly benefit from the rising oil price in the latter months of 2018, while those in the medium and downstream segments will benefit indirectly through accelerated investment in petroleum projects.

The business outcomes in the second half, therefore, will diverge and upstream firms will see better profits than those in the medium and downstream segments.

Regarding the shares of petroleum construction companies, a sharp price hike in the second half would be unlikely, but several tickers could still appeal to investors, helping to drive up the market, Viet opined.Bao Nguyen, GoBear Vietnam Country director

The user-oriented platform of GoBear neither aggregates nor sells products, it simply offers consumers a free comparison process based on their financial needs. VIR discusses with Bao Nguyen, GoBear Vietnam country director the companys new products plan and his vision for financial inclusion.

GoBear Vietnam has just launched three new products at the same time. What is the roadmap for new products for the rest of this year?

By the end of 2018, we look forward to adding more products to our platform. Next will be life insurance. Different from other types of general insurance, consumers often find it quite hard and time consuming to search for the right life insurance plan, especially when the benefits of more than one family member have to be taken into consideration.

GoBear Vietnam will offer a free and transparent comparison of life insurance plans available on the market, and users can find a range of products that match their specific needs in seconds.

You have had five new product launches in 2018 and expect to have at least one more before the year is over. What is the motivation behind this aggressive expansion?

Despite being one of the groups newer market entries, GoBear Vietnam has demonstrated consistent development in a number of business criteria throughout the past year. As of today, we are landing over two million monthly page views and one million monthly users on the website www.gobear.com/vn.

The key priority is now to broaden the variety of the products on our comparison platform as we continuously look to enhance the seamless user experience, with advanced search and filter options to help users find the best products.

We also plan to integrate a personal pre-approval feature to improve financial inclusion and financial access for our users. Our ultimate goal is to improve the standards of living for Vietnamese people that have limited access to mainstream financial services.

How will the integration of a personal pre-approval feature benefit Vietnamese users and improve financial inclusion?

Improving financial inclusion and serving the unbanked consumers is very important in an emerging market like Vietnam. The unavailability of credit risk information is a significant problem as it can substantially restrict the flow of capital to would-be entrepreneurs and small businesses.

And we all know there is a big pool of unbanked consumers in Vietnam with no formal credit histories. They have little in terms of a personal banking history from which lenders, including commercial banks and finance companies, can determine creditworthiness should they request a loan.

To solve this problem, the personal pre-approval feature will use non-traditional data and predictive data analytics, which are gathered from the consumers unique digital footprint, to produce highly predictive digital credit scorecards that enable them to access financial services. For financial institutions, this feature will help them to further expand their pool of customers while keeping risks in check.

With the planned personal pre-approval feature, GoBear will not only enable our users to access useful and affordable financial products that meet their needs in a timely manner, but also help our partners to better serve the underprivileged.

We understand that data collection is essential in order to provide users better access to financial products. From your perspective, how should financial technology be made safe for the Vietnamese users?

We have to admit that with innovation, however, comes risk. No one should assume that technology is 100 per cent safe. Data security and privacy are one of our biggest priorities. As a company that prides itself on service and data integrity, we have robust data policies and infrastructure to keep our users data private and secure, and will do everything we can to make sure the data stays safe with us.The NYPD is seeking to interview a man who may have been the last to see 26-year-old Lyric McHenry alive on August 14th. McHenry was found dead on a Bronx sidewalk after reportedly leaving a Manhattan nightclub with the mystery man. She had been out with friends for a belated birthday celebration.

McHenry, a producer and one-time reality star who appeared in EJ Johnson's EJNYC show, had shared social media posts while at nightclubs in Manhattan on August 13th into the next day. Around 5 a.m., a passer-by called 911 about an unconscious woman found near Undercliff Avenue and Boscobel Place. EMS took to her Bronx Lebanon Hospital, where McHenry was pronounced dead.

There were no obvious signs of trauma, and the medical examiner's office is still working to determine the cause of death. A bag of cocaine was reportedly found near her body.

Video shows a man in the area near where McHenry was found, and the NYPD would like to talk to him about her death. Anyone with information in regards to the unidentified individual 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.

The video comes after a report from the Daily Mail about a man McHenry may have been involved with: "[A] friend has revealed she was last seen five hours before her body was discovered with a man whom she had been texting - and who was turned away by doormen when he tried to get in... [A]t the final stop of the night, at Dream Downtown, a luxury hotel in Chelsea, she left with the mystery man. Friends have also told DailyMail.com that McHenry was in a casual relationship with a man from the Bronx at the time of her death - and that they suspect he may have been a drug dealer."

A spokesperson for McHenry's family said, "A friend said she went downstairs to get somebody in, because they weren't letting that person in. Lyric goes to the car and she gets in with whoever it was. That's the last they saw or heard from her that night. The friends didn't get a look at this person. And Lyric just went downstairs, she didn't say who it was."

The spokesperson also confirmed that McHenry was 15-20 weeks pregnant, adding that friends and family were not aware.

A memorial for McHenry was held on Sunday in Los Angeles. The Daily News reports that her father, Doug McHenry, a film and TV director and producer, gave a eulogy. Etienne Maurice said, "He talked about how proud he was to watch his daughter on her journey as a producer of film and TV. I remember him saying it broke his heart to know that her dream has been taken away due to this tragedy."Masan Group is working to rise higher in the global tungsten value chain

M&A activities in the past 10 years have been growing more prominent in Vietnam, with the total transaction value of $48.8 billion. In 2017 alone, the value was $10.2 billion, 10 times of what it was in 2009. It has been the norm for multinational companies to acquire Vietnamese businesses due to the acquirers sheer size, financial capability, and clear strategy to expand their businesses in Vietnam.

Despite all that, there were a small number of M&A deals involving Vietnamese companies gaining ownership in foreign ones. These rare cases usually make headlines and serve to demonstrate Vietnamese companies coming of age as they begin to expand beyond the borders and become global players. Some of the most noteworthy deals in the last decade include FPTs purchase of a 90 per cent stake in an American consulting company, Vinfasts acquisition of GM Vietnams entire local business, and Vinamilks purchase of Australias Driftwood Dairy.

Likewise, Masan Group is no stranger to the use of M&A to expand its businesses and create the most value for consumers, partners, as well as shareholders. Masan Groups acquisition of Nui Phao  the worlds largest tungsten mine  in the northern province of Thai Nguyen is a prime example of this strategy.

Nui Phaos acquisition from foreign funds

In 2010, Masan Group broke the news that it had acquired Nui Phao from Dragon Capital through the purchase of full ownership in the mine. As a result, a Vietnamese company officially retained control of the worlds single largest open-pit mine. Since 2010, Masan has invested heavily into Nui Phao mine with the intent of turning it into Vietnams tungsten capital and unlocking Nui Phaos untapped potential. In 2013, Masan Resources (MSR), the parent company of Nui Phao Mining, formed a 51:49 joint venture with H.C.Starck (Germany) known as Nui Phao-H.C.Starck Tungsten Chemicals Manufacturing LLC in order to downstream process tungsten.

Just recently, on August 13, 2018, Nui Phao Mining Company, a subsidiary of MSR, acquired H.C. Starcks 49 per cent stake in the joint venture for the total cash consideration of $29.1 million. The transaction was fully funded by Masan Resources cash and equivalents. The joint venture is now a 100 per cent wholly-owned subsidiary of MSR.

Craig Bradshaw, CEO of MSR, said: I hope Vietnam can be proud of Masan Resources ambition and ability, which we will combine with Vietnams potential and international execution capability to become a dominant player in the global industrial sector. We embody the Vietnam Can Do spirit, and we are strongly positioned not only to significantly increase shareholder value, but more importantly to enhance social economic value as a global representative of Vietnam.

To date, the joint ventures tungsten chemicals (Ammonium Paratungstate  APT, Blue Tungsten Oxide  BTO, and Yellow Tungsten Oxide  YTO) annual capacity is 9,000 tonnes, with expected sales volume in 2018 at about 7,000 tonnes. The tungsten chemicals are value-added products of Tungsten Concentrate (TC)  a product of Nui Phao Mining Company. Out of the aforementioned 7,000 tonnes of sales in 2018, approximately 6,500 tonnes were manufactured from TC produced at Nui Phao Mine. MSR aims to procure more TC from outside sources to satisfy the growing demand for tungsten chemical products. From the acquisition, MSR now owns the largest tungsten downstream processing plant in the world by capacity.

Growing from the worlds largest tungsten chemical (APT, BTO, YTO) producer with 36 per cent market share (excluding China), MSR is now on track to proceed deeper into the global tungsten value chain aided by full ownership of the downstream processing plant and technology.

Strategy to become the worlds leading tungsten chemical manufacturer

MSR is continuing to explore opportunities in an effort to achieve its vision of becoming a fully-integrated downstream industrial chemical and metal business of global scale. The management is currently in discussions with carefully selected downstream partners that are strategic in nature and with upstream suppliers as it looks to further secure its supply chain.

Danny Le, head of Strategy and Development at Masan Group, said, The acquisition is also consistent with the five-year strategy that we have outlined for MSR to develop an integrated business model to generate strong cash flows and profits through commodity cycles. In addition, this will better position Masan Resources for strategic partnerships in the near future and pursue an international IPO to unlock shareholder value.

MSR posted revenue of VND3.239 trillion ($143.3 million) in the first half of 2018, a 26.6-per-cent increase over the VND2.559 trillion ($113.2 million) recorded in the first half of 2017 as the tungsten prices upside persisted. MSR delivered an attributable net profit of VND300 billion ($13.27 million) in the first half of this year, up 376.2 per cent on-year. With favourable first half business results and higher tungsten realised prices, MSR is expected to yield an improvement in NPAT Post Minority Interest (MI) margin of 5 per cent in the second half of 2018 against the first half, achieving the expected NPAT Post MI of over VND1 trillion ($44.25 million) for the full year of 2018. This deal in particular as well as foreign acquisition by Vietnamese leading companies in general serve as motivation for Vietnamese businesses to further utilise M&A as a tool to acquire the best technology and practices in order to enhance business and better serve Vietnam and its people.POSCO E&C sets its solid foot in Long Son Petrochemical Complex

The South Korean builder will work on the 2.31 million square metre site on Long Son Island in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau. Work on the project, won from Vietnam Long Son Petrochemical (LSP)the investor of LSPCwill begin next month with the completion date set at September 2020, the company said.

Previously, POSCO E&C in January signed a KRW750 billion contract to build storage tanks and a wharf facility that will serve the petrochemical complex.

POSCO E&C announced signing a contract with LSP, wholly owned by Thailand's SCG, for the construction of a wharf facility worth $680 million in Ho Chi Minh City to serve the Long Son complex.

LSPC is located in Long Son commune of Ba Ria-Vung Tau province, 100 kilometres from Ho Chi Minh City. This integrated petrochemical complex will have a total olefin production capacity of 1.6 million tonnes per year.

Accordingly, POSCO E&C will build 28 petrochemical storage tanks with a total storage capacity of 300,000 tonnes at the petrochemical complex, raw material transfer pipelines, a quay for raw material products, and marine facilities. The builder aims to complete them in 2022.

This order seems more meaningful in light of the remarkable synergies POSCO E&C generated in its first year in Vietnam. POSCOs work includes Cai Mep International Port and an exclusive port for Vung Tau Cold Rolling Mill.

Back to LSPC, in February, LSP officially kicked off its long-awaited LSPC after more than ten years of development.

In late May, SCG reached an agreement to buy PetroVietnam's 29 per cent in LSPC, leaving it king of the hill.

This step once more confirmed SCG's determination to implement the petrochemical complex that was delayed for more than 10 years.

LSPC is located in Long Son commune of Ba Ria-Vung Tau province, 100 kilometres from Ho Chi Minh City. This integrated petrochemical complex will have a total olefin production capacity of 1.6 million tonnes per year.

The complex is designed to produce various petrochemical products, including essential plastic materials such as polyethylene, polypropylene, and other products in excess of two million tonnes per year, enabling it to substitute imported polyolefin products. Non-petrochemical supporting infrastructure, such as a deep sea port and other facilities, are also included.The Government has asked the Ministry of Planning and Investment to take steps to increase the effectiveness of medium and long-term public investment plans. Photo taken in HCM City. - VNA/VNS Photo Anh Tuan

The resolution, issued on Saturday, sets as the first task the completion of a legal system on construction investment ensuring consistency, synchronisation, reform of administrative procedures, simplification of business investment conditions and timely removal of barriers and obstacles in the sector.

The Government has ordered related ministries and central agencies to take the initiative in reviewing and proposing amendments and the promulgation of new legal documents to ensure uniformed implementation.

It urged the intensification of State management in all processes of construction project implementation and even the timing of its opening.

At the same time, the resolution said, the ministries and central agencies should quickly solve problems relating to all aspects of project construction investment, especially those related to administrative procedures and business investment conditions.

In the immediate time, the Ministry of Construction will continue studying and elaborating on the amendment and supplement of laws on construction, housing, the real estate business and urban planning.

The ministry was also assigned to undertake reforms and simplification of administrative procedures as well as conditions for business investment to create favourable conditions for all people and business enterprises.

The result of such works should be submitted to the National Assembly at the 7th Session in mid 2019, said the resolution.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Planning and Investment was assigned to co-ordinate with other related ministries and agencies in completing the draft revised Law on Public Investment in a direction that helps simplify administrative procedures, enhance decentralisation and take the initiative in formulating, appraising and assigning medium and long-term public investment plans to increase effectiveness.

The resolution said the ministry should report the results of such works to the National Assembly at its 6th session in October this year.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE) was assigned to co-ordinate with other related ministries and agencies in drafting the amendment and supplement for the revised Laws on Land. It should also take measures to improve business conditions and boost administrative reforms.

All results should be reported to the Government in the first quarter of 2019.

The Government also ordered the MoNRE to propose amendments and supplements to the Law on Environmental Protection to increase the effectiveness of environmental assessment reports. In particular, policies establishing the procedures for project evaluation and appraising construction design are to be upgraded.High logistic costs are holding back garment firms. Photo: VNA

The concept of global supply chains is not unfamiliar to import and export enterprises in the context of the Vietnamese economy becoming a market economy and international integration during the past 30 years. However, most Vietnamese enterprises, especially garment and textile firms, only participate in secondary supply chains with low added-value.

According to Nguyen Van Nam, director of the Research Institute for Brand and Competition Strategy, the outstanding disadvantages of the Vietnamese supply chain are its backwardness and lack of consistency.

At present, only 21 per cent of small- and medium-sized enterprises are part of the global supply chain, while the figure is 30 per cent in Thailand and 46 per cent in Malaysia. The logistics expenses of domestic enterprises is double or triple of those in a number of countries with similar economic conditions to Vietnam.

The expanded costs on logistics have hugely affected the segments of garment and textile, footwear, and electronics that employ a large number of labourers and run huge exports and imports, are hugely dependent on input, and have produce low added value.

According to Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association (Vitas), as of the end of 2016, logistics costs accounted for one-third of selling prices.

To resolve the issue, many firms apply technology to better manage warehousing as well as optimise their supply chains. Accordingly, commonly used technologies are backing up the bills and contracts, and automatically transferring documents between firms.

Pham Kien Cuong, business development vice manager at Vinafco JSC, a logistics firm established in 1987, said that applying technologies to the supply chain will save 5 per cent of the firms costs, expenses will be narrowed to 0 per cent, and personnel will be reduced by 25-30 per cent.

However, Cuong also told VIR that despite the huge advantages, the number of garment and textile firms applying technology to their supply chains is very small.

Garment and textile products are quite simple and easy to manage, which is different from electronic products that require high accuracy. Therefore, garment and textile companies rarely invest in their management systems and only focus on buyers, Cuong explained.

Garment and textile firms will receive huge benefits from applying technology to their whole logistic systems. However, only applying technology to warehouse management do not help them save costs. Cuong added.

Along with the investment in logistics, applying the lean management model is another optimal solution to optimise the supply chain.

According to Nguyen Dang Minh, chairman of the Advisory Board of GKM Lean Institute (GKM Vietnam Co., Ltd.), at present, 15 per cent of garment and textile firms apply lean management models in their operation and started to reap the sweet fruits, including Garment 10 JSC and Hung Yen Garment Corporation.

However, if they only apply mechanically lean management models from other countries without making changes to suit the Vietnamese environment, they will only be able to exploit 70 per cent the methods value.

Minh added that the Made in Vietnam lean management model developed by Vietnamese people suits all industries in Vietnam, including the garment and textile industry, which employ a massive number of people, because this model focuses on changing peoples mindset.

By the way, the model revolves around gaining profit or creating added values for the company by utilising the employees intellect to continuously improve the business process and minimise costs. In order to increase profit, firms have to keep constant revenue flows or accelerate the companys income gradually, while at the same time reducing and eliminating waste as much as possible.

However, the model is just one solution, the important thing is to shift the mindsets of company leaders and employees, which requires huge commitment and determination.The ASUS ROG Zephyrus laptop, a breakthrough in the field of gaming laptops

This years event  which will take place on Wednesday, August 29 at the JW Marriott Hotel in Hanoi, organised by the Bureau of Foreign Trade under Taiwans Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) is set to present cutting-edge products and solutions by 57 brands, focused on smart technology fields including transportation, information and communications, home appliances, and sport and healthcare equipment.

A product with the Taiwan Excellence logo boasts innovative function, premium quality, and high accessibility, Richard R. C. Shih, president and CEO of TAITRA remarked. As we return to the Vietnamese market this year, we look forward to introducing leading Taiwanese products, which will contribute to further enhancing Vietnamese customers living standards, reaffirming our position in the hearts of the Vietnamese people.

Taiwan Excellence 2018s strategy centres on increasing the exposure of breakthrough products imbued with remarkable improvements that do not only follow, but lead the latest technological trends.

The Infarex K20 keyboard by ADATA boasts anti-ghosting

Defining a new standard of innovation

When it comes to innovation, most Vietnamese people will think of Japan or the US  tech giants that have led the science and technology field for years. However, in recent years, Taiwan has made its mark around the world, with remarkable achievements in research and technological development, innovation, and creativity.

According to the World Economic Forums Global Competitiveness Report 2017, Taiwan ranked 17th in the Global Innovation Index. According to the International Institute for Management Development, Taiwan is among Asias Top 3 when it comes to innovation and ranks 14th out of the 63 most innovative economies in the world, while maintaining a high competitiveness score in science and technology infrastructure.

Highlights of Taiwan Excellence 2018

At the Taiwan Excellence press conference in Hanoi this week, visitors will have the opportunity to directly experience smart products by 18 brands in various sectors and interact with representatives of famous brands.

At the event, five leading Taiwanese brands  Johnson, GreenE, AVer, ADATA, and ASUS  will present new consumer products that are outstanding in their fields, yet user-friendly and useful, such as treadmills by Johnson, treatment blankets by GreenE, and gaming products by ADATA. One eminent product to be presented at the press conference is the Infarex K20 keyboard by ADATA, dubbed the best choice for gamers who are looking for a perfect keyboard for every battle.

Not only does Infarex K20 have a stunning look, it also boasts outstanding persistence and strength. It is also equipped with the capacity to receive multiple key press signals at once, a technology called anti-ghosting.

Also on display is the ASUS ROG Zephyrus laptop, a breakthrough in the field of gaming laptops, with an amazingly slim frame of 16.9mm-17.9mm, considered to be the current record for laptops using the GTX 1080 graphics card.

After the press conference, from August 31 to September 2, Taiwan Excellence will continue to offer Hanoian consumers the opportunity to experience Taiwanese products

directly and purchase them for the first time, in the Taiwan Excellence Pop Up Store at AEON Mall Long Bien.Taking the CBI industry in Vietnam to new heights

HLG has spent 10 years in Vietnam; what do you think about HLGs position in the Citizenship By Investment (CBI) industry, which is increasing rapidly in Vietnam?

HLG was the first law firm to truly open the CBI industry in Vietnam, with full-time locally based lawyers able to provide on-demand services to our clients. As such, we have been able to establish a solid reputation founded upon our commitment to legal excellence, professional integrity, and transparency in working with our clients.

Although we have always been very selective about the clients we choose to represent, our long history of delivering successful outcomes speaks for itself. We are absolutely grateful to our clients for their ongoing trust and support that has allowed HLG to take the lions share of the market, but we also recognise that we must continually fight to maintain our position at the top. Unfortunately, the absence of standardised regulations in Vietnam and the abundance of pseudo-professionals in the field (including many self-proclaimed experts) have caused real damage to clients and the greater CBI industry.

Jean-Francois Harvey

What were some milestones and key achievements in HLGs 10 years in Vietnam?

While HLG has been privileged to work with both foreign and local companies on some of the countrys most significant commercial mandates, what we consider to be one of our most important achievements is raising and setting the bar on how professional services for CBI are rendered in Vietnam.

We believe that a big part of our success comes from combining international expertise with local insight, and it has always been an important part of our practices to respect Vietnamese culture and customs. In each of our three Vietnam offices, 95 per cent of the HLG teams are local employees, which have greatly contributed to our overall strength in Vietnam.

Did the potential and growth of the market live up to what HLG expected when you decided to do business in Vietnam 10 years ago?

Indeed, the potential and growth of the Vietnamese market have followed our predictions from 10 years ago, when we first started our business in Vietnam. As a matter of fact, the growth has been so strong that Vietnam is one of our top markets in Southeast Asia.

We continue to be optimistic that the CBI industry will soon be regulated and legitimised in Vietnam so that our projection for the next 10 years will be reached.

In the current CBI industry, how is HLG supporting the Vietnamese business community? What are key programmes on which HLG is consulting for Vietnamese investors?

The choice of CBI programmes is a deeply personal and subjective process, so we cannot simply highlight just one or two programmes. While our clients main objectives are often to use CBI to expand their business opportunities, ease travel restrictions, and/or improve their standard of living, ultimately, each of our clients have different desires and objectives and the best CBI programme is the programme that fits their needs.

At HLG, we do not stop at only helping clients with obtaining their CBI product, but we will also work with our clients on meeting their business goals to ensure that they are ready to face the business environment outside of Vietnam.

Could you tell us about HLGs plans for the next five years?

Having just spent 10 years in Vietnam, we have been deeply appreciative of the warm reception we have been given by Vietnam and we hope to be here for as long as possible. We intend to continue to develop our practice in Vietnam and, if all goes well, we look forward to sharing our reflections again 10 years from now.

For HLG globally, we are continuing our efforts to expand in Asia and have our sights set on other continents as well.According to the Ministry of Constructions figures, the total amount of solid waste collected in Vietnam was estimated at 15.6 million tonnes per year at the end of 2017. Around 71 per cent of this went to landfills, while only 29 per cent underwent intermediate processing. Some 23 per cent of total waste was processed and recycled and the remaining 6 per cent of residue from composting or burning facilities were buried. This resulted in 77 per cent of municipal solid waste (MSW) in Vietnam ending up in landfills.

In Vietnam, MSW processing plants commonly use organic composting or burning technology, while disposing waste at landfills causes a negative impact on the environment. There are many reports of foul odours emanating from landfills, which seriously affect sanitation and the lives of the people living around the area. In addition, groundwater contamination and methane emissions from landfills exacerbate climate change.

Not to mention the risk of the uncontrolled growth of landfill sites. In spring 2017, a huge landfill site near Colombo in Sri Lanka collapsed after heavy rainfalls. More than 150 houses were buried under hundreds of tonnes of waste and 24 people were killed, Thomas Loesche, CEO of Germanys Loesche GmbH, told VIR.

Cement production is an industry that contributes significantly to the mitigation of environmental pollution by utilising waste from thermal power plants, metallurgical facilities, and chemical plants. Industrial waste such as slag from blast furnaces, slag and fly ash from thermal power plants, as well as pyrite slag and gypsum recovered from chemical plants have been used as raw materials and additives for cement production.

In its efforts to find a better solution for waste treatment, Loesche has created an MSW processing mill with a capacity of up to 200 tonnes per hour and developed a processing technology that allows the separation of specific combustible components such as plastics, paper, and wood.

Loesche has also supplied mills that treat sewage sludge the conventional treatment of which is quite expensivetogether with MSW. Forty per cent sewage sludge is mixed into normal MSW to produce a wet, organic portion and a high-quality burnable portion  the ideal material for pre-calciners in cement plants today. Sewage sludge that was treated in this way loses its notorious stench and decomposes more quickly.

The number of existing landfill sites has declined due to Loesches drive. Its technology could also help reduce the size of existing landfill sites and create more fuel for the cement industry.

We produce environmentally sound and odourless waste treatment plants that separate the combustible components from the organic matter. The combustibles can then be burned in cement plants and the organic material can be either deposited in controlled landfill sites or used in re-cultivating measures in open limestone mines, Loesche explained.

The possibilities are shown in Austria, where Loesches subsidiary A TEC has converted two old cement plants into some of the most modern plants in the world, both of them fired with over 90 per cent processed waste.

In Vietnam, INSEE Vietnam (previously known as Holcim), a subsidiary of Siam City Cement, has already gained benefits from using Loesche machines in solid waste pre-processing, automatically feeding liquid waste into cement kilns, operating and controlling waste disposal in cement kilns, and co-processing of non-recycled waste with a reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions with no ash residue.

This approach has impressed the leaders of Vietnamese ministries and agencies. I appreciate this technology and Loesches sharing of experience in processing solid waste into fuel, said Deputy Minister of Construction Bui Pham Khanh.

Tong Van Nga, chairman of the Vietnam Association for Building Materials, also said that with the experience gained over years of co-operation with Vietnams cement industry, Loesche GmbH has directly transferred technology and equipment and joined equipment manufacturing with Vietnamese mechanical firms, which has helped Vietnamese cement plants achieve their targets in reducing electricity and thermal energy consumption throughout the cement production process.

I do believe that Loesche will continue to succeed in combined waste treatment and provide substitutes for part of the conventional fuels used in cement production, Nga said.Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange (AO) have once again had their hopes for justice rekindled. But despite the recent landmark ruling against Monsanto in a San Francisco court, major obstacles remain on the path towards justice.

On August 11, the US court ruled that the multinational agrochemical corporation was liable for the health issues of a former groundskeeper, Dewayne Johnson, who claims that Monsatos weed-killer product (Roundup) contains carcinogens that cause his cancer. The company was ordered to pay 289 million USD as compensation for past and future economic losses and punitive damages to the American citizen, in a closely watched case that bears many similarities to the legal battle waged on behalf of Vietnamese victims. The US chemical group Monsanto has long been associated with the Agent Orange devastation in Vietnam. It was one of the main suppliers of more than 80 million litres of herbicides which contain Agent Orange that US troops sprayed over southern Vietnam in the period from 1961-71, to clear out the dense tracts of tropical jungles that served as the hideouts of the Vietnamese military forces. Of the total volume, 44 million litres were Agent Orange, containing nearly 370 kilograms of dioxin. Studies have showed that only 80 grams of dioxin in the water supply system of a city of 8 million could kill off the entire population, still, Monsanto and other chemical groups insist that their products were not harmful to humans health. The Government of Vietnam estimates that around 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed to the toxic substance. Three million people have grappled with debilitating diseases including various types of cancers, neural damage and reproductive failures. Birth deformities and mental impairments continue to haunt even the third and fourth generation of descendants of those originally exposed to dioxin, forty years after the war ended.

Quach Thanh Vinh, Chief of Office and Director of Liaison Lawyers Office for the Hanoi-based Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA), said that the court ruling set a fortuitous legal precedent that will help settle similar cases in which victims of chemical toxins seek compensation, including the associations own case. The association filed its first class-action suit in 2004, which pinned the blame on a total of 37 US chemical manufacturers  including Dow Chemical and Monsanto. However, the case was rejected three times by American courts, which claimed that there was no legal basis for the plaintiffs claims. The courts said that since the chemical companies produced these herbicides on request by the federal Government, they could not be held liable for their effects. The court also ruled that at that time, there was little concrete evidence establishing a causal relation between the herbicide Agent Orange and the health issues of the victims. Fortunately, recent scientific achievements have made it much easier to identify whether the illnesses were caused by the dioxin. In the US, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences has identified 13 diseases related to Agent Orange occurring in American veterans after their service in Vietnam. These 13 diseases also exist in the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange. In addition, as their immune systems were debilitated by the toxin, the Vietnamese victims also easily fell ill to a siege of other diseases that a healthy person could easily overcome. The association is gearing up for the next legal endeavours on behalf of nearly 3 million Vietnamese victims. But numerous American lawyers sympathetic to the cause and persistent in their pursuit of justice have urged Vietnamese plaintiffs to wait for a second lawsuit, Vinh said. The enlisting of American lawyers was critical as the case involves complaints against US-based companies, according to US laws and US judges will be presiding, according to Vinh. Their expertise with the US legal system and their support for us will certainly help tip the scales in our favour. The association, aside from litigation attempts, is still tirelessly working to bring justice to the Vietnamese victims by seeking support from influential politicians, scientists and progressive-minded people across the world, and lobbying sympathetic lawmakers in the US to draft bills asking the US Government to accept responsibility for the devastation in Vietnam as well as to take part in clean-up efforts and help the victims. Currently, the US has organised several clean-up operations at some of their former military bases such as the Da Nang airport or Bien Hoa airport, provide humanitarian assistance for people with disabilities in Vietnam, including victims of Agent Orange, but these efforts still can not fully make up for the devastation, pain and loss that Agent Orange causes in Vietnam. No matter how difficult and prolonged this case might be, we wont ever give up on it, for the sake of the millions of Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, said Quach Thanh Vinh said.It is expected that in the time to come, Vietnam will continue to further strengthen political trust, strategic attachment, and enhance the effectiveness of bilateral co-operation with Russia, and affirming Vietnams consistent foreign policy of placing Russia as a prioritised partner, and further promote the comprehensive strategic partnership in a more qualitative and practical manner.

Vietnam and Russia will also create a new co-operative momentum in the economic, trade, and investment sectors, with the Southeast Asian nation to expand the market share of Vietnamese goods in Russia.

TH Groups milk project in Russia will help the two nations to boost their trade and investment ties

One of the biggest co-operative projects between Vietnam and Russia is a milk producing project implemented by Vietnam's TH Group. It is expected that the group will organise the ground-breaking ceremony of its high-tech concentrated dairy and fresh milk production projects in Russias Kaluga oblast.

Russian Ambassador to Vietnam K.V. Vnukov told VIR that Russia is expanding its investment presence in Vietnam. We have begun implementing a bilateral deal on constructing automobile manufacturing and assembling plants in Vietnam, with Russias famous brands like KAMAZ and GAZ. Hopefully in the near future, these automobiles will approach the majority of Vietnamese consumers, he added.

Currently, Russia has only 116 investment projects in Vietnam, registered at $940 million. Meanwhile, Vietnam has 13 projects worth about $3 billion in Russia. The biggest firms include oil and gas joint ventures Rusvietpetro and Gazpromviet, the Hanoi-Moscow multi-functional cultural and business centre, the TH true MILK agricultural-industrial complex in Moscow, Kaluga, Primorsky, and Bashkortostan. Notably, TH Group in May 2018 inked a deal worth over $630 million with RFPI in order to produce milk in Russia.

After the free trade agreement between Vietnam and the Eurasian Economic Union took effect in October 2016, the two sides bilateral trade turnover has soared by an average 30 per cent per annum, to $3.55 billion last year.

Meanwhile, it is expected that in the time to come, Vietnam and Hungary will lift their relations to a new co-operative level, with a view to creating new changes in the two countries co-operation and expanding Vietnams influence in the Central-Eastern Europe region.

Currently, Hungary has only 17 investment projects in Vietnam, registered at $63.56 million. The total bilateral trade turnover hit over $355 million last year.A post shared by Andrea Finamore (@afinamore616) on Jun 28, 2018 at 5:48pm PDT

For residents of an exclusive community in Queens, swimming comes with the thrill of risking illness and basic hygiene.

Douglaston Manors two block stretch of private beachfront on Little Neck Bay is a selling point of the neighborhood: Homes currently for sale on Zillow  going for up to $6.3 million  advertise the prestigious waterfront community and privet beach.

But according to data published by the citys Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), Douglaston Manor beach is one of the most consistently contaminated beaches in New York City.

Every year, beginning in the spring and ending in the fall, the DOHMH updates its dataset on a monthly basis with water quality results from beaches all around the city. In particular, they test their water samples for enterococci  bacteria that indicate of the presence of human fecal material. By New York State Sanitary Code and New York City Health Code, no single sample should exceed a count of 104 cfus (colony forming units) per 100 mL of water for marine water recreation. If the geometric mean of five or more samples taken in a month exceeds 35 cfus per 100 mL, the beach is closed to swimmers and waders. Swimming in such polluted waters can lead to gastroenteritis or more serious diseases.



Doulgaston Homeowners Association Beach Bacteria Count Over Time (data from DOHMH, chart by Angela Wang)

So far in 2018, 17% of the samples collected in Douglaston have exceeded health code  one by over 11 times the safe limit. But 2018 is actually an improvement: last year 31.7% of the samples collected in Douglaston were found to exceed safe levels of enterococci, translating to 107 notification days: more than any other private or public beach in New York City. The beach was under advisory for the entire season.

A nearby sewer overflow facility, completed in 2011, has decreased sewage flow into the bay, but fecal bacteria are still finding a way to contaminate Douglaston Manor beach. The high bacteria counts go as far back as 2005, the first year data was published for the beach; one sample taken in May of 2011 was over 11400% higher than the warning threshold, making it the second most contaminated sample in the entire dataset. (Staten Islands YMCA beach takes the record, with a sample taken in August 2013 containing a bacteria count of 15,000.)

Despite the warnings, the pollution doesnt seem to faze long-time residents of the neighborhood. According to Angeline Panagi, who works at the Douglaston Manor gatehouse, about 20 swimmers dive into the water every day. A lot of the people in the neighborhood have been swimming here for years and years, so they don't really pay attention [to the warning signs], Panagi said. Newcomers may be deterred by the advisories, but regulars dont bat an eye. Ive swam in the bay for 63 years without any negative effect, Mike Gannon, a Douglaston old-timer, told me via email.



2018's Fecal Beach Hot Spots (data from DOHMH, chart by Angela Wang)

Other beaches you might want to be leery of for the rest of the summer (city beaches are open through September 9th) include Staten Islands Cedar Grove and Brooklyns Gerritsen/Kiddie Beach, which historically tend to be more polluted than other beaches in the city.

The good news is that New York Citys most popular public beaches  Coney Island and the Rockaways  are generally pretty clean. Only one sample at each beach, taken out of 72 and 51 respectively through July of this year, have failed to meet health standards.



2018 Water Quality Samples at Coney Island and The Rockaways (data from DOHMH, chart by Angela Wang)

If youre wary of stewing in human excrement at your next beach outing, the city posts the latest status updates on beach water quality here. (Protip: Avoid water recreation after it rains, when storm runoff and overflowing sewage pipes discharge directly into the citys waterways.)

Angela Wang lives in Brooklyn and sometimes writes and makes things. Follow her most places @angelareplica.

Vietnamese expats bring Industry 4.0 talent home

In order for them to contribute to Vietnams development and help it meet the challenges of Industry 4.0, the Vietnamese government has called on 100 young, talented Vietnamese people working overseas in the science and technology fields to come home and apply their skills and experience in the homeland.

Tran Thi Nhu Hoa, deputy head of the Vietnamese Student Association in South Korea and one of the 100 people selected in the Vietnam Innovation Network Programme led by the Ministry of Planning and Investment, used just one word, love, to describe the feeling that overcame her as she was given this opportunity. Hoa proudly told VIR, I am sure that I will return home to work for a university in Ho Chi Minh City. I will bring South Koreas highest technology and transfer it to Vietnam.

The programme aims to gather and mobilise the best human resources from overseas Vietnamese experts and connect them with domestic operations to change Vietnams technological development. Many Vietnamese experts are making their mark in their respective fields, not only in their adopted countries, but, like Hoa, a well-known researcher on early diagnoses of Alzheimers disease, also in their home country.

Brain connectivity worldwide

Minister of Planning and Investment Nguyen Chi Dung, who leads the Vietnam Innovation Network Programme, stressed that Vietnamese professionals with technical

capacities combined with international experience will be a crucial resource to ensure the successful implementation of the governments Industry 4.0 strategy, bringing rapid technological changes to Vietnam and allowing the country to transform along with the global economy.

Industry 4.0 is booming and has made it possible for developing countries like Vietnam to restructure their economy and create a breakthrough in development. Innovation was already the key before and the shortest way to achieve fast and sustainable development. Countries which do not seize this opportunity will not be able to succeed, said Dung.

Professor Ngo Bao Chau, the first Vietnamese person ever to win the Fields Medal, the worlds most prestigious award in the field of mathematics, said that connectivity is key for technology advancements and a prosperous country, but added, There must be a platform to gather the demand, resources, process, competencies, and management. If we dont have that, I am afraid we will not succeed.

This is not the first time that the Vietnamese government has tried to encourage overseas Vietnamese to return and partake in helping build the country indirectly or directly. The Vietnamese government has held the view that overseas Vietnamese are an integral part of and a powerful resource for Vietnam that was initiated by President Ho Chi Minh. It is a strategy used throughout Vietnams development record over the past decades, particularly during the economic reforms, launched in 1986, that spurred the countrys rapid economic growth and development, and transformed Vietnam from one of the worlds poorest nations into a lower middle-income country.

As an inspiration to the people gathered at the recent network conference, Vo Quang Hue, deputy CEO of Vingroup and responsible for the Vinfast automotive project, said that the dream of made-in-Vietnam products is a dream of serving the country.

Hue, with 24 years of experience working for well-known global groups including Bosch, said, I now live with the desire to contribute to building the country. I am happy because every day, my partners and I work towards a dream of creating a Vietnamese-made car, and it is going to become true.

Opportunities for talented people

Hue said that tens of thousands of foreigners hold leading positions in Vietnam, including in international corporations and local businesses. That indicates a number of interesting things. For instance, the opportunities to work as well as the work environment cannot be too inferior to other places in the world, he said

Leading groups Vingroup, FPT Group, and Viettel, during meeting the 100 talented individuals, showed their eagerness to co-operate with them on many major issues arising in the process of Industry 4.0, including e-government, smart healthcare, smart traffic, smart manufacturing, and finance and banking.

Industry 4.0 offers a wonderful chance for Vietnam to digitise its operations. The co-operation between young Vietnamese professionals who possess extensive expertise as well as experience on one side and technological enterprises which have promising projects on implementing the latest technologies into their operations on the other will help Vietnam become a pioneer in digital transformation, said FPT Groups chairman Truong Gia Binh.

Vingroup also plans to expand into artificial intelligence (AI), software, and big data and set up a Silicon Valley-style tech hub in Hanoi. VinTech would specialise in developing AI products, software programmes, and new-generation materials.

Meanwhile, Hoa from the Vietnamese Student Association in South Korea, said that Vietnam is holding golden opportunities, and this network programme is expected to gather power, and turn brain drain into brain gain. Overseas Vietnamese are a valuable asset to their home land, even though they live in other nations.TC Mariel is poised to become a major transshipment hub in America

ZEDMariel: Potential to attract investment in Cuba

Mariel Special Development Zone (ZED Mariel) is the first special development zone in Cuba, which is only 45 kilometres from the capital Havana. This zone has been invested by the Cuban government to become the largest industrial area in the country.

The Cuban government encourages investment in the sectors of food industry, consumer goods, construction materials, packaging industry, and agriculture to provide to the domestic market and promote socioeconomic development.

In the future, ZED Mariel is expected to export products and services in the region and become the leading hub for the US, thanks to TC Mariel port located within the zone.

As one of the five deep-water ports in the Caribbean and Central America, TC Mariel Port is the shortest-haul and lowest-cost to the US in the region. Furthermore, enterprises will benefit from the regulatory framework, incentives, and friendly business environment. Financial Times fDi magazine elected ZED Mariel as the winner of the Best Zone to Consider in the Future category in the Best Global Zones of the Year 2017 competition.

ViMariel Industrial Parkan attractive destination in Central America

Situated in ZED Mariel, ViMariel IP benefits from a prime location as well as preferential policies from the Cuban government.

It is very easy to access to ViMariel IP through Jose Marti International Airport (42km far), De Baracoa Airport (25km), San Antonio De Los Banos Airport (25km). The four-lane motorway from the IP joins the main eastern arterial road to the capital Havana (one hour drive), as well as the airports and seaports in the west.

Illustrative perspective of ViMariel IP

Viglacera Corporation will invest in synchronously building technical infrastructure: electricity supply from the 110/22 KV national transformer station (25MVA), a water supply station (6,500 cubic metres per day), a separate drainage system and waste water treatment system (up to 4,800cu.m per day). Solid waste from factories will be sorted, collected, and transported to the waste disposal area.

In addition, investors in ViMariel IP are supported by other services, such as restaurants, cafe, ETECSA telecommunications, security systems, customs systems, banking services, and cargo services by sea, rail, and road. These will allow investors to save time and money in foreign markets in general and Central America in particular.

In order to attract domestic and foreign investors in ZED Mariel, the Cuban government offers special tax incentives, fast approval, a one-stop system, and support in the recruitment of local labour resources, and among others.

ViMariel is shaping up to be a potential destination for investors whose products and services are aimed at the Cuban market or other export markets.Le Mai Tung - CEO, EyeQ EyeQ, the computer vision startup, is honoured to be the winner of Visas Everywhere Initiative 2018 for its Pay With Your Face product. Applying facial recognition technology, the startup hopes that buying things with a smartphone will become as easy as taking a selfie. Customers can substitute signatures and PINs with their face to make payments without a card. EyeQ aims to offer customers more options and flexibility with different biometric methods including facial recognition. Besides providing customers with a new experience, its facial recognition system also enhances the security of payment and transaction processes. While a signature can be faked and a PIN is easily forgotten or lost, face-matching systems can be nearly 98 per cent accurate, providing a safe and convenient payment option for consumers. In Vietnam, where cash-on-delivery is still the norm, EyeQ has tremendous opportunities to grow its business. Vietnams burgeoning e-commerce market was valued at $2.7 billion in 2017 and may reach $4.5 billion in 2022. At present, almost 85 per cent of all e-commerce orders are cash-on-delivery, while 14 per cent are digital payments. Taking part in Visas Everywhere Initiative has been a fantastic opportunity for EyeQ to gain exposure, network with other startups and business leaders, and generally refine our products. Visas API (Application Programme Interface) System is a diverse ecosystem that helps startups and fintech companies to develop. After this competition, we hope EyeQ will receive more attention to expand our offering, and to really put our proposal into action. Being endorsed by a leading digital payment provider like Visa will improve EyeQs brand awareness and marketing. With a vision to go global, EyeQ sees the competition as a shortcut to bring our offerings to overseas markets. EyeQ hopes to extend its reach to more of Visas partners and clients, and one day it will integrate the system into their platforms. To facilitate this goal, the startup is seeking more talent in the areas of artificial intelligence and computer vision. Over the past few years, Vietnams startup scene has picked up momentum thanks to the governments incentives and various initiatives in place. Vietnam is a high-potential market for startups, with enormous opportunities to innovate and expand. However, there are not many investment funds for Vietnamese startups. Hopefully, more programmes like Visas Everywhere Initiative will continue to give rise to new fintech companies and new payment methods in Vietnam. The founder of EyeQ graduated from the doctoral programme at the University of New South Wales, one of the Top 100 programmes in Computer Science. With a deep knowledge of big data, he wishes to create intelligent and innovative products offering high quality. EyeQ officially made its debut in Startup Wheel 2017, where it also picked up the first prize. Since then, the startup has begun to gain traction with its products for coffee shops, airport security, transport, and smart cities. With a focus on facial payment systems, EyeQ has developed a track record for face recognition by successfully identifying over two million Asian (including Vietnamese) faces. Hence, its service is trusted and used by its corporate clients such as Vingroup and Unilever Vietnam. EyeQ is looking for opportunities to integrate its face recognition system into mobile wallets, banks, and insurance companies, in addition to collaborating with Visa in the future. Phan Hong Minh - Founder and CEO, JupViec.vn Vietnam-based housekeeping service JupViec.vn has won the Financial Inclusion Award at Visas Everywhere Initiative this year. Known as the Uber for housekeepers, JupViec.vn aims to change the traditional housekeeping industry in Vietnam by connecting domestic workers with households online. We currently operate in 10 cities and provinces across Vietnam with a plan to scale up the operations to 20 cities and provinces by the end of next year. JupViec.vn applies modern technologies in the recruitment, training, and management of its workers to consistently manage and improve its service quality. As a result, the startup helps resolve most of the problems of modern households by providing trained domestic workers on an hourly basis. The startup, launched in 2012, has become a leading housekeeping service with a plan to increase its offerings to 10 services next year. JupViec.vn estimates that it will create nearly 1.2 million working hours for 2,000 workers in Vietnam this year. It is also projected to process 350,000 transactions in 2018, with $3 million in revenue. Like other fast-growing businesses, the number one pain point JupViec.vn aims to address at the moment is its payment method. The startup reported that 93 per cent of its customers currently use cash or bank transfer payments, and only 7 per cent of customers have adopted internet banking. This causes several problems for the startup, including a complicated process, incorrect information, and a long waiting time. JupViec.vn hopes that it can work with Visa to solve these problems and integrate Visa solutions such as Funds Transfer and mVisa directly in its platform. These products will help the startup optimise its mobile apps performance, especially given that most of its workers and customers are using the app on smartphones. It is obvious that the collaboration with Visa will bring a lot of advantages for the users. Their transactions will be safer because they no longer need to carry money. They can also use one card for all home services provided by JupViec.vn. Meanwhile, the tie-up will help Visa strengthen its cash-less business, not only in Vietnams large cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, but also expanding to other provinces. On top of that, it gives Visa a chance to have a larger social impact in Vietnam by supporting millions of working women to find part-time jobs and earn additional income. For JupViec.vn, winning this award is of great significance. Being certified by Visa, the worlds biggest digital payment provider, will help boost the startups brand. It also shows that Visa pays attention to small businesses and the startup community in Vietnam. I think that Visas Everywhere Initiative is a good programme, because it gathers many quality startups with creative ideas. We have learned a lot from the instructions offered by Visas experts as well as using Visas direct APIs to solve our payment problems. In addition, the competition is a good chance to brush up our presentation skills. We performed the pitch three times before the grand finale of Visas Everywhere Initiative. Moving forward, we will integrate Visa products into our platform to improve the transparency of payment and transaction processes. Besides developing digital payment solutions, we plan to introduce certain other services like massage at home, babysitting, and elderly care, among others, to help our customers optimise their time and make their lives more convenient. JupViec.vn will continue its expansion efforts to bring more opportunities for low-income women in Vietnam. Hai Ho - CEO, Triip.me We are very proud that Triip.me has outstripped many competitors to win the Audience Choice Award in Visas Everywhere Initiative this year. This award shows that our product is recognised and meets the requirements of many users. Our project has been in use for more than four years and has gained initial revenue. When they found out about us, Visa actively reached out and asked us to participate in this competition. At the same time, I also realised that I was struggling with the problem of how to receive payment from international tourists all over the world. Thanks to this competition, Visa helped connect us to other startups to co-work and map out directions for us to develop our company in the coming years. For startups in general and for Triip.me in particular, it is very important to be able to reach up globally. We are able to do that with the assistance of Visa which has a global network, a long history, and, most importantly, has many related entities which we can be connected with. Visa has met all of our requirements and answered all of our questions and connected us globally. Visa has even helped gather interested companies from different countries to sit down and work out feasible solutions for their needs. Vietnamese startups have not been given an opportunity like this before. It has special significance for startups like us, as we do not have many relations with other partners. There is a slogan in Vietnam that we are bringing Vietnamese startups to the world, but questions remain about where to go and how to go there. And Visa helps us with this task. Through this competition, I have learned many new things. One of them is that in order to let startups reach out to the global environment, we need the input of different bodies and sides, and startups cannot do it by themselves. Visa is the most interested in solutions which have an impact on the majority of society. It is not enough for a startup to make a product to get revenue; the product must also be of some benefit to society. Vietnamese startups should concentrate on this target, so they can be assisted by Visa and many other companies and organisations globally. This is absolutely the best way to help Vietnamese startups reach out to the global economy. Of course, opportunities are always accompanied by challenges. One of the biggest challenges was to meet Visas requirements with the best answers. We were lucky because we had four opportunities to discuss all requirements with Visas team from the US, to find out exactly what we had to do for this competition. Many things were done, many dossiers and proposals were sent between us, and we finally worked out the best way to implement our plan. Now we have our products, and Visa is assisting us in introducing our products to other partners in the global network. It is so great! We are well aware that this is only the first step and there is a tough road ahead. Lets go and reach further!Last week, actress Asia Argento was accused of sexually assaulting a former co-star when he was underage, and subsequently paying him off to stay silent. Argento strongly denied the accusations, instead claiming that her late boyfriend, Anthony Bourdain, paid her accuser out of compassion. TMZ then released incriminating text messages and a photo purportedly showing Argento naked in bed with then 17-year-old Jimmy Bennett.

Now, Rose McGowanArgento's former "ride or die" friend and fellow leader in the #MeToo movementhas released a long statement about the accusations. "I really hope you find your way through this process to rehabilitation and betterment," she writes. "Anyone can be be betterI hope you can be, too. Do the right thing. Be honest. Be fair. Let justice stay its course. Be the person you wish Harvey could have been."

McGowan explained that the person she's dating, model and activist Rain Dove, told her about the accusations against Argento. Dove told her that Argento admitted in text messages that she had slept with Bennett, and turned over the texts to the policethose texts were seemingly the leaked messages posted by TMZ. In the text messages that they published last week, Argento wrote: "I had sex with him it felt weird. I didn't know he was a minor until the shakedown letter," one message reads. "The public knows nothing, only what the NYT wrote. Which is one sided. The shakedown letter. The horny kid jumped me."

You can read McGowan's full statement below:

I would first of all like to start off this statement saying thank you for your patience. A lot of people have been demanding answers and a response to the recent events surrounding Asia Argentos sexual assault case. Many people believe that because we have been close in each others lives over the past year that perhaps I am affiliated with this incident or being complicit. I am not.

I first met Asia on a red carpet, but its only been the past year through our shared experience of the HW case that we have bonded. Asia was a person who understood my trauma in a way that many others didnt. We were able to talk through them together and champion each others voices. We even got matching dot tattoos! Something I had posted on my IG just about a month ago. Its no secret to anyone that Im a blunt, candid, brazen individual vocally- and I think thats what I really related to Asia the most with. They were edgy, confrontational, and strong willed with very little care about how much others liked or disliked them. Rare things to find in women in this industry or the world.

But then everything changed. In an instant. I received a phone call and series of messages from the being Ive been dating- Rain Dove. They said that they had been texting with Asia and that Asia had revealed that she had indeed slept with Jimmy Bennet. Rain also shared that Asia had stated that shed been receiving unsolicited nudes of Jimmy since he had been 12. Asia mentioned in these texts that she didnt take any action on those images. No reporting to authorities, to the parents, or blocking of Jimmys social media. Not even a simple message Dont send me these images. They are inappropriate. There were a few other details revealed as well that I am not at liberty to mention in this statement as investigators do their job.

Rain Dove said that they were going to go to the police with these texts once we were done speaking no matter what. But that they wanted me to be aware of them so that I may be able to take further actions. I responded with You have to. You must. I wasted no time. It wasnt hard to say or support. What was hard was the shell shock of the realisation that everything the MeToo movement stood for was about to be in jeopardy. An hour after our conversation was finished Rain Dove confirmed that they had turned over the texts and were in conversation with officers. Almost 48 hours later the texts were in the press.

I had introduced Rain Dove to Asia Argento last month, three days after the passing of Anthony Bourdain. I was with Asia to comfort and support her. Rain Dove came to support us both. It was an emotionally chaotic time and Rain Dove suggested we go to Berlin for a couple days to take the mourning out of Asias home and into a neutral space. So we did. While in Berlin Asia had mentioned that she was being extorted for a large sum of money every month by someone who was blackmailing them with a provocative image. No one in the room knew who the extortionist was. Now we know it to be a reference to this case.

Rain Dove continued on communicating with Asia occasionally after meeting her- and their conversations have been their own. I know Rain is a person to whom many high profile entities consult when they are experiencing social pressures because Rain is good at guiding them through the research confrontation, rehabilitation, and solution process. While they are a person who is good at keeping a secret for those dedicated to making things right- they are also justice driven. So it was not a surprise to me that I received that call and the messages from them. Ive referred to Asia in the past as My Ride or Die and said very clearly that their friendship comes first. I know that coming to me with those messages must have been hard for Rain because of that so I commend them for their bravery.

To the people who have checked in with me to see if Im alright- the answer is thank you and Yes. Ill be fine. Its sad to lose a friend connection, but whats even more sad is what happened to Jimmy Bennet. Whether or not the extortion case is true- it wasnt fair and it wasnt right. It is the type of thing I fight against alongside so many. The reason I havent released a statement is because Ive frankly been extremely humbled by this event. I had to take a step back and realise that in my own activism while I fight hard with passion- I need to evolve. In the past I have been occasionally angry. As a victim I was justified in fiery feelings. But I know that those accused are the friends, parents, and family members of other people. There absolutely should be no leeway or tolerance for sexual assault. Hard stop. NONE. Victims also shouldnt be told how they should react or what they should say about their abusers. However as allies to the victim and voyeurs of an event we should find a better way to balance support of the victim with due process for the accused. Ive never claimed to be perfect. This week especially has made me come to terms with the fact that we all have a lot of growing to do, including myself.

At this current moment it may be easy to focus on the drama of the situation. The conspiracy. But the real focus should be on supporting justice. Supporting honesty. And supporting each other. We can not let this moment break the momentum of a movement that has freed so many people. We must use it to allow us to become stronger. More compassionate. More aware. And More organised.

Asia you were my friend. I loved you. Youve spent and risked a lot to stand with the MeToo movement. I really hope you find your way through this process to rehabilitation and betterment. Anyone can be be better- I hope you can be, too. Do the right thing. Be honest. Be fair. Let justice stay its course. Be the person you wish Harvey could have been.Photo: Jason Mendez/Getty Images

When we talk about Afropunk, Brooklyns annual festival for black people and by black people, its usually in awe of the resplendent, DIY fashion. (And for good reason.) But beyond being a celebration of black beauty and ingenuity, its a communal gathering around music and the arts. This years festival saw performances from Kaytranada, the Internet, Tyler the Creator, Daniel Caesar, Miguel, Janelle Monae, Erykah Badu, and even a special guest appearance from the Sturgeon Moon. Vulture was on the ground for the whole weekend; here are the best moments you missed.

Erykah Badu and Janelle Monae performing together in the crowd.

After performing her own set on the main stage, Monae later joined queen Erykah Badu for a surprise joint performance to end the night and the festival. Badu brought her own moon to the stage as part of her backdrop, but naturally, there was already a full moon in Pisces overhead beaming directly on them (the last full moon of the summer!). Hollywood couldnt write a better scene if they tried. The two waded into the crowds to transmit their healing powers up close among the people, cleanse our auras, rejuvenate our spirit  and sing too.

Tyler the Creator flinging himself off his elevated stage.

And somehow not injuring a single limb. Oh, youth.

Kaytranada getting extremely drunk.

On Saturday, Canadian producer-DJ Kaytranada turned 26. He also headlined Afropunk, the timing of which meant he took to the stage with a red Solo cup in hand and never looked back. He sipped between spinning his Solange and Janet remixes, sipped some more after dropping his Chance the Rapper and the Internet collaborations; then by the time he got to the end of his set, thats when the real show started. Kaytranada, saying that this wasnt his best set because he got too lit (lies! it was still a delight), proceeded to treats fans to unreleased music off his upcoming album, including new tracks with MVP of the summer Ty Dolla $ign and Busta Rhymes. He probably wasnt supposed to play this music, but you do what you want on your birthday. He concluded his show by never actually ending it  instead, he replayed some songs, rambled for a bit, then got his mic cut off. A birthday story to tell the grandkids.

Erykah Badu made her entrance dressed like your grandmas lampshade.

You can all go home now. Badu won the fashion show.

Ava DuVernay.

She attended the festival with her film distribution company, Array, which backs POC-made indie projects. Array had its own pop-up where DuVernay held a meet-and-greet with black creators and fans, which, if youve seen her schedule lately, is precious time.

This 13-year-old (!) artist.

There are many booths at Afropunks marketplace, but only one this year run by a creator so young he needed to be chaperoned by his dad. Meet Isaiah Qualls, a 13-year-old wunderkind from New York City who taught himself to sketch and paint portraits of his favorite artists. I am now the proud owner of this pencil sketch of Lauryn Hill, which, frankly, is better than the real thing because at least she didnt keep me waiting.

Lauren hill A post shared by Isaiah Qualls  (@nyc.portrait) on Mar 13, 2017 at 1:09pm PDT

Janelle Monaes many hat changes.

Yes, of course, Janelle travels with a hat box, which she is then presented with onstage by one of her court ladies to make a quick wardrobe change before ascending to her literal throne for Django Jane. Bonus points: Janelles continued show-closing James Brown homage of purposely falling to the ground, spazzing out to the end of Tightrope, and never missing a single beat or a note.

Lots of lime green.

Listen up, Pantone: I have seen the color of the year  or at least the summer  and it is officially green. Specifically, lime green. Miguel, Steve Lacy from the Internet, and Fantastic Negrito all wore lime green pants, which wouldve been a fashion faux pas had you or I showed up in the same lewk, but all these men are exceptionally fly. (Shout out to Lacy for color blocking his lime green denim jeans with a blue hospital-scrubs-esque shirt.) But, obviously, no one can or ever will rock lime green better than Miz Erykah Badu, who was draped in it from head to toe.

A post shared by Sachyn (@sachynmital) on Aug 26, 2018 at 2:34pm PDT

H.E.R. and Daniel Caesars duet.

H.E.R. delayed her set over an hour presumably to make this happen (Caesars set on the opposite stage overlapped), and it was damn well worth the wait. Best Part was, indeed, the best part of their respective shows, and H.E.R. one of the best live vocalists of the entire festival.

Just Blaze bringing out Busta Rhymes.

Pro advice for future Afropunk-goers: Dont sleep on the Gold stage. All the best DJs play there and they tend to bring friends.

This guy and his veil-length durag.

According to what he told Vogue, filmmaker Darryl McPherson bedazzled this spectacular durag himself and treats it like a crown. When I walked past him the moment the video below was being captured, let me tell you I gasped.Aziz Ansari performs during the Oddball Comedy and Curiosity Festival in 2015. Photo: Scott Legato/Getty Images

This post originally contained descriptions of Ansaris jokes from the show. We dont want to give away the guys whole set, so it has since been removed.

Over the past few months, Aziz Ansari has quietly been returning to the stage for the first time since he was accused of sexual misconduct in January, beginning with performances at the Comedy Cellar in New York back in May as well as shows in Philadelphia earlier this month. He did his second series of abruptly announced material tune-up shows in Wisconsin last week, performing two shows in Milwaukee on Saturday at the Pabst Theatre and Turner Hall (earlier in the week, he did three nights of shows in Madison). I was at the Turner Hall show on Saturday, which was sold out for over 700 people, after being announced just a couple days prior. Ansari brought along Wil Sylvince (who emceed the evening), Hannibal Buress, and Michael Che as surprise guests; all four of the performers kept the audience rapt throughout. Phones were banned, which meant an engaged audience unencumbered by social media.

To address the elephant in the room: Ansari didnt. #MeToo allegations were levied against Ansari earlier this year by a New York photographer who was granted pseudonymity by Babe.net. She said that Ansari made her feel really pressured and uncomfortable during a date; Ansari released a response statement saying in part that they had sexual activity that by all indications was completely consensual. If you didnt know about the controversy, you wouldnt have realized that this was the beginning stage of Ansaris reemergence from it. My sense during the show was that the crowd was aware of the saga, but not judgmental about it. A woman sitting in front of me told me she saw it as very low on the scale of bad date to Harvey Weinstein.

Ansari took the stage looking a bit older than he did in the last season of Master of None. Who could know how much of that has to do with the stress of having his reputation questioned in the media, but it was striking to look at his face and see that a lot of his hallmark boyishness has faded. Nevertheless, his energy was still as high as ever as he ran through a set that lasted under an hour, and his material in this post-#MeToo context was more or less what it looked like before.Michael C. Hall in Safe. Photo: Ben Blackall/Netflix

Safe, a suspense thriller with Michael C. Hall, slipped onto Netflix in May this year, and you might not have heard much about it unless you watch every British crime drama on the site. Netflix seems mighty pleased with it, because its signed an overall deal with its creator Harlan Coben. Coben, whos best known for his many, many best-selling crime novels, is working with Netflix to develop 14 existing titles and future projects into English-language and foreign-language series and films, including an adaptation of his forthcoming novel Run Away. Its the perfect marriage of quantity and quantity.Photo: David Levenson/Getty Images

Last week, the New York Times reported that actress and #MeToo activist Asia Argento had made a deal to pay off a former co-star, Jimmy Bennett, who accused her of sexually assaulting him when he was a minor. Shortly thereafter, Argento denied the allegations  but text messages were soon leaked to TMZ that purported to contradict Argentos denial. Now, in a Monday statement released through a publicist, Argentos fellow #MeToo advocate Rose McGowan revealed that the texts in question came from the person she is dating, Rain Dove.

In her statement, McGowan explains that she and Argento only became close over the past year, after they both went public with their respective allegations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein. McGowan writes that, after the death of Argentos late boyfriend Anthony Bourdain, she introduced the actress to Dove, a model and activist whom McGowan had been dating. McGowan and Dove then visited Berlin with Argento, at which point Argento mentioned that she was being extorted for a large sum of money every month by someone who was blackmailing them with a provocative image.

McGowan continues that no one in the room knew who the extortionist was at the time. Meanwhile, Dove and Argento stayed in contact after the visit. The statement also reads:

I received a phone call and series of messages from the being Ive been dating- Rain Dove. They said that they had been texting with Asia and that Asia had revealed that she had indeed slept with Jimmy Bennet. Rain also shared that Asia had stated that shed been receiving unsolicited nudes of Jimmy since he had been 12. Asia mentioned in these texts that she didnt take any action on those images. No reporting to authorities, to the parents, or blocking of Jimmys social media. Not even a simple message Dont send me these images. They are inappropriate. There were a few other details revealed as well that I am not at liberty to mention in this statement as investigators do their job.

McGowan states that Dove then told her that they were going to turn over the texts to the police. I responded with You have to. You must. I wasted no time. It wasnt hard to say or support. What was hard was the shell shock of the realization that everything the MeToo movement stood for was about to be in jeopardy, she writes. Within an hour, she claims, Dove brought the messages to the authorities, and within 48 hours, the messages were in the press.

The statement further reads:

At this current moment it may be easy to focus on the drama of the situation. The conspiracy. But the real focus should be on supporting justice. Supporting honesty. And supporting each other. We can not let this moment break the momentum of a movement that has freed so many people. We must use it to allow us to become stronger. More compassionate. More aware. And More organized.

This post will be updated as the story develops.

Read the full statement below:Photo: Courtesy of HBO

Spoilers ahead for the Sharp Objects finale.

As if Ammas eerie fascination with her dollhouse wasnt enough to make Sharp Objects viewers cringe, now we know evil was buried in the floors all along, hiding Wind Gaps darkest secrets inside the magnificent replica of her familys Victorian mansion. Throughout the series, Camilles (Amy Adams) half-sister has led a double life: Shes a perfect mommas girl at home, and when shes skating around town, shes the local mean girl who manipulates all kinds of mayhem. But the Sharp Objects finale ends with a shock of shocks, at least for those who havent read Gillian Flynns novel: Amma is the real killer, not Adora, and she was collecting her victims teeth to recreate her mothers prized ivory bedroom floor.

When you realize that she was killing them to have the teeth to make the floor  how crazy, you know?! director Jean-Marc Vallee told Vulture. And then she killed the new friend! Probably to have more teeth to finish her piece of art! Her obsession with teeth, their obsession with perfection, its destroying them. This image of perfection is also a reflection of destruction.

Flynn told Vulture just seeing the dollhouse she had conjured for her 2006 novel was gut-wrenching, but the reveal of the tooth inlaid-floor hit her hardest. For me, obviously knowing how it was going to end, I felt my stomach clench, too, she said. Theres something about reading and writing something thats very different from actually seeing it as an audience member. I felt unsettled, queasy, frightened. I was the audience member going, Dont look in the dollhouse! Dont look in the dollhouse! and also at the same time, Look in the dollhouse! Look in the dollhouse!

It was production designer John Painos painstaking job to make sure everything about Ammas dollhouse was perfect for filming, including the floors that Amma made from the teeth she pulled from Ann, Natalie, and (gasp!) her new friend Mae. Prop makers used plastic baby teeth to create the floor, which Camille discovers in the closing moments of the finale, and Paino says it required meticulous work to get it just right.

Adora's bedroom in the dollhouse. Courtesy HBO. Adora's bedroom in the dollhouse. Courtesy HBO.

We shaved them down on the backs and a little bit on the top, so it would seem like she had made an attempt to make them resemble the tusk process, because the floor looks like if theres walrus tusks or whale tusks or elephant tusks, Paino said of the prop teeth. She made this fabulous dollhouse, so she would have probably gone to great lengths to sand them down and make them almost unnoticeable. There was a lot of back and forth about how far to go with camouflaging the teeth. We ended up putting one or two under the bed to make it more prevalent, so you could see them.

Horrifying floor aside, the dollhouse is pretty spectacular: It has practically everything you see in Adoras (Patricia Clarkson) house, from the hand-painted wallpaper, to paintings hanging on the walls, to a miniature stereo system like the one Alan (Henry Czerny) plays constantly to tune out his miserable life.

This family, this mother, and their image of perfection, this is how they live in this crazy house, Vallee said. And then theres a reproduction of this crazy house? The house has a dollhouse? They pay for their daughter to play with this giant dollhouse because theyre so in love with the world theyre creating without realizing that this is a horror film. It is a horror house.

Building the dollhouse was a meticulous process that production undertook while simultaneously building the interiors of the mansion at Occidental Stages in Los Angeles. Normally, youre deciding on the colors and the paint and ordering furniture  which takes time  and having things especially made, like paintings and everything to dress the house. But in this case, it was doubly hard because we were creating all of these things while also having to build the same for a dollhouse, Paino said. We went to people who make dollhouses outside the industry, and usually it takes two to three years to build something like that. We had two-and-a-half to three months.

The construction process. Courtesy HBO. The construction process. Courtesy HBO.

To begin, the house in Redwood Valley, California that was used for exterior shots was surveyed, and then three mockups were built as the team tried to figure out which was the best size for filming. It was kind of like Goldilocks. One was too big, one size was too small, and one was just right, Paino said. We needed it to be big enough to be shootable, but not so big that you cant get around it and it feels strange in the house its so big.

In the end, the dollhouse was built at three-quarter-inch scale and stood at five-feet wide and three-feet tall. Our dollhouse was in a scale that was great for filming, but there was no pre-made furniture for it, Paino said. Everything had to be made from scratch. Jean-Marc Vallee had to think about how exactly he wanted to shoot it, so that it could open up in certain ways when Amma is showing it off in various episodes. But sometimes we had to adjust for changes if things were re-written, like they re-wrote a part so they could peer through a window. The whole process was a nail biter.

The shell of the house was contracted out to a model shop, while all fabrics were hand-sewn, and a few painters were hired to match the same colors inside Adoras mansion. Three or four prop makers built all of the furniture, cutting every stick of wood by hand. The shingles on the roof, we got those measured. They have to be made by hand. You cant get those at the dollhouse store, Paino said. There were maybe 1,000 shingles that have to be made, weathered, and painted. It was very time-consuming.

The dollhouse interior. Courtesy HBO. The dollhouse interior. Courtesy HBO.

Our [property] master Hope M. Parrish and her team did an amazing job and our set decorator Amy Wells was fantastic, he added. Amy needs time to get samples and look at different types of furniture, see what wallpaper is available. Some of our wallpaper was extremely exclusive and hand-painted and came from overseas. So the person making the dollhouse was asking things like, When are you going to tell me what the couch looks like? And its one of those things where you say, Well, were figuring it out. This was a very complicated prop from that perspective.

Dollhouse furniture was built to scale. Courtesy HBO. Dollhouse furniture was built to scale. Courtesy HBO.

Adoras bedroom was the most important part to feature  especially for its role in the finale  and designers gave it the most space. Everything was replicated, from artwork to pillows to tchotchkes. Obviously there are some things that we might not put in  not every piece of furniture  because when you reduce it, you reduce it in scale and play a little bit with it, Paino said. But we really tried to make it as true to life as possible.

Doll figures for every member of the family were made, too. (Even Alan.) While furniture was built for the entire house, eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed in the first episode that Camilles bedroom remained empty. We made furniture for all of it, Paino said. But Jean-Marc may have taken a few pieces of furniture out to emphasize that Camille is not on her sisters radar and Adora has very mixed feelings about Camille. Adora helped her make the house so perhaps they didnt spend as much time on that.

The sturdy dollhouse is surprisingly easy to move: The top section, as seen in the show, is easily removable. We had a special crate, like a shipping crate, that we had put it in because God forbid if anything happened to it, Paino said. But if someone trips and it falls, its not going to break into a million pieces. It was very protected. It was extremely expensive to make.

Paino declined to provide an exact construction cost, but said the dollhouse was so labor-intensive it landed somewhere in the six figures. An incomplete second dollhouse was also built because in the book, Camille smashes it while looking for proof that Amma is the killer. But Flynn and showrunner Marti Noxon left that detail out of their scripts, so the scene was never filmed.

A year after Sharp Objects production ended, Ammas dollhouse is now safely tucked away at Fake Studio, the post-production house in Montreal where the show was completed. The most amazing thing to me is that it really looks like the actual set inside and out, Paino said. When its inside the house, its a little creepy. Its a house in a house. Its a little strange.

Hillary Kelly contributed reporting to this article.Amy Adams as Camille. Photo: Anne Marie Fox/HBO

Gillian Flynn insists she never even considered changing the ending of Sharp Objects to shock faithful readers who had tuned in to the show. The book was published over a decade ago and its double-twist ending probably wasnt well-known; some authors might jump at the chance to have another go at their first novel. But Flynn kept the bones of the story intact. We were all in agreement that we wanted it to be faithful to the book, she explained in a Vulture interview. Changing it would be sort of mystifying.

Adora is still found out as a Munchausen by proxy murderer (a diagnosis many of us first learned about from a young, ghostly Mischa Barton in The Sixth Sense) and sent to prison. Amma is sent to the city to live with Camille, where she struggles to acclimate, but makes a new friend. Camille briefly senses that life may be settling into a manageable rhythm. And then the new friend ends up dead, and Ammas the one who murdered her. We dont see Maes body on the show  only a flash of the death scene in the end credits  but the book offers a vivid description of her body propped tidily next to a Dumpster  Only six of her teeth had been pulled, the oversized front two and four on the bottom. Presumably, Amma ran out of time.

Despite leaving the framing intact, however, the tone of the shows ending wildly diverges from the novels. The novel and the show soften the story in different places, but ultimately, the book gives Camille a sense of closure that she lacks onscreen.

But before we get to that end, the show amps up the drama, namely with Richards rescue scene. In the novel, Camille allows her mother to poison her, albeit not nearly to the same degree. She takes a glass of bluish milk from her mother, drinking it while thinking, either the drink makes me sick and I know Im not insane, or it doesnt, and I know Im a hateful creature. Two days later, after explaining to Richard that she believes it was her mother who killed Marian, Ann, and Natalie  and Richard tells her he has a warrant to come the next day and search the house  she accepts a glass of liquid that smells like brown apples. Shes sick and feverish, and wakes up in her own urine. But shes never near death, and she doesnt call out for Richard, or send Amma to go find him like she does in the show. Camille accepts that the pills and mysterious milky medicine may hurt her, but she also knows that Richard will be coming by. She offers herself as a body for a toxicology report, not a potential victim. And Richard doesnt metaphorically break down the door to discover where his lover has been secreted. He walks in, standard operating procedure, warrant in hand.

In the novel, Camille also has no closure with Richard. She never sees him again after he comes in and discovers her in a robe, asking (not very subtly), Whats wrong with you? Youre a cutter? There is no apology in the hospital room, no soft parting. Camille remains as convinced of her bodys ability to repel as she was before.

In the book, Camille and Amma also live together (St. Louis on the show, Chicago in the book), but its not the smile-inducing, magical musical montage that the show provides. Instead, Amma is wildly needy and afire with anxiety. She cultivates an obsession with female serial killers, which her therapist attributes to Amma trying to find a way to forgive her mother. She slaps Camille for buying the wrong color upholstery for her dollhouse. The two dont share a teary but languorous ride to Adoras prison cell, where they hug and share sisterly glances. Instead, its Camille who later visits Amma in prison, where she asks for the answers we never get in the show.

Camille promises herself she wont ask about the killings, but the questions pour out of her. Amma explains that first the girls were her friends and they had fun: We were wild. Wed hurt things together. We killed a cat once. But then Adora began to take an interest in them. They werent my secrets anymore, she says. They started asking questions about me being sick. They were going to ruin everything. Camille makes her own assumptions, too  that Amma killed the girls out of jealousy. Its a scene that works on the page, but would feel awfully heavy-handed on the screen. These are things we already know, or at least implicitly understand. Amma cant bring herself to turn on her mother because she got her own sick enjoyment out of the attention that accompanied the fevers and vomiting and days in bed. Unlike Marian, Amma played along. Its no coincidence that Amma rearranged is simply Mama.

As for Camille herself, the aftermath of Amma and Adoras imprisonment leaves her weak and susceptible in the novel. And here is where the ending of the show really whisks away a chance at Camilles redemption  or possible slide into the family disease. The day Amma is arrested in the novel, Camille slips a knife up her sleeve and finally cuts into the one part of her body she has left pure. In the bathroom, she explains, I stripped off my shirt and dug it deep into the perfect circle on my back. Ground it back and forth until the skin was shredded in scribbly cuts. Curry broke in just before I went for my face. There is no mention or glimpse of the perfect circle on the show, but it functioned in the novel as a metaphor for her restraint, that she always managed to keep it uncut (mainly because it was so difficult to reach).

By cutting things off just after Camille sees the teeth in Ammas dollhouse floor, the show doesnt let us see that Curry then takes Camille into his home, where she says she is learning to be cared for. Its impossible to discern if she is learning to be just like Marian and Amma, or if shes simply letting her guard down. Eileen and Curry treat her like their child. They wake her and put her to bed with kisses. Eileen runs her baths and brushes her hair.

The last few lines of the article that Camille writes and Curry reads aloud on the show are actually the last lines of the novel. Was I good at caring for Amma because of kindness? Or did I like caring for Amma because I have Adoras sickness? I waver between the two, especially at night, when my skin begins to pulse.

Lately, Ive been leaning towards kindness.

The Camille of the show may be about to head off into an even uglier place  we just dont know  but the Camille of the novel at least retains an ounce of hope.Photo: Christopher Polk/Getty Images

Spoilers ahead for the Sharp Objects finale.

Before Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated director Jean-Marc Vallee entertained the idea of turning Big Little Lies into a TV sensation, he had already committed to directing HBOs Sharp Objects. The Canadian filmmaker thought it would be his first TV series, and he signed on out of a desire to work with actor Amy Adams, but also because of his emotional response to Gillian Flynns original novel.

Ive never seen, read, met, heard anyone like Camille Preaker, Vallee told Vulture in an interview. Gillian Flynns world is something so dark, and yet something beautiful about the humanity behind this. These women trying to love, and they dont know how. They just have such a bad history of abuse, and its sad. Its heartbreaking to see how much they try, but theyre sick. I had never tackled this kind of dark material, so I wanted to work with this wonderful actress to honor this book, this world, and this piece of imagination that is so unique.

But before production began on Sharp Objects, actor Reese Witherspoon  who had collaborated with Vallee on Wild  offered him a chance to direct Big Little Lies, which went on to win eight Emmys last year. I thought I might become a zombie directing these two whole things back-to-back, but I said, Lets cross our fingers and see if Im a superhuman being with a lot of energy and support, Vallee said. Apparently, I do have all that and lots of good help, but Im dead now. Im too tired.

In an extended conversation about Sharp Objects, Vallee explained why he chose to bury the lede, as reporter Camille Preaker might say, and not reveal the Wind Gap killers identity until the very end of the finale. He also discussed his musical choices and his bond with Led Zeppelin, why he added fans to so many scenes, and why he wants Amma Crellin (Eliza Scanlen) and Wind Gaps cool kids to travel on roller skates.

I want to start at the very end because it was insane. Why did you decide to show us the crucial evidence after the credits rolled?

It was written to be at the end, before the end credits. It didnt make sense to cut to these flashes from Ammas perspective, suddenly, as were with Camille. The whole series was designed through Camilles perspective. So shes the one discovering the teeth and the floor made out of teeth. Were with her and she sees Amma arriving, so of course, she wasnt there when Amma killed the girls. That didnt make sense to cut to these images from Camilles perspective, and it didnt make sense to cut suddenly to Amma because, of course, Amma is not thinking about, Oh, let me think about how I killed this girl. It wasnt good storytelling, you know?

The writers put it in there and we shot it, but we thought maybe we dont need this at all. Maybe we just finish on Dont tell mama. Which is what I did. And then, suddenly when we were editing, I went, Wait a minute, why dont we just give it away later on? We explained with these quick images and glimpses of what happened  we now officially know, Oh my God, it was Amma. And not only it was Amma, it was Amma helped by her two friends. So now we have the conclusion. We have the official answer to our questions. You know who killed and why, and so it made sense particularly using this song [Led Zeppelins In the Evening]. Theres no time for any images there. The song goes on and as its about to finish, Robert Plant sings, Oh, I need your love and  bang!  we cut the music and we go to this moment with the first song that we ever used in the series, Sylvan Essos Come Down. Which is a song that refers to mama: Hey, mama, wont you come down? And continued the end credits until we reveal the real woman in white.

Are you nervous that people might not watch that whole sequence?

Not at all. A lot of them will stop before seeing it, and then it will become a thing on the web. And theyll go, Oh my God, go back if you havent seen it.

What did you tell Eliza Scanlen in that moment when Amma says, Dont tell mama? I found her reaction funny in a way, like she got caught stealing candy.

She just got caught by her sister and her first reaction is like a kid. Shes nervous. We discussed the sense of the guilt. You just got caught doing something naughty, like a teenager being caught by his parents doing something stupid. But that something stupid is more than stupid. Its the worst. Its evil. But I said, Dont go evil. Just go like youre a stupid teenager. [Laughs.] Theres a hell of a smile, theres half of a breath, and then delivering the line Eliza has such good instincts. She just nailed that part. When you have good actors like this, theres not a lot to say or do. You just witness. Youre there. You capture and you say cut and thank you.

You won an Emmy for directing Big Little Lies, you were nominated for an Oscar, and youve become renown for your shooting style. No marks, no rehearsals, no shot list. How do you get actors who have never worked with you to be comfortable working in that fluid style? Especially with someone as young as Eliza.

Well, its not just the young actors. Most of them are used to working with marks, spots, track, dollies, lights here and there, flags. We dont do this. When they arrive on set, they see it will be different. But its easy to make them feel comfortable because there is no crew, so they dont feel like theyre being observed  except by the cameraman, the operator, the focus puller, the boom, and myself. I often ask the boom guy to get out because theres not enough room, and we just use hidden mics in their wardrobe.

And its about doing the scene over and over. We rarely cut. I like to just keep rolling and doing another take. Even between shots, were moving handheld. The camera is on the shoulder of the DP or the operator, and we move from one actor to the other, designing the shots. Theyre just redoing it and redoing it and redoing it for maybe 30 minutes until we cut, so theres something challenging and interesting for them to keep trying. They feel it. They bring something new. They try something less. They try something more. They can move a little bit more. They can use the space wherever they want and so it creates this space of freedom, of trying and not being afraid to mess up and to make a mistake.

We dont change lens, also. Ninety percent of the time, were using the same 35-millimeter and thats why we like to create this sense of distance between the audience and the characters. Its not because we changed lenses that we go tighter on an actor. Its because they walk close to camera or because we walk close to them. We wont start walking with the camera unless theres a motivation to follow a character, so they love it because its like a big playground to experiment and work and play at the same time. The nature of their job is to play and act.

How long does it usually take before actors stop questioning it and can just freely work in that space?

The first day, the first scene maybe. I remember Eliza asking Chris [Messina] and Amy, Is it always like this? And they said, No, so enjoy it. Since we dont wait for the technique, we just explore the storytelling and the acting. This is what I love as a director, to tell stories with great actors. This is the priority. Lets get these great actors and give them the space to do their magic, and lets capture the magic without being spotted. Thats how were moved. Were the first audience. Im there as the director and Im moved. Im in it and I see it and I love it, and then I design the shots based on what they do.

I know that music is also very important to you, and its important in the lives of these particular characters, especially Camille and Alan. Why did you select Led Zeppelin as Camilles soundtrack?

Well, there are a few reasons, but I think the main one is the nature of their sounds. Which is rock  vintage. Its not modern. Theres something about Led Zeppelin that suits this character. Its the nature of rock and roll to make noise and to be loud and say, Im gonna do it my way. Its confirming in a loud way that youre different. Camille doesnt use a loud voice, but she is so different. She is so rock.

There are only four Led Zeppelin songs that we use. We keep using them over and over. She likes to listen to them over and over. [Alice], the young woman that she meet at the rehab center, is a nice way of introducing music into Camilles world. She uses music to escape from within, from inside, like Alice taught her. She tells her in episode three, I can get the hell out of here whenever I want, and she puts her an ear bud in Camilles ear. And so, that is what Camille is doing learning to deal by using music.



We use music in our lives not necessarily to define ourselves, but it does. It does that. We use music to live, to love, to feel happy, to work sometimes. I always like to find characters in a project that will do that. Its great to design scenes and tell stories with this music element.

Your music supervisor Sue Jacobs told us that Led Zeppelin was important to you growing up. How so?

Im 55. I was born in 1963. So the 70s were my teenage years. As a teenager, I was into rock and roll  Bowie, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, even more progressive music like Genesis, and I was into a lot of British rock and roll. But I loved also American rock and roll. CCR, Jimmie Hendrix, The Doors, Patty Smith and Bob Dylan. Rock was my thing. It influences me and moves me, and its music that gives me ideas or wings to fly and to make films. Once I get into a project, I start to listen to music, and of course I go through my music library. It starts there. And then I do research. On Sharp, I ask Sue for a big list of rock and roll songs with the term mama in it, and came up with 100 songs or so. Ammas listening to these tracks, mainly. At one point, she plays Dear Mama from Tupac. That was just something we tried on set. It was nice to see this teenager play this track and go to her mother and, despite the abuse, show unconditional love and just hug her and start to dance with her. No dialogue. Just the moment.

What was your favorite use of a Led Zeppelin song in the show?

Oh my God, I love them all. But the ultimate is the end of episode eight when we use again In the Evening. This track was chosen because of its nature. The 45-second introduction with no lyrics, this moody music with the feel of danger and mystery, and then suddenly, it explodes into the rock song that is In The Evening. We use that introduction from episode one to episode eight, just those 45 seconds, as a score moment here and there. We can hear what [Camille] hears in her head with her ear buds in her ears. So this 45-second intro that explodes into the rock part after we hear Dont tell mama is a moment that I really enjoy.

How hard was it to get the rights to Led Zeppelins music?

Thanks to our great music supervisor, Sue Jacobs. She just knew how to make the sale there. She likes to say that she reunites music lovers and artists that have similar visions. Using Led Zeppelin as one of the most important sounds of the series was a blessing. It took time to get the deal, but its great to offer to new generations what these guys did. Its not classical music, but its classic music in a way. This rock and roll will never die, you know? Its so special. Even today, when you revisit Led Zeppelins library, there are so many tracks. Theres a track called Tea For One, that I rediscovered recently. And I went, Oh my god, this is so amazing.

What about Alan? What were you thinking about in terms of his musical tastes?

Classical music. Solo piano. When you hear a solo piano, theres a solitude about just one instrument playing. It can be beautiful, it can be sad. Hes into crooners  Engelbert Humperdinck, Perry Como, Robert Goulet, old-school Hollywood. He likes to listen to French music, romantic songs. Hes a man whos not satisfied with his personal life and his relationship with his wife. Hes using music to dream and to be romantic in his head.

I realized I used a lot of my fathers songs with Alan. I work with what Ive been listening to through the years and in my life in different projects. The songs bring you back to what you just saw in the story, or it brings you back to your own memory cause the music has this power to generate emotions and to trigger stuff in your brain. Its very powerful. Music is a subjective thing in every story. Its such a beautiful art form and I owe so much to all these musicians and I respect their art so much. I love to offer a playlist to the world, almost like being a deejay.

One aspect of the book that had to be tricky to figure out was Camilles obsession with words. The show doesnt use voice over, but hidden words appear and disappear on the screen, which I believe you came up with in editing. How did you decide to use the words in this way?

The whole idea came as I was shooting, but it was in the editing room that we really found the concept and how we were going to use it visually. This is just Camilles thing: Whenever a word is burning on her hip or back or stomach or leg, its appearing in her reality, but when its somebody elses perspective, you dont see the word. So we had to be selective in the shots that we were using to add these words. It had to be shots from Camilles perspective only, and not like Adoras POV on Camille. Of course, we werent gonna put a word in there, in reality. Its just her imagining these words as theyre burning her body. Her obsession with words was so great in the book. To read her talk about it was amazing in the book. Gillian and Marti [Noxon] decided not to use a voice over, so I just felt, Why dont we bring this obsession with words into her reality?

In the book, there are 74 words on her body, so with the visual effects team, we decided to put 74 words in the eight episodes that are words burning on her body. Although we dont hear her say anything about the words, at least we go into her head, and we have this feeling, Oh, okay, theres this word again. If you havent read the book, then you wonder what these words are. But you get it pretty soon that its just from her perspective.

There were an extraordinary number of fans in the series. That was your idea, right?

Its an element of trying to find sharp objects and focus on sharp objects. Same as the barbershop. The barbershop wasnt in the book or in the scripts. I asked Marti and Gillian, Why dont we add some scenes in a barbershop where well see this guy with blades, and characters getting their beard cut with these dangerous blades, and hearing the sound of them?

The fans are everywhere because its the South. Its hot. And we created this scene where we see a young Camille getting her finger closer and closer and closer to her fan. We said, Well, thats probably the first time she cut. And then, this fan thing is becoming an obsession also in her head. Theyre everywhere. She remembers this moment when she was playing with her sister Marian in her mothers room in front of that fan. It became a visual element that was nice to use here and there, and the sound of it also was great. Its a dangerous element. Its a sharp object, these blades.

Since were talking about the things you added, what about the roller skating? Eliza said she had to learn to roller skate for the show, and Amma doesnt roller skate all over Wind Gap in the book.

Its again trying to create visuals and use sound to create atmosphere. I just love the sound of those roller skates on the pavement. Theres a feeling of having seeing these girls all together, the three of them thinking that theyre the coolest. Amma has learned a lot from Adora and the town about Camille and that she used to skate around town. There is that first flashback, the first scene of the whole series where young Camille is roller skating with Marian in the 90s. And then, theres a crazy, wild scene with Camille and Amma as they are totally wasted on drugs and alcohol, skating through Wind Gap. So it was a great tool to create moments and visuals and sounds.

Your locations manager told me that Barnesville, Georgia, the town that was used for Wind Gap, wasnt even on his list of finalists, but you drove through it and fell in love. What was so special about Barnesville?

It has a feeling of Americana, of nostalgic America. There were these murals of a tire man, there was a red wagon, a red train car next to a vintage train station. There was something about this place that it got stuck in time. As we were passing from one small town to the other, they didnt stop there because we were looking for this square architecture  like in Back to the Future, where theres the mayor, theres a town, theres a square at the middle of the town with the city hall, you know.

When we were in Georgia, we passed through Barnesville. These elements  the red train car and the vintage mural of the tire man, and the feel of the place  I just went, Lets go back and check this out, guys. I think theres something there. We went on the main street and I looked at [production designer] John Paino and Greg Albert, the locations scout, and I went, I think we got it, guys. And it became Wind Gap.

Last question: Would you do another season if HBO asked?

Uh-oh. Oy. I was asked the same thing on BLL and my answer was no. [Laughs.] Then BLL two is coming out. I would have loved to do it, but at the same time I couldnt. Im glad Andrea Arnold took over. Would I do season two? I dont know. Maybe, maybe. Its meant to be a limited TV series and I have other projects, so I think Im gonna be somewhere else. No, I wont. Id love to work with all these people again. Every one of them. But lets do something else.Photo: Anne Marie Fox/HBO

Sharp Objects finishes on a dissonant, horror-movie note: one last scare that slithers into the frame when you thought it was over. The trial of pork mogul Adora Crellin (Patricia Clarkson) has concluded, and shes been sent to prison for committing a string of murders in Wind Gap, Missouri. Teenage Amma (Eliza Scanlen), now ensconced in St. Louis with her recovering alcoholic half-sister Camille (Amy Adams) and making new friends, appears in a doorway right after Camille learns the truth: In the scale model dollhouse of their childhood home, Adoras ivory bedroom floor has been recreated with teeth from murder victims gums. So Amma is the real killer  the Woman in White glimpsed at the edge of dark woods where teenage Camille once let boys have sex with her, or was gang-raped, according to visiting detective Richard Willis (Chris Messina).

Is this a plausible instance of childhood trauma paying itself forward in the form of multiple killings? Is it a cheap scare that doesnt really jibe with what we know about Amma, or about the psychology of young girls generally? Is it a thought experiment designed to trap sexist viewers who, to paraphrase a casual remark Amma made to Chief Vickery (Matt Craven), believe that women arent capable of such savagery? All of those things, probably. Perhaps more importantly, its an intense yet dreamy look at a woman with a tragic past whos introduced circling the bottom of the drain and nearly gets pulled through the grate.

Its that last aspect that most fascinates. Ive had many discussions with friends about the terrible journalism practiced by Camille (who drinks to excess, sleeps with two sources, and is rarely shown taking anything but the paltriest notes), as well as her editor and surrogate dad, Frank Curry (Miguel Sandoval), who dispatches a mediocre writer and established screw-up to report a potentially explosive out-of-town crime story, knowing full well that letting her stay with her mother, the towns most powerful citizen, would expose the paper to conflict-of-interest charges. This is all easy to make fun of, and Ive kidded it myself. (Camille is marginally less incompetent in the book, where at least we get a continuous stream of her thoughts and theories about the assignment.)

But Sharp Objects is so uninterested in being a primer on good journalism that fixating on that aspect seems as pointless as blasting Vertigo for its portrayal of surveillance work, or the Dirty Harry series for its representation of urban policing. Whats happening onscreen in this HBO miniseries is emotionally logical and psychologically astute, if deeply masochistic, to the point where watching the show amounts to marinating for one hour a week in a bathtub filled with tears. Its the story of a woman who seems to have reached the end of a very bad, short road, and returns to her origins for a reckoning that could either save or destroy her. It wraps an intuitive and inner-directed story inside such a meticulous, at times tactile-seeming depiction of life as its actually lived. The tension between those two impulses is what makes it pop.

Sharp Objects  based on Gillian Flynns novel, and overseen by Flynn, writer-producer Marti Noxon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and director Jean-Marc Vallee (Big Little Lies)  occupies a fascinating and precarious place in popular culture. It is outwardly realistic in every aspect, from its lived-in performances and atmospheric location shooting to its prismatic sound design and its nonlinear editing, which strives to replicate how the brain remembers and suppresses trauma. But in its heart, its a tragedy, a doom spiral about a damaged person slowly coming to terms with her damage, immersing herself in hell one last time and emerging, if not stronger, then alive, at least.

Its telling and understandable that some would criticize the series for building its story around a woman who is more acted-upon than acted. Camille seems  between the booze, the cutting, and the impulsive sex  to have spent most of her life engaged in a systematic act of self-negation. She doesnt return home triumphantly and start kicking over rocks; she slips in, and seems hesitant and wounded even when shes being bold. The character has been hurt, and hurt herself, in more ways than can be counted, and theres a hint of the flinch to how she interacts with people. When she finally comes face to face with The Truth about her mother and father, its as if shes been pulled there by forces not entirely within her control. Is it good for women, indeed for the culture, for an Oscar-nominated star like Amy Adams to take a role like this, and for HBO to bankroll it so handsomely and package it with such flair? No one ever asks such questions of stories about men flirting with oblivion, and there have been many excellent ones, including Under the Volcano, All That Jazz, Bad Lieutenant, and seven seasons of Mad Men. Were not yet at the point where a womans story can be one womans story and secondarily (and only optionally) Womans Story. But were getting there, and Sharp Objects is part of that shift.

What a strange, alternately infuriating and intoxicating ride this miniseries was. I started reading Flynns book before I began watching the HBO adaptation. Then I set the book aside, because I was so mesmerized by what Flynn, Noxon, and Vallee were doing  and by how tonally different it was from its source  that I realized Id rather reach the end of the story on the screen. Flynns book is told in first person, in a voice that seems equally influenced by hardboiled crime potboilers and the literary fiction subgenre about troubled writers returning to the miserable small town that spawned them and confronting the place in all its complexity and hypocrisy. The story ends more or less the same way in both versions, and hopefully it wont sound like a knock against either to say that (1) I didnt really believe Amma was capable of that kind of violence, and (2) this reaction didnt affect my respect for either version at all.

I cant remember the last time I watched a series where every episode left me feeling anxious and depressed to the point of emotional paralysis, yet also eager to immediately revisit the fictional space that the actors and filmmakers had so obsessively brought to life. Strange as it might sound, by the end of its run, the current TV production that Sharp Objects most reminded me of was Donald Glovers FX series Atlanta, which also fuses a borderline documentary-like sensibility with surreal situations and nightmare logic. Glovers Atlanta is the sort of place where people can have accurate discussions of restaurants, geography, dating rituals, and the current political climates effect on class and race, while at the same time encountering invisible cars, giant alligators being kept as household pets, and feuding showbiz brothers, one of whom serves soft-boiled ostrich eggs to guests as snacks. Sharp Objects recreates the stifling atmosphere, desolate streets, and reactionary social mores of a small town so vividly that it makes you want to pack your bags in preparation to leave a place you never actually lived in. But its also a story where the past and the present blur together, and we see words that the heroine carved into her flesh appearing on billboards and signage, and the main plot is woven around a series of murders that are nearly Hannibal-esque in their grotesque flamboyance. The image of a girls decaying corpse propped up like a rag doll will never leave my mind; its so searing that the show never feels the need to revisit it in flashback, because every time you pass that alley, you cant help but remember it.

This is ultimately a horror-movie space, as driven by fear, desire, and unconscious forces as Castle Rock, Twin Peaks, and Haddonfield. Wind Gaps mythology is built around a Civil War gang rape and a womens rebellion that never happened. The biggest local employer is a hog butchering factory that the citizens can hear and smell from miles away. The murder-mutilations are ultimately laid at the feet of the factorys owner, a Munchausen-by-proxy sufferer and amateur apothecary, and her stepdaughter, a junior serial killer who lures children into the woods and tears the teeth from their corpses. The unreality is so real, the reality so unreal, that trying to fix what youre seeing with a single label seems a bad faith exercise, or at the very least, insufficient to the task of coming to grips with what weve seen. The characters wander through a landscape of metaphors, both incidental and created. Camilles cutting is as fantastically overwrought as the tattoos on ex-felon Max Cadys body in Martin Scorseses 1991 remake of Cape Fear, a very different story about a disgraced prodigal child who returns home to force former neighbors to face their hypocrisy. Camille even has completely legible words on her back. How did they get there? It doesnt matter. As realistic as the sounds and textures may be, this story unfolds in a dreamscape.

Horror is what binds it together. Not just the frisson of revulsion that we experience in life whenever we come face-to-face with violence or decay, but the idea of horror, the genre of horror, the theory and practice of horror. A friend once summarized the premise of every great horror story as, The thing you fear most is what happens. Wind Gap is itself a vortex of decay, inhabited by characters who seem as lost as Camille, even if they dont score their bodies with words. The entire story seems to be at risk of collapsing on itself. And the first two-thirds of the final episode  titled Milk, as in mothers, perhaps  have the twilight credulity of a bedtime story, the old-fashioned kind that made kids stay up at night wondering if the floorboards creaked because a monster was hiding under the bed.

Adora grinds chemicals with a mortar and pestle and poisons her two living daughters. More, mama, pleads the bedridden, regressed Camille, taking a spoonful, the red liquid spotting her white nightgown. Amma holds forth at the family dinner table on the myth of Persephone, queen of the underworld, while wearing a flower crown. Im just helping nature along, Adora tells her husband. Its better if you dont try to stand, Amma tells Camille. Crawlings okay. This family is as dysfunctional as anything in a Tennessee Williams or Eugene ONeill play, and they act out as dimly aware that were watching them, a theater audience leaning forward in its seats hoping to see each glimmer of pain more clearly. Its kinda funny, huh, how many stories there are where princesses need to get rescued from witches, Amma says at their last family supper, foretelling the arrival of Frank and Richard (their entrance announced by red and blue police lights flickering on the ceiling), and inadvertently predicting how well feel about her post-Adora relationship with Camille, who assumes a maternal role and becomes princess to the younger womans witch.

I want to go back again, now. More, mama.Neil Simon. Photo: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

In 1991, on his tenth try, and after a theater career that had spanned 30 years and almost as many Broadway productions, Neil Simon finally won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He was rewarded for, at long last, not writing a Neil Simon play. Lost in Yonkers was, in many ways, a memory piece that was his attempt at a Jewish Glass Menagerie  the story of an angry, quarrelsome, not all that loving family thrown together in close quarters during World War II, with a hard, cold matriarch at its center. This is what we do so often to popular artists  we take the talent for granted but we withhold the reward until the pivot, the proof that Jack Palance can make us laugh or MoNique can terrify us or, in this case, that a funny man can get serious. Finally, here was evidence that Simon, who died on Sunday at 91, wasnt just funny; he could be important. By then, he had climbed every other mountain available to him: Ten Tony nominations for his plays, four Oscar nominations for his screenplays, a career that began during TVs first golden age of sketch comedy with him in the writers room for Your Show of Shows and Caesars Hour hes immortalized in My Favorite Year as the funny writer who was so nervous he could only whisper his jokes), and an epic run as the most commercially successful Broadway playwright in the history of the form.

And then it stopped. After Lost in Yonkers, Simon had a few more new plays produced  none of them hits on the level of Barefoot In the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, The Sunshine Boys or the other work that had made him famous. For most of his career, it had been enough just to be funny, but suddenly, his rat-a-tat style, his almost compulsive belief that there was no moment that could not be undercut or leavened with a perfectly crafted one-liner, was out of step with the times. Audiences did not want an audience-pleaser. He was dismissed as a laugh machine, synthetic, a gagmeister. When directors attempted to rethink his plays  a 2006 revival of Barefoot that worked hard to avoid laugh lines, a 2009 stab at Brighton Beach Memoirs that attempted to reapproach his dialogue with naturalism  they were brought down by the relentless gunfire rhythms of Simons speech, a mode he invented, and one that became, for a stretch in the 1960s and 1970s, the default language of American comedy. Was it that time had passed him by, or that his audience had just become impatient with a man who could do one particular thing better than almost anyone else and wanted to keep doing it?

Simons comedy was fledged in television, then honed on Broadway in the 1960s with the invaluable collaboration of his early director Mike Nichols, who insisted that funny things come out of real behaviors and undergirded Simons dialogue by seeking psychologically and physically grounded ways for his actors to play it; he pushed Doc, as he was known, for fixes and rewrites right up until the opening-night curtain rose. Simon was staggeringly prolific and successful. During the first half of 1967, he had three plays and a musical running on Broadway simultaneously, and for many years he owned a Broadway theater, the Eugene ONeill (he sold his interest about a decade before a different Broadway house, the Alvin, was named after him).

Many of the biggest laughs he got stemmed from exasperation. The moment in The Odd Couple when Oscar Madison explodes at his roommate, You leave me little notes! We are out of corn flakes. F.U. It took me 15 minutes to figure out F.U. stood for Felix Unger! was a last-minute rewrite that so completely upended the first audience that heard it that Walter Matthau, who played Oscar, had to pick up a prop newspaper and read it onstage until the roars died down. The echt Simon character is male, urban, neurotic, Jewish (or Jewish-ish), and at the very end of his rope, shouting as if its the only way to keep from losing his grip. Hes the middle-aged shlub of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, or Richard Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl snatching Marsha Masons underwear off a shower bar (I dont! Like! The Panties! Hanging! On! The Rod!); his most memorable women are caustic and/or alcoholic (The Gingerbread Lady, Only When I Laugh, California Suite) or goodhearted criers trying to keep the world from dragging them down any further. Simon could turn uncontainable urban frustration into comically woebegone arias  few playwrights better knew the sound of a pot finally boiling over  but he was best with duets, high-volume battles where both participants gave as good as they got. He never met a silence he liked. (Also, he came from an era before hashtags, and for him, the word problematic meant isnt getting a laugh, so nobody who revisits his plays or movies should be surprised to find his generally goodhearted work marred by the occasional drive-by stereotype.)

His roles were catnip for performers. Up until opening the author and director control a play, he said in 1963. Then its the actors. Fifty times, they received Tony nominations or awards for saying his words. Robert Redford, Elizabeth Ashley, Art Carney, Walter Matthau, George C. Scott, Linda Lavin, Maureen Stapleton, Mercedes Ruehl, Kevin Spacey, Christine Baranski, Alan Alda, and Matthew Broderick (as Simons alter ego Eugene in the first two installments of the autobiographical Brighton Beach trilogy) are among those who distinguished themselves by originating roles in his plays; George Burns, Maggie Smith, and Dreyfuss won Oscars for their work in his movies; Simons second wife Marsha Mason was nominated for three Academy Awards for Simon movies, once for playing a version of herself in Chapter Two, which was loosely based on his marriage to her after the early death from cancer of his first wife Joan Baim. He had a great one-off success writing The Heartbreak Kid for Nicholss partner Elaine May (who directed) and her daughter Jeannie Berlin (who starred), and he sidelighted in musicals with Promises, Promises and Little Me. He was also a shrewd businessman, who, after being locked out of profits from the TV series The Odd Couple, made sure to protect himself from getting similarly screwed ever again. Every playwright today who is able to drive a hard bargain owes him a debt.

A 2004 kidney transplant  the donor was Simons longtime friend and press agent Bill Evans  extended his life considerably, but he reportedly suffered from dementia and he was unable to write for the last decade, a period during which Broadway seemed to forget him. Simon himself had always been aware of the fluctuations in his reputation and seemed alternatingly frustrated by and resigned to it. People are always coming up to me and saying, Thanks for the good times, he said in 1991. It felt then like both a validation and a diminishment. Today, it feels like an epitaph  and not a bad one for any writer to be able to claim as ones own.Photo: Showtime

No one comes out of a Sacha Baron Cohen show looking good. Your mere presence on Showtimes Who Is America? means youve already been duped by a guy in a costume. Its an impossible game to win, but some guests make it out relatively unscathed by refusing to play along.

The people who look the worst on Who Is America? tend to look that way because they are the worst  egged on by Baron Cohens characters, they reveal their own deeply held, morally repugnant beliefs. Or, just as bad, they reveal that theyre willing to say morally repugnant things in order to be on television. Here is a ranking of all the guests in Who Is Americas finale, from those who leave with their reputations intact, to those who  do not.

Honorable Mention: Sarah Palin

Photo: Showtime

Though she wasnt actually in Sundays finale  or any episode of Who Is America  Sarah Palin was listed in the credits as Special Publicity Consultant (Inadvertent), because she raised such a stink about an interview she gave to Baron Cohens Billy Wayne Ruddick character. Presumably the footage wasnt strong enough to make the cut, so Palin got all worked up  and likely boosted the shows ratings  for nothing.

4. Barney Frank

Photo: Showtime

Former congressman Barney Frank has always been a brook-no-bullshit kind of guy, so its no surprise that he broke the typical liberal mold on Who Is America and just walked away from his interview with Billy Wayne Ruddick. At first, he slightly humors Ruddicks proof of a liberal child-sex ring and his insistence that the grab them by the pussy Trump tape was doctored. You seem to be extremely on edge, he half-jokes to Ruddick, but when he realizes that its just a waste of his time  since they wont be having a reasonable discussion  he heads out. Hes a sounding board for some reasonably funny jabs at the notion that conservatives will believe any conspiracy theory, but that notion got much less funny later in the show.

3. O.J. Simpson

Photo: Showtime

Its pretty clear from Gio Monaldos questions that Sacha Baron Cohen badly wanted to trick O.J. Simpson into admitting his guilt in the 1994 murders of his ex-wife and her friend. Did Baron Cohen not realize that Simpson pretty much already made a detailed confession in the book If I Did It? At this point, it would be pretty hard to make Simpson look much worse than he already does, since hes essentially a pariah who spent much of the last decade in jail. Is it any surprise that he laughs at Monaldos repeated insinuations that he killed Nicole Brown? Is he supposed to get indignant at this point, after years of denying involvement? At least he feigns a tiny bit of offense, laughingly telling Monaldo to stop, and saying I didnt kill anybody. (I didnt either! Monaldo shouts back.) Still, it was a funny setup to have Monaldos girlfriend turn into an excited murder fan when she finally realized who Simpson was.

2. Darren and Cody

Showtime. Showtime.

Darren and Cody both looked fully dejected when Lt. Erran Morad told them that they werent being chosen to join his secret anti-antifa mission, an honor that went to their new friend Glenn. But after seeing tonights episode, theyll realize that they dodged a bullet. Still, Darren and Cody were gullible enough to go along with the idea that theyd need training to camouflage themselves among the liberals at the Womens March. I suppose it makes sense that theyd go along with learning the finer points of Girls episodes or practicing radical lesbian phrases like I hate penises, but the willingness of the hateful right to pick up fake dicks and go nuts is yet again on full display here. These guys cannot wait to violate a Donald Trump dummy with dildos, thrusting themselves and getting rape-y at the drop of a hat. Sure, theyre pre-selected for their (hopefully marginal) beliefs, but its still nauseating to see them so eager.

1. Glenn

Photo: Showtime

Its one thing to, in the company of like-minded assholes, spout off hateful thoughts and beliefs, to excoriate those you disagree with by calling them names and wishing them harm. It should go without saying that its another thing entirely to murder strangers with whom you disagree. If were to believe that what we saw on Sundays Who Is America is an accurate depiction of what happened when Erran Morad and his accomplice Glenn visited the Womens March in San Francisco, we ought to be very, very scared. As his Israeli soldier character, Baron Cohen convinces Glenn that the tracking devices theyve placed on a few activists  supposedly part of a plot to chemically create transgender children  can be used to trigger an explosion just big enough to give them a heart attack. From what we see on screen, Glenn hesitates only briefly before pressing the button that he believes will cause a death. He has done no research on his own about this left-wing terror plot. He is ready for it to be true, and its lunacy doesnt register with him. Once he presses that button, he truly believes he has killed someone, saying, Ive never participated in somebodys death. I feel a little queasy. But does that queasiness lead to a breakdown or any kind of remorse at all? No, eventually Glenn says of his supposed first day as a murderer, Its been a wonderful experience for me. Does Glenn answer the shows title question? Is he America in 2018, or is he just the fringiest of the fringe, emboldened by Trump speeches like the one shown throughout this episode? Lets hope its the latter, though its easy to worry its the former. Baron Cohen, who tweeted that Who Is America is done for good after this episode, didnt have to dig too deep to find the worst of the worst in just seven half-hour installments.JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) - A source close to the investigation says a mass shooting during a video game tournament at a Jacksonville, Florida, riverfront mall has left three people dead.

The source says the person who opened fire died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The source spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release information on the shooting. It wasn't immediately clear if the source was including the suspect in the death toll.

Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said at a news conference Sunday afternoon that the suspect, a white male whose identity authorities are still seeking to confirm, had died. He did not elaborate, but said the shooting site had since been secured.

Several other people were taken to hospitals.

Sounds of the shooting were captured as the gaming tournament was being livestreamed.The City of Athens is working to revitalize its downtown and wants public input to do so.

The group Main Street Alabama will be meeting with several groups of residents throughout the first half of the week to gather a diverse pool of opinions.

The Limestone County Courthouse at the center of the Square in downtown Athens. Leaders are working to revitalize the area. (Courtesy: Athens Main Street) The Limestone County Courthouse at the center of the Square in downtown Athens. Leaders are working to revitalize the area. (Courtesy: Athens Main Street)

On Monday, they plan to drive and walk around the downtown area before they sit down with city and county elected officials as well as economic development partners.

Tuesday, the two Main Street teams will meet with business owners, students and faith leaders.

The day will be capped off with a Community Vision Session in which the public at large will be able to express their views and opinions. It will take place between 5:30 and 8:00 p.m. at Revival on Washington Street.

Wednesday will be spent finalizing their recommendations before they are presented to the public at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall.

Finally, six weeks after Wednesdays presentation, Main Street Alabama will use current market data to create a formalized, written report that will become the strategic plan for Main Street Athens.Funeral arrangements for Arizona Senator John McCain are set to take place this week.

McCain died Saturday, August 25th after a yearlong battle with brain cancer.

According to CNN, Wednesday, August 29th McCains body will lie in state at the Arizona State Capitol. A private ceremony will be held between two public viewings, where people can pay respects.

On Thursday, August 30th, the senator will be moved by motorcade to North Phoenix Baptist Church for a memorial service celebrating his life. A statement released says family, friends, along with national, state, local and tribal officials, and business leaders from across Arizona have been invited to attend. That service will start at 10 AM PT. Later that day, McCains body will leave Arizona and be flown to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland where he will be received by armed force bearers.

Then Friday, August 31st, the senator will lie in state at the United States Capitol. A formal ceremony honoring his life and legacy will take place at 11 AM ET. Following the service, McCains body will lie in state for the rest of the day for public viewing.

Saturday, September 1st, a memorial service for John McCain will take place at the National Cathedral in Washington. According to McCains family, friends, congressional colleagues and staff along with world leaders have been invited to attend the service. Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush will deliver eulogies at that service.

Then Sunday, September 2nd, a private memorial service will take place at 2 PM ET at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Following the service, a private burial ceremony will take place where McCain will be laid to rest.Huntsville Police are investigating a robbery at a local restaurant.

Police say sometime overnight Monday, burglars threw a rock busting out the front door to Pane E Vino Pizzeria. The owners of the restaurant discovered the damage when they showed up to work. Police say some items were stolen, but could not tell us what was taken.

Police are investigating.16 Customs Officers from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Vanuatu and Mongolia participated in a WCO Passenger Controls Workshop and Training in Suva Fiji from August 6th to August 10th, 2018. Facilitators from the WCO Secretariat, New Zealand Customs and Australian Border Force conducted the workshop.

Fiji Customs and the WCO Asia/Pacific Security Project co-hosted the workshop which was generously supported by the Government of Japan through the Security Project Fund.

The workshop provided information, shared experiences and promoted the greater benefits of enhanced passenger controls including the use of API/PNR data for pre-flight risk assessment to mitigate threats and facilitate low risk travellers. The training portion for Customs officials centred on the use of risk analysis to better identify high risk travellers. The training also provided an opportunity to discuss and explore passenger engagement beyond the green / red channel. For example the use of Roving Inspection Teams.

Practical exercises supported through simulation and role plays were used to apply new knowledge and techniques used in baggage examination, questioning and the search of persons. Participants were also introduced to the use of behavior analysis and body language interpretation in helping to assist customs officers to identify potential high risk passengers.

The Chief Executive Officer of the Fiji Revenue and Customs Service, Mr. Visvanath Das in his welcoming remarks emphasized the need for coordination and an effective risk analysis and targeting approach to be utilized with the use of advanced passenger information.

Mr. Norikazu Kuramoto, Deputy Director from the Japanese Customs and Tariff Bureau, presented on the implementation of the Asia Pacific Security Project and the significant contribution that the Government of Japan has made to this project, including supporting workshops and training on passenger controls.Email To : Multiple e-mail addresses must be separated with a comma character(maximum 200 characters) Email To is required.

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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Aug. 27, 2018 | PADUCAH

By West Kentucky Star Staff Aug. 27, 2018 | 01:08 PM | PADUCAH

Paducah Police are seeking the publics help in solving two recent vehicle fires that might be related.



Early on Sunday morning, August 19, Jeremy Huss of North 24th Street reported that a Ford F-150 pickup truck was destroyed by fire. Paducahs Fire Marshal ruled that the fire appeared to be intentionally set.



On June 30, a Jeep Renegade owned by Dolores Varner of Harrison Street was destroyed by fire about 3:30 am.



Police say the two fires are similar in nature.



Anyone with information is asked to call the Paducah Police Department at 270-444-8550.



Information also may be provided anonymously through West Kentucky Crime Stoppers by texting WKY and your tip to 847411 (tip 411) or by downloading the app WKY Crime Stoppers from the Apple Store or Google Play. Tipsters also may access the online tip form through the City of Paducah website at http://paducahky.gov/west-ky-crime-stoppers. Information leading to an arrest or indictment may result in a reward of up to $1,000.Titans' Henry will have surgery, no timetable for returnAdvertisement

By West Kentucky Star Staff

Aug. 27, 2018 | PADUCAH

By West Kentucky Star Staff Aug. 27, 2018 | 06:00 PM | PADUCAH

Partake in Paducah and West Kentucky Star have announced a media partnership.



WestKentuckyStar.com aims to provide 24/7 news, sports, weather and other local information of interest to the residents of western Kentucky and southern Illinois. Beginning immediately, Partake In Paducahs human interest stories will now be part of that content lineup.



Our partnership with Partake in Paducah is such an exciting opportunity. The community is naturally concerned about the news that negatively impacts all of us, says Jamie Futrell, General Manager for West Kentucky Star. As a news organization, it is easy to get lost in that information and therefore devote the majority of our resources to gathering that type of information. We believe that combining the high traffic of West Kentucky Star with the work Partake In Paducah is doing to share the human interest stories that have yet to be told in our community is the perfect complement to the news content we are known for.



Were honored to have West Kentucky Star as our newest partner, adds Jonas Neihoff, President of Socially Present, the managing team behind Partake in Paducah. Our goal is to see that Paducahs story is always being told through the eyes of the people who call Paducah home. West Kentucky Star has amassed a significant following. Were thrilled to see our stories being shared in a way that gives a broader reach to the voices of our community members.



The glimpses that Partake in Paducah gives us into the lives of local restaurants, artists, businesses and so much more exemplifies the diversity we have in Western Kentucky, concludes Karie Thornton, Digital Sales Director of Bristol Broadcasting. We could not be happier to be a vehicle to deliver that message consistently on the WestKentuckyStar.com. We love the idea of shining a positive light on the communities we serve.



To view the new content, go to the menu at the top of the West Kentucky Star page and click on PARTAKE.Advertisement

By Kentucky News Network

Aug. 27, 2018 | FRANKFORT

By Kentucky News Network Aug. 27, 2018 | 12:17 PM | FRANKFORT

The ACLU of Kentucky says it will fight back against a new effort to bring religion into Kentucky schools.



A state representative has pre-filed a bill that would require the national motto "In God We Trust" to be displayed in public schools.



State Rep. Brandon Reed (R) of Hodgenville pre-filed a bill that would require public schools to display the motto in a location of prominence, such as a hallway or cafeteria.



An Open Records Act investigation last year discovered public school teachers in Kentucky using the Bible to impart religious life lessons, which falls short of constitutionally allowed academic and objective study of the Bible for historical context or literary value.



Rep. Reed says "In God We Trust" has been the country's national motto for more than a half century, and would help send a positive message to kids as they enter a school building.



Duke adds the ACLU will be opposing the measure as it's considered in the 2019 legislature. Tennessee and Florida passed similar laws this year.Advertisement

By The Associated Press

Aug. 27, 2018 | FRANKFORT

By The Associated Press Aug. 27, 2018 | 11:24 AM | FRANKFORT

Gov. Matt Bevin's administration has taken public comments on proposed regulations for a Medicaid overhaul that has been blocked by a federal judge.



Kentucky officials received comments Monday from groups critical of proposed regulations that would set guidelines for changes to the state's Medicaid program.



The overhaul would include charging premiums and requiring "community engagement" by recipients, which could include working, volunteering or going to school. Medicaid is the state and federal health insurance program for poor and disabled people.



A judge blocked the changes earlier this year and sent the matter back to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services so the process could be restarted.



Opponents of the overhaul said Monday it's confusing for the state to pursue regulations on a Medicaid plan currently blocked in court.By The Associated Press

By The Associated Press Aug. 27, 2018 | 05:01 AM | FRANKFORT

A union that represents staff members at the Kentucky Education Association held an informational demonstration over contract negotiations.

The Courier Journal reports members of the Kentucky Education Association Staff Organization picketed Saturday in Frankfort a few blocks from the state Capitol where the KEA held massive protests aimed at lawmakers over teacher benefits earlier this year.

The Kentucky Education Association Staff Organization represents 53 KEA employees. A three-year contract expires at the end of the month.

Demonstrator Dennis Janes says the union believes it hasn't been treated fairly in negotiations and that the KEA wants to reduce its benefits.

KEA President Stephanie Winkler says she's optimistic that continued negotiations will result in a new contract.

___

Information from: Courier Journal, http://www.courier-journal.comThree New Martinsville, West Virginia residents and a Columbus, Ohio man have admitted to involvement in methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin distribution that spanned multiple states, United States Attorney Bill Powell announced.

Alex King, age 33, and Matthew Jackson, also known as Matt-Matt, age 22, each pled guilty to one count of Conspiracy to Distribute and to Possess with the Intent to Distribute Controlled Substances. King and Jackson admitted to working with others to distribute heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine from 2016 to April 2018 in Wetzel County and elsewhere.

Todd Jones, age 55, and Cynthia Henries, age 47, each pled guilty to Aiding and Abetting the Distribution of Methamphetamine. Jones and Henries admitted to selling methamphetamine in March 2017 in Wetzel County.

All four defendants each face up to 20 years incarceration and a fine of up to $1,000,000. Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the actual sentence imposed will be based upon the seriousness of the offenses and the prior criminal history, if any, of the defendant.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Robert H. McWilliams, Jr., and Shawn M. Adkins are prosecuting the cases on behalf of the government. The Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol; Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the Marshall County Drug and Violent Crimes Task Force, a HIDTA-funded initiative; the West Virginia State Police; the Tyler County Sheriffs Office; the Wetzel County Sheriffs Office; the Sistersville Police Department; the Paden City Police Department; and the New Martinsville Police Department investigated. The Columbus, Ohio, Police Department Gang Crimes Unit assisted in the case.

The investigation was funded in part by the federal Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force Program (OCDETF). The OCDETF program supplies critical federal funding and coordination that allows federal and state agencies to work together to successfully identify, investigate, and prosecute major interstate and international drug trafficking organizations and other criminal enterprises.

Senior U.S. District Judge Frederick P. Stamp, Jr. presided over the King, Jones, and Henries cases.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James E. Seibert presided over the Jackson case.DRUGS AND STOLEN PROPERTY INVOLVED IN THREE ARRESTS ON ALBERT DRIVE

On August 23, 2018, members of the Henderson County Sheriffs Office Crime Suppression Unit responded to the area of 77 Albert Dr. after receiving reports of suspicious activity in the area. Detectives observed a vehicle leaving the residence as they arrived, that through an investigation, was determined to be stolen. In addition, a second vehicle and a trailer observed at the address was also determined to be stolen. Additional detectives responded to assist, and a search warrant was completed at the residence. Three stolen vehicles, a stolen enclosed trailer, stolen landscaping equipment, a stolen registration plate, methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana, a schedule III-controlled substance, a firearm, and multiple items of drug paraphernalia were located during the search warrant.

Warren Rosslyn Newell, age 52 of 77 Albert Dr., Flat Rock, was arrested and charged with the following:

Felony Possession with Intent to Manufacture, Sell or Deliver Heroin

Felony Possession with Intent to Manufacture, Sell or Deliver Methamphetamine

Felony Possession with Intent to Manufacture, Sell or Deliver Schedule III Controlled Substance

Felony Maintaining a Vehicle, Dwelling or Place for the Use of a Controlled Substance

Felony Chop Shop Activity

Misdemeanor Simple Possession of Schedule IV Controlled Substance

Misdemeanor Possession of Drug Paraphernalia

Newell remains in the Henderson County Jail under a $100,000.00 secured bond.

Brian Charles Garner, age 33 of 33 Brian Dr., Canton, was arrested on several felony warrants out of Haywood County. In addition, he was charged with:

Felony Possession of a Stolen Motor Vehicle

Felony Possession of Methamphetamine

Garner remains in the Henderson County Jail under an $87,000.00 secured bond.

Timothy Daniel Frizzell, age 33 of 77 Albert Dr., Flat Rock, was arrested and charged with:

Felony Possession of Stolen Goods

Frizzell remains in the Henderson County Jail under a $10,000.00 secured bond.

More charges are expected to be filed as the investigation continuesWilliamson, WV (25661)

Today

Partly cloudy skies early then becoming cloudy with periods of rain late. Low 42F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early then becoming cloudy with periods of rain late. Low 42F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 80%.Kofi Annan: the Ghanaian man who was born to be a leader

The passing of former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan provides an opportunity to reflect on what makes great men great.

His legacy stands side by side with fellow Nobel laureates of African descent such as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Albert Luthuli, Wangari Maathai, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Barack Obama, Ralph Bunche and Desmond Tutu.

In some respects, Annan stands head and shoulder above his Nobel peers, having made history as the first person in sub-Saharan Africa to rise to the helm of the global governing body for two terms between 1997 and 2006. If we include North Africa, he shares this accolade with the late Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Egyptian diplomat who served as secretary-general between 1992 and 1996.

However, unlike Annan, Boutros-Ghali served for a single term after his bid for a second term was vetoed by the US. Underlining the much-critiqued stranglehold of the UN Security Council, France - one of the five veto powers - initially opposed Annans appointment.

Eulogies have captured the fact that Annan had pedigree by virtue of being born in 1938 to an elite Ghanaian family, his father, Henry Annan, having been an elected governor of the Ashanti province. Because of being born in a family of Ghanaian chiefs, it is easy to conclude that Annan was born a leader.

Snippets from his life also show that he grew into leadership.

Some have pointed out that his leadership traits - of decorum, people skills and charm - were nurtured early in his childhood as he observed the leadership styles of his father.

It would appear that most great leaders have a rabble-rousing youth.

At an elite boarding school in central Ghana in the 1950s, Annan exhibited proclivity towards human rights when he led a hunger strike, campaigning for better food. Joining the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi in the late 1950s, it is where he would be elected the vice-president of the Ghana national students' union.

Leaders often have defining moments early in their careers. Annans early leadership traits earned him a Ford Foundation foreign students leadership scholarship. This saw him studying economics at Macalester College, US, graduating in 1961 followed by post-graduate studies in international affairs at the Institut Universities des Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva, Switzerland.

Leaders are good at creating networks and vehicles through which they pursue their goals. A beneficiary of the Ford Foundation scholarship, Annan went on to establish his own foundation working on peace, democracy, food security and youth empowerment.

The networks he was involved in included the Africa Progress Panel; the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and focused on small-scale farmers; and The Elders, an organisation established by Nelson Mandela.

A statement from the Thabo Mbeki Foundation on his death indicates he was the organisations chairperson.

The shock on his passing in South Africa is partly because he was one of the dignitaries at the 100th Nelson Mandela centennial celebrations in July.

Part of Annans legacy lies in the consistency of his career at the UN. Joining the World Health Organisation in 1962, Annan would stay with the UN - save for a one-year hiatus in the mid-1970s - serving on the Economic Commission for Africa, UN Emergency Force, and UN High Commission for Refugees, UN headquarters, and UN peacekeeping missions. It was a natural progression culminating in his clinching the UN secretary-general as the first holder of the position to have risen through the ranks rather than being appointed from outside.

Iraq specifically, the Gulf region in general and the war on terror figure prominently in any assessment of Annan. A major low point was the oil-for-food programme in which UN staff and contractors were fingered for conflict of interest in transactions aimed at easing the effects of sanctions on Iraq in the early 1990s. Damaging to his personal reputation, allegations included the involvement of his son, Kojo Annan.

One researcher has pointed out that this was due to Annans leadership style underpinned by delegation of duty and a Laissez-faire approach with regard to disciplining errant UN staff.

In elevating him to the helm of the UN, member states must have favourably considered the fact that Annan had made a mark as a man of peace, for instance having negotiated the release of UN staff held hostage in Iraq in 1991 as part of the Iraq-Kuwait war. Eulogising Annan, the current UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, captured this consistency streak by saying, in many ways, Kofi Annan was the United Nations.

Leaders are masters at what they do but they are not infallible.

A major blot on Annans career is that as under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations (1993-1995), he failed to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide during which nearly 800000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred.

In a similar case, the UN under Annans watch was blamed for ethnic cleansing in Srebrenica, Bosnia, in 1995.

However, leaders recognise, admit and learn from their mistakes.

Annan repeatedly cited his failure in Rwanda as he advocated strong peacekeeping interventions in the worlds trouble spots such as Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa.

Of the failures in Bosnia, Annan wrote, in 1999: Through error, misjudgment and an inability to recognise the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the (Bosnian) Serb campaign of mass murder.

A number of episodes in his career hold up his diplomatic skills.

Hardly two years into Annan's UN leadership, he was faced with a deadly confrontation between some of the members of the UN Security Council and the former Iraqi strongman, the late Saddam Hussein.

On Husseins refusal to allow UN nuclear inspectors to access sites suspected of harbouring deadly weapons, the US and Britain promptly deployed warships in the Persian Gulf ready to strike.

France and Russia favoured a diplomatic approach with China swinging ambivalently between the two positions. In the end, Annan convinced the Security Council to take the negotiation route, travelling to Baghdad to personally negotiate with Hussein. With two options on the table - co-operate or face military strikes, Hussein demurred and a war was averted.

It is a diplomatic skill that Annan would leverage to similar situations including after his retirement when he helped nip in the bud an ethnically inspired post-election conflagration in Kenya pitting then president Mwai Kibaki against opposition leader Raila Odinga in early 2008.

Within the UN system, Annan will be remembered most as a transformational leader. He downsized a bloated UN human resource and rationalised entities within months of assuming office. Analysts agree that this led to a more efficient UN system.

Perhaps more significantly, he drove the global developmental agenda for the 21st century by convening the UN Millennium Summit of September 2000 which ultimately led to the launch of the Millennium Development Goals. It was the first time the UN set time-bound targets for poverty reduction and it has since been succeeded by the Sustainable Development Goals or the Agenda 2030.

Dr Bob Wekesa is a Senior Lecturer in the journalism and media department at Wits and an associate of the African Centre for the Study of the United States. This article was originally published on the Independent Online website. Click here for the original article.As the nation mourns the death of Sen. John McCain, friends and colleagues of the Arizona Republican are remembering the life of the man who made a lasting impact on so many.

McCain died Saturday, one day after his family announced he had chosen to stop treatment for the brain cancer he had been battling for more than a year.

His death prompted an outpouring of reminiscences, including lighthearted stories from even his sometime political foes, with many calling him a patriot as well as a politician who will be remembered for his integrity.

'An emotional thing for John'

Former Republican Sen. Bob Dole, a veteran like McCain who served for more than a decade in the Senate as majority leader, shared his favorite memory of McCain with anchor Ana Cabrera on "CNN Newsroom."

"I wore John's POW bracelet for a number of years," Dole said. "And one day in the Senate, I decided to let John know, and so we got off in a corner, and I extended my arm, and on my wrist was a John McCain POW bracelet. It was kind of an emotional thing for John."

McCain was a prisoner of war for more than five years after his plane was shot down in North Vietnam. The injuries he sustained in the war left him permanently incapable of raising his arms above his shoulders.

"He was my friend," Dole said. "And, you know, what do you say about a man like John McCain?"

Funny in the 'weirdest' ways

McCain's longtime friend, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, recalled McCain's humor in an interview with CNN's Dana Bash.

"You know, he is funny in the weirdest kind of ways," Graham said. "You know, I'm not a big reader. He is. But I might as well be because he reads the entire book to me."

When asked to clarify if McCain would actually read the books out loud, the South Carolina senator replied: "Yes, reads it loud. ... You know, 'What you do think about that?' I said, 'Well, I think if I liked that book I would have bought it.' But John has a very sarcastic sense of humor that took him through some pretty dark times, but he's a funny guy."

"You know, he can be tough," Graham added. "He is a politician like the rest of us. But the one thing I always believed about John, if I really needed him, he would be there. When he joins the fight, he sticks to the bitter end. There is no changing sides."

'Don't back down'

McCain's fellow Republican senator from Arizona, Jeff Flake, shared advice McCain gave him after Flake was elected to the House and was being criticized in his home state for his stances on reducing spending and earmarks.

Flake recalled the two traveling back to Arizona together, when McCain approached Flake with "a stern look on his face."

"I was like, 'What'd I do? What'd I do?'" Flake said. "And he put his finger in my chest and said, 'Don't back down.' He said, 'Don't back down, you're in the right, they'll come around. They'll come around. Stick to it.' And that was ... really nice of him to do. And I did stick to it. And they came around."

'This joy for his work'

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said McCain's love for his country was "unmatched."

"While he never made it to the presidency, in the Senate he was the leader that would see a hot spot in the world and decide we need to go there and stand up for that democracy," Klobuchar said.

She added: "He went every place -- every place that no one else would go -- to stand up for America, and in that way, he was a leader like no other. But I think part of the moment that people don't always realize about him was just this humor he had, this joy for his work, and that's anyone that worked with him experienced that. So, yes, it's about patriotism, but it's also about personal friendship."

'Doing vodka shots'

Hillary Clinton recalled stories of her and McCain's travels together -- including one time when the two drank vodka shots together.

"Well, our most famous experience with vodka shots was in Tallinn, Estonia, and of course we were there because John understood that Estonia was right on the front lines with Russia, and although we all hope that Russia would be a good partner, we had reason to be concerned," Clinton told Bash. "So we spent a memorable night in a hotel right on the old square in Tallinn doing vodka shots."

When asked whose idea that was, Clinton said it was "a mutually agreed-upon venture."

"We used to say what happens in Tallinn stays in Tallinn," she said.

Devil horn 'revenge'

Members of the media also shared their memories of their interactions with Arizona's senior senator.

CNN's Manu Raju tweeted about an instance when McCain's humor shined; while Raju was on live television, McCain came up behind him and gave him horns with his fingers, later calling it "revenge" in a Twitter post.

"McCain loved this moment when he gave me the devil horns on live TV - he especially loved his tweet about this episode, which he said may have been his most retweeted tweet," Raju wrote on Twitter.

'A chasm in the public square'

CNN's Jake Tapper, who covered McCain for many years, also reflected on the senator and Vietnam War veteran's life on CNN's "State of the Union."

"Unlike other politicians who never admit error or even imperfection, McCain was all too aware of his and was usually the first to raise them. And yet, there was always, with the senator, standing there, defiant, the reality of his past, of what he did as a prisoner of war," Tapper said, a reference to McCain's refusal to be released by his North Vietnamese captors unless the soldiers taken captive before him also were freed.

"[A]nd as we say goodbye to Senator McCain this week, many of us feel as if we have lost something other than just a man," Tapper said. "That may be not only because he tried to encourage us all to serve a cause greater than ourselves, it may be because he never stopped trying to be a better man. He never stopped trying to become the man he wanted to be. 'We're all afraid of something ...' McCain wrote in his book 'Why Courage Matters.' 'Don't let the sensation of fear convince you that you're too weak to have courage. Fear is the opportunity for courage, not proof of cowardice. No one is born a coward. We were meant to love. And we were meant to have the courage for it. So be brave. The rest is easy.'

"We're in an era right now of lies and indecency, of tribalism and nastiness, and in this era, we lost someone who tried -- tried -- to embody the opposite of those vicious impulses," Tapper said. "His loss leaves a chasm in the public square."JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) - Heavily armed agents have entered a Baltimore townhouse, the home of the father of the suspect in a deadly shooting at a video game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida.

Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said investigators believe 24-year-old David Katz of Baltimore was the shooter in an attack Sunday afternoon that left three people dead, including the suspect with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Eleven others were reported injured.

An FBI spokesman, Dave Fitz, confirmed agents had gone to the upscale townhouse home. But he did not immediately release any other specifics, citing an ongoing investigation.

The agents could be seen inside the home Sunday evening near Baltimore's Inner Harbor. They wore bulletproof vests and carried rotating machine guns. Reporters who gathered outside did not see any authorities carrying any bags of evidence outside.

___

8:30 p.m.

An FBI official in Baltimore has confirmed that agents are searching the family home of the man authorities believe was behind a deadly shooting attack at a video game tournament at a Florida mall.

An FBI spokesman, Dave Fitz, says agents have gone to the suspect's father's house in Baltimore, hours after Sunday's mass shooting in Jacksonville, Florida. He did not immediately release any other specifics, citing an ongoing investigation.

Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said earlier Sunday that investigators believe 24-year-old David Katz of Baltimore was the shooter. The sheriff says three people were killed Sunday, including the suspect, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot.

T.J. Smith is the chief spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department. He says he could only confirm that the mid-Atlantic city's force was assisting law enforcement partners "with some information that has led authorities to Baltimore."

___

7:45 p.m.

The Jacksonville sheriff says three people were killed, including the gunman, during a mass shooting at a video game tournament at a north Florida mall.

Sheriff Mike Williams said Sunday evening he believed the shooter is 24-year-old David Katz of Baltimore. He said the FBI was searching the man's home as part of the investigation.

Williams said nine other people were wounded by gunfire and are in stable condition and two others were hurt while fleeing the shots. He says the suspect died from a self-inflicted gunshot.

William said Katz committed the shooting with a single handgun. He said Katz was in Jacksonville for the "Madden NFL 19" video game tournament. The games maker, EA Sports, lists a David Katz as a 2017 championship winner.

__

6:45 p.m.

A Chicago man says people trampled each other while fleeing the gunfire that broke out at a Florida mall during a video game tournament.

Twenty-year-old Marquis Williams says he and his girlfriend, Taylor Poindexter, also of Chicago, were ordering pizza close by when shots erupted. He said Sunday that he didn't think it was gunfire at first.

Says William, "Initially we thought it was a balloon popping, but there weren't any balloons in the room. Then we heard repeat shots and we took off running."

Williams had participated earlier Sunday in the gaming tournament where authorities say a mass shooting claimed multiple fatalities. He says he got a view of the back of the shooter in a green shirt.

He describes people running in the panic to escape. He says it was then that he scuffed his leg and that Poindexter was treated at a hospital for a sprained ankle. They later returned, hoping to retrieve her cell phone, but the scene was cordoned off by authorities.

___

5:55 p.m.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott says President Donald Trump has called him, offering any federal help needed in response to a mass shooting during a video game tournament in Jacksonville.

Scott spokesman John Tupps said the governor also spoke Sunday with Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry and Sheriff Mike Williams.

The governor is preparing to fly from his home in Naples to Jacksonville and meet with investigators. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Florida Highway Patrol have been directed to help with the investigation.

An official close to the investigation said Sunday's shooting at a riverfront mall in Jacksonville has left four people dead.

___

4:55 p.m.

An official close to the investigation says a mass shooting during a video game tournament at a Jacksonville, Florida, riverfront mall has left four people dead.

The official says the person who opened fire died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release information on the shooting. It wasn't immediately clear if the official was including the suspect in the death toll.

Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said at a news conference Sunday afternoon that the suspect, a white male whose identity authorities are still seeking to confirm, had died. He did not elaborate, but said the shooting site had since been secured.

Several other people were taken to hospitals.

Sounds of the shooting were captured as the gaming tournament was being livestreamed.

___

4:45 p.m.

Florida authorities say they've finished clearing the scene of a fatal mass shooting at a riverfront mall in Jacksonville and there are no additional suspects.

Speaking to reporters Sunday afternoon, Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams says a suspect is dead at the scene and they are still working to identify the male.

The sheriff's office says the shooting, which erupted during a video game tournament, has left multiple dead and sent others to the hospital. Williams did not give any details on the number of people killed or wounded.

___

4:45 p.m.

It didn't take long for some Democratic candidates for governor to issue statements on a mass shooting in Jacksonville that left multiple people dead.

In the wake of the Feb. 14 Parkland school shooting that left 17 dead, gun violence has been a major issue ahead of Tuesday's primary election, in which voters will pick the Republican and Democratic nominees to replace outgoing Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

Former U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham sent an email to supporters that said the only way to end mass shootings is to "vote out the politicians complicit in this cycle of death."

Former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine also released a statement saying, "I am horrified and I am furious" and that it's time for new leaders.

Video game manufacturer Electronic Arts tweeted, "This is a horrible situation, and our deepest sympathies go out to all involved."

___

3:10 p.m.

Florida authorities say one suspect is dead at the scene after a fatal mass shooting at a riverfront mall in Jacksonville.

But on its Twitter feed, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office says it's unknown at this time if there's a second suspect and searches are being conducted.

The sheriff's office says multiple people have been killed in the shooting.

The department says to "stay far away from the area. The area is not safe at this time. STAY AWAY." They also warned news media to stay away from the area, which contains restaurants and shops along the St. Johns River.

___

2:55 p.m.

Florida authorities are reporting a multiple people dead and "many transported" to hospitals after a mass shooting at a riverfront mall in Jacksonville.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office used Twitter and Facebook to warn people to stay away from the Jacksonville Landing.

The department says to "stay far away from the area. The area is not safe at this time. STAY AWAY."

The sheriff's office didn't provide any other information, but also warned news media to stay away from the area, which contains restaurants and shops along the St. Johns River.

Florida authorities say one suspect is dead at the scene after a fatal mass shooting at a riverfront mall in Jacksonville.

But on its Twitter feed, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office says it's unknown at this time if there's a second suspect and searches are being conducted.

The sheriff's office says multiple people have been killed in the shooting.

The department says to "stay far away from the area. The area is not safe at this time. STAY AWAY." They also warned news media to stay away from the area, which contains restaurants and shops along the St. Johns River.NEW HARTFORD  The New Hartford Police Department is asking for the publics help identifying a larceny suspect.

Police say theyre trying to identify the man in the surveillance video regarding the theft of childrens clothing and a suitcase from Boscovs at Sangertown Square Mall.

If you recognize the man, youre asked to call New Hartford police at 315-724-7111 or 315-733-6666. All calls can remain confidential.UTICA- Utica police are investigating a falsely reported armed robbery, which was said to have occurred on the 1400 block of Kemble Street.

On Sunday police responded to a 911 call at Fiestaa Market, where two people were reported to have robbed the market store at gunpoint.

After the two men were detained and the incident was investigated, the two alleged suspects were released. According to the Utica Police Department, there was no evidence showing the alleged suspects had robbed the store.

Police tell WKTV that once the incident had been investigated thoroughly, it appeared no robbery occurred. Police are now looking into whether to charge the person from the store who made the call with falsely reporting an incident.

WKTV spoke with one of the alleged suspects' father, who tells us their side of the story.

They got in an argument with the gentleman inside the store for getting the wrong amount of change, said Bill Walk, the alleged suspect's father. And then they decided to call the police and make a false call.

Upon arrival, witnesses tell WKTV that Utica police had surrounded a white Chevy pickup truck in the middle of Hobart Street with their guns drawn. Inside the truck were the two alleged suspects involved in the incident.

You know right now my son is pretty upset to have guns drawn on him, said Walk. But the police were doing their job, they responded to a call and it's people like that make it bad for other people you know.WASHINGTON, D.C. (WLFI)  Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly is working to lower the number of suicides across the state and country.

The National Suicide Hotline Improvement Act was recently signed into law.

Senator Donnelly first introduced the Senate version of this bipartisan bill with Republican Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah in May 2017.

The goal is increase the effectiveness of the current suicide prevention lifeline system.

Donnelly said Congress is working on an easy to remember 3-digit suicide hotline number to better connect those in crisis.

"Many of the primary groups that are struggling with this challenge are teenagers, are veterans and so they would benefit from having a 3-digit number in place that is easy to call and that on the other end of the line is somebody who can talk to them about their challenges," said Donnelly.

Senator Donnelly has also worked on legislation to help law enforcement agencies establish or enhance mental health services for officers.WASHINGTON, D.C. (WLFI)  Indiana Senator Joe Donnelly is working to protect soldiers and their families from abusive financial practices.

Donnelly helped lead 48 other Senators in urging the Administration not to abandon its duty to protect service members and their families under the Military Lending Act.

This comes after Donnelly expressed concern last week with the Administration's move to suspend Military Lending Act examinations.

In a letter Donnelly and the Senators called on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Director Mick Mulvaney not to halt military lending checks.

"The administration has talked about suspending financial protections for our service members, I can't think of a worse idea, what we want to do is be there for our service members," said Donnelly.

Donnelly said setting military families up for success should be a top priority.



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This article is old - Published: Monday, Aug 27th, 2018

A north Wales health board has received the Ministry of Defences highest award in recognition of the support it provides to the armed forces community in North Wales.

Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board is one of four recently announced Welsh winners of the prestigious Gold Award under the MoDs Employer Recognition Scheme, which celebrates armed forces friendly employers.

The Health Board, which employs a number of armed forces reservists among its 16,500 staff, has been hailed as a model example to other large employers.

It been recognised for the wide range of support given to its reservist and army cadet force volunteer staff, as well as the wider armed forces community in North Wales.

This support includes paid leave to allow reservist staff to fulfil their duties within the armed forces and a range of person-centred support for those making the transition from deployment back to the workplace.

The Health Board also plays a lead role in the North Wales Armed Forces Forum, which was established in 2013 by BCUHB Chairman, Dr Peter Higson. The forum brings more than 70 organisations from across North Wales together to ensure that support for the armed forces community is joined up to meet their specific needs.

Among the initiatives borne out of the forum is a peer-mentor programme for armed forces veterans, which is the first of its kind in the UK. The innovative collaboration between BCUHB, Veterans NHS Wales and the Change Step charity is enabling veterans in North Wales to receive a full range of support during their transition back to civilian life.

Tony Fish, Regional Employer Engagement Director for the Reserve Forces and Cadets Association in Wales, said: BCUHBs support for the armed forces community is a model example to other large employers.

Their commitment to their reservist staff goes above and beyond the minimum standards that one might expect of an armed forces friendly employer.

Because of its championing of its reservist staff and track record of supporting the armed forces community in North Wales, BCUHB has shown itself to be a fantastic ambassador and advocate for defence.

Dr Peter Higson, who will retire as BCUHB Chairman at the end of August, said: Im extremely proud of the leading role the Health Board has played in championing and supporting the armed forces community in North Wales during my tenure as Chair of BCUHB and the Wales Armed Forces Forum.

Id like to pay tribute to the dedication and selflessness of the many staff from across the Health Board who combine a career in the NHS with service in the armed forces.Amazon has unveiled a new program to burnish its worsening image through social media. In the middle of August, the company began introducing a corps of Fulfillment Center Ambassadors on Twitter. The groups primary responsibility is to mitigate the damage from increasingly common exposures of the punishing conditions at Amazons warehouses.

This diplomatic corps includes at least 12 accounts so far, and the users profiles follow the same pattern. Their usernames all end with the title Amazon FC Ambassador, they all include the Amazon smile logo, and they all show a photograph of an employee in a warehouse, although his or her face often is outside the frame. In addition, the ambassadors profiles include a link that allows users to schedule a tour of an Amazon fulfillment center.

When Twitter users criticize Amazon for its low pay, dangerous working conditions or inhuman workloads, these ambassadors spring into action. They insert themselves into the conversation and cheerfully defend the company. Their favorite topics are wages, bathroom breaks, and the temperature of the warehouses where they work. The following comment from Phil is representative: Working conditions are very good- clean/well lit- Safety is a top priority at my facility!

The ambassadors affect a uniformly chipper tone and often cite the same talking points. For example, several ambassadors have posted variations on the following remark, again from Phil: We make ~30 percent more than traditional retail stores. We also have great medical benefits from day one.

Some comments express a nauseating affection for the company. In one post, Carol remarked, I can safely say that none of MY ideas have panned out anywhere near what Jeff Bezos has accomplished. I am more than happy, though, to continue working here, at BFI4, in WA. I receive a (more than fair) wage and work with some really good people. Making history, every day.

Such cloying paeans to the mammoth retailer and its obscenely wealthy CEO might make Twitter users think that they have stumbled into Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In fact, skeptics have challenged the ambassadors to prove that theyre real people, rather than bots. Ambassadors have obliged them by posting photos of themselves holding sheets of paper bearing the names of their interlocutors.

Real Amazon workers are, in fact, maintaining these accounts. These employees are stockers, stowers and managers at warehouses in places like Jacksonville, Florida; San Marcos, Texas; and Kent, Washington. Most of the ambassadors have worked at Amazon for a year or longer. They openly tell other Twitter users that the public relations campaign is part of their job responsibilities. It would be easy, though, to mistake the ambassadors for workers who are spontaneously defending Amazon without prompting.

FC ambassadors are employees who understand what its actually like to work in our FCs, said Ty Rogers, an Amazon spokesperson, in an interview with the Guardian. The most important thing is that theyve been here long enough to honestly share the facts based on personal experience. Its important that we do a good job of educating people about the actual environment inside our fulfillment centers, and the FC ambassador program is a big part of that, along with the FC tours we provide.

The truth of the matter was revealed to Yahoo Finance by a former Amazon employee who described his ambassadorship. Ambassador isnt a job you do every day, its just something you are trained to do, said Chris Grantham, who worked at a warehouse in Florida for three years. Becoming an ambassador was a way to get out of loading trucks or packing boxes for 10 to 12 hours. You may ambassador one day, then unload trucks for the next three.

Ambassadors receive an additional paid day off, which they must use within three weeks, and a $50 Amazon gift card. Plus, they gave us lunch: cold cuts and sandwich bread, said Grantham. Managers pick workers for this job. Generally speaking, ambassadors are the kiss-asses of the department, said Grantham. I stopped doing it after the first year I was there because it didnt pay more. Its voluntary.

Naturally, the ambassadors do not describe the actual working conditions at Amazon warehouses. These details can be found in the book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by journalist James Bloodworth, who worked at Amazon as part of his research. He describes an atmosphere of stress, high pressure and abusive managers. After workers enter the facility, they undergo screening reminiscent of that at a major airport. Hoodies, sunglasses and phones are forbidden, and workers are patted down upon leaving to discourage theft.

Other appalling details are presented in a survey that the workers rights group Organise conducted. Between December 2017 and March 2018, the group gathered information from workers at Amazon warehouses in the United Kingdom. Employees described being forced to stand for 10-hour shifts. A pregnant woman was reprimanded for being sick. About 73 percent of workers had had their targets (i.e., the number of items that they must pack or sort) increased from already unreasonable levels. An incredible 74 percent of workers avoided using the bathroom so that they would not miss their targets. Approximately 55 percent of workers reported having developed depression since they started their jobs at Amazon. About 42 percent of workers reported having witnessed bullying or harassment. Not surprisingly, 82 percent of workers said that they would not apply for a job at Amazon again.

A legion of Amazon workers has expressed its anger at their low pay and abominable working conditions. In the US, Amazon worker Shannon Allen, for example, has produced a series of videos that detail the mistreatment to which she was subjected.

Above all, the billion-dollar corporation is threatened with the possibility that its workers may take matters into their own hands. The World Socialist Web Sites International Amazon Workers Voice (IAWV) has undertaken a campaign to expose conditions at Amazon facilities around the world. This campaign has unquestionably caused deep disquiet among Amazon executives, particularly since the IAWV proposes a program of political and industrial action with which Amazon workers can fight back. The IAWVs calls for rank-and-file committees at fulfillment centers and for Amazon workers to link their struggles to those of millions of other logistics workers globallyespecially with those of UPS workersis a direct threat the superprofits of Jeff Bezos and his lackeys.

Because information about Amazons exploitation of its workforce is emerging steadily as workers gain the confidence to speak out, the companys charm offensive is falling flat. Twitter users have taken to arguing with the ambassadors and even insulting them.

Pranksters have created Twitter accounts to satirize the ambassadors, posting expressions of loyalty to father Bezos and hymns of gratitude for three-minute regulated breaks between shifts. But as part of the ongoing campaign to censor left-wing and oppositional viewpoints on the Internet, including, apparently, of criticism of corporations, Twitter has suspended some of these parody accounts. Nevertheless, the truth about Amazons slave driving is out, and workers coming into struggle will not be satisfied with the companys transparently false happy talk.Scott Morrison, Australias new prime ministerthe countrys seventh in just 11 yearsspent the weekend receiving the congratulations of the Trump administration and other US allies, and selecting his cabinet.

Morrison won a leadership ballot of the governing Liberal Party on Friday afternoon, after former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was ousted in a political coup organised by the partys most right-wing faction. Turnbulls so-called moderate supporters within the party threw their backing behind Morrison to prevent the victory of Peter Dutton, the candidate of the right. Morrison, an extreme right-wing figure himself, was elected as the compromise leader by just 45 votes to Duttons 40.

Turnbull is the fourth elected prime minister since 2010 who has been torn down by his or her own party, before finishing a single term in office. Even before Turnbulls demise, the regularity with which political leaders have been axed had led the British Broadcasting Corporation to label Australia as the coup capital of the world.

Turnbull himself gained the leadership of the Liberal Party in September 2015 by organising the removal of Tony Abbott, who had led the party to victory in the September 2013 election against the Labor Party. Labor had its own coups in June 2010, when Kevin Rudd was ousted by Julia Gillard, and again in June 2013, when Gillard was removed and Rudd reinstalled.

The constant factors in the intractable political turmoil in Australia have been the mounting geostrategic tensions between the US and China, and the immense disaffection, throughout the population, with the parliamentary establishment, due to rapidly falling living standards and ever-widening social inequality.

In 2010, Rudds removal was in large part due to his hesitation to align Australia fully with the openly confrontational policy being advanced by the United States, Australias strategic ally and largest source of investment, against China, the countrys largest export market and trading partner. The Labor powerbrokers who ousted him were in close contact with the US embassy, which characterised them as its protected sources in diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

Since the Rudd coup, and under the Gillard, Abbott and Turnbull governments, Australia has served as a crucial partner in the US military build-up in Asia and one of Washingtons closest allies on the world arena. Canberra has backed every US-led war and intriguefrom Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, to the persecution of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, to the denunciations of China over its territorial claims in the South China Sea and other issues.

Since late 2016, the Turnbull government, fully supported by Labor and the media, has waged a xenophobic campaign against purported Chinese influence in Australian business, politics and society, culminating in the ramming through in June of anti-democratic foreign interference laws, targeting Chinese individuals and business interests. The new legislation could also be used to criminalise opposition to US and Australian militarism.

Internal class tensions, however, have continued to escalate. Sections of big business are continuing to complain that the unconditional support for Washingtons confrontation with Beijing is threatening their critical markets in China.

Fear of an eruption of the working class led Turnbull to retreat from some of the most severe austerity policies of the previous Abbott-led government. But it also left him incapable of winning support for his key policies-- a pro-business restructuring of the energy industry and massive corporate tax cuts--from various right-wing populist parties that control the balance of power in the upper house of parliament.

This year, amid international warnings that Trumps policies were threatening to trigger a second global financial crisis, Turnbulls foreign minister Julie Bishop publicly rejected US calls for direct military participation in so-called freedom of navigation provocations in the South China Sea. Moreover, just two weeks ago, Turnbull delivered a major speech in which he sought to distance Australia from Trumps trade war measures against China.

In the final analysis, the move against Turnbull is part of a conscious and ongoing campaign to refashion the Liberal Party into one prepared to confront and ride rough-shod over both the working class and those sections of the corporate and financial elites that oppose confrontation with China.

The aim of the Dutton faction, which includes Tony Abbott and enjoys the full backing of the Rupert Murdoch-owned media, is to consolidate a right-wing base of support by blaming the acute social crisis on too much immigration and social welfare spending. Key figures in this faction, such as former military officers Andrew Hastie and General Jim Molan, are determined to use the foreign interference laws to prosecute alleged agents of Chinese influence and stoke virulent xenophobia against China.

The policies and demagogy of the Dutton-Abbott wing broadly parallel those of the pro-Trump alt-right in the US and the range of extreme-right and neo-fascist movements that have emerged to prominence across Europe. As international relations and parliamentary democratic forms of rule break down, preparations are being made to use authoritarian, police-state measures to defend the financial and corporate oligarchy against mass opposition from the working class to social inequality and war.

While Dutton lost his leadership bid, the right faction will put its mark on all the policies of the Morrison government. In the name of uniting the party, Morrisons compromise was to reinstate Dutton and some of his main backers, along with the three crucial figures in the challenge to Turnbull: Mathias Cormann, Michaelia Cash and Mitch Fifield, who continue to hold their senior cabinet posts.

Turnbull and Julie Bishop, reflecting the marginalisation of their moderate positions, have announced they will resign from the parliament.

Regardless of whether the US had a direct hand in the move against Turnbull, his ouster was welcomed in Washington. Trump took time out on the weekend to hold a very warm phone call with Morrison, in which the two pledged to uphold the US-Australia alliance. Morrison invited the US presidentwho is deeply unpopular in Australiato visit the country as soon as possible.

Morrisons apparent intention, reflected in his cabinet selections, is to hold together both the Liberal Party and its coalition with the rural-based National Party until he is forced to call the next electionwhich must be held by mid-May 2019.

Most of the policies his government will take to the election are already being implemented. These include ongoing cost-cutting to public health, public education and social welfare, and massive increases to military spending to finance the war preparations against China.

There is little question that Morrison, his new treasurer and former investment banker Josh Frydenberg, and finance minister Mathias Cormann remain determined to introduce major cuts to the corporate tax rate and to personal income taxes on the wealthy.

This reactionary economic agenda will be combined with attempts to divert social discontent into anti-immigrant xenophobia. Morrison declared earlier this year his support for a cap on annual migration; he has long been a ruthless advocate of the bipartisan Liberal/Labor policy of preventing refugees from reaching Australia by boat, and thus from claiming asylum.

Both the Liberal and National parties are desperate to win back the large section of their voter base that has switched to supporting various right-wing populist formations, such as Pauline Hansons One Nation, which blame the social crisis in working class and rural areas on immigration and welfare spending.

The Labor Party, headed by former union leader and Rudd-Gillard minister Bill Shorten, is trying to win government by posturing as an advocate social inequality and a progressive alternative to the Coalition.

The reality is that for the past four decades, Labor and the trade unions have been committed to maintaining the international competitiveness of Australian capitalism. This has translated, under Labor governments from 1983 to 1996 and from 2007 to 2013, into attacks on workers wages and conditions, austerity cuts to social spending and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. And Labor has more than matched the most right-wing faction of the Liberal Party in demonising refugees and blaming immigration for the lack of much-needed infrastructure and rising unemployment.

Labor is no lesser evil. If it is returned to government it will deepen the country's military alignment with the US against China and impose the full burden of the mounting economic crisis directly onto the working class.

The urgent task of facing the working class is to assert its own independent class nterests through the development of a mass, socialist and internationalist movement against all the establishment parties and against the capitalist profit system that they defend.Eight children, including one infant, were killed in an apartment fire in the Little Village neighborhood on Chicagos west side early Sunday morning. Fire officials have determined that it started on a second-floor enclosed porch and spread to two greystone buildings and a brown brick cottage behind the buildings around 4:00 a.m., on the 2200 block of S. Sacramento Avenue.

The children killed were identified as Maya Almaraz, 3 months; Ariel Garcia, 5; Lonni Ayala, 3; Gialanni Ayala, 5; Giovanni Ayala, 10; Xavier Contreras, 11; Nathan Contreras, 13; and Victor Mendoza, 16 years old. Two 14-year-old boys were taken to the hospital in very critical condition for smoke inhalation. On Sunday afternoon they were reported to be on life support. A Chicago firefighter has also been hospitalized for overexertion.

The neighborhood is home to a predominantly working class and Latin American immigrant population. Much of the housing stock in the neighborhood is aging, with some buildings being over a century old. Decades of deindustrialization on Chicagos West Side and cuts to public infrastructure and education have led to the growth of unemployment, particularly among youth, higher rates of crime, and a growth in low-wage, precarious employment.

Chicago Fire Commissioner Jose Santiago told local news station CBS 2 that the number of fatalities and injuries caused by the fire in one location was very unusual and that the city had not seen something like this in many years. The Chicago Tribune reported that it was the citys deadliest fire in more than a decade.

An intense and emotional scene unfolded on the block following the fire. A woman cried outside on a doorstep with children gathered around her. Chicago police and local television news stations, including ABC 7 and Telemundo, blocked the entrance to the street. Red crime scene tape cordoned off the entryways from the sidewalk to apartment buildings on the block. Volunteers from the Red Cross roamed up and down the sidewalks to offer water, snacks and emotional support to residents who had gathered outside.

Workers came from the neighborhood and surrounding areas to show support for the families of the victims and to grieve. A small memorial was set up for the victims on a patch of lawn in front of the homes, with candles and white crosses bearing the names of those killed.

What happened this morning was a massacre, John, a resident on the block, told the World Socialist Web Site. I saw five bodies wrapped in sheets lined up on the pavement after the firefighters came. Some of them were just babies. Everyone around here is in a state of shock. Children saw this happen. No one here is going to be the same again.

The building owners were out here in the morning, and all they could say was that they were so angry that the firefighters broke the windows of their property so they could get the people inside. But you know, windows can be replaced. You cannot replace a life.

Even though I did not know the families of the children who died, deep inside I feel connected to them. I am the father of twin babies, and they were all I could think about through this whole thing. Im very emotional right now. Look all around, there is so much emotion here.

John told the WSWS that he works two jobs, one of them as a pizza delivery driver. People around here work more jobs than that. You dont really know what its like until you spend a day here.

I did not hear any smoke alarms. It took probably 30 minutes for the fire department to get here. If this happened in a rich neighborhood like Gold Coast there would have been firefighters there right away and everyone would have been saved. But the rich dont care about this place; it has been neglected and abused for a long time.

While the exact causes of the fire remain unknown at the time of this writing, the Chicago Department of Buildings records show that the building failed an inspection in June due to an electrical problem.

Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Merritt said that investigators found no working smoke detectors in the building. Residents were alerted to the fire by a neighbor who told local press that she had been watching television when she saw flames through the window and told her neighbors in the house to get out.

The results of the investigation so far point to the fact that the tragic deaths were entirely preventable. According to the fire department, if working smoke detectors had been in place, the victims would have been woken by the alarms and could have all escaped to safety.

Robert, who works for a service company which boards up buildings after fire damage, said that fires in Chicago and its suburbs are fairly common. In a regular week, well have like four or five fires that we respond to. Sometimes as much as four per day.

Ive heard that the fire here was intentional, and then Ive heard that it wasnt intentional. We dont know the cause of the fire until after the investigation is done. What I had originally heard was that this was an electrical fire.

I dont even know if there were fire alarms in there. In Chicago, it all depends on your landlord and how well they maintain the property.

These same words could be used to describe the situations of workers across the US and around the world. Forced to live in substandard conditions due to falling wages and a rising share of wealth going to the top, many workers find themselves with no choice but to live in the most inexpensive areas that they can find. These are often areas with few amenities and social services, decaying infrastructure, and higher rates of crime.

According to the US Fire Association, 114 home fire deaths were recorded in the state of Illinois in 2017, a rate of 9.5 per month, with 18 in the city of Chicago. So far, 2018 has seen 78 recorded home fire deaths in the state, a rate of 9.75 per month.

Chicago Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel delivered empty remarks about the tragedy in Little Village at an unrelated event on Sunday. Theres a horrific loss of life. We havent seen this in a long time in the city of Chicago. In 2012, Emanuel announced cuts to funding and staffing for the Chicago Fire Department, referring to the plan as reform.

George Cardenas, Democratic Alderman for the 12th District of the city, visited the scene Sunday morning and told the Chicago Sun-Times, Its a massive tragedy, especially in a neighborhood that struggles. Cardenas made no effort to mention the decades of budget cuts and deindustrialization efforts overseen by the Democratic Party.

Workers and youth in Chicago will not find a way forward against poverty and cuts to social services through the Democratic Party apparatus and its many middle-class activist organizations throughout the city. In order to wage a fight for its demands for the funding of jobs programs, decent housing, and social and public infrastructure, the working class must build its own neighborhood committees, led by workers themselves.

The wealth of the capitalist class, created by the labor of the working class, must be expropriated by the workers in order to pay for the needs of the working class through a coordinated struggle worldwide to overthrow the capitalist system and replace it with socialism.Less than two weeks before classes resume on September 3, tens of thousands of French students are still being denied admission to university by the Parcoursup algorithm set up by the Orientation and Success for Students (ORE) law imposed in the face of mass student protests this spring. According to figures released on August 9, of the 812,050 university-age students who are enrolled in Parcoursup, 66,400 still had not been admitted anywhere.

The fact that tens of thousands of students may be denied higher education underscores the reactionary character of President Emmanuel Macrons education cuts. The measure aims to make universities more competitive and to prepare their privatization. It gives Frances public universities the power to select, and to reject, their own students.

Previously, virtually every student wanting to attend university, who had passed the baccalaureat exam at the end of high school, would be assigned to a public university in his or her chosen field. The new law, however, requires university admissions to take into account the baccalaureat score, the quality of the students high school, and the students academic record and internships. This favors more affluent layers of the population who can access better-ranked schools, travel, obtain internships and cultural experiencesopportunities denied to working-class families.

In the last three years, the number of incoming university students has grown by 30,000 to 40,000 each year, a tendency expected to continue until 2020. Public universities would therefore need substantial state investment to deal with the increased number of students. Instead, Macrons education cuts are substantially lowering the number of enrolments, forcing students to either attend private universities or abandon their studies outright.

After the ORE reform was announced, students protested across France in the spring, blockading dozens of universities to oppose the law and demand its withdrawal. Macron reacted with brute repression, sending the police to break up the blockades.

The trade unions and pseudo-left parties like the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) and Unsubmissive France (LFI) played a key role in isolating the students. They kept students from waging a joint struggle together with the workers against Macron, by limiting the movement in the railways, airlines and other industries to symbolic actions subordinated to the trade unions negotiations with Macron. The unions then approved Macrons policy of privatizing the railways and preparing more social attacks, isolating the student blockades and letting police crush them.

Faced with growing anger and concern among students, the government has tried to deny the figures about students being denied admission that are reported in the press. Higher Education Minister Frederique Vidal told RTL radio: There are 16,000 youth who are actively looking for admission, and 50,000 we are trying to contact and who currently are not answering our calls.

These 50,000 other candidates are inactive, according to the jargon of the government, who claims that they therefore do not need to be counted as seeking admission. We consider them inactive because one knows that youth can have other plans, be enrolled in the university system but not actively be seeking admission, Vidal tried to tell RTL.

The governments explanation flagrantly contradicts the experiences of thousands of students. LExpress contacted Guillaume Ouattara, an engineering student at Compiegne, who has analyzed the Parcoursup platforms algorithm, and concluded that the division between students who are or are not actively seeking admission is fraudulent.

Ouattara told LExpress, To be considered as actively seeking admission, one must have recently formulated a request for internships or have contacted the rectorate (to discuss admissions plans). However, many students do not even know that they can contact their rectorate or have not found internships that suited them. However, they are still logging on to the system to check if their situation has changed.

Though these students are still waiting to be admitted, the education ministry blamed them for supposedly not trying to gain admission: Every year, we have this problem. We ask the students to make themselves known to us if they are really looking for a place in higher education. We have sent them various messages on the platform.

Ouattara told LExpress he had his doubts: Students Im talking to have not all received either a phone call or a message.  There are indeed 66,000 students who are waiting, not 16,000 as the ministry claims.

The government has assigned only 7 million in aid for unassigned high school graduates moving expenses, assuming they will eventually be assigned a university. According to financial daily Les Echos, Aid packages of 200-1,000 for moving expenses are being granted as lump sums at the beginning of the university term for graduates who are forced to move far from their home after receiving an offer of admissions.

This derisory sum of 200-1,000, which does not compensate the cost of moving and starting university studies, is more of an insult than an offer of aid.

If thousands of students risk not being able to attend or finance their studies, it is because of social austerity that allows the super-rich to accumulate exorbitant fortunes at the expense of the masses.

The 7 million aid package proposed to as yet non-admitted students is less than what some French billionaires make in a day. Thanks to Macrons anti-social reforms, the 13 richest people in France have increased their wealth by 23.67 billion since the beginning of 2018.

Bernard Arnault, the richest person in Europe and the fourth-richest person on the planet due to his ownership of luxury conglomerate LVMH, was able to increase his fortune from 18 billion to 73.2 billion between 2008 and 2018a decade of deep economic crisis and social hardship for masses of working people. It would take a minimum wage worker 4 million years to earn Arnaults net worth.

Arnaults fortune increased by 19.1 billion over the course of the last year that is more than 52 million per day. Arnault earns in less than four hours the equivalent of the total funding proposed by the Macron administration to aid students who still have not received an admissions assignment from Parcoursup.On Tuesday August 21, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) reported that it had been hacked, with the US media quick to point the finger at Russia. But just one day later, the incident turned out to be a security test initiated by the Michigan Democratic Party to simulate a so-called phishing attack against the DNC.

The test involved the creation of a fake login page designed to look like the access page Democratic Party officials across the country use to log in to a service called Votebuilder, which hosts a database containing years of voter information. Phishing is a common attack method designed to trick people into handing over usernames and passwords that can later be used to access a real site.

While it is not unusual for companies and organizations to conduct tests to evaluate potential risks from phishing attacks of this nature, they are usually conducted in a way that obscures the infrastructure used in the test to prevent a third party discovering it and assuming it is a real attack. It is also best practice to inform those responsible for an organizations security that a test is taking place. Neither the DNC, NGP Van, who provide the Votebuilder service, or the cloud provider where the page was hosted, were informed of the tests in this case.

The page was initially discovered by a San Francisco-based cybersecurity firm, Lookout. The company alerted both the DNC and cloud hosting company DigitalOcean where the page was hosted on Tuesday August 21. DigitalOcean removed the page as soon as they were alerted by Lookout.

Mike Murray, Lookouts vice president of security intelligence, told reporters Lookout had probably found the site within 30 minutes of its being put onlinebefore anyone would have logged on to itand that it was changing rapidly, as if the hackers were building it as Lookout was discovering it.

Murray also said there was no way to tell who was behind the attack. That kind of analysis and attribution takes time, he told the Washington Post .

Josh Feinblum, chief security officer at DigitalOcean, said, We see no evidence that any sensitive data was stolen and our initial investigation indicates that we were able to address this threat prior to the attack being launched.

Without a shred of evidence, the Democrats and their supporters in the news media seized on the supposed hacking attempt to bolster claims of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections and of ongoing threats to this years midterm elections.

Bob Lord, chief security officer for the Democratic National Committee said the attack was further proof that there are constant threats as we head into midterm elections, and we must remain vigilant in order to prevent future attacks.

The New York Times responded with its usual scaremongering hysteria, reminding its readers When the Democratic National Committee was hacked in 2016 during the presidential campaign, the incident was traced to Russia. Citing two officials briefed on the latest incident, the Times claimed the attempt was aggressive and that hackers also may have sent emails to people within the national committee to try to trick them into using the fake page.

The Times continued, The combination of this attack on the committee, continued influence operations by Russia and others using social media, and efforts to breach think tanks underscores that the cyber age has changed elections forever. So many systems are vulnerable to manipulation, from the voter-registration systems in the 50 states to the inner workings of the parties, that the opportunities for foreign and domestic manipulation are many.

A Wall Street Journal article on August 22, written prior to reports of the testing, cited an email from a Democratic official saying, We believe that this was the beginning of a sophisticated attempt to hack into our voter file and we are treating it as such. The Journal adds, Such phishing attempts have been routine for over a decade against political campaigns and affiliated organizations. But this incident comes amid repeated warnings from senior U.S. intelligence officials that Russia is intent on interfering in the 2018 midterm elections.

Democratic representative for New York, Carolyn B. Maloney tweeted August 22, This hacking attempt comes just weeks after @HouseGOP voted AGAINST funding for voting protections. Our intel community warned us about this, and now its (sic) happening. This isnt fake news - its a REAL attack on our democracy. We need to act.

As quickly became clear, there was no attack. Even as the true nature of the incident was revealed, it was used to further propagate claims of Russian interference. In a follow-up statement, Lord said, There are constant attempts to hack the DNC and our Democratic infrastructure, and while we are extremely relieved that this wasnt an attempted intrusion by a foreign adversary, this incident is further proof that we need to continue to be vigilant in light of potential attacks.

Brandon Dillon, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, said the test was a misstep but it was part of efforts to improve cybersecurity especially as the Trump administration refuses to crack down on foreign interference in our elections.

A breakdown of communication between the Michigan Democrats and the National Committee and incompetence in carrying out a test without following best practices is now presented as proof of potential cyberattacks and the need for Trump to crack down on foreign interference in elections.

The incident once again sheds light on the utterly unsubstantiated claims by the Democratic Party that it was the victim of a Russian hacking attack during the 2016 election, which Democratic officials claimed was the alleged source of incriminating emails released by WikiLeaks.

In that case, not a shred of convincing evidence was presented showing that the Russian government was in fact behind the release of the emails. But the campaign initiated in the wake of the alleged 2016 hacking attempt was used by the media and Democratic Party officials to whip up an atmosphere of anti-Russian hysteria, used to justify a sweeping crackdown on freedom of expression on the Internet.The official number of those killed in the worst floods that the southern Indian state of Kerala has faced in nearly a century now stands at 445. Of the two million flood victims, almost one million people remain in more than 2,780 relief camps, with little prospect of returning to their homes in the near future.

Millions of Kerala residents now face the danger of water-borne diseases, such as cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, typhoid and leptospirosis, along with bites from poisonous snakes and other reptiles, which are expected to push up the current death toll.

Those able to return to their homes face immense difficulties due to the lack of electricity and drinking water. About 50 electricity sub-stations and over 16,158 transformers have been seriously damaged, cutting power to more than 2.5 million properties.

While water levels are receding, more than 100,000 houses need to be fully rebuilt, a task that will have to be undertaken by flood victims, as government authorities have virtually abandoned the survivors. Last Wednesday a 68-year-old man committed suicide after he was taken to the remains of his home at Kothad in Ernakulam district. Earlier in the week, a 19-year-old boy took his own life because his school certificates were destroyed by the floods.

Keralas transport system has been seriously impacted with about 11,000 kilometres of roads and 237 bridges damaged. A final estimate of the toll on the states agricultural sector cannot be made yet because state officials have not been able to reach many of the flooded areas. Over 10,000 hectares are flood damaged at a cost of 5.728 billion rupees ($82 million) in the hardest-hit Idukki district, which produces cardamom, pepper, tea, fruit and vegetables.

Initial estimates of the cost of the Kerala disaster currently stand at 200 billion rupees ($3 billion), but officials have warned that the final amount will be more than twice that figure. United Nations Development Programme senior advisor G. Pramod Kumar told the media: The total loss will probably run into billions of dollars. Think about Mississippi, Katrina and the Thailand floodsthey all ran into tens of billions of dollars. Finding money to recover from this level of damage is difficult.

The massive social destruction in Kerala, however, is a direct result of political decisions made by Indias ruling elite. Successive Indian governments, at central and state levels, all share the blame, having refused to provide badly needed flood-control infrastructure. Instead they have diverted government resources to providing facilities and tax breaks for foreign and local big business investors.

Indias central and Kerala state governments, whether led by the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janatha Party, the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the Congress Party, have promoted highly profitable construction, mining and deforestation industries without any consideration of their dangerous environmental impact.

In the aftermath of the disaster, all factions of the ruling elite are attempting to divert popular anger by shifting responsibility onto their political rivals.

The CPM-led Kerala state government, for example, is blaming neighbouring Tamil Nadu for the flood. In an affidavit submitted to the Indian Supreme Court on August 23, Kerala Chief Secretary Tom Jose said: The sudden releases from the Mullaperiyar Dam, the third largest reservoir in the Periyar Basin, forced us (Kerala) to release more water from the Idukki reservoir, downstream of Mullaperiyar, which is one of the causes of this deluge.

The Tamil Nadu state government rejected the Kerala governments allegations. Mullaperiyar Dam is located in Kerala but its operations are controlled by Tamil Nadu. This has been the source of regional chauvinist conflict between the two states for decades.

Congress Party state opposition leader Oommen Chandy blamed the current CPM-led state government for the floods, accusing it of not releasing water from Idukki dam until the last minute and causing huge damage to life and properties.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan rejected these accusations, claiming they were misleading, baseless and that emergency warnings were issued before the dams were opened.

Irrespective of Chandys claims, the previous Congress Kerala state government, which he led, is equally responsible for the disaster. Both state governments refused to act on recommendations by the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) in 2011. The Indian government-appointed agency identified future flood dangers and called for tight restrictions to be placed on quarrying, mining, illegal repurposing of forests and high-rise building constructions.

The Kerala government has called on the BJP-led central government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to provide 20 billion rupees ($287 million) in emergency assistance. Modi, however, has provided just 6 billion rupees ($86 million). He also rejected $100 million of aid offered by the United Arab Emirates, stating that India would not accept any assistance from a foreign government and had enough resources to deal with the disaster.

Last Wednesday, Raveesh Kumar, a spokesman for Indias ministry of external affairs, told the media: In line with the existing policy, the government is committed to meeting the requirements for relief and rehabilitation through domestic efforts.

The CPM-led Kerala state government has denounced the BJP governments response. Keralas finance minister Thomas Isaac told the media the central governments reaction was political discrimination against a leftist government.

Appearing on Manorama News channels Liveathon programme, Kerala CPM Chief Minister Vijayan called on Kerala residents to donate a months salary to help rebuild the flood damaged state. All those who have lost their houses should be provided new ones, he said. Damaged houses should be repaired. The government, however, cannot carry out these tasks on its own.

In other words, the economic burden of repairing the homes and basic facilities of millions of flood survivors in Kerala is to be placed on the backs of the working class.In February 2018, some 30 hand-written documents of imprisoned members of the Trotskyist Left Opposition from the years 1932-1933 were found in the Verkhneuralsk prison in the Southern Urals of Russia. Most of them were written in notebooks. The documents were discovered during maintenance work under the planks of the floor in chamber No. 312 of the prison.

Only a small portion of the Trotskyist oppositions literature that was written in the Soviet Union in this period has hitherto been known. The Stalinist secret police, the OGPU-NKVD, did its best to destroy the documents produced by the Trotskyists. Only a few of them made it across the border, where they could be published in the Bulletin of the Opposition, which was edited by Leon Trotsky, the leader of the Left Opposition, and his son Lev Sedov.

Pages in notebooks written by the Soviet Left Oppositionists

The discovery of these documents is of major historical and political significance. The contents of the three documents published so far are a powerful vindication of the decades-long struggle of the Trotskyist movement, which founded the Fourth International in 1938, against counterrevolutionary Stalinism. Their publication constitutes a major blow to the Stalinist and post-Soviet schools of falsification, which, for decades, have sought to slander, belittle and silence the Trotskyist movement.

Lev Sedov, the son of Leon Trotsky and editor of the Bulletin of the Opposition

The documents confirm that the Left Opposition, even after it was expelled from the Communist Party and thrown behind bars, remained a formidable force. As the historian Alexander Fokin, who teaches at Chelyabinsk State University and is among those working to publish these documents, noted:

In historiography, the view has been entrenched that after 1927, after the defeat of Trotsky, the Left Opposition in Russia de facto ceased to exist. But this discovery proves that even the Stalinist prison could not break these peoplethey organized and continued the struggle. Based on the manuscripts, it is clear that they were indeed striving to create a certain alternative program for the development of the USSR.

The Left Opposition emerged in the fall of 1923, in the last period of Lenins life and amid the aborted German revolution, when the growth of bureaucratism in the Soviet state and the Communist Party was already arousing opposition within the party and the working class as a whole. The backwardness of the Russian economy, the inheritance of tsarism, and the delay of the international, and especially the European, revolution strengthened conservative, nationally oriented layers in the party and state apparatus. They found their ideological justification in the theory of socialism in one country, which was advanced by Bukharin and Stalin in late 1924 in direct opposition to the internationalist spirit and perspective of the October Revolution of 1917.

During the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the mid-1920s, the Left Opposition criticized the dominant faction within the party leadership, headed by Stalin and including centrist and right-wing forces, for adapting to the petty-bourgeois and aspiring bourgeois Nepmen and to the kulaks (rich peasants), as well as for blocking proposals to accelerate industrialization and for suppressing inner-party democracy. In foreign policy, the Trotskyists condemned the increasingly opportunist line of the Comintern, which led to a series of devastating defeats of the working class, including in Great Britain and China.

Leon Trotsky with leaders of the Soviet Left Opposition in 1927

In the fall of 1928, the right-wing course of the official leadership of the Bolshevik Party was replaced by an ultra-left zig zag. One of the reasons for this was a grain crisis provoked, as the opposition had foreseen, by the unwillingness of the kulaks to sell grain to the state at unfavorable prices. After a period of slow industrialization and increasing reliance on market mechanisms, the Stalinist leadership shifted to the other extremea chaotic and adventurist policy of super-industrialization and violent collectivization of agriculture.

As a result of the extreme sharpening of the inner-party struggle, Trotsky and Zinoviev, along with some 8,000 oppositionists, were expelled from the party at the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927. From this point on, the repression against the Left Oppositionists steadily rose. The penalty of exile was replaced by prison sentences, and the conditions of imprisonment grew ever more cruel. As the historian and sociologist Vadim Rogovin emphasized, [T]he foundations of the bureaucratic-centrist political regime, which protected itself from any attempts to carry out socialist renewal, were laid in the struggle of the ruling factions against the Left Opposition. (V. Z. Rogovin, Vlast i oppozitsii, Moscow: 1993, p. 118)

Along with the political prisons in Yaroslavl and Suzdal, the Verkhneuralsk Prison, whose building had been constructed in the 1910s, became a center for the incarceration of expelled dissidents, including the Bolshevik-Leninists, as the Trotskyist oppositionists called themselves.

Photo of the building of the Verkhneuralsk political prison, which has been turned into a museum

Among the best known figures in the Verkhneuralsk political prison were the former Politburo members Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, the former head of the Gosbank (State Bank) and vice-head of the VSNKh (Highest Council of the Economy), Georgii Piatakov, the former secretary of the Comintern, Karl Radek, the former editor-in-chief of the Komsomol'skaia pravda, Aleksandr Slepkov and his friend, the writer Dmitrii Maretskii, who was the brother of Vera Maretskaia, a famous Soviet film star in the 1930s. The prisoners also included small groups of Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and representatives of other political tendencies.

A list of 117 names of imprisoned Bolshevik-Leninists, published in the Bulletin of the Opposition in March 1931, included some of the most outstanding representatives of international Trotskyism at the time: Fedor Dingelshtedt, a leading theoretician of the Left Opposition; Viktor Eltsin, the editor of Trotskys Collected Works in Russian; Man Nevelson, the husband of Leon Trotskys younger daughter, Nina Bronstein, and a leading oppositionist in his own right, Musia Magid, and Igor Poznansky, one of Trotskys former secretaries and among his closest collaborators.

Exiled Left Oppositionists. Top left: Viktor Borisovich Eltsin. Middle right: Igor M. Poznansky. Both were close collaborators of Leon Trotsky

Of perhaps the greatest significance among the published documents is the Bolshevik-Leninists theses on the Fascist Coup in Germany from April 1, 1933. (Click here to download the full Russian text.) Written just two months after Hitler was placed in power by a conspiracy at the highest echelons of the German bourgeoisie and state, it offers a sharp analysis of the origins of German fascism and the tasks facing the working class throughout Europe. The document begins by placing the rise of Nazism in the context of the crisis of world capitalism:

The state-organized counterrevolutionary coup that just occurred in Germany, the March counterrevolution, is an event of the greatest historical significance. The imperialist world war has not solved any of the contradictions of capitalist society. On the contrary, it extraordinarily intensified and deepened them, bringing them onto a higher stage The world economic crisis has deeply shaken the foundations of capitalist society. Even an imperialist leviathan such as the USA has trembled under its blows.

The document emphasizes that the decision of German capitalism to place fascism in power signified an escalation of the counterrevolution internationally. The German bourgeoisie, the Bolshevik-Leninists argue, had decided to destroy whatever concessions it had been forced to make in the wake of the betrayed 1918/19 revolution of the German workers and sailors.

A significant portion of the document deals with the betrayal of the German Communist Party (KPD) and its historical implications. Sharply attacking the KPD for having sown illusions in the supposedly socialist elements of the program of National Socialism, for having oriented German workers more toward the Nazi party, for having glorified the rise of fascism as a left radicalization of the masses, all the while opposing a united front with workers from the Social Democratic Party, it states:

The lack of opposition of the leadership of the German Communist Party to the fascist coup is only the decisive and final link in the chain of betrayals of the world revolution that international Stalinism has committed over the prolonged period of the preceding years. This betrayal of the international revolution... will go down in history along with the date of August 4, 1914 [when the German Social Democracy approved war credits for the German government.] .... In rejecting the international permanent revolution, it [the bureaucracy] feeds the counterrevolution. The bureaucracy of the USSR has constantly cleared the way for world reaction to crush the communist movement. The USSR is isolating itself from the world proletariat just as the latter is being isolated from the proletariat of the USSR.

The Bolshevik-Leninists not only criticized the KPD for its policies. They summarized the alternative that had been provided for years through the analyses and statements of the Left Opposition, and especially Leon Trotsky, of the situation in Germany. Then they put forward bluntly the only correct policy that would have been able, if implemented by the Comintern internationally, to shift the situation and balance of forces in favor of the working class:

In light of the growing danger of a fascist coup, the revolutionary leadership of the communists was obliged to: Strengthen day in and day out the anti-fascist front of the working class; Carefully prepare a general strike for its immediate realization in response to any attempt at a fascist coup; Carefully prepare everything possible for the arming of the workers at the moment of the assault of the c[ounter]-revolution; Mobilize the best forces of the world communist movement to help the German proletariat; Mobilize the Red Army of the USSR for the active support of an anti-fascist onslaught of the German working class; Declare openly and courageously to proletarian public opinion in Germany that it is not alone in its heroic struggle with fascism, that the proletariat of the USSR will help it crush the c[ounter]-revolution with all the resources the country has [at its disposal], including with armed forces, that have been awaiting this historical moment in full mobilizational readiness, that the Russian proletariat will fulfill its duty toward its German brothers with the same decisiveness with which the latter fulfilled theirs toward Russia in 1918.

In not even attempting to fulfill these elementary international revolutionary responsibilities, the Bolshevik-Leninists declared, international Stalinism has prepared and conditioned this giant world defeat of the proletariat. In this way, it has completed its own betrayal of the revolution. In this way, the Comintern has crossed itself out from the list of revolutionary factors, having become the tail-end, the left-wing of social democracy. [Emphasis in the original.]

The document bluntly sums up the dangers confronting the working class. The internal and external contradictions will push the government of fascist Germany on the path toward external aggression, and on the historical plane, against the USSR, for there is and can be no other way for the prolonged consolidation of the counterrevolution but through war.

However, the Nazi regime would last not decades, but years, the Bolshevik-Leninists predicted, and the working class would enter into revolutionary struggles, including in Germany itself:

The German working class constitutes half of the country. We are living in an epoch of wars and revolutions, when the political experience of the masses grows quickly, when all processes of social life are moving at sevenfold speed, when classes cannot remain for a long time in a state of confusion or passivity, no matter how cruel the defeats they had suffered.

The document concludes:

The world revolution is entering into one of its most dramatic phases. To explain this to the workers of the entire world, to mobilize the workers, to make sure that the working class understands the causes that have led to this phase, that it understands that the victory of the proletariat is impossible under the Stalinist regime, not just here [in the Soviet Union], but that it is also made more difficult in Europe, that international Stalinism is one of the decisive barriers that the working class needs to crush in order to overcome the giant wave of world reactionthis is our primary task. And we are obliged to fulfill it with all the possibilities and in all forms that we have at hand.

The theses were signed by 30 imprisoned Trotskyists, including: Dingelshtedt F., Kariakin M., Papirmeister P., Shinberg B., Novikov P., Abramskii A., Portnoi M., Bodrov M., Papirmeister Ya., Feldman, Nevelson M., Kessel, Borzenko, Blokh, Kugelev, Kozhevnikov N., Zaraikin, Papirmeister S., Eltsin V. B., Danilovich L., Khugaev K., Brontman, Vashakidze, Gogelashvili, Topuriia, Efremov, Shiptalnik, Sasorov, Kholmenkin, Shvyrov.

The notebook titled The situation in the country and the tasks of the Bolshevik-Leninists

The document is, in every respect, extraordinary. Cut off from the International Left Opposition and imprisoned, the Soviet Trotskyists offered an analysis that on all critical points completely coincided with that of Trotsky, adding aspects and emphases that are important for a comprehensive historical assessment of 1933. While not yet calling for the Fourth Internationala call Trotsky himself would issue only later that yearthere is no question that, judging by this document, the leading Soviet Trotskyists would have supported and contributed to the building of the Fourth International. Moreover, distribution of such documents in Europe and especially in Germany, amid the total collapse of the old leaderships, would have had a huge impact on the consciousness of thousands if not millions of workers.

The published documents so far are only a tenth of what has been found. Among the discovered manuscripts are several notebooks under the common title: The crisis of the revolution and the tasks of the proletariat. Other documents bear titles such as: A unified or ambiguous revolution? On the results of the discussion on permanent revolution, The theory of permanent revolution and the theory of socialism in one country, On the theoretical foundation of the Leninist opposition and Stalinist national-socialism, Basic questions of the economy and policy of the transitional period, Theses on economic policy (for a general and collective discussion).

These documents underline, illustrate and, in some sense, concretize the scale of the historical crime that the Stalinist bureaucracy committed in first isolating these cadres from the Soviet and international proletariat and then murdering them in the political genocide of the Great Terror. It is precisely because the Stalinist bureaucracy recognized that their political line resonated with the living experiences of the working class internationally and clearly articulated its historical and political tasks that it repressed them with historically unprecedented ferocity.

Starting in 1933, the oppositionists were carried off to labor camps, and by the end of 1936 they were virtually all in the two most awful placesthe camps of Kolyma in Eastern Siberia and the camps of Vorkuta near the Polar circle in the very north of the Urals.

Here many died of hunger, disease or forced labor, or were executed. Fearing that an upsurge of the working class internationally would benefit the Trotskyist movement, the Stalinist bureaucracy moved to escalate its repressions and launched the Great Terror, in which no less than 20,000 to 30,000 Soviet Trotskyists and hundreds of thousands or even millions of Communists and socialist intellectuals were killed. Virtually all of those from the Verkhneuralsk political isolator were among those murdered.

One of the handwritten pamphlets from the Verkhneuralsk politizolator

There is no question that the cadre that was destroyed by Stalin would have played a central role in leading the revolutionary movements against fascism that erupted within the European working class both on the eve of World War II and in the early 1940s. The mass terror of Stalinism against the Trotskyist and communist movement, soon abetted by the horrendous murder rampage of Nazism, provided the conditions under which these movements could be manipulated politically and brought under the control of Stalinism.

These documents powerfully vindicate the Trotskyist struggle against the counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy. Every element of their analysis was confirmed by events. No one, having read these documents, can argue that the Left Opposition was an insignificant political force in the Soviet Union. Every line in these documents is imbued with revolutionary optimism, tenacity and foresight, and a proud, hardened fighting spirit.

The Trotskyist movement was and has always been, as the Bolshevik-Leninists emphasized, first and foremost an international tendency. This is why, whatever the horrendous crimes of Stalin and whatever the extraordinary losses the Trotskyist movement had to suffer, it could not be either defeated or destroyed as a political tendency.

The Fourth International was founded in 1938 in Paris amid the greatest wave of counter-revolutionary terror in world history. It was, as David North put it in The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century, Trotskys victory over Stalin. In the end, it was the Stalinist bureaucracies, their mass parties and apparatuses, that ingloriously collapsed in 1989-91, while the Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International, has proceeded to build what is now the most widely read socialist website on the Internet, the World Socialist Web Site.

Significantly, the discovery of these documents was broadly covered in the Russian media, with leading news outlets, including the business daily Kommersant and the Komsomol'skaia Pravda reporting on it. Kommersant, one of the most widely read newspapers in Russia (as of 2013, it had a daily circulation of between 120,000 and 130,000) printed two of the documents in full in its online edition (the first two discussed in this article) and interviewed a series of historians about them.

There is a profound sense in Russian society that this historical material and the questions it raises are important, not just for archivists, but from a contemporary political standpoint. Hundreds and thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people in Russia will have read these documents by now. Many of them will be impressed by the degree of historical and political clarity, sharpness and foresight the Trotskyists evinced in them.

We urge the readers of these documents to contact the World Socialist Web Site and discuss these questions with us. The International Committee of the Fourth International represents the sole continuation of the heroic struggle of the Soviet and international Left Opposition. It has fought over decades to defend the Trotskyist perspective of international socialism and its analysis of the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism, which these documents so powerfully illustrate.

Earlier this year, the ICFI published the Russian translation of David Norths In Defense of Leon Trotsky, which constitutes a major contribution to an understanding of the basic historical and political issues that were bound with the Stalinist betrayal of the October Revolution, the struggle for Trotskyism and the post-Soviet school of historical falsification.

Buy this book and help us distribute it as widely as possible! Contact us if you are interested in working with us on these historical questions on a principled basis!There is a well-known saying, of murky Latin origin, that one should not speak ill of the dead. But when the death of an individual becomes the occasion for such universal glorification by the political establishment and the media, as with Senator John McCain of Arizona, a correction is in order. This is especially necessary since the newly deceased had such a lengthy record as a militarist and supporter of political reaction, and the further promotion of such policies is the transparent purpose of the hosannas being sung in his praise.

The Sunday television interview programs on five networks devoted the bulk of their coverage to McCains life and career and to fond reminiscences by well-heeled journalists and big-business politicians, Democratic and Republican. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd noted that McCain was the single most-interviewed person on the program, appearing 73 times in his 36-year political career.

McCain was a right-wing Republican, but the loudest tributes to his political record are coming from Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer proposed renaming the US Senates Russell Office Building. Instead of Richard Russell of Georgia, a Democratic Party defender of Jim Crow segregation, the building would now be named after a Republican defender of wars in Vietnam, Central America, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc.

Speaking on ABCs This Week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, Right now I'm just heartbroken. I think Americas in tears about the loss of this great man. Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted, John McCain was an American hero, a man of decency and honor and a friend of mine. He will be missed not just in the US Senate but by all Americans who respect integrity and independence.

In yet another characteristic display of lickspittling subservience to the ruling elite, socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: John McCains legacy represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service. As an intern, I learned a lot about the power of humanity in government through his deep friendship with Sen. Kennedy. He meant so much, to so many. My prayers are with his family.

What does John McCains legacy consist of? How did he provide an unparalleled example of human decency and American service?

McCain spent four years in the House of Representatives and 32 years in the US Senate, but it would be impossible to cite a single piece of legislation with which he was associated that benefited the broad mass of the American people. As far as domestic affairs were concerned, he was best known for voting (in the House) against the bill that established a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the Senate, he was the lone Republican among the Keating Five, senators who lobbied federal regulators on behalf of savings and loan swindler Charles Keating in 1987.

The political embarrassment caused by this episode, in which McCain narrowly avoided sanctions by the Senate Ethics Committee, led to his involvement in a decade-long effort to establish at least token limitations on corporate contributions to political campaigns. But the McCain-Feingold bill, as it became known, was ultimately gutted by the Supreme Court, which rejected most limitations on corporate purchasing of legislators as an infringement on free speech. Throughout his career, McCain was a reliable vote for the Republican rightfor the Gramm-Rudman Act to slash federal social spending, for the impeachment conviction of President Bill Clinton, and for (with a few exceptions) measures to deregulate business and cut taxes for the wealthy.

The overriding feature of McCains career, however, was his reflexive hawkishness on foreign policy. He supported war after war, intervention after intervention, always promoting the use of force as the primary feature of American foreign policy, and always advocating the maximum allocation of resources to fuel the Pentagon. In his honor, after his diagnosis with brain cancer made it clear that he was unlikely to survive this year, his Senate colleagues named the 2018 version of the Pentagon budget bill the John McCain National Defense Authorization Act.

McCains identification with militarism began with his family background: his father and grandfather were both admirals and now have US Navy warships named after them. McCain graduated from the Naval Academy and became a pilot, leading to his capture in Vietnam and five-and-a-half years of imprisonment. No doubt the circumstances he faced there were very difficult, but any sympathy must be tempered by the fact that he became a POW after dropping bombs on largely defenseless people, making him a front-line participant in one of the greatest war crimes in history, the savage American onslaught on Vietnam.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted in a commentary published after McCain sought to lecture the Vietnamese in 2000 about their political and economic policies:

While McCain gives sermons to the Vietnamese, let us recall that American military forces carried out mass executions, bombed civilians, defoliated half the country, carried out rape and torture, burned villages, shot children, threw prisoners out of helicopters and cut off the ears of people both alive and dead, keeping them as mementos and trading them for cans of beer. Not every soldier perpetrated such crimes individually, of course, but the military intervention as a whole was of a brutal, anti-democratic, imperialist character, which inevitably found expression in such sadistic conduct.

Once freed following the Paris agreement between Washington and Hanoi, McCain came home a war hero. After his first marriage ended in divorce in 1980, McCain married Cindy Lou Hensley, the daughter of a multimillionaire beer distributor in Arizona. Now flush with money, McCain moved to Arizona to begin a career in Republican politics. First elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, he backed the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 and the Reagan administration policy of supporting fascist forces in Central America, including death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala and the contra terrorists at war with Nicaragua (he was on the board of the US Council for World Freedom, the American chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, for several years). After succeeding Barry Goldwater in the US Senate in 1986, he backed the first Bush administrations invasion of Panama in 1989 and the full-scale American war against Iraq in 1990-91, during which hundreds of thousands of Iraqi conscripts were incinerated by American bombs, rockets and shells.

After some initial reluctance, McCain backed the Clinton administrations military threats in Bosnia, including the bombing of Serb forces, and then in 1999 cheered the full-scale bombing of Serbia, declaring that the United States could accept no limitation on its military operations in support of its aims in Kosovo: Were in it, and we have to win it. This means we have to exercise every option.

Like virtually every other Democrat and Republican, he supported the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, launching a war that is now approaching the end of its 17th year, the longest in American history.

It was in the second Iraq War that McCain played his most prominent and reactionary role, cosponsoring the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, along with Democrat Joe Lieberman, endorsing the bombing of Iraq, first under Clinton and then George W. Bush, cheerleading the 2003 invasion and then pushing for a more aggressive use of force during the protracted US occupation, culminating in Bushs surge of additional troops in 2006-2007.

McCain was a full-throated supporter of whatever lie the Bush administration chose as the basis of its war propaganda: Saddam Husseins alleged ties to terrorism; his possession of weapons of mass destruction; the desire to establish democracy in Iraq; and finally, the need to preserve stability, i.e., to deal with the consequences of the US destruction of Iraq as a functioning society.

Along the way, McCain found time to advocate military action against North Korea in 2003, US intervention in Iran in 2007, and US support for Georgia in the war between Russia and that Caucasian republic in 2008 (when he dispatched his wife Cindy to Tbilisi in a show of support).

Finally, in 2008, McCain won the presidential nomination of the Republican Party. Already in ill health, the 71-year-old nominee displayed his love of country by selecting the fascistic nitwit, Sarah Palin, as his running mate.

McCains 2008 presidential campaign was defeated, in part because of popular hostility to the war in Iraq, with which he was so identified, and partly because of his failure, during the financial crisis of September 2008, to respond as quickly as Obama to the demands of Wall Street for a full-scale federal bailout of the banks.

Throughout the Obama administration, McCain was a firm supporter of the Democratic president when he used military force, as in Libya, or threatened it, as in the South China Sea, and a critic when Obama pulled back, as in Syria. McCain and John Kerry introduced a Senate resolution to sanction the war in Libya, and McCain called for US air power to be used in a heavier way. In September 2013, McCain backed a resolution passed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to give US support to military operations in Syria that would change the momentum on the battlefield and strengthen forces opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. He repeatedly called for more boots on the ground for the US-backed war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

In October 2016, while the Democratic Party was focusing its presidential campaign on alleged Russian meddling, McCain authored an op-ed column published in the Wall Street Journal in which he indicted Russia for having slaughtered countless civilians in Syria through relentless indiscriminate bombing. There was no little irony in the former bomber of North Vietnam denouncing Russia for doing a tiny fraction of the damage inflicted by the shock and awe campaign in Iraq, which led to one million deaths and which McCain supported enthusiastically.

We have noted the embrace of McCains legacy by his supposed opponents in the Democratic Party. This is not merely the result of McCains support for the bogus allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, peddled by the Democrats and much of the military-intelligence apparatus. More than a decade ago, in the summer of 2004, there were back-channel discussions between Kerry and McCain, in which the Democratic nominee suggested the formation of a bipartisan presidential ticket, with McCain running as his vice-president, to oppose the reelection of George W. Bush. McCain toyed with the idea, but ultimately decided to remain with the Republicans.

In 2007, when his second campaign to seek the Republican presidential nomination was floundering in its initial stages, McCain was interviewed on the 60 Minutes program on CBS about the mounting opposition to the war in Iraq. At what point do you stop doing what you think is right and you start doing what the majority of the American people want? he was asked. McCain responded, I disagree with what the majority of the American people want. The Wall Street Journal hailed this responsewhich essentially rejected popular sovereignty as the basis of democracyas McCains Finest Hour.

It is this absolute commitment to the defense of American imperialism that endeared McCain to the US ruling elite as a whole and explains the outpouring of adulation over the weekend.In a vitriolic 11-page letter released over the weekend, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano alleged that Pope Francis was responsible for covering up allegations of sexual abuse by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and issued an unprecedented call for the pope to resign. McCarrick was removed as archbishop of Washington D.C. in June over claims that he assaulted a teenage altar boy while a parish priest 40 years ago.

The explosive contents of Viganos letter will only intensify the deep crisis in the Roman Catholic Church over the widespread sexual abuse of minors by priests over decades around the world and the ongoing systematic cover-up of these crimes by the church hierarchy. According to the letter, Pope Francis, who was installed in the top post in 2013 in a desperate bid to give the church a more compassionate and caring face, along with a long list of top church officials, was complicit in this criminal conspiracy.

Pope Frances has just completed a visit to Ireland where he performed what has become a standard, dishonest ritual: meeting privately with a select group of sexual abuse victims and asking for forgiveness as he presided over a mass on Sunday. On the same day, however, thousands of people protested against the papal visit in centre of Dublin with slogans such as the Pope is protecting paedophiles and Hey Pope Francis youre outta chances.

The author and abuse victim Colm OGorman, who organised the protest, told reporters that the pope had apologised and met survivors but evaded Vatican responsibility for crimes and cover-ups. I think [his visit] has made it worse, he said.

Under siege over allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in a number of countries, Pope Francis wrote a papal letter to all Catholics last week asked them all to help end this culture of death and vowing that there would be no more cover-ups. His response to Viganos letter will only further undermine his standing and that of the Catholic Church. Speaking on his return flight from Dublin to Rome, he dismissed the document, declaring he would not say a word about its claims and simply telling reporters judge it for yourselves.

Viganos letter is certainly a bitter, subjective document that highlights the backbiting and intense factional feuding inside the Catholic Church that reaches to the very top of the hierarchy. Vigano, who served as papal nuncio or Vatican ambassador to the United States from 2011 to 2016, belongs to the so-called conservative wing that has been deeply critical of the liberal Pope Francis. He makes no attempt to conceal his homophobia and deep-seated hostility to any attempt to ease the churchs reactionary injunctions against homosexuality.

The letter itself was clearly timed to embarrass Pope Francis while he was visiting Ireland and signalled the start of a public campaign to undermine and remove him. It was published simultaneously by Catholic conservative mouthpieces and was immediately followed by supportive statements from fellow conservatives. Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas declared that Viganos allegations were credible and instructed that the statement be distributed at all church services and through social media.

There is absolutely nothing progressive in any of the factions of the Roman Catholic Churcha wealthy, powerful institution of the ruling classes that has been a bulwark of political reaction down through the centuries. Pope Francis, who postures as a friend of the poor and hypocritically comments on social inequality, was notorious as former Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Bergoglio for his collaboration with the murderous Argentinian military junta and its crimes between 1976 and 1983.

While Pope Francis continues to make empty gestures toward the many thousands of young victims of sexual abuse at the hands of priests and bishops, he has steadfastly refused to make any formal admission of responsibility on the part of the Catholic Church. Such a statement would open the way for legal suits and demands for sizeable compensation payments.

Viganos posturing as the moral guardian of the Catholic Church is likewise riddled with hypocrisy. The letter is clearly targeted at Pope Francis and his liberal allies but in doing so Vigano traces a history of cover-up and deceit concerning allegations of sexual abuse that, by his account, stretches back until at least 2000. Vigano claims that his letters to Rome and those of two of his predecessors concerning Archbishop McCarricks gravely immoral behaviour were ignored by the Vatican.

Viganos chief accusation against Pope Francis was that he lifted the secret sanctions imposed on McCarrick by the previous Pope Benedict, which banned him from travel, celebrating mass and public meetings, and obligating him to follow a life of prayer and penance. Vigano pointedly exonerates the conservative Benedict and apparently believes that it is legitimate to sweep allegations of sexual abuse under the carpet by issuing a secret papal injunction.

Nor does Vigano try to explain why, given that he has known about the accusations for more than a decade, he has remained silent and only chooses to make the allegations public now. In reality, the entire institution is responsible for the systematic cover-up in defence of the wealth and tattered prestige of the church. The popes refusal to say a word about Viganos accusations is symptomatic of the stance of the institution as a wholestonewalling in the hope the repercussions of its crimes will simply go away.

The determination of the Catholic Church to cover-up wholesale crimes of sexual abuse is a warning that there is no line it will not cross. Pope Franciss collaboration with the Argentine junta and its murder of an estimated 30,000 workers, students, intellectuals and others is matched by the churchs backing for Francos fascist dictatorship in Spain and its cooperation with the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.

As the political establishment lurches towards authoritarian rule in country and after country around the world, the Catholic Church will not be found on the side of the poor and oppressed but rather backing the wealthy elites and their governments in the vicious suppression of working people.

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[16 March 2013]25 years ago: Israeli cabinet approves Oslo Accord

Rabin

On August 30, 1993, the Israeli cabinet gave its approval to a tentative agreement reached between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in secret negotiations held in Oslo, Norway. The agreement marked the end of a protracted struggle by the PLO against imperialist oppression and colonial domination, and its transformation into armed guards of the Zionist state and defenders of foreign capital.

The agreement laid the basis for the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, which took control of local policing in the Gaza Strip and those portions of the West Bank not under the direct rule of the Israeli military or ultra-right Zionist settlers. The Israeli regime was in dire need of such assistance, as the agreement came in the sixth year of the intifada, the spontaneous uprising of Palestinian youth and workers against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

An additional factor in Israeli calculations was the social crisis produced by an influx of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, under conditions of a global economic recession. Unemployment in Israel climbed to 11 percent, and the threat of upheavals within the Jewish working class was mounting.

The public celebrations of the Oslo Accord were hypocritical in the extreme. PLO leader Yasser Arafat, demonized as a terrorist in ruling-class propaganda, was suddenly praised as the face of peace. Another peacemaker was Prime Minister Rabin, an Israeli military officer for decades, who as defense minister organized the bombing of PLO headquarters in Tunis, the assassination of Arafats deputy Abu Jihad, and the countless massacres of school children and other innocent civilians in the occupied territories.

An editorial statement in the International Workers Bulletin, the US predecessor of the World Socialist Web Site, condemned the deal: Nothing could more clearly expose the blind alley reached by bourgeois nationalism at the close of the twentieth century. It demonstrates the impossibility of the oppressed peoples of the world achieving genuine liberation through the establishment of new national states or under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie.

The statement warned that far from leading to peace, the stage was being set for new and bloodier conflicts in which Jewish and Arab workers would have to confront both the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisies.

50 years ago: Half a million join student protest in Mexico City

Aerial photo of the Mexico City protest

On August 27, 1968, an estimated 500,000 students and supporters gathered in Mexico City to protest the administration of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz. The Diaz Ordaz presidency was marked by authoritarian rule used to suppress working class opposition and basic rights.

Protests were organized by the National Strike Council (Consejo Nacional de Huelga, CNH) a delegation of students elected by their peers from 70 universities in Mexico. The CNH directly challenged the anti-democratic repression of Diaz Ordaz and previous Mexican administrations. The students demanded:

The repeal of Article 145 of the penal code which allowed the imprisonment of anyone attending meetings of three or more people.

The abolition of the granaderos, the militarized police.

The release of all political prisoners.

The chief of police and his deputy be removed.

The identification of officials responsible for government crimes and repressions.

The summer of 1968 saw some of the largest and most violent clashes between protesters and the Mexican government. This was partly due to Mexico City being the host city for the 1968 Olympic Games. The Diaz Ordaz administration wanted to present an image of Mexico as an advanced country worthy of credit and capital investment. The students wanted to use the opportunity of a world stage to expose the Mexican government for its oppressive policies. One popular slogan was, We dont want Olympics, we want revolution!

Trying to avoid international embarrassment, Diaz Ordaz ordered heavy crackdowns on the peaceful demonstrations, including police occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in September. The August 27 protest followed a number of demonstrations that had been organized throughout the summer. But this demonstration was the largest in Mexicos history up to that point and revealed revolutionary sentiments among both students and workers. Protests continued to be organized by the CNH until October 2 when the police opened fire on unarmed demonstrators in Tlatelolco, an area of Mexico City.

75 years ago: Italian workers form factory committees

Badoglio

The revolutionary tide in Italy continued to rise, this week in 1943, as the government of Marshal Badoglio was forced to grant workers the right to elect factory committees by secret ballot. The agreement stated that management staff was excluded from voting, making a clear break with the fascist principle that the interests of workers and management were identical.

Workers either transformed the fascist unions into independent organizations or established new unions outright. Also won was a reduction in work hours from a seven-day week and a twelve-hour day to a six-day week and an eight-hour day, with no reduction in wages.

The retreat by the fascist Badoglio forced Roosevelt and Churchills Allied Military Government (AMG) in recently-occupied Sicily to make a tardy verbal concession more than a week after Badoglios, stating: The AMG abolishes today all fascist labor and corporative organizations ... and is substituting a free labor movement.

Badoglio, however, remained silent about the workers chief demand: an end to the war. General strikes and mass demonstrations demanded Peace and Down with the war. Thousands of desertions afflicted the army, and in Turin Italian soldiers joined armed workers in a gun battle against German soldiers.

Combined with concessions, Badoglio unleashed savage repression in an attempt to intimidate the working class from taking revolutionary action. Government tribunals were set up to try 1,500 antifascists on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government.

What really held back the working class was the influence of the Socialist Party and especially the Stalinists of the Communist Party, who spread illusions in the imperialist Allies and emphasized putting pressure on the government instead of preparing the working class to overthrow it and establish a workers government.

100 years ago: Anti-Soviet assassins kill Uritsky, wound Lenin

Uritsky

On the morning of August 30, 1918, outside the offices of the Cheka in Petrograd, Leonid Kannegisser shot and killed Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky, a leading member of the Cheka and member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Uritsky had a long career in the socialist movement and had joined the Bolshevik Party in July 1917 along with other members of Trotskys Mezhraiontsy (Inter-District) group. Kannegisser was a former military cadet and supporter of Kerenskys Popular Socialists, an anti-Bolshevik bourgeois party. Kannegisser shot Uritsky twice, fatally wounding him with a bullet to the head.

Then, in the evening of August 30, Lenin was shot by Fanny Kaplan, a former anarchist, and now member of the Social Revolutionary Combat Group, which had stalked both Lenin and Trotsky for weeks. Lenin was leaving a meeting at an arms factory when Kaplan fired three shots at him. Lenin was wounded in the neck and the shoulder. He was driven back to the Kremlin to receive medical attention where he collapsed. For several hours rumors circulated that he was dying.

When news of the assassination attempt and the murder of Uritsky spread around Russia in the next few days, millions were outraged, and the working class redoubled its struggle to defend the revolution. As Trotsky noted years later, when he was called back to Moscow from the front after the attempt on Lenins life, The mood of the party circles in Moscow was sullen and dismal, but they were absolutely unshakable. Lenin made a remarkable recovery and was on his feet in ten days, but the attack had long-term consequences for his health.

Petrograd and Moscow were hotbeds of conspiracies by counterrevolutionary groups, often with funding or the active assistance of agents of British and French imperialism. The Bolshevik leader and editor of the popular Red Gazette, V. Volodarsky, had been assassinated in Petrograd in June by a member of the Social Revolutionary Combat Group.

Modern research, however, shows that, while Kannegisser had connections to counterrevolutionary groups after the October Revolution, he was likely acting alone when he assassinated Uritsky, possibly in revenge for the shooting of a close friend by the Cheka on August 21.

In August 1918, the socialist revolution was fighting for its life. Kazan had fallen to the forces of the anti-Soviet Komuch government which was backed by the Czech Legion. The newly formed Red Army was now, under Trotskys leadership, establishing itself as a disciplined force, and would retake Kazan on September 10, but the situation was dire: the country had been invaded by British troops in Archangelsk in the northwest and Japanese troops in Vladivostok on the Pacific, the terminus of the critical Trans-Siberian Railway. German imperialist armies occupied Ukraine as a part of the desperate peace of Brest-Litovsk, and a hostile Menshevik regime was in power in Georgia.

The Soviet-controlled cities were starved of grain. The Soviet republic was forced to adopt the practices known as the Red Terror, including mass arrests of known counterrevolutionaries and summary executions, directed, above all, at the former landowners and wealthy capitalists.Teachers across the northwestern US state of Washington are voting overwhelmingly for strike action, as thousands of educators demand double-digit pay increases before the start of school. In their fight to reverse years of budget cuts, Washington teachers are giving voice to the anger and determination of educators and all workers across the US.

The threat of a statewide teachers strike in Washington takes place under conditions of growing anger among workers throughout the US and an unprecedented crisis within the ruling elite. Conditions are developing for a connection between educators and the hundreds of thousands of workers whose contracts have or will soon expire, including workers at United Parcel Service, the United States Postal Service and in steel, telecom and other industries. Seattle-area construction workers are already on strike .

The principal obstacle to a united action of workers is the trade union apparatus, which is working to prevent strike action or isolate and shut down struggles when they do break out.

Last Thursday, Longview educators were the first members of the Washington Education Association (WEA) to take strike action. About 400 educators and their supporters rallied outside the district offices demonstrating widespread support for the strike.

All teacher contracts in the state have been opened as a result of the state Supreme Court decision known as McCleary, the product of a 2012 lawsuit by parents outraged over attacks on public education. While about 40 school districts have settledsome for pay increases reportedly as high as 2535 percentmore than 200 have so far refused to meet the demands of teachers. This includes Seattle, the largest district.

Rallies and strike votes have been held in Highline, Centralia, Evergreen, Kent, Battle Ground, Washougal, Hockinson, Vancouver and Ridgefield, with more scheduled this week. Tacoma, the third largest district, has offered teachers an insulting 3.1 percent increase, as have a number of other districts. As a result of McCleary and the depth of the cuts imposed on Washington schools, the legislature was compelled to allocate $7.3 billion to the school system last year. Another $1 billion was added this year earmarked for teacher salaries.

The pay gap between Washington teachers and other similarly-educated workers is the sixth worst in the US, with educators making 32 percent less than other college graduates in the state. Moreover, the cost of housing in the state of Washington is extremely high, making it increasingly impossible for teachers to live in the districts where they teach.

A call for a statewide walkout to support ALL districts and/or a demonstration at the state capitol in Olympia on Labor Day has sparked great interest on social media.

While state legislators have failed to fund schools, the state is awash with money. It is the home to the worlds two richest people, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (net worth $150 billion) and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates ($91 billion). Its largest private employer by far is the commercial jet and military contractor Boeing, which saw its profits double last year.

In 2013, the state legislature handed Boeing an estimated $8.7 billion tax windfall, the largest state tax break in US history.

The main concern of Democratic Governor Jay Inslee, who signed the deal, and his colleagues in the legislature was, and continues to be, Boeing, Amazon and other major corporations, not children. The same tax breaks for Boeing were extended in 2017, with bipartisan support, to all manufacturers in the state, while property taxes were raised on workers homes.

In demanding decent wages, Washington educators are expressing not only their own pent-up anger, but that of educators, school workers and parents across the US suffering the effects of a bipartisan policy of defunding and privatizing education on a national level. McCleary may have opened the floodgates, but Washington teachers are taking their place within a broad-based radicalization of workers nationally and internationally.

Some 26,000 Los Angeles teachers are presently working without a contract and voting on strike action. North Carolina educators rallied last Friday at the state capitol demanding adequate funding for schools and are organizing town halls around the state to mobilize support. Alaskan teachers rallied last week during their first day of striking, protesting their second year of working without a contract. Earlier this month, thousands of teachers in Puerto Rico staged a one-day strike to oppose plans to close nearly a third of the schools on the hurricane-ravaged US territory.

A decade since the global financial crash, teacher strikes have erupted internationally, with mass strikes this year in Mexico, Argentina, Slovenia, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom and India.

The teachers unions, politically aligned with the Democratic Party, are doing everything they can to block the development of a national and international struggle of educators. Just as the National Association of Education (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) worked to suppress, limit and sell out the statewide teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona last spring, the NEA is trying to quash the fight in Washington state.

Under extreme pressure from teachers, the WEA has recommended 15 percent wage increases for certified teachers and 36.7 percent increases to support professionals, while desperately trying to keep a lid on teachers anger. Even in the wake of a miniscule 3.1 percent offer and an overwhelming strike vote, for example, Kent Education Association President Christie Padilla stated, We absolutely do not want to strike. If the NEA were a fighting organization, rather than a strike-breaking one, it would have already called a statewide strike.

The fight to reverse the bipartisan national policy of gutting public education while funneling massive tax cuts to the wealthy requires a new perspective, both organizationally and politically. The NEA and AFT have supported the pro-privatization, anti-public school agenda pursued by both Democrats and Republicans because they are advocates of capitalism, an outlook that has richly rewarded their upper echelons.

Assisting the unions in suppressing the class struggle are groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and the Democratic Socialists of America. Seattle teacher and ISO member Jesse Hagopian is a spokesman for these organizations, which are part of the union apparatus and have secured leading positions in several teachers unions. The ISO echoes the WEAs call for a grossly inadequate 15 percent increase and even calls a 13 percent bump a victory.

The WSWS Teacher Newsletter urges workers to break the stranglehold of the corrupt anti-working class unions by forming rank-and-file committees to take the conduct of the struggle into their own hands. These committees, drawn from schools and neighborhoods, should draw up demands as the basis for a nationwide strike, bringing together educators, parents, students and all sections of the working class.

The claim promoted by both the Democrats and Republicans that there is no money to adequately fund education is a lie, designed to camouflage the theft of social resources by the wealthy. The struggle by teachers poses directly the question of which class holds power and decides how societys resources are allocated: the working class, which produces all the wealth in society through its labor, or by the corporate and financial oligarchy.

The fortunes of Bezos, Gates and their Wall Street cronies must be expropriated and used to provide good-paying jobs, education, health care and housing for all. Boeing, along with the rest of the imperialist war machine, must be transformed into a publicly owned utility and devoted to peaceful and socially useful production such as rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure, including the construction of high-tech, modern schools in every community.

The defense of public education has become a revolutionary demand because it requires a struggle against the entire capitalist economic and political set up. We urge teachers to contact the Socialist Equality Party and take up the fight for socialism.National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Reality Winner, 26, was sentenced last Thursday to five years and three months in federal prison for leaking classified documents to the press which contained allegations of Russian manipulation of the 2016 presidential election.

Winner is the first person to be tried by the Trump Administration under the Espionage Act and according to her attorneys her punishment will be the longest sentence ever imposed for leaking classified information.

She pleaded guilty in June at a federal courthouse in Georgia as part of a plea deal to reduce her sentence. Prosecutors from the Justice Department did not seek the maximum sentence of 10 years imprisonment and instead recommended a 63-month penalty.

Winner was employed by defense contractor Pluribus International Corporation in May 2017 when she printed a classified document from the NSA office in Augusta, Georgia and mailed it to an online news outlet.

The news organization was never named by prosecutors, but the Justice Department announced Winners June 2017 arrest the same day that the online news source The Intercept published an article on a secret NSA document.

The document alleged that Russian military intelligence launched a cyber attack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last Novembers presidential election. Upon closer examination, however, the document fails to provide any real evidence to back up these claims as it merely rests on summary statements that are to be taken at face value.

For example, it reads Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors  executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions.  The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to  launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations (emphasis added).

Short on any specifics, the document fails to note if the operation had any discernible impact on the outcome of the 2016 election. Furthermore, the NSA documents contain hypothetical charts which show how Russian intelligence agents, or anyone else, might infiltrate US election systems. Winner may have thought the documents were proof of Russian hacking and leaked them to the media.

The ruling class has been involved in a ferocious conflict since Trumps victory in November 2016 over allegations of Russian hacking of the election for which no real proof has been offered. Behind these conflicts lie questions over foreign policy and democratic rights, with President Trump being criticized by Democrats and Republicans for his lack of bellicosity toward Russia and with Congressional Democrats leading the charge for the censorship of the Internet to combat foreign meddling.

The sentencing of Winner for leaking documents to the press and the Trump administrations war on journalists and whistleblowers is entirely consistent with the Obama Administrations persecution of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange.

Winner grew up in Kingsville, Texas, a small city 44 miles southwest of Corpus Christi. She joined the Air Force upon finishing high school and became a linguist, fluent in Arabic and Farsi. She was employed as a translator by the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. After leaving the military she again worked for the NSA, this time as a civilian contractor.

In court, Winner apologized for her actions calling them an undeniable mistake that I made, adding My actions were a cruel betrayal of my nations trust in me. For their part, prosecutors made the claim that the defendants unauthorized disclosure caused exceptionally grave harm to our national security.

US Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, Bobby Christine, appointed by Trump last year, told reporters outside the federal courthouse in Augusta, Georgia, Winner will serve a term of incarceration that will give pause to others who are entrusted with our countrys sensitive national security information and would consider compromising it, and Anyone else who may think of committing such an egregious and damaging wrong should take note of the prison sentence imposed today and the very real damage done.

Needless to say, the governments attorneys did not explain or make an effort to prove how exactly Winner compromised national security or put anyones lives at risk.

President Trump responded to the sentencing by publicly criticizing his own Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not prosecuting his rival Hilary Clinton in a similar fashion, tweeting, Ex-NSA contractor to spend 63 months in jail over classified information. Gee, this is small potatoes compared to what Hillary Clinton did! So unfair Jeff, Double Standard.At least 22 children and four women were killed by Saudi air strikes in Yemen on Thursday as the US-backed coalition continues its onslaught on the port city of Hodeidah and surrounding areas. The latest atrocities came just two weeks after a Saudi aircraft dropped an American-supplied bomb on a school bus in the northern town of Dahyan, killing 40 children and injuring more than 50.

According to reports from a news network aligned with the Houthi rebels, the first Saudi air strike hit a camp for internally displaced people (IDPS) in Duraihami, killing five people and injuring two. Then, in an act of cold-blooded murder that has become the hallmark of the Saudi air war in the impoverished country, an aircraft struck a group of 26 women and children trying to flee the scene of the earlier air strike by bus.

The Saudi-led coalition sought to justify the bombing by claiming that the rebels fired a ballistic missile from the area earlier in the day. In reality, the indiscriminate targeting of civilians is nothing new. According to data compiled by al-Jazeera and the Yemen Data Project, around one third of the 16,000 Saudi air strikes on Yemen since March 2015 have hit civilian targets. These have included weddings, water treatment plants, hospitals and electricity plants.

As with every air strike launched by the Saudis and their allies, which bear responsibility for the vast majority of the tens of thousands of civilian deaths caused by the bloody three-year-long conflict, the two strikes Thursday would not have occurred without the support of the United States. US military personnel operate a joint headquarters with their Saudi counterparts in Riyadh for intelligence sharing, regularly refuel Saudi jets in midair so they can continue their murderous raids, and supply the reactionary dictatorship with billions of dollars worth of bombs and other military equipment. Analyses of contracts between US defence contractors and Riyadh indicate that $90 billion in military equipment was sold to Riyadh by the US between 2010 and 2015.

Just one week prior to the latest massacre, research published by CNN revealed that the 500-pound bomb dropped by Saudi aircraft on a school bus on 9 August was manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the US' largest defence contractor. It was supplied to the Saudi air force in a munitions deal approved by the State Department after former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson lifted restrictions on supplying precision-guided arms shipments to Riyadh in march 2017.

Washington's support for Riyadh's near-genocidal assault on the Yemeni population was initiated by the Obama administration in March 2015. It has been intensified over the past year, including with the deployment of US special forces on the ground to call in air strikes, and a dramatic increase in the number of air strikes launched directly by the US in Yemen. These attacks, ostensibly directed against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS forces, saw a five-fold increase to over 130 in 2017.

Responding to the latest attack, United Nations officials renewed the organization's demand, issued following the August 9 school bus bombing, for an independent inquiry into the latest round of atrocities. Mark Lowcock, the UN's top relief official, declared that there was no doubt of Riyadh's responsibility for Thursday's twin attacks.

The bombing is part of the Saudi-led coalition's brutal offensive, relaunched in early July in close collaboration with Washington, to take the port city of Hodeidah, which Houthi rebels have held since 2014. The port remains one of the few lifelines through which aid can pass into the war-ravaged country. The siege of the city is causing aid organisations to fear that 8 million Yemenis, more than a third of the population, could be left without food.

Horrendous war crimes like those carried out on Thursday and in the school bus attack are a regular occurrence. On 2 August, at least 60 people were killed and over 130 injured after a fish market in Hodeidah was bombed. Meanwhile, Middle East Eye reported on 16 August that residents of the town of Duraihami, some 20 kilometres south of Hodeidah, had been stranded in their houses for days as Saudi forces and mercenaries carried out an offensive against the city to retake it from the Houthis.

There are some people that have bled to death [in the street] and no one dared to help them because of the clashes. Some corpses have decayed in the streets, Ahmed Mubarak, a Duraihami resident, told Middle East Eye. The town lives under siege, and also we are under siege inside our houses, as the snipers in the city from both sides kill anyone who leaves his house to the street.

On Friday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a 90-page report accusing the Saudi-United Arab Emirates alliance of war crimes. HRW criticised the Joint Incident Assessment Team (JIAT), set up by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to examine allegations of war crimes, for absolving coalition members of legal responsibility in the vast majority of attacks. The report continued: JIAT investigations show no apparent effort to investigate personal criminal responsibility for unlawful air attacks. This apparent attempt to shield parties to the conflict and individual military personnel from criminal liability is itself a violation of the laws of war.

Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said, For more than two years, the coalition has claimed that JIAT was credibly investigating allegedly unlawful air strikes, but the investigators were doing little more than covering up war crimes.

The slaughtering of civilians in Yemen has been all but ignored by the corporate-controlled media. The few expressions of concern that have been made, including from a handful of members of the US Congress, have focused on the danger that US military personnel could be charged with war crimes, rather than expressing any real concern for the plight of the Yemeni people.

The massacring of tens of thousands of civilians in pursuit of US imperialism's predatory interests in the Middle East long ago became a routine affair for the media and political establishment. If the Saudis now feel they can act with such impunity in Yemen, it is not merely because Washington backs Riyadh's aggressive war to the hilt, but also because the United States has been no less ruthless in its slaughtering of civilians. Since the launching of the war on terror 17 years ago, US imperialism has laid waste to entire societies and bears responsibility for deaths in the millions, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

US imperialism's unwavering support for Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen is bound up with its determination to retain its unchallenged dominance over the strategically significant and oil-rich Middle East. Washington's drive to crush the resistance of the Houthis, whom the US and Riyadh routinely accuse, without providing any evidence, of being Iranian puppets, is viewed as the prelude to an even bloodier and more devastating conflict with Iran.

The threat of such a catastrophic war is growing. In tandem with its backing for the escalation of the Yemen conflict over recent months, the Trump administration has moved to abrogate the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran. At the same time, Washington has given Israel a free hand to bomb Iranian installations in Syria, which has emboldened the right-wing Netanyahu government.

Earlier this month, the US began to reimpose punishing sanctions against Tehran, with a further round due to target Iran's lucrative oil exports in November. Washington has used these measures of economic warfare to bully its nominal allies and rivals alike to line up behind its provocative threats against Iran, which could rapidly erupt into a region-wide military conflict that would draw in the major powers.North Korea's state newspaper accused the US of "hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK" while "having a dialogue with a smile on its face" Sunday following a report on South Korean radio that American forces in Japan were running drills aimed at invading Pyongyang.

"We can not but take a serious note of the double-dealing attitudes of the US as it is busy staging secret drills involving man-killing special units while having a dialogue with a smile on its face," the commentary from North Korea's Rodong Sinmun said, citing South Korean reports that US special units had been flown to the Philippines as part of an invasion drill.

"The US would be sadly mistaken if it thinks that it can browbeat someone through trite 'gunboat diplomacy' which it used to employ as an almighty weapon in the past and attain its sinister intention," it added.

US Forces Japan (USFJ) told CNN on Monday it was "not aware of the drills" mentioned in North and South Korean media reports.

"In general, US aircrafts and ships operate from Japan every day in support of our commitments to our allies and partners in the region and in the interests of regional peace and security," Col. John Hutcheson, the Director of public affairs of USFJ, said in a statement.

The harsh rhetoric from Pyongyang comes just days after President Donald Trump nixed plans for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to make what would have been his fourth visit to North Korea, citing insufficient progress on the issue of denuclearization.

"I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to go to North Korea, at this time, because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," Trump tweeted on Friday. "Secretary Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved."

A diplomatic source told CNN that while it is possible that high-ranking officials in Seoul were informed of Trump's decision to cancel the trip prior to the tweets, the announcement caught South Korean diplomats at the working level off guard. South Korean President Moon Jae-in plans to visit Pyongyang next month for a third summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The South Korean Foreign Ministry said Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-hwa and Pompeo spoke by telephone Saturday to discuss the canceled trip and where negotiations might go from here.

A statement released by the ministry said Pompeo explained "in detail" the reasons for postponing the trip. The statement did not elaborate.

According to the South Korean Foreign Ministry, Kang called the cancellation "regrettable" while Pompeo reaffirmed the US position that it will continue to solidify South Korea-US cooperation.TISHOMINGO COUNTY, Miss. (WTVA) - A Corinth man is accused of stealing an ATV in Tishomingo County.

Steven Lynn Gray, 41, was arrested on August 25 and charged with grand larceny.

According to the Tishomingo County Sheriffs Department, the ATV was reportedly stolen from a residence on Highway 365 South in the Burnsville area.Update 08/28/18 3:29 p.m.

Kelvin Gene Robertson made his initial court appearance on August 28. His bond was set at $500,000.

See the original post below.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Miss. (WTVA) - Authorities in Montgomery County say they have captured a suspect who was considered armed and dangerous.

Sheriff Bubba Nix says 48-year-old Kelvin Gene Robertson fled from authorities after they responded to a shooting call on Sunday.

Authorities arrived around 11 a.m. at a home in the 2800 block of Highway 407. That's located in the Poplar Creek Community.

Montgomery County authorities say Robertson loaded a gun then shot through a glass door towards a deputy, but the deputy was not injured.

Mississippi Highway Patrol, SWAT and other law enforcement came to the home to assist.

Authorities went into the home and believed Robertson crawled out of a window and made his way to the highway.

There, law enforcement set up a perimeter. The suspect is believed to have left the area on foot.

Robertson faces aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer. He is also a convicted felon from Louisiana.TUPELO, Miss. (WTVA) - Tupelo police are asking for help solving the recent burglary of a church.

Police say East Heights Baptist Church on Lake Street was burglarized the night of August 22.

Photo: Tupelo PD Photo: Tupelo PD

The burglars are described as a tall white male and a white female with dark hair.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-773-8477.TALLAHASSEE, FL (WTXL) -- A benefit concert was held Sunday night for a local woman whos in recovery after having a brain tumor suddenly removed.

Vittoria hit her head and got a concussion while she was working at Izzy Pub and Sushi. That led doctors to discover a brain tumor that had been growing for 5 to 10 years and would've started causing seizures.

Its a long road to recovery for Vittoria. Thats why her coworkers and the community wanted to help in any way they could.

On top of 3 local bands hitting the stage, more than 100 items were donated. If you couldnt make it tonight and want to help, Vittoria has a go fund me page called sunflowers for V - because friends say those are her favorite flowers.TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - The Tallahassee Police Department will host community forums about new body cameras for officers.

Chief Michael J. DeLeo will host the forums, which will be held throughout Tallahassee.

The forums are designed to educate citizens about what they can expect when interacting with officers, TPD's policy and procedures and offer opportunities for the public to ask questions about the cameras.

"With the implementation of this essential tool, we will continue our efforts to be transparent with the community, and increase public trust," DeLeo said.

TPD began testing the Axon camera system on April 12, 2018.

The technology will improve digital evidence collection, strengthen officer performance and accountability, document encounters between police and the public, a TPD news release said.

By the end of 2018, all TPD sworn members will be issed the Axon Flex 2 cameras.

Times and places of the Body Worn Camera Community Forums:

August 30 at Thomasville Road Baptist Church

3131 Thomasville Road from 6:30 p.m.- 8:30 p.m.

September 10 at Greater Mt. Zion Primitive Baptist Church

1816 Saxon Street from 6:30 p.m. -8:30 p.m.

September 13th at Jack McLean Community Center

700 Paul Russell Road from 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m.

September 24 at Lawrence Gregory Community CenterSource: Xinhua| 2018-08-26 22:05:46|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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KATHMANDU, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- Two people died and three people went missing while 24 others survived after a boat capsized Saturday in Lalbakaiya River in Rautahat district of Southeastern Nepal, local authorities involved in the rescue operation said here on Sunday.

Chief District Officer of Rautahat, Govinda Rijal, told Xinhua that 24 people were found survived in the incident that took place at Tekauliya Ghat in the swollen Lalbakaiya River.

"Twenty-four people came to contact with the local administration on Sunday morning, who survived by swimming ashore. We have recovered the two bodies from near the crash site," said Rijal, adding that three people have still gone missing.

The ill-fated boat hit a pillar of an under-construction bridge in Lalbakaiya River and toppled.

Rescuers confirmed on Sunday that the number of people aboard was 29.

"Initially, we could not ascertain the exact number of missing people as we were not clear about how many people were on board the boat," Rijal said from the crash site, which is located 110 km southeast of the capital Kathmandu.

Due to rainfall, rivers in Nepal have gone swollen over the past weeks.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 00:06:20|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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TEHRAN, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- In the earthquake measuring 5.9 on the Richter scale in western Iran on early hours of Sunday, at least three people were killed and 243 others were injured, semi-official Mehr news agency reported.

According to Iranian Seismological Center, the epicenter of the earthquake in Iran's Tazeh Abad town in western Kermanshah province was at the depth of 8 km, 34.631 degrees north latitude and 46.220 degrees east longitude.

The earthquake was felt in the neighbouring provinces of Lorestan and Ilam as well as in the border areas of the neighbour country of Iraq.

People in Tazeh Abad town and the nearby villages rushed to the streets in panic following the quake and camped in the parks.

Long queues are reported at the gas stations in all parts of the Kermanshah province.

According to Mehr, the broken water and power connections have been fixed and the telephone lines have been fixed in the quake-hit region.

Red Crescent Society of Kermanshah province have dispatched 24 teams of rescue operators to Tazeh Abad and the villages affected.

45 after-shakes, ranging 2.5-4.1 magnitude, have taken place in the region.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 03:41:54|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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RAMALLAH, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- A senior official in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party said Sunday that Egypt has offered new proposals for achieving an internal Palestinian reconciliation and a national unity.

"We will give an answer to Egypt's new proposals over reconciliation within the coming 24 hours," said Azzam al-Ahmad, who chaired a Fatah delegation that held talks with senior officials of Egyptian security intelligence services in Cairo for two days.

"Our position is that the file of reconciliation must be finalized first," said al-Ahmad, quoted by the Palestinian state-run news agency WAFA.

"Then we should go to the file of the truce (with Israel) as well as the development and relief projects in the Gaza Strip," he said.

Last week, Cairo hosted another round of dialogue between senior Egyptian security intelligence services officials and leaders of Palestinian factions and political powers, including Islamic Hamas movement, which has ruled Gaza since 2007.

Earlier on Sunday, a senior Palestinian official from Gaza said that the Egyptian-sponsored internal Palestinian dialogue over reaching a cease-fire agreement with Israel will be resumed in Cairo this week.

The dialogue will focus on two major issues: reaching a truce agreement between Israel and Gaza Hamas-led militants, and ending the internal division to achieve national unity.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 08:07:37|Editor: xuxin

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Rescuers work at the site of a collapsed building in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, India, Aug. 26, 2018. At least 10 people were feared trapped under the debris following the collapse of a four-storey building on Sunday in western Indian state of Gujarat, police said. (Xinhua/Stringer)

NEW DELHI, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- At least 10 people were feared trapped under the debris following the collapse of a four-storey building on Sunday in western Indian state of Gujarat, police said.

The building collapsed in Odhav area of Ahmedabad, about 27 km south of Gandhinagar, the capital city of Gujarat.

"This evening a building collapsed near Jhewan Jhotyi society here," a police official in Ahmedabad said. "No casualties have been reported so far but there is assertion 10 people are trapped inside."

Following the collapse, authorities rushed police teams and fire service personnel to the spot to carry out rescue work.

"The rescue operations are going on in full swing," the police official said. "Earth movers have been brought to spot to remove the debris."

According to officials the building was already declared unsafe by the local municipal authorities and inmates were issued eviction notices.

"Most of the families had vacated their apartments, only three or four remained, who are now feared trapped inside," city mayor Bijal Patel told media.

Deadly accidents due to failing infrastructure (either new or old) is common in India. Construction experts blame the lax administration and corruption in India for flouting building rules that often results in using poor quality materials, inadequate supervision, poor safety standards for workers.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 10:53:09|Editor: Liangyu

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LANZHOU, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- He Yong, a Chinese carpenter, has created a beautiful but functional bicycle out of wood.

Measuring 1.8 meters long and standing less than 1 meter tall, the bicycle created by the 55-year-old carpenter in northwest China's Gansu Province is made of walnut and elm.

It took more than two months to build. Every part, from the handle, seat and wheels to the drive system, is made of wood.

"I didn't use any nails. Different pieces of wood was connected by mortise-and-tenon joint, a traditional joint type in China," he said. "For me, the bicycle is a functional work of art."

Attracted by the woodwork of local carpenters, He bought carpentry tools with money which should be used for textbooks when he was a child. At the age of 14 he left school, despite family objections, to enter the carpentry trade.

"I could make furniture for others when I was 17," he said.

The idea to make the wooden bicycle came to him in late 2016. "I'm a carpenter. I want to show the world the skills of Chinese carpenters," he said.

He became an online celebrity after he made an 11-km-long ride, which was recorded and uploaded online.

An unnamed buyer from the neighbouring Shaanxi Province has approached him, asking to buy the wooden bicycle for 30,000 yuan (around 4,400 U.S. dollars), but He rejected the offer.

"The bike is like my friend. I won't sell it," said He, who has a bigger ambition. He plans to improve his creation and make it even faster than a traditional metal bicycle.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 10:58:11|Editor: Liangyu

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TAIPEI, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Thirteen operations each lasting more than eight hours, with four-hour sleep at most everyday, was the timetable of 68-year-old Taiwan surgeon Chen Chao-long and his colleagues, when they conducted liver transplant operations for six children in four days in Beijing last year.

Now serving as the superintendent emeritus at Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Chen is well known for conducting Asia's first liver transplant surgery in 1984, and has since been dubbed as "the father of liver transplants in Asia."

In 2007, as recognition of his extraordinary work, Chen was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

"Surgeries demand hard work, but when you see patients, once on the verge of death, recover under your treatment, and reckon they will return and contribute to the society again, you feel the utmost joy and fulfillment," Chen said.

CROSS-STRAIT RESCUES

In November 2001, Chen received an emergency call from the Peking University First Hospital in Beijing, asking for medical assistance for a 12-year-old girl who suffered from congenital hepatic fibrosis and was in urgent need of a liver transplant.

"The political situation across the Taiwan Strait then was not at a good time, and even among our peers there were doubt about exchanges with the mainland. Also, the airplane tickets for our 14-strong team would cost a fair amount of money," Chen said.

However, thanks to the support from Wang Yung-ching, founder of Chang Gung Medical Foundation and Formosa Plastics Group, Chen and his team finally made the journey to Beijing.

With help from Chen and his team, the operation turned out to be a huge success, and was praised as the largest medical emergency cooperation across the Strait, and marked the beginning of Chen's continuous cooperation with his mainland counterparts.

In 2002, Chen, with his mainland peers, conducted a successful operation on a girl from Shandong Province named Dong Guonyu, who was caught by the so-called "Wilson's disease." She received part of her mother's liver in a tough operation, which took 50 medical staff from across the Strait 14 hours to finish.

Four years later, Dong and her parents visited Chen in Taiwan to express their gratitude. Now she is the mother of a 10-year-old child in a happy family.

In Chen's office, there is a picture drawn by one of his little patients, Liu Mingrui -- a pair of hands tending to a heart, with words of "in love we become stronger" on the canvas. Liu received a liver transplant surgery led by Chen in 2006, when he was only nine months old.

"When I was making a speech in 2014 in Shanghai, Liu came all the way to give me the picture. Now he is an excellent student and a runner in school," Chen said.

SOWING SEEDS OF MEDICAL SKILLS

The diameter of the hepatic artery is as thin as 1.5 to 2 mm, which makes liver transplant operations very complex and highly risky. However, Chen is famous for his delicate, precise skills with an extraordinary control of bleeding.

"Maybe chopsticks give our hands a better flexibility training than knives and forks," Chen joked.

Invited by Sun Yat-sen University of Medical Sciences, Chen made his first journey to the mainland in 1995. Since then, he has visited the mainland over 100 times to help with liver transplant operations and train doctors in hospitals, including those in remote areas.

"I believe that medical science is a discipline of saving lives rather than a property kept to oneself," he said.

In 2006, Chen visited Renji Hospital at Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine and showcased a model operation there, which was recorded by cameras as a valuable reference. With years of meticulous learning and practice, surgeons at the hospital accomplished 803 successful liver transplant operations last year.

For many mainland doctors, Chen is not only a treasure chest of skills to draw from, but also a bridge of medical exchange and friendship from the other side of the Strait.

"HELP OUR ANCESTRAL HOME"

"Mr. Wang Yung-ching always told me that as long as we had the capability, we should try our best to help our ancestral home. His idea deeply touched me," Chen said.

Now on the mainland, Chen is assisting the Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital with upgrading their medical skills and building another liver transplant center.

He also helps mainland doctors receive training at Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, and mainland patients to receive treatment there.

Chen Zheng, an anesthetist from Hunan Children's Hospital who is studying at the hospital, said Chen has been very supportive and he was treated like he has always been a part of Chen's team.

So far 24 mainland patients have received liver transplant operations, and over 300 doctors from the mainland and across the world engaged in advanced studies at the hospital, said Wang Chih-chi, current superintendent at Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and a core member of Chen's team.

"One doctor's capability is limited, but passing on one's medical skills to more might save a life on the other side of the world," Wang said.

At the age when most people retire, Chen still works in the field with a tight schedule: every Monday and Friday he works on outpatient medical care, every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday on surgeries, and every weekend on academic exchanges.

In the past two years, Chen also traveled to Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Qinghai Province to help establish medical centers and supervise complicated surgical treatments.

"Until now, Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital has given over 1,700 liver transplant operations on patients who had been in critical condition. These heart-warming and powerful stories make me realize the depth and greatness of humanity," Chen said.Environmental activists and Amulsar mine employees clashed today near the resort town of Jermouk in south central Armenia.

Jermouk resident Vazgen Galstyan, who opposes the mine, reports that employees of Lydian Armenia, the company that plans to operate the mine, used some sixty cars to block the main highway to the town to protest the fact that mine opponents have been blocking all roads leading to the mine for several weeks now.

The employees say the activists are illegally prohibiting them from gainful employment.

Galstyan claims that the employees taunted the activists and threw bottles and stones at them. Scuffles then broke out between the two sides.

The Jermouk roadway was opened after the employees drove away.

Galstyan says that mine opponents will review todays proposal, announced by the Ministry of Nature Protections Environmental Protection and Mining Inspectorate to temporarily halt all mining operations at Amulsar until a new environmental impact study can be conducted, and then decide whether to continue blocking roads leading to the mine.

The Inspectorate has called on the Ministry of Nature Protection to invalidate a 2016 environmental impact assessment that supported Lydia Armenias claims that the mine would not negatively impact the local environment or public health.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 12:18:26|Editor: Liangyu

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MEXICO CITY, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- China's Belt and Road Initiative offers "many benefits" and "more investment" for Latin America, according to the head of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Regional countries are beginning to assess the possibility of participating in this "great project," in which China "has a lot to offer" in the areas of trade and infrastructure, said ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Barcena.

"I am a big believer in the Belt and Road Initiative," Barcena told Xinhua during a visit to Mexico City, adding "it would draw more investment in connectivity, mobility to the Industry 4.0 digital agenda, and all of that."

In Chile, where ECLAC is headquartered, Chinese investment is having a positive impact on digital communications, as well as scientific and technological cooperation, she added.

While regional trade with China has grown nearly 200-fold in less than a decade, "the interesting thing" about the initiative is that it "redirects a large part of the relationship with China towards infrastructure," said Barcena.

In the five years since China unveiled the innovative global development scheme, the initiative has gradually evolved from a concept into concrete actions, and won worldwide recognition, including in Latin America, a region traditionally lacking in both infrastructure and the financial resources to build it.

At this year's Second Ministerial Meeting of the China-CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) Forum, held in Chile's capital Santiago, countries approved a special declaration endorsing the initiative.

China has also invited ECLAC to be part of the initiative's board of directors, said Barcena, in recognition of the agency's role as a bridge between the two regions.

As a step toward greater cooperation between Latin America and China, El Salvador this week announced it was establishing diplomatic ties with the Asian giant, Barcena said.

China has floated "very interesting" proposals to develop key industries, such as energy, construction and scientific innovation, through trade, investment and financial cooperation, said Barcena.

According to China's customs authority, trade between China and Latin America and the Caribbean reached some 260 billion U.S. dollars in 2017, an increase of 18.8 percent year-on-year.

China's Ministry of Commerce reports indicate that Chinese investment in Latin America has surpassed 200 billion dollars, turning the region into the second leading destination for Chinese overseas investment.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 12:18:27|Editor: Liangyu

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CANBERRA, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Support for Australia's governing Liberal-National party (LNP) coalition has fallen to its lowest level since 2008 following Scott Morrison's ascent to prime minister.

Morrison was sworn in as Australia's new prime minister on Friday night after a majority of the Liberal Party's 85 Members of Parliament (MPs) chose him to succeed Malcolm Turnbull.

The new prime minister faces an uphill battle to revive the LNP's support among voters with a federal election looming after the latest Newspoll, published on Sunday night, revealed the party's primary vote dropped in the wake of the leadership crisis to 33 percent, its worst result since 2008.

Support for the Opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP) rose 6 percent to 41 percent, its highest since 2015 Newspoll results, which prompted Turnbull to challenge former prime minister Tony Abbott for the leadership.

The ALP led the LNP 56-44 on a two-party preferred basis compared to 51-49 when Turnbull was the prime minister earlier in August.

If those numbers were upheld at the federal election, which is expected to be held in May 2019, the ALP would win in an overwhelming landslide, winning as many as 90 of 150 seats in the House of Representatives compared to 55 for the LNP.

In the first head-to-head contest between Morrison and ALP leader Bill Shorten, Shorten emerged the more popular leader, overcoming a 12-point deficit to Turnbull in a poll on the preferred prime minister to lead Morrison by six points.

It marks the first time since February 2015 that Shorten has been the preferred choice for the prime minister over the incumbent.

However, the poll found that the LNP would perform better if Julie Bishop, who served as deputy leader of the Liberal Party for 11 years, had won the leadership ballot.

Bishop was eliminated in the first round of voting having received the fewest votes and on Sunday announced her resignation as the minister for foreign affairs.

According to Newspoll, 29 percent of voters believe Bishop would be the best leader of the Liberal Party compared to 25 percent for Morrison and 14 percent for Turnbull.

Only 6 percent chose Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who was defeated by Morrison on Friday as the best leadership candidate.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 12:23:28|Editor: Liangyu

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SYDNEY, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Australia's oldest university, the University of Sydney, has been granted heritage listing in the State of New South Wales (NSW), where it has stood since 1850.

Also granted heritage status were associated residential colleges, and Victoria Park, a vibrant green space close to the heart of Sydney's urban sprawl.

"It is only fitting that Australia's oldest university should be on our state heritage register," NSW Heritage Minister Gabrielle Upton said.

"The land was reserved by Governor Phillip in 1790 for use by church, Crown and school' and the university was established in 1850."

The University's oldest buildings have long been admired for their venerable and distinguished appearances which Upton said are some of the most important examples of Gothic and Tudor revival style architecture in Australia.

The site's colleges, libraries, museums, education, public and recreational spaces provide opportunities for people from all over the world to interact for now, Upton said.

"The University and its colleges provide opportunities for students to learn in an environment that is looking to the future and proud of its history."Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 12:28:29|Editor: Liangyu

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- Police in the Florida city of Jacksonville said Sunday a mass shooting inside a gaming bar has killed three people, including the gunman himself, and injured 11 others.

The following is a chronology of the bloodiest and most notable mass shootings recorded in the United States in the past decade:

-- SANTA FE, Texas, May 18, 2018: A high school student armed with a shotgun and a revolver killed 10 people, most of them fellow students, and wounded at least 10.

-- PARKLAND, Florida, Feb. 14, 2018: A former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, opened fire with an assault-style rifle, killing 17 students and educators.

-- SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas, Nov. 5, 2017: A gunman with an AR-15-style rifle barged into the First Baptist Church and killed 26 people, more than half of whom were children.

-- LAS VEGAS, Nevada, Oct. 1, 2017: At least 59 people, including the alleged gunman himself, were killed and more than 500 others wounded when the attacker opened fire, sniper-style, on an open-air music festival in Las Vegas. It was the worst mass shooting attack in U.S. history.

-- FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida, Jan. 6, 2017: Five people died and six others were injured in the shooting inside the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. The gunman, Esteban Santiago, then laid down his weapons and surrendered to police.

-- ORLANDO, Florida, June 12, 2016: A security guard wielding an assault-type rifle and a handgun killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando before he was shot dead by police.

-- SAN BERNARDINO, California, Dec. 2, 2015: A couple declaring allegiance to the Islamic State killed 14 people and wounded 17 others at a social services center in San Bernardino City, southern California. Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik were pursued by police and died in the ensuing shootout.

-- ROSEBURG, Oregon, Oct. 1, 2015: A 26-year-old student killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg in the state of Oregon before committing suicide after exchanging gunfire with police.

-- CHARLESTON, South Carolina, June 17, 2015: A white man opened fire during a prayer meeting inside a historic black church in downtown Charleston, killing nine people in an assault that authorities described as a hate crime.

-- CHICAGO, Illinois, May 26, 2015: Twelve people were killed and more than 40 more wounded in shootings in Chicago during Memorial Day.

-- WACO, Texas, May 17, 2015: Nine people were killed and several wounded after a shootout between rival biker gangs in Waco, Texas, with more gangs threatening to descend on the town after the violence.

-- WASHINGTON, Sept. 17, 2013: A 34-year-old navy contractor employee opened fire inside the building at the Washington Navy Yard that serves as the headquarters of the Naval Sea System Command, killing 12 people before he was shot dead by police.

-- NEWTOWN, Connecticut, Dec. 14, 2012: The Sandy Hook elementary school shooting stunned the nation after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults. The attacker, who killed his mother prior to the rampage, also died in the massacre.

-- OAK CREEK, Wisconsin, Aug. 5, 2012: A white supremacist killed six people in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek before he was wounded by police and turned the gun on himself.

-- AURORA, Colorado, July 20, 2012: Twelve people were killed and 59 others injured at a Batman movie premiere, where a lone, heavily armed gunman burst into a packed theater in a suburb 10 miles (16 km) east of Denver.

-- TUCSON, Arizona, Jan. 9, 2011: A gunman opened fire at a public gathering outside a grocery store in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people including a nine-year-old girl and wounding at least 12 others. The 22-year-old shooter was reported to be fixated on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot point blank in the head, leaving her critically injured, but she miraculously recovered.

-- FORT HOOD, Texas, Nov. 6, 2009: U.S. army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan opened fire at a military base in Fort Hood, leaving 13 dead and 42 others wounded.

-- BINGHAMTON, New York, April 4, 2009: A man shot 13 people dead at a civic center in Binghamton, where he had enrolled earlier to study English, before killing himself.

-- CARTHAGE, North Carolina, March 30, 2009: A heavily-armed gunman shot dead seven patients and a nurse in a privately-owned nursing home in North Carolina, intending to kill his estranged wife who worked there.

-- DEKALB, Illinois, Feb. 15, 2008: A former student opened fire in a lecture hall of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, killing five students, mostly women, and wounding 16 others before fatally shooting himself.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 12:58:34|Editor: Liangyu

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HARARE, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's special envoy Su Hui met with Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa here on Sunday, extending Xi's cordial greetings and congratulations on Mnangagwa's election as the new president.

Su, also vice chairperson of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said the successful holding of the elections reflected the common wish and choice of the Zimbabwean people.

She expressed her best wishes for Zimbabwe's greater achievements in economic and social development under the new president's leadership.

Su added that China welcomes President Mnangagwa's participation in the upcoming Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) and his contribution to the success of the summit, which is to bring the China-Africa and China-Zimbabwe comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation to a higher level.

In response, Mnangagwa thanked Xi for sending a special envoy to attend the inauguration ceremony, asking Su to pass on his sincere greetings and best wishes to Xi.

Referring to economic development as the most pressing task domestically, Mnangagwa vowed to promote the country's opening-up policy to attract foreign investment, and welcomed entrepreneurs from around the world including China to invest in his country.

Mnangagwa said the two countries are "all-weather" friends and their bilateral relationship has now been upgraded to a comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation and will embrace good opportunities in various fields of collaboration.

The president said he has been looking forward to attending the FOCAC Beijing Summit and meeting with President Xi to discuss Africa-China and Zimbabwe-China cooperation, and wished the summit a complete success.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 12:58:34|Editor: Liangyu

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NEW DELHI, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The state-owned Indian Railways has for the first time decided to introduce on-board shopping experience on a number of its premium trains across the country to generate revenue for the cash-strapped service.

"To start with, perfumes, bags, watches will be sold on premium trains in western and central, likely from December this year. Sellers will be selected from tenders to be floated next month. The idea is to generate revenue for the railways," a senior official said Monday.

The Indian Railways is one of the world's largest train networks, criss-crossing the country from north to south. It operates some 9,000 passenger trains and carries nearly 23 million passengers every day.

This vast public enterprise can be referred to as a semi-state. It runs schools, hospitals, has it own police force and construction companies, and has 1.3 million people on its payroll, making it the seventh biggest employer in the world.

In 2015, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government pledged 137 billion U.S. dollars over five years to modernize and expand the railways.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 13:18:39|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The top leader of Islamic State (IS) outfit in Afghanistan has been killed by long-range missiles fired by U.S.-led NATO coalition forces that struck IS hideouts in Afghanistan's eastern province of Nangarhar, said a statement Monday.

"Abu Saad Erhabi, together with 14 IS militants, was killed when the missiles struck IS hideouts in Waziri Tangai locality, Khogyani district, Nangarhar province on Sunday," read the statement issued by Afghan army Corps 201 Selab based in the region.

Seven militants of the group were also injured after the attack in the mountainous district, southwest of provincial capital Jalalabad city, the statement added.

Two IS command posts together with large amount of explosive and weapons were destroyed following the strikes.

Leader Erhabi was the fourth IS leader in Afghanistan to be killed since mid 2017 in eastern Afghan region, according to officials.

The district has been the scene of heavy clashes between security forces and IS militants from time to time.

The clashes have forced thousands of villagers in Khogyani to flee to safer places.

The IS group, which emerged in Nangarhar in early 2015, has yet to make comments on the report.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 13:58:45|Editor: Liangyu

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PHNOM PENH, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- A group of Chinese entrepreneurs are exploring investment opportunities in Cambodia.

The Tianxia Chaoshang Economic Conference's investment delegation, led by Li Songjian, chairman of Mingyuan Group Limited, is visiting the Southeast Asian nation to learn more about its investment potentials and incentive policies.

Speaking at a business forum in Phnom Penh on Monday, Li said the 42-member delegation came from 35 Chinese enterprises that do businesses in real estate, finance, agriculture, high-tech industries, healthcare and biotech, among others.

"Our visit is to get better understanding about business potentials and incentive policies of Cambodia, and to explore investment opportunities that will contribute further to the development of Cambodian economy," he said.

Sok Chenda Sophea, secretary general of the Council for the Development of Cambodia (CDC), said foreign investors could own 100 percent of their investment in Cambodia in all fields, except the purchase of land that required investors to possess only 49 percent of the investment, as 51 percent must be held by Cambodian partners.

"Cambodia is the most open and liberal country in the region. You can invest 100 percent in all sectors including banking, insurance, airline, and telecoms," he told the forum.

"Also, we don't have any capital control, you can bring in as much money as you want, and you do business and make profit, you can take the money back to China or send it to other countries without any restrictions," he added.

Pung Kheav Se, president of the Federation of Khmer-Chinese in Cambodia, said China has been Cambodia's biggest trading partner and source of investment for a long time. Bilateral trade volume was valued at 5.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2017, while China's investment in the kingdom was 1.6 billion U.S. dollars.

"For the time being, Cambodia's society is stable, national economy is maintaining its growth momentum. Also, it is renowned for its best investment policies among the ASEAN countries," he said.

"The inception of the new government and the strong leadership of Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen will undoubtedly further strengthen our confidence in the prospect of the sustained economic growth," he said, referring to the new government that will be formed on Sept. 6 after Hun Sen's ruling Cambodian People's Party won a sweeping victory in the sixth general election last month.

The delegation arrived in Cambodia on Sunday for a four-day visit. They are scheduled to pay a courtesy call on Hun Sen on Tuesday.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 14:38:50|Editor: Liangyu

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HEFEI, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Working at a Chinese pharmaceutical company over the past two years, Martin Kuete, from Cameroon, has gained a clearer view about how to help African people better fight against HIV/AIDS.

In 2013, he signed up for a program to study in China. Co-sponsored by UNESCO and the Chinese government, the program offered fellowships to 25 applicants from developing countries to study in Chinese universities.

"China has a large population, but its HIV infection rate is one of the lowest in the world," he said explaining why he wanted to learn more about the HIV control measures of China.

He entered Huazhong University of Science and Technology, pursuing his Ph.D. After three years of study, he joined Anhui Biochem United Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., which specializes in producing anti-HIV/AIDS drugs and anti-HBV medicines.

The work experience gave Kuete more insight into China's fight against AIDS.

"The Chinese government offers financial support as well as free screenings and drugs to people with HIV, which makes people more willing to go and get tested," said Kuete.

He said the high public awareness of AIDS prevention and well-rounded pandemic and epidemic surveillance systems are key to China's low infection rate.

Kuete said in most African countries, the supply of drugs is far lower than the real demand. He hopes to help African companies gain the technology to produce AIDS medicine on their own.

Wang Zhe, deputy general manager of Biochem, said 59 percent of the anti-AIDS drug supply used in African countries are imported from the United States, and the remaining 41 percent are generic drugs from India.

"We have already supplied our active pharmaceutical ingredients to some African pharma manufacturers in Ghana and Morocco so that they can produce the medicine," said Wang.

Kuete said he conducts market analysis in order to minimize his company's investment risks in Africa.

As the Chinese firm's business development manager, it is part of Kuete's job to promote the drugs produced by Biochem to African countries, in addition to focusing on developing new drugs.

"The price of Biochem drugs is one-eighth that from Western countries, making them more affordable in Africa," he said.

This month, he went to his home country of Cameroon to help Biochem drugs gain marketing authorization.

The former obstetrician and gynecologist said the willingness to become an AIDS doctor took root in his mind eight years ago when he was working at a Cameroon hospital. He met a pregnant woman with AIDS. Her baby was born with the disease.

"It was frustrating since there was nothing I could do. Then I decided to do something to make a change," said Kuete, who was then 27 years old. The next year, he took a training course focused on HIV/AIDS.

He said every time he travels back to Cameroon, he takes every opportunity to share his findings from China with local medical students.

"My company helps African countries produce their own anti-AIDS drugs. I believe that's the best way to help Africa fight against AIDS," Kuete said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 14:58:53|Editor: xuxin

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LONDON, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May has directed officials to start working on a British satellite navigation system amid an ongoing row with the European Union (EU) over Britain's access to the bloc's Galileo system after Brexit, British media reported.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond has signed off funding amounting to as much as 100 million British pounds (129 million U.S. dollars) to "map out" the project, which will rival the continental system Britain had a key role in creating, according to The Telegraph.

The government confirmed in May that it is developing options for a British global satellite navigation system. Then junior Defense Minister Guto Bebb put the cost at 3 billion pounds to 5 billion pounds (3.86 billion dollars to 6.43 billion dollars).

The disclosure comes as EU officials said Britain, which is set to leave the EU in seven months' time, could be denied access to Galileo's sensitive security information.

Galileo, the 10-billion-euro (11.6 billion dollars) satellite program being developed by the EU to rival the American GPS, is intended to provide accurate position, navigation and time information for governments, citizens, industries and the military.

Britain has reportedly made critical contributions to the program, with its companies building payloads for the satellites and developing the security systems. The British government said there was mutual benefit for Britain to remain involved in Galileo but it needed assurance from Brussels that British industries could collaborate on an equal basis and Britain could have continued access to the necessary security-related information.

The government warned in May that it wanted 1 billion pounds (1.29 billion dollars) back from the EU if it was excluded from the Galileo system.

Britain has in fact started being frozen out of the program. In June, British firms were blocked from bidding for the next round of contracts for Galileo.

"There is an option on the table that would benefit both the UK and EU. If that is not accepted by the EU, we are a proud and confident nation and will be looking at all alternatives," British Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation Sam Gyimah had said in furious response.Armenian President Armen Sarkissian today met with members of a delegation from Lebanon on a fact-finding mission in Armenia to explore investment and business opportunities.

The delegation, according to an Armenian government press release, consists of entrepreneurs, state officials and mayors.

Noting that the strong friendship that connects the two countries and peoples, Sarkissian said that Armenia encourages strengthening such ties in all sectors.

The Armenian president said there were many examples of successful Lebanese and Lebanese-Armenian business ventures in Armenia.

Armenia is a superb country to invest and succeed in. One shouldnt take into account the countrys small population, but the fact that Armenia is a great jumping off point to reach other markets, Sarkissian said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 15:13:58|Editor: Yurou

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URUMQI, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Zhao Shoucai, an amateur photographer, believes the state gate in the border city of Horgos has turned into a beautiful swan from an ugly duckling.

On the border between China and Kazakhstan, the state gate is a landmark in Horgos, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, through which people can travel between the two countries.

"There have been five generations of the state gate since the 1960s," Zhao said. "The first generation was very shabby, made of cheap red bricks. The gate was locked most of time back then, with almost no tourists or businessmen traveling between these two countries."

The second gate was built in 1983 when the border at Horgos for passengers and freight reopened, five years after the country began reform and opening-up.

The second generation was relocated and expanded, and more importantly, the gate was not locked anymore, Zhao said. "There were huge crowds of people traveling through the gate almost every day."

With China's reform and opening-up, the state gate in Horgos has gone through five generations so far. The fifth generation gate has seen more than 300,000 people traveling between the two countries in 2017.

Compared with the official state gate, there is a more well-known state gate at the Horgos International Border Cooperation Center, which has become a tourist destination.

Taking the shape of the letter H as a token of harmony, the gate is 18.81 meters high, as 1881 is the year Horgos became a border pass between China and Kazakhstan. In 2012, the gate won an international award for landscape planning and design.

"Although it was not the official gate, local residents were used to calling it the state gate because people also can come and go between China and Kazakhstan at the center through it," said Ma Li, a shop owner in Horgos.

The Horgos International Border Cooperation Center is the world's first cross-border free-trade zone and the biggest duty-free shopping center in western China. It allows entry of citizens from any country with valid passports or with exit and entry permits.

"From a shabby gate to a famous symbol that won an international award, the update of the state gate symbolizes the tremendous changes of our country's image," Zhao said. "The gate has also witnessed the great achievement our country had made since the reform and opening-up."

Opened in 2012, the center has more than 5,000 shops, with daily sales reaching 5 million yuan (739,000 U.S. dollars).

Ma Donghuai, a shop owner who started his Horgos businesses in 2002, said the look of the border city had changed dramatically.

"There were few kinds of goods when I came to Horgos in 2002, but now we have a wide range of goods from all around the world, like wines from Georgia and carpets from Iran," Ma said.

The sixth generation of the state gate is under construction, expected to be complete within this year. The gate will see about 5 million people and 3 million tonnes of cargo traveling between China and Kazakhstan every year.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 15:13:59|Editor: Yurou

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by Ouyang Wei

VALENCIA, Spain, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Looking out of the windows of his office near the Port of Valencia, Spain, Sun Kai can clearly see the huge "arms" of bridge cranes stretching out into the sky.

"Every day, when looking out at those cranes, I see my company's business expand in concrete steps," said Sun, chief executive officer of Noatum Ports S.L.U.

Headquartered in Valencia on the Mediterranean coast, the company operates container terminals in the Port of Valencia and the Port of Bilbao on the northern Atlantic coast, and railway terminals in Zaragoza and Madrid.

Last November, COSCO Shipping Corporation Ltd -- a Chinese shipping giant -- acquired a majority stake in the Spanish company.

The investment was accompanied by advanced management, know-how and global resources, energizing Spain's transport and logistics industry.

"China has accumulated abundant management experience in running container terminals. After the acquisition, we've gradually introduced an advanced operation process and management into Noatum, and improved efficiency," said Sun.

With the help of the Chinese management team, the company has established an operations department to increase efficiency at the ports and railway terminals. A new health, security and safety department has been set up to ensure the company meets the highest safety standards.

It has also established a railway service unit to improve intermodal transport between Spain's coastal areas and hinterland, and is working on a project to upgrade the operating system of the two ports.

From January to July, containers handled by the company reached 2.08 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), with an annual increase of 13.2 percent.

Sun said he expects the company to handle 3.7 million TEUs this year, up by over 12 percent from 2017.

"We are in the best position now," said Elvira Gallego, general manager of Noatum Container Terminal Bilbao.

"The current management is more efficient ... I think we have a good executive management team at the headquarters, and we have everything updated," she said.

"COSCO is a huge investor, we now have COSCO's shipping lines that will help us to get bigger, and we have a big portion of the trade between Spain and China. I think it's the best moment," she said.

The Port of Valencia is a main gateway to the Iberian Peninsula. It handled 4.83 million TEUs last year, making it the largest port in the Mediterranean region and the fifth-largest in Europe in terms of container traffic, according to port officials.

"China is a strategic country for the Port of Valencia, given that 50 percent of foreign trade between Spain and China passes through it," said Francesc Sanchez, general director of the Port Authority of Valencia.

More than 55 percent of Spain's gross domestic product comes from the area within a 350-km radius of the port, he said.

The Belt and Road Initiative has boosted cultural exchange apart from goods exchange, he said. "It is an opportunity for both Chinese companies and the Spanish economy."

"This important investment effort from China in Bilbao means a significant improvement in the efficiency of the logistics system as well as more shipping lines," said Ricardo Barkala, chairman of the Port Authority of Bilbao.

The Port of Bilbao is the hub linking Spain with other European countries along the northern Atlantic coast. Among the port's 12 main markets, China is only second to Britain in container traffic.

"China's Belt and Road Initiative is an economic and geostrategic huge opportunity for the world, mainly for international trade," said Barkala.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 15:59:05|Editor: ZX

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The 72-seat Bombardier Q400 turboprop aircraft, powered by a mix of biofuel and air turbine fuel, is seen at Delhi Airport in New Delhi, India, Aug. 27, 2018. India's first biofuel-powered plane aimed at cutting down air travel costs was flight-tested Monday. (Xinhua/Partha Sarkar)

NEW DELHI, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- India's first biofuel-powered plane that aims at cutting down air travel costs was flight-tested Monday.

The 72-seater Bombardier Q400 turboprop aircraft, powered by a mix of biofuel and air turbine fuel, took off from Jolly Grant airport in the northern state of Uttarakhand's capital Dehradun for the Indian capital after being flagged off by Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat, officials said.

India will join an elite group of nations like the United States and Australia if the testflight turns out to be a complete success.

"The biofuel for this testflight was developed by Dehradun-based state-owned Indian Institute of Petroleum and agricultural residues, non-edible oils, and industrial and municipal wastes were used for the preparation," an official said.

"There were no passengers on the flight. Only airline and aviation officials were on the flight being operated by low-cost airline Spicejet. Aircraft engineers are also on board to help out the pilots in case of any emergency," he added.

The first-ever biofuel flight was operated by Virgin Atlantic airlines between London and Amsterdam some 10 years ago.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 16:09:07|Editor: xuxin

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TIRANA, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The Albanian government will decrease the agriculture budget in the coming years in a bid to reduce the public debt, according to local media.

Agriculture funds will drop to 0.53 percent of national production in 2019, compared with 0.66 percent or 10.9 billion lek (around 101 million U.S. dollars) this year. In 2021 it will drop further to 0.48 percent.

Agriculture employs almost half of Albania's labor population and agricultural production accounts for about 20 percent of GDP.

The government has committed itself to reducing the public debt from the current nearly 69 percent to 63.5 percent by 2020.

According to economists, the tightening of budget policy is expected to affect other sectors of the economy besides agriculture, as the government will have less room for new debt.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 16:34:10|Editor: xuxin

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SEOUL, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's presidential Blue House said Monday that the cancellation of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's visit to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) will influence the opening date of the inter-Korean liaison office.

Blue House Spokesman Kim Eui-keum told a press briefing that he "cannot say there will be no influence" of the cancelled Pompeo visit to the DPRK on the opening date of the inter-Korean liaison office.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un agreed to set up the joint liaison office in the DPRK's border town of Kaesong after holding their first summit on April 27 at the border village of Panmunjom.

The inter-Korean liaison office was widely forecast to be launched by the end of this month.

The spokesman said the opening date had been considered under smooth conditions such as the top U.S. diplomat's visit to Pyongyang and the third Moon-Kim summit, which the two Koreas agreed to hold in the DPRK's capital city by the end of September.

However, the opening date needed to be re-considered as new situations emerged, he noted.

Pompeo was originally scheduled to travel to Pyongyang this week, but U.S. President Donald Trump asked Pompeo not to go to the DPRK because he felt "we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

Trump, however, tweeted that Pompeo looked forward to visiting the DPRK in the near future, saying he would like to "send my warmest regards and respect" to the DPRK leader and look forward to seeing him "soon."

The Blue House spokesman said South Korea was waiting for the DPRK's response to the changed situations, noting that the opening date of the joint liaison office should be discussed with the DPRK side.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 16:34:11|Editor: xuxin

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SEOUL, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- More than seven out of 10 South Korean people favored the parliamentary ratification of the Panmunjom Declaration, which was signed by South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), a poll showed Monday.

According to the poll commissioned by South Korea's parliamentary speaker secretariat, 71.8 percent of respondents said the Panmunjom Declaration should be ratified by the unicameral National Assembly. Only 13.6 percent opposed the ratification.

The result was based on a survey of 1,005 voters conducted by local pollster Gallup Korea from Aug. 21-22. It had 3.1 percentage points in margin of error with a 95 percent confidence level.

The declaration was signed after the first Moon-Kim summit on April 27 at the border village of Panmunjom. Moon and Kim agreed to completely denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, stop all hostile acts and increase exchanges.

President Moon has called for the parliamentary ratification of the inter-Korean agreement to enforce it regardless of political situations here.

Asked about the inter-Korean summits on April 27 and May 26, 73.5 percent of respondents said those two summits between Moon and Kim fared well.

Moon and Kim agreed to hold their third summit in the DPRK's capital city before the end of September.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 17:19:19|Editor: xuxin

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BEIJING, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping on Monday underlined thorough and solid cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to benefit people in countries involved and build a community with a shared future for humanity.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, addressed a symposium held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, marking the fifth anniversary of the BRI.

Vice Premier Han Zheng, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and head of the leading group on advancing BRI development, presided over the meeting.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 17:54:28|Editor: xuxin

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MAIMANA, Afghanistan, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- At least four militants have been killed and eight others injured as a clash erupted between government forces and Taliban outfit in Qaramkul district of Afghanistan's northern Faryab province on Monday, provincial police spokesman Abdul Karim Yurash said.

The clash, according to the official, flared up after Taliban insurgents attacked some security checkpoints in Yusuf Mirzai village early morning and police returned fire triggering gun battle forcing militants to flee after leaving four bodies behind.

Eight militants and two security personnel have been injured in the fighting, the official asserted.

Sporadic fighting has been continuing, the official said, adding the security forces would continue to chase the militants elsewhere in the district to ensure peace and security there.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 18:29:35|Editor: xuxin

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Chinese Ambassador to Egypt Song Aiguo speaks during an interview with Xinhua News Agency in Cairo, Egypt, Aug. 23, 2018. Ahead of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's visit to China, Chinese Ambassador to Egypt Song Aiguo hailed the close relations between China and Egypt as a model for Sino-African cooperation. (Xinhua/Meng Tao)

CAIRO, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Ahead of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's visit to China, Chinese Ambassador to Egypt Song Aiguo hailed the close relations between China and Egypt as a model for Sino-African cooperation.

"Thanks to the joint efforts of both sides, we are delighted to see that the China-Egypt comprehensive strategic partnership has reached a new level," Song told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.

The two countries have maintained close coordination on international and regional issues in recent years, the Chinese envoy noted.

The close political relations between the two countries are underpinned by the rapid increase in bilateral trade and investment as well as cooperation in carrying out major infrastructure projects, Song said.

In 2017, China maintained its status as Egypt's largest trading partner and source of imports, while China's investment in Egypt continued to increase rapidly, he said.

The China-Egypt bilateral trade in 2017 totalled 10.83 billion U.S. dollars, while the number of Chinese citizens visiting Egypt hit a record high of 300,000.

"The two countries also made promising progress in mutual exchanges and cooperation in the fields of science and technology, education, health and environmental protection," the ambassador said.

President Sisi, who has visited China many times since he took office in 2014, is scheduled to participate in the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) slated for Sept. 3-4.

"President Sisi's visits to China reflect the importance attached by the Egyptian leader to the development of the China-Egypt relations," Song said.

The FOCAC Beijing summit will be held under the theme "China and Africa: toward an even stronger community with a shared future through win-win cooperation."

Through the summit, China will align the Belt and Road Initiative with the Agenda 2063 of the African Union (AU), the UN 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development, and the development strategies of respective African countries, according to Song.

The initiative, proposed by China in 2013, aims to build a trade and infrastructure network that connects Asia with Africa and Europe along the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road.

Africa is a natural and historical extension of the "Belt and Road" as it boasts abundant natural and human resources as well as huge market potential, Song said.

Meanwhile, China is in the process of implementing the policies of economic restructuring and industrial upgrading, with the support of capital, technologies and cost-effective equipment, he said.

"The two sides can complement each other to achieve common development," he said, noting that the Sino-African cooperation is the shared aspiration of the peoples of both sides.

Saying that the China-Egypt cooperation can be regarded as a model for the cooperation between China and African countries, Song believed Sisi's upcoming visit to China will further promote the development of the Sino-African relations.

As an African country, Egypt is an important member of the FOCAC and has made important contribution to it, Song said.

"Next year, Egypt will assume the presidency of the AU. I believe that the new Sino-African cooperation projects proposed by the Beijing summit will be well implemented during Egypt's presidency," the Chinese envoy said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 18:39:39|Editor: Yurou

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SAN SALVADOR, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- Salvadoran politician Juan Manuel Flores has traveled to China more than 30 times.

Known as "El Chino"(the Chinese) for his Chinese roots as well as his endeavor to forge closer ties with China for over a decade, Flores is also president of the Salvadoran Association of Friendship with China.

He has taken part in dozens of events, including expos, to introduce Salvadoran entrepreneurs to the Chinese market.

So when China and El Salvador established diplomatic relations on Aug. 21, Flores felt his years of efforts had paid off finally.

"I've been waiting for this news for ages," said Flores, who is also a member of the ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. "I've taken businessmen, politicians, mayors to China. We've learned about the (Chinese) initiatives. (We also hold) expectations for commercial exchange, Chinese investment in El Salvador and (by) Salvadoran businessmen in China."

Flores hopes that now, with embassies and consulates to be established in both countries, there will be more opportunities, especially for Salvadoran businessmen who had been trying to do business with China since the days when there were no diplomatic relations.

Chinese-Salvadoran cooperation can now expand to areas such as education and culture, with the establishment of China's Confucius Institutes in El Salvador, the introduction of scholarship programs, as well as exchange activities in agriculture, and especially in areas that create more jobs.

The politician said the proposal for a special economic zone is in process. It could be a window for introducing Chinese investment.

With regard to the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, Flores said the possibility of El Salvador becoming part of the project increases with the new diplomatic relations.

"It is something no one wants to be left out of," he remarked.

Personally for Flores, the focus will always be on cultivating a relationship based on friendship.

"Let's be clear, for China's friendship is a very important factor; and that's what we want to cultivate," he said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 18:54:41|Editor: xuxin

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ATHENS, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- A state of emergency has been declared on the Greek island of Hydra due to electricity and water outages which started on Sunday morning, Greek national news agency AMNA reported on Monday.

The Hellenic Electricity Distribution Network Operator (DEDDIE) has not yet found the cause of the blackout and announced that two generators that will temporarily supply the island have been loaded onto a ship that would arrive in Hydra on Monday.

Meanwhile, the water supply problem is being solved with the help of a Greek Navy tanker that brought water to the island on Monday, as water pumps on the island rely on electricity.

Local hoteliers reported that disappointed tourists had left the island as a result of the outages.

Last week many districts of Athens were hit by an electricity blackout for at least two hours, resulting in traffic jams due to traffic lights which were not operating and at least 90 telephone calls to the Fire Service for people stranded in elevators.

According to the Greek power grid operator ADMIE, that blackout was due to a faulty switch at a sub-station in a northern Athens suburb.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 18:54:42|Editor: xuxin

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BERLIN, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of people have joined a spontaneous demonstration in the city of Chemnitz on Sunday night which was organized to mark the violent death of a local inhabitant.

The protest was inspired by the still unresolved death of a 35-year-old German in a violent brawl which erupted during the Chemnitz "City Festival" earlier on Sunday.

According to the newspaper "BILD", the march was also attended by right-wing extremists who chanted anti-immigrant slogans. Municipal authorities cancelled the "City Festival" pre-maturely out of security concerns and called in large numbers of police officers to monitor the developing situation.

A police spokesperson told press on Monday that "no special incidents" were recorded during the night aside from two suspected cases of physical assault, one case of verbal threats being made, and a case of resistance offered against enforcement officers.

So far, police have arrested a 22-year-old and a 23-year-old man in connection to the death which reportedly resulted from a violent confrontation between several individuals of different nationalities at the "City Festival".

The severely-injured victim died in hospital on Sunday, while two other men, aged 33 years and 38 years respectively, were hospitalized as well. State prosecutors and police are treating the case as manslaughter but said that it was too soon to speculate about the identity and motives of the perpetrators at this point.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 19:09:46|Editor: xuxin

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MAIMANA, Afghanistan, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Up to 54 militants have been killed and dozens more injured as fighting aircrafts pounded Taliban positions in Afghanistan's northern Faryab province on Monday, an army spokesman in the northern region Mohammad Hanif Rezai said.

"A group of Taliban militants blocked a road linking provincial capital Maimana to Ghormach district at noon to target military convoy but the government forces in efforts to disperse the militants conducted series of sorties as a result 54 militants were killed and dozens other injured," Rezai told Xinhua.

Two Taliban senior commanders Mullah Shah Wali and Mullah Qayum are also among those killed in the strikes, the official added.

According to the official, ground operations backed by airpower are continuing in the area.

Taliban militants haven't commented.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 19:29:50|Editor: xuxin

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PARIS, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- French Budget Minister Gerald Darmanin expressed uncertainties on Monday about honoring economic commitments next year, expecting weaker than expected growth that may weigh on the budget deficit.

"Prime Minister (Edouard Philippe) forecasts growth at 1.7 percent. There are still uncertainties, it can be a little more, it can be a little less. Economy is not an exact science," Darmanin said.

The minister, however, said the government would stick to its pledge to bring down the budget gap to under the European Union (EU) safe line of 3.0 percent.

"The deficit will be below 3.0 percent, but more than 2.3 percent," he told BFMTV news channel.

The government had previously targeted to accelerate growth by 1.9 percent and to report 2.3 percent of deficit.

By 2022, it wants to narrow the deficit to below 1.0 percent, mainly by reducing public expenditure by three percentage points from the gross domestic product (GDP) by freezing the expenditure of some ministries, local authorities, and social security welfare.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 19:34:51|Editor: xuxin

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THE HAGUE, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- On the opening day of court hearings here, Iran requested that judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) order the immediate lifting of sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States.

"The sanctions are unjust and harmful," Mohsen Mohebi, head of the international legal affairs center of the Iranian President's office, told judges on Monday at the Peace Palace in The Hague. "The sanctions are damaging the economy of Iran, and driving millions of people into poverty."

Iran asked the judges to find that the United States breached its obligations to Iran, and order it to terminate the sanctions without delay, as well as any threats about further sanctions. Iran is also asking judges to ensure the United States guarantees it will not violate its obligations again, and will fully compensate Iran for the violation of its international legal obligations.

The lawsuit followed the decision by U.S. President Donald Trump in May to quit the nuclear agreement, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) signed in 2015. The United States announced the full reinstatement of U.S. nuclear sanctions on Iran as well as a high level of economic sanctions targeting, directly or indirectly, Iran and Iranian companies, and/or nationals.

After the United States reinstated the sanctions, Iran started proceedings against it before the ICJ on July 16. According to Iran, the U.S. violated a 1955 friendship treaty between the two countries, the Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights, and requested the Court to indicate provisional measures.

Iran gave its oral arguments on Monday and on Tuesday the United States will have the opportunity to issue their reaction. The second round of oral arguments are scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday this week. The announcement of the order on the provisional measures by the judges can take months.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. Its role is to settle legal disputes submitted to it by states and to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by authorized UN organs and specialized agencies, in accordance with international law. The seat of the court is in The Hague.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 19:49:55|Editor: xuxin

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LONDON, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May will fly to sub-Saharan Africa late Monday for the first time in order to forge new trade links for post-Brexit Britain.

May becomes the first British leader to visit sub-Saharan Africa in five years, making a three-day trip that includes meetings with the presidents of South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.

The prime minister will bring a trade delegation with her in an attempt to boost Britain's post-Brexit export prospects, although her visit comes at a time when the British government has been accused of a paying insufficient attention to the region.

The last time a British prime minister visited sub-Saharan Africa was in December 2013 when David Cameron attended Nelson Mandela's funeral.

May has never visited sub-Saharan Africa. Her only previous trip to the continent was a visit to Tunisia in 2015 in the aftermath of the Sousse hotel terror attack.

Speaking ahead of her flight to South Africa on Monday evening, the prime minister said, "Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy" and that "a more prosperous, growing and trading Africa is in all of our interests."Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 20:09:58|Editor: xuxin

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BERLIN, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Germany's capital city is considering restricting foreigners from purchasing property in a move to keep housing affordable, Michael Mueller, the city's acting mayor, announced in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper on Monday.

Mueller argued that tighter legal restrictions on foreign real estate investment would help ensure an adequate supply of affordable housing for Berlin's 3.7 million inhabitants. "The state finance minister is currently elaborating proposals for preventing speculation with living space," he said.

Towards this end, the mayor urged the federal government to make property which it owns in Berlin available for new social housing projects. "I want to buy all of the property owned by the federal government in Berlin to build affordable housing," Mueller told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Berlin is often seen as an emblematic case of growing pressure on housing in German cities which have witnessed a sharp rise in real estate and rental prices. The Federal Association of the German Construction Industry (HDB) recently estimated that between 330,000 and 340,000 newly built apartments will be completed in Germany 2018, slightly short of a government target of 350,000 needed to meet current levels of demand.

More worryingly, HDB drew attention to an overhang of 400,000 outstanding building permits which have yet to result in any actual construction. The association warned that the circumstance at least in part owed to the increasingly speculative behavior of investors in large cities who were delaying construction in anticipation of higher property prices.

Such speculation is particularly rampant in the German capital. Average rents have more than doubled since 2008, the fastest rate of increase recorded in the country. It is not unusual for several hundreds of interested parties to compete for available apartments, while foreign-owned properties are kept empty in the hopes that their value will rise as Berlin continues to grow.

Berlin, which was heavily bombed in World War II, still receives billions of euros in fiscal transfers from Germany's federal government each year. The city is sometimes described as being "poor but sexy." It is increasingly catching up economically with other European capitals, but the development is not unanimously welcomed by its residents.

The latest real estate market report by the city of Berlin showed a significant 25-percent rise in the transformation of rental property into privately owned property in 2017. For newly constructed property, the figure was even higher at 45 percent. Many of these units are then transformed into short-term tourist rental accommodations on platforms such as "Airbnb". Aside from reducing the availability of housing stock for local inhabitants, the U.S. company is regularly accused of failing to hold its users accountable for tax fraud.

In May, the Federal Central Tax Office (BZSt) confirmed that it had launched an investigation into thousands of apartments listed on Airbnb on suspicion of illegal tax evasion. If the ongoing probe results in back payments to fiscal authorities, Berlin would be the principal beneficiary. The city boasts at least 11,701 listings on Airbnb, more than Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, and Frankfurt combined.

In the meanwhile, city authorities are already resorting to creative ways to try to keep the cost of living in Berlin under control. Five "environment protection areas" have been created since 2016 which are intended to preserve existing housing structures and prevent the displacement of locals. Eight more are being scheduled to take shape in the course of 2018.

Much like Berlin, major cities in New Zealand have experienced soaring real estate costs as foreign investors pile into the market as well. Under a new law that was passed in New Zealand recently, foreign investors will only be allowed to acquire apartments in large-scale new housing development projects as part of a bid to boost the overall housing supply available to residents. "We are considering doing this as well," the mayor of Berlin said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 20:20:02|Editor: Yurou

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WUHAN, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- At dusk, Cheng Fang held her three-year-old daughter in her arms, relaxing under a tree while her husband swam in the lake.

"We come here to the Donghu Lake when we have free time. My husband enjoys swimming in the lake in summer," she said. "We also go for a stroll or ride bicycles on the greenway throughout the year."

Donghu Lake, in the city of Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, has an area of over 30 square km. The Donghu Lake Greenway, the first section of which opened in December 2016 and the second section opened last year, has a total length of more than 100 km.

Four years ago, Cheng settled down in Wuhan. "I didn't like the city very much when I first came here, but now, I think the city is beautiful with its lake and greenway," she said.

"The lake has become popular these last two years. My wife goes for a walk around the lake every day," said Xia Xing, 71.

Xia and his wife, Fu Fang, 64, grew up in Wuhan, and strolling around the lake has become an important part of their daily life.

"We used to walk at a playground in a university nearby, but now, I like to walk or cycle by the lake, which is very relaxing," Fu said.

However, in the 1980s, the lake was polluted by industrialization and urbanization.

"We grew up by the lake, and it was clear and free of pollution when we were little. But fewer and fewer people came to swim in the 1980s," Xia said. "Now, people are coming back to swim in the lake again."

Thanks to efforts by the local government, last year, the water quality of the lake was the best on record in recent 40 years.

"Nearly 10,000 tonnes of sewage has been stopped from going into the lake every day. Stopping sewage from going into the lake is an essential step for the ecological restoration of the lake," said Peng Xuesong with the Donghu Lake area's construction office.

The construction of the greenway has also helped improve the water quality. "Rain is filtered by trees and aquatic plants, which reduces the amount of pollutants that go into the lake and increases the lake's restoration capacity," said Zhang Xiaolin with Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The area has also developed a joint supervision mechanism between the local government and local organizations, and a lake protection conference is held annually to better improve the water quality and protect the lake's environment.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 20:25:03|Editor: xuxin

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MOGADISHU, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- At least two Somali soldiers were killed in a road blast at Al-Baraka junction in Mogadishu's Hodan district, police said on Monday.

A police officer who declined to be named told Xinhua that a bomb placed along the road exploded as a military vehicle was passing by.

"We can confirm that two soldiers died in the blast and we are establishing more details on the incident," the officer said. Residents said that they also heard huge blast at the scene.

"The blast was huge and we have leant that military vehicle was hit by roadside bomb. Heavily armed security forces arrived at the scene." a resident, Muna Ahmed, told Xinhua.

The residents said the blast resulted from an explosive device fitted into a vehicle.

The police later cordoned off the scene and launched an investigation into the incident but no arrest has been made.

No one has claimed responsibility for the latest attack although the al-Shabab militant group often stages such attacks in Mogadishu.

The incident took place despite heavy security in Mogadishu on Monday where security officers blocked some major roads.

Security forces were deployed on the main roads, blocking public transport and private vehicles from using the roads.

The motive behind such lockdown remained unclear as public commuter buses could be seen stuck on the main roads and many people walking along city roads.

Somali forces backed by AMISOM ousted al-Shabab from the capital Mogadishu in August 2011, but the terror group is still in control of several areas in southern Somalia and capable of conducting attacks.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 20:45:24|Editor: Lu Hui

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Tourists experience traditional culture at the Jiangxiyan Irrigation System site in Longyou County, east China's Zhejiang Province, Aug. 26, 2018. The Jiangxiyan Irrigation System has been added to the World Heritage Irrigation Structures list in August 2018. Longyou County promotes the development of tourism featured with local culture, attracting 6.669 million visits of tourists in the first half of 2018 and generating a total revenue of 4.31 billion yuan (632.39 million U.S. dollars). (Xinhua/Wang Xiaochuan)The following thoughts were provoked by Michael Booth's fascinating and enjoyable book 'The Almost Nearly Perfect People - Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia' , puboished by Vintage, in 2015.

The Financial Times used to have a Nordic Correspondent called William Dullforce, which always seemed to me to be rather unfair. Before you even read his reports, an image formed your mind of a blond giant, his frowning face set in profound thought and his hair streaming in an icy wind, wielding a huge hammer as he constructed vast articles which were both boring and forceful. I never met him, so for all I know he was a small, slight man with dark hair, who never hammered anything more weighty than a picture hook. But his articles were not dull, for the Nordic countries are not dull. Like Canada, often idiotically dismissed as boring, these small nations are fascinating and full of interest and unusual things.

In almost every argument about major social issues, the Nordic factor is advanced by one side or the other. I have seen it argued cogently that these countries are successful not because of their high taxes and colossal welfare systems, but because of their smallness, their homogeneity and their consensual societies, and the very high levels of trust which result from this. It is precisely this trust which enables them to demand such high taxes, in the expectation that they will not be thrown away on mad projects ( as ours tend to be).

In fact their economic performance, in many cases, has been damaged by the high-tax model. I think there is something in this, and I also think that recent immigration, especially in Sweden, may be about to change this picture completely. For such a small society, migration at this level (especially since so much of it comes from outside Europe) is surely going to be revolutionary.

The area is also full of political and historical anomalies. World War Two is full of strange moments. While Britain accepted the aid of the horrible Soviet despotism to fight off the threat of the horrible National Socialist tyranny, Finland did roughly the opposite, not-quite-allying with the Third Reich to fend off Stalin. At one point there were minor hostilities between Finland and Britain as a result, in the far north, which is especially strange given that Britain had come within inches of sending troops to aid Finland against the USSR in 1940.

Sweden, now universally admired as a land of neutrality, social democracy, liberalism, niceness, peace and brotherhood, discreetly opened its railway system to Hitler in 1940 and later, first to allow him to attack Norway, later to help him in his fight against the USSR. You may well ask what else they could have done, but Norway fought Hitler and Finland fought Stalin, when the odds were terrible.

Swedens long, cruel policy of sterilising those it regarded as unfit to reproduce is also pretty horrible.

And Denmarks strange period as a German-ruled, yet Social Democratic state is one of the strangest kinks in modern European history.

But thats not really the point of this article, which is about Michael Booths fascinating, funny and enlightening book The Almost Nearly Perfect People  behind the myth of the Scandinavian Utopia.(Vintage Books, 9-99) which I have recently read.

Mr Booth, who is married to a Dane, is a bit of a lefty and so the book isnt exactly excoriating about the Nordic countries and peoples. I think he may be too kind to Finlands ceaselessly over-rated schools, much loved by the egalitarian OECD but perhaps not quite as perfect as portrayed in its PISA reports . But it is knowledgeable, and amusing and often surprising, and he does feel able to criticise these strange societies. I can thoroughly recommend it.

But the reason for this posting is an astonishing passage in his chapters on Sweden, the dominant Nordic country, which he saves to the end. He is very funny about the Swedes, especially an experiment in which he tries to provoke them by behaving in an utterly unSwedish manner in various situations.

But on pages 357 to 360 he produces one of those blinding-light moments that finally link up and solidify long strands of thought. This comes just after a disturbing passage on Swedens ugly experiments in the eugenic movement and its inexcusable forced sterilisation of supposedly inferior types, which continued even after World War Two. This is worth reading because in Britain and the USA the embarrassing association of the enlightened left with eugenics is now largely forgotten, or concealed. He quotes a Swedish historian, Ulf Nilson, as saying They really thought that by eliminating the inferior unborn, a cleaner, healthier race would gradually be produced. Now, of course, we associate such ideas only with the racialist utopians of the Third Reich. But we are mistaken. What else might we be mistaken about?

Well, here it comes. Mr Booth then moves on to nice, Social Democratic Swedens modern adventures in what some would see as Utopian totalitarianism, its habit of snatching away large numbers of children from homes it disapproves of. He says this was often for spurious, even ideological reasons. Does this sound at all familiar?

He quotes a Swedish journalist, Brita Sundberg-Weitman , who wrote This is a country where the authorities can forcibly separate a child form its parents to prevent them from giving it a privileged upbringing. In Sweden this got very much out of hand in the 1960s and 1970s. (There is some evidence that the forcible removal of children from their parents is now out of hand in Britain, too). Michael Booth, in a very balanced way, complains 1) that modern-day Sweden can be astonishingly hard on a transgender person (read the book to find out how hard, though I am pretty sure this must have been changed by now) and 2) he sympathises with  a Swedish mother [who wants] to stay at home with your young child, but [finds herself] accused of being old-fashioned, a traitor to feminism.

But here comes the kick to the groin: Michael Booth concludes that Swedish Social Democracy 'was driven by one single, over-arching goal; to sever the traditional, some would say natural, ties between its citizens, be they those that bound children to their parents, workers to their employers, wives to their husbands or the elderly to their families. Instead, individuals were encouraged - mostly by financial incentive or disincentive, but also through legislation, propaganda and social pressure - to take their place in the collective, as one commentator rather ominously put it, and become dependent on the government.

But he notes that this can also be truthfully described as liberating Swedish citizens from each other allowing them to become autonomous entities.

But of course (and this conclusion is mainly me) they are only autonomous within the embrace of the strong state, which substitutes itself for family, employer and all other social ties, and seizes most of their wealth in return for requiring a loyalty and submission as great as any imposed in feudal times, in return for social protection. Thus did the peasant whose hovel lay in the shadow of his Lord's castle offer up his fealty in return for safety.

He quotes the Swedish author Henrik Berggren:

The Swedish system is best understood not in terms of socialism but in terms of RousseauRousseau was an extreme egalitarian and he really hated any kind of dependence  depending on other people destroyed your integrity, your authenticity  therefore the ideal situation was one where every citizen was an atom separated from all the other atomsThe Swedish systems logic is that it is dangerous to be dependent on other people, to be beholden to other people. Even to your family.

Egalitarianism, the unshakeable dogma of our time, set loose in the 18th century by the French Revolution, and still prowling to and fro, seeking whom it may devour, even now ruining the educations of thousands of children near you, far more enduring and persistent than its close relatives, socialism and communism. Why cannot reasonable conservatism defeat it once and for all?

Theres an interesting mention here of the fact that Germany (probably one of the last socially conservative, pro-family major states in the world, thoiugh for how much longer?) funnels its welfare through the family, whereas Sweden's state provides its largesse directly to the individual, bypassing family.

And here was the blinding light. Here was where the stern paternal authoritarianism of modern egalitarianism met the stroppy 'libertarian' individualism of the post-1960s generations. There was no conflict. There was in fact an alliance.

I had a major epiphany in 1990-91, living in Moscow, when I realised that the real profound difference between Soviet life and my own life up till then in the Britain which existed between 1950 and 1990, was that in the USSR the state was ferociously strong and the married family (what was left of it) broken and weak, and that this was deliberate and conscious. The other differences, in state ownership of the economy and even in personal liberty, were superficial compared with this. In fact, it seemed to me that the states demand for mental submission was part of its war on private life and family life, rather than the other way round. Hence my near-obsession with the sinister cult (barely noticed by most foreign visitors to the USSR) of Pavlik Morozov, the mythical child revered by the Communist state for denouncing his own parents to the secret police.

And when I came, a few years later, to write my book The Abolition of Britain and several subsequent books on the same general subject, it was this conflict between private life and the married family on one side and the cold, parental all-encompassing state that was the real battle. Who cared about nationalisation or trade unions? This was the issue, the conflict whose outcome would decide all our futures.

And then came the great and growing explosion of popular atheism, and the open surrender of the state to drugtaking. What were all these things about? Why, they were about personal autonomy. Their central slogan was I can do what I like with my own body and nobody can stop me. How dare you tell me what I can do with it?

The paradox, well understood by Aldous Huxley, is that the person who proudly yells this battle cry also meekly accepts that in return he must surrender his mind, his privacy and his wealth to the power of the parental state.

In Michael Booths book, it all came together in an intentional, deliberate pattern. These things are connected. And it is the absence of the Christian conscience which makes them possible, and which is their enemy and rival. The new all-powerful parental state, the war against the married family, the scorn for conscience, the loud demand for personal autonomy and the rage against those who suggest it is in any way limited by morality or law, are all one cause, reborn in the West since the collapse of the USSR and advancing fast on all fronts. I saw it in Moscow and after my return from there, but instinctively. As so often, my instincts were right, and it has taken long years for my understanding and knowledge to catch up with them

When I was researching The Abolition of Britain, I often found that quotations in various books and articles were incredible. How could such and such a person have actually said anything so brutally honest and thus so risky to his or her own cause? So I would nervously track them down to their sources, and was repeatedly amazed to find them accurate. It is one of the great joys of research. The one I was most amazed by, and the one I still wonder about, is about the parental state. As I wrote here some years ago:

Still to be found in the archives of The Times for February 1980 is a letter from Helen Brook, who spent much of her life obsessively pressing contraceptives first on unmarried women, then on schoolchildren. The triumph of her creepy beliefs has brought about [[Note, I would not now say this. I would say 'has been followed by'. But I did say it at the time]] a pandemic of unwanted pregnancies and abortions, the very things she claimed to be preventing.

She let her real aim be known when she wagged her finger warningly at those who dared get in her way, hissing: From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State to take major decisions - objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child.

She knew power was on her side.

When, back in 1967, she offered contraceptive 'help' to under-age girls - behind the backs of their parents and their GPs - most normal people viewed her actions as shocking. In 1995 (under a Tory government, of course) she got the CBE. Now her view is the law of the land.

And next?Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 20:30:04|Editor: xuxin

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BEIRUT, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Visiting Swiss President Alain Berset said on Monday that his country supports Lebanon in securing a safe return for Syrian refugees to their homeland.

"We hope to be able to support you in this regard because this issue is not local or regional only but an international cause," Berset said during a joint press conference with his Lebanese counterpart Michel Aoun.

The Swiss president also emphasized the need to find a political solution and secure suitable circumstances for the return of refugees to Syria.

The Syrian refugee crisis has become a hot topic in Lebanon lately.

According to the NGO Human Rights Watch, More than 1 million Syrian refugees have registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Lebanon, while the government estimates the true number of Syrians in the country at 1.5 million.

Political parties in Lebanon have, on many occasions, voiced their concerns about the large number of refugees in the country, saying their prolonged stay represents an economic and social burden.

Berset said he appreciates Lebanon's generous hosting of Syrian refugees, which is posing great challenges to the country.

Meanwhile, Aoun reiterated Lebanon's strong commitment to securing a safe return for Syrian refugees, while praising a Russian strategy drafted to guarantee the return of 890,000 Syrians from Lebanon to their homeland.

Also on Monday, Lebanon and Switzerland signed a visa exemption agreement for diplomats from both countries, while agreeing to bolster economic ties and increase mutual investments.

Berset is set to meet Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri and Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 20:45:10|Editor: Lu Hui

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (C, rear), also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, addresses a symposium marking the fifth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Aug. 27, 2018. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)

BEIJING, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping on Monday underlined thorough and solid cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to benefit people in countries involved and build a community with a shared future for humanity.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, addressed a symposium held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, marking the fifth anniversary of the BRI.

In the autumn of 2013, respectively in Kazakhstan and Indonesia, Xi proposed the building of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road -- the Belt and Road Initiative for short.

Xi stressed that the initiative serves as a solution for China to participate in global opening-up and cooperation, improve global economic governance, promote common development and prosperity, and build a community with a shared future for humanity.

China's trade with Belt and Road countries has exceeded 5 trillion U.S. dollars and outward direct investment has amounted to over 60 billion dollars, creating over 200,000 local jobs, he said.

Xi pointed out that jointly pursuing the BRI was not only aimed at economic cooperation but also an important pathway to improve global development patterns and global governance and promote the healthy development of economic globalization.

"The broad support for the BRI shows aspiration from countries involved, developing countries in particular, for peace and development," Xi said, noting the BRI is an initiative for economic cooperation, instead of a geopolitical alliance or military league, and it is an open and inclusive process rather than an exclusive bloc or "China club."

"It does not differentiate countries by ideology nor play the zero-sum game. As long as countries are willing to join, they are welcome," Xi said.

The next priority of jointly advancing the initiative is to realize its high-quality development, he said.

Xi asked for efforts to push for progress in Belt and Road projects, especially those delivering real benefits to local people, and keep expanding the market while maintaining the balance of trade.

He advocated a policy system on financial support for the BRI and encouraged non-governmental funds to invest in infrastructure and resource development projects in Belt and Road countries.

Work should be done to boost exchanges in areas of education, science, technologies, culture, sports, tourism, health and archaeology, he said.

Xi ordered authorities to regulate investment activities and pay high attention to forestalling risks overseas.

He also stressed importance of intensifying the CPC's leadership over the joint development of the BRI.

Vice Premier Han Zheng, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and head of the leading group on advancing BRI development, presided over the meeting.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 20:50:13|Editor: xuxin

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KATHMANDU, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Tens of hundreds of people from LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersexual) communities from across Nepal participated in the annual "Pride Parade" in the capital Kathmandu on Monday.

The pride fest was inaugurated by flying the colorful balloons and raising the Rainbow Flag in Thamel, the major tourist hub in the capital city. As every year, members of the marginalized community marched on the street with fanfare coinciding with Gaijatra, the festival of cows.

The Pride Parade has been initiated by a non-governmental organization Blue Diamond Society to encourage the third gender people to recognize and celebrate their identity.

Sexual minorities from various districts of Nepal were seen marching in colorful and unique attires, fancy makeup and vibrant accessories. According to the organization, more than 2,000 people participated in the parade from at least 40 districts of Nepal.

"This year, we are doing parade under the theme 'Alliances for Solidarity,' as we are in need of solidarity from the different quarters of society," Pinky Gurung, chairman of Blue Diamond Society, told Xinhua, adding that "equality for LGBTI is not just our issue, but all the government bodies, stakeholders and organizations should come up together to address this issue."

Purnima Shrestha, an LGBTI activist from Bara district, said, "We are never accepted in any other festivals as compared to men and women. This is the only festival where we gather and celebrate our sexual orientations."

Members from the community from different districts shared that the perception of Nepali society towards them has been gradually changing in the recent times.

"People used to tease us in streets with negative names and connotations. But now, they call us as third gender or with our own names. It is a positive move," said Sapana Gupta, a transgender from Kapilvastu district.

Nepal is regarded as one of the most progressive countries in Asia to recognize LGBTI rights as the country's constitution prohibits discrimination against sexual minorities and has special legal provisions for their protection, empowerment and advancement.

The Supreme Court had directed the Nepal government authorities in 2007 to amend laws to end all the discrimination against LGBTI citizens. As per this, the government has been issuing citizenship and passport for third genders under "Other" category.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 20:50:14|Editor: Yurou

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BEIJING, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Chinese lawmakers Monday began the second reading of a draft decision on the Individual Income Tax Law at a bimonthly session of the top legislative body.

Explaining the draft to lawmakers at the start of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee session, Xu Hui, vice chairman of the NPC's Constitution and Law Committee, said that it is necessary to revise the current law to enable taxation to better play its role in adjusting income distribution.

According to a draft amendment deliberated at a bimonthly session of NPC Standing Committee in June, the minimum threshold for personal income tax exemption was raised from 3,500 yuan (about 512 U.S. dollars) to 5,000 yuan per month or 60,000 yuan per year.

The draft amendment added special expense deductions for items like children's education, continuing education, treatment for serious diseases, as well as housing loan interest and rent.

The decision under deliberation adds a new special expense deduction for caring for the elderly. "The move has fully taken into consideration the fact that the aging population and the number of single-child families are mounting among the wage-earners in China," Xu said.

The State Council should set the range, standards, and enforcement steps for the special expense deductions and then report to the NPC Standing Committee, said a provision added to the draft.

The draft also stated that taxation authorities should provide taxpayers with information on their income and tax withheld.

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.

According to the draft, the previous method of taxing monthly income will be replaced with a new calculation which focuses on taxing annual income.

The draft decision is scheduled to come into force on Jan. 1, 2019 while part of the decision including the minimum threshold for personal income tax exemption is scheduled to go into force on Oct. 1 this year.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 21:05:16|Editor: xuxin

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WELLINGTON, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand tertiary students will be offered the chance to participate in NASA's International Internships Program in the United States, under an agreement between the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and NASA.

"Through the program, high-achieving students will have the opportunity to work in NASA's best and most advanced research facilities, with access to expert mentors," Economic Development Minister David Parker said in a statement on Monday.

"The experience could inspire someone to begin the journey to becoming an astronaut or to follow in the footsteps of great Kiwi scientist Sir William Pickering who led the successful effort to put the first U.S. satellite in orbit," Parker said.

The minister said he hopes this will galvanize New Zealand students to think about how their skills could be applied in the space industry, in areas such as Earth observation, data science, astrobiology or robotics.

It also strengthens New Zealand's connection with global space networks and raises New Zealand's profile as a location for space activities, he said, adding New Zealand is well-positioned to become a hub for new space activities with its highly-skilled workforce and expertise in physics, energy, engineering and computer science research.

The agreement is accompanied by a new scholarship from the New Zealand Space Agency, which will be available to up to four successful applicants to cover the cost of participation, airfares, accommodation, and other associated expenses.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 21:10:17|Editor: xuxin

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TRIPOLI, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Libya's UN-backed government on Monday condemned the ongoing clashes in the south of the capital Tripoli between government forces and militias.

"The Presidential Council of the Government of National Accord condemns and denounces the armed attack on the outskirts of Tripoli City by some outlawed gangs and armed groups," the government said in a statement.

The security forces have been instructed to intervene, it noted, vowing to "bring the militias to justice according to relevant UN Security Council resolutions."

The statement called the attack "a threat to the safety and security of the people," accusing it of attempting to "obstruct local and international efforts to establish stability" in Libya.

Clashes have been going on since Sunday night between forces of the UN-backed government and armed militias in southern Tripoli, killing at least one civilian and injuring three others, according to Tripoli Security Directorate.

The reasons for the clashes remain unknown, as southern Tripoli has been witnessing tensions and military mobilization between armed groups both outside and inside the city over the past few days.

Following the 2011 uprising that toppled former leader Muammar Gaddafi's regime, Libya has been suffering escalating violence and chaos, as well as political division.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 21:30:22|Editor: xuxin

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KAMPALA, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- A court in northern Uganda on Monday granted bail to three lawmakers and scores of their supporters who are facing treason charges over an attack on the president's convoy.

Gulu Resident Judge Stephen Mubiru granted bail to Robert Ssentamu Kyagulanyi, Paul Mwiru, Gerald Karuhanga and dozens of their supporters after presenting sureties.

"Their bail application is allowed. Each of them (suspects) is to execute a non-cash bond of 5 million shillings (about 1,350 U.S. dollars). Each of the sureties as well is to execute a non-cash bond of 10 million shillings (2,700 dollars)," Mubiru said at a televised court hearing.

The suspects are expected to reappear before the Gulu Chief Magistrate Court on Thursday.

The 33 suspects are facing charges of treason over alleged intention to harm President Yoweri Museveni in the northwestern district of Arua.

It is alleged that on Aug. 13, the suspects and others still at large in Arua municipality obstructed and violently attacked by stoning one of the vehicles in the presidential convoy.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 21:30:22|Editor: ZX

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Workers of shipyard Uljanik from Pula and 3. Maj from Rijeka protest in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, on Aug. 27, 2018. Around 1,000 Croatian shipyard workers protested here on Monday over unpaid wages, demanding the resignation of the company's management board. (Xinhua/Patrik Macek)

ZAGREB, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Around 1,000 Croatian shipyard workers protested here on Monday over unpaid wages, demanding the resignation of the company's management board.

The workers arrived in Zagreb from the coastal cities Pula and Rijeka, where the shipyards Uljanik and 3. Maj are located. The shipyards are part of Croatia's largest shipbuilding group, Uljanik, that is dealing with financial problems.

They started a strike on Wednesday last week and have now decided to stage a protest in front of the government building in Zagreb. They are demanding the government's help, as it has a minority stake in the company. They are protesting not just over late payments, but also because of shipyards' uncertain future.

The Uljanik Group is a privately owned company. Among many owners, the biggest are the country's top insurer Croatia osiguranje and local banks, while the workers control almost 50 percent of the company.

Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and three government ministers met union members on Monday. After the meeting, union leaders told workers that they were told the unpaid wages could be paid by the end of the week.

The protest ended peacefully, but the workers stressed they will continue to strike until they see the money in their bank accounts. Economy minister Darko Horvat told reporters that the government was working hard to secure salaries for the workers. He emphasized that the survival of the shipyards was in the government's interest, but that they have to be more effective so that the same problem doesn't repeat in four or five years.

According to some estimates, Croatia has spent over 30 billion kuna (4.7 billion U.S. dollars) to save its shipyards in the last 17 years. After joining the European Union in 2013, the shipyards had to be restructured so they could operate without government money, since EU rules don't allow for state financial help.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 21:35:23|Editor: xuxin

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By Alessandra Cardone

ROME, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- About 140 migrants and refugees on an Italian coast guard vessel were allowed to disembark in Sicily over the weekend, after being confined on board for six days amid tensions between Italy and the European Union (EU) over their relocation.

The Italian government, led on this issue by hard-line Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, refused to let most of them off the boat until a specific solution was provided late on Saturday.

The Italian Catholic Church would now welcome 100 of them, and another 40 would be equally relocated between Ireland and Albania (a non-EU country), according to the cabinet.

On the issue, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte stated Italy might withhold the country's funding to the next EU budget, confirming an earlier threat made by Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio.

Referring to an EU informal meeting held with 12 member states (including Italy) in Brussels on Friday -- which failed to provide an immediate solution for the relocation -- Conte blamed the EU's lack of action.

The prime minister said Italian authorities would "draw their conclusion."

"Let me be even clearer: we are at work in order to put a reserve on Italy's acceptance of the (EU) multi-year financial plan under discussion," Conte wrote in a statement.

"Under these conditions, it is not possible for Italy to express its adherence to a provisional budget that implies such an inconsistent social policy," the PM added.

Di Maio -- who also leads governing anti-establishment Five Star Movement -- had been more outspoken in his criticism towards the EU on Friday.

"Once again, the EU has decided to turn its back on Italy, to care nothing for the principles of solidarity and responsibility," Di Maio wrote on Facebook.

"As a political force, we are not anymore ready to pay 20 billion euros (23 billion U.S. dollars) a year as they require. Do they want 20 billions from the Italian citizens? They must show they deserve them," he added.

According to EU statistics, Italy's contribution to the European budget was 13.94 billion euros in 2016, equal to 0.83 percent of the country's gross domestic product. In the same year, the EU spent 11.59 billion euros in Italy.

Meanwhile, the long detention of the migrants on board of the coast guard ship Diciotti raised strong protests at domestic and international level -- including from the UN refugee agency UNHCR -- and produced the first factual consequences.

Interior Minister Salvini was being investigated for "illegal confinement, illegal arrest, and abuse of power" by the prosecutor in Agrigento, Sicily, for his role in the event.

The prosecution office said the probe was opened following hearings the prosecutor held in Rome with top officers of the Immigration and Civil Liberties Department depending from the Interior Ministry.

Salvini brushed off the decision, saying in an interview to Il Messaggero newspaper on Monday that "the judicial probe would reveal itself a boomerang."

"I think they (Agrigento prosecution office) have miscalculated, if they believed they would stop or intimidate someone," the minister added.

Several signs of protests against the prolonged confinement of the migrants on board were sent to the interior ministry during the six-day standoff. The most recent step came from the Chairman of the Italian Medicines Agency (AIFA), Stefano Vella, who resigned on Saturday.

In a statement released by Ansa news agency, Vella explained that "as a doctor, I cannot tolerate to lead a public health body at a time when people are treated this way in our territory, where a universal health care system is in place."

Appeals to the interior ministry had previously arrived from the public prosecutor with the Juvenile Court in Catania and Italy's national authority for children and adolescents -- concerning 27 non-accompanied minors -- and the national ombudsman for the rights of the detained people.

The National Association of criminal lawyers Association (UCPI) also sent a letter to President Sergio Mattarella, urging his "authoritative intervention... to protect inviolable rights and the same founding principles of our living together."

The Diciotti had rescued the group of migrants and asylum-seekers -- 192 people, of which at least 130 from Eritrea -- off the Libyan coasts on Aug. 15.

The ship was allowed to dock at the Sicilian port of Catania only on Aug. 20, but without permit to disembark.

The unaccompanied minors were allowed to leave the boat on Aug. 22, while 16 sick people -- including two suffering from tuberculosis -- were evacuated before the weekend. (1 euro = 1.16 U.S. dollars)Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 21:40:26|Editor: xuxin

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by Tichaona Chifamba

HARARE, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa was on Monday enjoying his first day in office after being inaugurated as president amid humongous task to fix a broken economy.

The July 30 election also saw him gaining more political legitimacy as his first leg as president, finishing off former president Robert Mugabe's term, had somehow been controversial coming as it did through a military intervention.

He took over from Mugabe in Nov. 2017 before winning an election, in which he garnered 50.67 percent of the vote.

He appears eager to put the elections behind him so as to focus on growing the economy which has been shrinking over the years, weighed down to a large extent by economic sanctions imposed by some Western powers over governance issues.

"My government will in the next five years accelerate industrialization, modernization and mechanization, with greater emphasis on market-driven policies. Furthermore, comprehensive strategies will be put in place to stimulate the value chains across our industries and commerce," he said soon after being inaugurated.

African leaders including Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Edgar Lungu of Zambia, Mokgweetsi Masisi of Botswana and African Union chairperson and President of Rwanda Paul Kagame attended the inauguration ceremony.

Mnangagwa is now expected to announce a new cabinet that will help him realize his vision to turn around the economy, fight bureaucracy and improve the ease of doing business, exterminate endemic corruption, create jobs and foster unity among Zimbabweans.

He also wants Zimbabwe to be an accepted member of the international community, pledging to uphold democracy and the rule of law.

"Through the engagement and re-engagement policy, we are opening a new chapter in our relations with the world, underpinned by mutual respect, shared principles and common values," he said.

Zimbabweans continue to yearn for a better livelihood after enduring years of economic hardships exacerbated lately by cash shortages, joblessness, limited health facilities and access to water, inadequate housing, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Harare resident Farai Tsopotsa said although he had not voted for Mnangagwa, he expected him to listen to the needs of all the people regardless of their political affiliation.

"The contest is over. He won the election and is now my president. So I expect him to uphold the constitution and lead the nation without fear or favor," he said.

Political commentator Tichaona Muchapera said: "After reading his pledge, which puts the economy first, l believe it's a good departure from the old, when politics took centre stage at the expense of the economy. His commitment to his own pledge would be tested by the Cabinet he is going to appoint."

Mnangagwa also assumes office when there is a subtle nudge by some players in the international community for inclusivity in governance issues.

Soon after the Constitutional Court dismissed opposition leader Nelson Chamisa's challenge to Mnangagwa's victory on Aug. 24, the European Union delegation and heads of mission of EU member states in Harare issued a statement calling for an inclusive approach to crafting reforms.

"The electoral process revealed improvements as well as challenges ... It is important that the new government engages all stakeholders in substantive discussions on the necessary reforms, including on further electoral reforms," they said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 21:45:26|Editor: xuxin

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TRIPOLI, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Clashes since Sunday night between forces of Libya's UN-backed government and armed militias in the south of the capital Tripoli have killed one civilian and injured three others, Tripoli Security Directorate said Monday.

The directorate condemned the "indiscriminate shelling of civilians" by the clashes in the region of Al-Khalla, urging civilians in the areas to "take caution."

Meanwhile, the municipal council of the nearby city of Tarhuna, some 90 km southeast of Tripoli, confirmed that government forces were attacked by outlawed armed groups.

The armed groups are "intimidating citizens and damaging their properties," it added.

According to witnesses, heavy gun firing and explosions could still be heard in some parts of the city.

The reasons for the clashes remain unknown, as southern Tripoli has been witnessing tensions and military mobilization between armed groups outside and inside the city over the past few days.

Following the 2011 uprising that toppled former leader Muammar Gaddafi's regime, Libya has been suffering escalating violence and chaos, as well as political division.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 22:05:31|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has called for persistent efforts to enhance healthcare, medical insurance, and pharmaceutical reforms to ease the difficulties in receiving medical services and alleviate the financial burden on patients.

Li, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks in a written instruction to a national teleconference on medical reforms which is held Monday in Beijing.

Li urged reforms that lower the cost of overpriced drugs, deepen public hospital reform, improve the basic medical insurance system and the multi-tiered diagnosis and treatment system, and develop medical and healthcare services via the internet.

Li said the reforms have already achieved some important results and a large number of medical workers have made great contributions to promote the reforms and protect people's health.

Vice Premier Sun Chunlan attended and addressed the teleconference.

Sun, also head of the State Council's health reform leading group, echoed Li's instruction and asked for more efforts to tackle key problems in the reforms to better benefit the people, inspire medical workers to perform their duties better, and ensure sustainable inputs for the medical system.

Sun also stressed the need to strengthen supervision and regulation over medical work, enhance drug quality control, and support private hospitals.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 22:20:36|Editor: xuxin

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BAGHDAD, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Iraq has rehabilitated part of its largest oil refinery located in Baiji of the country's central province of Salahudin after it was sabotaged in fierce battles against Islamic State (IS) militants four years ago.

"The rehabilitation of the refinery's Salahudin No. 1 part has completed and it is ready now to produce three oil derivatives products: kerosene, diesel and petrol," Khalaf Abdul-Hussein, head of the technical team of the rehabilitation of the refinery, told Xinhua.

The capacity has returned to 60,000 barrels per day (bpd), close to its designed capacity of 75,000 bpd, Hussein said, adding that the 15-day experimental production will begin on Sept. 1.

The Iraqi engineers managed to rehabilitate Salahudin No. 1 after borrowing some undamaged spare parts from the adjacent Salahudin No. 2 part of the refinery, he explained.

Meanwhile, the rehabilitation of Salahudin No. 2 is also underway, yet in need of equipment and spare parts to be provided by the foreign companies building the refinery.

Located near the town of Baiji, some 200 km north of the capital Baghdad, the largest oil refinery in Iraq produces a total of 300,000 bpd of oil derivative products.

The refinery was completely destroyed in the first Gulf War in 1991, but soon restored by Iraqi engineers.

The huge refinery site witnessed intense fighting since IS militants captured large parts of Salahudin Province after June 2014, but the Iraqi government forces liberated the refinery and its surrounding areas in April 2015.

However, media reports said after the liberation from IS, the refinery site was looted by unidentified militias.

Khalid Mahmoud, head of oil pipelines department, told Xinhua that the Iraqi oil ministry has reconnected pipelines from the oilfields of Salahudin and Kirkuk to the refinery in Baiji, with more efforts underway to restore the pipeline network to transport petroleum products from the refinery to other Iraqi provinces.

Iraqi Oil Minister Jabbar Luaiby said earlier that the ministry decided to complete the rehabilitation in six to nine months, adding that he has instructed government oil companies in northern, central and southern Iraq to make joint efforts in restoring the oil refinery.

Observers believe the re-operation of the Baiji refinery would benefit Salahudin Province, as the revenues from the oil products would fund the reconstruction of areas destroyed by the IS, and create jobs to reduce unemployment in the province.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 22:35:40|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIRUT, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Lebanon's industrial exports increased to 1.79 billion U.S. dollars in the first five months of 2018, up 6.6 percent year on year, according to an official report issued on Monday.

Fadi Gemayel, head of the Association of Lebanese Industrialists, attributed the increase to the success of some Lebanese industrialists in opening new markets for their products.

"Industrialists have made great efforts in exploring new markets for their products," Gemayel told Xinhua.

Chemicals accounted for most of the Lebanese exports in value, followed by food and tobacco, electric equipment and basic metals, according to the report issued by the Industry Ministry.

Lebanon's industrial exports have witnessed recessions in the past few years because of the closure of the only functioning crossing between Jordan and Syria, which is vital for the transport of goods from Lebanon to Gulf states.

However, Syrian government forces have taken control of the border after a three-year closure, making it possible for Lebanese exporters to use the crossing again to sell their products abroad.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 22:45:43|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BERLIN, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The Federal Cartel Office in Germany has launched an investigation into the planned fusion of ailing retail giants Kaufhof and Karstadt, the Bonn-based government agency announced on Monday.

Andreas Mundt, director of the Federal Cartel Office, told press that his staff would consider the position of the two department store chains in German regional markets, as well as its digital competition from e-commerce providers.

The news comes shortly after the newspaper "Sueddeutsche Zeitung" (SZ) reported that the merger could collapse surprisingly due to financial difficulties experienced by Kaufhaus' Canadian mother corporation Hudson's Bay Company (HBC).

According to SZ, HBC has received an ultimatum from a consortium of banks led by the Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg (LBBW) to ensure its compliance with conditions for the earlier award of a 1.3-billion-euro loan by the end of the September. The funds in question were used to purchase the buildings which house the stores of Kaufhaus across Germany.

If HBC fails to meet the deadline set by the banks, it faces the prospect of either having to repay the loan in its entirety or experiencing the repossession of its real estate portfolio as collateral.

The development has thrown an unexpected spanner into negotiations over the merger between HBC and the Austrian Karstadt owner Signa which were already well-advanced in July.

Kaufhof and Karstadt own nearly 200 department stores in Germany and employ around 37,000 combined staff in the country. Until recently, the deal was expected to be finalized shortly with Signa acquiring just over half of the shares of the new company and taking responsibility for the operative business.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 22:55:45|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BERLIN, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The prospect of a de-escalation in the ongoing trade conflict between the United States and European Union (EU) has propelled German business confidence to its highest level in half a year, a study published on Monday by the Institute for Economic Research (Ifo) finds.

The closely-watched Ifo Business Climate Index compiled rose by 2.1 points to 103.8 points in August. The finding was based on a monthly survey by the Munich-based institute of 9,000 managers at German companies from various business sectors.

"The German economy is currently experiencing a summer high", a statement by Ifo President Clemens Fuest read. Fuest attributed the development to a "ceasefire in the global trade conflict", and the lasting strength of the domestic economy in Germany.

Managers polled by Ifo were slightly more upbeat about their current commercial situation, as well in their assessments of future prospects compared to the previous month. The trend held for firms across the retail-, industrial manufacturing-, service- and construction sectors considered in the Business Climate Index and thus marked the end of a series of six consecutive months of decline in confidence for industrial manufacturers.

Fuest highlighted the "significantly more optimistic expectations of industrial firms, especially in the automotive industry" as having contributed to the better than expected findings. Most economists had forecast a lower reading of 101.9 points for August.

During a recent meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker secured a pledge from the United States to exempt the bloc from further punitive tariffs on automotive imports. Instead, the EU and United States would focus on launching negotiations for a program of mutual tariff reduction and reforms of the surveillance- and enforcement mechanisms of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

German minister for the economy Peter Altmaier (CDU) has welcomed temporary respite in the trade conflict between the EU and United States. Nevertheless, Altmaier warned that the concessions won by Juncker could "only be a first step" towards a wider reversal of the Trump's protectionist "America First" doctrine.

Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and German business associations have repeatedly called for mutual tariff reductions as a means to repair strained transatlantic ties and help improve the export competitiveness of the U.S. economy. Such an elimination of trade barriers in the automotive and other sectors would have to take place in rules-based framework of the WTO.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 23:00:45|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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LONDON, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Training collars which deliver an electric shock to dogs and cats are to be banned under new legislation announced Monday by the British government.

The remote-controlled electronic training collars, known as e-collars, have a remote device that triggers an electronic pulse, which can be varied in strength, while others may spray a noxious chemical.

The Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) said that as well as being misused to inflict unnecessary harm and suffering, there's also evidence e-collars can re-direct aggression or generate anxiety-based behavior in pets, making underlying behavioral and health problems worse.

Defra said their action follows a public consultation on a proposed ban for all e-collars.

Environment secretary Michael Gove said: "The use of punitive shock collars cause harm and suffering to our pets. This ban will improve the welfare of animals."

The national animal charity, the Dog's Trust, was among the welfare organizations calling for the collars to be banned.

The trust's director of canine behaviour and research Rachel Casey said: "We are appalled that it is still legal to buy and use electronic shock collars in England. It is both unnecessary and cruel to resort to the use of these collars on dogs. This type of device is not only painful for a dog, it can have a serious negative impact on their mental and physical well-being."

According to the trust, the devices can send between 100 to 6,000 volts to a dog's neck, and have the capacity to continuously shock a dog for up to 11 seconds at a time.

A government consultation attracted over 7,000 responses. Around half of those responding pointed out that they did not want a ban on containment fences.

A considerable number of responses, whether supportive of a total ban or supportive of invisible fencing, also expressed concern at the number of people who use the hand-held devices incorrectly and without proper training.

The government has said it will not extend the ban to invisible fencing systems, which can keep pets away from roads and potential traffic accidents. Animals often respond well to invisible fencing and quickly learn to stay within a boundary without receiving a static pulse.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 23:05:46|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIRUT, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri vowed not to give up on the position of Prime Minister, a local private TV reported Monday.

"Hariri is only concerned with the stances that come directly from President Michel Aoun," the sources close to Hariri told LBCI.

Earlier in the day, Lebanese President Michel Aoun said he is waiting for Hariri to present him with a cabinet lineup.

"Political and sectarian diversity creates problems when it comes to government formation. We listen to the demands of political parties and we aim to reach an agreement that would result in cabinet formation," Aoun said.

Hariri's duty is to form the cabinet, and should take the initiative and "go ahead with the formation," he added.

Hariri is facing various hurdles in his attempt to form a 30-member national unity government, caused by the rifts among rival politicians over the representation of the main Christian parties, as well as the Druze sect and the question of Sunni representation from outside Hariri's Future Movement.

Meanwhile, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri have on many occasions called for legislative sessions which are constitutionally guaranteed even in the absence of a government.

However, sources close to the Future Movement described Berri's call as increased pressure on Hariri to give up his premiership.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 23:05:46|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BERLIN, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Germany's federal cartel office will focus on protecting competition in the digital industry, Bundeskartellamt president Andreas Mundt said during the presentation of the annual report 2017 on Monday.

Following the suggestions of the coalition agreement by the current German government, there are ongoing discussions about further modernizing the anti-trust law, in particular with regards to monitoring the abuse of market-dominating companies. "We will intensify our focus on the topic of e-commerce even further," said Mundt.

The increasing importance of large internet platforms bring up new anti-trust and economic issues. The mechanisms of the digital economy often lead to large markets being concentrated on individual companies such as Amazon, Facebook, or Google, a press representative explained to Xinhua on Monday. "The Bundeskartellamt, like other competition authorities worldwide, is paying particular attention to the network effects that arise on such platforms."

Mundt particularly addresses the planned projects from the coalition agreement. These would include transparency with regard to algorithms, artificial intelligence, dynamic pricing, as well as rankings and inter-dependencies in comparison portals.

To date, the German cartel office has imposed fines totaling 273 million euros (318 million U.S. dollars) in the current year 2018, compared to 66 million euros in 2017.

This increase is linked to the closure of a loophole in the German law which has allowed companies to escape a fine by restructuring their business. This would have affected anti-trust prosecution in recent years, said Mundt.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 23:20:53|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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DOHA, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The government of Qatar has announced that it will establish a new air base called "Tamim Air Base," said state-run Qatar News Agency (QNA) on Monday.

The remarks were made by Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Malki, deputy commander of the Qatari Emiri Air Force, during an interview with "Al Talai" magazine published on Sunday by the Directorate of Moral Guidance in the Ministry of Defense.

The QNA said that to welcome new aircraft and systems that have been introduced to the air force service, Qatar would expand Al Udeid Air Base, the biggest military facility used by the United States in the Gulf, plus developing the Doha Air Base.

The new development would include the French Rafael fighters, U.S. F-15 fighters, Eurofighter Typhoon jets, the latest radar systems and communications, Al-Malki said.

He said there are organizational projects of strategic nature which will be seen at the Emiri Air Force.

Al-Malki also added that in 2018, Emiri Air Force had welcomed the first female batch as pilot candidates.

Qatar has been working extra hard to improve its defense system and readiness, and expand its military relations with many countries massively, especially, after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt cut ties with Qatar over their support for terrorism and interference in the internal affairs of other countries.

Earlier this year, Qatar announced that it would spend 3.71 billion U.S. dollars to buy 28 military helicopters.

In 2017, Qatar purchased 24 Eurofighter Typhoon jets from London.Cyprus PIO: Turkish Cypriot and Turkish Media Review, 18-08-27 Cyprus Press and Information Office: Turkish Cypriot Press Review Directory - Previous Article - Next Article From: The Republic of Cyprus Press and Information Office Server at <http://www.pio.gov.cy/> Turkish Cypriot and Turkish Media Review-25-27.08.18 No. 164/18 [A] TURKISH CYPRIOT / TURKISH PRESS Contents [A] Turkish Cypriot Press [01] A Turkish Cypriot "association" wonders why the "decision" for the return of the Maronites in their villages in the occupied area of Cyprus has not been implemented yet [02] Ozcinar speaks about their plans for the "development" of occupied Morfou [03] Sucuoglu accuses the Greek Cypriot side of having "excessive demands" on the Cyprus problem [04] BBP leader: "Greece does not deserve an olive branch but to be beaten by a branch" [05] "Prickly pear trees victim of the occupation" [06] The foreign students in the occupied area of Cyprus will have to take a "student permit" [07] Businessmen say that a new increase in the price of electricity would be a disaster [08] The foreign trade deficit in the occupied area of Cyprus in first four months of 2018 is 551 million dollars [09] "Plundering has spoiled us" [10] Ayia Paraskevi Church in occupied Famagusta is neglected [B] Turkish Press [A] TURKISH CYPRIOT / TURKISH PRESS [01] Erdogan: The issue is about Turkey, not me [02] Deepening Turkey-Russia relations gain new dimension [03] US delivers new Chinook helicopters to Turkey despite F-35 problem [A] Turkish Cypriot Press [01] A Turkish Cypriot "association" wonders why the "decision" for the return of the Maronites in their villages in the occupied area of Cyprus has not been implemented yet Turkish Cypriot daily Kibris Postasi newspaper (27.08.18) under the title: "Why the return of Maronites is being delayed?", reports that the "association of economy and businessmen investors" in a written statement wonders why the return of the Maronites is being delayed. Pointing out that although the so-called four-coalition government and Turkey have fully supported this issue, the aim that was the return of Maronites to their villages has not been accomplished one year later. The "association" underlined that the "implementation of this decision" will bring a lot of benefits to the "country", taking into consideration that the "TRNC" is not recognized. The "association" alleges further that this "implementation" would mean that the "rule of law is valid in a non-recognized country", adding that this will reinforce the Turkish side in its struggle to become "accepted" in the international community. The "association" claims further that the "implementation of the decision" for the return of Maronites to their villages in the occupied area of Cyprus would constitute also another important step towards the direction of being included in the "international law", especially after the establishment of the "immovable property commission", which is the most important decision taken by the international community with a surplus value for the Turks. The "association" calls the so-called government not to delay further to "implement this decision" and claims that everyone should realize that any further delay of the "implementation of this decision" would prove that they do not have the ability to be "self-administrated" and that the fascist and prohibitive circles in both sides of the island are in full cooperation. (AK) [02] Ozcinar speaks about their plans for the "development" of occupied Morfou Turkish Cypriot daily Havadis newspaper (26.08.18) reported that the "mayor" of occupied Morfou Mahmut Ozcinar, in exclusive statements to the paper alleged that new buildings will be constructed in the area. Ozcinar argued that they have plans for the development of occupied Morfou and alleged that they are carrying out a study by evaluating the students' profile in order to build an area for the students. "Our aim is to carry out a study, examine the profile of the students and cover their needs", Ozcinar said, adding that new residences for youth will be also built. He also added that among their goals is the completion of an open market in occupied Morfou and of a new park called "city park". Ozcinar added further that although they do not confront any difficulties in the field of "construction and zoning plans", discipline is necessary in every new construction. Pointing out that especially the occupied Kapouti area is a speedy developing area, Ozcinar stressed the need for the "construction laws" to be implemented there. (AK) [03] Sucuoglu accuses the Greek Cypriot side of having "excessive demands" on the Cyprus problem Turkish Cypriot daily Hakikat newspaper (27.08.18) reports that Faiz Sucuoglu, "deputy" with the National Unity Party (UBP) in the occupied part of Lefkosia, claimed that prior to the forthcoming meetings in New York, the Greek Cypriot side continues having "excessive demands" on the Cyprus problem and showing an intransigent stance. Issuing a written statement, Sucuoglu evaluated the developments on the Cyprus problem and accused the Greek Cypriot side of following a "hostile stance". Alleging that the Turkish Cypriots are determined not to accept their rights to be seized, he argued that the main aim of the Greek Cypriots is the lifting of "Turkey's unilateral right of independence" and Turkey's active and effective guarantees. "If the Greek Cypriots consider that with armament, buying new helicopters and collecting allies against Turkey, they will force Turkey to withdraw from his rights, then they are disillusioned", Sucuoglu alleged. (AK) [04] BBP leader: "Greece does not deserve an olive branch but to be beaten by a branch" Turkish Cypriot daily Kibris Postasi newspaper (25.08.28) reported that the leader of the Great United Party (BBP) Mustafa Destici accused Greece of not being a good neighbor for Turkey and for supporting PKK and FETO members and claimed that "Greece does not deserve an olive branch but to be beaten by a branch". Destici, who was speaking in Eskisehir after the Friday prayer, stated that Greece is doing harm to Turkey, is supporting PKK and FETO members, is saying that Cyprus is under occupation and violates Turkey's right in the Aegean; still Turkey continues to offer an olive branch. "This has to stop and Turkey should give an answer", he claimed, adding that Turkey should give an answer to Greece taking into consideration the continuing works in Cyprus and the violations of its territorial waters in the Aegean. (CS) [05] "Prickly pear trees victim of the occupation" Under the above title, Turkish Cypriot daily Afrika (27.08.18) reports that the for some years now the prickly pear trees grow on the off fenced city of Varosha are affected by the "Dactylopius opuntiae (prickly pear cochineal)" disease which has also started to affect other trees, like olive trees and can put in danger trees of the whole island. However, the occupation army does not give permission for three years now for applying medicine to the trees in order for the disease to be put under control. Citing information Afrika writes that the situation is quite serious and the Republic of Cyprus will apply to the UN in order for measures to be taken on the issue. (CS) [06] The foreign students in the occupied area of Cyprus will have to take a "student permit" Under the title "student permit will be now mandatory for students", Turkish Cypriot daily Yeni Duzen newspaper (27.08.18) reports that Aysegul Baybars, "interior minister" explained the new "immigration rules" concerning the foreign students, who study or will study in the "country". She added that the travelling to and from the occupied area of Cyprus for both workers and students is increased. Claiming that the population in the occupied area of Cyprus is much more than those who are "citizens", Baybars said that for this reason, the control of the exit and entry to the occupied area of Cyprus is very important. Baybars argued that one of the issues that have been complains for years now is the registration of the students in the occupied area of Cyprus and added: "We are working together with the ministry of national education, the ministry of labour and social security, the ministry of health, and the police immigration department. We are establishing a system that will go into effect after September 30, 2018". She explained that this system will be integrated with the systems of "ministry of health, ministry of education and the police immigration department", adding that when a foreigner arrives in the occupied area of Cyprus under the status of student will be registered in the arrival, and at the university then the student will have to take health control at the "ministry of health" and will also have to take student permit at the "ministry of interior". Baybars believes that with this method they will be able to reduce the number of illegal students. (DPs) [07] Businessmen say that a new increase in the price of electricity would be a disaster Under the title "It will be a disaster", Turkish Cypriot daily Diyalog newspaper (27.08.18) reports that Turkish Cypriot businessmen commented on self-styled minister of economy Ozdil Nami's statements that an increase in the price of electricity is inevitable in the occupied area of the Republic of Cyprus. Turgay Deniz, chairman of the Turkish Cypriot Chamber of Commerce, told the paper that the increase in the price of electricity will negatively influence everybody and argued that this increase should be made gradually. He expressed the view that it would not be easy to recover from this loss and added that both businesses and the people have no strength to endure any more. "Anyway we use the most expensive electricity in the world", he claimed. Moreover, Fethi Ozbogac, chairman of the Turkish Cypriot hoteliers' union, said that they are facing a "terrifying" cost of electricity and that their problems have reached a critical stage. He argued that what they should actually do is to focus on tourism, which is allegedly the only way to deal with the devaluation of the Turkish lira and the purchase of fuel with foreign currency. Finally, Ugur Ergun, chairman of the "young businessmen association", said that it is very difficult for them to accept a new increase in the price of electricity, but it is not very difficult to see that this increase will not be the last one. He argued that in a "country" which has so highly expensive electricity you can neither produce nor achieve a success in various business fields. (I/Ts.) [08] The foreign trade deficit in the occupied area of Cyprus in first four months of 2018 is 551 million dollars Turkish Cypriot daily Kibris newspaper (27.08.18) reports that the foreign trade deficit in the occupied area of Cyprus is 551 million 164 thousand dollar in first four months of 2018, adding that the exports in the period January-April, 2018, were estimated as 48.1 million dollars, while the exports in the same period were 599.2 million dollars. According to data by the "economy ministry's trade department", the foreign trade deficit increased by 21, 01% compared to last year's same period, which was 455 million 463 thousand dollars. The exports had an increase of 10, 95%, from 366 thousand 556 dollars last year (Jan-Apr 2017) to 48 million 114 thousand dollars this year (Jan-Apr 2018). The imports at the same period had an increase of 20,14%, from 498.8 million dollars in first four months of 2017 to 599.3 million dollars. (DPs) [09] "Plundering has spoiled us" Under the above title, Turkish Cypriot daily Yeni Duzen newspaper (27.08.18) reports that 80-year-old Turkish Cypriot carpenter Tahsin Ozler, who has his workshop in the within the walls part of occupied Nicosia, told the paper that the plundering which took place in the occupied area of the Republic of Cyprus after the 1974 Turkish invasion has "spoiled" the Turkish Cypriot community. "In the past, the Turkish Cypriots had passed through very difficult days but we have always supported each other. After 1974 plundering has spoiled the community. Those, who had no right to take a property, took a property. People who had borrowed two shillings from me and could not pay me back took lots of properties after 1974 and became rich", said Ozler in an interview with Yeni Duzen describing as wrong the decision to use the Turkish lira instead of the Cyprus lira. Referring to his personal experience, he said that after the 1974 invasion, the house and cinema which he had abandoned in 1963 in occupied Omorfita remained in a military zone. "We still cannot go to our property", he noted adding that they were told that their property would be returned but this did not happen. (I/Ts.) [10] Ayia Paraskevi Church in occupied Famagusta is neglected Turkish Cypriot daily Kibris newspaper (25.08.18) reported that 12 trucks are parked in the yard of the Ayia Paraskevi Church in occupied Famagusta. The paper noted that the yard of the neglected church, which is dated on the 16th century and is one of the oldest churches in occupied Famagusta was cleaned from garbage after a campaign took place some time ago. According to KIBRIS Greek Cypriot archaeologist Andreas Foulias reacted against the condition of the Church and stressed the need of its restoration in the framework of the works of the Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage. (CS) [B] Turkish Press [01] Erdogan: The issue is about Turkey, not me According to Turkish daily Hurriyet Daily News (26.08.18, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/erdogan-the-issue-is-about-turkey-not-me-136159), Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Aug. 26 that attacks against himself were not actually about him, but instead targeted Turkey, and in nature were similar to previous attempts to invade Anatolia. "Do not forget, Anatolia is a wall and if this wall collapses, there will no longer be a Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Balkans or Caucasus," Erdogan said in the southeastern province of Mus, warning that such an event would lead to the collapse of surrounding regions. "If we show even a small sign of weakness, you will see they will come onto us like hooded crows. Some unwary people among us think this is an issue about me. No, their issue is Turkey. The issue is Islam," he said. "The issue is not the AKP [Justice and Development Party], it is Turkey; it is Islam, which they have symbolized in the name of our nation. Those who know the West know being a Turk means being a Muslim. Turkey means all Muslims' hope. We are the only country and nation who has direct contact with the West but is still able to protect its identity and freedom. This is why oppressed societies care so much about Turkey that they have a place for us in their hearts and prayers," Erdogan also said. Erdogan made the comments during a ceremony to mark the 947th anniversary of the Battle of Manzikert (Malazgirt in Turkish), in which the Seljuk Turks claimed victory over the Byzantine Empire in 1071. The battle on Aug. 26, 1071 saw Seljuk Turks led by Sultan Alparslan defeat a Byzantine army and lead the way for the Turks to dominate Anatolia. During his speech on Aug. 26, Erdogan marked the historic battle and called on the Turkish youth. "We have shown the entire world what kind of a nation we are. Young people! Protect this legacy born in the past, moving forward into the future," he said. On Aug. 25, Erdogan had also released a message marking the anniversary of the historic battle. "Defying a host of attacks from inside and out, our people have clung to this soil for almost 1,000 years thanks to the soul of Manzikert." Turkey's biggest safeguard is the "determination of our people to protect their independence, their motherland and their future," even in the face of economic attacks, Erdogan had added. "As you know, above all, we will be 'one.' We will be great, alive and brothers. It is all together that we will be Turkey, and do not forget this: One nation, one flag, one homeland and state. They will not be able to divide us, break us up, and if we are 'one,' great and alive, with the help of God, we will walk toward [the goals of] 2023, 2053 and 2071 in very different ways," Erdogan said on Aug. 26. The ceremony at the historic battle site in the Manzikert district also saw the participation of Parliament Speaker Binali Y?ld?r?m and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahceli. [02] Deepening Turkey-Russia relations gain new dimension Turkish daily (27.08.18, https://www.dailysabah.com/diplomacy/2018/08/27/deepening-turkey-russia-relations-gain-new-dimension) reports that the developing cooperation between Turkey and Russia can become multidimensional with joint initiatives in many areas and personal diplomacy between the leaders of the two countries. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, and the head of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) Hakan Fidan travelled to Moscow Friday for talks on bilateral and regional issues, including the recent developments in Syria. They met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin. Before meeting the Turkish delegation, Putin said Friday that Russia's relations with Turkey were deepening and their coo peration in regional issues and the economy was increasing. The Russian President also praised the Russian and Turkish efforts in Syria, saying that a solution was closer to the input of Iran, the European Union, the U.N. and the U.S. In an effort to restore calm in the region and improve the humanitarian situation in war-torn Syria, the three guarantor states Turkey, Iran and Russia, launched the Astana process on Jan. 23, 2017, establishing de-escalation zones. In the meeting, Putin was joined by Foreign Minister Lavrov, Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu and his special representative on Syria Alexander Lavrentiev. Before meeting Putin, Cavusoglu met Lavrov earlier in the day, while Akar and Fidan met with Shoygu. Fidan and Akar were also in Moscow last week where they met Russian officials and the Defence Minister. () During the recent meeting, Lavrov announced that Russia and Turkey have agreed to establish a mechanism to restore a visa-free regime between the two countries. "Russia is ready to lift visa restrictions for the Turkish holders of special and service passports as well as for drivers engaged in cargo transportation between the two countries," Lavrov told reporters after his meeting with Cavusoglu. Cavusoglu conveyed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's greetings to Putin, saying that the Turkish President was eager to host him in Istanbul in the near future. () Putin also mentioned the regular contacts with Erdogan. During the BRICS meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa in July, Russian media reported that Putin requested Erdogan to allow the import of Russian meat. Soon after the meeting, the first batch of meat from Russia was delivered to Turkey. Cavusoglu stressed that bilateral ties with Russia were important for the region's security and stability. "The contacts between the two head of states [Erdogan and Putin] are very important for the security, welfare and stability of the region, as well as for the two countries," he said. Calling Russia a "strategic partner," the Turkish Foreign Minister underlined the importance of further developing bilateral ties with Russia. "We will both improve bilateral relations between the two countries for [providing] stability and economic development in the region and we will boost our cooperation on regional matters," he added. He further said, without giving any particular name, that some countries and individuals were jealous of Turkey and Russia's close cooperation and friendship. [03] US delivers new Chinook helicopters to Turkey despite F-35 problem According to Turkish daily Sabah newspaper (27.08.18, https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/2018/08/27/us-delivers-new-chinook-helicopter-to-turkey-despite-f-35-problem), Turkey has started to receive the second batch of CH-47 Chinook heavy transportation helicopters from the U.S., despite the ongoing crisis with the country regarding delivery of F-35 jets. The Presidency of the Defence Industry announced that the first of five helicopters, part of the second delivery of Chinooks, entered the inventory of the Turkish Military on Saturday. The initial agreement with Boeing, an American multinational corporation, on the purchase of 11 CH-47 helicopters in 2011 first delivered six helicopters in 2016. () Still, the F-35 Joint Program Office announced on Aug. 16 that it would continue to execute current program plans with all partners, including Turkey, and to abide by any future policy guidelines. () Each CH-47 helicopter has two rotors and two motors, each having 4,800 horsepower. With a range that can increase to 1,100 km with the help of the fuel tanks, the helicopters can fly safely even at conditions of zero visibility. The helicopters, which can carry 10 tons, can be used in war operations and operations with humanitarian and civil aims. TURKISH AFFAIRS SECTION (DPs/ AM) Cyprus Press and Information Office: Turkish Cypriot Press Review Directory - Previous Article - Next ArticleSource: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 23:20:53|Editor: ZX

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SINGAPORE, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan on Monday welcomed ministers from 12 countries across Africa, who came to the city-state for the third iteration of the Singapore-Sub-Saharan Africa High-Level Ministerial Exchange Visit.

Balakrishnan said the African countries have developed at an impressive pace and demonstrated incredible potential. However, the challenges confronting Africa are also more complex today, according to the foreign minister's welcome remarks.

"With over half of Africa's population set to urbanize by 2050, urbanization will be both an opportunity as well as a key challenge that many governments would have to face," Balakrishnan said, adding that the theme of this year's Exchange Visit, Singapore and Africa: Partners for Smart Cities, was "so apt."

He said Singapore had structured the Exchange Visit around three of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals, because building a smart city was not just about providing infrastructure or Internet connectivity, but about harnessing the new tools that the digital revolution was providing in order to improve living standards for every single citizen.

The three goals were decent work and economic growth; industry, innovation, and infrastructure; and sustainable cities and communities, he added.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 23:25:53|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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JERUSALEM, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Israel's national expenditure on civilian research and development (R&D) amounted to 57.8 billion new shekels (15.95 billion U.S. dollars) in 2017, up 11.1 percent year on year, according to a report released Monday by the Central Bureau of Statistics.

Israeli R&D expenditure in 2017 accounts for 4.5 percent of GDP, compared with 4.4 percent in 2016, the report said.

In terms of the percentage of GDP, Israel ranked first in 2016 among the countries of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, followed by South Korea and Sweden, and is expected to maintain its top place in 2017.

The expenditure on civilian R&D per capita in Israel reached 1,752 dollars in 2017, mainly owing to the high concentration of development centers of multi-national companies in Israel.

In the business sector, there was a 5.6-percent increase in expenditure on R&D, including activities in international R&D centers in Israel.

The business sector includes mainly computer programming, consulting and other services in computers and software, scientific research, start-up companies, international R&D centers, technological incubators and industry.

According to the report, 55.6 percent of government R&D expenditures in 2017 were allocated to the development of general knowledge, with 29.5 percent used for advancing industrial technologies.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 23:30:55|Editor: ZX

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CAPE TOWN, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The South African government on Monday released a draft Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) that abandons a previous deal to build costly nuclear plants by 2030.

The draft plan confirms that the deal to build nuclear plants has now been shelved in favor of cheaper, cleaner sources of energy like wind, solar, gas and hydro-power.

The government under former president Jacob Zuma had been working on a deal, allegedly with Russia, to build nuclear reactors at a cost of 1 trillion rand (about 70 billion U.S. dollars). That deal would provide for 9,600 megawatts (MW) of nuclear power as part of the energy landscape by 2030.

The opposition and environmental groups strongly oppose the deal which they say is unaffordable and would entail corruption.

The IRP, released by Energy Minister Jeff Radebe, includes the following new additional capacity by 2030: 1,000 MW from coal, 2,500 MW from hydro-power, 5,670 MW from solar power, 8,100 MW from wind, and 8,100 MW from gas.

"This approach... provides the necessary policy certainty while creating the space for all of us to engage in detail on the impending energy transition and the options available to us as South Africa," Radebe said.

The opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) welcomed the policy shift.

"The fact of the matter is that we never needed new nuclear plants, and we didn't have the money to build them. On this score, the new draft IRP is a substantial improvement on the old one," the DA said.

"We are moving towards cleaner, renewable energy and away from the corrupt nuclear deal," the party said. "This is something to be welcomed."

The government invited the public to put their input into the draft IRP in a 60-day period.

"We urge you not to wait for the 60 days but to provide us your written comments and proposals with supporting data or evidence where possible as soon as you have them ready to help minimize the time to finalize the IRP and therefore create policy certainty," Radebe said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 23:45:59|Editor: ZX

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ISLAMABAD, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Process for an upcoming presidential election in Pakistan started on Monday as three candidates filed their nomination papers.

The election will be held on Sept. 4 to replace incumbent President Mamnoon Hussain, who will complete his five-year tenure.

Those who submitted nomination papers included Arif Alvi of the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Fazal-ur-Rehman of the religious parties' alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) and Aitzaz Ahsan of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

The major opposition Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and some other small opposition parties announced support to Fazal-ur-Rehman.

The opposition parties had earlier agreed to field a joint candidate but differences emerged over the nomination of the candidate.

The PML-N wanted the PPP to change Aitzaz Ahsan with another candidate as the party was unhappy at some of his statements against the jailed PML-N former leader Nawaz Sharif.

Opposition parties continued meetings on Monday to remove internal differences and support Fazal-ur-Rehman, who heads the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party.

The opposition parties could give a tough time to PTI if they agree on a consensus candidate, according to political watchers.

On their part, the ruling PTI and its coalition partners are confident of winning the election as they have the required number of the national and provincial lawmakers.

The National Assembly, Senate and four provincial assemblies are part of the electoral college for the presidential elections.

The session of both houses of the parliament has been summoned to meet at 10:00 a.m. local time on Sept. 4 for the election.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 23:51:00|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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KIEV, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Ukraine will maintain defense spending at about 5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) next year, a senior security official said Monday.

In 2019, Ukraine's defense budget is expected to reach some 200 billion hryvnyas (about 7.18 billion U.S. dollars), Oleksandr Turchynov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, said in a statement after a meeting on budget planning.

Turchynov listed the development and the procurement of modern high-precision missile weapons, artillery armaments, armored vehicles and ammunition as among the key areas of defense financing next year.

The funds will be also used for strengthening the state's air defense system, cyber security and information security, Turchynov said.

He added that the increase of the financial support for Ukrainian servicemen will also be an important part of the next year's defense budget.

After two decades of keeping its defense expenditures at below 1.5 percent of the GDP, Ukraine began to gradually boost its defense budget in 2014, when the conflict between government troops and pro-independence armed groups started in the country's eastern regions.

While in 2013 the country's defense budget stood at 1.11 percent of the GDP, in 2016 it has reached 5 percent of the GDP and has been maintained at that level for three years.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 23:56:01|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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KIEV, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The number of international tourist arrivals to Ukraine's capital Kiev is expected to top 2 million this year, a local tourism official said Monday.

Head of the tourism department at Kiev City Administration Anton Taranenko told reporters that Kiev is expected to receive two million foreign tourists this year compared with 1.8 million visitors in 2013.

At a media briefing, Taranenko said that 850,000 international travelers visited Kiev in January through June, 28.8 percent more than in the same period of 2013.

Belarus was the largest source of tourists to Kiev, followed by Israel, the United States, Germany and Turkey, the official said.

Tourism in Kiev rebounded in 2017, with the number of overseas tourist arrivals reaching 1.6 million.

A total of 25,200 Chinese citizens visited Kiev last year, up 54.6 percent year-on-year.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-27 23:56:01|Editor: ZX

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by Justice Lee Adoboe

ACCRA, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The national flags of Ghana are flying at half mast across the country and at the country's missions around the globe.

Kofi Annan, former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, passed on at a hospital in Bern, Switzerland, after a short illness.

"We knew that in August he tends to come to Ghana and stay in his house and family members will go and see him. So we were looking forward to seeing him in August. So to hear this news is really shattering," Kojo Amoo Gottfried, Ghana's former ambassador to China, told Xinhua on Saturday hours after the news broke.

Amoo-Gottfried, who grew up with Kofi Annan in Bompata, Kumasi, said: "As a man, Kofi was forthright, truthful and did what he considered to be right, and never gave up."

Commentators say not only do people in war-torn countries recognize the greatness of Annan, who took over from Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1997 as the seventh UN secretary-general, but also the youth and women see a father figure in him.

"To say he is a statesman is an understatement. He lived fulfilled life always preaching peace and fairness in the world and he practiced it so much," Ghana's deputy information minister Nana Ama Dokuaa Asiamah-Adjei remarked in an interview with Xinhua.

"His fight for the youth, his fight for women, we cannot forget," she said, adding that her wish was for Annan to have stayed a little longer for Ghana and Africa to tap into his reservoir of experience.

Ordinary Ghanaians like Eric Kwaku, a taxi driver, said Annan's achievements were a source of pride for Ghanaians.

"I felt proud when he rose to the secretary general position as a Ghanaian ... He did the best for the world," he told Xinhua in his native Twi language on Sunday.

Wosila Asumbe Abubakar, a level-100 student of the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ), said the late secretary general's ascent to that position was great honor to Ghana.

"His death is a big blow to Ghana," the young student said. "He fought for peace around the world and was successful. It gives me a lot of inspiration."

Joseph Opoku, an estate developer, said Annan's achievements have been of great inspiration to his family, and he tried to let his children model their lives around that of the revered global statesman.

"I even visited his family home at Cape Coast and that of Kumasi, and so it is like, it became a sort of inspiration for me."

Inspired by Annan, Opoku said he decided to send all his children abroad after secondary education for them to get exposed to the world, make good use of opportunities out there and serve the world.

In 2004, the UN opened an international peacekeeping training center in Ghana's capital in honor of their serving secretary-general.

Emmanuel Kwesi Aning, Head of the Faculty of Academic Affairs and Research at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center (KAIPTC), told Xinhua that: "Annan and Mandela epitomized the optimism and the hopes of the independence movement."

"Annan was a young man when we got independence, probably about 19 years, so he took this optimism and the hope that the black man can deliver and he lived up to it," he said.

In the institute, Aning said the feeling was that of shock, loss and sadness, tinged with the new desire to work harder to protect the legacy that the former secretary-general stood for.

"I think Annan meant different things to different people. For the refugee in Dafour whom Annan visited ... he was almost like a god," the expert said.

He listed places such as Tusla, Trebenista and Syria, Rwanda, Kenya and Iraq where the late secretary-general endeared himself to the people.

Aning revealed that any time elections were held in Ghana, Annan was quietly behind the scene urging leaders to choose peace over violence.

The expert credited the late secretary-general with the introduction of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), now the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as some of the finest works on HIV/AIDS, the green revolution and new thinking into ICT.

"Those were the legacies of Mr. Annan because they were decisions that were centered on the human being; how do we improve human lives, that has remained, and that is why he still is the face of the United Nations," Aning added.Chinese Ambassador to Egypt Song Aiguo talks about China-Egypt ties during an interview with Xinhua News Agency in Cairo, Egypt, on Aug. 23, 2018. (Xinhua/Meng Tao)

CAIRO, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Ahead of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's visit to China, Chinese Ambassador to Egypt Song Aiguo hailed the close relations between China and Egypt as a model for Sino-African cooperation.

"Thanks to the joint efforts of both sides, we are delighted to see that the China-Egypt comprehensive strategic partnership has reached a new level," Song told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.

The two countries have maintained close coordination on international and regional issues in recent years, the Chinese envoy noted.

The close political relations between the two countries are underpinned by the rapid increase in bilateral trade and investment as well as cooperation in carrying out major infrastructure projects, Song said.

In 2017, China maintained its status as Egypt's largest trading partner and source of imports, while China's investment in Egypt continued to increase rapidly, he said.

The China-Egypt bilateral trade in 2017 totalled 10.83 billion U.S. dollars, while the number of Chinese citizens visiting Egypt hit a record high of 300,000.

"The two countries also made promising progress in mutual exchanges and cooperation in the fields of science and technology, education, health and environmental protection," the ambassador said.

President Sisi, who has visited China many times since he took office in 2014, is scheduled to participate in the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) slated for Sept. 3-4.

"President Sisi's visits to China reflect the importance attached by the Egyptian leader to the development of the China-Egypt relations," Song said.

The FOCAC Beijing summit will be held under the theme "China and Africa: toward an even stronger community with a shared future through win-win cooperation."

Through the summit, China will align the Belt and Road Initiative with the Agenda 2063 of the African Union (AU), the UN 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development, and the development strategies of respective African countries, according to Song.

The initiative, proposed by China in 2013, aims to build a trade and infrastructure network that connects Asia with Africa and Europe along the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road.

Africa is a natural and historical extension of the "Belt and Road" as it boasts abundant natural and human resources as well as huge market potential, Song said.

Meanwhile, China is in the process of implementing the policies of economic restructuring and industrial upgrading, with the support of capital, technologies and cost-effective equipment, he said.

"The two sides can complement each other to achieve common development," he said, noting that the Sino-African cooperation is the shared aspiration of the peoples of both sides.

Saying that the China-Egypt cooperation can be regarded as a model for the cooperation between China and African countries, Song believed Sisi's upcoming visit to China will further promote the development of the Sino-African relations.

As an African country, Egypt is an important member of the FOCAC and has made important contribution to it, Song said.

"Next year, Egypt will assume the presidency of the AU. I believe that the new Sino-African cooperation projects proposed by the Beijing summit will be well implemented during Egypt's presidency," the Chinese envoy said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 00:16:07|Editor: huaxia

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CHICAGO, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) agricultural commodities traded lower on Monday morning, with soybean futures dropping over 14 cents per bushel after the Pro Farmer Crop Tour of the U.S. Midwest pegged output above the government's already-lofty forecasts.

As of 1500 GMT, the most active December corn was down 2.5 cents at 3.6025 dollars per bushel, November soybeans were down 14.75 cents at 8.405 dollars, and December wheat was 8.25 cents lower at 5.065 dollars per bushel.

Participants on the annual tour of the Corn Belt projected soybean production at 4.683 billion bushels on yields of 53 bushels an acre. That tops the U.S. Department of Agriculture's outlook for 4.586 billion bushels on yields of 51.6 bushels an acre.

Wheat futures fell for a sixth straight session amid weak demand for U.S. supplies. Last week's Export Sales Report showed sales fell to the lowest in six weeks.

As for weather forecast for agricultural crop, parts of the Midwest are in excessive heat or heat warnings start on Monday, as heat indexes will jump over 100 Fahrenheit degrees. EnditemSource: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 00:16:07|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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NAIROBI, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Kenya has been advised to diversify its funding mechanisms to avoid over-reliance on commercial banks, which is hurting access to credit for businesses.

In Kenya, 95 percent of all funding is from banks, with only 5 percent coming from non-bank institutions, an indication that the economy heavily relies on the banking sector.

The experts from Cytonn, a Nairobi-based investment firm, pushed for capital market products as alternative for the funding of businesses.

"Investment managers and the capital markets regulators need to look at how to enhance non-bank funding like high yield solutions.

The products offer investors with cash a chance to invest at a rate of about 18 percent per annum, an equivalent to what the fund takers, such as real estate developers, would have to pay to get funds from the banks, said Cytonn in a brief on Monday.

With the investment alternatives, instead of savers taking money to the bank and getting negligible returns, they just invest in a funding vehicle where the business would pay the same 18 percent per annum that they would pay to get the same money from the bank.

"For the saver, it helps improve their yields, at best 7 percent per annum, to as high as 18 percent per annum, and for the business seeking funding, it helps them access funding much faster to grow their business. Promoting alternative funding is also essential to the affordable housing piece of the Big Four government agenda, which requires capital markets funding," said Cytonn.

However, the firm noted such models need a change in legislation, especially at the capital markets to promote competing products to help tap into funding models that are more flexible and pocket-friendly.

According to Cytonn, in developed economies, 40 percent of business funding comes from the banking sector, with 60 percent from non-bank institutional funding.CHICAGO - Chicago's annual summer killing spree continued last weekend with two more shooting deaths and 29 wounded. This is the fifth year the summer killings have been ongoing. In 2017 the fourth weekend in August tally was 7 killed, 26 wounded. In 2016, the same weekend tally was 15 killed, 57 wounded;

the 2015 weekend tally was 6 killed, 30 wounded and the same weekend in 2014 saw 7 killed, 36 wounded.

Thus far in 2018, 322 males have been killed in Chicago, as were 55 females. 298 of the victims were African-American, 47 were Hispanic. 23 were white/caucasian.

These shootings have cost taxpayers over $110 million dollars thus far this year, HeyJackass.com estimates. Those numbers assume the following:

$55,000: Average gunshot victim ER and hospital expenses.

$1000: Average CFD ambulance ride, only applicable to 80% of victims, rest self-transport.

$800: Homicide-related autopsies.

Doesnt include hospice care or ongoing rehabilitation.

Cost estimates provided by Chicago Killings Cost $2.5 Billion and The bill for treating a gunshot wound: $21,000 for the first 35 minutes.

More at HeyJackAss.comSource: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 00:16:07|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- After new U.S. sanctions on Russia over a poisoned ex-spy took effect on Monday, the Russian embassy to the United States blasted the move and said Moscow will "withstand" Washington's "brute pressure."

In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the embassy said the sanctions were "hostile," "illegitimate" and "one-sided."

"Decisions are made with zero attempts to look into things, while ignoring our calls for dialogue, in absence of any real proof of 'Russia's guilt,'" said the statement, accusing the U.S. mainstream media of spreading "absurd accusations" against Russia.

U.S. politicians "have an unhealthy craving for demolishing the fundamental basis of bilateral relations, on which rests the global security," Russian embassy's statement said, warning that "every new 'seizure' of American sanctions 'fever' brings the U.S. close to the point of no return in resolving pressing international issues."

"It turns out that no one is safe from the brute pressure of Washington. Not everyone can withstand it. But Russia can," the embassy said.

Former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, aged 66, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench outside a shopping center in Britain's southwestern city of Salisbury on March 4.

Britain claimed the pair were exposed to a nerve agent and holds Russia responsible. Russia has denied any involvement.

Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department said the country will impose new sanctions on Russia over the case.

On Monday morning, the Federal Register -- the U.S. government publishing office -- said in a notice that the new U.S. sanctions came into effect.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 00:56:14|Editor: ZX

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Russia on Monday blasted the U.S. sanctions over an alleged poison attack on a former Russian spy, saying Moscow will "withstand" and respond to Washington's "brute pressure."

In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the Russian embassy to the United States said the sanctions that took effect on the same day were "hostile," "illegitimate" and "one-sided."

"Decisions are made with zero attempts to look into things, while ignoring our calls for dialogue, in absence of any real proof of 'Russia's guilt,'" it said, accusing the U.S. mainstream media of spreading "absurd accusations against our country."

"It feels like local politicians have an unhealthy craving for demolishing the fundamental basis of bilateral relations, on which rests the global security," it said, noting that U.S. "political elites seem to ignore the fact that every new 'seizure' of American sanctions 'fever' brings the U.S. close to the point of no return in resolving pressing international issues - joint fight against terrorism and danger of WMD falling into the hands of non-governmental entities."

"It is clear that the worst Cold War scenarios, the ones the world should have forsaken 30 years ago, are now taking shape. Instead, it turns out that no one is safe from brute pressure of Washington," the embassy said, adding that "the U.S. public has to know that sanctions against Russia are futile. They meet the interests of neither Russian, nor American people."

"Not everyone can withstand it. But Russia can," it said, referring to U.S. punishment actions. "We do not accept Washington's hostile sanctions. They will have no effect on our determination to follow our own course in international relations."

Also on the same day, the Kremlin was quoted by media as saying that it needed time to assess the impact of U.S. sanctions before considering retaliatory response, but President Vladimir Putin would act in line with Russia's national interest.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov was quoted by media outlets as saying that Russia has drawn up a group of response in case Washington imposes sanctions on Russian sovereign debt.

On Monday, the U.S. Federal Register said in a notice that U.S. sanctions came into effect on the same day.

The Department of State has determined that "the Government of the Russian Federation has used chemical weapons in violation of international law or lethal chemical weapons against its own nationals," it said.

U.S. foreign assistance, the licensing of defense articles and services, and the licensing of national security-sensitive goods and technology concerning effort to Russia would be banned.

Russia will also be denied of "any credit, credit guarantees, or other financial assistance by any department, agency, or instrumentality of the United States Government, including the Export-Import Bank of the United States."

However, the notice read that the Department of State "has determined and certified to Congress ... that it is essential to the national security interests of the United States to partially waive the application of the sanctions."

This included the issuance of licenses in support of government space cooperation and commercial space launches, the safety of flight of civil fixed-wing passenger aviation, and transactions with Russian nationals, wholly-owned U.S. subsidiaries in Russia, and Russian state-owned or state-funded enterprises, "provided that such licenses shall be issued on a case-by-case basis."

"These measures shall be implemented by the responsible departments and agencies of the United States Government and will remain in place for at least one year and until further notice," said Christopher Ford, assistant secretary of state, in the notice.

Former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, aged 66, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench outside a shopping center in Britain's southwestern city of Salisbury on March 4. Britain claimed the pair was exposed to a nerve agent and holds Russia responsible, while the Russian government has denied any involvement in it.

The U.S. State Department said on Aug. 8 that the country will impose new sanctions on Russia over the case.

"These sanctions will take effect upon publication of a notice in the Federal Register, expected on or around August 22, 2018," said State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert.Ugandan students pose for a group photo in Kampala, capital of Uganda, Aug. 8, 2018. China on Wednesday offered scholarships to 30 needy students at Uganda's largest university, Makerere University. (Xinhua/Zhang Gaiping)

KAMPALA, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Sixty-nine Ugandan students who have won Chinese scholarships will soon travel to China to pursue academic studies on various disciplines.

Speaking at a send-off reception for the students, Chinese Ambassador to Uganda Zheng Zhuqiang said China welcomes more young Ugandan students to study in China.

"We believe you will become the driving forces to expedite Uganda's development and become the goodwill ambassadors for China-Uganda friendship," Zheng said.

He added that round 500 Ugandans take short-term training courses in China every year.

For his part, John Muyingo, Uganda's state minister for higher education, urged the students to acquire skills from China that can be used in fasttracking Uganda's development.

"We badly need the skills you are going to acquire to develop your country," Muyingo said.

He hailed China for the continued provision of scholarships to Ugandan students.

Collin Twebaze, one of the scholarship winners who spoke on behalf of his colleagues, said they hope the skills they acquire from China will contribute positively to the development of Uganda.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 01:11:16|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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GAZA, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Israel on Monday reopened Erez crossing on the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel after a week-long closure, according to the Palestinian Authority committee which runs crossing points with Israel.

The committee said Erez crossing point is the only crossing point for Palestinians, including patients who need medical treatment, businessmen and merchants.

The closure of the crossing one week ago was made to pressure on Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip to keep the border areas with Israel calm, according to Israeli media reports.

The committee added that during the closure, Israel only allowed through patients in need of urgent medical treatment, international aid workers and representatives of foreign humanitarian organizations.

Israel said reopening the crossing came following relative calm in the Gaza Strip and a significant decrease in releasing arson balloons and kites from the coastal enclave into Israel.

The 2 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip rely on Erez crossing to travel to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan. However, Israel keeps tight restrictions on the movement of Palestinians.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 01:11:16|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The United States has reached a trade agreement with Mexico that would pave the way to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Monday.

"We're going to call it the United States-Mexico trade agreement," Trump said at an event in the Oval Office with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto joining by conference call.

"We'll get rid of the name NAFTA. It has a bad connotation because the United States was hurt very badly by NAFTA for many years," he said.

Trump also said he would speak with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a little while and hoped to resume negotiations with Canada soon.

"One way or another we'll have a deal with Canada. It'll either be a tariff on cars or it'll be a negotiated deal," he said.

Talks on renegotiating the NAFTA began in August 2017 as Trump threatened to withdraw from the trilateral trade deal, which he claimed harmed U.S. industries and jobs.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 01:11:16|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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RIGA, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The united police trade union of Latvia said on Monday that it is calling a picket in Riga on Sept. 27 to demand guarantees that the existing system of long-service pensions for retired officers will stay intact, local media reported.

The police union's leader Agris Suna said that the picket might be joined by officers of the Latvian state police, various municipal police forces, as well as firefighters and employees of other services subordinated to the interior ministry.

In Suna's words, the trade union wants guarantees that the current pension system will not be changed. The trade union has reportedly received "leaked information" about changes being planned for the system.

With their protest, police officers are also going to demand better social guarantees and pay raises so they do not have to combine several jobs to sustain their families, the union leader said, adding that although their wages were recently raised the increase was too small to make any difference. "The wages are barely back to the pre-crisis level," Suna said.

He added that the trade union counts around 2,000 policemen as its members, but the possible changes in the pension system might affect some 20,000 employees, including also border guards, firefighters and others.

The Latvian finance ministry has proposed replacing the long-service pension system for persons with special service ranks with an alternative compensatory mechanism where money for pensions would be saved in private retirement plans.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 01:21:18|Editor: Liangyu

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Li Zhanshu, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, presides over a bimonthly session of the 13th NPC Standing Committee at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Aug. 27, 2018. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing)

BEIJING, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislature began its bimonthly session on Monday, with deliberating draft civil code sections and revisions to the individual income tax law on the agenda.

Li Zhanshu, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, presided over the meeting.

DRAFT CIVIL CODE SECTIONS

Six draft sections on specific areas of civil law were submitted to the top legislature for review, beginning the second phase of formulating the country's long-expected civil code.

The six draft sections, namely provisions on property, contract, personality rights, marriage and family, inheritance, and torts, consist of 1,034 articles.

Monday's meeting marked the beginning of the second phase, which is expected to run until 2020, according to Shen Chunyao, head of the Legislative Affairs Commission under the NPC Standing Committee.

During this week's session, the six draft sections were submitted as a package but may be put through follow-up readings for further deliberation, reviews, and revisions in different batches, Shen said while presenting the drafts at the opening meeting.

After that, the revised draft sections will be combined with the General Provisions to form a draft civil code and submitted to the plenary session of the NPC in March 2020, said Shen.

INDIVIDUAL INCOME TAX LAW

According to a draft amendment to the individual income tax law, the minimum threshold for personal income tax exemption was raised from 3,500 yuan (about 512 U.S. dollars) to 5,000 yuan per month or 60,000 yuan per year.

The draft adds a new special expense deduction for caring for the elderly, in addition to previous special expense deductions for items like children's education, continuing education, treatment for serious diseases, as well as housing loan interest and rent.

Explaining the draft to lawmakers at the start of the NPC Standing Committee session, Xu Hui, vice chairman of the NPC's Constitution and Law Committee, said that it is necessary to revise the current law to enable taxation to better play its role in adjusting income distribution.

LAWS ON FARMLAND OCCUPATION TAXES, VEHICLE PURCHASE TAXES

Draft laws on farmland occupation taxes and vehicle purchase taxes were submitted to the ongoing session for the first reading.

The draft law on farmland occupation taxes states that entities and individuals who occupy farmland to build houses or other non-agricultural construction should pay farmland occupation taxes. The construction of water conservancy facilities on farmland will be exempt from tax.

The building of military installations, schools, kindergartens, social welfare institutions, and medical institutions on farmland will be exempt from the farmland occupation taxes as well, it said.

According to the draft law on vehicle purchase taxes, entities and individuals should pay purchase taxes at a tax rate of 10 percent, same as the figure stated in the current interim regulation, for buying cars or motorcycles, streetcars or trailers with an engine displacement of over 150 milliliters.

It said tax authorities will decide the payable taxes in cases that taxpayers declare obviously low taxable prices with no warrant.

E-COMMERCE LAW

The draft e-commerce law was submitted to the NPC Standing Committee session for the fourth reading.

E-commerce platform operators may face a penalty of 500,000 yuan, or up to 2 million yuan in serious cases, for failing to take necessary steps against intellectual property rights infringement by merchants on their platforms, or unreasonably restricting transactions on the platforms, the draft law said.

It also said e-commerce operators should fulfill their obligations to protect the environment, adding that the State Council, local governments at or above county-level as well as related departments should take measures to support and promote environmentally friendly packaging, storage, and transportation in e-commerce.

LAW ON SOIL POLLUTION

The draft law on soil pollution prevention and control was submitted to the session for the third reading.

According to the draft, there will be national standards for soil pollution risk control, and a nationwide soil condition census should be conducted at least once every ten years.

A network of monitoring stations are required to be established nationwide with data and other information collected shared among environmental, agricultural, natural resources, housing, water resources, health, and forestry and grassland authorities, it said.

Environmental and health authorities of the State Council are required to conduct screening and evaluation of toxic and harmful substances in the soil and make public a list of them.

AMENDMENT TO CRIMINAL PROCEDURE LAW

According to a draft amendment to the criminal procedure law, a default judgment can be applied to not only corruption-related criminal cases, and also serious cases endangering state security and terrorist activities that have been examined and approved by the Supreme People's Procuratorate.

Lawmakers also reviewed other documents including a treaty of extradition between China and Barbados.

The legislative session will run until Friday.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 01:41:22|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (C, rear), also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, addresses a symposium marking the fifth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Aug. 27, 2018. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)

BEIJING, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping on Monday underlined thorough and solid cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to benefit people in countries involved and build a community with a shared future for humanity.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, addressed a symposium held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, marking the fifth anniversary of the BRI.

Xi called for efforts to uphold dialogue and consultation, joint contribution, shared benefits, win-win cooperation, exchange and mutual learning and to promote political mutual trust, economic integration, people-to-people exchanges with the Belt and Road countries in order to advance the initiative step by step, producing achievements.

In the autumn of 2013, respectively in Kazakhstan and Indonesia, Xi proposed the building of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road -- the Belt and Road Initiative for short.

As of July 2018, more than 100 countries and international organizations had signed Belt and Road cooperation documents with China, extending the initiative's scope from the Eurasian continent to Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the South Pacific region.

Xi stressed that the initiative serves as a solution for China to participate in global opening-up and cooperation, improve global economic governance, promote common development and prosperity, and build a community with a shared future for humanity.

The freight train X8044 from Hamburg of Germany arrives at Wujiashan railway container center station in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Aug. 26, 2018. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)

HIGH-QUALITY DEVELOPMENT

The next priority of jointly advancing the initiative is to realize its high-quality development, Xi said.

Xi asked for efforts to push for progress in Belt and Road projects, especially those delivering real benefits to local people, and keep expanding the market while maintaining the balance of trade.

He advocated a policy system on financial support for the BRI and encouraged non-governmental funds to invest in infrastructure and resource development projects in Belt and Road countries.

In 2014, China announced contributing 40 billion U.S. dollars to set up a Silk Road Fund to support the Belt and Road projects. A year later, the China-initiated new multilateral financial institution Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank was established.

Photo taken on Jan. 12, 2018 shows a sign of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Beijing, capital of China. (Xinhua/Li Xin)

Xi said work should be done to boost exchanges in areas of education, science, technologies, culture, sports, tourism, health and archaeology.

Under the initiative, China has set up 81 education institutions and projects as well as 35 cultural centers in countries along the Belt and Road.

Xi stressed that investment activities should be regulated and businesses should operate in accordance with laws and regulations, pay attention to environmental protection, and fulfill their social responsibilities.

In the first seven months of 2018, Chinese companies raised investment in 54 countries along the Belt and Road. The 8.55-billion-U.S. dollar newly added investment represented an 11.8 percent increase year on year.

Xi said high attention must be paid to forestalling risks overseas.

Workers go about their work on an assembly line at Twyford Ceramics, a Chinese tiles manufacturing company, in Kajiado County of Kenya, May 12, 2017. (Xinhua/Sun Ruibo)

COMMON DEVELOPMENT

China's trade with Belt and Road countries has exceeded 5 trillion U.S. dollars and outward direct investment has amounted to over 60 billion dollars, creating over 200,000 local jobs, Xi said.

The China-Europe freight rail service network, a crucial part of the BRI, has expanded rapidly. Sunday's arrival of freight train X8044 from Hamburg, Germany marked the 10,000th trip since the beginning of the freight rail's operation in 2011.

For the past few years, trains have rumbled along the route, taking garments, auto parts, chemicals and other Chinese goods to European consumers, while bringing back European food, machinery and equipment, as well as timber products.





Xi pointed out that jointly pursuing the BRI was not only aimed at economic cooperation but also an important pathway to improve global development patterns and global governance and promote the healthy development of economic globalization.

Last year, Beijing hosted the first-ever Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, attended by state and government leaders of 29 countries. The more than 1,600 participants came from over 140 countries and 80 international organizations.

"The broad support for the BRI shows aspiration from countries involved, developing countries in particular, for peace and development," Xi said, noting the BRI is an initiative for economic cooperation, instead of a geopolitical alliance or military league, and it is an open and inclusive process rather than an exclusive bloc or "China club."

"It does not differentiate countries by ideology nor play the zero-sum game. As long as countries are willing to join, they are welcome," Xi said.

Vice Premier Han Zheng, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and head of the leading group on advancing BRI development, presided over the meeting. Enditem

Photo taken on Nov. 9, 2017 shows a wharf at Qinzhou port in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. (Xinhua/Zhang Ailin)

(by Xinhua writers Xu Lingui, Fu Shuangqi, Zhao Xiuzhi, Chen Yongrong, Wang Yaguang; Video: Wang Siban, Yu Guoqing, Liu Ruoshi, Geng Linlin.)Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 01:51:23|Editor: Liangyu

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Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, meets with a cultural delegation of Hong Kong disciplinary forces led by Lee Ka Chiu, secretary for security of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Aug. 27, 2018. (Xinhua/Wang Ye)

BEIJING, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng on Monday met with a cultural delegation of Hong Kong disciplinary forces.

Han, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, met the delegation led by Lee Ka Chiu, secretary for security of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government, at the Great Hall of the People.

Praising the work of Hong Kong disciplinary forces, Han expressed hope that they would fully implement the policy of "one country, two systems", safeguard national security and the rule of law in Hong Kong, provide sound service to the Hong Kong people as well as promote exchanges and cooperation between Hong Kong and the mainland.

Lee said the disciplinary forces would continue to fulfill their duty in accordance with law and make more contributions to safeguarding national sovereignty, security, and development interests, and maintaining lasting prosperity and stability of Hong Kong.

The delegation visited the mainland to mark the 40th anniversary of reform and opening-up.LaborUnionReport.com, a website that provides news about labor unions, reports Monday on a recent survey that shows public sector unions should be concerned about taxpayer and employee views the recent Janus decision.

The US Supreme Court decision in June ruled that government unions in states without Right-to-Work laws violated government workers' First Amendment rights by requiring the workers pay fees to unions as a condition of employment.

A survey revealing the public's reaction to the ruling, conducted by Lloyd Corder, Ph. D., shows:

Awareness of the Supreme Court ruling is high. While most (71%) are aware of the ruling , some are not (29%).

, some are not (29%). Many think the ruling is a positive development. 51% say the changes are positive , but 32% do not and 17% are on the fence. When asked whythey think the changes are positive (n=147), respondents offered a number of reasons, including that the ruling protects their personal rights and freedoms (37%), eliminates what they believe is an unfair labor practice (22%) and allows them to save money by not being forced to pay dues(18%) .

, but 32% do not and 17% are on the fence. When asked whythey think the changes are positive (n=147), respondents offered a number of reasons, including that . Workers will exercise their new freedom to stop paying dues. One-third plan to change what they are paying, with 6% saying they have already stopped paying dues and 25% saying they plan to stop paying. [Emphasis added.]

More information on LaborUnionReport.comSource: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 01:51:24|Editor: ZX

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PARIS, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Haunted by criticism at home over economic Policy, French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday outlined his acton plan on the international scene, hoping for grandeur thanks to an "ambitious" and "innovative" foreign policy.

At an annual ambassadors' conference here, Macron told his diplomatic envoys about the need "to represent France and its interest" abroad via "a reliable diplomacy" which "supposes a certain capacity of reinforced anticipation."

"We are in a context where we must act calmly and lucidly. Calm because it is not a question of changing strategy as soon as an external event appears. Lucidity, because it is not enough to underestimate the crises of the world," he said, keeping his approach to talk to all despite differences.

EUROPE

With the European elections only a few months away, the 40-year-old liberal and harsh Europe advocate warned "the European fight is just beginning. It will be long, it will be difficult."

"The extremes have progressed and nationalism has awakened. Is this a reason to give up? Certainly not. We are paying for several decades for a Europe that has weakened... We must actually redouble our efforts," he said.

He asked partners in the single-currency bloc to "take new initiatives and build new alliances" and "not give up the ambition that was born a year ago," referring to his victory over the eurosceptic and far-right leader Marine Le Pen in last year's presidential contest.

"Multilateralism is going through a major crisis which collides with all our diplomatic activity, above all because of the U.S. policy," the French head of state said.

"We must write and tell the history of Europe that we want, showing concrete results to convince our citizens that the way of cooperation in Europe, in the world is the only one that can lead to mutual trusting relationships in the interest of France," he added.

SECURITY

Arguing that "Europe can no longer rely entirely on the United States for its security," Macron pledged to unveil in the coming months a plan to reinforce security in Europe.

"It is up to us today to take responsibility and guarantee security, and therefore European sovereignty," he stressed.

Macron also noted that security indoors "imposes a stability in the Middle East," which he said "can be built in ethnic, religious, political pluralism and work with all actors."

He spoke about "alarming situation" in Syria where "a new humanitarian tragedy" is looming. He also reiterated support to Libyan officials' efforts to hold election by the year-end.

Regarding the Iran crisis, he recalled France's stance to maintain 2015 nuclear deal after U.S. withdrawal, while proposing broader talks.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 02:21:30|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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AMMAN, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Jordan and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Monday stressed the need of continued support for the Syrian refugees in Jordan.

In a meeting in Amman between Jordanian King Abdullah II and the UNHCR Commissioner Filippo Grandi, the two looked into ties and the necessity of continuing services to meet the needs of the Syrian refugees in Jordan, according to a Jordanian royal court statement.

The two sides reviewed the burden on Jordan hosting a large number of Syrian refugees, as well as the impact on its economy, education, health and infrastructure.

King Abdullah II urged the international community to shoulder responsibilities for refugee-hosting countries, including Jordan, to continue supporting the refugees and host communities.

The UN official voiced appreciation for Jordan's role, stressing on the agency's keenness to reduce pressure on Jordan in this regard.

Also on Monday, Jordanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ayman Safadi met with Grandi, urging the international community to continue supporting Syrian refugees and the hosting countries.

Safadi said Jordan, which hosts 1.3 million Syrian refugees, bears burden that exceeded its capabilities and has done everything it could to help the Syrian refugees in spite of the limited resources.

The minister warned against negative consequences in light of drop in international support.

He added that Jordan supports the voluntary return of refugees, stressing the importance of international efforts in this regard.

The UN official commended the importance of the partnership with Jordan and its effective role in aiding the refugees and meeting their needs.File Photo: A man works on a handwoven carpet at a bazaar in downtown Tehran, Iran, on July 30, 2018. Iran will file a lawsuit with international tribunals against U.S. fresh sanctions on importing handwoven Iranian rugs, Press TV reported on July 28. (Xinhua/Ahmad Halabisaz)

WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday that Washington will defend itself in a case brought up by Iran in The Hague to protest the U.S. exit of the landmark Iran nuclear deal, and U.S. re-imposition of sanctions that were lifted under the deal.

In a statement, Pompeo said that Iran's filing with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) "is an attempt to interfere with the sovereign rights of the United States to take lawful actions, including re-imposition of sanctions, which are necessary to protect our national security."

Iran brought the case to the United Nations' highest court last month to challenge the U.S. decision to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and to reimpose the sanctions that were suspended as part of that deal.

Earlier on Monday, the opening day of court hearings in The Hague, the Netherlands, Iran requested that judges at the ICJ order the immediate lifting of U.S. sanctions.

"The sanctions are unjust and harmful," said Mohsen Mohebi, head of the international legal affairs center of the Iranian President's office. "The sanctions are damaging the economy of Iran, and driving millions of people into poverty."

Pompeo said "The proceedings instituted by Iran are a misuse of the Court," adding that Washington "will vigorously defend against Iran's meritless claims this week in The Hague," and to continue to work with allies to counter Iran's regional influence and ballistic missile program.

Moreover, Iran asked the judges to note that the United States breached its obligations to Iran, and order it to terminate the sanctions without delay and stop any threats about further sanctions.

Tehran also asked judges to make the United States promise that it will not violate its obligations again, and will fully compensate Iran for the violation of its international legal obligations.

The lawsuit followed the decision by U.S. President Donald Trump in May to quit the JCPOA. The United States also announced the full reinstatement of U.S. nuclear sanctions on Iran.

Iran accused the the U.S. side of violating a 1955 friendship treaty between the two countries, the Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights, and requested the Court to indicate provisional measures.

Iran gave its oral arguments on Monday. On Tuesday, the United States will have the opportunity to issue their reaction.

The second round of oral arguments are scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday this week. The announcement of the order on the provisional measures by the judges could take months.

The ICJ is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. Its role is to settle legal disputes submitted to it by states and to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by authorized UN organs and specialized agencies, in accordance with international law. The seat of the court is in The Hague.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 03:11:39|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BERLIN, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- German Interior Minister and Christian Social Union (CSU) leader Horst Seehofer has defended the recent creation of a controversial regional border police unit in his home state of Bavaria on Monday.

Speaking in the town of Freilassing on the German-Austrian border, Seehofer said that the purpose of the unit was to "restore law and order" by preventing illegal immigration within the European Union (EU). Seehofer was joined in the public appearance by Bavarian governor Markus Soeder (CSU) and state interior minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU).

The interior minister also took the opportunity to announce that he was close to reaching an agreement with Italy for Rome to take back asylum seekers which were previously already registered there.

"We are already very well advanced (in talks with Italy). There will be an agreement," Seehofer said. The prospective deal would mirror concessions made earlier by Greece and Madrid to help prevent so-called "secondary migration" of asylum seekers within the EU Schengen free travel area.

Authorities in Germany are generally only able to refuse entry to foreign citizens without documents at the border if they did not plan to file an application for humanitarian residence in the country itself. Under the latest bilateral regulations, this circumstance will no longer apply to non-EU nationals who attempt to enter Germany illicitly after first setting foot in Spain or Greece. Even individuals who indicate that they want to obtain asylum upon arrival will be detained and returned to their first entry point into the EU within 48 hours.

For Seehofer, the recent deals with Madrid and Greece marked important first steps towards the restoration of rules under the Dublin regime governing which EU state is responsible for asylum seekers arriving in the bloc. Back in 2015 at the height of the "refugee crisis", the temporary suspension of the regime enabled hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers to travel from Hungary to Germany via Austria.

However, neither Seehofer nor any of the other senior CSU politicians in attendance on Monday were able to present concrete evidence to support claims that the Bavarian border police was already contribution to the maintenance of a new order of "intelligent border controls" envisioned by the interior minister. According to a report by the public broadcaster "Bayerischer Rundfunk", the unit in question has so far only encountered four cases of illegal immigration since mid-July.

Faced with resulting criticism of relying on symbolic politics to pander to right-wing voters, Seehofer was unwilling to confirm the figure cited by "Bayerischer Rundfunk". Instead, he highlighted that 3000 illegal immigrants were turned back by federal police at the Bavarian-Austrian border during the first of 2018.

Under an agreement struck between Bavaria and Berlin, the state's border police can only conduct inspections with the explicit approval of the federal government. As a consequence, the project has been described by some as an attempt by the Bavarian government to bolster the superficial appearance of its state-level control over asylum policy ahead of looming regional elections.

The re-activation of the previously defunct police unit in July was also accompanied by the opening of a regional asylum agency in Bavaria. Officially established to speed up deportations from the state, the agency will also only be able to perform auxiliary functions as the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) remains responsible for the conduct of asylum application procedures under the German law.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 03:11:39|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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GAZA, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations Jamie McGoldrick arrived in the Gaza Strip on Monday through the Israeli-controlled Erez crossing point to meet with Hamas officials, according to sources from the movement.

The sources told Xinhua that the meeting discussed the efforts of reaching a truce agreement between the Palestinian factions and Israel in the Gaza Strip in return for easing the Israeli blockade that has been imposed on Gaza since 2007.

Meanwhile, member of Hamas political bureau Hussam Badran announced on Sunday that the internal Palestinian dialogue that was scheduled to resume in Cairo on the truce and reconciliation was postponed for several days.

The announcement came after the official of the Fatah delegation to Egypt Azzam al-Ahmad said Sunday that they informed the security intelligence officials in Cairo that "the final response to the Egyptian paper on reconciliation will be in less than 24 hours."

The official state-run Palestinian news agency WAFA quoted Ahmad as saying from Cairo that "our position is necessary to complete the file of reconciliation first and then we'll move to the file of calm and development projects and relief in the Gaza Strip."

Cairo last week witnessed talks between Egyptian security intelligence services officials and leaders of Palestinian factions, most notably Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since mid-2007.People walk near the ship loading cranes from China in Walvis Bay, Namibia, on Feb. 9, 2018. Namibia's port in the coastal town of Walvis Bay will become the "most brilliant pearl on the Atlantic Coast of southwest Africa" with the delivery of four ship-to-shore (STS) cranes manufactured by China, the Chinese ambassador to the country said Friday. The cranes, manufactured by China's Zhenhua Port Machinery Company, will be deployed at the new container terminal that is expected to be completed by mid-2019. (Xinhua/Wu Changwei)

WINDHOEK, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- When 28-year-old Kenny Puturi from Namibia completed his secondary education some years back, odd jobs were a distinct feature in his life.

As luck would have it for him, eight years ago he was recruited by contractor company China Henan International Cooperation Group (CHICO) to work on the Otjinene-Okamatapati road project.

The Otjinene-Okamatapati road forms part of the Southern African Regional Trunk Road. It links the Trans-Kalahari to the Trans-Caprivi highway, aiding in Namibia's economic prospects in terms of import and export.

There, Puturi got a vocation as a junior surveyor, a dream once far-fetched from him. CHICO has been involved in the development of the road network in Namibia since 2007.

Today, his duties include picking up levels and surveying borrow pits.

He credits his profession prospects to the training offered by his Chinese employer.

"I gained hands-on experience including supervisory and leadership skills. The skills are applicable when working with surveyor assistants and compensation of land for the community. It has been very satisfying," he said Thursday.

Investment in training of locals, according to CHICO's representative Charles Cui, is aimed at empowering Namibian youth.

It also help reduce soaring unemployment the country is battling with. Namibia Statistics Agency placed the country's unemployment figures at 37.3 percent in 2017, an increase from 34 percent recorded in 2016 and 28 percent in 2014.

According to Cui, training is facilitated by various private service providers from Namibia and South Africa, with internal training and on-the-job training also included.

Intercultural communication has been central to the success of training employees.

Workers of China Harbor and Engineering Company pose for a photo in Walvis Bay, port of Namibia, Feb. 9, 2018. (Xinhua/Wu Changwei)

"Bridging language barriers was done by engaging expatriate employees through robust training and explaining the Namibian culture as well as the law that governs the labor industrial issues in the country," he said.

Furthermore, the company also ensured that an interpreter conversant in both English and Mandarin was hired to eliminate misunderstandings.

The impact has been multi-faceted, visible in the quality of outputs.

With a financial injection of more than 5 million Namibian dollars (352,000 U.S. dollars) in industrial skills programs, CHICO has trained more than 800 employees (80 women and 720 men) between 2014 and 2017 in various fields such as construction, health and understanding of the Labour Act.

Application of skills gained by employees like Puturi has since translated into the successful completion of major road network projects including Okamatapati-Grootfontein development project officially launched by Namibian President Hage Geingob in April.

Training has also boosted soft skills of employees.

"Provision of training alleviated their self-confidence and level of understanding in performing their jobs. Some employees were promoted into more senior positions," added Cui.

Meanwhile, Puturi said his job and training has ignited in him passion for engineering and construction, and he hopes to get funds and support to pursue studies at tertiary level. "I have found a career at the Chinese company," he said.

In the meantime, Cui said that training is an integral part of an organisational development program.

The Chinese contractor currently employs more than 200 people working in engineering fields, administration and management.

Chinese ambassador to Namibia Zhang Yiming said that Chinese companies have created about 11,000 employment opportunities in Namibia and 250 million Namibian dollars (17.6 million dollars) of tax revenue.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 03:31:44|Editor: ZX

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- U.S. State Department said on Monday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday spoke over phone with South Korean and Japanese foreign ministers to discuss the next step on the engagement with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

According to an announcement issued by State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert, Pompeo and South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha "reaffirmed the United States and the Republic of Korea remain committed to the final, fully verified denuclearization" of the DPRK.

The two diplomats also "pledged to maintain close coordination and agreed that pressure must continue until the DPRK denuclearizes," read the statement.

In a separate statement also issued by Nauert, Pompeo and Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono also reaffirmed their commitment to the the DPRK's final denuclearization, and "agreed that pressure must continue until the DPRK denuclearizes."

Pompeo and Kono "affirmed the strength of the U.S.-Japan Alliance and vowed to continue working closely together to address common challenges, seize shared opportunities, and advance the interests of both the United States and Japan" in the region, read the statement.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday tweeted that he had asked Pompeo to cancel his upcoming trip to the DPRK, just one day after Pompeo said he and Stephen Biegun, the U.S. new special envoy for the DPRK, will travel to Pyongyang the following week "to make further diplomatic progress towards our objective."

Speaking of the call between Pompeo and Kang, the South Korean Foreign Ministry said on Friday that "Pompeo explained in detail the background behind the postponement of his visit to North Korea."

In response, Kang expressed regret over the postponement of the visit, "citing the unswerving commitment of the ROK and the US to a thorough implementation of the measures agreed upon at the inter-Korean and US-North Korea summit talks."

She also proposed that South Korea and the U.S. side, "while maintaining the momentum of dialogue, continue efforts to achieve denuclearization and establish peace on the Korean Peninsula," read the statement.

In the joint statement after his June 12 meeting in Singapore with DPRK top leader Kim Jong Un, Trump committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK, while Kim reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to a complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 03:41:46|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BUCHAREST, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Romanian Prime Minister Viorica Dancila on Monday called on heads of Romanian Diplomatic Corps to promote economic diplomacy abroad and to attract foreign investment.

"Foreign diplomatic missions play the role of being the messengers of Romania's economic offerings, facilitators of contracts with the business community in their countries of residence," Dancila told a meeting with heads of Romanian diplomatic missions who returned to the country to attend the Annual Reunion of Diplomatic Corps.

"I very much appreciate the ambassadors and general consuls who are constantly engaged in activities of economic diplomacy," she said, adding that such heads of missions are praised and represent a model worth replicating.

The PM stressed that the "doors" to Romania's embassies must be always open to national entrepreneurs interested in foreign markets.

She called for a more efficient and coordinated exploitation of those areas where agreements can be concluded and new contracts signed, hoping that heads of diplomatic missions would use to the "fullest extent" the expertise of the diplomats they coordinate, including those sent on an external mission by the different ministries with economic vocation, commercial advisers, labour and social affairs attaches, domestic affairs attaches, military attaches, and tourism attaches.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 04:31:56|Editor: xuxin

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Nashat Abu Ammar patrols at his village of Shbeki in the eastern countryside of Sweida province in southern Syria on Aug. 15, 2018. Nashat Abu Ammar, who is 40 years old, received an urgent call from his terrified wife before daybreak on July 25, telling him Islamic State (IS) militants were at the front door, trying to break in their house. (Xinhua/Ammar Safarjalani)

by Hummam Sheikh Ali

SWEIDA, Syria, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Nashat Abu Ammar, 40 years old, received an urgent call from his terrified wife before daybreak on July 25, telling him the Islamic State (IS) militants were at the front door trying to break in their house.

The man was just having a night shift at a hospital in a nearby town outside his village of Shbeki in the eastern countryside of Sweida province in southern Syria.

Shocked by the call, he rushed to coworkers, fumbling for anyone with a car to provide a ride back home to try to defend his wife, his 75-year-old mother, and three children, the oldest of whom is an 11-year-old boy.

Upon reaching the outskirts of the village and trying to make his way home, the man received a gunshot at his back by one of the IS militants who were sealing off Shbeki.

His friends were quick to rush him to the hospital but his wife kept calling him, asking why he hadn't shown up as the attackers were breaking into the house.

Ammar couldn't tell he was shot which would make her feel much worse, but that wound in the back is tormenting him with guilt as he said would rather die defending his family than being treated at the hospital.

Later on, the man learned that his families were taken hostage by the IS militants, which attacked Shbeki and four other towns in the eastern countryside of Sweida before dawn on July 25, of which the first massive attack was coupled with suicide bombings inside Sweida, leaving over 260 people killed during the whole attack.

The man was then told that his old mother couldn't make it on foot and she was shot dead in the eastern part of the village by her captors.

"My mother was 75-year-old with a heart condition and was ... shot dead," he recounted, with tearing eyes and a cracking voice

In Shbeki, a small village of 200 residents, most of the people there are relatives. When the militants attacked, they snatched the people from the homes whose men were either out for night jobs or out of the country.

The attackers got the information of these houses from the Bedouins who used to frequent the village.

Other men confronted the attackers as most of them held up rifles and started defending themselves.

Jawdat Abu Ammar, Nashat Abu Ammar's cousin, was in Saudi Arabia along with his two brothers when the attack took place. After knowing their women and children were taken, they returned to Shbeki three days later.

Unable to enter their homes due to all of the emotions, they decided to wait for their families to be set free and enter their homes together.

"I felt agony as I wasn't here to defend my family. This feeling is like a big deep wound, but we have a strong faith in our army, our president and we believe that our kidnapped families will return safely," he told Xinhua.

He also took up a rifle and wore the traditional attire of the Sweida people, a white skullcap black baggy trousers and shirt, along with his brothers as they started patrolling the town just in case of any sudden attack by IS.

"We are all ready to sacrifice for our country. All we can say is that the women and children should return," he said.

The IS militants kidnapped over 30 people when they retreated as a result of the local resistance and the army backup, during which 60 people were killed in the village.

The militants later negotiated the lives of the hostages in exchange for the Syrian army to allow the besieged IS militants in the nearby province of Daraa to leave.

The army later captured Daraa and closed in on the IS in the Tulol al-Safa hills in the remote eastern countryside of Sweida.

The 19-year old Muhannad Abu Ammar was killed by IS, marking the first hostage to be slain. Later on, a woman was said to have died from her tough medical condition.

The father of Muhannad told Xinhua that he had suffered from two shocks: the first was the IS attack and the second is when he received a video showing his son being killed.

"They wanted to kill everything as that calls for knowledge in this country," he said.

Ghazi Abu Ammar, one of the senior members of the Abu Ammar family, said the people of the Shbeki village were peaceful and have never imagined that their village would be attacked by IS.

"The people of this village are peaceful and most of them work in farming and we haven't anticipated such an attack and truly such a surprise attack have cost us many martyrs," he said.

The man in his 60s recounted what happened that day, saying that the IS militants attacked Shbeki in large numbers and entered the village from four directions at 3:50 a.m. local time on July 25 while people were asleep.

The IS militants snuck into the village and took positions on rooftops. They sent two fighters to each house and started firing, shooting sleeping people dead in cold blood, he said.

"They kidnapped women and children in cooperation with Bedouins who were in the village. They called people by name because they were tipped off," he revealed.

They shot at the houses whose residents refused to open and broke the locks and took women and children to the Guidance Unit in the village before hustling them to the eastern part of the village.

"We didn't know when they got out of the village with the hostages," he said.

Ghazi said at the time of the attack, only 15 residents of the village could fight back.

"When we heard the gunshots, those who have rifles and guns and others who have hunting rifles fought the attackers."

The only place that couldn't be entered by the IS attackers in the village is a place where people had machine guns and Kalashnikov rifles.

"We received aid from many places in Sweida and Syria and we managed to withstand the attack for two hours before we received help from outside," he recounted.

Four IS commanders were killed by the locals in the village and their bodies were retrieved by the withdrawing IS militants, who stole cars in the village and left.

"Those militants entered the village with the aim to kill and terrorize people ... this is the nature of IS as they enter any area to terrorize people and kill," Ghazi stressed. "This is terrorism."

Shbeki is now almost empty of women as the men sent them after the IS attack to the capital city of Sweida for safety.

The men of the village along with other volunteers are now patrolling the village and their land in anticipation to another IS attack, even though the militants of the terror-designated group were pushed way back and are now besieged by the army.

The families of the kidnapped people called on the international community and humanitarian organizations to help in securing the release of their families from the grip of IS.

Activists said that negotiations between the Syrian side and the IS under a Russian mediation haven't yet resulted in the release of the kidnapped people.

But the men of Shbeki said they have faith in the Syrian leadership to secure the release of their families.

Those men seemed to be strong but whenever they recall their women and children, they get tears and refuse to enter homes, showing visitors the bullet holes and the leftovers of the IS attack on their homes.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 04:36:58|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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DAR ES SALAAM, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Tanzanian Vice-President Samia Suluhu Hassan on Monday urged member states of the African Union (AU) to remit their statutory contributions on time to enable the continental body to fulfill its operations.

"Some of the AU's departments and missions like the African Court of Human Rights (AFCHR) have been affected by lack of funds to run them effectively," she said shortly after she had sworn in three judges of the court in Arusha city.

Hassan added: "We should make sure that we submit our contributions on time in order to enable the union, its units like the African Court of Human Rights, to discharge their duties smoothly.

The Vice President said since most of AU member states signed an agreement for the establishment of the court they must honour their commitments by submitting their contributions instead of relying on donors.

She said the Tanzanian government, one of the signatory of an agreement to establish the court, will continue to cooperate with the court.

The judges who were sworn-in were Imani Aboud (Tanzania), Stella Anukam (Nigeria) and Blaise Tchikaya from Congo Brazzaville.

The new appointment brings to 11 the number of judges at the AFCHR. Six of them are women and five are men.

Speaking shortly after she was sworn in, Judge Aboud promised to work hard to make sure that justice was delivered on time.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 05:07:08|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The special representative and head of the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), Leila Zerrougui, on Monday called for dialogue ahead of the December elections in the country.

Zerrougui told members of the Security Council that "tangible progress has been made" on the ongoing electoral process. However, she said that despite this progress, the coming period before the elections take place on Dec. 23 "will be marked by disputes and intense political consultations."

She encouraged all parties to continue to engage in dialogue.

Zerrougui also said that the perceived credibility of the electoral process "remains a key concern" and that this could heighten tensions in the country.

She added that "more meaningful inclusion of women" in the electoral process is a priority, as well as ensuring that there is "no intimidation of political activists and human rights defenders."

Zerrougui also called for the lifting of the general ban on public demonstrations and upholding the freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, which are crucial to making meaningful progress as the holding of elections draws nearer.

A number of Security Council members said that the UN is willing to offer logistical aid for the coming elections in the DRC, which has rejected all offers of help.

The DRC's ambassador to the UN, Ignace Gata Mavita, defended the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), his country's electoral committee.

"The results achieved so far by CENI should allow us to trust in the institution and allow it to carry out its mission without interference in its work based on considerations which owe more to speculation than reality," he said.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has said that the humanitarian situation "remains worrying" in Uvira territory, South Kivu, one of the 26 provinces of the DRC, where more than 14,000 people have been displaced following an attack by a coalition of the Mai Mai militia on Aug. 18. Many people who were displaced were forced to flee again.

In addition, earlier this month, some 3,900 people were reportedly displaced in northern Shabunda and some 3,200 people in the southeast of the province of Maniema, due to clashes between armed groups and the armed forces.

Since June, the UN and its partners have been assisting more than 600,000 people in need, including internally displaced people and refugees.

According to an agreement reached between President Joseph Kabila and the opposition on Dec. 31, 2016, elections were to be held by the end of 2017, and Kabila was not to run for a third term or initiate amendments to the constitution.

Citing logistical difficulties that prevented the elections from being held on Nov. 5, 2017, CENI published a new electoral calendar for combined presidential, legislative and provincial elections to take place on Dec. 23, 2018.

Following the end of the voter registration period, between July 25 and Aug. 8, Kabila's party, the Peoples' Party for Reconciliation and Democracy, announced that its candidate for president will be former Interior Minister Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, thus putting an end to speculation as to Kabila's intentions.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 05:22:12|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ALGIERS, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Monday was rushed to Switzerland's Geneva for "periodic medical checks," the official APS news agency quoted a statement of the President Office.

In April 2013, Bouteflika, 81 years old, suffered cerebral vascular accident, which reduced his mobility and his presidential activity as he makes rare public appearances.

Since then, the health condition of the president has been subject to controversy, as several opposition parties and national personalities sent him a letter on May 26 to request him to retire.

Yet, the ruling parties and other pro-regime parties highlight the socio-economic achievements of Bouteflika since he came to power in 1999, as they urged him to run for fifth term during the presidential elections of 2019.

Re-elected in 2014 for a fourth term until 2019, Bouteflika is likely to accept to run for a fifth term as long as the constitution allows him to do so, according to observers.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 05:37:15|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BAGHDAD, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Two people were killed and four others injured on Monday in separate attacks in central Iraq, security sources said.

In one attack, unidentified gunmen opened fire at a civilian and killed him in Baghdad southwestern suburb of Radhwaniyah, Major Raid Ali Hussein told Xinhua.

In another incident, a roadside bomb ripped through al-Ghadeer neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, leaving three people wounded and damaging two cars, Hussein said.

In Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, a civilian was killed and another wounded when unidentified gunmen opened fire at civilians in Kanaan area near the provincial capital Baquba, some 65 km northeast of Baghdad, Salam al-Shimary from Diyala Operations Command told Xinhua.

Also in the province, the extremist Islamic State (IS) militants fired mortar rounds on Abu Garma village in northeast of Baquba, damaging some houses of villagers without human casualties, Shimary said.

Meanwhile, the extremist IS militants shot dead 20 cows belonging to villagers in al-Udheim area north of Diyala in an attempt to avenge the villagers for their cooperation with the Iraqi government, Mohammed al-Obeidi, head of Udheim town council, told Xinhua.

The security situation in Iraq has been dramatically improved after Iraqi security forces fully defeated the extremist IS militants across the country late in 2017.

However, small groups and individuals of extremist militants melted or regrouped in urban and rugged areas, and are carrying out attacks against the security forces and civilians despite operations from time to time to hunt them down.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 05:47:17|Editor: ZX

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ROME, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Italy would soon revise the concession system concerning the country's infrastructures, and decide whether to re-nationalize some of them, the Infrastructures and Transport Minister Danilo Toninelli said on Monday.

"By September, I will summon all infrastructure concessionaires, asking them (to provide) a detailed plan of ordinary and extraordinary maintenance interventions," Toninelli told the parliament's joint Environment and Public Works committees in a hearing.

The minister explained the government would do all it could to "revise entirely the concession system and the contract duties (falling on concessionaires)."

"We will decide case by case whether the public interest is to be better served by forms of nationalization, or by renegotiating the current contracts in order for these to be less in favor of private concessionaires," he told lawmakers.

Toninelli's address to parliamentary committees concerned the partial collapse of a major motorway bridge in the northwest city of Genoa on Aug. 14, in which 43 people were killed.

The viaduct was operated by Autostrade per l'Italia (part of Atlantia holding company), which holds the concession to manage most of Italy's highway network.

"Genoa's collapse was not the result of a tragic chance, but rather an event confirming the dramatic need of a national maintenance plan that our government has been signalling since it was named," Toninelli stressed.

"We are talking about a wide plan of ordinary and emergency maintenance on our territory and on existing infrastructures, with scheduled and continuous interventions."

In the same day, Giovanni Toti, the governor of the Liguria region surrounding Genoa city, appealed for the collapsed bridge to be "demolished and reconstructed as soon as possible."

"Under current rules, this operation is under the responsibility of Austostrade per l'Italia, which must ensure this is done with alacrity, and obviously sustaining all costs," Toti told a broadcast press conference in Genoa.

Major sections of the collapsed bridge were still standing, and needed to be removed in order to build a new structure, which would serve as a major connection between Genoa west and east, and towards two highways.

After checking the security of the parts still standing last week, the technical inspectors appointed by the Infrastructure Ministry warned some of them were precarious -- especially the eastern section -- and needed to be swiftly torn down.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 05:57:19|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIRUT, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Civil society activists in Lebanon's northern city of Tripoli called for an open sit-in on Tuesday in front of the city's power station to demand for 24-hour electricity in the city, local media reported Monday.

Tens of protesters gathered in front of government-owned Kadisha Electricity on Monday asking citizens not to pay their electricity bills until the government succeeds in securing 24 hours of power supply in the city, online independent newspaper Elnashra reported.

Lack of electricity in Lebanon has been a problem for many years, with the government being incapable of generating the needed amount of power.

Lebanese residents usually turn to private operators, which charge higher, during power outages.

The current public electricity production capacity in Lebanon stands at 2,000 MW, while national demand goes beyond 3,300 MW in summer months.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 06:07:20|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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KHARTOUM, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- At least 16 people were killed in a traffic accident on Monday in Sudan's North Darfur State, official SUNA news agency reported.

Four others were injured in the accident happened on the Western Salvation road to the east of El Fasher, the capital city of North Darfur State, said the report.

The accident took place when a mini vehicle collided with a passenger bus coming from the opposite direction.

Sudan is among countries of the highest death rates in traffic accidents, mainly due to careless driving, crumbling roads and poor vehicle scrapping system.

Citizens complain about poor road conditions, while the ministry of roads and bridges attributes the accidents to overloaded trucks and high speed.

Sudan's Interior Ministry recently said it was working out new plans to reduce traffic accidents, including installation of radars to monitor speed on the country's highways.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 06:12:21|Editor: ZX

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TRIPOLI, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) on Monday called for immediate cease-fire in the Libyan capital Tripoli, which has been witnessing violent clashes between government forces and militias since Sunday.

"The UNSMIL is following the clashes in and around Tripoli with grave concern and calls on all parties to immediately cease all military action," the mission said in a statement.

The UN mission expressed concern over the indiscriminate fire and shelling in densely populated residential areas, "endangering civilian lives and reminding all parties of their duty to protect civilians, in accordance with international humanitarian and human rights law."

"The mission stresses that political aims must not be pursued through violence and warns that the build-up of armed groups and hostile acts and rhetoric risk a wider military confrontation," the mission said.

Southern Libya has been witnessing violent clashes between forces of the UN-backed government and armed militias, which so far killed one civilian and injured several others, according to Tripoli Security Directorate.

The reasons for the clashes remain unknown, as southern Tripoli has been witnessing tensions and military mobilization for the past few days between armed groups from outside and inside the city.

Following the 2011 uprising that toppled former leader Muammar Gaddafi's regime, Libya has been suffering escalating violence and chaos, as well as political division.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 06:22:22|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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YAOUNDE, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Over one fifth of the population in Cameroon have used hard drugs, according to a government-led survey quoted Monday by the country's communication minister and government spokesman, Issa Tchiroma.

"The National Anti-Drug Committee is formal: 21% of the population have already experienced the hard drugs, 10% are regular users," Tchiroma told a press conference in the capital Yaounde.

Among the regular drug users, 60 percent are between 20 and 25 years old, and more than 12,000 young people under 15 are involved in the use of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances, according to Tchiroma, who blamed growing insecurity in the English-speaking part of Cameroon on drug consumption among youths.

The Anglophone crisis "illustrates the unprecedented and negative effects of drugs used by our young compatriots", Tchiroma said, adding the government will take measures to curb the situation.

According to the latest death toll established by the government, 109 security forces have been killed since the armed insurgency started a year ago in the Anglophone regions of the country. It is unclear how many of separatist forces have died.

The armed separatist forces want the two regions, North West and South West, to secede from the majority French-speaking nation and form a new nation called "Ambazonia".Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 06:22:23|Editor: ZX

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RABAT, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Moroccan and South Korean senior officials met on Monday and discussed means to foster bilateral cooperation.

Speaker of Morocco's House of Representatives Habib El Malki held a meeting with visiting Deputy Speaker of South Korea's National Assembly Lee Ju-Young, and talked about opportunities of cooperation in vital areas including renewable energy, tourism and car industry.

During the meeting, El Malki lauded the distinguished friendship between the two countries, while Lee mentioned a memorandum of understanding between the legislative institutions of both countries.

South Korea attaches great importance to strengthening its relations with Morocco, a country that stands out by its important geostrategic position as a gateway to Africa and a link between Europe and the Middle East, he added.

Lee is currently on a visit in Morocco with a parliamentary delegation.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 06:37:25|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The special representative and head of the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), Leila Zerrougui, on Monday called for dialogue ahead of the December elections in the country.

Zerrougui told members of the Security Council that "tangible progress has been made" on the ongoing electoral process. Despite this progress, she said, the coming period before the elections on Dec. 23 "will be marked by disputes and intense political consultations."

She encouraged all parties to continue to engage in dialogue.

Zerrougui said that the perceived credibility of the electoral process "remains a key concern" and that this could heighten tensions in the country.

She added that "more meaningful inclusion of women" in the electoral process is a priority, and there should be "no intimidation of political activists and human rights defenders."

Zerrougui called for the lifting of the general ban on public demonstrations and upholding the freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, which are crucial to making meaningful progress as the holding of elections draws nearer.

A number of Security Council members said that the UN is willing to offer logistical aid for the coming elections in the DRC, which has rejected all offers of help.

Anne Gueguen, deputy permanent representative of France to the UN, describing the upcoming elections as a "watershed" and a chance for the DRC to recommit to the path of peace, said it also represents a responsibility on the part of all stakeholders.

The elections must take place "in a climate of trust," she said, calling for the inclusion of women and the release of political prisoners, in accordance with the Saint-Sylvestre agreement.

While welcoming Kinshasa's decision to take charge of financing and logistics for the elections, she nevertheless stressed that MONUSCO stands ready to "offer further technical support" and has the means to do so.

The DRC's ambassador to the UN, Ignace Gata Mavita, defended the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), his country's electoral committee.

"The results achieved so far by CENI should allow us to trust in the institution and allow it to carry out its mission without interference in its work based on considerations which owe more to speculation than reality," he said.

Cheng Lie, a member of the Chinese delegation to the UN, urged the Security Council to support efforts by the African Union and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, as well as regional countries, to play a leading role in mediation, and in helping to enhance engagement among political parties.

The focus should be on the government's ownership of the political process, he said, emphasizing the need to implement the Saint-Sylvestre agreement, and to respect the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of the DRC.

MONUSCO should, within its mandate, strengthen consultations with Kinshasa, he added, emphasizing that his delegation supports African countries in seeking African solutions.

China has participated in peacekeeping operations within, and provided humanitarian assistance to the DRC, he noted.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has said that the humanitarian situation "remains worrying" in Uvira territory, South Kivu, one of the 26 provinces of the DRC, where more than 14,000 people have been displaced following an attack by a coalition of the Mai Mai militia on Aug. 18. Many people who were displaced were forced to flee again.

In addition, earlier this month, some 3,900 people were reportedly displaced in northern Shabunda and some 3,200 people in the southeast of the province of Maniema, due to clashes between armed groups and the armed forces.

Since June, the UN and its partners have been assisting more than 600,000 people in need, including internally displaced people and refugees.

According to an agreement reached between President Joseph Kabila and the opposition on Dec. 31, 2016, elections were to be held by the end of 2017, and Kabila was not to run for a third term or initiate amendments to the constitution.

Citing logistical difficulties that prevented the elections from being held on Nov. 5, 2017, CENI published a new electoral calendar for combined presidential, legislative and provincial elections to take place on Dec. 23, 2018.

Following the end of the voter registration period, between July 25 and Aug. 8, Kabila's party, the Peoples' Party for Reconciliation and Democracy, announced that its candidate for president will be former interior minister Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, thus putting an end to speculation as to Kabila's intentions.Source: Xinhua| 2018-08-28 06:47:27|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. pro-gun control group that has been fighting for stopping downloadable guns Monday hailed a ban by a U.S. district judge to block release of blueprints for 3D weapons on the internet.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a group advocating gun control, said in a statement that Judge Robert Lasnik of the U.S. District Court of Western District of Washington in Seattle has issued a preliminary injunction blocking the publication of the plans for making untraceable 3D guns on the internet.

"Today's decision is an unqualified success for the American public and, indeed, the global community," Avery Gardiner, co-president of the Brady Campaign, said.

The ban has been pursued by 19 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, as well as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which have sued the U.S. government for settling a lawsuit nearly two months ago that allowed blueprints of 3D-printed guns to be posted online.

Defense Distributed, a company based in Austin, Texas, argued that the access to the online blueprints is guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution's First and Second Amendments, which protect free speech and the right to bear arms, respectively.

However, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence said "the Second Amendment does not grant Defense Distributed the right to publish the blueprints, nor does it protect the right to create or own 3D-printed guns."

"3D-printed guns represent a supreme threat to our safety and security, and we are grateful that Judge Lasnik recognized it as such," said the Campaign's co-president Gardiner.

The pro-gun control group urged the U.S. State Department to "end this threat once and for all" because it is responsible for oversight of firearm exports."

The State Department is "able to step in and protect Americans from foreign terrorists and other dangerous people from obtaining the ability to print their own untraceable assault rifles," said Brady Campaign co-president Kris Brown.

Lasnik issued a temporary restraining order on July 31 to block the release of the online blueprints for printed untraceable 3D guns, and the order is due to expire on Tuesday.

The district judge turned the temporary restraining order into a preliminary injunction, which will remain in place until the case is resolved.

Plaintiffs represented by Washington and other states "have a legitimate fear that adding undetectable and untraceable guns to the arsenal of weaponry already available will likely increase the threat of gun violence that they and their people experience," Lasnik ruled.

"The instability and inaccuracy of 3-D printed firearms pose threats to the citizens of the states, including both users and bystanders, while the toy-like appearance increases the risk of unintentional discharge, injury and/or death," he said.

In 2012, the federal government initially banned the posting of computer aided design allowing users to manufacture a plastic handgun with a 3D printer, but the ban was challenged by Defense Distributed in a lawsuit.

The government signed a tentative settlement in April with Defense Distributed on releasing plans for 3D weapons on the internet.

Lasnik said that posting online plans for 3D weapons that carry no information about licenses, serial numbers and registrations would post a security risks for the public and be abused by felons or terrorists.

"Every single day in America 96 people die from gun violence," the Brady Campaign said in a Twitter post Monday.

"Every day, 47 children and teens are shot in murders, assaults, suicides and suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention," according to statistics posted on the group's website.Hungarys motorway M1, connecting Budapest with Vienna, will be upgraded on a 43-kilometre section and extended with a third lane, Innovation and Technology Minister Laszlo Palkovics told news portal Origo.

M1 is Hungarys most overloaded motorway, practically the sole transit traffic artery between the two capital cities. With traffic approaching the tolerance limit, the motorway cannot be used by a lot more vehicles, he said.

The revamping project, to cost 25 billion forints (EUR 77m), will start in September and, if all goes according to plan, last until late 2019, Palkovics said. The construction of the third lane is scheduled to start in 2021, he said.Hungarys population decline slowed in the first six months of the year compared with the same period in 2017 as both the number of births and the number of deaths decreased, the Central Statistical Office (KSH) reported.

The figures show that there were 43,069 births in January-June, a 2.4% drop from the same period a year earlier. The number of deaths was 66,869, down 3.8% compared with 2017.

The decline in births and the even greater drop in the death rate means that the rate of natural population decline was down 6.3% compared with the same period in 2017.Liberal and left-wing columnists criticize the government for displaying a flag depicting a cross on the Parliament building on August 20. Conservative commentators, on the other hand, find the critics of the flag paranoid and their comments absurd.

On August 20, the government for the first time decorated the Parliament building with Christian cross flags reminiscent of the banners of St. Stephen, but onto which white crosses had been superimposed.

The cabinet office of the Prime Minister said that the flags were displayed in accordance with the spirit of Hungarys Fundamental Law which describes the protection of Christian values as important for the State.

In Nepszava, Gyorgy Sebes finds it sad that the government uses symbolic politics to boost its popularity.

The left-wing columnist thinks that the governments earlier ban on symbols of totalitarian regimes, taken together with its decision to display banners decorated with a cross on August 20, signal an attempt by the government to design and impose a new system of values and symbols which every Hungarian must follow.

Heti Vilaggazdasags Andras Hont accuses the government of hypocrisy. The liberal commentator suggests that while the government claims that it defends Christian values, in reality it violates the basic norms of Christianity.

As an example, Hont mentions the governments policies towards migrants, noting that the authorities no longer offer food to those migrants in the transit zones on the Serbian border whose asylum application have already been rejected.

Hont also mentions that the government has supported the Kurultaj events which celebrates the putatively common pagan and nomadic heritage of eastern Turkic peoples and Hungarians.

Hont finds it controversial that the government wants to defend Christian Europe and Hungary from mostly Muslim migrants, but at the same time, celebrates the common heritage of Hungarians and pagan nomadic peoples.

Tamas Pilhal in Pesti Sracok contends that liberals are suffering from a phobia towards national symbols.

The (tiny) Liberal Party in a press release wrote that the display of the flag with the cross on the Parliament building is abhorrent, reminiscent of the interwar anti-Semitic Imredy governments practice, which defended discriminatory anti-Jewish legislation with the pretext of the defence of Christian and national values.

Pilhal finds it peculiar that despite their constant fear of Christian symbolism, left-wing and liberal intellectuals like to refer to Christian values when they criticize the governments immigration policies.

Magyar Idoks Zsolt Bayer calls the Lefts outrage over the flag a joke. The pro-government columnist thinks it absurd to suggest that Christian churches have any political power in Hungary.

Bayer claims that the display of the flag with the cross is a revolutionary act against the anti-national and anti-religious cosmopolitan Zeitgeist. Bayer goes so far as to suggest that critics of the flag want to destroy all traditions and identities and turn people into liberal, gender-aware consumer zombies.

Pro-immigration critics of the Christian symbol have more affinity towards Muslim symbols than traditional Christian and Jewish ones, he claims.

MTI Photo: Illyes Tibor

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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.The 14th annual Porcupine Mountain Music Festival was held over the weekend. It was estimated that over 700 music lovers were in attendance for the event that ran from Friday to Sunday at the Porcupine Mountains State Park. Fourteen different bands played on the big stage throughout the weekend and others took to the all-acoustic stage in the Busking Barn.

By JEAN NORDINE

[email protected]

PORCUPINE MOUNTAINS  Large crowds were in attendance over the three-day 14th annual Porcupine Mountains Music Festival. The bottom of the mountain was a sea of lawn chairs and awnings as hundreds of music lovers enjoyed a variety of music.

Merchandise from all the bands was available for purchase and workshops were held in the chalet. On Friday The Barefoot Movement held a writing and arranging songs workshop and Saturday Ryan Peterson held a looper workshop. Also on Saturday a drum workshop with Randall of The Ragbirds was held at the Folk Sch...FMC Corp.'s planned split into separate pesticide and lithium companies moved a step closer Monday when the Philadelphia company detailed its proposal to offer public investors shares a minority stake in its new lithium company, Livent.

FMC shares closed Monday at $86.36, up 1 percent for the day. The stock topped $98 in January.

Most of FMC's yearly sales of about $3 billion a year are in its farm pesticide units, which were bulked up last year after a business swap with DowDuPont Co.

But FMC chief executive Pierre Brondeau has said that Livent could be worth roughly as much as the rest of the company, given lithium's large potential for growth as a key element in electric-car and smartphone batteries. The unit had sales of $347 million last year, up from $264 million in 2016.

Livent's CEO will be Paul Graves, now FMC's chief financial officer. His chief operating officer will be Thomas Schneberger, an FMC veteran who has been a leader in its lithium unit since 2014. Gilberto Antoniazzi will be chief financial officer.

Lithium is also used to treat manic depression, and has grease, plastics, and aerospace uses. It is mined in rugged deserts in China, Argentina, and Chile, and sent for intermediate and final processing to sites closer to factory centers. Quebec, Bolivia, and parts of the United States are also potential new sources.

The company's lithium business has worked for 20 years with a succession of staten and national governments in Argentina to bring that nation's lithium to market, from its lithium brine extraction site at Salar del Hombre Muerto (Dead Man's Salts) in a desert area approaching the Andes Mountains. The company has lithium production sites in the U.S., United Kingdom, China and India. More than half its lithium sales are to companies in Asia.

Livent employs 750. Many are unionized mine workers in Argentina. The company said it "has not established" the size of its proved lithium reserves in that country, its major source of raw materials.

Despite rising demand, prices and expectations for lithium makers have varied, since one or more new producers could have a big effect on the market, FMC warned. The company has made expensive bets on new production that should come on line between 2019 and 2025.

FMC, unlike some of its lithium rivals, processes basic lithium ores, and refines it into intermediate products and high-purity metals.

The company, once known as Food Machine Corp., has a history of buying new businesses and splitting into separate companies. FMC's largest business  pesticides  was enhanced by a deal in which the firm got a group of DuPont pesticides, and a research laboratory and farm in Newark, Del., in exchange for FMC's former food-additives business, to help Dow and DuPont get their merger plan past antitrust enforcers at the European Union.

Without lithium, FMC will be what investors call a "pure play" pesticide company, one of five multinational pesticide giants competing with DowDuPont's planned CorTeva spin-off along with rival giants in Europe and China. Unlike Bayer-Monsanto or DowDuPont, FMC has avoided pairing its pest poisons with genetically-modified organisms (GMOs).

FMC has split its lithium-manufacturing operations among the U.S., China, and other countries. Because the processes are divided among distant sites, few people know details of the complete Livent production processes; the company hasn't patented a number of its production steps, preferring to keep its work secret.

Late last year, FMC boasted they expected to bring the new company to market in time to meet a big increase in global demand. Brondeau "says I was lucky. I say I was smart," said Tom Schneberger, global business director for FMC Lithium at that time.

Brondeau has said both companies plan to keep their headquarters at the 49-story FMC building that towers over the Schuylkill, I-76 and 30th Street Station at the edge of the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel campuses in Philadelphia's University City.A woman scans the prices on cans of soup into a cash register at a grocery store in North Bergen, N.J. Read more

The food-industry spotlight will be on Campbell Soup Co. this week as the company unveils the results of a top-to-bottom business review launched in May after chief executive Denise Morrison abruptly retired.

A string of acquisition missteps under Morrison, including her plans to establish a beachhead in fresh food that faltered, and the unremitting decline of its still highly profitable canned soup business have knocked the Camden company out of Wall Street's favor.

But, the 149-year-old company's core problem  lack of revenue growth from existing brands  is shared by most large packaged-food companies. In total, revenues at 10 of the nation's biggest publicly traded packaged-food and beverage companies have fallen by about 15 percent over the last five years. Last year, only PepsiCo increased revenue, but only by 1 percent.

Experts said the woes of the biggest packaged-food firms run deep, wide, and sometimes in conflicting directions: Food has to be healthier and cleaner, but indulgence is just as important; the evermore important millennial generation remains a riddle; digital commerce has given small firms easier access to consumers, eroding the power of big brands; and the quality of store brands has improved, increasing pressure on the sales and profits of national brands.

Above all, consultants and analysts said, a lack of innovation that resonates with consumers has caused turmoil in a sector that can expect overall revenue to grow only a paltry 1 percent a year.

Solving the combination riddle

"The industry is not creating big ideas like it used to," said Gary Stibel, founder and chief executive of New England Consulting Group. "There are line extensions du jour, but there are no major new innovations. In terms of advertising messaging, the industry has walked away from the big ideas that built brands over decades to short messages that mean very little to anybody."

Instead, the big, historical packaged-food companies, not just Campbell, but also General Mills Inc., Kellogg Co., Conagra Brands Inc., and others, try to buy their way to prosperity. They move into faster-growing categories, try to capture the growth of hot, new brands, or simply merge to cut costs. Too often, as was the case with Campbell's purchase of Bolthouse Farms in 2012, it doesn't work.

"Too many of the acquisitions are of brands that have already reached their plateau and have little growth potential left in them," said Stibel, who started his career in 1970 as a marketing manager at Procter & Gamble.

Then what happens? Management, often new management, starts over, sells businesses, and makes acquisitions to implement a new strategy or simply to regain focus.

If Campbell follows that route and announces a dramatic move Thursday, such as a sale of Bolthouse Farms and other so-called packaged fresh businesses, it wouldn't be the first time a food company ran the risk of whiplash from quickly going into and out of businesses.

Big Foods growth appetite

Conagra in January 2013 paid $6.8 billion, including debt, for Ralcorp's private-label business, touting the ability of those operations, which make products sold with other retailers' labels on them, to boost Conagra's topline growth rate. Private label was growing twice as fast as branded goods, Conagra said.

Managing its own brands and the nation's largest private-label business proved to be too challenging. In 2016, with a new CEO and under pressure from an activist investor, Conagra sold most of its private-label operations for $2.7 billion and booked a $4.2 billion loss.

In June, Conagra announced another giant deal, agreeing to pay $10.9 billion, including debt, for Pinnacle Foods Inc., a roll-up that includes Mrs. Paul's frozen fish, Vlasic pickles, and Open Pit barbecue sauce, brands that Campbell jettisoned in the 1990s.

In their quest for growth, J.M. Smucker and General Mills have turned to pet food, but even Fido offers no guarantee of growth.

Smucker Co. in 2015 paid $5.8 billion for Big Heart Pet Brands, which includes Meow Mix and Kibbles 'n Bits. It had $2.3 billion in revenue that year. Smucker has already started to take impairment charges on the business because it hasn't met expectations. Since 2016, sales in the unit are down slightly.

General Mills Inc. made an even bigger play for pet food, paying $8 billion in April for Blue Buffalo Pet Products Inc., a maker of natural products.

Small deals are also popular, with good reason. An estimated $15 billion in packaged-food sales shifted to companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue from 2012 through 2017, according to IRI, a Chicago-based research firm. Digital marketing and e-commerce have made it easier for small brands to build a business that becomes attractive to giants.

Kellogg Co. last October paid $600 million for Chicago Bar Co. LLC, maker of Rxbar, which had been founded just five years earlier and was expected to have $120 million in annual sales in the crowded, $5 billion snack-bar market. Rxbar touts "clean" labels that display a short list of ingredients on the front of the package.

During an Aug. 2 earnings conference call, Citi Research analyst David Driscoll raised the obvious question, given how quickly Rxbar had made itself worth $600 million to Kellogg. "I think some people have launched similar products," Driscoll said. "How do you defend the business?"

Before acknowledging the existence of Rxbar imitators, Kellogg chief executive Steven A. Cahillane touted strong growth by Pringles potato chips and Rice Krispies Treats. The latter were so "on fire" that Kellogg could not keep up with demand.

Like others in Big Food, Kellogg contends with the concurrent consumer demands for junk and healthier food. While junk food did well for Kellogg (though Cahillane called Rice Krispies Treats a "wholesome" snack), the company's staple breakfast cereals were still declining. "History shows that it needs more and better health and wellness innovation and communication to get back into growth," Cahillane said.

But even healthier options don't always meet sales expectations.

What can Big Food cook up?

Gerry Shreiber, founder and longtime CEO of J&J Snack Foods Corp. in Pennsauken, said it is true that food companies have to offer healthy or "better for you" products. "But, it doesn't work as well as people thought."

There's a gap between the food being "good for you" and the ability of the food to "satisfy inner taste buds," Shreiber said.

So, where should Big Food turn?

Eddie Yoon, an independent consultant in Chicago, said the industry needs to look for the sort of landmark technological innovation the Campbell's condensed soup was in its day.

Developing an in-home replacement for the microwave, which destroys the quality of food and doesn't heat evenly, would be a good place to start, Yoon said.

"If you had a better way of heating food fast, I think a lot of innovation would follow," he said.With millions of dollars in medical marjuana proceeds  all cash  being moved across Pennsylvania monthly in unmarked cars, state banking regulators have appealed to leaders in Congress to create protections for financial institutions so that banks and credit unions might serve the state's cannabis industry.

The Wolf administration on Friday sent a letter making the request to Congress' leaders: U.S. Reps. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), and U.S. Sens. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.).

"We urge Congress to consider legislation that creates a safe harbor for financial institutions to serve a state-compliant business, or entrusts sovereign states with the full oversight and jurisdiction of marijuana-related activity," states the letter from Secretary of Banking and Securities Robin L. Wiessmann. State banking officials from Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Louisiana , Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington state also signed the letter.

The federal government considers marijuana illegal, although 31 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized the drug for either medical or adult recreation use.

The handful of institutions that provide service to the marijuana industry are at constant risk of federal prosecution, asset forfeiture or criminal penalties.

"The well-documented conflict between federal and state law creates barriers for banks desiring to serve businesses involved in state-licensed marijuana activities," said Wiessmann. "This has resulted in regulatory and legal risk  and created a 'cash and carry' industry."

Currently about 70 percent of all American "plant touching" marijuana businesses  growers and dispensaries  lack bank accounts. Nearly 50 percent of ancillary service providers also are without a financial institution, according to Philadelphia-based cannabis banking attorney Steve Schain.

Fewer than 0.03 percent of the nearly 12,000 U.S. financial institutions are willing to bank marijuana money, said Schain, citing his own research. The upshot: marijuana-related businesses conduct all transactions in cash, including paying employees, rent, taxes and vendors.

"The cash-only business creates horrific safety and operation concerns for both marijuana-related businesses and their employees, vendors, landlords and taxing bodies," Schain said.

The lack of banking also makes cannabis businesses vulnerable to theft, and insurance covers only up to $20,000 in a "cash loss," said Schain. "Because marijuana-related businesses often have $200,000 to $500,000 in cash on hand, theft can be a fatal blow to the enterprise."

Though the state's medical marijuana program has been running since February, the Wolf administration's letter shows that unbanked cash poses a threat to the effort.

"This raises concerns with respect to public safety, increases difficulty tracking the flow of funds, and contributes to a loss of economic activity, workforce development and community development opportunities," Weissman wrote.

An Obama-era document called the Cole Memo previously offered guidance to financial institutions and provided some limited protections. Earlier this year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the memo, "leading to uncertainty about banks' ability to serve this industry without running afoul of federal statutes," Weissman wrote.John Georges paper mill company was the only one to ask for tariff protection on imported newsprint. Read more

On Wednesday, the U.S. government agency in charge of trade will vote on whether to keep newsprint tariffs in place or scrap them altogether.

The International Trade Commission in Washington will meet at 11 a.m. to decide whether to affirm permanently the tariff on uncoated groundwood paper. Sold as protection for paper-mill workers, the tariffs were requested by only one Washington state paper factory and its private-equity owner, One Rock Capital, based in New York City. The Department of Commerce agreed to the tariff, which dramatically increased all U.S. newsprint prices.

According to the Wall Street Journal, John A. Georges, 87, partner of One Rock Capital, made the case last year to Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce and a former private-equity executive. Georges was president (1981-84) and then CEO (1984-96) of International Paper, and before that spent 28 years with the DuPont Co.; he holds an M.B.A. from Drexel University.

Known on Wall Street as a prominent Greek American financier, Georges is hardly a middle-class worker in need of protectionist tariffs. He and his son Andrew S. Georges both own million-dollar properties.

The elder Georges owns a home in Vero Beach, Fla., with an estimated value of $5.5 million. His home in Greenwich, Conn., with five beds, seven baths, and 12,863 square feet, is listed for sale for $9.9 million. The price has been cut several times.

His son, 51, also a partner at One Rock Capital, and his son's wife, Heather, own a home in Greenwich listed on Zillow with an estimated value over $7 million.

Ross earlier this month cut the tariff to 16.88 percent from over 22 percent. According to the Department of Commerce, the only petitioner seeking newsprint tariffs is North Pacific Paper Co., owned by One Rock.

Local news publishers want the tariff cut to zero, and argue it hurts American consumers.

"This tariff is extremely onerous, unfair, and totally unwarranted. The damage it is doing to the already fragile state of the economics of newspapers of all sizes across America is severe," said Inquirer and Daily News publisher Terrance C.Z. Egger.

"We are very grateful by the overwhelming support we are receiving from both Sen. Casey and Sen. Toomey on behalf of the newspapers in the commonwealth and encourage them to keep up their efforts," Egger said.

According to Pew Research, the newspaper industry was already in the process of layoffs before the tariff. At least 36 percent of the largest newspapers across the United States  as well as at least 23 percent of the highest-traffic digital-native news outlets  experienced layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018, according to the Pew study.

These were exacerbated by the tariff, put in place in January after One Rock Capital filed its complaint to the Department of Commerce.

Since the tariff went into effect, many smaller newspapers around the country have struggled to handle the increased costs, leading to layoffs and page-count reductions. Newspaper industry groups lobbied Congress and the administration to back off the tariffs, arguing that the measures did more harm than good.

For instance, the Tampa Bay Times announced a series of layoffs that the paper said were a direct result of the higher costs from tariffs. The conservative Washington Times carried an op-ed against the tariffs written by David Chavern and Joel Quadracci, president and CEO of Quad Graphics, the largest printer in the United States.

As for Wednesday's meeting, "We will not know the reasoning for the ITC's decision until mid-September, when it files its final determination," said Paul Boyle, senior vice president, public policy, at the News Media Alliance in Arlington, Va.A task force commissioned by Gov. Wolf in the aftermath of February's mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school calls on school officials and students  and, when necessary, police  to better communicate with each other about potential threats, and urges schools to step up mental-health services, including adding psychologists and nurses.

Released just as more than 1.7 million students are starting a new year in Pennsylvania public schools, the report from the Pennsylvania School Safety Task Force  co-chaired by Wolf, who is seeking re-election in November, and Auditor General Eugene DePasquale  is light on specifics but identifies a number of broad strategies aimed at addressing students' fears about mass shootings as well as bullying, other types of violence, and depression.

DePasquale, citing testimony from six hearings held around the state this spring with students, educators, and other stakeholders, said in a statement that "young men and women stood before us and described their feelings of helplessness and anxiety, that they want more and better mental health services. Now, it is our job to heed those concerns, and to do everything in our power to create safer spaces for learning."

Although no money or specific mandates were attached to Monday's report, Wolf noted that the 2018-19 state budget included a $60 million initiative to issue grants to districts across the state  as determined by a new state committee  that would help pay for new safety measures, such as updating buildings, training teachers, or establishing community violence-prevention programs.

"It's abundantly clear that by working together, schools, communities, and the state can take a holistic approach to make our classrooms a safe place for students to learn," Wolf said in a statement. "Our focus is on preventing violence that threatens schools, while also taking every precaution to protect and provide security for students and teachers."

Most of the report's findings are recommendations for improving the overall climate in schools  including a stronger emphasis on teaching kids social and emotional learning strategies beginning in the early grades so that they can better cope with bullying, depression, and other factors that have been linked to a spate of school shootings. The attack in Florida killed 17 people.

The 66-page report painted a rather dim portrait of student happiness in Pennsylvania. It said surveys have found that more kids are reporting they've been bullied  28.2 percent in the most recent school year, up from 16.9 percent in 2015  and that 38.1 percent reported feeling sad or depressed most days, with 16.5 percent saying they had seriously considered suicide.

Only 41.3 percent of Pennsylvania children say they enjoy being in school, and the numbers for high school kids are closer to just one-third.

Among the report's 31 actionable findings is a call for multidisciplinary task forces aimed at doing a better job in both identifying potential safety threats and sharing information, while creating a climate where students feel more comfortable sharing information with teachers and staff.

"Individuals reported the more consistent information-sharing would allow stakeholders to 'connect the dots' before an incident occurs," the report stated, although it noted that privacy concerns remain a major issue.

The report suggested that these multidisciplinary teams could involve teachers, administrators, other staff, students, parents, law enforcement officers, and first responders.

"We need guidance counselors and officers and just people communicating with the kids and getting involved with the students," said the report, quoting a high school student identified as Rhiya G. The task force also called for more venues for kids to talk about bullying.

The task force noted that Pennsylvania falls short on the recommended levels of school nurses, psychologists, and school social workers. For example, while school nurses are often on the front lines of identifying safety threats, there is only one school nurse for every 809 students in the state's public schools. The National Association of School Nurses recommends a 750-1 ratio.

The report calls for increased staffing in these areas but comes with no dollars attached. For much of his 3 years as governor, Wolf, a Democrat, has clashed with Republican-led proposals to increase statewide education funding.

Robin Roberts, director of Parents United for Public Education, a Philadelphia school advocacy group, said she was glad the report addressed the need for more mental health services but called it "an unfunded mandate." She called on the district to stop outsourcing mental health programs and institute its own district-wide services.

While Philadelphia hasn't experienced mass school shootings, she said, bullying is a problem, and more counselors and school nurses and community engagement could be more effective than other security measures.

"We are having active-shooter drills," she said. "They're not going to save a single soul; they're simply not. You can go in a school with all of their front-door security and get to a place with children."Dr. William R. Hite, Superintendent for the School District of Philadelphia helps ring in the new year on the first day of school with (L-R) Angelys Roman, Jarhaim Munoz, Marianna Rodriguez, and Annika Pfeister at the Luis Munoz-Marin School in Philadelphia, Pa., Aug. 27, 2018. Read more

School's in.

With optimism, pomp, and dozens of actual bells sounding a noisy chime, officials formally opened the school year for 130,000 students in Philadelphia public schools Monday morning, marking the first time in modern history that city students returned to school before Labor Day. (That shift, officials said, comes largely to maximize instruction early in the school year.)

"We are beyond excited to start the 2018-19 school year," Ariel Lajara, principal of Munoz Marin Elementary, a K-8 school in North Philadelphia, said to the dignitaries  Mayor Kenney, Superintendent William R. Hite Jr., most of the new school board, and other officials  who gathered in the schoolyard for the traditional bell ringing.

The school year got off to a hot start, with temperatures reaching 90 in Philadelphia Monday, and with heat indexes forecast to reach triple digits, the school district announced that students would be dismissed at 1 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday.

The school year starts with the new governance structure in place. The School Reform Commission is gone; the nine-member, mayoral-appointed Board of Education now presides over the district. Officials hope families will see no practical differences in schools, though Hite said his job has changed as a result.

"It feels like a new start for all of us," Board President Joyce Wilkerson said, adding that the first day "really does set the tone for what's going to happen for the rest of the school year."

City Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell said that the new governance structure gives an air of possibility to the new year.

"It's a different kind of feeling, a different kind of expectation," Blackwell said. "This feels different."

Kenney, who "put it all on the line for public education," by engineering the end of the SRC and a return to local control, was in good spirits, saying the bells reminded him of first days at his own grade school, Our Lady of Mount Carmel at Third and Wolf Streets, where a nun in full habit rang an old-school bell to start every school day, Kenney said.

Fixing the city's schools, where, even amid progress, just a third of students can read on grade level and 67 percent graduate on time, is the key to everything, Kenney said  to lifting people out of poverty, to keeping middle-class families from moving to the suburbs when it comes time for their kids to start kindergarten.

"This is the most important economic investment we can make in our city," said Kenney, adding that without education, "nothing else matters."

Though he wants stability to be the byword for this school year, Hite said, there are some new things, too  instrumental music in all schools, expanded arts opportunities, more modernized classrooms, ninth grade academies in all comprehensive high schools.

And at Munoz Marin, the 650-student school featured some new bells and whistles, too. The school got a new heating and air-conditioning system and other upgrades, including a renovated library. (The school does not, however, have a librarian  fewer than 10 schools in the district now have one.)

As he wove his way through hallways, Lajara, the principal, waved to new students and greeted returning ones warmly, shaking parents' hands and asking about their summers. He said he was delighted by the early start to school, and if the school calendar does move up by another week next year, as he has heard, he would welcome that, too.

"The earlier the better," said Lajara. "If it was up to me, we'd have even more instructional days."

Temperatures hit 90 Monday afternoon and looked to crack the mid-90s the next two days. Teachers' union officials have raised concerns about starting school in August, when the school system's mostly un-air-conditioned buildings have had months to accumulate heat  but school officials pointed out that there's little temperature difference between late August and mid-June, when school used to end.

The August start was fine with Evelyn Rosado, who dropped daughter Ruthmary Vasquez off at Munoz Marin early to start sixth grade.

"Now, it's my vacation," joked Rosado, who hugged her daughter hard.

As students streamed in, the mother and daughter were philosophical about their hopes for the new school year.

"I want her to get good grades," Vasquez said of Ruthmary.

"I want," Ruthmary said, "to make my mom proud."

Officials criss-crossed the city, visiting multiple schools to mark the first day of classes.

At Kensington Health Sciences Academy, teacher Rachel Newman, launching a global leadership program at the school, said she had high hopes for the year. Previously, the school had three career tracks  dental assistant, pharmacy tech, and nursing  but there were not enough spaces for all students to land in one of those tracks, so some students had no academic focus.

The new global leadership track, Newman said, will equip students to take action to solve problems they see in their neighborhoods and in the world.

What things, Wilkerson asked the students, did they want to change?

"I want to fix the violence," said Dynasty Perez, a sophomore. "Children are dying every day."

Board member Leticia Egea-Hinton, who was trained as a social worker, looked at Perez. Becoming an activist is important work, she said.

"I'm doing it on the board," said Egea-Hinton. "That's what I signed up for."Since opening its doors a year ago, Herman's Coffee has collaborated on custom blends of coffee with local businesses that range from a web design studio to a screen-printing shop to Kensington's Martha bar. This month, the Pennsport coffee shop and roastery launched a new bag of beans aimed at funding the fight against childhood cancer: Alex's Blend, the product of a partnership with Alex's Lemonade Stand.

Herman's founder and co-owner Mat Falco said that after he approached the pediatric cancer foundation about working together, representatives visited to sample coffee and determine what the flavor profile would be. Naturally, the final product features citrus notes, and it's also redolent of berries and cocoa.

Falco plans to have the blend available year-round. Ten percent of gross sales of all Alex's Blend coffee and other products, such as T-shirts and tote bags with the Alex's Blend logo, will go to Alex's Lemonade Stand, he said.

Alex's Blend, $18 for a 12-ounce bag at Herman's Coffee, 1313 S. Third St., Philadelphia; hermanscoffee.com.After Novartis genetically engineers each patient's T cells to attack blood cancer cells, the product, Kymriah, is shipped in a bag to the hospital where the one-time therapy is given intravenously. Read more

Novartis on Monday announced European approval for Kymriah, the groundbreaking T-cell therapy for blood cancer developed with the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

However, availability in each country will depend on reimbursement, manufacturing, and clinical training issues that the company is still working out.

Kymriah, or tisagenlecleucel, became the world's first T-cell therapy with the initial approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a year ago for an advanced pediatric blood cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukemia. In May, U.S. approval was expanded to an aggressive adult disease called diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. The European Commission approval is for both cancers.

A one-time treatment, Kymriah is made by siphoning each patient's T cells, genetically programming these immune soldier cells to attack malignant blood cells, then returning them to the patient.

While the immunotherapy is offering new hope to patients who are out of treatment options, the jaw-dropping U.S. list prices have been controversial. The leukemia treatment costs $475,000 plus hospital costs (although reimbursement is based on whether patients are still responding after a month) and lymphoma treatment is $373,000.

The lymphoma price tag was set to match the competition  Gilead Science's Yescarta, which was approved last fall for the same relapsed lymphoma.

Novartis Oncology CEO Liz Barrett said in a statement that the European Commission's approval is "a transformational milestone for patients in Europe in need of new treatment options."

"This approval demonstrates the global impact of the therapies we developed in Philadelphia," Penn immunotherapy pioneer Carl June said in a statement.

Timing for Kymriah availability in each country "will depend on multiple factors" the company's statement said. "Training is already underway at key qualified treatment centers  and Novartis continues to collaborate with national health and reimbursement authorities across Europe."

The existing manufacturing plant is in Morris Plains, N.J. Novartis is pursuing expansion through agreements with Germany's Fraunhofer Institute and a French plant, CELLforCURE.

Fewer than 1,000 pediatric leukemia patients in the U.S. and Europe are candidates for Kymriah. An estimated 6,500 U.S. adults and more in Europe could use it to battle relapsed lymphoma.

In the first half of this year, Kymriah has had $28 million in sales. Novartis hopes the market will ultimately grow to $1 billion a year.FILE  In this Aug. 1, 2018, file photo, Cody Wilson, with Defense Distributed, holds a 3D-printed gun called the Liberator at his shop in Austin, Texas. Read more

The federal judge who last month temporarily blocked a Texas group from posting more files for 3-D-printed guns on its website decided Monday to keep the ban in place until the court case is resolved, meaning Defense Distributed still cannot publish any "blueprints" for making guns with a 3-D printer.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Robert S. Lasnik in Seattle granted a preliminary injunction in the case brought by the Washington state attorney general  along with the attorneys general of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and 17 other states  against Defense Distributed and the U.S. State Department.

"Plaintiffs have a legitimate fear that adding undetectable and untraceable guns to the arsenal of weaponry already available will likely increase the threat of gun violence they and their people experience," the judge wrote, listing participating states that have been the sites of school and workplace shootings or attempts.

His decision follows a week of drama last month when gun-control groups and Democratic politicians scrambled to find a way to stop Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson from posting the files on his website. Wilson had advertised his publication date as Aug. 1 but posted them a few days earlier; thus the files were copied, shared, and reposted before Lasnik's order on July 31 blocking their release.

After a five-year legal battle over the publication of the data, which began during the Obama administration, the State Department in April reached a settlement with Wilson that allowed him to post the files beginning on July 27.

The state prosecutors are arguing that the federal government didn't follow the proper procedure for making the rule change that allowed the files to be posted. They asked the court to declare that change invalid and issue an injunction in place that will last until the proposed modification has gone through the "proper" procedure.

Of the 10 files Wilson posted in July, one was a blueprint that allows users to 3-D-print a working firearm  without passing a background check or using a licensed gun dealer. Made of plastic, such guns don't have serial numbers and can't be detected by a metal detector unless they have metal parts. The guns shoot bullets, just as conventional guns do.

Lasnik's ruling followed written and oral arguments by both sides. In it, he concluded Wilson's posting of the data "would subvert the domestic laws of states with more restrictive firearm controls and threaten the peace and security of the communities where these guns proliferate."

The judge was also dismissive of Wilson's argument that the files are already available online, saying that didn't apply to any he might create in the future or files owned by others.

Wilson responded to the decision Monday afternoon with a tweet highlighting part of the judge's decision accompanied by a single word of commentary: "FARCE."

Wilson contends he has a First Amendment right to publish the files and says his initial effort succeeded because the files were released into the public domain. In recent days, he has sought donations for his organization on Twitter.

Lasnik said the First Amendment argument raises many questions, but he "decline[d] to wade through these issues," instead saying that Wilson's constitutional right to disseminate the files has not been taken away because the files can still be transmitted in any other way. It was this section that Wilson appeared to disagree with on Twitter.

The ruling was a setback not just for Wilson but for the State Department.

Lasnik dismissed the federal government's argument that the injunction was unnecessary because there is already a federal law, the Undetectable Firearms Act, that prohibits guns that don't set off metal detectors.

"The very purpose for which the private defendants seek to release this technical data is to arm every citizen outside of the government's traditional control mechanisms of licenses, serial numbers, and registration. It is the untraceable and undetectable nature of these small firearms that poses a unique danger," he wrote.

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who led the case against the State Department and Defense Distributed, praised the decision, as did gun-control groups.

"Once again, I'm glad we put a stop to this dangerous policy," Ferguson said in a statement. "But I have to ask a simple question: Why is the Trump administration working so hard to allow these untraceable, undetectable 3-D-printed guns to be available to domestic abusers, felons, and terrorists?"

The State Department had originally banned Wilson from posting with an export-law argument, saying the blueprints posed a national security concern if downloaded by people in other countries. Now, the department says it does not regulate the spread of such data within the United States and argued in court filings that the states couldn't prove that they would be irreparably harmed by Wilson's posting of the files.

Trump has not weighed in on the debate beyond a July tweet saying he would look into the issue and that he didn't think printed guns made much sense. His press secretary said at the time that the Justice Department had made the decision to allow the files to be published without consulting Trump.

At a hearing early last week, Lasnik expressed frustration with the case, saying Congress should take action.

Wilson had already agreed to make the downloads inaccessible within Pennsylvania and New Jersey after the attorneys general of those states each sued him. The case in Pennsylvania was on hold while the Washington case proceeded.

The judge's ruling on Monday was also hailed by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. "This nationwide injunction is a tremendous win for public safety and common sense," Shapiro said in a statement. "These 3-D-printed guns represent an immediate threat to our communities, and we will continue the legal fight to ensure they don't end up in the hands of children, criminals, terrorists, and others who cannot legally possess firearms."In most of the obvious ways, the 11 a.m. Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul seemed unremarkable Sunday. The pews were reasonably full for a late August weekend. People prayed and sang. They gave at the offering. The line for communion was long. Children fidgeted.

But later, as Catholics left the soaring building just off the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, it quickly became apparent that faith in a religion is quite different from faith in its leaders.

Word had spread about new accusations from a former Vatican ambassador that Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis had been aware for years of sexual misconduct allegations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then archbishop of Washington; he resigned this summer. The former ambassador, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, called for the pope's resignation.

The pope also was not popular Sunday among those who had time to speak with a reporter.

"I believe he should [resign]. Yes, I do," said Stan Lignowski, 64, of Philadelphia. He attended two Masses Sunday morning, his cane propped beside him on the pew. "My faith is sustained," he added. "I'm really worried about the church."

Even the Rev. Dennis Gill, the basilica parish priest who led the 11 a.m. Mass, called the new reports "distressing" and had concerns about church leadership. "If it's true, I think the Holy Father has lost the capacity to lead, and that calls for severe consequences," he said.

Gill said the recent upheaval in the church has made his faith stronger "because I know that the power of God will prevail."

As they left the basilica, churchgoers could see a small demonstration organized by Catholics for Action and Catholics for Change across the street, involving about 35 protesters seeking an increase in the statute of limitations in child abuse cases. Gill invited four women, all practicing Catholics, to talk with him briefly. He mostly listened as they told him why they had come.

Kelly Fitzgerald, a protester from Philadelphia, said she was molested by a priest while she was a high school student. She also said she'd like to see resignations among top church leaders. "I think that the entire clergy, the entire archaic feudal society that they're living in, needs to go," she said. "We need to start again. It's been done before."

Marilyn Legato, a Gillette, N.J., woman who attended the service, said she thinks it's time for the church to welcome married and female priests. She, too, thought the pope should step down, though her Catholic faith remains strong. "I think it's horrific," she said of recent allegations. "I don't have bad enough words. It's enough to shake your faith, if you don't realize they're just men."

John Kearney, 71, a former trial lawyer who lives in Riverton, said he'd like to write a letter. "Dear Church," it would say. "The truth will set you free, signed, An Anxious Member."

He is reserving judgment on Vigano's letter because of the politics involved, but said the church needs to "clean house," both of priests directly involved in misconduct and of those who covered it up. He feels for the good people who have been tainted by the bad.

"I think there are so many priests and nuns who follow the rules, follow their vocations, do nothing but good for people, and they get tarred with this brush, too, and that's not right," he said.

He wants the church to solve its problems, but his faith remains strong. "Regardless of what comes to the fore, it's my faith. It's not their faith."

In his 11-page letter, Vigano mentioned what he said were the pope's disparaging comments regarding Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia.

"The archbishop enjoyed working with Archbishop Vigano during his tenure as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States and found his service to be marked by integrity to the church," said Ken Gavin, spokesperson for the archdiocese of Philadelphia. "However he can't comment on Archbishop Vigano's recent testimonial as it is beyond his personal experience."

At Mass on Sunday evening at the basilica, Chaput told parishioners that the sex-abuse scandal had led many Catholics to question whether they should leave the church.

But, he said, the church is not about the men who make up its hierarchy  the church is about Jesus Christ.

"And we can't leave him," Chaput said, "because there's nowhere else to go."

In his letter, Vigano described a gathering of papal ambassadors in Rome on June 21, 2013, where he had just enough time to greet the pontiff with "I am the Nuncio to the United States." The pope immediately "assailed me with a tone of reproach, using these words: 'The bishops in the United States must not be ideologized! They must be shepherds!'"

Two days later, Vigano wrote, he asked to see the pope, to try to clarify those remarks. At that meeting, he said, the pope spoke in a friendly, almost affectionate tone.

Vigano wrote that the pope said: "Yes, the bishops in the United States must not be ideologized, they must not be right-wing like the archbishop of Philadelphia, (the pope did not give me the name of the Archbishop) they must be shepherds; and they must not be left-wing'  and he added, raising both arms  'when I say left-wing I mean homosexual.'"

He wrote that the pope asked, "in a deceitful way," what Cardinal McCarrick was like. Vigano said he answered frankly, that there was a thick dossier, that he "corrupted generations of seminarians and priests."

Once back in Washington, Vigano wrote, events became clear to him.

Monsignor John-Francois Lantheaume told him that at a Texas gathering in July, he had met Cardinal McCarrick, who, taking him aside, used almost the same words as had the pope, saying, "The bishops in the United States must not be ideologized, they must not be right-wing, they must be shepherds  "

"I was astounded!" Vigano wrote in his letter. "It was therefore clear that the words of reproach that Pope Francis had addressed to me on June 21, 2013, had been put into his mouth the day before by Cardinal McCarrick. Also the pope's mention 'not like the archbishop of Philadelphia' could be traced to McCarrick, because there had been a strong disagreement between the two of them about the admission to communion of pro-abortion politicians."A new study found landlords in three big cities rejected more than half of tenants who receive affordable housing vouchers. In Philadelphia, most options for voucher recipients are outside of Center City. Read more

When Paul Woods got a housing voucher three years ago, he thought that he'd been given a fresh start after a series of setbacks. Woods, who served in the Marines and is now on disability, had been living with family and friends, bouncing from place to place. But his voucher came with an expiration date: 60 days to find an apartment.

Many landlords rejected Woods, 61, because of his voucher, he said. He found some who accepted vouchers but would show him only certain units  typically, less attractive ones. In Philadelphia, where rental rates are rising and affordable housing options are shrinking, his options were scarce.

Woods missed his deadline but got an extension. He now rents a home in Mount Airy, where he lives with his 5-year-old son. "I'm very happy with where I am now," he said. "There aren't many options out there."

A study released last week by the Urban Institute found that landlords often reject voucher holders, particularly in wealthier neighborhoods, even when the rents are within the range of what the voucher recipient can pay.

Researchers investigated discrimination against voucher holders in Los Angeles, Newark, Fort Worth, Washington, and Philadelphia. The cities were selected because all had large housing-choice voucher programs and a diverse housing stock and population.

In Philadelphia, the study involved calling 422 listings and asking whether the landlord accepted Housing Choice Vouchers, formerly known as Section 8 vouchers. Researchers selected apartments that matched what an average voucher holder pays. Two-thirds of the time, the landlord would not accept a voucher. In an effort to rule out racial discrimination, the calls were all made by a white woman.

"What we've really learned from this is just how hard it is to use a voucher," researcher Martha Galvez said. "And especially how hard it is to use a voucher in a neighborhood that is low-poverty, and might offer good schools and a high-quality environment."

Denial rates were even higher in Fort Worth (78 percent) and Los Angeles (76 percent). Rates were lower in Newark (31 percent) and Washington, D.C. (11 percent).

Philadelphia had the biggest difference  26 percent  in denial rates between high-poverty and low-poverty neighborhoods, the study found.

The Philadelphia Housing Authority recently updated its rental rates to better align with average market rent in each neighborhood. It's allowing some tenants to move into neighborhoods they previously couldn't afford. Still, a look at the rental listings on PHA's website showed scant availability in Center City or its surrounding neighborhoods. (The 1,145 listings represent only a sample of those available.)

"The reality is, in very popular neighborhoods, property owners are able to rent their apartments on the open market, and in many cases these landlords don't want to deal with the regulations that govern our program," said Nichole Tillman, spokeswoman for PHA.

PHA requires regular inspections to ensure that the homes meet federal quality standards. Enrollment in the program can often take several months, which can mean delayed rental collection.

Walter Lapidus, who runs Anchor Realty, which manages 1,400 units citywide, said he constantly gets calls from tenants asking whether property is available for vouchers. "Unfortunately, to the extent our owners can avoid having to deal with the PHA bureaucracy, they do," Lapidus said. "Maybe when the market settles down, that will reverse."

In Philadelphia, it's illegal to discriminate against someone based on "source of income," but there's no law requiring a landlord to enroll in the Housing Choice Voucher Program.

When the Penn Wynne apartments in Wynnefield displaced tenants for renovations in June 2017, hundreds of people who receive housing assistance went looking for apartments in the area, said Rasheedah Phillips, managing attorney for Community Legal Services. Phillips said many of the tenants with vouchers couldn't find landlords who would take them and wound up having to move out of the neighborhood.

"As we see mass evictions and displacement of buildings increase in Philly, this will increasingly become an issue for tenants looking to quickly lease up elsewhere to avoid homelessness, and facing rejections from landlords who 'don't take vouchers,'" Phillips said.

Philadelphia Media Network is one of 19 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the city's push towards economic justice. See all of our reporting at https://brokeinphilly.org.Brigitte K. Nzali braids the hair of a customer at the African & American Braiding, Inc in Blackwood, N.J. Nzali, from Cameroon, has been fighting for 17 yrs to get the state to understand that braiding should not fall under cosmetology and hair styling because no chemicals are used and because she says its a "cultural tradition" and not a styling technique to be taught in beauty school. Read more

Gov. Murphy has conditionally vetoed a unanimously passed bill that would have lifted the requirement in New Jersey that professional hair braiders complete 1,200 hours of training at a beauty school  which costs upward of $17,000  and suggested that lawmakers consider an amendment that would reduce the required amount of training to 40 to 50 hours.

"I commend the Legislature for taking steps to expand economic opportunities for African American women, immigrants from African and Caribbean countries, and others by easing potentially burdensome licensing requirements that may prevent many from engaging in the practice of hair braiding.  At the same time, it is important to balance opening economic opportunity with maintaining consumer protections," Murphy said in a statement Monday before he sent the bill back to the Legislature.

Murphy proposed that experienced braiders be required to receive 40 hours of training, and said the instruction should be focused on sanitation, decontamination, and infection control. Those new to the trade should obtain 50 hours of training, including styling techniques, he said.

Hair braiding is similar to the beauty culture, barbering, manicuring, and skin-care professions, which are subject to limited regulations that ensure their customers are not harmed, Murphy said.

The bill passed the Legislature last month after several hair braiders teamed up with the nonprofit Institute of Justice, which battles what it sees as government overreach and abuse, to lobby for changes in the licensure law.

Brigitte Nzali, the longtime owner of the African & American Braiding salon in Blackwood, testified at several hearings, saying that hair braiding was cultural, passed on through generations, and that the profession should not be subject to regulation that's overly expensive and restrictive.

The conservative Americans for Prosperity also pushed for lifting the requirements, saying they were anti-business.

Twenty-five other states have enacted such an initiative, and Pennsylvania lawmakers have considered revising that state's hair-braiding regulations.

Nzali said that she understands the need for some regulation and said that 40 hours of training might be appropriate.

"There should be some training for sanitation, and to make sure the sink is clean," she said Monday. "If there are no rules, people can do anything. There also should be some training in technique, to teach not to pull the hair too tight, and to do the braiding to keep the hair healthy."

Assemblywoman Angela McKnight (D., Hudson), who sponsored the bill, said that she plans to meet with her constituents to get their input on the governor's recommendation. "I'm optimistic and will continue to fight for what's right for my constituents," she said.

McKnight, who wears braids, said that at least 50 braiders testified before lawmakers and said the licensing requirements have forced many of them out of business.

Assembly Bill 3754 also called for the creation of a Hair Braiding Establishment Advisory Committee to look into limited regulations or recommendations on best practices. But Murphy said that he would prefer that two experienced hair braiders be seated on the Board of Cosmetology and Hairstyling. That board regulates beauty salons and related businesses, and is charged with overseeing hair-braiding shops.

Under his recommendation, the board would be increased from 11 to 13 members.

"The board's current composition does not assure the presence or participation of an individual with hair-braiding expertise. It would make sense to remedy this shortcoming, particularly given the importance of hair and hair care to communities of color," Murphy said in his statement.Former U.S. President Barack Obama delivers his speech at the 16th Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture at the Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa, Tuesday, July 17, 2018. Read more

Former President Obama on Wednesday released his endorsements for Democratic nominees in the upcoming midterm elections, and in Pennsylvania, one of the candidates is running for two seats at the same time.

Obama endorsed Tina Davis for the state Senate's Sixth District, which covers parts of Bucks County. Davis is also seeking another term in the state House of Representatives, where she represents the 141st Legislative District, which also includes Bucks County. (Obama did not endorse her in that race).

Davis was first elected to the House in 2010.

She told the Bucks County Courier Times in May that she was seeking two seats because she was encouraged by the high number of women running for election in Pennsylvania. (Davis is co-founder of the group Emerge Pennsylvania, which trains Democratic women to run for office).

Sen. Robert "Tommy" Tomlinson, an incumbent Republican and Davis' opponent in the Senate race, criticized her for running for multiple seats. He told the Courier Times: "She is making it clear that she cares less about serving the public and more about ensuring she has a job. The truth is that if Tina Davis felt she could win the Senate seat, she wouldn't run for both."

Davis told the Courier Times that if she wins both seats, she will step down from one, forcing a special election for that seat.

Other Pennsylvania Democratic nominees endorsed by Obama on Wednesday include:

Madeleine Dean , Fourth Congressional District (Montgomery County)

Susan Wild, Seventh Congressional District (Lehigh County)

Liz Hanbidge, State House District 61 (Montgomery County)

Carolyn Comitta, State House District 156 (Chester County)

And in New Jersey, Obama endorsed:Days after Christina Carlin-Kraft's violent death inside her Main Line apartment, police across Southeastern Pennsylvania continue their search for two men connected to her in the final days of her life.

On Monday, investigators released surveillance images of an unidentified man they believe spent time with the 36-year-old model before she was strangled in her Ardmore condo-apartment building Aug. 22. Another man was being sought by investigators as the suspect in a burglary that was reported at Carlin-Kraft's apartment days before her death, according to law enforcement sources.

>>READ MORE: Slain Ardmore model's father says she was the 'brightest light that ever lived'

The Montgomery County District Attorney's Office said Monday that Carlin-Kraft was with an unidentified man early on Aug. 22. The two met near Broad and Locust Streets in Center City, and may have taken a ride-share to Carlin-Kraft's apartment, according to the District Attorney's Office.

Law enforcement sources said last week that surveillance video from Carlin-Kraft's building shows her and a man entering early on Aug. 22  hours before police found her body  but does not show him leaving. Investigators believe he jumped from the balcony of Carlin-Kraft's second-floor apartment.

Meanwhile, investigators have issued an arrest warrant for Andre Melton, 31, of Southwest Philadelphia, in connection with a burglary that Carlin-Kraft reported at her apartment on Aug. 18. As of Monday, Melton was not considered a suspect in her death, according to law enforcement officials.

Last week, police in Lower Merion put out an alert for a vehicle reportedly tied to Melton, a burgundy Kia Sorento with Virginia plates. On Friday afternoon, police in Upper Darby spotted that vehicle after an automatic license-plate reader mounted on a police vehicle scanned the Kia's plate, said Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood.

The officer who spotted the Kia was traveling in the opposite direction, Chitwood said, in the area of Clearbrook Avenue and Garrett Road. By the time the officer was able to turn around, he had lost sight of the vehicle.

No additional sightings of Melton or the Kia were reported.

In reporting the robbery last week, Carlin-Kraft told police in Lower Merion that she had taken a ride-share to dinner at the Sofitel hotel in Center City on Aug. 18, but couldn't remember how she returned home, according to a law enforcement source.

Surveillance video from her building shows Carlin-Kraft returning early the next morning, propped up by a man investigators believe is Melton, sources said. The man is seen later that morning leaving the building with bags believed to be filled with Carlin-Kraft's belongings.

On Aug. 22, Philadelphia police helped Lower Merion officers serve a search warrant at Melton's home in the 6500 block of Theodore Street in Southwest Philadelphia's Elmwood section, sources said.

There, they took another man and a woman into custody for narcotics possession, and discovered items reported missing by Carlin-Kraft, including designer purses, jewelry, and a Gucci belt, the source said.

They also found evidence that the credit cards Carlin-Kraft had reported stolen in the burglary had been used in Philadelphia and Delaware County by people at the Theodore Street address.

Hours later, when investigators went to speak with Carlin-Kraft about the burglary, they found her body.

As investigators continued their search Monday, Carlin-Kraft's family continued to mourn her loss.

In an obituary published Sunday in the Atlantic City Press, the family described her as a "small-town girl" who found success in New York City as a budding model. Her death, the obituary states, "brought expressions of grief from family members, friends and former design and fashion colleagues from Manhattan to Los Angeles," as well as her native South Jersey.

Carlin-Kraft had lived at Cambridge Square, 120 Sibley Ave., for about a year, according to a close friend. The unit was owned by Alexander Ciccotelli, whom she had been dating for several years. He was identified as her fiance in her obituary.

A relative who answered the door at Ciccotelli's family home in Wynnewood declined to comment Monday.

"Whether spending time with loved ones, caring for animals, or lending her talents to design, Christina carried herself with warmth and grace," her obituary states.

Carlin-Kraft's funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Holy Trinity Parish: St. James Church, 6415 Atlantic Ave., Ventnor, N.J. Burial will follow at Laurel Memorial Park Cemetery, Egg Harbor Township.

Anyone with information on either suspect is asked to call Montgomery County detectives at 610-278-3368 or Lower Merion police at 610-649-1000.The American flag at half-staff at the White House on Monday afternoon. Read more

While the White House faced criticism for flying its flag at full-staff following the death of John McCain  ultimately lowering it again Monday  Pennsylvania and New Jersey ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff to honor the longtime Republican senator from Arizona.

Gov. Wolf has ordered all flags at the Capitol Complex and public buildings and grounds throughout the state to fly at half-staff through sunset on Sunday. Gov. Murphy, ordered flags to be lowered on Wednesday, which would have been McCain's 82nd birthday.

"Sen. John McCain dedicated his entire life to his country, and we owe him a debt of gratitude for his sacrifice and contributions over decades of service," Wolf said in a statement. McCain died Saturday, a day after his family said the senator was discontinuing treatment for brain cancer. "Sen. McCain embodied the core principles of American citizenship, and he put his country over himself at every turn. He will be missed."

While flags were flown at half-staff at other federal buildings in Washington Monday morning, the White House returned its flag to full-staff. Late Monday afternoon, following criticism, the White House reversed course, again lowering its flag to half-staff and issuing a proclamation stating that the flag would remain at half-staff in honor of McCain until his burial.

According to guidelines from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the flag is to be lowered "after the death of a United States senator" on the day of and day after the official's death.

States also often honor national figures with public displays of mourning, but their timing can differ from the federal government's. Other states in the region that have lowered their flags in honor of McCain include Delaware, Maryland, and New York.

The White House has not responded to a request for comment. President Trump did not issue a presidential proclamation for McCain, which is typically done to honor the death of a noteworthy national figure, until late Monday afternoon, amid the backlash over the White House's response.

Monday's proclamation called for flags "at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the federal government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States" to remain at half-staff until "sunset, on the day of interment."

McCain is expected to be buried Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

The Washington Post reported Sunday night that Trump had previously nixed such a proclamation in favor of a tweet that simply offered his "deepest sympathies" to McCain's family. According to the report, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, chief of staff John F. Kelly, and other White House aides had advocated for a statement referring to McCain as a "hero."

"Another reminder that Trump views the presidency and its powers exclusively as something for his personal use, not as a national trust that at times should transcend the individual in office," wrote my colleague Jonathan Tamari, who came across a single man playing a bagpipe Sunday in front of the Capitol to honor McCain's passing.

McCain earned Trump's ire after issuing a dramatic "no" vote back in July 2017 that proved decisive in keeping the Affordable Care Act alive, but Trump's dislike of the Arizona senator predates his presidency. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said he didn't consider McCain a war hero because he had been captured when his plane was shot down over Vietnam.

"He's not a war hero. He's a war hero because he was captured," Trump said. "I like people that weren't captured."Former Pennsylvania state Treasurer Rob McCord is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday, August 28, 2019 after pleading guilty to federal corruption charges Read more

HARRISBURG  When news spread three years ago that Rob McCord, Pennsylvania's onetime state treasurer, wore an FBI recorder in hope of exposing a pay-to-play culture in Harrisburg, it sent a chill through the Capitol.

McCord had been caught illegally shaking down potential donors, and prosecutors were eager to use him as bait to lure others into the trap of an ambitious public corruption probe.

But McCord's brief turn as a government cooperator instead ended in a spectacular debacle, one that cut short the only case the treasurer helped to build that resulted in a trial.

Now, as McCord prepares to be sentenced Tuesday before U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III for his own crimes, what exactly his cooperation delivered and how happy prosecutors were with his performance could become the defining factors in whether he will receive jail time.

McCord faces a range of 57 to 71 months in prison under federal guidelines, according to recent court filings. He could receive far less if federal prosecutors advocate for him to receive credit for his assistance in the probe. Last week, they declined to comment on whether they will do so.

McCord's lawyer, Robert E. Welsh Jr., said he will ask the judge to consider his lengthy public service. McCord, he said, has tried to lead a productive life since his political downfall, taking classes and working as an occasional yoga instructor in North Carolina, where he now lives.

"We're going to demonstrate that he is committed to serving other people," Welsh said last week. "What motivated him to get into public service was really public service. That's not to say that justifies his actions here, but the law is such that the judge has to consider every factor of his background."

That background is fraught.

Before his world came crashing down, McCord, a onetime Democrat from Montgomery County, boasted the kind of political resume that could have propelled him to higher office. A Harvard University graduate with a background in high finance, he was elected state treasurer in 2008 and quickly made a name for himself as a forward-thinking, fast-talking elected official fluent in the worlds of both venture capitalism and politics.

Though he could be aggressive, he also possessed a people-person streak that made him accessible and likable. It was little surprise when he threw his name into the governor's race in 2014.

The race ended in his political undoing. Facing a crowded field in the Democratic primary  among the candidates a wealthy, self-funded opponent, Tom Wolf, who ultimately snagged the nomination and became governor  McCord became desperate in his quest to raise campaign cash. And then he became reckless.

What he didn't know was that federal agents were secretly recording his conversations as part of a sweeping pay-to-play investigation in the Capitol that, unbeknownst to anyone in political circles, had already ensnared John H. Estey, onetime chief of staff to Gov. Ed Rendell. Estey, who had surreptitiously agreed to wear a recording device, led federal authorities to McCord.

In 2015, McCord abruptly resigned his post, and later pleaded guilty to attempting to strong-arm campaign donors in an effort to bolster his flagging campaign. His cooperation with federal authorities led to further charges in the sweeping probe, including against former Treasurer Barbara Hafer and Chester County businessman Richard Ireland, a little-known but wealthy donor and fund-raiser whom McCord had secretly recorded in late 2014.

Prosecutors accused Ireland of attempting to bribe McCord through campaign donations, as well as a job in the private sector, in exchange for the then-treasurer's help in landing multimillion-dollar state contracts. To prove their case, federal authorities needed to show that there was an explicit quid pro quo between McCord and Ireland.

But in his turn as the star witness at Ireland's trial last year, McCord turned out to be a defensive and unpredictable witness. He painted a deeply cynical portrait of how business sometimes gets done in Harrisburg, testifying at one point: "This is a weird business. You say, 'You lie down with dogs, get up with fleas'  but you have to lie down, in a sense, with anybody in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania to get stuff done."

But he also came off as too talkative and too willing to make excuses  including for his own crimes.

Under cross-examination by Ireland's lawyer, Reid Weingarten, McCord admitted he had to be convinced that he did something wrong. He told the jury that he had read a book called Three Felonies a Day, by Harvey A. Silverglate, which "convinced me absolutely that you could be committing not just a crime, but a felony, without intending to hurt anybody, without intending to even cross the chalk lines. And I thought, I'm one of those people."

Then McCord, still under cross-examination, said he never believed that his dealings with Ireland involved a quid pro quo relationship.

That delivered a devastating blow to a case that relied upon McCord's admitting plainly that what he and Ireland were discussing was a bribe. The former treasurer's equivocation caused such heartburn among prosecutors that Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Consiglio later turned on his own witness  launching a string of questions about additional quid pro quo arrangements that McCord had been caught on tape discussing with other potential donors.

Although McCord was never charged with crimes in connection with those additional dealings, prosecutors could urge Jones to consider them as he crafts the former treasurer's sentence next week.

One of those alleged arrangements involved a potential donor Consiglio described only as a prominent Republican donor with business interests in the "education marketplace." Though the man was never identified in court, Consiglio detailed McCord's purported hustle in a sidebar conversation with Jones during Ireland's trial  a transcript of which was obtained by the Inquirer and Daily News.

It happened in late 2013, when McCord was surreptitiously being recorded by Estey, who was purporting to help McCord raise cash for his gubernatorial campaign.

"The deal was, Rob McCord would, if he was elected governor, fire three people from the Department of Education," Consiglio said.

The initial discussion was to exchange the firings for a campaign donation of $25,000. But, the prosecutor said, McCord put a bigger price tag on the deal.

"When the price came up, the donor said $25,000," Consiglio recounted. "Rob McCord countered and said, 'For that kind of ask, it's a hundred thousand.'"

The nursing-home executive, Ross Nese, has repeatedly declined comment. Gureghian's lawyer, H. Marc Tepper of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, said in a letter last week that his client had "not been involved in any wrongdoing, nor has he been charged with any criminal offense."

McCord described parts of that deal on the witness stand under prompting from Consiglio and eventually revised his earlier answers to admit that he had engaged in quid pro quo behavior. But that reversal came too late to salvage the government's case against Ireland.

As soon as prosecutors rested their case, and before Ireland's lawyer could begin putting on their defense for the jury, Jones dismissed all 79 counts Ireland faced, saying that the government had failed to show there was an explicit agreement between Ireland and McCord to swap donations for state contracts. It was McCord's own testimony, Jones noted, that helped doom the case.

Neither McCord nor another important witness in the case "performed as the government hoped they would," the judge said. "They were the clear foundation of the government's case going into this trial, and their collapse left the government in an untenable position scrambling to cobble together an alternative theory. This was ultimately an impossible task."

Come Tuesday, McCord will find out just how much prosecutors plan to hold that collapse against him.

Staff writer Craig R. McCoy contributed to this article.A protest Sunday against President Trump&'s appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court attracted more than 200 participants to the late-morning rally in Center City. Read morePope Francis holds his weekly general audience in the Pope Paul VI hall at the Vatican, Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2018. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini) Read more

It's the first day of classes for Philadelphia public schools, which means that students, parents, and teachers across the city are bracing themselves for the start of another year. I wish them luck on this hot, still-summery day. Unfortunately our news this morning includes updates on yet another mass shooting in the U.S., this time at a video game tournament in Florida, where three were killed and nine more shot. Plus, sexual misconduct allegations are rocking the Catholic church as some believers question the leadership of the Pope.

Reading this online? Sign up here to get this newsletter delivered to your inbox every morning.

 Aubrey Nagle (@aubsn, morningnewsletter@philly.com)

When the rebuild began two summers ago, the Wells Fargo Center was certainly in need of a makeover.

The $250 million mission to revamp the venue with new seats, sound systems, eating experiences, and more is a slow and steady race, not to be completed until the summer of 2020.

But this summer's updates are some of the project's crown jewels, including a new glass wall with views of the skyline.

Shots rang out at an online video game tournament as it was being livestreamed from a Florida mall Sunday. A gunman believed to be 24-year-old David Katz of Baltimore killed two others and then himself during the rampage.

Nine other people were wounded by gunfire and all were in stable condition Sunday evening.

The mass shooting raised questions of security for esports events, which some top players say hasn't caught up with the rising industry.

A former Vatican ambassador to the United States has alleged Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis were aware of sexual misconduct allegations against an American cardinal years before he resigned this summer.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano published an 11-page letter about the allegations through two conservative Catholic sites Sunday and called for Pope Francis to resign.

Pope Francis declined to confirm or deny Vigano's claims Sunday. Following the accusations, Catholics attending Mass at a Philadelphia church questioned his ability to lead.

What you need to know today

Through Your Eyes | #OurPhilly

We're over the moon for this shot, @blurredpixels_ig.

Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and we'll pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout out!

Thats Interesting

Opinions

"We continually ask members of a community buckling under the crush of poverty and mass incarceration and systemic racism and negligence to heal themselves."  Columnist Helen Ubinas on why Philly is burying its children instead of its weapons.

Ohio State University sullied its legacy by giving football coach Urban Meyer a slap on the wrist for lying about knowledge of his assistant coach's domestic abuse allegations, writes columnist Bob Ford.

Columnist Ronnie Polaneczky writes that Pennsylvania could use another grand jury investigation, this time to ask why legislators are blocking bills that would help victims of childhood sex abuse.

What were reading

Your Daily Dose of | Neon

Neon signs arent as popular as they used to be thanks to energy-saving alternatives. But local glass benders are keeping the tradition glowing bright, for now.Kate McClure and her boyfriend Mark D'Amico (center) started a GoFundme page for Johnny Bobbitt Jr. (left), a homeless man who helped Kate when she was stranded. Kate ran out of gas and Johnny spent his last $20 to buy gas for her at this CITGO station. . ELIZABETH ROBERTSON / Philadelphia Inquirer Read more

On an October night in 2017, around 11p.m., 27-year-old Kate McClure was driving into Philadelphia on I-95 from New Jersey when her car ran out of gas. She didn't have any cash. Lucky for her, Johnny Bobbitt, a homeless man sitting next to the I-95 exit, used his last $20 to help her.

This could have been a vignette about kindness but what happened next is an ugly reminder that in America, everyone has the right to make choices with their money except for the poor and people in addiction.

In gratitude, McClure and her boyfriend, Mark D'Amico, 37, at the time, launched a GoFundMe page to help Bobbitt. The story went viral and the page raised more than $400,000. McClure spoke to Good Morning America and other outlets, explaining that she would consult with a lawyer and a financial adviser about the best ways for Bobbitt to use the money.

Spending money wisely is not usually a prerequisite in GoFundMe campaigns. For example, the campaign for Prashanth Raju, a man who was critically injured in a car accident in Delaware, has already raised more than $184,000 and states clearly that, "All the funds are going directly to Prashanth Raju's bank account for him to use."

Meanwhile, Bobbitt's money is managed by relative strangers.

The couple said that they would open two trusts in Bobbitt's name and give him an allowance, as if he were a child. Instead of getting a home, which was Bobbitt's top priority, he found himself living in a camper on the couple's property in Burlington County. Instead of getting his dream car  a 1999 Ford Ranger  he was given a used SUV that broke down. Both vehicles were registered in McClure's name so that he couldn't sell them.

What's aggravating here is that Bobbitt was trusted completely with his money when it was time to help McClure with his last $20. But, when the money was to be used for his own benefit, people decided he couldn't be trusted and should be told how and when to spend the cash. D'Amico told the Inquirer that giving a person in addiction the money would be like "giving him a loaded gun."

Less than a year later, Bobbitt is back on the streets and using drugs. (GoFundMe is investigating possible misuse of funds  but, for the sake of this conversation, let's put all that aside and assume that McClure and D'Amico acted with only the purest intentions.)

The idea that poor people can't, or shouldn't, handle their own money  especially if it came from a benefactor  is on brand for America.

Every year, there is a discussion about restricting food stamps to only pay for healthy foods and requiring people who receive food stamps to pass drug tests. God forbid a poor person will enjoy a cold Coke  like millions of Americans every day  or that people who use drugs won't go hungry.

One counter-argument is that affluent people indulge  drink, eat unhealthy food, gamble  using their own money while poor people use taxpayers' money, hence it is justifiable to limit its use to necessities. But rich people get money from the government all the time. Just look at the subsidies to homeowners. Every year $134 billion of tax money goes to homeowners  the majority to rich people who own multiple, expensive houses. That's more than the total budget of food stamps, low-income housing tax credits, housing vouchers, and emergency cash assistance combined.

Unlike programs that benefit the poor, programs that benefit the rich don't come with any strings attached  no restriction on how the money can be used or politicians calling for homeowners to be drug tested to get the benefit.

But Bobbitt is not only poor, he is also a person in addiction. What if he used the money that people donated to buy drugs?

Short answer: That's none of your business. People spend money in ways that some might disapprove of all the time. Holier-than-thou D'Amico even admits that he "borrowed" some of the donated money to gamble at SugarHouse casino.

The longer answer is that for addiction treatment to succeed, a person needs to be ready for treatment  mentally, emotionally, socially  and treatment needs to be readily accessible (which is hardly the case in the Philadelphia area). Forcing people into treatment is a recipe for failure. But perhaps the key for recovery is recognizing the relapsing nature of addiction. Recovery and treatment is not "one-and-done," but a process with steps forward and backward.

McClure and D'Amico called their GoFundMe page "paying it forward." The only thing that was paid forward is paternalism and stigma. Instead of creating a compassionate environment for Bobbitt's journey in recovery, his relapses became news. Imagine struggling through recovery, relapsing, and then feeling that you are disappointing thousands of people.

On Good Morning America, Bobbitt said he felt as if he had won the lottery. But, as Bobbitt's story shows, if you are poor and in addiction, even winning the lottery is not enough.

Philadelphia Media Network is one of 19 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the city's push towards economic justice. See all of our reporting at https://brokeinphilly.orgNew Jersey Governor Phil Murphy (D-NJ) should acknowledge the grave constitutional violations occurring in New Jersey's schools and lead the effort to sit down with the plaintiffs and work out a plan to begin the process of integrating our schools. Read more

I came to America as an immigrant in the 1970s, settling with my family in East Orange. As I began to attend the public schools, I experienced firsthand the two different worlds in which New Jersey students remarkably live. My junior high school and high school housed classrooms that were under-resourced, stocked with outdated books and obsolete equipment. A mere 20 minutes way in Livingston and Maplewood, students attended well-supplied and well-equipped public schools, some of the highest-performing in the state.

Decades later, these disparities still exist and are undergirded by extreme racial and socioeconomic segregation. While East Orange is nearly 90 percent black with a median annual household income of only $40,000, Livingston is more than 75 percent white with a median annual household income of $129,000. These types of statistics are replicated across the state.

Children of color living in urban centers attend vastly different schools than their suburban counterparts who live in whiter and wealthier communities.

I still wonder what opportunities I would have had if I had attended school in an affluent suburb. I succeeded thanks to the values instilled in me during my childhood in Jamaica, strong mentorship, and a lot of luck.

Many of my classmates weren't so lucky. They dropped out of school and, driven by a lack of hope and resources, too many made poor choices presented in their immediate environment and ended up involved on the wrong side of the criminal justice system.

New Jersey's segregated schools are not a political issue. They are a civil rights crisis.

Schools in New Jersey are the sixth most segregated in the nation for African Americans and seventh most segregated for Latinos. Our schools are more segregated than those in the South.

The ability of all children to get a quality education in our public schools is a key part of achieving the American dream. This is part of the dream my parents immigrated to the United States to secure.

New Jersey's students, like my own two children, will compete against children from all over the world. All children, including my own, learn best when they attend diverse schools and can make friends with students from different races, backgrounds, and cultural experiences. It better prepares them for the increasingly multicultural world they will face as adults.

Attacking the problem of school segregation is essential to ensuring every student in our state is equipped to succeed  including children in our urban centers. We should not lose young minds simply because they were raised and educated in Newark, Trenton, East Orange, Jersey City, or Camden.

We've tackled this problem indirectly through enforcement of New Jersey's fair housing laws, known as the Mount Laurel doctrine. During my years as an elected official in Westampton, I have been a forceful advocate for these laws despite fierce opposition.

We now need focused solutions for our segregated classrooms. Gov. Phil Murphy has a historic opportunity to act on this issue.

In May, civil rights groups  including the Latino Action Network and the NAACP  joined with concerned parents to file a landmark lawsuit against the state of New Jersey to integrate our schools.

New Jersey's Constitution was the first in the nation to explicitly prohibit racial segregation in public schools. The N.J. Supreme Court has ruled that even implicit segregation violates students' rights. Mercer County Assignment Judge Mary C. Jacobson has given the governor until the end of August to respond to this lawsuit.

Rather than take an adversarial stance, he should acknowledge the grave constitutional violations occurring in New Jersey's schools and lead the effort to sit down with plaintiffs and work out a plan to begin the process of integrating our schools. This will not only save taxpayers the expense of protracted litigation, it will also allow us to start focusing on solutions.

I was encouraged that the governor issued a statement recognizing the deep segregation in our schools shortly after the lawsuit was filed in May. Now, he needs to breathe life into those progressive words and follow up with concrete actions.

The children of New Jersey have waited long enough. Now is the time for the grown-ups to resolve one of the central civil rights challenges confronting our state.

Carolyn V. Chang is the immediate past president of the Association of Black Women Lawyers of New Jersey (ABWL) and currently serves as chair of ABWL's Social Justice Committee. She served as a member of the Westampton Township, Burlington County, governing body, where she was mayor from 2013-2016.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...An image of US President Donald Trump, colouring the American flag incorrectly, has gone viral on the social media, earning him flak from several corners.

The President was photographed adding a blue stripe to the outline of the US star-spangled banner instead of filling in the 13 alternating red and white stripes.

The incident took place during the POTUS' (President Of The United States) visit to a childrens hospital in Nationwide Childrens Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Alex Azar, the Secretary of US Department of Health and Human Services, tweeted photos of Trump with US First Lady Melania Trump at the hospital, colouring pictures including the US flag.

The opioid crisis is one of our top priorities at HHS, with a drumbeat of action on the full range of efforts where we can assist local communities. Today, I joined @POTUS & @FLOTUS in Ohio to learn how states and communities are responding to the challenge of opioid addiction.

The opioid crisis is one of our top priorities at HHS, with a drumbeat of action on the full range of efforts where we can assist local communities. Today, I joined @POTUS & @FLOTUS in Ohio to learn how states and communities are responding to the challenge of opioid addiction. pic.twitter.com/NwxSoeNznA  Alex Azar (@SecAzar) August 25, 2018

Soon enough, Twitterati pointed out the error, with images zooming on the misplaced blue stripe. The President has colored his flag wrong. That is all, the Twitter user Talia, wrote.

The President has colored his flag wrong. That is all. pic.twitter.com/wWXBgR9I6V  Talia (@2020fight) August 25, 2018

Hilarious theories went viral following this.

One section of Twitterati claimed that Trump was attempting to colour in the Russian flag, which is made up of three horizontal layers of white, blue and red.

Another theory suggested he was issuing a coded message about John McCain a few days before the senators death from brain cancer.

While some simply said that Trump was trying to copy the child sitting next to the table.

However Trump supporters, some thought that the President was paying tributes to the police with the added blue line.New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday issued a notice to Facebook owned WhatsApp, IT and Finance ministry asking why a grievance officer in India has not been appointed yet by the instant messaging app. The apex court has sought a detailed reply from them within four weeks.

The Centre had last week asked WhatsApp to set up a local entity with a grievance officer and find a technical solution to trace the origin of fake messages.

WhatsApp CEO Chris Daniels was recently in India and met top government official including union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to discuss the ways to clamp down on fake news on its messaging platform that had led to series of horrific crimes in the country like mob-lynching.

The government has sent out two notices to the Facebook-owned company directing it to take urgent measures to curb false information and rumours being spread on the messaging platform.

The IT ministry has, in the past, said that the platform cannot escape its responsibility for such rampant abuse and needed to find originators of provocative messages. It had also warned that in the absence of adequate checks, it will treat the messaging platform as abettor of rumour propagation and legal consequences will follow.

In its response, WhatsApp has informed the government that it is building a local team, including India head, as part of steps to check fake news circulation even as it did not meet the key demand of identifying message originators.

Apart from education and advocacy programmes, WhatsApp has also introduced new features to let its users identify forwarded messages, restricted number of forwards at a time, and brought out full-page ads giving "easy tips" to spot fake news.

With agency inputsCHENNAI: MK Alagiri has threatened his estranged brother and DMK working president MK Stalin of 'consequences' if he is not included in the party. Revolting against his brother, Alagiri said that he wants to join the party because he wants to save it.

"Earlier Kalaignar was there. Now we have to save the party and we want to join it. If they don't include us in the party, they will have to face the consequences," the expelled DMK leader said.

Alagiri had earlier claimed that the party led by Stalin is not willing to take him back. "They do not (DMK led by its working president M K Stalin) appear to want to take me back," he had said. Alagiri had said that the next step that he will be taking will be decided after the rally on September 5. He said that functionaries from all districts will be consulted and a decision will then be taken.

Alagiri has been revolting against his brother at a time when Stalin is set to be elected as the party president. A former minister, Alagiri was expelled in 2014 by Karunanidhi for indulging in anti-party activities and making derogatory remarks. Karunanidhi had then named Stalin as his political heir. The transition of power was formalised when Stalin was made the working president of the party in January 2017 after Karunanidhi's health did not permit him to preside over the affairs of the party.

Soon after Karunanidhi's death, Alagiri claimed that despite being the working president of the DMK, Stalin had not been 'working'. Stalin, however, hit back at his brother's comments and claimed that he has been working relentlessly for the DMK since the day he was made the party's working president.

On Sunday, Stalin filed his nomination for the post at Anna Arivalayam at the party headquarters in Chennai. He is likely to be elected during the party's General Council meeting on August 28 in Chennai.

Before filing the papers, Stalin along with senior party colleagues TR Baalu and A Raja visited Dayalu Ammal, Karunanidhi's wife, at her Gopalapuram residence. Later they also met party veteran and general secretary K Anbhazhagan and headed straight to the memorials of DMK founder and former Chief Minister CN Annadurai and Karunanidhi at the Marina beach-front and paid floral tributes.

The names of Stalin as the party chief and Duraimurugan as the party treasurer were proposed by all 65 DMK district secretaries.New Delhi: Expenses incurred on the security cover of BJP president Amit Shah cannot be disclosed, the Central Information Commission (CIC) has held citing RTI Act exemption clauses of "personal information" and "safety".

The commission has denied the appeal of a petitioner who had also sought to know the rules governing extension of security cover to a private individual and the authorities, which foot the bill of such cover to a private individual.

The application was filed by Deepak Juneja on July 5, 2014, when Shah was not a member of the Rajya Sabha. He had also sought to know the list of people who have been given security by the government.

The information was denied by the Home Ministry citing Section 8(1)(g) that exempts from disclosure information that would endanger the life or physical safety of any person.

The ministry had also cited Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, which exempts information that is personal, would cause unwarranted invasion of privacy and is not linked to any "public activity".

In its previous order in the matter, the CIC had upheld denial of information as it was not disclosed before Parliament.

Juneja challenged the CIC order in the Delhi High Court where Justice Vibhu Bakhru set aside the transparency panel's order stating that the commission was first required to examine whether information sought by the petitioner was exempted under clauses (g) and (j) of Section 8(1) of the RTI Act.

It lobbed the matter before the CIC again to consider private contentions in the light of the exemption clauses of Section 8(1) of the act. The commission again heard Juneja and the Home Ministry in the matter.

Juneja submitted that the grant of security cover to eminent persons under threat is the duty of the state in cases where the beneficiary holds a high office as they cannot perform their vital functions while reeling under threat, Information Commissioner Yashovardhan Azad noted in the order.

However, the appellant submits that defraying cost of elite Z+ security cover to private persons must not be from the state exchequer, Azad pointed out.

"Amit Shah, who happens to be the national president of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) has been granted Z+ security cover by the MHA since July 2014 despite him not being holding any constitutional or statutory office," Juneja said, adding that since it was public money he has the right to know.

The ministry said the respondent's contention is that revelation of expenses incurred in providing security cover would reveal the intricacies, and magnitude and rigour of security cover.

It said rules governing the entitlement of grant of security cover and process of threat assessment among others are framed in consultation with central security agencies, which are exempted from the purview of the RTI Act, and disclosure would nullify the exemptions.

"Judicial notice can be taken of the fact that the protectees are already facing the highest level of threat and that is why they have been accorded with the highest level of security cover," Azad, a former IB special director, held.

He said revelation of names of protectees if not adding on to the danger to their life or physical safety would be counterproductive to the efficacy of security cover.

The names of private Z+ protectees are personal since they do not owe the security cover to their public office but private position in life, the information commissioner said. "The public eminence of the private person, threat perception and the potential harm... Are key determinative factors while granting security cover," he said.

He said the identity, specific threat perception analysis among other factors are personal information of a protectee who does not hold a public office.

"The right to know, in such a case, must make way for the right to privacy of the individual and the efficiency of governance since the same furthers the concept of 'practical regime' of the RTI as conceptualised in the preamble of the RTI Act," Azad said.

He also cited last year's Supreme Court order on Right to Privacy to buttress his argument.

On December 9, 2015, the list of protectees in political and judicial field was disclosed in a Rajya Sabha question by the Home Ministry, hence making a further case for not disclosing it, Azad said.New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI), through the Ministry of External Affairs, has written a letter to the Antigua government asking it to arrest fugitive businessman Mehul Choksi.

India has been trying to bring back Choksi from Antigua under the provision of a law of the island nation which provides for extradition of a fugitive to a designated Commonwealth country. In its letter to the government of Antigua, CBI stated that a red corner notice is not necessary for the arrest as it is only required to pin-point the location of a fugitive. And because Choksi's location is known and that he has taken citizenship of Antigua, CBI wants the island nation to arrest him and begin to process for his formal extradition to India.

CBI's letter chooses to mention the red corner notice specifically because the Antigua government had previously questioned why one had not been issued. Sources in the government also previously hinted that the government there is unwilling to act because it does not have a formal treaty with India which would compel them to send Choksi back.

Earlier this month, India had handed over a request to Antigua for extradition of Mehul Choksi who is charged in connection with India's biggest banking fraud and is living in the Caribbean nation after taking its citizenship. A team of officials from the MEA and other agencies had been sent to Antigua to request the authorities there to extradite Choksi. The team had presented details of the case against Choksi to the Antiguan government.

Antigua had cleared Choksi's citizenship in November 2017 after India did not give any adverse report to stall his application for it.New Delhi: A Court of Inquiry (CoI) on Monday ordered initiation of disciplinary actions against Major Leetul Gogoi, holding him accountable for fraternizing local in spite of instructions to the contrary and for being away from the place of duty while in the operational area.

Major Gogoi was detained by the Jammu and Kashmir Police from a Srinagar hotel with a local woman on May 23. He was allegedly involved in a brawl with the woman at the hotel.

Major Gogoi had courted a fresh controversy after he was arrested from a hotel in J&K's Srinagar with a woman. The CoI proceedings against Major Gogoi were initiated shortly after Army Chief General Bipin Rawat assured an exemplary punishment if the former was found guilty.

The two-member Court of Inquiry panel was formed to probe the matter and recommend what action should be taken against Major Gogoi if he was found guilty of involvement in any unlawful activity.

Major Gogoi along with the woman was taken to a police station from where he was handed over to his unit. Police said that at 11 am they got a call from Hotel Grand Mamta about an altercation at the hotel.

This was not the first time Major Gogoi got embroiled in a controversy. He is the officer who had stirred a row in 2017 after photos had gone viral in which a local was tied to the bonnet of his vehicle in Badgam district to avoid stone pelting incident.Islamabad: India and Pakistan will resume their talks on various aspects of the Indus Waters Treaty in Lahore on Wednesday, the first bilateral engagement since Prime Minister Imran Khan took office.

India's Indus Water Commissioner P K Saxena is expected to reach here on Monday to begin the two-day discussions with his Pakistani counterpart Syed Mehr Ali Shah on Wednesday, Dawn quoted a government official as saying.

The last meeting of the Pakistan-India Permanent Indus Commission was held in New Delhi in March during which both the sides had shared details of the water flow and the quantum of water being used under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty.

The talks will be the first official engagement between India and Pakistan since Khan became Prime Minister on August 18.

In a letter to Khan on the day he was sworn in as Pakistan's 22nd prime minister, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed India's resolve to build good neighbourly relations between the two countries.

On July 30, Modi telephoned Khan to congratulate him on his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party's victory in the general elections and expressed hope that both countries will work to open a new chapter in bilateral ties.

The Pakistani side will reiterate its objections over two water storage and hydropower projects being built by India during the two-day talks scheduled for August 29-30.

The official said Pakistan would raise its concerns over 1000MW Pakal Dul and 48MW Lower Kalnai hydroelectric projects on the Chenab river.

The official said that the two sides would also finalise the schedule of future meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission and visits of the teams of the Indus commissioners.

He said that the water commissioners of Pakistan and India were required to meet twice a year and arrange technical visits to projects' sites and critical river head works, but Pakistan had been facing a lot of problems in timely meetings and visits.

The two-day session is also expected to discuss ways and means for timely and smooth sharing of hydrological data on shared rivers.

The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank and signed by then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan's president Ayub Khan, administers how the water of the Indus river and its tributaries that flow in both the countries will be utilised.

Under the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty 1960, waters of the eastern rivers Sutlej, Beas and Ravi had been allocated to India and the western rivers the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab to Pakistan, except for certain non-consumptive uses for India.New Delhi: Indian Navy will soon have a new weapon to target enemy submarines. An anti-submarine rocket which can hit targets 8.5 kilometres away has been developed by the Armament Research and Development Establishment (ARDE) along with High Energy Materials Research Laboratory (HEMRL).

According to The Times of India, ARDE director KM Rajan said on Sunday that the new rocket to target enemy submarines has been demonstrated to the Navy. We have recently demonstrated a new rocket technology to the Navy, who have issued a set of qualitative requirements to be achieved during our internal trials. We will be handing over the rocket to the Navy for their user trials after achieving the target of their qualitative requirements," Rajan told The Times of India.

Faced with an ever-increasing presence of Chines Navy warships and submarines and a rapidly modernising Pakistani Navy, the Indian Navy has been trying to get better and modern offensive capabilities. The Times of India also quoted a senior Defence Research and Development Organisation, under which the ARDE and HEMRL come, that the Indian Navy requires a rocket which can target an enemys submarine from a distance of 8 km.

At present, the Navy has 110 kg Russian Rocket Guided Bomb (RGB)-60 which can engage an enemy submarine at a maximum range of 5.3 km. The RGB-60 has a warhead of 25 kilogrammes and is fired from the Rocketnaya Bombometnaya Ustanovka (RBU) 6000 launcher mounted on warships of the Rajput Class, Delhi Class and Talwar Class.

The Defence Ministry had on August 25, 2018, approved procurement of 111 utility helicopters for the Navy at a cost of over Rs 21,000 crore. Defence Ministry officials said the ministry cleared procurement proposals worth nearly Rs 46,000 crore which included the acquisition of the helicopters. The decisions were taken at a meeting of the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), the ministry's highest decision-making body on procurement.At a time when the entire country has come together to help Kerala in the aftermath of unprecedented floods in the state, a BJP MLA - infamous for making controversial remarks - has said that the natural disaster is a result of slaughtering cows in the open.

Vijaypura's BJP MLA Basanagouda Patil Yatnal invited massive ire after he claimed that the prevailing situation in Kerala was because the state had hurt Hindu sentiments. "In Kerala, people openly slaughter cows. What happened? Within a year, a situation like this (flood) arose. Whoever hurts the Hindu religious beliefs will face such consequences," he said recently. Yatnal would then elaborate on how Hindus worship cows and killing the animal is at par with killing humans.

The remarks have invited massive retaliation with people at large accusing Yatnal of being insensitive to the ground realities. Others have said that he is only interested in making headline-grabbing statements which have no scientific backing or backing of logic.

Logic perhaps does not figure too high in Yatnal's priorities as he has made several controversial remarks in the past as well. He had said just last month that if he could, he would have had all intellectuals shot dead because of their support for the human rights of terrorists. In June, he had stirred the hornet's nest when he said that BJP corporators have been told not to work for Muslims.

I'm telling you Corporators, don't work for the welfare for Muslims. You must work for the welfare of Hindus only. Who voted us to power? I told my staff, no one wearing skull caps or burqas should visit my office: BJP MLA Basangouda Patil Yatnal. #Karnataka pic.twitter.com/mz3FbjTrDx  ANI (@ANI) June 7, 2018

Statements like these have repeatedly given fodder to opposition parties in their bid to attack BJP. Yatnal's most recent statement on Kerala floods could put embarrass the central leadership of his party at a time when PM Narendra Modi has repeatedly said he stands with the people in the state in their time of need.NEW DELHI: Former prime minister Manmohan Singh has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging him to leave the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) "undisturbed". Singh said that and said this would be respecting both history and heritage.

His letter comes amid reports that the NMML be dedicated in the memory of all former prime ministers. Strongly opposing the idea, Singh raised concern over the attempts being made to change the "nature and character" of the NMML.

"Jawaharlal Nehru belongs not just to the Congress but to the entire nation. It is in this spirit that I have written to you," he said.

Singh also quoted Atal Bihari Vajpayee in his letter saying that even during the tenure of the late PM, there was no attempt to change the nature and character of the NMML. "I recall that during the six-year tenure of Shn Atal Bihari Vaipayee as Prime Minister, there was absolutely no attempt made to change the nature and character of the NMML

and the Teen Murthy complex in any way. But sadly that seems to be part of the agenda of the Government of India now," he wrote.

Singh also said that Vajpayee had described Nehru in Parliament as a "vibrant personality" and said that "such a resident may never grace Teen Murti again".

"Let us respect this sentiment and keep Teen Murti as a memorial to our first prime minister Pandit Nehru and leave the Teen Murti complex undisturbed as it is. This way we will be respecting both history and heritage," Singh said in the letter.

Singh said the NMML is dedicated to the memory of the country's first prime minister and prime architect of the Indian nation-state. "Nehru has left behind an incredible imprint on our country and the world. His distinctiveness and greatness have been acknowledged even by his political opponents and rivals," Singh said.

The NMML was established in the memory of India's first prime minister and the museum at the Teen Murti House has preserved some rooms as they were at the time of Nehru's death.While the deal to buy 36 Rafale fighter jets has made a lot of headlines and also generated a lot of controversy, this is not the first aircraft that the Indian Air Force is acquiring from Dassault Aviation. Dassault Aviation has had a long association with the Indian defence forces.

In the past, there have been several fighter jets that have been supplied to India by Dassault Aviation. These include Toofani, Mystere IV, the Jaguar and the Mirage 2000.

Toofani: The first Dassault Aviation aircraft, Toofani was ordered by India in 1953. 71 Ouragans (Toofani) were supplied to India in March 1954 with an additional 33 second-hand Ouragans taking the total number of aircraft to 104. The first generation straight wing fighter from France - Ouragon - was inducted by the IAF to augment the earlier used Vampire as the mainstay fighter. The Ouragan was used by the IAF for nearly 15 years. As mentioned in the book 'Baptism Under Fire', the Ouragan were used during the liberation war of Goa in 1961 and in 1962 to perform reconnaissance missions during the Sino-India War.

Mystere IV: In 1957, the IAF saw a major expansion when 104 Mystere IV A joined the Toofani. Mystere IVAs was the first "supersonic-in-a-dive" aircraft in the IAF. 110 Mystere IVAs were inducted into the IAF from 1957 onwards and were extensively used in ground attack role during the war with Pakistan. The Mystere IV stayed operational in the IAF until 1973.

Feb. 23 1951, the first flight of the Dassault Mystere MD.452

photo shows IAF Mystere IVA pic.twitter.com/LGqbMy0d9v  World Air Photo (@planenut27) February 24, 2016

Alize: In 1960, 12 Breguet Br-1050 ALIZE ASW Turboprop aircraft were purchased to create a carrier-based ASW and Reconnaissance squadron aboard the newly purchased aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. Later, in 1966-67 two more ALIZE were released and transferred to the INAS 310 Squadron (August 1968), as attrition replacements.

Jaguar: In 1978, the IAF placed an order for 40 Jaguars and got a license to build 120 Jaguar aircraft at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL). The IAF temporarily accepted two Jaguars in July 1979 under the first batch but starting establishing its own production line in HAL. The Airforce Technology website states that the delivery of the second batch of 40 Jaguars began in 1981 while the third batch comprising assembly kits of 45 aircraft were transported to HAL in May 1981. The IAF acquired 17 Jaguars in 1999 and 20 more between 2001 and 2002.

#YearsBack on this day #IAF - 19 Jul 1979 : First two Anglo-French #JAGUAR fighter aircraft accepted by the Indian officials in UK from British Aerospace. The aircraft arrived at Ambala air base on 26 Jul 1979. pic.twitter.com/ZyctiPykuo  Indian Air Force (@IAF_MCC) July 19, 2018

Mirage 2000: In 1982 and 1986, the IAF ordered a total of 42 single seat (H) and 7 dual seat (TH) MIRAGE 2000 aircraft and 10 more (4 H and 6 TH) in 2000. Three squadrons Tigers, Battle Axes and Wolfpack, at Gwalior, operate the fleet.

Indian Air Force(IAF) Mirage -2000 lands at Yamuna Expressway: http://t.co/ANFGT4K9jp pic.twitter.com/QiRpSMbxzz  MIB India (@MIB_India) May 21, 2015

In 2015, the company got into a joint venture with Anil Ambani led Reliance for form Dassault Reliance Aerospace Limited. The company asserted that it is committed to contributing towards building up an aero-defence manufacturing eco-system in India so as to position the country as an international supplier reference in the global aerospace market.

"Dassault Aviation Executive Committee rallies around the huge challenge to highly contribute to the 'Make in India' and 'Skill India' policies that will lead to Indias self-sufficiency in the aerospace domain," Dassault Aviation had said.

From the Rafale fighter to the high-end Falcon family of business jets and military drones, Dassault Aviation has delivered aircraft in over 90 countries over the last century.Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj on Monday hailed her ministry and various Indian embassies for the work done by them to assist Indians across the world. Appreciating the work, the minister said: "If a 'Pravasi Bharatiya' gets stuck anywhere in the world, they are confident that the government will save them. Relief is just one tweet away," she said.

She also proudly claimed that, like never before, all embassies are handling issues related to citizens on a priority basis. "What was never a priority in embassies, has become the top priority now. The Prime Minister has made overseas Indians proud and the MEA has made them confident," Sushma Swaraj said during her address in Vietnam.

The minister, as well as the ministry, have on multiple occasions in the past helped rescue Indians stranded in several places around the world. Swaraj regularly monitors and replies to the requests and suggestions on her Twitter feed. She is well-known for using social media to interact with citizens and help them in times of any crisis.

Just a few days back, she had helped a man who had lost his passport in the US just a fortnight before his wedding. He reached out to the Minister on Twitter and she replied soon after lending a hand of help.

Devatha Ravi Teja - You have lost your Passport at a very wrong time. However, we will help you reach for your wedding in time. Navtej - Let us help him on humanitarian grounds. @IndianEmbassyUS https://t.co/wxaydeqCOX - Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) July 30, 2018

Apart from helping people out, she is often praised for her cheeky replies on the micro-blogging site. For example, when she was asked if people should visit Bali where The Mount Agung volcano erupted, the External Affairs Minister cheekily said: "I will have to consult the volcano there."

I will have to consult the volcano there. https://t.co/bv2atzWtZg - Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) August 8, 2018

However, the minister's timely help on Twitter was recently criticised by Congress chief Rahul Gandhi who said that she had no job except spending time working on people's visas.

Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's interventions in foreign affairs, he said: "Everybody says that it is a great thing that India's Foreign Minister spends a lot of her time working on visas. Do you realise what that statement means? It means the Foreign Minister has nothing better to do than get people visas. So, only there is the monopoly of the Foreign Ministry, and the PMO (Prime Minister's Office) has monopoly over the Foreign Ministry."NEW DELHI: After Congress chief Rahul Gandhi attacked the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) during a speech in the UK, the saffron outfit is likely to invite him for an event in Delhi.

The RSS will be organising a three-day lecture series Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective from September 17 to 19 in Delhi. As per sources, Rahul Gandhi will get the invitation for the same along with Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M) leader Sitaram Yechuri.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat will be interacting with intellectuals and political leaders during the 3-day event. The idea of the event is to invite people from different ideologies for the event.

Giving details of the event, RSS prachar pramukh Arun Kumar said the Sangh was for the first time organising a three-day lecture series of its chief Mohan Bhagwat. "Bhagwatji will address and interact with a select audience comprising prominent citizens on 'Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective' in a three-day lecture series," Kumar said.

Kumar said people across the country wanted to know and associate with the RSS. "This lecture series has been organised in this context... Sarsanghchalak (RSS chief) Mohan Bhagwatji will present the Sangh views on various contemporary issues of national importance," he said.

Last week at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Rahul had said the idea of RSS is similar to that of Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world. He had also alleged that the RSS was trying to "change" the nature of India and "capture" its institutions.

Hitting back at Rahul, the Sangh said that the Congress chief cannot understand the saffron outfit as he does not know India. "The entire world today is facing the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. He is unaware... He does not understand the gravity of the situation that's why he is making such statements," Arun Kumar said.

Referring to the Congress president's old statement that he is trying to understand India, the Sangh leader said, "One who doesn't understand India cannot understand the Sangh." He is ignorant about India and its cultural ethos of 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam', which means the world is one family, Kumar said.New Delhi: A day after he came out in the defense of Congress chief Rahul Gandhi over his latest remarks on 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Monday admitted that only some leaders from the grand-old party were involved in the genocide.

"The incident (1984 Sikh riot) took place when Indira ji was killed. At that time, Rajiv Gandhi was at an airport in Bengal. There was no Congress involvement other than some people. I have named few people, Sajjan Kumar, Dharamdas Shastri, Arjun Das and two more people," Captain Amarinder Singh said today.

Reacting to his statement, the Shrimoni Akali Dal (SAD) hit out at the Punjab Chief Minister and accused him of holding a soft corner for 1984 main accused Jagdish Tytler by not mentioning him in his speech. "Captain Amarinder Singh should write to the Supreme Court that he is the biggest and main witness in the case. Amarinder took names of five accused in the case, including Sajjan Kumar, Dharamdas Shastri and Arjun Das. But, he has a soft corner for Jagdish Tytler and hence, he did not mention his name as the accused in the case," SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal said.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi triggered a major controversy on Friday by denying his party's involvement in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots that shook the nation and claimed thousands of Sikh lives. Rahul was asked about the involvement of his partymen in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots when he describes the incident as a tragedy and a painful experience. He, however, disagreed that his party was involved.

"I think any violence done against anybody is wrong. There are legal processes ongoing in India but as far as I'm concerned anything is done that was wrong during that period should be punished and I would support that 100 percent," he said.

His remarks on 1984 riots drew severe criticism from BJP and Akali Dal leader who sought to remind the Gandhi scion of direct involvement of several Congress leaders in instigating the genocide.

Yesterday, the SAD had hit out at Congress chief Rahul Gandhi over his remarks on the 1984 riots, saying by disagreeing with the view that his party was involved in the genocide, he had salt into the wounds of the Sikh community.

Nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed, mostly in Delhi, in riots that followed the 1984 assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Some Congress politicians, Sajjan Kumar included, have been accused of leading the killer mobs.New Delhi: Google on Monday dedicated a doodle to Australian cricketer Don Bradman on the occasion of his 110th birth anniversary.

Often referred to as "The Don", the cricketer has a number of accolades to his kitty, with a Test batting average of 99.94, considered as the greatest achievement by any sportsman in a major sport.

During his 20-year stint, Bradman consistently scored at a level that earned him fame as one of the greatest batsmen in the history of cricket. He is known for leading an Australian team known as "The Invincibles" on a record-breaking unbeaten tour of England.

Post his retirement, Bradman retained a pre-eminent position in the game by acting as an administrator, selector, and writer for three decades.

The Australian cricketer continues to hold a number of records, including those of highest career batting average, highest series batting average, highest ratio of centuries and double centuries per innings played, among others. He is also known for being the first batsman in Test history to score two triple centuries, first and only batsman to have remained unbeaten on 299 in a Test innings, and first batsman to score a Test triple century (304) at number 5 position.

Bradman was hospitalised with pneumonia in December 2000, two months after which he breathed his last at his residence on 25 February 2001 at the age of 92.

In 2009, the ace cricketer was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.Geneva: Myanmar`s military carried out mass killings and gang rapes of Muslim Rohingya with "genocidal intent" and the commander-in-chief and five generals should be prosecuted for the gravest crimes under international law, U.N. investigators said.

In a report, they called for the U.N. Security Council to set up an ad hoc tribunal to try suspects or refer them to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The Security Council should also impose an arms embargo on Myanmar and targeted sanctions against individuals most responsible for crimes.

They blamed the country`s de facto civilian leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, for failing to use her "moral authority" to protect civilians. Her government "contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes" by letting hate speech thrive, destroying documents and failing to shield minorities from crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The report also criticised Facebook for allowing the world`s biggest social media network to be used to incite violence and hatred. Facebook responded on Monday by announcing that it was blocking 20 Myanmar officials and organisations found by the U.N. panel to have "committed or enabled serious human rights abuses".

Contacted by phone, Myanmar military spokesman Major General Tun Tun Nyi said he could not immediately comment. The Myanmar government was sent an advance copy of the U.N. report in line with standard practice.

Zaw Htay, spokesman for Suu Kyi`s government, could not immediately be reached for comment. Reuters was also unable to contact the six generals named in the report.

A year ago, government troops led a brutal crackdown in Myanmar's Rakhine state in response to attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on 30 Myanmar police posts and a military base. Some 700,000 Rohingya fled the crackdown and most are now living in refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh.

The UN report said the military action, which included the torching of villages, was "grossly disproportionate to actual security threats".

"The crimes in Rakhine State, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts," said the U.N. panel, known as the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar.

Suu Kyi`s government has rejected most allegations of atrocities made against the security forces by refugees. It has built transit centres for refugees to return, but U.N. aid agencies say it is not yet safe for them to do so.

Suu Kyi "has not used her de facto position as Head of Government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events, or seek alternative avenues to meet a responsibility to protect the civilian population", the report said.

The United Nations defines genocide as acts meant to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part. Such a designation is rare, but has been used in countries including Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan.

In the final 20-page report, the panel said: "There is sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the Tatmadaw (army) chain of command, so that a competent court can determine their liability for genocide in relation to the situation in Rakhine state."

Marzuki Darusman, chair of the panel, said commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing should step down pending investigation.

"Accountability can only take place both from the point of view of the international community but also from the people of Myanmar if the single most significant factor is addressed. And that is the role of the commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing."

The list of generals also included Brigadier-General Aung Aung, commander of the 33rd Light Infantry Division, which oversaw operations in the coastal village of Inn Din where 10 Rohingya captive boys and men were killed.

That massacre was uncovered by two Reuters journalists - Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28 - who were arrested last December and are being tried on charges of violating Myanmar`s Official Secrets Act. The court had been due to deliver a verdict on Monday, but at a brief hearing postponed the hearings until Sept. 3.In yet another bid to show that work and not stature is of prime importance, the Imran Khan government has done away with VIP protocol at all airports in Pakistan.

Dawn has reported that the decision to ban special security and other privileges for influential people was done away with starting from Sunday. "We have decided to strictly implement the decision to provide equal opportunities to all travellers without any discrimination," the country's information minister Fawad Chaudhry was quoted as saying.

VIPs in Pakistan, like in many other countries, are accustomed to special treatment at airports. Joining queues and waiting for baggage are usually a headache for common citizens. In Pakistan though, airports officials could now be severely punished if found extending special favours to any traveller.

Dawn also reports that while similar measures were announced by previous governments, not much materialised at the ground level.

The Imran Khan government, which won the elections after a poll campaign which also spoke of austerity, has sent strong signals that it means business. First-class air travel for high-ranking officials - including the President and PM - have been done away with while it has been previously reported that the motorcade for Imran Khan will also be kept to an absolute minimum that is required for his safety."If this military equipment, involved in the parade, had been used in 2014, then Luhansk and Donetsk would have been ours" - people on military parade in Kyiv

A lot of new features were presented at Ukraines Independence Day parade  military aviation, the participation of female military personnel, and new models of weapons, and a new official army greeting. The sensations of the people who came to watch the parade remain unchanged.

"Ukraine has unique people. They are unique on our planet, being open-hearted and open-minded. I cannot describe it with just words, you should feel it in order to understand it. Ukraine is dear, open, and friendly."

Andriy and his daughter Maria (Chudniv, Zhytomyr region)

"Ukraine is unique as it can survive in any conditions. It is a blooming country with great potential and beautiful people. We do not need any help, we can do it ourselves."

Anastasia (Kyiv)

"Ukraine is beautiful and kind, and we live here."

Alla and her daughter Nadia (Kyiv)

"Ukraine is unique in every aspect: people, lands, attitude towards each other and attitude towards the others. Hospitality. Here you can find everything. "

Natalia, Oleg, and their daughter Olexandra

"The Ukrainian language is the second most euphonic in the world, Ukraine is very nice in its way, especially, thanks to the Carpathians. This is like an eighth wonder of the world. Ukraine is very fine. Tourists should come to Ukraine for its development."

Vova, 15 years old (Kyiv)

"Ukraine is unique primarily because it is our homeland, we love it. How can I say why the mother is unique? This is a beautiful country with kind and friendly people."

Serhiy and Semen

Ukraine is unique in its freedom.

Sasha, 12 years old (Kyiv)

"Because she is our native land, very good, the bright country with friendly and kind people."

Ivan, Iryna (Ovruch, Zhytomyr region)

"Ukraine is our family, we have been born here, we live here, we shed blood for it. It is unique by what is happening in the state. We should tell the foreigners that we love salo (lard) and borsch, and when they come to visit, we should be respected, especially, you know who."

Victor "Odesa", Olexandr "Khirurg", Andriy "Karkas" and Karabakh Mykhailo

"The parade is beautiful, I like it, you will not see it every day. Everything is well organized. It is a beautiful country, peaceful for me. It is peaceful and good to live here"

Gola, Nigeria

"Ukraine is unique, at least, because we were born here, this is my country. I was offered to move from the country many times, but I refused. I just love Ukraine for what it is. Ukraine is kind, sincere, beautiful, and unique. "

An employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Anna and Zarris the Brave Hero, a 20-fold donor, who is preparing to participate in the anti-terrorist operation

"The parade is super-beautiful, we are here for the first time. We did not prepare for the interview. Ukrainians are good and polite, and there are lots of attractive places in Ukraine. Guys in the uniform are so handsome!"

Mykyta, Snizhana, Olia, Tolia (Zhytomyr)

"Ukraine is our homeland, fraternal, beautiful, united, and the best people in the world live here."

Dmytro and Yegor Marchenko, Olga Kapinus, employees of the Ministry of Defense

"Ukraine is my Motherland, I did not even think about anything else. For me, it is just the best."

Yulia (Luhansk)

"Ukraine is unique with its people, territory, and language. Attractive, beautiful, hospitable. When we were on the front line in 2014, we had no equipment and weapons. If this military equipment, involved in the parade, had been used in 2014, then Luhansk and Donetsk would have been ours."

Patri George Yankovsky, Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate

"Ukraine is unique because it is my native country, I was born and grew up here, my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born here. Although Ukraine is, in fact, small, we have a very talented people, our country is rich in talents and resources."

Stepan, Ukraine

Read the original text at 112.ua.Open source

John McCain died at the age of 82, four days before his birthday. The day before it became known about his decision to stop treatment for cancer. Despite the fact that the senator imposed a serious battle on the illness, it still won.



"Over the course of the year, John surpassed expectations for survival, but the progress of the disease and age made their verdict. A man of great willpower decided to stop treatment, "the McCain family said in a statement.



Two days after this statement, McCain's final battle was over - the hero of the Vietnam War, the legendary politician died surrounded by his family.



There were many battles in the life of John McCain. A man of enormous willpower bravely overcame obstacles, achieved goals and fought for his beliefs. Sometimes he lost, but he never gave up.



We will tell about the main battles of the senator. In memory of the great and sincere friend of our country.



Facts from the biography



- John McCain was born August 29, 1936 at the US airbase "Coco-Solo" in Panama.



- Grandfather and father of McCain were four-star admirals of the US Navy (the highest military rank in the Navy in peacetime).



- McCain's childhood was associated with numerous relocations - the future politician attended about 20 schools.



- John McCain followed in the footsteps of his grandfather and father, graduating from the Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1958. He was not the most diligent student, seriously studying only what he considered necessary. Was reprimanded for violation of discipline and non-compliance with military regulations.



- Piloting planes, got into several accidents. One of them, in November 1965, ended in the loss of an airplane.



- In 1967, John McCain was seconded to the US Navy aircraft carrier Forrestal, participated in the US military operation in Vietnam, code-named "Thunder Rumble." Soon McCain started his first important battle.

The first battle of McCain

Vietnamese captivity



McCain did not stay long on Forrestal. After a fire on an aircraft carrier on July 29, 1967, in which 134 US Navy sailors died and McCain miraculously survived, he was transferred to the Oriskani aircraft carrier in 163rd assault squadron.



Until the end of October 1967, he made 22 sorties, including on targets in the area of Haiphong and Hanoi.



The aircraft was shot down by the S-75 air defense system on October 26, The pilot catapulted and landed in a lake in the center of Hanoi.



His arms and leg were broken. Vietnamese soldiers, pulling McCain out of the lake, severely beat him.



During the interrogation, the Vietnamese determined that they had taken the son of a high-ranking US officer, although, as McCain himself later said, they absolutely did not understand the political structure of the States.





In December 1967, having lost 26 kg and graying McCain was transferred to a POW camp in Hanoi, where his comrades in captivity cared for him.



"Listen, the most precious things in my life were the bonds that linked me to my fellow prisoners: they were beautiful, we fought together, we loved each other, we knocked on the walls to each other, I recall this experience with great pride."



In March 1968, McCain was transferred to solitary confinement. In July, John's father became commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, after which the North Vietnamese authorities offered to release McCain before his comrades.



McCain refused. He said he was ready to accept the offer only if the US military, who had been captured before him, were also released.



In August 1968, McCain was subjected to constant beatings, seeking to break his will. At the same time he was ill with dysentery.



Because of the fractures obtained these days, McCain lost the ability to raise his hands above his head.



Interestingly: in captivity was required from McCain to reveal military information. After another beating, he stated that he agreed to give the names of his fellow squadron, after listing to the Vietnamese the list of players of the Green Bay Packers.



In total, McCain was held captive for 1967 days (5 years and a half) and was released on March 15, 1973.

The second battle of McCain

The struggle for political Olympus



After returning from captivity, McCain remained in military service and did this until 1981.

"This guy showed incredible courage, strong character and perseverance in order to reach this point. This is the man that we need as president, one who can make firm decisions who will not surrender in the face of danger," said George W. Bush about McCain.

Undoubtedly one of the most memorable John McCain clips.pic.twitter.com/4JZiZf6pg5  Ricky Davila (@TheRickyDavila) August 24, 2018





John McCain initially provided all possible assistance, lobbied sanctions against Russia, the transfer of lethal weapons to Ukraine and reminded that more concrete steps are needed to help than simply expressing concern.



"Russia is a gas station trying to impersonate a country: it's kleptocracy, corruption, it's a nation which economy relies solely on oil and gas supplies, so economic sanctions are important."



He was in Kyiv during the Maidan, then saying the following:



"Your peaceful struggle has inspired the whole country to change, we are here to support your actions and the right to change your destiny freely, peacefully and democratically. And your destiny, we believe, is in a united Europe - Ukraine will give Europe the best, and Europe will give the best to Ukraine. America is with you! "



Also John McCain visited Donbass, where he supported the spirit of the Ukrainian military.

The Third Battle of McCain

Cancer



In July 2017, during the operation to remove the thrombus above the left eye McCain was diagnosed with brain cancer. This was the most aggressive form of cancer - glioblastoma.



He began treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix (Arizona). At the same time he interrupted the treatment to come to the Senate and take part in the voting on the health reform of Barack Obama.





The fight against cancer lasted more than a year.



"He answers this challenge, like all the others in his life. He never gave up," McCain's daughter wrote in 2017.



And yet the cancer won. John McCain passed away, leaving a huge mark in world politics. In the end I would just like to left here his favorite song. McCain adored it and listened at a loud volume before every public performance.



Rest in peace, John McCain.

Read original article at 112.uaThe work of the checkpoint "Maiorske" in Donetsk region is still suspended due to the regular attacks as the press service of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine reported on Facebook.

"Currently, due to the regular attacks, the functioning of the checkpoint "Maiorske' is stopped and the check operations of the persons and vehicles do not take place there. The State Border Guard Service appeal to the citizens with the request to consider this information when they plan the trips. Other checkpoints are open in accordance to the summer schedule and work in the normal mode," the message said.

As we reported on August 24, Maiorske checkpoint in Donetsk region suspends its operation because of the regular shelling. Reportedly, Maiorske checkpoint was shelled from sniper rifles today on August 23. One of the units where the border officers were conducting the pass of the citizens through the inter-entity boundary line was damaged during the shelling.

Also, the division line checkpoint in Stanytsia Luhanska will be closed from September 2 to 7, due to the ongoing maintenance works. The respective agreement was made during the session of Minsk contact group on August 22.

Related video:In the weeks and days leading up to Ukraines Independence Day on Friday, Kiev was awash with hint, rumour and speculation. This would be the day that the nation's favourite rockstar Svyatoslav Vakarchuk would finally announce his intention to run for the presidency. He would do it, it was suggested, at the end of his sellout 80,000-plus concert in the capitals Olympic Arena.

Opinion polls conducted throughout the year suggested the Okean Elzy frontman would be in with a fighting chance at next March's elections. Stranger things have happened in Ukrainian politics, after all; and as the man who penned the soundtracks for two revolutions, he already has an easy way in with the electorate. Even from a standing start, polls have suggested he would be within touching distance of favourite Yulia Tymoshenko, and well ahead of the current president, Petro Poroshenko.

In the end, Vakarchuk kept people guessing. At a press conference arranged before the concert, the 43 year old declared there would be a moratorium on politics, and said he would only answer questions about his music. There would be no official declaration  just noisy guitars.

Born in Zakarpattia, the sleepy, rustic region on the western border, Vakarchuk moved to the nearest big city, Lviv, when he was three months old. His father was a scientist, a widely published quantum physicist, who later became a Minister for Education in the post-Orange revolution government.

Svyatoslav would follow in his fathers professions on both fronts. At university, he also specialised in physics, defending a PhD on string theory. And in 2007, he made inroads into politics, becoming an MP in the national parliament. He would quit after less than a year in protest at the "atmosphere of corruption". To this day, he is one of few MPs to voluntarily walk away from the lucrative business of governance.

In between physics and politics, Mr Vakarchuk became an international superstar. Already in the 1990s, his group was hugely popular in Russia, playing to sell-out crowds from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. What made this even more remarkable was that the band were singing in Ukrainian  hitherto considered an unsophisticated rural language.

Two revolutions made them political icons at home. Their songs Rise up, my dear, and I wont give up without a fight were played on loop. They played to hundreds of thousands at the height of the Euromaidan protest in December 2013  just before those protests turned deadly. By the time president Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in February 2014, Mr Vakarchuk was already being talked about as a future leader.

If I think that it's necessary, Ill do it, he said at the time. Im not afraid, and all my life have carried responsibility. But Im not rushing into politics.

Mr Vakarchuk did not rush back into politics. Petro Poroshenko instead emerged as the countrys leader, beating Ms Tymoshenko into second place.

This time around, things are more unpredictable, says the reformist MP, and former journalist Sergii Leshchenko. Ukrainians are tired, pinched by four years of war and incomplete reform, he says, and yearn for serious change. This opens the presidency up to unconventional political forces like Vakarchuk, or even Vladimir Zelensky, a political satirist who has also put his hat into the ring.

Petro Poroshenko has been in parliament for 20 years, and Yulia Tymoshenko for 22  these are politicians of an old vintage, he told The Independent. Vakarchuk has the advantage of being fresh, but also already enjoying wide recognition. Everyone knows and likes him. Even Poroshenkos chocolate company used his music in their commercials.

Even without a declaration, many have already begun to attack what they describe as the musician's political inexperience. In a rare intervention, former President Viktor Yushchenko suggested the presidency was a step too far from someone untested in government. A spin doctor advising the President Poroshenko campaign told The Independent that it would be simple to attack obvious weaknesses. Members of Yulia Tymoshenkos inner circle meanwhile suggested the musician would struggle from a standing start if he decided to run. It will be very hard for him without a party environmental organisational structures, said Alex Ryabchyn, an MP for Ms Tymoshenkos Batkivshchyna party. But were not afraid of strong competition. The campaign would benefit from him running. The more pro-European candidates the better. Judging from feedback at the Friday concert, Mr Vakarchuk has yet to convince his faithful. For every fan supporting the idea of a presidential run, there were many critical voices. Friends and supporters say Ukraine's political classes would be wise not to underestimate the celebrity. Vakarchuk was not your average rock star, they said. He had surrounded himself with "clever" people  self-made businessmen, academics and journalists. A "voracious reader," and "deep thinker", he was also a "shark" when he needed to be. "He's tough as nails, and I know because I negotiated several contracts with him," said Petr Chernyshev, a local businessman who recruited Vakarchuk to front advertising campaigns for Carlsberg and Kyivstar, a local telephone operator. Of course, he'll have to get ready for a level of attack he is not used to yet. Everyone will attack him. But I think hell give as good as he gets. I hope he runs. Read the original text here. Related: Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Twitter to hold closed meeting for U.S. elections Related: 2019 elections in Ukraine: Everything you need to know in few minutes Related: Parliament Speaker denied information about postponement of elections Related: Self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk Republics cannot decide on elections1,500 pieces of evidence will be presented at the session hall; the first hearing is slated for September 17

Voice of America

The prosecutors will present about 1,500 pieces of evidence in the next trial over Paul Manafort, the former leader of Donald Trump's election campaign.

According to The Washington Post, the court will consider Manafort's actions when he worked as the political consultant in Ukraine during Viktor Yanukoyvch's rule.

The trial is to begin on September 17, with the jury planning to look into Manafort's activity in 2006-2017.

The outlet also added that three witnesses will be involved in the trial; they already testified in the hearings in Manafort's case.

Earlier, Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of financial crimes, New York Times reported.

After a 16-day trial, Manafort was found guilty of five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts, and two counts of bank fraud. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the remaining 10 counts, and the judge declared a mistrial on those charges.

Paul Manafort is charged with laundering money and evading taxes over ten years of cooperation with former Ukrainian leaders. Previously, an investigation team released over 300 documents, which reveal the details of Manafort's cooperation with the currently disbanded Party of Regions - the-then pro-presidential and ruling political force in Ukraine. The ex-official faces up to 80 years in prison.The Speech of Poroshenko is provided at the General Assembly

Open source

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko plans to visit New York in September and take part at the session of the United Nations General Assembly. Ukrainian Ambassador to the US Valery Chaly claimed this during the press club meeting of the heads of the foreign diplomatic institutions of Ukraine, Interfax-Ukraine reports.

Bilateral meeting of Poroshenko with American President Donald Trump is not yet in plans.

The diplomat added that the speech of Poroshenko is provided at the United Nations General Assembly, the number of bilateral meetings, in particular with investors, business and diaspora.

Yet, answering the question on the possible meeting of the presidents of Ukraine and the USA, Chaly said: Such a meeting isnt planned yet but one way or another there has to be the verification of schedule think that a full-hour meeting wont be held.

In this vein, he noted that the Ukrainian Diplomatic Mission works on the meeting of the heads of the US Department of State and Ukrainian MFA.

As it was reported earlier, the UN Secretary-General claimed that would make every effort to restore peace in Ukraine.The diplomats headed to the east of Ukraine accompanied by military

Ukrainian diplomats will hold a meeting on Sunday in Donbas. Pavlo Klimkin, Head of Ukrainian MFA posted a common photo with the ambassadors on Facebook.

'Morning. And 80 representatives of diplomatic services in good humor fly to Donbas. The session of the ambassadors - 2018,' the Minister said.

Related: Klimkin on Polish law on National Remembrance Institute: There's room for manipulation

As Ukrainian Ambassador in Germany Andriy Melnik noted, the diplomats headed to the east of Ukraine accompanied by the military.

Later, Melnik added that the diplomats will visit the Joint Forces Operation area.

The meeting of the heads of the foreign diplomatic agencies in Ukraine is scheduled for the end of August.

In terms of the meeting of the heads of the foreign diplomatic agencies in Ukraine, we will coordinate the recovery actions of sovereignty and territorial integrity of a State and will determine the key priorities for the whole range of external relations of ours,' the President claimed this on August 4.

Related: HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WEEK: AUG. 20  24

Related video:The second part of the sanctions will be imposed if Russia does not agree to stop the use of the chemical weapons and will not allow UN observers to hold the inspections in 90 days

Open source

On August 27, the sanctions of the U.S. against Russia concerning the Skripal's case have come into force as the U.S. State Department reported.

The package of sanctions will include the ban for the provision of the external assistance to Russia, sale of weapons and financing of such deals, refusal from the credits by the state bodies of the U.S. and ban for export of dual-use goods and technologies.

The sanctions provide the stop of the financing of the deals on the sale of weapons to Russia.

Also, within the new sanctions package, the U.S. stops the crediting and financial aid of the U.S. state bodies: the refusal to provide Russia any credit, credit guarantee or provision of the financial aid by any department, state agency or other institution of the U.S., including the Export-Import Bank of the US.

The sanctions provide the stop of the sale of any defense goods, defense services, engineering design and construction services and the licenses for the export of any goods from the U.S. equipment list to Russia.

U.S. State Department defined the refusal to use these sanctions against issuance of the licenses in the support of the state cooperation on space and commercial space launches as the necessary in the interests of the national security of the US. Such licenses will be provided in the particular case in accordance with the policy of the export licensing for Russia until these sanctions came into force.

Moreover, the sanctions will concern the export of the goods and technologies to Russi, which are "sensitive" from the point of view of the national security and defined at the checklist.

The second part of the sanctions will be imposed if Russia does not agree to stop the use of the chemical weapons and will not allow UN observers to hold the inspections in 90 days.

As we reported the U.K. urged the U.S. and EU to coordinate sanctions against Russia. Also, the U.S. imposed new anti-Russian sanctions because of poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

Related video:The reasons for the detention were not revealed

Open source

Another Crimean Tatar was detained on the administrative border between Kherson and occupied Crimea, as Nariman Dzhelalov, Deputy Head of Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, wrote on Facebook.

Resat Medinov, a Crimean Tatar born in 1994, during crossing Armyansk checkpoint from Crimea to the continent was detained by the officers of Border Guard Service of Russian Security Service, he told.

According to Krymsos, Medinovs relatives could not get any information about the detainee from the representatives of Russias Security Service. The reasons for the detention were not revealed as well. It is unknown where is he now.

Earlier, the court in Crimea sentenced Oleksandr Steshenko, Kharkiv resident, to two years of imprisonment. He was found guilty of arson of the house of Russian mufti. Steshenko was also detained during crossing Crimeas administrative border in April, 2018.

Related video:Open source

Russia regards British Air Force actions which intercepted Russian Be-12 over the Black Sea a provocation, as the press office of Russias Embassy in UK reports.

Russian armed forces strictly comply with international law and pose no threat to Britain. One might understand why Royal Navy escorts Russian military ships in the English Channel, in the vicinity of the British coastline, even if this there is no need for the UK to publicise it. But what kind of threat to Britain or its allies does a Russian patrol aircraft hypothetically pose while conducting flights off Russia's own shore, some 1500 miles away from the UK? the message says.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson and other British politicians who present such routine Russian activity as provocative incidents, are themselves behaving in a highly irresponsible manner. This latest episode aptly demonstrates how harmful is the very idea of deploying RAF and other NATO forces in Romania, Poland or Baltic states. Instead of strengthening anyone's security, such military presence is being used by the British authorities for provocative actions of their own - not only through verbal statements, regrettable as they are, but also in real military terms, which is simply dangerous, the Russian representatives stated.

As we reported earlier, the Typhoon fighters of the British Royal Air Force flew from the Mihail Kogalniceanu base in Romania on August 23 to intercept the Russian anti-submarine Be-12 aircraft over the Black Sea.

It was noted that this is the second such case in a week, when the RAF aircraft are raised "to prevent provocation by Russian aircraft." The previous interception took place on 20 August.

Related video:In Cherkasy region, a citizen of Latvia died in the car accident at Kyiv-Odesa highway as the press service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine reported.

The accident took place in Nesterivka village on August 27. According to the information, two cars: BMW and heavy vehicle MAN collided.

"In the result of the collision, a passenger of one of the cars, BMW, a citizen of Latvia died at the site and the driver was urgently hospitalized to Mankiv Central Regional Hospital with the injuries of varying degrees of severity as soon as he was provided the emergency care," the message said.

At the site, the on-call sentries of the firefighting and rescue units worked that de-blocked the body of the victim from the damaged car and prevented the ignition of the spilled fuel.

Earlier a car accident took place in Luhansk region, as a result of which, an 18-year-old passenger died at the scene, the 17-year-old and three girls at the age of 17-18 were injured.

Also, a Ukrainian bus with tourists had an accident in Podkarpackie Voivodeship in Poland on August 17. As a result of the accident, three people deceased, and 51 are injured. The Ukrainian Consul urgently headed out to the scene.

Related video:The reasons are the non-unified system of research in various cities, as well as different principles of assessment of the real environmental situation in various areas across the country

Open source

The ranking of Ukraine's most polluted cities, which was released recently, cannot be treated quite objective and comprehensive - due to a number of reasons. Specifically, it is about the non-unified system of research in various cities, as well as different principles of assessment of the real environmental situation, Obozrevatel news agency reports.

The authors of the research refer to the data by the Central Geophysical Observatory named after Borys Sreznevsky; however, according to NGO Ekopatrul, there's not a single active page on the observatory's website, while the main page reflects only meteorological indexes.

The mentioned ranking is based absolutely different conditions of environmental monitoring. For instance, in Dnipropetrovsk region, there are automatic surveillance posts in Dnipro, Nikopol, Pavlohrad and Kryvyi Rih. The first three even have their own Telegram channels, where all relevant data is published. Besides, the information is released via ECOINFO portal, where one can learn about the conditions of atmosphere - anywhere in Dnipro. However, the data from stationary sources is submitted directly by enterprises, and it's not always up to date. In Kryvyi Rih, the resource center constantly refreshes the data.

In Zaporizhya, the situation is a bit more complicated, since there are only five surveillance stations across the city, and there are only devices used to collect samples. The samples are taken to labs, and the results are released only the following day; the lab only reports if the borderline admissible concentration of harmful substances is exceeded. Therefore, it is tough to learn the actual numbers. Such procedure is also employed in Lutsk, northwestern Ukraine.

Kherson and Mykolaiv regions are the only regions in Ukraine, where experts keep the track of heavy metals pollution levels. Odesa and Kharkiv do not even have their own observation stations.

In Kyiv region, the indexes are mostly approximate, since the four observation stations are located too close to Kyiv and do not always reflect the actual indexes across the rest of the region.Earlier, mostly Russians and citizens from the Post-Soviet Union countries used to be traveling to the capital but now the citizens of Belarus, Israel, the USA, Germany, and Turkey

Open source

850 thousand tourists have visited Kyiv in 2018. This is the highest record for the last four years. Anton Taranenko, Head of the Tourism Office of the Kyiv City State Administration claimed this at the briefing on Monday, Interfax-Ukraine reports.

We are expecting two million foreign tourists this year. This year, we have almost made it to the level of 2013. This summer has become a record for the past four years. For the six months of 2018, Kyiv has been visited by 850 thousand foreign tourists, when 660 thousand in 2013 for the same period, Taranenko claimed.

According to him, the agency anticipates the incensement of the tourist flow by 25 percent at the end of this year comparing to 2017.

He stressed that more than 50 percent of the tourists in 2013-2014 were from Russia and Post-Soviet Union countries. Belarus, Israel, the USA, Germany, and Turkey came in the top five in the following year.

Belarus took the first place, and this is only because a lot of Belarusians travel to Kyiv, stay for a couple of days and then go the shores of the Black Sea, so it is a short-term tourism. The tourist flow from Israel increases. Owing to the return of cruises in Kyiv, the representatives of the tourist cluster of the USA and Germany are traveling to our country. Turkey is always in the top five. The flow from Italy, France, and Great Britain are also increasing, the Head of the Tourism Office of the Kyiv City State Administration stressed.

Head of the Profile Department of the KSCA stressed that for Kiev, event tourism is a priority.

According to the published information, the tourist fee in Kiev in 2018 will be about $1.1m.Today, the restrictive measure should be chosen for MP Savchenko; earlier her arrest was extended until September 10

Open source

The Shevchenkivsky district court of Kyiv has postponed the session on the case of MP Nadia Savchenko until August 29 as the correspondent of 112 Ukraine reported.

"The session was postponed on August 29 at 16:30. Today the consideration of the case did not take place. The lawyers and prosecutors came to the courtroom, while Nadia Savchenko did not appear," the correspondent said.

Earlier it was reported that the court should choose the restrictive measure for MP Savchenko.

According to him, at 13:00 the session in the Appeal Court also should take place, during which the appeal of the lawyers on the restrictive measure is going to be considered.

"We were reported that Nadia Savchenko will be sent there at 12:00," the correspondent added.

As we know, the Prosecutor General's Office and the Security Service of Ukraine finished the investigation of the criminal proceeding against Savchenko and Head of the "Officer Corps" Volodymyr Ruban on the suspicion of the terrorism on July 30.

Nadiya Savchenko, MP is suspected of organizing a terrorist act in the Ukrainian Parliament and in the government district of Kyiv. Yuriy Lutsenko, Prosecutor General claimed that he has proof that Savchenko planned an armed coup d'etat, which would have brought to mass civilian casualties. In particular, according to the information of Prosecutor General's office, she planned to shell Kyiv from a grenade launcher.

Also, it was reported that non-affiliated MP Nadia Savchenko and Volodymyr Ruban, the Head of 'Officer Corps' planned to attack the cortege of the President of Ukraine with the large caliber sniper rifle.

On July 13, the detention of Savchenko was extended until September 10 and she declared an indefinite hunger strike.

Related video:Next year, the purchase of the weaponry, financing of the cyber security sphere, modernization of the special communication, defense o the information are planned

In 2019, the financing of the defense and security sector of Ukraine can reach $7.1 billion (not less than 5% of the GDP). Oleksandr Tyrchynov, the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) claimed this as the press service of the council reported.

On August 27, Turchynov held the meeting with the presence of first vice prime minister and Minister of Economic Development and Trade Stepan Kubiv, acting Finance Minister Oksana Markarova, Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and the heads of other law enforcement bodies.

Turchynov said that according to the prediction of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, the GDP of Ukraine will be $141 billion in 2019.

"Thus the financing of the defense and security sector of Ukraine, that should be not less than 5% of the GDP, will be about $7.1 billion", he said.

NSDC Secretary also added that the work out and purchase of the modern high-precision missile weaponry (missile systems and complexes, including the cruise missiles), artillery weaponry, armored vehicles, high-precision ordnance, ammunition and special chemistry products, strengthening of the air defense system of the state and possibilities of Ukraine's Air Force will be among the prioritized directions of the financing for the next year.

Also, it is planned to finance the implementation of the state policy in the sphere of the cybersecurity, implementation of the events on the development and modernization of the special communication, defense of the information, modern equipment of the testing firing ranges for the testing of the missiles, ammunition.

"One of the prioritized aims of the defense budget is the implementation of the social guarantees for the soldiers; first of all the increasing of their financial ensure as it is necessary for the preservation of the professional core of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the National Guard and other law enforcement bodies," he said.

After the finish of the forming of the defense budget it will be confirmed at the NSDC session and passed to the Cabinet of Ministers.

As we reported Viktor Muzhenko, the Head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine claimed that the funding in the sum of at least $4 billion is needed for the army in 2019.

Earlier U.S. President Donald Trump signed the act which provides expenses on national defence in the amount of $716 billion. Moreover, the act provides allocation for Ukraine in the amount of $250 million for the defence sector.

Related video:A hybrid form of yoga that combines traditional yoga postures with modern yoga moves and a silk hammock. Pre-registration required.

Please note: Aerial Yoga at the Yoga Art Space studio requires pre-registration through our website at www.YogaArtSpace.com/calendar. If no one registers for a class, the class may be cancelled between 6-12 hours prior to the class start time. Though this event is shown as a regular, weekly class each week on the Alabi calendar, there are occasionally times when the class will be cancelled in advance such as for certain holidays. All updates and cancellations are on the studio calendar at www.YogaArtSpace.com/calendar.

What is Aerial yoga?

Aerial Yoga is a hybrid form of yoga that combines traditional yoga postures infused with modern yoga moves and an silk fabric hammock.

Do I need Previous Yoga Experience?

No previous yoga experience is not necessary to enjoy an Aerial yoga class. In fact it can be easier than normal yoga! The silk hammock acts like a support whenever you require it, almost like having your own personal yoga teacher giving you assistance throughout the entire yoga class! Another advantage of having the support of the hammock is that 90% of students are able to complete more challenging poses, such as handstands!

Can Everybody do Aerial Yoga?

Yes and no. Students who have had a previous injury can find Aerial yoga much easier to participate in then normal yoga. This is due to the the weight being evenly distributed between your body, the hammock and the earth.

People who suffer any of following contraindications are advised NOT to participate in an Aerial yoga class: if you have had recent surgery of any sort, if you suffer glaucoma, if you are pregnant, if you suffer a heart condition (including very high or low blow pressure), if you get vertigo, if you have had a recent stroke or a hernia, if you have osteoporosis or any bone weakness, if you have carpal tunnel syndrome, or if you have had botox in the last six hours.

What Should I Wear?

All jewellery items must be removed before participating, a t-shirt must be worn to cover the armpit area and leggings are advised to avoid the silk rubbing on the skin and creating irritation. Please have clean feet or, alternatively, bring a pair of socks with you.Farah Diaz-Tello is senior counsel for the SIA Legal Team , which transforms law and policy so that people who end their pregnancies outside the formal medical system can do so with dignity and without punishment. Her home is in New York City, but her heart is in Texas forever.

Neither answer, each of which focuses on access to clinics, gets to the real endgame of abortion foes: to make abortion a crime. And when there is a crime, there is, axiomatically, a perpetrator. Under most pre-Roe criminal abortion laws, the perpetrator was the provider and the person who obtained the abortion was merely a witness. But as people are increasingly able to access safe means to end a pregnancy at home, prosecutors treat them as their own illegal provider and the fetus as the victim of a crimesometimes even charged as a homicide.

Ironically, the person who has been closest to honest on this point is Donald Trump. Remember in early 2016, seemingly a lifetime ago, when the then-candidate was asked how he planned to make good on his promise to ban abortion? He promised Supreme Court picks who would overturn Roe and parroted the shibboleth that the decision would return to the states. But then he veered revealingly off-script, saying that abortion-seekers would perhaps go to illegal places. Pressed further on whether this would permit states to penalize people who have abortions, he said, There has to be some form of punishment.

While the statement was almost immediately recanted amid rebukes from all his opponents, from Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz, Trumps blunder was not terribly surprising to people who closely follow reproductive rights. Theres no need to guess what would happen if Roe falls: We can look at what is happening in the states already testing the waters of criminalization.

As important of a precedent as Roe is, it is still an empty promise for many. As Robin Marty explains above page, the widespread barriers to access mean that many poor and undocumented people dont really have a choice. So, seeking options that are affordable, accessible and private, people have turned to reproductive health technologies, both ancient and new, to meet their needs. The advent of effective abortion pills and the availability of information online have created options where none previously existed. According to one study, in June 2017 there were more than 200,000 Google searches in the U.S. for information on how to end a pregnancy.

As self-managed abortion has become safer medically, it has become more dangerous legally. Although the Constitution protects ones right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy, prosecutors have attempted to criminalize people suspected of ending one. Consider Purvi Patel, the Indiana woman sentenced to 20 years behind bars for allegedly ending a pregnancy using pills she ordered from an online pharmacy. She spent three years imprisoned before finally being vindicated on appeal in 2016. Or Jennifer Whalen, the Pennsylvania mother sentenced to 18 months in prison for helping her daughter have a safe abortion with pills. According to the SIA Legal Teams research, there have been 21 known arrests related to self-managed abortions since 2000, and likely many more we dont know about. And with Roe under threat, prosecutors and lawmakers will rush to prove their anti-abortion bona fides.

It is a grave miscalculation to believe that post-Roe will look anything like pre-Roe. Our nation has spent the intervening 45 years devising a prison-industrial complex that is unparalleled in the world and in which women are the fastest-growing population. Surveillance technology enables law enforcement to use DNA to connect fetal remains to the person who delivered them. If we want to prevent abortion from being yet another ground for mass imprisonment, the only option is to transform the legal landscape.

Fortunately, there is change on the horizon. Massachusetts legislature has finally voted to repeal a 19th-century law that was used to prosecute a woman for a self-managed abortion as recently as 2007. New York gubernatorial candidates Andrew Cuomo and Cynthia Nixon are recognizing the urgent need to reform the states outdated abortion criminalization laws, last used in 2011 against a woman who allegedly drank a tea to end her pregnancy.

With the writing on the wall, the question for advocates is no longer how to save Roe, but how to finally ensure all people have genuine access and prevent the next arrest.

Farah Diaz-Tello is senior counsel for the SIA Legal Team, which transforms law and policy so that people who end their pregnancies outside the formal medical system can do so with dignity and without punishment. Her home is in New York City, but her heart is in Texas forever.

Get Ready for Anti-Abortion Terrorism

What alarms me most about the threat to Roe is the potential for an uptick in anti-abortion terrorism. The increasing scarcity of abortion providers will create a vulnerable target range for those committed to ending abortion access through violence. The hostile rhetoric of President Trumpand the reluctance of federal authorities to treat anti-abortion and white supremacist violence as domestic terrorismsignals to vigilantes that they have little to fear from federal prosecution.10:44 | Beijing (China), Aug. 27.

The audience took place Monday at Zhongnanhai , the headquarters of China's central government in Beijing.

China's Vice-President stressed that it was a great pleasure to welcome the Peruvian delegation.

"Both countries have enjoyed a lasting friendship, and the Chinese community in Peru dates back about 400 years ()," Wang Qishan pointed out.

For his part, Popolizio remarked Peru is the country with the largest and oldest Chinese migrant population in South America.

"People of Peru and China are heirs to a millenary basis. This highly important historical legacy really constitutes the fundamental basis of this close relationship in terms of friendship and cooperation ," he added.09:08 | Lima, Aug. 24.

legal

Said process had started long before the Sustainable Development Goals made the "providingidentity for all" a global priority ( SDG 16.9 ).Therapaws

Canine therapists

by Anita LeBlanc

From the August, 2018 issue

Three-legged, nine-year-old Annie receives enthusiastic smiles and cheers from Glacier Hills Manor's elderly residents as she ambles off the elevator with Jerry Nordblom. Annie, an Australian Shepherd mix, makes her way to each resident, receiving pets, coos and praise. "I tell her she's supposed to give therapy, not get it!" Nordblom grins as Annie continues her rounds.



Nordblom, a volunteer with local nonprofit Therapaws, has been making weekly visits to Glacier Hills since 2006. Annie is his second canine colleague; his first, a collie mix named Cori, has since passed. Karen OConnor, Therapaws' president, says the all-volunteer organization began operations as Therapets in 1988 when Sue Fischer received approval from University of Michigan Hospitals (now Michigan Medicine) to visit patients with her golden retriever, Willie. In 2001, Therapets became Therapaws and an official nonprofit, its mission to "promote and provide the therapeutic effects of the human-animal bond by placing qualified therapy dog teams, registered with Alliance of Therapy Dogs, at hospitals, other health-care facilities, schools, libraries and special events." By request, Therapaws teams even visit local college campuses during exam time to help alleviate student stress.



Therapaws' more-than 130 dog-human teams must undergo testing and observation through the Alliance of Therapy Dogs, a separate organization that sets the rules for human-dog behavior. All teams must pass background checks. Most importantly, dogs and their humans must have a knack for connecting with people.



Annie clearly has the knack, something Nordblom finds surprising in light of the abuse she suffered nine years ago as a five-month-old puppy. Then known as Brownie, she was savagely beaten by a man who took his rage at his girlfriend out on the dog and left the wounded animal to die in a park. A rescuer found her and took her to the Huron Valley Humane Society where she underwent several surgeries but still lost her left hind leg. Nordblom and his wife, Barbara, adopted her. They lavish much love and care on her at their property in Whitmore Lake. Her assailant was sentenced from two-to-four years in prison.



The visit is drawing to a close, but not before Annie receives treats and final pets from the residents and a few nurses. Glacier Hills Life Enrichment Coordinator Gail Pacurai says the visits from Annie and Nordblom bring positive memories and enthusiasm to the residents. "Just look at those faces, those smiles!" she exclaims.



[Originally published in August, 2018.]







>> AnnArborObserver.com >> City Guide >> Children >> Private Schools

City Guide

Private Schools

View our map of private schools in Ann Arbor >>







EC indicates that the school offers care for younger children before and/or after normal school hours. Enrollment figures from the 2019-2020 school year. Tuition figures for 2019-2020.

Many private schools also offer preschool programs; see listings under Child Care & Preschool Programs.

Ann Arbor Academy

1153 Oak Valley [(734) 747-6641

70 students in grades 4-13 (13th year bridge program to college or work). Meredith Schindler, director. For students with divergent learning styles, learning disabilities, dyslexia, Asperger's, high-functioning autism, and AD/HD. Multisensory techniques. Summer program. $19,600/yr with limited scholarships available. annarboracademy@gmail.com, annarboracademy.org 38, D8



Ann Arbor Adventist Elementary School

2796 Packard [(734) 971-5570

A Bible-based Christian education with outreach opportunities for grades 1-8. Small class size. Tuition ranges from $2,500-$3,500 depending on church affiliation. Contact principal Nicole Hadley by phone or email for more information. nhadley@misda.org, annarbormi.adventistschoolconnect.org 39, F7



Ann Arbor Christian School

5500 Whitmore Lake [(734) 741-4948

Interdenominational school with 200 students in grades Pre-K-8. Strong focus on Christian faith integration. Pre-K fees vary; $5,266 for half-day kindergarten; $9,436 for grades K-5; $10,293 for grades 6-8; sibling discounts and tuition assistance available. office@annarborchristian.org, annarborchristian.org BA, TT, 40, D1



Ann Arbor Hills Child Development Center

2775 Bedford [(734) 971-3080

Programs for parents and toddlers, preschoolers, jr. kindergarten, kindergarten, and grades 1 & 2. Ramelle Alexander & Amy Jordan, co-directors. Individualized programs at every level with emphasis at elementary level on literacy, math, and core subjects. Call for pricing. admin@aahcdc.com, aahcdc.com 41, F6



Ann Arbor Orthodox Classical Academy (A2OCA)

9900 Jackson, Dexter [(734) 475-4590

Opens Fall 2021 for grades K-2 (grades 3-4 if sufficient interest). Intellectually stimulating, academically challenging curriculum in a Christ-centered learning environment. Small classes. Tuition $12,000 per year; discounts for multiple children, assistance available. info@a2oca.org, www.a2oca.org



Christian Montessori School of Ann Arbor

5225 Jackson [(734) 332-9600

For infants-6th grade. Programs in a non-denominational Christian environment. Montessori-credentialed teachers. Full- and half-day care from $1,212/month. Financial assistance available to qualified applicants. Apply on website. office@cmsaa.org, cmsaa.org 42, A4



Clonlara School

1289 Jewett [(734) 769-4511

K-12 personalized learning approach with campus, homeschool, and distance learning options. Chandra Montgomery Nicol, executive director. Campus program (30 enrolled), Off-campus program (1,200 enrolled). Campus K-2 yearly tuition $7,500, grades 3-5 $9,900, grades 6-8 $13,500, high school $15,555. See website for off-campus and online tuition. info@clonlara.org, clonlara.org 43, E6



Daycroft School

1095 N. Zeeb [(734) 662-3335

Since 1960. 155 students in grades toddler-grade 6. David Lee, head of school. A.M. toddler $5,320-$11,800. Full-day toddler $7,710-$17,100. A.M. preschool $11,160. Full-day preschool $16,150. Kindergarten $17,600. Grades 1-6 $19,670. Hours 8:00 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Low student-to-teacher ratios. Before- and after-school programs. Financial aid available. admissions@daycroft.org, daycroft.org EC, 44, A3



Emerson School

5425 Scio Church [(734) 665-5662

315 students in grades Y5s-8. Ed Hollinger, Interim Head of School. Programs for gifted and academically talented students in STEM, world languages, art, music, physical education, and library. Average class size 15. Average teacher experience 15 years. Y5s: $16,590 full day. K: $18,670, 1-5: $22,830, 6-8: $24,910. Need-based financial aid available. Summer camps. admissions@emerson-school.org, emerson-school.org BA, Drop-In, 45, A6



Father Gabriel Richard Regional Catholic High School

4333 Whitehall [(734) 662-0496

560 students in grades 9-12. Chris Dotson, principal. Education based upon Catholic principles and traditions. College prep. $11,500/yr. Financial aid available. fgroffice@fgrhs.org, fgrhs.org 46, H2



Greenhills School

850 Greenhills [(734) 205-4068

625 students in grades 6-12. Peter Fayroian, head of school. Average class size 15. Contact for pricing. admission@greenhillsschool.org, greenhillsschool.org Drop-In, 47, H4



Hebrew Day School of Ann Arbor

2937 Birch Hollow [(734) 971-4633

Grades YK-5. Rabbi Will Keller, head of school. Multi-age classrooms in grades 1-2 and 3-4. General studies and Hebrew immersion/Judaic studies program. $15,788 kindergarten; $16,540 grades 1-5. Lower tuition possible through an application process. office@hdsaa.org, hdsaa.org EC, 48, E7



Michigan Islamic Academy

2301 Plymouth [(734) 665-8882

261 students in grades pre-K-12. Fayzeh Madani, principal. Montessori preschool and kindergarten. Full-time Islamic school. $6,400 kindergarten tuition. $5,850 grades 1-12. mia@mia-aa.org, mia-aa.org 50, F3



Rudolf Steiner School of Ann Arbor - High School

2230 Pontiac Tr. [(734) 669-9394

120 students in grades 9-12. College-prep academics, immersive program including hands-on experiences, music, languages, and fine arts. $23,500 with flexible tuition options. admissions@steinerschool.org, steinerschool.org 51, E3



Rudolf Steiner School of Ann Arbor - Elementary & Middle School

2775 Newport [(734) 995-4141

275 students in grades 1-8. Immersive academics including hands-on experiences, music, languages, and fine arts. $19,000 with flexible tuition and before & after-school care options. admissions@steinerschool.org, steinerschool.orgEC, 52, C2



St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School

2250 E. Stadium [(734) 821-2200

475 students (preschool-grade 8). Julie Fantone Pritzel, principal. $3250 half-day kindergarten ; $8,400 grades K-8 (one student). Discounted rates for siblings. school@stfrancisaa.org, stfrancisa2.com /school EC, 54, F6



St. Paul Lutheran Elementary & Middle School

495 Earhart [(734) 665-0604

300 students in grades pre-K-8. Robert Burgess, principal. Call for tuition; sibling discounts. Financial assistance available. admissions@stpaulannarbor.org, school.stpaulannarbor.org EC, 55, G4



St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic School

540 Elizabeth [(734) 769-0911

105 students in preschool-grade 8. Tim DiLaura, headmaster. Classical Catholic education with curriculum and pedagogy in union with formation of Catholic faith and practice. Spanish grades K-4, Latin grades 5-8. Upper and lower school choirs. Daily Mass or Adoration. See website for tuition. lsteffy@sta2.org, sta2.org EC, BA, Drop-in, NAEYC, TT, 56, D4



Spiritus Sanctus Academy

4101 E. Joy [(734) 996-3855

170 students in grades pre-K-8. Sr. Maria Gemma, OP, principal. Roman Catholic teachings; full academic program. Contact for pricing. annarbor@spiritussanctus.org, facebook.com /spiritussanctusacademy 53, H1



Summers-Knoll School

2203 Platt [(734) 971-7991

Grades K-8 plus Y5s and preschool. Johnathan Letcher, head of school. Project-based, place-based, interdisciplinary learning in multi-age classrooms for bright, gifted, and creative children. Programs during vacation breaks, including summer camp. Preschool: $7,250+. Y5s: $13,750. Kindergarten: $18,500. Grades 1-5: $21,700. Grades 5-8: $23,000, which includes morning and after care. info@summers-knoll.org, summers-knoll.org EC, TT, 57, F6



Veritas Christi Catholic High School

640 Ridgewood [(734) 645-1643

Grades 7-12. Charles (Chip) Clearwater, principal. Online Roman Catholic high school for students with special needs. Contact for pricing. veritaschristi.com 58, E7

The organizers of the annual Arctic Circle Forum in Reykjavik did not send any official invitation to the Russian Federation, but they would be happy if Russian leaders decided to come, Forum Chairman and former President of Iceland Olafur Ragnar Grimsson told RIA Novosti.

We did not officially invite President Putin to attend the Arctic Circle Forum, but it would be a great honor for us to welcome him at the event, Grimsson noted. Of course, we will always be happy to see the Russian Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and the President of Russia at the assembly in Reykjavik, he said. It would be a great honor for us to welcome representatives of the Russian Government if they decide to attend the Arctic Circle Assembly, he added.

The Governor of the Murmansk Region has confirmed her intention to attend the 2018 Forum together with a regional delegation, and talks are also underway to receive a delegation from the Krasnoyarsk Territory, he added.

Several years ago now, we decided it would be interesting to acquaint assembly members with various Russian Arctic regions that have tremendous significance, and we have been inviting their leaders and delegations for the past four years, he said. This is because the Russian Arctic stretches through seven time zones and it is twice as big as the United States, he pointed out. Therefore it is important that people comprehend the size of various Russian Arctic territories as well as their importance, while discussing Arctic matters, he noted.YEREVAN, AUGUST 27, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian-German relations will reach a new level by the recent visit of Chancellor Angela Merkel to Armenia, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Arman Navasardyan told reporters on August 27, Armenpress reports.

Germany will support and assist Armenia in a number of matters, in particular, in the development of relations with Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany is number one in the list of the EU states, and Merkel said with an open text that they will contribute to the development of our relations with Europe. Merkel also stated that the Artsakh conflict should be solved peacefully, and Germany will do everything to contribute to that, he said.

The Ambassador highlighted the fact that Chancellor Merkel saw in her own eyes the country of Armenia which carried out a Velvet revolution.

He positively assessed Merkels visit to Armenia, but said its just the beginning of all relations, time will show how they will develop.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, AUGUST 27, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan sent a congratulatory letter to Moldovas Prime Minister Pavel Filip on the Independence Day, the Armenian PMs Office told Armenpress.

The letter says:

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

Accept my sincere congratulations and best wishes on the occasion of Moldovas national day  the Independence Day. I am convinced that the active inter-governmental joint work will contribute to further strengthening the mutual cooperation between Armenia and Moldova and creating favorable conditions for launching new prospective initiatives in commercial, scientific-technical and cultural-humanitarian sectors, as well as for the development of the whole spectrum of bilateral relations.

The Armenian PM addressed his wishes to PM Filip and the good people of Moldova.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, AUGUST 27, ARMENPRESS. The meeting of Speaker of the Parliament Ara Babloyan and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was held on August 27, the Parliament told Armenpresss.

The Speaker made the initiative to meet earlier with the statement issued on the countrys domestic political situation.

During the meeting the leaders of the executive and legislative powers in particularly stated:

Regardless of political views everyone in Armenia has a right to freedom of expression and different opinion

Independence of judiciary is a key guarantee for ensuring justice in the country, therefore the separation and balance mechanism of legislative, executive and judicial powers should not be undermined in any case

Armenias judicial system has not yet exhausted itself with its all tools in the implementation of justice, nevertheless, if the sides come to a conclusion based on the political discussions that there is a need for transitional justice institute, it should be carried out by the changes of the Constitution and the respective legislative field and must not harm the justice in any case.

According to the Governments program, approved by the Parliament on 07.06.2018, the snap parliamentary elections must be held at least within a year. In case of holding the snap parliamentary elections through Constitutional changes, the referendum institute can be the most democratic one among the series of mechanisms, as the Constitution, that is subject to change, has been adopted by a referendum. Nevertheless, the choice of any option on this issue should be made based on broad public and political discussions. Such opportunities are not exhausted both in the Parliament and broad public circles.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, AUGUST 27, ARMENPRESS. Political scientist Narine Dilbaryan says German Chancellor Angela Merkels recent visit to Armenia will positively affect the Armenian-German relations, Armenpress reports.

The political scientist told reporters that Angela Merkel was quite impressed with Armenias open society.

We managed to show that we are an open society: I think the enthusiasm both the ordinary citizens and our authorities showed to Merkel has impressed her a lot, she said.

According to her, the Armenian-German relations can receive the necessary quality in economic and financial sectors in the 21st century.

Dilbaryan expressed hope that the Armenian side has presented real programs to the German delegation.

I have heard from the words of the German Ambassador that there are expectations regarding the support to social programs, but of course, this is not enough. The visit was held in social, scientific-cultural and cognitive terms, and it was held also due to the fact that Merkel arrived in Armenia really prepared, she said, adding that this visit can be considered as one of the most influential ones during the tenure of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

Edited and translated by Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, AUGUST 27, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan received member of Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament, MEP Martin Sonneborn on August 27.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Government of Armenia, the PM welcomed the MEP and thanked him for his pro-Armenian actions at the European Parliament, particularly over the issues of the Armenian Genocide and Nagorno Karabakh.

During the meeting issues referring to the democratic processes and reforms in Armenia were discussed.

The PM referred to the non-violent, peaceful velvet revolution, noting that Armenia lives an era of great transformations, and the steps of the new government are aimed at the development of democracy, fight against corruption, establishment of rule of law, protection of human rights, independence of the judicial branch, elimination of economic monopolies and establishment of favorable business environment. Nikol Pashinyan emphasized that these reforms will give Armenia an opportunity to be more democratic, more secure and successful.

Martin Sonneborn saluted the peaceful democratic process in Armenia and the reforms initiated y the Armenian Government in various spheres. The sides highlighted the assistance of European institutions for the successful implementation of the reform agenda in Armenia.

The interlocutors also referred to Nagorno Karabakh conflict and highlighted its peaceful settlement in the sidelines of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chairs format.

Translated and edited by Tigran SirekanyanHe is set to become Denmarks future King but by the looks of it, the 50-year-old Crown Prince Frederik is still just a big kid heart.

After enjoying a family vacation with his wife, Crown Princess Mary, and their four children, Christian, 12, Isabella, 11, and seven-year-twins Vincent and Josephine, Prince Frederik decided to relive his youth by attending the popular Denmark music festival Smukfest.

The five-day outdoor festival held in an open forest is considered to be quite rowdy with alcohol and drugs considered the norm, according to a source speaking to Womans Day.

The event is said to also include nude runs, strip shows and an annual drinking competition  certainly not somewhere you would expect to see a middle-aged Prince.

Yet, dressed in a casual party shirt and shorts was Prince Frederik, letting loose among the thousands of people with one source admitting he seemed a little tipsy.

Prince Frederik showing off his best dance moves at Smukfest festival. Source: Instagram/Tomorrows Crowned Heads

The Prince even got up on stage and showed off his best dance moves during the set of Danish band, Nephew  the same band that performed at his 50th birthday party.

All the while Frederik was busy having a good time, his wife Mary 46, had returned to her royal duties following their family vacation and remained at home to look after their children.

Crown Prince Frederik and Princess Mary dressed the part while on vacation with their four kids. Source: Getty

And it seems Mary wasnt too happy about her husbands partying which is not in-line with the expectations of a future King.

Mary works hard  she enjoyed her holiday but now she knows she has a duty to serve the Danish people and do it properly. Its easy to see why shed be incredibly embarrassed by Freds behaviour, a palace source told Womans Day.

Story continues

Everyone knows Mary wishes hed just grow up!

Got a story tip? Send it to tips@yahoo7.com.au

Want more celebrity, entertainment and lifestyle news? Follow Be on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram.Austria's foreign minister defended on Monday the presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin at her wedding, denying she had been used by him after photos of the two dancing fueled questions about her neutrality. "He didn't use me in any way," Karin Kneissl said in an interview with Der Standard daily. "I see it this way: I have established a basis of trust with Putin and he with me -- a reciprocity based on which it will become possible to talk about certain things." The invitation to the August 18 wedding and widely circulated images of Kneissl bowing down in front of Putin at the end of a dance have raised sharp criticism from the opposition and come amid reports that European intelligence services have distanced themselves from Vienna. Kneissl was nominated to the post by the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), who took power in a coalition government with Kurz's centre-right People's Party (OeVP) late last year. The FPOe has a "cooperation pact" with Putin's United Russia party since 2016. Kneissl said she invited Putin in June when he was on an official visit in Vienna while she happened to be giving wedding invitation cards to Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and other colleagues that day. "It was out of a spontaneous situation... I didn't expect him to accept," she was quoted as saying in the interview after returning from her honeymoon. "It was a huge surprise for all of us." She added that during the wedding, she and Putin briefly talked about Syria, but gave no further details. She and Putin have both insisted the wedding was a private event. Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the FPOe has defended Kneissl, saying "one can't represent Austria any better than this". In an interview over the weekend with Die Presse daily, he said he may like to invite hardline Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and Hungarian nationalist firebrand premier Viktor Orban to his own wedding. Kurz has insisted Austria, which currently holds the EU rotating presidency, shares the EU's stance on Russia. Putin's visit came amid reports that other Western countries have been becoming warier of intelligence cooperation with Austria due to suspicions that the FPOe and its interior minister are trying to exert influence on intelligence agencies. The opposition last week called for a meeting of the national security council within two weeks to discuss the concern that information may no longer be shared by allies with Austria for fear it may be shared with Moscow. Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl said she briefly discussed Syria with Russian President Vladimir Putin dance during her weddingA 14-year-old boy accused of repeatedly stabbing a female classmate during a school assembly attacked her when she refused his romantic advances, police say.

The teen girl told investigators the boy had tried to start a romantic relationship with her, but she told him she liked him only as a friend.

The boy then reportedly stabbed the girl nine to 11 times with a 10cm folding knife that had a serrated edge, Fox News reported.

A 14-year-old Oklahoma boy accused of repeatedly stabbing a female classmate attacked her when she refused his romantic advances, police say. Source: KOCO/ABC5

Investigators had earlier been tight-lipped about a possible motive behind the August 16 stabbing at Luther High School, Oklahoma, US. The attack happened as students gathered on the first day of school.

A teacher was able to subdue the boy and take the knife from him, while other teachers gave the girl CPR as they waited for first responders to arrive.

Police Chief David Randall confirmed the girl had been released from hospital.

The 14-year-old victim is transported to hospital by helicopter after being stabbed 9 to 11 times. Source: KOCO/ABC5

The boy remains in the Oklahoma County Juvenile Detention Center and faces charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.

Chief Randall told NBC News he was struck by the boys nonchalant attitude about what he had done, as the teen showed no remorse whatsoever.

Luther Public Schools shared a statement on their website shortly after the incident, saying: There was an incident at the High School Assembly this morning at the Auditorium.

The situation is under control, the students at the high school are safe.Facebook banned Myanmar's army chief and other top military brass on Monday after a UN investigation recommended they face prosecution for genocide for a crackdown on Rohingya Muslims. The world's biggest social network is the prime source of news and information for many in a country that only recently came online following nearly half a century of military rule. But Facebook has also been a platform for the army and Buddhist hardliners to spread hate speech and incendiary posts against the stateless Rohingya and other minorities. The site aired support for the military's bloody "clearance operations" last year that forced some 700,000 Rohingya over the border into Bangladesh. Facebook acknowledged this was the first time it had banned a state or military actor, noting it was a "unique" situation. "We've taken this step in Myanmar following findings by international experts, including a recent UN-commissioned report, that many of these officials committed serious human rights abuses in the country," Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja said. As to whether this could set a precedent, the spokeswoman said: "We recognise that people in other parts of the world face devastating violence on a daily basis, and we will continue to investigate and take action when we have enough facts to do so." UN investigators lambasted the platform earlier this year, saying it had morphed into a "beast" in Myanmar. In recent months, the tech giant has embarked on a huge public relations campaign, admitting it has often been too slow to take down inflammatory posts. It blacklisted two firebrand Buddhist monks and an Islamophobic group notorious for spreading anti-Muslim propaganda. But this is the first time it has touched the country's military. "We are banning 20 Burmese individuals and organizations from Facebook -- including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the armed forces," the platform said, adding that it wants to prevent them from using the service to "further inflame ethnic and religious tensions". Facebook has some 18 million accounts in the country of 51 million people and is also relied on heavily by the government to make announcements. - Millions of followers - Army chief Min Aung Hlaing had two active Facebook accounts, one boasting 1.3 million followers and the other 2.8 million. Posts in both English and Burmese would refer to the Rohingya as "Bengali", implying they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and helping reinforce the idea they do not belong in mainly Buddhist Myanmar. His pages also featured denials of atrocities during the crackdown, which was justified by the army as a legitimate means of rooting out Rohingya militants. Both accounts were taken down immediately as the explosive UN report circulated. The accounts of five other top military leaders specifically mentioned in the report were also blacklisted. A total of 18 Facebook accounts -- not all the individuals listed in the ban had a presence on the network -- one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages were removed. The accounts were followed by a total of almost 12 million people, Facebook said, adding that data had been preserved. Rights groups have long criticised the platform for taking days to delete malicious posts, by which time many had gone viral. These include calls for the killing of a Muslim journalist and the spreading of messages to both Buddhists and Muslims saying that the other community was preparing to attack them. The UN report singled out Facebook for its "slow and ineffective" response. It also strongly criticised civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to use her position and moral authority to stand up for the Rohingya. In Yangon, government spokesman Zaw Htay said it was asking Facebook for more information on the blocking. "Community standards must be balanced," he told local media, referring to the company's content guidelines. "The government would like to know the exact reason." Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the violence in Myanmar on several occasions including at a congressional hearing earlier this year. He told lawmakers Facebook planned to hire more native speakers to help monitor the situation and had partnered with civil society groups to identify perpetrators of hate speech. Facebook has banned Myanmar's military chiefs Myanmar's Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing was among those banned by Facebook after a UN report blamed military leaders for inciting violence against the Rohingya minorityThe family of a 26-year-old man who was stabbed to death say they are shattered beyond belief.

Jordan Byrne, who lived in North Bondi in Sydneys east, was allegedly murdered in a fight over a woman after a night out with friends.

Mr Byrne had grown up on the NSW Central Coast with a passion for rugby league and earned junior representative honours.

Jordan Byrne grew up on the Central Coast with a passion for rugby league and earned junior representative honours. Source: 7 News

Six years ago he moved to Bondi, fell in love with surfing and worked hard as a crane driver.

Jordan loved life, was a constant source of laughter, such a loveable character, Mr Byrnes family told 7 News in a statement on Monday.

Jordan was taken from us by a vicious and evil perpetrator, which shattered our family beyond belief.

Mr Byrnes family released a statement on Monday speaking of their grief at losing him. Source: 7 News

The 26-year-old was allegedly stabbed multiple times in the face and stomach in his North Bondi unit.

He was rushed to Sydneys inner-city St Vincents Hospital, but did not survive emergency surgery.

Milo Wild, 27, has been charged with murder. It is believed both men had dated the same woman.

The accused, Milo Wild (left), and Jordan Byrne (right) are believed to have dated the same woman. Source: 7 News

Wild did not face the magistrate on Monday, opting to stay in his holding cell.

One of the accuseds family members came to support him at Waverley Court on Monday.

Wild has been refused bail and will remain in custody until his next court date in October.The family of a mother fighting for her life in a Bali hospital have been told they might get her home to New Zealand soon.

Abby Hartley, 41, and her husband Richard travelled to Bali earlier this month for their second honeymoon and first holiday without the children.

But just a few hours after arriving, the mother started experiencing severe pain.

She was rushed to the ICU at a hospital in Nusa Dua where it was determined a chunk of her bowel had died.

After emergency surgery, Ms Hartley took a turn for the worse and developed a respiratory issue that only allowed her to take in 70 per cent of her needed oxygen.

The mother was put in an induced coma.

A New Zealand mother has been left fighting for her life after falling ill on the first day of her Bali holiday. Photo: Give A Little

Dad told us kids to get on the first plane over from [New Zealand] as things werent looking too good and mum needed all the support she could get, Ms Hartleys daughter Sophie wrote on her fundraising page.

Ms Hartley remains in a coma and was hooked up to a machine to be given 100 per cent oxygen.

She is having mild physiotherapy to move her arms and legs, and Sophie said she has some movement with her eyelids.

The family were told on Saturday they might be able to bring the mother home when she reaches 40 per cent oxygen from the respirator.

Also what we need is to get Abby awake, we have been playing all the voice recordings and videos sent by all those close to her and we are getting some response so please keep them coming, we understand it feels a bit strange talking into a phone but we believe it is helping Abby a lot, Sophie said.

Ms Hartley was moved to a public hospital on August 12 after the bills started to stack up. Photo: Give A Little

The family are now trying to scrape together more than $146,000 for a specialised aircraft to transport Ms Hartley.

Our only options now are to wait it out over here in Bali  with medical bills stacking up or to get an EVAC, Sophie said.

A Give A Little page has been started to raise money for the familys medical bills and the flight home.Five people were charged Monday with murdering a transgender prostitute who was allegedly trying to stop them robbing her client in a Paris park, a case that has sparked fury amongst LGBT rights groups. Vanesa Campos, a 36-year-old originally from Peru, was shot dead on the night of August 16-17 in the Bois de Boulogne, a large park on the French capital's western edge which has been used for years by sex workers. Eight people were detained on Tuesday in connection with her death and five have now been charged with murder as well as robbery, a legal source said, adding that they had been remanded in custody. Hundreds of sex workers and activists marched in Paris on Friday in memory of Campos, holding white roses and signs that said "Justice for Vanesa" as they chanted, "Trans murder, the state is complicit". LGBT groups have lashed out at an anti-prostitution law which they said had made Campos' work more dangerous. Campaign groups including trans rights organisation Acceptess-T are calling for the 2016 law, which criminalises the buying of sex, to be repealed. Campaigners say it has hit sex workers' incomes and forced them to work in more isolated locations so that their customers are not seen by the police -- exposing them to a greater risk of assault. Buying a prostitute's services is punishable with a fine in France of 1,500 euros ($1,750), rising to 3,750 euros for repeat offenders. "The law is 100 percent responsible for Vanesa's death," Acceptess-T leader Giovanna Rincon told AFP at the march on Friday, calling for "real measures to fight transphobia". A makeshift memorial was created in tribute to Vanesa Campos, a transgender sex worker who was murdered in ParisGerman Foreign Minister Heiko Maas again took aim at US President Donald Trump's foreign policy in a speech on Monday, branding his policies towards Europe "irritating". "Obviously it irritates us when President Trump describes Europe as an enemy of the USA in the same breath as Russia and China or calls NATO into question almost as a throwaway remark," Maas told a gathering of Romanian diplomats in Bucharest. "It seems absurd that we in the European Union have to worry about reacting to US tariffs that are justified on national security grounds," Maas said, before going on to note that this "absurdity" may simply be the reflection of a new geo-political reality. "'America First' was a wake-up call. Our answer to that must be: 'Europe United!," Maas said. Last week the minister used an article in the Handelsblatt newspaper to call on Europe to consider a "new world order" more independent of the US, prompting Chancellor Angela Merkel to make clear that this was only Maas's personal opinion. In his speech on Monday, Maas called on the EU to develop a "common foreign and security policy worthy of the name", as well as a "defence union", and added that the principle of unanimity had too often led to the policy of the "lowest common denominator". "We must be able to find areas in which majority decisions are conceivable for all member states," he said. Maas also expressed concern over "polarisation" evident in Romania over alleged government corruption and controversial judicial reforms. Earlier this month more than 450 people were hurt, including 30 police, during clashes at anti-government protests. "It's not the discussion as such that worries us, as that has to take place. It is the harshness of the debate, which has led to violent confrontations," Maas said. He called for a "compromise" to be found over judicial reform which would preserve the balance of powers while bringing together Romanian society. Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas branded US President Donald Trump's policy towards Europe "irritating" during a visit to BucharestA homeless man who helped a stranded motorist in the US said he is begging for money once again because he has no access to the $545,000 raised for him through a GoFundMe page.

Johnny Bobbitt gained worldwide attention when he used his last $20 to fill up the gas tank of stranded motorist Kate McClure in Philadelphia in November 2017.

Ms McClure and her boyfriend, Mark DAmico, started a GoFundMe campaign in return, promising that Mr Bobbitt would have a home.

The couple are now being accused of withholding the funds raised for Mr Bobbitt.

Johnny Bobbitt Jr gave his last $20 to help Kate McClure get home. Miss McClures boyfriend Mark DAmico is pictured in the middle of the photo on the right Source: GoFundMe/AP

The page quickly raised $545,000 (US$400,000), and Mr Bobbitt even revealed what he planned to purchase with his new-found fortune.

Weve received a lot of comments and questions about what Johnnys plans are for this money and how it will be used, Ms McClure revealed.

The first thing on the list is a NEW Home which Johnny will own!!

He will never have to worry about a roof over his head again!! Second will be the dream truck hes always wanted..  a 1999 Ford Ranger.

But Mr Bobbitt told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he cant use the $272,000 left out of the $545,000 that donors raised, and he no longer has a camper or a car.

Mr Bobbitt says he is unable to access the money raised for him. Source: Associated Press

DAmico says he controls the money

Mr Bobbitts lawyer, Jacqueline Promislo, confirmed he was living on the streets and back on drugs, but said he was entitled the money raised for him.

What [Mr Bobbitt] would like is to obtain the money that has been raised for him, Promislo told NBC News.

Over 14,000 people gave him money to help him get off the streets and give him a safe place to live.

Ms McClure said the couple did all they could to help Mr Bobbitt.

Mr DAmico said he controls the money and will start dispensing it when Mr Bobbitt gets a job and stops using drugs.

Giving him all that money, its never going to happen, he told the Inquirer.

Johnny Bobbitt before he was homeless. Source: Facebook

Ill burn it in front of him, he said, adding that giving an addict the money would be like giving him a loaded gun.

Story continues

Mr Bobbitt fears the couple have spent the money themselves on holidays to California, Florida and the Grand Canyon, and gambled a portion away.

I think it might have been good intentions in the beginning, but with that amount of money, I think it became greed, he said.

Mr DAmico admitted to the Inquirer that he used $680 (US$500) of the money at a casino, but said he had since repaid the full amount.

GoFundMe is investigating whether the money was mismanaged and said it will work to ensure Mr Bobbitt receives the help he deserves and that the donors intentions are honored.A Hong Kong pro-democracy group led by high-profile activist Joshua Wong said Monday two of its members had been detained and questioned in mainland China. The pair were released within hours but were warned not to publicise their experiences, the Demosisto party said in a statement. Hong Kong has rights unseen on the mainland but concerns are growing that those liberties are under serious threat as China tightens its grip on the semi-autonomous city. Wong described the detentions as a "clear signal" that Chinese security forces were trying to suppress the democracy movement. Demosisto campaigns for self-determination for Hong Kong, a concept which Beijing considers intolerable and a challenge to its territorial integrity. The pair, who according to the statement were not key members of the party, were allegedly picked up at train stations in the southern Chinese towns of Shenzhen and Guangzhou in March and August. Both members were asked about their participation in recent protests and for information about Demosisto, the group said. The first was questioned at a police station and released around three hours later, according to the statement. The second was taken to a hotel, where they were attached to what the group said resembled a lie detector and accused of "trying to stir up trouble in the mainland". Demosisto said the member was offered payment to provide information after returning to Hong Kong, before being asked to sign an apology and released after five hours. Beijing considers calls for self-determination in Hong Kong as tantamount to demands for independence. The emergence of an independence movement in the last four years has led to a crackdown in the city, with some activists jailed and others barred from office. It also comes as Hong Kong prepares to launch a high-speed rail link to the mainland at the end of September. The new line will see China's security staff operating on the city's turf for the first time, prompting fresh fears over citizens' freedoms. Demosisto founder Wong said the rail link could enable Chinese state security to "fully review and follow... every citizen" who visits the mainland. Beijing considers calls for self-determination in Hong Kong as tantamount to demands for independenceIran demanded Monday that the UN's top court order the United States to suspend nuclear-linked sanctions against Tehran, but Washington vowed to "vigorously" fend off the legal challenge. The Islamic Republic launched a suit at the International Court of Justice over US President Donald Trump's decision to reimpose sanctions that were lifted in a landmark 2015 accord. Trump says the sanctions are needed to ensure Iran never builds a nuclear bomb. But Iran's representative Mohsen Mohebi branded them "naked economic aggression". His team of lawyers told the court in The Hague that the measures were already devastating Iran's economy and threatening the welfare of its citizens. "The United States is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran's economy and Iranian nationals and companies," Mohebi said. "Iran will put up the strongest resistance to the US economic strangulation, by all peaceful means." US lawyers are due to give their response in arguments before the court on Tuesday, with experts expecting them to challenge the ICJ's jurisdiction. "We will vigorously defend against Iran's meritless claims this week in The Hague," said US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He said Iran's lawsuit was "an attempt to interfere with the sovereign rights of the United States to take lawful actions, including re-imposition of sanctions, which are necessary to protect our national security". - 'Irreparable prejudice' - ICJ judgements are binding, final and without appeal. However, whether any decision will be implemented remains unclear, with both Iran and the US in the past ignoring ICJ rulings against them. The US measures have added to Iran's economic woes, fuelling strikes and protests across the country and political spectrum. The sanctions target financial transactions and imports of raw materials, cars and aircraft among other sectors. A second wave of punitive measures is due to hit the OPEC member state in early November, targeting its vital energy sector including oil exports. Iran's lawyers said the sanctions would cause it "irreparable prejudice". They urged the court to order the suspension of the sanctions pending a definitive ruling. London-based lawyer Samuel Wordsworth, for Iran, told the court the measures were threatening Iranians' access to medicines as well as disrupting business deals. - 'One-sided deal' - The ICJ is expected to take a couple of months to decide whether to grant Tehran's request for a provisional ruling. A final decision could take years. After years of diplomacy, the 2015 deal was signed by Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. Sanctions were lifted in return for Iran committing not to pursue nuclear weapons. Trump, who took office in 2016, called it a "horrible one-sided deal". He said it "failed to achieve the fundamental objective of blocking all paths to a Iranian nuclear bomb." - Business deals scuppered - Iran's lawyers said the US sanctions had disrupted tens of billions of dollars' worth of business deals with foreign companies. Iran's currency the rial has lost around half its value since April. International companies including French oil firm Total and Germany's Siemens have suspended operations in Iran since Trump announced the US withdrawal in May. Trump said the sanctions would turn up the financial pressure on Tehran to come to a "comprehensive and lasting solution" regarding its activities such as its "ballistic missile programme and its support for terrorism". The case is the second brought by Tehran against Washington since 2016. That year it brought a suit at the ICJ against the freezing of around $2 billion of Iranian assets abroad which US courts say should go to American victims of terror attacks. Hearings in that case are due to start on October 8. In both cases Iran is basing its claim on the obscure 1955 Treaty of Amity and Economic Relations, signed long before the country's Islamic revolution. Despite the treaty, the two countries have not had diplomatic ties since 1980. Iran routinely refers to the US as "the enemy" and its officials chant "Death to America" at official functions. Iran's representative Mohsen Mohebi (left) branded US sanctions 'naked economic aggression' as Tehran opened its case at the International Court of Justice US President Donald Trump has described the 2015 Iran agreement as a 'horrible one-sided deal' US sanctions have fuelled economic trouble in Iran Air France and British Airways have said they will halt flights to TehranA 21-year-old student in Iran has been sentenced to seven years in prison for taking part in university protests, her lawyer and Iranian media said on Monday. Parisa Rafei, an arts student at the University of Tehran, was convicted of "assembly with the intention of acting against national security, propaganda against the system and disrupting public order", according to reformist newspaper Shargh. Her lawyer, Saeed Khalili, described the sentencing as "unfair and unreasonable" on Twitter. He was also quoted by Shargh as saying: "In my view, none of these charges are logical or a legally sufficient reason to indicate that she has committed a crime." Khalili said the alleged crimes were focused on a student union demonstration in early December over issues such as dormitory opening hours. "All these actions are within the framework of law and rights stated in the constitution," Khalili added. A total of 45 of her fellow students are also behind bars for their part in much broader unrest that swept the country later in December, according to an article in the reformist Etemad newspaper. It said at least two of the students have been given sentences of eight years, without providing details, and that all the cases were due to be completed within the next month. An Iranian woman raises her fist in a cloud of tear gas during a protest at the University of Tehran on December 30, 2017Julie Bishop has hit out at the dirty tactics that saw key Liberal party members tear down her candidacy in Fridays leadership spill.

Ms Bishop was the partys deputy leader for more than a decade but was knocked out in the first round of voting in Fridays leadership ballot after Malcolm Turnbull allowed a spill to go ahead.

In the wake of the tumultuous push for a new leader, messages from a private WhatsApp group revealed plans to throw support behind eventual Prime Minister Scott Morrison from round one, rather than Ms Bishop, to ensure rival Peter Dutton would not win the ballot.

Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher told 19 Liberal Party members in the Friends of Stability WhatsApp group, despite our hearts tugging us to Julie, we need to vote with our heads for Scott in round one.

Julie Bishop said she was aware of a message thread tearing down her ballot chances. Image: AAP

[Mathias] Cormann rumoured to be putting some WA votes behind Julie Bishop in round one, Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher wrote to the group.

But as Mr Morrison, the sixth prime minister in a decade, attempts to restore stability to his fractured government , Ms Bishop says frustrated Australians are still looking for answers.

The member for Curtain, who will now move to the backbench for the meantime, said the chaos of the week-long leadership spill had been personally devastating for a number of Australians.

Scott Morrison, Julie Bishop and Peter Dutton all competed for the Liberal leadership. Image: AAP

You would have to ask the individuals involved but it appeared to be a tactic to promote Peter Dutton into the prime ministership, whatever the cost, Ms Bishop said.

There has been speculation she could take on an ambassador role or succeed Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove when his commission finishes in March.

Cormann denies dirty tricks

Julie Bishops colleagues say she left her run for the Liberal leadership a bit late and deny the outgoing foreign minister was the victim of a dirty tricks campaign.

Finance Minister Mathias Cormann says he doesnt believe she was the victim of dirty tricks.

I mean, I dont know. Not from my point of view, he told ABC TV on Monday.

Story continues

Mathias Cormann, who has been returned as finance minister, says he was not part of any dirty tactics. Source: AAP

The minister, who backed Peter Dutton to become prime minister, said rumours he had been involved in such tactics were untrue.

I can completely and categorically rule out any such tricks, as you call it, he said.

Fellow WA MP Melissa Price, who is joining the front bench as Environment Minister, said she thought Ms Bishop left her tilt at the top job too late.

I wondered whether Julie was perhaps just a couple of hours late to the piece and I really felt that maybe people had already aligned themselves with either Dutton or Morrison, she told ABC Perth on Monday.

Im not a mind reader, I cant tell you what the rest of my colleagues were thinking, but I think that might have played a part.Late US senator John McCain took a final swipe at Donald Trump in his farewell message to the nation delivered posthumously Monday, denouncing "tribal rivalries," as an aide confirmed the president will not attend the lawmaker's funeral. The message came as Trump found himself mired in controversy over his rather conspicuous failure to pay tribute to McCain, who died Saturday at 81 after a year-long battle with brain cancer. The flag at the White House was at full-staff Monday, and no formal statement came from Trump beyond a brief tweet. On Monday, McCain offered his final thoughts, in a message read by his former campaign manager Rick Davis -- and he did not spare the Republican president. "We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe," McCain said in the statement. "We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been," he added -- an apparent reference to Trump's plans for a border wall. "I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world's greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil," the former prisoner of war, two-time Republican presidential candidate and titan of US politics said. "Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here," he said, adding that the country "will get through these challenging times." That appeared to be a reference to Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan. McCain's death has left many American mourning the loss of a national hero who repeatedly challenged the status quo and consistently sought bipartisan solutions to the country's problems. The longtime senator clashed repeatedly with Trump despite being from the same party, and the president -- who in 2016 famously dismissed McCain as "not a war hero" -- has paid scant tribute to the senator in the wake of his death. With bad blood between them at the boil, McCain reportedly excluded Trump from his funeral ceremonies -- a development that Davis confirmed on Monday. "The president will not be, as far as we know, attending the funeral. That's just a fact," Davis told a press briefing in Arizona. The two men who defeated McCain in his White House campaigns, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, are expected to deliver eulogies at a Saturday service at the National Cathedral in Washington, a day after McCain's body lies in state in the US Capitol. McCain will be buried Sunday at the US Naval Academy in nearby Annapolis, Maryland in a private funeral service. In his final message to the nation, late US senator John McCain launched a last broadside at Donald TrumpMexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's advisers on Monday hailed a new trade deal with the United States, saying it represented progress on energy and wages for Mexico's workers. "We see the agreement announced today as a positive step, because it reduces the uncertainty about our economy and also takes into account the concerns raised by the president-elect's team," said future foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard. Lopez Obrador is a leftist free-trade skeptic, and his landslide victory in Mexico's July 1 elections had raised doubts about the future of the ongoing renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). However, his transition team has been taking part in the talks, and gave their blessing to the two-way deal announced between Washington and Mexico City. Ebrard said the preliminary deal -- which will now be presented to Canada, the third member of NAFTA -- represented progress "especially related to the Mexican energy sector, labor conditions and wages for our workers." It also "maintains trilateral arenas for resolving disputes and certainty about the agreement itself in the medium term," he said in a joint press conference with future economy minister Graciela Marquez Colin at Lopez Obrador's offices in Mexico City. The comments alluded to many of the thorniest issues that had been dividing the negotiating teams. Lopez Obrador, who takes office on December 1, has been reluctant to continue outgoing president Enrique Pena Nieto's opening of the Mexican energy sector, complicating negotiations on the energy portion of the deal. Low wages for Mexican workers are meanwhile a sore spot for both the United States and Canada -- and for Lopez Obrador himself, who vowed to bring them closer in line with what American and Canadian workers earn. The talks had also stumbled over US President Donald Trump's bid to eliminate NAFTA's dispute resolution mechanism and introduce a "sunset clause" requiring the three countries to renew the deal every five years. The three countries have been renegotiating NAFTA for just over a year at the behest of Trump, who calls the 1994 trade pact a "terrible deal" that he blames for sending US manufacturing jobs to Mexico. In announcing the deal, Trump suggested he might cut Ottawa out of the agreement reached with Mexico and added that he wanted to change the name of the North American Free Trade Agreement because it has "bad connotations." Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto urged Canada to get on board, tweeting he had told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by phone that a final, three-way deal was possible this week. Pena Nieto also spoke with Trump on the phone, in a conversation televised live from the Oval Office. The Mexican president's office said the two-way deal "reflects a balance between both countries' interests" and "brings certainty" about the economy. US President Donald Trump (R) shake hands with Mexico's Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal watched by Mexico's Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray Caso (C) after reaching an agreement on tradeIsrael's prime minister says he sees a path to peace with Palestinians through the "normalisation" of relations with Arab states which, like his country, are also facing an emboldened Iran. "Many Arab countries now see Israel not as their enemy but as their indispensable ally in pushing back Iranian aggression," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview with Lithuania's LRT public broadcaster which aired on Monday. "This has created normalisation which can lead to peace. I believe that if we have peace with the broader Arab world, it will help us get to peace with the Palestinians," he added in the interview taped during his visit to the Baltic state -- the first-ever by an Israeli premier -- that ended on Sunday. Israel has peace treaties with just two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan, while others insist on an agreement with the Palestinians as a prerequisite that would pave the way to formal relations. Earlier this year Saudi Arabian King Salman reaffirmed "steadfast" support for the Palestinian cause after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman signalled a shift in the country's approach. Prince Mohammed in April said in a magazine interview that Israelis, as well as Palestinians, "have the right to have their own land". Both Israel and Saudi Arabia have opposed the Iran nuclear deal and pushed for tougher action against Iran's spreading influence in the Middle East. In July, the Saudis slammed a controversial Israeli law as "perpetuating racial discrimination" against Palestinians by defining the country as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Arab citizens account for some 17.5 percent of Israel's more than eight million population and have long complained of discrimination. The Israeli legislation was also condemned by the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, comprised of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. At least 171 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire during demonstrations near the border with Israel that began in March amid a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Israel -- whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (C) is seen here in Lithuania -- has peace treaties with only two Arab countries, Egypt and JordanA pregnant woman and her partner, missing for three days after their broken-down car was abandoned in the Northern Territory outback, have been found safe.

Bianca Farnsworth, 25, and Cody Rowland, 29, had not been seen since they abandoned their old Mitsubishi Urvan on the Stuart Highway just before 3pm Friday.

Northern Territory police confirmed to Yahoo7 they located the couple safe and well at the Desert Oaks rest area, about 35km north of Erldunda on Monday.

The pair tried to hitchhike with their pet rotweiller after their van broke down. Source: NT Police

The couple were travelling in an old Mitsubishi Urvan. Image: NT Police

They were able to send a text message to a relative from the phone of another traveller, advising that they were safe after having car troubles, a NT Police spokesperson said.

Police initially thought the Victorian couple and their pet Rottweiler had attempted to hitch-hike the remaining 200km to Alice Springs after their car broke down.

Both are believed to be in good health however Bianca is several months pregnant with her first child, A NT police spokesperson said in a statement before they were found.

It is unclear what supplies or finances they have available.An asylum-seeker boat has reached Australia for the first time in almost four years, the government said Monday, with many of those on board the Vietnamese vessel fleeing into a crocodile-infested mangrove rainforest after running aground near the coast. Locals said passengers from the rickety vessel disappeared into the dense forest near the Daintree River, north of popular tourist city Cairns, in the tropical far north of Queensland state on Sunday. They will have to avoid crocodiles, venomous snakes, ferocious sandflies and giant cassowaries -- one of the world's deadliest and most aggressive birds -- that all call the ancient Daintree rainforest home. Queensland Police Minister Mark Ryan told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation 15 passengers had been found so far. The ABC added that two others, including the boat's captain, were still missing. The Brisbane Courier Mail reported that up to 20 were unaccounted for. It said those detained were well dressed and in good health. State Emergency Service area controller Peter Rinaudo said earlier his crews were searching through the mangroves and near the mouth of the river, reportedly with dogs. "It'll be a hard slog, it's still quite warm in there and it'll be tough conditions for the guys," he told the ABC. "I hope the people, however many there are, get located -- it's not a nice area for them to be in." A fisherman who spotted two asylum-seekers hiding in the mangroves said he took the pair on a tour of the Daintree River. "We gave them a ride up the river and had a few laughs and we got them to help us pull in the crab pots", fisherman Justin Ward told television broadcaster Channel Nine, adding that they were taking photos and selfies. He later broke it to the men that he would hand them over to the police. - Tough policy - Home affairs minister Peter Dutton said the partially sunk vessel had come from Vietnam and was the first boat of asylum-seekers to reach the country since 2014. "Australia, we believe, has received the first... people-smuggling venture in over 1,400 days," he told reporters. "We will work with the agencies to make sure we can repatriate these people back to their country of origin, once we understand the facts of the matter." Dutton did not confirm how many passengers were on board or their nationalities. Under Canberra's tough immigration policy, asylum-seekers who try to reach Australia by boat are either turned back or sent to remote Pacific camps where conditions have been widely criticised. They are blocked from resettling in Australia. The United Nations and human rights advocates say the policy violates the 1951 Refugee Convention of which Australia is a signatory. Dutton reaffirmed the government's stance on Monday, saying the boat's arrival was "a reminder that people-smugglers have not gone out of business". "We've had a very proud record, over the course of the last few years, and we aren't going to take a backward step. The people-smugglers... will not succeed in putting people on to boats to get to Australia." Most asylum-seeker boats that have arrived in Australia in recent years embarked from Indonesia, though some originated in Sri Lanka. Former Border Force chief Roman Quaedvlieg tweeted Monday that Vietnamese fishing boats "have been illegally fishing in fleets" off the far north Queensland coast in the past two years due to their own depleted fishing stocks. "Possible the Daintree vessel & crew have used this activity as a staging point to make Oz landfall & avoid returning to VN (Vietnam)," he added. Australian authorities are searching crocodile-infested waters and mangrove forests for people seen fleeing their boat after it ran agroundA survival expert arrested near Barcelona over the brutal 1998 rape and killing of a young Dutch boy after one of the most extensive murder investigations to date in the Netherlands agreed Monday to be extradited from Spain. Spanish police arrested Joseph Brech, 55, on Sunday afternoon in a mountainous area near the town of Castelltercol some 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Barcelona while he was going out to cut wood. The authorities believe Brech -- an experienced mountain climber who had scaled Mount Everest -- killed eleven-year-old Nicky Verstappen who vanished two decades ago on August 9 at a summer camp in southern Limburg province, near the German border. Brech had worked at the camp at the time, according to Spanish police. Verstappen's body was found a day after his disappearance close to the camp site, with authorities later confirming he had been sexually abused before his death. Police at the time mounted a massive search closely followed by Dutch media and the public, but the killer remained on the loose -- until advanced DNA testing earlier this year led officers to Brech. Spanish police on Monday escorted the suspect to a tribunal in the city of Granollers where he told a judge from Madrid's High Court by video conference that he had been in Spain since March and agreed to be extradited to the Netherlands, the court said in a ruling. Brech will be held without bail until he is extradited, the court added. He is accused of murder, sexual aggression and kidnapping, it added. - 'Love to have answers' - His arrest follows a public appeal on Wednesday, during which Dutch detectives shared photographs of the suspect. A Dutchman living in Spain recognised the man in the photos and sent a tip-off to Dutch newspaper the Telegraaf, which contacted police. Brech was living "in a tent in the woods" near an abandoned and isolated house where several homeless people live, the unidentified man told the newspaper. "He told me he liked living in nature and that was why he was there," the man said. Brech had extensive survival gear at the time of his arrest, including fishing roads, a book on edible wild plants, batteries and dehydrated foods. In a picture shared by Spanish police, he appears face down on a dirt road with his hands handcuffed behind his back as police stand over him. The boy's mother, Berthie Verstappen, said the family did not expect the arrest would come so soon after last week's police appeal. "We feared he would hide so well that he would not be found for months. We would love to have answers to the questions we have, even if we dread hearing what happened," she told Dutch public television on Sunday night. - DNA evidence - The case regularly returned to the public eye in the Netherlands over the past two decades. Police said new digital techniques helped them to develop a DNA profile in 2008, from traces found on Verstappen's clothing, but there had been no match. As time ran out to catch the suspect, police in February appealed to 21,500 men to donate DNA samples in a bid to close in on the perpetrator. Some 16,000 men living in the area where Verstappen was murdered volunteered to hand over DNA samples. But Brech, a former scout worker who was 35 at the time of the murder, was not among the volunteers, and as he was previously interviewed as a witness, police became suspicious. When his family reported him as missing in April, Dutch and French police searched his cabin in France's mountainous eastern Vosges region, where he owns a chalet. They found traces of DNA on his personal belongings which matched samples taken from the slain boy's clothes. A European-wide warrant for Brech's arrest was issued on June 12. Eleven-year-old Nicky Verstappen who vanished two decades ago on August 9 at a summer camp in southern Limburg province, near the German border Spanish police arrested Joseph Brech, 55, on Sunday afternoon in a mountainous area near the town of Castelltercol some 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Barcelona Eleven-year-old boy Nicky Verstappen was raped and killed at a Dutch summer camp two decades ago Advanced DNA testing eventually led police to BrechA suspect in the brutal 1998 killing of a young Dutch boy has been arrested in Spain, police said on Sunday after one of the most extensive murder investigations to date in the Netherlands. Eleven-year-old Nicky Verstappen disappeared during the night of August 9, 1998, while at a summer camp at the Brunssumerheide nature reserve, near the German border. His body was found the next evening, close to the camp site. He had been sexually abused before he was killed. "Jos B, 55, a suspect in the death of Nicky Verstappen was arrested in Spain on Sunday afternoon. He was taken into custody and will be handed over to the Netherlands," a police statement issued in Limburg, the southern district in which the boy disappeared, said. Suspect Jos Brech, a former scout worker who is believed to be a survival expert, was reported missing in April and police had thought he was hiding in France's mountainous eastern Vosges region, where he owns a chalet. Brech was arrested "thanks to a witness who recognised him after seeing his picture in the media in recent days" investigators added, hailing the "good cooperation" with the Spanish police. "We got him! Jos Brech was arrested in Spain near Barcelona!" journalist Peter R. de Vries, spokesman for the dead boy's family, exclaimed on Twitter. "The family is very relieved. Justice will be done!" Police at the time of the murder mounted a massive search closely followed by local media and the Dutch public, but the 11-year-old boy's killer was never found. As time ran out to catch the suspect, police earlier this year appealed to more than 20,000 men to donate DNA samples in a bid to close in on the perpetrator. Police said new digital techniques helped them to develop a DNA profile in 2008, from traces found on Verstappen's clothing, but there had been no match. Earlier this year, some 16,000 men living in the area where Verstappen was murdered volunteered to hand over DNA samples after a call by detectives. However Brech, who was 35 at the time of the murder, was not among the volunteers but as he was previously interviewed as a witness, police became suspicious. When his family reported him as missing, Dutch and French police searched his cabin in the Vosges region. "We found traces of DNA on his personal belongings. It was a match," chief prosecutor Jan Eland said last week when Dutch police announced they had identified a suspect. A European-wide warrant for Brech's arrest was issued on June 12. A monument for eleven-year-old boy Nicky Verstappen who was raped and killed 20 years ago in Brunssummerheide, The Netherlands. A suspect has been arrested in Spain.Turkey banned a weekly rally staged since the mid-1990s by mothers protesting against the disappearance of their sons and relatives on the grounds that it had been exploited by a terror group, the interior minister said Monday. In an unexpected move, Turkish police used water cannon, tear gas and plastic bullets to disperse the 700th protest by the Saturday Mothers in central Istanbul this weekend, causing consternation among rights activists. Almost 50 people were detained, including leaders of the Saturday Mothers movement such as 82-year-old Emine Ocak, although all were later released. "We didn't let them (protest) because we want an end to this exploitation and deceit," Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu was quoted as saying by the state-run Anadolu news agency. "Should we have turned a blind eye to motherhood being abused by a terror organisation?" he added. Soylu did not specify further but Istanbul authorities had said that the rally was banned after calls to attend were made through social media channels linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The protest, held every Saturday since May 27, 1995, remembers the disappearance of relatives in the 1980s and 1990s -- allegedly at the hands of the state -- in one of modern Turkey's most turbulent periods. The disappearances happened at the peak of the PKK insurgency demanding self-rule in the Kurdish-dominated southeast. Tens of thousands have lost their lives in the conflict that began in 1984 and continues to this day. The country was also wracked by political instability and violence following the 1980 military coup, with many detained for political activism. Activists say the state has never properly investigated the fate of those who disappeared after being detained by the authorities. The Saturday Mothers group were unable to hold their protests from 1999 to 2009 due to repeated police interventions but they then resumed and Saturday was the first time in recent years that officers stepped in. The rally's forceful dispersion came two months after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a new mandate with enhanced powers, which activists fear will be used to squeeze freedom of expression in Turkey. The Saturday Mothers group is said to have been inspired by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of Argentinian mothers who hold rallies after their children disappeared during Argentina's military dictatorship. Turkish police used water cannon, tear gas and plastic bullets to disperse the 700th protest by the Saturday Mothers in Istanbul on Saturday

A fearless 81-year-old grandmother has been filmed pulling two pythons out of a barbecue in a Brisbane backyard.

On Sunday morning Faye Morgan was called to help family members at Karana Downs who had seen one snake slip into the barbecue the day earlier.

In the footage, obtained by 7 News, the elderly woman lifts up the lid before reaching in to grab the unwelcome visitors.

The grandmother, who has spent her whole life on a farm, was not afraid to reach in and remove the snakes. Source: 7News

Ms Morgan grabs the first python near the head and tail, and yanks it out.

Both she and homeowner Marc Wright do a double take as they had not realised there was another snake seeking refuge in the barbecue until then.

She pops the first python into a plastic container before reaching back in to wrangle the second snake.

Ms Morgan has spent her whole life on a farm and is no stranger to the slithering serpents.

Im not scared, I love it, the 81-year-old told 7News.

It wasnt until the first snake was out that they realised there was another one under the lid also seeking refuge. Source: 7News

This duo have been relocated.

I say goodbye to them, and say hope you have a lovely life when I relocate them, Ms Morgan said.

In fact the grandmother had pulled a python from the same spot 18 months before  so they knew she was up for the challenge.

And as she has moved a few over the years, she knows what shes doing.

I dont recommend that anyone should do what I do, Ms Morgan said.

Stuart McKenzie, from The Snake Catcher 24/7 Sunshine Coast, warned the public to refrain from catching snakes by themselves.

On the weekend he posted about an injured python which died.

The main message is just dont do it, he said on Sunday.

Mr McKenzie recommends those who come across unwanted visitors call a professional snake catcher and said leave it alone and hopefully it will move away on its own.

He added, If its in a backyard, take your pets and kids away, and always maintain a safe distance from the snake.A love story with an unlikely setting began in the queue for KFC when a woman shouted a stranger his meal after his card declined.

A Wellington man was looking forward to tucking into some fried chicken on Saturday night, but there was a problem with his card at the register.

Luckily for him, a woman in the line stepped forward and offered to pay for the meal, the New Zealand Herald reported.

A Wellington man launched a social media appeal to find the kind stranger who shouted his KFC meal when his card declined. Source: Vic Deals / Facebook

The Kiwi devoured his chicken, then launched a social media appeal to find the kind woman to return the favour after his payday.

To the beautiful girl who paid for my KFC tonight when my card declined, thank you so much.

I didnt get your name but if it was you please message me, I get paid next week and would love to take you out, he wrote on local Facebook page Vic Deals.

In less than 24 hours, a response came from a woman who claimed to be the girl he was searching for.

Omg, that was me! she wrote.

Lets get Maccas for brunch tomorrow morning.

As if the man wasnt lucky enough  he said he found $20 down the crack of the couch and offered to shout the woman for Maccas breakfast the following morning.

She responded: OMG I love McMuffins. You know the way to my heart.

The man said he found $20 in the couch and could treat the woman to a Maccas breakfast. Source: Vic Deals / Facebook

It is not known if the pair will have a follow-up date at another take-away restaurant, however they have joked about a fitting wedding reception if the relationship stood the test of time.

We will have our wedding at KFC to honour the place that brought us together Snack boxes for all guests, sounds great, the pair added.

The page went into meltdown over the couples new found love that blossomed over a some deep fried chicken.

One person described the tale as a love story for the ages.

Another said: If she is reading this he is a catch, wish he would take me out for KFC on payday.Keith Batman, a Cayuga County legislator challenging state Assemblyman Gary Finch this year, netted a pair of endorsements last week.

The New York State National Organization for Women Political Action Committee supports Batman, a Democrat, in the 126th Assembly District race. The organization cited his support of equal pay for women, job equality and service on the Cayuga County Family Planning Board as reasons why he received its endorsement.

Mickey Belosi, president of the group's central New York chapter, believes Batman is engaged in the community and focused on women's equality.

"We need representation in Albany that is energetic and action driven," she said.

NOW is the latest women's group to support Batman's bid for state Assembly. He is running on the Women's Equality Party line. The party formed in 2014 and supports primarily Democratic candidates for federal, state and local offices.

In addition to NOW's support, Batman received the backing of the New York State AFL-CIO, a federation of private and public sector unions. The labor group held its convention last week and endorsed several candidates for state-level offices, including Batman.

"I am grateful for the important support of the AFL-CIO, and I am grateful that so many organizations are stepping up to endorse and support my campaign," Batman said in a statement. "Grassroots support is the most critical part of any campaign. When the people are with you, big money and big political machines cannot stand."

The unions supporting Batman's candidacy include United Auto Workers Region 9 and Roofers Local 195.

Batman is challenging Finch, a Republican, in the 126th district. The district includes parts of Cayuga, Chenango, Cortland and Onondaga counties.

Republicans have an enrollment advantage in the district, but Batman is hoping to overcome that disparity in this race. In previous races for Scipio town supervisor and Cayuga County Legislature, he has won despite GOP voters outnumbering Democrats in his town and legislative district.

Love 5 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 5As a child, the approach of September always made me a little sad. It signified the end of the long, lazy days of summer and the start of school, which meant early mornings and piles of homework. Now, as an adult, I look back with nostalgia on the back to school days, missing the opportunity to learn and discuss new topics with people of different perspectives and backgrounds. Seymour Public Library offers all ages the chance for continuing education, not only with online services like Universal Class, but with programs and speakers that offer the community a chance to explore different topics.

Civics at Seymour starts back up this fall with new programs and speakers. Septembers highlights will include talks on property tax, freedom of speech and refugees:

 6 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 12: "Local Government from a Tax Perspective": What does government look like from a property tax perspective? Learn about the often complicated and confusing role property taxes play in funding our local governments, schools and services with Kelly Anderson.

 6 p.m. Monday, Sept. 17: "First Amendment and Freedom of Press in the Modern Age": Learn the impact of the First Amendment and freedom of press on your everyday life with Newhouse professor and director of the Tully Center of Free Speech, Roy Gutterman. Gutterman will highlight the importance of these protections not just for the press, but for citizens.

 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 25: "Refugees, Asylum and Migration": The U.S. has a long history of accepting refugees, as well as a history of refusing entry to some people. Take a look at the history of modern refugees in the U.S. and the issues and law associated with a variety of groups as they attempted and continue to attempt to escape from situations around the world and resettle in the U.S., with local historian Tom Henry.

The library will also kick off a film series at Auburn Public Theater, 8 Exchange St., Auburn. Join us for the screening of three classic films focused on politics and government at 6 p.m. Mondays, Sept. 24, Oct. 1 and Oct. 15. There will be a brief intro before each film by the librarys own Shawn Connery. Visit the librarys website for upcoming film titles.

Other upcoming programs include:

 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 9: "First Amendment and Freedom of Press" with local historian Tom Henry

 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 23: "Civil Disobedience" with Henry

 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 30: "Finding the Facts in an Era of Fake News" with Dori Gottschalk-Fielding of the Seymour Librarys History Discovery Center

 TBD: Election Day wrap-up with Henry

 6 p.m. Monday, Nov. 12: Trivia night: Could you pass the U.S. civic test for citizenship?

 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 10: Human Library

Civics in action: Dana Balter, Democratic candidate for Congress, will hold a town hall meeting at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 5, at Seymour Public Library, 176-178 Genesee St., Auburn. This public forum is free and open to the public. Incumbent Rep. John Katko has been invited to attend.

Missed a past civics lecture, or cant attend an upcoming program? Visit the librarys website at seymourlibrary.org/civics and click on Past events and supplemental materials to view recorded streams of programs and download copies of the slides used. Civics at Seymour is made possible by the Fred M. Everett and Ora H. Everett Charitable Trust.

September also marks the start of Seymour Librarys newest reading and discussion series, Finding a Voice: Female Creativity and Expression in Literature.

Throughout history, women have been silenced by the patriarchal system. Explore the ways in which female writers have found their voice during Finding a Voice, a reading and discussion series sponsored by Humanities New York and the Friends of Seymour Library. Dr. Maryanne Felter will facilitate the discussion in this six-part series that will focus on womens creativity in art, literature and theater.

Join us for a brief introductory meeting at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 4. Participants will meet the facilitator, Dr. Maryanne Felter, sign out copies of each book and receive the syllabus for the reading discussion series.

Supplies are limited, so if interested, please register by contacting the library at (315) 252-2571 or stop by the main desk to sign up.

For more information about books and meeting times, visit the librarys website at seymourlibrary.org/findingavoice.

Jackie Kolb is community services coordinator at Seymour Library in Auburn. For more information, visit seymourlibrary.org or call (315) 252-2571.

Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0Showing its commitment to Government's Make in India scheme, Tata Motors rolls out 1500th GS800 (General Service 800) Safari Storme 4X4 for the Indian Armed Forces. Dr Subhash Bhamre, MoS, Defence, Government of India along with Mr Vernon Noronha, Vice President, Defence & Government Business, Tata Motors, rolled out the vehicle with a ceremonial flag off at its Pune facility. The company bagged the order to supply 3192 units of Safari Storme to Indian Armed forces and have successfully delivered 1300+ vehicles. Tata Motors supplied over 1.5 lakh vehicles to the Indian Military and Paramilitary forces, since 1958.

The Safari Storme GS800 gets an indigenous design to meet the requirements of the Indian Army with a contemporary, highly reliable and sturdier Diesel engine along with robust features, and a minimum payload capacity of 800 kgs. The vehicle has gone through a rigorous trial period of fifteen months in varied terrains across the country, demonstrating its supreme performance. The vehicle has been customized to endure severely rugged operational conditions and has a capability of coping with both on-road or off-road terrains, offering 60 percent higher payload, over 70 percent higher power and over 200 percent higher torque.

Commenting on the successful roll-out of the 1500th Tata GS800 Safari Storme, Mr. Vernon Noronha, Vice President, Defence & Government Business, Tata Motors Limited said, We, at Tata Motors, take immense pride to roll-out the 1500th GS800 Safari Storme of the 3192 order for the Indian Army. This modern SUV  Tata GS800 is specially customized to meet the requirements of the Indian Armed Forces. The continued faith bestowed by the countrys security forces in Tata Motors is a reflection of our pedigree & aspiration to serve the nations challenging requirements on the front lines. The milestone of rolling out the 1500th Safari Storme is the result of the absolute dedication of our workforce, while reiterating our commitment to support Governments Make in India initiative.

Click here for latest News and Updates!

The GS800 Safari Storme comes packed with features are bucket seats, mobile charging point, power windows, Air Conditioning (AC), heating, demisting, and ample space for the crew members, while it also gets some special features such as ABS, recovery hooks, jerry can and fog lamps to suit army requirement during missions.Alex Jones, the far-right-wing radio and internet demagogue who has been praised as amazing by Donald Trump, and who has often devoted rants on his program InfoWars to attacking trans and gay people, apparently has a taste for trans porn performers himself.

Jones is perhaps best known for advancing the conspiracy theory that the 2012 schoolhouse mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut never actually happened, and that the schoolchildren killed in the massacre were actors. Jones is now being sued by parents of the Sandy Hook victims, who say that followers of Jones have harassed them and victimized them with death threats.

But Jones has also made a habit of attacking trans people, describing them as super ugly and weigh[ing] 500 pounds. He has also accused trans women of actually being gay men who want to go get breast implants and doll your hair up in order to seduce other gay men.

However, according a report by the LGBT news site Pink Nation, Jones accidentally exposed a trans porn website on his phone to viewers of his InfoWars program last week.

In between his right-wing extremist tirades and off-the-cuff conspiratorial theorizing, Jones advertises various health supplements on his InfoWars programs. During one recent show, according to Pink News, Jones held his smartphone up to the camera, to demonstrate how to use the website of one such sponsor.

But during the demonstration Jones, accidentally hit the button to change tabs, opening up the list of other pages he had open. Among the tabs was one that appeared to show a pornographic video titled Naughty Tbabe Mistress, which features a transgender woman, the site reported.

The video of Jones accident may be viewed at this link. The thumbnail image of the Naughty Tbabe Mistress video appears at the 0:36 mark. The screen quickly goes dark, but in the video at the link, the image is repeated in slow motion at the 1:01 mark, as well.

According to Pink News, the clip stars Marissa Minx, who describes herself as Australias #1 Trans Companion/XXXAdult Model on social media.

In what appears to be another measure of Jones audience reach, the name "Marissa Minx" saw a sharp spike in Google searches on August 24, and another dramatic uptick on August 27, when online news sites began widely reporting on Jones apparent taste for trans porn. See the Google search trends at this link.

The full title of the video apparently viewed by Alex Jones is Naughty tbabe Marissa Minx relieved of cock hunger by stud, according to The Spectator magazine.

I think its great hes watching my work. I had heard of Infowars before, the trans performer told The Spectator. Hi Alex Jones! Happy to give you a free membership to my site, or maybe you could have me on your show for a discussion?

"While I am always flattered by fans that watch my films, I'm also frustrated and saddened by the ones who choose to be hypocritical," Minx said. "Hope that Alex gets the help he needs because it's just unfortunate that people like this try to take down others because of their own issues. I'm an avid supporter of the LGBTI community and will continue to be."

"When you create quality content with quality performers, even the haters are going to watch it," opined Dan Hogue, director of operations with Transerotica, which runs the site MarissaMinx.com.

Left, photo of Marissa Minx, courtesy TransErotica. Right, photo by Sean P. Anderson / Wikimedia CommonsShould Beaufort County's commissioners be resolved to ask the federal government to defend our Southern Border by ending the Biden /Harris Open Border policy in regards to that one border that is intentionally made OPEN?

Yes, Illegal Migrants are a huge expense to local governments.

No, the cost of Undocumented Immigrants is insignificant in our providing a pathway for the "Browning of America".WILMINGTON A new law in Carolina Beach cracking down on food trucks will be served in court.The Institute for Justice on Tuesday, Aug. 21, announced a lawsuit against the town over the move.The lawsuit is a response to a town ordinance passed in April allowing brick-and-mortar restaurants to venture into the food truck business, so long as they have been operating for more than a year.said Justin Pearson, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice.IJ is a nonprofit law firm focused on litigating matters of economic freedom, school choice, private property, and free speech. Pearson said the lawsuit is about the economic liberty of food truck owners.Johanna Talcott, an IJ attorney, said.Carolina Beach allowed no food trucks to operate in the town before passing the new law earlier this year. Neither IJ or the food truckers involved in the lawsuit are aware of any Carolina Beach restaurants operating food trucks.Michelle Rock, owner of Momma Rocks Deserts and T'Geaux Boys, said.Joining Rock in the lawsuit are Aaron and Monica Cannon, owners of A&M's Red Food Truck, and Harley Bruce, owner of Poor Piggy's BBQ & Catering Truck. The food truck owners said they just want the town to treat them like they treat the restaurants.Rock said.Pearson said the ordinance is unconstitutional on several grounds. For one, it violates a provision of the state constitution that people have the right to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. Pearson said the ordinance also violates the equal protection clause and the anti-monopoly clause.Pearson said.Michael Cramer, Carolina Beach town manager, said town officials haven't seen the lawsuit and declined comment.An Imperial Wizard of a Maryland Ku Klux Klan chapter was sentenced to four years in prison by a Virginia judge on Tuesday for firing a gun in a school zone during the 2017 "Unite The Right" rally in Charlottesville, CNN reports . If not for the outreach effort of a black activist, the Klansman would have likely done harder time.Richard Preston was given an eight year sentence with four years suspended and three years of supervised probation.According to his testimony, Preston attended the white nationalist rally as a member of the "Real Three Percent Rising" militia; he was shown on video shouting the n-word and firing in the direction of a black counter-protester wielding a blowtorch.Preston claims he only shot the gun because he was trying to protect people from the blowtorch, but the judge believes Preston did not act out of fear, but anger.Preston was charged with shooting a firearm within 1,000 feet of a school and pleaded no contest.Daryl Davis, a black R&B musician (pictured above), reportedly paid part of Preston's bail, stood up for him in court, and offered to help educate Preston by taking him to the National Museum of African American History And Culture. The judge agreed to the proposal. Davis later testified about the trip to the museum.Davis told CNN.Davis also reportedly walked Preston's bride down the aisle at their wedding.CNN noted in its report earlier this month that on his trip with Preston to the museum Davis has spent decades befriending KKK members. He says that 200 Klansmen that he befriended have left the group; 40 have given him their robes as a symbolic gesture upon leaving.said Davis.On Monday, Rose McGowan, a leading face of the #MeToo movement and alleged sexual assault victim of Harvey Weinstein, tweeted out her support for fellow #MeToo icon Asia Argento. A New York Times article over the weekend revealed that Argento paid out $380,000 to Jimmy Bennett, a former child actor who claims that in 2013, Argento sexually assaulted him in a California hotel. Bennett was 17 at the time. Bennett once played Argento's son - when he was 7 - in the 2004 film The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.According to The Hollywood Reporter:This prompted McGowan to tweet:This is an act of unmitigated hypocrisy from McGowan. While it's true that we should all weigh the evidence in each individual accusation, the #MeToo movement has famously ignored that advice time and again, destroying the careers of men in prominent positions based on accusations and the suggestion that we must #BelieveAllWomen. McGowan herself has tweeted along those lines:So, if McGowan now wants to talk about waiting for evidence, that sounds great. But let's be clear: the major flaw of the #MeToo movement has been the demand that evidence be secondary to accusations. And it's hypocrisy to flip the script the moment that McGowan's friend is implicated.A homeowner is suing police in Greenwood Village, Colorado, after they destroyed his house with explosives to flush out a shoplifter hiding there. The cops maintained a 19-hour siege to collar Robert Seacat, who "stole items from WalMart" and fired a gun at them during the showdown.

Police offered Leo Lech $5000 for the loss of his home. "If you look at the photos of Osama Bin Laden's compound, I would say his house looks better than mine does," Lech said at the time. After inspectors declared the home a total loss, the city offered Lech $5,000 in compensation. Since then he's spent hundreds of thousands of dollars repairing the home. He's now filed a federal lawsuit, claiming civil rights violations, and unjust compensation from the government.

This story was from last year; his case doesn't seem to be going well.

Attorney Rachel Maxam, who represents Lech, isn't giving up. After U.S. District Court judge Philip Brimmer ruled against her earlier this year, she appealed the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.  But from the beginning, attorney Maxam knew that increasing that figure would be difficult. After all, the Colorado Governmental Immunity Act restricts suits against municipalities such as Greenwood Village, and complaints against individuals can only succeed if they're found to have acted willfully and wantonly

This situation has the whiff of "rich urban enclave" to it, where local government exists to keep other local government (and their taxes) out, and functions more or less as a glorified, armed HOA.UPDATE 8/27/18 3:35pm:

After criticism from the American Legion and others, the White House decided to again lower the flag to half staff in honor of Senator John McCain late this afternoon.

From CBS:

In McCain's case, before the flag was lowered again, the American Legion issued a statement urging the president to do so in keeping with "long-established protocol." The veterans organization said: "Mr. President, just this year, you released presidential proclamations noting the deaths of Barbara Bush and Billy Graham. Senator John McCain was an American hero and cherished member of The American Legion. As I'm certain you are aware, he served five and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam and retired from the U.S. Navy at the rank of Captain. He then served in the U.S. Congress for more than three decades. On the behalf of The American Legion's two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCain's death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nation's flag be half-staffed through his internment."

Trump waited until this afternoon  two days after McCain's death  to finally release a formal proclamation regarding McCain's death.

Story earlier today:

The flag at the White House was only left at half staff in honor of Senator John McCain until just after midnight Monday morning. This breaks with the tradition that the flag remains at half staff for a sitting senator who dies until the day of internment. McCain's funeral is set for Sunday.

In fact, if petty Trump had his way, the flag probably wouldn't have been lowered at all. But "the federal code states that the flag shall be lowered on the day of death and the following day for a sitting member of Congress," according to ABC News.

Trump also ignored a question about his thoughts on McCain's legacy when asked by ABC.

When ABC News chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl asked the president for "any thoughts on the legacy of John McCain," Trump heard the question but ignored him several times during a Mexico trade announcement in front of reporters, according to Karl.

Flag back at full staff atop WH. Pres Trump did not issue proclamation on the death of @SenJohnMcCain, which usually calls for flags to remain at half-staff through the day of interment, which is Sunday at the @NavalAcademy. pic.twitter.com/NGasNPT0VB  Mark Knoller (@markknoller) August 27, 2018

It's no wonder the McCain family asked Trump not to attend the funeral. They did invite George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Mike Pence.

Image: 12019/PixabayLaw firms are singularly bad at technology, yet present a singularly delicious target to hackers. One particular vulnerability comes from all their abandoned domain names, which Gabor Szathmari writes "pose a significant cyber risk to the legal profession."

Domain name abandonment allows cybercriminals to gain access to, or reset passwords for online services and profession-specific portals. These online services store documents, emails and other information relating to a legal practice, including financial details, personal information, confidential information and client-legal privileged information. 

In short, bad actors can re-register an abandoned domain of a business and take full control of email services configuring it to:

receive email correspondence sensitive in nature; and

use the email accounts to reset passwords to online services.Milo Yiannopolous is having a very bad week and just wants to eat his sushi in peace, you ungrateful bastards.

A little backstory. Last week, Politicon (think Comic-Con but with less cosplay) announced the lineup for its 2018 convention to be held in October in Los Angeles. Milo was included in that lineup, with his appearance touted as an opportunity to "speak at length about the institutional Left's systematic protection of sex offenders who share its politics, as well as his experiences being wrongly smeared as an advocate for a crime of which he is in fact a victim. The appearance marks his return to the front lines of the American culture wars." Less than 24 hours later, Yiannopolous was disinvited from Politicon after social media threats of a boycott. One speaker, comedian Cameron Esposito, canceled her appearance after learning of his involvement and others threatened to do likewise.

When Yiannopolous found out he was disinvited, he told Mediaite "I subject myself to this continuous hell because unlike the needy, vacuous, desperate grifters of conservative media, I actually care about my fans and the stuff I talk about. No amount of cancellations from now until the end of time will ever deter me from trying. Next!"

Fast forward to Friday night. Yiannopolous posted a short video of himself with his husband at sushi restaurant on Facebook. The comments were less than laudatory, accusing Yiannopolous of fleecing his aforementioned fans out of money they paid for the VIP membership to his website which promised a daily podcast that apparently hasn't been updated for weeks, if not months.

And that's when Milo lost his shit.

Such a snowflake!

[Photo: Wikimedia Commons]BIMSTEC: Senior officials' meeting scheduled for Tuesday

A meeting of the senior officials, including the Foreign Secretaries, of the member countries of Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) is taking place here on Tuesday in preparation for the regional group's 4th Summit conference.We thank our sponsor for making this content possible; it is not written by the editorial staff nor does it necessarily reflect its views. There's nothing like having great audio to take your gaming marathon to the next level. Whether you're an esports athlete or just love to get the most out of gaming, you're READ THE RESTThis is one of those genius "I can't believe this hasn't been done already" kind of things.

An architect from Indiana has photoshopped recognizable modernist homes into the overly sentimental, idyllic world of a Thomas Kinkade painting, making for a funny mashup series.

It all started with this tweet from another architect, Donna Sink, where she instigates, "Does anyone do paintings of Modern buildings in the style of Thomas Kincade?"

Does anyone do paintings of Modern buildings in the style of Thomas Kincade?  Donna Sink, Architect (@DonnaSinkArch) August 18, 2018

Indianapolis-based @robyniko answered her call, writing, "I'm in. Let's start off easy with one of Kahn's beautiful boxes (eg the Fisher house)"

Then he worked on others, like the Eames house (the wishing well is a nice touch!):

Then someone requested he do architect Philip Johnson's historic Glass House next. He calls his creation "Philip Johnson's Glass Cottage," (emphasis mine) a nod to Kinkade's use of cottages in his paintings:

On this one, he writes, "Ok i really have to stop now. Merry Corbsmas:"

But he didn't stop. He then tackled the Farnsworth House (which I included as the lead image above).

A couple days later he was still at it. On this one, he writes, "Pack your bags for a rocky seaside getaway at the Gehryhaus! You'll love the *squints at copy* homey chain link fence & softly weathered *checks notes* corrugated steel siding while you eat a homemade breakfast in the soft glow of the *deep sigh* aggressively geometric sun room."

You can follow how it all went down in this thread:

Starting a thread of my Thomas Kinkade + Modernism mashups:  the "schtick" haver (@robyniko) August 19, 2018

(ArchPaper)

images via @robyniko, used with permissionFrom encryption strength to server count, there are plenty of factors to consider when purchasing a VPN, but one many users ignore is where their provider is based. Choosing a VPN in a country with weak privacy laws still leaves you vulnerable, as governments can compel VPNs to share their users' data. Therein lies the value of a VPN like ProtonVPN.

ProtonVPN is Swiss-based and protected by famously strong privacy laws, sounlike other providersit won't be coerced into spying on its users. Proton keeps you safe with ultra-secure AES-256 encryption and leverages Perfect Forward Secrecy make sure your encrypted traffic stays private. Plus, Proton takes its security to the next level by housing its server infrastructure in hardened locations, like an underground fallout shelter and a former army base.

ProtonVPN Plus subscriptions are on sale, with 1-year plans starting at $59.9950 percent off the usual price.This inflatable bed is as comfortable as a regular mattress, and stores away in a corner of my closet.

My home is slightly off the beaten path. Friends frequently end up staying once it gets late, and bed space can quickly become a premium. When the couches fill up, I have two of these inflatable Intex queen-sized beds.

Simple to inflate or deflate with their own built-in pumps, these mattresses go up in seconds. You can pick your firmness by putting more air in, or letting some out. The vinyl is durable, and after nearly 10 years of use on the first one I purchased it shows very few signs of wear.

I find standard queen-sized bed-in-a-bag kits for the air mattresses, and they fit perfectly. I can move said mattresses around and give people nice views out the windows. When folks disappear, the mattresses do to! These are simple to fold back up and stick in the closet.

Leaving an air mattress out and inflated around an aggressive Maine Coon Cat can be hilarious, but I do not suggest it. Put the mattress away after use.

Intex Comfort Plush Elevated Dura-Beam Airbed Built-in Electric Pump, Bed Height 22", Queen via AmazonAround a month ago, Ebola popped back up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, scant days after the World Health Organization had declared that another outbreak of the disease had come to an end.

Trying to contain the Ebola virus, which is transmitted via bodily fluids, can be a nightmare for healthcare professionals, especially in areas where medical resources and the infrastructure required to rapidly deploy field investigators, ship HAZMAT gear or refrigerate vaccines is non-existent. Doing it in a war zone? So much worse. But that's where the latest outbreak is going down.

Congo's North Kivu Province is hotly contested by a number of militant groups, vying for control over the region's mineral resources. There's a lot of shooting. There's a lot of blood. The local population, fearing for their lives, is highly mobile. This makes it hard to track Ebola or treat those who risk further spreading the virus. In the midst of this untenable situation, even those brave enough to risk their own lives to keep the disease at bay are now proving vulnerable.

From The Guardian:

The WHO said a doctor in Oicha had been hospitalised with Ebola, and 97 of his contacts had been identified. "It is the first time we have a confirmed case and contacts in an area of high insecurity. It is really the problem we were anticipating and at the same time dreading," Salama said. Karin Huster, coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres in Mangina, the epicentre of the outbreak, said new patients were arriving at the emergency treatment units every day. "Obviously we are concerned. We are worried that we are not seeing the suspect cases coming into our centres that we should be seeing. It is not a situation where we are confident that the outbreak is under control," Huster said. "It is all about winning the trust of the community. It's super important to come early when they are sick and people often come too late." The insecurity in the region and a mobile population has made vaccination campaigns like the one that helped overcome an Ebola outbreak that killed 33 in northwest of the DRC earlier this year less effective.

In an effort to get this growing shit-storm under control, those with the power to rubber stamp the use of experimental drugs have given the go-ahead for the use of five new experimental Ebola vaccines, so long as doctors have the permission of their patients to use them.

If the security situation worsens, the next steps to render the red zone safe enough for the medical personnel to do their jobs may be to deploy troops from Congo, the African Union or the United Nations.

Image via Wikipedia CommonsThe first season of True Detective was a sensation, arguably qualifying as some of the best television of all time. The show's second season? Not so much.

While it wasn't bad, it wasn't particularly good either. Based on the trailer for the third season of the series, it looks like True Detective could be back on track.

Starring Academy Award Winner Mahershala Ali, the third season of True Detective airs on HBO in January 2019.Asian Boss hit the streets of Tokyo to ask Japanese people what they thought of English curse words, oaths, insults, and epithets compared to Japanese ones. One person pointed out that English swear words are more direct (e.g., "Go fuck yourself"), whereas Japanese swear words are "more like insults and very indirect" (e.g., manuke, which literally means "out of rhythm" and is used to describe a loser). This is in keeping with the Japanese concept of aimai, which stresses implicitness over explicitness.- The two-time presidential candidate passed away on Saturday evening at his home

- He died at the age of 81 after long battle with cancer and shortly after he stopped treatment

- The Republican was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, called glioblastoma, in 2017

PAY ATTENTION: Click 'See First' under 'Following' tab to see Briefly news on your news feed.

Celebrated United States (US) senator and war hero John McCain has passed on after long battle with brain cancer.

The Republican congressman died at the age of 81 on Saturday, August 25, at 4.28 pm, a few hours after his family disclosed he had stopped medical treatment.

Arizona Senator John McCain died at the age of 81 on Saturday, August 25, at 4.28 pm a few hours after his family disclosed he had stopped his treatment.Photo: WhrRadio.

READ ALSO: Excited new father shares photos of his wife in labour room on social media

Briefly.co.za learnt that a statement issued by the late senator's office indicated he died in his home in Arizona with his family and friends around to say goodbye.

As was earlier reported, the congressman was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, identified as glioblastoma, in 2017 and was undergoing treatment until recently when he and the family decided to stop the radiation and chemotherapy.

In a statement issued on Friday, August 24, McCain's family said the senator had decided to end his treatment after it became clear there was nothing humanly possible they could do to save his life.

"Last summer, Senator John McCain shared with Americans the news our family already knew. He had been diagnosed with an aggressive glioblastoma, and the prognosis was serious. In the year since, John surpassed expectations for his survival. With his usual strength of will, he chose to discontinue medical treatment," the family noted.

The Friday announcement left McCain's colleagues shaken despite having braced for the worst following his cancer prognosis in 2017.

It effectively closed a tumultuous Washington career that included two unsuccessful presidential runs and saw McCain emerge as a singular political figure.

In 2000, McCain challenged George Bush for the Republican presidential nomination and lost.

And in 2008, the senator ran against former President Barrack Obama and once again did not succeed in his quest for the presidency.

McCain, who retired from the Navy before joining politics, was first elected to the Senate in 1986 and had become a vehement critic of President Donald Trump, especially with regard to the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Meanwhile, leaders from across the world continue to pay tributes to the fallen American war veteran.

For more amazing, funny and informative videos, please visit Briefly South Africa's YouTube Channel.

Do you have a story to share with us? Go to our Facebook page and leave a comment.

To stay up to date with the latest news, download our news app on Google Play or iTunes today.

Source: Briefly.co.zaArsenal manager Unai Emery claimed his first Premier League victory against West Ham after goals from Nacho Monreal, Danny Welbeck and an own goal by Issa Diop, earned them a 3-1 win.

PAY ATTENTION: Click "See first" under the "Following" tab to see Briefly News on your newsfeed!

However, it was the Hammers that drew first blood in the London Derby after Marko Arnautovic put his side ahead, midway through the first half with a driven low shot into the corner.

READ ALSO: Little girl teaches SA valuable and touching lesson in Ubuntu

Alexandre Lacazette pushes Jack Wilshere at full time during the Premier League match between Arsenal FC and West Ham United at Emirates Stadium on August 25, 2018 in London, United Kingdom.

READ ALSO: Afrikaans neighbours praised for dousing black farmer's farm fire

Spanish defender Nacho Monreal drew Arsenal level when he finished powerfully at the back post, Arsenal then took the lead with 20 minutes to play after some horrible defending from Diop.

Welbeck then wrapped things up in stoppage time to make sure maximum points were secured.

The Gunners boss denied rumours of a training ground rift with Mesut Ozil after he was surprisingly absent from the squad, Briefly.co.za learned.

When asked about Ozil's omission, and if it was due to a training ground argument, Emery denied the claims and said that Ozil was unwell.

Mesut Ozil of Arsenal during the Premier League match between Chelsea FC and Arsenal FC at Stamford Bridge on August 18, 2018 in London, United Kingdom.

"Why is this information (out there)? It isn't true. I don't know who is telling you this information," he said. He sat down with me and we decided that he would not play. He left training because he was going to his home because he is sick," he said.

Emery said he had discussed the situation with the German and they had both concluded it would be best for him to sit out the fixture because he was unwell.

"Today he was here, I told him to come in if he feels better and he feels better today and before the match he was with the team," Emery said.

Although it was far from a vintage performance, the result saw Emery pick up his first three points as manager, although admits there are things to improve upon.

Watch Mzansi's billionaires in the video below from our Briefly - South Africa YouTube channel.

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Source: Tuko.co.ke

Source: Briefly.co.zaMzansis power couple, Ayanda and Zulu Mkhathini, have taken a well-deserved romantic getaway to Greece. The two work extremely hard and are so deserving of a little time-off.

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The stunning couple are not only incredible entertainers, they also dish out major #CoupleGoals too.

Ayanda and Zulu make the most stunning couple. Almost all of their pics look like cover shots for GQ and their Greece getaway pics are nothing less.

Briefly.co.za learnt that the couple have been living their best life in Greece. From boat rides on the crystal clear water, to walks on the beach, they are taking full advantage of the pictures scenery that Greece has to offer.

READ ALSO: Cici now says Arthur didn't assault her in new courtroom revelation

Here are some of the flawless snaps that the power couple have shared:

It looks like they have taken a personal photographer on holiday with them. These snaps are too good. Yussss!

For more amazing, funny and informative videos, please visit Briefly South Africa's YouTube Channel.

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Source: Briefly.co.zaThe two women who killed Boitumelo Dlamini by pouring petrol all over her and setting her on fire received their sentences on Monday.

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Cynthia Mosupi and Sharon Twala received 18 and 14-years respectively after they were found guilty of kidnapping and murdering a Eletsa Secondary School pupil, The Sowetan reported.

Boitumelo Dlamini, 18, was murdered in 2015 after Mosupi and Twala abducted her and set her alight in an apparent act of jealously.

18 and 14-years jail time for 2 women convicted of killing a schoolgirl. Photo credit: The Sowetan/Tankiso Makhetha

READ ALSO: Adam Catzavelos' brother opens up in radio interview: 'He doesn't speak about race regularly'

Briefly.co.za learned the pair was found guilty in October 2017 and was expected to appear in the North Gauteng High Court, where they received their sentencing on Monday, 27 August 2018.

The evidence shows the accused positioned themselves at the gate of the school in such way that accused would not have been able to see them when the deceased exited the school," the court heard.

According to video footage, Dlamini promised to stay away from Mosupi's baby daddy, whoever the women showed her no mercy and the court saw how she was subjected to torture.

However, Mosupis lawyer, Paulos Motsweni, argued his client was under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time of the murder.

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Top 5 richest men in South Africa on Briefly. Everyone, quick: off the top of your head, name a billionaire. Now, think hard and name two or three South African billionaires. How about more? Dont worry, we have gathered this extremely interesting information for you!

Source: Briefly.co.zaEconomic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema received a lot of backlash on Twitter over a post he made about Jews eight-years-ago.

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On 1 October 2010, Juju made a tweet about Jews and concentration camps which came back to haunt him now.

"Do u still send a Jewish kid with ADD to a Concentration Camp?" the EFF head's post read.

READ ALSO: Social media disgusted after video of woman calling shoppers monkeys goes viral

Only recently the post gathered a lot of attention and tweeps hauled him over the coals because of it.

Siphamandla wrote, "Julius Malema is a disgrace to South Africa. These vile and racist comments directed towards Jewish people is unacceptable. He belongs to the same WhatsApp group as Adam Catzavelo. Injustice somewhere is a threat to justice everywhere - Martin Luther King Jnr."

Joan Tozer, who goes by the Twitter handle @TozerJoani, added: "A despicable individual in every sense of the word! The polar opposite of Madiba who had every reason to be a ranting racist. But no ...he who has not suffered at all has the audacity to call the shots! Adversity breeds character! Need I say more!"

Quasimodo, @africandarter, wrote: "The wheel of life never stops turning. Even for you brother. When it happens, Ill be there to remind you."

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Briefly South Africa has gone through the list of current and immediate past African leaders and is ready to present Top-5 tips on how to be an average African president.

Source: Briefly.co.zaNews / Press Release

by ARTUZ

Amalgamated Rural Teachers' Union of Zimbabwe, ARTUZ condemns in the strongest of terms the shooting of teachers in Swaziland on 25-08-2018.The teachers who are members of the Swaziland National Association of Teachers, SNAT were protesting against the 0.00 percent Conditions of Living Adjustment, (COLA) offered by their employer.ARTUZ supports SNAT's call for a 6, 5% COLA which is in line with cost of living in their country.It is however regrettable that SADC nations are gladly copying and pasting the Marikana model of crowd control. Zimbabwe recently copied from the script and massacred its own citizens.Guns will not solve the crisis of capitalism but adopting new people oriented economic policies.King Mswati and his government should respect fundamental human rights as declared in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, UNDHR and other related conventions. The right to protest is a critical pillar of democracy and guarantees popular participation in decision making. Peace and development is only possible when all citizens are accorded space to freely express themselves.The new culture of guns controlled democracy is a threat to the peace we have enjoyed as a region.We urge the SNAT leadership to remain resolute demanding a realistic COLA for the teachers in Swaziland.We wish a quick recovery to the injured cdes.ALUTA Continua !!!!ARTUZ INFORMATION DEPARTMENT.+263776129336/775643192.Opinion / Columnist

The greatest test If Zimbabwe's 2018 elections were free, fair and credible would President Mnangagwa and his Zanu PF junta have won the elections?The answer must be an emphatic YES.As much as President Mnangagwa and his junta have tried to rebrand themselves as having undergone some dramatic Damascene transformation since the November 2017 military coup that remove Robert Mugabe when push came to shove they refused to give up Zanu PF's carte blanche dictatorial powers including the powers deny the ordinary people their freedoms and rights.President Mnangagwa is nothing more than the Rich young man who knelt before Jesus and said "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"Jesus reminded the rich young man about keeping the Commandments."Teacher," replied the young man, "I have kept all these from my youth."In our story. President Mnangagwa and his junta understood that if they were to revive Zimbabwe's economic fortunes they must ditch Mugabe's arrogance and isolationist rhetoric and re-engage with the whole world especially the western investors and lenders. They certainly hit the ground running preaching their "Zimbabwe is open for business!" mantra at every opportunity. They were everywhere in large numbers too, in their conspicuous multi-coloured scarfs and broad smiles, they looked like a noisy flock of boisterous red wattle ground hornbills.Jesus looked at him, loved him, and said to him, "There is one thing you lack: Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me."But the man was saddened by these words and went away in sorrow, because he had great wealth. Then Jesus looked around and said to His disciples, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!"Mark 10: 21 to 23.The one thing our Zanu PF hornbill caravan lacked was to hold free, fair and credible elections. They knew that this was the ultimate acid test of their "new dispensation" democratic credentials. It was clear from the word go that the hornbills were not going to renounce Zanu PF dictatorial powers that had brought them absolute power and the vast wealth."Zanu PF ichatonga! Igotonga! Imi muchingohukura! Nokuhukura!" (Zanu PF will rule! And rule! Whilst you (calling for democratic change) bark! And bark!) President Mnangagwa had often said before the November 2017 coup and he said it again and again after the coup.So when it came to Zanu PF holding on to absolute power, President Mnangagwa and his junta friends made it crystal clear that they will not implement even one democratic reform to dilute much less take away the party's dictatorial powers.Of course, the ordinary Zimbabweans were painfully aware that in spite all the talk of political change since last November's coup Zanu PF was not going to grant the people their freedoms and human rights including their right to free, fair and credible elections.It is a historic fact that Zimbabwe's 2018 elections were rigged.How can the elections be judged free, fair and credible when there was no free public media? When 2 to 3 million Zimbabweans in the diaspora were denied the vote because Zanu PF feared that the majority of them would not vote for the party. When ZEC failed to produce a clean and verified voters' roll and thus facilitated the many vote rigging schemes such as bussed multiple voting. When Zanu PF used traditional leaders, rogue war veterans and state machinery to harass and bribe the rural voters so they are beholden to the party and would not dare to vote for anyone else. The rural voters are no more than medieval serfs beholden to the landlord, Zanu PF.So to ask again: If Zimbabwe's 2018 elections were free, fair and credible would President Mnangagwa and his Zanu PF junta have won the elections? One would have to have to add, knowing; as the people would have done given freedom of expression and free media, etc.; that was their chance to reclaim their full citizen rights and never again be treated as a serf? The people would have voted for freedom, liberty and human dignity! Zanu PF defeat was a certainty.What is both tragic and frustrating here is that Zimbabweans knew that Zanu PF would rig these elections as long as the elections went ahead without first implementing the democratic reforms designed to take away the party's dictatorial powers. The nations has known of the sheer futility of holding elections with no reforms since the 2008 elections. The only reason elections have gone ahead with no reforms is because the opposition is greedy.Zanu PF successfully bribed Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC friends into doing nothing about implementing the reforms for five years of the GNU. Mugabe dangled the promise of a few gravy train seats to make sure they would participate in the 2013 elections regardless how flawed and illegal the process. It worked!"The worst aspect for me about the failure to agree a coalition was that both MDCs couldn't now do the obvious  withdraw from the (2013) elections," admitted David Coltart, one of the MDC leaders, in his book."The electoral process was so flawed, so illegal, that the only logical step was to withdraw, which would compel SADC to hold Zanu PF to account. But such was the distrust between the MDC-T and MDC-N that neither could withdraw for fear that the other would remain in the elections, winning seats and giving the process credibility."MDC leaders participated in this year's elections knowing fully well that not even one reform had been implemented since the rigged July 2013 elections.So Zanu PF blatantly rigged these elections to secure the presidency and 2/3 parliamentary majority. By participating in these flawed elections; 60 political parties, 23 presidential candidates and whole plethora of independent candidates contested; the opposition gave the process the modicum of credibility. No doubt, MDC leaders like Tendai Biti and David Coltart, who won the few caveated gravy train seats, are over the moon with joy  paid for by the misery and deaths of povo.The true cost of 38 years of corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF rule is the country's economic meltdown that has left  of the population living on US$1.00 or less a day and the brutal political oppression has left over 30 000 murdered by the party in cold. The nation now faces the prospect of another five more years of the same corrupt and tyrannical rule!Buckle up, those who can, we are in for yet another five years of hell-on-earth! Those who are hoping for the economic recovery, you can forget; the flood of investors and lenders President Mnangagwa promised will never come. By rigging the elections the junta confirmed to the world Zimbabwe is a pariah state ruled by vote rigging thugs. Investors do not do business with thugs. We are on our own and the economic hardship and political oppression are set to continue and get worse!"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God," said Jesus.It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for Zimbabwe to achieve any meaningful political stability and economic recovery without first wrestling away Zanu PF's dictatorial powers, especially now that the corrupt opposition is helping it hide the vote rigging.President Mnangagwa passed everything else but failed to hold free, fair and credible elections; that was his camel through the eye of a needle test!As the first batch of third quarter bank earnings began to trickle in, Id discussed why bank stocks were a solid bet as August winds to a close. The stabilization of the broader housing market in Canada was one of my top reasons for optimism, in addition to rising rates, which have been a boon for earnings in 2018 so far.

Today we are going to discuss two of the top Canadian banks that have already released earnings in the third quarter. Which should you stash in your portfolio today? Lets take a look.

Royal Bank of Canada (TSX:RY)(NYSE:RY)

Royal Bank stock was down marginally as trading came to a close on August 24. The stock is up 0.96% in 2018 so far and 11% year over year. Royal Bank released its third-quarter results on August 22.

The bank reported record earnings of $3.1 billion in the third quarter, which represented an 11% increase from the prior year. It also posted diluted earnings per share growth of 14% to $2.10. Both net income and diluted EPS were also up 2% from the previous quarter. The Personal and Commercial Banking segment saw net income rise 8% to $1.51 billion on the back of residential mortgage lending growth, commercial lending, and deposit growth. Royal Bank also posted double-digit net income growth in its Wealth Management and Capital Markets segments.

The board of directors announced an increase to its quarterly dividend of 4% to $0.98 per share payable on November 23, 2018.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (TSX:CM)(NYSE:CM)

CIBC stock has been mostly flat in 2018 so far. However, shares have surged 6.7% over a three-month period as of close on August 24. The stock is also up 15.7% from the prior year. Back in late July Id discussed why CIBC stock was the premier choice for investors looking for bank stocks that offered top shelf income.

CIBC released its third-quarter results on August 23. Net income surged 25% from the prior year to $1.36 billion with adjusted net income climbing 20% to $1.39 billion. Diluted earnings per share also rose 16% to $3.01. Canadian Personal and Small Business Banking net income climbed 14% year-over-year to $639 million and Canadian Commercial Banking and Wealth Management increased 20% to $350 million. Once again its U.S. Commercial Banking and Wealth Management segment reported huge year-over-year growth of 295% to $162 million due to the inclusion of CIBC Bank USA for the full quarter.

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The board of directors also declared a $0.03 dividend increase to a quarterly dividend of $1.36 per share. This represents an attractive 4.4% dividend yield.

Which should you buy today?

In truth I like both stocks as we head into the fall, but CIBC is my favourite target today. Both quarterly reports were very impressive but CIBCs rock solid dividend edges out Royal Bank in late August.

More reading

Fool contributor Ambrose O'Callaghan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned.The man accused of killing four people, including two police officers, in Fredericton earlier this month is expected to plead not guilty, according to his lawyer.

Defence lawyer Nathan Gorham said a final decision on the plea would be made following the Crown's disclosure of evidence and a possible preliminary hearing. His client, Matthew Vincent Raymond, made his first court appearance on Monday.

"He's in shock," Gorham said of Raymond. "But he's looking forward to defending this case vigorously."

Raymond, 48, shackled and wearing an orange prisoner jumpsuit, was escorted by sheriff's deputies into the courthouse. He remained quiet during the proceeding and kept his head bowed.

He is charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Fredericton Police Force Constables Robb Costello, 45, and Sara Burns, 43, and civilians Donnie Robichaud, 42, and Bobbie Lee Wright, 32.

Gorham suggested it's unlikely his client will enter a plea during his next court appearance, Sept. 24, which will focus on the disclosure and next steps.

But he said he doesn't expect to receive "much of a disclosure" because Crown prosecutor Darlene Blunston requested a return in early October to allow enough time to prepare the "large" disclosure of evidence.

More than 50 people, including the families of Robichaud and Wright, were inside the courtroom Monday morning, where Judge Julian Dickson presided.

The proceeding touched on the release of the disclosure and a publication ban of a piece of pre-trial evidence.



Gorham, a defence lawyer who practises in Saint John and Toronto, represents Raymond and was appointed by the government.

"I will honestly assist my client and I will help him obtain what the law offers for him," Gorham said. "At the same time, however, I can feel a sense of sadness and a sense of tragedy here."

On Monday afternoon, Gorham told reporters that the alleged shooter is in "shock and poor physical condition."

Story continues

Police have said all four victims were hit by bullets from a long gun fired from the third storey of an apartment building on Brookside Drive on the city's north side on Aug. 10.

The suspect was arrested at the scene and taken to hospital with serious injuries after being shot in the abdomen by police, a court document revealed.

Gorham told reporters that the alleged shooter is in "poor physical condition" and still receiving medical treatment following his release from hospital last week.

He was considered to be in serious but stable condition and remained in hospital until last Thursday, when he was transferred to an undisclosed provincial correctional facility, according to a Department of Justice and Public Safety spokesperson.

"The specific location cannot be released for security reasons," Alexandra Davis said in an email to CBC News. "No further information will be provided regarding this subject."

Fredericton police responded to reports of gunfire at the apartment complex at 7:10 a.m.

Costello and Burns, the first officers to arrive at 237 Brookside Dr., Building C, were shot and killed trying to help two civilians  later identified as couple Robichaud and Wright.

Raymond had been living in the apartment building for about four months, CBC News has learned.

Police have said Raymond had a licence to possess firearms and legally purchased the long gun he's alleged to have used in the shooting.

At a news conference Aug. 11, police said they were looking for a connection between Raymond and the civilian victims.Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley are back under an air quality advisory.

Environment Canada reinstated the advisory just after 1 a.m. PT Monday, due to high levels of grit from wildfire smoke hanging in the air.

A statement said smoke from the wildfires has moved into the region, despite cooler, damper weather over the weekend.

Francis Ries, a senior project engineer with Metro Vancouver's air quality division, said skies are deceivingly clear.

"Right now, the air seems damp and cool and somewhat fresh," he said Sunday morning.

"However, there is some smoke embedded in the fog and the cloud we're seeing, and certainly our instruments are telling us that it is at levels that give us concern."

Much of the province has been under air quality advisories for nearly two weeks as hundreds of wildfires burn provincewide.

The ocean-air reprieve on the coast didn't reach other regions in the province, or any areas directly downwind of wildfire.

Environment Canada said all advisories will stay in place until there is a significant, lengthy change in the weather.

Children, the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions are particularly at risk when the air quality is poor. Those people should avoid strenuous activity until conditions improve.

Air Quality Health Index ratings improved over the weekend, according to the province, with the Okanagan and northern regions seeing a drop from "very high" risk ratings down to low or moderate.

With files from Zahra Premji

Read more from CBC British ColumbiaThe fate of one of Canada's last hangars from the Second World War will be discussed by city council's executive committee on Monday.

Hangar 11, located just west of NAIT, is one of the last surviving structures of its kind. But the 80,000 square-foot building sits on the Blatchford re-development site, and might be torn down as a result.

Demolishing the building would be a mistake, said Barbara Hilden, chair of the Edmonton Historical Board.

"Stories are intangible," Hilden said. "And this is one of those rare examples of a physical thing we have that can help tell the story of Edmonton's contributions in World War II."

Hangar 11 was built in 1942 and served as part of the United States Lend-Lease program, where North Americans supplied airplanes to Russian allies. The planes were flown from Edmonton to Alaska before making their way to Russia, Hilden said.

Last year, the building was put on a list of the Top 10 Most Endangered Historic Places in Canada, compiled by the National Trust For Canada, a charity focused on preserving older buildings.

The hangar is now vacant and deteriorating, after years of not being used.

A city report says the roof needs to be replaced, while the interior has extensively water-damaged floors, walls and ceilings. The mechanical and electrical systems are also outdated.

Demolition not the only option

The city is considering demolishing the building to make way for a carbon-neutral neighbourhood on Blatchford, the old City Centre Airport land. The city report notes the land the hangar sits on would be sold to NAIT, which is set to expand its campus, and is keen on acquiring land clear of buildings.

But there are two other options: restore and maintain the hangar or hold off on making a decision until the city conducts additional studies, identifying a way to potentially re-purpose the building.

The report says restoration would cost between $14 million and $20 million.

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A full restoration isn't practical, said Hilden. The Edmonton Historical Board has been advocating for the building to be protected from further deterioration while the community discusses the hangar's significant past  and potential future, she said.

"It could be integrated in a meaningful way into the Blatchford redevelopment to give a sense of community to this otherwise brand new development," she said, noting the hangar could be converted into a library or community centre.

"It tells the longer, deeper history of what happened at that site  Edmonton's contributions on a provincial, national and even international scale."

'We save buildings, but we have to be selective'

The city report notes Hangar 11 is on Edmonton's inventory of historic resources, which lists significant sites, but doesn't provide official historic designation.

"It is believed to be one of the last remaining buildings of its kind in Western Canada, possibly in the nation, and is one of the most significant historic structures in Edmonton," the report reads.

That doesn't mean the city is guaranteed to save it, said Mayor Don Iveson. The hangar doesn't fit with the street grid or utility plan for the Blatchford redevelopment, a project that has been in the works for almost a decade, Iveson said Sunday.

"So we'd have to drastically alter our development plans and we would have to invest considerable money. And quite frankly our resources are very tight right now," Iveson said.

The city hasn't been too keen to preserve historic buildings in the past, Hilden said.

"We're losing so many of them. Edmonton doesn't have a great track record of taking care of its buildings. In particular, some of the more pedestrian and unimpressive, for lack of a better word, buildings," she said, noting Hangar 11 isn't a beautiful structure, but is still valuable.

But for Iveson, a building's age won't necessarily spare it from the wrath of a wrecking ball.

"It's critical that the city act to preserve structures, but we pick the most important churches, not all churches  the most important aviation historical buildings," he said, pointing to the Alberta Aviation Museum, which has formal historic designation.

The museum is located on a site adjacent to Blatchford.

"We save buildings, but we have to be selective about which ones we save."Government told to take Bishwokarma to court

The Supreme Court has ordered the government to produce Khadga Bahadur Bishwokarma, spokesperson for the Netra Bikram Chand-led Communist Party of Nepal, to the apex court within 24 hours along with documents of prosecution.The federal government wants a better understanding of how climate change and extreme weather could affect key parts of infrastructure in Eastern Canada.

A tender for a vulnerability and risk assessment was issued Friday and applies to the Confederation Bridge, airports in Wabush, N.L., and St. Anthony, N.L., as well as ferry terminals in:

- Digby, N.S.

- Saint John, N.B.

- Caribou, N.S.

- Wood Islands, P.E.I.

- Souris, P.E.I.

- Cap-aux-Meules, Que.

The Public Works tender says the sites listed are vulnerable to "sea level rise, increased storm activities and changing wave climate" and Ottawa wants to identify any areas that are at risk of failure or damage.

No one from Public Works and Government Services Canada was available to comment Friday on the tender.

Nancy Anningson, coastal adaptation co-ordinator for the Halifax-based Ecology Action Centre, said the undertaking sends a signal that authorities recognize rising sea levels can have a dramatic effect on infrastructure.

She said that even if bridges, ferry terminals and airports were constructed with climate change in mind, the increase in extreme weather events and rising sea level predictions means the work is never-ending.

Plans for the Confederation Bridge, for example, took into account higher sea levels, but the estimated rate of rise has increased since the span opened in 1997, said Anningson.

Avoiding 'catastrophic failure'

"Even though great planning was done at the time, as the predictions change, then we have to take a look at how climate change will affect this structure and continue to monitor and adapt as we can so these structures will continue to exist and we won't have a catastrophic failure," she said.

Anningson said she hopes more work of this nature will be done in the future, but she'd also support a broader scope.

"I would very much like to see something similar where we're taking a look all around the province at our coastline and we're assessing structures that are at risk and therefore people who are at risk," she said.

Read more articles from CBC Nova ScotiaAs the new school year gets underway, Environment Canada has issued a heat warning for southern Quebec  forecasting warm and humid conditions that will linger into Wednesday.

The heat warning was issued early Monday, covering Lachute to the Eastern Townships and Lanaudiere to the U.S. border. The warning includes Montreal, Laval and the South Shore.

Environment Canada says Tuesday will be particularly muggy with humidex values expected to be in the low forties.

"Temperatures are going to rise today," Environment Canada meteorologist Alexandre Parent told CBC on Monday. "The heat warning is really for tomorrow."

Parent said people should keep an eye on the forecast in the coming days as severe thunderstorms are possible.

A high of 32 C is expected Tuesday, he said, with a humidex of 43. Wednesday should be humid, he said, with possible showers and thunderstorms. Temperatures should return to normal by Thursday.

Having a short heat wave like this in late August is not uncommon, said Parent.

"It's not that exceptional," he said. "It's kind of a heat wave, but it's only going to last one day, basically."

However, the amount of hot days affecting southern Quebec is higher than normal this year.

This week's forecast

- Tuesday: Showers with possible thunderstorms. High near 32 C. Humidex of 43.

- Wednesday: Scattered showers or thunderstorms. High near 29 C. Humidex of 40.

- Thursday: Mostly cloudy with a 40 per cent chance of showers. Not as muggy. High near 23 C.

- Friday: Sunshine. High near 24 C.

'We're way above the normal'

Where there are normally only 10 to 12 days with maximum temperatures above 30 C, this year will see about 20 such days.

Last year, he said, there were zero such days between June and September.

"It's quite a contrast this year," said Parent. "We're way above the normal."

There are many factors that contribute to heat waves, Parent added. With global warning, heat waves may become more frequent in the future, he said, but "we can not explain one event by only referring to global warming."

Anybody who is vulnerable to the heat should use caution, said Parent. Heat warnings are issued when the hot or humid conditions are expected to pose an elevated risk of heat illnesses.

Environment Canada says health risks to young children can be reduced by cooling them often, hydrating them adequately and reducing their exposure to the heat.Protesters gathered in Burns Lake, B.C. Saturday after firefighters were told their gear wasn't appropriate to fight fires burning south of the village.

The firefighters, working for a Fort St. John-based company, drove west to Burns Lake earlier this week, offering sprinklers, pumps and hoses to fight fires on the village's south side.

But after testing the gear, the B.C. Wildfire Service said the high-capacity water delivery system wouldn't be appropriate to fight the fires and won't be used.

Locals reacted angrily, saying that equipment could have been used to help fight fires threatening the area.

"It feels like our property and our land doesn't mean anything. There's resources here that haven't been deployed. It's a waste of time and money," said protest organizer Ginger Moyah.

"Everyone's really hurt."

The locals gathered by the trucks on Saturday morning to protest, but have moved their demonstration outside the local wildfire centre.

Councillor Charles Rensby said the group wants officials to reconsider their decision.

"What we're trying to do is put pressure on B.C. wildfire to re-look at some of the options ... to try and get a plan together to stop wildfires from destroying everyone's homes and livelihoods," he said.

'Not an appropriate tool'

Winds have complicated the battle against the complex of fires southwest of Burns Lake, which includes the Nadina, Verdun and Cheslatta Lake wildfires.

The gear in question is a high-capacity water delivery system, meaning it can move large bodies of water around to reach fires.

A statement from the wildfire service said the gear needs "very large bodies" of water and flat terrain to work  neither of which was available.

"In areas of the fire where this tool would be most effective, the water sources were insufficient, the terrain was challenging and there was significant distance between structures," the service said in an emailed statement.

Story continues

"The B.C. Wildfire Service is currently evaluating the use of alternate water delivery systems for utilization on the Babine Complex as well as for future use with wildfire suppression."



Moyah said she doesn't buy it.

"There's more than enough water sources over there [on the southside]," she said. "There's a million lakes over there."

Read more from CBC British Columbia

Correction : An earlier version of this story said the firefighters with special equipment were from Alberta. In fact, about half of the firefighters are from Alberta and the rest are from B.C.(Aug 27, 2018 5:51 PM)YANGON (Reuters) - Two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, have been detained in Myanmar since Dec. 12, 2017. At the time of their arrests, they had been working on an investigation into the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men and boys in a village in Rakhine state. After eight months of hearings, a court is set to decide on Monday whether or not to convict the reporters under the Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison. The following are key events in the case: Dec. 12-13, 2017 Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are arrested in Yangon after being invited to meet police at a restaurant. The government says they face charges under the Official Secrets Act. The two reporters are held incommunicado at a secret interrogation camp for the next two weeks. Dec. 18, 2017 Myanmar's military says it has discovered a mass grave in the village of Inn Din, in western Rakhine state. Dec. 27, 2017 The reporters appear in court and are remanded to custody. Their families say the pair told them they were arrested almost immediately after being handed documents by the policemen they met for the first time the night of their arrest. Jan. 10, 2018 Pre-trial hearings begin, with prosecutors seeking charges against the journalists under the Official Secrets Act. On the same day, the military says its soldiers murdered 10 captured Muslims, whose bodies were those discovered by security forces in the mass grave in Rakhine, during insurgent attacks. Feb. 1, 2018 A police witness, Major Min Thant, says under cross-examination that information in the documents the reporters were holding in their hands at the time of their arrest had already been published in newspaper reports. The court denies a request for bail. Feb. 6, 2018 Police witness Second Lieutenant Tin Htwe Oo, who testifies that he was part of the arrest team, says he burned the notes he made at the time, but gives no reason why. Feb. 8, 2018 Reuters publishes the investigation that the reporters had been working on. It describes how security forces and local Rakhine Buddhists were involved in the killing of the 10 Rohingya Muslim men and boys buried in the mass grave at Inn Din. Feb. 11, 2018 Myanmar says action will be taken against members of its security forces in connection with the killings at Inn Din, but says it is not related to the Reuters report. Feb. 28, 2018 A civilian witness for the prosecution reads from notes on his hand when asked about the location of the journalists' arrests. When challenged he says he wrote on his hand to jog his memory while testifying because he is forgetful. March 7, 2018 A police officer who took part in a post-arrest search of Wa Lone's family home testifies that officers were looking for material "related to news". March 28, 2018 Lawyers for Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo ask the court to throw out the case, saying there is insufficient evidence to support charges against the pair. March 29, 2018 Prominent human rights lawyer Amal Clooney joins the legal team representing the two Reuters reporters. "Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are being prosecuted simply because they reported the news," Clooney says in a statement. April 20, 2018 Prosecution witness Police Captain Moe Yan Naing tells the court that a police brigadier general had given orders to entrap Wa Lone by giving him "secret documents" and then arresting him. Prosecutors later argued that Moe Yan Naing should be declared an unreliable witness, but the judge rejected the request. April 29, 2018 Moe Yan Naing is sentenced to a year in prison for violating Myanmar's Police Disciplinary Act by talking to Wa Lone. May 16, 2018 Police Lance Corporal Naing Lin, the officer Moe Yan Naing said was ordered to entrap Wa Lone, tells the court he met the reporters, but denies giving them documents. June 11, 2018 A senior police officer denies during cross-examination by defense lawyers that the reporters were held at an interrogation camp, mistreated or asked if they were "spies" during questioning. Afterwards, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo dispute this account, saying they were handcuffed and questioned every two hours by different officers for about three days during their two-week detention period at the Aung Tha Pyay police special branch interrogation center. July 2, 2018 Prosecutors and defense lawyers deliver final arguments in the pre-trial phase of the case. July 9, 2018 Yangon district judge Ye Lwin charges Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo with breaching the colonial-era Official Secrets Act. Both journalists plead "not guilty" to the charges, telling the judge they "followed journalistic ethics". July 16, 2018 Wa Lone gives the first detailed account to the court of the night he and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested, saying that Police Lance Corporal Naing Lin had called him at least twice on Dec. 12, demanding a meeting at which the officer abruptly handed both reporters some papers. He said they were arrested by plainclothes officers almost immediately after Naing Lin gave him the papers, which he did not have time to look at. July 17, 2018 In a second day of testimony, Wa Lone describes how police deprived him and Kyaw Soe Oo of sleep for about three days and placed black hoods over their heads while transporting them to the interrogation center. Wa Lone says the interrogation focused on their reporting of the Inn Din killings, rather than on the documents they are accused of obtaining. July 24, 2018 Kyaw Soe Oo testifies that he was forced to kneel on the floor for hours after police found images of the men killed at Inn Din on his phone. Aug. 4, 2018 U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls for the immediate release of two Reuters reporters at a meeting with Myanmar Foreign Minister Kyaw Tin on the sidelines of a regional conference in Singapore. Aug. 6, 2018 Defense witnesses testify to the integrity of the two journalists, with former teacher Ye Naing Moe, director of Yangon Journalism School, praising both reporters as curious and excellent students who had won multiple awards for stories focusing on the underprivileged and social issues. They were jailed "for revealing the truth", he says. Aug. 10, 2018 Wa Lones wife, Pan Ei Mon, gives birth to the couple's first child, a baby girl, in a Yangon hospital. She is named Thet Htar Angel. Aug. 20, 2018 Yangon district judge Ye Lwin announces he will deliver his verdict on Aug. 27. (Editing by Alex Richardson)Photo - War Cemetery of Jews, Warsaw

The commemoration of the end of WWI is coming up  11 November 2018. The poems (below) commemorate all the returned servicemen who have done their bit to help defend our country; particularly those who have had problems fitting into that very society that they helped to defend.

There are not my poems; they are written by relatives of mine. My father was in a protected occupation, producing milk for the American air base in Mackay, Queensland and he and his farmer-mates were not accepted for enlisting when they fronted up. In my role as a pastor and chaplain, and now in Well-Being Australia, my respite mission, I have encountered many returned servicemen and women with adjustment problems. It goes back three generations.

Photo - Albert Brokman Auschwitz survivor with his grand-son

One of these poems is from a Rat of Tobruk, who was still writing poems and stories at age 99  he was 100 in April 2015; and recently passed away. The other is a response to this poem by his niece who grew up knowing many ex-servicemen after WWII and had friends who returned from Vietnam in the 70s.

'Ee's still me mate by Colin Thomas, Como WA, aged 99.

I told you we would meet again

One sunny afternoon.

Here we are both sitting here,

Old mates again in tune.

What have you been doing mate?

Now me, I catch a bus.

Go to the shopping centre too

For an amble without a fuss.

Of course I get me a bit of grub,

To ease my empty tum,

Although those seats are kinda hard,

Give me an itchy b-m.

When on your own you feel quite sad,

Without another voice

That you've been hearing all those years -

You know I miss my Joyce.

She was a lovely, happy lass,

I met her at a ball,

But what we both were doing there

For sure, I don't recall.

For 60 years we were together

She was a good pal and mother

I'll never find such a good girl

Nor do I want another.

So how about you, old man,

How have you spent your life?

I 'spect you have a tribe of kids

And a nicely rounded wife.

I'd like you to meet my daughter

She's here to take me home,

Gets upset if I am late

And hates to see me roam.

But still, I say, it's part of me

Dear Jess, I've got to walk;

Old soldiers need to get around

 and talk!

Photo - Warsaw War Statutes

One story - many stories: behind closed doors by Colin's niece.

The figure in the wheelchair looked out of place

Over by the fire in the corner

Watching the babbling crowd with a century of memories.

Elsewhere in the reception room the champagne flowed

G'day G'day Can I get you a drink? I'd kill for a hot cuppa

So cuppa it was, eventually brought with aplomb in white china on a silver tray

I enquired if he belonged to the bride or the groom, he answered both.

He had introduced his grand-daughter to his old mate's grandson at some family party;

Both sides were relieved at the match of these thirty-somethings on the shelf!

Gradually the hot tea lubricated his vocal chords.

I was happy to be off my high-heeled feet; I sat and listened between the lines.

He was one of Life's survivors, unlike some of his less fortunate mates.

And the less fortunate he mentioned were the ones who returned.

Physical injuries healed and were cared for, like his missing leg;

Widows and kids were looked after by Legacy;

Social needs were met by the RSL  well, he said with a sneer  at least until Vietnam.

It was Peace. Normality. Right?

But behind closed doors there was immense suffering in silence.

His mate, the groom's grandfather, had nightmares until the day he died,

And he was one of the lucky ones, with a loving family

And a wife who stuck by him though she never slept a full night

Since the lover she waited six years for came home in a different guise.

The old man's eyes grew grey and clouded

As he remembered the sufferings of his own father after the Great War

And he saw the same problems with his son's mates in the seventies

And he lamented that those returning now are still hiding behind those doors,

Even though they now have a name for it (a medical term he couldn't remember).

Just then the Bride floated up on a cushion of excitement.

C'mon Grandad, we are going to do the wheelchair dance, here we go...

And his grin was so wide you could see it round the back of his head

As they sashayed off to the future he had fought for.

There is Hope

For all those suffering from trauma and feelings of misunderstanding, whether you are military people or others, I pray you will come out from your dark tunnel soon and take comfort from John 1:5: And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

For help, comfort or just a kind word, your local pastor or chaplain is always available, or you can contact sympathetic souls through these contacts:

Lifeline  phone 13 11 14 or www.lifeline.org.au

Beyondblue  www.beyondblue.org.au

Mens sheds  www.mensshed.org

You can add your own stories to the archives - Australian War Memorial

Some of Colins memoirs have been submitted to the Australian War Memorial. They are interested in anyone's stories or reminiscences or memorabilia:

Photo - Chunnic Bair Trenches, Gallipoli

Dr Mark Tronson is a Baptist minister (retired) who served as the Australian cricket team chaplain for 17 years (2000 ret) and established Life After Cricket in 2001. He was recognised by the Olympic Ministry Medal in 2009 presented by Carl Lewis Olympian of the Century. He mentors young writers and has written 24 books and enjoys writing. He is married to Delma, with four adult children and grand-children. Dr Tronson writes a daily article for Christian Today Australia (since 2008) and in November 2016 established Christian Today New Zealand.

Mark Tronson's archive of articles can be viewed at http://www.pressserviceinternational.org/mark-tronson.html2018 marked the fifth IPCPR for Caldwell Cigar Company. The company has evolved its portfolio into a combination of core lines, limited editions, and collaborations. Over the past five years, Caldwell has worked with factories in three different countries (Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua). It has also established a strong distribution company with Down & Back LLC that not only handles the distribution for the brands, but also for La Barba, Room 101, and Porsche Design cigar accessories (the latter was on display at the Caldwell booth).

Cigar-wise, there were three new launches that spanned the Caldwell portfolio. Two are new blends, and one is a slight refresh of an existing one.

The Caldwell Collection has become the foundation of Caldwells regular production. Two of the three lines under the Caldwell Collection have new blends. First up, Long Live the King now has a maduro offering called Long Live the King MAD MF. Its the third blend to be released in the line following the original Long Live the King release and 2016s limited edition Savages releases.

Long Live the King MAD MF was described as a limited production release. The blend uses a Mexican San Andres wrapper over an Indonesian binder, and fillers from the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and the U.S. (Pennsylvania). The cigar is available in four sizes: Corona (5 3/4 x 43), Belicoso (5 1/2 x 52), Super Toro (6 x 54), and Magnum (6 x 60). Each size is presented in 10-count boxes.

Eastern Standard now has a Sungrown Habano offering called Eastern Standard Habano. Its a unique offering that uses a Mexican San Andres Sungrown wrapper over an Ecuadorian binder and a blend of Dominican and U.S. Pennsylvania filler. The cigar will be available in four sizes: Robusto (5 x 50), Double Robusto (5 1/2 x 56), Toro Extra (6 1/4 x 54), and Magnum (6 x 60). It is presented in 20-count boxes. This cigar was one of the standout cigars I smoked at IPCPR.

The Eastern Standard Habano is the fourth blend under the Eastern Standard line to be released. Previous installments include the Eastern Standard Dark Connecticut, Eastern Standard Midnight Express (Maduro), and the limited edition Eastern Standard Dos Firmas.

Finally, Anastasia, a limited edition collaboration done with Ernesto Perez-Carrillo Jrs Tabacalera La Alianza is back. The cigar was originally released in 2016. The 2018 version uses a higher priming tobacco because of limited availability of the 2016 version. The 2018 edition is distinguished by a blue colored secondary band as opposed to the green colored one found on the 2016.

Blend details of Anastasia are not being disclosed. The 2018 version is available in the same four sizes as the 2016: Caspia (5 3/4 x 43), Kartel (5 x 49), Mercure (7 x 47), and Opera (6 x 52). Each size is presented in 20-count boxes.

2018 Product Reports

Photo Credits: Cigar CoopIndia lends three fortified cars for BIMSTEC meet

India has provided three sophisticated armoured vehicles to be used by the heads of state/government participating in the fourth summit of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation scheduled to take place in Kathmandu on August 30 and 31.Some changes are happening at PDR Cigars this year. Owner Abe Flores has named Richie Otero the companys new Director of Sales. At the same time, the company is launching a new logo  which is going to permeate into some of its packaging. At the same time, the company had several new releases that were being introduced .

While the PDR Star logo hasnt completely been phased out, PDR has already phasing in the new logo. This logo consists of three interlocking P, D, and R letters with the name PDR CIGARS and A. FLORES on it. The PDR star is also on the new logo, but has a diminished presence.

First up, there is a new installment to the A. Flores Gran Reserva line in the form of a maduro. This A. Flores Gran Reserva Maduro joins the A. Flores Gran Reserva Corojo, Habano, and Desflorado (Connecticut Shade offering). This cigar features a San Andres Maduro wrapper over a Dominican Olor binder and Dominican Olor filler. The cigars are available in five sizes: Half Corona (3 1/2 x 46), Robusto (5 x 52), Torpedo: (6 1/2 x 52), Gran Toro: (6 x 54), and Double Magnum: (6 x 60). All of the sizes will be available in 24 count boxes except the Half Corona which will be available in 5 count tins or 50-count boxes.

As a whole, the Gran Reserva line is getting a packaging upgrade. The cedar sleeves are being replaced by paper sleeves.

There is a new line of coffee flavored cigars known as PDR 1878 Roast Cafe. The cigars come in three varietals: Natural Roast, Medium Roast, and Dark Roast. These are extensions of three of the PDR 1878 lines. The PDR 1878 Roast Cafe Natural Roast is a coffee flavored offshoot of the PDR 1878 Capa Natural (aka White Label). The PDR 1878 Roast Cafe Medium Roast is based on the PDR 1878 Capa Sun Grown (aka Blue Label) while the PDR 1878 Roast Cafe Dark Roast is based on the PDR 1878 Capa Maduro (Black Label).

Each of the three blends is available in three sizes: Corona: (5 1/4 x 44), Robusto: (5 x 52), and Toro: (6 x 52). All three sizes are presented in 20-count boxes.

Speaking of the core PDR 1878 line, this will undergo packaging changes  including new boxes and bands featuring the new logo. These will affect all four lines: Capa Natural, Cape Oscura, Cape Sun Grown, and Capa Maduro.

The Flores y Rodriguez Connecticut Valley Reserve Azul and Maduro lines are returning. These are two ultra-premium limited production lines by PDR Cigars. Both cigars utilize a Connecticut Broadleaf wrapper, Jalapa binder, and a combination of Dominican Corojo, and Nicaraguan Condega tobaccos in the filler. The difference is the Azul uses a Connecticut Broadleaf Rosado wrapper as opposed to an Oscuro on the maduro. Both lines will once again be offered in 15-count boxes or 19-count ceramic jars.

Finally, El Criollito expands with four new vitolas bringing the total number to eight. The new sizes are shorter smokes in length. These sizes include: Club (4 1/2 x 30), Perla (3 3/4 x 42), Purito (4 x 34), and Short Gordo (4 1/4 x 58). El Criollito is a line originally released in Europe, but was launched last year for the U.S. at the 2017 IPCPR. The blend for El Criollito features an Ecuadorian Criollo Rosado wrapper over a San Andres binder, and fillers from Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.

2018 Product Reports

Photo Credits: Cigar CoopKanchanpur curfew remains

The Kanchanpur District Administration Office continued the curfew in Mahendranagar from 10am to 6pm on Sunday. The order will continue from 10pm till 5 on Monday morning, authorities said.Kanchanpur rape, murder case: Curfew relaxed till 6pm today

The Kanchanpur District Administration Office has lifted the curfew in Mahendranagar until 6pm on Monday.Kanchanpur rape, murder case: District Court extends Bam sisters remand

The Kanchanpur District Court on Monday extended the remand of Roshni Bam and Babita Bam, who have been arrested in connection with the investigation into the rape and subsequent murder of a teenager in Kanchanpur.Landslide buries 2 houses, 108 houses at risk

A massive landslide triggered by torrential rainfall since Sunday night buried two houses at Molpha in Khandachakra Municipality-5 of Kalikot district. Around 108 houses facing a risk of landslide.Let short-selling begin

Shorting injects much needed balance into the markets now that margin trading is allowedMan arrested with pangolin scale

Police have arrested a person with a pangolin scale while he was out to sell the cover of the endangered species in Bhimeshwor Municipality in Dolakha.Misunderstanding China

Chinas actions in the South Asian Indian Ocean Region have been misinterpreted as hawkishProvince 2 law minister padlocks bank for defiance

Internal Affairs and Law Minister of Province 2 Gyanendra Yadav padlocked the main gate of Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) in Janakpur on Sunday for defying public holiday orders.Rautahat boat capsize: Body of missing child found in India

The body of a 10-year-old child, who had gone missing after a boat capsized at Tikuliya Ghat in Gaur Municipality-4 of Rautahat on Saturday, was found in Jamunaha Ghat, India on Monday.School office assistant electrocuted in Dang

An office assistant at the Amar Higher Secondary School in Urahari, Tulsipur Sub-Metropolitan City-11, Dang, was electrocuted on Monday. Jogi Lal Chaudhary, 45, died of electric shock, police said.Stop Intimidating Citizens

Governments action against Lenin Bista is a naked display of powerStranded Nepali workers could rejoin jobs in Saudi

Thirty-eight Nepali migrant workers, who had been stranded in Saudi Arabia, will be taken back to their previous jobs.Supreme Court Interim order to stop Animal cruelty

The Supreme Court (SC) on Sunday issued an interim order to stop cruel treatment of animals while being transported in vehicles.Tourism income grows to record Rs67b last fiscal

Nepal earned a record Rs67.09 billion in foreign exchange from the tourism industry in the last fiscal year 2017-18 which ended mid-July, according to the statistics of Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB). The figure represents a steep 14.6 percent jump from the previous fiscal year. The country had received 940,218 tourists in 2017.TRC yet to prepare reparation policy

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has largely failed to look into war-era cases of rights violation, is delaying the reparation policy, which could guide relief provisions for thousands of people awaiting justice.Two bodies found in India, at least three others missing

Bodies of two Rautahat boat capsize victims were recovered in India on Sunday.1. Yes. If a city of 150,000 cant provide safe drinking water for 10 days, a probe is needed.

2. Yes. Not only should there be a state investigation, but customers should get a rebate.

3. No. The city will be working with TCEQ to develop an after-action plan. That will suffice.

4. No. The whole episode was just an annoyance. An outside investigaton is unnecessary.

5. Unsure. Its hard to say without knowing more details about the issue.

Vote

View ResultsBy Solomon Arinaitwe



The electoral commission has finally gazetted Mr Kassiano Wadri Ezati as the Arua Municipality Member of Parliament, more than 10 days after he was elected.

Mr Wadri polled 6,528 votes (38%), beating the NRMs Nusura Tiperu who came second with 4,763 votes(27%) followed by Independent candidate Robert Ejiku with 2,703 votes (15%). FDCs Bruce Musema followed in 3rd place with 1,372 (4%).

In a letter to the clerk to the parliament dated Thursday 23rd August 2018, the Electoral Commission finally put to rest, fears that had been building since his arrested and subsequent arraignment at Gulu Magistrates on charges of treason.

Wadri and 32 others were arrested a day before the elections, following fracas on the final day of the campaigns and taken to Gulu.

The group faces charges of terrorism at the Gulu Magistrates Court and is expected back in the court on August 30th.

Prosecution accuses the MP-elect and 33 other opposition supporters of pelting President Musevenis motorcade with stones with the intention of harming him.

Treason is a capital offence which upon conviction, attracts a death sentence.

Mr Museveni has indicated that the NRM will challenge Mr Wadris victory in court, accusing the opposition of importing voters to Arua and intimidating women, scaring them away from voting.

Prior to being gazette, tempers had started flaring up, with many questioning why the MP-elect was not gazetted as winner of the Arua Municipality by-election, a prerequisite for him to be sworn in.

The Parliamentary Elections Act, however, does not provide a time frame on when results or a winner has to be gazetted.

The MP-elect together with his co accused are currently appearing before the High Court in Gulu for hearing of their bail application.By Ritah Kemigisa..

Kenyas President Uhuru Kenyatta will meet US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office for 20 minutes before going into an expanded bilateral meeting in the Cabinet Room with their delegations.

The US is the largest source of tourists to Kenya and the country hopes direct flights from Nairobi to New York from October will boost arrivals.

Kenya is the 85th largest supplier of goods imported into the US and trade between the two countries is worth $1.5bn (1.17bn) , according to Americas Department of Commerce.

Kenya also wants to secure financing for a new $4.5bn highway from the port city of Mombasa to the capital Nairobi.

Kenya is seen as a strategic partner to the US in the fight against terror in the East and Horn of Africa and both countries have troops in Somalia.

Strengthening security cooperation will be on the agenda when the two leaders meet in Washington DC.

President Kenyatta will also meet UK Prime Minister Theresa May on Thursday in Nairobi after she visits South Africa and Nigeria.Tokayev noted that Kazakhstan has considerable resources to supply its domestic market with quality fuel and lubricants and sustainable electricity supply. The President instructed the minister to take all measures necessary to address the tasks set.Blog Archive Oct 31 (4) Oct 30 (4) Oct 29 (3) Oct 28 (3) Oct 27 (3) Oct 26 (3) Oct 25 (5) Oct 24 (3) Oct 23 (3) Oct 22 (3) Oct 21 (3) Oct 20 (4) Oct 19 (3) Oct 18 (5) Oct 17 (2) Oct 16 (3) Oct 15 (4) Oct 14 (4) Oct 13 (3) Oct 12 (3) Oct 11 (3) Oct 10 (4) Oct 09 (3) Oct 08 (4) Oct 07 (3) Oct 06 (3) Oct 05 (5) Oct 04 (3) Oct 03 (3) Oct 02 (3) Oct 01 (4) Sep 30 (4) Sep 29 (5) Sep 28 (6) Sep 27 (2) Sep 26 (3) Sep 25 (3) Sep 24 (3) Sep 23 (4) Sep 22 (4) Sep 21 (5) Sep 20 (3) Sep 19 (3) Sep 18 (4) Sep 17 (4) Sep 16 (5) Sep 15 (4) Sep 14 (5) Sep 13 (5) Sep 12 (4) Sep 11 (3) Sep 10 (4) Sep 09 (4) Sep 08 (3) Sep 07 (4) Sep 06 (5) Sep 05 (4) Sep 04 (3) Sep 03 (3) Sep 02 (3) Sep 01 (3) Aug 31 (4) Aug 30 (3) Aug 29 (4) Aug 28 (3) Aug 27 (3) Aug 26 (6) Aug 25 (3) Aug 24 (4) Aug 23 (3) Aug 22 (3) Aug 21 (3) Aug 20 (5) Aug 19 (4) Aug 18 (4) Aug 17 (5) Aug 16 (3) Aug 15 (4) Aug 14 (4) Aug 13 (3) Aug 12 (3) 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Mar 22 (2) Mar 19 (1) Mar 18 (1) Mar 16 (1) Mar 15 (2) Mar 13 (1) Mar 12 (1) Mar 11 (1) Mar 10 (1)From the Local ES:

A project to open an LGTB friendly retirement home has been given the green light by authorities in Madrid with plans to open it by the end of the year.

A building in the Villaverde district in the south of Madrid has been earmarked to house the retirement home, which will be funded by public money from Madrid's regional government.

The new centre will be home to 66 permanent residents and will have a day centre for a further 30 people.

Federico Armenteros has been working for almost a decade to set up a specialized residence for elderly gay people through the December 26th Foundation - named after the date in 1979 when the law used during Gen Franco's dictatorship to imprison homosexuals - was repealed.Sunday, August 26, 2018

On Friday, August 24, a federal judge allowed the lawsuit Al Otro Lado v. Kelly -- which challenges Customs and Border Protection (CBP)'s practice of routinely failing to permit asylum seekers at the border to actually request asylum through a variety of allegedly unlawful actions -- to proceed. The plaintiff in the lawsuit is the nonprofit Al Otro Lado, co-founded by attorney Nora Philips (who was featured on the blog for her work with the organization in this 2015 post).

Al Otro Lado v. Kelly highlights one of the biggest shortcomings of the expedited removal process, which is that although statute and regulation require that individuals apprehended at or near the border be asked if they are afraid to return to their countries and referred for a credible fear interview if they answer affirmatively, reports have suggested that a fair inquiry into and opportunity to articulate that fear often does not occur. It will be interesting to see how this lawsuit plays out, particularly in light of the Trump Administration's immigration and border enforcement priorities.

The Center for Constitutional Rights' Press Release is below:

"August 24, 2018, San Diego  A federal judge ruled this week that a lawsuit challenging U.S. Customs and Border Protections (CBP) practice of turning away asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border can proceed. The lawsuit was brought by the Los Angeles and Tijuana-based organization Al Otro Lado, Inc., as well as individual asylum seekers who are collectively represented by the American Immigration Council, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Southern Poverty Law Center and an international law firm. The complaint challenges CBPs systematic denial of the right to access the asylum process, forcing individuals fleeing persecution to return to countries where they face grave danger and the risk of death. CBP had asked the court to dismiss the case altogether, which the judge denied in this ruling.

Thousands of refugees fleeing for their lives have been unlawfully denied the right to seek protection in the United States. We are heartened that the Court recognized the U.S. governments legal obligations to accept asylum seekers at our southern border, said Erika Pinheiro, Litigation and Policy Director at Al Otro Lado.

The judge affirmed the plaintiffs claim that high-level CBP officials have the obligation to direct their agents at ports of entry across the southern border to process individuals who present themselves for asylum. The judge further held that those asylum seekers can proceed with legal action against high-level officials for derogation of their responsibilities under domestic and international law.

The ruling puts the Trump Administration on notice that the United States brazen dereliction of its domestic and international humanitarian obligations to hear asylum claims will not be tolerated, said Angelo Guisado, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Now, our plaintiffs, who bravely took up this legal challenge on behalf of thousands whom CBP also unlawfully turned away at the border, will have the opportunity to be heard in court.

The lawsuit documents the experiences of hundreds of asylum seekers turned away at ports of entry all along the U.S.-Mexico border. To carry out its turn-away practice, CBP employs a variety of tacticsincluding misinformation, threats and intimidation, threats of forced family separation, verbal and physical abuse, and coercion. Many were unlawfully turned away multiple times, despite having expressed fear of returning to their home countries in the face of humanitarian crises in Mexico, Haiti, and certain Central American countries.

The judge affirmed that the asylum seekers could proceed with seeking relief in their individual cases, and also suggested that they could represent a class of other asylum seekers, potentially thousands, who have allegedly experienced the same failures to act by CBP.

The judge also affirmed that Al Otro Lado as an organization has standing to proceed with their claims against CBP, observing that the organization demonstrated sufficiently that it had shifted significant resources away from its non-refugee programs to provide emergency support for the burgeoning migration crisis in Tijuana, including individual screenings and in-depth trainings to educate asylum seekers about CBPs alleged conduct of denying the most basic form of access to the asylum process.

According to Melissa Crow, senior supervising attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center and co-counsel for plaintiffs, The courts decision represents an important first step toward holding U.S. Customs and Border Protection accountable for flagrant violations of U.S. law that have deprived countless asylum seekers of the right to seek protection in our country. The governments outrageous practice of turning away vulnerable individuals at the border must end."

-JKoh

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2018/08/judge-allows-lawsuit-challenging-border-patrol-practice-of-turning-away-asylum-seekers-to-proceed.htmlMonday, August 27, 2018

The Florida Third District Court of Appeal affirmed the denial of an injunction against stalking sought by an attorney against another attorney

Ms. Raulerson is an associate attorney employed by a law firm (Barnard Law Offices, L.P., BLO), which regularly represents insured homeowners and other parties with insurance claims, including bad faith claims. The senior and name partner at BLO is Andrew C. Barnard (Mr. Barnard). Mr. Barnard was designated as Ms. Raulersons attorney for purposes of the stalking case, and he also represents her in this appeal. The petition includes allegations regarding conduct witnessed by Mr. Barnard and statements heard by him, in each case relating to lawsuits and conduct in a courtroom or courthouse.

The respondent, Mr. Font, is identified in the petition as the managing partner of a law fir , Font & Nelson, LLC, in Fort Lauderdale. Mr. Fonts law, Font & Nelson, LLC, in Fort Lauderdale. Mr. Fonts law firm regularly represents insurers, and Mr. Font has expressed a particular interest in identifying fraudulent insurance claims for prosecution under the applicable criminal statutes. The petition alleges that Mr. Font, among other wrongful acts: threatened, harassed, stalked, cyberstalked, or abused Ms. Raulerson; threatened to harm [Ms. Raulerson] and individuals closely associated with [Ms. Raulerson]; repeatedly harassed and threatened [Ms. Raulerson] and her co workers and her employer by forcing her to appear at court hearings having nothing to do with her, and then threatening her with criminal actions, going so far as to publish a false affidavit against her which he suborned from a prior client; and repeatedly published the affidavit in all cases involving [BLO] as well as other cases where [BLO] has no involvement whatsoever.As the trial court cogently noted at the outset, the petition more nearly resembles, in its overall impression, a grievance complaint to The Florida Bar, or a motion for sanctions in the ten enumerated insurance lawsuits (and one petition to this Court) involving the parties, rather than other petitions for injunction under Chapter 784 (I dont think that this is the forum for me to decide, frankly, a lot of what you would like me to decide based on your pleadings).

The law

The core allegations in the petition describe interactions between Ms. Raulerson in her capacity as an attorney for the BLO firm and Mr. Font in his capacity as an attorney, all occurring in connection with the ten, enumerated, insurance-related lawsuits. Mr. Fonts verbal threats to Ms. Raulerson that he will cause her to lose her bar license and livelihood and reputation, and his repeatedly filing the affidavit of a former BLO client (as purported evidence of insurance fraud by that client and BLO) could involve unprofessional behavior or even conduct subject to discipline by The Florida Bar, but falls short of harassment under the statutory definition.

The unsuitability of the stalking statutes for complaints about the repeated electronic service of subpoenae, even frivolous subpoenae, by one lawyer on another is apparent and was properly recognized by the trial court. Such conduct, as alleged in the present case and if proven, may be many things, but it is not cyberstalking under section 784.048(1)(d).

Hat tip sunEthics. (Mike Frisch)

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_profession/2018/08/a-florida-as-the-trial-court-cogently-noted-at-the-outset-the-petition-more-nearly-resembles-in-its-overall-impression-a.htmlMonday, August 27, 2018

(Aug. 23, 2018): Alabama Abortion Decision Raises Alarms Ahead of Kavanaugh Hearings, by Andrew Beck:

Last week the Eleventh Circuit struck down an Alabama ban on dilation & evacuation (D&E) abortions, affirming a lower court decision finding the ban unconstitutional. However, the decision underscored the current fragile state of constitutional protection for abortion.

According to Andrew Beck, the Alabama statute

made it a crime for physicians to provide D&E abortions. Had Alabama been permitted to enforce the ban, it would have prevented hundreds of women each year from being able to have an abortion, because D&E is the only outpatient procedure that is available after the earliest weeks of the second trimester. As the trial court that heard the case explained, the state could not justify such a substantial obstacle to the constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy.

Although the Eleventh Circuit panel agreed that the law was unconstitutional, Judge Dubina wrote separately on the record to express his own personal disagreement with Roe v. Wade. Judge Dubina noted that while he is bound to follow Supreme Court precedent as an appellate judge, if he were on the Supreme Court, he would have voted to uphold the statute and overturn Roe v. Wade. Judge Dubina's comments underscore the threat that, following Justice Kennedy's retirement, a newly constituted Supreme Court can overrule Roe v. Wade or water down its protections.

Beck notes that there are "dozens of reproductive rights cases working their way through the federal court system, any one of which could reach the Supreme Court." Given that the next Supreme Court appointment will shift the balance of the Court, he emphasizes that Senators questioning Judge Kavanaugh:

must insist that he disclose not whether he acknowledges that Roe is settled law, but whether he believes that the Constitution protects the fundamental right to obtain an abortion, and how meaningful that protection is. To paraphrase Judge Dubina, Judge Kavanaugh should be asked not whether he acknowledges all of the Supreme Courts precedents, but whether he agrees with them or not.

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/reproductive_rights/2018/08/alabama-abortion-decision-raises-alarms-ahead-of-kavanaugh-hearings.htmlUsername: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average

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Page: 1 2 Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 443824

08-27-2018 03:19 AM











Post: #1 Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

Advertisement









Tensions between the United States and Russia escalated over the weekend after President Trumps national security adviser John Bolton warned the administration would react very strongly in case Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad again uses chemical weapons in the upcoming offensive against Sunni Islamist rebels in the northwestern Idlib Province.



Bolton told reporters in Jerusalem last week the U.S. is very concerned about the possibility that Assad may use chemical weapons again.



Just so theres no confusion here, if the Syrian regime uses chemical weapons we will respond very strongly and they really ought to think about this a long time, Bolton said after his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.



On Friday, Bolton told his Russian counterpart Nikolai Patrushev that the US response to a new chemical attack by the pro-Assad coalition will be stronger this time Bloomberg reported.



Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov subsequently warned the U.S. not to take reckless moves in Syria.





We warn the Americans and their allies against taking new reckless steps in Syria, Ryabkov told the RIA news agency adding that Russia remains committed to the total elimination of terrorist epicenters in Syria and the return of this country to a normal life.





http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/251101 WWIII right around the corner. Iran is not backing down and it has all of Russias support and even China now joining in with Russia. We are living dangerous times. The US obssession with an Iran regime change can bring drastic changes to our world.Tensions between the United States and Russia escalated over the weekend after President Trumps national security adviser John Bolton warned the administration would react very strongly in case Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad again uses chemical weapons in the upcoming offensive against Sunni Islamist rebels in the northwestern Idlib Province.Bolton told reporters in Jerusalem last week the U.S. is very concerned about the possibility that Assad may use chemical weapons again.Just so theres no confusion here, if the Syrian regime uses chemical weapons we will respond very strongly and they really ought to think about this a long time, Bolton said after his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.On Friday, Bolton told his Russian counterpart Nikolai Patrushev that the US response to a new chemical attack by the pro-Assad coalition will be stronger this time Bloomberg reported.Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov subsequently warned the U.S. not to take reckless moves in Syria. GrimShaw

Asinus Asinum Fricat

User ID: 447734

08-27-2018 03:22 AM



Posts: 32,525









Post: #2 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

[ ]ANIMAL ASSAD!!!!! [/size] LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 458959

08-27-2018 03:22 AM











Post: #3 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

I doubt the Washington terrorists will try and pull off that False Flag chemical weapons attack now . LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 443824

08-27-2018 03:22 AM











Post: #4 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria







Russian, Syrian Defense Shields Fully Ready to Confront Western Airstrikes





TEHRAN (FNA)- A prominent Russian defense analyst noted recent efforts jointly made by terrorist groups and the western states to possibly stage a false-flag chemical attack in Idlib as a pretext to invade Syria, and said that the Russian and Syrian defense systems are fully ready to dodge any airstrike.



Defense analyst and editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine Igor Korotchenko was quoted as saying by the Arabic website of Sputnik news agency on Sunday that the terrorists' provocative acts, including their use of chemical weapons in Idlib may lead to a repetition of the April 14 scenario and the West-led coalition attacks against the government in Damascus.



He underscored the Syrian defense shield's preparedness to confront any possible attacks, and said they are able to cover all main cities and towns.



The Russian analyst said that the Russian defense systems stationed in Syria are also able to protect the Humeimim and Tartus airbases and other regions hosting the Russian military men, advisors and experts.



Korotchenko also said that the provocative moves planned with the partnership of terrorists are likely to lead to attacks against the Syrian army as such false-flag operations are one of Washington's tools to attain its foreign policy objectives in the region and undermine deescalation and peace efforts in Syria.



The western coalition, led by the US, launched missile strikes against Syria on April 14 under the pretext of a false-flag chemical attack against Douma in Eastern Ghouta of Damascus.





http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13970604000328 They are going to war.Russian, Syrian Defense Shields Fully Ready to Confront Western AirstrikesTEHRAN (FNA)- A prominent Russian defense analyst noted recent efforts jointly made by terrorist groups and the western states to possibly stage a false-flag chemical attack in Idlib as a pretext to invade Syria, and said that the Russian and Syrian defense systems are fully ready to dodge any airstrike.Defense analyst and editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine Igor Korotchenko was quoted as saying by the Arabic website of Sputnik news agency on Sunday that the terrorists' provocative acts, including their use of chemical weapons in Idlib may lead to a repetition of the April 14 scenario and the West-led coalition attacks against the government in Damascus.He underscored the Syrian defense shield's preparedness to confront any possible attacks, and said they are able to cover all main cities and towns.The Russian analyst said that the Russian defense systems stationed in Syria are also able to protect the Humeimim and Tartus airbases and other regions hosting the Russian military men, advisors and experts.Korotchenko also said that the provocative moves planned with the partnership of terrorists are likely to lead to attacks against the Syrian army as such false-flag operations are one of Washington's tools to attain its foreign policy objectives in the region and undermine deescalation and peace efforts in Syria.The western coalition, led by the US, launched missile strikes against Syria on April 14 under the pretext of a false-flag chemical attack against Douma in Eastern Ghouta of Damascus. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 458959

08-27-2018 03:23 AM











Post: #5 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

GrimShaw Wrote: (08-27-2018 03:22 AM) [ ]LONG LIVE ASSAD!!!!! [/size]

LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 443824

08-27-2018 03:23 AM











Post: #6 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

LoP Guest Wrote: (08-27-2018 03:22 AM) I doubt the Washington terrorists will try and pull off that False Flag chemical weapons attack now .

The Russians are taking them very seriously. The Russians are taking them very seriously. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 138491

08-27-2018 03:26 AM











Post: #7 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

It isn't what it looks like. A diplomatic way has been worked out for the US to leave without it looking like the US and allies are the terrorists. Calm down. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 458840

08-27-2018 03:26 AM











Post: #8 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

neocon scum plan matches on...already threatened to nuke Syria the psychos have LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 110056

08-27-2018 03:28 AM











Post: #9 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

LoP Guest Wrote: (08-27-2018 03:26 AM) neocon scum plan matches on...already threatened to nuke Syria the psychos have

United States of Israel United States of Israel LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 458959

08-27-2018 03:28 AM











Post: #10 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

LoP Guest Wrote: (08-27-2018 03:23 AM) LoP Guest Wrote: (08-27-2018 03:22 AM) I doubt the Washington terrorists will try and pull off that False Flag chemical weapons attack now .

The Russians are taking them very seriously.

I still dont understand why Russia stood aside the last time the US pulled this stunt and let them bomb that factory . I still dont understand why Russia stood aside the last time the US pulled this stunt and let them bomb that factory . LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 443824

08-27-2018 03:29 AM











Post: #11 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

LoP Guest Wrote: (08-27-2018 03:28 AM) LoP Guest Wrote: (08-27-2018 03:23 AM) The Russians are taking them very seriously.

I still dont understand why Russia stood aside the last time the US pulled this stunt and let them bomb that factory .

Maybe the Russians have a new weapon. Maybe the Russians have a new weapon. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 348173

08-27-2018 03:30 AM











Post: #12 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

GrimShaw Wrote: (08-27-2018 03:22 AM) [ ]ANIMAL ASSAD!!!!! [/size]

LoP Guest Wrote: (08-27-2018 03:23 AM) GrimShaw Wrote: (08-27-2018 03:22 AM) [ ]LONG LIVE ASSAD!!!!! [/size]



LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 457328

08-27-2018 03:32 AM











Post: #13 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

It's astounding how stupid some [people can be.



Every time there has been either a diplomatic solution presented or the plan to remove US forces, there is a chemical attack or some other "humanitarian crisis".



Assad might be a lot of thing, but even he is not that stupid.



Even a stupid person would wait till the US was out and then do whatever they wanted.



he would not use chemical weapons just when the US announced they were leaving. How can some of you be that f*cking stupid?



The idea that some of these f*cking retards on here do not get this is actually incredibly funny and profoundly sad at the same time.



Here's a hint for the low IQ crowd. The "rebels" are the ones doing it. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 443824

08-27-2018 03:35 AM











Post: #14 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria





Irans Defense Minister Amir Hatami arrived in Damascus on Sunday, Aug. 26 demanding Russian and Syrian commitments to stand foursquare behind Al Qods under US-Israel assault. This was Irans response to the US-Israeli plan, finalized last week in Jerusalem by visiting US National Security Adviser John Bolton with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, for a joint offensive against the Iranian Al Qods Brigades and Shiite militias in Syria.

Hatami arrived in Syria with draft texts for those guarantees in his pocket. By this step, Irans supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has pushed the four key players in the Syria arena into setting out their positions without delay.





https://www.debka.com/iran-demands-guara...-in-syria/





Russia answers.





Russia Sends Largest Naval Armada Of Syrian War Amidst New Chemical Attack Warnings.





We observed previously after John Bolton's threat late this week of "greater military force" should chemical weapons allegations emerge against Damascus, that a familiar pattern has long been in play on Syria: just when it appears the jihadists are on the brink of final defeat, and as stability is returning after seven years of grinding war, something happens to bring things right back to the brink of global crisis and escalation.



Authored and submitted by Leith Aboufadel via Al Masdar News,



Russia has built up its forces around the Mediterranean Sea in response to reports that the U.S., France, and Great Britain could be preparing to attack Syria after US National Security Advisor John Bolton informed Russia that America is prepared to respond with greater military force than it has used against Assads regime in the past, according to Bloomberg.



According to Yoruk Isik of the Bosphorus Observer, the Russian Navy has sent another armada of ships towards Syrias territorial waters in order to increase the strength of their forces around the country.





https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-2...rovocation Iran demands guaranteed Russian/Syrian backing against US-Israeli offensive in Syria.Irans Defense Minister Amir Hatami arrived in Damascus on Sunday, Aug. 26 demanding Russian and Syrian commitments to stand foursquare behind Al Qods under US-Israel assault. This was Irans response to the US-Israeli plan, finalized last week in Jerusalem by visiting US National Security Adviser John Bolton with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, for a joint offensive against the Iranian Al Qods Brigades and Shiite militias in Syria.Hatami arrived in Syria with draft texts for those guarantees in his pocket. By this step, Irans supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has pushed the four key players in the Syria arena into setting out their positions without delay.Russia answers.Russia Sends Largest Naval Armada Of Syrian War Amidst New Chemical Attack Warnings.We observed previously after John Bolton's threat late this week of "greater military force" should chemical weapons allegations emerge against Damascus, that a familiar pattern has long been in play on Syria: just when it appears the jihadists are on the brink of final defeat, and as stability is returning after seven years of grinding war, something happens to bring things right back to the brink of global crisis and escalation.Authored and submitted by Leith Aboufadel via Al Masdar News,Russia has built up its forces around the Mediterranean Sea in response to reports that the U.S., France, and Great Britain could be preparing to attack Syria after US National Security Advisor John Bolton informed Russia that America is prepared to respond with greater military force than it has used against Assads regime in the past, according to Bloomberg.According to Yoruk Isik of the Bosphorus Observer, the Russian Navy has sent another armada of ships towards Syrias territorial waters in order to increase the strength of their forces around the country. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 443824

08-27-2018 03:36 AM











Post: #15 RE: Dangerous stand-off between Russia and US over Syria

LoP Guest Wrote: (08-27-2018 03:32 AM) It's astounding how stupid some [people can be.



Every time there has been either a diplomatic solution presented or the plan to remove US forces, there is a chemical attack or some other "humanitarian crisis".



Assad might be a lot of thing, but even he is not that stupid.



Even a stupid person would wait till the US was out and then do whatever they wanted.



he would not use chemical weapons just when the US announced they were leaving. How can some of you be that f*cking stupid?



The idea that some of these f*cking retards on here do not get this is actually incredibly funny and profoundly sad at the same time.



Here's a hint for the low IQ crowd. The "rebels" are the ones doing it.



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Username: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 1 Vote(s) - 1 Average

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Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 454886

08-27-2018 08:57 PM











Post: #1 Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it

Advertisement



There will be no place to go for information but military controlled radio broadcasts.



In fact, it will be difficult to go visit someone in the next town let alone call or text them.



Even if a small actor like North Korea were to drop just three 200 kiloton nukes on strictly military targets, it would end forever, the reign of the "liberal media" Not even the much hyped EMP would do as much harm to the liberal house of cards than North Korea destroying the Boeing, Northrop and Lockheed aircraft factories.



No EMP necessary. No city busters necessary. Just the aircraft factories.



And Russia is way more capable than North Korea. All internet commerce and social media will cease. The only platforms libs will be able to avail themselves to virtue signal from will be a street corner. Perhaps.There will be no place to go for information but military controlled radio broadcasts.In fact, it will be difficult to go visit someone in the next town let alone call or text them.Even if a small actor like North Korea were to drop just three 200 kiloton nukes on strictly military targets, it would end forever, the reign of the "liberal media" Not even the much hyped EMP would do as much harm to the liberal house of cards than North Korea destroying the Boeing, Northrop and Lockheed aircraft factories.No EMP necessary. No city busters necessary. Just the aircraft factories.And Russia is way more capable than North Korea. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 458449

08-27-2018 09:20 PM











Post: #2 RE: Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it

5 rubles LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 449191

08-27-2018 09:32 PM











Post: #3 RE: Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it

We are already at war with Russia. The Microwave Cell Towers are weapons. Wake the f*#k up. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 454886

08-27-2018 09:33 PM











Post: #4 RE: Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it

Single source monopolies always lose the big wars.



It's not just the US that relies on its big three warplane companies. The US makes its allies dependent on what is basically single source supply. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 456709

08-27-2018 09:36 PM











Post: #5 RE: Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it

By whatever means necessary...we will put down the communist uprising in this country.



The death toll....incalculable at this time because most will crawl back under the rocks when the fighting starts...



but as that movie title says...."there will be blood"...and they will still lose.



They do not have the fortitude to stand for the long fight.



They do not actually believe what they are fighting for is worth dying for.



true patriots and people that love freedom will fight,they will die. Just like untold others across our history. Why? Because yes. Liberty is that important.



If you do not believe in you cause enough to fight and die for it...then you do not believe in it.



I will die for liberty for my children. If you are not willing to die to take it away from them...then I have already won. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 458449

08-27-2018 09:37 PM











Post: #6 RE: Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it

There a huge difference between calling for a war with Russia* and being disgusted by the Agent Orange publicly bending over in front of his puppet master, Putin





* Actually, I don't know any Liberal who's doing that. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 454886

08-27-2018 09:44 PM











Post: #7 RE: Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it

LoP Guest Wrote: (08-27-2018 09:37 PM) There a huge difference between calling for a war with Russia* and being disgusted by the Agent Orange publicly bending over in front of his puppet master, Putin





* Actually, I don't know any Liberal who's doing that.

They are. CNN is constantly. Fox news military analyst quit because they wont. They are. CNN is constantly. Fox news military analyst quit because they wont. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 443824

08-27-2018 09:51 PM











Post: #8 RE: Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it

Any war with Russia will be completely lost hence the reason the US hasnt invaded Syria yet and changed the Iranian regime. Russia is the number one weapon production in the world and I am quite sure it has new weapons.



Napoleon lost to Russia.

Hitler lost to Russia.

The US and allies will lose to Russia. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 449191

08-27-2018 09:54 PM











Post: #9 RE: Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it

LoP Guest Wrote: (08-27-2018 09:51 PM) Any war with Russia will be completely lost hence the reason the US hasnt invaded Syria yet and changed the Iranian regime. Russia is the number one weapon production in the world and I am quite sure it has new weapons.



Napoleon lost to Russia.

Hitler lost to Russia.

The US and allies will lose to Russia.

The Microwave cell phone towers are weapons. They were built right on top of us and can be used at any instant. Nobody even realizes. That's the weapon. Making everyone stupid. The Microwave cell phone towers are weapons. They were built right on top of us and can be used at any instant. Nobody even realizes. That's the weapon. Making everyone stupid. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 456709

08-27-2018 09:54 PM











Post: #10 RE: Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it

LoP Guest Wrote: (08-27-2018 09:51 PM) Any war with Russia will be completely lost hence the reason the US hasnt invaded Syria yet and changed the Iranian regime. Russia is the number one weapon production in the world and I am quite sure it has new weapons.



Napoleon lost to Russia.

Hitler lost to Russia.

The US and allies will lose to Russia.

Edgar Cayce predicted Russia would save the woeld one day.



maybe they already have...when the Cuban misslil crisis was hot, a submarine commander was going to launch nukes but didn't....was that it....



or...



are they going to expose and defeat the most corrupt regime on the planet right now.....hint...it's not in Bulgaria or some other small country Edgar Cayce predicted Russia would save the woeld one day.maybe they already have...when the Cuban misslil crisis was hot, a submarine commander was going to launch nukes but didn't....was that it....or...are they going to expose and defeat the most corrupt regime on the planet right now.....hint...it's not in Bulgaria or some other small country LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 438276

08-27-2018 10:09 PM











Post: #11 RE: Any war with Russia will basically end the liberal platforms calling for it

wailing and gnashing of teeth in the liberal house

sounds about right















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Gov. Edgar Chatto said Sunday he received last week a letter, dated Aug. 13, from Policy and Special Concerns assistant secretary and FOI-PMO director Kristian Ablan, commending the Province of Bohol for pioneering the FOI ordinance in the Visayas. On behalf of the National FOI Program, let me congratulate the Province of Bohol on its achievement as the pioneer province in the Visayas to have an FOI Ordinance, Ablan said in his letter. Ablan added that the FOI-PMO thanks Bohol for the efforts and dedication in localizing the FOI. This milestone is a step forward towards the FOI programs vision for a more transparent nation. For this, the FOI-PMO assures the provincial government of Bohol of its commitment in providing constant guidance on this venture. We are of service in providing assistance in the implementation of the FOI program. If you have concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the FOI-PMO, Ablan said. 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Abapo explained that Dutertes EO on FOI merely encourages local government units to observe and be guided accordingly.When he proposed the provincial ordinance, Abapo said recognizing the importance of the peoples right to government information, and guided by the Presidents Executive Order, the provincial government deems it necessary to provide a local mechanism for its offices where the peoples right to information is respected and upheld. The ordinance, which covers all government offices under the provincial government, is, however, subject to exceptions provided by law and jurisprudence. Section 4 of the ordinance, which is on Access to Information, provides that every Filipino shall have access to information, official records, public records and to documents and papers pertaining to official acts, transactions or decisions, as well as government research data used as basis for police development, in the custody of the provincial government of Bohol or any of its offices, subject to pertinent laws, ordinances, rules and regulations. Section 5 provides for the exceptions, stating that Freedom of Information (FOI) shall be denied when the information falls under any of the exceptions enshrined in the Constitution, existing law, or jurisprudence. It also states that in line with this, the provincial legal officer is directed to prepare a local inventory of FOI exceptions and submit the same to the Governor, who shall, in turn, endorse the same to the Sangguniang Panlalawigan within 30 calendar days from the date of effectivity for its approval. The SP secretary shall then cause the publication of the local inventory of FOI exceptions for the guidance of all government offices covered by this ordinance. The local inventory of FOI exceptions shall be periodically updated by the Provincial Legal Officer and the SP. The ordinance also provides for the availability of Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net worth (SALN), reminding all public officials of the Provincial Government of Bohol of their obligation to file and make available for scrutiny their SALN in accordance with existing laws, rules and regulations, and spirit and letter of this ordinance. Section 7 provides that no request for information shall be denied unless it clearly falls under any of the exceptions in the inventory of FOI exceptions.Dr. Daniel Chan, senior consultant medical oncologist at the Icon SOC Mount Elizabeth Medical Centre in Singapore.

A new way of cancer treatment that harnesses and augments the abilities of the bodys own immune system has been found effective in improving survival rates and quality of life of lung cancer patients. Malaysians switched, saved, and visited Philippines

posted August 27, 2018 at 06:50 pm by Manila Standard Lifestyle August 27, 2018 at 06:50 pm

Watsons Malaysia customers who made the switch and won a trip to the Philippines. Malaysian model and Miss World Malaysia 2009 Thanuja Ananthan joins the Switch.Save.Win winners. Customers take the Switch Test challenge. Following the success of Watsons Switch and Save campaign in the Philippines launched in 2012, the health and beauty retailer adapted it in Malaysia.The campaign aims to educate shoppers not to compromise quality and savings when it comes to personal care and healthcare essentials. Watsons Malaysia partnered with Philippine Department of Tourism and Cebu Pacific to launch the Switch.Save.Win contest which attracted 70,000 entries nationwide. The contest was exclusive to Watsons Card VIP members only.A minimum spend of 30 Malaysian ringgit on Watsons Brand items qualified shoppers to play at the Watsons Malaysia event held in May. In July, 80 Watsons Malaysia shoppers who won the Switch.Save.Win grand prize were treated to a holiday for two that included flights, accommodation, and tours for a four-day/three-night stay in the Philippines.

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.No to nuclear weapons in South China Sea. Department of National Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said on Chinas plan to deploy nuclear weapons in South China Sea, also known as the West Philippine Sea, a dispute territory among China, Philippines and at least three other Southeast Asian countries. Well we definitely object to that, mag-object tayo diyan dahil hindi dapat sila magdala ng nuclear weapons diyan sa disputed area. For what? Wala naman tayong kuwan sa kanila, wala naman tayong masamang balak sa kanila, wala naman tayong balak na atakihin yung mga reclaimed areas nila. The Defense chief territorial disputes over the South China Sea should be discussed in a civil way through the Department of Foreign Affairs and its Chinese counterparts. Kaya nga pinag-uusapan natin, we are talking about our disputes in a civil matter and there is no need for them to militarize to that level, na magdadala sila ng nuclear armed aircraft or any other weaponry there that are nuclear-tipped, Lorenzana said. In its annual report to the US Congress, the United States Department of Defense noted that Beijing had indicated that development plans may be underway to power islands and reefs with floating nuclear power stations, which reportedly will start before 2020. The US added that Chinas nuclear weapons policy prioritizes the maintenance of a nuclear force able to survive a first strike and to respond with sufficient strength to inflict unacceptable damage on an enemy. Malacanang had earlier expressed concern over the possible deployment of nuclear weapons in the contested region. Were concerned about the entry of any and all nuclear weapons into the Philippine territory because our Constitution provides that we are nuclear free zone, Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said, noting that Southeast Asian nations had a nuclear weapons moratorium treaty that was inked in 1995. But China Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang had rejected the US report, saying that China continues to be committed to a peaceful development path and follows a national defense policy that is defensive in nature. In 2016, the Philippines won its arbitration case against Chinas nine-dash line claim over the South China Sea but China has refused to recognize the ruling. Meanwhile, Lorenzana said that the Philippine Navy (PN) should have been always the strongest service in the military. In his speech welcoming the arrival of PN contingent in the recent Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises in Hawaii at Pier 13, in South Harbor in Manila, Lorenzana said he was basing his statement on the theories expounded by American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan on his book, The Influence of Seapower Upon History, 1660-1783.The defense chief said he learned these concepts when he was still a cadet at the Philippine Military Academy. One of the lessons espoused by Mahan is that national greatness was associated with the sea, with its commercial use in peace and its control during wartime. I have always believed that the Philippines being an island nation should have a good Navy, a credible Navy, in fact looking back through our history, since we became independent, the strongest armed services in the Armed Forces (should) be the Philippine Navy because our country is an island nation, he added. Only neglect and the militarys heavy involvement in counter-insurgency campaigns and other land security problems have prevented the PN from gaining its proper niche. Lorenzana said that it is only in the past few years that proper attention has been given to the upgrading of the Navy as attested by its first ever deployment of ships, personnel and even a naval helicopter in the biennial RIMPAC exercises. Let me congratulate our sailors and marines for their successful participation in this years RIMPAC 2018 in Honolulu, Hawaii. This is truly an important milesstone not only for our Navy but also for our entire defense department, this is the first time that we sent a naval contingent to join other Navies, the DND chief added. The PN deployed the strategic sealift vessel BRP Davao Del Sur (LD-602) and frigate BRP Andres Bonifacio (FF-17), an AgustaWestland naval helicopter and around 700 sailors and marines for the exercises which started June 27 and ended on Aug. 2. Lorenzana also expressed hope that the PN will be invited again for the next RIMPAC as the latter is a good exposure and training for the naval personnel. We were talking a while ago and since this is a very good exposure for our defense people, not only the Navy and marines, but maybe we could also send some Army Special Forces (troop) to participate and also some of our Air Force Special Operations Wing (personnel), and maybe next time around we can also send more ships, maybe three ships altogether, he added. The DND chief also emphasized that the PNs participation in RIMPAC signifies a new era in its maritime operational engagement, cooperation and interoperability with other Navies allowing it to tackle areas of areas of common concern. Indeed as we face growing maritime security challenges around the world, there is a need for Navies to work together to increase familiarity and exchange best practices, we also have this trilateral exercises, naval patrols with Indonesia and Malaysia, not only maritime patrol but also aerial patrol, so maybe we could also go into naval exercises with them in the future, something that we should discuss with my counterpart(s), he added. By participating in joint multi-lateral maritime exercises our sailors and marines are exposed to new ideas and ways of handling things which can be used to enhance our own systems and doctrines, its also a good chance for our personnel to experience planning and execution of combined naval operations as well as establish the Navys capacity for prolonged operations overseas, our way forward is therefore clear, Lorenzana said. In line with this, the DND chief said efforts will continue in acquiring more assets for the PN to make it stronger and credible and something that the Philippines, as a maritime nation, can be proud of.FIND AND FINE THEM. Metro Manila transport authorities are studying the possibility of imposing a hefty P10,000 penalty against each bus swerving out of the yellow lanea move aimed at improving the flow of traffic along the already heavily congested Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, the main highway in Metro Manila that cuts through the capital of 16 million population. Manny Palmero

The Metro Manila Development Authority is considering imposing a P10,000 penalty on buses that leave the yellow lane in a bid to improve the flow of traffic along Edsa.Members of the Metro Manila Council, the MMDAs policy-making body, made this announcement during a recent meeting in Mandaluyong City where they also discussed the fate of the controversial Expanded High Occupancy Vehicle Traffic scheme that prohibits drivers without companions along Edsa during rush hours from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., from Monday to Friday. The MMC is composed of 17 mayors and local government executives in the National Capital Region. There were proposals that were raised by the mayors We will be studying this matter, said Quezon City Mayor Herbert Bautista, who chairs the Councils special committee on traffic. At present, the MMDA penalizes yellow lane violators with P500 fine. Under the Yellow lane policy, buses are prohibited to go outside the two lanes designated for them while private vehicles may enter the yellow lane only 100 meters before they exit. MMDA general manager Jose Arturo Garcia Jr. expressed optimism that the new policy would smoothen traffic along Edsa. The MMC also approved an increase in fines for illegal parking in Metro Manila, from P200 to P1,000 for attended illegally parked cars, and from P300 to P2,000 plus a towing fee for unattended illegally parked vehicles.We really need to increase these penalties because our motorists can no longer traverse through alternate routes as these are being obstructed by illegally parked vehicles, said Garcia. We really need to do something and were encouraging the people to go for carpooling, he added. In the Senate, Senator Grace Poe said the long-delayed release of subsidies for the modernization of the transport sector will be under scrutiny when the Senate discusses the budget of the Department of Transportation. Poe, the chairman of the Senate public services committee, said the financial assistance of P80,000 given to jeepney drivers to be affected by the modernization program to be insufficient. Poe said she was not against modernization, but wants to know how the program is being implemented. She said 600,000 drivers would be affected by the modernization. If they canceled their route, what will be the substitute? And how can they buy a jeepney which costs P1.2 million to P1.8 million if they will be given P80,000 for the down payment? Poe said.The chairman of the House committee on agriculture on Monday called for a congressional inquiry into the rising prices for rice as the National Food Authority came under heavy fire for its failure to ensure food security. Panel chairman and ANAC IP Party-list Rep. Jose Panganiban said he would invite the concerned government agencies to shed light on why rice prices remained high, and how the government, through the NFA, had imported grain stock from Thailand and Vietnam that was infested with weevils. We have already sent a letter to NFA asking them to shed light on these issues, Panganiban said at a news conference. Panganiban said the NFA does not seem to have fulfilled its mandate to ensure food security and stable prices for the nations staple food. He added that the NFA declaration that tons of weevil-infested rice brought into Subic was safe for distribution after being fumigated. It is not [acceptable]. That was an irresponsible statement, Panganiban said. Davao City Rep. Karlo Nograles, chairman of the House committee on appropriations, also urged the NFA to act on the problems plaguing the rice industry. The NFA administrator is right; we legislators should go out in the field and really look into the problems in the rice industry. The short recess of Congress provided an opportunity to go to our markets and learn firsthand about the prices and supplies of riceand what I discovered is very worrisome, Nograles said. On Friday, NFA Administrator Jason Aquino challenged legislators and concerned parties to go around the country to learn more about the issues involving rice, saying that the NFA is open for scrutiny anytime. Those who want to verify what we had been doing, can check our records, go around the country and ask the people, he said. Nograles said he discovered that there is a large spike in rice prices in Cagayan de Oro because the NFA had slashed the supply of NFA rice in Region 10 and diverted it to Region 9 to address the rice crisis in the Zamboanga Peninsula. As a result, Nograles said, the residents of Cagayan de Oro have no choice but to buy commercial rice. The absence of cheaper alternatives in the form of NFA rice has allowed commercial rice suppliers to dictate rice prices in the market. Meanwhile, Panganiban assured farmers that the proposed Revised Agricultural Tariffication Act that he principally sponsored will not hurt them even as it seeks the entry of cheaper rice by replacing the quantitative import restrictions on rice with tariffs. Panganiban said the government is targeting to raise P20 billion to provide subsidies for the farmers. Senator Francis Escudero on Monday said he would not join some of his colleagues in calling for the abolition of the NFA or the resignation of its administrator. Escudero said the NFA is capable of doing things that cannot be done by private sector traders. He also said he wants to hear what Aquino has to say about the problems that beset the rice industry. I have heard so many things against him, so I want to hear him, he said.If there is a liability, all those accountable should be made fo answer for the rice crisis, he said. He said he hopes Senator Cynthia A. Villar, chairman of the Senate agriculture and food committee, will call another hearing to determine what the NFA and the Department of Agriculture have been doing to address the problems. The Commission on Audit, meanwhile, has flagged the National Food Authority for allowing private rice traders to exceed their maximum weekly allocations for Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur and Cavite in 2017. Non-compliance with the allocations was noted in Cavite provincial office, NFA Region 1 provincial offices in Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur, and areas served by the NFA North District Office, the COA said. The maximum weekly rice allocation to retailers was not properly observed in NDO, CPO and two POs in RO No. 1, resulting in inequitable rice distribution, thereby defeating the intention of the allocation system and giving undue advantage to selected retailers which could lead to diversion of stocks, the report read. Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Pinol, meanwhile, dismissed the calls to abolish the NFA. In a dzMM radio interview, Pinol said the NFA abolition would not solve the rice shortage in Zamboanga City. Yes, we need NFA, he said. NFA is a state agency recognized by the World Trade Organization. That is our advantage. Let us not just say hasty words, he added. Senator Sherwin Gatchalian called for the abolition of NFA for the rice shortage and the rising prices of rice in Mindanao, while former Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III said he would support such a call. That is not the answer. Let us refrain from knee-jerk reaction. Let us look at this problem from an institutional standpoint. Let us not [make a] hasty decision such as that, Pinol said. NFA discovered 330,000 bags of weevil-infested imported rice at the ports of Subic Bay Freeport and Tabaco, Albay. But Pinol said the presence of rice weevils was commonplace. You know, we children of farmers know that. Actually, it is just ordinary, natural just as there are black ants, he added. I agree with Dr. Frisco Malabanan that it is safe to eat. In fact, in our province, we just put the [weevil-infested] rice under the sun. It is just normal to see [weevils] in palay and rice [grains], he said. But Pinol said someone must be held accountable for the delays in the delivery of the rice to the market, and why it so easily deteriorated.The Iranian parliament Sunday impeached the countrys economic affairs and finance minister as U.S. renewed sanctions on the Islamic Republic take toll on the economy and national currency, Rial.

The vote in the parliament removed Masoud Karbasian from office after 137 votes backed his removal while 121 opposed it, reports say.

The sacking takes place amid the deterioration of the countrys economy and alarming unemployment coupled with sharp fall of the Rial, which has lost half of its value since April.

Sanctions were re-imposed on Iran early this month after President Donald Trump withdrew his country from the multinational nuclear accord signed in 2015. Trump has claimed the Obama era deal, which provides for the gradual removal of economic sanctions and Tehrans commitment to curb its nuclear enrichment program, was full of flaws.

The Trump administration is also set to enact by November 4 a series of new sanctions that will target Irans oil industry.

Masoud Karbasian is the second minister to be removed from President Hassan Rouhanis cabinet after the sacking by the parliament of labor minister, early this month.

Last month, Rouhani laid off the head of the central bank in a set of measures to cope with domestic pressure.

Foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Sunday the U.S. is waging a psychological war against Iran and its business partners, Tasnim news agency reported.

President Trump has warned that entities or countries doing business with Iran cannot do business with America. The warnings and the new sanctions have left many companies in the limbo. A majority of western companies, which have resumed business with Iran in the wake of the 2015 deal, have begun freezing projects or pulling out.

British Airways and Air France last week said they were wrapping up by mid-September flights to and from Tehran, citing profit reasons.The Kuwaiti Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has warned that sanctions may befall private carrier Wataniya Airways by September 6 if the airline does not improve its services after customers repeatedly complained about flights delays and cancellations.

The DGCA threatened to revoke the airlines license if the company fails to address complaints.

The warnings came Sunday after lawmakers and the Kuwaiti Crown Prince Sheik Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah sounded the alarm when the airline passengers were stranded Saturday in Istanbul, Baku, and Sarajevo over lack of aircrafts, Gulf Business reports.

The Crown Prince on Saturday evening instructed the government to fly back home citizens affected by Wataniya flights cancellations. The lawmakers on Sunday requested explanation for the cancellations and demanded compensation for affected passengers, according to the media.

The airline argued that it was short of aircrafts in view of a larger summer rush for flights than expected. It however reassured the DGCA that it will amend the situation.

Wataniya Airways returned to business in July 2017 following a six-year hiatus. The firm currently operates four A320 family aircraft on routes that cross the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe.

In July, it signed, via its exclusive aircraft provider Golden Falcon Aviation, an order of 25 Airbus A320neo jets worth around $2.8bn at list prices.Iranian-British aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe sentenced to five-years in prison has returned to prison after a brief release for family reunion, reports say.

Nazanin Zaghari is currently serving a five-year sentence for plotting to topple the regime in Tehran. The lady and Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charity arm of London-based news network Reuters she works for, have denied the charges.

A project manager at the foundation, she was arrested in April 2016 at Tehran airport on her way back to Britain after a visit to her family in Iran.

Zaghari, mother of a four-year old daughter, was briefly released from Evin prison in Tehran, for three days to reunite with her family last week.

Her husband Richard Ratcliffe, who lives in Britain, in a statement relayed by the media, said she returned to prison in Tehran to continue serving her sentence despite hopes her release would be extended.

She was shivering and shaking and crying  and said: How can you take me away from my baby, when she needs me? he said in an email received by AFP.

The Iranian-British aid workers request for an extension of her release appeared to have first been granted, but later, she received a call from the prosecutor telling her to avail herself to authorities at the detention center by sunset, London-based The New Arab reports.

Britains Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt wrote on Twitter that attempts to free Zaghari-Ratcliffe would continue, Reuters reports.

Looks like Iranian legal system is impervious to the simple fact at the heart of this: an innocent woman is desperate to be reunited with her family, Hunt said.

Spoke to Foreign Minister (Mohammad Javad) Zarif on Fri but that clearly wasnt enough. The fight goes on.Angolas President Joao Lourenco over the weekend said he is confident that Germany will supply Angola with warships, despite the controversy the deal sparked in the past.

Lourenco, who succeeded Jose Eduardo dos Santos 11 months ago, was speaking at the end of a two-day visit to Berlin at the invitation of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

During his visit, the former defense minister met with Merkel and representatives of German companies doing business in Angola.

Angela Merkel reportedly said that Germany is open to discussing defense matters despite the controversy over supplying naval vessels to Angola.

In 2011, Merkels ruling coalition came under fire from the opposition over plans to supply German-built naval vessels to Angola. The deal was scrapped.

In 2014, as defense minister, Lourenco signed a new cooperation deal in Berlin and said Angola needed more warships.

The two countries have set up a bilateral commission that meets every two years. The commission organized economic forums and defined a cooperation partnership strategy.

Currently, Angola is Germanys third most important partner in sub-Saharan Africa, with a business volume worth about 800 million. Thirty German companies have a representation in Angola. The Central African nation imports mainly cars, machines and technology. Germany buys Angolan oil and gas.

Angolas defense spending accounts for 21 percent of its entire budget for this year. It will spend 11.3 percent on education and 7.4 percent on health.Yes, you can transfer your domain to any registrar or hosting company once you have purchased it. Since domain transfers are a manual process, it can take up to 5 days to transfer the domain.

Domains purchased with payment plans are not eligible to transfer until all payments have been made. Please remember that our 30-day money back guarantee is void once a domain has been transferred.

For transfer instructions to GoDaddy, please click here.The new reformist Prime Minister of Ethiopia Ahmed Abiy has secured a $1 billion deal from the World Bank to continue the ongoing reforms in the Horn of Africa nation.

The deal with the global financial institution had been reached because of the reforms taking place in the country, Abiy told the press in Addis Ababa over the weekend. It was his first press interaction since coming into office.

The 41-year-old ex-soldier, who took office in April, has announced a series of economic and political changes. Since taking power, Abiy has ordered the release of thousands of prisoners and opened state-owned companies to private investment.

The World Bank and other donors suspended budgetary support to Ethiopia after a disputed and violent election in 2005.

Last month, during his diaspora tour, Abiy met with the World Bank and IMF bosses in Washington, DC, to discuss ways of improving relations.

The economy of Ethiopia is forecast to be the fastest growing economy in Sub-Saharan Africa this year at 8.5%, according to the IMF.

The country is currently carrying out a number of large-scale infrastructure projects, including the Grand Renaissance Dam and a railway network.

Much of the investment in the country has come from overseas.

According to the IMF, foreign direct investment growth was up by 27.6% in 2016/17.Rebel violence in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is escalating inside the vast countrys Ebola-hit North Kivu province, putting millions at risk, the United Nations refugee agency warned on Friday.

Thousands of civilians have fled their burned-out villages, bringing reports of brutal attacks, Andrej Mahecic, spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told the regular press briefing in Geneva Friday, following reports that a case of Ebola infection and one suspected case have been found in one town in the area, Oicha, which is surrounded by armed groups.

The disease has killed more than 60 people and infected dozens more in recent weeks

Forced displacement in this part of the country remains massive. It is estimated that more than a million people are displaced in North Kivu. This is the highest concentration of internally displaced people (IDPs) in the DRC. An estimated half a million people have been forced from their homes this year alone.

At the same briefing, Dr. Peter Salama, WHO Deputy Director-General of Emergency Preparedness and Response, said that the discovery of Ebola infection in the hard-to-reach part of eastern DRC could mark a pivotal point in the response to the deadly disease.

It really was the problem we were anticipating and the problem  we were dreading. Our teams have responded this week. Theyve had to reach Oicha with armed escorts Once they reach Oicha, they are able to move within Oicha town more freely, because the town itself is a yellow zone from a security perspective, he explained.

Andrej Mahecic said UNHCR is particularly worried about the deteriorating situation in the Ebola-hit northern territory of Ben, where Oicha town is located. The area is home to some 1.3 million people. Spiraling conflict has left the population living there virtually in a state of siege since October 2017. Reports of increased human rights violations and restrictions of humanitarian access are frequent.

Estimates are that more than 100 armed groups are active in the province, continually terrorizing the population. Despite a large-scale military offensive of the Congolese Army against one of the main rebel groups, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) since January, there has been no let-up in the violence.

Despite security challenges, a UNHCR team accessed the area north of Beni earlier this month and conducted humanitarian assessments in Oicha and Eringeti districts, he said, adding: Residents told our staff about brutal attacks against the civilians carried out with machetes. Stories of massacres, extortion, forced displacement and other human rights violations are frequent.

Further, sexual and gender-based violence is rampant across the Beni territory. Many children are being recruited as child soldiers. The violence is particularly rampant in the so-called triangle of death, between the towns of Eringeti, Mbau and Kamango, on the Uganda-DRC border, as well as in the towns of Beni, Oicha and Mavivi.

UNHCR is scaling up its capacity in North Kivu to respond to the growing humanitarian needs.

We are arranging additional emergency shelters and other humanitarian assistance to meet the needs of the displaced in Beni. While UNHCRs humanitarian response is continuing despite the outbreak of Ebola, the prevailing security situation and drastic funding shortfall severely hamper our efforts. UNHCRs DRC 2018 appeal totaling $201 million is only 17 per cent funded, explained Andrej Mahecic.Local Cement Producers Postpone Protest Rally after PMs Letter

By Tea Mariamidze

Local cement producers, who have been speaking about the problems in the field, have decided to postpone their planned August 22 rally for a week, after they got a letter from the prime minister, asking for a week to study the issue.The Georgian cement producers addressed the PM on August 21, saying the situation on the market has become uncontrollable and extremely tense.The companies say they use imported material - clinker for producing the cement, which has been stopped by the customs service for an unlimited period.Due to the absence of the material, most of the factories have suspended their work. 2-3 factories have very little supply, after which they will also stop operating. This means that around 700 people, employed in our factories will lose jobs, the statement of the cement producers reads.They say the procedure of clinker check takes at least 28 days, which is a long time and results into additional taxes and sanctions for the local entrepreneurs, who import the material.Local producers of cement think that company Heidelbergcement, which has its material, wants the government to prohibit the import of raw materials, and that way stay on the market as an only local producer. The solution that local producers of cement see is to increase taxes on imported cement.Heidelbergcement cannot produce high-quality clinker, and usually it is so expensive that it makes no sense to buy it and produce cement Giant HeidelbergCement controls over 80% of the market. It is a monopolist and should be subject to monopoly regulations, the small factories say.The producers say the market needs timely and clear solutions and regulations, which will be applied to every factory, regardless of its size or market share.The statement also sets ways of solving the current problems in the cement production field:- Clinker clearance must be made from invoice directly. This will result in a reduced cost of the final product.- Due to inspection of quality, the import of raw materials should not be impeded- Quality control should be tightened and carried out on cement itself and this should be done against all manufacturers or importers- Tax on imported cement should be increasedThis way we will protect the market and maintain local production, the cement producers said.@newsbysmiley @alextdaugherty @martinvassolo

At one of Miamis best-known black churches, Pastor Arthur Jackson III delivered a message before the Sunday sermon.

This is a critical election, he said, speaking from the pulpit as the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church flock fluttered fans bearing the likeness of Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum. We have to make it happen.

The people nodded, and repeated his words. And Gillums gubernatorial campaign hoped that it was good.

If the only African American candidate in Floridas Democratic primary for governor is going to make history, hell need the help of the states black community to get through Tuesdays primary election. Significantly out-spent by his four opponents, Gillums ability to connect with a staunchly Democratic and somewhat disenfranchised voting population remains one of his biggest advantages.

And if his campaigns talk of a last-minute surge from the middle of the pack is to become more than just hype, then Sunday was a likely tipping point for Gillum. The final day of early voting  known as Souls to the Polls due to the tradition of faith-based politicking in the black community  had the potential to make or break his upset bid, as black pastors around the state urged their parishioners to cast their ballots.

Were right where we want to be, said Gillum spokesman Geoff Burgan, pegging the African American electorate at just shy of a quarter of the 700,000 votes cast so far by Democrats heading into Sunday morning..

Gillum, who is running for the Democratic nomination against Gwen Graham, Jeff Greene, Chris King and Philip Levine, has made clear that his campaign is not tailored exclusively to black voters. His message as the only non-millionaire in the race is more appropriately described as a call to the lower and middle class.

But while most of the field spent the weekend in north and Central Florida, Gillum, 39, bounced around South Floridas historically black neighborhoods, traveling from Deerfield Beach to Richmond Heights, where he grew up as a child. He attended Jacksons church Sunday morning, and was given time to make a direct plea to parishioners.

We can create more of that opportunity for all people. But we cant do it, yall, unless we vote. We cant do it unless we get out there and let our voices be heard. We cant do it unless we put some respect back on our vote and on our community by showing up and voting like our lives depend on it, he said. When we win, all of us are going to Tallahassee.

Read more here.Someone in St. Petersburg who lacks the brain cells to spray paint a swastika has defaced campaign signs for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Philip Levine.

On Monday, Peter Schorsch, publisher of FloridaPolitics.com, tweeted out an image of a Levine yard sign that had been tagged by "some horrible person." The spray-painted symbols were bungled, but were clearly supposed to resemble a swastika.

Levine is Jewish.

His campaign said the vandalized signs were located at Southeast corner of 66th St N and Tyrone Blvd, outside of Bond Diamonds. They issue the following statement:

As Governor, I will never be held hostage to hatred, or bigotry, or intolerance. Never. All candidates should speak out against this intolerable behavior. We are better than the haters, bigger than the bigots, and tomorrow we will show them why.Lelectricite est devenue, de nos jours, un besoin dune importance majeure, et cela, dans tous les domaines dactivite. Que ce soit dans les maisons ou []The Konstantaras family, comprising of thespians Lizz Njagah Konstantaras and Alex Konstantaras, is months away from welcoming its newest member.

The celebrated film and television couple is expecting their second child. The Award-winning Kenyan actress broke the news on social media over the weekend.

She wrote: Baby 2K on the way. #BabyNo2 Alex, George and I are so stoked Thanking God for this awesome opportunity to add another little one to our family.. we love you Baby 2K..

The House of Lungula actress also shared a clip showing off her baby bump and a picture of her firstborn son, George, breaking the news.



The Konstantaras relocated to Greece in July 2016 following the birth of their first child in February 2016.

The move was triggered by my parents who have become very attached to my son, and we felt it was better to go and stay with them for a while so that they can enjoy their grandchild, said Alex in a past interview.

Lizz added: We are doing great, our son is enjoying spending time with his grandparents. They spoil him a lot.

Their new bundle of joy is expected in December this year.Nominated Senator Millicent Omanga has written to the Parliamentary Service Commission seeking permission to fly Business Class, claiming she cannot fit in the standard aircraft seats in the Economy Section, the Sunday Standard reports.

According to reports, the matter was discussed at the PSC meeting on July 14 and subsequently rejected.

Insiders argued that accepting the frivolous request would have opened an avenue for all MPs to demand preferential treatment on non-issues.

It is true the Senator wrote a letter which the commission rejected on the grounds that we cannot give everyone who is well-endowed special treatment. This will give other MPs with different challenges to put demands on us, an unnamed senior official at the commission was quoted as saying.

Senate Clerk Jeremiah Nyegenye could not confirm or deny the matter: It would not be in order to discuss details between the commission and the members with a third party or give documents.

Officials reportedly indicated that they were taken aback with the unusual request but admitted that the senator was within her rights to make the request.

Omanga has, however, denied writing the letter stating she was not aware of anything pertaining to it.

I am not aware of what you are talking about, she said.

She further took to social media to blast the Standard newspaper for poor journalistic practices where readers are inundated with sensationalized stories.

Also Read: I Love My Curves Even If You Call Me A Hippo.. Senator Millicent Omanga Tells Fat-Shamers

Naturally, the report has attracted furious reactions from Kenyans on social media, with some blasting Millicent Omanga as a drama queen.

Nominated (a seat given for free) senator Millicent Omanga, complains economy seat too small for her. Business class is mostly legroom but her arrogance is too much. Also, she can use her own money-Sh1.2 million salary, two economy class seats and spread her entitlement there. pic.twitter.com/N8ueMA61YB  Boniface Mwangi (@bonifacemwangi) August 26, 2018

this crap happens when we accept mediocrity reward politician who didnt impress electorate in the first place well,we have more pressing issuesshe should be writing Letters to PSC on scrapping yet to be implemented 16% Fuel levy etcissues that touches WanjikuSMH..  Mandela Devis (@mandeladev) August 26, 2018

Another reminder to us @kot that majority of our politicians are driven by self interests. Hizi nominated seats and women rep seats need to be scrapped!  kimberly Kimani (@kimberlyKimani1) August 26, 2018

Bus za Keroka, Homabay, Migori na Nyanza at large utoshea wanawake wa maana, wazuri na wakubwa zaidi ya @MillicentOmanga hawache ujinga. And the ?s are 3*2. Hiyo rasa yake ni ndogo sana sana.  Don Muindi Kawinzi (@DonKawinzi) August 26, 2018

Drama queens expect everything to be tailored to their tastes and sets standards based on their opinions. They dont hesitate to tell others in totally inappropriate ways that they dont just measure up .  Vicki Clinebell  kipkoech mitei Rober (@MiteiRober) August 26, 2018Medieval books secret code remains unbroken

The oldest book in the University of Florida Libraries was one of the first in the fledgling universitys collection 100 years ago, but it was already ancient then.

The leather-bound New Testament was handwritten in Latin around 1250. Thats deep in the Middle Ages, before Marco Polo traveled to China, before we knew the Earth traveled around the sun. When the book was written, the Inca and Mali Empires thrived. The Crusades raged. Istanbul was Constantinople.

Written in black and brown ink on sheepskin parchment, the book is presumed to have passed through three Italian libraries in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then traveled to Scotland, finding a home in Edinburghs Signet Library.

Somewhere during its journey through medieval Europe, several people wrote notes in the margins of the book. The notes in brown ink are mostly Roman numerals, but the writing in red  which, from the style of the letters, seems to be from the fourteenth century  is mysterious.

Some of the scribbles seem to be words, but theyre illegible. Others form a cryptic code of repeating letters. On the second-to-last page is a list of letters next to corresponding numbers.

Is it the key to a secret code? No one knows. You can try to decipher it  or just admire this ancient and irreplaceable book  by exploring the digitized version, which was created due to demand from libraries, students and researchers from around the world.

Want to get a closer look? The book is available to view on request at the Harold and Mary Jean Hanson Rare Book Collection in Smathers Library East.It's getting ever more crowded in the ancient capital of Nara as record numbers of two-legged visitors encounter record numbers of four-legged residents, creating concerns about the health and safety of both groups.

Last month, a survey by the Nara Deer Preservation Foundation, which looks after the deer, showed there were 1,360 in the Nara Park area. It was the largest number recorded since the foundation began counting deer in 1955.

That year, there were only 378 deer in Nara Park. Over the following decades, the population grew rapidly at first and then steadily as various steps were taken by the city to control it after farmers complained their crops were being damaged.

The foundation recorded 1,226 deer in Nara Park last year, and the record number this year is likely due to increased patrols by foundation members, as well as efforts by the city, prefecture, and foundation to reduce traffic accidents in the vicinity that kill or injure them.

The rise follows jumps in Nara's tourism. In late July, Nara officials announced that over 16.3 million people had visited in 2017, compared with 15.5 million in 2016.

While the total is short of the record 18 million who came to Nara in 2010 for the 1,300th anniversary celebration, it marks a steady increase. In particular, there were 1.99 million visitors from abroad, up 26.3 percent from 2016. Two-thirds who spent at least one night in Nara were from China, but city tourism centers also reported increases in inquiries from Malaysian, American, Australian, French and Spanish day-trippers. - Japan TimesJapan's Defense Ministry will consider deploying the Aegis Ashore land-based missile defense system in areas near Akita and Yamaguchi prefectures, a senior ministry official said Monday.

"We will mull (deployment of the Aegis Ashore system) in Akita and Yamaguchi prefectures, as well as their vicinities," Masaki Fukasawa, deputy director-general of the defense minister's Secretariat, said at a meeting with Akita Governor Norihisa Satake.

Fukasawa's statement is believed to have been made to soften Satake's stance on the deployment, people familiar with the matter said.

The ministry plans to open bidding on Sept. 12 to select companies to conduct geological and water surveys for the Ground Self-Defense Force training areas in the northeastern city of Akita and in Hagi in the western prefecture of Yamaguchi.

During the talks, held at the Akita prefectural government office, Fukasawa told Satake that the ministry will include in its discussions government-owned sites that are outside the SDF's jurisdiction, in case the two areas are deemed unfit to host the Aegis Ashore system from the survey results.The administration of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is facing pressure over a crackdown sparked by militant attacks last August.

"Through their acts and omissions, the civilian authorities have contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes", the fact-finders said.

The United Nations and Washington have labelled the campaign "ethnic cleansing", after some 700,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine to Bangladesh, bringing with them testimonies of rape, arson and indiscriminate killings in the northern part of the state.

These Rohingya refugees crossed the Myanmar-Bangladesh border by boat through the Bay of Bengal a year ago. Such a designation is rare under worldwide law, but has been used in countries including Bosnia and Sudan and in the Daesh campaign against the Yazidi communities in Iraq and Syria.

"The ethnic violence in Myanmar has been truly horrific", it said.

China's Foreign Ministry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The U.N. panel, led by former Indonesian attorney-general Marzuki Darusman, named the Myanmar army's commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, and five other generals who should face justice. The decision, which according to a former high-ranking military official, was made by Min Aung Hlaing himself but was very unpopular within the military, who believed he was made a scapegoat of to protect more senior leadership.

The verdict in Myanmar's prosecution of two Reuters journalists accused of breaching the country's Official Secrets Act is postponed on Monday until September 3 because the judge overseeing the case is in poor health.

In a rare instance of security forces being punished for extrajudicial killings, Myanmar's government later announced that seven soldiers had been sentenced to 10 years in prison with hard labor for the killings. "The military must respect human rights for #Burma's democracy to succeed".

Worldwide pressure on Myanmar has been growing as U.N. -mandated investigators are set to publish a report on the crisis on Monday and the United Nations Security Council will hold a briefing on Myanmar on Tuesday.

The fact-finding mission created by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2017, concluded in a report that "there is sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the Tatmadaw (Myanmar army) chain of command".

They said the commander-in-chief and five generals should be prosecuted for orchestrating the gravest crimes under law.

Reuters was not able to contact those four generals on Monday.

The investigators, who were never granted access to Myanmar, said they based their findings on interviews with 875 victims and witnesses, as well as satellite imagery and authenticated documents, photographs and videos. Myanmar repeatedly denied the United Nations investigators access to the country.

The U.N. Security Council meets Tuesday, but observers say it is unlikely that any decisive action will come from that body.

The report detailed a horrifying list of atrocities committed against the Rohingya, including murder, enforced disappearance, torture, as well as sexual violence "perpetrated on a massive scale".

"Although improved in recent months, Facebook's response has been slow and ineffective".

"We continue to work to prevent the misuse of Facebook in Myanmar - including through the independent human rights impact assessment we commissioned earlier in the year".

"We're removing a total of 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook Pages, followed by nearly 12 million people". In response, Facebook removed six pages and six accounts associated with him and other military commanders.

The piece, which found more than 1,000 posts, comments and images attacking Muslims on the platform, demonstrated that Facebook, despite repeated warnings, had devoted scant resources to controlling the problem in Myanmar, where it is the dominant social media force.

If convicted, the two journalists can appeal and would also be eligible for a possible pardon by Myanmar's civilian president, a staunch Suu Kyi ally.That all ended, though, when President Donald Trump abandoned the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, under which Iran had agreed to curb its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting sanctions on its economy.

Air France will stop flights from Paris to Tehran from September 18 because of "the line's weak performance", an airline spokesman said.

In the wake new USA sanctions on Iran, Air France and British Airways have announced they're shutting down flights to Tehran, saying they're not commercially viable.

British Airways, for its part, said it was cancelling its London-Tehran service as "the operation is now not commercially viable".

Iran's currency has fallen sharply since the USA sanctions were reimposed, wreaking havoc on the country's economy.

German airline Lufthansa said it had no plans to stop flying to Tehran.

The EU, which is working to maintain trade with Tehran, agreed 18 million euros ($20.6 million) in aid for Iran on Thursday, including for the private sector, to help offset the impact of USA sanctions.

The package of assistance offered to Iran, announced on Thursday, is "for projects in support of sustainable economic and social development" in the Islamic Republic, and includes funds to help develop the private sector, according to a statement from the European Commission.

Air France is the French arm of Franco-Dutch airlines group Air France KLM.

The decision of European airliners to halt flights to the Iranian capital Tehran in September has paved the way for Turkish carriers to increase their fights.

The flag carrier of the Netherlands, KLM, which is owned by the same parent company as Air France, had already announced they would discontinue flights to Tehran Sept. 23.

Both airlines re-opened the Tehran route in the wake of the worldwide accord between western powers and Iran, under which crippling economic sanctions on Tehran were lifted after its leaders agreed to roll back the scope of the country's nuclear activities.

Iran's ambassador to Britain expressed regret at BA's decision.

Companies in the air travel industry jumped at the opportunity to corner the newly-opened market, as Boeing and Airbus looked to find new customers in Iran and airlines inside the Middle-Eastern nation-Iran Air and Mahan Air, among others-were eager to expand their route networks further beyond their borders.

Hamid Baeidinejad, the Iranian ambassador to the United Kingdom, disagrees with the airlines' decision.South Korea weighs in on the cancelling of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's fourth trip to the North, which was scheduled for this week.

Kono declined to reveal details about what Pompeo said regarding the cancellation of his planned trip to North Korea. The main objective of this trip was to introduce Mr. Biegun as the newest member of the negotiating team and the one to lead the ongoing efforts moving forward. "Trump might have felt that there was no need to send Pompeo to North Korea without any guarantee of substantial progress on North Korea's denuclearization", said Shin Beom-chul, a senior researcher at the Asan Institute for Foreign Studies.

"The issues are tough, and they will be tough to resolve", Mr. Biegun said, standing beside Mr. Pompeo.

Pompeo has pressed for tangible steps toward North Korea's abandonment of its nuclear arsenal while Pyongyang is demanding that Washington first make concessions of its own.

At the same time, lawmakers from both parties, including GOP hawks who generally support Trump, have expressed concerns about such a move, as it could be used by the North to demand the removal of USA troops from South Korea and potentially Japan without anything in return.

Officials say progress has stalled because the USA wants North Korea to take concrete steps before making any concessions, while Pyongyang wants Washington to reciprocate as it moves toward denuclearization.

The cancellation follows two days of US-China trade talks in Washington that ended with no sign of progress toward resolving a deepening trade war between the world's two largest economies and no plans for more talks in the near term.

Meanwhile, while describing the postponement of Pompeo's trip as a setback, South Korea's Foreign Ministry said it expects China to continue serving a "constructive role" in global efforts to solve the nuclear crisis and noted that Beijing continues to express commitment to fully implement sanctions against the North.

The paper was citing an unnamed South Korean media outlet.

"The continuation and further development of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK) nuclear program and related statements by the DPRK are a cause for grave concern", said a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), using the initials of North Korea's official name.

Meanwhile, while describing the postponement of Pompeo's trip as a setback, South Korea's foreign ministry said it expects China to serve a "constructive role" in worldwide efforts to solve the nuclear crisis.

The United States has escalated a trade war with China by implementing tariffs in response to what Mr. Trump believes are unfair trade practices. It's nearly like these countries can't be trusted.

Beijing hit back at Trump's "capricious" accusations in a statement posted on the foreign ministry website on Saturday. China claims to be working on both denuclearization and regional stability.

Negotiations have been all but deadlocked since U.S. President Donald Trump's summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June.

"The US statement is contrary to basic facts and is irresponsible", China's foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said.

"All parties concerned should.show more sincerity and flexibility, instead of being capricious and putting the blame on others".

Trump himself was still open to another meeting with Kim, in hopes of advancing the process, but was not pleased with the latest signals from North Korea, a White House official said. He's well aware of past failures by previous administrations and I certainly don't consider him to be naive about potential success with the insane little North Korean dictator in power. He isn't afraid of bold moves and that is what an effort on this scale takes.The head of Islamic State in Afghanistan, Abu Saad Erhabi, was reportedly killed in a strike on an ISIS-K hideout Saturday night, state authorities said Sunday.

Lt. Col. Martin O'Donnell, a spokesman for USA forces in Afghanistan, said American forces launched a counterterrorism strike in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday that targeted a "senior leader of a designated terrorist organization".

However, the group's weapons cache was also destroyed in the airstrike, officials said.

Abu Sayed, the previous leader of Islamic State in Afghanistan, died in a USA strike on the group's headquarters in Kunar province in July 2017.

"We again draw attention to flights by "unidentified" helicopter in northern Afghanistan to deliver arms and munitions to the local ISIS militants and the Taliban cooperation with this terrorist group".

"The Emir of Daesh in Afghanistan along with 10 others was killed", said a statement by the National Directorate of Security, calling the group by an Arabic acronym.

The group has a stronghold "in Nangarhar, on Afghanistan's porous eastern border with Pakistan, and become one of the country's most risky militant groups", Reuters reported.

Former ISIS-K leader Abu Sayed was killed in a strike in the eastern province of Nangarhar and Sayed's predecessors were killed joint United States and Afghan operations.

It's unclear exactly how many Islamic State fighters are in the country, because they frequently switch allegiances. But the USA military estimates that there are about 2,000.

Erhabi is thought to have led about 2,000 fighters in Afghanistan under an affiliate known as Islamic State Khorasan.

More than 150 ISIL fighters surrendered to Afghan forces in Jowzjan on August 1, a move troops and the Taliban hailed as the end of the group's foothold in the north of the country.SUV

According to a post on the Omro Police Department Facebook , officers received a call for a motor assist from a woman who thought her car was running strangely. She pulled over and opened the hood to have a look at the engine of her, and to her surprise, she saw a live, giant snake wrapped around it.Two officers on patrol arrived on the scene and, after taking the necessary precautions, tried to untangle the snake and eventually fix what was wrong with the car. They noticed that, ironically, the serpentine belt had come off but they could do nothing about it, what with the snake stuck between the engine and the plate.They struggled to remove it but found out that it was too strong and stubborn. Eventually, they called for backup themselves, in the person of snake expert Steve Keller. They also called a towing company to take the SUV in for repairs.The story has a happy ending, though.The snake has been identified as a Ball Python (originally thought to be Burmese). It worked its way between the engine and the skid plate, the Omro PD writes. The reluctant reptile is alive and well, just tired and scared.Thanks to Steve Keller for driving from Menasha to get the snake out. Steve does educational programs and also provides rescue and adoption services for snakes, the post continues.No word yet on how the snake got inside the car or where the woman might have picked it up from.The powerful radio control aircraft lobby is squaring off against the FAA, Department of Defense and some members of Congress over the future of their hobby, and the government departments may be outgunned politically. At issue is the so-called Rule 336 that essentially exempts those flying model planes for hobby and recreation from the long list of flight restrictions and certification requirements that apply to drone operators. It was pressure on Congress from the RC groups that resulted in the exemption in the first place several years ago and theyre mobilizing to protect that initial victory.

If Rule 336 is modified or removed, our hobby will be dealt a heavy blowhobby shops will close, club memberships will drop, flying fields will disappear, and young pilots will be discouraged from the great fun of building and flying models, RC supporters say in a We the People petition filed with the White House. The Academy of Model Aeronautics has led the battle so far and is continuing to lobby in Washington. The House has passed its version of the reauthorization, which maintains Rule 336, but the Senate is still formulating its bill. The current short term authorization for the FAA expires Sept. 30.Here's one reason Republicans are feeling better about the Montana Senate race: a new internal poll for the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) shows Republican candidate Matt Rosendale leading Democratic Sen. Jon Tester by two points.

Why it matters: While this poll doesn't mean Democrats are certain to lose, they can't afford to give up this Senate seat in November. Montana's Senate seat is one of 10 Democrats are defending in states Trump won in 2016.

Two caveats to this poll: (1) the sample size is 600 likely voters around the state and (2) the margin of error is 4 points, meaning that Tester could, in fact, be ahead. And the Real Clear Politics average has Tester up by 5.5 points.

The poll also shows that Tester has a 49% favorable rating compared to Rosendale's 44%.

that Tester has a 49% favorable rating compared to Rosendale's 44%. Illegal immigration is the top concern (24%) among the likely voters surveyed for this poll. That could help Rosendale fire up the Republican base in Montana, especially after President Trump tweeted "Democrats like Jon Tester continue to support the open borders agenda  Tester even voted to protect Sanctuary Cities. We need lawmakers who will put America First."

One more thing: Republicans control every statewide office in Montana, except for Tester's Senate seat and the governorship, per Real Clear Politics.Russian opposition leader and prominent Putin critic Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to 30 days in prison for breaking public protest laws, reports Al Jazeera.

Why it matters: Navalny was convicted in January but sentenced more than six months later, a delay he claims was part of the Russian government's efforts to stop him from leading nationwide protests over pension reform on Sept. 9. Navalny has been jailed several times for organizing protests against Putin and for other charges he says are bogus. He was barred from running for president in January.French President Emmanuel Macron announced an "exhaustive review" of defense cooperation in the European Union, claiming the EU can no longer rely on the U.S. for its security, reports the AFP.

"Europe can no longer rely on the United States for its security. It is up to us to guarantee European security."

 Emmanuel Macron

The big picture: Macron said defense proposals would be revealed in the coming months, and that discussions would include all European countries  even Russia. President Trump left his European allies reeling after the July NATO summit in Brussels, during which he made some veiled threats to withdraw the U.S. from the military alliance if other countries didn't boost their defense spending.India is a mecca for people seeking spiritual gurus, but instead of reaching enlightenment, some devotees become victims of horrific crimes.

Behind the scenes: There are tens of thousands of gurus across the country, many spearheading charitable programs that benefit their communities. But there has also been a spate of criminal cases against powerful gurus, including one of the country's most powerful: Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. An Al Jazeera investigation reveals a seedy world of sexual abuse and accusations of murder and mass castration within the walls of his ashram.

Anshul Chhatrapati says his father, a journalist, was murdered after publishing a letter in his newspaper that accused Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh of rape. For the past 11 years, the Central Bureau of Investigation has assigned Anshul an armed bodyguard.

What more can they do to us? Theres nothing more valuable than life, and that theyve already taken.

 Anshul Chhatrapati

Singh, who has been convicted of sexually assaulting two female followers, denies the allegations against him. His spokesman, Prakash Singh Salwara, says: I never saw anything that indicated that a crime had been committed."

Go deeper: Watch the full report from Al Jazeera's 101 East.A UN fact-finding report has called for top military leaders in Myanmar to be investigated for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes against the Rohingya people.

The big picture: Myanmar's government has consistently claimed its operations in Rakhine State target militant threats, but evidence in the report suggests otherwise: "Military necessity would never justify killing indiscriminately, gang raping women, assaulting children, and burning entire villages." The UN has called for the case to be referred to the International Criminal Court and names six military officers as "priority subjects for investigation and prosecution."

In response to the report, Facebook  which the UN has previously said played "a determining role" in fueling the Rohingya crisis  announced it would be removing and banning dozens of accounts for committing or enabling "serious human rights abuses" in Myanmar.

Go deeper: Mass graves and ethnic grievances in Myanmar's Rakhine state.President Trump announced Monday from the Oval Office that he plans to enter into a new trade agreement with Mexico called the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement  getting rid of the name NAFTA  with the hope that Canada will "negotiate fairly" and join at a later date, enter into a separate deal, or face automobile tariffs.

The details: Despite Trump's announcement, any trade deal would have to first be approved by Congress. The agreement with Mexico requires 75% of an automobile's value to be manufactured in North America, up from NAFTA's current level of 62.5%. It would also require 40% to 45% of the car to be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour.

A senior administration official told reporters Monday that "there's never been a trade agreement remotely as good on labor" as this one, which the administration hopes will help win the support of Democrats. The official also said the new standards the agreement sets for modernizing digital trade, financial services, and intellectual property are far better and more enforceable than anything in NAFTA or the now-abandoned Trans-Pacific Partnership.

What's next: Negotiations with Canada are expected to begin this afternoon. Both the U.S. and Mexico have expressed a desire to have Canada join the agreement, but according to the U.S. Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer, the deal is set to be presented to Congress either way.

Per CNBC, the White House would need to ask Congress to approve a bilateral track if Canada does not join the agreement, a process that would take at least 180 days. A senior administration official said they will have a better sense of whether they will need to notify Congress of a bilateral or a trilateral agreement by the end of the week.

The bottom line: When asked if Mexico would agree to a bilateral deal if Canada cannot be brought onboard, the senior administration official told reporters they would have to ask the Mexican government.1 big thing: Trumps gambling losses

Trump salutes supporters in West Virginia last week. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

President Trumps run of big, unorthodox bets  ranging from negotiating with a nuclear madman in North Korea to depending on friends who turned out to be "flippers"  is looking riskier and less winnable by the day.

Consider his wildest bets, made largely against the advice of advisers and most GOP leaders:

He continues to play footsie with Kim Jong-un, insisting he can get the lying, nuclear-armed oppressor to surrender his arms. But Trump  after falsely declaring there was no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea after his Singapore summit  was forced to cancel Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's visit because the North Koreans show few signs of cooperating.

to play footsie with Kim Jong-un, insisting he can get the lying, nuclear-armed oppressor to surrender his arms. But Trump  after falsely declaring there was no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea after his Singapore summit  was forced to cancel Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's visit because the North Koreans show few signs of cooperating. He wagered he could bring peace to Middle East because of his unique deal-making skills and his bond with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, after moving the embassy to Jerusalem, the Trump team is preparing to release a peace plan after months of no-contact with the other negotiating partner: the Palestinians.

he could bring peace to Middle East because of his unique deal-making skills and his bond with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, after moving the embassy to Jerusalem, the Trump team is preparing to release a peace plan after months of no-contact with the other negotiating partner: the Palestinians. He keeps escalating his trade war with China  certain Xi Jinping will buckle, even though nobody on his team has true visibility into Xi's mental state. Trade talks with China are at a standstill. And while Trump's big bet could pay off with a better ultimate deal with Beijing, there's a risk the tit-for-tat tariff war could, in the meantime, hinder economic growth and put thousands of Americans out of work.

his trade war with China  certain Xi Jinping will buckle, even though nobody on his team has true visibility into Xi's mental state. Trade talks with China are at a standstill. And while Trump's big bet could pay off with a better ultimate deal with Beijing, there's a risk the tit-for-tat tariff war could, in the meantime, hinder economic growth and put thousands of Americans out of work. He rolled big that steel and aluminum tariffs would assert American strength and protect domestic industries. Instead, he managed to alienate allies around the globe and hurt American interests  from automakers to pipeline users to farmers suffering from retaliatory tariffs.

that steel and aluminum tariffs would assert American strength and protect domestic industries. Instead, he managed to alienate allies around the globe and hurt American interests  from automakers to pipeline users to farmers suffering from retaliatory tariffs. He bet on loyalty, believing friends like Michael Cohen, David Pecker and Omarosa would never turn. They all did.

TBD on his public ridicule of Robert Mueller:

Trump routinely whacks Mueller and calls his probe a witch hunt. But approval of Mueller's investigation in a Fox News poll last week was 59% (up 11 points from July)  higher than Trumps, which was 45% in the Fox poll (42% in Gallup).

and calls his probe a witch hunt. But approval of Mueller's investigation in a Fox News poll last week was 59% (up 11 points from July)  higher than Trumps, which was 45% in the Fox poll (42% in Gallup). But many Republicans think the investigation is a witch hunt, and Republicans are who he needs to stave off impeachment. It's critical for Trump to make it a red-blue issue, and he's done that.

Be smart  An outside Trump adviser said that when you add it all up, hes "losing the midterms in spite of a strong economy."The logo of Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing is seen at their new drivers center in Toluca, Mexico, April 2018.

The suspected murder of the 20-year-old woman, whom police identified only by the surname Zhao, is the latest in a series of violent crimes that have fuelled safety concerns about the service which pairs auto owners and passengers.

The latest grisly episode triggered severe criticism of Didi on social media and prompted regulators to warn of industry-wide action.

Didi said the customer service representative who took the complaint had not followed up with an investigation within two hours, as the firm promises.

Didi declined to comment on Monday.

Zhong, the 27-year-old driver who has been detained, has confessed to the crime, the report adds. The body was dumped beyond a guardrail over a cliff, police said.

The driver passed an initial background check because he had no prior criminal record, and he logged on to the Hitch service with an authentic ID the day of the killing, Didi said.

The announcement came a day after the company admitted it bore "responsibility" for the crime, failing to act on a complaint about the same driver from another passenger, who claimed he drove her to an isolated area and followed her in his vehicle after she left the auto.

Besides emerging as the world's largest ride-hail company by number of trips, it is reportedly on the verge of completing more than one billion journeys.

Around 30 million rides a day are booked through the company, it says.

Didi, which was valued at US$56 billion in a fundraising round previous year, has been expanding into overseas markets including Australia and Mexico, going head-to-head with Uber.

In response to this latest tragedy, Didi has announced that Hitch's general manager and its vice president for customer services have both been removed from their positions while the system has been suspended nationwide for re-evaluation. The service allows passengers to catch rides from registered drivers headed in the same direction.

China's police and transport ministry said on Sunday that Didi Chuxing had "unshirkable responsibility" for what happened to the passenger after she got into a Didi carpooling service vehicle last Friday.

The killing exposed a flaw in Didi's process for reporting issues with drivers, according to the company. One driver was sentenced to 10 months in prison, while the other received a sentence of 3.5 years.

After a 21-year-old flight attendant was murdered in May, allegedly by her Didi driver, the company unveiled a series of measures to improve safety, including limiting the hours during which carpool drivers can pick up passengers of the opposite sex, and testing an "escort mode" on its app enabling passengers to share their routes and destinations with emergency contacts.1 big thing: A Church in crisis

Pope Francis spent much of his visit to Ireland over the weekend seeking forgiveness  for those guilty of abuses of power and sexual abuses, and for some members of the hierarchy who knew of the abuses and did nothing.

The Vaticans former ambassador to Washington claims the pope falls into that second category.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano writes in a stunning 11-page letter that he told Francis in 2013 that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had been sanctioned by Pope Benedict XVI over numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, but Francis nonetheless rehabilitated McCarrick. McCarrick resigned last week, the first cardinal to do so in 90 years. He maintains his innocence.

Asked about the allegation by reporters on Sunday, Francis wouldnt confirm or deny it, saying: I will not say a single word on this. I think this statement speaks for itself, and you have the sufficient journalistic capacity to draw conclusions.

Responses to the letter have varied widely, as the Wall Street Journal notes in a piece headlined: Pope Faces Crisis of Credibility Over Coverup Accusations.

Rev. Robert Imbelli of Boston College told the Journal: The pope leaves it to journalists in their professional competence to evaluate the truth.Clearly, their work would be facilitated by the release of relevant documents.

Massimo Faggioli of Villanova University tells Slates Isaac Chotiner

The backdrop: Francis has previously sought forgiveness for his handling of a major sex abuse scandal in Chile. Confidence in his ability to handle such scandals is falling among U.S. Catholics, per Pew.

The bigger picture: Sex abuse scandals are eroding trust in an institution already struggling with declining membership in nearly every country across Europe and the Americas.

A Pew survey found that, as of 2015, while 32% of Americans were raised Catholic, just 21% remained so  more than double the drop-off among Protestants. U.S. Catholics are also older, on average, than members of other major religions.

Its not just that people are becoming less religious. In Brazil, for example, Protestantism has grown rapidly as Catholicism has become less dominant.

Membership in the Church has held steady at around 18% of the global population for decades, according to Vatican data, with growth in Africa making up for declines elsewhere.

Consider the case in Ireland, though: The last papal visit was in 1979, when the Church dominated many aspects of Irish life. One-third of the country's entire population turned up to hear John Paul II speak. This time, one attendee told NPR she had decided not to tell acquaintances she was going: "It wasn't a popular thing to say."Saudi Arabias King Salman made the decision to to nix the plan to list a portion of Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabias national oil company, on the stock market, according to Reuters.

Why it matters: The expected IPO was a project of the kings son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is working to overhaul the countrys economy and society to be more open under his "Vision 2030" program. But, per Reuters, some believe that Salman's move away from the IPO shows that  as long as he remains in control  Saudi Arabia may not be truly committed to an open and transparent economy.We saw fresh signs this week that Democrats wont be able to stop the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Axios spoke to the offices of the senators that the White House considers potential swing votes for the next Supreme Court Justice, and theyre saying all the things Team Kavanaugh would want to hear.

The bottom line: Even Democrats involved in the effort to oppose Kavanaughs nomination privately admitted to Axios that there will have to be a major new development for them to have any chance of killing his confirmation. They say they need an explosive document, or a trainwreck during the confirmation hearings.

What they're saying:

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a centrist who supports abortion rights, met with Kavanaugh for over two hours and said the two discussed abortion "at length." Kavanaugh told her that, like Chief Justice John Roberts who was confirmed in 2005, he believes Roe v. Wade is "settled law." Collins later was complimentary of Kavanaugh, saying the meeting was excellent and that she was very pleased with his answers.

a centrist who supports abortion rights, met with Kavanaugh for over two hours and said the two discussed abortion "at length." Kavanaugh told her that, like Chief Justice John Roberts who was confirmed in 2005, he believes Roe v. Wade is "settled law." Collins later was complimentary of Kavanaugh, saying the meeting was excellent and that she was very pleased with his answers. Sen. Lisa Murkowski's (R-Alaska) communications director Karina Petersen told Axios that Murkowski, a moderate who also feels very strongly about Roe v. Wade, focused many of her questions on the fate of the case. Petersen says Kavanaugh confirmed to Murkowski what he told Collins, that the case was settled precedent.

communications director Karina Petersen told Axios that Murkowski, a moderate who also feels very strongly about Roe v. Wade, focused many of her questions on the fate of the case. Petersen says Kavanaugh confirmed to Murkowski what he told Collins, that the case was settled precedent. Sen. Joe Manchin's (D-W.Va.) communications director, Jonathan Kott, told Axios that Kavanaugh repeatedly stressed "his independence as a jurist" during their meeting, and emphasized that he "takes into account the human impact of his rulings." Kott said most of their conversation centered on how Kavanaugh's rulings would affect health care, especially for West Virginians.

communications director, Jonathan Kott, told Axios that Kavanaugh repeatedly stressed "his independence as a jurist" during their meeting, and emphasized that he "takes into account the human impact of his rulings." Kott said most of their conversation centered on how Kavanaugh's rulings would affect health care, especially for West Virginians. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) emphasized the importance of shielding the court from politics following her meeting with Kavanaugh, and said the meeting helped her learn more about his judicial record and temperament.

What to watch: Everything can still change during the confirmation process. Several Democrats have indicated they plan to aggressively grill Kavanaugh over whether he'd be willing to override precedent, and his feelings toward Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation  more specifically, whether President Trump could face prosecution while still in office.

What's next? A source working to confirm Kavanaugh told Axios they're spending this week on practice hearings  mimicking what his week will be like during his confirmation hearing in early September. "Similar cycles/times/hearings, etc.," the source said. "Very lifelike rounds of questions..."Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has visited Nagorno-Karabakh and met with its leaders for a third time since taking office more than three months ago.

Pashinian was accompanied by Armenias Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan and the chief of the Armenian armys General Staff, General Artak Davtian, during the low-key visit. The three men met twice on Sunday with Bako Sahakian, the Karabakh president, and General Levon Mnatsakanian, the commander of Karabakhs Armenian-backed army.

Pashinians press service issued no statements on the trip.

According to Sahakians office, the first meeting focused on various issues relating to cooperation between the two Armenian republics.

The second meeting was held at the Karabakh army headquarters in Stepanakert. A short statement by Sahakians office said the two sides discussed military affairs and, in particular, ways of strengthening the army. Also, Mnatsakanian was reported to brief Pashinian on the current situation along the Armenian-Azerbaijani line of contact.

The authorities in Stepanakert said in May and June that Azerbaijan is massing troops there in possible preparation for large-scale hostilities. The conflicting parties have reported few major ceasefire violations on the Karabakh frontlines since then, however.

Azerbaijans Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov and his recently appointed Armenian counterpart, Zohrab Mnatsakanian, held their first face-to-face talks in Brussels on July 11. The U.S., Russian and French mediators co-chairing the OSCE Mins Group, who were present at the talks, expect them they to meet again in September.Dan Bilzerian, a controversial American social media celebrity of Armenian descent, officially became an Armenian citizen on Monday during his first-ever visit to his ancestral homeland.

Bilzerian is a professional poker player who is primarily known for his playboy lifestyle. He has tens of millions of followers on Instagram and Facebook who are attracted by his regular photos of private jets, scantily clad women, piles of cash and guns.

The 37-year-old nicknamed the King of Instagram gave no details of his trip to Armenia when he announced it on Twitter shortly before arriving in Yerevan early on Sunday night. Accompanied by several companions, he declined to answer questions from journalists at the citys Zvartnots airport.

Mnatsakan Bichakhchian, the head of an Armenian police department on visas and passports, announced the following morning that Bilzerian and his brother Adam have taken an Armenian citizenship oath. Bichakhchian posted on his Facebook page a photograph of himself and the two men standing in his office.

Speaking to RFE/RLs Armenian service, Bichakhchian revealed that the brothers were granted Armenian citizenship in 2014 but had to take the oath in order to complete their naturalization process. The official suggested that they were strongly influenced by their ethnic Armenian father Paul Bilzerian who he said already holds an Armenian passport.

Dan Bilzerian, who endorsed Donald Trump during the 2016 U.S. presidential race, is no stranger to controversy. In 2014, for example, he was briefly arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of possessing bomb-making materials.

Bilzerian is the latest Armenian American celebrity to travel to Armenia. Kim Kardashian, the world-famous reality TV star, visited the country in April 2015.

Unlike Kardashian, Bilzerian has rarely made public statements on issues relevant to Armenia or the sizable Armenian community in the United States.Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and parliament speaker Ara Babloyan reportedly agreed on Monday to defuse political tensions in Armenia following bitter recriminations traded by the countrys current and former leaders.

The two men met one week after Babloyan expressed serious concern over Pashinians far-reaching statements made at an August 17 rally in Yerevan.

Addressing tens of thousands of supporters, the premier accused Armenian judges of acting on orders issued by the former government and threatened to create bodies of transitional justice. He also announced plans to push through the parliament constitutional amendments that would facilitate the conduct of fresh parliamentary elections. He told his supporters to be ready to press lawmakers to enact those changes.

Senior representatives of former President Serzh Sarkisians Republican Party (HHK) reacted furiously to Pashinians speech, accusing him of stifling dissent, blackmailing the Armenian parliament and seeking to control the judiciary.

Babloyan, who is also affiliated with the HHK, similarly accused Pashinian of subjecting the parliament to pressure and coercion. Prime Minister Pashinians speech at the rally contained extremely dangerous messages to the constitutional order, he said in an August 20 statement.

The speaker added that he will discuss his deep concerns with Pashinian, President Armen Sarkissian as well as other Armenian officials and foreign diplomats based in Yerevan. Pashinian expressed readiness to meet him.

Babloyans office said that the two men reached a number of understandings at their meeting. In particular, it said, they agreed that everyone in Armenia should enjoy freedom of speech and dissent, that judicial independence must not be undermined, and that any elements of transitional justice must conform to the Armenian constitution. It was also agreed that any amendments to the Armenian constitution should be enacted as a result of broad-based political discussions, said the office.

The Armenian government did not issue any press releases on the meeting.

President Sarkissian welcomed the agreements reached at the premiers talks with the speaker later in the day. The president hopes that we will see positive results very soon, read a statement by the presidential press service.

Hakob Badalian, a Yerevan-based political analyst, believes that Pashinians tough speech was a response to the political comeback of Robert Kocharian, another former president who is facing criminal charges stemming from the 2008 post-election violence in Yerevan. Kocharian made the announcement on August 16. HHK representatives have not ruled out the possibility of cooperating with him.

Badalian suggested that the HHK and Pashinian agreed to restore the status quo that existed until their latest war of words. I think the statement [by Babloyans office] implies that there is no need for transitional justice, that the parliamentary elections will be held as planned and that the former government is not reneging on its pledges, he told RFE/RLs Armenian service.

The policy program of Pashinians cabinet, reluctantly approved by the HHK-controlled parliament in June, calls for the holding of snap parliamentary elections within a year. Under the existing constitution, such polls can be held only if the prime minister resigns and the National Assembly twice fails to elect his or her replacement.

In his August 17 speech, Pashinian warned of the possibility of the HHK and other parliamentary forces installing another prime minister in case of his resignation. He said his political team will therefore draft constitutional amendments that would allow the parliament to dissolve itself. But speaking to journalists on August 22, Pashinian said that this is only one of the scenarios considered by his government.By Sara Israfilbayova

The Armenian economy is going through hard times and the government is almost unable to resolve existing problems. The country, which has been occupying the lands of neighboring Azerbaijan, is in a deep crisis.

Further evidence of the fact is that the only giant of the Armenian economy Rusal Armenal plans to start massive reductions from September 1.

Rusal Armenal, established in 2000 on the basis of the Kanaker Aluminum Plant, is wholly owned by Russias largest aluminium company Rusal.

The plant leadership announced that due to the U.S. sanctions, the volume of exports and revenues decreased. Employees of the plant are alarmed - many of them will remain unemployed from September.

Commenting on the issue, Armenian economist Movses Aristakesyan said that the U.S. sanctions are fairly applied to the corrupt economies of corrupt countries. The former authorities of Armenia should not consistently get rid of a number of strategic facilities, making them the property of Russia, he added.

Former authorities did not need to abandon objects of strategic importance, to sell property for debts. The governing bodies of the previous authorities should have understood this, passing the factories to the hands of the Russian authorities, the economist explained, adding that Armenia lost sovereignty, economic and, therefore, social security.

Moreover, the economic weakness of Armenia was confirmed also by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. A few days ago he presented the theses of the governments economic strategy and once again irritated the specialists.

The Armenian Prime Minister repeated the cliches like stable economy, export-oriented economy, high-tech economy, etc., which annoy and irritate people of Armenia.

Its curious that talking about tourism, Pashinyan got confused in figures and in an attempt to present a positive on the suspension of migration, mixed together the migration and tourist flows. In a word, the prime minister mixed up the indicators, wishing to show how the migration under his rule decreased.

Pashinyans attempts only irritate the citizens of the country, especially those who have a little sense in the subject.

Earlier, journalists held a monitoring in a number of large retail outlets in Yerevan and found out that contrary to the assurances and promises of the prime minister, prices have gone up on almost all food products - dairy and meat products, vegetables and fruits.

Even prices on bread are increased and some of the leaders of large bakeries told reporters that the rise in prices is due to rising prices for Russian flour.

Price rise against the background of falling incomes of the population in Armenia threatens to erupt an economic catastrophe.

Although the authorities are trying to cover the economic shocks in the country in a decent digestible for the public wrapper, the scale of the problem actually promises to go far beyond any decency.

Unlike the fictional reality that the Armenian authorities are speaking about, this is the real situation in the country. Armenian experts note that the government is only engaged in pretending to solve economic and social problems and allegedly create a favorable environment.

---

Sara Israfilbayova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Sara_999Is

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Laman Ismayilova

An exhibition "Peace and friendship in the dreams of artists" will be open at the Iranian Cultural Center on August 28.

The exhibition will be held jointly by the Azerbaijani Artists Union and the Cultural Center of the Iranian Embassy in Baku, Azertag reported.

More than 150 artworks will be exhibited as part of the event. The exhibition will feature professional and amateur artists, as well as the masters of decorative applied art.

Azerbaijani and Iranian peoples have common cultural and religious traditions.

Two countries successfully cooperate in many areas, including agriculture, transport, tourism, industry and other spheres.

The Days of Iranian Culture was held in Baku on June 27 - July 1, 2018.

The concerts with participation of Iranian figures of arts, exhibitions, screening films and theatrical performances were organized as part of the event.

The Days of Iranian and Azerbaijani cultures in 2010, 2011, 2017 also kicked off with a great success.

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzNaila Huseynli

Azerbaijan, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan create the Center for Nomadic Civilization.

The corresponding resolution of the Government of Kazakhstan is published on the website of the information and legal system of normative legal acts of the Republic of Kazakhstan "Adilet".

The center will be located in Bishkek. The mission of the Center is to create a sphere of mutual trust and cooperation between the Turkic-speaking peoples, and other states through the development of sport, as well as organize sport events and popularize the heritage of each nation and state with the traditions of nomadic culture, and deepen integration through sport.

The head of the Center will be appointed by the Council of Heads of State of the Turkic Council on the recommendation of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Turkic Council.

He will be elected for a term of four years. The first president of the Center will be the representative of Kyrgyzstan. The working languages of the Center are the state languages of the parties, as well as the English language.

The Cooperation Council of the Turkic Speaking States (Turkic Council) was established by the current members, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey in 2009.

Turkic Council has been constructed on four main pillars as common history, common language, common identity and common culture. It aims to broaden the existing bilateral cooperation areas such as economy, science, education, transportation, customs, tourism and other various fields between the Member States into multilateral cooperation for the benefit of the region.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

Iran's Minister of Information and Communications Technology Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi said the government plans to launch an online system to measure radio frequency levels in the country.

One of the main duties of Communication Regulatory Authority of the Islamic Republic of Iran is to measure Cumulative Radiation Level in the country so that the standards are met, Azari Jahromi said on August 26, Fars news agency reported.

He added that an online system for measuring the radio frequency levels in Iran will be unveiled soon on the occasion of the Iranian Government Week.

Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum longer than infrared light. Radio waves have frequencies as high as 300 gigahertz (GHz) to as low as 30 hertz (Hz). At 300 GHz, the corresponding wavelength is 1 mm, and at 30 Hz is 10,000 km. Like all other electromagnetic waves, radio waves travel at the speed of light. They are generated by electric charges undergoing acceleration, such as time varying electric currents.

Radio waves are generated artificially by transmitters and received by radio receivers, using antennas. Radio waves are very widely used in modern technology for fixed and mobile radio communication, broadcasting, radar and other navigation systems, communications satellites, wireless computer networks and many other applications.

Different frequencies of radio waves have different propagation characteristics in the Earth's atmosphere; long waves can diffract around obstacles like mountains and follow the contour of the earth (ground waves), shorter waves can reflect off the ionosphere and return to earth beyond the horizon (skywaves), while much shorter wavelengths bend or diffract very little and travel on a line of sight, so their propagation distances are limited to the visual horizon.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzThe Suns also sent out their condolences to McCain's family along with a genuine message on how the organization feels about the late senator's contributions to the nation.

He was fierce, he was loyal, he could work across the other side of the aisle, but he could be the very best person in a battle."McCain died at the age of 81, after battling glioblastoma, an aggressiveform of brain cancer that affects almost 700,000 Americans".

Friday, Aug. 31: McCain's body will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, where the senator's family, colleagues, staff and the public will honor his life and service. He reportedly disinvited Trump to his funeral. Former President George W. Bush will give a eulogy at the National Cathedral. He frequently criticized the president's policies and tone, taking aim at Trump's friendly relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and famously sinking legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Even when he was accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, McCain wanted to make it clear that he did not see Barack Obama as his enemy.

Mr Trump, who received serial deferments and did not serve in the military, said Mr McCain was "a war hero (only) because he was captured", adding, "I like people that weren't captured".

Mr Obama said that despite being his Democratic rival, they shared the ideals "for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched and sacrificed".

Details on McCain's funeral have not been announced at this time.

Mr Trump's response: McCain was a "dummy" who had barely managed to graduate from the US Naval Academy.

McCain was once a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War where his plane was shot down and he was taken prisoner.

The vacancy created by Mr McCain's death narrowed the Republican majority in the US Senate to 50 seats in the 100-member upper chamber, with Democrats controlling 49.

"He was a huge institutionalist and loved the Senate because the Senate forces individuals and parties to come together and he wasn't seeing that", Flake said. "It's tough to imagine politics without John McCain".

Klobuchar and her husband did visit McCain and his wife while he was fighting brain cancer. He continued to issue statements and tweets, published a valedictory book and took part in an HBO documentary that some likened to starring in his own obituary.

"I can tell you there are possibilities, glimmers of hope within the Senate now". "Great things are always within our reach. But the progress of disease and the inexorable advance of age render their verdict", Tweeted Meghan.

His family announced on Friday that McCain, who left Washington in December, had chose to cease treatment.By Trend

Uzbekistan is ready to consider the proposal of partners to reform the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS), Uzbekistans President Shavkat Mirziyoyev said at the summit in Turkmenistan, the UzA news agency reported.

The fund is the only regional organization that has undergone a test of durability and today it can become an effective mechanism for cooperation," the president said.

"I am confident that we will be able to achieve a balance of interests of all regional countries within the organization, our common future is in our hands," Mirziyoyev said.

The president stressed that only with the full participation of all countries in the activity of the fund, it will be possible to solve common problems and challenges.

"In this regard, we are ready to consider the proposals of our partners to improve the regulatory and legal framework and organizational structure of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea," he said.

The summit of the heads of the founding states of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS) was held in Turkmenistans Turkmenbashi. Leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan took part in the event.

In 2016 Kyrgyzstan suspended its participation in the activity of the fund as it did not meet the interests and vital needs of the country. In 2009, Bishkek insisted on the need for reform to equalize the interests of all Central Asian countries.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzNoting that there are many banks in Italy, which are not dependent on the US dollar, he said, "The banks will do their transactions with Iran in euro".

Pourfallah said the government should switch its focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Italy instead of major enterprises in order to be able to manage the situation under sanctions. On August 6, the United States reimposed stiff economic sanctions on Iran, ratcheting up pressure on the Islamic Republic despite statements of deep dismay from European allies, three months after President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers. A first set of reimposed US sanctions affect financial transactions that involve US dollars, Iran's automotive sector, the purchase of commercial planes and metals including gold. Trump warned that those who don't wind down their economic ties to Iran "risk severe consequences." --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz A second batch of US sanctions targeting Iran's oil sector and central bank are to be reimposed in early November. The official added that a number of Italian banks are currently working with Iran despite the returning US sanctions.By Trend

President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev, speaking at a meeting of the heads of states-founders of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea, has proposed to make the Aral sea region a zone of environmental innovations and technologies, Podrobno.uz reported.

"This initiative is aimed at uniting our common efforts in order to create conditions for attracting foreign investment in the development and implementation of environmentally friendly technologies, integrated implementation of the principles of "green" economy, environmentally friendly, energy and water saving technologies, prevention of further desertification and environmental migration, development of ecotourism and implementation of other measures," the president of Uzbekistan said.

For a comprehensive discussion of this initiative, Mirziyoyev proposed to organize a special conference next year with the support of the UN, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Global Environment Facility.

"We consider it possible to instruct the Board of the Fund to hold negotiations with these international organizations on practical issues of creating a zone of environmental innovations and technologies, including the formation of a single list and joint preparation of innovative projects, taking into account the experience of such projects in environmentally unfavorable regions of the world, the allocation of long-term concessional loans and grants for these purposes," Mirziyoyev said.

In addition, he proposed to open representative offices of these international institutions under the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will travel to Tehran on Sept. 7, presidency announced on Aug. 27.

Erdogan will attend the third summit within the Astana process amid raising concerns for possible regime attack on Syria's rebel-held Idlib province, Hurriyet Daily News reported.

Turkey, Russia and Iran are the guarantors of a countrywide ceasefire in Syria and the guarantors will meet in Tehran. They have been mediating a peace process since January 2016 among Syrias warring sides in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu held two meetings with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the last two weeks. The minister also met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Aug. 24. Defense Minister Hulusi Akar and National Intelligence Organization Director Hakan Fidan also held meetings in Moscow, just a week after their first trip to the Russian capital.

Turkeys demarche comes over impending Syrian military operation into the Idlib where Ankara warns against a full scale military operation will risk lives of civilians among nearly three million people there.

The Syrian army, backed by Russia, is aiming to eliminate jihadists, which have been controlling the province since early 2017.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Kamila Aliyeva

Singapore's Indorama Corporation will invest $ 335 million in the creation of modern cotton and textile production in Uzbekistan.

The government of Uzbekistan issued a resolution On measures to create modern cotton-textile production by Indorama (Singapore) in the Republic of Uzbekistan.

According to the document, the company in 2019-2023 will send $ 225 million of direct investment in the cultivation of raw cotton, corn, or another crop on the basis of crop rotation.

Another $ 115 million will be invested in the organization of deep processing of raw cotton and the production of cotton yarn during the implementation of the second phase of the project.

According to the resolution, the company will receive 50,000 hectares of land in the Kashkadarya and Syrdarya regions. In the second stage, the company will receive land in the Fergana and Jizzakh regions.

Indorama Corporation is one of Asias leading chemical holding companies. Today based in Singapore, its origins trace back to 1975 with the start of Indo-Rama Synthetics in Indonesia. Indo-Rama Synthetics started as a yarn spinning company and manufactured cotton yarns in its early days. During the 1990s, the company diversified into the production of synthetic spun yarns and polyester fibers.

Currently, Uzbekistan is the worlds sixth-largest cotton producer among 90 cotton-growing countries.

In Uzbekistan, about 3.5 million tons of raw cotton are produced annually. The country produces about 1.1-1.2 million tons of cotton fiber annually, which accounts for about 6 percent of global cotton production. About 50 percent of the cotton fiber produced is shipped for export.

One of the policy priorities of Uzbekistan is further development of its textile industry. Uzbekistan takes consistent steps to increase the volume of cotton fiber processing.

In the period 2010-2014, the textile industry of Uzbekistan received and spent foreign investments worth $785 million while 147 new textile enterprises with participation of investors from Germany, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, the USA, Turkey and other countries were commissioned. Export potential of these enterprises amounted to $670 millions.

---

Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzEarly Oct. 23, Barbara Jensen Teague tried to have an involuntary psychiatric hold placed on her 50-year-old son after noticing his increasingOn the night of May 28, 2017, a Tehachapi correctional officer opened fire at his wife and her lover from outside the bedroom window of the wiJoseph Luiz can be reached at 395-7368 or by email at jluiz@bakersfield.com. You can also follow him on Twitter @JLuiz_TBC.Ten years ago, no one was talking about Beaumont's food scene.

"When we ate out, we just went to the same chains and drive-thrus over and over," said local food blogger Elizabeth Tatum.

Other than a handful of established eateries, local dining options were spare and sparsely known.

With Beaumont Restaurant Week, which began an eight-day run yesterday, the city checks off one more box on a list of cultural accomplishments that are standard in larger cities.

> > PHOTOS: Were you 'Seen' at Restaurant Week Preview?

#EATBMT Restaurant Week, like restaurant weeks in Houston and Dallas, is an effort to expose locals to what the city has to offer and to entice out-of-town guests to stop and try some local fare rather than pulling off the freeway for chicken nuggets and fries.

Yolanda Bessard, real estate investor and home health care provider, said she liked seeing Beaumont on a par with other Texas cities.

"I think it's an awesome thing, and Beaumont needed something like this. It opens people up to the restaurants they were unaware of  the newer places they'd never heard of before," Bessard said.

Food for thought

Although many locals have touted the food in and around Beaumont for a while, only recently did a serious conversation about the local grub get under way.

The #EATBMT campaign launched by the Beaumont Convention & Visitors Bureau this February aims to instill pride in local cuisine.

Among its other benefits, the promotion encourages support of local establishments.

"Beaumont has never really gone after the culinary tourism," said Mallory Cross, with the Beaumont CVB. "Part of what we think sells Beaumont is not just the location, but the food  Tex-Mex, Cajun, seafood.... It's our culture and the restaurants here really take that to heart."

"Really, in these past five years you can see how much we've been growing in the food and art scene," said Tatum, 22.

"It's a great way for Beaumont to show that we can be cool, like bigger cities. You don't have to go to a chain every night. You can eat local, and there's live music and good food and you're supporting your community.

"I chose to stay in Beaumont after college because it has great potential, and good restaurants that aren't just your average chain," Tatum said.

John Swift, owner of Republic Chicken, wasn't born in Southeast Texas, but he visited often before moving to the area. He said when he would go elsewhere, the food didn't taste "right."

"There's something special about the food here, it's Cajun and Texan and good, homestyle food, and it's diverse." Swift said.

"You can go to two restaurants down the street from each other and order gumbo at both. They will taste radically different and both be killer and both be true, Southeast Texas cooking."

Whetting appetites

This week's event will give some lesser-known restaurants an opportunity to show the community what makes them special. Krystal Kennedy, restaurant manager at the MCM Elegante hotel, said they're excited to welcome customers from in and out of town to the hotel's three restaurants.

"It's promoting local business as well as bringing outside public into the hotel to show that we're open to everyone, not just guests," Kennedy said.

Frankie Randazzo, owner of Madison's on Dowlen, wanted to know how he could get involved. During discussions with the #EATBMT team, the idea of a throwback night caught everyone's attention.

Randazzo's restaurant Goodfella's Italian Grill and Steakhouse was a popular date-night spot until it closed in 2013. Restaurant Week seemed the perfect time to revive the restaurant, if only for a night.

"People are excited," Cross said. "The reservations came in really fast, and I know people are looking forward to it."

"We've been in the community for 14 years now and we constantly try to do stuff to help out the community, get local names out there, and we're really excited to be a part of this," said Jordon Buchholz, manager at Madison's.

Guillermo Abarca, co-owner and manager of Carmela's, said he didn't hesitate when asked to participate  for many of the same reasons.

"The main idea is to get all the local restaurants working together," Abarca said. "But I wanted to use this opportunity to show the customers that we really appreciate them."

Leslie Valentine, of Vidor, said she and her friends are always looking for new experiences like this.

"They're doing more around Southeast Texas, so we're excited about coming out for this," said Valentine, 26.

Valentine is among many who are enthusiastic about the area's cultural growth. Konnor Segura, a Port Neches native, is passionate about the region's nightlife and happy to see the area gaining well-deserved recognition.

"Beaumont is getting its own culture and great places to go and see live music and try new food. It's really great to see," said Segura, 22.

Nightly specials

As a part of Restaurant Week, many restaurants are hosting one-night-only events with special menus.

Brad Breaux, head chef at J. Wilson's, is excited about their Thursday night special, Breakfast for Dinner.

"We took some of our really popular items off our brunch menu and put them in with our dinner menu, plus we're offering some other items that we haven't served in a long time," Breaux said.

Bando's on 11th Street is opening its doors for the first time since Tropical Storm Harvey just for the fundraiser. They will offer lunch Monday through Friday, and on Wednesday night will serve a four-course dinner, including an intermezzo between the second and third courses and a beverage.

Some of the more expensive restaurants are offering date-night and brunch deals for couples wanting to try something higher-end at affordable prices.

Suga's Deep South Cuisine downtown is offering $10, $20 and two $40 options, all of which include an alcoholic beverage pairing.

Isa Ordou, 36, works for Del Papa Distributing Company, which partnered with Beaumont CVB and #EATBMT for the event. He said he wants people to understand that they don't have to travel for great experiences.

"It gets people to try something new," Ordu said. "People can see what Beaumont actually has to offer instead of thinking they have to go out of town for a great night."

Haley.Bruyn@BeaumontEnterprise.comCan't connect right now!

The state-run IRNA news agency says one of the two killed was a 70-year-old man who died of a heart attack during the earthquakes.

According to the US Geological Survey said the shallow quake struck about 88 kilometers west-northwest of Kermanshah on early Sunday.

Bazvand said a crisis center had been set up, with hospitals and relief organizations placed on alert.

There were reports that the quake was felt far across the border into Iraq.

Iran sits on major fault lines and is prone to near-daily earthquakes.

The earthquakes in Iran's Kermanshah province come as some still remain homeless after a major 7.3 magnitude natural disaster in November struck the same region, killing over 530 people. Reportedly 2 people died and over 100 injured in the natural disaster. The nearly entirely Kurdish province of Kermanshah is nestled in the Zagros Mountains along the border with Iraq.

President Hassan Rouhani said those responsible would be held to account. Some other sources put the magnitude of the quake at 5.9.

In 1990, a 7.4-magnitude quake in northern Iran killed 40,000 people, injured 300,000 and left half a million homeless, reducing dozens of towns and almost 2,000 villages to rubble.As rain poured down and water rose around their Groves home on Aug. 29, Phyllis and Max Odom sat in their living room, watching TV, fielding panicked calls from their children in what they thought was their dry home  until Phyllis stepped on the floor.

"I thought that I'd spilled something," she said. Then she realized the water inside was rising. She heard what sounded like an airboat passing by outside, she said, and thought "what the devil is going on?"

Outside, water had filled the neighborhood, making its way up the slope of their lawn, into the house.

"Max had his breathing machine," Phyllis said, and she didn't know how they would get out on their own.

Her son, who had been rescuing people in Houston, called and told her to "go outside with a flashlight and flash a towel and make a fool of yourself. So that's what I did."

She caught the attention of Travis Cloudy, who lives a few streets away and was rescuing the Odoms' neighbors from their flooding homes by boat.

> > RELATED: Mid-County man rescued others with Jeep, trailer

He launched from nearby Cleveland Avenue and spent the night running residents from their homes to dry ground, where rescuers with vehicles that could pass through high water were waiting to ferry them to shelters.

When Cloudy entered the Odoms' home, he found Max and Phyllis knee-deep in water. They had moved Max's two guitars, which he inherited from his father, off the floor to keep them dry, but they hadn't made any other preparations to leave.

"I was in la la land," overwhelmed by the situation, Phyllis said.

The couple, and Max's breathing machine, wrapped carefully in a trash bag to keep it dry, were carried out to a boat, waiting just outside the front door.

> > 2017: Residents of Port Arthur nursing home take legal action

As they were helped in, "I thought we were going to tip," she said. "I hollered."

Cloudy took them back to the launch point, where their daughter was waiting. They didn't return to the house for several days, and when they did, found most of their belongings submerged. The guitars, and pictures of their family, hung high on the wall, had been spared.

Cloudy walked through the same door earlier this month, shaking Max's hand and introducing himself to the couple, who hadn't known the name of the man who carried them out of their home.

"Long time no see," he said. "I'm Travis. It's been a long time since I've seen you, I was the one that helped get y'all out that night."

"Oh, golly, oh, I tell you," said Max, sitting in the same spot Cloudy had found him a year earlier.

They recalled the experience, filling in gaps in each others' memories of the night. "I'll never forget that night," Phyllis told him.

"I was glad to see a boat," she said. "I'm glad to have neighbors like you."

As Cloudy made runs through the neighborhood late into the night, with water rising higher and dangerous conditions forcing law enforcement to shut down their own rescue attempts, David Linthicum stayed inside his home.

"We'd be going to one house, and people would call out and stop us and ask us to take them," said Cloudy, who estimated that he got about 60 people out of the neighborhood that night.

Linthicum's family had evacuated around 10:30 p.m. but he refused to leave the Groves house. Outside, his boat was on a trailer in the driveway, but it was blocked in by the family's cars, with no way to get it out. He didn't need it, anyway, he thought  he wasn't leaving.

"I kind of thought it was a dream," said Linthicum, who had worked as a supervisor for Drainage District 7 for years.

Linthicum's family had been texting Cloudy, who said he would stop to check on him before he called it a night.

"Two miles down the road felt like the other side of the world," without a way to get to him, said his son, Brian.

Well after midnight, the lightning and rain outside "was getting bad," Cloudy said, and he knew checking on Linthicum would be his last stop.

"I tied up the boat to a tree," he said, gesturing outside Linthicum's now-repaired home, which shows few signs of the storm after months of rebuilding. "And I told him, you can't stay here."

They floated past house after house that was flooded, most of their occupants already gone, through the neighborhood that "looked like a soup bowl," Cloudy said. "It was like a lake with houses in the middle."

"I never would have dreamed this could happen," Linthicum said. "I went through a lot of hurricanes, and I'll take them any day compared to Harvey."David Trone, the wealthyPotomac Democrat who is running for Congress, announced Monday that he is recovering from cancer and that he will continue his campaign to succeed Rep. John Delaney, D-Md.

Trone, co-founder of Total Wine & More, is scheduled for surgery in mid-September to remove a kidney. He said he plans to return to the campaign trail quickly and is confident he will make a full recovery.

"Nothing will interfere with my being fully engaged as a candidate and as a member of Congress after the recovery," Trone said in a statement.

Trone spent $10 million of his own money on his way to winning the Democratic nomination in June, defeating seven opponents in a gerrymandered district that stretches from the Washington, D.C., suburbs to western Maryland.

He faces Republican Amie Hoeber in the Nov. 6 general election, a race that political forecasters expect him to win.

Trone revealed his diagnosis three days after a political blogger published photos of him with thinning hair and looking like he had lost weight. The post in A Miner Detail said Maryland Democratic officials were concerned about Trone's health.

In the statement, Trone, 62, said that on June 25 - the day before he won the Democraticprimary - lab tests "confirmed" that he had a "tumor in my urinary tract."

"Since then, I have undergone treatment at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore that has led to a substantial reduction in the size of the tumor," Trone said.

His doctors, he said, believe "my prognosis is positive."

In the Friday blog post by Ryan Miner, Trone campaign manager Jerid Kurtz, described the speculation about Trone's health as "gossip."A Twin Falls, Idaho-based ASC filed a lawsuit against Nashville, Tenn.-based AmSurg and Twin Falls NSC, complaining of "gross mismanagement" and alleging the companies did not support strategic planning after competitor Twin Falls-based St. Luke's Magic Valley Medical Center opened an outpatient surgery center, among other issues, according to a Magic Valley.com report.

Here are seven things to know:

1. In 1998, physicians opened Sawtooth Surgery Center and reported successful growth and development in the Twin Falls community for eight years before bringing on National Surgical Corp. to acquire 51 percent ownership in 2007. According to the report, the ASC remained largely successful until NSC sold a majority of its ownership in the center to AmSurg in 2011.

2. The lawsuit alleges Sawtooth's performance "deteriorated" between 2011 and 2017, when AmSurg and Twin Falls NSC were "superimposing generic corporate resources on a surgery center that was uniquely situated and uniquely affected by market conditions." Included in those market conditions was a local hospital, St. Luke's Magic Valley, opening a new outpatient surgery center where physicians began taking cases.

3. In the lawsuit, Sawtooth reported physician satisfaction dropped from 70 percent in 2012 to 25 percent in 2013, citing issues with scheduling, on-time starts, patient wait times and property management issues. The ASC also stated that physicians were dissatisfied with the building maintenance and a lack of support for strategic planning.

4. According to the lawsuit, patient charges significantly increased after AmSurg acquired a portion of the center, leading to patient complaints. Although the suit states AmSurg reduced the charges, Sawtooth alleges the company "looked to other means of squeezing profitability."

5. As a result of the center's challenges, the lawsuit states ophthalmologists considered leaving the center in 2013, and ultimately reduced case load and then left the center in 2017. Sawtooth alleges in the lawsuit that the management companies did not provide support for the center during discussions to maintain a relationship with the ophthalmology group.

6. In 2017, Twin Falls NSC did not renew the ASC's option to lease its property without notice.

7. The ASC has filed a lawsuit against Twin Falls ASC and AmSurg seeking more than $75,000 in damages.The husband of imprisoned charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has praised Jeremy Hunt for his handling of her case.

The British-Iranian charity worker was reunited with her family, including her four-year-old daughter, during the temporary release.

She returned to jail earlier, Richard Ratcliffe said in a statement.

She was travelling to Iran to introduce her young daughter Gabriella to her family when she was arrested, charged and convicted of espionage.

She denies the allegation and said she was on holiday in Iran to allow her daughter to spend time with relatives there. It was quite emotional for her, she wanted to show her to her friends and say, "Look, this is my mummy, and she's out of prison".

She is serving a five-year jail sentence for alleged sedition.

In relation to Hunt, Ratcliffe said: "He's been great in that sense: he's been clear and critical and he's said "listen, she's innocent and she shouldn't be in prison, her treatment has been appalling", and all the things that we've been asking the government to do". Her father has taken Nazanin back to prison,"he said in an email received by AFP news agency".

"I was surprised it happened, I was elated on Friday", he said.

She had only been given 10 minutes' notice that she was being released on Thursday, the campaign said. "It's very unusual for it to only be three days- every other prisoner I heard of, it's always extended".

Despite the plea, the prosecutor's office has stood firm on its stance and Mr Ratcliffe - who was refused a visa to visit his wife and daughter - has confirmed that his wife is now back in her jail cell.

Gabriella has been staying with family since Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who previously worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was detained at Imam Khomeini airport in April 2016.

Boris Johnson provoked consternation in November a year ago when he told MPs that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been "training journalists" in Iran.The Missouri Foundation for Health has awarded $743,470 in grants to 14 public health agencies in the southeastern portion of the state, according to DailyJournal Online.

Cape Girardeau (Mo.) County Public Health Center will take the lead on the five-year multicounty grant.

"There are not many county health departments in Missouri currently using electronic health records largely due to cost, not because it isn't needed," Park Hills, Mo.-based St. Francois County Health Center Director Jessica McKnight said. "We applied for the grant because as a group we were looking towards the future and there are many benefits that EHR can offer us; helping us work more efficiently and giving us access to more data that will help us address the needs of the community."

St. Francois County Health Center is already planning for the new system, as well as potential disruptions to care while staff get up to speed on the new tech. The health center will be open throughout the implementation process, but will not be providing any nursing services Sept. 18 to Sept. 20 while staff is in training.

The Missouri Foundation for Health serves as a healthcare resource for communities and nonprofits in southeastern Missouri. It is the largest organization of its kind in the state and one of the largest in the country.Magee (Miss.) General Hospital filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Aug. 24.

The hospital entered bankruptcy protection to reorganize its debt, and officials said the facility will remain open during the bankruptcy process.

"The hospital is not closing," Frank Wade, MD, a member of the hospital's board, told MageeNews.com. "We are reorganizing. This is not the end, but a beginning to a stronger future for Magee General Hospital."

In its bankruptcy petition, Magee General Hospital listed its assets as between $1 million and $10 million and listed its liabilities in the same range.

More articles on healthcare finance:

South Carolina hospital to close: 4 things to know

Michigan hospital blames 'aggressive, direct competitor' for financial troubles

Texas microhospital forced to close due to sharp decline in reimbursementThe LNP editorial board said last year four of five nonprofit hospitals in Lancaster County, Pa., had operating margins about twice as high as what is needed to maintain financial stability, according to the publication.

The editorial board cited a recent report by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council. The report states nonprofit hospitals generally need an operating surplus of 4 to 6 percent to remain financially stable, although every case is different.



The board referenced Lancaster (Pa.) General Hospital's surplus, which has been rising since 2012. During the five-year period ended June 30, Lancaster County's dominant hospital had half a billion dollars more than it needed to cover expenses, according to LNP. Last fiscal year, Lancaster General Hospital had a 13.6 percent surplus, or $143 million. Nearby Hershey (Pa.) Medical Center had an 11.1 percent surplus last year, or $166.7 million.

"Yes, nonprofit hospitals serve the community  that's a requirement of maintaining their nonprofit status, and they earn substantial federal, state and local tax breaks to do so. Unfortunately, the community gets a little poorer every time someone tears open a hospital bill," according to the board.



Lancaster General Hospital spokesperson John Lines told LNP the hospital plans to invest $100 million every year for the next five years into new technology and facilities. "Those investments aim to strengthen the health of our community, lower readmission rates and improve clinical outcomes. This often leads to further lowering the total cost of care for our patients," he told LNP.



More articles on healthcare finance:

450 hospitals at risk of potential closure, Morgan Stanley analysis finds

South Carolina hospital to close: 4 things to know

Michigan hospital blames 'aggressive, direct competitor' for financial troublesAmid financial woes, Huntsville (Texas) Memorial Hospital is actively searching for a health system partner to help finance various improvement projects, according to a KBTX news report.

The hospital disclosed Aug. 22 that it was behind millions of dollars in payments to vendors. As a result, it has made several expense cuts, including layoffs affecting administrative staff.

Interim hospital CEO Michael Morgan a financial partner is needed to help remodel or build a new hospital.

"Over the past several months we have been working closely with our advisors to consider all of our options, including partnering with potential healthcare business partners," Mr. Morgan told The Item. "A number of highly respected health systems have formally expressed interest and are exploring what a potential future with the Huntsville Memorial Hospital would look like. They are in the process of conducting standard due diligence work at this time."

So far, the hospital has received interest from 38 different healthcare organizations regarding a partnership.

Mr. Morgan emphasized that despite the financial troubles the hospital will not close, KBTX reports.More than 1,000 unionized healthcare workers and their supporters plan to protest Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente on Labor Day.

The workers are represented by the Service Employees International Union  United Healthcare Workers West. They intend to march to Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Downey, Calif., to protest plans they say would negatively affect patient care.

According to the union, those plans include outsourcing various employees, including 70 pharmacy warehouse workers in Downey, 34 couriers at a laboratory in North Hollywood, Calif., and 96 pharmacy warehouse workers in Oakland and Livermore, Calif. Union officials also claim Kaiser Permanente plans to move 742 jobs from call centers in Hollywood, Baldwin Park and Woodland Hills to other areas of California, as well as close a skilled nursing facility in Manteca, Calif., effective Oct. 31.

"Kaiser Permanente is raking in money and yet it's acting like it has no choice but to outsource employees and relocate others to areas where they would be paid far less," Steve Allman, a 16-year Kaiser Permanente employee in Downey, said in a prepared statement. "Families like mine will have the legs cut out from under us and patients will suffer."

In a statement to Becker's, John Nelson, vice president of communications at Kaiser Permanente, noted the planned informational picketing is not a walkout, and said care delivery and operations will not be affected. He also expressed disappointment in the union's claims.

"The truth is Kaiser Permanente is growing and adding jobs. As one of the largest private employers in California with more than 149,000 employees and 16,000 physicians, we have added more than 13,000 jobs in the state since 2015. We have more than 12,000 open staff positions and will continue to add many kinds of jobs, including blue collar jobs. The number of our employees represented by SEIU-UHW has grown by more than 8,000 over the same period," he wrote.

"We are disappointed that the current leadership of SEIU-UHW has chosen to mischaracterize Kaiser Permanente's strong commitment to labor and to pursue an adversarial, destructive approach."

More articles on human capital and risk:

Vermont nurses lead negotiator quits talks, says union leaders forced her out

Nurses pressure Vermont medical center amid budget process

Pennsylvania hospital workers picket, say Tower Health wants to slash their benefitsProsecutors say two people who lived in a New Mexico compound that trained children to carry out mass shootings intended to attack Atlanta-based Grady Memorial Hospital, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

Here are six things to know:

1. Details about the planned attack surfaced as prosecutors moved to revoke the suspects' bonds. The case, infused with allegations of abuse and terrorism, is brought against five adults who lived with 11 starving children at a New Mexico compound.

2. Several children who had been held captive at the compound told prosecutors that two individuals, Jany Leveille and her partner Siraj Wahhaj, were working on plans to attack the hospital, among other "corrupt" institutions in Atlanta.

3. Leveille allegedly complained about the treatment she and her mother had received at the hospital and planned to "shoot or otherwise attack the nonbeliever," according to CNN. There were no details released about the treatment the two women received.

4. Leveille and Mr. Wahhaj have been charged with child abuse resulting in death and conspiracy to commit child abuse after the body of 3-year-old Abdul Ghani Wahhaj was found in the compound Aug. 6. The couple and the three other adults living on the compound Hujrah Wahhaj, Subhannah Wahhaj, and Lucas Morten have been charged with 11 felony counts of child abuse, according to CNN.

5. Also included in the prosecutor's motion to revoke the suspects' bonds was a document they found at the compound titled, "Phases of a Terrorist Attack. " The handwritten document included "instructions for 'the one-time terrorist'; instructions on the use of a 'choke point'; a location 'called the ideal attack site'; the 'ability to defend the safe haven,'; the 'ability to escape-perimeter rings'; and 'sniper position detection procedure,'" according to a court filing obtained by

6. Leveille, and possibly other defendants, may suffer from delusions, and they have a history of harming children, the AJC reported.Duluth, Minn.-based Chris Jensen Health and Rehabilitation Center was cited for neglect after Minnesota investigators found four nurses did not attempt resuscitation on an unresponsive patient who ultimately died, according to the StarTribune.

The 170-bed nursing home has a history of regulatory violations and did not have a system in place to ensure a patient's medical wishes were followed when found without a pulse or not breathing, according to the findings of a Minnesota Department of Health investigation released Aug. 22.

The deceased patient had a physician orders for life sustaining treatment for CPR from their physician. Despite this order, four nurses failed to provide basic life support after finding the person unresponsive, according to the investigation. One nurse assumed the patient did not have a CPR request. Another nurse knew the patient needed resuscitation, but felt it was too late to start emergency care, while a third nurse was too upset to perform CPR, investigators said. A nurse practitioner told investigators she gave an order to not administer CPR, after realizing the patient was dead.

The health department said the nurses' failure posed a health risk to the 45 other patients at the facility who indicated they'd like to receive CPR, if necessary. To correct the violation, the facility reeducated all its nurses on CPR and emergency response protocols by conducting mock emergency drills. The facility also reviewed every resident's medical records to ensure each patient has a physician's order for lifesaving treatment.

Amy Porter, executive director of Chris Jensen Health and Rehabilitation Center, declined StarTribune's request for comment on the patient death, but shared the following written statement with the publication:

"At all times, the health, safety and privacy of our residents and staff are our first priority," Ms. Porter said.

More articles on post-acute care:Zimmer Biomet received a warning letter from the FDA Aug. 24 concerning its Warsaw, Ind.-based North Campus manufacturing facility, according to Street Insider.

Here are six things to know:

1. The FDA previously inspected the Zimmer Biomet's Warsaw North Campus in 2016 and issued a Form 483 with inspection observations and conclusions. The FDA then conducted a re-inspection in April and issued a second Form 483. The Aug. 24 warning letter outlines the steps Zimmer Biomet has taken to address the FDA's concerns, but it also notes violations that require action or explanation.

2. Zimmer Biomet previously provided the FDA with a written response to corrective actions and plans to provide regular updates on its quality remediation plan at the plant. The company will also respond to the most recent warning letter within 15 days and expects to schedule a proposed regulatory meeting after the response to the most recent letter is submitted.

3. The warning letter didn't restrict production or shipment of products from the facility. The company is also able to keep products from the plant on the market place and can continue to seek FDA 510(k) clearances for its products.

4. However, the warning letter does state that certificates to foreign government requests will not be granted before the violations are corrected, and it won't grant premarket approvals for Class III devices for applications related to the quality system regulation violations.

5. The company believes all concerns in the warning letter "can be resolved without material impact" to its financial results. "We cannot, however, give any assurances that the FDA will be satisfied with our response to the warning letter or as to the expected date of the resolution of the matters included in the warning letter."

6. The FDA could take additional regulatory action that would potentially restrict manufacturing, marketing and selling products in the future until issues cited in the warning letter are resolved.

During its second quarter conference call, Zimmer Biomet CEO Bryan Hanson addressed the FDA's 483 observations from its re-inspection in April. At the time, the facility continued to manufacture its full range of products. "At Zimmer Biomet, patient safety is our first and guiding priority, completing our quality remediation to the highest standards is of utmost importance and we take it very seriously," he said. "However, fixing these issues in the right way takes time. I remain confident in the people and the processes we have in place and I can assure you that we will continue to appropriately resource and staff this important work and we will keep the FDA updated on our progress."A federal judge rejected The Seattle Times' bid to dismiss defamation claims brought by Johnny Delashaw, MD, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.

Here are seven things to know:

1. Dr. Delashaw sued the newspaper April 11. He accused the Times of falsely reporting in its 2017 Quantity of Care series that he endangered patients by increasing surgical volume and rushing through procedures at the Swedish Neuroscience Institute in Seattle.

2. The newspaper called for the dismissal of eight of Dr. Delashaw's defamation claims, arguing the allegations did not meet the standard necessary to sue a news organization protected by the First Amendment. U.S. District Judge James Robart rejected the bid for dismissal.

3. The judge also rejected a motion to dismiss defamation claims against The Seattle Times' co-defendant Charles Cobbs, MD. Dr. Cobbs is the director of Swedish Neuroscience Institute's Ivy Center for Advanced Brain Tumor Treatment. Dr. Delashaw claimed that Dr. Cobbs conspired to destroy Dr. Delashaw's reputation.

4. The judge dismissed Dr. Delashaw's allegation that The Seattle Times violated Washington State's Consumer Protection Act by engaging in unfair business practices.

5. Dr. Delashaw resigned from his position as chair of the Swedish Neuroscience Institute March 1, after the newspaper published its Quantity of Care series.

6. The Washington Medical Commission suspended Dr. Delashaw's medical license in May 2017, attributing its decision to "an immediate threat to the public health and safety," according to The Seattle Times report.

7. The Washington Medical Commission reinstated Dr. Delashaw's license under three years of oversight. He is unable to be employed in a medical leadership position, under the commission's stipulations.Tamil Nadu Fisheries Minister D Jayakumar visited Japan this weekend to attend the Japan International Seafood and Technology Expo. During his visit, Jayakumar went to the safari park in Fuji.

The senior minister made a stop at the park and fondled a lion cub. He immediately took time to pen a small poem and sent it along with the photo to journalists on Whatsapp. The photo sported Jayakumar wearing the typical AIDMK attire - a white shirt and a white dhoti holding the cub with a smile on his face.

The Tamil poem he wrote can roughly be translated to, "When the lion cub saw a gallant Tamil lion from brave Tamil Nadu, he thought it was his father and jumped and sat on me.Anthony Maslin and Rin Norris yesterday thanked Ms Bishop for "everything she has done for us", telling The West Australian the former foreign minister had held Russian Federation to account for their involvement in the "catastrophic tragedy" of MH17.

"We will focus on keeping our economy strong, keeping Australians safe, and keeping Australians together".

His new Cabinet includes Christopher Pyne as the new defense minister and Dutton returning as minister of home affairs.

Dutton had assumed the inaugural role of minister for Home Affairs after former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull previous year created the superministry that combined the functions of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), Australian Federal Police (AFP), Border Force, Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), Austrac, and the office of transport security. In Malcolm Turnbull's cabinet, Fletcher was the Urban Infrastructure Minister.

Turnbull then relinquished his prime ministership on Friday after a second leadership spill that saw former Treasurer Morrison defeat Dutton 45-40 in a party vote and be sworn in as Australia's 30th prime minister on Friday night.

Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce was not given a portfolio but has been appointed Special Envoy for Drought Assistance and Recovery while Tony Abbott was snubbed altogether and will remain on the backbench.

The 62-year-old Bishop had had been deputy leader of the ruling party since 2007 and failed to become prime minister in Friday's leadership ballot.

Ms Bishop contested last Friday's vote but was eliminated in the first round, with Mr Morrison then emerging as a surprise compromise victor over Mr Peter Dutton, Mr Turnbull's conservative challenger who brought the leadership crisis to a head earlier in the week.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke to Mr Morrison yesterday afternoon.

Finance minister Mathias Cormann said the result was "not surprising" but the government was now "back to work".

Bishop, a rare female voice in the Australian government, had put her hand up to be one of three candidates to replace Turnbull.

The factional truce comes two days after Turnbull announced he would resign and quit Parliament following weeks of destabilising campaigning by the conservative wing of the Liberal Party. As such, Morrison and his backers rallied their colleagues to vote for him over Bishop in the first round. Both saw off Bishop, who secured the support of 11 MPs in the first round of voting.A Belfast herd management software firm has been bought by an Australian rival as part of an 8m deal.

FarmWizard, set up by Co Armagh entrepreneur Terry Canning in 2004, has been snapped up by AgriWebb.

The deal comes as Farmwizard owner Wheatsheaf Group  part of the empire of the Duke of Westminster  bought a minority stake in AgriWebb for 8m.

AgriWebb is the Australian market leader in livestock farm management software.

The deal includes AgriWebbs acquisition of FarmWizard, which provides livestock and dairy software.

FarmWizard has been part of Wheatsheaf since 2015  and is understood to be regarded as fundamental to the growth of the combined businesses.

Mr Canning, FarmWizard chief executive and founder, said: Over the last 14 years, we have built a platform that allows both farmers and processors to digitise their business and generate production efficiencies.

With this deal, our customers will enjoy improved support and product enhancements from the AgriWebb platform.

FarmWizard has nine members of staff in Belfast.

AgriWebb said that with the digitisation of agriculture on the rise, the combination of AgriWebb and FarmWizard farm management products would solve both the ongoing needs of livestock producers and deliver food provenance for end-to-end supply chain enterprises.

Justin Webb, co-founder of AgriWebb, said: AgriWebbs mission is to enable the agriculture sector to enhance its offering through digital technologies.

Farming in the UK represents a significant part of the economy, providing 61% of the raw materials for the wider UK agri-food industry, contributing 10bn to the economy and employing over half a million people.

Wheatsheaf Group is a leading global investor and developer of innovative food and agri-tech firms.A Northern Ireland agri-tech company is heading to Africa alongside Prime Minister Theresa May on her first official visit to the continent.

Devenish, based in Belfast, develops sustainable and innovative animal nutrition products and solutions for the feed industry, the food industry and for human health, trading in over 40 countries around the world.

Its group CEO is among 29 business leaders from across the UK heading to Africa. They will visit South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya, meeting with leading businesses, policy makers and entrepreneurs, in the hope of building new investment, trading and export ties between the UK and these emerging markets.

Mrs May said: "Devenish is an excellent example of the kind of forward-thinking company which is driving economic growth and prosperity both here in the UK and overseas. I am pleased that they are joining me on this visit to Africa, where their strengths in innovation and technology are representative of the unique offer which the UK holds for growing markets across the continent."

Richard Kennedy of Devenish said: "I am delighted to join the Prime Minister's visit to Africa, a continent which represents significant opportunity for Devenish. We already have a presence in Africa which we are focused on growing, organically and through acquisition.

"It is important for us as both exporters and potential investors to build strong relations on the ground and this trade mission is a valuable opportunity to do so.

"For Devenish, when moving into a new market, it is crucial that we have sustainable agricultural systems in place which are appropriate to the region from the very start.

"This trade mission will allow us to forge significant relations that will help us in our future endeavours."

The visit will allow Devenish to build on its relationships with partners in Africa and explore further opportunities for growth, delivering sustainable solutions for farming businesses overseas.

During the trip, the Prime Minister will set out how new partnerships between the UK and Africa can add value to the UK economy, create new market opportunities for British businesses, and boost jobs and prosperity for the benefit of all.

In a separate development, Devenish has revealed how landmark funding from the European Investment Bank (EIB) was almost scuppered by Brexit.

The firm is in talks to acquire at least seven companies in Europe, Africa, Asia, the US, the UK and Central America after securing 118m (107m) in long-term funding, comprised of 40m (36m) from the EIB, with commitments from Ulster Bank and Danske Bank.

The deal was the first support for the agri-business sector on the island of Ireland under the Investment Plan for Europe, in which the European Commission and EIB are strategic partners.

Two years ago Devenish unveiled a new Omega 3-enriched chicken which it brought to market with Moy Park.

The latest investment will be used to develop a purpose-built Global Innovation Centre in Dowth, Co Meath.

Devenish aims to boost its turnover by more than 100m to 315m and add around 100 jobs to its current 450-strong international workforce by 2021. Devenish, which is directing much of its R&D in the US, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, revealed how Brexit almost scuppered the EIB deal.

Mr Kennedy said: "It faltered and stuttered around Brexit, because of the EIB being a European bank and because of the uncertainty around Brexit.

"The deal took a bit longer than expected. That was to ensure we were able to mitigate all the risks and to have a strategy in place to deal with any eventualities around a hard Brexit and a soft Brexit.

"The patient equity the EIB put in will go across the UK and Ireland. We are not going to allow Brexit to take those opportunities away."

In 2017 Devenish bought a 50% stake in Yem-Vit, a Turkish maker of poultry, ruminant and aquaculture products. Now it's in talks to buy as many as seven companies. Mr Kennedy said: "They are small acquisitions - bolt-ons that will give us enriched chicken."The former Fermanagh billionaire Sean Quinn claims he is "not losing any sleep" over his ambitions to buy back the business empire he founded and spectacularly lost after gambling on Anglo Irish Bank's share price.

"If they want to just wreck it, so be it, on their head it is.

"If they want me to save it, I can do that. I have the raw materials, the support of the staff, the support of the community, and the support of everybody to do it, and the ability and the knowledge and the know-how to do it," he said.

"I am not losing sleep over it. It is entirely up to them".

Quinn emerged in public last Tuesday, for the first time in years, to allege to a crowd of local supporters that he was "knifed in the back" by the new owners of his former empire who have turned around the business to deliver a 200m turnover and a 59% increase in profits.

Quinn said he was invited to address the meeting of supporters in the Border town of Ballyconnell, Co Cavan.

"They asked me to go public over the last number of years which I refused to do," he said.

But he thought it "would only be right to fill in the Quinn supporters on what the position was, they were reading in the paper about how well the company was doing and all this sort of craic".

He added: "I went and I explained things as I saw them and that was it."

He claimed that while it was true sales and employment had increased at his former concrete and plastics business, it had run out of raw materials "because nobody in the local community are going to sell to what they would consider as traitors and what I would consider as traitors".

Once Ireland's richest man, Quinn was ousted from his businesses over his 2bn debt, racked up buying shares in the former Anglo Irish Bank. He was jailed for contempt of court and declared bankrupt.

An Irish consortium, backed by US investors, bought back part of his businesses, with Quinn's blessing, and hired him as a consultant on 500,000 a year.

Quinn left that role in 2016, claiming it was by "mutual consent" but told the Sunday Independent last week that he was "sacked in writing".

Quinn's public address last Tuesday marks a ratcheting up of tensions in the area in recent months. A new Facebook page, Sean Quinn community, was launched in April by a group claiming to include current and former employees. A previous Facebook page was shut down by the High Court.

Separately, it has been learned that Quinn Industrial Holdings has recorded 19 separate incidents since taking over the business in December 2014. These include an alleged physical assault on a relative of one of the group's senior management in May, while threatening and hostile signs have been erected in the area.

Sean Quinn has consistently condemned threats and intimidation against his former business, and repeated this weekend that he has had no hand, act or part in any campaign.

Having told the public meeting last week he wanted to buy back the business, Quinn told the Sunday Independent it was "not the top of our agenda". He added: "Top of our agenda is winning the court case next year and growing Quinn Bet," referring to the online betting firm he launched last year and which is run by his family.

He said the business has left the family "in a much more stable position, mind wise and money wise".

A legal action by Quinn wife's Patricia and her children, denying liability for the 2.3bn debt, is due in the Dublin High Court in January. The family are also being pursued over the alleged asset stripping by Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, Anglo's successor.

As for his troubles of the past years, Quinn said: "Let's put it this way. Whatever I have to do in life, I just get on with it and do it. So if you are asking me was it a very worrying time? I slept every night from the time they took it [the business] off me eight years ago."

Quinn Industrial Holdings was invited but did not attend the meeting in Ballyconnell.

A statement said the representations of the company's prospects at the meeting were "inaccurate".

"Quinn Industrial Holdings DAC reported a 59% increase in pre-tax profits last year, and this year has seen a continuation of the trend of increased turnover, profits, investment and employment. Due to the hard work of the company's 830 staff, the company's long-term future is bright."A still from the video where Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests that after Brexit, people crossing the Irish border should be subject to inspections, just like during The Troubles

The DUP has reiterated that it will not support checkpoints on the border after arch-Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested people crossing the frontier could be inspected as they had been during the Troubles.

The Tory MPs comment have been branded pig ignorant by the SDLP and ill-informed by Irish Tanaiste Simon Coveney after they surfaced in a video posted on Twitter.

In the clip Mr Rees-Mogg is shown at a town hall-style discussion on Brexit talking about the border, which has proved one of the most difficult parts of the Brexit negotiations with Brussels to solve. Both sides have ruled out a hard border.

In the clip Mr Rees-Mogg says that the UK could continue with historic arrangements to avoid a loophole that would allow people to enter the country. He added: There would be our ability, as we had during the Troubles, to have people inspected.

Its not a border that everyone has to go through every day. But of course for security reasons during the Troubles, we kept a very close eye on the border to try and stop gun-running and things like that.

Last night, it emerged that the controversial remarks had been filmed at an EU debate at the University of Sussex in April 2016. However, that didnt stop them going viral.

While he didnt openly criticise Mr Rees-Mogg, DUP MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson disagreed with the need for Troubles-style border arrangements.

Were very clear that what we want is a free trade agreement between the UK and the European Union, and of course that would mean the free movement of people, and it would also mean facilities for the movement of goods across the border without the need for new infrastructure to be put in place.

The UK has made clear that whatever the outcome of these negotiations, they do not intend to put checkpoints on the border. That is a position which we support.

The first element agreed between the EU and the UK was the continuation of the common travel area between the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic.

Therefore, even in a no deal scenario, we believe that the common travel area would continue to operate, and we would not see the need for people to be stopped.

Mr Coveney highlighted the clip on Twitter, saying: Its hard to believe that a senior politician is so ill-informed about Ireland and the politics of the #Brexit Irish border issue that he could make comments like these.

We have left the Troubles behind us, through the sincere efforts of many, and we intend on keeping it that way.

SDLP Brexit spokeswoman Claire Hanna MLA said the comments were pig ignorant and a disturbing warning about the aspirations of extreme Brexiteers.

Ms Hanna said: It is offensive that a senior politician would use the Troubles as a benchmark for solving the border issue. This unguarded answer exposes how empty all the honeyed phrases about not returning to the borders of the past over the last two years really are.Nigel Farage has come under fire for comments he made about Michel Barnier in a newspaper interview

Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has come under attack from Northern Ireland politicians for saying that the European Union's chief negotiator "would like the IRA to become active again".

In an interview given to The Times newspaper on Saturday, Mr Farage also accused Michel Barnier of "almost encouraging republican terrorism".

The comments have outraged a number of political representatives here just over a week before Parliament returns from summer recess.

"Full marks to Barnier," Mr Farage said.

"He's terrified the British establishment into being prepared to surrender almost everything."

He added that Mr Barnier, the EU's Brexit negotiator, "would like the IRA to become active again" and had created the idea of "a hard border and soldiers with rifles".

The Alliance Party's deputy leader Stephen Farry labelled Mr Farage's comments as "stupid".

"They illustrate an increased desperation as Brexit unsurprisingly is not going as planned," he said. "The Irish border is not some minor complication but central to the lives of many.

"The Barnier team and wider European Union continues to show much greater understanding than the Brexit ideologues [of] what is necessary to protect the Good Friday Agreement."

The SDLP's Brexit spokesperson and South Belfast MLA Claire Hanna said Mr Farage was "clueless" when it came to the border issue.

"Nigel Farage is an utterly reckless person who says extreme things to attract attention with no regard to their consequences.

"He's completely clueless about the dynamics and complexity of the border and regulation issues. This is part of extreme Brexiteers' project blame and trying to apportion blame and failure on everybody but themselves," she added.

Mr Farage also said that Prime Minister Theresa May had softened her approach to Brexit when the government met at Chequers in July.

TUV leader Jim Allister agreed with Mr Farage's sentiments, while also blaming the EU for "a deliberate distortion" between what a customs and a security border would mean.

"Since the EU has been malevolently hyping the border issue throughout the negotiations with much nonsense propagated about a threat to peace, I can fully understand Nigel Farage's sentiment," he said, adding that the "spectre of violence feeds the EU's propaganda".

A spokesperson for Mr Barnier said no comment would be made by him or a representative.Northern Ireland could soon be the only part of the UK where electric shock collars for dogs and cats are not banned.

Used as training devices, the remote control collars can trigger an electric pulse of varying strength or spray noxious chemicals at the animal.

Environment Secretary Michael Gove is this week expected to announce the move to prohibit their sale, the Mail on Sunday has reported.

The newspaper said the Environment Secretary has branded the collars "punitive devices" which "can cause harm and suffering, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to our pets".

Use of the collars has been banned in Wales, and earlier this year Scotland began moves towards prohibiting dog owners from using them.

The Government can ban the devices in England, and potentially here.

However, it has deliberately avoided introducing legislation affecting Northern Ireland while Stormont is not functioning, meaning it could be the only part of the UK where the practice can continue.

The devices cause dogs to yelp, squeal, crouch and exhibit physiological signs of distress, the Dogs Trust has previously said.

And despite being sold to improve the way dogs behave, they can actually worsen an animal's behaviour, the charity stressed.

Polling for the Dogs Trust earlier this year showed almost a third of people (31%) wrongly thought the collars, which can continuously shock a dog for 11 seconds, were already banned.Belfast Trust has confirmed it has stopped taking new admissions at the scandal hit Muckamore Abbey Hospital.

Last week the Belfast branch of public sector union NIPSA said it had been informed by its members that the hospital, which provides inpatient facilities for vulnerable individuals with learning difficulties and mental health problems, had stopped admitting patients.

Read More

A Belfast Trust spokesperson initially told the Belfast Telegraph that "no decision" had been taken to stop admissions.

However, on Monday a spokesperson said: "The trust has taken steps to cease or significantly restrict unplanned admissions to Muckamore Abbey Hospital. Where an admission is considered unavoidable systems will be in place to ensure all alternative options are fully explored.

"This decision will be kept under continuous review ."

An investigation at Muckamore Abbey Hospital is under way after allegations of abuse by staff against vulnerable patients.

Since November 2017, 13 members of staff have been suspended after allegations of ill-treatment were made.There has been considerable debate within Saudi Arabia about whether the sale was warranted and about whether selling off even a small stake of the kingdom's crown jewel was too risky.

The plan to float around 5 per cent of Aramco - expected to be the world's largest stock sale - forms the cornerstone of a reform programme envisaged by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to wean the economy off its reliance on oil.

The decision to shelve the IPO raises doubts about the management of the process as well as the broader reform agenda, sapping the momentum generated by Prince Mohammed's dramatic 2030 Vision announcement in 2016 that helped propel him to power in the world's top oil exporter. Though Prime Minister Imran Khan is managing a very hectic domestic schedule, at an appropriate time he should visit these countries for productive and meaningful interaction.

Industry sources told Reuters this week that both the worldwide and domestic legs of the IPO had been postponed indefinitely.

In its report, the International Monetary Fund said Saudi economic growth will pick up as government spending rises on the back of an increase in oil prices.

Khalid al-Falih, the energy minister and chairman of Saudi Aramco, denied that the deal had been cancelled but declined to say when it would take place.

But Aramco executives have repeatedly cited unfavourable market conditions to push back the IPO, earlier scheduled for this year, with many observers sceptical whether the listing will happen at all.

Indeed, proceeding with the outlines of the vast Saudi Vision 2030 plan required a cash flow for investment in education, infrastructure and trade that only a financial diversification from the singular oil assets in Saudi Arabia could provide. Its estimated valuation was roughly $2 trillion, though some investors had been skeptical of that.

"The Aramco IPO was supposed to be an example of a new global level of transparency". It also predicted a strengthening of Riyadh's state finances because of higher oil and non-oil revenues. That money will go into the coffers of the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund, which owns a 70pc stake in Sabic.

Doubt has surrounded the initial public offering (IPO) for months.

The IMF did not factor in an Aramco listing in its growth forecast for the kingdom this year or last "due to continued uncertainty" over the plans, so any delay would not have an impact its projections, Mr Callen said as the IMF published its annual review of the Saudi economy.

READ: Saudi Aramco raising billions to buy Sabic: Smart but will it work?SDLP deputy leader Nichola Mallon says she has been contacted by a number of Belfast Trust staff who have been underpaid due to a technical error.

Mrs Mallon called on the Belfast Trust to ensure immediate action was taken to pay staff their full wages in the coming days, saying the amount unpaid came to several hundred pounds for a number of workers.

In a statement the Belfast Trust has said it was made aware of the issue on Monday and it was committed to making sure staff received the correct wages.

"These workers have direct debits and bills to pay and if this is not rectified as a matter of urgency they will be pushed into debt," she said.

This is the latest in a litany of wage blunders suffered by healthcare workers since this new pay system, which cost some 15m, was implemented."

The North Belfast MLA pointed to the Business Services Organisation (BSO), a section of the Northern Ireland health care service responsible for payroll, as the possible root of the problem.

The BSO took over the processing of healthcare salaries in 2014.

There have been previous issues with its systems, and in 2016 a payroll glitch affected the pay packets of almost 2,500 staff.

I have been in contact with the Chief Executive of the Belfast Trust to ask for assurances that all staff members will receive their correct wages immediately," Mrs Mallon added.

"I understand the Belfast Trust HR Director is to make contact with BSO first thing tomorrow morning to get to the bottom of the issue and urgently resolve the matter. Ive asked for an update from the HR Director tomorrow [Tuesday] after these discussions.

In a statement, a Belfast Trust spokeswoman said: "This was brought to the attention of Belfast Trust today [Monday]. We are committed to ensuring staff receive their correct pay.

"We will work with BSO colleagues as a matter of urgency to address this concerning matter for all staff affected."Two young woman escaped serious injury on Saturday night after being attacked outside a rave in north Belfast by a bare-chested machete-wielding man who had been shot just minutes earlier.

The women, understood to be in their 20s, were injured by the attacker shortly after 10.30pm as they enjoyed the Ardoyne and Marrowbone Community Festival dance event.

SDLP councillor Paul McCusker, a member of the festival committee, witnessed the mayhem after he rushing outside the venue at Holy Cross Boys' Primary School following the sound of gunfire.

"All of a sudden this man appeared with a machete and he was swinging it all over the place," he said.

"It was shocking, this is a weapon which we know is capable of cutting people's heads off.

"People were squealing in terror because he was completely out of control. The police were told: 'Get here quick, he's going to kill someone'."

He said one woman, who required treatment for a laceration on her leg, was told that the blade missed a major artery by a centimetre.

"We are lucky that no one was killed," he added.

It is understood the other young woman sustained cuts to her arm before local community workers disarmed the attacker.

He is belived to have later presented himself at the Mater Hospital.

"That's when we found out that he'd been shot," Mr McCusker said.

"This person wasn't attending the event, but unfortunately it happened on the periphery."

A large police presence remained in the area until early yesterday and a PSNI Land Rover was stationed outside the hospital where the man was treated for a gunshot wound to his calf. He also sustained bruising to his face.

Detective Sergeant Danielle Moffett described the circumstances surrounding the shooting as a "particularly concerning example of how criminal groups seek to control communities through fear and violence".

When asked if police could confirm the victim of the shooting was the same man behind the machete attack, the PSNI said "enquiries are ongoing".

In a separate incident, another male who had been thrown out of the music event later returned with two knives, which were confiscated.

It is the first time that a dance event has been included in the line-up of the 10-day festival, which received funding from The Executive Office's Urban Villages initiative.

"The entire community is angry," Mr McCusker said.

"The committee met with residents who had expressed concern about hosting a club night, and an agreement was reached.

"Now it has been thrown back in our faces it is unlikely this particular event will be hosted again. It is sad that certain individuals have ruined it for everyone."

The committee said no public money was used for the dance event, which was organised by local DJs and only facilitated by festival organisers.

The committee also expressed "disgust and disappointment" that those bent on causing trouble had tarnished the ArdBoneFest, which concluded last night. It said: "Those involved in these incidents do not represent anyone and must be held accountable for their actions."

The committee is to review how events are delivered in the future.

Sinn Fein councillor Ryan Murphy condemned the attacks, which could have had "disastrous consequences", and urged anyone with information to contact police.Kurtis Johnston is accused of attacking the woman in east Belfast.

A man allegedly poked his ex-partner in the eye with her keys and threatened to burn her mother out, a court heard today.

Kurtis Johnston, 22, is accused of attacking the woman in east Belfast on Saturday as she left home with their 11-month-old daughter.

Police also claimed he forced his way into the property, wrecking furniture, and stole more than 300 worth of tanning products in two earlier incidents.

Johnston, of Model Avenue in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, appeared before Belfast Magistrates' Court on charges of common assault, theft of keys and threats to damage property.

He faces further counts of burglary, criminal damage, and shoplifting.

Opposing bail, a police officer said Johnston allegedly confronted his ex-partner while she was on the Castlereagh Road with the child.

It was claimed that he became angry when she refused to accompany him, lifting keys from the pram and poking the woman in the eye.

According to the prosecution case Johnston then grabbed her by the neck, pulled her up an alleyway and slapped her face, and said he would "give her something to cry about".

The officer alleged: "He told her he would burn her mum out of the house."

Separate charge sheets relates to claims he pushed his way into the woman's home on August 6, broke a mirror, ripped a door off a wardrobe and threw a television onto the ground.

He is also accused of stealing tanning goods valued at in excess of 300 from a Boots store in Belfast on August 3.

Defence counsel argued Johnston's address in Carrickfergus is well away from the alleged victim.

But refusing bail, District Judge Harry McKibbin said: "I can't put any conditions that would satisfy me this lady can be kept safe from this man."

He remanded Johnston in custody to appear again by video-link on September 6John McCluskey outside Roslea surgery, which he is campaigning to reopen

Residents in a border village have called for their local GP surgery to reopen after more than a year of 30-mile round trips to see a doctor.

The practice in Roslea, Co Fermanagh, shut in April 2017, leaving locals without a GP for the first time in 170 years.

Its closure was another symptom of the demise of the small doctors' practice model within the county due to a surge of retirements and an inability to recruit young doctors to replace them.

A group of local GPs stepped in to fill the void, but only for two months.

This skeleton service saw the community provided with telephone advice in the mornings. A doctor was only on hand in the afternoons to see patients and sign prescriptions.

Since then Roslea villagers have been left with no alternative but to make a round trip of 30 miles to visit a GP in Lisnaskea, and patience is at breaking point.

A patient transport service was set up in May 2017 by the Health and Social Care Board to ferry patients to their appointments.

As there was no demand for the bus, however, it was replaced with a voluntary car service, which has also had little or no uptake.

But the Maple Group Practice in Lisnaskea, Fermanagh's second largest town, is bursting at the seams and now has over 15,000 patients on its books.

As well as Roslea patients, others have joined from nearby Newtownbutler, and another former surgery in Lisnaskea, which amalgamated with Maple due to GP retirements.

A new healthcare hub for Lisnaskea has been in the pipeline for a decade but has been delayed for various reasons, most recently the collapse of the Stormont Assembly.

Plans for the new surgery were first announced by the then Health Minister Michael McGimpsey in 2008. The Department of Health said: "The department's intention is to progress the development as quickly as possible once a suitable site has been made available to us."

With the Maple Surgery now critically oversubscribed, patients have complained of long waiting times for appointments, jammed telephone lines and a lack of parking.

Hugh Pat Clerkin (82) is a Roslea native who now has to travel 18 miles each way to attend his doctor in Lisnaskea. he said: "I had open heart surgery back in 1992 followed by a heart attack so I still have to see my GP twice a week to have blood checks.

"My wife and I are both in our 80s so it is not easy getting down to Lisnaskea early in the morning, because we are not up to that anymore.

"We should be catered for in our own area."

John McCluskey (74) is among those campaigning to get the Roslea surgery reopened and believes the community deserves and needs a GP of its own.

"We need a surgery here full-time and we won't stop campaigning until it's reinstated," he said.

"Our elderly people are suffering and that's not right in this day and age.

"People are entitled to a better service than they are currently receiving.

"Once you get to see the doctor they are fine, but getting to see them is nearly impossible.

"You could wait for an hour or two for the phone to be answered to get an appointment in the Maple clinic.

"I'm one of a number of patients who end up getting into the car and driving to Lisnaskea to try and get one in person."

Pensioner Daphne D'Arcy's late father Dr Frank was the local GP in Roslea for many years.

"No matter what your medical need, even if it's only something small, you still have to drive all the way to Lisnaskea," she said.

"It's very inconvenient for people as they have to try to get an appointment in advance or they might not even bother trying.

"If someone has transport difficulties and feels unwell they might decide to hold off and see how they feel in a week or so.

"When dad was the GP in Roslea many years ago, he worked 24/7 and people could come to the surgery from 8.30 in the morning until 6 at night, but now there's nothing.

"Luckily I have a car and can drive to Lisnaskea, but in another few years I might not be able to if my licence isn't renewed."

Phidelma Hand (51) was also born and raised in Roslea.

She said: "We're now facing longer waits for appointments in Lisnaskea whereas before you could get one in our old surgery on the same day.

"My daughter Shauna had an appointment at Maple recently which was supposed to be at 3 o'clock but she wasn't seen until 4.30.

"She had spent half-an-hour on the phone in the first place trying to get through to the surgery to get that appointment." Elsewhere in the rural county it is a similar story as closures and mergers of surgeries have become commonplace over the past two years, leading to a complete reshuffling of GP provision.

In December 2016 Maguiresbridge Surgery closed and patients were transferred four miles away to the Brookeborough surgery.

Then in April 2017 Brookeborough's practice merged with Tempo to become Brookeborough and Tempo Primary Care Services.

And there appears to be no end in sight to Fermanagh's GP healthcare crisis.

In March of this year it was announced that Derrylin, Florencecourt and Derrygonnelly surgeries would amalgamate and become known as Cuilcagh Medical Practice. This move was prompted by the retirement of two doctors and sparked further concerns from patients about the retention of the three surgeries.A victims' group has urged the United Nations to include the Troubles in a new annual event for people who died through terror.

The UN General Assembly has designated August 21 as a date to honour and support victims and survivors of terrorism.

The first International Day of Remembrance of and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism was held last Tuesday.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said it is about recognising the impact of terrorism on the lives of ordinary people worldwide.

A European day for terror victims is held each year and is marked at Stormont, organised by TUV leader Jim Allister.

However, Kenny Donaldson from the South East Fermanagh Foundation (SEFF) said victims of the Troubles should receive international recognition.

"There has existed a European Day for Victims of Terrorism for many years which we mark here in Northern Ireland through the initial efforts of Jim Allister MLA," he said.

"We are very encouraged that the UN is now following suit.

"Terrorism knows no borders and the ethos of SEFF has always been that victims of terrorism should work collaboratively across nation states in furthering their objectives - it should not be solely the preserve of terrorism to do so."

Mr Donaldson said the organisation has a strong partnership with victims of Eta terrorism in Spain and plans are afoot to develop links with terror victims from other countries.

He added: "We have written to the UN and have requested that the Northern Ireland Troubles and the terrorist campaign which ensued would be reflected within the events planned to commemorate this new set-aside day in 2019.

"What occurred was not a war, it was not a conflict, it was a terrorist campaign."

More than 3,600 people were killed and thousands more injured during three decades of violence.

An analysis by the Washington Post showed that 18,475 people died from terrorism worldwide in 2017. The UN said that, last year, nearly three-quarters of all deaths caused by terrorism were in just five countries - Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia and Syria.

Explaining the International Day of Remembrance, the UN said: "Victims of terrorism continue to struggle to have their voices heard, have their needs supported and their rights upheld.

"Victims often feel forgotten and neglected once the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack fades, which can have profound consequences for them."

Mr Guterres said: "I welcome the decision of the General Assembly to establish an International Day of Remembrance of and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism.

"We must lift up the voices of victims and survivors of terrorist attacks, who consistently call for accountability and results."Staff at a Bangor shop were threatened at knife point during an attempted robbery.

The incident happened at premises in the Rathgael Road area of Bangor on Sunday night.

Shortly before 9.25pm police received a report of a man entering the premises and producing a knife before demanding a member of staff open the till.

The staff member was unable to do this and the suspect made off empty handed.

The woman was not injured but was left very badly shaken.

Police have appealed to anyone with information on this incident to contact detective at Bangor on the non-emergency number 101, quoting reference 1279 26/08/18.Aiden Corless lights candles in the middle of an artwork made up of clay child shoes at the site of the former Tuam home (Niall Carson/PA)

Hundreds of people taking part in a vigil have called for the remains of hundreds of babies to be exhumed from a site in Co Galway.

Around 500 people gathered for the silent vigil in Tuam to coincide with the Papal Mass in Dublin.

People walked from Tuam Town Hall for 30 minutes to the former site of the mother and baby home while stopping at poignant spots along the way, including the local graveyard.

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Baby shoes, toys and teddy bears were tied to the railings along the route.

They gathered at the site where remains of infant bones have been found, which was managed by the Sisters of the Bon Secours between 1925 and 1961.

Annette McKay, whose sister vanished from the mother and baby home, said that the children deserve to have a proper burial.

Her mother Maggie OConnor, from Galway was sent to Bon Secours when she was 17.

She was pregnant after being raped.

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Ms McKay (64) knew nothing of her oldest sister, Mary Margaret OConnor, for years.

The child is reported to have died in the mother and baby home in 1943 from natural causes.

People are shouting to have this place dug up, its an obscenity, she said.

We could never imagine there would be a septic tank with almost 800 children in it, never in your wildest nightmares.

I dont know a country that would put 796 babies in a disused sewage tank.

I look at the Pope (Francis) coming to Ireland and then I hear people talking about the last Popes visit here in 1979 and how they loved him and the Catholic Church but time and time again I hear about abuse and scandal.

We are telling the church you must change.

The Pope and the rest of them should have come here and listened to what the Catholic Church did to 796 children.

Ms McKay, who lives in Manchester, and many others are calling for the site to be excavated and for the identities of the remains to be made known.

Those babies arent hidden, they are in that septic tank and they need to be given back to their families, she added.

In 2013, local historian Catherine Corless discovered official records showing that around 800 children died at the home in Tuam.

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In March, a commission of investigation announced it had found a significant number of human remains at the site.

Ms Corless believes most of the children are buried on the site, part of which had a local authority estate built on it in the 1970s.

The vigil in Tuam is one of a number of counter-demonstrations taking place during the pontiffs visit to Ireland.

Irelands Minister for Children Katherine Zappone is expected to make a recommendation on the future of the burial site in Tuam in early autumn.

During the vigil, people held up the names of the 796 children as they gathered to protest at the site of the former home for unmarried mothers.

People also recited the childrens names and lite candles in their memory while hundreds of baby shoes were placed in a circle on the ground.

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A special sculpture of babies in the shape of a baptismal font, which was made by a Belgium woman, took centre place in the art work.

The artwork sat at the spot which would have been the back of the old mother and baby home.

Only one wall remains of the baby home which is a monument to six men who were shot in 1922.

Ms Corless, who carried a small makeshift coffin to the site, said: Its important that we give them a funeral to let the babies know we are still here as I believe their spirits are here and they are calling out to us.

They deserve to be exhumed and buried. It was horrible what they did to them.

Reacting to the large turnout, she said: I cant put words to it.

This is to make a statement and its overwhelming to know there is great support for the Tuam babies.

We will get them out of there and bury them."He was someone who above all else wanted to change policy, not change leader, and I am confident given the remarks of new Prime Minister Scott Morrison, given the ministerial appointments he's made, there will be better policy, a united party and a sharper difference with our opponents", he said.

"Due to the high turnover of prime ministers, we can not see ourselves making a figure of a sitting Australian prime minister again", Mark Connolly, the general manager of the Sydney branch, said.

Mr Abbott supported his sister, who is a lesbian and clashed with her former seminarian brother in last's year's debate about whether Australia should legalise gay marriage.

Morrison has already announced a new cabinet - including some of those behind Turnbull's toppling - and is also keen to move on quickly, visiting drought-affected areas today after pinpointing farmers as his number-one priority.

"I look forward to drawing on my background as a mechanical engineer to carry out my new ministerial role".

She has been replaced by former Defense Minister Marise Payne.

When some members of the group pointed out Bishop should be notified, another member, claimed to be Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne, allegedly wrote: "I have".

Morrison was sworn in as the country's 30th leader late on Friday after a bitter Liberal Party revolt against moderate Turnbull driven by a hardline conservative faction.

The poll also showed that voters considered Julie Bishop, and not Morrison, to be right person to head the Liberal Party.

"The age of bitterness has come to a close, and the age of working together and focusing on the future has come", Morrison said on his visit to Quilpie, a small outback town about 1,000 km (620 miles) west of Brisbane, capital of Queensland state.

Senator Mathias Cormann, one of several senior ministers who had pledged their loyalty to Mr Turnbull before turning on him, will return as finance minister in Mr Morrison's new Cabinet. "She has been and remains an inspiring role model for women here and around the world".

It added: "Be aware that this is a ruse trying to get her ahead of Morrison so he drops out and his votes go to Dutton".

The ABC has confirmed former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull will resign from Parliament later this week.

Morrison, who has often spoken of the strong relations between the two nations, understands the importance of foreign investment in Australia, said Holden.Pilgrims from Northern Ireland who travelled for Pope Francis' closing Mass spoke of their joy at sharing in the historic occasion.

Many thousands of people from here attended the service in the Phoenix Park in Dublin yesterday. For many it involved early starts and long journeys.

Several bus-loads of pilgrims from Belfast Parishes Community, including worshippers from St Patrick's, Holy Family, Sacred Heart, Ligoniel and Holy Cross, set off from Belfast at 7am, arriving in good time to find a viewing place near the main altar where the Pope was the chief celebrant in the Mass.

Pat McGuinness from the Holy Family parish was there with her daughters Brid and Bronach.

She said: "I was here in 1979 to take part in the Mass conducted by Pope John Paul II and the memory of that has been with me ever since. I am also excited about the arrival of Pope Francis, and it is great to celebrate the Mass with all the faithful. We have preparing for this in our parish for many weeks so this day marks the end of a long journey."

Her daughter Brid said: "Once I heard the Pope's visit announced, there was no question of not coming down to see him. This Pope is so humble and yet he gets to the point. He described the Church as 'a field hospital after a battle in life'. I liked that."

Her sister Bronach said: "I feel very much part of it all. I appreciate that Pope Francis has come to Ireland and it's important to turn out for him."

Marguerite Kerr, a civil servant from Cliftonville in Belfast, was only 11 when she attended Pope John Paul II's Dublin Mass in 1979. "It is wonderful to attend a second Papal Mass here in the Park, and it's very important to welcome the Pope to Ireland," she said. "Pope Francis is a modern thinker and he is like a breath of fresh air. He has a great way with people, with an infectious smile and he is down to earth.

"I also think that he is trying his best to tackle the clerical sex abuse issue and that is good enough for me."

Monica McCambridge and brother-in-law Bobby McCambridge, from St Brigid's parish, South Belfast, saw Pope John Paul II during his 1979 visit, though they did not know each other at that time. Monica said: "I have a great respect for Pope Francis, he is so humble. I like the way he travelled in a Skoda to meet the president at his residence in Phoenix Park. That says it all."

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(Stefano Rellandini/Pool Photo via AP) AP Pope Francis at the Phoenix Park, Dublin for the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder. PA Pope Francis at the Phoenix Park, Dublin for the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder. PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and President Micheal D. Higgins awaiting Pope Francis arrival at the Phoenix Park, Dublin for the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder. PA Pope Francis is greeted by a delegation of clergy and representatives from Ireland West Airport as he arrives at the airport in Knock in County Mayo, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Yui Mok/PA Wire PA Pilgrims wait for the arrival of Pope Francis at Knock Holy Shrine, in County Mayo where he will view the Apparition Chapel and to give the Angelus address, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives to attend the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis is greeted by a delegation of clergy and representatives from Ireland West Airport as he arrives at the airport in Knock in County Mayo, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Yui Mok/PA Wire PA Pope Francis during a visit to Knock Holy Shrine, in County Mayo to view the Apparition Chapel and to give the Angelus address, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA A gust of win blows Pope Francis' cape as he speaks at the Knock Shrine, in Knock, Ireland, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018. Pope Francis is on a two-day visit to Ireland. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison) AP Pope Francis during a visit to Knock Holy Shrine, in County Mayo to view the Apparition Chapel and to give the Angelus address, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Audrey Elliott with the signed Co Mayo jersey by Pope Francis at Ireland West Airport, Knock in County Mayo, which she hopes will lift the Mayo 'curse' so the team can win an All-Ireland title. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. The Co Mayo curse dates back to the last All-Ireland winning Mayo team of 1951 who were said to be cursed on their victory drive home from Dublin with the winning cup. See PA story IRISH Pope Airport. Photo credit should read: Cate McCurry/PA Wire PA Pope Francis during a visit to Knock Holy Shrine, in County Mayo to view the Apparition Chapel and to give the Angelus address, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis with pilgrims at Knock Shrine, County Mayo, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder. PA Pope Francis at Knock Shrine, County Mayo, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder. PA People gather in Dublin's Phoenix park ahead of the arrival of Pope Francis for the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope Colour. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Orlagh McGlade, from Armagh, in Dublin's Phoenix park ahead of the arrival of Pope Francis for the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope Colour. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Members of the Garda Siochana - the police service of the Republic of Ireland - in the rain await Pope Francis to board his plane to depart from the airport in Knock in County Mayo, after a visit to Knock Holy Shrine, in County Mayo, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Yui Mok/PA Wire PA Clerical sex abuse protesters assemble at the General Post Office (GPO) on O'Connell Street in Dublin, prior to marching to the Garden of Remembrance to hold a protest to coincide with the Papal Mass at Phoenix Park, before walking to the site of a nearby former Magdalene laundry, during the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire PA Clerical sex abuse protesters assemble at the General Post Office (GPO) on O'Connell Street in Dublin, prior to marching to the Garden of Remembrance to hold a protest to coincide with the Papal Mass at Phoenix Park, before walking to the site of a nearby former Magdalene laundry, during the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire PA Clerical sex abuse protesters assemble at the General Post Office (GPO) on O'Connell Street in Dublin, prior to marching to the Garden of Remembrance to hold a protest to coincide with the Papal Mass at Phoenix Park, before walking to the site of a nearby former Magdalene laundry, during the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire PA A message to Pope France is tied to the fence of the former Tuam home for unmarried mothers in County Galway, where a mass grave of around 800 babies has recently been uncovered, during the visit to Ireland by the pontiff. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Childrens toys are place at Scoil Mhuire primary school in Tuam, Co Galway in protest to Pope Francis visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was set up following claims of mass burials of hundreds of children at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrive to attend the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA An aerial view of the crowd at Phoenix Park in Dublin as Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives to attend the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA An aerial view of the crowd at Phoenix Park in Dublin as Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA An aerial view of the crowd at Phoenix Park in Dublin as Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA An aerial view of the crowd / Pope Francis at Phoenix Park in Dublin as Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrive to attend the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Sex abuse victim William Gorry (left) showing emotions as he joins clerical sex abuse protesters at the General Post Office (GPO) on O'Connell Street in Dublin, prior to marching to the Garden of Remembrance to hold a protest to coincide with the Papal Mass at Phoenix Park, before walking to the site of a nearby former Magdalene laundry, during the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire PA Bed sheets with names of deceased children tied to the fence of the former Tuam home for unmarried mothers in County Galway, where a mass grave of around 800 babies has recently been uncovered, during the visit to Ireland by the Pope Francis. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis speaks at the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives to attend the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA An aerial view of the crowd at Phoenix Park in Dublin as Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA People hold up names of children as they gather to protest at the site of the former Tuam home for unmarried mothers in County Galway, where a mass grave of around 800 babies has recently been uncovered, during the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA The Stand4Truth protest at the Garden of Remembrance to coincide with the Papal Mass at Phoenix Park, before walking to the site of a nearby former Magdalene laundry, during the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA People hold up names of children as they gather to protest at the site of the former Tuam home for unmarried mothers in County Galway, where a mass grave of around 800 babies has recently been uncovered, during the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA People hold up names of children as they gather to protest at the site of the former Tuam home for unmarried mothers in County Galway, where a mass grave of around 800 babies has recently been uncovered, during the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives to attend the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis at the Phoenix Park, Dublin for the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder. PA Pope Francis at the Phoenix Park, Dublin for the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder. PA An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and President Micheal D. Higgins awaiting Pope Francis arrival at the Phoenix Park, Dublin for the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder. PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis joins an audience of 82,500 at Croke Park Stadium in Dublin during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. Photo credit: Brian Lawless/PA Wire. PA Cardinal Kevin Farrell (left) and Pope Francis enjoying the performances at Croke Park in Dublin, during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA Pope Francis speaking at Croke Park in Dublin, during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA Pope Francis speaking at Croke Park in Dublin, during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA Pope Francis waves to the audience as he leaves Croke Park Stadium in Dublin, after attending the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire PA Pope Francis prays at Croke Park Stadium in Dublin, during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis prays at Croke Park Stadium in Dublin, during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis speaks to the audience at Croke Park Stadium in Dublin, during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Performers at Croke Park in Dublin, prior to the arrival of Pope Francis who will join an audience of 82,500 and hear five testimonies by families from Ireland, Canada, Iraq, and Africa, during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA Crowds and performers at Croke Park in Dublin, in preparation for the arrival of Pope Francis who will join an audience of 82,500 and hear five testimonies by families from Ireland, Canada, Iraq, and Africa, during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA Pope Francis waves to the crowd as he arrives at the Croke Park Stadium in Dublin, Ireland, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018. Pope Francis is on a two-day visit to Ireland. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) AP Pope Francis joins an audience of 82,500 at Croke Park Stadium in Dublin during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives at the Croke Park stadium for the Festival of Families, in Dublin, Ireland, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018. Pope Francis is on a two-day visit to Ireland. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham) AP Crowds and performers at Croke Park in Dublin, in preparation for the arrival of Pope Francis who will join an audience of 82,500 and hear five testimonies by families from Ireland, Canada, Iraq, and Africa, during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA People hold up lights at Croke Park Stadium in Dublin, as Pope Francis joins an audience of 82,500 where he will hear five testimonies by families from Ireland, Canada, Iraq, and Africa, during the Festival of Families event, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire PA Pope Francis waves to the waiting crowds on Christchurch, Dublin as he travels in the Popemobile during his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis waves to the waiting crowds on O'Connell Street, Dublin as he travels in the Popemobile during his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pauline Gallagher (right) with her daughters Amelia and Alana after seeing Pope Francis on College Green, Dublin, as he travels in the Popemobile during his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Joe Giddens/PA Wire PA Pope Francis greets Aidan Walsh, during a visit to the Capuchin Day Centre on Bowe Street in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA Pope Francis shakes hands with Br Kevin Crowley as he arrives for a visit to the Capuchin Day Centre on Bowe Street in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA Pope Francis speaks during his visit to the Capuchin Day Centre for Homeless in Dublin, Ireland, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018. Pope Francis is on a two-day visit to Ireland. (Tiziana Fabi/Pool Photo via AP) AP Pope Francis during a visit to St Mary's Pro Cathedral in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA Pope Francis during a visit to St Mary's Pro Cathedral in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA Pope Francis waves to the waiting crowds on Christchurch, Dublin as he travels in the Popemobile during his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis meets with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at Dublin Castle as part of his visit to Ireland. Photo credit: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis meets with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, right, as he arrives at Dublin Castle, Ireland, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018. Pope Francis is on a two-day visit to Ireland. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham) AP Pope Francis signs a guest book as he meets with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, in Dublin, Ireland, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018. Pope Francis is on a two-day visit to Ireland. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) AP Pope Francis arrives for a visit to St Mary's Pro Cathedral in Dublin to meet with recently-married couples, and couples preparing for the Sacrament of Marriage, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire PA Stephen O'Brien selling bottles of holy water from the St Mary's Pro Cathedral on Talbot Street, Dublin, during the visit of Pope Francis to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives for a visit to St Mary's Pro Cathedral in Dublin to meet with recently-married couples, and couples preparing for the Sacrament of Marriage, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire PA Pairs of baby shoes hang from the railings on Sean McDermott Street in Dublin in memory of the children who died at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co Galway, during the visit of Pope Francis to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Supporters wait to see Pope Francis outside Our Lady of Lourdes Church on Sean McDermott Street, Dublin, the resting place of Matt Talbot, on the first day of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis at St Patrick's Hall at Dublin Castle, Dublin, prior to his speech, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Yui Mok/PA Wire PA Pope Francis kisses a young girl at the end of his meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, in Dublin, Ireland, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018. Pope Francis is on a two-day visit to Ireland. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia) AP Priests await the arrival of Pope Francis to St Mary's Pro Cathedral in Dublin, where he will meet with recently-married couples, and couples preparing for the Sacrament of Marriage, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire PA Crowds wait for Pope Francis at College Green, Dublin, prior to him travelling through Dublin in the Popemobile during his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Joe Giddens/PA Wire PA Pope Francis delivers a speech in St Patrick's Hall at Dublin Castle, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Yui Mok/PA Wire PA Pope Francis (left) shakes hands with Taoiseach Leo Varadakar after his speech in St Patrick's Hall at Dublin Castle, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Yui Mok/PA Wire PA Pope Francis speaks with President Michael D Higgins in his study during a visit to Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA Pope Francis (left) shakes hands with Taoiseach Leo Varadakar after his speech in St Patrick's Hall at Dublin Castle, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Yui Mok/PA Wire PA Pope Francis (centre right) arriving at St Patrick's Hall at Dublin Castle, Dublin, with Taoiseach Leo Varadakar (centre left) after his speech, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Yui Mok/PA Wire PA Pope Francis (centre right) leaves St Patrick's Hall at Dublin Castle, Dublin, with Taoiseach Leo Varadakar (centre left) after his speech, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Yui Mok/PA Wire PA Pope Francis speaks with President Michael D Higgins in his study during a visit to Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: WMOF18/Maxwell Photography/PA Wire PA Pope Francis delivers his speech in St Patrick's Hall at Dublin Castle, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Yui Mok/PA Wire PA Pope Francis presents Taoiseach Leo Varadkar with a gift as they meet at Dublin Castle during his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis signs the arrivals book as he meets with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at Dublin Castle as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA The Hassoun family, (left to right not given) Saif Eddin Hassoun, Sanaa Edris, Mohmoud Al A'Araj, Hasba Hassoun, Lana Al A'Araj (six), Aala Al A'Araj, (four) and Tala Al A'Araj (one), wait to meet Pope Francis following a tree planting ceremony at Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Joe Giddens/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives for tree planting ceremony during a meeting with Irish President Michael D Higgins, at Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Joe Giddens/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives for a meeting with Irish President Michael D Higgins, at Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. Photo credit: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis receives a bouquet of flowers from five-year-old Annalise, daughter of Foreign Affairs minister Simon Coveney, as he arrives at Dublin International Airport, at the start of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives for a meeting with Irish President Michael D Higgins and wife Sabina , at Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives for a meeting with Irish President Michael D Higgins, at Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Protestors wearing baby shoes, to signify the children who died in mother and baby homes in Ireland, protest in Dublin ahead of the start of the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives for a meeting with Irish President Michael D Higgins and wife Sabina , at Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis arrives for a meeting with Irish President Michael D Higgins and wife Sabina , at Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park, Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Danny Lawson/PA Wire PA Pope Francis is greeted by Archbishop Eamon Martin as he arrives at Dublin International Airport, at the start of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis as he arrives at Dublin International Airport, at the start of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis as he arrives at Dublin International Airport, at the start of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis as he arrives at Dublin International Airport, at the start of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis as he arrives at Dublin International Airport, at the start of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis is greeted by members of the clergy, representatives of Government and the local County Council, as he arrives at Dublin International Airport, at the start of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Bishop Eamon Martin waits for the arrival of Pope Francis at Dublin International Airport, for the start of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Saturday August 25, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA Pope Francis waves as he boards an airplane at Rome's Fiumicino international airport, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018. The pontiff is traveling to Ireland for a two-day visit on the occasion of the 2018 World Meeting of Families. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini) AP / Facebook

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Whatsapp Pope Francis prays inside St Mary's Pro Cathedral during his visit to Dublin, Ireland. (Stefano Rellandini/Pool Photo via AP)

Sr Mary Carlin and Sr Teresa O'Neill attended the World Festival of Families at Croke Park on Saturday night. Sr Mary said: "It was a great celebration of family life, with so many young couples and their babies at the concert."

Sr Teresa added: "The atmosphere was electric, and it was something I will remember for the rest of my life."The sister of a six-month-old girl buried beneath Tuam mother and baby home in Co Galway has accused the Catholic church of "sweeping away the victims", while thanking actor Liam Neeson for his support.

The remains of some 796 children are buried in an underground septic tank below where the Bon Secours-run home once stood.

As Pope Francis conducted mass for an estimated 500,000 worshippers in Dublin's Phoenix Park yesterday, Annette McKay along with hundreds of relatives of victims, held a vigil more than 130 miles away.

Ms McKay's sister Mary Margaret O'Connor died from whooping cough and heart failure while in the home with her mother Maggie.

Visiting from Bury in England, the councillor told this newspaper of the "electric" atmosphere as a procession made its way from Tuam town hall to the old site.

Ms McKay said: "We got to the site and worried about how we were going to read out the baby names and, in the end, we decided that the best thing to do was to give people 10 or 20 cards and for them to shout out the names.

"It was absolutely magical because suddenly all of the babies' names were being heard.

"It was beautiful and people were aware of how sensitive it was. Children and older people wanted to read. Young mums too, as well as survivors."

Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, Ballymena-born actor Neeson had called for moves to help identify the babies' bodies. He said: "The Irish government, aided by the Catholic Church and especially the nuns' order, the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours, must not shirk the responsibility of giving these souls the dignity and respect of identification."

Ms McKay said the A-list actor "is on the side of the just".

"If you've got a voice as big as Liam Neeson's and you're willing to speak for the children that have no voice then use your voice Liam, shout at the top of your lungs."

Ms McKay's mother was one of more than 30,000 Irish mothers who were subjected to cruelty from the Catholic Church. Ms O'Connor was raped by the caretaker of another home before moving to the home in Tuam.

Forced adoptions of babies born in non-marital relationships were commonplace. In tribute to those who died, hundreds of pairs of shoes and a piece of porcelain artwork depicting baby shoes were left at the site.

"Something that was inhumane became human," said Ms McKay. "It was very moving."

Addressing worshippers at Phoenix Park yesterday, Pope Francis said: "We ask for forgiveness for all those times in which many single mothers were told that to seek their children who had been separated from them, and the same being said to daughters and sons themselves, that this was a mortal sin. This is not a mortal sin. We ask for forgiveness."Irelands childrens minister has urged the Pope to act to address the legacy of the mass grave at Tuam mother and baby home in Co Galway. Niall Carson/PA.

The Catholic church should contribute substantially to the cost of addressing the legacy of a mass grave at a former mother and babys home in Ireland, the Government told the Pope.

It was a shameful chapter in Irish history and the church must take real action, quickly and unconditionally, to make reparation to those who lived at its Tuam residence in Co Galway, Childrens Minister Katherine Zappone said.

Between 1925 and 1961 around 800 infants were buried in a septic tank at the home for unmarried mothers.

The minister raised the issue with the pontiff on Saturday and on Monday released the contents of a letter she gave him.

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She wrote: It is my strong conviction that given the role of the church in this shameful chapter of recent Irish history it must play a practical role in addressing the hurt and damage.

I believe that the church should contribute substantially to the cost of whatever option is decided by the government.

This should be done willingly, unconditionally and quickly.

Nothing less will demonstrate remorse.

She added: I am writing to you in the hope that the church will accept its responsibilities and make reparation for its part in a very shameful chapter of Irish history.

Mother and baby homes came to public attention in Ireland during the summer of 2014 following a series of disturbing reports of high mortality rates and claims of possible burials of children on the grounds of the former residence in Tuam.

The then government decided to have these matters investigated and an official Commission of Investigation was established in February 2015.

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The Commissions excavations which confirmed the presence of remains on the site of the former Bon Secours religious order home.

The Commission believes that there are a significant number of childrens remains there, the minister said.

An expert team is considering options to fulfil what the minister called the duty to these children.

They include a complete excavation of the site and DNA analysis of the hundreds of remains contained.

The minister added: There was little compassion shown to children and their mothers in this home.

We cannot change what happened to them. For the little ones whose remains are in a sewage system, we owe them dignity in death.

For their mothers, siblings and families we need to give them some peace.Hyatt has a relatively small footprint across the UK, compared with its brand recognition (Hyatt/PA)

Hotels group Hyatt is on track to grow its UK footprint, with plans to open a new site at Great Scotland Yard as part of major brand launch.

The US companys UK presence is small compared with its global footprint, with just five sites in the country  four in London and one in Birmingham.

But it is expanding rapidly, having recently confirmed the opening of one of its so-called Unbound Collection sites, based in the former home of the London Metropolitan Police at Great Scotland Yard for next year.

The Press Association understands a second UK location is also in the pipeline but details of its exact location and sub-brand under the Hyatt umbrella has yet to be publicly confirmed by the company.

The Unbound Collection can be described as a selection of estates. So it could be a train, it could be a boat, could be a hotel, it could be a castlePeter Fulton on Hyatt's new Unbound Collection

Despite having recently backed off from a potential offer for Spains NH Hotels, Hyatts president and chief executive, Mark Hoplamazian, earlier this month said Europe remains a key focus for the business.

We see a lot of opportunity here in the UK, we feel were under-represented. Thats why the team is working extremely hard at exploiting these opportunities, Peter Fulton, an executive vice president for Hyatt hotels, told the Press Association.

We dont see the development pipeline slowing down over the next five years.

Hyatt has bolstered its London-based development team  which serves the whole of Europe and was previously located in Zurich  with three new appointments and an internal transfer.

We increased our development presence here in London to be closer to where the capital is and thats proven to be a bit of a godsend as well, so thats really helped stimulate this whole pipeline, he said.

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Day-to-day Mr Fulton  who also oversees Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South-West Asia  said the team is talking to potential operators, independent hotel and land owners across the region, as well as capital partners and sovereign wealth funds looking for investment opportunities.

That is in addition to a fresh push into franchising.

Weve been in the UK for 30 years plus, but because we werent franchising and so forth we didnt really see the growth that chains have, and now we have that growth coming through, Mr Fulton said.

He sees a particular need to be in Edinburgh  a location where he says Hyatt customers want to go.

So not being in Edinburgh is a problem for us.

In the meantime, the company is trying to extend its reach by launching a loyalty programme with 500 small luxury hotels across the world, many of which will be based in Europe.

Mr Fulton explained that more than 87% of those locations  many of which are yet to be announced  are in places where Hyatt has yet to set up shop.

Theres the innovation that comes in  how do we fight above our weight and give  opportunities to our loyalty partners?

When asked whether Edinburgh sites were in the mix, Mr Fulton hinted at a potential partnership.

I was speaking to one of the owners there yesterday and it was about exactly that, so that will come out towards the end of the year when thats all finally dotted and crossed.

However, he stressed that a Hyatt hotel is still on the cards for Edinburgh.

That will not preclude us from going and opening a hotel there on our own. So this is a placeholder.Jeremy Hunt has said he will visit Burma at the earliest opportunity to seek answers after a UN report called for military leaders to be prosecuted for genocide against Rohingya Muslims.

The Foreign Secretary described the report as deeply disturbing and said there should never be a hiding place for those who commit these kind of atrocities.

Investigators working for the UNs top human rights body took the unusual step of identifying six military leaders by name among those behind what they called deadly, systematic crimes against the ethnic minority.

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The call amounts to some of the strongest language yet from UN officials who have denounced alleged human rights violations in Burma since a bloody crackdown began last August.

Mr Hunt tweeted: Deeply disturbing to read UN report on crimes against Rohingya people.

There must be never be a hiding place for those who commit these kind of atrocities. Have decided to visit Burma to seek answers at the earliest opportunity.

Deeply disturbing to read UN report on crimes against Rohingya people. There must be never be a hiding place for those who commit these kind of atrocities. Have decided to visit Burma to seek answers at the earliest opportunity  Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) August 27, 2018

The three-member fact-finding mission and their team, working under a mandate from the UN-backed Human Rights Council, meticulously assembled hundreds of accounts from expatriate Rohingya, as well as satellite footage and other information to assemble the report.

The militarys contempt for human life, dignity and freedom, for international law in general, should be a cause of concern for the entire population of Myanmar (Burma), and to the international community as a whole, fact-finding mission chair Marzuki Darusman, a former Indonesian attorney-general, told a news conference.

The council created the mission in March last year, nearly six months before a string of deadly rebel attacks on security and police posts set off a crackdown that drove Rohingya to flee into neighbouring Bangladesh.

More than 700,000 people are thought to have fled, according to UN estimates.

The team compiled accounts of crimes including gang rape, the torching of hundreds of villages, enslavement, and killings of children, some before the eyes of their own parents.

But it was not granted access to Burma and has decried a lack of co-operation or even response from the government, which received an early copy of the report.

The UKs ambassador to the UN, Karen Pierce, said she was not confident the UN Security Council would unanimously back referral to the International Criminal Court.

To date Russia and China have taken a different view of ICC referral and without acceptance by them of a referral then Im afraid it will be very difficult for the Security Council to take that step, she told Channel 4 News.

Ms Pierce said Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi had not been as bold or as firm as she could have been in dealing with the violence, but added: The responsibility does not primarily lie with the Burmese government but with the Burmese military, and it is their role that needs a proper judicial investigation and accountability mechanism.

Minister for the UN Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon will use a speech at the UN Security Council on Tuesday to urge the international community to increase financial support for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

Lord Ahmad, who is set to call for the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing to be brought to justice, said: The UK is playing a leading role in bringing an end to this crisis. We need an international political consensus to bring the appalling humanitarian situation to an end.

Bangladesh has done more than its fair share to help the refugees. Now its the turn of other countries to step up, and provide the money that will help support both refugees and the communities that support them, and for international partners to act together to ensure justice for the victims of the crisis.Northern Ireland Secretary of State Karen Bradley has been named as one of a number of senior parliamentarians whose spouses have been given special access passes into Westminster facilities.

Some of the MPs' spouses are lobbyists or business people who have campaigned to influence government policy, according to a report in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph.

The Secretary of State's husband, Neil, is listed in the European Commission's register of lobbyists as "group manager government affairs" at International Airlines Group, the owners of British Airways, the newspaper reported.

The special "spouse passes" give access to Parliament's restaurants and bars, and permit up to six guests to accompany the holders.

They are designed to help parliamentarians see their children and spouses with ease.

A spokeswoman for the Secretary of State, who has been MP for Staffordshire Moorlands since the 2010 general election, told the Belfast Telegraph that Mr Bradley never used his spouse pass for business visits to the Houses of Parliament.

"When attending professional meetings, he enters the House the same way as any member of the public," she said.

The spokeswoman said all MPs were entitled to 'spouse passes', but could not say whether this included abstentionist MPs who had not taken up their seats.

Among the other senior parliamentarians whose spouses have been involved in advocacy and policy influencing are Sir Kevin Barron, the chairman of the Commons standards watchdog, and Crime Minister Victoria Atkins.

Sir Kevin's wife, Lady Deane-Barron, works on 'advocacy' with the YMCA, the Telegraph reported, while Ms Atkins is married to Paul Kenward, managing director of British Sugar, and who campaigned against the introduction of a tax on fizzy drinks.

Ms Atkins told the Daily Telegraph: "My husband has never used the pass for work."Police made more than 260 arrests at Notting Hill Carnival over the bank holiday weekend.

As of 5.45pm on Monday 125 arrests had been made on the day, including 25 for possession of an offensive weapon and 74 for drugs offences.

On Sunday officers made 133 arrests and recovered 16 knives at the event in west London, Scotland Yard said.

They detained 42 people on drugs offences, 20 on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon and seven on public order offences.

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Two were arrested on suspicion of sexual offences, three for common assault and 12 on suspicion of possessing psychoactive drugs.

British Transport Police said its officers made nine arrests on Sunday.

On both days the festivities came to a halt as thousands of people paid tribute to Grenfell Tower victims.

At 3pm on Monday, revellers marked 72 seconds of silence in memory of the 72 people who died following the fire in June last year.

The tower block is within half a mile of the parade route.

A Section 60 order will be in place on Monday, 27 Aug across the #NottingHillCarnival geographical area for a further 15 hours, between 09:00hrs until 23:59hrs. https://t.co/AVULQ5S520 pic.twitter.com/FXp7g12e2g  Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) August 27, 2018

Police were operating with enhanced stop-and-search powers in a bid to crack down on violence.

Scotland Yard imposed a Section 60 order across the carnival area between 9am and 11.59pm on both days.

The order allowed officers to search people if they believed they were carrying offensive weapons or in anticipation of violence.

On Monday the police presence was very visible, with officers wearing high-visibility vests stopping and searching men and women of all races as they walked along the pedestrianised streets.

But the police seemed in good spirits, stopping from time to time to high-five revellers, and acting as guides.

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Notting Hill Carnival Gold Commander Dave Musker said: On Sunday, my officers along with colleagues from the British Transport Police arrested 133 individuals for a range of offences and 20 weapons were seized, including knives.

I am confident that the Section 60 order imposed yesterday prevented these dangerous items being brought to carnival, and based on the intelligence at my disposal, I consider it proportionate and necessary to ensure a safe carnival today.

The bank holiday weekend event was policed by the highest number of officers in six years.

Almost 7,000, some from the Metropolitan Polices newly formed Violent Crime Task Force, were policing Mondays event to combat the threat of violent crime.

This was up from 6,100 at the less busy family day on Sunday.

Undercover police and officers from firearms and dog units were in place.

After a wave of violent crime in the capital in recent months, Scotland Yard announced knife arches had been placed at strategic points along the route to help reassure people about their safety.Theresa May is preparing to fly to Africa on a three-nation trade mission in an attempt to bolster Britains post-Brexit fortunes.

Mrs May will visit South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya as she makes her first trip to the continent since becoming Prime Minister in 2016.

She will be accompanied by a 29-strong business delegation, adding her aim is to deepen and strengthen partnerships around the world as the UK prepares to leave the EU in 2019.

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Security will also feature on her agenda, with the threat of Boko Haram in Nigeria and elsewhere in west Africa and the work of British troops in Kenya to help countries fight al-Shabaab militants in Somalia under consideration.

Mrs Mays visit to Nairobi will mark the first by a British prime minister to Kenya since Margaret Thatcher in 1988.

It is also the first to Africa by a British PM since David Cameron in 2013 for Nelson Mandelas memorial service.

Mrs May will fly into South Africas legislative capital Cape Town on Tuesday, where she will meet young people before delivering a keynote speech on trade and how UK private sector investment can be brought into Africa.

After a bilateral meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, in which Zimbabwe is likely to feature, the PM is also expected to visit Robben Island.

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Mr Mandela was imprisoned here and the visit would commemorate the 100th anniversary of the former South African presidents birth.

On Wednesday, Mrs May intends to meet Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari in the capital Abuja before meeting victims of modern slavery in Lagos.

After arriving in Kenya on Thursday, Mrs May is expected to meet president Uhuru Kenyatta shortly after his return from seeing US President Donald Trump in Washington and before he travels to China to meet president Xi Jinping.

The British PM will then see British troops and later a business school.

A state dinner hosted by Mr Kenyatta will conclude the trip.

I am proud to be leading this ambitious trip to Africa and to become the first UK Prime Minister in over 30 years to visit KenyaPrime Minister Theresa May

The PM will arrive back in the UK just days before Parliaments summer recess ends and a hectic and potentially stormy two-week session is expected before a further break for the party conferences.

Mrs May said: Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy, and as longstanding partners this trip is a unique opportunity at a unique time for the UK to set out our ambition to work even closer together.

A more prosperous, growing and trading Africa is in all of our interests and its incredible potential will only be realised through a concerted partnership between governments, global institutions and business.

As we prepare to leave the European Union, now is the time for the UK to deepen and strengthen its global partnerships.

This week I am looking forward to discussing how we can do that alongside Africa to help deliver important investment and jobs as well as continue to work together to maintain stability and security.

I am proud to be leading this ambitious trip to Africa and to become the first UK Prime Minister in over 30 years to visit Kenya.

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UK officials have indicated they hope the trip will counter stereotypes of Africa, citing the Band Aid charity efforts as having framed attitudes among some older Britons since the 1980s.

With United Nations figures showing more than 200 million 15 to 24 year olds live in Africa, officials add the UKs aim is to find ways to help young people on the continent make a living through jobs in a secure environment.

The Prime Ministers deputy official spokeswoman said: The visit will also emphasise that it is in the worlds interest to help secure African jobs and growth because if we do not then conflict, poor work prospects and economic instability will continue to encourage migration, dangerous journeys to Europe.

We will be talking about security and the PM will use the visit to announce further support to tackle instability across the region because nations cant prosper without it.

Details on investment in Britains diplomatic network in Africa are expected to emerge, amid growing Chinese influence on the continent.

It comes after Foreign Office minister Sir Alan Duncan last year told MPs that savings would be made in Africa and elsewhere to free up 4.2 million to fund 50 new jobs in the European network, while former foreign secretary Boris Johnson this year announced new diplomatic posts in Swaziland and Lesotho.The combination of terrain enhanced rain bands and a slow moving storm system means that a lot more rain is likely to fall on the Big Island.

Lane dumped enough rain to trigger landslides - several of which blocked the main island's Highway 19, a major thoroughfare - and cause severe flooding in many areas.

Officials on Saturday said the biggest impacts involved minor rock falls at the summit and increased steaming from vents.

Whiteout conditions could occur on the new lava field due to steam produced by heavy rainfall on still-hot lava flows.

Flames burned nine homes in the historic coastal town of Lahaina and forced 600 people to evacuate, Maui County spokeswoman Lynn Araki-Regan said. Some have returned, but many have not because much of the area lacks power, emergency workers reported.

He says the island got heavy rain overnight which helped douse the flames.

Wright said he had gone to Hilo with his children Friday to surf, taking advantage of the waves brought by the storm.

Tropical Storm Lane drenched parts of Hawaii with about 4 feet of rain as it crept past the state Saturday, causing flash floods and prompting evacuations even as it dissipated over the islands' rugged slopes. She said police, fire and other departments were working to keep people off the roads, as some areas were still under water. By Saturday the water had receded enough that they were able to return home and start cleaning. Otherwise, firefighters may send in a helicopter or call in the National Guard.

The rainfall eased early Saturday. The tropical storm warning remained in effect. The storm caused damage, mostly on the Big Island, where rivers raged near Hilo and almost 40 people had to be rescued from homes.

Hilo received more than 31 inches (79 cm) of rain from Wednesday through Friday, its largest three-day total since records began in 1949.

In Hilo, on Hawaii Island, residents posted images and videos on social media Friday of streets that had turned into rushing rivers and of cars inundated by the floods.

Hurricane Lane secured its place in the history books before it quickly dissipated into a tropical storm and moved off from Hawaii.

A powerful hurricane that threatened Hawaii for a week is weakening and is now a tropical storm.

Lane dumped almost 3 feet of rain on parts of the Big Island of Hawaii over the past two days, forcing residents to flee their flooded homes in waist-high water. "It's very unsafe!" Honolulu's mayor, Kirk Caldwell, pleaded with tourists that they were putting themselves in danger as the storm churned closer. But he says the good news is Lane got weak and fell apart. Tropical systems prefer upper air wind patterns without any wind shear (the change in wind speed or direction with height).

As of 5AM HST, Hurricane Lane was 110 miles south-southwest of Honolulu, heading north at two knots with 50 knot sustained winds.Pope Francis listens to a journalists question aboard a flight to Rome at the end of his two-day visit to Ireland (Gregorio Borgia/AP)

Pope Francis has declined to confirm or deny claims by the Vaticans retired ambassador to the United States that he knew in 2013 about sexual misconduct allegations against the former archbishop of Washington.

Francis said the 11-page text by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano speaks for itself and that he would not comment on it.

Francis was asked by a US reporter during an airborne press conference on Sunday if Mr Viganos claims that the two discussed the Theodore McCarrick allegations in 2013 were true.

The pope was also asked about Mr Viganos claims that McCarrick was already under sanction at the time, but that Francis rehabilitated him.

He said he had read Mr Viganos document and trusted journalists to judge for themselves.

Its an act of trust, he said. I wont say a word about it.

The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published Mr Viganos text on Sunday as the pope wrapped up a two-day visit to Ireland dominated by the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Mr Vigano, 77, a conservative whose hard-line anti-gay views are well known, urged the reformist pope to resign over what he called Francis own culpability in covering up McCarricks crimes.

Francis accepted McCarricks resignation as cardinal last month, after a US church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

Since then, another man has come forward to say McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary.

The accusations have created a crisis of confidence in the US and Vatican hierarchy.

Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report  which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses  the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.

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Mr Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions.

His letter identifies by name the Vatican cardinals and US archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair. He said documents backing up his version of events are in Vatican archives.

The Vaticans ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2016, Mr Vigano said his two immediate predecessors did not fail to inform the Holy See about accusations against McCarrick, starting in 2000.

Mr Vigano said he himself sent at least two memos on him.

He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer, and to no longer celebrate Mass in public or travel.

He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on June 23, 2013, at the Vaticans Santa Marta hotel where the pope lives, three months after Francis was elected pope.

Mr Vigano wrote that he told Francis: Holy Father, I dont know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.

Soon thereafter, Mr Vigano wrote, he was surprised to find that McCarrick had started travelling on missions on behalf of the church, including to China.

McCarrick was also one of the Vaticans intermediaries in the US-Cuba talks in 2014.

Mr Viganos claim that McCarrick had been ordered by Benedict to stay out of public ministry and retire to a lifetime of prayer is somewhat disputed, given that McCarrick enjoyed a fairly public retirement.

But Mr Vigano insisted the sanctions had been imposed, and said a former counsellor in the embassy at the time was prepared to testify about the stormy meeting when McCarrick was informed of them.

Barry Coburn, McCarricks civil attorney, said the allegations in the Vigano letter are serious.

Archbishop McCarrick, like any other person, has a right to due process. He looks forward to invoking that right at the appropriate time, he said in a statement.Restaurant chain Bubbacue has ceased trading at its two Belfast outlets

Bubbacue has closed its restaurants on Callender Street and Botanic Avenue

Bubbacue has closed its restaurants on Callender Street and Botanic Avenue

THE former hit barbecue restaurant Bubbacue has left debts of more than 1 million following its surprise closure.

Documents published online show dozens of creditors are owed thousands, including a 400,000 taxpayer-funded loan. But liquidators estimate the Belfast chain, owned by John and Karen Blisard, has just under 18,000 to pay off what they owe.

Read More

However, the final figure may be more, with at least one creditor not on the list still out of pocket by at least 54,000.

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One person owed thousands of pounds told Sunday Life they were not even aware the business was closing until it was announced on social media.

It's understood the Blisards have returned to John's native United States, citing family reasons.

Despite riding to success on the pulled pork craze, it announced last month it was closing with immediate effect after going into liquidation. It had one site on Callender Street and another on Botanic Avenue.

The Blisards, who also founded and then sold the burrito chain, Boojum, said they were pulling the plug with a Facebook post.

In March 2017, the firm secured 400,000 from the NI Growth Loan Fund, which is backed in part by taxpayer-funded Invest NI.

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Liquidators Keenan Corporate Finance published details of the amount owed to 27 suppliers and backers on Companies House earlier this month, totalling 1,201,758.

It includes 40,528 owed to Close Brothers Asset Finance and 30,352 to wholesale food supplier, Henderson.

The papers state more than 400,000 is still outstanding to the NI Growth Loan Fund, as well as 4,787 in redundancy payments to staff. They also reveal the directors ploughed 454,916 of their own funds into the company, which they haven't been able to make back.

Other companies still owed money include cooking oil suppliers, Frylite, NI Water, Electricity Ireland and drinks supplier, Nelson Sauvin.

The liquidators estimate the firm has just 17,610 available to meet the debts.

Sunday Life tried to contact John Blisard, but received no response.

A spokesperson for WhiteRock Capital Partners, which administered the fund, said they had conducted their normal lending procedures, including due diligence checks on the business.

They added they are seeking to recover the money.

cwoodhouse@sundaylife.co.uk



@MrCWoodhouseUDA boss Dee Stitt has been left red-faced after he was told that he was not a fit person to act as a trustee of a charity.

The Kilcooley Community Forum, of which he has been a leading member, was restructured recently, and has now been granted charitable status.

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Convicted robber turned Charter NI chief executive Stitt applied for a position on its Trustee Board only to be knocked back by the Charity Commission over concerns about his criminality and how his home was targeted in a recent police drugs raid.

In a move that has been ridiculed by UDA members, he then sought advice about appealing the decision from an ex-IRA prisoners' support group.

Referring to Stitt's failed bid to get on the Trustee Board at the Kilcooley Community Forum, a Charity Commission spokeswoman said it could not comment "as this is considered to be their personal data".

The decision has led to questions being asked about how the crime boss continues to hold onto his position as the 35,000 per year chief executive of the UDA-linked Charter NI, which is also a registered charity.

A UDA insider asked: "If the Charity Commission is saying that Stitt is not a proper person to act as a Trustee for the Kilcooley Community Forum, then how can he continue as CEO of Charter NI?

"After he was knocked back, he approached an ex-IRA prisoners' group and asked it to give him an endorsement and send it to the Charity Commission, which it did, but he was still refused."

Our source said the refusal has embarrassed Stitt as he was chairman of the Kilcooley Community Forum and loved to take a lead role at meetings involving other agencies, including senior PSNI officers and government officials.

"He's been left with a red face, especially after he ran to the Provos to help with his appeal to the Charity Commission," added the UDA insider.

Stitt, who has spent the past six weeks sunning himself at his Bulgarian bolthole, is due back in Northern Ireland later this week.

He is returning to find his East Belfast UDA brigade in chaos, with its leader and his best pal, Jimmy 'Millions' Birch (left), the target of an internal coup led by ex-life sentence prisoner Davy McMaster.

On a flying visit back to Northern Ireland in July, sneaky Stitt reached out to McMaster behind Birch's back, telling him that he would support his takeover moves.

He did this in the hope that he could continue as North Down UDA commander and Charter NI chief executive. McMaster has the backing of four of the East Belfast UDA's six battalions, with only Birch's own Tullycarnet unit staying loyal to him.

Stitt's North Down battalion is split on who to endorse. Knowing that the knives are out for her husband, Birch's wife Caroline, the Operations Manager at Charter NI, has resigned from what she says is "95 per cent of the voluntary groups I sit on".

In a scathing social media post, she added: "I'm not listening to your crap any more, my life is passing by and from now on I'll not be holding back."

Birch's problems began after four East Belfast UDA battalions held a secret meeting last month at which they expressed support for Davy McMaster's takeover.

Three men blamed Birch on having their houses raided by police. After the meeting broke up, cruel graffiti about the loyalist was sprayed on the Comber Greenway. The McMaster faction have since made it known that Birch and his supporters have only five guns at their disposal. The only two that are of use, modern handguns, are held by Dee Stitt's North Down UDA.

cbarnes@sundaylife.co.ukIndonesian presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto speaks to supporters in Jakarta after his formal registration as a candidate for the 2019 presidential election, Aug. 10, 2018.

Updated at 3:02 p.m. ET on 2018-08-27

Indonesias upcoming presidential election will not only be fought through rallies on the campaign trail but in cyberspace, where online influencers will play a role in helping shape the outcome, analysts told BenarNews.

With close to 150 million Indonesians having access to the Internet, politicians are increasingly using social media to get their message across to the masses. In recent years, electoral campaigning in Indonesia has featured so-called buzzers  people with thousands of followers on social media  who are paid to post content in support of politicians, experts said.

Social media influencers play an important role in advertising in the digital era when the influence of traditional media, such as television and newspapers as well as formal institutions is diminishing, Mohammad Rinaldi Camil, a researcher at the Center of Innovation Policy and Governance, told BenarNews

At the same time, peer-to-peer influence is on the rise.

Mohammad said a study by him found that some buzzers were paid between 50,000 rupiah (U.S. $3.50) to 250,000 per post on Twitter.

President Joko Jokowi Widodo is seeking a second five-year term in a presidential election scheduled for April 17, 2019. His opponent in the campaign is Prabowo Subianto, whom he defeated narrowly in the 2014 polls.

Many months before Election Day, a hashtag war between supporters of both candidates is already being waged on Twitter and Facebook.

Jokowis opponents use the hashtag #2019gantipresiden (#2019changepresident) to drum up support for Prabowo, a 66-year-old former army special forces commander who has been linked to alleged human rights abuses. Prabowo has denied those allegations.

Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo gives his State of the Nation address at parliament, in Jakarta, Aug. 16, 2018. [AP]

The presidents supporters have responded with #diasibukkerja (#heisbusyworking) and #2019tetapjokowi (#2019stilljokowi).

Mardani Ali Sera, an opposition politician who popularized #2019changepresident, said the movement which started on Twitter was growing massively both online and offline.

The hashtag has dominated conversations on social media for three months. So the brand is very strong, said Mardani, a politician from the Muslim-based Prosperous Justice Party.

The movements growth has been organic, he said.

Surveys have shown that conversations on social media are an indicator of public sentiment in the real world, Mardani said.

About 143 million Indonesians had access to the Internet in 2017, according to the Association of Indonesian Internet Providers.

A recent study by We Are Social, a global advertising agency, found that Indonesians with access to the Internet spend more than eight hours a day online, including 3.5 hours on social media.

Political advertising on social media has become an industry involving huge amounts of money, according to social media expert Nukman Luthfi.

Young people nowadays spend less time watching TV or reading papers. For that reason money that was usually spent on TV and newspaper advertising has shifted to social media, he told BenarNews.

Guilty of spreading misinformation

Netizens dont just share facts about their favorite politicians, but also misinformation, or fake news.

Earlier this year, a court in Pekanbaru on Sumatra island sentenced Muhammad Abdullah Harsono to two years and eight months in prison after finding him guilty of spreading misinformation on Facebook that could cause social and religious discord.

Police said Muhammad was among four people arrested last year on suspicion of involvement in an online fake-news factory called Saracen. Authorities did not identify Saracens paymasters.

But the group received millions of rupiah as payment after spreading misinformation and hate speech against Jokowis government, police said without elaborating.

In 2016 and 2017, large protests by Muslims against Jakartas Christian governor, Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama, began with a Facebook post suggesting that he had insulted the Quran for remarks he made during a meeting with residents in Kepulauan Seribu district.

An edited video posted on Facebook made it appear that Ahok had said the Quran deceived people while he was talking about how his opponents used a verse in the scripture to discourage people from voting for him.

Ahok lost the Jakarta gubernatorial election to former Education Minister Anies Baswedan, who courted support from the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and other conservative Muslim groups despite his liberal credentials.

Ahok soon after was sentenced to two years in prison for blasphemy. He is due for release in January.

Social media expert Nukman said Jokowis decision to pick Maruf Amin, a senior Muslim cleric known for conservative views on LGBT and other issues, as his running mate could pacify his opponents who have tried to paint him as being not Islamic enough.

Using the religious card to attack Jokowi wont sell anymore, he said. So I think the conversations online in the lead-up to the election will focus on the economy and human rights to some extent.Iran's defense minister said Sunday his country will continue its support of the Syrian government to ensure improved security in the region, adding that the nature of the two countries' cooperation won't be decided by a "third party".

Minister Ayoub also championed the two countries' special relationship, saying that "Syrian-Iranian relations are a model for bilateral ties between independent and sovereign nations".

"The Islamic Republic has high capabilities in the area of defence and can help Syria in expanding their military equipment", he said, according to ISNA.

Iran said Monday that it had agreed to a deal to deepen military cooperation with Syria, reaffirming its intention to remain in the country despite moves by the USA and its allies to contain Tehran's military reach.

The defence ministers of Iran and Syria have signed an agreement on military cooperation and reconstruction in the war-torn country, Iranian media reported on Monday.

Bolton said Putin had agreed that "Iranian interests in Syria were not conterminous with Russian interests in Syria and that he would be content to see the Iranian forces all sent back to Iran".

"With this accord, we have paved the way for a reconstruction of the Syrian military industries", he said.

U.S. national security adviser John Bolton, speaks during an interview about the meeting with his Russian counterpart Nikolai Patrushev, at the American embassy in Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday, August 23, 2018.

"It was not a question of where they might be inside Syria". Iran-backed militias, including the powerful Lebanese Hezbollah movement, have also backed Assad's troops in fighting on Syrian soil.

Assad last month said reconstruction was his "top priority" in Syria, where more than 350,000 people have been killed and millions forced to flee their homes.

World powers, who long called for Assad's ouster, insist reconstruction aid should only come with political transition, but fellow regime ally Russian Federation is pressing them to provide support.

According to the ministry spokesperson, recent statements by US National Security Advisor John Bolton threatening to bomb Syria could be interpreted as confirmation of such impending airstrikes.Malaysian Defense Minister Mohamad Sabu addresses a symposium of the International Association of Counterterrorism and Security Professionals (IACSP), in Kuala Lumpur, Aug. 27, 2018.

The violent uprooting of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmars Rakhine state threatens to expose members of the persecuted and stateless minority to recruitment by extremists, new Malaysian Defense Minister Mohamad Sabu told an international symposium on counterterrorism Monday.

Malaysia was taking the threat seriously, Mohamad said, while the chief of the nations counterterrorist police special branch said Monday it had uncovered several cases in which Islamic State (IS) recruited Rohingya expats to wage a so-called holy war in Rakhine. Malaysia is home to a community of more than 100,000 Rohingya expatriates.

We are concerned that the Rohingyas could be manipulated to become suicide bombers or recruited into terrorist cells in this region, the defense minister said during the opening speech at a two-day meeting in Kuala Lumpur of the International Association of Counterterrorism and Security Professionals (IACSP).

At a news conference afterwards, Mohamad likened the displacement of the Rohingya to Palestinian efforts to fight for an independent state against Israel.

In the end, many took the path of suicide bombers and it has become a serious threat. We are concerned that this, too, can happen in Myanmar where gross human rights abuses were reported, the minister said.

It will come to a point that they will not mind returning home and die fighting. That is why this issue is important. What has happened to the Palestinian people can happen to the Rohingya, he said.

The threat of Rohingya drifting into terrorism will exist as long as the international community kept ignoring the plight of the stateless minority group, Mohamad said.

Some 1 million Rohingya refugees are sheltering in southeastern Bangladesh, including more than 720,000 people who fled Myanmar since August 2017 amid a brutal crackdown mounted against ARSA, a Rohingya insurgent group, which had launched deadly coordinated attacks on army and police outposts in Rakhine that month.

The United Nations and United States, however, have both branded the crackdown as ethnic cleansing because of mass atrocities allegedly committed against Rohingya civilians by Myanmar security forces during the counter-ARSA offensive.

On Monday, the U.N. called for top military leaders in Myanmar to be investigated for genocide in Rakhine state.

Ayob Khan Mydin Pitchay, the Malaysian polices counterterrorist chief who also appeared at Mondays symposium, mentioned four cases since 2015 in which IS had recruited Rohingya expatriates in Malaysia.



At least four Rohingya were charged for their alleged involvement in terror-related activities and were currently incarcerated, he said.

IS recruited the Rohingya as well as Bangladeshi expats with the goal of sending them to wage holy war in Myanmar, according to a report by ChannelNews Asia, which cited Ayob.

There is always a possibility that these Rohingya people will be exposed to Salafi jihadi ideology, get recruited and get sent back to Rakhine state to wage this so called jihad war, the Singapore-based news website quoted him as saying.

But we are monitoring this situation very closely. We will take necessary action. We wont tolerate any attempt by any foreigners to use Malaysia as a base to attack foreign countries, the head of the counter-terrorist special branch said.

We do not support terror activities



Mohamad Sadek, a Rohingya who has lived in Malaysia for more than 10 years, took issue with the warnings from government officials that Rohingya expatriates could become radicalized.

The handful of arrests of Rohingya were isolated cases, he said.

Hundreds of thousands of us are here but only four joined them. It shows that we do not support terror activities, Sadek, who runs an NGO, told BenarNews.

We only want to live in peace.For Immediate Release, August 27, 2018 Contact: Bill Snape, Center for Biological Diversity, (202) 536-9351, bsnape@biologicaldiversity.org

Sarah Burt, Earthjustice, (415) 217-2055, sburt@earthjustice.org

Garrett Blad, SustainUs, (513) 808-6395, garrett.blad@sustainus.org Senate Urged to Block Super-polluting Supersonic Flights Over U.S. Land Bill Provision Would Reverse Decades-old Ban WASHINGTON Thirty-eight environmental, public-health and community groups today called on the Senate to reject a bill provision that would lift the ban on civilian supersonic flight over U.S. soil. As todays letter notes, the provision would boost the return of luxury supersonic planes projected to burn five to seven times more fuel per passenger than typical airliners. Resurrecting these flying gas-guzzlers would cause the aviation industrys already massive climate damage to skyrocket, said Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity. Supersonic planes are a gratuitous luxury for the super-rich and a dirty burden for everyone else. This bill would clear the runway for their comeback. Because the loud sonic booms from aircraft breaking the sound barrier harm people and wildlife, a 1973 Federal Aviation Administration regulation banned civilian flight at supersonic speeds over U.S. soil, restricting supersonic speed to travel over the ocean. Section 5017 of the 2018 Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act, a bill pending in Congress, would reverse that protection. Quiet efforts to build the high-speed planes are again underway, despite the Concordes flop decades ago. Boom Supersonics is developing an airliner it says could fly commercially by 2023. Supersonic business jets are in development by Spike Aerospace and Aerion Supersonic with the goal of being in service by the mid-2020s. A return of supersonic aircraft threatens to greatly worsen aviations contribution to the climate crisis. A recent analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation found that new commercial supersonic planes will likely emit 70 percent more carbon dioxide than comparable new subsonic airplanes will be allowed to emit. New supersonic airliners will also likely exceed international subsonic limits for nitrogen oxides by 40 percent, according to the analysis. Exposure to nitrogen oxides is linked to respiratory disease, heart attacks and strokes. Supersonic planes might help the one percent zip around the world faster, but they would jeopardize my generations shot at inheriting a livable planet, said Garrett Blad, executive coordinator of SustainUs. With the Trump administration killing climate protections left and right, a return of these dirty planes is the last thing we need. International aviation is among the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas pollution. Even without supersonic aircraft, the industry is already expected to generate 43 metric gigatons of CO2 through 2050, consuming more than 4 percent of the worlds remaining carbon budget, according to a Center report. At a time when we need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from aviation, not increase them, incentivizing commercial use of supersonic aircraft is a huge step in the wrong direction, said Sarah Burt, an attorney at Earthjustice. Supersonic planes potential return comes as the Trump administration pushes forward proposals to roll back pollution rules for power plants and vehicles, the nations two largest sources of greenhouse gases.Abbott India, which is listed on the BSE, currently offers over 110 brands which cover multiple therapeutic areas such as women's health, gastroenterology, neurology, thyroid, pain management, general care, vitamins and vaccines.

Drug major Abbott India aims to launch around 100 products over the next five years as it looks to strengthen existing therapy areas as well as grow over-the-counter portfolio.

The Mumbai-based firm, which is a subsidiary of US-based Abbott Laboratories, had launched 21 new products in the country last fiscal.

"Abbott plans to launch around 100 products over the next five years. Our focus remains on growing existing therapy areas such as gastroenterology, metabolics, vaccines, central nervous system and women's health," the company's Managing Director Ambati Venu said.

The company is also looking at strengthening its over-the-counter portfolio with a wider range of product formats, he added.

"In total, our pharmaceutical business covers 90 per cent of therapies in India so our goals are to increase the depth and breadth of the medicines we offer in these areas, ensure broader reach to people in India and continue to launch improved medicines that make it better or easier for people to get healthy," Venu said.

He added that the company's strategic priorities are focused on making life better for the patient.

"Over the next five years, we want to create an innovative healthcare ecosystem that improves access and is based on technology and insights, for both now' and next' therapies," he said.

As part of the growth strategy, the company wants to accelerate its established brands by creating innovative services for patients, doctors, care givers and chemists across the continuum of care, he added.

"And we believe that technology innovation through digital ecosystem is a key in markets like India, with increased penetration due to the recent boom in the telecom sector.

"The current state of digital innovation in India, though rapid, is perhaps being carried out in silos pharma, diagnostics and doctors need to collaborate effectively to truly help improve health for people in India," Venu said.

The company is in the unique position to help connect all the parties and be a holistic healthcare provider across the continuum of care, keeping patients as the focal point and that is going to be the key to company's sustainable success, he added.

Abbott India, which is listed on the BSE, currently offers over 110 brands which cover multiple therapeutic areas such as women's health, gastroenterology, neurology, thyroid, pain management, general care, vitamins and vaccines.

Therapeutic segments related to cardiac, diabetes, derma, neuro portfolio and hospital business fall under another group entity Abbott Healthcare Pvt Ltd (AHPL).

Together, Abbott India and AHPL form the Established Pharmaceuticals business of Abbott in India.by Louis Raphael Sako*

In a letter the Chaldean primate recalls the sufferings and persecutions of community in the last decade. He calls for future "guarantees" and a "common foundation" based on equal citizenship. The challenge of emigration, can only be defeated by restoring a social and political fabric on which to rebuild life.

Baghdad (AsiaNews) - Christians and other Iraqi minorities need "guarantees" to survive and a "common foundation" from which to build based on "citizenship, not religion or doctrine, writes the Chaldean primate, Card Louis Raphael Sako in a message published on the website of the Chaldean patriarchate and sent to AsiaNews for information. The "deterioration" of security in the last 13 years, warns the cardinal, including kidnapping, ransom, homicide, destruction of houses and property has caused a progressive "loss of confidence" among Christians, who have been forced to emigrate.

However, today more than ever it is important to rebuild the social and political fabric and guarantee a future in their country of origin, to which they have provided "very important contributions" in the past from the "economic, social and cultural" point of view. Returning to them, warns Card Sako, the lost "dignity".

Below the full text of Patriarch Sakos message. A translation from the original Arabic

In this article I would like to discuss the main reasons why Christians must on one hand remain in their homeland, that is Iraq, or on the other hand to leave it and emigrate. In any case, I want to express my concern about the current and future situation of our country.

First of all, it should be pointed out that Christians are an original people in Iraq, not an immigrant community that has come from another planet. In fact, the roots of Iraqi Christians date back to the first century AD, while their ethnic origins go back thousands of years before, being descendants of Chaldeans, Assyrians, Syriacs and Arabs.

Throughout their long history, Christians have served their country in a very decisive and influential way at all levels, including economic, cultural and social. They firmly believe that Iraq is their land of origin and an integral part of their identity, and that they represent a fundamental part of the different components of society.

Therefore, they refuse to be marginalized as regards their membership of the land and the Iraqi people. And despite all that has happened in Iraq, Christians desire, from the depth of their hearts and for all, peace, stability, true equality, real recognition of citizenship, freedom and dignity.

The reasons that push towards immigration

Iraqi Christians have withstood prolonged social and political pressures, and are treated as an insignificant minority and second class citizens. And of course, this way of treating them hurts. We only need to recall all that Christians suffered during the war between Iran and Iraq, the occupation of Kuwait, the 13 years of embargo, the fall of the regime in 2003, and the failure of successive governments in to lay the foundations for a national state and to consolidate a culture of citizenship and equality.

On the contrary, sectarianism and tribalism triumphed, which are founded on the protection of one groups members only, the spread of a religious preaching based on fundamentalism, which refers to ancient concepts to justify violence, although religion should be based on mercy , acceptance of the other, and a respectful attitude towards everyone.

What's more, the deterioration of the security situation in the last 13 years, and its consequences such as the series of kidnappings, ransoms, murders, bombing and seizures of homes and properties, has meant that Christians have lost confidence and hope for a better future, and everything that forced them to leave everything and migrate.

But the real shock was the invasion of the Islamic State "Daesh" and its conquest of the city of Mosul and the whole territory of the Nineveh plains in 2014, and the emptying of its Christians (). [The symbol: (: Nazarenes), placed on the houses and properties of Christians in Mosul and in the Nineveh plains, by Isis has now become the symbol of today's anti-Christian persecution.

In reality, the Islamic State had given three choices to Christians: conversion to Islam, payment of a tax, of so-called protection (jizya - dhimma), or forced and immediate abandonment of their land, otherwise they would have been killed. And unfortunately, Daesh has erased Christian monuments and symbols in Mosul, both ancient and modern ones.

Immediately after the fall of the regime (by Saddam Hussein), some local political forces began a conflict among themselves to dominate the Christian towns and villages of the Nineveh plains, with the aim of redesigning the demographic map of that area, each of those forces for their own interests.

The military barrier that separates the Christian town of Batnaya (under the control of the Iraqi army and the Shiite militias) from those of Telesqof and Alqosh also Christian (under the control of the 'Peshmerga' armed forces of the autonomous region of Kurdistan Iraqi) is the concrete proof of this conflict. This barrier has not been removed even today, despite promises made to remove it from both the Iraqi Kurdistan region authority and the Iraqi government.

International organizations have also encouraged Christians to emigrate, offering them all the support and tools to do so. Equally, the Western mass media have pushed in this direction, reiterating that - within five or ten years - there would be no more Christians in Iraq.

All these factors have contributed in bringing Christians to a point where they feel that their dignity is attacked, their trust is lost, their millennial existence is threatened. And this is also true of their membership, history, identity, faith, and language. Allow me to give a concrete example concerning the university of Hamdaniya (Qaraqosh, which is a Christian city on the Nineveh plains). An academic who does not belong to this city has been appointed as president. While we know that the Church has helped the university to continue after the invasion of Daesh in that area, and even today the students belonging to it use the halls and buildings of the Church as university classrooms. And there are other unpleasant and sad examples like this.

Christians were about 4 or 5% of the Iraqi population. They were about a million and a half before the fall of the regime [by Saddam Hussein], and they were a national, cultural, social and economic elite.

But since the beginning of 2003 about 1220 Christians have been killed in various incidents of violence throughout Iraq, including 700 people, including religious, killed for their Christian affiliation. And 23,000 Christian properties were seized, 58 churches were blown up. Let it be clear that none of these statistics include what the Islamic State did. Daesh, in reality, burned, desecrated, etc. all the churches in Mosul and in the towns and villages of the Nineveh plains. And as a consequence of all this, one million Christians, out of a million and a half, left Iraq.

The factors that encourage them to stay

Iraqi Christians and other minorities need reassurance to stay in their land, continue their millennial presence, and continue their coexistence with other members of society. They want the government to look at them with the same eyes with which they look at other groups, making them feel that they are citizens of equal dignity, both in rights and duties. Because citizenship, as we know, is not based on religion and doctrine, but on common foundations.

Christians want quick and clear solutions for some issues, such as: respect for their identity, diversity, the areas historically belonging to them (against attempts at demographic and ethnic change), their protection from any threat, attack, or from any law that oppresses them. Moreover, there is a great need to rebuild trust between Christians and their neighbors in the areas freed by Daesh, through concrete procedures such as: punishment of criminals, compensation for damages in favor of victims, restitution of property to rightful owners, the removal of mines from their fields, the reconstruction of their homes, and the improvement in essential services, so that they can return to their homes.

The current situation requires a precise strategy to establish social justice and equal opportunities. And it is very important to work on discernment, teaching, culture education of the acceptance of the other, and mutual respect among people belonging to different religions. All this must be done in homes, in places of worship, in schools, on books and school programs, and in the formation of teachers. Finally, we must condemn any insult or aggression against any citizen, especially if caused by his religious, doctrinal, ethnic, or sexual affiliation.

* Chaldean Patriarch of Baghdad and president of the Iraqi Episcopal ConferenceClick the photo to write a caption and have a chance to win a free subscription to the Norfolk Daily News.

Shocking! People Are Consuming Glitter Pills To Make Their Poop Sparkle Life oi-Syeda Farah

Have you ever thought of taking a sparkling dump? Sounds crazy, right? Well, there are people out there who are going to the next level of making their poop sparkle by consuming glitter pills.

It all started when an Ohio-based company started selling glitter pills which supposedly, start making your poop sparkle and glittery!

Though the pills come with a warning that states that the pills are only used for decoration purpose and not for human consumption, people seem to be consuming them anyway for their glittery results. Strange!

Most Bizarre Things Doctors Have Removed From Humans; #3 Is Shocking!

But This Raises A Question On How Safe Is Glitter Consumption For Your Health?

Well, according to research, it is believed that glitter is not recommended for consumption as there are chances that it would get lodged in the digestive system, and it can even alter hormone production. Apart from this, it would also increase your risks of cancer.

The Impact Of Glitter On The Environment

Environmentalists around the world insist that humans need to reduce the use of glitter as it is glutting our oceans at the rate of eight million tons every single day! This is the equivalent of one garbage truck that is full of toxic plastic dumped per minute.

The marine researchers reveal that the excess glitter is literally killing marine life. The different molluscs, decapods, echinoderms, fish, seabirds and whales are consuming these microplastics which are derived from glitter. This is causing a lot of unwanted health issues among the animals as well.

Even though there are so many health issues, it is believed that now the world is ready to taste some edible glitter! Be it in the form of glittery coffee, or a Turkish dish, there are a lot of food items which have glitter in them!

For the companies that use edible glitters, they are required by law to include a list of ingredients on their label that contain items like sugar, acacia, maltodextrin, cornstarch and colour additives. So this consumption is believed to be safe.

11 Unusual Non-edible Things Consumed By Humans

But our question is, are you ready for it? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.The cholera epidemic is spreading rapidly in Algeria where more and more people are falling sick, hospitalized or dying from this highly contagious disease, according to local press reports.

North African countries are deeply concerned about the situation, fearing contamination, as Algerian authorities were slow to react to the plague, failed to spot the early signs of the deadly ailment and tried at first to minimize its health risks before admitting the cholera outbreak.

Now the situation has become very scary and might spin out of control, threatening the whole region. In neighboring Morocco, the health ministry is on high alert to monitor and detect any possible cases, while Tunisia announced precautionary measures, advising citizens not to drink water from unknown sources and to wash fruits and vegetables thoroughly before consumption.

According to the Algerian health ministry, at least 139 people have been hospitalized across the country since August 7, confirming some fifty cases of cholera.

In a bid to avoid public backlash and social resentment in a country on a verge of implosion due to deepening political crisis and endemic corruption, the Algerian authorities say only two people died so far of cholera, but many believe there are more deaths related to this bacterial disease usually spread through contaminated water.

Most cholera cases were reported in the provinces of Blida, Bouira, Tipaza, Medea and Ain Defla, as well as in the capital. Algerians accuse the government of negligence, saying the outbreak could have been averted had authorities been quick in their response.

Mohamed Bekkat Berkani, president of the National Council of Doctors (GPs) deplored the health situation in the country, saying the local Pasteur Institute was not able to control the epidemic or identify its origin.

In recent months, several cases of water contamination and health problems have been reported by Algerian media blaming the irrigation of fruits and vegetables with wastewater.

This infectious disease causes severe diarrhea, which can lead to dehydration and even death if left untreated. It is caused by eating food or drinking water contaminated with a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae.

According to the World Health Organization, cholera is most common in places with poor sanitation, crowding, war, and famine. Common locations include sub-Saharan Africa and not a country like Algeria, member of the OPEC with huge cash and oil resources.Thousands have signed a petition in support of a young woman who held captive for two months and was tortured.

During her captivity, she was subjected to every torture imaginable: She was repeatedly raped by 15 men, beaten, deprived of food and basic sanitary needs, and had her body forcibly tattooed by her captors, the petition organizers wrote.

Speaking to Moroccan web TV Chouf TV 17-year old Khadija said she was kidnapped in June and held for two months by a gang of men in Oulad Ayad, a small town about 150 kilometers (90 miles) northeast of Marrakesh.

Khadija, speaking with grief, said that she was tortured and kept without food or shower.

Local media said that at least 12 suspects were arrested in the case, which took place after Morocco passed a new law to tackle violence against women.

The law provided new protections for survivors, but human rights groups said it didnt go far enough.Morocco and the World Bank started Monday in Rabat discussions on a set of issues, on top of which preschool education and the consolidated social register that will identify families deserving to benefit from social assistance programs.

The discussions are held during the visit World Bank Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Tunisian Ferid Belhaj, is paying to Morocco this week.

A working session was held this Monday with the new Minister of Economy and Finance, Mohamed Benchaaboun, who started thus his official activities since his appointment to the position on August 20. Other meetings are scheduled with the Head of Government Saad Eddine El othmani as well as with representatives of the private and public sectors.

The WB has decided to support Morocco in its desire to invest soon in early childhood, improve the quality of access to health care and social protection programs, a WB statement said.

The social protection programs begin with the establishment of a consolidated national register that King Mohammed VI had commended in the Throne Day Speech as a promising start for the gradual improvement of social welfare programs over the short and medium terms.

This is a national registration system to identify families that truly deserve to benefit from social assistance programs. To this end, precise and objective standards will be set and modern technology will be used, the King had said, describing the register as a strategic and ambitious social project which concerns large segments of the Moroccan population.

In this connection, the Vice President of the World Bank for the MENA region will attend in Rabat the signing of an agreement between the Moroccan Ministry of the Interior and Indias International Institute of Information Technology. Under the agreement, the fruit of a South-South collaboration between the two countries, Morocco will use state-of-the-art digital identification software for access to social programs especially for the most vulnerable layers of society.

Youth unemployment and employment will be one of the other issues of cooperation between Morocco and the World Bank.

The social programs overhaul is undertaken as the Government is planning to suppress as of 20189 subsidies on a number of basic products, mainly flour, butane gas and sugar. This will sound the end of the Compensation Fund that drains away billions of Dirhams every year.

Subsidies on petroleum products were lifted in 2015.

Ferid Belhaj served as World Bank Country Manager for Morocco from 2002 to 2007, where he developed a new and multifaceted dialogue with one of the best performing Middle-Income countries.

From 2007 to 2010, he was the World Banks Special Representative to the United Nations in New York, where he engaged with various UN agencies on a range of programs, mainly climate change, the Millennium Development Goals, fragile and post-conflict states and the global financial and food crises.

In the 15 months preceding this appointment as Vice President for the MENA region, Ferid Belhaj was Chief of Staff of the President of the World Bank Group. From 2012 to 2017, he led, from Beirut, the activities of the World Bank in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Iran.Moroccos Interior Ministry and the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore (India) signed Monday in Rabat a Memorandum of Understanding providing for developing a modular open source platform, called MOSIP, that will constitute the core of the management system of the national population register being currently set up by the Moroccan government.

Morocco will be the first country to participate in the development of the MOSIP and will be its first user. This will enable the country to play a strategic role in the context of South-South cooperation for the promotion of this open source software platform.

Under the MoU, Morocco will benefit from Indias experience and technological know-how capitalized during the setting up of the largest population register in the world.

The National Population Register will guarantee reliability of the identification data and the authentication services of the beneficiaries of social programs listed in the Unique Social Register (RSU)

the RSU will identify families that truly deserve to benefit from social assistance programs. To this end, precise and objective standards will be set and modern technology will be used, as put by King Mohammed VI in the Throne Day speech he delivered on July 29.

The World Bank is extending financial and technical support to Morocco for the setting up of the National Population Register (RNP) and the RSU.

In this vein, the international financial institution has facilitated the South-South cooperation with the Government of India for the development of the RNP and is providing technical support through ID4D, which helps countries to implement digital identification systems that make targeting and social protection programs much more efficient.Photo: Bobby Doherty

In 2015, the journalist Anand Giridharadas was a fellow at the Aspen Institute, a confab of moneyed thought leaders where TED-style discourse dominates: ostensibly nonpolitical, often counterintuitive, but never too polemical. In his own speech that year, Giridharadas broke with protocol, accusing his audience of perpetuating the very social problems they thought they were solving through philanthropy. He described what he called the Aspen Consensus: The winners of our age must be challenged to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm. The response, he said, was mixed. One private-equity figure called him an asshole that evening, but another investor said hed voiced the struggle of her life. David Brooks, in a New York Times column, called the speech courageous. That lecture grew into Winners Take All, Giridharadass new jeremiad against philanthropy as we know it. He weaves together scenes at billionaires gatherings, profiles of insiders who struggle with ethical conflicts, and a broader history of how Americas wealth inequality and philanthropy grew in tandem.

How did you find yourself in this world of philanthropists and thought leaders?

A friend nominated me for the Aspen fellowship. I went through an interview, then I got a call late one night, in early 2011, basically saying, Youll meet four times over two years for a week each. Youll sit in a room with 20 other people, discuss Plato and Aristotle and Gandhi, well talk about our lives, and it will be an advice circle, all very private. It was generally businesspeople and entrepreneurs who want to make a difference, to shift from just making money to giving back. Every year they invite two or three people who dont fit that profile, to spice it up slightly  journalists, artists, people designed to be a little renegade-y.

It seems that this experience made you even renegadier. Were you immediately radicalized?

I would love to tell you I figured it out within two minutes, but these things are seductive. It was a drip-drip-drip-drip of moments where you thought, Wait a second, why are we sitting in the Koch building? Why is this event funded by Monsanto, and by Pepsi, which seems to be changing the world by fattening kids? Why is Goldman Sachs a sponsor of our annual summer retreat? The reality of the world outside kept getting worse and worse, and the people in the fellowship, and the sponsors, seemed to be the very people sucking most of the juice of progress. What I started to realize was that giving had become the wingman of taking. Generosity had become the wingman of injustice. Changing the world had become the wingman of rigging the system.

You quote a great line from Thomas Piketty: he says, the durability of this system depends on the effectiveness of its apparatus of justification.

Yes! I read that line in a moment where I was thinking, What is this book? The apparatus of justification, thats what this all is! Ive never been back to Aspen since I finished the fellowship. Ive been told, in many subtle ways, that Im not welcome back. No one is more easily offended than the person who thinks they are changing the world. Because they think, I could be burning this money or spending it on a yacht. Theres a simple critique that says, All this philanthropy is a drop in the bucket, and I think they would all agree to that. But my critique goes way farther than that: This is a drop in the bucket that is upholding the problem. The idea that their kindness is how a bad system is maintained  it hurts them in a way thats hard to overstate.

There have been other books, some quite good, attacking the rhetoric of conscious capitalism, but they tend to be aimed at lefties. You seem to be trying to persuade a general audience.

I am, by temperament, a flamethrower, but my editor helped me understand that if you dont tell this through the stories of people struggling with this, youre not going to get behind enemy lines. My first draft was more like me throwing rocks at this world. My editor said, First of all, thats a fight youre not going to win. Second of all, there are people in these worlds who think youre right. Tell us their stories.

What did you learn by interviewing them?

They educated me on how complicated some of this stuff was. Amy Cuddy, the social psychologist I wrote about, helped me understand that for many thinkers like her who want to speak to the plutocratic confabs, yeah, you can just keep it real, and give one talk there and never come back again. But if youre someone like her, a real feminist who has a lot to say, maybe it is valuable to stay in there. I still think the people shes speaking to are using her, but she was very real with me about how she calibrates it.

Starting with the most egregious offenders in your book: The Sackler family donate millions of dollars to art museums and universities, but they were also deeply culpable in causing the opioid crisis, lying about the dangers of Oxycontin.

Right. The CDC now estimates that 200,000 people have died in the opioid epidemic. Just think about that for a minute. Those are genocide numbers! Not only have they not gone to jail, their names are in the Brooklyn Museum.

So whats the relationship between the harm and the philanthropy?

I think we are all busy and fragmented and tired. We make sense of the world through very small shards of information, and when we think of a Sackler or a Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk, there are a couple words that come into our heads, then we move on. So what people like the Sacklers do is use giving to make sure the initial, shallow perception that you and I have, that journalists and regulators and potential prosecutors may have, is, Oh yeah, thats that family that gives to the arts.

Are there subtler examples of harm done by philanthropists?

Mark Zuckerberg talks all the time about changing the world. He seldom calls Facebook a company  he calls it a community. They do these things like trying to figure out how to fly drones over Africa and beam free internet to people. And in various other ways, they talk about themselves as building the new commons of the 20th century. What all that does is create this moral glow. And under the haze created by that glow, theyre able to create a probable monopoly that has harmed the most sacred thing in America, which is our electoral process, while gutting the other most sacred thing in America, our free press. And they do it under the cover of changing the world. If JP Morgan tried to pull off what I just described, they wouldnt be able to. Why? Because wed all be like, Why is a bank deciding what our press should be like? Why is a bank redoing our election system? Why is a bank the only bank in America?

It was interesting to read in your book that foundations created by Rockefeller and Carnegie were initially considered outrageous and undemocratic. Now theyre considered beyond reproach: How can you criticize people for giving their money away?

And people on the left will criticize other people on the left for making the same criticisms Theodore Roosevelt made 100 years ago. But look at Andrew Carnegies essay Wealth. Were now living in a world created by the intellectual framework he laid out: extreme taking, followed by and justified by extreme giving. Were living in a world in which the government feels it would be an unwarranted extension of its sovereignty to ensure that the minimum wage is a living wage. But at least before the new tax law, we spent $60 billion a year subsidizing charitable deductions. If we didnt give them that tax break, it could pay a wage subsidy, it could give us all a lower tax rate, whatever.

A friend in the tech industry told me once that he thought politics were pointless, because you can get more juice for your squeeze by trying to change the world in other ways. How would you have responded?

[Hangs head]

Its a fairly common perspective!

Youre baiting me. Im trying to be a nice person, though. Tending to the public welfare is not an efficiency problem. The work of governing a society is tending to everybody. Its figuring out universal rules and norms and programs that express the value of the whole and take care of the common welfare. That is an inherently, and rightfully, and beautifully inefficient process. Corporations get more juice from the squeeze because corporations dont solve very complicated problems. God bless em, but making Pepsi or manufacturing a car seat is an easy problem. Governing 350 million people is an extraordinary thing that we have discredited in this age of markets. The right has discredited it head-on, explicitly, intentionally, but the left has passively assented to its discrediting.

By the way, I would say most places in Europe dont live in Carnegies world. If Mark Zuckerberg went to Europe and said, Im changing the world, everybody would look at him like, What are you talking about? So I mostly wrote the book to discredit them as world-changers; if the public just sees through it, it will take away a lot of their power. I just wanted to take a lot of the weird valence off the word thought-leader, to make it a joke, so that no one ever uses it again in an un-ironic way.

Wed all be indebted. But what would come after that?

I think we need to return to politics as the place we go to change the world. Next time you see a problem, think about what a public, universal, institutional, and democratic solution would be. But now lets get more practical. For one, I think society should take on the college tuition or the college debt of anybody who chooses to do public-sector work. There could also be public housing for people who work in the public sector. New York could say, If you want to build this big building, youve got to build some affordable housing and reserve some of it for people who are teachers and council-members, maybe even some activists.

How do you think the philanthropists have contributed to the Trump era?

I think well-meaning liberals, which include most of the people Im writing about, paved the way for Donald Trump. By promulgating pseudo-change all these years, they staved off actual reform. It is certainly possible to imagine that if wed actually reformed trade and education and gone after the opioid crisis, Trump would not have been president. Also, philanthropists gave Donald Trump a lot of his language. Hes the ultimate phony billionaire-savior. A lot of his maneuvers are intellectual moves that took root long ago among this plutocratic-giver class: I alone can fix it. For decades, these people have said they have some special ability because of their private-sector skill.

Romney ran on the promise of being Americas CEO.

Ive been hearing that language for a long time. Same with the idea that billionaires can fight for the common mans interest because they are above it all. Like Trump says, I dont need the money  thats a Bloomberg idea. Even Trumps veneration of the entrepreneur, and his despising of government  these philanthropists have laid the track. And not just right-wing people; well-meaning liberals have slowly participated in this denigration of governments effectiveness. So when I see Donald Trump, I see a man who has ridden the coattails of a lot of rich liberals.The Government has been criticised for plans to use taxpayers money to monitor our own social media.

Companies have been invited to submit tenders to the Department of Social Protection and outline how they would conduct the service.

It would see certain keywords monitored that may flag issues to the Department.

The Department said it Is part of efforts to help it understand policy, economic and customer issues and says there's no guarantee it will go ahead with the monitoring.

Earlier: The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) says we should be worried that the government is going to monitor our social media activity.

The Department of Social Protection (DSP) has put out a tender for a company to look for the use of certain words on Facebook and Twitter.

Elizabeth Farries from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties said: "I want to be clear that this isn't the same as an ordinary company monitoring people's online speech."

"People depend on the DSP for their livlihood and for access to essential services.

"So it is unthinkable that the DSP is making decision to monitor this speech in this way given the clear power imbalance between the two parties."

Digital DeskA man has been arrested after gardai seized drugs worth an estimated 150,000 in Limerick yesterday.

Quantities of cannabis and heroin were seized by the Limerick Divisional Drugs Unit and armed gardai.

Approximately 5kg of cannabis herb with an estimated street value of 100,000 and 12oz of Diamorphine (heroin) with an estimated street value of 50,000 were recovered.

The drugs were uncovered after a house at Colbert Park, Janesboro in Limerick was searched.

A 56-year-old man was arrested at the scene and is detained at Henry Street Garda Station.By Olivia Kelleher

A teenage boy who was told his cancer in the skull was terminal in Ireland is looking forward to returning back home next month after surgeons successfully completed a life-saving operation in the States.

Aaron McMahon (18) from Shanagarry, Co Cork underwent a successful eleven-hour surgery to remove a chordoma tumour at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre (UPMC) last month.

He hopes to fly back home next month. His prognosis is good.

In an interview with Cork's 96FM Aaron said his recovery was going well and he was looking forward to getting back to his own bed.

He experiences "small headaches" but his pain levels have been significantly reduced.

He admits he is looking forward to simple pleasures at home and reiterated his thanks for the funds that were raised for his treatment in the States.

I just want to go home to my own bed! And the dogs Oscar and Cooper. I am speechless towards the amount of people who got involved. Everyone who came out fundraising. I am very thankful.

Meanwhile, his mother Gail said she is concerned about coming home as she claims the country is without the medical expertise needed to assist Aaron on his road to recovery.

"The comfort here of going in and seeing one of the team (in Pittsburgh), it doesn't matter which one, and you can ask questions.

"If I am out with Aaron and I have a problem I can email. You have no idea of that feeling that at last I have somebody who can take care of Aaron."

Mrs McMahon said it was frightening to have to travel to the States to obtain the surgery for Aaron.

She calls for improved treatment options in Ireland.

Aaron was informed by doctors in Ireland that his only option was palliative care after he was diagnosed with a chordoma.

Aaron with his parents

Aaron had previously travelled to Germany for proton treatment for his condition which involves a rare form of cancer that occurs in the bones of the base of the skull and the spine.

The McMahon family would like to acknowledge the work of the Gavin Glynn Foundation.

The foundation, which was set up in memory of a four-year-old boy who died of a rare form of cancer, booked and paid for flights and accommodation in America.

They are also hugely appreciative of the over 100,000 raised on a GoFundMe page.

The teenager has also expressed his thanks to people from all over Ireland who sent letters and cards since he went public with his plight earlier this year.

It is understood that Aaron first spotted his reoccurring headaches in 2013 and they got progressively worse by 2016.

He was diagnosed with a brain tumour and had surgery in Dublin before going to Germany for treatment.

Earlier this year he noticed he had eye problems again and the family were told that his condition was terminal.

However, surgeons in Pittsburgh said they could treat him and he has gone from strength to strength since the surgery.

Chordoma is part of a group of malignant bone and soft tissue tumours called sarcoma and is diagnosed in one million people per year.Former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, right, greets Pope Francis during a 2015 prayer service in Washington, D.C. Photo: Jonathan Newton-Pool/Getty Images

A former Vatican ambassador to the U.S. has alleged in a letter that Pope Francis and his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had both been long aware of sexual misconduct allegations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and that Francis was complicit in the cover-up and his continued abuses. The letter, which was written by controversial Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, hit the Catholic media on Saturday night and quickly rattled the already reeling Catholic world.

McCarrick, the 88-year-old former archbishop of Washington, D.C., was accused of groping a teenage boy in June, which led to more allegations of abuse and his subsequent suspension and resignation from the church.

The 77-year-old Vigano, who has plenty of professional baggage and enemies in the church, testifies in his 7,000-word letter that Cardinal McCarricks history of sexual misconduct was known in the upper echelons of the Vatican for more than a decade. He claims that multiple warnings about McCarrick were ignored, that Pope Benedict eventually sanctioned McCarrick, and that Pope Francis knew McCarrick was a serial predator since at least mid-2013, but still covered for and empowered him to the bitter end. The letter doesnt just implicate Francis, whom Vigano calls on to resign, but multiple other former and current church leaders on both sides of the Atlantic.

When asked about the letter during a flight back to Rome following a two-day trip to Ireland, Francis told journalists to read the statement attentively and make your own judgment.

I will not say a single word on this, he continued. I think this statement speaks for itself, and you have the sufficient journalistic capacity to draw conclusions.

When some time passes and you have your conclusions, maybe I will speak, said Francis. But I would like that your professional maturity carries out this task.

If any of Viganos allegations turn out to be true, it would obviously have enormous consequences for Francis and the church. But the letter, whether its claims are accurate or not, is also part of an ongoing ideological civil war between conservatives like Vigano  who are looking to hold onto their power and traditions  and more liberal leaders like Francis, whose well-publicized reform efforts have been credited with making the church more tolerant and more palatable to a wider audience.

This is either an extraordinary and vicious slander or an act of revelation that should be the undoing of just about every figure mentioned in its pages. It has an apocalyptic feel either way.  Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 26, 2018

Vigano alleges that an archbishop first made the Vatican aware of McCarricks misconduct in 2000, and that he personally alerted his superiors about McCarrick via two separate memos in 2006 and 2008. But the warnings  which were about McCarricks sexual abuse of seminarians and young priests, not minors  were ignored until a statement from a psychotherapist regarding McCarricks behavior reached Benedict in the late aughts and prompted him to act.

According to Vigano, Benedict ordered McCarrick to withdraw from public life and no longer stay in seminaries. That punishment either didnt happen or wasnt respected by McCarrick, as he clearly continued to make public appearances afterward.

Vigano also accuses Francis of serious misconduct, alleging that he had personally informed the then-new pope in 2013 about McCarricks sexual misconduct and Benedicts order of punishment, but that Francis did not make the slightest comment about those very grave words of mine and did not show any expression of surprise on his face, as if he had already known the matter for some time[.] He accuses Francis of being a part of the cover-up, ignoring or reversing Benedicts sanctions, and not only placing his trust in McCarrick  whom he had known for years  but awarding him new influence and power, including a high-profile role as a roving ambassador for the church. Francis only acted, according to Vigano, when media reports of McCarricks alleged abuse of a minor emerged.

Vigano has said that his letter was an effort to clear his conscience before he dies, as well as protect the church and sexual abuse victims, but he has not offered any proof of his assertions, and has thus far declined opportunities to back up his claims  responding to a request for elaboration from the Washington Post with the comment that, Silence and prayer are the only things that are befitting.

The archbishop also referenced multiple documents in his letter, including his own memos  which means there should be some kind of paper trail to support his allegations  but he has thus far provided none.

The National Catholic Register, a conservative publication that is considered an opponent of Francis, reported on Sunday that it had confirmed at least one of Viganos allegations  yet like the archbishop, it offered no evidence. The Register reported that it had independently confirmed that the allegations against McCarrick were certainly known to Benedict, and the Pope Emeritus remembers instructing [Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone] to impose measures but cannot recall their exact nature. The publication did not cite a source or on-the-record comment, and does not make clear how it confirmed the allegation about Benedict, or how it learned what he did or did not remember.

There are, however, other accounts which indicate the Vatican was aware of rumors about McCarricks misconduct, as the L.A. Times explains:

This summer several clerics said they had communicated to Vatican representatives years ago concern about the rumors, and about the case of a New Jersey priest whose private letters allege his life was ruined by McCarricks sexual behavior. The priest reached a $100,000 settlement in 2006 with the church in New Jersey, The New York Times reported this summer. He was himself removed amid allegations of inappropriately touching minors and has not responded to efforts by the Post to be interviewed.

This is also not Viganos first bout with damaging headlines. He has faced his own allegations of covering up sexual abuse, is a political enemy of Francis and others within the church hierarchy, and lost what became a widely publicized power struggle with the Vatican leadership under Benedict. Vigano was also bitter when McCarrick was consulted over him in the selection of powerful new American bishops, and according to the New York Times, Vigano has run with a crowd of traditionalist Catholics deeply critical of Pope Francis and recently attended a raucous meeting of anti-Francis prelates and faithful in the basement of a Rome hotel, where he could be seen talking to the LifeSite news reporter who translated the letter into English.

Vigano, when he was still the Vaticans ambassador to the U.S., was the one responsible for arranging the infamous meeting in 2016 between Pope Francis and Kim Davis, the municipal clerk from Kentucky who became a momentary hero on the American right after she was fired for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The outcry over that meeting embarrassed Francis during a high-profile trip to the U.S., and his allies subsequently alleged that the meeting was set up by Vigano to accomplish just that. Francis later removed Vigano from his ambassador role. (He had also been removed from a leadership post under Benedict.)

It is thus absolutely not a coincidence that Viganos allegations emerged while Francis was making a high-profile visit to Ireland, where the church has steadily lost influence and other instances of widespread sexual misconduct by clergy have occurred. Addressing a crowd on Sunday, the pope asked for forgiveness for the abuses in Ireland, abuses of power, conscience, and sexual abuses by church leaders.

Pope Francis defended his methods of addressing allegations of sex abuse by priests on Sunday, telling journalists that a tribunal, which survivors have demanded, wasnt viable or convenient because of the different cultures of the bishops who must be judged. He said his ad-hoc system works better, and several bishops have already been judged. It is not clear when or if an investigation into the allegation in Viganos letter will occur. Whatever happens, its likely the churchs dramatic internal conflict and the fallout from this new wave of sex-abuse scandals will continue to unfold simultaneously for some time.

This post has been updated to include Pope Franciss response.This year's NAPLAN results show that the percentage of NSW students achieving at or above the national minimum standard, which is set at different levels for each year group, also fell for year 7 reading and spelling, and year 9 spelling and numeracy since last year. Additionally, the proportion of NSW year 9 students achieving at or above a band 8 fell for all but one domain after the state government scrapped its policy to use NAPLAN reading, writing and numeracy results as a prequalification to sit the HSC earlier this year. Year 9 results improved significantly across the state last year, the first and only year the HSC policy was in place, but have fallen once again for reading and writing this year. Improvements in year 9 numeracy results have been maintained.

"Kids respond to incentives the same as any of us but it's not clear that underlying ability changed, it's most likely that kids just tried harder on the tests," Dr Goss said. Over the long term, only mean writing scores have gone down nationally, falling nearly 24 points for years 7 and 9, 18 points for year 5 and 8.7 points for year 3 since 2011. Year 3 and 5 reading and year 3 grammar and punctuation scores have gone up the most on average since 2008, rising between 24 and 34 points across the country. Barbara Young, principal of St Oliver's Primary School in Sydney's west, said her school uses NAPLAN results to set its goals and strategies for the coming year. "We look really closely at our NAPLAN results and we use them to look at how we can improve learning for our students," Ms Young said.

"If we see that there is a need to improve writing, we'd have the literacy lead teacher going in for planning and going into the classroom and working shoulder-to-shoulder with teachers to improve their strategies." The school will receive its latest NAPLAN results on Tuesday morning but said it requires teachers to spend a minimum of 100 minutes every day on literacy and 60 minutes on numeracy based on previous years' results. Most year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students sat the national standardised tests for reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation and numeracy in May this year. This was the first year that the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority began introducing NAPLAN online, with about 20 per cent of students across Australia sitting the tests on a computer and the remainder continuing to do the pen-and-paper version. ACARA's chief executive Robert Randall said the online tests were a success, with 99.8 per cent of students able to complete the computer tests, and that their comparability with the paper tests has been verified by independent experts and state and territory education departments.

However, a report commissioned by the NSW Teachers Federation and released this week found that the online and paper tests are not comparable and will be "of very limited use to students, teachers parents and schools". ACARA noted that students who sat the writing test online had results that "were, on average, higher than the results of students who completed [the] writing test on paper". Mr Randall said this was most likely because students sitting the tests online were better able to go back and edit their work and that "we need to be cognisant" of the difference between the two mediums as online tests continue to be phased in until 2020. NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes said he was encouraged to see NSW performing above the national average in all five NAPLAN testing domains, across all four participating year levels. "Earlier this year I expressed concerns regarding the comparability of online, and pen-and-paper testing," he said. "I continue to be strongly of the view that there is a need to get on with the work necessary to move towards a single, online formative assessment."Local streaming platform Stan hasn't pulled the plug on popular television series Wolf Creek despite the shows lead actor being charged with rape.

Prominent Australian actor John Jarratt was last week charged with a historical sexual assault. The 66-year-old is alleged to have sexually assaulted a woman he lived with in a Sydney share house around 40 years ago.

Jarratt strongly denies the allegation and will face court on Wednesday, October 10. The actor is best known for portraying serial killer Mick Taylor in the Wolf Creek film series.

He reprised his role in 2016, after Stan (part-owned by Fairfax Media) created a television spin-off and the show was later renewed for a second season. As of Monday afternoon, it was still available to Stan subscribers.Researchers say Australians are underestimating the danger of pharmaceutical drugs, with the Territory's prescription opioid deaths tripling in a decade.

A new report from the Penington Institute, Australia's Annual Overdose Report 2018, warns Australia is heading towards a United States style drug overdose crisis.

Prescription drug deaths are on the rise. Credit:AFR

The report showed 2177 Australian lives were lost to drug overdose in 2016 - the highest number in 20 years.

It also found Australians were misusing prescription pain killers like fentanyl unlike any previous time in history.Big seat to fill. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The hole that John McCains death has left in the lives of his family (and the hearts of many a Capitol Hill reporter) will be difficult to fill. His seat in the Senate is a different story.

While the nation mourns its fallen maverick (and/or, bickers on Twitter about whether he was a patriot or a jingoist; a human rights advocate, or a supporter of South African apartheid; a man who bravely resisted his partys Trumpist turn, or who cravenly helped to birth it), operatives and elected officials are gaming out the political implications of his departure.

Heres a quick rundown of what McCains death will  and will not  mean for American politics going forward.

Arizona governor Doug Ducey will make one of the most important decisions of his career.

John McCains last major political act was not his deciding vote against repealing Obamacare  but rather, his decision to remain in his Senate past June 1 of this year. Had McCain stepped down before that date, Arizona voters would have been able to chose his replacement in a special election this fall. This would have given Democrats an outside shot of netting two Senate pickups in Arizona, and securing control of the upper chamber.

By holding on through the summer, McCain gave governor Doug Ducey the opportunity to handpick his successor, who will not need to face voters until November 2020.

This will be a tricky decision for Ducey, who is looking to win reelection in Arizona this fall  and, reportedly, to be the GOP nominee for president in the medium-term future. Thus, one could imagine the governor opting for a moderate Republican, out of desire to appeal to swing voters this fall and honor McCains idiosyncratic example.

But all signs suggest Ducey will cruise to reelection, and personally installing a RINO in the Senate would alienate donors and activists hell need in a future bid for higher office. Thus, despite early rumors, it is exceedingly unlikely that Ducey will appoint Cindy McCain (whose policy views are not well known) to her husbands seat in a caretaker capacity.

While Ducey is sure to pick a conventional Republican, its unclear precisely what brand of conventional hell settle on. As FiveThirtyEights Perry Bacon Jr. notes, the Arizona GOP is divided between a more establishment wing (Ducey) and a more tea party one (former sheriff Joe Arpaio). Bacon Jr. predicts that Ducey will opt to pick a caretaker replacement for McCain  someone who would step down in 2020, thereby allowing Republican primary voters to pick the senators long-term replacement  so as to avoid inflaming either wing of his state party.

But reporting from the Washington Post suggests Ducey favors appointing someone who could hold on to the seat. Which makes sense: Arizona is turning purple, and forfeiting the advantage of incumbency would give Democrats a better chance of capturing McCains old seat in 2020.

Republican sources provided the Hill with a short list of potential appointees:

Several sources also pointed to former senator Jon Kyl (R), McCains longtime seatmate who is now shepherding Judge Brett Kavanaughs nomination to the Supreme Court, and former representative John Shadegg (R), who left Congress in 2011.

Mitch McConnells job is about to get a bit easier.

Any of the contenders on Duceys short-list would (almost certainly) make it easier for McConnell to push his agenda (which is to say, far-right judges) through the Senate. With McCain sidelined, the GOPs majority in the upper chamber has been 50-to-49 for most of this year  a margin that allows any individual Republican senator to hold business hostage to his or her idiosyncratic demands. Granted, few in McConnells caucus have availed themselves of this power. But some do miss votes on occasion, forcing the Majority Leader to rely on Democratic cooperation.

Now, McConnell has breathing room in the short term  and, in all probability, a much more loyal vote for the presidents agenda in the long one. If Republicans fend off the threat of a Democratic takeover this fall, theyll return to Washington next year with a much more uniformly pro-Trump caucus (as less independent freshman senators would likely take the seats of Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, and John McCain).

Brett Kavanaugh will still probably be confirmed, while Obamacare repeal will remain dead.

McCains replacement will give McConnell a higher margin for error in the Kavanaugh confirmation fight. With McCain sidelined, it would only have taken a single Republican defection (plus unanimous Democratic opposition) to sink Trumps Supreme Court pick. Now, it will take two.

But pro-choice Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski were already giving every indication that they would rather protect Senate norms than a womans right to choose. And vulnerable, red-state Democrats have evinced little appetite for taking a high-profile stand against Trump right before facing the voters this fall. So, McCains departure is probably a moot point.

Similarly, McCains replacement is unlikely to cast a deciding vote in favor of repealing Obamacare. Although McCains opposition was decisive last summer, now that Democrat Doug Jones has one of Alabamas Senate votes, Murkowski or Collins would have to flip to get repeal through. And theres no sign that either has interest in reversing one of the most popular votes theyve ever taken.

That said, if Republicans manage to keep the House  and pad their majority in the Senate  then repeal will become a real possibility next year.

Republicans will talk a bit less about human rights when justifying their desire to drop bombs on foreigners.

A news analysis from The Wall Street Journal suggests that the GOP might now accelerate its turn away from the robust internationalism propounded by Mr. McCain toward a more limited role for the U.S. advocated by President Trump.

But this is a bad misdescription of Trumps actual foreign policy. After all, the presidents vision of limited role for the U.S. on the world stage has involved extending the longest war in American history (despite the utter absence of a coherent strategy or compelling national interest in Afghanistan); increasing the nations gargantuan military budget; overruling theE.U.s right to set its own foreign policy by imposing sanctions on all European firms that do business with Iran; bombing Syrias sovereign government multiple times without United Nations approval; and asserting (albeit, without, as of yet, exercising) Americas right to launch a preemptive war against North Korea if it does not forfeit its nuclear arsenal.

There are few signs, then, that McCains departure will lead the Republican Party to embrace a less interventionist approach to geopolitics. But it is plausible that his absence will accelerate a shift in how the party rationalizes the assertion of American might on the world stage. McCain framed his support for the American imperial project in missionary, universalist terms:

The United States had a responsibility to facilitate the proliferation of liberal democracy, and to prevent genocidal atrocities, the world over. McCain (and his fellow neoconservatives) might have applied these arguments selectively (tip-toeing around the authoritarianism and human rights violations of Americas allies). But their putative reverence for internationalism, and liberal democracy, nevertheless had real implications for the substance of U.S. foreign policy.

In Trumps mercenary, mercantilist vision of American empire, the U.S. has no special investment in Europes well-being, or in preserving the legitimacy of (U.S.-built) international institutions. In fact, Trumps empire barely has any use for diplomats or soft power of any kind: Even as the president jacks up Americas military budget, and expands its international commitments, hes sought to shrink the State Department and slash foreign aid.

McCain might have been the GOPs most prominent defender of the Cold Warera conception of Americas role on the world-stage (including its responsibility to counter the threat Russia supposedly poses to Western values). Now, hes gone. And theres little sign that the Republican base will be eager to elect globalists of his vintage in the future.In keeping with Granny's pledge to steer clear of naming names in the current Canberra kerfuffle (C8), Steve Cornelius of Brookvale writes: "On the afternoon of Friday 24 August, ABC television cancelled an episode of the British quiz show Pointless (one of my favourites). Instead, we were subjected to a speech by some dude claiming to be Australias new Prime Minister. It struck me as an example of replacing something pointless with something even more pointless."

Warren Menteith of Nyatnyatan, Bali, thinks a change of PM should be followed by another societal change: "With apologies to Peter Allen, we should change the National Anthem to 'I still call Australia Rome'". Et tu, Warren.

There are yet more Groucho Marx quotes (C8) that appear very much in keeping with the current political climate. Bill Leigh of West Pennant Hills refers to this one: The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, youve got it. Ian Stevenson of Gladesville likes: Those are my principles, and if you don't like them ... well, I have others."

Edward Loong of Milsons Point sees similar suitability in the thoughts of Will Rogers: "Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke."

While we signed-off on our signs thread (C8) last week, we couldn't resist this late arrival from Nina Poulos of Berry: "I saw this sign above a doctors office in Mumbai. Below the name were the qualifications Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery, Oxford. And in brackets failed. Not very reassuring."A 52-year-old man has died in a house fire after rescuing his elderly mum from the blaze near Five Dock.

A man died after re-entering a house at Rodd Point to battle a fire. Credit:Nick Moir

The man was in the home on Henley Marine Drive in Rodd Point with his 82-year-old mother when the fire broke out in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Emergency services were called just before 2.30am and arrived to find the house well alight.Queensland parents are withdrawing their children from national numeracy and literacy tests in greater numbers than parents in other states, according to the new NAPLAN 2018 data out today.

The controversial test was introduced in 2008 across four cohorts  Years 3, 5, 7 and 9  and has seen participation levels steadily fall.

Education Minister Grace Grace said she will continue to advocate for a national, comprehensive review of NAPLAN, particularly in the area of writing. Credit:AAP

This years test scores show Queensland had the highest rate of withdrawal from Year 3 reading tests - 5.1 per cent compared with the national average of just 3 per cent.

The withdrawal rate from Year 9 reading tests was even higher at 7.9 per cent, compared with a national average of 3.2 per cent.A Brisbane train station is proposed to be redeveloped to include more than 750 additional commuter car parks as well as a retail and residential precinct.

Honeycombes Property Group submitted a development application to Brisbane City Council on Thursday proposing the redevelopment of the Ferny Grove train station commuter car park.

Honeycombes Property Group's proposed Ferny Grove Central development. Credit:Honeycombes Property Group

The 3.5-hectare site is occupied by the train station, bus interchange and commuter car parking area at present, with 973 parking spaces.

The development application proposed to increase parking on the site to 1732, with 759 additional spaces for commuters and 469 further car parks for the retail and residential components*.Victorian students in year 9 who sat their NAPLAN test online achieved writing scores that were up to 15 points higher than their peers who wrote out their responses with pen on paper.

The anomaly has prompted the state's curriculum watchdog to contact every Victorian school to warn them against getting too excited, or disappointed, about results.

Clayton North Primary School was among those to sign up for NAPLAN online testing this year. Credit:Jason South

If you are a paper school and want to compare your results to the online schools you should factor in 10 to 15 points, Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority chief executive Dr David Howes said.

And if you are a school that shifted online, just be a bit cautious in thinking you've managed to suddenly increase your writing scores.A woman who went missing in Mandurah on Monday morning has been found wandering outside WA Police headquarters in the Perth CBD.

Mary Cummins, 80, was last seen walking near Hungerford Avenue and McLarty Road in Halls Head at around 9am and was reported missing to Mandurah police.

Mary with lamingtons, acup of tea and a WA Police officer. Credit:WA Police

Ms Cummins niece said she immediately started searching for her aunt.

"The last they'd seen her was 8.40am and I got the call at twenty past nine," she said.Prime Minister Scott Morrison's government faces up to two weeks without a minister responsible for financial services as the industry is rocked by damaging revelations that will lead to a suite of major policy changes in the wake of the banking royal commission.

Fairfax Media understands the responsibilities of the Treasury portfolio may not be decided for another fortnight as Treasurer Josh Frydenberg considers whether to take personal control of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission after a week of meetings with the department and regulators.

The government is looking to shift the narrative away from reluctant enforcer to bank punisher under Mr Morrison.

Assistant Treasurer Stuart Robert. Credit:Andrew Meares

The new Prime Minister has spent the past year berating bank executives after resisting an inquiry into the scandal-plagued industry for more than 18 months.A shuttle bus ferrying Home Affairs public servants around Canberra each day will expand its route as it replaces a service costing nearly half a million dollars.

Bureaucrats at the agency will travel between its offices in Barton, Civic, Braddon and Belconnen on buses seating at least 11 people on two services each hour through the national capital.

The new 24km bus route, operating weekdays in business hours, will also take public servants to the new Australian Border Force headquarters at 3 Molonglo Drive, Canberra Airport after bureaucrats move there.

Home Affairs has expanded its bus route for staff since finding a business to transport public servants between its offices in Civic and Belconnen in 2015.

It did not reveal the yearly cost of its shuttle bus route on Friday but a three-year contract to drive its public servants between Belconnen and Civic cost $420,000, a figure revised up from $370,000 in May this year, according to a contract notice."I think it's an olive branch, it's a sign of respect," Hadley said, adding that the appointment was an opportunity to "repair bridges". "His words to me were 'it's a fair dinkum offer'. If it's a fair dinkum offer, would you take it?" But Mr Abbott remained coy, responding: "I have a fair dinkum job, to be the member for Warringah. I suspect I can manage other things, but let's see what it involves." Mr Abbott also indicated that he intended to run again at the next election.

Im not retiring, I regard myself as a young man, he said. I still think I have a lot of public life left in me and I am determined to make the most of it. Mr Abbott said that while he was considering the envoy role he did not want to "step on the toes" of Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion and others involved in the space. A bipartisan parliamentary committee co-chaired by Liberal backbencher Julian Leeser is currently taking submissions on the constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians. Patrick Dodson, assistant to the opposition spokesman on Indigenous Affairs, dismissed the potential appointment as an attempt by Mr Morrison to "buy off wrecker Tony Abbott" with a "special but undefined role".

"Labor is seriously concerned about appointing the ex-self-appointed Prime Minister for Indigenous affairs to the role of envoy, given his ignorant, hopeless and frankly offensive track record on Indigenous issues," Senator Dodson said. "As Prime Minister, he cut over $500 million from Indigenous programs in the 2014 federal budget. Senator Pat Dodson Credit:Alex Ellinghausen "And who can forget his profoundly offensive comments in 2015, claiming that people living in remote communities without adequate services were making a 'lifestyle choice' while defending his governments decision to close up to 150 remote communities." Mr Abbott had also backed then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's rejection of a constitutionally entrenched body to represent Indigenous people as recommended in last year's Uluru statement, Senator Dodson said.

"The suggestion that Tony Abbott could act as some kind of messenger or representative for First Nations people is condescending to the overwhelming number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who support the calls for a Voice to Parliament and a Makarrata Commission to oversee truth-telling and agreement-making  both of which Mr Abbott has not supported," he said. "This is yet another example of the Liberal National Party playing a game with themselves, placating each others egos and trivialising First Nations peoples concerns and long-ignored calls for justice and recognition." Indigenous Health Minister Ken Wyatt said he would support Mr Abbott as special envoy for Indigenous Affairs, but only if he took a consultative approach. "Look, Tony has been offered something by the Prime Minister, whether I agree or disagree doesn't matter," Mr Wyatt told Perth radio station 6PR on Monday. "If Tony accepts that, then he's going to have to work with Aboriginal people, listen to them, accept their perspectives and then bring that back.

"What I liked about Malcolm [Turnbull] was that he kept reminding all of us that we have to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to find the solutions, not do things to them. "If Tony can do that, then that's fine. If he can't, then I have a problem." Mr Abbott told Hadley that he remained passionate about Indigenous Australia, but believed that effecting change in the area required support from the highest echelons of power. "This does really require the Prime Minister's authority to get things done," he said. "It needs someone at the very top to cut through."

He said the biggest challenge in Indigenous Affairs was implementing policies in the face of "governance" and "attitudinal" issues, claiming that it was "still the official view" that "it's okay for Aboriginal kids to not go to school." "It's not. If you don't go to school and get a decent education, in English, how do you function in modern Australia?" he said. "The kids have got to go to school, the adults have got to go to work, and the community has got to be safe." Mr Abbott brought the Indigenous Affairs portfolio into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in 2013, a move he described at the time as necessary to ensure that indigenous policy was more than an "afterthought". He prides himself on his record of visiting remote Indigenous communities at least once a year as opposition leader and prime minister, including a trip with Mr Morrison in 2009.Malcolm Turnbull has told senior Liberal colleagues he will quit federal Parliament on Friday, starting a race among aspiring candidates to replace the former prime minister.

"I've had a great team in federal Parliament and a great team here at Wentworth," the former prime minister told a party gathering at Easts Rugby club on Monday night.

"But as you know, my prime ministership has come to an end. The circumstances have appalled most Australians but again, I won't labour the point.

New order: Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull with NSW party president Philip Ruddock on Monday night. Credit:James Alcock

"I have a strong view which I've made very clear publicly so it comes as no surprise, that former prime ministers are best out of parliament not in it, and I think recent events best underline the value of that observation. And so, accordingly, on Friday, I will resign from the House of Representatives."Trump shakes hands with Idaho senator Mike Crapo. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Axios has obtained a list of Trump administration scandals. The list hints at the overflowing sewer of Trumpian corruption and incompetence, and the refusal of congressional Republicans to investigate any of it. Oddly enough, this list is being circulated by Republicans in Congress. The list, composed of Democratic requests for hearings that Republicans have blocked, is meant to warn of what Congress would look into if Democrats win the midterms. Axios reports that Republican stomachs are churning at the mere thought that any of the items on the list could receive a public hearing.

The list includes the kinds of policies a normally functioning Congress would probe, including Election security and hacking attempts, White House security clearances, and Hurricane response in Puerto Rico. (Congress held bipartisan hearings on the governments response to Hurricane Katrina, but has not done so for the response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico, where hundreds of Americans died.) But most of the cases listed focus on corruption: President Trumps tax returns, Trump family businesses  and whether they comply with the Constitutions emoluments clause, including the Chinese trademark grant to the Trump Organization, Trumps dealings with Russia, including the presidents preparation for his meeting with Vladimir Putin, and on and on.

Probably the most picayune item on the list would be White House staffs personal email use, though of course it might be difficult for Republicans to dismiss this issue given that they based their entire campaign on the premise that the use of personal email constitutes a grave criminal defense and continue to demand the imprisonment of Hillary Clinton for this very offense.

The most predominant theme of the list is corruption. Trump has maintained control of a private business empire, refused to disclose its details to the public, and has interwoven his private and public interests. Congressional Republicans refuse to take any steps to limit the potential for corruption and blackmail. Even the basic step of compelling disclosure of Trumps tax returns, so that Americans could learn who might be bribing the president, is too much for them.

Republicans have so completely internalized their role as handmaidens to Trumps corruption that they have turned evidence of his incompetence and guilt into an argument for maintaining their power to cover it up. Why are they emphasizing this point? Some Republican voters are unenthusiastic about the midterm elections, and fail to grasp the stakes. Since the base likes Trump much more than they do his congressional allies, it makes sense for the purposes of base mobilization to emphasize their role as Trumps legal bodyguards.

Additionally, some of Trumps allies have floated arguments that Trump would actually benefit from a Democratic Congress, giving him a useful foil to play off of. The Trump scandal list is likely aimed in part at Trump himself, reminding him of what he has to lose if Congress were to begin looking into his misconduct.

The public-facing version of the argument focuses on the specter of impeachment. Democrats in Congress are pragmatic enough to recognize that, merits aside, removing Trump from office would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, and hence extensive Republican support, which blocks any partisan removal. They have accordingly played down any such intention. Republicans are the ones elevating impeachment as an issue, hoping to stoke up the Trumpian base.

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial echoes the argument made by the partys Congressional wing. After acknowledging that Democratic leaders might be saying they have no intention to impeach the president if they win the House, it proceeds to argue that they will anyway. And the reason it provides is that Trump is a gigantic crook:

claiming that Mr. Trump is an illegitimate President who conspired with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election, that he is profiting from the Presidency for personal gain, that he obstructed justice by firing James Comey, and that after Michael Cohens plea the President is now an unindicted co-conspirator in campaign-finance fraud.  No doubt Democrats would start slowly by revving up the investigative machinery: subpoenas, hearings, all covered to a fare-thee-well by the media. Michael Cohen will be a major witness, as will the others named in the plea-deal documents. The Trump tax returns will get a star turn.

Having an unindicted co-conspirator who is profiting in secret, and may be subject to all sorts of blackmail, sounds like a situation Congress might want to look into. But rather than conclude from this indictment that Trump is deeply corrupt or in need of oversight, the Journal instead concludes that it shows the importance of not investigating him.

The strategic decision by the Republican majority in Congress to conduct virtually no oversight of the Executive Branch is most important issue at stake in the midterm elections. The decision has been mainly implicit, with almost no public consideration of an alternative course of action. At this point, Republicans have so internalized their subordination to Trump that they are now leaning into the cover-up as a case to maintain their power.The number of politicians and bureaucrats seeking confidential advice on ethical dilemmas and integrity issues has risen to a record high, according to the Queensland Integrity Commissioners annual report.

Commissioner Dr Nikola Stepanovs office has received a four-fold increase in requests for advice in the last year. Credit:Facebook

Commissioner Nikola Stepanovs office received 216 requests for advice - a four-fold increase from the average of 58 requests received each year over the previous five years.

Most people (202) received formal advice from the commissioner and 14 people received guidance over the phone.

Under the Ministerial Code of Conduct, ministers and assistant ministers are obliged to meet with the Integrity Commissioner at least once each year.Damascus: Iran's defence minister has said his country will continue its support of the Syrian government to ensure improved security in the region, adding that the nature of the two countries' cooperation won't be decided by a "third party".

Israel has expressed concern over Iran's growing influence in Syria, accusing Iran of seeking to establish a foothold near the frontier with the Jewish state. The United States has been pressing for Iran to withdraw its fighters from Syria. In recent meetings between US and Russian officials, President Donald Trump's national security adviser John Bolton said he and Russian officials are discussing the issue, without providing details, calling it a US priority.

Iran says its presence in Syria is at the invitation of the Syrian government. "No third party can affect the presence of Iranian advisers in Syria," Iran's Defence Minister Amir Hatami told reporters in Damascus.

His comments came at the start of a two-day visit to Syria, where he met with the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and other senior officials. The high-level military delegation headed by Hatami is expected to boost cooperation between the two countries, and Iranian media reported that the two are expected to sign new military and defense agreements.Chicago: Marijuana's main mind-altering ingredient was detected in nursing mothers' breast milk in a small study that comes amid evidence that more US women are using pot during pregnancy and afterward.

Experts say the ingredient, THC, has chemical properties that could allow it to disrupt brain development and potentially cause harm, although solid evidence of that is lacking.

The new study involved 50 nursing mothers who were using pot and provided breast milk samples to researchers at the University of California, San Diego. Lab testing found small amounts of THC, the psychoactive chemical that causes marijuana's "high", in 34 of 54 samples up to six days after they were provided. Another form of THC and cannabidiol, a pot chemical touted by some as a health aid, were detected in five samples.New York: US President Donald Trump has bowed to public pressure by agreeing to re-lower the American flag over the White House in honour of one of his most vociferous critics, the late US senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

The White House flag was lowered to half-mast on Saturday evening after McCain's death but was returned to full-mast a day later. Trump's reversal came just hours after McCain's spokesman released a farewell statement containing clear rebukes of the President.

The official rule is that flags fly at half-mast for 24 hours after a member of Congress dies, but leaders of both political parties and military veteran groups said it was disrespectful not to keep the flags lowered for longer given McCain's legacy as a Vietnam War veteran and longtime congressman.

"Its outrageous that the White House would mark American hero John McCains death with a two-sentence tweet, making no mention of his heroic and inspiring life," Joe Chenelly, executive director of veterans' group AMVETS, said.Latest News Westpac announces 138% profit rise CEO Peter King happy with results, but says that Big Four bank still has some way to go

Only 7% of people have refinanced, says Aussie Home Loans research New research suggests that only 7% of mortgage holders have refinanced, with hundreds of thousands left on the table

A non-bank lender has witnessed 34.78% growth in third party originations, alongside year on year loan book growth of 30.3%, taking its total loan settlement value to $3.6bn in FY18, an increase 19.4%.

Homeloans Limited (ASX: HOM) attributes the results to above-system sales growth, a market-leading funding program, outstanding book quality and improved cost discipline.

A statement from the lender continued, Homeloans continues to bolster its third-party broker and direct channels, and the results of this approach are evident in the strong settlements growth.

Speaking to Australian Broker, Daniel Carde, GM of third party distribution said, Our year on year growth in third party can be attributed to a number of factors. Firstly, we have seen mainstream lenders exercising more conservative lending policies and offering reduced product flexibility. Secondly, as the mortgage lending landscape becomes more and more difficult for the consumer to navigate, the mortgage broker proposition becomes stronger.

In the last financial year, Homeloans total settlements reached values of $4.3bn, up 19.4% on FY2017 and its principally-funded loan book reached $8.6 billion, an increase of 30.3% on 30 June 2017. Meanwhile, third party originations, which totaled $2.3bn in the last financial year, were valued at $1.5bn H1 FY18 and $1.6bn in H2, to total $3.1bn for the full year.

Net profit after tax (NPAT) on a normalised basis reached $26.2 million, up 40.1% on FY2017 and NPAT on a statutory basis reached $25.3 million, up 60.1% on FY2017.

The results encompass the first full reporting year since the complete integration of Homeloans and RESIMAC.

Homeloans has said it will continue to focus on enhancing efficiencies and bolstering its customer-focused distribution capability, with a particular focus on third-party broker and direct channels.

Carde added, With our broad product offering, covering both prime and non-prime borrowers, as well as access to over 85% of the mortgage brokers operating in Australia, we are well positioned to capitalise on the opportunity that this has created.Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC

The police are seeking the publics assistance identifying a man accused of groping a woman at the Kings Highway subway station on Aug. 21.

The individual approached a 52-year-old woman on the Manhattan-bound B-Q train platform and grabbed her buttocks as she was entering the train, according to police.

The authorities released a photo of the man and described him as approximately 5-foot-9, about 175 pounds, and between 27 and 30 years old.

Anyone with information in regards to this incident is asked to call the NYPDs 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.Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC

Its a choice between junk or skunk.

The city has to leave food scraps to rot in the Ridge for a whole week in order to do more bulk pickup, Department of Sanitation reps told a meeting of Community Board 10 on Aug. 22, explaining that New Yorks Strongest needed to cut back organics collection from two pickups a week down to one in Bay Ridge to focus on the areas need for bulk pickups, which cannot be done while collecting organics in dual-bin trucks that have separate, smaller compartments for trash and scraps.

You cant put large bulk items in a dual-bin truck. This is the first or second  depending on the month  district in the city in terms of bulk disposal, said Henry Ehrhardt, a spokesman for the department. You guys are up at the plateau, thats a huge problem when youve got dual-bin trucks.

But residents complained that their food-waste containers reek after sitting out in the sun for a week. Ridgite Joe Cacciola suggested that the department pick up organics more frequently during the summer months, but sanitation officials said that would be unrealistic.

You just cant do a seasonal pick up like that, said department spokesman Ignazio Terranova. You got to take into consideration the trucks that are going to be out there, the logistics in terms of the routes. You just cant turn this on and off like a light switch.

Cacciola said he understands the issues a seasonal pickup schedule would present, but that the reeking trash he had to deal with was no joke.

Of course its difficult, but its also really difficult to have all that food sitting around for a week, he said.

Last year, Ridgites raised a ruckus over the lack of bulk pickups, which left junk at the curb for weeks at a time.

Staffers for Councilman Justin Brannan (DBay Ridge) said his office supported anything that helped speed up bulk pickups in the district.

One of the things we noticed earlier in the year when we took office was an increase in complaints about beds, furniture and bulk items out on the streets for longer periods of time, said Chris McCreight, Brannans chief of staff. We understand why they need to make it easier for bulk pick up, which is great, were starting to see the effects of that now.

McCreight said he believes there are things residents can do keep their food scraps from stinking up the neighborhood, even with the reduced collection.

I think it can be done, I think we just need to make sure everybody knows the right days that theyre supposed to put it out, McCreight said. Once they get accustomed to that I think its going to be good.

The organics collection program rolled out in Bay Ridge more than four years ago.Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC

Revelers who come out for this years JOuvert parade can expect to celebrate among thousands of cops and hundreds of floodlights  but not Mayor DeBlasio, who said he wont be attending the early morning festivities preceding the West Indian Day Parade on Sept. 3.

Not this year, Hizzoner said during a Thursday sit-down with the Brooklyn Paper and other local media. But I plan to go at some point in my life.

DeBlasio  who said he has never attended JOuvert, but has gone to mas camps staged ahead of the annual event  applauded the efforts officials took last year to prevent fatal violence that has plagued past celebrations, attributing the relatively peaceful festivities to its new 6 am start time, along with security checkpoints set up along the route and a beefed-up police presence that included more than 300 floodlights and some 3,700 officers, roughly 10 percent more than the 3,400 dispatched in 2016, when separate shooters killed two attendees.

I think the bottom line last year is that it broadly worked. It was the change of the time, I think, and putting the checkpoints in place, and obviously the tremendous police presence, he said.

Earlier this month, local leaders including Borough President Adams said the city will bring the heightened safety measures back to this years parade  which runs along Flatbush Avenue and onto Empire Boulevard before curving onto Nostrand Avenue, where it ends at Midwood Street  and DeBlasio said the Police Department will announce a security plan, which may include even more precautions, very soon.

As to anything new, Im going to leave that to the NYPD, he said. I want to make sure all that has been perfected before we talk about it.

DeBlasio isnt the only mayor not to show face at the break-of-dawn Labor Day event  none of his predecessors have attended since it began in 1984, according to an organizer, who said he would be more than welcome this year should he change his mind.

I did extend an invitation to him to be our cultural ambassador, but I have not heard back yet, said Yvette Rennie, who runs JOuvert City International.

And although DeBlasio has yet to attend the festivities since he arrived in Brooklyn in 1992, hes been a regular presence at the West Indian Day Parade that follows JOuvert throughout the years.Can we stop talking about Michael Cohen now? Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

After months of painstaking negotiations that often seemed on the verge of collapse, the United States and Mexico reached a bilateral deal on Monday that would rewrite key portions of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the landmark 1994 pact that President Trump attacked relentlessly on the campaign trail and has continued to rail against during his presidency. The big question now is whether Canada, the third party to the original deal, will come onboard.

During an Oval Office briefing with reporters, Trump awkwardly spoke with Mexican president on speaker-phone, hailing the new agreement as a breakthrough. He also said that he would be terminating NAFTA, and that the name of the new deal would be the the U.S.-Mexico Trade Agreement. He then threatened Canada with new tariffs on cars if it didnt come to a trade agreement with with the U.S., which he said could be bilateral.

Behind the scenes, though, the Trump administration is attempting to get Canada to sign off on a trilateral deal, and Trumps words could be viewed as a threat for Canada to join as quickly as possible.

Pool report: Trump is calling this "the U.S.-Mexico Trade Agreement," says he wants to get rid of the name NAFTA, says, "Well see if Canada can be part of" the deal.



This is not what his administration is doing. His administration is working on a three-country NAFTA.  Daniel Dale (@ddale8) August 27, 2018

With Canadian-U.S.relations at a low after Trump assailed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in June, the country has withdrawn itself from NAFTA talks in recent weeks.

But Canadas minister of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland, said that once the bilateral issues get resolved, Canada will be joining the talks to work on both bilateral issues and our trilateral issues.

Judging by initial reports about the revised agreement with Mexico, which focused heavily on auto manufacturing, Trump and his hard-line nationalist trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, got a good deal of what they wanted. The New York Times has some of the details:

To qualify for zero tariffs under Nafta, car companies would be required to manufacture at least 75 percent of an automobiles value in North America under the new rules, up from 62.5 percent previously. They will also be required to use more local steel, aluminum and auto parts, and have a certain proportion of the car made by workers earning at least $16 an hour, a boon to both the United States and Canada.

Trump, rebuking decades of free-trade orthodoxy that helped to define the modern Republican Party, has complained time and again that NAFTA is unfair to America. He has frequently called it the worst deal ever made.Dear Reader,

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Digital EditorIn 2010, the ABC spent $36 million on international services (about $42 million in todays dollars). These days, a guesstimate of the international broadcasting spend is $11 million; the ABC isnt too explicit about the budget. Such vagueness is symptomatic. Perhaps its the reticence born of embarrassment.

The cash is only just dripping and a lot of life has departed. The international TV and radio efforts are gasping, limping shadows of their former selves.

Theyre not corpses, but they are on life support.

These are the worst of times for Australian international TV, which is 25 years old this year. And these are the hardest of days for Radio Australia, which is set for its 80th birthday next year.

CANBERRA - Australias international broadcasting effort in the AsiaPacific is at its lowest-ever level.

Canberra should be straight-out ashamed, because this has been a disgraceful trashing of a significant foreign-policy asset. Thats the central point of this series of columns about the fading of the Oz broadcast voice in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia: the failure of strategic vision that has allowed such a foreign-policy instrument to be so wasted.

Previously I have made the case for creating an Australian International Broadcasting Corporation (AIBC) to resolve the tension between the domestic and international broadcasting demands of the ABCs charter. Its purpose would be to use independent journalism to serve Australias interests, influence and values in the AsiaPacific.

The propositions are Canberra-centric, not broadcasting-based, reflecting the consensus of the Oz polity about todays worrying international trends and, just as importantly, some long-held truths.

Not least of those truths is the one to be found at the heart of seven Australian defence white papers over 40 years: geography matters.

Traditionally, Australia wanted a strong international broadcasting voice in what defence-speak calls our region of primary strategic interest: Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and the eastern Indian Ocean. The broadcasting tradition is looking most modern.

Geography is back.

Or as that old geographer and still forceful strategist Paul Dibb might grizzle, the demands of geography never went away, were just feeling em with fresh force.

As Dibb observes, Australias international security outlook is starting to look very threatening. To bolster Australias security, he writes, we need to focus more on our region of primary strategic concern  We should aim to reassert our influence in these areas as China moves increasingly to challenge our strategic space.

Coming at the same worries from a different direction, Anthony Milner says Australias foreign-policymakers have to start working on a Plan B, to get busy and get creative to build Australias independent influence in the region.

Gareth Evans says Australia must look to its interests and influence and good international citizenship, because the assumptions which have sustained and underpinned Australian security and economic policy for decades are in meltdown. He offers four key elements for Australias response: Less America. More self-reliance. More Asia. More global engagement.

In the foreign-policy game, the word influence stands besides interests, at the calculating, cerebral end of the field; yet influence and interests must always be within shouting distance of values and beliefs, which tend to reside in the heart and hearth of the arena.

The words that describe good journalismreliable, independent, factualare exactly the same things youd want in the foreign policy of a country seeking to persuade others, protect interests, project influence and promote values.

Lots of strategic angst begets plenty of anxiety and a quest for answers. Good answers are always scarce. And some of the old answers have much to offer.

Tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

Great journalism is part of what Australia should be doing for the AsiaPacific. Weve got a wonderful journalistic traditiona hack heritagethat should be honoured by being rediscovered and reinvented for the 21st century.

The review of Australias media reach in the AsiaPacific is now considering the future of our broadcasting voice, having finished taking submissions last week. What started as an orphan inquirynot really wanted by the government and unloved by the ABChas a chance to do great work, to give the government options for a policy redo. Time to shift from life support to new life.

A fresh vision and lots more cash for Oz broadcasting in the South Pacific are the obvious first steps. Certainly, thatd be consistent with the interests and values elements of the enhanced Biketawa Declaration on security cooperation, to be signed by Australia and the other members of the Pacific Islands Forum.

Australia needs to match the sentiments its embracing in the new Biketawa Declaration with plenty of action and ambition.

Maybe the orphan inquiry on international broadcasting will be let off the leash and told to go hard for something that looks like a landmark legacy.

Governments on the brink sometimes think about legacybe generous, call it good policyin the lucid moments between parliamentary tremors, political tantrums and electoral turmoil.

Power up Oz journalism in the AsiaPacific. The times call for a strong and distinctive Australian voice.Lets just pretend the last few hours never happened. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Even after Senator John McCains death, President Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the man. Hours after McCain succumbed to cancer on Saturday, Trump reportedly nixed a White House statement that called the senator a hero, instead offering a single, anodyne tweet that conspicuously eschewed any personal praise.

On Monday, there was visual evidence of Trumps contempt. The White House had lowered its flag to half-staff on Sunday, but shortly after midnight, it was back at full staff, in a clear break with precedent  which dictates that it be lowered until burial  and the U.S. flag code.

Flag back at full staff atop WH. Pres Trump did not issue proclamation on the death of @SenJohnMcCain, which usually calls for flags to remain at half-staff through the day of interment, which is Sunday at the @NavalAcademy. pic.twitter.com/NGasNPT0VB  Mark Knoller (@markknoller) August 27, 2018

The blatant disrespect toward McCain drew loud scorn from veterans groups and many others. And, after hours of criticism, given more life by Trumps refusal to answer any questions about McCain, the White House retreated in humiliating fashion on late Monday afternoon. The flag was lowered again, and Trump issued a grudging pro-McCain statement that did not sound very Trumpian. Despite our differences on policy and politics, it read in part, I respect Senator John McCains service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment. McCains funeral is scheduled for Sunday.

NEW statement from @realDonaldTrump: "Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCains service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment."  Katherine Faulders (@KFaulders) August 27, 2018

Trump also said in the statement that he would send Chief of Staff John Kelly, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and National Security Adviser John Bolton to represent the administration at McCains services. McCain had specifically requested that Trump not attend, so at least the president isnt planning on disrespecting McCain one last time by showing up.

This article has been updated throughout.Manohar Parrikar, who is currently admitted to a private hospital in for a review health check-up, will return to his home state on August 29, his office said in Panaji on Monday.

Parrikar, 62, had flown to on August 23 and was admitted to the Lilavati Hospital there.

"Chief Minister to return to Goa on Wednesday," the Chief Minister's Office said in a single-line statement.

Earlier this year, Parrikar had undergone treatment in the US for nearly three months for a pancreatic ailment and returned in the last week of June.

He went to the US again earlier this month for a follow-up.

He then returned to Panaji on August 22 and the next day flew to

CMO officials had refused earlier to divulge further details about his health.

Parrikar had met Prime Minister in on August 7 and sought his intervention to address the current crisis in the state's mining sector.External Affairs Minister arrived in Hanoi on Sunday night as part of her four-day visit to Vietnam and Cambodia, which aims at deepening India's strategic cooperation with the two key nations in the ASEAN region.

India's ties are on an upswing with the two major countries in the powerful ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) grouping.

India has been particularly scaling up its cooperation with Vietnam in areas of maritime security and energy.

"Hon'ble External Affairs Minister Smt. arrives in Hanoi on a three day visit to Vietnam (26-28 August 2018)," Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Ravish Kumar tweeted.

In Vietnam, Swaraj will co-chair the 16th meeting of the Joint Commission, along with the country's Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh.

The External Affairs Minister's visit to Vietnam and Cambodia will provide an opportunity to hold in-depth discussions with the political leadership on a wide range of global, regional and bilateral issues, and advance our strategic engagement with these countries and the ASEAN region, the MEA had said on Saturday.

In her first official visit to Cambodia, Swaraj will hold extensive talks with her counterpart Prak Sokhonn, covering the entire expanse of bilateral and regional issues of mutual interests.

She will call on Prime Minister Hun Sen and President of the Senate Say Chhum.

During Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang's visit to New Delhi in March, both the sides had vowed to join hands for an open and thriving Indo-Pacific, besides ensuring an efficient and rules-based regional security architecture.

Vietnam and several other ASEAN member countries have territorial disputes with China over the resource-rich South China Sea.

China has been opposing India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) exploring oil in areas claimed by Vietnam in the South China Sea (SCS). India has been asserting that the ONGC's exploration is a commercial operation and not connected with the dispute. Oil exploration in the SCS is a sensitive issue in the Vietnam-China relations.Photo: ABC Photo Archives/ABC via Getty Images

Moving up from elementary to middle school can be a big leap for sixth-graders. No longer sitting in one classroom all day, theyre responsible for getting to and from different classes with all of the necessary supplies. A streamlined school-supply collection helps students negotiate the balance of what to store in their lockers and what to tote around in their backpacks all day.

Of course, supply lists vary based on the individual school and teacher, but teachers always appreciate when students come equipped with the basics. As long as theyre prepared with something to write with, and something to write on, thats helping the teacher out a lot, says Jaclyn Zera, a sixth-grade teacher in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. For a more comprehensive list of sixth-grade school supplies, we talked to three sixth-grade teachers at New York City public schools for the essentials theyd recommend to new middle-schoolers.

Five Star Filler Paper, College Ruled, Reinforced, Loose Leaf Paper $18 now 17% off $15 for 3 Since some sixth-graders, according to teachers, are nervous about leaving things in their lockers and tend to carry everything theyll need for the day with them, teachers are aware of lightening the load. We try to minimize the supplies theyre carrying, says Ashma Patel, a sixth-grade social studies teacher at the NEST+m (New Explorations into Science, Technology and Math) school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Instead of having binders, I ask them to have a folder with loose leaf. As classes move through units, students often will move their older loose leaf to a binder for studying at the end of the year. Therefore, Zera stresses the importance of using quality paper. I encourage them to get the reinforced loose leaf paper so the pages dont fall out quite as easily, and so paper doesnt fall all over the place, she says. $15 for 3 at Amazon Buy $15 for 3 at Amazon Buy

Jam Paper Heavy Duty Plastic 3-Hole Punch Folders $14 for 6 Just as loose leaf needs to be sturdy, teachers prefer heavy-duty plastic folders to flimsy paper ones for handouts and other papers kids tote back and forth to school. Sara Shin, a sixth-grade English teacher at IS 30 in Brooklyn, says paper folders rip in half by the end of November, maybe December. Inexpensive folders like that seem like a good deal, but know they arent going to last through the year. Zera agrees that we dont want parents throwing their money away to have to buy things over and over. A heavy-duty folder tends to last a little bit longer. $14 for 6 at Amazon Buy $14 for 6 at Amazon Buy

Staedtler Norica #2 HB Woodcased Pencils, Black $21 Zera says many middle-schoolers feel more comfortable writing in pencil since they can erase mistakes. I like regular pencils, she says. Because mechanical pencils tend to break and then theyre fumbling around looking for a piece of graphite. These sleek, black pencils got the nod of approval for middle-school students from pencil experts. Getting unique-looking pencils like these is also a good idea because, as Patel says usually if students have a personal connection [to their pen or pencil] theyre less likely to lose it. Its a lot less likely theyll leave them behind. This is a huge help for teachers who say they often waste time loaning out pencils to kids whove forgotten theirs. Its also a good idea to carry a small pencil sharpener as many classrooms dont have one. $21 at Amazon Buy $21 at Amazon Buy

Post-it Notes Original Pads in Marseille Colors (Pack of 24) $17 now 29% off $12 Highlighters and colored pencils are great for printouts and other documents that students can write on, but if theyre reading from a borrowed textbook theyll need something less permanent. A lot of curriculum asks for students to have Post-its or flags, says Shin. Shell have her students use sticky notes to show how theyre interacting with a complex text  looking for evidence, marking up questions, especially because they cant write in their books. $12 at Amazon Buy $12 at Amazon Buy

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Every editorial product is independently selected. If you buy something through our links, New York may earn an affiliate commission.The Allahabad High Court refusing to grant interim relief to power companies, which had filed pleas against RBI norms on stressed loans, is a setback for the sector as a whole. The authors explain why only financial engineering, without resolving key structural issues, cannot revive these stressed power projects.

On the backdrop of the 180-day grace period granted by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) ending on Monday, the Allahabad High Court refused to grant interim relief to the firms facing National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) proceedings. According to the RBI's ...

Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal. They do not reflect the view/s of Business Standard.The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council is yet to get a formal proposal from the government of Kerala for a cess to fund post-flood rehabilitation. Thomas Isaac, the states finance minister, had said he would be doing so, with a request for permission to levy one on the State GST (SGST).

The latter, he had argued, was purely an intra-state tax and so, there is no logic in denying (such a request). We want to have a 10 per cent cess on SGST, which I think will get us some Rs 10 billion", he had said. On how the Council would respond, Bihar deputy chief ...India has finally approved guidelines to bring the use of drones under a legal framework. If all goes well, from December, drones can be used for purpose like mapping, surveying and photography, which till now was illegal due to absence of any guidelines.

However, following global norms, the government has restricted the use of drones for delivering of goods and food items which may hinder its commercial usage. Jayant Sinha, minister of state for civil aviation while announcing the policy indicated that this was done keeping in mind the security aspect and the government will be ...India can seek extradition of fugitive billionaire without an Interpol Red Corner Notice as it is not a mandatory requirement for the process, the has told the Ministry of External Affairs.

In a communication to the ministry earlier this month, the agency said the purpose of a Red Corner Notice (RCN) is to locate an absconding accused which has already been achieved in Choksi's case after confirmation from Antigua that he is their citizen, officials said.

They also said that having an RCN is of little value now as Antigua has granted him citizenship and Choksi is now an Antiguan passport holder.

The agency has communicated to the ministry that it has already written to its counterpart agency in Antigua for the provisional arrest of Choksi, who is the alleged mastermind of the over 2 billion USD bank fraud in the

"The contention of Antiguan authorities that the only way the movement of Choksi could be restricted is through issue a Red Corner Notice is not legally sound as primary objective of locating the subject has already been addressed," the letter said.

The subsequent steps for a provisional arrest and an extradition will have to be taken by Antigua for which an RCN is not a "prerequisite", the officials said.

Choksi has appealed to the Interpol to not issue an RCN against him as the charges are politically motivated, they said.

He also said the conditions of jails in India are not good and staying their would violate his human rights, the officials said.

Choksi, the uncle of his alleged partner in crime Nirav Modi, also said the charges against him have been hyped by the media and he might not get a fair trial in India as courts may be influenced by reports, they said.

The Interpol, after receiving Choksi's plea, sought the CBI's reply which the Indian agency has sent denying all allegations levelled by him.

The promoter of the Gitanjali group, Choksi, had left India in the first week of January, nearly a fortnight before the biggest banking scam was detected in the Punjab National Bank's Brady House branch.

He had taken an oath of allegiance in Antigua on January 15, 2018, thus completing his citizenship, which was granted to him in November, 2017.It is part of a larger plot, which will eventually help banks discard the considerable burden involved in handling huge amounts of cash and stick to their core operational area as is done in matured economies. Sources familiar with the developments told Business Standard that Mint Road is engaged with the industry on the subject, but said it will be sometime before the ...

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Digital EditorMany opposition parties will reiterate their demand for paper ballots for future elections, among other things, in a meeting with the of India (EC) on Monday.

The EC has called the meeting with seven national and 51 state recognised political parties to discuss various electoral issues such as electoral rolls, limiting political parties' expenditure and timely submission of annual audited reports by parties among other things.

At least 17 parties, including the NDA ally Shiv Sena, have been pitching for returning to ballot papers.

These include the Congress, Trinamool Congress (TMC), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S), Telugu Desam Party (TDP), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Samajwadi Party, CPI-M, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), DMK, CPI, YSR Congress, Kerala Congress Mani (KCM) and AIUDF.

"We will raise the issue of ballot papers in the meeting for fair and impartial elections. We want to make it clear that we do not consider EVMs as tamper proof," an opposition leader told IANS.

"Secondly, we would point out that the election expenses of political parties must also be limited along with the candidates," he added.

Although the EC in its official agenda of the meet released to the press has not mentioned simultaneous polls, the issue is likely to come up for discussion.

A majority of opposition parties have already told the Law Commission that they do not consider this proposal as practical or desirable.

The agenda for the meeting includes discussion on how to improve "accuracy, transparency and inclusiveness" of electoral rolls, measures to encourage enhanced representation of women in political process, issues related to expenditure ceiling for parties, timely submission of annual audited reports and election expenditure reports among other things.

Also on the agenda are alternative modes of voting for domestic migrants and absentee voters.China on Saturday called Donald Trump "irresponsible" after the US President cancelled his top diplomat's latest trip to North Korea and suggested Beijing was stalling efforts to disarm Pyongyang.

Trump said on Twitter that he didn't believe the visit was appropriate because he feels "we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula".

Trump and Kim met in person during a historic summit in Singapore in June.

"President Moon will still head to Pyongyang, North Korea will ask for easing of sanctions and expansion of inter-Korean cooperation, but South Korea will not be able to accept that", Park said.

Negotiations have been all but deadlocked since the June summit in Singapore.

Washington has called for the economic embargo on North Korea to be maintained, saying the sanctions must remain in place until Pyongyang dismantles its atomic arsenal, and could even be tightened.

At the time North Korea issued a sour media statement about its talks with Pompeo on the heels of his two-day visit to Pyongyang.

US President Donald Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on August 16, 2018 in Washington, DC.

Why did Saudi Arabia call off Aramco floatation?

Yemen Army and popular forces targeted a Saudi sea base in Red Sea near Aramco oil installations, south of Saudi Arabia. Aramco will raise funds from banks and global bondholders to buy a controlling stake in the petrochemical group.

Stephen Biegun, 55, who is retiring as Ford's vice president for worldwide governmental affairs, had been considered for the post of Trump's national security advisor before it went to John Bolton.

At the same time, lawmakers from both parties, including GOP hawks who generally support Trump, have expressed concerns about such a move, as it could be used by the North to demand the removal of USA troops from South Korea and potentially Japan without anything in return.

Pompeo, who would have been making his second visit to Pyongyang since the summit, had not been due to meet Kim this time.

Pompeo and Trump have both promised Kim Jong Un a prosperous future for North Korea should he abandon nuclear weapons. Kang asked Pompeo to keep the momentum of dialogue with North Korea to establish denuclearization and peace on the Korean peninsula, according to the Foreign Ministry's news release.

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono says that United Nations -prohibited ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products to North Korea have created an "extremely big loophole" in enforcing United Nations sanctions on Pyongyang.

Meanwhile, while describing the postponement of Pompeo's trip as a setback, South Korea's Foreign Ministry said it expects China to continue serving a "constructive role" in global efforts to solve the nuclear crisis and noted that Beijing continues to express commitment to fully implement sanctions against the North. "In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim". He's well aware of past failures by previous administrations and I certainly don't consider him to be naive about potential success with the insane little North Korean dictator in power. "Good decision especially if otherwise Pompeo would have returned empty handed". The sanctions were created to exert painful economic pressure on Pyongyang and drive North Korea's Mr. Kim to enter into talks over the country's nuclear program.

The reaction in Beijing and Seoul came hours after Mr. Trump directed Pompeo to delay his trip because of what he saw as a lack of progress on nuclear disarmament talks with the North. Mr. Trump also said the nuclear negotiations with North Korea have been hampered by a lack of support from China, which is the North's only major ally and is engaged in an intensifying trade dispute with the United States.

In May, Trump announced he was calling off his planned summit with Kim, citing Pyongyang's "open hostility", reversing his position eight days later after a North Korean change of attitude.has banned the at airports for "influential people" including politicians, judges and military officials as part of the new government's austerity plan, media reports said on Monday.

The decision will be strictly implemented to provide equal opportunities to all travellers without any discrimination, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry was quoted as saying by Dawn.

The move, which came under effect from yesterday, comes days after the new government led by Prime Minister Imran Khan banned the discretionary use of state funds and first-class air travel by officials and leaders, including the president and the prime minister, as part of its austerity drive.

The interior ministry has directed the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) that no government official or other VIPs would be given protocol at airports.

The VIP protocol was given by the FIA.

Such decisions had also been taken by previous governments but they could not implement them in a letter and spirit, the report said.

It had been observed that influential people were given VIP protocol at airports so that they could avoid standing in long queues and get cleared their luggage without any hustle, Chaudhry said.

"We have seen that influential people used to seek assistance of FIA officials at airports who (officials) accompanied them to promptly clear their luggage," he said.

The VIP protocol was usually given to politicians, legislators, senior bureaucrats, judges, military officials and journalists.

In case any FIA official is caught giving protocol to a VIP, he would face strict action, the ministry warned in a letter sent to all zones of the agency.

According to the interior ministry, immigration counters at airports would be monitored and if any VIP was seen being given special treatment, the immigration staff and official in charge of their shift would be immediately suspended, the report said.

The ministry had also directed the FIA to not harass passengers leaving the country.

The investigation agency was also directed to facilitate passengers of flights at the time of their arrival at the country's airports.

All previous governments had decided to eliminate the at airports but there was a VIP lounge at Benazir Bhutto in Islamabad where VIPs sat before their luggage was cleared by officials of the FIA, Security Staff or Civil Aviation Authority.A Delhi court on Monday acquitted two persons facing trial for their alleged involvement in an Indian Airlines plane hijack in 1981, giving them benefit of doubt. The court said that the prosecution had "miserably failed" to prove its case against the accused "beyond reasonable doubt."

The judgement was announced by Additional Sessions Judge, Ajay Pandey, of New Delhi District, Patiala House Courts.

Carrying 111 passengers, the Indian Airline flight number IC-423 was heading from New Delhi to Srinagar on 29 September 1981 when it was hijacked midair and was forced to land in Lahore in Pakistan. Following a commando operation, the passengers and the crew were rescued and the two accused, namely Tajender Singh and Satnam Singh, along with their associates were apprehended.

After being deported to India, Satnam Singh filed an application in 1999 for his discharge submitting that he was punished by a Pakistan court and had served life sentence there. In February, 2000 he was discharged by the court. Citing same grounds, Tajender Pal Singh also approached the court in July 2000. On this the Delhi Police filed a supplementary charge sheet adding new sections including 121 (waging war against the Government of India), 121A (conspiring to commit certain offences against the state) among others.

Today, in its judgement the Patiala House court observed that the prosecution miserably failed to prove charges under Sections 121 or 121A IPC against either of the accused and both persons were granted benefit of doubt and acquitted of the charges levelled against them.

The order copy of Monday's judgement reads: "It was rightly submitted that specific role and identification of accused persons was required from the witnesses qua any act, which could have been considered as waging war or attempting or abetment to wage war against the Government of India. In the case in hand accused persons were not identified by any witnesses produced by the prosecution to have done any such act."

The court also observed that "no official document, letter or communication was collected by the investigating officer (IO) to verify the names of the crew or the passengers. Hence, the possibility of some specific witnesses being chosen by IO to support his case cannot be ruled out and their testimony cannot be said to be beyond reasonable doubt."

The court further noted that the "accused persons have already been convicted for the alleged hijacking of the Indian Airplane by the competent court at Pakistan. Neither any charge-sheet has been filed for those offences against them nor was any charge framed. No sanction for prosecution of these offences was granted by the competent government.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Aditya Birla Academy (ABEA) has announced the launch of new professional programs to nurture the aspirations of the educators and school administrators who are in constant pursuit of excellence.

ABEA aims to equip educators with cutting-edge skills and modern tools to enhance their abilities and make them privy to 21st century modes of teaching. The first batch of ABEA will start in September 2018.

Along with the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, ABEA is offering educators the Virtual Online Teaching (VOLT) Certificate Program that aims to inculcate and enhance their 21st century skills that are fast-becoming imperative for one's overall development.

Another revolutionary offering is the professional diploma program in talent development and gifted education, offered by Belin-Blank Center in partnership with the University of Iowa College of The program is designed to aid educators in bringing out the true potential of a gifted student.

The affiliation between ABEA and The University of Nottingham (Malaysia Campus) brings to educators the unique opportunity of pursuing the PGCert and PGDip in Educational and Leadership Management that aim to strengthen one's leadership and management skills.

Each of these unique courses will be conducted online, along with face to face workshops, by reputed international faculty. The academy will also conduct short-term workshops on Saturdays for the professional development of teachers.

"I have always believed that teachers are special people - blessed souls entrusted with the most critical and noble responsibility of shaping the minds and the imaginations of future generations," said founder and chairperson, Aditya Birla Academy, Neerja Birla.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Fighter jets, either from Russia or Tajikistan, carried out airstrikes in Darqad district of Takhar province in north-eastern Afghanistan.

Provincial governor's spokesperson, Mohammad Jawid Hejri, confirmed the news and said that a clash broke out between drug smugglers and Tajik border guards in Takhar province.

He added that rockets were fired by the border guards in the province, following which "fighter jets" carried out an airstrike early on Monday.

However, Hejri said that the jets were "foreign", belonging to either Russia or Tajikistan. He stated that the affected area is under the control of the Taliban and not under the Afghan government. He also informed that two Tajik border guards lost their lives during the clash.

The Takhar province, which borders neighbouring Tajikistan, has seen a number of clashes in recent months, notably between Afghan security forces and armed groups, including Taliban. The terrorist group has attacked dozens of check posts in the province in recent weeks.

Earlier this month, 12 border police officers were killed in an attack by the Taliban in the Dasht-e-Qala district of Takhar province.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)After wrapping up the Malta schedule of 'Bharat', Ali Abbas Zafar shared a gorgeous picture of Katrina Kaif from the sets of the movie.

The Bollywood diva looked absolutely stunning in a bottle green embroidered lehenge, with soft curls.

The director shared the photo on Instagram and captioned it as,"Bharat #between #the#shots @katrinakaif #picture #by @marcinlaskawiec."

Previously, Zafar took to social media announcing the wrap of the second schedule with a still of the lead couple- Salman Khan and Katrina.

In the still, Salman donned in a classic black sherwani, and danced away his 'Tiger Zinda Hai' co-star, who looks dazzling.

"Malta schedule wrapped .... @Bharat_TheFilm @BeingSalmanKhan #katrinakaif", he had tweeted.

To keep the buzz around the film alive, the team of 'Bharat' has been keeping fans abreast with all the happenings from the movie sets. The 'Dabangg' actor has shared a series of videos from Malta, while the 'Fitoor' actor has also shared some stills.

The first schedule of the movie was wrapped up in Mumbai.

'Bharat' is Zafar's third collaboration with Salman, in which the actor will be seen sporting five different looks spanning over 60 years, including a crucial part which will showcase the actor in his late 20s, looking much leaner and younger.

The film, which also stars Tabu and Disha Patani in pivotal roles, it is slated to hit the big screens on June 5, next year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Eight people, including six children, were killed after a fire tore through a two-storey home on Sunday (local time).

"We have not had this in many, many, many years -- this amount of fatalities and injuries in one location," CNN quoted city's Fire Commissioner Jose Santiago, as saying.

The fire commissioner lauded the quick thinking of a woman who smelled the fire and saved a lot of lives in the neighbourhood.

"She had just gotten home from work. She smelled it. I think she saw it. And then she started immediately knocking on doors, ringing doorbells," Santiago said.

The fire department informed that two children were rushed to the hospital in very critical condition, while a firefighter was hospitalised.

Although the officials did not reveal the cause of the fire, the city's building inspection records highlighted two code violations during its most recent inspection in June, one of them being an "extension cord at rear exterior of fron [sic] building feeding rear Building (DANGEROUS AND HAZARDOUS."

Santiago said that no smoke detectors were found in the affected home.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian woman who has been held in Tehran for more than two years on sedition charges, has returned to prison after a temporary three-day release.

The British-Iranian charity worker was reunited with her family, including her four-year-old daughter, during the temporary release.

She has always denied the allegation, but was convicted previous year.

But the family's hopes of her bail from Iranian jail being extended have been dashed.

Iran is coming under great economic strain from U.S. sanctions and the release gesture may well be a reward to the United Kingdom which, along with the European Union, opposes President Trump unilaterally abandoning the nuclear deal with Tehran.

But just 10 minutes after arriving, the family received another phone call from the prosecutor's office and was told she would have to be back in her cell by sunset because the necessary permit had not been signed off.

He said: "Gabriella wanted her to see the teacher and the nursery". Her father has taken Nazanin back to prison,"he said in an email received by AFP news agency".

Steve Jobs' Daughter May Have Forgiven Him, But Should We?

It's a odd thing to write a devastating memoir with damning details but demand that these things are not, in fact, damning at all. The book features many moments where it seems like Lisa is making her father look like a monster.

Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe told him she was concerned about the impact of the latest development on her young daughter, saying: "You can't send a small child her mummy, and then take her away again after three days".

Iranian authorities and her lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.

Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was jailed for five years in 2016 after being convicted of spying, which she denies.

"I haven't done anything wrong - you just extended my cellmate's furlough, and she is serving a longer sentence for bigger crimes".

In a statement on Thursday, Amnesty International called for Zaghari-Ratcliffe's " full and unconditional release", describing her as "a prisoner of conscience who should never have been jailed in the first place".

Britain's foreign minister Jeremy Hunt wrote on Twitter that attempts to free Zaghari-Ratcliffe would continue.

Iran does not recognise dual nationality and has been treating her exclusively as an Iranian citizen in the case.University Grants Commission (UGC) Secretary Professor Rajnish Jain has issued a warning to 21 colleges under Delhi University saying their financial grants will be withheld if they do not appoint full-time Principals.

"As per the latest available update, it has been noticed that many colleges have not complied with the directives of MHRD/UGC to appoint regular Principals. In most of the colleges, interviews have not been held at the respective Governing Bodies. This shows lack of commitment on the part of college authorities for strengthening the administrative and academic atmosphere in their colleges," a notice sent to the colleges on August 13 read.

In the notice, the statutory board which is responsible for the maintenance of higher in India, underlined the fact that the appointment of the Principals was to be completed by July 15, 2018.

The UGC also instructed the colleges to expedite the process of selection of full-time Principals in the colleges by August 31, 2018.

"It is once again requested to expedite the process of selection of a full-time regular Principal in your college. Further, you are hereby requested to inform the date of interview for the post of the Principal latest by 31st August 2018, failing which the UGC will be constrained to withhold the release of further grants, the notice further read.

"After the issuance of the notice, only one college has appointed a regular Principal while some others are in the process of doing the same. If they do not do so in the given time frame, then their grants and benefits will be stopped. A full-time Principal ensures having a good administration and maintaining an academic environment. UGC as an apex body is regularly focusing on the quality of higher education," UGC Secretary Rajnish Jain told ANI.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Indian Army's Court of Inquiry (CoI) on Monday ordered to initiate disciplinary action against Major Leetul Gogoi in the Srinagar hotel altercation case.

Major Gogoi has been prima facie found guilty for violating the official Army policy on fraternising with a local woman and for being absent from the place of duty while on active service in an operational area.

Major Gogoi was detained by the Jammu and Kashmir Police from a hotel in Srinagar on May 23 following an altercation.

The argument erupted when major Gogoi was allegedly trying to enter the hotel with a woman and the hotel staff refused to let them in.

On 26 May, Chief of Army Staff, General Bipin Rawat said that Major Gogoi would be given "exemplary punishment", if found guilty.

Major Gogoi first made headlines in April last year when he tied a civilian to the bonnet of his vehicle as a "human shield" and drove through Jammu and Kashmir's Budgam.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), through the Ministry of External Affairs, has written a letter to the Antigua Government asking them to arrest fugitive Mehul Choksi in multi-billion dollar Punjab Bank (PNB) scam.

In the letter to Antigua government, the central probe agency also asserted that India could seek extradition of Choksi without issuing an Interpol Red Corner Notice as it is not mandatory in the said process. The CBI added that an RCN is needed to locate a fugitive, which in Choksi's case has already been achieved.

"A Red Corner Notice is not necessary for the arrest of (Choksi) as it is only required to identify the location of the fugitive. Since the location and nationality of Mehul Choksi are already known, he should be arrested and Antigua government should begin with his extradition process, " the CBI in the letter to Antigua Government said.

On August 9, Antigua had assured to cooperate with India for the extradition of Choksi.

Additional Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Manpreet Vohra flew to Antigua on August 3 and met with Antiguan foreign minister EP Chet Greene to discuss on Choksi's extradition.

During the meeting, Vohra had handed over the extradition request to Greene. The Indian delegation also held a follow-up meeting with the Antiguan foreign minister over the weekend before they left Antigua on August 5. Also, High Commissioner Mahalingam had spoken to the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda Gaston Browne and other officials over Choksi's extradition on August 6.

India has been trying to bring back Choksi from Antigua under the provision of a law of the island nation which provides for extradition of a fugitive to a designated Commonwealth country.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In a fresh appeal to the Election Commission of India, the Congress Party has once again requested the poll body to bring back ballot papers for the 2019 general elections.

According to sources, the party made the appeal ahead of the all-party meeting, called by the EC later today.

Earlier in March, the Congress had asked the EC to allow voters to exercise their franchise by stamping the ballot paper in the 2019 elections, alleging tampering of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).

On August 2, at least 17 political parties, including Telugu Desam Party (TDP), and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) sang in tune with the Congress and expressed their distrust on the existing voting process.

However, the BJP brushed aside the tampering allegations, saying, it's an attempt by the opposition parties to cover up their own defeats in the recently concluded polls.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who is on a two-day official visit to the Kingdom of Thailand, held bilateral talks with Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister of Thailand General Prawit Wongsuwan in Bangkok on Monday.

Sitharaman also called on Prime Minister of Thailand General Prayuth Chan-o-cha.

During the meetings, both sides discussed issues relating to defence cooperation between the two countries. The Ministers welcomed the positive momentum and substantive content of ongoing bilateral defence engagement and discussed measures to further enhance and deepen defence cooperation between India and Thailand.

It was decided to step up military-to-military engagement by commencing bilateral navy exercises.

In addition, both countries will explore enhancement of ongoing joint exercises, the MAITREE counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism Army Exercise, as well as their SIAM BHARAT Air Force exercise.

The two countries will also expand cooperation on maritime security, focusing on greater sharing of information to develop Maritime Domain Awareness.

The Defense Minister offered additional training opportunities for the Royal Thai Army in India, including through tailor made courses in specialised areas, which was welcomed by Thailand.

The Ministers also discussed stepping up defence industry and R&D cooperation. The two sides identified specific areas for such engagement and would discuss this further through institutionalised dialogue mechanisms.

Defense Minister and the Thai leadership also discussed regional security developments. Both sides noted complementarities in their approaches to the Indo-Pacific region and decided to hold regular consultations on issues of mutual interest.

Sitharaman welcomed Thailand's forthcoming Chairmanship of ASEAN and as the ASEAN country coordinator for India, which would create additional pathways for engagement between India and Thailand, including under the ADMM Plus framework. In this context, the Defence Minister of Thailand welcomed India's initiative to host the inaugural BIMSTEC Army Exercise and Conclave of Chiefs in India in September 2018 and confirmed Thailand's participation.

Sitharaman is on an official visit to Thailand from August 27 to August 28.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Monday said that the US Ambassador has assured strict action against those involved in the attack of Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) president Manjit Singh GK in California.

After meeting the US Ambassador in Delhi, Harsimrat told ANI, "We met the US Ambassador today. He has assured that strict action will be taken and all help will be extended. He said that the law will take its course and nobody will get scot-free."

On Sunday, Harsimrat alleged that the men who attacked Manjit Singh GK in California have links with Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI. She also alleged that the attackers enjoy the support of senior Congress leader Jagdish Tytler who is an accused in the 1984 anti-Sikh riot case.

Harsimrat had told ANI, "Heads of 'Sikhs for Justice' who are direct beneficiaries of ISI and work on their orders and are supported by those who are in direct touch with the likes of Jagdish Tytler, and Jasbeer Singh Lobana and his son Gagandeep Singh Lobana, were seen attacking him (Manjit Singh GK). Jasbeer Singh Lobana is the same person who has spent three months in jail for trying to intimidate an eyewitness against Jagdish Tytler in the 1984 massacre."

"These people are attacking that person (Manjit Singh GK) of Sikh community, who has been fighting for years to get justice, to put Jagdish Tytler behind bars and to ensure that people get to know the reality of the Gandhi family. This attack clarifies that the nexus between the Congress party, the Sikhs for Justice and the ISI," she had added.

The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leader had also accused Congress president Rahul Gandhi of having links with the miscreants who attacked the Sikh leader on Saturday.

"Rahul Gandhi said in the UK that the Congress had no role in 1984 anti-Sikh riots and within a few hours our president Manjeet Singh GK was attacked. You will find connections between the attackers and Rahul Gandhi," she said.

Harsimrat had also demanded adequate security for the DSGMC chief and said that she would discuss the matter with the US Ambassador.

Manjit Singh GK was attacked by a group of unknown men at the Yuba City Gurdwara in California on Saturday. The attackers allegedly pushed Singh to the ground, causing his turban to fall off and blackened his face. Three people have been arrested in connection with the matter.

Recalling the incident, Manjit Singh had informed that a group of over 20 people had attacked him. This is the second such attack on Manjit Singh this week. On Monday, the DSGMC chief and his family were allegedly attacked by Khalistan sympathisers at a TV studio in New York, following which he appealed to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj for help and demanded action.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US Ambassador to India Ken Juster on Monday assured Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal that the incidents of violence in the United States will be fully investigated by local law enforcement authorities.

Juster took to his official Twitter handle and informed that he had a productive meeting with Harsimrat, which came after the Union Minister had asked the US Ambassador to take strict action against those involved in the attack of Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) president Manjit Singh GK in California on Saturday.

"Productive meeting with Minister @HarsimratBadal_ and the delegation of Sikh leaders. We assured Minister Badal that incidents of violence in the United States are taken seriously and fully investigated by local law enforcement authorities," Juster wrote on Twitter.

Following a meeting with Juster earlier in the day in the capital, Harsimrat had told ANI, "We met the US Ambassador today. He has assured that strict action will be taken and all help will be extended. He said that the law will take its course and nobody will get scot-free."

On Sunday, Harsimrat alleged that the men who attacked Manjit Singh GK in California have links with Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI. She had also alleged that the attackers enjoy the support of senior Congress leader Jagdish Tytler, who is an accused in the 1984 anti-Sikh riot case.

Harsimrat had told ANI, "Heads of 'Sikhs for Justice' who are direct beneficiaries of ISI and work on their orders and are supported by those who are in direct touch with the likes of Jagdish Tytler, and Jasbeer Singh Lobana and his son Gagandeep Singh Lobana, were seen attacking him (Manjit Singh GK). Jasbeer Singh Lobana is the same person who has spent three months in jail for trying to intimidate an eyewitness against Jagdish Tytler in the 1984 massacre."

"These people are attacking that person (Manjit Singh GK) of Sikh community, who has been fighting for years to get justice, to put Jagdish Tytler behind bars and to ensure that people get to know the reality of the Gandhi family. This attack clarifies that the nexus between the Congress party, the Sikhs for Justice and the ISI," she had added.

Manjit Singh GK was attacked by a group of unknown men at the Yuba City Gurdwara in California on Saturday. The attackers allegedly pushed Singh to the ground, causing his turban to fall off and blackened his face. Three people have been arrested in connection with the matter.

Recalling the incident, Manjit Singh had informed that a group of over 20 people had attacked him.

This is the second such attack on Manjit Singh this week. On Monday, the DSGMC chief and his family were allegedly attacked by Khalistan sympathisers at a TV studio in New York, following which he appealed to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj for help and demanded action.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj is likely to meet her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi in New York next month, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly's (UNGA).

Both the foreign ministers will be present at the 73rd session of the UNGA which will begin on September 18.

The development comes days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Imran Khan on being sworn-in as the new Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Last week, Pakistan signaled that Imran Khan may not be able to attend the meet in order to cut down government expenses. However, senior Pakistani diplomats urged him to reconsider the decision, saying that representing Pakistan was not a waste of funds, particularly on key issues like Kashmir and Afghanistan, Dawn reported.

Earlier on August 22, Khan expressed interest with regards to a meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi, stating that both the countries must engage in dialogue to resolve their differences.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India and Pakistan will hold the 115th meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) in Lahore from August 29 to 30, to discuss various issues under Indus Waters Treaty.

A nine-member Indian delegation, led by Indian Commissioner for Indus Waters, PK Saxena, and comprising technical experts will arrive in Lahore for the annual meeting on August 28. The Pakistani side will be led by their Indus Commissioner, Syed Muhammad Mehar Ali Shah.

PIC was formed under Indus Waters Treaty, signed between India and Pakistan in 1960, it includes the Indus commissioners of both the countries. The treaty provides for both the commissioners to meet at least once every year, alternately in India and Pakistan.

The treaty specifies that the waters of three eastern rivers namely Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, had been reserved for India while that of western rivers, namely Indus, Chenab and Jhelum, are for Pakistan. However, India has unrestricted rights to develop hydroelectric power projects on the western rivers, within the specified parameters of design.

Pakistan contends that the design of two under-construction hydroelectric projects of India in Chenab basin, namely Pakal Dul (1000MW) and Lower Kalnai (48MW), violate the treaty's provisions, while the Indian side affirms its right to build these projects and holds that their design is fully in compliance of set guidelines.

The Commission is likely to hold technical discussions on the issues raised by Pakistan on these two projects. Other regular issues like data exchange and programs of tours and meetings are also likely to be taken up.

The previous meeting of the PIC was held in New Delhi from March 29 to 30, 2018.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Jharkhand High Court on Monday quashed the ban imposed on Popular Front of India (PFI) by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in the state.

The court observed that the Jharkhand government did not follow the procedures to ban the organisation. Hence, the ban and the case filed against it has been quashed.

Advocate A Allam told ANI, " No incriminating material was found that calls for a ban. No anti-social or anti- activities were found. The PFI has registration in Society Registration Act. The organisation works for "

In February, the Jharkhand Government banned the PFI for spreading anarchy in the state. The action was taken after the Law department gave its consent on the proposal of the Home Department.

The PFI was banned under Section 16 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1908.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)When accounting for relative risk of drinking, researchers found that any alcohol consumption increased these risk factors and emphasized that the safest amount of alcohol is no alcohol. The study also finds what lots of prior research has shown: The more people drink, the higher their risk of alcohol-related health problems.

Any protection alcohol may provide against heart disease is outweighed by the health problems it causes, particularly cancer, according to the authors of the study, published August 23 in The Lancet.

They found that the modest improvements in heart health associated with light drinking are more than offset by the increased risk of other conditions including breast cancer and cancer of the larynx, as well as violence and vehicle accidents.

Some of the top-billed findings from the study that were pushed to the fore in the press release and have been widely quoted in the media, were that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 were likely to develop a serious health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury.

"The evidence is adding up that no amount of drinking is safe", says study co-author Emmanuela Gakidou, a professor of global health and health metrics sciences at the University of Washington.

The risk climbs in a steep "J-curve", the study found. But those who had two drinks per day had a risk 7% higher than non-drinkers.

This may send a message that alcohol consumption is OK, experts say, but they warn that about 5 percent of cancers are linked to alcohol.

According to DrinkWise, 80 per cent of Australians do not abstain from alcohol, and 16 per cent usually have five or more standard drinks.

Most national guidelines, including the UK's, urge moderate alcohol consumption rather than total abstention, The Guardian reports. "There is no warning on alcohol packs though it is a confirmed cancer-causing substance", he said.

Mexican farmers sue VW over 'hail cannons' they say caused droughts

They are not respecting their neighbors' request to definitively stop using hail cannons. It said it would continue to use the cannons if needed.

The study found that for people aged 15-49, alcohol was the most important risk factor, account for 3.8% of women's deaths and 12.2% of men's.

He said: "The latest ONS data shows that alcohol consumption in the United Kingdom has fallen 19% over the last decade and people are less likely to binge drink than they were 10 years ago".

"The conclusions of the study are clear and unambiguous: alcohol is a colossal global health issue", Burton wrote, suggesting that policy makers put a priority on programs that focus on decreasing alcohol consumption.

Both were grounded in new methods that compensated for the shortcomings of earlier efforts.

"With such a volume of conflicting evidence, it is hardly surprising that people might be confused about what is a safe level of drinking".

In Asia, South Korean men took the lead, with 91 percent hitting the bottle at least once in a while.

In 2016, 1.5 billion men and 900,000 women were current drinkers. Denmark led the list for most drinkers (97 percent of men and 95 percent of women), while Romania (men) and Ukraine (women) had the heaviest drinkers. On average, each day women consume 0.73 alcoholic drinks, while men drink 1.7 drinks, according to the findings.

The most abstemious nations were those with Muslim-majority populations.Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, on Monday, urged 'Malayalis' all over the world to contribute their one month salary to rebuild the flood-hit state.

In a Facebook post, Vijayan said, "We can overcome any hurdle if Malayalis across the world stand united. Money will not be a hurdle for rebuilding Kerala. Let Malayalis across the world contribute their one month's salary for rebuilding the state. We should think about this."

"Everyone won't be able to give their one month's salary together. You can give it in ten month's time. The non-resident Malayalis should try to ensure the support of those who are with them," he added.

Kerala has recently been hit by the worst floods in the century, which caused it a loss of Rs. 19,512 crore to the state. The flood-ravaged state has received financial help from various states, Central government, organisations, and individuals.

Several Members of Parliament (MPs) and IAS Officers Association of Andhra Pradesh (IASOA -AP) also donated their one day income to support Kerala.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Former prime minister Manmohan Singh has urged incumbent Narendra Modi to leave the Teen Murti memorial, dedicated to the memory of Jawaharlal Nehru, undisturbed out of respect for history and heritage.

The former prime minister's comments came amid reports that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Central Government is planning to turn the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) into a memorial for all the prime ministers of the country.

In a letter to his successor, Singh said, "The NMML is dedicated to the memory of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and prime architect of the Indian nation-state, who left behind an indelible imprint on our country and indeed on the world. His distinctiveness and greatness have been acknowledged even by his political opponents and rivals."

Singh added that during the six-year tenure of late former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, there was no attempt made to change the nature and character of the NMML and Teen Murti complex. However, Singh stressed that the same is now an agenda of Prime Minister Modi's government.

Urging Prime Minister Modi to keep NMML a centre of first-rate scholarship and professional excellence, Singh continued, "The museum itself must retain its primary focus on Jawaharlal Nehru and the freedom movement because of his unique role having spent almost ten years in jail between the early 1920s and the mid-1940s. No amount of revisionism can obliterate that role and his contributions."

Quoting Vajpayee's speech in Parliament when Nehru passed away, Singh further said, "As Atal Bihari Vajpayeeji himself said in his moving speech to Parliament when Panditji passed away: 'Such a resident may never grace Teen Murti again. That vibrant personality, that attitude of taking even the opposition along, that refined gentlemanliness, that greatness we may not again see in the near future. In spite of a difference of opinion we have nothing but respect for his great ideals, his integrity, his love for the country and his indomitable courage'."

The two-time prime minister further said that Nehru not only belonged to the Congress but to the entire nation. Singh also requested Prime Minister Modi to respect the sentiment and keep the Teen Murti memorial undisturbed. "This way we will be respecting both history and heritage," Singh further stated.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A policeman in Pakistan, who intercepted the former husband of Bushra Maneka for speeding has been transferred.

Attributing to police sources, Geo News reported that Pakpattan District Police Officer (DPO) Rizwan Gondal and his party attempted to intercept Khawar Maneka, at a checkpoint on August 23, but he did not stop.

Subsequently, the cops chased his vehicle and managed to intercept him. Sources added that Khawar verbally abused the policemen when the policemen stopped him.

On August 27, the Punjab provincial government summoned Gondal and demanded him to apologise to Khawar. The Police sources added that the latter did not obey the orders and argued that the policemen were not at fault for stopping Khawar, following which he was transferred.

Gondal had also informed Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar on his decision of not apologising to Khawar, sources further said.

Meanwhile, sources in the Punjab provincial government revealed that Buzdar had persuaded Pakpattan DPO and Khawar to resolve the matter.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan's Minister for Human Rights ShireenMazari has said that the incumbent government in Islamabad is preparing a proposal to resolve the Kashmir issue.

Mazari, made the statement during a talk hosted by Pakistan based journalist Nasim Zehra. "The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government will prepare a proposal on resolving the Kashmir conflict within one week and present it in the cabinet. They will also discuss the issue with other stakeholders," said Mazari adding, "The proposal is almost ready and we hope that it is considered soon."

In his first speech after winning the July 25 general elections, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said he wanted to have good relations with India and work to resolve all outstanding issues through dialogue. Mentioning Kashmir as the core issue of dispute between the two nations, he added that it was about time that the two countries sat across the table and discussed the issues of concern.

"We should sit across and resolve the issues instead of we blaming India for problems in Balochistan and they blame us for problems in Kashmir. I can say that if you (India) will take one step forward, we will take two steps forward. The relationship between the two countries has been one-sided so far and Pakistan has been blamed for all sorts of terrorism in the We want friendship with India and want to resolve all issues through dialogue," Khan elucidated.

External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj is also likely to meet her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly's (UNGA) in New York next month.

There have been ups and downs in the relations between the two countries in the past. The relations between the two nations took a further dip after the terror attacks by Pakistan-based groups in Pathankot in 2016.

The sentencing of retired Indian Naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav to death by a Pakistani military court in April over espionage charges in 2017 further strained the already fragile bilateral relations between the two nations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A former Indian top intelligence official has said that Pakistan's obsession with Kashmir has given its Army an institutional supremacy. This obsession had also led to birth of several terrorist organizations which has ultimately killed the democratic institutions in Pakistan.

"This was facilitated by the early demise of Md. Ali Jinnah and the assassination of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, the two stalwarts of the Pakistan movement who could have given a democratic direction to the country. Pakistan Army became the arbiter and wresting Kashmir became the national obsession. The Kashmir mission is central to the maintenance of supremacy of the Army and its most cogent rationale. Pakistan gradually became an Army with a state rather than a state with an Army," former Special Secretary in the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW), Jyoti K. Sinha, has written in the Indian Defence Review (IDR).

The officer further said that the Pakistan Army is dominated by the Punjabi Muslims, whereas other communities in the country have little or no presence in it. "A Baluchi or a Sindhi General does not exist. There are a few Pashtoon Army officers but they can hardly either aspire or dream of becoming of force within the officer corps of the Pakistan Army," Sinha wrote.

While mentioning an interesting anecdote Sinha wrote: "Soon after the 1971 war, Lt. Gen. Habibullah Khan, a retired General of the Pakistan Army was on a visit to the Bihar Regimental Centre at the Danapur Cantonment, Patna. He had begun his career in the Army as a young officer in the Bihar regiment and was one of the honoured guest at the Golden Jubilee Celebration at the Bihar Regimental Centre, Danapur. He with some bitterness mentioned to a fellow officer, who was his batchmate at the Royal Indian Military College, Dehradun, that though very well placed in the Pakistan Army and with an impeccable record he could not become Chief of the Pakistan Army as he was a Pashtoon".

Anti-Punjabi Muslim sentiments translated into Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan. The spark which led to the 1971 war with India and its disastrous consequences for Pakistan was the arrogance of Punjab to deny political power to the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan.

"Under the Pakistan Army regime led by General Yahya Khan, the Punjabi Muslims manufactured the theory of two majorities in a 'democratic polity' which Pakistan aspired to create after the 1970 elections. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman whose party won a majority in the Pakistan National Assembly was denied the post of Prime Minister of the country. What happened thereafter is history but yet the vivisection of Pakistan had little or no impact on the Punjabi Muslim mindset. It is laughable but true that both in Islamabad and Rawalpindi it was said that creation of Bangladesh was good riddance of the dark, short and indolent Bengali Muslims. Pakistan had become more homogenous and the Pakistan economy would now prosper. The irony is that every possible economic indicator shows that the Bangladeshi economy is in a far better shape than that of truncated Pakistan," Sinha wrote in his article.

In 2017, the GDP growth of Bangladesh was 7.30 per cent whereas that of Pakistan was 4.71 per cent.

The foreign exchange reserve of Pakistan in April 2018 was USD 17,539 million and it is steadily declining whereas that of Bangladesh was USD 30,937 million and is steadily increasing.

"There is a real possibility of Pakistan's economy going bust. What a delicious irony!" wrote Sinha.

He added: "The Bangladeshi polity after the initial hiccups is stabilizing into a healthy democratic polity with the Bangladeshi Army finally becoming totally subservient to the civil authority and the duly elected government. The Pakistani polity today remains as unstable as ever with an unpredictable future. The deep state continues to wield the big stick. Kashmir is a prize which must be won whatever it takes".

"It is said that history repeats itself and this is very likely to happen in Pakistan as it refuses to learn from it. The Pakistan Army continues to rule the roost and must continue to have the first claim on the shrinking resources of Pakistan. The veneer of democracy may be cultivated and encouraged but the deep state must always have the last say. After all Kashmir remains the unfinished agenda of partition! If three successive Indo-Pak wars have not produced the desired results then Pakistan must resort to other means to wrest Kashmir from India. The theory of the thousand cuts was evolved by the wily General Zia-Ul-Haque. He proved himself to be too clever by half," Sinha wrote.

He further said: "The deep state in Pakistan launched a covert war to wrest Kashmir from India. Terrorists' organizations were created and supported to launch a covert war in Jammu & Kashmir. The Jehadi ideology was spawned and it spread to other parts of the with devastating effect. The dominance of the Punjabi Muslims ensured through the mechanism of the Pakistan Army and justified by the national obsession with Kashmir will continue to obstruct the evolution of a democratic polity in Pakistan which alone can ensure that all the sections of the people of Pakistan feel secure about their future within the Pakistani polity."

Sinha further said that Baluchistan, which constitutes nearly 50 per cent of the land mass and only 5 per cent of the population of Pakistan, has remained starved of resources because the country's resources must be diverted to the higher cause of building up the country's defense forces and the security apparatus to complete the unfinished agenda of Partition.

He added that the Pashtoons comprising nearly 25 per cent of the Pakistani population and Sindhis constituting 14 per cent of the population must abjure their fair share in the resources of the country and their position in the power structure of the Pakistani polity till the deep state wins in the valley.

"The problem is that in waging this war history will repeat itself for Pakistan without India raising even a little finger. Pakistan is fighting a war which remains to be lost. It is not difficult at all to see the writing on the wall. It may take another 20-25 years to complete the script," Sinha concluded.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actor-model Paris Jackson celebrated godfather and 'Home Alone' star Macaulay Culkin's birthday with an adorable wish.

The 20-year-old took to social media to mark Culkin's 38th birthday as she posted a slideshow of flashback pictures - including a snap of their matching tattoos, which they got last year.

"Happiest of birthdays mack attack," Jackson wrote in the caption. "I love you so so dearly and keep you very close to my heart. Always."

Culkin has been close to late Michael Jackson's daughter since birth. He was close to the music icon - who passed away in 2009 - from an early age.The former child star is also said to be the godfather of the late King of Pop's sons Prince and Bigi.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Late Republican Senator John McCain's body will lie in state at the capital city of Arizona, Phoenix on Wednesday (local time), Governor Doug Ducey announced.

Ducey further said that he will wait until the burial of the senator before announcing the name of his successor.

"Out of respect for the life and legacy of Senator John McCain and his family, Governor Ducey will not be making any announcements about an appointment until after the Senator is laid to rest," Ducey's senior adviser Daniel Ruiz II told The Hill. "Now is a time for remembering and honouring a consequential life well lived.

A service has been scheduled in Arizona, after which McCain's body will be brought back to Washington, where he will lie in state. A full funeral service will be held for him at the Washington National Cathedral, a Republican close to the McCain family told CNN.

McCain will be laid to rest in Annapolis after the ceremonies in the United States capital.

To honour the senator, the US embassy in Vietnam, where McCain was a prisoner of war for five and a half years, announced a new fellowship after his contributions.

"In honour of Senator McCain's contributions and those of his former U.S. Senate colleague and long-time collaborator on U.S.-Vietnam issues, John Kerry the U.S. Mission in Vietnam will launch the McCain/Kerry Fellowship," the U.S. Mission wrote in a statement Sunday, as reported by The Hill.

"Each year a young Vietnamese leader committed to public service will travel on a U.S. study tour, deepening ties between our peoples and furthering the positive legacy of Senator McCain," the statement continued.

John McCain passed away on Saturday (local time) at the age of 81 after a prolonged illness.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Monday met several foreign dignitaries from Bangladesh, Japan and Sri Lanka in an effort to strengthen strategic partnership and bilateral relations with these countries.

Swaraj met Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, Japan's State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Kazuyuki Nakane and Bangladeshi Planning Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal and held talks with them on the sidelines of the third Indian Ocean Conference.

Inaugurating the third Indian Ocean conference in Hanoi, Swaraj said that the Indian Ocean is a central component of a free and fair Indo-Pacific region, adding that the country has a vision of collective action and cooperation for realising its true potential.

"The Indian Ocean was known as 'Ratnakali' or ocean of treasures'. Our vision of the region is of collective cooperation and coordination. Therefore, nurturing a climate of peace and stability is an important priority for our foreign policy. We have to commit to the idea of peaceful co-existence," she had added.

Earlier in the day, Swaraj had also hailed the Indian embassies across the for their efforts.

Speaking at the Swami Vivekanand Cultural Centre in Hanoi, Swaraj had said, "If any Non-Resident Indian (NRI) gets stuck anywhere in the world, they are confident that their government will save them. Relief is just one tweet away. What was never a priority in embassies has become the top priority now."

She had also unveiled the bust of Mahatma Gandhi at the Indian embassy in Hanoi.

Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted, "Paying respect to the Father of the Nation! EAM @SushmaSwaraj unveiled the bust of Mahatma Gandhi in the Chancery building at the Embassy of India in Hanoi."

Swaraj is on a five-day, two-nation tour to Vietnam and Cambodia since August 26 to strengthen bilateral ties with these two countries.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The 8th meeting of India-Kenya Joint Trade Committee was held in Nairobi, Kenya, from 22nd - 25th August, 2018. The meeting was co-chaired by Union Minister of Commerce & Industry and Civil Aviation, Suresh Prabhuand Mr. Peter Munya, Cabinet Secretary (Minister) for Industry, Trade and Cooperatives, Government of Kenya.

The discussions during the meetings covered India's contribution in implementation of Kenya's Big Four Agenda - food security, affordable housing, universal healthcare and manufacturing, expansion and diversification of bilateral trade, Kenya's readiness to join the International Solar Alliance, implementation of Lines of Credit, of over US$ 220 million, extended by Government of India in power transmission, SMEs development, revival of theRivatex factory and agricultural mechanization, implementation of decisions taken during the high level exchanges, cooperation in health, blue economy, agro-processing sectors and WTO related issues; and training & capacity building programmes offered by India.

An Agreed Minutes of the Meeting was signed by both Ministers. A meeting of India-Kenya Joint Business Council was held on the side-lines of the Joint Trade Committee meeting. In his address to the Kenyan and Indian business leaders, Suresh Prabhu emphasized on research and design in products specific to Kenyan needs and urged Indian businesses to carry out a market study to identify priority areas for bilateral cooperation.

The Commerce Minister also interacted with the members of the Indian diaspora and apprised them about the various developmental initiatives and achievements of the Government of India.

During the visit, Suresh Prabhu, called on the Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta, and Deputy President, Mr.

William Ruto. The Commerce Minister, Suresh Prabhu, was accompanied by senior officials of the Ministry of Commerce & Industry and a business delegation.

India and Kenya are Indian Ocean neighbours and share longstanding trade and people-to-people contacts. At present, India is one of Kenya's largest trade partners and the second largest foreign investor in Kenya. Indians are the third-largest group of tourists to Kenya. The last meeting of Joint Trade Committee was held in New Delhi in February 2015.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Now, sources close to the matter have said that the plans for listing the IPO were scrapped quite some time ago, but the company line started out with mild disappointment, initially suggesting there may be a delay, and gradually increased to a full-scale cancellation.

As Canada expressed its concern over the violation of human rights in KSA, the kingdom expelled Canada's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and called back hundreds of patients from Canada.

He did not elaborate on the acquisition but Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser last month confirmed preliminary talks to acquire a "strategic stake" in Sabic, the world's fourth-largest petrochemicals company that is 70 per cent owned by the government-run Public Investment Fund (PIF).

The proposed listing of Aramco was a central part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's reform drive aimed at restructuring the kingdom's economy, reducing its dependence on oil revenue and cutting its debt.

"He's been very good at creating expectations but not as good at managing expectations", said Dorsey.

"The government remains committed to the initial public offering of Saudi Aramco, in accordance with the appropriate circumstances and appropriate time chosen by the Government, Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said in a statement released on Saudi Press Agency".

But analysts said the IPO - which would be the world's biggest listing - could be delayed by a couple of years.

DJI Mavic 2 Pro: price, specs, release date announced

DJI has introduced a new Hyperlapse feature to the series, which adds the element of time to video content. Featuring a new, Hasselblad-branded camera, the Mavic 2 Pro has an impressive 20 megapixel 1-inch sensor.

Yemen Army and popular forces targeted a Saudi sea base in Red Sea near Aramco oil installations, south of Saudi Arabia.

It lies at the heart of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's vision to transform the economy.

Part of the funds Saudi Arabia would have earned were slated to go toward a sovereign wealth fund that could be invested overseas.

"A Sabic deal would allow the government to buy time for the Aramco IPO", industry and global banking sources told Reuters.

Aramco will raise funds from banks and global bondholders to buy a controlling stake in the petrochemical group.

READ: Saudi Aramco raising billions to buy Sabic: Smart but will it work?

Industry sources told Reuters this week that both the worldwide and domestic legs of the IPO had been postponed indefinitely.Escorts and Tadano Group, Japan's biggest and world's leading mobile crane manufacturer, announced their joint venture to manufacture rough terrain cranes and truck mounted cranes. The joint venture will strengthen Escorts technology leadership and market presence in the material handling equipment space.

The JV will leverage the cost effective frugal Indian engineering excellence of Escorts and world leading Japanese technology from Tadano to cater to an expanding market for heavier capacity and efficient Truck & RT Cranes and sophisticated truck mounted and rough terrain cranes in the 20 to 80 tonnage category.

The 51:49 joint venture between Tadano and Escorts respectively will enable both partners to optimize their current and future capabilities in the segment globally. The JV will aim to take leading position in the high tonnage crane segment in medium to long term.

Production by the joint venture is expected to commence at Faridabad in the third quarter of this financial year itself.

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Jindal Saw announced that since it is not currently exporting large diameter pipes to US, the levy of Anti Dumping Duty by US Department of Commerce on import of large diameter welded pipes from India would not have any direct impact on the company's business.

On 21 August 2018, US Department of Commerce has imposed Anti Dumping Duty on imports of Large Diameter Welded Pipes from Canada, China, Greece, Korea, Turkey and India.

The Anti Dumping Duty in respect of import of Large Diameter Welded Pipes from India has been fixed at 50.55%.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)At least four people were killed and 143 injured following torrential rains in Taiwan that also caused agricultural losses worth more than 563.2 million Taiwanese dollars ($18 million), authorities said on Monday.

Central and southern Taiwan have suffered floods that have paralysed factories and work on farms in addition to causing power outages and damaging several roads, reports Efe news.

According to disaster management authorities, thousands of homes have been flooded and about 7,000 people have been evacuated, including 1,827 who are living in 20 temporary shelters.

Some 70,000 households have suffered power outages, according to fire agency data.

A Taiwanese weather expert on Monday forecast three more days of torrential rains and strong winds, warning residents of increased flooding, landslides and falling rocks, while evacuations continue.

The army has mobilized more than 37,000 troops and some 5,000 aircraft and vehicles to deal with the situation arising from the torrential rains.

--IANS

ksk/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi reiterating demand for full statehood to Delhi and also staged a rally here on the issue.

Labour Minister and AAP leader Gopal Rai, who wrote to Modi, urged him to meet AAP legislators and "respect the feelings" of capital's residents to grant full statehood to Delhi.

Rai along with over 40 party legislators and leaders like Atishi Marlena and Dilip Pandey first rallied at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence here to voice their demand.

They said they had collected 10 lakh signatures in support of their demand, which they intend to submit to the Prime Minister. The AAP leaders later proceeded to the Sansad Marg in central Delhi, where they were stopped by the police from proceeding further.

The protesters held a sit-in on Sansad Marg while shouting slogans like "Dilli Maange Apna haq" (Delhi demands its right).

The police later ferried the letters of support from Delhi residents to the Prime Minister's residence.

On July 1, the party had launched a signature campaign on 'Dilli Maange Apna Haq' (Delhi demands its right) for getting full statehood, aiming to get signatures of 10 lakh persons on their demand.

Rai told IANS that problems pertaining to unemployment, college admissions, CCTVs and slum clusters would be resolved if Delhi attained full statehood.

"Youngsters with 95 per cent marks are running from college to college but not getting admissions. If Delhi becomes a full state, we can build more colleges on Delhi's land which will guarantee admissions in Delhi.

"... we can also carry out projects like installation of CCTVs, which will guarantee added security to women in Delhi," he said.

The Delhi Minister said that though the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had always demanded full statehood to Delhi, but now the BJP is brushing the matter under the carpet.

AAP MLA Alka Lamba said that the Prime Minister should not disappoint the people of Delhi and at least consider the letters in support of their demand.

Rai warned that the AAP will continue with their campaign in support of their demand till it was met by the Centre.

--IANS

sd/tsb/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)M.K. Stalin, virtually anointed as his political heir by the late leader M. Karunanidhi, is all set to be elected the DMK President on Tuesday.

His final "coronation" is expected to be announced formally on Tuesday at the party headquarters when the DMK's General Council is set to meet.

The election of Stalin as the DMK's second President is likely to be a smooth affair as all the 65 district secretaries of the party have proposed his name for the top post and his is the only nomination.

He will be the second President of the party, a post which was held by his father Karunanidhi for 49 long years.

Stalin was given the role of Working President in January 2017 after his late father and former Chief Minister Karunanidhi was largely confined to his home due to age related ailments.

The elevation of Stalin as the party President became a necessity after Karunanidhi passed away early this month.

The 65-year-old son of Karunanidhi will relinquish the post of Treasurer and senior leader Duraimurugan is set to be elected unopposed to that post as no other nomination has been filed for that post.

The path to the ascension of throne by Stalin was paved at the party's Executive Committee meeting held on August 14 where senior leaders one after another urged the 'waiting prince' to lead them by taking over the party's mantle.

But whether the tenure is going to be smooth for Stalin has to be seen as he has to face the challenge of leading the party to victory in the ensuing by-elections in two Assembly constituencies: Tiruvarur (fell vacant after Karunanidhi's death) and Tiruparankundran (vacant after the death of AIADMK lawmaker A.K. Bose).

The DMK's candidate in the R.K. Nagar by-election in Chennai lost his deposit and came a poor third after independent candidate T.T.V. Dinakaran and AIADMK leader E. Madhusudhanan.

There is also a complaint that Stalin as the Working President was not able to lure some of the disgruntled AIADMK legislators and come to power.

Stalin's elder brother M.K. Alagiri, who opposed his leadership and was later dismissed from the party by Karunanidhi for anti-party activities, may work against the DMK party in the by-elections.

Alagiri has announced his plans to hold a rally in Chennai early next month to show his strength. On Monday, he warned that if he was not taken back into the party, then DMK would have to face "consequences".

The Alagiri-Stalin rivalry has plagued the DMK for a long time but Karunanidhi kept a fragile peace.

"I feel Alagiri himself may contest in Tiruvarur. He may like to ride on the wave of being Karunanidhi's own son. It is immaterial if he loses provided DMK also loses," political analyst Raveendharan Dhuraiswamy told IANS.

He said Alagiri may not be a challenge for Stalin within the party but may pose a hurdle from outside.

According to Dhuraiswamy, the poll scene in Tamil Nadu has changed to a three-corner contest between the AIADMK, DMK and AMMK led by Dinakaran.

Stalin will also be under intense scrutiny and would be compared with Karunanidhi for a long time time. It may take some time and some election victories for Stalin to come out of his father's shadows.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank on Monday filed two criminal defamation complaints against Congress President Rahul Gandhi and party Spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala in a court here for their tweets regarding deposits made in the bank after demonetisation.

The complaints pertain to Surjewala's press statement about alleged conversion of over Rs 745 crore in old currency in five days following demonetisation on November 8, 2016.

He had later backed it with Twitter messages on the same. Similarly, Gandhi had posted tweets on the matter.

The court of Additional Metropolitan Magistrate ordered an inquiry under Section 22 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and posted the matter for September 17.

Pointing out that BJP President Amit Shah is a bank director, the Congress leaders had alleged that it was involved in a "national scam" after demonetisation.

Gandhi and Surjewala's tweets on June 22 had targeted both the BJP and Shah.

The cooprative bank and its Chairman Ajay Patel, through their counsel S.V. Raju, contested the allegations in the defamation suits and claimed that the allegations were false and defamatory.

IANS broke the story on June 22 about the bank netting the highest deposits among such cooperative banks of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes that were abruptly demonetised on November 8, 2016.

The information on the matter accessed under the Right to Information Act by a Mumbai-based RTI activist said that the ADCB had secured deposits of Rs 745.59 crore of the spiked notes in just five days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the demonetisation announcement.

On November 14, 2016, five days after demonetisation, all district cooperative banks were banned from accepting deposits of the banned currency from public amid fears that black money could be laundered through this route.

--IANS

desai/tsb

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An Indian Army officer who was caught with a woman in a Srinagar hotel on May 23 is likely to face court martial after he was indicted by a court of inquiry.

According to Army sources, orders have been issued to initiate disciplinary action against Major Leetul Gogoi on two accounts.

"For fraternizing a local in spite of instructions to the contrary and being away from the place of duty while in operational area," an Army source said.

The source said the Army was "likely to initiate court martial against the officer".

Major Gogoi was caught on May 23 in a Srinagar hotel with a Kashmiri woman and a man who works for the Army.

He was questioned by police and was let off after the woman told the police that she had wilfully accompanied the officer.

Army Chief General Bipin Rawat, during a visit to Srinagar after the incident, said "strictest possible action" would be taken if Major Gogoi was found guilty "of any offence".

Major Gogoi hit the headlines in April 2017 when he tied a man to the bonnet of his military vehicle to deter stone pelters from attacking his troops and election staff in the district of Budgam in the Kashmir Valley.

The incident took place after last year's by-elections in the Valley. An FIR was filed against Major Gogoi after the April 9 incident.

Major Gogoi, who is said to have been effective in counter-insurgency operations in the Kashmir Valley, was awarded a commendation certificate by the Army Chief last year.

--IANS

sar/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actress Asia Argento, who has been accused of sexual assault against musician Jimmy Bennett, will no longer be a part of the judging panel of the twelfth season of the show "X Factor Italy".

According to sources, Argento has been expelled from the show amid the allegations that she has settled the accusation with Bennett for a sum of $380,000, and now the live portion of the show will officially begin with a new judge, reports variety.com

Audiences will still see her on the first seven episodes of the show which have already been shot. These include initial auditions to pick competitors for the show's 12 final spots.

Following the allegations against Argento of sexual abuse, television network companies Sky Italia and FremantleMedia had issued a statement saying that if the accusations were true, they "would have no choice but to take note of it and put an end to the collaboration".

The new judge will be announced on September 5 during the "X Factor" press conference in Milan.

The show's broadcaster and producers have not commented anything on Argento's expulsion yet.

--IANS

sim/rb/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Billed as one of the costliest Malayalam films, "Aadujeevitham" -- which has been the only thing on the mind of its director Blessy for many years -- will make its way into the screens only in 2020, he says.

The film, based on the similarly-titled award-winning Malayalam novel and written by Benyamin, is the story of a man ending up in shambles after reaching the Middle East as he finds himself tending goats in extreme desert temperatures.

Blessy told IANS that the delay is because the canvas of the film is so big and it has to be shot across seasons, which is why he doesn't see it ready for release before 2020.

"We have completed one schedule which was shot here. Now the remaining three more schedules are all to be shot abroad. Various locations are being considered and one that is almost zeroed down is Morocco. Shooting is not causing the delay. The delay is in the planning process as we just can't afford any error," Blessy said.

Blessy has scripted the story, making appropriate changes to meet the demands of cinema and to make it commercially viable.

Blessy is known for films like "Kaazcha", "Thanmathra" and "Pranayam".

Actor Prithviraj plays the lead character in the new film, for which K.U. Mohan is handling the camera.

--IANS

sg/rb/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Allahabad High Court on Monday refused to give interim relief to power producers that are facing insolvency proceedings as the Reserve Bank of India's debt resolution plan deadline ended on Monday. During a hearing, the court refused to pass an interim relief order to these companies and asked financial creditors to initiate insolvency proceedings against the defaulting power companies. However, reports suggest the RBI has given 15 more days to banks to hire legal counsels and resolution professionals, which also gives them more time to resolve these NPAs.

As per the RBI's February-12 circular, the over 70 defaulting companies had been given six months starting from March, following which financial creditors were supposed to move the NCLT against them. The RBI circular came into effect on March 1 and the 180-day deadline concludes on August 27.

The high court has also directed the centre to take a suitable action in the next 15 days under Section 7 of the RBI Act. It has also asked the high-level empowered committee to decide within two months on a resolution in consultation with the Reserve Bank of India, reported ET.

As per the Section 7 of the RBI Act, the Central government may from time to time give such directions to the Bank as it may, after consultation with the Governor of the bank, consider necessary in the public interest. Experts believe that going through insolvency won't address the core issues plaguing the power sector -- like slippage, delayed payments, no power purchase agreements, etc -- and would lead to nothing but a sizeable haircut to the lenders.

There are about 34 stressed power projects and the combined value of their outstanding loans is about Rs 1.74-lakh crore. Banks believe the insolvency process could depreciate the value of these assets and want more time to resolve them. They are also trying their best to find out solutions before such NPAs are referred to NCLT. The State Bank of India recently said about 7-8 power sector projects, including KSK Mahanadi, Prayagraj Power, JP Power Venture, etc, worth Rs 17,000 crore are expected to be resolved soon as lenders are nearing consensus on these projects.

Despite its earlier guidelines, the regulator gave a 15-day window to the banks to appoint legal counsels and resolution professionals. And, in the extended time period, if any of the stressed assets are resolved, it would not be referred to the law tribunal for insolvency proceedings.

(Edited by Manoj Sharma)The state-run public transport corporation on Monday launched a non-stop luxury bus service to connect the holy Hindu town Tirupathi in Andhra Pradesh and Bengaluru airport.

"The service will ferry domestic and international passengers to and from Tirupathi to the airport in 5 hours both ways," Karnataka State Road Transport Corp (KSRTC) official R. Girish told IANS here.

The average distance between the destinations is about 280 km.

The 'Flybus' service will operate twice a day from the airport -- at 10 a.m. and 10 p.m., reaching Tirupathi at 3 p.m. and 3 a.m. The bus will leave Tirupathi at 11 a.m. and 9 p.m, and reach the airport at 4 p.m. and 2 a.m.

"As the world-famous Hindu god Venkateshwara and his consort Padmavathi temple attract thousands of devotees from across the country and abroad, the service will facilitate them to reach Tirupathi at the earliest and catch return or connecting flights from Bengaluru conveniently," said Girish.

The corporation operates similar services for air passengers to and from Mysuru, Madikeri, Mangaluru and Kundapura in Karnataka and Coimbatore and Salem in Tamil Nadu daily.

As the country's third largest airport, the Kempegowda airport had handled 80 lakh passengers in the first quarter (April-June) of this fiscal (2018-19) after registering 269 lakh passenger movements in fiscal 2017-18.

--IANS

fb/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The CBI on Monday submitted an 'action taken report' (ATR) in a sealed cover to the Patna High Court on the alleged mass rapes at the Muzaffarpur shelter home.

The court had last week expressed unhappiness over the CBI's failure to submit a progress report and an ATR. The court told the CBI to submit the ATR at the next hearing on August 27.

A High Court bench headed by Chief Justice M.R. Shah had also directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to respond on the sudden transfer of a CBI Superintendent, J.P. Mishra, probing the crime. The Patna High Court is monitoring the CBI probe.

The CBI advocate on Monday informed the court that it has also submitted the report explaining the transfer of that officer in the sealed cover.

But the court questioned the CBI as to how its DIG, who was present in the court, managed to look after the work in three states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand while probing the Muzaffarpur shelter home case.

The court will hear the case on Tuesday.

J.P. Mishra, who was transferred to Patna barely two months ago, was last Tuesday shifted as the Superintendent in the office of the Deputy Inspector General (Patna Range).

Among those arrested and jailed for the multiple rapes is journalist Brajesh Thakur. Social Welfare Minister Manju Verma had to resign after it became known that her husband was in close touch with Thakur.

The Muzaffarpur horror came to light when the Bihar Social Welfare Department filed an FIR based on a social audit of the shelter home conducted by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

--IANS

ik/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) patron Sharad Yadav on Monday accused the Modi government of not helping flood-ravaged Kerala.

"Following the devastating floods, the Kerala government demanded Rs 20,000 crore from the Centre. But the central government gave only Rs 600 crore, which is less than 10 per cent of the amount demanded," Yadav told the media.

"And when the United Arab Emirates (UAE) tried to help Kerala, the aid was rejected by the central government," he said.

Yadav said Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said on Sunday in his monthly radio broadcast that the entire country was standing by Kerala.

"The people in the country are indeed with the people of Kerala except the central government. It is not helping Kerala properly," he said.

Hundreds have been killed and hundreds of thousands made homeless following the worst flooding in Kerala in nearly a century.

--IANS

aks/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)China on Monday welcomed the joint participation by India and Pakistan in the ongoing counter-terrorism drill of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Russia.

According to the Chinese media, some 3,000 soldiers from China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, India and Pakistan were participating in the "Peace Mission 2018" drill. India and Pakistan joined the bloc in 2017.

Ten representatives from Uzbekistan were serving as observers in the drill.

Beijing called India and Pakistan important countries in South Asia and said that stability in their ties was key to peace and development in the region and the world.

"We welcome India and Pakistan's joint participation in this counter-terrorism exercise under the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation framework," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said here.

The ties between India and Pakistan were strained after the terror attack on an Indian Army camp in 2016, which New Delhi says was backed by Islamabad.

"These two countries are important ones in South Asia. Their relations' stability is significant to the peace and development of the region and the whole world," Hua said.

"We sincerely hope that they could enhance their dialogue and cooperation both bilaterally and within multilateral mechanisms like the SCO, work together to improve their ties and jointly maintain regional peace and stability," he added.

--IANS

gsh/soni/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pushing for a 10-point charter of demands, including social security, standard minimum wages and annulling certain changes in labour laws, the West Bengal unit of Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) on Monday said it will organise a march to the state labour department on August 29.

The Left-wing trade union said workers from various sectors across the state will attend the rally and present their demands to state labour minister Moloy Ghatak.

"The state government is taking anti-people decisions. The labour minister does not meet the trade unions. So we plan to march to the state labour department on August 29," said CITU state general secretary Anadi Kumar Sahu.

He said one of the key demands of industrial workers participating in the rally is a rollback of the labour law reforms initiated by the Centre.

"The Centre has asked the Bengal government to spell out its stand on the recent labour law reforms. We demand the government hold discussions with all the trade unions in the state," he said.

Sahu said the state government should stop harassing tea and jute workers and take initiative to reopen several closed factories in Bengal.

He also demanded that the salary of Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) and Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) workers in the state should be increased. "A section of those workers will also join the march," he said.

-IANS

mgr/ssp/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's appeal to people to contribute a month's salary in the wake of the flood disaster has elicited a good response.

Governor P. Sathasivam said on Monday that the appeal was reasonable.

"As the first citizen of the state, I have decided to do it and will hand over the cheque to the Chief Secretary," said Sathasivam, a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

He had contributed Rs 1 lakh earlier to the Chief Minister's Distress Relief Fund. On Monday, he handed over a cheque for Rs 250,000 as the balance amount towards his contribution of one month's salary.

Vijayan's appeal, made through Asianet TV channel, on Sunday has gone viral on the social media.

He has suggested that those interested in contributing a month's salary can do it over a period of 10 months.

Advocate General C.P. Sudhakara Prasad said: "I had already handed over Rs 1 lakh when the CM made his call asking everyone to contribute. Now, heeding to his call to hand over a month's salary, I will do it when I get my next month's salary."

Kerala Police chief Loknath Behra told the media that he would pay his one month's salary in one instalment.

"I have got numerous calls from my colleagues who too have promised to contribute one month's salary. Kerala will bounce back very quickly," said Behra.

Senior Congress legislator and former Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan said he had also decided to hand over his one month's salary too.

"But the state government should ensure that they stop all extravagance," he said.

Mohammed Hanish, a senior bureaucrat who heads the Kochi Metro, also promised to donate a month's salary. Many other officials and Ministers have also made the pledge.

The social media has welcomed Vijayan's call.

Ever since monsoon rains began lashing Kerala on May 29, a total of 417 people have died. The flood fury this month has caused unprecedented destruction and forced more than one million people to take shelter in relief camps.

--IANS

sg/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Communist Party of India(Marxist-Leninist) leader was shot dead on Monday by unidentified assailants in Bihar's Bhojpur district, police said.

Ramakant Ram was attacked when he was on his way to defecate in the open in a nearby field of his village Nadhi under Sahar police station, a district police official said.

Police have registered a case and began the investigation.

Angry over the incident, local residents, mostly party workers, staged a protest against the state government.

--IANS

ik/anp/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Nearly 37 years after an Air India plane was hijacked and commandeered to Pakistan, a Delhi court on Monday acquitted two of the accused in the case who were charged with waging war against the country.

Additional Sessions Judge Ajay Pandey acquitted Tajender Pal Singh and Satnam Singh of the charges under Sections 121 (waging war against the government of India) and 121A (conspiracy to commit certain offences against the state) of the Indian Penal Code by granting them the benefit of the doubt.

The court said that the prosecution had miserably failed to prove its case against them beyond reasonable doubt.

The case against the two dates back to September 29, 1981, when an Air India plane en route to Srinagar from New Delhi was hijacked and forced to land in Pakistan.

The hijackers were arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment in Pakistan, from where both were deported in 2000 after serving life terms. In 2011, the Delhi Police charge-sheeted them in the case.

"The accused have already been convicted by a competent court in Pakistan for the hijacking of the Indian airplane. Neither any charge sheet has been filed for those offences against them nor any charge framed. No sanction for prosecution of those offences was granted by the competent authority," the court said.

"Hence, in the absence of identification and description of specific role of each accused by the witnesses, this court is of the opinion that prosecution has miserably failed to prove the charge under Sections 121 or 121A of the IPC against either of the accused."

--IANS

akk/tsb/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi government on Monday said that its Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) has started providing DNA sample reports in cases of crime against women and in cases related to Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) within a month.

This came after Health Minister Satyendra Jain held a review meeting with the FSL Director on the functioning of the laboratory in Rohini.

"As per the direction of the Health Minister, this laboratory has brought down the pendency of DNA Unit and subsequently made a regular cycle to dispose of the DNA cases within a month pertaining to crimes against women and cases under Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses (POCSO)," stated the Crime Scene Management Division of the FSL in its report submitted to Jain.

Jain's office said a proposal of DNA capacity building with the infrastructure of 1,000 cases per year of DNA sample reports is under consideration of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs.

"New facilities such as examination of explosive materials and examination of finger prints are also on its way," it said adding the FSL is planning to set up 14 Mobile Crime Scene Units at each Delhi police district.

"The mobile units are essential for quick responses and instant collection of exhibits and evidence. These units will function round the clockA to reduce any chances destruction of evidence due to delay," the Health Minister's office said.

In 2017, total number of crime scenes registered in the laboratory was 488, for which 1,212 forensic teams were deputed to attend the scenes of crime round the clock.

"Our government is extremely sensitive about crimes against women, since Delhi reports a higher rate of crimes against women. In such cases, the laboratory is providing the forensic reports/inputs at the earliest," Jain's office said.

--IANS

Sd/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A suspect in the 1998 murder of a Dutch boy has been arrested in Spain with the help of mass DNA testing, the Spanish police announced on Monday.

Nicky Verstappen, 11, was found dead near a campsite in the southern Dutch province of Limburg on August 10, 1998, and the only piece of evidence police were able to find was some unidentified DNA on his body.

"A survival expert, who is the alleged perpetrator of the sexual attack and murder of the 11-year-old boy, has been found on a mountain near Castellercol," the Spain's police said on Twitter.

In May 2017, the Dutch police launched a mass DNA testing campaign in Limburg to try to finally identify the alleged perpetrator, Efe news reported.

Some 14,000 men took part and though none was the suspect, the police were recently able to identify a 55-year-old man named Jos Brech through the DNA of a relative, who was a close match.

Brech was believed to be on the run, so, on last Wednesday, the police released images of the suspect to the public and a Dutch citizen who recognized him reported him to authorities on Sunday.

The Spanish police were able to arrest Brech within hours after having tracked him down to a tent in a wooded area near a house where he had been seen.

Spanish authorities expected to hand the suspect over to counterparts in the Netherlands.

--IANS

soni/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The RSS may invite Congress president Rahul Gandhi to attend a three-day lecture series by Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat here next month, sources in the organisation said today. The idea is to invite people from different ideologies for the event, a source in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh said, adding that the list is being prepared and may also include CPI (M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury.

Indications are that Gandhi could be invited came on a day the RSS criticised him for drawing parallels between the Sangh and Islamic radical outfit Muslim Brotherhood. Giving details of the September event, RSS prachar pramukh Arun Kumar said the Sangh was for the first time organising a three-day lecture series of its chief Mohan Bhagwat on the theme, 'Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective'.

"Bhagwatji will address and interact with select audience comprising prominent citizens on 'Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective' in a three-day lecture series," Kumar told reporters.Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) patron Sharad Yadav on Monday urged the Election Commission to clarify doubts regarding electronic voting machines (EVM) and demanded that elections should be held on ballot paper.

"There are doubts over the EVMs in the minds of the people. And despite the Supreme Court order of May 2017, the Commission has not fulfilled its promise over VVPATs," Yadav told the media here.

He said people might not take part in elections fearing that EVMs were faulty. "Which is very dangerous. The elections should be held through ballot paper."

Yadav pointed out that many developed countries were using paper ballot.

Attacking the Modi government over unemployment, Yadav said that the government claims were different from the reality.

"In 2011-12, the growth rate of the country was 4 per cent and 3.3 per cent in 2013-14. This went down to less than half per cent in 2015-16."

Yadav added: "About 550 jobs are cut every day and there are about 12 crore unemployed youth in the country."

The crop insurance scheme, he said, had mainly benefitted insurance companies, not farmers. He said the insurance companies earned about Rs 9,929 crore from the scheme.

The former central minister alleged that the government was trying to intrude into people's private lives.

"They used the social media before the 2014 elections. Now as they are being exposed, they are threatening the social media companies.

"In the name of fake news, they want to put restrictions on WhatsApp."

--IANS

aks/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi government has directed all its departments to abolish the use of single-use plastic items like water bottles, plastic cups, plates, jugs, folders, banners and glasses in offices and at official events.

Delhi's Ministry has issued an order to all the government departments telling them to phase out the use of single-use plastic items in their offices and at exhibitions, workshops, seminars and conferences, an official told IANS on Monday.

The action, he said, will help safeguard Delhi's

On the World Day in June, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced to end the use of single-use plastic by 2022 and pledged to eliminate all single-use plastic items from the country.

--IANS

nks/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Farm and construction equipment maker Escorts on Monday entered into a joint venture with Japan's biggest mobile crane manufacturer Tadano to produce higher capacity mobile cranes in the 20-80 tonnage category.

"The new joint venture with Tadano Group is a step towards catering to market demand for smarter, safer and bigger mechanized infrastructure solutions in the higher tonnage category", Escorts CMD Nikhil Nanda said after signing the deal.

The 51:49 joint venture between Tadano and Escorts respectively will leverage frugal Indian engineering excellence of Escorts and world leading Japanese technology from Tadano, Nanda said. The venture will be called Tadano Escorts India Pvt Ltd.

The JV, to come up adjacent to Escorts existing factory at Faridabad, will manufacture rough terrain cranes and truck mounted cranes in the 20 to 80 tonnage category. It will strengthen Escorts technology leadership in material handling equipment space.

"An initial capital investment of Rs 60 crore is planned for the JV which is likely to begin production in the third quarter of the current financial year. There is a market for 250 to 300 machines per year in India. The industry is growing at 15 to 20 per cent," Escorts Group COO Shailendra Agrawal told IANS.

The venture will cater to expanding market of big construction companies servicing metro projects, railways, oil and gas industry, smart city construction, solar power projects, mining, roads and bridges in India. Later, it plans to even export.

"Escorts has a strong technology legacy and diversified portfolio in construction equipment market and Tadano has a proven global technology and together we will cater to India and other growing economy", Tadano President and CEO Koichi Tadano said after signing the agreement with Nanda.

Currently, the major players in the domestic market for rough terrain cranes is Kolkata-based infrastructure equipment maker TIL and some Chinese companies led by heavy machinery maker Sany Group in the truck mounted crane segment.

Tadano has been selling its products made in Japan and Germany in India since 2012.

--IANS

mgu/anp/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday said the European Union (EU) should take its security and defence projects into its own hands and become less reliant on the US.

"Europe can no longer leave its defence to the US. It is now up to us to take our own responsibility and to guarantee the safety and therefore the sovereignty of the EU," Macron said outlining his foreign affairs policies, in an address to French Ambassadors at the Elysee Palace here.

In the coming months, he would promote a project to reinforce and restructure defence systems within the EU, in a move that could involve collaborating with third parties such as Russia, Xinhua news agency reported.

--IANS

mag/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Facebook announced on Monday that it has blocked the accounts of the commander-in-chief of the Myanmar Armed Forces and others to prevent the spread of hate speech and fake news.

The United Nations on Monday recommended that Min Aung Hlaing and other members of the Myanmar military leadership, should face genocide charges for their campaign that has seen hundreds of thousands of mostly-Muslim Rohingyas flee to Bangladesh since last August, Efe news reported.

"Today, we are taking more action in Myanmar, removing a total of 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook Pages, followed by almost 12 million people. We are preserving data, including content, on the accounts and pages we have removed," Facebook said in a statement.

It pointed out that the UN investigative report had found evidence that "many of these individuals and organizations committed or enabled serious human rights abuses in the country."

"We want to prevent them from using our service to further inflame ethnic and religious tensions," added Facebook.

In addition to General Hlaing, the Myanmar military television network, Myawady, has also been blocked.

The UN-authorized Fact-Finding Mission, presented in Geneva on Monday, said that there were elements of intentional genocide in the military operation launched a year ago in the western state of Rakhine against the Rohingya minority.

The mission condemned the government of Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, for not doing enough to stop the violence and recommended the establishment of an international tribunal to investigate and prosecute the alleged perpetrators belonging to the Armed Forces.

It demanded the prosecution of General Hlaing, his second in command, Soe Win, and four other army officers.

The presentation of the report comes one year after rebel attacks on several security posts in Rakhine triggered a military retaliation by the Myanmar army and the subsequent exodus of 700,000 Rohingyas to neighbouring Bangladesh.

The Rohingyas are mostly Muslim minority ethnic group that Myanmar does not recognize as citizens, considering them illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and imposing many restrictions on them, including freedom of movement.

--IANS

anp/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Plane journeys are taking longer than a decade ago, according to a report that claims the change is due to airlines "padding" their schedules to create an impression that passengers are reaching their destinations on time.

The report by London-based travel guide, Which?, carriers were adding extra time to flight schedules, in some cases up to 30 minutes, to ensure they maintain punctuality and are therefore less likely to be liable for compensation payouts, the Guardian reported on Monday.

A majority of flight routes are advertised as taking longer than 10 years ago, despite improvements in aircraft technology, the report found.

Researchers examined average flight times for 125 routes operated by large airlines in 2009 and compared them with last year.

They found that 76 routes, 61 per cent, are now slated to take longer; with 87 per cent of British Airways flights analysed found to be slower. That proportion is 82 per cent for Ryanair, 75 per cent for Virgin Atlantic and 62 per cent for easyJet.

British Airways flights from Heathrow to Bangkok, New York and Singapore were extended by 20 minutes, and a Virgin Atlantic flight from Heathrow to Newark Liberty airport, New Jersey, now takes an average of 35 minutes longer.

Rory Boland, Which? travel editor, said: "Passengers are likely to feel that schedule padding is another case of airlines pulling the wool over their eyes. Instead, longer scheduled flight times are likely to mean passengers spend more time sitting around at the gate or on the plane itself, just so the airline can pat itself on the back for being 'on time' at your destination."

--IANS

ksk/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)This is one war widow of Ahmednagar cast in the mould of her husband Kondaji Lakshman Malunjkar, who was killed in the 1965 India-Pakistan war.

Over five decades after she was widowed, Lahanbai Malunjkar is now waging a different battle with the local and state authorities to get possession of a 10-acre plot awarded to her as part of the compensation following the death of 23-year-old Kondaji on the war front.

"I am already 71. That land is my right, but I am too old and unable to take possession. I appeal to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to help me before it is too late," Lahanbai told IANS at her home in Rumbhodi village.

She said her simple life as a teenager was shattered when she was informed on October 2, 1965, that her young husband Kondaji, a soldier with the Maratha Light Infantry, had died in action in Jammu & Kashmir.

"My only son, 18-month-old Deepak was in my lap then. There were no other close male relatives on both sides in our families. I started all over as a widowed, teenager mother, and encountered huge difficulties, but somehow I managed," recalls Lahanbai.

In 1972, a ray of hope appeared: Defence authorities allotted her 10 acres of agricultural land in Aurangpur village, around 6 km from Rumbhodi.

"My grandmother's travails just began," says Sachin Malunjkar, Lahanbai's grandson.

"The people of Aurangpur would not allow us in. It meant that our land remained only on paper. We had no means to take physical possession of it," says Sachin Malunjkar.

After waging a four-year war of nerves with the villagers, the family retreated by seeking another plot of land -- measuring 2.5 acre -- which the district administration allotted to Lahanbai.

But that land was was more than 25 km away, most of it rocky and unfit for cultivation. So Lahanbai rejected it and finally surrendered it after 30 years in 2007, according to Sachin Malunjkar.

Lahanbai's son Dipak became adult, married and they have two sons, Sachin and Sagar. The joint family continued to eke out a modest living by farming on their own nine-acre ancestral plot in Rumbhodi, supported by Lahanbai's war-widow pension which started with Rs 27.50 in 1965 and is now around Rs 25,000 per month.

Ahmednagar Resident Deputy Collector Prashant Patil says that the plot in question belongs to the woman. "It has not been taken away, but she will have to take possession and start cultivation there," he said.

"If there are any legal issues, we are ever ready to help her, she can approach the local revenue official (tehsildar) for guidance," Patil told IANS.

Local Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) legislator Vaibhavrao Pichad has promised to raise the issue in the Maharashtra Assembly and through the NCP, even in Parliament.

Aurangpur villagers claim they are opposed to the land allotment in their village since they are facing a shortage of grazing land for their cattle. Possession of land by Lahanbai could result in some farmers losing their land, they say.

"Besides, it is a forest land and cannot be allotted for farming," said a villager.

Sachin pointed out that they had even approached former Maharashtra minister Babanrao Pachpute, tehsil officials, the collectorate and other officials, but nothing has happened in the last 46 years.

"My efforts with the tehsil office continue. Now they have asked us to measure and demarcate the plot, which we hope to complete soon," said Sachin.

Unaffected by her 45-year experience, Lahanbai is grooming her younger grandson Sagar to either the join the armed forces or the police.

(Quaid Najmi can be contacted at q.najmi@ians.in)

--IANS

qn/prs/tb

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union Minister Nitin Gadkari will on August 28 sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with six states for the construction of Lakhwar multi-purpose project in the upper Yamuna basin, Water Resources Ministry said on Monday.

The six states are Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi.

To create storage facilities in upper Yamuna basin, the six states had signed an MoU to conserve and utilize the monsoon flows of the Yamuna, a Ministry statement said.

Under the MoU, a 204-meters high Lakhwar project will be constructed near Lohari village of Uttarakhand with live storage capacity of 330.66 Million Cubic Meter (MCM).

"This storage will provide irrigation for 33,780-hectare land and facilitate availability of 78.83 MCM water for domestic, drinking and industrial use in six basin states," said Ministry.

According to the MoU, the Centre will provide 90 per cent fund and the rest would come from the states. The total project is worth Rs 3966.51 crore.

The project will generate 300 mw of power and will be executed by Uttarakhand Jal Vidyut Nigam Limited (UJVL), it said.

"Except sharing of stored water, all other resultant economic benefits, including generation of hydro power due to construction of the dam, are assigned to Uttarakhand," said Ministry.

--IANS

sm/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Patna High Court on Monday directed the Bihar government to impose a ban on the usage of plastic bags.

A bench comprising Patna High Court Chief Justice M.R. Shah asked the state government to make a law on the ban and to use the media to create awareness.

It slated the next hearing for September 24.

Last week, a draft notification was circulated for a blanket ban on the manufacture, import, storage, transport, sale and use of plastic after seeking objections and suggestions from civilians, institutions and stakeholders.

According to the notification, the plastic bags are non-biodegradable, produce toxic gases on burning, cause blocking of sewers and drains, reduce soil fertility and pose a threat to the life of cattle.

No one will sell, store, distribute or use any kind of plastic bag for storing or dispensing edible or non-edible goods in the jurisdiction of all municipal corporations, municipal councils and nagar panchayats, it added.

--IANS

ik /ksk/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India is a natural partner in China's Belt and Road project and should not be paranoid about its key artery in the disputed Kashmir as it won't affect Beijing's neutral stance, a top Chinese government official said on Monday.

"Historically, India was an important country on the ancient Silk Road and it is fair to say that India was a natural partner in the ancient (Silk Road) and (is one) in the Belt and Road initiative," China's Assistant Foreign Minister Zhang Jun said here.

India has opposed Belt and Road's flagship project China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as it cuts through the disputed Kashmir.

"China has repeatedly stressed that CPEC is an economic initiative. Implementing CPEC does not change China's position on Kashmir," Zhang said.

China is building a huge network of roads, highways, ports and sea lanes to connect Asia with Europe. Many countries including India suspect the project is a China's geostrategic ploy.

"Let me say a few points. First, India is an important neighbour of China. Both China and India are emerging economies and developing countries. Under the leadership of our leaders, China and India relations have exhibited a very good momentum of growth and entered a phase of development.

"I think we can all recall that since April, it has been only three months, President Xi and Prime Minister Modi met in Wuhan, in Qingdao, and in Johannesburg in South Africa.

"Three important meetings between of the two leaders and they have reached important understandings which added fresh and strong impetus to our bilateral ties," Zhang added.

--IANS

gsh/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Xiaomi, currently India's second-largest smartphone seller, had introduced India to the concept of flash online sales after its 2014 debut. Then, in 2017, the Chinese giant changed its strategy, switched focus to offline retail. Earlier this year, it overthrew Samsung from the top slot. It is now reportedly planning to stir up the retail market further.

According to The Economic Times, in a global first, Xiaomi is planning to establish exclusive outlets in new formats in India. Not to be outdone, its compatriot brand Huawei nurses similar plans for the country.

The company spokesperson told the daily that Xiaomi is setting up thousands of dedicated stores in rural locations - from around 500 Mi Stores by the end of this year, the brand hopes to scale up to "a few thousand" by next year in order to maintain its growth pace. The maker of Redmi and Mi smartphones and televisions, will be opening the franchisee-owned stores in taluk-level areas.

This is the first time any brand is setting up exclusive stores in rural India at such a scale. And that's good news for not just Indian consumers but also the economy since the move will reportedly generate more than 5,000 jobs in such areas.

Xiaomi's share of online sales dropped to 70 per cent last month - down from 95 per cent till Jan 2017 - courtesy a six-fold increase in offline sales. This fresh retail push will change the balance further.

Citing experts, the report added that this development could further stifle Indian smartphone brands that are surviving on sales in rural markets and intensify competition with Samsung. It will also pose a big challenge to Reliance Retail. The latter currently is a major player in the rural markets thanks to its small Jio stores that also sell mobile phones and electronics.

"In many cities where we have become number one, we have 30-40 per cent share in offline. We can extend this to 100-150 cities and even lakhs of villages. That is when we will achieve the true potential of offline retail," Manu Jain, Managing Director of Xiaomi India, told Business Today a month ago.

The company's offline ambitions, in fact, go far beyond mobile phones. "Smartphone is what we are famous for, but we have a much bigger pool of products," said Jain, rattling off categories ranging from scooters and shoes to air/water purifiers and laptops. "Even refrigerators and possibly air-conditioners. Why not? We are an Internet company. Anything that can be a smart-connected device, we want to be there," he had added.

Meanwhile, Huawei, the world's second largest smartphone maker after Samsung as per US-based researcher IDC, too is reportedly ready to spread its wings in the offline segment. Executives told the daily that the brand will set up 100 large franchise-owned exclusive stores in Indian cities for its Honor handsets, which are sold online globally.

The big question now is whether this move by the Chinese players to tap the untapped potential in tier 2 and beyond markets will prompt copycat moves among the other players in business.Pointing out that the seas around India have nurtured its links of commerce and culture with its extended neighbourhood over millenia, Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Monday said that nurturing a climate of peace and stability in this region is an important priority for New Delhi's foreign policy.

"This region is host to the world's busiest waterways and three quarters of that traffic is headed for destinations beyond our region," Sushma Swaraj said while addressing the Third Indian Ocean Conference here.

"As an important trade and energy waterway, carrying half the world's container shipment, one third of its bulk cargo traffic and two third of oil shipments, the Indian Ocean clearly assumes importance well beyond its immediate shores and its littorals," she said.

"Nurturing a climate of peace and stability in this region is therefore an important priority for our foreign policy."

Stating that that though there is diversity within the region, Sushma Swaraj said challenges within it are "quite similar".

"Our vision for the region is one of cooperation and collective action," she said.

India, along with the US, Japan and Australia, are part of a quad revived last year that seeks to work for peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region.

Sushma Swaraj's remarks assume significance given China's belligerent attitude in the South China Sea region and Beijing's attempts to increase its footprint across the Indian Ocean.

"Hanoi is therefore a particularly appropriate setting for us to discuss developments in the Indian Ocean and the Indo-Pacific region," she said.

She said that India sees the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean)regional bloc as central to the regional maritime architecture, reflecting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June.

Sushma Swaraj stressed on three priorities that New Delhi accords to the Indian Ocean region and referred to the SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) initiative of New Delhi.

"In its implementation, this approach includes: projects to promote hinterland linkages and strengthen regional connectivity; linking South Asia to Southeast Asia (under India's Act East Policy); and playing an active and constructive role in strengthening regional maritime security."

Sushma Swaraj said that the first part is India's focus on developing hinterland linkages and regional connectivity.

She said that India is devoting more resources and assigning greater priority to building connectivity, contacts and cooperation in its immediate neighbourhood.

"The second element is the expanded interpretation of what constitutes our neighbourhood," she said.

"This is reflected in the renewed emphasis in our Act East Policy and the new Think West policy towards West Asia and the Gulf region."

Sushma Swaraj said that the Act East Policy is at the heart of New Delhi's eastward orientation and ties in with its broader approach to the Indo-Pacific.

She said that India accords high priority to key infrastructure projects such as the Kaladan multi-modal transport linking the Sittwe Port in Myanmar with Mizoram in India's northeast, and the Trilateral Highway linking India, Myanmar and Thailand.

"Our recent agreement with Indonesia to develop port infrastructure in Sabong is yet another step in this direction," she said.

"Coming to the third element, contributing to regional maritime security: we are working to ensure the safety and security of maritime traffic through the ocean by strengthening skills and logistics of our Indian Ocean neighbours," Sushma Swaraj said.

The Indian Minister arrived here on Sunday on the first leg of her two-nation tour to Southeast Asia that will also see her visiting Cambodia.

--IANS

ab/tsb

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India has decided to step up military-to-military engagement with Thailand by commencing bilateral Navy exercise besides expanding cooperation on maritime security, as per a statement.

The decision was taken in the bilateral talks between Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister General Prawit Wongsuwan.

"It was decided to step up military-to-military engagement by commencing bilateral navy exercises. In addition, both countries will explore enhancement of ongoing joint exercises, the MAITREE counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism Army Exercise as well as their SIAM BHARAT Air Force exercise," as per the statement.

"Both sides would also expand cooperation on maritime security, focusing on greater sharing of information to develop Maritime Domain Awareness."

It further said Sitharaman offered additional training opportunities for the Royal Thai Army in India, including through tailor made courses in specialised areas, which was welcomed by Thailand.

Sitharaman is on an official bilateral visit to Thailand from August 27 to 28. She also called on Prime Minister of Thailand General Prayut Chan-o-cha.

As per the statement, both sides discussed a gamut of issues relating to defence cooperation between both countries.

"The Ministers welcomed the positive momentum and substantive content of ongoing bilateral defence engagement and discussed measures to further enhance and deepen defence cooperation between India and Thailand," it said.

"The Ministers also discussed stepping up defence industry and R&D cooperation. The two sides identified specific areas for such engagement and would discuss this further through institutionalised dialogue mechanisms," the statement said.

--IANS

spk/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Indian diaspora in the Netherlands has been mobilizing funds over the last two weeks to aid victims of the floods in Kerala.

A number of Dutch nationals have also participated in the effort, according to a press release from the Indian Embassy here.

The Stichting International Yoga Day, which joined hands with the Indian Embassy to organize the International Day of Yoga celebrations in June, has donated Rs 10 lakh.

The Netherlands Malayalee Association (Nanma) has made an initial contribution of Rs 10 lakh for flood relief.

Rajni Nambiar, who runs The South India Kitchen together with her friends, hosted a fundraising dinner for the flood victims and raised Rs 1 lakh for the Kerala Chief Minister's Disaster Relief Fund.

The Indian Students Association of the University of Twente, University of Wageningen and other Indian Students Associations are also engaged in fundraising initiatives.

Rakesh Naduvathmana, a young architect from Kerala, has launched a crowdsourcing initiative through GoFundMe.com which has received a good response from both the Indian diaspora and Dutch nationals.

The Embassy is facilitating the routing of these contributions to the Kerala Chief Minister's Disaster Relief Fund.

--IANS

vsc/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Iran opened a case at the UN top court on Monday, calling on the organization to suspend unilateral economic sanctions imposed by Washington after US President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 international nuclear deal.

Iran's representative at the Hague-based International Court of Justice said he was obliged to bring the case before judges as the US refused to negotiate a solution through diplomatic channels, Efe news reported.

Lawyers accused Washington of trying to "bring Iran to its knees" and said the sanctions were in breach of a bilateral accord struck in 1955.

Trump outlined fresh sanctions in early August, just three months after the long-term critic of the Iranian regime withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a historic accord struck by his predecessor Barack Obama, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany in 2015.

The deal required Tehran to abandon its pursuit of a nuclear arsenal in exchange for the partial lifting of international economic sanctions.

--IANS

soni/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Iran on Monday requested the judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to order the immediate lifting of sanctions imposed on the country by the United States.

"The sanctions are unjust and harmful," Mohsen Mohebi, head of the International legal affairs center of the Iranian President's office, told judges on Monday at the Peace Palace here. "The sanctions are damaging the economy of Iran, and driving millions of people into poverty," Xinhua news agency reported.

Iran asked the judges to find that the US breached its obligations to Iran, and order it to terminate the sanctions without delay, as well as any threats about further sanctions.

Iran is also asking judges to ensure the US guarantees it will not violate its obligations again, and will fully compensate Iran for the violation of its international legal obligations.

The lawsuit followed the decision by US President Donald Trump in May to quit the nuclear agreement, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) signed in 2015. The US has announced the full reinstatement of nuclear sanctions on Iran as well as a high level of economic sanctions targeting, directly or indirectly, Iran and Iranian companies, or nationals.

After the US reinstated the sanctions, Iran started proceedings against it before the ICJ on July 16.

According to Iran, the US violated a 1955 friendship treaty between the two countries, the Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights, and requested the court to indicate provisional measures.

Iran gave its oral arguments on Monday and on Tuesday the US will have the opportunity to issue their reaction. The second round of oral arguments are scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday this week. The announcement of the order on the provisional measures by the judges can take months.

The ICJ is the principal judicial organ of the UN. Its role is to settle legal disputes submitted to it by states and to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by authorized UN organs and specialized agencies, in accordance with international law. The seat of the court is in The Hague.

--IANS

anp/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Karnataka has so far received Rs 46.15 crore as funds for relief and rehabilitation of people in flood-hit Kodagu district, an official statement said.

"The Chief Minister's relief fund has received a total of Rs 46.15 crore through contributions from various state's institutions, private firms and employee associations," a statement from Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy's office said.

Demand Drafts (DD) worth Rs 14 crore were received through 153 different individuals and organisations, while more than Rs 9 crore was transferred to the relief fund through internet banking and digital wallets.

Kodagu's villages, towns and public infrastructure were severely damaged after torrential rains caused floods and landslips in the hilly district during the southwest monsoon from August 14-22.

According to preliminary estimates, the district has suffered losses worth Rs 1,140 crore to public and private property as a result of the rains, Kodagu Deputy Commissioner P. Sreevidya earlier said.

At least 34 village panchayats have been badly damaged.

Apart from the Chief Minister's relief fund, several Kannada media houses, private organisations and non-governmental organisations have also been collecting funds to help the region in distress.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman during her visit to the district last week announced Rs 1 crore aid from Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS), being a Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka.

She had also said Rs 7 crore will be given to the affected district from the state-run defence organisations' corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds.

While Karnataka has sought Rs 2,000 crore interim relief from the Centre for rehabilitation measures in the hilly district, Sitharaman had said the aid will be announced only after an assessment of the losses.

--IANS

bha/anp/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Sleeping less than six hours or waking up several times in the night is associated with an increased risk of asymptomatic atherosclerosis, which silently hardens and narrows arteries, warns a study.

"Failure to get enough sleep and restlessness during the night should be considered risk factors for blocking or narrowing of the arteries," said study author Fernando Dominguez of the Spanish National Centre for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC) in Madrid.

The study, presented at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress 2018 in Munich, Germany, involved nearly 4,000 healthy middle-aged adults who wore a waistband activity monitor for seven days to record sleep quality and quantity.

They were divided into five groups according to the proportion of fragmented sleep, and four groups designating average hours slept a night - less than six (very short), six to seven (short), seven to eight (the reference), and more than eight (long).

Atherosclerosis, the narrowing of arteries due to plaque build-up on the artery walls, was assessed in leg and neck arteries using three-dimensional ultrasound.

The average age of participants was 46 years and 63 per cent were men.

The researchers found that those in the highest quintile of fragmented sleep were more likely to have multiple sections of arteries with atherosclerosis compared to those in the lowest quintile.

"Studies are needed to find out if sleeping well and long enough can prevent or reverse this effect on the arteries," Dominguez said.

"In the meantime it seems sensible to take steps to get a good night's sleep -- such as having a physically active lifestyle and avoiding coffee and fatty foods before bedtime," Dominguez added.

The research also showed that people who had short or disrupted sleep were also more likely to have metabolic syndrome, which refers to the combination of diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity, and depicts an unhealthy lifestyle.

--IANS

asj/gb/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)NDA-ally Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) on Monday announced rallies and meetings across the country to highlight what it said were decisions taken by the Modi government to "protect the interests of Dalits and backward classes".

These rallies over the coming months will also point to the Congress' antipathy towards Dalit icon B.R. Ambedkar and backward classes, said party chief and Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan here.

"I had the responsibility to change public perception about the NDA and Prime Minister Narendra Modi as anti-Dalit and anti-backward. Now, I am happy that no political party says it now," Paswan told reporters.

This month, the BJP-led NDA government overturned a Supreme Court March 20 order that "diluted" The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, which had put safeguards against arrests in such cases.

The SC order led to a nationwide uproar, with the LJP threatening to protest if the Act was not restored to its original form. Subsequently, the government introduced a bill in Parliament for the purpose.

"We are defending the government because it has done historic work. It is pro-poor and pro-Dalit," Paswan said.

A rally will be held in Punjab's Faridkot on August 30 and later in Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Vijayawada, and Bengaluru.

Taking a dig at the Congress, Paswan said that the party had fielded candidates against Ambedkar in the general elections, and also failed to put up his portrait in the Central Hall of Parliament.

He said that the Congress could have made a Muslim the Chief Minister in Uttar Pradesh in the past but it did not.

He also criticised Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati for issuing an order in May 2007 as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, barring arrest in a complaint of atrocities until the matter is investigated by a senior police official and seeking of medical certificate in case of rape.

"Mayawati must hold a press conference to explain the matter. If it is not true, I will resign. Else, she must retire from politics," he said.

The LJP leader also said that there was no resentment among the people from the upper castes over restoration of provisions of the SC/ST Act.

--IANS

spk/tsb

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A major NGO wants the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to be introduced in Mizoram in order to check the inflow of illegal immigrants in the Christian-dominated state, an official said here on Monday.

The official from the Mizoram government's Directorate of Information and Public Relations (DIPR) said that the all powerful NGO, Young Mizo Association (YMA, met Governor Kummanam Rajasekharan at the Raj Bhavan here and raised the NRC issue.

"The YMA emphasised to prepare the Mizoram's own register of citizens on the lines of Assam's NRC to check illegal immigrants," a DIPR statement said.

It said the YMA leaders have asked Rajasekharan to take steps to strengthen the security along the Mizoram's international borders to curb the influx of illegal foreigners from neighbouring countries.

Mizoram has an unfenced international border of 510 km with Myanmar and 318 km with Bangladesh.

The Border Security Force has been guarding the Bangladesh border and Assam Rifles troopers are posted along the Myanmar frontiers.

The YMA is a non-political voluntary organisation set up in June 1935 and it has over 800 branches spread across Mizoram and several other northeastern states including Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura. The YMA is a registered body and it has over three lakh members.

--IANS

sc/ksk/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A panel set up by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs has recommended virtual "decriminalisation" of several offences under the Companies Act to reduce the legal and court battles companies have to face even if the offence committed is not serious but merely a lapse that is essentially technical or procedural in nature. The panel proposed that such "non serious offences" may be shifted to in-house adjudication process.

Set up by Piyush Goyal when he was the interim finance minister, the panel today submitted a report on the review of penal provisions of Company Act 2013 to Arun Jaitley. The report recommends restructuring of corporate offences to relieve Special Courts from adjudicating routine offences and de-clogging the NCLT among several other proposals related to corporate compliance.

The 10-member committee, which includes Kotak Bank's Uday Kotak and lawyer Shardul S Shroff, was set up with a view to promote better corporate compliance.

The committee undertook a detailed analysis of all penal provisions, and broke them down to eight categories based on the nature of offences. After speaking to different stakeholders it recommended that the existing "stringent" law should not be diluted for serious offences covering six categories.

A corporate ministry source said, "the committee has decided to ensure stringent compliance and punitive action in cases of fraud. For example, the cross-cutting liability under section 447, which deals with corporate fraud, would continue to apply wherever fraud is found. But with a view to reduce the burden on businesses the panel has proposed that lapses which are found not willful acts of commission and omission, falling under two categories may be shifted to in-house adjudication process."

The panel in its report says that the change would promote ease of doing business and better corporate compliance. The panel lays down that special courts currently have a huge backlog of prosecution cases and this has been leading to immense hardships for small companies while they were guilty of "lapses".

The ministry will now study the report to work out a formula for de-clogging the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) through significant reduction in compounding cases before the tribunal.

The other significant aspect of the report pertains to corporate governance including declaration of commencement of business, maintenance of a registered office, protection of depositors' interests, registration and management of charges, declaration of significant beneficial ownership, and independence of independent directors.

The main recommendations of the committee include restructuring of corporate offences to relieve special courts from adjudicating routine offences, re-categorisation of 16 out of the 81 compoundable offences by shifting them from the jurisdiction of special courts to an in-house e-adjudication framework. In these cases of adjudication defaults would be subject to levy of penalty by the authorised adjudicating officer (Registrar of Companies). Remaining 65 compoundable offences will continue to remain under the jurisdiction of special courts due to their potential misuse.

In another significant move, the report proposes status quo in case of all non-compoundable offences, which relate to serious corporate offences. If accepted the government would have to set up a transparent online platform for e-adjudication and e-publication of orders.

The recommendations related to corporate compliance and corporate governance include re-introduction of declaration of commencement of business provision to better tackle the menace of 'shell companies' and greater disclosures with respect to public deposits, particularly in respect of transactions exempted from the definition of public deposits under section 76 of the Act to prevent abuse and harming of public interest.

In another tightening of rules, the panel has proposed non-maintenance of registered office to trigger de-registration process, and disqualification of directors who hold directorships beyond permissible limits. To ensure that independent director don't sacrifice their independence due to pecuniary relationship, a cap on remuneration in terms of percentage of income has been proposed.UK Prime Minister Theresa May will embark on her maiden trip to the sub-Saharan Africa this week, making her the first British leader in five years to visit the region.

During her three-day trip this week, May will meet the Presidents of South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, reports the Guardian.

The Prime Minister will be accompanied by a trade delegation in an attempt to boost Britain's post-Brexit export prospects, although she comes at a time when the government has been accused of a paying insufficient attention to the region, informed sources said on Sunday.

The last time a British Prime Minister visited sub-Saharan Africa was in December 2013 when David Cameron attended Nelson Mandela's funeral.

He had intended to return in the summer of 2016 in the final days of his premiership but the planned visit was abandoned when May took over his post.

May has never visited sub-Saharan Africa. Her only previous trip to the continent was a visit to Tunisia in 2015 in the aftermath of the Sousse hotel terror attack.

Speaking ahead of her flight to South Africa on Sunday evening, May said: "Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy" and that "a more prosperous, growing and trading Africa is in all of our interests".

May will arrive in Cape Town on Tuesday for a bilateral meeting with the South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa.

She will then meet the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja before flying to Nairobi for a bilateral with his Kenyan counterpart, Uhuru Kenyatta.

It will be the first visit to Kenya by a British Prime Minister for 30 years.

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Meghalaya Chief Minister and National Peoples Party (NPP) candidate Conrad Sangma on Monday won the by-election from the South Tura Assembly constituency by a huge margin.

But former Speaker Martin Danggo, who resigned from the Congress and joined the NPP, lost to Pius Marwein of the United Democratic Party (UDP) in Ranikor constituency.

The by-election in South Tura was necessitated after Agatha Sangma resigned to pave the way for her brother Conrad to contest in order to retain the post of Chief Minister.

Conrad, the youngest son of the late Purno A. Sangma, defeated Charlotte W. Momin of the Congress by 8,421 votes in a four-cornered contest.

The NPP candidate secured 13,656 votes while Charlotte got 5,235 votes.

Conrad, who was sworn as the 12th Chief Minister of Meghalaya on March 6, was a non-elected member of the 60-member Assembly.

"I won because people voted for development," he told IANS.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also congratulated Conrad on his win, saying: "Congratulations for the win from South Tura, Chief Minister! Best wishes in your endeavours to take Meghalaya to new heights of growth."

Conrad assumed the top post of Meghalaya, which his father had held for a short period, after the regional United Democratic Party (UDP), People's Democratic Front and the Hill State People's Democratic Party (HSPDP) decided to support the NPP in forming the government on condition that an NPP leader would be the Chief Minister.

In Ranikor, Danggo, who had represented the constituency for five consecutive times, lost to novice Marwein by 2,896 votes.

Marwein polled 13,183 votes while Danggo bagged 10,287. People's Democratic Front (PDF) candidate P.N. Syiem and Jackiush A. Sangma of the Congress secured 1,978 and 938 votes respectively.

Both the UDP and PDF are part of the NPP-led Meghalaya Democratic Alliance coalition government.

Danggo was elected in the February general Assembly polls on the Congress ticket by defeating Marwein by 2,002 votes.

With this victory, the NPP and the UDP has increased its strength to 20 and eight respectively in the Meghalaya Assembly.

Other parties which are supporting the Conrad-led government are PDF(four members) the Bharatiya Janata Party and HSPDP (two each) and Nationalist Congress Party (one), besides two Independents.

--IANS

rrk/ksk/sed

(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.)Citing an RBI notification, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Monday demanded that the SBI should declare Gujarat State Petroleum Corp (GSPC) bankrupt and said the company owed Rs 12,000 crore to several banks.

He accused the Modi government of trying to protect the company from being declared bankrupt.

Ramesh said that on February 12, the Reserve Bank of India issued a circular stating that any company that owed more than Rs 2,000 crore to banks should be declared bankrupt within 180 days.

"GSPC's highest debt is from SBI, which is Rs 1,200 crore. According to RBI's notification, SBI should declare GSPC bankrupt," said Ramesh.

"Last month GSPC submitted a 15-page document, entitled 'Gujarat State Petroleum Corp Debt Resolution Plan' to SBI for the restructuring of outstanding loan. Therefore, it is beyond any doubt that GSPC is not in a position to repay the loan," he added.

Ramesh said: "GSPC has also suggested to transfer a portion of this outstanding loan to the Gujarat State Financial Services (GSFS) and Gujarat State Investment Ltd (GSIL)."

During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's term as Gujarat Chief Minister, the GSPC was cited as one of the greatest examples of the Gujarat Model.

"In 70 years, for the first time the Central government has filed an affidavit challenging a circular of the RBI in High Court with the only intention of saving GSPC," said Ramesh.

"In its affidavit, the government said they are not in agreement with the RBI circular and the period of 180 days needed to be extended to 360 days. Some power companies have moved the court, which includes Adani Power. So, this is another big scam after Rafale Deal," he added.

He said SBI was under pressure to take a decision on the loan restructuring to avoid GSPC being declared bankrupt, because in case it was declared bankrupt, it would be a huge blow to the Prime Minister.

Even after the sanction of Rs 20,000 crore to GSPC, no oil or gas was extracted, he said.

Ramesh said this raised questions about the priorities and intentions of Modi. "The PM has not spoken a word on the GSPC issue after 2007. Why is he silent?"

--IANS

sid/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah will hold a day-long meeting with BJP chief ministers and deputy chief ministers on Tuesday.

The BJP has 15 chief ministers and seven deputy chief ministers including two in Uttar Pradesh and one each in Gujarat, Bihar, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura.

In Bihar the BJP is part of the coalition government led by Janata Dal-United while in Nagaland, it is part of NDPP's Neiphiu Rio-led People's Democratic Alliance.

"Apart from a general strategy, discussions regarding the implementation of various Central schemes and preparedness for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls are likely to come up during the meeting," a BJP leader told IANS.

The chief ministers council meeting, which has been an annual affair since 2014 after Modi took over, is likely to begin at 10 a.m.

Shah will deliver the inaugural speech while the Prime Minister will address the valedictory session.

--IANS

bns/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Top military leaders in Myanmar, including the commander-in-chief, must be investigated and prosecuted for genocide in Rakhine state and crimes against humanity in other areas, according to a UN report released on Monday.

The report -- based on hundreds of interviews, research and analysis by a UN-mandated fact-finding mission -- is the strongest condemnation by the UN of the military's actions following the crackdown on Rohingya Muslims last August.

It extended culpability for the humanitarian crisis in Rakhine state to Myanmar's civilian government, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate The civilian government, the report said, failed to speak out against unfolding events, spread "false narratives, oversaw the destruction of evidence in Rakhine state and blocked independent investigations".

"Through their acts and omissions, the civilian authorities contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes," it said. The UN report called for the case to be referred to the Criminal Court of Justice, according to the

The Army's tactics were "consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats", it said.

The fact-finding mission went beyond the military's actions in Rakhine and investigated its conduct more broadly since 2011, a time when the world was celebrating the country's opening to the West and nominally democratic transformation.

The UN report found "patterns of gross human rights violations and abuses committed in Kachin, Rakhine and Shan state" that "undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under law".

The government has consistently said its operations targeted militant or insurgent threats. But the report said that the crimes it documented were "shocking for the level of denial, normalcy and impunity that was attached to them".

"Military necessity would never justify killing indiscriminately, gang raping women, assaulting children and burning entire villages."

The fact-finding mission concluded that there was "sufficient information" to open a genocide and war crimes investigation of senior generals. A spokesman for Myanmar's armed forces could not be reached for comment.

The report also noted that Myanmar authorities "do not tolerate scrutiny or criticism and use various laws to arrest, detain or harass human rights defenders and journalists".

"The report will have a big impact internationally," Richard Horsey, a former UN diplomat in Myanmar and long time Yangon-based analyst, was cited as saying by the Washington Post.

"Its specific finding that there was sufficient ground for investigation and prosecution of military commanders for genocide was likely to have particularly serious diplomatic, not only legal, consequences," he said.

The UN fact-finding mission will present a detailed report to the Human Rights Council on September 18.A Myanmar judge on Monday postponed the ruling against the two detained Reuters journalists who were probing the persecution of the ethnic Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine state, to September 3.

Reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who have maintained their innocence, could face a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison if they are convicted of violating Myanmar's colonial-era law known as the Official Secrets Act, reports Efe news.

The journalists were arrested on the night of December 12, 2017, after meeting two policemen who, according to the defendants, handed them allegedly confidential documents.

Since then, both have been detained without bail and have appeared some 30 times before the court. The investigation began on January 9 and the charges were formally filed on July 9.

In April, Police Captain Moe Yan Naing testified that a senior officer had ordered him and his subordinates to offer secret documents to Wa Lone in order to set him up.

The arrested journalists were investigating the murder of a dozen Rohingya discovered at Inn Din village in Rakhine, a massacre for which seven Myanmar Army soldiers were later sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The Inn Din incident is related to an offensive started by the Myanmar Army on August 25, 2017, which resulted in an exodus of over 700,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh.

The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has demanded the release of the two journalists and said the freedom of press has to be respected, an appeal which the European Union, the US and several other international organisations have also joined.

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)North Korea has released a Japanese citizen held in custody for allegedly violating its law, saying that the decision was made "on the principle of humanitarianism", its state-run media reported.

Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Sunday night confirmed the release of Tomoyuki Sugimoto, a Japanese who had been under investigation for an unspecified crime, reports Yonhap News Agency.

He was "kept under control by a relevant institution to be inquired into his crime against the law of North Korea", the KCNA said in an English dispatch.

"The relevant institution of North Korea decided to leniently condone him and expel him from North Korea on the principle of humanitarianism," it added.

The North's media outlet did not provide detailed information about the crime he allegedly committed and from when he had been kept in custody.

Japanese media speculate that the man might be a 39-year-old video creator that they reported in mid-August to have been arrested in North Korea.

The man is presumed to have been sent to China either by train or airplane. The Japanese government is said to be working to confirm where he is now.

Japan has stepped up its demand for North Korea to resolve the issue of its people kidnapped by Pyongyang decades ago.

The North has claimed the issue was already resolved, while demanding Japan to apologise for its colonial-era atrocities and make appropriate compensation for the crimes.

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Against the backdrop of intense criticism from Congress leaders including former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, that government was seeking to "dilute" Jawaharlal Nehru's legacy by changing the character of the Nehru Memorial Museum Library, its Director on Monday rejected the charge, saying the aim was to "upgrade" the memorial.

"We are upgrading the existing Nehru Memorial Museum Library. There is no motive to dilute Nehru's legacy. If anything, we are improving it and including more sections that will give more insights into his life to the public," NMML director Shakti Sinha told IANS.

On a new section recently added on its website, NMML says that it "reflects the democratic system of India" and "has been tasked by the Government of India to set up a New Museum on Prime Ministers of India".

In a letter to Modi sent last week, Manmohan Singh had raised concerns over the NDA government's move to create a museum dedicated to all Prime Ministers of India in the Teen Murti complex.

Asked about the concerns raised by Manmohan Singh, Sinha said the planned upgrade will "focus on all former Prime Ministers". He, however, said that it will be separate from the NMML.

"These are two things. One is the upgradation of NMML and the other is the setting up of a museum of all former Prime Ministers in the Teen Murti Bhavan," he said.

The Teen Murti Bhavan was Nehru's residence for 16 years until his death on May 27, 1964.

Manmohan Singh had also urged Modi to "leave the Teen Murti Complex undisturbed as it is" reminding him that it is "a memorial to our first Prime Minister Pandit Nehru. This way we will be respecting both history and heritage."

Manmohan Singh further argued that the NMML "must remain a centre for first-rate scholarship and professional excellence".

"The museum itself must retain its primary focus on Jawaharlal Nehru and the freedom movement because of his unique role having spent almost 10 years in jail between the early 1920s and mid 1940s.

"No amount of revisionism can obliterate that role and his contributions," Manmohan Singh wrote.

In this context, Sinha said that even though NMML is not only limited to Nehru in its current form, the upgrade will see a greater representation of all former PMs, including Manmohan Singh.

"We will be doing exhibitions on Indira Gandhi and all other Prime Ministers. Nobody has a problem with it, I don't know why he (Manmohan Singh) has an issue with it," added Sinha, who was appointed as the NMML director in September 2016.

Sinha had served as private secretary and joint secretary to Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1998-99. He was also a director of the RSS-affiliated think-tank India Foundation.

--IANS

ss-vsc/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Delhi Lt Governor Anil Baijal's office on Monday said that no file related to installation of CCTVs across the national capital is pending with it.

"A misleading impression is being created through certain media posts and releases that the file for the installation of closed-circuit televisions in Delhi is pending with the office of the Lt Governor.

"It is clarified that this is incorrect. No file pertaining to CCTVs is pending with the L-G's office," the Raj Niwas said in a statement here.

The women MLAs of the Aam Aadmi Party posted videos on the social media on Raksha Bandhan on Sunday to demand that the L-G should not hamper the CCTV installation project.

--IANS

nks/tsb

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi Government has directed that no officer can use more than one official vehicle irrespective of the number of charges they hold.

The order, issued last week by Delhi's General Administration Department (GAD), also restricts the use of government vehicle for any private purpose.

It also directed all the Head of Departments (HODs) to install GPS-enabled tracking devices in all its vehicles.

The GAD said GPS-enabled tracking devices should be installed also in the vehicles of corporations, board and other government agencies. Vehicles hired from private contractors should also be GPS-enabled.

"It has come to the notice of the government that many officers are using more than one official vehicle on the ground that they are holding additional charges.

"It is, therefore, ordered that the entitled officers shall use only one government vehicle irrespective of the number of charges they are holding," the order stated.

It directed that no vehicle will run without GPS trackers from next month.

"The Finance Department should ensure that there is regular periodic audit of the government vehicles. General pool for vehicles be restricted to the department where there are functional exigencies," it stated.

"Allotment of vehicles to an entitled officer will be done through executive order by name so that responsibility can be fixed in case of misuse," it stated.

The government wants a software developed to link log book generation with the movement of vehicles tracked by GPS.

--IANS

nks/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Through this window, the reader will catch a glimpse of some aspects of my life as a Papua New Guinean. This book of verse is a small window on the world I see and the world I live in.

This is a collection of short poems exposing my view of the world through a window of my house.

To be invited into a persons house means that the person has accepted you into his or her life and you are now privy to some things about the persons life.

DAGUA - In Papua New Guinea, a house symbolises a persons life. A house shows status and defines a persons standing in the community.

To the reader, I introduce Talicia Nuhunge who contributed four original compositions I have included in this collection. She is an important part of my world and she now speaks alongside me.

The poetry was written in English and Tok Pisin and the reader will find that Tok Pisin is often used without English translation in some of the collection.

It is my view that Papua New Guinean literature cannot be truly captured without the use of Tok Pisin.

Where I have employed unfamiliar Tok Pisin, vernacular or foreign language words, a footnote is provided at the end of each verse for clarity.

Even though, this book is a window to my world, the reader will find that this book speaks about a wide range of topics.

The verses capture snippets of everyday life in Papua New Guinea, the people and the land as well as biodiversity, politics, development issues and spirituality.

It is now up to readers to hear the words and form their own picture of the world and use some of the experiences shared in this collection as a compass to perhaps enhance their lives.

DAGUA - In Papua New Guinea, a house symbolises a persons life. A house shows status and defines a persons standing in the community.

To be invited into a persons house means that the person has accepted you into his or her life and you are now privy to some things about the persons life.

This is a collection of short poems exposing my view of the world through a window of my house.

Through this window, the reader will catch a glimpse of some aspects of my life as a Papua New Guinean. This book of verse is a small window on the world I see and the world I live in.

To the reader, I introduce Talicia Nuhunge who contributed four original compositions I have included in this collection. She is an important part of my world and she now speaks alongside me.

The poetry was written in English and Tok Pisin and the reader will find that Tok Pisin is often used without English translation in some of the collection.

It is my view that Papua New Guinean literature cannot be truly captured without the use of Tok Pisin.

Where I have employed unfamiliar Tok Pisin, vernacular or foreign language words, a footnote is provided at the end of each verse for clarity.

Even though, this book is a window to my world, the reader will find that this book speaks about a wide range of topics.

The verses capture snippets of everyday life in Papua New Guinea, the people and the land as well as biodiversity, politics, development issues and spirituality.

It is now up to readers to hear the words and form their own picture of the world and use some of the experiences shared in this collection as a compass to perhaps enhance their lives.Tech Podcast: Nokia gets its PureView trademark back from Microsoft

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OnePlus 6T is expected to come with a tear-drop notch and triple camera system



While other smartphone manufactures are still trying to play catch up in the smartphone segment, OnePlus is all set to launch its second flagship of this year. The OnePlus 6T is expected to launch in November and will come with a design language similar to Oppo's new phones like F9 Pro and R 17. One of the key highlights will be a triple-lens camera.



Nokia gets its PureView trademark back from Microsoft



Nokia is finally getting its PureView trademark back from Microsoft. The trademark was passed on to Microsoft in the year 2014 when the Finnish brand was acquired by the American software giant. If you jog your memory a little, few of the best Nokia camera phones came with PureView lens. The list includes the popular Nokia PureView 808, Nokia Lumia 1020, Nokia Lumia 920 and Lumia 1520.



Facebook wants you to make friends with strangers using 'things in common'



Facebook is testing a new feature called 'things in common'. If you are on Facebook, chances are that you've come across various strangers online, through groups, events or just friends of friends. Now, the social network giant wants you to extend your friend list further by letting you talk to strangers that have 'things in common'.

A report from CNET suggests that the feature is currently being tested in US. When asked about the future prospects of the new feature the company did not mention any specific plans of a roll out.

India can seek the extradition of fugitive diamantaire even without issuance of a Red Corner Notice (RCN) from the as his location has been revealed, the CBI has informed the Ministry of External Affairs, sources said on Monday.

A source told IANS: "The CBI has informed the MEA, which is communicating with the Antiguan government that it can seek the extradition of Choksi even without the issuance of an RCN against him from the "

The source said since the location and nationality of Choksi is already known, he should be arrested or detained there.

According to the source, the Indian government in its request also informed the Antiguan goverenment that if Choksi moves out to any of the countries, then the host countries would also seek clarification from Antigua as he is travelling on their passport.

Earlier this month, the CBI, which is probing the Rs 13,500-crore banking fraud allegedly committed by the diamond jeweller and his nephew Nirav Modi, has communicated to the MEA that it has already written to its counterpart agency in Antigua for the provisional arrest of Choksi.

In its request to the Home Ministry, the CBI said Choksi's extradition was being sought "on grounds of principle of reciprocity and dual criminality".

India and Antigua are signatory to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), a multilateral treaty negotiated by the member-states of the United Nations and promoted by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the CBI pointed out in its request.

The source also revealed that the Gitanjali group owner has also appealed to the to not issue an RCN against him alleging that the charges against him are politically motivated and the condition of the Indian jails are very poor.

The Interpol, after receiving Choksi's plea, sought the CBI's reply. The CBI in its reply has denied all allegations levelled by Choksi.

Choksi is said to have fled India on an Indian passport in the first week of January 2018. The Antiguan government is believed to have cleared his application for citizenship in November 2017, for which he may have paid around Rs 1.3 crore.

Choksi had taken the oath of allegiance as a citizen of Antigua on January 15 this year. Days later, on January 29, the CBI filed a case and started investigating Choksi andAn online fundraiser sale for the relief work in flood-hit Kerala will see 32 works of modern and contemporary Indian art being auctioned from Wednesday on art dealer Saffronarts online platform "Story LTD".

The Kerala Flood Relief Fundraiser Auction will feature works of master artists like F.N. Souza, K.G. Subramanyan, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar, Manjit Bawa, Thota Vaikuntam and Sujata Bajaj.

"There will be no Buyer's Premium, and proceeds, in part or full, from this sale will be donated to the Kerala Chief Minister's Distress Relief Fund," Saffronart said in a statement.

The auction house said it has a long-standing relationship with Kerala, which is home to many of India's leading modern and contemporary artists.

Saffronart's CEO Dinesh Vazirani invited people to "open their hearts and give generously towards the cause".

"We hope that this fundraiser auction will contribute in helping those in need during this national disaster. As we do our little bit to stand with Kerala, we urge you to do the same," he said.

The devastating floods in Kerala have left around 370 persons dead and lakhs displaced, forcing them to take shelter in relief camps.

The 24-hour online auction will begin at 8 p.m. on Wednesday. It is open to serious collectors as well as first-time bidders, and is a no-reserve auction.

All lots can be viewed online on storyltd.com.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Several opposition parties and ruling NDA constituent Shiv Sena on Monday pushed for reverting back to ballot paper in place of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and opposed simultaneous elections at a meeting convened by the Election Commission which also saw some parties pitching for state funding of elections.

The Shiv Sena differed with its ally BJP to support the polls through ballot paper and the CPI-M too differed from other opposition parties and said it was not for returning to the old system of holding elections. It sought more safeguards in EVMs.

Chief Election Commissioner O.P. Rawat said after the meeting that the poll panel will take a call on all the issues raised by parties including on EVMs and ballot paper, integrity of electoral rolls and ceiling on expenditure by political parties.

"We will definitely look into the issues presented by them. There will be a satisfactory solution to them," Rawat said.

Parties like the Congress, CPI, Trinamool Congress, BSP, DMK and Shiv Sena said that there should be a return to ballot papers while the BJP and BJD said they were satisfied with electronic voting machines (EVMs).

The AAP said either the count to verify electronic voting machine (EVM) results with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) should be increased or there should be a return to ballot paper while the AIADMK said it was fine both with EVMs and ballot paper.

Congress leader Mukul Wasnik said the party supported "the demand of using ballot paper in the election in the present situation." He said malfunctioning of EVMs was a major issue.

"VVPATs were introduced but are not being cross-checked. We demanded that at least 30 per cent of the votes should be cross-checked," Wasnik said.

He said more transparency was required in the voters list as a number of cases had surfaced in the recent past where lakhs and lakhs of bogus voters were found. "These bogus voters affect the entire electoral process."

Shiv Sena leader Anil Desai said: "We have made a point... Let us go back to ballot papers. We have insisted on ballot papers for elections to the largest democracy."

BJP leader and union minister J.P. Nadda said the Election Commission's efforts to match EVM results with VVPAT was a good move.

"We should think ahead. The Election Commission has properly replied to all questions raised about the EVMs and we should look forward. (Using) VVPAT is a good move and it should be taken forward," he said.

Asked about the Congress demand for a return to ballot paper, he said that party's "habit of looking forward has ended".

Nadda said the BJP laid emphasis on correct identification of voters and proper training of people involved in the process. "(For) accurate voting there should be accurate identification. There should not be proxy identification."

Nadda said the voter slip should not be the only way for identification as it can be purchased by an influential candidate and it should also be on the basis of six other identified documents.

"The other thing we said was that deletion of a voter from electoral rolls should be with a reason and should not take place below the level of district magistrate," he said.

Bahujan Samaj Party's Satish Misra said EVMs can be hacked. He said almost every party, except one, had made the demand and the world had gone back to the ballot paper.

Kalyan Banerjee of Trinamool Congress said they were demanding state funding of elections to check corruption.

He said there was time still to implement voting through ballot paper before the Lok Sabha elections.

CPI-M's Nilotpal Basu said they mainly raised the question of funding of elections because this was the issue agitating the minds of electorate.

"Corporate funding has been promoted in such a big way." He said some parties want to go back to the ballot box but the CPI-M wanted much more "thorough-going reforms.

"We are not for returning. We are for further strengthening the safeguards which can make them more transparent and can really remove the "doubts in public mind," he said.

He said simultaneous polls were not discussed but in the written submission the party had said that the suggestion was "totally anti-Constitutional."

The AIADMK said it was not against the ballot paper or EVMs.

"We are ready to face anything. At the same time, we suggested there should not be any malpractice, any doubt regarding EVM machines during the elections," senior AIADMK leader and Lok Sabha Deputy Speaker M. Thambidurai said.

He said state funding was the only answer to stop election malpractices.

CPI's Atul Kumar Anjan said there was a need to put an end to electronic voting system as many people in this country have sugar and eyesight related problems.

"Within eight seconds they cannot see to whom they have voted. There are lots of troubles with these machines."

BJD's Pinaki Mishra said: "We would ideally like the EC to lay down as to what percentage of the VVPAT paper trail they are going to count. Once that is done, I believe everyone should be reasonably satisfied."

He said his party supports the idea of simultaneous elections.

AAP's Raghav Chadha said EVMs can be easily hacked and there were incidents where these machines have created trouble during elections.

"At least 20 per cent voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines and electronic voting machines (EVMs) should be verified or paper ballot system should be implemented," he said.

LJP leader and Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan told reporters that the party had not received "notice" for the meeting.

--IANS

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(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 Monday accused the opposition parties of spreading anarchy.

Talking to reporters, he lashed out at the opposition for the ruckus they created in the state Assembly when the government was presenting the supplementary budget for 2018-19.

Adityanath said the opposition parties were "trying to create an atmosphere of chaos" where there existed none. "The opposition parties are creating a furore over nothing... They are trying to spread anarchy."

Earlier, as the Assembly resumed after a four-day recess, legislators from the Bahujan Samaj Party, Samajwadi Party and the Congress raised slogans against the government and accused it of failing to maintain law and order in the state.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Monday called upon people to reject the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha election and instead vote for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in all seven seats in the city to see "real development".

He was speaking at the inauguration of the AAP East Delhi Lok Sabha constituency office.

If the AAP won all seven seats, "I promise a beautiful, healthy and educated Delhi", Kejriwal said.

The AAP leader accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of failing to do "even a single thing" for Delhi since the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. So it was time the people of Delhi voted for the AAP.

"You (people) gave the BJP seven Lok Sabha seats thinking they will do something. Then you gave us 67 out of 70 seats in Delhi. We provided cheap electricity, free medicines, Mohalla Clinics. What have those seven MPs done over these years?" Kejriwal asked.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Over 50 militants were killed and dozens injured as aircrafts pounded Taliban positions in Afghanistan's Faryab province on Monday, an official said.

A group of Taliban militants blocked a road to target military convoys but the government forces in efforts to disperse the militants, conducted a series of sorties, as a result 54 militants were killed and dozens other injured, army spokesman Mohammad Hanif Rezai said.

Amongst those killed were two senior Taliban commanders -- Mullah Shah Wali and Mullah Qayum, Xinhua quoted the official as saying.

According to the official, ground operations backed by air power are continuing in the area.

Taliban has not released any statement yet.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Pakistan government has banned VIP protocol given by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to influential people at airports across the country, the media reported on Monday.

The decision came into force from Sunday as the Interior Ministry directed all officials concerned of the agency's immigration wing to implement it, reports Dawn news.

"We have decided to strictly implement the decision to provide equal opportunities to all travellers without any discrimination," Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry told Dawn on Sunday.

"We have seen that influential people used to seek assistance of FIA officials at airports who (officials) accompanied them to promptly clear their luggage," the Minister said.

The VIP protocol was usually given to politicians, legislators, senior bureaucrats, judges, military officials and journalists.

In case any FIA official is caught giving protocol to a VIP, he would face strict action, the Ministry warned.

Immigration counters at airports would be monitored and if any VIP was seen being given special treatment, the immigration staff and official in charge of their shift would be immediately suspended.

It was observed in the VIP lounge at Benazir Bhutto International Airport in Islamabad that the influential people would sit in a luxurious atmosphere while their luggage was being cleared by FIA officials, Airport Security Staff or Civil Aviation Authority.

However, there is no such lounge available at the new Islamabad airport established near Fatehjang where all passengers have to follow the normal procedure.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan will reiterate its serious objections over two water storage and projects being built by India during a meet with New this week in Lahore.

A government official told Dawn news on Sunday that Indian Water Commissioner P K Saxena, along with a delegation, was expected to reach Lahore on Tuesday to begin the discussions with his Pakistani counterpart Syed Mehr Ali Shah from Wednesday.

The official said Pakistan would raise its concerns over the 1000MW Pakal Dul and 48MW Lower Kalnai hydroelectric projects on two different tributaries of River Chenab despite Islamabad's serious objections over their designs.

Pakistan has been raising reservations over the designs of the two projects and would like India to either modify it to make them compliant to 1960 Indus Waters Treaty or put the projects on hold until an understanding is reached between the two sides.

The official said Islamabad and New would also finalise the schedule of future meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission and visits of the teams of the Indus commissioners.

He said that the water commissioners of Pakistan and India were required to meet twice a year and arrange technical visits to projects' sites and critical river head works, but Pakistan had been facing a lot of problems in timely meetings and visits.

The two-day session is also expected to discuss ways and means for timely and smooth sharing of hydrological data on shared rivers.

Pakal Dul is a storage-cum-power project and can have gross storage of about 108,000-acre-feet of water. The project design envisages its filling every monsoon season between mid-June and end-August.

Pakistan believes that the tunnel spillway of Pakal Dul should be raised closer to the dead storage level because its placement 40 metres below the dead storage level could allow drawdown flushing not permitted to India under the 1960 water treaty, reports Dawn news.

On the 48MW Lower Kalnai project, Pakistan has raised objections to its freeboard, pondage and intake and is of the view that the depth of bridge girder and provision of freeboard should be close to one metre and considers two-metre freeboard as "excessive".

The Lower Kalnai project is on a left bank tributary of Chenab and can have gross storage of about 1,508 acre feet of water.

Under the provisions of the 1960, waters of the eastern rivers - Sutlej, Beas and Ravi - had been allocated to India and the western rivers - the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab - to Pakistan, except for certain non-consumptive uses for India.The Congress on Monday accused Goa Chief Minister and former Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar of being silent on the controversial Rafale deal, saying he was aware of the violation of several norms linked to the purchase of the French military aircraft.

All India Congress Committee spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi while speaking to the media at the party headquarters here questioned that how did Parrikar, despite being the then Defence Minister "did not know that a deal had been negotiated, signed and agreed upon?"

"A Defence Minister who knew about bypassing of the cabinet committee on security (CCS) norms, transfer of technology and not following of defence procurement procedure, continues to maintain his silence and chooses not to answer," Chaturvedi said.

"So his silence is a conspiracy in an agreement that has betrayed this nation."

Chaturvedi also slammed Parrikar for his alleged flip-flop on the Rafale deal, accusing him of going into hiding over the alleged scam.

"Here is a Defence Minister, who just days before the deal was signed, had gone on record to say that some terms of the agreement were non-negotiable. But you were aware that those were the very clauses that were negotiated in France," she added.

"And the nation saw how Parrikar continued to hide, instead of giving answers on the deal. It is a known fact that he himself was not prepared for it and was caught off guard."

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government had signed the Rafale deal in September 2016 while Parrikar served as the Defence Minister, to purchase fighter jets from France.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prama Hikvision India Limited plans to invest Rs.500 crore in a manufacturing facility for electronic security and surveillance products in Andhra Pradesh.

The company, a joint venture between Prama India and Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology of China on Monday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the state government.

The MoU was inked by the officials during Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu's round table Session in Mumbai.

The company is keen to invest in a manufacturing facility for electronic security and surveillance and other latest electronic equipment with a capacity of 15-20 lakh cameras and recording back-end devices production per month.

The project will bring an investment of approximately Rs 500 crore, which is expected to generate 1,000 direct and indirect jobs and more in auxiliary industries, said a statement.

The company is looking to treble its capacity to make cameras by expanding its manufacturing footprint in India to meet a steady increase in demand for cameras and digital video recorders.

Meanwhile, Naidu met Tata Group chairman emeritus Ratan Tata and discussed investment opportunities in Andhra Pradesh. He urged Tata Group to come forward for production of electrical vehicles and promote green mobility in new state capital Amaravati.

The Chief Minister sought their cooperation in development of industrial park in capital region, introduction of Vistara air services from Vijayawada, starting Starbucks at Visakhapatnam and Vijayawada and technology sharing for creating best eco system in capital region.

Naidu also visited Tata Experience Centre and interacted with the Tata Group officials.

He invited the group to invest in hotel industry including resorts in the state saying it has a vast potential for tourism promotion.

The Chief Minister invited the Tata Group to visit AP along with proposals of investment and said that he would form a committee to coordinate with them.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The government plans to offer a direct subsidy up to Rs 1.4 lakh on electric vehicles, including cars and two-wheelers and three-wheelers. The decision was taken during a meeting of the committee on EVs, which was chaired by Expenditure Secretary AN Jha. The panel has also increased the subsidy allocation amount from Rs 4,000 crore to Rs 5,000 crore for a period of five years. The current decision is in contrast with the Centre's earlier stance of avoiding the additional financial burden that the government would incur in incentivising buyers under the second phase of the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles (FAME-II) scheme. Under the phase 2 of the scheme, the government expects to see about 8-fold increase in the sale of EVs. Pollution being one of the prime reasons for the adoption of EVs, the government initially wants to focus on 11 most polluted cities, including New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru.

The subsidy will be capped at 20 per cent of the cost of an electric vehicle, The Times of India reported. Considering this, one can hope to get around Rs 1 lakh to Rs 1.4 lakh discount on EVs from domestic manufacturers like Tata and Mahindra.

India aims to become a major market for EVs by increasing the EV penetration from the current one per cent to at least 40 per cent by 2030. To encourage people to use more EVs, the finance ministry may also make petrol and diesel cars more expensive by imposing a marginally higher tax. While the Union cabinet will take the final decision of the phase policy draft, hybrid vehicles and trucks have been excluded from this benefit for now.

Earlier the Centre had decided to spend the allocated amount on both charging stations and subsidy. But later it decided to stick to only state-owned buses for the subsidy. The last week's meeting saw the committee recommend subsidy on cars, bikes, and scooters. The committee has said the scheme would be offered for the limited number of vehicles but the number is yet to be decided.

Experts suggest the inclusion of private vehicles is largely driven by a great interest shown by auto companies, which saw an uptick in sales after the government launched FAME-I scheme in 2015. After the launch, various incentives -- up to Rs 29,000 for bikes and Rs 1.38 lakh for cars -- were offered on electric and hybrid vehicles.

This year in April, the government extended the phase 1 till September-end or till its second phase is approved. Under the phase 2, the subsidy amount will be decided on the basis of the capacity of the vehicles' battery -- Rs 10,000 on each kilowatt hour (KwH). Most e-cars in India come with 14 KwH capacity and two-wheelers and three-wheelers with 2 KwH and 4-kWh battery, respectively, which means they could earn up to Rs 1.4 lakh discount. However, the amount could be as high as Rs 4 lakh for high-end cars.

(Edited by Manoj Sharma)The Punjab Assembly, led by Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, on Monday unanimously passed a resolution asking the Central government to pursue with Pakistan the issue of opening of the Kartarpur Sahib corridor during the 550th birthday celebrations of the first Sikh Guru, Sri Guru Nanak Dev.

The resolution was moved by the Chief Minister on the second day of the monsoon session of the Assembly.

All members of the House, cutting across party lines, were of the view that the opening of the corridor would enable millions of Indian devotees to pay obeisance at the the historic Sri Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara.

The Gurdwara, where the first Sikh Guru spent the last years of his life, is located in Pakistan across the international border, though it is clearly visible from Dera Baba Nanak in Punjab's Gurdaspur district.

Moving the resolution, the Chief Minister informed the House that he had already written to Union External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to take up the issue with her Pakistani counterpart.

The Punjab government, he said, had been urging the government of India, time and again, to take up the matter with Islamabad.

The opening of the corridor was a cherished dream of the Sikh community, he added.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The RSS on Monday was critical of Congress President Rahul Gandhi for drawing comparisons of it with the Islamic State (IS) and the Muslim Brotherhood and plans to invite him for a three-day lecture series here next month to enlighten people about the organisation.

The sangh parivar fountainhead, which is holding a lecture series on "Future of Bharat: An RSS Perspective" between September 17 and 19, said it will invite all the political parties, including the Congress, to enlighten them about its vision and also to clarify the misconceptions about it.

Addressing a press conference, Arun Kumar, the Akhil Bharatiya Prachar Pramukh of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) said that RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat will address and interact with a select audience comprising prominent citizens during the three-day event.

Responding to a volley of questions regarding Rahul Gandhi's continuous attacks on RSS, including the recent comparison with the Muslim Brotherhood and the IS, Kumar said that Congress President's remarks were due to his lack of knowledge.

"If Rahul Gandhi is clear about how the IS, the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic terrorism is haunting the entire world, he would have never drawn such comparisons," Kumar said.

Questioning Rahul Gandhi's understanding of India, he said that one cannot understand the RSS until he understands the country.

"Sometimes we feel and even he accepts that he is trying to understand the country. One who has not understood India can never understand the RSS. To understand the RSS one needs to first understand India at least," he said.

The RSS functionary said that unless Rahul Gandhi understands "Sarva Dharma Sambhava (all Dharmas are equal to or harmonious with each other), We the people and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family)", he will not be able to understand the RSS.

"Because of lack of knowledge, he is drawing such comparisons (with IS and Muslim Brotherhood)," Kumar told reporters.

Asked about the invitees to the event, he said that top people from the fields of social, cultural organisations, media, columnists and even legal fraternity besides foreign ambassadors and high commissioners, will be invited to the event to get to know and understand the RSS perspective on various issues of national importance.

Asked whether the political parties opposed to the idea of the RSS would be invited to the event, Kumar said: "We will contact all the political parties. All means all."

To a specific question about inviting Rahul Gandhi, he said, "It is our prerogative whom to invite. We will try to touch all the strata of the society."

An RSS functionary, however, said that as President of the Congress party, Gandhi will also be an invitee.

Responding to Congress charges that the BJP and the RSS believed in divisive politics, Kumar said that political parties speak a lot for vote bank but it is the people of the country who decide.

"I don't need to comment on it. People will decide," he said.

Speaking at an event organised by Indian Journalists' Association in London, Rahul Gandhi had once again compared the RSS with the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist organisation. Earlier he had compared the RSS with the IS.

According to Rahul Gandhi, Muslim Brotherhood was banned after the assassination of Anwar Sadat (the then Egyptian president) in 1981, while the RSS was banned after Mahatma Gandhi's assassination (in 1948).

"So, there are tremendous similarities. And the most interesting one, women are not allowed in either of these organisations. So, they are similar," Gandhi said.

Describing the purpose behind organising the event, Kumar clarified that it has been organised due to growing eagerness about the RSS amongst larger sections of the society including the intellectuals and the youth and also to clarify about the questions which are being raised about it.

"India is moving ahead towards regaining its special and unique position in the world among the galaxy of nations. At the same time the RSS is realizing that there is a growing eagerness amongst larger sections of the society including the intellectuals and the youth to know and understand the RSS perspective on various issues of national importance. This lecture series has been organised in this context where Bhagawatji will present the RSS' view on various contemporary issues of national importance," he said.

To a question pertaining to Rahul Gandhi's claim that Congress was not involved in the 1984 riots, Kumar said it would not hold water because late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, himself had said: "Jab bada ped girta hai to dharti hilti hai (when a big tree falls, the earth shakes)".

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Retailers Association of India (RAI) will help boost the fast growing retail sector in Andhra Pradesh especially in upcoming cities, besides promoting the state as an investment destination for retail and allied sectors, an official said on Monday.

The CEO of Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board (APEDB), J. Krishna Kishore, signed a MoU with the RAI CEO Kumar Rajagopalan in Mumbai for the initiative in the presence of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu.

With this, the APEDB and RAI will join hands to encourage, facilitate, support and partner retailers to modernize, expand and adopt best practices across technology, logistics, warehousing and infrastructure.

They will also collaborate on promoting Andhra Pradesh as an investment destination among the retail investors and allied sectors, improve policies, regulations and standards designed to foster growth and development retail and related sectors in the state.

"The MoU is a step in right direction as rising incomes, increasing tastes and preferences, emerging markets in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities make Andhra Pradesh an attractive destination for retailers," said Kishore.

"Andhra Pradesh is standing on the threshold of a 'retail revolution' and this collaboration will help give an impetus to the retail industry there," noted Rajagopalan.

The Indian retail market is estimated to be worth around Rs 47 lakh crore with a 7 per cent growth, but a significant share of the market remains untapped by modern retail which promises a huge opportunity for the country, especially Andhra Pradesh.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A major deadline in the process of resolving the country's most pressing corporate and banking problem of NPAs, or bad loans, is ending on Monday with the RBI having set a six-month time frame for finalising resolution plans for around 70 large stressed accounts worth over Rs 3.8 lakh crore.

In a circular on restructuring bad loans issued in February, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had asked banks to identify projects with even a day's default as stressed assets and conclude resolution proceedings in 180 days.

The RBI circular had directed banks to take loan accounts of Rs 2,000 crore and above, which remain unresolved for over 180 days starting from March 1, 2018, to the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) under the new Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC).

Domestic rating agency Icra has said in a recent report that these 70 large non-performing asset (NPA) accounts are mostly from the power, telecom and construction sectors.

According to banking sources, banks have been working overtime to finalise the resolution plans for these accounts so as to avoid going for bankruptcy proceedings in the NCLT.

The country's largest lender, State Bank of India (SBI), is looking at recovering more than Rs 40,000 crore of its stressed assets in the current fiscal, an official said on Saturday.

State-run State Bank Of India (SBI) Deputy Managing Director (Stressed Assets Resolution Group) Pallav Mohapatra said, the SBI expects to make a recovery of more than Rs 40,000 crore in the current financial year, mostly through the IBC, while a smaller percentage would be recovered from other sources like sale of assets and one time settlement.

Bankers are hoping that the RBI will take a lenient view and not refer all the NPA accounts to NCLT immediately after Monday's deadline expiry as the resolution process is already underway in some cases.

The power sector accounts for the major chunk of NPAs and according to RBI, the total outstanding loans of scheduled commercial banks to the sector, including renewable energy, stood at Rs 5.65 lakh crore as on March 2018.

A Parliamentary panel report has revealed that there are as many as 34 stressed electricity projects with a total capacity of over 40,000 MW.

Power producers had petitioned the government that RBI norms on resolving the NPAs issue were too rigid in view of the serious problems being faced by the industry in the way of coal shortage and the huge bill outstandings due from state distribution companies.

The Power Ministry had urged the RBI to extend the deadline by six months, but the central bank has rejected the extension request.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Energy in its report earlier this month noted that the new RBI guidelines on NPAs will only deepen the crisis of the electricity sector.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Real Madrid, led by Gareth Bale, defeated Girona 4-1 on the latter's home turf, mounting a comeback after seeing the hosts get on the board first.

Last year, the capital squad had suffered their first defeat of the 2017-2018 season to Girona at the Estadi Municipal de Montilivi, but -- after seeing Borja Garcia notch the first goal for Girona in the 16th minute on Sunday -- they turned things around and swept to a well-earned revenge.

Inopportune tackles in an otherwise virtually penalty-free match were the bane of the hosts, however, as Girona's Marc Muniesa and Pere Pons gave Madrid two penalty kicks in the 38th and 50th minutes, on which team captain Sergio Ramos and Karim Benzema - respectively - both converted to tie the match up at the half and then move ahead early in the second period, reports Efe news agency.

It was Bale who added the third tally in the 59th minute and then Benzema again who put the icing on the cake on a great crossing shot from the Welshman in the 80th minute for the win.

Madrid is now ahead of Barcelona after two La Liga games.

Julen Lopetegui's squad swept to victory before 13,889 fans -- the largest crowd at the stadium in recent memory -- in an intense match with a number of scoring chances and exciting moves.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A special court on Monday discharged Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy from a graft case in which he was alleged to have freed government land in the city suburb for monetary benefit.

"Special Lokayukta (ombudsman) court judge D.B. Patil has allowed withdrawing Kumaraswamy's name from the case in which he was accused of taking bribe to de-notify 3.8-acre land acquired by the state-run BDA to form the Arkavathy residential layout in the city," chief minister's counsel Hasmath Pasha said.

Of the four co-accused in the case -- retired IAS officer K. Jothiramalingam and two officials Sriram and Raviprakash -- were also discharged on the lack of evidence.

The case pertains to freeing the land from the state control when Kumaraswamy was the chief minister of the then Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S)-BJP coalition government in 2006-07.

Barring the fourth co-accused -- former minister C. Chennigappa -- the three co-accused and Kumaraswamy had filed a discharge application in the anti-graft court here. Chennigappa did not file the application.

"The petitioner (Mahadevswamy) did not seek the government's permission to file the graft case against Kumaraswamy who was the chief minister and a legislator then," recalled Pasha.

The judge also noted that the case was filed in 2011, four years after the land was freed from the government in 2007 and the complainant failed to prove the irregularity charge, causing revenue loss to the government.

Kumaraswamy heads the JD-S-Congress coalition government in the state.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Under the scanner of various investigating agencies, the right-wing Sanatan Sanstha on Monday demanded that the word 'secular' be removed from the Indian Constitution.

Sanstha spokesperson Chetan Rajhans said the words 'socialist' and 'secular' were added in the Constitution by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

"So, if there is a provision to add words, these can also be removed by the same provisions," he told a media conference in Mumbai.

Facing a barrage of questions, Rajhans said that the issue is "nothing new" and that the organisation has been demanding this for long through constitutional means.

Although Sanstha as well as another outfit, Hindu Janjagruti Samiti, are currently facing the heat of various investigating agencies, Rajhans said none of the two was involved in any terror activity. "These are purely religious organizations," he added.

"We are being defamed in a pre-planned manner. We do not support or approve of violence in any form. Our mission for the past 27 years is to propagate 'dharma and spirituality," Rajhans said.

He also brushed aside any involvement of Sanatan Sanstha in the killings rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, Communist leader Govind Pansare (both in Maharashtra), and author M.M. Kalburgi and journalist Gauri Lankesh (both in Karnataka).

"As per our information, nine persons have been arrested by the Maharashtra Anti Terrorist Squad and the Central Bureau of Investigation. None of them is the Sanatan Sanstha's sadhak (seeker). In fact, we have heard of the five names among the accused for the first time. So nobody should link them with us," Rajhans said.

Besides, he pointed out, neither the ATS-CBI chargesheets nor the remand applications have named Sanatan Sanstha. "It is only parties like the Congress, communists, some intellectuals and thinkers and progressive organisations who are targeting the small organisation," he said.

"Demanding a ban on us or arresting our leader, just because the accused are arrested, is ridiculous," Rajhans said.--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Uttar Pradesh government presented a Rs 34,833.24 crore supplementary budget for the year 2018-19 in the Assembly on Monday.

In the supplementary budget, almost one fourth of the provisions has been marked for the agriculture sector.

The state government has allocated Rs 5,500 crore for paying off cane arrears for the year 2016-17 and 2017-18, while Rs 500 crore was earmarked for direct benefit transfer (DBT) for farmers.

It has also allocated Rs 800 crore for the Zewar airport while Rs 850 crore was marked for the Kumbh Mela which will take place in Allahabad next year.

Based on the proposals by legislators, the state government has proposed the allocation of Rs 750 crore for the construction of roads and Rs 301 crore has been proposed to be spent on flood relief.

The House reconvened earlier on Monday after a four-day recess.

It was however adjourned till Tuesday soon after Opposition lawmakers created a ruckus, accusing the Yogi Adityanath-government of failing on all fronts, specially in maintaining the law and order.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Samsung India is looking to install about five of its 4K Onyx Cinema LED displays at movie theatres across the country by the end of 2018, a senior company executive has said.

The South Korean tech giant introduced the LED display for large screens in collaboration with multiplex theatre major PVR Cinemas in India on Monday.

"This is our first installation and we are trying to go further and install many more screens in the country. Roughly 5-7 installations (in India) is what we are looking at before we exit 2018," Puneet Sethi, Vice President, Consumer Electronics Enterprise Business, Samsung India, told IANS.

IANS had first reported in May that PVR Cinemas will be among the first multiplex chains to install Onyx Cinema LED in the country and that the LED screen would be deployed at PVR multiplexes in Delhi and Mumbai.

"To begin with in India, we are concentrating only on Delhi and Mumbai. As we get into the first quarter of 2019, we will also focus on other metro cities such as Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad," Sethi said.

"We are in discussion with other leading multiplex chains as well," Sethi added.

The technology was originally introduced by Samsung in 2017 and it deployed the first screen in Korea.

PVR Cinemas said it would install the 4K Onyx Cinema LED screen in Mumbai by the end of 2018.

"This financial year we are looking at one more installation, which will be in Lower Parel, Mumbai," said Sanjeev Kumar Bijli, Joint Managing Director, PVR Ltd.

The installation of one LED screen roughly requires 8-10 weeks.

"Based on the response of viewers in these two cities, we would decide about further installations in 2019," Bijli added.

With this new technology, currently available only in a few countries across the world, enthusiasts can watch movies with better picture quality, true colours, and greater vibrancy and accuracy, Samsung India claimed.

The LED display comes with comprehensive solutions such as "Onyx View", "Onyx 3D" and "Onyx Sound". The screen delivers HDR (High Dynamic Range) to the cinema, showcasing on-screen contents at peak brightness level, nearly 10 times greater than that offered by the standard cinema projectors.

The screen offers "Onyx" surround sound from JBL by Harman International and Samsung's Audio Lab.

(Krishna SinhaChaudhury can be contacted at krishna.s@ians.in)

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Nawaz Sharif brought to accountability court today

Islamabad: Former Prime Minister (PM) Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif was brought to the accountability court in Islamabad from Adiala Jail today. Nawaz appeared before Judge Mohammad Arshad Malik who is hearing remaining two corruption cases regarding the Al-Azizia and Flagship Investment which was filed by National accountability bureau (NAB).



However, Judge Malik had submitted a petition on Friday to the Supreme Court (SC) in order to seek the fifth extension in Nawaz Sharifs trial.



The application will be taken up by SCs three-judge bench which is headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Mian Saqib Nisar. They will decide whether to allow the extension in Nawazs trail or not.Citing a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) notification, senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Monday said that the State Bank of India should declare Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC) as bankrupt by 5 p.m.

The Congress leader said, On February 12, 2018, RBI issued a circular stating any company that owes more than Rs 20,000 crore to banks, should be declared bankrupt within 180 days.

"GSPC's highest debt is from SBI. According to RBI's notification, SBI should declare GSPC as bankrupt by 5 p.m. today (Monday)," said Ramesh.

During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's term as Gujarat Chief Minister, the GSPC was cited as one of the biggest successful Gujarat Model and was shown as an example for other states in India.

"In 70 years, for the first time the Central government has filed an affidavit in High Court against RBI, with the only intention of saving GSPC," said Ramesh.

Even after the sanction of Rs 20,000 crore to GSPC, no oil or gas has been extracted from GSPC, he said.

"The company is in bankruptcy now and this is a burden on taxpayers and public has been lied to," he added.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court on Monday restrained the Centre from filling the post of Director General Medical Services (Air Force) and sought Centre's response on the plea by Lt. General Manomoy Ganguly who is asserting claim to be appointed as DGMS (Army).

The bench of Justice A.K. Sikri and Justice Ashok Bhushan restrained the Centre from filling the post as the court was told that the post of the DGMS (Air Force) is likely to be filled thereby closing the doors on Lt. General Ganguly.

Senior counsel Kapil Sibal, who appeared for Lt. Gen. Ganguly, told the court that a man junior to Ganguly by one year is being appointed to the vacant slot.

The court was informed that to defeat the claim by Lt. Gen. Ganguly, the DGMS (Air Force) has been posted as DGMS(Army).

The court ordered that the post of DGMS (Air Force) should not be filled as it perused the records relating to the matter before it.

Attorney General K.K. Venugopal said that it was the decision of Defence Minister to move the DGMS (Air Force) as DGMS (Army).

Attorney General said, "It is Defence Minister's order." Sibal retorted: "Maybe. It may be Prime Minister's decision. A Defence Minister is not above law."

Senior counsel P.S. Patwalia also appearing for Ganguly told the court that he was being offered a three-tier post.

"So far I have not been given anything. They are offering him a three-tier post. If third post (DGMS-Air Force is filled by a third person, then nothing will be left", Patwalia told the court.

The top court by its August 1, 2018 while differing with the Armed Forces Tribunal's May 7, 2018, direction to appoint Lt. Gen. Ganguly as DGMS (Army) had remitted the matter to the Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

The AFT by its May 7, 2018, order had directed the Centre to appoint Lt. Gen. Ganguly as DGMS (Army) "as expeditiously as possible and certainly not later than one month from today, and for that purpose, take all necessary consequential steps."

The next date of hearing is September 10.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) patron Sharad Yadav on Monday demanded that the general elections be held through the ballot paper as there were doubts about the electronic voting machines in the minds of the voters.

"There are doubts over the EVMs in the minds of the people. And despite the Supreme Court order of May, 2017 the Commission has not fulfilled its promise over the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT)," he told a press conference here.

Yadav said that many people might not participate in elections because of their apprehensions over the voting machines which would be very dangerous. "So the elections should be done through ballot paper," he said.

"The Commission must take some robust step to clear the doubts of the voters. And I shall soon hold a rally in Delhi named 'Vote bachao, Desh bachao' (save vote, save country)," he said adding many developed countries are using the ballot paper now a days.

He said that he was not in favour of the idea of one nation, one election.

Yadav also attacked the Narendra Modi government accusing it of not helping Kerala.

"Following the devastating floods, the Kerala government demanded Rs 20,000 crore from the centre, but the central government gave only Rs 600 crore. And when the United Arab Emirates (UAE) tried to help Kerala, then it was rejected by the central government," he said.

Slamming the Prime Minister, Yadav said that during his 'Mann ki baat' monthly broadcast programme Modi said that the entire nation was standing with Kerala.

"Entire people of the country is standing with the people of Kerala except the central government, as it is not helping Kerala properly," he said.

Attacking the NDA government over the issue of employment, Yadav said that they are making big claims on employment but the facts were completely different.

Yadav said there is no rule of law of in the country as people are lynched in the name of cows and eating habits.

"Now mobs are killing people in the name of religion, lands from the tribals are being snatched, women in the country are not safe," he said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Anglo-Dutch oil multinational Royal Dutch Shell's Indian arm on Monday said that it will acquire French oil major Total SA's 26 per cent stake in the Hazira liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Gujarat.

In a statement here, Shell Energy India, however, did not disclose the consideration involved in acquiring the stake in the company that operates the 5 million tonnes per annum capacity in Hazira.

"Shell Gas BV, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell plc, has signed a binding Letter of Intent (LoI) with Total Gaz Electricite Holdings France to acquire its 26 per cent equity in the Hazira LNG and Port venture in India, subject to regulatory approvals," the statement said.

"The move will allow Shell commercial and operational flexibility over Hazira to maximise integrated value and offer creative customer value propositions. This portfolio action is consistent with Shell's strategy to deepen its presence in the gas value chain in India, the fourth largest LNG consumer in the world."

The Hazira LNG and Port venture comprises two companies -- Hazira LNG that operates an LNG regasification terminal in Gujarat; and Hazira Port that manages a direct berthing multi-cargo port at Hazira.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Budget passenger carrier SpiceJet on Monday successfully operated India's first test flight partially powered by bio-fuel.

A mix of 25 per cent bio-fuel and 75 aviation turbine fuel (ATF) powered a SpiceJet Q400 turboprop aircraft on the 200 km flight from Dehradun to Delhi on Monday morning.

SpiceJet termed the operation India's first-ever "BioJet Fuel" flight. It pointed out -- reduction in carbon emissions and enhancement of fuel efficiency -- as advantages of using "BioJet fuel" as compared to ATF.

The bio-fuel type made from the Jatropha crop was developed by the CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum (IIP), a constituent of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research based in Dehradun.

Subsequently, 25 per cent of bio-fuel blended with ATF powered one of the two engines of the Q400 aircraft for the over 40-minute-long flight.

The aircraft ferried 28 on-board, including the crew and regulatory officials. It was received by Cabinet ministers and airline officials at the Indira Gandhi International Airport's Terminal 2.

At an event to mark the success of the test flight, Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said that the central government plans to come out with an environment friendly aviation action plan till 2035.

On the policy front, Road Transport and Highway Minister Nitin Gadkari said that a cabinet note on the standardisation and use of bio-fuel blended with ATF will be prepared by Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.

Gadkari elaborated that bio-fuels obtained from non-edible seeds will aid in employment creations, import substitution, making transport costs effective and pollution free.

As per IATA, aviation industry contributes to 2 per cent of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the world, which will rise as the sector expands.

The development assumes significance due to high ATF prices, which have dented the domestic airline sector and led almost all players to report losses for the first quarter of 2018-19.

Presently, fuel prices constitute around 50 per cent of the overall operations cost of domestic airlines. India's ATF prices are amongst the highest in the world due to crude oil import and addition of state levies.

The fuel is not under the GST ambit like the bunker fuel used for the shipping industry.

"Rising costs are worrying for aviation companies. The reason being the high fuel costs," Gadkari said.

"It is approx. Rs 70 a liter, it can cost up to Rs 10 less which in turn will help... boost the aviation sector as a whole."

According to SpiceJet Chairman and Managing Director Ajay Singh: "This fuel is low cost and helps in significantly reducing carbon emissions. It has the potential to reduce our dependence on traditional aviation fuel by up to 50 per cent on every flight and bring down fares."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Software major Tech Mahindra on Monday announced its partnership with Microsoft to create a Blockchain-based solution to fight the spam call menace.

According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) or spam calls are a major nuisance to telecom subscribers across the country. TRAI has been working with industry stakeholders to curb this menace.

"Blockchain as a technology is a powerful tool to combat the issue of spam calls and fraud risks, to protect user information, as well as the integrity of the telecom sector," Rajesh Dhuddu, Global Practice Leader of Blockchain at Tech Mahindra, said in a statement.

"This Distributed Ledger Technology (commonly known as Blcokchain)-based solution will enable enterprises to stop financial frauds and perpetration of misleading financial information by unregistered telecom marketers who rampantly use the SMS service of telcos," Dhuddu added.

The solution will bring all the relevant parties in the ecosystem onto Blockchain, helping telecom service providers and telemarketers take care of preference registration and consent acquisition -- which are in line with the tenets of the TRAI regulation.

Built on Microsoft Azure platform, the solution will be a shared, secured ledger of UCCs distributed across a network of computers, which will ensure a transparent and verifiable system to help companies mitigate UCC on their networks, Tech Mahindra said.

"The intersection of Cloud and Blockchain will ensure a new way of monitoring and enforcing compliance throughout the ecosystem," said Prashant Shukla, National Tech Officer, Microsoft India.

"Through this solution we will be able to help service providers be compliant with the new (TRAI) regulation," Shukla said.

"With a Microsoft Azure Blockchain-powered solution, we will ensure that we mitigate loopholes used by fraudsters and spammers to reach end users," Shukla added.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)National Award-winning filmmaker Ketan Mehta and actor Pankaj Kapur, who have come together to make a short film "Toba Tek Singh," based on an eponymous short story penned by Saadat Hasan Manto, say the film celebrates the ongoing quest of belonging of a human being.

The story was written in 1955, themed around the India and Pakistan partition of 1947.

Asked how he sees a reflection of reality in the story in the context of socio-political change that India is going through, Mehta told IANS here: "In the end of the film, we have used a song of Baba Bulleh Shah, 'Bullah ki jaana main kaun?' That's what I believe it is... 'Toba Tek Singh' is an open-ended quest and human statement..."

Pankaj added: "Where is Toba Tek Singh? Is he in India? Is he in Pakistan? Is he within you? Or is he living inside me? It is an ongoing quest, and an idea to find out the sense of belonging.

"It is interesting how the audience can see two parts of the story. From its outer layer, it talks about the partition of two countries, India and Pakistan. In between the lines, it talks about the struggle of a man who is searching the answer of 'Who am I'?"

What was the intriguing factor of the story which motivated Mehta to turn the short story into a film?

"This is a great story not only on partition, but it is also a human story. I read the story during my college days and the story stayed with me for the longest time. The story questions who is mad, and who is not mad... Are the people outside of the asylums mad, or the ones that are inside mad?" Mehta said.

Pankaj said that when he heard the script, he felt the story not only holds a strong relevance in present times, but he also felt compelled to tell it.

"The core thought is how people look at others who are different than us. How do we look at other individuals who think differently? This thought is very close to my heart. For me, it was important to be a part of this story more than anything else, so that if not immediately, after 15 years, people will watch the film and say that this story is worth watching."

The film is being shown on OTT platform ZEE5, as a part of ZEE5 Film Festival.

Pankaj said the medium is irrelevant.

"Whether it is releasing in the form of a feature film, short film, theatrical release or a digital film, it did not bother me."

As for Mehta, he says he employs a different cinematic language when he tells a story and it depends upon the medium he chooses to tell it in.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Two persons were killed and four others, including a kid, injured in a clash over the formation of a state rural body board in West Bengal's Malda district on Monday, police said.

The clash took place between groups allegedly belonging to state ruling party Trinamool Congress over the control of a gram panchayat (lowest tier of the three-tier panchayat system) board at Gopalpur village in Malda district's Manikchawk.

"Two persons were shot dead during a clash over panchayat board formation at Gopalpur village on Monday. Four others including a three year old boy, sustained injuries in the clash. They have been admitted to a local hospital in Kaliachawk area," said an officer from Manikchawk police station.

Locals said the clash was a result of a Trinamool Congress faction fight in which two sides hurled bombs and opened fire at each other following a verbal spat.

The police, however, said the political affiliation of the two deceased is yet to be ascertained.

"We haven't received any details regarding the political involvement of those two men. Our senior officers are on the spot and raids are on to get hold of the accused miscreants. The situation is now under control," the officer said.

The situation in several Bengal districts has been tense over the last few days centring the panchayat board formation after the Supreme Court permitted the notification of the results of 20,159 uncontested seats in the state panchayat polls. Clashes were reported from Deganga in North 24 Parganas, Chopra in North Dinajpur and Murshidabad and Howrah districts.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Two persons were killed on Monday on the Agra-Lucknow Expressway when the vehicle they were travelling in got a flat tyre, police said.

The victims were into real estate business and were headed from New Delhi to Lucknow. Another inmate of the car was injured critically.

The accident took place near the Kharagpur Saraiyya village in Etawah district.

The driver lost control after the tyre burst and the vehicle collided with the divider, police said.

Station House Officer (SHO) of Usarahaar, Yogendra Sharma, told IANS that the injured were pulled out of the car by police personnel and locals, but the two were declared dead on arrival at the PGI at Saifai.--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Dubai, Aug 27 (IANS/WAM) The UN Refugee Agency has launched a digital campaign to secure support for millions of displaced Syrian children, both inside the war-torn country and in neighbouring countries.

The UNHCR drive aims to help millions of school-aged Syrians access education, the agency reported on Monday.

One out of every three schools in Syria have been damaged, while others are used as shelters, thus creating a major impediment for more than 2 million children's access to within the country, according to UN reports.

In neighbouring countries, the situation was equally troubling as increasing poverty and debt among refugees prevented some 700,000 Syrian children from attending school, reports said.

"Supporting is one of UNHCR's most important priorities. Education protects displaced families and children from having to resort to negative coping mechanisms such as child labour, early marriage, among others," said Houssam Chahine, Head of Private Sector Partnerships in the Middle East and North Africa region at UNHCR.

Through this campaign, UNHCR seeks to complement its efforts to ensure the rehabilitation of schools, training of teachers and the provision of resources to displaced and refugee families to ensure education for millions of children, said the official.

--IANS/WAM

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)PPP still firm on Aitzaz Ahsan nomination

ISLAMABAD: According to reports, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), which had nominated Aitzaz Ahsan as its candidate, is standing firm on its choice and has rejected the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) objections.



Earlier in the day, PPP senior leader Khursheed Shah said that he was hopeful that the PML-N would make a positive decision after taking into consideration his partys choice. The PML-N and the PPP will have to resolve their differences and move forward together, he said, adding that PPPs candidate for presidency was the candidate of all of Pakistan.







Also a statement quoting former president and PPP Co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari said, Aitzaz Ahsan will remain our nominee. We will convince the PML-N to accept Ahsan.The United States Consulate in Mumbai on Monday awarded 26 Indian shipping companies which participated in the US Coast Guard (USCG)'s Automated Mutual-assistance Vessel Rescue (AMVER) programmes.

The AMVER in a worldwide initiative that ensures quick and efficient rescue of disabled or distressed ships at sea, saving the lives of sailors and ensuring continuity of shipping operations.

US Consul-General in Mumbai Edgard Kagan said that AMVER, now in its Diamond Jubilee year, is an excellent example of mutual assistance and partnership.

"These awards are an opportunity to recognize the Indian merchant mariners and their efforts to facilitate world trade while preserving safety at sea," Kagan said.

Presenting the awards jointly with Kagan, India's Director-General of Shipping Malini V. Shankar said that AMVER is a unique and voluntary global ship reporting system used worldwide to arrange for assistance to ships and sailors in distress at sea.

"Instead of relying only on specialized rescue operations, this initiative provides an excellent opportunity for mutual cooperation on the seas. AMVER is an enduring example of international public-private partnership," Shankar added.

Established in 1958 and managed by the USCG, AMVER is a search-and-rescue (SAR) programme in which merchant ships sailing the high seas make themselves available for maritime emergency response on a voluntary basis without regard to nationality but with the main objective that no call for help should go unresponded.

Over 140 nations are participating in AMVER, providing a global safety net for mariners, comprising more than 7,850 ships available to carry out SAR services worldwide.

In 2017, AMVER mobilized 103 ships for providing such assistance to distressed ships and helped save 153 lives of mariners.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US Ambassador to India Kenneth Juster on Monday said that a full investigation will be carried out on the attack on Sikh leader Manjit Singh G.K. in California last week.

After an Akali Dal delegation led by Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal called on him, Juster tweeted: "Productive meeting with Minister @HarsimratBadal_ and the delegation of Sikh leaders. We assured Minister Badal that incidents of violence in the United States are taken seriously and fully investigated by local law enforcement authorities."

Akali Dal leader and President of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee Manjit Singh G.K. was attacked by alleged pro-Khalistan activists in Yuba City Gurdwara in California on Saturday.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday that Washington will defend itself in a case brought up by Iran in The Hague to protest the US exit of the landmark Iran nuclear deal, and US re-imposition of sanctions that were lifted under the deal.

In a statement, Pompeo said that Iran's filing with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) "is an attempt to interfere with the sovereign rights of the US to take lawful actions, including re-imposition of sanctions, which are necessary to protect our national security".

Iran brought the case to the United Nations' highest court last month to challenge the US decision to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and to reimpose the sanctions that were suspended as part of that deal, Xinhua reported.

Earlier on Monday, the opening day of court hearings in The Hague, the Netherlands, Iran requested that judges at the ICJ order the immediate lifting of US sanctions.

"The sanctions are unjust and harmful," said Mohsen Mohebi, head of the international legal affairs center of the Iranian President's office. "The sanctions are damaging the economy of Iran, and driving millions of people into poverty."

Pompeo said: "The proceedings instituted by Iran are a misuse of the Court," adding that Washington "will vigorously defend against Iran's meritless claims this week in The Hague," and to continue to work with allies to counter Iran's regional influence and ballistic missile program.

Moreover, Iran asked the judges to note that the US breached its obligations to Iran, and order it to terminate the sanctions without delay and stop any threats about further sanctions.

Tehran also asked judges to make the US promise that it will not violate its obligations again, and will fully compensate Iran for the violation of its international legal obligations.

The lawsuit followed the decision by US President Donald Trump in May to quit the JCPOA. The US also announced the full reinstatement of US nuclear sanctions on Iran.

Iran accused the the US side of violating a 1955 friendship treaty between the two countries, the Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights, and requested the Court to indicate provisional measures.

Iran gave its oral arguments on Monday. On Tuesday, the US will have the opportunity to issue their reaction.

The second round of oral arguments are scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday this week. The announcement of the order on the provisional measures by the judges could take months.

The ICJ is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. Its role is to settle legal disputes submitted to it by states and to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by authorized UN organs and specialized agencies, in accordance with international law. The seat of the court is in The Hague.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Then prime minister was not in favour of advancing the election in 2004 as he feared defeat but an overconfident BJP still decided to go for it, says his long-time aide Shiv Kumar Pareek, recognisable to everyone by his handlebar moustache.

Pareek also feels that the coordination that existed between the (BJP) and workers during the Vajpayee era is now missing.

"There were two reasons behind the (2004) defeat. First, the slogan of ' Shining' went against us. The second was the decision to hold early polls. Although Atalji was not in favour of early polls, the party decided to hold it," Shiv Kumar, who had been with Vajpayee through thick and thin for over five decades and was his virtual shadow, told IANS in an interview.

He disclosed that Vajpayee had sensed the BJP's defeat in 2004, a day before he cast his vote in the last election he ever contested.

"'Sarkar to gayi. Hum haar rahe hain' (The government is going. We are losing)," Vajpayee told Shiv Kumar after returning from an election campaign in around midnight.

He said when he countered that a defeat was not possible, Vajpayee replied: "In which world are you living in? I am campaigning among people."

Asked about the performance of the and whether it was following the path shown by Vajpayee, Shiv Kumar said: "It's a political question. When I praise someone, I do it wholeheartedly, and when I criticise something, I do it to the fullest as well.

"Walking on Atalji's path means living the way he lived, treating everyone the way he did and performing like he did as a prime minister. I hope they will follow his path."

He added that it was due to the foundation laid by Vajpayee that the BJP not only crossed the half-way mark in 2014 but also became the first ever non-Congress party to a simple majority on its own. Besides the Centre, the BJP is now ruling 19 states. "If the foundations are strong, the structure will be steady."

Asked whether the country could see another Vajpayee, Shiv Kumar said: "I believe that an artisan may create any idol, whether of Lord Ram or Hanuman or Ma Durga, but people will not bow before it until it is consecrated and installed in a temple.

"Atalji used to do the same with the karyakartas. In the present situation, there is nobody who does it. The coordination that existed between the party and the workers during the Vajpayee era is missing now."

Shiv Kumar said the was doing a good job and taking ahead Vajpayee's initiatives. "This government is also bringing a lot of new schemes. In 2019, the people of this country will judge this government."

Is there any difference between the "Shining India" campaign and Modi's "New India" slogan?

He said: "Vajpayee was running a coalition government of 24 parties while Modi is running a majority government with BJP being in power in 19 states. Although an atmosphere against it is being created, the BJP will emerge victorious. The number of seats may go down but it will not be defeated."

Shiv Kumar rejected suggestions that Vajpayee kept himself away from active due to the shock defeat in 2004.

"Atalji was never bothered about victory or defeat. You must have heard his famous poem -- Na haar me na jeet me, kinchit nahi bhaybheet mai. After defeat he attended the BJP's Executive meet in where he declared his retirement from active After that he kept himself confined to attending limited functions of his closest ones. He remained active till Bhairon Singh Shekhawat contested the in 2007."

Asked whether Vajpayee really wanted Modi removed as Chief Minister of post the riots in Godhra, Shiv Kumar replied: "Vajpayee wanted him (Modi) to follow Rajdharma (rule of law)."

Shiv Kumar, who saw Vajpayee from very close quarters, said the late leader's life was like an open book.

"I am an orphan now," he said, referring to Vajpayee's passing away. He was the only person besides the family who was allowed on Vajpayee's cremation platform.

"I was an RSS worker. Later I became a worker of the Jan Sangh. After Shyama Prasad Mukerjee's death in mysterious circumstances, I approached Atalji and expressed my willingness to work with him as a caretaker. He was non-committal initially. Finally, he agreed and I started working with him in 1967."

He said this was how he got associated with Vajpayee till his last breath.

"If you look for the ideals of Lord Ram, the of Lord Krishna, the policies of Chanakya in one man, he was "

According to Shiv Kumar, Vajpayee used to watch movies, listen to songs and see Marathi plays at his 3, Krishna Menon Marg residence for 14 long years after he demitted office as Prime Minister and from where he was taken to hospital where he died.A court will deliver on September 4 judgement in the 2007 Hyderabad twin bomb blasts which had claimed 42 lives.

The Second Metropolitan Sessions Court will deliver the judgement, a lawyer told reporters outside the Nampally Criminal Court complex on Monday.

All four accused were produced before the court through video conferencing from Cherlapalli Central Prison on the city's outskirts where they are lodged.

The judge conducted the final hearing on Monday.

The near simultaneous bomb blasts at Gokul Chat, a popular eatery, and at Lumbini Park, near the State Secretariat, claimed 42 lives and injured over 50 on August 25, 2007. An unexploded bomb was also recovered under a foot-over bridge at Dilsukhnagar.

The alleged Indian Mujahideen (IM) operatives -- Mohammed Sadiq Ahmed Sheikh, Anique Shafiq Syed, Mohammed Sadiq, Akbar Ismail Choudhary and Ansar Ahmed Badhsah Sheikh -- are lodged in the Cherlapalli prison.

The trial against them was shifted to a court hall located in the premises of the prison in June 2018 on security grounds.

The accused were arrested by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad in October 2008. Three other accused including IM Chief Riyaz Bhatkal and his brother Iqbal Bhatkal still remain at large.

The case was initially investigated by the Andhra Pradesh Police and following bifurcation of the state it was handed over to the Counter Intelligence wing of Telangana Police.

Three chargesheets were filed against the accused. In 2014, the court framed charges against them. They were charged with murder and other offences under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Explosive Substances Act.

--IANS

ms/mag/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Cloud infrastructure and business mobility major Vmware has announced that "VMware Cloud on AWS" service is now available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Asia-Pacific (Sydney) region.

VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service that reduces the cost and effort associated with migrating applications to the Cloud.

The service brings VMware's enterprise-class Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) software to the AWS Cloud, enabling customers to run production applications across VMware vSphere-based hybrid cloud environments.

"VMware Cloud on AWS is now available across multiple regions globally including the US, Europe, and now Asia-Pacific, and we've increased the rate at which we deliver innovative capabilities and powerful solutions for our customers," Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware, said in a statement on Sunday.

VMWare is hosting its annual conference "VMWorld 2018" here throughout this week.

VMware Cloud on AWS provides a fast and cost-effective way to migrate mission-critical applications or even entire data centres, to the Cloud.

VMware also announced new capabilities that will help organisations rapidly migrate applications and data centres to an intrinsically secure Cloud service.

"VMware Cloud on AWS is the only Hybrid Cloud service that allows vSphere customers to leverage consistent infrastructure across on-premises data centers and AWS, allowing them to migrate current and new workloads to the Cloud with agility and best security," said Sandy Carter, Vice President, EC2 Windows Enterprise Workloads, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

--IANS

na/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Veteran actor Anupam Kher, who will next be seen in the film "The Accidental Prime Minister", has compared Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress President Rahul Gandhi, saying while the former has a road map for the country's development, the latter is yet to share his vision for the nation's future.

The actor's wife Kirron Kher is Chandigarh's BJP MP, but Anupam, who has been vocal about India's social, political and economic issues, says he will keep talking about the country without joining the world of

He shared his thoughts on a question and answer session with his fans on micro-blogging platform Twitter while he was on a flight to New York.

When a Twitter user asked Anupam to rate Modi's performance as a Prime Minister and if he has worked on issues that the nation is suffering from, the actor said: "PM Modi is earnestly working for the betterment of the country. It is for all to see. I have faith in his capabilities and intentions."

Asked to draw a comparison between Modi and Rahul Gandhi, Anupam commented: "Mr. Modi is a self made man. He seems to have kind of a road map for the development of India. Mr. Gandhi has so far got things on a platter so he is yet to tell us what is his vision for the future of India."

One user asked Anupam for suggestions for Rahul Gandhi after his London conference.

Anupam quipped: "Dil se bolo mere dost (Speak from the heart, my friend)."

A user urged Anupam to point out one work by Modi with proof for the betterment of India and its poor people.

"For that you can file a RTI," responded Anupam, who, in another response, shared that his favourite Prime Ministers of India have been Lal Bahadar Shastri and P.V. Narasimha Rao, apart from Modi.

He said he also found the Late Atal Bihari Vajpayee "remarkable and very inspirational".

Who do you think will win the 2019 general elections, asked one user.

"The party that gets the maximum votes," Anupam said.

Where do you see India in 5 years, literacy and economy wise?

"We are only a 71-year-old country. We may have a long journey but we are going at a great speed. We are the bestest," the actor said on an optimistic note.

Asked if there were any chances of him joining politics, the "Saaransh" actor said: "I will continue talking about the country without joining "

In "The Accidental Prime Minister", Anupam will be seen essaying former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

--IANS

rb/sed

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A woman from Chhattisgarh on Monday chose to go with her parents leaving behind her husband who was a Muslim but had converted to Hinduism to marry her.

Before converting to Hinduism, Aryan Arya was Muslim, Mohd Ibrahim Sidhiqui. He had converted to Hinduism on February 23, 2018, at Raipur.

The woman, Anjali Jain, who appeared before the bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud, said that she wanted to stay with her parents.

Noting her wish and also that she was a major, the court permitted her to go with her parents.

In the last hearing of the matter, the top court had asked the Dhamtari district Superintendent of Police to present Anjali Jain before the court.

Mohd Ibrahim Sidhiqui alias Aryan Arya had moved the top court against the Chhattisgarh High Court order giving her the option to either live her parents or be accommodated in a hostel.

The High Court order came even as it noted that Anjali Jain was a major (23 years), and by her own admission was married.

The High Court order came on a habeas corpus petition by Sidhiqui and after the Anjali Jain told the court that she had married him at an Arya Samaj Temple at Raipur on February 25, 2018, as per Hindu rites and traditions.

Sidhiqui had contended in his petition before the High Court that State police was not acting on his complaint.

Anjali after marrying Aryan Arya had returned to her parents' home with a hope that she would disclose her marriage in due course of time.

However, her parents came to know about the marriage. Anjali left her parents' home, without informing them, on the night of June 30.

But she was found by police even before she could have met her husband. The police took her to a police station and then to Sakhi Center for women set up by the government.

It has been contended that even though Anjali clearly wished to go with her husband, the local police incorrectly recorded her statement and handed over her custody to her father Ashok Jain.

--IANS

pk/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)It was widely known that Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, N N Vohra was not keen to continue beyond the two-month extension he was given on June 28. But he could not have bargained for such an unceremonious exit after ten years of distinguished service.

In Delhi apparently for a dentists appointment, he had to rush back that very next day as the new Governor flying in to take over charge. The outgoing Governor may have earned the ire of the Centre for not encouraging a rebellion in the PDP to facilitate the formation of a new coalition government. His written advisory to the ...DMK Working President is set to become the party President unopposed as he is the only person who has filed the nomination for that post on Sunday, the last day for filing of nominations, said a party official.

Similarly senior leader Duraimurugan is also set to become the party Treasurer unopposed.

Stalin gave his nomination papers to DMK's Organising Secretary R S Bharathi.

Stalin and Duraimurugan will be formally elected at the General Council meeting to be held in Chennai on August 28.

Their names were proposed by all the district secretaries of the party, a party official said.

On August 20, DMK General Secretary K Anbazhagan said in a statement that the General Council would meet at the party headquarters to elect a new President and the Treasurer.

Presently, the Leader of the Opposition in the Tamil Nadu assembly, M K Stalin, holds the posts of Working President and Treasurer.

The party's Executive Committee has already urged Stalin to take over as the party President.As many as 1,276 people have lost their lives, including 443 in Kerala, due to rains, floods and landslides in eight states during the monsoon season so far, the Home Ministry said today.

According to the Home Ministry's National Emergency Response Centre (NERC), 443 people have died in Kerala, where 54.11 lakh people in 14 districts have been severely hit by the rains and worst floods.

Standing crops on over 47,727 hectares of land were also damaged in the southern state.

As many as 218 people have died in Uttar Pradesh, 198 in West Bengal, 166 in Karnataka, 139 in Maharashtra, 52 in Gujarat, 49 in Assam and 11 in Nagaland.

Thirty-seven people have also been missing -- 15 in Kerala, 14 in Uttar Pradesh, five in West Bengal and three in Karnataka, while 349 have been injured in rain-related incidents in the states.

Rains and deluge have hit 26 districts in Maharashtra, 23 each in Assam and West Bengal, 18 in Uttar Pradesh, 14 in Kerala, 11 each in Karnataka and Nagaland and 10 in Gujarat.

Over 14.52 lakh people have been living in relief camps in Kerala, where 43,727 hectares of crops were damaged by the deluge.

In Assam, 11.47 lakh people have borne the brunt of the rains and floods, which have also hit crops on 27,930 hectares of land.

In West Bengal, 2.27 lakh people have been affected by the floods and crops in 48,552 hectares are damaged.

In Uttar Pradesh, 2.92 lakh people are affected by the monsoon rains which have also damaged 49,053 hectares of crops.

In Karnataka, 3.5 lakh population were hit by the rains, floods and landslides and crops on 3,521 hectares of land were damaged.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 15-year-old girl was killed while her cousin sister injured after they were hit by a tanker truck in west Delhi's Janakpuri area this morning, police said today.

The accident occurred near Mata Chanan Devi Hospital, they said.

The deceased was identified as Nagma. Her cousin sister, who is also aged 15, is undergoing treatment at a city hospital, they said.

The accused driver was arrested.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Three persons, including a minor were killed while eight others injured, four of them seriously, in Bihar's Araria district today when an auto tempo, in which they were travelling in collided head on with a truck coming from opposite direction, police said.

The incident occurred near Manulla village, the sub-divisional police officer Manoj Kumar said that the dead have been identified as Kishore Rishideo(38), his three year old daughter and Sunil Kumar Paswan(32).

All the eight injured persons, including four seriously injured, have been admitted to Araria sadar hospital for treatment, the police said.

The incident occurred when the driver of an auto tempo carrying 11 passengers, which was on its way to Raniganj from Badgama, lost his control over the vehcile and collided head on with a sand-laden truck coming from opposite direction, the SDPO said.

The truck overturned on the tempo killing three on the spot and left eight others injured.

The driver of the truck managed to escape from the spot, he said.

The bodies were trapped inside the sand laden truck and locals helped to take them out, the SDPO added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Four persons were arrested today in connection with a robbery-cum-murder case that took place in a nearby village earlier this month, police said.

With the arrest of four of the eight members involved in the crime, police claimed to have solved the case that took place on the intervening night of August 11-12 in Begumpur village.

Apart from looting gold and cash, the accused had brutally murdered the house owner Joga Singh (60) and severely injured his wife Kashmir Kaur and son Mandeep Kumar.

SSP Deepak Hilori said the crime was committed by members of the notorious 'Kalandhar gang', also known by names such as the 'Kala Kachha gang' and the 'Bengala gang'.

Sain Ali (mastermind), Tohin Motta, Dilbar Tandi, all residents of Malerkotla and Gurfan alias Bohru, a resident of Rajasthan's Pilani tehsil, were arrested, the SSP said, adding that all four belonged to the age group of 20-25 years.

The four other accomplices are yet to be arrested and efforts are on to nab them, Hilori said.

He said the police have recovered from the accused some of the gold ornaments along with the rods, sticks, torch and saw used in the crime.

The gang has been active in Punjab and the adjoining states for the past 15-20 years and a number of cases including those of brutal murders against all the accused are already registered in various police stations across the state.

Talking about their modus operandi, the SSP said the womenfolk of the gang firs recce the area where they intend to commit the crime by posing themselves as fakir, beggars and rag-pickers.

After getting detailed information about the family, they execute the crime at around midnight by brutally assaulting the family members first in order to create terror.

Basically they are nomads of Rajasthan who originally belong to 'fakir kalandhar' community, he said.

But now they are settled in other places such as Ludhiana, Malerkotla in Punjab, Saharanpur and Meerut in Uttar Pradesh and some parts of Haryana also, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Altogether four Bru refugee families have returned from the relief camps in Tripura after the final repatriation process started on Saturday, a senior state home department official here said.

A total of 32,876 Brus belonging to 5,407 families living in six relief camps in North Tripura district were identified by Mizoram government during November 2016 as bona fide residents of the state and could be repatriated.

The official said two Bru families, to be resettled at Rasdali and Meidum villages in Mizoram-Assam border district of Kolasib, returned today, the second day of the repatriation.

Yesterday being Sunday, it was not an official day for repatriation but one family returned. Another family had come back to Mizoram on Friday, a day before the repatriation commenced, he said.

The official said the state government would continue to undertake the repatriation process scheduled to be conducted from August 25 till September 25 in accordance with the road map for repatriation prepared by the state government and approved by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

During an exercise to identify who wanted to return to Mizoram recently, 2,753 people belonging to 423 families, majority of them from Kasakau relief camp, expressed willingness to be repatriated.

However, even these who expressed willingness to return to Mizoram earlier were most likely to stay back, Mizoram Bru Displaced People's Forum (MBDPF) president A Sawibunga told PTI from Naisingpara relief camp.

The MBDPF had signed an agreement with the Centre and governments of Mizoram and Tripura on July 3 in New Delhi for repatriation of the Bru displaced people. The repatriation process is scheduled to be completed before September 25.

The agreement stipulated that Rs 4 lakh for each repatriated Bru family would be deposited in the bank account of the head of the family which would mature after three years and payment of Rs 1.5 lakh as housing assistance.

Each repatriated Bru family would also be given Rs 5,000 through Direct Benefit Transfer every month and free ration for two years.

A section of the refugees, however, were not happy with the package and demand more.

The Brus are in Tripura since late 1997 in the wake of a communal tension triggered by the murder of a forest guard inside the Dampa Tiger Reserve on October 21, 1997 by Bru National Liberation Front militants.

The first attempt to repatriate them in 2009 failed and triggered another wave of exodus after the killing of a youth three days before the commencement of the repatriation process.

Though some Bru families had returned to Mizoram during a number of repatriation processes and on their own, many of them refused to leave Tripura.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Six people were arrested from different places here and 4.6 kg of poppy husk and ganja were seized from them, police said today.

SSP Vaibhav Krishna said Masuri town police arrested two persons early today with 2.3 kg poppy husk, and during questioning, the accused, Naeem and Mahboob of Dasna town, confessed that they were going to supply it in NCR area.

The officer also said that Vijaynagar police has arrested a man with 1.2 kg marijuana, while three others have been held from Sihani gate area with 1.1 ganja, a knife and a motorcycle stolen from sector 58 in Noida.

All the accused have been booked under Narcotic Drugs & Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, police said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The AAP dispensation and the Delhi home department are on collision course on the appointment of three special public prosecutors to handle the alleged assault case of Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash in the court, according to sources.

Sources said that home department has been urging Home Minister Satyendar Jain for appointing senior public prosecutors following the request of Delhi Police, but the minister has turned down the request.

They said that Jain is insisting on the appearance of no one else but the regular government public prosecutors to handle the alleged chief secretary assault case in court.

The home department recently received a letter from the Delhi Police requesting approval of the competent authority (home minister) for appointment of advocate Mohit Mathur, V Madhukar and Siddharth Aggarwal as special PPs.

Reacting to the development, Leader of Opposition in Delhi Assembly, Vijender Gupta, hit out the AAP government.

"The Delhi government is making deliberate, planned and sustained efforts to influence and derail the judicial process in the high profile case against CM, Dy. CM and 11 MLAs. Home Minister Satyender Jain is making all out effort to weaken the case," Gupta alleged in a statement.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)AAP legislators led by party leader Gopal Rai today submitted over 10 lakh letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to demand full statehood for the national capital.

The MLAs along with other party leaders assembled at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence and proceeded to submit the letters.

However, they were stopped by police on the way to Prime Minister's Office and later a select group of legislators submitted the letters.

The Aam Aadmi Party had started a signature campaign in July seeking public support on the same.

"The people of Delhi receive step-motherly treatment from the central government in their own home state. We had started a campaign for full statehood on July 1 and as part of it we launched a signature campaign addressed to the prime minister. We have received over 10 lakh signatures," AAP convenor Gopal Rai said.

A special three-day session of the Delhi Legislative Assembly was held in June to discuss the demand for full statehood for the national capital. The AAP-majority Assembly had even passed a resolution in this regard.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher,AAP legislators led by party leader Gopal Rai today went to submit over 10 lakh letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to demand full statehood for the national capital.

The Aam Aadmi Party had started a signature campaign in July seeking public support on the same.

The MLAs along with other party leaders assembled at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence and proceeded to submit the letters.

"The people of Delhi receive step-motherly treatment from the central government in their own home state. We had started a campaign for full statehood on July 1 and as part of it we started a signature campaign addressed to the prime minister. We have received over 10 lakh signatures," AAP convenor Gopal Rai said.

A special three-day session of the Delhi Legislative Assembly was held in June to discuss the demand for full statehood for the national capital. The AAP-majority assembly had even passed a resolution in this regard.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A body was recovered from the debris



of the two building blocks that collapsed in a government colony in Gujarat's Ahemedabad city following rains, an official said today.

While four people were rescued after the four-storey building blocks located in Odhav locality collapsed last night, some were feared trapped under the debris.

"After 12 hours of rescue operation, we recovered a body crushed under the debris. The four rescued people had received injuries and were taken to a hospital," additional chief fire officer Rajesh Bhatt said.

A number of families resided in the nearly 20-year-old building blocks, but majority of them had vacated the premises on Saturday after the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) officials asked them to do so, looking at the poor condition of the structures.

"We have contacted all the families and nobody is missing. So, there is no likelihood of anyone else being trapped under the debris, which is being cleared," Bhatt said.

The two building blocks, constructed under a government housing scheme about two decades back, collapsed around 8 pm yesterday after rains in the city, trapping five people who were residing there despite the AMC's warning.

AMC commissioner Vijay Nehra said officials had visited the building earlier and asked its residents to vacate the premises, owing to its dilapidated condition.

"Nearly 300 people were residing in the two building blocks. After our warning, most of them had vacated their houses, but some people returned there last evening," he said.

After the structure collapsed, personnel of the city fire brigade and the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) conducted the rescue operation.

Gujarat Minister of State for Home Pradipsinh Jadeja, city Mayor Bijal Patel and other senior officials visited the site last night.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Major Leetul Gogoi, who was at centre of the controversy, has been indicted by an Army court for "fraternising" with a woman, paving way for initiation of disciplinary action against him, Army officials said on Monday.

The report of the court of inquiry, headed by an officer of the rank of Brigadier, had been submitted earlier this month in which Major Gogoi has been charged with "fraternising" with a local in spite of instructions to the contrary and "being away from the place of duty while in operational area", they said.

Police had detained Gogoi on May 23 following an altercation when he was allegedly trying to enter a Srinagar hotel with an 18-year-old woman. He was briefly detained by the police and later handed over to Army authorities.

Maj Gogoi, who had used Farooq Ahmed Dar, an artisan, as a during Parliamentary by-elections in April 2017 by tying him to the bonnet of his vehicle, will now face summary of evidence before court martial proceedings are initiated against him, the officials said.

The punishment, according to the officials, can range from a severe reprimand to dismissal from service after summary of evidence that would emerge during the proceedings.

The Army had ordered the CoI following the May 23 incident. Army chief General had said in Pahalgam that exemplary punishment would be given to Gogoi if he was found guilty of "any offence".

The Army chief had said in May, barely two days after Major Gogoi had been caught with the woman, that "if any officer of the Indian Army is found guilty of any offence, we will take strictest possible action".

He also added, "If Major Gogoi has done something wrong, I assure you that he will be awarded punishment at the earliest... The punishment will set an example."



Major Gogoi had hit the headlines last year after he tied a man to a jeep in purportedly as a shield against stone pelters during polling in the Srinagar Lok Sabha by-election on April 9.

He had been backed by the Army. According to the Army, he had tied Farooq Ahmed Dar to his jeep to ensure that crowds do not throw stones at polling staff he was escorting to safety.

Rawat had then supported the young officer's action and honoured him with the Army chief's 'Commendation Card' for his 'sustained efforts' in counter-insurgency operations.

However, the May 23 incident was reversal of his fortunes and he found himself in dock after he was detained by the police along with another Territorial Army personnel, who happens to be a local.The Arunachal Pradesh Assembly today paid rich tribute to former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who passed away on August 16.

Speaker Tenzing Norbu Thongdok said the country had lost an excellent leader and a great poet with his demise.

"It was during his tenure that India successfully conducted nuclear tests at Pokhran, and renewed hopes for peace between India and Pakistan emerged with the start of the New Delhi-Lahore bus service.

The former prime minister's death was announced by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital on August 16. He was 93.

"Vajpayee's idea was to develop the North East so that India could shine in the real sense," Deputy Chief Minister Chowna Main said, adding, his principle of country first, party last had won the hearts of millions.

The House later observed a two-minute silence as a mark of respect to the departed leader, before the Speaker adjourned the proceedings for the day.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actor Asia Argento has been dropped as a judge on "X Factor Italy", days after reports emerged that she allegedly sexually assaulted a young actor and then paid him off.

According to Hollywood Reporter, the 42-year-old actor will only feature in the initial seven episodes of the show's upcoming season where contestants will be auditioned.

The producers -- Sky Italia and FremantleMedia -- have decided to remove the actor from live portion of the talent show, which will air on September 6.

Argento's replacement, who will shoot for the live portion with main cast on October 25, will be announced on September 5.

A report by The New York Times, obtained the legal documents in which actor Jimmy Bennett claimed that Argento assaulted him in a California hotel when he was only two months past his 17th birthday; the age of consent in California is 18.

Argento and Bennett co-starred in 2004 film "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things", which she also wrote and directed. Bennett, a 7-year-old at the time, played Argento's son. The two apparently kept in touch.

Argento has denied assaulting Bennett, saying the actor wanted to extract money from her after her name came up in the Weinstein scandal.

She said rather than facing a court battle at a time when she was already dealing with a public case, her then-boyfriend, late chef Anthony Bourdain, decided to pay off Bennett.

After the report surfaced, the producers had issued a statement saying that if they were true, they "would have no choice but to take note of it and put an end to the collaboration".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union Minister of State for Social Justice Ramdas Athawale today opposed the Sanatan Sanstha's demand to remove the word "secular" from the Constitution.

The Dalit leader also said he was opposed to the concept of a Hindu nation.

Earlier in the day, Sanstha spokesperson Chetan Rajhans said the Hindutva outfit wanted the term "secular" to be dropped from the Constitution, as it is "very vague and has no specific definition or meaning".

Athawale said the word secular has kept the country integrated.

"Notwithstanding anybody's demand, the word will remain in the Constitution forever," he told reporters.

Athawale, who heads RPI (A), demanded a proper probe as the "Sanstha is facing serious allegations".

However, he did not speak about the charges against the Sanstha.

The minister said the ban on the Goa-based Sanstha, as demanded by the Congress and other parties, would be of little use.

"Thoughts of a person cannot be stopped by killing him. No one should endorse violence. But those involved in violence should face stern action," he said.

Athawale said the Narendra Modi government is a secular dispensation.

"The 'Sab ka sath, fab ka vikas' motto of the BJP is a secular thought," he said.

Commenting on possibility of several opposition parties coming together against the BJP for the 2019 polls, Athawale said, "Even if the Opposition parties join hands, their unity will break over the issue of who would be prime minister. If the BJP, Shiv Sena and the RPI (A) contest 2019 elections jointly, we would win more than 42 seats of Lok Sabha in Maharashtra alone (out of 48)".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij today said the work of setting up Shri Krishna Ayush University at Kurukshetra is in full swing and Rs 2.98 crore



has already been sanctioned for its boundary wall.

Vij said instructions have been given to start the construction of the university and develop infrastructure as soon as possible.

The educational institution would be a perfect combination of modernity and antiquity, the minister said.

It would provide post graduation courses in Aayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Sidhha and Homeopathy to make the youth of Haryana aware about the ancient and alternate medical system.

Vice Chancellor of University Baldev Kumar said the university is being set up in 100 acres of land in Fattupur village of Kurukshetra.

The construction work would start soon after completing all necessary formalities, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The government's ambitious Ayushman Bharat scheme, that will pay up to Rs five lakh in hospitalisation costs to poor and vulnerable families, will also cover drugs and diagnostic expenses three days prior to and 15 days post hospitalisation.

He was speaking at an an event where the logo of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojna (PMJAY) or Ayushman Bharat was unveiled along with Data Privacy and Information Security Policy and Anti-fraud Guidelines.

Nadda said strict action will be taken against those involved in running fake websites which lure people with bogus schemes in the name of the government's insurance scheme.

He said for identification of beneficiaries of the Ayushman Bharat scheme, letters will be sent to every family having a QR code. Pre-authorisation for the scheme will be done in half an hour, he added.

The scheme will be launched on September 25 on the birth anniversary of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay, as announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Nadda said around 85 per cent of rural families and 60 per cent of urban families have been identified so far under the scheme.

Asked whether the scheme was being renamed after former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, he said, "Its name is Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojna. We just released the logo."



Nadda said a cover of Rs five lakh per family per year will be given under the scheme which covers 10.74 crore poor and vulnerable families.

"Three days ahead of admission and 15 day after discharge, people will be given free medicines, diagnostics and all others," he said replying to a query on till how many days before admission and after discharge, the patients will get facilities free of cost.

The objectives of the AB-PMJAY are to reduce out-of- pocket hospitalisation expenses, fulfil unmet needs and improve access of identified families to quality inpatient care and day-care surgeries, the minister said.

The services will include more than 1,300 procedures covering pre and post hospitalisation, diagnostics, medicines among others, and the beneficiaries will be able to move across borders and access services across the country through the provider network seamlessly, Nadda added.

He said 29 states and UTs have signed the MoU and started working on implementation of the scheme while pilots have started in 16 states and UTs.

Other states and UTs will also start pilots before fully launching the scheme on September 25, he said.

"The scheme's architecture and formulation has undergone a truly federal process, with stakeholder inputs taken from all states and UTs through national conclaves, sectoral working groups, intensive field exercises and piloting of key modules," the health minister said.

He said strict action will be taken against those running fake websites about Ayushman Bharat and added no enrolment is required for beneficiaries and there is no payment for obtaining services at empaneled hospitals.

"Criminal cases will be lodged against fraudulent websites and agents trying to collect money from beneficiaries, he added.

To strengthen implementation and operational preparedness, he said training has already been initiated in 15 states and UTs.

The government has given total flexibility to the states to choose their own modes of implementation among Insurance, Trust or Mixed Mode and it is ready to provide the required support as well, the minister said.

The National Health Agency Information Security and Data Privacy are being institutionalised to provide adequate guidance and set of controls on the secure handling of beneficiaries' personal data and sensitive personal data in compliance with all laws and regulations applicable, he said.

"The information security is based on international best practices and India specific regulations and more than 94 controls set at various levels for secure handling of sensitive personal data," he said.

On expenses, he said the government stands committed to support the people who need it.

"Our effort is to benefit the maximum number of people. It is a political commitment. Whatever expenses are there, we will give it" he said adding the call centre for this scheme will start from September 5.

Asked if the government had hurried into announcing the scheme as a part of the identification process was still underway, he said, "This is a continuous process."



"Around 85 per cent have been covered so they can take its benefit. The rest 15 per cent we are trying to reach them. It will be done in a month or two," he said.

Nadda said the hospitals which want to facilitate the scheme beneficiaries, they have to have a "Arogya mitra" who just has to be computer literate and the rest of the training will be given to him by the ministry.

Asked if states like Delhi were yet to take a decision on joining the scheme, he said they were on board and the MoU will be signed soon.

Nadda also said he had asked the Odisha chief minister to take a decision on joining the scheme so that people benefit through it.

Asked if the government was thinking of empanelling diagnostic labs as well, he said, "They can develop a system but the government will give payment (under the scheme) only to hospitals.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The NCP sought today a ban on the Sanatan Sanstha over its alleged links with a "bomb plot" and the killing of rationalists and opposed the right-wing group's demand to drop the word "secular" from the Constitution.

The Sharad Pawar-led party said those arrested in connection with seizure of explosives in parts of Maharashtra were often seen at events organised by the Sanatan Sanstha, but the Goa-based outfit is now distancing itself from them.

"Whenever someone is held, it (the Sanatan Sanstha) claims those held are not associated with it. Those who have been arrested were often seen at events of the Sanatan Sanstha or (its affiliate) the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti," Maharashtra NCP spokesperson Nawab Malik told reporters here.

"It fears the government may come under pressure, leading to A ban on the outfit. The Sanstha is shrugging its responsibility. We demand the outfit be banned. The Centre should take immediate steps," Malik added.

Speaking to the media separately, NCP chief Sharad Pawar trashed the right-wing group's demand to drop the word "secular" from the Constitution.

"It does not matter who says what. Only Parliament has the right to change a decision made in Parliament. And I don't think no party in the Parliament thinks so (about removing the word secular from the Constitution)," said the former Union minister.

The NCP chief made the remarks here after attending a meeting of the party's core committee and another with its senior leaders to discuss its activities in the run up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Probe agencies suspect peopled linked with the Sanatan Sanstha were associated with the recently unearthed "bomb plot" and the killings of four rationalists-activists in Maharashtra and Karnataka since 2013, charges denied by the outfit.

The Sanatan Sanstha today claimed persons arrested in connection with the seizure of explosives and arms in different parts of Maharashtra as well as for the four killings were not its "seekers".

It also claimed the term "secular" in the Constitution was vague and should be removed by Parliament by bringing about an amendment.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah and 15 chief ministers of the party will attend a meeting here tomorrow as it gears up for the Lok Sabha polls, which are less than eight months away.

BJP sources said the conference of chief ministers, in which the top brass takes stock of works going on in states ruled by the party and issues them directions, has assumed added significance due to the upcoming assembly elections in three states and the Lok Sabha polls and these would be likely discussed in the day-long meeting.

Assembly polls are due in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, all ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), later this year.

The agenda of good governance and running pro-poor policies has been a key feature of the chief ministers' meetings, which have been taking place regularly since Modi took over as prime minister in 2014.

BJP's deputy chief ministers in different states will also attend the meeting.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Of course. You would have to be be barking mad to want to bring this rabble to NZ. But then socialists are mad by definition. It's not as if we don't have...Barring the ruling BJP, no political parties in Tripura are opposed to National Register of Citizens (NRC) revision, a senior CPI(M) leader said today.

If the Centre wishes to revise the citizenship register across the country, the CPI (M) has "no reason to oppose the move", Lok Sabha MP Jitendra Chowdhury said.

"NRC is a regular matter. It was supposed to be regularly updated but no state took measures after 1951. Following the recent Assam exercise, talks about updating NRC in other states have been doing the rounds. I don't think any Indian citizen will oppose the exercise," he told reporters.

The Indigenous Nationalist Party of Twipra (INPT), a regional party with a tribal base, has also been demanding NRC revision in the state.

The party organized a five-hour sit-in in front of Swami Vivekananda Maidan here today to press for their demands, including revision of register and empowerment of Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council, which administers areas inhabited by indigenous people of the state.

INPT president Bijoy Hrangkhawl said a delegation of the party would visit Delhi soon to submit a memorandum to the Centre in this regard.

"The demand for NRC revision is a constitutional one. We demand that citizens clarify their stance on the issue," Hrangkhawl said during his speech.

Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb had said last month that everyone in the state has valid papers and there was no demand for updating the register.

"Everything is in order in Tripura and everyone has valid papers. Hence, it is not an issue for us," Deb had said.

The IPFT, the ruling party's ally in the state, however, has been vocal in its demand for draft revision.

"The revision should be carried out on the lines of NRC exercise in Assam. It is the need of the hour," Mevar Kumar Jamatiya, the General Secretary of Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT), said last week.

Taking a dig at the BJP, the Congress today said that saffron party maintains double standards.

"Even when BJP national president Amit Shah said the NRC should be revised, Chief Minister Biplab Deb asserted there was no need for the exercise. This only goes on to show the double standards of the BJP," Congress Vice President Tapas Dey said.

He, however, cautioned that many tribal people might not have their documents in place.

"We have always been in favour of NRC revision, but in case of Tripura, utmost care should be taken because tribal people in the hilly and remote areas might have misplaced their documents. Under such circumstances, the real citizens should not be deleted from the list.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)At least six persons were injured in a clash between activists of the TMC and the opposition BJP today over a rumour that an MLA of the ruling party was injured when a rally was attacked with stones, police said.

Eleven persons were detained in connection with the clash that occurred in Belari gram panchayat (GP) area of the district.

Trinamool Congress (TMC) workers brought out a procession after forming the board at Dhandali GP and the party's Howrah Rural district president Pulak Roy, an MLA, took part in it, police said.

BJP workers allegedly pelted stones at the rally and a rumour quickly spread that Roy was injured in stone throwing.

Roy himself, however, confirmed that he was not attacked.

Meanwhile, the rumour spread to the neighbouring Belari GP where the BJP had won majority of the seats.

In protest against the 'attack' on the MLA, TMC workers put up a road blockade at Belari and local BJP activists also organised a rally denying the allegation.

The two sides clashed and six persons were injured, police said adding that they were released from hospital after first aid.

The police and RSF personnel brought to the spot and brought the situation under control.

Eleven persons were detained in this connection, police said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The BJP would launch its campaign for the Madhya Pradesh assembly polls at a convention to be held here on September 25, a senior leader said today.

The gathering--Mahakumbh--is being organised to mark the birth anniversary of RSS ideologue and Bhartiya Jana Sangh co-founder Deendayal Upadhyay, at the BHEL Jamboree Maidan.

State unit BJP president Rakesh Singh said they would invite Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the event to be attended by party chief Amit Shah, leaders of the BJP from Madhya Pradesh and party workers.

"The Madhya Pradesh BJP would launch its poll campaign by holding 'Mahakumbh' on the birth anniversary of Deendayal Upadhyay on September 25. Party president Amit Shah will attend the convention," Singh told reporters.

Singh also said that Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan's ongoing "Jan Ashirwad Yatra", which was earlier scheduled to be culminated at the convention, would continue even after September 25.

Assembly polls are slated to be held in the central state later this year, schedule for which is yet to be announced by the Election Commission.

Singh said the BJP had organised similar gatherings ahead of the assembly polls in 2008 and 2013.

Responding to a query on the photos purportedly showing some leaders of the state BJP laughing while carrying the urns containing ashes of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Singh said these photos are doctored.

The photos had gone viral on the social media.

Madhya Pradesh has a 230-member assembly.

The Congress has been out of power in the BJP-ruled state since 2003.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Six fishermen swam to safety while one was missing after their boat capsized in the Arabian Sea off the Uttan coast here in Maharashtra, police said today.

The mishap took place around 9.30 pm yesterday when the seven fishermen on board the transit boat were on way to a bigger boat anchored in the deep sea, an official at the Uttan police station said.

Amid the high tide, their transit boat overturned off the Uttan coast, located in Bhayandar area of Thane, he said.

While four fishermen swam to safety late last night, two reached the Uttan shore this morning, the official said.

Divers and locals were searching for the missing fisherman, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)American defence major Boeing and Dynamatic Technologies have announced delivery of another set of aft pylon and cargo ramp components for Boeing's H-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopter.

Indian firm Dynamatic Technologies manufactures critical components for H-47 Chinook, one of the world's most advanced multi-mission, heavy-lift transport helicopters.

"This delivery marks a significant milestone in the success of the Make in India programme and our commitment towards building indigenous manufacturing capabilities," Pratyush Kumar, president of Boeing India said in a statement today.

India is procuring 15 Chinook heavy-lift helicopters from Boeing.

"We established the Chinook production line in 2014 as part of our commitment to manufacture aerospace aerostructures in India and Dynamatic has been our key partner in that journey. The future of advanced manufacturing in India looks promising," he said.

"Boeing and Dynamatic Technologies have announced the delivery of the 75th aft pylon and cargo ramp components for Boeing's H-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopter," Boeing India said in the statement.

Dynamatic Technologies had delivered the first set of aft pylon and cargo ramp assemblies for the Chinook in February 2015. This first delivery was mentioned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his inaugural address at the Aero India Exhibition in 2015, it said.

"This is a remarkable milestone in our partnership with Boeing," said Udayant Malhoutra, CEO and Managing Director of Dynamatic Technologies, adding, "We are manufacturing complex assemblies for global OEMs and have become an integral part of the worldwide supply chain, incorporating globally accepted standards of aerospace manufacturing in our facilities."



The Chinook is a true multi-role, vertical-lift platform, emphasising heavy-lift transport of troops, artillery, equipment, and fuel. It is the helicopter of choice for humanitarian disaster-relief operations and mass evacuation of refugees.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The voter enlistment forms duly filled in by the displaced Bru people in the relief camps of the neighbouring Tripura have gone missing following a burglary at the election office of Mizoram's Mamit district, a top police officer said here today.

The burglary comes at a time when the final phase of repatriation of Bru families from Tripura to Mizoram is under progress.

The district administration in Mamit has filed an FIR in the matter and an investigation is being carried out to solve the case, Superintendent of Police H L Thangzuala said.

"In an FIR filed on August 24, the administration said that the election office of Mamit was burgled the night before and crucial documents have gone missing," he said.

A Special Investigation Team (SIT) has been constituted, with Sub-Divisional Police Officer as the chief, to probe into the complaint, the SP said, adding that no arrest has been made in the case so far.

Thousands of Bru refugees from Mizoram fled to Tripura after ethnic clashes of 1997. The clashes broke out after a forest official was killed by Bru National Liberation Front (BNLF) militants.

Over 32,000 Bru people have been living in six temporary camps in North Tripura district since then.

The Centre, in association with the governments of Mizoram and Tripura, had been repatriating the displaced Brus in phases.

Mizoram, the last remaining Congress bastion in the northeast, is due for polls this December.

The election officials from the state had recently visited the refugee camps in Tripura for updating the voters' list amid protests by civil societies in the state, who insisted that the revision process be carried out after the repatriation process.

The officials, who returned from Tripura on August 19, had been working to ascertain the genuineness of the claims made in the enlistment forms, a source in the district administration said, adding that the process to update the electoral roll now hangs in balance.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A five-year-old girl died today after the cylinder attached to her ventilator support system ran out of oxygen while she was being shifted to another hospital 160 kms away in Chhattisgarh's Bastar division, an official said.

Bijapur Chief Medical and Health Officer Dr B R Pujari said the incident took place when Bulbul Kudiyam, who was diagnosed with severe pneumonia and was on ventilator support, was being shifted to Jagdalpur Medical College Hospital in Bastar district from Bijapur district hospital.

Kudiyam, a resident of Toynar village, had fallen ill at her ashram school in nearby Matwada village and was admitted in Bijapur district hospital on August 22, Dr Pujari told PTI.

He said that last night it was decided to shift her to Jagdalpur, around 160 kms from Bijapur, as her condition had turned critical.

Dr Pujari said the oxygen in the cylinder ran out by the time the ambulance reached Tokapal village in Bastar and Kudiyam was declared dead on arrival by doctors of the Jagdalpur Medical College Hospital.

"Generally it requires one oxygen cylinder to shift patients from Bijapur to Jagdalpur. We will investigate how it got exhausted so quickly," Dr Pujari said.

When asked if a medical technician was travelling in the ambulance, Dr Pujari said that the hospital's sole 108 ambulance with a technician was on duty somewhere else and so Kudiyam was shifted in an ambulance without one.

"If the driver had contacted Bijapur health officials in time, they would have arranged for an oxygen cylinder from nearby ambulance services," he said.

The ambulance driver had reportedly contacted staff at Tokapals local government hospital for a replacement oxygen cylinder but was allegedly refused, Chamru Kudiyam, the child's father, said.

The girl's father alleged that negligence on the part of Bijapur district hospital led to his daughter's death.

"The oxygen exhausted in the cylinder when the ambulance was nearing Tokapal. The driver had tried to arrange for another cylinder from Tokapal hospital but staff there refused. There was no technician in the ambulance either," Chamru told reporters.

He also accused his child's ashram school authorities of not providing timely treatment to his daughter.

Bijapur Collector K D Kunjam said that he had directed the CMHO to probe the incident and submit a report.

He said that authorities at Matwada ashram school had also been asked to give an explanation about the treatment given to the child when she fell ill there.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Calcutta High Court today set aside a single judge order directing the transfer of probe into the unnatural death of a Raniganj businessman's wife to the CBI from the state CID.

A division bench comprising Chief Justice J Bhattacharya and Justice A Banerjee directed that the CID will continue its probe and asked the state investigating agency to file a progress report within three months.

The bench set aside the August 21 order of Justice Rajasekhar Mantha following an appeal by the West Bengal police.

Justice Mantha had directed the transfer of the investigation into the unnatural death of Pushpa Bhalotia, who died on October five, 2017, to the central agency.

Justice Mantha had noted that there were glaring gaps in the progress report filed by the CID, which had taken over the investigation from the local police.

It had been claimed by her husband Manoj Bhalotia, a well-known businessman in the mines and business town, and his family members that Pushpa had committed suicide by setting herself afire at their residence at Raniganj in West Burdwan district.

The 39-year old woman was found with burn injuries and was taken to a private hospital in Durgapur where she succumbed.

The post mortem report, however, said that there was a bullet injury in her forehead which could be the reason for her death, apart from the burn injuries, counsel for the woman's brother, who had filed a petition in the court seeking a CBI probe into her death, had said.

Questioning as to how she could shoot herself and then set herself afire or vice versa, Pushpa's brother Gopal Agarwal had filed a murder case against her husband and his family members.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bosnian journalists today demanded justice after a reporter said he was severely beaten by unknown attackers after covering politically-sensitive protests.

The US and European Union also condemned the assault on Vladimir Kovacevic, a journalist who works for the TV network BN in Bosnia's Serb-run entity.

Yesterday night he posted a photo on Twitter of his bloodied face and bandaged head.

The two attackers "clearly knew where I lived... when I passed by them they began to beat me brutally," wrote Kovacevic, who was hospitalised in Banja Luka, the administrative capital of Republika Srpska.

The incident sparked outcry among local media, who reported that scores of people, including many journalists, gathered in Banja Luka today to protest the attack.

"One of us has been attacked," said the president of Bosnia's journalists' association Marko Divkovic.

"It looks like a case of organised terror from politicians, the justice system and the police," he alleged, adding that he feared more trouble for Bosnian journalists in the run-up to October 7 elections.

Reporters in Bosnia are routinely subjected to verbal attacks, threats and libel lawsuits in a country with a deeply polarised political climate.

Kovacevic was attacked while returning from covering a demonstration over the death of 21-year-old student David Dragicevic.

The young man's death has become a symbol of corruption and injustice with protesters accusing authorities of a cover-up.

The demonstrations -- held daily since March -- have become the leading political issue in Bosnia's Serb-run entity as elections near.

The US Embassy in Sarajevo condemned the attack and other recent physical assaults of journalists as "unacceptable".

The EU's delegation in Bosnia also denounced the incident and said it was closely tracking press freedom as it analyses the country's application for membership in the bloc.

Harlem Desir, a media representative for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), also deplored the beating saying "the negative rhetoric being used against the media must end, in order to prevent further such attacks against journalists."



"I urge the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina to swiftly investigate this attack and bring its perpetrators to justice," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Tamil Nadu government today lauded squash players from the state who had won medals at the ongoing Asian Games in Indonesia and announced a cash incentive of Rs 20 lakh each to them.

Chief Minister K Palaniswami congratulated Joshna Chinnappa, Dipika Pallikal Karthik and Saurav Ghosal for winning bronze medals in individual squash events at the ongoing games in Jakarta-Palembang and appreciated them for bringing laurels to the country and the state.

He recalled their good show in the Commonwealth Games held earlier this year.

"On behalf of the people of Tamil Nadu, I convey my heartiest congratulations to you on your marvellous achievement," he said in separate letters to the three players.

"You will now be eligible to receive the high cash incentive of Rs 20 lakh, which was announced by late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa to encourage sportspersons," he said.

He wished the players brought more fame to the country and the State.

Chinnappa, Dipika Pallikal and Ghosal had won bronze medals in squash women's and men's singles, respectively.

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Algun dia Colombia volvera a la ideologia de Bolivar







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LOS REVOLUCIONARIOS NO TOMAN CACA-COLA No se trata solamente de un capricho, sino de una sana actitud en todos los sentidos. Desde la solidaridad con el pueblo colombiano donde la empresa Caca-Cola ha cometido los mas grandes abusos contra sus trabajadores incluyendo el presunto secuestro y asesinato de los dirigentes del sindicato, hasta la proteccion de la salud de nuestros hijos, enviciados por ese jarabe de cola y azucar, que les produce obesidad prematura. Pensemos tambien los revolucionarios, que ese dinero que gastamos en los refrescos es utilizado por esas empresas para financiar el terrorismo en nuestro pais. Es cierto, no se trata solo de la Caca-Cola, sino tambien de la cerveza, de los cigarrillos y todos esos articulos innecesarios y mas que eso, daninos para nuestra salud. Podriamos incluso pensar en un dia de parada para cada uno de ellos. Es cuestion de irnos organizando. Pero para empezar, que tal si dejamos de comprar Caca-Cola y sus similares?



























Cuando lo extraordinario se vuelve cotidiano...



Discurso del Acto de Grado en Barinas en 12 de Febrero del 2005 Queridos Graduandos:



Mas que un discurso, quiero dirigirles algunas palabras que escribi anoche, despues de visitar en las clinicas, a los estudiantes heridos, a consecuencia de los enfrentamientos con la policia de hace apenas dos dias.



Me ha tocado por razones del destino, ser la persona que les otorgue el titulo que bien merecieron con sus estudios. Y me siento sumamente orgulloso de serlo. Me consta que la Universidad de Los Llanos Occidentales Ezequiel Zamora, a pesar de lo dicho por los enemigos de esta universidad, es una universidad de primera.



No tendremos la mejor planta fisica, en los salones hace calor. En el comedor hace calor. Pero no es en lo material que las cosas deben valorarse. El mayor capital es el ser humano. Y en eso, nuestra UNELLEZ, lo digo con conocimiento de causa, esta sobrada. Los llaneros venezolanos son nobles, valientes, de coraje.



En la UNELLEZ hacen vida, en este momento, aproximadamente 67000 personas. El 97% de ellas son estudiantes. Jovenes que, como Ustedes hasta el dia de hoy, buscan ese titulo, que constata los anos de dedicacion y de estudio.



Los jovenes son el rio de la vida, ustedes graduados deben ser los capitanes de esos barcos que naveguen por el rio de la vida.



Nuestra Patria atraviesa momentos muy dificiles porque decidio dejar de ser esa matrona de edad vetusta y complaciente, para ser joven, rebelde y altanera. Nuestra imagen ya no es la de una acaudalada ricachona mayamera. En nuestro rostro brilla ahora la sonrisa del Che Guevara, con su diente delantero torcido, su pelo largo y su boina con la estrella.



Entender esto, a mi me ha tomado practicamente toda la vida. Tengo 53 anos, y ya perdi mi oportunidad de derramar sangre joven a causa de un ideal.



Ustedes son jovenes, estan en la flor de la vida. No cometan por favor el error de renunciar a su instinto de rebelion. El Che Guevara fue Ministro de a Economia en Cuba. Los billetes y las monedas se adornaban con su rostro. Nada de eso le importo. Primero fue a Angola donde paso un penoso ano de combate. Despues se fue a Bolivia, donde encontro la muerte. El Che era el ultimo que comia, el que cargaba la mochila mas pesada. Siempre se sacrificaba por los demas en un estoicismo que mas parecia fervor religioso que ideologia marxista.



Si quieren un modelo de vida. Ahi lo tienen.



Dije hace unos momentos que el 97% de la poblacion de la UNELLEZ es estudiante. Se imaginan Ustedes la Universidad que podriamos tener si todos los estudiantes tuvieran la abnegacion, la combatividad del Che?



Los momentos que se avecinan van a requerir de una gran unidad del pueblo venezolano. La alternativa de continuar siendo libres o regresar a la pobreza se nos planteara en los proximos dias de forma enmascarada, o quizas peor, desenmascarada, vestida con uniforme de soldado del Imperio.



Por nuestra parte podemos esperar lo mejor. La macroeconomia no podria ir mejor, la justicia social ha mejorado notablemente. Las misiones ocupan un papel muy importante en el pago de dicha justicia social. Aqui en Barinas ya hemos cumplido con dos de las misiones, la mision Robinson y la mision Sucre. No hay analfabetismo y no hay exclusion en la educacion superior, en estas tierras de Zamora.



Pero ay malhaya! Son precisamente estos exitos los que nos hacen mas antipaticos al Imperio. Para ellos, somos inclusive un mal ejemplo que se esta contagiando al resto del continente y cuidado sino al resto del mundo.



Nunca venceremos al Imperio. Estara siempre ahi, acechando. Por lo menos hasta que el mismo no se autodestruya. Porque, sepanlo senores, el neoliberalismo es canibal. Cuando le ataque el hambre, se devorara a si mismo.



Ustedes, queridos graduandos, a partir de hoy pasan a conformar la elite profesional que debe sostener este pais en los proximos cuarenta o cincuenta anos. Anos decisivos para el logro de nuestra libertad y del rescate de nuestra Soberania.



No se dejen comprar. No se dejen corromper. No se dejen gritar. No se dejen pisar. Que nadie les diga que comer, o que vestirse, o que leer. Sean siempre autenticos, rebeldes, contestatarios. Pero eso si, profundamente patriotas, dignos de ser hijos de Bolivar.



Muchas gracias y que Dios los bendiga.





Alguna duda?



Medio siglo de Holocausto Palestino



Oscar Zanartu Nacio en Caracas en 1960. Ha realizado exposiciones individuales en las galerias Minotauro, Clave y San Francisco, y en salas de Coro, estado Falcon, y Puerto Ordaz, estado Bolivar. En Paris su obra ha sido exhibida en el Centro Cultural Tanagra, en la Exposicion Cite Internationale des Arts, en las galerias De Mars y Arver Space, al igual que en la Galeria Municipal Levallois, en Levallois Perret (Francia). En muestras colectivas, su obra se ha expuesto en Belgica, Francia, Estados Unidos y Venezuela; en Caracas intervino en la exposicion "Del genesis a la memoria", 1995, organizada por la Fundacion La Previsora. En 1982 obtuvo el Premio Nacional Critven y en 1990 la Mencion de Honor Jose Antonio Paez, en la Embajada de Venezuela en Paris. En 1991 se le concedio el primer premio de Pintura Itinerante, en Levallois Perret, Francia.



OZ1



OZ2



OZ3



OZ4



Homenaje a Jason Galarraga



La Victoria de Samotracia



Odalisca



Mas fotos de la nevada del pasado agosto 2008



























La Sierra Nevada de Merida



Nuestro precioso Churum Meru



Homenaje a Picasso



Autoretrato



Sabes lo que bebes en una Coca-Cola?

La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.

Mi profesion?

Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.

Sal en la Coca Cola?

A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.

De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:

Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gusto

Acido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)

azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)

Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantas

Mucha Cafeina

Conservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o Potasio

Dioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebe

Sal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracion

El uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.

Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.

Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.

En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).

Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.

La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.

Bebidas Light?

Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el

Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.



Publicado por loretahur



En realidad, la formula secreta de la Coca-Cola se puede detallar en 18 segundos en cualquier espectrometro optico, y basicamente la conocen hasta los perros. Lo que ocurre es que no se puede fabricar igual, a no ser que uno disponga de unos cuantos millones de dolares para ganarle la demanda que te metera la Coca-Cola ante la justicia (ellos no perderian).La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gustoAcido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantasMucha CafeinaConservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o PotasioDioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebeSal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracionEl uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el aspartamo , despues de tres semanas mojado, pasa a tener gusto de trapo viejo sucio.Para evitar eso, se agregan una infinidad de otros productos quimicos, uno para alargar la vida del aspartamo, otro para neutralizar el color, otro para mantener el tercer quimico en suspension porque sino el fondo de la gaseosa quedaria oscuro, otro para evitar la cristalizacion del aspartamo, otro para realzar el sabor, dar mas intensidad al acido citrico o fosforito que perderia su sabor por el efecto de los cuatro productos quimicos iniciales... y asi sucesivamente.Un consejo final !!Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.Publicado por loretahur

MARGARINA o MANTEQUILLA La margarina fue producida originalmente para engordar a los pavos; cuandolo que hizo en realidad fue matarlos.Las personas que habian puesto el dinero para la investigacion quisieronrecobrarlo asi que empezaron a pensar en una forma de hacerlo.Tenian una sustancia blanca, que no tenia ningun atractivo como comestible,asi que le anadieron el color amarillo, para venderselo a lagente en lugar de la mantequilla.Que tal esa?... Ahora han sacado algunos nuevos sabores para vender mas alos incautos como usted y yo.CONOCE USTED la diferencia entre la margarina y la mantequilla?Siga leyendo hasta el final... porque se pone bastante interesante!Comparacion entre mantequilla y margarina:

1.- Ambas tienen la misma cantidad de calorias.

2.- La mantequilla es ligeramente mas alta en grasas saturadas: 8 gramos,comparada con los 5 gramos que tiene la margarina.

3.- Comer margarina en vez de mantequilla puede aumentar en 53% el riesgo deenfermedades coronarias en las mujeres, de acuerdo con un estudiomedico reciente de la Universidad de Harvard.

4.- Comer mantequilla aumenta la absorcion de gran cantidad de nutrientesque se encuentran en otros alimentos.

5.- La mantequilla provee beneficios nutricionales propios mientras lamargarina tiene solo los que le hayan sido anadidos al fabricarla.

6.- La mantequilla sabe mucho mejor que la margarina y mejora el sabor deotros alimentos.7.- La mantequilla ha existido durante siglos mientras que la margarinatiene menos de 100 anos.

Ahora... sobre la margarina:

1.- Es muy alta en acidos grasos trans. (Si, esos que recien ahora loscientificos descubrieron que son malisimos y los gobiernoscomenzaron a prohibirlos) .

2.- Triple riesgo de enfermedades coronarias.

3.- Aumenta el colesterol total y el LDL (el colesterol malo) y disminuye elHDL (el colesterol bueno).

4.- Aumenta en cinco veces el riesgo de cancer.

5.- Disminuye la calidad de la leche materna.

6.- Disminuye la reaccion inmunologica del organismo.

7.- Disminuye la reaccion a la insulina.

Y he aqui el factor mas inquietante (AQUI ESTA LA PARTE MAS INTERESANTE! ):A la margarina le falta UNA MOLECULA para ser PLASTICO...!!Solo este hecho es suficiente para evitar el uso de la margarina de porvida, y de cualquier otra cosa que sea hidrogenada (esto significaque se le anade hidrogeno, lo cual cambia la estructura molecular de lassubstancias).Usted puede ensayar lo siguiente:Compre un poco de margarina y dejela en el garaje o en un sitio sombreado.Dentro de unos dias notara dos cosas:

* No habra moscas; ni siquiera esos molestos bichos se le acercaran (esto yale debe decir a usted algo).

* No se pudre ni huele mal o diferente porque no tiene valor nutritivo; nadacrece en ella. Ni siquiera los diminutos microorganismos puedencrecer en ella.Por que? Porque es casi plastico!!



No a la guerra, Si a la Paz



Misterios de la ciencia...



Los costos de la guerra



medicos y capitalismo...



Capitalismo...



medicos (2)



Quien educa a nuestros hijos?



Los Medios...



Sin Palabras...



Chistes feministas

- Cual es el problema, Eva?

- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz...

- Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.

- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...

- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.

- Que es un hombre?

- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.

- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.

- Cual es el truco?.

- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.

- Cual?

- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.





Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas?  Porque todos son unos cerdos

Un dia, en el Paraiso, Eva llamo a Dios: Tengo un problema.- Cual es el problema, Eva?- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz... - Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.- Que es un hombre?- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.- Cual es el truco?.- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.- Cual?- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas?  Porque todos son unos cerdos

Ellas...



Ellas (2)...



Tres venganzas femeninas VENGANZA NUMERO 1

Hoy mi hija cumple 21 anos y estoy muy contento porque es el ultimo pago de pension alimenticia que le doy, asi que llame a mi hijita para que viniera a mi casa y cuando llego le dije:

-Hijita, quiero que lleves este cheque a casa de tu mama y que le digas que: Este es el ultimo maldito cheque que va recibir de mi en todo lo que le queda de su puta vida!!! Quiero que me digas la expresion que pone en su rostro.

Asi que mi hija fue a entregar el cheque. Yo estaba ansioso por saber lo que la bruja tenia que decir y que cara pondria.

Cuando mi hijita entro, le pregunte inmediatamente: -Que fue lo que te dijo tu madre?

-Me dijo que justamente estaba esperando este dia para decirte que no eres mi papa!



VENGANZA NUMERO 2

Un hombre que siempre molestaba a su mujer, paso un dia por la casa de unos amigos para que lo acompanaran al aeropuerto a dejar a su esposa que viajaba a Paris.

A la salida de inmigracion, frente a todo el mundo, el le desea buen viaje y en tono burlon le grita:

- Amor, no te olvides de traerme una hermosa francesita Ja ja ja!!

Ella bajo la cabeza y se embarco muy molesta.

La mujer paso quince dias en Francia.

El marido otra vez pidio a sus amigos que lo acompanasen al aeropuerto a recibirla.

Al verla llegar, lo primero que le grita a toda voz es:

- Y amor me trajiste mi francesita??

- Hice todo lo posible, - contesta ella - ahora solo tenemos que rezar para que nazca nina.



VENGANZA NUMERO 3

El marido, en su lecho de muerte, llama a su mujer. Con voz ronca y ya debil, le dice: - Muy bien, llego mi hora, pero antes quiero hacerte una confesion.

- No, no, tranquilo, tu no debes hacer ningun esfuerzo.

- Pero, mujer, es preciso - insiste el marido - Es preciso morir en paz.

Te quiero confesar algo.

- Esta bien, esta bien. Habla!

- He tenido relaciones con tu hermana, tu mama y tu mejor amiga.

- Lo se, lo se Por eso te envenene, hijo de puta!!!



machismo y cibernetica



Chiste machista La NASA ha enviado al espacio una mision experimental tripulada por dos monos y una mujer.Apenas abandona la atmosfera, se establece comunicacion con Houston.

-Atencion, simio 1, verifique sistemas hidraulicos, controle adecuada presion de los propulsores de arranque. A 60.000 pies disminuya un 25% la velocidad.

El simio hace la sena de OK.

-Atencion, simio 2, nivele al cruzar la estratosfera y active sistemas anticongelantes. No olvide monitorear sistemas de comunicacion e indicadores de presion. Comprendido?.

El simio hace la sena de OK.

-Atencion, Houston llamando a mujer: no se olvide.

-Mujer: Si, si, ya se! -interrumpe enojada- que no me olvide darles de comer a estos monos de mierda y que no se me vaya a ocurrir tocar nada!.



.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti.

Un abogado mantiene un romance con su secretaria.Al poco tiempo, esta queda embarazada y el abogado, que no quiere que su esposa se entere, le da a la secretaria una buena suma de dinero y le pide que se vaya a parir a Italia.Esta pregunta: Y como voy a hacerte saber cuando nazca el bebe ? El abogado responde: Para que mi mujer no se entere, tan solo enviame una postal y escribe por detras: Spaghetti. Y no te preocupes mas, que yo me encargare de todos los gastos.

Pasan los meses y una manana la esposa del abogado lo llama al bufete, algo exaltada: Querido, acabo de recibir el correo y hay una postal muy extrana viene desde Italia. La verdad, no entiendo que significa.El abogado, tratando de ocultar sus nervios, contesta:Espera a que llegue a casa, a ver si yo entiendoCuando el hombre llega a casa y lee la postal, cae al suelo fulminado por un infarto.Llega una ambulancia y se lo lleva. Ya en el hospital, el jefe de cardiologia se queda consolando a la esposa y le pregunta cual ha sido el evento que precipito tan masivo ataque cardiaco.

Entonces la esposa saca la postal y se la muestra diciendole: No me explico, doctor; el solamente leyo esta postal. Vea usted mismo lo que trae escrito.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti."Tres con salchicha y albondigas y dos con almejas



Gol !!!!



Chistes de Borrachos Entra un borracho a su casa todo manchado con lapiz labial por todos lados hecho un desastre, y la mujer le pregunta:-Hombre que te paso?Y el borracho le responde:-No me vas a creer, me pelee con un payaso!



Este es un borracho que entra en un bar y le dice al camarero:-Me da cinco copas de whisky?Al rato:-Me da cuatro?Al rato:-Me da tres copas?Despues:-Me da dos copas?Luego le dice:-Me da una copa?Y le dice al camarero:-Ves? Cuanto menos bebo, mas borracho estoy!

A Centre of Excellence in Biotechnology is being set up at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) here for promoting biotechnology research in the state.

The Rs 430 crore centre is part of the state government's proposal to create Centres of Excellence in key areas to make Tamil Nadu a knowledge capital, innovation hub and a preferred destination for global investors, a TNAU release said today.

To be set up in an area of five acres with all necessary infrastructure and equipment, it will be a joint venture between the state government, the NABARD, TNAU, private industries and philanthropists.

The Centre will be a world-class infrastructure for research and development in biotechnology and allied areas to strengthen biotechnology research, education, skill development among others, the release said.

It will act as a hub for high-quality research by interlinking TNAU and other academic and research institutes of Tamil Nadu with International collaborations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Centre and six states of North India will sign a memorandum of understanding tomorrow for construction of Lakhwar multi-purpose project in the Upper Yamuna basin in Uttarakhand, the Ministry of Water Resources said today.

Water Resources Minister Nitin Gadkari will sign an MoU with Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, Vasundhara Raje of Rajasthan, Trivendra Singh Rawat of Uttarakhand, Manohar Lal Khattar of Haryana, Arvind Kejriwal of Delhi, and Himachal Pradesh's Jai Ram Thakur in Delhi for the project worth Rs 3,966.51 crore.

The Lakhwar project envisages construction of a 204-metre-high concrete dam across the Yamuna near Lohari village in Dehradun district of Uttarakhand with a live storage capacity of 330.66 million cubic metre (MCM).

This storage will provide irrigation to 33,780 hectares land and availability of 78.83 MCM water for domestic, drinking and industrial use in the six basin states.

The project, which is to be executed by Uttarakhand Jal Vidyut Nigam Limited (UJVL), will generate 300 MW of power.

Out of the total project cost of Rs 3,966.51 crore, the power component of Rs 1,388.28 crore will be borne by the Uttarakhand government, which will get the benefit of the total power generation once the project is complete.

Out of the remaining Rs 2,578.23 crore, which forms the irrigation and drinking water components, 90 per cent will be borne by the Centre (Rs 2,320.41 crore), the statement said.

The rest 10 per cent will be divided between Haryana - Rs 123.29 crore (47.82 per cent), Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand Rs 86.75 crore (33.65 per cent), Rajasthan - Rs 24.08 crore (9.34 per cent), Delhi - Rs 15.58 crore (6.04 per cent) and Himachal Pradesh - Rs. 8.13 crore (3.15 per cent), the ministry said.

Storage created as a result of implementation of Lakhwar project will be shared by the basin states in proportion to their overall annual allocations as given in the mother MoU signed between the six states on May 12, 1994.

"Allocation of water from storage created by Lakhwar Dam Reservoir will be regulated by UYRB as per this MoU. Except the sharing of stored water, all other resultant economic benefits including generation of hydropower due to construction of the dam are assigned to the state of Uttarakhand," the statement added.

Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi are the six Upper Yamuna Basin states.

Upper Yamuna refers to the stretch of the Yamuna from its origin to the Okhla Barrage in Delhi.

The six states had signed an MoU on May 12, 1994, regarding allocation of surface flow of River Yamuna. The agreement had recognised the need to create storage facilities in Upper Yamuna Basin to conserve and utilise the monsoon flows of the river in a regulated manner.

The MoU had also laid down the interim seasonal allocation of the annual utilisable flow of the river pending creation of storage facilities.

MoUs for other major projects being envisaged in the Upper Yamuna reaches which are Kishau Multi-Purpose project and Renukaji Multi-Purpose project.

A fourth project is the Vyasi project, a run-of-the-river scheme under which a concrete dam across Yamuna river, is being constructed near Vyasi village in Dehradun district. The Vyasi project is scheduled for commissioning by December 2018.

The Kishau Multi-purpose project, which includes construction of a 236-metre-high concrete dam across Tons river, a tributary of Yamuna in Dehradun district with a live storage capacity of 1,324 MCM, will create irrigation potential of about 97,000 hectares, make available 517 MCM drinking water and generate 660 MW of power.

The Renukaji Multi-Purpose project, which has been conceived as a storage project on Giri river, another tributary of Yamuna, in Sirmour district of Himachal Pradesh, envisages construction of 148 metres high rock filled dam for supply of 23 cubic metre per second (cumec) water to Delhi and generate 40 MW of power during peak flow.

As per the MoU of 1994, separate agreements will have to be done between the six basin states for each water storage project in the upper reaches of the Yamuna.

After completion of all these storage projects in Upper Yamuna Basin (including Lakhwar), the total benefits in terms of additional irrigation potential created will be 1,30,856 hectares, water availability for various uses will be 1,093.83 MCM and power generation capacity will be 1,060 MW.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Chinese officials have defended Beijing's initiative to build railways and other infrastructure across Asia against complaints it leaves countries with too much debt after Malaysia cancelled two high-profile projects.

The officials today said the "Belt and Road" facilities built with Chinese loans might require time to pay off but are valuable for developing economies.

The deputy chairman of the Cabinet's planning agency, Ning Jizhe, told reporters "people's livelihoods and economic development have been boosted." He said, "no 'debt trap' was created." Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad scrapped plans this month for Chinese-built projects including a USD 20 billion railway he said his Southeast Asian country cannot afford.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)China is challenging the latest round of US tariffs against Chinese goods through the World Trade Organization.

The Chinese government yesterday formally requested "dispute consultations" with the United States over the Trump administration's imposition of USD 16 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods last week. China has responded with similar taxes on US goods.

Its request to the World Trade Organization opens a 60-day period for the two countries to hold talks.

China already is holding talks with the US about its previous tariffs on both Chinese steel and aluminum products and over alleged Chinese violations of US intellectual property protections.

All told, the administration is preparing tariffs on USD 200 billion in Chinese products. China has vowed to retaliate on American goods worth USD 60 billion.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)China today welcomed the participation of militaries of India and Pakistan for the first time in a mega anti-terror drill of the SCO and hoped that the two countries could enhance dialogue and cooperation both bilaterally and within multilateral mechanisms to maintain regional peace and stability.

The anti-terror exercise of the Beijing-based Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) being held at Chebarkul town in Chelyabinsk region in Russia from August 22 to August 29 aimed at expanding cooperation among the member countries to deal with the growing menace of terrorism and extremism.

India and Pakistan are participating in the drill for the first time since becoming full members of the SCO in June 2017.

The joint exercise titled Peaceful Mission 2018 being conducted by the Central Military Commission of Russia involve tactical level operations in an international counter insurgency or counter terrorism environment under the SCO Charter.

"We welcome India and Pakistan's joint participation in this counter-terrorism exercise under the SCO framework," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told a media briefing.

"These two countries are important ones in South Asia," she said, adding that stable relationship between the two countries is "significant to the peace and development of the region and the whole world."



"We sincerely hope that they could enhance their dialogue and cooperation both bilaterally and within multilateral mechanisms like the SCO, work together to improve their ties and jointly maintain regional peace and stability," she said



At least 3,000 soldiers from China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, India and Pakistan are participating in the drill.

The Indian contingent of 200 personnel is primarily composed of troops from infantry and affiliated arms and services along with the Indian Air Force.

Chinese military experts also welcomed the participation of India and Pakistan in the counter-terrorism drill.

The previous SCO counter-terrorism drills were mainly limited to the Central Asian nations. But due to the entry of India and Pakistan, the SCO's counter-terrorism mission has expanded to South Asia, Li Wei, a counter-terrorism expert at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations in Beijing, told state-run Global Times.

"The effective counter-terrorism cooperation among SCO countries has greatly undermined terrorist groups in Central Asia in recent years, and it's expected that this effective cooperation will also boost stability in South Asia, a region facing a more complicated counter-terrorism situation with a variety of active terrorist groups," Li said.

Sun Zhuangzhi, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said Peace Mission 2018 will also greatly improve military and political mutual trust among SCO countries, especially between India and Pakistan.

"It's a rare opportunity for Pakistan and India, which have long been involved in military conflict, to enhance military exchanges and trust. This could improve regional stability," Sun said.

Li said future counter-terrorism drills among SCO countries have to come up with new drills on targeting terrorist groups in South Asia.

He suggested that the SCO further expand to include Afghanistan, which is currently an observer country, to strengthen counter-terrorism efforts in South Asia.

The SCO was established in Shanghai in 2001, with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as founding members.

It expanded to include India and Pakistan in 2017.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Describing Pakistan and China as "Iron brothers", Chinese Ambassador Yao Jing today said his country wants to work closely with the new Pakistani government led by Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Jing called on Pakistan's new Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and congratulated him on his assumption of office and formation of the new government in Pakistan, the Foreign Office (FO) said in a statement.

"Pakistan and China are Iron Brothers' and close friends," the statement quoted the Chinese ambassador as saying.

Jing further said his government wants to work closely with the new government of Pakistan to further strengthen the bilateral relations between the two countries.

Reciprocating Jing's good wishes, Qureshi said Pakistan and China are close friends and strong partners, the statement said.

He said the new government is determined to take strategic cooperative partnership between Pakistan and China to new heights.

Welcoming the upcoming visit of China's State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi to Pakistan in September, Qureshi said he said he look forward to an in-depth exchange of views with him on all matters of mutual interest.

Praising the vision of President Xi Jinping for China's socio-economic development, he said Pakistan could learn much from Chinese experience in socio-economic development, particularly agriculture, as Pakistan is basically an agrarian economy.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Class 9 student was allegedly raped by three men who kidnapped her from Dankaur area of Gautam Buddh Nagar in a car today, police said.

The incident took place near Roshanpur village this morning and two of the accused have been arrested, they said.

"The girl was on her way to relieve herself outside the village when the three accused kidnapped her and raped her in the car," Superintendent of Police (Rural) Aashish Shrivastava said.

"They later dumped the girl near the village and fled," he said.

According to the SP, an FIR was lodged at the Dankaur police station on the complaint of the girl's family.

Three persons from a neighbouring village were named in the FIR. Two of them -- Ajay Singh Gujjar and Surendra Singh Gujjar, have been arrested, while the third accused, Arun, is absconding, police said.

The accused have been charged under sections 367 (kidnapping) and 376 (rape) of the Indian Penal Code and relevant sections of the Prevention of Children against Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, they said.

Police teams are working to nab the third accused, the SP said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik today felicitated a contingent of Odisha Police that took part in the Independence Day parade in Kolkata, an official said.

The team from Odisha was adjudged the Best Marching Contingent among other squadrons of armed forces and paramilitary forces in West Bengal, he said.

Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee awarded them a trophy for the achievement.

Congratulating the officers today, Patnaik said he was happy with the performance of the officers and expected them to fare well in future endeavours.

The officers, on their part, presented their trophy to Patnaik during the felicitation programme.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Chief Minister V Narayanasamy today requested the Centre to restore cent per cent funding for development of higher educational institutions in the Union Territory.

He made the request at a meeting with Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar in New Delhi today.

The cent per cent grant was sought under the Centrally sponsored scheme of RUSA (Rashtriya Uchachakar Siksha Abhiyan), a release from the Chief Minister's office said.

It said Puducherry earlier used to get cent per cent grant, but the Centre had brought it down to the ratio of 60:40.

Health and Tourism Minister Malladi Krishna Rao was also present during the discussions the Chief Minister had with the Union Minister, the release said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)COAI has voiced concern over Aadhaar-issuing body UIDAI's new norms on face recognition saying that some of the stipulated provisions impose additional cost and time burden on telecom firms and are against the tenets of ease of doing business.

The Cellular Operators' Association of India (COAI) said that while the industry fully supports all efforts to make authentication secure and customer-friendly, two of the provisions under the new rules may put fresh posers for telcos.

The face comparison and audit requirements place additional burden on operators and raise costs and processing time, COAI Director General, Rajan Mathews told PTI.

And while the operators will strive to comply with the roll-out deadline of September 15, much would dependent on device manufacturers and their readiness, Mathews added.

"The face recognition enhances security for consumers. But two aspects of UIDAI's order are of concerns to us. This includes a requirement that operators have to keep a copy of the photo and compare it at the back-end, thus duplicating the process done by UIDAI," Mathews said.

He said that this new back-end requirement goes against the principles of ease of doing business as it leads to duplication of efforts.

"Also, the industry will do its best to comply with the implementation deadline but a part of the compliance also depends on device manufacturers," Mathews said.

Earlier this month, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) announced a phased rollout of face recognition feature as an additional mode of authentication, starting with telecom service providers from September 15. It has proposed a monetary disincentive for telcos found slipping on the prescribed targets from mid next month.

Significantly, the UIDAI has said 'live face photo' capture and its verification with the photo obtained in eKYC will be essential in those cases where Aadhaar is used for issuance of mobile SIMs.

UIDAI had said the move aims to curb the possibility of fingerprint spoofing or cloning, and seeks to tighten the audit process and security around issuance and activation of mobile SIMs. It may be recalled that in June this year, a Hyderabad-based mobile SIM card distributor had forged Aadhaar details for activating thousands of SIMs.

A UIDAI source, however, sought to play down COAI's apprehensions saying that the authority's norms are aimed at ensuring security and integrity of the entire process.

The UIDAI source said that new requirements are far less when compared to the previous paper-based KYC (Know Your Customer) process and documentations that were involved. A fine balance has been struck between ease of doing business and security considerations, said the UIDAI official who did not wish to be named.

Moreover, a majority of device vendors have already been certified, the official said, adding that initial target has, as it is, been kept at only 10 per cent of total monthly authentication transactions.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Meeting with Leaders, Civil Society and the Diplomatic Corps at Dublin Castle

This morning, after leaving the Presidential Residence, the Holy Father Francis transferred to Dublin Castle where he met with leaders, representatives of civil society, and members of the Diplomatic Corps.

Upon arrival the Pope was received by the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar, who accompanied him to the room in front for the signing of the Book of Honour. Then, together, they proceeded to the St. Patrick Hall, where they were awaited by more than 250 people including political and religious leaders, members of the Diplomatic Corps and representatives of civil society.

After the Taoiseachs introductory discourse, the Holy Father gave his address.

At the end the Taoiseach accompanied the Holy Father to the main entrance for the farewell greeting.

The Pope then transferred to the nunciature, where a group of young people awaited him outside, while in the courtyard he was welcomed by a choir. At the entrance to the residence he was received by the religious and lay staff of the Papal Representation.

The following is the Holy Fathers address during the meeting with the leaders, civil society and members of the Diplomatic Corps:

Address of the Holy Father

Taoiseach,

Members of Government and of the Diplomatic Corps,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

At the beginning of my visit to Ireland, I am grateful for the invitation to address this distinguished assembly representing the civil, cultural and religious life of the country, together with the members of the diplomatic corps and guests. I appreciate the friendly welcome I have received from the President of Ireland, which reflects the tradition of cordial hospitality for which the Irish are known throughout the world. I likewise appreciate the presence of a delegation from Northern Ireland. I thank the Taoiseach for his words.

As you know, the reason for my visit is to take part in the World Meeting of Families, held this year in Dublin. The Church is, in a real way, a family among families, and senses the need to support families in their efforts to respond faithfully and joyfully to their God-given vocation in society. The Meeting is not only an opportunity for families to reaffirm their commitment to loving fidelity, mutual assistance and reverence for Gods gift of life in all its forms, but also to testify to the unique role played by the family in the education of its members and the development of a sound and flourishing social fabric.

I would like to see the World Meeting of Families as a prophetic witness to the rich patrimony of ethical and spiritual values that it is the duty of every generation to cherish and protect. One need not be a prophet to perceive the difficulties faced by our families in todays rapidly evolving society, or to be troubled by the effects that breakdown in marriage and family life will necessarily entail for the future of our communities at every level. Families are the glue of society; their welfare cannot be taken for granted, but must be promoted and protected by every appropriate means.

It was in the family that each of us took his or her first steps in life. There we learned to live together in harmony, to master our selfish instincts and reconcile our differences, and above all to discern and seek those values that give authentic meaning and fulfilment to our lives. If we speak of our entire world as a single family, it is because we rightly acknowledge the bonds of our common humanity and we sense our call to unity and solidarity, especially with the weakest of our brothers and sisters. Yet all too often, we feel impotent before the persistent evils of racial and ethnic hatred, intractable conflicts and violence, contempt for human dignity and for fundamental human rights, and the growing divide between rich and poor. How much we need to recover, in every instance of political and social life, the sense of being a true family of peoples! And never to lose hope or the courage to persevere in the moral imperative to be peacemakers, reconcilers and guardians of one another.

Here in Ireland, this challenge has a special resonance, in light of the long conflict that separated brothers and sisters of a single family. Twenty years ago, the international community followed attentively the events in Northern Ireland that led to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. The Irish government, in union with the political, religious and civil leaders of Northern Ireland and the British government, and with the support of other world leaders, created a dynamic context for the peaceful settlement of a conflict that had caused untold pain on both sides. We can give thanks for the two decades of peace that followed this historic agreement, while expressing firm hope that the peace process will overcome every remaining obstacle and help give birth to a future of harmony, reconciliation and mutual trust.

The Gospel reminds us that true peace is ultimately Gods gift; it flows from a healed and reconciled heart and branches out to embrace the entire world. Yet it also requires constant conversion on our part, as the source of those spiritual resources needed to build a society of authentic solidarity, justice and service of the common good. Without that spiritual foundation, our ideal of a global family of nations risks becoming no more than another empty platitude. Can we say that the goal of creating economic or financial prosperity leads of itself to a more just and equitable social order? Or could it be that the growth of a materialistic throwaway culture has in fact made us increasingly indifferent to the poor and to the most defenceless members of our human family, including the unborn, deprived of the very right to life? Perhaps the most disturbing challenges to our consciences in these days is the massive refugee crisis, which will not go away, and whose solution calls for a wisdom, a breadth of vision and a humanitarian concern that go far beyond short-term political decisions.

I am very conscious of the circumstances of our most vulnerable brothers and sisters  I think especially of those women and children who in the past endured particularly difficult situations, and to the orphans of that time. With regard to the most vulnerable, I cannot fail to acknowledge the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the Church charged with responsibility for their protection and education. I was deeply moved by the words spoken to me by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs; I thank her for those words. The failure of ecclesiastical authorities  bishops, religious superiors, priests and others  adequately to address these repellent crimes has rightly given rise to outrage, and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community. I myself share those sentiments. My predecessor, Pope Benedict, spared no words in recognizing both the gravity of the situation and in demanding that truly evangelical, just and effective measures be taken in response to this betrayal of trust (cf. Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, 10). His frank and decisive intervention continues to serve as an incentive for the efforts of the Churchs leadership both to remedy past mistakes and to adopt stringent norms meant to ensure that they do not happen again. More recently, in a Letter to the People of God, I reaffirmed the commitment, and the need for an even greater commitment, to eliminating this scourge in the Church, at any cost, moral and of suffering.

Each child is in fact a precious gift of God, to be cherished, encouraged to develop his or her gifts, and guided to spiritual maturity and human flourishing. The Church in Ireland, past and present, has played a role in promoting the welfare of children that cannot be obscured. It is my hope that the gravity of the abuse scandals, which have cast light on the failings of many, will serve to emphasize the importance of the protection of minors and vulnerable adults on the part of society as a whole. In this regard, all of us are aware of how urgent it is to provide our young people with wise guidance and sound values on their journey to maturity.

Dear friends,

Almost ninety years ago, the Holy See was among the first international institutions to recognize the Irish Free State. That initiative signalled the beginning of many years of dynamic cooperation and harmony, with only an occasional cloud on the horizon. Recently intensive endeavour and goodwill on both sides have contributed significantly to a promising renewal of those friendly relations for the mutual benefit of all.

The threads of that history reach back to over a millennium and a half ago, when the Christian message, preached by Palladius and Patrick, found a home in Ireland and became an integral part of Irish life and culture. Many saints and scholars were inspired to leave these shores and bring their newfound faith to other lands. To this day, the names of Columba, Columbanus, Brigid, Gall, Killian, Brendan and so many others are still revered throughout Europe and beyond. On this island monasticism, as a source of civilization and artistic creativity, wrote a splendid page in Irish and universal history.

Today as in the past, the men and women who live in this country strive to enrich the life of the nation with the wisdom born of their faith. Even in Irelands darkest hours, they found in that faith a source of the courage and commitment needed to forge a future of freedom and dignity, justice and solidarity. The Christian message has been an integral part of that experience, and has shaped the language, thought and culture of people on this island.

It is my prayer that Ireland, in listening to the polyphony of contemporary political and social discussion, will not be forgetful of the powerful strains of the Christian message that have sustained it in the past, and can continue to do so in the future.

With these thoughts, I cordially invoke upon you, and upon all the beloved Irish people, Gods blessings of wisdom, joy and peace. Thank you.A day after a Congress leader demanded scrapping of the Rafale fighter aircraft deal, the Jammu and Kashmir BJP today accused the Congress of "fabricating lies" in a "desperate" bid to corner the NDA government ahead of the Lok Sabha polls next year.

Terming the allegations over the deal "half-backed, false, misleading and confusing", it alleged that Congress' insistence on making the contents of the deal public was aimed at helping the intelligence agencies of China and Pakistan.

Congress leader and Rajya Sabha MP Partap Singh Bajwa had yesterday termed Rafale deal the "biggest scam in the country's defence sector post-Independence" and demanded its cancellation.

State BJP spokesperson Brigadier Anil Gupta (retd) said, "In a desperate bid to corner the Narendra Modi government prior to the 2019 polls, the Congress is fabricating lies and scams in the hope that it may succeed in maligning the image of the BJP-led NDA government."



He claimed the Congress which made a "record of scams" during UPA II, is "trying desperately" to paint the BJP with the same brush.

"Terming the Rafale deal a scam is an attempt of the Congress at mud-slinging, hoping that some mud would definitely stick and at least sow a seed of doubt in the mind of the gullible public before the 'do or die' elections for the party which is struggling for its survival," Gupta said, adding the Congress would never succeed in its "nefarious design".

Countering the allegation that a loss of Rs 41,205 crore has been caused to national exchequer in the deal, the BJP leader said till 2014, the then UPA government failed to negotiate the contract with the manufacturer due to difference of opinion in fulfilling certain conditions of the Request for Proposal (RFP) pertaining to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL).

He said the purchase of 36 aircraft in 'fly-away' condition is custom-made and includes a lethal weapon package, performance based logistical support (ensuring 75 per cent serviceability of fleet at all times), 13 India-specific capabilities, 50 per cent offset, supply of spares, servicing, training of pilots, and state of the art avionics.

"Also, the difference in value of dollar in 2012 and 2016 also needs to be kept in mind. You cannot compare apples and oranges, Gupta said, adding the present contract also includes five year maintenance guarantee.

He said Congress president Rahul Gandhi had to eat a humble pie on the floor of Parliament during the "no-confidence motion" debate on the issue of "secrecy clause" in the deal, which was also subsequently clarified by the French Ambassador.

"Still, Congress continues to rake up the issue just to mislead the people," Gupta said adding operational capability of a strategic platform depends on its configuration and no nation discloses it.

"By insisting for the same, Congress is trying to help the intelligence agencies of China and Pakistan," Gupta alleged.

On the allegation that the prime minister did not follow the laid down procedures and bypassed cabinet committee of security (CCS) while making the deal, the BJP leader said the panel had given clearance to the proposal of purchasing 36 aircraft on government to government basis prior to Modi's departure for Paris on April 9, 2015.

"All procedures laid down in Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) 2016 for Inter-Government Agreement (IGA) have been meticulously followed," he said.

As regards favouring Reliance Defence, the BJP leader said, "IGA was signed between two sovereign governments. No private individual, entity or firm was involved from the Indian side. The procurement process also does not involve any Indian private company.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Green activists and conservationists have demanded heritage city status for Agra in Uttar Pradesh, even as efforts are on to transform it into a smart city.

With three world heritage monuments, the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort and Fatehpur Sikri, two under consideration, Sikandra and Itmad-ud-daula, and dozens of other historical structures, Agra is "highly qualified" to be designated as a heritage city, say conservationists.

Sikandra is the mausoleum of Akbar. It has a perfect blending of Hindu, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Jain themes.

Itmad-ud-daula, the first tomb to be built in white marble, marks the departure from the red sandstone buildings of Mughal architecture, according to the official website of Agra city.

Another unique addition to Agra's rich cultural heritage is Soami Bagh, set to open on August 31 after 114 years of construction work.

Many consider Soami Bagh, samadhi of the founder of the Radhasoami faith, as an architectural rival to the Taj Mahal because of its intricate inlay work and carvings.

The samadhi, with gothic-style pillars flanking the sides, harmoniously synthesises several architectural styles. The 193-feet-tall structure of white marble rests on a foundation of 52 wells, while the gold-plated pinnacle (kalash) weighs 5.5 tons.

Surendra Sharma, president of Braj Mandal Heritage Conservation Society, an NGO, says "Agra deserves the heritage city tag, to protect its identity. The haphazard urban growth is a huge threat to historical monuments. Encroachment around monuments and mushroom growth of colonies should be discouraged."



The Supreme Court is monitoring urban developments in Agra and the working of Taj Trapezium Zone Authority, after reports suggested pollution levels in Agra and neighbourhood had increased alarmingly and could threaten the Taj Mahal.

M C Mehta, in a PIL before the Supreme Court, has raised many issues of concern, which has led the apex court to call for a "vision document" on TTZ.

This document, prepared by Delhi's School of Planning And Architecture, will be presented in the apex court this week.

Activists in Agra have drawn up an alternative vision document, which calls for heritage status for the city.

Government agencies, including Uttar Pradesh Tourism, are in favour of heritage city status, but developers and colonisers are opposing the move, fearing that the status would halt construction activities.

Agra was selected to be developed into a smart city in September 2016.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Congress today accused the central government of stonewalling questions over the Rafale fighter deal, saying there was a "conspiracy of silence" and an attempt to "bypass the national interest".

Party spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi also claimed that the then Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar was not in the loop when the agreement to procure 36 fighter planes from France was signed in 2016 and demanded that he "break his silence" on the issue.

Addressing a press conference here on the issue which her party has been raising at various fora, Chaturvedi said Parrikar's "silence amounts to agreement to the conspiracy that has betrayed the nation."



She alleged that the Modi government had made "self- interest as its primary goal over the national interest."



The spokesperson claimed that the union government had overpriced the aircraft, reduced the number of aircraft and taken the offset benefit away from a public sector company and handed it over to a "friendly" private company.

"I dont call Rafale a deal. It is a scam. And what the government is doing and how it is trying to defend itself is nothing but a sham," Chaturvedi said.

"There is a conspiracy of silence to hide the investigation or to take responsibility to carry out an investigation in a very open and shut case of how you can help your own people and bypass national interest," she added.

She said Parrikar, now the Chief Minister of Goa, was not even present in France when the deal was signed.

"Forget presence, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had not even been prepared for the prime ministers announcement (about the deal) and was caught off-guard. What we understand is that he (Parrikar) did not even know a deal has been negotiated, signed and agreed upon," She said.

The Congress spokesperson said her party expects Parrikar, who held the defence portfolio from November 2014 to March 2017, to answer questions related to the deal.

She claimed that Parrikar knew that the norms of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) were "bypassed" and the procedure of the defence procurement was not followed.

Demanding answers to the questions, she said, Parrikar "continues to maintain silence" over the matter.

"Silence is also a conspiracy and an agreement to something that has betrayed the nation. I would hope that, perhaps, he will come forward and answer the questions. It (the deal) was happening under his watch...but he left that for someone else to do it," Chaturvedi said.

She said that Parrikar, just daysprior to the signing of the deal in September 2016, had gone on record to say that some terms of the contract were non-negotiable.

"Andthose are the very clauses that were negotiated on the table in France," she claimed.

Chaturvedi said that in the original tender invited by the Congress-led UPA government for acquiring 126 multi-role fighter planes, two fighter aircraft - Rafale and Eurofighter Typhoon - were found equal on all technical parameters.

In the financial bid round, Rafale became the lowest bidder and Eurofighter Typhoon "admittedly" wrote a letter dated July 4, 2014 to the then defence minister, offering to reduce the price by 20 per cent, she said.

Chaturvedi sought to know why both the companies were not asked to bid afresh through the Inter-governmental agreement route so as to arrive at the lowest price in favour of public interest.

The Congress spokesman said the NDA government is repeatedly stonewalling questions raised by the party about the deal, saying "there is a conspiracy of silence".

Chaturvedi recalled the UPA government had negotiated for 126 jets, of which 18 were to come in fly-away condition and the rest through the transfer of technology route.

"They would have been manufactured by made-in-India public sector unit, that is Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. There would have been two benefits - we would have been making our own jets and the offset contract benefit worth Rs 36,000 crore would have gone to HAL," the Congress spokesperson said.

She alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his France visit, changed the terms of the deal and the technology transfer clause was "thrown out of the window".

Chaturvedi said Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's statement in Parliament about a confidentiality clause in the Rafale deal was nothing but a "blatant lie".

"When the UPA was negotiating the deal, it had shared the price of the aircraft," she said.

The government has repeatedly rejected the Congress allegations about the deal.

Sitharaman has maintained that the deal was signed after following a transparent procedure and that the cost of each aircraft along with weapon systems was much lower than what was negotiated by the UPA government.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Counting of votes for the South Tura and Ranikor Assembly by-elections in Meghalaya began today amidst tight security, the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) F R Kharkongor said.

Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma is contesting from the South Tura seat as the ruling National People's Party (NPP) candidate.

Former Congress MLA Martin M Danggo, who resigned from the Assembly is the ruling NPP candidate for the Ranikor seat.

Sangma is leading over his nearest rival and Congress candidate Charlotte W Momin by over 5800 votes after first two rounds of counting, the CEO said.

In the Ranikor seat, the United Democratic Party candidate P Marwein is leading by over 1000 votes against his nearest rival Danggo of the NPP after first two rounds of counting, the CEO said.

The by-elections to the two seats was held on August 23.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A court here today stayed proceedings against Aam Aadmi Party lawmaker Alka Lamba in a case of allegedly trespassing and vandalising a shop in the city and obstructing the police from performing their duty in 2015.

Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal said there was only one charge -- 427 (mischief causing damage to the amount of fifty rupees) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) -- made out against Lamba which did not call for prosecution, Advocate Mohd Irshad, who is appearing for the AAP leader, said.

The other charges which were not made out against Lamba included 186 (obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions), 353 (assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty) and 427 (house-trespass in order to commit offence punishable with imprisonment) of IPC, he said.

An FIR was lodged against the MLA from Chandni Chowk on August 10, 2015, a day after she had received head injuries in a stone-pelting attack during her anti-drug campaign in Delhi's Kashmere Gate area.

The case was registered at the Kashmere Gate Police Station on a complaint by traders including the proprietor of a sweet shop, Shiv Mishthan Bhandar, after a video clip emerged in which she was allegedly seen vandalising shops along with some of her supporters.

Lamba was earlier summoned as accused in the case by the court which had taken cognisance of a charge sheet filed by the police against her.

She was earlier charge sheeted for alleged offences under sections 186 (obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions), 353 (assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty), 427 (mischief causing damage to property), 451 (house-trespass) and 34 (common intention) of the IPC.

The charge sheet said that on August 9, 2015, Lamba along with some other persons committed trespass in the shop and threw a cash bill machine, vandalised the counter and obstructed and deterred the police personnel present there.

According to the police, the CCTV camera footage recovered from the shop showed Lamba toppling the billing machine while one of her colleagues was seen pushing everything from a table and jostling with policemen.

The AAP leader had claimed that the 30-second CCTV footage was shot after she was attacked.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Curfew was relaxed for four hours today in violence-hit Malpura town of Rajasthan's Tonk district where fifteen kanwariyas were injured in a clash with local people, police said.

Curfew is in force in Malpura town from the last four days and 30 people have been arrested so far, they said.

No fresh incidence of violence occurred in curfew-hit areas and considering the law and order situation, the clampdown was relaxed for four hours from 10 am to 2 pm today. However, mobile internet services remain suspended, Station House Officer at Malpura Police Station, Navneet Bihari Vyas, said.

He said a few accused have been arrested under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Tension gripped the area after some miscreants hurled stones on kanwariyas while they were passing through a Mulsim-dominated area on August 23.

The attack was followed by arson in which a vehicle was torched, forcing the authorities to impose Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which prohibits an assembly of more than four persons in an area.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The daughter of an anaesthetist accused of gassing his wife and another daughter to death using a yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide described her dead sister as her "soulmate" in a Hong Kong court today.

Prosecutors have accused Khaw Kim-sun of leaving the inflatable ball in the boot of a car where the gas leaked out and killed his wife and 16-year-old daughter Lily.

Khaw, 53, was having an affair and his wife would not grant him a divorce, prosecutors said.

They accused him of hatching a deliberate plot to murder her, but said it was likely he had not intended to kill his daughter.

Khaw's eldest daughter May-ling, 19, spoke of her sister at the High Court trial today.

"Lily was two-and-half years younger than me. She was probably my soulmate. We were very close and we had a lot in common," she told the court.

She described her sister as brave and a "free spirit" but also said she was impulsive and quick to anger, without giving further details.

May-ling said she was aware of her father's affair with Shara Lee, who was her Chinese tutor and also taught Lily.

"At first I felt slightly betrayed but at the same time my parents hadn't been getting along well. I could understand my father would find someone and I felt bad for my mum," she told the court.

Khaw's wife Wong Siew-fung and Lily were found on a roadside in a locked yellow Mini Cooper in 2015, in a case which initially baffled police.

The pair were certified dead at the same hospital where Khaw worked and a post-mortem concluded they had died from inhaling carbon monoxide. Police found a deflated yoga ball in the back of the car.

A professor from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Khaw was based, told the court Monday that he had seen the anaesthetist fill two yoga balls with carbon monoxide, saying he was taking them to the chemistry department for tests.

The court heard earlier in the trial that Khaw had told colleagues he planned to use the gas on rabbits, but later told police that he had taken it to get rid of rats at home.

Asked by the defence whether there were animals in the family home in Sai Kung, a largely rural area in the north of Hong Kong, May-ling said there had been mosquitoes, cockroaches and rats.

The case continues later Wednesday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Delhi Court today imposed a cost of Rs 7,000 on Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) activist Medha Patkar for seeking adjournment for cross-examining a witness in a defamation case lodged against her by KVIC Chairman V K Saxena.

Patkar and Saxena, the Khadi Village and Industries Commission (KVIC) chief, have been embroiled in a legal battle since 2000 after she filed a suit against him for publishing advertisements against her and the NBA. Saxena was then the head of an Ahmedabad-based NGO, National Council for Civil Liberties.

Saxena, in turn, had filed two cases against her for making derogatory remarks against him on a TV channel and issuing a defamatory press statement against him.

Metropolitan Magistrate Nishant Garg passed the order after Patkar sought adjournment in the case as her lawyer was not available to cross examine a journalist who had deposed as a witness to support Saxena's case.

The court took exception to this observing that despite giving a date of convenience to the parties, Patkar's lawyer was absent.

"The counsel submits that the main lawyer will not be able to appear in the court today. Clearly, today's date was given at the convenience of parties. Even otherwise, the ground furnished for non-appearance is not accepted.

"Accordingly, the opportunity to cross examine is deferred subject to payment of Rs 7,000 to the witness," the court said and posted the matter for hearing on November 26.

At the outset, one of the witnesses, Dilip Gohil, told the court that he had received a press note levelling allegations against Saxena in November 2000 from Patkar after which a was published on a website.

He also told the court that he had enquired with the Saxena on the issue which he has outrightly refuted.

The witness told the court that Saxena has been associated with water conservation programme in Saurashtra as also with the rehabilitation of people living near the Narmada dam.

The court on July 9 had framed defamation charges against Patkar in a case lodged against her by Saxena in a complaint for allegedly defaming him on a TV channel in 2006.

The court had framed the notice against the activist under sections 499/500 (defamation) of the IPC and fixed the matter for recording of Saxena's evidence. It entails a punishment of up to two years.

The notice was framed in one of the defamation cases filed against Patkar by Saxena in which she had allegedly made a statement in April 2006 on a panel discussion on a channel claiming that Saxena had received civil contracts from Gujarat-based Sardar Sarovar Nigam, which manages the Sardar Sarovar Dam. The allegation was denied by Saxena.

Soon after the defamation complaint was lodged by Saxena against Patkar, Sardar Sarovar Nigam Ltd, in a letter to the Gujarat Police, had said that "V K Saxena, neither in his personal capacity, nor as President of National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), ever applied to the Nigam for the award of any civil contract and/or for any supply contract in the past, nor the Nigam has ever given any civil or any other contract to him or to his NGO-- NCCL."



The court has separated the three ongoing defamation cases -- one filed by Patkar and two by Saxena, considering that these were pending since long and needed to be expedited.

The activist, in her complaint, has alleged that she was defamed by an advertisement published by Saxena in November 2000 and the imputations made in the publication affected her reputation and fame and caused her immense harm. The court had on April 9 begun the cross-examination of Patkar in this case during which she had denied having deliberately concealed facts to tarnish Saxena's image.

Patkar and Saxena had earlier refused the suggestion of the court to settle the matter through mediation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today met Thailand's top leadership and discussed ways to further strengthen the strategic ties between the two countries.

Sitharaman, who is leading an Indian delegation to Thailand, called on Thailand Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha and discussed ways to enhance the bilateral ties.

She also met Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Prawit Wongsuwan and discussed strengthening India-Thailand strategic ties.

Sitharaman arrived here yesterday along with the Indian delegation to strengthen Indo-Thai defence cooperation and strategic ties.

Vice Minister for Defence General Roungrojana Chumrasromrun welcomed her and the delegation on arrival in Bangkok.

She also inspected a guard of honour in the Thai capital.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Delhi court today acquitted two men, accused of hijacking a New Delhi-Srinagar Air India flight and forcing it to land in Pakistan in 1981.

Additional Sessions Judge Ajay Pandey granted the relief to Tajinder Pal Singh and Satnam Singh.

According to the prosecution, on September 29, 1981, the two allegedly hijacked an Air India plane from New Delhi en route to Srinagar via Amritsar and forced it to land in Lahore, Pakistan, where they were arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Both were deported in 2000 from Pakistan after serving life-term for hijacking.

They had later sought their discharge from the case but a sessions court had dismissed their plea.

In 2011, the Delhi Police had charge sheeted them under various sections 121 (waging war against the government of India), 121A (conspiring to commit certain offences against the state), 124A (sedition) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

The Delhi high court had also dismissed their plea seeking stay on the sessions court order and asked the trial court to proceed with the matter.

Both were granted bail in July last year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)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A Delhi court today acquitted two men, accused of hijacking a New Delhi-Srinagar Indian Airlines flight and forcing it to land in Pakistan in 1981.

Additional Sessions Judge Ajay Pandey granted the relief to Tajinder Pal Singh and Satnam Singh.

According to the prosecution, on September 29, 1981, the two allegedly hijacked an Indian Airlines flight from New Delhi en route to Srinagar via Amritsar and forced it to land in Lahore, Pakistan, where they were arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Both were deported in 2000 from Pakistan after serving their sentence.

They later sought their discharge from the case but a sessions court dismissed their plea.

In 2011, Delhi Police had charged them under various sections of the IPC - 121 (waging war against the government of India), 121A (conspiring to commit certain offences against the state), 124A (sedition) and 120B (criminal conspiracy).

The Delhi High Court had also dismissed their plea seeking a stay on the sessions court order and asked the trial court to proceed with the matter.

Both were granted bail in July last year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The director of a private builder's firm in Noida was arrested for allegedly cheating buyers, police said today.

Amit Somal, director of the Premia Projects Private Limited, was arrested in a joint operation by the teams of Crime Branch and Sector 20 police station, they said.

Somal, who lives in Dwarka, New Delhi, was wanted for some time over complaints of cheating from buyers, the police said in a statement late tonight.

He has been booked under Indian Penal Code sections 420 (cheating) and 406 (criminal breach of trust), the police said.

He would be remanded in judicial custody, they added. No other details were available immediately.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A senior Pakistani police officer was sacked after he refused to tender an apology to former husband of Prime Minister Imran Khan's third wife Bushra Bibi for stopping him at a picket.

The Punjab government today removed District Police Officer (Pakpattan) Rizwan Omar Gondal from his post and ordered him to report to the central police office Lahore following his refusal to tender an apology to Khawar Manika, ex-husband of Bushra Bibi.

A senior police officer told PTI that Khawar Manika was coming from Lahore to Pakpattan (some 175-km from Lahore) when he was stopped at a picket at 1 am on August 23.

"Manika didn't stop his car when police signalled him at the picket. Police chased his car and intercepted it a few kms away. Khawar Manika hurled abuses at police officials for not letting him go despite his introduction."



The official said DPO Gondal was summoned by newly elected Chief Minister Usman Buzdar on Friday last.

"The chief minister told the DPO that Manika has complained that police officials had misbehaved with him therefore he should apologise. Gondal, however, refused to apologise saying he didn't do anything wrong. On this the chief minister ordered his removal," the officer said, adding Gondal has been removed on the direction of Imran Khan after Bushra Bibi took up the matter with him.

Opposition PML-N has criticised Imran Khan for intervening in the matter of his wife's ex-husband.

"This is merit what Imran Khan has been talking after coming to power. What example Khan has set to remove senior police officer is before everyone and it is regrettable," PML-N former minister Malik Ahmad said.

Early this year, Khan married his "spiritual guide" Bushra Bibi.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The commercial use of drones (unmanned aircraft) across sectors such as agriculture, health and disaster relief under new regulations will come into force from December 1, but delivery of payload, including food items, would not be allowed as of now, the government said today.

All civilian drone operations will be restricted only during day time and flying will be restricted within visual line of sight which usually would be 450 metres, the regulation says.

Except nano drones and those owned by National Technical Research Organisation and central intelligence agencies, the rest would be registered and issued Unique Identification Number (UIN).

The regulation prevents the drones from flying around airports, near international border, near coast line, state secretariat complexes. Besides, they cannot operate in strategic locations, vital and military installations and Vijay Chowk in the capital or be used for wedding photography.

Unveiling the regulations, Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said, "Our progressive regulations will encourage a vast Made in India drone industry."



He said the relief efforts in Kerala would have been much more effective had the regulation been in place by now. He said drone market is expected to touch USD 1 trillion in the coming years.

"We are likely to go from travelling in auto rickshaws to air rickshaws. There is a wide range of application of drones, from disaster relief, surveillance, security monitoring, precision agriculture, precision logistics," said Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha.

The registration of the drones, permission to fly will be done digitally through the 'digital sky platform', connected to local police, which will implement "no permission, no take off".

Users of the nano drone,which weighs less than 250 gram and flies up to 50 feet, are exempted from securing permission, including from local police. But micro drones flying up to 200 feet and small drones flying over 450 feet and above will have to require police permission.

"Users will be required to do a one-time registration of their drones, pilots and owners. For every flight (exempted for the nano category), users will be required to ask for permission to fly on a mobile app and an automated process permits or denies the request instantly.

"To prevent unauthorized flights and to ensure public safety, any drone without a digital permit to fly will simply not be able to takeoff," said a government statement.

Asked about the delivery of food items, Sinha indicated the second set of regulations may allow their delivery based on outcome of tests.

While drones can be used for agricultural purpose, they cannot be used for spraying pesticides until specifically cleared. Besides, carriage of explosives, animals and human payload are not allowed.

Suspension and cancellation of license has been provided in the regulations besides slapping of various sections of the Indian Penal Code for violation and falsification of documents.

The government has identified 23 sites across the country where the drone technology will be put to extensive use to evalute its further usage. A drone task force under his chairmanship will provide draft recommendations for drone Regulations 2.0.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 24-year-old Delhi University student was arrested for allegedly robbing a DSLR camera from an amateur photographer at the Tughlaqabad Fort, police said today.

The police were informed about the incident yesterday.

Krishan Singh (19), an amateur photographer, who is undergoing photography training from an institute in Delhi, told police that he was contacted through Facebook by two persons for preparing their portfolio.

Therefore, he came to the Tughlaqabad Fort for a photoshoot of his clients.

While they were doing the photoshoot, two men came towards them and said they did not have permission to click pictures at the fort, police added.

The accused started assaulting the complainant and robbed his professional Nikon DSLR camera and ran away from the spot, they said.

A case was registered at the Govindpuri police station.

During the course of investigation, thorough search operation was launched at the Tughlaqabad Fort and the adjoining jungle area. On the basis of description of the accused, people with similar identities were questioned and secret informers were also deployed, the police said.

Subsequently, one Vishal, a resident of Tughlaqabad village, was nabbed near a shop in Tughlakabad Village and the robbed camera was recovered from him, they added.

During interrogation, the accused revealed that he is a second-year student pursuing his BA (Pass) course from the Delhi University through correspondence.

He told the police he is addicted to liquor and at times he went to the Tughlaqabad jungle area for drinking. There he met one Irshad and the duo bonded over their liquor addiction.

They saw the victim clicking pictures and decided to rob his camera to get money for liquor, police said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The on Monday indicated its opposition to capping election and suggested that the should instead moot for better transparency.

The (BJP), in an all-party meeting with the Election Commission, also said that it is "optimistic" about introducing the woman quota bill in Parliament.

"The political campaigns led by political parties are agenda-based and guided by vision documents. If this is limited in any sense, it would certainly encourage based on caste and individual influence-based Therefore, the ECI may moot for better transparency than limit the expenses," it said.

The was represented by its general secretary Bhupender Yadav.

The has supported a cap on poll

The BJP, according to a statement released later, also said that a political party's campaign encourages and influences voters to participate in elections.

With all contributions greater than Rs 20,000 being reported now, it might well be left to candidates and parties to report their sources of funding and expenditure, the said.

Political parties mobilise funding on the basis of their voting support base and their membership, it said, adding that corporate, high net worth individuals and crowd funding is a consequence of their voter base.

"Hence, there is no reason to introduce any cap on such collection or expenditure," it said.

The BJP, however, said the extent of ceiling on election expenditure of a political party should be discussed widely, keeping in view the several factors depending on the basis of number of candidates put by a party, social-political dynamics, geographical area of the state or constituencies, density, numbers of rallies proposed by the party among other factors.

"In fact, some of unrealistic appropriation of expenses to the candidate account needs to be revisited," it said.

To a topic about the measures political parties can undertake to encourage representation of women, the BJP said it is committed to women empowerment in all walks of life and is "pioneer" in encouraging women participation at its organisational level.

"Most of the BJP-ruled states have reserved seats for women candidates in panchayat election. The BJP is concerned and is optimistic about introducing woman representation reservation Bill in Parliament to address this cause but the constant animosity on behalf of the opposition parties is creating hindrances in accomplishing the same," it said.

The BJP also told the that voter slips should not be treated as an identity proof as it has been evident that at times influential voters have even engaged in purchasing it.

It called for taking steps so that voter slip is also accompanied with one standard ID proof, and pitched for linking voter registration with Aadhaar to rule out duplication of voters.The Election Commission said today that it would provide "satisfactory solution" to the concerns raised by political parties on the infallibility of electronic voting machines (EVMs), after some of them pitched for returning to the ballot paper system at an all-party meeting.

Talking to reporters after the meeting, Chief Election Commissioner O P Rawat said, "We will definitely look into all the suggestions given by them (political parties) and there will be a satisfactory solution to them."



The Election Commission convened the meeting ahead of elections to several state assemblies later this year and the Lok Sabha polls scheduled for early next year.

It is customary for the poll panel to listen to political parties ahead of elections.

In the meeting, several opposition parties raised the issues of EVM tampering and technical glitches in the voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) system.

Representatives of the Congress, Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Trinamool Congress were among those who raised these issues and many of them also suggested going back to the ballot paper system, representatives of parties and EC officials present in the meeting said.

Though EVM tampering and VVPAT glitches were not on the agenda, parties raised these issues.

Some parties also suggested that the number of constituencies where results of EVM and paper audit trail device are matched be increased to enhance the confidence of voters and parties in the reliability of the voting mode.

"Nothing final has been decided yet, but one way to allay fears is to increase the number of constituencies where EVM and paper trail machine results are matched," a senior EC functionary said after the meeting.

Responding to repeated questions on EVMs, Rawat said the EC takes a comprehensive view.

"Some of the parties said going back to ballot is really bad as it will bring back booth capturing...we don't want (that). At the same time, some parties said there are problems with EVMs, there are issues with VVPAT slip count so why not EC takes a call on this," Rawat said.

Asked about the stand of the EC on EVMs and whether it remains the "same" as it was in the past, the Chief Election Commissioner dubbed it as a "hypothetical question".

In June last year, when the EC had invited parties to prove that the EVMs can be hacked, only two parties accepted the challenge but they too opted out of the event.

As many as 13 parties had last year questioned the reliability of the EVMs.

Then Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi had maintained that the EVMs used by the EC were "non-tamperable" and with 100 per cent use of paper trail machines in all future elections the issue of tamperability of the machines "stands closed".

The "failure rate" of EVMs in most elections has been 0.7 per cent.

EVMs were first used in election in India in May, 1982 in a Kerala byoll.

But since there was no law prescribing its use, the Supreme Court struck down the election.

The Representation of the People Act was amended in 1989 to allow use of EVMs. But a general consensus on its use was evolved only in 1998.

Over 11 per cent of the 10,300 VVPAT machines across 10 states had developed faults and had to be replaced during the bypolls on May 28 this year.

This prompted the EC to make ingenious changes to ensure that the failure rate goes down.

Voter-verifiable paper audit trail machines dispense a slip with the symbol of the party for which a person has voted for. The slip appears on a small window for seven seconds and then drops in a box. But the voter cannot take it home.

VVPATs are used in all polling stations. But as of now, results of EVMs and VVPATs are matched in one polling station per constituency.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 65-year-old man was sentenced to life imprisonment by a POCSO court here today for abducting and raping a minor girl.

The court also imposed a penalty of Rs one lakh over the convict.

The judgment came in a record five working days after the charge sheet in the matter was submitted on August 20, Special Public Prosecutor (SPP) at the Kota POCSO Court Kamal Kant Sharma said.

Judge Girish Kumar Agrawal sentenced Pappu alias Hariram, a resident of Chawani Ramchandrapura here to life imprisonment for abducting and raping a 10-year-old girl, the SPP said.

The girl was attending her mother at a hospital on October 13, 2017 when the accused took her on pretext of providing her money. He took her to Lakheri town where he raped her near a railway station and later left her.

The victim somehow managed to reach Kota railway station where she narrated the incident to police.

A case was lodged the next day in Nayapura police station in Kota under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the POCSO Act, the SPP said.

Police arrested the accused in the matter on May 22 this year, he added, adding



a charge sheet in the matter was submitted to the POCSO court on August 20 this year and in the speedy trial of only five working days, the court today convicted Pappu.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh today handed over cheques worth Rs 2.90 crore as additional financial assistance to the families of those killed in the police firing in Faridkot district.

On October 12, 2015, torn pages of the Guru Granth Sahib were found in Faridkot's Bargari village. In the protests that followed, two people died in police firing in Behbal Kalan village on October 14.

The chief minister has raised the compensation amount to Rs 1 crore for the kin of the deceased from the Rs 75 lakh recommended by the Justice (retd) Ranjit Singh Commission, along with a job.

The chief minister assured them of all possible assistance by the state government.

He, however, said no amount of monetary help could ever compensate the loss of a human life.

Earlier, the government had sanctioned an additional assistance of Rs 90 lakh each for the families of Gurjit Singh and Krishan Bhagwan, residents of village Sarawan and Khurd respectively, who were killed in the police firing, an official spokesperson said.

The then SAD-BJP government had given Rs 10 lakh each to the families of the deceased.

The Amarinder Singh-led Congress government had paid a compensation of Rs 60 lakh to Ajit Singh, a resident of Bathinda district's Nathpur village, who was critically injured in the firing.

It had also announced reimbursement of all the expenses incurred on his treatment, besides providing a lifelong medical attendant at a cost of Rs 15,000 per month.

An assistance of Rs 50 lakh was also provided to another injured Beant Singh of Behbal Khurd village.

The government has already reimbursed a sum of Rs 2.60 lakh for his medical treatment, the spokesperson said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court today said the female genital mutilation (FGM) of minor girls of the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community leaves a "permanent emotional and mental scar" on them and the practice may be held as violative of dignity of women as prescribed in the Constitution.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud referred to constitutional schemes as interpreted by the apex court over a period of time and said "the fact that the practice is essential religious practice does not make it constitutional".

"You just cannot inflict any kind of injury to another person," the bench said, adding that for husbands, young girls should not go through all this.

"This kind of mutilation leaves a permanent emotional mental scar on small girls. You snip her genitalia," the bench said.

Senior advocate A M Singhvi, appearing for a Dawoodi Bohra Muslim group, said if this practice, which is an essential religious practice, is questioned then somebody may challenge the male circumcision in Muslims and there would be no end to such judicial scrutiny.

He said the petition be referred to a larger Constitution bench as it pertained to religious practice as was the case with the Sabarimala temple where menstruating women are denied the entry.

He also referred to the triple talaq judgement and said the present petition also raised the "substantial question of law" pertaining to Articles 25, 26 and 29 of the Constitution which deal with the freedom of religion and protection of religious rights of the minorities.

"The matters like this should be heard by a bench of five or seven judges," he said.

The bench referred to Article 25 (2) and said that it enabled the state to make law and if the State does not make the statute, even then on the ground of "public order, morality and health" the practice of FGM can be scrutinsied by the court.

"Additionally, you may be also governed by Article 15 (which prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, sex etc) which enables the State to make law to ensure dignity of women," the bench said.

Referring to the practice of "polyandry" and "devdasi" where eldest daughter was being offered to the God, the bench said, "the fact that the practice is essential religious practice, it does not make it constitutional".

The senior lawyer said that the court had waited for the legislature to enact the law abolishing 'Sati' and the present issue cannot and should not be decided in a PIL filed by a person who is not aware of the practice and has not filed any evidence in support ofthe plea.

"I represent 70,000 Bohra Muslim women and they have no problem with the practice and moreover, this was not the case of FGM as made out to be be," Singhvi said.

The advancing of arguments remained inconclusive and would resume tomorrow.

Earlier, the apex court had said that the fact that the FGM is being practised from tenth century is not "sufficient" to hold that this formed part of the "essential religious practice", which cannot be scrutinised by court.

Prior to this, the court had made it clear that it cannot direct doctors to perform genital mutilation of minor girls of the community and had questioned the "scientific justification", if any, behind the procedure.

Attorney General K K Venugopal, appearing for the Centre, had reiterated the government's stand that it was opposing the practice and said that this has been banned in many countries like the US, the UK, Australia and around 27 African nations.

The practice causes irreparable harm to girl children and has many health repercussions, the top law officer said and referred to Article 25 to highlight the point that a religious practice can be stopped if it was against "public order, morality and health".

The bench was hearing the PIL filed by Delhi-based lawyer Sunita Tiwari against the practice in the community.

Tiwari, in her plea, sought a direction to the Centre and the states to "impose a complete ban on the inhuman practice" of 'khatna' or "female genital mutilation" throughout the country.

Female genital mutilation is performed "illegally upon girls (between five years and before she attains puberty)" and is against the "UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of which is India is a signatory", the plea said, adding the practice caused "permanent disfiguration to the body of a girl child".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The first asylum seeker boat has reached Australia in more than four years, a government minister said today, as new concerns were raised about the psychological state of children who arrived earlier and were banished by the government.

Australia has virtually stopped such boat arrivals by using the navy to turn them back and sending asylum seekers who arrive by ship to immigration camps on the poor Pacific island nations of Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

But a group of people recently arrived in northeast Australia on a fishing boat from Vietnam, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said.

"We will work with the agencies to make sure we can repatriate these people back to their country of origin, once we understand the facts of the matter," Dutton told reporters.

Vietnamese asylum seekers have been accepted by Australia as legitimate refugees in the past. But Vietnamese have also been intercepted at sea by Australian authorities, had their refugee claims rejected at sea and been sent back to their homeland.

Dutton blamed a failure of surveillance for the boat reaching Cape Kimberley in the World Heritage-listed Daintree Rainforest north of Cairns in Queensland state.

Queensland Police Minister Mark Ryan said 15 asylum seekers had been detained and authorities were searching for others from the Vietnamese boat, which was reported on Sunday.

A previous government announced on July 19, 2013, that any asylum seeker who arrived by boat would not be allowed to settle in Australia. Single men were sent to Papua New Guinea and others were sent to Nauru. The boats, mostly from Indonesian ports, were at the time arriving at a rate of more than one a day carrying asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The United States has agreed to accept up to 1,250 of the refugees. Asylum seeker children on Nauru are now deliberately harming themselves and researching ways to die, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported on Monday.

Leaked documents compiled by immigration department workers and obtained by the ABC reveal a spate of self-harm incidents on the island. One report from June said a 14-year-old refugee poured gasoline over herself and had a lighter.

Another report from June showed a 10-year-old refugee attempted self-harm by ingesting some sharp metal objects similar to fencing wire.

Former child psychologist Vernon Reynolds, who was employed on the island by the Australian government's health care contractor from August 2016 to April 2018 said he was concerned that some refugee children would die.

"I'm reasonably surprised that no one has," he told the ABC.

Reynolds said the children were exhibiting signs of severe trauma.

"They stop eating much, they stop drinking much, they stop looking after the day-to-day self-care," she said.

The Department of Home Affairs said Australia gives significant support to Nauru to provide health and welfare services, with various providers contracted to offer age-appropriate care.

The last asylum seekers to reach Australia by boat were 157 Sri Lankans.

They were aboard an Indian-flagged ship from the southeast port of Pondicherry when they were intercepted by an Australian customs vessel in late June 2014 and were brought to Australia.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An adult male rhino was tonight gunned down by forest guards in "self-defence" at the Kaziranga National Park in upper Assam, a senior Forest



Department official said.

An eight-member patrolling party of forest guards at Agratoli Range was attacked by the rhino at around 7 pm, Kaziranga Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) Rohini Ballab Saikia said.

The guards first fired in the air to chase away the pachyderm, but when the rhino did not relent, "they were forced to fire at the animal in self-defence", killing it on the spot, Saikia said, adding that it is a rare instance.

Senior Park and Forest officials have rushed to the site, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Madras Hight Court dismissed today as withdrawn an anticipatory bail plea moved by former Anna University controller of examinations in



connection with the alleged re-valuation scam.

Police had booked 10 professors, including the then controller G V Uma, for allegedly "receiving money" from some engineering students and giving them extra marks during re-evaluation.

Uma had been suspended subsequently and a committee formed by the university to look into the issue.

When the plea for anticipatory bail came up, the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC) informed the court that they were yet to complete the probe on the complaints of corruption and other offences in connection with the scam.

Recording the submission, Justice M Dhandapani asked the response of the petitioner's counsel.

To this, counsel said he would withdraw the application if the court permits.

Recording it, the judge dismissed the plea as withdrawn.

According to petitioner Uma, she held the post of controller of examinations of the university between March 3, 2015 and March 2, 2018.

During the period, she conducted the exams for the university as well as colleges affiliated to it in a fair and transparent manner without giving room for remarks from any quarters.

She claimed that the controller can neither influence the examiners nor the officers to award favourable marks to any student.

The DVAC has not conducted proper inquiry and had opted to pick and choose method of arraigning the petitioner in the scam, she alleged.

She submitted that she would abide by the conditions imposed by the court and cooperate with the investigation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The then Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal was "aware" of the proposed action of the police to disperse the protesters at Kotkapura in Faridkot by using force, according to the findings of Justice Ranjit Singh Commission which probed sacrilege incidents.

The one man commission, the report of which was tabled in the state Assembly today, also held the police responsible for the using force at Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan, describing it as "unprovoked, unwarranted and uncalled" for.

The report held that the police opened fire at Behbal Kalan in which two persons were killed, "without any warning and without taking permission from civil authorities".

The commission was formed by the Congress government to investigate the various incidents of sacrilege of the religious texts including at village Burj Jawahar Singh Wala, Bargari and firing incidents at Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan in 2015.

In an action taken report of the government on the recommendations of the commission, the state government has issued show cause notices to several senior police officials including then Director General of Police Sumedh Singh Saini (now retired) and then ADGP Law and Order Rohit Chaudhary.

The chief secretary has also been directed to take appropriate disciplinary action against all civil officials as per recommendations of the commission within 90 days, as per action taken report.

Naming former CM Parkash Singh Badal, the commission in its supplementary report submitted on August 16, said, "...earlier the commission had in its report observed that the facts might indicate the involvement of the CMO, but it is now clear that the Chief Minister and the CMO were apparently kept in the loop about the action proposed by the police and the action finally taken at Kotkapura".

In the supplementary report, the commission noted, "there is sufficient material available on record in the form of telephone calls between the Deputy Commissioner, Mantar Singh Brar MLA, Gagandeep Brar (the then Principal secretary to CM)...The chain is thus complete and clear that the CM Parkash Singh Badal was not only in touch with district administration but was in touch with DGP as well and was quite aware about the situation developing at Kotkapura and also about proposed action by police."



Referring to supplementary report, the government in its action taken report said the recommendations of the commission had been accepted, saying it was decided to refer the matter to CBI, the investigation agency shall also ascertain whether any act of commission or omission was committed by any other person.

Significantly, the Shiromani Akali Dal has already rejected the commission report and accused the commission of acting as 'Congress Sarkari Commission'.

The commission had dealt with the incidents of sacrilege at village Burj Jawahar Singh Wala, Bargari, Gurusar and Mallke. Besides it also probed incidents of sacrilege in districts SAS Nagar, Fatehgarh Sahib, Rupnagar and Patiala, SBS Nagar (Nawanshahr), Hoshiarpur, Amritsar, Bathinda, Barnala, Faridkot, Fazilka, Ferozepur, Gurdaspur, Jalandhar, Kapurthala, Ludhiana, Mansa, Moga, Sangrur, Sri Muktsar Sahib and Tarn Taran.

The government had already announced to handover probe into Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan firing to the CBI. Earlier, when the report was tabled in the Assembly today, the Akalis staged a walk out.

Speaker Rana KP Singh said a debate on the report will take place tomorrow and it will be telecast live on TV channels.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A former CPI(ML) worker was today shot dead by unidentified miscreants at Nadhi village in Bhojpur district, a police officer said.

Superintendent of Police Awakash Kumar said that the deceased, identified as 45-year old Ramakant Ram, was an accused in the killing of two persons associated with the Ranvir Sena in 2001.

CPI(ML) MLA from Tarari Sudama Prasad said, Ram was attacked when he stepped outside his house for answering nature's call.

The miscreants opened fire at him killing him on the spot, the police officer said.

Raids were on to nab the culprits, he said.

Angry over the incident, local residents and party workers were not allowing the police personnel to take away the body for post-mortem examination, police sources said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A suspected gangster allegedly involved in murder and kidnapping cases was arrested in south Delhi here, the police said today.

Vikas Singh, a native of Bihar, was arrested on August 25 on the basis of a tip-off, they said, adding that he was planning to kill a Ghaziabad-based businessman.

He, along with his associates, had allegedly killed a fellow gangster in Bihar in 2017 and kidnapped a Nepali businessman in 2016, police said.

A trap was laid after police learnt that Vikas Singh was coming to meet someone outside the Sangam Cinema in R K Puram here, they said, adding that subsequently he was nabbed.

During interrogation, he revealed that he, along with another gangster Babloo Dubey, had kidnapped the Nepali business tycoon, Suresh Kedia, from Birganj in Nepal for ransom, police said.

On May 28, the victim was rescued after three days by the Bihar Police, they added.

Police said Vikas Singh also revealed that Kedia gave gold worth Rs 10 crore after his release to one of the contact persons of the accused in Chandni Chowk here.

The kidnapping of the businessman was planned by Dubey in Buxer Jail in Bihar, along with his associates Kunal Singh, Rahul Singh, Vikas Singh and others.

Later, a dispute arose between the gangsters over distribution of the ransom money. Dubey was killed while being produced in Bettiah Court in Bihar from jail on May 11, 2017, said Rajiv Ranjan, Additional Commissioner of Police (crime).

Most of the persons involved in the killing of Dubey have been arrested, while Vikas Singh was absconding.

Soon after Dubey's killing, Kunal Singh had taken the responsibility of the murder in a video clip sent to media persons. Dubey was a mafia don of Champaran, Bihar, and involved in more than 50 cases of murder, kidnapping for ransom and extortion despite being in jail, Ranjan said.

The interrogation also revealed that Vikas Singh was hiding in Delhi with one Ashu Pahalwan and running an office of tour and travels, said the officer.

When he was in jail in Bihar, an inmate, who belonged to Ghazipur in east Delhi, was also lodged there for liquor smuggling.

The inmate had approached Vikas Singh for the contract killing of the businessman in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, for which the former agreed to pay Rs 15 lakh. But with Vikas Singh's arrest, this plan was foiled, Ranjan said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The ruling BJP in Rajasthan said today that the opposition Congress was intimidated by the popularity of Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and was trying to disrupt her statewide Gaurav Yatra using "various means".

Former Rajasthan BJP president Ashok Parnami said Congress national general secretary Ashok Gehlot was "afraid" of Raje's popularity, after a few miscreants pelted stones at Raje's meeting on Saturday in Pipad town of Jodhpur division.

Raje and other BJP leaders have accused the Congress of staging the incident. The opposition party has condemned the incident but said it does not adopt such kind of tactics.

"Congress doesn't want the yatra to proceed and is trying to disrupt it through various means, including by filing writ petition in high court and then pelting stones on CM's Rath in Pipad. Why is Ashok Gehlot afraid of CM Raje's rising popularity," Parnami said at a press conference in Jaipur.

He showed videos in which a group of people could be seen supporting Gehlot and inciting the crowd to pelt stones on Raje's cavalcade.

Congress has a strong hold in Pipad and they cannot shy away from responsibility by only condemning the incident, he added.

Fifteen people have been arrested in connection with the incident, Additional Superintendent of Police (Jodhpur rural), Khinv Singh said, adding, five of them were taken into custody today.

The BJP leader said the people arrested would reveal their identity during police interrogation.

Gehlot and state Congress chief Sachin Pilot yesterday condemned the stone-pelting incident and said it was unfortunate that the BJP was holding their party responsible.

"It is a highly condemnable act if someone has thrown stones during the visit of the Chief Minister," Gehlot had tweeted.

Parmani said the people of Rajasthan have been supporting Raje's yatra, which began from Udaipur division on August 4. This is the second phase of the yatra.

On Saturday night, a few miscreants disrupted Raje's yatra and pelted stones during a meeting. Stones were also hurled on the chief minister's rath in Pipad, police said.

Earlier that day, a few miscreants pelted stones on Health Minister Kalicharan Saraf's vehicle near Khairwara town, breaking its rear windshield.

Today Saraf told reporters that he holds Congress and its supporters responsible for the incident.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Global investment bank Goldman Sachs today said it has appointed Prachi Mishra as the managing director and chief India economist.

Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Mishra was the deputy division chief of the Western Hemisphere Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Before that, she headed the strategic research unit at the Reserve Bank of India from February 2016 to May 2017. She was also a specialist adviser at the RBI between November 2014 and February 2016.

Mishra was the first lateral recruit at the RBI.

Prior to that, she had worked as a senior economist at both the IMF and the ministry of finance.

Mishra, a Delhi School of Economics alumnus, did her PhD and M.Phil in economics from Columbia University.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Criminal defamation suits were filed before a local court today against Congresss leaders Rahul Gandhi and Randeep Singh Surjewala by the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank (ADCB) over their allegation that the bank was involved in a "scam" to convert "Rs 750 crore" within five days of demonetisation in 2016.

A plea filed by complainants--the ADCB and its chairman Ajay Patel--contended that the two leaders had levelled "false and defamatory allegations" against the bank.

Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate S K Gadhvi has ordered a court enquiry into the matter under section 202 of the CrPC(to enquire into the case to decide whether or not there is sufficient ground for proceeding)



The matter will be taken up on September 17.

Gandhi and Surjewala had reportedly alleged that the ADCB had received deposits of Rs 745.59 crore of demonetised currencies within five days of Prime Minister Narendra Modi announcing the note ban, wherein higher denominations of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 were scrapped, on November 8, 2016.

The allegations were made by Gandhi and Surjewala, days after NABARD (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development) had issued a response to an RTI query filed by a Mumbai-based activist.

Surjewala is the communication department incharge of the Congress.

In the plea filed through their lawyer S V Raju, the ADCB and Patel submitted before the court that the statement made by both the Congress leaders was false because the bank did not exchange such a huge amount.

It further stated that the bank did not have such huge amount to exchange.

In a tweet, Gandhi had said, "Congratulations Amit Shah ji, Director, Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank, on your bank winning 1st prize in the conversion of old notes to new race. Rs 750 crore in 5 days!



"Millions of Indians whose lives were destroyed by demonetisation, salute your achievement," he had said on Twitter.

Surjewala had said, "We expect the prime minister will himself come forward and give answers on the charges against Amit Shah, whom he has appointed. There should be an independent time-bound probe into this entire scam".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A nationalised bank in Rajkot district 'shut' its operations for half-day today, apparently at the behest of a state minister who accused the officials of not processing the crop insurance payment of farmers.

Local police said the minister only "requested" the bank authorities to speed up the processing of the payment.

In videos of the incident broadcast by channels, Civil Supplies Minister Jayesh Radadiya of BJP, who represents Jetpur seat, purportedly told the officials of the Jetpur branch of the SBI to close their operations for the remaining day.

Radadiya approached the bank in Jetpur, 75 kms from Rajkot, this afternoon with some farmers who had claimed that their crop insurance payments were delayed by the bank, sources said.

"The bank is not processing the money it had received last year from insurance firms into the accounts of farmers," Radadiya told reporters before the incident occurred.

He claimed an insurance company had last year cleared claims of around 150 farmers in the area and approved payment of Rs 1.75 crore.

"The bank is not releasing the money to the farmers. Officials are also not giving any satisfactory reply when farmers approach them," the minister alleged.

The bank officials were not available for comment.

Jetpur police said the bank officials shut their branch in afternoon after Radadiya's visit.

According to police, the minister only requested the bank officials to speed up their work regarding crop insurance.

"Radadiya came to the SBI branch in Jetpur to make a representation about the non-payment of crop insurance money to some farmers. After Radadiya's visit, the bank shut its operation for the day. The minister only requested the officials to speed up their work related to crop insurance," said Jetpur police inspector M N Rana.

In one video, Radadiya purportedly told the officials not to open the bank till further orders.

"I will not allow any of your branches to run in entire Jetpur...Last year's insurance for groundnut crop is not paid yet..I don't care if it was not done by you or by the insurance firms," Radadiya purportedly told the bank staff.

"Do not open this (branch) without my order..Now wind up your operation," the minister told a bank official.

Radadiya didn't respond to the calls made to him after the alleged incident.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Security officials in Tajikistan said today that two people have been killed and one injured after men stormed the border from Afghanistan.

Tajik Border Guards said in a statement that they are looking for a group of 10 to 12 armed men who crossed the Panj River separating the country from Afghanistan yesterday.

The men, armed with a hand-held grenade launcher and automatic rifles opened fire on three forest rangers, killing two of them and injuring one. Tajikistan has a long, porous border with Afghanistan, and the area across the Panj is currently under Taliban control.

The incident comes a week before Moscow hosts a Taliban delegation for Afghanistan talks.

Russia's Defence Ministry later on Monday denied reports that it carried out airstrikes on nearby Taliban-controlled territory in retaliation.

Officials in Russia and Tajikistan have long been worried about a potential spillover of militant activities from Afghanistan. The chief of Tajikistan's Border Guard Forces earlier this year raised the alarm about an estimated 7,000 Afghan militants roaming the border area.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Around five students of a gurukul at Rohtak's Ladhot village were allegedly sodomised by their seniors and some staff members for the past few months, police said today.

The victims, studying in class 5 and class 6, told their family members about the crime yesterday, the police said, adding an FIR has been registered.

The accused had threatened them with dire consequences if they reported the matter, the police said.

A case has been registered against some senior students and staff of the gurukul under relevant sections of the IPC and the POCSO Act, they said, adding police is investigating the matter.

Meanwhile, the district Child Welfare Committee issued a notice to the institute's management seeking their response on the allegations made by the students.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)As his hunger strike entered the third day today, Patidar leader Hardik Patel vowed to continue his fast till his demands for quota for his community members and loan waiver for Gujarat farmers were met.

The Patidar quota stir spearhead, who received more support for his agitation today, hit out at the BJP government, alleging the prevailing situation in Gujarat is "worse than what it was during the British Raj".

Apart from some local Congress leaders and MLAs, Kapil Patil, a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Council, met Hardik Patel at his residence near here, where he is on an indefinite fast, and extended their support to him.

Patil is a leader of the Loktantrik Janata Dal.

Talking to the media, Hardik Patel claimed a large number of his supporters were trying to reach his residence, but the police were preventing them from coming here.

"Even sitting MLAs are being prevented from coming to my residence. This BJP government and its police are trying their best to stop this agitation. This situation is worse than what it was during the British Raj," he alleged.

"I know the police are working at the behest of the BJP government. But, I want to tell you that no one can stop us now. I am still fit and my hunger strike will continue till both my demands are met," he said.

The 25-year-old Patidar leader urged his supporters to sit on fast at their respective villages and towns if they are unable to reach his residence.

Hardik Patel started his hunger strike on August 25, the third anniversary of his mega pro-quota rally in Ahmedabad that had turned violent.

He is demanding a loan waiver for Gujarat farmers and inclusion of his community in the OBC category to facilitate reservation for its members in government jobs and education.

Hardik Patel launched his fast from his residence after authorities in Ahmedabad as well as Gandhinagar refused to allot a place for the hunger strike.

Yesterday, former railway minister and TMC leader Dinesh Trivedi, representatives of the Lalu Prasad Yadav-led Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Hindustani Awam Morcha of former Bihar chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi had called on him to extend their support.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Instances of police from other states arresting people from the national capital without informing the local police has led the Delhi High Court to call for revisiting procedure for such actions to ensure life and liberty of citizens is not compromised by the "lawlessness" of the police force.

A bench of Justices S Muralidhar and Vinod Goel said such practice was "contrary to the police manuals" and if allowed to go unchecked, would "amount to condoning the lawlessness by the police force".

"In a country governed by the rule of law, this is simply unacceptable," the court said while referring to two incidents -- one of a young married couple being taken into custody from the Jawaharlal Nehru University here by a Uttar Pradesh police officer on a complaint by the woman's father and the other in which police officials from Gujarat arrested and took away a juvenile from here without informing the Delhi Police.

The court said the existing procedures to be followed by police officers of one state seeking to arrest or conduct searches and investigation in another state or union territory were "not being observed".

"There are also instances of persons impersonating police officers, producing fake identity cards and taking away persons or property," the bench said, adding it was "time to revisit the procedures devised to ensure that the life and liberty of persons is not compromised on account of the lawlessness of the police force".

The court constituted a two-member committee, comprising former Delhi HC judge Justice S P Garg and a former Director General of Police (Investigation), Kanwaljeet Deol, to enquire into the matter, particularly the legality of the actions of the UP police officer from the Loni police station, who had taken away the couple without intimating the local police station at Vasant Kunj.

"The Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), Government of India is directed to ensure that there is a full cooperation extended to the above committee both by the Delhi Police as well as the police in district Ghaziabad. The committee will be given full access to the relevant records and is permitted to question the police personnel in both police stations.

"As part of the report, the committee will give suggestions on how the system can be improved and such instances of violations by the police of the procedure minimized," the bench said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union Health Minister JP Nadda today said his ministry is holding deliberations on an expert panel's report on "faulty" hip replacements surgeries by a multinational company in India.

We are deliberating on it, he told reporters here, with elaborating.

His comments came after reports appeared in the media, claiming pharma giant Johnson and Johnson "suppressed" facts on the harm caused by surgeries which were conducted on patients in India using "faulty" hip replacement systems.

According to reports, the expert committee, set up to investigate complaints about hip implant devices, has suggested that the company pay compensation of around Rs 20 lakh to the affected patients.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.): A group of Hindu Munnani volunteers today laid a near-seige to the district Collectorate here, demanding relaxation of conditions for conduct of Vinayaka Chathurthi festival next month.

The volunteers gathered at the Collectorate and insisted on meeting the district Collector to put forth their demands.

However, later officials allowed representatives of Hindu Munnani to meet Collector Shilpa Prabakar Satheesh.

Munnani state vice-president V P Jeyakumar and general secretary Arasuraja among others met the Collector and submitted a petition containing various demands with regard to conduct of Vinayaka Chathurthi celebrations in the town.

In the petition, they alleged the police amd revenue officials in the district had imposed 'unnecessary' restrictions to obtain permission for organising events in connection with the festival and wanted them to be relaxed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh Jai Ram Thakur today said officials should be vigilant in areas bordering Punjab and Haryana.

Replying to a question asked by Congress MLA Naina Devi in the state assembly here, under call attention motion, Thakur said, "Himachal Pradesh is a peaceful state and criminals, including murderers, rapists, robbers and drug peddlers, may want to take refuge here after committing crimes in neighbouring states."



In response to the July 14 encounter by Punjab police in Bilaspur district, the Himachal government is mulling over increasing police strength in border areas, the CM said.

Thakur said after the encounter Punjab police detailed their Himachal counterpart on the matter and said a car snatcher had been killed.

The CM said three close circuit television cameras have been installed and one constable along with three home guard jawans, equipped with AK 47s, have been deployed at Tauba Check Post in Bilaspur district near Punjab border.

He said all vehicles entering the state are not checked, though random police inspections are often conducted. Checks are also conducted based on special information.

Two constables, three home guard jawans have been deployed and two CCTVs have been installed at Kainchi Morh Tourist Assistance Centre in Bilaspur district, the CM told the house.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur today ordered a magisterial inquiry into the clash between youth Congress workers and police outside the state Assembly here on Friday.

However, opposition Congress members demanded a judicial inquiry into the matter and staged a walkout from the Assembly.

Speaking during the ongoing Monsoon Session of the House, the chief minister claimed that Congress youth workers threw stones and lathis at police personnel during their demonstration on Friday.

Police used water cannons to disperse them. Despite this "I am ready for a magisterial inquiry, as in a democracy the views of the opposition are taken care of by the ruling party", Thakur said.

"We want the proceedings of the House to run uninterrupted," he said.

The Congress had claimed that a dozen of their youth workers suffered injuries in the incident, while the chief minister today said nine policemen, including an additional superintendent of police, were hurt during the clash.

Thakur said if Speaker Rajeev Bindal allows, they were ready to discuss the issue in the House.

Members of the youth Congress were allowed to hold demonstrations between 11.30 am and 1.30 pm by the Shimla deputy commissioner, but its workers held the protest at 3.30 pm, he said.

Some of them climbed barricades and started throwing stones and lathis at police personnel. Nine policemen were injured, he said, adding that in response, police had to use water cannons to disperse the protesters.

On a photo being circulated by Congress workers on social media sites, claiming it was of the Friday clash, Thakur said it was an old one and that of a woman injured in an attack by a group in Rajasthan.

Raising slogans in support of their demand for judicial inquiry, Congress MLAs entered the Well as soon as the house began at 2 pm. The speaker adjourned the House till 2.30 pm.

When the House reassembled, Bindal said four members of the opposition, including Mukesh Agnihotri and Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, wanted to discuss the issue under rule 67 of the Assembly.

Police resorted to unprovoked lathicharge on youth Congress workers and there should be a judicial inquiry into the matter, Agnihotri said, claiming that he had a CD regarding the clash.

He demanded that the footage on the CD should be screened in the Assembly.

The Congress MLA said appropriate action should be taken against those responsible for the lathi-charge.

Sukhu claimed that the situation took an ugly turn when a policeman threw a stone at a youth Congress worker.

Opposition members entered the Well when BJP MLA Rakesh Pathania was speaking.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India has initiated probe into alleged dumping of a certain type of steel imported from Brazil, China and Germany following a complaint BY a domestic player.

The commerce ministry's investigation arm - Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) - has stated that there is an evidence of injury to the domestic industry caused by dumped "High Speed Steel of Non Cobalt Grade" from these three countries.

Graphite India Ltd has filed an application before the DGTR for imposition of anti-dumping duty on imports of the product from Brazil, China and Germany.

This steel is used for making high speed steel cutting tools.

"There is prima facie evidence of injury to the domestic industry caused by dumped imports from subject countries to justify initiation of an anti-dumping investigation," DGTR has said in a notification.

In the probe, the directorate would determine the existence, degree and effect of any alleged dumping.

If established that dumping has caused material injury to domestic players, the directorate would recommend imposition of anti-dumping duty on the imports of the chemical from these nations.

The period of investigation covers 2017-18. However, for the purpose of injury investigation, the period will also cover the data of 2014-17.

Anti-dumping duties are levied to provide a level playing field to local industry by guarding against cheap below-cost imports.

Imposition of anti-dumping duty is permissible under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) regime. Both India and China are members of the Geneva-based body.

The duty is aimed at ensuring fair trading practices and creating a level-playing field for domestic producers vis-a-vis foreign producers and exporters.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India and Pakistan will resume their talks on various aspects of the Indus Waters Treaty in Lahore on Wednesday, the first bilateral engagement since Prime Minister Imran Khan took office.

India's Indus Water Commissioner P K Saxena is expected to reach here today to begin the two-day discussions with his Pakistani counterpart Syed Mehr Ali Shah on Wednesday, Dawn quoted a government official as saying.

The last meeting of the Pakistan-India Permanent Indus Commission was held in New Delhi in March during which both the sides had shared details of the water flow and the quantum of water being used under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty.

The talks will be the first official engagement between India and Pakistan since Khan became prime minister on August 18.

In a letter to Khan on the day he was sworn in as Pakistan's 22nd prime minister, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed India's resolve to build good neighbourly relations between the two countries.

On July 30, Modi telephoned Khan to congratulate him on his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party's victory in the general elections and expressed hope that both countries will work to open a new chapter in bilateral ties.

The Pakistani side will reiterate its objections over two water storage and hydropower projects being built by India during the two-day talks scheduled for August 29-30.

The official said Pakistan would raise its concerns over 1000MW Pakal Dul and 48MW Lower Kalnai hydroelectric projects on the Chenab river.

The official said that the two sides would also finalise the schedule of future meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission and visits of the teams of the Indus commissioners.

He said that the water commissioners of Pakistan and India were required to meet twice a year and arrange technical visits to projects' sites and critical river head works, but Pakistan had been facing a lot of problems in timely meetings and visits.

The two-day session is also expected to discuss ways and means for timely and smooth sharing of hydrological data on shared rivers.

The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank and signed by then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan's president Ayub Khan, administers how the water of the Indus river and its tributaries that flow in both the countries will be utilised.

Under the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty 1960, waters of the eastern rivers Sutlej, Beas and Ravi had been allocated to India and the western rivers the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab to Pakistan, except for certain non-consumptive uses for India.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India's criminal justice system is in ICU and unless drastic measures are taken to revive it, the adage "justice delayed is justice denied" would become true, Rajya Sabha MP and eminent jurist K T S Tulsi warned here today.

"India's justice system is in ICU... and unless drastic measures are taken for its revival, the adage 'justice delayed is justice denied' will be proven right," he said.

Tulsi made the observation while speaking at a seminar on the criminal justice system in India, organised by Ludhiana Management Association here.

Pointing out the existence of a plethora of laws entailing repeated amendments, Tulsi rued that "the justice delivery system was pathetic, resulting in low conviction rates and failing to serve as a deterrent for those committing crimes."



The noted 'criminal' lawyer said the country's criminal justice mechanism suffers from lack of judiciary's accountability and cooperation between its investigation and prosecution wings, allowing criminals go scot free.

Even if they are charged, they manage to wriggle out either due to botchy investigation or lackadaisical prosecution, he said.

Expressing his concern over the huge pendency of criminal cases and the tardy pace of their disposal, Tulsi said at the present rate, it would take up to 300 years to clear the backlog.

Highlighting the "distressing state of affairs" in the criminal justice system, Tulsi compared India's meagre conviction rate of 21.2 per cent for cognisable offences with those of the USA and Japan, which have a conviction rate of over 98 per cent.

Listing procedural delays as yet another malady plaguing the country's criminal justice system, Tulsi said this affliction has resulted in more than 60 per cent of the prisoners being undertrials.

"This is a travesty of justice that we keep accused in jails for long periods, often without sufficient evidence," he said.

Stressing upon "the need for a paradigm shift" in the criminal justice deliver mechanism, Tulsi said, "We need to change our mindset for having more and more laws, increasing the sentence and denying bail as deterrents against committing crimes."



"We rather need to have a more effective and professional investigation system, better management of court procedures, reduction of court holidays and modernisation of police stations for having a fast and deterrent justice delivery system," he added.

He said the judiciary should be made accountable for timely delivery of justice with provisions for abatement of criminal cases, not decided within a prescribed time limit.

He said "the sad state of affairs is due to our unwillingness and inability to make the courts accountable for delays due to the impending threat of being charged for the contempt of court."



Tulsi attributed the rising trend of mob lynchings to "the tacit support of politicians and indifference of those who are entrusted with the responsibility for maintaining law and order."



The eminent jurist cautioned that if this state of affairs in the criminal justice system remains unchecked, it would lead to "vigilante justice" and high levels of insecurity amongst the citizens.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The government is working on a comprehensive strategy to double the country's exports by 2025, Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu said today.

Issues related to exporters were discussed during a stakeholders' meeting to discuss a strategy for revitalising India's exports and doubling the exports by 2025.

"This is necessary in view of challenges like uncertainty of global trade, rigid approach of banks affecting availability of credit, high logistics cost and productivity standards and qualities," an official statement quoting Prabhu said.

Minister of State for Commerce and Industry C R Chaudhary will be the chairperson of this mission and will review the work of different export promotion councils and divisions of the ministry.

In 2017-18, the country's merchandise exports grew by 10 per cent to USD 303 billion, while services exports rose by 18.8 per cent to USD 195 billion in the same period.

The ministry is also taking meetings with key ministries for preparing sectoral export strategies.

Prabhu stated that a special strategy is being prepared for the services sector to achieve broad-based growth instead of the existing pre-dominance of IT-ITeS.

The ministry said that commodity and territory specific strategy is also being prepared for items like gems and jewellery, textiles, engineering, electronics, chemicals, pharma, agri and marine products.

Territory specific strategy will cover North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Europe, North East Asia, ASEAN, South Asia, Latin America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

The commerce minister said that apart from traditional markets, India must also look at boosting trade with smaller countries.

He also said that exporters should not miss the opportunity presented by China's consumer market.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.): Public sector Indian Bank today said it has contributed Rs four crore to the Kerala Chief Minister Distress Relief Fund for rehabilitation work in the flood affected state.

The Executive Director of city-headquartered bank A S Rajeev handed over a cheque of Rs 4.01 crore to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan recently.

"The amount comprises Rs 3.01 crore collective contribution by the bank employees and Rs one crore from the bank", Indiab Bank said in a statement.

Over 300 people have lost their lives and four lakh are still in relief camps in Kerala.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Indian diaspora in the Netherlands has been mobilising funds, both individually and collectively, over the last two weeks to aid victims of the floods in Kerala.

A number of Dutch nationals have also participated in the effort, according to a statement issued by the Indian Embassy here today.

The Stichting International Yoga Day, which had joined hands with the Indian Embassy to organise the International Day of Yoga celebrations in June, has donated a sum of Rs 10 lakh, it said.

The Netherlands Malayalee Association (Nanma) has made an initial contribution of Rs 10 lakh for flood relief, the statement said.

Rajni Nambiar, who runs the South India Kitchen together with her friends, hosted a fundraising dinner for the flood victims and raised Rs one lakh for the Chief Minister's disaster relief fund, it said.

The Indian Students Association of the University of Twente, University of Wageningen and other Indian students associations are also engaged in various fundraising initiatives.

Rakesh Naduvathmana, a young architect from Kerala, has launched a crowdsourcing initiative through GoFundMe.com which has received a good response from both the Indian diaspora and the Dutch nationals, the statement said.

The Embassy of India is facilitating the routing of these contributions to the Kerala Chief Minister's disaster relief fund, it added.

About 2.35 lakh Indians, including people of Indian origin from Suriname, are in Netherlands, officials said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The civil aviation ministry has given its approval to operate international flights from the city's Devi Ahilyabai Holkar Airport, a senior airport official said.

The first international flight is expected to start from December after completion of necessary formalities, according to Aryama Sanyal, director, Devi Ahilyabai Holkar Airport.

"We have got the green signal of the Union civil aviation ministry for the operation of international passenger flights from Indore," Sanyal told reporters today.

She said that in view of the plan to start international operation from the airport, the civil aviation ministry has written to the home ministry to set up an immigration check post here.

The finance ministry has also been requested to complete the necessary formalities to grant the status the notified airport by the customs department, she added.

Without giving specific information, Sanyal said that Jet Airways has expressed interest in starting international flights from Indore, however, its proposal is awaited.

Currently 44 domestic flights are being operated from the city airport and between January 1 and June 30, about 13 lakh flyers travelled from the airport, according to her.

Sanyal expects this number to go up to 26 lakh by the end of 2018.

She said that discussions are on to discontinue the announcement system in a bid to turn the city airport into a 'silent airport' like others.

The display system providing information about the arrival and departure of flights will also be strengthened, she said, adding in addition, a help desk will be set up for the passengers.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Iran opened a lawsuit today demanding the UN's top court order the suspension of renewed US sanctions which it says are devastating its economy.

The Islamic Republic says US President Donald Trump's decision to reimpose sanctions over its nuclear programme aim to bring it "to its knees" and are in breach of a 1955 treaty.

Sanctions had been lifted under a 2015 multilateral agreement in return for Iran committing not to pursue nuclear weapons. But Trump reimposed unilateral sanctions three weeks ago. He said they were needed to ensure Iran never builds a nuclear bomb.

A second wave of punitive measures are due to hit Iran in early November, targeting its vital energy sector including oil exports.

Judges at the International Court of Justice in the Hague opened hearings with the Islamic Republic's lawyers due to make their opening arguments.

The US measures have added to Iran's economic woes, helping to fuel strikes and protests from across the country and political spectrum. In the latest blow, Iran's parliament impeached Economy Minister Masoud Karbasian yesterday.

Tehran filed its case before the ICJ in late July, calling on the Hague-based tribunal's judges to order the immediate lifting of sanctions pending a definitive ruling.

It said the sanctions would cause it "irreparable prejudice". It argues they breach the 1955 Treaty of Amity and Economic Relations between Iran and the United States.

"The current US Administration is pushing the sanctions to their maximum with the sole aim of bringing Iran to its knees," Iran's lawyers said in the court filing.

"The USA is besieging Iran economically, with all the dramatic consequences that a siege implies for the besieged population." - 'One-sided deal' -



The ICJ is expected to take a couple of months to decide whether to grant Tehran's request for a provisional ruling. A final decision in the case may take years.

The 2015 deal was signed by Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany.

Trump, who took office in 2016, called it a "horrible one-sided deal." He said it "failed to achieve the fundamental objective of blocking all paths to a Iranian nuclear bomb." To the horror of the other signatories, Trump pulled out and announced he would reinstate sanctions.

Tehran says that the new sanctions are already hurting its economy. Iran's currency the rial has lost around half its value since April.

In a court filing at the ICJ, Iran's lawyers said the US sanctions threaten tens of billions of dollars' worth of business deals with foreign companies. International companies including France's Total, Peugeot and Renault, and Germany's Siemens and Daimler, have suspended operations in Iran since Trump announced the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal in May.

Air France and British Airways announced Thursday they would halt flights to Tehran next month, saying they were not commercially viable. The British carrier added however that the decision was unrelated to the fresh sanctions.

Trump said the sanctions would turn up the financial pressure on Tehran to come to a "comprehensive and lasting solution" regarding its activities such as its "ballistic missile programme and its support for terrorism."



Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this month appeared to rule out any immediate prospect of talks, saying "there will be neither war, nor negotiations," with the US.

Washington's lawyers will present their case on Tuesday. Experts expect them to challenge the ICJ's jurisdiction.

The ICJ was set up in 1946 to rule in disputes between countries.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The presidents of Iran, Russia and Turkey will meet next week for their third tripartite summit seeking an end to the Syrian conflict, Turkish state television said today.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will travel to Iran to meet his Russian and Iranian counterparts Vladimir Putin and Hassan Rouhani on September 7, state-run TRT Haber television said.

Private NTV television added the summit would be held in the northern Iranian city of Tabriz.

A Turkish presidential official contacted by AFP could not immediately confirm the reports. However, the presidency has invited Turkish journalists to cover a trip by Erdogan to Iran on September 7.

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the tripartite summit was being prepared but did not confirm the date or venue.

"It could take place in Tehran. This option is being examined. We will make the appropriate announcement once all the nuances have been harmonised through diplomatic channels and when everything is ready," he added.

Erdogan had previously indicated that he planned to host a summit on Syria on September 7 in Istanbul with Putin and also French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But press reports over the last few weeks have suggested that such a meeting was increasingly unlikely and was set to be replaced by the latest three-way summit between Iran, Russia and Turkey.

The three leaders have previously met in the Russian resort city of Sochi and the Turkish capital Ankara.

Ankara, Moscow and Tehran are backing peace talks based in the Kazakh capital Astana which they insist are aimed at reinforcing, rather than undermining, a UN peace process in Geneva.

Iran and Russia are the main allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and their military interventions in Syria are widely seen as tipping the balance of the seven-year civil war in the regime's favour.

Turkey has backed rebels seeking to oust Assad but since late 2016 has been working increasingly closely with Iran and Russia to bring peace to Syria. A major item on the summit agenda is expected to be the rebel-held northwestern Syrian province of Idlib which Assad wants to recapture, to crown a string of military successes.

But Turkey has said a military operation to take Idlib risks provoking a humanitarian "catastrophe", warning that 3.5 million people are crammed into the region.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Iran's President Hassan Rouhani is clinging to power but finds himself under attack from all sides -- conservatives, reformists and the street -- as he prepares for a grilling in parliament tomorrow.

The US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers and Washington's reimposition of sanctions have already battered the Iranian economy, and critics say it has exposed the failures of Rouhani's five years in power.

For the first time, lawmakers have summoned Rouhani to parliament to face questions over the collapsing value of the Iranian currency, over stubbornly high unemployment and corruption.

Lawmakers have already impeached his labour and economy ministers this month, and are seeking further scalps.

They have the power to impeach Rouhani himself, though he is protected by the fact that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said he should see out his term to 2021, despite his own harsh criticisms of the president's policies.

Despite his dim prospects, Rouhani still has the backing of moderate conservatives, including powerful parliament speaker Ali Larijani.

But many in the hardline establishment opposed his negotiations with the West and feel vindicated by the unravelling of the nuclear deal.

They have led the charge against Rouhani's cabinet, and were on Monday seeking enough votes for impeachment proceedings against his industry and transportation ministers.

"The best outcome for them is a lame duck president, as their chances will go up for (the next election) in 2021," said political journalist Fereshteh Sadeghi.

As for the reformist faction, it was key to Rouhani's election successes in 2013 and 2017, seeing him as its best option after the movement was suppressed in the wake of mass protests in 2009.

But Rouhani has failed to deliver on his promises of easing civil liberties, particularly his vow to release political prisoners and reduce censorship.

Reformists now fear being tarnished by their association with Rouhani and some have broken ranks to slam the government's performance.

"What have we done with this nation? We made them miserable and wretched," said reformist MP Elias Hazrati as he voted in favour of impeaching Economy Minister Masoud Karbasian on Sunday.

"No one believes Rouhani will reform anything anymore. He was just a tool for the system, appearing to address people's demands for change without really changing anything," said Clement Therme, Iran research fellow for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

On the back of popular support, Rouhani won emphatic victories in the past two presidential polls.

Even with the Guardian Council barring almost all candidates, there was genuine enthusiasm for his plans to rebuild Iran's foreign standing and attract investment.

With the key part of that strategy -- the nuclear deal -- in tatters, the sense of disillusionment on the streets of Tehran is now palpable.

Many wealthier Iranians are trying to leave, while poorer areas have seen regular, low-level strikes and protests that have occasionally turned violent.

The prices of essential goods are rising rapidly, and worse pain is to come when US sanctions on Iran's vital oil sector return in November.

"Look at my breakfast. I can't afford fruit anymore," a motorbike delivery man told AFP, holding up a can of lemonade and a piece of bread.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Iran has signed a deal to rebuild Syria's armed forces, which have been depleted by more than seven years civil war, Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami has said.

Hatami, on a two-day visit to Syria, told the Beirut-based al-Mayadeen TV station yesterday that the agreement also stipulates helping rebuild Syria's military industry.

The announcement comes as the US under President Donald Trump shifts is toughening its stance on Iran's support for Syrian President Bashar Assad's government, which has weathered a calamitous civil war.

The White House has demanded that Iran extract itself from Syria as an essential precondition to lifting sanctions that went into effect earlier this month.

Israel has also been critical of Iran's expanding role in Syria, saying it won't tolerate a permanent Iranian military presence near its frontiers.

Iran has been an essential backer of Syria's government in the civil war now in its seventh year, providing advisers, military supplies, training and thousands of militiamen to fight alongside the Syrian army.

Hatami said Iran was in Syria at the invitation of the government.

The precise details of the agreement were not announced.

The Syrian government does not release casualty numbers, but monitoring groups say the government has lost tens of thousands of fighters since the civil war broke out in 2011.

Iran and Russia both intervened on behalf of the government as opposition forces gained ground in the early years of the war.

Assad, who has ruled with an iron fist since inheriting the presidency from his father in 2000, now looks safe in his post but he rules over a shattered country.

At least 400,000 people have been killed in the war, according to monitoring groups, and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia estimates the economic damage to the country at over USD 300 bn.

The government and its international backers have described the conflict as a war against terrorism and enemies abroad, chiefly the US and other western nations.

Hatami said Syria's government is now in a stronger position and warned against any "foreign aggression" against Syria.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Iran today demanded the UN's top court suspend US nuclear-linked sanctions against Tehran, accusing Washington of plotting its "economic strangulation".

The Islamic Republic launched a suit at the International Court of Justice in The Hague over US President Donald Trump's decision to reimpose the sanctions that had been lifted in a 2015 accord.

Iran says Trump's move breaches a 1955 treaty. It told the court the measures were already devastating its economy and threatening the welfare of its citizens.

"The United States is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran's economy and Iranian nationals and companies," Iran's lawyer Mohsen Mohebi told the court.

"This policy is nothing but naked economic aggression against my country," he added.

"Iran will put up the strongest resistance to the US economic strangulation, by all peaceful means." US lawyers are due to give their response in arguments before the court on Tuesday.

Sanctions had been lifted under a 2015 multilateral agreement in return for Iran committing not to pursue nuclear weapons.

But Trump reimposed unilateral sanctions three weeks ago. He said they were needed to ensure Iran never builds a nuclear bomb.

A second wave of punitive measures are due to hit Iran in early November, targeting its vital energy sector including oil exports.

The US measures have added to Iran's economic woes, helping to fuel strikes and protests from across the country and political spectrum.

In the latest blow, Iran's parliament impeached Economy Minister Masoud Karbasian on Sunday.

Tehran filed its case before the ICJ in late July, calling on the Hague-based tribunal's judges to order the immediate lifting of sanctions pending a definitive ruling.

It said the sanctions would cause it "irreparable prejudice". It argues they breach the 1955 Treaty of Amity and Economic Relations between Iran and the United States.

The ICJ is expected to take a couple of months to decide whether to grant Tehran's request for a provisional ruling. A final decision in the case may take years.

The 2015 deal was signed by Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany.

Trump, who took office in 2016, called it a "horrible one-sided deal." He said it "failed to achieve the fundamental objective of blocking all paths to a Iranian nuclear bomb." To the horror of the other signatories, Trump pulled out and announced in May that he would reinstate sanctions.

Tehran says that the new sanctions are already hurting its economy. Iran's currency the rial has lost around half its value since April.

In a court filing at the ICJ, Iran's lawyers said the US sanctions threaten tens of billions of dollars' worth of business deals with foreign companies.

International companies including France's Total, Peugeot and Renault, and Germany's Siemens and Daimler, have suspended operations in Iran since Trump announced the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal in May.

Air France and British Airways announced Thursday they would halt flights to Tehran next month, saying they were not commercially viable. The British carrier added however that the decision was unrelated to the fresh sanctions.

Trump said the sanctions would turn up the financial pressure on Tehran to come to a "comprehensive and lasting solution" regarding its activities such as its "ballistic missile programme and its support for terrorism."



Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this month appeared to rule out any immediate prospect of talks, saying "there will be neither war, nor negotiations," with the US.

Washington's lawyers will present their case on Tuesday, with a second round of arguments on Wednesday and Thursday. Experts expect the US to challenge the ICJ's jurisdiction.

The ICJ was set up in 1946 to rule in disputes between countries.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Israel is working on a new missile system capable of hitting targets anywhere in the Middle East, Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said today.

State-owned arms manufacturer Israel Military Industries (IMI) would deliver "within a few years" an advanced integrated system "allowing precise hits by remote launching", he said in a statement.

Lieberman added that the contract with IMI was budgeted at "hundreds of millions of shekels".

The Israeli shekel is currently trading at 3.63 to the US dollar.

"The project for setting up a precision rocket and missile system is underway," Lieberman said in the statement.

"Part of it is already in production and part is in the final phases of research and development.

"We are acquiring and developing precision fire systems that will allow... the Israel Defence Forces to cover within a few years every point in the region."



Israel is considered the leading military power in the Middle East and believed to be the only country in the region to possess nuclear weapons.

Foreign military experts say it has several batteries of its Jericho ballistic missile, capable of delivering nuclear warheads.

IMI said in 2004 that it had produced a cruise missile, the Delilah, with a range of 250 kilometres (150 miles).

It also has an array of anti-missile rocket systems but today's statement quoted IMI chairman Yitzhak Aharonovitch saying that the new armament would "reflect the company's technological capabilities, which specialise in the ability to fire accurately, to strike at a variety of ground targets".

Israel faces a variety of threats and considers Iran its most dangerous foe in the region.

It is regularly targeted by rockets and mortar fire from the Gaza Strip, ruled by Islamist movement Hamas.

Another of its enemies is the Iran-backed Shiite group Hezbollah based in neighbouring Lebanon.

Israel also shares a border with Syria, where Iran and Hezbollah are fighting alongside President Bashar al-Assad in his country's civil war.

Netanyahu has pledged to prevent Tehran from further entrenching itself in Syria and a series of recent strikes that have killed Iranians there have been attributed to Israel.

Lieberman did not reveal details of the planned new system or its potential targets and his office did not respond to AFP requests for information.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In an effort to check fire incidents, authorities in Kishtwar district of Jammu and Kashmir today restricted people from storing dry grass and fodder near residential structures.

Officials said dry grass stocked in residential areas was the main cause of fire incidents in the hilly district.

Kishtwar has witnessed major fire incidents in the recent past, including in Afti and Sukhnaie villages.

"As a precautionary measure, the district magistrate in order to check future fire incidents has imposed restriction on storing or dumping fodder, dry grass and hay near or inside residential places," the officials said.

They said District Magistrate Angrez Singh Rana ordered that dry grass and fodder be kept at least 50 metres from the main locality or village, preferably covered or stacked.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Over 20,000 personnel of central paramilitary forces such as CRPF and BSF will be deployed in Kashmir Valley for "pre-election duties" ahead of panchayat polls in Jammu and Kashmir, officials today said.

They said a total of 202 companies that were given the task of conducting the recently-concluded Amarnath pilgrimage in the state will now be deployed in Srinagar, Budgam, Ganderbal, Baramulla, Sopore, Kupwara, Bandipora, Shopian and Awantipora for pre-election duties.

The pilgrimage, which lasted about two months, concluded yesterday.

A single company of these forces has about 100 personnel.

According to an order issued by the state police, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) will contribute the largest number of companies at 132, followed by Border Security Force (BSF) 32, Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) 25 and Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) 13.

"A total of 203 companies of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) deployed for the Amarnath Yatra have been diverted and ordered to be deployed for pre-poll duties in view of the panchayat polls in the state, dates for which are yet to be announced," a senior official said.

He added a number of other reserve units of these forces and the state police will also be deployed once the poll dates are announced.

Local body elections are likely to be held in the last week of September.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The CPI(M) has expressed interest in working together on public issues with actor-turned-politician Pawan Kalyan's Jana Sena party in Telangana, the Jana Sena said here today.

CPI(M) state secretary Tammineni Veerabhadram has written to Kalyan expressing interest to work with the Jana Sena , the party said in a release.

Communist parties are already working with Jana Sena in Andhra Pradesh on public issues, it said.

Veerabhadram said the parties are in touch on working together in Telangana on public issues.

As per a directive by Kalyan, the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) of Jana Sena held a meeting with its leaders from Telangana and decided to have consultations with the CPI(M) leaders, the jana sena party release said.

"PAC decided to hold a face-to-face meeting with CPI-M leaders in the light of a widespread speculation of early elections in Telangana," the release said.

After the talks, PAC would submit a report to Kalyan, it added.

Kalyan, a top Telugu actor, had floated Jana Sena at the time of the 2014 elections.

He had supported the TDP-BJP combine then, but is now estranged.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A top jihadist leader of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara group, an aide and two civilians have been killed in northeastern Mali by a French airstrike, the French command centre in Paris said today.

"Commandos deployed on the ground (after the airstrike) confirmed the death of Mohamed Ag Almouner and one of his bodyguards. They also found the bodies of a woman and a teenager," a statement said of the action near Menaka.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actor John Krasinski believes his wife Emily Blunt is the reason for his recent success.

The 38-year-old actor starred alongside Blunt in "A Quiet Place", which we also directed and co-wrote. The horror film has been a massive hit in the United States and other countries with even critics praising it for the visuals and story.

Speaking with The Independent, Krasinski credited Blunt for teaching him "so much about how to go about the business".

"I honestly feel I wouldn't have this career if I hadn't met her, because she's taught me so much about how to go about the business," the actor said.

"She's been my secret ingredient," he added.

Krasinski said it was Blunt who encouraged him to direct "A Quiet Place".

"I was originally just going to star and Emily told me I had to direct it. She knew it was a huge opportunity for me, and in the madness she just let me be myself," he said.

The actor said after the film, their bond has become stronger than it ever was.

"It without a doubt made our marriage stronger. I think we were both surprised by that. Not that I thought it would get worse but we were much more in love after the movie. We leaned on each other in a way we never had," Krasinski said.

"I also certainly wouldn't have felt as comfortable watching someone else pretend to give birth in a bathtub," he joked.

Krasinski will be next in Amazon's "Jack Ryan" series, which is based on Tom Clancy's novels.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)"Justice has been finally done," remarked Farooq Ahmed Dar, an artisan used as a 'human shield' by Major Nitin Leetul Gogoi, today on hearing the officer was indicted by an Army Court of Inquiry for allegedly "fraternising" with a local woman in May this year.

The Court of Inquiry(CoI) indicted Gogoi on two counts -- allegedly "fraternising" with a local woman in a Srinagar hotel and being away from his place of duty, and "being away from the place of duty while in operational area". This paves the way for disciplinary action against Gogoi, army sources said today.

"I am thankful to the Almighty. The person who ruined my life has to face the wrath of God finally. God has his ways to do justice," Dar told PTI over phone from his home.

The 28-year-old embroidery artisan, who is struggling to pick up the threads of his life after the traumatic incident, said the army should have treated his case also on compassionate grounds and listened to his version of the incident that sparked an outrage.

"I am not even sure whether I will be able to restart my life again but I am happy that God has given me justice at the end of the day. The person who is responsible for my destruction has also been eventually shamed," said Dar, who has been shunned by neighbours after a video of him being tied as a 'human shield' by Gogoi came in public domain.

Suffering from depression as he was boycotted by villagers for allegedly being a government agent, Dar recalled his repeated pleas to Gogoi to release him but he refused to pay heed.

"The army major was arrogant with power and considered himself as my creator. However, little did he know that 'Uski lathi mein awaaz nahi hai' (lightning makes no sound until it strikes)," he said.

On April 9 last year, a team led by Gogoi tied Dar to the bonnet of an army jeep to escape heavy stone pelting in central Kashmir's Budgam district, the image going on to make global headlines and putting the civilian-security polarisation in the Valley once again in spotlight.

It was election day for the Srinagar Lok Sabha constituency and Dar said he was on his way to cast his vote, braving the boycott call by separatist organisations. Eight people were killed in police firing on the day.

Investigations by central agencies and local police backed Dar's account of events of the day, raising questions on the army's claim that he was a stone-pelter.

Investigations found Dar was on his way to his sister's place for a condolence visit after voting when the army picked him up and beat him mercilessly before tying him with ropes and parading him through nearly 28 villages.

"I have not been able to understand my mistake. Was it going to the polling booth and casting my ballot wrong?" he said.

He said he continued to face a social boycott as people in his village Chill, in Budgam district, had distanced themselves after they learnt he had participated in the election process.

Mohammad Ashan Untoo, the head of the International Forum for Justice and Human Rights group in the Valley who has filed a case against the army before the Chief Judicial magistrate, said "I have faith in the Almighty as well as the judiciary."



"One day we will get justice in our case too," Untoo said.

Gogoi was detained by the police on May 23 this year for sometime after an altercation took place at a hotel reception here when he allegedly tried to enter along with an 18-year-old woman. Gogoi had told the police that he had come for a "source meeting".

After his indictment, the officer will now face summary of evidence before court martial proceedings are initiated against him, army officials said.

The Army had ordered the CoI following the May 23 incident. Army chief Gen Bipin Rawat had also said that exemplary punishment would be given to Gogoi if he was found guilty of "any offence".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Barring a fall in kabuli gram prices on subdued demand against adequate stocks position, other pulses held steady at the wholesale pulses market today in thin trade.

Traders said sluggish demand from retailers against sufficient stocks position put pressure on kabuli gram prices.

In the national capital, kabuli gram small variety fell by Rs 100 to Rs 4,900-5,700 per quintal.

Following are today's rates (in Rs per quintal): urad Rs 4,100-5,200, urad Chilka (local) Rs 5,200-5,300, urad best Rs 5,300-5,800, Dhoya Rs 5,750-5,950, Moong Rs 4,900-5,400,



Dal Moong Chilka local Rs 5,500-5,700, Moong Dhoya local Rs 6,000-6,500 and best quality Rs 6,500-6,700.

Masoor small Rs 3,750-4,000, bold Rs 3,800-4,100, Dal Masoor local Rs 4,300-4,700, best quality Rs 4,400-4,800, Malka local Rs 4,550-4,850, best Rs 4,650-4,950, Moth Rs 3,800-4,200, Arhar Rs 3,700 and Dal Arhar Dara Rs 5,000-6,900.

Gram Rs 4,150-4,300, Gram dal (local) Rs 4,400-4,800, best quality Rs 4,800-4,900, Besan (35 kg), Shakti bhog Rs 2,000, Rajdhani Rs 2,000, Rajma Chitra Rs 6,150-8,350, Kabuli Gram small Rs 4,900-5,700, Dabra Rs 2,700-2,800, imported Rs 4,700-5,100, Lobia Rs 3,400-3,600, Peas white Rs 4,100-4,150 and green Rs 4,200-4,300.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today asked people of the national capital to reject both the BJP and Congress in the 2019 general elections and urged them to vote for the AAP for faster development of the city.

The chief minister claimed that if the seven Delhi MPs were from the AAP then they would not have allowed the sealing drive in the city by "stalling Parliament".

After inauguration of Aam Aadmi Party's east Delhi Lok Sabha office, he alleged there was no benefit of giving votes to the BJP and Congress as both parties do not take care of Delhiites.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had won all seven seats in the national capital, defeating Congress and AAP candidates.

At the event, he also sought funds for the AAP to contest the upcoming polls.

Kejriwal asked gathering at the event to draw a comparison between the works done by the AAP government and BJP MPs and then decide whom they want to give their votes.

"If all seven MPs were from the Aam Aadmi Party, the pace of work would have been 10 times more. What did you (people) get for voting in favour of BJP candidates?" Kejriwal asked.

Asserting that the AAP will win all seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi, he said, "I want to ask you who have worked a lot for you -- the BJP or AAP. I want to ask if they (people) remember any work done by seven BJP MPs.

"On other side, the Delhi government has reduced electricity bills, and also provided free of cost medicines, setting up of mohalla clinics, improvement of government schools among others."



Kejriwal accused the BJP of creating hurdles in the government's works through the lieutenant governor.

Raising the issue of recent sealing drive, the AAP's national convener alleged that had all seven BJP MPs sat on dharna, sealing would not have been allowed in Delhi.

"Think once if all seven MPs were from the AAP, Parliament would have been stalled, but sealing would not have been allowed...

"The Aam Aadmi Party is the party of common people. AAP thinks about the people of Delhi, but the Congress and BJP do not think about you (people)," Kejriwal said.

He claimed that there is no benefit of voting for the Congress as it is "finished" and it only works for cutting the votes in the elections.

The AAP is yet to officially declare its candidates for the Lok Sabha polls.

However, they have named Atishi Marlena (East Delhi), Raghav Chadha (South Delhi), Pankaj Gupta (Chandni Chowk), Dilip Pandey (Northeast Delhi) and Ghuggan Singh (Northwest Delhi) as Lok Sabha constituency in-charge.

Party sources said these five would be declared as AAP's Lok Sabha candidates.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Maharashtra government today issued a circular seeking donation from ministers, legislators and staff of a day's salary to the Chief Minister's relief fund to help flood-affected Kerala.

The general administration department's circular asks the chief minister, ministers, MLAs, MLCs, civil servants and other staffers to donate the amount from their September salaries.

The circular asked government departments to inform their staffers about the donation and also stated that those unwilling to do so should not be forced.

The circular, however, said that staffers having objections should convey their views to the officials of their departments.

The state government had, on August 18, announced Rs 20 crore financial assistance and also deployed doctors to help Kerala deal with the destruction caused by the floods.

According to the Kerala government, 302 persons have died between August 8-26 due to the floods.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda today alleged that the BJP government in the state has failed to deliver on all fronts and people were eagerly waiting for the polls to teach the party a lesson.

The Congress leader alleged that the Manohar Lal Khattar government makes tall claims about development, but there is nothing on the ground to back their claim.

"This government has proved to be a non-performing one. It has failed on all fronts and its image among public is just the opposite to what it pretends to be.

"Farmers, employees, youth, elderly, traders, every section is fed up with them. Law and order has completely broken down. People are just waiting to teach them a lesson when polls are held next year," Hooda told reporters here.

He also blamed the Khattar government for mismanagement of the state's economy.

"In 2013-14, when the Congress was in power the state debt was just over Rs 60,000 crore which has now crossed Rs 1.61 lakh crore. They (BJP) talk about Rs 6 lakh crore of investment into the state, but how much of this has materialised they should tell," Hooda said.

"All major development projects... happened during our time. They must spell out what they have done in these four years. They have only spent crores of rupees on event management and publicity blitzkrieg," he charged.

Hooda claimed the Congress was getting overwhelming response to the 'Jankranti Yatra' he had started earlier this year. The sixth phase of the Yatra will begin on September 9 from Pehowa in Kurukshetra district.

"We are getting overwhelming response from the public. This shows the public mood, which is against them," he said.

On Shiromani Akali Dal's (SAD) decision to contest the next year's Lok Sabha and Assembly polls in Haryana, the Congress leader said this would not have much impact.

He said while Congress had always batted for Haryana's rights on water issue, other parties had only politicised the issue.

"However, in Haryana's interests, we are ready to accompany the chief minister if he decides to take a delegation to meet the prime minister so as to put pressure on the Centre for early completion of the SYL canal," he said.

To a question, Hooda, who is a member of Congress' Manifesto Committee, said his party is ready and fully prepared for the Lok Sabha as well as the Assembly polls.

Hooda backed the government deciding to name some projects after former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, saying he was a leader who commanded great respect across all parties.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The office of Lt Governor Anil Baijal today clarified that no file from the Delhi government pertaining to the proposed installation of CCTV camera is pending with it.

The L-G office in a statement, said a "misleading" impression is being created through certain "media posts and releases" that the file for installation of CCTVs is pending with the office of the lieutenant governor.

"It is hereby clarified that this is incorrect. No file pertaining to installation of CCTVs in Delhi by GNCTD is pending with the office of the Lt. Governor, Delhi," it stated.

The Delhi government plans to install nearly 1.4 lakh CCTV cameras across the national capital to ensure safety of women in the city.

Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal alleged that the BJP has stalled the file of CCTV cameras through the L-G for several months.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi High Court was today informed by the DDA that it has allotted land to the AAP government for constructing building for a minority school which has been functioning from tents since its demolition over 40 years ago during the Emergency.

A bench of Acting Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice V K Rao was told that a plot of 4,000 square metres has been allotted by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) for the construction of the school in Old Delhi.

It noted that the competent authority had in principle granted approval for constructing the secondary school at Eidgah at Quresh Nagar in the walled city.

The bench disposed of the petition after the petitioner expressed satisfaction over the development.

The court had last year asked the Delhi government and the authorities concerned to explore the possibility of allotting land for the minority school.

It had asked the Delhi chief secretary to coordinate with all agencies, including the DDA and the municipal body.

The court, which was hearing a PIL seeking reconstruction of the school building, had expressed concern after it was told that the minority institution has been functioning from tents since its demolition on June 30, 1976 during the Emergency.

The PIL filed by civil activist Firoz Bakht Ahmed had contended that the state of affairs at the Qaumi School was "sad and pitiable" as it was functioning from the ground of the Eidgah at Quresh Nagar in Old Delhi after its building was demolished.

The plea had alleged that despite promises of land and building, nothing was done and the school continued to function in a "tattered, tented and tinned structure, without a building" since 1976.

The PIL, filed through advocate Atyab Siddiqui, had contended that children from the "downtrodden and backward classes have to suffer due to threats of closure, makeshift classrooms, leaking roofs and no proper facilities.

"A hostile and inclement environment can hardly be conducive for learning. With competition in board examinations reaching stupendous proportions, children from such schools are placed at a huge disadvantage from the very inception of their schooling life."



It had contended that it was obligatory on the state to provide infrastructure including a school building, and the civic authorities had failed to discharge their statutory onus.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Sri Lanka's former strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa today said President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe should part their ways after some members of the ruling alliance joined the opposition to defeat a report on the delimitation of electorates in provincial councils.

The Delimitation Commission Report on Provincial Councils was defeated in Parliament last week after some members of Sirisena's Freedom Party joined Rajapaksa's joint opposition.

Sirisena's Freedom Party and Wickremesinghe's United National Party (UNP) are in the unity government.

The UNP, SLFP-Maithri Faction, Joint Opposition and Tamil National Alliance (TNA) voted against the report rejecting the holding of provincial council elections under the mixed electoral system.

Either the president must leave the government or the prime minister must leave the government. I think it is the prime minister's responsibility because he was the one who engineered the defeat of the report presented by the president," Rajapaksa said.

The passage of the report was required to hold the already postponed elections for the provinces.

The government move was seen as its wish to further delay the elections.

Rajapaksa said his party wants early elections. We can win it under the old or the new system," he said.

The government claimed that a new system introduced in February this year was found to be flawed.

Rajapaksa's opposition alleged that the government feared facing the election as it will lose it.

In another development, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa the younger brother of the former president has been summoned by the special corruption high court which came into operation last week.

The new court was set up to expeditiously handle the corruption cases of the 10-year Rajapaksa regime.

The cases instituted under normal court system have been found to be laborious with a severe backlog of cases.

Several members of the Rajapaksa family were arrested and freed on bail pending cases.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the then powerful defence ministry top official under his brother's regime had obtained a Supreme Court order to prevent his arrest over alleged misappropriation of over 90 million rupees of state funds to build a memorial for his parents.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Water Resources Minister Nitin Gadkari suggested today that linking rivers could be one of the solutions to the problem of water shortage in some areas and may also help in dealing with floods in others.

He said issues related to availability and sharing of riverwaters are one of the biggest problems in the country and many states are under stress, litigating against each other.

Speaking at the National Water Symposium organised by Shiv Nadar University in Delhi, he said India - as a whole - has been unsuccessful in creating lasting solutions to water disputes.

"It is time that we explore all avenues using technology, to conserve ground water, and the government is committed to playing a constructive role in this," Gadkari said.

"We believe that river linking projects, could be one of the solutions to the problem that we face. The water storage in rivers also needs to be addressed to reduce flooding and also ensuring that surplus water during monsoon does not get wasted by going into seas," the minister said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)As flood waters rose to engulf their homes at Kainakary, a picturesque village in Alappuzha district, at least 20 families took refuge in a church cemetery and are living in the company of the dead with their domestic animals.

Thankachan and his family refused to accept help and go to a safer place leaving behind their cows and goats.

However, as the water rose to a dangerous level, the family took shelter in the St Mary's church cemetery at Kainakary village, a taluk in Kuttanad, with the animals.

Kainakary is a sought-after spot by television serial makers due to its scenic beauty.

"We are not scared of living in the cemetery in the company of the dead. This is the final resting place of my father, elder sister and many other relatives who are buried here," Thankachan said.

"We had cows and goats and we did not want to leave them behind," he added.

Presently, there are 20 other families who have taken shelter at the graveyard.

They cook meals with whatever they are able to lay hands on, including fish.

Water is a problem though and the stranded people have to depend on bottled water from Alappuzha.

Five rivers originating from the Western Ghats, including the sacred Pamba river, drain into the Vembanad lake at the tip of Kainakary, famous for its snake boat race rowers.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Locals opposing the construction of Jaitapur nuclear power plant in coastal Konkan today held a protest march, opposing land acquisition for the project.

Villagers, including women in large numbers, gathered at Madban village in Ratnagiri district and shouted slogans against the proposed power plant.

"The power plant was proposed 12 years ago but our opposition to it still remains. We want the government to cancel the project," said Satyajeet Chavan, chairman of Janhakka Seva Samiti, which is leading the agitation against land acquisition for the project.

Almost 80 per cent of the land acquisition of the total 930 hectares owned by 2,500 persons, has been completed. However, some farmers and villagers are opposing the project, citing forced rehabilitation and loss of livelihood.

"The use of nuclear fuel, its impact on global warming and potential threat to fishermen, are issues not being properly addressed by the government," he said.

The proposed nuclear power plant will take over land that currently belongs to the villagers in five different fishing villages: Madban, Varliwada, Karel, Niveli and Mithgavane.

In March, French Ambassador to India Alexandre Ziegler said construction of the Jaitapur nuclear power plant is expected to begin this year-end.

India and France had on March 10 inked an agreement to expedite the project. On completion, the Jaitapur project will be the largest nuclear power plant in the world, with a collective capacity of 9,900 MW.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Madhya Pradesh High Court has upheld the conviction of a man in a rape case despite the victim failing to recognise him.

The district court in Sehore had on August 12, 1997 sentenced Rafiq Khan to 10 years in jail for raping a woman at knife-point on October 28, 1996.

Khan filed an appeal against the trial court's order that same year on the ground that the victim had not recognised him during the trial.

The victim had told the trial court that she was unable to see the face of the perpetrator as he had worn a mask. Her brothers had also said that they had not seen anyone at the crime spot.

However, while filing a police complaint, the victim and her brothers had named the accused as well as identified him, which was corroborated by forensic evidences.

On the basis of the medical report, a single bench of Justice J P Gupta observed that the victim had suffered injuries to her private parts.

The high court also said the accused and the victims undergarments had blood stains of both of them and a forensic examination had confirmed it.

The bench, dismissing Khan's appeal in its order on August 20, said, "Witnesses supported the prosecution story at the stage of examination. Thereafter, cross-examination was deferred. The same was conducted after about five months in which they turned hostile and claimed that statements given earlier were wrong."



"Other material and circumstances available on record corroborate earlier version of the witnesses. The trial court has not committed any error in relying upon the statements of witnesses given at the examination stage," the bench said.

The HC bench cancelled Khan's bail with immediate effect and ordered him to surrender before the trial court.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Eight members of a criminal gang were sentenced to life imprisonment today by the district and sessions court in Aurangabad for murdering an NCP corporator in 2002.

Three others were acquitted for want of evidence in murdering Saleem Qureshi.

Additional District and Sessions Court Judge V V Pail found main accused Shaikh Imran Shaikh Nazeer alias Imran Mehendi and seven others guilty under section 302 (punishment for murder) r/w 34 (Acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of the Indian Penal Code for their role in the crime.

According to prosecution, Mehendi and his accomplices had abducted Qureshi over old enmity from near Roxy Talkies in the city on March 5, 2012 and subsequently killed him.

The gang then abandoned Qureshi's car on a road in Sillekhana area.

Qureshi's body was later found buried in Padegaon area.

Police later booked the gang members under stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crimes Act (MCOCA) and filed a chargesheet against them.

The court examined 66 witnesses during the trial.

Police personnel were deployed in a large number on the premises of the court in view of the verdict.

Mehendi and others are facing charges of murder in more than five cases, according to prosecution.

These cases have not yet come to trial stage.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A man was booked for allegedly flashing at minor girls residing in a building opposite his in Mumbra locality of Maharashtra's Thane district, police said today.

A Mumbra police official said that accused Mohammad Ansari (50) had flashed at these girls, in the age group of 8-9 years, from the window of his residence yesterday afternoon.

The children complained to their parents who then approached police, he said.

Ansari, who is unemployed, is currently absconding and efforts were on to nab him, the official said.

A case has been registered against him for stalking and other offences under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, Thane police spokesperson Sukhada Narkar said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Maj. Leetul Gogoi, who was at the centre of the 'human shield' controversy, has been indicted by an Army court of inquiry for "fraternising" with a local woman in Srinagar, paving the way for possible court martial, army officers said.

Army sources said disciplinary action has been recommended against Maj. Gogoi after an Army court of inquiry (CoI), conducted by a brigadier, indicted him for the Srinagar hotel incident on May 23. The findings of the CoI have been vetted by the General Officer Commanding of the 15 Corps, based in Srinagar.

Maj. Gogoi was detained by police following an altercation at the hotel in Srinagar where he was allegedly trying to enter with an 18-year-old woman.

Days later, the Army had ordered the CoI into the incident after Army Chief Gen. Bipin Rawat said in Pahalgam that exemplary punishment would be given to Maj. Gogoi if he was found guilty of "any offence".

"If any officer of the Indian Army is found guilty of any offence, we will take strictest possible action," Gen. Rawat had said.

Army sources said the CoI has held him accountable for "fraternising" with a local in spite of instructions to the contrary and "being away from the place of duty while in operational area".

The officer, who was at the centre of the human shield row after his decision to tie a civilian to the bonnet of his vehicle in Kashmir last year during stone-pelting by a mob, will now face summary of evidence, a process similar to framing of charge sheet. The process is like to take three months.

Based on the summary of evidence, to be compiled by "competent authorities", the Army is likely to decide further action in the case which may include General Court Martial (GCM) or Summary General Court Martial (SGCM).

The sources said Maj. Gogoi may face GCM if charges framed against him are serious.

The GCM is like a full court, while the proceedings in SGCM are conducted in a much shorter time span and cases are disposed of quickly.

Maj. Gogoi had hit the headlines last year after he tied a man to a jeep in Kashmir purportedly as a shield against stone pelters during polling in the Srinagar Lok Sabha by-election on April 9.

Gen. Rawat had supported the young officer's action and honoured him with the Army chief's 'Commendation Card' for his 'sustained efforts' in counter-insurgency operations.

The sources said Maj. Gogoi will continue to carry out his normal duties till a final decision is announced in the case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Malaysia today pitched for deepening its economic engagement with India and said that achieving the trade target of USD 15 billion annually by 2020, which the two countries had set, looks "promising".

Malaysia's High Commissioner to India Hidayat Abdul Hamid, while addressing an interactive session on 'Doing Business with Malaysia' here, said India was an important trading partner for Malaysia and both the countries needed to work closely in order to deepen bilateral trade relations.

"Our bilateral trade performance has strengthened to USD 14.3 billion in 2017, marking an increase of over 21.8 per cent from USD 11.8 billion in 2016. From January to June this year, the two-way trade has reached USD 7.7 billion," he said at the event organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and the Malaysian High Commission.

Noting that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak had set the annual target of trade at USD 15 billion by 2020, the envoy said he believes that with the current momentum and performance that target "looks promising".

"We just need to put more efforts in realizing that," Hidayat said.

Talking about investment opportunities available in Malaysia, he said the country has many advantages from which India can benefit.

"Malaysia's strength in areas like infrastructure, healthcare, construction industry, palm oil and petroleum products had been part of India economic development agenda for many years. A number of prominent investors from India are already strengthening their foothold in Malaysia and we welcome more investment from India," he said.

"We would like to encourage more importers to source from Malaysia since we have bilateral trade agreement namely Malaysia India Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (MICECA) and regional trade agreement namely ASEAN India FTA (AIFTA)," the Malaysian envoy said.

Roswaidin Mohd Zain, Consul (Investment), Consulate General of Malaysia (Investment Section), Mumbai, Mohd. Feisal Ezuan Abdul Aziz, Trade Commissioner, Consulate General of Malaysia (Trade Section), Mumbai, Nagendran Balasundram, Regional Manager (South Asia), Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) India, Sulaiman Suip, Director, Tourism Malaysia, New Delhi, Khairul Anwar, Director, Malaysian Timber Council and Anand Dureja, Head -- International, Oyo Rooms, made presentations on the investment opportunities available in Malaysia.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 28-year-old man, carrying a reward of Rs 50,000 on his head, was arrested today for involvement in kidnapping of a doctor by an Ola cab driver in East Delhi's Preet Vihar last year, police said.

Harsh alias Gaurab Sharma is the eight accused to have been arrested in the case, they said.

On July 7, 2017, Dr Shrikant Gaur of Metro Hospital went missing from Preet Vihar, following which a case was registered.

He had boarded an Ola cab and went untraced soon after.

Later, the kidnappers demanded Rs five crore from cab aggregator Ola for his release.

Police rescued the doctor nearly 13 days after he went missing.

Seven men were arrested, including the main accused, but Harsh alias Gaurav Sharma remained at large and subsequently, a reward of Rs 50,000 was decalred on his arrest, the police said.

Last week, he was nabbed while walking towards Buddhist Monastery from ISBT, police said.

He completed his secondary education from Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, and then married against his parent's wishes, hence, was disowned by his family.

During this period, he came into contact with Sushil and Anuj of his village. They lured him and roped into kidnapping the doctor for want of easy money, police said.

He was pursuing B Pharma, but dropped out after getting involved in the kidnapping, they said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Manipur government has decided to prepare a ranking of all the banks operating in the state on the basis of the services provided by them to the people, according to Chief Minister N Biren Singh.

"A circular would be issued to ask the banks to submit the details of the services provided by them to the public soon," Singh said.

The amount of money to be deposited from the state's exchequer to these banks would be decided on the basis of ranking, he said while attending a function of the Manipur State Co-operative Bank Ltd (MSCB) yesterday evening.

The chief minister said the state government has initiated a number of steps to encourage entrepreneurship and self employment.

Manipur Social Nemcha Kipgen said the government has decided to launch six integrated cooperative development projects in six districts of the state.

The integrated cooperative development projects will focus on development of primary agricultural credit societies as multi-purpose self-reliant entities, allied sector cooperatives and viable functional linkages among cooperatives, the minister said.

The projects are likely to benefit 2700 societies promoting economic activities in the field of agriculture, agro-based industries, cottage and household industries and agro-allied sector like fishery, dairy, handloom, horticulture and rural industries, Nemcha added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Mauritius IFC is a tax compliant jurisdiction and has put in place appropriate legislation for exchange of information with other nations as per global norms, the Economic Development Board of Mauritius said today.

Mauritius was not included in the "European Union list of non-cooperative jurisdictions for tax purposes' published in December 2017", Faraz Rojid, head of financial services, Economic Development Board of Mauritius, said.

"The Mauritius IFC (International Financial Centre) is a recognised jurisdiction by international authoritative organisations.

"As a credible and trusted IFC, Mauritius has constantly and consistently implemented significant initiatives and adopted appropriate legislations to enhance its legal and regulatory frameworks for exchange of information and transparency as per the international norms and standards, in order to combat money laundering and terrorist financing," Rojid said.

Mauritius has been at the forefront in the fight against international tax evasion and other malpractices, he added.

In June 2015, Mauritius signed the OECDs' Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters. Mauritius currently has an exchange information mechanism with 127 jurisdictions.

In July 2017, Mauritius signed the Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Related Measures to Prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (MLI).

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The mayors of the three BJP-led civic bodies today met Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, seeking release of municipal funds "due to them" from the government as per the recommendations of the third and fourth Delhi Finance Commissions.

North Delhi Mayor Adesh Gupta, South Delhi Mayor Narender Chawla and East Delhi Mayor Bipin Bihari Singh were accompanied by respective heads of standing committees and leaders of the three municipal houses.

"We met Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal at his office to apprise him of the financial crisis being faced by the three corporations, which is badly affecting smooth functioning. He listened to our woes and sought 7-10 days time to discuss the matter with officials," Gupta said.

He was speaking at a joint press conference addressed by the three mayors at the Civic Centre here.

During interaction with reporters, he also stressed on the need for immediate release of the "pending plan funds" and the amount "due as per the recommendations of the third and fourth Delhi Finance Commissions" to enable corporations to take up delayed developmental projects and concentrate on the core work related to sanitation, health, urban development and education.

Gupta, joined by Chawla and Singh, claimed that the amount as per the recommendations of two finance commissions has "not been released".

He said the liability of the North Delhi Municipal Corporation with respect to monthly salary and pension comes to Rs 295 cr.

"As the funds are not being released by the Delhi government, the NDMC has not been able to release salary to its employees regularly. Further, the delay in disbursement of salary to sanitation employees, is making the routine sanitation work of the city difficult," Gupta said.

He also demanded an allocation of Rs 1,202 cr, under urban development and transport sector to carry out conservancy, sanitation and other related works.

Gupta alleged that the Delhi government was "yet to release Rs 1,431 cr" as per the recommendations of the Delhi Finance Commission.

Chawla said the south corporation is being "denied" the due amount under urban development, transport, education and health sectors for the last several years.

"Only an amount of Rs 137.60 cr has been released till the first quarter of 2018-19 against an annual budget proposal of Rs 1,579.19 cr. Moreover, not even a single rupee has been released or even allotted under urban development and transport sectors," he said.

The SDMC demanded an allocation of minimum Rs 505 cr for 2018-19 for sanitation work, facilities in JJ colonies, community centres and development of roads.

EDMC's Singh said that allocation under the urban development sector has "not been made for the year 2018-19".

"There is a dire need of Rs 124 cr for clearing the backlog of gratuity and commutation claims till March 2018," he said.

"The EDMC must be released an amount of Rs 1,005 cr due to it as per the recommendations of the finance commissions," Singh said.

Gupta expressed hope that that the Delhi government will soon release the funds due to all the three corporations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto today said that a final trade deal with the United States and Canada is possible this week, as the US and Mexico wrapped up talks on an updated NAFTA.

Pena Nieto tweeted that he had spoken with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the phone and told him it was important his country "rejoin the process, with the goal of concluding trilateral negotiations this week" on a new North American Free Trade Agreement, the trade pact that has bound the three countries since 1994.

At the White House, US President Donald Trump said Washington and Mexico City had reached a "really good deal".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Congress today claimed that public-sector Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC) owes Rs 12,000 crore in loans to various banks, and accused the Narendra Modi government of trying to prevent the company from being declared bankrupt.

Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh claimed at a press conference that a Rs 20,000-crore scam has come to light in GSPC, 13 years after then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi announced in 2005 the discovery of a natural gas block in the Krishna-Godavari basin.

He cited two reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) that noted that GSPC took loans of Rs 20,000 core from 15 banks and gave contracts for drilling to "four-five companies".

Money was spent but gas was not found and today GSPC is in a financial state that it needs to be referred to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, the Congress leader alleged.

"Last year in August, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pressure, ONGC was forced to buy GSPC gas block and GSPC got a relief of about Rs 8,000 crore. It still has to pay Rs 12,000 crore to banks," Ramesh alleged.

He also cited the February 2, 2018, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) circular, under which if a company on March 1, 2018 owes banks more than Rs 2,000 crore and if it defaults, it should be declared bankrupt after 180 days.

Ramesh claimed that for the first time in 70 years, the cental government has filed an affidavit in the Allahabad High Court against the RBI circular.

Noting that the 180-day window for GSPC ends today, Ramesh said all eyes were on State Bank of India to which the corporation owes over Rs 1,200 crore as to whether it would declare GSPC bankrupt or succumb to "government pressure".

"Does State Bank of India have the courage to declare GSPC bankrupt," he asked.

Efforts to get a response from GSPC authorities did not yield results.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Political will and administrative skill are more important to eliminate social evils and these should be coupled with any new legal initiative undertaken, Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu said today adding merely enacting a new law does not stop a crime or change the system.

Delivering his key note speech during the 48th foundation day celebrations of the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPRD) here, Naidu also lauded the central government's decision to demonetise two large currencies (Rs 1,000 and Rs 500).

"We have a weakness and fancy for a new law. Anything happens (there is a demand to bring) new law...but does the new law stop all the crimes?," he asked.

Senior and top brass of the central police forces and home ministry were present on the occasion.

"I had said in the past that a mere new bill does not suffice. What is required is political will, administrative skill and then go for the kill of the social evil. Making any number of laws is not going to change the system. They are required, I am not denying that...," he said.

He was referring to the recent changes and introduction of new laws to check crimes against women and for anti-corruption.

The Prime Minister, Naidu said, is trying his best to fight corruption through new legal initiatives.

On demonetisation, he said this was done with a "good intention" and all the monies hidden in "bedrooms, bathrooms and under the pillow has now reached the banks and has come into the system".

Naidu hoped the Income Tax Department and the RBI would "quickly" do their investigations in this context and put in the public domain their findings.

The Vice-President also hailed the Jan Dhan scheme to provide bank account to all and said some even "ridiculed as to why it is needed as there is no money".

Those who opened it realised its importance when demonetisation of the two large currencies was announced, he said.

"Then the criticism of the (currency) note ban started. That is a right in democracy for citizens but people said all money reached the bank so what?



"That was the aim. The money that was in bedroom, bathroom and under the pillow, has reached the bank and come into the system...", he said.

Now, what is white and black in now the job of the RBI and the Income Tax Department to find, Naidu said.

On issues pertaining to the police, he said transparency and accountability are corner stones for effective policing.

He asked the police forces across the country to pro-actively put in public domain the figures of crime reportage and detection.

The vice-president also cautioned against the new emerging threats and security challenges by way of cyber warfare, which he said needed to be tackled by using the "power of knowledge."



On economic reforms, he said, as the country moved towards greater privatisation and has allowed 100 per cent FDI (in some areas), many foreign companies were coming in and operating and there was need to be "extra careful". "We have to work together and evolve joint strategies," he said.

During his address, the Vice-President also expressed concern over moral values in the society and said this needed to be addressed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Indore bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court today dismissed a PIL seeking cancellation of allotment of land by the state government to Yoga guru Ramdev's Patanjali Ayurveda.

The 40-acre plot of land in the Pithampur industrial area of Dhar district was allotted to the company at Rs 25 lakh per acre in September 2016 and the firm had proposed to invest Rs 500 crore to set up a food processing unit there.

A bench of Justices P K Jaiswal and Sunil Kumar today rejected the PIL, filed by local social worker Tapan Bhattacharya, and fined him Rs 10,000 for submitting a baseless petition.

The court also ordered that the fine, after realisation, should be deposited in the relief fund for flood-hit Kerala.

In his PIL, Bhattacharya had alleged that the land was given at cheap rates to provide illegal benefits to Patanjali.

The PIL also claimed that the state's industrial policy, rules and regulations were not followed.

The state government had argued that the land was allotted by the state Cabinet in accordance with rules.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) submitted a progress report on the Muzaffarpur shelter home sex scandal case to the Patna High Court today in a sealed cover.

CBI counsel Sanjay Kumar submitted the report on the status of the progress of the case and transfer of CBI's SP-rank officer, who was part of the probe team in the case.

The investigating agency submitted the report before a bench comprising Chief Justice Mukesh R Shah and Justice Ravi Ranjan in compliance of its order passed on the previous hearing on two counts.

Kumar, along with deputy inspector general CBI, Patna, who was also present in the court, submitting the report said that it comprised two aspects -- the progress report of the investigation and transfer of its SP J P Mishra.

The bench posted the hearing of the case for tomorrow.

On August 23, the bench had pulled up the CBI for its failure to submit a progress report in the investigation into the case.

The court asked the central probe agency to explain as to why Mishra, who was the investigating officer in the case, was transferred.

Mishra, was shifted from the Special Crime Branch and attached to the office of the DIG at Patna vide an order passed by the CBI headquarters on August 21.

Opposition parties in Bihar have criticised the reshuffle, alleging that it would adversely affect the probe.

The Patna High Court was monitoring the probe into the sordid episode at the government-funded short stay home for girls at Muzaffarpur on the request of the Bihar government.

Meanwhile, the court also expressed displeasure over leak of details of the investigation and asked the media to refrain from publishing the same as it could be detrimental to the probe.

The sexual assault of 34 girls over a period of time in the government-funded Muzaffarpur shelter home came to light after a social audit was conducted by the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

An FIR was subsequently registered by the Bihar social welfare department and 10 persons, including prime accused Brajesh Thakur whose NGO ran the shelter home, were arrested.

However, following a huge outcry, the Nitish Kumar government handed over the probe to the CBI a month ago which was followed by the resignation of social welfare minister Manju Verma a few days later.

The court had on August 6 directed the SP, CBI, to submit a report with regard to the progress of the investigation.

In an earlier hearing on the matter, the state government had requested the high court to monitor the CBI probe and consider appointing a special judge for speedy trial.

Both the requests were accepted by the court.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)United Nations investigators today called for an international probe and prosecution of Myanmar's army chief and five other top military commanders for genocide against the country's Rohingya minority.

"Myanmar's top military generals, including Commander-in-Chief Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing, must be investigated and prosecuted for genocide in the north of Rakhine State, as well as for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan States," a UN-backed fact-finding mission said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Myanmar court postponed ruling today on whether two Reuters journalists violated a state secrets law while reporting on the Rohingya crisis, with a new date set for next week.

"The verdict will be announced on September 3," said district judge Khin Maung Maung in a swift hearing at a courthouse in Yangon, adding that the presiding judge was sick.

The decision delays the long-anticipated ruling for Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, who have been in Myanmar's Insein prison for some eight months.

They were arrested in December after being invited to a dinner with police in Yangon and pounced on as they left the restaurant, accused of possessing classified material.

Authorities charged them with violating a colonial-era state secrets act, which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years.

But the claims were undercut by a police witness who said his superior had ordered a set-up and by arguments that the allegedly secret documents had been published in state media.

The case has sparked fears of eroding press freedoms under civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Reuters has robustly denied the charges and the newswire launched a global advocacy campaign that included diplomats, celebrities and the legal assistance of prominent rights lawyer Amal Clooney.

"Whatever they decide for us, we will not be afraid," Wa Lone told reporters as he left the courthouse and was led back into a police van.

Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone were probing the September 2017 massacre of 10 Rohingya men and boys in Myanmar's Rakhine state a week after the military launched a sweeping crackdown on members of the stateless Muslim minority.

The United Nations and Washington have called the campaign "ethnic cleansing", after some 700,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine for Bangladesh, bringing with them testimonies of rape, arson and killings in the northern part of the state.

Myanmar rejects the charges but has admitted the killings investigated by Reuters took place.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Indian Navy rescued nearly 17,000 people caught in gushing waters in flood-ravaged Kerala, a Defence spokesperson said here today.

Navy personnel who were part of the rescue mission code named "Op Madad" in Kerala, displayed their skills and courage in rescuing thousands of people, Commander Sridhar Warrier, the spokesperson in Kochi, said.

In all, the Indian Navy rescued a total of 16,843 people, of which 1,173 were airlifted while 15,670 were rescued by teams using Gemini boats after Kerala experienced unprecedented rainfall, which resulted in widespread flooding, he told PTI.

"Such was their efficiency that in fact, no deaths by drowning were reported in any area where Naval teams systematically organised their rescue efforts," he said.

Warrier said a robust and efficient Command, Control and Logistics Organisation of the Southern Naval Command (SNC), coordinated by Joint Operation Centre (JOC), ensured naval personnel deployed in the worst-hit areas were utilised efficiently to rescue maximum number of people.

Based on inputs from the state administration, as well as feedback from the teams on ground, careful planning of the utilisation of resources available with the Command was done and teams were deployed in the general areas where distress calls were most concentrated, he said.

"Once the resources available with the Southern Naval Command in terms of Gemini boats and divers were found to be falling short, additional resources were sought and promptly received from other Naval commands," Warrier said.

SNC Headquarters also coordinated with the Air Force headquarters for airlift of personnel and equipment from Mumbai and Visakhapatnam to Kochi.

He said deployment of teams to inaccessible areas was mostly done by airlift and even this was extremely difficult as landing grounds for the aircraft were not readily available due to inundation of most areas.

The teams were dropped off at the closest locations and, thereafter, they moved by boat/road to the affected areas.

Naval aircraft operated from the Naval Air Station INS Garuda and were deployed from Chalakudy, Thrissur to Ayroor, Pathanamthitta to airlift survivors from locations inaccessible by road, the spokesman said.

Some of the rescued people were relocated to safe sites and the rest were brought to Naval relief camps set up in the T-2 Hangar and Naval KG School inside the Naval Base, he said.

As the waters receded, de-induction of 92 teams and over 500 men began after obtaining clearance from the state government.

He said Wayanad district was the first to be severely hit as a result of the incessant rains, which resulted in flooding and landslides.

Consequently, on August 9 in view of the worsening situation and the challenges faced by the state administration, the Southern Naval Command launched "Operation Madad" to facilitate rescue and relief efforts to the affected areas, the spokesman said.

Initially, Op Madad State III was executed on August 9, which was raised to State II on August 10, wherein majority of rescue and relief teams were brought to full readiness and kept on standby for immediate deployment, he said.

The rains intensified considerably from August 14 which resulted in waters in major dams crossing the danger levels and forcing the state government to order opening of the shutters of some 35 of these 39 dams.

"This resulted in major flooding at Ernakulam, Kottayam and Pathanamthitta districts mainly due to opening of shutters of four dams in Idukki district and Kakki Dam in Pathanamthitta district and led to massive increase in water levels and flow in Periyar and Pamba rivers," he said.

Since the situation developed over a period of ten days, the naval deployments were also carried out in phases.

The Joint Operations Centre (JOC), Kochi became the nerve centre during the conduct of Operation Madad.

The JOC was augmented with a Planning and Coordination Section, rescue coordination cell within the operations room and a team muster and kitting up point at the ground floor of the JOC building, in order to quickly deploy teams as per requirement, the spokesman said.

Deployment of rescue teams peaked on August 19, wherein a total of 92 teams were deployed simultaneously across all affected areas, he added.

JOC was also the nerve centre for planning and coordination with all other Services and state agencies, and carried out this task seamlessly to maximise rescue efforts on the ground.

Over 300 people have died and lakhs displaced in the floods and landslides caused by the monsoon rains since August 8 across Kerala.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The National Commission for Women (NCW) took today cognisance of a case involving alleged killing of a woman by her boyfriend here and directed the Delhi Police to apprise it of the probe into the matter, an official said.

According to a media report, the 18-year-old woman was reportedly shot dead by her boyfriend who suspected her of having an affair in Shalimar Bagh.

The suspect was taken into police custody but he managed to escape, the official said, noting that the commission has written to the DCP of North West Delhi, Aslam Khan, to apprise it of the probe into the case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)With his "kheer" comment stirring up the political cauldron in Bihar, Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha today sought to refute suggestions that it was an overture to the RJD, saying he had "neither sought milk from the RJD nor sugar from the BJP".

Kushwaha, the Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) chief, asserted that his party was making efforts to bring on vote from every section of the society so as to help Prime Minister Narendra Modi in getting a second term after 2019 polls.

Kushwaha, the Union minister of State for Human Resource Development, said on Sunday that a delicious "kheer" can be prepared with milk from the Yadavs and rice from the Kushwahas, apparently hinting at a political realignment.

Replying to queries he said today, "Things should be explained in a proper manner... I did not say anything in terms of any particular party or community. My statement should not be viewed or looked in a manner in which it is being done."



Asked about his response if the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) was ready to give milk for making "kheer", Kushwaha asserted, "I have neither sought milk from the RJD nor sugar from the BJP. I had not taken the name of any party or any community. So, where and how did the RJD come into the picture ?... Why are you (media) viewing a particular community as a particular party ?"



"Yaduvanshiyon ka dudh aur Kushwansiyon ka chawal mil jaye to kheer ban sakti hai (kheer can be prepared with the milk from the Yadavs and rice from the Kushwahas)," he said during a function organised by his party on Sunday to mark the 100th birth anniversary of late B P Mandal, a former chief minister of Bihar.

RJD leader Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, who has time and again invited Kushwaha to align with the RJD, grabbed the opportunity and said yesterday that "kheer prepared with love and affection is delicious, energetic and full of nutrition".

Of late, Kushwaha has been embarrassing the Nitish Kumar-led NDA government in Bihar with his statements.

He has been critical of the Bihar government and had in the past even suggested Kumar to voluntarily "give up the bid" for a fourth term in office in 2020.

The Union minister had also said, "We will get the sugar from Brahmins, Tulsi from Choudharyji (RLSP Bihar chief Bhudev Choudhary) and can make delicious kheer with the dry-fruits from the extremely backward classes and Dalits and Dastarkhan from the house of our minority community. Then we can relish the delicious kheer together."



Iterating it, Kushwaha said everyone should get equal share of the "kheer", apparently hinting at just and fair seat-sharing among the NDA partners in Bihar.

"No one should get more or less than his/her share. This is a social justice. If such an atmosphere is created only then any society, state or the country can be strengthened," he said.

Kushwaha, however, showed a soft corner for RJD chief Lalu Prasad and said, "I am not among those who criticise even Prasad's shadow and create tension in the society." He did not name anyone.

RJD leader and MLA Bhai Virendra said that everything has been discussed and the announcement with regard to Kushwaha joining the grand alliance is merely a matter of time.

Hindustani Awam Morcha (Secular) chief and former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, an RJD ally, asked Kushwaha "not to sail on two boats" and said that he would welcome Kushwaha if he joins the grand alliance.

"Our alliance leader Tejashwi Prasad Yadav will also welcome him... I had told Lalu Prasad on an earlier occasion that we should take the RLSP in the grand alliance if he wishes so."



The RLSP's partners in Bihar -- the BJP and the JD(U) -- chose to tread cautiously and tried to downplay Kushwaha's "kheer" remark.

"What Kushwahaji has said seemed like a proverb. Rice, milk and sugar belonged to everyone ... One should not read anything more in it as Kushwahaji has already taken a resolve to make Narendra Modiji prime minister in 2019 again," Bihar BJP chief Nityanand Rai told PTI.

JD(U) spokesperson and MLC Niraj Kumar said, "It seems more of a proverb than anything else ... Upendra Kushwaha had played an important role in uprooting the 'jungle raj' from Bihar and he is with the NDA.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Netherlands looks at around 25 per cent growth in Indian visitors in 2018 on the back of various promotional initiatives taken by the country, a senior tourism official of the European nation said.

The country had 1.65 lakh visitors from India in 2017 which was a 31 per cent growth in visitor arrivals compared to 2016, the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions (NBTC) said.

"We forecast a 25 per cent growth in the number of visitors from India to around 2.05 lakh for the current year", NBTC Holland Marketing Global Travel Trade Manager Carola Muller - van Rijn told PTI.

This growth is based on a number of initiatives that are being undertaken, she added.

"One of the important reason for the rise in the number of visitors is growing direct connectivity from India to Amsterdam and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines beginning operations between Mumbai and Amsterdam, will also add to the number of visitors from India to the Netherlands," Muller said.

A growing middle class and worldwide growth in tourism are also aiding the expansion, she added.

On the initiatives, Muller said, "We in collaboration with our partners are organising the Holland Sales Mission 2018 in Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai to educate travel trade partners here about the tourism offerings in the Netherlands."



The NBTC is also highlighting scenic attractions, museums, architecture and other interesting regions and cities beyond Amsterdam, she added.

On being asked about the average stay of an Indian visitor, she said, "The average duration of Indian visitors per visit in the Netherlands is four days."



The NBTC is responsible for branding and marketing the Netherlands nationally and internationally. Using the 'Holland' brand, NBTC promotes the country as an attractive destination for holidays, business meetings and conventions.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Lok Janshakti Party president Ram Vilas Paswan today announced that the NDA will soon start a nation-wide pro-Dalit and pro-backward communities programme.

The programme, which will include rallies and conferences, will highlight all



the initiatives undertaken by the NDA-government for Dalits and other backward communities.

Paswan asserted that the Bhartiya Janata Party-led alliance of four parties will remain intact in Bihar. He played down speculation of growing friendship between Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha (RLSP) and Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav.

"The RJD has no future. Lalu Prasad is going to jail and his son is facing criminal charges. Why should anybody ally with that party? All four parties of the NDA will contest the Lok Sabha polls together and win all 40 seats in Bihar," Paswan said at a press conference.

The LJP will organise Dalit rights (Dalit Adhikar) rally and other events in Punjab on August 30, in Gujarat on September 4, in Lucknow on September 5 and in Kaithal of Haryana on September 16, Paswan said, adding that a number of other cities would also be covered as part of the programme.

Paswan said the alleged callousness of the previous dispensation would also be focused on during the drive.

He claimed that the Modi-government's decision to strengthen the law on atrocities against Dalits and tribals, besides its advocacy for reservation for these communities in promotion in government jobs have turned the tide in favour of these disadvantaged sections.

With less than eight months left before Lok Sabha elections, the NDA is making an all out effort to win over Dalits.

Paswan said opposition parties which used to call the NDA-government anti-Dalit have now become silent.

He said the Congress, BSP and other parties in the opposition did nothing for Dalits and other backward communities (OBCs) when they were in power.

He recalled the passage of a bill in Parliament which granted constitutional status to the OBC commission.

Attacking BSP chief Mayawati, Paswan said she diluted provisions of law on atrocities against Dalits in 2007.

He dared her to explain her position on the matter, claiming he would resign if proven wrong.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Haryana Congress president Ashok Tanwar today accused the ruling BJP of politicising the death of a newborn after an ambulance, carrying him, allegedly got stuck in a traffic jam caused by a rally of the state Congress unit.

Tanwar also alleged that the authorities had prepared the investigation report in the matter "under pressure". The report had said delay in reaching the hospital caused the infant's death.

He said the private hospital in Sonepat where the child was born "was not even registered and ill equipped to deal with critical cases as the infant was born nearly two months premature".

The child died soon after reaching Pandit Bhagwat Dayal Sharma Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) at Rohtak on Wednesday. He was referred to the institute from Sonepat civil hospital.

Director General, Haryana Health Services, Dr Satish Agarwal had recently submitted the report to Health minister Anil Vij.

Vij had later said, "It was found in the report that the ambulance was stuck for about 20 to 30 minutes due to jam caused by the cycle rally of the Haryana Pradesh Congress chief Dr Ashok Tanwar...On the basis of these evidences, the main reason for the death of newborn was delay in reaching the hospital."



Denying this, Tanwar claimed that he had already crossed over to another village when the ambulance approached. A way was cleared for it immediately by party volunteers, he said.

The Congress leader said the "premature" baby had been in the private hospital in Sonepat -- where he was born -- for over nine hours. The hospital took time to settle the pending dues with his parents, he claimed.

"Precious time was already lost in the hospital, which referred the newborn to Sonepat's civil hospital, which was at a distance of about 20 kms. The child reached there in the ambulance in the stipulated time, which is the average time it takes to reach there given the traffic conditions. The major delay was not on account of our rally, but due to construction work on four flyovers along the way," said Tanwar.

He said the civil hospital's report had blamed the private hospital for the baby's condition, "but it was changed under pressure from the government".

"The government is silent on action against the private hospital. Nothing is being said how the hospital was allowed to admit such patients for deliveries when it was not registered for this and even ill equipped to handle such cases. Nothing is being said about the ambulance which lacked basic facilities like an oxygen cylinder and paramedical staff...but they are blaming us and targeting me due to political reasons.

"The baby, who was referred to PGIMS, reached there alive, but the FIR registered in the case says he reached there dead. We want to know why is politics being played in the whole thing," Tanwar said.

He said he was pained at the loss of the life.

Tanwar said permission had been taken from the authorities concerned for the 'Cycle Yatra' in Sonepat.

He had taken out the 'Haryana Bachao Parivartan Lao' bicycle rally near Kundli village on the NH 1 targeting the BJP over the Rafale deal.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The National Green Tribunal has directed the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) to check burning of tyres and close illegal denting and painting shops in northeast Delhi.

A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel ordered the municipal corporation, DPCC and the DCP, of the area to take immediate action against such units in Gokulpur village in Shahdara.

"In view of the order of this tribunal, no tyre burning or denting and painting works ought to be allowed in the old mini market, Gokalpur Village. Since, it is stated that in violation of the order of the tribunal, burning of tyre and denting and painting work is still continuing, we direct the DPCC to execute the order of this tribunal.

"EDMC Shahdara and DCP, North East Delhi may facilitate the execution of the order. The applicant is permitted to move the above authorities. It may furnish complete set of papers to the said authorities for compliance of this order. The DPCC may coordinate with the above authorities," the bench said.

The green panel directed the DPCC to file report of the action taken to it by e-mail.

The tribunal's direction came on the plea filed by the Resident Welfare Association seeking execution of the order of NGT banning tyre burning in open and closure of unauthorised units running in Shahdara area.

The NGT had earlier noted that various units like bakeries, welding shops and slaughter houses were functioning in residential areas without proper permission.

The tribunal made it clear that if there was non-compliance of its order, it would take coercive measures in terms of the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 against the authorities concerned.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The National Green Tribunal has summoned secretaries of the Forest Department and the Urban Development of the Himachal Pradesh government to explain "unsatisfactory progress" in the Manali-Rohtang ropeway project.

A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Adradh Kumar Goel noted that despite its direction to expedite the work on "Palchan Rohtang" ropeway, forest clearance has not been granted to it.

"We find it difficult to understand why forest clearance has not been granted in spite of directions of this tribunal.

"It is further stated that the project will be completed within 48 months after the clearance is granted. In view of emergent situation as set out in the orders of this Tribunal dated February 6, 2014 and further orders mentioned in our last order dated July 17, 2018, such a long timeline seems to be unjustified and to defeat the purpose of the order of this tribunal," the bench said.

The tribunal also noted that no strict timeline has been furnished with regard to creation of parking facilities at Gulaba Beas Nallah (below Marhi) and below Rohtang.

"Similarly, for the new Sewage Treatment Plant, no timeline is mentioned for completing the tender process.

"We, accordingly, direct that the tender process be completed positively within four weeks. In view of unsatisfactory progress of compliance of directions of this tribunal, we consider it appropriate to direct the secretary, Forest Department and secretary Urban Development of the Himachal Pradesh government to remain present on the next date to explain their stand," the tribunal said.

The green panel had earlier asked the state government to make all possible efforts to take forest clearance from the competent authority.

With regard to rehabilitation of people affected due to the ropeway project, the tribunal had made it clear that the people, who will be displaced of their business, would be given complete priority for rehabilitation under the Relief and Rehabilitation scheme prepared by the state government.

The Himachal Pradesh government had earlier signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Malana Ropeway Pvt Ltd for execution of the 9-km long Palchan-Rohtang ropeway to be constructed at an estimated cost of Rs 390 crore.

The NGT has directed the state government to explore the possibility of passenger ropeways to other places like Bhrigu Laka, Hamta Pass, Patalsu Peak, Kothi Peak, Shilla Thatch and Chanderkhani Pass, where tourists can see snow.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Niti Aayog has suggested setting up of an overarching 'Himalayan Authority' for coordinating integrated and holistic development of hilly states at the foothills of Himalayan region.

The government think tank has recommended that the proposed authority should provide strategic guidance for development of the region in a sustained manner.

"A 'Himalayan Authority' as an overarching institution may be set up to coordinate integrated and holistic development of the Himalayan States to ensure convergence and synergy, to provide strategic guidance, to commission assessments of the programmes and to monitor fulfilment of the SDG goals," the Aayog said.

Its summary report, 'Contributing to Sustainable Development in the Indian Himalayan Region', said: "It would also foster regional collaboration to address issues that have regional dimensions."



According to the report, the Himalayan Authority may be housed in the NITI Aayog.

The chief secretaries of the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) states, secretaries of the ministries concerned at the Centre, subject experts and think tank representatives could be members of the authority, it suggested.

The report pointed out that IHR presents both challenges and opportunities for skill development and building an entrepreneurial culture.

IHR which makes up India's north and north-eastern borders, comprises 10 mountain states and four hill districts from states of Assam and West Bengal.

The region stretches from the mountains in the northern states of Jammu & Kashmir, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh to the north-eastern states of Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. It also covers the hill districts of Dima Hasao and Karbi Anglong in Assam and Darjeeling and Kalimpong in West Bengal.

IHR shares borders with 6 neighbouring countries with upstream-downstream geographical connect.

Niti Aayog in 2017 had set up Five Thematic Working Groups contributing to Sustainable development in the Indian Himalayan Region.

These themes related to improving water security in mountain towns and cities through revival of springs, developing responsible mountain tourism, increasing skilled workforce, transforming shifting cultivation in north eastern hill region to ensure ecological, food and nutritional security and making available required dataset and information.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Rightwing outfit Sanatan Sanstha claimed today that the people arrested in connection with seizure of explosives and arms from various parts of Maharashtra and those allegedly involved in the killing of rationalists were not its members.

Its spokesperson Chetan Rajhans told reporters that a few people with "progressive mindset", along with political parties such as the Congress and the Left block, were putting the Sanstha in the dock without providing any evidence of wrongdoing.

The outfit is facing renewed calls of ban, after the arrest of several people in the state recently threw up the possibility of them having links with the Sanstha.

The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad carried out raids in Nallasopara in neighbouring Palghar district and Pune between August 9-11, and arrested five people for allegedly stockpiling crude bombs, explosives and firearms.

Vaibhav Raut, Sharad Kalaskar, Sudhanwa Gondhalekar, former Shiv Sena councillor Shrikant Pangarkar and Avinash Pawar were arrested between August 10 and 24 and are in ATS custody.

The CBI, investigating the August 2013 killing of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, recently arrested Aurangabad resident Sachin Andure and has told a court he was the main shooter along with Kalaskar.

The central agency also told a special Pune court yesterday that there was a link between the killing of Dabholkar and journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh in Bengaluru in September last year.

Karnataka Police's Special Investigation Team, which is probing the killing of Lankesh, had met Maharashtra ATS officials in Mumbai last week to exchange information on their respective investigations.

"Our Sanstha is being targeted without any reason. The charges against us are baseless and mindless. None of the nine arrested accused is affiliated with our organisation. We have not even heard the names of Kalaskar, Andure, Surale brothers and Rege before this," Rajhans said.

Shubham Surale and his relative as well as Rohit Rege have been charged by the CBI with hiding a 7.65mm pistol allegedly belonging to Andure.

The Karnataka SIT is probing whether this weapon matches the bullet casings found outside Lankesh's Bengaluru home.

Rajhans claimed four others, including cow protection outfit functionary Vaibhav Raut, were "relatively known" to his organisation.

"But they belong to different Hindu organisations. There are over 320 Hindu outfits across the country. So how can someone say that they all belong to Sanatan Sanstha?" he questioned.

He said the accused participated in some programmes of the Sanstha on their own.

The spokesperson also hit out at the media for running what he claimed were based on "unauthentic sources" and added that the Sanstha planned to move court over this.

Rajhans claimed the Sanstha was a spiritual organisation and not a single allegation about its links to such cases had been proved in court nor any chargesheet filed against it.

Responding to a query on the Sanstha's founder Jayant Athavale not coming forward to answer charges, he said Athavale did not hold any post in the outfit and was busy compiling "granths".

When asked whether the outfit sought to make India a "Hindu Rashtra", Rajhans said, "Every sanstha has a motto. We have ours. We want to fulfil our motto by following non-violence, spiritual enlightenment and making an amendment in the Constitution."



Explaining his statement, Rajhans said the Sanstha wanted the term "secular" to be dropped from the Constitution.

"This word is very vague and has no specific definition or meaning. This was not in the Constitution initially and was added during Emergency by the Indira Gandhi government in 1976," he said.

The spokesperson claimed the word "secular" should be removed by Parliament by exercising Article 368(B).

Article 368 regulates the procedure for amending the Constitution.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Japanese government officials said today that they were trying to ensure the safety of a Japanese tourist whom North Korea said it had expelled after detaining him on unspecified charges.

The official Korean Central Agency said late Sunday that Japanese tourist Tomoyuki Sugimoto had been "kept under control" for questioning about "his crime," without specifying what he had been accused of.

In a two-sentence report, the agency said the authorities decided to "to leniently condone him" and expel him on the principle of humanitarianism.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters that Japan's government was doing its "utmost," but refused to give further details, citing the sensitivity of the issue.

Japan's government confirmed about two weeks ago that it was looking into reports that one of its citizens was being held in North Korea, but has not identified the person by name.

Japan's Kyodo agency, citing a government source, said the person was believed to be a videographer in his 30s and may have been suspected of shooting video of a military facility while on a group tour to Nampo, a port city in western North Korea.

The government had sought his release through the North Korean Embassy in Beijing, Kyodo said. Japan does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea.

North Korea has also arrested other foreign nationals. Three Korean-Americans accused of anti-state activities and detained for more than a year were released and returned home in May with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when the two sides were preparing for the June summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

American college student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested by North Korean authorities in January 2016 after being accused of stealing a propaganda poster and sentenced to 15 years in prison, died in June 2017, days after he was repatriated to the U.S. with severe brain damage.

Their arrests were widely seen as politically motivated and had compounded the dire state of relations over North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.

If the Japanese man's release is confirmed, his repatriation will have come quicker than some of earlier cases. A Japanese correspondent for the Nikkei newspaper was detained in North Korea for more than two years after being taken into custody on spying charges in Pyongyang in December 1999.

His release was seen as an attempt by North Korea to get Japan to make concessions ahead of their planned normalization talks.

Japan and North Korea have also had disputes over abductions of Japanese citizens decades ago. Japan says North Korea abducted at least 17 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train agents in Japanese language and culture to spy on South Korea. Pyongyang has acknowledged abducting only 13 of them and said eight of them had died. Five others allowed by the North to visit Japan in 2002 stayed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Russian hackers indicted by the US special prosecutor last month have spent years trying to steal the private correspondence of some of the world's most senior Orthodox Christian figures, The Associated Press has found, illustrating the high stakes as Kiev and Moscow wrestle over the religious future of Ukraine.

The targets included top aides to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who often is described as the first among equals of the world's Eastern Orthodox Christian leaders.

The Istanbul-based patriarch is currently mulling whether to accept a Ukrainian bid to tear that country's church from its association with Russia, a potential split fueled by the armed conflict between Ukrainian military forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The AP's evidence comes from a hit list of 4,700 email addresses supplied last year by Secureworks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies.

The AP has been mining the data for months, uncovering how a group of Russian hackers widely known as Fancy Bear tried to break into the emails of US Democrats , defense contractors , intelligence workers , international journalists and even American military wives.

In July, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, a U.S. grand jury identified 12 Russian intelligence agents as being behind the group's hack-and-leak assault against Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

The targeting of high-profile religious figures demonstrates the wide net cast by the cyberspies.

Patriarch Bartholomew claims the exclusive right to grant a "Tomos of Autocephaly," or full ecclesiastic independence, sought by the Ukrainians. It would be a momentous step, splitting the world's largest Eastern Orthodox denomination and severely eroding the power and prestige of the Moscow Patriarchate, which has positioned itself as leading player within the global Orthodox community.

Ukraine is lobbying hard for a religious divorce from Russia and some observers say the issue could be decided as soon as next month.

"If something like this will take place on their doorstep, it would be a huge blow to the claims of Moscow's transnational role," said Vasilios Makrides, a specialist in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Erfurt in Germany. "It's something I don't think they will accept." The Kremlin is scrambling to help Moscow's Patriarch Kirill retain his traditional role as the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and "the more they know, the better it is for them," Makrides said.

The Russian Orthodox Church said it had no information about the hacking and declined comment. Russian officials referred the AP to previous denials by the Kremlin that it has anything to do with Fancy Bear, despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko flew to Istanbul in April in an effort to convince the patriarch to agree to a split, which he has described as "a matter of our independence and our national security." Moscow's Patriarch Kirill is flying to Turkey later this week in a last-ditch bid to prevent it. Hilarion Alfeyev, Kirill's representative abroad, has warned that granting the Tomos could lead to the biggest Christian schism since 1054, when Catholic and Orthodox believers parted ways.

"If such a thing happens, Orthodox unity will be buried," Alfeyev said.

The issue is an extraordinarily sensitive one for the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Reached by phone, spokesman Nikos-Giorgos Papachristou said: "I don't want to be a part of this story." Other church officials spoke to the AP about the hacking on condition of anonymity, saying they did not have authorization to speak to the media.

Bartholomew, who is 78, does not use email, those church officials told AP. But his aides do, and the Secureworks list spells out several attempts to crack their Gmail accounts.

Among them were several senior church officials called metropolitans, who are roughly equivalent to archbishops in the Catholic tradition. Those include Bartholomew Samaras, a key confidante of the patriarch; Emmanuel Adamakis, an influential hierarch in the church; and Elpidophoros



Lambriniadis, who heads a prestigious seminary on the Turkish island of Halki. All are involved in the Tomos issue; none returned recent AP messages seeking comment.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The probe into a spat between an additional district magistrate (ADM) and a retired Army colonel here has been handed over to the superintendent of police (crime), officials said today.

The ADM was suspended by the Uttar Pradesh government on August 24 following the altercation involving the Army veteran over an illegal construction outside his house in Sector 29 of the city.

The illegal construction by the ADM was razed by the Noida Authority on August 29, days after a complaint was lodged by his neighbour Colonel (Retired) Rakesh Pratap Singh Chauhan.

"Now SP (Crime) Ashok Kumar Singh is investigating the case," a police spokesperson said.

The case came to light on August 14 when Chauhan was arrested and jailed for a few days over a complaint by the ADM's wife, who accused the Army veteran of molestation and hurling casteist slurs.

Chauhan, while in jail, had filed a counter-complaint accusing the ADM, his wife, his son and three others of assault and attempt to murder.

The episode witnessed a new twist when a CCTV footage emerged purportedly showing the ADM and his supported assaulting Chauhan, who was later granted bail by the court.

"There were two FIRs registered in the case, one on the complaint of the ADM's side and the other from the retired colonel's side. The former was being probed by the SHO of Police Station Sector 20, while the Circle Officer, City 1st, was handling the latter," according to a police official.

"Now both the matters are being together looked into by the superintendent of police (crime)," the official said.

The development of handing over the probe to the SP Crime comes close on the heels of transfers of former CO, City 1st, Anit Kumar, and Sector 20 SHO Manish Kumar Saxena.

According to officials, Kumar has been transferred to the Police Recruitment Board in Lucknow, while Saxena has been transferred to the Crime Branch, Crime Investigation Department (CBCID) in the state capital.

The ADM, who along with his associates two of whom have been arrested -- has been booked for assault, is on the run, the officials said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A non-resident Indian (NRI) serving a jail term in a UK jail for killing his wife over eight years ago is to be deported to India to serve the remainder of his murder sentence in Punjab.

Harpreet Aulakh was sentenced to a minimum of 28 years in London in December 2010 for ordering the murder of his wife, Geeta Aulakh, after she asked for a divorce. The 40-year-old will be deported under the India-UK Repatriation of Prisoners Act, the BBC reported today.

"All arrangements are in place. According to the plan, the UK authorities will bring him to Delhi from where a team of Punjab police officers will bring him to Amritsar," IPS Sahota, a top prison official in Punjab, was quoted as saying.

Inspector general of prisons Roop Kumar said Harpreet, who is from Punjab, had told the UK authorities that he wanted to serve his remaining term in India.

Geeta, 28, was brutally attacked with a machete during the attack in Greenford, west London, in November 2009. She worked for local Indian community radio station, Sunrise Radio, and her murder had hit the headlines around the world at the time of the attack.

In November 2009, the victim, who was the mother of Harpreet's two sons, was hacked to death with a sword, which her husband of 10 years had chosen from a selection of swords at a store days before the murder.

The attack took place when Geeta went to pick up her sons after leaving work at the radio station where she worked as a receptionist.

She was found with head injuries and her right hand severed, and died a few hours later in hospital.

Harpreet, also known as Sunny, and two others - Sher Singh, 19, and Jaswant Dhillon, 30, - were also found guilty of Geeta's murder in 2010. Singh, who actually wielded the sword, and Dhillon, who acted as the lookout for the group, were sentenced to 22 years behind bars.

During the trial, the court was told that British-born Indian-origin Geeta wanted to divorce her husband over his involvement in violent crimes, leading him to plot her murder.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Emphasising the economic importance of the Indian Ocean, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today said nurturing a climate of peace and stability in this region is an important priority for India's foreign policy.

Swaraj's comments assume significance in the wake of China increasing its footprints in the Indian Ocean, which figures prominently in President Xi Jinping's ambitious 'One Belt, One Road' initiative to build a new Silk Route.

India is opposed to the 'One Belt, One Road' initiative as it includes the China Pakistan-Economic Corridor (CPEC) which transverses through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

China has stepped up activities in the Indian Ocean where it is building ports and other infrastructure in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

"There can be no doubt that the Indian Ocean is at the centre of the emerging Age of Asia'...This region is host to the world's busiest waterways and three-quarters of that traffic is headed for destinations beyond our region," Swaraj said while addressing the Third Indian Ocean Conference here.

"As an important trade and energy waterway, carrying half the world's container shipment, one-third of its bulk cargo traffic and two thirds of oil shipments, the Indian Ocean clearly assumes importance well beyond its immediate shores and its littorals," she said.

"Nurturing a climate of peace and stability in this region is therefore an important priority for our foreign policy," Swaraj added.

Emphasising that India and Vietnam are connected not only by the common waters but also by a shared vision for peace and prosperity, she said, "Hanoi is therefore a particularly appropriate setting for us to discuss developments in the Indian Ocean and the Indo-Pacific region."



The Indian Ocean, which borders Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia, is home to major sea lanes and choke points that are crucial to global trade. Nearly 40 per cent of the world's offshore petroleum is produced in the Indian Ocean, which also has rich mineral deposits and fisheries.

Swaraj said in an inter-dependent world characterised by enhanced economic and trade linkages, the importance of sustainable use of our ocean resources cannot be overstated.

"For us in India, the seas around us have nurtured our links of commerce and culture with our extended neighbourhood over millenia," she said.

Swaraj said though there is diversity within the region, the challenges within it are "quite similar".

"Our vision for the region is one of cooperation and collective action," she said.

"We cannot tap the bounty of the Indian Ocean without ensuring maritime peace and stability. Economic prosperity and maritime security go hand-in-hand," she said.

Swaraj said those who live in this region bear the primary responsibility for peace, stability and prosperity in the Indian Ocean.

She further said India sees Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as central to the regional maritime architecture.

Swaraj is in Vietnam on the first leg of her four-day two-nation tour which aims at deepening India's strategic cooperation with Vietnam and Cambodia -- the key countries in the ASEAN region.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In the wake of two recent cases of sexual abuse in the shelter homes of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Odisha government has asked all organisations running such facilities to install CCTVs on the premises to ensure safety and security of girls.

The government plans to conduct meetings with the heads of all child care institutions in the state to discuss the security measures adopted by them, Odisha Women and Child Development Minister Prafulla Samal said today on the sidelines of a three-day sensitization workshop here.

"All women and child care institutes have been asked to ensure complete security of their inmates by installing CCTVs at the entrance and disallowing entry of unknown people. Emergency numbers like 181 and 1098 should be pasted or painted on the walls of shelter homes," Samal told reporters.

The owners and heads of almost all child care institutes across 30 districts of the state took part in the three-day workshop here to discuss standards of care, license application and recruitment process among other issues.

Earlier this month, the state government had asked collectors to carry out physical inspection of child care institutions across the state.

The state government had also directed the collectors to gather intelligence about the ongoing activities in the shelter homes.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)With reconstruction work under way in flood ravaged Kerala, skilled plumbers from Odisha's Kendrapara district are making a beeline to the southern state.

The services of Kendrapara plumbers are being sought to set right the damaged drinking water and sewerage pipelines, an official said.

Kendrapara is known in the country and abroad for its skillful plumbers. Placement agencies and firms in Kerala are intent on seeking the services of Kendrapara lumbers, he said.

"Batches of plumbers from the district have begun leaving for Kerala. The process has started in the past two to three days. We have received reports in this regard from the native villages of these skilled workforces," said Rajnagar Tehsildar, Nihar Ranjan Mallick.

The plumbers who were engaged elsewhere have also left their workplace to head for Kerala.

"I was engaged in a plumbing firm in Kolkata. I have taken a month's break from my job to return home. We a batch of plumbers will leave for Ernakulum very soon. My employer in Kolkata was gracious to grant my leave for working in Kerala, said Raghav Parida, a 38-year-old plumber from Taradipala village under Pattamundai tehsil.

"As far as I know around 500 people from Kendrapara have left for Kerala for restoring drinking water pipelines. Many more are expected to head for Kerala in the coming days as the state badly requires skilled workers like us for speedy restoration," he added.

In major areas of Kendrapara, plumbing is a significant economic activity that has been providing income sources to thousands of families, an official said.

This has been in vogue for generations. Besides major urban centres, plumbers mainly from Pattamundai, Aul, Rajnagar, Rajkanika regions have spread their network in various places across the country, he said.

Many have even made their way to the Gulf and Middle east countries for their dexterity in plumbing, he said.

There are 20000 plumbers from the district overseas as per an official estimate, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In Haryana, now the details



of farmers' crops will be registered online through 'Meri Fasal-Mera Byora' portal launched by the state government.

Farmers will be able to register the details of their kharif crops on this portal from September 15, 2018, an official spokesperson said.

The online registration of crops will be done for free by village level entrepreneurs (VLE) of general Seva Kendras located in villages.

He said the state government has launched state level Fasal e-Soochna portal to provide information related to sown kharif crops and to provide the eligible farmers benefit of various government schemes.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan Army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa today had the first formal meeting with Prime Minister Imran Khan and discussed the security situation in the country as well as the efforts to ensure long-lasting peace and stability in the region.

Bajwa congratulated Prime Minister Khan on assuming the top ministerial job during their meeting here at the PM Office, according to a statement issued by the PM Office.

Prime Minister Khan and the army chief discussed the country's security situation in what was their first meeting since Khan was sworn-in as the 22nd premier of Pakistan on August 18.

The two leaders vowed to maintain their efforts to ensure long-lasting peace and stability in the region, the statement said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Pakistani court today gave the anti-corruption body a final chance to file its response by Wednesday in a petition seeking the revocation of the sentence handed to former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his family in the Avenfield properties corruption case.

Sharif, 68, along with his daughter Maryam, 44, and his son-in-law Capt (retd) Muhammad Safdar, 54, are serving jail terms of 10 years, seven years and one year respectively in the Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, after the accountability court convicted them on July 6 over the family's ownership of four luxury flats in London through illegal means.

The three-judge bench of the Lahore High Court headed by Justice Shahid Waheed also announced that the court would hear the petition on a day-to-day basis, Dawn newspaper reported.

Noting the absence of the National Accountability Bureau's (NAB) counsel in the court for the hearing, the bench ordered the bureau's prosecutor to appear before it at the next hearing on August 29 and submit a reply on behalf of the NAB.

"NAB is being given the final chance to submit its reply," the bench cautioned.

Before adjourning the hearing till August 29, the court rejected three separate applications filed by lawyers seeking to become party to the case.

Senior lawyer A.K. Dogar had filed the petition assailing the conviction of the Sharifs, besides challenging the existence of the National Accountability Ordinance (NAO) 1999.

The ordinance was promulgated by the then military ruler Pervez Musharraf. According to its provisions, a member of the armed forces was immune from being proceeded.

The lawyer pleaded that ousted premier Sharif and others had been convicted by a court which had no jurisdiction because the law under which it had been created was a dead law.

He urged the Lahore High Court to suspend the operation of the accountability court's judgement for being issued by a court that had been established under a non-existent law.

Three corruption cases were filed against Sharif and family last year following a decision by Supreme Court on July 28 of the same year.

The formal trial of the Sharif family started on September 14 and was to be completed in six months but later the deadline was extended at least thrice.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan's former president Asif Ali Zardari and his sister Faryal Talpur appeared before a joint investigation team of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) today in Islamabad to record their statement in a Rs 35 billion money laundering and fake bank accounts case.

In July, the Supreme Court listed 63-year-old Zardari and his sister as beneficiaries in an alleged scam "running into billions of rupees" that led to the arrest of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) co-chairman's close aide and famous banker Hussain Lawai.

The FIA issued notices on Saturday to the former president and his sister to appear at the agency's headquarters in Islamabad on Monday. This is the fourth time they have been summoned, Dawn newspaper reported.

The two, along with several PPP leaders - including former prime ministers Yousaf Raza Gillani and Raja Pervez Ashraf - reached the FIA office amid tight security.

An FIA team grilled the siblings on fake accounts and transactions associated with them, the paper said.

"It is a fake case and unfortunately the case against me was filed during the tenure of Nawaz Sharif. It was filed on the behest of Mian Sahab," Zardari told the media outside the FIA office.

"The FIA (officials) can ask whatever they want, but the crux of the matter is (the) facts (speak otherwise)," he said when asked about the probe.

Zardari served as the 11th President of Pakistan from 2008 to 2013.

The FIA has been asked by the Supreme Court to submit a comprehensive report in connection with the fake accounts case on Tuesday.

Initially, Zardari and Talpur avoided appearing before the agency and expressed their distrust in the FIA officials.

On August 17, a local banking court in Karachi had issued non-bailable arrest warrants for Zardari and other absconding suspects in the ongoing probe.

The court ordered the suspects to be arrested and presented before it by September 4.

On August 18, the Islamabad High Court approved the former president's petition for protective bail in the case.

Zardari had filed a petition in the court through his counsels Aitzaz Ahsan and Latif Khosa after a local banking court on August 17 issued non-bailable arrest warrants for the former president and other absconding suspects in the ongoing probe.

The FIA is investigating 32 people in relation to money laundering from fictitious 29 accounts, including Zardari and his sister Talpur. Zardari's close aide Lawai was arrested last month in connection with the probe.

In addition to 29 bank accounts already under scrutiny, the investigators have "detected 15 more suspicious accounts", according to a senior FIA official.

These accounts were opened in the names of persons other than those in whose names the 29 accounts were opened, said the official. Up to Rs 1 billion, Rs 2 billion and Rs 3 billion had been transferred from these newly discovered accounts, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan's senate has passed a resolution condemning an anti-Islam cartoon contest planned by a far-right Dutch lawmaker, in one of the first actions taken by the assembly since last month's elections.

In his first address to the senate since being sworn in, Prime Minister Imran Khan vowed to take the matter to the United Nations, saying that few in the West understand the pain caused to Muslims by such activities.

Geert Wilders, a Dutch lawmaker known for his fierce criticism of Islam, plans to hold a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest later this year.

Physical depictions of the Prophet are forbidden in Islam. Pakistan summoned the Dutch ambassador earlier this month in protest. The Dutch government has distanced itself from the event.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Panacea Biotec today said it has inked a tripartite pact with Natco Pharma and Breckenridge Pharmaceutical Inc to manufacture and supply of Azacitidine injection, a chemotherapy drug, for the US market.

As per the terms of agreement, Natco has provided the technology for manufacturing Azacitidine to Panacea Biotec's Baddi facility.

Panacea will be responsible for manufacture and supply of the product, which will be marketed, sold and distributed by Breckenridge in the US.

In a regulatory filing, Panacea said its application (prior approval supplement) for qualifying its site has been filed with the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) and the approval is expected in due course of time.

"This collaboration will enable the company to grow its revenues and will also ensure increased capacity utilisation of our oncology plant at Baddi," Panacea Biotec Managing Director Rajesh Jain said.

Shares of Panacea today ended 0.91 per cent down at Rs 256 on the BSE.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Some political parties urged the Election Commission today to link Aadhaar number of voters with electoral rolls to weed out duplicate names, the poll panel said.

"Political parties urged the commission to link Aadhaar numbers with electors' detail for better electoral roll management," an EC statement said after an all-party meet convened by it ahead of the Assembly polls in four states later this year and the Lok Sabha polls due next year.

Seven recognised national parties and 51 recognised state political parties were invited for the meeting. Out of the total 58 parties, 41 attended the meeting.

At least two Election Commission functionaries, who attended the meet, said, "25 per cent" of the 41 parties, which attended the meeting, made this demand.

In August, 2015, a Supreme Court order on Aadhaar card had put brakes on the Election Commission's project to link the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) (Aadhaar) number with voters' electoral data to check multiple entries in electoral rolls.

The commission had then asked its chief electoral officers in all states and Union territories to "suspend with immediate effect till further orders" all activities to collect and feed Aadhaar numbers of voters as part of its National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP).

In its August, 2015 judgement, an apex court bench has made it clear that Aadhaar card will be optional for availing various welfare schemes of the government and no personal information of the holders of such cards shall be shared by any authority.

"The UIDAI (Universal Identification Authority of India)/Aadhar will not be used for any other purposes except PDS, kerosene and LPG distribution system," it said.

Political parties also expressed concern over paid and suggested to make it an electoral offence to curb this menace, the statement said.

Seeking to provide a level-playing field for parties in elections, the Election Commission had proposed making paid an electoral offence to provide a strong deterrent in a bid to stamp out the menace. But its proposal is pending with the Law Ministry since 2012.

Political parties also asked the commission that on the lines of Doordarshan and All India Radio (AIR), free airtime to political parties should be provided on private media for electoral campaigns.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Stating that he was "happy" that Rahul Gandhi has made it clear he was not driven by prime ministerial ambitions, NCP chief Sharad Pawar said today the party getting the maximum number of seats after 2019 polls would claim the post.

"Let elections take place, remove these people (BJP) from power. We will sit together. Whichever party has got more seats can claim the prime minister's post," Pawar, 78, said.

"And I am happy that the Congress leader (Rahul Gandhi) has also said he is not in the race for the prime minister's post," he said at a party meeting in Mumbai.

His remarks has come a day after the Congress president said he was not driven by an ambition to become prime minister.

"I dont have these visions. I view myself as fighting an ideological battle and this change has come in me after 2014. I realised that there's a risk to Indian state, to Indian way of doing things and I'm defending that," Gandhi said.

At the Mumbai meeting, Pawar reminded NCP leaders that the United Progressive Alliance, formed after the 2004 general election, had dislodged the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, formed in 1998.

He said he will "try to go to each state and make regional parties which are not with the BJP to join us (the opposition alliance)".

"Congress is strong in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. In Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati-Akhilesh are there. Situation is different in each state. Hence, we will have to get along with parties which are strong in each state," the former Union minister said.

Lok Janshakti Party leader and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan said on Saturday said that there was no vacancy for the post of prime minister in 2019.

He said the united opposition front should start worrying about the 2024 elections, as Modi faces no challenge in 2019.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Punjab Assembly unanimously passed a resolution today to press the Centre to pursue with Pakistan the opening of Kartarpur Sahib corridor for the 550th birthday celebration of Guru Nanak Dev, the first Sikh Guru.

The resolution was moved by Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on the second day of the monsoon session of the assembly.

All House members were unanimous in their opinion that the opening of the corridor would enable Indian devotees to pay their obeisance at the historic gurdwara in Pakistan.

Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara, where Guru Nanak Dev spent his last years, is located across the international border, though it is visible from Dera Baba Nanak in Gurdaspur district.

Moving the resolution, the chief minister informed the House that he had written to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to take up the issue with her Pakistani counterpart.

The opening of the corridor was a cherished dream of the Sikh community, Singh said.

Punjab Cabinet Minister Navjot Singh Sidhu, who recently visited Islamabad for Imran Khan's swearing-in as prime minister, has said he had hugged Pakistan Army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa after he told him about the possibility of allowing pilgrims from Dera Baba Nanak to visit Kartarpur Sahib, separated by a distance of about three kilometres.

Sidhu was present in the Punjab Assembly today.

He has said the Pakistan Army chief told him they were making efforts to open the corridor.

This, Sidhu has said, was being done to mark the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev next year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.): Complying with a Madras High Court directive, the Tamil Nadu Nadu government today said pillion riders of two wheelers should also wear a helmet, as mandated in the Motor Vehicles Act.

"The rider and pillion must wear helmets compulsorily, failure of which would attract a penalty under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988," an official release said.

The government said 38,491 accidents were reported till July this year,of which 15,601 involved two two-wheeler riders alone.

A total of



7,526 people died in the mishaps, of which 2,476 were two wheeler riders.

Of this number, 1,811 did not wear helmets, it said.

On August 21, the court had sought to know why the compulsory helmet rule for pillion riders and seat belt for occupants of car were not enforced effectively and directed police to file a report on steps taken so far to implement it.

It gave the directive during hearing of a petition seeking a direction to police to ensure that helmet is worn by both rider and pillion as mandated in the Motor Vehicles Act.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Egyptian police today killed five suspected jihadists in a raid on their hideout in a mountain creek in southern Egypt, the interior ministry said.

A statement said security personnel clashed with the alleged militants during an operation to comb a remote area some 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of Cairo.

Five "terrorist elements" were killed after they opened fire on security forces, the ministry said.

There was no mention of any losses among the security personnel.

Jihadists launched an insurgency in Egypt after the 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, who was forced out by the military in the face of mass protests against his rule.

Attacks have largely been concentrated in the Sinai Peninsula in eastern Egypt, but have also taken place elsewhere across the country.

The army in February launched a major operation centred on the Sinai to wipe out jihadists, including members of the Islamic State group.

The military says that over 250 suspected jihadists and at least 35 soldiers have been killed in the "Sinai 2018" operation.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has made the fight against terrorism a priority, but rights groups accuse the government of also using it as cover to crack down on dissent.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A sub-inspector (SI), drawn for UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's security, allegedly committed suicide by shooting himself with his service revolver at his residence here apparently over a domestic dispute, the police said today.

The incident took place last evening at the residence of the deceased, Vikas Singh (35), in Gorakhpur's Budh Vihar area under the Khorabar police station limits, they said.

The sub-inspector killed himself with his service revolver. According to the initial probe, domestic dispute seems to be the reason behind the suicide, Superintendent of Police (City) Vinay Kumar Singh said.

Vikas Singh was posted as sub-inspector at Gulahura police station in Siddharthnagar district and had come to Gorakhpur for the duty of the chief minister's security, he said.

He shot himself when he was with his wife in a room, the SP said, adding that the rest of the family was on the terrace at the time of the incident.

"The revolver has been seized and his body sent for post-mortem. Information about the incident has already been sent to the Siddharthnagar superintendent of police," Vinay Kumar Singh said.

"The couple often used to fight and they were fighting on the day of incident as well. I, my mother, Vikas' daughter Sona (2) and three-month-old son Shivansh were on the terrace," the deceased SI's younger brother Abhilash Singh told reporters.

"Suddenly at around 8.00 pm we heard a shot being fired. When we came down, I saw the blood-soaked body of my brother lying on the sofa and bangles scattered on the bed," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Authorities say a Tesla driver, who said he thought his car was in Autopilot mode, crashed into the back of a firetruck in San Jose.

The California Highway Patrol says the Tesla rear-ended a fire engine that was stopped with its emergency lights activated along US-101 around 1 am yesterday.

The 37-year-old driver, Michael Tran, told officers, "I think I had auto-pilot on." Tran was later arrested on suspicion of drunken driving. It wasn't immediately clear if he had an attorney.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the two firefighters in the firetruck were not injured. The newspaper says Tran and a female passenger in the Tesla were taken to San Jose Regional Medical Center with minor injuries.

Tesla's semi-autonomous Autopilot mode has come under scrutiny following other recent crashes. The carmaker says the function is not designed to avoid a collision and warns drivers not to rely on it entirely.

It was unclear whether Autopilot was activated. Tesla says in a statement that it "has not yet received any data from the car, but we are working to establish the facts of the incident.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pope Francis has declined to comment on a growing scandal after a former Vatican official claimed the pontiff ignored sexual abuse allegations against a senior clergyman and called on him to resign.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican envoy to the United States, said he had told Francis of the claims against prominent US cardinal Theodore McCarrick in 2013.

But rather than punish McCarrick, who was forced to resign last month, Vigano said Francis had lifted sanctions imposed on him by his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI.

"Corruption has reached the very top of the Church's hierarchy," Vigano said in an eleven-page letter published on Saturday in the National Catholic Register and several conservative US Catholic publications.

But the pope refused to address the allegation yesterday.

"I will not say a word about that. I think that the communique speaks for itself," Francis said on his plane as he flew back from Dublin to Rome.

The timing of the letter's release -- right in the middle of Francis's landmark trip to Ireland -- has raised speculation of a campaign by conservatives in the Church against the liberal pontiff.

Francis told journalists to "read the communique attentively and make your own judgement," referring to Vigano's letter.

"You have sufficient journalistic capacity to draw conclusions," he went on.

"When a little time has passed and you have the conclusions perhaps I will talk..," he added.

Bishop Vigano, 77, who was a papal nuncio in Washington between 2011 and 2016, said that Benedict XVI imposed canonical sanctions against McCarrick in the late 2000s.

McCarrick was forced to leave his seminary and live a life of penance after former Vatican ambassadors in Washington, now dead, reported him for "gravely immoral" behaviour with seminarians and priests.

Vigano claimed Francis asked him about McCarrick when he took office in June 2013, but that the pope ignored his warnings.

He said the pope "knew from at least June 23, 2013, that McCarrick was a serial predator," adding that "he knew that he was a corrupt man, he covered for him to the bitter end".

The pope accepted the resignation of McCarrick, now 88, in July, making him just the second cardinal ever to lose his status.

In Ireland yesterday the pope "begged for God's forgiveness" for past clerical abuse scandals, which have badly damaged the image of the Church in the Catholic stronghold.

He spoke of the "open wound" of clerical abuse, demanding "firm and decisive" measures to find "truth and justice" before saying mass to tens of thousands of flag-waving worshippers.

His trip was also met with protests, with about 5,000 abuse victims and supporters attending a "Stand for Truth" rally in the capital Dublin, while another "Nope to the Pope" demonstration called for gay and transgender recognition.

It was the first papal trip to Ireland since John Paul II spoke in front of 1.5 million people during a visit in 1979.

The pope went to Ireland to close the 2018 World Meeting of Families -- a global Catholic gathering that addressed issues including the treatment of gay people in the Church.

On the plane back to Rome after the two-day trip, the pope recommended parents seek psychiatric help for children who show homosexual tendencies.

"When it shows itself from childhood, there is a lot that can be done through psychiatry, to see how things are. It is something else if it shows itself after 20 years," he said.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar on Saturday urged the pope to take action against abuses and ensure justice for abuse victims worldwide.

"Holy Father, I ask that you use your office and influence to ensure that this is done here in Ireland and across the world," he said, calling the scandals a "stain" on the Church and state.

The pope met eight abuse victims yesterday, including a woman assaulted by a priest when she was in hospital aged 13.

On the plane to Rome, Francis said he "suffered a lot" at the meeting.

The Church's standing has been badly dented by the abuse scandals and the Irish have shed traditional Catholic mores, voting earlier this year to legalise abortion after approving same-sex marriage in 2015.

Multiple probes in Ireland have found Church leaders protected hundreds of predatory priests and former Irish president Mary McAleese revealed this month that the Vatican had sought to keep Church documents inaccessible to government investigators.

The abuse scandals in Ireland are part of a worldwide crisis for the Vatican.

A devastating report earlier this month accused more than 300 priests in the US state of Pennsylvania of abusing more than 1,000 children since the 1950s.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu has asked Indian businesses to carry out a market study to identify priority areas for expanding cooperation with Kenya, as the country eyes fresh avenues to boost bilateral trade with the African nation.

The Eighth Session of the India-Kenya Joint Trade Committee meeting was held in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya from August 22-25.

"Addressed the India-Kenya Joint Business Council today in the presence of industry leaders & business representatives from both countries. Invited Kenyan businesses to invest in India and urged Indian businesses to research key priorities & design products specific to Kenyan needs," Prabhu tweeted after the meeting.

During the visit, he also met Kenya's Foreign Affairs Chief Administrative Secretary Ababu Namwamba



and discussed with him on exploring new avenues of cooperation, mutual growth and strengthening of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

"We are keen to explore new opportunities in logistics, agriculture, energy, pharma and many other sectors with Kenya," the minister had tweeted after landing in Kenya.

The joint trade meeting took place against the backdrop of India's exports to Kenya dropping to USD 1.97 billion in 2017-18 from from USD 4.11 billion in 2014-15.

India's imports from Kenya too slowed down from USD 117.42 million to USD 72.57 million during the same period.

In his address to the Kenyan and Indian business leaders, Prabhu emphasised on research and design in products specific to Kenyan needs.

India also explored opportunities to increase exports of petroleum products, cars and motorcycles, and mobile phones to Kenya during the meeting, sources said.

The meeting covered India's contribution in implementation of Kenya's Big Four Agenda food security, affordable housing, universal healthcare and manufacturing, expansion and diversification of bilateral trade - an official statement said.

The two sides also deliberated upon issues like Kenya's readiness to join the International Solar Alliance, implementation of Lines of Credit of over USD 220 million, extended by India in power transmission, SMEs development, revival of the Rivatex factory and agricultural mechanisation.

A meeting of India-Kenya Joint Business Council was held on the sidelines of the joint trade committee meeting.

India is one of Kenya's largest trade partners and the second largest foreign investor in Kenya. Indians are the third-largest group of tourists to Kenya.

The last meeting of Joint Trade Committee was held in New Delhi in February 2015.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Cinema theatre chain PVR said today that it has tied up with Samsung to use the Korean electronics major's 'Onyx' LED technology, which brings to move goers enhanced display and sound quality experience.

The technology replaces the projection-based show of movies.

It has been deployed at a theatre here and will be extended to another PVR property in Mumbai by November.

"We are the first cinema exhibition chain in the country to introduce this disruptive theatre technology for Indian movie-goers," PVR Ltd Joint Managing Director Sanjeev Kumar Bijli told PTI.

He added that the technology, which requires an investment of roughly Rs 7 crore per screen, will be deployed at another PVR property in Mumbai this year. The company will gauge viewer response before taking a call on future deployments.

PVR operates the largest multiplex network in the country with 643 screens at 138 properties in 54 cities. It served over 75 million viewers last year and expects this to grow to 100 million this fiscal.

Samsung India Vice President, Consumer Electronics Enterprise Business Puneet Sethi said the current deployment is among the few screens worldwide that is powered by the new-age technology.

"There are about 8-10 screens across countries like the US, Mexico, Korea... we are in discussions with other companies as well for deployments in India," he added.

Onyx Cinema LED moves away from the projection systems hitherto and delivers better picture and sound quality, he said.

The screen offers Onyx surround sound experience from JBL by Harman International and Samsung's Audio Lab.

This integration, according to Sethi, eliminates the audio 'sweet spot' in the middle of the theatre and ensures that all viewers can enjoy the same experience regardless of seat location within the theatre.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Didi Chuxing (Didi) announced that it shuts the hitching service countrywide starting from August 27 and has laid off two senior executives after a Didi driver had raped and murdered a female passenger.

Police said the 20-year-old victim, surnamed Zhao, got into a Didi hitching car in Yueqing, Zhejiang Province at around 13:30 local time on August 24. An hour later, she sent a "help" message via WeChat to her friends before losing contact.

According to local media, the victim's family and friends instantly contacted Didi's customer service and called the police after they received the help message. However, Didi did not offer the information about the car and the driver in time until several hours later. Since the best rescue time missed, the tragedy eventually happened.

The suspect was arrested on Saturday morning and then the 27-year-old Didi driver surnamed Zhong confessed that he raped and killed the victim.

Didi responded that the suspect had no previous criminal record and he registered as a Didi driver with real individual information, while used a fake car plate when committing the crime.

On August 26, Didi announced the process of its internal inspection, saying that the company will suspend the hitching service nationwide from the next day and will reevaluate its business modes and product logic.

Meanwhile, Didi decided to sack Hua Jieli, the general manager of Didi's hitching service unit, and Huang Jinhong, vice president of customer service business.

Didi said in the statement that the company is facing increasingly more serious challenges in security management and disposal as its service volume expanded day by day. Especially, it still has deficiency in potential risk recognition, process system design and responding punctuality and sincerely accepts the criticism from the public and regulators.

The tragedy took place only three months after an air hostess was also murdered by a Didi driver. Both incidents spark a wide range of public rage and distrust on the safety of car-hailing services and the platform.Usman Khawaja struck an unbeaten century as Australia A beat India B by five wickets under the D/L Method in a rain-affected match to reach the final of the Quadrangular Series here today.

Austraila A will meet India B again on Wednesday in the final to be played at Chinnaswamy stadium here, while South Africa A and India A will fight for third position on the same day.

India B and Australia A bagged 12 points each while India A and South Africa A claimed nine points from five matches.

In a rain-hit match played at Alur, Australia A chased down the truncated target of 247 in 40 overs with the help of a magnificent 101 not out by Khawaja, which came from 93 balls with ten boundaries and a six.

He was ably supported by Jack Wildermuth, who played a cameo of unbeaten 62 off 42 balls, which was studded with five boundaries and three sixes.

The duo shared 93 runs for the sixth wicket, which saw the team through.

Khawaja and Alex Carey gave a perfect start to Australia A as they stitched 77 runs for first wicket in 13.1 overs.

Captain Travis Head left Khawaja after scoring just five and then Peter Handscomb added to the woes by scoring just two off six balls, leaving the team struggling at 95 for three in 19 overs.

Marnus Labuschagne (13) and Ashton Agar (15) also could not stay long with Khawaja.

It was then left to Khawaja and Wildermuth to take the team to victory, but not before rain reduced the innings to 40 overs.

Jalaj Saxena grabbed two wickets while Shreyas Gopal, Deepak Hooda and Kulwant Khejroliya picked one wicket each.

Earlier, India B posted 276 for 6, riding on Manish Pandey's brilliant unbeaten century.

Pandey cracked a superlative 117 not out from 109 balls, a knock studded by seven boundaries and three sixes.

Pandey, who came into bat at 64 for 2 in the 15th over, lost Ishan Kishan (31) and Kedar Jadhav (5), but stitched a 84-run partnership with Deepak Hooda (30) for the fifth wicket.

Jalaj Saxena made 18 and Shreyas Gopal an unbeaten 12, in company of Pandey.

Pacer Michael Neser was the most successful bowler for Australia A as he bagged three wickets for 47 runs in nine overs.

In the other match of the day, South Africa A defeated India A by 4 wickets, after the visitors raced past 158 runs target in 37.4 overs.

Batting first, India B were skittled out for 157 in 37.3 overs, with Sanju Samson (36) and Deepak Chahar (38) being the only two batsmen who showed some application to post a respectable target.

Seven batsmen, including Ambati Rayudu and Shreyas Iyer, failed to get to double digit figures.

Dane Paterson's five-for ripped apart India A as he finished with a match-winning figures of five for 19 with two maidens in it.

Sisanda Magala and Robert Frylinckb bagged two wickets each.

In reply, South Africa A rode on Pieter Malan's 47-run knock to take the total to 103 for four in 27.2 overs, requiring 56 runs in remaining overs.

However, they lost two more wickets of Paterson (12) and Senuran Muthusamy (16), before South Africa A could pull off an easy victory.

K Khaleel Ahmed bagged three wickets, while Krunal Pandya claimed two. Mayank Markande scalped one.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Rosa Bouglione, the star matriarch and celebrity darling of France's legendary Bouglione circus family, has died aged 107, her relatives announced today.

"Right up to August 26 she remained the uncontested queen of the circus," a family statement said.

She reigned over the Cirque d'Hiver (Winter Circus) in the heart of the French capital "for nearly a century," after her husband Joseph and his three brothers bought the venue in 1934, the statement added.

"Madame Rosa received the greatest stars and welcomed the greatest international artists to this temple of the circus," which has a capacity of 1,500.

In her extraordinary life story published in 2011, Bouglione told of how she was married in a lion's den.

Born in a horse-drawn caravan to a family of performers in Belgium on December 21, 1910, under the name Rosalie Van Been, she died Sunday in Paris at her home close to the Cirque d'Hiver.

"Five generations, covering 55 children, great and great, great grandchildren will say adieu to their emblematic grandmother who has bequeathed them a love of the circus," the statement said.

The public will be able to pay their respects before the coffin at the famed Cirque d'Hiver on Wednesday ahead of a funeral mass during the afternoon.

Rosa will be buried alongside "all the members of the dynasty" at the cemetery in Lizy-sur-Ourcq, near the River Marne northwest of Paris, the family said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Over 3.26 lakh people are still in relief camps across Kerala even after a fortnight of the devastating deluge that left a trail of destruction claiming 322 lives and rendering thousands homeless.

With rehabilitation measures on, the government today said an immediate relief of Rs 10,000 would be disbursed soon to the flood-affected.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan issued necessary instructions to district collectors on the aid during a video conference to review the post-flood situation in the state.

A total of 3,42,699 people are in 1,093 relief camps, a release from chief minister's office said.

As per the latest government update on the flood situation, 322 people have lost their lives in the monsoon fury since August 8.

Though several people are returning home, Vijayan said the relief camps have to be continued for few more days.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi would arrive here tomorrow for a two-day visit to the flood-affected areas.

In a tweet, he said he would visit some relief camps and also meet fishermen and party volunteers involved in relief work.

He would visit Alappuzha, Chengannur and Ernakulam tomorrow and some places in Wayanad and Kozhikode districts on August 29.

A release from the chief minister's office said work of burying carcasses were nearing completion and four lakh birds and more than 22,000 small and big animals have been buried.

Vijayan asked district authorities to finalise the loss suffered by each sector without delay.

Meanwhile, several people have come forward, responding to the chief minister's appeal to donate one month salary for the chief minister's disaster relief fund.

Governor P Sathasivam has handed over a cheque for Rs. 2.50 lakh as balance amount towards his contribution of one month's salary to the CMDRF.

The governor had earlier contributed Rs one lakh on August 14.

The total amount received towards the CMDRF touched Rs.700 crore today, officials said.

As the state was focusing on cleaning houses and public places on a large-scale, gram sabhas at Kuttanad in Alappuzha would be undertaking a cleaning drive with participation of 75,000 volunteers tomorrow.

Many places of Kuttanad, an area which is below sea level, is still under waterlogged and people are finding it difficult to return home.

State Finance minister T M Thomas Isaac said more than 75,000 volunteers drawn from various parts of the state are expected to participate in the cleaning programme.

Centres to collect relief materials were assisting the flood-hit people to get back on their feet and are now in the process of preparing special kits consisting of five kg rice and other essential items to those returning home from camps.

Meanwhile, telecom authorities said 98 per cent connectivity have been restored in flood-hit areas as part of disaster mitigation activities taken up by the Telecom department, BSNL, telecom service providers and telecom infrastructure providers in collaboration with the state government.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) of Rajasthan police arrested today two government employees for accepting bribe in Sikar and Jhunjhunu districts in the state, an official said.

A team of the ACB arrested Sri Ram, an electricity department employee in Sikar for accepting a bribe of Rs 2,000 from the complainant for allegedly providing electricity connection, Deputy Superintendent of Police, ACB, Kamal Prasad said.

The accused had demanded Rs 5,000 but the deal was settled at Rs 2,000, he said.

In another trap, an ACB team arrested a patwari, Anita Kumari, in Mukundgarh of Jhunjhunu district for taking a bribe of Rs 500 to settle a court case, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Lok Insaf Party (LIP) and rebel AAP legislators today demanded that the Punjab government implement a resolution passed by the state assembly asking other states to pay royalty to Punjab for using river water.

Ousted Leader of Opposition Sukhpal Singh Khaira, along with seven other legislators and two members of Lok Insaf Party, held a protest outside the assembly complex, asking the government to implement the resolution.

LIP member Simarjit Singh Bains, his brother MLA Balvinder Singh Bains and eight rebel AAP members said the issue of sharing Punjab water with Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi was raised during the previous Akali Dal-BJP government and the assembly had passed the resolution unanimously to demand royalty from these states.

"From then on, no action has been taken in this regard and AAP and the LIP have decided to push the matter by holding protest," Bains said.

According to the international riparian law, he said, these states have to pay royalty for taking river water.

Bains said Punjab has shared more than 12 million acre feet (MAF) water with Rajasthan since 1965, which amounted to more than Rs 16 lakh crore, but no government has bothered to raise this issue with the state.

"Farmers in Punjab have no other source of income... Punjab government can generate income by charging royalty for its water," he said.

In 2016, Punjab Assembly passed a resolution asking for royalty payment for Satluj-Yamuna water from its neighbouring states, including Rajasthan, giving another dimension to Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal dispute.

The Rajasthan government has refused to pay any royalty citing the 1981 agreement between states in the region.

In accordance with the 1981 agreement, drawn under the Congress rule, the share of water between Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan was revised.

Following the agreement, the total share of Punjab was raised to 4.22 MAF, for Rajasthan it was raised to 8.6 MAF and Haryana's was unaltered at 17.17 MAF.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Relief materials collected by institutions and individuals in the city for flood-ravaged Kerala are set to sail in a ship from Kolkata Port today.

"The relief materials will be sailing for the Kochi Port today on MV SSL Chennai in two 20-feet containers," Kolkata Port Trust (KoPT) Deputy Chairman S Balaji Arunkumar told PTI.

The containers would be carried free of cost by the vessel from the Netaji Subhas Dock here.

"It will take at least seven days to reach the Kochi Port and from there, the port authorities will help to get the relief materials distributed," Arunkumar said.

MV SSL Chennai is a sister ship of the doomed MV SSL Kolkata, which had been abandoned after extensive damage due to a fire.

Sister ships are typically of the same class and size, and owned by the same company.

Over 300 people have died and lakhs displaced in the floods and landslides caused by the monsoon rains since August 8 across Kerala.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The RSS may invite president to attend a three-day lecture series by Sangh chief in New Delhi next month, sources in the organisation said on Monday.

The idea is to invite people from different ideologies for the event, a source in the said, adding that the list is being prepared and may also include CPI(M) General Secretary

Indications that Gandhi could be invited came on a day the RSS criticised him for drawing parallels between the Sangh and Islamic radical outfit Muslim Brotherhood.

Giving details of the September event, RSS prachar pramukh Arun Kumar said the Sangh was for the first time organising a three-day lecture series of its chief on the theme, 'Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective'.



"Bhagwatji will address and interact with select audience comprising prominent citizens on 'Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective' in a three-day lecture series," Kumar told reporters.

The event will be held at Vighan Bhavan from September 17 to September 19.

Kumar said people across the country wanted to know and associate with the RSS.

"This lecture series has been organised in this context... sarsanghchalak (RSS chief) Mohan Bhagwatji will present the Sangh views on various contemporary issues of importance," Kumar said.

Replying to a question on whether Gandhi will also be invited, Kumar said the list had not been finalised.

"It is our prerogative to choose who to invite or not. Leave this to us... But people from all walks of life, including from different political outfits, ideologies and religions, will be invited," he said.

In June this year, veteran and former president attended an event at the RSS headquarters in on the Sangh's invitation, for which he was criticised by the party leaders.



The RSS, an ideological mentor of BJP, was the focus of Gandhi's attack during his recent visit abroad.

Last week, at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Gandhi had said the RSS' idea is similar to that of Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world.

He had also alleged that the RSS was trying to "change" the nature of India and "capture" its institutions.

The Sangh said the chief cannot understand the saffron outfit as he does not know India. He had also alleged that the RSS was trying to "change" the nature of India and "capture" its institutions.The rupee pared most of its early gains, trading slightly higher at 69.88 against the US currency in late morning deals on sustained dollar selling by banks and exporters amid weak dollar overseas.

The domestic unit opened sharply higher at 69.75 against last Friday's closing level of 69.91 a dollar at the interbank foreign exchange market here.

It domestic currency witnessed volatility and moved in a wide range between 69.65 and 70.00 during morning deals, the rupee was trading at 69.88 at 1030 hrs.

Higher local equities lent some support to the rupee, a dealer said.

Overseas, the US dollar's safe-haven appeal faded against a basket currencies in early Asian trade, after risk sentiment in the broader markets picked up following the speech from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

Meanwhile, the 30-share BSE Sensex is trading higher by 348.00 points, or 0.91 per cent, at 38,599.380 at 1040 hrs.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Russia today said that international peace talks on Afghanistan have been postponed following a phone conversation between Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Afghan leader Ashraf Ghani.

Moscow had been preparing to host peace talks on September 4 and had invited Taliban representatives to participate.

The Russian foreign ministry said that Ghani had "in principle" supported the idea of such a meeting but said Afghanistan needed more time to develop a "consolidated" position including ongoing changes in the government.

"An agreement was reached to jointly work on a new date of the meeting through diplomatic channels," the ministry said in a statement.

The Afghan government faces fierce criticism over an increasingly deadly insurgency.

Yesterday Ghani rejected the resignations of the intelligence chief and the interior and defence ministers, demanding they help bolster the country's defences.

Earlier this month Ghani offered a conditional three-month ceasefire to the Taliban, a move welcomed by the United States and NATO after nearly 17 years of war.

Zamir Kabulov, special representative of the Russian president on Afghanistan, had earlier said the talks would be "in the framework of launching a process of national reconciliation in Afghanistan".

In April 2017, Moscow hosted an international conference on Afghanistan with representatives from Afghanistan, India, Iran, China, Pakistan, and five former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

The US was invited to that meeting but did not participate.

Russia and its allies called on the Taliban to lay down weapons and negotiate with the Afghan government directly. Moscow also declared its readiness to serve as a platform for dialogue.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Moscow court today gave a 30-day jail sentence to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny over an unsanctioned protest earlier this year, just days before another planned political rally.

Judge Alexei Stekliyev of the Tverskoy District Court in the capital ruled that Navalny had repeatedly violated Russian law with a call for a mass protest in January, an AFP correspondent in the courtroom reported.

Navalny was detained on Saturday evening outside his home in Moscow. His charges pertain to an unsanctioned protest he organised on January 28, violating Russia's strict laws which forbid any public event without city hall's authorisation.

In the courtroom today, Navalny's defence lawyer asked the judge for two days in order to read through the case, which contains 219 pages, but Stekliev only allowed 30 minutes.

Speaking before the decision, the 42-year-old Kremlin critic said the case was an indictment of Russia's political system.

"Over the past four years... Moscow has not once approved our request to rally where we requested," he said.

He added that the only reason he is being held on the same charge for the third time is to keep him from holding a protest on September 9 against the government's retirement age hike.

Navalny has called some of the biggest protests in Russia in recent years. His anti-corruption rhetoric is especially popular among younger people who follow his online channels and blogs.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Comments and links to reports on science, and its applications.The legislators of opposition SAD today dumped the Justice (retd) Ranjit Singh Commission report on sacrilege incidents outside the Assembly complex, even before it was tabled in the Punjab Vidhan Sabha.

The one-man commission was set up by the Congress government in April 2017 to investigate the various incidents of sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib and other religious texts.

Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal rejected the report, describing it as "waste paper".

"The report has no sanctity," Badal said.

He alleged that it was prepared at the residence of chief minister Amarinder Singh.

The SAD has accused the Congress of defaming the Akalis by blaming them for the sacrilege incidents.

Legislators of the opposition party also raised anti-government slogans.

SAD MLA Bikram Singh Majithia alleged that Amarinder Singh, Justice (retd) Ranjit Singh and Sikh preachers Baljit Singh Daduwal -- parallel jathedar of Damdama Sahib -- and Dhian Singh Mand -- acting jathedar of Akal Takht in 2015 -- had "colluded" to prepare the report.

He blamed Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI for the sacrilege incidents.

Pakistan's ISI is bent upon disturbing the peace and communal harmony in Punjab, Majithia said.

He demanded the arrest of Justice Ranjit Singh, a former judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, and cabinet minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa for allegedly fabricating evidence and leaking a top secret document before its submission in the Vidhan Sabha.

The first part of the 182 page report was leaked online earlier this month.

The SAD and its ally BJP have submitted a notice for breach of privilege motion to the Speaker K P Singh against those who leaked the report.

Majithia accused Justice Ranjit Singh of going beyond the terms of reference to conspire to "weaken" the SAD as well as the hallowed institutions, including the Akal Takth, Sikh's highest temporal seat, and Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC).

The government will table the report along with action taken report in the House today, officials said here.

The report dealt with incidents of sacrilege at village Burj Jawahar Singh Wala, Bargari and firing incidents at Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan in 2015.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Saudi-led military coalition fighting in Yemen today accused the United Nations of "biased" reports on air strikes that allegedly killed dozens of children in rebel-held areas.

"The coalition is surprised by the ... biased positions of some reports," said coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki, adding that the information was "prejudiced" and based on "rebel stories".

The coalition has not confirmed or denied it carried out two air raids on Thursday that the UN said killed at least 26 children and four women south of the flashpoint rebel-held city of Hodeida.

The UN Security Council had already called for a "credible" investigation into a strike blamed on the coalition in northern Yemen on August 9 that the Red Cross said killed 40 children.

The coalition has announced its own probe into that raid.

Two UN officials have made public statements condemning the attacks.

"We all know that UN bodies are under pressure by the Huthi militias... and these reports may have come in response to that pressure," Maliki said. "There is no war without collateral damage."



Saudi Arabia and its allies have fought the Huthis since 2015 in an attempt to restore Yemen's internationally recognised government to power and push back the rebels, who still hold the capital Sanaa.

The war has left nearly 10,000 people dead and unleashed what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court today directed the registries of all high courts to put on their respective websites that they have set up anti-sexual harassment committees in the HCs and their subordinate district courts across the country.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra took note of the reports filed by the high court registries that they have complied with a direction of the apex court.

The bench, which also comprised justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, had on May 11 directed all the high courts to set up these committees in all courts across the country within two months in accordance with a 2013 law.

The bench had asked its Registry to communicate the order to the registrars general of each high court for necessary action by the chief justice or the acting chief justice.

The directions to set up the panel came on a petition filed by an advocate who had alleged that she was assaulted by some lawyers observing a strike at the Tis Hazari district court complex here.

The court, which had earlier granted protection to the woman lawyer, had also tried to mediate the dispute between her and the bar members of Tis Hazari district courts.

Cross-FIRs have been lodged by the lawyer and the accused advocate against each other at the Subzi Mandi police station here.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court today accorded primacy to the wish of a 23-year-old Jain woman that she wanted to live with her parents instead of her husband who had allegedly relinquished Islam and converted to Hinduism to tie the nuptial knot with her.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, who had directed the Chhattisgarh police to bring the woman before it today for an interaction, posed some queries in chaste Hindi to ascertain her wishes.

The bench, which also comprised Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, asked her several questions like "What is your name", "Did your marriage actually take place" and "Why don't you want to live with your husband".

The woman replied to the queries and said she was a major, she has not been coerced by anyone and though she married Mohd Ibrahim Siddhiqui alias Aryan Arya, she wanted to live with her parents voluntarily.

The bench considered her unequivocal statement and modified the order of the High Court that had asked her to either live with her parents or be accommodated in a hostel and had allowed her to go to her parental home straightaway.

The top court said it would not get into the legality and validity of the marriage, as it would be dealt the competent courts.

After taking note of the statements of the woman, it said "she has categorically stated that she does not want to go with her husband and wants to go back to her parents. In view of the aforesaid, we permit her to go back to the parents...

"We refrain from commenting on the marriage. As she is major, she is entitled to take her decision as to where she wants to go".

Jugal Kishore Gilda, Advocate General for Chhattisgarh, appeared and argued on behalf of the state government.

Earlier, Mohd Ibrahim Siddhiqui alias Aryan Arya had filed a plea in the apex court seeking the release of his wife from her parents' custody.

The court had then directed the superintendent of police of district Dhamtari in Chhattisgarh to produce Anjali Jain, daughter of Ashok Kumar Jain, before it today.

Siddhiqui had converted to Hinduism and taken the name of Aryan Arya to marry the woman. He had challenged the Chhattisgarh High Court order directing the woman to either go to a hostel or her parental home.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court today stayed a one month jail term awarded to an advocate by the Punjab and Haryana High Court for allegedly writing a post on social networking site Facebook to criticise an order.

A bench of Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan stayed the order sentencing advocate Maneesh Vashistha to month-long simple imprisonment for his Facebook post and sought a response from the registrar general of the High Court.

Senior advocate Vikas Singh, appearing for Vashistha, said this was an unverified post on the social networking site which was later erased.

"Experts have an opinion that this post can be doctored. The high court is wrong in holding him guilty of contempt of court," he said.

The bench, after hearing brief arguments, said "Issue notice, returnable in four weeks. In the meantime, there shall be stay of the impugned order".

Vashistha, in his appeal, has claimed that "the order is totally wrong, illegal, against law, against facts and is beyond record, arbitrary, lacking reasoning, summary and sketchy in nature and is based on surmises and conjectures and is thus liable to be quashed".

It said he has been convicted on an allegation that he had published the post having "contemptuous remarks" against the High Court regarding an order dated August 24, 2017, relating to BSNL employees, on his Facebook account, which he had erased s subsequently.

His plea said that the high court's May 31 judgement did not disclose the date on which appellant has committed the alleged contempt, that is the date he had published the contemptuous remarks and displayed them on Facebook.

Vashistha also denied having written any such post on the social networking site to allegedly criticise a judgement given last year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court today reserved its order on the issue of constituting a committee to deal with issues pertaining to jails and suggest reforms for prisons across the country.

A bench comprising justices Madan B Lokur, S Abdul Nazeer and Deepak Gupta perused the draft of terms of reference of the committee which was prepared by Additional Solicitor General (ASG) A N S Nadkarni and advocate Gaurav Agrawal, who is assisting the court as an amicus curiae in the matter.

The bench told the ASG and the amicus that terms of reference prepared by them should be "clear" no grievance could crop up later.

"Please sit down together. It will hardly take 30 minutes for you," the bench said, adding, "make it clearer".

The bench said that the committee, to be headed by a retired judge of the apex court, should be given all necessary facilities to carry out their work.

To this, the ASG said, "We have said that all benefits given to a Supreme Court judge will be given".

The bench referred to the issue relating to Supreme Court Committee on Road Safety, headed by former apex court judge Justice K S Radhakrishnan, and said that it took months to provide facilities to the panel.

While hearing a matter relating to inhuman conditions in 1,382 prisons across India, the bench had earlier said that a committee should be set up to look into the issue on a day-to-day basis and suggest measures to tackle the problems since it includes the issue of human rights of prisoners in jails.

It had said that the committee, to be headed by a former apex court, would be assisted by two-three officers of the Government of India.

The apex court had on August 5 expressed displeasure that several states had not yet appointed the board of visitors who regularly inspect prisons to ensure that they are being run in accordance with rules.

It had taken strong exception to overcrowded jails across the country and said prisoners also have human rights and cannot be kept in jail like "animals".

It had earlier passed a slew of directions over unnatural deaths in jails and on prison reforms across India.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Market regulator Sebi has ordered the release of bank and demat accounts of two entities after recovering dues of Rs 27.38 lakh in two separate matters.

In March 2017, Sebi had directed the banks, depositories -- NSDL and CDSL -- and mutual funds to attach the bank and demat accounts of Dulron Procon Private Ltd along with other entities in the matter of Bank of Rajashthan Ltd to recover Rs 14.93 lakh.

In another case, the regulator had passed an attachment order in 2014 against Mangiram Sharma to recover Rs 10.41 lakh in the case of Adani Exports Ltd.

The attachment orders were passed against the two entities after they failed to pay the fine imposed on them by the regulator.

As per two separate orders dated August 23, Sebi has recovered Rs 15.53 lakh in the matter of Bank of Rajashthan Ltd Technologies (India) and Rs 11.85 lakh in the matter of Adani Exports.

Sebi said the banks, depositories -- NSDL and CDSL -- and mutual funds "are hereby directed to release the bank/ demat accounts/ lockers, etc" of the entities.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court has held that the second marriage of a person during the pendency of an appeal against a divorce decree would not be void in cases where the parties have decided not to pursue the appeal.

A bench of Justices S A Bobde and L N Rao, while interpreting section 15 of the Hindu Marriage Act dealing with the issue of marriage by divorced persons, said the restriction placed on second marriage till the dismissal of an appeal would not apply in cases were the parties have arrived at a settlement and decided not to go ahead with the appeal.

"Following the principles of purposive construction, we are of the opinion that the restriction placed on a second marriage in Section 15 of the Act till the dismissal of an appeal would not apply to a case where parties have settled and decided not to pursue the appeal," the bench said.

Section 15 of the Act states that it shall be lawful for either party to marry again after dissolution of a marriage if there was no right of appeal against the decree of divorce. It also said the second marriage by either of the parties shall be lawful only after dismissal of appeal, if any, against the decree of divorce.

The apex court's verdict came as it set aside Delhi High Court's August 2016 judgement which had declared as null and void the second marriage of a man during pendency of his appeal against divorce.

"The Hindu Marriage Act is a social welfare legislation and a beneficent legislation and it has to be interpreted in a manner which advances the object of the legislation. The Act intends to bring about social reforms. It is well known that this court cannot interpret a socially beneficial legislation on the basis as if the words therein are cast in stone," the bench said.

While referring to an earlier judgement of the apex court, the bench said it was held that "incapacity for second marriage for a certain period of time does not have the effect of treating the former marriage as subsisting and the expression 'spouse' would not include within its meaning the expression 'former spouse'."



The first marriage of the man was dissolved by the trial court after his then wife had approached the court seeking divorce. The man had approached the high court against the trial court's order.

During the pendency of appeal, both the parties arrived at a settlement after which the man filed an application to withdraw his appeal against the trial court order. The high court on December 20, 2011, dismissed his appeal as withdrawn in terms of the settlement.

However, the man married another woman on December 6, 2011.

His second wife thereafter filed a petition for declaring the marriage as void and raised the ground that the appeal filed by the man against the divorce with his first wife was pending before the high court when the marriage was solemnised between them.

The trial court had rejected her plea, following which she had approached the high court which declared their marriage as null and void.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A sedition case was lodged against "unidentified persons" for allegedly raising 'pro-freedom' slogans during a National Conference rally in Poonch in support of Article 35A of the Constitution, police said today.

The rally was led by NC MLA Javed Ahmed Rana in Mendhar tehsil during a day-long strike against the slated Supreme Court's hearings on a slew of pleas challenging the validity of the Article 35 A of the Constitution, which accords special rights and privileges to the Jammu and Kashmir natives.

During the rally, some unidentified persons raised "pro-freedom" slogans, following which a case under sections 124-A (sedition) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Ranbir Penal Code (RPC) was lodged, a police official said.

"The sedition case was registered against unidentified persons on Saturday," said the official, adding no arrests have been made as yet.

This is the second sedition case registered against unidentified persons in Poonch district this month. On August 6, a similar case was lodged at Gursai police station in the border district after some people raised pro-freedom slogans during a strike in support of the Article 35A.

The National Conference Scheduled Caste Cell (NCSCC), meanwhile, staged a rally at Ramnagar in Udhampur district today, stressing upon the need to safeguard the Constitutional provision which, they claimed, reflects the identity and dignity of the people of the state.

Leading a protest march of the NC workers, the party's cell co-chairperson Vijay Lochan said the people of the state would not allow the abrogation of the Article 35A, which, he claimed, was vital for the economic sustenance and jobs of the youths in the state.

He said weakening Article 35A would tantamount to usurping the rights of the unemployed youths and exposing the business community to threat from non-state subjects who may come and settle in the state.

Lochan accused the BJP of unleashing a misinformation campaign on Article 35A, saying its leaders were dividing the people on the basis of region, religion and caste.

He described Article 35A as "region and religion-neutral" and said it protects the interests of all segments of the society.

The National Conference will fight the divisive of the BJP and offer every sacrifice for strengthening the bonds of amity and unity between the people, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A senior health official posted in Assam's Dhemaji district was arrested when he was accepting a bribe of Rs 12,000 for clearing vehicle bills, at his office this evening, police said.

Joint Director Health Services, Dhemaji, Dr Abdul Latif, was caught accepting the bribe from one Mridul Sarma, an Assam Police press release said.

Latif had demanded the bribe from Sarma for clearing a bill due to the complainant for his supply of hired vehicle to the office concerned, the release said.

The accused officer had demanded a bribe of Rs 18000 (10 per cent of the bill amount of Rs 1.83 lakh) from the complainant, it said.

The complainant had approached the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) police station, following which an FIR was registered under relevant sections today, the release said, adding that the arrested official's house will be searched.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)



Guwahati: The Anti-Corruption branch of Assam police on Friday had arrested a retired Deputy Commissioner over bribery charges.





According to the reports, the Anti-Corrpution branch had arrested Binod Kumar Deka, retired Deputy Commissioner of Chirang district in connection with ACB PS Case no 25/2017, under section 7/13(1)(d)(ii)/13(2) PC Act as prima facie evidence found about the involvement of Deka in the offence.





Rajib Saikia, Chief Public Relation Officer of Assam police said that, on 22 September, 2017 Champa Basumotary of Borbori, Srijani Apartment 1B under Dispur police station of Guwahati had submitted a written FIR at ACB PS that accused Deka, who was working as Deputy Commissioner of Chirang at that time received an amount of Rs 30,000 as bribe against the sanction of bill for work order dated 31.3.2017.





In support of her allegation video footage was also given by her. As per the FIR investigation has been carried out and from the material evidence and expert reports, prima facie the charges levelled against Deka has been found to be true. Hence Deka has been arrested today and kept in ACB PS for further follow up action, Rajib Saikia said.





The arrested retired Deputy Commissioner will be produced before special court in Guwahati tomorrow.



South Korea said today it may delay the imminent opening of a liaison office in North Korea, after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's trip to Pyongyang was abruptly cancelled by Donald Trump.

Trump on Friday pulled the plug on the visit, blaming a lack of progress in denuclearisation efforts since his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June.

The sudden cancellation has put the brakes on Seoul's plans to open a liaison office in North Korea following a rapid diplomatic thaw on the Korean peninsula.

"I can't say it won't have any impact," Kim Eui-kyeom, the South's presidential spokesman, told reporters.

"We were considering the opening of the liaison office as part of a smooth series of events including Pompeo's visit to the North and the inter-Korean summit, but there is a need to review it since a new situation has arisen," he added.

Blue House officials told AFP he was referring to the timing of the opening rather than the project as a whole.

The setting up of the inter-Korean liaison office was agreed between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and the North's Kim at their summit in April.

Moon favours engagement with the North and has pressed for a resumption of cross-border cooperation, potentially risking differences with Washington.

The South Korean leader is due to visit Pyongyang next month for what will be his third meeting with Kim this year.

But the office, to be located in the North's border city of Kaesong, has raised concerns that the transfer of material there could violate UN sanctions against North Korea.

Seoul's unification ministry on Monday brushed off the accusations, saying that all goods were being transferred to build and operate the office and "not for the economic benefit of North Korea".

During their summit in Singapore in June, Trump and Kim signed up to a vague commitment to denuclearisation, which the US leader touted as a historic breakthrough.

But Pyongyang has since criticised Washington for its "gangster-like" demands for complete, verifiable and irreversible disarmament and the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency recently reported there were no indications that North Korea has stopped nuclear activities.

After the cancellation of Pompeo's trip, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the mouthpiece of the North's ruling party, accused Washington of "double-dealing attitudes".

"The US is hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK" (North Korea) if it fails in its efforts to secure the North's "unjust and brigandish 'denuclearisation first'", it said in a weekend commentary that recalled the rhetoric of the past.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Seven notorious criminals have been arrested with illegal weapons from different locations in the city, a police officer said today.

Based on a tip-off, a police team arrested Chhitarmal Kaatwa (30) late yesterday night from Phulera police station limits along with an illegal pistol and two live cartridges, DCP (West) Ashok Kumar Gupta said.

The accused confessed to his role in arms smuggling and supply, he added.

Based on the information provided by Kaatwa, police teams arrested Mukesh Jat (28), Mohan Singh (30), Pawan (36), Manohar Mehra (35), Jitendra Kumar Kumawat (42) and Harlal Jat (30) from different locations within the Kardhani police station limits, Gupta said.

Four illegal pistols, two country-made weapons and three live cartridges were recovered from the accused persons, he said.

The accused have been booked under the Arms Act. All of them have a criminal record and have cases of murder, loot and vehicle theft registered against them, the DCP said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)High Commissioner of Republic of Seychelles to India Philippe Le Gall today expressed his deep sadness over heavy loss of human lives in the devastating floods in Kerala.

Describing as 'terrible' the material damage caused by the deluge earlier this month, he paid tributes to all those helping the families of the victims in Kerala "in such painful circumstances."



The envoy was delivering a speech at the Pondicherry University on the 248th anniversary of arrival of Indian diaspora in Seychelles.

He recalled the arrival of five Indians from Puducherry 248 years ago at Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, and said it was the beginning of historic and emotional connection between the country and India.

Philippe Le Gall released a special souvenir on commemorating the arrival of first Indians in Seychelles.

Puducherry Lt Governor Kiran Bedi, Vice Chancellor (in charge) of the Pondicherry University Govindaraj and Honorary Consul General of Seychelles in Chennai M.Sesha Sai were among those who attended the event.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The BJP said today Union Minister Nitin Gadkari and its national secretary Muralidhar Rao would represent the party at a memorial meeting for DMK supremo M Karunanidhi, setting at rest speculation over its president Amit Shah's participation at the August 30 event.

BJP state unit president Tamilisai Soundararajan said in a statement that Gadkari, Minister for Shipping and a former national president of the party, and Rao would attend the meeting, expected to see participation of a galaxy of political leaders from across the country.

Former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda, Ghulam Nabi Azad of Congress, chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, N Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar respectively, their Delhi counterpart Arvind Kejriwal and CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury are among those likely to attend.

A section of the media had reported that Shah had accepted the DMK invite, setting off speculations of political realignments ahead of next year's Lok Sabha polls.

Of late, the DMK has been highly critical of the BJP on various issues, including Cauvery and NEET.

It had even protested the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April to Tamil Nadu, in the backdrop of the Cauvery issue.

Black flags were hoisted atop the residences of Karunanidhi, Stalin, Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi and other leaders in protest against Modi's visit and for not forming the Cauvery Management Board (CMB) then.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Royal Dutch Shell today said it will acquire French oil major Total SA's 26 per cent stake in the company that operates 5 MTPA Hazira LNG terminal in Gujarat.

The size of the deal was however not disclosed.

"Shell Gas BV, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell plc, has signed a binding Letter of Intent (LoI) with Total Gaz Electricit Holdings France to acquire its 26 per cent equity in the Hazira LNG and Port venture in India, subject to regulatory approvals,"it said in a statement.

Hazira LNG & Port venture comprises two companies -- Hazira LNG that operates an LNG regasification terminal in Gujarat and Hazira Port, which manages a direct berthing multi-cargo port at Hazira.

"The move would allow Shell commercial and operational flexibility over Hazira to maximise integrated value and offer creative customer value propositions," it said.?



This portfolio action is consistent with Shell's strategy to deepen its presence in the gas value chain in India, the fourth largest LNG consumer in the world, Royal Dutch Shell said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Karnataka Agriculture minister Shivashankar Reddy today said Siddaramaiah could become the chief minister again if coalition partners--Congress and JD(S)- decide so in the coordination committee meeting.

Reddy's remarks coming days after Siddaramaiah's comments about becoming chief minister again fuels speculation that all is not well within the Congress-JDS coalition.

To a query on the government's future, Reddy said, "We all fought elections under the leadership of Siddaramaiah.

Though there were possibilities of Congress coming to power and he becoming the chief minister, due to reasons better known to all, we could not get the majority. Thus, he lost the chance of becoming chief minister again."



"Suppose tomorrow the two parties (Congress and JD-S) sit together at the coordination committee meeting and take some decision for some change, then the change will happen," he told reporters at Chamarajnagar.

A similar reaction came from Congress MLA and former JD(S) leader Cheluvaraya Swamy, who too backed Siddaramaiah and flayed those who were trying to "isolate" the former chief minister.

"Nobody can isolate Siddaramaiah. He has the leadership quality. A towering personality, Siddaramaiah is honest andhas done lots of good works," he said.

He said election result might have been adverse due to caste-based but Siddaramaiah gave an administration for five years that was admired across the country.

"Though Congress got 80 seats under Siddaramaiah's leadership, he remains unquestionable in the party," he said to a question about alleged efforts within and outside the party to "isolate" Siddaramaiah from becoming chief minister again.

Addressing party workers in Hassan district on Friday, Siddaramaiah reportedly said if people wish, he will become chief minister again.

The former chief minister's remarks kicked up a row with some seeing it as having an unsettling effect on the JDS-Congress government.

Asked if he wants to be Chief Minister, Siddaramaiah later said "If people bless me, I will want to become the chief minister, but not now. After five years when next election is held."



Responding to Siddaramaiah's comments, Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy has said anybody could become a CM in a democracy.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Lieutenant Governor (LG) of Delhi today informed the Supreme Court that an experts committee would be constituted to deal with all aspects relating to solid waste management in the national capital.

A bench of Justices Madan B Lokur, S Abdul Nazeer and Deepak Gupta observed that the issue of solid waste management in Delhi was "serious" and said the committee would have to meet on a day-to-day basis to take stock of the situation.

Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Pinky Anand, appearing for the LG's office, and senior advocate Colin Gonsalves, who is assisting the court as an amicus curiae, placed before the bench the names of persons who could be made members of the committee.

The ASG said that persons engaged in business enterprises or having any commercial interest should not be made members of the panel and the names suggested by them should also have people from the resident welfare association (RWAs).

"How often are they (committee) going to meet? They will have to meet every day," the bench observed.

"It (meeting) has to be on a day-to-day basis. They have to visit the sites, find out what needs to be done. It will not be a bureaucratic kind of a committee. The issue is serious," the bench observed.

During the hearing, the bench observed that bureaucrats would be there in the committee and the members should try to "work together" to deal with the serious issue.

The bench asked the ASG and the amicus to find out whether the persons, who are residing outside Delhi and whose names have been suggested for the committee, could do this work on a day-to-day basis.

"They will have to come every day for meetings. You will have to give them office space. Almost 20 persons are there. It is a serious thing and not a one-time thing," the bench said.

The amicus told the court that he would find out from those residing outside Delhi as to whether they could attend the meetings daily.

At the fag end of hearing, the amicus said travelling expenses and hotel costs for those committee members, who are residing out of Delhi, should be given.

The bench fixed the matter for further hearing on August 29.

The top court had on August 17 asked the LG to constitute a committee to go in depth into all aspects of solid waste management in Delhi including cleaning up the landfill sites at Gazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla and frame a workable and implementable policy.

The court had said that problem of solid waste in Delhi was "very critical" and cooperation of citizens was needed to deal with it.

The apex court had earlier said that Delhi was facing an "emergency situation" due to the mountains of garbage.

The issue of waste management had cropped up when the court was dealing with a tragic matter of 2015 in which it had taken cognisance of the death of a seven-year-old boy due to dengue.

The victim had been allegedly denied treatment by five private hospitals here and his distraught parents had subsequently committed suicide.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A special court today sentenced two men to life imprisonment and imposed a heavy fine on them in connection with the 2007 court blasts case in the Uttar Pradesh capital.

Special Judge Babita Rani had declared Tariq Kajmi and Mohd Akhtar guilty on Thursday and fixed today for awarding the quantum of punishment.

She sentenced them to life imprisonment today and imposed a fine of Rs 5.10 lakh each.

The court was conducting the trial in district jail, Lucknow. Both the accused have already been in jail for 11 years.

Pronouncing the verdict, the court observed the accused had not only attacked the judiciary but also conspired to wage war against the country, which were serious offences.

Joint Director of ATS Subhash Chandra Singh and senior public prosecutor Atul Kumar Ojha had demanded death penalty for the convicts, while the lawyers of the accused, Arif Ali and Furkan Khan, pleaded for leniency, saying they had been in jail for last 11 years.

The third accused in the case, Khalid Mohd, had died during course of the trial and the fourth accused, Sajjadur- Rehman, was earlier given a clean chit.

According to government lawyers Pravin Srivastav and MK Singh, the accused had been chargesheeted for sedition, criminal conspiracy and attempted murder which were offences under the Indian Penal Code.

They had also been booked under the Explosive Substances Act and the Prevention of Unlawful Activities Act.

The court convicted the two accused for all these offences.

The prosecution produced 44 witnesses in support of its case, while the defense examined its three witnesses.

A series of blasts had taken place in courts at Lucknow, Faizabad and Varanasi on November 23, 2007. Several people died in Varanasi and Faizabad but there was no casualty in Lucknow.

For Lucknow blasts, the FIR was registered in the Wazirganj police station on same day.

During the course of the probe, on December 22, 2007, the STF arrested Tariq Kajmi of Rani ki Sarai village in Sarai Meer police station area of Azamgarh. Mohammad Akhtar of Kashmir were arrested on December 27.

The STF had then said the four were operatives of Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI).

Later, the Lucknow court blast case was transferred to the anti-terror squad (ATS) which submitted the charge-sheet against the accused in April, 2008.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)No-frills airline on Monday operated India's first test flight powered by biojet fuel, marking a new chapter in the fast-growing domestic sector.

The nearly 45-minute flight from Dehradun to the national capital was operated with a Bombardier Q400 aircraft, partially powered by biojet fuel made from Jatropha plant, according to an airline official. The flight landed at around 1150 hours here.

With the test flight, India has become one of the few countries and probably the first among the developing nations to use biofuel for flying planes.

on Monday said it has successfully operated "India's first ever biojet fuel flight".

It also comes at a time when the is grappling with spiralling fuel prices that are impacting their profitability. However, use of biofuel for regular flights would take some time.

For the test flight, which carried 28 people, including five crew members, the aircraft's right engine was filled with 75 per cent turbine fuel (ATF) and 25 per cent of biojet fuel, made from Jatropha plant, the airline official said.

The fuel was prepared by the CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum (IIP), Dehradun. The institute's Director Anjan Ray said around 330 kg of biojet fuel was made for the little over 40-minute flight.

Noting that it was a "historic occasion" to operate the test flight, Chairman and Managing Director said India is the first among developing countries to fly flight powered by biojet fuel.

In a release, SpiceJet said the advantage of using biojet fuel as compared to ATF is that it reduces carbon emissions and enhances fuel efficiency.

At a function to mark the successful operation of the test flight here, Civil Minister Suresh Prabhu said efforts are on to have a consumer-friendly, affordable and environment-friendly aviation sector.

Road Transport Minister said the government plans to come out with a "special policy" for use of biofuel in the aviation sector.

"Taking our biofuel mission forward @PetroleumMin will be bringing a new Bio- ATF Policy soon," Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said in a tweet.

Science and Technology Minister Harsh Vardhan said biojet fuel is carbon neutral and that only "three to four nations are using biojet fuel".



He also emphasised that ways should be explored to scale up production of such fuels.

Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha was also present on the occasion.

All the ministers mentioned that increased use of biofuels would also benefit farmers and also help in reducing oil import bill.

Biojet fuel is low cost and helps in significantly reducing carbon emissions. "It has the potential to reduce our dependence on traditional aviation fuel by up to 50 per cent on every flight and bring down fares," said.

Among others, officials from aviation regulator DGCA, SpiceJet and the IIP were in the test flight, which was flagged off by Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat at Dehradun. The Q400 aircraft has 78 seats.

The biojet fuel has been recognised by American Standard Testing Method (ASTM) and meets the specification standards of Pratt & Whitney and Bombardier for commercial application in aircraft.

According to global airlines' body IATA, aviation industry contributes to 2 per cent of the total global greenhouse gas emissions.

The IATA has also set out a target for one billion passengers to fly on aircraft using a mix of clean energy and fossil fuels by 2025, the release said.

SpiceJet has a fleet of 36 Boeing 737NG and 22 Bombardier Q400 planes. On an average, it operates 412 flights daily.



Guwahati : Police had seized over 500 grams brown sugar valued at Rs 1 crore in the international market at Churaibori area along Assam-Tripura border on Friday.





According to the reports, based on intelligence input, Assam police and North Tripura police had jointly launched operation and seized the brown sugar from a passenger bus at Churaibari check post along Assam-Tripura border.





Police had arrested a person named Tapan Dutta, who carried the brown sugar hidden in Patanjali and Kelloggs oats packets.





The passenger bus bearing registration number of AS-01JC-8042 went from Guwahati to Agartala and the arrested person was trying to deliver the brown sugar to a person in Agartala.





During the preliminary police investigation, the arrested person revealed that, an unknown person handed over the seized brown sugar to him at Paltan Bazar area in Guwahati and asked to deliver it to a person named Jahangir Miya in Agartala.





A police official of North Tripura police said that, based on intelligence input, police had launched operation and seized 500 grams brown sugar and arrested a person named Tapan Dutta.



Spontaneous shutdown was observed at several places in after clashes broke out between youths and security forces following rumours about scrapping of Article 35A, a police official said.

Article 35A, which accords special rights and privileges to the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, is facing a legal challenge in the Supreme Court.

"Spontaneous shutdown is being observed in many places in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, and district in south Kashmir," the official said.

He said announcements were made on loudspeakers that has been scrapped and people were asked to observe a strike and come out to protest.

"Shops and other business establishments, which had opened this morning, downed shutters after rumours of being scrapped spread like wild fire and were circulated on social media, the official said.

Stone-pelters clashed with security personnel in and in the Safakadal area here in the wake of the rumours, he said.

The official said security forces are on the job to control the situation.

In a statement, police appealed to people to maintain calm and not pay heed to rumours.

"Some sections of media circulated news regarding The news is refuted as baseless. People are requested to maintain calm and not to pay heed to rumour. The main hearing is on August 31, the statement said.

Article 35A was incorporated in the Constitution by a 1954 Presidential Order.A statue of Mother Mary was found damaged on the church premises here today, police said.

Police suspect that vandals could have damaged the 'Maatha statue' (statue of Mother Mary), said to be 100-years-old, around midnight yesterday.

People in the area, who used to offer prayers at the Church before putting out to sea, found the bust portion damaged this morning.

Local people blocked the Kovalam-Kanyakumari road demanding action against the culprits.

Police held talks and persuaded them to disperse.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Bombay High Court has ruled as "constitutional" the requirement for prospective subordinate court judges in the state to have sufficient knowledge of Marathi.

A division bench of Justices R M Savant and Revati Mohite Dere, on August 24, had upheld the provisions of Rule 5(3)(d) of the Maharashtra Judicial Service Rules of 2008, which mandates that a candidate must have sufficient knowledge of Marathi so as to enable him or her to speak, read and write the language and translate from it to English and vice versa.

The bench was hearing a petition filed by one Shobhit Gaur, who was shortlisted by the Maharashtra Public Service Commission (MPSC) for the post of Civil Judge Junior Division and Judicial Magistrate First Class, but was later rejected as he did not know Marathi.

Gaur, in his petition, sought his rejection order, dated April 9, to be quashed and set aside. He also challenged the rule on the ground that it violated Article 14 of the Constitution.

Gaur said the rule unfairly discriminates between the advocates practising in Maharashtra and those doing so outside the state.

The bench, however, refused to accept the petitioners contention.

"In our view, no fault can be found with the appointing authority coming to the conclusion that the petitioner was unsuitable for appointment," the court said.

The court has said it cannot hold the decision to be "arbitrary or unreasonable" when the petitioner has not satisfied eligibility conditions.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal today accused Amarinder Singh of "consorting with radical elements" to the defame previous Akali-BJP government, charges the Punjab chief minister trashed as "unfounded".

At a press conference here, Badal alleged Sikh preacher Baljit Singh Daduwal had held a late night meeting at the chief minister's residence last night to "vet" the Justice (retd) Ranjit Singh Commission report.

He released purported call details to allege there was a "sinister conspiracy to defame the erstwhile SAD-BJP government and divide the Sikh community". Badal also alleged that Amarinder Singh and his ministers were "consorting with radical jathedars" as part of this conspiracy.

In the state Assembly also, Badal had made allegations against the government.

Taking a strong exception to Badal's "baseless" allegation that he met Daduwal the previous night, Amarinder Singh urged Speaker Rana K P Singh to order a probe into the matter.

Lashing out at the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president for "attempting to mislead the House" with unfounded charges, the chief minister said an inquiry would help ascertain the truth.

The allegations were made by Sukhbir Singh Badal soon after the government tabled in the House the Justice (Retd) Ranjit Singh Commission report into the sacrilege cases.

Asserting he had never met Daduwal and does not even recognise him, Amarinder Singh said when he had gone to Bargari after the police firing, he was told that the Sikh preacher was also sitting there.

"But I had neither seen nor ever met him", said the chief minister.

Pointing out that his official residence was monitored by Close Circuit Television Cameras (CCTVs), Amarinder Singh said in the Assembly that the CCTV videos could easily be checked.

Badal had alleged that the CM had met Daduwal to hatch a conspiracy ahead of the tabling of the Justice (Retd) Ranjit Singh Commission report.

The chief minister dared Badal to a debate over the sacrilege incidents that had rocked the state during the regime of the SAD-BJP. He also requested the Speaker to initiate House proceedings against the MLA for "lying" on the floor of the House.

Amarinder Singh said the Akalis were indulging in cheap gimmicks to divert public attention from their misdeeds of 10 years, particularly the incidents of sacrilege which they had failed to check.

Badal had told reporters that an "unholy nexus between the Congress, AAP and ISI sponsored radical outfits to help the Congress" wash its sins against the Sikhs was out in the open.

"We have conclusive evidence that the chief minister is not only encouraging radical elements but also consorting with them. This new evidence proves that the Ranjit Singh Commission report was vetted at the farm house of a radical leader," he alleged.

He said a meeting was held on July 18 which was attended by among others by Congress minister Sukhjinder Randhawa". He alleged the presence of Randhawa proved the charges that he was instrumental in getting "fabricated evidence" recorded in the Ranjit Commission report.

He said though Daduwal claimed he was in Bathinda, the SAD was in possession of his entry into Chandigarh through the Banur toll plaza. Badal also released purported pictures of Daduwal with Amarinder Singh. He said it was surprising that the chief minister was denying ever meeting Daduwal.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A survival expert arrested near Barcelona over the brutal 1998 rape and killing of a young Dutch boy after one of the most extensive murder investigations to date in the Netherlands agreed today to be extradited from Spain.

Spanish police arrested Joseph Brech, 55, on Sunday afternoon in a mountainous area near the town of Castelltercol some 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Barcelona while he was going out to cut wood.

The authorities believe Brech -- an experienced mountain climber who had scaled Mount Everest -- killed eleven-year-old Nicky Verstappen who vanished two decades ago on August 9 at a summer camp in southern Limburg province, near the German border. Brech had worked at the camp at the time, according to Spanish police.

Verstappen's body was found a day after his disappearance close to the camp site, with authorities later confirming he had been sexually abused before his death.

Police at the time mounted a massive search closely followed by Dutch media and the public, but the killer remained on the loose -- until advanced DNA testing earlier this year led officers to Brech.

Spanish police on Monday escorted the suspect to a tribunal in the city of Granollers where he told a judge from Madrid's High Court by video conference that he had been in Spain since March and agreed to be extradited to the Netherlands, the court said in a ruling.

Brech will be held without bail until he is extradited, the court added. He is accused of murder, sexual aggression and kidnapping, it added.

His arrest follows a public appeal on Wednesday, during which Dutch detectives shared photographs of the suspect.

A Dutchman living in Spain recognised the man in the photos and sent a tip-off to Dutch newspaper the Telegraaf, which contacted police.

Brech was living "in a tent in the woods" near an abandoned and isolated house where several homeless people live, the unidentified man told the newspaper.

"He told me he liked living in nature and that was why he was there," the man said.

Brech had extensive survival gear at the time of his arrest, including fishing roads, a book on edible wild plants, batteries and dehydrated foods.

In a picture shared by Spanish police, he appears face down on a dirt road with his hands handcuffed behind his back as police stand over him.

The boy's mother, Berthie Verstappen, said the family did not expect the arrest would come so soon after last week's police appeal.

"We feared he would hide so well that he would not be found for months. We would love to have answers to the questions we have, even if we dread hearing what happened," she told Dutch public television on Sunday night.

The case regularly returned to the public eye in the Netherlands over the past two decades.

Police said new digital techniques helped them to develop a DNA profile in 2008, from traces found on Verstappen's clothing, but there had been no match. As time ran out to catch the suspect, police in February appealed to 21,500 men to donate DNA samples in a bid to close in on the perpetrator.

Some 16,000 men living in the area where Verstappen was murdered volunteered to hand over DNA samples.

But Brech, a former scout worker who was 35 at the time of the murder, was not among the volunteers, and as he was previously interviewed as a witness, police became suspicious.

When his family reported him as missing in April, Dutch and French police searched his cabin in France's mountainous eastern Vosges region, where he owns a chalet.

They found traces of DNA on his personal belongings which matched samples taken from the slain boy's clothes.

A European-wide warrant for Brech's arrest was issued on June 12.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her new Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi is "possible" in the US on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly session next month, a media report said today.

This could be the first ministerial-level bilateral meeting since Prime Minister Imran Khan became Pakistan's 22nd prime minister on August 18.

"Such a meeting (between Swaraj and Qureshi) is possible but no decision (has been taken) yet," Dawn quoted a senior Pakistani diplomat in the US as saying.

The External Affairs Ministry has not announced any such meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi.

In a letter to Khan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had expressed India's resolve to build good neighbourly relations between the two countries.

In July, Modi had telephoned Khan and congratulated him on his party's victory in the general elections and expressed hope that both countries will work to open a new chapter in bilateral ties.

The 73rd United Nations General Assembly opens on September 18 in New York.

Swaraj will address the annual high-level UNGA session on September 29, according to the provisional list of speakers released by the UN.

Pakistan is reluctant to confirm its agenda for the UNGA meeting as it is still undecided who will represent the country at the world body, the report said.

Media reports in Islamabad has indicated that Khan may skip the UNGA as part of his efforts to cut down on government expenses. However, several Pakistani diplomats and political commentators have urged him to reconsider his decision.

Pakistani officials feel the prime minister Khan's presence in New York will add a new dimension to an India-Pakistan meeting, even though he will not participate in minister-level talks, the report said.

Dawn news, quoting diplomatic sources in Washington, said Islamabad would like to see how productive this meeting could be, particularly because India has already said that it is not ready to resume bilateral or formal talks with Pakistan.

They point out that this week, India strongly rejected a suggestion that in his letter to Khan, Prime Minister Modi had expressed interest on resuming talks.

The Indian reaction forced Pakistan to clarify that the suggestion was a media interpretation of the letter and Foreign Minister Qureshi, in his comments on Modi's letter, never said that "the Indian Prime Minister had made an offer of a dialogue", the report said.

Last week, a key US official said America welcomes Khan's statement emphasising the importance of peace on both sides of Pakistan's borders.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today inaugurated the 'Jaipur Foot' camp here and met with 500 Vietnamese beneficiaries of the free India-made prosthetic limb.

Swaraj is in Vietnam on the first leg of her four-day two-nation tour which aims at deepening India's strategic cooperation with Vietnam and Cambodia -- the key countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region.

The minister met with the beneficiaries and encouraged a girl to walk with the newly-fitted artificial limb.

External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Ravish Kumar said in a tweet: "Together with you when you take those small steps! EAM @SushmaSwaraj inaugurated the Jaipur foot camp and encouraged a girl to walk with the newly fitted artificial limb. 500 Vietnamese beneficiaries were present at the Camp organised in the Phu Tho province of Vietnam".

Meanwhile, Swaraj lauded the role played by the Indian community in Vietnam in consolidating cultural connect between the two countries.

She praised the Indian diaspora in Vietnam for strengthening people to people connect between the two nations.

"Hailing the role played by Indian community in Vietnam in consolidating cultural connect between India and Vietnam! EAM @SushmaSwaraj praised the Indian Diaspora in Vietnam for strengthening people to people bond between two nations," Kumar said in another tweet.

Last month, it was announced in Jaipur that about 1,000 differently-abled people in Myanmar and Vietnam would be provided free Indian-made prosthetic 'Jaipur Foot'.

The Jaipur-based Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS) has started an artificial limb fitment camp in association with the central government at Myanmar's Yangon city.

The camp is being organised as per an agreement between BMVSS and the Ministry of External Affairs for providing 5,000 'Jaipur Foot' to the needy amputees of various countries.

Last month, the BMVSS organised camps in Vietnam.

"In both Myanmar and Vietnam, 1,000 disabled people will be provided with 'Jaipur Foot'. This is a humanitarian effort of the Union government where BMVSS is the implementing agency," an official statement said last month.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today unveiled the bust of Mahatma Gandhi at the Embassy of India in the Vietnamese capital here.

Swaraj is in Vietnam on the first leg of her four-day two-nation tour which aims at deepening India's strategic cooperation with Vietnam and Cambodia -- the key countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region.

The bust was unveiled in the Chancery building of the Indian mission.

External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Ravish Kumar said in a tweet: "Paying respect to the Father of the Nation! EAM @SushmaSwaraj unveiled the bust of Mahatma Gandhi in the Chancery building at the Embassy of India in Hanoi".

Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang, on his State visit to India in March, had paid tributes to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat in New Delhi.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Air Intelligence Unit of the Customs department arrested a Tanzanian national and seized amphetamine worth Rs 3 crore allegedly from her possession, an official said today.

The AIU, in a statement, said that Cheche Lulu Hubert was intercepted on a tip-off after she arrived at the international airport here from Johannesburg in South Africa last night.

A search of the accused's baggage led to the recovery of 3.07 kilograms of amphetamine from a specially-made false layer in her trolley bag, an AIU official said.

Amphetamines have been classified as synthetic drugs that stimulate the central nervous system and make the user active and lively.

The Tanzanian national has been arrested under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, the AIU release said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Congress general secretary Ashok Gehlot today accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of attempting to "erase" Jawaharlal Nehru's role as the opposition party slammed the proposed changes at the Teen Murti Bhavan complex, which houses the former prime minister's memorial.

Gehlot's comments come amid reports about the government's plans to build a museum for all former prime ministers of the country in the Teen Murti Bhavan complex. The Congress is vehemently opposed to the idea.

"It is very unfortunate that PM Modi is trying to erase former PM Nehru ji's role at Teen Murti Marg Memorial. The nation has never seen a prime minister before who acts so revengefully, just because most former PMs were not of Modi ji's ideology," Gehlot said in a tweet.

The NMML was established in the memory of India's first prime minister and the museum at the Teen Murti House has preserved some rooms as they were at the time of Nehru's death.

Last week, former prime minister Manmohan Singh wrote to Modi, urging him to leave the historic Teen Murti complex "undisturbed".

"Jawaharlal Nehru belongs not just to the Congress but to the entire nation," Singh said in his letter.

The decision to build a museum for all the former prime ministers was announced last month by NMML director Shakti Sinha.

"We will build a museum for all Prime Ministers in the 25 acre estate (Teen Murti Bhavan). This will be separate from the existing structure of the Nehru Memorial," Sinha had said.

The decision was taken at the 43rd annual meeting of the NMML, chaired by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

Citing a report about the Central Information Commission's (CIC) refusal to share information about expenses incurred on the security of BJP president Amit Shah, Gehlot accused the Modi government of hiding information.

"Modi government has become a government functioning in secrecy. They do not believe in revealing or disclosing anything. Information is hidden, media is gagged, democracy is stifled every day under Modi govt," the Congress leader said in another tweet.

According to the report shared by Gehlot, the CIC refused to give out the information citing RTI Act exemption clauses of "personal information" and "safety".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Punjabas effort to criminalise blasphemy further is dangerous

Amarinder Singhas blasphemy law can have disastrous consequences in Punjab

Reject Punjabas life term for sacrilege

A blasphemous law

India: Punjab Sacrilege bill - A Dangerous Game

==

Hindustan Times

Punjabas effort to criminalise blasphemy further is dangerous

Going a step ahead over the previous version of the Bill by proposing life-term for sacrilege of all religious texts hints at the Punjab Congressas attempt to score the political brownie points.

Aug 24, 2018

The Amarinder Singh cabinet approved amendments to the CrPC and IPC, making the desecration of religious texts punishable with life in Punjab(Anil Dayal/HT)

In what seems a clear attempt to pander to religious sensibilities, the Punjab government has sought a state-specific amendment to make the countryas blasphemy law under Section 295 of the IPC more stringent. Currently, it prescribes two years punishment for ainjuring or defiling a place of worship with intent to insult the religion of any class.a

The Amarinder Singh cabinet, on Tuesday, approved amendments to the CrPC and IPC, making the desecration of religious texts punishable with life in Punjab. It made the case for the insertion of Section 295 AA, providing that awhoever causes injury, damage or sacrilege to Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Srimad Bhagwad Gita, Holy Quran and Holy Bible with the intention to hurt the religious feelings of the people, shall be punished with imprisonment for lifea . Criminalising the blasphemy law further is fraught with danger and it needs to undergo much more legal scrutiny before it is pushed through, if at all.

Even the context and timing of the Bill has more to do with scoring populist brownie points in a state where religion and politics mingle ceaselessly. The bill was first enacted by the previous Akali Dal-BJP government as a desperate damage-control exercise in the wake of Sikh rage over a rash of desecrations of the Sikh holy book in 2015. The amendment at that time specifically sought life imprisonment for desecration of Guru Granth Sahib and a 10- year term for that of other religious texts. But the home ministry returned the bill saying it would violate the Constitutional principle of secularism and was aexcessive in lawa . The current Congress government in the state withdrew the bill last year. The home ministry has to approve state-specific changes in the central code.

Still, the issue remains an emotive one. What has raised political temperatures is a report by the Justice Ranjit Singh Commission set up by the Amarinder government to probe past incidents of blasphemy. It is no coincidence that the billas presentation in the assembly on August 24 has been timed with the tabling of the Justice Ranjit Singh Commission report which squarely blames the previous government for the past incidents of sacrilege.

Harsh blasphemy laws in other countries have been brazenly misused to settle political scores and silence opponents of the ruling regime. They also feed religious frenzy as we have seen in our neighbourhood. The only redeeming aspect is that Punjabas bill will have [to] go through central scrutiny. Hopefully, at that stage the more draconian provisions of the bill will be removed.

o o o

Moneycontrol.com, August 24, 2018

Amarinder Singhas blasphemy law can have disastrous consequences in Punjab

Even when seen from the narrow political terms, the Congress can only hope to have a short-term gains as the use religious sentiments for political purposes is more likely to help the Akali Dal and the BJP

by Ashutosh Kumar

The Amarinder Singh-led Congress government in Punjab has decided to introduce a bill in the forthcoming assembly session to amend the Indian Penal Code (Punjab Amendment) Bill, 2016 and the code of Criminal Procedure (Punjab Amendment) Bill, 2016 to make sacrilege of religious scriptures punishable by life imprisonment.

The amended part would include Section 295 AA in the IPC to make sacrilege punishable for desecration of not only the Guru Granth Sahib, as was the case with the earlier bill passed by the Shiromani Akali Dal government, but also include the scriptures of other religious communities, i.e. Bhagavad Gita, Bible and Quran. Once passed by the legislature, it would await the Centreas approval a an earlier bill was returned by the Centre on the ground that the punishment sought should have been for hurting the religious sentiments of all communities.

The Congress governmentas decision to introduce the bill coincides with its decision to table the Justice Ranjit Singh Commission Report, which looked into incidents of desecration of the Guru Granth Sahib and the ensuing protests in several villages in late 2015. Protesters were killed in police firing in Behbal Kalan and Kotakpura in Faridkot.

Akali patriarch Parkash Singh Badalas name has also figured in the report. Badal has also been accused of pressurising the head granthi of Takht Damdama Sahib and other Sikh priests to exonerate the Dera Sacha Sauda chief of blasphemy charges after he was charged with impersonating the 10th Sikh Guru.

With the bill and the report, the Congress has revived its attack on the Akali Dal, charging the party of failing to check repeated incidents of desecration of the holy book and trying to exonerate the Dera chief eyeing the votes from his followers.

In politics, timing matters. The Congress is trying to do two things as 2019 elections is around the corner with Punjab among the few states where the party clearly fancies its chances.

One, the party wants to remind the panthic voter about the abject failure of the Akali Dal to check the repeated acts of sacrilege hurting the religious sentiments of the Sikh community.

The Akali leadership (read the Badal family), despite remaining in power for two terms (2007-17), has been at the receiving end from both the panthic voter and the sizeable Sikh diaspora for weakening not only the ideology of the cadre-based party but also the two pillars of Sikh politics a the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) and the Akal Takht.

In the 2014 and 2017 polls, many of the disgruntled panthic voters supported the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). As the AAP in Punjab seems to be on the verge of imploding, Singh, who had resigned from the Congress after Operation Blue Star, aims to wean away the committed panthic vote of the Akali Dal and the AAP in Congressa favour.

Second, the party also wants to flaunt its secular character to strengthen its support base among other communities by proposing the sacrilege bill.

While the Akali Dal must take its share of the blame, the Congress cannot get away for playing with the religious sentiments of the people in a state which has in the past witnessed such politics taking a disastrous turn.

The Congressa move to further strengthen the blasphemy law has come at a time when the middle classes in society are moving towards right-wing politics based on religious identity.

The Constitution underlines the secular democratic character of Indian polity by not only invoking it in the Preamble but also by guaranteeing the right to religious freedom through Articles 19 and 25. Given this, there are existing laws to punish those who hurts religious sentiments a so, is there a need to bring an extraordinary law?

We are witnessing mobs going on a rampage justifying their acts in the name of religion; extraordinary laws, such as the ones to protect national security, have led to highhandedness by state agencies, and; such laws have led to political parties misusing it in the past. The proposed blasphemy law must be seen in this light.

Even when seen from the narrow political/electoral terms, the Congress can only hope to have a short-term gains as any attempt to use religious sentiments for political purposes is more likely to help the Akali Dal, the past master of panthic politics, and the BJP.

(Ashutosh Kumar is professor, department of political science, Panjab University. Views expressed are personal)

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The Economic Times, August 25, 2018

Editorial

Reject Punjabas life term for sacrilege

The government of Punjab has done the nation a disservice by seeking to add a section to the Indian Penal Code (IPC) that would make even reasoned debate of theology a crime that warrants life imprisonment.

The Centre should reject the recommended change to the IPC. The colonial-era law already contains two sections, 295 and 295A, which provide for two-year and three-year prison terms, respectively, for damaging or defiling any place or object held to be sacred by any class of people and for hurting the religion or religious sentiments of any class of people. Punjab now proposes 295AA with life imprisonment for ainjury, damage or sacrilegea to the Guru Granth Sahib, the Geeta, the Quran and the Bible.

The Akali Dal government of Punjab had proposed a similar law for defiling the Guru Granth Sahib, in the wake of repeated incidents of deliberate attempts to incite religious fury by strewing torn pages and mangled copies of the Sikh holy book in different parts of Punjab. The Centre had turned down the proposal on the ground that it was not secular. The present amendment incorporates the holy books of other major faiths and, so, seeks to clear the secular bar. This is the wrong response to deliberate attempts by anti-national forces to provoke religious disturbance. The political class should unite to ask people to be on guard against such provocation, and seek their cooperation to defeat anti-India moves. Sensible politics and law enforcement are the right response, not tougher laws liable to abuse.

To have such a law on the statute book is to invite abuse: the law on sedition is a case in point. Sedition cases have been rife across the land, in spite of repeated Supreme Court rulings that only active incitement to violence against the state constitutes sedition.

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The Indian Express, August 25, 2018

A blasphemous law

Using state power to enforce the sacred, Punjabas sacrilege law defiles the sacred, messes with the secular.

Written by Pratap Bhanu Mehta

The blasphemy law also messes with secularism. A liberal state needs two sensibilities.

The blasphemy law also messes with secularism. A liberal state needs two sensibilities. The Punjab governmentas proposal to amend Article 295 of the Penal Code is deeply regressive and will have deep ramifications beyond Punjab. The proposed amendment gives life imprisonment for whoever causes injury, damage or sacrilege to the Guru Granth Sahib, the Bhagwad Gita, the Quran and the Bible. As we have seen in the case of neighbouring Pakistan, the progressive strengthening of anti-blasphemy laws during the Seventies was a sign of a toxic combination of greater intolerance and authoritarianism. Does India want to traverse the same road?

Holy books like the Adi Granth are sacred. They are sacred not just for their content. They express the highest truths about Ultimate Reality. The aSata in aEk Omkar Sat Nama brilliantly combines both Truth and Existence. But in the Sikh tradition, the Book is also treated iconically, with elaborate rituals around its sacred treatment, often to the point where it is not easily disseminated. But using state power to enforce the sacred, both defiles the sacred and messes with the secular.

The article defiles the sacredness of the Book, the eternity of the Word because the status of the Book now becomes an artefact of state power. It is if the song of Krishna, or the word of Mohammad, or the teaching of the Gurus, now need the imprimatur of state violence to secure their sacredness.

Rather than being luminous, potent and transcendent texts, their status is now reduced to a section of the Indian Penal Code. It also gives defilers of these texts more power: It is in effect saying these books can, in fact, be defiled by some rearrangement or even a burning of a copy. So much for the indestructible Word. The greatest heresy is to think that the word of God needs protection from the mortal state. The sacrilege to the book is not its burning, it is this law.

But this law also messes with secularism. A liberal state needs two sensibilities. The first is that many good things are good and derive their authentic meaning precisely from the fact that there is no coercion behind them. The second is that my beliefs and faith, even if entirely sound, do not by themselves provide sufficient ground for the state using its coercive power to enforce them. The argument that the state needs to use coercive power in deference to religious sentiments (however sincere those sentiments might be), is a piece of illiberal and dangerous nonsense. I may respect something, but it does not give sufficient warrant for the state to enforce this belief or sentiment on others. Religious sentiments need not be illiberal; but they become illiberal when they become the basis for the state enforcing the idea that everyone has to defer to those sentiments. In India, we are constantly expanding the circle of deference to religious sentiment. Contrary to what the Punjab government says, making religious sentiments the basis for law, is a recipe for competitive political mobilisation and conflict, not of peace. This law is also deeply authoritarian. The idea of life imprisonment for acts of injury to the book is neither about deterrence, nor piety. It is simply about the state making a show of its power because it can.

The law also messes with history in bizarre ways. In order to show that the law was not directed at a particular religion, the act includes texts like the Bhagwad Gita in its ambit. The law is still sectarian in that it protects four texts, and the state has decided which texts get protection. But whatever the glories and importance of the Bhagwad Gita, the idea that the state now creates a new liturgy of respect around that text in the same way as the Adi Granth or the Koran, is the state taking over the right to define the significance of these texts in its own way. It is in effect converting the text to what it has never been.

Defenders of the amendments say that the text will not lead to the closing of spaces for criticism, since the act of injury to the text is narrowly defined. But this is plain nonsense. One of the tragedies of modern Sikhism is simply that the religion of extraordinary ecumenism and wondrous detachment has become often seriously internally intolerant. Part of this is political: The SGPC wanting to maintain as much of its monopoly over the religious organisation as possible. But if you talk to serious Sikh scholars you will quickly find out just how difficult it is to do serious critical scholarship in this area: Scholars have been traumatised by their communities. I have personally known scholars who will not write critically on intra-Sikh politics for fear of reprisals.

Often the issue is simply that the scholarship dealing with the character of the text is considered ainjuriousa to the text, a defilement. In another context, even our courts have held rearranging Basava Vachanas in a different order (to give a more afeminista reading) was offensive to the Lingayats. Given this context, any law that empowers the state to give upto life imprisonment for injury to the book is about nothing but creating a pall of fear. Its effect will not be the number of prosecutions; its effect will be more palpably felt in people not even daring to push the boundaries of protest.

When the original IPC was discussed in the 1920s, our leaders were far more conscious of its possible infringement on liberty. Now the political class legitimises any infringement on liberty with the imprimatur of majoritarian sentiment behind it. It is true that in Punjab there were acts of desecration of several religious texts. But there are enough existing laws to deal with those who would want to maliciously generate enmity between communities. Second, the motives of these desecrators are mixed. But if they have a political purpose, it is to make sure that they can use religious sentiments to destroy Indiaas liberal democracy. By caving into those fears, by treating Indian citizens as infantile creatures of passion who cannot be educated for liberty, we are unwittingly aiding their political agenda.

It should also worry a democracy that no political party has opposed or called out the authoritarian character of this bill. Congress and AAP are now both legitimising areligious sentimenta as itself a valid argument (think Ayodhya). For, caving in to some nebulous argument about religious sentiments does not just make us destroy both religion and the state, it also produces political cowardice of the highest order.

The writer is vice-chancellor, Ashoka University.

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countercurrents.org, August 26, 2018

India: Punjab Sacrilege bill - A Dangerous Game

by Vidya Bhushan Rawat

Punjabas Congress government trading a dangerous path again trying to abeata BJP in using religion as a pretext. Why Mr Amrinder Singh feel that any critique to religion is sacrilege and the person need to be punished for life?

While, I can understand that in multicultural societies we need to be very careful. As administrator we must be above our personal prejudices based on caste, religion and regional identities and therefore ensure that deliberate attempt to dishonor faith or humiliate people on the basis of their faith must be protected, in the very similar way as people have right to profess their faith as well as declared that they are non believers.

This country developed secularism under the guise of multiculturalism which left non believers, humanists, atheists, rationalists outside the prism of asecularisma even when our first prime minister was a proclaimed atheist yet secularism was more used as symbolism to look better governed and functioned than our problematic neighbours where religious bigot dominated the political discourse as well as politics.

The Sarv Dharm Sambhav business in India has hurt those who seek reforms with in their own religions. It stop people from doing so as the religious groups join hands. Multiculturalism and secularism are not synonymous as being suggested in India. Secularism is basically for the state to be non religious and treat all equally as per rule of law.

Now, Punjab Sacrilege bill is still not known as what is sacrilege. Frankly, Punjab was not bothered about others. The Akalis had prepared the bill that any one who defile Guru Granth Saheb or speak ill against it will be punished and the bill was returned by the center and now punjab government has become more ainclusivea and included Geeta,Quran and Bible in it. Question is what is the definition of sacrilege? Will it be physical burning or defiling of the religious books or the definition would be enlarged to include any critique of religion or religious practices, in the name of ahurtinga areligious sentimentsa of the people or spreading animosity among communities. If the bill stops people from critiquing religion then it will become blasphemy law and will be dangerous. We all are witnessing how secular, human rights activists, minority rights activists are being attacked in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia under the blasphemy laws where questioning Islam is blasphemous. Will Punjab lead India towards a new blasphemous act ? Will other states too follow this ridiculous act to appease all the religious people of sarv dharm variety ?

All religions have deeply inbuilt prejudices. There are discriminatory practices divinely sanctioned by religion. You can say some are better than others but by and large they remain rigid as religions do not allow you to aamenda their aversesa or hymns which are absolutely out of date as per our times unlike our constitution which allow people to amend the rules or acts to suit the interests of the people according to the time.

It means all the critique by the Dalit Bahujan Adivasis in India to the so called brahmanical religious text which degraded them and devalued them, will come under this act ? It means any Muslim woman or former Muslim who question Quran or any christian who write a Why I am not a Christiana should face life imprisonment ? It means Dr Ambedkaras aRiddles of Hinduisma will be prohibited ? It means we canat read Salman Rushdieas book afreedom at midnighta or Satanic verses. If means all the Mazhabis and Ravidasis who critique Sikkhism will get life imprisonment. In democratic societies, we need not to agree with everything said by people or written by them but we defend their right to express themselves. Differences are only countered through providing better critique and alternatives and not by stifling their voices or sending them to imprisonment.

It is dangerous. All Ambedakrites, human rights activists, those believe in human freedom must oppose the Punjab bill as it is an attempt to stop people from critiquing religion. We can understand and will support if some one defile a religious place physically but writing critique of religion or speaking against it does not and should not come under such stringent laws. Even if Punjab government want an act, it must consult human rights groups, general public at large, social activists on the issue. The supreme court must reject it unconstitutional which gives us freedom of expression and thought.

Is not not strange and shameful that religious critique which our constitution allow us to do is being banned and punishment being made to life imprisonment while those who are burning the constitution and insulting it are let off lightly.

What an India. Rahul Gandhi and Congress party must ponder it whether Amrinder Singh is deliberately hurting Congress or whether he has the support from Congress high command. If the party high command support it, then we must say, the congress has still not learnt its lessons well and continue to appease the religious groups. It is time, the voices of common people must be heard and not merely the religious heads. Punjab government must be forced to take this bill back which is against our constitution and all democratic norms. It violate the fundamental rights of an individual to critique religion and can be misused by police officials as well as politicians to target their opponents which will bring more chaos and anarchy in the society. India has to be guided by religious morality and not through individual religious values.

Vidya Bhushan Rawat is a social and human rights activist. He blogs at www.manukhsi.blogspot.com twitter @freetohumanity Email: vbrawat[at]gmail.comTelangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao today met Union Minister for Water Resources and Road Transport Nitin Gadkari in Delhi and discussed with him,irrigation projects and other issues concerning the state.

He urged Gadkari to refer Telangana's complaint on sharing Krishna river water to a tribunal under the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act, an official release said here.

The matter was, however, earlier referred to the Brijesh Kumar Tribunal though Telangana had sought it to be referred to a tribunal under the Act, Rao said.

Noting that the Tribunal is confined to distributing water between Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, he said Telangana wants re-distribution of water in the entire Krishna basin.

Hence, the matter should be referred to a tribunal under the Act, he said.

Rao urged that the Sitarama project on Godavari river be treated as an old project.

The project has been referred to the Godavari River Management Board (for permissions), he said, citing information with the state government.

Rao also took up several important road projects concerning the state with Gadkari, according to the release.

Rao, who had been camping in the national capital for the last two days, met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 25.

In that meeting, Rao had sought, among others, the Centres approval for the new Zonal system (concerning government employment) finalised by the state government and allotment of certain defence lands in Hyderabad for construction of a new Secretariat building complex in Hyderabad.

Rao met Union Ministers Rajnath Singh and Arun Jaitely yesterday on the same issues.

Raos visit to Delhi assumed significance amid speculation here about the possibility of advancement of Legislative Assembly elections in Telangana.

Legislative Assembly polls in Telangana are scheduled to be held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha elections next year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Three people were killed in a mass shooting at a video game tournament in the northern Florida city of Jacksonville, police have said, with the gunman among the dead.

"There were three deceased individuals at the scene, one of those being the suspect, who took his own life," Sheriff Mike Williams told a conference yesterday, naming the suspect as 24-year-old David Katz from Baltimore, Maryland.

"There were nine victims transported by JFRD (local fire and rescue) to area hospitals. Some of those have gunshot wounds. There were two additional gunshot victims that self-transported themselves to local hospitals.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Three suspected drug peddlers were arrested after heroin and poppy straw were allegedly recovered from their possession in Jammu division, the police said today.

Raju Singh and Kulvinder Singh of Ludhiana were arrested during vehicle checking in Jammu city last evening, a police official said.

He said 20 kgs of poppy straw was recovered from their possession.

A local drug peddler Kewal Krishan alias Nikka Billa was arrested after three gms of heroin was recovered from his possession at Sattani village in Udhampur district yesterday, the official said.

He said an FIR under the NDPS Act was registered against him.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Tom Hardy has said that he is ready to play Marvel antihero Venom in more than one film as he is contracted with Sony for three movies.

The 40-year-old actor is all set to debut as the character in Ruben Fleischer's "Venom", which also stars Riz Ahmed and Michelle Williams.

In an interview with Total Film Magazine, Hardy said he would be open to reprising his role as Eddie Brock and his alter-ego, Venom, should the film be a success.

"I'm open to whatever you want to do with it. We've signed up for three of them. So it's very much an open case. We'll see what people's responses are to it," Hardy said.

"I think it's an awesome character. I love playing both of them. It's an amuse-bouche, and for Sony, it's the Venom-verse launched in isolation, as it were," he added.

The British star also hinted that the Spider-Man spin-off will serve as a standalone trilogy.

"We all prepped for it to be a standalone universe. So whatever Sony want to attach to it at a later date, it's a fulcrum piece. But let's see what happens when it lands," Hardy said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)French energy giant Total SA will exit the Indian LNG venture by selling 26 per cent stake to its partner Royal Dutch Shell, the two companies announced today.

Total had in March 2004 picked up 26 per cent stake in the 2.5 million tonnes a year Hazira liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal in Gujarat. The terminal capacity was later doubled to 5 million tonnes.

Hazira LNG terminal was commissioned in 2005 and expanded to 5 million tonnes in 2013.

Shell holds the remaining 74 per cent stake in Hazira LNG.

"Total has signed a binding Letter of Intent (LOI) with Shell for the sale of its 26 per cent minority equity stake in Hazira LNG regasification terminal in India," the company said in a statement.

The transaction remains subject to the approval of regulatory authorities.

Shell in a separate statement said its subsidiary, Shell Gas BV has entered into an agreement with Total Gaz Electricit Holdings France to acquire its 26 per cent equity in the Hazira LNG and Port venture located in Gujarat.

Neither company disclosed financial details of the deal.

In parallel, Total signed an agreement to sell 0.5 million tonne LNG per year to Shell over 5 years, on a delivery basis to supply the markets of India and neighboring countries. The deliveries will be sourced from Total's global LNG portfolio and are expected to begin in 2019.

"This deal enables Total to capture value through an asset disposal, while the LNG sales contract allows us to maintain the balance of our LNG portfolio," said Philippe Sauquet, President Gas, Renewables and Power. "We remain committed to supply the Indian subcontinent, which is a key market experiencing strong growth in LNG demand."



Hazira LNG & Port venture comprises two companies -- Hazira LNG Pvt Ltd which operates LNG regasification terminal and Hazira Port Pvt Ltd that manages a direct berthing multi-cargo port at Hazira.

"The move would allow Shell commercial and operational flexibility over Hazira to maximise integrated value and offer creative customer value propositions," the company said.

The move, it said, is consistent with Shell's strategy to deepen its presence in the gas value chain in India, the fourth largest LNG consumer in the world.

Shell aims to contribute in bridging the energy deficit and further augment gas supplies in India, the statement said.

"Today marks an important milestone," said Maarten Wetselaar, Shell's Integrated Gas & New Energies Director.

He added: "This purchase creates a fully-owned and integrated Shell value chain supply from our global LNG portfolio, regasification at the Hazira facility, and downstream customer sales. It enables Shell to better serve Indian customers and meet the country's long-term need for more and cleaner energy. This also significantly strengthens the connection of the fastest growing gas markets in the world, India, and Shell's unrivaled portfolio of competitive gas supply."



Shell Energy India (SEI) was established in 2017, to aggregate demand from downstream customers and secure competitive international supply to meet such demand and will market and sell that gas to customers across India.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A government memorandum advising bureaucrats to avoid "casual attires" such as denim wears while being on official duty triggered criticism from opposition parties, who termed it as 'feudal'.

The memorandum issued by Principal Secretary for Revenue, Education and Information and Cultural Affairs Sushil Kumar advised officials to give due regard to dress code in state level official meetings.

"District Magistrates, ADMs being the district head need to ensure that in/at the state level official meeting which are chaired by the Hon'ble Chief Minister, Dy. CM, Ministers, Chief Secretary etc. or other high level official meetings due regards needs to be given to the dress code," the memorandum said.

It said, "Certain casual attires like jeans and cargo pants should be avoided."



In the memorandum, Kumar said, he has three decades of experience in the Government of India service and he was yet to see an officer from the IAS or central services come to office wearing casual attires like denims.

The memorandum also pointed out that a few officials read and send messages on their mobile phones during meetings, which is a mark of disrespect.

Referring to former chief minister Manik Sarkars advise to officers to keep hands off their pockets, Kumar reiterated the issue and advised the district magistrates to ensure that officers maintain decorum and adhere to proper code of conduct while attending official functions or meetings.

Citing an example, the principal secretary said a Madhya Pradesh official had received the chief minister wearing goggles and he was later chastised.

When contacted, Tripura Pradesh Congress vice-president Tapas Dey said this order is a perfect reflection of feudal mindset of the state's ruling BJP-IPFT government and encroachment on the rights of government servants.

"How can they give orders on what to wear and what to avoid in the name of dress codes? This is most condemnable. Ours is a democratic country and not the colonial British rule. This type of memorandum reminds us the colonial rule only," CPI(M) spokesperson Goutam Das said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Tripura Police have registered a complaint against a person for allegedly slandering former chief minister Manik Sarkar in a social media post.

A West Agartala police station official said a general diary was registered on August 21 against the person for allegedly slandering Sarkar, a CPI-M Politburo member.

Advocate Kaushik Roy Debbarma had lodged the general diary with the police station.

The post read Two thieves on the streets of Agartala in the apparel of beggars and the man in his Facebook page allegedly uploaded two photo-shopped images of Sarkar and Rose Valley Group chairman Gautam Kundu.

CBI officials have questioned several ministers of Sarkar's government in the last few months over the Rose Valley scam, including former revenue minister Badal Choudhury, former minister for social welfare and social education Bijita Nath and senior CPI(M) leader Goutam Das.

A press statement issued by CPI(M) today said Sarkar had joined an initiative in Agartala during the day to collect funds for Kerala flood relief.

"Sarkars photographs from the fund collection drive were computer edited and images of Rose Valley group chief Gautam Kundu were superimposed before being uploaded on Facebook with the clear intention of character assassination of Sarkar and CPI(M). We condemn the act", CPI (M) state office secretary Haripada Das said.

The Rose Vally ponzi scam has hit over 14 lakh people, who lost around Rs 3,500 crore, officials said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)President Donald Trump says the prospects are "looking good" for an agreement with Mexico that could set the stage for an overhaul of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"A big deal looking good with Mexico!" Trump tweeted Monday morning. U.S. and Mexican negotiators worked over the weekend to narrow their differences. Once they reach an agreement, the third country in NAFTA Canada would be brought back in to finalize a revamp of the 24-year-old pact.

NAFTA reduced most trade barriers between the three countries. But Trump and other critics say it encouraged U.S. manufacturers to move south of the border to exploit low-wage Mexican labor.

The Trump administration wants a higher percentage of auto production to come from within the NAFTA bloc before qualifying for duty-free status.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)President Donald Trump today said the United States had reached a "really good deal" with Mexico and talks with Canada would begin shortly on a new regional free trade pact.

But Trump hinted that all might not be smooth sailing from here, suggesting he could cut Ottawa out of the deal reached with Mexico and adding that he wanted to change the agreement's name.

"It's a big day for trade. It's a really good deal for both countries," Trump said.

"Canada, we will start negotiations shortly. I'll be calling their prime minister very soon," Trump said.

US and Mexican negotiators have been working for weeks to iron out differences in order to revise the nearly 25-year old North American Free Trade Agreement, while Canada was waiting to rejoin the negotiations.

While Mexico's top negotiator, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo reiterated today that the next step was for Canada to rejoin the discussions on the trilateral accord, Trump said, "We could have a separate deal or we could put it in the same deal."



Trump indicated he would take a tough line with Ottawa on autos and dairy tariffs, long a source of tension between the neighboring countries.

Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto spoke to Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday and urged Ottawa to rapidly rejoin the talks with the goal of getting a final NAFTA rewrite this week.

"I expressed the importance of them reentering the process with the goal of concluding an agreement this very week," Pena Nieto said on Twitter.

He said the agreement with Mexico is "good for both countries." "We made it much simpler," Trump said in the Oval Office announcement, surrounded by Guajardo, Mexico's Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray and US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

Pena Nieto joined by phone, and thanked Trump, calling the breakthrough on NAFTA "very positive for the United States and Mexico," and looked forward to the trilateral agreement.

Trump, however, said he wanted to drop the name NAFTA, saying it had "bad connotations" because the United States had been hurt by the agreement.

"This is something that is very special for our manufactures and our farmers," Trump said.

Guajardo and Videgaray have been shuttling back and forth to Washington for more than a month for meetings with Lighthizer to try to iron out the bilateral stumbling blocks, including rules for the auto market, before the end of August.

Talks ground to a halt in May, in part due to the July 1 presidential elections in Mexico.

The trilateral treaty has been a key target in Trump's aggressive trade strategy and he has repeatedly threatened to scrap it altogether, branding it a "disaster".

But after a year of intense negotiations to salvage NAFTA, US and Mexican negotiators are keen to seal a new deal before Pena Nieto hands power to President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on December 1.

For that to happen, the US Congress must be notified 90 days in advance, which means the administration must send the notice by the end of the week.

Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland of Canada had said earlier she was encouraged by the progress and would rejoin the talks once bilateral discussions concluded.

She currently is on a European trip but Guajardo said last week Freeland had indicated she would be available as soon as the United States and Mexico were ready to move to the next phase.

Freeland's spokesman Adam Austen said, "We will only sign a new NAFTA that is good for Canada and good for the middle class." "Canada's signature is required."



A key element of the US-Mexico talks has been content requirements for autos, which Mexico reportedly agreed to increase to 75 per cent from North America to get duty free NAFTA treatment.

The sides also have reached agreement on the portion of cars made at "high wage" factories that can receive duty-free treatment, according to reports.

That requirement would deter US auto manufacturers from moving production to Mexico, where labour costs are lower, something central to Trump's attacks on NAFTA.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Delhi court today acquitted two men of the charges of waging a war against the country in a case relating to the hijacking of a Delhi-Srinagar Indian Airlines flight and forcing it to land in Pakistan in 1981.

Tajinder Pal Singh and Satnam were granted "benefit of doubt" by the court, which said the prosecution has failed to prove beyond "reasonable doubt" the charges levelled against them.

According to the prosecution, Indian Airlines flight IC-423, operated by a Boeing 737 and carrying 111 passengers and six crew members, took off from the Palam Airport here to Srinagar on September 29, 1981.

It was hijacked mid-air by the accused, who forced the plane to land at Lahore in Pakistan, where they got arrested and underwent imprisonment from September 30, 1981 to October 31, 1994 as part of their life sentence by a court there, the prosecution had said.

The hijackers, who reportedly belonged to the Dal Khalsa extremist outfit, had demanded the release of several Khalistani extremists, including Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, among other things.

In a commando action, Pakistan used its elite commando force which cleared the plane and got all the passengers released. The hijackers faced trial in Pakistan and they were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Additional Sessions Judge Ajay Pandey termed the case as "unique", saying the prosecution of the accused was not launched by the police but got initiated on the filing of an application by them for discharge.

Besides Jalandhar resident Tajinder Pal Singh and Himachal Pradesh-based Satnam, there were three more persons -- Gajender Singh (from Chandigarh), Karan Singh (Jammu and Kashmir), Jasbir Singh Chima (Mohali, Punjab) -- were wanted in the case.

While Satnam was discharged on February 11, 2000 by a city court on ground of double jeopardy as he had already been convicted for the incident in Pakistan, co-accused Tajender moved court seeking discharge on the ground of parity on July 19, 2000.

However on October 1, 2011, a supplementary charge sheet was filed against all the accused, following which a prosecution was launched against both of them, while three others were declared proclaimed offenders.

Advocate Maninder Singh, who appeared for Tajinder and Satnam, said the other three accused were declared proclaimed offenders.

While acquitting the accused, the court said the main charge sheet filed by the police after registration of the FIR in 1981 was not available either with the police or in the court records.

Noting that "a clear non-application of mind or consideration of extraneous material is reflected", it said the accused were entitled to acquittal "for want of proper sanction", which had remained a "grey area" in the case.

If convicted, the accused could have got death penalty or life sentence.

It said that besides their confession about the hijack in their discharge application, nor was any information available against them, neither did any of the witnesses recognise them during the trial.

"Even if the fact stated in the application of the accused are taken on their face value and even if for the sake of arguments it is presumed that the accused have admitted the hijacking of a plane to Lahore, it is rightly submitted by their counsel that the prosecution has failed to satisfy the ingredients of section 121 (waging war against the government of India) and 121 A (conspiracy to wage war against government of India) of IPC beyond reasonable doubt against either of the accused," the court said.

It noted that both the accused persons had already been convicted for the alleged hijacking by the competent court in Pakistan.

However, the court said that "findings of the judgment of Pakistan court, cannot be read against the accused persons to prove their presence or of the alleged act committed by them on board flight."



The judgment of the Pakistan court was only relevant to the extent that the accused were tried and convicted there, it said, adding that an independent appreciation of evidence was required to be done.

It said the charge sheet, on the basis of which the judgment was passed by the Pakistan court, and the evidence was not available before it.

The court said the fact of trial of the accused was relevant for considering their plea of double jeopardy in view of section 300 (person once convicted or acquitted not to be tried for same offence) of the CrPC and Article 20 (2) (no person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once) of Constitution, it said.

It said that no official document, letter or communication was collected by the Investigating Officer to verify the names of the crew members of the flight. Also absent was the identification and description of specific roles of each accused by witnesses.

"The accused persons are thus granted benefit of doubt and are acquitted of the charges levelled against them," the court said. It also discharged the two from the offences under section 124A (sedition) of IPC.

The court had framed charges under section 121 and 121A, read with section 120B (criminal conspiracy) of IPC against both accused persons to which they pleaded not guilty and claimed trial.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Uttarakhand Cabinet today decided to constitute a committee for relocating of Gujjar families from the Corbett Tiger Reserve and shutdown schools which have less than 10 students.

It also decided to launch a medical insurance scheme named after former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee providing an annual coverage of Rs 5 lakh to every family.

The proposals were cleared by the state cabinet at a meeting chaired by Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat, cabinet minister and spokesman of the government Madan Kaushik told reporters.

It was decided that a committee headed by the forest minister will be constituted to implement an order of the Uttarakhand High Court to relocate the Gujjar families living in the Corbett Tiger Reserve to somewhere else, Kaushik said.

The agriculture minister and the chief secretary will be the members of the panel, he added.

Kaushik said the high court will also be informed about the formation of the committee.

Nine Gujjar families are at present living in Jhirna range and 24 in Dhela range of the reserve, he said.

In another decision, the cabinet approved the closure of state-run primary and upper primary schools which have less than 10 students.

Those studying in such schools will be shifted to other schools, Kaushik said.

Out of the total 12,339 government primary schools in the state, 2,425 have less than 10 students. And out of 2,796 upper primary schools, 291 have less than 10 students, he said.

The cabinet also gave its nod to a medical insurance scheme named after Vajpayee providing an annual coverage of Rs 5 lakh to around 20 lakh families.

A budgetary provision of Rs 172 crore will be made for the scheme -- Atal Ayushman Yojana Uttarakhand (AAYU) -- which will come into force from September 25, Kaushik said.

The Cabinet also paid tributes to Vajpayee by reading an obituary proposal and observing a two-minute silence.

Vajpayee had passed away on August 16. He was 93.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)To chants of "People power! Our power!" Ugandan pop star turned government critic Bobi Wine was freed on bail today, ending days of incarceration during which he and some of his co-accused allege they were tortured by security forces.

The 36-year-old lawmaker, whose real name is Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, was on crutches as he left the courthouse in the northern Ugandan town of Gulu. He claims he was injured by severe beatings by security forces while he was in detention. Ssentamu had been detained since August 14.

A judge freed him alongside others who are similarly charged with treason for their alleged roles in an incident in which President Yoweri Museveni's motorcade was pelted with stones.

Scores of his supporters outside the courtroom cheered when he came out of the courthouse. They shouted the people's power slogan which had been popularized by Ssentamu. Ssentamu left the courthouse in an ambulance headed for a private hospital in the capital, Kampala.

"We are much stronger and greater in spirit than we were before," Gerald Karuhanga, one of Ssentamu's co-accused, told local broadcaster NTV after being freed, alleging torture.

Ssentamu was initially charged before a military court with illegal possession of firearms and ammunition. On Thursday those charges were withdrawn and he was immediately re-arrested and charged before a magistrate with the more serious offense of treason.

Ssentamu's arrest came after he was campaigning on Aug. 13 in an election to choose a lawmaker in the northwestern town of Arua. Museveni also was in Arua at the time, campaigning for a rival candidate who eventually lost.

While the president was departing, authorities said, his motorcade was pelted with stones by people believed to be supporters of Ssentamu and the candidate he backed, Kassiano Wadri.

Ssentamu's driver was shot and killed that evening, allegedly by security forces.

Authorities have been under pressure to free Ssentamu, who is challenging the long rule of Museveni by appealing to young people who despair over the lack of jobs and other opportunities. His supporters, citing his success in helping opposition candidates to win elections across the country, are urging him to run for president in 2021.

The treason case could drag on for months and maybe even years, potentially crippling Ssentamu's efforts as an anti-government activist.

A trial date has not yet been fixed for the treason charges. Ssentamu and his co-accused will still be required to appear before a magistrate's court on Aug. 30. At some point the magistrate, having considered the evidence, will then decide if the case should be committed to the high court for trial.

The jailing of Ssentamu drew street protests at home as well as outrage from top musicians around the world. He alleges severe torture while in detention. Another lawmaker, Francis Zaake, is hospitalized with serious injuries he sustained in detention after being arrested over the Arua incident.

"These people should never have been tortured, should never have been terrorized," said Kizza Besigye, an opposition politician and four-time presidential contender who witnessed court proceedings Monday.

The treason charges are "a disgrace," he said.

At least two of Ssentamu's co-accused fainted during court proceedings, and one of them had required resuscitation, Besigye told reporters. The government denies the allegations of torture.

Museveni, a U.S. ally on regional security, took power by force in 1986 and has since been elected five times. Although he has campaigned on his record of establishing peace and stability, some worry that those gains are being eroded the longer he stays in power.

The 74-year-old Museveni is now able to seek re-election in 2021 because parliament passed legislation last year removing a clause in the constitution that had prevented anyone over 75 from holding the presidency. Ssentamu publicly opposed that decision.

Museveni recently has accused "unprincipled politicians" of luring young people into rioting.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Investigators working for the UN's top human rights body said today that top Myanmar military leaders should be prosecuted for genocide against Rohingya Muslims.

The call, accompanying a first report by the investigators, amounts to some of the strongest language yet from UN officials who have denounced alleged human rights violations in Myanmar since a bloody crackdown began last August.

The three-member "fact-finding mission" working under a mandate from the UN-backed Human Rights Council meticulously assembled hundreds of accounts by expatriate Rohingya, satellite footage and other information to assemble the report.

The UN-backed Human Rights Council created the mission six months before a rebel attack on security posts set off the crackdown that drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fleeing to neighbouring Bangladesh.

Through hundreds of interviews with expatriate Rohingya and use of satellite footage, the team compiled accounts of crimes including gang rape, the torching of hundreds of villages, enslavement, and killings of children some before their eyes of their own parents.

The team was not granted access to Myanmar and has decried a lack of cooperation or even response from the government, which received an early copy of the report.

The team cited a "conservative" estimate that some 10,000 people were killed in the violence, but outside investigators have had no access to the affected regions making a precise accounting elusive, if not impossible.

Above all, the investigators said the situation in Myanmar should be referred to the International Criminal Court, and if not, to a special tribunal. Last week, Myanmar's government rejected any cooperation with the ICC, to which it is not a party. China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power over whether the issue will be brought before the ICC, has been reticent about condemning Myanmar's government during the crisis.

UN officials and human rights watchers have for months pointed to evidence of genocide in Myanmar, and the United States late last year said that "ethnic cleansing" was occurring in Myanmar. But few experts have studied the issue as in-depth and in such an official way as the fact-finding team, with a mandate from a body that has Myanmar's approval: The country is among the 47 members of the Human Rights Council.

The United Nations does not apply the word "genocide" lightly. The fact-finding team's assessment suggests the crimes against the Rohingya could meet the strict legal definition which was last met over crimes in Bosnia and Rwanda nearly a quarter-century ago.

Human rights watchers say determining "genocidal intent" is perhaps the most difficult criteria to meet: In essence, it's the task of assessing the mindsets of perpetrators to determine if ethnicity, race, religion or another attribute had motivated them.

"The crimes in Rakhine state, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts," the report said, alluding to a region of Myanmar that is home for many Rohingya.

Adding into their assessment: The extreme brutality of the crimes; "hate rhetoric" and specific speech by perpetrators and military commanders; policies of exclusion against Rohingya people; an "oppressive context;" and the "level of organization indicating a plan for destruction."



The investigators cited six Myanmar military leaders by name as "priority subjects" for possible prosecution, led by the commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing. A longer list of names is to be kept in the office of the UN human rights chief for possible use in future judicial proceedings. The United States and European Union have already slapped sanctions on some Myanmar military leaders, though Min Aung Hlaing is not among them.

The authors called for the creation of a special body, or "mechanism," to keep watch on the still-evolving human rights situation in Myanmar. They said the United Nations' own role in the country since 2011 should be reviewed to see if the world body did all it could to prevent such a crisis.

They also faulted Aung San Suu Kyi for not using her role as head of Myanmar's government, nor her "moral authority" she is a Nobel peace prize laureate to stop the events in embattled Rakhine state.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Uttar Pradesh assembly today witnessed noisy scenes with a determined Opposition raising anti-government slogans and demanding an



immediate discussion on the Deoria shelter home case, leading to the adjournment of its Question Hour.

As soon as the House assembled this morning, the Samajwadi Party and the Congress members rose to their feet, demanding immediate discussion on the shelter home issue and accusing the government of failing not only in protecting the women but on the entire law and order front.

As the SP and the Congress members trooped into the well of the House raising anti-government slogans, the BSP members lent their support to them by standing in their places amid the pandemonium.

The Samajwadi Party legislators raised the anti-government slogans, donning red caps.

Leader of the Oppostion Ram Govind Chowdhury (SP) said the matter of Deoria shelter home was of utmost importance and need immediate discussion in the House.

"An international racket is there behind the sexual exploitation of girls in shelter homes. Such cases were found in all the shelter homes, including those of Deoria, Pratapgarh and Banaras. We demand a discussion on the issue and a probe by the Supreme Court judge. The IAS and the IPS officers were involved in the case," he later told reporters, alleging that the shelter home girls were being forced to prostitution.

"If any morality is left, the government should resign. The operator of the shelter home (in Deoria) have been seen dancing along with BJP leaders," he said.

BSP leader Lalji Verma also demanded a judicial probe into the Deoria shelter home case.

"There should be a judicial probe and not a CBI one into the matter," he said.

As the protesting legislators did not pay heed to Speaker Hriday Narain Dixit's pleas to take their seats, the House was adjourned for 30 minutes and later for the entire Question Hour.

Even after the House reassembled for the Zero Hour, the scene remained the same with the Congress and the SP members continuing to raise slogans against the government and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath who too was present in the House.

The House took up the entire agenda for the day amid sloganeering and the house was adjourned for the day at 12.55 pm.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The death toll in last week's boat tragedy in the Ganga river here rose to three after the recovery of the body of a woman today, an official said.

With this bodies of three women have so far been fished out while efforts are on to trace others, District Magistrate Atal Kumar Rai said.

The deceased has been identified as Sarvesh, 37, he said.

Bodies of Nagini and Meena were recovered earlier, he added said.

As many as 27 men and women were in the boat when it capsized in the river near Rajarampur village in the Mandawar area here on August 25. Eleven men and six women were rescued, he said.

The rescue operation is being carried out by the National Disaster Response Force and the Uttar Pradesh Provincial Armed Constabulary.

Rai said the help of the locals, living in the nearby areas, was also being taken to trace the missing persons.

Additional Superintendent of Police (city) Dinesh Singh said the people were headed for their fields located on the other side of the river when the boat overturned.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Uttar Pradesh government today tabled the first supplementary budget to the tune of Rs 34,833.24 crore for FY2018-19 in the UP Legislative Assembly, to meet the additional expenditure for the year.

Earlier in February this year, the Yogi Adityanath government had passed a budget of Rs 4.26 lakh crore for the ongoing fiscal year.

The supplementary budget, presented by state Finance Minister Rajesh Agarwal, earmarked funds for a number of schemes under different heads in the memory of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The supplementary budget also proposed Rs 500 crore for developing a defence corridor along the Bundelkhand Expressway.

The state government has earmarked Rs 34 crore for cow shelter homes that will be set up in 68 districts, and also proposed an additional Rs 50 crore for the Kumbh Mela, to be held in January 2019.

Besides, the budget sought Rs 10 crore for developing different spots in Bateshwar (Agra) in the memory of Vajpayee and Rs 5 crore for setting up a centre for excellence in DAV College Kanpur, where the former prime minister had his education.

It also proposed Rs 5 crore for organising a cultural festival in the memory of the former prime minister as well as construction of 'Smriti Sankul'.

The budget also sought Rs 5 crore for establishment a satellite centre of King George's Medical University (KGMU) in Balrampur.

It also earmarked Rs 5 crore for setting up 'Sant Kabir Academy' and another Rs 5 crore for the 'Surya Kant Tripathi Nirala Academy' in Unnao.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A man was arrested for allegedly trying to rape an eight-year-old girl when she had gone to buy a rakhi from his shop here, police said today.

The man was arrested yesterday after the girl's family lodged a complaint, Circle Officer Rizwan Ahmad said.

He said the accused attempted to rape the girl in his shop, but was rescued by locals after she shouted for help.

The man was thrashed by locals who handed him over to the police, the officer said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A US strike over the weekend killed a senior Islamic State commander in eastern Afghanistan, Afghan and US officials said today.

The strike in Nangarhar province killed Abu Sayeed Orakzai, a senior leader in the extremist group, according to Shah Hussain Martazawi, deputy spokesman for the Afghan presidency.

He said the operation showed the government's "determination to fight terrorism." Lt. Col. Martin O'Donnell, a spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan, said American forces launched a counterterrorism strike in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday that targeted a "senior leader of a designated terrorist organization." He did not provide further details.

"These efforts target the real enemies of Afghanistan, the same enemies who threaten America," he said.

An IS affiliate that emerged in Afghanistan in 2014 has carried out scores of attacks targeting security forces and the country's Shiite minority. Even with US and NATO support, Afghan security forces have struggled to combat IS and the more well-established Taliban.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The US government's top official overseeing the USD 1.5 trillion student loan market resigned in protest today, citing what he says is the White House's open hostility toward protecting the nation's millions of student loan borrowers.

Seth Frotman will be stepping down from his position as student loan ombudsman at the end of the week, according to his resignation letter which was obtained by The Associated Press.

He held that position since 2016.

Frotman is the latest high-level departure from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump's budget director who has been also acting director of the bureau, took over in late November.

But Frotman's departure is specifically notable, since his office is one of the few parts of the US government that specifically was tasked with handling student loan issues.

"You have used the bureau to serve the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America," Frotman wrote, addressing his letter directly to Mulvaney.

Congress specifically created the student loan ombudsman office when it created the CFPB, citing a need for there to be a specific go-to person to handle student loan complaints nationwide.

One previous occupant of that position is Rohit Chopra, who is now a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission.

The position is quite powerful, able to work with the bureau's enforcement staff to specifically target bad behaviour in the student loan market as well as act as a voice inside the government on behalf of student loan borrowers.

The office has returned USD 750 million to harmed borrowers since its creation.

Frotman's office was central to processing tens of thousands of complaints from student loan borrowers against their services.

It also was the office at the centre of the lawsuits against for-profit colleges like Corinthian Colleges and is currently heading up a lawsuit between the CFPB and Navient.

The Navient lawsuit has been mired in bureaucratic red tape as the Department of Education, headed by Betsy DeVos, has been unwilling to help the CFPB with their lawsuit.

Under Mulvaney, the bureau has scaled back its enforcement work and has proposed revising or rescinding all of the rules and regulations it put into place under the Obama administration.

Mulvaney downgraded the mission of Frotman's student loan office earlier this summer and moved it the umbrella of consumer education instead of enforcement.

While at the time Mulvaney's office said it was a minor organisational shake up, consumer advocates saw the change as a specific move to downplay the CFPB's mission when it came to student loans.

"The damage you have done to the bureau betrays these families and sacrifices the financial futures of millions of Americans in communities across the country," Frotman said.

A spokesman for the bureau was not immediately available to respond to Frotman's letter.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The United States will "vigorously defend" itself in the International Court of Justice against Iran's challenge to the reimposition of US sanctions, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said today.

Iran demanded in The Hague that the top UN court suspend the unilateral US sanctions, which were slapped back on three weeks ago following the US withdrawal from a landmark 2015 nuclear accord with Tehran.

"We will vigorously defend against Iran's meritless claims this week in The Hague," Pompeo said.

He said Iran's filing with the International Court of Justice was "an attempt to interfere with the sovereign rights of the United States to take lawful actions, including re-imposition of sanctions, which are necessary to protect our national security.

"The proceedings instituted by Iran are a misuse of the court," he contended.

In oral arguments in The Hague, Iran's representative Mohsen Mohebi accused Washington of plotting his country's "economic strangulation."



Pompeo countered: "President Trump withdrew from the JCPOA for a simple reason: it failed to guarantee the safety of the American people from the risk created by Iran's leaders."



The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is the name given to the 2015 international agreement under which sanctions on Iran were lifted in return for curbs on its nuclear program.

The reimposition of US sanctions has added to Iran's economic woes, fuelling strikes and protests across the country and political spectrum.

The sanctions target financial transactions and imports of raw materials, cars and aircraft among other things.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Vatican today rolled back on Pope Francis' recommendation that parents seek psychiatric help for children who show homosexual tendencies.

The pope made the comments to journalists as he was flying back to Rome from Ireland, but the Vatican later removed his phrase from its official account, saying he had not meant to suggest that homosexuality was a mental illness.

Francis was asked by a journalist what he would say to parents who observe homosexual traits in their children.

"When it shows itself from childhood, there is a lot that can be done through psychiatry, to see how things are. It is something else if it shows itself after 20 years," he said.

The pope added that ignoring a child who showed homosexual tendencies was an "error of fatherhood or motherhood".

However, when the Vatican later published the pope's answer, the reference to psychiatry had been removed.

When asked why, a Vatican spokeswoman told AFP it had been done in order to not "change the thoughts of the Holy Father".

"When the pope referred to 'psychiatry', it is clear that he was doing it to highlight an example of 'things that can be done'.

But with that word he didn't mean to say that it (homosexuality) was a 'mental illness'," she said.

Francis' trip to Ireland was fraught with controversy amid accusations that he ignored sexual abuse allegations against prominent US cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A volcano that erupted in Indonesia in 1815 and caused poor global weather may have been partly responsible for the defeat of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo, changing the course of European history.

Historians know that rainy and muddy conditions helped the Allied army defeat Napoleon, according to the researchers from Imperial College London in the UK.

Two months prior to the June 1815 event, a volcano named Mount Tambora erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, killing 100,000 people and plunging the Earth into a 'year without a summer' in 1816.

Researchers found that electrified volcanic ash from eruptions can 'short-circuit' the electrical current of the ionosphere -- the upper level of the atmosphere that is responsible for cloud formation.

The findings, published in the journal Geology, could confirm the suggested link between the eruption and Napoleon's defeat.

The Tambora eruption short-circuited the ionosphere, ultimately leading to a pulse of cloud formation. This brought heavy rain across Europe that contributed to Napoleon's defeat.

The study shows that eruptions can hurl ash much higher than previously thought into the atmosphere -- up to 100 kilometres above ground.

A series of experiments showed that that electrostatic forces could lift ash far higher than by buoyancy alone.

Researchers created a model to calculate how far charged volcanic ash could levitate, and found that particles smaller than 0.2 millionths of a metre in diameter could reach the ionosphere during large eruptions.

"Volcanic plumes and ash both can have negative electrical charges and thus the plume repels the ash, propelling it high in the atmosphere," said Matthew Genge from Imperial College London.

"The effect works very much like the way two magnets are pushed away from each other if their poles match," he said.

The experimental results are consistent with historical records from other eruptions.

Weather records are sparse for 1815, so to test his theory, researchers examined weather records following the 1883 eruption of another Indonesian volcano, Krakatau.

The data showed lower average temperatures and reduced rainfall almost immediately after the eruption began, and global rainfall was lower during the eruption than either period before or after.

He also found reports of ionosphere disturbance after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, Philippines, which could have been caused by charged ash in the ionosphere from the volcano plume.

A special cloud type appeared more frequently than usual following the Krakatau eruption. Noctilucent clouds are rare and luminous, and form in the ionosphere.

Genge suggests these clouds therefore provide evidence for the electrostatic levitation of ash from large volcanic eruptions.

"Vigo Hugo in the novel Les Miserables said of the Battle of Waterloo: 'an unseasonably clouded sky sufficed to bring about the collapse of a World.' Now we are a step closer to understanding Tambora's part in the Battle from half a world away," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Election Commission is setting up voter-friendly polling booth with various facilities like ramps for letting wheel-chair bound electors easily access it during the upcoming state assembly elections, Rajasthan Chief Electoral Officer Ashwini Bhagat said today.

He said the voters' facility being the top priority of the poll panel, the office of the state Election Commission is also trying to provide transportation facilities to all polling stations, besides the wheel chairs, ramps and volunteers at the polling booths.

Bhagat said the polling booths would also have the drinking water, power supply, different toilet for men and women and ramps for differently-abled persons to access the polling booth.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is set to invest about USD 300-350 million in Indian digital payments major Paytm, according to sources.

The investment, which values the Alibaba and SoftBank-backed One97 Communications at over USD 10 billion, is likely to be announced in the next few weeks, according to two people familiar with the development.

They did not wish to be identified as the deal is still in the works.

One of the persons said the deal would see Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway pick up 3-4 per cent share in One97 Communications, the parent firm of Paytm.

An email sent to Berkshire Hathaway did not elicit a response, while a Paytm spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.

The deal, if completed, would be Berkshire Hathaway's first investment in an Indian technology ecosystem.

It will also add more muscle to Paytm's operations as it competes against rivals like PhonePe and Google's Tez. Paytm has also been aggressively diversifying its business into areas like investment management and e-commerce.

In May last year, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank had pumped in USD 1.4 billion (over Rs 9,079 crore) into Paytm.

Paytm has been one of the prominent beneficiaries of the governments move in November 2016 to scrap high denomination notes. It has seen manifold growth in transactions on its platform as well as expansion in number of users.

The company crossed an annual gross transaction run-rate of USD 29 billion in May this year. It attributed the growth to strong adoption of mobile payments and bank transfers on its platform.

One97 also owns 49 per cent stake in Paytm Payments Bank. Also, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma had started e-commerce business under Paytm Mall that competes with giants like Amazon and Walmart-backed Flipkart.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US President Donald Trump was due to make a trade announcement today as US and Mexican negotiators signalled they were zeroing in on a preliminary deal to rewrite the North American trade pact.

The prompted ebullience on stock markets, sending Wall Street to fresh records.

Earlier today, a top Mexican official had told reporters a single issue remained to be resolved in US-Mexico talks, with Trump tweeting that "big deal" was at hand.

"A big deal looking good with Mexico!" Trump said. The White House said Trump would make a trade announcement at 11:00 am ET (1500 GMT).

"We have one very important issue to finish," Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said, declining to elaborate. "The idea is if we finish this item we will be concluded."



However, Guajardo once again stressed that efforts to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement would not be complete until a final agreement is reached with Canada.

He told reporters, "We are not going to disclose anything because a lot of these things imply Canada. Until we finish with the position of Canada, we'll not be able to disclose all the elements."



The negotiations are aimed at ironing out bilateral issues and calling on Canada, the third NAFTA partner, to rejoin the now year-old discussions.

Guajardo and Mexico's Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray have been shuttling back and forth to Washington for more than a month for meetings with US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to try to iron out the bilateral stumbling blocks, including rules for the auto market, before the end of August.

Talks ground to a halt in May, in part due to the July 1 presidential elections in Mexico.

The trilateral treaty has been a key target in Trump's aggressive trade strategy and he has repeatedly threatened to scrap it altogether, branding it a "disaster".

But after a year of intense negotiations to salvage the 25-year-old pact, the United States and Mexico appear close to a point where Canada -- which had been waiting for US-Mexican agreement on auto industry rules -- can rejoin the talks.

US and Mexican negotiators are keen to seal a new deal before Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto hands power to president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on December 1.

For that to happen, the US Congress must be notified 90 days in advance, which means the administration must send the notice by the end of the week.

Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland of Canada said earlier she was encouraged by the progress and would rejoin the talks once bilateral discussions concluded.

She currently is on a European trip, but Guajardo said last week Freeland had indicated she would be available as soon as the United States and Mexico were ready to move to the next phase.

A key element of the US-Mexico talks has been content requirements for autos, which Mexico reportedly agreed to increase to 75 percent from North America to get duty free NAFTA treatment.

The sides also have reached agreement on the portion of cars made at "high wage" factories that can receive duty-free treatment, according to reports.

That requirement would deter US auto manufacturers from moving production to Mexico, where labor costs are lower, something central to Trump's attacks on NAFTA.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)PARIS (Reuters) - Air France-KLM's French unions reiterated demands for a 5.1 percent pay increase on Monday, without calling any new strike action as the airline group awaits the arrival of a new chief executive.A cross-union grouping behind earlier strikes that led to the May resignation of the last CEO, Jean-Marc Janaillac, vowed after a meeting on Monday to maintain its core demand on pay. But it stopped short of calling for an immediate resumption of strikes as some workers' representatives had threatened."We remain mobilised to defend our demands," the unions said in a joint statement. ...MUMBAI (Reuters) - The stock-broking arm of India's Axis Bank on Monday began offering commodity derivatives trading on the Multi Commodity Exchange platform, making it the first subsidiary of a bank to offer the service.The Reserve Bank of India had allowed bank subsidiaries to provide commodity broking services in September last year, as the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the capital market regulator, tries to deepen the market.Existing Axis Securities clients can now trade commodity futures and options after filing a declaration, Axis Securities managing director Arun Thukral told ...Berkshire Hathaway Inc is in talks to invest about 20-25 billion rupees ($285.4-356.7 million) in India's One97 Communications Ltd, the parent of digital payments firm Paytm, the Economic Times reported on Monday. Berkshire, the conglomerate run by billionaire Warren Buffett, is said to pick up a 3-4 per cent stake in Paytm's parent and the deal is being done through a primary subscription of shares, the paper said citing people familiar with the matter. If materialised, it could be the first direct investment in India by Buffett, it said. One of Berkshire's key ...Berkshire Hathaway Inc has picked up a Rs 25 billion ($356 million) stake in the parent of digital payments firm Paytm, a source said, its first investment in an Indian startup as it forays into the financial payments sector. The conglomerate run by billionaire Warren Buffett confirmed in an email that Berkshire had invested in One97 Communications Ltd. Buffett was not involved in the transaction, his assistant Debbie Bosanek said in the email, without giving more details. India's Economic Times had reported on Monday that Berkshire was in talks for a 3-4 per cent stake in a ...BEIJING (Reuters) - Profits earned by China's industrial firms rose 16.2 percent in July from a year earlier, slowing from 20.0 percent in June, the statistics bureau said on Monday. In the first seven months of 2018, industrial profits rose 17.1 percent from the same period last year, compared with a 17.2 percent rise in the first half.China's industrial firms' liabilities grew 6.5 percent in July from a year earlier, compared with a 6.6 percent rise in June. The data covers large companies with annual revenue of more than 20 million yuan from their main operations. ($1 = 6.8740 Chinese yuan ...BEIJING (Reuters) - China's ambitious "Belt and Road" projects are not a debt trap, and some countries' high debt levels are long-standing and not to be blamed on the initiative, a senior official at China's state planner said on Monday.Ning Jizhe, vice-chairman of the National Development Reform Commission (NDRC), made the remarks at a news conference in Beijing. The Belt and Road initiative, first mentioned in a speech Chinese President Xi Jinping gave in Kazakhstan in 2013, is a vehicle for Beijing to take a greater role on the international stage by funding and building global transport ...BEIJING (Reuters) - China's state council committee said on Monday it would fend off financial risks in areas including online finance and listed firms' stock collateral loans.In a post following a meeting held by the state cabinet's Financial Stability and Development Commission (FSDC), the government said it will speed up the development of a long-term supervision mechanism for internet finance, adding that risks in internet lending are controllable overall.The FSDC also said China will improve the quality of listed companies, reform stock issuance system, and broaden long-term and stable ...BEIJING (Reuters) - China's investment growth, already at record lows, may weaken even further in the future and authorities should step up fiscal and financial measures to give it a boost, the state planner said on Monday. Beijing is urging more infrastructure spending as the economy faces both domestic and external risks, such as U.S. tariffs. But the benefits will take time to kick in, with analysts expecting the economy to get worse before it gets better. Fixed-asset investment (FAI) in the first seven months of the year grew at the slowest pace on record since early 1996, after a long ...By Alun John and Julie ZhuHONG KONG (Reuters) - Three of the world's largest bitcoin mining equipment makers plan to raise billions of dollars with initial public offerings in Hong Kong, even as other companies report plunging demand for the chips needed to make bitcoin and a halving in the price of the cryptocurrency. Soaring cryptocurrency prices last year triggered a boom in demand for specialist mining chips and in developing "mines" - facilities with thousands of machines that create the coins by solving complex mathematical puzzles.Yet the U.S. chipmaker Nvidia Corp said this month ...JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's ColorChip, a maker of communication components for telecom providers and data centres, is close to being bought by an unnamed Chinese company for as much as $300 million, Israeli media reported on Monday.ColorChip, which was founded in 2001, was not immediately available for comment.Newspapers said ColorChip has raised $112 million in private funding to date and that the firm has a workforce of about 250 people.Israeli companies and technologies have attracted significant interest from China in recent years. (Reporting by Steven Scheer; Editing by Jeffrey ...By Michael NienaberBERLIN (Reuters) - German business morale improved for the first time this year in August as a trade truce between the European Union and United States made company executives less concerned about a transatlantic trade war.The Ifo economic institute said on Monday its closely-watched business climate index jumped to 103.8, beating July's reading of 101.7 and a Reuters consensus forecast of 101.9.U.S. President Donald Trump agreed during a meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker last month to refrain from imposing tariffs on European cars while the two ...The king spoke, and a $2 trillion dream went up in smoke. For the past two years, Saudi Arabia has prepared to place up to 5 per cent of its national oil company on the stock market. Officials talked up the Saudi Aramco initial public offering (IPO) with international exchanges, global banks and US President Donald Trump. The planned listing was to be the cornerstone of the kingdom's promised economic overhaul and, at a targeted $100 billion, the biggest IPO ever. It was the brainchild of 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, heir apparent of the world's largest ...By Roberta Rampton and Jeff MasonWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and Mexico reached a deal on Monday to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and talks with Canada were expected to begin immediately in the hopes of reaching a final agreement by Friday, a senior U.S. trade official said."We are now inviting the Canadians in as well and hope that we can reach a fair and successful conclusion with them as well," the official told Reuters in an interview."There are still issues with Canada but I think they could be resolved very quickly," the official said.The ...BERLIN (Reuters) - German business morale improved by much more than expected in August, a survey showed on Monday, suggesting that concerns about a global trade war among company executives in Europe's largest economy have eased.The Munich-based Ifo economic institute said its business climate index jumped to 103.8 after 101.7 in the previous month. The August reading beat a Reuters consensus forecast of 101.9."In addition to a robust domestic economic situation, the truce in the trade conflict with the U.S. contributed to improved business confidence," Ifo chief Clemens Fuest said."The ...BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Germany's antitrust regulator will examine a deal by utility groups RWE and E.ON to carve up Innogy with a focus on a cross-shareholding between the two firms that is part of the transaction.Under the landmark deal, Innogy - which is 76.8 percent-owned by RWE - will be broken up, with RWE keeping the unit's renewable assets and getting those of E.ON. E.ON, in turn, will get Innogy's retail and network activities.The transaction, first announced in March, also includes RWE receiving a direct stake of 16.67 percent in E.ON, creating an ownership link between the two ...ROME (Reuters) - Italian Economy Minister Giovanni Tria said on Monday, during a visit to the Chinese capital, that the goal of his trip is not to find new buyers for Italian debt, denying recent speculation in the Italian media. "The objective of the mission is to strengthen economic cooperation between our two countries," Tria said in an interview with China's Guangming newspaper translated into Italian by China Radio International's website. "Chinese investors will evaluate whether to buy Italian debt just like any other foreign or Italian investor," Tria added. "I'm confident that the ...By Sharay Angulo and David ShepardsonWASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. and Mexican trade negotiators are close to squaring away bilateral differences on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and will resume talks on Monday morning, Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said on Sunday.Earlier, Guajardo told reporters the two sides were likely "hours" away from reaching a common position, but in the evening he said more work still needed to be done, and that talks would start again on Monday at 9 a.m. local time in Washington."We've continued making progress," Guajardo said.The ...By Sharay AnguloWASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. and Mexican trade negotiators are "hours" away from squaring away bilateral differences on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) but work with Canada is likely to stretch into September, a top Mexican official said on Sunday.Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo told reporters that work with Canada, which has sat out the latest phase of NAFTA talks, would take at least a week, though he was optimistic Mexico and the United States were close to agreement."I would say that we're practically in the final hours of this negotiation," he ...WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mexican and U.S. officials are close to agreeing they have resolved their bilateral issues in the renegotiation of the North American Free Agreement (NAFTA) but a major issue must still be settled, a top Mexican official said on Monday.Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said he still had to conclude a "very important" issue when asked by reporters if Mexico and the United States had reached agreement. He did, however, note that an announcement was "probably on the agenda."Separately, a Mexican source familiar with the talks said it was "almost certain" there ...By Sharay AnguloWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mexico and the United States are close to agreement on bilateral issues in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a top Mexican official said on Monday, as U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted a "big deal" was "looking good."When asked by reporters if a deal had been reached, Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said an announcement was "probably on the agenda," but that he still had to conclude a "very important" issue.The White House said Trump would make an announcement on trade at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 ...By Anshuman Daga and Fathin UngkuSINGAPORE (Reuters) - Noble Group Ltd won approval on Monday from a majority of shareholders for a $3.5 billion debt restructuring plan that should ensure the survival of what was once Asia's biggest commodity trader. Faced with the prospect of the company's insolvency, shareholders reluctantly backed a debt-for-equity swap that will leave them with ownership of just 20 percent of the business, while handing majority control to a group of creditors comprised mainly of hedge funds."Today, the decision to avoid liquidation rests in your hands," Noble Chairman ...By Anshuman Daga and Fathin UngkuSINGAPORE (Reuters) - Noble Group Ltd won approval from shareholders on Monday for a $3.5 billion debt restructuring plan that should ensure the survival of what was once Asia's biggest commodity trader.Faced with the prospect of the company's insolvency, shareholders reluctantly backed a debt-for-equity swap that will leave them owning just 20 percent of the business, while handing majority control to a group of creditors comprised mainly of hedge funds."It's obviously a relief to get this out of the way today and to get such a strong support from our ... A first sentencing echo from the economic meltdown? | Main | California's confusing efforts to do criminal justice by initiative 

October 10, 2008

Boston Globe noticing crime dogs not barking in 2008 campaign

With all due respect to McGruff the Crime Dog (who has his own blog), I have been intrigued, somewhat amazed and consistently disappointed by how quiet the 2008 election season has been on issues of crime and punishment. I am pleased to see that the Boston Globe, in this editorial headlined "Politically, crime doesn't pay," is also noticing that crime dogs are not barking this fall. And the editorial has some interesting theories why:

Despite an overall drop in crime rates over the past decade, fear of crime remains a daily concern for residents in many American cities. The candidates are giving short shrift to the issue by succumbing to their own fear of talking about crime. Obama may be reluctant to draw attention to his hometown problems in Chicago, where murder and gun violence rates are up sharply. McCain may see no political upside of the crime issue, either. He alienated the gun lobby again by supporting the rollback of the insidious Tiahrt amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement agencies to gain access to comprehensive federal gun tracing data as a means to identify rogue gun dealers.... Americans of all races are still waiting for a healthy debate on why black people are imprisoned at five times the rate of white people. Is it the breakdown of families, the failure of social and economic interventions, or racial bias on the part of police or prosecutors? This subject deserves at least as much attention from the candidates as they give to "diplomacy without preconditions." Each candidate still has some explaining to do. Voters deserve to hear more about why McCain voted against bipartisan crime bills during the 1990s. And Obama's position on the constitutionality of citywide bans on handguns remains murky, at best. The candidates seem only too happy to duck discussions about crime. Neither, therefore, deserves commendation as an especially effective crime-fighter.

I concur that both Presidential candidates are happy to duck discussions about crime, but the media (both mainstream and non-traditional) are also responsible for failing to show any real interest or concern about these issues. Moreover, it has been more than 20 years since either political party has shown a real interest at the federal level in having a truly "healthy debate" about crime and punishment. Largely inconsequential distractions like the death penalty, the exact scope or federal judicial sentencing discretion, and US attorney firings make for great political theater and sound-bites, but it has been decades since persons in either the White House or Congress has shown a real interest in the hard work of figuring out how best to prevent and fight crime throughout the United States.

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October 10, 2008 at 04:01 PM | Permalink

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The Death Penalty is an "inconsequential distraction?"

Posted by: Will | Oct 13, 2008 2:46:51 PM

Post a commentBy Henning GloysteinSINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil prices fell on Monday on concerns the U.S.-China trade dispute will erode global economic growth, although looming U.S. sanctions against Iran's oil sector kept crude from falling further, traders said.International Brent crude oil futures were at $75.63 per barrel at 0654 GMT, down 19 cents from their last close.U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were down 30 cents at $68.42 a barrel.Trading activity was limited due to a public holiday in Britain, traders said."Falling U.S. rig counts and last week's decline in U.S. inventories are ...By Ahmad GhaddarLONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices fell on Monday on concerns the U.S.-China trade dispute will erode global economic growth, and ahead of a conference call between members of a committee monitoring an OPEC and non-OPEC deal on output cuts.International Brent crude oil futures were at $75.49 per barrel at 0956 GMT, down 33 cents from their last close.U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were down 32 cents at $68.40 a barrel.Trading activity was limited due to a public holiday in Britain, traders said."Falling U.S. rig counts and last week's decline in U.S. inventories ...By Stephanie KellyNEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices were flat on Monday, pausing after last week's substantial gains as a committee monitoring a deal between OPEC and non-OPEC producers saw production increasing and a U.S.-China trade dispute also weighed on sentiment.Brent crude futures rose 11 cents to $75.93 a barrel by 11:14 a.m. EDT (1514 GMT).U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures fell 3 cents to $68.69 a barrel.Last week, WTI posted a 4.3 percent weekly gain while Brent marked a 5.6 percent weekly increase. Traders said prices pulled back after market intelligence firm Genscape ...(Reuters) - An OPEC and non-OPEC monitoring committee found that oil producers participating in a supply-reduction agreement cut output in July by 9 percent more than called for in their pact, two sources familiar with the matter said on Monday. The findings for last month compare with a compliance level of 120 percent for June and 147 percent for May, meaning participants have been steadily increasing production. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and other producers led by Russia pledged on June 22-23 to return to 100 percent compliance with agreed cuts of 1.8 million ...By Henning GloysteinSINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil prices dipped slightly on Monday on concerns that a U.S.-China trade dispute will erode global economic growth, although looming U.S. sanctions against Iran's oil sector kept crude from falling further, traders said.International Brent crude oil futures were at $75.75 per barrel at 0122 GMT, down 7 cents from their last close.U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were down 9 cents at $68.63 a barrel."Falling U.S. rig counts and last week's decline in U.S. inventories are supporting oil prices amid a protracted U.S.-China trade war that ...(Reuters) - South Korean steelmaker POSCO on Monday said it had signed a deal to buy lithium mining rights in Argentina from Australia's Galaxy Resources for $280 million.POSCO said in a statement that it would also build a lithium plant in Argentina, planning to produce 25,000 tonnes of the commodity per year for 20 years starting from 2021.Lithium, a critical ingredient for batteries used in electric vehicles, has seen growing demand in recent years as some consumers shift away from cars powered by fossil fuels. POSCO said the move would secure stable lithium supplies for its battery ...A federal judge in San Francisco dismissed a securities fraud lawsuit in which Tesla Inc shareholders accused the electric car company and Chief Executive Elon Musk of misleading them about the progress of production of its Model 3 vehicle. In a decision made public on Monday, US District Judge Charles Breyer said that while shareholders claimed that Tesla fell short of its production goals, "federal securities laws do not punish companies for failing to achieve their targets." Breyer said the shareholders have until Sept 28 to amend their complaint. Their lawyer, ...By Shadia NasrallaSTAVANGER, Norway (Reuters) - The chief executive of French oil and gas giant Total said on Monday that he and his wife drive an electric car - but when it comes to business, he relies on fossil fuels. "It's a 100 percent e-car. It's a nice Renault electric car. And I'm driving it every weekend. It's my private car," Patrick Pouyanne told an oil conference."Of course I have my company car which is internal combustion. To make long distances I don't use an electric car."When Total took over upstart utility Direct Energie in April, it said the deal was part of its strategy ...TOKYO (Reuters) - Four Toyota Motor Corp group companies said on Monday they will form a joint venture to develop software that manages brakes, steering and other components for automated driving.Advics, Aisin Seiki Co, Denso Corp and Jtekt Corp aim to launch the company in March 2019 with Denso to be the biggest stakeholder, owning 65 percent, they said in a joint statement. https://bit.ly/2wh6DoJThe Nikkei business daily had flagged the deal last week. In addition, Aisin and Denso said they would set up a 50-50 joint venture to develop and sell electrification driving modules. They will ... New BOP regulation on halfway houses | Main | Wisconsin state appellate court urges guideline repeal 

October 22, 2008

Rudy Giuliani doing robocalls accusing Senator Obama of being soft on crime

Earlier this month there were reports that Senator McCain was going to resort to old-school "soft-on-crime" attacks as part of his strategy to get back his mojo in the final month of the 2008 campaign. Thanks to reporting by Politico, we now are starting to see the specifics of the Big Mac attack on the crime front.

First, as detailed here and here, the Republican Party of Florida has paid for a flier that alleges in various ways that Senator Obama would be soft on crime. And now, as reported here and here, everyone's old pal and favorite mayor is getting into the act: "Rudy Giuliani is portraying Barack Obama as soft on crime in robocalls being blasted out to swing states by the RNC and the McCain campaign."

You can here this new robocall at this link, and here is the heart of Rudy's message to voters:

Hi, this is Rudy Giuliani, and I'm calling for John McCain and the Republican National Committee because you need to know that Barack Obama opposes mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, drug dealers, and murderers. It's true, I read Obama's words myself. And recently, Congressional liberals introduced a bill to eliminate mandatory prison sentences for violent criminals -- trying to give liberal judges the power to decide whether criminals are sent to jail or set free. With priorities like these, we just can't trust the inexperience and judgment of Barack Obama and his liberal allies.

Candidly, I am not especially surprised that Senator McCain is playing this old-school "soft-on-crime" card in an effort to make up ground in the polls. Indeed, I am a bit surprised that it took the McCain camp this long to try to beat up Senator Obama for putting responsible policy-positions ahead of inflammatory rhetoric in the sentencing arena.

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October 22, 2008 at 04:50 PM | Permalink

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Obama would love to loose juvenile predators onto Chicago streets--how do we know? He praised Ayers' initiatives on juvenile justice.

Obama IS soft on crime. Whether he will give rein to that softness (other than appointing a lot of judges who will favor criminals) is an open question. But we know where his sympathies lie--just look at his response to the Jena Six case.

Posted by: | Oct 22, 2008 6:02:39 PM

I'd be very interested to learn if there is any documentation for the claim that "opposes mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, drug dealers, and murderers." Does anybody know what the hell he's talking about, or is it just a lie?

Posted by: Gritsforbreakfast | Oct 22, 2008 6:50:11 PM

I would also add, Doug, as Radley Balko pointed out in a piece you linked to earlier, that Obama has not always put "responsible policy-positions ahead of inflammatory rhetoric." As far as I can tell, there's very little difference between the two candidates on crime except that Obama supports law enforcement pork to the states (Byrne and COPS grants) and McCain voted against them, which was IMO the right call.

Posted by: Gritsforbreakfast | Oct 22, 2008 6:55:32 PM

Well, does Obama oppose mandatory prison terms for murder? According to a CNN story on the subject, his campaign had no immediate comment, and I would expect them to immediately say it is not true if it is not.

While there are many mandatory minimums that should be reexamined and possibly repealed, I think that most people agree that murder is not one of them. If that is Obama's position, it is a perfectly legitimate issue to raise.

Posted by: Kent Scheidegger | Oct 22, 2008 6:57:33 PM

I am sure without seeing the proof that it is a classic half-truth, given what time of year it is.

Posted by: Da Man | Oct 22, 2008 7:11:10 PM

Something you guys missed - Rudy's late climbing on board may indicate McCain's chances are better than the published polls show. He wouldn't jump on a sinking ship. I'm an engineer working military jet engine development. I got the link from Instapundit.

Posted by: Jim M | Oct 22, 2008 8:30:46 PM

Grits, do you really think Obama's "positions" reflect his true beliefs? He lauded terrorist Ayers' book on juvenile justice, which basically said that young predators should simply be let go. He made a reference to the "just us" system, which betrays a certain hostility to a system which keeps us all safe. Obama would appoint judges who would be much more likely to toss state convictions and death sentences. Obama leapt to the defense of the Jena Six thugs.

Do you really expect us to believe that there is little difference between McCain and Obama on crime? Now it may be that Obama just isn't willing to give rein to his sympathies towards criminals because he doesn't want to risk the negative publicity, but make no mistake, Obama is soft on crime.

Posted by: | Oct 23, 2008 12:25:56 AM

TalkLeft says it well.

'Soft On Crime' Makes a Comeback

The Obama campaign issued a statement Wednesday from Tom Nee, president of the National Association of Police Organizations, denouncing the mailer as the most dishonest attack "from an increasingly dishonest, dishonorable campaign."

"It's clear that Sen. McCain and his agents would rather distort facts and scare people than talk about his disastrous public safety and economic policies that offer no change from the last eight years," Nee said.

Posted by: | Oct 23, 2008 3:15:07 AM

This is just silly political rhetoric. It is meant for the lay people only. If it was meant to be taken seriously, it would have included specific citations. But it did not. This is just for the stupid people (as many call them).

And even someone that opposes mandatory minimums for any murder might have good reasons for doing so. But that is beyond the scope of a discussion in involving the stupid people.

(By the way stupid people is what a member of Rudy's campaign called the lay people in the flyover.)



Posted by: S.cotus | Oct 23, 2008 6:21:37 AM

Rudi wouldn't jump on a sinking ship?

How to explain his attempts to get now-indicted Bernie Kerrick

Posted by: Da Man | Oct 24, 2008 11:29:05 AM

Post a commentToyota Motor Corp will invest $500 million in Uber to jointly work on developing self-driving cars, a source familiar with the matter said on Monday, a bid by both companies to catch up to rivals in the hotly competitive autonomous driving business. Toyota, one of the world's largest carmakers, and Uber Technologies Inc, the leading ride-hailing service, are widely seen as lagging the competition in developing self-driving cars. The partnership deepens an existing relationship and reflects CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's strategy of Uber developing autonomous vehicles through ...(Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp will invest about $500 million in Uber Technologies Inc to jointly work on developing driverless vehicles, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.The investment valued Uber at about $72 billion, WSJ reported. Toyota's U.S. listed shares rose 3.2 percent in volume spike in afternoon trading.Toyota and Uber were not immediately available for comment.Earlier this year, a group of investors led by Japan's SoftBank Group Corp invested in Uber, as Softbank became its largest shareholder. Carmakers, tech companies and ...WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump will make a trade announcement at 11 a.m. (1500 GMT) on Monday, the White House said, as anticipation builds that the United States and Mexico are close to an agreement between the two North American Free Trade Agreement nations. Earlier on Monday Trump wrote in a post on Twitter: "A big deal looking good with Mexico!" Meanwhile, the Mexican economy minister said Mexican and U.S. officials were nearing an agreement. (Reporting by Jeff Mason; Writing by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)(This story has not been edited by Business Standard ...WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto told U.S. President Donald Trump in a phone call on Monday that his country wants to incorporate Canada into a newly-struck trade deal amid renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.Trump said he would call Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau soon and that if Canada wants to negotiate fairly the United States would do so. (Reporting by Jeff Mason, Lisa Lambert; editing by Grant McCool)(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States told the World Trade Organization on Monday it would block the reappointment of one of the WTO's four remaining appeals judges next month, leaving the bare minimum of three on what is effectively the supreme court of trade.There are normally seven members of the WTO's Appellate Body, but three have already left and Shree Baboo Chekitan Servansing needs to be reappointed for a second term next month. Three judges is the minimum needed to hear appeals. Trade diplomats and lawyers say the United States is precipitating a crisis at the WTO by vetoing judicial ...WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and Mexico have agreed to a 16-year lifespan for the North American Free Trade agreement, with a review every six years that can extend the pact for 16 years more, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said on Monday. The plan would not contain an automatic expiration for NAFTA as proposed in the prior U.S. demand for a "sunset clause." (Reporting by David Lawder; editing by Grant McCool)(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The trade deal between the United States and Mexico will stand even if Canada does not come to an agreement with the Trump administration in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico's foreign minister said on Monday."If for any reason the government of Canada and the United States do not reach a (NAFTA) agreement, we already know that there will still be a deal between Mexico and the United States," Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray told a news conference in Washington. (Reporting by Sharay Angulo)(Only the headline and picture ...By Marcelo RochabrunSAO PAULO (Reuters) - Uber said on Monday it would appeal a ruling by a labor court in Brazil in favor of a driver who demanded to be considered an employee of the ride hailing app, whose labor model views drivers as independent contractors. The ruling, however, will not be implemented until all appeals have been made, the judge wrote in a decision on Friday. Uber Technologies Inc said in a statement that it will file an appeal before the nation's top labor court, saying there was "solid jurisprudence" to support its case. The company added that it has already won 123 ...A Delhi resident's PAN Card was misused in a recent case of data theft. Anuj Kumar Srivastav, a 27-year-old sales executive in a pharma company, has claimed that his PAN Card details were stolen and transactions of more than Rs 20 crore made in his name. The Lakshmi Nagar resident said that his name was listed as "director" in 13 firms with the stolen data. Moreover, a deal of around Rs 61 lakh was made with a Hong Kong-based company on his name. Srivastav is a working professional with a monthly salary of Rs 25,000 per month, owns a WagonR car, and lives in a modest rented accommodation. Srivastav came to know about the misuse of his personal details when the Income Tax Department issued a notice to him earlier this year, The Indian Express reported.

He said that when he first got the notice, he didn't take it seriously. Srivastav ignored the first three notices as he thought they were mistakenly sent to him. The notices intimated him that on April 23, 2015 Rs 61.37 lakh were remitted from one Maxkart Impex company to Dynamic Telecom Trading Lts situated at Bright Way Tower in Mong Kok Road.

"I got a call from an IT official who informed me that the transaction was carried forward from Janakpuri branch of a national bank. The payment was made allegedly in lieu of import of software where I was made as a proprietor of Maxkart Impex company," said Srivastav, as mentioned in the daily.

Few days later he went to the bank along with a CA, where he was showed the photocopy of his voter ID, PAN card and his photo but with a signature that was not his. He eventually filed a complaint with Delhi Police and the Enforcement Directorate but no action was taken.

Meanwhile, Srivastav found that a "heavy amount" was deducted on his tax, following which he tried to approach the investigating agency again. It is then that he found that he was made director of 13 companies with the help of his PAN card and "bogus accounts" were created from where transactions of Rs 20 crore were made in the last seven months.

Eventually, on July 31, a Delhi court ordered the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Delhi Police to act on the complaint and take out a detailed report on the matter by September 1. A senior official of the EOW said that initially they sent the matter to the IT department but were eventually asked by the court to investigate it themselves. The Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) Sumedh Kumar Sethi also told the daily that cases involving cheating and breach of trust amounting to more than Rs 2 crore will be dealt with by the EOW.

Srivastav said that he was not given a personal loan of even Rs 5 lakh once banks perused his IT documents. He now hopes that the IT department would rectify the mistake.

While Srivastav may soon be out of this mess, the case raises concerns about safety of documents such as PAN and Aadhaar, which are increasingly becoming necessary to avail governtment schemes and even phone SIMs. As it is, India still does not have data protection laws.

French security researcher, Elliot Alderson, has been consistently challenging Indian authorities and UIDAI over the lack of data security.

(Edited by Anwesha Madhukalya) Lots of notable sentencing action in the circuit courts | Main | What's the early line on the upcoming OJ sentencing? 

December 3, 2008

Another reminder of the crime dog that did not bark in the 2008 election season

Since one senate race was only decided last night and another one remains unresolved, this commentary I just noted on SSRN still is timely. The piece is by Professor Stephen Saltzburg from the Summer 2008 issue of the ABA's Criminal Justice magaine, and it is titled "Where is Criminal Justice in this Presidential Year?". Here is the abstract:

This article notes that throughout the presidential campaigns there has been little emphasis on criminal justice and few serious proposals by candidates for changing or improving the way in which the federal government enforces criminal law. There has been little discussion about the respective roles that the federal government and the states should play in law enforcement. The author calls for the next president to convene an inclusive national congress on criminal justice. He encourages the president to bring together prosecutors, defense counsel, judges, legislators, law enforcement, correctional officials, probation and parole officers, academics, victims advocacy groups, other public interest organizations, and ordinary citizens to reexamine and establish our criminal justice priorities, to propose reforms that will identify more clearly those whose criminal acts warrant long prison sentences and those who are better served by treatment.

December 3, 2008 at 09:23 AM | Permalink

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I never even realized this either until now...that makes me feel safe...lol I know my state govt won't do anything about it either.

Posted by: Ka-Bar John | Dec 4, 2008 10:29:56 AM

Post a commentMinister for Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad has made a strong pitch for profit generated by digital platforms such as Google, FaceBook and Twitter, from big markets such as India, being ploughed back to create more jobs in these countries.

According to an official statement issued on Sunday, the minister told the G20 conference at Salta in Argentina that the largest and most dynamic markets for digital services are in Asia, Latin America and Africa with India having one of the largest footprints of several popular social media and other digital platforms.

"It is only fair and just that the revenue and profit generated from these platforms be equitably reinvested in the largest markets to create more infrastructure and generate more job opportunities for the people there," Prasad said.

He articulated India's concerns about data protection and individual privacy and informed the meeting that India had already put in place stringent measures backed by laws passed by parliament.

Prasad said that privacy cannot prohibit innovation nor can privacy become the shield for the corrupt or terrorists. "We need data to improve business but the data must be anonymous, objective, and taken with consent," he added.

The minister said that India believed in internet access for all, adding that the Internet is one of the finest creations of the human mind, but it cannot be the monopoly of a few.

He highlighted the fact that India had taken a serious note of reported misuse of social media platform data. "Such platforms will never be allowed to abuse our election process for extraneous means," he said.

The Minister further said that the purity of the democratic process should never be compromised and that India will take all required steps to deter and punish those who seek to vitiate this process. India's views received wide appreciation and support from several delegations including the hosts Argentina, Germany and the EU.

Several other countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Indonesia and Japan expressed a keen desire to work with India in a range of IT and cyber related fields.

India also presented a non-paper at the meeting, held on August 23 to 24, listing its experience of using government platforms for inclusion and economic development, which was well received.

The G20 member nations agreed to promote policies that will contribute to bridging all forms of digital divide, with special attention to the digital gender divide.The six-month deadline set by RBI to finalise resolution plans for around 70 large stressed accounts worth over Rs 3.8 lakh crore comes to a close on Monday with banks making a last mile dash to avoid bankruptcy proceedings against these defaulters who are mostly in the power and highways sectors.

Bankers are of the view that the bankruptcy resolutions at the national company law tribunal (NCLT) so far have seen them taking large haircuts which in cases like Alok Industries was as high as 86 per cent.

The RBI circular asks banks to identify projects with even a day's default as stressed assets, and conclude resolution proceedings in 180 days. The circular came into effect on March 1 and the 180-day deadline concludes on August 27.

If no resolution is reached by today, these accounts, which also include some telecom companies, will have to be referred to NCLT to initiate bankruptcy proceedings, the RBI had said.

Banks are trying to come up with resolution plan for these accounts as going to NCLT will mean large haircuts. In some of the stressed accounts, some lenders have already finalised resolution plans, bankers said.

It can be noted that almost three fourths of these Rs 3.8 lakh crore-worth stressed assets are power companies which had dragged the central bank to the Allahabad High Court where the matter is still pending.

That the matter is sub-judice also gives bankers some confidence that they may get some more time to resolve them out-of-court. SBI managing director Arijit Basu had said on Friday that about 7-8 power sector projects worth Rs 17,000 crore are expected to be resolved soon as lenders are nearing consensus on these.

"There are about 34 stressed power projects and the combined value of their outstanding loans is about Rs 1.74 lakh crore. We have looked at 13-14 accounts which would entail changes in management, investment etc. Out of these, 7-8 accounts we are looking at very closely to get some consensus among the banks," Basu said.

"A few banks have already sanctioned resolution plans for some cases and others are in the process of doing so," said an executive director of a state-run bank.Messaging app WhatsApp is in news for all the wrong reasons for quite some time. From combating fake news to launching its payments service, the company has constantly come under scanner for failing to comply with the Indian laws. On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a notice to the company and the government, asking why WhatsApp has not yet appointed a grievance officer in India. This may spell trouble for the Facebook-owned company, which has big plans for India -- its biggest market in terms of the customer base.

A Supreme Court bench under Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman and Justice Indu Malhotra asked all the stakeholders -- WhatsApp, Law and Justice Ministry, Finance Ministry and IT Ministry -- to reply in the next four weeks.

Supreme Court today issued a notice to #WhatsApp, IT and Finance ministry and sought a detailed reply from them within four weeks as to why a grievance officer in India has not been appointed yet by Whatsapp pic.twitter.com/iqxaiIi5AP - ANI (@ANI) August 27, 2018

Interestingly, other foreign players like Facebook, Google, etc, have already hired their grievance executives for India. Google has hired a grievance professional for its payments service Google Tez too. During a meeting on August 21, Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had asked WhatsApp CEO Chris Daniels to comply with certain guidelines to minimise the spread of fake news. He said the company must have a local grievance officer in India and a system to trace the origin of fake messages. However, in a later response, the company said it can't trace the origin of a chat due to the end-to-end encryption system and the private nature of the platform.

During an SC hearing on Monday, petitioner advocate Virag Gupta, who was appearing for the Centre for Accountability and Systemic Change, said the company should not be allowed to run its payments service unless it hires a grievance authority who can address customers' issues and coordinate with the investigating authorities. He said the platform does not even fulfil the 'Know Your Customer' norms mandated by the government for data and online payment companies.

In the past three months, India has seen 39 incidents of lynching due to mass misinformation spread on WhatsApp. The government has also come under intense pressure to take steps to stop such incidents from happening. It has now asked WhatsApp to address three major concerns -- hire a grievance officer in India, set up a data storage facility, and proper compliance of Indian laws. The company has assured the government it will address all major concerns. To curb fake news spread, WhatsApp recently rolled out the limited 'forward message' option for India, which restricts a forward message to just five users.

(Edited by Manoj Sharma)27 Aug 2018, 7:40 PM

Amazon plans to invest $700 mn in the Future Group

Jeff Bezos-led Amazon in India has begun formal negotiations with Kishore Biyani's Future Group to invest around $600-700 million for a 12 to 15 per cent stake in the retail major as reported by the Business Standard. The two entities have signed a term sheet to take the talks further, sources said. This denotes the two sides have officially entered a pact. If the deal materialises it will most likely be a combination of cash and stocks.

Warren Buffet in talks to invest in Paytm parent firm

In what might be the first direct investment in India by legendary investor Warren Buffet, his Birkshire Hathaway is in talks to invest about Rs 2500 cr in Paytm parent One97 Communications. If the transaction takes place, it would value Paytm at over $10 bn. The firm is already backed by China's Alibaba Group Holdings and Japan's Soft Bank. One of Berkshire's key fund managers, Todd Combs, who is also a potential chief investment officer at the company, is leading the transaction, according to the Economic Times.

Govt says Google, Facebook must plough back profits

Minister for Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad has made a strong pitch for profit generated by digital platforms such as Google, FaceBook and Twitter, from big markets such as India, being ploughed back to create more jobs in these countries. The minister told the G20 conference at Salta in Argentina that the largest and most dynamic markets for digital services are in Asia, Latin America and Africa with India having one of the largest footprints of several popular social media and other digital platforms. Several other countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Indonesia and Japan expressed a keen desire to work with India in a range of IT and cyber related fields.

Rafale row: Anil Ambani files Rs 5000-crore defamation lawsuit against National Herald

Anil Ambani's Reliance Group companies have filed a Rs 5,000 crore defamation suit against Congress-owned National Herald, claiming an article published in the newspaper regarding the Rafale fighter jet deal was "libellous and derogatory". They also filed a second, similar suit against Gujarat Congress leader Shaktisinh Gohil seeking Rs 5,000 crore in damages for defamation.

RBI deadline for banks to resolve Rs 3.8 lakh cr bad loans ends today

The six-month deadline set by RBI to finalise resolution plans for around 70 large stressed accounts worth over Rs 3.8 lakh crore comes to a close on Monday with banks making a last mile dash to avoid bankruptcy proceedings against these defaulters who are mostly in the power and highways sectors. The RBI circular asks banks to identify projects with even a day's default as stressed assets, and conclude resolution proceedings in 180 days. If no resolution is reached by today, these accounts, which also include some telecom companies, will have to be referred to NCLT to initiate bankruptcy proceedings, the RBI had said.

Indian Railways to revise flexi-fare scheme, introduce discounts next month

The railways is all set to come up with a revised flexi-fare scheme next month to bring in some relief for passengers, who, in some sectors pay as much as airfares for the premium trains, sources said. They said the ministry is planning to suspend the scheme temporarily as an experiment during lean months in some identified trains as they are seeing occupancy as low as 30 per cent.

Vijay Mallya listed to appear before special court under new fugitive law today

Beleaguered businessman Vijay Mallya is listed to appear before a special court here today as part of the first action initiated against an absconding accused under the newly enacted fugitive economic offenders law.

Official sources said while it is certain that Mallya may not appear in person as he is contesting an Indian extradition case in London, it is expected that his authorised legal representative may submit a reply to the court as part of his official response to the notice.

Anil Ambani steps down as director of Reliance Naval and Engineering

Reliance Naval and Engineering Ltd (RNAVAL) has said Anil D Ambani has resigned as director of the company with immediate effect. Ambani has resigned in compliance with provisions of Section 165 of the Companies Act, 2013, prescribing the limit on directorships to only 10 public companies, RNAVAL said in a regulatory filing.Flying of Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) or in common parlance, drones, will be legal across India from December 1. The Ministry of Civil Aviation has finalised a national drone policy, and has fixed parameters - including height - for drone flights. From the outset the policy outlines a No Drone Zones. The regulation defines "No Drone Zones" as areas around airports, near international border, Vijay Chowk in Delhi, State Secretariat Complex in state capitals, strategic locations, vital military installations and such.

Owners and pilots will have to be registered, and permission will be required for each flight. Users will need to apply for permission on an app and digital permits will be given instantly through an automated process.

During daytime flights, drones can be flown to a height of up to 400 ft. The use of drones by civilians is currently restricted by the Directorate General of Civilian Aviation.

The Ministry of Civil Aviation said that drones are a technology platform that has wide-ranging applications from photography to agriculture, from infrastructure asset maintenance to insurance. A senior ministry official said, "Drones range in size from very small and those that can carry multiple kilograms of payload. It was necessary to develop global standard drone regulations that would permit, with appropriate safeguards, the commercial application of various drone technologies."

Despite pressure from drone operators and law and order matrix in the country the preparation of drone regulations through a Civil Aviation Requirement (CAR) has taken multiple years. The ministry justified the delay by saying that drone technologies have been evolving very rapidly and many countries are still experimenting with their drone regulations and no International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) rules have been developed. But police and intelligence agencies have been reiterating that India's security environment necessitates extra precautions.

Minister of Civil Aviation, Suresh Prabhu said, "Today we start an exciting new chapter in India's aviation history by allowing commercial use of drones. I am sure that many new and exciting applications will emerge that will propel India's economy forward. Our progressive regulations will encourage a vast Made in India drone industry."

The new drone policy has a huge digital root. Instead of simply digitizing a paper-based process for registering and operating drones, India has formulated an all-digital process. The Digital Sky Platform is the first-of-its-kind national unmanned traffic management (UTM) platform that implements "no permission, no takeoff" (NPNT).

As per this rule, users will be required to do a one-time registration of their drones, pilots and owners. For every flight (apart for the nano category), users will be required to ask for permission on a mobile app. Once a request is filed on the app an automated process would permit or deny the request instantly.

For flying in controlled Airspace, filing of flight plan and obtaining Air Defence Clearance (ADC) /Flight Information Centre (FIC) number shall be necessary.

Since law and order agencies were worried over unauthorised flights of drones and the threat they pose, the rules have been created to prevent illegal operations and to ensure public safety. Any drone without a digital permit to fly will simply not be able to takeoff. The unmanned traffic management will operate as a traffic regulator in the drone airspace and will coordinate closely with the defense and civilian air traffic controllers (ATCs) to ensure that drones remain on the approved flight paths.

The rules announced today are the first in the series and thus titled Regulations 1.0. These regulations will enable the safe, commercial usage of drones starting early December.Budget carrier SpiceJet today successfully operated India's first test flight powered by biojet fuel. According to the airline, a Bombardier 78-seater Q400 aircraft, partially using biojet fuel, took off from Dehradun and landed at the airport in the national capital.

The flight was powered with a blend of 75 per cent air turbine fuel (ATF) and 25 per cent biojet fuel, it said.

The global aviation body IATA (International Air Transport Association) recently set out a target for one billion passengers to fly on aircraft using a mix of clean energy and fossil fuels by 2025. To put it into context, some 4.1 billion people flew last year globally.

In a release, the airline said the advantage of using biojet fuel as compared to ATF is that it reduces carbon emissions and enhances fuel efficiency. Made from Jatropha crop, the fuel has been developed by the CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum (IIP), Dehradun, SpiceJet said.

Around 20 people, including officials from aviation regulator DGCA and SpiceJet, were in the test flight. The duration of the flight was around 25 minutes, according to an airline executive.

SpiceJet Chairman and Managing Director Ajay Singh said biojet fuel is low cost and helps in significantly reducing carbon emissions.

"It has the potential to reduce our dependence on traditional aviation fuel by up to 50 per cent on every flight and bring down fares," he said.

According to global airlines' body IATA, aviation industry contributes to two per cent of the total global greenhouse gas emissions. The biojet fuel has been recognised by American Standard Testing Method (ASTM) and meets the specification standards of Pratt & Whitney and Bombardier for commercial application in aircraft.

Business Today had earlier reported that bio-jet fuel, which is prepared from inedible oils and fats, is 60-70 per cent more expensive than conventional jet fuel. A change in the ATF (aviation turbine fuel) mix could bump up cost of operations for airlines, and affect their bottomlines.

In 2008, a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 flew from London to Amsterdam in a first ever flight using biojet fuel. Since then, a number of airlines have taken to the biojet fuel path, including Cathay Pacific, JetBlue, Lufthansa, Qantas, and United Airlines who have made significant investments by forward-purchasing 1.5 billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

Some airports such as Oslo, Stockholm, Brisbane and Los Angeles are already mixing SAF with the regular jet fuel.

In 2017, some 100,000 flights were flown on bio-jet fuel across the globe, and IATA expects this number to hit one million flights by 2020. A flight completely powered by biojet fuel has the potential to reduce carbon emissions by up to 80 per cent.

With PTI inputsWashington is pressing the European Union to speed up trade negotiations launched after last month's meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, two German and a U.S. official said on Saturday.

Emily Haber, Germany's ambassador to the United States, told reporters a working group formed after the Trump-Juncker meeting had convened for the first time this week, and U.S. officials were pressing "for very rapid results."

She said EU officials would need a clear mandate to move beyond the current "scoping exercise" and a deal would need to be reached before European Parliament elections in May 2019.

"The Americans are in fact pressing for very rapid results," Haber said at an event to unveil plans for more than 1,000 events in the United States next year aimed at strengthening bilateral ties.

"As far as the timelines go, I would point out that we have European Parliament elections next year, and an agreement would have to be reached in a timely manner before these elections," she said.

A U.S. official confirmed Washington was asking for talks to be put on "a much faster timeline" but gave no specific date.

Trump agreed during the meeting with Juncker to refrain from imposing threatened car tariffs on European firms while the two sides launched negotiations to cut tariffs on steel, aluminum and other goods.

The surprise agreement eased the threat of a transatlantic trade war, but U.S. officials have grown frustrated about the slow pace of progress in subsequent weeks, with the first working group meeting postponed until after European holidays.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last month he was hopeful the issue could be resolved "very quickly."

A European Commission spokesman confirmed a meeting of the EU-U.S. working group took place this week but gave no details.

Stefan Mair, a member of the executive board of the German industry group BDI, said some progress was reported at the first meeting of the new working group, including on the expected timetable, but did not elaborate.

"We know the Trump administration is strongly pressing for short timelines and quicker progress," Mair said at the event showcasing ties between Germany and the United States.

"But we insist that this should not happen at the expense of a thorough result because we are interested in seeing an agreement that goes beyond tariffs and looks at more general issues affecting business relationships," he added. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ieIrish Central Bank Deputy Governor Sharon Donnery, who leads the European Central Bank's taskforce on bad loans, became the first person to publicly put her name forward for the post of chair at the bank's Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) on Friday.

The ECB began the process last month of looking for an expert to succeed supervisory chief Daniele Nouy and oversee a sector still weighed down by non-performing loans and weak profitability following the bloc's debt crisis.

Nouy, who set up the SSM from scratch in 2014, is due to step down when her five-year term ends on Dec. 31. Prospective candidates had until Friday to apply.

"Ms. Donnery is an exceptional candidate and Minister Donohoe is pleased to have a person of her stature going forward for the role," a spokeswoman for Ireland's Finance Minister Pashcal Donohoe said in a statement.

Media reports have also mentioned European Banking Authority Chair Andrea Enria, ECB supervisor Ignazio Angeloni and former Dutch supervisor Jan Sijbrand among potential candidates.

Three senior Italian banking sources told Reuters last month that they expected Enria, 57, to apply, with one of them seeing him as the "perfect choice".

Although it is up to individuals to apply, no candidate is likely to succeed without their home government's approval and a direct lobbying effort among euro zone members.

Ireland's government strongly backed central bank governor Philip Lane earlier this year for the post of ECB vice president that eventually went to Spain's Luis de Guindos. Lane is expected to be a candidate to become ECB Chief Economist, another board position that is up for grabs next year.

The race to replace ECB chief Mario Draghi in 2019 could also influence the shortlist of supervisors the ECB settles on before making a final proposal to the EU Council in the autumn after consultation with the European Parliament and the Council, among others.

The ECB may also come under pressure to find a woman for the job as only two of its 25 Governing Council members are female. The Parliament has pressed EU nations for years to pick more women for top ECB jobs, something they failed to do when they selected de Guindos as vice president earlier this year.

Donnery, who joined Ireland's central bank as an economist in 1996, became its director of credit institutions in 2014 and was promoted to the role of deputy governor two years later, the first woman to hold the role. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie Lots of notable pieces in August 2018 issue of Criminology & Public Policy | Main | "Capital and punishment: Resource scarcity increases endorsement of the death penalty" 

August 27, 2018

A notable (and curious?) call for criminal justice reform that serves as another sign of new political times

The passing of John McCain this weekend led me to review some of my long ago postings in the blog topic archive labelled Campaign 2008 and sentencing issues. The main theme I kept returning to is how little discussion there was of criminal justice issues during that election cycle. Here are links to a few of the 2008 posts on that theme:

Other posts in that archive that might still be considered notable a decade later include Rudy Giuliani doing robocalls accusing Senator Obama of being soft on crime and Is Senator Clinton to the right of Justice Scalia on sentencing issues?. (This last post has me thinking again about the fact that Hillary Clinton's criminal justice history makes her seem much more like a member of the "tough and tougher" crowd than many (most?) members of the current GOP. Hillary Clinton in 2007 (in)famously opposed making retroactive the first small crack guideline amendments passed by the US Sentencing Commission, most of the GOP seemingly now supports making the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act fully retroactive.)

Of course, circa 2018, there is a heck of a lot more talk about criminal justice reform from an array of political candidates in all parties. And I noticed this morning this interesting (and somewhat curious) commentary by Beto O'Rourke, a Texas congressman taking on Ted Cruz for election to the US Senate, under the headline "ORourke: Texas should lead the way on true criminal justice reform." I recommend the piece in full, and here are excerpts:

On Wednesday, I toured the Harris County Jail with Sheriff Ed Gonzalez and met men from this community who have made a mistake from which they may or may not recover. Men who dont have the resources to post bail. Some of whom got arrested on purpose to get the treatment and care they need, care they wont be able to afford or access on the outside. In fact, the Harris County Jail is the largest provider of mental health services in our state, a state that is the least insured in the nation. Of the 10,000 inmates in the Harris County Jail, one quarter of them are being prescribed at least one psychotropic medication. The jail has more people receiving psychiatric treatment every day than the nine state mental hospitals in Texas combined. But beyond those who need health care, there are many more languishing behind bars for nonviolent crimes  sixty percent yet to even be convicted. Unable to work, to pay taxes, to raise their kids, to contribute to our society, to realize their full potential. And its happening at the average cost of $87 per person, per day, and more than $400 per person, per day for prisoners requiring medication or medical treatment. That tab is ultimately picked up by the taxpayers of Harris County. The jail I visited is not an outlier. Rather, it is part of the worlds largest prison population. One that is disproportionately comprised of people of color, though we know that people of all races use illegal drugs at roughly the same rate. Many have called this the New Jim Crow, and for good reason. One in four black children have had a parent in the criminal justice system, compared to just four percent of white children. That rate is nearly two times what it was in the 1980s. And it begins with a school-to-prison pipeline that starts as early as kindergarten, where a black child is four to five times as likely to be suspended or expelled as a white child. Following my visit, I am more convinced than ever that Texas can and must take the lead in building a criminal justice system that is more fair and that urgently puts our country closer to the words written above the highest court in our land: equal justice under law. This is how I propose we do it. First, we should eliminate private, for-profit prisons from our justice system. Locking someone up is a power that should be reserved for our government, not outsourced to corporations that have the perverse incentive of getting more people behind bars so that there are more profits for their shareholders. Second, we need to end the failed war on drugs that has long been a war on people, waged on some people over other people. Who is going to be the last man  more likely than not a black man  to languish behind bars for possessing or using marijuana when it is legal in more than half of the states in this country? We should end the federal prohibition on marijuana and expunge the records of those who were locked away for possessing it, ensuring that they can get work, finish their education, contribute to their full potential and to the greatness of this country. Third, we must stop using mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent drug offenses  a practice that costs taxpayers dearly and destroys lives in the process by locking up people who could safely re-enter society. And we replace this practice with policies that begin treating addiction like the public health concern it is. Fourth, we can end the current use of bail bonds that punish people for being poor. This is a tactic that wastes resources on incarcerating those who are not a threat to anyone, not a flight risk, not likely to be repeat offenders. In the Harris County Jail, its estimated that 500 to 600 of the inmates at any given time fit this description  in for misdemeanors but without the resources to post bail as I did more than twenty years ago. Finally, we should provide meaningful reentry to help cut down on recidivism for those who committed non-violent crimes. That starts with strong rehabilitation services, counseling and access to preventative health care. It continues by banning the box on job applications so those formerly incarcerated can work and pay taxes, returning drivers licenses so they can get to that place of employment, allowing them to apply for loans that can unlock skills trainings, and ensuring their constitutional right to participate in civic life by voting is protected.... Giving low-level offenders a second chance no matter the color of their skin or the economic status they hold can create opportunity for all of us. It will help build a future that is more just, more fair, and more prosperous for every single person in this state and this country. It is time for Texas to lead the way.

I call this commentary "curious: because O'Rourke is talking about his experience touring a local jail while running for federal office, and he makes no mention of current federal proposals like the FIRST STEP Act. Senator Ted Cruz has been resistant to some federal sentencing reforms proposed even by the GOP, and I would think candidate O'Rourke could and should seek to clearly distinguish his position from that of his opponent. Moveover, as students of modern criminal justice know, it is a bit curious to call for "Texas to lead the way" in criminal justice reform because, to a large extent, Texas already has starting the the mid 2000s when the state turned away from building more prisons and invested in more alternatives to incarceration.

Curious particulars notwithstanding, it is still heartening that our modern political times have evolved to the point that prominent candidates in the Lone Star State are eager to talk at length about improving Texas justice (even when a candidate is seeking a federal office).

August 27, 2018 at 12:23 PM | Permalink

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Post a commentRural banks have thrived across China since 2007 as part of the governments plan to promote financial inclusion. Photo: VCG

China Construction Bank (CCB), one the big four Chinese state-owned banks, sold 27 rural banks to Bank of China (BOC), making BOC the biggest owner of village banks in the country.

Bank of China, also one of the big four, bought the 27 rural banks for 1.6 billion yuan ($240 million), offering a slight premium on the listing price of 1.57 billion yuan.

In April 2017, BOC bought 15 other rural banks from policy lender China Development Bank for 978 million yuan, nearly 20% less than the sellers asking price. The deal gave BOC the countrys largest banking network penetrating into the vast rural areas.

Rural banks, with business mainly covering villages or townships, have thrived across China since 2007 as part of Chinese governments plan to promote financial inclusion. Since then, CCB invested a total of 1.4 billion in creating the 27 rural banks.

But after 10 years of development, the banks contribution to the parents bottom line was minimal. As of the end of 2017, the 27 rural banks had a total net profit of 281 million yuan, or just a 10th of a percent of the parent banks total net profit of 243.6 billion yuan.

While BOC has designated rural banks as its core approach to expanding financial inclusion, CCB has never specified a role for rural banks in its financial inclusion strategy. Instead, CCB has emphasized the use of financial technology for the underserved rural segment.

CCB listed the 27 rural banks on the Beijing Financial Assets Exchange in late June seeking potential bidders. It stipulated that the buyer would have to acquire the 27 banks all together. The seller also set 13 additional buyer requirements, such as total assets of no less than 1 trillion yuan and ownership of at least 20 rural banks as of June 30, 2017. The requirements made BOC the only eligible potential buyer.

In 2011, BOC set up a joint venture with Fullerton Financial Holdings, owned by the Singapore state investment firm Temasek, to establish a network of rural banks in China.

As of the end of 2017, BOC Fullerton had 97 rural banks, including the 15 banks acquired from China Development Bank, with a total net profit of 457 million yuan in 2017.

Rural banks profitability could vary significantly. Among the 15 banks bought from China Development Bank, eight had net losses in 2016. Caixin has learned that some profitable rural banks could have an annual return on equity as high as 30%.

BOC Fullerton Chairman Wang Xiaoming told Caixin that the company has patience with the development of rural banks.

Bank of China doesnt expect the rural banks to provide an immediate return, Wang said. He said he expected the acquisition to hurt the parent banks financial results, but the parent is big enough to absorb.Chinas ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing has fired two senior managers and promised business reforms after a 20-year-old woman was allegedly raped and killed by a driver over the weekend while using Didis popular carpooling service.

But, the public rightfully asks, is that enough?

The incident occurred just three months after a young female flight attendant using the same Didi service was killed by different driver. In both cases, Didi suspended the Hitch carpooling service  which matches drivers and passengers on the same route  and promised to revamp its safety measures.

Also in both cases, Didi said it had received complaints from other riders about the suspect before the killing, without following up on the complaints.

Government regulators met Sunday with Didi executives, ordering the company to take concrete measures rather than just lip service and make passenger safety its bottom line.

The repeated crimes are alarm bells for Didi to seriously reassess its business model as its corporate reputation is at stake. For regulators, it is time to re-evaluate their approach to regulating freewheeling internet behemoths.

Didi launched the Hitch service in 2015 as a budget version of its ride-hailing service. The company has marketed Hitch with a focus on social networking and has allowed drivers to create public tags for passengers, including physical features, gender and age. This function was removed after the May incident.

Huang Jieli, the former general manager of Hitch who was fired Sunday, once described Hitch as a very sexy application scenario to make a private car a half-open, half-private social space. Didi has repeatedly advertised Hitch with the implication of dating and making friends.

Many analysts have argued that such a model makes a carpooling service a cradle for sexual harassment, misleading drivers and putting passengers privacy and safety at risk.

Now, after a second passenger killing in three months, the public deserves to know whether this business model and product logic were backed by Huang personally, or whether they reflect Didis business philosophy. And will the removal of an individual executive make things different?

After the May incident, the transport ministry published an article accusing ride-hailing companies  without identifying Didi  of flat-out ignoring regulatory directives, just giving lip service in place of taking concrete measures. The article said the companies care only about valuation and investor benefits and dont take the public interest seriously.

As ride-hailing platforms become a significant segment of the public transport system, regulators should improve supervision to catch up with the pace of the changing market. They shouldnt allow companies to use innovation as an excuse to avoid regulatory oversight.

Regulators should also show their teeth by imposing hefty fines that make violators feel real pain, rather than just holding meetings and sending rectification requests.

With 90% of the ride-hailing market and a $56 billion valuation, Didi has grown into a behemoth that regulators are hesitant to touch for fear of hurting the industry or local growth. This is partly because Chinese regulators often shoulder dual missions to regulate the market while encouraging an industry to grow. That can lead to a laissez-faire approach that encourages businesses to challenge regulatory boundaries.

Didi has faced repeated accusations of sexual harassment by its drivers as well as complaints that the company abuses its near-monopoly on ride-hailing to overcharge consumers. Regulators so far have made little effort to fix these issues.

In the latest incident, Didi has inescapable responsibility, in terms of business model, customer service and emergency response. It is time for Didi to make fundamental changes. Otherwise Didi, one of Chinas most established unicorn technology innovators, will march to the opposite side of the rule of law.

Zhou Dongxu covers policy in China for Caixin Media.

Translated by Han Wei (weihan@caixin.com)

Read more:

Beijing Blasts Didi After Another Passenger Killed by Driver

Timeline of Sexual Assaults Involving Didi DriversThe paper said the visit is expected to usher in new cooperation prospects between the two countries.



It reported that this is the first visit of a Vietnamese Head of State to Egypt since the two countries established diplomatic ties in 1963. Egypt was one of the first Arab countries to have relations with Vietnam.



The two Presidents will hold talks in Cairo discussing new prospects of bilateral cooperation in a variety of domains such as politics, economy, trade investment, culture and education.



The newspaper quoted President Quang as saying to Egyptian media that he was pleased to pay a state visit to Egypt at a time when the two countries were holding a range of significant events to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the establishment of the diplomatic relations.



The President was also quoted as saying that he would discuss with President Sisi and senior Cairo government officials the directions and measures to promote cooperation and friendship between the two countries in politics, defence, security, trade, investment, agriculture, education and training, culture and tourism



He added that there are immense prospects and potentials for bilateral cooperation across all areas between Vietnam and Egypt.



The newspaper also mentioned the official visit to Vietnam by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi in September last year.-VNAnews, latest-news

ACT government minister Mick Gentleman has offered internet giant Google his support in helping to set up an office in Canberra, as a subsidiary of Google's holding company steps up drone delivery trials in the capital. Mr Gentleman said he made the offer when he met Google co-founder Sergey Brin during a recent trip to California. "I did offer him an opportunity to set up a base in the ACT for Google," Mr Gentleman told The Canberra Times. "We know that Google, of course, provide great employment opportunities and great opportunities for career advancement as well. "We'd like to [take] any opportunity we can to help them, as long as the Canberra community is on board as well." Google played down any interest in expanding into the capital, with a spokesman referring The Canberra Times to a tweet posted by then-Google Australia managing director Jason Pellegrino in May. Mr Pellegrino said Google had been overwhelmed by interest from all over Australia, but was focused on its long-term growth in Sydney and its new office in Melbourne. Mr Gentleman's interest in attracting Google to the ACT comes as a subsidiary of Google's holding company, Alphabet, signalled its desire to continue expanding its drone delivery trials throughout Canberra. The company, Wing, "graduated" from Alphabet's X research division to become an independent business in July, and has already added to its offering in the Bonython area. Wing trialled automated drone delivery of Guzman y Gomez and Chemist Warehouse products to customers at Fernleigh Park in Googong and Royalla last year, before expanding into Bonython in 2018. Bunnings and Jasper and Myrtle Chocolates have since joined the trials. More than 100 customers in the Bonython area are signed up to receive deliveries from the drones, which fly at 120km/h and can carry up to 1.5 kilograms. Wing chief executive James Ryan Burgess said Wing had no plans to expand into other Australian cities, and hoped to start trials in other south Canberra suburbs in the coming months. He said Australia was at the forefront of drone technology, with particularly positive attitudes in the ACT. "We think this is great technology for all cities, but for now we really want to focus on Canberra and engage with the community before we focus on scaling," Mr Burgess said. "... Our intention would be to refine the technology and improve the service. "[Keeping it small in Bonython at the moment] allows us to really engage with people first-hand." Mr Burgess would not say exactly how many people Wing employed in Canberra, but said it was "a handful" of between five and 10, with others travelling back and forth to California. Bonython resident Jeremy Hawkes, who placed his first drone delivery order about three weeks ago, said he had enjoyed the convenience. Mr Hawkes said he had received an order from Guzman y Gomez about four minutes after placing it, saving him 15 or 20 minutes compared to the time it would have taken to travel to the store and return home. "The longest [turnaround] time has been about eight minutes," he said. "I've really enjoyed it."

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/d8d1d9d7-a9f8-4d24-b131-0aa7c6c4511e/r0_91_4828_2819_w1200_h678_fmax.jpgnews, crime

A man found guilty of trying to film a woman underneath a change room wall at a Canberra Kmart will appeal his conviction in the ACT Supreme Court. Dane Christian Muench will argue on Monday the magistrate was wrong to find him guilty and will ask the Supreme Court to dismiss the charges against him. At the heart of the defence case is the possibility Muench was wrongly accused in the minutes after the woman saw the phone pointed at her from underneath the cubicle wall. Muench was charged over the October 16, 2016, incident at the Tuggeranong Hyperdome after police released surveillance footage of the suspect and Muench was recognised. Muench did not deny he was in the Kmart changerooms around that time but denied it was him who tried to film the woman getting changed. The Greenway man pleaded not guilty to a charge of attempting to capture intimate data. However, a magistrate found the offences against Muench proved earlier this year. The woman had told the court she had entered the change room cubicle to try on some clothes, and that out of the corner of her eye she saw a man walk into the adjoining cubicle. As she undressed, she saw a black phone pointed at her from under the next cubicle. She pulled out her own phone and started filming, in footage that was later played to the ACT Magistrates Court when the case was heard last year. "Hey what are you doing?" the woman is heard on the video. "I've got you on tape." After she confronted the man she put her clothes back on, exited her cubicle, and went to find staff. A short while later, Muench exited the change room, where the woman was now standing with staff members. He angrily denied he had done anything wrong, dumped a pile of clothes, and then left, the court heard. Muench denies it was him or he was filming the woman under the cubicle door. The defence argues the woman took some five minutes to leave the cubicle after calling the man out, and that it is possible the real perpetrator left the scene before Muench entered with clothes to try on. The result was that when Muench eventually exited himself, he was simply assumed to be the offender, the defence argues. In the documents filed to court by Muench's solicitor Tom Taylor, of McKenna Taylor, Muench argues in part that the verdict of guilty was unreasonable or not supported by the evidence. His lawyers argue the magistrate erred in finding, on the whole of the evidence, that the only rational inference was that it was Muench who tried to film the woman. It is further argued that the magistrate erred in finding the woman would have heard any footsteps or opening of a door in the adjoining cubicle. The appeal is listed for hearing on Monday.

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/188e3cb8-01a4-4ca8-8601-b539ad517047/r0_48_940_579_w1200_h678_fmax.jpgForeign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying's Regular Press Conference on August 27, 2018

2018/08/27

Q: According to reports, a "lawmaker" from Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party said on social media that it was because the mainland accepted El Salvador's request to provide over 27 billion dollars that El Salvador established diplomatic relations with the mainland. What is your comment?

A: China and El Salvador established diplomatic relations on the basis of the one-China principle, which accords with the international law and basic norms governing international relations. It is justified and aboveboard. The Salvadorian government just made the same right choice as the UN and other 177 countries already did. The one-China principle is by no means a bargaining chip, and will never become one.

When establishing diplomatic relations with China, the Salvadorian side never proposed any economic preconditions. There is no such thing as the so-called "bargaining". The relevant person who claimed the so-called "checkbook diplomacy" is fabricating something out of thin air, deceiving himself and judging others by himself.

Q: According to Japanese media reports, the DPRK has released a Japanese man who was originally detained there. This man has now arrived in China presumably on his way back to Japan. Can you confirm that and do you have any details?

A: I'm not aware of the situation you mentioned.

Q: Reports say that on August 24, for the first time, both Pakistan and India took part in the anti-terror exercise called "Peace Mission-2018" of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Russia. Officials from the defense ministries of Pakistan and India said that they believe the two sides can learn from each other and it provides a unique opportunity for them to exchange experience. What is your comment on the exchanges and cooperation between Pakistan and India?

A: We welcome the joint participation of Pakistan and India in the anti-terror exercise under the SCO framework.

Both Pakistan and India are important countries in South Asia. A stable Pakistan-India relationship is of great significance to the peace and stability of the region and the peace and development of the world. We sincerely hope that the two countries can strengthen dialogue and cooperation bilaterally and within such multilateral mechanisms as the SCO, improve their relations and jointly uphold regional peace and stability.

Q: After the US and Australia banned Huawei and ZTE from supplying telecommunications equipment, the Japanese side also decided to ban Huawei from entering its market. What's your comment?

A: We have noted relevant reports. As far as I know, the Japanese government didn't make such remarks. If I remember correctly, this is just what Sankei Shimbun reported. The Chinese government always encourages the Chinese enterprises to conduct economic cooperation overseas on the basis of abiding by international rules and local laws. The cooperation between Chinese and foreign enterprises, including Japanese ones, is mutually beneficial and win-win in nature, and in line with international rules as well as local laws and regulations. We are concerned about relevant reports and will try to check on and verify the situation. We hope that the Japanese side will provide a fair, transparent and just environment for Chinese and Japanese enterprises to carry out normal and mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation, instead of the opposite.news, latest-news

The ACT's new watchdog for restrictive practices is investigating a fenced-off facility used to isolate a Canberra student with special needs from his peers. Following a report in The Canberra Times and calls from disability advocacy groups for an investigation, senior practitioner Mandy Donley confirmed she was looking into the case. An education directorate spokeswoman said no formal investigation was currently underway. A spokeswoman for Ms Donley said the senior practitioner had visited the school and was working with those involved. Last week, ACT Education Minister Yvette Berry defended the specialist school's decision to build a locked facility for Abdul-Ghani Ferkh, who has complex autism. While Canberra schools avoided restrictive practices where possible, Ms Berry said she had been assured the appropriate action had been taken by the school, which had rightly made safety a priority. People with Disabilities ACT director Robert Altamore blasted the facility as unacceptable in any school system, especially in a territory that prided itself on being a human rights jurisdiction. "It seems we have learned nothing from the [2015 autism cage] incident in the ACT," Mr Altamore said. "In some ways it's worse because he's [isolated] all the time." Abdul was suspended from the Woden School, which caters for students with moderate to high needs, in early April after running off campus to the local shops, and had been waiting for more than four months to return to class. This month, his family was told he could only come back under strict new conditions banning him from interacting with other students and some staff, and restricting his movements in the school to the new classroom, which is encircled by fences and a floor-to-ceiling security gate. The school said this was the only way to ensure the safety of its staff and Abdul after a string of destructive behaviour, but his family has labelled the set-up as inhumane and reported Abdul had been visibly upset since he returned to school on Thursday. While Abdul was initially eager to go back to class, his mother Safaa said he had since thrown his school bag in the bin. "He keeps looking for his friends, every day. [On Wednesday] he was very upset, he doesn't want to go back now," she said. An advocate supporting the family from Advocacy for Inclusion also labelled the facility as concerning and said money spent on its construction would have been better used supporting Abdul in class. Ms Donley, a forensic mental health nurse who investigated the use of restrictive practices in Victoria, took up the newly created role of senior practitioner in July but it is understood she cannot take formal action on a matter until her legislative powers kick in next month. From September 1, the watchdog will have the power to stop restrictive practices in ACT schools and disability services. Such practices are defined by the ACT government as anything used to "restrict the rights or freedom of movement of a person for the primary purpose of protecting the person or others from harm", including the seclusion of a person in a room or other space. New reforms underway in the wake of the 2015 autism cage scandal will also make it an offence from July 2019 to use a restrictive practice without a positive behaviour support plan or to ignore directions from the senior practitioner. A behaviour plan for Abdul is in place.

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/2cfb062d-0036-454b-92e1-1cf3c02fcea7/r0_240_4256_2645_w1200_h678_fmax.jpgnews, federal-politics

While most school students are taught about Australian democracy, few schools have classrooms where you can look out the window and see Parliament House. The students of Canberra Girls Grammar School have long been in the shadow of parliament, as furious debate plays out just down the road. But as to whether people over the age of 16 should decide who should sit in Australia's houses of parliament, opinion is divided. Canberra Girls Grammar year 11 student Elisabeth Abhayaratna thinks the voting age should be lowered. Year 12 student Tara Dabrowski disagrees. Year 11 student Shriya Bellamkonda-Vaka can see both sides of the argument, but feels the cons outweigh the pros. While teenagers views differ, a Senate inquiry is discussing whether 16 and 17 year olds should have their say in elections and referendums. The inquiry, headed by Greens senator Jordon Steele-John, is the latest attempt to extend the vote to an estimated 600,000 young Australians, many of whom feel disenfranchised with the current state of politics. "I think 16 and 17 year olds do have the capacity to be informed voters and should be able to vote because they are also impacted by government policies," Elisabeth said. Tara follows politics with interest, but acknowledges thats not always the case among her peers. "I believe 16 and 17 year olds are still mostly uninformed in politics and they should be given a longer period of time to sufficiently get involved and motivated to participate in politics," she said. "At 18, a majority of people have jobs and they'll understand what it means to go to work most days and they'll understand how at uni you have to think about financial things, whereas a majority of 16 and 17 year olds are living in sheltered households with parents helping them through." Shriya said: "I think adding the extra responsibility and duty of voting might lead them to make hasty decision rather than informed decisions and I think that could be pretty dangerous. Australia's voting age has been lowered once before, when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam dropped the minimum age from 21 to 18 in 1973. While there was a groundswell of support for that move 45 years ago, a similar change in public opinion hasn't taken place in regards to lowering it further. The Australian Election Study, a survey of voters' attitudes and habits after every Australian election since 1987, found in 2016 just 11 per cent of those surveyed thought the voting age should either definitely or probably be lowered to 16. However, that figure has slightly increased from the 2010 study, which saw 6.1 per cent of voters call for a lowering of the voting age. "Indeed, if anything, Australian public opinion is more emphatically opposed to lowering the age than is found elsewhere," a 2013 Australian Electoral Commission report found. If the proposal put forward at the senate inquiry does become a reality, 16 year olds would be able to opt in. It's an idea that Canberra College year 11 student Rosemary Irvine supports. "With all the big decisions happening around the world, we should have the right to express ourselves," Rosemary said. "I think some people feel that they don't know enough about it [when they're 16 and 17] but they should have the choice to be able to vote until they're 18." While fellow Canberra College student Ruby Zandona, 17, can understand why her peers would want to vote in elections, she said many weren't ready for the responsibility. "I feel personally politically aware, but I do think that because I'm still living with my parents, I'm still at school, I don't have a full-time job. There's so many factors and so many things I don't understand because I'm not independent," Ruby said. "The type of teenagers that would vote would possibly be a small group and that group would be very outspoken." At St Edmund's College, year 12 student Matt Winchester said while some students might be politically aware, voting should be optional if the age was lowered. "The vast majority of students while they're 16 and 17 are focusing on schooling and their social and sporting lives," he said. "Some would be for it, but many wouldn't be mature enough." Fellow year 12 student Zane Hogan said even if 16 year olds were allowed to vote, not much would change in federal politics. Noah Wright, 17, said most people are able to form stronger political beliefs once they leave school. He said classes should be offered to 16 and 17 year olds in schools about issues to do with voting. "It takes until you go into the real world to get an understanding," Noah said. While the senate inquiry represents one of the largest pushes to lower the voting age, the idea of having 16 year olds head to the ballot box is a recurring topic. A national youth affairs conference debated the idea in 1994, pressuring then-Prime Minister Paul Keating to act. At the conference, Young Liberals member - now North Sydney MP - Trent Zimmerman said "youth today did not believe politics applied to them" when asked why the age should be lowered. Among the other attendees was Natasha Stott-Despoja, who would go on to be a senator for the now defunct Australian Democrats. "It is no wonder that young people feel alienated and discriminated against with this sort of trivialism happening in federal politics," she said. In 2015, the Victorian Youth Affairs Council called on the federal government to lower the voting age, with the Australian Democrats also saying they would introduce a bill into NSW parliament if elected to the upper house at the state election that year. State parliaments have toyed with the idea: South Australia in 2001, Queensland in 2003 and again in 2008, and Tasmania, with its state Greens party putting forward a motion in 2006 and 2013. A report was tabled in the ACT Legislative Assembly recommending the voting age be lowered in 2007, however a committee said the proposal should not be supported. Federal Labor has also brought up the idea. It was one of the key recommendations from former-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's 2020 Summit, held in 2008. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten called for the minimum voting age to be lowered in 2015 during a NSW Young Labor conference. Despite many false starts and failed attempts, Australian youth organisations believe now is the time to allow 16 year olds to have their say. Liam Jones from the ACT Youth Advisory Committee was watching from the public gallery when voting age legislation was introduced to Parliament. He said there was a broad consensus from young people that they should be able to have a say. "There's a degree of cynicism of the political process, so I think the voice of young people, in my experience, are very optimistic, and they have a lot to contribute to the discourse," Mr Jones said. "Young people have a lot to offer." There hasn't been a standalone Youth Minister since 2013 after prime minister Tony Abbott scrapped the portfolio, merging it under the Department of Education. Mr Jones said many young people feel ignored by Federal Parliament. "I wouldn't say issues are being neglected, but I would say that if 16 and 17 year olds were allowed to vote, there might be some issues that would come to the front," he said. It's a sentiment shared by YWCA chief executive Michelle Phillips. "If 16 and 17 year olds were able to vote, then the major political parties would take notice of young people on the issue," Ms Phillips said. "Young people deserve the right to benefit from better policies and putting young people first." Australian Youth Affairs Coalition chair Katy Acheson said 16 year olds had many responsibilities in life that adults also have and voting should also be added to the list. "Sixteen year olds can drive and work, they pay taxes, they make choices about medicine and can be citizens of a country, and they're already actively involved in building Australia, so why not give them the right to vote?" Ms Acheson said. "The earlier people are involved in the electoral process, the more consistently they'll stay involved in it in the long term, and we really want our country that has its population involved in that process." While Australia debates the issue, 16 year olds have already had their say in elections in countries including Scotland, Austria, Germany and Brazil. "This generation is more informed than any generation before and have very strong opinions about political issues," Ms Acheson said. When it comes to issues 16 and 17 year olds think federal politicians should tackle, mental health and the treatment of refugees are among the biggest concerns. Ruby is concerned about equal rights for the LGBTIQ+ community. Tara is worried young people only see short-term solutions, and wouldn't take into account the country's debt or taxes. Matt said the connection between mental health and social media should be looked into. Shriya said access to mental health services should be high on the list of priorities for politicians. While not all students may not want to step forward to the ballot box at the next election, many just want their voices heard by those in power. "Politicians might say they care a lot for the youth, and things like that, but pleasing us is not high on their priorities," Ruby said.

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/e67a8c9d-aea1-4db2-9f4c-ce315ed029f9/r0_240_4500_2782_w1200_h678_fmax.jpgThe gravity of the existential threat we face from Islamic Jihad is truly of epic proportions. It is essentially a battle pitting free-civilized man against a totalitarian barbarian. What is at stake is the struggle for our very soul - namely who we are and what we represent. The lives that were sacrificed for individual rights and freedoms that we've come to cherish are being chiseled away from right under our noses by the stealth jihadists. And many of us are in denial and totally clueless.



The left's appeasement and pandering to evil is nothing new. What makes their utopian delusions so infuriating and unpardonable is that it is not only they who will have to pay the consequences, and deservedly, so, they are thwarting and undermining our best efforts at resistance and are thus dragging us down in the process as well.







By Peter Lancz,, the head of the Raoul Wallenberg World Campaign Against Racism.Bihar Board has released the class 10 compartment results. The board results have been declared on the official website - biharboardonline.bihar.gov.in. Candidates who have appeared for the exam can check their results now. The board had declared the class 10 results on June 26 for the annual examinations held in March. Last week, the BSEB has released the class 12 compartment results for more than 1.5 lakh students.

The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) has released the class 12 compartment exam results. A candidate who has appeared for the exam can check their results on the official website of the board. Over 1.55 lakh candidates have appeared for the exam which was conducted between July 13 and 20.

BSEB has also released the answer key for the objective questions of the intermediate compartmental examination 2018. Candidates have to obtain at least 30 per cent marks in the theory paper and 40 per cent marks in the practical paper to pass the intermediate examination.

How To Check The BSEB Class 12 Compartment Results

Visit the official website of Bihar Board (biharboard.ac.in).

Click on Bihar Board Intermediate Examination Result 2018.

Choose your stream.

Enter all the mandatory fields.

Click the submit to view the results.

Take a printout of the results for future use.

Click here to check your results

Students who obtained 300 marks will be under the first division. However, candidates have to secure at least 225 marks to achieve a place under the second division. BSEB has declared the class 12 examination results on June 6. Over 12 lakh candidates have appeared for the examination out of which only 6 lakh students have cleared the exam.

What To Do After Class 12? Top 10 Government Jobs One Can Take UpHaryana Staff Selection Commission (HSSC) has released an employment notification calling out aspirants to apply for the posts of Constable and Sub Inspector. Those interested can check out the eligibility, salary scale, how to apply and the complete details of the government job here. Selected candidates can earn up to INR 53500. The last date to apply for the government job is Sep 18, 2018.

Reservation in seat allocation and concession in fee will be awarded for the backward classes and differently abled according to the government norms. The selection process will be by means of written exam and socio-economic criteria. You will be evaluated for a total of 100 marks.

Get Selected In HPSC And Earn Up To INR 191000!

HSSC Recruitment 2018 Vacancy Details

CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Posts Constable and Sub Inspector Organisation Haryana Staff Selection Commission (HSSC) Educational Qualification Class 10 passout from a recognised institute Experience Freshers can apply Skills Required Physical fitness; knowledge of Hindi or Sanskrit Job Location Haryana Salary Scale INR 16900 to INR 53500 Industry Civil services Application Start Date August 26, 2018 Application End Date September 18, 2018

Application Fee INR100 Age Limit 18 to 42 years

Also Read: HPSC Invites Online Applications For HCS And Other Allied Services

How To Apply For HSSC Recruitment 2018

In order to apply for HSSC Recruitment 2018, follow these steps:

Step 1: Log on to the HSSC official website.

Step 2: On the home page, click on the link for police recruitment.

Step 3: Complete the one time registration and click on the LOGIN button.

Step 4: Enter your credentials in the login form and complete the application process.

Note:

Once the application form is filled, you will not be allowed to make any changes to it. So candidates are advised to carefully enter your details and recheck them before submission.

Follow the link - http://www.hssc.gov.in/writereaddata/Advertisements/72_1_1_part1_compressed.pdf to read the detailed official notification.Odisha Power Transmission Corporation Limited (OPTCL) has released an employment notification calling out aspirants to apply for the post of Management Trainee (Electrical).

The application process is online. You may pay the application fee online as well through the official website. The selection process will comprise a computer based test and a personal interview.

Those interested can check out the eligibility, salary scale, how to apply and the complete details of the government job here. Selected candidates can earn up to industry standards. The last date to apply for the government job is Sep 27, 2018.

Engineer Maharashtra Electricity Distribution, Join Mahavitaran

OPTCL Recruitment 2018 Vacancy Details

CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Posts Management Trainee (Electrical) Organisation Odisha Power Transmission Corporation Limited (OPTCL) Educational Qualification Electrical engineering degree from a recognised institute Experience Freshers can apply Skills Required Managerial skills Job Location Odisha Salary Scale Not mentioned Industry Power Application Start Date August 28, 2018 Application End Date September 27, 2018

Application Fee INR 1000 Age Limit 21 to 32 years

Also Read: Enter Data At BECIL And Earn Up To INR 17498

How To Apply For OPTCL Recruitment 2018

In order to apply for OPTCL Recruitment 2018, follow these steps:

Step 1: Log onto the OPTCL official website.

Step 2: Click on the CAREER tab on the home page.

Step 3: Under the relevant post, click on the application link. (The link will be active only from Aug 28, 2018.)

Step 4: Complete the One Time Registration and then use your credentials to login and apply.

Frequently Asked Questions In MT InterviewPhoto: Nunatsiaq News

Dozens of passengers from an Arctic cruise ship that ran aground last week were expected to be flown back south Saturday night, weather and sea ice permitting.

"We're considering it," said Catherine Lawton of One Ocean Expeditions tour company.

"Right now, everything's dependent on weather and ice. What we're trying to do is watch the variables and put possible options in place."

The Akademic Ioffe, operated by One Ocean, ran aground Friday morning in Pelly Bay about 70 kilometres north of Kugaruuk, on the Simpson Peninsula on Canada's eastern Arctic coast.

The ship, a 117-metre ice-strengthened vessel that has made many Arctic cruises, has since been refloated.

"There is some damage to the vessel," said Chris Krepski of the Transportation Safety Board.

Lawton said the ship owners have told her the damage to the hull is "contained and limited."

The Ioffe's 102 passengers and 24 staff have been transferred to the Ioffe's sister ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov.

"They picked up all the passengers this morning in search and rescue operations with the Canadian Coast Guard," Cpl. Serge Yelle of the Kugaruuk RCMP detachment said Saturday.

Lawton said there's plenty of room aboard the Vavilov, which has 83 passengers of its own. Onboard programming was continuing Saturday.

If conditions on the ocean remain stable, between 80 and 90 passengers were expected to be flown to Yellowknife Saturday night in a chartered plane. Those remaining from the Ioffe were to spend the night on the Vavilov and will be flown south on Sunday.

The Canadian Coast Guard confirmed Saturday that the icebreaker Canadian Coast Guard Ship Amundsen and its helicopter were at the scene, while a second vessel, Canadian Coast Guard Ship Pierre Radisson, would arrive later in the day.

Coast Guard spokeswoman Lauren Solski said the ship still appears seaworthy despite the accident, although an inspection was underway Saturday.

"It is floating and very stable. No injuries or oil leaks have been reported," said Solski.

Lawton said there had been no report of any environmental concerns.Photo: The Canadian Press Members of the Fredericton police officers salute the hearse carrying slain colleague Const. Sara Burns following a regimental funeral for Cst. Burns and Cst. Robb Costello in Fredericton on Saturday, August 18, 2018.

A man accused of murdering two Fredericton police officers and two civilians will appear in the Provincial Court of New Brunswick on Monday morning.

Matthew Vincent Raymond, 48, faces four counts of murder in the deaths of Const. Sara Burns, Const. Robb Costello, Donnie Robichaud and Bobbie Lee Wright.

The four were gunned down Aug. 10 outside an apartment complex in the New Brunswick capital.

Costello, 45, was a 20-year police veteran with four children, while Burns, 43, had been an officer for two years and was married with three children.

Robichaud, 42, had three children and had recently entered into a relationship with Wright when they were killed.

Thousands of police officers and first responders from across the continent travelled to Fredericton last Saturday to attend a regimental funeral for Burns and Costello.Photo: Contributed

Buck-a-beer has come into effect in Ontario, bringing the minimum price of a bottle or can of beer to $1 from $1.25.

Brewers are not required to charge less and the lower minimum price does not apply to draft beer, nor does it include the bottle deposit.

The policy was a highly publicized campaign promise for newly minted Premier Doug Ford, but it was decried by a number of the province's craft brewers on social media.

Some have said they could not afford to participate without sacrificing the quality of their product.

Ford has said participating businesses will be offered prime spots in Liquor Control Board of Ontario stores or advertising in the store magazine's inserts, among other possible rewards.

The Tories have said a return to buck a beer would see more competition in the beer market without affecting the province's revenues from beer and wine taxes, which government documents show brought in roughly $589 million in 2016-2017.The Brazilian pianist passed away at dawn on the first Monday Nelson FreireHe is 77 years old. He was at...Dalmia Cement plans to double capacity in east

27 August 2018

Dalmia Cement (Bharat) Ltd, India, plans to double its cement manufacturing capacity in the east to 17Mta in 24 months at a total investment of INR35,000m (US$499m), said a top official according to The Hindu.

Currently, we have four units operating in the east producing 8.5 million tonnes of cement annually, said Mahendra Singhi, group CEO, cement and whole-time director, DCBL.

As part of our expansion plan, we have decided to put up two new units in Odisha and one each in Bihar and West Bengal, he explained.

The company will invest in new projects in Odisha and in Bihar, West Bengal, funded mainly through debt and internal resources.

Published underMost of us have to work for a living. But working hard doesnt necessarily mean youre making money.

In fact, the most physically demanding and dangerous jobs arent usually the ones commanding the highest salaries. Ever wonder which jobs will earn you the biggest paycheck? Glassdoor recently compiled a list of the highest paying jobs in America. Most of them require years of schooling and advanced degrees.

Whether youre just starting out on your career journey or youre trying to plan your second act (its never too late to make a change), read on to find out which jobs will put the most money into your bank account.

25. Data Scientist

Median base salary: $96,116

No, a data scientist doesnt examine beakers or conduct experiments in a lab  but they are very smart. This profession requires analytical thinking as the data scientist must use technical skills to solve complex technical problems. One of the hardest aspects of the job? Figuring out what the problem is in the first place.

Next: Tax Manager



24. Tax Manager

Median base salary: $96,175

A tax manager is more than just a typical accountant  and theyre paid a salary that reflects that. Tax managers have responsibility for specific tax functions such as tax compliance or reporting. Interested in this career path? You better be great at math.

Next: Cloud Engineer



23. Cloud Engineer

Median base salary: $96,449

The future is in the cloud  no, not the white puffy thing in the sky. Cloud engineers have extensive experience with cloud services such as open source technology, software development, system engineering, and scripting languages in the tech world. Its a job that didnt exist 50 years ago but is in hot demand today.

Next: Attorney



22. Attorney

Median base salary: $96,678

There are so many different kinds of attorneys making all kinds of money  how much depends a lot on your specialty, length of tenure, and geographical location. However, when you become a lawyer, youre almost guaranteed to earn a six-figure salary eventually. That comes in handy for paying off all those pricey law school loans.

Next: Consulting Manager



21. Consulting Manager

Median base salary: $97,154

Consulting manager is also a broadly defined category that can describe several different types of jobs. These individuals may work in specific departments for a whole company and might be independently employed or full-time. No matter what, consulting managers are highly analytical and adaptable. They can make a lot of money with the right gig.

Next: Scrum Master



20. Scrum Master

Median base salary: $98,239

Speaking of jobs that didnt exist 50 years ago a scrum master facilitates agile development teams in the tech industry. Master may make the role sound more prestigious than it is, though  technically the scrum master doesnt lead any projects, so theyre not directly responsible for the outcomes.

Next: Systems Architect



19. Systems Architect

Median base salary: $100,984

Not all architects design physical structures. A systems architect is responsible for creating complex systems and networks for businesses. It may be complicated, but the result is worth it: this role almost always includes a six-figure salary.

Next: Strategy Manager



18. Strategy Manager

Median base salary: $101,754

Strategy managers are individuals who keep the big picture in mind. This role requires innovative thinking and planning to help businesses implement major company-wide goals and initiatives. Usually getting hired for a lofty salary like this one requires a person to have proven results.

Next: Data Architect



17. Data Architect

Median base salary: $101,900

This IT professional helps with designing, creating, deploying, and ultimately managing an organizations data architecture. Generally, you need a computer science or computer engineering degree to get hired for this role.

Next: Financial Planning & Analysis Manager



16. Financial Planning & Analysis Manager

Median base salary: $102,155

Financial planning is all about making educated guesses regarding a companys financial future. This person will need to notice trends, deviations, and anomalies in the financial big picture and offer suggestions for improvement.

Next: Solutions Architect



15. Solutions Architect

Median base salary: $102,160

This may sound like a complicated job, but its actually quite simple. In the IT world, some companies need help customizing solutions to issues theyre having. Thats where a solutions architect comes in  and gets paid handsomely for solving those problems.

Next: IT Program Manager



14. IT Program Manager

Median base salary: $102,969

All the new information technology jobs require someone to keep track of them. An IT program manager organizes and plans for projects for companies. Usually, this role requires an MBA.

Next: Plant Manager



13. Plant Manager

Median base salary: $103,892

Keeping track of daily operations in a manufacturing plant requires a significant amount of patience and expertise. Plant managers must oversee employees, production, and efficiency to keep the plant running smoothly.

Next: Applications Development Manager



12. Applications Development Manager

Median base salary: $104,048

This management role oversees a team of analysts or developers and schedules projects, timelines, and appropriate resources. They get paid a huge salary, but thats because the job is fairly complex.

Next: Engineering Manager



11. Engineering Manager

Median base salary: $105,260

A successful engineering manager needs to be able to communicate, delegate, and motivate. He or she also requires technical ability and exemplary communication skills.

Next: Software Architect



10. Software Architect

Median base salary: $105,329

The thing about IT jobs is that they often require candidates to move to technology hubs in the country  which are often some of the most expensive places to live. The high salaries may sound enticing, but theyre often required for settling into expensive cities like San Jose.

Next: Nurse Practitioner



9. Nurse Practitioner

Median base salary: $106,962

Nurses are some of the hardest-working professionals in the medical field. Extraordinarily long, grueling shifts are just par for the course, plus dealing with patients can be emotionally draining, too. Thats why nurses get paid so much  they deserve it.

Next: Software Engineering Manager



8. Software Engineering Manager

Median base salary: $107,479

The career path in the IT field often goes from managing the data to managing the people who manage the date. Not only do you need a technical skill set, you also require people skills to manage effectively.

Next: Physician Assistant



7. Physician Assistant

Median base salary: $108,761

The difference between physician assistants and doctors is minimal. First, theyre not licensed to perform surgery. Second, they always work under the supervision of a doctor and never autonomously. But like doctors, these medical professionals earn high salaries.

Next: Software Development Specialist



6. Software Development Specialist

Median base salary: $108,879

Software developer jobs are numerous because theyre often difficult to staff. Developers work at all types of companies and can even work remotely if the company allows it. Typically, you need a computer science degree for this role.

Next: Corporate Counsel



5. Corporate Counsel

Median base salary: $115,580

Any kind of lawyer is all but guaranteed to earn a healthy salary. Corporate attorneys are especially well-paid because businesses have a vested interest in protecting their assets  and profits.

Next: Enterprise Architect



4. Enterprise Architect

Median base salary: $115,944

An enterprise architect gets paid the big bucks to help stakeholders, management, and subject matter experts develop the organizations strategy and IT assets. This role requires big-picture thinking, organization, and people skills.

Next: Pharmacist



3. Pharmacist

Median base salary: $127,120

Becoming a pharmacist is more stressful than you might think. The great thing about this job is that it can be done in any state or city of the country and it often commands a healthy salary.

Next: Pharmacy manager



2. Pharmacy Manager

Median base salary: $146,412

Whos in charge of the pharmacist? The pharmacy manager, of course. Like a pharmacist, this job is very enticing to people who may not want to live in major cities but still want a high-paying salary. Typically, pharmacy programs are shorter than traditional degrees and only require two to three years of undergraduate study.

Next: Physician



1. Physician

Median base salary: $195,842

You know the old story: if you want to make money, you need to become a doctor. Physicians require many years of rigorous schooling and the profession isnt well suited to some personality types. However, if you have the brains and stamina to become a doctor, your bank account will thank you for it.Police investigating Halloween death as a homicide

Pueblo police have begun a homicide investigation after finding a deceased female in her home on Halloween.Lifelong Episcopalian Senator John McCain Remembered as 'Hero' Who Stood Quietly for His Faith 27 August, 2018 by Leonardo Blair , |

As tributes continue to pour in from around the world for Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona who succumbed to brain cancer at his home on Saturday, many who praised his life as a war hero also remembered the lifelong Episcopalian for his faith.

In a statement on the passing of her father, who was 81, at the time of his death, Meghan McCain alluded to her father's faith and the belief that he is now in heaven.

"My father is gone, and I miss him as only an adoring daughter can. But in this loss, and in this sorrow, I take comfort in this: John McCain, hero of the republic and to his little girl, wakes today to something more glorious than anything on this earth," she wrote before referencing the ending of famed novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle, the seventh and final book in his The Chronicles of Narnia series.

"Today the warrior enters his true and eternal life, greeted by those who have gone before him, rising to meet the Author of All Things: 'The dream is ended: this is the morning,'" her statement ended.

Despite his affiliation with the Episcopal Church, McCain, attended the Southern Baptist-affiliated North Phoenix Baptist Church in Phoenix for at least 17 years Baptist News Global said. He never officially joined the congregation or got baptized there. In a 2008 interview, the church's then pastor, Dan Yeary, said he discussed baptism with McCain but respected his faith tradition.

"You have to be baptized by immersion to be a member [of North Phoenix]," Yeary said. "John and I have dialogued about that. ... John is an Episcopalian, and he and his family attend North Phoenix Baptist Church when he is in town."

In a Sunday statement, The Most Rev. Michael Curry, presiding bishop and primate of The Episcopal Church praised the late senator for his selflessness.

"The life of Senator John Sidney McCain has been a witness to the nobility of living not for self alone but for the ideals and values that make for a better world. With countless others, we of the Episcopal Church give God thanks for his life and service and pray likewise for his wife, children and family. May his soul and the souls of all the departed Rest in Peace and rise in glory. Amen," he said.

In the early 1990s, Yeary talked with McCain on video about his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than five years and how his faith help sustain him.

"He just came up and sat in my office for a good two hours and talked about how prayer and his faith sustained him in that setting," Yeary said. "It was a wonderful day. From that moment on, John and I forged a friendship. It is not the kind where we talk every week or even every month. ... [But] I would tell anyone who asks me it has been a privilege to serve as their pastor."

Yeary also praised him for his maverick approach to politics and life in general.

"I think John reaches out to everybody," Yeary told BNG. "He's not afraid to spend time with people who have radically different views. I think that's smart. That's intelligent."

McCain's running mate in the 2008 presidential election, Sarah Palin, also remembered the late senator as an "American original" in a statement on Twitter.

"Today we lost an American original. Sen. John McCain was a maverick and a fighter, never afraid to stand for his beliefs. John never took the easy path in life - and through sacrifice and suffering he inspired others to serve something greater than self," she wrote. "John McCain was my friend. I will remember the good times. My family and I send prayers for Cindy and the McCain family."

Russell Moore, president of the SBC's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission also had only praise for McCain on Twitter.

"John McCain was a hero. He was tortured for his country, and stood up to his captors with courage. Ever since, he's stood up for the ideals of democracy and freedom at home and around the world. His death is an incalculable loss for our nation," wrote Moore.

Robert Jeffress, pastor of the 12,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas also had high praise for McCain in a Fox News interview, despite their political differences.

"I met him a few years ago in the Hannity green room and I remember when I walked in the room, he was over in the corner of the room wolfing down a sugar cookie. And he saw me. He wiped the crumbs away from his mouth and he came over and introduced himself. He said 'Pastor, I'm John McCain. And even though he knew that we had some real political differences with one another, he didn't bring those up. Instead, he said very complimentary and encouraging words. And it's just a reminder that you could be gracious with whom you disagree," Jeffress said.

"I remember we talked about the 2008 election and I asked him, 'senator, why do you think Obama won the election?' I was expecting this long complex answer, he said, 'It's simple. He out campaigned me.' And that was just an illustration that you could be gracious in both victory and defeat," he continued.

Jeffress noted that that McCain lived an exemplary life with few regrets and share some of the things he believes people should emulate.

"I think there are two lessons we can all learn from him. First of all to be tenacious in your convictions. Let's be honest. The reason he and President Trump butt heads is because they both are men of conviction. And we shouldn't condemn either one for standing up for their convictions," he said.

"We ought to emulate his service to our country...John McCain made great sacrifices as a POW," he continued.

"I think the death of John McCain is time for all of us to pause and reflect on the brevity of life and the fact that all that really matters in the end is our relationship with one another and our relationship with God who Meghan McCain so beautifully described as the author of all things. I think John McCain was able to look back on his life with a few regrets but also with the knowledge that he had served his country, he had served his family well. And that's how you want to end your life. With few regrets," said Jeffress.

Sen. McCain is expected to be honored over five days in three states this week.

Read more about Sen. McCain on The Christian Post.NEW DELHI, August 27, 2018 (Morning Star News)  Christians confidence in the judiciary in Nepal was shattered after a court sentenced a 63-year-old pastor to 10 years in prison on rape accusations the complainant later renounced, church leaders said.



Pastor Govinda Prasad Dhakal, 63, was sentenced on June 7 upon conviction for frequently raping a minor he and his wife had adopted in 2016. Christian leaders and his family roundly refute the allegation, citing an attempt by the alleged victims family to extort money from him with a false accusation.



We are not happy to see the verdict, because everything was pre-decided, Tanka Subedi, chair of the Religious Liberty Forum Nepal (RLFN), told Morning Star News.



The complainant, the now-12-year-old girls mother, confessed before the court that she had fabricated the rape story in a fit of anger over the pastors unwillingness to pay the girls school fees after he returned the child to her custody, a source present in the courtroom said. Authorities arrested Pastor Dhakal on Dec. 12, 2017, based on the mothers initial statement.



Prabhushanta Dhakal, Pastor Dhakals younger son, was a witness to the courtroom proceedings. He said the mother expressed remorse, saying she never thought the pastor would end up in jail.



The girls mother in the court confessed, I was angry, but now I understand that I must not harm this religious personI am sorry, Prabhushanta Dhakal told Morning Star News.



The pastors family and Christian leaders said they were shocked that, despite her confession and other documentary evidence, the court failed to relent in its determination to convict Pastor Dhakal. Because the alleged victim initially said, under pressure from a Hindu woman who opposes Christianity, that the pastor raped her, the court has the liberty to ignore the mothers retraction and other evidence, Prabhushanta Dhakal said.



Despite the mothers recorded confession, the court did not take cognizance of her statement, nor did the court take action against her for her initial fabricated statements that she had given in the presence of the judges, pastor B.P. Khanal, head of The Lords Assembly and a social activist, told Morning Star News. How could the honorable judge allow this and still go ahead and pronounce 10 years of imprisonment on an innocent person?



Pastor Dhakal was also fined 2,000 Nepalese rupees (US$18).



We are forced to believe that the judge passed an unfair judgment because Govinda is a Christian, otherwise there was no other reason for such a verdict, especially when the accusers themselves had confessed before the court that they were hoping to make a huge amount of money by putting a false charge against Govinda, Subedi of the RLFN said. Secondly, we are led to believe that he was not given a clean chit due to our stand of no bribing.



It was evident that the court was biased and convicted Pastor Dhakal because he is a Christian leader, Khanal said. The medical report of the alleged rape victim presented in court favored the pastor, he added. Prabhushanta Dhakal said the medical report stated that she had her hymen ruptured some years ago. How many years ago, medical sciences cannot specify, he said.



Another girl adopted by the couple, 15-year-old Amrita, who has been living with the Dhakal family the past five years, told the court that the family has treated her well. The oldest of the familys adopted children, Amrita told the court that Pastor Dhakal never misbehaved with her, and that she never saw him misbehave with other girls.



Two other adopted girls living with the Dhakal family, Sonia, 13, and Mithu Maya, 14, gave statements against the pastor under pressure from an influential Hindu woman, according to Prabhushanta Dhakal and Khanal. They said that Hindu woman, Meena Kharel, a member of a child welfare committee who operates an orphanage, opposes Christianity.



Prabhushanta Dhakal said Kharel pressured the alleged victim and her mother into accusing the pastor of rape.



Amrita disclosed to Khanal how Kharel pressured her, telling her to repeat certain words in the courtroom, Khanal said.



Kharels opposition to Christianity was heightened when she lost an election for deputy mayor of Bharatpur to a Christian candidate, Prabhushanta Dhakal said.



He appealed the verdict of the lower court, filing a petition in the Makwanpur High Court on July 10.



Initially a government employee, Pastor Dhakal has worked as an evangelist since 2004 and has also been involved in Bible distribution, church planting, supporting pastors and working with at-risk children and orphans. He is the pastor of Handikhola Church in Manahari-3 Makawanpur.



Pastor Dhakal served as pastor to the church for more than 11 years. He was living with his wife, Saraswoti, 57, and four adopted children before the charges against him were filed. All four of the adopted children have been sent back to their respective homes, and their schooling has been stopped in the middle of the year, except for Amrita, who has been taken into the house of a lady pastor in Kathmandu, Prabhushanta Dhakal said sadly.



Alleged Extortion

The alleged victims mother and maternal uncle, a police constable, threatened Pastor Dhakal and demanded money from him after he sent the alleged victim, whose name is withheld, back to her mother in December due to the girls anti-social behavior.



Citing Saraswoti, Khanal said the girls family made phone calls to Pastor Dhakal in 2017 initially demanding 20,000 rupees (US$177) for her schooling, which had been discontinued when she was sent back home. When the pastor refused, they threatened him, saying they would teach him a lesson of a lifetime, Saraswoti said.



Her uncle said, I know how to trap you, Saraswoti told Morning Star News.



Gradually the extortion demand increased to 7,000,000 rupees (US$$62,050), said Prabhushanta Dhakal.



First they demanded 20,000 for enrolling her in a school. Then they made this fabricated story of rape and demanded 70 lakh rupees from my father, he said. They thought that my father is a very rich man, and he can give whatever they demand.



When the pastor refused to pay them anything, the girls mother and uncle filed the rape case against him on Dec. 12, three months after she was sent back home, he said.



You people should come with a big bag of 70 lakh rupees, then we will free your father, her uncle told me, said Prabhushanta Dhakal, who added that he also felt harassed when a worker in the district attorney generals office demanded a bribe of 400,000 rupees to dismiss the case.



Traumatic Past

Well known for their generosity, the couple adopted the alleged rape victim, an impoverished Dalit, in 2016.



For about six years my father has been sheltering children in our house, helping to educate them and providing for their needs, Prabhushanta Dhakal said.



The alleged victim lost her father five years ago, and since then the family has been living in poverty in Surkhet. When Pastor Dhakal learned of the conditions in which they were living from a pastor friend, his compassionate heart drove him to bring her to his home to give her education and a secure future, his son said. They enrolled her in the same school as Amrita.



The couple was not aware that she had behavioural issues, refusing to mix or cooperate with other children and threatening and troubling them enough that the couple began to receive complaints from other parents, Prabhushanta Dhakal said. After trying to help the girl improve her behavior for one and a half years, the pastor sent her back to her mother on Sept. 9, 2017.



They also did not know that the girls family had received settlements in prior cases of alleged rape. She was allegedly raped on two separate occasions, once by a 16-year-old boy and, a few years ago, by an 18-year-old, Khanal said.



At the age of 9, she was raped by a boy who was rich and influential, he said. The case was dismissed after an out-of-court settlement was done between the two families. Subsequently they gave money to the mother and the case was dismissed.



Prabhushanta Dhakal said the family did not know about these cases until after the pastor was charged.



Neither did her mother reveal it to us until they used the same tactics on my father, accusing him of raping her, he said.



Injustice for Doing Good

Khanal said his visits to Pastor Dhakal in jail in Chitwan jail have shown him to be joyful and well-respected by other inmates.



He said he is praying and is hopeful that God will do justice, Khanal said.



Saraswoti and Pastor Dhakal have two sons of their own, 33 and 31, who are married, and three grandchildren.



Saraswoti said she feels they are facing injustice for doing good.



If you would like to help persecuted Christians, visit http://morningstarnews.o rg/resources/aid-agencies/ for a list of organizations that can orient you on how to get involved.



If you or your organization would like to help enable Morning Star News to continue raising awareness of persecuted Christians worldwide with original-content reporting, please consider collaborating at https://morningstarnews.org/do nate/ ?Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican ambassador to the U.S., shared on Sunday that he told Pope Francis about accusations of sexual abuse made against a prominent priest in 2013. Vigano reported that despite being told about the accusations, Francis took no action. The Archbishop is now urging Francis to step down.

In a statement released by Vigano on Sunday he said, "In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, he [Pope Francis] must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example to Cardinals and Bishops who covered up McCarrick's abuses and resign along with all of them.

CBS News spoke with Vigano who said, he decided to speak out now "to combat the grave situation in the church, to protect the church and also to stop future abuse."

CBS News reports that Vigano told the producer Anna Matranga that he had no agenda in releasing this statement and that he was simply stating facts.

The Archbishop recalled a conversation he had with Francis in June 2013, shortly after Francis became pope. The pair talked about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who is the former archbishop of Washington, D.C. McCarrick resigned last month after claims came out that he sexually abused seminary students and an altar boy.

In his statement Vigano states that he told Francis about the allegations saying, "Holy Father, I don't know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance."

Vigano states the Pope did not respond to the statement, and McCarrick continued in his role in the church.

Vigano continued, "[Pope Francis] must honestly state when he first learned about the crimes committed by McCarrick, who abused his authority with seminarians and priests. In any case, the Pope learned about it from me on June 23, 2013 and continued to cover him."

On Saturday, Pope Francis addressed the sex abuse scandal in Dublin saying, "The failure of ecclesiastical authorities  bishops, religious superiors, priests and others  to adequately address these repugnant crimes has rightly given rise to outrage and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community. I myself share these sentiments."

Pope Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation on July 28.

Vigano continued saying, Archbishop of Washington D.C. Donald Wuerl also knew about the allegations made against McCarrick. Vigano wrote, "His recent statements that he knew nothing about it  are absolutely laughable. The cardinal lies shamelessly."

CBS News reports, a spokesperson for Wuerl responded to these claims Sunday saying, "In spite of what Archbishop Vigano's memo indicates, Cardinal Wuerl did not receive any documentation or information during his time in Washington regarding any actions taken against Archbishop McCarrick."

According to The Washington Post, the Pope has declined to confirm or deny his knowledge of the allegations against McCarrick.

In a statement issued by Vatican Cardinal Raymond Burke to Life Site News, Burke said, The declarations made by a prelate of the authority of Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano must be totally taken to heart by those responsible in the Church.

Burke continued, Each declaration must be subject to investigation, according to the Churchs time-tried procedural law.

Photo courtesy: Getty Images/Franco Origlia/StringerAccording to sociologists Mark Mulder, Aida Ramos, and Gerardo Marti, Latino Protestants are a force to be reckoned with. They are simply more religiously active than their Latino Catholic or white or black Protestant counterparts. They are more actively committed to their congregations, and their churches are more central to their religiosity and to their lives. Latino Protestants are a growing but neglected religious group that will become a more visible and prevalent force in American life. As Latinos continue to grow as a percentage of the US population, and as more Latinos become Protestants, people will need to know more about this growing segment of US Christianity.

These three researchers have collaborated on a book, Latino Protestants in America, which results from a study called the Latino Protestant Congregations (LPC) Project that was funded by the Lilly Endowment. The book is based on the first years of the project (20142016), but the study will continue through 2018.

After providing a broad introduction to Latino Protestantism (chapter one) the authors frame their study historically (chapter two), helping readers understand both the importance of conversions to Protestantism after the takeover of the Southwest by the United States (1848) and how immigration has impacted the growth of Latino Protestant churches, particularly after the 1965 Immigration Act. With that background, the book refers to a number of studies of Latino Protestants (chapter three), including the in-depth interviews of the LPC Project, to provide a snapshot of the diversity of the community today.

The next three chapters address Latino Protestant identity (chapter four), congregational life (chapter five) and the social and civic engagement of Latino Protestants in US society (chapter six). The descriptions in these chapters demonstrate that: Latino Protestants, as the books subtitle suggests, are both growing and becoming more diverse. Because of their unique history and experiences, Latino Protestants have developed an identity that is distinct from that of other US Protestants and from Latino Catholics. They are starting and growing churches that reflect that identity, and they are participating in politics and social issues in ways that demonstrate their unique ecclesiology, theology, and ethno-religious identity. The book ends (chapter seven) with a description of how Latino Protestants might influence US Protestantism and highlights some of the issues that the researchers did not address, but which they consider important for future study.

Diverse Expressions

Latino Protestants in America clearly accomplishes its goal of offering a map of a route that leads to a deeper understanding of Latino Protestants. The book provides many interesting snapshots and illustrations of what Latino Protestantism looks like today. It names and describes some of the reasons why Latino Protestantism is growing and provides examples of some of the diverse flavors represented under its broad canopy. The book does a good job of summarizing the results of some earlier studies of Latino Protestants and combining that with their own field research.

In the last chapter, the authors mention some of the issues they feel need further research. Their biggest concern is to avoid ethnoracial essentialization, a situation in which Latino Protestants are described by tautological and racialized stereotypical statements that have no analytic value. As an example, they mention the tendency to state that Latino Protestants have worship services with a Latino flavor without being able to clearly explain what that means. Because it is difficult to clearly describe this diverse community, they hope that future research will coalesce around a common set of interests. With that in mind, they suggest that future research focus on worship, ethnic identity, and civic engagement for the sake of building a body of shared understanding.

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The authors want their readers to realize how diverse Latino Protestantism is, and so they look at all types of Protestant religious expressions. But this tends to downplay the fact that the vast majority of Latino Protestants are Pentecostal or evangelical (about 75%) and that this is the segment of Latino Protestantism that is growing the most (see Pew research on Latino religions and the work of Clifton Holland). For example, the largest Latino Protestant denomination, the Assemblies of God, is only mentioned once in the book, and the third, fourth, and fifth largest denominations (Seventh-day Adventist, Church of God and Apostolic Assembly) are not mentioned at all. Of the five largest Latino denominations in the US, only the Southern Baptists are mentioned extensively. Much smaller mainline denominations are mentioned more often than any of the larger evangelical and Pentecostal denominations.

In addition, the book does not focus on other important issues related to Latino Protestantism. It mentions the issue of migration but mostly focuses on Latino Protestants once they are in the US. The authors address the impact of Protestant immigration from Latin America only in passing. New migrants from Central America and Puerto Rico, in particular, are increasing the number of Latino Protestants and also bringing new expressions of Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal faith with them. These versions of Protestantism were born in Latin America and are not the result of direct missionary efforts. They have many things in common with their US counterparts, but many of the recent movements look more like African Indigenous Churches than the more traditional expressions of US Protestantism that originally sent missionaries to Latin America. These new movements are having an important influence on the development of Latino Protestantism, and the missionary efforts of Latino Protestants are also having an impact in Latin America (as detailed in Andy Olsens article in the July/August 2017 issue of CT).

Another important issue the book neglects is the relationship between class and the flavors of Latino Protestantism. Numerous studies have demonstrated that Pentecostal expressions of faith have been more attractive to poorer Latinos. The book implies that mainline Latino Protestant churches achieve the highest socioeconomic status, though the authors acknowledge that the research is not clear on this issue. These other studies would posit that Pentecostal churches have been more attractive to the poor and that Pentecostal churches have probably done more to help Latinos improve socioeconomically, if one takes into account the place the people started from when they became Pentecostals.

Energy and Revival

The authors remind us throughout the book that Latino Protestantism is growing and that it will continue to grow. Their research invites us to ask important questions about Latino Protestants. They also have some crucial questions that are always in the background throughout the book. These are large-picture questions that do not have straightforward answers, dealing with the expanding role of Latino Protestants in US Protestantism, the varied experiences of Latinos who attend churches that are not predominantly Latino, and the impact of Latino Protestant conversions on the Catholic Church in the US.

Mulder, Ramos, and Marti have written an engaging and readable book that challenges us to recognize why understanding Latino Protestants is so important. This book joins with an increasing number of studies of Latino Protestantism and will likely serve as an important introduction to many who are just beginning to recognize the importance of this growing community, particularly in the social scientific field. On a personal level, I will be very interested to see the direction that the Latino Protestant Congregations Project takes and how it encourages the development of more research in this area.

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The authors of Latino Protestants in America have provided us with a very useful resource. By focusing on aspects of Latino Protestantism that are unique or different from other forms of Protestantism in the US, they invite us to look at what the community might contribute to the future of Christian faith in this country. May the spiritual vitality of Latino Protestants and their commitment to the life of the church continue to bring energy and revival to Gods people in America.

Juan Martinez is professor of Hispanic studies and pastoral leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author of The Story of Latino Protestants in the United States (Eerdmans).Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment

Earlier this month, billboards that hung on the property of Newport Beach's Fashion Island and the Irvine Spectrum were taken down after several complaints were directed toward the Irvine Company. This is the SoCal Harvest Crusade, which has posted up ads around the Southern California area for a few years. Yet, this is the first incident of its kind in which a SoCal Harvest ad received complaints and was forced to be taken down due to peer pressure. A full refund was given to Harvest Riverside Church.

What was on this billboard that caused some people to be offended? As Pastor Greg Laurie of Harvest Riverside explains to CBS News, "This is a Christian event ... but notice on the poster it says Harvest, my name." The banner depicts Greg Laurie speaking and holding a black colored book, which is not explicitly labeled as a Bible. But apparently, it was obvious to some people, and that's when they got offended.

Laurie shares some further thoughts, "I'm offended all the time. In malls, things I see in billboards, but I'm not out to boycott it, especially if they paid for it."

Technically, the owner of the malls can do whatever they want with the billboards. The discussion at hand is not about whether it is right or wrong to post up religious based events on public property. The real issue is whether the posting or taking down of such ads are in line with our nation's belief in free speech, and to some degree, freedom of religion.

God's word tells us that the world and all that is in it was created and sustained by God. When humanity fell due to the original sin of Adam, the entire human race took on a sin nature that caused them to be innately distanced and fearful of the Lord God. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to this world to reconcile sinners onto God, which He did through His substitutionary death on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin debt. Sin brings about the expectation of God's wrath in hell, but Jesus paid the fine with His life so that we can be forgiven and made righteous when we believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior. Christ promised that He will return again in the future to establish His physical kingdom on earth. But until then, this world's economic, social, and political culture will not resemble the kingdom of God. Christians are kingdom citizens who live in this sin-cursed world, which will not be receptive to the light of God's word and His rule.

It's interesting to note that the Bible does not advocate freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because He created all people in this world to live a certain way, which is to worship God and not idols. A failure to live up to that standard leads to accountability and final judgment. However, God has used freedom of speech and freedom of religion, in countries such as the US, as a means of common grace for His people. It thus allows for Christians to freely practice and live out their faith in a culture that would be otherwise against them. Freedom of speech can be an agent of tremendous good, but also of tremendous evil if exercised by a wicked person.

If America wants to live by freedom of speech, then Christians should certainly be entitled to benefit from that philosophy as well. This means no one has any right to silence or harass another person's worldview or ideology. But this incident with the SoCal Harvest banner isn't the first, and most likely will not be the last, time that we see a double standard being played out in regards to Christianity. It's odd to believe in free speech but at the same time lash out at the actions of a person who is simply expressing what he believes, in this case an invitation to a Christian event.

This begs the question of what would have happened if the mall displayed a paid ad promoting gay pride, abortion, or Sharia law? Would people have complained about that? If so, what would the mall have done? Either they would have to take it down out of respect for those bothered by it, or continue to keep the ad up in the name of political correctness.

As Proverbs 26:5 says, "Answer a fool as his folly deserves, that he not be wise in his own eyes." Because fools often times live by a incoherent standard, it is sometimes necessary to call it out and expose it in order to bolster the truth and consistency of the Christian worldview. When people live by God's law, then everything in life is true, sensible, harmonious, and edifying. Any other worldview would prove confusing if not detrimental to live by. This is an example we are seeing in this situation with free speech.

The Bible does not call Christians to protest or take vengeance on unbelievers in instances like this. Matthew 5:44 says, "But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you ..." Christians are called to continue to be a good witness onto unbelievers, always praying for and working for their salvation in the Lord. In times of unjust treatment of the church by outsiders, God vindicates the cause of the church, as He has done many times in history.

We see instances in Scripture when God takes the unjust actions of the enemy and turns it around for good (Romans 8:28). In Acts 12, Herod does violence to the church and imprisons the Apostle Peter. This does not end in defeat for the church, as the Lord sends an angel to free Peter from prison. Moreover, God strikes Herod down in due time. This is not meant to say that God always strikes down unbelievers onto death for their actions, but He does take their attacks against the church and use it to further advance His gospel work.

So what is God's redeeming work in the SoCal Harvest incident? We cannot read the mind of God, but we see some great results of this tragedy. The event has gotten media publicity, which spread awareness of the gospel and the Crusade. Perhaps it might have even drawn some sympathy for the cause of the church. Perhaps this incident drew more people to the SoCal Harvest event, and led to the more professions of faith.

In any case, we are called to pray and to persevere in the work of God, trusting that God is on our side and will continue to vindicate the cause of the church. As Galatians 6:9 teaches, "Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary."

Steve Cha is teaching pastor of Grace City LA.Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment

"Some lives are so vivid, it is difficult to imagine them ended. Some voices are so vibrant, it is hard to think of them stilled. John McCain was a man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order."

This is how President George W. Bush remembered John McCain on Saturday after the senator died at the age of eighty-one. True to form, the senator asked Mr. Bush and President Obamaeach of whom ran against him in presidential campaignsto deliver eulogies at his funeral.

Today America is remembering one of our nation's greatest heroes. This morning's Wall Street Journal calls him a "principled leader." CNN describes him as a "War Hero. Statesman. Maverick," calling him "one of the leading voices in American politics."

Others have fought for our nation and even been prisoners of war. Others have served in the United States Senate and even been nominated for president of the United States.

John McCain is being remembered today especially because of this singular trait: his sacrificial courage.

Why McCain couldn't raise his arms

In 1973, McCain wrote about his experience as a prisoner during the Vietnam War. Reading his account over the weekend was a moving experience for me.

On October 26, 1967, McCain's Skyhawk dive bomber was shot down over Hanoi. His right leg was broken, his left arm was fractured, and his right arm was broken in three places.

Vietnamese doctors eventually tried to put a cast on his right arm (without Novocain) but could not set the bones and put him in a chest cast. He spent two years in solitary confinement, communicating with fellow prisoners by tapping codes through the prison walls. He suffered from dysentery for a year and a half.

Since his father was commander in chief of US forces in the Pacific, camp officials offered at one point to release him. McCain refused, insisting that those who had been imprisoned before him be set free first.

He was then subjected to extreme torture. His left arm was broken again, and his ribs were cracked. He was made to stand on a stool for days. He was released in 1973 but was left with permanent injuries as a result of his mistreatment. For instance, when he gestured during political speeches, he never raised his arms above his shoulders because he couldn't.

Two reasons sacrificial courage is so rare

Sacrificial courage is especially remarkable because it is so rare. And it is so rare because it is contrary to human nature and to our secular culture.

The first temptation is the essence of all temptation: "You will be like God" (Genesis 3:5). Friedrich Nietzsche called it "the will to power," the basic human drive to be more, have more, and do more.

We see it in the first sin, when the first man and woman took the forbidden fruit in their quest for pleasure and power (v. 6). We see it in the second recorded sin, when Cain murdered Abel because his brother's offering was more esteemed than his own (Genesis 4:1-8).

We see it in the horrific shooting in Florida yesterday, when a video gamer lost in the tournament and opened fire on other competitors. He killed two people and injured eleven others before turning the gun on himself.

For John McCain to put other prisoners ahead of himself in Vietnam was counter to the egotism that drives our fallen nature today.

Such courage is also counter to our secular culture. We recognize self-sacrifice, but we reward self-promotion. Sen. McCain was in the news occasionally, but the Kardashians make headlines daily.

Two reasons sacrificial courage is so essential

While sacrificial courage is contrary to human nature and secular culture, it is essential to true Christian discipleship. Jesus was clear: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23). We are called to "present your bodies as a living sacrifice" to God (Romans 12:2), to be "crucified with Christ" (Galatians 2:20).

Why? Consider two facts, one negative and one positive.

One: Our culture opposes our Lord. God's word warns us: "All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted" (2 Timothy 3:12). John instructed us, "Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you" (1 John 3:13).

If we will stand for Jesus, we must by definition stand against all who stand against him. Sacrificial courage is then essential to the life of faith.

Two: Our Father can do more with our lives than we can. When we surrender our ambitions and plans to Jesus, he is able to lead us into his "perfect" will (Romans 12:2). And we will testify with Paul, "I can do all things through him who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13).

"I don't mind a good fight"

In accepting the Republican nomination for president on September 4, 2008, John McCain stated: "I don't mind a good fight. For reasons known only to God, I've had quite a few tough ones in my life. But I learned an important lesson along the way: In the end, it matters less that you can fight. What you fight for is the real test."

What will you fight for today?Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment

I have been blogging for a decade now, primarily on topics in theology, current events, and apologetics. During that time, I have noted the extensive presence of village atheism within the "infidel" blogosphere. While the blogosphere also has its share of "village Christians", what is particularly ironic about the proliferation of village atheism is the fact that the online atheist/skeptic community persistently tries to brand itself as being especially rational, critical, and objective. And yet, the widespread and vocal opinions of the village atheists directly contradict this aspirational branding.

First, a word on terminology. So far as I can see, the term "village atheist" was first popularized in the 19th century to refer to an atheistic individual within a religious community who vocally (and provocatively) expresses his/her dissent from the religious consensus of the community. For example, G.K. Chesterton identified Thomas Hardy as a village atheist (see Kevin Taylor, Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Question of Tragedy in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, p. 168).

However, in more recent literature the meaning of the term has evolved to identify a type of popular atheism that is often brash in presentation and lacks critical nuance. (In other words, minority status within a wider religious community is no longer essential to the term.) One sees this use in Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil, p. 178 when Inwagen juxtaposes the unlettered popular opinions of the "village atheist" over against the more sophisticated opinions of the "atheist". In this article I will be using the term "village atheist" in the broad sense used by Inwagen.

If you want to see how widespread village atheism is (and how virulent in expression), just consider the success of atheist Peter Boghossian's book A Manual for Creating Atheists. As I pointed out in my review, the book is a poorly written screed that makes a litany of claims that range between the patronizing and the absurd. For example, Boghossian asserts that any theist who fails to respond favorably to an atheist's explanation of their beliefs must be brain damaged. Apparently only a brain damagedperson could fail to see that atheism is true.

A Manual for Creating Atheists is a terrible book. But it has also been a very successful book, selling thousands of copies and amassing more than 400 reviews on Amazon.com averaging 4 1/2 stars. That's a lot of village atheists.

So what exactly is a village atheist? As I define it, this individual is characterized by several traits including the following:

The proliferation of binary oppositions: Perhaps the most common (and troubling) hallmark is the simplistic categorization of people into two groups: the irrational, delusional religious "faith-heads" and the rational, irreligious skeptic. Boghossian's book is a disturbing example of this opposition.

A claim of righteous indignation: Village atheists frequently claim the moral high ground. They are angry at biblical atrocities, the problem of evil, God, intelligent design, the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, Muslims, hijabs, the Crusades, etc. Unfortunately, this alleged righteous indignation often provides a cover for them being overly emotional, rude, xenophobic, and moralizing.

Lack of prior theoretical reflection: Village atheists frequently make bold assertions without a theoretical framework to back-up those assertions. For example, they will claim "Belief in God is irrational" without a defensible theory of rationality to justify the assertion. Or they will claim "You're a Christian because you were born in Kentucky" without a defensible theory of why social location defeats one class of belief (e.g. "religious") but not another (e.g. "non-religious").

Short attention span: This becomes especially evident when you challenge the village atheist to provide a theoretical framework to back-up their various incendiary assertions. Instead, if any response is forthcoming, it is typically the invocation of some new red herring or rabbit trail.

Unresponsiveness to criticism: You can spend the afternoon arguing with a village atheist, carefully deconstructing some point they've made, only to have them repeat the very same point (perhaps in slightly amended form). This is indicative of doxastic closure.

Caricaturing the opinions of others: Village atheists tend to caricature the views of other people, setting up and knocking down strawmen. (See for example, how Boghossian defines "faith".)

The proliferation of tribalism: Village atheists tend to look askance on internal criticism (i.e. one atheist critiquing another), instead insisting that efforts must be focused on attacking Christians and other "religious" people (i.e. the out-groups).

As I already noted, there are also many village Christians who exhibit similar traits. (But the way, it should not surprise us that when village Christians leave the church, they typically become village atheist.)

We should also keep in mind that many atheists are highly intelligent, charitable and reasonable. That is definitely another lesson I've had driven home after ten years of blogging.

But that doesn't change the fact that the online infidel community has a large and very vocal number of village atheists. And I think it behooves the leaders of that community who are intelligent, charitable and reasonable to take a more vocal stance against the vocal village atheists, especially if they want to continue to claim the mantle of rationality and intellectual credibility.Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Tesla will start to make vehicles in its Shanghai plant in 2020. The initial stage will only see the production of Model 3, whose price is expected to be less than RMB 300,000, according to a local media report.

On July 10, Tesla reached an agreement with Shanghai Lingang Area Development Administration and Lingang Group to build a new auto plant in Shanghai, the American automakers first factory outside the United States. With an expected annual capacity of 500,000 vehicles, the plant will perform various functions, such as R&D, manufacturing, sales. The scale and construction of Teslas Shanghai factory, covering a total area of 1.72 square kilometers, is better than that of its American factory, a people attending the negotiation said.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, revealed during the company's second quarter earnings call on the first day of August, the new factory in China will be funded with a loan from a local bank. Besides, Tesla also posted its recruitment announcement via its Wechat account for the factory in China, including engineering and construction posts.

As to the reason why Tesla located its factory in Shanghai, Yang Zao, chief analyst on new energy business from TF Securities, pointed out the Yangtze River Delta region boasts the most sophisticated supply chain and obvious advantages over other regions in power battery, material, and auto parts. Many famed suppliers, such as CATL, Lishen Battery, Shanshan Corporation, have set up production bases in the region.

Relevant government policies may be another factor for the location decision. From 2014 when Tesla tapped into Shanghai market, the government has issued 6,000 free license plates for Tesla vehicles. It only took the government a week to build charging piles, which impressed Elon Musk a lot.Denmark is taking a step in the right direction by allowing gay men to donate their blood to help others in need.

Previously, gay men were prohibited from donating due to fears of the HIV virus spreading  but now the country is aiming to better embrace gender equality by modernizing their blood donation system.

The authority [patient safety] has found a model we feel is safe and we will therefore incorporate it into Denmark, Danish health minister Ellen Trane Nrby told DR Nyheder. All safety mechanisms in our blood donation system are built on trust and we have some very advanced tests that screen the blood.

Just like the United States, Denmark does have a restriction  gay men wont be able to donate blood if theyve had sex with another man within a period of four months. After four months of abstinence, they are clear to donate.

Fortunately, the restriction has a beneficial condition: The period wait is voided if the man is in a monogamous relationship.Ben Affleck goes to rehab after Jennifer Garner stages intervention with Bible in hand

Hollywood actor Ben Affleck was seen checking into an inpatient rehab facility soon after his estranged wife, Jennifer Garner, was seen at his home with a Bible in hand.

According to TMZ , Garner visited Affleck's Pacific Palisades home Wednesday, and was reportedly accompanied by a lawyer. Photos of the actress show her walking into Affleck's house clutching a Bible and what looked to be a journal.



Garner, the unidentified woman and Affleck then walked out of the house together and drove off in Range Rover. Later that evening, Affleck was photographed entering The Canyon rehab facility in Malibu, where he reportedly check-in for an "extended period of time." This is Affleck's third stint in rehab.

The rehab facility's website describes the location as a "state-of-the-art private-pay treatment program housed on 120 beautiful acres near the Malibu coastline."

Affleck and Garner were wed in 2005, but announced their separation in a joint statement in 2015. In April, they filed for divorce.

Following her lead role in the faith-based film "Miracles From Heaven," Garner has been seen attending church regularly with her children. Despite their separation, Affleck has also been spotted going to church with garner and their children from time-to-time.

Two weeks ago, The Blast reported that the Los Angeles Superior Court had postponed the couple's divorce proceedings because they hadn't yet filed their paperwork.

"If you fail to take the appropriate steps in your case, the court may dismiss your case for delay in prosecution," read a document obtained by The Blast.

This article was originally published in The Christian Post and is re-published here with permissionFormer youth mentor at Saddleback Church convicted in molestation case

A former youth mentor at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California was convicted by a jury Wednesday of molesting twin teenage boys.

Thirty-three-year-old Ruven (Ruben) Meulenberg was convicted of two counts of lewd acts with a minor younger than 14 and three counts of lewd acts on children 14 or 15 in an Orange county court, according to the City News Service.

Meulenberg, who the church claims as only a volunteer, was accused of committing the molestations between May 2016 and May 2017 against the twin brothers he mentored at Saddleback Church Youth Center. The actions allegedly occurred off church property.

Deputy District Attorney Courtney Thom reportedly described for jurors earlier this month an incident that happened when Meulenberg took the twin brothers to a movie theatre. The youth mentor is said to have encouraged one of the boys to sit on his lap and proceeded to kiss the 14-year-old boy on the on the head, cheek and mouth.

Meulenberg allegedly asked the boy to switch seats with his brother after the boy said that he didn't feel comfortable kissing Meulenberg. Meulenberg proceed to molest the other boy in a similar fashion.

"This occurred in isolation in the back row of a darkened movie theater," Thom said. "This is not saying hello or goodbye. This is the defendant manipulating his position of trust and confusing these young boys to see how far he could go."

On the way home from the theater, Meulenberg had one of the boys sit between his legs in the backseat of a car.

Once the boys got home, they told their mother what had occured. The mother then contacted the church to report the boy's allegations.

In statement released last May, Saddleback Church explained that a church representative called the police on May 24, 2017 to report the allegations. Meulenberg was arrested the next day.

Read the full article at The Christian PostCollecting guide: Chinese archaic bronzes

Christies Chinese ceramics and works of art specialists explain what to look for when building a collection of Chinese archaic bronzes

1. Familiarise yourself with the different forms Made in sets to furnish the tombs of Chinas elite, Chinese archaic ritual bronzes were used to hold offerings of food and drink to the ancestors of the past. They were produced in huge quantities in a range of shapes, each of which has a specific name. When looking to build a diverse collection, it is important to familiarise oneself with the names of the different forms. Some of the more popular archaic bronze forms include:

Gong: A ritual wine vessel with cover (above), often characterised as metamorphic forms of animals.

Fangyi: A ritual wine vessel (above) with tapering body of rectangular section and a roof-shaped cover.

A very rare miniature bronze ritual wine vessel and cover, you. Late Shang dynasty, 12th-11th century B.C. 4 in (11.5 cm) high with handle. Estimate: $200,000-300,000. Sold for $495,000 on 13 September 2019 at Christies New York

You: A ritual wine vessel (above) with a stout oval body and an overhead handle, usually with a cover.

A finely-cast bronze ritual wine vessel, zun. China, late Shang-early Western Zhou dynasty (12th-10th century B.C.). 26.3 cm (10 3/8 in). Sold for 200,000 on 23 June 2020 at Christie's in Paris

Zun: Another ritual wine vessel, flared and with a bulbous mid-section (above).

Gu: Also a ritual wine vessel, similar to the zun but with a slender silhouette (as above).

A bronze ritual tripod wine vessel, jue. Late Shang dynasty, 13th-11th century B.C. 8 in. (20.3 cm.) high. Sold for $32,500 on 22-23 March 2018 at Christies New York

Jue: One of the more striking vessels (above) of the archaic ritual bronze assembly  another ritual wine vessel, with a prominent spout, whorl-capped posts, flared tail and long tripod legs.

The Fu Yi Liding. A bronze ritual tripod food vessel. Late Shang dynasty, Anyang, 12th-11th century B.C. 8 in (21 cm) high. Sold for $125,000 on 22 March 2019 at Christies New York. Sold for $125,000 on 22 March 2019 at Christie's New York

Ding: A ritual cooking vessel (above) with a globular body, tripod legs and a pair of upright handles.

Pou: A ritual wine vessel (above) with rounded body, used for storing wine.

The Ran Fu Bing He. A rare bronze ritual tripod wine vessel and cover, he. Late Shang-early western Zhou dynasty, 11th century B.C. 13 in (33 cm) high. Estimate: $450,000-550,000. Offered in Important Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art on 18-19 March 2021 at Christie's New York

He: A ritual wine vessel and cover (above), supported on either two or three legs with a spout rising diagonally from the shoulder, opposite a C-form handle.

Hu: A classic pear-shaped ritual wine vessel (above), sometimes with a cover.

The Ge Zu Ji Gui, a large bronze ritual food vessel. Early Western Zhou dynasty, 11th-10th century B.C. 15 in (38 cm) across handles. Sold for $555,000 on 22 March 2019 at Christies New York

Gui: A ritual food vessel (above) with a compressed globular body, raised on a waisted foot, with a pair of loop handles usually decorated with animal heads.

The Ge Zuo Cong Yi Fangding. A rare bronze ritual rectangular food vessel. Early Western Zhou dynasty, 11th-10th century BC. 8 in (21.5 cm) high. Estimate: $500,000-700,000. Sold for $555,000 on 22 March 2019 at Christies New York

Square forms: Many of the standard shapes also appear in square or fang versions, including the fangzun, fanghu and fangding. Of great significance to the ancient ruling elites, square vessels are much more rare.

2. Look out for inscriptions From the latter part of the Shang dynasty (1600-1100 BC) onwards, some Chinese bronze ritual vessels were marked with inscriptions which can indicate for whom the object was made, when, and for what purpose.

Inscription on the interior of the Luboshez Gong, possibly a clan sign, of four footprints around what has been interpreted as two hands holding an album or book



Late Shang-dynasty and early Western Zhou-dynasty (11th-10th century BC) vessels tend to have simpler inscriptions, while those on Western Zhou-dynasty vessels (9th-8th century BC) tend to be longer and more complex. Inscriptions make a vessel more rare, and add to its value.

Dating these markings is key: in some cases, they will have been added by a collector long after the piece was originally produced.

3. Consider for whom the vessel may have been made Chinese archaic bronze vessels often have extensive provenance, with ownership dating back hundreds of years. It makes sense that the finest examples often come from important and well-known collections, because they would have been commissioned by Chinas most powerful figures.





The Shao Fangding. A rare and important bronze ritual rectangular food vessel. Late Shang dynasty, Anyang, 11th century B.C. 8 in (20.7 cm) high. Sold for $1,095,000 on 22 March 2019 at Christies New York

These vessels are often inscribed with significant clan marks, indicating the calibre of the patronage surrounding their manufacture. They are surviving symbols of Chinas royalty and elite.

4. Take note of condition The condition issues of archaic bronzes are not always immediately obvious. It is always important to take an X-ray of a bronze to check for hidden damage, because cracks or corrosion may have been carefully concealed using sophisticated restoration techniques. 5. Familiarise yourself with the different periods associated with ancient bronzes Objects that fall under the category of ancient Chinese bronzes span a period ranging some 1,800 years  from the Shang dynasty (1600-100 BC) to the Han (206 BC- 220 AD). It is important to understand the different styles associated with each period. The more classic vessels  those most closely associated with archaic Chinese bronzes  were typically produced in the Shang (1600-1100 BC) and Western Zhou (1100-771 BC) dynasties.





New and more elaborate shapes, techniques and decoration were introduced in the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC), Warring States period (475-221 BC) and Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). Advancements in metalwork led to the use of intricate gold, silver and turquoise inlay in Warring States vessels, ornaments, fittings and blades. Complex designs including scrolls and interlocking animals were also a common feature in later periods.

6. Look out for bronze mirrors Mirrors made in bronze, highly polished on one side, were also popular in ancient times. Although the earliest bronze mirrors date to Neolithic times, they only began to be mass-produced from the Warring States period (475-221 BC) onwards, with the finest examples dating to the Han (206 BC-220 AD) and Song (960-1279) dynasties.





Bronze mirrors were produced right up until the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), so it is important to identify the age of a mirror. Pay attention to the quality of casting and the style of design on the non-polished side. 7. Ornaments and ritual weapons Bronze was also used to make ritual weapons including blades and axe heads, and elaborate ornaments such as belt hooks, which were an indication of status when worn by the elite.



Crews announced progress in fighting the Mendocino Complex Fire, the largest wildfire in state history, as increasingly humid weather conditions allowed crews to create a backfire in an effort to contain the active fire in the Mendocino Complexs northeastern section.

The last three to four days have been very favorable for firefighters, said Capt. Cary Wright, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protections public information officer for the Mendocino Complex. Humidity levels have been up, creating what firefighters call good overnight recovery, which provided the distance to set a backfire ahead of the main fire heading northeast, said Wright.

Its less likely to have spot fires when that relative humidity goes up. Two weeks ago we were seeing embers being thrown a mile out, he added.

Monday marks one month since the start of the Mendocino Complex Fire, which has spread over parts of Mendocino, Lake, Colusa and Glenn counties and is made up of two parts: the River Fire north of Hopland, which is completely contained, and the much larger Ranch Fire northeast of Ukiah, which is 67 percent contained.

The level of containment has stayed the same for several days, yet Wright said thats a bit misleading because the fire actually increased by more than 24,000 acres between Saturday morning and Sunday evening, most of it from the backfire, bringing the total to a massive 450,985 acres. Depending on weather conditions, it will likely take four to five days for the backfire and main fire to join, he said. Cal Fire expects full containment by Saturday.

The focus today and probably the next couple of days is to get in there and mop up all the hot spots, Dennis Burns, fire behavior specialist for Cal Fire, said in a video update Sunday.

In the less active part of the fire zone, some of the 3,114 firefighters in the fire area were able to bring in heavy equipment to repair fire lines and cut down hazardous trees over the weekend.

The cause of the Mendocino Complex Fire, which has resulted in the death of one firefighter and three firefighter injuries, is still unknown.

A new fire sprang up in Lake County on Sunday afternoon just south of the Mendocino Complex, Cal Fire reported. The Cache Fire grew to 120 acres by evening and was located in Clearlake Oaks at Highway 20 and New Long Valley Road. Late Sunday night, it was burning 105 acres and was 20 percent contained.

Cal Fire crews also took part in fighting a grass fire on the eastern edge of Castro Valley Sunday afternoon that engulfed motorists on nearby Highway 580 in thick white smoke. Quickly contained to 48 acres, the fire near Palo Verde Road turned the hillside from gold to charcoal black.

Tara Duggan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tduggan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @taradugganExxon Mobil Corp. has been looking to buy renewable energy for delivery in Texas, according to people familiar with the matter.

The largest U.S. oil company sent out a request for proposals with a June 8 deadline, inviting solar or wind power suppliers to pitch contracts that would last 12, 15 or 20 years, according to a document obtained by Bloomberg and people with knowledge who asked not to be named discussing confidential matters. Exxon, based in Irving, Texas, is seeking at least 100 megawatts and would consider proposals for more than 250 megawatts.

I have never seen an oil and gas company doing a corporate PPA anywhere near that size, said Kyle Harrison, a New York-based analyst at Bloomberg NEF, referring to the power-purchase agreements used to buy electricity. If youre seeing the biggest oil and gas companies going out and making investments in clean energy, it shows that renewables are cost-competitive. This can be a way for them to show a commitment to sustainability without suffering economically.

WINDY: Texas remains No. 1 in U.S. wind energy

Exxon declined to comment. Its not clear whether the company has reached an agreement with any supplier to buy this power, nor whether it was seeking the electricity for its own use.

Rockefeller Mantra

Exxon has been slow to follow Big Oil rivals such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc and BP Plc into renewable energy technologies. While Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods acknowledges the risk of climate change and is testing whether biofuel made from algae can work on an industrial scale, he said earlier this year that the companys investment dollars will follow oil magnate John D. Rockefellers bet-on-what-you-know mantra.

But as the price of renewable power declines, the company may see the value in consuming wind or solar, even if it eschews producing that kind of energy. Texas is the biggest wind-producing U.S. state, with power prices occasionally going negative on windy days, and solar power is cheaper than coal in many parts of the world.

SAVINGS: Texas utility customers could save $1.2 billion from tax reform

The number of companies contracting to buy renewables continues to expand. Excluding utilities, companies and agencies agreed to buy 7.2 gigawatts of clean energy worldwide through July, shattering the record of 5.4 gigawatts for all of 2017, according to BNEF.

Good to see them dipping their toe in the water, but well have to wait to see if they put their foot in the water, said Amy Myers Jaffe, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York.

--With assistance from Christopher Martin and Joe Carroll.

2018 Bloomberg L.P.Houston-based Archway Properties and Ridgeline Property Group of Atlanta have teamed up to build a 685,400-square-foot speculative warehouse northeast of Houston to meet a growing demand from e-commerce tenants.

The building, designed to accommodate one or two tenants, will go up on 40 acres within Archway Properties 111-acre Park Air 59 mixed-use project at the northeast corner of U.S. 59 and Will Clayton Parkway in Humble. Completion is planned in the second quarter.

Were seeing really low vacancy rates across the Houston market and a lot of population growth and projected growth over the next 5 to 10 years, Archway Properties development manager Ben Allen said. Thats driving a lot of the demand for warehousing.

The deal follows another spec project in Baytown, a two-building distribution center totaling 390,000 square feet at Interstate 10 and Thompson Road announced by Investment & Development Ventures and Sealy & Co. Thursday.

RELATED: Deal of the week: Jackson-Shaw starts industrial project in Humble

The Park Air 59 building will be constructed with 40-foot clear heights, enabling goods to be stacked higher. Such heights are common in Dallas, a major regional market for distribution space, but the top height is Houston is typically 36 feet, Allen said. The buildings extra weight will require a thicker-than-normal slab of 8 inches.

Ridgeline Property Group will purchase the land from Archway Properties, which will partner with Ridgeline in the development, Allen said. The project is a few miles east of Bush Intercontinental Airport.

Houstons industrial vacancy ticked up to 5.7 percent in August, brokerage firm NAI Partners said.

In the past 12 months, developers have broken ground on 8 million square feet of distribution space including recent deals by Conns HomePlus in north Houston and Best Buy in Missouri City.

RELATED: Houstons industrial market charges ahead as office lags

The strong market means developers are confident to build before securing commitments from tenants. Of the 10.9 million square feet of industrial space under construction across the Houston region, 43 percent has been preleased, according to NAI Partners.

Also in Park Air 59, Jackson-Shaw is developing a three-building industrial project with Thackeray Partners on a spec basis. The buildings, totaling 320,000 square feet, wont directly compete with the 685,000-square-foot warehouse, which is targeting larger users, Allen said.

Once the land sale is closed, Archway Properties will have 20 acres along both U.S. 59 and Will Clayton Parkway remaining for lease or sale in Park Air 59. The project contains Rooms To Go, Sunoco and an upcoming medical office building for Vital Heart & Vein just west of the latest planned warehouse.

The newest project is expected to break ground in the next couple of months, Allen said. JLL is marketing the project.

katherine.feser@chron.com

twitter.com/kfeserAug. 13

At 10:01 a.m. Officer D.Rocha was dispatched to the 4600 block of Locust Street in reference to a burglary of a motor vehicle. Upon arrival at 10:14 a.m., Rocha made contact with the complainant / victim. Victim stated between the time her vehicle was parked at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 11 and about 2 p.m. Aug. 12, unknown suspect(s) made entry into her vehicle.

At 11:24 a.m., Officer Trujillo was dispatched to City Hall lobby in reference to an identity theft call in the 5300 block of Pocahonta. Upon arrival he spoke to the victim who stated an unknown person may have used his identity information to file a 2017 income tax return.

Between 1 and 1:20 p.m., a victims unlocked vehicle was burglarized in the 4700 block of Bellview Drive.

Aug. 14

At 12:59 a.m., Officer D. Norman was traveling in the 8000 block of Chimney Rock Rd when she observed a 2013 White Dodge Avenger with no license plate light. Officer Norman conducted a traffic stop on the said vehicle for the above listed violation. Upon further investigation, the driver was arrested for driving while license invalid. A third party that was going to take custody of the vehicle was arrested for an out of county warrant with Dallas County Sheriffs Office. Officer T. Quimby assisted in this investigation.

At noon, Officer Carson was dispatched to the Bellaire Police Lobby in regards to meeting with a victim whose identifying information was used to open a line of credit with Home Depot.

Aug. 15

At 1:30 a.m., Officer D. Norman initiated traffic stop on a Silver Toyota Camry for unreadable license plate in the 4700 block of Laurel. The driver was found to be in possession of approximately 0.25 ounces of marijuana. Officer Norman also located drug paraphernalia and a vape pen with a thick brown liquid inside of it. Harris County Assistant District Attorneys Office advised that the driver was a candidate for the Misdemeanor Marijuana Diversion Program (MMDP). The driver agreed to participate in the MMDP program. The driver was booked into the Bellaire Jail for Possession of Drug Paraphernalia. Officer J. Clisham assisted in this investigation.

At 11:06 a.m., Officer D.Rocha was dispatched to the 5500 block of IH 610 West Loop South northbound in reference to a motor vehicle accident. The unit #1 driver of the motor vehicle accident was identified by her Texas Identification card. This driver was subsequently found to be driving a motor vehicle while her Texas Drivers license currently suspended. She was arrested and booked at the Bellaire jail for driving while license suspended / enhanced with previous convictions for DWLS. Cpl D. Clawson assisted at the scene.

At 6:55 p.m., Officer Guerra was dispatched to the 4700 block of Bellaire Boulevard in reference to a minor accident. Officer Guerra conducted an interview with the at-fault driver. During the crash investigation the driver was found to have a suspended drivers license and no proof of financial responsibility. The driver was taken into custody for driving while license invalid-enhanced and taken to the Bellaire Police Department for booking and processing.

At 6:10 a.m., Cpl. Porter observed a black pickup truck traveling northbound in the 6600 block of South Rice Ave with its right front headlight not working. Cpl. Porter conducted a traffic stop on this vehicle in the 6000 block of South Rice Ave. Driver was identified by his Texas drivers license and stated he did not have any proof of financial responsibility. Driver was checked via computer query and found to be driving while license suspended. The subject was taken into custody and transferred to the Bellaire Police Jail for processing.

Aug. 16

At 2:45 p.m., Officer Carson was dispatched to 7001 Fifth St. in regards to a 5-year-old male who fell from the ladder of a diving board. The male was transported to the hospital by Bellaire Medic 81. Officer Trujillo assisted with this incident.

At 11:30 a.m., Officers H. Lopez and D. Clawson were dispatched to the 4300 block of Phil Street in reference to a welfare check. Upon arrival it was determined that the son had gotten into an argument and an assault had occurred.

At 4:16 p.m., Officer Schwausch was patrolling the 6300 block of IH610 NB when he observed a white Pontiac in front of him with expired registration. Officer Schwausch initiated a traffic stop on the vehicle and found the driver was driving with a suspended driver license without proof of financial responsibility. The driver was arrested for driving while license invalid-enhanced and transported to the Bellaire Police Department without incident.

At 8:04 p.m., Officer Schwausch was dispatched to Feld Park in reference to a burglary of a motor vehicle. The victim returned to his vehicle and found the front driver side window broken. The unknown suspect took various items belonging to the victim. Officer Guerra assisted with the case.

Aug. 17

At 8:26 a.m., Officer C Barber was dispatched to a motor vehicle crash in about the 6900 block of IH-610 northbound. Contact was made with the driver of a silver Toyota who admitted to Officer Barber he had no insurance. His information was run through the Bellaire Emergency Communication Center and it was determined the suspect's license to drive was currently suspended with an end date of Nov. 4, 2018. Officer Rocha assisted with this arrest.

At 4:55 p.m., Officer Schwausch was dispatched to the Bellaire Police Department lobby to meet with a victim of credit card abuse in the 5100 block of Bellaire Boulevard. The victim stated his wallet was stolen on July 25 from his work truck. The victim showed Officer Schwausch bank statements that showed the suspect used his debit card from four different Bank of America locations.

Aug. 18

At 3:10 p.m., Officer made contact with the victim who advised an unknown suspect forced entry into her residence and stole items in the 4300 block of Bissonnet. This case was determined to be a burglary of habitation.

At 2:30 p.m., Officer Marcotte initiated a traffic stop on a beige Ford Taurus for expired registration in the 5400 block of Bellaire Boulevard. The driver presented an insurance card that was fictitious, was arrested and charged with displaying fictitious insurance.

Aug. 19

At 4:54 a.m., Officer Clisham observed a vehicle in the 7100 block of Alder Drive traveling without headlights activated during hours when headlights were required. Officer Clisham initiated a traffic stop on said vehicle based on the probable cause mentioned above and made contact with the driver. After making contact with the driver and further investigation, the suspect driver was placed into custody and charged with driving while intoxicated.

At 4:38 p.m., Officer Marcotte initiated a traffic stop on a 2013 Cadillac for expired registration in the 8000 block of IH610 southbound. The driver was found to have a suspended drivers license, was arrested and charged with driving while license invalid.

At 7:40 p.m., Officer Marcotte initiated a traffic stop on a white Chevy blazer for invalid registration in the 6300 block of IH 610 northbound. The driver gave a false name and date of birth and was arrested tor failure to identify to a police officer.

Aug. 20

At 11:30 p.m., Officer Clisham initiated a traffic stop in the 5200 block of Bellaire Boulevard for the offense of not having license plate displayed on the front of the vehicle. After making contact with the driver and further investigation, the driver of the vehicle was placed into custody and charged with possession of a controlled substance.The Sam Houston Area Council, effective Aug. 1, is now accepting girls into local Cub Scout packs as a part of the new Scout Me In campaign. The Sam Houston Area Council serves approximately 50,000 youth in 16 counties in Southeast Texas.

Cub Scouts are for elementary school kids, ages 5-10 years old. Starting Feb. 1, 2019, girls will be able to join Boy Scouts, which is for grades 6-12 and ages 11-17 years old.

Debbie Rollinson, a volunteer member of the board of directors and the vice chairman of membership for Sam Houston Area Council, notes that starting February 1, the Boy Scout program will be known as Scouts BSA, to make the name more gender neutral. The other current programs, including Cub Scouts, Venturing, Explorers and Sea Scouting, are already gender neutral.

Girls have been welcomed in Venturing and Explorers and Sea Scouts for decades, but now it is new to Boy Scouts And Cub Scouts, Rollinson explained.

Rollinson continued, I think it is a great idea to let the girls, who have been coming along with their brothers to all these activities, now earn the badges and the ranks.

Rachael Hutchinson, who has a son Mason in Boy Scouts, and two daughters, Scarlett and Abby, entering Cub Scouts, echos that sentiment.

Hutchinson and her husband Chad have been involved with Scouts in the Sam Houston Area Council in a number of ways, with Chad being a den leader, and Rachael being an outdoor activities coordinator.

Cub Scouting even way back then, was always for families. Your whole family can come camping, fishing or to a cook out. My daughters had been going to everything that my son has been going to. My one daughter was 18 months old the first time she went camping with the pack. They had already been planning to join Venturing at 14. When they realized they could be with Cub Scouts, they were very excited, Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson noted that, as a parent, she is most looking forward to her whole family being truly involved.

We have made some great family friendships in the pack. Its great for our kids to make those friendships too, Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson notes that both Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts are great programs, but its great for girls to now have the second option.

I think that BSA offers somethings that just fits certain girls personalities better. Cub Scouts just fits my family better, we dont have to be split up. Cub Scouts started us on a path to be outdoors together. Every family vacation we camp somewhere new. It has always been about families, and now it is official.

Rollinson believes that the future of Scouting will be strong, just so long as there are always adults willing to volunteer and guide the Scouts.

Rollinson herself has been a volunteer for Scouts for 28 years, long past her children growing up and leaving the programs.

I think Scouting offers some of the best leadership development training that is out there for use. We have an opportunity through Scouting to make an impact for good, Rollinson said.

To sign up your child for Scouts, visit www.BeAScout.org. To find out what local packs are nearby, enter in your zipcode or childs school on the website.

rebecca.hazen@chron.comThe Port of Galveston's bond rating has been upgraded, which could help the port receive lower-cost financing for infrastructure improvements on roads, docks and other equipment.

The port recently announced that Standard and Poor's Global upgraded the port's bond rating to an "A-". It was previously a "BBB+".TEDDY BLACKBURN / REUTERS

Average gasoline prices in Houston fell nearly two cents a gallon over the past week, but drivers should expect an increase heading into the last big weekend of the summer driving season, according to GasBuddy, a website that tracks gasoline prices nationwide.

A gallon of gasoline averages $2.57 a gallon Sunday, down 4 cents from month ago, but up 46 cents a gallon from the same time a year ago.(WB) Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar raised LGBTI-specific issues during Pope Francis two-day visit to the country.

Varadkar, who is openly gay, on Saturday in a speech in front of Francis at Dublin Castle pointed out same-sex couples can legally marry in Ireland. Varadkar also noted Irish voters in May voted overwhelmingly to legalize abortion in the country.

Divorce became legal in Ireland in 1996.

The Ireland of the 21st century is a very different place today than it was in the past, said Varadkar. Ireland is increasingly diverse.

One in six of us were not born here, and there are more and more people who adhere to other faiths, or who are comfortable in declaring that they subscribe to no organized religion, he added. We have voted in our Parliament and by referendum to modernize our laws  understanding that marriages do not always work, that women should make their own decisions, and that families come in many forms including those headed by a grandparent, lone parent or same-sex parents or parents who are divorced.

Consensual same-sex sexual relations were criminalized when Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979.

Varadkar told an Irish television last week that he planned to tell Francis LGBTI people, women and those who are divorced feel excluded from the church. The Washington Blade has reached out to Varadkars office for comment.

Clergy sex abuse overshadows papal visit

Francis on Saturday met with Irish President Michael D. Higgins and visited Dublins St. Marys Pro-Cathedral. Francis on Sunday visited a Catholic shrine in western Ireland and celebrated Mass at Dublins Phoenix Park that marked the end of the World Meeting of Families 2018 before he returned to Rome.

Francis traveled to Ireland less than two weeks after a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report that says Cardinal Donald Wuerl of the Archdiocese of Washington and other church officials covered up clergy sex abuse of children for decades.

Wuerl, who was the bishop of Pittsburgh from 1988-2006, was scheduled to attend the World Meeting of Families in Ireland, but he cancelled his trip after the grand jury released its report. The National Catholic Register and other Catholic media outlets on Saturday published a letter from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican ambassador to the U.S., in which he said Francis knew about the sex abuse allegations against then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington.

Vigano in his letter that urges Francis to resign said the pontiff rescinded the sanctions against McCarrick that Pope Benedict XVI had previously imposed against him.

McCarrick in June resigned from the College of Cardinals. The disgraced former archbishop of Washington has been ordered to a life of prayer and penance before the church tries him on the allegations.

Vigano in his letter states the seriousness of homosexual behavior must be denounced and homosexual networks present in the church must be eradicated, even though there are no links between pedophilia and homosexuality.

Vigano in 2015 invited Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who went to jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, to meet with Francis at his D.C. home during his trip to the U.S.

Francis had a private meeting with Yayo Grassi, a former student, and his longtime partner, while he was in D.C. The Vatican downplayed the pontiffs meeting with Davis.

Francis meets with clergy sex abuse survivors

The Vatican Press Office said Francis on Saturday met with eight people who have suffered abuse of power, of conscience and sexual abuse.

The press release also notes Francis acknowledged the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the church. The Vatican Press Office and media reports also indicate Francis expressed shame at the churchs response to the sex abuse scandal in the country and around the world.

Francis in May met with Juan Carlos Cruz, a gay man from Chile who is among the hundreds of people who were sexually abused by a priest in the countrys capital of Santiago, at the Vatican. All of Chiles Catholic bishops submitted their resignations the same month amid lingering outrage over the clergy sex abuse scandal that has rocked the South American country.The school year began today for Cleveland ISD and the Cleveland Police Department is encouraging motorists to be watchful of children walking on or near roadways.

There are many streets in our neighborhoods that dont have sidewalks, and people use the edge of the paved roadway to walk or ride their bicycles, said CPD police chief Darrel Broussard.

Broussard said motorist and pedestrian traffic will increase with the beginning of school.

We encourage citizens to get up a little earlier, so they dont find themselves running late and having to rush, he said.

He also recommended drivers take an extra moment, or two to look for children at intersections, or those who may be about to cross the roadway.

Drivers are being warned to slow down, because our neighborhood streets will be a lot busier. Many students will be crossing the streets with both buses and parents dropping and picking up children, the chief said.

Drivers should make sure there are no distractions inside their vehicles especially cell phones. Use of cell phones are prohibited in school zones where signs are posted.

Officers will be working school zones and watching for speeders and cell phone violators for the protection of our children, Broussard warned.

Motorists on the highway or public streets are asked to stop before reaching a school bus operating flashing warning lights when loading or unloading students. Traffic should stop when approaching from either direction. Motorists should not proceed until the bus resumes motion or the visual warning signal lights are no longer activated. Motorists who commit the offense of failure to stop or remain stopped for a school bus commits a misdemeanor punishable by a fine not less than $500, or no more than $1,250. A second conviction and the judge may order a persons drivers license suspended for at least six months (see Texas Transportation Code Sec. #545.066).

Cleveland Police Department is asking that you heighten your awareness when traveling in school zones, or when approaching school buses with or without warning lights on, Broussard urged residents.Houston-area cyclists and families can enjoy a fun autumn day of exploring the Heights at the 2018 13th Annual Houston Heights Bicycle Rally & Scavenger Hunt.

The Houston Heights Association plans to host the event Sunday, Oct. 7, and is looking for volunteers and vendors to help make the event a success.

The bike rally will begin at Marmion Park at 1802 Heights Blvd. at 8 a.m. and continue through 5:30 p.m. It will include a five-mile ride, a 20-mile ride and a new stroller and bike parade designed for families as well as an after-party at the park.

Sharon Dearman, HHA vice president of communications, board member and bicycle rally co-chair, said as the participants ride, they will look for clues for the scavenger hunt to direct them.

Riders on both the 20-mile and the 5-mile rides are given maps with a list of clues to certain landmarks along the route, Dearman said. They need to read the clues and find the item it is referring to. There are some pretty tough clues.

Prizes will be awarded at the after-party to the riders who figure out the most clues, and door prizes will also be handed out. Hotdogs, lemonade, cookies and other refreshments will be served.

Dearman said more than 600 people from the Heights and surrounding areas attended last years after-party and that she expects more this year with the addition of the stroller and bike parade.

We added the stroller and bike parade this year, which includes strollers, tricycles, bikes with training wheels, wagons and the like, so our families with really young kids can participate too, Dearman said. Because the demographics of the Heights is changing, we need to keep changing along with it.

She said HHA is looking for around 75 to 100 volunteers to help with various activities at the event, including setting and cleaning up, serving food and beverages and managing traffic for the parade.

More Information To learn more about the bicycle rally or to register, visit https://www.houstonheights.org/event/bicycle-rally-scavenger-hunt/. Online registration closes Oct 4. The fee for the 20-mile ride is $25 online and $30 the day of the event. The fee for the five-mile ride is $15 online and $20 the day of the event. If you are interested in volunteering or having a vendor booth, email bicyclerally@houstonheights.org. See More Collapse

Dearman said the bicycle rally will also have space for about 10 vendor booths, and she encouraged those interested in showcasing their products or services to area residents to get involved.

We would love to see booths

from any vendor from the Heights and our surrounding communities, especially for simple bike maintenance, kid-friendly activities, health and fitness, apparel, realtors, etc., she said. It is a great way for businesses to get in front of the very folks who will patronize them.

Dearman said the Houston Heights Association exists to build community and that the annual bike rally is a big part of that.

Like our other Heights Association events, the rally is about bringing our community together - from within the Heights and throughout Houston, Dearman said. The route takes our riders through areas of Houston they might have never seen. They can learn something about our citys architecture, history, art, diversity and more along the way. It encourages fitness, families spending quality time together and just having fun.

Jim and Donna Bennett are longtime volunteers for the Houston Heights Association, and Donna has chaired the bicycle rally twice before. Jim Bennett said while the event raises funds for HHA, the focus is mainly to help people enjoy time together in the community.

The bicycle rally is mostly about fun, he said. Yes, it does raise money for the HHA, but the focus is more on fun while being a family-friendly event.

Jim Bennett urged Houston-area residents to try out the bicycle rally so they can see the Heights from a different vantage point - on a bicycle.

Come out and enjoy a day of exploring the Heights and nearby areas on your bicycle, Bennett said. It will be fun and challenging for adults and kids alike.

tracy.maness@hcnonline.comThe Katy Independent School District is rapidly approaching 80,000 students and that explosive growth has spurred on the need for new campuses and more teachers. But according to one Katy ISD board member, state officials in Austin have dropped the school finance ball.

The State of Texas as gone AWOL. They have gone missing in action, said district trustee George Scott. The State of Texas has declared war on public education financing at least over the last four or five years.

Texas has decreased its share of public school funding over the past 10 years, allowing rising local property taxes to make up the difference. District officials are anticipating a 2.9 percent enrollment growth in the next school year, along with a 2.4 percent growth in the tax base.

Even though were growing 3,000 plus students a year, (state funding) will continue to go down under the current funding formulas, Chris Smith, Katy ISDs chief financial officer, told school board members at their meeting. Were going to continue to grow throughout the year. That is one of the things thats unique for Katy ISD, Smith said.

Scott said he appreciated the districts finance department for what he called consistent stable management in Katy ISD - even with the state footing less of the bill of educating Katy students.

What we have is an extremely consistent growth pattern, Scott said. The big difference is the finances.

Katy ISD officials are anticipating revenues of more than $715 million in the 2018-2019 general fund. Of that amount, 64 percent - more than $443 million - will come from local tax revenues.

That is, by far, our largest revenue source in the general fund and increasing every year, Smith said.

According to district officials, state funding for Katy ISDs general fund amounts to just over $209 million.

Trustee Rebecca Fox said she would be talking to state legislators in Austin about the states role in school funding.

Im quite concerned about the future. School funding has to be at the top of their priority list, Fox said. They need to hear from all of us. Our childrens education has to be a priority - a bigger priority than it is.

Along with opening a new campus to be named Campbell Elementary and adding an 11th grade to just opened Paetow High School, this years Katy ISD budget will also earmark a 2 percent bump in pay for teachers along with a one percent lump sum payment for other district staffers. The total payroll budget for 2018-2019 amounts to almost $630 million - including salaries, benefits and what Katy ISD officials referred to as other compensation. They said that amounts to about 88 percent.

Were very labor intensive, Smith told the board members.

About 4.7 percent of the general fund budget will be directed toward supplies and materials, but that includes much more than papers and pencils. A big chunk of that amount will go toward fuel for school buses, Smith said.

We spend a lot of money in transporting students and staff around the district, he said.

During the board meeting, Scott angrily slammed his hand on the desk - knocking over a soda - while criticizing state officials over funding issues and even some community members, whom he called knuckleheads. He did not identify the target of his insult although frequent Katy ISD critic Sean Dolan, who has announced his plan to run for the Katy ISD board, was in the audience.

The people of this community need to make a decision soon, Scott said. Are they going to turn this district over to knuckleheads or are they going to continue to support solid management in the district?

mike.glenn@chron.com3 1 of 3 Wild and Scenic Film Fest Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Wild and Scenic Film Fest Show More Show Less 3 of 3





The Bayou Land Conservancy will host the Wild and Scenic Film Festival On Tour at the Star Cinema Grill in Vintage Park on Thursday, Aug. 30.

The Wild & Scenic Film Festival is a collection of films from the annual festival held the third week of January in Nevada City, Calif., which is now in its 16th year. Wild & Scenic focuses on films which speak to the environmental concerns and celebrations of our planet.Hunters Creek

8/18/18 at 2245 hours. 900 Block of Voss. Driving While Intoxicated. Officer was running radar on Voss when his attention was drawn to a vehicle traveling in excess of the speed limit. Upon approaching the driver after initiating a traffic stop, the officer observed signs of intoxication. The driver was administered field sobriety tests and failed them. The subject was placed under arrest and transported for a breath test. The breath test results were twice the legal limit. The 25-year-old female was booked into the Harris County Jail.

8/22/18 at 1045 Hours. 8500 Block of Katy Freeway. Illegal Open Fire/Camping. Officers were dispatched to the area in reference to a fire in the area near a bayou. Upon arrival officers located a homeless individual who had set-up a camp and had a fire going. The subject said he was burning garbage and litter. The subject was assisted in extinguishing the fire, taking down his camp and moving.

8/23/18 at 1830 Hours. 10800 Block of Roaring Brook. Fraud. Victim reported that she had received several text messages from a (618) area code number claiming to be from her bank and needing to verify banking information. She did not respond to any of the text messages but grew suspicious as they continued. She then contacted her bank and learned that a charge had gone through earlier in the day for a pizza in Rhode Island. Other attempted charges had been denied at various other businesses. Information about the transactions and text message were obtained and provided to detectives for a follow-up investigation.

Bunker Hill

8/19/18 at 0230 hours. 200 Block of Mayerling. Possession of Drug Paraphernalia. Officer was on patrol when he observed a vehicle sitting in a drive way occupied by 2 subjects. The vehicle appeared to be out of place and as the officer drove by the vehicle started to leave the area. The officer initiated a traffic stop and upon approaching the vehicle he could smell the odor of marijuana emitting from the car. The subjects stated that they were lost and had stopped to look for directions. A check of the vehicle located a small quantity of marijuana and miscellaneous paraphernalia. The 22-year-old passenger was issued a citation for the violation and escorted from the area.

8/22/18 at 1015 Hours. 11700 Block of Brandon Way. Identity Theft. Victim reported that his wife had received a text message that her password needed to be changed on their bank account. Soon after changing the password a withdraw occurred from a remote location from their account. The bank and their credit monitoring service were both notified of the incident. Information was obtained and provided to detectives for their follow-up investigation.

Piney Point

8/22/18 at 1915 Hours. 100 Block of Mott Lane. Attempted Fraud. Victim was checking a web-based ticket resell service when he located 2 tickets that belong to him for sale on the site that were for the same event, date and seats. The victim was not selling the tickets. The victim will be contacting the ticket reseller and the event host to determine who listed the tickets for sale and if it is a fraud.

8/23/18 at 1030 Hours. 100 Block of White Pillars. Burglary of a Vehicle (Delayed Report). Victim reported that last Wednesday evening between 11 pm and 930 am, unknown persons entered her unlocked vehicle that was parked in her driveway and removed a wallet. The wallet did contain a credit card, identification and a small amount of money. The credit card has been cancelled. Officers checked the area for video surveillance systems however, none were located. Information was provided to detectives for a follow-up investigation.

8/23/18 at 1200 Hours. 100 Block of Jeffers. Fraud. Victim reported being informed by his bank of a possible fraud committed against his account. A fraudulent check was created using his bank account and personal information. The check was presented and cashed at an area Kroger store. Upon examining the check, it was identified as clearly being fraudulent, however it had been processed by the store and the financial institution. Information and evidence was collected and forwarded to detectives for their follow-up investigation.The Houston-Galveston Area Council has announced the launch of the Gulf Coast Regional Tow and Go Program, which provides no-cost towing for vehicles that break down from mechanical failure while traveling within the city of Houston on freeways with camera coverage.

The regional quick clearance program will expand next into Harris County and eventually to freeways in neighboring counties where camera coverage is available and as funding is allocated. Tow and Go will replace existing clearance programs like SafeClear.

Vehicles that break down due to mechanical failure (e.g., out of gas, overheating, flat tire) while traveling in the programs service area will be cleared, at no cost, to a safe location within one mile. Motorcycles are included in the program, and trailers can be towed when possible.

Each tow is authorized by law enforcement, including the Harris County Sheriffs Office and the Houston Police Department. Law enforcement officers authorize every Tow and Go clearance either from their location in the Houston TranStar traffic center where freeway-monitoring cameras allow them to view incidents in real time or while officers are on the freeway. Each tow operator contracted to perform the quick clearance service has not only met strict selection standards, they have also completed roadway safety and traffic incident management training.

If a motorist calls for their own towing service, such as AAA, it must arrive before law enforcement monitoring the freeway has authorized Tow and Go or meet them at the safe location where they have been cleared from the freeway.

If a breakdown is the result of a flat tire and the motorist has the necessary equipment along with a working spare, the Tow and Go operator will change the tire, at no cost, once the vehicle has been moved to a safe location off the freeway. Vehicles that are abandoned, involved in a crash, or in a law-enforcement incident are not eligible for the no-cost service, and the vehicles owner must pay established local jurisdiction towing rates.

The Tow and Go program is an essential component of effective Traffic Incident Management, and will address the dangers, frustration and costs associated with congestion on Houstons freeways, said H-GAC Regional Incident Management Program Manager David Fink. Traffic is one of the biggest concerns for Houston-area residents. Hours spent in heavy congestion caused by stalled vehicles not only impact productivity and the environment but can put lives at risk.

The Houston-Galveston Area Council manages The Gulf Coast Regional Tow and Go Program through funding provided by the Federal Highway Administration and the Texas Department of Transportation. Initial participants in the program include the City of Houston, Harris County, and representatives from the towing industry that operate out of Houston TranStar.

For more information about Tow and Go and to download the Houston TranStar app, visit TowAndGo.com . Motorists who experience mechanical failure on the freeway coverage area can call 713-881-3333 for immediate assistance or to speak with law enforcement.An 18-year-old man accused of sexually assaulting a woman at the Exotic Adult Store in Houston robbed a Porter gas station at gunpoint with three other men during a violent crime spree last week, according to authorities.

Houston police spokeswoman Jodi Silva on Monday identified Charles Craig as one of the four suspects allegedly behind a pair of robberies that took place Thursday morning. The teen has been charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and aggravated sexual assault, she said.

He could linked to several more robberies in Houston, Silva added.

He was on probation after pleading guilty in April to another aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon charge. The teens lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.

Two suspects, including Craig, are believed to have sexually assaulted a woman at the adult store at the 15800 block of the Eastex Freeway, Silva said.

Craig was captured shortly after the Exotic Adult Store robbery and the search for the three remaining suspects continues.

OUTSIDE ROSENBERG: Boy, 2, drowns in pond

The Montgomery County Sheriffs Office linked the four suspects in the adult store attack to a robbery 13 miles north of the crime, to the Circle K Phillips 66 gas station located at 21900 FM 1314 in Porter around 2:40 a.m., a spokesman said.

A deputy saw Houston polices social media postings on the Exotic Adult Store robbery and realized the vehicle  a black Dodge Ram  was used in both crimes, Deputy Steve Squier said.

In the Circle K robbery, one of the pistol-toting suspects corralled a customer into the store with a gun pointed at the victims head, according to surveillance footage. He then leaped over the counter while another suspect grabbed the clerk, put a gun to his head and ordered him to open the cash register, according to a Montgomery County Sheriffs Office news release.

At one point during the hold-up, the four suspects hid in the store. The surveillance video shows the suspects going in and out of the store as more customers came in. One of the men robbed the two customers of their phones before returning to the store to steal cigarettes and an unspecified amount of cash, according to the news release.

The four are believed to have fled the gas station in the Dodge Ram truck before arriving at the Exotic Adult Store. There, the men disarmed the security guard and sexually assaulted a victim at the store.

The suspects bolted in the security guards vehicle when an alarm at the store went off, authorities said.

Three of the men escaped after a short chase that ended when their vehicle crashed, police said.

For any information about the identity of these suspects, contact the Montgomery County Sheriffs Office 936-760-5800 and refer to case Number 18A240006 or contact Multi-County Crime Stoppers at 1-800-392-STOP (7867).A Houston man accused of several abductions and sexual assaults in Harris and Montgomery counties was indicted on Thursday for a new charge filed against him related the alleged sexual assault of an elderly woman in Conroe in April.

Howard Junius Dixon, 23, was originally arrested on May 1 near The Woodlands after tips from victims from other cases and the public helped develop him as a suspect.

The Conroe Police Department issued a plea to the public for assistance in identifying a suspect involved in the sexual assault of an elderly woman who was working in her garage on April 12.

Officers were dispatched to the senior-citizen apartment complex, Arella Forest at Woodland, located at 545 FM 1488 after a 71-year-old woman said she was assaulted by a man she did not know.

After Dixon was arrested as a suspect in the other abductions and sexual assaults, Conroe Police detectives continued their investigation to determine if he was the suspect in their case.

Conroe Police Sgt. Scott McCann said they identified Dixon as the suspect in the alleged sexual assault of the elderly woman and filed a felony charge of aggravated sexual assault of an elderly person.

Dixon was recently indicted on this charge by a Montgomery County grand jury and also faces additional charges of sexual assault and aggravated sexual assault in Montgomery County.

Dixon remains in the Montgomery County Jail on a $500,000 bond. He could face up to life in prison if convicted. Dixons attorney, John Hafley, did to respond to request for comment.

The first reported attempted abduction happened in the 900 block of North Vista Drive, near Imperial Valley Drive, around 10:45 a.m. on April 28.

A woman told police a man - later identified as Dixon - tried to force her into his car, but she was able to evade the suspect with the help of nearby lawn-care workers, Harris County Sheriff's Office Violent Crimes Lt. Jeff Stauber stated in a previous article.

Dixon allegedly tried to force another woman into his vehicle in the 16200 block of Bend Drive a few minutes later, less than a mile from the North Vista Drive location. She was able to break away and run for help before anything more nefarious could happen.

Dixon struck again 24 hours later near an apartment complex at the corner of the Interstate 45 and Rayford Road in Montgomery County.

He "coerced" a woman into his vehicle on April 29, detectives said, and forced her to perform a sexual act.

A few hours later, he came back to the same area in Montgomery County and coerced another woman into his vehicle, police allege. This time, he allegedly choked her before sexually assaulting her.

Dixon is due back in court for a plea agreement on Oct. 3.

Grand Jury Indictments for Aug. 21 and 23:

Edward Hernandez - possession of a controlled substance

Nachandria Chanae Johnson - theft

Jorge Luis Hernandez - tampering with physical evidence

Neil Edwin Beal - driving while intoxicated - subsequent offense

Holly Diane Espinoza - driving while intoxicated - subsequent offense

Wayne Hubbard Fuller - possession of a controlled substance

Mario Alberto Romo - possession with intent to deliver/manufacture a controlled substance

Shamarie Eleutario Harris - aggravated robbery

Jerry Wayne Walters II - credit/debit card abuse

Mark Christopher Schulze - possession of a controlled substance

Jason Powell Turrentine - possession of a controlled substance

Cory Nathan Wistinghause - theft

Rodney Bryant McCrary - possession of a controlled substance

Brooke Ashley Bishop - possession of a controlled substance

Jamone Deshun Greenwood - aggravated robbery

Kelly Earnest Bolander - theft

Theophylus Vondran - possession of a controlled substance

Jorge Luis Hernandez - possession of a controlled substance

Donald Lee Johnson - assault - public servant

Joaquin Ignacio Roman-Barrios - possession of a controlled substance

Eduardo Jose Correa - possession of a controlled substance

Ben Adam Blankenship - three indictments for possession of a controlled substance

Scott Allen Anderson - unlawful possession of firearm by felon

Zayne Hunter Wood - burglary of a habitation

Chelsie Brianne Martinez - one indictment for possession of a controlled substance and one indictment for tampering with physical evidence

Eduardo Osorio-Hernandez - driving while intoxication - subsequent offense

Jacob August Holly - possession of a controlled substance

Harry Tidecobb Harrison - assault causes bodily injury - family

Nathaniel Allan Johnson - one indictment for assault - family strangulation and one indictment for violation of protective order

Dustin Detroy Simmons - two indictments for aggravated assault - family violence, threaten with deadly weapon

John Franklin Black - possession with intent to deliver/manufacture controlled substance

William Andrew Eastwood - possession with intent to deliver/manufacture controlled substance

Larry Ward - possession of a controlled substance

Jacques Gerald Blair - possession of a controlled substance

Lamon Kentate Hubbard - possession with intent to deliver/manufacture controlled substance

Wilfredo Meza-Hernandes - aggravated assault with a deadly weapon

jennifer.summer@hcnonline.comMontgomery County Sheriff Rand Henderson is requesting the county commissioners allow him to carry over $1.3 million in unused funds to hire more personnel for the upcoming year.

Montgomery County Commissioners will meet at 9:30 a.m. on the fourth floor of the Alan B. Sadler Commissioners Court Building, 501 N. Thompson St.

During the countys multi-day budget workshop, Henderson made the largest staffing request to the court asking for funding for 10 patrol deputies, two sergeants and one lieutenant. Henderson, who is a proponent of zero-based budgeting, was able to reduce his budget for the upcoming year from $32.203 to $31.756 million.

However, the court was only able to budget for one property and evidence technical and one crime scene investigator, however, according to Budget Officer Amanda Carter, Henderson will be able to use his carryover funds from the current year toward deputies in the upcoming budget year.

According to Henderson, he projects that amount to be about $1.3 million.

During last years budget workshops, Henderson requested an additional $3.7 million to add 41 positions. The court agreed to give him $3 million. The additional $700,000 will came from unused salary funds from the previous year.

The countys preliminary Fiscal Year 2018-19 budget is set at $344 million, up from last years $323 million adopted budget, which was a 5.5 percent decrease from the Fiscal Year 2016-17 budget. However, the preliminary budget for the 2019 is a small increase over the countys $335 million actual budget from last year.

The court is also proposing keeping the tax rate of 46.67 cents per $100 valuation for the upcoming year.

The court will consider adoption of its Fiscal Year 2018-2019 budget Sept. 5.

In other business:

Road Bond - The court will consider allocation of proceeds from the 2015 $280 million road bond.

Tax relief - The court will discuss a resolution requesting all Montgomery County taxing jurisdictions to seek property tax relief.

Shortage - Henderson is asking for the courts approval of funds to cover a $245,000 shortage in the jail pharmacy.One of two suspects accused of following an undercover Houston Police Department officer after she left a bank and burglarizing her vehicle was sentenced to 38 years in prison on Friday.

Houston resident Hose Lenard Singleton, 37, was found guilty of engaging in organized criminal activity by a jury in Judge Lisa Michalks 221st District Court and sentenced on Friday.

Gang members engaging in predatory theft in this community will not be tolerated, Montgomery County Assistant District Attorney Michael Ghutzman said in a release. Let it be known that bank juggers that choose to target citizens in Montgomery County will receive swift justice. The Montgomery County District Attorney Brett Ligon and his assistants will ensure that these cases are charged appropriately and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

"Jugging" often involves thieves who watch someone withdraw cash from a bank, follow them to their next destination, and then break into the vehicle to take the cash.

According to the Houston Police Department, this is the longest sentence ever handed down by a Texas jury for a non-violent bank jugging-related offense.

During the jury trial, Ghutzman and Rob Freyer presented information that on Jan. 23, HPD conducted a sting operation where they caught Singleton and his co-defendant, accomplice Charles Ray Price Jr., allegedly stalking an undercover HPD officer from a bank in north Harris County to a location in Montgomery County.

After leaving her vehicle, the undercover officer went inside a local business. Singleton then burglarized the officers car, stealing $2,500, the Montgomery County District Attorneys Office stated in a release. Both Singleton and Price were apprehended within seconds.

Price remains in the Montgomery County Jail on a charge of engaging in organized criminal activity. He is due back in court for a jury trial beginning Sept. 10.

More than a dozen HPD officers spoke during trial concerning their past encounters with Singleton who they have dealt with for more than 20 years.

Singleton is one of Houstons most prolific bank juggers, HPD Officer C.E. Dorton stated during the course of the trial.

Dorton added, Singleton is a member of the Hustling Under Pressure criminal street gang - a group known for targeting citizens leaving banks and stealing their money.

Previously, Singleton was convicted of multiple narcotics and jugging-related offenses, including a 57-month trip to federal prison for dealing crack cocaine and a felony bank jugging case out of Miami-Dade County, Florida. Additionally, Singleton still has two pending felony cases in Harris County and one pending felony in Comal County, all of which involve bank jugging, the DAs Office stated.

Singleton will be eligible for parole after serving at least 19 years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.We can't seem to find the page you are looking for.

You may have typed the address incorrectly or you may have used an outdated link.A year in retrospect since Hurricane Harvey has changed several things for YES to YOUTH  formerly known as Montgomery County Youth Services.

One of the most notable changes is their evacuation policy, especially after a tree damaged their youth shelter in Conroe, forcing them to evacuate the girls and boys to another location.

We have signed a memorandum of understanding with a church and a hotel in the Austin area in the case of any future natural disasters, YES to YOUTH Executive Director Dannette Suding said. If we are experiencing flooding or damage locally, it is most likely that local churches and hotels, locally, will experience the same thing. We want to get our children out of here and to a safe location.

During Hurricane Harvey, the YES to YOUTH youth shelter received the brunt of the damage when the building was struck by a large oak tree causing significant damage to the roof, several walls and a youth bedroom, frightening the staff and 15 children staying there at the time, forcing them to evacuate.

The ground was saturated with all the rain we received during Harvey which caused for the tree to fall onto the shelter, Suding said.

Not long after evacuating the children to another location, YES to YOUTH representatives learned of a grant through their workers compensation insurance company, Texas Mutual Insurance Co., that could help pay for the repairs to the roof and building.

After receiving numerous requests for grant funding, Texas Mutual granted $10 million to policyholders in the affected counties including nearly 30 policyholders receiving funding in Montgomery County. YES to YOUTH received $10,000 to help fix the damaged property.

After Hurricane Harvey, we looked at what we could do that would be meaningful and help businesses recover, said Jeremiah Bentley, vice president, marketing and customer engagement for Texas Mutual. YES to YOUTH/MCYS has been a customer for a while and was one of the first to apply for the grant in the Montgomery County area. This is a great nonprofit organization with a mission to help residents in this community; we were honored to help.

Bentley added that 97 percent of those who applied for the grant received funding and were able to award those grant monies within a week of applying for most of the recipients.

We wanted to make sure businesses could get back to work and organizations like (YES to YOUTH) get back to helping people, Bentley said.

This was especially important for YES to YOUTH who experienced an uptick in services needed after Hurricane Harvey.

Among the services they provide, YES to YOUTH works to socialize the kids living at the shelter which includes taking them to restaurants and parks to learn the social rules at both places. This was one of the services that were in danger of being suspended if they hadnt received the grant from Texas Mutual.

We had more kids in the shelter because the family was evacuated from their home and the shelter they went to was not accepting a 15-year-old boy in some cases so families were split between shelters until they could find an apartment, Suding explained. We also experienced an increase in counseling as we had children that moved up here after losing their home and their school to flooding. A lot of them had anxiety and others experienced bullying.

Since Harvey, YES to YOUTH has re-opened their shelter in Conroe and also recently moved to a new office to better serve their teens and counseling clients.

If we had not received this grant, we would have had to put our services on hold and not accept additional clients, Suding said. Without this grant, I dont know what we would have done or where we would be right now.

jennifer.summer@hcnonline.comAs Hilliard Elementary School teacher Bianca Fray sat before her newest class of third-grade students Monday, teaching them the rules of the classroom, a small vase with plastic flowers rested on a bookshelf over her shoulder.

After Hurricane Harvey filled Hilliard with four feet of water last August, movers salvaged just a single box of items from Frays classroom. They included a green M&M plush toy given to her by a former student, stuffed animals accumulated from her former school in Austin ISD, and the multicolored flowers, which suddenly and surprisingly took on new meaning.

I dont think I realized how much it meant to me until everything was kind of over and I put it all back in my library this year, said Fray, who began her third year at Hilliard on Monday, when students returned to the campus for the first time since Harvey. After everything happened, as a teacher, we just were so overwhelmed and everything moved so fast.

As Houston ISD welcomed an estimated 214,000 students back to school Monday, children and teachers settled into the familiar confines of Hilliard, home to about 575 students on the citys northeast side. One year removed from Harvey, they had plenty to celebrate: about $5 million in repairs and upgrades finally were complete, and for the first time since it was annexed into HISD five years ago, Hilliard had met state academic standard.

I am looking forward to a spectacular year, because if we can do what we did last year, through that adversity, you have no idea the heights we will reach this year, said HISD Board President Rhonda Skillern-Jones, whose district includes Hilliard.

For many of HISDs students, Monday marked a typical return to school. Other than Hilliard, only one other storm-damaged school made a major move, as Braeburn Elementary School opened in portable buildings on the campus of Welch Middle School. Students also saw little to no change in the classroom after earlier predictions of dire budget cuts did not fully come to fruition.

Across the district, HISD officials and parents did report one significant first-day issue: transportation delays at some of the districts 46 new magnet bus hubs. HISD instituted the hubs, where students are picked up and dropped off, to enable more direct bus routes to campuses, though some families must travel farther to reach bus stops.

Our electronic system was not working, so we had to manually sign our bus drivers in, HISD Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan said. Once the buses got out and started rolling, we did have some congestion at some of our hub stops.

HISD sent shuttles to pick up students who missed or could not board buses on time, Lathan said. Transportation officials are reviewing potential changes to alleviate the issues, she said.

At Hilliard, which is not a magnet campus, families arrived with relative ease for the 7:30 a.m. first bell. Children donning sparkling sneakers and bountiful hair bows quietly separated from loved ones, with only a few reluctant to let go. Staffers served as traffic cops, shuttling students into the right classrooms. If not for a mid-morning press conference and scattered clusters of balloons, Hilliard could have passed for any other campus in HISD.

Its a sense and feeling that youre home, a sense of calmness, Hilliard Assistant Principal Bathsheba Nash said. We were ready, and the students and parents were ready, as well.

Over four days in late August of last year, Harvey dropped about 38 inches of rain near Hilliard, according to the Harris County Flood Control District. Several days later, then-HISD superintendent Richard Carranza and four school board members took reporters on a tour of the campus. Standing water remained in spots. Classroom walls, normally plastered with bright-colored posters, had been stripped bare. Thick, musty air permeated every room.

Outside a fourth-grade classroom  the same spot where Fray now teaches  Carranza warned that Hilliard might not be salvageable. Ashley Jones, who grew up near Hilliard and sent her first-grader to the campus last year, braced for demolition.

I didnt think they were going to open this back up because of how it looked right after Harvey, said Jones, who stopped by Hilliard about a week after the storm. A week after Harvey, they were pulling up floors and you could see all the trash, all the debris. It was sad.

HISD officials ultimately deemed the 54-year-old campus restorable. They gutted the facility, rewired much of the electrical work, replaced virtually all of the furniture and installed a new drainage system designed to present future flooding, among numerous other repairs. In the end, HISD demolished four out of its 280-plus campuses, with plans to rebuild them by January 2020.

While fixes were made, students attended the old Fonwood Early Childhood Center building, about five miles northwest of Hilliard. With help from staffers at a Fort Worth-area elementary school, who brought tubs of supplies and rocking chairs for all Hilliard teachers, HISD employees prepared the once-vacant building. They finally welcomed students back to school in late September, about a month after Harvey.

Teachers and administrators immediately noticed the change in their students. The sound of rain hitting the rooftop sent some children into a funk. Kids more often requested basic necessities, like clothes and toothbrushes.

If definitely felt like a different year, Fray said. For those first two months, it never went away.

Even before Harvey, conditions were ripe for low academic performance at Hilliard, where 88 percent of students are considered economically disadvantaged by the state.

Every year since 2013, when HISD took over Hilliard from the now-defunct North Forest ISD, the campus had failed to meet state academic standards. Headed into the 2017-18 school year, about two-thirds of staff members had left or been replaced. Hilliard received help under HISDs school turnaround plan known as Achieve 180  a part-time nurse, a social services coordinator, a counselor  but it was not among the 10 highest-priority campuses.

On the states standardized tests, however, Hilliard students showed remarkable progress in 2017-18. About 80 percent of students showed growth in reading and 70 percent reported growth in math. Both totals exceeded the district averages of 69 percent and 68 percent, respectively, for each subject.

The progress was enough to earn Hilliard a rating of 77  the equivalent of a C letter grade  and a met standard label under the states new academic accountability system. School leaders chalked up the strong scores, in part, to ambitious teachers who took advantage of professional development opportunities offered by the district.

They really met the challenge head-on, and they knew going in that there was an expectation about moving with a sense of urgency, Nash said.

Hilliard administrators cautioned that the accountability results only reflect test scores from a single year, warning against complacency.

Nevertheless, Hilliards accomplishment marks another notch for turnaround efforts at the five former campuses of North Forest ISD, which the state shuttered amid major academic and financial woes.

In the five years since HISD annexed the campuses, all but North Forest High School have met standard at least once. While raw academic performance remains dismally low and campus staffs remain highly susceptible to turnover, local leaders said they see incremental progress.

It took a while for them to get acclimated to us, and for us to get acclimated to them, said state Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, who opposed the closure of North Forest ISD in 2013. But all in all, there have been kinks there and kinks there, but they have ironed a lot of it out.

jacob.carpenter@chron.com

Twitter.com/ChronJacobThree people, including a woman and her teenage son, have been charged in the shooting death of a man whose body was found on a road in Bear Creek Pioneers Park in March.

Lourdes Roman, 53, her 15-year-old son and Emmanuel Del Olmo, 32, have been charged with murder. Roman's son was referred to Harris County Juvenile Probation authorities on the charge.The east Texas city of San Augustine may be small and struggling, but residents won't tolerate anyone calling them names.

In June, the Houston Chronicle published a story about the closing of the local Dairy Queen, one of 27 stores a franchisee closed across the state.

"This is the armpit of East Texas," Jason Monday, of Nacogdoches, told the paper when asked for his thoughts on the subject. Monday was in San Augustine that day installing a sign at a business across the street from the shuttered Dairy Queen.

READ THE STORY: Whats's a Texas town without a Dairy Queen?

Word traveled fast, though it wasn't the first insult to be hurled at the town.

Once, someone infamously painted on a roadside rock near town: San Augustine, 10 miles ahead, 100 years behind. Another person soon flipped that rock over.

The school board, in similar fashion, wasn't having Monday's remark. On July 24, according to the San Augustine Tribune, they passed a resolution cutting ties with him and his business.

On Aug. 2, the paper printed the biting resolution in full:

WHEREAS, the mission of our district is to meet the diverse educational needs of our children and to empower them to become competent, productive contributors to a demographic society and an ever-changing world; and

WHEREAS, our school board members work closely with parents, educational professionals and other community members to create the educational vision we want for our children; and

WHEREAS, our school board members are responsible for ensuring the structure that provides a solid foundation for our school system as well as a safe and positive environment; and

WHEREAS, during a recent visit from a Houston newspaper, Jason Monday of Monday Signs in Nacogdoches, Texas expressed his contempt publicly for our town and its citizens and in essence our children; and

WHEREAS, the San Augustine Independent School District has, in the past, done business with Jason Monday and the Monday Sign Company of Nacogdoches, Texas and has paid them for services for our district; and

WHEREAS, the derogatory statement made by Jason Monday of Monday Signs of Nacogdoches, Texas regarding San Augustine and its citizens may have negative and possibly lasting repercussions which will affect our community and our children; therefore

BE IT RESOLVED that the San Augustine Independent School District Board of Trustees, in support of our children and this community, will no longer be associated with or do business with Jason Monday or Monday Signs of Nacogdoches, Texas and urges the community of San Augustine to stand up for our community and our children by rejecting such divisive and irresponsible statements.

Emily Foxhall writes about all things Texas for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and send her story ideas at Emily.Foxhall@chron.com.The Motor City's calling for two Houston-area parents landed them behind bars Monday after they allegedly left their 11-year-old daughter home alone to travel cross-country for a concert.

The parents, John Guerrero, 48, and Virginia Yearnd, 39, were arrested Monday after they arrived back in Houston after seeing English rock band Godflesh, according to the Harris County Precinct 4 Constable's Office.

Guerrero and Yearnd left their Spring home Wednesday for the concert that night, according to court documents.

MYSTERY: Barefoot woman seen in security video sparks mystery

Deputies found out the girl was home alone only after her great aunt called police to report the incident Thursday, according to court documents. The woman called the young girl and learned she had been home alone since the previous morning.

Deputies called the parents several times to try and talk with them but couldn't get through for hours, police said. They eventually got a hold of Yearnd, who initially told them they were in Louisiana, court documents state.

She later came clean with deputies about her and Guerrero taking the trip to Detroit to see the English rock group live, deputies said.

FAMILY AFFAIR: Mom and teen son among 3 charged in fatal shooting

When deputies got to the home to check on the girl, they found her trying to cook. The mother had told deputies that she asked her sister to check in on the child, but the girl told deputies no one came by. It is unclear when deputies got to the home to check on the girl.

The parents were arrested Monday on second-degree felony child endangerment charges.

In Texas, a parent - or anyone else who has custody or cares over a child under 15 - can be charged with child endangerment if he or she "intentionally abandons the child in any place under circumstances that expose the child to an unreasonable risk of harm," according to the Texas Penal Code.

They were booked in to the Harris County Jail with no bond, according to Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman. They are facing up to 20 years in prison, if convicted.

Child Protective Services is looking into the incident, deputies said.

Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message.

Jay R. Jordan covers breaking news in the Houston area. Read him on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and our subscriber site, HoustonChronicle.com | Follow him on Twitter at @JayRJordan | Email him at jay.jordan@chron.comDuring Hurricane Harvey, the Ali family lost almost everything after their Fort Bend County home was flooded by a foot of storm water. The downstairs portion, including the kitchen and two bedrooms, were destroyed and the family found themselves living in hotels and with friends for months. After they moved back, the kitchen remained a total loss and the family used a back yard grill as a makeshift kitchen.

We have had our ups and downs but this experience has given me a new appreciation for the strength of my parents and everything they have overcome, daughter Naureen Ali said, who is grown and now lives on her own. Ali has two sisters who still live at home with her parents and an older brother currently serving overseas in the Navy.

Volunteers from ISGH River Oaks Islamic Center, where the Ali family are members, came to help with cleanup efforts the day after the storm, which happened to fall on the day before Eid Al Adha, a special Islamic holiday also called the "Festival of Sacrifice". Now one year later, family members were celebrated having their home back.

We are so grateful for everything these groups have done to restore our family home, Naureen Ali said.

A star-studded group of celebrities from partner organizations who worked together to completely rebuild the house and replace all the furniture gathered to welcome the Ali family to their newly-rebuilt home Tuesday, August 12.

"We all deal with some sort of destruction in life, some sort of devastation in life, but it's how we respond to it that really matters and we've seen that here in such a big way," Texas First Lady Cecilia Abbott said during a ribbon-cutting ceremony which also featured appearances by Susan Dell, Houston home-builder David Weekley and Jim Mattress Mack McIngvale.

The rebuild-project was funded by a $350,000 grant from the Rebuild Texas Fund, created jointly by the OneStar Foundation, a state-wide non-profit that has focused on supporting communities affected by Hurricane Harvey and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

The Ali Family home is located in the same southwest Houston neighborhood where Michael Dell grew up, wife Susan Dell told reporters.

When Harvey hit, his childhood neighborhood, just like this one, was underwater. We knew we had to do something, she said.

Within a few days, the couple created the Rebuild Texas Fund, Dell said.

It has been absolutely incredible and inspiring to see the strength of the families and the communities and to see how tens of thousands of volunteers have rallied to help, she said.

Houston home-builder David Weekley also joined as a partner in the project alongside HomeAid Houston, a non-profit organization that works in collaboration with builders from the Greater Houston Builders Association to provide materials and contractors to help rebuild homes damaged by the hurricane.

The great thing about the recovery effort in Houston is many of the organizations involved are very collaborative, said Chris Yuko, director of BuildAid, a Houston-based non-profit that also worked as a partner on the project. BuildAid was founded after the storm and funded via a $5.5M grant from the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund, administered by the Greater Houston Community Foundation and established by Houston's Mayor Turner and Harris County Judge Emmett.

The groups have partnered on three other home-rebuild projects and during the process, Yuko said they discovered moving families back into homes without furniture was problematic.

Its nice to bring a homeowner into their home, but they cant actually return home until they have a place to put their head at night and a place to sit down and share a meal, Yuko said.

In search of solutions, Yuko said he reached out to Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale and invited him to join the project. McIngvale was soon on board.

"Through Hurricane Harvey, we truly found unity in community and that will continue as we continue the rebuilding efforts, so we're proud to donate some furniture here today," McIngvale said.

Yuko said volunteers from Ecclesia, a downtown-area church he and his family attend, arranged to bring a food truck to cater the event and help welcome the Ali family back to their home.

The faith-based community, the public sector and private business, they have all come together as partners on the project, Yuko said.

James Boone Jr., director of construction efforts for BuildAid, also attended the event to help welcome the Ali family back to their new home.

It is great to be able to give back and see a family that was truly devastated and displaced and be able to help out and get them back home and actually make things better than they were before, Boone said. I came to the event to tell them welcome home and God bless you. They say God is everywhere and so God is actually using us as a vessel to get his work done. I truly believe that.As students returned Monday to Lone Star Colleges many campuses in the Houston metro area, some community members have already started campaigning for a seat at the colleges table of elected leaders.

LSCs nine-seat Board of Trustees has three open seats on the Nov. 6 ballot: for trustees in District 1, District 2 and District 8. The deadline for candidates file paperwork was Aug. 20.

None of the sitting incumbents for those three positions have filed for re-election, but all three seats will be contested races. In order to file for candidacy, potential board members must have lived in the district for which they are running for at least six months, and in the state for at least one year.

The three incumbents not seeking re-election are: in District 1, David Holsey; District 2, Kyle Scott; and serving District 8, Ron Trowbridge

Trustees serve six-year terms without compensation, during which they convene monthly to set board and system policies, establish tax rates and set budgets and monitor the systems overall performance.

Below, in the order theyll appear on the ballot, is a roundup of who the candidates are and what they hope to accomplish should they secure a seat.

District 1: LSC-CyFair territory

Michael (Mike) Stoma, 66, of Cypress, is a project manager and consultant for an oil company. Stoma said he has a history with the college  he was a student when LSC was founded and taught at North Harris College before it became LSC - North Harris.

You have to keep up once youre in the industry, and community college is key to the growth of our workforce and educational system. I saw this as an opportunity to make a difference, and I jumped in, Stoma said.

Also running is George Edwards, Jr., 63, of Cypress. He is a certified public accountant for ExxonMobil. He was once on the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District Board of Trustees, and said he was one of the first supporters of the LSC campus in CyFair.

Im running to promote student access and success by providing quality academic and support services, including community involvement, to provide quality workforce training and to promote economic development, Edwards said.

District 2: LSC-North Harris territory

Ernestine Pierce, 66, of Spring, has worked for more than 40 years in both public and private education as a teacher and administrator, but most recently as an adjunct professor at LSC.

According to her campaign website, she is passionate about ensuring safe neighborhoods, creating effective schools and offering affordable skilled education programs, as well as keeping taxes low.

Pierce did not offer any additional comments, and referred any questions to information on her website.

Matthew Wheeler, 30, of Humble, is also on the ballot. He is a project manager for a nonprofit organization, Mission Squash, that provides after-school programming. He has been involved in education at both elementary and secondary levels, and said this is the next step.

I really value what education can do for students, and I want to be part of that process at the college level. Not everybody needs to be a lawyer or doctor, and Lone Star has a lot of nontraditional degrees that can change lives, Wheeler said.

District 8: LSC-Kingwood territory

Mike Sullivan, 60, of Kingwood, is an executive. According to his campaign website, he served on both the Humble Independent School District Board of Trustees and the Houston City Council, and was formerly the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector from 2013-2016.

Sullivan did not respond to telephone calls or email messages from The Villager.

On his website, Sullivan listed several priorities for LSC, including ensuring programs prepare students to enter the workforce, supporting fiscally sound budgets and ensuring campuses have the leading technology to train students.

Guillermo Professor Puente, 34, of Kingwood, is an adjunct professor at LSC as well as a real estate broker. While he is now pursuing his doctorate degree, he said he decided to run for the seat because he loves to teach and described it his calling.

My primary platform is working to help make Lone Star College Texas online institution. I want to concentrate on getting closer to what the students need to know, and I want to show new ways of doing business, decision-making and problem-solving, Puente said.WASHINGTON - Amid breaking news of a U.S.-Mexico trade deal, President Donald Trump invited reporters into the Oval Office on Monday to punctuate the moment in an unusual way: allowing them to sit in on a celebratory phone chat with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.

But when he punched a button on a phone, the line was dead.

"Enrique?" Trump said, with television cameras rolling. There was no response. "You can hook him up," he called out to aides. "You tell me when. This is a big deal. A lot of people are waiting."

The audience, including top White House advisers and Mexican diplomats, would have to wait a touch longer - "Hellooo," the president tried again. "Do you want to put that on this phone please? Hellooo?" - before an aide finally took the receiver and patched Pena Nieto through.

The awkward, real-time sequence in the Oval Office offered another example of Trump's willingness to discard protocol and conduct his presidency like a reality show playing out in real time, conscripting those around him in service of the spectacle.

From hour-long Cabinet meetings broadcast live on cable television to White House events and campaign rallies in which he impulsively invites guests on stage to speak, Trump has employed his showman's mind-set to cast those around him in bit parts for a never-ending series about himself.

"I thought we'd congratulate each other before it got out," Trump told Pena Nieto.

Parts of the conversation were so stilted that it took on the air of a hastily arranged photo op. A translator tried to keep up with the Mexican leader's Spanish, while Pena Nieto promised Trump, who doesn't drink, a tequila toast.

Former press aides to presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama could not remember anything similar during their tenures, and reporters wondered aloud on social media whether Pena Nieto even knew he was on speaker phone. A senior Trump administration official familiar with the call said the Mexican side fully agreed to it.

Trump "thought talking about sealing the deal in front of reporters would be not just interesting but important for the American people to see," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. "It was coordinated with the Mexican government. I'd caution you that something like that does not take much time at all. If a deal is done, you say, 'Hey, Mr. President, why not get on a phone call for the press?'"

The official emphasized that Trump's performative personality has allowed him to discard the convention of his predecessors and pull back the curtain on a job that has long been "so scripted and milquetoast" in which presidents "follow a script line-by-line."

The approach has offered some advantages for Trump, allowing him to bask in the glow of unadulterated praises.

At Cabinet meetings, Trump has allowed reporters to observe as he moves around the table asking aides to answer questions about issues ranging from the economy to tax reform to foreign policy - prompting them to praise his leadership in flowery, often over-the-top prose.

At official events and campaign rallies, Trump has also made a habitof calling on associates, friends and ordinary supporters to join him on stage - sometimes offering them the microphone to address the raucous crowds.

During an address at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in July, Trump called to the stage 94-year-old Allen Q. Jones, a World War II veteran, who promptly asked if he could visit the Oval Office.

Trump leaned and answered, "Yes," thrilling the crowd and prompting Jones to request an autograph a photo of himself with Trump during the campaign.

Public officials who attend Trump's events said they come prepared in case they are called on by the president to perform.

In Duluth, Minnesota, in June, Trump called up several politicians, including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., as well as a local county commissioner, Pete Stauber, a Republican who is running for Congress.

"Hey, Pete, come here," Trump said. "Say a few words. I wasn't supposed to do this, but let's hear him."

Stauber took the mic and praised Trump for curbing regulations and boosting the economy. "Mr. President, these people support you!" he said, drawing a huge cheer from the crowd.

Trump took the microphone back and said: "So I didn't know he was going to do that. Then he takes out a speech and reads it."

Stauber's campaign spokeswoman, Caroline Tarwid, said Trump's campaign informed them ahead of time that the candidate, who rode to the rally in the presidential limo, might be asked to speak.

"Obviously, the staff did let us know that anything can happen," Tarwid said.

But such unscripted moments have also led to flubs. At a live-televised meeting with congressional leaders on immigration in January, Trump appeared confused on policy details and contradicted himself several times, leaving lawmakers uncertain over his intentions.

More recently, Trump was speaking at a White House ceremony honoring federal immigration agents when he impulsively asked a Latino Border Patrol agent to join him and address the room.

"Speaks perfect English," Trump declared with a smile as the agent made his way to the stage, prompting blowback from commentators that the president had been racially insensitive.

For Trump, Monday's speakerphone call with Pea Nieto helped mask 18 months of tensions with his Mexican counterpart, who abruptly canceled a White House visit early last year after Trump repeated his campaign pledge to make Mexico pay for his proposed border wall.

As the two leaders wrapped up, Pena Nieto told Trump he was sending him "an affectionate hug."

"A hug from you would be very nice," the president replied, before hanging up and mistakenly telling reporters that he had just sealed a trade deal with Canada.As soon as Rachel Hundley saw the link, her heart sank.

A city council member in the small, quiet city of Sonoma, California, Hundley was working from home Aug. 13 when a message from an unfamiliar address popped into her inbox. What she read stunned her. The anonymous email accused the 35-year-old Hundley of being "immoral and unethical." It then suggested that she drop out of her race for reelection in November. She read the note a few times before the reality of the threat set in. Then she clicked the link.

The now-disabled website, called "Rachel Hundley Exposed," attacked Hundley for her stance on divisive issues while mayor of Sonoma. It contained photographs mined from Hundley's social media accounts, including some showing her in a bra and underwear and working at Burning Man, the famed art and music festival. The site, supposedly by an organization called "Sonoma Citizens for Peace and Cooperation," called Hundley a "cruel and demented person," who was "a cancer" that needed to be cut from the community.

"I was stunned," Hundley said. "It's 2018. I thought we'd gotten past this."

While unprecedented numbers of American women are running for public office in 2018, harassment and smear tactics that dig into the personal lives of female candidates are still fairly common. But when victims of these attacks, designed to tarnish reputations and derail campaigns, confront the attacker, it can actually spark outrage, inspire voter support and raise the candidate's profile, experts and candidates said.

Over the years, public response to these types of attacks on candidates have shifted, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement, said Jennifer Lawless, a professor at the University of Virginia who has spent years studying the intersection of gender and politics. Research shows women who push back and call out the behavior are often rewarded. But the threat of such harassment can still deter women from running.

"I think it's important to call out these kinds of examples and make sure female candidates or women in the political arena know they don't have to suck it up and remain silent," Lawless said.

Hundley conferred with advisers and close friends -- many of whom suggested that she ignore the threats. Instead, Hundley decided to address it head-on with a YouTube video, which has nearly 14,000 views as of Monday afternoon. In it, she called out the "anonymous coward" for attempting to slut-shame her into silence, and put the threats against her in the broader context of the harassment and hypocrisy women in politics face. The purpose of the website was to make her afraid, she said. But she refused to be intimidated.

"I am here today to tell my faceless bullies that I cannot be shamed into quitting because I am not ashamed," Hundley said in the video, eyes fixed on the camera.

Most politicians deal with trolls and criticism, and in 2018, the platforms and methods for harassment are vast. A 2016 Inter-Parliamentary Union survey of women in legislatures around the world found that more than 40 percent reported wide distribution of "extremely humiliating or sexually charged images."

Tactics such as sexualizing candidates are usually specific to women, Lawless said. For men, evidence of sexual prowess is often seen as a positive, a boon to their masculinity. But with women, it's different, she said.

"Whether it's slut-shaming or trying to humiliate a women because of something she did in her past that's linked to sexuality, that kind of activity still happens more to women than men," Lawless said. "Tapping into a woman's sexuality is seen as a way to undermine her credibility and undercut her experience."

Before Hundley, Krystal Ball chose to speak out when photos of her were leaked during her campaign for congress in Virginia in 2010, in one of the first instances of this strain of online harassment to garner national attention. The photos were taken at a costume party when Ball was 22, and showed her and her ex-husband holding a sex toy. She'd faced an uphill battle as a 28-year-old female, Democratic candidate with an odd name, running in an overwhelmingly Republican district. When she thinks back to when she first saw the photos online, after having worked so hard to be taken seriously, the horror still seems fresh.

As with Hundley, Ball was advised to lay low or issue a denial, but she decided to go public. She didn't want to be cowed, she told The Washington Post. Despite having little TV experience at the time, Ball did a gauntlet of interviews to address the photos. On the drive to her first TV appearance, she remembers listening to The Shirelles, taking comfort as they sang, "Mama said there'd be days like this." She wrote an op-ed for Huffington Post, taking responsibility for the photos and slamming the efforts to embarrass her and make her feel "like a whore," because she saw a chance to set an example.

"I was thinking, 'What about when this happens to the next woman? What is she going to see about how to respond,' because certainly I'm not gonna be the last person this happens to," Ball said.

Ball was praised by many for her bravery and boldness. Although she lost her race, polling numbers showed she'd performed better because of how she handled the situation. Over the years, Ball has heard from many women that she gave them the confidence to run by showing that it was possible to endure such smear tactics with grace and directness, she said. Still, it pains her to watch other women go through similar things.

"Running for office is incredibly exposing for anyone, but when you're a woman it's doubly so." Ball said. "There's a model for how male politicians are supposed to be, but there's no model for when you're a woman."

When Hundley made her response video, she wasn't familiar with Ball's story. She wasn't following a precedent -- she was just angry, and wanted to model "radical transparency." Still, the nerves were intense. On the morning of Aug. 20, before the video was posted, Hundley was so anxious that she vomited.

"I wasn't sure if this was going to blow up in my face," Hundley said.

But the outpouring Hundley has felt from her community and beyond has been entirely positive. She's even had a wave of volunteers to help with her campaign, with people offering to put up yard signs and host fundraisers. Hundley said the help is coming from people who are determined to keep attacks like the one against her from being successful, and Hundley is proud to be part of the change propelling women forward in politics.

"I believe that talking about this happening removes all of the power that it has," Hundley said. "Once that video was released into the Internet ether, I felt like I'd done what I needed to."President Donald Trump should be more worried about federal prosecutors in New York than about the Russia probe led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz said Sunday.

Dershowitz, an informal Trump adviser, said in an appearance on ABC News' "This Week" that the expanding probe by prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York could spell the greatest peril for Trump because of the lack of constitutional protections for the president at that level.

"I think he has constitutional defenses to the investigation being conducted by Mueller," Dershowitz said. "But there are no constitutional defenses to what the Southern District is investigating. So, I think the Southern District is the greatest threat."

Trump's legal team has cited the Constitution in arguing that the president should not sit down for an interview with Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election as well as potential collusion with Trump's campaign and obstruction of justice. Trump has routinely denounced the probe as a "witch hunt."

The president's legal quandary in New York, meanwhile, continues to deepen after prosecutors there granted immunity last week to Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer for the Trump Organization; and to David Pecker, a longtime Trump ally who is the executive of the National Enquirer magazine's parent company.

News of the cooperation deals came days after former Trump attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felonies, including two counts related to hush money paid just before the 2016 election to women who alleged affairs with Trump. Cohen said he made the payments at Trump's direction.

The Cohen case is unlikely to lead to any legal consequences for Trump while he is in office, experts say, although it could prompt calls for his impeachment should Democrats take the House in November.

Dershowitz said Sunday that "it would be great" to have Democrats in charge on Capitol Hill so that they can conduct investigations into Trump's actions.

But he continued to play down Trump's failure to report the hush money, arguing that the person at fault for the campaign finance violation would be the campaign's treasurer, not the candidate.

"The president or the candidate is entitled to contribute anything he wants to his own campaign," Dershowitz said. "So the only issue here is whether or not there was a failure to report the contribution. That failure to report is attributable to the treasurer of the campaign, not to the president."

Weighing in on whether Trump should sit for an interview with Mueller, Dershowitz contended that "it would be good for the American public if President Trump sat down and said everything he knows, but it wouldn't be good for President Trump. And that's why his lawyers are so strongly recommending against it."

He also offered four broader points of advice for Trump.

"Look, my advice to the president - I never gave it to him privately because I'm not his lawyer, but on television - is: Don't fire, don't pardon, don't tweet and don't testify. And if he listened to those four things, he'd be in less trouble than he is today," Dershowitz said.

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," former attorney general Alberto Gonzales said that Cohen's guilty plea and the conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort - in a prosecution led by Mueller's office - were creating "a lot of debate and swirl around the president as an individual, and that's never good."

Trump has praised Manafort and recently sought his attorneys' advice on a potential pardon, according to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. Gonzales said that while Trump is entitled to speak his mind, his apparent sympathy for Manafort puts him at odds with his own Justice Department.

"They had a very successful conviction of Paul Manafort. And to have the president then, you know, speak so well of Paul Manafort was somewhat unusual," Gonzales said.

He added that it might be helpful for Trump to at least answer written questions from Mueller in the Russia probe, even if he declines to provide oral testimony.

"I think perhaps it may ease, in the minds of certain members of the American public, the president's involvement, the president's knowledge about Russian involvement" in the 2016 presidential election, Gonzales said.

---

The Washington Post's Carol D. Leonnig, Devlin Barrett and Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.WESTPORT  To recount Bill Taibes history in the food industry is to take a tour of the frontlines of the American food scene over the last 20 years.

Chef and owner of Westport restaurants The Whelk, Kawa Ni and Jesup Hall, Taibe, 42, a Weston resident, forged an unlikely path to haute cuisine. Raised in the small town of Patterson, N.Y., Taibe said a big night out to dinner with his family meant a trip to the Red Lobster in Danbury.

I was just the worst student ever in high school, Taibe said. Fortunately for Taibe, his friends uncle owned a catering company and offered him a job with the company after high school.

Food just started to make sense to me and it was a way for me to control my mind and use my hands and be creative, Taibe said.

From the time Taibe was 14 and began working in a butcher shop in Patterson, it felt natural for him to break down chicken and deer, but he never thought food could be a career.

Twenty-five years ago, people were not talking about being chefs in this country, so for me, there was no real path, at least one that I understood, Taibe said.

Nonetheless, Taibe enrolled in the culinary program at Baltimore International College, where he excelled.

For someone who could barely make his way through high school, I graduated second in my class at culinary school, Taibe said.

From Baltimore, Taibe moved to New York City to intern for Larry Forgione at his restaurant An American Place. The godfather of American cuisine, Forgione created a third space for casual American restaurants at a time when the only two options for NYC restaurantgoers were fine-dining French restaurants or neighborhood eateries, Taibe said.

It was a real tribute to farmers and chefs and artisans, Taibe said of Forgiones food, largely sourced from the Hudson Valley.

After a year with Forgione, Taibe hoped to escape the expense of the city, so he opened the Zagat restaurant guide and found La Panetiere, a highly-rated classic French restaurant in Rye, N.Y.

It was the most stressful experience Ive ever had in my life. It was intense and hard and there was a lot of screaming and hot, but it was a great experience, Taibe said of his 10-month stint at La Penetiere.

Always chasing the next challenge, Taibe then worked at the Port Chester restaurant Two Moons, which made southwestern American cuisine.

I had a pretty good head on my shoulders and I was focused and knew what I wanted to do, so when I got to Two Moons I worked really hard and there was a great chef there. But a couple months in, the owners approached me and asked if I would take over, Taibe said.

He was only 23, yet Taibe was the head chef at a respected restaurant. After two years, however, Taibe took a position as a sous chef at the Greenwich restaurant Wildfire. There, he met his wife Rachel, who was a bookkeeper at the restaurant. She still does the finances for all of Taibes restaurants, and the couple has two teenage sons.

Like at Two Moons, Taibe was promoted to head chef at Wildfire but left to work under Nicola Zanghi at the Italian restaurant Zhangis in Stamford. A year later, Taibe was approached to work as the opening head chef the new restaurant Grand in Stamford. Grand was a wacky place with modern American food and and adjoining nightclub, Taibe said.

It kind of took over Fairfield County. People didnt know what to do with it. There were hundreds of people at this restaurant, lines out the door, Taibe said of Grand.

After Grand, and about 13 years ago, Taibe opened Relish in South Norwalk. We started changing peoples minds about what can happen here in Fairfield County with food, Taibe said of his time at Relish, which he said had aggressively loud music and dark lighting.

The bistro American food at Relish won praise in a New York Times review. However, Taibe said his business partner one night ordered movers to empty the restaurant of everything inside so he could pay personal debt.

We lost everything and it took us some time to get back. I didnt want to be back in restaurants. I was done. I put so much energy into that restaurant and then woke up one morning and everything was gone, Taibe said.

A friend soon recruited Taibe to help open the Burger Bar in South Norwalk. But before he could open the restaurant, Taibe said he got a call from Stamford restaurateur Mary Schaffer, who asked him to be head chef at Napa & Co., an American restaurant in Stamford sourced by all local farmers, many of whom Taibe sustains close relationships as president of the Westport Farmers Market.

Two years into his time at Napa & Co., Taibe was ready to open another restaurant and discovered a location in Westport  small, forgotten and in disarray.

I fell in love with the size and what I knew Id be able to do with it, Taibe said. Almost a decade ago, Taibe opened the 36-seat Le Farm restaurant at the location and trusted the towns cultured, wealthy and intelligent community would help make the restaurant a success  which it did.

After six years, Taibe said he grew out of Le Farm, so he sold it to a friend, who opened The Cottage at the location. In the meantime, Taibe opened another restaurant in town, The Whelk, an oyster bar, and followed that up a few years later with Kawa Ni, a Japanese bar-food-style restaurant.

Going forward, Taibe said he plans to open more Kawa Ni restaurants, perhaps in Port Chester, N.Y., and West Hartford. He is done opening restaurants in Westport, but Taibe said the town will always be his home base.

Reflecting upon his impact on the states food scene, Taibe said, We were on the front line of creating a Connecticut restaurant scene. Im proud that now theres many more people involved in it and theres many other great restaurants, but Im really proud we were there in the beginning, pushing this thing forward.

svaughan@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2638; @SophieCVaughan1Few towering political figures can say their foundation was built on mediocrity and insubordination - twin distinctions of John McCain's time at the Naval Academy.

Since his birth at a naval base in Panama, there was little doubt that the son and grandson of admirals would one day be clad in sharp whites and commissioned as an officer in the Annapolis summer heat. That was the problem, he wrote in 1999, frustrated that his life seemed "preordained" to fall into the inescapable orbit of Navy service.

"You have come to appreciate the value of discipline," President Dwight Eisenhower told the Naval Academy class of 1958, though a newly minted Ensign McCain in the crowd may have been an exception at the time. Out of 899 graduates in McCain's class, only five had worse grades.

McCain, who died Saturday of brain cancer at age 81, would go on to endure more than five years of brutal captivity as a prisoner in Vietnam and serve as a Republican senator in Arizona for three decades, in a career that included two failed bids for president.

Yet it was his time at the Naval Academy that set his career on a tumultuous climb and, in some ways, girded his defiance with resolve that would help him survive imprisonment and torture after his plane was shot down over North Vietnam.

And Annapolis is where he will be laid to rest, he wrote in his recently published book "The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations."

In 1993, more than 20 years after his release from captivity, McCain addressed the Naval Academy graduating class in what would become one of his most memorable speeches. He spoke fondly of scaling the wall to escape into town, among the many actions that would earn him the only high marks he received at the academy - piles of demerits, which he also accumulated through pure insolence and back talk.

McCain first congratulated those who earned good grades and stayed out of trouble. Then, he spoke to midshipmen who were more like him.

"Although academic and other honors may have eluded you, the standards here are such that simply surviving the four years reflects great credit on your ability and dedication," he told the class. "I say that with all sincerity."

The world was changing, McCain noted, unrecognizable since the first time they entered the academy gates. The Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union had disintegrated in their first year, and flash points of conflict in Somalia and the Persian Gulf were signs of instability emerging from the Cold War.

What the midshipmen learned in Annapolis, he explained, would help them navigate uncharted waters of combat.

Their resolve and duty could be tested in full view, or even in private moments. His North Vietnamese captors had offered relief if he denounced the United States, saying his peers would never know, McCain told the crowd. But he would know, McCain said, and that was enough.

"There may be times in your life when the consequences of your devotion to duty are so dire that you will be tempted to abandon it," he said. "There may be times when truly only you will know. But you will resist. I know you will."

McCain would often return to the Annapolis grounds for different events, including a lecture series that included remarks less than a month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a visit during his 2008 presidential run. It was a return to the "scene of the crime," he said then, according to the Capital Gazette.

In an October interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, McCain acknowledged that lessons learned from his schooling had helped him weather his sometimes perilous political career.

"I've made more mistakes than most anybody you will ever know," McCain said in the interview, conducted for the 2017 Naval History Conference. "But one thing has guided me, is what I learned the first day I walked through the main gate at the Naval Academy. And that was do the right thing, and do it honorably, and you can never go wrong."

It is Annapolis that McCain has returned to, again and again, in life and in death.

McCain's father and grandfather are buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. But Adm. Charles "Chuck" Larson, a longtime friend, is buried at the academy in Maryland.

And near Larson is where McCain will be laid to rest, he wrote in his recent book.

McCain's plot is near where the two men first met, he wrote, on the bank of the Severn River, "back where it began."

That day was foretold in 1993, at the stadium just down the road from the cemetery, where McCain will soon return for the last time.

"I will go to my grave in gratitude to my Creator for allowing me to stand witness to such courage and honor. And so will you," McCain said. "My time is slipping by. Yours is fast approaching. You will know where your duty lies."This is just what we need! Scientists just have discovered a giant Hyalomma tick, which can become 3 cm long and can bite humans and transmit serious pathogens for the first time in Sweden. Some super-ticks!

The giant Hyalomma tick, which can become three centimeters long and can bite humans and transmit serious pathogens, has for the first time been spotted in Sweden.

The Hyalomma is a genus of hard-bodied ticks that is common in Asia, Europe, and North Africa and can also be found in Southern Africa. According to researcher Giulio Grandi it has been found to carry a hemorrhagic fever virus.

They are very quick and they are hunters so they do not wait for their prey but actively look for a host to attack. When they are filled up with blood they can grow to become two or three centimeters long. They are giant ticks, Grandi told Swedish Radio.

Grandi works at Swedens National Veterinary Institute, which is running a research project over several years in order to investigate how infectious diseases are affected by the changing climate. The institute asked members of the public to send in both living and dead ticks and it has received around 2,000 specimens so far.

During the month of August alone, three full-grown Hyalomma ticks were sent in to the Institute from Landskrona in southern Sweden, Nykoping in the southeast, and Koppom in the southwest. The giant tick has never before been spotted in Sweden and one theory is that the ones found this month may have made it over via migratory birds.

Ann Albihn, who is an associate professor at the National Veterinary Institute and a professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, said there have been other surprising findings during the research project. For instance, ticks of different kinds have been sent in from 90 percent of all municipalities within the northern region of Norrland.

There are strong indications that there are more ticks in the far north and in Swedens northern mountain region than previously believed, Albihn said.

Albihn added that the likelihood of being infected with hemorrhagic fever from the Hyalomma tick is very low, as is the likelihood that the giant tick will establish itself in Sweden in the short-term. However, depending on future Earth changes, the Hyalomma tick may develop a new trick to handle the tougher Swedish climate, Albihn warned, suggesting it may for instance learn to winter indoors.

The ones that manage to adapt are the ones that survive, said Albihn.

Just what the end of the world needed: some aggressive invasive disease-carrying jumbo-sized super-ticks.

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Jumping Jackflash Hypothesis

Twitter  Giant Hyalomma tick, which can become 3 cm long and can bite humans and transmit serious pathogens, has for the first time been spotted in

Xin Huanet  Giant tick discovered in SwedenBy Olivia Rose

CAICOS Express Airways is gearing up to cease flights on several key routes across the Turks and Caicos Islands.





This is according to a statement issued by management of the company on Tuesday, August 14.





"Due to circumstances beyond our control we much regret that as of August 31, Caicos Express Airways will no longer provide airlift services between Grand Turk and Salt Cay, and Grand Turk and South Caicos.





However, the company said it is able and willing to provide charter flight services to these islands.





"We take this time to thank our valued stakeholders and customers who have supported Caicos Express Airways throughout the years, Caicos Express Airways remain committed to the people of the Turks and Caicos Islands, the release stated.





Well known South Caicos community leader Reverend John Malcom said the airlines decision to pull out of the island at the critical juncture is rather unfortunate.





"Once again the community of South Caicos is thrown into a state of disarray as a result of Caicos Express announcement of its cessation of flights between South Caicos and Grand Turk.





"This is a new episode on the ongoing saga of airlift in and out of South.





"This comes at a very critical time because with the recent opening of East Bay and Sailrock more visitors are discovering this part of the destination and loving it.





The news of the airlift cessation has sparked upset among residents especially in South Caicos since only a few months ago the plug on pivotal banking services was pulled from the island.





Earlier this year, CIBC First Caribbean Bank also suspended its services to the hurricane ravaged island due to safety concerns.





Leaving customers to ferry or fly to complete their banking at either the Providenciales or Grand Turk branch.





The Weekly News has since reached out to the airline for a response and was informed that a press conference will be held next week to further update the public.



Former White House aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman took a break from her "Unhinged: An Insider's Account of The Trump White House" book tour to unwind and celebrate a friend's birthday in Texas.

The public figure let down her hair at the Daiquiri Shoppe in Grand Prairie where she and her friends were seen getting down to Nelly's "Hot in Here," according to TMZ.An off-duty Harris County deputy shot and killed an armed man while working security at a Northline-area club on Monday, according to the Harris County Sheriffs Office.

The deputy was working a secondary job at the Club las Cumbres in the 8800 block of Airline, when he noticed some suspicious men in a pickup truck in the parking lot, around 12:15 a.m., said Lt. Chris Sandoval of the sheriffs office.Harris County has been identified as a "hotspot" in a state with a growing number of children avoiding vaccinations for personal reasons, according to a June 2018 study from PLOS medicine.

RELATED: Statewide data shows Texas anti-vaccine movement is growing

Texas is one of 18 states that allows families to opt out of vaccinations for non-medical reasons, including religious beliefs. During the 2017-18 school year, around 1.07 percent of the state's student population opted out of vaccinations for non-medical reasons, up from 0.57 in the 2011-12 year.

Exemptions have grown amid what is commonly referred to as the "anti-vaccination movement," led by parents who refuse vaccines for their children because of religious beliefs, a fear of injecting any additional chemicals into their child's body, or an overall uncertainty about the specific vaccine.

Some experts fear the growing number of exemptions could lead to an increased risk of disease among the overall student population, but Harris County school officials say they don't have many options when it comes to a family's personal choice.

"Every parent does as they see fit," said one administrative assistant at The Branch School, where about 10.9 percent of the student population reported a vaccine exemption for personal reasons.

Paula Aguirre, a marketing and communications specialist for Aristoi Classical Academy, provided a similar statement.

"We follow state law with respect to vaccinations and exemptions," she said.

RELATED: Texas No. 1 'hotspot' for vaccine exemptions

Aristoi and The Branch School were among five schools in Harris County that recorded non-medical exemptions more than 10 percent of the student population, according to data from the Texas Department of Health and Human Services. The five schools' overall enrollment population is between 100 and 450 students per location.

At one school, The Connection School of Houston, more than a quarter of its student population filed a non-medical vaccine exemption, the data shows. Requests for a comment were not returned. The school enrolls 200 students.

In Harris County, 0.83 percent of the student population opted out of their vaccinations for personal reasons last year.

The PLOS study, titled "The state of the antivaccine movement in the United States: A focused examination of nonmedical exemptions in states and counties," named Harris County among the 12 communities with more than 400 kindergartners who applied for a non-medical vaccine exemption in the 2016-17 year.

That data point was enough to signal some concern in the study.

"The high numbers of [non-medical vaccinations] in these densely populated urban centers suggest that outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases could either originate from or spread rapidly throughout these populations of unimmunized, unprotected children," according to the PLOS study. " The fact that the largest count of vaccine-exempt pediatric populations originate in large cities with busy international airports may further contribute to this risk."

Julian Gill is a digital reporter in Houston. Read him on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, houstonchronicle.com. | julian.gill@chron.comA Fort Worth teen is behind bars after allegedly sexually assaulting a 78-year-old woman and stealing her car on Sunday.

Police said Jesus Arredondo Gloria, 19, impersonated a police officer and forced his way into the home of the victim.Texas Rangers arrested a man in connection with the death of a missing Roman Catholic priest from Massachusetts whose body was discovered last week in Willacy County.

Juan Carlos Baez Escobedo, 27, was charged with murder Friday and is being held in Willacy County Jail on $2 million bail, said Lt. Johnny Hernandez, spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, who declined to discuss further details about the case.

Father William Costello, 71, a retired priest from the Fall River Diocese in Massachusetts, was last seen at the Tiki Condominiums on South Padre Island on Aug. 1.

The circumstances of the matter are disturbing, the diocese announced in a statement about Costellos death.

Costellos remains were discovered near a South Texas cemetery in the town of Santa Monica, the diocese said, and authorities have made an arrest in the case.

Beyond that, the diocese has no other details at this time, the diocese said.

Costello was ordained a priest in Fall River in 1974 and he had served as the pastor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish.

Fall River Bishop George Coleman, now retired, placed Costello on administrative leave in January 2012 after learning from the Rhode Island State Police that Costello was part of an investigation it had undertaken, according to the diocese.

The investigation did not involve the abuse of minors, the diocese stated. No charges were filed against Costello, the diocese said, and Costello later moved to South Texas.

John Tedesco is a staff writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | jtedesco@express-news.net | Twitter: @John_TedescoTHE PUBLIC Works Department has awarded contracts for the clean-up of deposited sargassum seaweed on the coastline in Grand Turk.





It is anticipated that work will begin within the coming week in the most heavily affected areas.





A Government statement on Monday (August 20) explained that sargassum poses no threat to humans.





"though decaying mounds of the material may create eyesores and offensive odours, the wrack line stabilises beaches as it catches wind-blown sand, preventing erosion and stabilizing dunes, it read.





"The management of these issues therefore, requires careful consideration of the use of the shoreline for recreational enjoyment and the environmental impact of the sargassum on the coastline.





While removal of sargassum is normally not permitted, excessive amounts are recognised as "problematic and consideration is being made for removal where required.





In the statement the Department of Environment and Coastal Resources (DECR) acknowledged that the current quantities of sargassum that have washed ashore may pose a frustration to residents and visitors.





"Nevertheless, the DECR would like to assure all parties that we seek to act in the best interests of residents, valued visitors and our environment.





Sargassum is an important seaweed found throughout the worlds oceans. In fact, the Sargasso Sea is named after the concentration of this algae in its waters.





Periodically, sargassum washes up on beaches which is a natural process that can provide important structure and nutrients to these areas.





While floating around, it provides an important habitat for a number of organisms, particularly giving shelter to juvenile fish and sea turtles during their vulnerable stages.





Anyone seeking to remove large amounts of material from the eastern shoreline of Grand Turk should contact the DECR office at 338-3172 or [email protected] to seek further guidance to coordinate removal efforts.





In areas where quantities of sargassum are too large to be buried in the sand, it should be transported to the dump for waste disposal.





It can also be composted for use as soil amalgamation in landscaping.



THE NUMBER of predicted storms this year has been reduced  but the public is urged to continue with thorough hurricane preparations.





According to an updated forecast by the Colorado State University (CSU), fewer storms are likely to make landfall this Atlantic hurricane season.





CSU research scientist Dr Phil Klotzbach said this is due to cooler water temperatures, dry air and strong wind shear.





In April, the university predicted a slightly above average season that could be just as active as the last.





Researchers said 14 storms were likely, seven of which were expected to become hurricanes and three are to be major hurricanes.





On August 2, the university changed its prediction to a total of 12 named storms and six hurricanes - three of which will be a category three or higher.





The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also updated its forecast on August 9.





It predicted nine to 13 named storms, four to seven hurricanes and two major hurricanes.





Both the CSU and NOAA are now expecting a below average season.





A statement from the Department of Disaster Management and Emergencies on Monday (August 20) said extensive planning remains extremely important.





"It takes only one storm to cause loss of life and damage to infrastructure, it read.





"The department encourages all residents, visitors and the business community to ensure that they have completed their preparations.





"As we are now in the peak of the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season, persons who have not started their preparations are encouraged to do so now.





In April Director of the DDME Dr Virginia Clerveaux stressed the importance of being prepared.





She said that residents and businesses should have a disaster management plan and up to date survival kits with food and water for at least a week.





"Ensure that you have batteries for your flashlights or solar operated flashlights, because we recognise that we can lose power for extended days and weeks after a major storm.





Preparations should also be made to protect pets from adverse weather conditions, while passports, important documents and money should be kept in a safe accessible place.





Last September the Turks and Caicos Islands was battered by category five hurricane Irma and category three hurricane Maria.





Irma made landfall on September 7 and its eye passed between 32 to 36 miles south of the Islands.





Coincidentally, this date also marked the anniversary of hurricane Ikes landfall in the TCI as a category four storm nine years ago.





In December last year Dr Clerveaux recalled that the storm caused widespread catastrophic damage throughout the TCI, leaving no island or cay untouched.





The worst affected islands were Salt Cay, South Caicos, Providenciales and Grand Turk.





Two weeks after the impact of that storm and while still grappling with the early recovery stage, the TCI once again had to move into response mode for another major storm.





Hurricane Maria followed the exact same path of hurricane Irma, passing between 35 to 105 miles off the islands as a category three storm on September 21.





The storms destroyed vital infrastructure and damaged hundreds of homes across the territory  but fortunately no one was killed or seriously injured.





Next month will be the year anniversary of the arrival of the storms.





Details on preparing for hurricanes are available at www.nhc.noaa.gov/prepare/ready.php



Earlier this year, I was on my way home from a conference when I learned my flight from Seattle to Denver was delayed. That by itself was no big deal  happens all the time. Unfortunately, it was the first leg of a two-flight trip, and the two-hour delay meant there was no way I was going to make my connecting flight out of Denver to Dallas. As frequent travelers know all too well, thats when things start to get messy.

Thankfully, I thought, I was a card-carrying, first-tier member of the airlines premium mileage club (company and club shall remain nameless). Surely, a quick phone call to the exclusive phone number Id been given would connect me directly to a friendly ticketing agent, who would verify my exalted priority status and work some magic to get me home at a reasonable hour. Alas, it was not to be. The phone was answered by a machine, and the computerized voice assured me that while they were experiencing unusually long hold times, my call was very important to them. After what felt like an eternity, I did speak to a real person, who spent 20 minutes asking me questions, combing through various flight schedules, connecting airports and seating availability, and trying (to her credit) desperately to stitch together a workable solution. Eventually, we decided the best bet was to cancel my flight and rebook  at the airlines expense  with a different carrier that could meet my needs. I finally made it home in the wee hours, and the next day was a blur.

Throughout the ordeal, I couldnt help but thinking: here was a job (the job of making complex travel reservations) that could have been handled immediately, and almost instantly, by artificial intelligence. It was a matter of sifting and sorting through mountains of data to satisfy a specific set of requirements  something humans arent particularly well equipped for, but which is right in a computers wheelhouse. Theoretically, when I called, AI wouldve answered with no hold time, and could have run through every airline and airport database in seconds to present me with options. Even better, it could have already known that my flight was delayed and contacted me proactively to ask if I wanted to change flights! In that alternate universe, I might have gotten home faster with less stress and frustration, and the airline could have salvaged some customer satisfaction with no human intervention required.

So the question is, why isnt the airline already doing this?

Whats the hold up?

My airline snafu, which happens to thousands of travelers every day, is just one example of how companies could be using AI to operate more efficiently and improve the customer experience  but theyre not. We know the technology is out there and that some organizations are putting it to work in similar, and even more impressive, use cases. But many more companies, despite making massive investments in AI, are still stuck in the concept phases and are months or years away from reaping the returns.

Why is that? Truth be told, its because plugging AI into long-established, complex systems and integrating the technology amongst human counterparts is no easy task.

This conundrum  the struggle to derive real business value from AI  was at the center of a recent panel discussion in which I participated. It was IP Softs AI Pioneers Forum, where some of the leading thinkers on the subject pondered how companies can put AI to its highest use and achieve measurable performance increases in less time. Here are a few key points of discussion from those sessions, and some thoughts on how businesses can work through the sticking points.

Clarify your objectives

Interestingly, panelists agreed that the nebulous nature of AI, and the lack of a clear definition of what AI is and isnt, may be holding the technology back. In other words, many companies seem to have reached the conclusion that they need to move forward with AI, but key players in the organization have yet to agree on exactly what the technology can and should do.

My advice to these companies: instead of trying to understand the technology, start by clearly defining the business outcome youre trying to achieve. Be specific. For example, go beyond the generic improve the customer experience to create a detailed wish list of how it would play out in real life. It may turn out that your problem could be solved by something other than true AI.

If youre convinced that AI can bring the vision to life, recognize the fact that AI isnt an all-powerful solution. I like to think of AI as a brain. In humans, the brain does the processing and then sends instructions to other parts of the body to carry out an action. Its similar in technology, in that AI must work in conjunction with arms and legs that can carry out its orders. Those other body parts could include resources you already have in place such as robotic process automation, conversational agents and, in some cases, even people.

Assess your maturity

Another sticking point the panel discussed was the issue of maturity. That is, organizations have to ask themselves whether they truly have the ability to define, develop and manage their AI investments in a way that will create value. After all, AI isnt some piece of plug-and-play software you can just flip on and start using. There are significant process changes that need to occur, in technology systems and human employees alike. Security should also be of chief concern. AIs impact on security can be profound, which means you must determine what controls and protections will be necessary from the very beginning to ensure your sensitive data (sources and outcomes) remain secure.

When theres confusion and disagreement over how to proceed, it can lead to a case of analysis paralysis. So before charging full steam ahead with AI, companies should realistically assess their own readiness to do so. Thankfully, the IP Soft AI Pioneers Forum is now working to develop a universal AI maturity model that may be helpful to companies in these cases.

Decipher your data

Finally, theres a major challenge in data access and integration. Larger, older companies often have huge stores of customer and transactional data collected over many years. But, as valuable as all that information would be to an AI system, they arent able to access it because those legacy systems werent built with data mining in mind.

Earlier this year, my employer hosted a CxO forum where, for example, three companies reported having over 400 legacy systems that needed to be accessed to get the necessary data to feed to their AI engine. They clearly had their work cut out for them.

Getting back to the airline example, to realize my dream AI scenario theyd need their intelligent bot to be able to access and cross-reference customer records and personal preferences, flight status, reservation systems, airport maps, and more. Figuring out how to merge it all together could unlock powerful AI capabilities, but for now that wealth of information sits largely untapped.

There may be no silver bullet answer to this problem, but some out-of-the-box thinking could get things started. For instance, look into the next generation of data lakes (perhaps data oceans) as a way to house those massive volumes of raw legacy data, without the costs of transforming/restructuring it all into a polished data warehouse format. When it comes to accessing that data, it wouldnt necessarily require a complete systems integration in the traditional sense. Instead, RPA-powered bots could be sent to fetch bits of legacy data in real time and courier them back to the AI brain.

Finally, keep in mind that you may be able to leverage your existing ecosystem to make the job easier. Many of the leading vendors for IT, ERP and CRM systems are building AI into their offerings, which may unburden your company from having to commission its own solutions.

Take baby steps

With so many factors in play, deciding to go all-in on AI can become overwhelming and, consequently, stagnating. Instead, approach it through iterations. Take small steps to demonstrate value early in the process. As with any innovation, providing proof of early wins will build support, and that support drives the funding to reach the next level.An effort to change how student test scores factor into performance evaluations for public school teachers seemed to be a done deal just two months ago, but the failure of the state Senate to pass a bill in the waning days of the legislative session is coming back to haunt incumbents in both parties.

New York State United Teachers has promised a tremendous show of force against the five Democrats who voted for a Republican bill that tied the proposed changes to evaluations to more funding for charter schools. The union did not endorse any Democrat who voted for the bill, and has also poured money into the campaign of Jim Gaughran, a Democrat who is challenging Republican state Sen. Carl Marcellino of Long Island in the upcoming election.

NYSUTs $11,000 contribution to Gaughran through its political action committee is the largest contribution hes received and came just a few weeks after Marcellino voted for a bill proposed by state Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan in lieu of Marcellinos own bill, which focused on delinking test scores from teacher evaluations and had appeared to be on a path to passing the state Legislature just weeks before. The Assembly passed a similar bill and Gov. Andrew Cuomo appeared ready to sign the changes into law.

The fact that this bill was not even brought up for a vote by the Senate Republican majority is ridiculous, state Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Senate Democratic leader, said in an email. Clearly the only way this legislation will be passed into law is by having new leadership in the State Senate, and a functional Democratic majority.

The fact that this bill was not even brought up for a vote by the Senate Republican majority is ridiculous.  state Senate Democratic leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins

Support for Flanagans bill was a deal-breaker between the union and former state Senate Independent Democratic Conference members Jeff Klein, Diane Savino and David Valesky, as well as state Sen. Kevin Parker, a mainline Democrat, according to union leader Andrew Pallotta. Pallotta said in a telephone interview that there are plans to deploy union members to make phone calls and knock on doors to battle against their re-elections  a notable setback for the four state senators who received the unions backing two years ago.

It just stands out as something that will weigh heavily on them, Pallotta said. When the union gets motivated, look out.

State Sen. Simcha Felder, who also voted for Flanagans bill, was not endorsed by the union in 2016 nor this year. Felder is nominally a Democrat, but has caucused with the Republicans since he took office.

NYSUT, which represents K-12 teachers as well as SUNY and CUNY faculty, has pushed for years to create an evaluation system for teachers that would not rely on tests. Student performance on standardized tests were incorporated into the teacher assessment system in 2010. Their importance increased five years later per new legislation, but a backlash led by NYSUT resulted in a five-year moratorium on using student test performance in evaluations. Opposition to standardized tests more generally had also catalyzed opposition among parents across the country. Hundreds of thousands of students eventually opted out of taking tests based on the controversial Common Core educational standards in protest.

When the union gets motivated, look out.  Andrew Pallotta, NYSUT president

The bill proposed by Marcellino would have eliminated the role of state tests in teacher evaluations, which in turn would then be determined by local school districts. Though it eventually received widespread support in both houses of the state Legislature, it may fall by the wayside in the early months of the upcoming state legislative session. School funding will take precedence at that time, according to Pallotta, who declined in the interview with City & State to say whether the union would back the bill again in the same form.

Flanagans bill included much of the same language as Marcellinos, including a repeal of annual professional performance reviews, but included controversial provisions that would have expanded the regional charter school cap by 100 schools, diminished oversight of private yeshivas and increased funding for charter schools. It passed the state Senate 35-25 on June 20 as the session wrapped up. This bill is the best way forward, Flanagan said in a statement that day.

But Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie declared Flanagans bill dead on arrival, likening the charter school provisions to legislative cyanide. And in the case of state Sen. Jeff Klein, the controversial vote means he will not receive money from a union whose political action committee, Voice of Teachers for Education, was among his biggest contributors just a few years ago.

As he fights off a tough primary challenge from Alessandra Biaggi, Klein has faced some notable fundraising setbacks in recent weeks. Now he also has to deal with 600,000 state teachers and university faculty who are looking to do what they can to keep candidates they once endorsed, plus Felder, from winning re-election.

This, Pallotta said, is personal.Letitia James clearly isnt used to being part of the establishment.

She was nearing the emotional crescendo of her stump speech to donors Tuesday night at a fundraiser for her state attorney general campaign at the Times Square Irish pub Connolly's. A full floor of the massive bar was filled with supporters, drinking in her every word between sips of white wine, when she let the old James slip out.

James was saying that New York's next attorney general needs to be someone who lives and breathes and wakes up every day committed to improving the life of someone. So I need all of you to march in defiance   James stopped, and caught herself. No, not in defiance, in respect, she continued, more calmly, into those polls on Sept. 13 and vote.

It was an appropriate self-edit. A vote for James isnt defiant. A vote for the one-time insurgent is now a vote for the mainstream, for continuity, for the party line and for the ticket of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, bulldozing his way to a third term.

James political persona always had a cool demeanor  tall, calm and smooth in conversation. But her politics were defiant: She was the first person ever elected on the Working Families Party line alone, bucking the Brooklyn Democratic Party in her 2003 election to the New York City Council. She has joined the mainstream since then, widely embraced by city and state Democrats  but shes always maintained some of her outsider credentials, winning the public advocates office despite lagging opponent Dan Squadron in endorsements. Once in office, she challenged a number of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasios agencies in court.

But now James has decided that aligning herself with Cuomo, the odds-on favorite in the Democratic primary on Sept. 13, is the surest path to victory in the four-person attorney generals primary race. Getting the endorsement from Cuomo and the backing of the state Democratic Party has been a benefit to her campaign coffers and her name recognition. She has a decent lead in all the public polls released so far, and she has won well over 50 endorsements from elected officials  far more than her opponents.

But Cuomos support has hurt her in other ways. She lost The New York Times nod, one of the few endorsements which may actually sway voters, to Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham law professor who has never held elected office. The Times wrote about James ties to Cuomo with disdain. Given the political landscape in New York and elsewhere, the state attorney must be absolutely independent, the editorial read.

James thinks, however, that her backing by on-the-ground political players will matter more. I thought about all of the support that we had received from labor, she told City & State at the fundraiser, when asked what she made of the Times endorsement. This wasnt a dig at the Times elitism, imagined or otherwise, but a bet on numbers. Theyre the salt of the Earth, James said, referring to unions. They know how to get out the vote, and thats going to be critically important in a primary on an off day, she said, referring the the election, moved to a Thursday to avoid Rosh Hashanah and the anniversary of Sept. 11.

Labor unions have almost unanimously backed James so far, save for the New England Regional Council of Carpenters  not exactly a force in New York elections  which has endorsed Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney. The fourth candidate in the Democratic primary, Verizon lobbyist Leecia Eve, has likewise received just one union endorsement, from the Buffalo-based CWA Local 1168. Teachout hasn't received a single labor endorsement. And yet, Teachouts list of endorsements has been growing, largely composed of candidates and groups to the left of the Democratic Partys mainstream, from gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon to New York Communities for Change, a grassroots economic justice group. One notable exception: the Working Families Party, which made the rare decision to co-endorse both Teachout and James, even after James declined to pursue the WFP ballot line. Many observers thought she avoided the line at Cuomos behest, after it backed Nixon over the sitting governor, and James essentially confirmed it to the Times Union on Wednesday, quoting unnamed Democrats who felt that the WFP party was very self-righteous.

No longer running on defiance, James is instead running on experience, and respect for the office. She has plenty of both. James has been a public-interest lawyer for nearly three decades, working as a Legal Aid attorney, counsel to state legislators and an assistant attorney general under Eliot Spitzer. But shes also a student of the office, listing past attorneys general and what they focused on  Robert Abrams, consumer fraud; Spitzer, financial crimes.

James hasnt been a practicing lawyer for years, but she said she has been itching to get back in the courtroom. She considered doing overnight per diem public defender work while she served in the City Council. She ultimately passed, citing potential liability to the city, but she has been able to flex her legal muscles occasionally as public advocate. James personally represented an unaccompanied immigrant child in court during her first term, and set apart her tenure in the office by filing more lawsuits than her three public advocate predecessors combined. It was a deliberate attempt to add weight to an office with few enumerated responsibilities. I would describe what I have attempted to do, or have done, in the office of public advocate as a mini attorney generals office and legal services, she said.

Her legal record, however has been mixed, with judges tossing a number of cases because she didnt have legal standing to sue. After nearly five years in the office, she has no marquee legal wins to point to. Her biggest win may have been securing a settlement for 10 New Yorkers who were unfairly removed from the citys rent freeze program.

But James told City & State that, like a minor leaguer waiting for a call up, shes already dreaming of what she would do as the top law enforcement officer in one of the biggest states in the country. Its a position that creates opportunities to fight everyone from unscrupulous landlords in Brooklyn to what many New Yorkers consider the unscrupulous landlord in the White House.

I would love to second seat, she said, referring to the practice commonly known as second chairing where the legal offices leader actually argues a case in court as co-counsel to one of their assistants. Particularly in light of whats happening in our country, I would love to argue a case in federal court in defense of someones rights, in defense of environmental laws, reproductive rights, housing rights, discrimination case, you name it, she said. A Martin Act, a Donnelly Act violation, consumer fraud case, I would love to, she added, referring to the laws that let the attorney general prosecute securities fraud and bust up trusts, respectively.

James Times Square event was billed as an activists and young professionals fundraiser, and most of the room appeared to be born after James graduated from Howard University School of Law in 1986. But James, who will turn 60  about 20 years older than she looks  a month after the primary, could still try to relate, quoting a couple of hip hop anthems to close out her speech. We started from the bottom and now were here, she said, borrowing from Drakes 2013 hit to describe her political rise. And whats the other one? she asked the crowd. Her political aide in the crowd was ready with the answer, a 2016 Fat Joe record. So James shouted to the crowd: Nothing can stop me, Im all the way up!

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Eve has received no labor endorsements.On December 21, 2004, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan opened his annual end-of-year press conference with a dour description of the twelve months that had just passed. On that day, he stood before a packed press room to deliver an earnest assessment of events that threatened the UN and his personal reputation, including scandal in his administration. While in total control of the moment, he was clearly shaken by the turmoil racking the organization.

Theres no doubt that this has been a particularly difficult year, Annan said in response to a reporters question, and I am relieved that this annus horribilis is coming to an end.

Annan, who died August 18 at the age of 80, was a veteran in working with the media. His recognition of a horrible year represented something of a departure from his incessant optimism, but it is emblematic of the seriousness with which he treated the press throughout his long career at the UN.

Related: The intrepid reporter who got expelled from the UN

Annans conduct with reportersat that press conference and throughout his time as secretary-generalis a testament to his lifes work, his office, and the UN ideal. It also suggests a model for coexistence between the media and those organizations they cover, even under tense circumstances.

The period around the December 2004 press conference was among the most difficult of Annans tenure. The UN had been unable to prevent war in Iraq, and conflicts raged around the world. A suicide attack against the UNs Baghdad compound convulsed the organization, and Annan had come under scrutiny as part of the investigation into corruption within the UNs Oil-for-Food humanitarian program. There was a general sense that the secretary-general was losing his leadership grip.

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In the moments preceding the Iraq war, Annan had adopted a more strident voice against what he had perceived as a march toward conflict. His approach earned him respect in some quarters, but it also drew the ire of others, who resented the activism of the worlds chief diplomat. Prior to that seminal December press conference, Annan endured endless, often negative attention from a press corps that stalked him from the doorway of his Beekman Place residence to the entranceways and hallways throughout the UN compound.

But Annan didnt shun reporters. In fact, he accepted some of the criticism that was levelled at him. Annan understood the role of the media to signal democratic ideals, balance unrestrained power, and sometimes act as an agent for discomfort in what many perceive as the soft-cushioned easy chair of the diplomatic establishment. By denying or demeaning the media, Annan might have done a better job of protecting himself, but he would have sent mixed signals to those around the world who look to the UN and leaders like Annan to set the tone. His response to reporters seemed graced with the knowledge that his actions were being watched in countries where many still struggle to come to terms with the job of the press.

Annan fully recognized the medias fourth estate status, respected how reporters work, and understood how to manage media even when operating under a severe disadvantage.

Questions at that 2004 press conference veered at times to the personal, referring to Annans family and inner circle. I know that certain quarters have been quite persistent in attacking the UN and me, but there have also been some constructive criticisms, which we accept, Annan saida signal that not even the worlds top diplomat was beyond reproach.

Annan had a long relationship with the press corps. Prior to becoming secretary-general, he had served as the head of the UNs peacekeeping department and had worked in a variety of roles throughout the organization. Annan was well-liked by many of the resident correspondents; his disarming, fatherly demeanor made him a standout in a building already brimming with charismatic diplomats. He beamed with pride alongside his secretariat colleagues after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, but he was also never able to erase the stains of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia. The press saw it all.

Annanand the UN, under his chargeseemed to apply a number of principles in their work with the media. They fully recognized the medias fourth estate status, respected how reporters work, and understood how to manage media even when operating under a severe disadvantage. Even in the darkest days of his administration, Annans UN stretched itself to accommodate journalists, tending tirelessly to a global press corps working under rolling international deadlines.

Annan may have made tactical decisions to bypass journalists at times, but he never took the strategic decision to limit press access or diminish the role of the media. Even when racing to meet his schedule and coaxed by staff to walk past a press stakeout, Annan was rarely able to resist his impulse to address reporters. If nothing else, he would typically offer a turn of the head and an open hand that implied Ill be right back to you.

From the archives: What can the UN do for press freedom?

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

David Hirsch is a former resident correspondent at the United Nations. He is currently studying globalization in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth College.California lawmakers outlined a proposal to help PG&E Corp. and other utilities cope with billions of dollars of potential damages from deadly wildfires that ravaged the state last year.

SANTA ROSA, CA, Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, California, where wildfires completely destroyed a neighborhood. Photo by Dominick Del Vecchio  Oct 11, 2017

SANTA ROSA, CA, Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, California, where wildfires completely destroyed a neighborhood. Photo by Dominick Del Vecchio  Oct 11, 2017

The plan, part of a broad package addressing the growing threat of wildfires such as forest management practices, doesnt go as far as PG&E wanted to alleviate its liabilities, but could help ease Wall Streets concerns regarding the companys liquidity. It includes allowing utilities to float bonds to cover fire costs.

The proposal would also direct state regulators to consider factors such as extreme weather events and those outside a utilitys control when weighing whether companies can pass along liability costs to customers. A bill, which will be presented next week, must be passed by lawmakers before the legislative session ends Aug. 31.

We must protect the long-term interest of the utility ratepayer, said California Senator Bill Dodd, co-chair of a conference committee set up to address wildfire risks. We can all agree the status quo is unacceptable.

PG&E, the states biggest utility owner, has spent months lobbying lawmakers for relief from wildfire costs that JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimates could reach as much as $17 billion. The San Francisco-based company wanted to change a state law that says property owners can collect compensation from utilities linked to fires even if the companies werent negligent. Governor Jerry Brown had proposed relaxing that standard, although lawmakers on the wildfire committee ultimately abandoned the idea.

What we want to be able to do is put together a proposal that makes sure that we have investor-owned utilities that arent going to go belly up, and that we are going to protect ratepayers at the same time, Chad Mayes, a state assemblymember, said at Fridays hearing.

Scott Wetch, a lobbyist for the Coalition of California Utility Employees, said if legislation fails to provide a meaningful solution to fire liabilities facing PG&E from last year, the company could face a liquidity issue that would threaten contracts with power producers including renewable energy providers.

PG&E said in a statement that it looks forward to reviewing the language of the bill when it is released.

Spreading Costs

The ability to issue bonds to cover potential fire liabilities could help PG&E spread the costs over an extended period of time. Consumer advocates said the practice may open the door to having ratepayers instead of shareholders pay for all the liability costs for last year.

We urge legislators to reject any bailout of PG&E, the other utilities, their executives and shareholders, said Becky Warren, a spokeswoman for the Ratepayer Protection Network, which represents a group of agricultural, industrial and residential customers.

Read more: Facing $17 Billion in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change

PG&E has lost more than $13 billion in market value since early October, when blazes broke out in Northern California wine country. State investigators have said the companys equipment caused 16 of last years fires. They havent yet made a ruling on the cause of the Tubbs fire, the deadliest and most destructive in the area.

The real question for investors is how much will shareholders will have to pay for these unprecedented wildfire costs, said Paul Patterson, a utility analyst for Glenrock Associates. The devil will be in the details.

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.A once-powerful hurricane twisted and drifted away from Hawaii, leaving behind heavily saturated ground on the Big Island and many residents on other islands relieved it didnt wreak more havoc.

Firefighters on the Big Island rescued 39 people from floodwaters Friday through early Saturday as the island grappled with the nearly 4 feet (1.2 meters) of rain from Tropical Storm Lane, formerly Hurricane Lane, dumped on the eastern part of the island over the course of three days.

In Honolulu, where the storm deposited only a few inches of rain, shopkeepers removed plywood from their windows and reopened for business.

The National Weather Service canceled all storm warnings for the state.

Preliminary figures from the weather service show that Lane dropped the fourth-highest amount of rain for a hurricane to hit the United States since 1950. Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Texas a year ago, topped the list.

The storms outer bands dumped as much as 45 inches (114 centimeters) on the mostly rural Big Island, measurements showed. The main town of Hilo, population 43,000, was flooded Friday with waist-high water.

It was almost biblical proportions, said Kai Kahele, a state senator who represents Hilo. The ground was soggy on Saturday, he said, and it was still raining.

But Hilo is accustomed to rain, he noted. And the Wailuku River, which raged with runoff, has a name that means destructive water in Hawaiian. Native Hawaiians who have lived in the area for hundreds of years know how dangerous the river can be, Kahele said.

Hawaii County Civil Defense spokeswoman Kelly Wooten said teams were assessing damage but continued to focus on recovery efforts because of the ongoing precipitation.

Big Island Book Buyers in Hilo opened as normal Saturday morning after owner Mary Bicknell saw a bit of sunshine.

Everybody is in pretty good spirits. Its kind of nice, she said of her customers before adding everyone was hoping and praying its over.

One of the islands volcanoes is erupting, and the rain could still cause whiteout conditions on some active lava fields when it hits the molten rock and boils off as steam.

About 200 miles (320 kilometers) and several islands to the northwest, tourists on the island of Oahu wandered Waikiki Beach and took leisurely swims as shopkeepers prepared to reopen.

Hotels began putting deck chairs back alongside pools. Dozens of surfers were in the Pacific, looking to ride small waves. The breeze was light.

Winds were also calmer on Maui, which had seen about 12 inches (30 centimeters) of rain and wind gusts up to 50 mph (80 kph). On Saturday, winds were about 11 mph (18 kph). Like the Big Island, Maui experienced flooding and landslides.

Lane first approached the islands earlier this week as a Category 5 hurricane, meaning it was likely to cause catastrophic damage with winds of 157 mph (252 kph) or above. But upper-level winds known as shear swiftly tore the storm apart.

As flooding hit the Big Island, winds fanned brush fires that had broken out in dry areas of Maui and Oahu. Some residents in a shelter on Maui had to flee flames, and another fire forced people from their homes.

Flames burned nine homes in the historic coastal town of Lahaina and forced 600 people to evacuate, Maui County spokeswoman Lynn Araki-Regan said. Some have returned, but many have not because much of the area lacks power, Araki-Regan said.

Those outages meant the water provider on Mauis west side was unable to pump, so officials at the Maui Electric utility urged conservation  particularly important because firefighters need supplies to put out the remaining flames.

The central Pacific gets fewer hurricanes than other regions, with only about four or five named storms a year. Hawaii rarely gets hit. The last major storm to hit was Iniki in 1992. Others have come close in recent years.

Its great that it didnt get us, Nick Palumbo II, who lives and owns a surf shop on the island of Lanai, said of Lane.

He worried, however, that the near-miss would give residents a false sense of security.

Were going to get nailed one time, and people are going to not listen, Palumbo said, exactly like `The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

(Associated Press journalists Brian Skoloff and John Locher in Honolulu; Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska; Darlene Superville in Washington; and Justin Pritchard in Los Angeles contributed to this report.)

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Invoking the familiar insurance contract interpretation doctrine of California and other jurisdictions, that truly ambiguous policy wording must be construed against the insurer drafting it, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California decided on August 16, 2018 that coverage for abrupt collapse of a building was not limited to losses where the insured building has fallen to the ground. Rather, it includes situations where the building ceiling and its attached equipment have dropped nearly a foot in height, and ceiling tiles and a layer of insultation have fallen onto furnishings below.

The decision, Hoban v. Nova Cas. Co., is reported at 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 139116, and involved the failure of two trusses supporting the roof of a bowling alley in Madera, California. These failures caused the ceiling of the building to drop approximately 6 to 10 inches below its as-built elevation, resulting in the Madera County government immediately ordering the business closed for public safety reasons until repairs could be made.

The bowling alley owners, plaintiffs Patti and Terry Hoban, were insured by a commercial insurance policy issued by defendant Nova Casualty Company. In ruling on cross-motions for summary judgment, the court stated that, while damages caused by collapse are typically excluded from insurance coverage, plaintiffs purchased additional coverage specifically to provide protection in the event of collapse. The key to the grant of collapse coverage, found in an endorsement titled Additional Coverage   Collapse, was that it applied only to an abrupt collapse as described and limited in the endorsement. The endorsement, in turn, defined the phrase abrupt collapse as meaning an abrupt falling down or caving in of a building or any part of a building with the result that the building or part of the building cannot be occupied for its intended purpose.

The endorsement adding collapse coverage explicitly stated that it did not apply to a building, or any part of one, in danger of falling down or caving in, or to a part of a building still standing after a loss, even if it has separated from another part of the building, and even if the building shows evidence of cracking, bulging, sagging, bending, leaning, settling, shrinkage or expansion.

After investigating the cause of loss, the insurer retained a lawyer to provide it with a coverage analysis. The lawyer told the insurer that the policys collapse coverage did not apply to plaintiffs loss because the roof had not collapsed. The insurer denied the insurance claim, asserting that because the ceiling and roof of the building had not fallen down there had been no collapse. Therefore, the insurer contended that the collapse coverage did not apply at all to plaintiffs loss. The same argument found its way into the insurers motion for summary judgment, and in defense of plaintiffs cross-motion for the same relief. In brief, the insurer argued that the additional coverage provision for collapse did not apply in this case because the insured building still stood and had not fallen to the ground.

The court noted that in a diversity of citizenship case such as this one applying California law, the courts role in construing the insurance contract is to discern how the California Supreme Court would apply the abrupt collapse definition to the essentially undisputed facts of the loss. If the states highest court had not adjudicated the issue, a federal court must make a reasonable determination of the result the highest state court would reach if it were deciding the case.

Although the California courts have litigated collapse insurance coverage issues with some frequency, creating a split in authority, the extent of collapse coverage, the court noted, depends on the precise policy language, so cases interpreting collapse provisions with language different from the policy in this case, or that leave the term collapse undefined, were of limited utility in aiding this court to make a decision.

Accordingly, the court resorted to the general principles of insurance policy interpretation under California law, starting with the rule requiring a court, first, to resort to the language of the contract in order to ascertain its plain meaning or the meaning a lay person would ordinarily attach to it, making it consistent with a policyholders reasonable expectations. The goal in construing an insurance policy is to give effect to the parties mutual intention, and the terms of a contract are ambiguous if they are susceptible of more than one reasonable interpretation. Contract language must be interpreted as a whole and as applied to the factual circumstances of the case. The contract terms must not be found ambiguous in the abstract. Most importantly in this case, ambiguities in coverage provisions interpreted by California courts are construed against the insurance company.

The court concluded that the language of this policy was ambiguous because there was more than one reasonable interpretation of its intended meaning regarding collapse. One reasonable meaning of the phrase caving in, the court said, is defendants understanding: that the building has completely collapsed to the ground. The court noted that the policy did attempt to differentiate between a building that has suffered an abrupt collapse and one that is standing. This suggests, the court stated, that even though the policy does not unambiguously require it, the building or part of the building must collapse completely to the ground for coverage to exist.

The court pointed out that in common parlance a building can cav[e] in . . . with the result that the building . . . cannot be occupied for its intended purpose . . . by having its roof or ceiling fall an appreciable distance, even if the building as a whole has not completely collapsed to the ground. As put another way by the court, [n]othing in the policy unambiguously informs the policyholder that, to be covered, the building or a part of it must fall completely to the ground.

The court carefully examined the insurers word choice in order to shed light on whether to suffer a collapse the insured building must completely fall down or flatten. The crucial phrase used in the policy is abrupt collapse, which the court observed highlights the manner in which the collapse must occur to warrant coverage. By contrast to this temporal element, the policy did not use the term complete collapse, which would refer the reader to the degree of collapse required for coverage. With coverage applying to the abrupt collapse of either a building or any part of a building the court thought the policy wording strongly suggested the policy was intended to cover a partial collapse of a part of a building, so long as it occurred abruptly, not only total or complete collapse.

In a related use of word logic, the court observed that specifying that the collapse must render the building or part of the building so that it cannot be occupied for its intended purpose [is language] that would be unnecessary and redundant if the policy required the building or part of the building to have collapsed to the ground. A building or a part of building that has collapsed to the ground cannot be occupied for any purpose, or at all, let alone for its intended purpose, so to require collapse to the ground would render the actual policy wording  that the collapsed building cannot be occupied for its intended purpose  to be mere surplusage. [C]ontracts, the court said, are usually interpreted to avoid [such] redundancy.

The court recited evidence establishing the predicate for coverage based upon the partial collapse of features of the building. The court noted that it was undisputed that the overhead monitors of the bowling alley fell 6 to 10 inches in elevation, and that ceiling tiles and insulation fell to the table tops and counters below. The court stated, These constitute any part of a building that has fall[en] down. It was also undisputed that the business was closed at the order of the County of Madera for public safety reasons until repairs could be completed, so neither the building nor any part of it could be occupied for its intended purpose. Accordingly, the court held, there is no genuine dispute of material fact about whether a part of the building fell down and whether the building could be occupied for its intended purpose. Finally, based upon the policy language stating that coverage does not extend to parts of building understanding even if it shows evidence of cracking, bulging, sagging, pending, leaning, settling, shrinkage or expansion, the court found that this language could be reasonably understood as intending to exclude coverage for any regular maintenance costs, and not as requiring a complete collapse for coverage to exist. To rule otherwise, the court said, would transform the policy into a maintenance agreement. Here the building was in a state of collapse, well beyond the point at which ordinary maintenance would be called for.

Plaintiffs sued their insurer for not only breach of contract, but also for breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, but this claim was rejected based on the genuine dispute doctrine. This doctrine holds that where there is a genuine dispute over coverage, or the amount of loss, an insurers denial of benefits gives rise to tort damages only if the insured shows the denial or delay was unreasonable. As a corollary of that principle, California courts hold that a genuine dispute exists only where the insurers position is maintained in good faith and on reasonable grounds. Here it was found that it was undisputed that the building did not completely collapse to the ground, which under the insurers interpretation would mean there was no coverage under the policy.

Plaintiffs contended the genuine dispute doctrine did not excuse the insurers claim denial because it formed its view of coverage at the outset of the claims process for conducting an investigation, that is not relevant, even if it were true. It is undisputed that the building did not fall to the ground and nothing about the investigation would or could have impacted a coverage decision based on defendants interpretation of the policy. While defendants policy interpretation ultimately proved to be incorrect, given the ambiguity of the contract and the manner in which California law requires such ambiguity to be construed, accordingly, the court held that defendant insurer was entitled to summary judgment in its favor as to the plaintiffs bad faith claim.AVON LAKE, Ohio -- Diane Cover, of Avon Lake, was applying for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) after discovering an ancestral connection when she learned of a special project being conducted through the DAR.

All of the DAR chapters across the country are providing official recognition certificates and special pins for ceremonial presentation to all of the Vietnam War veterans they can find.

Due to the program, Cover was able to have the presentation for her brother, Charles Beard, at a recent class reunion. Beard is a retired lieutenant commander from the United States Navy.

Cover said Mary Jane Burger is the regent of the Lorain County Nathan Perry Chapter of the DAR. Burger explained the program to her.

When Burger was contacted, she said: "We are currently most publicly known for this project. We have recognized over 600 vets in about two years, most in Lorain County."

Burger said the DAR began with a partnership with a committee of the Department of Defense to recognize the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Vietnam War era -- Nov. 1, 1955, to May 15, 1975. The Vietnam War lasted 20 years, she said.

"If you were in the military then, you are eligible for the recognition this award brings. The purpose is to recognize and honor those U.S. military veterans," Burger said.

The program was initiated by an act of Congress with a proclamation. On the back of the pin are the words "A grateful nation thanks and honors you."

Honorees receive the pin, a certificate that shows their years of service during the Vietnam War, and a copy of the proclamation.

There are four pins available for veterans or family members who apply for the Certificate of Honor Program:

* First pin: for living American military prisoners of war. If a POW is dead, the pin may be presented to a surviving spouse.

* Second pin: for unaccounted for or veterans missing in action, to immediate family members: parents, spouse, siblings and children. Families must apply for each one.

* Third pin: in memory of a veteran, for immediate family, parents, spouse, siblings and children of a veteran who is listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall. This is a gold star pin.

* Fourth pin: surviving spouse pin, a blue star pin for the spouse of a deceased Vietnam War veteran. The pin is from the nation, not from the DAR.

Then there is a fifth pin, called the Vietnam Veteran lapel pin. Its purpose is to recognize, thank and honor United States military veterans who served during the Vietnam War period.

The eligibility for the pin is living, United State veterans who served on active duty in the United States Armed Forces from November 1, 1955 through May 15, 1975 regardless of the location of their service.

Burger said there are 6.4 million living Vietnam veterans, and 2.3 million have been recognized through the DAR project.

All presentations must be made at a ceremony that the family coordinates or that is held in conjunction with another event. For more information or to apply, email Burger at mjburger2@yahoo.com. Please include the veteran's name, branch of service, as well as where and when they served.

Note: Each year, the Department of Defense chooses one DAR daughter in each state to receive recognition in Washington, D.C., for being an outstanding daughter in the project. Mary Jane Burger was chosen for the honor to represent Ohio. She went to Washington's Constitution Hall in June and received a medallion and a certificate thanking her for her work in honoring Vietnam War Veterans.A 9-11 memorial is located on the new fire station's second floor, featuring a beam from the World Trade Center in New York City. Late resident Richard Barson, who had been in the steel business, secured the relic for Beachwood.

BEACHWOOD, Ohio -- Perhaps no area fire station has ever generated so much discussion and -- to some critics -- so much cost during its planning and construction. But after much anticipation, the doors to the new Beachwood Public Safety Center were opened Sunday for all the community to see.

An estimated 300 residents made their way through during a three-hour open house at the 27,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility located on the northeast corner of East Park Drive and Richmond Road.

Many of them came away impressed.

"I think it's beautiful," said North Woodland Road resident Carmen Griffin, one of many visitors who took a tour of the center after a grand opening ceremony and ribbon cutting were held in the morning. "It's a beautiful building that will help the safety of the community and of the firefighters who work here."

Vanessa Malone, who lives on nearby Beacon Drive, said she was attracted to the open house because her daughter, Victoria, 6, wanted to see up close the pole firefighters will use to descend to the first floor when an emergency beckons.

The second-floor emergency operations center.

"It looks great, in my opinion," Malone said. "I know I've called the Fire Department twice (for help in the past), and I'm glad to have them close by."

Indeed, architect Paul Erickson, working with information supplied by firefighters who toured various fire stations in Ohio and near Erickson's Virginia office for ideas, took meticulous care to create functional space and amenities for firefighters and neighbors.

For instance, as firefighter Greg Liggett said, the station's bays -- from where fire trucks emerge when leaving for emergencies -- face away from the Penske Building directly across Park East Drive and veer outward onto Park East Drive toward the Richmond Road intersection.

"That way, when we blast our sirens, it won't be directly at the building, and there are no homes at the intersection," Liggett said.

Liggett and Capt. Phil Corpora did much of the visiting to other sites, talking to out-of-town firefighters and administrators and bringing back the best ideas for Beachwood's new building.

There are many opportunities for firefighters to train at the new Public Safety Center. Here, Beachwood firefighter Don Balog rappels on a rear wall of the building.

"As you can see, it's very transparent," Corpora said of the building. "When you enter the front door (off Richmond Road), you can see (through windows) right to the other side of the building."

Corpora noted that there is a big window in the weight room so that those in the bay can see if a firefighter is in distress while working out. The weight machinery was donated by the philanthropic organization Beachwood 100.

The station's living quarters feature 10 individual bunks, each room coming with three lockers so that firefighters from all three 24-hour shifts will have one. And there are five unisex restrooms in the dwelling area.

Although the Beachwood Fire Department does not now have any women among its roster of 40 firefighters, Corpora said, "We're planning for everything, for decades ahead, as best we can."

Beachwood's fire-rescue workers pose Sunday in front of the new Public Safety Center.

A couple of key elements to the building are its "hot zone" design and extensive training areas.

Liggett said Erickson has set the trend nationwide for fire station designs that keep all carcinogens firefighters bring back on their clothing and equipment from fire sites sealed off from their living quarters. The design is especially important to Beachwood firefighters, as one of their own, Capt. Michael Palumbo, died in May 2017 from brain cancer believed to have been contracted while on the job.

Much of the building's back side is available for a wide variety of firefighter training. Against the rear side of the building, firefighters can practice rappelling and various forms of fire rescue. The space is also available for use by police departments and regional SWAT teams.

"Any (department) that wants can use it," said Fire Chief Patrick Kearns. "In the past, we'd have to go to NASA Glenn or Cleveland Browns Stadium to practice these things, and that would take up a lot of our time.

"We can also practice here whenever we want, and that means practicing at night, too. Not all fires happen in the daytime hours. When you'd have to go to those other places for night training, they'd have to turn on lights and they don't like doing that," he said.

Even the three-story hose tower, where hoses are hung to dry, will be used for training. Grates in the floor around the tower will allow firefighters to rappel and practice hooking up equipment. The stairwell around the tower is made to be easily cleaned of any products used in training drills.

An open mezzanine above the bay area includes a window firefighters can use to practice gaining access to apartments. The mezzanine area can be configured to include furniture or other obstacles to further help with training.

"Today is a historic day in the life of our city," Mayor Martin Horwitz said during his remarks before the ribbon cutting. "We join together to dedicate a building that stands not just for the safety and well-being of Beachwood, but for that of our neighbors and region for decades to come."

The building includes an emergency operations center, which can seat 40 and hold up to 60 area safety officials, if necessary, to coordinate plans in the case of an area emergency. The second-floor EOC features four large TV screens and several covered floor boxes that can be opened and allow for emergency communications and data sharing.

Added after original plans were drawn up is a dispatch center on the first floor. Beachwood officials are talking with other communities about joining a dispatch center that would be located within the building.

When asked about the likelihood of getting other communities to use a Beachwood dispatch center, Kearns said: "It's 100 percent. We're going to be working with others.

"There's already talk that some communities are looking to pull out of (dispatch centers) in Chagrin Valley and Parma," he said.

Criticism surrounding the new Beachwood Public Safety center has largely centered on its cost. In May, it was announced that the cost topped $14 million, including land acquisition, protecting and restoring wetlands and, for $800,000, the addition of the dispatch center.

"The base cost of the fire station is $9.8 million," said Kearns, flatly. "And when you add to that a dispatch center, an emergency operations center and training facility, for $14 million, that's a bargain.

"They're (Beachwood administrators) talking about building a new police station, and the initial bids have come in at $15 to $16 million, just for the one function of a police station."

Kearns said the Fire Department will be fully moved into the new building in three weeks. The new building will take over from the current fire station number two on Chagrin Boulevard.

The current fire station number two, at about 6,000 square feet, was built to house volunteer firefighters in 1974, and is considered too small for modern firefighting operations. Kearns believes the new location will result in better response times.

"People keep congratulating me today about the new fire station, but they shouldn't congratulate me," Kearns said. "They should congratulate themselves for financing and supporting better safety for the community and for firefighters.

"And, our firefighters should be congratulated because each and every one of them participated in this process," he said.

The planning process began seven years ago, he said.

"I believe history will show that the city of Beachwood and its residents will be glad to have this fire station."BROOK PARK, Ohio -- Hundreds of acres of Ford-owned property continue to sit vacant in Brook Park, but Mayor Mike Gammella said he is not giving up on bringing a "substantial" business to that site.

He told City Council members at their Aug. 21 meeting that he had met in Detroit with Ford Land Chairman and CEO David Dubensky the previous week, and that those talks were positive. Ford Land is a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company.

"We had a very good discussion," Gammella said. "Fortunately, I know him from my past life (as a United Auto Workers union-Ford international representative), and I have a good relationship with him."

He said he emphasized to Dubensky his desire for a single, large business on the property.

"One of the biggest projects we have to do, and one of the biggest projects I'm taking on as mayor of this city, is getting something substantial on that property," Gammella said. "I want something that's more in the high-tech realm in order to move this city forward."

He went on to say Ford is working with him "extremely closely" and that he recommended marketing the property internationally. Gammella envisions promoting the site to Japan, Germany, China, Romania and Czechoslovakia. Amenities such as access to multiple highways and an international airport make it lucrative and attractive, he said.

"We have to put our best foot forward ... and I do look for good things to come about in the next year or so," Gammella added, noting that the property's environmental cleanup "is not as bad as some people portray it to be."

"But it is an issue," he acknowledged. "What I'm angling for is one, big blockbuster business in there."

The total size of the defunct property is 367 acres, and Gammella said he anticipates approximately 230 acres would be developed.Q3: What do you think of 1Malaysia, and what is your vision of a united Malaysia? I visualize it as a mighty river with many contributing streams, like the Nile. Can you comment on that?





MBM: I have never heard it put quite that way, but that is an interesting, and if I may add, original metaphor. I like it! The mighty Nile has its Blue and White Niles. I suppose Malaysia has its brown, black, yellow and a few other colors contributing to our Nile. I have never heard it put quite that way, but that is an interesting, and if I may add, original metaphor. I like it! The mighty Nile has its Blue and White Niles. I suppose Malaysia has its brown, black, yellow and a few other colors contributing to our Nile.





That metaphor presupposes that we would all mix it up and become undifferentiated, for at the Nile delta you could not separate the waters from the Blue Nile from that of the Red. Unfortunately, or fortunately I would argue, we humans are always proud of our culture, heritage, and even color. The more developed we are, the more conscious we are of our roots. Being conscious or proud of ones heritage is very different from being obsessed or defined by it. The former is positive and constructive; the latter, negative and destructive. Barack Obama personifies the former; Adolf Hitler, the second.





We all have this need to belong; we do not want to be an insignificant part of a large homogenous mass. Incidentally, that is also part of Allahs grand design; He could have made us all clones of each other. Life would not be much fun then, nor would it be beautiful.





Let me suggest a culinary metaphor instead. America prides itself with its melting pot model. There is however, no mistaking what is in the pot; it is essentially an English stewan Anglo-Saxon culture and ethos. Today that stew is enriched with the addition of Italian pasta, jalapeno peppers, and French wine, but in flavor, texture, color, and yes, even smell, it is still basically the old English stew. Even a hint of challenging that would throw things in a tizzy. Witness the hysteria gripping the White extreme right to Obamas presidency.





I once suggested the salad as the more appropriate metaphor for Malaysia. Yes, there are onions, black olives and other ingredients, but there is no mistaking that it is not salad without the greens. Salads are not a regular Malaysian fare, so my metaphor fell or felt flat.





rojak. The main if not defining vegetable there is taugeh (bean sprouts). It alone however, does not make rojak; we need cucumbers, tofu, onions, black olives, and all the other ingredients. Without them it would not be rojak. They enhance the overall flavor. Nonetheless when you pick up a spoonful of rojak, you could still separate out the various ingredients, but once in your mouth, you taste only the complete recipe, not the individual vegetables. More appropriate would be the more familiar and universal favorite,. The main if not defining vegetable there is(bean sprouts). It alone however, does not make; we need cucumbers, tofu, onions, black olives, and all the other ingredients. Without them it would not be. They enhance the overall flavor. Nonetheless when you pick up a spoonful of, you could still separate out the various ingredients, but once in your mouth, you taste only the complete recipe, not the individual vegetables.





rojak. The Malays, Chinese, Ibans and others should be proud of their heritage; it is not Malaysia without them. As to what I think of 1Malaysia, I do not know as no one, least of all Prime Minister Najib, has clearly articulated it. Besides, I am more interested in the content, not the label. I am also not much for slogans. That is my vision of a united Malaysia, the. The Malays, Chinese, Ibans and others should be proud of their heritage; it is not Malaysia without them. As to what I think of 1Malaysia, I do not know as no one, least of all Prime Minister Najib, has clearly articulated it. Besides, I am more interested in the content, not the label. I am also not much for slogans.



By Olivia Rose

THE BEREAVED family of brutally slain Kevino Bah Smith have said they are waiting with bated breath for his alleged killers to face court.





The tragic death of young Kevino is still fresh in the minds of his mother Patty Smith and his father John Smith, who told the Weekly News that they are praying for justice to prevail.





Kevinos dismembered remains were found discarded in a busy area in Breezy Brae, Grand Turk, in late April 2015 following an aggressive police search effort.





The 25-year-old man was reported missing after last being seen having a heated confrontation with several people.





Last week two men charged with his murder, Lamar Griffith and Conrad Thomas Jr, were told that they will be standing trial in March 2019.





That will make it four years since Patty and Johns youngest child was savagely taken away from them.





Speaking on this latest development John said he hopes his family will finally get some closure.





"I feel much better knowing the case will be brought forward next year; these four years have been very long.





"Its been a long, long time and it still hurts as if it was just yesterday but thank God its coming up next year.





Kevinos grief-stricken mother Patty, whose deafening outcry on social media prompted the local police force to dig deeper into the gruesome murder, said the pain will never go away.





"The way how my son was brutally murderedIm still hurting for my baby. Thats one of my jewels they destroyed because I had four children and now Im left with just three and its hard.





"Whenever I talk to my younger daughter and I say hey baby girl, it pains me because he was the baby boy.





Patty who has been highly critical of the handling of the investigation from the onset, regularly writing on social media that her boy had been forgotten, said she has been trying to pick up the pieces and move on from that horrendous ordeal.





"Sometimes I would just have flashbacks of him, how he used to throw his [dreads] back and do stuff that I sorely miss.





"Next week September 2 wouldve been his birthday and whenever his birthday comes around we miss him dearly. Thats when I really hit rock bottom.





She said it hurts "so much that it has taken so long time for his alleged killers to be brought before the courts.





Recounting memories of her son, she said just a glimpse of Kevinos garments sometimes causes a flood of emotions so strong that she is driven to uncontrollable tears.





"Some days I feel like Im hitting rock bottom, under a cliff or the world is closing down on me.





"When I get up and I cant see him, I cant touch him, I cant talk to him, I cry day and night.





Crippled with emotions Patty said: "I just want justice for my baby. Why did they do that to me?





The Weekly News has been reliably informed that the prosecution and the defence have both agreed to have the men tried in a judge only trial.





Reports also state that the prosecution is seeking to have special prosecutor Evans Welch handle the Crowns case.





The men are represented by attorneys Oliver Smith and Keith James.



LAKEWOOD, Ohio -- Raising Cane's is eyeing Lakewood for its next chicken joint in the region.

The news comes from Lakewood councilperson Tristan Rader, who posted on Facebook over the weekend that a Raising Cane's franchisee has submitted a proposal to tear down the Bob Evans restaurant at 14115 Detroit and build a fast-food establishment in its place.

According to a portion of the proposal posted by Rader, the new restaurant would include a drive through as well as a dining room with a capacity of 76 diners with another 26 seats outside on a covered patio.

A proposal has been submitted to the City of Lakewood to convert Bob Evans (on Detroit) into a drive-through Raising... Posted by Councilperson Tristan Rader on Saturday, August 25, 2018

The matter will now go to the Lakewood planning commission and architectural board for permitting and design review. A traffic study will also need to be done, according to the councilperson.

The project could face pushback from city council. Rader said he and some of his fellow council members are looking at limiting the number of new fast-food restaurants in Lakewood.

"Our goal should be to promote the health of the community," he wrote on Facebook. "The vibrancy of our city as a whole; and local, homegrown businesses... More fast-food and more drive-through chains do NOT fit that vision, in my humble opinion."

The Bob Evans in Lakewood opened in 2014, about three years before Bob Evans Farms got out of the restaurant business and sold the division to Golden Gate Capital.

The first Raising Cane's in Cuyahoga County opened to long lines and heavy traffic earlier this month in Strongsville. Besides its signature chicken fingers, the chain is known for its sauce, a condiment so secretive only managers know the recipe.

Related content: Raising Cane's opens first Cleveland-area restaurant, but is it better than Guthrie's?CLEVELAND, Ohio - Navy Week, featuring a variety of events here to celebrate that branch of the service, will formally open with a 5 p.m. ceremony on August 28 at the Cuyahoga County Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on Public Square.

The free event will include remarks by Vice Admiral Forrest Faison III, and performances by the U.S. Fleet Forces Band and Navy Ceremonial Guard Drill Team.

For Navy Week, which runs through Sept. 2, the monument has created a special display focusing on three admirals who were Northeast Ohio natives.

They are:

* Rear Admiral David Sinton Ingalls, of Hunting Valley, who was the Navy's first and only flying ace of World War I, and later served in the Ohio House of Representatives.

*Cleveland native Rear Admiral Isaac Campbell Kidd who was killed on the bridge of the battleship USS Arizona during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and was the first Navy flag officer killed in action in World War II.

*Fleet Admiral Ernest Joseph King, of Lorain, who served as commander in chief of the U.S. fleet and chief of naval operations during World War II.

The Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, 3 Public Square, will have extended hours during Navy Week, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission is free.WASHINGTON, D.C. - Ohio members of Congress on Monday expressed cautious optimism about a new trade deal that President Donald Trump announced with Mexico, but most said they'll need to scrutinize its details before deciding whether to support it.

Trump held a joint phone call with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto to announce a bilateral deal to replace the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with an agreement that Trump described as "a really good deal for both countries."

Both said they hoped the United States would be able to resolve any differences with Canada, so the agreement would include all three countries.

"A lot of people thought we'd never get here because we all negotiate tough," Trump said. "We do, and so does Mexico. And this is a tremendous thing."

But the pair didn't release specifics of the deal during their call, and administration officials including U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer were only slightly less vague during a subsequent phone call with reporters.

Look forward to reviewing the details but pleased to see todays breakthrough on trade w/ #Mexico. As Ive said many times, I believe we must do more to open markets to US products, vigorously enforce our trade laws & protect American #jobs.  Rob Portman (@senrobportman) August 27, 2018

They did say it provides more detailed rules of origin for automobiles that would "be much better for the region and for the United States," that it contains "completely enforceable" labor requirements, and that it will set new, high-level standards in areas like digital trade and financial services.

"With respect to the United States and Mexico, we have an agreement that is absolutely terrific," Lighthizer told reporters. "I think it is fair to say we'll do a rebalancing. I think it's going to lead to more jobs for American workers and farmers, but also more jobs for workers and farmers from Mexico. "

Most Ohio members of Congress said they'll need more information about what's in the agreement before deciding whether to support it.

Sen. Rob Portman - an Ohio Republican who held Lighthizer's job when George W. Bush was president - said he looks forward to reviewing the agreement's details, but is "pleased to see that there has been a breakthrough."

"As I've said many times, I believe we must more vigorously enforce our trade laws and protect American jobs," said a statement from Portman, who voted to approve the NAFTA agreement when he was a U.S. House of Representatives member in 1993.

I applaud @realDonaldTrump for following through with yet another promise by delivering a fairer & more reciprocal trading relationship with Mexico. I look forward to further reviewing the agreement & continuing to work to achieve better trade deals for Ohio workers & families.  Rep. Jim Renacci (@RepJimRenacci) August 27, 2018

Sen. Sherrod Brown - a longtime NAFTA critic who opposed the agreement as a U.S. House of Representatives member - called the tentative pact with Mexico "an important step forward." But he said he needs to review its text, which the White House has not yet revealed, and that he's collaborating with Lighthizer to ensure "every detail is right for Ohio workers."

"We still have a lot of work to do to bring Canada on board and write the legislation needed to make any deal a reality," said a statement from the Ohio Democrat.

U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci of Wadsworth, a Republican running against Brown in November's election, was more sanguine about the announcement. Trump has endorsed Renacci's senate campaign, and Renacci has courted Trump supporters throughout the state.

"I applaud President Trump for following through with yet another promise by delivering a fairer and more reciprocal trading relationship with Mexico," said a statement from Renacci. "Today, the U.S. and Mexico reached a tentative agreement that will put in place stronger labor standards, allow for more agricultural trade, and will provide more opportunities for U.S. businesses to succeed. I look forward to further reviewing the agreement and continuing to work closely with the President to achieve better trade deals for Ohio workers and families."

GOP Rep. Bob Gibbs of Holmes County was also enthused, calling the deal "another piece of great news for American workers." He released a statement that applauded Trump's efforts "to renegotiate and modernize NAFTA to benefit American workers," and encouraged Canada to work with the United States to finalize a deal.

Congress must have its say on this Administrations #NAFTA. Simply, any new North American trade agreement must raise wages and create a level playing field across the board. I look forward to reviewing the details in the weeks to come.



My full statement: https://t.co/B39wghnKhq pic.twitter.com/Y6o2gZ4ytO  Marcy Kaptur (@RepMarcyKaptur) August 27, 2018

"Tax cuts and regulatory reform have spurred incredible economic growth and put millions of Americans back to work," Gibbs' statement said. "Breaking down trade barriers and making sure other countries play by the rules will make it easier to export American-made products, allowing our nation's workers, the best in the world, to compete on a level playing field in the global market."

Bainbridge Township Republican Rep. Dave Joyce said the agreement sounds like "a step in the right direction" and he looks forward to reviewing it.

"Any time we can come to an agreement and lessen the chance of a trade war happening between the U.S. and another country, I think that's a good thing," said a statement from Joyce. "We must find a deal that benefits our American workers and families."

Toledo Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who joined Brown in voting against NAFTA, said "the details and the fine print of the new agreement with Mexico matter more than a hasty self-proclaimed victory." She said she's eager to see whether Trump and his team "lived up to the promises he made to America's workers in his 2016 campaign."

"We must end the job outsourcing bonanza that has taken hold since NAFTA's passage," said a statement from Kaptur. "As someone who fought with all I had to prevent NAFTA's passage and the trauma it wrought on American workers, I know the devil is in the details. I look forward to reviewing the details of this agreement as well as the issues that remain with Canadian negotiators in the days and weeks to come."

Niles Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan agreed with Kaptur that any new deal must raise wages, protect workers' rights and freedoms, cut back outsourcing, and put the interests of working families ahead of international corporations in all three countries.

"As a member of Congress, one of my principal responsibilities is to ensure the American economy is inclusive and does not leave hardworking families behind," said a statement from Ryan. "I look forward to reviewing the text of this initial agreement, and will continue to pressure the administration to achieve a strong, trilateral agreement that puts workers in the United States, Mexico, and Canada first."

Ryan and Kaptur's concerns echoed those expressed in a joint statement from the presidents of the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO, UAW, Communications Workers, and International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers unions, which said NAFTA has had a "devastating impact on workers."

"We are aggressively engaged in pursuing an agreement that works for working people in all three countries, and we are not done yet," said their statement. "There is more work that needs to be done to deliver the needed, real solutions to NAFTA's deeply ingrained flaws."

The Business Roundtable was less eager to ditch the old deal, issuing a statement that argued separate deals with Mexico and Canada would "create more regulatory burdens, disrupt North American supply chains and hurt U.S. workers and businesses. Any effort to withdraw from NAFTA altogether would endanger millions of U.S. jobs and harm the competitiveness of U.S. companies."

"In modernizing NAFTA, the touchstone of success is whether changes improve - rather than weaken - NAFTA for U.S. workers and businesses," the organization's statement said. "Business Roundtable has concerns that today's announcement might signal not an improvement, but rather a step backward by requiring a sunset provision, weakening investment protections and constraining access to dispute settlement procedures. Any final agreement with Mexico and Canada should expand trade, not restrict it."CLEVELAND, Ohio - A poll released by the ACLU of Ohio and the Pretrial Justice Institute on Monday finds that 54 percent of Ohioans "support major reforms to the criminal justice system" and that three-quarters of them believe wealthy people receive better treatment from the courts.

Other poll results include:

Seventy-two percent of respondents "support providing reliable transportation to court for individuals awaiting trial."

Seventy percent of respondents "support limiting the number of days most Ohioans can remain in jail before trial."

Fifty-five percent of respondents support releasing individuals without requiring them to put up money to secure a bond.

"The poll in Ohio confirms what we've already seen coming out of national polls - which is that voters care about bail reform and have a fundamental understanding that our pretrial system is not just," stated ACLU of Ohio policy counsel Caitlin Hill in a written statement. "Left unchanged, our use of money bail will continue to create a two-tier system of justice, where people with financial means can buy their freedom, and poorer people cannot."

Cleveland.com has advocated for reform of the region's inequitable bail systems as part of its ongoing series, Justice for All. Shortly after the launch of the series, officials in Cuyahoga County and in Columbus began looking at issues of bail reform. Local law enforcement officials led by John J. Russo, presiding and administrative judge of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, recently formed the Criminal Justice Council to study and implement justice reforms, including making the system fairer to poor defendants.

Also, a bill that has stalled in the Ohio General Assembly calls for courts to take steps to, among other things, reduce the jail population across Ohio by having judges do a better job assessing the risk of defendants skipping court or getting in trouble if released before trial.

The poll, conducted by Lake Research Partners, questioned 537 registered voters in Ohio over the phone from May 2 and May 17 of this year, and the "percentages reflect the view of Ohio voters of all major demographic groups, political affiliations, and geographical regions throughout Ohio," according to the ACLU and the Pretrial Justice Institute. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.2 percent.

Lake Research Partners, based in Washington, D.C., is a political strategy consultant that works on progressive causes.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A fawn with an arrow through its jaw is wandering around Parma, but police say it's healthy and dodging wildlife officials.

The fawn was sighted near the intersection of Cocoa Drive and Panama Drive on Monday. Police received reports from concerned residents over the past 10 days.

Staff from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources came to Parma last Thursday to try to trap the deer. But the deer dodged the nets and looked to be mobile and eating, Parma Sgt. Dan Ciryak said.

Since the deer seems to be in good health besides from the arrow, it will stay free for now.

If the deer was captured and transported, it could suffer intense stress.

Parma passed legislation in 2016, along with five other Cuyahoga County suburbs, to permit bow hunting. People who want to hunt the deer need to apply for permits and meet requirements to do so. Bow hunting season is September through February.

It's not clear where or how the fawn was shot.

If residents see a change in the fawn's health or other problems, they can contact Parma police.COLUMBUS, Ohio - U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown announced new legislation Monday that would send any federal money recovered from the now-shuttered Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow to Ohio school districts.

Brown, a Democrat from Cleveland, said he will introduce his bill in the U.S. Senate this week. He said he drafted the bill with ECOT in mind, but it will be worded in a way that would allow school districts in other states to obtain recovered funds if a charter school overbills for student attendance.

ECOT received more than $130 million from Washington. If any of that is recovered - and Brown is doubtful it will be recovered in full - it would go into the U.S. Treasury. Brown's bill would send the money to the districts, with those that lost the highest number of students to ECOT to receive higher proportions of money.

ECOT closed in January, after the state concluded it received funds for students who merely logged in to class, many for just an hour a day. The state is trying to recover about $80 million from the school and another $60 million and its founder, William Lager, and other school officials.

"ECOT stole taxpayer dollars and cheated Ohio students," Brown said during a news conference at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. "Twelve thousand Ohio students saw their school close overnight in the middle of the school year, with little warning. We're talking about a so-called school that had been falsifying attendance records, falsifying attendance records to rake in taxpayer dollars."

Students withdrew from their district schools to attend ECOT, but Brown said that the districts were still affected. Money for schools don't just pay for classroom teaching, but for overhead and other costs.

Brown said he has reached out to the U.S. Department of Education to try to figure out how aggressively it is trying to recover money sent to ECOT. He said he's been told officials can't say much at this time because the matter is under investigation.

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has a history of advocating for changes in traditional education, including supporting charter schools. But Brown said he will nevertheless push the issue - even though it's midterm election season and the Senate is on recess. Brown is seeking re-election to his seat against Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci.

"One of the things I've learned in the Senate is you watch, you keep the pressure on, you write letters, you do things like this news conference and talk about it and put pressure on somebody like Betsy DeVos, who clearly has an agenda to protect her lifelong love of for-profit charters and for-profit colleges and universities... It's my duty to figure this out and put pressure on her."

Democrats have tried to make ECOT a central campaign issue, by saying Republicans avoided strict oversight of the school. Politicians in both parties received campaign contributions from Lager and other ECOT officials, but Republicans benefited the most.

"I think there's corruption, the likes of which we haven't seen in my lifetime," he said.

He mentioned ECOT and Cliff Rosenberger, the former Ohio House speaker who resigned amid an FBI probe looking into his relationship with payday lending lobbyists. Rosenberger has said he's done nothing wrong.

"You have these bookends of corruption that we've never seen in this state. And we now have some Republican elected officials saying they're trying to get to the bottom of it but it just happens to be... after years and years and years of scandal in an election year."STRONGSVILLE, Ohio -- A New York-based developer said construction of a new office-retail development, off the north side of Ohio 82 across from SouthPark Mall, will begin in late August or early September.

Ian Ross, founder and principal of Somera Road Inc., said the development -- dubbed Royalton Collection -- will include Panera Bread, which will relocate about 1,400 feet west from its existing location at 17090 Royalton Road.

Ross said Panera is moving to Royalton Collection because the restaurant wants a drive-through and its current parcel doesn't contain enough room.

"Panera does incredibly well where they're at now, so they believe that building will sublease immediately," Ross said.

Panera Bread did not return emails for comment.

Ross said Somera has signed other tenants for Royalton Collection, but he wasn't ready to identify them last week.

Royalton Collection will include one existing three-story office building, formerly occupied by Medical Mutual of Ohio; one new single-story building that will house Panera Bread; and three additional new single-story multi-tenant retail buildings.

Land at the southeast corner of the 8.5-acre site has been reserved for a possible sixth building. The development's sole entrance-exit is off Ohio 82 and will include a traffic signal.

The city's Planning Commission approved the site plan for Royalton Collection in July.

In December, City Council voted 4-3 to rezone the 8.5 acres site to make the development possible, after Somera threatened to sue the city if council said no.

Promises and concerns

Last year, Somera agreed to address concerns of residents living in three subdivisions near the proposed Royalton Collection site. The developer promised to:

Eliminate a restaurant on the northeast side of the site and move remaining restaurants to the southwest by more than 100 feet. The change will mean a minimum distance of 230 feet between any new retail building and any home. The developer said that's more distance between homes and all existing commercial developments, including Great Escape Plaza and The Plaza at SouthPark.

Create a "no-build zone" that will prohibit building construction along the eastern border of the 8.5 acres. That would establish a buffer area between the development and homes to the east.

Increase the thickness of additional greenery from 50 feet to 80 feet along the east side of the development. The greenery will include shrubs and 10-foot-tall evergreen trees "to ensure year-round noise reduction."

Upgrade the existing 20-year-old storm-water retention and detention system on the 8.5-acre site to modern standards and city requirements, and add a "water-quality system."

Sign a formal agreement that will ensure that Somera stays true to these promises, and cap retail development on the site at 75,000 square feet.

Pay $100,000 to homeowners' associations in the Ledgewood area. The associations can use the money for signs, safety improvements such as speedbumps or road-maintenance costs.

In a July 11 letter to city officials, residents repeated and elaborated on their earlier concerns. They worried that landscape changes, new lights, noise, blowing trash, crime, stormwater and increased traffic from Royalton Collection will negatively impact their neighborhoods.

At the July 12 Planning Commission meeting, city officials said Somera's site plan complies with most if not all promises the developer made in December, according to meeting minutes.

For example, Royalton Collection will have a total of 68,510 square feet of building space, leaving 6,490 additional square feet for a possible sixth building. That meets the requirement of capping total building space at 75,000 square feet.

Also, to address stormwater, Somera will enlarge an existing detention basin at the north end of the site from 73,000 cubic feet to 125,000 cubic feet. The developer will reconfigure sewers to direct all stormwater from Royalton Collection to that detention basin.

However, city Engineer Ken Mikula said the height of evergreens along the east property line must increase to 10 feet to meet Somera's obligations to residents.

City officials said a traffic-impact study, for which Somera paid, found that no improvements are needed to Ohio 82 or other nearby streets. A three-lane entrance-exit, with an existing traffic light, will include a right-turn-only lane out of the development. If improvements to the traffic light are needed, Somera will pay.

As for the concern about bright lights, a site-lighting plan approved by the city's Architectural Review Board showed that no light from Royalton Collection will cross the development's borders.

In addition, the $100,000 Somera promised residents will go into an escrow account when the developer receives its first building permit, city officials said.LORD Michael Ashcroft has succeeded in his attempts to have sitting Belize appellate judge Samuel Awich investigated for misbehaviour and possible removal from office.





The matter had already been going on for six years when earlier this year, after having exhausted all of the legal options in Belize, and losing in the countrys court of appeal, Ashcroft took the matter to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) in June.





His complaint against Justice Awich was first aired in July 2012, when he and Dean Boyce, who was then the director of Ashcrofts British Caribbean Bank, wrote a letter to the Judicial and Legal Services Commission (JLSC).





They complained that Awich should not have been appointed to the Court of Appeal in Belize and that the Belize Advisory Council should launch an investigation into Awichs conduct when he was a Supreme Court judge, Belizean media reported.





The request detailed allegations of lack of judicial acumen, delays in judgment writing and lack of timeliness in the delivery of judgments while Justice Awich was a judge of the Supreme Court of Belize.





They relied on the grounds of misbehaviour and/or alternatively inability of the judge.





The commission considered their complaint and dismissed it on the grounds that the complaint had no relation to Awichs current position as such the complaint was misconceived and premature.





The commission stated that the appointment of justices of appeal resides with the prime minister and the countrys constitution does not countenance the participation of the commission or the Bar Association in that process.





Ashcroft then sued the JLSC in front of Justice Courtney Abel, who in October 2014 ruled that the complaint should not have been summarily dismissed as baseless and misconceived without first convening a preliminary inquiry to review the matter as the prior conduct of Justice Awich as a judge of the Supreme Court could provide some foresight as to his conduct as a judge of the Court of Appeal.





He ordered that the complaint should go back to the commission for reconsideration, prompting the government and the JLSC to appeal his decision in the Court of Appeal in June 2017.





The appellate court upheld the commissions initial decision to dismiss Ashcrofts complaint against Justice Awich.





Ashcroft and Boyce thereby took their final appeal to the Caribbean Court of Justice on June 26, 2018. The court delivered its ruling on July 31.





Reported in Caribbean media, the Port of Spain, Trinidad based CCJ ruled that Justice Awich is to be properly considered for investigation by the JLSC.





The judgement paves the way to allow the JLSC to refer the complaint to the Belize Advisory Council which would then investigate whether the judge should be removed from office.





During the appeal hearing, the justices considered Section 102 of the Constitution of Belize which provides for the removal from office of a justice of appeal for misbehaviour and/or inability.





The court held that the section was clear that the JLSCs role was strictly to consider whether the complaints were serious and, if so, to refer them to the Belize Advisory Council, whose role was to investigate the matter and to advise the governor-general whether the judge should be removed.





The CCJ said that a judicial officers past conduct, depending on the circumstances, could bear relevance on the question of whether removal from office was warranted.





The JLSC was therefore bound to determine whether the complaint was grave enough to warrant referral and the JLSC ought not to have dismissed the request without proper consideration, the CCJ ruled.





The court also provided guidance on the issue of what constitutes inability and misbehaviour.





The judgment stated that the term inability referred to the lack of capacity to perform the duties of the office at the requisite level of competence and skill.





A judge who was unable to write and deliver judgments on time or who was often overturned on appeal may lack the ability to do his job.





The CCJ noted that a judge may be unable to perform the functions of the office at one level of the judiciary but be perfectly capable of performing the functions at another level.





Misbehaviour would mean a judge has serious character flaws that would render him or her unfit to hold office.





Conduct of a criminal nature, corruption, and serious moral failings could amount to misbehaviour.





So too "may any conduct, whether falling within the categories above or not, which in the view of a wide cross section of reasonable members of the society brings the judiciary into public ridicule or opprobrium.





The court disagreed with the Court of Appeal of Belize and in setting aside its judgment, made an order referring the complaint back to the JLSC.





The CCJ also awarded costs from all of the hearings leading up to and including the final appeal, to the appellants.





Ashcroft, who has long held major business interests and developments in the Turks and Caicos Islands became a controversial figure during the Michael Misick years.





He currently conducts his business interests in the TCI under Waterloo Investment Holdings.



FORMER premier Michael Misick has once again tied the knot, this time to long time girlfriend and fiancee Tatjana van de Merwe of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.





The ceremony was held on Sunday, August 19, in Misicks native island of North Caicos.





The simple ceremony, set against a backdrop of the beautiful turquoise waters and the lush vegetation of the island, saw family and friends coming together to wish the happy couple God speed as they began their life together as man and wife.





This is Misicks third marriage, the first being to Yvette Marcelin, attorney at TWA Mercelin Wolf.





His second was to US actress LisaRaye McCoy in a lavish fairytale styled ceremony that at the time made the news and magazine covers around the world.





The former couple had wed after a whirlwind romance that McCoy detailed during her testimony in the Special Investigation and Prosecution Teams (SIPT) trial in October last year.





Unlike Misicks second wife, not much is known publicly about his third, except what was revealed in court in February 2017 when her name first appeared in court documents linked to Misick.





At that time, during court submissions in a hearing where Misick was seeking the release of some of his funds to cover his living expenses, SIPT prosecutor Andrew Mitchell made reference to an engagement ring that Misick had given to van de Merwe.





Mitchell had argued strongly for the judge to refuse Misicks application, stating that Misick had flown to the Dominican Republic in May 2016 to receive private medical care, had ran for election in December with a comprehensive election campaign, and gotten engaged at which time he presented his new fiancee with a valuable engagement ring.





In reference to the engagement ring, the prosecutor told the court that he did not have any evidence that Misick had purchased the ring.





In pointing to another example in defence of the Crowns assertion that the former premier had access to undisclosed money, the prosecutor had pointed to when the former premier had first proposed to wed van de Merwe in 2013.





The prosecutor had said that the Crowns evidence showed that the wedding would have cost at least $12,800.





Omarosa bombshell

Misicks new marriage comes shortly after a report in British newspaper the Daily Mail that controversial former Donald Trump advisor Omarosa Manigault-Newman and Misick had an affair back in 2005.





The affair reportedly lasted six months, fizzling out after LisaRaye McCoy intervened in the friendship and she and Misick married.





Reports are that the former premier was at the time seeking to boost his and the territorys image on the world stage through his relationship with Manigault-Newman.





Omarosa, who was recently fired by the Trump administration, published a memoir titled

Unhinged about her formative years, detailing her first meetings with then reality show host Donald Trump on the hit show The Apprentice.





The book also chronicles her time serving at the Trump White House before being fired.





Meanwhile, Misick remains on trial in the TCI on several charges of corruption, along with members of his former Cabinet. (Delana Isles)



Walmart, already the nation's largest retailer, is trying to create a massive, digital marketplace to draw more shoppers to its website  and away from its biggest rival, Amazon.

Starting Monday, edgy outdoor-gear company Moosejaw will be featured on Walmart's website with its own, online destination. Purchased by Walmart in 2017, Moosejaw's assortment of merchandise includes items from brands like Patagonia and Canada Goose  a departure from what many customers have come to expect from Walmart and its everyday low prices.

The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer has been branching into higher-end goods. It's acquired men's apparel company Bonobos and women's fashion and accessories company ModCloth in recent years. Moosejaw's online shop also builds on Walmart's recent deal with Lord & Taylor, which created a fashion destination on Walmart.com with more premium brands.

Moosejaw, like the other companies Walmart has acquired of late, targets millennial shoppers, which is something Walmart has said it wants to do more of, especially as that younger generation has greater spending power.

The new landing page for Moosejaw on Walmart.com will include "thousands of items" from premium outdoor brands like Deuter, Craghoppers and First Ascent by Eddie Bauer, the companies said Monday in a blog post. It will also sell Moosejaw-branded clothing, including its jackets and other camping gear, and the plan is to add more Moosejaw products over time.President Donald Trump speaks to reporters upon his departure from the White House in Washington, August 17, 2018.

Besieged by increasing legal concerns, U.S. President Donald Trump is thought to be looking to shore up his political position ahead of the midterm elections in November.

One way to do so could be to distract voters from the problems at home by shifting the focus to the ongoing trade war with China, analysts said. In other words, the U.S. may be on the verge of escalating the conflict between the world's two largest economies.

Last Tuesday, Trump was hit by two legal bombshells simultaneously: One involved his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who was found guilty of eight felonies, and the other his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to eight felony counts involving various fraud.

Potentially the most damaging piece of news for Trump was Cohen implicating the president in an illegal scheme to silence two women from making public their claims of having sex with him.

The two cases have fueled talk  even from the president himself  about impeachment.

"The point is that with the political pressures at home, Trump needs to up his political capital (buffer)," said Vishnu Varathan, Mizuho Bank's head of economics and strategy.

The White House could drum up support by focusing attentions on a "common enemy," but that could anger businesses suffering from tariffs, Varathan said.

"On China, he will be caught between using 'distract and consolidate' by turning up trade pressures, and not squandering his political capital given that businesses are not in favour of an intensifying trade dispute. It is a tough call and may include incremental shifts either way," he told CNBC in an email.

Nick Marro, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, echoed those sentiments, explaining that Trump has demonstrated a pattern of turning to geopolitics as a domestic ploy.

"There is a chance that the president could use the trade war as a diversion: We've seen him do it before with international affairs," Marro said.

But that's a "big risk" if there's any chance that the dispute could be deescalated, he told CNBC.

"The greatest value from the talks (recently) was that both sides returned to the negotiating table, perhaps creating a path forward for more substantive discussions. But that small momentum would be eliminated if Trump uses the trade war as a political diversion."

Shane Oliver, AMP Capital's head of investment strategy, said the U.S. legal developments so far aren't severe enough to lead to Trump being removed from office, but it runs the risk of the president "doing even less considered things" to shore up his base. For markets, that could mean more volatility that could intensify in the months ahead, according to Oliver.

However, former U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Frank Lavin told CNBC's Dan Murphy that the "odds are overwhelming" that the Democrats will win the House in the midterms. That could spell bad news for Trump.

"If the House goes Democratic, they now have investigative powers, they can summon witnesses ... they can have hearings," Lavin, who served in multiple Republican administrations, said. However he qualified that for any real damage to Trump's political future, there has to be real "fire below the smoke ... some kind of crime or activity that rises above the level of the felony."

There wasn't consensus, however, that Trump's domestic headaches would have any impact on where the U.S.-China trade war is heading.

For one, Milken Institute Asia Fellow Curis Chin said the trade tensions are set to worsen regardless of what's troubling Trump. Instead, the president is simply keeping to his initial campaign promise: "fair trade" through "a tougher stance on the trade relationship with China," said Chin, who was formerly U.S. ambassador to the Asian Development Bank.

"Trump has tapped into an ongoing unease in the United States, and indeed across Asia, about Chinese trade practices. The violation of intellectual property rights, and unfair or unequal treatment of foreign companies in favor of domestic players in China is a challenge faced by American and non-American companies alike," he said.

Despite that, a NBC News/Marist poll released last week found that Trump's tariff policy has failed to catch on in three states critical to the midterm elections  Pennsylvania, Texas and Illinois. Many voters in those states said that the duties will raise the cost of consumer goods and hurt the U.S. economy.Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey expects to pick a successor to the late Republican Sen. John McCain following a series of memorial services this week.

McCain, a longtime lawmaker, GOP presidential nominee and occasional thorn in President Donald Trump's side, died Saturday at age 81 after a struggle with brain cancer. The Navy veteran, who survived years of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, will be laid to rest Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland.

State law dictates that the governor appoints someone to fill the open Senate seat. Ducey, a Republican, will wait until McCain is buried to name a replacement in the Senate.

"Out of respect for the life and legacy of Senator John McCain and his family, Governor Ducey will not be making any announcements about an appointment until after the Senator is laid to rest," Ducey advisor Daniel Ruiz II said in a statement over the weekend, according to AZ Central.

The governor is expected to restore the GOP's 51-49 seat majority in the Senate as members go through the critical decision of whether to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's second choice for the Supreme Court during his presidency. While it is unclear now who Ducey will pick, reports suggest state Republicans could push him in two vastly different directions: a GOP senator with an independent streak who emulates McCain, or a Republican who aims to be a champion of Trump's agenda.

Ducey's choice would serve at least through 2020. The state would hold a special election that year to fill the remainder of McCain's term through 2022, according to Matt Roberts, a spokesman for the Arizona secretary of state's office.

Another election for McCain's seat would take place in 2022, because the senator won re-election for a six-year term in 2016.Pot stocks are on fire, and according to one trader the group is setting up to go even higher.

A number of cannabis stocks were on the move Monday afternoon after Toronto-based weed supplier Tilray scored a new partnership with the Nova Scotia Liquor Company. The report sent shares of Tilray up 20 percent, hitting a new all-time intraday high of $54.16 and gave a boost to other names in the space, including Cronos Group, which also rose 20 percent, and Aurora Cannabis, which jumped nearly 6 percent.

Tilray is just the latest pot stock to catch a bid from larger corporations seeking to take advantage of the potential widespread legalization of marijuana use. The momentum began earlier this month when alcohol beverage giant Constellation Brands announced a record $4 billion dollar investment in Ontario-based marijuana company Canopy Growth  the stock surged 90 percent since then and is now trading at all-time highs.

As a way to take advantage of the pot stock surge, CNBC's "Options Action" trader Mike Khouw recommends a call spread in shares of Canopy Growth.

"Obviously what we've seen is that the stock has made this real sharp move here, and so one of the things we want to do is avoid a risk of a move back down," he said Friday on "Options Action."

Khouw's strategy involves purchasing the October 47.5 calls for $4.00 and selling the October 60 calls for $2.35. The trade breaks even at $50.15 and sees gains up to $60, or more than 25 percent higher from Canopy Growth's current stock price by October expiration.

Many of the major players in the cannabis space have seen double-digit gains this month as rumors of other impending corporate investments in the space have ignited a surge of investor optimism. According to "Fast Money" trader Tim Seymour, the group has much more room to grow.

"What we're seeing cannabis traders do is they're rotating into U.S. names, and that's something that ultimately I think you want to take a look at,' Seymour said Friday on CNBC's "Options Action." Seymour also noted that while Canada's newly legalized recreational weed law sets up for a big growth opportunity, the U.S. market has the potential for 15 times the amount.

Shares of Canopy Growth are up 98 percent year to date and were trading higher on Monday afternoon around $46.90.Billionaire investor Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought a stake in India's largest digital payments company, Paytm, the company confirmed Monday.

Berkshire confirmed "the investment was made" in One97 Communications  the parent company of Paytm  and said Buffett was not personally involved in the deal.

The Economic Times reported earlier Monday Berkshire was in talks to invest between 20 billion to 25 billion rupees ($286 million to $357 million) and pick up a 3-4 percent stake in One97 Communications.

The news was also reported by Mint, an Indian financial daily newspaper.

A deal that size would value Paytm at over $10 billion, according to the Economic Times. The newspaper said that Todd Combs, one of Berkshire's key fund managers, is leading the transaction. He is reportedly seen as a potential chief investment officer at the firm.

It's one of Buffett's first direct investment in India, the newspaper added.

Paytm is India's biggest mobile commerce platform and is already backed by Japan's SoftBank and Chinese tech giant Alibaba and its fintech affiliate Ant Financial. Two years ago, Paytm said it saw a sizable growth in traffic when India unexpectedly pulled 86 percent of its cash from circulation, leading to a massive cash crunch. That allowed digital payment firms to provide an alternative mode of payment to India's consumers.Chipotle Mexican Grill's long-term strategy to woo customers back to the troubled burrito chain won't do much to ease its near-term woes, according to Wedbush.

Analyst Nick Setyan downgraded the stock to underperform from neutral on Monday and slashed his 12-month price target, citing weaker-than-expected same-store sales growth so far in the third quarter and increased pressure on profits margins through 2020.

Setyan said Chipotle's comparable store sales won't grow as fast during the third quarter as what analysts expect, based on his preliminary research. Analysts forecast an average of 5.7 percent growth for same-store sales, but Setyan said he thinks they will come in at growth of 4.5 percent. He previously forecast comparable store sales growth of 5.5 percent during the third quarter. He also cut his price target to $445 from $450 a share.

Shares of Chipotle fell 4.8 percent Monday, last changing hands at around $496.

Setyan attributed the slowdown to an outbreak of Clostridium perfringens, a foodborne disease that occurs when food is kept too warm for too long, that was traced back to a Chipotle in Ohio, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 700 customers reported gastrointestinal problems, including nausea, diarrhea and fever, after eating at the Chipotle restaurant, according to local health officials.

The incident dealt another blow to Chipotle, which has spent years trying to convince diners and investors it has improved its food safety practices. The company said it will start retraining all restaurant employees on food safety and wellness protocols this week.

Setyan said Wall Street's same-store sales estimate of 4.2 percent for full-year 2019, might not be out of reach, but there are several "underappreciated" risks. He said menu price increases from 2017 and early 2018 will have less of an impact on sales growth and new menu items could be pushed back further than expected.

In addition, CEO Brian Niccol's compensation and bonus package is tied to achieving several financial targets in 2020, including $20 in earnings per share and same-store sales growth at a rate of more than 6.5 percent, Setyan said.

However, these incentives might not be as meaningful as some bullish investors believe, Setyan said. He noted that Niccol will be well-compensated even if 2020 numbers are not as robust as desired.

While Chipotle shares shed value on Monday, the company's stock is still up more than 70 percent since January, the result of investors' renewed confidence after former Taco Bell CEO Niccol was brought in to run the company.Economist Mohamed El-Erian said Monday there's a 60 percent chance that President Donald Trump's hard line with China and Europe yields "fairer trade" for the U.S.

On CNBC's "Squawk Box," the chief economic advisor at Allianz predicted a 15 percent chance that Trump's approach would result in a "Reagan moment" in trade, especially with China. It would be similar to Ronald Reagan's tough stance against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

"That would transform the landscape," El-Erian said. Reagan also engaged in aggressive trade policies, including quotas on Japaneses cars. Some analysts say the policies were mixed.

El-Erian gave a 25 percent chance that Trump's trade moves would spark a global trade war.

Trump first proposed tariffs in March to correct what he deemed were unfair trading practices  moves that were met with retaliatory measures from the European Union, Canada, Mexico and China.

A new round of U.S. tariffs on $16 billion worth of Chinese imports kicked in on Thursday, prompting an equivalent retaliation from Beijing.

El-Erian, considered one of the world's most influential financial market thinkers, previously said he expects the U.S. will win the trade war, citing the performance of U.S. markets relative to China and others.

But he said Monday the real question for investors is "how much damage would we incur in the process of winning this?"

"I've said from day one, it's just a matter of time until other countries realize that their best approach is to collaborate with the U.S. and fix things that are broken," El-Erian said.By Delana Isles

ON TUESDAY (August 21) US chain restaurant Outback Steakhouse officially opened its doors to the TCI public.





The opening came one day after the restaurant formally cut the ribbon at a VIP event in the lobby of its Grace Bay, Providenciales, outlet.





In attendance at that event were Premier Sharlene Cartwright Robinson, ministers of the Government, members of parliament, other officials, special invited guests and local and US staff members.





Owners of the establishment Christopher and Mary Mortimer, both of the Bahamas, were also on hand to welcome the dignitaries to their newest venture.





Christopher Mortimer will serve as president and CEO of the restaurant. The Mortimers are joined in their investment by local partner, Phillip Misick.





The owners took the opportunity on Monday to make their first corporate donations to the Turks and Caicos Islands community.





The recipients were the TCI Cadets and the TCI Aquatics swim club - two organisations selected by the premier.





In a keynote address, the premier welcomed the newest investors and restaurant to the TCI, stating that the territory prides itself on its high end brand, which Outback Steakhouse will only add to.





She observed that the TCI is now a part of a very short list of Caribbean outlets of Outback Steakhouse following behind the Bahamas, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.





"We here pride ourselves on a very strong, high end brand and we believe that this chain of restaurants only adds to our reputation and is definitely commensurate with all TCI brand experiences.





She pointed out that the opening, brought to these shores by a Bahamian family, is indicative of the close relationship the two countries share, and formally welcomed the Mortimer family to the TCI.





"It is simply not every day that we see this and we are thrilled that you have brought this mother son business experience to the Turks and Caicos Islands.





She also expressed her pleasure that the Outback brand represents the things that the TCI holds dear and wishes to see in all good corporate citizens.





"One, a strong sense of family which oftentimes sees a greater commitment to the success of a business and a strong local management component with opportunities for our people.





"We celebrate today with Mr [ Stephen] Garland who will lead this local facility as its manager, and I caution him that he is the only one not to have family discounts because as a Garland he would recognise very quickly that he is related to about three quarters of the population, the premier said, to laugher from the audience.





She pointed out that the opening of the restaurant is indicative of the confidence investors continue to place in the TCIs economy.





"Your multimillion dollar investment in this business speaks volumes for what we have to offer here.





"We are grateful that you have made the bold statement of investing first and then of wanting to employ Turks and Caicos Islanders only and of your successful search to find a Turks and Caicos Islander to entrust management to, the premier remarked.





A corporate representative was also on hand to offer some remarks on behalf of the parent company Bloom Brands Inc, at the opening.





Suk Singh, the chief development officer at Bloomin Brands Inc welcomed the TCI to the family, stating that this year Outback turns 30.





He observed that in 1988 when a group of four friends opened the first Outback in Tampa, Florida, they were not imagining that 30 years down the road, they would have more than 900 restaurants in 23 countries around the world.





He welcomed the TCI as the 23rd location to the chain, and expressed hope for a great working and business relationship.





Prior to Mondays ribbon cutting ceremony, the restaurant hosted a free dining experience for selected residents, with selected menu items being offered free of charge.





That event was very well attended and received by local residents who commented quite positively on the menu items.





Local staff are still currently undergoing training by a team of Outback employees from the US.





The restaurant opens Monday to Sunday, with its latest opening time being up to midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, and doors closing at 11pm all other nights of the week.



European markets closed in positive territory on Monday as investors reacted to comments from the head of the Federal Reserve on the U.S. central bank's policy-tightening path.

The pan-European provisionally Stoxx 600 index closed 0.5 percent higher, with all sectors in positive territory. In the U.K., markets are closed due to a bank holiday.

Looking across the benchmark, Germany's Metro Group was the top performer, after Ceconomy said it was in talks to sell most of its 10 percent stake in the German wholesale retailer. Shares of Metro Group closed 12 percent higher.

Markets reopened in Turkey following a week-long holiday. The Turkish lira weakened 3 percent Monday amid continued concerns over the country's economy. Traders remained cautious about risks facing the country, which is engaged in a standoff with the U.S. over detained American pastor Andrew Brunson.

Meanwhile in Asia, equities lifted as China's central bank, the People's Bank of China (PBOC), reintroduced a policy adjustment called the "counter-cyclical factor," aimed at keeping the yuan's daily midpoint fixed to a relatively stable value. The move is seen as an attempt to support China's currency amid accusations from President Donald Trump that it is a "currency manipulator."

Market players also monitored news from Friday that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell sees "further, gradual" rate hikes ahead.

Powell said at the Jackson Hole Symposium in Wyoming that the central bank would likely continue with its policy tightening if the economy continued to strengthen. Powell last week came under fire from Trump for the second time, saying in an interview with Reuters that he was "not thrilled" by the central bank's raising of rates.

In geopolitical news, the U.S. is to impose sanctions on Russia on Monday, in solidarity with the U.K. over allegations Moscow was involved in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

Meanwhile, traders were once again given a surprise from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, after the billionaire announced on Friday a halt to his plan to take the electric car maker private. Tesla's stock was hit with a rout after Musk tweeted his intention to take the company off the stock market earlier this month.

In corporate news, Fidessa Group and Sirius Minerals reported results on Monday.

Markets stateside opened on a positive note and Nasdaq hit 8000 points for the first time as the United States and Mexico reached a trade deal, paving the way to replace NAFTA.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 159 points as Caterpillar outperformed. The gained 0.5 percent to hit a record high with tech as the best-performing sector.Elon Musk's hubris after his now-infamous tweet about possibly taking Tesla private could come back to haunt him with regulators, former Securities and Exchange Commission attorney Teresa Goody told CNBC on Monday.

The Tesla co-founder and CEO abandoned the idea late Friday, just weeks after he took to Twitter on Aug. 7, writing he's "considering taking Tesla private at $420 [per share]," adding, "Funding secured."

A little over a week after his original tweet, Musk gave an unapologetic interview to The New York Times. He also said he doesn't plan to stop tweeting.

"What I think the SEC is going to find alarming  as I did when I read the New York Times article, his interview  is the fact the he says, 'Well, I don't regret any of my tweets. Why would I?' Because a lot of people believed you and lost a lot of money," said Goody, formerly an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel at the SEC and currently CEO of The Goody Group consultancy.

The Musk tweet stunned Wall Street, and his actions since, including blog posts and the Times interview, seem to have done little to quell concern among investors and regulators.

Shares of Tesla opened under pressure Monday after a rough few weeks.

"I think it is good that we have clarity, and now this whole going private is kind of now blown out of the water. So there is clarity. And the confusion to the market has now ended," Goody said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "But questions from the SEC are going to continue."

The commission, according to a Times report on Aug. 15, served Tesla with a subpoena, looking into whether Musk violated securities laws by claiming he had funding for the maneuver.

In a late Friday blog post, Musk said, "Given the feedback I've received, it's apparent that most of Tesla's existing shareholders believe we are better off as a public company." He also wrote, "There is also no proven path for most retail investors to own shares if we were private."

Goody said Musk's blog post shows further evidence that "basically the due diligence" was not adequate. Figuring out how much institutional and retail shareholders can retain in a private Tesla are "things you would initially usually discuss before making a public statement about an imminent tender offer," she added.

Tesla was not immediately available to respond to CNBC's request for comment on Goody's interview.President Donald Trump's trade agreement with Mexico is a good step forward but he needs to strike a deal with China to really provide some relief to farmers, Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., told CNBC on Monday.

The new deal between the U.S. and Mexico paves the way to replace NAFTA, the current agreement between the two countries and Canada.

"While the farmers are happy and optimistic, as am I, we still have a couple more places to go here before we can say that we really won this battle and put our farmers on top," Walorski said on "Power Lunch" shortly after the deal was announced.

"The retaliatory actions that China has taken are still going to be an impact," she said. Trade tensions continue to escalate between the U.S. and China. Last week, both countries implemented another round of tariffs on $16 billion worth of each other's goods.

Meanwhile, there were no major breakthroughs after U.S. and Chinese officials met last Wednesday and Thursday.

The two countries have now targeted $50 billion of each other's goods and threatened duties on most of the rest of their bilateral trade.

Walorski was among the 20 GOP lawmakers who signed onto a recent letter to Trump from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady and Trade Subcommittee Chairman Dave Reichert. That letter urged Trump to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

"Let's just strike a deal. A deal that's fair," Walorski told CNBC.

Farmers have been particularly hard hit by China's retaliatory tariffs, which have targeted things like soybeans and pork. In July, Trump said China is "being vicious" by targeting U.S. farmers on purpose.

Walorski, who met with Indiana farmers on Monday, said she is "grateful" to Trump for making progress with Mexico.

However, farmers "need to know that very, very quickly they can kick up this production and they're going to be certain of what the details are of that bill." That said, Walorski insists the agricultural community is still supportive of Trump.

"They believe in the president's plan. They believe in his policy," she said. "They're just fearful of the uncertainty but this is a good step forward."

 CNBC's Fred Imbert and Reuters contributed to this report.Dear Work It Out,

I'm 71, but I've been told I look 60. I have high energy, lots of experience, a college education and am free of family responsibilities. I've had great interviews but then don't get the job. I've read several articles on interviewing and being prepared, in which I have provided examples of leadership, interpersonal experience, etc. I dress well, am well spoken and want to continue working. How do I get past the age issue?

I've gotten multiple questions just this week on how to land a job when you're over 60. While I haven't been there myself, hearing several people's experiences has made me realize how frustrating this issue can be.

As a boss in my 30s, I regularly interview, hire and manage people who are both older and younger than me, so I may have an interesting perspective. I also spoke to two corporate recruiters and TopResume expert Amanda Augustine to get their take on the topic.

First, you should know that age discrimination in the U.S. is illegal. Employers are not allowed to treat job candidates or employees less favorably because they are 40 or over, and if you think they have, you can file a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Still, even though it's unlawful to make hiring decisions based on your age, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. As Augustine told me, "It may not be fair, but it's certainly real. Age discrimination is alive and well in the job market."

What are some signs you may be facing ageism?

If you hear words like "overqualified," it might mean "too expensive" or "we're afraid you'll get bored and quit"

If the interviewer keeps talking about their "fun" corporate culture, it could be code for "young" there

If they ask about your age or retirement plans, that's illegal and a dead giveaway

While you can't control the interviewer or any misguided ideas they may have, you can focus on presenting yourself as the best, most qualified person for the job. That starts with your resume. If you're landing interviews but not making it past the first round, you might need to update your resume to better reflect who you are.

One thing you want to watch for is length. Hiring managers do not want to see a five-page resume with expanded margins, 10-point font and every job you've had since high school. It's too much! And it could tip off your age.

The ideal resume should comfortably fit onto one page. (You could stretch it to two if you're going for an executive-level position.) And every word should be relevant to the job you're seeking.

That may mean the standard, reverse chronological format isn't right for you. Instead, you could consider listing previous jobs under "Experience Highlights" so you can pick and choose the most pertinent. You might also want to emphasize roles you've held for the past 10 to 20 years, and synthesize anything prior in a one-line list of earlier experience at the bottom.

Use the "Objective" or "Executive Summary" section at the top to preempt any anticipated questions about your candidacy. For example, if you've been out of the workforce for a bit, here's where you might include how excited you are to get back to work and how you've kept your skills up to date. But keep it concise  two sentences max.

Once you're in the room, don't let the interviewer make assumptions. Let them know how this job fits into your long-term career plans and how your experience gives you an advantage.

Also be mindful that if you are downgrading roles, interviewers might worry the job won't be enough for you. Be transparent about why you want this position. Perhaps at this point you're looking for a less-demanding job or you want to get back to doing the work rather than overseeing it.

Above all, emphasize how you will bring value to the business. That's the bottom line. Hiring managers want people who are going to save them time and make them money. Convince them of that, and your age ain't nothing but a number.

Have a pressing career concern or question? Email me anonymously at workitout@cnbc.com. Submissions may be edited for length and clarity.

Don't Miss: 4 interviewing tricks to boost your confidence  and the secret that no one tells you

Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube!Ask the average person what the most luxurious watch company is and he or she might answer, "Rolex." But there is a different brand making its way into the mainstream because of its record-setting resale prices and rising influence among culture-setting celebrities and hip-hop artists: Swiss watch brand Patek Philippe.

Kevin Hart wearing a six-figure Patek Philippe watch. Brian Dowling | WireImage | Getty Images

According to music lyric site Genius, a third of Billboard's Hot 100 songs in 2017 included a reference to Patek Philippe. That number outpaced both Rolex and Jay-Z's frequently mentioned Audemars Piguet, and continues to grow, with 13 chart-toppers mentioning the brand so far in 2018.

Of course, for watch enthusiasts, the brand, founded in 1839, is not a new discovery; it has long been the pre-eminent mark of luxury. "For many, Patek Philippe is religion," says John Reardon, international head of watches at Christie's. "Patek Philippe represents the finest watches humankind ... can make or has made or will make, but actually represents the best of the best whether it was 150 years ago or today." The brand has set itself apart with a unique combination of craftsmanship and utility, featuring some of the most complicated functions found in mechanical watches, such as perpetual calendars and double chronographs. But with a sterling reputation also comes an eye-catching price tag. At the Tiffany & Co. flagship store off New York's Fifth Avenue, the Patek Philippe 5271p Grand Complications will set you back $260,825  before taxes. Historic pieces often set records. A 1930 Patek Philippe pocket watch sold at auction in 2014 with a final price tag of $24 million and was hailed by Sotheby's as the most expensive watch ever sold at auction at the time.

As a novice, paying the equivalent of a college education for a watch seems insane. Since I'm still paying off my own four-year degree, an authentic Patek Philippe is light years out of my budget. I wanted to see how a more affordable option might stack up, so I headed to New York City's Chinatown, where street hawkers are known to sell knock-offs of the world's finest luxury brands. Amid the cover of a crowded street, a man asking if I'm interested in watches flashes a laminated list of brand names like Rolex, Gucci  and Patek Philippe. After some negotiations, he hands me a watch that vaguely resembles a Patek model, except he's willing to sell it for just $60 in cash. The watch looked somewhat convincing to me, though the embossed stamp on the back of the band read "GENUINE LEATHER," a laughably unnecessary statement for a watch that is supposed to cost six figures.

A $60 Patek Philippe knock-off purchased in New York City's Chinatown (left) and the real deal  a $260,000 Patek Philippe 5271P Grand Complications watch with manual winding CNBCs Zack Guzman & Nate Skid

My next stop was Reardon's office at Christie's to show it to him, a man who has been personally collecting Patek watches for nearly 20 years. Could my bargain "Patek" remotely pass for the real thing? He smiled immediately as he eyed the watch with disdain. "Usually when I look at a watch the first thing I want to do is take a loupe [magnifier] and take a close look at it," he says. "But with this watch, unfortunately, from across the room I could tell you have a fake watch." My $60 watch seemed to function as well as an automatic watch is expected to function  a fact that impressed Reardon  but it obviously lacked the world-class movements that come with handmade craftsmanship, the weight of platinum, the detailed dial and working complications that come with most genuine Pateks.

International head of watches at Christie's, John Reardon, explains to frugal CNBC multimedia reporter Zack Guzman why a knock off $60 Patek Philippe is a bad purchase. CNBC's Nate SkidRollie Atkinson, the owner and publisher of The Healdsburg Tribune and three other weeklies in Sonoma County, California.

HEALDSBURG, Calif.  The town square here feels as if it is from a bygone era: lush greenery, redwoods and palm trees, a bakery that sells its famed sticky buns each morning, a more-than-a-century-old inn that proclaims its "wine country warmth."

It is also the sort of place, with an abundance of wealth and aging baby boomers, that loves its local newspaper.

Even so, last year Rollie Atkinson, the owner and publisher of The Healdsburg Tribune and three other weeklies in Sonoma County, was staring down a grim financial reality. The business model, he said, was "failing rapidly." He was tired of throwing his savings into the newspapers to keep them going, and weary of the "daily struggle" of staying afloat in an environment where readers have access to a torrent of information for free.

More from The New York Times:

When a local paper gets new owners, partisan strife hits its doorstep

Trump's tariffs on canadian newsprint hasten local newspapers' demise

After Capital Gazette shooting, readers reflect on their community newspapers

"I knew we had to do something different," he said.

He hired a broker to put a value on his business, thinking perhaps he could find a deep-pocketed investor. That went nowhere.

Then he found another possibility. Just to the south, in Berkeley, Calif., an online news site called Berkeleyside had taken a new approach to the crisis in local news: Sell stock to its readers. It was wildly successful. The site's direct public offering  a more intimate version of an initial public offering in which a company sells stock without an investment bank  began in 2016 and closed this year. It raised $1 million.

"The D.P.O. just hit all the right buttons," Mr. Atkinson said. "It allowed for longer-range planning. It provides for community ownership, community buy-in."

So, in what is believed to be a first for a local newspaper, Mr. Atkinson undertook a similar strategy for the four newspapers that make up his Sonoma West company, which have a combined paid circulation of 9,900: The Healdsburg Tribune, The Cloverdale Reveille, The Windsor Times and Sonoma West Times & News. Since March, he has gotten a quarter of the way to his goal of $400,000. The offering lasts until March 2019, and the road show consists of Mr. Atkinson making his pitch over cocktails, at dinner parties and in everyday conversations around town. (A prospectus is posted online, offering a rare look at the finances of a local newspaper chain.)

"We're a high-contact sport around here," Mr. Atkinson said in a recent interview alongside Ray Holley, his managing editor. "Our readers are right here. We're face to face. When we are in the grocery store checkout line, there are our subscribers and readers. For Ray and I, it takes a long time to get our shopping done."

Local newspapers have long been staples of communities across the country. But the shifts in the wider media industry have been devastating to these smaller publications. Over the past decade, many have closed while others have cut their newsroom staffs and how many times a week they publish.

Yet the political moment the nation finds itself in has helped Mr. Atkinson's crusade. Sonoma County is reliably blue  although there are pockets of conservatism in its agricultural communities  and President Trump's constant attacks on the news media have worried many of the papers' readers.

A number of Mr. Atkinson's new investors have told him that they do not just want to save their local paper. They also want to "save democracy," he said.

One of those investors is Marie Gewirtz, 67, who has lived here for three decades and is retired from her job in marketing in the local wine industry.

"Many of us really treasure our local newspaper," she said. "I was raised to believe that journalism was key to democracy."

In recent years, as the print paper cut back by two pages some weeks, there was a backlash among members of the community, especially older ones, who felt a cherished ritual was disappearing. "The people who wanted to sit and read the print paper with a glass of wine or cup of coffee," Ms. Gewirtz said.

She added, "I think, now more than ever, we can support democracy by supporting our communities."

Rick Theis, 72, also retired from the wine industry, said: "I get my notifications from The New York Times every day, and I open them up with dread. What did our infamous president do now?"

So he put $5,000 in Sonoma West, an investment that he said made him feel that he was pushing back, in a small away, against forces that have diminished the role of traditional journalism in American society.

"I really depend on the small community newspaper," Mr. Theis said. "They at least have trained journalists reporting the news, which social media does not."

Mary Fricker, a retired reporter who worked for the local daily paper, The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, said the national mood had not been behind her decision to invest. She has lived in the area for decades, and write-ups in the local paper about her children and grandchildren fill her scrapbooks.

"I grieve every day over what's happened to journalism, especially newspapers," she said. "I need to put my money where my mouth is."

Many of the same issues that animate communities across California, like an affordable housing shortage and devastating wildfires, are the ones that dominate the pages of Mr. Atkinson's newspapers. There is a deep affinity for local businesses  witness the two independent bookshops on the town square, and the locally owned hardware stores  and the county's communities have been more successful than others in the United States in keeping big-box retailers away.

Still, the cost of housing is so high that Mr. Holley, the managing editor, always asks potential new hires if they have a stable place to live.

Mr. Atkinson said he believed that his was the first local newspaper to sell stock directly to readers. Rick Edmonds, the media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, said he knew of no other examples, even at a time of great experimentation at the level of local news, with owners testing online pay walls and nonprofit models.

"We're kind of in a period now  an inflection point, you could say  where more and more different things are coming up," Mr. Edmonds said.

In a note to its readers published this year, Berkeleyside's editors wrote, "Local news around the U.S. is in peril, but Berkeleyside's D.P.O. shows that small sites can raise the capital they need to succeed from within their very own communities." Berkeleyside also helped Sonoma West with its D.P.O.

Mr. Atkinson was quick to emphasize that he did not believe a stock offering would work for many other local newspapers, especially those that are not in wealthy areas like Sonoma County, or have the same kind of older readership with liberal leanings.

Now that he has an influx of money, however, one of the first things he plans to do is raise salaries for his staff, which has eight newsroom employees. Reporters have been making $15 an hour, a rate that California has decided will be its minimum wage in a few years.

"That's not because I'm stingy," Mr. Atkinson said. "That's because it's all we could afford."Larry Kudlow, top economic advisor to the White House, said he hoped Canada would look at successful trade negotiations between Mexico and the U.S. for inspiration as its own round of talks kicks off this week, otherwise the U.S. might have to resort to auto tariffs.

"We hope Canada is watching carefully at how successful negotiations can go," he said. "We really would like a deal with them."

Kudlow appeared on CNBC on Monday after President Donald Trump announced the U.S. had reached a new agreement on trade with Mexico that could pave the way to replace NAFTA.

The administration has been trying to renegotiate the 24-year-old deal between the U.S., Mexico and Canada for months. Canada will now have to enter the talks after staying on the sidelines while talks advanced with Mexico. "If we can't get a good strong fair deal with Canada ... the U.S. might have to resort to auto tariffs," Kudlow said, citing a threat the president has previously made.

"Hopefully Canada will cooperate and move the ball in our direction," he said.

The new deal with Mexico is for 16 years, to be reviewed every six years. It has to be approved by Congress. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told CNBC on Monday that the plan doesn't cap imports of light vehicles from Mexico but does leave steel and aluminum tariffs in place.

Mexico's foreign minister said Monday during a news conference that his country would proceed with the deal, which Trump renamed the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement, even if Canada and the U.S. fail to agree to terms.It could be a bumpy ride. Stocks in emerging markets have been reeling this year. After rising more than 30 percent in 2017, the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets exchange-traded fund (EEM) is down more than 8 percent in 2018 as investors face several challenges.

Over the past 10 years, the fund has been one of the best performers in its category, according to Morningstar, which rates it four stars. Leverenz says his approach will guide him through the latest volatility.

"When the world is looking at the headlines, we look at the companies we own or want to invest in and try to understand them better," Leverenz in a phone interview. "So when there is trouble in the world, we tend to do well because we can find good companies" at a more reasonable price.

Instead, Leverenz  who manages the $38.2 billion-asset Oppenheimer Developing Markets fund  is calmly plotting what his next stock purchase will be.

A firestorm is engulfing emerging market stocks but Justin Leverenz, manager of the world's second-largest EM fund, is not alarmed.

Political uncertainty in countries like Mexico and Brazil, tighter monetary policy from the U.S. Federal Reserve and, most recently, a sharp drop in the Turkish lira are just come of these challenges.

Turkey's currency fell to a record low earlier in August after President Donald Trump approved a doubling of U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs on Turkish imports unless detained American pastor Andrew Brunson is released.

Exchange-traded funds that track Turkish, Brazilian and Chinese stocks are down 14.9 percent, 9.3 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively, since Aug. 9.

Between that day and Aug. 16, emerging market funds have registered outflows of $1.3 billion, according to data from the Institute of International Finance.

"Much of this comes from forces beyond our control," Leverenz said. That is why "we have a north star when it comes to investing and that is our approach."

Leverenz's approach has made the fund one of the best performers of the "Diversified Emerging Markets" category. The fund has outperformed 91 percent of its peers over the past 10 years, gaining 5.5 percent in that time period, Morningstar data show. This year, the fund is down 4.4 percent but still ranks in the eighth percentile in its category.

The manager, who has been running the Oppenheimer Developing Markets fund since 2007, said "there are some good companies out there" in emerging markets even in the midst of the broad sell-off. He and his team like companies in the health-care, luxury goods and internet sectors.

"What we do is focus on companies that have extraordinary growth, great competitive advantage and have opportunities to build businesses we have never seen before," he added.

Leverenz said an example of such a company is Amazon, as it started out as an online bookseller and eventually turned into one of the biggest online retailers. But companies like these can be found outside of tech as well, he said.

The fund holds shares in Fomento Economico Mexicano, better known as Femsa, a Monterrey, Mexico-based multinational that owns about half of Coca-Cola Femsa, one of the largest Coke bottlers in the world. It is also the parent company Oxxo, the largest convenience store chain in Mexico. Leverenz described Oxxo as the "CVS or Walgreens of Mexico."

But the company was originally best known as the parent company of Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma, the maker of beers such as Dos Equis, Tecate and Sol. In 2010, Femsa sold Cuauhtemoc to Heineken in exchange for a 20 percent stake in the beer giant.

"What happened was the core of the business went from being beer to Coke bottling," said Leverenz. "I don't know if you spend a lot of time in Latin America, but soda consumption there is much higher than it is in the U.S."

Leverenz's fund first invested in Femsa shares on Feb. 28, 2011, according to Morningstar. Since then, the stock has surged nearly 170 percent.BY THE NUMBERS

IN THE NEWS TODAY

STOCKS TO WATCH

United Continental (UAL) will transfer its stock listing to Nasdaq from the New York Stock Exchange, beginning on September 7. CEO Gerry Laderman said the airline's move was partly due to an ongoing effort to control costs. Twitter (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on September 5. Committee chairman Greg Walden (R-Oregon) said the committee wants more information on how Twitter monitors and polices content. Elliott Management is said to be critical of the proposed deal by Dell Technologies (DVMT) to buy back its VMware tracking stock, according to the New York Post. Elliott has so far said it has not decided how it will vote its shares, but sources told the paper that stakeholder Carl Icahn is now against the deal. Cushman & Wakefield (CWK) received two positive analyst recommendations, with the commercial real estate firm's stock rated "overweight" in new coverage at Barclays, and "market outperform" in new coverage at JMP Securities. CA Technologies (CA) said the FTC had cleared the acquisition of the software maker by Broadcom (AVGO), with both companies continuing to expect the deal to close during the fourth quarter.

WATERCOOLERCalm, the meditation app valued at $250m, is pursuing acquisitions and considering entering retail as part of its quest to become "the Nike of the mind".

The San Francisco-based start-up wants to become a flagship brand for mindfulness, inspired by the sportswear maker and the Virgin conglomerate.

The Calm app includes guided daily 10-minute meditations, half-hour stories to help you sleep, and masterclasses in subjects including mindful eating. More than 30m people have downloaded the app, which costs $59.99 for a year's subscription.

After raising $27m this summer in a round led by Insight Venture Partners, Calm wants to explore making more physical products. It already sells a scented sleep spray but wants to go much further.

Michael Acton Smith, one of the two British co-founders of the company, was behind the popular children's brand Moshi Monsters, which started as a children's website and expanded into toys, music and a magazine. He said it was important to take the Calm brand offline.

"I can see retail outlets, to clothing, to publishing, to hotels. Ultimately, we'd like to buy an island and have a Calm island run as a profitable resort," he said.

In the Calm offices in San Francisco, where every day starts with a communal 10-minute meditation from the app, hangs a framed cover from a 1977 edition of People magazine: it features a picture of Farrah Fawcett running, and the words "stars join the jogging craze".

Calm believes it is at the start of a trend in which more people will take active care of their mental health, just as physical exercise became popular decades ago.

Alex Tew, the other Calm co-founder, said the market could be huge. "Most people understand the benefits of physical movement and good food. They are now beginning to see sleep and meditation as the missing pillars in modern society," he said.

Calm is unusual for an app in being able to charge for its core service, rather than funding it through digital advertising. Unlike other subscription businesses, such Netflix and Spotify, it has not had to pay huge sums for its content. Run by a 30-person team, the six-year-old start-up has been cash flow positive for several years, according to its co-founders.

"Often in Silicon Valley, there's a trade-off between growth and profitability. It is very rare to be able to do both at the same time," said Mr Acton Smith. "Calm is one of those businesses that does."

Calm faces competition from other meditation apps, most notably Headspace, which has raised $75m at an undisclosed valuation. Both apps were founded by British men who moved to California. Mr Acton Smith said Calm had deliberately avoided iconography of flowing orange robes and New Age mysticism, which he calls "woo woo".

"We've both done well at understanding the brand and taking the crunchiness and health and wellness from California and not leaning into it; instead making it more western, more mainstream  and in a way, more British and cynical," said Mr Acton Smith.

More from the Financial Times:

The cost of staying silent on mental health

Vaping should be promoted by UK government, say MPs

Number of 'ghost patients' at GP surgeries rises sharplyBy Delana Isles

POPULAR US coffee chain Starbucks will soon be opening an outlet in the Turks and Caicos Islands.





The news was first revealed last month during a launch of one of the companys stores over in Jamaica, however no formal announcement has yet been made in the TCI.





Loop News Jamaica reported on July 4 that Sandals Resorts Internationals deputy chairman, Adam Stewart and Margaritaville Caribbean Groups chairman, Ian Dear recently came together to form Caribbean Coffee Baristas and that they plan to bring the coffee franchise to TCI as well as the Cayman Islands this year.





Loop reported that the opening of the two stores is set to occur by the end of this year and by 2020 the franchise intends to have a total of 15 Starbucks operating in the Caribbean region, five of which are already located in Jamaica.





Stewart reportedly said the following to Loop News: "Both Turks and Cayman fall under our licensing agreement. By the end of the year, we will open a Starbucks store in both Turks and Cayman.





"We plan to roll out at least three stores in Cayman. We are looking to grow the franchise across the Caribbean and see to it that our teams are both professional and successful.





"Our partnership works brilliantly. Ian [Dear] was instrumental in building Margaritaville and has operations in islands of the Caribbean.





"From my groups perspective, we are not always in the same islands as Ian so this venture gives us both an expanded footprint and thats what I think Starbucks saw in us - our reach across the region.





Stewart and Dear came together two and a half years ago to bring Starbucks to Jamaica. The pair recently sent 12 Jamaican coffee farmers to Costa Rica to meet with Starbucks global director of agronomy to study efficiencies in coffee production.





The Weekly News reached out to Premier Sharlene Cartwright Robinson for comment on this latest development and to find out whether the Government is aware of how many stores the US company will be opening in the territory.





She stated that when concessions are not requested from the Government by investors, it is only provided with these details as a form of courtesy.





The premier added that to date the Government is not privy to that information but she expects to meet the investors very soon.





Reports in other parts of the media here in the TCI are that the coffee chain will soon be conducting a recruitment drive for their store at Margaritaville in Grand Turk.





It was reported by Magnetic Media on Thursday (August 23) that Starbucks has begun a vigorous advertising campaign for staff.





The news agency reported that the franchise is hoping to attract a qualified store manager, shift supervisor and barista at a job fair on Tuesday, August 28, from 9am to 3pm.





They are calling on Turks and Caicos Islanders to apply for these positions.





While in recent years the TCI has not allowed franchises into the territory, the companys coffee beans and ground products are sold at major supermarkets across Providenciales.





Starbucks will soon join the recently opened Outback Steakhouse, another US franchise, in the territory.



The judge presiding over the case, T.S. Ellis, declared a mistrial on the other 10 counts when the jury was unable to reach a consensus after four days of deliberation.

Manafort, President Donald Trump 's former campaign chairman, was found guilty on Aug. 21 of eight counts of tax fraud, bank fraud and failing to file foreign bank account reports. Manafort faced 18 charges in the Alexandria, Virginia, case, which was not directly related to Mueller's investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

But legal experts say Mueller's team is unlikely to bother.

If Mueller follows through on a second attempt to obtain guilty pleas on those counts, he could add to the already immense pressure on Manafort by extending his potential prison sentence and inflating his legal bills.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is running out of time to decide whether to retry Paul Manafort on the handful of charges that didn't yield convictions from his bank fraud and tax crime trial.

Federal prosecutors on Mueller's team now have until Wednesday to inform Ellis whether they plan to try again for guilty verdicts on those remaining counts or whether they will dismiss them from Manafort's indictment.

Attempting to retry those charges would benefit neither Manafort nor Mueller, said former federal prosecutor Elie Honig.

"If they do retry, you're looking at three trials for the same guy," Honig said, suggesting that doing so would be inefficient and a waste of resources.

Manafort, 69, faces a second trial against Mueller's prosecutors in Washington, D.C., federal court in mid-September. He's charged with seven counts, including money laundering, failing to register as a lobbyist and conspiring against the United States.

Both trials involve work Manafort did as a consultant for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.

Retrying the Virginia trial, even in a limited form, could pose other challenges for the prosecutors. Ellis had regularly admonished Mueller's attorneys to speed through their case, which spanned 10 days, 27 witnesses and more than 360 evidence exhibits.

On a few occasions, tempers appeared to flare between the judge and the team of U.S. attorneys; at one point, the prosecutors filed a motion asking the judge to retract one of his criticisms to avoid unfairly prejudicing the jury against them.

If asked to redo 10 counts, Ellis may have even less patience to spare for the prosecutors.

And while Ellis could postpone the retrial until after Manafort's Washington trial has finished, he could also order it to begin beforehand. That would potentially push back the Washington trial, which has already been delayed once, even further.

Patrick Cotter, a former New York federal prosecutor, said there is "absolutely no legal reason" to retry the counts.

"He's facing more than sufficient time under the counts he's been convicted of" without even factoring in the upcoming Washington trial, Cotter said.

But, Cotter added, there's a chance the U.S. attorneys will still tell Ellis they intend to retry the 10 counts come Wednesday.

"It wouldn't shock me," Cotter said. "Any lawyer likes to keep their options open as long as possible."Noble Group Ltd won approval on Monday from a majority of shareholders for a $3.5 billion debt restructuring plan that should ensure the survival of what was once Asia's biggest commodity trader.

Faced with the prospect of the company's insolvency, shareholders reluctantly backed a debt-for-equity swap that will leave them with ownership of just 20 percent of the business, while handing majority control to a group of creditors comprised mainly of hedge funds.

"Today, the decision to avoid liquidation rests in your hands," Noble Chairman Paul Brough told shareholders at a packed meeting before the voting began.

Small shareholders at the meeting told Reuters they were angry with Noble's management as the plan diluted their investment value, but added they saw no choice but to support the plan in order to save at least some of their investment.

Roger Ong, 49, a driver who has invested in Noble shares said he had no choice but to vote in favor of the plan.

"We want to keep the company afloat rather than liquidate it," he said.

Noble, founded in 1986 by Richard Elman, who took advantage of a commodities bull run to build it into one of the world's biggest traders, has had its market value all but wiped out from $6 billion in February 2015.

The crisis for the company started that month after Arnaud Vagner, a former employee, published reports anonymously under the name of Iceberg Research that accused Noble of inflating its assets. The upheaval triggered a share price collapse, credit downgrades, writedowns and asset sales.

Singapore-listed Noble has always stood by its accounts.

Under the debt-for-equity deal, the company's debt will be halved and it will get access to trade finance and hedging facilities, vital in a sector where profit margins are in the low single digits.

In return, Noble will hand over 70 percent of its restructured business to creditors, while existing shareholders' equity will be reduced to 20 percent and its management will get 10 percent.

Noble only needed a simple majority of the voters in attendance at Monday's meeting to approve the plan for the debt restructuring to go ahead.

The company's shareholders include sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp, Abu Dhabi-based fund Goldilocks Investment Co Ltd and Eastspring Investments, as well as retail investors.

Trading in Noble's shares were earlier halted pending an announcement.

In its glory days, Noble employed hundreds of traders, with ambitions to rival competitors like Glencore <GLEN.L> but it had to sell off prized assets, including its oil and gas units, to rivals Vitol and Mercuria.

Analysts say Noble still faces an uphill battle, with its losses widening to $128 million during the April to June quarter from $72 million in the first quarter.

"This will not stop securities holders (existing and those who have already sold) from suing the individuals and organisations responsible," Iceberg Research said in a note on Monday.The United States is currently at a weaker position with North Korea than before U.S. President Donald Trump met with the leader of the rogue nation, an expert told CNBC on Monday.

His warning follows a North Korean state-controlled newspaper on Sunday accusing the U.S. of "double-dealing" and "hatching a criminal plot" against Pyongyang after Washington abruptly canceled a visit by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The decision to cancel Pompeo's trip appeared to have been made abruptly, coming just a day after Pompeo announced it would happen.

Since Trump's summit with North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un, the U.S. has called off its military exercises with South Korea while China and Russia have softened pressure on North Korea.

"We are worse off than where we were when the summit happened because, in the meantime, China and Russia have alleviated sanctions pressure on North Korea. We've also unilaterally canceled our military exercises with South Korea with our own president even labeling these exercises provocative which certainly unnerved Japan," said Sean King, senior vice president at public policy and business development firm Park Strategies.Small-cap stocks are still an investor's best bet, even as the Trump administration makes progress toward easing trade tensions, "Shark Tank" investor and entrepreneur Kevin O'Leary told CNBC on Monday.

"I say there is 20 percent more cash to come to these companies in the next 24 months through tax reform, so I am staying on this trade. I am betting they continue to outperform not only the , but maybe even emerging markets. There is tremendous value to be unlocked in small caps in America," O'Leary said on CNBC's "Power Lunch."

Small caps, or companies with a relatively small market capitalization, like those on the Russell 2000, have been racing ahead of large caps since February. They are normally considered the riskiest group in the U.S. stock market, due to high volatility, but investors have increasingly turned to these stocks as insulation against the trade wars. Since about 80 percent of small-cap revenues are domestic, they experience far less direct impact from tariffs or other trade retaliation than large caps.

News of President Donald Trump's progress with Mexico on trade talks could prompt investors to once again broaden their focus to international stocks, but O'Leary maintained small caps are a safe play, thanks to deregulation from tax reform.

"For the next two years, the full impact of tax reform will play out in enhanced cash flows in small caps, because what we have seen now is primarily driven by deregulation .... That's why you are starting to see this momentum," O'Leary said.

Brinker Capital global investment strategist Tim Holland acknowledged declining trade tensions "may take some of the bloom out of the small-cap rose," but he also said small caps have numerous other tailwinds to fuel their growth.

"If you look at the structural tailwinds for small caps right now  the tax cut, the deregulatory environment, incremental buybacks here at home  we still think small caps, in the end ... are still the most attractive as we go into the end of 2018," Holland said Monday on CNBC's "Power Lunch."

Despite his optimism, Holland warned the markets as a whole  small caps included  may experience a pullback in the coming months due to seasonal weakness in the equity markets, Federal Reserve rate hikes and special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

"We wouldn't be surprised to see a bit of a pullback into the fall  the calendar tells you that's probably going to happen," Holland said. "But if you step back and think about fiscal policy, earnings, hopefully improving trade rhetoric ... at Brinker Capital, we've been overweight risk assets, overweight U.S. equities, and we think that positioning continues to make sense."

The Russell 2000, which tracks the bottom 2,000 stocks on the Russell 3000, is up 12.55 percent year to date. The S&P 500 is up only 8.35 percent since then, according to FactSet.Sen. John McCain's father and grandfather, both admirals, are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but the straight-speaking former POW, war hero, congressman, senator and two-time Republican presidential candidate chose to be laid to rest at his alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

After a private service at the school chapel on Sunday, McCain will be buried next to his Naval Academy classmate and lifelong friend, Adm. Chuck Larson, according to the Arizona Republican's office.

McCain, who survived nearly six years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, succeeded Barry Goldwater to represent Arizona in the Senate, lost a White House bid to freshman Sen. Barack Obama and became an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, died Saturday at age 81. The senator's wife, Cindy, and family were at his side, his office said. Survivors include seven children and five grandchildren.

Read his full obituary: Sen. John McCain, hero POW, former presidential hopeful and maverick Republican, dies at age 81.

Also see: John McCain: Life and times of an American maverick in photos

McCain is to lie in state at the Arizona State Capitol on Wednesday, which would have been his 82nd birthday. The public is invited to pay respects. A memorial service for invited guests is scheduled for Thursday at the North Phoenix Baptist Church. Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Beau also died of brain cancer, will be among the speakers.

McCain's remains will then be flown to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, and he will lie in state the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Friday for public viewing. A memorial service for invited guests is planned for Saturday at the Washington National Cathedral. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Obama are among those expected to speak.

McCain and Larson were classmates at the Naval Academy and at the Naval Air Station Pensacola flight school. Larson graduated at the top of the Class of 1958 at the academy, while McCain ranked near the bottom. Larson went on to become commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command and twice served as superintendent of the academy. He also was a naval aide to President Richard Nixon. He died of pneumonia at age 77 in 2014 after undergoing two years of treatment for leukemia.

During his 3-decade congressional career, McCain was a conservative who rejected Republican orthodoxy, earning him the label "maverick." He backed campaign finance reform to limit corporate donations to candidates and was a leader in efforts to normalize relations with Vietnam, despite being held as a prisoner of war for nearly six years. He voted against a bill to make Martin Luther King's birthday a federal holiday but backed legislation to support his Native American constituents, including the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which opened the way for tribal casino development.

And he was a thorn in the side of Trump, who during the 2015 presidential campaign said McCain was "not a war hero" because he had been captured by North Vietnam.

McCain died a day after his family announced that "with his usual strength of will, he has now chosen to discontinue medical treatment" for brain cancer. He underwent surgery last summer. Nearly two weeks after the surgery, he marched into the Senate to a standing ovation and cast the deciding vote that killed the Senate GOP's "skinny" bill to repeal Obamacare  at 1:29 a.m.

"From the beginning, I have believed that Obamacare should be repealed and replaced with a solution that increases competition, lowers costs, and improves care for the American people. The so-called 'skinny repeal' amendment the Senate voted on today would not accomplish those goals," McCain said in a statement. "We must do the hard work our citizens expect of us and deserve."

Trump never forgave him. In signing what Congress called the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, the president omitted the dying senator's name while reading the title of the bill at the ceremony earlier this month.

People close to the senator informed the White House that McCain wanted Vice President Mike Pence, but not Trump, to attend his funeral. It a tweet after McCain's death, Trump offered his "deepest sympathies" to McCain's family but had no praise for the senator.

In a September 2017 interview on CBS' "60 Minutes," McCain said the devastating brain cancer diagnosis made him appreciate his life.

"I have feelings sometimes of fear of what happens. But as soon as I get that, I say, 'Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You've been around a long time, old man. You've had a great life,'" he told CBS.

"You just have to understand that it's not that you're leaving. It's that you ... stayed. I celebrate what a guy who stood fifth from the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy has been able to do. I am so grateful. I, every night when I go to sleep, I am just filled with gratitude."

In the interview, he expressed a wish for a memorial service at Annapolis. "I want, when I leave, that the ceremony is at the Naval Academy, and we just have a couple of people that stand up and say, 'This guy, he served his country.'"Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) arriving for work on Capitol Hill hours after voting NO on the GOP 'Skinny Repeal' health care bill, on July 28, 2017, in Washington, DC. Getty Images

The death of Sen. John McCain from glioblastoma on Saturday once again sheds light on this devastating illness and the need to find a cure. It is the same brain cancer that took the life of Joe Biden's son, Beau, back in 2015, and former Sen. Ted Kennedy in 2009. "It is very sad about the outcome of Sen. McCain, yet it reminds us how brutal and deadly this disease can be and how much work is still ahead of us to combat it," said Mazen Kamen, president of the Kamen Brain Tumor Foundation in New York City. The nonprofit organization aims to provide new and effective treatment strategies for brain cancer, especially for children. Kamen's own son lost his battle to glioblastoma in 2016.

Daunting statistics

Sen. McCain's brain cancer was determined just a year ago after he underwent surgery to remove a blood clot over his left eye at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix. Lab results determined there was a link between the clot and the tumor.

Items and personal notes are left outside the office of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) as people pay their respects to the late Arizona senator on August 26, 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona. Ralph Freso | Getty Images

Glioblastoma multiforme is the most common and deadliest of the glial tumors because the cells reproduce so rapidly. They can be found anywhere in the brain or spinal cord. The tumor grows by turning normal brain cells into stem cells, which continuously replicate and regrow. So even if a tumor is surgically removed, it is difficult to extract every cancerous cell; any left behind will result in the growth of a new tumor.

He was not only a hero during his lifetime but also a hero during his illness. ... This is a life lesson to all of us who face adversities in life. Mazen Kamen founder, Kamen Brain Tumor Foundation

Traditional therapies for brain cancer  surgery, chemotherapy and radiation  haven't been very successful, said Dr. Jose Baselga, chief medical officer and physician-in-chief at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, because the brain is designed so toxins can't infiltrate it. "It is very challenging to have chemotherapy get to the brain with a good dose," he said. Instead, Dr. Baselga says researchers and scientists are making strides in what he calls precision medicine.

Making new inroads in lifesaving researchThe gender wage gap is persistent, and a new study reveals that even women students who hail from Ivy League schools are falling short of shattering the glass ceiling, financially.

In fact, for "97.5% of the schools we looked at, female graduates earn less than male ones, a phenomenon that's likely to have gender equality implications for the rest of their lives," according to the new study by BusinessStudent.com, a website geared towards people pursuing business degrees.

The study looked at the average top 117 schools as defined by the U.S. News & World Report College Rankings for 2018 as well as data from the Department of Education to determine how much women graduates were making in comparison to men. It analyzed the average earnings for people who had started school six years prior and who are now working and no longer full-time students.

The study found that only three schools had females that made more than males after graduating: Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts; Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. At Clark, women alumni pull in a mean salary of $33,600, compared to men at $33,500. At Stevens, women make $64,000 while men make $63,000. And at Yale, women make $74,700 in comparison to men's earnings of $74,600.

And while the differences between gender where women make more are $100 in two instances and $1,000 in the other, overall the study found that in the years following graduation, the average male alumni is earning $59,000, while the average female is earning $48,000, an $11,000 or 19 percent difference. Fifty-eight percent of the top schools covered in the study had female grads earning 10 to 20 percent less than males. Twenty-nine percent of women made 20 to 30 percent less, and 13 percent made 5 to 10 percent less.

Notably, the top 10 schools with the biggest gender wage gaps for graduates include a number of prestigious universities. Princeton University, for example, has the second biggest gender wage gap, according to the study, with males earning a median pay of $86,900, while females earn a median pay of $54,600; or 37.2 percent less than their male counterparts.

"This gender gap in earnings tends to be most pronounced at elite universities where graduates have access to the highest paying jobs," the study states.

Despite the gender wage gap, schools that offer the highest earning potential for female graduates include Harvard University, where female graduates make a median pay of $83,000; MIT, where they pull in a median pay of $82,400; and Stanford University, with a median pay of $76,700, according to the study.

The school with the biggest gender wage gap, though, is Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Median pay for female alumni that hail from the school earn 57.3 percent less than males ($24,800 compared to $58,100).

Here are the top 10 schools with the biggest gender wage gaps from graduates (based on mean earnings), according to BusinessStudent.com's study:

1. Brigham Young University

Men: $58,100

Women: $24,800

2. Princeton University

Men: $86,900

Women: $54,600

3. Wake Forest University

Men: $70,000

Women: $44,900

4. Rice University

Men: $76,600

Women: $49,400

5. Williams College

Men: $59,600

Women: $39,200

6. Pomona College

Men: $51,300

Women: $34,800

7. Stanford University

Men: $112,700

Women: $76,700

8. Carnegie Mellon

Men: $94,300

Women: $64,700

9. Brown University

Men: $72,300

Women: $50,200

10. Duke University

Men: $105,100

Women $73,500

It is worth noting that the study did not take into account a number of factors, including cost of living based on location and chosen occupation. The study also notes that since it looked at data from six years from the date they first arrived at school, it is statistically unlikely that a person would have a graduate degree, although it is possible.

Don't miss: Only 61 percent of men believe a wage gap exists, new study finds

Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube!Pattanaphong Khuankaew | EyeEm | Getty Images

Health insurance wasn't enough to spare a high school teacher from a $108,951 hospital bill. Drew Calver, 44, of Austin, Texas, had a heart attack last year, resulting in a four-day emergency hospital stay, according to a report from Kaiser Health News. Despite having health-care coverage, he wound up with the six-figure bill  thanks to a practice known as "balance billing." In balance billing, medical providers that are out of network are unable to reach an agreement with the insurer on a reasonable price for service. In turn, the patient ends up on the hook for the remainder. Patients often also end up with higher expenses in the form of high deductibles, out-of-network fees and additional expenses related to testing that may not be useful. Your best protection is to become an empowered patient and prepare to contest unreasonably high bills. Here are four suggestions from Carolyn McClanahan, a certified financial planner and an M.D., to gear up for battle.

1. Ask the right questions

It's no longer enough to ask your doctor's receptionist, "Will you take my insurance?" "When you're making an appointment, don't ask if you're covered under your plan," said McClanahan, who is director of financial planning at Life Planning Partners in Jacksonville, Florida. "Everyone will take your insurance." Your doctor's office may accept your insurance, but that won't spare you from a surprise bill weeks later if he or she is out of your network, McClanahan said. The correct question for your doctor's receptionist is, "Are you in my network?" Be sure to document who gave you the answer and the date so that you're prepared to fight back if you get a bill that says otherwise, McClanahan said. Speak up when your doctor recommends tests and prescriptions. Ask questions such as: "Is the testing facility in-network?" or "Are the doctors evaluating the tests in-network?" Recent data from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that nearly 1 in 5 inpatient hospital admissions include a claim from an out-of-network provider. The foundation studied medical bills from large employer plans.

Don't be shy about asking your doctor for an explanation if he or she recommends that you undergo a test. Learn more about the test and find out how the results will affect the approach to treatment. "If they can't provide a clear answer, ask, 'Is this test really necessary?'" said McClanahan. Finally, curb costs on prescriptions by asking whether your medication is covered under your plan and if a cheaper version is available. Sometimes it's cheaper to pay cash for your medication than to claim it on your insurance, McClanahan said. She suggested digging up drug price information on GoodRx.com and comparison shopping. "Know the benefits and risks, how long will you be on medication, and what are the alternatives to the medication prescribed," McClanahan said.

2. Examine your plan's coverage

Understand what your policy covers, including the details on out-of-pocket maximums, deductibles and coinsurance. Get familiar with your state's laws against balance billing. More than 20 states have some kind of legislation on the books to protect consumers from balance billing, according to the Commonwealth Fund.

When you are admitted to the hospital in the event of an emergency, write on all of your paperwork that you will only permit in-network care, said McClanahan. Be sure to take a photo of this document or make a copy of it. "Once you get the bill, if they charge you for out-of-network care, you have ammunition," McClanahan said.

3. Fight back

Thinkstock Images | Getty Images

If balance billing is illegal in your state and you receive a massive out-of-network bill, be sure to reach out to your doctor first, as it may be an error. Pull in your insurer to help. If neither your doctor nor your insurer will help you address the bill, then it's time to contact the regulators, said McClanahan. That means you should reach out to your state medical board and your state's insurance department. If your insurance plan is self-funded  one in which your employer assumes the financial risk for providing your health-care benefits  then you should contact the U.S. Labor Department's Employee Benefits Security Administration.

4. Keep good recordsToyota is investing $500 million investment in ride-hailing giant Uber in a bid to accelerate autonomous ride-sharing, the companies announced on Monday afternoon.

The investment values Uber, one of the world's most valuable privately held companies, at $72 billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. That's a significant jump from Uber's most recently stated valuation of $62 billion, based on a self-reported tender offer at the end of the first quarter. The company lost $659 million last quarter, marking a wider loss than its first-quarter figure, according to its own report.

Under the deal, the companies will incorporate self-driving technology into vehicles based on Toyota's Sienna minivans, and the companies plan to begin piloting the program in 2021, they said. Toyota has dubbed the platform "Autono-MaaS," standing for "autonomous mobility as a service."

In June, Toyota invested $1 billion in Southeast Asian Uber-rival Grab.Amazon has acquired various small businesses and other e-commerce business in the past few years. Various mergers and acquisitions have been done by Amazon since 1998. With continuous growth and profitability of the E-commerce Behemoth Amazon, now there are speculations that it will be merging along with Samara Capital to acquire one more e-commerce business More. Samara Capital is a private Indian based equity firm which basically invests in Emerging Indian Companies (EICs). Together, in partnership with Samara Capital, Amazon is in talks to acquire More.

As per reports, it is been unofficially stated that Amazon will be incorporating with Samara Capitals to acquire about 42 to 49% of Aditya Birla Retail Ltd.s Supermarket chain More. Investing around  4,200-4,400 crore, Amazon is planning to buy More. Since the United States e-commerce has grown at doubled pace in the retail and grocery business in India, it will leave no stones unturned in order to acquire More in partnership with Samara Capitals. In partnership with Amazon and depending on the stake it put in buying, Samara will invest in the remaining staking holding amount.

To avoid complications, Amazon will invest in a lower stake of the minimum threshold for buying, ultimately using the indirect route for investment. Foreign retailers are allowed to own only 51% of stakes in a multi-brand retail venture after approval of the government. They need to obey various other conditions and rules.

Amazon had been in discussion regarding investment with RP Sanjiv Goenka a group owned Supermarket chain known as Spencers Retail Ltd.

As per the reports from some anonymous sources, it has been cited that Amazon is planning a large number of investments in Retails and grocery business. It is been said that Amazon has distinctively set aside around $500 million of the amount to invest in food retails business in India. As per the Economic Times, it was reported in May 2018 that roughly around  4,300 crores were estimated as the price to sell More by Aditya Birla Retail. Also, news was hovering that an agreement was signed for this.

Although there are speculations that Amazon has bought stakes in Kishore Biyanis Future group, it is still not a confirmed report. There is no confirmation regarding the market speculation from either Amazon or from Samara Capitals about the acquisition of More. When tried to probe regarding this news, there was no response of emails from the spokesperson of both Amazon and Samara Capitals firm.

Amazon had expanded its empire in retail and grocery business in India. It has a tough competition with its rival company in the United States Walmart Inc. which is trying to spread in Indias fastest growing online retail business.

Various other competitors like Flipkart, Walmart has been trying to take root and expand in the grocery and retail business giving tough competition to Amazon.

It is not yet confirmed by the news of the acquisition of More by Amazon as both the spokesperson of Amazon and Samara Capitals have not given any official statement on it. With the buzz going on in the market about this news, it wont be a surprise if Amazon will acquire More  one of the largest chain of Supermarkets in India

About More

Supermarkets have been trending in India since last decade. More is among the top largest supermarkets chain in India. Among other popular supermarkets such as Reliance Retails, Future Groups and D-Mart, More ranks fourth in the country. It is a retail arm of Aditya Birla Group Company. With around 590 Supermarkets and 23 Hypermarkets spread around the country, More is trending and making good business in retails and grocery. It also provides online grocery services in some of the cities in India such as Bangalore, Pune, and NCR.President Donald Trump on Monday gave his respects to deceased Sen. John McCain "despite our differences on policy and politics," and signed an order to fly the U.S. flag at half staff.

McCain, who had been a target of Trump's ire during his final year in the Senate, died Saturday at age 81.

Trump also said he has signed a proclamation to fly the U.S. flag at half-staff until McCain's final resting service, which will be held Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

The White House had garnered criticism for raising its flag Monday morning, even as other U.S. monuments and government sites kept their flags lowered  a long-standing symbol of national respect.

The White House once again lowered its flag on Monday afternoon, shortly before Trump ordered flags across the nation flown at half-staff "as a mark of respect for the memory and longstanding service" for McCain.The British ambassador to the U.S. is taking a road trip this week across the Midwest in a borrowed electric Jaguar to meet with states that are maintaining high clean-energy standards even as the Trump administration rolls back federal environmental rules.

"You have to be encouraged by the number of U.S. states which are supporting ambitious climate change targets, and so there is a lot we can still work with here," said Ambassador Kim Darroch. He spoke with CNBC shortly before starting his trip around five Midwestern states to promote American and British cooperation on low- and zero-emission vehicles and other clean-energy initiatives.

Darroch is meeting with several state and city politicians, including Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. He's also touring facilities such as the Argonne National Laboratory, where scientists research new energy technologies.

British companies already employ 150,000 people in the states Darroch is visiting: Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.

"It is not generally realized just how deeply the U.K. is plugged into these five states," he said. "There are hundreds of businesses literally based across the region, offshoots of major British companies."

Jaguar is lending Darroch its new I-Pace, an electric crossover unveiled in March, for the trip. The vehicle has been billed as a serious competitor to high-end electric vehicles from Tesla.

He said he was disappointed the U.S. withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, but says he's optimistic about progress individual states have made.

The U.K. is also still working through negotiations around its decision to leave the European Union, but Darroch said he is confident the country will have a deal this fall. The first priority for the U.K. will be to negotiate its own free-trade deal with the U.S., he said.

"We are disappointed by the administration's decision to impose steel and aluminum tariffs," Darroch told

CNBC. "On the other hand, we were encouraged by the agreement the president reached with the president of the European Commission a few weeks back on negotiating a new free-trade agreement on industrial goods apart from vehicles, and that would be a big step forward."The U.S. Army has drafted a plan to test for toxic lead hazards in 40,000 homes on its bases, military documents show, in a sweeping response to a Reuters report that found children at risk of lead poisoning in military housing.

The inspection program, if implemented, would begin quickly and prioritize thousands of Army post homes occupied by small children, who are most vulnerable to lead exposure. Ingesting the heavy metal can stunt brain development and cause lifelong health impacts.

The lead inspections would cost up to $386 million and target pre-1978 homes to identify deteriorating lead-based paint and leaded dust, water or soil, according to the military documents.

A draft Army Execution Order says the program's mission is to mitigate all identified lead hazards in Army post homes in the United States. In homes where dangers are detected, the Army would offer soldiers' families "temporary or permanent relocation" to housing safe from lead hazards, it says.

The Army's mobilization comes after Reuters published an investigation on August 16 describing lead paint poisoning hazards in privatized military base homes. It documented at least 1,050 small children who tested high for lead at base clinics in recent years. Their results often weren't being reported to state health authorities as required, Reuters found.

Behind the numbers were injured families, including that of a decorated Army colonel, J. Cale Brown, whose son JC was poisoned by lead while living at Fort Benning, in Georgia.

The article drew a quick response from lawmakers, with eight U.S. senators demanding action to protect military families living in base housing.

The Army's planned response is laid out in military documents, including the draft Execution Order, minutes from a private meeting attended by top Army brass, and other materials.

One priority, detailed by Under Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy in an August 22 meeting, is for the military's response to counter any sense "that we are not taking care of children of Soldiers and are not taking appropriate action quickly enough," meeting minutes say. "The Army will remain focused on the actions to assess, inspect, and mitigate risks to Soldiers and Families," the minutes say, citing McCarthy and Vice Chief of Staff General James C. McConville.

Army spokeswoman Colonel Kathleen Turner acknowledged plans are being formulated but said no decisions have been made. "Out of an abundance of caution, we are going above and beyond current requirements to ensure the safety of our soldiers and their families who work and live on all of our installations," Turner said in a statement. "We are currently evaluating all options to address these concerns.

Old lead-based paint becomes a poisoning hazard when it deteriorates, and poor maintenance of military base homes can leave legions at risk. About 30 percent of service families including some 100,000 small children live in U.S. military housing owned and operated by private companies in business with the military.

There are nearly 100,000 homes on U.S. Army bases, and the lead inspections are expected to focus on the approximately 40,000 built before a 1978 U.S. ban on the sale of lead paint.

The plans depart from guidance that appeared on the Army Public Health Center's website as recently as last week, which "discouraged" lead-based paint inspections in Army homes. The website has since been updated and omits that language.

Under the plans, the documents show, the Army would:

Inspect all pre-1978 Army family housing units nationwide, including visual lead-based paint assessments by certified personnel, swipe-testing for toxic lead paint dust, and testing of tap water. Some homes will also receive soil testing. This phase alone, described as "near term actions," will cost between $328 million to $386 million, the Army's Installation Services director estimated.

Temporarily or permanently relocate families when hazards are found. "If a Family or Soldier are concerned with potential negative impacts from lead; the U.S. Army will offer them a chance to relocate to a new residence," the documents say. "We must do everything we can to maintain that trust."

Conduct town hall meetings on Army posts to address residents' lead concerns. The Army intends to do so with "empathy," the meeting minutes say. "Tone is key and can be just as important as the actions we take."

The documents leave some questions unanswered. They don't say how long it would take to inspect all 40,000 homes. Also unclear is whether the Army has funds immediately available for the program, or would need Congressional authorization to set them aside.

The Army would ensure that the private contractors who operate base housing "are meeting their obligations" to maintain base homes, the documents say, and would require them to show compliance with lead safety standards through independent audits.

The documents do not discuss whether private housing contractors would bear any of the costs of the lead inspections, or how any repairs would be funded.

In most cases, Army post homes are now majority-owned by private real estate companies. Under their 50-year agreements with the Army, corporate landlords operating military housing agreed to control lead, asbestos, mold, and other toxic risks present in some homes, particularly historic ones.

The U.S. and China will continue their standoff in the ongoing trade war as there is just not "enough pain" yet for either side to back off, an expert said on Monday.

"I think we are in for a prolonged period of continuing escalating tensions," said Deborah Elms, the executive director at the Asian Trade Centre, which is based in Singapore.

One problem is that "both sides think they have the upper hand in this debate," Elms told CNBC's "Capital Connection."

Her comments came after the U.S. and China slapped new tariffs on each other last Thursday and their two-day meeting ended with no major breakthrough.

She said the situation is likely to worsen in the months ahead through the U.S. midterm elections.

"I think we don't have enough pain in the system yet for either side to say, 'Okay, I declare that we've got to have a different approach right now.' That's the challenge," said Elms.

Market watchers are now keeping their eyes on another round of U.S. tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods expected later this year.

As has been noted by analysts, China does not import enough U.S. goods to be able to match Washington's potential tariffs on a dollar-for-dollar basis. So, should the U.S. keep increasing the amount of goods on which it imposes duties, "something has to give," Elms said.

If "they can't continue to match the U.S., they'll have to do something else  it'll be on services, it'll be on retaliation against U.S. companies in China, it will be some other mechanism and they'll have to wait and see what that will be, but it will be something," she said.

U.S. companies operating in China will have to be prepared for "a lot more scrutiny," she added.

Some have suggested the Chinese currency could become a non-tariff weapon in the trade war. But, on Friday, the People's Bank of China appeared to dash that speculation when it announced a change to its yuan policy that looked to keep the currency steady.Shares of big U.S. automakers climbed on news that the U.S. and Mexico have reached a preliminary deal to update the 25-year old North American Free Trade Agreement, but experts warned that the deal is too narrow to have a major impact on carmakers' fortunes.

General Motors, Ford Motor, and Fiat Chrysler all jumped on trading Monday, as Donald Trump announced the agreement at the White House. Here's how they responded: GM and Fiat-Chrysler rose 4.3 percent, while Ford increased 2.8 percent.

But U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, said the deal that would be called The United States-Mexico Trade Agreement  would not undo the 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum that have raised costs at GM and Ford this year.

And experts on U.S.-Mexico trade said that the need for congressional ratification of the deal, coupled with the prospect that the president's party could lose control of the House of Representatives or the Senate in November's election, means that the agreement isn't likely to push shares meaningfully higher.

"There's a very good chance this will never see the light of day," said Frank DuBois, a professor at American University's Kogod School of Business and head of the Made in America Index, which tracks the domestic and imported content of every car model sold in the U.S. "Auto companies will pressure Congress to leave well enough alone."

The new deal will last 16 years and will be reviewed every six years. It will not cap imports of light vehicles from Mexico.

The deal's provisions allow for import tariffs on cars and trucks that do not get at least 75 percent of their content from within the NAFTA region of the U.S., Canada and Mexico, or use a higher proportion of labor that makes at least $16 an hour. That provision would incent car makers to push more of their production into the U.S. or Canada from lower-wage Mexican plants, or buy more parts from outside of Mexico.

The expected impact is that makers of cars from existing Mexican plants will pay import duties of 2.5 percent when they are sent to the U.S., DuBois said. But vehicles made in newly-built plants will pay 25 percent. On paper, that gives U.S. automakers a powerful incentive to build in the U.S., but the likelier outcome is that automakers will hold off siting any new plants for as long as they can, DuBois said.Iranian lawyers will ask the International Court of Justice on Monday to order the United States to lift sanctions ordered by the Trump administration against Tehran.

The lawsuit filed with the ICJ, also known as the World Court, says the U.S. sanctions, which are damaging its already weak economy, violate terms of a little-known 1955 friendship treaty between the two countries.

The United States, which will respond formally in oral arguments on Tuesday, has yet to issue a public response.

U.S. lawyers are expected to argue that the United Nations court should not have jurisdiction in the dispute, that the friendship treaty is no longer valid and that the sanctions Washington has levied against Tehran do not violate it anyway.

The oral hearings, essentially a request by Iran for a provisional ruling, will last for four days, with a decision to follow within a month.

The ICJ is the United Nations tribunal for resolving international disputes. Its rulings are binding, but it has no power to enforce them and on rare occasions they have been ignored by some countries, including the United States.

U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of a 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, with his administration then announcing unilateral plans to restore sanctions against Tehran.

Under the 2015 deal, which Trump sees as flawed, Iran reined in its disputed nuclear program under U.N. monitoring and won a removal of international sanctions in return.

Although the United States' European allies have protested against Trump's move, most Western companies intend to adhere to the sanctions, preferring to lose business in Iran than be punished by the United States or barred from doing business there.

The ICJ has so far ruled that the 1955 treaty is still valid, even though it was signed long before the 1979 Islamic Revolution that triggered decades of hostile relations with Washington.In a bid to cut costs, Tata Steel has started the process to cancel power purchase agreements between Bhushan Steel and Bhushan Energy, The Economic Times reported.

Cancelling the purchase agreement with Bhushan Steel, which it acquired through bankruptcy resolution proceedings, will help the company save up to Rs 30-40 crore every year, the report said citing two people with knowledge of the matter.

The Tatas had earlier revoked an office lease agreement between Bhushan Steel and its former promoters, the report said.

Tata Steel spokesperson Kulvin Suri did not respond to an emailed questionnaire sent by the newspaper.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Launched in October 2016, Workplace by Facebook has quietly become a considerable competitor to the likes of Slack, Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms. The enterprise social network, which is available in a free version as well as a paid plan ($3/per user/per month), is now in use at more than 30,000 companies globally, according to Facebook.

For organizations considering a new collaboration tool, or those already using Workplace, weve gathered 10 tips from early adopters to help organizations maximize Facebooks enterprise platform, both on desktop computers and mobile devices.

Getting started and setting ground rules

1. Start by managing expectations.

Workplace looks and feels a lot like the consumer Facebook  which is one of its biggest attractions.

One of the reasons we chose Workplace was because many of our employees were already familiar with Facebook, says Suzie Elliott, head of human resources for Farmers Insurance. For that reason, our employees needed minimal training, if any at all, before they were comfortable using the tool. We provided guidance, but because of the familiarity of the platform, it didnt take any convincing to get employees excited about adopting it.

Facebook Workplace will seem instantly familiar to anyone who uses the consumer version of Facebook. (Click the image to enlarge it.)

But a heads up: Due to the familiarity of Facebook as a casual social network for updating friends, its important to stress to enterprise users whats appropriate for sharing on Workplace.

One of the first things we did when we launched Workplace company-wide was to tell everyone why were using it and how we should use it, says January Collamat, marketing manager for Cloud Employee, a U.K.-based IT outsourcing company for startups and tech firms around the world.

We let users know what should go up on Workplace and what shouldnt, Collamat continues. For example, an employee could have easily posted memes and links to inappropriate content, had we not established that this platform is only for sharing posts that are useful to everyone. The company established rules against posting extreme views, especially on religion and politics; too much personal information; and most work-related problems that are better discussed offline with a manager or HR.

2. But dont stifle speech.

That said, a few team members at Cloud Employee have posted company policy-related complaints on Workplace. Since its an open platform that can let you engage with anyone from the organization, those employees had the chance to have a dialogue with the CEO, and as a result, their issues were resolved right away, says Collamat.

This is another great thing about the platform: It doesnt matter what role you play in the organization. Everyone is able to engage with each other, and even with the CEO, she says.

3. Get the C-suite on board.

Workplace is for the C-suite to the frontline teams to remote employees, notes Jason Cutler, director of channel sales for SADA Systems, a business consulting and IT services firm. Having C-suite users will send a message of adoption throughout the organization and help your company fully unlock the power of transparent and efficient collaboration through Workplace.

4. Give employees kudos.

Sharing praise on Workplace is an ideal way to boost morale and team spirit.

Use Workplace to make your employees feel more valuable, advises Collamat. Its great for employee recognition, birthday greetings, work anniversary greetings, and any other shout out that will make employees feel special.

Kudos from management shared on Workplace can indirectly encourage peers to high-five one another on the platform, too, Collamat says. Feedback from Cloud Employee workers indicates that positive peer recognition on Workplace is one of the reasons they choose to remain with the company, she adds.

Integrating tools and bots

5. Take advantage of the one-stop shop.

Like most collaboration platforms, Workplace integrates via APIs with a wide variety of complementary platforms, tools and services including Microsoft SharePoint, Dropbox, Box, Zoom, Cisco Webex Meetings, and Bloomberg.

Its sometimes hard for users to know what system to use when, so why not provide them with a technology hub that serves as a one-stop-shop for all of the tools they need to effectively do their jobs? asks SADA Systems Cutler.

Some Workplace integrations can enable you to get more out of the tools or platforms youre already using, which in turn might save your team money.

For example, when hosting a collaborative event such as a webinar or all-hands training in the Zoom conferencing platform, you could use Workplaces live-streaming option to affordably allow greater access to the conference, says Fausta Ballesteros, director of marketing and communications at Softvision, a global digital development company with offices in 10 countries.

Facebook Workplace offers live-streaming capabilities that lets viewers share instant feedback. (Click the image to enlarge it.)

In the past, when we wanted to host a global conference for employees, wed have to pay for 2,500 seats in Zoom to increase the webinars attendee capacity, Ballesteros explains. Now we only pay for up to 10 seats in Zoom, and then we live-stream the Zoom webinar on Workplace to the entire company.

In addition, Ballesteros continues, people can post their feedback or ask the speaker questions instantly in the Workplace live-stream. It gives our CEO and employees the chance to get their questions answered in real time. And the Workplace video is automatically saved, so people can watch it later if they werent able to attend.

6. Share relevant industry news automatically.

Workplace integrates with Bloomberg , Yahoo Finance , Reuters and other media outlets, delivering business and financial news directly to Workplace groups. New hires often struggle to learn the latest news for their industry, says Anand Dass, who manages partnerships for Facebook. So integrations with media outlets make it easy for them to stay updated and have discussions.

Facebook Bloomberg and other media outlets can deliver relevant news to Workplace groups. (Click the image to enlarge it.)

You dont have to get bombarded with constant news updates throughout the day, however. For example, with Bloomberg any group admin can set up keywords related to their industry, in order to be notified only about news articles relevant to those keywords, Dass says.

7. Build bots.

Along with standard integrations from developers such as Microsoft and Dropbox, Workplace enables enterprise developers to build bots for chat and other use cases specifically for internal teams.

Farmers Insurance is one such enterprise leveraging bots in Workplace. Our employees had to go to multiple places to find information or take action on the various types of leave, like PTO or bereavement, says Elliott. So Farmers developers built a bot that could access information about an employees remaining vacation time and other leave-related data and answer employees questions via a conversational bot within Workplace.

Youll likely need to work with your IT team or a Workplace partner to build a bot, Elliott says. But its worth the effort. Now, employees can view all the pertinent information with a few clicks of a button instead of being sent from site to site to try and identify their remaining PTO days, she adds.

Success strategies

8. Update your companys page daily.

Create a Workplace page for your organization on which you post company-wide announcements, events, news and surveys every day, suggests Collamat. The content that we post is motivational posts and interesting reads, she says. Sometimes, even the CEO shares good reads and funny stuff. It all adds to a fun and light environment, and it keeps everyone checking the page daily.

9. Create a weekly roundup of important posts.

I constantly have Workplace up on my desktop, but for employees who dont live in the app, it can be tiresome to figure out what is the latest need-to-know information, says Katie Bouwkamp, Senior Communications Manager for Smartsheet, a cloud-based work execution platform. From week one, we launched a Company Announcements group in Workplace. Each Monday, I post a roundup of key company updates and cross-departmental happenings across our business. The roundup links back to key posts from the week and gives employees an easily accessible digest of important company information.

10. Encourage innovation.

Workplace makes an ideal forum for developing and sharing ideas. For example, Softvision hosted a company-wide project, the Innovation Pod Challenge, on Workplace. The aim was to encourage people from all areas of the business to come up with new ideas and technology to benefit our clients, says Ballesteros.

Softvision created a Workplace group for the project and unveiled it with a live-streaming video announcement on the platform. More than 110 ideas were shared in the group, and 13 of the strongest ideas were chosen for the next round of the challenge, Ballesteros says. Those ideas were then pitched to the executive team and lead sales reps, also via live-streaming video.

The top three ideas that combined innovation, product insight and business change were chosen and are now in the process of being brought to life, Ballesteros adds.

This story, "10 ways to get the most from Facebooks Workplace" was originally published by Computerworld .90%

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This CoolSocial report was updated on 2021-10-26, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want.We are analyzing the site. Please wait a few seconds..University of Alabamas Nitesh Saxena and Prakash Shrestha have developed a new method to make two-factor authentication (2FA) super easy and secure  Listening-Watch. It involves a wearable device that uses speech signals and is not vulnerable to near or far attacks.

The Listening-Watch system uses an activity tracker or a smartwatch and random browser-generated speech sounds. It is a redesigned approach, expanding upon the previous Sound-Proof approach that relied on ambient sounds and ended up being completely vulnerable to attackers who were near the user, as well as remote attackers.

With Listening-Watch, the browser would play back a short random code encoded into human speech when a user attempts to login. The login succeeds if the watchs audio recording contains this code (decoded via speech recognition technology) and is similar enough to the browsers audio recording (i.e., audio recorded through the microphone at the login terminal).

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2 key security features in Listening-Watch

Saxena, Ph.D., professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Computer Science at University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), told UAB News, Listening-Watch offers two key security features. It uses random code encoded into speech to withstand remote attackers. Low-sensitivity microphones found in current wearable devices cannot capture distant sounds, which will thwart proximity attackers.

UAB News added:

In a real-world scenario, two-factor authentication using Listening-Watch would be implemented by using an application installed on the wearable device. Push messages would prompt the device to record and decode speech sounds played by the browser. When a user attempts to log in, the browser of the primary device, such as a PC terminal, laptop, smartphone or tablet, plays back a short random code encoded into human speech, and the login succeeds if the watchs audio recording contains the same code and is similar enough to the browsers audio recording. The speech is decoded using voice recognition technology.

Even if a remote attacker knew the users environment, his or her attacks against Listening-Watch would reportedly fail, since authentication success relies upon the presence of the random code in watchs recordings.

The researchers explained on the UAB SPIES site:

Unlike traditional TFA, Listening-Watch does not require the users to perform any actions while attempting to login to the system except entering their credentials. Interaction may be needed only in occasional cases where terminal cannot play back audio and require a fall back authentication process. Although there is the presence of active sounds in the authentication process, Listening-Watch does not require the user to interact with the second authentication factor. So Listening-Watch is effectively a minimal-interaction approach that significantly reduces the interaction between the user and the authenticating token.

According to the research paper Listening-Watch: Wearable Two-Factor Authentication using Speech Signals Resilient to Near-Far Attack (pdf), At its core, Listening-Watch uses speech transcription and audio correlation analysis to extract the verification code and determine the proximity between the watch and the terminal. Although Listening-Watch creates an active sound that may be distractive to the user in contrast to traditional password-only authentication, it significantly enhances the security of the authentication system (to a level equivalent to that of traditional TFA schemes) without imposing much burden on the user.BRIDGEPORT  About 30 protesters gathered in front of City Hall Monday to protest how hard it is to get to school on foot.

Many of the protesters were of high school age, saying their walk to school  some have to trek as far as two miles  is fraught with unsafe intersections, poor lighting and substandard sidewalks. They also said that once arrived at school, they face long lines to get through the security check.

It is time for the city to put a priority on pedestrian safety, said Tania Chapa, 14, who attends Bullard Havens Technical High School.

The protestors were members of the group Make the Road Connecticut, which only last week staged a similar protest asking for better communication between teachers and administrators and Latino parents.

A lot of us dont graduate on time because we miss too much of our first-period classes, said Crystal Aguirre, who recently graduated from Harding High School and will be attending Housatonic Community College. To make it on time, I walked on unlit streets, cracked sidewalks and facing harassment all along the way.

Students said that the school district has been parsimonious in handing out city bus passes, and buying one would cost them $70 a month  out of the question for most inner-city kids.

The protestors presented a 20-page research paper compiled by Sacred Heart University students that graded the routes that many students take to the three high schools. It gave most of the routes a failing grade because of sidewalks that lack buffers (the grassy strip between the street and the sidewalk), a lack of crossing lights and curbs in poor repair .

Make the Road organizer Alison Martinez said that the report would be given to the Board of Education and other city officials.

A large majority of students said in our survey that their walk to school negatively impacts their performance in school, she said. We need to draw attention to the challenges that low income high school students face to get to school everyday, impacting their attendance and even their ability to graduate, she said.

The school board in June  faced with budgetary pressures  decided to increase walking distances for children in grades five through eight by a quarter mile to 11/4 miles. This saved the district more than $548,000.

The protest was staged in front of City Hall on Lyon Terrace (the former Central High School) atop Golden Hill, where most of the school district offices are located.

Long-time School Board member Maria Pereira said that the protest should have taken place down the hill at the Margaret E. Morton Government Center, where Mayor Joe Ganim hangs his hat.

The condition of the sidewalks, streets and crosswalks is the responsibility of the city, not the Board of Education, she said. We have nothing to do with the conditions of the sidewalks.

She said that the school district is focused on educating children once they enter school buildings.

They need to go before the City Council and the mayor, she said. What does the school board have to do with the streets and the sidewalks? Nothing. Were in the business of education.

She added that she had a long walk to Harding High School (the old one) when she was a teenager  more than a mile across the the East Side and much of the East End.

From William Street to Harding. And I did that in high heels, she said. I wanted to look cute!

jburgeson@ctpost.comWhen doctors and other health experts talk about vaccines, more often than not, theyre talking about children.

And though children do typically need to get immunized against mumps, measles and the like if they want to attend school, theyre not the only ones who have to keep up with their shots.

Its hard, to some extent, to get adults to understand that vaccines are as important, in some cases more important, for them as they are for children, said Dr. David Marks, medical director of outpatient primary care for Griffin Faculty Physicians, a multispecialty group affiliated with Griffin Hospital in Derby.

Some of the diseases adults need to shield themselves against range from the merely painful  such as shingles  to the downright deadly, such as flu and pneumonia.

August is National Immunization Awareness month and, with the month winding down, the state health department put out a statement this week urging adults to make sure they are current with their shots.

The truth is that you never outgrow the need for immunizations to protect your health, said state health commissioner Raul Pino in the statement.

Dr. Zane Saul, chief of infectious diseases at Bridgeport Hospital, agreed.

There are a lot of important reasons for people to be up on their shots, he said Infectious diseases are complicated, so prevention is key. Often, by the time people realize they have these illnesses, its too late.

Saul said another reason to keep up on immunizations into adulthood is that the availability of good vaccines is constantly changing to include shots to prevent an ever-growing array of illnesses, such as shingles and pneumonia.

The health department released a schedule that listed which shots adults should get and at what age.

For instance, health authorities recommend getting the flu shot every year, getting the shingles vaccine after 50 and getting the pneumonia vaccine after 65 (or earlier for those with certain medical conditions).

Though keeping current on shots can be life-saving, Marks said many adults arent as vigilant as they should be about staying up to date with their immunizations.

He said the reasons that adults dont keep on vaccinations vary, from a fear of needles to a lack of awareness that they need to keep up on their shots.

But, Marks said, if these adults arent careful they are just setting themselves up for diseases.STRATFORD  U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary Flotilla 24-2, 1 Birdseye St., is offering its About Boating Safely course on Sunday, Sept. 16. The cost of the class is $50 per student. Pre-registration is required. To register for these classes, email Flotilla242@comcast.net or call 203-381-2085.

About Boating Safely is an 8-hour course, starting at 8 a.m Successful completion of this course satisfies the Connecticut licensing requirements for both boats and personal watercraft. Instruction will cover all the basic topics involved in the safe operation of recreational boating and seamanship.BRIDGEPORT  Aaron Turner will not use the Working Families third party line to keep up his fight to succeed his retiring mentor, state Sen. Ed Gomes.

Gomes, who represents both Bridgeport and Stratford residents of the 23rd state Senate District, made history by becoming the first candidate in the nation elected to a state legislature solely on the Working Families ballot line in a February 2015 special election.

That line is still there if Turner, who lost the Aug. 14 primary for Gomes seat to endorsed fellow Democrat Dennis Bradley, wants it. It would then be a three-way race in the November general election between Bradley, Turner and Republican John Rodriguez.

I do have that option. But Im not going to exercise it, Turner said Monday.

Lindsay Farrell, the Connecticut Working Families Partys executive director, confirmed, He has told us he doesnt want to run.

The Working Families endorsed Turner over Bradley, even though the party supported Bradley in 2015 when he ran successfully for Bridgeports school board.

Turner said Gomes situation was different when the latter ran successfully three years ago as the Working Families Party candidate.

It was a special election in the heart of winter. The only election in town, Turner said.

At that time, Gomes was trying to retake the 23rd District seat he had lost in 2012 when he was defeated in that years Democratic primary by Andres Ayala. The special election was scheduled after Ayala resigned from the legislature to become commissioner of the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

Gomes, having been denied the Democrats endorsement for the special election, ran as the Working Families candidate and won.

Then in 2016, Bradley was endorsed by the Democratic Town Committee for Gomes seat, and the incumbent, with help from his Working Families allies, forced an August primary and prevailed.

Gomes in an interview Monday agreed with Turners decision not to continue his campaign, arguing it would be too challenging. Gomes noted how, in Democrat-dominated Bridgeport, Once you win the primary youre sort of sealed in there. There are people that just say, Are you a Democrat? They vote the party line.

But Gomes also encouraged Turner, who was Gomes legislative aide, to remain in politics and run in a future election.

As far as future runs, its always a possibility, Turner said.

Farrell said the Working Families Party has no plans to remain involved in the 23rd Distirct race. She said the party will take a wait-and-see attitude toward Bradley.

He got elected to the Board of Education and we supported him then, and then he immediately challenged Ed Gomes, one of our champions. That left a bad taste in peoples mouths, Farrell said. We hope we will be able to work well with him (in the legislature) and that he will serve the district well. Lets see.Its not every day you can live long enough to literally see a statue built in your honor, but that was just the kind of birthday weekend NASA pioneer Katherine Johnson had.

Johnson turned 100 on Aug. 26 and got to ring in her centennial by attending the unveiling of the statue and scholarship created in her honor at her alma mater, West Virginia State University. Johnson is a math genius and in her career worked during a time when the barriers to entry for women and people of color in the field were incredibly high. She graduated from high school when she was 14 and graduated from West Virginia State at 18.

Johnsons story was chronicled in the 2016 book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, by Margot Lee Shetterly, and in the subsequent, Academy Awardnominated film it was based on.

Related: Check Out This Stellar Women of NASA Lego Set

She was a computer at NASA, responsible for calculating, by hand, what it would take to get astronauts safely to space and back for the United States first manned space flights. The late John Glenn famously asked for Johnson to check the computers work to make sure that the numbers for his re-entry would be sound for his inaugural orbit around the Earth in 1961.

Former President Barack Obama awarded Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and last year, NASA opened the Katherine Johnson Computational Research Facility.

Throughout her career and amid her late-in-life recognition for her work, Johnson has always emphasized the team effort that was required to reach those great heights.

In an interview with NASA in 2017, Johnson said of her experience, "I was excited at something new, always liked something new, but give credit to everybody who helped. I didn't do anything alone but try to go to the root of the question and succeeded there."

As for her advice to aspiring mathematicians and engineers, Johnsons strategy is simple. Do your best, and like it. Like what you do, and then you will do your best, she said. I never missed a day  my problem was to answer questions. And I did that to the best of my ability at all times.

Related:



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reservedWhen youre crushing it at work but youre feeling unnoticed, you start to feel less attached to your job. If you dont want your employees to leave for greener pastures, here are a few ways you can show your appreciation for the hard work they do

Say thank you: When you tell your employees that youre thankful for the work they do, it gives them a sense of worth. Anytime you hear positive things about an employee, pass that information along. You dont have to throw a party, but hearing that youre doing good work feels good. It means even more when you find out it came from a coworker or a member.

Put them in the right place: Each one of your employees has different motivations. By getting to know your employees on a personal level you can help them work towards their goals and dreams. Help each employee grow in a way that will give them greater value and help them chase their career dreams.

Give them freedom: Employees who have shown the ability to handle responsibility should be given the opportunity to make decisions on their own. Help your employees take ownership in the company by investing in their development, so they can grow into the leaders of tomorrow.Barry Strangways,, accused in sexual assaults Garfield Chambers, alleged second-degree murder Cecil Graham, murder victim

Police have charged Barry Strangways, 42 (left) a superintendent at apartments in Toronto for 15 years with the sexual assault of a girl and boy on what is said to be multiple occasions during his term at 12 Rockford Road near Bathurst St. south of Steeles Ave. The offenses occurred over a period of as long as four years. Strangways was also employed at 4750 Jane Street from 20032008 and 2911 Bayview Avenue from 20082012.

MURDER SUSPECT NAMED

At centre, Garfield Chambers, 43, of Toronto, is being sought for the second-degree murder of Cecil Graham, 49 (right) last Friday at a parking lot near 2305 Markham Rd. Two men are said to have fought. Police ask witnesses to come forward.Greetings Compliance Friends! School is back in full swing up here in the nations capital, and unfortunately so is morning rush hour.

While the NAFCU compliance team cant do much to help with your morning commute, we can offer some things to keep in mind when it comes to new private student loans.

The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, (S.2155) was signed into law in May 22, 2018 and brought several amendments to the Truth in Lending Act (TILA), including some new protections for members and cosigners with private student loans. Section 601 of S.2155 added provisions to TILA which will prohibit the credit unions ability to declare a default or accelerate the debt of a members private student loan in the event of a members death or bankruptcy. If a member dies with a remaining private student loan balance, the new provision also requires the credit union to release any cosigners from the obligation. Heres a brief excerpt of the relevant language:Starbucks announced this week it will be opening its first U.S. signing store, a store designed to uniquely serve the hearing impaired.

The coffee giant has long been known for their brand dedication, employee-centric culture and willingness to think outside the box. Opening a signing store in Washington, D.C., (their second deaf-friendly worldwide following a similar store in Malaysia) is the next in a series of positive Starbucks brand experiences.

Here are three things Starbucks got right with the signing store, and what financial institutions can learn from their example.

Showing commitment to employees.

The idea for the deaf-friendly store actually came from Starbucks deaf partners (employees) themselves. Starbucks found these employees faced workplace limitations and often struggled to excel in the loud, fast-paced environment.Why a gift ban bill for Pa. lawmakers doesn't go far enough, critics say

Gov. Tom Wolf says a loophole in a gift ban bill would still allow unregistered lobbyists from showing lawmakers with gifts and he wants it closed.The Undead Archives

I have finally salvaged my pre-Blogger TDR archives and added them into Blogger. They are almost totally in the form of one giant post for each month. And the formatting strayed from the originals. Sorry. But historians everywhere can rejoice that this treasure trove of my thoughts is restored to the world.Presenting an exclusive excerpt from Asad Durrani's new book Pakistan Adrift: Navigating Troubled Waters (Westland) which offers his assessment of the challenges faced by Pakistan in the last decades.

Photo: Westland Books

(Excerpted with permission from Westland Books)

***

Good concepts, brilliant designs and even sound strategies have never been enough. For their success, we make certain assumptions and lay down conditions that must be fulfilled. It must be assumed, for example, that an agreement, no matter how favourable to one or the other side, is not to be touted as a unilateral victory. Eager to make political capital out of the accord, some Pakistani officials went to town claiming they had made the Indians finally agree to discuss Kashmir. India reacted predictably and clarified that the only aspect of Kashmir it ever intended to discuss was Pakistans support to the insurgency. The composite dialogue, and along with that the peace process, was put on hold.

The following year, in 1998, the arch rivals brought their nukes out of the basement. The celebrations that followed in India and Pakistan, and not only on the streets, were accompanied by plenty of chest thumping and bellicosity towards each other. Obviously, there were also concerns both inside and outside the region: how would the two nascent nuclear powers adjust to the new, potentially dangerous, nuclear environment? At the very least, some measures were necessary to prevent a situation in which one side or the other would fire a nuclear weapon in panic or because it misread a signal, such as a missile test by the other.

Since it was a matter of grave concern for both the countries, a hotline between the two DGMOs was quickly established. Indeed, the basic issue to be addressed was the conflict-ridden relationship that might lead to a nuclear exchange. If that required a spectacular step, then Vajpayee was the man to take it. In February 1999, he undertook his famous bus yatra to Lahore. The Declaration that he signed on February 21, with his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, went beyond nuclear confidence-building measures and attempted to revive the peace process. The composite dialogue once again formed the bedrock of the agreement. Once again, it had to be shelved before it got a fair chance when, in early May 1999, Pakistan-backed troops and militia were found occupying heights on the Indian side of the LOC in the Kargil sector.

Composite dialogue between India-Pakistan had to be shelved before it got a fair chance when, in early May 1999, Pakistan-backed troops and militia were found occupying Kargil. (Photo: Indiatoday.in)

Indo-Pak relations suffered another setback when, later in the year, the Pakistani Army Chief, General Pervez Musharraf, took over in a military putsch. Since the General was the architect of Kargil, India was obviously reluctant to resume the peace process as long as he was in power. But when Musharraf was found to be firmly in the saddle, Vajpayee invited him to give peace another chance. Musharraf, who had, in the meantime, assumed the office of president, visited India in July 2001 and met the Indian prime minister in what became known as the Agra Summit.

It failed because the hawks in Delhi led by LK Advani, the Indian home minister, scuttled the process.

In the aftermath of 9/11, events took a further dip. When America decided to invade Afghanistan to flush out the Al-Qaeda, the group suspected of having masterminded this enormity, it sought cooperation from Pakistan. India was obviously unhappy with the prospect of Pakistan once again becoming a frontline ally of what was now the sole superpower. It offered its own services instead. Pakistan got the role as it was better located. Already sulking over being upstaged by Pakistan, India mobilised for war when its Parliament was attacked, probably by members of a banned Pakistani militant outfit. For most of 2002, the armed forces of the two countries remained in a state of high alert. There were, however, good reasons why it did not escalate into war, even a limited one.

Some of the reasons are well known: the risk of nuclear conflagration, because of which third parties were eager to restrain both sides before they went over the brink. Another, perhaps the more potent constraint, is less known. An all-out conventional war between the two countries was very likely to end in a stalemate. Since countries do not normally start wars without a reasonable chance of achieving a strategic objective, India and Pakistan, after 1971, did not take their conflicts beyond a build-up on the border and skirmishes across the LOC. Another factor that led to the disengagement of forces was the vested interest of the resurgent Indian economy.

Concerns both inside and outside the region  How would the two nascent nuclear powers adjust to the new, potentially dangerous, nuclear environment? (Photo: PTI)

India still could have initiated a war in 2002, either in frustration or in the belief that the US presence in the area would deny Pakistan its nuclear option. But then there were other implications to consider. With active hostilities removing all constraints on Pakistan from supporting the insurgency in Kashmir, it could become more intense and durable. More importantly, if the war ended without causing major damage to Pakistan, it would have deprived India of a potent card that it had so far used to good effect: the threat of war. Even though Pakistan had a reasonable chance of preventing India from achieving a decisive military victory, it was still sensitive to Indian threats of war.

Being the smaller country, its economy was more vulnerable to wartime tensions. After thirty years of high economic growth, it had gone through its worst recession in the 1990s. Now that there was some promise of recovery as an important ally of the US, tensions with India was an unwelcome development. Paradoxically, when the drums of war receded, both the countries found that their threat cards had been played out, seemingly for the last time.

Dove and hawk - Unlike Vajpayee, seen to push for peace with Pakistan, Advani was considered a hardliner. (Photo: PTI)

Pakistan had, time and again, warned that if India did not agree to resolve the Kashmir problem, the region could be blown apart in a nuclear holocaust. In the absence of any desperate resolve in Pakistan to follow up on these threats, the argument was fast losing its effectiveness. I believe, by 2002, Indias threat of a major conventional war too had run its course. Now that the two countries had manoeuvred each other into a deadlock, it was time to revive their on-again off-again peace process. The 2004 SAARC Summit in Islamabad seemed to be the right moment. Before that, the stumbling blocks that had caused the failure at Agra had to be removed.

The very fact that the framework evolved in 1997 had survived nuclear tests, the Kargil episode, a military coup, 9/11, and the standoff of 2002, proved that it was a robust construct. One of its best features was that it could accommodate the preferences of both the parties and prevent concerns, even serious ones like Kashmir, from scuttling the process. In Agra, this potential for an understanding was not best used because the two sides insisted that their respective interests be recognized as the core issue: Kashmir for Pakistan and cross-border infiltration for India. To resolve this conflict in the spirit of the original concept, all one had to do was to make both the concerns part of the process.

Two extracts from the joint press statement of 6 January after Vajpayee met Musharraf to seal the agreement show how smoothly it could be done.

President Musharraf reassured Prime Minister Vajpayee that he would not permit territory under Pakistans control to be used to support terrorism in any manner

The two leaders are confident that the resumption of composite dialogue will lead to peaceful settlement of all bilateral issues, including Jammu & Kashmir, to the satisfaction of both sides.

The plan was now perfect, but to start the process, some movement had to take place on the ground, for example, with a round of meetings on mundane issues to establish a good beginning. It had, however, been the thinking in some quarters that a gesture on Kashmir, even a symbolic one, might be the best way to kick-start the process. Kashmir after all was not only the core issue for Pakistan, having sucked in hundreds of thousands of Indian troops, it was also a multi-corps problem for India.

Former ISI chief Asad Durrani presents a detailed picture of the challages faced by India-Pakistan in the last few decades. (Photo: Screengrab/Al Jazeera)

The gesture had to meet some essential criteria: it was to be without prejudice to the declared Kashmir policies of India and Pakistan; it had to provide some hope that a resolution of the dispute was seriously sought; and it had to sufficiently engage the Kashmiris to let the two countries work on their less intractable issues. The meeting of the leadership on both sides of the Kashmir divide seemed to meet these criteria adequately. Ultimately, it was decided to start a bus service between the two parts of Kashmir from April 7, 2005. The idea must have been that not only the leaders but divided families too could be brought together.

The bus was also bound to make a bigger and better all-round impact than meetings between a few individuals, which, in any case, were not expected to show immediate results. There was, however, a risk involved: if the odd bus were to be blown up by any of the many detractors of the peace process, it would be a serious setback at this nascent stage. That, mercifully, did not happen, and nor did much else after the initial euphoria over the bus trips and some high-profile visits by the Hurriyat leaders to Pakistan. The symbolism was still helpful.

(Excerpted with permission from Westland Books)

Also read: Not cricket at all - How Imran Khan won in politics, using hateA year after Doklam, India and China are doubling down on their old Confidence Building Measures and, according to Sushant Singh of the Indian Express, they are planning to sign a new bilateral Memorandum of Understanding on defence exchanges and cooperation. These decisions have been taken during the visit of Chinas defence minister Wei Fenghe to India last week.

According to the report, the two sides also agreed to handle Doklam-like incidents with sensitivity and resolve them through greater interaction at lower levels in the military.

This immediately begs two questions.

First, how does one just create a general rule about the Doklam incident where India was able to intervene in what it considers Bhutanese territory, because of the proximity of the Chinese road building effort which was just about 100 metres from the Indian position in Doka La?

Bigger questions

The second is to speculate whether consultation and talks at lower levels could have persuaded the Chinese to turn back at the site of road construction last June.

The Chinese must have known that India is sensitive about Jampheri ridge and had earlier tolerated Chinese patrols going there on foot via the road-head below Doka La.

But road construction was another matter and would have presaged the occupation of a ridge line that would have given the Chinese observation over the entire Siliguri Corridor.

One of the bigger questions, raised about the Doklam incident last year, was whether the Sino-Indian CBM process had run out of steam.

Over the years the two countries had signed a number of measures, beginning with the Peace and Tranquility Agreement (BPTA) of 1993 and ending with the Border Defence and Cooperation Agreement (BDCA) of 2013.

Sushma Swaraj with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in Beijing in April. (Photo: Reuters)

Yet, there had been incidents, such as the Chinese incursions in Depsang in 2013 and Chumur in 2014. There was talk after the BDCA, that the Chinese would now like to draft a Code of Conduct, but little came out of it and in the run-up to the Wuhan summit.

Officials on both sides emphasised that there would be no more such agreements. However, that still left room for the effective implementation of the older measures, which is what is now being attempted.

Recall, that after the Wuhan summit, the Indian side gave clear instructions to its personnel to observe the older CBMs strictly. The Chinese did not give any public instructions on this, but no doubt the PLA, too, was told to strictly abide by the rules.

Wuhan summit

Though the idea of a hotline between Chinese and Indian commanders is currently stuck up on issues of protocol, it will be untangled one way or the other and will definitely play a role in reducing tensions.

The Wuhan summit has helped unfreeze the ties between the two countries. That, indeed, was the goal of the summit. This has led to a number of meetings between Indias defence and external affairs ministers with their Chinese counterparts, as well as those between the NSA and his Chinese counterpart.

China will continue its steady penetration of the region, but Indias security interests won't be undermined if engagement increases. (Photo: Reuters)

The two countries were able to hold their second maritime affairs dialogue in Beijing in July 2018. The first had been held two years before, in February 2016.

Visits of military delegations have also resumed.

Recently, Lt Gen Liu Xiaowu, Deputy Commander of the Western Theater Command visited New Delhi and Indias Eastern Command headquartered in Kolkata.

This was followed by the visit of Indias Eastern Army commander Lt Gen Abhay Krishna to China heading a four-member delegation in August.

Maintaining balance

The challenge for India is to maintain a balance in the competitive and cooperative elements of our relationship with China. Unfortunately, Indias own performance in the economic and military fields has led to a widening gap between them, requiring New Delhi to reach out to external players like the US to maintain a balance of power.

In recent months, India has also tamped down its criticism of the Belt and Road Initiative. In Wuhan, the two sides took the decision to work on a joint project in Afghanistan, which appears to ignore Islamabads concerns about Indian activities in Afghanistan.

It could also form the model of three-country cooperation in the region.

One example can be Nepal where both countries are committed to railway projects and could end up creating a system that links the Tibet Railway to the Indian system.

Engaging China enables New Delhi to prevent or deflect zero-sum outcomes relating to Beijing in its immediate neighbourhood in South Asia and the IOR. China will, no doubt, continue its steady penetration of the region, but engagement can ensure that this process is not used to undermine Indias security interests.

(Courtesy of Mail Today)

Also Read: One year after Doklam standoff: Will Bhutan increase deployment to check activities of Chinese military?They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The idiom is all the more true in the new media age where pictures and memes go viral, often for all the wrong reasons.

The Congress partys official Twitter handle put out images of Rahul Gandhi, on a visit to the German Parliament, looking dazed and confused.

To make it worse, the pictures were captioned The many facets of Rahul Gandhi.

While Congress supporters initially wondered if their partys Twitter account had been hacked, it was followed by another tweet that had pictures of Gandhi walking through the archive of German members of Parliament. Rival BJPs official Twitter handle wasted no time re-tweeting it captioning even we couldnt resist retweeting this.

Even we couldn't resist retweeting this ;) https://t.co/M0y9Uvun7M  BJP (@BJP4India) August 23, 2018

What the BJP IT cell had been trying hard to establish all these years was being handed on a silver platter by their opposite number  that Rahul Gandhi is clueless and confused (the Pappu narrative).

The social media team of the Congress, after years of playing catch-up to the BJP (and even newbie Aam Aadmi Party) had seemingly begun to up their game in the last year or so. Divya Spandana, the actress-turned-politician and the new social media in-charge of the party, had been credited with the turnaround.

When kissing scene starts while watching movie with family. pic.twitter.com/K8fx7iIXL2  Gaitonde (@gaitondesays) August 23, 2018

With a newfound aggressive approach, the Congress social media (SM) cell was often seen paying the BJPs cyber warriors back in their own coin  even trolling the Prime Minister to good effect.

But it often seems the party still has a problem with communicating and figuring out the pulse of the netizens. On too many occasions, the partys official handle has been seen to come up with bloopers to provide fodder for the trolls.

Sample this: A Twitter poll with KnowYourLegacy hashtag asked: "In the absence of motorable roads in Bhutan in 1958, PM Nehru rode on an animal to visit the country. What animal was it?

In the absence of motorable roads in Bhutan in 1958, PM Nehru rode on an animal to visit the country. What animal was it? #KnowYourLegacy  Congress (@INCIndia) September 4, 2017

And one of the options happened to be donkey. Now, for anyone who knows how the social media works, the fate of the poll was already sealed. Over 67% picked the donkey, and Congress deleted the original poll and started the poll again; there was a problem thoughthe donkey option was still there!

To quote Ian Flemings 007, Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

Looking like a Greek God? The person tweeting this out from the official Twitter handle must have thought something like that.

The latest blooper has left many on Twitter wondering if there is a BJP mole in the Congress SM cell. But a former employee who worked under Ms Spandana for the SM cell says: When I was there, only three seniors (including Ms Spandana) had access to the Congress official handle. It is impossible that the tweet was not authorised by Divya. In any case, the tweet is still very much on the TL. It certainly has her stamp of approval.

Another former employee defends Ms Spandana: I think the idea is to get more visibility and mentions for the party. When I worked there, Divya used to make a big deal out of follower count, page views and mentions. It certainly has to be part of a strategy.

Except, nobody has a clue what that strategy could be. Congress has only reinforced the Pappu image of Gandhi; no wonder BJP latched on to it immediately, was how an advertising professional reacted.

Straight out of a fashion magazine

That single tweet might have probably undone the whole effort that went into the image makeover of Rahul Gandhi. Since last September, Rahul Gandhi has been trying to connect with Non-resident Indians, students and foreign politicians in his trips abroad. In between, Gandhi made a fiery speech in Parliament, signing it off by walking across the aisle and hugging the Prime Minister during the vote of no-confidence. It was assumed that Brand Rahul had turned a corner.

Coming back to the issue, the pictures of Gandhi in the now infamous tweet seemed straight out of a fashion magazine. It was as if he were striking poses for a photo shoot like a print model would. The propriety of posting such pictures through the official handle of the party didnt seem to have occurred to the people handling the account, including Ms Spandana.

What could have gone wrong?

So, what must have gone wrong there?

My assessment is that, in their blind deification of Gandhi, the handlers probably lost their sense of judgement and thought the pictures would convey a thoughtful, pensive image of Gandhi, against the backdrop of the graffiti of World War II in the German Parliament. Instead, it turned out to be the butt of jokes and a viral meme. Even the captionmany facets of Rahul Gandhi  reeked of boy band level drooling and adulation.

There is the story of The King and the foolish monkey in the Panchatantra.

A pet monkey was treated like royalty and had access to the personal chamber of a king forbidden to even the loyal servants. While the King was having a siesta on the monkeys watch one day, a fly came and sat on the Kings chest. Despite trying to shoo it off, the fly would find its way back again. In a fit of rage, the monkey took a sword and aimed at the flyand instead split open the chest of the King. The moral of the story being, a foolish friend can cause more harm than an enemy.

In their blind admiration for the Gandhi scion, the cheerleaders at 15, Gurudwara Rakab ganj (where the Congress SM cell operates out of) might have thought Gandhi looked like a Greek God in these pictures to lose their bearings. Now, they cant complain about people making hilarious memes of the mugshots. Thats the nature of social media.

Congress social media strategy

For the longest time, Congress has taken the higher moral ground when they came under vicious attack from trolls, who mostly identify with the BJP. But, with the official Congress handle often exuding troll-like behaviour themselves in their effort to ramp up aggression of late, that leverage may not hold anymore.

Nawaz Sharif has been arrested on corruption charges. Wed like to know what his dear friend, PM Modi has to say about this. pic.twitter.com/VpIfJplfMX  Congress (@INCIndia) July 14, 2018

Recently, following the arrest of former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Pakistan, the Congress handle tweeted a picture of Sharif holding hands with Prime Minister Modi, captionedNawaz Sharif has been arrested on corruption charges. Wed like to know what his dear friend PM Modi has to say about this. These kinds of tweets take away from everything the grand old party supposedly stands for.

Fanboy moment? Why would Indias oldest party make a big deal of a celebrity following its Twitter account in any case?

There have also been many other tweets originating from the official handle of Congress that people struggle to make sense of. Some of them were later deleted.

One such deleted tweet said, Thank you @amitabhBachchan ji for the follow. We wish you all the best for 102 not out. We have another reason to celebrate. We have 4 million followers today.

With the relations between the Gandhis and the Bachchans going south, it triggered speculations and was deleted later. Why would Indias oldest party make a big deal of a celebrity following its Twitter account in any case?

Yes, but why? Facing backlash, the tweet was deleted later.

Another strange tweet goes We regret to hear about the passing away of Sridevi. An actor par excellence. A legend who will continue to live in our hearts through her stellar body of work. Our deepest condolences to her loved ones. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2013 by the UPA government. The tweet was found deleted later after a backlash.

On Womens day, the party tweeted a poll asking, How will you be celebrating this womens day? The options were A) drinking what you love; B) Laughing out loudly; C) Late night loitering; D) All of the above. The options reeked of an elitist mindset more than anything. I remember a friend of mine quoting the tweet saying  We work our a**** off at work and wouldnt be bothered do all these on a working day.

What the Congress seems to need, more than anything, at this point is to have people with political acumen working for them in the SM cell. And having folks with some grassroots connect wouldnt harm either.

Rather than appointing people on the basis of their unflinching devotion to Gandhi (Ms Spandana apparently owes her position on account of her loyalty), they might consider having people who can analyse things more dispassionately if they are to avoid such gaffes and save Gandhi from being the butt of jokes in the future.

Also read: Rahul Gandhi compares lynching in India with the rise of ISIS. So what?Thank you for reading!

Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. All rights reserved.

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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.Five Point Holdings LLC engages in the development and design of mixed-use, master-planned communities that combine residential, commercial, retail, educational, and recreational elements with public amenities. It operates through the following segments: Valencia, San Francisco, Great Park, and Commercial. The Valencia segment includes community of Valencia being developed in northern Los Angeles County, California, as well as other land historically owned by FPL, including 16,000 acres in Ventura County, California and approximately 500 acres of remnant commercial, residential and open space land in Los Angeles County. The San Francisco segment involves the Candlestick Point and The San Francisco Shipyard communities located on bay front property in the City of San Francisco, California. The Great Park segment refers to the Great Park neighborhoods being developed adjacent to and around the Orange County Great Park, a metropolitan park under construction in Orange County, California. The Commercial segment consists of the Five Point Gateway Campus, an office and research and development campus within the Great Park Neighborhoods, consisting of four newly constructed buildings. The

Read MoreBayer Aktiengesellschaft operates as a life science company worldwide. It operates through Pharmaceuticals, Consumer Health, and Crop Science segments. The Pharmaceuticals segment offers prescription products primarily for cardiology and women's health care; specialty therapeutics in the areas of oncology, hematology, and ophthalmology; and diagnostic imaging equipment and contrast agents, as well as cell and gene therapy. The Consumer Health segment markets nonprescription over-the-counter medicines, medical products, medicated skincare products, nutritional supplements, and self-care solutions in dermatology, nutritional supplements, pain and cardiovascular risk prevention, digestive health, allergy, and cold and cough. The Crop Science segment offers chemical and biological crop protection products, improved plant traits, seeds, digital solution, and pest and weed control products, as well as customer service for agriculture. This segment also provides breeding, propagation, and production/processing of seeds, including seed dressing. Bayer Aktiengesellschaft has a collaboration agreement with MD Anderson Cancer Center to develop oncology drugs; research and license agreement with Dewpoint Therapeutics, Inc. for the development of new treatments for cardiovascular and gynecological diseases; collaboration agreement with Exscientia Ltd, Foundation Medicine Inc., and Evotec AG; research collaboration with Arvinas Inc. and Forschungszentrum JAlich GmbH; strategic research partnership with University of Oxford to develop novel gynecological therapies; and research collaboration agreements with Haplogen GmbH and Kyoto University to identify new drugs candidates for the treatment of pulmonary diseases. The company distributes its products through wholesalers, pharmacies and pharmacy chains, supermarkets, online and other retailers, and hospitals, as well as directly to farmers. Bayer Aktiengesellschaft was founded in 1863 and is headquartered in Leverkusen, Germany.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of FUJIFILM: ASSISTEC Co Ltd, BioCare Europe EspanaSL, BioCare Europe Srl, CSG Limited, Celltrust Animal Therapeutics Co Ltd, Cellular Dynamics International, DS Chemport (Australia) Pty LTD, DS Chemport (Malaysia) SDN BHD, DS Nordic Graafinen OY, Dimatix, Eurocolor Zurich AG, FI Medical device Manufacturing Co Ltd, FS DEVICE Co Ltd, FUJI DKH HEALTHCARE LLP, FUJI Hunt Iberica SL, FUJI Hunt Nordic AB Sweden, FUJIFILM (China) Investment Co Ltd, FUJIFILM (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, FUJIFILM (Shanghai) Trading Co Ltd, FUJIFILM (Thailand) Ltd, FUJIFILM ASIA PACIFIC PTE LTD, FUJIFILM Australia Pty Ltd, FUJIFILM Belgium NV, FUJIFILM Business Expert Corporation, FUJIFILM COLOMBIA SAS, FUJIFILM Canada Inc, FUJIFILM Cellular Dynamics Inc, FUJIFILM Corporation, FUJIFILM DISPLAY SOLUTIONS KOREA CO LTD, FUJIFILM Dimatix Inc, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies Denmark ApS, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies Holdings Denmark ApS, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies Texas LLC, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies UK Limited, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies USA Inc, FUJIFILM Dis Ticaret AS, FUJIFILM Electronic Imaging Europe GmbH, FUJIFILM Electronic Imaging Korea Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials (Europe) GmbH, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials (Europe) NV, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials (Europe) Srl, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials (Hong Kong) Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials (Singapore) Pte Ltd, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials (Suzhou) Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials Korea Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials Manufacturing Korea Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials Taiwan Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Electronic Materials USA Inc, FUJIFILM Engineering Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Europe BV, FUJIFILM Europe Business Service spzoo, FUJIFILM Europe GmbH, FUJIFILM France SAS, FUJIFILM Global Graphic Systems Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Healthcare Laboratory Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Holdings America Corporation, FUJIFILM Holdings Australasia Pty Ltd, FUJIFILM Holdings NZ Limited, FUJIFILM Hong Kong Limited, FUJIFILM Hungary Ltd, FUJIFILM Hunt Chemicals USA Inc, FUJIFILM IMAGING PRODUCTS & SOLUTIONS BV, FUJIFILM IMAGING PRODUCTS & SOLUTIONS GmbH & Co KG, FUJIFILM Imaging Colorants Inc, FUJIFILM Imaging Colorants Limited, FUJIFILM Imaging Germany Verwaltungs GmbH, FUJIFILM Imaging Protec Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Imaging Systems (Suzhou) Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Imaging Systems Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Imaging Systems GmbH & Co KG, FUJIFILM India Private Limited, FUJIFILM Ink Solutions Ltd, FUJIFILM Insurance (Hawaii) Inc, FUJIFILM Intellectual Property Research Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Irvine Scientific Inc, FUJIFILM Irvine Scientific Inc., FUJIFILM Italia SpA, FUJIFILM Kyushu Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Logistics Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Logistics Solution (China) Limited, FUJIFILM Logistics Solution (Hong Kong) Limited, FUJIFILM Logistics Solution (Vietnam) Co Ltd, FUJIFILM MEDICAL SYSTEMS TAIWAN, FUJIFILM MYANMAR LIMITED, FUJIFILM Manufacturing Europe BV, FUJIFILM Manufacturing USA Inc, FUJIFILM Media Crest Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Media Manufacturing Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Medical Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Medical IT Solutions Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Medical Service Solutions Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Medical Solutions Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Medical Systems (Shanghai) Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA Inc, FUJIFILM Medical Technical Service (Shanghai) Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Middle East FZE, FUJIFILM NZ Ltd, FUJIFILM Nordic AB, FUJIFILM North America Corporation, FUJIFILM Opt-Electronics (Shenzhen) Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Optical Devices Europe GmbH, FUJIFILM Optics Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Optics Philippines Inc, FUJIFILM Opto Materials Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Pharmaceuticals USAInc, FUJIFILM Philippines Inc, FUJIFILM Photo Manufacturing Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Printing Plate (China) Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Recording Media GmbH, FUJIFILM Recording Media USA Inc, FUJIFILM Sericol India Private Limited, FUJIFILM Sericol Nederland BV, FUJIFILM Sericol Overseas Holdings Limited, FUJIFILM Sericol Polska Sp zoo, FUJIFILM Sericol de Mexico SA de CV, FUJIFILM Shizuoka Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Software Co Ltd, FUJIFILM SonoSite Inc, FUJIFILM South Africa (Pty) Ltd, FUJIFILM Speciality Ink Systems Limited, FUJIFILM Speciality Ink Systems Pension Plan Trustee Limited, FUJIFILM Systems Corporation, FUJIFILM Techno Products Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Techno Service Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Tissue Engineering (Shanghai) Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Toyama Chemical Co Ltd, FUJIFILM UK Ltd, FUJIFILM UKRAINE LLC, FUJIFILM Ultra Pure Solutions Inc, FUJIFILM VET Systems Co Ltd, FUJIFILM VIETNAM Co Ltd, FUJIFILM Wako Pure Chemical Corporation, FUJIFILM YANGON LIMITED, FUJIFILM do Brasil Ltda, FX Global Inc, FX Global Supply Solutions Inc, FX International Partners, Fuji Hunt Asian Pacific Holding Pty Ltd, Fuji Xerox, Fuji Xerox (China) Limited, Fuji Xerox (Hong Kong) Limited, Fuji Xerox (Thailand) Co Ltd, Fuji Xerox Asia Pacific Pte Ltd, Fuji Xerox Asia Pacific Pte Ltd (Malaysia Operations), Fuji Xerox Asia Pacific Pte Ltd (Myanmar Branch), Fuji Xerox Australia Pty Limited, Fuji Xerox Co Ltd, Fuji Xerox Document Management Solutions Pty Limited (Australia), Fuji Xerox Eco-Manufacturing (Suzhou) Co Ltd, Fuji Xerox Far East Limited, Fuji Xerox Hai Phong Co Ltd, Fuji Xerox Industry Development (China) Company Limited, Fuji Xerox InterField Co Ltd, Fuji Xerox Korea Company Limited, Fuji Xerox Manufacturing Co Ltd, Fuji Xerox New Zealand Limited, Fuji Xerox Philippines Inc, Fuji Xerox Printing Systems Co Ltd, Fuji Xerox Service Creative Co Ltd, Fuji Xerox Service Link Co Ltd, Fuji Xerox Singapore Pte Ltd, Fuji Xerox System Service Co Ltd, Fuji Xerox Taiwan Corporation, Fuji Xerox Vietnam Company Limited, Fuji Xerox of Shanghai Limited, Fuji Xerox of Shenzhen Ltd, IP Labs GmbH, IS Japan, Japan Tissue Engineering Co Ltd, Medwork, Opsis TherapeuticsInc, PT FUJIFILM INDONESIA, Perseus Proteomics, Sericol Group, Sericol Ink Limited, Sericol Limited, Sonosite, TeraMedica Inc, Ultra Pure Solutions Inc, Upstream Print Solutions Australia Pty Ltd, Whitech Pty Limited, Xerox, and FUJIFILM RUS LLC.Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, a diversified financial institution, provides various financial products and services to personal, business, public sector, and institutional clients in Canada, the United States, and internationally. The company operates through four strategic business units: Canadian Personal and Business Banking; Canadian Commercial Banking and Wealth Management; U.S. Commercial Banking and Wealth Management; and Capital Markets. The company offers chequing, savings, and business accounts; mortgages; loans, lines of credit, student lines of credit, and business and agriculture loans; investment and insurance services; and credit cards, as well as overdraft protection services. It also provides day-to-day banking, borrowing and credit, investing and wealth, specialty, and international services; correspondent banking and online foreign exchange services; and cash management services. The company serves its customers through its banking centers, as well as direct, mobile, and remote channels. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce was founded in 1867 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.

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First American Financial Corp. operates as an insurance company. It provides title insurance and settlement services to the real estate and mortgage industries. The company operates its business through the following segments: Title Insurance & Services and Specialty Insurance. The Title Insurance & Services segment provides title insurance, escrow, closing services and similar or related financial services domestically and internationally in connection with residential and commercial real estate transactions. It also maintains, manages and provides access to title plant records and images and provides banking, trust and investment advisory services. The Specialty Insurance segment issues property & casualty insurance policies and sells home warranty products. It also provides title plant management services, which include title and other real property records and images, valuation products and services, home warranty products, property and casualty insurance and banking, trust and investment advisory services. First American Financial was founded in January, 2008 and is headquartered in Santa Ana, CA.

Read MoreFidelity European Trust PLC is an open-ended equity fund launched and managed by FIL Investment Services (UK) Limited. It is co-managed by FIL Investments International Limited. The fund invests in the public equity markets of Continental Europe. It makes its investments in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors. The fund invests in stocks of companies operating across all market capitalizations. It also invests in value oriented growth stocks. The fund benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against the FTSE World Europe ex UK Index. Fidelity European Trust PLC was formed on November 5, 1991 and is domiciled in the United Kingdom.

Read MoreMaxar Technologies Inc. provides earth intelligence and space infrastructure solutions in the United States, Asia, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Canada, and internationally. It operates through Earth Intelligence and Space Infrastructure segments. The Earth Intelligence segment offers earth imagery products, including orthorectified imagery, imagery basemap, 3D and elevation, and information products; and SecureWatch, a subscription offering that provides online access to imagery and geospatial intelligence platform. This segment also offers geospatial information, application, and analytic services. It serves U.S. and other international government agencies, such as defense and intelligence agencies, as well as commercial customers in various markets. The Space Infrastructure segment provides space based infrastructure, robotics, sub-systems, and information solutions, including communication and imaging satellites and payloads; platforms for space exploration and hosting instruments for earth science; space subsystems for power, propulsion, and communication; satellite ground systems and support services; space-based remote sensory solutions; space robotics; and defense systems. This segment serves government agencies and satellite operators. Maxar Technologies Inc. was founded in 1969 and is headquartered in Westminster, Colorado.

Read MoreWall Street analysts have given PSA Group 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 PSA Group wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. All rights reserved.

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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.6 hours ago

American Water Works is a Strong Buy as Profits Continue to Flow

American Water Works (NYSE:AWK) will deliver its third-quarter earnings report after the market closes on November 2. The third quarter has historically been the companys strongest quarter and this year appears to be no exception. The consensus opinion of analysts is for the utility giant to post earnings per share (EPS) of $1.52 cents on revenue of $1.21 billion.

Read ArticleWall Street analysts have given iShares MSCI Taiwan 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 Taiwan ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.The following companies are subsidiares of EnerSys: ABSL Power Solutions Inc., ABSL Power Solutions Ltd., Acumuladores Industriales EnerSys SA, Alpha Alternative Energy Inc., Alpha Broadband Services Inc., Alpha Innovations Industria e Comercio de Produtos Eletronicos Ltda., Alpha Innovations Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Alpha Mexico Network Power S.A. de C.V., Alpha Tech Energy Solutions India Private Limited, Alpha Technical Services Ltd., Alpha Technologies Ltd., Alpha Technologies Pty. Ltd., Alpha Technologies Services Inc., Alphatec Technologies (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., Argus Research Ltd., Batterias Hawker de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Battery Power International Pte Ltd., Coppervale Enterprises Inc., DCPM Engineering Sdn Bhd, EH Batterien AG, EH Europe GmbH, EH Global Holdings GmbH, EH Swiss Holdings GmbH, ENAS Industrial Batteries Morocco Sarl, EnerSys (Chaozhou) Huada Batteries Company Limited, EnerSys (China) Huada Batteries Company Limited, EnerSys (Chongqing) Huada Batteries Company Limited, EnerSys (Jiangsu) Huada Batteries Company Limited (94.7%) *, EnerSys (Luxembourg) Finance Sarl, EnerSys (Yangzhou) Huada Batteries Co. Ltd., EnerSys A/S, EnerSys AB, EnerSys AD, EnerSys AE, EnerSys AS, EnerSys Advanced Systems Inc., EnerSys Argentina S.A., EnerSys Asia Limited, EnerSys Australia Pty Ltd., EnerSys BV, EnerSys BVBA, EnerSys Battery Private Limited, EnerSys Brasil Ltda., EnerSys Bulgaria EOOD, EnerSys Canada Inc., EnerSys Capital Inc., EnerSys Cayman Euro L.P., EnerSys Cayman Holdings L.P., EnerSys Cayman Inc., EnerSys Delaware Inc., EnerSys Delaware LLC I, EnerSys Delaware LLC II, EnerSys Delaware LLC III, EnerSys Delaware LLC IV, EnerSys Delaware LLC V, EnerSys Energy Products Inc., EnerSys Europe Oy, EnerSys European Holding Co., EnerSys GmbH, EnerSys Holdings (Luxembourg) Sarl, EnerSys Holdings UK Ltd., EnerSys Hungaria Kft., EnerSys India Batteries Private Ltd., EnerSys JSC, EnerSys LLC, EnerSys Ltd., EnerSys Malaysia Sdn Bhd, EnerSys Mexico Holdings LLC, EnerSys Mexico Management LLC, EnerSys Participacoes Ltda., EnerSys Reserve Power Pte. Ltd., EnerSys S.r.l., EnerSys SARL, EnerSys SNC, EnerSys South East Asia Pte. Ltd., EnerSys de Mexico II S de R.L. de CV, EnerSys de Mexico S de R.L. de CV, EnerSys s.r.o., EnerSys sp. z o.o., EnerSystem Chile Ltda., Enersys Aku Sanaya Dis Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Esfinco LLC, Hawker GmbH, Hawker Power Systems Inc., Hawker Powersource Inc., Hawker Systems GmbH & Co. KG., ICS Industries Pty Ltd, ICS Industries Pty Ltd., ICS Sheet Metal Pty Ltd., Industrial Battery Holding Ltda., International Communication Shelters Australasia Pty Ltd., Lancord Pty Ltd., Lenmic Pty Ltd., MIB Energy Sdn Bhd, N Holding AB, National Infrastructure Pty Ltd., National Infrastructure Services Pty Ltd., NaviSemi Energy Pte Ltd., NaviSemi Inc., New Pacifico Realty Inc., NorthStar Battery Company LLC, NorthStar Battery Company LLC, NorthStar Battery DMCC, Outback Power Technologies Inc., Powercom (NSW) Pty Ltd., Powersonic S de R.L. de CV, Purcell Systems, Purcell Systems Inc., Purcell Systems International AB, Quallion LLC, Riverfront Holding S. de R.L. de C.V., Shenzhen Huada Power Supply Mechanical & Electrical Co. Ltd. , SiteTel Shanghai Co Ltd., SiteTel Sweden AB, Telecomponents & Supply (Hong Kong) Ltd., The Enser Corporation, UTS Holdings Sdn Bhd, UTS Technology (JB) Sdn Bhd, UTS Technology (PG) Sdn Bhd, YCI Inc., and Yecoltd S. de R.L. de CV.The following companies are subsidiares of Abbott Laboratories: 3A Nutrition (Vietnam) Company Limited, ABON Biopharm (Hangzhou) Co. Ltd., AGA Medical Belgium, AGA Medical Corporation, AGA Medical Holdings Inc., ALR Holdings, AML Medical LLC, APK Advanced Medical Technologies LLC, ATS Bermuda Holdings Limited, ATS Laboratories Inc., Abbott, Abbott (Jiaxing) Nutrition Co. Ltd., Abbott (UK) Finance Limited, Abbott (UK) Holdings Limited, Abbott AG, Abbott Asia Holdings Limited, Abbott Asia Investments Limited, Abbott Australasia Holdings Limited, Abbott Australasia Pty Ltd, Abbott B.V., Abbott Bahamas Overseas Businesses Corporation, Abbott Belgian Investments, Abbott Bermuda Holding Ltd., Abbott Biologicals B.V., Abbott Biologicals LLC, Abbott Bulgaria Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Capital India Limited, Abbott Cardiovascular Inc., Abbott Cardiovascular Systems Inc., Abbott Delaware LLC, Abbott Diabetes Care Inc., Abbott Diabetes Care Limited, Abbott Diabetes Care Sales Corporation, Abbott Diagnostics GmbH, Abbott Diagnostics International Ltd., Abbott Diagnostics Technologies AS, Abbott Doral Investments S.L., Abbott Equity Holdings Unlimited, Abbott Equity Investments LLC, Abbott Established Products Holdings (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Finance Company SA, Abbott Financial Holdings SRL, Abbott France S.A.S., Abbott Fund Tanzania Limited, Abbott Gesellschaft m.b.H., Abbott GmbH & Co. KG, Abbott Health Products LLC, Abbott Healthcare (Puerto Rico) Ltd., Abbott Healthcare B.V., Abbott Healthcare Costa Rica S.A., Abbott Healthcare LLC, Abbott Healthcare Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Healthcare Private Limited, Abbott Healthcare Products B.V., Abbott Healthcare Products Ltd, Abbott Holding (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding GmbH, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited Luxembourg S.C.S., Abbott Holdings B.V., Abbott Holdings LLC, Abbott Holdings Limited, Abbott Holdings Poland Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Hungary Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Abbott Iberian Investments (2) Limited, Abbott Iberian Investments Limited, Abbott India Limited, Abbott Informatics Asia Pacific Limited, Abbott Informatics Canada Inc, Abbott Informatics Corporation, Abbott Informatics Europe Limited, Abbott Informatics France, Abbott Informatics Germany GmbH, Abbott Informatics Netherlands B.V., Abbott Informatics Singapore Pte. Limited, Abbott Informatics Spain S.A., Abbott Informatics Technologies Ltd, Abbott International Corporation, Abbott International Enterprises Ltd., Abbott International Holdings Limited, Abbott International LLC, Abbott International Luxembourg S.ar.l., Abbott Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Ireland, Abbott Ireland Financing Designated Activity Company, Abbott Ireland Limited, Abbott Japan Co. Ltd., Abbott Kazakhstan Limited Liability Partnership, Abbott Knoll Investments B.V., Abbott Korea Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Bangladesh) Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco (Dos) SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Abbott Laboratories (Mozambique) Limitada, Abbott Laboratories (Pakistan) Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Philippines), Abbott Laboratories (Puerto Rico) Incorporated, Abbott Laboratories (Singapore) Private Limited, Abbott Laboratories A/S, Abbott Laboratories Argentina Sociedad Anonima, Abbott Laboratories B.V., Abbott Laboratories C.A., Abbott Laboratories Finance B.V., Abbott Laboratories GmbH, Abbott Laboratories Inc., Abbott Laboratories International LLC, Abbott Laboratories Ireland Limited, Abbott Laboratories Limited, Abbott Laboratories Limited - Laboratoires Abbott Limitee, Abbott Laboratories NZ Limited, Abbott Laboratories Pacific Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Poland Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Laboratories Products B.V., Abbott Laboratories Residential Development Fund Inc., Abbott Laboratories S.A., Abbott Laboratories SA, Abbott Laboratories Services Corp., Abbott Laboratories Slovakia s.r.o., Abbott Laboratories South Africa (Pty) Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Trustee Company Limited, Abbott Laboratories Uruguay S.A., Abbott Laboratories Vascular Enterprises, Abbott Laboratories d.o.o., Abbott Laboratories de Chile Limitada, Abbott Laboratories de Colombia S.A., Abbott Laboratories de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Abbott Laboratories druzba za farmacijo in diagnostiko d.o.o., Abbott Laboratories s.r.o., Abbott Laboratories(Hellas) Societe Anonyme, Abbott Laboratorios S.A., Abbott Laboratorios S.A., Abbott Laboratorios del Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Abbott Laboratuarlari Ithalat Ihracat ve Ticaret Ltd.Sti, Abbott Laboratorios Lda, Abbott Laboratorios do Brasil Ltda., Abbott Limited Egypt LLC, Abbott Logistics B.V., Abbott Management GmbH, Abbott Management LLC, Abbott Manufacturing Singapore Private Limited, Abbott Mature Products International Unlimited Company, Abbott Mature Products Management Limited, Abbott Medical (Hong Kong) Limited, Abbott Medical (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Abbott Medical (Portugal) Distribuicao de Produtos Medicos Lda, Abbott Medical (Schweiz) AG, Abbott Medical (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Abbott Medical (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Australia Pty. Ltd., Abbott Medical Austria Ges.m.b.H., Abbott Medical Balkan d.o.o. Beograd (Novi Beograd), Abbott Medical Belgium, Abbott Medical Canada Inc./ Medicale Abbott Canada Inc., Abbott Medical Danmark A/S, Abbott Medical Devices Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Espana S.A., Abbott Medical Estonia OU, Abbott Medical Finland Oy, Abbott Medical France SAS, Abbott Medical GmbH, Abbott Medical Hellas Limited Liability Trading Company, Abbott Medical Ireland Limited, Abbott Medical Italia S.p.A., Abbott Medical Japan Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Korea Limited, Abbott Medical Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Abbott Medical Laboratories LTD, Abbott Medical Nederland B.V., Abbott Medical New Zealand Limited, Abbott Medical Norway AS, Abbott Medical Overseas Cyprus Limited, Abbott Medical Sweden AB, Abbott Medical Taiwan Co., Abbott Medical U.K. Limited, Abbott Medical spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Middle East S.A.R.L., Abbott Molecular Inc., Abbott Morocco SARL, Abbott Nederland C.V., Abbott Nederland Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Netherlands Investments B.V., Abbott Norge AS, Abbott Nutrition Limited, Abbott Nutrition Manufacturing Inc., Abbott Operations Singapore Pte. Ltd., Abbott Operations Uruguay S.R.L., Abbott Overseas Cyprus Limited, Abbott Overseas Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Overseas S.A., Abbott Oy, Abbott Point of Care Canada Limited, Abbott Point of Care Inc., Abbott Poland Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Procurement LLC, Abbott Products (Philippines) Inc., Abbott Products (Spain) S.L., Abbott Products Algerie EURL, Abbott Products B.V., Abbott Products Distribution SAS, Abbott Products Egypt LLC, Abbott Products Limited, Abbott Products Limited Liability Company, Abbott Products Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Products Operations AG, Abbott Products Operations LLC, Abbott Products Romania S.R.L., Abbott Products Tunisie S.A.R.L., Abbott Products Unlimited Company, Abbott Resources Inc., Abbott Resources International Inc., Abbott S.r.l., Abbott Saudi Arabia Trading Company, Abbott Scandinavia Aktiebolag, Abbott Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, Abbott South Africa Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Strategic Opportunities Limited, Abbott Trading Company Inc., Abbott Universal LLC, Abbott Vascular Devices (2) Limited, Abbott Vascular Devices Limited, Abbott Vascular Inc., Abbott Vascular Instruments Deutschland GmbH, Abbott Vascular International, Abbott Vascular Japan Co. Ltd, Abbott Vascular Limitada, Abbott Vascular Netherlands B.V., Abbott Vascular Solutions Inc., Abbott Ventures Inc., Abbott West Indies Limited, Abbott drustvo sa ogranicenom odgovornoscu za trgovinu i usluge, Advanced Neuromodulation Systems Inc., Alere, Alere (Shanghai) Diagnostics Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Healthcare Management Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Medical Sales Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Technology Co. Ltd., Alere A/S, Alere AB, Alere AS, Alere AS Holdings Limited, Alere BBI Holdings Limited, Alere Bangladesh Limited, Alere China Co. Ltd., Alere Colombia S.A., Alere Connect LLC, Alere Connected Health Limited, Alere Connected Health Ltd., Alere Diagnostics GmbH, Alere DoA Holding GmbH, Alere GmbH, Alere GmbH (Austria), Alere GmbH (Germany), Alere HK Holdings Ltd., Alere Health B.V., Alere Health BVBA, Alere Health Corp., Alere Health Sdn Bhd, Alere Health Services B.V., Alere Healthcare (Pty) Limited, Alere Healthcare Connections Limited, Alere Healthcare Inc., Alere Healthcare Nigeria Limited, Alere Healthcare S.L., Alere Holdco Inc., Alere Holding GmbH, Alere Holdings Bermuda Limited, Alere Holdings Pty Limited, Alere Home Monitoring Inc., Alere Inc., Alere Informatics Inc., Alere International Holding Corp., Alere International Limited, Alere Lda, Alere Limited, Alere Limited (New Zealand), Alere Medical BVBA, Alere Medical Co. Ltd., Alere Medical Pakistan (Private) Limited, Alere Medical Private Limited, Alere North America LLC, Alere Oy Ab, Alere Philippines Inc., Alere Phoenix ACQ Inc., Alere Pte Ltd, Alere S.A., Alere S.r.l., Alere S/A, Alere SAS, Alere San Diego Inc., Alere Scarborough Inc., Alere Spain S.L., Alere Switzerland GmbH, Alere Technologies GmbH, Alere Technologies Holdings Limited, Alere Technologies Limited, Alere Toxicology AB, Alere Toxicology Inc., Alere Toxicology S.r.l., Alere Toxicology Services Inc., Alere Toxicology plc, Alere UK Holdings Limited, Alere UK Subco Limited, Alere ULC, Alere US Holdings LLC, Alere s.r.o., Alisoc Investment & Co, Amedica Biotech Inc., Ameditech Inc., American Generics S.A.S., American Medical Supplies Inc., American Pharmacist Inc., Antares S.A., Apica Cardiovascular Limited, Aquagestion Capacitacion S.A., Aquagestion S.A., Arriva Medical LLC, Arriva Medical Philippines Inc., Arvis Investments Limited, Atlas Farmaceutica S.A., Avee Laboratories Inc., Axis-Shield AD III AS, Axis-Shield AD IV AS, Axis-Shield AS, Axis-Shield Diagnostics Limited, Axis-Shield Ltd., BBI Animal Health Limited, BBI Diagnostics Group 2 Public Limited Company, Banco de Vida S.A., Bioabsorbable Vascular Solutions Inc., Bioalgae S.A., Biohealth LLC, Biosite Incorporated, Bosque Bonito S.A., Branan Medical Corporation, Brandex Europe C.V., British Colloids Limited, CFR Chile S.A., CFR Interamericas EL Salvador Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, CFR Interamericas Nicaragua Sociedad Anonima, CFR Interamericas Panama S.A., CFR Pharmaceuticals, California Property Holdings III LLC, CardioMEMS LLC, Caripharm Inc., Cephea Valve Technologies, Cephea Valve Technologies Inc., Colibri Medical Aktiebolag, Comercializadora y Distribuidora CFR Interamericas Honduras S.A., Concateno South Limited, Concateno UK Limited, Consorcio Tecnologico en Biomedicina Clinico-Molecular S.A., Continuum Services LLC, Cozart Limited, Dextech S.A., Diagnostik Nord GmbH, Distribuciones Uquifa S.A.S., Domesco Medical Import-Export Joint-Stock Corporation, Duphar International Research B.V., Endocardial Solutions, Epocal (US) Inc, Esprit de Vie S.A., European Chemicals & Co, European Drug Testing Service EDTS AB, European Services S.A., Evalve Inc., Evalve International Inc., FARMINDUSTRIA S.A., Fada Pharma Paraguay Sociedad Anonima, Fadapharma del Ecuador S.A., Farmaceutica Mont Blanc S.L., Farmacologia Em Aquicultura Veterinaria Ltda., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV Ecuador S.A., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV S.A., Fernwood Investment S.A., First Check Diagnostics LLC, Focus Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Forensics Limited, Forestcreek Overseas S.A., Fournier Pharma Corp., Fournier Pharma GmbH, Fournier Pharmaceuticals Limited, Framed B.V., Gabmed GmbH, Garden Hills LLC, Global Analytical Development LLC, Globapharm & CO LP, Glomed Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Golnorth Investments S.A., Gynocare Limited, Gynopharm Sociedad Anonima, Gynopharm de Centroamerica S.A., Gynopharm de Venezuela C.A., Hi-Tronics Designs Inc., IDEV Technologies Inc., IG Innovations Limited, IMTC Finance B.V., IMTC Holdings B.V., IMTC Technologies Inc., Ibis Biosciences LLC, Igloo Zone Chile S.A., Igloo Zone S.L., Inmobiliaria Naknek S.A.C., Innovacon Inc., Instant Tech Subsidiary Acquisition Inc., Instant Technologies Inc., Instituto de Criopreservacion de Chile S.A., Integrated Vascular Systems Inc., Inverness Canadian Acquisition Corporation, Inverness Medical (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Australia Pty Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Hong Kong Limited, Inverness Medical Innovations SK LLC, Inverness Medical Investments LLC, Inverness Medical LLC, Inverness Medical Shimla Private Limited, Inversiones K2 SpA, Inversiones Komodo S.R.L., Ionian Technologies LLC, Irvine Biomedical Inc., Kalila Medical, Kangshenyunga S.A., Knoll UK Investments Unlimited, LLC VeroInPharm, Laboratoires Fournier S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano Lafrancol S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano del Ecuador S.A., Laboratorio Internacional Argentino S.A., Laboratorio Synthesis S.A.S., Laboratorios Lafi Limitada, Laboratorios Naturmedik S.A.S., Laboratorios Pauly Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Laboratorios Recalcine S.A., Laboratorios Transpharm S.A., Laboratory Specialists of America Inc., Lafrancol Dominicana S.A.S., Lafrancol Guatemala S.A. Sociedad Anonima, Lafrancol Internacional S.A.S, Lafrancol Peru S.R.L, Lake Forest Investments LLC, Lightlab Imaging Inc., Limited Liability Company Abbott Laboratories, Limited Liability Company Abbott Ukraine, Limited Liability Company VEROPHARM, Lung Fung Hong (China) Limited, Mansbridge Pharmaceuticals Limited, MediGuide LLC, MediGuide Ltd., Medscreen Holdings Limited, Metropolitana Farmaceutica S.A., Midwest Properties LLC, Murex Argentina S.A., Murex Biotech Limited, Murex Biotech South Africa, Murex Diagnostics Inc., Murex Diagnostics International Inc., Natural Supplement Association LLC, Negocios Denia Sociedad Anonima, Neosalud S.A.C., Nether Pharma N.P. C.V., NeuroTherm LLC, Normann Pharma-Handels GmbH, North Shore Properties Inc., Novamedi S.A., Novasalud.com S.A., Nutravida S.A., OJSC Voronezhkhimpharm, Omnilab Iberia Sociedad Limitada, OptiMedica, Orgenics France SAS, Orgenics International Holdings B.V., Orgenics Ltd., PBM-Selfcare LLC, PDD II LLC, PDD LLC, PT Alere Health, PT. Abbott Indonesia, PT. Abbott Products Indonesia, Pacesetter Inc., Pantech (RF) (PTY) LTD, Pembrooke Occupational Health Inc., Penagos S.A., Pharma International Sociedad Anonima, Pharmaceutical Technologies (Pharmatech) S.A., Pharmatech Boliviana S.A., Polygon Labs S.A., Quality Assured Services Inc., RF Medical Holdings LLC, RTL Holdings Inc., Ramses Business Corp., Recben Xenerics Farmaceutica Limitada, Redwood Toxicology Laboratory Inc., Rich Horizons International Limited, SC VEROPHARM, SJ Medical Mexico S de R.L. de C.V., SJM International Inc., SJM Thunder Holding Company, SPDH Inc., Saboya Enterprises Corporation, Salviac Limited, Scanax AS, Sealing Solutions Inc., Selfcare Technology Inc., Shandong Abbott Dairy Product Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Medical Devices Science and Technology Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Shanghai Si Fa Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Sinensix & Co., Spinal Modulation LLC, St. Jude Medical, St. Jude Medical AB, St. Jude Medical ATG Inc., St. Jude Medical Argentina S.A., St. Jude Medical Asia Pacific Holdings GK, St. Jude Medical Atrial Fibrillation Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Brasil Ltda., St. Jude Medical Business Services Inc., St. Jude Medical Cardiology Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Colombia Ltda., St. Jude Medical Coordination Center, St. Jude Medical Costa Rica Limitada, St. Jude Medical Europe Inc., St. Jude Medical Export Ges.m.b.H., St. Jude Medical GVA Sarl, St. Jude Medical Holdings B.V., St. Jude Medical India Private Limited, St. Jude Medical International Holding, St. Jude Medical LLC, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings II, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings NT, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings SMI S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings TC S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Mexico Business Services S. de R.L. de C.V., St. Jude Medical Middle East DMCC, St. Jude Medical Operations (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., St. Jude Medical Puerto Rico LLC, St. Jude Medical S.C. Inc., St. Jude Medical Systems AB, St. Jude Medical Turkey Medikal Urunler Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Standard Diagnostics Inc., Standing Stone LLC, Swan-Myers Incorporated, TC1 LLC, Tendyne Holdings Inc., Tendyne Medical Inc., Thoratec Delaware LLC, Thoratec Europe Limited, Thoratec LLC, Thoratec Switzerland GmbH, Tobal Products Incorporated, Topera GmbH in Liquidation, Topera Inc., Tremora S.A., Tuenir S.A., TwistDx, UAB Abbott Laboratories, UAB Abbott Medical Lithuania, Union-Madison Realty Company Inc., Unipath Limited (dba Alere International/aka Cranfield), Unipath Management Limited, Unipath Pension Trustee Limited, Veropharm, Veropharm Limited Liability Partnership, Vida Cell Inversiones S.A., Vida Cell S.A., Vivalsol, W&R Pharma Handels GmbH, Western Pharmaceuticals S.A., X Technologies Inc., Yissum Holding Limited, ZonePerfect Nutrition Company, eScreen Canada ULC, eScreen Inc.,      ( ), and Abbott Laboratories Baltics.Africa Energy Corp. operates as an oil and gas exploration and production company in South Africa and Namibia. It holds a 90% interest in the Exploration Right for Block 2B offshore that covers an area of 3,062 square kilometers located in the west coast of South Africa; 43.85% interest in the Petroleum Exploration License 37 covering an area of 17,295 square kilometers located in the northern Namibian offshore region; and 49% interest in the Exploration Right for Block 11B/12B covering an area of approximately 19,000 square kilometers located in the Outeniqua Basin off the southern coast of South Africa. The company was formerly known as Horn Petroleum Corporation and changed its name to Africa Energy Corp. in March 2015. Africa Energy Corp. was incorporated in 2010 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.

Read More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.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. Ltd., AIG Asset Management (Europe) Limited, AIG Asset Management (U.S.) LLC, AIG Assurance Company, AIG Australia Limited, AIG Brazil Holding I LLC, AIG CIS Investments LLC, AIG Canada Holdings Inc., AIG Capital Corporation, AIG Capital Services Inc., AIG Claims Inc., AIG Egypt Insurance Company S.A.E., AIG Employee Services Inc., AIG Europe (Services) Limited, AIG Europe Holdings S.a.rl., AIG Europe S.A., AIG Federal Savings Bank, AIG Financial Products Corp., AIG General Insurance Co. Ltd., AIG Global Asset Management Holdings Corp., AIG Global Real Estate Investment Corp., AIG Global Reinsurance Operations, AIG Holdings Europe Limited, AIG Insurance (Thailand) Public Company Limited, AIG Insurance Company China Limited, AIG Insurance Company JSC, AIG Insurance Company of Canada, AIG Insurance Company-Puerto Rico, AIG Insurance Hong Kong Limited, AIG Insurance Limited, AIG Insurance Management Services Inc., AIG Insurance New Zealand Limited, AIG International Holdings GmbH, AIG Investments UK Limited, AIG Israel Insurance Company Ltd, AIG Japan Holdings Kabushiki Kaisha, AIG Kenya Insurance Company Limited, AIG Korea Inc., AIG Latin America I.I., AIG Latin America Investments S.L., AIG Lebanon SAL, AIG Life Holdings Inc., AIG Life Insurance Company (Switzerland) Ltd, AIG Life Limited, AIG Life South Africa Limited, AIG Life of Bermuda Ltd., AIG MEA Holdings Limited, AIG MEA Limited, AIG Malaysia Insurance Berhad, AIG Markets Inc., AIG Matched Funding Corp., AIG PC Global Services Inc., AIG Philippines Insurance Inc., AIG Property Casualty Company, AIG Property Casualty Inc., AIG Property Casualty International LLC, AIG Property Casualty U.S. Inc., AIG Re-Takaful (L) Berhad, AIG Resseguros Brasil S.A., AIG Seguros Brasil S.A., AIG Seguros Mexico S.A. de C.V., AIG Shared Services Corporation, AIG South Africa Limited, AIG Specialty Insurance Company, AIG Technologies Inc., AIG Travel Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., AIG Travel Assist Inc., AIG Travel Assist Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., AIG Travel EMEA Limited, AIG Travel Inc., AIG Uganda Limited, AIG Vietnam Insurance Company Limited, AIG WarrantyGuard Inc., AIG-FP Pinestead Holdings Corp., AIG-Metropolitana Cia. de Seguros y Reaseguros S.A., AIGGRE EOLA LLC, AIGGRE Europe Real Estate Fund I GP S.a r.l., AIGGRE U.S. Real Estate Fund I GP LLC, AIGGRE U.S. Real Estate Fund I LP, AIGGRE U.S. Real Estate Fund II GP LLC, AIU Insurance Company, AM Holdings LLC, Ageas Protect, AlphaCat Managers Ltd., American General Corporation, American General Life Insurance Company, American Home Assurance Co. Ltd., American Home Assurance Company, American Home Assurance Company Escritorio de Representacao no Brasil Ltda., American International Group Inc., American International Group UK Limited, American International Overseas Association, American International Overseas Limited, American International Realty Corp., American International Reinsurance Company Ltd., American International Underwriters del Ecuador-Holding S.A., American Security Life Insurance Company Limited, Arthur J. Glatfelter Agency Inc., Avondhu Limited, Blackboard Customer Care Insurance Services LLC, Blackboard Insurance Company, Blackboard Services LLC, Blackboard Specialty Insurance Company, Blackboard U.S. Holdings Inc., Chartis Takaful Enaya B.S.C. (c), Commerce and Industry Insurance Company, Crop Risk Services Inc., Eaglestone Reinsurance Company, Ellipse, Fortitude Group Holdings LLC, Fortitude Life & Annuity Solutions Inc., Fortitude Reinsurance Company Ltd., Franklin Life Insurance Company, Fuji Fire and Marine, Glatfelter Insurance Group, Globe and Rutgers Insurance Group, Grand Isle SAC Limited, Granite State Insurance Company, Group Risk Services Limited, Group Risk Technologies Limited, Illinois National Insurance Co., Jefferson Eola Venture LLC, Johannesburg Insurance Holdings (Proprietary) Limited, Laya Healthcare Limited, Lexington Insurance Company, MG Reinsurance Limited, Mt. Mansfield Company Inc., National Union Fire Insurance Company of Pittsburgh Pa., National Union Fire Insurance Company of Vermont, New Hampshire Insurance Company, PT AIG Insurance Indonesia, Pine Street Real Estate Holdings Corp., Private Joint-Stock Company AIG Ukraine Insurance Company, Risk Specialists Companies Insurance Agency Inc., SA Affordable Housing LLC, SAFG Retirement Services Inc., Service Net Warranty LLC, Stratford Insurance Company, SunAmerica Affordable Housing Partners Inc., SunAmerica Asset Management LLC, Talbot Holdings Ltd., Talbot Underwriting Holdings Ltd., Talbot Underwriting Ltd., Thai CIT Holding Company Limited, The Insurance Company of the State of Pennsylvania, The United States Life Insurance Company in the City of New York, The Variable Annuity Life Insurance Company, Travel Guard, Travel Guard Group Canada Inc./Groupe Garde Voyage du Canada Inc., Travel Guard Group Inc., Tudor Insurance Company, VALIC Financial Advisors Inc., Valic Retirement Services Company, Validus Holdings, Validus Holdings (UK) Ltd., Validus Holdings Ltd., Validus Reinsurance (Switzerland) Ltd, Validus Reinsurance Ltd., Validus Ventures Ltd., Volunteer Firemen's Insurance Services Inc., Western World Insurance Company, and Western World Insurance Group Inc..Medtronic Plc is a medical technology company, which engages in the development, manufacture, distribution, and sale of device-based medical therapies and services. It operates through the following segments: Cardiac and Vascular Group; Minimally Invasive Technologies Group; Restorative Therapies Group; and Diabetes Group. The Cardiac and Vascular Group segment consists of products for the diagnosis, treatment, and management of cardiac rhythm disorders and cardiovascular disease. The Minimally Invasive Technologies Group segment focuses on respiratory system, gastrointestinal tract, renal system, lungs, pelvic region, kidneys, and obesity diseases. The Restorative Therapies Group segment comprises of neurostimulation therapies and drug delivery systems for the treatment of chronic pain, as well as areas of the spine and brain, along with pelvic health and conditions of the ear, nose, and throat. The Diabetes Group segment offers insulin pumps, coninuous glucose monitoring systems, and insulin pump consumables. The company was founded in 1949 and is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland.

Read MoreBank of America Corp. is a bank and financial holding company, which engages in the provision of banking and nonbank financial services. It operates through the following segments: Consumer Banking, Global Wealth and Investment Management, Global Banking, Global Markets, and All Other. The Consumer Banking segment offers credit, banking, and investment products and services to consumers and small businesses. The Global Wealth and Investment Management provides client experience through a network of financial advisors focused on to meet their needs through a full set of investment management, brokerage, banking, and retirement products. The Global Banking segment deals with lending-related products and services, integrated working capital management and treasury solutions to clients, and underwriting and advisory services. The Global Markets segment includes sales and trading services, as well as research, to institutional clients across fixed-income, credit, currency, commodity, and equity businesses. The All Other segment consists of asset and liability management activities, equity investments, non-core mortgage loans and servicing activities, the net impact of periodic revisions

Read MoreWall Street analysts have given BlackRock Floating Rate Income Trust a "N/A" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but BlackRock Floating Rate Income Trust wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.Raymond James Financial, Inc., a financial holding company, through its subsidiaries, engages in the underwriting, distribution, trading, and brokerage of equity and debt securities, and the sale of mutual funds and other investment products in the United States, Canada, Europe, and internationally. The company operates through Private Client Group, Capital Markets, Asset Management, RJ Bank, and Other segments. The Private Client Group segment provides securities brokerage services, including the sale of equities, mutual funds, fixed income products, and insurance products to their individual clients; and borrowing and lending of securities to and from other broker-dealers, financial institutions, and other counterparties. The Capital Markets segment offers securities brokerage, trading, and research services to institutions with a focus on sale of the United States and Canadian equities and fixed income products; and manages and participates in underwritings, merger and acquisition services, and public finance activities. The Asset Management segment engages in the operations of Eagle, the Eagle Family of Funds, Cougar, the asset management operations of Raymond James & Associates, trust services of Raymond James Trust, and other fee-based asset management programs. The RJ Bank segment provides corporate loans, SBL, tax-exempt loans, and residential loans. The Other segment engages in private equity activities, including various direct and third party private equity investments; and private equity funds. Raymond James Financial, Inc. was founded in 1962 and is based in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of Carnival Co. &: 1972 Productions Inc., 6348 Equipment LLC, A.C.N. 098 290 834 Pty. Ltd., A.J. Juneau Dock LLC, AIDA Kundencenter GmbH, Adventure Island Ltd., Air-Sea Holiday GmbH, Alaska Hotel Properties LLC, Barcelona Cruise Terminal SLU, Bay Island Cruise Port S.A., Belize Cruise Terminal Limited, CC U.S. Ventures Inc., CCL Gifts LLC, CSSC Carnival Italy Cruise Investment S.r.L, Carnival (UK) Limited, Carnival Bahamas FC Limited, Carnival Bahamas Holdings Limited, Carnival Corporation & plc Asia Pte. Ltd., Carnival Corporation Hong Kong Limited, Carnival Corporation Korea Ltd., Carnival Corporation Ports Group Japan KK, Carnival Finance LLC, Carnival Grand Bahama Investment Limited, Carnival Investments Limited, Carnival Japan Inc., Carnival License Holdings Limited, Carnival Maritime GmbH, Carnival North America LLC, Carnival Port Holdings Limited, Carnival Ports Inc., Carnival Support Services India Private Limited, Carnival Technical Services (UK) Limited, Carnival Technical Services Finland Limited, Carnival Technical Services GmbH, Carnival Technical Services Inc., Carnival Vanuatu Limited, Costa Crociere PTE Ltd., Costa Crociere S.p.A., Costa Cruceros S.A., Costa Cruise Lines Inc., Costa Cruise Lines UK Limited, Costa Cruises Shipping Services (Shanghai) Company Limited, Costa Cruises Travel Agency (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Costa Cruzeiros Agencia Maritima e Turismo Ltda., Costa Group Digital & Strategic Services GmbH, Costa International B.V., Costa Kreuzfahrten GmbH, Cozumel Cruise Terminal S.A. de C.V., Creative Travel Lab Ltd., Cruise Ships Catering & Services International N.V., Cruise Terminal Services S.A. de C.V., Cruiseport Curacao C.V., D.R. Cruise Port Ltd., Ecospray Technologies S.r.L., F.P.M. SAS, F.P.P. SAS, Fleet Maritime Services (Bermuda) Limited, Fleet Maritime Services Holdings (Bermuda) Limited, Fleet Maritime Services International Limited, GXI LLC, Gibs Inc., Global Experience Innovators Inc., Global Fine Arts Inc., Global Shipping Service (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Grand Cruise Shipping Unipessoal LdA, Grand Turk Cruise Center Ltd., HAL Antillen N.V., HAL Beheer B.V., HAL Cruises Limited, HAL Maritime Ltd., HAL Nederland N.V., HAL Properties Limited, HAL Services B.V., HSE Hamburg School of Entertainment GmbH, Holding Division Iberocruceros SLU, Holland America Line Inc., Holland America Line N.V., Holland America Line Paymaster of Washington LLC, Holland America Line U.S.A. Inc., Ibero Cruzeiros Ltda., Iberocruceros SLU, Information Assistance Corporation, International Cruise Services S.A. de C.V., International Leisure Travel Inc., International Maritime Recruitment Agency S.A. de C.V., Milestone N.V., Navitrans S.R.L., Ocean Bahamas Innovation Ltd., Ocean Medallion Fulfillment Ltd., Operadora Catalina S.r.L., P&O Princess American Holdings, P&O Princess Cruises International Limited, P&O Princess Cruises Pension Trustee Limited, P&O Properties (California) Inc., P&O Travel Limited, Prestige Cruises Management S.A.M., Prestige Cruises N.V., Princess Bermuda Holdings Ltd., Princess Cays Ltd., Princess Cruise Corporation Inc., Princess Cruise Lines Ltd., Princess Cruises and Tours Inc., Princess U.S. Holdings Inc., RCT Maintenance & Related Services S.A., RCT Pilots & Related Services S.A., RCT Security & Related Services S.A., Roatan Cruise Terminal S.A. de C.V., Royal Hyway Tours Inc., Santa Cruz Terminal S.L., SeaVacations Limited, SeaVacations UK Limited, Seabourn Cruise Line Limited, Shanghai Coast Cruise Consulting Co. Lda, Ship Care (Bahamas) Limited, Sitmar Cruises Inc., Spanish Cruise Services N.V., Sunshine Shipping Corporation Ltd., T&T International Inc., Tour Alaska LLC, Transnational Services Corporation, Trident Insurance Company Ltd., Westmark Hotels Inc., Westmark Hotels of Canada Ltd., Westours Motor Coaches LLC, Wind Surf Limited, and World Leading Cruise Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd..The following companies are subsidiares of Exxon Mobil: AKG Marketing Company Limited, Aera Energy LLC, Al-Jubail Petrochemical Company, Ampolex (Cepu) Pte Ltd, Ancon Insurance Company Inc., Barnett Gathering LLC, Barzan Gas Company Limited, Caspian Pipeline Consortium, Celtic Exploration Ltd., Coral FLNG S.A., Cross Timbers Energy LLC, Ellora Energy Inc., Esmeroon Oil Transporta Imperial Oil Limited, Esso (Thailand) Public Company Limited, Esso Australia Resources Pty Ltd, Esso Deutschland GmbH, Esso Erdgas Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 15) Limited, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 17) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Angola (Overseas) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Chad Inc., Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria (Deepwater) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria (Offshore East) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria Limited, Esso Exploration and Production UK Limited, Esso Global Investments Ltd., Esso Italiana S.r.l., Esso Nederland B.V., Esso Norge AS, Esso Petroleum Company Limited, Esso Raffinage, Esso Societe Anonyme Francaise, Exxo Holdings Inc., Exxon Azerbaijan Limited, Exxon Chemical Arabia Inc., Exxon International Finance Company, Exxon Luxembourg Holdings LLC, Exxon Mobile Bay Limited Partnership, Exxon Neftegas Limited, Exxon Overseas Corporation, Exxon Overseas Investment Corporation, ExxonMobil (China) Investment Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil (Taicang) Petroleum Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil Abu Dhabi Offshore Petroleum Company Limited, ExxonMobil Alaska Production Inc., ExxonMobil Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., ExxonMobil Australia Pty Ltd, ExxonMobil B Resources Company, ExxonMobil Capital Finance Company, ExxonMobil Capital Netherlands B.V., ExxonMobil Central Europe Holding GmbH, ExxonMobil Cepu Limited, ExxonMobil Chemical France, ExxonMobil Chemical Gulf Coast Investments LLC, ExxonMobil Chemical Holland B.V., ExxonMobil Chemical Services (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil China Petroleum & Petrochemical Company Limited, ExxonMobil Development Africa B.V., ExxonMobil Development Company, ExxonMobil Egypt (S.A.E.), ExxonMobil Exploracao Brasil Ltda., ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Malaysia Inc., ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Norway AS, ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Romania Limited, ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Tanzania Limited, ExxonMobil Finance Company Limited, ExxonMobil Financial Investment Company Limited, ExxonMobil France Holding SAS, ExxonMobil Gas Marketing Europe Limited, ExxonMobil General Finance Company, ExxonMobil Global Services Company, ExxonMobil Golden Pass Surety LLC, ExxonMobil Holding Company Holland LLC, ExxonMobil Holding Norway AS, ExxonMobil Hong Kong Limited, ExxonMobil International Services SARL, ExxonMobil Iraq Limited, ExxonMobil Italiana Gas S.r.l., ExxonMobil Kazakhstan Inc., ExxonMobil Kazakhstan Ventures Inc., ExxonMobil LNG Services B.V., ExxonMobil Lubricants Trading Company, ExxonMobil Oil Corporation, ExxonMobil PNG Limited, ExxonMobil Petroleum & Chemical BVBA, ExxonMobil Petroleum & Chemical Holdings Inc., ExxonMobil Pipeline Company, ExxonMobil Production Deutschland GmbH, ExxonMobil Production Norway Inc., ExxonMobil Qatargas (II) Limited, ExxonMobil Qatargas Inc., ExxonMobil Ras Laffan (III) Limited, ExxonMobil Rasgas Inc., ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company, ExxonMobil Russia Kara Sea Holdings B.V., ExxonMobil Sales and Supply LLC, ExxonMobil Technology Finance Company, ExxonMobil Ventures Finance Company, ExxonMobil Ventures Funding Ltd., Fujian Refining & Petrochemical Co. Ltd., Golden Pass LNG Terminal Investments LLC, Golden Pass LNG Terminal LLC, Gulf Coast Growth Ventures LLC, Imperial Oil Limited, Imperial Oil Resources Limited, Imperial Oil Resources N.W.T. Limited, Imperial Oil/Petroliere Imperiale, Infineum Italia s.r.I., Infineum Singapore Pte. Ltd., InterOil Corporation, Jurong Aromatics Corporation Pte Ltd, MPM Lubricants, Marine Well Containment Company LLC, Mobil Australia Resources Company Pty Limited, Mobil California Exploration & Producing Asset Company, Mobil Caspian Pipeline Company, Mobil Chemical Products International Inc., Mobil Corporation, Mobil Equatorial Guinea Inc., Mobil Erdgas Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Mobil Exploration & Producing Australia Pty Ltd, Mobil International Petroleum Corporation, Mobil Oil Australia Pty Ltd, Mobil Oil Exploration & Producing Southeast Inc., Mobil Oil New Zealand Limited, Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited, Mobil Producing Texas & New Mexico Inc., Mobil SerLimited, Mobil Venezolana De Petroleos Inc., Mobil Yanbu Petrochemical Company Inc., Mobil Yanbu Refining Company Inc., Mountain Gathering LLC, Mozambique Rovuma Venture S.p.A., Palmetto Transoceanic LLC, Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas Global Company LDC, Permian Express Partners LLC, Phillips Exploration LLC, Qatar Liquefied Gas Company Limited, Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas Company Limited, Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas Company Limited (II), SPI Limited, Saudi Aramco Mobil Refinery Company Ltd., Saudi Yanbu Petrochemical Co., SeaRiver Maritime Inc., South Hook LNG Terminal Company Limited, Tengizchevroil LLP, Terminale GNL Adriatico S.r.l, Trend Gathering & Treating LLC, Wolverine Pipe Line Company, XH LLC, XTO Delaware Basin LLC, XTO ENERGY, XTO Energy Canada, and XTO Holdings LLC.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.The Bank of New York Mellon pays an annual dividend of $1.36 per share and currently has a dividend yield of 2.30%. 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 30.22% 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.The following companies are subsidiares of PerkinElmer: Analytica of Branford, Applied Biosystems, Arnel Inc., ArtusLabs, Beijing Huaan Magnech Bio-Tech Co. Ltd., Beijing Longrun Bio-Tech Co. Ltd., Beijing Meizheng Bio-Tech Co. Ltd., Beijing Meizheng Testing Lab Co. Ltd., Beijing OUMENG Biotechnology Co. Ltd., Bio Evolution SAS, Bioo Scientific Corporation, Biosense Picolabs Inc., Biosense Technologies Pvt Ltd., Caliper Life Sciences, Caliper Life Sciences Inc., Cambridge Research & Instrumentation Inc., CambridgeSoft, Ceiba Solutions, Chengdu PerkinElmer Medical Laboratory Co. Ltd., Chromo G.A. SAS, CisBio US Inc., Cisbio Asia Pacific Ltd, Cisbio Bioassays SAS, Cisbio China Ltd., Cisbio Group SAS, Cisbio KK, Cisbio.com, DNA Laboratories Sdn. Bhd., Dani Analitica S.r.l., Dexela, EUROIMMUN (Hangzhou) Medical Laboratory Diagnostics Co. Ltd., EUROIMMUN (South East Asia) Pte Ltd., EUROIMMUN (Tianjin) Medical Diagnostic Technology Co. Ltd., EUROIMMUN AG, EUROIMMUN Brasil Medicina Diagnostica Ltda., EUROIMMUN Diagnostics Espana S.L.U., EUROIMMUN France SAS, EUROIMMUN Italia Diagnostica Medica S.r.l., EUROIMMUN Japan Co. Ltd., EUROIMMUN Medical Diagnostics (China) Co. Ltd., EUROIMMUN Medical Diagnostics Canada Inc., EUROIMMUN Medical Laboratory Diagnostics South Africa (Pty) Ltd., EUROIMMUN Medizinische Labordiagnostika AG, EUROIMMUN Polska Spolka z o.o., EUROIMMUN Portugal Unipessoal Lda., EUROIMMUN Schweiz AG, EUROIMMUN Turkey Tibbi Laboratuar Teshisleri A.S., EUROIMMUN UK Ltd., EUROIMMUN US Inc., EUROIMMUN US Real Estate LLC, Geospiza, Guangzhou EUROIMMUN Medical Diagnostic Products Co. Ltd., Hangzhou EUROIMMUN Medical Diagnostic Products Co. Ltd., Horizon Discovery, Immunodiagnostic Systems, Integromics S.L., Jiangsu Meizheng Bio-Tech Co. Ltd., LabMetrix Technologies, Labtronics, ManCell SAS, Nexcelom Bioscience, NovaScreen Biosciences Corporation, Opto Technology, Orchid Biomedical Systems Pvt Ltd., Oxford Immunotec, Pediatrix Medical Group - Newborn Metabolic Screening Business, Perkin Elmer Chile Ltda., Perkin Elmer Italia SpA, Perkin Elmer Sdn. Bhd., Perkin Elmer Yuhan Hoesa, Perkin Elmer de Mexico S.A., Perkin-Elmer Argentina S.R.L., Perkin-Elmer Instruments (Philippines) Corporation, PerkinElmer (Hong Kong) Ltd., PerkinElmer (India) Pvt Ltd., PerkinElmer (Ireland) Ltd., PerkinElmer (Schweiz) AG, PerkinElmer (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund L.P., PerkinElmer (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Co. Ltd., PerkinElmer (UK) Holdings Ltd., PerkinElmer Analytical Solutions B.V., PerkinElmer Automotive Research Inc., PerkinElmer BVBA, PerkinElmer CV Holdings LLC, PerkinElmer Cellular Technologies Germany GmbH, PerkinElmer Danmark A/S, PerkinElmer Diagnostics Global Holdings S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Diagnostics Holdings Inc., PerkinElmer Espana S.L., PerkinElmer Finance Luxembourg S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Finland Oy, PerkinElmer Genetics Inc., PerkinElmer Germany Diagnostics GmbH, PerkinElmer Global Diagnostics S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Global Financing S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Global Holdings S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Health Sciences (Australia) Pty. Ltd., PerkinElmer Health Sciences B.V., PerkinElmer Health Sciences Canada Inc., PerkinElmer Health Sciences FZ-LLC, PerkinElmer Health Sciences Inc., PerkinElmer Health Sciences Pvt Ltd., PerkinElmer Healthcare Diagnostics (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PerkinElmer Holding Luxembourg S.a r.l., PerkinElmer Holdings Inc., PerkinElmer Holdings Pty. Ltd., PerkinElmer IVD Pte Ltd., PerkinElmer Inc., PerkinElmer Informatics Inc., PerkinElmer Instruments (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., PerkinElmer International C.V., PerkinElmer Investments Ky, PerkinElmer Israel Ltd., PerkinElmer Japan Co. Ltd., PerkinElmer LAS (Germany) GmbH, PerkinElmer LAS (UK) Ltd., PerkinElmer Life Sciences International Holdings, PerkinElmer Limited, PerkinElmer Ltd., PerkinElmer Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PerkinElmer Nederland B.V., PerkinElmer Norge AS, PerkinElmer Oy, PerkinElmer Polska Sp z o.o., PerkinElmer Pty. Ltd., PerkinElmer SAS, PerkinElmer Saglk ve Cevre Bilimleri Ltd., PerkinElmer Shared Services Sp z o.o., PerkinElmer Singapore Pte Ltd., PerkinElmer South Africa (Pty) Ltd., PerkinElmer Sverige AB, PerkinElmer Sweden Health Sciences Holdings AB, PerkinElmer Taiwan Corporation, PerkinElmer VertriebsgmbH, PerkinElmer chemagen Technologie GmbH, PerkinElmer do Brasil Ltda., Perten Instruments, Perten Instruments (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Perten Instruments AB, Perten Instruments France SASU, Perten Instruments GmbH, Perten Instruments Italia S.r.l., Perten Instruments of Australia Pty Ltd., RHS Ltd, RayAl Ltd., Shandong Meizheng Bio-Tech Co. Ltd., Shanghai Haoyuan Biotech Co. Ltd., Shanghai Spectrum Instruments Co. Ltd., Shanghai Spectrum Instruments Co. Ltd., Signature Genomic Laboratories, Solus Scientific Solutions Inc., Solus Scientific Solutions Ltd., Surendra Genetic Labs, Suzhou PerkinElmer Medical Laboratory Co. Ltd., Suzhou Sym-Bio LifeScience, Suzhou Sym-Bio Lifescience Co. Ltd., Tulip Diagnostics, Tulip Diagnostics Pvt Ltd., Vanadis Diagnostics, Vanadis Diagnostics AB, ViaCell, ViaCord LLC, VisEn Medical, VisEn Medical Inc., Wallac Oy, Wellesley B.V., Xenogen Corporation, ZeLab SAS, and chemagen Biopolymer-Technologie AG.National Bank of Canada engages in the provision of commercial banking and financial services. It operates through the following segments: Personal and Commercial, Wealth Management, Financial Markets, US Specialty Finance and International (USSF&I), and Other. The Personal and Commercial segment involves in banking, financing, and investing services offered to individuals and businesses as well as insurance operations. The Wealth Management segment focuses on the investment solutions, trust and lending services, and other wealth management solutions offered through internal and third-party distribution networks. The Financial Markets segment includes banking and investment banking services and financial solutions for large and mid-size corporations, public sector organizations, and institutional investors. The USSF&I segment comprises specialty finance expertise activities of subsidiary ABA Bank, which offers financial products and services to individuals and businesses; and activities of targeted investments in certain emerging markets. 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Read MoreThe sextoy market is growing quite rapidly in India right now.

Although it is not a big trend, it is a hot topic on the internet as it is secretly expanding its market.

In this article, we will focus on sextoy and introduce recommended sextoy for Indian beginners of sextoy by gender.

India, the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, is very strict about sex.

Also, premarital sex is basically not allowed. Therefore, there are many people who are sexually restricted.

But what happens when you continue to be sexually restricted?

Frustration may build up and you may end up taking your sexual stress out on your partner.

If you are able to adopt sextoy in a timely manner, you can get rid of those problems.

I want to have more exciting sex than Im having now.

I want more variation in masturbation

I want to get even stronger pleasure than I do on my own.

If you have any of these problems, please stay with me until the end.

What is sex toys for Indian?

Sextoy, as the name implies, is a toy used during sex and masturbation.

It is a generic term for vibrators, Egg-vibrators, Electric massagers, dildo, handcuffs and condoms.

They are used to make regular sex more exciting or to make masturbation more pleasurable.

Because sextoy is very stimulating, it can help you to get rid of the problems and frustrations of being in a rut of sex with your partner for a long time, or if you are unhappy with the lack of pleasure in sex with your partner.

The ability to satisfy your desires with movement, texture, and size, which cannot be done by a normal human being, can help you to be satisfied with sex and, as a result, improve your relationship with your partner.

It is also said to help improve sexual dysfunction (inability to get an erection or ejaculate) and difficulty in feeling during sex (insensitivity), which is attracting more attention than in the past.

In recent years, the demand for sextoy has increased due to the spread of smartphones and the Internet and the increasing number of people using online shopping.

Even those who are concerned about the appearance of sextoy (and find it difficult to purchase) can now easily obtain it by using mail order.

In the case of online shopping, most of the stores have taken steps to ensure that the contents of the products delivered to you are not revealed, so you can purchase them without your family members knowing.

Until a while ago, you had to go to the store where the adult goods were sold to buy them, so it was quite a hurdle to overcome.

Also, many people may have an image that sextoy is somehow embarrassing to own.

But nowadays, some of them are so stylish and cute that you cant believe they are sextoy at a glance.

More and more people are using them for travel and outdoor use because they are not too bulky and are suitable for carrying around.

Sextoy situation in India

Before introducing the recommended sextoy for Indians, lets talk about one of the sextoy situations in India in recent years.

In India, due to the high concentration of population, the following six cities have particularly high sales of sextoy in India.

Mumbai

Kolkata

Bangalore

Delhi

Chennai

Hyderabad

These cities account for roughly 70 percent of sextoy sales in India.

In the future, the percentage of sextoy use will gradually increase in other cities in India as well.

If you never talk about sextoy publicly, that girl in your neighborhood might be a sextoy user too.

If you are interested in sextoy, you dont have to suppress your desire for it.

What are Sextoys for beginner?

Among all sextoys, sextoy for beginners are vibrators, dildo, masturbators, Sex Lubricants, and condoms.

Sex Lubricants and condoms, which are familiar to people who have had sex, are also a great beginners sextoy.

I will explain the details of each toy later, but there are many sextoy products that are painful to use and can only be used after some anal expansion.

I assume that the Indian readers of this article are people who have not had much experience with sextoy.

If such people use professional sextoy suddenly, they are at risk of injury or trauma.

Therefore, to introduce sextoy, you need to start with a beginners version and gradually become familiar with it.

Advantages of using sextoy for Indians

There are three advantages of using sextoy for Indians

You can masturbate in a wide variety of ways.

Can have stimulating sex

Can develop new sexual zones

If you try to masturbate with your own fingers or hands, it tends to be a pattern.

However, with sextoy, you can easily masturbate in a variety of ways.

You will definitely be fascinated by the attraction of new stimulation.

Also, your daily sex life will be more exciting than ever.

There are many things in sextoy that are visually stimulating and give you a strong and intense feeling of pleasure.

This allows you to see your partners promiscuity in a way that you wouldnt normally see it.

When you are in a relationship, sex with your partner may become a pattern, but it can also eliminate these problems.

It can also lead to the development of new sexual zones (which is the training of sexual stimulation to allow you to feel orgasms).

For more information on the development of new sexual zones, see the following articles

[Women's Erogenous Zone]How to find and develop, 7 hidden sexual zones !![In India] In this issue, we will dissect the female erogenous zone! ..." Many of you may be like that. Men, in particular, shou...

Thus, the use of sextoy can only be a good thing for the men and women of India.

Sextoy for beginner men in India

So, lets continue with the recommended goods for Indian sextoy beginners.

For ease of understanding, we will introduce them by gender. Lets start with the men!

The following five goods are recommended for novice Indian sextoy men

Masturbator

Cock rings

Love Doll

Sex Lubricants

Toys for the prostate

Lets check each one in detail.

Masturbator

The masturbator is a sextoy for men that elaborately reproduces a womans vagina, mouth, and anus, and is one of the most popular sextoy products.

It is used by men to masturbate, and it is popular because it provides stronger stimulation and pleasure more easily than using hands.

Most are made of good quality silicone, and their softness is something that cannot be achieved with ones own hands.

They can provide stronger pleasure than a real womans vagina, so be careful not to overuse them. (You wont be able to have an orgasm in a womans vagina anymore.)

Again Male masturbators are a wonderful toy. I do not need any favourite timing, bothersome bargaining. You do not have to worry too much.

Revolutionize your masturbation time! ! !

Made in Japan is a wonderful kinky toy.#sextoysindia #SexToyIndia #Japanhttps://t.co/4k70QGzoTP pic.twitter.com/tRVdxTKPpa   SEXToys India PR  (@SextoysIndia) November 12, 2018

Some of them are disposable, while others can be washed and used over and over again, so its fun to buy a few to use depending on your mood.

If you want to know more about masturbator, please click here

Really pleasant male masturbation and how to do it Are you in a rut with your daily masturbation routine? I'm going to show you five ways men masturbate that you might ...

[For Beginners] How to choose and use a male masturbator without fail Gentlemen.Have you ever used a masturbator? The person who sees this article is probably the one who has not experien...

Cock Ring

A cock ring is literally a ring-shaped sextoy that is worn on a mans penis.

It maintains an erection by binding the penis with a ring of rubber and blocking blood flow.

It is sometimes used as an accessory to be worn on the penis, and may be made of metal or plastic as well as rubber.

In some cases, cock rings have parts or vibrators attached to them that stimulate the vagina, so they kill two birds with one stone, giving a woman pleasure while maintaining an erection.

Cock rings are also sometimes used to treat erectile dysfunction.

It can help with erectile dysfunction, where the penis doesnt get hard when you get an erection or doesnt last long when you try to insert it.

Men who are prone to breakage or who are unsure of the hardness and size of their erections can use a cock ring to increase the size of their penis and maintain an erection for a longer period of time.

Cock rings vary in price from around RS700 to over RS2000 with a vibrator function.

Some of them do not fit your penis, so you should check the size of the cock ring before you buy.

You should know the size of your partners or your own penis when it is erect.

[Penis enlargement] What is a cock ring? Types and usage Cock rings can make your penis bigger and harder. It also makes sex with women more fulfilling and increases your sat...

Love Doll

Love dolls, also known as Dutchwives, are dolls with the appearance of a woman who can experience simulated sex.

There are dolls that look like a woman, but they have no face and only have their breasts and lower torso cut off, and some dolls are so realistic that they can actually be mistaken for real women.

Some expensive dolls can cost more than 1 million yen, and the quality of the doll is easily influenced by the price.

The higher the price, the higher the quality of the doll will be, the closer it will be to the real woman, and the cheaper the doll will be, the less elaborate it will be, making it look like a real doll! Something is wrong! That is also true.

You cant go wrong if you choose a balance between price and taste.

There are stores that allow you to make custom-made love dolls, so you can create a girl of your choice.

You can make a girl of your choice. You can start with inexpensive love dolls at first, and once you get used to it, you can try custom-made love dolls.

If you want to know more about Love doll, please click here

Thorough explanation of the charm of sex dolls! Have you ever heard of sex dolls that are used primarily for pseudo-sex purposes? It is a doll that is quite close to...

Sex lubricants

Sex lubricants are used as a substitute for lubricating fluid during sex or as a lubricant for men to use masturbator rules.

It is not uncommon for women to have difficulty getting wet, depending on their physical condition, or to have difficulty getting wet due to their constitution.

Forcing the penis into the vagina at such times can cause painful intercourse.

There are various types of Sex Lubricants, some with a warming effect, some with a cooling effect, and some with a scent.

Changing the Sex Lubricant used during play is recommended as a good sex accent.

If you want to learn more about Sex Lubricants, click here.

What is sex lubricant?Explain the difference and usage of each ingredient The word "sex toy" may seem like a hurdle to overcome, but lotion is actually one of the most familiar sex toys. Many...

Toys for the Prostate

Another sextoy for men is prostate toys.

The most famous prostate toys include Enemagra, which was originally a prostate massager developed by an American urologist to treat an enlarged prostate line.

Modern prostate toys are imitations of Enemagra that have spread as sextoy for men.

Many people think of prostate toys as being used by gay men, but in fact they are often used by straight men.

What is the prostate?

The prostate is an organ found only in men. It is a walnut-sized organ located deep in the pelvis, just below the bladder, and its primary role is to protect and nourish sperm.

You cannot touch the prostate gland from outside the body, but you can touch it by inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus.

By inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus and touching the prostate and developing it, you can feel intense orgasms.

Orgasms felt in the prostate are mainly dry orgasms, which are orgasms that do not involve ejaculation. (You can also feel orgasms with ejaculation through prostate stimulation.)

The prostate is called the male G-spot, and dry orgasms can be much more intense than ejaculation.

Therefore, men who are able to develop a prostate can become addicted to the pleasure.

sextoy for beinner women in India

The following are the recommended goods for Indian women who are new to sextoy.

The following three are recommended for use by women who are new to sextoy.

Vibrator.

Dildo

Electric Masserger

Lets check out what each one is in detail.

If you want to check out womens toys, click here.

[BEST25]Sex Toys for Women in IndiaThat Can Help You Have an Orgasm There are many women who pretend to feel orgasm during sex. But don't worry, you don't have to pretend to feel orgasm...

Vibrators

A vibrator is a sextoy that vibrates with an Egg-Vibrator to provide stimulation and is often referred to simply as a vibrator.

Some vibrate as well as rotate, and there are many variations of sextoy.

It is quite a popular sextoy, and is well recognized by people who do not know much about sextoy.

Its usage is similar to that of a massager, but it is more compact and easier to carry than a massager, and many of them look as cute as a lipstick or a macaroon, so they are popular among women.

For a while, a famous influencer on twitter said, This is good! You may have heard of the topic of this article by introducing the recommended vibrators.

Vibrators are great for women to use on their own, but they are also recommended for men who have difficulty satisfying women with sex.

Since it is powered by electricity, it is far less tiring than moving your hands by yourself.

This makes it easier to satisfy a woman with sex because you can caress her for longer than usual.

Vibrators are mainly used on the female side, but they can also be used on men.

When used on men, they are used to attack the nipples and glans, and in both cases it is recommended to wear a condom for hygiene reasons.

Introducing how to use the vibrator, its purpose, and how to choose it! Vibrator uses the vibrations caused by the rotation of the motor to provide stimulation. It is one or two of the most...

Dildo

A dildo is a model sextoy made to mimic a male penis.

It can be made of silicone, elastomer (think of it as a material similar to PVC), metal or glass.

A dildo can be used by a man for his female partner during sex, or by a woman for masturbation to get pleasure from it.

They are mainly inserted into women, but some can be used in the male anus as well.

It is sometimes used synonymously with vibrators, but the vibrator is not the same thing as a vibrating device.

A model of a penis that does not vibrate is a dildo.

Some of them have suction cups that can be attached to the floor or wall so that you can enjoy realistic masturbation without using your hands.

For fun, there is a dildo made in the shape of your partners penis.

This one is also popular as a gift, and if youve been together for a long time and are having trouble finding a gift for your partner, you might want to pick one.

To learn more about dildo, please click here.

What is Dildo: Orgasms with Dildos for Men and Women A dildo is a model of a male organ that is used by women for masturbation and by men to stimulate the prostate gland. Th...

Electric Masserger

A Electric Masserger is a hand-held electric massager, also known as a handheld massager, and can usually be purchased at electronics stores.

It was originally designed to relieve stiff shoulders and back pain, so the hurdle of buying one in a physical store is quite low.

Many people may have seen or used it in some form or another, as it is often installed in leisure hotels.

Such a massager is highly recommended for beginners because it is easy for women to get pleasure from it when they use it during masturbation.

It is larger than Egg-Vibrator and vibrations are stronger than those of Egg-Vibrators and vibrators, so even just hitting the clitoris can give you a great deal of pleasure.

For those women who have never had an orgasm during sex with their man, the massager may be a good way to get a feel for what it feels like to have an orgasm.

It looks and feels like an electric massager, so you wont have to feel awkward if your roommate finds out.

If you are in a rut of having sex with your partner, if you want to feel an orgasm through masturbation, or if you are thinking of using a sextoy, why dont you try it from a simple massager?

To learn more about Electric Masserger, click here.

What is a massager? Introducing types, selection methods, and usage Originally, the Magic-wand vibrator and the massage machine were sold as a home massage machine used for the back and th...

How to choose a sextoy for Indian

Now that weve covered the different types of sextoy, heres how to choose one.

Especially if you are trying sextoy for the first time, pay attention to the following three points:  Does the size fit you (the partner)?

Does the size fit you (your partner)?

Is the environment able to produce sound without problems?

Price range

First of all, the choice of size is quite important.

Most sextoy are used against or inserted into the genitals, but the genitals are very delicate organs for both men and women.

For this reason, using an inappropriate size may cause damage.

Secondly, the environment should be able to produce sound without problems.

Some sextoys not only wear, but also rotate and vibrate. Its easier to get pleasure from something that moves than something that doesnt, but the fact that it moves means that the internal rotors make some noise.

If you live in a house with thin walls or if you have roommates, you may not be able to concentrate because of the noise, so it is best to choose one that is silent or has a low noise level.

Especially in India, where many people live with their families, it is very important that you dont have to worry about sound when you use it.

Finally, there is the price range.

The price range of sextoy ranges widely, from around RS500 at the cheapest to RS10,000 or more at the highest.

Its good to consider how much money you can afford and how much you want to buy.

Do you want your family to not find out about sextoy?

I live with my family and want to use sextoy without them finding out! If you are a man, you should buy a camouflage sextoy that does not look like a sextoy at first glance.

For men, there are many masturbators that do not look like a sextoy, and for women, there are vibrators that only look like cosmetics.

If you choose such a type, youll be safe in case your family members find out.

How to buy sextoys in India

The best way to purchase sextoy is through online shopping.

For more information on how to purchase sextoy, please see the article below.

Sextoy is one of them.

Therefore, you can easily get sextoy in India by using online shopping.

SexToysINDIA is a long established and stable sextoy store and you can have sextoy delivered to any place in India.

They also offer cash on delivery, so those who are worried about shopping with a credit card do not have to worry.

Of course, the latest security is in place, so your information will not be taken out when you use your credit card.

To begin with, many people may be concerned about whether they are legally allowed to purchase sextoy.

ikmAs it turns out, its not illegal.

Right now, it is not open to the public because the Indian adult market is still in the development stage, but it will gradually spread from now on.

Take advantage of sextoy and open the door to new pleasures and culture.

Cautions for Indians using sextoy

When using sextoy, keep the following three things in mind

Keep sex toys clean

Watch out for electrical leakage

Beware of the heat generated by the body while using a sex toy

As I mentioned earlier, many sextoy products are used for the delicate zone.

Therefore, it is most important to keep the sextoy itself clean. It is very important to keep the sextoy itself clean, because if a slight scratch is created by friction, bacteria can enter and breed there.

It is safe to wear a condom when using the masturbator, just in case.

In addition, many sextoy devices are powered by a power source, so if they are not waterproof, there is a possibility of electric shock or malfunction due to wetness.

Some may even develop heat during continuous use. If the fever becomes too much, you may get burned, so be careful.

If you get a fever during use, stop driving the sextoy immediately and refrain from using it.

You will enjoy sex more if you keep it safe and use it correctly.

Summary

What did you think?

In this article, we have introduced the recommended sextoy for the beginners of sextoy in India.

The sextoy market is growing rapidly in India and it will continue to grow steadily in the future.

As India is a rather closed-minded country, it can be difficult to be open about ones sexual habits and values.

However, being faithful to ones desires by properly dissolving ones sexual desire is very effective for ones physical and mental health.

If this is your first time to learn about sextoy, or if you are interested in using sextoy, why not give it a try?

Indian Sextoys for ur best! will introduce you to sextoy and other trivia about sextoy, sexuality, and sexuality for men and women.

I want to read more! If you think its a great idea, please bookmark it.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 following companies are subsidiares of Prudential Financial: 210-220 E. 22nd Street SSGA Owner LLC, AIG Edison, AIG Star, AREF Cayman Co Ltd., AREF GP II Pte. Ltd., AREF GP Ltd., ASPF II - Feeder Fund GmbH, ASPF II - Verwaltungs - GmbH & Co. KG, ASPF II Management GmbH, ASPF III (Scots) L.P., ASSURANCE, AST Investment Services Inc., Adlerwerke CB Investment LLC, Administradora de Fondos de Pensiones Habitat S.A., Administradora de Inversiones Previsionales SpA, Aoba Life Insurance Company, Asia Property Fund III GP S.a.r.l., Assurance IQ LLC, Assurance Intelligence LLC, BSC CP LP, Braeloch Holdings Inc., Braeloch Successor Corporation, Brazilian Capital Fund GP Limited, Broad Street Global Advisors LLC, Broome Street Holdings LLC, CB German Retail LLC, CLIS Co. Ltd., COLICO INC., Campus Drive LLC, Capital Agricultural Property Services Inc., Chadwick Boulevard Investment Holdings Co. LLC, Cibecue LLC, Coconino LLC, Colico II Inc., Columbus Drive Partners L.P., Commerce Street Holdings LLC, Commerce Street Investments LLC, Coolidge LLC, Coral Reef GP, Coral Reef L.P., Coral Reef Unit Trust, Cottage Street Investments LLC, Cottage Street Orbit Acquisition LLC, DHFL PRAMERICA LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY LIMITED, DICKENS AVENUE HOLDINGS VI LLC, DICKENS AVENUE PARTNERS VI (Ireland) L.P., DICKENS AVENUE PARTNERS VI (US) L.P., Don Cesar Investor LLC, Dryden Arizona Reinsurance Term Company, Dryden Finance II LLC, EVP II GP S.a r.l., EVP II Sweden Resi I GP S.a r.l., Edison Place Senior Note LLC, Essex LLC, EuroCore GP S.a r.l., European Value Partners GP S.a.r.l., Everbright PGIM Fund Management Co. Ltd., Flagstaff LLC, GA 1600 Commons LLC, GA 333 Hennepin Investor LLC, GA BV LLC, GA Bay Area GP LLC, GA Bay Area Investor LLC, GA Belden LLC, GA CLARENDON LLC, GA Cal Crossings LLC, GA Collins LLC, GA E. 22nd Street Apartments Holdings LLC, GA East 86 Street LLC, GA JHCII LLC, GA MENLO PARK INVESTOR LLC, GA Manor at Harbour Island LLC, GA Metro LLC, GA Mission LLC, GA TRITON INVESTOR LLC, GA W Paces LLC, GA/MDI 333 Hennepin Associates LLC, GIBRALTAR BSN HOLDINGS SDN BHD, GIBRALTAR INDIA SOLUTIONS LLP, Gateway Holdings II LLC, Gateway Holdings LLC, German Retail Income CP LP, Gibraltar BSN Life Berhad, Gibraltar International Insurance Services Company Inc., Gibraltar International Service LLC, Gibraltar Reinsurance Company Ltd., Gibraltar Universal Life Reinsurance Company, Glenealy International Limited, Global Portfolio Strategies Inc., Gold GP Limited, Gold II L.P., Gold L.P., Graham Resources Inc., Graham Royalty Ltd., Green Tree GP, Green Tree L.P., Greenlee LLC, Halsey Street Investments LLC, Hirakata LLC, IVP Fund GP LLC, Impact Investments Bridges UK S.a.r.l, Inter-Atlantic G Fund L.P., Inversiones Previsionales Chile SpA, Inversiones Previsionales Dos SpA, Ironbound Fund LLC, Jennison Associates LLC, Kyarra S.a r.l., Kyoei Annuity Home Co. Ltd., LINEUP LLC, Lake Street Partners IV L.P., MC GA COLLINS HOLDINGS LLC, MC GA COLLINS REALTY LLC, MC Insurance Agency Services LLC, Manor at Harbour Island LLC, Marble Canyon LLC, Maricopa LLC, Market Street Holdings IV LLC, Morenci LLC, Mulberry Street Holdings LLC, Mulberry Street Investment L.P., Mulberry Street Partners LLC, Mullin TBG Insurance Agency Services LLC, MullinTBG Insurance Agency Services, National Family Assurance Group LLC, New Savanna, Orchard Street Acres Inc., PAI Bay Farm LLC, PAI Bayrock Groves LLC, PAI Belvidere Farms LLC, PAI Big Cypress Farm LLC, PAI Corcoran 640 Ranch LLC, PAI DeKalb Farm LLC, PAI Delano 1500 Ranches LLC, PAI Flicker Orchard LLC, PAI Good Hope Farm LLC, PAI Hawk Creek Ranch LLC, PAI Hills Valley Ranches LLC, PAI Holly Hill Groves LLC, PAI Hunt Farm LLC, PAI Jackson Bayou Farm LLC, PAI Lake Placid Groves LLC, PAI Wallula Gap Vineyard LLC, PCP V Cayman AIV GP L.P., PEREF II Co-Invest 1 GP S.a r.l., PEREF II GP S.a r.l., PEREF II PV S.r.l, PFI EM-Tech Fund I LLC, PG Business Service Co. Ltd, PG Collection Service Co. Ltd., PGA Asian Retail Limited, PGA European Limited, PGI Co. Ltd, PGIM (Australia) Pty Ltd, PGIM (Hong Kong) Ltd., PGIM (Scots) Limited, PGIM (Shanghai) Company Ltd., PGIM (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., PGIM AVP IV GP S.a r.l., PGIM Advisory (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PGIM Agricultural Investments GP LLC, PGIM Agricultural Investors LP, PGIM Broad Market High Yield Bond Fund L.P., PGIM Broad Market High Yield Bond Partners LLC, PGIM Capital Partners Management (Feeder) VI LLC, PGIM Capital Partners Management Fund VI L.P., PGIM European Financing Limited, PGIM European Services Limited, PGIM Financial Limited, PGIM Fixed Income Alternatives Fund II L.P., PGIM Fixed Income Alternatives Fund L.P., PGIM Fixed Income Alternatives GP LLC, PGIM Fixed Income Alternatives II GP LLC, PGIM Foreign Investments Inc., PGIM Holding Company LLC, PGIM INDIA ASSET MANAGEMENT PRIVATE LIMITED, PGIM INDIA TRUSTEES PRIVATE LIMITED, PGIM Inc., PGIM International Financing Inc., PGIM Investments LLC, PGIM Japan Co. Ltd., PGIM Korea Inc., PGIM LTIF Berlin GP S.a r.l., PGIM LTIF Berlin MLP S.ar.l., PGIM LTIF GP S.a.r.l., PGIM Limited, PGIM Loan Originator Manager Limited, PGIM M Campus GP S.a r.l., PGIM Management Partner Limited, PGIM MetaProp Investor LP LLC, PGIM Netherlands B.V., PGIM Overseas Investment Fund Management (Shanghai) Company Ltd, PGIM Private Capital (Ireland) Limited, PGIM Private Capital Limited, PGIM Private Placement Investors Inc., PGIM Private Placement Investors L.P., PGIM REF EUROPE SCSp, PGIM REF Europe GP S.a r.l., PGIM REF Europe Member LLC, PGIM REF Intermediary Services Inc., PGIM Real Estate (Japan) Ltd., PGIM Real Estate (UK) Limited, PGIM Real Estate CD S.a.r.l., PGIM Real Estate Capital VII GP S.a r.l., PGIM Real Estate Carry & Co-Invest GP LLC, PGIM Real Estate Carry & Co-Invest GP S.a r.l., PGIM Real Estate Carry & Co-Invest L.P., PGIM Real Estate Carry & Co-Invest SCSp, PGIM Real Estate Co-Invest Holdings LLC, PGIM Real Estate Debt GmbH, PGIM Real Estate Finance Holding Company, PGIM Real Estate Finance LLC, PGIM Real Estate France SAS, PGIM Real Estate Germany AG, PGIM Real Estate Global Debt GP LLC, PGIM Real Estate Inmuebles S. de R.L. de C.V, PGIM Real Estate Italy S.r.l., PGIM Real Estate Loan Services Inc., PGIM Real Estate Luxembourg S.A., PGIM Real Estate MVP Administradora IV S. de R.L. de C.V., PGIM Real Estate MVP Administradora V S. de R.L. de C.V., PGIM Real Estate MVP Inmuebles IV S. de R.L. de C.V., PGIM Real Estate MVP Inmuebles V S. de R.L. de C.V., PGIM Real Estate Management Luxembourg S.a.r.l., PGIM Real Estate Mexico S.C., PGIM Real Estate S. de R.L. de C.V., PGIM Real Estate U.S. Debt Fund GP LLC, PGIM Senior Loan Opportunities Management (Feeder) I LLC, PGIM Senior Loan Opportunities Management Fund I L.P., PGIM Strategic Financing LLC, PGIM Strategic Investments Inc., PGIM USPF VI Manager LLC, PGIM Warehouse Inc., PGLH of Delaware Inc., PIFM Holdco LLC, PIIC Limited, PIISC Holdings (UK) Limited, PIM KF Blocker Holdings LLC, PIM KF Blocker V Holdings LLC, PIM USPF V Manager LLC, PLA Administradora Industrial SRL, PLA Administradora LLC, PLA Administradora S. de R.L. de C.V., PLA Asesoria Profesional II S. de R.L. de C.V., PLA Asesoria Profesional S.de R.L. de C.V., PLA Co-Investor LLC, PLA Mexico Industrial Manager I LLC, PLA Mexico Industrial Manager II LLC, PLA Mexico Residential Manager I LLC, PLA Residential Fund III Aggregating Manager LLC, PLA Residential Fund III Limited Manager LLC, PLA Residential Fund III Manager LLC, PLA Residential Fund IV Aggregating Manager LLC, PLA Residential Fund IV Manager LLC, PLA Retail Fund I Blue LP, PLA Retail Fund I LP, PLA Retail Fund I Manager LLC, PLA Retail Fund I Red LP, PLA Retail Fund II Aggregating Manager LLC, PLA Retail Fund II LLC, PLA Retail Fund II LP, PLA Retail Fund II Manager LLC, PLA Retail Fund II U.S. Carry/Co-Invest LP, PLA Services Manager Mexico LLC, PLAI Limited, PMCF Holdings LLC, PMCF Properties LLC, PPPF General Partner LLP, PR GA SCP Apartments LLC, PRAMERICA PRECAP VI GP (SCOTS FEEDER) LLP, PRAMERICA PRECAP VI GP LLP, PRECO ACCOUNT III LLC, PRECO ACCOUNT PARTNERSHIP III LP, PRECO Account IV LLC, PRECO Account Partnership IV LP, PRECO III GP LLP, PREFG Hanwha Manager LLC, PREI Acquisition I Inc., PREI Acquisition II Inc., PREI Acquisition LLC, PREI HYDG LLC, PREI International Inc., PRIAC Property Acquisitions LLC, PRICOA Management Partner Limited, PRISA Fund Manager LLC, PRISA II Fund Manager LLC, PRISA II Pooled Manager LLC, PRISA III Fund GP LLC, PRISA III Fund PIM LLC, PRREF II Fund Manager LLC, PRU 3XSquare LLC, PRUCO LLC, PRUDENTIAL CAPITAL ENERGY PARTNERS MANAGEMENT (FEEDER) LLC, PRUDENTIAL MORTGAGE SKP MEMBER LLC, PRUDENTIAL MORTGAGE SKP REIT LLC, PRUDENTIAL MORTGAGE SKP VENTURE 2 LLC, PRUDENTIAL MORTGAGE SKP VENTURE LLC, PT PFI Mega Life Insurance, Passaic Fund LLC, Pine Tree GP, Pine Tree L.P., Platinum GP Limited, Platinum II L.P., Platinum L.P., Pramerica (Hong Kong) Holdings Limited, Pramerica (Luxembourg) CP GP S.a.r.l., Pramerica (Scots) CP GP LLP, Pramerica Business Consulting (Shanghai) Company Limited, Pramerica EVP CP LP, Pramerica Financial Asia Headquarters Pte. Ltd., Pramerica Financial Asia Limited, Pramerica Fixed Income Funds Management Limited, Pramerica Fosun Life Insurance Co. Ltd., Pramerica General Partner LLP, Pramerica Holdings Ltd, Pramerica Insurance Agency (China) Company Ltd., Pramerica PRECAP I GP LLP, Pramerica PRECAP II GP LLP, Pramerica PRECAP III GP LLP, Pramerica PRECAP IV GP LLP, Pramerica Pan European Real Estate (Scots) LP, Pramerica Property Partners Fund (Scotland) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital I (Scotland) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital I GP (Scots Feeder) LLP, Pramerica Real Estate Capital II (Scots) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital III (Scots) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital IV (Scots) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital IV GP (Scots Feeder) LLP, Pramerica Real Estate Capital IV GP Limited, Pramerica Real Estate Capital V (Netherlands) GP LLP, Pramerica Real Estate Capital V (Scots) Limited Partnership, Pramerica Real Estate Capital VI (Scots) Limited Partnership, Pramerica SGR S.p.A, Pramerica Systems Ireland Limited, Preco III (Scotland) Limited Partnership, Pru 101 Wood LLC, Pru Alpha Partners I LLC, Pru Fixed Income Emerging Markets Partners I LLC, PruVen Capital Partners Fund I L.P., Pruco Assignment Corporation, Pruco Life Insurance Company, Pruco Life Insurance Company of New Jersey, Pruco Securities LLC, Prudential 900 Aviation Boulevard LLC, Prudential Affordable Mortgage Company LLC, Prudential Agricultural Property Holding Company LLC, Prudential Annuities Distributors Inc., Prudential Annuities Holding Company Inc., Prudential Annuities Inc., Prudential Annuities Information Services & Technology Corporation, Prudential Annuities Life Assurance Corporation, Prudential Arizona Reinsurance Captive Company, Prudential Arizona Reinsurance Term Company, Prudential Arizona Reinsurance Universal Company, Prudential Bank & Trust FSB, Prudential Capital Energy Opportunity Fund L.P., Prudential Capital Energy Partners L.P., Prudential Capital Energy Partners Management Fund L.P., Prudential Capital Partners Management Fund IV L.P., Prudential Capital and Investment Services LLC, Prudential Chile II SpA, Prudential Chile SpA, Prudential Commercial Property Holding Company LLC, Prudential Customer Solutions LLC, Prudential Equity Group LLC, Prudential Financial Securities Investment Trust Enterprise, Prudential Fixed Income Global Liquidity Relative Value Partners LLC, Prudential Fixed Income U.S. Relative Value Partners LLC, Prudential Funding LLC, Prudential General Services of Japan Y.K., Prudential Gibraltar Agency Co. Ltd., Prudential Global Funding LLC, Prudential Holdings of Japan Inc., Prudential Huntoon Paige Associates LLC, Prudential IBH Holdco Inc., Prudential Impact Investments Mortgage Loans LLC, Prudential Impact Investments Private Debt LLC, Prudential Impact Investments Private Equity LLC, Prudential Industrial Properties LLC, Prudential Insurance Agency LLC, Prudential International Insurance Holdings Ltd., Prudential International Insurance Service Company L.L.C., Prudential International Investments Advisers LLC, Prudential International Investments Company LLC, Prudential International Investments LLC, Prudential Investment Management Services LLC, Prudential Japan Holdings LLC, Prudential Legacy Insurance Company of New Jersey, Prudential Life Insurance Company of Taiwan Inc., Prudential Mortgage Asset Holdings 1 Japan Investment Business Limited Partnership, Prudential Mortgage Asset Holdings 2 Japan Investment Business Limited Partnership, Prudential Mortgage Capital Asset Holding Company LLC, Prudential Mortgage Capital Funding LLC, Prudential Mortgage Capital Holdings LLC, Prudential Multifamily Mortgage LLC, Prudential Mutual Fund Services LLC, Prudential Newark Realty LLC, Prudential QOZ Investment Fund 1 LLC, Prudential Realty Securities Inc., Prudential Retirement Financial Services Holding LLC, Prudential Retirement Holdings LLC, Prudential Retirement Insurance and Annuity Company, Prudential Securities Secured Financing Corporation, Prudential Securities Structured Assets Inc., Prudential Seguros Mexico S.A. de C.V., Prudential Seguros S.A., Prudential Servicios S. de R.L. de C.V., Prudential Structured Settlement Company, Prudential Systems Japan Limited, Prudential Term Reinsurance Company, Prudential Trust Co. Ltd., Prudential Trust Company, Prudential Universal Reinsurance Company, Prudential Workplace Solutions Group Services LLC, Prudential do Brasil Seguros de Vida S.A., Prudential do Brasil Vida em Grupo S.A., Prudential/TMW Real Estate Group LLC, Pruservicos Participacoes Ltda., QMA JP EM All Cap Equity Partners LLC, QMA LLC, QMA Wadhwani LLP, Quartzsite LLC, Residential Services Corporation of America LLC, Rio CP LP, Rock European Real Estate Holdings S.ar.l., Rock Global Real Estate LLC, Rock Kensington Limited, Rock Marty GP S.a r.l., Rock Oxford S.a r.l., Rock UK Real Estate Holdings S.ar.l., Rock UK Real Estate II S.a.r.l., Rockstone Co. Ltd., Rosado Grande LLC, Ross Avenue Energy Fund Holdings LLC, Ross Avenue Minerals 2012 LLC, SCP Apartments LLC, SENIOR HOUSING PARTNERS VI GP LLC, SENIOR HOUSING PARTNERSHIP FUND VI GP LLC, SHP IV Carried Interest LP, SHP V Carried Interest L.P., SMP Holdings Inc., SVIIT Holdings Inc., Sanei Collection Service Co. Ltd. (Kabushiki Kaisha Sanei Shuuno Service), Senior Housing Partners IV L.L.C., Senior Housing Partners V LLC, Senior Housing Partnership Fund IV L.L.C., Senior Housing Partnership Fund V LLC, Sterling Private Placement Management LLP, Stetson Street Partners L.P., Strand Investments Limited, TBG Insurance Services Corporation, TENSATOR HOLDINGS LTD, TF Proveedora S.C., TMW ASPF I Verwaltungs GmbH & Co. KG, TMW ASPF Management GmbH, TMW Management LLC, TMW Real Estate Group LLC, TMW Realty Advisors LLC, TMW USPF Verwaltungs GmbH, TRGOAG Company Inc., The Gibraltar Life Insurance Co. Ltd., The Keynes Dynamic Beta Strategy (US) Fund GP LLC, The Prudential Assigned Settlement Services Corp., The Prudential Brazilian Capital Fund LP, The Prudential Gibraltar Financial Life Insurance Co. Ltd., The Prudential Home Mortgage Company Inc., The Prudential Insurance Company of America, The Prudential Life Insurance Company Ltd., The Prudential Real Estate Financial Services of America Inc., The WMF Group, Thurloe Commercial Guernsey Limited, Times Square Center Associates, USPF V - Verwaltungs - GmbH & Co. KG, USPF V Carry LLC, USPF V Co-Invest LLC, USPF V Investment LP, United States Property Fund VI GP S.a r.l., Vailsburg Fund LLC, Vantage Casualty Insurance Company, Wabash Avenue Holdings V LLC, Wabash Avenue Partners V L.P., Wadhwani Capital Limited, Waveland Avenue Holdings I LLC, Waveland Avenue Partners I (Ireland) L.P., Waveland Avenue Partners I (US) L.P., Wellness Services Ecossistema De Bem Estar Ltda., Wellness Services SRL, Yamato Life, and Yavapai LLC.Gildan Activewear Inc. manufactures and sells various apparel products in the United States, Canada, and internationally. It provides various activewear products, including T-shirts, fleece tops and bottoms, and sport shirts under the Gildan, Gildan Performance, Gildan Hammer, Comfort Colors, American Apparel, Anvil by Gildan, Alstyle, Prim + Preux, and GoldToe brands. The company also offers hosiery products comprising athletic; dress; and casual, liner, therapeutic, and workwear socks, as well as sheer panty hoses, tights, and leggings under the brands of Gildan, Under Armour, GoldToe, PowerSox, GT a GoldToe Brand, Silver Toe, Signature Gold by Goldtoe, Peds, MediPeds, Kushyfoot, Therapy Plus, All Pro, Secret, Silks, Secret Silky, and American Apparel. In addition, it provides men's and boys' underwear products, and ladies panties under the Gildan and Gildan Platinum brand names; and ladies' shapewear, intimates, and accessories under the Secret and Secret Silky brands. The company sells its products to wholesale distributors, screen printers, or embellishers, as well as to retailers and consumer brand companies. The company was formerly known as Textiles Gildan Inc. and changed its name to Gildan Activewear Inc. in March 1995. Gildan Activewear Inc. was founded in 1946 and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada.

Read MoreWall Street analysts have given Alerian MLP 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 Alerian MLP ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.Federated Investors, Inc. is a publicly owned asset management holding company. Through its subsidiaries, the firm provides its services to individuals, including high net worth individuals, banking or thrift institutions, investment companies, pension and profit sharing plans, pooled investment vehicles, charitable organizations, state or municipal government entities, and registered investment advisors. Through its subsidiaries, it manages separate client-focused equity, fixed income, balanced and money market mutual funds along with separate client-focused equity, fixed income, money market, and balanced portfolios. Through its subsidiaries, the firm invests in the public equity and fixed income markets across the globe. It invests in growth and value stocks of small-cap, mid-cap, and large-cap companies. The firm makes its fixed income investments in ultra-short, short-term, and intermediate-term mortgage-backed, U.S. Government, U.S. corporate, high yield, and municipal securities. It employs both fundamental and quantitative analysis to make its equity investments. Federated Investors, Inc. was founded in 1955 and is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with additional offices in New York City and London, United Kingdom.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of Marsh & McLennan Companies: 8WORKS INC., 8WORKS LTD, A. Constantinidi & CIA. S.C., A.C.N. 000 951 146 Pty Limited, A.C.N. 001 572 961 Pty Limited, A.C.N. 076 935 683 Pty Limited, A.C.N. 102 322 574 Pty Limited, ACE Insurance Agents Limited, ACE Insurance Consultants Limited, ACE Insurance and Reinsurance Brokers Limited, AD Corretora de Seguros, AFCO Premium Acceptance Inc., AFCO Premium Credit LLC, Access Equity Enhanced Fund GP LLC, Admiral Holdings Limited, Agnew Higgins Pickering & Co. (Bermuda) Ltd, Aldgate Investments Limited, Aldgate Trustees Ltd, Alexander Forbes Group Holdings Limited, Alpha Consultants Limited, Alta SA, Altius Real Assets (GP) LLC, Amal Insurance Brokers Limited (in liquidation), Anda Insurance Agencies Pte Ltd, AssetVal Pty Ltd, Assur Conseils Marsh S.A., Assurance Capital Corporation, Assurance Services Corporation, Australian Insurance Brokers Pty Ltd, Australian World Underwriters Pty Ltd., BBPS Limited, Barney & Barney Orange County LLC, Beaumonts (Leeds) Limited (in liquidation), Beaumonts Insurance Brokers Limited (in liquidation), Beaumonts Insurance Services Limited, Beneficios Integrales Oportunos SA, Benefitfocus Inc., Blue Marble Micro Limited, Blue Marble Microinsurance Inc., Bluefin, Bluefin Insurance Group Limited, Bluefin Insurance Services Limited, Boulder Claims LLC, Bowring (Bermuda) Investments Ltd., Bowring Marine Limited, Bowring Marsh (Bermuda) Ltd., Bowring Marsh (Hong Kong) Limited, Bowring Marsh Asia Pte. Ltd., Bowring Marsh Corretora de Resseguros Ltda., Bowring Marsh Limited, Broderick Piller Pty Ltd, Broker 2 Broker Limited, BuildPay LLC, Burke Ford Trustees (Leicester) Limited, C.T. Bowring Limited, CMC-Belgibo NV, CPRM Limited, CPSG Partners LLC, Carpenter Marsh Fac Chile Corredores de Reaseguros Limitada, Carpenter Marsh Fac Colombia Corredores de Reaseguros S.A., Carpenter Marsh Fac Peru Corredores de Reaseguros S.A.C., Carpenter Marsh Fac Re LLC, Carpenter Turner Cyprus Ltd, Carpenter Turner S.A., Cascade International Holdings C.V., Cascade Regional Holdings Limited, Central Insurance Services Limited, Charter Risk Management Services LLC, Chartwell Healthcare Limited, Chronos Insurance Brokers Pty Limited, Claims and Recovery Management (Australia) Pty Limited, Clark Thomson Insurance Brokers Limited, Client Provide Limited, Colombian Insurance Broking Wholesale Limited, Consultores 2020 C.A., Cronin & Co Insurance Services Limited, DVA - Deutsche Verkehrs-Assekuranz-Vermittlungs GmbH, Dawson Insurance, DeLima Marsh S.A. - Los Corredores de Seguros S.A., Dovetail Insurance Corp., Dovetail Insurance Corp., Dovetail Managing General Agency Corporation, Dovetail Technology Service India Private Limited, Draw Connect Limited, Draw Create Limited, Draw Group London Limited, Eagle & Crown Limited, Echelon Australia Pty Limited, Echelon Claims Consultants Sdn Bhd, Echelon New Zealand Limited, EnBW Versicherungs Vermittlung GmbH, Encompass Insurance Agency Pty Ltd., English Pension Trustees Limited, Epsilon (US) Insurance Company, Epsilon Insurance Company Ltd., Eustis Insurance & Benefits, Evolution Management Ltd, Exchange Insurance Services Limited (in liquidation), Exmoor Management Company Limited, Faulkner & Flynn LLC, Freedom Trust Services Limited, GC Genesis LLC, GCube Insurance Services Inc, GCube Underwriting Limited, Gama Consultores Associados Ltda., Gem Insurance Company Limited, Global Premium Finance Company, GrECo International Holding AG, Gracechurch Trustees Limited, Gresham Pension Trustees Limited, Group Promoters Pty Limited, Guy Carpenter & Cia (Mexico) S.A. de C.V., Guy Carpenter & Cia. S.A., Guy Carpenter & Co. Labuan Ltd., Guy Carpenter & Company AB, Guy Carpenter & Company Corredores de Reaseguros Limitada, Guy Carpenter & Company Corretora de Resseguros Ltda., Guy Carpenter & Company GmbH, Guy Carpenter & Company LLC, Guy Carpenter & Company Limited, Guy Carpenter & Company Limited, Guy Carpenter & Company Ltd./Guy Carpenter & Compagnie Ltee, Guy Carpenter & Company Participacoes Ltda., Guy Carpenter & Company Peru Corredores de Reaseguros S.A., Guy Carpenter & Company Private Limited, Guy Carpenter & Company Proprietary Limited, Guy Carpenter & Company Pty. Ltd., Guy Carpenter & Company S.A., Guy Carpenter & Company S.A. (Uruguay), Guy Carpenter & Company S.A.S., Guy Carpenter & Company S.r.l., Guy Carpenter (Middle East) Limited, Guy Carpenter Bermuda Ltd., Guy Carpenter Broking Inc., Guy Carpenter Colombia Corredores de Reaseguros Ltda., Guy Carpenter Insurance Brokers (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Guy Carpenter Japan Inc., Guy Carpenter Mexico Intermediario de Reaseguro S.A. de C.V., Guy Carpenter Reasurans Brokerligi Anonim Sirketi, HAPIP GP 2009 LLC, HAPIP GP LLC, HSBC Insurance Brokers International (Abu Dhabi) LLC (in liquidation), Hamilton Bond Limited, Hansen International Limited, Hayward Aviation Limited, INSIA Europe SE, INSIA SK s.r.o., INSIA a.s., INSURANCE BROKERS OF NIGERIA LIMITED, IRC Asia Insurance Brokers Limited, InSolutions Limited, Industrial Risks Protection Consultants, Ingeseg S. A., Ingeseg S.A., Insbrokers Ltda., InsurTech Alliance LLC, Insure Direct (Brokers) LLC, Insure Direct (Brokers) LLC [BAHRAIN BRANCH], Insure Direct - Jardine Lloyd Thompson Limited, International Catastrophe Insurance Managers LLC, International Loss Control Services Limited, International Risk Consultants (Asia) Limited, Invercol Limited, Irish Pensions Trust Limited, Isosceles Insurance (Barbados) Limited, Isosceles Insurance Company Limited, Isosceles Insurance Ltd, Isosceles PCC Limited, J&H Marsh & McLennan Limited, J.W. Terrill Benefit Administrators Inc., JI Holdings Limited, JIB Group Holdings Limited, JIB Group Limited, JIB Holdings (Pacific) Limited, JIB Overseas Holdings Limited, JIB UK Holdings Limited, JL Marine Insurance-Brokers GmbH & Co. KG, JLM Verwaltungs GmbH, JLT (Insurance Brokers) Limited, JLT Actuaries and Consultants Limited, JLT Advisory Limited, JLT Affinity Colombia Solutions SAS, JLT Agencies Limited, JLT Asesorias Ltda, JLT Asia Holdings BV, JLT Asia Shared Services Sdn Bhd, JLT Belgibo, JLT Benefit Consultants Limited, JLT Benefit Solutions Limited, JLT Benefit Solutions SA (Pty) Ltd, JLT Bermuda Ltd, JLT Brasil Holdings Participacoes Ltd, JLT Chile Holdings SpA, JLT Colombia Retail Limited, JLT Colombia Wholesale Limited, JLT Consultants & Actuaries Limited, JLT EB Holdings Limited, JLT EB Services Limited, JLT Employee Benefits Holding Company (PTY) LTD, JLT Employee Benefits SA (Pty) Ltd, JLT Financial Planning Limited, JLT France Holdings, JLT Group Services Pty Limited, JLT Holdings (Barbados) Ltd, JLT Holdings (NZ) Limited, JLT Independent Insurance Brokers Private Limited, JLT Insurance Agencies Limited, JLT Insurance Brokers Co. Limited, JLT Insurance Brokers Co. Limited ( Shanghai Branch), JLT Insurance Brokers Co. Limited (Beijing Branch), JLT Insurance Brokers Co. Limited (Guangzhou Branch), JLT Insurance Brokers Ireland Limited, JLT Insurance Brokers SA, JLT Insurance Group Holdings Ltd, JLT Insurance Management Malta Limited, JLT Intellectual Property Limited, JLT Intellectual Property [UK Branch], JLT Interactive Pte. Ltd., JLT Investment Management Limited, JLT LATAM (Southern Cone) Wholesale Limited, JLT Latin American Holdings Limited, JLT Life Assurance Brokers Limited, JLT Management Services Limited, JLT Marine (Pty) Ltd, JLT Mexico Holdings Limited, JLT Mexico Intermediario de Reaseguro S.A. de C.V., JLT Netherlands BV, JLT Norway AS, JLT PLA, JLT Pension Trustees Limited, JLT Pensions Administration Holdings Limited, JLT Pensions Administration Limited, JLT Peru Reinsurance Solutions Limited, JLT Peru Retail Limited, JLT Peru Wholesale Limited, JLT QFM Services Limited, JLT RE Brasil Administracao e Corretagem de Resseguros Ltda, JLT Re (French Branch), JLT Re (Northern Europe) AB, JLT Re Argentina Corredores de Reaseguros S.A.U., JLT Re Labuan Limited, JLT Re Limited, JLT Re Pty Ltd, JLT Reinsurance Brokers GmbH, JLT Reinsurance Brokers Limited, JLT Reinsurance Brokers Limited [French Branch], JLT Risk Management Limited, JLT Risk Solutions AB, JLT Risk Solutions AB Branch - Germany, JLT SA IB Holdings Company (Pty) Limited, JLT SCK Affinity Administracao e Corretora de Seguros Ltda., JLT SCK Corretora e Administradora de Seguros, JLT Secretaries Limited, JLT Sigorta ve Reasurans Brokerlii A.., JLT Singapore Holdings Pte. Ltd., JLT Specialty France, JLT Specialty Insurance Broker A/S, JLT Specialty Limited, JLT Specialty Limited [DUBAI BRANCH], JLT Specialty Pte. Ltd., JLT Towner Insurance Management (Anguilla) Limited, JLT Trust Services (Barbados) Ltd, JLT Trustees (Southern) Limited, JLT Trustees Limited, JLT UK Investment Holdings Limited, JLT Vantage Risk and Benefit Consulting Private Limited, JLT Wealth Management Limited, JLT do Brasil Corretagem de Seguros Ltda, JLTPCS Holdings Pte. Ltd., JMIB Holdings BV, JSL Securities Inc., Japan Affinity Marketing Inc., Jardine IBR Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson (Proprietary) Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Asia Pte Ltd, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Australia Pty Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Canada Inc, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group Ltd, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group plc, Jardine Lloyd Thompson India Private Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson India Private Limited (UK Branch Office), Jardine Lloyd Thompson Insurance Consultants Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Insurance and Reinsurance Brokers Inc., Jardine Lloyd Thompson Ireland Holdings Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Ireland Unlimited Company, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Korea Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Limited [Macao Branch], Jardine Lloyd Thompson PCS (Dubai) Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson PCS Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson PCS Pte Ltd, Jardine Lloyd Thompson PCS SA, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Private Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Pty Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Sdn Bhd, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Valencia y Iragorri Corredores de Seguros SA, Jardine Pension Trustees Ireland Limited, Jardine Risk Consulting Co. Limited, Jardine ShunTak Insurance Brokers Limited, Jardine ShunTak Insurance Brokers Limited [Macao Branch], Jardines PF- Consultoria Em Gestao De Risco Limitada, Jelf, Jelf Commercial Finance Limited, Jelf Financial Planning Limited, Jelf Insurance Brokers Limited, Jelf Limited, Jelf Risk Management Limited, Jelf Wellbeing Limited, John Lampier & Son Ltd, Johnson & Higgins (Bermuda) Limited, Johnson & Higgins Limited, KESSLER & CO AG, Kepler Associates Limited, Kessler & Co Inc., Kessler Consulting Inc., Kessler Prevoyance Inc., Key Underwriting Pty Limited, Kroll, Lambert Brothers Holdings Limited, Lambert Brothers Insurance Brokers (Employee Benefits) Limited, Lambert Brothers Insurance Brokers (Hong Kong) Ltd, Laterlife.com Limited (in liquidation), Lavaretus Underwriting AB, Lavaretus Underwriting AB (BRANCH - Denmark), Libra Insurance Services Limited (in liquidation), Lloyd & Partners Limited, Local Government Insurance Brokers Pty Limited, Lomond Macdonald Limited, Lynch Insurance Brokers Limited, M&M Vehicle L.P., M.P. Bolshaw and Company Limited, MAG JLT SpA, MERCER ALTERNATIVES LIMITED, MM Risk Services Pty Ltd (for dissolution), MMA Mid-Atlantic Employee LLC, MMA Securities LLC, MMB Consultores S.A., MMC (Singapore) Holdings Pte. Ltd., MMC 28 State Street Holdings Inc., MMC Borrower LLC, MMC Brazilian Holdings B.V., MMC Capital Inc., MMC Cascade Regional Holdings LLC, MMC FINANCE (EUROPE) LIMITED, MMC FINANCE HOLDINGS LTD, MMC Finance (Australia) Limited, MMC Finance (Singapore) Limited, MMC France Holdings (Luxembourg) S.a.r.l., MMC GP III Inc., MMC Group Services sp. z o.o., MMC Holdings (Australia) Pty Ltd, MMC Holdings (New Zealand) ULC, MMC Holdings (UK) Limited, MMC International Finance (Barbados) SRL, MMC International Holdings LLC, MMC International Limited, MMC International Treasury Centre Limited, MMC Middle East Holdings Limited, MMC Poland Holdings B.V., MMC Realty Inc., MMC Regional Asia Holdings B.V., MMC Regional Caribbean Holdings Ltd., MMC Regional Europe Holdings B.V., MMC Regional LATAM Holdings B.V., MMC Securities (Europe) Limited, MMC Securities LLC, MMC Treasury Holdings (UK) Limited, MMC UK Group Limited, MMC UK Pension Fund Trustee Limited, MMOW Limited, MMRC LLC, MOW Holding LLC, MPIP III GP LLC, MPIP IV GP LLC, MPIP V GP LLC, MPIP VI GP LLC, Mangrove Insurance Europe PCC Limited, Mangrove Insurance Solutions PCC, Mangrove Insurance Solutions PCC Limited, Manoel Management Services Ltd, Marchant McKechnie Insurance Brokers Limited, Marine Aviation & General (London) Limited, Marsh & McLennan (PNG) Limited, Marsh & McLennan Agencies AS, Marsh & McLennan Agencies Limited, Marsh & McLennan Agency A/S, Marsh & McLennan Agency LLC, Marsh & McLennan Agency Limited, Marsh & McLennan Agency Pty Ltd., Marsh & McLennan Argentina SA Corredores de Reaseguros, Marsh & McLennan Colombia S.A., Marsh & McLennan Companies Acquisition Funding Limited, Marsh & McLennan Companies Acquisition Limited, Marsh & McLennan Companies Asia Pacific Treasury Center Limited, Marsh & McLennan Companies BVBA/SPRL, Marsh & McLennan Companies Finance Center (Luxembourg) S.a.r.l., Marsh & McLennan Companies France S.A.S., Marsh & McLennan Companies Holdings (Luxembourg) S.a.r.l., Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc., Marsh & McLennan Companies Regional Holdings S.a.r.l., Marsh & McLennan Companies Services B.V., Marsh & McLennan Companies UK Limited, Marsh & McLennan Europe S.a.r.l., Marsh & McLennan GP I Inc., Marsh & McLennan Global Broking (Bermuda) Ltd., Marsh & McLennan Holding GmbH, Marsh & McLennan Holdings (Canada) ULC, Marsh & McLennan Holdings Inc., Marsh & McLennan Incorporated (for dissolution), Marsh & McLennan Innovation Centre Holdings II, Marsh & McLennan Innovation Centre Holdings S.a.r.l., Marsh & McLennan Innovation Centre Limited, Marsh & McLennan Insurance Services Limited, Marsh & McLennan Ireland Limited, Marsh & McLennan Management Services (Bermuda) Limited, Marsh & McLennan Risk Capital Holdings Ltd., Marsh & McLennan Servicios S.A. De C.V., Marsh & McLennan Shared Services Canada Limited, Marsh & McLennan Shared Services Corporation, Marsh (Bahrain) Company SPC, Marsh (Beijing) Risk Management Consulting Co. Ltd., Marsh (China) Insurance Brokers Co. Ltd., Marsh (Hong Kong) Limited, Marsh (Insurance Brokers) LLP, Marsh (Insurance Services) Limited, Marsh (Malawi) Limited, Marsh (Middle East) Limited, Marsh (Namibia) (Proprietary) Limited, Marsh (Pty) Ltd, Marsh (Risk Consulting) LLP, Marsh (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Marsh A/S, Marsh AB, Marsh AG, Marsh AS, Marsh Advantage Insurance Holdings Pty Ltd, Marsh Advantage Insurance Pty Ltd., Marsh Africa (Pty) Ltd, Marsh Argentina S.R.L., Marsh Associates (Pty) Ltd, Marsh Austria G.m.b.H., Marsh Aviation Insurance Broking Pty Ltd (for dissolution), Marsh B.V., Marsh Botswana (Proprietary) Limited, Marsh Brockman y Schuh Agente de Seguros y de Fianzas S.A. de C.V., Marsh Broker Japan Inc., Marsh Broker de Asigurare-Reasigurare S.R.L., Marsh Brokers (Hong Kong) Limited, Marsh Brokers Limited, Marsh Canada Limited/Marsh Canada Limitee, Marsh Company Management Services Cayman Ltd., Marsh Compensation Technologies Administration (Pty) Ltd, Marsh Corporate Services (Barbados) Limited, Marsh Corporate Services Isle of Man Ltd, Marsh Corporate Services Limited, Marsh Corporate Services Malta Limited, Marsh Corretora de Seguros Ltda., Marsh EOOD, Marsh Egypt LLC, Marsh Emirates Consultancy LLC, Marsh Emirates Insurance Brokerage LLC, Marsh Employee Benefits Limited, Marsh Employee Benefits Zimbabwe (Private) Ltd, Marsh Eurofinance B.V., Marsh Europe S.A., Marsh FJC International Insurance Brokers Limited, Marsh For Insurance Services S.A.E., Marsh Franco Acra S.A., Marsh GSC Servicos e Administracao de Seguros Ltda., Marsh GmbH, Marsh Holding AB, Marsh Holdings (Pty) Ltd, Marsh India Insurance Brokers Private Limited, Marsh Insurance & Investments LLC, Marsh Insurance Brokers, Marsh Insurance Brokers (Macao) Limited, Marsh Insurance Brokers (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Marsh Insurance Brokers (Private) Limited, Marsh Insurance Brokers AO, Marsh Insurance Brokers Limited, Marsh Insurance Consulting Saudi Arabia (in liquidation), Marsh Insurance and Reinsurance Brokers LLC, Marsh Intermediaries Inc., Marsh International Broking Holdings Limited, Marsh International Holdings II Inc., Marsh International Holdings Inc., Marsh Investment B.V., Marsh Ireland Brokers Limited, Marsh Ireland Brokers Limited (UK Branch), Marsh Ireland Holdings Limited, Marsh Israel (1999) Ltd., Marsh Israel (Holdings) Ltd., Marsh Israel Consultants Ltd., Marsh Israel Insurance Agency Ltd., Marsh Israel International Brokers Ltd. (in liquidation), Marsh JCS Inc., Marsh Japan Inc., Marsh Kft., Marsh Kindlustusmaakler AS, Marsh Korea Inc., Marsh LLC, Marsh LLC Insurance Brokers, Marsh LLC [Ukraine], Marsh Lda., Marsh Limited, Marsh Limited [Fiji], Marsh Limited [New Zealand], Marsh Limited [PNG], Marsh Ltd. [Wisconsin], Marsh Management Services (Bahamas) Ltd., Marsh Management Services (Barbados) Limited, Marsh Management Services (Bermuda) Ltd., Marsh Management Services (Dublin) Limited, Marsh Management Services (Labuan) Limited, Marsh Management Services (MENA) Limited, Marsh Management Services (USVI) Ltd., Marsh Management Services Cayman Ltd., Marsh Management Services Guernsey Limited, Marsh Management Services Inc., Marsh Management Services Isle of Man Limited, Marsh Management Services Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Marsh Management Services Malta Limited, Marsh Management Services Singapore Pte. Ltd., Marsh Management Services Sweden AB, Marsh Marine & Energy AB, Marsh Marine Nederland B.V., Marsh Medical Consulting GmbH, Marsh Mercer Holdings (Australia) Pty Ltd, Marsh Nest Inc., Marsh Oman LLC, Marsh Oy, Marsh PB Co. Ltd., Marsh Philippines Inc., Marsh Privat A.I.E., Marsh Private Client Life Insurance Services, Marsh Pty. Ltd., Marsh Qatar LLC, Marsh RE S.A.C. Corredores de Reaseguros, Marsh Rehder Consultoria S.A. (MRC), Marsh Rehder S.A. Corredores de Seguros, Marsh Resolutions Pty Limited, Marsh Risk Consulting B.V., Marsh Risk Consulting Limitada, Marsh Risk Consulting Ltda., Marsh Risk Consulting S.L., Marsh Risk Consulting Services S.r.L., Marsh Risk and Consulting Services (Pty) Ltd, Marsh S.A. Corredores De Seguros, Marsh S.A. Mediadores de Seguros, Marsh S.A.S., Marsh S.p.A., Marsh SA [Argentina], Marsh SA [Belgium], Marsh SA [Luxembourg], Marsh SA [Uruguay], Marsh SIA, Marsh Saldana Inc., Marsh Saudi Arabia Insurance & Reinsurance Brokers, Marsh Secretarial Services Limited, Marsh Semusa S.A., Marsh Services Limited, Marsh Services Spolka z.o.o., Marsh Sigorta ve Reasurans Brokerligi Anonim Sirketi, Marsh Spolka z.o.o., Marsh Szolgaltato Kft., Marsh Takaful Brokers (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Marsh Treasury Services (Dublin) Limited (in liquidation), Marsh Treasury Services Limited, Marsh Tunisia S.a.r.l., Marsh UK Limited, Marsh USA (India) Inc., Marsh USA Borrower LLC, Marsh USA Inc., Marsh Uganda Limited, Marsh Venezuela C.A. Sociedad de Corretaje de Seguros, Marsh Vietnam Insurance Broking Company Ltd, Marsh Zambia Limited, Marsh Zimbabwe Holdings (Private) Limited, Marsh d.o.o. Beograd, Marsh d.o.o. za posredovanje u osiguranju, Marsh for Insurance Services - Jordan, Marsh i-Connect (Pty) Ltd, Marsh s.r.o., Matthiessen Assurans AB, Mercer (Argentina) S.A., Mercer (Australia) Pty Ltd, Mercer (Austria) GmbH, Mercer (Belgium) SA-NV, Mercer (Canada) Limited/Mercer (Canada) Limitee, Mercer (China) Limited, Mercer (Colombia) Ltda., Mercer (Danmark) A/S, Mercer (Finland) OY, Mercer (France) SAS, Mercer (Hong Kong) Limited, Mercer (Ireland) Limited, Mercer (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Mercer (N.Z.) Limited, Mercer (Nederland) B.V., Mercer (Norge) AS, Mercer (Polska) Sp.z o.o., Mercer (Portugal) Lda, Mercer (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Mercer (Sweden) AB, Mercer (Taiwan) Ltd., Mercer (Thailand) Ltd., Mercer (US) Inc., Mercer Administration Services (Australia) Pty Limited, Mercer Africa Limited, Mercer Agente de Seguros S.A. de C.V., Mercer Asesores de Seguros S.A., Mercer Asesores es Inversion Independientes S.A. de C.V., Mercer Broking Ltd., Mercer Career Unipessoal Lda, Mercer Consultation (Quebec) Ltee., Mercer Consulting (Australia) Pty Ltd, Mercer Consulting (Chile) Limitada, Mercer Consulting (France) SAS, Mercer Consulting (India) Private Limited, Mercer Consulting B.V., Mercer Consulting Group Inc., Mercer Consulting Holdings Sdn. Bhd., Mercer Consulting Limited, Mercer Consulting Middle East Limited, Mercer Consulting S.L.U., Mercer Consulting Venezuela C.A., Mercer Corredores de Seguros Limitada, Mercer Corretora de Seguros Ltda, Mercer Danismanlik Anonim Sirketi, Mercer Deutschland GmbH, Mercer Employee Benefits - Medicacao de Seguros Unipessoal Lda., Mercer Employee Benefits Limited, Mercer Financial Advice (Australia) Pty Ltd, Mercer Financial Services Limited, Mercer Financial Services Limited liability company, Mercer Financial Services Middle East Limited, Mercer Global Investments Europe Limited, Mercer Global Investments Management Limited, Mercer HR Consulting Borrower LLC, Mercer HR Services LLC, Mercer Health & Benefits (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Mercer Health & Benefits Administration LLC, Mercer Health & Benefits LLC, Mercer Holdings Inc., Mercer Holdings Inc. [Philippines], Mercer Human Resource Consulting Ltda, Mercer Human Resource Consulting S.A. de C.V., Mercer ICC Limited, Mercer Investment Consulting Limited, Mercer Investment Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Mercer Investment Solutions (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Mercer Investments (Australia) Limited, Mercer Investments (Hong Kong) Limited, Mercer Investments (Japan) Ltd, Mercer Investments (New Zealand) Limited, Mercer Investments LLC, Mercer Ireland Holdings Limited, Mercer Italia Srl Socio Unico, Mercer Japan Ltd., Mercer Korea Co. Ltd., Mercer LLC, Mercer Limited, Mercer MC Consulting Borrower LLC, Mercer Master Trustees Limited, Mercer Mauritius Ltd., Mercer Oliver Wyman Holding B.V., Mercer Outsourcing (Australia) Pty Ltd, Mercer Outsourcing S.L.U., Mercer Pensionsfonds AG, Mercer Pensionsraadgivning A/S, Mercer Philippines Inc., Mercer Private Investment Partners IV General Partner S.a.r.l., Mercer Private Markets AG, Mercer Private Markets Advisers (US) AG, Mercer Services Poland Sp. z.o.o., Mercer Sigorta Brokerligi Anonim Sirketi, Mercer South Africa (Pty) Limited, Mercer Superannuation (Australia) Limited, Mercer Switzerland Inc., Mercer System Services LLC, Mercer Technology Acquisitions Limited, Mercer Treuhand GmbH, Mercer Trust Company LLC, Mercer Trustees Limited, Mercer WorkforcePro LLC, Mercury Insurance Services Pty Ltd, Moola Systems Limited, Mountlodge Limited, Muir Beddal (Zimbabwe) Limited, NERA Australia Pty. Ltd., NERA Economic Consulting GmbH, NERA Economic Consulting Limited, NERA S.R.L., NERA SAS, NERA UK Limited, NERA do Brasil Ltda. (for dissolution), National Economic Research Associates Inc., NetComp Insurance Corp., Neuburger Noble Lowndes GmbH, Normandy Reinsurance Company Limited, Northern Alliance Brokers Limited (in liquidation), OWL Marine Insurance-Brokers GmbH & Co.KG, OWL Marine Verwaltungs GmbH, Oliver Wyman (Bermuda) Limited, Oliver Wyman (Hong Kong) Limited, Oliver Wyman AB, Oliver Wyman AG, Oliver Wyman Actuarial Consulting Inc., Oliver Wyman B.V., Oliver Wyman Consulting (Shanghai) Ltd, Oliver Wyman Consultoria em Estrategia de Negocios Ltda., Oliver Wyman Energy Consulting Limited, Oliver Wyman FZ-LLC, Oliver Wyman Group KK, Oliver Wyman Inc., Oliver Wyman LLC, Oliver Wyman Limited, Oliver Wyman Limited Liability Company, Oliver Wyman Limited/Oliver Wyman limitee, Oliver Wyman Ltd., Oliver Wyman Pte. Ltd., Oliver Wyman Pty. Ltd., Oliver Wyman S. de R.L. de C.V., Oliver Wyman S.A.S., Oliver Wyman S.L., Oliver Wyman S.r.l., Oliver Wyman SNC, Oliver Wyman SPRL/BVBA, Oliver Wyman Sdn. Bhd., Oliver Wyman Services Limited, Oliver Wyman Servicios S. de R.L. de C.V., Oliver Wyman sp. z o.o., Omega Indemnity (Bermuda) Limited, Organizacion Brockman y Schuh S.A. de C.V., Osbornes Insurances Oxford Limited (in liquidation), PFT Limited, PI Indemnity Company Designated Activity Company, PT JLT Reinsurance Brokers, PT Jardine Lloyd Thompson, PT Marsh Indonesia, PT Marsh Reinsurance Brokers Indonesia, PT Mercer Indonesia, PT Nexus Asia Pacific, PT Oliver Wyman Indonesia, PT Quantum Computing Services, PT Quantum Investments, PT Quantum Support Services, Pallas Marsh Servicos Ltda., Pavilion Alternatives Group (Singapore) PTE. Ltd, Pavilion Financial Corporation Holdings UK Limited, Pavilion U.S. Investments Holdco LLC, Pension Trustees Limited, Pensionsservice Benefit Network Sverige AB, Perils AG, Personal Pension Trustees Limited, Pet Animal Welfare Scheme Limited, Portsoken Trustees (No. 2) Limited, Portsoken Trustees Limited, Potomac Insurance Managers Inc., Premier Pension Trustees Limited, Premium Services Australia Pty Limited, Professional Claims Handling Limited (in liquidation), Profund Solutions Limited, Promerit AG, Promerit Hungary Kft, Promerit Schweiz AG, Pymetrics Inc., R G Ford Brokers Limited, R R B Beratungsgesellschaft fuer Altersversorgung mbh, R. Mees & Zoonen Holdings B.V., Renewable Energy Loss Adjusters LLC, Renewable Energy Loss Adjusters Limited, Resource Benefit Associates, Rightpath Reinsurance SPC Ltd., Risk Management Australia Pty Limited, Rivers Group Limited, Rockefeller Risk Advisors Inc., Rutherfoord International Inc., SAFCAR-Marsh, SBJ Holdings Limited, SCIB (Bermuda) Limited, SCM Global Real Estate Select GP LLC, SCM Infrastructure General Partner S.a r.l., SCM International Private Equity Select III GP LLC, SCM LT General Partner S.a.r.l., SCM PE General Partner S.a.r.l., SCM PE II GP Ltd., SCM PE II Scotland GP Ltd, SCM Strategic Capital Management (Luxembourg) S.a.r.l., SICAR Marsh S.a.r.l., SME Insurance Services Limited, Sail Insurance Company Limited, Scalene Re Ltd, Seabury & Smith Borrower LLC, Seabury & Smith LLC, Secure Limited, Sedgwick (Holdings) Pty. Limited, Sedgwick Consulting Group Limited, Sedgwick Dineen Group Limited, Sedgwick Financial Services Limited, Sedgwick Forbes Middle East Limited, Sedgwick Group, Sedgwick Group (Australia) Pty. Limited, Sedgwick Group (Bermuda) Limited, Sedgwick Group (Zimbabwe) Limited, Sedgwick Group Limited, Sedgwick Internationaal B.V., Sedgwick Limited, Sedgwick Management Services (Barbados) Limited, Sedgwick Management Services (Singapore) Pte Limited, Sedgwick Noble Lowndes (UK) Limited, Sedgwick Noble Lowndes Group Limited, Sedgwick Noble Lowndes Limited, Sedgwick Overseas Investments Limited, Sedgwick Private Limited, Sedgwick Re Asia Pacific (Consultants) Pte Ltd (for dissolution), Sedgwick Trustees Limited, Sedgwick UK Risk Services Limited, Sedgwick Ulster Pension Trustees Limited, Settlement Trustees Limited, Shanghai Mercer Insurance Brokers Company Ltd., Shorewest Insurance Associates LLC, Sirota Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Sirota Consulting UK Limited, Smith Long Term Disability Management Group Inc., Societe d'Assurances et de Participation Guian SA, Software Underwriting Systems Limited (in liquidation), Southern Marine & Aviation Inc., Southern Marine & Aviation Underwriters Inc., Sudzucker Versicherungs-Vermittlungs GmbH, Sumitomo Life Insurance Agency America Inc., Sylvite Financial Services, TBX Solutions Limited, Talent Tech Labs LLC, The Benefit Express Holdings Limited, The Benefit Express Limited, The Carpenter Management Corporation, The Insurance Partnership Holdings Limited, The Insurance Partnership Services Limited, The Positive Ageing Company Limited, The Purple Partnership Limited, The Recovre Group Pty Ltd, Thomsons Online Benefits (HK) Ltd., Thomsons Online Benefits Inc., Thomsons Online Benefits Limited, Thomsons Online Benefits Pte Ltd., Thomsons Online Benefits S.R.L, Torrent Government Contracting Services LLC, Torrent Insurance Services LLC, Torrent Technologies, Torrent Technologies Inc., Tower Hill Limited, Tower Place Developments (West) Limited, Tower Place Developments Limited, U.T.E. AMG, U.T.E. Marsh - Caja Castilla La Mancha Junta de Comunidades, U.T.E. Marsh - Salvado Reus (in liquidation), U.T.E. Marsh - Salvado Reus 2012, U.T.E. Marsh - Salvado Vila-Seca 2010, UAD BB Marsh Lietuva, Vezina & Associes Inc., Vezina Assurances Inc., Victor Insurance Europe B.V., Victor Insurance Holdings Inc., Victor Insurance Italia S.r.l., Victor Insurance Managers Inc., Victor Insurance Managers Inc./Gestionnaires d'assurance Victor inc., Victor O. Schinnerer & Co. (Bermuda) Ltd., Victor O. Schinnerer & Company Limited, Victoria Hall Company Limited, Wellnz Limited, William M. Mercer (Canada) Limited/William M. Mercer (Canada) Limitee, William M. Mercer AB, William M. Mercer Comercio Consultoria e Servicos Ltda., Wortham Insurance & Risk Management, everBe SAS, and realright GmbH.Wells Fargo & Co. is a diversified, community-based financial services company. It is engaged in the provision of banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance. It firm operates through the following segments: Community Banking, Wholesale Banking, Wealth & Investment Management, and Other. The Community Banking segment offers complete line of diversified financial products and services for consumers and small businesses including checking and savings accounts, credit and debit cards, and automobile, student, and small business lending. The Wholesale Banking segment provides financial solutions to businesses across the United States and globally. The Wealth and Investment Management segment includes personalized wealth management, investment and retirement products and services to clients across U.S. based businesses. The Other segment refers to the products of WIM customers served through community banking distribution channels. The company was founded by Henry Wells and William G. Fargo on March 18, 1852 and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

Read MoreHelix Energy Solutions Group, Inc. is an international offshore energy company. It focuses on subsea construction, maintenance and salvage services to the offshore natural gas and oil industry. The firm also provides specialty services to the offshore energy industry, with a focus on well intervention and robotics operations. The company operates through three segments: Well Intervention, Robotics and Production Facilities. The Well Intervention segment offers vessels and related equipment that are used to perform well intervention services primarily in the Gulf of Mexico and North Sea regions. The Robotics segment involves four chartered vessels and also includes ROVs, trenchers and ROVDrills designed to complement offshore construction and well intervention services. The Production Facilities segment includes its investment in the Helix Producer I and Kommandor LLC. Helix Energy Solutions Group was founded in 1979 and is headquartered in Houston, TX.

Read MoreImperial Brands PLC, together with its subsidiaries, manufactures, imports, markets, and sells tobacco and tobacco-related products. It offers a range of cigarettes, fine cut and smokeless tobacco, papers, and cigars; and next generation product (NGP) portfolio, such as e-vapour products, as well as oral nicotine and heated tobacco products. The company sells its products under various brands, including Davidoff, Gauloises, JPS, West, L&B, Bastos, Fine, Winston, News, Parker & Simpson, blu, Kool, Horizon, Jade, Cohiba, Montecristo, Romeo Y Julieta, Backwoods, Skruf, Golden Virginia, Rizla, and Knox in approximately 160 countries worldwide. It also provides logistics services that include the distribution of tobacco and NGP products for tobacco and NGP product manufacturers; and various non-tobacco and NGP products and services. In addition, the company is involved in the management of a golf course; marketing of papers; restaurant business; distribution of pharmaceuticals, POS software, and published materials and other products; printing and publishing activities; and provision of long haul transportation, industrial parcel and express delivery, advertising, and support management services. Further, it owns the trademarks; and retails its products. The company was formerly known as Imperial Tobacco Group PLC and changed its name to Imperial Brands PLC in February 2016. Imperial Brands PLC was founded in 1901 and is headquartered in Bristol, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreWall Street analysts have given iShares MSCI Canada 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 Canada ETF 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 Emerging Markets 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 Emerging Markets ETF 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 Russell 1000 Growth 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 Russell 1000 Growth ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.By Trend





The visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Azerbaijan and the region as a whole confirms Europes interest in building partnership relations with the countries of the South Caucasus, European expert on economy issues Igor Tsaranich told Trend.

Germany is interested in strengthening the trade and economic relations with Azerbaijan as the leading and developed country of the region, Tsaranich said.

He noted that Germany, just like most European countries, supports the implementation of large-scale energy projects being implemented by Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan has showed itself on international arena as a guarantor of the energy security of Europe, and this fact is very important and valuable for Germany as the leading EU country, the expert said, noting that trade and economic contacts have been established between the two countries.

He said the visit of the German chancellor to Azerbaijan will open new opportunities for further cooperation between Baku and Berlin.

Presently, over 200 companies with German share operate in Azerbaijan.

In the first half of 2018, trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Germany amounted to $805.36 million, according to Azerbaijans State Customs Committee. The export of Azerbaijani products to Germany amounted to $421.06 million. Over the year, the trade turnover between the two countries and exports from Azerbaijan to Germany almost doubled. Germany is the fifth biggest trade partner of Azerbaijan.The following companies are subsidiares of MetLife: 1001 PROPERTIES LLC, 10700 WILSHIRE LLC, 1201 TAB MANAGER LLC, 150 NORTH RIVERSIDE PE MEMBER LLC, 1925 WJC OWNER LLC, 23RD STREET INVESTMENTS INC., 500 GRANT STREET ASSOCIATES LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, 500 GRANT STREET GP LLC, 60 11TH STREET LLC, 6104 HOLLYWOOD LLC, AFP GENESIS ADMINISTRADORA DE FONDOS Y FIDECOMISOS S.A., AFP PROVIDA S.A., AGENVITA S.R.L., ALICO EUROPEAN HOLDINGS LIMITED, ALICO HELLAS SINGLE MEMBER LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY, ALICO OPERATIONS LLC, ALICO PROPERTIES INC., AMMETLIFE INSURANCE BERHAD, AMMETLIFE TAKAFUL BERHAD, American Life Insurance Company, BEST MARKET S.A., BIDV METLIFE LIFE INSURANCE LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY, BLOCK VISION HOLDINGS CORPORATION, BLOCK VISION OF TEXAS INC., BORDERLAND INVESTMENTS LIMITED, BOULEVARD RESIDENTIAL LLC, BUFORD LOGISTICS CENTER LLC, CC HOLDCO MANAGER LLC, CHESTNUT FLATS WIND LLC, CLOSED JOINT-STOCK COMPANY MASTER D, COMPANIA INVERSORA METLIFE S.A., CORPORATE REAL ESTATE HOLDINGS LLC, COVA LIFE MANAGEMENT COMPANY, DAVIS VISION INC., DAVISVISION IPA INC., DELAWARE AMERICAN LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, DES MOINES CREEK BUSINESS PARK PHASE II LLC, ECONOMY FIRE & CASUALTY COMPANY, ECONOMY PREFERRED INSURANCE COMPANY, ECONOMY PREMIER ASSURANCE COMPANY, EURO CL INVESTMENTS LLC, EXCELENCIA OPERATIVA Y TECNOLOGICA S.A de C.V., FEDERAL FLOOD CERTIFICATION LLC, FORTISSIMO CO. LTD, FUNDACION METLIFE MEXICO A.C., GLOBAL PROPERTIES INC., General American Life Insurance Company, Grand Bank N.A., HASKELL EAST VILLAGE LLC, HIGH STREET SEVENTH AND OSBORN APARTMENTS LLC, HOUSING FUND MANAGER LLC, INTERNATIONAL TECHNICAL AND ADVISORY SERVICES LIMITED, INVERSIONES METLIFE HOLDCO DOS LIMITADA, INVERSIONES METLIFE HOLDCO TRES LIMITADA, JOINT-STOCK COMPANY METLIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, LHC HOLDINGS, LHCW HOLDINGS, LHCW HOTEL HOLDING, LHCW HOTEL HOLDING LLC, LHCW HOTEL OPERATING COMPANY, LONG ISLAND SOLAR FARM LLC, LUMENLAB MALAYSIA SDN. BHD., Logan Circle Partners, MARKETPLACE RESIDENCES LLC, MAXIS GBN S.A.S., MC PORTFOLIO JV MEMBER LLC, MCJV LLC, MCMIF HOLDCO I LLC, MCMIF HOLDCO II LLC, MCP - WELLINGTON LLC, MCP 100 CONGRESS MEMBER LLC, MCP 1500 MICHAEL LLC, MCP 1900 MCKINNEY LLC, MCP 2 AMES LLC, MCP 2 AMES ONE LLC, MCP 2 AMES OWNER LLC, MCP 2 AMES TWO LLC, MCP 220 YORK LLC, MCP 22745 & 22755 RELOCATION DRIVE LLC, MCP 249 INDUSTRIAL BUSINESS PARK MEMBER LLC, MCP 3040 POST OAK LLC, MCP 350 ROHLWING LLC, MCP 4600 SOUTH SYRACUSE LLC, MCP 550 WEST WASHINGTON LLC, MCP 60 11TH STREET MEMBER LLC, MCP 7 RIVERWAY LLC, MCP 9020 MURPHY ROAD LLC, MCP 93 RED RIVER MEMBER LLC, MCP ALLEY 24 EAST LLC, MCP ASHTON SOUTH END LLC, MCP BLOCK 23 MEMBER LLC, MCP BRADFORD LLC, MCP BUFORD LOGISTICS CENTER 2 MEMBER LLC, MCP BUFORD LOGISTICS CENTER BLDG B LLC, MCP BURNSIDE MEMBER LLC, MCP CENTER AVENUE INDUSTRIAL MEMBER LLC, MCP CLAWITER INNOVATION MEMBER LLC, MCP COMMON DESK TRS LLC, MCP DENVER PAVILIONS MEMBER LLC, MCP DILLON LLC, MCP DILLON RESIDENTIAL LLC, MCP ENV CHICAGO LLC, MCP FIFE ENTERPRISE CENTER LLC, MCP FRISCO OFFICE LLC, MCP GRAPEVINE LLC, MCP HIGHLAND PARK LENDER LLC, MCP HUB I LLC, MCP HUB I PROPERTY LLC, MCP LODGE AT LAKECREST LLC, MCP MA PROPERTY REIT LLC, MCP MAGNOLIA PARK MEMBER LLC, MCP MAIN STREET VILLAGE LLC, MCP MOUNTAIN TECHNOLOGY CENTER MEMBER TRS LLC, MCP NORTHYARDS HOLDCO LLC, MCP NORTHYARDS MASTER LESSEE LLC, MCP NORTHYARDS OWNER LLC, MCP ONE WESTSIDE LLC, MCP ONYX LLC, MCP PARAGON POINT LLC, MCP PLAZA AT LEGACY LLC, MCP PROPERTY MANAGEMENT LLC, MCP SEATTLE GATEWAY INDUSTRIAL I LLC, MCP SEATTLE GATEWAY INDUSTRIAL II LLC, MCP SEVENTH AND OSBORNE MF MEMBER LLC, MCP SEVENTH AND OSBORNE RETAIL MEMBER LLC, MCP SHAKOPEE LLC, MCP SLEEPY HOLLOW MEMBER LLC, MCP SOCAL INDUSTRIAL  ANAHEIM LLC, MCP SOCAL INDUSTRIAL  BERNARDO LLC, MCP SOCAL INDUSTRIAL  CANYON LLC, MCP SOCAL INDUSTRIAL  CONCOURSE LLC, MCP SOCAL INDUSTRIAL  FULLERTON LLC, MCP SOCAL INDUSTRIAL  KELLWO00OD LLC, MCP SOCAL INDUSTRIAL  LAX LLC, MCP SOCAL INDUSTRIAL  LOKER LLC, MCP SOCAL INDUSTRIAL  REDONDO LLC, MCP SOCAL INDUSTRIAL  SPRINGDALE LLC, MCP STATELINE LLC, MCP THE PALMS AT DORAL LLC, MCP TRIMBLE CAMPUS LLC, MCP UNION ROW LLC, MCP VALLEY FORGE LLC, MCP VALLEY FORGE ONE LLC, MCP VALLEY FORGE OWNER LLC, MCP VALLEY FORGE TWO LLC, MCP VANCE JACKSON LLC, MCP VINEYARD AVENUE MEMBER LLC, MCP VOA HOLDINGS LLC, MCP VOA I & III LLC, MCP VOA II LLC, MCP WATERFORD ATRIUM LLC, MCP WEST BROAD MARKETPLACE LLC, MCP  ENGLISH VILLAGE LLC, MCPF ACQUISITION LLC, MCPF FOXBOROUGH LLC, MCPF  NEEDHAM LLC, MCPP OWNERS LLC, MCRE BLOCK 40 LP, MEC HEALTH CARE INC., MET 1065 HOTEL LLC, MET CANADA SOLAR ULC, METLIFE 1007 STEWART LLC, METLIFE 1201 TAB MEMBER LLC, METLIFE 425 MKT MANAGER LLC, METLIFE 425 MKT MEMBER LLC, METLIFE 555 12TH MEMBER LLC, METLIFE 8280 MEMBER LLC, METLIFE ACOMA OWNER LLC, METLIFE ADMINISTRADORA DE FUNDOS MULTIPATROCINADOS LTDA., METLIFE ALTERNATIVES GP LLC, METLIFE ASHTON AUSTIN OWNER LLC, METLIFE ASIA HOLDING COMPANY PTE. LTD., METLIFE ASIA LIMITED, METLIFE ASIA SERVICES SDN. BHD, METLIFE ASSET MANAGEMENT CORP., METLIFE ASSIGNMENT COMPANY INC., METLIFE AUTO & HOME INSURANCE AGENCY INC., METLIFE BL FEEDER, METLIFE BL FEEDER LP, METLIFE BORO STATION MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CABO HILTON MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CAMINO RAMON MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CAPITAL CREDIT L.P., METLIFE CAPITAL LIMITED PARTNERSHIP, METLIFE CAPITAL TRUST IV, METLIFE CB W/A LLC, METLIFE CC MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CHILE ADMINISTRADORA DE MUTUOS HIPOTECARIOS S.A., METLIFE CHILE INVERSIONES LIMITADA, METLIFE CHILE SEGUROS DE VIDA S.A., METLIFE CHILE SEGUROS GENERALES S.A., METLIFE CHINO MEMBER LLC, METLIFE COLOMBIA SEGUROS de VIDA S.A., METLIFE COMMERCIAL MORTGAGE INCOME FUND GP LLC, METLIFE COMMERCIAL MORTGAGE INCOME FUND LP, METLIFE COMMERCIAL MORTGAGE ORIGINATOR LLC, METLIFE COMMERCIAL MORTGAGE REIT LLC, METLIFE CONSQUARE MEMBER LLC, METLIFE CONSUMER SERVICES INC., METLIFE CORE PROPERTY FUND GP LLC, METLIFE CORE PROPERTY FUND LP, METLIFE CORE PROPERTY HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE CORE PROPERTY REIT LLC, METLIFE CORE PROPERTY TRS. LLC, METLIFE CREDIT CORP., METLIFE DIGITAL VENTURES INC., METLIFE EMEKLILIK VE HAYAT A.S., METLIFE EMERGING MARKET DEBT BLEND FUND, METLIFE EU HOLDING COMPANY LIMITED, METLIFE EUROPE INSURANCE d.a.c., METLIFE EUROPE SERVICES LIMITED, METLIFE EUROPE d.a.c., METLIFE EUROPEAN HOLDINGS LLC., METLIFE FINANCIAL SERVICES CO. LTD, METLIFE FM HOTEL MEMBER LLC, METLIFE FUNDING INC., METLIFE GENERAL INSURANCE LIMITED, METLIFE GLOBAL BENEFITS LTD., METLIFE GLOBAL HOLDING COMPANY I GMBH, METLIFE GLOBAL HOLDING COMPANY II GMBH, METLIFE GLOBAL HOLDINGS CORPORATION S.A. De C.V., METLIFE GLOBAL INC., METLIFE GLOBAL OPERATIONS SUPPORT CENTER PRIVATE LIMITED, METLIFE GROUP INC., METLIFE HCMJV 1 GP LLC, METLIFE HCMJV 1 LP LLC, METLIFE HEALTH PLANS INC., METLIFE HOLDINGS INC., METLIFE HOME LOANS LLC, METLIFE INNOVATION CENTRE LIMITED, METLIFE INNOVATION CENTRE PTE. LTD., METLIFE INSURANCE AND INVESTMENT TRUST, METLIFE INSURANCE BROKERAGE INC., METLIFE INSURANCE K.K., METLIFE INSURANCE LIMITED, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL HF PARTNERS LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL LIMITED LLC, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND I LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND II LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND III LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND IV LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND V LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND VI LP, METLIFE INTERNATIONAL PE FUND VII LP, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT HOLDINGS, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT LLC, METLIFE INVESTMENTS ASIA LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENTS LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENTS PTY LIMITED, METLIFE INVESTMENTS SECURITIES LLC, METLIFE INVESTORS DISTRIBUTION COMPANY, METLIFE INVESTORS GROUP LLC, METLIFE IRELAND TREASURY D.A.C., METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY FUND GP LLC, METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY FUND LP, METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY OWNERS, METLIFE JAPAN US EQUITY OWNERS LLC, METLIFE LATIN AMERICA ASESORIAS E INVERSIONES LIMITADA, METLIFE LEGAL PLANS INC., METLIFE LEGAL PLANS OF FLORIDA INC., METLIFE LHH MEMBER LLC, METLIFE LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, METLIFE LIFE INSURANCE S.A., METLIFE LOAN ASSET MANAGEMENT LLC, METLIFE MAS S.A. DE C.V., METLIFE MEMBER SOLAIRE LLC, METLIFE MEXICO HOLDINGS S. DE R.L. DE C.V., METLIFE MEXICO S.A., METLIFE MEXICO SERVICIOS S.A. DE C.V., METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT FUND LP, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT GP LLC, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT PARALLEL FUND LP, METLIFE MIDDLE MARKET PRIVATE DEBT PARALLEL GP LLC, METLIFE MULTI-FAMILY PARTNERS III LLC, METLIFE MUTUAL FUND COMPANY, METLIFE OBS MEMBER LLC, METLIFE OFC MEMBER LLC, METLIFE ONTARIO STREET MEMBR LLC, METLIFE PARK TOWER MEMBER LLC, METLIFE PENSION TRUSTEES LIMITED, METLIFE PENSIONES MEXICO S.A., METLIFE PET INSURANCE SOLUTIONS LLC, METLIFE PLANOS ODONTOLOGICOS LTDA., METLIFE POWSZECHNE TOWARTZYSTWO EMERYTALNE S.A., METLIFE PRIVATE EQUITY HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE PROPERTIES VENTURES LLC, METLIFE RC SF MEMBER LLC, METLIFE REAL ESTATE LENDING LLC, METLIFE REINSURANCE COMPANY OF BERMUDA LTD., METLIFE REINSURANCE COMPANY OF CHARLESTON, METLIFE REINSURANCE COMPANY OF VERMONT, METLIFE RETIREMENT SERVICES LLC, METLIFE SAENGMYOUNG INSURANCE COMPANY LTD., METLIFE SECURITIZATION DEPOSITOR LLC, METLIFE SEGUROS S.A., METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING FINCO LLC, METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING FUND LP, METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING GP LLC, METLIFE SENIOR DIRECT LENDING HOLDINGS LP, METLIFE SERVICES AND SOLUTIONS LLC, METLIFE SERVICES CYPRUS LIMITED, METLIFE SERVICES EAST PRIVATE LIMITED, METLIFE SERVICES EEIG, METLIFE SERVICES EOOD, METLIFE SERVICES SOCIEDAD LIMITADA, METLIFE SERVICES SP Z.O.O, METLIFE SERVICIOS S.A., METLIFE SLOVAKIA S.R.O. V LIKVIDACII, METLIFE SOLUTIONS PTE. LTD., METLIFE SOLUTIONS S.A.S., METLIFE SP HOLDINGS LLC, METLIFE SYNDICATED BANK LOAN FUND SCSP, METLIFE SYNDICATED BANK LOAN LUX GP S.A.R.L., METLIFE THR INVESTOR LLC, METLIFE TOWARZYSTWO FUNDUSZY INWESTYCYJNYCH S.A., METLIFE TOWARZYSTWO UBEZPIECZEN NA ZYCIE I REASEKURACJI S.A., METLIFE TOWER RESOURCES GROUP INC., METLIFE TREAT TOWERS MEMBER LLC, METLIFE WORLDWIDE HOLDINGS LLC, METROPOLITAN CASUALTY INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN DIRECT PROPERTY AND CASUALTY INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN GENERAL INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN GLOBAL MANAGEMENT LLC., METROPOLITAN GROUP PROPERTY AND CASUALTY INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN LIFE SEGUROS E PREVIDENCIA PRIVADA S.A., METROPOLITAN LIFE SOCIETATE de ADMINISTRARE a UNUI FOND de PENSII ADMINISTRAT PRIVAT S.A., METROPOLITAN LLOYDS INC., METROPOLITAN LLOYDS INSURANCE COMPANY OF TEXAS, METROPOLITAN PROPERTY AND CASUALTY INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN TOWER LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, METROPOLITAN TOWER REALTY COMPANY INC., MEX DF PROPERTIES LLC, MFA FINANCING VEHICLE CTR1 LLC, MIDTOWN HEIGHTS LLC, MIM CLAL GENERAL PARTNER LLC, MIM EMD GP LLC, MIM I LLC, MIM METWEST INTERNATIONAL MANAGER LLC, MIM ML-AI VENTURE 5 MANAGER LLC, MIM PROPERTY MANAGEMENT LLC, MIM PROPERTY MANAGEMENT OF GEORGIA 1 LLC, MIM THIRD ARMY INDUSTRIAL MANAGER LLC, MISSOURI REINSURANCE INC., ML - URS PORT CHESTER SC MANAGER LLC, ML 300 THIRD MEMBER LLC, ML ARMATURE MEMBER LLC, ML BELLEVUE MANAGER LLC, ML BELLEVUE MEMBER LLC, ML BRIDGESIDE APARTMENTS LLC, ML CAPACITACION COMERCIAL S.A. DE C.V., ML CERRITOS TC MEMBER LLC, ML CLAL MEMBER LLC, ML DOLPHIN GP LLC, ML DOLPHIN MEZZ LLC, ML MATSON MILLS MEMBER LLC, ML MILILANI MEMBER LLC, ML ONE BEDMINSTER LLC, ML PORT CHESTER SC MEMBER LLC, ML SENTINEL SQUARE MEMBER LLC, ML SLOANS LAKE MEMEBR LLC, ML SOUTHLANDS MEMBER LLC, ML SOUTHMORE LLC, ML SWAN GP LLC, ML SWAN MEZZ LLC, ML TERRACES LLC, ML THIRD ARMY INDUSTRIAL MEMBER LLC, ML VENTURE 1 MANAGER S. DE R. L. DE C.V., ML VENTURE 1 SERVICER LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 1 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 2 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 3 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 4 LLC, ML-AI METLIFE MEMBER 5 LLC, MLIA MANAGER I LLC, MLIA PARK TOWER MANAGER LLC, MLIA SBAF COLONY MANAGER LLC, MLIA SBAF MANAGER LLC, MLIC ASSET HOLDINGS II LLC, MLIC ASSET HOLDINGS LLC, MLIC CB HOLDINGS LLC, MLJ US FEEDER LLC, MM GLOBAL OPERATIONS SUPPORT CENTER S.A. DE C.V., MMP CEDAR STREET OWNER LLC, MMP CEDAR STREET REIT LLC, MMP HOLDINGS III LLC, MMP OLIVIAN OWNER LLC, MMP OLIVIAN REIT LLC, MMP OWNERS III LLC, MMP OWNERS LLC, MMP SOUTH PARK OWNER LLC, MMP SOUTH PARK REIT LLC, MREF 425 MKT LLC, MSV IRVINE PROPERTY LLC, MTC FUND I LLC, MTC FUND II LLC, MTC FUND III LLC, MTL LEASING LLC, MTU HOTEL OWNER LLC, NATILOPORTEM HOLDINGS LLC, NEWBURY INSURANCE COMPANY LIMITED, OCONEE GOLF COMPANY LLC, OCONEE HOTEL COMPANY LLC, OCONEE LAND COMPANY LLC, OCONEE LAND DEVELOPMENT COMPANY LLC, OCONEE MARINA COMPANY LLC, OMI MLIC INVESTMENTS LIMITED, PACIFIC LOGISTICS INDUSTRIAL SOUTH LLC, PARK TOWER JV MEMBER LLC, PARK TOWER REIT INC., PJSC METLIFE, PLAZA DRIVE PROPERTIES LLC, PNB METLIFE INDIA INSURANCE COMPANY LIMITED, PREFCO FOURTEEN LLC, PREFCO XIV HOLDINGS LLC, PROVIDA INTERNACIONAL S.A., SAFEGUARD HEALTH ENTERPRISES INC., SAFEGUARD HEALTH PLANS INC., SAFEHEALTH LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, SEVENTH AND OSBORN MF VENTURE LLC, SINO-US UNITED METLIFE INSURANCE CO. LTD., SOUTHCREEK INDUSTRIAL HOLDINGS LLC, ST. JAMES FLEET INVESTMENTS TWO LIMITED, SUPERIOR PROCUREMENT INC, SUPERIOR VISION BENEFIT MANAGEMENT INC., SUPERIOR VISION HOLDINGS INC., SUPERIOR VISION INSURANCE INC., SUPERIOR VISION INSURANCE PLAN OF WISCONSIN INC., SUPERIOR VISION OF NEW JERSEY INC., SUPERIOR VISION SERVICES INC., Safeguard Health Enterprises, Security First Group Inc., THE BUILDING AT 575 FIFTH AVENUE MEZZANINE LLC, THE BUILDING AT 575 FIFTH RETAIL HOLDING LLC, THE BUILDING AT 575 FIFTH RETAIL OWNER, THE DIRECT CALL CENTRE PTY LIMITED, TRANSMOUNTAIN LAND & LIVESTOCK COMPANY, UVC INDEPENDENT PRACTICE ASSOCIATION INC., VERSANT HEALTH CONSOLIDATIONS CORP., VERSANT HEALTH HOLDCO INC., VERSANT HEALTH LAB LLC, VIRIDIAN MIRACLE MILE LLC, VISION 21 MANAGED EYE CARE OF TAMPA BAY, VISION 21 PHYSICIAN PRACTICE MANAGEMENT COMPANY, VISION TWENTY-ONE MANAGED EYE CARE IPA INC., Versant Health, WDV ACQUISITION CORP., WFP 1000 HOLDING COMPANY GP LLC, WHITE OAK ROYALTY COMPANY, and WHITE TRACT II LLC.TCF Financial Corporation operates as the financial holding company for TCF National Bank that provides various financial products and services in the United States and Canada. It operates through Consumer Banking, Commercial Banking, and Enterprise Services segments. The company offers checking, savings, and money market accounts; certificates of deposit; individual retirement accounts; debit and credit cards; and check cashing and remittance services. It also provides investment management and custodial services, trust services, financial and estate planning, and retirement planning and employee benefit programs; residential, consumer, and small business lending products; and consumer real estate secured lending, consumer loans, loans secured by personal property, and unsecured personal loans. In addition, the company offers loans and lines of credit, deposits, cash management, capital market products, international trade finance, letters of credit, foreign exchange management services, and loan syndication services. Further, it provides commercial and industrial, commercial real estate banking, and lease financing; and treasury services comprising investment and borrowing portfolios, as well as manages capital, debt, and market risks. As of December 31, 2020, the company operated 478 branches, including 373 traditional branches, 102 supermarket branches, and three campus branches located in Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona, and South Dakota; and 1,062 ATMs. TCF Financial Corporation was incorporated in 1987 and is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan.

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OSCE is expected to monitor the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops on Aug. 28, Azerbaijans Defense Ministry said in a message on Aug. 27.

The monitoring will be held under the mandate of the OSCE chairperson-in-office personal representative near Azerbaijans Goygol district.

On the Azerbaijani side, the monitoring will be held by Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Andrzej Kasprzyk, his field assistants Mikhail Olaru and Simon Tiller.

On the Azerbaijani territories, occupied and controlled by Armenian armed forces, the monitoring will be held by Gennady Petrica and Martin Schuster, field assistants of the OSCE chairperson-in-office personal representative.

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.The following companies are subsidiares of Molina Healthcare: Aetna & Humana - Medicare Advantage, Affinity Health Plan, AmericanWork Inc., Better Health Network, Camelot Care Centers Inc, Children's Behavioral Health Inc., Choices Group Inc., College Community Services, Dockside Services Inc, Family Preservation Services Inc., Family Preservation Services of Florida Inc., Family Preservation Services of North Carolina Inc., Family Preservation Services of Washington D.C. Inc., Family Preservation Services of West Virginia Inc., Florida NetPASS LLC, Hclb Inc., Magellan Complete Care, Maple Star Nevada Inc., Maple Star Oregon Inc., Mercy CarePlus, Molina Clinical Services LLC, Molina Healthcare Data Center Inc., Molina Healthcare of Arizona Inc., Molina Healthcare of California, Molina Healthcare of Florida Inc., Molina Healthcare of Georgia Inc., Molina Healthcare of Illinois Inc., Molina Healthcare of Iowa Inc., Molina Healthcare of Louisiana Inc., Molina Healthcare of Maryland Inc., Molina Healthcare of Michigan Inc., Molina Healthcare of Mississippi Inc., Molina Healthcare of Nevada Inc., Molina Healthcare of New Mexico Inc., Molina Healthcare of New York Inc., Molina Healthcare of North Carolina Inc., Molina Healthcare of Ohio Inc., Molina Healthcare of Oklahoma Inc., Molina Healthcare of Pennsylvania Inc., Molina Healthcare of Puerto Rico Inc., Molina Healthcare of South Carolina LLC, Molina Healthcare of Texas Inc., Molina Healthcare of Texas Insurance Company, Molina Healthcare of Utah Inc., Molina Healthcare of Virginia Inc., Molina Healthcare of Washington Inc., Molina Healthcare of Wisconsin Inc., Molina Holdings Corporation, Molina Hospital Management LLC, Molina Information Systems LLC dba Molina Medicaid Solutions, Molina Medical Management Inc., Molina Pathways LLC, Molina Pathways of Texas Inc., Molina Youth Academy, NextLevel Health Illinois, Pathways Community Corrections Inc., Pathways Community Services LLC, Pathways Community Support of Texas Inc., Pathways Health and Community Support LLC, Pathways Human Services LLC., Pathways of Arizona Inc., Pathways of Delaware Inc., Pathways of Idaho LLC, Pathways of Maine Inc., Pathways of Massachusetts LLC, Pathways of Oklahoma Inc., Pathways of Washington Inc., Providence Community Services, Providence Human Services, Raystown Developmental Services Inc., The Game of Work LLC, The RedCo Group Inc., Total Care Medicaid plan, Transitional Family Services Inc., Unisys -Health Information Management, and YourCare Health Plan.Reinsurance Group of America, Inc. is a holding company, which engages in the provision of traditional and non-traditional life and health reinsurance products. It operates through the following segments: U.S. and Latin America; Canada; Europe, Middle East, and Africa; Asia Pacific; and Corporate and Other. The U.S. and Latin America segment markets individual and group life and health reinsurance to domestic clients for a variety of products through yearly renewable term agreements, coinsurance, and modified coinsurance. The Canada segment offers individual life reinsurance, and to a lesser extent creditor, group life and health, critical illness and disability reinsurance, through yearly renewable term and coinsurance agreements. The Europe, Middle East, and Africa segment serves individual and group life and health products through yearly renewable term and coinsurance agreements, reinsurance of critical illness coverage that provides a benefit in the event of the diagnosis of a pre-defined critical illness and underwritten annuities. The Asia Pacific segment comprises individual and group life and health reinsurance, critical illness coverage, disability, and superannuation thr

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President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an will travel to Tehran on Sept. 7, presidency announced on Aug. 27.

Erdo?an will attend the third summit within the Astana process amid raising concerns for possible regime attack on Syria's rebel-held Idlib province, Hurriyet Daily News reported.

Turkey, Russia and Iran are the guarantors of a countrywide ceasefire in Syria and the guarantors will meet in Tehran. They have been mediating a peace process since January 2016 among Syrias warring sides in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavu?o?lu held two meetings with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the last two weeks. The minister also met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Aug. 24. Defense Minister Hulusi Akar and National Intelligence Organization Director Hakan Fidan also held meetings in Moscow, just a week after their first trip to the Russian capital.

Turkeys demarche comes over impending Syrian military operation into the Idlib where Ankara warns against a full scale military operation will risk lives of civilians among nearly three million people there.

The Syrian army, backed by Russia, is aiming to eliminate jihadists, which have been controlling the province since early 2017.The following companies are subsidiares of Sealed Air: A.P.S. (Holdings) Limited, AFP Trading (China) Co. Ltd., AFPTOH LTD, APS Automated Packaging Systems GmbH & Co. KG, APS Verwaltungs-GmbH, Air Ride Pallets Hong Kong Limited, Austin Foam Plastics Inc. (dba AFP Inc.), Automated Packaging Systems, Automated Packaging Systems Asia Holding Company Limited, Automated Packaging Systems Comerciale Importacao do Brasil Ltda., Automated Packaging Systems Europe, Automated Packaging Systems LLC, Automated Packaging Systems Limited, Automated Packaging Systems Southeast Asia Co. Ltd., B+ Equipment, B+ Equipment SAS, Beacon Holdings LLC, Biosphere Industries, BluPack (New Zealand), Blue Dot Packaging Pty Ltd., Cactus (Shanghai) Trading Co. Ltd., Cryovac (Malaysia) SDN. BHD, Cryovac Brasil Ltda., Cryovac Holdings II LLC, Cryovac International Holdings Inc., Cryovac LLC*, Cryovac Leasing Corporation, Cryovac Londrina Ltda., Cryovac Packaging Portugal  Embalagens Ltda., Cryovac-Sealed Air de Costa Rica S.R.L., DELTAPLAM Embalagens Industria e Comercio, Diversey, Diversey J Trustee Limited, Diversey Trustee Limited, Entapack Pty. Ltd., Fagerdala (Chengdu) Packaging Co. Ltd, Fagerdala (Shanghai) Foams Co. Ltd., Fagerdala (Shanghai) Polymer Co. Ltd., Fagerdala (Suzhou) Packaging Co. Ltd., Fagerdala (Thailand) Limited, Fagerdala (Xiamen) Packaging Co. Ltd., Fagerdala Leamchabung Limited, Fagerdala Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Fagerdala Mexico S.A. de C.V., Fagerdala Mexico Supply Chain S.A. de C.V., Fagerdala Packaging Inc. (Indiana), Fagerdala Singapore Pte Ltd, Fagerdala Singapore Pte. Ltd., Getpacking.com GmbH, Invertol S. de R.L. de C.V., JSC Sealed Air Kaustik, KRIS Automated Packaging Systems Holding Company, Kevothermal LLC, Kevothermal Limited, Nelipak Holdings, Pack-Tiger GmbH, Polyrol Limited, Polyrol Packaging Systems LLC, ProAseptic Technologies S.L., Producembal- Producao de Embalagens LTDA, Reflectix Inc., SLD Air Packaging Paketleme Malzemeleri Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Saddle Brook Insurance Company, Sealed Air (Asia) Holdings BV, Sealed Air (Barbados) S.R.L., Sealed Air (Canada) Co./CIE, Sealed Air (Canada) Holdings B.V., Sealed Air (China) Co. Ltd., Sealed Air (China) Limited, Sealed Air (Israel) Ltd., Sealed Air (Korea) Limited, Sealed Air (Latin America) Holdings II LLC, Sealed Air (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Sealed Air (New Zealand), Sealed Air (Philippines) Inc., Sealed Air (Singapore) Pte. Limited, Sealed Air (Ukraine) Limited, Sealed Air Africa (Pty.) Limited, Sealed Air Americas Manufacturing S. de R.L. de C.V., Sealed Air Argentina S.A., Sealed Air Australia (Holdings) Pty. Limited, Sealed Air Australia Pty. Limited, Sealed Air Australia Real Estate Pty Ltd, Sealed Air B.V., Sealed Air Belgium N.V., Sealed Air Central America S.A., Sealed Air Chile SpA, Sealed Air Colombia Ltda., Sealed Air Corporation (US), Sealed Air Cyprus Ltd., Sealed Air Denmark A/S, Sealed Air Finance B.V., Sealed Air Finance II LLC, Sealed Air Finance Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Sealed Air Funding LLC, Sealed Air General Trading LLC, Sealed Air GmbH (Germany), Sealed Air GmbH (Switzerland), Sealed Air Hellas SA, Sealed Air Holding France SAS, Sealed Air Holdings (New Zealand) Pty. Ltd., Sealed Air Holdings South Africa Proprietary Limited, Sealed Air Holdings UK I Limited, Sealed Air Holdings UK Limited, Sealed Air Hong Kong Limited, Sealed Air Hungary Ltd., Sealed Air Investment and Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Sealed Air Japan G.K., Sealed Air LLC, Sealed Air Limited (Ireland), Sealed Air Limited (UK), Sealed Air Luxembourg (I) S.a.r.l., Sealed Air Luxembourg (II) S.a.r.l., Sealed Air Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Sealed Air Management Holding Verwaltungs GmbH, Sealed Air Multiflex GmbH, Sealed Air Netherlands (Holdings) I B.V., Sealed Air Netherlands (Holdings) II B.V., Sealed Air Netherlands Holdings V B.V., Sealed Air Norge AS, Sealed Air OY, Sealed Air Packaging (India) Private Limited, Sealed Air Packaging (Shanghai) Co. Limited, Sealed Air Packaging (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Sealed Air Packaging LLC, Sealed Air Packaging Materials (India) LLP, Sealed Air Packaging S.L.U., Sealed Air Peru S.A.C., Sealed Air Polska Sp. Zoo, Sealed Air Pty Limited, Sealed Air S.A S., Sealed Air S.r.l., Sealed Air South Africa (Pty.) Ltd., Sealed Air Svenska AB, Sealed Air Taiwan Limited, Sealed Air UK Limited Partnership, Sealed Air US Holdings (Thailand) LLC, Sealed Air Uruguay S.A., Sealed Air Verpackungen GmbH, Sealed Air de Mexico Operations S. de RL. de C.V., Sealed Air de Venezuela S.A., Sealed Air s.r.o., Shanklin Corp, Shanklin Corporation, TTS-Ciptec, TXAFP Asia Pacific Ltd., TXAFP GP LLC, and Trigon Industries.The following companies are subsidiares of The Western Union: Banco Western Union do Brasil S.A., Coins, Custom House, Custom House (Online) Ltd., Custom House Currency Exchange (Australia) Pty. Limited, Custom House Currency Exchange (Singapore) Pte. Limited, Custom House Financial (UK) Limited, Custom House Financial Ltd., Custom House Holdings (USA) Ltd., Custom House ULC, E Commerce Group Products Inc., First Financial Management Corporation, Global Collection Services S.A., Global Corporate Real Estate Advisors LLC, Grupo Dinamico Empresarial S.A. de C.V., MT (Bermuda) 1 Ltd, MT (Bermuda) 2 Ltd, MT Caribbean Holdings SRL, MT Financial Holdings Ltd., MT Global Holdings Ltd., MT Group Investment Holdings Ltd., MT Group Ltd., MT Holdings (Bermuda) Ltd., MT Holdings Limited, MT Holdings Switzerland GmbH, MT International Holdings Ltd., MT International Operations Partnership, MT International Operations SRL, MT Network Holdings Ltd., MT Payment Services Ltd., MT Payment Services Operations EU/EEA Limited, MT Worldwide Holdings Ltd., Money Transfer Financial Services Limited, Operaciones Internacionales OV S.A. de C.V., Opus Software Technologies Private Limited, PT Western Union Indonesia, Paymap Inc., RII Holdings Inc., Red Global S.A., Ruesch Holding LLC, Ruesch International (Delaware) LLC, Ruesch International L.L.C., Servicio Electronico de Pago S.A., Servicio Integral de Envios S. de R.L. de C.V., Servicios de Apoyo GDE S.A. de C.V., SpeedPay Inc., Speedpay, The Western Union Real Estate Holdings LLC, Transfer Express de Panama S.A., Travelex, Union del Oeste de Costa Rica SRL, Vigo Remittance Canada Company, Vigo Remittance Corp., WU BP Peru S.R.L., WU Technology Engineering Services Private Limited, WUBS Financial Services (Singapore) Pte Limited, WUBS Payments Limited, Western Union (Bermuda) Holding Finance Ltd., Western Union (Hellas) International Holdings S.A., Western Union Acquisition Partnership, Western Union Benelux MT Ltd., Western Union Business Solutions (Australia) Pty Limited, Western Union Business Solutions (Hong Kong) Limited, Western Union Business Solutions (Malta) Limited, Western Union Business Solutions (SA) Limited, Western Union Business Solutions (Singapore) Pte Limited, Western Union Business Solutions (UK) Limited, Western Union Business Solutions (USA) LLC, Western Union Business Solutions Japan KK, Western Union Chile Limitada, Western Union Communications Inc., Western Union Consulting Services (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Western Union Corretora de Cambio S.A., Western Union Financial Holdings L.L.C., Western Union Financial Services (Australia) PTY Ltd., Western Union Financial Services (Canada), Western Union Financial Services (Hong Kong) Limited, Western Union Financial Services (Korea) Inc., Western Union Financial Services (Luxembourg) S.a.r.l., Western Union Financial Services Argentina S.R.L., Western Union Financial Services Eastern Europe LLC, Western Union Financial Services GmbH, Western Union Financial Services Inc., Western Union Financial Services International (France) SARL, Western Union GB Limited, Western Union Global Network Pte. Ltd, Western Union Holdings Inc., Western Union International Bank GmbH, Western Union International Holdings LLC, Western Union International Limited, Western Union International Services LLC, Western Union Ireland Holdings Limited, Western Union Ireland Partnership, Western Union Japan K.K., Western Union LLC, Western Union Luxembourg Holdings 1 S.a.r.l., Western Union Luxembourg Holdings 2 S.a.r.l., Western Union Luxembourg Holdings 3 S.a.r.l., Western Union MT (Australia) Pty. Ltd., Western Union MT East Ltd., Western Union Malta Holdings Limited, Western Union Malta Limited, Western Union Morocco SARL, Western Union Network (Canada) Company, Western Union Network (France) SAS, Western Union Network (Ireland) Limited, Western Union Network Belgium SPRL, Western Union Northern Europe GmbH, Western Union Online Limited, Western Union Overseas Limited, Western Union Payment Services (India) Private Limited, Western Union Payment Services GB Limited, Western Union Payment Services Ireland Limited, Western Union Payment Services Network (Canada) ULC, Western Union Payment Services Network EU/EEA Limited, Western Union Payment Services UK Limited, Western Union Payments (Malaysia) SDN. BHD., Western Union Peru S.A., Western Union Processing Limited, Western Union Processing Lithuania UAB, Western Union Processing Services Inc., Western Union Regional Panama S.A., Western Union Retail Services Belgium, Western Union Retail Services GB Limited, Western Union Retail Services Ireland Limited, Western Union Retail Services Italy S.r.l., Western Union Retail Services Norway AS, Western Union Retail Services RO SRL, Western Union Retail Services Spain S.A., Western Union Retail Services Sweden AB, Western Union Services (Philippines) Inc., Western Union Services (Spain) S.L., Western Union Services India Private Limited, Western Union Services S.L., Western Union Services Singapore Private Limited, Western Union Singapore Limited, Western Union South Africa (PTY) Limited, Western Union Support Services (Nigeria) Limited, Western Union Support Services Cote dlvoire, Western Union Turkey Odeme Hizmetleri Anonim Sirketi, Western Union do Brasil Participacoes Limitada, and Western Union do Brasil Servicos e Participacoes Ltda..The following companies are subsidiares of TransUnion: Accupost Corporation, AppLock Limited, Auditz, Autolocator (Pty) Ltd., Beheer en Beleggingsmaatchapij Stivaco B.V., CIFIN S.A.S, [email protected] plc, Callcredit Data Solutions Limited, Callcredit Information, Callcredit Lead Generation Limited, Callcredit Marketing Ltd., Callcredit Public Sector Limited, Callcredit Spain S.L.U, Centro de Informacion y Estudios Estrategicos Empresariales S.A., Centro de Operaciones Servicios de Informacion Estrategica S.A., CheckMend Ltd., Coactiva Limited, Collection Africa Ltd., Confirma Sistemas de Informacion S.L., Credit Bureau of Carmel & Pebble Beach Inc., Credit Information Services Limited, Credit Information Systems Company Limited, Credit Reference Bureau (Holdings) Limited, Credit Reference Bureau Africa (Pty) Ltd., Credit Reference Bureau Africa Ltd., Credit Reporting Services Limited, Credit Retriever LLC, Crivo, Crown Acquisition BidCo Ltd., Crown Acquisition Consumer Ltd., Crown Acquisition MidCo Ltd., Crown Acquisition MidCo. 2 Ltd., Crown Acquisition TopCo. Ltd., DMWSL 617 Ltd., DMWSL 618 Ltd., DMWSL 619 Ltd., DMWSL 620 Ltd., DataLink Services, Datalink Services Inc., Decision Systems Inc., DecisionMetrics Limited, Diversified Data Development Corporation, Drivers History Inc., Drivers History Information Sales LLC, FT Holdings Inc., FactorTrust, FactorTrust Inc., GMAP Japan KK, GMAP Marketing Consulting Shangahi Co. Ltd, Healthcare Payment Specialists, INSDEC LLC, IS Resources Inc., Immobilise.com Limited, L2C Inc., L2C Inc., Link Marketing Inc., Link2credit Inc., Moussoro Participacoes Ltda., RTech, RTech Healthcare Revenue Technologies Inc., Recipero, Recipero Inc., Recipero Limited, Regional Data Systems Limited, RentPort, Rubixis, Rubixis Inc., Rubixis Technologies Private Limited, STS Vail Beheeren Administracion S. DE. R.L. DE C.V., Servicios y Asesoria S CO BC SA de CV, Signal, Soluciones de Informatica de Centroamerica (SICE) S.A., Source USA Insurance Agency Inc., Tenant ID Limited, Title Insurance Services Corporation, Trans Union Central America S.A., Trans Union Chile S.A., Trans Union Content Solutions LLC, Trans Union Costa Rica S.A., Trans Union Guatemala S.A., Trans Union Honduras-Buro de Credito S.A., Trans Union International Inc., Trans Union LLC, Trans Union Nicaragua S.A., Trans Union Real Estate Services Inc., Trans Union Software Services Private Limited, Trans Union de Puerto Rico Inc., Trans Union of Canada Inc., TransUnion (Mauritius) Limited, TransUnion (Proprietary) Ltd., TransUnion Africa (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Africa Holdings (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Analytic and Decision Services (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Asia Ltd., TransUnion Auto Information Solutions (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Baltics UAB, TransUnion Brasil Sistemas em Informatica Ltda., TransUnion CIBIL Limited, TransUnion Colombia Ltda., TransUnion Consumer Solutions LLC, TransUnion Credit Bureau (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Credit Bureau Namibia (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Data Solutions LLC, TransUnion Digital LLC, TransUnion El Salvador S.A. de C.V., TransUnion Exchange LLC, TransUnion Financing Corporation, TransUnion Global Holdings LLC, TransUnion Global Holdings LP, TransUnion Global Technology Center LLP, TransUnion Healthcare Inc., TransUnion Holding Cyprus Ltd., TransUnion ITC (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Information Group Limited, TransUnion Information Services Limited, TransUnion Information Solutions Inc., TransUnion Information Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd., TransUnion Intelligence LLC, TransUnion Interactive Inc., TransUnion Intermediate Holdings Inc., TransUnion International Holdings LLC, TransUnion International UK Limited, TransUnion Kenya Limited, TransUnion Limited, TransUnion Ltd., TransUnion Marketing Solutions Inc., TransUnion Netherlands I B.V., TransUnion Netherlands II B.V., TransUnion Rental Screening Solutions Inc., TransUnion Reverse Exchange S de R.L. de C.V., TransUnion Risk Advisory Inc., TransUnion Risk and Alternative Data Solutions Inc., TransUnion Rwanda Limited, TransUnion S.A., TransUnion Soluciones de Informacion Chile SA, TransUnion Soluciones de Informacion S de R.L de C.V., TransUnion Teledata LLC, TransUnion UK Holdings Ltd., Tru Optik, TruSignal, TruSignal Inc., TrueLink, Trustev, Trustev Limited, Vail Holdings UK Ltd., Vail Systemen Groep B.V., Verifacts LLC, Visionary Systems Inc., Worthknowing Inc., eBureau, eBureau LLC, iovation Inc., iovation Ltd., and process benchmarking limited.MasTec, Inc. engages in the provision of infrastructure construction services. It operates through the following segments: Communications; Oil and Gas; Electrical Transmissions; Clean Energy and Infrastructure; and Other. The Communications segment performs engineering, construction, maintenance and customer fulfillment activities related to communications infrastructure, primarily for wireless and wireline/fiber communications, and install-to-the-home customers. The Oil and Gas segment offers services on oil and natural gas pipelines and processing facilities for the energy, and utilities industries. The Electrical Transmission segment deals with the energy and utility industries. The Clean Energy and Infrastructure segment serves energy, utility and other end-markets through the installation and construction of power generation facilities, including from clean energy and renewable sources such as wind, solar and biomass, as well as various types of heavy civil and industrial infrastructure. The Other segment comprises of equity investees, other small business units that perform construction, and other services for a variety of international end-markets. The company was founded by

Read MoreBahrain's property watchdog Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) has warned the kingdom's developers to regularise their activities by the end of this week or face action.



Starting from September 1, it will be illegal for the developers to operate without a Rera Developer licence and off-plan sales project licence, reported BNA citing a senior official.



Following the end of the six-month transition period given to developers for the regularisation of their activities by August 31, all these violators will face strict action, remarked Rera CEO Shaikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Khalifa.



He pointed out that the response from real estate brokers had been overwhelmingly positive with more than 98 per cent of them already licensed. Now it was the turn of developers of off-plan sales projects to apply for a Rera licence immediately to avoid law violations.



"Starting from next month, operating without a Rera licence will be in breach of the real estate regulations and sanctions will apply to those who do not comply with the law," he added.



Shaikh Mohammed said that implementation of the Real Estate Sector Regulation Law 27 of 2017 had garnered favourable feedback from investors as it instilled greater confidence in the real estate sector besides encouraging further local and international investment and stimulate demand for real estate properties in Bahrain, stated the BNA report.



Calling upon the buyers of units in these non-compliant developments to be cautious, Rera chief said they will not benefit from wide-ranging consumer protection mechanisms that have been safeguarded by the Real Estate Sector Regulation Law (Law 27 of 2017) if they deal with a non-Rera licensed developer of an off-plan sale project.



To assist developers with licensing their off-plan sale developments, Rera has a comprehensive website which provides details on the steps to be followed to enable compliance with the Real Estate Sector Regulation Law, he added.The following companies are subsidiares of V.F.: 1994 Inc. Ltd., 530 Park Ave 10-F LLC, 530 Park Ave 14-H LLC, ALL'CROWN SA, Administradora Mexicana de Servicios S de RL de CV, Administradora de Servicios Honduras S.A., Altra Footwear, Altra LLC, C.C.R.L. LLC, Chapter 4 Corp, Cherry SAS, Ciliegia Srl, Corporacion Distribiduidora de Dickies S de RL de CV, Cutler de Mexico SA, Czech Distribution Services s.r.o., DSI Enterprises LLC, Dickies de Honduras SA de CV, Dickies de Parras S de RL de CV, EAGLE CREEK EUROPE LIMITED, Eagle Creek, Eagle Creek Inc., GFYS LLC, GREENSPORT MONTE BIANCO, Horace Small, INVERSIONES INMOBILIARIES AUSTRALES SA, INVERSIONES VF CHILE DOS LTDA, INVERSIONES VF CHILE LTDA, IW Apparel LLC, IW Holdings LLC, IW Panama Trading S. de R.L., IceBreaker, Icebreaker Apparel LLC, Icebreaker Australia Pty, Icebreaker Australia Retail Pty, Icebreaker Europe Limited, Icebreaker Holdings Limited, Icebreaker Licensing LLC, Icebreaker Limited, Icebreaker Merino Clothing Europe Ltd., Icebreaker New Zealand Limited, Icebreaker Pure Merino GmbH, Imagewear Apparel Corp., Industrial Laundry Services LLC, Industrias Coahuila de Zaragosa S de RL de CV, JanSport Apparel Corp., Kipling Apparel Corp., Kipling Belgium, Kipling Holdings LLC, Kirsche GmbH, Kodiak Group Holdings CO., Lee Bell Inc., Lucy, Lucy Apparel LLC, Majestic Athletic Official Store, Mo Industries Holdings, NII Sales - Texas LLC, Napapijri, North East Rig-Out Limited, North Elm Properties LLC, RED KAP DE MEXICO S DE RL DE CV, RKI HONDURAS S de RL, Reef Holdings Corporation, Rock & Republic, SERVICIOS Y PROMOCIONES TEXTILES LTDA, South Cone, South Cone Inc, Supreme, Supreme Holdings Inc., Supreme Intermediate Holdings Inc., T.I. Venture Group Inc, TBL INVESTMENTS HOLDING GMBH, TBL Licensing LLC, THE NORTH FACE ITALY SRL, THE NORTH FACE SAGL, THE RECREATIONAL FOOTWEAR CO., TIMBERLAND EUROPE BV, TIMBERLAND HK TRADING LTD., TIMBERLAND LUXEMBOURG HOLDING ASIA S.A.R.L., TIMBERLAND UK LTD., The North Face, The North Face Apparel Corp, Timberland, Timberland Asia LLC, Timberland IDC Ltd., Timberland International LLC, VANS MADEIRA LDA, VANS SPAIN SL, VF (J) FRANCE SAS, VF (J) NEDERLAND BV, VF (J) NETHERLANDS SERVICES BV, VF APPAREL PORTUGAL LDA, VF ASIA LTD, VF Apollo Investments Limited, VF Apollo Singapore Pte. Ltd., VF Asia Sourcing Ltd, VF Austria GMBH, VF BRANDS MALAYSIA SDN BHD, VF BRANDS TAIWAN LTD., VF Belgium BV, VF Brands Pte. Ltd., VF CH Apollo Sagl, VF CH Holdings GmbH, VF CH Imagewear Canada GmbH, VF CH MEXICO INVESTMENTS SAGL, VF CH-MEX Holdings LLC, VF CHINA LTD., VF CIS LLC, VF COMERCIALIZADORA LTDA, VF CZECH SERVICES SRO, VF CZECH SRO, VF Corporation, VF DE ARGENTINA SA, VF DO BRAZIL LTDA, VF EGE GIYIM SANAYI VE TICARET LIMITED SIRKETI, VF EUROPE BV, VF GERMANY TEXTILE-HANDELS GMBH, VF Germany Services GMBH, VF HELLAS EPE, VF HOLDING SAGL, VF HOLDINGS MEXICO LLC, VF Hong Kong Limited, VF IB Holdings LLC, VF IMAGEWEAR DE MEXICO S DE RL DE CV, VF IMAGEWEAR MAJESTIC (UK) LTD, VF INTERNATIONAL SAGL, VF INVESTIMENTOS DO BRAZIL LTDA, VF IP Holdings LLC, VF ISRAEL (APPAREL) LTD, VF ITALIA SRL, VF ITALY SERVICES SRL, VF Imagewear Canada Co., VF Imagewear Inc, VF Intellectual Property Services Inc, VF International Holding GmbH, VF Investments Holding GmbH, VF Investments Netherlands BV, VF JEANSWEAR ARGENTINA SRL, VF JEANSWEAR ESPANA SL, VF Japan KK, VF KOREA LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY, VF LUXEMBOURG SARL, VF Management Service Italy S.r.l., VF NL Holdings CV, VF NL Imagewear B.V., VF NORTHERN EUROPE LIMITED, VF NORTHERN EUROPE SERVICES LIMITED, VF Norway AS, VF OUTDOOR (CANADA) CO, VF OUTDOOR MEXICO S DE RL DE CV, VF OUTDOOR SERVICES S DE RL DE CV, VF Outdoor LLC, VF PANAMA SOURCING SERVICES S. DE R.L., VF PARTICIPACOES DO BRASIL LTDA, VF PERU SA, VF POLSKA DISTRIBUTION SP ZO O, VF Playwear Dominicana SA, VF Playwear LLC, VF Receivables LP, VF Receivables Services LLC, VF SAGEBRUSH ENTERPRISES LLC, VF SALES SAGL, VF SERVICIOS DE HONDURAS SA, VF SERVICIOS EL SALVADOR LTDA. DE CV, VF SHANGHAI SOURCING LIMITED, VF SOURCING THAILAND LTD, VF Scandinavia ApS, VF Services LLC, VF Servicios de Guatemala Srl, VF Servicios de Nicaragua Srl., VF Shanghai Enterprise Company, VF Shanghai Limited, VF Singapore Overseas Services Pte Ltd, VF Solutions LLC, VF Sourcing India Private Limited, VF Sweden AB, VF Switzerland Enterprises GmbH, VF Taiwan Limited, VF Transglobal GmbH, VF Treasury Services LLC, VFSE Investments LLC, VFSLA Commercial Services LLC, VFSLA Servicios S. de R.L. de C.V., Vans, Vans Inc, W-D APPAREL COMPANY LLC, W-D Licensing LLC, WD Europe SAS, WD Supply Holding Limited (HK), Walls Cayman Limited, Walls Holding Company LLC, Walls Industries LLC, Williamson Industries Ltd., Williamson-Dickie APAC Holding Company Ltd., Williamson-Dickie Apparel Trading (Shanghai) Ltd., Williamson-Dickie Canada Co., Williamson-Dickie Europe GmbH, Williamson-Dickie Europe Holdings Ltd., Williamson-Dickie Europe Ltd., Williamson-Dickie HK Holding Company Ltd., Williamson-Dickie Holding Co-Mexico S de RL de CV, Williamson-Dickie Manufacturing Company LLC, Williamson-Dickie Middle East FZE, Wooster GK, Workwear Sourcing S. de R.L., World Jeans VF Asia Ltd, Worldwide Workwear Ltd., and Ying Tao Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd..Wall Street analysts have given Concord Medical Services 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 Concord Medical Services wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.Henkel, a Germany-based chemical and consumer goods company has posted sales of 5.143 billion euros ($5.97 billion) during the second quarter of the year, marking an organic growth of 3.5 per cent.



Driven by strong organic growth, Henkel delivered a good development in the second quarter despite significant negative currency effects and higher material prices. We increased quarterly sales to an all-time high, further improved our adjusted EBIT margin and achieved the highest quarterly adjusted earnings to date, said Henkel CEO Hans Van Bylen.



Our Adhesive Technologies business unit delivered very strong organic growth, Laundry & Home Care reported good growth and the development of Beauty Care was also positive.



We achieved organic sales growth across all regions, with a very strong performance in emerging markets and a good development in mature markets. Our North American consumer businesses returned to growth with service levels back to normal, he added.



As in the first quarter, we were confronted with significant currency headwinds and increasing material prices in the second quarter. Currencies negatively impacted our reported sales with 6.1 per cent or about 310 million euros. Our operating profit and earnings per share were also affected by currencies. Excluding the impact of currency effects, we delivered a strong operational EPS increase of 7.7 per cent, explained Hans Van Bylen.



Updated outlook for fiscal year 2018Henkel has updated its guidance for fiscal 2018. The company confirms its expectation for organic sales growth of 2 to 4 per cent for the Henkel Group. Henkel now expects organic sales growth in the Adhesive Technologies business unit of 4 to 5 per cent from previously 2 to 4 per cent. In the Laundry &Home Care business unit Henkel continues to expect growth in the range of 2to 4 per cent. In the Beauty Care business unit Henkel confirms its expectation of positive organic sales growth of 0 to 2 per cent.



For adjusted return on sales (EBIT), Henkel now anticipates an increase year on year to around 18 per cent from previously more than 17.5 per cent. All three business units are expected to contribute to this positive performance. Reflecting the development of currencies and material prices, Henkel now expects an increase of between 3 and 6 per cent in adjusted earnings per preferred share from previously between 5 and 8 per cent.



The outlook underlines our continued focus on sustainable profitable growth and we are committed to further drive the implementation of our strategic priorities, said Hans Van Bylen.  TradeArabia News ServiceEmirates SkyCargo, the freight division of Dubai's national carrier Emirates, will carry flood relief cargo of over 175 tonne to south Indian state of Kerala, joining the UAE community in their support to the affected people of the state.



More than a dozen flights, the air cargo operator will transport the relief goods, which have been donated by various UAE-based businesses and organisations, to state capital Thiruvananthapuram - the nearest online Emirates station to the areas most affected by the flood, said a statement from the Emirati carrier.



The goods, including lifesaving boats, blankets and dry food items, will be handed over to the local flood relief and aid organisations for distribution, it added.-TradeArabia News Service

German engineering major Bosch is launching eCityTruck, an electrical powertrain suitable for the vast majority of delivery vehicles. The first vehicles to feature the new electric powertrain will be launched in Germany in 2019.



The eCityTruck powertrain will equip electric vans that especially handle last-mile deliveries from distribution centres to recipients. The kind of stop-and-go traffic that often take place within ecommerce deliveries is an area where electric vehicles are particularly efficient, because they can recuperate the energy from constant braking, which increases their range.



Most delivery routes amount to less than 80 km a day  a distance easily covered on a single battery charge. Fleets can then be recharged overnight at the depot.



To keep pace with goods supply in cities, theres no avoiding a rethink of delivery traffic. Boschs electrical powertrain for commercial vehicles has the potential to change the face of urban delivery traffic. Were getting electric vans ready for the mass market, said Dr Markus Heyn, member of the board of management of Robert Bosch GmbH.



There are two versions of Boschs eCityTruck powertrain: one with a transmission and one without. The goal is to create solutions that are quick to integrate and accommodate automakers differing requirements. These powertrain solutions can be scaled for light commercial vehicles weighing two to 7.5 metric tons, making them suitable for a large section of the commercial vehicle market.



Bosch already offers an all-in-one solution for passenger cars  the e-axle  which significantly shortens vehicle development times. With its new eCityTruck powertrain concept, Bosch has taken multiple components such as an electric motor and power electronics and combined them into one unit. This economizes on parts, making the powertrain not only far more efficient, but more affordable as well.



Thanks to the easily integrated solution, customers no longer have the time-consuming task of developing new components. One further advantage for automakers, both established names and new players, is that the Bosch solution lets them bring vehicles to market quickly.



According to a report by Research and Markets, the market for light commercial vehicles in the UAE is set to grow by 8.25 per cent by the year 2022, which can be attributed to a rise in infrastructure projects across the country, as well as growing logistics and tourism sectors.



Boschs plans for the electrification of commercial vehicles go beyond vans. Together with the Nikola Motor Company, a U.S. start-up, Bosch is developing a powertrain that raises the bar for electric range.



For Bosch, these powertrain technologies for delivery traffic are another milestone on the path toward achieving a leading global position in the electromobility mass market set to emerge after 2020, and toward making its vision of emissions-free, accident-free, and stress-free mobility a reality.



The future of mobility at Bosch is automated, connected, and electrified. By expanding its product portfolio to include light commercial vehicles, Bosch is supporting not only automakers with their electrification strategies but with it the wider economy. The new powertrain would support wider adoption in the logistics and service sector across the world towards adopting greener transport solutions.



UAE e-commerce will hit $10 billion by 2018 according to market research firm Frost & Sullivan. The UAEs Supreme Council of Energy issued directive Number 01 of 2016 that government institutions must ensure that 10 per cent of all new purchases of fleet vehicles are of hybrid or electric vehicles.



This will support the UAEs target for two per cent of all vehicles to be hybrid or electric by the year 2020, and 10 per cent by 2030. In turn, this will help to reduce total carbon emissions in Dubai by 19 per cent by 2021.  TradeArabia News ServiceA court in Sharjah, UAE, has adjourned the hearing of a cheque bounce case against Arif Naqvi, founder of the private equity firm Abraaj, to tomorrow (August 28), reports said.

This is second such case against Naqvi to be heard in a court in the UAE. The case relates to a cheque worth $217 million (Dh798 million) issued by Naqvi to Sharjah-based Crescent Group founder Hamid Jafar, said a Gulf News report.

The new case comes after a similar case relating to a cheque bounce of $300 million was settled out of court on July 15, it said.

Cheque bounce is a criminal offence in the UAE and Naqvi could face a jail term if found guilty, the report added.There is a new threat blowing up in the news, and its capable of exploiting most computing devices in operation today, said an industry expert, explaining how it could be prevented it from infiltrating an organization.



Consider yourself warned: There is a new threat blowing up in the news, and its capable of exploiting most computing devices in operation today.



The threat is named NetSpectre, and its critical that you take a few minutes to learn a little more about itand how you can prevent it from infiltrating your organization.



What is NetSpectre?



Recently discovered by a team of security researchers, NetSpectre is a variant on the new Spectre family of attacks.



Spectre attacks take advantage of a chip feature called speculative execution. Speculative execution was originally designed to improve CPU performance. But cyber criminals have developed a way to exploit this feature. Now, cyber criminals can develop Spectre attacks that exploit this feature, and trick computers into leaking sensitive information.



First, nearly every modern computing device is vulnerable to them. The speculative execution feature that they exploit is found in Intel, AMD, and ARM chips. These chips are present in computers, mobile devices, cloud servers, and almost any other device you can think of that has been produced since 1995.



Second, while Spectre attacks can potentially be patched, they may not be able to be solved via software improvements alone. To fully mitigate this exploit, it is likely you need to change a devices processor architecture, at the hardware level.



Earlier versions of Spectre attacks were dangerous enough. But now NetSpectre has emerged, and it carries with it a new feature that suggests Spectre attacks are about to become even more dangerous than they originally appeared.



What makes NetSpectre so dangerous?



On the surface, NetSpectre operates like many other Spectre attacks. As The Hacker News explains, with NetSpectre, a cyber criminal can, write and execute malicious code to extract data from a previously-secured CPU memory, giving that attacker access to passwords, cryptographic keys, and other sensitive information.



Now, previously-known variants of Spectre attacks had a limitation: the attacker needed to get the victim to first download and execute malware onto their computer, or to access an insecure website that was running malicious JavaScript, before they were able to launch their Spectre attack. But NetSpectre does not share this limitation.



NetSpectre can be launched over a network, which includes LANs and between virtual machines in Googles Cloud. As Bleeping Computer explains, NetSpectre, can simply bombard a computers network ports and achieve the same results, as previous, more involved Spectre attacks.



NetSpectre itself can only exfiltrate data at relatively low speeds, and thus requires a substantial amount of time to achieve its objectives. But it carries a frightening promise: this new threat demonstrates a potentially devastating, previously-unknown, exploit in the majority of the worlds computing devices. And you can bet that cyber criminals are hard at work developing new, faster, and even more dangerous threats to exploit this same vulnerability.



How to beat back NetSpectre, and its next evolution



The good news is: Youre not alone in your fight against NetSpectre and its variants.



Google remains hard at work, funding research to discover new Spectre exploits before they appear in the wild. And earlier this year, Intel released a series of patches that began to mitigate their speculative execution vulnerabilities. These patches appear to close the NetSpectre vulnerability. So if you have been aware of these emerging Spectre attacksand updated your systems accordinglythan you should be protected against NetSpectre.



But if you have not updated your systems accordingly, or if you are unsure if you have patched this vulnerability, then please take some time today to do so. While it is heartening to hear that the OEMs behind these vulnerabilities are attempting to correct them, cyber security is an all hands on deck activity.

Whether you are a business owner, a security professional, or simply an individual user, you share some responsibility for ensuring your networks safety. And that begins with continued awareness of what threats are emerging, and how to protect yourself against them.



About the author



Sreeraj Gopinathan is head of Threat Anticipation Services at Paladion, a leading information security service provider.The newly appointed Canon Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) president and CEO visited Canon's regional headquarters in Dubai, emphasising the region as a priority for the global provider of imaging technologies and services.

Yuichi Ishizukas visit to Canons regional headquarters for the Middle East and Central and North Africa comes just four months into his new leadership role.

The visit reinforced Canon EMEAs commitment to the growth of the regions imaging industry by providing the latest technologies in business and consumer imaging products and solutions, the company said.

The Middle East and Central and North Africa are fast-developing markets for Canon, especially with the rise of the local tech and start-up scenes driven by the entrepreneurial endeavours of the youth that make up the majority of the population across the region. Various industries in the private sector are also seeking to adopt digitisation as a policy for seamless and efficient business operations, and imaging technologies are an integral part of this operational transformation.

The Middle East and Africa are important growth markets for Canon. We are expanding in these regions rapidly because businesses and governments understand how imaging technologies can enhance their global competitiveness in a fast-evolving, digital world, said Ishizuka.

During his visit, Ishizuka toured Canons newly opened Space360, an innovation-led, collaborative space that connects minds and drives creativity within the organisation, and also acts as an idea generation hub between other like-minded entities. He also visited Canons Innovation Centre which opened last year as an evolved showroom concept to provide businesses and other entities with a live demonstration of Canons latest technologies.

Canon EMEA contributes around one-third of Canons global sales revenue and employs in the region of 17,000 people.  TradeArabia News ServiceEmirates is offering passengers attractive fares to Edinburgh to celebrate the inaugural flight to the Scottish capital on October 1.



Travellers in the UAE can book special fares on all Economy and Business Class travel starting today (August 27) until September 10 for travel between October 1 and May 31, 2019.



Economy Class passengers can enjoy fares starting from Dh2,495 ($679) and Business Class passengers can enjoy fares starting from Dh13,165 ($3,583.6).



Edinburgh is the airlines second destination in Scotland after Glasgow and its eighth in the UK. Scotland is a popular destination for leisure and business travellers for its rich history, gourmet food, cultural scene and architectural attractions such as the Edinburgh Castle. The Scottish capital is the second most visited city in the UK by tourists with spectacular sites such as the citys Old Town and New Town which are both Unesco World Heritage Sites. It is also the first city in the world to be designated a Unesco city of Literature.



The new daily service will be operated by an Emirates Boeing 777-300ER in a three-class cabin configuration which offers eight private suites in First Class, 42 lie-flat seats in Business Class and 304 spacious seats in Economy Class. Flight EK023 will depart Dubai daily at 0955hrs and arrive in Edinburgh at 1450hrs, while the return flight, EK024 will depart Edinburgh at 2015hrs and arrive in Dubai at 0640hrs the next morning.



Travellers can also book with Emirates Holidays and enjoy a five-star holiday experience for an additional spend starting at Dh1,173 ($319.3) per person, exclusive of the airfare. - TradeArabia News ServiceMaster of Architecture student Aaron Szeto is discovering the many ways that architecture can improve peoples lives.

For me, architecture really balances using my creative skills with helping other people, he says. Its about designing built environments that shape the way we live. It's also a way of analyzing spaces and improving how humans can inhabit them.

Immersed in research



For his thesis, Aaron has been exploring how architecture can address the issue of flooding in deltaic communities. As a recipient of the Bruce and Dorothy Rossetti Scholarship, Aaron decided to travel to flood-prone Thailand to conduct his research. While he was there, he made several connections in the local architecture community who helped him navigate the area.

I got recommendations on where to go and who to meet with to better understand the Chao Phraya Delta in Thailand, he recalls. People were very gracious in helping me to arrange rides in rural areas as well. I had a lot of unplanned but really great experiences there.

While in Bangkok, Aaron observed how the urbanization of the city has resulted in an increase of concrete hardscapes that trap water during heavy rainfalls, and he began envisioning ways to use traditional landscapes to alleviate the issue.

One of the things I worked on was studying how water could be brought back into the city by daylighting the old canals, he explains. I also looked at temple compounds as places to collect, retain, and release water because of their historic connection to the canal system. Thresholds were then developed where people can interact with water as they move between the temple to the canal.

There's a cleansing aspect to the design as you go through the spaces, as well as an offering aspect. The Thai have lost this connection due to the loss of water in their urban structures, so its a way to not only physically bring water back into the temples and the city, but to reconnect the people with their spirituality and their culture.

Local viewpoints



Aaron also had a chance to experience other cultures and environments with his various studio courses and electives. Throughout the four-year Professional Architecture Program, he has travelled to Portugal, through the East Coast of the United States, and to Cuba  gathering valuable perspective.

I think the design studios at Dal offer a diversity that is very important to the pedagogy of architecture. They teach you how to analyze different urban conditions at multiple scales, he says.

Portugal really stood out for me because it was my first experience abroad with Dal as part of our summer Free Labs. We went there with our professor Cristina Verissimo, who does a lot of research and experimentation with cork as it is a very common material and resource in Portugal. It was a really eye-opening experience.

A glimpse at work life



Aarons travels didnt stop there. He also chose to pursue co-op placements on the West Coast of Canada. In the second year of his program, his work term took him to HCMA Architecture + Design in Victoria, BC. This opportunity gave him a great overall understanding of the daily operations in an architectural firm. By the time he showed up for work at his second co-op, Aaron was a couple more years in and able to bring more experience to the table.

Kasian Architecture in Vancouver was an exciting opportunity for me to take a bit more initiative, he recalls. I was really fortunate because my supervisor got me involved in many projects. I felt like I was contributing to a lot of the decision-making, which was really rewarding, especially as a student about to enter the workplace.

Seeing beyond



Back in Halifax, Aaron has been actively involved with the Dalhousie Architecture Students Association (DASA). In addition to being class rep throughout his entire program  mediating with the faculty on behalf of his fellow students  he also took on the role of DASA President.

Its really great to get involved in a leadership position during the year, he says. We're often in our own bubble here, so its a good chance to get engaged with other students and to see the faculty as part of a larger community.

Aaron completed his thesis this summer and will be graduating in October. Looking back, he names his co-op work terms, travel opportunities, and conferences as the main highlights of his education.

I think that opportunity to actually go out and see all the various ways that people are responding to different issues is really helpful to me as a young architect because I can learn from these situations and apply them to my future work in Canada.Mishra, a Delhi School of Economics alumnus, did her PhD and M Phil in economics from Columbia University. (Photo: Screengrab YouTube)

Mumbai: Global investment bank Goldman Sachs today said it has appointed Prachi Mishra as the managing director and chief India economist.

Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Mishra was the deputy division chief of the Western Hemisphere Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Before that, she headed the strategic research unit at the Reserve Bank of India from February 2016 to May 2017.

She was also a specialist adviser at the RBI between November 2014 and February 2016. Mishra was the first lateral recruit at the RBI. Prior to that, she had worked as a senior economist at both the IMF and the ministry of finance.

Mishra, a Delhi School of Economics alumnus, did her PhD and M Phil in economics from Columbia University.The three companies sell jewellery to major retailers including Costco Wholesale Corp, J C Penny Co, Army/Navy Stores, Macy's Inc and Zale Corp, among others. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: Three American companies are directly involved in multibillion-dollar international fraud transactions linked to Nirav Modi, according to an investigation by the court-appointed examiner that was filed on Saturday.

The three companies sell jewellery to major retailers including Costco Wholesale Corp, J C Penny Co, Army/Navy Stores, Macy's Inc and Zale Corp, among others, it said.

The Firestar Diamond Inc, Fantasy Inc and A Jaffe Inc directly involved in the fraud made by Nirav Modi firm according to US Court examiner John J Carney in its investigation.

The US court in its investigation also finds that Firestar Chief Executive Officer Mihir Bhansali and A Jaffe CFO Ajay Gandhi were involved in fraudulent transactions.

According to a report, the 120 days investigation found enough proof to support the allegation made by Indian officials that the Nirav Modi firm, foreign companies, and their top officials were involved in the fraud.

The investigation by the examiner John J Carney in the US court will likely support India's case against the fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi. UK authorities have confirmed to India that Nirav Modi has been located in the UK and have asked India for necessary documents to make a provisional arrest.

The trustee in the bankruptcy case, Richard Levin on Sunday applauds the hard work of the examiner John J Carney and said the report will be reviewed "in depth to determine what action is warranted."

On 14 February, Punjab National Bank said it has detected a fraud worth USD 1.7 billion perpetrated by Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi using fake PNB letters of undertaking (LoUs). Both the accused had left India a month before the scam came to light.

(With input from agencies)The government also approved procurement of 14 vertically launched short range missile systems. Of these, 10 systems will be indigenously developed. (Photo: AP)

New Delhi: In a major decision, the Defence Ministry today gave its nod to acquisition of 111 utility helicopters for the Navy at a cost of over Rs 21,000 crore besides approving separate procurement proposals worth nearly Rs 25,000 crore, according to officials.

A meeting of the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), the ministry's highest decision-making body on procurement, cleared the proposals.

The procurement of the naval utility helicopters will be the first project under the ambitious strategic partnership (SP) model which provides for roping in private firm to build select military platforms in India in partnership with foreign defence manufacturers.

"The DAC, in a landmark decision today, approved procurement of 111 Utility Helicopters for the Indian Navy at a cost of over Rs 21,000 crore," the Defence Ministry said.

The utility helicopters will be used in attack missions as well as for search and rescue and surveillance operations.

The ministry said the DAC also granted approval to a few other procurement proposals amounting to Rs 24,879.16 crore, which included one on buying 150 indigenously designed and developed 155 mm advanced towed artillery gun systems for the Indian Army at an approximate cost of Rs 3,364.78 crore.

These guns have been indigenously designed and developed by DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) and will be manufactured by production agencies, as nominated by DRDO.

The DAC also accorded approval to procure 24 naval multi role helicopters (NMRH) which will have the capability to engage in anti-submarine warfare. The MRHs are an integral part of the frontline warships like the aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates and corvettes.

In addition, the government also approved procurement of 14 vertically launched short range missile systems. Of these, 10 systems will be indigenously developed.

"These systems will boost the self-defence capability of ships against anti-ship missiles," the ministry said.

The Indian Navy in August last year had issued global request for information (RFI) for procurement of 111 utility and 123 multi-role helicopters.

The Navy has been pressing the government to procure new utility and multi-role helicopters to add teeth to its existing capability and replace its ageing fleet of choppers but the procurement process has seen years of delay.

The government had issued an RFI for it in 2011 as well as in 2013.

In May last year, the defence ministry had finalised the SP model under which select private firms will be roped in to build military platforms like submarines, fighter jets and choppers in India in partnership with foreign entities.

The policy envisages establishment of long-term strategic partnerships with Indian defence majors through a transparent and competitive process wherein they would tie up with global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to seek technology transfers to set up domestic manufacturing infrastructure and supply chains.

Initially, the strategic partners will be selected in four segments - fighter aircraft, helicopters, submarines and armoured fighting vehicles/main battle tanks. It is expected to be expanded to other segments at a later stage.By Najiya O, TwoCircles.net

The heavy downpour in this monsoon season gave way to the worst floods faced by Kerala in a century. Adding to the heavy rains was the ever-increasing water level in the scores of dams all over the state along with landslides and mudslides. The result was the disastrous floods which inundated large parts of the state for days on end. Nearly 400 people lost their lives, thousands were injured. And lakhs were displaced from their homes. But Kerala did not fall down. The small state at the southern end of India fought bravely during the floods and the rescue mission also was successfully completed. And now the state is looking forward to rehabilitation, no, in other words, building the new Kerala.

The state rose from the initial confusion of the hard-beating floods with a courage and determination unprecedented in history. The rescue of Kerala became the mission of all strata of people, from the fishermen on the coasts to the IT professionals in the cities.

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The young generation, which the elders used to laugh at saying they are always on phones and the internet, suddenly rose to the occasion. They utilised the internet on their fingertips to coordinate the rescue mission. Unofficial control rooms opened up on social media such as Whatsapp and Facebook for the rescue mission. Emergency numbers were announced on the social media for the aid of those caught up in the floods. The people stranded on rooftops and isolated buildings in the heavily flooded areas sent audio and video messages on the social media which were widely shared, and thus reached the rescue teams. The Compassionate Kerala, a group formed by former Kozhikode Collector Prashant Nair (commonly known as Collector Bro among the youths) was at the forefront to coordinate things, by collecting data on the rescue needs, sending information to the rescue teams and updating on the happenings.

The tech-savvy young generation created new apps to aid the rescue mission. The NRIs in the Gulf, Europe and elsewhere coordinated from their respective countries too. The Kerala government also rose to the occasion by creating a new website solely for the rescue and relief activities connected with the deadly floods  www.keralarescue.in. Now, Google could not wait on the sidelines. The internet giant began a move to mark the safety of people. People were asked to mark if they were safe in the Kerala floods or not. Websites like www.microid.in came up with maps to mark the flooded areas, which was useful for both rescue workers as well as those travelling with relief materials.

The leaders of the state-led from the front. They did not give orders and sit back in their comfortable homes. Instead, the ministers, MLAs and other political party leaders were in the front of the mission to save Kerala working from their own respective constituencies. Finance Minister Dr Thomas Isaac and Agriculture Minister VS Sunil Kumar were seen in the forefront of rescue and relief activities. Collector and sub-Collector of Wayanad carried sacks of rice on their backs when trucks came to the relief collection point at night when other volunteers in the camp were taking rest after a tough day. Several district Collectors and IAS officers were in the forefront to lead the rescue and relief mission. Notable are TV Anupama of Thrissur, K Vasuki of Thiruvananthapuram, and Amit Meena of Malappuram, as well as other IAS officers Rajamanickam, UV Sumesh, and Prashant Nair. You are making history. You are showing the world what Malayalis can do. In my opinion, you are working like soldiers who fought for freedom. Though these words were said by K Vasuki to a cheering crowd at a relief camp in Thiruvananthapuram, whole Kerala took her words as an inspiration to move forward in the difficult times.

The Chief Minister, who was known to have a difficult relationship with the media, managed the grave situation wisely, with not a single negative tinge in his press meets. He convened press meets regularly and informed the media of what was happening. Even when the whole state was rallying against the centre for not providing an adequate number of army and navy personnel and helicopters for airlifting, the CM maintained that the Centre was helpful and that it had offered more help. He always carried a positive note in his press meets. And his office worked 247 in those days.

The bureaucracy worked along with the political leadership, and the local population also joined them. Nobody waited for directions to come from the top as to what to do. The local self-government bodies and its representatives acted as guides of their respective areas to identify and rescue each and every one, and they also supervised the relief camps. Local youth clubs and small groups also played their part in the mission to save the state. They are still active in the field with relief activities in remote areas where the government officials and aid may not reach.

Similarly, the role of the opposition parties also is commendable. The highly-political state of Kerala saw its ruling party and opposition going together in the mission to rescue the people. The opposition stood firmly with the ruling government and kept away from making accusations sensing the gravity of the situation.

The Kerala Police and Fire Force were responsible for the warning and evacuation of people from the affected areas before the waters rose, and they actively involved themselves in the rescue operations once floods came in. They also assisted the central forces and fishermen towards the end. The role of the NDRF, the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force cannot be sidelined; they were in the forefront for rescue by water and air, as well as airdropping food to those stranded in the flooded parts.

Perhaps, the most important part in the rescue mission was carried out by the fishermen. The centre had provided helicopters to airlift those stranded on rooftops in the areas where water had submerged even two-storey houses. Several dams were opened and water was flowing heavily into the 44 rivers all over the state. The rains were incessantly falling too. When Saji Cherian, MLA of Chengannur, broke down on an interview with a news channel, it was clear that things were falling apart. It was then that the new saviours came to the forefront  the fishermen. Fishermen from Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Alappuzha and even Malappuram went all the way to the flooded parts with their boats and initiated the new phase of the rescue mission. In fact, they chose on their own volition to risk their lives and row their boats through the heavily-flowing water to save people.

Though the Navy and the NDRF followed in, the death count would have probably gone up substantially, had the fishermen folk not turned up. And the state did recognize the efforts of the sidelined section of the society. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan hailed the fishermen as the Army of Kerala, which in a way serves as a befitting reply to the centre which refused to send in more army men for the rescue.

Even as the rescue mission was going on, contributions were flowing in from different parts. The government requested people to contribute to the Chief Ministers Distress Relief Fund. Other states in the country offered great help, financially and materially, which amounts to a total of around Rs 150 crore. When the state announced the primary estimate of loss as Rs 20,000 crore and requested for Rs 2,000 crore as immediate relief, the centre gave Rs 600 crore. Countries like UAE, Qatar and Thailand offered help, but the central government has taken a position not to accept foreign aid.

Tales of love in the time of floods

A fisherman from Tanur in Malappuram district has become the symbol of love and sacrifice in the deadly floods. A group of fishermen saved some women from the floods and boats were ready to transport them to a safer place. But a woman was not well and sensing that she might find it difficult to climb onto the boat from the water in which they were standing, Jaisal did the unexpected. He knelt on the ground covered by water so that the women could step onto his back and get down into the boat. The video of the same went viral on the social media and even the international media took notice of it.





While celebrities and big businessmen are contributing considerable amounts to the Chief Ministers Distress Relief Fund and relief works of other small groups, there are also tales of love and sacrifice from those who cannot pay much. Malappuram district witnessed one such expression of sacrifice last day when a bunch of old people approached the district Collector and offered their old-age pension amount to the relief fund. Another woman handed over to the Collector the money she had kept for the Umrah pilgrimage. Over 350 inmates from the prisons across the state have been cooking and packing food for the flood victims, to be airdropped or sent to relief camps and stranded houses. They fed the flood-hit people with chapatis, upma, idlis, bread and jam etc.

The volunteers of the Ideal Relief Wing, the disaster management wing of the Jamat-e-Islami Hind were active in the rescue mission in all parts of the state. And now that the rescue has been completed, the IRW is active in running relief camps and in the cleaning of houses, other buildings and public places. There have been reports of the members of the IRW cleaning up a church first and then offering prayers inside the church itself as there were no mosques nearby. Different teams of the IRW have moved to different parts of the states with relief kits comprising of cleaning items, food and essentials etc for the relief activities. The state coordination office of the organization in Kozhikode is managing the activities.

In another example of love and harmony, a temple in Thrissur district opened its doors to the Muslims of the area to offer their Eid prayers since all mosques in their area were covered with water. Another report says of a group of people including women in a village who were shifted to a mosque nearby as the residential area was under the threat of a landslide. Mosques that allow women inside have specific places allotted for them normally. Hindu temples do not normally allow non-Hindus to enter. But all those restrictions flew away as they saw people suffering. Mosques and churches turned into relief camps, temples opened their doors for Eid namaz.

A group of 200 people from Malappuram are at the forefront of cleaning activities in Aluva in Ernakulam district on Saturday. The team under the banner of Mission Flood 2018 went to Aluva with cleaning equipment, medical facilities, clothes, food and drinking water etc. They cleaned up houses, public places and temples alike. The team also had plumbers and electricians, snake-catchers and doctors for the mission.

There have also been reports of little kids contributing to the flood relief. A little girl who had been saving money to buy a bicycle broke her piggy bank and gave all her money to the CMDRF. On knowing the incident, the famous cycle company Hero Cycles has got ready to gift her a bicycle. In another incident, a brother and sister decided to donate the land they inherited from their father to the CMDRF.Mumbai: Anushka Sharma and Varun Dhawan have given it all for Sui Dhaaga  Made in India. The superstars play innocent village folk Mauji and Mamta living in heartland India with dreams to make a name for themselves. While Anushka plays an embroiderer, Varun plays the role of a tailor from heartland India. Director Sharat Katariya wanted to capture the genuine small town essence in his film and went all out to make it as authentic as possible.

Sharing the experience, Anushka said,Craftsmen work day and and night and Sharat wanted to show how a craftsman in such places would work through the night. We learnt that many use the bright street lights to aid their professional needs and we wanted to capture this in the film.

Varun added, These talented artists generally go on the roof of their houses and start working at night. Mauji and Mamtas character takes a leaf out of this dedication, ambition and entrepreneur spirit. We shot some sewing and embroidering scenes using the street lights of Chanderi and they are really touching. Sharat has got some very heartfelt moments while shooting these scenes.

Varun and Anushka have been paired for the first time together and they have definitely become the most-awaited on-screen jodi of 2018. YRF's entertainer Sui Dhaaga  Made in India brings together National Award winning producer-director combo of Maneesh Sharma and Sharat Katariya after their blockbuster Dum Laga Ke Haisha. The film is a salute to the inherent entrepreneurial spirit that the youth of India and our local artisans have.

Sui Dhaaga - Made in India is set to release on September 28 this year, just before Gandhi Jayanti.Mumbai: Taapsee Pannu is currently touring the country with her Manmarziyaan co-stars Abhishek Bachchan and Vicky Kaushal to promote the brilliant album of the Anurag Kashyap helmed romantic drama.

Although several songs from the film have released and are already a raging hit across radio stations and with the fans, the entire album is yet to come out. One of the songs, Kundali, which is a sangeet number, released recently much to the anticipation of the audience. Sticking to the Punjabi essence of the film, the song is a proper bhangra number, pictured on Taapsee. But the credit for choreography goes to two southern artists. Sisters Navadevi and Navalakshmi, who are extremely popular down South and have worked with industry veterans like Rajnikanth and Kamal Hassan, choreographed the Soorma actress, who is playing a Sikhni in the film. This is the first time they're working in Bollywood and agreed to choreograph the song as they wanted to work with Taapsee and Anurag. Also, as two full fledged south Indians they choreographed a complete bhangra number, much to the awe of the cast and crew.

I was pleasantly surprised when Anurag Kashyap told me he has gotten new girls from the south to choreograph the song. I almost didnt believe him when he told me this first. I thought he was joking. Until one day I turned up at the rehearsal and realised he wasnt. He wanted a new take on a sangeet number. Punjabi sangeet numbers are done to death in our films and he thought getting new choreographers who are not of the same background as the song and flavour of the film might just get in something refreshing which I feel it did. The song is beautiful and the peppy choreography these 2 girls added to it makes it fresh and exciting to watch. Its the first time Anurag has a proper lip sync dancing number in his film so expect something unique for sure!

Kundalis audio came out on Friday, but we cannot wait for the video to release to see the magic the sisters have created!Mumbai: Kareena Kapoor Khan and Ranveer Singh will be co-starring in Karan Johar's period drama "Takht". Interestingly, the two gorgeous actors were set to work together for first time in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 'Goliyon Ki Raasleela: Ram-Leela' (2013), but later Kareena was replaced by Depika Padukone to play Ranveer's romantic interest. However, the Bollywood diva says she is excited to finally collaborate with the actor.

Calling Ranveer one of the most "phenomenal" performers of this generation, the 37-year-old star said she is happy that they are finally working together.

"It is great that finally after so many years I will be sharing screen space with him. It was long due collaboration. He is just a phenomenal actor. It will be an honour to share screen space with him. I am very happy," Kareena told PTI.

The actor said the film is also special for her as after a long time she is working on a Dharma Productions project, to be helmed by one of her closest friends Karan.

"I have done so many movies with Dharma in the past, but after a long time Karan is directing me. It feels great. Working with Karan is always a pleasure," she said.

Kareena said the comfort level she and Karan share in real-life translates well on-screen.

"He is one of my closest friends. He is actually like my brother. He is somebody I trust and love immensely. For me it's like being at home whenever I work with Karan and Dharma. It going to be a blast for sure," she added.

"Takht" set in Mughal era also features Alia Bhatt, Bhumi Pednekar, Vicky Kaushal, Janhvi Kapoor and veteran actor Anil Kapoor.

Filmmaker Karan Johar took to social media recently to make the revelation about upcoming Bollywood magnum opus. He wrote, "An incredible story embedded in history...An epic battle for the majestic Mughal throne... A story of a family, of ambition, of greed, of betrayal, of love & of succession...TAKHT is about WAR for LOVE....@dharmamovies @apoorvamehta18"

An incredible story embedded in history...

An epic battle for the majestic Mughal throne...

A story of a family, of ambition, of greed, of betrayal, of love & of succession...

TAKHT is about WAR for LOVE....@dharmamovies @apoorvamehta18 pic.twitter.com/BQg6SvdFfb  Karan Johar (@karanjohar) August 9, 2018

After helming 2016 Diwali blockbuster 'Ae Dil Hai Mushkil', Karan will be donning the director's hat for 'Takht' after two years.

The flick will hit the theatres in 2020.It is common knowledge that actor Suriya has a huge fan following in Andhra and Telengana. He enjoys a big market as well for his Telugu version of Tamil movies. The Singam star was at Rajahmundry on Saturday for the shoot of his upcoming political thriller NGK in Selvaraghavans direction when he could not come out of his vanity vanas a massive crowd had gathered at the location. The actor was cheered wildly as he waved at his fans from his vanity van. As enthusiasm soared among them, the situation was becoming unmanageable with fans soon surrounding him to click selfies.

The bouncers accompanying Suriya could not control the huge gathering. The fans were demanding that Suriya take pictures with each and everyone assembled there. When things were getting out of control, the actor was forced to leave the location in a jiffy and give a miss to the shoot.

Suriyas security personnel managed to take him to his car from where Suriya drove off to the hotel where he was staying. Sources revealed that the days shooting was cancelled. Having wasted a day, the makers of the film moved to an alternative shooting location after arranging for very tight security for Sunday. NGK, in which Suriya plays a MLA named NG Kumaran, has Rakul Preet Singh and Sai Pallavi as his heroines.

Confirming the news, SR Prabhu of Dream Warrior Pictures, who produces NGK, said, We know Suriya sir has a big fan following in Andhra and Telengana, but we did not expect this massive crowd to turn out and were surprised. Now, we have shifted to a remote location in the same city and continuing the shoot.

Were sets erected for the shoot, we asked. No! But Selva sir wanted a live location in Rajahmundry for a certain segment of the story. Hence, we moved to a similar location far away from the hustle-bustle, Prabhu reveals.

It is not the first time Suriya has been mobbed by his fans in Rajahmundry. Earlier in January when Suriya visited Rambha Theater at Rajahmundry to watch his film Gang (Telugu dubbed version of Thaana Serndha Koottam), the crowd went crazy and he had to evade his fans by jumping to the other side of the theatre and climbed a gate to reach his car outside.After watching the news of Kerala being torn apart by the recent floods, Frederique Lien Vanessa, at her home in Toulouse, grieved for the state and even decided to donate something for the distressed. Her care for the country, especially South India, is not something that can be described in words. Frederiques love story with the country started with her chancing upon Indian movies.

Her fascination for India and its cinema took her to a bigger level when she co-founded Festival des Cinemas Indiens de Toulouse or Toulouse Indian Film Festival. Now the chief selector of the festival, she is living her dream. Indian films face a big misunderstanding in France. A very big majority of the audience and the film industry dont know about Indian films at all though you read and watch it on international media. But still the French do not know much about India, especially contemporary India, she comments.

An ardent follower of world films, she happened to see a lot of Asian, especially Indian movies. Thus I knew a lot about India and its culture. I want to share with the audience the infinite richness of Indian cinema, to show them Indian cinema is not only about Satyajit Ray (a lot of people know about him there) and the many directors and films that deserve to be screened in France, she says how the festival was born.

Frederique believes that Indian cinema has so many aspects that qualify for worldwide releases. France, known for its realistic and masterly films and film makers, have a big market for Bollywood, but Frederique says that the French, especially from cities like Toulouse and Marseille, need to watch more Indian movies than Paris. It is a big annoyance for us that most of films selected in our film festival will never be screened except during the film festival. Very often, spectators ask us to organise new screenings. This is a very challenging project, the kind of projects nobody wants to believe in, I guess. But I decided to embark on this new journey to promote contemporary Indian films and show the variety and richness of Indian film industries all over France.

This years festival was in April and she has already begun the selection process for the next edition. Each year, we try to select films that appeal to the French audience and the ones dubbed to French. Our aim is to promote Indian films and showcase the variety of movies. I keep this in mind while watching films and also check if those were released in France. Very few Indian films have a French release, she explains. Apart from the festival, there is a huge community that follows Indian cinema and culture, thanks to the festival. Now the festival has completed six years and attracts a lot of spectators. Frederique is a big fan of South Indian movies, especially Tamil and Malayalam films. Besides cinema, I have a lot of interest in literature, plays and photography. I wish I could read literature from different languages of India. I also have a project in mind  a documentary about India, she concludes.Washington: Pregnant women with heart disease are recommended to give birth no later than 40 weeks of gestation.

A study by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Guidelines has recommended such practice.

"Beyond 40 weeks, pregnancy has no added benefit for the baby and may even have negative effects," said lead researcher, Jolien Roos-Hesselink.

"Pregnancy is a risky period for women with heart disease because it puts additional stress on the heart, so the guidelines advise inducing labour or a cesarean section at 40 weeks," Hesselink added.

Heart disease is the main reason why women die during pregnancy in many western countries. In comparison to healthy pregnant women, those with heart disease have a 100 times greater risk of death or heart failure.

Most women with heart disease have a healthy pregnancy, but researchers recommend that they should be aware that they have a higher risk of obstetric complications, including premature labour, pre-eclampsia, and post-partum bleeding.

An estimated 18-30% of offsprings have complications and up to 4% of neonates die because of such complications.

Researchers time and again have recommended that In-Vitro fertilisation (IVF) is not for a pregnant woman with a heart disease since the said process often uses high doses of hormones, which increase the risk of thrombosis and heart failure.

Also carrying more than one baby puts more stress on the heart; therefore the women with heart disease undergoing IVF are strongly advised to transfer a single embryo. Furthermore, women with congenital heart diseases, for example, pulmonary arterial hypertension, severely dilated aorta, or severely reduced ability of the heart to pump blood, need contraception advice to avoid unplanned pregnancy.

"When drug companies have no data on whether a drug is safe during pregnancy and breastfeeding they tend to say it is not recommended. It may be appropriate to give a drug to a severely ill woman if there are no harmful side effects noted in the databases listed in the guidelines," said another researcher Vera Regitz-Zagrosek.

Therefore a delivery plan should be devised at 20-30 weeks, specifying vaginal or cesarean delivery for pregnant women suffering from such diseases.

"The delivery plan should be available 24 hours a day so that when a pregnant woman with heart disease arrives at the hospital in labour hospital staff knows exactly what to do," Hesselink further added.

The study appears in the European Heart Journal.Apart from foreign currencies, Rs 4.6 lakh cash was found in his jacket pocket. Kalimuthu Natesaperumal, who was about to board a Singapore-bound flight, was arrested for further interrogation.

Chennai: Customs officials at Chennai Airport had a busy Sunday morning seizing nearly Rs 90 lakh worth of foreign currencies and gold from three passengers.

According to a customs press statement, the officials intercepted Kalimuthu Natesaperumal (51) of Sivaganga when he was approaching the security check point on early on Sunday. He was stopped on suspicion and was taken in for questioning as he appeared to be nervous. When checking his baggage, foreign currencies concealed between saris were found, the statement said.

About 66,300 Euros, $US 32,770, $S 1,600 and 2,650 Brunei Dollars in different denominations, totally valued at Rs 77 lakhs were recovered.

Apart from foreign currencies, Rs 4.6 lakh cash was found in his jacket pocket. Kalimuthu Natesaperumal, who was about to board a Singapore-bound flight, was arrested for further interrogation.

A few hours later, at around 10 am, the officials stopped another passenger - Rakeebudeen Kaja Nawas (43) of Ramanathapuram - who was bound for Colombo, at the departure terminal on suspicion. During the search of his baggage, the official found $US 5,000 (about Rs 3.5 lakh.) As he has not declared the amount, the currencies were seized under Customs Act, the statement added.

In another incident, Customs officials stopped Shaik Shafi Ahamed (39) of Chennai, who had arrived from Kuwait and checked his baggage. During the search, the officials found 10 gold hairs coated with copper concealed by fixing within hair clips. The 148 grams of gold strips are of 24 karat purity and valued at Rs 4.5 lakh. The smuggled gold was seized from the passenger.Bengaluru: Two country made 7.6mm pistols, which were recovered from among the cache of illegal arms that was seized by the Maharashtra ATS from the alleged Hindutva brigade on August 10, may be the killer pistols that were used to silence Pune-based rationalist Prof Narendra Dabholkar and Bengaluru-based journalist activist Gauri Lankesh.

The pistols, according to sources, have been sent for ballistic examination to the Gujarat Forensic Science Laboratory. Investigation so far has exposed the hand of an unnamed militant right wing organisation with alleged links to Goa-based Sanatan Sanstha and its linked organisations in the two states behind the murders of four liberal thinkers - Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi and Gauri - in Maharashtra and Karnataka.

Sanstha has, however, denied its involvement in the cold blooded killings of the rationalists. The investigation in the sensational murder cases has picked up pace following a major breakthrough in the Gauri murder case by the Karnataka SIT. It is becoming clear now that the same module of Hindutva hardliners is reportedly behind the four murders.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Sunday told a court in Mumbai that Sachin Andure, who allegedly shot dead rationalist Prof Dabholkar on August 20, 2013, was reportedly in touch with the killers of Gauri and that Amol Kale, who is one of the key accused in the Gauri case; had allegedly handed over a country made 7.65mm pistol along with three bullets and a magazine to Andure. He in turn handed the pistol and ammunition to his relative Shubham Surale in Aurangabad. Surale further handed it over to his friend Rohit Rege. The CBI has recovered the pistol, bullets and magazine from Rege'a house in Aurangabad.Mysuru: Kodagu recorded moderate rainfall on Sunday but the situation in the rain and landslide-hit district is returning to normal with 864 more people at relief centres returning home.

Presently, there are 3,227 people lodged in 32 relief camps. Earlier, a total 7,594 victims were housed in 51 relief centres. According to Mr Gangaram Baderia, principal secretary and relief commissioner, revenue department (disaster management) the deputy commissioner of Kodagu may keep a team of NDRF and relieve all other rescue teams from different agencies including those of the Indian army, navy, air force, fire and emergency services, home guards, civil defence, and NCC on Sunday. The teams have so far rescued 4,450 people in Kodagu.

Meanwhile, Karnataka engineers association has assured the Kodagu district administration of free consultation for reconstruction and rehabilitation of the flood affected. As many as 1,048 out of 1,052 telecom networks including those of Airtel, BSNL, TSP, Idea, Jio and Vodafone are being restored. Chescom has restored electricity in most of the villages.

State government employees association head Mr H.K. Ramu who visited Kodagu on Sunday and said that they are donating their one days salary which will amount to Rs 102 crores, for the relief of people of Kodagu.

Meanwhile, Deputy Commissoner P.I. Srividhya on Sunday said, Despite an order from the district administration to stop accommodation of tourists in resorts, homestays and hotels in Kodagu, it has come to our notice that the owners continue to accommodate tourists and are even taking them to affected areas risking their lives. Hence the affected areas are being declared prohibited areas. I have directed the police to initiate action against those who violate it.The main opposition party will stage agitations and take out marches at district and state levels over the alleged scam worth thousands of crores of rupees. (Photo: ANI)

New Delhi: Undeterred by legal notices served on its leaders, the Congress has decided to intensify its campaign against the Rafale fighter aircraft deal which, the party claimed, was altered to benefit Prime Minister Narendra Modi's industrialist "friend" and "promote crony capitalism".

The Congress has lined up a series of events to take the issue to the people and "expose" the Narendra Modi government ahead of next year's parliamentary election.

The main opposition party will stage agitations and take out marches at district and state levels over the alleged scam worth thousands of crores of rupees.

Besides, senior party leaders will hold press conferences across the country till September 6 to "reveal the truths" about the revised deal which, it claimed, was inked at a much higher price than the one the previous UPA dispensation had negotiated.

The district-level agitations will be held from September 7 to 15, while the state-level agitations will be organised from September 16 to 30.

The Congress has also set up a separate control room at the party headquarters to monitor district-level agitations.

"Please ensure that a massive state-level agitation and a march to the Governor's House for submission of memorandum to the Governor," party general secretary Ashok Gehlot has said in a letter to the party's state unit chiefs.

According to party sources, the Congress will make the alleged Rafale scam a "poll issue" and target the Modi government over its claim of corruption-free governance.

The Congress has accused the Modi government of not disclosing the price of the aircraft and alleged that the price was three times higher than that negotiated during the UPA government with France's Dassault Aviation, the manufacturer of the aircraft.

The Congress has also accused PM Modi of "personally benefitting" from the deal, and alleged that it was the reason behind his continued silence on the issue.

"The Rafale scam is a sordid saga of squandering our national interests and promoting crony capitalism by the Modi government," the party said.

It has also accused PM Modi of helping his "friend" Anil Ambani-led Reliance Group in getting offset contracts for the aircraft, bypassing the public-sector Hindustan Aeronautics Limited.

The Reliance Group has sent defamation notices to many Congress leaders warning them against levelling charges that are "misleading".

The company has asked Congress leaders to "cease and desist" from levelling such charges.

Ambani recently wrote to Congress president Rahul Gandhi on the deal, saying his party has been "misinformed, misdirected and misled" by "malicious vested interests and corporate rivals" on the issue.

Leading the Congress attack on the government over the deal, Gandhi, during his recent interactions in Germany and the UK, alleged that the deal smelt of corruption, which has caused loss to the state exchequer to the tune of thousands of crores of rupees.By Ram Puniyani

On 17th August (2018), during the funeral procession of the former Prime Minster of India, Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Swami Agnivesh was assaulted outside the BJP head office, when Swami was trying to participate in the procession. The assaulters, the some members of the crowd, began to heckle him and then they physically attacked him. They were raising the slogans, Bharat Mata ki jai and Deshdrohi Wapas jao. (Go back anti-National)

A month ago, in Pokur Jahrkhand, Agnivesh was brutally assaulted, allegedly by student wing of BJP. The attack was severe and as a matter of relief he survived while his turban was taken away and his clothes were torn asunder. In the wake of this attack many a BJP supporters, justifying the attack circulated the video of Swamijis speech. In this video he is criticizing the Prime minister Modi for his statement that there was plastic surgery in Ancient India as seen in planting of elephants head on a boys neck or Kauravass being born though stem cell technology. He went on to criticize Modi for his public pujas in Nepal and Dhaka.

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Attacking Amarnath yatra and idol worship, Agnivesh pointed out that the Barfani baba, the ice shivling is a natural phenomenon which gets formed due to natural processes of deposits of stalactite and stalagmite. In the same video he points out that one of the years, when the deposits were inadequate to form the ling (the Shiva idol), ice had to be put to give it the shape of linga. Similarly criticizing the Kumbh mela, people congregating to wash their sins, he points out that bathing in such polluted water on contrary can lead to new diseases.

Overall, Swami has been part of various social movement like Bandhua Majdoor Mukti Morcha, (against bonded labor) for which has also participated in global eradication of modern form of bonded laor, under the aegis of UN. He has been associated with movements opposing female feticide and against sati. He has been part of Arya Samaj organization for long time. In recognition of his work he has received various awards like Right Livelihood (Alternate Nobel) in 2004, apart from Rajiv Gandhi Sadbhavna Award again in same year. There are various issues on which one can disagree with him, like his interpretation of Hinduism exclusively to Vedic period etc., still what is important is his constant engagement with issues related to downtrodden of the society, to those related to modern forms of bonded labor, to sati, female feticide to name the few.

A saffron clad swami has been targeted by the followers of Hindu nationalist brigade. This attack on him is in the series which began with murder of Dr. Dabholkar, and later took the lives of Com. Govind Pansare, Dr. Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh. As intolerance is growing in the society, those having opinions contrary to ruling dispensation are being targeted. As the culprits are enjoying impunity, appreciation from the leaders of ruling party, they know they can get away with hate crimes of this dastardly nature. Lets imagine, a saffron clad Swami is coming to pay last respects to the ex Prime Minster of India and he is heckled and insulted! These hooligans, drunk on fake nationalism and false pride in things in the name of religion, get encouragement from the powers that be, the real culprits are those who support them, appreciate them, those who in the first place disseminate this ideology which is sectarian and looks down their opponents or their ideas as anti national or anti religion.

What is more surprising is that all this is being done in the name of Hindu religion, which celebrates diversity to its core. We know that most of the religions have a single founder and single holy book, still they develop sects within. Christianity has Catholics, Protestants, born again, Pentecostals among others. Muslims have Shia and Sunnis in the main while Sufis and Ahmadiya are also very much there. Buddhism Jainism Sikhism also has sects within them. In contrast Hinduism has no single founder, no single Holy book, and no single pattern of clergy or rituals. It is a collation of diverse traditions like Brahmanism, Tantra, Nath, Siddhanta, Shaiva, Vashanav and Bhakti among others. Diversity is the very core of Hindu religion. Right within Hindu fold Swami Dayanand Sarswati could form Arya Samaj and propound his ideology that Hinduism is primarily founded and based on Vedas.

While Idol worship is part of some sects of Hinduism, as such Hinduism also encompasses animist nature worship, to tri-theism, to polytheism to Nastik (atheist) tradition of Charvak as well. The concept of God also varies from the idol worshipers to those who believe in formless God. Swami Agnivesh propounds that Vedas are the base of Hindu religion.

The central focus of Agnivesh has been social reform, and thats probably his most important engagement with the society. Irrespective of his views and his contribution to the cause of social issues, he has right to follow his notion of Hinduism. No one can usurp his right of following his own Hinduism. The present attacks on him by the followers of Hindu nationalism are not grounded in the values of tolerance of Hinduism, they are rooted in the politics, they are part of the sectarian interpretation of Hinduism and selective use of Hindu identity for mobilizing Hindus for political goals, there is nothing religious about it.

While hoping that present Government will provide security to this social reformer and political activists like him, one hopes that the serial killings of rational thinkers-activists, which began with the killing of Dabholkar is brought to a halt. The guilty are identified, tried and punished as per the law. The nation should heave a sigh of relief that two recent attacks by the ideology which killed these social reformers have failed (Agnivesh and Omar Khalid), and should pledge that these killers will not be able to extinguish the voice of dissent.Thiruvanathapuram: As relief and rehabilitation work initiated in flood ravaged Kerala, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Sunday urged all Malayalees to donate one month salary to rebuild the state, where the death toll has now touched 302 and over four lakh are still in relief camps.

In many districts, people have started moving from camps to their homes after cleaning work has been completed.

The receding flood waters had left mounds of mud and debris in their homes and surroundings.

The toll on Subday climbed to 302 with more bodies being recovered, a government press release here.

Pinarayi Vijayan has also reviewed ongoing relief operations.

There are still 4.62 lakh people in 1,435 relief camps. At least three lakh houses have been cleaned so far.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday hailed the humanitarian assistance rendered to victims of Kerala floods by people from all walks of life, saying that irrespective of age group or area of work, people are contributing for the cause.

He also put on record his appreciation for the role rendered by the Army, Air Force, Navy, NDRF, BSF, CISF and the RAF in relief and rescue operations.

"Yesterday was the festival of Onam. We pray for Onam to provide strength to the country, especially Kerala, so that it returns to normalcy on a newer journey of development. Once again on behalf of all Indians, I would like to reassure each and everyone in Kerala and other affected places that at this moment of calamity, the entire country stands by them," PM Modi said in his monthly 'Mann ki Baat' radio address.

He said the loss of lives cannot be compensated, but he assured the grief-stricken families that in this moment of suffering, every Indian stands by them shoulder to shoulder.

As Kerala struggles to stand on her feet, water logging of homes in various places, especially in Kuttanad region of the worst hit Alapuzha district continues to be a worrying factor.

Huge pumps will be used to flush out water from homes and premises, after which the cleaning process will be taken up by removing the accumulated silt, authorities said.

Vijayan, who had accompanied PM Modi and Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh during the aerial surveys, said they were touched by the intensity of the devastation and he hoped that the Centre would provide more funds.

The union government has already released Rs 600 crore as immediate assistance against the state's demand for Rs 2,000 crore.

Opposition leader in the assembly, Ramesh Chennithala, said more central funds were needed for Kerala and there was nothing wrong in accepting foreign aid to help rebuild the state.

With the floods having left a trail of massive destruction and rehabilitation and reconstruction requiring huge financial resources, Vijayan wanted Keralites, both in the country and outside, to exhibit their generous self and contribute one month's salary to the state.

"We need to find our strength. It will be difficult to contribute one month's salary at a stretch. But Keralites, including from outside, can at first contribute three days' salary a month and over a period of 10 months, donate the remaining sum', Vijayan told Malayalam TV channels in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday.

In the coming days, relief camps in schools and colleges will be wound up and people, whose homes were fully waterlogged even now, would be shifted to marriage halls and convention centres, Finance Minister Thomas Isaac told reporters in Alapuzha.

Meanwhile, the defence personnel would continue to support the state authorities in flood hit areas in relief and rehabilitation initiatives, a spokesperson said.

As of date a total of 10 Columns and 12 Engineer Task Force of the Army are carrying out continuous rescue and relief operations in the area.

The troops are involved in road opening, clearing of landslides and construction of temporary bridges, utilising the natural resources available in the area.

So far approximately 26 temporary bridges have been constructed, repaired and approximately 50 roads have been cleared for the general public, a defence press release said.

At least 3.64 lakh carcasses of birds and over 17,000 of big animals have been retrieved and buried so far.While the Air Force pressed into service 26 helicopters, the Navy operated 20 aircraft and army 70 teams for the rescue operations.

Thiruvananthapuram: The Central forces will continue to support in the relief operations, mainly in Kuttanad area, even as the joint flood operations of the forces have been called off.

Air officer commanding-in-chief Air Marshal B Suresh said that rescue operations posed big challenges owing to factors like the terrain and density of population and it also happened to one of the major disaster rescue operation in terms of load as about 1,200 ton was airlifted.

Mr. Suresh, who held a joint press conference along with Pangode military station commanded Brigadier C G Arun and Southern Naval Command commander S Sanooj here on Sunday, said that the forces would continue to support the relief operations by providing medical assistance and helping in sending relief materials.

It already helped in restoration of many roads and bridges and would be cooperating with the government is such operations as well even as the formal humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) operations in flood hit areas ended.

Mr. Suresh refused to comment on allegations that the lapses in regulation release of water from dams led to the floods.

He however said that the lessons from the current rescue operations would be used to improve the rescue operations during any such occasions in future.

While the Air Force pressed into service 26 helicopters, the Navy operated 20 aircraft and army 70 teams for the rescue operations. While the air force rescued 11,96,736 kilo gram loads, army and navy could rescue over 30,000 people.But not many perhaps may have read of the Hindujas going to the Shah of Irans help in the early 1970s with huge supplies of potatoes and onions from Punjab fields when a booming Iranian economy, riding on rising global oil prices, badly needed them as its food economy faced a crisis amid their most congested ports.

Chennai: Gopichand Hinduja, one of the brothers who run the vast Hinduja groups industrial and financial ventures, is only interested in what is possible. The entrepreneur in his view will always find some ways and means to accomplish a given task. He will find some window or find a way to fix the door.

Old-timers may know that Hindujas business was earlier headquartered in Iran. But not many perhaps may have read of the Hindujas going to the Shah of Irans help in the early 1970s with huge supplies of potatoes and onions from Punjab fields when a booming Iranian economy, riding on rising global oil prices, badly needed them as its food economy faced a crisis amid their most congested ports.

The Shah called the Hindujas because they had acquired a reputation for getting difficult things done and finding solutions where others scratched their heads, writes Dean Nelson, former foreign correspondent in Delhi and covering India and South Asia for Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph, narrating this amazing episode in his recent book, Jugaad Yatra  Exploring the Indian Art of Problem Solving.

It was not long after Indira Gandhis army had inflicted a humiliating defeat on Pakistans forces in the 1971 war, recalls Nelson. But when Shahs commerce minister, Fereidoun Mahdavi asked the Hindujas to find a solution to the soaring potato and onion prices in Iran by filling each and every town and city of Iran with potatoes and onions, the Hinduja brothers took up the challenge.

Gopichand and his elder brother Srichand, from newspaper reports then gleaned that there was a glut of potatoes and onions in Amritsar and Jalandhar markets and all they needed to do was to buy the glut in Punjab, transport it 1,200 kilometres through Pakistan to Zahedan, just over its border in Iranian Baluchistan, and from there to local markets to bring the prices down, writes Nelson.

They only needed Pakistans then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhuttos nod as no Indian trucks had been allowed on Pakistans roads since the 1947 partition of India. But that end was managed by Iran as they had good ties with Pakistan and the latter even agreed to one-time passage of the trucks.

The rider, though, was that the Hindujas had to find non-Indian nationals to drive them. Suddenly some 1,400 non-Indian drivers had to be found from around the World. To avoid the consignment getting stranded at the Wagah border, the Hindujas contacted International agencies to find them. Many of the drivers were flown in from Seoul in South Korea and in just three weeks, they had assembled an army of truckers to come to the Shahs rescue, writes Nelson.

This massive logistical exercise of moving potatoes and onions by road worked and it helped stabilise the prices in Iran once they reached the markets there, the author quotes Gopichand Hinduja having explained to him. Just as K.K. Modis sugarcane factory manager had promised to deliver milk for his familys wedding without knowing how, the Hindujas had given their word to the Shah that they would supply onions and potatoes and once given, it had to be honoured, whatever it took, Nelson summarises that episode thus.

State authorities, professionals and technocrats might have looked at this issue entirely differently, but the point that Nelson seeks to drive through several such stories in much of this 155-page lovely read, a reflective travelogue through the terrain of the Indian art of problem solving the hallmark of Indias genius for decades  captured by the omnibus word Jugaad - is that there is a humanism even in crisis management.

The practitioner of jugaadism works around the problem, doesnt take no for an answer and draws on willpower and lateral thinking to solve or bypass it, elaborates Nelson based on his interactions with a several personalities involved with different kinds of innovations, or what some would call quick-fix solutions.

As Dean Nelson says, his journey began tracking the frugal home invention like octogenarian M B Lal whose Snowbreeze air cooler offers affordable cooling to Indias poor, or more recently the invention of an Arunachalam Muruganantham, a social entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu who ingeniously came up with a low-cost sanitary napkin for the rural womenfolk in particular.

There is a quirky side to this phenomenon too when the push for quick-fix and shoddy solutions to problems also spawns inefficiency and corruption. The author draws quite a bit from the Commonwealth Games scam in this regard, which was quite an embarrassment to India while hosting this prestigious event in New Delhi.

The issue is not just about low-cost, desi, home-grown solutions that could tap into the market psychology of the middle, the lower middle and the poorer classes who still form the bulk of Indias population. At an ideological level it peaks towards what the former BJP ideologue Govindacharya would call total rejection of Western materialism and their life-styles to foster a new Swadeshi in India that fits in well with the rise of right-of-centre Hindu nationalism.

However, as the author points out, there are major rejections of Indias Jugaadism too. A successful industrialist like Anand Mahindra wants none of such short-cuts, but hard, science and technology-driven original and innovative research projects that have already put India on the global automobile map. So too is a non-nonsense person like former Union Environment minister, Prof Jayaram Ramesh, who sees a real danger in Jugaadism encouraging a culture of non-compliance particularly with regard to Environmental regulations.

The Chalta Hai (anything goes) attitude will not do for the New India of the 21st century, what with the Prime Minister Narendra Modis Make in India initiative, scaling to ambitious heights of putting a manned mission in space, as detailed in his latest Independence Day Address. The Indian Space Research Organsiation (ISRO) symbolises Indias inherent capacity for S and T success, which is no Jugaadism.

This debate might go on, but at the end of the day the journalist in Dean Nelson is very realistic. Whether India would follow Modis Mangalyaan map or take another bypass road instead, the Jugaad Yatra marches on.The treaty specifies that the waters of three eastern rivers namely Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, had been reserved for India while that of western rivers, namely Indus, Chenab and Jhelum, are for Pakistan. (Photo: ANI)

New Delhi: India and Pakistan will hold the 115th meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) in Lahore from August 29 to 30, to discuss various issues under Indus Waters Treaty.

A nine-member Indian delegation, led by Indian Commissioner for Indus Waters, PK Saxena, and comprising technical experts will arrive in Lahore for the annual meeting on August 28. The Pakistani side will be led by their Indus Commissioner, Syed Muhammad Mehar Ali Shah.

PIC was formed under Indus Waters Treaty, signed between India and Pakistan in 1960, it includes the Indus commissioners of both the countries. The treaty provides for both the commissioners to meet at least once every year, alternately in India and Pakistan.

The treaty specifies that the waters of three eastern rivers namely Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, had been reserved for India while that of western rivers, namely Indus, Chenab and Jhelum, are for Pakistan. However, India has unrestricted rights to develop hydroelectric power projects on the western rivers, within the specified parameters of design.

Pakistan contends that the design of two under-construction hydroelectric projects of India in Chenab basin, namely Pakal Dul (1000MW) and Lower Kalnai (48MW), violate the treaty's provisions, while the Indian side affirms its right to build these projects and holds that their design is fully in compliance of set guidelines.

The Commission is likely to hold technical discussions on the issues raised by Pakistan on these two projects. Other regular issues like data exchange and programs of tours and meetings are also likely to be taken up.'He had always given wrong direction to the society, it is no surprise he is again doing the same thing,' Ghosh said. (Photo: File)

Kolkata: The BJP on Sunday came down heavily on Amartya Sen, likening him to people who have always misled the society, a day after the Nobel laureate called for an alignment of non-BJP, non-communal forces for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Intellectuals like Sen, who had always professed Left ideology, are losing touch with reality. Sen had said CPI(M) is getting invisible. Nothing can be truer than this, nothing can be truer than the fact that people like Sen, a Marxist, have little relevance in the present times, West Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh told reporters on the sidelines of a party programme here.

On Sens call for defeating BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP leader said people like him have always taken the society on the wrong path.

He had always given wrong direction to the society, it is no surprise he is again doing the same thing, Ghosh said.

Sharply reacting to Ghoshs diatribe against Sen, Trinamool Congress Secretary General Partha Chatterjee said, One has to be a reader of books to acquire the right to speak on Amartya Sen.

Chatterjee said, Those people, who wield lathis at processions, should refrain from making comments on a person of Sens stature as they cant appreciate the words spoken by an erudite person like him.

Criticising the BJP government at the Centre, Sen had said yesterday that a party having got 31 per cent votes and ill motives in politics came to power in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.Kochi: The state government has deployed fishermen for flood rescue operation wi-th a clear focus, said Fisheries minister J. Mercykutty Amma. She was addressing the meeting convened by fisheries department here on Sunday to honour the fishermen from Ernakulam who saved hundreds of stranded people during heavy floods.

The state will treasure forever the unique service of fishermen during the unprecedented natural disaster. All sections of society stood united to save those who were devastated by the flood. Fishermen could save lives of 65,000 flood-hit people by using their 669 fishing boats and canoes. Various other NGOs used 259 boats for rescue operation, the minister said.

On August 15, two fishermen were sent to Pat-hanamthitta with their big canoes. As the natural fury continued unabated, more fishermen were cal-led for rescue service thr-ough mike announcement in coastal belts.

Even the fishermen who were out in the sea were called back while trucks from neighbouring states were seized to tra-nsport fishing boats to flooded areas. Later, realizing the gravity of the situation, fishermen voluntarily arranged fishing boats and moved to inundated areas, the minister added.

The minister added that more than 70 per cent of the stranded people in Pathanamthitta were rescued by fishermen while only 30 per cent people were saved by the Central forces and other agencies.

Though all sections of society were there in the rescue and relief works, the fishermen have to be honoured as they are marginalised section of society, remarked the minister.

The fishermen were given Onam kit and Ona kodi. Hibi Eden MLA presided over the function. K.V. Thomas MP, MLAs P.T. Thomas, K.J. Maxi, S. Sharma, John Fernandez, M. Swaraj, V.D Satheesan, Eldhose Kunnappilly, and leaders of fisheries organisations also attended.Hubballi: KPCC president Dinesh Gundurao said that more importance will be given to the legislators of North Karnataka while filling the six vacant posts due to the Congress in the state Cabinet.

Addressing the media in Belagavi after monitoring the preparations of the party for the local body elections on Sunday, he said that ministers would be continued or changed based on an evaluation of their efficiency after two years. Asserting that BJP MPs from the region have failed to provide justice to the people and are using them as a vote bank, he said Congress parliamentarians from the region had managed to ensure special status and benefits of Article 371(J) during the tenure of the previous UPA government to overcome backwardness.

Slamming the Opposition, Mr Gundurao said BJP leaders are unable to digest the fact they are out of power and are issuing statements that the coalition government would be short-lived. The promises made by PM Modi before the elections have not been fulfilled. The BJP has failed in creating jobsand did not appoint the Lokpal. Atrocities against women, dalits and the oppressed class have increased, he said.Mr. Gandhi is scheduled to reach Thiruvananthapuram by 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

Thiruvananthapuram: Congress president Rahul Gandhi will visit the flood-affected areas of the state on August 28 and 29.

Mr. Gandhi is scheduled to reach Thiruvananthapuram by 10 a.m. on Tuesday. He will go to Chengannur in helicopter and from there to Alappuzha to visit the flood affected areas and people.

KPCC president M M Hassan said that Mr. Gandhi would be attending the reception to be given to fishermen who were involved in rescue operations. Financial assistance for the 20 out of the thousand houses to be constructed by KPCC would be also distributed at the function to be held at Camelot convention centre in Alappuzha.

Mr. Hassan, opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala and former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy would be offering assistance for constructing one house each.

Mr. Gandhi would reach Kochi by around 3.30 p.m. and visit Aluva, Paravur and Chalakkudy areas.

On Wednesday, the Congress president would flag off trucks with relief materials collected by the Ernakulam district congress committee for distribution at various relief camps. He would proceed to Kozhikode in a special flight and would visit parts of Wayanad by helicopter. He will visit the calamity-hit areas of Kottathala village from 11.30 a.m. He is scheduled to return to Kozhikode airport by 1.15 p.m. and return to Delhi.RSS spokesperson Arun Kumar on Monday said the Congress chief cannot understand the saffron outfit as he does not know India. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) is likely to extend an invitation to their critic Congress President Rahul Gandhi for an event next month, sources in the organisation said on Monday.

The RSS event titled 'Future of Bharat' will be held in New Delhi and several other opposition leaders are expected to be present, reports stated.

The idea is to invite people from different ideologies for the event, a source in the RSS said, adding that the list is being prepared and may also include CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury.

In a three-day lecture series from September 17-19, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat will interact and present the Sangh's perspective on various issues of national importance.

In June this year, Congress veteran and former president Pranab Mukherjee attended an event at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur on the Sangh's invitation, for which he was criticised by the party leaders.

The indication that Gandhi could be invited came on a day the RSS criticised him for drawing parallels between the Sangh and Islamic radical outfit Muslim Brotherhood.

RSS spokesperson Arun Kumar hit out at Rahul Gandhi for likening the RSS to Muslim Brotherhood. He said the Congress chief cannot understand the saffron outfit as he does not know India.

Last week at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Gandhi had said the RSS' idea is similar to that of Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world.

Also Read: RSS' idea similar to Islamist group Muslim Brotherhood, says Rahul in UK

He had also alleged that the RSS was trying to "change" the nature of India and "capture" its institutions.

"The entire world today is facing the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. He is unaware... he does not understand the gravity of the situation that's why he is making such statements," Kumar said while responding to a question on Gandhi's remarks about the RSS.The Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) led by Kushwaha is an ally of the ruling NDA government in Bihar. (Photo: PTI)

Patna: Hinting at a political realignment with the RJD ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Union minister Upendra Kushwaha said a delicious kheer can be prepared with milk from the Yadavs and rice from the Kushwahas.

The Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) led by Kushwaha is an ally of the ruling NDA government in Bihar.

RJD leader Tejaswi Prasad Yadav, who has time and again extended invitation to Kushwaha to align with the RJD, grabbed the opportunity and said today that kheer prepared with love and affection is delicious, energetic and full of nutrition.

The Yadav community in Bihar is known for rearing cows while the Kushwahas are primarily agriculturists.

Kushwaha was addressing a function organised by his party on Sunday to mark the 100th birth anniversary of late B P Mandal, a former chief minister of Bihar, at the S K Memorial hall in Patna.

Yaduvanshiyon ka dudh aur Kushwansiyon ka chawal mil jaye to kheer ban sakti hai (kheer can be prepared with the milk from the Yadavs and rice from the Kushwahas), he said.

The minister also said, We will get the sugar from Brahmins, Tulsi from Choudharyji (RLSP Bihar chief Bhudev Choudhary), and can make delicious kheer with the dry-fruits from the backward classes and Dalits. Then we can relish the delicious kheer together, Kushwaha told the gathering on the occasion.

This is the definition of social justice that late Mandal dreamed of, he said.

Mandal had also headed the Backward Classes Commission that recommended 27 per cent quota for OBCs in jobs. The panels recommendations were implemented by the then V P Singh government in 1990.

In a tweet, Tejaswi Yadav said, Undoubtedly Upendra ji, delicious and nutritious kheer is necessary for working class. And health benefits of panchmewa not only provides energy to the body but also helpful in building healthy and equitable society.

Kheer prepared with love and affection is a delicious, energetic and full of nutritious value. This is a good dish, Tejaswi said on Twitter on Sunday.

When pointed out that his party chiefs statement sounded rebellious, RLSP national general secretary and spokesman Abhyanand Suman told PTI that the party was still very much in the NDA fold.

On why Kushwaha made such a statement that was sure to embarrass the coalition, he said, In a democratic set up, every party and its leader try to expand its social base by reaching out to different sections and communities and this effort is in that regard.

Of late, Kushwaha has been embarrassing the Nitish Kumar-led NDA government in Bihar with his statements.

He has been critical of the Bihar government and had in the past even suggested Kumar to voluntarily give up the bid for a fourth term in office in 2020.

Earlier this month, when an RLSP leader was gunned down in broad daylight, Kushwaha had asked the chief minister how many dead bodies would wake up the administration.

The RLSP chief was conspicuous by his absence during the get-together of top NDA leaders in Patna on June 7.

Kushwaha had later cited personal reasons for staying away from the function.

The RLSPs partners in the Bihar government -- the BJP and JD(U) -- chose to tread cautiously on his kheer remark.

They said Kushwahas statement sounded more like a recipe and there was nothing more to read into it.

What Kushwaha ji has said it looked like a proverb. Rice, milk and sugar belonged to everyone... One should not read anything more in it as Kushwaha ji has already taken a resolve to make Narendra Modi ji prime minister in 2019 again, Bihar BJP chief Nityanand Rai told PTI.

JD(U) spokesperson and MLC Niraj Kumar said It looks like more of a proverb than anything else... Upendra Kushwaha has played an important role in uprooting jungle raj from Bihar and he is with the NDA.'No amount of white washing/blog writing can increase that!' Surjewala wrote, mentioning Arun Jaitley in the tweets. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: The Congress claimed on Sunday the "ad hoc" policies of the BJP-led government at the centre has put the Indian economy in "dire straits", and took a dig at Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, saying writing blogs cannot increase investment.

In a series of tweets, Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala alleged the manner in which the Modi government has sought to "suppress 'back series'" of a report on the GDP and attempted to distort them, is now out in the open.

"Truth has a way of coming out and cannot be ever suppressed. Jaitleyji, your Govt has left our economy to dire straits ... investment is in doldrums," Surjewala said.

The GDP Back Series Report 2011 was made public earlier this month. According to the draft report, the economy recorded a 10.08 per cent growth rate in 2006-07 under then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the highest since liberalisation of the economy in 1991.

The government has said the report was an unofficial document that has not been accepted by it. It has also said the report was at discussion stage and its acceptance will be based on wider consultation.

Surjewala also claimed that the gross fixed capital formation as a per cent of GDP was 34.3 per cent in 2011-12. In 2013-14, he said, it was 31.3 per cent.

But in the past three years, it has remained constant at 28.5 per cent and has impacted growth, he said.

"No amount of white washing/blog writing can increase that!" Surjewala wrote, mentioning Arun Jaitley in the tweets.

He said Jaitley should know that the present government had inherited an economy that was on an upswing.

"But due to BJP's adhoc and myopic economic policies -demonetisation, flawed implementation of GST and 'tax terrorism'; that momentum was lost," he alleged.

He said the UPA-1 and UPA-2 delivered the highest decadal growth - 8.13 per cent at factor cost - since Independence.

Under Modi government, GDP growth in 2017-18 is 6.7 per cent, which is at a four-year low, he said.Adityanath, who has represented Gorakhpur in Lok Sabha five times, said as controversy flared, he decided to visit the BRD Medical College the very next day. (Photo: File)

Lucknow: Nearly a year after the deaths of more than 60 newborns at a hospital in his home turf in Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has said the incident may have been blown out of proportion due to the institute's "internal politics". Adityanath also said that he had to act after news channels and the media had "made it an issue".

"Last year when I heard of the news, I thought a similar thing had happened. But when I saw that all news channels and media had made it an issue, I sent DG (Director General - Health) to Gorakhpur and a sought a report. I also sent my health minister and the minister for medical education and told them to submit a report," Adityanath said in Lucknow while launching a campaign for the state nutrition mission.

Adityanath, who has represented Gorakhpur in Lok Sabha five times, said as controversy flared, he decided to visit the BRD Medical College the very next day.

"I asked people there what actually the matter was, and was told there was nothing as such...And if the deaths were due to the lack of oxygen, then children put on the ventilators would have been the first to die. I said there must definitely be something. From where were the figures come from? Then it emerged it was internal politics," the UP chief minister said.

Adityanath said after the incident, the doctors at the medical college were not keen on seeing patients worrying that it may become an issue.

"We had to counsel them that you do your job and not worry about anything else," he said. "If your conscience is clean, then you should not bother, we told the doctors," Adityanath said.

More than 60 children, mostly infants, had died at the government hospital within a week in August 2017 allegedly because it ran out of oxygen cylinders since it did not pay the vendor. The state government denied that shortage of oxygen led to the deaths.

In its report submitted in the same month, a committee under the then UP chief secretary Rajiv Kumar probing the tragedy had recommended criminal action against then principal of the BRD Medical College Dr Rajiv Mishra and other officials at the hospital.Rao on Monday noon called from the mobile number 944XXXXX65 and warned the Terminal Manager that improvised explosive devices (IED) have been placed in seven flights of Air Asia, Jet Airways and Air India. (Representional Image)

Bengaluru: A bomb threat call, which was later found to be a hoax, created panic at the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) on Monday, prompting security officials to conduct exhaustive checks on flights.

It was the fourth threat call to the KIA in a week by the same man, who identifies himself as Adithya Rao from Kundapur. The last call he made was to the Terminal Manager of Air Asia at 12.42 pm on Friday.

Rao on Monday noon called from the mobile number 944XXXXX65 and warned the Terminal Manager that improvised explosive devices (IED) have been placed in seven flights of Air Asia, Jet Airways and Air India. The caller gave in the flight numbers in which the IEDs are planted including the flight from Bengaluru to Kochi which was already suspended due to floods.

The sleuths of Central Industrial Security Forces (CISF) and local police launched a search but found nothing. This is not the first time Adithya has made a hoax call to the KIA. His first call was on August 20 at 9.46 am from 888XXXXX96 and claimed that IEDs have been planted in some flights. He again called up at 3.46 pm to issue the same threat.

On August 23, he again called at 11.04 am from 962XXXXX44 and told the Terminal Manager that IEDs planted in airlines could go off any time. The KIA officials have lodged a complaint with the Airport police.

The police have identified the caller and are making efforts to nab him. So far, the intentions of the caller could not be ascertained as he has randomly picked up the flight numbers.

Hoax call at city rail station too

Panic gripped the City Railway Station too on Monday when a similar bomb threat call was made to the station. The caller claimed that IEDs have been planted in Cloak Room and could go off any time. The Railway Police along with bomb detection and dog squads carried out a thorough search at the Cloak Room but found nothing. A case has been registered and the police suspect that it is the same person who called the KIA issued a threat at the city railway station too.Chennai: Madras high court has dismissed a petition seeking direction to Tamil Nadu transport department to ensure safety measures incorporated as per statutory rules and regulations in all government public transport buses operated in the State and also to direct the authorities concerned to provide adequate infrastructure at the bus terminus and shelters.

The division bench comprising Justice S. Manikumar and Justice Subromonium Prasad, before which the PIL came up for hearing on Monday, has dismissed the petition with a cost of Rs 10, 000 to be paid to Juvenile Justice Fund.

The petitioner Jawahar Shanmugam, who had already filed several PILs including the requirement of ramps in the hospitals and fire safety measures, in the present petition highlighted details about the poor condition of the buses run by the state transport corporations.

He alleged that Tamil Nadu government is on keen to encouraging big private bus operators to ply luxurious buses and they have captured a very good market share and profit. He submitted that non-maintenance of the public transport buses had led to several accidents. The corporation ends up paying hefty compensation to family members of the accident victims.

The petitioner said despite having some sound rules on bus body design, these buses are poorly maintained, making it unsafe for the driver to drive the vehicle and also pose dangers to the commuters. Traveling in these buses becomes nightmarish experience.

He sent a representation to the authorities on November 27, 2017 highlighting these issues. As there was no reply from the authorities he has filed the present PIL.HYDERABAD: A city court hearing the case of the twin blasts at Lumbini Park and Gokul Chat in August 2007 postponed the case to September 4. The court was expected to announce the verdict on Monday but now it is likely to come next Tuesday at the Cherlapally Central Prison. The IInd Additional Metropolitan Sessions Judge T. Srinivas Rao, who is to deliver the verdict in the case, stated in the court hall that the judgment is not ready as it is a voluminous case. For judgment call on September 4.

Defence counsel is Shaik Saifullah Khalid for the five accused in the case. On Monday all the five accused Akbar Ismail Choudhary, Aneeq Shafeeq Sayeed, Farookh Sharfuddin Tarkash, and Sadiq Israr Ahmed Sheikh were produced before the court via video conferencing from Cherlapally Prison where they are lodged. The proceedings were held in a closed court hall with the general public and the media was not allowed inside.

The defense counsel for the accused  G. Gurumurthy, Raji Reddy, M.A. Azeem and Shaik Saifullah Khalid  were present in the court hall and so were the public prosecutors and officials of the counter intelligence and Octopus. Three cases  two pertaining to two blasts at Lumbini Park and Gokul Chat and one unexploded bomb found at Venkatadri theatre in Dilsukhnagar were registered against Akbar Ismail Choudhary, Aneeq Shafeeq Sayeed, Farookh Sharfuddin Tarkash, Sadiq Israr Ahmed Shaik and Mohammed Tareeq Anjum Ahsan. Anjum is charged with harbouring Iqbal Bhaktal and Riyaz Bhaktal who are involved in the case and are absconding. A total of seven persons are accused in the case. Nearly 170 witnesses were examined and cross-examined during the trial.

The accused were charged under Section 302 (murder) and other relevant provisions of the IPC and sections of Explosive Substances Act in connection with the twin blasts and also with regard to recovery of an unexploded bomb that was found under a foot overbridge in Dilsuknagar area.

It may be recalled that 42 persons were killed and 72 persons injured in the blast at Gokul Chat and Lumbini Park on August 25, 2007, evening. The bomb blasts were reportedly executed to avenge the Mecca Masjid blast and subsequent police firing. Octopus  the counter terrorism unit of the erstwhile united AP police  had registered and investigated a part of the case soon after the blast and later the counter intelligence wing of the state police took the probe ahead. All the accused were caught by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad and later handed over to the Gujarat police. The state police later took them into custody and on interrogation they admitted to their involvement in the twin blasts reportedBengaluru: The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) will soon interrogate some of the accused in the Gauri Lankesh murder case to find out their involvement in the murder of Kannada scholar M.M. Kalburgi. So far, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) has arrested 12 people in the Gauri case. They are lodged in judicial custody at Bengaluru Central Prison at Parapanna Agrahara.

According to official sources, the CID has taken the permission of the jurisdictional court in Dharwad, where the case was registered, to interrogate the accused  Amol Kale alias Bhaisahab, Ganesh Miskin, Rajesh Bangera, Amit Degwekar, Sujeet Kumar alias Praveen alias Manjunath alias Sujeet S.R. and Manohar Edave. If the CID finds the involvement of any of them in the Kalburgi case, they will approach the court for their body warrant, said the officer.

Prof Kalburgi was shot dead at the entrance of his house in Dharwad on August 30, 2015. Kale is allegedly at the heart of all the four murder plots of rationalists including Kalburgi. Miskin had reportedly driven the motorcycle in both the murder cases. He had ferried Parshuram Waghmare, who reportedly fired four bullets at Gauri, three of which hit her. Miskin had also allegedly driven Sujeet, who reportedly shot Kalburgi point blank. Miskin had waited on the motorcycle a few yards away and later drove away with the shooters in both the cases, said the officer.

Bangera (50), a government employee in the education department in Madikeri, is allegedly the arms and ammunition supplier to the group, which is behind the assassination plots. He had also reportedly trained the youths recruited by Amol Kale (37)  a former Pune coordinator of Hindu Janajagruti Samiti and his associates from the Hindutva group for the covert operations.

Manohar Edave from Vijaypura was allegedly in charge of the recruitment wing in Karnataka.

Amit Degwekar alias Pradeep (39) is the only accused in Gauri murder case, whose address reflects the address of Sanatan Sanstha in Ponda, Goa. He is said to be one of the alleged financial links between the organisers of hit list and the Right wing infantry, which was let loose on the liberal and progressive thinkers in Maharashtra and Karnataka.Hyderabad: The Election Commission (EC) said on Monday that no one had approached them from any state to discuss the dissolution of Assembly. EC officials said if any state came to them after dissolving the assembly, they would take action according to EC rules. They said that they had no connections to the rumours swirling in Telangana about early polls. They made it clear that elections are conducted according to election rules.

Meanwhile, two days ago Telangana government Chief Advisor Rajiv Sharma met Chief Election Commissioner Ashok Lavas and reportedly enquired about the possibilities of holding elections to the Telangana State Legislative Assembly along with four other states in December. When asked about Mr Rajiv Sharmas meeting with Mr Lavas, the officials said that they had no information.

TRS MP Sitaram Naik also said that they had written to the EC requesting information on the possibilities of holding elections to Telangana Legislative Assembly along with four other states in December. He also said that TRS MP G. Vinod Kumar was on this job. It may be recalled that MP Vinod Kumar also met EC officials a few days back and enquired about the possibilities of early elections to the Telangana Assembly.

During his four-day Delhi visit, Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao reportedly held discussions with Prime Minister Narendra Modi about early elections. TRS leaders believe that the state would go to polls along with four states in the North and say that Mr Raos decision to hold a massive public meet  Pragathi Niveda-na Sabha  on September 2 as a show of strength hints at this move.Requesting the people not to get agitated about the issue, the district collector said that a list prepared in consultation with the family members of the 13 persons killed in the firing, has been recommended to the government for job appointments.

TIRUNELVELI: Government jobs for relatives of 13 persons killed in the police firing vis-a-vis the Sterlite stir on May 22 are expected to be announced soon, said the Thoothukudi district collector, Sandeep Nanduri on Monday. This was in response to some of the anti-Sterlite activists who accused the government of being indifferent to their suffering.

Requesting the people not to get agitated about the issue, the district collector said that a list prepared in consultation with the family members of the 13 persons killed in the firing, has been recommended to the government for job appointments. The Chief Minister has to announce the posts allotted, which is expected anytime soon, said Mr. Nanduri.

Further, explaining the reason for the delay in fixing a prosthetic leg for the 22-year-old Princeton, whose right leg was severely injured by bullet shot during the anti-Sterlite riot, he said that as the injured youth wanted the prosthetic leg offered to him to be replaced by an advanced model for which the government has sanctioned `7.50 lakh. Another injured person, Vijayakumar successfully underwent bone reconstruction treatment at Meenakshi mission hospital, Madurai and the expense for the surgery has been borne by the government, added the collector.

The district administration too has also constituted a committee headed by the Thoothukudi district revenue officer to look into the removal of copper slag, allegedly dumped by the copper smelter plant, obstructing the flow of a water-body-Uppatruodai as per directions of the Madurai bench of Madras High court in a case filed by an environmentalist against the copper smelter plant.

A pollution control board official, however, said that the copper slag was dumped in a private patta land with the consent of the land owner near the stream-Uppatruodai.New Delhi: Accepting a girls statement that she wanted to stay with her parents, the Supreme Court on Monday allowed a Jain girl, who had married a Muslim boy, after his conversion to Hinduism, to return to her parents home. The girl Anjali Jain who was produced before a three judge bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud told the court that she did not want to go back to her husband and would like to stay with parents.

To a question from the CJI, the girl admitted to the marriage with the boy but claimed that she was induced into the marriage. She said she wanted to go back to her parents now. Counsel for the boy, who had appealed against the Chattisgarh high court order that she be put in a hostel, said the girl was subjected to psychological pressure and was administered certain medicines by her parents. But the court said that since she wanted to go with her parents, it did not want to pass any order against her wish.

In his petition, Arya said that though he had converted to Hinduism from Islam to marry the girl, whom he was in love was under an unlawful custody of her parents. He claimed that the girls parents opposed the marriage. The marriage was solemnised on February 23, 2018 at Arya Samaj temple in Chattisgarh. He said after she visited her parents, she was not allowed to return to him.New Delhi: In a huge relief to backward class students, the Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay the 69 per cent quota law, which has been challenged on the ground that the quota exceeds the maximum 50 per cent limit imposed in the Mandal commission judgment.

A Bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Ms. Indira Banerjee, after hearing senior counsel K.M. Vijayan and counsel Sivabala Murugan, dismissed the application, seeking stay of operation of the 1994 law. Counsel pleaded for creation of additional seats as was being done all these years, but the court turned down the prayer.

The Bench said the main petition questioning the validity of the law would be heard in November to decide whether the matter required adjudication by a five judge Constitution Bench.

The petitioners Sanchana and Akhil Annapoorani said she came well within the cut off mark required for 50% of the total seats available for admission to Medical College in the Government College, as originally announced including fresh additional seats sanctioned for the Academic year 2018-2019, including the government seats available in Private Medical colleges.

The Petitioners were unselected from the open category seats due to 69% reservation. In the overall merit list without taking into consideration the students who did not join the course due to various reasons and the number of seats available under surrender seats in the All India Quota, all the students who prima facie come within the quantitative restriction of 50 per cent are entitled to be admitted to the Medical College. The Petitioners Rank entitle them to get admitted in the Government seats in any one of the Government colleges and who is not admitted due to 69% reservation in State of Tamil Nadu. They soughtstay of the operation of theTamil Nadu Backward Classes, Schedules Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Reservation of Seats in Educational Institutions and of Appointments or Posts in the Services under the State) Act, 1993.

They said the conduct of the State of Tamil Nadu having exceeded the quantitative restriction of 50 per cent reservation as decided by this Court in Indira Sawhney case and the failure to identify creamy layer among the backward classes in State of Tamil Nadu alone resulted in a Constitutional injury to the Citizens of State of Tamil Nadu against the Constitutional mandate, thereby denying a meritorious students to get admission to professional college in accordance with the Constitution.

The petitioners while seeking to quash the 69 per cent quota law sought a direction that they should be admitted by creating extra seats as was being done for the last two decades.

They alleged that the law, which came into force in 1994, was passed without legislative competence, without enabling constitutional amendment of Article 15(4), in excess of 50 per cent reservation alone, and in conformity with the 9-Judges judgment of this Court in Indra Sawhney Vs. Union of India  1992. Unless the 1994 lawstayed, the applicants will not be admitted to the first year M.B.B.S/B.D.S. in the Academic Year 2018  2019 on the basis of their marks within the 50 per cent reservation available for the open category candidates, they said and sought a direction in this regard.Thiruvananthapuram: Sunday nights tweets by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the UAE Vice President and Prime Minister, on duties of good officials, have gone viral in view of the controversy over the Centre cold-shouldering the UAE aid offer for flood-ravaged Kerala.

Although the tweets had no direct references to Kerala, social media has been abuzz with a cross-section of opinions, linking them to the unprecedented natural calamity and aid responses.

There are two types of officials The first type are the keys of goodness They like to serve people. Their happiness in facilitating human life... and their value in what they give and their real achievement is changing life for the better. They open doors, they offer solutions, and they always seek to benefit people, Sheikh Mohammed tweeted.

In a second tweet, he described the second type, For good difficult to easy And they underestimate a lot. They suggest actions that make human life more difficult. Their happiness is that people need them and stand by their doors and their desks.

States and Governments succeed only if the first type increases on the second.The tweet on the empathetic and problem solvers, strikes a chord in minds of millions of people, not just the Malayali Diaspora, who share the universal grief over the devastation and the need for offering salve to the nearly one million people in relief camps and others confined to partially submerged homes.

The second type represents the bureaucrat, steeped in red-tape and raises technical issues to deny timely benefits to people.

At the height of the unprecedented floods, Sheikh Maktoum had tweeted his concern for the flood victims in Kerala, whose workforce had contributed to the Dubai success story.

On August 18, soon after Sheikh Maktoum had spoken to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the latter tweeted: A big thanks to @hhshkmohd for his gracious offer to support people of Kerala during this difficult time. His concern reflects the special ties between governments and people of India and UAE.

Subsequently on August 21, in Thiruvananthapuram, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan shared with the media bizman Yusuff Ali M As word that the UAE rulers had decided to donate $ 100 million towards Keralas relief and rehabilitation efforts. This mention of a specific amount, even before it was officially announced either by the UAE Government or the Centre, seems to have cast a shadow on the Sheikhdom's offer of help to a State with which it has vibrant people-to-people relationship.Kerala may be barking up the wrong tree, or should one say the wrong dam? The Mullaiperiyar dam, an ingenious creation of the British engineer Pennicuick, is being targeted at a time of plenty as well. The irony is it has become a symbol of discord even at a time when the ancient structure proved its ability to hold 142 feet level of water. Maybe, it is the contentious environment of the day that is to blame. The issue, however, must be viewed with sympathy as Kerala has been devastated, even if it was only done in by a disaster that was presaged with plenty of warnings having been given by scientists and environmentalists.

The facts bear out that Tamil Nadu has a clear case as well as a clear conscience with regard to Mullaiperiyar. The discharge from the TN-operated dam was just about 6 tmc feet of water as compared to the 36 tmc feet that the Idukki and Idamalayar dams sent rushing downstream to overwhelm Aluva and Ernakulam-Kochi in the maximum weeks of the disaster, which were the second and third weeks of August. The enormity of 40-plus rivers overflowing their banks is a biblical spectacle of a deluge that proved as frightening as the effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans.

What such calamities reveal is there are many more to come and the one to blame is mankind. A warmer world will see more and more extreme events. This is a theme that has often repeated itself as storms of every possible category to flooding, landslides and fires ravage the planet on a routine basis these days. You dont need any silly logic like those of some bakhts who blamed the Kerala floods on a bachelor gods anger when we know that man has helped these events over the last 100 years with just his selfish presence on the planet in increasing numbers that have topped seven billion and counting.

The industrial world could be blamed for all the damage caused by global warming as it expanded in the 19thand 20thcenturies. However, we are also to blame for climate change by sheer unplanned expansion of living spaces as forests have been denuded to try and satisfy an insatiable greed, a fact that is particularly relevant to the ecology of the precious Western Ghats whose biodiversity was the pride of South India. The imagery of palm-lined beaches and nature and native cures in spas has been an excellent driver of tourism for Gods own country. Only now are questions being asked whether excesses in this segment are beginning to tell.

The point is the dangers of unplanned expansion without sparing a thought to disturbing the ecological balance were well brought out in the Gadgil and Kasturirangan reports on the ecology of the Western Ghats. The United Nations disaster response expert Muralee Thummarukudy and Madhav Gadgil had warned in their 2011 reports that a mega-monsoon was inevitable and for which the state was ill-prepared. Muralee is quoted as having said that he was not at all proud that his doomsday forecast had proved right. The push for development may have bulldozed all such concerns.

A very bitter Gadgil is quoted as saying Unfortunately, our state governments are in collusion with vested interests that do not want any environmental laws to be implemented. Our recommendations would have been accepted in any law-abiding society. But we have a lawless society and extremely poor governance. That rings very true when the impact of the disaster strikes in the images of rushing water and the devastation it leaves in its wake we have had an overdose in the past few weeks. It is a very sad moment to see lives wrecked beyond easy redemption as thousands of dwellings have been damaged and the pain and the costs involved in rebuilding lives are beyond description.

The other problem that environmentalists have often stressed is the apathy towards coastal regulations. India has such a long coastline from West Bengal to Gujarat in peninsular India that unplanned development extending for thousands of kilometres is bound to prove disastrous. It appears the march of private capital and the commerce it spins off in the hunt for profits is unstoppable. And then there is the sand mafia that has been supplying a precious building resource for developers and builders all over the country. The ecological damage they have caused by mining sand from rivers is still being assessed.

In the final analysis, we are incapable of learning from history. A few months on, life will be nearer normal and the worst of the flooding experience will have been forgotten. It will be back to business as usual as 1.3 billion people will be living off the finite resources of the country. Maybe, looking at all this, it would be a good idea if man were to colonise Mars in order to survive the climate apocalypse that might make Earth uninhabitable, as also foretold in the puranas and their definition of the yugas. The inexorable march of destruction might jeopardise the whole of mankind some day in the not too impossibly far future. Is Kali yuga coming sooner than predicted?

(R Mohan is the Resident Editor of Chennai and Tamil Nadu editions of Deccam Chronicle)Mysuru: The next Assembly polls are a full five years away and we will see then was how former chief minister Mr Siddaramaiah reacted when asked by the media in Mysuru if was planning to reconsider his decision not to contest polls again and whether he would be a contender for CM.

The veteran leader, whose statement in Hassan and later in Mysuru on Friday that he would like to be CM again, had created ripples in political circles, added, In Hassan, since people demanded that I should become CM again, I said that we will see during the next elections.

Siddarmaiah said people will remember the work taken up during his tenure and majority of Congress candidates will win ULB polls. For Mysuru alone, our government had given `2,532 crore, which is the highest ever, many works are being taken up in the district. It was during our term that Mysuru got the tag of the cleanest city in India. We will win more than 40 seats in ULB elections in Mysuru alone.

Though the Congress tally in Mysuru has dropped from eight to three in the Assembly polls, that will not affect ULB polls, he said. BJP had deputed 33 people just to lie and create negative publicity during the assembly elections. So our development works took a back seat. Sometimes, lies mask the actual reality. But this time, it will not happen, people will remember our work and we will come to power in the Mysuru city corporation (MCC) on our own.

On the allegation that the Congress view was not considered while passing an ordinance to help small vendors who take loans on a daily basis from local financiers, he said, It was the decision of the coalition government. Waiving loans is in our CMP.

Mr Siddaramaiah demanded that the Centre announce a special package of Rs 1,000 crore soon for Kodagu which has suffered from such a big disaster. The process of assessment of losses is underway, he said. On Defence Minister Ms Nirmala Sitharamans spat with Kodagu in-charge minister Sa Ra Mahesh, he said, It was too much. It was not expected of a Union minister.Chennai: DMK president nominee, MK Stalin accused the State government of shielding the IG facing allegations of sexual harassment from a woman Superintendent of police by being vindictive towards the victim and appointing officers close to him in the Vishaka panel to probe the serious complaint.

Why were those close to the IG facing the accusation, nominated to enquire into the complaints against him? Was it a quid pro quo as the IG is in charge of the probe into the corruption charges against the Chief Minister, Deputy Chief Minister and some other Ministers? Stalin asked in a hard-hitting statement on Sunday.

The DMK opposition leader accused the government of showing interest in protecting the IG rather than enquire into the complaints against him. The Internal Complaints Committee formed by the DGP T. K. Rajendran, based on the woman SPs complaint, does not conform to the guidelines issued by the Supreme Court on the Vishaka Committee. It appears the ICC has been formed with an ulterior motive, Stalin said.

In order to ensure a fair probe, the committee should include a third party, such as a NGO or another body thats familiar with the issue of sexual harassment, as per the Supreme Court guidelines. Instead, a retired police official Saraswathi has been made as member, in blatant violation of the rules, the DMK chief said.

Also, ADGP Su Arunachalam, nominated to the committee, has been transferred to Chennai from Ramanathapuram while the Deputy Inspector General of Police, Thenmozhi who has also been nominated to the ICC, had worked under the IG facing the accusations.

The committee has been constituted with the sole aim of helping the IG to go scot-free and throwing to winds womens safety, Stalin said.

The gross violations of the Supreme Court guidelines apart, even before the ICC could have its first sitting, the woman SP has been shunted out of the DVAC and the government has allowed the IG who is well versed in cyber technology to continue in the DVAC giving him an opportunity to erase the CCTV footage evidences.

There is no safety and security to women employees in this government. This is a terrible situation prevailing. This is unfortunate. This IG has been granted permission to meet the Chief Minister. It appears that not only the woman officials complaint but also all the corruption complaints against the ministers have been planned to be permanently stopped, Stalin alleged.

He demanded that the Chief Secretary immediately transfer the IG to some other department and include a person from an NGO as member in the ICC so as to ensure the safety of working women. Also he sought the posting of an honest IG to DVAC.Madurai: DMK's working president M K Stalin is all set to ascend the throne as the chief at the party's general council meet at Chennai on Tuesday even as elder brother Alagiri sounded yet again his war-cry that the party would come to grief if it continues to keep him out. If they do not readmit me, they will have to face the consequences, Alagiri told reporters here on Monday.

He said he would go ahead with the 'silent' march to his father Karunanidhi's burial site at Marina on September 5. The party cadres only wanted me to take the lead in organising the march to pay homage, Alagiri said, while appealing to all the DMK members to participate in his rally.

Sounding bitter and angry, the former Union Minister insisted that while he had never craved for any position in the party, his present mission was only aimed at saving the DMK in the present crisis caused by Karunanidhi's death on August 7. I had kept quiet since Kalaignar was alive. He is not there now. The party has to be saved and protected, so we have entered the arena, Alagiri said.

Seeking to deflect a reporter's question why he has declared war now after having kept mum when his father elevated Stalin as the party's working president (January 4, 2017), Alagiri claimed that his father had wanted to readmit him into the DMK, but these people (the Stalin group) were preventing him then.

Even before the tears could dry on the faces of the grieving kin and the DMK cadres, Alagiri had declared his war on Stalin claiming on August 13, after paying respects at his father's Marina abode that all the loyal party workers were with him. He also repeated his jibe that the DMK had lost all the elections it had contested after his expulsion and would continue to lose and face decimation unless he was readmitted.

It may be recalled that Karunanidhi had ordered Alagiri's expulsion (March 2014) at the peak of his vitriolic attacks on DMK leaders  brother Stalin in particular  and Karunanidhi had even gone on record he could not take it anymore. He told me Stalin would die in three months. Can any father withstand such a horrid thing? the anguished father had then said, openly. And after that, Alagiri remained in political wilderness as Karunanidhi refused to yield to pressure to readmit him  it came mostly from his wife Dayalu Ammal and daughter Selvi who wielded considerable influence over him.

If the party leaders, even the cadres, had kept quiet and chose to ignore Alagiri's repeated attacks on the party and Thalapathi so far, that was because we did not want to hurt Kalaignar by taking him on. Though he (Kalaignar) was himself angry at him, the father in him might still not like us criticise his son in strong terms. But now there is no such inhibiting impediment, said a DMK senior. Not just that; now the situation is just the opposite. The present party leadership (read Stalin) will actually appreciate it if we hit back at Alagiri, he added.

That, in fact, was already witnessed soon after Alagiri's Marina declaration of war on August 13, when Stalin's close associate J Anbazhagan, MLA, declared before crowded TV cameras that Stalin should not hesitate to cut the umbilical cord (read Alagiri) if that hurt the party interests.

Besides, not a single DMK functionary has come out in support of Alagiri, or even in sympathy pleading his case with the post-Karunanidhi leadership. If anything, Stalin's grip on the party only seems getting stronger, and total, as even the old-timers like party general secretary K. Anbazhagan and principal secretary Durai Murugan, have rallied behind him.

Reporters at his Madurai interaction on Monday asked Alagiri if any known DMK face would be sighted at his Marina homage for his father. I do not want to answer questions based on presumptions, he shot back.

Only on Saturday, he had claimed that his September 5 rally would demonstrate his strength. You will know how the DMK cadres have accepted me and want me there (in the party), he had said, while repeating his threat that if he was readmitted into the party, the DMK would continue to face defeat in the 2019 Lok Sabha election just as it did in the last Parliament and Assembly elections.

The Alagiri rally will certainly be an interesting event for the media that has gone berserk, albeit in patches and thankfully so, in its excitement at the 'challenge' to the new emperor in the DMK. One must understand Alagiri had been the strongman of the south once upon a time when our leader Kalaignar allowed him to be so. Thalapathi has taken control of all the district units in the south even 7-8 years ago and now the party is completely under his control, said party senior.

He requested anonymity, explaining, Party leadership has given us instructions not to react to anything that he (Alagiri) says, not to give any importance to someone who has nothing to do with the party.Chennai: BJP national president Amit Shah will not attend the memorial meeting of late DMK chief M. Karunanidhi here on Aug. 30, instead he will be represented by BJP senior and Union Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari and partys national general secretary Muralidhar Rao at the meeting.

Gadkari, is a former national president of the party, and Rao is in-charge of Tamil Nadu affairs. The announcement on Mr. Shah being represented by party seniors, was made by state president Dr. Tamilisai Soundararajan, thus putting to rest speculation that he would attend the memorial meeting.

As per the original tour schedule of Mr. Shah, he will meet the Chief Ministers and Deputy CMs of the BJP ruled states on Tuesday and would be in New Delhi till Aug.31. On Aug. 30, he would be attending a meeting of the RSS, a senior leader said and added his schedule has been fixed long ago and the State leaders would be informed if there were any changes.

Already speculation was rife that the BJP was cozying up to the DMK. But the occasion did not set the tone and tenor for such a move, he said and asserted that Shah had ensured that the party is represented at the memorial meeting.

Though certain media reports claimed that the BJP national chief would surely attend, state leaders have been insisting that they have not been informed about his tour schedule till Sunday. As though confirming Mr. Shahs plans, partys MP Subramanian Swamy had on Aug.25 said the party chief has decided not to attend the DMK meet in Chennai. Happy to learn that Party President Amit Shah has decided not to attend the DMK meet, Mr. Swamy tweeted.

Meanwhile partys national secretary H. Raja and Dr. Tamilisai also asserted that there is no official confirmation from the party high command over Shahs visit. Media reports claimed that Shah had accepted the DMK invite, triggering speculations of political realignments ahead of Lok Sabha polls next year.

The DMK has been highly critical of the BJP on several issues, including the Cauvery and NEET and the party had even showed black flags at Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to the city in April. Black flags were hoisted atop the residences of Karunanidhi, Stalin, Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi and other leaders in protest against Modi's visit and for not forming the Cauvery Management Board (CMB) then.

On Sunday, a visibly annoyed Tamilisai sought to know why the media was showing so much attention on poll alliance and said there was still ample time for the BJP to decide on forming electoral alliances in the State.Hyderabad: Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Mon-day requested the Centre to refer the Krishna water-sharing dispute to a Tribunal for adjudication under Section 3 of the Inter State River Water Disputes Act, 1956 (ISWR), instead of extending the term of the Brijesh Kumar Tribunal for the purpose. Rao met Union Highways and Water Resources Minister Nitin Gadkari in New Delhi.

In a letter submitted to Gadkari, the CM said, We have made a representation to the Centre in this regard on July 14, 2014. However, instead of referring the matter under Section 3 of ISWR Act, the Centre extended the term of the Brijesh Kumar Tribunal and referred the matter under Section 89 of the AP Reorganisation Act, 2014.

The CM added, The provisions under Section 89 are limited in scope and will not be able to do justice to the rightful claims of Telangana. It is, therefore, necessary that the matter is referred to the Tribunal under the ISWR Act.

The CM urged the Union Minister to refer the issue to the Krishna Water Dispute Tribunal instead of the Brijesh Kumar Tribunal for ensuring justice to the people of Telangana.

Telangana, which was carved out of Andhra Pradesh on June 2, 2014 has sought to be considered as an entity separate from the parent state in distribution of Krishna water among the stakeholder states. It seeks fresh determination of its share in the Krishna water.

The Brijesh Kumar Tribunal had earlier determined the Krishna water share among Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra. After bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, the share of Telangana was determined from Undivided AP share while the TS government has been demanding reallocation of water among four states by treating Telangana as a separate state.

Mr Rao brought to the notice of Gadkari that Sitarama project being constructed on Godavari was not a new project and said that they had only redesigned the old project and sought approvals from the Central Water Commission. Rao also sought faster approvals and Rs 11,000 crore for laying the 6-lane Regional Ring Road in Hyderabad abetting ORR.

Mr Rao thanked Gadkari for according approval to upgrade the 154-km Sangareddy-Narsapur-Toopran-Gajwel-Jagadevpur-Bhongir-Choutuppal highway and 180-km Choutuppal-Yacharam-Shadnagar-Chevella-Shankarpalli-Kandhi highway as national highways.

The CM informed that about 2,000 km of roads in Telangana were handed over to NHAI to develop as four-lane roads, of which 1,000-km development had been completed and the rest were in tender-stage. He also sought Rs 3,000 crore for maintenance of the 3,600-km national highways being maintained by the state power works department.Chennai: AIADMK presidium chairman E. Madhusudhanan has called the media for a 'bombshell' of an interaction at his residence noontime Tuesday amid reports that his longtime rival in the ruling party and fisheries minister D. Jayakumar has rocked his boat a bit too hard in the just-concluded cooperatives elections in their high-voltage north Chennai turf.

There is too much of sarvaadhikaram (dictatorship) seen in the party now. I have complained about this to OPS (party coordinator) just now and will meet the CM tomorrow (Tuesday). I will speak to the media after that, Madhusudhanan told Deccan Chronicle.

While he refused to divulge further details, sources close to him said OPS counseled patience saying that the intra-party hostilities could be sorted out at the AIADMK general council meeting (expected within a few weeks), but Madhusudhanan insisted on an immediate solution to the growing assault on his 'image' due to the intensified rivalry with Jayakumar. After the OPS meeting at the latter's ministerial bungalow at around 9 pm, Madhusudhanan took the decision to see the CM on Tuesday morning.

Madhusudhanan had openly accused Jayakumar of hurting his chances in the RK Nagar by-election (21 Dec, 2017), in which rebel AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakaran scored a comfortable victory.

There have been reports that OPS too has been upset for a long time, complaining to close associates that he was being sidelined in the state administration.A contrite Pope Francis has begged "God's forgiveness" for the child sex abuse scandal while seeking "firm and decisive measures to seek truth and justice". In accepting that the Church does have a problem, however, the exemplary Pope has stayed on the path of righteousness, showing willingness to investigate his own flock. Since he took over from his predecessor, the first Pope in 600 years to renounce his post, Pope Francis has ensured greater inclusiveness, with sexual diversity no longer a closet secret. This may have upset more conservative churchmen, particularly in America, which seems to be in rebellion over the Vatican accepting gays. Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican envoy to the US, has revealed sordid details on a prominent US cardinal while demanding the Pope's resignation.

Contrast the Pope's openness over the sexual scandals in the Catholic church with that of other major religions that hardly ever visit the problem, even in discussions. It was a surprise, more than a shock, that members of the Catholic church's priesthood in India tried to play down the same kind of allegations that surround Catholic priests worldwide. Some even went to court with pleas for protection, than believing like good Catholics that the truth will set them free. There is, however, no getting away from the fact that priests' deviant sexual practices, preying on children and women, has blighted the church's history. Reports published in the US point to 300 Pennsylvania priests abusing over 1,000 children in the last seven decades. The Pope has much more to do to cleanse his clergy.Ireland and the Vatican moved significantly closer over the weekend to forging a more rational Church-state relationship that would not only strengthen Irish secularism but also restore the confidence of many among the worlds 1.2 billion Roman Catholics.

Ostensibly, Pope Francis historic two-day visit was to attend the triennial Festival of Families in Dublin. But since he chose the venue, an element of long-term planning cannot be ruled out. Symbolically, the first family to tell their story to His Holiness and the gathering of nearly 43,000 people in the Croke Park Stadium was a father, mother and two children from Mumbai. Speaking of information technology and the social media, they warned to public applause of the danger of technology overwhelming family values.

That is only one challenge that faces this divided, war-torn and yet indomitable island and the modernis-ing Leo Varadkar, who became Irelands youngest ever Taoiseach (Prime Minister) in June 2017. To take one small example, the black humour of a play titled A Skull in Connemara that I saw in Dublins Olympia Theatre two days before the Pope landed showed graves being dug up and skulls and bones being merrily smashed while swipes were taken at the Catholic clergy. All that would have been unthinkable when I last sat in the slightly tired red and gold Victorian splendour of the Olympia Theatre in 1959: Indias Ram Gopal was dancing there and I, a young reporter in Newcastle upon Tyne, was handling the publicity.

Ireland has moved since then from religious conservatism to thrusting modernity.Although Mr Varadkar, who was brought up as a Roman Catholic, respectfully addressed the Pope as Holy Father, his welcome speech in Dublin Castle was almost a scolding. He spoke of the shame and sorrow of the Catholic legacy and demanded corrective action. It was a far cry from the last and first papal visit in 1979, when nearly three million devotees che-ered Pope John Paul II as a sovereign head of state and keeper of the nations conscience.

Abortion, contraception, divorce and gay sex were forbidden then. No one complained of high-ranking priests sodomizing young boys or of babies being taken away from unmarried mothers and sold into adoption. No one mentioned the notorious Magdalene Laundries, which were supposed to rescue, support and rehabilitate fallen women but were really vicious Church-run dens where helpless women were sexually, physically and mentally exploited.

Pope Francis bravely acknowledged all these crimes. He spent 90 minutes with eight victims of sexual abuse, expressed regret and promised redress. Its Mr Varadkars legitimate boast that the Churchs hand no longer lies so heavily on secular affairs. His own life as Irelands first (and the worlds fourth) openly gay head of government symbolises this revolution. Ireland was the first country in Europe  probably in the world  to legalise same-sex marriage.

India can take some pride in this transformation. The Taoiseachs father, Dr Ashok Varadkar, was a Mumbai-trained doctor who migrated to Ireland. Mr Varadkar himself, who has visited his ancestral country several times, completed his medical internship at Mumbais KEM Hospital. Whether or not he has a smattering of Marathi I dont know, but his English has an Irish accent and he is fluent enough in Gaelic to make speeches in that dead but patriotically honoured language.

Mr Varadkar tried to make his reception for Pope Francis as wide-based as possible, inviting leaders of other Christian sects, members of the Council of State and European Parliament, lawyers and judges. But Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party of British-held Northern Ireland, ungraciously refused his invitation, thereby drawing attention to the minority fanaticism that  shades of India  has partitioned the island.

When I interviewed the ultra-Protestant DUPs founder, Ian Paisley, a fundamentalist firebrand preacher, during what the Irish call the Troubles of 1969, he informed me that Indias problems were due to Papa (meaning Pope Paul VI) visiting Bombay four years earlier. He called Pope John Paul II the anti-Christ when he addressed the European Parliament in 1988. On Sunday, Pope Francis sent his love to Northern Ireland, but it will be some time before passions have cooled sufficiently for him to take up Mr Varadkars suggestion and visit the British province.

There is no doubt that even in Ireland, the Pope is no longer the figure of awed veneration he once was. No more than 45,000 worshippers attended his Holy Mass at the Knock shrine where a village boy claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1879. Its a different Ireland. Following the May referendum when 66.4 per cent of 4.8 million Irish people supported removing the ban on abortion, Mr Varadkar promised a new law by the end of the year. This will meet a demand that has been gathering strength since 2012 when a 31-year-old Indian dentist, Savita Halappanavar, died at Univer-sity Hospital in Galway due to the complications of a septic miscarriage and the denial of her request for an abortion.

During a radio interview on January 18, 2015 (his 36th birthday), Mr Varadkar spoke publicly for the first time about being gay: Its not something that defines me. Im not a half-Indian politician, or a doctor politician or a gay politician for that matter. Its just part of who I am, it doesnt define me, it is part of my character I suppose. Ireland sent the Irish Brothers to run schools in India. It also sent the Loreto nuns who educated millions of Indians, including West Bengals Jyoti Basu. India has returned the compliment with a Prime Minister of whom the world can be proud. Leo Varadkar would be a fitting guest of honour for one of our Republic Day ceremonies.Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next.In the early days of Islam, Muslim women enjoyed leadership and community building roles. Unfortunately, cultural manifestations corrupted the understanding of their rights. However, women continued to excel as scholars in the field of religious sciences. One fourth of Hadith, Prophetic sayings that form the corpus of Muslim faith have been collected from women transmitters. Many women jurists gave fatwas, religious verdicts and no objections were raised when opinions differed from their male contemporaries.

Interestingly, Islamic history acknowledges that while some men were often found guilty of fabricating Hadith, not a single woman was ever accused of such a charge. Their intellectual integrity in conveying religious truth has never been in doubt.

As spiritual masters and exemplars of Islamic piety, Muslim women made their mark in history as scholars, poets, individual mystics, ascetics and founders of Sufi schools. They served as respected teachers, and guides in the same way as did Muslim men, often-surpassing men in their understanding of the Quran and Islamic spirituality. As Sulami, a tenth century Iranian scholar wrote a rare study of eighty Sufi women.

One of the most striking aspects of the female Sufis is the certainty expressed in their relationship with God and His love for them. Sufis themselves credit the famed mystic woman Rabia Basri of the late eighth century with the development of the philosophy of Divine Love. Consumed by passion for God, Rabia fostered circles of worship and study. She taught that God be loved for His sake alone, not for the fear of Hell or want of Paradise.

Other early women mystics include Umm Haram whose tomb is in Cyprus, Rabia bint Ismail of Syria, Muadha al Adaiyya of Syria, Nafisa of Makkah, Zainab and Ishi Nili of Persia and Fatima of Nishapur who lived in Makkah. All these women made major contributions to the vitality of Islamic thought.

Ibn al Arabi, of the thirteenth century, one of the greatest Sufi Masters of all time wrote of Shams of Marchena and Fatima of Cordova, two women mystics profoundly influencing him. Bayazid Bistami, the famous ninth century mystic, when asked about his master, he said it was an old woman he had met in the desert. He also spoke of Fatima of Nishapur as one of his teachers, describing her as an advanced mystic. Dhun Nun the great Egyptian Sufi Master too, acknowledged her scholarship and piety.

Someone asked Dhun Nun, Who, in your opinion, is the highest among the Sufis? He replied, A lady in Mecca, called Fatimah Nishapuri, whose discourse displayed a profound apprehension of the inner meanings of the Quran. She is of the friends of God, and my teacher. She counseled him, In all your actions, watch that you act with sincerity and in opposition to your lower self. Whoever doesnt have God in his consciousness is erring and in delusion, whatever language he speaks, whatever company he keeps. Whoever holds Gods company never speaks except with sincerity and assiduously adheres to a humble reserve and earnest devotion in his conduct.

Sayyida Nafisa of the early ninth century lived in Egypt, gaining a reputation for piety and knowledge of Islam. People in vast numbers sought her prayers. Many religious scholars including Imam Shafai, who founded one of the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence, attended Nafisas discourses and discussed matters of religious law with her. Before Imam Shafai died in 820 CE, he had requested that Nafisa perform funeral prayers for him. His body was taken to her house, for her constant fasting had rendered her too weak to travel.

Despite outward male or female forms, in the Sufi doctrine there is no space for I, for all that exists is Thou, the One Divine reality.After the success of the previous virtual reality headset, Samsung is preparing to unveil a new VR headset that will be Bluetooth-enabled. The upcoming models have made an appearance on a Bluetooth certification website with similar numbers  XE800ZBA and XQ800ZBA. Apart from this, the listing doesnt reveal much but it does indicate that Samsung will be launching two versions of the headset.

Previously, XE800ZBA made an appearance on FCC and some of the specifications had been detailed. A report by Variety states that the new headset goes by the model name HMD Odessey+ and it is largely based off the original Odessey headset that was launched last October. This headset is believed to run on the Microsoft Mixed Reality software and will make use of inside-out positional tracking which allows users to lean into VR experiences without the need for any external tracking hardware.

The Odessey+ will include dual 3.5-inch screens that feature a resolution of 1440 x 1600 pixels per eye. It will also have integrated audio from AKG. The sensor found here will include a WMR camera, IPD sensor, G-sensor, gyroscope and proximity sensor. Connectivity options are said to be HDMI 2.0, USB 3.0 and Bluetooth. The Odessey+ will also feature a dual array mic.

The report adds that the specifications have also mentioned a wider eye box and a redesigned nose part that will aim to reduce fogging of the lenses.

Since it has already popped up on the FCC and at a Bluetooth certification website, the launch should be imminent and we expect it to be unveiled at IFA Berlin 2018.

Disclaimer: The above report is completely based on online rumours and leaks from the respective sources. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Deccan Chronicle and/or other staff and contributors to this website.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.Siemens earlier this month unveiled its new strategy, which sees its five industrial divisions combined into three operating companies to simplify the trains to turbines company and make its structure leaner.

German engineering giant Siemens said a report by monthly Manager Magazin that it could cut 20,000 jobs as part of its Vision 2020+ strategy was completely unfounded.

We do not follow the reasoning behind the figures named in the magazine article. No statements of this kind were made, Siemens said on Friday, adding that details of the new strategy were still being worked out.

Manager Magazin said on Thursday Siemens aimed to reap cost savings from slimming down administrative costs in personnel, legal and finance, and at its shared services division, citing comments that Chief Executive Joe Kaeser made to some investors at a roadshow at the beginning of August.

The report comes after Siemens earlier this month unveiled its new strategy, which sees its five industrial divisions combined into three operating companies to simplify the trains to turbines company and make its structure leaner.

Under the changes, Siemens said it expected to lift the annual growth rate and profit margin of its industrial business by 2 percentage points over the medium term and increase its basic earnings per share at a faster rate.

The group said at the time its corporate headquarters functions would be leaner as a result of tasks being outsourced, but gave no details of job losses.

The newly formed Operating Companies are currently working on the detailed planning, Siemens said on Friday, adding there were no plans for a company-wide cost-cutting programme initiated by its headquarters.

Manager Magazin also reported that Kaeser told analysts he was looking for a partner for its gas turbine business and was in senior-level talks with companies in China.

Siemens declined to comment on the possible partnership.

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.Vivo has officially teased the launch of the smartphone that further confirms two key features  it will have a fourth-generation under-display fingerprint scanner and a Waterdrop notch design.

While Vivo is all set to take the wraps off its latest smartphone  the Vivo V11 Pro in India, the same day, the company will launch the sequel to the Vivo X21 (which is barely few months old) in China on September 6. Vivo has officially teased the launch of the smartphone that further confirms two key features  it will have a fourth-generation under-display fingerprint scanner and a Waterdrop notch design.

Dubbed the Vivo X23, the upcoming device has already been leaked numerous times in the past few weeks. As per the rumours and leaks, the device would sport a 'waterdrop' style notched display with 91.2 per cent screen-to-body ratio and the dual rear camera setup will have a super wide-angle camera. Additionally, the cameras are said to be backed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) for enhanced photography. The successor to X21 will also come with a 3D face recognition feature similar to that on Mi 8 Explorer Edition.

The X23 would feature a 6.4-inch FHD+ display with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio. According to a Geekbench listing, the device would come with a Snapdragon 710 chipset, paired with up to 8GB RAM although some reports suggest that the handset would run on a Snapdragon 670 SoC, clubbed with 6GB RAM. In terms of optics, the smartphone is likely to feature a 12MP+5MP dual camera setup found on its current-generation high-end phones.

Disclaimer: The above report is completely based on online rumours and leaks from the respective sources. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Deccan Chronicle and/or other staff and contributors to this site.

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.Iranian defence minister Amir Hatami (L) meeting with his Syrian counterpart Abdullah Ayoub (R) in the capital Damascus. Iran and Syria signed a deal for military cooperation in a meeting between the defence ministers of the two countries in Damascus, Iranian media reported on Monday. (Photo: AFP)

Tehran: Iran and Syria signed a deal for military cooperation in a meeting between the defence ministers of the two countries in Damascus, the Tasnim news agency reported on Monday.

Iranian defence minister Amir Hatami travelled to Damascus on Sunday for a two-day visit, meeting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and senior military officials, Tasnim reported.

Iranian forces have backed Assad in the countrys civil war.

Tasnim did not provide any details about the military cooperation deal.

US national security adviser John Bolton said last week that Iran should remove its forces from Syria.

Senior Iranian officials have said their military presence in Syria is at the invitation of the Assad government and they have no immediate plans to withdraw.A group of senior students, studying at the boarding Gurukul school in Haryanas Rohtak, have been accused of sodomising at least five of their junior students.

Some of these minor boys, from classes five and six, say they were being sexually exploited by their seniors on the campus for nearly a year. All the victims are below nine years of age and undergoing counselling by experts after the ordeal came to light.

The victim boys say they were often picked up at night and taken to the terrace or in the bathroom where they were sodomised by boys of classes ninth and tenth. They were also beaten and threatened if they resisted. The police have registered a case under relevant sections including the Protection of Children from Sexually Offences Act (POCSO).

The accused will be produced before the Court today.

The incident came to light on Rakshabandhan when the mother and sister of one of the boys studying in class six visited the campus. The boy started crying profusely. He pleaded with his mother to take him out of the school. It is then when the minor boy revealed that his seniors have been sexually exploiting him now for over a year.

The mother in panic created a hue and cry. Four other students of class five and six soon came forward to admit that they too were sexually exploited by these boys. The police have also booked the school staffers in the case.In all the articles about last weeks 50th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Prague, few took note of one of its enduring scars: widespread and ubiquitous atheism. Some may be surprised to learn that the Czech people are the most irreligious people in Europe, not just because of decades of government-sponsored atheism, but because of centuries of government-enforced religion.

When Communist officials first came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, undermining and eradicating religion became a top priority. The Marxists tried to co-opt the Roman Catholic Church with a patriotic organization, loyal to the regime, known as Catholic Action. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.) However, the Vatican quickly condemned the governments creation.

The government began paying priests salaries  something not a single priest refused  in order to win their loyalty. The Office of Religious Affairs placed some of its loyal priests in positions of ecclesiastical authority. Yet the bishops maintained fidelity.

Failing at counterfeiting, the government resorted to confiscation. Prague ordered all monasteries closed on April 13, 1950, resulting in a massive seizure of church property. The communist government plundered 429 buildings belonging to male monastic orders, 670 buildings belonging to female orders, some 2,000 works of art, another 2,000 historical artifacts, and 1.8 million books. This does not include the massive destruction of precious historical items, carried out on such a scale that even former Czechoslovakian Prime Minister Zdenek Fierlinger lamented it.

Authorities then forcibly merged the Byzantine Catholic Church with the Orthodox Church (with strong ties to Moscow) on April 28, 1950. The number of Orthodox increased many times over  at least, for the moment.

However, the Prague Spring brought talk of lessening religious oppression. Alexander Dubceks government again recognized the Byzantine Catholic Church on June 13, 1968. Of the 210 parishes to vote that year, only five remained Orthodox. An estimated 90 percent of Eastern Rite Catholics had returned to their church home by 1971. (For a detailed account, see this article.)

Meanwhile, the Orthodox Church continues to suffer from the governments pro-Orthodox policy to this day.

Force is never a victory

The Communists, both yours [Russian] and ours, were always enemies of the Church, a former Orthodox Archbishop of Prague told a Russian media outlet.

When it came to the Byzantine Catholic Church, the Communists sought only liquidation, the then-archbishop said in 2011. We Orthodox know that such force is never a victory.

That the Czechoslovakian party members supposedly helped the Orthodox Church in Czechoslovakia was only their cunning maneuver, he said. In fact, the Communists only injured the work of Orthodoxy.

In his view, state intervention in favor of Orthodoxy, and against other churches, represents the main reason for the mass exit of parishioners from the Orthodox Church. The arrival of Soviet tanks on our streets completed this process. As a church with a sizable number of Russian emigres, the Orthodox Church had become identified in the public mind with the repressive native government and, ultimately, their occupiers.

The former archbishop went on to detail the alternating use of state power by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians over the centuries. Alas, they long predate the advent of Communism in 1948, or the Soviet invasion of Prague 20 years later.

And they follow a pattern: a significant increase in the favored churchs membership, followed by an equally large exodus when freedom returns  and each falling away fuels the ranks of the unchurched and unbelievers.

The most historically important contraction followed World War I. After a period of religious tolerance between Protestants and Catholics, Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II imposed Catholicism  banishing tens of thousands of non-Catholics from their homeland  in 1627. With the fall of the Habsburgs in 1918, more than a million Czechs (including 300 priests) left the Roman Catholic Church. Most chose not to affiliate with another church.

A pox on both their houses-of-worship

Within a few decades, the state went from favoring to outlawing the Roman Catholic Church. Both sides used the State to wage war against one another, and the souls of the faithful became their casualties.

In the end, the Czechs declared a pox on both their houses-of-worship. The Czech Republic today has the highest level of atheism in Europe. Numbers vary  some place the number of atheists at two-thirds of the population or more  but all surveys find a majority of Czechs profess no belief in God.

That does not mean that the Czech people feel no yearning for communion with God. Such a state is an anthropological impossibility. However, as one writer in the Guardian put it, today in the Czech Republic small evangelical and charismatic denominations are thriving. Precisely those churches that have never used the State to compel them to come in are most likely to see the faithful enter.

Christians tempted to praise a large Christian government whose interventionist policies help evangelize must study the example of Czechoslovakia. If it is accurate that government is not reason, it is not eloquence, neither is it persuasion  and in the wrong hands, it quickly burns those who so recently controlled it. A state that can banish other denominations clergy one year can banish yours the next. The government that can seize control of your enemys churches can expropriate yours, as well.

The cautionary tale of recent history is: The Church that lives by the State shall die by the State.

(Photo credit: Petr Grambal. This photo has been cropped. CC BY 2.5.)CHESTER  A man was fatally shot on a city street Monday morning, police said.

The victim has been identified as 31-year-old Everett Wilson. His death brings the citys homicide toll this year to 14.

Chester police and Delaware County detectives are investigating the incident, which occurred just after 11 a.m. in the 900 block of Yarnall Street. Officers arrived to find a white Dodge Journey with the drivers side window shattered, glass and numerous shell casings on the ground.

Wilson was sitting in the drivers seat of the Dodge, which had New York plates and was parked in front of a doctors office. He suffered multiple gunshot wounds to his upper body. Paramedics from Crozer-Chester Medical Center pronounced him dead at the scene.

The call came in at 11:08, we have a male in his early 30s shot numerous times, Chester Police Chief James Nolan IV said early in the investigation. The victim was in a rental car. We have multiple officers and detectives tracking down leads. If members of the public have information we urge them to contact police.

Officers could be seen knocking on doors along the quiet street just west of Ninth Street near the Commodore Barry Bridge overpass as residents gathered to watch the drama unfold. A family member who approached the scene shouting thats my son, was restrained by police.

Nolan said there was the report of a suspect fleeing the scene, but police were still verifying his description. Officials do not yet have a motive to the shooting.

Asked about the numerous shootings in the city Nolan said police would like to see it stop but the shootings involve an organized crime element, which makes it difficult for police to track.

Nolan said the end of the summer often sees a spike in violence as people who have been away return to the city.

Its 11 a.m. on a Monday, who expects it? said Nolan. Were working to increase the department, in fact were are holding interviews in September.

Anyone with information is asked to contact city Detective Victor Heness at 610-447-8429 or vheness245@chesterpolice.org or county Detective Thomas Scarpato at 610-891-4708.By Phil Heron

editor@21st-centurymedia.com

@philheron on Twitter

I have only one regret about the way we handled the horrific details laid out in the grand jury report on priest abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses.

Actually, two.

One, I wish we could have run more, specifically the heart-breaking details included in the exhaustive, 900-page report. As the grand jury stated in the opening sentence of its report, people need to read this. It is not easy reading, especially for a lifetime Catholic and former altar boy like me.

My second misgiving? That I did not use the headline I originally penned for our front page.

Let Us Prey.

I backed off that out of respect, since that phrase is an actual part of the Mass and much of the liturgy.

Its a hell of a lot more than those 300 priests  and their superiors  offered any of the more than 1,000 young boys and girls they victimized.

For most of the past two weeks I have been trying to come to grips with matters of faith. I have not been back in church since.

Actually, thats not technically true. I have not attended Mass. My wife and I usually try to stop at the church sometime over the weekend, light a candle, and sit silently in prayer for a few minutes.

I now question whether I need a priest  or the church  to have a relationship with God.

I miss the sacraments. But not a lot else.

So long as Im in the confessional, I should probably get a few other things off my chest. Im a longtime member of St. Josephs Parish in Downingtown. Yes, weve had our share of problems. That has not helped my outlook.

Back in 2005, when Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham issued her first grand jury report on abuse by priests in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, St. Joes played a prominent role. Our pastor was named in the report. Eventually he became the highest-ranking church official charged in the priest sex abuse scandal. He was not charged as an abuser, but with endangering the welfare of a child, basically for carrying out the policy of the archdiocese, a policy that moved problem priests around from parish to parish. At its core, the hideous truth was that the business of the church was protecting the church, not its youngest, most innocent charges.

At the time, the monsignor was given a standing ovation in church. I still remember sitting in the pew that day wondering how many of these faithful had actually read the grand jury report. I had. It was sickening. After Mass that Sunday, at the 1 p.m. family dinner that formed the backbone of the large Italian family I had married into, the topic of the church came up. I think I stunned most of those sitting at the table that day when I said they should not be surprised when they take this guy away in handcuffs one day.

Eventually, the monsignor was charged and convicted. The case has since bounced around the courts, eventually being tossed out. He now awaits retrial. What is at question is whether the statute he was charged under at the time could apply to him. What is not is the policy of the church.

Since then we have seen the same horrors repeated in a grand jury report covering the Altoona-Johnstown parish.

I should have been prepared for what was coming two weeks ago.

I was not surprised; I was sickened.

The grand jury laid bare the deepest secret of the Catholic church, decades of abuse by clergy of young, vulnerable victims. And perhaps worse, a pattern of cover-ups by church officials, policies clearly devised to protect the church and its minions, not the most vulnerable members of its flock, its children.

The grand jury detailed policies  in Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton  that clearly indicated church officials took pains to cover the tracks of abusive priests, even to the point of simply moving them from one parish to another  often without the benefit of alerting the faithful to the predator being dropped into their midst.

This follows by just a few months another incident that sparked headlines at St. Joes. Another monsignor was said to be on administrative leave. As usual, it took a couple of weeks for the full story to come out. It was not pretty when it did.

So where do we go from here?

First, I suggest every person actually read the grand jury report. I say this as a practicing, lifelong Roman Catholic and former altar boy.

I was never abused by a priest. Never really had any inkling of such a thing, aside from one priest who once came in for a hug and whose stubble grazed my young face.

Its not like there was not opportunity.

As an altar boy I spent a lot of time alone with priests, in the sacristy and other places.

They would actually take us out of school at Assumption Blessed Virgin Mary in West Grove to serve a funeral Mass in my home town of Oxford. There was no Catholic cemetery in Oxford, the closest was 10 miles away in West Grove, where the school also was located. We would serve the Mass, then ride with the priest  alone  to the cemetery. After the service, the priest would drop us off at school. How many parents do you think would allow that today?

My first reaction on reading the details of the grand jury report was disbelief.

Then revulsion.

Then anger.

It has once again shaken my faith, something that as a member of St. Josephs Parish in Downingtown seems to be happening with some regularity these days.

I have begun to question whether I need priests  or the church at all  to have a relationship with God.

But I do not miss the God-less acts of a church that can only be labeled for what it is at this point.

In too many instances, a fraud, one engaged in a criminal conspiracy to conceal acts that devastated thousands of children.

And one for which there now is very little in the way of justice.

Faith? I have plenty of it. I just have little or none left for a church and its leaders who could have possibly allowed such craven, un-Godlike acts to go on for so long.

They say faith will set you free. In this instance, it just might free a lot of the faithful from their church.

Philip E. Heron is editor of the Daily Times. Call him at (484) 521-3147. E-mail him at editor@delcotimes.com. Make sure you check out his blog, The Herons Nest, every day at or http://delcoheronsnest.blogspot.com. Follow him on Twitter, @philheron.In 2016, the year after Act 27 was implemented, state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale criticized state law enforcement and health officials for both the rape kit testing backlog and for a poor reporting system.

He was absolutely right to make that a priority, and were encouraged by the measurable progress that has been made in significantly reducing the backlog.

But we want to see that number get to zero  so more work clearly must be done.

We have a tendency to minimize the crime of sexual assault. If a bullet is fired, its generally tested immediately  not put into a drawer for a year or more. Why the different standard for rape kits in some police departments? They should be tested as quickly as possible, so perpetrators can be tracked before they offend again.

We applaud Lancaster County law enforcement for reporting no backlogged rape kits  a template for other counties to follow.

If there are zero untested rape kits in Lancaster County, that is certainly a very good thing, DePasquale recently told LNP.

Blests report was prompted by Kendra Saunders, who submitted a question about the status of rape kits in this county through We the People, LancasterOnlines reader-powered journalism project.

Saunders, a counseling psychologist at Millersville University, said she has worked with many sexual assault victims.

One really simple thing we can do to show that we value victims is to test their rape kits, she told LNP.

As Blest reported, men such as Gabriel Valentin-Rodriguez, Antwuan Gomez and Robert Pitt wouldnt have been charged with sexual assault crimes committed in Lancaster County and convicted without the results of a rape kit being tested.

Lancaster County police departments submitted 42 cases last year and the state police tested them all, state police spokesman Ryan Tarkowski told Blest.

Act 27 set requirements for reporting how many kits are backlogged, meaning untested for more than a year.

The legislation requires municipal police departments to report annually how many of their kits are backlogged. In the first report in 2016, Lancaster County departments had 28 backlogged kits. Officials at many of the departments said they did not understand how to report the information correctly.

However, district attorney spokesman Brett Hambright told Blest a backlog hasnt been a problem with county departments.

I can only speak for Lancaster County in saying we have never had a true backlog in the sense of kits that should be tested (being) essentially neglected in evidence lockers.

Kits that had been classified as backlogged fell under two categories that the Department of Health added for its April 2018 report: a victim who did not consent to testing or an anonymous victim, Hambright said.

After evidence is gathered in a rape kit, victims must give consent for a kit to be tested by police, according to state law. Some victims decide against taking that step.

That number will probably never be zero, DePasquale said.

Testing rape kits does help prevent future rapes and crack down on future crimes, he said. But you have to respect the wishes of the victim and walk through it with the victim.

He is right about this.

At Lancaster General, trained sexual assault forensic nurse examiners, or SAFE nurses, provide care to victims of sexual assault, Mary Ann Eckard, spokeswoman for Lancaster General Health, told Blest.

The SAFE nurses primary concern is for the patients physical and emotional well-being, she said. Evidence collection is important, but the patients medical needs and emotional well-being are always the first focus.

This is as it should be.

Police from the jurisdiction in which the crime happened have 72 hours to pick up the kit from the hospital. Those departments have 15 days to send it to one of three state labs. If a victim doesnt give immediate approval for testing, his or her kit must be stored for at least two years, according to state law, Blest reported.

But Lancaster city police keep untested kits 10 more years, to give victims time to come forward before the state statute of limitations on the assaults committed against them expire, Lt. Phil Berkheiser said.

Some may feel that they are not ready to talk about it to law enforcement and can be assured that the evidence will be properly collected and held until they are ready to proceed, he said.

We commend Lancaster police for this. It can take years before victims of sexual assault are ready to talk about what they endured. Giving them time to decide whether to proceed with the testing of their rape kits is something all police departments should do.

The Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape would like the commonwealth to strengthen the guidelines on the handling of rape kits.

There are no guidelines, for instance, about informing victims if their kit is about to be destroyed, Kristen Houser, PCARs chief public affairs officer said.

Better protocols for kit collection, kit processing, kit storage and kit destruction need to be established, she said.

We agree.

We can never hope to erase the pain of what survivors have been through  much as we desperately want to.

But what we can do, at least, is to ensure that the criminal justice system gives them the respect and dignity they deserve, by handling carefully the evidence of the harm that was done to them.

 Lancaster NewspapersPROVO  Reluctant to replicate the transportation tax hike Utah County voters shot down in 2015 but also keen for a chance to increase local road funding, the Utah County Commission has voted to let voters decide this fall whether to implement a $22 million sales tax hike for transportation projects.

But that vote came with a condition  and one that Utah Transit Authority officials did not fulfill by the commission's deadline on Thursday.

And yet, the Utah County Commission may still decide to let the question go to the ballot, depending on how discussions go during another meeting on the issue Tuesday.

As an attempt to have more control over the portion of revenue UTA would collect from the 0.25 percent sales tax hike if it's enacted  which would equal about $8.8 million a year  commissioners voted Tuesday to put the tax hike question on the November ballot, but only if UTA officials sign an interlocal agreement requiring UTA to use its portion of the tax money only on Utah County projects.

The potential sales tax hike would mirror exactly what voters shot down in 2015 when it was on the ballot as Proposition 1, with revenue split 40 percent to cities and towns for road projects, 40 percent to UTA, and 20 percent to the county.

After Proposition 1 failed in major counties including Salt Lake County and Utah County despite a push to create more revenue for roads and transit for cities and counties that have struggled to keep up on projects, Utah lawmakers sought a way to give counties another shot at the tax hike.

The product: SB136, a bill that mandated sweeping structural changes to UTA in an effort to repair public trust of the scandal-riddled agency while also giving counties the power to resurrect Proposition 1  either by a public vote or through action by their legislative bodies.

Calling the $22 million potential revenue a "big bribe," Utah County Commissioner Bill Lee said the commissioners were put in a tough spot after SB136 passed.

"(But) $22 million is nothing to sneeze at," Lee said. "So it becomes a serious conversation."

Yet if Utah County voters were confronted with a replication of Proposition 1, "I can almost tell you right now it's going to get shut down," Lee said.

So the commissioners sought a way to reconcile their dislike of SB136 while also taking advantage of an option that might give Utah County the revenue it needs to bring its roads up to par  and also pay off the debt the county incurred for its bus rapid transit system sooner.

The result was the interlocal agreement.

"If this is signed by the county and by UTA, it's not Prop 1. It's different," Lee said. "I think this is a compromise in which we can at least take it to the people and say, 'What do you think?'"

But even as the county commissioners readied to pass a resolution to put the question on the ballot contingent on UTA signing the agreement, commissioners were warned they were running out of time.

"This is something that must be done by Friday," warned Scott Hogensen, the county's deputy clerk/auditor during Tuesday's meeting, adding "if we have shilly-shallying around what we're going to do, it's going to delay getting everything programmed, everything printed and delay getting the ballots into people's hands, potentially."

Commissioners included a deadline of Thursday, Aug. 23, at 5 p.m., one day after UTA's board of trustees meeting on Wednesday.

But because the interlocal agreement wasn't included on UTA's agenda, UTA board Chairman Greg Bell shut down a discussion at the end of Wednesday's meeting, after criticizing Utah County commissioners for giving the board so little time.

"They give us a deadline of tomorrow night?" Bell said. "That's not even good faith."

UTA board member Andrew Jackson explained the commissioners were also under a tight deadline, but he relayed the message UTA would not be able to take action because it wasn't noticed on an agenda.

In an interview Friday, Lee acknowledged UTA missed the commission's imposed deadline, but said county officials have discussed the potential of bringing the topic up for discussion again during next week's meeting, so there might still be a chance the commissioners will place it on the ballot without UTA's official signature on the interlocal agreement.

The hope is, Lee said, UTA officials will eventually sign the interlocal agreement, based off of conversations between the county and UTA attorneys.

"We're hoping, kind of in good faith, that they'll take this seriously, because right now if we throw it on the ballot as Prop 1 again, it dies," Lee said. "It's just not going to pass."

Lee said he still has a "major concern" that UTA might not actually sign off on the interlocal agreement, but whether or not Utah County moves forward with the ballot question will be up to Tuesday's discussion.

"If they don't sign it, then we've got Prop 1, and I'm telling you," Lee said, "it'll probably die a miserable, miserable death."SALT LAKE CITY  A 17-year-old boy was killed after being stabbed early Monday in Salt Lake City.

Salt Lake City police say two groups got into an argument about 1 a.m. on 1300 South between Main and State streets. Police detective Robert Ungricht did not know what started the argument, but it progressed down the street to Kensington Avenue (1530 South) and State Street.

The 17-year-old victim was with three others, all juveniles. The other group was believed to have had at least three people, according to police, but they did not know if they were adults or juveniles.

At Kensington, the argument escalated and the teen was stabbed in the torso. He died while in surgery at a local hospital, Ungricht said.

As of Monday morning, no one had been arrested. The teen's three friends were taken to the Salt Lake City Police Department to be interviewed. Detectives were also reviewing surveillance video in the area to try and identify the alleged attacker.

Anyone with information can call police at 801-799-3000.

This story will be updated as additional information becomes available.FRUIT HEIGHTS  Investigators questioned a person of interest Monday in connection with the shooting of a Utah Transit Authority bus with 10 occupants and a semitrailer driving through Fruit Heights.

As of Monday evening, no arrests had been made. But detectives said they were confident that the shooting was an "isolated" incident, possibly even accidental, said Davis County Chief Sheriff's Deputy Ty Berger.

"I'm confident the episode has been concluded," he said, adding that they don't believe there is a danger to the public.

The frightening incident began about 5:15 a.m. when a UTA bus and a semitrailer hauling a trailer full of cement powder were traveling close to each other on U.S. 89 between Mountain Road and 125 North, Berger said. Five to 10 shots were fired.

"The shots appeared to have originated from an orchard that is between Mountain Road and Highway 89," he said.

One round went through a window of the bus, according to Berger. No one was sitting in that seat, but there was a passenger in "very close proximity," he said, about an "arm's-length away."

"Its remarkable we didnt have injuries or even a death in this situation, he said. "It could have been devastating to a lot of people.

Deeell Fifield said the shots woke up him and his wife.

"We were sound asleep this morning around 5 a.m. and we heard a 'pop, pop, pop.' We heard about six. It woke us up and my wife rolled over and said, 'What was that?'" Fifield said. "You know, you think it's fireworks."

Minutes later, the Fruit Heights couple heard more shots.

"Pop, pop, pop  three shots, and then a break and a few seconds and then another pop, pop, pop  three shots," he said. "I'm a hunter so to me it was pretty obviously, it sounded like a pistol."

But Berger said based on most witness accounts, there were three rounds of shots, all within seconds of each other. Most people said they heard an initial five to six shots, then a pause, then three more shots followed by another short pause, and finally three more shots.

Deputies believe a semi-automatic handgun was used but had not recovered the weapon or any shell casings.

The bus had just left the park-and-ride lot in Fruit Heights and was traveling about 50 mph when it was hit, according to UTA officials. Two rounds also impacted the semitrailer. No one was injured.

The drivers of both vehicles immediately realized their vehicles had been hit and they pulled over and called 911. Berger said officers from several law enforcement agencies responded and quickly surrounded the area but no gunman was found. Additionally, no suspicious vehicles were spotted in the area and no one was seen entering or leaving the area, he said.

Officers obtained a search warrant to meticulously go through the large orchard, which is part of a family-owned farm, Berger said, looking for evidence of where the shots may have come from. Based on where the bus and semitrailer were hit, and the trajectory of the shots, detectives determined the "most possible direction from where they came from, and concluded it was in an area of the orchard near an adjacent house, he said.

The orchard is thick in that area, and because of a hill, U.S. 89 isn't even visible. Because of that, Berger said it was "just not possible for someone to have been intentionally aiming for vehicles on the highway. Someone was likely negligently firing a gun without regard to their backstop, police believe, leading investigators to conclude the shooting of the bus and truck was an accident.

While conducting their investigation, a very intoxicated man approached deputies and had an "unusual interaction" with them, Berger said. "He injected himself into the investigation."

As red flags were raised for deputies because of "the manner in which he injected himself," they began to take more interest in the man.

"His aggression escalated as we asked questions," Berger noted.

The man was arrested for investigation of public intoxication and disorderly conduct and taken to the Davis County Sheriff's Office for an "in-depth" interview regarding the shootings, he said.

Investigators learned the man lived in a basement apartment adjacent to the orchard. Detectives expanded their search warrant for not just the orchard, but the man's apartment and an outbuilding. Berger said a rifle was found in the apartment, but not the type of weapon believed to have been fired at the vehicles.

Police are asking anyone who may have seen something out of the ordinary in that area to call them at 801-451-4151.

Contributing: Ladd Egan, Caitlin BurchillSALT LAKE CITY  The Utah Museum of Fine Arts boasts a covetable rare Egyptian collection. But perhaps even more interesting than the collection itself is the Utah-born woman behind it, Natacha Rambova.

Rambova was a respected, self-taught Egyptologist and academic who donated over 300 ancient artifacts to the UMFA. But she was also an ambitious costume designer, a glamour icon of the 1920s, a ballerina and the wife of megastar Rudolph Valentino.

Even her worst enemy has admitted the genius of Natacha, wrote journalist Herb Howe in 1930, that unquenchable flame of ambition that sweeps out from her ruthlessly.

Rambovas flame of ambition shone when, as a teenager, she insisted on training as a ballerina under Russian ballet master Theodore Kosloff. She then braved a nine-year career in the film industry before pursuing her interest in spirituality and Egyptology.

For such an iconic woman, her beginnings are rather surprising  Rambova was born in Salt Lake City in 1897 as Winifred Kimball Shaughnessy, the great-granddaughter of Heber C. Kimball, a former member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Although Rambova only lived in Salt Lake City for the first few years of her life, her scholarship influences Salt Lake City  particularly the UMFA  to this day.

Early career, film industry and Valentino

After Rambova spent her early years at a boarding school in England and her late teenage years in a ballet dance company, art director Alla Nazimova recruited her to work in the film industry as a costume and set designer.

Although Rambova was new to the film industry, art design had long been a part of her life. According to the book Madam Valentino by Michael Morris, Rambova kept material for making costumes and paper for sketching under her bed as a child.

Rambovas first film, The Woman God Forgot, came out in 1917. She designed the costumes and Cecil B. DeMille, who would go on to produce some of Hollywood's biggest Golden Age films, produced. In various films throughout the next nine years, Rambova worked as an art director, set designer, writer, producer, design supervisor and actress, according to Madam Valentino.

While she worked in the film industry, Rambova met Rudolph Valentino, the Latin lover and movie star who would become her husband.

Evelyn Zumaya, author of Affairs Valentino and co-author of Beyond Valentino, argues that Rambova  a successful costume designer and art director at the time of her marriage to Valentino  made Valentino a star, not the other way around. However, the relationship would ultimately end her film career.

In Hollywood, she was just run over, Zumaya said. Her marriage to Valentino kind of destroyed her career because his handlers and employers wanted her out.  She had a reputation for decimating budgets and being very demanding.

Following her divorce from Valentino in 1926 and disillusionment with the film industry, Rambova began to explore theosophy and spiritualism, which would eventually lead to her interest in Egyptology, according to an article on egyptology.yale.edu.

Egyptology, spiritualism and UMFA

I felt as if I had at last returned home, Rambova said about her first visit to Egypt in 1936, according to Madam Valentino. The first few days I was there I couldnt stop the tears streaming from my eyes. It was not sadness, but some emotional impact from the past  a returning to a place once loved after too long a time.

Rambovas love for Egyptology and spiritualism fueled her scholarship and passion for the remainder of her life. Colleen Darnell, an Egyptologist, professor at the University of Hartford and published scholar on Rambova, said Rambovas fascination with spiritualism was not uncommon at the time.

Natacha had an initial interest in spiritualism which was a popular pursuit and study during the early 20th century, Darnell said in an email to the Deseret News. But rather than simply a temporary phase or fad in her life, she did develop a more serious interest in ancient philosophies and particularly religious imagery as it relates to Jungian analysis.

Darnell described Rambova as a self-taught Egyptologist who contributed to Egyptology as an editor of important publications on Egyptian tombs and an author of an essay on the symbolism of mythological papyri.

Eventually, many pieces Rambova collected in her trips to Egypt and around the world made their way to Rambovas early home: Salt Lake City.

Rambovas mother, Winifred Hudnut, was the first in the family to donate art to the UMFA, and Rambova followed suit. By the time Rambova died in 1966, she had donated 300 artifacts to the museum ranging from the predynastic period to the Roman period.

When we reopened the museum (last) August and I gave the tour of this gallery, I said Natacha was probably the museums first curator, said UMFA curator Luke Kelly as he stood in the museums Ancient Mediterranean Art exhibit, surrounded by Rambovas donations.

Kelly noted that Rambova was detailed and precise in her curations, more so than other collectors at the time.

Everything she did, she did with a whole new passion, Kelly said. When she was doing her research on comparative symbolism, other scholars said, Yes, she was self-taught, but the passion and discipline she showed was just as if she was a Ph.D. candidate.'

Rambovas ultimate dream was to open a museum of her own. In a letter dated June 27, 1952, to I. Owen Horsfall, then-director of UMFA, Rambova wrote:

It has always been one of my fast vanishing dreams to someday start a small museum of religious symbolism  complete with archive, research library and exhibition room, where lecture could be given.

Although Rambova didnt live to see her dream become reality, her contributions to the UMFA maintain her legacy of learning and art. When asked how Rambovas work influenced the UMFA, Kelly laughed and said, Well, it influenced me.

Here is this museum in Utah that has this wonderful Egyptian collection, Kelly continued. Its hard to find that anywhere else.SALT LAKE CITY  A group suing the state to derail the medical marijuana ballot initiative has removed references to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in an amended lawsuit.

Backers of the complaint filed the new version on the same day last week that the church announced its opposition to the initiative but that it does not object to marijuana derivatives being used in medicinal form with appropriate controls and safeguards.

The lawsuit still maintains the marijuana initiative should be invalidated because it violates the constitutional principles of property rights, due process and equal protection under the law.

"While any other landlord would be able to turn away a cigarette-smoking tenant, for example, solely on the basis that they use tobacco, which the landlord may find repugnant or likely to damage or cause loss to their property, a landlord who receives an application from a medical cannabis cardholding tenant would no longer have those rights under the (initiative)," according to the amended lawsuit in 3rd District Court.

Drug Safe Utah originally claimed the proposed medical marijuana law would violate constitutional protections of religious freedom, specifically among Latter-day Saints. The church is not part of the lawsuit.

The lawsuit contended that "any practicing member" of the church would "find this mandate deeply offensive and incredibly repulsive to their religious beliefs and way of life."

Latter-day Saints and members of all religions have "the right not to consort with, be around or do business with people engaging in activities which their religion finds repugnant, and to refuse to lease their property to people engaging in activities which they deeply oppose," the initial lawsuit said.

The lawsuit continues to seek a court order stopping the initiative from appearing on the November ballot.

Drug Safe Utah, an organization created in April to oppose the initiative, and its president, Walter Plumb III, are among the plaintiffs listed in the lawsuit. The amended version no longer includes Drug Safe Utah but lists a new group called Truth About Proposition #2.SALT LAKE CITY  The Murray Police Department just posted its lip-sync challenge video using a song by James the Mormon and David Archuleta.

The video shows the police department singing along to Workin by the two Utah artists, who are both returned missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The Murray Police Department shared the video Friday. It had more than 16,000 views as of Monday.

Earlier this month, the Salt Lake City Police Department shared a lip-sync video that included officers singing along to Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus, according to my report for the Deseret News.

But they didnt just sing. The law enforcement officials decided to ride a large tire, which had been transformed into a pink doughnut. They even smashed into boxes of Banbury Cross doughnuts, too.

The SLCPD challenged the Unified Police Department, Sandy Police Department and the Cottonwood Heights Police Department to take part in the challenge.

The Cottonwood Heights Police Department responded to the challenge over the weekend, too.

Police departments across the country have been partaking in the lip-sync challenge, which includes daring other departments to perform a lip-sync video.

The lip-sync challenge has encouraged groans, eye rolls and smiles across the country this summer. In fact, Virginias Norfolk Police Department performed Uptown Funk and received 72 million Facebook views alone from its video.Once an Oppo sub-brand, Realme is now its own separate entity that is aiming to launch its second smartphone in India. The company will unveil the Realme 2( 10999 at amazon) smartphone on August 28, which will be a Flipkart exclusive. We already know that the upcoming device will feature a notched display and previous reports suggest a dual-rear camera setup on the device. Now, Flipkart has confirmed these features in a micro-site dedicated for the device. The webpage also reveals that Realme 2 will feature a 6.2-inch display and will be powered by a massive 4,230mAh battery.

No other specifications of the smartphone have been revealed. However, images the Realme 2 were accidentally made live on the companys website and they suggest that the device might come with a fingerprint sensor on the rear. The authentication mechanism was missing from its predecessor, the Realme 1. Realme 2 is also tipped to feature the same faceted design that was used on its predecessor and the OPPO F7 Diamond Black edition. The images revealed black and blue colour variants of the device. As mentioned earlier, not much is known about the smartphones hardware. Rumours suggest that it could offer configuration similar to the Oppo F7 and come equipped with a 6.23-inch Full HD+ display. It might be powered by a MediaTek Helio P60 SoC and is tipped to feature a 16MP + 2MP camera setup on the rear.

Last month, former VP of Oppo and Head of Oppo India, Sky Li, had announced his resignation from the company as he took up the position of Global CEO at Realme. Li said that the Realme brand will focus on providing youth-oriented mobile phones that offer strong performance and stylish designs. Additionally, the company said that its very young in terms of team composition as the average age of team members is not more than 30 years.

The companys first device was Realme 1 (review). The smartphone was launched in 3/32 GB, 4/64GB and 6/128 GB variants, which are priced at Rs 8,990, Rs 10,990 and Rs 13,990 respectively. In terms of specifications, the device features a 6-inch Full HD+ display and comes with a 18:9 display aspect ratio. It is powered by a 2.0 GHz octa-core MediaTek Helio P60 SoC and runs on ColorOS 5.0, which is based on Android 8.1. The phone is backed by a 3410 mAh battery. In the camera department, the Realme 1 features a single 13MP primary camera and on the front is an 8MP sensor.It is stretchable, flexible, strong, light, voluminous, and a great conductor of electricity.

Graphene has been touted as the Wonder Material since more than a decade and a half, after Nobel award-winning scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov pulled it from a block of Graphite using just a regular adhesive tape. You and I have also been producing Graphene unknowingly by the simple act of writing with pencils. Most pencils are made of Graphite and if you manage to draw a thin-enough line on a piece of paper, you have successfully produced Graphene.

Graphene has two-dimensional properties and consists of carbon atoms bonded together in the shape of interlocking hexagons. Imagine a honeycomb or a chicken wire pattern. The bond between these carbon atoms is super strong and the material itself is a high conductor of electricity, making it equitable (if not more) to the potential of plastics when they were first commercialised in the 1920s, after which, the plastic-free world as we knew it changed forever.

Graphene, too, was supposed to change the world for good, but the high cost of the production of the material has slowed its growth rate and subsequently, the products that emerge from it. An indian startup now finds itself embroiled in this elusive race for Graphene-based products.

Founders of Log 9 Materials: (Left) Kartik Hajela, (Right) Akshay Singhal

Armed with 25 scientists and engineers, Log 9 Materials is a Bengaluru-based Graphene Nanotechnology startup that found its roots at IIT-Roorkee. Akshay Singhal and Kartik Hajela, both with an IIT pedigree, started Log 9 Materials while researching air filtration at IIT-Roorkee, where they accidentally discovered the application of Graphene in cigarette filtration. Born out of the result of this accident was a product called PPuF or the Post Purification Filter for Cigarettes. Log 9 used Graphene to create this detachable and reusable cigarette filter which reduces toxic chemicals in cigarette smoke by 50%. This was the first successful commercialisation of Graphene filters by the startup and it now owns a patent for the technology.

Researching upon Graphene or for that matter on any material is a costly affair. We got incubated in IIT Roorkee wherein we used their resources on a pay per use model for analysis and characterization purposes. We were a team of 3 back then in 2015-16. We then shifted to Bengaluru after our funding from GEMS Investment, wherein we tied up with IISC, Bengaluru (Indian Institute of Science) as a startup affiliate to use their facilities for analysis purposes. Other than that, we have our own lab in our current office which is a kilometer from IISC, recalls Kartik Hajela, Co-Founder and VP of Log 9 Materials.

Team Log 9 hard at work

While Graphene has innumerable potential applications, including in smartphone displays, wearables and batteries, Log 9s core focus lies in two major domains: Filtration and Energy. We are extensively working upon air filtration, water filtration, oil-water separation and primary energy generation using metal air batteries, explains Hajela.

Log 9 has applied for 9 patents out of which 1 has already being granted in cigarette filtration. Other patents filed are majorly process patents and the startup claims that its processes are what differentiate it from other Graphene-based research happening around the world. Manufacturing Graphene is a costly task and thus we focus a lot on how to manufacture the material required for any specific application or project on which we work upon, Hajela tells Digit.in.

The latest product from Log 9s stable, LSP 20, is a reusable Graphene-based absorbent that can clean up oil leaks and spills from water bodies 4X more efficiently than convention materials. Not only has the startup managed to increase absorbent properties of by using Graphene, the recovery of the LSP 20 after it absorbs all the oil is free of leakage, so the oil does not drip back into the water while lifting out the absorbant. The LSP 20 can also be reused 7-8 times, thereby increasing its cost efficiency.

PPuF and LSP 20 oil-absorbant by Log 9 Materials

Hajela tells us, We have already started commercialising our Oil Sorbent and Hazmat products made out of Graphene. We have set up a manufacturing facility for the same and currently have orders in the marine and oil refinery industry.

While the oil absorbing LSP 20 pads was not patented by Log 9, the startup says that it has kept the technology a trade secret and there is no competition of such graphene-based economically viable product as of now. We looked and it is truly difficult to find Graphene-based oil absorbants out there, although research on the subject dates back to 2014.

Log 9 is also working on Graphene-based metal-air batteries for stationary and mobility applications. Our offerings would be clean in nature and would be filling a big gap in the EV industry when it comes to Lithium-Ion batteries and that is range. Our offering is a primary energy generator, like a fuel cell, and will have the metal replaced rather than charging happening, claims Hajela.

While the startup is very hopeful about the future of Graphene-based commercial products, the founders acknowledge the fact that even after the academic validation of Graphene as a super material, it has not been adopted widely. Reason for the same has been the cost associated with Graphene manufacturing process and the sector-agnostic approach taken by researchers, explains Hajela. He further adds that Log 9 has been able to balance these high costs by working on the material based on the final end application, innovating on processes to make them commercially viable, and finally integrating the same into a cost-effective and more efficient product.

With sights on the electric vehicle industry and experience in developing key processes in the production of Graphene-based products, Log 9 is one of the most innovative startups in India right now. It now remains to be seen how the startup evolves itself into a bigger name in a very young, dynamic and unstable industry focussed on commercialising Graphene.

Cover image of Graphene: Log 9Buffett set to buy into Paytm parent One97 Communications

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is set to pick up a minor stake in One97 Communications Ltd, the parent firm of home-grown digital payments firm Paytm, reports quoting sources familiar with the matter said.

According to a report in the Mint news paper, Buffetts investment firm Berkshire Hathaway has been in talks with the Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led Paytm for the past few months and a deal is likely soon. The report said One97 Communications expects to raise about $300-350 million in the transaction.

The deal values the Paytm group at $10-12 billion, indicating that Buffett is likely to buy a little over 3 per cent in One97 Communications.

Paytm, a local start-up, which began operations in 2010, has seen tumultuous growth and is now the leading digital payments and e-commerce firm in India. It recently got a payments bank licence and has started operations.

Paytms key investors include Softbank, SAIF Partners, Alibaba Group and Ant Financial. Recently Paytm also innovated with selling investment products like gold and mutual funds through their network.

The deal, if concluded, will be the first transaction by Warren Buffett in the Indian start-up universe.

The development comes at a time when Paytm is entering the cloud business to support developers, startups, and enterprises. It is also planning to launch its financial product platform Paytm Money soon.

The investment will position Paytm in a better position to fight competition in the digital payments space from rivals such as Flipkarts PhonePe, Googles Tez and Facebook-owned WhatsApp.

Buffet has so far refrained himself from Indian internet companies, which are growing by leaps and bounds.

It is to be seen how US and Chinese investors get along in the Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led company.

Berkshire Hathway entered the Indian market in 2011 in partnership with Bajaj Allianz to sell insurance. That flopped and the company exited two years later.

Although several Berkshire portfolio companies have operations in India, Berkshire is yet to make any direct investment in Indian companies.Amidst accountability row, LDF govt floats World Bank loan proposal

As the calls for fixing responsibility for the devastating floods that left most of Kerala submerged for almost two weeks, claimed over 400 lives and rendered lakhs of people homeless become louder, the Pinarai Vijayan-led Left Democratic Front government in the state is now reported to have now come out with a proposal to raise funds from the World Bank.

During a media interview, the Kerala chief minister also made a fervent appeal to Keralites across the world to contribute a months earnings to help the state in its rehabilitation efforts.

The announcement follows another controversial claim the ruler of the United Arab Emirates had offered $700 million for the flood-ravaged state and that the centres regulations governing foreign funds are standing in the way of accepting such huge foreign aid.

After torrential rains and the simultaneous release of water from nearly 80 dams across the state that inundated most of Gods own country, generous aid and relief have been pouring from across the country to help people reclaim their lives and property.

There has even been an announcement by the centre that it would take up rebuilding and repair of roads and bridges damaged in the flood fury.

However, the Kerala chief minister now says he is looking to raise a World Bank loan to rebuild public infrastructure that has been ravaged by the worst floods in over a century.

Vijayan did not disclose the amount of money the state plans to raise from the multilateral development bank, but reports quoting a state government official who is privy to the discussions said the government is preparing a concept note to raise Rs3,000 crore.

Not just Keralites, people and organisations from across the country and outside have spared no effort to reach out to the distressed people in the state.

While the NGOs and the centre and other state governments pitch in to help, efforts to fix accountability on the LDF government headed by Pinarayi Vijayan continue to be drowned by criticism by the so-called intelligentsia and the media on a non-existent aid offer.

The state did not care to take advance measures to avoid a catastrophe and even failed to inform the public sufficiently early to prevent, minimise and manage a disaster that was waiting to happen.

One cannot in any way compare the situation in Kerala with disasters in Odisha in the past two decades. In October 1999, Super Cyclone Pradip battered coastal districts of Odisha with wind speeds of up to 250 kmph for 36 hours accompanied by torrential rains and 7-10 metre high tidal waves. The cyclone claimed 10,000 (unofficially 50,000) lives. Nearly 1.3 million people were affected, 3.15 lakh cattle perished. The Union government sent a grant of Rs300 crore.

But, in October 2013, when intense tropical storm Phalin struck Odisha with violent wind speeds and incessant rains, the state machinery was prepared to face the challenge.

It evacuated 6 lakh people from coastal areas to safe shelters stocked with 1 million food packages. Only 44 lives were lost. More than two lakh houses were flooded and over 1,000 villages were inundated.

Sadly, for Kerala, the LDF government has not learnt from the 2014 floods caused by an intense pre-monsoon cyclonic activity between 1 April and 8 May that claimed 123 lives and the Okhi cylone in the southern tip that claimed several hundred, mostly fisherfolk.And now, Google, Paytm team up for 7-10% stake in Future Retail

US Internet giant Google and Alibaba-backed Paytm Mall are reported to be teaming up to buy up to 10 per cent stake in Kishore Biyanis flagship company Future Retail, in a Rs3,500-4,000 crore deal, in another marriage of brick and mortar shop and online marketplace.

The transaction is expected to value Future Retail at Rs30,000-Rs32,000 crore against its current valuation of Rs26,000 crore.

An alliance with Future Retail puts the group in competition against Amazon, which has also reportedly submitted a term sheet to buy an equal stake in the firm, the publication reported, citing sources.

The news pushed up Future Retail stock to an intraday high of Rs552.00 in morning trade today.

Future group chairman Kishore Biyani had recently announced chances of a possible deal with a foreign investor for fund infusion through sale of both primary and secondary shares.

Biyani is reported to have held meetings with Amazons Jeff Bezos in the US and Alibaba officials in China. Further, he plans to close the deal with a foreign investor in the next 2 months.

The new capital infusion is expected to result in the dilution of earnings for the shareholders.

This would aid the company in establishing omnichannel facilities across the country. Further, company may utiliise the proceeds to increase its discount offerings to gain market share. The company is also expanding its network rapidly. The company added 6 FBB stores and 83 Easyday stores during Q1FY19, taking the total count to 67 and 749 stores, respectively. Further, the store count of Big Bazaar stood at 285 stores in Q1FY19.

Meanwhile, Bharti Group, a major shareholder in future Retail, had in June 2018, sold more than half of its stake in the retail chain for nearly of Rs1,697 crore through open market transactions. Bharti group entity Cedar Support Services disposed of 30.3 million shares of Future Retail, or about 6.04 per cent stake in Future Retail through that transaction.

It is likely that the Bharti group may offload the remaining stake to the google-Paytm combine.

Future Retail recently reported 3.56 per cent rise in its net profit for the April-June quarter at Rs 153.12 crore, against a net profit of Rs147.85 crore in the same period a year ago.

Future Retail also announced resignation of Rajan Bharti Mittal as non-executive director of the company "due to preoccupations".Meet the virtual pooch that could help prevent dog bites

A virtual dog could soon be used as an educational tool to help prevent dog bites, thanks to an innovative project led by the University of Liverpool's Virtual Engineering Centre (VEC).

In collaboration with Dogs Trust and University of Liverpool animal behaviour researchers, the VEC has created a proof of concept virtual reality (VR) experience in which people can approach and interact with a dog displaying signs of aggression in a safe and controlled way.

The experience aims to help adults and children recognise specific behaviours displayed by dogs, which could potentially lead to an attack or incident if not correctly identified.

6,740 hospital admissions for dog bites and strikes were recorded in the UK in 2013 and University of Liverpool research suggests that the burden of dog bites is considerably larger than those estimated from hospital records.

As part of a desire to better educate children and adults about dog bite prevention, Dogs Trust wanted to explore whether a digital tool could help people identify a range of stress and threat behaviours typically exhibited by dogs, which have the potential to lead to a bite.

In response to this challenge, a team animal behavioural specialists and psychologists from the University worked closely with the VEC to make certain that the body language and detail shown in the virtual environment was both realistic and a truthful reflection of real-world canine behaviour.

As the user approaches the dog, the behaviour and body language of the dog gradually changes, the dog's behaviour begins to display signs of aggression including licking its lips, lowering of the head and body, front paw lifting, growling, and showing of teeth. These behaviours are referenced from the 'Canine Ladder of Aggression' which shows how a dog may behave when it does not want to be approached.

Iain Cant, VEC Visualisation Team Leader says, "This was a really interesting project to work on with a lot of exciting potential for the future.

"The next steps will look to enhance the detail within the immersive environment to ensure the simulation is as realistic as possible. Future developments will also show a wider range of dog behaviours and the dog's reactions to user behaviour."

"More broadly the project highlights how immersive experiences can be used by organisations such as Dogs Trust as a valuable educational tool."Illinois researchers develop method to cancel noise without ear-blocking headphones

Disruptive noise is almost everywhere, from people talking in the office corridor to road construction down the street to the neighbor's lawn mower. Research being conducted at the University of Illinois' Coordinated Science Laboratory is looking to improve this noisy frustration.

Current noise cancelling technology comes in the form of headphones and earbuds. To cancel noise, these headphones emit an anti-noise signal to contrast the external sounds. The time available for the headphones to produce this anti-noise signal is extremely short. This results in some noise getting through, which is why all these devices must cover the entire ear with noise-cancelling material. However, wearing such ear-blocking devices for long periods of time is not comfortable, and can even be harmful.

"Our goal is to not block the ear canal," says Sheng Shen, lead author and a Ph.D. candidate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory and Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). "We envision a behind-the-ear device that still achieves noise cancellation as good as the best headphones or earbuds available today."

The main idea behind this research involves combining wireless IoT networks with noise cancellation. A microphone is placed in the environment that senses sounds and sends them over wireless signals to an earpiece. Since wireless signals travel a million times faster than sound, the earphone can receive the sound information much faster than the actual sound itself.

"This is similar to lightning and thunder  the lightning arrives much before the thunder, allowing people to prepare for the loud rumble," said Shen's advisor, Romit Roy Choudhury, an ECE Professor. "Similarly, our ear device gets the sound information in advance, and has much more time to produce a better anti-noise signal."

A person who wants to cancel noise (let's call the person Alice) would place the IoT microphone away from her, say on her office door. The noise from her coworkers' conversation in the hallway is picked up by this IoT device and transmitted to Alice's earpiece over a wireless connection. The actual sound arrives at the earpiece later, and because of this lead time, the noise can be fully cancelled. As a result, it is no longer necessary to block the ear canal.

There are however, a few limitations. The IoT microphone needs to be between the noise source and Alice. If noise is coming at her from all directions, a couple more IoT devices would need to be placed around her. In tests conducted during the research, the device designed by Shen and Choudhury's group outperformed a leading headphone in overall noise cancellation and was rated better by the human participants.

When asked about the potential privacy concerns involved with the device, Shen nullified some of the most common fears.

"The most common privacy concern is that the device will secretly record someone's voice," Shen says. "This device is analog, so it has no capacity to record the sound. The moment the device hears the sound it is sent out wirelessly."

This differentiation is what separates Shen's device from many IoT devices commonly used today, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, which must record voice samples in order to operate.

Shen and his colleagues are already receiving attention for their work. The research paper about the project was recently selected for presentation at the upcoming Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Data Communication (ACM SIGCOMM) Conference which takes place in Budapest, Hungary, in late August. The conference brings together global researchers across the field of computer networking and communications.

"This is bound to change the way we think of noise cancellation, where networks of IoT sensors coordinate to enable quieter and more comfortable environments," said ECE Assistant Professor Haitham Hassanieh, who is a co-author on this paper. Other co-authors include Nirupam Roy and Junfeng Guan, both ECE Ph.D. students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Looking forward, the team would like to expand the use of their device to provide noise cancellation for more than one individual at a time and make the wearable device even lighter for continuous use.Why polluted air may be a threat to your kidneys

There is good evidence that polluted air increases the risk of respiratory problems such as asthma  as well as organ inflammation, worsening of diabetes and other life-threatening conditions. But new research suggests air pollution can also fuel something else  chronic kidney disease, or CKD, which occurs when a person's kidneys become damaged or cannot filter blood properly.

Recently published in PLOS ONE, a University of Michigan (U-M) study highlights the lesser-known connection.

"Similar to smoking, air pollution contains harmful toxins that can directly affect the kidneys," says Jennifer Bragg-Gresham, M.S., Ph.D., a Michigan Medicine epidemiologist and the study's lead author.

"Kidneys have a large volume of blood flowing through them, and if anything harms the circulatory system, the kidneys will be the first to sense those effects."

People with diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure or heart disease are at increased risk of developing CKD. Which is why high-risk patients who live in heavily populated or polluted areas should recognize the danger and take precautions, Bragg-Gresham says.

Why air pollution is dangerous

Air pollution contains fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, which is a cocktail of microscopic particles.

Because these particles are virtually weightless, they can stay in the air longer, causing humans to unavoidably inhale them on a regular basis without knowing it. PM2.5 can lead to serious health effects when inhaled often.

By reviewing Medicare claims data and air-quality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the study's authors found a positive association between CKD rates and PM2.5 concentration.

Says study co-author Rajiv Saran, MD, a Michigan Medicine nephrologist and director of the United States Renal Data System Coordinating Center at U-M: "If you look at areas that are heavily polluted versus areas that are less polluted, you will find more chronic kidney disease."

According to figures cited in the new research, chronic kidney disease afflicts more than 27 million Americans. People with CKD have an eight-fold increased risk of cardiovascular mortality.

Unfortunately, PM2.5 is almost impossible to avoid.

We encounter air pollution from many simple everyday activities, such as cooking and driving. Other contributors are smoking, burning wood, packaged spray products, household appliances and, perhaps the most obvious, industry and vehicle emissions.

Air pollution also contains heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium  all of which are known to negatively affect the kidneys.

Problems and preventive measures

The U-M research examined several prior studies on the issue, including an effort conducted in select coal-mining areas of Appalachia that found a 19 percent higher risk of CKD among men and a 13 per cent higher risk in women compared with those who lived in counties with no mining.

The good news: PM2.5 levels are much lower in the US than in other industrialized countries such as China and India.

"What this means for the countries with higher PM2.5 is significantly higher odds of CKD," says Bragg-Gresham, also an assistant research scientist at U-M. "Our research was only able to examine a small range of PM2.5 values present in America but was able to find a significant association."

However, it's still important to take precautions when exposed to air pollution, especially for people who have existing health conditions or who live in densely populated or polluted cities.

"In heavily polluted areas, consider wearing masks that cover your nose and mouth, limit hours outside and limit long hours commuting to work in high traffic as well," Saran says, adding that the risk should be taken seriously.

"Many people don't see the seriousness of air pollution because it isn't something visible, but that doesn't mean it's any less important for your health."A Donegal chef who rescued two struggling swimmers while on his work break has been hailed as an unsung hero.

Gerard Lally, who works as the head chef at the Great Northern Hotel in Bundoran, helped two swimmers from the sea after they got into difficulty.

Mr Lally, who is originally from Dublin but has been living in Bundoran for four years, was watching swimmers from Roguey Point while on a break from work.

He noticed two swimmers in difficulty and saw a third man attempting to get a lifebuoy to them.

Mr Lally, who is a keen surfer and swimmer, entered the water and swam to the struggling swimmers who were visiting Bundoran over the Northern Ireland spring bank holiday weekend at the end of May.

Details of the rescue only emerged after a colleague of Mr Lally's posted the private message that one of the rescued men sent to him as she felt he deserved recognition for his bravery.

The father of two pulled the two men on to the rocks after he got the lifebuoy to them.

I was out sitting at the cliff at the main beach at Roguey watching the beach and saw a couple of people struggling in the water, he said.

At first, I thought they were messing about and then I realised they were trying to dive under the water to get back I knew they were caught in a rip.

Mr Lally said he expected lifeguards to respond at any second before he realised that the lifeguard duty had not begun.

Sometimes I go for a swim on my break so luckily I was wearing swim shorts under my chef trousers. There was one man out up to his chin and he was holding the rope to the lifebuoy but he couldn't get it out to the two swimmers.

 I took it off him and swam out to them. When I got the rope to them I swam to the rocks and then pulled the two of them in.

By that stage the lifeboat had arrived and picked up a third person who had got into difficulty.

At the time I had not realised they were so bad but they were close to drowning. They were so exhausted they could not stand up.

Mr Lally returned to work as his break time was up.

I walked back to work and the helicopter was overhead and there were paramedics there. It was kind of surreal and blurry. I just acted without thinking and then went back to work and told my colleagues I had helped a couple of people out of the water. It felt weird and then when I realised they were airlifted and one had to spend a few days in hospital I realised how close they were to drowning.Australian city of Parramatta, near Syndey, has launched the FloodSmart website to inform its citizens on flood risk information for the Upper Parramatta River. The website is to reduce the impact of flooding in the city and to create better resilience and protection for residents and businesses. FloodSmart incorporates the Flash Flood Forecaster tool which uses real-time and forecast weather data to predict flooding and provide early warnings to government, residents and businesses. The Flash Flood Forecaster has been developed by consultancy firm Royal HaskoningDHV and IT water management specialist Nelen & Schuurmans, both based in the Netherlands.

Dashboard developed for Parramatti showing the citizens and businesses the real time situation for a flood risk .

More resilient community

Lord Mayor of the City of Parramatta, Councillor Andrew Wilson, said: FloodSmart is an innovative tool which will help empower our community to become more resilient, and forms part of our commitment to using smart solutions to help solve the challenges that river cities such as Parramatta face.

Ben Patterson, Director Advisory Group: Rivers, Deltas & Coasts Australia at Royal HaskoningDHV said: Our Flash Flood Forecast tool is proven to be highly accurate in predicting flooding via numerous applications worldwide.

Patterson continued: By warning local people in advance, they can take steps to protect their families and their property. They simply sign up for alerts via the city councils website.

Real-time prediction

The Flash Flood Forecast is now live. It is a fully cloud-based system using real-time and forecast weather data a fully cloud-based system.

When Flash foresees a flood hazard it sends out warning messages bot via email and SMS messages to a recipient group. The receiver gets vital information about the forecast and is urged to evaluate the situation via the Flash dashboard.

The dashboard is online and mobile responsive.

Dedicated server park in Amsterdam

Fun fact: the Australian warning system is being ran on the other side of the world in a dedicated server park in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

For the next five years the Parramatta council and all other stakeholders, such as the State Emergency Service New South Wales, are being ensured of accurate and timely flood information and warnings.

This news item was originally published on the website of Royal HaskoningDHV.

(Top photo: Royal HaskoningDHV)

Read also on this website

 Dutch experts use Trico-method to develop flood-resilient residential area in Wisbech, UK, 9 June 2017

 Flood & Coast 2016: Dutch and British flood experts seek cooperation on asset resiliency and community involvement, 24 February 2016

 Dasuda alliance uses latest 3D Live mapping for flood simulations in Cape Town, South Africa, 29 August 2013

 Country: Australia

 Expertise: Resilient cities



More information

Royal HaskoningDHV

Amersfoort, the Netherlands

+ 31 88 348 20 26

www.rhdhv.com

Nelen &n Schuurmans

Uttrecht, the Netherlands

+31 30 233 02 00

www.nelen-schuurmans.nl/en

Video presentation on Flash Flood Forecaster.

The idea for male skincare company Bulldog was born in 2005 when founder, Simon Duffy, noticed that there were no straightforward skincare options that were made for him. Looking at the shelves, there were products he used, but no products he loved.

Bulldog is now a flourishing business and making its mark in the FMCG sector. Dynamic Business had a chat to founder, Simon Duffy, about creating a successful FMCG company, managing competition and advice for those who want to follow suite.

There are major competitors in the FMCG market, how did you manage to compete with the big guys?

When you start something new in mens skincare, the are several bigger companies that have many advantages such as famous brands, momentum with the big retailers, and huge marketing budgets.

By contrast, when we started Bulldog in the UK in 2007, we were starting from zero on all these fronts. What we were able to do was to make better and more positive choices across manufacturing, formulation and branding.

Bulldogs products have been purpose built for men and are not just a mens version of what was initially a womans product. Our formulations are highly effective and use natural ingredients. Weve always tried to make more environmentally responsible choices such as never using plastic microbeads. We are certified by Cruelty-Free International and are proud to be part of the global campaign to end cosmetic tests on animals. I think its the combination of these elements that men have come to love in Bulldog.

As our company has grown, weve found that men are increasingly interested in more natural formulas. However, what will never change for male skincare users is that they are demanding in terms of performance and results. Its been crucial for Bulldog to really deliver to mens needs. Our success in doing this has helped the brand to grow through word-of-mouth recommendations.

From a branding perspective we also very purposefully intended Bulldog to stand out in a crowded market. Before Bulldog, the mens skincare aisle was a sea of blacks, blues and greys. All these products were marketed with complicated skincare jargon. Our simple white packaging was chosen to be different; and our simple and straightforward language was intended as an antidote to the unnecessary complexity we saw elsewhere.

We love the Bulldog as he is mans best friend. Hes highly-memorable, masculine, approachable, and brings personality to a market that takes itself too seriously and follows female beauty rules too closely.

How long did it take from idea to official launch?

About 1.5 years. We first had the idea in November 2005 and launched with Sainsburys in June 2007.

Do you have a co-founder?

Yes, my good friend, Rhodri Ferrier.

Where did you source your initial funding from?

Raising money is a really hard challenge for any new business. We had more than 80 different meetings trying to organize funding for Bulldog. In the end we raised the seed money we needed from 18 people who shared our vision and values for Bulldog.

What retailer was first to supply your product? Could you talk us through that process?

Sainsburys was the first retailer to list our product. They are a leading supermarket in the UK. They have been great partners for us. More than ten years on and we are still growing sales really quickly with them.

The process to list with a big retailer takes about 9 months. You have initial meetings to introduce the team and explain the concept. There are follow up meetings to explore different areas such as what was unique in our formulations and how we were planning to market our brand. We also had to provide reassurance around other areas such as business insurance and how we were going to manufacture the products. In the final part of the process, the retailer will call in samples of all the existing products they sell and all the pre-qualified new products they might potentially launch. Internal teams will devise various shelf plans, with one version ultimately signed off by senior management for implementation in stores.

Bulldog secured a listing for 6 items in 300 stores in our first time through this process. It felt like a huge moment to see our items on a supermarket shelf for the first time.

What were your three main obstacles and how did you combat them?

The three main obstacles we faced when were starting were (1) raising funds, (2) formulating products in a different way using natural ingredients, and (3) getting the brand listed for the first time.

From a formulation perspective we wanted to challenge the conventions and legacy thinking in our industry. There is a very commoditized way to make skincare products for men using the same types of ingredients, same preservatives, and artificial fragrances. With Bulldog we wanted to change things. We prioritized natural ingredients, avoided controversial cosmetic ingredients like parabens, and committed to no artificial colours or ingredients from animal sources. This created a tricky brief and there were many manufacturers who refused to work with us on these terms. In the end we found an amazing manufacturing team to work with in the UK.

Developing the signature fragrances for our products was also a big challenge and great fun. We exclusively use essentials oils rather than artificial fragrances. We spent hours working with some talented people to blend these fragrances. Bulldog products smell great and its something we always hear nice things about from people who use products

If there is something you could go back and tell or teach yourself in the beginning phases, what would it be?

It took us a few attempts to get our packaging design right. I wish wed cracked the code on this earlier.

I also think we would have been able to go faster had we recruited some more brilliant people earlier on. Perhaps Rhodri and myself tried to do too much ourselves for too long.

Any big news you have to share with us?

Yes! We just launched the Original Bamboo Razor in the UK and USA. Its an exciting development for us.

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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday announced the National Risk Management Center, part of a new effort to combat cyberthreats to the nation.

The new agency's mission will be to defend the U.S.' critical infrastructure through greater cooperation between the public and private sectors.

The center will bring together government experts and industry partners to work out ways that the government can support the partners. The idea is to create a single point of access to all government resources that can be used to defend against cyberthreats.

"I occasionally still hear of companies and state and locals that call 911 when they believe they've been under a cyberattack," said DHS Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen at a National Cybersecurity Summit held in New York City on Tuesday.

"The best thing to do will be to call this center," she continued. The center will provide organizations under cyberattack with what they need to repel, mitigate and root out adversaries from their systems.

Solving Puzzles

The center also will be a place for forging strategies against threats.

"Having the private sector with us will enable us to take a piece of threat data to determine what puzzle it belongs to and then to determine how to fit it into the puzzle," Nielsen said.

Through that approach, "we can see the trend, we can see the thread, we can see the purpose, perhaps, of the attack, but certainly the implications and effects," she explained.

"The private sector also knows its operational environment better than we will ever know in government," added Nielsen, "so we will look to their expertise to help us to understand how the pieces fit together."

The power of information sharing already has been seen in initiatives like the Cybersecurity Risk Information Sharing Program in the U.S. Department of Energy, Secretary Rick Perry noted in a panel discussion at the summit.

It was due to that close collaboration that the department was able to identify a very dramatic event last year about Russian intrusions into our energy systems, he observed.

"Had we not had this close working relationship with our private sector partners, it would most likely gone unfounded," he said.

Cyber Firehouse

Underpinning the creation of the National Risk Management Center is the recognition that cybersecurity defense is a team sport, observed Brad Medairy, a senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, an international technology consulting company headquartered in McLean, Virginia.

"It requires a partnership of the whole of government and the whole of industry to address it," he told TechNewsWorld.

The new center is an extension of capabilities the DHS has been developing to protect the nation's critical infrastructure, noted James Barnett, head of the cybersecurity practice at Venable, a law firm in Washington, D.C.

"Secretary Nielsen would certainly want to announce this now with the recent revelation of Russian hackers into the controls of several American companies that make up the energy grid," Barnett, a former Navy Rear Admiral, told TechNewsWorld.

The federal government already has an information-sharing center in place -- the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center -- but the new center appears to be a different kind of animal.

"NCCIC has been more of a coordinating and information sharing effort -- the government will collate and provide you with information to help yourself," Barnett explained. "It sounds like NRMC is one step closer to a cyber firehouse, where DHS will actually provide direct assistance."

Actionable Information

One frequent complaint from the private sector is that the quality of information from the government is poor. The new center could change that.

"As conceived, NRMC will focus and organize the federal government's efforts to provide the private sector operating critical infrastructure with actionable threat data," Barnett said. "This would be more than just a malware warning or patch. It sounds like DHS is willing to provide deeper information on threats, to include supply chain threats."

For validating the supply chain and procurement process, the center is an essential step forward, said Ray DeMeo, chief operating officer of Virsec, an applications security company in San Jose, California.

"This initiative wisely prioritizes actionable threat data, a critical gap in today's Industrial Control System threat environment," he told TechNewsWorld. Z,pz. "Threat actors have a significant lead time ahead of responders -- often weeks or months," DeMeo pointed out. "With more actionable threat data, our human intervention can focus beyond immediate triage to higher-order efforts. Who are the attackers? What is their methodology?"

Sophisticated Threats

Public-private cybersecurity partnerships are nothing new, but the private sector may be coming to this latest vehicle with a different attitude.

"It's recognizing that the threats are getting more sophisticated and more complex," said Matt Olsen, president of IronNet Cybersecurity, a Fulton, Maryland, maker of a suite of cybersecurity technologies.

"There's also a fundamental recognition that companies can't go it alone against the most sophisticated threat actors out there, particularly nation-states like Russia and China," Olsen, a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told TechNewsWorld.

In order for partnerships to work, the partners must trust each other. That's proven to be a challenge in the cybersecurity arena in the past, and it could be a barrier to the new center gaining momentum.

"Will the center bring government and industry together to provide solutions, or is this going to be another layer of bureaucratic influence on industry?" wondered Emily Miller, director of national security and critical infrastructure programs at Mocana, a Sunnyvale, California-based company that focuses on embedded system security for industrial control systems and the Internet of Things.

"Is it going to come up with unfunded mandates? Is it going to create baselines that industry has to comply with that do not provide actual security? Those are the questions the industry is going to have in mind when they think about what is the goal of the National Risk Management Center," Miller told TechNewsWorld.

Show Me the Money

Achieving private sector trust will be a challenge, acknowledged Venable's Barnett.

Howver, "DHS has positioned itself in the cyberworld as a resource and facilitator, not a regulator. Establishing NRMC is a positive step in organizing the government's assistance, if it is well resourced," he noted.

"The success of the new effort will depend on whether the government is able to provide NRMC with the money, expertise and capacity to meet its objectives, and how well it is accepted by the critical infrastructure private sector," Barnett said.

Everyone needs to be talking less and doing more to reduce cyber-risk, suggested Ed Cabrera, chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro, a Tokyo-based maker of enterprise cybersecurity solutions.

"We have been espousing the need for better public-private partnerships for the better part of 15 years, but we have failed to execute," he told TechNewsWorld.

"The blame cannot be solely laid at the feet of government," Cabrera said. "We in industry have our role and responsibility to work hand-in-hand with government and each other to eliminate cyberthreats, and reduce technical and systemic vulnerabilities."

John P. Mello Jr. has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Phoenix, Megapixel.Net and Government Security News. Email John.

(Reuters)Pope Francis talks to journalist on the papal plane during his flight to Manila.

Pope Francis has appealed for unity and family love in an open-air Mass in Philadelphia wrapping up his six-day visit to the United States and Cuba.

"We renew our faith in the word of the Lord which invites faithful families to this openness," he said at the VIII World Meeting of Families.

"It invites all those who want to share the prophecy of the covenant of man and woman, which generates life and reveals God," said the Pope in his homily before thousands of people on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Earlier, the pontiff prayed with a group of victims of child sexual abuse, saying "God weeps" for their suffering.

Clergy and bishops abusing children will be held accountable, he said in a country where the Roman Catholic Church has faced accusations of covering up child sex scandals in the past.

That has led to some U.S. dioceses having to make huge compensation payments to victims and accusations from survivors that Vatican has not dealt properly with child-abuse allegations.

As has become a custom for the Argentine pope, he gave a wide-ranging press briefing en route from the United States to Rome.

Pope Francis spoke on the thorny subject of forgiving priests who have molested minors, saying that the strength to forgive, and to be forgiven, can only come from God, Catholic News Agency reports.

Francis also told journalists that while he is willing to forgive clergy who have abused children and young people, he understands why there are some who find it difficult.

"We must forgive, because we were all forgiven," the Pope said. However, "it is another thing to receive that forgiveness."

The Catholic Church leader told journalists aboard the papal plane he is not judgmental of victims or the families of molested children who struggle to forgive the abuser.

He cited a meeting with a meeting once with a victim of molestation, who told him her mother had "lost her faith and died an atheist" due to the abuse.

"I understand that woman," the Pope said, "and God who is even better than me understands her."

Pope Francis said he believes this mother "has been received by God," taking into account that it was her own flesh and blood, her daughter, who was molested.

"I don't judge someone who can't forgive," he said, but said instead he prays for them. "God is a champion in finding paths of solutions. I ask him to fix it."To build the largest and most complete Amateur Radio community site on the Internet - a "portal" that hams think of as the first place to go for information, to exchange ideas, and be part of whats happening with ham radio on the Internet. eHam.net provides recognition and enjoyment to the people who use, contribute, and build the site. This project involves a management team of volunteers who each take a topic of interest and manage it with passion. The site will stand above all other ham radio sites by employing the latest technology and professional design/programming standards, developed by a team of community programmers who contribute their skills to the effort. The site will be something of which everyone involved can be proud to say they were a part. We welcome your comments. The eHam.net Team, Revision 07/2020.Oncologists from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) today celebrated a watershed moment in medicine: approval by the European Commission (EC) of Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel, formerly CTL019) --the first-ever U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved personalized CAR T-cell gene immunotherapy for aggressive blood cancers, pioneered together with Novartis and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

The EC approved Kymriah for the treatment of pediatric and young adult patients up to 25 years of age with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) that is refractory, in relapse post-transplant or in second or later relapse; and for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory (r/r) diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) after two or more lines of systemic therapy.

"Six years ago, when we treated the first child, Emily Whitehead, with this experimental therapy, these patient populations had exhausted all the treatments we had to offer. There was nothing left for us to offer," said Stephan Grupp, MD, PhD, Director of the Cancer Immunotherapy Program and Section Chief of Cell Therapy and Transplant at CHOP, and a Professor of Pediatrics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "In a remarkably short period of time we've ushered in a brand new field of medicine. We couldn't be more pleased the CAR T-cell treatment we first gave Emily has not only saved her life, but has been proven effective in more blood cancers, and may completely change the outcomes of these diseases in patients in Europe and around the world."

Chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy genetically modifies a patient's immune cells to make them seek out and kill leukemia cells. The approach was developed by a team led by Carl June, MD, of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2012, Penn and Novartis entered into a global collaboration to further research, develop and commercialize Kymriah. CHOP was the first institution to use the therapy in children with leukemia.

"To date, our unrivaled immunotherapy program has now treated more than 250 patients with this innovative therapy, more than any other pediatric institution in the world," said Stephen Hunger, MD, Chief of the Division of Oncology and Director of the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at CHOP. "Young cancer patients are in critical need of personalized cell therapies here in the U.S., and we're delighted to now see Kymriah fill an unmet need abroad."

EC approval of Kymriah was based on two pivotal Novartis-sponsored global, multi-center Phase II trials, ELIANA and JULIET, conducted in countries worldwide, including the U.S. and Europe.

"ELIANA data evaluated by the European Medicines Agency demonstrate strong and durable response rates," said ELIANA lead study author Shannon L. Maude, MD, PhD, a pediatric oncologist at CHOP and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "Patients not only get better, but personalized, cancer-fighting cells can remain in the body for months or even years, effectively doing their job."

The U.S. FDA approved Kymriah to treat children and young adults with r/r ALL in August 2017, and then, in May 2018, approved it for the treatment of adults with r/r large B-cell lymphomas. CHOP offers Kymriah for both r/r ALL and r/r DLBCL.

Clinical research trials are also underway at CHOP to further improve CAR T-cell therapy and apply it for use in more pediatric cancers. For more information on our Cancer Immunotherapy Program, click here: https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/cancer-immunotherapy-program

###

Editor's Notes: Some CHOP investigators serve or have served as consultants to Novartis to support the company's continued development of this treatment. In addition, Dr. Grupp is an inventor of a process for treating toxic reactions to the therapy.

The University of Pennsylvania has licensed some technologies involved in these studies to Novartis. Some of the scientists involved in these trials are inventors of these technologies. As a result of the licensing relationship with Novartis, the University of Pennsylvania receives significant financial benefit, and some of these inventors have benefitted financially and/or may benefit financially in the future.

About Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals, and pioneering major research initiatives, Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 546-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.eduWASHINGTON-(Aug. 27, 2018)-Healthy muscle cells rely on the protein dysferlin to properly repair the sarcolemmal membrane, a thin specialized membrane that serves a vital role in ensuring that muscle fibers are strong enough and have the necessary resources to contract. Mutations in the DYSF gene that produces this essential protein causes limb girdle muscular dystrophy type 2B (LGMD2B), a disease characterized by chronic muscle inflammation and progressively weakened muscles in the pelvis and shoulder girdle.

LGMD2B can affect able-bodied people during their childbearing years and makes it difficult to tiptoe, walk, run or rise unaided from a squat. Ultimately, many with the muscle-wasting condition require wheelchair assistance. There is no therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration for this condition.

In a head-to-head trial between the conventional glucocorticoid, prednisolone, and a modified glucocorticoid, vamorolone, in experimental models of LGMD2B, vamorolone improved dysferlin-deficient muscle cell membrane stability and repair. This correlated with increased muscle strength and decreased muscle degeneration, according to a Children's-led study published online Aug. 27, 2018, in Molecular Therapy. By contrast, prednisolone worsened muscle weakness, impaired muscle repair and increased myofiber atrophy.

"These two steroids differ by only two chemical groups," says Jyoti K. Jaiswal, MSC, Ph.D., a principal investigator at Children's National Health System and senior study author. "One made muscle repair better. The other made muscle repair worse or about the same as untreated experimental models. This matches experience in the clinic as patients with LGMD2B experienced increased muscle weakness after being prescribed conventional glucocorticoids, such as prednisolone."

Jaiswal likens the plasma membrane to a balloon that sits atop the myofiber, a long cell that when healthy can flex and contract. If, in the process of myofiber contraction, the plasma membrane experiences anything out of sync or overly stressful, it develops a tear that needs to be quickly sealed. An intact balloon keeps air inside; tear it, and air escapes. When the plasma membrane tears, calcium from the outside leaks in, causing the muscle cell to collapse into a ball and die. The body contends with the dead cell by breaking it up into fragments and sending in inflammatory cells to clear the debris.

The study team got the idea for the current research project during a previous study of the experimental treatment vamorolone for a different type of muscular dystrophy. "In Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), treatment with vamorolone not only reduced inflammation, but the membranes of muscle fibers were stabilized. That was the team's ah-hah moment," he says.

Three different doses of vamorolone were tested on cells derived from patients with LGMD2B with higher cell membrane repair efficacy seen with rising treatment dose. The dysferlinopathic experimental models were treated for three months with daily doses of cherry syrup laced with either 30 mg/kg of vamorolone or prednisolone or cherry syrup alone as the placebo arm.

"Right now there are zero treatments," he says. People with LGMD2B turn to rehabilitative therapies and movement aids to cope with loss of mobility. Doctors are cautioned not to prescribe steroids. Jaiswal says many patients with LGMD2B grew up doing strenuous exercise, former athletes whose first indication of a problem was muscle cramping and pain. How this progresses to muscle weakness and loss is an area of active research in Jaiswal's lab. "While additional research is needed, our findings here suggest that modified steroids such as vamorlone may be an option for some patients," Jaiswal says.

"There is a nuance here: In addition to genomic effects, steroids also have physical effects on the cell membrane which may make some of the approved steroids 'good' steroids for dysferlinopathy that could selectively be used for this disease," adds Sen Chandra Sreetama, lead study author. Further research could indicate whether vamorolone, which is in Phase II human clinical trials for DMD, or any off-the-shelf drug could slow decline in muscle function for patients with LGMD2B.

###

Additional Children's study authors include Goutam Chandra; Jack H. Van der Meulen; Mohammad Mahad Ahmad; Peter Suzuki; Shivaprasad Bhuvanendran; and Kanneboyina Nagaraju and Eric P. Hoffman, both of ReveraGen BioPharma.

Research reported in this news release was supported by the Clark Charitable Foundation; Muscular Dystrophy Association, under award number MDA277389; National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, under award number R01AR055686; National Institutes of Health (NIH), under award numbers K26OD011171 and R24HD050846; and the District of Columbia Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center under NIH award number 1U54HD090257.New York, NY (August 27, 2018)--A phase three clinical trial has shown that a drug called tafamidis significantly reduces deaths and hospitalizations in patients with transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM), a progressive form of heart failure that may be more common than doctors realize.

The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine by the trial's co-chair Mathew S. Maurer, MD, a heart failure specialist at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and NewYork-Presbyterian, and colleagues.

The takeaway

If tafamidis receives FDA approval for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, it would be the first medical therapy for this life-threatening disease.

Compared to a placebo, the drug reduced deaths by 30 percent, reduced cardiovascular-related hospitalizations by 32 percent, and slowed the decline in quality of life among the 441 patients enrolled in the 2-year study.

Background

Once diagnosed, patients with ATTR-CM only live on average three to five more years.

"ATTR-CM is considered to be a rare disease, but it is underdiagnosed," Maurer says. "Until recently, cardiologists rarely tested for ATTR-CM, because diagnosis required a heart muscle biopsy and there has been no treatment for the disease. But now that we can detect the disease with noninvasive imaging, we're finding more cases."

ATTR-CM occurs when a protein called transthyretin becomes unstable and clumps together and forms sticky amyloid in heart muscle. (Amyloid deposits also occur in Alzheimer's disease, but those plaques develop through a different mechanism and cannot be treated with the drug tested in this study.)

The disease is most common in men over the age of 60 and is caused by heritable genetic mutations or age-related changes in the regulation of transthyretin.

Tafamidis acts by stabilizing transthyretin, preventing its dissociation and ability to form amyloid.

What the study means for patients

"Based on this study, tafamidis may offer the first treatment for patients with this type of heart disease," Maurer says. "Right now, the best we can do is manage the symptoms of ATTR-CM."

The drug, the study found, also slowed decline in heart function and quality of life without causing more adverse effects.

A different drug, patisiran, was recently approved by the FDA to treat nerve damage - but not heart disease - caused by transthyretin.

What's next

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will consider whether to approve tafamidis for the treatment of transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy.

Patients can receive tafamidis at certain sites through an early access program established by Pfizer. NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center is the program's first site and is now accepting and enrolling patients.

Caveats

"Tafamidis prevents progression of the disease, and like other preventive drugs, it should be given as early as possible," Maurer says. "We'll need to diagnose people with ATTR-CM earlier for this drug to have the biggest benefit. Currently, patients are diagnosed with advanced disease, and we need to change that."

###

More Information

Mathew S. Maurer, MD, is the Arnold and Arlene Goldstein Professor of Cardiology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and medical director of the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

The study, "Tafamidis Treatment for Patients with Transthyretin Amyloid Cardiomyopathy," was published August 27 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Other authors are included in the paper.

The work was supported by Pfizer, Inc. The authors disclose no additional conflicts of interest.

Columbia University Irving Medical Center provides international leadership in basic, preclinical, and clinical research; medical and health sciences education; and patient care. The medical center trains future leaders and includes the dedicated work of many physicians, scientists, public health professionals, dentists, and nurses at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Mailman School of Public Health, the College of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and allied research centers and institutions. Columbia University Irving Medical Center is home to the largest medical research enterprise in New York City and State and one of the largest faculty medical practices in the Northeast. For more information, visit cumc.columbia.edu or columbiadoctors.org.

NewYork-Presbyterian

NewYork-Presbyterian is one of the nation's most comprehensive, integrated academic healthcare delivery systems, whose organizations are dedicated to providing the highest quality, most compassionate care and service to patients in the New York metropolitan area, nationally, and throughout the globe. In collaboration with two renowned medical schools, Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, NewYork-Presbyterian is consistently recognized as a leader in medical education, groundbreaking research and innovative, patient-centered clinical care.

NewYork-Presbyterian has four major divisions:

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is ranked #1 in the New York metropolitan area by U.S. News and World Report and repeatedly named to the Honor Roll of "America's Best Hospitals."

NewYork-Presbyterian Regional Hospital Network comprises hospitals and other facilities in the New York metropolitan region.

NewYork-Presbyterian Physician Services, which connects medical experts with patients in their communities.

NewYork-Presbyterian Community and Population Health, encompassing ambulatory care network sites and community healthcare initiatives, including NewYork Quality Care, the Accountable Care Organization jointly established by NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia.

For more information, visit http://www.nyp.org and find us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.Munich, Germany - 27 Aug 2018: The antithrombin drug rivaroxaban does not reduce the risk of a composite endpoint of survival, myocardial infarction and stroke after an episode of worsening heart failure in patients with heart failure, sinus rhythm, and coronary artery disease, according to late breaking results from the COMMANDER HF trial presented today in a Hot Line Session at ESC Congress 20181 and with simultaneous publication in NEJM.

After an episode of worsening heart failure, patients experience high rates of hospital readmission and death, particularly in the first few months. Previous studies have suggested that the enzyme thrombin may contribute to these poor outcomes by inducing inflammation, endothelial dysfunction, and clot formation (thrombosis) in blood vessels.2

Rivaroxaban is an oral, direct factor Xa inhibitor that reduces thrombin generation. Higher doses (10-20 mg daily) are approved to treat and prevent venous thromboembolism, and prevent stroke or systemic embolism in patients with atrial fibrillation. Lower doses (2.5 mg twice daily), combined with antiplatelets, reduce cardiovascular mortality, myocardial infarction and stroke in patients with acute coronary syndromes or stable coronary artery disease.

The COMMANDER HF trial tested whether, compared to placebo, rivaroxaban 2.5 mg twice daily could reduce thrombin generation and thereby lower rates of death and cardiovascular events in patients with recent worsening of chronic heart failure, who had reduced ejection fraction (40% or less), coronary artery disease and no atrial fibrillation.

Professor Faiez Zannad, study author, University of Lorraine, Nancy, France, said: "COMMANDER HF is not just another trial of oral anticoagulation in heart failure. The aim is to interfere with disease processes that rely on thrombin using a targeted antithrombin drug."

The trial enrolled 5,022 patients from 628 sites in 28 countries. Patients were randomly assigned to rivaroxaban 2.5 mg, taken orally twice daily, or matching placebo. The use of guideline recommended therapies for heart failure and coronary artery disease was well balanced between groups and included diuretics, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers, beta-blockers, and mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists. Background therapy included aspirin in virtually all patients and a substantial number were also receiving dual antiplatelet agents at the time either rivaroxaban or placebo was initiated in the trial.

The median age of participants at the start of the study was 66 years, 23% were women, and the median ejection fraction was 34%. Patients were followed-up for the primary efficacy outcome of all-cause mortality, myocardial infarction, or stroke. The primary safety outcome was the composite of fatal bleeding or bleeding into a critical space with a potential for permanent disability.

During a median follow-up of 21.1 months, the primary efficacy outcome occurred in 626 (25.0%) of 2,507 patients assigned to rivaroxaban compared to 658 (26.2%) of 2,515 on placebo (hazard ratio [HR] 0.94, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.84-1.05, p=0.27). There were no differences between groups in all-cause mortality (HR 0.98, 95% CI 0.87-1.10, p=0.74) or nonfatal myocardial infarction (HR 0.83, 95% CI 0.63-1.08, p=0.17) but there was a significantly lower rate of nonfatal stroke in the rivaroxaban, compared to placebo, group (HR 0.66, 95% CI 0.47-0.95, p=0.023).

The principal safety outcome occurred in 18 (0.7%) patients assigned to rivaroxaban and 23 (0.9%) assigned to placebo (HR 0.80, 95% CI 0.43-1.49, p=0.48). Patients taking rivaroxaban had a significantly higher risk of major bleeding as defined by the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH) compared to those on placebo (HR 1.68, 95% CI 1.18-2.39, p=0.003). This result was mainly driven by the ISTH criterion of bleeding causing a fall in haemoglobin of 2 g/dL (1.24 mmol/L) or more.

Serious adverse events were reported in 479 (19.2%) patients taking rivaroxaban and 451 (18.0%) on placebo. The percentage of patients who permanently discontinued study medication due to an adverse event was 7.1% in the rivaroxaban group and 5.8% in the placebo group.

Professor Zannad said: "The most likely reason rivaroxaban failed to improve the primary efficacy outcome is that thrombin-mediated events are not the major driver of cardiovascular events in patients with recent heart failure hospitalisation. Whether a higher dose of rivaroxaban could have led to a more favourable result is unknown."

###

Notes to editors

SOURCES OF FUNDING: Janssen Research and Development.

DISCLOSURES: Please see the paper for full disclosures.

References and notes

1 "COMMANDER HF - Randomized Study Comparing Rivaroxaban with Placebo in Subjects with Heart Failure and Significant Coronary Artery Disease Following an Episode of Decompensated Heart Failure" will be discussed during:

Press Conference - Hot Line - Late Breaking Clinical Trials 3 on Monday 27 August at 08:00 CEST.

Hot Line Session 3 on Monday 27 August from 11:00 to 12:30 CEST in the Munich Auditorium.

Meet the Trialist - COMMANDER HF on Monday 27 August from 14:00 to 14:30 CEST on the ESC TV Stage in ESC Plaza.

2 Zannad F, Greenberg B, Cleland JG, et al. Rationale and design of a randomized, double-blind, event-driven, multicentre study comparing the efficacy and safety of oral rivaroxaban with placebo for reducing the risk of death, myocardial infarction or stroke in subjects with heart failure and significant coronary artery disease following an exacerbation of heart failure: the COMMANDER HF trial. Eur J Heart Fail. 2015;17:735-742. doi: 10.1002/ejhf.266.

About the European Society of Cardiology

The European Society of Cardiology brings together health care professionals from more than 150 countries, working to advance cardiovascular medicine and help people lead longer, healthier lives.

About ESC Congress 2018

ESC Congress is the world's largest and most influential cardiovascular event contributing to global awareness of the latest clinical trials and breakthrough discoveries. ESC Congress 2018 takes place 25 to 29 August at the Messe Munchen in Munich, Germany. Explore the scientific programme. More information is available from the ESC Press Office at press@escardio.org.Munich, Germany - 27 Aug 2018: Long-term antiplatelet monotherapy after stenting is safe but does not reduce the risk of death or heart attack compared to standard dual antiplatelet therapy, according to late breaking results from the GLOBAL LEADERS trial presented today in a Hot Line Session at ESC Congress 20181 and published in The Lancet.

Ischaemic heart disease is the top global cause of death.2 In this condition, arteries supplying oxygen-rich blood to the heart become narrowed due to the build-up of fatty material. Treatments include medication, surgery to bypass the arteries, and keyhole surgery to open clogged arteries by inserting a stent (percutaneous coronary intervention; PCI).

Among patients undergoing PCI, dual antiplatelet therapy (aspirin plus a P2Y12 inhibitor) reduces the risk of blood clots and heart attacks but also increases the risk of bleeding.3-7 A shorter duration of dual antiplatelet followed by single antiplatelet therapy with a P2Y12 inhibitor might reduce adverse events with no increase in bleeding.8

GLOBAL LEADERS is the largest trial to date testing one month of dual antiplatelet therapy versus the standard of more prolonged dual antiplatelet therapy after drug eluting stent implantation.9 The trial enrolled 15,991 patients scheduled to undergo PCI for stable coronary artery disease or acute coronary syndromes. Patients were recruited from 130 centres in 18 countries in Europe, North and South America, and Asia Pacific.

Patients underwent PCI with a drug-eluting stent, were treated with the direct thrombin inhibitor bivalirudin, and then randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to the experimental or standard treatment arm.

The experimental arm received one month of dual antiplatelet therapy with aspirin plus the P2Y12 inhibitor ticagrelor, followed by ticagrelor monotherapy for 23 months. The standard treatment arm received 12 months of dual antiplatelet therapy with aspirin plus a P2Y12 inhibitor (clopidogrel for patients with stable coronary artery disease, ticagrelor for those with acute coronary syndromes), followed by aspirin monotherapy for 12 months.

Patients were followed up for the primary endpoint of all-cause death or non-fatal myocardial infarction at two years. Myocardial infarction diagnoses were confirmed by a central committee that examined electrocardiograms (ECGs) at discharge, three and 24 months. The secondary endpoint was the rate of moderate or severe bleeding (grade 3 or 5 on the Bleeding Academic Research Consortium scale) within two years.

At two years the primary endpoint had occurred in 304 (3.8%) patients in the monotherapy group and 349 (4.4%) in the standard treatment group (rate ratio [RR] 0.87, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.75-1.01, p=0.073). All-cause mortality occurred in 224 (2.8%) patients in the monotherapy group and 253 (3.2%) in the standard treatment group (RR 0.88, 95% CI 0.74-1.06, p=0.186), and the incidence of non-fatal myocardial infarction was 1.0% versus 1.3%, respectively (RR 0.80, 95% CI 0.60-1.07, p=0.142). Rates of moderate or severe bleeding were 2.0% versus 2.1%, respectively (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.78-1.20, p=0.766).

Professor Patrick Serruys, principal investigator, Imperial College London, UK, said: "Ticagrelor, in combination with aspirin for one month, followed by ticagrelor alone was not superior to one-year standard dual antiplatelet therapy followed by aspirin alone for reducing deaths or heart attacks during the two years after stenting."

Professor Serruys noted that the trial was not designed to assess non-inferiority, meaning that further studies are needed to confirm that monotherapy is not less effective than extended dual antiplatelet therapy. But he said: "The risk of monotherapy compared to extended dual therapy was 0.75-1.01, suggesting that monotherapy is relatively safe."

###

Notes to editors

SOURCES OF FUNDING: The study was sponsored by the European Cardiovascular Research Institute (ECRI) with grants from Biosensors, AstraZeneca and the Medicines company.

DISCLOSURES: Dr. Serruys reports personal fees from Abbott Laboratories, AstraZeneca, Biotronik, Cardialysis, GLG Research, Medtronic, Sino Medical Sciences Technology, Societe Europa Digital Publishing, Stentys France, Svelte Medical Systems, Philips/Volcano, St. Jude Medical, Qualimed, and Xeltis, outside the submitted work.

References and notes

1 "GLOBAL LEADERS TRIAL - A randomized comparison of 24 month ticagrelor and 1 month aspirin versus 12 month dual antiplatelet therapy followed by aspirin monotherapy" will be discussed during:

Press Conference - Hot Line - Late Breaking Clinical Trials 3 on Monday 27 August at 08:00 CEST.

Hot Line Session 3 on Monday 27 August from 11:00 to 12:30 CEST in the Munich Auditorium.

Meet the Trialist - GLOBAL LEADERS TRIAL on Monday 27 August at 16:15 to 16:40 CEST on the ESC TV Stage in ESC Plaza.

2 World Health Organization. The top 10 causes of death 2016: http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-causes-of-death.

3 Bonaca MP, Bhatt DL, Cohen M, et al. Long-term use of ticagrelor in patients with prior myocardial infarction. NEJM. 2015;372:1791-1800.

4 Mauri L, Kereiakes DJ, Yeh RW, et al. Twelve or 30 months of dual antiplatelet therapy after drug-eluting stents. NEJM. 2014;371:2155-2166.

5 Valgimigli M, Bueno H, Byrne RA, et al. 2017 ESC focused update on dual antiplatelet therapy in coronary artery disease developed in collaboration with EACTS. Eur Heart J. 2018;39:213-260.

6 Miyazaki Y, Suwannasom P, Sotomi Y, et al. Single or dual antiplatelet therapy after PCI. Nat Rev Cardiol. 2017;14:294-303.

7 Capodanno D, Mehran R, Valgimigli M, et al. Aspirin-free strategies in cardiovascular disease and cardioembolic stroke prevention. Nat Rev Cardiol. 2018:15:480-496.

8 Gargiulo G, Windecker S, Vranckx P, et al. A critical appraisal of aspirin in secondary prevention: Is less more? Circulation. 2016;134:1881-1906.

9 Vranckx P, Valgimigli M, Windecker S, et al. Long-term ticagrelor monotherapy versus standard dual antiplatelet therapy followed by aspirin monotherapy in patients undergoing biolimus-eluting stent implantation: rationale and design of the GLOBAL LEADERS trial. EuroIntervention. 2016;12:1239-1245.

About the European Society of Cardiology

The European Society of Cardiology brings together health care professionals from more than 150 countries, working to advance cardiovascular medicine and help people lead longer, healthier lives.

About ESC Congress 2018

ESC Congress is the world's largest and most influential cardiovascular event contributing to global awareness of the latest clinical trials and breakthrough discoveries. ESC Congress 2018 takes place 25 to 29 August at the Messe Munchen in Munich, Germany. Explore the scientific programme.

More information is available from the ESC Press Office at press@escardio.org.Munich, Germany - 27 Aug 2018: The main reasons why people die after noncardiac surgery are revealed today in a study of more than 40,000 patients from six continents presented in a late breaking science session at ESC Congress 2018.1 Myocardial injury, major bleeding, and sepsis contributed to nearly three-quarters of all deaths.

"There's a false assumption among patients that once you've undergone surgery, you've 'made it'," said study author Dr Jessica Spence, of the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI), a joint institute of Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) and McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. "Unfortunately, that's not always the case, and now we have a much better sense of when and why people die after noncardiac surgery. Most deaths are linked to cardiovascular causes."

The VISION study2 included 40,004 patients aged 45 years or older undergoing noncardiac surgery and remaining in hospital for at least one night. Patients were recruited from 27 centres in 14 countries in North and South America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia, and monitored for complications until 30 days after their surgery.

The researchers found that 715 (1.8%) patients died within 30 days after noncardiac surgery. Of those, 505 (71%) died in hospital (including four [0.6%] in the operating room), and 210 (29%) died after discharge from hospital. Dr Spence said: "One in 56 patients died within 30 days of noncardiac surgery and nearly all deaths occurred after leaving the operating room, with more than a quarter occurring after hospital discharge."

Eight perioperative complications - including five cardiovascular - were associated with death within 30 days postoperatively. The top three complications, which contributed to nearly three-quarters of all deaths, were myocardial injury after noncardiac surgery (MINS; 29%), major bleeding (25%), and sepsis (20%).

"We're letting patients down in postoperative management," said principal investigator Professor Philip J. Devereaux, director of cardiology at McMaster University. "The study suggests that most deaths after noncardiac surgery are due to cardiovascular causes, so cardiologists have a major role to play to improve patient safety. This includes conducting blood and imaging tests to identify patients at risk then giving preventive treatment, including medications that prevent abnormal heart rhythms, lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and prevent blood clots."

Earlier findings from the VISION study showed that a simple blood test can identify MINS, enabling clinicians to intervene early and prevent further complications.3 The blood test measures a protein called high-sensitivity troponin T which is released into the bloodstream when injury to the heart occurs.

Regarding cardiovascular complications, MINS occurred in 5,191 (13%) patients and independently increased the risk of 30-day mortality by 2.6-fold; major bleeding occurred in 6,238 (16%) patients and increased risk by 2.4-fold; 372 (0.9%) patients had congestive heart failure, which raised risk by 1.6-fold; 152 (0.4%) patients had deep venous thrombosis which raised risk by 2.1-fold; and 132 (0.3%) patients had a stroke, which increased risk by a factor of 1.6.

Regarding noncardiovascular complications associated with 30-day mortality, sepsis occurred in 1,783 (4.5%) patients and independently increased risk by 5.7-fold; infection occurred in 2,171 (5.4%) patients and raised risk by 1.9-fold; and 118 patients (0.3%) had acute kidney injury resulting in new dialysis, which increased risk by 4.7-fold.

"Combined, these discoveries tell us that we need to become more involved in care and monitoring after surgery to ensure that patients at risk have the best chance for a good recovery," said Dr Spence, who is also an anaesthesiologist at HHS and a PhD candidate at McMaster University.

###

Notes to editors

SOURCES OF FUNDING: Roche Diagnostics provided the troponin T assays as well as financial support for the VISION Study. Funding for this study came from more than 60 grants for VISION and its substudies. Canada: Canadian Institutes of Health Research (7 grants); Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario (2 grants); Academic Health Science Centres Alternative Funding Plan Innovation Fund Ontario; Population Health Research Institute; CLARITY Research Group; McMaster University Department of Surgery Surgical Associates; Hamilton Health Science New Investigator Fund; Hamilton Health Sciences; Ontario Ministry of Resources and innovation; Stryker Canada; McMaster University, Department of Anesthesiology (2 grants); St. Joseph's Healthcare, Department of Medicine (2 grants); Father Sean O'Sullivan Research Centre (2 grants); McMaster University Department of Medicine (2 grants); Roche Diagnostics Global Office (5 grants); Hamilton Health Sciences Summer Studentships (6 grants); McMaster University Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics; McMaster University, Division of Cardiology; Canadian Network and Centre for Trials Internationally: Winnipeg Health Sciences Foundation; University of Manitoba Department of Surgery (2 grants); Diagnostic Services of Manitoba Research; Manitoba Medical Services Foundation; Manitoba Health Research Council; University of Manitoba Faculty of Dentistry Operational Fund; University of Manitoba Department of Anesthesia; University Medical Group, Department of Surgery, University of Manitoba, Start-up Fund. Australia: National Health and Medical Research Council Program. Brazil: Projeto Hospitais de Excelencia a Servico do SUS (PROADI-SUS) grant from the Brazilian Ministry of Health in partnership with Hcor (Cardiac Hospital Sao Paulo-SP); National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPQ) grant from the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology. China: Public Policy Research Fund (grant CUHK-4002-PPR-3), Research Grant Council, Hong Kong SAR; General Research Fund (grant 461412). Research Grant Council, Hong Kong SAR: Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (grant 13/008). Colombia: School of Nursing, Universida Industrial de Santander; Grupo de Cardiologia Preventiva, Universidad Autonoma de Bucaramanga: Fundacion Cardioinfantil-Instituto de Cardiologia; Alianza Diagnostica SA. France: Universite Pierre et Marie Curie. Department d'anesthsie Reanimation, Pitie-Salpetriere, Assistance Publique-Hopitaux de Paris. India: St. John's Medical College and Research Institute: Division of Clinical Research and Training. Malaysia: University of Malaya (grant RG302-14AFR); University of Malaya, Penyelidikan Jangka Pendek. Poland: Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (grant NN402083939). South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal. Spain: Instituto de Salud Carlos III; Fundacio La Marato de TV3. United States: America Heart Association; Covidien. United Kingdom: National Institute for Health Research.

DISCLOSURES: Dr Devereaux has received grants from Abbott Diagnostics, Boehringer Ingelheim, Covidien, Octapharma, Philips Healthcare, Roche Diagnostics and Stryker.

References and notes

1 "VISION Study - Frequency, causes, and timing of 30-day mortality after noncardiac surgery: analysis of the vascular events in noncardiac surgery patients (VISION)" will be presented during the session Late Breaking Registry Results 1 on Monday 27 August from 08:30 to 10:00 at the Centre Stage - The Hub.

2 VISION: Vascular events In noncardiac Surgery patIents cOhort evaluatioN

3 Botto F, Alonso-Coello P, Chan MT, et al. Myocardial injury after noncardiac surgery: a large, international, prospective cohort study establishing diagnostic criteria, characteristics, predictors, and 30-day outcomes. Anesthesiology. 2014;120:564-578. doi: 10.1097/ALN.0000000000000113.

About the European Society of Cardiology

The European Society of Cardiology brings together health care professionals from more than 150 countries, working to advance cardiovascular medicine and help people lead longer, healthier lives.

About ESC Congress 2018

ESC Congress is the world's largest and most influential cardiovascular event contributing to global awareness of the latest clinical trials and breakthrough discoveries. ESC Congress 2018 takes place 25 to 29 August at the Messe Munchen in Munich, Germany. Explore the scientific programme.

More information is available from the ESC Press Office at press@escardio.org.New findings from Australian and American researchers raise hope of living with advanced breast cancer -- instead of dying from it

The findings, uncovered in mice and patient tumours, are published in Nature Cell Biology today. They reveal a previously unseen 'ecosystem' in advanced breast cancer, in which the primary breast tumour emits signals that halt the growth of secondary tumours elsewhere in the body.

The spread of cancer beyond the original tumour - known as metastasis - is the most deadly aspect of most cancers. Once a breast cancer has spread to other parts of the body, treatments are far less effective and a patient's prognosis worsens sharply. In Australia, 8 women die from breast cancer every single day1.

"This new research has yielded that rare thing," says Dr Christine Chaffer (Garvan), "- a clue from the cancer itself about new possibilities to fight its spread. Our goal is to work out how we can mimic this 'freezing' of secondary cancers, so that one day we might influence all breast cancers to keep their secondary tumours in check."

The researchers found that, in mice, primary breast tumours can influence 'breakaway cells' that have left the primary tumour to establish new tumours throughout the body. The primary tumour sends its message via the immune system, through an 'inflammatory response' provoked by the tumour. Immune cells spread through the body, locating the sites where breakaway cells have settled in preparation for the launch of new secondary tumours. Once the immune cells locate the breakaway cells, remarkably they are able to 'freeze' them - halting tumour growth.

"When these breakaway cells are settling, before they have established a new tumour, they are particularly vulnerable," explains Dr Chaffer, "because they are in an intermediate state, and their identity isn't very solid. It's at this point that the immune system can intervene."

"When breakaway cells are forced to remain in the transition state, they don't grow very well," remarks Dr Sandra McAllister (Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston), who co-led the research with Dr Chaffer, "and their ability to form a new tumour is severely compromised. So, remarkably, by activating the immune response, the primary tumour essentially shuts down its own spread."

Crucially, there is indirect evidence that the same process may also be happening in people. The team found that, in a group of 215 breast cancer patients at high risk for developing metastasis, patients with high levels of the same type of immune response had better overall survival compared to those with low levels.

Dr Chaffer and her lab are now devising how this discovery might be applicable in the clinic.

"When you have a primary tumour, there are untold numbers of breakaway cells that will travel throughout the body - but not all of them will form tumours," she says. "By some estimates less than 0.02% of breakaway cells will form secondary tumours2-4- so we have a real opportunity to bring this number down to zero."

They have already discovered some of the signals the immune cells are sending to keep metastasis at bay. But they are casting a wide net, and looking at this process from many angles.

"We want to understand exactly what the tumour is releasing to activate this immune response, and how immune cells are targeting the secondary sites," concludes Dr Chaffer. "In principle, all of these steps present therapeutic opportunities that could be used to stop a cancer from developing any further."

The researchers hope to use the new information to find ways to suppress the spread of cancer in all breast tumours. In addition, they hope to apply their findings beyond breast cancer, to determine if similar processes may be exploited to suppress spread in other tumour types.

###

This study is the result of a collaboration between the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr Christine Chaffer is the inaugural recipient of the Rebecca Wilson Fellowship in Cancer Research at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. The Fellowship, established and funded by The NELUNE Foundation in 2017, is in memory of the late Rebecca Wilson a dear friend of The NELUNE Foundation.

This work was also supported by funding from the International Mentoring Foundation for the Advancement of Higher Education (IMFAHE) (AGR); Center for Stem Cell Bioinformatics at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (JNH); Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation, Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology (RAW); Advanced Medical Research Foundation and Nelune Foundation (CLC); National Institutes of Health (NCI) RO1 CA166284, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, American Cancer Society Research Scholar award, and Department of Defense CDMRP BCRP Era of Hope Scholar Award.

National Breast Cancer Foundation http://www.nbcf.org.au Luzzi, K.J. et al. Multistep nature of metastatic inefficiency: dormancy of solitary cells after successful extravasation and limited survival of early micrometastases. The American journal of pathology 153, 865- 873 (1998). Cameron, M.D. et al. Temporal progression of metastasis in lung: cell survival, dormancy, and location dependence of metastatic inefficiency. Cancer research 60, 2541-2546 (2000). Chambers, A.F., Groom, A.C. & MacDonald, I.C. Dissemination and growth of cancer cells in metastatic sites. Nat Rev Cancer 2, 563-572 (2002).Microvascular dysfunction, or small vessel disease, can be an important cause of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (preserved pumping capacity), an international team including researchers from Karolinska Institutet and AstraZeneca report in a study published in The European Heart Journal. The results can play a crucial part in identifying people in the risk zone for this type of heart failure and in the development of effective drugs.

Heart failure is the most common reason for hospitalisation and causes much suffering. Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, which is one of the two main types of heart failure, lacks scientifically proven treatments and more research is needed to understand how the disease develops and is to be treated.

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet, along with colleagues from AstraZeneca and four other groups in Sweden, the USA, Finland and Singapore have now conducted a study of over 200 patients with this type of heart failure.

The study involved the use of an innovative coronary imaging protocol developed by Professor Li-Ming Gan's research group in the IMED Biotech Unit in order to obtain a patient-friendly, cost-effective way to test coronary artery's ability to increase its blood flow (Coronary Flow Reserve - CFR) in addition to the traditional imaging approach to generate overall picture of the heart's structure and function.

"Being able to identify patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction is not only key to improving patient outcomes through early diagnosis but also for us to understand the causal mechanisms underlying the disease so we can develop future targeted therapies", says Professor Li-Ming Gan, Chief Scientist and Senior Medical Director, IMED Biotech Unit, AstraZeneca.

The results of the study, which is the first of its kind, show that 75 per cent of the patients had what is known as microvascular dysfunction. This is a disease in which the coronary artery shows no sign of narrowing or plaque in radiographs, but has damage to the endothelium that coats the inside of the blood vessels. The blood vessels do not work as they should, which can lead to adverse changes in the heart muscle. The researchers therefore draw the conclusion that microvascular dysfunction can be a critical underlying disease mechanism in patients with heart failure in which the ejection fraction is preserved.

"The results will be useful in identifying patients at risk of developing the disease, but above all they'll make an essential contribution to the development of drugs for patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction," says Lars Lund, Senior Consultant and Professor at Karolinska Institutet's Department of Medicine in Solna.

The results will be presented at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) congress in Munich and are published in The European Heart Journal.

###

The project was financed by AstraZeneca and the researchers are in receipt of grants from the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Heart and Lung Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the National Medical Research Council of Singapore, and the Academy of Finland, Finnish Foundation for Cardiovascular Research.

Publication: "Prevalence Of Microvascular Dysfunction in Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction: PROMIS-HFpEF". Sanjiv J. Shah, Carolyn S. P. Lam, Sara Svedlund, Antti Saraste, Camilla Hage, Ru-San Tan, Lauren Beussink-Nelson, Maria Lagerstrom Fermer, Malin A. Broberg, Li-Ming Gan and Lars H. Lund. European Heart Journal, online 27 August 2018.A new study has demonstrated a method that produces novel light beams from synchrotron light sources, opening up a new way to generate X-ray beams.

Structured light, created using the process of generating and applying light to a surface, is important in many of today's devices, such as 3D scanners, dual photography and microscopic technology.

The team of Japanese scientists, led by Shunya Matsuba, an assistant professor at the Hiroshima Synchrotron Radiation Center at Hiroshima University, has shown that structured light, in the form of a vector beam (light beams whose polarization direction rotates around its axis), can be produced from the superposition of two optical vortex beams (beams of lights that contain a point of zero intensity, forming a spiral phase structure.)

"We have demonstrated the generation of the vector beam using synchrotron radiation. This work has opened a way to generate X-ray vector beams," says co-author Prof. Masahiro Katoh of the Institute for Molecular Science (IMS) at the National Institutes of Natural Sciences/Sokendai in Japan.

The production of structured light in the X-ray wavelengths has been challenging, however, and the new technique presented by the Japanese scientists can potentially allow for the use of such structured light in research areas accessible only with synchrotron radiation, such as X-ray absorption spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography.

The scientists based their method on a technique that produces circularly polarized light from two linearly polarized ones whose polarization directions are orthogonal to each other. In synchrotron light sources, this method has been applied to uniformly polarized beams coming from two undulators. An undulator is a device that emits quasi-monochromatic light with various polarizations.

Matsuba and his team applied this method for two vortex beams coming from two helical undulators positioned in tandem. The research follows previous studies that have used lasers and optical components to create vector beams, with wavelengths usually within the visible or near-infrared portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The findings were published in the journal of Applied Physics Letters in July 2018.

Katoh goes on to explain that "the next step of this research is to demonstrate the generation of vector beams of other types, for example, radially polarized beams. Our ultimate goal is to control all the optical properties of synchrotron radiation, such as wavelength, coherence, spatial, temporal structures and so on." This will pave the way for new opportunities in many fields, including X-ray diffraction, scattering and absorption/emission spectroscopy due to the new method of generating structured light that has been demonstrated in this study.

###

This work was supported by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), the Joint Research by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) and IMS.

The full research team involved in the study is as follows: Shunya Matsuba, Keigo Kawase and Atsushi Miyamoto of the Hiroshima Synchrotron Radiation Center, at Hiroshima University; Shigemi Sasaki of the Hiroshima Synchrotron Radiation Center and the School of Physical Science and Technology, at ShanghaiTech University; Masaki Fujimoto and Taro Konomi of the Institute for Molecular Science, at the National Institutes of Natural Sciences/Sokendai; Naoto Yamamoto and Masahito Hosaka of the Synchrotron Radiation Research Center at Nagoya University and Masahiro Katoh of the Institute for Molecular Science and the Synchrotron Radiation Research Center.Levels of some persistent organic pollutants (POPs) regulated by the Stockholm Convention are decreasing in the Arctic, according to an international team of researchers who have been actively monitoring the northern regions of the globe.

POPs are a diverse group of long-lived chemicals that can travel long distances from their source of manufacture or use. Many POPs were used extensively in industry, consumer products or as pesticides in agriculture. Well-known POPs include chemicals such as DDT and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), and some of the products they were used in included flame retardants and fabric coatings.

Because POPs were found to cause health problems for people and wildlife, they were largely banned or phased out of production in many countries. Many have been linked to reproductive, developmental, neurological and immunological problems in mammals. The accumulation of DDT, a well-known and heavily used POP, was also linked to eggshell-thinning in fish-eating birds, such as eagles and pelicans, in the late 20th century, and caused catastrophic population declines for those animals.

In 2001, 152 countries signed a United Nations treaty in Stockholm, Sweden intended to eliminate, restrict or minimize unintentional production of 12 of the most widely used POPs. Later amendments added more chemicals to the initial list. Today, more than 33 POP chemicals or groups are covered by what is commonly called the "Stockholm Convention," which has been recognized by182 countries.

"This paper shows that following the treaty and earlier phase-outs have largely resulted in a decline of these contaminants in the Arctic," says John Kucklick, a biologist from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the senior U.S. author on the paper, published August 23 in Science of the Total Environment. "When POP use was curtailed, the change was reflected by declining concentrations in the environment."

"In general, the contaminants that are being regulated are decreasing," says Frank Riget from the Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Denmark, and lead author.

POPs are particularly problematic in the Arctic because the ecosystem there is especially fragile, and pollution can come from both local sources and from thousands of miles away due to air and water currents. POPs also bioaccumulate. This means that they build up faster in animals and humans than they can be excreted, and that exposure can increase up the food chain. Plankton exposed to POPs in water are eaten by schools of fish, which are in turn eaten by seals or whales, and with each jump up the food chain the amount of POPs increases. The same is true for terrestrial animals. A large mammal's exposure, therefore, can be large and long-lasting.

Indigenous people living in northern coastal areas such as Alaska often consume more fish and other animals that come from higher on the food chain than the average American. Such communities, therefore, are potentially exposed to larger amounts of these pollutants.

For almost two decades beginning in 2000, Kucklick and Riget worked in conjunction with scientists from Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Iceland and Norway to track POPs in the fat of several marine mammals and in the tissue of shellfish and seabirds. They also monitored air in the Arctic circle for pollution.

To gain a fuller picture of how the deposition of POPs might have changed over time, the study included specimens archived since the 1980s and '90s in special storage facilities around the globe. The U.S. specimens were provided by the NIST Biorepository, located in Charleston, South Carolina. Samples archived in that facility are part of the Alaska Marine Mammal Tissue Archival Project (AMMTAP) or the Seabird Tissue Archival and Monitoring Project (STAMP). Both collections are conducted in collaboration with other federal agencies.

The study pooled more than 1,000 samples taken over the course of several decades from many different locations throughout the Arctic Circle. In general, the so-called legacy POPs--those that have been eliminated or restricted from production--were shown to be decreasing over the past two to three decades, although some had decreased more than others.

The biggest decreases were in a byproduct of the pesticide lindane, a-HCH, with a mean annual decline of 9 percent in Arctic wildlife.

The research team found PCBs had decreased as well. Most industrial countries banned PCBs in the 1970s and '80s, and their production was reduced under the Stockholm Convention in 2004. Previously, the compounds had been widely used in electrical systems. In this study, it was found that their presence had decreased by almost 4 percent per year across the Arctic region since being pulled from the market.

Two of the legacy POPs listed under Stockholm, -HCH and HCB, showed only small declines of less than 3 percent per year. -HCH was part of a heavily-used pesticide mixture with the active ingredient lindane and HCB was used both in agriculture and industry.

A small number of the legacy POPs had increased in a few locations, although some of those were at sites suspected to be influenced by strong, still-existing local pollution sources.

Notably, the flame retardant hexabromocyclododecane (HBCDD) showed an annual increase of 7.6 percent. HBCDD was one of 16 additional POPs added to the Stockholm Convention as of 2017 and is recommended for elimination from use, with certain exemptions.

Most of the research conducted for this paper was a direct result of the 2001 treaty stipulations, which included a requirement that sponsors participate in ongoing, long-term biological monitoring. Although the U.S. participated in the research, it has not ratified the treaty. It is expected that work on the treaty will continue as new POPs are identified.

This recent research work highlights the usefulness of long-term data and international scientific collaboration, says Riget. "You really need to gather more than 10 years of data before you can see the trend because in the short term there can be some small fluctuations," he notes. "Looking at this data also showed us how to be more economical and avoid over-sampling in the future."

###It was Aug. 14, 2017, just one week before the Moon would cross paths with the Sun and Earth, casting its shadow across the United States. The entire country buzzed with anticipation for the fleeting chance to see the corona, the Sun's tenuous outer atmosphere.

But the wait was uniquely nerve-wracking for a group of scientists at Predictive Science Inc., a private research company in San Diego: They had just published a prediction of what the corona would look like on Aug. 21, the day of the total solar eclipse. How would their prediction -- the result of a complex numerical model and tens of hours of computing -- compare to the real thing?

"Waiting for totality, you know exactly what you've predicted and what you're expecting," Predictive Science researcher Zoran Miki? said. "Because you work with the model so much and see the prediction so many times, it's burned into your brain. There's a lot of anxiety because if you're totally wrong, it's a bit embarrassing."

The Predictive Science researchers used data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, to develop a model that simulates the corona. Their model uses measurements of magnetic fields on the Sun's surface to predict how the magnetic field shapes the corona. Their work was supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Miki? is the lead author of a paper summarizing their work and published in Nature Astronomy on Aug. 27, 2018.

Coronal science is deeply rooted in the history of total eclipses; even with state-of-the-art technology, it's only during a total eclipse that scientists can resolve the lowest region of the corona, just above the Sun's surface. This dynamic part of the solar atmosphere is threaded with complex magnetic fields that supply the energy for tremendous eruptions like flares and coronal mass ejections.

As particles and radiation from solar explosions travel out from the Sun, they can manifest as disturbances in near-Earth space, known as space weather. Just as variable as the weather we experience on Earth, space weather can disrupt communications signals, astronauts and satellites in orbit, or even power grids.

The ability to forecast and predict space weather -- much like we do terrestrial weather -- is critical to mitigating these impacts, and models such as Predictive Science's are key tools in the effort.

Eclipses offer a unique opportunity for researchers to test their models. By comparing the model's corona prediction to observations during the eclipse itself, they could assess and improve the performance of their models.

The model the Predictive Science team used for the August 2017 eclipse was their most complex yet in two decades of eclipse-predicting.

Greater complexity demands more computing hours, and each simulation required thousands of processers and took about two days of real time to complete. The research group ran their model on several supercomputers including facilities at the University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computer Center; the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego; and the Pleiades supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California.

In addition to SDO's maps of the Sun's magnetic field, the model used SDO observations of prominences -- snakelike structures made of cool, dense solar material that protrude from the Sun's surface. Prominences form in stressed parts of the magnetic field, where it's twisted into a rope and capable of erupting if overwound.

The researchers also included new calculations for coronal heating. We don't yet understand how the corona blazes upwards of 2 million degrees Fahrenheit, while just 1,000 miles below, the underlying surface simmers at a balmy 10,000 F. One theory proposes electromagnetic waves -- called Alfven waves -- launched from the Sun's churning surface rush out into the corona, heating particles as they propagate outwards, a bit like how ocean waves push and accelerate surfers toward the shore.

By accounting for prominences and these tiny -- but numerous -- waves, the scientists hoped to paint an increasingly detailed portrait of the corona's complex behavior.

After the eclipse, the group found their prediction bore a striking resemblance to the Aug. 21, 2017, corona, although the model lacks many finer structures. Both the prediction and photos from the ground taken on the day of the eclipse show three helmet streamers -- immense, petal-shaped structures that form over a network of magnetic loops. The strength of the comparison supports advances in the new model.

Scientists have always known the twisted magnetic fields underlying prominences are an important part of the Sun, but the team's earlier models weren't sophisticated enough to reflect it. The same is true for the waves heating the corona. "In some sense, the model's performance tells us the new heating model is headed in the right direction," Miki? said. "It's certainly showing improved results. We should pursue and refine it further."

In the business of eclipse predictions, it helps when the Sun is quiet, or less active. In August 2017, the Sun was in one such quiet phase, moving steadily toward a period of low solar activity in its approximately 11-year cycle.

The scientists fed their model with magnetic field data collected from the Sun's Earth-facing side over the preceding 27 days -- the time it takes the Sun to complete one full rotation -- since they currently don't have a way to observe the entire spherical solar surface all at once. With that approach, measurements taken at the beginning of the 27-day period -- from parts of the Sun's surface that have subsequently rotated toward the back where they can no longer be seen -- are more likely to grow outdated than those taken at the end. But in times of diminished solar activity, the magnetic field isn't quick to change, so even 27-day-old data is useful.

One discrepancy between the prediction and the observations is a skinnier feature, called a pseudostreamer, that jets out from the Sun's upper-right. The researchers determined their model missed the pseudostreamer because the magnetic field changed in that specific region during the data collection. A different model's prediction successfully captured this pseudostreamer, Miki? said, because it appears to have estimated the magnetic field more accurately there.

"The biggest thing I take away from this is they've got a sophisticated model that looks good, but they're limited by their observations," said Alex Young, a solar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who wasn't involved with the study. "What the model misses is a matter of the Sun changing, and that's something they can't handle without enough observations from the right places."

Testing a model like this so thoroughly supports the idea that, with more data and diverse vantage points, scientists can better calculate the Sun's finer dynamics -- and ultimately improve their ability to forecast space weather events that can interfere with technology and astronauts in space.

Just under a year after millions glimpsed the corona themselves during the total eclipse, on Aug. 12, 2018, NASA launched Parker Solar Probe on its way to actually fly through the corona, going closer to the Sun than any spacecraft before.

Parker Solar Probe will send back to Earth observations from inside the corona itself, which researchers can add to their models, filling crucial knowledge gaps in the corona's complicated physics.

Miki? said models like theirs can complement the mission by contextualizing the spacecraft's journey through the corona. Scientists have never worked with data collected so close to the Sun. By modeling the entire corona -- the bigger picture -- researchers will provide crucial perspective on Parker's surroundings as it ventures into entirely unexplored territory.

"This is amazing science for Parker Solar Probe and from the eclipse, that shares one key purpose," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Beyond the science, this is about really advancing our understanding of and ability to predict space weather, a major impact we can have at NASA."

###Tropical cyclones continue to regularly develop in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. As Tropical Storm Miriam was developing, the GPM or Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite observed the rainfall happening within the storm.

Tropical Depression Fifteen-E (TD15E) formed in the eastern Pacific Ocean about 1,000 nautical miles (1852 km) southwest of the Baja California peninsula early on Sunday Aug. 26, 2018. TD15E became better organized with increased banding later in the day and was upgraded by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) to tropical storm Miriam.

The GPM core observatory satellite saw the forming tropical storm earlier on Aug. 26 at 0223 UTC (Aug. 25 at 10:23 p.m. EDT). Heavy rainfall near the center of the forming tropical cyclone was examined with the GPM satellite's Microwave Imager (GMI) and Dual-Frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) instruments. GPM's Radar (DPR Ku Band) revealed that extremely heavy rainfall was occurring within the organizing storm. GPM's radar measured rain falling at over 190 mm (7.5 inches) per hour in one powerful storm.

GPM's radar data (DPR Ku Band) revealed the 3D structure of precipitation within storms in the forming tropical cyclone. The most powerful storm in this simulated 3D view from the north-northeast was shown by GPM's radar to reach heights of about 15 km (9.3 miles). Energy, known as the latent heat of condensation, is released when precipitation occurs within these tall storms. This energy provides some of the fuel needed to form and sustain tropical cyclones. GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA.

At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC) on Aug. 27 the center of Tropical Storm Miriam was located near latitude 13.9 degrees north and longitude 130.5 degrees west. That's about 1,485 miles (2,385 km) west-southwest of the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico.

Miriam is moving toward the west near 14 mph (22 kph), and this general motion is expected to continue for the next couple of days. A turn toward the west-northwest is expected on Thursday. On the forecast track, Miriam will approach the central Pacific basin late Wednesday or Wednesday night.

Maximum sustained winds have increased to near 65 mph (100 kph) with higher gusts. Additional strengthening is forecast during the next 2 to 3 days, and Miriam is expected to become a hurricane tonight or early Tuesday, Aug. 28.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) predicts that Miriam will intensify as it moves toward the west along the southern periphery of the strong ridge to its north. Miriam is expected to become a hurricane tomorrow. The hurricane is expected to make a turn to the north in a few days as it moves into the central Pacific Ocean. Miriam is then forecast to weaken back to tropical storm intensity on September 1, 2018.

###

For updated forecasts on Miriam, visit: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov

Harold F. Pierce / Rob Gutro

NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterThe Jiachala Formation was fed largely from the Gangdese arc have long been considered as syn-collisional foreland-basin deposits based on the reported occurrence of Paleocene-early Eocene dinoflagellate cysts and pollen assemblages. Because magmatic activity in the Gangdese arc continued through the Late Cretaceous and Paleogene, this scenario is incompatible with U-Pb ages of detrital zircons invariably older than the latest Cretaceous.

In order to solve this incongruence and constrain the depositional age and tectonic setting of the Jiachala Formation, a new research was carried out with stratigraphic, sedimentological, provenance analysis including sandstone petrography, detrital zircon U-Pb age and Hf isotopic data; and paleontological analysis by Prof. Xiumian Hu's group at Nanjing University.

According to this research, the Jiachala Formation was originally deposited on a submarine fan in the trench environment at the active southern margin of the Asian plate. Sandstone petrography, detrital-zircon U-Pb ages and Hf isotope ratios indicate provenance from the Gangdese arc and the central Lhasa terrane. Because magmatic activity in the Gangdese arc was virtually continuous, the youngest population of detrital zircons contained in the Jiachala Formation constrain its depositional age as Late Cretaceous (~88-84 Ma). What's more, based on the U-Pb age spectra of detrital zircons and sandstone petrography, there are no Paleocene-Eocene units similar to the Jiachala Formation which compares well with Upper Cretaceous exposed within and close to the Yalung Zangbo suture zone (Figure 1).

Integrated geological information indicates that the Jiachala Formation accumulated in the Neo-Tethyan trench during subduction of oceanic lithosphere (Figure 1).In summary, this research gives a new interpretation about the Jiachala Formation and enriches the case study of the arc trench system of the active Asian continental margin.

###

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41525007, 41602115).

See the article: Fu H, Hu X, Crouch E M, An W, Wang J, Garzanti E. 2018. Upper Cretaceous trench deposits of the Neo-Tethyan subduction zone: Jiachala Formation from Yarlung Zangbo suture zone in Tibet, China. Science China Earth Sciences, 61: 1204-1220, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-017-9223-5

http://engine.scichina.com/doi/10.1007/s11430-017-9223-5Addressing interaction between genetic variant and post-traumatic stress may represent supplemental or alternative to treatment with addictive opioids

A study of more than 1,000 motor vehicle accident survivors published in JNeurosci reveals a common variant in a gene involved in the stress response that increases vulnerability to developing chronic pain. Addressing the interaction between this genetic variant and post-traumatic stress may represent a supplemental or alternative to treatment with addictive opioids.

Sarah Linnstaedt and colleagues conducted two prospective studies of European American and African American men and women admitted to the emergency room following a motor vehicle collision. In addition to genotyping these patients, the researchers assessed their distress immediately after the accident as well as their pain and post-traumatic stress symptoms six weeks later. Participants of both ethnicities with a particular variant in the gene FKBP5 reported more severe pain at follow up, which was related to their level of distress. Further analyses uncovered a molecular mechanism by which this variant increases FKBP5 expression and mediates its relationship with post-traumatic chronic pain.

###

Article: A functional riboSNitch in the 3'UTR of FKBP5 alters microRNA-320a binding efficiency and mediates vulnerability to chronic posttraumatic pain

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3458-17.2018

Corresponding author: Sarah Linnstaedt (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA), sarah_linnstaedt@med.unc.edu

About JNeurosci

JNeurosci, the Society for Neuroscience's first journal, was launched in 1981 as a means to communicate the findings of the highest quality neuroscience research to the growing field. Today, the journal remains committed to publishing cutting-edge neuroscience that will have an immediate and lasting scientific impact, while responding to authors' changing publishing needs, representing breadth of the field and diversity in authorship.

About The Society for Neuroscience

The Society for Neuroscience is the world's largest organization of scientists and physicians devoted to understanding the brain and nervous system. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1969, now has nearly 37,000 members in more than 90 countries and over 130 chapters worldwide.Scientists at Scripps Research have developed a urine diagnostic to detect the parasitic worms that cause river blindness, also called onchocerciasis, a tropical disease that afflicts 18 to 120 million people worldwide.

Described in the journal ACS Infectious Diseases, the new, non-invasive test may provide an inexpensive method of determining in real time whether a person has an infection, which would give public health officials and doctors critical information for tracking outbreaks and treating current infections.

"River blindness affects individuals both in Africa and Latin America, and because many of these endemic regions are difficult to access, what is needed in the field is an inexpensive point-of-care means to monitor the disease," says Kim Janda, PhD, the Ely R. Callaway Jr. Professor of Chemistry and member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at Scripps Research.

River blindness is a filarial disease, like elephantiasis, and occurs when the parasitic worm Onchocerca volvulus takes up residence in the skin. Adult worms pump out babies (microfilaria) at an alarming rate, which are ultimately re-spread by blackfly bites. The microfilariae can migrate to the eye and die, releasing toxins and causing inflammation. People with the disease will slowly go blind without medical intervention.

Janda says onchocerciasis monitoring and evaluation are especially necessary steps for people leading elimination efforts. To know if these efforts are working, doctors need to be able to show when disease transmission has been interrupted. The current gold standard for detecting the parasitic worms is a "skin snip" biopsy. However, snips are generally insensitive indicators of infection, and the sensitivity of the skin snip decreases as the density of microfilaria in the skin decreases. Other tests cannot distinguish between past and current infections.

Currently, onchocerciasis elimination programs rely primarily on mass drug administration of the therapy Ivermectin to suppress and eventually eliminate transmission of Onchocerca volvulus. Yet, without a means to evaluate if an infection is ongoing, it's hard to assess if prevention efforts are working--and if it's safe for people to stop taking medication.

The new lateral flow assay took over 10 years to develop, but it is now ready for manufacturing and testing in the field. The key to the assay's success was in the making of designer antibodies to detect a unique biomarker that only shows up when a human host has metabolized a worm neurotransmitter called tyramine. Humans then secrete this biomarker in urine.

A negative on the "dipstick" test shows a colored line in the test. Got the parasite? The test would show no lines.

Unlike the skin snip biopsy, Janda says this non-invasive test is the first to use a metabolite produced by adult worms. Moreover, the dipstick's inexpensive design, coupled with smartphone apps, would offer automatic image processing, which ultimately could translate to address critical gaps in the surveillance and treatment of river blindness.

###

Authors of the study, "Non-Invasive Urine Biomarker Lateral Flow Immunoassay for Monitoring Active Onchocerciasis Infection," were first author Ryan Shirey, Daniel Globisch, Lisa Eubanks and Mark S. Hixon of Scripps Research.

The work was supported by a donation by John Moore to The Worm Institute of Research and Medicine (WIRM) of Scripps Research, the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, and by the Institute for Medical Microbiology, Immunology and Parasitology, University Hospital of Bonn, Germany, as part of a consortium grant funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (grant OPP1083888).

About Scripps Research

Scripps Research is ranked the most influential scientific institution in the world for its impact on innovation. A nonprofit research organization, Scripps expands basic knowledge in the biosciences and uses these fundamental advancements to develop profound innovations that improve well-being. Scripps researchers lead breakthrough studies that address the world's most pressing health concerns, accelerating the creation and delivery of medical breakthroughs to better human health across the globe. Our educational and training programs mold talented and committed students and postdocs into the next generation of leading scientists.

For more information about Scripps Research visit http://www.scripps.edu. Follow @ScrippsResearch on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.A biochemist's startup company announced Monday that it had secured an exclusive patent license agreement with the Air Force Research Laboratory for a breakthrough technology that could help military veterans suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder.

Stephanie Davis, chief scientist and founder of the Boston-based Elke Therapeutics, said the agreement allows the company to develop the Air Force's patented neuropeptide Y binder as a stand-alone biomarker product or packaged with its proprietary therapeutic compound that modulates neuropeptide Y, a naturally occurring peptide that acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain.

High levels of neuropeptide Y are associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and drug addiction, Davis said, and manipulation of the compound has been identified as a potential therapy for controlling neural alterations in patients.

"This has an immense potential to improve healthcare," Davis said. "Its biosensor capabilities make it a great diagnostic tool and it can be used to monitor the effectiveness of neuropeptide Y drugs."

The technology licensed by Davis was invented by four researchers at the Air Force's 711th Human Performance Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Established under the Air Force Research Laboratory, the wing's workforce includes world-class scientists and engineers advancing human performance through research and collaboration with surrounding universities and medical institutions.

Davis found the Air Force technology in an online database of available military inventions built by TechLink, the Department of Defense's national partnership intermediary for technology transfer. TechLink works with the Air Force Technology Transfer Program, providing no-cost assistance to businesses that want to leverage Air Force science and engineering. According to the agreement, Davis has to pay an upfront licensing fee and a 4-percent royalty on sales.

Joan Wu-Singel, a senior technology manager at TechLink, guided Davis through the express licensing process.

"It's a young company but the science is there and Davis knows how to use it," said Wu-Singel.

In addition to PTSD, Davis is working on related therapies for metabolic syndrome and cardiomyopathy.

With the license secured, Davis said she plans to grow the company and move forward with in vitro and small animal studies.

"As a part-time professor, I've had students who were combat vets with PTSD, and witnessed its effects," Davis said. "Our long-term vision is to advance breakthrough products, and we're structured for early-stage monetization to get us there."

###(PHILADELPHIA) - Patients with a rare skin disease, commonly called Butterfly Syndrome, that causes chronic blistering and extensive scarring also develop an aggressive and fatal form of cancer early in life. Now an international team of scientists led by researchers at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center - Jefferson Health finds that immune system-related enzymes are major contributors to the cancer's development. The discovery identifies new therapeutic strategies and reveals how chronic inflammation can spur cancer.

"We're describing for the first time a mechanism that instigates tissue damage-driven cancers," said senior author Andrew South, PhD, an associate Professor in the department of Dermatology and Cutaneous Biology at Jefferson (Philadelphia University + Thomas Jefferson University) who published the work August 22nd in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Dr. South studies a severe skin disorder called recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (RDEB). The genetic disease makes the skin incredibly fragile--even the slightest touch can cause damage as the condition results from mutations in a gene that helps to hold layers of the skin together. A small scratch or brush of the skin can easily separate the layers and cause blisters that do not heal well. This often leads to considerable scarring. Most individuals with RDEB also develop a skin cancer called squamous cell carcinoma early in life.

"RDEB is a skin condition that leads to profound disability and lifelong pain for those who have it," said Sharmila Collins, Founder and Trustee of Cure EB (formerly Sohana Research Fund) and mother of a child with RDEB. "The daily routine of pricking blisters and dressing wounds takes hours, is very painful and has a profound impact on family life. After years of daily management, sufferers are at high risk of developing a very aggressive squamous cell carcinoma that leads to early death. Research into the mechanisms of this particular cancer with the aim of treating it, is therefore a priority. We are thrilled to have been able to support researchers at the forefront of this work."

Squamous cell carcinoma is a type of cancer that develops in tissues that act as a barrier to the environment such as the skin, but also the oral cavity, lungs and cervix. Many people develop this kind of cancer in their skin from sun exposure, and when detected early, squamous cell carcinoma of the skin is curable. But that's not the case for RDEB patients. Their five-year survival rate is close to zero.

Dr. South and colleagues wanted to figure out why the cancer is so frequent in RDEB patients and what makes it so aggressive. He reached out to labs and clinics around the world that treat these patients to collect as many RDEB squamous cell carcinoma samples as possible, including Jefferson's clinic for Adult EB patients, one of the few that offers treatment for cancer in this population. Then he and his team scrutinized the tumors' genetic makeup.

When the researchers examined the genetic sequences of RDEB patients' tumors, they found a group of enzymes called apolipoprotein B editing complex (APOBEC) caused a large proportion of the cancer's mutations. These proteins help our immune systems by editing nucleic acid messages in pathogens, and in us. When APOBEC enzymes edit our DNA's messages for example, they increase the diversity of antibodies available to fight off infection. In RDEB patients, inflammation from continued tissue damage and the persistent threat of microbial infection ratchets up APOBEC expression, leading the enzymes to attack the patient's DNA, which then creates cancer-causing mutations.

In fact, DNA changes from APOBEC account for 42 percent of mutations in an RDEB skin tumors. In most people with skin cancer, APOBEC is much less active, making up about only about two percent of the mutations in tumors. The finding means these APOBEC alterations distinguish RDEB skin cancer from the kind caused by sunlight. And since RDEB skin tumors develop in places with chronic wounds, the discovery further provides a mechanism for how inflammation and tissue damage spur cancer progression.

"We show for the first time that a different mutational process appears to promote cancers caused by chronic tissue damage, as observed in RDEB. This is potentially an invisible force that also contributes to a much broader range of cancers," said first author Raymond Cho, MD, PhD, a UCSF Health dermatologist and associate professor in the Department of Dermatology at UCSF.

Dr. South and colleagues then looked at which genes turn off or on and by how much in RDEB skin tumors compared to squamous cell carcinomas in other tissues. When the researchers grouped genes that perform similar biological functions together, they discovered RDEB skin cancers share more in common with those that develop in the oral cavity than cancer that develops in the skin from UV exposure. The finding reveals RDEB skin cancer acts more like squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity than the skin. Together with previous research that shows that like RDEB skin cancer, squamous cell carcinoma in the oral cavity is more aggressive than in the skin and also has more APOBEC mutations, Dr. South's discovery suggests therapeutic approaches for oral cancer might be effective against RDEB skin cancers.

"We should be treating those cancers in the RDEB patients similarly to how we treat cancer in the oral cavity," said Dr. South. "That's a direct clinical outcome from this research." Immune checkpoint inhibitors such as nivolumab, which the FDA has approved to treat oral squamous cell carcinoma, might also work against RDEB skin cancer for example, but researchers would first need to prove its efficacy.

"RDEB is a devastating and life-threatening disease that has a major impact on patients' quality of life and no approved treatment options. We are honored to work with Dr. Andrew South toward accelerating research on treatments and cures for EB and to deliver hope, healing, and results for families around the world," said Michael Hund, Executive Director, EB Research Partnership.

As a result of the new work, the Department of Defense recently awarded Dr. South with a grant for nearly $1.75 million USD to figure out what turns APOBEC enzymes on and to look for compounds that disable them. "Such inhibitors could be used to help prevent mutation acquisition and skin cancer development in RDEB patients," said Dr. South.

###

The Sohana Research Fund (now named Cure EB) and EB Research Partnership funded the bulk of the research described in this paper. Other contributors include Debra International and the National Cancer Institute (NCI 5R01CA194617).

Regarding the DoD award, The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and the Defense Health Agency J9, Research and Development Directorate, awarded this grant through the Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program under Award No. (W81XWH-18-1-0382). Opinions, interpretations, conclusions and recommendations are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Department of Defense.

Article reference: Raymond J. Cho et al., "APOBEC mutation drives early-onset squamous cell carcinomas in recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa," Science Translational Medicine, DOI:10.1126/scitranslmed.aas9668, 2018.

For Media Requests Contact: Edyta Zielinska, edyta.zielinska@jefferson.edu, 215-955-7359Researchers at UBC's Okanagan campus have developed a new and improved method to judge the effectiveness of experimental therapies for neurodegeneration--the progressive loss of neurons.

"Neurons--or nerve cells--are hugely important to our daily lives," says post doctoral fellow Aaron Johnstone and study lead author. "These specialized cells collect and process the large amounts of information that enter our bodies via our senses, control our muscles and organs, and form our thoughts and memories. When these cells become unhealthy, it leads to diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, ALS, glaucoma and chronic pain."

Johnstone says his study uses the first automated test specifically designed for measuring degeneration of sensory neurons grown in a lab.

"The variability in nerve cell lengths, densities and shapes have traditionally made it difficult to reliably analyze their health," says Johnstone. "This, in turn, has generated confusion about the effectiveness of potential pharmacological or genetic treatments."

Using the new approach, which is software-assisted, the research team were able to measure nerve cell densities more accurately.

To do this the team grew nerve cells in a lab environment, and after establishing healthy neurons researchers mimicked the conditions that cause neurodegeneration. Neuron loss was then captured using fluorescent microcopy--a process that makes the tiny cells easier to see--and analyzed using a computer algorithm.

Johnstone suggests that objective measurement is essential to the process of developing new medicines.

"This procedure makes evaluating new treatment options, like drugs or gene therapies, far more accurate and trustworthy," Johnstone adds.

###

The study is a collaboration between UBC Okanagan Vice Principal of Research Phil Barker's lab and Robin Hallett, research fellow at Toronto's Sick Kids Hospital.

The study, published in PLOS ONE was supported by funds from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Health Research Fund of Quebec.

About neurodegenerative disease

Neurodegenerative disease is an umbrella term for a range of conditions, which primarily affect the neurons of the brain, the sensory system, muscles and organs. Neurons are the building blocks of the nervous system. Neurodegenerative diseases are incurable and debilitating--dementia being the most common. More specific conditions include Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.Promising to solve an environmental problem may initially worsen it, according to researchers from UCSB and the University of Oregon

As ocean conservation efforts kick into high gear amid concerns over climate change, food insecurity and habitat degradation, a disturbing phenomenon may also be on the rise: preemptive overfishing in a given area in anticipation of impending conservation policies.

"We show that efforts to close off fishing in a major part of the world's ocean paradoxically led to more fishing, thus undermining the very conservation goal that was being sought," Kyle Meng, a professor at the UC Santa Barbara Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, said of his new research. Meng is a co-author of "The blue paradox: Preemptive overfishing in marine reserves," now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings have implications for general conservation efforts, as well as methods that scientists use to monitor and evaluate policy efficacy.

According to the researchers, while efforts to curtail overfishing and promote ocean biodiversity through the establishment of marine reserves have generally had positive results, the period leading up to implementation of policy can be a particularly vulnerable one. Fishermen, perhaps fearing the decline of their livelihood, recreation or general entitlement to their activity, tend to over-extract resources immediately before the protections become official.

"A simple way to think about it is that fishers face a 'use it or lose it' dilemma," said Grant McDermott, a professor at the University of Oregon and fellow co-author of the study. "And, like I presume many of us would in their situation, they invariably choose to fish as much as possible while they still can."

Such behavior was noted in the team's recent observation of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), a swath of central Pacific Ocean roughly the size of California, known for its remarkably diverse marine ecosystem. Using datasets and continuous satellite monitoring provided by Global Fishing Watch, the researchers found that in the period leading up to the ban on fishing in PIPA that was enacted on January 1, 2015 -- a successful ban celebrated by conservationists and scientists alike -- preemptive fishing placed PIPA in a more impoverished state by the time the policy was enforced. In fact, this extra preemptive fishing was equivalent to 1.5 years of avoided fishing following the ban.

Such events are not new, according to the study. In other environmental domains, similar policies affecting endangered species, water and land resources, and climate change policy, have seen similar anticipatory behaviors. For example, in advance of the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA), private landowners in North Carolina and elsewhere deforested their properties to minimize land-use restrictions that would go into play upon settlement by woodpecker colonies. As a result, red-cockaded woodpecker habitats declined after the bird gained protected status via ESA. This phenomenon also was evident in non-environmental circles, such as after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, when calls for tougher legislation led to a surge in firearm sales.

However, these previous examples are all land-based and involve clearly demarcated property rights, according to the authors. The striking thing about this latest study, they said, is that it demonstrates preemptive resource extraction can occur even in a marine setting, where property rights are usually far from secure. The precise conditions that would allow for this to occur in such a "commons" remains a topic for future research, however.

"While we do not know exactly why this behavior is occurring just yet," said Meng, "it is not hard to imagine that a fisher who has expertise in a particular fishing region may want to take advantage of that experience before a ban is implemented. After the ban, that know-how no longer has any value."

"Our goal in this study was to find out whether preemptive extraction is actually occurring in a marine setting and to quantify the effects," added McDermott. "Now that we've established those facts, we hope to uncover the underlying mechanisms more precisely in subsequent research."

In terms of marine overfishing, the researchers extrapolate that if other marine reserve announcements were to trigger similar preemptive fishing behavior, it could temporarily increase the share of global over-extracted fisheries from 65 percent to 72 percent. This increase, they say, undermines the very objective of the marine reserve and can push fisheries and fish populations in an already precarious state to a point of no return even before a ban is enacted. In addition, they said, a further depleted fish population means less income for fishers and the communities they live in.

"While a certain amount of preparatory time is needed for any future policy, we do urge future marine reserves to be implemented in a quicker manner," said co-author Christopher Costello, who is a professor at the Bren School. "Additionally, the ability to continuously monitor fishing activity around the world using data from Global Fishing Watch also suggests that such preemptive action can be detected and discouraged from happening even before the fishing ban takes place."

The group is currently investigating those possible remedies and exploring why fishers are engaging in this preemptive fishing behavior.

"Undercovering the exact motives behind this phenomenon will help us go a long way toward ultimately preventing it from happening," Meng said.

###CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers reveal techniques - inspired by the study of information theory - to track how changes in precipitation alter interactions between the atmosphere, vegetation and soil at two National Science Foundation Critical Zone Observatory sites in the western United States.

"Information arising from fluctuations in rainfall moves through ecosystems, similar to the way that information flows through communication networks," said Praveen Kumar, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and study co-author. "This type of analysis, which is new to ecological and hydrological studies, lets us determine how well different aspects of an ecosystem are connected and whether responses to changes in climate are site-specific or common across different ecosystems."

The researchers looked at changes in heat, soil moisture and carbon flow - known as fluxes - before, during and after rainfall and drought events in two locations. The first site, in southwestern Idaho, experienced several days of rainfall during July 2015. The second, in the Southern Sierra region of California, experienced a multiyear drought starting in 2012.

"At the Idaho site, we saw increased connectivity between the atmosphere and soil in the period directly after the rainfall," said Allison Goodwell, a civil engineering professor at the University of Colorado, Denver who is a former Illinois graduate student and lead author of the new study. "At the Southern Sierra site, we found that heat and carbon fluxes responded to the drought in different ways, and that sources of connectivity varied between high- and low-elevation sites."

"Another aspect that made this study unique was the availability of data from multiple stations at different elevations at each site," Kumar said. "This allowed us to see if the changes in connectivity were due to climate differences resulting from elevation. Normally, the data collection stations are isolated, making it difficult to perform this type of comparative analysis."

Although the field sites and data are from different ecosystems, times and weather disturbances, the study provides insight into how connectivity influences different types of fluxes, the researchers said. Stronger connectivity alters how rainfall affects moisture, heat and carbon flux in the system, and the progression from early to late-stage drought.

"These results show the ways in which a watershed may respond to precipitation disturbances, in this case drought," said Richard Yuretich, the program director for the NSF Critical Zone Observatories. "The information is important to predicting how ecosystems will respond to future extreme events."

###

Aaron Fellows and Gerald Flerchinger from the U.S. Department of Agriculture also contributed to this research.

The National Science Foundation Grant for the Critical Zone Observatory for Intensively Managed Landscapes and the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship supported this research.

Editor's notes:

To reach Praveen Kumar, call 217-300-4688; kumar1@illinois.edu.

To reach Allison Goodwell, call 303-315-7499; allison.goodwell@ucdenver.edu.

The paper "Dynamic process connectivity explains ecohydrologic responses to rainfall pulses and drought" is available from the U. of I. News Bureau.

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1800236115A geographic profiling tool used to catch serial criminals could help reduce the casualties of human-tiger conflict, according to scientists who collaborated on an innovative conservation research study.

A geographic profiling tool used to catch serial criminals could help reduce the casualties of human-tiger conflict, according to scientists who collaborated on an innovative conservation research study.

The results of their research, published in Nature Communications, help explain how villagers in Sumatra coexist with tigers. If used pre-emptively it could have helped cut attacks by half, saving tigers from poaching and retaliation killings.

Dr Matthew Struebig at the University of Kent's Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, in its School of Anthropology and Conservation and Dr Freya St. John at Bangor University, led a collaboration between spatial ecologists and social scientists to help predict where human-tiger conflict interventions could be most effective.

Tigers are on the brink of extinction due to deforestation and persecution. They are highly threatened and pose a public threat, but in Sumatra tigers continue to coexist with people, offering insights for managing dangerous wildlife elsewhere. Millions of conservation funds are spent each year trying to reduce people's risk of encountering harmful animals, and mitigating livestock losses of local farmers.

To reveal the drivers of human-tiger conflict the team coupled spatial analyses of tiger encounter risk with information from 2,386 Sumatrans who were asked about their tolerance of wildlife. To map risk, the study used 13 years of human-tiger encounter records to generate a geographic profile - a sophisticated statistical technique previously used throughout the world to predict the whereabouts of serial criminals based on where their crimes have been committed.

Although the risk of encountering a tiger was generally greater around populated villages near forest or rivers, the geographic profile revealed three places where risk was particularly high. At the same time questionnaires revealed that people's tolerance for tigers was related to their underlying attitudes, emotions, norms and spiritual beliefs.

By combining this information, the team was able to highlight villages where risk was adversely high, and tolerance was unusually low - valuable guidance for organisations such as Fauna & Flora International, an international conservation charity that supports the Indonesian authorities and other in-country partners in Sumatra, helping them to prioritise conflict interventions.

The techniques used in this study are highly significant and open up new possibilities for more targeted actions that will not only boost efficiency, but - more importantly - ensure that fewer people and tigers come to harm as a result of their interactions. This research has shown for example that, had this information been available at the time, pre-emptive interventions using these predictions could have averted up to 51% of attacks on livestock and people, potentially saving 15 tigers.

Dr Struebig said: 'Understanding people's tolerance is key to managing dangerous species and is particularly urgent for tigers. When combined with our maps of encounter risk, information on people's tolerance to wildlife helps us direct conservation resources to where they are needed most. This could amount to significant cost savings in terms of animals lost or funding spent, so could be very useful in conservation.'

###

The research published in Nature Communications, also provides further evidence of the benefits of interdisciplinary research on such conservation conflicts.

Addressing human-tiger conflict using socio-ecological information on tolerance and risk by Matthew Struebig, Nicolas Deere, and Jeanne McKay, all University of Kent; Matthew Linkie, Wildlife Conservation Society Indonesia; Betty Millyanawati, Fauna & Flora International Indonesia; Fachruddin Mangunjaya, Universitas Nasional Indonesia; Sally Faulkner and Steven Le Comber, Queen Mary University of London; Nigel Leader-Williams, University of Cambridge; and Freya St. John, University of Kent and Bangor University.

For further information or interview requests contact Sandy Fleming at the University of Kent Press Office.

Tel: 01227 823581

Email: S.Fleming@kent.ac.uk

News releases can also be found at http://www.kent.ac.uk/news

University of Kent on Twitter: http://twitter.com/UniKent

Established in 1965, the University of Kent - the UK's European university - now has almost 20,000 students across campuses or study centres at Canterbury, Medway, Tonbridge, Brussels, Paris, Athens and Rome.

It has been ranked 22nd in the Guardian University Guide 2018 and in June 2017 was awarded a gold rating, the highest, in the UK Government's Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

In the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2015-16, it is in the top 10% of the world's leading universities for international outlook and 66th in its table of the most international universities in the world. The THE also ranked the University as 20th in its 'Table of Tables' 2016.

Kent is ranked 17th in the UK for research intensity (REF 2014). It has world-leading research in all subjects and 97% of its research is deemed by the REF to be of international quality.

In the National Student Survey 2016, Kent achieved the fourth highest score for overall student satisfaction, out of all publicly funded, multi-faculty universities.

Along with the universities of East Anglia and Essex, Kent is a member of the Eastern Arc Research Consortium (http://www.kent.ac.uk/about/partnerships/eastern-arc.html).

The University is worth 0.7 billion to the economy of the south east and supports more than 7,800 jobs in the region. Student off-campus spend contributes 293.3m and 2,532 full-time-equivalent jobs to those totals.

Kent has received two Queen's Anniversary prizes for Higher and Further Education.

FFI protects threatened species and ecosystems worldwide, choosing solutions that are sustainable, based on sound science and that take account of human needs. Operating in more than 40 countries worldwide, FFI saves species from extinction and habitats from destruction, while improving the livelihoods of local people. Founded in 1903, FFI is the world's longest established international wildlife conservation organisation and a registered charity.Two new $1 million awards from the National Science Foundation aim to help researchers take advantage of the latest advances in data science, networking and computation while protecting the integrity of their scientific work. The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will serve as lead institution on both projects.

Many scientists today use sophisticated data-intensive approaches to combine and analyze large data sets from scientific instruments and data stores all over the country. While these techniques hold great value for discovery and innovation, integrating the necessary data and tools into a scientist's workflow is often a complex undertaking. In addition, errors can be introduced when data is moved or analyzed; if those errors go undetected, it can compromise the science.

With the two new grants, NSF's Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is supporting RENCI and its collaborators for developing a high-performance, end-to-end platform to facilitate the use and processing of scientific data and with developing a system to detect and diagnose unintentional data errors. The ultimate aim of both projects is to improve the productivity of America's scientists and increase confidence in the outcomes of their work.

Detecting data errors

This week NSF announced an award of $999,575 over three years to support Integrity Introspection for Scientific Workflows (IRIS), a project to develop a seamless system to uncover unintentional data errors. While previous work has focused on catching malicious hackers or software bugs, IRIS will be the first to specifically address the detection of unintentional--and often unseen--errors that can be introduced when working with big data.

"Like a game of telephone, sometimes the data that goes in one end of the process is not exactly the same as the data that comes out the other end," said RENCI research scientist Anirban Mandal, the project's Principal Investigator. "Some of these errors can go undetected and as a result the scientific analysis or simulation gives wrong answers, and the scientist may not even be aware of that. Many of these errors are not very obvious, and it takes complex analysis to catch them and find the root cause."

RENCI, the project's lead institution, will receive $400,000. Collaborators include Von Welch at Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research and Ewa Deelman of University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute's Science Automation Technologies.

The project will use machine learning techniques to monitor data at different points in the research workflow, identify unintentional errors and trace their origins. Once developed, the error detection and analysis tool will be integrated with Pegasus, a software widely used by scientists to manage the computations on and the movement and use of big data so that scientists can readily integrate automatic error detection into their scientific analysis processes. IRIS researchers will use data and tools from scientific applications in gravitational wave physics, earthquake science and bioinformatics to develop, validate and test their methods.

"We're using these domain applications to drive our computer science research, and the outcomes of the computer science research will feed back into the domain sciences," said Mandal. "While the focus on detecting and analyzing unintentional errors is an angle that we haven't explored before, the project builds on our current work in the NSF SWIP project, research conducted in the NRIG research group, and it leverages RENCI's long history of supporting domain scientists' ability to use distributed large-scale computational infrastructure."

Moving from possible to feasible

The second project, Delivering a Dynamic Network-centric Platform for Data-driven Science (DyNamo), also uses Pegasus as a platform. In this case, the aim is to help scientists take better advantage of available resources and high performance networks for working with large data sets scattered in facilities around the country. The project, announced in July, provides a total of $1 million over two years.

"Many distributed computing resources and high-speed networks currently exist but are not used effectively because they're too hard to use," said Mandal, the project's Principal Investigator. "To make it easier for scientists to use these resources, we will build a platform that bridges the gap between the capabilities that are out there and what scientists can realistically integrate into their workflows."

RENCI, the project's lead institution, will receive $375,000. Co-Principal Investigators include Ewa Deelman of the University of Southern California, Michael Zink of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Cong Wang of RENCI, and Ivan Rodero of Rutgers.

The fundamental idea behind DyNamo is that scientists should be able to spend more time doing science and less time figuring out how to navigate complicated systems for accessing, moving and analyzing data. The project will develop new algorithms, policies and mechanisms to coordinate access to data repositories and facilitate their use.

The team will work with domain scientists from the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) and Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) communities to develop and test an end-to-end system that can be seamlessly integrated into Pegasus. If it works for CASA and OOI researchers, who heavily depend on scientific instruments, big data sets and simulations to study the atmosphere and oceans, respectively, then it will be well positioned to work for many other scientific domains.

The researchers will test new algorithms and models in real time with live streaming data, which is currently not possible in many scientific domains including CASA and OOI. By serving as testbeds for DyNamo, the CASA and OOI scientific communities will benefit from its capabilities early on, potentially speeding advances in weather forecasting and advancing understanding of how the oceans impact ecosystems, the atmosphere and human society.

###PHILADELPHIA - Adding another inhibitor to therapies that cut off a tumor's access to blood vessels could be the key to helping those therapies overcome resistance in glioblastoma, a deadly form of brain cancer. Drugs that target the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) - a signaling protein that stimulates the formation of blood vessels - are available but have yet to show an overall survival benefit in many malignant cancers. Now researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have shown the key may lie in adding an additional inhibitor that blocks the platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), which regulates cell growth and division. The study not only identifies PDGF as a combination target for anti-VEGF therapies, but it also shows that pairing makes tumors more sensitive to anti-VEGF therapies in mice. Nature Communications published the findings today.

The American Cancer Society estimates there will be almost 24,000 diagnoses of malignant glioblastoma in the United States in 2018. It is the most common and most aggressive primary brain tumor, and patients have a median survival of about 14 months. One treatment approach involves targeting VEGF - most commonly with the drug bevacizumab -, with the idea being that cutting the tumor's access to blood vessels will cut off its supply of oxygen and nutrients it needs to survive.

A team led by senior author Yi Fan, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of Radiation Oncology at Penn, analyzed human glioblastoma specimens and found VEGF receptor expression was reduced in tumor-associated endothelial cells - the cells that line the interior surface of the blood vessels. In other words, the tumors are transforming the endothelial cells to make these cells resistant to anti-VEGF therapies. That's where the second inhibitor comes in. Researchers identified a PDGF pathway to knock out called PDGF/NF-B/Snail. Blocking that pathway prevented the tumor endothelial cells from transforming, leaving the cancer vulnerable.

"This could be the key to solving the biggest problem in the field of anti-vascular cancer therapies," Fan said. "Tumors are highly resistant to anti-VEGF therapies alone, but our study shows the flaw is in the current treatment, not the concept itself."

Tianrun Liu, MD, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Fan's lab, is the study's lead author.

Since drugs already exist that can target both pathways, researchers put the combination to the test and showed that blocking both VEGF and PDGF improved overall survival in mice.

"These findings point the way toward a next generation of anti-VEGF therapies, opening the door to version 2.0," Fan said.

Fan noted that further research is needed to evaluate this combination in humans, as well as to look for other potential targets.

###

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R00HL103792, R01NS094533, R01CA190415), an American Association for Cancer Research Judah Folkman Award, a B*Cured Foundation Brain Cancer Investigator Award, and a McCabe Award.

Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $7.8 billion enterprise.

The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top medical schools in the United States for more than 20 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $405 million awarded in the 2017 fiscal year.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center -- which are recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report -- Chester County Hospital; Lancaster General Health; Penn Medicine Princeton Health; Penn Wissahickon Hospice; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional affiliated inpatient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, a partnership between Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network and Penn Medicine, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, a leading provider of highly skilled and compassionate behavioral healthcare.

Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2017, Penn Medicine provided more than $500 million to benefit our community.PHILADELPHIA --With medical school loan debt averaging $200,000, many physicians pursue the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program that eliminates federal student loans after 10 years of service in the public sector. But the fate of the program hangs in the balance, as government officials signal a desire to end it, leaving physicians in a lingering uncertainty that's unnecessary and unfair, health policy experts from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and three other medical institutions argue in a new commentary published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

"There are justifiable reasons to support the program and also justifiable reasons to change it," senior author David A. Asch, MD, a professor of Medicine and Medical Ethics and Health Policy and executive director of the Penn Center for Health Care Innovation, and his colleagues wrote. "But there are no justifiable reasons to keep recent graduates in suspense."

The program, which began in 2007 under President George W. Bush, forgives remaining federal debt for borrowers who have made 120 payments or 10 years' worth of loan repayments while employed at nonprofit or public institutions. Those conditions are particularly favorable for physicians, as most begin their careers in residency programs - which counts towards years of repayment - at nonprofit medical centers or hospitals, and often continue in that setting afterwards. According to the authors, a third of 2017 graduates who borrowed money for medical school report planning to use the program.

Recently, the program has been threatened with elimination by Congress and the Trump administration, with little guidance about the fate of current borrowers.

A U.S. House of Representatives proposal makes borrowers after July 1, 2019 ineligible for the program - and leaves unclear whether borrowers pursuing federal loans prior to that time will be grandfathered in. Further muddying the waters, the Department of Education retroactively reversed certifications for some lawyers working in nonprofit institutions, and indicated that certifications are now temporary and subject to final approval by them.

It's what the authors call an "unnecessary uncertainty" that deserves clarity and swift decisions. "Physicians are trained to handle uncertainty but that does not excuse leaving new physicians facing uncertainties that can be easily resolved," they wrote. "Even as we consider new approaches toward financing training for public service, we should insist on clarity for those who have already pursued it."

The program is not without its problems, including issues such as insufficient cost estimates.

While it could help the mounting problem of educational debt in America, the designers of the program may have been thinking more about lower paid public school teachers and not have anticipated how many higher paid physicians would be eligible and how the long years of training would increase the proportion of physician debt relieved from the program. "It's structured to encourage borrowers to minimize current loan repayment to maximize eventual loan forgiveness," says Asch. "That's a strategy that could work out well for physicians and other borrowers," he added, "but it's also a risky one--one that could lead young physicians to accumulate even more debt as they delay paying off loans."

Physicians pursuing higher earning specialties with typically longer training, such as neurosurgery, also end up responsible for less of their debt repayment than physicians pursuing lower earning specialties with typically shorter training, such as family medicine. "That probably was not an intended consequence of the program's structure, but it's nevertheless a perverse outcome, given recognized shortages and relatively low pay in primary care fields compared to subspecialties," says Justin Grischkan, MD, the lead author of the study and a resident physician in Internal Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Still, expunging the program, rather than fixing it, would not only worsen educational debt, it may also prevent people from entering the medical workforce. "Physicians who are planning to use the program are more likely to graduate with higher debt, receive less scholarship support and come from backgrounds with lower parental income" Grischkan says. As more medical students come from high-income backgrounds that can support their education without debt (nearly one third of graduates), overall debt is further concentrated among those with the most need, the authors said.

"A medical degree is increasingly out of reach of many who might contribute to a workforce more responsive to diverse national needs," the authors wrote. Ending that program "may remove a financial support critical to national interests."

The authors estimate annualized costs for the program at around $1 billion for physician medical education. Ending it could redirect that $1 billion more efficiently toward health care workforce goals, but it's more plausible that those funds would go elsewhere, they said. "A flawed program may be better than none at all."

###

Co-authors of the study include Benjamin P. George MD, MPH at Yale New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Conn., and E. Ray Dorsey MD, MBA, of the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry in Rochester, NY.

Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $7.8 billion enterprise.

The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top medical schools in the United States for more than 20 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $405 million awarded in the 2017 fiscal year.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center -- which are recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report -- Chester County Hospital; Lancaster General Health; Penn Medicine Princeton Health; Penn Wissahickon Hospice; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional affiliated inpatient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, a partnership between Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network and Penn Medicine, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, a leading provider of highly skilled and compassionate behavioral healthcare.

Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2017, Penn Medicine provided more than $500 million to benefit our community.On 23 August 2018, Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland signed a collaboration agreement on the CERES flagship programme and took a concrete step towards a joint innovation ecosystem in the field of bioeconomy. The aim is to develop materials from renewable resources in order to safeguard a sustainable future. The Academy of Finland has granted a EUR 9.5 million flagship funding for the first four years of the project. An extension funding for the next four-year period will be based on an interim evaluation. The total funding of the project is EUR 24 million.

The CERES innovation ecosystem will create a unique foundation for new bioeconomy innovations in Finland. Plant-based biomaterial is the future plastics and, according to researchers, much beyond. The purpose of this ecosystem is to develop new materials, in particular based on lignocellulose and forest biomass, for industrial-scale production of packaging, textiles and separation systems, as well as semiconductors, composites and solutions for energy storage.

According to VTT's scenario calculations, if used to manufacture high added-value products, Finnish forest and field biomass could double in value by 2050. It is possible to do all this and, at the same time, reach the climate targets set for the country. This scenario work is the first analysis of Finland's potential in the bioeconomy and its transition to a low-carbon economy, which takes account of all industrial and emission sectors.

The objective of Finland's national bioeconomy strategy is to create 100,000 new jobs in the country and increase the bioeconomy output by EUR 40 billion by 2025. The research and development work to be performed under CERES will support the delivery of this objective and help companies to make new openings in the international market.

On 23 August 2018, VTT President and CEO Antti Vasara and Aalto University President Ilkka Niemela signed a collaboration agreement to establish the CERES ecosystem. In this agreement, both parties emphasise their willingness to create a joint ecosystem in the field of biomaterial research, as well as create ground rules for successful cooperation. The agreement also aims to support the commercial exploitation of project results.

CERES will function as a virtual knowledge centre. It will develop new methods for biomass processing as well as material solutions based on these, and provide the industry long-term, globally cutting-edge R&D work.

###

The Academy of Finland's funding decision, press release of 18 April 2018: https://www.aka.fi/en/about-us/media/press-releases/2018/academy-of-finland-selects-first-two-competence-clusters-to-the-new-flagship-programme/

VTT prepares development paths towards 2050 climate goals, press release 27 March 2018: https://www.vttresearch.com/media/news/vtt-prepares-development-paths-towards-2050-climate-goals Further information:

Aalto University

Professor Orlando Rojas

tel. +358 50 512 4227, orlando.rojas@aalto.fi

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd

Research Professor Kristiina Kruus

tel. +358 50 520 2471, kristiina.kruus@vtt.fi Further information on VTT:

Paula Bergqvist

Specialist, External Communications

+358 20 722 5161

paula.bergqvist@vtt.fi

http://www.vtt.fi

VTT Ltd is one of Europe's leading research, development and innovation organisations. We help our customers and society to grow and renew through applied research. The business sector and society in general benefit most from VTT when we solve challenges requiring world-class know-how together, and convert them into business opportunities. VTT in social media: Twitter @VTTFinland, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram. For photos and videos, please visit our Image Bank.If you've ever experienced jet lag, you are familiar with your circadian rhythm, which manages nearly all aspects of metabolism, from sleep-wake cycles to body temperature to digestion. Every cell in the body has a circadian clock, but researchers were unclear about how networks of cells connect with each other over time and how those time-varying connections impact network functions.

In research published Aug. 27 in PNAS, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and collaborating institutions developed a unified, data-driven computational approach to infer and reveal these connections in biological and chemical oscillatory networks, known as the topology of these complex networks, based on their time-series data. Once they establish the topology, they can infer how the agents, or cells, in the network work together in synchrony, an important state for the brain. Abnormal synchrony has been linked to a variety of brain disorders, such as epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

Jr-Shin Li, professor of systems science & mathematics and an applied mathematician in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, developed an algorithm, called the ICON (infer connections of networks) method, that shows for the first time the strength of these connections over time. Previously, researchers could only determine whether a connection existed between networks.

Li and collaborators first tested their method on simulated network of different sizes they created. Next, they tested the method on a network of oscillators -- populations of dynamic units that repeatedly fire together, go silent, then fire together again -- created in the lab by Istvan Kiss, professor of chemistry at Saint Louis University. When they applied Li's algorithm to the network of interactions among the synthetic oscillators, the results matched what Kiss had determined through his experiments, finding the same connections in a network of 15 chemical oscillators. Such prediction of this dynamic topology was not previously possible, the researchers said.

Li said this method has a variety of applications beyond cell networks.

"This lays the foundation to analyze real-world complex networks of tremendous size, such as transportation, internet, power grids, and social networks," he said.

Li also collaborated with Erik Herzog, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University who studies the cellular and molecular basis of circadian rhythms in mammals, to determine the connections between cells in a mouse brain. Herzog measured the circadian rhythm from 541 cells from the right and left sides of the mouse brain, then asked Li to estimate how these connections changed over time -- something that hadn't been done in the biology field.

"The connection at one time may be strong, but at another time it may be stronger or weaker, so we can use this data to recover the functional connectivity," Li said. "If we know this, then we know the network, then we can do more study and investigate over time whether this network will be synchronized or whether specific dynamic patterns will emerge."

Herzog said ICON would help him and other scientists to understand principles that allow systems to efficiently synchronize.

"For example, we want to define the essential features of networks of cells that keep daily time under different conditions," Herzog said. "We hope that ICON can map out connections and describe the interactions, such as attraction versus repulsion, of cells at different developmental stages so we can understand more about how circadian systems assemble after birth, adapt to challenges such as winter or summer, and fail to coordinate during stressors such as shift work or flying across multiple time zones."

In another experiment, collaborator William Schwartz, a former visiting professor of biology at Washington University now at the University of Texas at Austin, tested the method on seven groups of five mice who were housed together for a period of time as social networks. Schwartz measured the oscillations of the mice at the end of the experiment and provided the data to Li, who applied his algorithm to infer results from the data. In the end, both Schwartz and Li found that four of the groups of mice had social synchronization because they had the same body temperatures at the end of their time together. Three groups did not have the same body temperatures and were not socially synchronized.

###

Wang S, Herzog E, Kiss I, Schwartz W, Bloch G, Sebek M, Granados-Fuentes D, Wang L, Li, J-S. "Inferring Dynamic Topology for Decoding Spatiotemporal Structures in Complex Heterogeneous Networks." PNAS, Aug. 27, 2018, http://www.pnas.org/lookup/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721286115.

This research was supported by funding from the National Academy of Science Keck Future Initiative seed grant; the National Science Foundation; the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR); and the National Institutes of Health (1R21-EY027590-01, U01EB021956, NS09536702 and GM094109).

The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 96.5 tenured/tenure-track and 33 additional full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, 1,200 graduate students and 21,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners -- across disciplines and across the world -- to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.Political news was the primary driver of British Pound to South African Rand (GBP/ZAR) exchange rate movement last week, and that looks to continue in the coming week too. A lack of notable ecostats for most of the week will leave investors paying closer attention to Brexit news and geopolitics.

After opening at the level of 18.66 last week, GBP/ZAR spent most of the week trending with a downside bias. On Wednesday, GBP/ZAR briefly touched on a weekly low of 18.28, though investors were hesitant to buy the Rand much higher as political uncertainties weighed on the Rand too. On Friday, GBP/ZAR trended in the region of 18.35.

British Pound (GBP) Tumbles Versus South African Rand (ZAR) as Brexit Fears Revive

Despite weakness in the South African Rand last week, it was generally able to climb versus an even weaker Pound as Brexit uncerta

inties revived.

Demand for emerging market currencies like the South African Rand improved significantly earlier in the week due to a US Dollar (USD) selloff, which made it easier for the Rand to register gains against Sterling.

The South African Rand was able to more easily capitalise thanks to persistent Brexit fears weighing heavily on Sterling.

Concerns about how Brexit uncertainties are limiting UK economic activity have prevented the Pound from recovering too far from its recent lows, and Sterling became even weaker towards the end of the week when no deal Brexit concerns returned to focus.

As the UK government revealed its contingency plans for the possibility of a no deal outcome to Brexit negotiations, investors panicked at the possibility that a no deal Brexit could become reality.

According to Kit Juckes, Chief FX Strategist at Societe Generale:

Fears of a no deal Brexit fears are reaching fever pitch ... Sterling has no support other than a bearish consensus and a low valuation,

Meanwhile, the South African Rand remained resilient. Markets briefly panicked when US President Donald Trump tweeted criticism towards South Africas current political controversies.

According to Cristian Maggio from TD Securities, Trumps tweets didnt actually change South Africas outlook though:

I am concerned about land reform but I dont see why markets should be more concerned if Trump is asking Pompeo to check whats happening - its a purely domestic sovereign matter for South Africa.

Overall, the South African Rand continued to benefit from the emerging market rally and US Dollar weakness, as well as Federal Reserve uncertainties, keeping GBP/ZAR near weekly lows.

Pound (GBP) Exchange Rates Forecast: No Deal Brexit Fears to Dominate GBP Movement

As next weeks UK economic calendar will be relatively quiet until UK consumer confidence data comes in on Friday, Pound movement is likely to be influenced by political developments  especially any potential Brexit developments.

Since the UK government announced its plans for a potential no deal Brexit last week and also indicated that October was no longer the deadline for a potential Brexit deal, Brexit uncertainties have returned to the forefront of market concerns.

Brexit uncertainties could actually keep notable pressure on the Pound for months, at least until more clarity is offered on what sort of Brexit outcome is most likely.

With the UK and EU not expecting to reach a deal until October or potentially later, the Pound is unlikely to see a notable boost in demand any time soon.

Even if upcoming UK consumer confidence data beats expectations, Brexit uncertainties will put a cap on the Pounds potential for gains.

South African Rand (ZAR) Exchange Rates Forecast: South African Trade Stats Ahead

The South African Rand has been benefitting from US Dollar (USD) weakness and an emerging market rally in recent sessions, but the rally may slow and the South African Rand may react more to domestic news.

Of course, the strength of the US Dollar and global geopolitics and risk-sentiment will continue to be influential, but if South Africas own political uncertainties persist the South African Rand may struggle to hold its recent gains.

Markets are concerned by the possibility that the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) could be nationalised, with uncertainty that this may influence the banks mandate.

There are also concerns about tensions between the US and South Africa following Trumps criticism last week.

In terms of data, next Fridays South African trade report from July could influence the South African Rand too.My Thai wife (she has her carte de sejour) is expecting a baby in January. We are French residents, paid taxes since 2013. I am retired. She does not work. We have top up health insurance.



I see a bewildering amount of information about allowances for having a baby. but have no idea what exactly we can claim. We already have one son aged 5.



Although French resident we have been in Thailand for some months visiting family.. My wife became pregnant in Thailand and her scans etc have been done in Thailand to date. We return to France mid September.



Any advice appreciated (our French is limited to discuss with services)Privacy Settings

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A Pennsylvania grand jury recently delivered its account of rampant abuse that involved 1,000 children, 300 priests, and 70 years of silence or denial from the Catholic Church. According to an Associated Press article on August 16, 2018, Pope Francis expressed shame and sorrow and stated he wanted to eradicate this tragic horror.."

The history of the Catholic Church reflects a consistent pattern of celibate clergy violating their obligations and vows. According to a short history written by Thomas Doyle, JCD, this includes abuse with adults of the same sex, women, and children. From the late nineteenth into the early twenty-first century, Church leadership adopted a position of secrecy and silence, but in previous centuries they quite publicly acknowledged it.

In the sixteenth century, for example, sexual abuses led, in part, to the Protestant Reformation, whose proponents believed celibacy caused moral corruption. Consequently, new religions were initiated in which clergy not only served as pastors, they also married, had children, and lived a customary family life. From my perspective this change was positive: clergy became able to sexually express themselves in a healthy and beneficial way, which helped them understand and relate to the congregation in a more realistic capacity.

Today many are aware that an intricate relationship exists between psychology, spirituality, and sexuality. My award-winning book, Grow Up Your Ego: Ten Scientifically Validated Stages to Emotional and Spiritual Maturity, provides practical exercises to help identify and address aspects needing attention in our own lives. My approach is optimistic:

with intention, we can continue to develop our ego functioning and our spirituality;

we are not bound by the pains and insults of the past; and

no matter our age, we can continue to grow and increase our ability to live fully.

I believe deeply rooted patterns of trauma and secrecy are beginning to shift. The abuse in the Pennsylvania Catholic diocese coming to light and being dealt with is but one example. Another example is the emergence of womens voices within the Catholic Church. Nuns on the Bus." is an organization founded by Catholic Sisters in the progressive spirit of Vatican II. Rooted in Catholic social justice ideals, this organization is open to all who:

value womens leadership;

accept and appreciate people from religious as well as secular backgrounds;

welcome and affirm members of the LGBTQ+ community; and

support multiculturalism and anti-racism.

As their name implies, Nuns on the Bus tour the country. In 2018, they will travel through twelve states to discuss economic inequality, elections, immigration, and other key issues. They plan to bring what they learn from voters to President Trump. More information is available at www.nunsonthebus.org.

This sort of shift in awareness is happening on many levels in our culture todayfrom the #MeToo movement to race inequality to politics to transparency in the Catholic Church. We are being asked to really look at the shadows in our institutions and in ourselves. There is a certain type of behavior we will no longer tolerate. Comments on your experiences and feelings during this important time are much appreciated. What are some of the areas in your own community or even within yourself that still need work?The two heads of San Antonios most prominent lobbying organization for hoteliers each got their start in the local tourism industry.

Liza Barratachea, CEO of the San Antonio Hotel and Lodging Association, got her first job working at Six Flags Fiesta Texas when the park first opened in the early 90s.

Barratachea weaved her way through the corridors of City Hall and the state capitol  working for City Council members Robert Marbut, Bonnie Conner and Rebecca Viagran and as a policy and budget advisor to former Gov. Rick Perry.

Prior to joining the association in 2016, Barratachea held a nine-year stint at the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce as vice president of public affairs.

After graduating the University of Wisconsin-Stout in 1995, La Quinta Inns & Suites recruited Justin Holley, the associations chairman. Holley rose to regional vice president of operations while the company was based in San Antonio but was laid off when Blackstone, one of the worlds largest private equity firm, bought the company in 2006.

RELATED: Banker flies planes, plays Conjunto and oversees a $2 billion bank established by NAFTA

Now Playing: Business reporter Joshua Fechter sat down to talk with Liza Barratachea and Justin Holley of the San Antonio Hotel and Lodging Association. Video: San Antonio Express-News

Six years later, Holley became a partner in ABH Hospitality Management, which manages four hotels in San Antonio along with lodging facilities in Austin, Corpus Christi and Temple.

Quick facts about Liza Barratachea and Justin Holley What is your typical morning routine, time up, breakfast, etc.? Barratachea: I have a three-year-old daughter, so my morning routine is get ready, wake her up, get dressed, try to figure out what we're going to eat in the car on the way to school and then get Starbucks and then read everything I can on the articles from the night before and then get going with emails and returning phone calls and what not. Holley: And mine starts with a phone call from her, from Liza. No. Mine starts at about 5:30, but I have four dogs that wake me up every morning. My morning is them, getting them ready for the day and then me off and determining which hotel I've got to deal with and seeing what's going on here at the association and working with Liza. What book are you reading right now? Barratachea: I read a lot of "Goodnight Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown. It's a good one. Holley: With everything going on with the paid time off and all that, the joke is I'm reading the City Charter. Favorite restaurant? Holley: Boudro's Texas Bistro. Barratachea: Rosario's. First job with a paycheck? Barratachea: I worked at Fiesta Texas when it opened. Holley: My uncle paid me to plant trees and bale hay on our family farm in Wisconsin, but my first real paycheck was a Witt's Piggly Wiggly stocking groceries. What's your passion/hobby outside of work? Barratachea: Running. Holley: Mine's travel. If you had to pick an entirely different career in an entirely different industry, and there were no limitations to what you could do, what would it be? Barratachea: Probably in the medical profession, probably be a nurse or take care of people. Holley: Nothing else. It has to be in the service industry. It's in my blood. See More Collapse

In recent years, the Hotel and Lodging Association has become a more active player in local and state politics. In 2017, the group was part of a broad coalition of San Antonio business and tourism leaders that opposed the so-called bathroom bill, which would have limited restroom use for transgender people in government buildings and public schools.

In June, the association scored an early victory in a movement to establish a tourism public improvement district that local tourism officials say is necessary to raise funds to market San Antonio to travelers and help the city compete with Austin, Dallas and Houston. City Council members gave preliminary approval to the proposal. Now, its supporters must gather signatures from more than 60 percent of the citys hoteliers.

The Express-News sat down with Barratachea and Holley Aug. 14 at the associations office off of Commerce St. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation:

Q: How do you think your backgrounds prepared you for your current position?

Barratachea: When I was at the chamber ... I was there for almost 10 years. Were basically a small chamber of commerce for hotels. With me coming on board, the leadership really wanted to see more of an advocacy role and more play in whats going on with City Hall and for us to be more engaged and involved at an advocacy level locally.

Justin was coming on board and he had big ideas and I had big ideas that really blended well together.

Holley: Its amazing the people we talk to that are not in our industry that got their skills from our industry. Most everybodys first job is at Six Flags, SeaWorld, a restaurant, a hotel when they worked themselves through college. I was talking to one of the university professors just recently at UTSA that was part of the film program here, SA Film Festival. He moved to the United States from Puerto Rico and his first eight years spent working in a hotel, banquet set-up. Now hes a research professor over at UTSA. We all gain those skills and I think the most frustrating part as a leader in San Antonio is that our industry doesnt take advantage of itself to tell its story.

Q: There were concerns when Donald Trump was first elected-

Holley: President of a hotel company, right?

Related: Surgeon's path leads from the operating room to the UT system and the Ford Foundation

Q: That his rhetoric and his policies would dampen international travel. Has Trump  his rhetoric, the travel ban, his immigration and trade policies  impacted the San Antonio market at all?

Barratachea: There is a thing called the Trump Slump, but whether or not thats scientifically supported is very arguable. There was a decline in international travel before he was elected. Whether that had to do with a specific foreign policy, we cant say that. Do we know that international travel bans are negative and not welcomed in our industry? Absolutely. We want everyone to be here.

Its not just Donald Trump, right? We saw a huge attack on the industry with the bathroom bill. It wasnt an attack on our industry, per se, but we are about welcoming people.

Holley: Big portions of our business comes from the Mexican nationals that come up here whether it be shopping or them doing business. There was kind of a period that a lot of that kind of stopped, but that was also the time that the peso devaluated, so there was a lot of those issues. I dont think it can be pointed to a specific piece.

Q: Are yall worried that the bathroom bills going to come back up in 2019?

Holley: Yes.

Barratachea: I wouldn't say we're worried. I think that-

Holley: Were preparing for it.

We are an open and inclusive association and industry. We cant turn away anybody because we need everybody to help us be successful. To have that environment, its very frustrating. Being a small business owner, being a resident and somebody who happens to just happen to be LGBT is an issue of, This isnt my state that I think it should be.

Barratachea: We were successful in defeating it with strong leadership from the speakers office and a lot of coordination from a lot of different organizations. Well have to regroup and build that coalition again and keep the message consistent that this is not good for Texas and its not good for business.

Holley: Theres so many other things they could worry about that could help us grow as a state that they shouldn't even play in that realm because its not worth it.

Barratachea: We havent identified all of our priorities for this session. I think this in light of whats going on locally with paid sick leave and how paid sick leave and labor issues are so important to the industry, I think that thatll be something that we will continue to say that businesses really should be driving what happens in their businesses and how they should support their employees.

Almost all of the employees who work for hotels in San Antonio, with the exception of people who are part-time or who are working at very small operations, they have paid sick leave. We actually are not opposed to paid sick leave. Were opposed to government-mandated paid sick leave.

Related: Chavez helps San Antonio manufacturing keep its edge

Q: Would you seek legislation to preempt the paid sick leave ordinance?

Barratachea: I think that we probably would be one of many organizations who would support the effort. Whatever thoughtful legislation moves forward that says, We can't piecemeal it from city to city ... I dont know what that looks like. We havent gotten into the crafting of a bill, but I think that at the end of the day, its very dangerous to go down that route.

Q: The San Antonio Airport System is undergoing their new strategic development plan. Do yall have a wish list of what yall would like to see at the airport? Perhaps a new airport?

Barratachea: In terms of what we would want to see from the airport, I think that the proximity to downtown is ... You cant put a number on that, the value to the people who come for our conventions and it being so close, its wonderful. Moving it out to somewhere else I think would be ... While there might be more direct flights, which would be a benefit, I think it would be very difficult to offset.

Holley: Everybody says our airport, its horrible. Its not horrible.

Barratachea: I dont think its horrible.

Holley: Actually its a really nice airport. Its easy to get in and out of. Now, is it frustrating that you always have to have a connector to get in and out of San Antonio? Yes, but what decides is that is airlift. People want to travel here, but you have to have consistent travel.

Q: Have you ever had to fire someone directly or do layoffs?

Holley: I learned early on that Im not firing somebody. Theyre firing themselves. Law protects them so I cant just fire anybody for anything, so they must have done something that caused either harm to the business or harm to another employee or just they didnt know how to do the job and were never going to improve. You wouldnt want that person in your organization anyway, so as soon as you get over that, then its a little easier, but you never want to see somebody hurt.

Barratachea: If its not a good fit for you, its probably not a good fit for them. Theres probably another organization or boss that would be a better fit for them, so I think its more about perspective.

Q: Have either have you been fired or laid off before? If so, how do yall bounce back from that?

Holley: I was laid off in 2006 because the La Quinta purchase was backed by Blackstone. The old saying of when one door closes, another one opens, that is so true. Every time anybody has layoffs in San Antonio, I call whoever I know in that situation and talk to them because I wouldnt be in this seat today if it wasnt for the La Quinta layoff. I got to open more doors and see more things and now I own a company. I probably wouldnt have did that if I would have stayed at La Quinta.

Related: Bank CEO talks about Trump, the border wall and why he doesn't mind making waves

Q: What do you look for when interviewing people?

Holley: I was president of Paseo del Rio Association thats now the River Walk Association. Nancy Hunt was retiring as the executive director and we were hiring the new one. I was leading the process with Tammy Werline and every interview I ended, I said, Now close your eyes and Im going to say a word. Then just blurt the first thing out of your mouth. I would say, River Walk. Then they would have to say something. This one candidate said smelly. I was like, Thanks for your time.

You can train anybody to do anything in my mind. Its personality.

Barratachea: I think it was really about the chemistry. I do think personality a lot, but I think of whether its a good fit, coming back to that philosophy of if its a good fit and you can assess that through their body language and how they hold themselves and how they carry themselves and what their priorities are.

Q: Yall have obviously been successful to be here, but have either of you ever had one project that you worked hard on and it completely bombed?

Holley: I got here in 2001. I lived in North Carolina and they had this thing called the Festival of Trees. What they would do is as a hotel, you bought a tree and you decorated it. Then they had tickets you could buy, and you could win tickets. The tree had a bunch of free nights on it. It essentially went to help charity.

It was right when Haven For Hope was getting off its feet. I said, We need to do this in San Antonio. We need to have this right on the river somewhere and have this festival of trees.

We get it going and Mayor (Phil) Hardberger had signed a letter of support for the whole thing. Then one person, who will remain nameless, didnt like the idea and caused a big stink. We had to shut it down a week before we were going to start it.

Barratachea: Oh my gosh.

Holley: I was so pissed. But, through that experience, we had gotten The RK Group to help us with a piece of it. I got to know Jody Newman through this. I got to build a ton of strong relationships through it. It was just so disheartening. I just felt so defeated. Then we did the Lucky Duck Race and the Lucky Duck Race did five years. We raised, I dont know, half a million dollars or something for Haven for Hope or something like that. If one idea doesnt work, throw the spaghetti on the wall and something else will stick.

Barratachea: Im sure Ive had failures. Nothing as good as Justins.

Holley: I just have so many of them.

Joshua Fechter is a staff writer in San Antonio. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFreportsA well-equipped barbecue box stocked with all your grilling and smoking essentials can make your outdoor grilling life so much easier. A toolbox or tackle box both make perfect barbecue boxes.

And putting one together is an absolute blast, like Christmas Day.

The use of a well-stocked box is a staple in the competition barbecue circuit, where cooks have to travel far and wide to the next contest. With no access to the kitchen pantry, everything has to be packed for the road to properly season and prep the brisket, chicken and ribs.

It makes your life easier, said C.J. Bean, a San Antonio cook who operates the Smokin Frijoles team. When I first started, I put everything that I could find into one, but the more experience I gained, the better I was able to customize it to make sure I had everything I really needed.

Bean keeps his competition dry rubs, marinades and injection fluids in his box in generic containers to keep his secrets a secret. He also loads it up with a lineup of Head Country barbecue sauces and a few other gadgets.

RELATED: Review: Jason Dady's Tre Trattoria finds new life on the River Walk at San Antonio Museum of Art

Now Playing: Store your most commonly used outdoor cooking products in a tool or tackle box to keep things centralized, portable and fresh. Video: Chuck's Food Shack

The small size and accessibility of the box allows you to easily keep track of your inventory, so you know what you have and what you dont, and it frees up considerable space in the kitchen pantry.

The box can (and should) also be stored indoors in a climate-controlled setting, and will keep ingredients fresh. I have had too many spices to count clump up and get nasty when stored in the Food Shack or a 120-degree garage.

Heres some good news: In a barbecue world where fancy grills and gadgets can carry steep price tags, a big toolbox thats sturdy enough to carry 30 pounds or more of supplies can purchased for less than $25.

So how exactly should you stock your box? There tends to be a pretty standard lineup of ingredients in barbecue. Heres what can be found in mine, but customize at will.

Gritty stuff

Salt, pepper, garlic powder: These three ingredients seem to show up in every recipe or technique and are required stocking. Whether you opt for kosher or sea salt, stock it in large quantities with a big container of coarse ground black pepper and garlic powder. The trio is so popular, it takes on the SPG acronym in barbecue circles and can always be mixed in equal amounts for a quality rub.

Light brown sugar: Another favorite ingredient for rubs and glazes, theres always a need for light brown sugar to add sweetness to the meat. Get it in box form for easier storage.

Your favorite rub: I traditionally prefer to make my own, but Ill keep a bottle or two of the commercial stuff on hand to be used in a pinch.

Other stuff: Paprika, chili powder, onion powder, thyme and mustard powder can all add additional flavor in recipes or stand out on their own.

RELATED: 3 big classic restaurant shakeups: River Walk, Dominion, Medical Center

Wet stuff

Apple juice and cider vinegar: When used in a spray bottle as a spritz, the juice can add a sweet finish to your meats and the cider vinegar can give it a punchy bite. Both can also be used in marinades and injections.

Broths: Beef broth, with the addition of some of the gritty stuff, makes a fantastic mopping sauce and can also boost a brisket though injection. Chicken broth is worthy of inclusion, too.

Sauces: Soy sauce, a bottle of hot sauce and Worcestershire sauce are all must-stock items because they pack so much flavor. A little goes a long way. Its also a good idea to keep a standard commercial barbecue sauce and some mustard on hand. The bottles can eat up a lot of box real estate, so you consider placing them in smaller containers.

Sodas: A can of Coke or Dr Pepper is commonly used as a flavor injector for ribs on the barbecue circuit because they are loaded with sugar and have memorable tastes.

Gadgety stuff

Aluminum foil: The duct tape of barbecue, theres always a need for it in some capacity, and you never want to run out. I usually keep two rolls in the box at all times.

Injector: A large syringeto put all of that flavor inside the meat is a must. The needle can be finicky, so its not a bad idea to keep an extra on hand.

Fire starter: Keep a stick lighter in the box, as well as an extra box of matches, to make sure you always have the means to light up a chimney starter, smoker or grill. The ignition systems with many gas grills often need a little help.

Freezer bags: A box of 1-gallon (or larger) freezer bags that hold a tight zip seal are invaluable when marinating meat, but they can also be used for storage.

Measuring cups: Load up a few devices to measure from a teaspoon to a few cups for sauces and mixing.

Extras: Items such as a spray can of Pam, meat thermometer, timer, wash rags and a simple pocket knife are all staples that Ill place in the storage compartments outside of the main box area.

Totaling it all up, there are about 30 items regularly stored in my barbecue box, and its the most efficient way to keep track of your inventory.

Recipe: Slow-Grilled Mustard Chicken

cblount@express-news.net | Twitter: @chuck_blount | Instagram: bbqdiverROCKPORT  All along the Coastal Bend, Hurricane Harvey has been impossible to forget.

A year later, reminders of the storm are everywhere: in the blue-tarp rooftops, temporary stop lights and boarded-up buildings. The word "Harvey" is scrawled in a restaurant bathroom, on a ruined camper, on a business wall.

While Beaumont and Port Arthur pick up the pieces northeast of Houston, the tourism-dependent area 170 miles southwest is trying to present itself as open for business. They hauled off what seemed like endless mountains of debris. They fixed up hotels, restaurants and stores. But the storm's effects still grip the communities, where people are ever-pushing to rebuild.

THEN & NOW: Photos show how Harvey flooded Houston neighborhoods

Harvey made landfall near Rockport and Port Aransas at 10 p.m. on Aug. 25, 2017. It lashed the beach communities with 130 mph winds and, in some places, a 10-foot storm surge. The damage was violent. In Houston and beyond, it began to rain.

Every day here, people face Harvey anew. Elvira Robles, 76, wakes up in a recliner in a dark mobile home, where it's hard for her to get around with her walker. Chris Lusk, 28, brushes his teeth in the kitchen sink before going to work on damaged homes.

Hoss Corry, 52, launches a boat next to the ruined pier where he fished for trout as a kid.

"We think about Harvey every time we drive around town," said Steve Chenault, 41, who works with Corry catching crabs.

The vast implications of Harvey only continue to reveal themselves. Walls crack. Tears fall unexpectedly.

People moved here for the water and the gentle, gulf breezes  which wrecked them.

"It's very much a struggle in every aspect," said Michelle Simmons, 52, who owns a Rockport store called New Beginnings. "Everything is different."

***

When he wakes up, Port Aransas Mayor Charles Bujan checks the forecast in the gulf. His family has lived in the city for generations. He looks at the water now with caution.

DON'T SAY IT'S OVER: A year later, Harvey recovery remains uneven with many still struggling

Harvey impacted just about everything on the spirited island, home to 4,000 people before the storm. It damaged the quirky businesses and colorful homes, plus a slew of city buildings and miles of gas pipeline. It changed the shape of the island itself.

City officials estimate between $500 million and $1 billion in overall damage. The storm took a toll on residents also  a toll the mayor worries will never heal. "[I]t took a part of our lives," said Bujan, 74.

The mayor wore boat shoes and spoke in his City Hall office. A typed note covered part of the clock behind him: HARVEY'S EYEWALL ROARS ASHORE ON ST. JOE 8/26/2017 TIME 0307.

In Port A, as it's known, people still trade Harvey stories, including the one about the Nixons, who weathered the storm on their shrimping boat. They point to altered landmarks: the beach-side condo Cline's Landing, now gutted; the Rock Cottages, where piles of rock sit; the beloved Salty Dog Saloon, which served the namesake gin and grapefruit drink, still closed.

Like the smashed boat storage facility in Rockport, set for a soft reopen on the storm's anniversary, it was Pelican Club in Port Aransas that became the local poster child of destruction. The restaurant sank into the ground, collapsed in on itself. It looks stuck in time as an insurance battle unfurls.

Next door at Fisherman's Wharf, John "Mike" McNatt, 62, watches people photograph the building daily. "That's the personification of Hurricane Harvey right there," he said on a recent afternoon. Out back, he could see palm trees that bent in Harvey's wind.

The city is changed, and the evidence is everywhere, including the business marquees. NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS, the signs read. With the loss of apartments and mobile homes, it's hard to find an affordable place to live. Employers lack workers.

Jody Sackschewsky, 59, the Fisherman's Wharf bookkeeper, works in the refurbished upstairs. She recounted how the grocery store now was filled with construction workers instead of familiar faces.

"You don't know where everybody went," she said.

CLASSROOM CRUNCH: Gulf Coast schools get a lesson in perseverance

It was crowded, at least, in Shorty's, the long standing local bar. Within 8 days of Harvey, they were open for business.

"As soon as we could get ice and beer, we were slinging it," said Jason Jenkins, 38, who works now at the hard-hit marine science institute.

This bar, Jenkins said, is their church  a place to which they can always return. Here, in the small, dark space, there is a sense of normal. The same caps caked in dirt hang from the ceiling. The warped floorboards are smooth again. Gentle wind blows through the door.

***

Ten miles up the coast, in Rockport, some two dozen officials and stakeholders paused amid a grueling year to congratulate themselves. It was the last meeting of the Long Term Recovery team. They went around the room: 83 percent of businesses reopened. The school district was repairing its rooftops and planning a new gym.

"I think we ought to give ourselves a hand," said William Whitson, 59, a lead technical consultant, and they did.

Full recovery in Rockport  with more than twice the population of Port A before the storm  could take as long as 10 years, according to the mayor. He estimated the loss in property value at $221 million. Though sales tax was up because of construction, the city applied for a $5 million loan to supplement its budget.

"I think we're ahead of where we expected to be," Mayor Patrick Rios, 67, said.

Still, it was easy to worry. Affordable housing was razed and not yet rebuilt. On the wealthy Key Allegro, a fraction of full-time families remained. The battered bridge to reach it was reduced to one lane.

Rebuilding raised the question of what kind of community to recreate. One recent evening, residents in flip flops and fishing shirts filled a makeshift city council chamber to debate it. The city faced an influx of RV parks. The council was taking control from a board regulating the look of downtown.

"If we lose downtown, Rockport's just another town," warned Debbie Parker, who runs a winery there. (She is also raising money to replace the iconic, oceanside sculpture of a blue crab.)

"This is our future here," urged developer and builder Alan Lee Copeland, 62, who owns property downtown.

HEART OF HARVEY: Rockport's Vietnamese community seek guidance from their priest after Harvey

The quaint downtown Rockport they wished to protect already was different. A bar called "Rock Bottom" opened in recent months, named in reference to Harvey. The Rockport Center for the Arts, which lost its main building, relocated down the road.

Coast Modern, a frame and art shop, relocated too. Recently, Michelle Bell walked in, toting a framed lithograph she purchased decades ago in Dubai.

The store owner, Mike Catlin, took apart Bell's frame. Like much of his work now, this task was related to Harvey. The mat was warped. Catlin chose a new, gray one and slid a sliver of gold along the inside edge. "I want to give you at least a visual," Catlin said. He wore a short-sleeve button-down shirt with cartoon shark heads.

Bell, 65 and retired, leaned over to look at it through groovy sunglasses.

"I like it," she said. "I have more I need to bring."

***

And so, up and down the Texas coast, cities large and small reckon with what the monster storm took.

In Beaumont, officials estimate that Harvey flooded about 2,250 structures, or six percent of the total. They believe two-thirds have been repaired. The city is also looking to protect its drinking water system, which Harvey temporarily knocked offline.

In Port Arthur, about 85 percent of structures were damaged, Mayor Derrick Freeman estimated, affecting practically everyone and testing residents' commitment to the city, where Freeman is working hard to keep the population above 50,000. "We are ready to be known for something greater than Harvey," he said.

MILES OF MISERY: Tivoli's 'uninhabitants' on their own after a direct hit from Harvey

It's anniversary will be lost on no one.

In July in Port Aransas, Gene Frost was waiting for his home to be torn down. The storm had pushed it off the tall poles that once held it up and left it at a near-45 degree angle on a pile of everything he had. For eleven months, he dug out the pieces underneath but he was 60 and could only do so much. A local organization's offer to build a new home felt impossible to decline.

"Is it going to kill me?" he asked days before the scheduled demolition. He nodded yes. But maybe then he could move ahead.

Sixteen-year-old Kate Upchurch that morning walked across a backyard on Weeping Willow, where once-dense oak trees looked skeletal. She signed up with the Episcopal Diocese of Texas to volunteer here. Roger Hoover, 51, of Missouri City, led the group.

"Just hold tight," said Hoover, nervous as he passed her the heavy chainsaw.

She braced her legs, gripped the tool and pushed the roaring blade through the tree.

***

Emily Foxhall is the Texas Storyteller for the Chronicle. She has written about mental health, crime and the Fort Bend County's ongoing evolution from rural to urban. She joined the Chronicle in 2015 after two years in Orange County, Calif., reporting for the Los Angeles Times and its community papers. Her work also has appeared in the New York Times, the Texas Tribune and the New York Observer. She is a Yale graduate and a Houston native. Email her at emily.foxhall@chron.com. Follow her on Twitter at @emfoxhall.

Design by Rachael Gleason

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The Houston Chronicle is dedicated to serving the public interest with fact-based journalism. That mission has never been more important. Show your support for our journalism at HoustonChronicle.com/subscribe.Three weeks ago, author and former police detective Ron Stallworth of El Paso received an unexpected call from the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke.

It was a particularly unusual call because Stallworth is the African American cop who helped infilitrate a group of Colorado Klansmen in the late 1970s in a daring operation that inspired director Spike Lees latest movie, BlacKkKlansman.

It was funny hearing his voice after 40 years, Stallworth told a rapt audience at the Alamo Drafthouse Park North about to see a special screening of the movie Saturday night. He denied he was a racist or a white supremacist, even though he supports Trump and Trump is.

Stallworth said he and Duke talked for an hour about a wide variety of issues, ranging from President Trumps views, separation of the races and separating families at the border.

The audience listened intently as Stallworth recounted that conversation and gave insider details about the movie, which is based on a book Stallworth wrote about his experiences.

Ninety percent of my story is in this movie, he said. The other 10 is Hollywood.

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Stallworth, who grew up in El Paso and lives there today, was Colorado Springs Police Departments first black detective. In 1978, he answered a newspaper ad recruiting members for the local Klan chapter. The phone call resulted in an invitation to a meeting, which was attended by one of Stallworths fellow detectives who was white, posing as Stallworth.

The undercover operation stopped several cross burnings and other planned acts of violence and terrorism, Stallworth said.

In the movie, the white detective is played by Adam Driver as Flip Zimmerman, a Jewish officer. The real white detective who worked with Stallworth, however, wasnt named Flip and he wasnt Jewish. But Stallworth is OK with the poetic license Lee took with his characters.

Other ficitional creations include a university student activist played by Laura Harrier. But Duke, who is played by Topher Grace, was definitely in the real story, Stallworth said. Stallworth said he spoke with Duke on the phone during the undercover operation, posing as a white man spouting hate for all minorities.

Stallworth recalled for the audience Saturday night the time he met Duke in person. The Grand Wizard was in Colorado Springs to install Stallworth as a KKK member and the real Stallworth was one of the officers called in to provide police protection. At one point, Stallworth said, he stood between Duke and the local Klan leader and when the fake Stallworth stepped up with a Polaroid, the real Stallworth put his arms around each Klansman and hugged them close, smiling for the camera, startling the white men.

RELATED: Railroad bridge near Comfort survived flood to be preserved as landmark

Stallworth said watching the movie, seeing scenes of his life playing out on the big screen, is like having an out-of-body experience.

I wrote the words four years ago, Stallworth said of writing his memoirs, and to hear the words come out of the actors mouths is just surreal.

Though humorous lines are woven throughout the film, Stallworth stressed that its not a comedy.

I was just a cop who did his job, Stallworth said. I dont feel I did anything special.

More than 100 people welcomed Stallworth and his wife, Patsy, at the movie theater for his talk Saturday night. Many stood in a long line waiting for him to autograph his book. The couple is on a tour of Alamo Drafthouse theaters in numerous cities for special screenings of the movie. Saturdays audience included the daughter of his sophomore English teacher, Elroy Bode, to whom Stallworth dedicated his book.

At the event, Stallworth was wearing a T-shirt supporting fellow El Pasoan Beto ORourke, the Democratic congressman running for the U.S. Senate.

RELATED: San Antonio artist sets Guinness record for tiny paintings

During Stallworths half hour talk, moderator Nita Campos, the theaters manager, asked him what he hoped audiences take away from the movie.

Stallworth promptly said people shouldnt be hung up on labels such as skin heads, neo-nazis or alt-right and simply recognize white supremacists for who they are.

Dont be afraid to stamp it down when it rears its ugly head (and) more importantly dont be afraid to talk about race in America, he said, drawing applause from the crowd. It is the shadow that hangs over our heads as a nation and it always has and always will.

You should be able to turn to the person on the left and right of you, open a dialogue and have a serious discussion about race without anger coming in.

Thats what happened in that phone call with Duke three weeks ago. No anger, just a plain-spoken discussion.

In fact, Stallworth said, the former Klan leader told him he didnt like how he was portrayed in the movie but that he liked Stallworths book.

I got an endorsement from the Grand Wizard, he said, smiling broadly.

vtdavis@express-news.netWall Street analysts have given iShares MSCI Switzerland 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 Switzerland ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.Vivint Solar, Inc. provides distributed solar energy primarily to residential customers in the United States. It owns and installs solar energy systems through long-term customer contracts. The company also sells photovoltaic installation products, as well as solar renewable energy certificates. As of December 31, 2019, it had an aggregate capacity of 1,294.0 megawatts covering approximately 188,300 homes. The company was formerly known as V Solar Holdings, Inc. and changed its name to Vivint Solar, Inc. in April 2014. Vivint Solar, Inc. was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Lehi, Utah.

Read More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Wall Street analysts have given Hertz Global 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 Hertz Global 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.1Field checks

Drones are helpful for everyday crop checks, but can also be helpful in annual checks to see if what you have done to improve drainage, or whatever else, is working.

2Annual progress

If you fly over your field on the same day each year you can see improvements or notice that nothing has changed.

3Pest control

Thiele also uses the drone to check his pest traps. He traps raccoons and groundhogs that destroy their crops and are a nuisance to the farm. Using the drone to check the traps saves him steps and time by first discovering which traps need attention.

4Spot spraying

DJI makes a drone about two or three times larger than a typical drone with eight rotors that can be used to spot spray. It lifts a tank high into the air, and the operator can view the field from the air and spray where it is need, saving time and money with precision spraying.

5NVDI

Normalized difference vegetation index is a numerical indicator that uses the visible and near-infrared bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.

This technology has been adopted to analyze remote sensing measurements and assess whether the target being observed contains live green vegetation or not. With NVDI, you can determine crop damage, stress, draught, wind or hail damage.

6Education

Farmers are lifelong learners, hosting many field days and discussions to share and learn from one another, Thiele, like others, has used his drone to share farming practices with others.

He has taken drone footage at farming events so farmers could see what was happening in the field live on a screen. He also focuses on agricultural advocacy, taking videos of the everyday happenings at his farm and creating a voice-over to educate consumers.

Source: William Thiele, Butler County, Pa. dairy farmer.

Next week: Selecting a drone.

(Farm and Dairy is featuring a series of 101 columns throughout the year to help young and beginning farmers master farm living. From finances to management to machinery repair and animal care, farmers do it all.)

More Farming 101 columns:NFU Cymru has warned of the "serious and potentially catastrophic" impact that a cliff-edge Brexit scenario will have on the future viability of Welsh agriculture.

The dire warning follows the publication of the first batch of government technical notices outlining preparations in the event of a no-deal.

Four papers were published by Defra dealing with the future of farm support and RDP funding along with two by HM Customs and Revenue, dealing with trade and trade tariffs.

Additionally, a technical notice on organic farming was published, which suggests that the trade of organic agri-food products would face a cliff-edge scenario in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

The products would not be allowed into the EU until UK organic certification bodies are officially recognised by the EU Commission  as this stands, the approval could take up to nine months.

NFU Cymru has stressed the need for free and frictionless trade with the EU and has called for clarity on the future of agri-food products if the UK were to leave the EU without a deal on 29 March 2019.

NFU Cymru President, John Davies said: Whilst I recognise that the Government has to plan for all eventualities, I want to emphasise on those who represent Wales in Westminster that a cliff edge scenario will be disastrous for Welsh food and farming, the economy, environment, tourism and culture.

Those who campaigned for Brexit did so on the promise that the UK would be better off after leaving the EU and that a deal would be struck to allow us to continue to trade freely with our biggest and nearest market.

WTO tariffs

Of particular concern to farmers across the UK will be the trade paper that examines tariffs.

The note explains that in the event of a no deal, trade with the EU will be on non-preferential World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms, meaning that Most Favoured Nation (MFN) tariffs and non-preferential rules of origin would apply.

It further adds that the UK will apply its own MFN rates to goods imported from the EU and will determine and publish these before the UK leaves the EU.

Under WTO terms, the UK government would have full flexibility to reduce import tariffs, which they could do to decrease imported food costs.

Mr Davies added: The available research from organisations such as HCC and the AHDB, along with our commissioned reports, have consistently highlighted the negative impact that WTO tariffs would have - with exports in the sheep sector being worst hit.

The beef sector could also be negatively impacted if Government allows low or tariff-free beef imports - potentially from countries with lower standards of production and regulation - this would have a huge impact on the Welsh beef industry.

'Major concern'

Mr Davies said the move to WTO tariffs, plus the lack of clarity around what rates the UK Government will set, is of "major concern" to Welsh farming businesses.

He said farming is a long term business and the publication of these notices combined with the ongoing political disagreement on the shape of the UK's future relationship with the EU is causing "huge concern" to the farming industry within Wales, "hampering ability" to plan for the long term.

Lets not forget that farming delivers economically, socially, culturally and environmentally for all of Wales, he added.

The whole of the rural economy would be affected and the knock on effect of lower production levels would have detrimental effects on the landscape and our environment. A critical level of supply of high quality PGI status Welsh lambs is essential to keep a viable processing sector in Wales.

While we believe that a deal is the most likely outcome to the ongoing negotiations between the EU and UK, we urge both sides to find pragmatic solutions to the issues still outstanding between them. A no deal outcome would be the worst possible one for the farming industry."New 6m fund to help expand woodland in EnglandNeha Dhupia celebrates her 38th birthday today, on August 27, 2018, and wishes from celebrities and fans alike are in pouring on Twitter. The actress walked the ramp last night at the Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai, along with her husband Angad Bedi, and the pictures look nothing less than spectacular. Also, hubby Angad Bedi posted a story on his Instagram handle of Neha Dhupia blowing the candles on her birthday cake and captioned it as, "Happy birthday to my world Neha Dhupia, Mrs Dhupia Bedi."

Taimur Celebrates Raksha Bandhan With Sara Ali Khan & Inaaya! Check The Cute & Adorable Pictures!

Angad Bedi also posted a picture on his Instagram handle, in which he can be seen pecking a kiss to his wife Neha Dhupia at the beach and he captioned the picture as, "Happy birthday my world @nehadhupia mrs DhupiaBedi #happybirthday," for which the birthday girl Neha replied on her Instagram story as, "Thank you my love, Angad Bedi."

Neha Dhupia and Angad Bedi might throw a birthday bash tonight and invite their near and dear ones. We'll have to wait and watch if Bollywood stars will make a beeline at her birthday bash, as she is a pretty good friend to almost everyone in the film industry and has attended all their parties as well.

Also, the birthday girl flaunted her baby bump as she walked the ramp at the Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai along with her husband Angad Bedi. When asked if she's following the footsteps of Kareena Kapoor, she said to PTI, "It has never been my intention to set a trend or be a part of one. The intention is to get up and continue your life and do things like nothing ever happened."

Here's wishing the lovely and sweet Neha Dhupia a very happy birthday and may she have many more such wonderful years to come.

Neha Dhupia SPEAKS on her Pregnancy for the FIRST time; Watch Video | FilmiBeat

After Divorce With Malaika Arora, Arbaaz Khan To Marry His Girlfriend Giorgia Andriani?It is quite known to all that Fahadh Faasil was the initial choice for one among the lead roles in Mani Ratnam's upcoming film Chekka Chivantha Vaanam. The Malayalam film audiences were indeed happy to hear about the big news of the project; however, later, it was revealed that Fahadh Faasil had to opt out of the project and the role went to Tamil actor Arun Vijay.

Now, Fahadh Faasil himself has opened up about the reason on why he had opted out of Mani Ratnam's upcoming big venture. It was in a recent interview with popular Malayalam magazine Vanitha that the actor opened up about the same.

Fahadh Faasil revealed that he rejects a film when he is unable to visualize that movie in his mind. He added that it is not an easy task and there have been instances when he has reached to the final decision at the last moment. He mentioned that the same thing had happened with Mani Ratnam's Chekka Chivantha Vaanam. The actor has stated that he tried to visualize the film in his mind till the last moment; but, unfortunately, he couldn't. Fahadh Faasil also mentioned that Mani Ratnam would have definitely identified the reason on why he backed out of the project. He also added that if one goes into a film in which he/she doesn't believe in, it would be a torture for everyone.

Meanwhile, Chekka Chivantha Vaanam's trailer has already hit the online circuits and it has opened to a good reception. The film has been scheduled to hit the theatres on September 28, 2018.A few months ago, actress Sri Reddy stripped in public and levelled a host of allegations against the Telugu film industry. During her 'protest', she claimed that several top producers exploit 'local girls' and ultimately show them the door. She also claimed that they prefer casting girls from Mumbai in their films and ignore the local talent. Post this, she made some scandalous claims about the likes of Kona Venkat and AR Murugadoss and this left everyone in a state of shock.

As expected, her actions created a great deal of buzz in the industry and ruffled a few feathers. Actors Vishal and Karthi lashed out at her and asked to provide proof to back her claims. However, at the same time, actress Andrea Jeremiah backed her and said that she deserved to be praised for speaking about the sensitive matter.

"If what Sri Reddy saying is true, then it takes a strong heart to reveal it. I've never faced any allegations like that, but if someone faces things like that, saying it openly is correct and the people behind this should be punished," - (sic) she added.

Now, actress Priya Bhavani Shankar has spoken on the issue of casting couch and said that claims about the sexual exploitation of women in the film industry cannot be overlooked. She added that such things happen in all industries and not the film world alone.

While commenting on the casting couch controversy, the Kadaikutty Singam actress virtually backed Sri Reddy and added more credibility to her claims.

On a related note, Sri Reddy has made it clear that she has no plans of stopping her war against casting couch. A few days ago, she made a few more explosive claims about the TFI and said that it is controlled by a few families.

"In Telugu, the audience will watch and encourage the films featuring big heroes. Only four film families are ruling the entire industry. That is the reason why Tollywood is the worst of all. Also, the industry does not encourage any new talent. However, in Chennai, even the small-budget films are getting recognised," she added.

Sri Reddy also revealed that she is working on her biopic and added that it's going to be pretty explosive.

Andrea Jeremiah Comments On The Casting Couch Row, Backs Sri ReddyLONDON, August 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The latest results from the 2018CBI Index - a special report published by the Financial Times' Professional Wealth Management magazine - has revealed that St Kitts and Nevis is making travel more accessible to their citizens. The country's Citizenship by Investment (CBI) Programme received praise for improving both its freedom of movement and affordability - a result of the nation's rising diplomatic ties and price responsiveness to the growing investor immigration market.

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/735098/St_Kitts_Nevis.pdf

The twin-island nation is famed for being the world's first country to develop a Citizenship by Investment Programme, providing a path to citizenship to those who contribute to the nation's development.

The freedom of movement element in the study evaluates the number of visa-free or visa-on-arrival destinations available to St Kitts and Nevis citizens, who can now travel to more than 150 jurisdictions worldwide - a valuable feature for those seeking a second citizenship. In the past year, St Kitts and Nevis signed several important travel treaties, including with Russia, Moldova, Nepal, India, Indonesia, Rwanda, and Taiwan.

The CEO of the St Kitts and Nevis Citizenship by Investment Unit, Les Khan, explains why freedom of movement is a critical component to the citizenship programme: "Living a more global lifestyle is a key desire for those seeking a second citizenship. The results from the 2018 CBI Index, ranking St Kitts and Nevis first in the Caribbean for freedom of movement, show that we are committed to consistently improving the quality of our offering."

For the second year running, the Caribbean nation received perfect scores for its due diligence, ease of processing, and travel and residence requirements.

Khan says that strong attention to due diligence - the security and background check procedures carried out during the application process - provides nations entering into visa-free travel treaties with St Kitts and Nevis with the comfort that those crossing their borders are of high moral fibre and character: "Our due diligence process is at the centre of everything we do. By ensuring that only the best apply, we instil confidence in our citizens, both living on the island and abroad, as well as in the countries they may choose to travel to."

Investors can obtain further information regarding the St Kitts and Nevis Citizenship by Investment Programme on the Unit's official website: http://www.ciu.gov.knNovartis International AG / Novartis receives European Commission approval of its CAR-T cell therapy, Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) . Processed and transmitted by Nasdaq Corporate Solutions. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

The EC approval is based on the first global CAR-T registration trials, which included patients from eight European countries and demonstrated durable responses and a consistent safety profile in r/r pediatric B-cell ALL and r/r DLBCL



Novartis is the only company with an approved CAR-T cell therapy for pediatric r/r B-cell ALL and the first to receive approval in two distinct indications, both in the EU and the US



Novartis continues its strategy to expand manufacturing facilities with agreements with external collaborators, such as CELLforCURE in France

Basel, August 27, 2018Novartis today announced that the European Commission (EC) has approved Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel, formerly CTL019). The approved indications are for the treatment of pediatric and young adult patients up to 25 years of age with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) that is refractory, in relapse post-transplant or in second or later relapse; and for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory (r/r) diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) after two or more lines of systemic therapy. Kymriah developed in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) is a ground-breaking one-time treatment that uses a patient's own T cells to fight cancer, and the only chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) therapy to receive regulatory approval in the EU for these two distinct B-cell malignancies. Kymriah was also the first CAR-T cell therapy ever approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

"The Kymriah approval is a transformational milestone for patients in Europe in need of new treatment options," said Liz Barrett, CEO, Novartis Oncology. "Novartis will continue to build a global infrastructure for delivering CAR-T cell therapies where none existed before remaining steadfast in our goal of reimagining cancer."

Kymriah, a cell dispersion for infusion with doses varying between 1.2 x 106 6 x 108 CAR- positive viable T cells, is a living medicinal product, manufactured individually for each patient by reprogramming the patient's own immune system cells. Kymriah is the only approved CAR-T cell therapy built using the 4-1BB costimulatory domain, which is critical for full activation of the therapy, enhancement of cellular expansion and durable persistence of the cancer-fighting cells.

This approval was based on the review of the only two global registration CAR-T clinical trials, JULIET and ELIANA, which included patients from eight European countries. In these trials, Kymriah demonstrated strong and durable response rates and a consistent safety profile in two difficult-to-treat patient populations[1]. In 2012, Novartis and Penn entered into a global collaboration to further research, develop and commercialize CAR-T cell therapies, including Kymriah, for the investigational treatment of cancers. This collaboration between industry and academia was the first-of-its-kind in CAR-T research and development.

"When the University of Pennsylvania and Novartis agreed to work together to develop CAR-T therapy, our main goal was clear and ambitious to address unmet needs for patients and to extend, improve and save lives," said Carl June, MD, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Penn and Director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies in the Abramson Cancer Center. "We are proud that our efforts in CAR-T now offer the European blood cancer community a breakthrough that brings new hope."

Kymriah was designated as an orphan medicinal product and is one of the first PRIME-designated therapies to receive EU approval; PRIME (PRIority MEdicines) is a program launched by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to enhance support for the development of medicines that target an unmet medical need and help patients benefit as early as possible from therapies that may significantly improve their quality of life.

"Bringing Kymriah to patients in the EU advances the treatment paradigm in an unprecedented way and delivers a lifesaving therapy to young patients with ALL who have not been successfully treated with existing therapies, and who have limited options left[2]," said Prof. Peter Bader, Head of the Division for Stem Cell Transplantation and Immunology and Principal Investigator of the ELIANA study at the University Hospital for Children and Adolescents in Frankfurt/Main.

Both B-cell ALL and DLBCL are aggressive malignancies with significant treatment gaps for patients. In Europe, ALL accounts for approximately 80% of leukemia cases among children[3], and for patients who relapse from standard of care therapies, the outlook is poor[2]. This low survival rate is in spite of patients having to undergo multiple treatments, including chemotherapy, radiation, targeted therapy or stem cell transplant, and further highlights the need for new treatment options. DLBCL is the most common form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, accounting for up to 40% of all cases globally[4]. For patients who relapse or don't respond to initial therapy, there are limited treatment options that provide durable responses, and survival rates are low for the majority of patients due to ineligibility for autologous stem cell transplant (ASCT) or because salvage chemotherapy or ASCT have failed[5].

Novartis expects to launch initially in the pediatric ALL indication, as we continue to ramp up capacity. Moreover, timing for Kymriah availability in each country will depend on multiple factors, including the onboarding of qualified treatment centers for the appropriate indications, as well as the completion of national reimbursement procedures. Training is already underway at key qualified treatment centers to facilitate safe and seamless delivery to patients; and Novartis continues to collaborate with national health and reimbursement authorities across Europe on a fair, value-based pricing approach that is sustainable for national healthcare systems.

As this innovative treatment is made available to more patients globally, Novartis has been actively pursuing options to expand manufacturing capabilities beyond our facility in Morris Plains, New Jersey. This includes our agreement with CELLforCURE, based in France and one of the first and largest contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) producing cell and gene therapies in Europe, the expanded alliance with Fraunhofer Institute which currently supports the manufacturing of Kymriah for global clinical trials and for post approval manufacturing , as well as technology transfer efforts to a CDMO in Japan.

About Kymriah ELIANA Pivotal Study

The EC approval of Kymriah in pediatric and young adult patients with r/r B-cell ALL is based on the pivotal Phase II ELIANA clinical trial, the first pediatric global CAR-T cell therapy registration study for Kymriah in children and young adults with r/r B-cell ALL. ELIANA was conducted in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, evaluating Kymriah in patients in 25 centers in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and in Europe, in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Norway and Spain.

In this Novartis-sponsored, global, multi-center study evaluating 75 patients infused with Kymriah with three or more months of follow-up, 81% of patients achieved overall remission (95% CI: 71% - 89%) with 80% of responders still in remission at 6 months. Sixty percent of patients achieved complete response (CR) and 21% of patients achieved CR with incomplete blood count recovery (CRi). Of those patients in remission, 100% had no minimal residual disease (MRD) detected in the bone marrow[1]. Overall survival (OS) was 90% at six months, and 76% at 12 months. Median OS was 19.1 months (95% CI: 15.2 - NE) in this difficult-to-treat patient population.

In ELIANA, 47% percent of patients experienced Grade 3 or 4 CRS. CRS was managed according to the global CRS management protocol at clinical sites adequately trained for the safe administration and management of Kymriah. There were two deaths within 30 days of Kymriah infusion: one due to progressive disease with CRS and one death with resolving CRS from intracranial hemorrhage. Within eight weeks of treatment, 13% of patients experienced Grade 3 or 4 neurological events. The most common severe (Grade 3 or 4) neurological events were encephalopathy and/or delirium. Severe (Grade 3 or 4) febrile neutropenia and infection occurred in 36% and 44% of patients, respectively[1].

About Kymriah JULIET Pivotal Study

The EC approval of Kymriah in adult patients with r/r DLBCL is based on the pivotal Phase II JULIET clinical trial, the first multi-center global registration study for Kymriah in adult patients with r/r DLBCL. JULIET was conducted in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania, and is the largest study examining a CAR-T therapy in DLBCL, enrolling patients from 27 sites in 10 countries across the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Europe in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands. In the JULIET trial, patients were infused in the inpatient and outpatient setting.

In this Novartis-sponsored, global, multi-center study, among 93 evaluable patients who were followed for at least three months or discontinued earlier, Kymriah demonstrated an overall response rate (ORR) of 52% (95% confidence interval [CI], 41% - 62%), with 40% achieving a complete response (CR) and 12% achieving a partial response (PR). The relapse-free probability at 6 and 12 months was 68% and 65%, respectively; and the median duration of response was not reached at the time of data cut-off, indicating sustainability of response[1]. The OS rate at 12 months was 49% and median OS was 11.7 months among all infused patients (n=111) (95% CI, 6.6-NE).

In JULIET, 22% of all treated patients experienced Grade 3 or 4 CRS within eight weeks of infusion with Kymriah, as defined by the Penn Grading Scale, a rigorous scale for grading CRS. CRS was successfully managed globally using site education on implementation of the CRS treatment protocol. Twelve percent of patients had Grade 3 or 4 neurologic adverse events, which were managed with supportive care. Grade 3 or 4 cytopenias lasting more than 28 days were reported based on laboratory findings and included thrombocytopenia (41%), lymphopenia (28%), neutropenia (24%), leukopenia (21%) and anemia (14%), Grade 3 or 4 infections and Grade 3 or 4 febrile neutropenia occurred in 32% and 15% of patients, respectively[1].

Important Safety information from the Kymriah SmPC

Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) is an autologous, immunocellular cancer therapy which involves reprogramming a patient's own T-cells with a transgene encoding a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) to identify and eliminate CD19-expressing cells. It is administered as intravenous infusion.

Kymriah is indicated for the treatment of pediatric and young adult patients up to 25 years of age with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) that is refractory, in relapse post-transplant or in second or later relapse as well as for adult patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) after two or more lines of systemic therapy.

Kymriah must not be administered in case of hypersensitivity to the active substance or to any of the excipients of the product. In addition, contraindications of the lymphodepleting chemotherapy that is usually preceding the Kymriah infusion to prepare the patient's body, must be considered.

For details please see the Summary of Product Characteristics (SmPC).

Reasons to delay Kymriah treatment

Kymriah treatment should be delayed, if a patient has any of the following conditions:

Unresolved serious adverse reactions (especially pulmonary reactions, cardiac reactions or hypotension) from preceding chemotherapies.

Active uncontrolled infection.

Active graft-versus-host disease (GVHD).

Significant clinical worsening of leukemia burden or lymphoma following lymphodepleting chemotherapy.

Monitoring after Kymriah infusion

Kymriah may cause side effects that could be severe, life-threatening or fatal. Therefore, patients should be monitored daily for the first 10 days following infusion for signs and symptoms of potential cytokine release syndrome, neurological events and other toxicities. Physicians should consider hospitalization for the first 10 days post infusion or at the first signs/symptoms of cytokine release syndrome and/or neurological events. After the first 10 days following the infusion, the patient should be monitored at the physician's discretion.

Patients should be instructed to remain within proximity (i.e., 2 hours of travel) of a qualified clinical facility for at least 4 weeks following infusion. They should be advised to contact their healthcare provider right away, if they experience any of signs and symptoms of cytokine release syndrome, neurological events, infections and tumor lysis syndrome or if other severe or serious side effects occur.

Patients are advised to take their body temperature twice a day for 3-4 weeks after treatment with Kymriah, and if the temperature is high to contact their doctor immediately.

Important side effects

Kymriah may cause side effects that could be severe, life-threatening or fatal. They usually happen in the first eight weeks after the infusion, but can also develop later. The following main side effects can occur after Kymriah infusion:

Cytokine release syndrome has been frequently observed and almost always occurred within the first 10 days after Kymriah infusion. Patients may experience high fever, chills, difficulty breathing, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain, joint pain, low blood pressure, dizziness/light headedness, and issues with blood coagulation. Adverse reactions of multiple body organs, such as the heart, the liver or kidney, may occur.

Neurological events, in particular encephalopathy, confusional state or delirium, can occur frequently with Kymriah. Other manifestations can also include altered or decreased consciousness, agitation, seizures, difficulty speaking, understanding speech, or loss of balance. The majority of neurological events occurred within eight weeks following Kymriah infusion and were transient. Because of the risk of neurological side effects, patients should not drive, operate heavy machinery, or do other activities that require alertness for eight weeks after receiving Kymriah.

Infections can occur frequently after Kymriah infusion. As appropriate, prophylactic antibiotics should be administered and surveillance testing should be employed prior to and during treatment with Kymriah. Infections are known to complicate the course and management of concurrent cytokine release syndrome. Vaccination with live virus vaccines is not recommended at least six weeks prior to the start of lymphodepleting chemotherapy, during Kymriah treatment, and until immune recovery following treatment with Kymriah.

Febrile neutropenia was frequently observed in patients after Kymriah infusion. In the event of febrile neutropenia, infection should be evaluated and managed appropriately with broad-spectrum antibiotics, fluids and other supportive care, as medically indicated.

Tumor lysis syndrome is a rapid breakdown of tumor cells and release of their contents into the bloodstream. This can interfere with the workings of various body organs, especially the kidneys, heart and nervous system. To minimize risk of tumor lysis syndrome, patients with elevated uric acid or high tumor burden should receive allopurinol, or an alternative prophylaxis, prior to Kymriah infusion.

Prolonged cytopenias, which is a low count of one or more types of blood cells such as red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets, can persist for several weeks following Kymriah. The majority of patients who had cytopenias at day 28 following Kymriah treatment improved or resolved within three months after treatment. Prolonged neutropenia has been associated with increased risk of infection.

Hypogammaglobulinemia or Agammaglobulinemia, a condition in which the level of immunoglobulins (antibodies) in the blood is low and the risk of infections is increased, can occur in patients treated with Kymriah. Infection precautions, antibiotic prophylaxis and immunoglobulin replacement should be managed per age and standard guidelines.

Secondary malignancies: After treatment with Kymriah, patients will be monitored life-long by their healthcare provider, as they may develop secondary cancers.

Pregnancy and breast-feeding: It is not known, whether Kymriah has the potential to be transferred to the fetus via the placenta and could cause fetal toxicity, including B-cell lymphocytopenia. Kymriah is not recommended during pregnancy and in women of childbearing potential not using contraception. It is unknown, whether Kymriah is excreted in human milk. A risk to the breast-fed infant cannot be excluded. Women, who are breast-feeding, should be advised of the potential risk to the breast-fed infant.

Blood, organ, tissue and cell donation: Patients treated with Kymriah should not donate blood, organs, tissues and cells for transplantation.

Please see the full Summary of Product Characteristics (SmPC) for KYMRIAH, www.KYMRIAH.com (http://www.KYMRIAH.com)

Disclaimer

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by words such as "launches," "launching," "strategy," "potential," "can," "will," "plan," "expect," "investigational," "launched," "transformational milestone," "goal," "breakthrough," "hope," "may," "underway," or similar terms, or by express or implied discussions regarding potential marketing approvals, new indications or labeling for Kymriah, regarding our ability to scale and sustain commercial manufacturing for Kymriah, regarding our ability to onboard and sustain a network of qualified treatment centers, regarding our ability to obtain reimbursement approval from national health and reimbursement authorities, or regarding potential future revenues from Kymriah. 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 Kymriah will be submitted or approved for sale or for any additional indications or labeling in any market, or at any particular time. Neither can there be any guarantee that we will successfully scale and sustain commercial manufacturing for Kymriah, or successfully onboard and sustain a network of qualified treatment centers to offer Kymriah. Nor can there be any guarantee that we will successfully obtain reimbursement approval for Kymriah from relevant national health and reimbursement authorities, or at any particular time. Neither can there be any guarantee that Kymriah will be commercially successful in the future. In particular, our expectations regarding Kymriah could be affected by, among other things, our ability to successfully scale and sustain commercial manufacturing; our ability to onboard and sustain a network of treatment centers; our ability to obtain reimbursement approval from national health and reimbursement authorities; the uncertainties inherent in research and development, including clinical trial results and additional analysis of existing clinical data; regulatory actions or delays or government regulation generally; global trends toward health care cost containment, including government, payor and general public pricing and reimbursement pressures; our ability to obtain or maintain proprietary intellectual property protection; the particular prescribing preferences of physicians and patients; general political and economic conditions; safety, quality or manufacturing issues; potential or actual data security and data privacy breaches, or disruptions of our information technology systems, and other risks and factors referred to in Novartis AG's current Form 20-F on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Novartis is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

About Novartis

Novartis provides innovative healthcare solutions that address the evolving needs of patients and societies. Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Novartis offers a diversified portfolio to best meet these needs: innovative medicines, cost-saving generic and biosimilar pharmaceuticals and eye care. Novartis has leading positions globally in each of these areas. In 2017, the Group achieved net sales of USD 49.1 billion, while R&D throughout the Group amounted to approximately USD 9.0 billion. Novartis Group companies employ approximately 125,000 full-time-equivalent associates. Novartis products are sold in approximately 155 countries around the world. For more information, please visit http://www.novartis.com (http://www.novartis.com).

Novartis is on Twitter. Sign up to follow @Novartis at http://twitter.com/novartis (http://twitter.com/novartis)

For Novartis multimedia content, please visit www.novartis.com/news/media-library (http://www.novartis.com/news/media-library)

For questions about the site or required registration, please contact media.relations@novartis.com (mailto:media.relations@novartis.com)

References

[1] Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) Summary of Product Characteristics (SmPC), 2018.

[2] Ronson, A., Tvito, A., Rowe, JM., "Treatment of Relapsed/Refractory Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in Adults." Current Oncology Reports, 2016 Jun;18(6):39. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27207612. Accessed August 2018 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27207612.%20Accessed%20August%202018).

[3] World Health Organization and European Environment and Health Information System, "Incidence of Childhood Leukaemia." December 2009. Available at: http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/97016/4.1.-Incidence-of-childhood-leukaemia-EDITED_layouted.pdf. Accessed August 2018 (http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/97016/4.1.-Incidence-of-childhood-leukaemia-EDITED_layouted.pdf.%20Accessed%20August%202018).

[4] World Health Organization. Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Review of cancer medicines on the WHO list of essential medicines. Available at: http://www.who.int/selection_medicines/committees/expert/20/applications/DiffuseLargeBCellLymphoma.pdf (http://www.who.int/selection_medicines/committees/expert/20/applications/DiffuseLargeBCellLymphoma.pdf). Accessed August 2018.

[5] Crump M, Neelapu S, Farooq U, Van Den Neste E, Kuruvilla J et al. (2017) Outcomes in refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma: results from the international SCHOLAR-1 study. Blood. E-pub ahead of print August 03. doi: https://doi.org/10.1182/blood-2017-03-769620 (https://doi.org/10.1182/blood-2017-03-769620). Accessed August 2018.

# # #

Novartis Media Relations

Central media line: +41 61 324 2200

E-mail: media.relations@novartis.com (mailto:media.relations@novartis.com)

Eric Althoff

Novartis Global Media Relations

+41 61 324 7999 (direct)

+41 79 593 4202 (mobile)

eric.althoff@novartis.com (mailto:eric.althoff@novartis.com) Fiona Phillips

Novartis Oncology Communications

+1 862-778-7705 (direct)

+1 862-217-9396 (mobile)

fiona.phillips@novartis.com (mailto:fiona.phillips@novartis.com)

Novartis Investor Relations

Central investor relations line: +41 61 324 7944

E-mail: investor.relations@novartis.com (mailto:investor.relations@novartis.com)

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





Media release (PDF) (http://hugin.info/134323/R/2212701/862790.pdf)

-Atlas Renewable Energy and Bancomext announce US$88.5 million financing for the Guajiro plant

-Guajiro will generate an estimated 300 GWh annually, equivalent to the electrical demands of about 120,000 homes

MEXICO CITY, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Atlas Renewable Energy and el Banco de Comercio Exterior (Bancomext) announced today the signing of a long-term financing agreement for Atlas Renewable Energy's solar power plant in Mexico, located in the state of Hidalgo.

Bancomext will provide $88.5 million dollars to finance the construction of the project, along with a $17 million dollars line of credit for Value Added Tax (VAT). The plant will have an installed capacity of approximately 129.5 MWp.

The project was awarded a power purchase agreement (PPA) with the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), Mexico's federal electricity company, in the first long-term energy auction, carried out in 2016 as part of Mexico's energy reform.

The Guajiro Solar project is expected to begin operations in the second quarter of 2019. The plant will span over 410 hectares in Nopala de Villagran, located in the state of Hidalgo. Guajiro Solar estimates it will generate 300 GWh annually, equivalent to the demand of roughly 120,000 homes. Atlas Renewable Energy estimates that the operation of the project will prevent the annual emission of more than 215,000 tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to eliminating more than 46,000 cars from circulation.

Carlos Barrera, CEO of Atlas Renewable Energy, stated that, "The financing of the Guajiro Solar project marks an important milestone for Atlas Renewable Energy and consolidates Mexico as one of our main markets. It also strengthens our track-record of successful renewable energy project financings throughout Latin America." He recognized Bancomext's management of this transaction and for the positive impact it has had in accelerating investment in renewable energy projects throughout Mexico. "As we continue to grow, we will look for other opportunities to partner again with leading financial institutions such as Bancomext and government entities such as CFE," he concluded.

Camilo Serrano, general manager of Atlas Renewable Energy for Mexico, emphasized that, "This project demonstrates a collaboration of public and private interests to increase the presence of renewable energy in Mexico," and commented that they will look for more opportunities to expand Atlas Renewable Energy's footprint in Mexico.

Francisco N. Gonzalez Diaz, general director of Bancomext, highlighted that, "The Guajiro Solar project positions Atlas Renewable Energy as a reliable partner for investment and infrastructure development within the Mexican energy sector." This project will generate 300 GWh annually, while helping achieve the goal of generating 35% of Mexico's energy from renewable sources by 2024. Additionally, it provides an economic stimulus for the region. He added that, "This type of financing is intended to continue supporting the development of projects aligned to the Federal Government's market strategy for renewable energy."

As its first solar energy project in Mexico, Guajiro is part of Atlas Renewable Energy's growth strategy to deepen its position in Mexico, a core market for Atlas Renewable Energy. The company launched its regional expansion in last year, with the inauguration of a plant in Chile that generates 110 MW, and the acquisition of an operating 70MW plant in the North of Chile. In July of this year, the company raised a green bond for two of its operating plants in Uruguay, and currently the company is in construction and advance development stage for several photovoltaic plants in Brazil with a total capacity of 450 MW.

Bancomext considers the energy sector strategic for the development of the country, so it has a program for the financing of renewable energy projects through the granting of long-term resources, in local currency or US dollars, to support companies during the construction, operation, and maintenance stages of the projects.

About Atlas Renewable Energy

Atlas Renewable Energy (Atlas) is a renewable energy generation company that develops, builds, and operates renewable energy projects with long-term energy contracts across Latin America. The current Atlas portfolio is 800MW+ of contracted projects in development, construction, or operational stages, and aims to grow an additional 1.5GW over the next decade.

Launched in early 2017, Atlas includes an experienced team with the longest track record in the solar energy industry in Latin America. The company is recognized by its high standards in development, construction, and operation of large-scale projects.

Atlas Renewable Energy is part of the Energy Fund IV, founded by Actis, a leading private equity investor in the energy sector of emerging markets. Actis has allocated more than $600 million of equity in Atlas Renewable Energy to invest in long-term renewable energy contracted projects.

Atlas's growth is focused on the main emerging markets and economies of Latin America, using its proven development, commercialization and structuring know-how to bring clean energy to the region. By actively engaging with the community and stakeholders at the center of its project strategy, Atlas works every day to provide the world with a cleaner future.

To more know more about Atlas Renewable Energy, visit: http://www.atlasrenewableenergy.com/.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/735310/Atlas_Renewable_Energy_Logo.jpg(Nay Pyi Taw/Fornebu, 27 August 2018) Telenor Group and UNICEF today announced that its successful mobile birth registration pilot will be scaled to Myanmar. The organisations signed a partnership agreement for a Mobile Birth and Death Registration (MBDR) project endorsed by the Government of Myanmar.

When launched in Mon State, south eastern Myanmar, the pilot will allow midwives to enter birth and death registration on a smartphone application. Township health offices receive and register this information and issue certificates using a digitalised recording system instead of the previously manual method.

Reducing inequalities

More than one billion people in the world today lack an official identity. The ability to prove one's identity is crucial to social, political and economic inclusion and enables greater access to basic services such as healthcare and education. Changing this reality is a challenge, but also an opportunity to reduce inequalities on a huge scale.

The ability to prove one's identity is crucial to social, political and economic inclusion and enables greater access to basic services such as healthcare and education.

"Telenor Group is committed to the UN Sustainable Development Goal #10. By supporting the government's civil registration system with UNICEF, Telenor Group and Telenor Myanmar focus on reducing inequalities by leveraging innovative digital services and connectivity to bring the benefits of e-government to the public, and to support Myanmar's future digital economy," said Petter Furberg, Chairman of the Board for Telenor Myanmar and EVP, Head of Emerging Asia for Telenor Group.

In addition to the financial support, Telenor Group will grant free data access to MBDR's web-based platform and provide training to midwives on how to register information and manage the digital system.

A game changer

UNICEF Representative to Myanmar, June Kunugi said, "We enter this partnership having witnessed the results of a recent birth registration campaign in Myanmar that opened the door for children to go school and access other basic services. The support from Telenor Group will be a game changer in allowing UNICEF to support the Government of Myanmar to reach all children through establishing a digital vital statistics system."

Although Myanmar already uses an electronic platform (eVR) to archive birth and death records at Union, State and Region levels, registration in townships is completed in paper forms. The agreement signed today to extend eVR in Mon State, is targeted to increase birth and death registration coverage, improve data confidentiality and security, and reduce the use of additional resources to fill, print and transport paper forms. The pilot aims to reduce the time it takes to receive a birth registration certificate from 3-6 months down to around one month.

The new pilot is based on experiences from a first-of-its-kind Digital Birth Registration pilot carried out by Telenor in Pakistan, together with UNICEF and local Governments. By training local health workers visiting newborns for health check-ups to also register the births via a mobile app, the pilot saw an increase in birth registration from 30 percent to 90 percent during just six months. The project has been gradually scaled and the ambition is to register 700,000 children by end of 2018, covering a total of nine districts in Punjab and Sindh provinces. Telenor Group has a global ambition of facilitating access to identity for seven million across its footprint by 2020.

Press contacts:

Hanne Knudsen

Director, Media Relations, Telenor Group

+47 90 80 40 15 | Hanne.knudsen@telenor.com (mailto:Hanne.knudsen@telenor.com)

Alice Yu

Communications Manager, Telenor Group Asia

Telenor Group Asia

+6590126658 | Alice.Yu@telenor.com

Jean-Yves M. Gallardo

Director of Communications, UNICEF Norway

+47 992 89 629 | jean-yves.gallardo@unicef.no (mailto:jean-yves.gallardo@unicef.no)

About Telenor Group:

Telenor Group connects its 172 million customers to what matters most. Connecting the world has been Telenor's domain for more than 160 years and we currently operate across Scandinavia and Asia. We are committed to responsible business conduct and driven by the ambition of empowering societies.

About UNICEF:

UNICEF works in some of the world's toughest places, to reach the world's most disadvantaged children. Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, to build a better world for everyone.





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: Telenor via Globenewswire

BANGKOK, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Thailand aims to connect China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to accelerate more investment and trade opportunities in Asia, especially ASEAN and ACMECS, Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak told almost 1,000 participants from both China and Thailand at the "Thailand-China Business Forum 2018: Comprehensive Partnership through the Belt and Road Initiative and the EEC".

The forum was held by the Thailand Board of Investment (BOI) in support of the 6th Thailand-China Joint Cooperation Committee meeting in Thailand.

Dr. Somkid told the audience that it was the first time the Chinese delegates, led by China's State Councilor Wang Yong, had also invited a group of major Chinese entrepreneurs and high-level Chinese executives to join the mission to explore investment opportunities in Thailand. The number of Chinese entrepreneurs joining the mission was over 400 persons, which was beyond expectations.

In his keynote speech, Dr. Somkid said that Chinese investment patterns are shifting both because of the changing global economic landscape and because of China's rapid economic development. At the same time, many countries in Asia have started to cooperate more closely and also link up via the development of logistical and transport projects.

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in particular has become a major driver of economic development in this part of the world as it is connecting China with many countries across Asia, as well as connecting Asia at large with Europe and other parts of the world. In this respect, ASEAN countries have emerged as a significant part of BRI's development roadmap. In addition to Thailand's strategic location at the heart of ASEAN, its long-standing trade and economic cooperation with many countries is helping increase competitive advantages, which presents enormous opportunities to Chinese investors.

China is very strong in various industries that Thailand identifies as targeted industries, especially S-Curve industries such digital & software development; high value-added products from natural rubber; electric vehicles and automotive parts; machinery and parts; automation and robotics; telecommunication products and parts; biotechnology; electronics and parts; and the manufacture and repair of aerospace technologies.

With this in mind, the Thai government has developed a number of infrastructure projects and special initiatives, such as the Eastern Economic Corridor of Innovation (EECi), to serve as an incubator hub for startups and human resource development.

"Thailand is more than ready to support the economic progress of Asia as the country is already out of the economic recession period," Dr. Somkid stressed. "From an economic growth of 0.9% a couple of years ago, Thailand's economic growth has gradually improved to 4.8% in the first half of this year. We have seen strongly positive trends as our exports have increased and our international reserve is strong," he added. "I am confident that China and Thailand can work together to create a strong trade and investment network. Although Thailand is a relatively small country, we are strongly committed to supporting the fast development of Asia."

Mr. Kobsak Pootrakul, Minister Attached to the Office of Prime Minister, said that the Thai government viewed it as highly important to nurture and strengthen trade ties as well as investment and economic relations between Thailand and China. The government realizes that China's Belt and Road Initiative and Thailand's policy to make EEC a thriving economic hub within ASEAN complement each other well and will bring greater success and prosperity for both countries.

He added that the forum provided a good opportunity for Chinese entrepreneurs to learn more about Thailand's key economic policies, especially as regards bilateral cooperation on industrial, trade and investment development. Also important are updates on infrastructure projects that connect Thailand, China and other Asian countries, such as a high-speed train link, a dual-track train system and new digital infrastructure such as a submarine cable linking with neighboring countries.

The Thai government sees the economic transformation of the country as its top priority, which is why it seeks to ensure a supportive business environment and ecosystem for investors. As part of this mission, the government will establish a new committee chaired by the Prime Minister to facilitate investors and make it easier for foreign investors to conduct business in Thailand.

Ms. Duangjai Asawachintachit, Secretary General of the Thailand Board of Investment (BOI), echoed those views. "Chinese investors are among our top priority targets," Duangjai said. "To better support them, BOI has established three offices in China so as to facilitate Chinese investors across the country. In the two years and the first half of this year, the total value of investment applications from China has already exceeded 56 billion baht. In addition, we have arranged roadshows to China several times to promote investment in Thailand."

For more information, please contact:

Thailand Board of Investment

Email: thailandinvestmentyear@gmail.com

Tel. +66 (0) 2553 8111

www.boi.go.th

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/735436/Thailand_China_Business_Forum_2018.jpgToronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - August 27, 2018) - Tidal Royalty Corp. (CSE: RLTY.U) (OTC: TDRYF) ("Tidal Royalty"), a leading provider of royalty financing to licensed U.S. cannabis operators, is pleased to announce it has entered into a binding letter of intent ("Agreement") to acquire certain assets that are strategic to Tidal Royalty from CannaRoyalty Corp. (CSE: CRZ) (OTC: CNNRF) ("CannaRoyalty"), a leading North American cannabis products and brands company.

Pursuant to the Agreement, Tidal Royalty will acquire a royalty entitlement and equity interest in Alternative Medical Enterprises, LLC, doing business as AltMed, ("AltMed") a leading multi-state, vertically-integrated operator. The aggregate consideration for the acquisition is C$8 million, in a combination of cash and Tidal Royalty's stock.

AltMed is led by former senior pharmaceutical executives and has captured market share by implementing pharma industry standards to the development, production and dispensing of medical cannabis. AltMed has vertically-integrated operations in both Florida and Arizona, pursuant to such states' regulated cannabis programs, and currently has applications for licenses pending in Ohio. In addition to distributing its own award-winning product line (MuV) of topicals, gels, concentrates and transdermal patches, AltMed has distribution partnerships with leading cannabis brands - including with Wana Brands, a leading producer of cannabis-infused products.

Pursuant to the Agreement, Tidal Royalty will acquire a royalty on U.S. and international sales of the MuV product line. Tidal Royalty will also acquire an equity interest in AltMed.

"We've been following AltMed for quite some time now and have watched them expand their footprint very strategically and methodically. They are led by an extremely entrepreneurial and capable management team and we feel that they are positioned to be a leading player in the U.S. industry. We are excited to be in this position and look forward to finding additional ways that we can support their growth plans," said Paul Rosen, CEO & Chairman of Tidal Royalty. "This transaction was really made possible by our strong synergistic relationship with CannaRoyalty, a company whom we have a great deal of respect and admiration for. We are confident that our companies will identify additional mutually-strategic opportunities in the emerging U.S. regulated cannabis industry."

"This Agreement advances our stated strategy of realizing value for shareholders on non-core assets. The gains from our successful investment in AltMed will provide CannaRoyalty with capital to continue to expand its distribution and brand network in the California market. We are confident that AltMed will be a valuable addition to Tidal Royalty's portfolio, and as CannaRoyalty continues to grow and build a solid presence in California, we look forward to opportunities to partner with the experienced team at Tidal Royalty," said Marc Lustig, Chairman and CEO of CannaRoyalty.

Closing of the transaction is subject to, among other things, the satisfactory completion of due diligence, which is currently underway, and the receipt of all corporate and regulatory approvals.

With the execution of this Agreement, Tidal Royalty has now entered into letters of intent with cannabis operators in Florida, Arizona, California, Nevada, Massachusetts and Illinois. In addition, Tidal Royalty is in the process of evaluating multiple additional opportunities across the U.S., including in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Michigan. Tidal Royalty intends to provide further information on those discussions when the respective parties reach an agreement and execute letters of intent.

About Tidal Royalty

Tidal Royalty provides royalty financing to the U.S. regulated cannabis industry. Led by an executive team with extensive industry experience in Canada and the U.S., Tidal Royalty provides operators with the funding they need to grow their business. Operators benefit from non-dilutive capital and investors get top-line access to a diversified portfolio of companies that will form the future of this transformative industry.

For further information, please contact:



Tidal Royalty Corp.

Terry Taouss, President

Email: terry@tidalroyalty.com

This news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "continue", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "may", "will", "potential", "proposed" and other similar words, or information that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Readers are cautioned that forward-looking information contained in this new release is not based on historical facts but instead is based on reasonable assumptions and estimates of management. Forward-looking information contained in this news release includes, but is not limited to: the ability to enter into definitive documentation in respect of letters of intent currently entered into by Tidal Royalty, the ability of Tidal Royalty to enter into additional letters of intent and associated definitive documentation with current or further proposed investee companies, the operating and financial performance of any investee company to be funded by Tidal Royalty from time to time and the ability of Tidal Royalty to generate revenue or realize profit through royalty agreements or equity investments with any future investee companies. In addition, this news release contains forward-looking statements attributed to third-party sources, the accuracy of which has not been independently verified by Tidal Royalty. Forward-looking information contained herein is based on the opinions and reasonable assumptions and estimates of management as at the date hereof and is subject to a variety of known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of Tidal Royalty, that could cause actual events or results of Tidal Royalty to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking information. Such factors include: U.S. regulatory landscape and enforcement related to cannabis, including political risks and risks relating to regulatory change, risks relating to anti-money laundering laws and regulation, other governmental and environmental regulation, public opinion and perception of the cannabis industry, risks related to the enforceability of contracts, the requirement by Tidal Royalty to obtain additional financing, the limited operating history of Tidal Royalty, timeliness of government approvals for granting of permits and licences needed by any future investee companies, including licences to cultivate cannabis, the actual operating and financial performance of any future investee company, competition and other risks affecting Tidal Royalty in particular and the U.S. cannabis industry generally, and the risk factors effecting Tidal Royalty disclosed in the listing statement of Tidal Royalty available at www.sedar.com. Because of such risks, uncertainties and other factors, investors should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking information contained herein. Tidal Royalty is under no obligation, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law. The foregoing statements expressly qualify the forward-looking information contained herein.This release does not constitute an offer for sale of, nor a solicitation for offers to buy, any securities in the United States.

Neither the CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - August 27, 2018) - Cordoba Minerals Corp. (TSXV: CDB) (OTCQX: CDBMF) ("Cordoba" or the "Company") today announces that the Company, through its wholly-owned subsidiary Cordoba Minerals (USA) Corp., has entered into a joint venture and earn-in agreement (the "Joint Venture Agreement") with Bell Copper Corporation (TSXV: BCU) ("Bell Copper") and certain of its wholly-owned subsidiaries, to explore the copper porphyry project located in northwestern Arizona, USA (the "Arizona Copper Project"), which is drill-ready with initial drilling expected to commence in the coming weeks.

"Cordoba is pursuing an opportunity with the full support of High Power Exploration to drill test a copper porphyry target situated along the Arizona Volcanic Arc. This significant region has provided between 50-70% of the American copper supply over the last 100 years," commented Mario Stifano, President and CEO of Cordoba Minerals.

Joint Venture Agreement

Pursuant to the terms of the Joint Venture Agreement, and as part of the initial commitment to the project, Cordoba will subscribe for 2,857,143 units of Bell Copper on a private placement basis at a price of C$0.07 per unit. Each unit will consist of 1 common share in the capital of Bell Copper and 1 common share purchase warrant, with each warrant exercisable at a price of C$0.105 per share for a period ending 12 months from the date of issuance. The warrants are subject to a mandatory exercise in the event that, at any time prior to the expiry of the warrants, Bell Copper's common shares trade at or above $0.14 for 30 consecutive trading days. Following the completion of the unit private placement, but prior to the exercise of any warrants, Cordoba will own approximately 4% of Bell Copper on a non-diluted basis.

In addition to the unit subscription, Cordoba will also fund C$300,000 in cash for initial drilling expenditures at the Arizona Copper Project.

Following the completion of the initial drilling program, Cordoba will have the option to earn up to an 80% interest in the Arizona Copper Project (by way of acquisition of membership interests in the joint venture company MMDEX LLC, a wholly-owned indirect subsidiary of Bell Copper) by completing certain phased project expenditures over a 7.5 year period as follows:

Phase 1 C$1M within 18 months to earn 25% interest

Phase 2 Additional C$3M within subsequent 2 years for 51% interest

Phase 3 Additional C$3M within subsequent 2 years for 70% interest

Phase 4 Additional C$10M within subsequent 2 years for 80% interest

The completion of the transactions contemplated by the Joint Venture Agreement remain subject to, among other things, the receipt of all required approvals from the TSX Venture Exchange ("TSXV") by each of Bell Copper and Cordoba, and Bell Copper shareholder approval.

Technical Information & Qualified Person

The technical information in this release has been reviewed and verified by both Dale A. Sketchley and Eugene Schmidt, both Qualified Persons for the purpose of National Instrument 43-101.

Mr. Sketchley is a consulting geologist to Cordoba Minerals with more than 40 years of experience in the mineral exploration, mining and consulting industry. He is a Member of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia (APEGBC) and the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (CIMM). Mr. Sketchley is considered independent under National Instrument 43-101.

Mr. Schmidt is Cordoba's Vice President of Exploration with more than 50 years' experience as a geologist focused on mineral exploration, mining and industry consulting, 30 of which he has specialized in the southwest United States, Chile and Peru porphyry copper provinces. He is an SME Registered Member #4025503RM and Registered Geologic Engineer #227 (Washington).

Mr. Schmidt is not considered to be independent under National Instrument 43-101.

About Cordoba Minerals

Cordoba Minerals Corp. is a Toronto-based mineral exploration company focused on the exploration and acquisition of copper and gold projects in the Americas. Cordoba is currently focused on its 100%-owned San Matias Copper-Gold Project, which includes the advanced-stage Alacran Deposit, located in the Department of Cordoba. For further information, please visit www.cordobaminerals.com.

ON BEHALF OF THE COMPANY

Mario Stifano, President and CEO

Cordoba Minerals Corp.

For further information, please contact:

Evan Young, Director, Investor Relations

Email: eyoung@cordobamineralscorp.com

Phone: +1 (647) 808-2141

Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release includes "forward-looking statements" and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. All statements included in this news release, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements including, without limitation, that future exploration could result in the discovery of a significant copper porphyry deposit; that Cordoba will fully execute its option to earn into an 80% interest in the Arizona Copper Project; the completion of the unit subscription; the completion of the drilling program; and the receipt of TSXV approval Forward-looking statements include predictions, projections and forecasts and are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "potential", "target", "budget" and "intend" and statements that an event or result "may", "will", "should", "could" or "might" occur or be achieved and other similar expressions and includes the negatives thereof.

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 Cordoba operates, are inherently subject to significant operational, economic, and competitive uncertainties, risks and contingencies. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results, and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations include actual exploration results, interpretation of metallurgical characteristics of the mineralization, changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined, future metal prices, availability of capital and financing on acceptable terms, general economic, market or business conditions, uninsured risks, regulatory changes, delays or inability to receive required approvals, and other exploration or other risks detailed herein and from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators, including those described under the heading "Risks and Uncertainties" in the Company's most recently filed MD&A. The Company does not undertake to update or revise any forward-looking statements, except in accordance with applicable law. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.MOSCOW, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- GAC Motor, China's leading automaker, is set to make its first appearance at the Moscow International Automobile Salon (MIAS) from August 29 to September 9 with all-star vehicle lineup. The press conference is set for 1:55 pm on August 29 at Booth C203, Hall 14, Pavilion 3, Crocus Expo International Exhibition Center. The company will also host a brand promotion event from 10 am to 11 am on August 30, inviting Russian dealers and media to witness GAC Motor's official entry into the Russian market.

Yu Jun, President of GAC Motor, once remarked in the 2018 International Distributor Conference that Russia is a key market as the company continues to follow China's 'Belt and Road' Initiative, which marks further steps in exploring the more mature markets in Europe. Some of GAC Motor's vehicle models have already received sales qualification in Russia. There is strong confidence that the dynamics, durability and safety of these automobiles can win the heart of local buyers.

With a solid foundation in product development, manufacturing and global-scale operation, GAC Motor, as an independent Chinese brand, has made satisfactory progress in global markets with best-selling and award-winning vehicles as well as five-star services.

During MIAS, GAC Motor will be debuting its elite vehicle lineup, including sales champion GS4 SUV, the upmarket GS8 SUV, first minivan GM8, high-end sedan GA8 as well as all-electric SUV GE3. The star of GAC Motor's first exhibition in Moscow will be the GS8 SUV, the first mid- to large-sized 7-seat SUV from a Chinese brand that has sold over 10,000 cars in a month in the domestic market.

GAC Motor has followed a steady, innovation-driven and quality-oriented strategy since the brand was established 10 years ago. With a global research and development (R&D) network, world-class manufacturing facilities, international supply chain and marketing layout, the brand has launched a series of models that have achieved great success both at home and abroad?

Moreover, GAC Motor has established global sales and service networks in 15 countries and regions, and has been praised as the "Best Chinese Car Brand" in multiple overseas markets. The automaker has made stunning appearances at top international auto shows such as the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) and Dubai Motor Show, and MIAS will mark another milestone in the brand's development.

"With a vigorous quality control system and leading domestic supply systems, GAC Motor is an extremely strong brand with an established, comprehensive quality guarantee. We want to show the best of the Chinese automobile industry in the Russian market through our debut at MIAS," Yu noted.

About GAC Motor

Founded in 2008, Guangzhou Automobile Group Motor CO., LTD (GAC Motor) is a subsidiary of GAC Group which ranks 202nd among Fortune Global 500 companies. The company develops and manufactures premium quality vehicles, engines, components and auto accessories. GAC Motor has now ranked first among all Chinese brands for five consecutive years in J.D. Power Asia Pacific's China Initial Quality Study SM (IQS), demonstrating the company's quality-centric strategy from innovative R&D), manufacturing to supply chain and sales & services.

For more information, please visit:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GACMotor

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gac_motor

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/gac_motor

Media Contact:

Sukie Wong

+86-186-8058-2829

GACMotor@126.com

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/734829/GAC_Motor_GS8.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/734827/GAC_Motor_manufacturing_factory.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/734830/GAC_Motor_global_networks.jpgVANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / August 27, 2018 / Midnight Sun Mining Corp. (the "Company" or "Midnight Sun") (TSX-V: MMA) is pleased to report initial results of its Phase One 2018 exploration program on its Zambian copper-cobalt properties, the Solwezi Group of Licences ("Solwezi Licences") located in the North-Western province of Zambia. Phase One work included 7 diamond drill holes totalling 1,503 meters and 234 air core holes totalling 10,424 meters at the Mitu target, as well as ground and airborne geophysical surveys.

The Company has received independent assay results for all submitted diamond drill holes. Significant results from the diamond drill holes, as well as from air core drilling are presented in the Table below.

Phase One - Mitu Area - Initial Significant Drill Hole Intercepts Hole # Drill Type Mitu Area Az Dip From (m) To (m) Interval (m) Cu % Co % Ni % Cu Eq % MTDD035 Including HQ Core Discovery 035 60 115.0 125.0 129.3 129.3 14.3 4.3 0.42% 0.51% 0.10% 0.28% 0.05% 0.11% 1.61% 3.73% MTDD036 HQ Core Discovery 035 60 185.0 190.0 5.0 0.25% 0.04% 0.08% 0.87% MTDD037 Including Including HQ Core Southeast 035 60 129.9 129.9 146.0 153.6 135.0 147.0 23.7 5.1 1.0 0.34% 0.64% 1.62% 0.04% 0.04% 0.10% 0.15% 0.32% 1.50% 1.11% 1.81% 6.05% MTDD038 Including HQ Core Southeast 035 60 101.8 104.0 123.0 111.0 21.2 7.0 0.28% 0.45% 0.05% 0.07% 0.03% 0.04% 0.88% 1.28% MTAC198 Including Air Core Northwest vertical 3.0 18.0 6.0 31.5 3.0 13.5 0.04% 0.22% 0.06% 0.05% 0.04% 0.05% 0.81% 0.81% MTAC204 Including Air Core Northwest vertical 1.5 3.0 49.5 24.0 48.0 21.0 0.14% 0.15% 0.07% 0.10% 0.05% 0.06% 0.96% 1.36% MTAC212 Air Core Northwest vertical 3.0 12.0 9.0 0.03% 0.03% 0.06% 0.45% MTAC224 Air Core Southeast vertical 19.5 28.5 9.0 0.05% 0.02% 0.04% 0.33% MTAC236 Air Core Southeast vertical 45.0 52.5 7.5 0.05% 0.01% 0.05% 0.28%

Notes:

Reported intervals are the downhole widths, which are similar to the true widths.

Reported intervals are calculated for zones assaying > 0.2% copper or 0.02% cobalt and containing less than 2 meters of internal waste.

Copper equivalent values are estimated using current metal prices of $2.73/lb copper, $29.26/lb cobalt, and $6.03/lb nickel and are presented for ease of interval comparison only. Metallurgical recovery factors are assumed to be 100% although the recovery factors for various metals may vary significantly.

Diamond Drill Program

Drill holes MTDD035 and MTDD036 were drilled along a profile within the "Discovery Zone" established in prior years' drilling. Drill holes MTDD037 and MTDD038 were drilled 300 meters to the southeast where one hole drilled in 2017 had defined the southeast margin of the "Discovery Zone." These holes indicate continuity of significant copper-cobalt-nickel mineralization between previous holes.

Drill holes MTDD039 and MTDD041 tested targets to the northwest and southeast of the Discovery Zone identified by geophysical, soil geochemical and air core drill results. These holes encountered barren lithologies suggesting structural dislocation in these areas. Follow-up drilling is planned to determine the source of these anomalies.

The above drilling has shown that the Discovery Zone has a strike length of over 800 meters and a down dip extension of 300 meters.

Drill hole MTDD040 tested a prominent geophysical anomaly 5 kilometers to the southeast of the Discovery Zone, identified by geophysical work conducted in 2018. This hole did not return significant metal values, although it did encounter black shales, which are the typical host rocks for the targeted mineralization and follow up drilling in this area is planned.

Air core program

234 Air Core holes totalling 10,424 meters have been drilled in 2018, with samples being sent for independent assays on 99 of these holes with results received from 35 of these holes to date. The primary purpose of this drilling was to locate areas of black shale lithology with elevated base metal values beneath overburden to direct diamond drilling along the >14 km of indicated strike length of the Mitu trend along the western flank of the Solwezi Dome. Air Core holes also provide indications of possibly exploitable oxide mineralization within the overburden.

A map of the 2018 drill locations can be found on the company website here.

Geophysical Survey

While the Mitu area has limited surface rock exposure, the favourable black shale host rock has demonstrated a response to Natural Sourced Audio Magneto Tellurics ("NSAMT") geophysics. The anomalies detected by this system have proven important in developing targets and directing drill holes, as the NSAMT data shows some of the structural fabric of the bedrock geology and black shale units. In 2018, an additional 34 line kilometers of NSAMT surveying have been conducted over the Mitu area and results from this work are currently being analyzed and interpreted.

In addition, a 3,889 line kilometer geophysical airborne survey was flown over the entire Solwezi License area by Geotech Airborne. The survey included the contractor's proprietary Versatile Time-Domain Electromagnetic ("VTEM") system, as well as horizontal magnetic gradiometer and radiometrics instruments. The VTEM system is ideal for rapid mapping of conductive units, such as the prospective black shales that host mineralization at Mitu. This will help identify black shale basins that may be similar to the Discovery Zone. The magnetics survey will help with structural mapping, as it responds to the subtly different magnetic signatures of the rocks and the typically lower magnetic signature of faults. The system should also respond to pyrrhotite, which is associated with copper-cobalt mineralization. Finally, radiometrics has proven very useful in identifying the different lithologies and will, therefore, along with the magnetics and VTEM, help generate an accurate geology map.

Once the resulting data has been received and compiled, the interpretation will guide the next phase of drilling at Mitu and other target areas including Dumbwa, Kifubwe, 22 Zone and Khaziba where significant mineralization has been encountered in previous exploration campaigns.

The Company's President and Chief Executive Officer, Brett Richards stated: "The results of Phase One drilling continue to support the potential size and scale of the mineralization at Mitu while also showing the continuity of mineralization in the Discovery Zone. I am excited to receive the full interpretation of the geophysical work to pair with these assay results as we plan for Phase Two of this year's exploration."

Qualified Control/Quality Assurance

Samples obtained during both diamond drill and air core drilling were transported directly to SGS Inspection Services in Kalulushi, Zambia by Midnight Sun personnel for sample preparation. There the samples were sorted, dried, crushed, and pulped before final chemical analysis using ICP-OE methods. All samples returning >10,000 ppm Cu were automatically re-assayed for higher level concentrations by SGS, which is a fully accredited laboratory. Standards and blanks were inserted regularly in the sample stream and checks were done for Au and Cu.

Qualified Person: Peter Flindell, MAusIMM and MAIG, a Qualified Person under NI 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical data and contents of this release.

Please refer to the Company's previous New Releases as well as the Company presentation on its website at: www.midnightsunmining.com.

ABOUT MIDNIGHT SUN MINING

Midnight Sun has earned a 60% interest in the Solwezi Licences with the potential to acquire the remaining 40%. The Solwezi Licences are comprised of two individual prospecting licences totalling 506 square kilometres, situated in the North-Western Province of Zambia, adjacent to First Quantum's Kansanshi Mine; Africa's largest copper mining complex, on the prolific Zambia-Congo Copper Belt.

Led by experienced directors and talented management, Midnight Sun aims to further explore the impressive mineralization and anomalies that have recently been discovered on the Solwezi Licenses.

Midnight Sun Mining Corp. trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol MMA.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF MIDNIGHT SUN MINING CORP.

Brett A. Richards - President and Chief Executive Officer

For Further Information Contact:

Brett A. Richards Al Fabbro

President and Chief Executive Officer Lead Director

Tel: +1 905 449 1500 Tel: +1 604 351 8850

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 NEW RELEASE.

This news release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements." All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include changes in market conditions, unsuccessful exploration results, changes in commodity prices, unanticipated changes in key management personnel and general economic conditions. Mining exploration and development is an inherently risky business. Accordingly, the actual events may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect any of the Company's forward-looking statements. These and other factors should be considered carefully and readers should not place undue reliance on the Company's forward-looking statements. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made from time to time by the Company or on its behalf, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.

SOURCE: Midnight Sun Mining Corp.Product launches emphasize commitment to deliver innovative, software-enabled solutions to help customers navigate the shifting energy landscape

Exciting product innovations to help customers meet evolving challenges include eLumina TM HVDC Control System, 72.5kV compact Gas Insulated Switchgear (GIS), new "Digital Twin" for Power Transformers, Intelligent Digital Substations, Asset Lifecycle Management Services and advanced Energy Management System (EMS) with full Wide Area Monitoring Systems (WAMS) enhancement

HVDC Control System, 72.5kV compact Gas Insulated Switchgear (GIS), new "Digital Twin" for Power Transformers, Intelligent Digital Substations, Asset Lifecycle Management Services and advanced Energy Management System (EMS) with full Wide Area Monitoring Systems (WAMS) enhancement New products will help improve grid utilization, increase access to renewable energy sources, and improve reliability and efficiency throughout the energy value chain for customers and citizens around the world

Through its Digital Energy portfolio of software solutions and services, GE supports the transformation of energy networks

The role of the grid is experiencing a pivotal change. GE Power's Grid Solutions business (NYSE:GE) today unveiled product innovations at CIGRE 2018 to address customers' needs to adapt to a more digitalized, decentralized and decarbonized energy landscape.

In the past, a simpler grid model transmitted electricity from large generation plants to end users. With carbon dioxide levels the highest they have ever been in 800,000 years, a modern grid is key to integrate renewable energy resources effectively as they are forecasted to represent two-thirds of global net electricity by 2050.

"The global energy landscape is undergoing a massive transformation. The grid of the future will require smarter, faster and more interoperable solutions to ensure resiliency, efficiency and security. That's why our Grid Solutions team is focused on investing in and delivering new digital, automation and HVDC technologies to transform energy networks across the globe. Our new product innovations will help our customers not only navigate the ever-changing energy landscape, but also unleash the full potential of electric grids worldwide," said Reinaldo Garcia, president and CEO of GE Power's Grid Solutions business.

At this year's CIGRE, GE Power's Grid Solutions business launched the following new products and services as part of their holistic approach to grid modernization:

eLumina TM HVDC Control System : Introducing the industry's first HVDC solution to implement a world-class digital measurement system fully based on IEC 61850. eLumina delivers a 50 percent smaller footprint and 80 percent reduction in field connections that simplifies system architectures, improving maintenance and operational efficiency. With 10 times more computing power, eLumina brings more data to operators to enable actionable intelligence through improved analytics and situational awareness. This new powerful platform is designed around a "single-source-of-truth" system model, enabling a more scalable, flexible, interoperable and adaptive HVDC solution.

: Introducing the industry's first HVDC solution to implement a world-class digital measurement system fully based on IEC 61850. eLumina delivers a 50 percent smaller footprint and 80 percent reduction in field connections that simplifies system architectures, improving maintenance and operational efficiency. With 10 times more computing power, eLumina brings more data to operators to enable actionable intelligence through improved analytics and situational awareness. This new powerful platform is designed around a "single-source-of-truth" system model, enabling a more scalable, flexible, interoperable and adaptive HVDC solution. F35 Gas Insulated Switchgear (GIS) with 72.5kV : By 2050, 66 percent of the world's population will be living in urban communities, requiring more power in compact areas. Simultaneously, offshore wind is predicted to reach a cumulative capacity of 115 GW by 2030, and these wind farms are moving into deeper waters that require larger turbines with higher power ratings. To address these shifts, GE Power's Grid Solutions business has launched a new compact F35 Gas-Insulated Substation (GIS) for 72.5 kV networks. With a bay volume reduced by 23 percent and a 30 percent reduction in SF 6 mass this new GIS delivers reliable power to urban, industrial and windfarm applications. For wind turbines and collection platforms specifically, this enhanced design allows the power voltage transformer to feed auxiliaries under "no wind" conditions, making it the ideal interface for offshore wind applications.

: By 2050, 66 percent of the world's population will be living in urban communities, requiring more power in compact areas. Simultaneously, offshore wind is predicted to reach a cumulative capacity of 115 GW by 2030, and these wind farms are moving into deeper waters that require larger turbines with higher power ratings. To address these shifts, GE Power's Grid Solutions business has launched a new compact F35 Gas-Insulated Substation (GIS) for 72.5 kV networks. With a bay volume reduced by 23 percent and a 30 percent reduction in SF mass this new GIS delivers reliable power to urban, industrial and windfarm applications. For wind turbines and collection platforms specifically, this enhanced design allows the power voltage transformer to feed auxiliaries under "no wind" conditions, making it the ideal interface for offshore wind applications. Modernizing the Grid through Digital Transformers, Intelligent Digital Substations, Asset Lifecycle Management Services and advanced EMS with full WAMS enhancement: As automation grows across the energy industry, digital control systems will play a vital role in the machines, grids and systems that deliver energy to the people and places that need it most. With these devices in place, the grid of the future will be able to recalibrate itself in real-time so that it can balance demand and integrate multiple-generation resources reliably. From the field to enterprise, GE Power's Grid Solutions business has created digitally connected solutions to increase efficiency and reliability of the network and it's connected assets, including:

"Digital Twin" for Power Transformers enables effective asset performance management to extend asset life and maximize operational performance. Advanced sensor technology with a digitalized secondary system delivers condition-based data and statistic models to build a software-enabled model of the transformer or even the entire substation: the twin. This interactive model allows operators to move from reactive to predictive maintenance solutions and improve system efficiency.

enables effective asset performance management to extend asset life and maximize operational performance. Advanced sensor technology with a digitalized secondary system delivers condition-based data and statistic models to build a software-enabled model of the transformer or even the entire substation: the twin. This interactive model allows operators to move from reactive to predictive maintenance solutions and improve system efficiency. Intelligent Digital Substations enable utility operators to maximize asset and substation utilization up to 30 percent. Coupling powerful visualization tools with the digitization of primary substation equipment and secondary systems, operators can collect and analyze critical data to proactively detect potential failures up to six months in advance.

enable utility operators to maximize asset and substation utilization up to 30 percent. Coupling powerful visualization tools with the digitization of primary substation equipment and secondary systems, operators can collect and analyze critical data to proactively detect potential failures up to six months in advance. Asset Lifecycle Management Services include a comprehensive portfolio of methods to collect distribution and transmission asset health data through a set of proven analytics and consulting services. These services are tailored to reduce failure rates by up to 50 percent, reduce maintenance costs by up to 25 percent and extend asset life by up to 20 percent. By incorporating the use of data, these end-to-end services optimize grid asset management strategies.

include a comprehensive portfolio of methods to collect distribution and transmission asset health data through a set of proven analytics and consulting services. These services are tailored to reduce failure rates by up to 50 percent, reduce maintenance costs by up to 25 percent and extend asset life by up to 20 percent. By incorporating the use of data, these end-to-end services optimize grid asset management strategies. Advanced EMS with full WAMS enhancementprovides the situational awareness operators need to increase network utilization and stability allowing more renewable integration and network automation.

With GE's hundred plus years of domain expertise and the power of digital integration, GE Power's Grid Solutions business is playing a critical role in boosting efficiency throughout the energy value chain across the globe.

If you are attending CIGRE, visit GE's stand #330 on the third floor of Palais des Congres de Paris, France and contact us for on-site interviews with our industry experts. For daily updates, follow us at @GE_Power and the hashtag CIGRE47.

About GE:

GE (NYSE:GE) is the world's Digital Industrial Company, transforming industry with software-defined machines and solutions that are connected, responsive and predictive. GE is organized around a global exchange of knowledge, the "GE Store," through which each business shares and accesses the same technology, markets, structure and intellect. Each invention further fuels innovation and application across our industrial sectors. With people, services, technology and scale, GE delivers better outcomes for customers by speaking the language of industry. http://www.ge.com/

About GE Power

GE Power is a world energy leader providing equipment, solutions and services across the energy value chain from generation to consumption. Operating in more than 180 countries, our technology produces a third of the world's electricity, equips 90 percent of power transmission utilities worldwide, and our software manages more than forty percent of the world's energy. Through relentless innovation and continuous partnership with our customers, we are developing the energy technologies of the future and improving the power networks we depend on today. For more information please visit www.ge.com/power, and follow GE Power on Twitter and on LinkedIn.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180827005323/en/

Contacts:

For more information:

Allison Cohen, +972 (0)54 729 9742

GE Power, Grid Solutions business

Global Media Relations Leader

allison.j.cohen@ge.comThe global precision agriculture market 2018-2022 is expected to post a CAGR of close to 14% during the forecast period, according to the latest market research report by Technavio

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180827005411/en/

Technavio has published a new market research report on the global precision agriculture market from 2018-2022. (Graphic: Business Wire)

A key factor driving the growth of the market is the focus on increasing agricultural output. Precision agriculture technologies like VRT provide farmers with detailed information on qualitative and quantitative inputs required for an agricultural area. This allows a farmer to plan farm activities in accordance with the expected yield and optimize on both time and resources. Similarly, precision agriculture uses GPS/GNSS and wide area augmentation system (WAAS) to obtain real-time location service that allows the use of a right amount of resources such as fertilizer, water, and other nutrients.

This market research report on the global precision agriculture market 2018-2022 also provides an analysis of the most important trends expected to impact the market outlook during the forecast period. Technavio classifies an emerging trend as a major factor that has the potential to significantly impact the market and contribute to its growth or decline.

This report is available at a USD 1,000 discount for a limited time only: View market snapshot before purchasing

In this report, Technavio highlights the technological advances in precision agriculture as one of the key emerging trends in the global precision agriculture market:

Global precision agriculture market: Technological advances in precision agriculture

Technologies like telematics, robotics, and nanotechnology are groundbreaking technologies in the global agricultural sector, and enable better decision making among farmers. Advanced technologies are being used to reduce input and increase the yield from an agricultural field. The benefits of using advanced technology include soil management, site management, fertilizer application, crop protection and pet management, and microbial safety.

"Among these advanced technologies, one such technology is nanotechnology. Nanotechnology provides various benefits to agriculture. Nanocapsules can be used to deliver pesticides, fertilizers, growth hormones, and other enzymes. Nanosensors are used to monitor soil conditions, crop growth, and to detect animal and plant pathogens. In addition, Nano chips and Nanoparticles are also being used in the agricultural industry," says a senior analyst at Technavio for research on agricultural equipment.

Global precision agriculture market: Segmentation analysis

This market research report segments the global precision agriculture market by technology (GIS, telematics, GPS, VRT, and remote sensing), by product (hardware and software services), and geographical regions (APAC, EMEA, and the Americas).

The Americas led the market in 2017 with a market share of close to 48%, followed by APAC and EMEA respectively. However, during the forecast period, the market share of APAC is expected to grow significantly due to the increasing adoption of precision agriculture in countries like India, China, and Japan. These countries have undertaken various initiatives to improve agricultural productivity and thereby food security.

Looking for more information on this market? Request a free sample report

Technavio's sample reports are free of charge and contain multiple sections of the report such as the market size and forecast, drivers, challenges, trends, and more.

Some of the key topics covered in the report include:

Market Landscape

Market ecosystem

Market characteristics

Market segmentation analysis

Market Sizing

Market definition

Market size and forecast

Five Forces Analysis

Market Segmentation

Geographical Segmentation

Regional comparison

Key leading countries

Market Drivers

Market Challenges

Market Trends

Vendor Landscape

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Competitive scenario

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 10,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180827005411/en/

Contacts:

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media Marketing Executive

US: +1 844 364 1100

UK: +44 203 893 3200

www.technavio.comDow Jones received a payment from EQS/DGAP to publish this press release.

DGAP-Media / 2018-08-27 / 17:30 Uniper SE and SOCAR will collaborate on projects aimed at improving the energy efficiency of oil and gas production in Azerbaijan. The two companies signed an agreement to that effect on Saturday, 25.8., in Baku during German Chancellor Angela Merkel's trip to Azerbaijan. The German energy provider and the Azerbaijan state oil and gas company have been working in close cooperation for the past five years. The principle aim of the new agreement is to enhance efficiency in energy use in production processes and thereby lower greenhouse gas emissions in Azerbaijan. Initial projects have already been identified and are now set to be reviewed in greater detail. The feasibility study shows, thanks to the application of modern technologies, a significant achievement of natural gas savings in the gas grid is possible. Back in 2013, Uniper and SOCAR concluded a long-term gas supply contract. Until 2045, up to 1.5 billion m of natural gas is slated to flow to Europe each year via the so-called Southern Gas Corridor. These gas deliveries serve to diversify the European and with it the German gas supplies and enhance security of supply and competition. In 2016 SOCAR and Uniper formed a joint venture for the development of energy efficiency. The joint venture will gain additional value by modernizing and expanding the electricity and steam generation facilities at the SOCAR chemical complex in Sumgayit Azerikimya. The launch of new facilities is scheduled for early 2020. The German government is assisting the project through a HERMES export credit guarantee. With an investment volume of around 30 million euros, the project draws mainly on German technology. Uniper and SOCAR are also bound together by their longstanding partnership. This partnership covers projects in the fields of technology, energy management, management training and corporate social responsibility. Christopher Delbruck, Member of the Management Board at Uniper, commented on the contract signing in Baku: "The new project marks another milestone in the partnership between the two companies, set to run over the long term. It will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the region and conserve the country's natural resources. The collaboration between Uniper and SOCAR is of mutual benefit to both sides and offers sound prospects for the future." Rovnag Abdullayev, President of SOCAR: "Strategic cooperation we have with one of the leading German companies UNIPER provided great opportunities for Azerbaijan to realize its natural resources as well as benefit from the modern technologies. Enhancing energy efficiency is of great value both for environment protection and gaining additional value from the natural gas saved in this project. Inking this agreement once again reiterates the high level of economic ties between our two countries, demonstrates the cooperation parties enjoy under the Southern Gas Corridor project as well as highlights the important role Azerbaijan and SOCAR play in European energy security." *About Uniper:* Uniper is an international energy company with around 12,000 employees worldwide. The company operates about 36 Gigawatt of reliable power generating capacity in Europe and Russia, which consists mainly of gas, coal and hydro power plants. With its balanced portfolio and its technical and commercial expertise, Uniper is able to offer attractive and customized products and services at competitive prices. Uniper's trading activities create links between global energy markets. These activities comprise the entire value chain for commodities trading in markets for electricity, emission allowances, natural gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), coal and freight. Moreover, the company's experience in asset operation and global trading serve as the basis for comprehensive service packages that - in addition to asset management - can also include supplying raw materials and fuels as well as operational management of power plants. *About SOCAR:* SOCAR is one of the leading international energy companies. In order to ensure the economic interests of the Azerbaijani people, SOCAR is a major operator and participant in a number of transnational projects across the country and abroad. The company is active in all the oil and gas industry value chains. Exploration of oil and gas fields, production, processing and transportation of oil, gas and gas condensate constitute the main part of the operations of SOCAR. SOCAR also exports natural gas, oil and petrochemical products to the country's market, as well as international markets. The company's goal is to become a vertical integrated international energy company with advanced experience in the field of effective operation, social and environmental responsibility. As an important EU energy supplier, SOCAR plays a special role in the sustainable economic development of Europe. For further information please contact: Georg Oppermann T +49 2 11-45 79-55 32 M +49 1 78-4 39 48 47 georg.oppermann@uniper.energy This press release may contain forward-looking statements based on current assumptions and forecasts made by Uniper SE management and other information currently available to Uniper. Various known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors could lead to material differences between the actual future results, financial situation, development or performance of the company and the estimates given here. Uniper SE does not intend, and does not assume any liability whatsoever, to update these forward-looking statements or to conform them to future events or developments. End of Media Release Issuer: Uniper SE Key word(s): Energy 2018-08-27 Dissemination of a Press Release, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases. Archive at www.dgap.de Language: English Company: Uniper SE E.ON-Platz 1 40479 Dusseldorf Germany Phone: +49 211 73275 0 Fax: +49 211 4579 5 01 E-mail: info@uniper.energy Internet: www.uniper.energy ISIN: DE000UNSE018, DE000UNSE1V6 WKN: UNSE01, UNSE1V Indices: MDAX Listed: Regulated Market in Frankfurt (Prime Standard); Regulated Unofficial Market in Berlin, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Hanover, Munich, Stuttgart, Tradegate Exchange End of News DGAP Media 717843 2018-08-27

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 27, 2018 11:30 ET (15:30 GMT)Rumor has it industry lobbying has persuaded the government to agree to 300-500 MW of distributed PV in each of the populous nation's 34 local government areas, with a reduction in "non-technical costs" making up for a lack of guaranteed payment.An insider close to China's National Energy Administration (NEA) divulged last week that the authorities may launch a new quota for distributed PV projects to be installed without a government subsidy. pv magazine has learned the proposal was thrashed out after talks between the government, the national PV industry body, solar companies and industry ...

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.Blockchain at Berkeley, Uphold, Brave, and Cred (formerly Libra Credit) Announce a Reserve Standard for Decentralized Assets

SINGAPORE / ACCESSWIRE / August 27, 2018 / CRED (formerly Libra Credit) joined a coalition of leading blockchain organizations to form the Universal Protocol Alliance. This universal transparent reserve and custody standard that introduces 'Proxy' digital assets to the world via the Universal Protocol Platform (UP Platform). The UP Platform, which recently announced early backing by a group of leading institutional investors, serves as the hub for the creation and management of 'proxy' tokens and user features that will drive mass user adoption of cryptocurrencies.

Proxy Tokens are a digital representation of their underlying asset and can exist on other blockchains. This technology enables Proxy Bitcoin, for example, to exist on Ethereum and be reasoned with directly by Ethereum's decentralized applications, decentralized exchanges and smart contracts.

The founding members announced today are:

Cred (formerly known as Libra Credit) - Founded in 2018 by a group of former PayPal executives, Cred has introduced a revolutionary lending protocol and platform for digital assets.

(formerly known as Libra Credit) - Founded in 2018 by a group of former PayPal executives, Cred has introduced a revolutionary lending protocol and platform for digital assets. Uphold - Founded in 2014, Uphold has over 850,000 users around the world and has traded over $3.5 billion on its digital money platform and reserve ledger.

Brave - From the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox, Brave radically improves internet browsing and leadership in the realms of privacy and digital advertising with the Basic Attention Token.

Blockchain at Berkeley - An academic organization at University of California, Berkeley, that provides educational resources, consultancy, and R&D to some of the biggest blockchain projects in the world.

The platform will enable a new world of tokenized digital assets - ranging from Proxy blockchains such as Bitcoin, to Proxy securities and Proxy Private Equity - and will facilitate the instant and seamless conversion of different forms of value. In doing so, the UP Platform will unlock the vast and untapped full potential of blockchain to transform how individuals and businesses store and transfer value, with Proxy Tokens representing the next generation of digital money. The UP Platform will also enable decentralized exchanges to offer tokens previously unable to reason with each other, and private custody of any digital asset with a highly-secure wallet option. For everyday users, the platform introduces groundbreaking new types of safeguards that render cryptocurrencies significantly more practical and convenient to own, such as private key recovery, inheritability and loss assurance.

"We are proud to be one of the founding members of the Universal Protocol (UP) Alliance. Together with Blockchain at Berkeley, Brave, and Uphold, we are advocating a universal custody and reserve standard that we believe will usher in the next 100 million users of blockchain and crypto assets. The founding members of UP all share our belief that a more transparent, fair and interoperable financial ecosystem will benefit everyone, and lead to more economic prosperity." said Dan Schatt, Chairman of the UP Alliance and Cofounder of Cred.

About the UP Alliance

The Universal Protocol Platform, is a transformational development for the entire blockchain industry, allowing all cryptocurrencies to be convertible on a single network.

Official Website: https://universalprotocol.io/

About Cred (Formerly Libra Credit)

CRED, formerly Libra Credit, is a decentralized lending ecosystem that facilitates open access to credit anywhere and anytime based on the Ethereum blockchain.

Official Website: https://www.libracredit.io/

Telegram: https://t.me/libraofficiallink

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LibraCredit

Email: katelynn@libracredit.io

SOURCE: CredRIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- HIMSS Middle East and Elsevier, the global information analytics company specializing in science and health, are proud to announce the call for submissions for the 4th Annual Middle East HIMSS-Elsevier Digital Healthcare Award 2018.

Sean Roberts, Vice President for HIMSS EMEA said, "The HIMSS-Elsevier Digital Healthcare Award is a showcase for best practices in health and informatics. The award demonstrates how rapidly transformational information and technology solutions are entering in to common use in the Middle East. We are excited to start receiving submissions."

Since 2013, the HIMSS-Elsevier Digital Healthcare Award has attracted 178 submissions across 29 countries and 99 unique organisations. In total, the projects submitted have impacted over 41 million patients worldwide.

This year's award for Outstanding ICT Achievement focuses on institutions who have harnessed information and technology to successfully advance patient care and safety. It follows the success of last year's awards, which saw strong participation from 14 healthcare organizations across the Gulf Cooperation Counsel (GCC), recognizing two first-time winners: Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Medical Group, KSA (Outstanding ICT Achievement category) and Ministry of Health & Prevention, UAE (Outstanding ICT Innovation category).

First launched in the Middle East in 2015, the HIMSS-Elsevier Digital Healthcare Award has received 48 submissions from leading public and private organisations in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Egypt and Jordan, including 2017 finalists Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi UAE, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz University Hospital KSA, Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Medical Group KSA and Ain Al Khalee Hospital UAE.

Commenting on the announcement, Tim Hawkins, Managing Director for Elsevier Clinical Solutions EMEALAAP said, "I'm honored that we are once again partnering with HIMSS to acknowledge an increasingly prominent area of medical practice. In an ever more pressurized medical environment the winning entry will demonstrate how technology delivers a tangible value to their institution."

Judges for this year's Award are:

Mariam Almutairi , Takween Tech, KSA

, Takween Tech, KSA Dr. Osama ElHassan , Head of eHealth, Dubai Health Authority, UAE

, Head of eHealth, Dubai Health Authority, UAE John Daniels , Global Vice President, HIMSS Analytics, USA

, Global Vice President, HIMSS Analytics, Tim Morris , Product & Partnership Director, Elsevier EMEALA/APAC

Submit your case study here or email HIMSS to enquire.

Deadline for submissions is Friday, September 17 2018.

Winners will be recognised on Wednesday, 10 October, 2018, at the HIMSS Saudi Arabia Conference and Exhibition - during the main programme ceremony and at the HIMSS-Elsevier Digital Healthcare Award dinner on 10 October - in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

About HIMSS

HIMSS is a global advisor and thought leader supporting the transformation of health through information and technology. As a mission driven non-profit, HIMSS offers a unique depth and breadth of expertise in health innovation, public policy, workforce development, research and analytics to advise global leaders, stakeholders and influencers on best practices in health information and technology. Through our innovation companies, HIMSS delivers key insights, education and engaging events to healthcare providers, governments and market suppliers, ensuring they have the right information at the point of decision. As an association, HIMSS encompasses more than 72,000 individual members and 630 corporate members. We partner with hundreds of providers, academic institutions and health services organizations on strategic initiatives that leverage innovative information and technology. Together, we work to improve health, access and the quality and cost-effectiveness of healthcare. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, HIMSS serves the global health information and technology communities with focused operations across North America, Europe, United Kingdom, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. www.himssme.org

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a global information analytics business that helps institutions and professionals advance healthcare, open science and improve performance for the benefit of humanity. Elsevier provides digital solutions and tools in the areas of strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support and professional education, including ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, ClinicalKey and Sherpath. Elsevier publishes over 2,500 digitized journals, including The Lancet and Cell, more than 38,000 e-book titles and many iconic reference works, including Gray's Anatomy. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a global provider of information and analytics for professionals and business customers across industries. www.elsevier.comBROOKLYN, NY / ACCESSWIRE / August 27, 2018 / IEH Corporation (OTCQB: IEHC) announced today it has been selected to present at the third annual MicroCap Leadership Summit, hosted by MicroCapClub, on Friday, September 28, 2018, at the Westin Chicago Northwest Hotel in Itasca, Illinois.

The IEH presentation will be made by CEO David Offerman. The MicroCap Leadership Summit utilizes a small group format whereby the company will present to approximately 50 retail and institutional microcap investors throughout the day. The Company's investor presentation will be accessible on the 'Investor Relations' page of the IEH website, located at https://www.iehcorp.com/about/investors/

For more information about the MicroCap Leadership Summit, please visit http://microcapclub.com/summit/

About MicroCapClub

MicroCapClub is an exclusive forum for experienced microcap investors focused on microcap companies (sub $300m market cap) trading on United States, Canadian, UK, and Australian equity marketplaces. MicroCapClub was created to be a platform for experienced microcap investors to share and discuss stock ideas. Investors can join our community by applying to become a member or subscribing to gain instant view only access. MicroCapClub's mission is to foster the highest quality microcap investor Community, produce Educational content for investors, and promote better Leadership in the microcap arena. For more information, visit http://microcapclub.com

About IEH Corporation

For over 77 years and 4 generations of family-run management, IEH Corporation has designed, developed, and manufactured printed circuit board (PCB) connectors, custom interconnects and contacts for high performance applications. With its signature Hyperboloid technology, IEH supplies the most durable, reliable connectors for the most demanding environments. The company markets primarily to companies in defense, aerospace, space and industrial applications, in the United States, Canada, Europe, Southeast and Central Asia and the Mideast. The company was founded in 1941 and is based in Brooklyn, New York.

SOURCE: IEH CorporationBanks are trying to come up with a resolution plan for these accounts as going to NCLT will mean large haircuts.

Mumbai: With the six-month deadline set by Reserve Bank to finalise resolution plans for around 70 large stressed accounts worth over Rs 3.8 trillion ending on 27 August, banks are burning the midnight oil to avoid bankruptcy proceedings against these defaulters who are mostly power producers.

Bankers prefer out-of-NCLT resolution as the bankruptcy resolution so far has seen them taking large haircuts which in cases like Alok Industries was a whopping 86 percent.

The RBI circular asks banks to identify projects with even a day's default as stressed assets, and conclude resolution proceedings in 180 days. The circular came into effect on 1 March and the 180-day deadline concludes on 27 August (today).

If no resolution is reached by Monday, these accounts, which also include some EPC and telcos companies, will have to be referred to NCLT to initiate bankruptcy proceedings, the RBI had said.

Banks are trying to come up with a resolution plan for these accounts as going to NCLT will mean large haircuts.

In some of the stressed accounts, some lenders have already finalised resolution plans, bankers said.

It can be noted that almost three-fourths of these Rs 3.8 trillion-worth stressed assets are power companies which had dragged the central bank to the Allahabad High Court where the matter is still pending. That the matter is sub-judice also gives bankers some confidence that they may get some more time to resolve them out-of-court.

"A few banks have already sanctioned resolution plans for some cases and others are in the process of doing so" said an executive director of a state-run bank who sought not to be named.

Most banks are having their board meeting to approve a resolution plan or a management committee meeting to sanction credit to these defaulting companies on Monday, he added.

Last week State Bank of India managing director Arijit Basu has said about eight power projects worth Rs 17,000 crore were expected to be resolved soon as lenders were nearing consensus on these accounts.

"We have looked at 13-14 accounts which would entail changes in the management, investment etc. Of these, we are looking at seven to eight accounts very closely, to get some consensus among banks," Basu had said.

Bankers, however, said the exact number of accounts where resolutions have been arrived at, or the number of cases that will be referred to NCLTs, will be known only by Monday evening.

There are reports that lenders have identified at least 60 NPA accounts worth Rs 3.5 trillion against whom bankruptcy proceedings will be initiated.

According to a recent Icra report, 70 large accounts, mainly from power, EPC and telecom with a total exposure of Rs 3.8 trillion, would require resolution by September 1 as per the RBI's February 12 circular.

Bankers hope that RBI may show some leniency in regard to these accounts by not asking them to refer all of them to NCLTs immediately after the August 27 deadline as it knows that in some of the cases resolution process is underway.

"The RBI may not extend the deadline but they are unlikely to say take all these accounts to NCLTs the very next day....this is what everybody is feeling because in a few cases some resolution plans are already in place while many others are in the process of doing so," said the head of a state-run bank who also wanted not to be named.Splitting GAIL 'is not on the government's agenda,' Pradhan said adding his ministry wants efficiency in operations of the company

New Delhi: Oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Monday ruled out separating GAIL's gas transportation and marketing businesses but said the state-owned gas utility should divest its non-core petrochemical business at a good price.

To resolve the conflict arising out of the same entity owning the two jobs, GAIL will bifurcate the accounts and give outside parties access to its vast pipeline network.

"GAIL board has considered the issue and has assured that it will operate the two businesses of gas transportation and marketing independently and autonomously," Pradhan said.

He was speaking at the launch of the company's online portal for common carrier capacity booking by marketing entities and consumers for transportation of natural gas through its pipelines.

Splitting GAIL "is not on the government's agenda," he said adding his ministry wants efficiency in operations of the company.

Pradhan said GAIL was formed with the objective of building pipelines and over the past three decades has also become a major marketer of gas.

Pipelines are crucial for taking natural gas to consumers across the country. Currently, the pipelines are concentrated in the western and northern part of the country only.

"GAIL has to concentrate on pipeline laying. It is unacceptable that they neglect pipeline for marketing and petrochemicals," he said. "It is unacceptable that they dress up their balance sheet with margins earned from gas marketing and petrochemicals."

Later talking to reporters, he said the company board has deliberated on the issue and agreed to separate balance sheets of the two businesses as also operating the pipelines on the transparent basis by giving third party access.

Petrochemicals is "non-core business" of GAIL, he said. "GAIL should exit petrochemical business when they get a good price."

GAIL, he said, has to perform and fulfil the aspirations of taking gas to every nook and corner of the country.

There is an estimated 30 million standard cubic meters per day of natural gas that cannot be produced now because of lack of pipeline infrastructure to take the fuel to the consumers, he said.

India's current domestic natural gas production is around 70 mmscmd.

Pradhan said GAIL will separate balance sheets of marketing and transportation business.

This would mean that if GAIL were to sell gas to a consumer, its marketing division will have to enter into an agreement with the unit owning and operating the pipelines on the same terms and tariffs as being offered to outside third parties.

The oil ministry has been for last few months considering bifurcating GAIL's businesses to resolve the conflict of the same entity doing both the jobs. One of the reasons for this was some industry players alleging that GAIL was not giving them access to its 11,000-kilometer pipeline network to transport their gas.

GAIL Chairman and Managing Director B C Tripathi said GAIL gave first open access to its pipelines in 2004 when four companies booked capacities. Today, there are 115 consumers using GAIL pipelines, he said.

The ministry had in January stated that it is considering to split GAIL into two - one for laying pipelines and the other for marketing and petrochemicals - to encourage more transparency between the two operations.

This is because it believed that all entities authorised to lay natural gas pipelines including GAIL have to "provide mandatory open access of its gas pipeline infrastructure on common carrier principle at the non-discriminatory basis, at transportation rates determined by the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB)".

Citing a 2006 policy, it stated that in the long run with the maturity of gas markets, the authorised entities should have transportation of natural gas as their sole business activity and not have interest in gas marketing or city gas distribution network.

GAIL is the country's biggest gas marketing and trading firm and owns most of the country's pipeline network.FPIs have pulled out more than Rs 2,100 crore from equities and nearly Rs 37,000 crore from the debt markets

New Delhi: Foreign investors have pumped in a little over Rs 6,700 crore into the Indian capital markets so far this month on improvement on the macro front, better corporate earnings and correction in the mid and small-cap space.

The latest inflow comes following a net infusion of over Rs 2,300 crore in the capital markets -- both equity and debt -- last month. Prior to that, overseas investors had pulled out over Rs 61,000 crore during April-June.

"The recent net inflow could be attributed to improvement on the macro front, better earnings from corporate, correction in the mid and small-cap space and positive observations of IMF on India," said Himanshu Srivastava, Senior Analyst Manager Research at Morningstar.

"The direction is definitely positive. However, the quantum of inflows from FPIs is much lower than what we have seen in the past when they come with full conviction. It indicates that there is a fair bit of uncertainty and cautiousness among FPIs at the moment," he added.

Overall, so far this year, FPIs have pulled out more than Rs 2,100 crore from equities and nearly Rs 37,000 crore from the debt marketsThe panel has made various recommendations as part of larger efforts to promote ease of doing business and better compliance levels.

New Delhi: A government-appointed panel on Monday suggested restructuring of corporate offences under the companies law and an in-house adjudication mechanism to ensure that courts get more time to deal with serious violations.

The 10-member committee, which submitted its report to Corporate Affairs Minister Arun Jaitley, has made various recommendations as part of larger efforts to promote ease of doing business and better compliance levels.

Suggesting strict measures, the panel has pitched for disqualification of directors in case they have directorships beyond permissible limits and capping an independent director's remuneration "in terms of percentage of income".

This is to prevent any material pecuniary relationship which could impair his independence on the board of the company, an official release said about the panel's recommendations.

Among other suggestions is de-registration of companies in case of non-maintenance of registered office.

Chaired by Corporate Affairs Secretary Injeti Srinivas, the committee was set up last month to review the existing framework dealing with offences under the Companies Act, 2013 and related matters and make recommendations to promote better corporate compliance.

Existing rigour of the law should continue for serious offences, covering six categories, whereas, for lapses that are essentially technical or procedural in nature, mainly falling under two categories may be shifted to in-house adjudication process, the panel has recommended.

"The committee observed that this would serve the twin purposes promoting of ease of doing business and better corporate compliance.

"It would also reduce the number of prosecutions filed in the special courts, which would, in turn, facilitate speedier disposal of serious offences and bring serious offenders to book," the release said.

The cross-cutting liability under section 447, which deals with corporate fraud, would continue to apply wherever fraud is found, it added.

Apart from the restructuring of corporate offences to relieve special courts from adjudicating routine offences, the panel has mooted "re-categorisation of 16 out of the 81 compoundable offences" under the Act.

This would be done by shifting them from the jurisdiction of special courts to an "in-house E-adjudication framework wherein defaults would be subject to levy of penalty by the authorised adjudicating officer (Registrar of Companies)", the release said.

Taking into account their potential misuse, the panel has suggested that the remaining 65 compoundable offences should continue to be under the jurisdiction of special courts.

Other recommendations include status quo has been recommended for all non-compoundable offences relating to serious serious violations, instituting a transparent online platform for E-adjudication and E-publication of orders.

Towards "de-clogging" the work before the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), the committee has suggested a significant reduction in compounding cases before the tribunal.

The committee has said that the jurisdiction of a regional director should be increased with "enhanced pecuniary limits for compounding of offences under section 441 of the Companies Act 2013 (the Act)".

The report also touches upon various aspects of corporate governance, including the declaration of commencement of business, maintenance of a registered office, protection of depositors' interests, registration and management of charges, declaration of significant beneficial ownership, and independence of independent directors.

Another recommendation is to vest with the central government the power to approve the alteration in the financial year of a company under section 2(41) and conversion of public companies into private companies under section 14 of the Act.

To deal with the menace of shell companies, the panel has recommended re-introduction of a declaration of commencement of business provision.

With respect to corporate governance, the committee has called for greater disclosures regarding public deposits and reduced time limits for filing documents related to creation, modification and satisfaction of charges.

"Once a company obtains restrictions under section 90(7) relating to significant beneficial ownership, in respect of shares whose ownership remains undetermined, such shares should be transferred to the Investor Education and Protection Fund if rightful owner does not claim ownership within a year of such restrictions," the release said.

Well known banker Uday Kotak, former Lok Sabha Secretary General T K Vishwanathan and law firm Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas' Executive Chairman Shardul S Shroff were among the panel members.The move to sell a stake in MIAL is a part of GVKs efforts to free up cash for new projects, like the ongoing second airport in Navi Mumbai.

The GVK Group is reportedly in discussions to sell a significant minority stake in Mumbai International Airport Pvt. Ltd (MIAL). Parallelly, South Africas Bidvest Group, which holds a roughly 13.5 percent stake in MIAL, is reportedly looking to exit its investment.

GVK has initiated discussions with airport operators and with sovereign wealth funds  the firm is negotiating with Singapores Changi Airport, German airport operator AviAlliance, Indias sovereign wealth fund National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), reported the Mint.

Bidders are expected to table non-binding offers by 10 September. Citigroup is managing the transaction, the Mint report said.

On the other hand, private equity firms Blackstone, TPG, Brookfield, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), the Changi Airport Group and Dubai Airports are in the fray to acquire Bidvest's stake in MIAL. NM Rothschild is running the mandate, reported The Economic Times (ET).

The deal size is pegged at $300 million to $350 million (Rs 2,100-2,500 crore), valuing MIAL at between Rs 15,000 crore and Rs 18,000 crore, the ET report added.

The move to sell a stake in MIAL is part of GVKs efforts to deleverage and free up cash for new projects such as the ongoing second airport in Mumbai, the Mint report added.

MIAL, which operates the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA), is a subsidiary of GVK Airport Holdings Private Limited, a division of the Mumbai-traded GVK Power and Infrastructure Ltd. GVK Power had a debt of Rs 12,854 crore at the end of March, 2018.

In February, 2017, GVK bagged the right to build Mumbais second airport, in Navi Mumbai. The project is expected to cost around Rs 14,000 crore.

GVK reportedly owns a 50.5 percent stake in MIAL. The Bidvest Group holds a 13.5 percent stake and Airports Co. South Africa Ltd holds a 10 percent stake. The remainder of MIAL is with state-run Airports Authority of India (AAI).Jet Airways staff association has also raised serious concerns about media reports and social media messages 'relating to the insolvency of the company, concerns of violations of law, Sebi investigation into fraudulent transactions and other management actions'.

Mumbai: Amid Jet Airways battling financial problems and coming under the regulatory scanner, an employees' union of the airline has sought clarity from the management on the issues that have led to the current situation.

Flagging concerns, the Jet Airways Staff and Officers' Association, which claims to have around 10,000 members, has written to CEO Vinay Dube seeking a meeting with him to have a comprehensive understanding of the factors.

In a letter to the CEO, the association has also complained that the management was wasting financial resources on "inefficient" operations and hiring of foreign pilots.

The letter, written last week, comes against the backdrop of the crisis-hit airline deferring announcement of June quarter results, exploring cost-reduction ways, coming under the regulatory lens for alleged corporate governance lapses and talks of a possible pay cut for the employees.

Meanwhile, aviation regulator DGCA is to start safety audit of the airline today, sources said.

The board of the full-service carrier is scheduled to consider the June quarter results today where there would also be discussions on cost-reduction ways and turnaround plan.

The association does not represent Jet Airways' pilots, engineers and cabin crews since these categories of staff have separate unions.

"We are concerned for our members who are employed in the staff and officers category across the country in respect of their service conditions, salary and wage enhancement and conditions of service which have been brought to your notice vide our charter of demands to finalise a settlement," the association said.

A response was awaited from an airline spokesperson on the queries about the letter.

Stating that Dube failed to meet the association's representatives after giving an appointment for a meeting on 10 August, the grouping said it is awaiting the schedule of the meeting with the management team to put across concerns and grievances.

The association has also raised serious concerns about media reports and social media messages "relating to the insolvency of the company, concerns of violations of law, Sebi investigation into fraudulent transactions and other management actions".

According to the letter, employees have not been able to get their due from the management all these 25 years while it is unfortunate that the company has squandered large sums of money on inefficient operations, expats' induction, unwanted expenditure, among others.

"We also notice complaints that have come about malpractices in hiring employees for non-aviation related work. We will be happy to discuss these issues with you," the letter said.

Further, the association has suggested that the CEO should have discussions with the HR department on all the pending issues in the last three years.

This is for a "comprehensive understanding of the failure of the company in meeting the basic requirement of employees and the delay in resolutions of pending legal matters", it added.

"Our members have shown utmost restraint in the last few months... and any delay in resolution of the subject matter will not be in the interest of the company," the association said.

Meanwhile, a senior Corporate Affairs Ministry official said the Registrar of Companies (RoC) has asked for details from the airline about certain issues and that the process is going on.

To a query on whether the airline has received queries from the RoC regarding financial issues and delay in announcement of quarterly results, a Jet Airways spokesperson said "it has not received anything in this regard".

Information has also been sought from the airline's auditors against the backdrop of the airline deferring the announcement of June quarter results, he added.

Markets regulator Sebi is also looking into the airline delaying June quarter results after the carrier's audit committee expressed reservations, sources said earlier this month.

The board of Jet Airways would consider cost reduction initiatives and turnaround plan along with June quarter results at its meeting on 27 August.

The board, on 9 August, deferred the announcement of unaudited financial results for the June quarter.Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said that the state will hold talks with all international agencies for financial aid and the process will start soon

Flood-ravaged Kerala is reportedly planning to approach the World Bank to raise a loan of around Rs 3,000 crore to rebuild public infrastructure in the state, a media report said.

Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, in an interview with Mint, said that the state will hold talks with all international agencies for financial aid and the process will start soon. The newspaper, quoting a state government official familiar with the development, said that the Centre is unlikely to object to the Left Democratic Fund's (LDF) dispensation in raising a loan.

We are in touch with the Centre, they seem to agree in principle, the official was quoted as saying by Mint.

The latest development has come at a time when Centre has refused foreign aid for Kerala, including Rs 700 crore offered by the UAE. Opposition parties, including the Congress and CPM, have trained its guns on the Centre asking it to remove obstacles in accepting foreign funds.

Union Minister Alphons Kannanthanam defended the Centre's decision, saying in refusing foreign aid for rehabilitation of the flood-hit state, the government has followed a 14-year convention it "inherited" from previous governments of not accepting such assistance in the face of natural calamities.

Joining the issue, CPM Kerala state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan said Centre should make changes in the convention to get Kerala assistance from foreign countries. In a Facebook post, he termed as "wrong" the Centre's decision to refuse UAE's aid offer.

"The refusal to accept foreign assistance is an act of vengeance," Balakrishnan said. Congress termed the Centre's decision as "disappointing."

Last week, the Centre said Rs 600 crore released to flood-hit Kerala was only the advance assistance and additional funds would be released when an inter-ministerial team visits the state again and assesses the damage.

"It is clarified that Rs 600 crore released by Centre is the advance assistance only. Additional funds would be released from NDRF on assessment of the damages as per laid down procedure," the statement said.

The central government had released Rs 600 crore to flood-hit Kerala as promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Rs 500 crore) and Home Minister Rajnath Singh (Rs 100 crore) during their visits to the state.

On Sunday, Vijayan expressed confidence that funds to rebuild Kerala is not going to be a problem.

"Today across sectors people are contributing to Kerala. Just imagine how much there will be if all the working people decide to contribute one month's salary for Kerala," he told a TV channel.

"Today the issue is not about the amount but on whether the money can be accepted," he said. "In the coming days, this will be resolved."

With inputs from agenciesPaddy has been affected in 20,000 hectare and even banana plantations has been hit badly. Spices like cardamom have been affected in 2,000 hectares

New Delhi: Floods in Kerala have damaged paddy, banana, spices and other crops in 45,000 hectares of farmland, Agriculture Secretary Shobhana K Pattanayak said on Monday.

The state government has been asked to submit a detailed proposal seeking central funds to provide relief to the growers, he said.

"The state has estimated damage to 45,000 hectares of farm fields. We have also got the same report. More than crops, the damage to houses and other infrastructure is more in Kerala," Pattanayak told PTI.

Paddy has been affected in 20,000 hectare and even banana plantations has been hit badly. Spices like cardamom have been affected in 2,000 hectares or so, he said.

As per the official data, the area sown to paddy crop in Kerala stood at 57,000 hectares till last week in the current season, lower than 62,000 hectares in the year-ago period.

The sowing of paddy, the main Kharif crop, begins with the onset of southwest monsoon from July and harvesting is done from October onwards.Future Retail Ltds shares jumped some 6.2 percent on Monday, their biggest intra-day percentage gain since 25 May, 2018.

Future Retail Ltds shares rose as much as 6.2 percent to Rs 519.7, their biggest intra-day percentage gain since 25 May, 2018, buoyed by media reports that global tech giants Google and Amazon are in talks for a stake in the Future Group flagship.

Over 7,18,600 shares of Future Retail Ltd reportedly changed hands on Monday, compared with a 30-day average of 789,600 shares.

Google is looking to join forces with Alibaba-backed Paytm Mall to invest Rs 3,500 crore to Rs 4,000 crore ($499.36 million - $570.69 million) in Future Retail, The Economic Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Separately, the Indian unit of Amazon has signed a term sheet to invest around $600 million to $700 million for a 12-15 percent stake in Future Retail,the Business Standard reported.

Future Retail, however, denied both reports.

Google and Amazon were not immediately available for comment, while PayTM refused to comment, Reuters reported.

Last week, a The Times of India report said that Alibaba is in talks with big Indian companies, including Future Retail, to boost its retailing plans in India.

Earlier, in June, PremjiInvest, the investment arm of Wipro chairman Azim Premji, picked a six percent stake in Future Retail from the Bharti Group for about Rs 600 crore.

The Bharti Group currently holds about a three percent stake in Future Retail via Cedar Support Services.

With inputs from ReutersLarsen and Toubro (L&T) on Monday said its construction arm has won an order worth Rs 1,394 crore for the execution of the Kundalia Irrigation Project - Right Bank in Madhya Pradesh (MP)

New Delhi: Larsen and Toubro (L&T) on Monday said its construction arm has won an order worth Rs 1,394 crore for the execution of the Kundalia Irrigation Project - Right Bank in Madhya Pradesh.

"The water and effluent treatment business of L&T Construction has won an EPC order worth Rs 1,394 crore from the Water Resources Department, Government of Madhya Pradesh, for the execution of the Kundalia Irrigation Project - Right Bank," the engineering and construction major said in a Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) filing.

L&T said the project envisages to provide water for micro-irrigation to more than 64,000 hectares of cultivable land in the command area of Rajgarh district of Madhya Pradesh by lifting water from Right Bank of the Kundalia reservoir on the Kalisindh River.

Shares of the company were trading at Rs 1,354 a piece, up 0.83 percent, from the previous close on the BSE.Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu has asked Indian businesses to carry out a market study to identify priority areas for expanding cooperation with Kenya, as the country eyes fresh avenues to boost bilateral trade with the African nation

New Delhi: Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu has asked Indian businesses to carry out a market study to identify priority areas for expanding cooperation with Kenya, as the country eyes fresh avenues to boost bilateral trade with the African nation.

The Eighth Session of the India-Kenya Joint Trade Committee meeting was held in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya from 22-25 August.

"Addressed the India-Kenya Joint Business Council on Monday in the presence of industry leaders & business representatives from both countries. Invited Kenyan businesses to invest in India and urged Indian businesses to research key priorities & design products specific to Kenyan needs," Prabhu tweeted after the meeting.

During the visit, he also met Kenya's Foreign Affairs Chief Administrative Secretary Ababu Namwamba and discussed with him on exploring new avenues of cooperation, mutual growth and strengthening of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

"We are keen to explore new opportunities in logistics, agriculture, energy, pharma and many other sectors with Kenya," the minister had tweeted after landing in Kenya.

The joint trade meeting took place against the backdrop of India's exports to Kenya dropping to $1.97 billion in 2017-18 from $4.11 billion in 2014-15.

India's imports from Kenya too slowed down from $117.42 million to $72.57 million during the same period.

In his address to the Kenyan and Indian business leaders, Prabhu emphasised on research and design in products specific to Kenyan needs.

India also explored opportunities to increase exports of petroleum products, cars and motorcycles, and mobile phones to Kenya during the meeting, sources said.

The meeting covered India's contribution in the implementation of Kenya's Big Four Agenda  food security, affordable housing, universal healthcare and manufacturing, expansion and diversification of bilateral trade - an official statement said.

The two sides also deliberated upon issues like Kenya's readiness to join the International Solar Alliance, implementation of Lines of Credit of over $220 million, extended by India in power transmission, SMEs development, the revival of the Rivatex factory and agricultural mechanisation.

A meeting of India-Kenya Joint Business Council was held on the sidelines of the joint trade committee meeting.

India is one of Kenya's largest trade partners and the second largest foreign investor in Kenya. Indians are the third-largest group of tourists to Kenya.

The last meeting of Joint Trade Committee was held in New Delhi in February 2015.Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit, one of the accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case has approached the Supreme Court seeking a court monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT) probe into the allegations made against him.

Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit, one of the accused in the 2008 Malegaon blasts case, has moved the Supreme Court demanding a court-monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT) probe. Purohit claimed that there was an alleged conspiracy to frame him in the 2008 blast case and in his plea has relied on army reports.

Purohit also said that he was providing the information to the army and the security forces and not to other outfits such as Islamic State and his claims can be verified by the SIT probe, reports India Today.

Justice UU Lalit recused from the case on Monday and the case will now go to a different bench, reported CNN News18.

In June 2018, it was reported that all the accused in the Malegaon blast case were already out on bail and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) court said that all the previous bonds and sureties submitted by them were to continue. The case had seen various twists and turns as the investigation was passed on to various agencies.

Soon after the blast in Malegaon, a town in north Maharashtra with a sizeable Muslim population, the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), which probed the case first, booked Noorul Huda, Raees Ahmed, Salman Farsi, Farogh Magdumi, Shaikh Mohammed Ali, Asif Khan, Mohammed Zahid, Abrar Ahmed and Shabbir Masiullah Batteriwala for the blast which claimed six lives when an improvised explosive device strapped to a motorcycle went off while 101 persons were injured. The CBI took over the case a year later, and endorsed the line of investigation taken by ATS.

However, the NIA, to which the probe was transferred in 2011, filed a charge sheet absolving them of all charges, and instead named four others, including Sadhvi Pragya and Colonel Purohit, who were members of a Hindu extremist organisation.

Following this, in April last year, a special court in Mumbai discharged them from the case, as the NIA submitted that it had found no evidence against them. The ATS moved the Bombay High Court against the trial court's order, terming it as contrary to the evidence on record.

Initially, the 2008 case was probed by the Maharashtra Police and the ATS. In April 2011, it was taken over by the NIA.

Lt Colonel Purohit is accused of floating Abhinav Bharat, a right wing Hindu organization for collecting funds to procure arms and explosives and also organising meetings where the Malegaon attack was planned.After BJP Tamil Nadu unit president Tamilisai Soundararajan's statement speculation over party president Amit Shah's participation at the event was put to rest

Chennai: The BJP said Monday Union Minister Nitin Gadkari and its national secretary Muralidhar Rao would represent the party at a memorial meeting for DMK supremo M Karunanidhi, setting at rest speculation over its president Amit Shah's participation at the 30 August event.

BJP state unit president Tamilisai Soundararajan said in a statement that Gadkari, Minister for Shipping and a former national president of the party, and Rao would attend the meeting, expected to see participation of a galaxy of political leaders from across the country.

Former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda, Ghulam Nabi Azad of Congress, chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, N Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar respectively, their Delhi counterpart Arvind Kejriwal and CPM General Secretary Sitaram Yechury are among those likely to attend.

A section of the media had reported that Shah had accepted the DMK invite, setting off speculations of political realignments ahead of Lok Sabha 2019 polls.

Of late, the DMK has been highly critical of the BJP on various issues, including Cauvery and NEET.

It had even protested the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April to Tamil Nadu, in the backdrop of the Cauvery issue.

Black flags were hoisted atop the residences of Karunanidhi, Stalin, Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi and other leaders in protest against Modi's visit and for not forming the Cauvery Management Board (CMB) then.Major Leetul Gogoi was caught with a woman at a Srinagar hotel earlier this year. Indian Army officers are prohibited from fraternising with local residents of areas where they are deployed.

Check Kawoosa, Budgam: Since that fateful day in May when their daughter was caught with Indian Army officer Major Leetul Gogoi at a hotel in Srinagar, the life of the Wani family has turned upside down. On Monday morning, as news of a Court of Inquiry issuing orders to initiate disciplinary action against Gogoi came in, the woman's family thought it was "payback time" for the "decorated" officer.

The Wani family is in the middle of rebuilding their home. They were forced to live in a tin shed for four years after their home in Budgam's Check Kawoosa area was damaged in the floods in Jammu and Kashmir in 2014.

The sight of any approaching stranger sends a chill down the mother's spine. A mother of four, she suffers from chronic depression. "I don't know what has happened," the woman's father said. "It is the government's job to punish him. But if the news is true, Gogoi has paid for the sins he committed."

After the incident, the family felt ostracised. The woman's father travelled several kilometers on foot to work at a brick kiln, keeping his head down while he walks down the streets of his village. When there was no work at the kiln, he worked in paddy fields or orchards at places where people didn't know where he was from.

"I have not been able to look my neighbors in the eye since that day," he said. "It is a life filled with humiliation."

The woman's 35-year-old mother said: "When my neighbours see me, they start whispering behind my back. It kills me from inside,"

Major Gogoi of the Indian Army's 53 Rashtriya Rifles battalion is better known for using a Kashmiri shawl-weaver as a "human shield" against stone-pelters on 19 April, 2017, when the by-elections for the Srinagar parliamentary constituency were being held. Gogoi had tied the man to the bonnet of his army vehicle and driven through a few villages as a warning to stone-pelters. Although his actions were condemned, he was given the Chief of Army Staff's Commendation Card. On May 23, he was briefly detained at the Khanayar Police Station after he was caught with a woman from Budgam's Check Kawoosa entering a hotel near the Dal lake in downtown Srinagar.

"If Major Gogoi has done something wrong, then I can say that he will be given due punishment, and the punishment will be such that it will set an example," Chief of the Army Staff General Bipin Rawat had said.

On Monday, the Indian Army's Court of Inquiry held Major Gogoi accountable for "fraternising with locals in spite of instructions to the contrary and for being away from the place of duty while in an operational area". Senior army officers based in Jammu and Kashmir said if the Corps Commander gives his approval, it could mean court martial for the officer.

"The thing is he violated the rules. Imagine a situation where locals would have recognised him in that part of the city, which is dangerous for a serving army officer; that too a man whose photos were widely available on the internet. People would have tied him to the bonnet of a jeep. How could we face that situation? It was a total dereliction of duty," said a senior Srinagar-based army officer.

The woman's father said that after the couple was caught and she had admitted before a magistrate that she had gone to the hotel with Gogoi willingly, they stopped her from going to school  she is above 18 years of age, according to her Aadhaar Card  and even from visiting a local skill development centre. According to documents from the Srinagar hotel, they were to spend the night there. She has since lived with her maternal uncle around 15 kilometers northeast of her home.

The family said that army personnel had come to their house twice before the fateful incident, but Gogoi never entered. "Instead, he sent a local resident, Sameer Malla, who asked our daughter to join a self-help group," the father said.

"We have already suffered more than him. Even if he is thrown out of the army, how would it matter to us? How is this going to restore our honour and dignity in the society?" the father asked.The Madhya Pradesh BJP would launch its poll campaign by holding 'Mahakumbh' on the birth anniversary of Deendayal Upadhyay on 25 September.

Bhopal: The BJP would launch its campaign for the Madhya Pradesh Assembly polls at a convention to be held in Bhopal on 25 September, a senior leader said on Monday.

The gathering Mahakumbh is being organised to mark the birth anniversary of RSS ideologue and Bhartiya Jana Sangh co-founder Deendayal Upadhyay, at the BHEL Jamboree Maidan.

State unit BJP president Rakesh Singh said they would invite Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the event would be attended by party chief Amit Shah, leaders of the BJP from Madhya Pradesh and party workers.

"The Madhya Pradesh BJP would launch its poll campaign by holding 'Mahakumbh' on the birth anniversary of Deendayal Upadhyay on 25 September. Party president Amit Shah will attend the convention," Singh told reporters.

Singh also said that Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan's ongoing "Jan Ashirwad Yatra", which was earlier scheduled to be culminated at the convention, would continue even after 25 September.

Assembly polls are slated to be held in the central state later this year, schedule for which is yet to be announced by the Election Commission.

Singh said the BJP had organised similar gatherings ahead of the Assembly polls in 2008 and 2013.

Responding to a query on the photos purportedly showing some leaders of the state BJP laughing while carrying the urns containing ashes of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Singh said these photos are doctored.

The photos had gone viral on the social media. Madhya Pradesh has a 230-member assembly. The Congress has been out of power in the BJP-ruled state since 2003.A notification issued on Friday by Calcutta Universitys Controller of Examinations said that the revised date for the examinations will be announced shortly.

Calcutta University (CU) has deferred its undergraduate examinations, which more than 10,000 students are scheduled to take. A notification issued on Friday by CUs Controller of Examinations, Jayanta Sinha, said that the revised date for the examinations will be announced shortly.

The Indian Express reported that the Bachelor of Science Part I practicals (honours) and Bachelor in Fashion and Apparel Designing (BFAD) theory exams, which were originally scheduled for 28 August, will be rescheduled. Many have speculated that the examinations have been pushed because of a date clash with the Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad's (TMCP) Foundation Day celebration, according to The Times of India.

The rumours have elicited criticism.

This is a clear example of how the ruling party has turned education institutions into party offices. They are just following what the ruling party is dictating. The examinations have been deferred so that students who are members of TMCP can attend the foundation day rally, SFI state president Pratik Ur Rahman was quoted as saying by The Indian Express.

The TMCP, however, has denied the claims. They said that the postponement of the examination dates is an internal matter of the university, and only its authorities can clarify why they have taken such a decision.

As per the report from The Times of India, the annual TMCP Foundation Day event is celebrated on a large scale, where TMCP leaders address members of the party's student wing. Since the party came to power in 2011, thousands of students across the state have been attending the programme.

To mark the occasion this year, party president and chief minister Mamata Banerjee will address a rally near Mahatma Gandhis statue on Mayo Road. The Indian Express speculated that she is likely to make some key announcements at the rally, including naming the new TMCP president. The post has been vacant since Jaya Dutta was removed from the position in June.All India Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi alleged that Manohar Parrikar, who was Defence Minister at the time, was aware of the violation of several norms linked to the purchase of the French military aircraft.

The Congress on Monday accused Goa Chief Minister and former Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar of being silent on the controversial Rafale deal, saying he was aware of the violation of several norms linked to the purchase of the French military aircraft.

All India Congress Committee spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi while speaking to the media at the party headquarters in Panaji questioned how Parrikar, despite being the then Defence Minister, "did not know that a deal had been negotiated, signed and agreed upon?"

"A Defence Minister who knew about bypassing of the cabinet committee on security (CCS) norms, transfer of technology and not following of defence procurement procedure, continues to maintain his silence and chooses not to answer," Chaturvedi said. "So his silence is a conspiracy in an agreement that has betrayed this nation."

Chaturvedi also slammed Parrikar for his alleged flip-flop on the Rafale deal, accusing him of going into hiding over the alleged scam.

"Here is a Defence Minister, who just days before the deal was signed, had gone on record to say that some terms of the agreement were non-negotiable. But you were aware that those were the very clauses that were negotiated in France," she said. "And the nation saw how Parrikar continued to hide, instead of giving answers on the deal. It is a known fact that he himself was not prepared for it and was caught off guard."

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government had signed the Rafale deal in September 2016 while Parrikar served as the Defence Minister, to purchase fighter jets from France.Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said the Congress will come out with a response when it gets an invitation for Gandhi to attend the three-day lecture series by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat

New Delhi: The Congress said Monday it has not received any invite for its president Rahul Gandhi to attend an Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) event in September and would respond to questions on the matter only after an invitation is received.

"I do not answer hypothetical, speculative questions... This is purely imaginary at the moment," Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi told reporters.

He said the Congress will come out with a response when it gets an invitation for Gandhi to attend the three-day lecture series by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.

"I have said to you categorically upon checking that we have received no invitation as I speak," Singhvi reiterated.

"As and when we receive an invitation, the Congress party receives an invitation, there will be an appropriate (and) proper response and you all will be shared with that response," he stressed.

RSS sources said earlier on Monday that the organisation may invite the Congress president to the lecture series.

"The idea is to invite people from different ideologies for the event," a source in the Sangh said, adding, the list is being prepared and may also include CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury.

Indications that Gandhi could be invited came on a day the RSS criticised him for drawing parallels between the Sangh and Islamic radical outfit Muslim Brotherhood.

Giving details of the September event, RSS prachar pramukh Arun Kumar said the Sangh was for the first time organising a three-day lecture series by Bhagwat on the theme, 'Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective'.As soon as the House assembled in Uttar Pradesh on Monday morning, the SP and the Congress members rose to their feet, accusing the government of failing not only in protecting the women but on the entire law and order front

Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh Assembly Monday witnessed noisy scenes with a determined Opposition raising anti-government slogans and demanding an immediate discussion on the Deoria shelter home case, leading to the adjournment of its Question Hour.

As soon as the House assembled Monday morning, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Congress members rose to their feet, demanding immediate discussion on the shelter home issue and accusing the government of failing not only in protecting the women but on the entire law and order front.

As the SP and the Congress members trooped into the well of the House raising anti-government slogans, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) members lent their support to them by standing in their places amid the pandemonium.

The SP legislators raised the anti-government slogans, donning red caps.

Leader of the Oppostion Ram Govind Chowdhury (SP) said the matter of Deoria shelter home was of utmost importance and need immediate discussion in the House.

"An international racket is there behind the sexual exploitation of girls in shelter homes. Such cases were found in all the shelter homes, including those of Deoria, Pratapgarh and Banaras.

We demand a discussion on the issue and a probe by the Supreme Court judge. The IAS and the IPS officers were involved in the case," he later told reporters, alleging that the shelter home girls were being forced to prostitution.

"If any morality is left, the government should resign. The operator of the shelter home (in Deoria) have been seen dancing along with BJP leaders," he said.

BSP leader Lalji Verma also demanded a judicial probe into the Deoria shelter home case. "There should be a judicial probe and not a CBI one into the matter," he said.

As the protesting legislators did not pay heed to Speaker Hriday Narain Dixit's pleas to take their seats, the House was adjourned for 30 minutes and later for the entire Question Hour.

Even after the House reassembled for the Zero Hour, the scene remained the same with the Congress and the SP members continuing to raise slogans against the government and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath who too was present in the House.

The House took up the entire agenda for the day amid sloganeering and the house was adjourned for the day at 12.55 pm.Four fire tenders were rushed to douse the blaze at a building in Mumbai's Parel area. The building has been evacuated.

A fire broke out on Monday at a three-storey building near Premier Talkies in Mumbai's Parel area, according to media reports. Four fire tenders were rushed to douse the blaze.

The blaze started in the ground plus three-storey building, Iqbal Mansion, around 4 pm and it was brought under control within half an hour, an official told PTI.

"No one was reported killed or injured," the official said."Our control room got information about the fire in the residential building in Parel at 4.12 pm. Mumbai Fire Brigade personnel, four fire tenders, police, ambulance and BEST Supply and Ward staffers were mobilised and the fire was extinguished at 4.40 pm," he said.

The cause of the fire will be known only after an inquiry, the official said.

According to eyewitnesses, thick smoke billowed out of the house and people living in the adjacent buildings rushed outside.

This is the second fire incident in Parel, an upscale area, in the last five days.

On 23 August, four people were killed and 21 suffered injuries after a fire broke out on the 12th floor of the 17-storey Crystal Tower building near Hindmata Cinema in Dadar.

According to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the building did not have the mandatory occupation certificate granted by the civic body, but it was already occupied by around 58 flat owners.

The developer of the building, Abdul Razak Ismail Supariwala, was booked under IPC Sections 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 336 (act endangering life or personal safety of others), 337 (causing hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others), 338 (causing grievous hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others). He was subsequently arrested.

With inputs from agenciesThe autopsy reported new-born anomalies like yolk sac retention and liver dysfunction

The first-ever Humboldt penguin, born in a Mumbai zoo last week, died two days ago, a zoo official said on Friday, 24 August.

Hatched on 15 August, the penguin died on 22 August, Wednesday, shocking zoo authorities.

An autopsy was performed by a three-member team of the Bombay Veterinary College, Parel, at the zoo hospital. The preliminary report revealed that the chick suffered from "new-born anomalies like yolk sac retention and liver dysfunction" resulting in its death.

The Veermata Jijabai Bhonsale Udyan and zoo authorities said that parents of the chick  Mr Molt and Flipper  took good care of it after it was hatched, but it failed to survive.

However, it is not clear why the development was kept under wraps by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for more than two days though the chick's birth had generated huge enthusiasm among Mumbaikars.

After mating in captivity, the penguin pair Mr Molt and Flipper, finally delivered an egg in early July at the BMC's VJBU, or Mumbai Zoo, proving a big morale-booster for the civic body which had come under heavy fire for importing the endangered flightless birds from South Korea.

Eight Humboldt Penguins, three males, three females and two chicks  later named as Dory, Donald, Daisy, Popeye, Olive, Bubble, Flipper and Mr Molt  were imported here from Seoul's COEX Aquarium on 26 July, 2016.

However, one female, Dory could not survive and died on 23 October, 2016 following a bacterial infection during the period of acclimatisation.

After Dory's death, questions were raised on the wisdom of keeping these birds in hot Indian climatic conditions, especially since 2000, as they figure on the "Vulnerable" category in the Red List of International Union for Conservation of Nature, Switzerland.

Humboldt penguins have a life-span of around 25 years.Article 35A, which was incorporated in the Constitution by a 1954 presidential order, accords special rights and privileges to the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir and bars people from outside the state from acquiring any immovable property in the state.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday adjourned its hearing on a fresh plea challenging the constitutional validity of Article 35A, which empowers the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly to define "permanent residents" for bestowing special rights and privileges to them.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud did not take up the matter as the petitioner had circulated a letter in the apex court registry seeking adjournment of hearing on the plea.

Lawyer and Delhi BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay, in a fresh plea, has sought a direction to the central and state governments to declare Article 35A of the Constitution as "arbitrary" on the ground that it was contrary to fundamental rights like the right to equality, dignity of women, freedom of speech and expression and the right to life and personal liberty.

Article 35A, which was incorporated in the Constitution by a 1954 presidential order, accords special rights and privileges to the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir and bars people from outside the state from acquiring any immovable property in the state.

It also denies property rights to a woman who marries a person from outside the state. The provision, which leads to such women from the state forfeiting their right over property, also applies to their heirs.

Earlier, the apex court had adjourned the hearing on a batch of petitions including the one filed by NGO 'We the Citizens', through lawyer Barun Kumar Sinha, till the week commencing on Monday.

It had said that a three-judge bench would decide whether the pleas challenging the Article should be referred to a five-judge Constitution Bench for examining the larger issue of alleged violation of the doctrine of basic structure of the Constitution.

The apex court is hearing a batch of pleas seeking quashing of the Article which confers special status to permanent residents of the state.

Political parties, including the National Conference and the CPM, have moved the Supreme Court in support of Article 35A that empowers the state Assembly to define "permanent residents" for bestowing special rights and privileges to them.

An NGO, 'Ikkjut Jammu', has also filed a plea seeking quashing of the provision. It has said that Article 35-A furthers the "two nation theory which is against the theory of secularism".

The state government, while defending the Article, had cited two verdicts of the constitution benches of the Supreme Court in 1961 and 1969, which had upheld the powers of the president under Article 370(1)(d) of the Constitution to pass constitutional orders.

The Article was incorporated in the Constitution in 1954 by an order of President Rajendra Prasad on the advice of the then Cabinet headed by Jawaharlal Nehru.Renowned aerospace scientist G Satheesh Reddy has been appointed as the Chairman of the DRDO following the retirement of S Christopher in June.

Renowned aerospace scientist G Satheesh Reddy has been appointed as the chairman of the Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) following the retirement of S Christopher in June. He will later take charge as the Secretary in the Department of Defence Research and Development (DDR&D).

Reddy, who is known for his research and development in missile systems and has contributed towards the advancement of aerospace technologies and industries, is currently employed as the scientific advisor to defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

He has been at the helm of the conceptualisation, design and development of inertial sensors, navigation schemes, algorithms systems, calibration methodologies, sensor models, simulation along with development of satellite navigation receivers and hybrid navigation systems. Under his leadership, advanced products and varieties of avionics systems have been developed and flight tests have been completed successfully in various strategic programmes of the country, The Indian Express reported.

Reddy is a graduate in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU) in Andhra Pradesh and holds the distinction of being inducted as a fellow of Royal Institute of Navigation, London, Royal Aeronautical Society, UK. He was also been awarded the full member diploma as a Foreign Member of the Academy of Navigation and Motion Control, Russia.

He is the first defence scientist working in India to have received the Silver Medal of Royal Aeronautical Society, UK, and has also been selected for the first IEI (India) and IEEE (USA) joint award for Engineering Excellence.

Reddy, who is the 13th and youngest head of DRDO, received the Indian Science Congress Association Homi J Bhabha Memorial award of the Indian Science Congress Association for the year 201314. He is the fourth from the Missile Complex in Hyderabad to reach the top post in DRDO after APJ Abdul Kalam, VK Saraswat and Avinash Chander.CJI Justice Dipak Misra delivered the first Madhusudan Das Memorial Lecture at his alma mater at the Madhusudan Law College in Cuttack on the topic 'Role of Lawyers in the Dispensation of Justice Delivery System' during which he asked law students to engage in the practice of 'Cause Lawyering.'

Cuttack: Chief Justice of India (CJI) Justice Dipak Misra on Sunday asked law students to engage in the practice of "Cause Lawyering" and develop the idea of serviceability to the law by taking up 'pro bono' cases at a low income to protect human rights.

Cause lawyering is described as a practice of "lawyering for the good" or using law to empower members of the weaker layers of society.

Justice Misra delivered the first Madhusudan Das Memorial Lecture at his alma mater at the Madhusudan Law College in Cuttack on the topic 'Role of Lawyers in the Dispensation of Justice Delivery System'. The function was attended among others by Chief Justice of Orissa High Court Justice K S Jhaveri.

Speaking on the personal capabilities of a lawyer, Justice Misra said it is wrong to assume that lawyers practice only to earn money. Rather, the lawyers as a class are supposed to do service to society like that of the judiciary as an institution and protect human values, he said.

"In some judgments of the Supreme Court, it has been mentioned about the serviceability of the Institution and the lawyers are to develop the idea of serviceability to the cause of law and to the cause of adjudication by believing in cause lawyering, Justice Misra said.

Quoting Shakespeare, Dr Samuel Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Mahadev Prasad Singh extensively in his address, the CJI told the students to believe and stand for law.

When you practice law, you must hold the brief for your client and do the best as the client should have done, he said.

Speaking on Lincolns concept of lawyering, he asked the students to be very articulate, passionate and to have a tremendous sense of intellectual honesty.

On the duties of lawyers, the CJI said that it is the duty of a lawyer to argue forcefully, articulately and passionately but without aggressiveness.

He also asked the students to continuously study for self improvement.

"Unless you are continuously involved in educating yourself, there is a danger," the CJI said adding that for this, he is still a student of law and a student of philosophy.

Earlier, paying rich tributes to legendary Madhusudan Das, the CJI particularly emphasised on "Madhu Babus" leadership quality, bravery and his belief in the pride of Odisha and his love for the motherland and mother tongue Odia.

Justice Jhaveri too in his address threw light on Madhusudan Das' contributions to the judiciary and legal education in Odisha.Just a week after Imran Khan took his oath as the Pakistan prime minister on 18 August, India is set to have its first official engagement with a team of officials travelling to Islamabad for a meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission.

Just under a fortnight since Imran Khan took oath as the Pakistani prime minister, India is set to have its first official engagement with a team of officials travelling to Islamabad for a meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission. During the meet, which will be held in Lahore, Pakistan will reiterate its serious objections over two water storage and hydropower projects being built by India, said media reports.

A government official told Dawn on Sunday that Indian Water Commissioner PK Saxena, along with a delegation, was expected to reach Lahore on Monday to begin the discussions with his Pakistani counterpart Syed Mehr Ali Shah (acting Pakistan Commissioner for Indus Waters) from Wednesday.

On 21 August, Khan had expressed his willingness to restart the stalled India-Pakistan peace process and said the two countries must engage in dialogue to resolve their differences, including on the Kashmir issue, and start trading.

In a letter to Khan on the day he was sworn in as Pakistan's 22nd prime minister, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had expressed India's resolve to build good neighbourly relations between the two countries. On 30 July, Modi telephoned Khan to congratulate him on his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party's victory in the general elections and expressed hope that both countries will work to open a new chapter in bilateral ties. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi are set to meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September.

The Pakistani government official also said the government would raise its concerns over the 1000MW Pakal Dul and 48MW Lower Kalnai hydroelectric projects on two different tributaries of River Chenab despite Islamabad's serious objections over their designs. The two-day session, from 29 to 31 August, is also expected to discuss ways and means for timely and smooth sharing of hydrological data on shared rivers.

The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank and signed by then-prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan's president Ayub Khan, administers how the water of the Indus river and its tributaries that flow in both the countries will be utilised.

Under the Indus Waters Treaty, India has to share details about any hydropower project on the rivers over which Pakistan has water rights. Under the provisions of the 1960 treaty, waters of the eastern rivers  Sutlej, Beas and Ravi  had been allocated to India and the western rivers  the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab  to Pakistan, except for certain non-consumptive uses for India.

Pakistan has been raising reservations over the designs of the Pakal Dul and Lower Kalnai projects and would like India to either modify it to make them compliant to Indus Waters Treaty or put the projects on hold until an understanding is reached between the two sides.

Pakistan has also shared its concerns with the World Bank over the inauguration of the Kishanganga (tributary of Jhelum river) hydroelectric power project that it violated the Indus Waters Treaty as it would limit the supply of water flowing into Pakistan, as per the Times of India report.

The Pakistani official said Islamabad and New Delhi would also finalise the schedule of future meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission and visits of the teams of the Indus commissioners.

He said that the water commissioners of Pakistan and India were required to meet twice a year and arrange technical visits to projects' sites and critical river head works, but Pakistan had been facing a lot of problems in timely meetings and visits.

Pakal Dul is a storage-cum-power project and can have gross storage of about 1,08,000 acre feet of water. The project design envisages its filling every monsoon season between mid-June and end-August.

Pakistan believes that the tunnel spillway of Pakal Dul should be raised closer to the dead storage level because its placement 40 metres below the dead storage level could allow drawdown flushing not permitted to India under the 1960 water treaty, reported Dawn newspaper.

On the 48MW Lower Kalnai project, Pakistan has raised objections to its freeboard, pondage and intake and is of the view that the depth of bridge girder and provision of freeboard should be close to one metre and considers two-metre freeboard as "excessive".

The Lower Kalnai project is on a left bank tributary of Chenab and can have gross storage of about 1,508 acre feet of water.

The last meeting of the Pakistan-India Permanent Indus Commission was held in New Delhi in March during which both the sides had shared details of the water flow and the quantum of water being used under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty.

With inputs from agenciesCongress president Rahul Gandhi will pay a two-day visit to flood-affected areas of Kerala from Tuesday onwards.

New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi will pay a two-day visit to flood-affected areas of Kerala from Tuesday onwards.

Rahul will reach the capital city of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday following which he will visit the flood-affected areas of Chengannur, Alappuzha and Angamaly.

On the second day of his visit, the Congress chief is scheduled to visit Wayanad district.

Earlier on Saturday, Rahul had expressed his solidarity with the people of Kerala and tweeted, "This is a difficult time for the people of Kerala. In relief camps and homes across the state, people are grieving for their loved ones. On this Onam let us pledge to put aside our differences, stand united together and focus on the task of #RebuildingKerala."

This is a difficult time for the people of Kerala. In relief camps & homes across the state, people are grieving for their loved ones. On this Onam let us pledge to put aside our differences, stand united together and focus on the task of #RebuildingKerala.  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) August 25, 2018

Kerala has been facing the worst flood in a century, which claimed lives of as many as 357 people.Flood-ravaged Kerala may have to wait a few months to get the complete financial aid package from the Centre as the process of assessing the extent of damage and fund release is time-consuming, officials said.

New Delhi: Flood-ravaged Kerala may have to wait a few months to get the complete financial aid package from the Centre as the process of assessing the extent of damage and fund release is time-consuming, officials said.

After the initial release of funds, the central government follows certain rules and guidelines before awarding the final aid to any state for a natural calamity, a home ministry official, privy to such circumstances, said.

The Centre has so far released Rs 600 crore for Kerala, which witnessed its worst flood in a century. The death toll in Kerala floods has touched 293 since 8 August while 15 people are still missing.

According to the existing guidelines on disaster relief funds, the central government's contribution to the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) is 75 percent for general category states and 90 percent for special category states of hilly regions.

But the amount is released in each financial year in two instalments - in June and December.

However, the central government, upon being satisfied that exigencies of a particular calamity so warrant, may recommend an earlier release of the central share but that too up to just 25 percent of the funds due to the state in the following year.

But this release will be adjusted against the instalments of the subsequent year.

Similarly, for getting relief from the National Disaster Response Fund (NDRF), the state government will have to first submit a memorandum showing sector-wise damage with proper justification for requirement of funds and then it is assessed whether a case for additional assistance from NDRF is made out under the existing guidelines.

This itself is a time-consuming exercise for a state which is still trying to recover from the disaster, the official said.

An official statement from the Ministry of Home Affairs, which was issued on 23 August giving details of the flood relief measures taken by the central government in Kerala, noted that the submission of the memorandum by the state will take time.

The memorandum from the state government, when comes, will be examined to assess the likely requirement of funds as per items and norms of expenditure under the SDRF/NDRF.

If the preliminary examination reveals that there are adequate funds in SDRF for providing relief as per norms, the state would be advised accordingly.

If the preliminary examination reveals that the state is in need of assistance, a central team will be deputed for making an on-the-spot assessment, the guidelines say.

After the tour and assessment, the central team will submit a report.

The report of the central team will be examined by the sub-committee of the national executive committee (SC-NEC) headed by the Union home secretary.

The SC-NEC will assess the extent of assistance and expenditure which can be funded from the NDRF as per norms and make recommendations.

Based on the recommendations of the SC-NEC, a high-level committee, headed by the Union home minister, will approve the quantum of relief to be released from the NDRF.

The release of assistance from NDRF will be subject to adjustment of 50 percent of the balance in the SDRF as on 31 March of the preceding financial year.

Upon the approval of the high-level committee, the Ministry of Finance will release assistance from the NDRF to the state.

Another official said the whole exercise normally takes three to six months and hence the final award from the central government to a state comes late.

Expenditure from the NDRF is meant to assist a state to provide immediate relief in those cases of severe calamity, where the expenditure required is in excess of the balance in the state's SDRF.

According to the guidelines, the expenditure on reconstruction, restoration, disaster preparedness and mitigation should not be part of the SDRF or NDRF and is to be met from the normal budgetary heads or plan heads.

On 21 August, the central government had released Rs 600 crore as immediate relief to the Kerala government.

Citing a 2004 decision, the central government has announced that it would not accept any assistance from a foreign government, which created a huge controversy.

The statement of the Ministry of External Affairs came after Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said that the United Arab Emirates had offered to give Rs 700 crore as assistance to his state.

However, UAE ambassador Ahmed Albanna had clarified that there has been no official announcement so far by the UAE on any specific amount as financial aid.Relief Commissioner Gangaram Baderia said in a statement that the flood-hit Kodagu district in Kerala is slowly returning to normalcy. The 51 temporary relief shelters, which housed 5,041 people across the district last week, have come down to 32, with 3,227 people residing in them.

Kodagu: Flood-hit Kodagu district in Karnataka is limping back to normalcy as hundreds of people returned to their homes from relief camps, said an official on Sunday.

"Kodagu is getting back to normalcy. A total of 1,800 people returned from the relief camps to their villages wherever the houses are intact," state Relief Commissioner Gangaram Baderia said in a statement.

The 51 temporary relief shelters, which housed 5,041 people across the district last week, have come down to 32, with 3,227 people residing in them. The relief camps were set up a week ago in the district after torrential rains caused floods and landslides in the hilly district during the southwest monsoon from 14-22 August.

The district's Deputy Commissioner P Sreevidya had asked to relieve all the rescue teams, including the Indian Army, Air Force, Navy and other agencies, while keeping one team of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), the statement added.

The torrential rains have claimed 17 lives while damaging more than 2,200 homes and public buildings. The Karnataka government has sought Rs 2,000 crore interim relief to rehabilitate the flood affected in the district, about 270 kilometres from state capital Bengaluru.

The district received moderate to heavy rainfall on Sunday, and is likely to continue to see moderate to heavy rains for the next two days, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said.Major Leetul Gogoi, who was detained by the police in a Srinagar hotel after he was seen with a local woman in May, is set to face disciplinary action and held accountable by the Court of Inquiry for 'fraternising' with a local woman

Major Leetul Gogoi, who was detained by the police in a Srinagar hotel after he was seen with a local woman in May, is set to face disciplinary action and held accountable by the Court of Inquiry for "fraternising" with a local woman despite being given instructions to the contrary and for staying away from the place of duty while in an operational area.

Earlier in August, sources had said that it was likely he would face punitive action as Court of Inquiry (CoI) ordered by the army into the incident was likely to indict him in the case.

On 23 May, Gogoi was detained by the police after an altercation at the hotel in Srinagar where he was allegedly trying to enter with an 18-year-old woman. Days later, the army had ordered the Court of Inquiry into the incident after army chief General Bipin Rawat said in Pahalgam that exemplary punishment would be given to Gogoi if he was found guilty of "any offence". "If any officer of the Indian Army is found guilty of any offence, we will take strictest possible action," Rawat had said.

Gogoi had reportedly disguised himself as a Muslim youth and also roped in another army soldier, Sameer Malla, to stay with the Kashmiri girl at the hotel in Srinagar. The police also said that Gogoi and Sameer, who is from Khag village of Budgam district, fought with the staff and raised commotion as they were denied the room.

Initial reports had said that the girl was a minor but several conflicting accounts about her age muddied the case. The police later stated before the magistrate that according to the girl's Aadhaar card, she was "above 18 years of age".

Gogoi had hit the headlines last year after he tied a man to a jeep in Jammu and Kashmir purportedly as a shield against stone-pelters during polling in the Srinagar Lok Sabha by-election on 9 April. At the time, General Bipin Rawat had supported the young officer's action and honoured him with the army chief's "Commendation Card" for his "sustained efforts" in counter-insurgency operations.

With inputs from agenciesOn Saturday, MK Alagiri claimed that the DMK would face a 'threat' after his 5 September rally in Chennai, but a Tamil Nadu minister claimed it was only an attempt to be reinstated into the party.

Expelled DMK leader MK Alagiri on Monday said that the party would face consequences if it does not reinstate him. On being asked why the former Union minister did not revolt for re-entry to the party earlier, he said the DMK earlier had his father, M Karunanidhi, but it needed saving now.

"Kalaingar (Karunanidhi) wanted to readmit me," he claimed. "But these people (MK Stalin and his supporters) were preventing him then."

Earlier Kalaignar (M Karunanidhi) was there. Now we have to save the party (DMK) and we want to join it. If they don't include us in the party, they will have to face the consequences: Expelled DMK leader MK Alagiri on being asked 'why there wasn't any revolt earlier'. #TamilNadu pic.twitter.com/ToJ5kUIp8E  ANI (@ANI) August 27, 2018

Alagiri, who is based out of Madurai, has been meeting his supporters the past few days to discuss the Chennai rally. The consultations continued on Monday. He has also claimed that the DMK will lose the 2019 Lok Sabha elections the way it lost the last parliamentary and Assembly polls if the party did not readmit him.

On Saturday, Alagiri had claimed that the DMK would face a "threat" after his 5 September rally in Chennai. "Even rivals had appreciated my election work and organisational skills," he said. "A section of DMK leaders will understand me at least now."

Alagiri was referring to his role in ensuring the DMK's success in the by-elections in southern Tamil Nadu during the party's 2006-2011 rule.

"I never desired for any post when thalaivar (leader) Karunanidhi was alive. Why should I seek any post now?" he told reporters on Saturday. "I don't have any desire to become the DMK president.... MK Stalin is showing urgency in taking over as party president."

When asked about Tamil Nadu minister RB Udhayakumar's remarks that his rally was an attempt to join the DMK again, Alagiri said there was nothing wrong if he re-joined a party that was founded by CN Annadurai and nurtured by his father.

Alagiri's latest statement comes a day after his brother and DMK working president MK Stalin filed nomination papers for the post of the party's president, which has been vacant since Karunanidhi's death on 7 August.

The DMK presidential election is scheduled to be held in Chennai at the party's annual general council meeting on Tuesday. Always considered the political heir apparent to his father, Stalin is all set to be elected unopposed.

Alagiri has been in political hibernation since Karunanidhi expelled him from the party in 2014. The former Union minister was sacked at the height of his fight with Stalin over establishing supremacy in the DMK. He wielded considerable influence in the southern districts of Tamil Nadu and was the party's organising secretary for the south zone before his expulsion.

With inputs from PTICBI counsel Sanjay Kumar along with deputy inspector general CBI, Patna, who was also present in the court, submitting the report said that it comprised two aspects  the progress report of the investigation and transfer of its SP J P Mishra.

Patna: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) submitted a progress report on the Muzaffarpur shelter home sex scandal case to the Patna High Court on Monday in a sealed cover.

CBI counsel Sanjay Kumar submitted the report on the status of the progress of the case and transfer of CBI's SP-rank officer, who was part of the probe team in the case.

The investigating agency submitted the report before a bench comprising Chief Justice Mukesh R Shah and Justice Ravi Ranjan in compliance of its order passed on the previous hearing on two counts.

Kumar, along with deputy inspector general CBI, Patna, who was also present in the court, submitting the report said that it comprised two aspects  the progress report of the investigation and transfer of its SP J P Mishra.

The bench posted the hearing of the case for tomorrow.

On 23 August, the bench had pulled up the CBI for its failure to submit a progress report in the investigation into the case.

The court asked the central probe agency to explain as to why Mishra, who was the investigating officer in the case, was transferred.

Mishra, was shifted from the Special Crime Branch and attached to the office of the DIG at Patna vide an order passed by the CBI headquarters on 21 August.

Opposition parties in Bihar have criticised the reshuffle, alleging that it would adversely affect the probe.

The Patna High Court was monitoring the probe into the sordid episode at the government-funded short stay home for girls at Muzaffarpur on the request of the Bihar government.

Meanwhile, the court also expressed displeasure over leak of details of the investigation and asked the media to refrain from publishing the same as it could be detrimental to the probe.

The sexual assault of 34 girls over a period of time in the government-funded Muzaffarpur shelter home came to light after a social audit was conducted by the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

An FIR was subsequently registered by the Bihar social welfare department and 10 persons, including prime accused Brajesh Thakur whose NGO ran the shelter home, were arrested.

However, following a huge outcry, the Nitish Kumar government handed over the probe to the CBI a month ago which was followed by the resignation of social welfare minister Manju Verma a few days later.

The court had on 6 August directed the SP, CBI, to submit a report with regard to the progress of the investigation.

In an earlier hearing on the matter, the state government had requested the high court to monitor the CBI probe and consider appointing a special judge for speedy trial.

Both the requests were accepted by the court.In a statement, the Indian defence ministry in New Delhi said that both sides decided to step up military-to-military engagement by commencing bilateral naval exercises.

Bangkok/New Delhi: India and Thailand on Monday decided to step up defence and security cooperation, particularly in the maritime sphere, considering the evolving security situation in the critical sea lanes in the region, officials said.

The decision was taken after wide-ranging talks between Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and her Thai counterpart General Prawit Wongsuwon in Bangkok.

In a statement, the Indian defence ministry in New Delhi said that both sides decided to step up military-to-military engagement by commencing bilateral naval exercises.

"The ministers welcomed the positive momentum and substantive content of ongoing bilateral defence engagement and discussed measures to further enhance and deepen defence cooperation," it said.

Sitharaman also called on Thailand prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha and discussed ways to enhance the bilateral ties.

In the talks, the two defence ministers also decided to explore strengthening current military drills between the armies and air forces of the two countries.

"Both sides noted complementarities in their approaches to the Indo-Pacific region and decided to hold regular consultations on issues of mutual interest," the ministry said.

Officials said the two sides deliberated on the situation in the Indo-Pacific region where China has been trying to expand its influence.

The ministry said the Thai defence minister welcomed India's initiative to host the inaugural BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) Army exercise and conclave of chiefs in India in September and confirmed Thailand's participation.

The BIMSTEC is a regional grouping comprising Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bhutan and Nepal.

The grouping accounts for 22 percent of the global population, and has a combined gross domestic product of $2.8 trillion.

Sitharaman arrived in Bangkok on Sunday along with an Indian delegation, on a three-day visit to strengthen Indo-Thai strategic ties.

Vice Minister for Defence General Roungrojana Chumrasromrun welcomed her and the delegation on arrival in Bangkok.

She also inspected a guard of honour in the Thai capital.With rehabilitation measures on, the government on Monday said an immediate relief of Rs 10,000 would be disbursed soon to the flood-affected.

Thiruvananthapuram: Over 3.26 lakh people are still in relief camps across Kerala even after a fortnight of the devastating deluge that left a trail of destruction claiming 322 lives and rendering thousands homeless.

With rehabilitation measures on, the government on Monday said an immediate relief of Rs 10,000 would be disbursed soon to the flood-affected.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan issued necessary instructions to district collectors on the aid during a video conference to review the post-flood situation in the state.

A total of 3,42,699 people are in 1,093 relief camps, a release from chief minister's office said.

As per the latest government update on the flood situation, 322 people have lost their lives in the monsoon fury since 8 August.

Though several people are returning home, Vijayan said the relief camps have to be continued for few more days.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi will arrive in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday for a two-day visit to the flood-affected areas. In a tweet, he said he would visit some relief camps and also meet fishermen and party volunteers involved in relief work.

He will visit Alappuzha, Chengannur and Ernakulam and some places in Wayanad and Kozhikode districts on 29 August.

A release from the chief minister's office said work of burying carcasses were nearing completion and four lakh birds and more than 22,000 small and big animals have been buried.

Vijayan asked district authorities to finalise the loss suffered by each sector without delay.

Meanwhile, several people have come forward, responding to the chief minister's appeal to donate one month salary for the chief minister's disaster relief fund.

Governor P Sathasivam has handed over a cheque for Rs 2.50 lakh as balance amount towards his contribution of one month's salary to the Chief Minister's Distress Relief Fund (CMDRF). The governor had earlier contributed Rs 1 lakh on 14 August.

The total amount received towards the CMDRF touched Rs 700 crore on Monday, officials said.

As the state was focusing on cleaning houses and public places on a large-scale, gram sabhas at Kuttanad in Alappuzha would be undertaking a cleaning drive with participation of 75,000 volunteers on Tuesday.

Many places of Kuttanad, an area which is below sea level, is still waterlogged and people are finding it difficult to return home.

State finance minister TM Thomas Isaac said more than 75,000 volunteers drawn from various parts of the state are expected to participate in the cleaning programme.

Centres to collect relief materials were assisting the flood-hit people to get back on their feet and are now in the process of preparing special kits consisting of five kilograms of rice and other essential items to those returning home from camps.

Meanwhile, telecom authorities said 98 percent connectivity have been restored in flood-hit areas as part of disaster mitigation activities taken up by the Telecom department, BSNL, telecom service providers and telecom infrastructure providers in collaboration with the state government.Rahul Gandhi on Sunday said that people support populist leaders like US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi because they are angry over not having jobs

London: Rahul Gandhi on Sunday said that people support populist leaders like US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi because they are angry over not having jobs, as the Congress president stepped up his attack on the BJP and the RSS. Interacting with Indian Journalists' Association here, Gandhi said that instead of solving the problem, these leaders ride on that anger and damage the country.

"People support populist leaders like Trump and Modi because they are angry that they don't have a job. Instead of solving this problem these leaders ride on that anger. They damage the country by this," he said. Rahul said that India was facing a "full blown crisis" of unemployment and the Government was refusing to admit it.

During an interaction programme at the prestigious London School of Economics,Rahul said that where China creates 50,000 jobs a day, only 450 jobs are created in a day in India and that this is a catastrophe.The Congress president said there is a systematic attempt to impose one ideology on the country, the ideology coming straight from Nagpur. There are attempts to centralise power.

Gandhi again maintained that "there is a lot of similarity between Muslim Brotherhood and RSS. They use democratic processes to capture power". The Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest political Islamist group in the Arab world. It is banned and declared as a terrorist organisation by the governments of several countries.

He said that "both the organisations were formed in the 1920s, both believe in institutional capture and both were banned, particularly the RSS was banned after Mahatma Gandhi's assassination". Meanwhile, BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said that the likes of President Ram Nath Kovind, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who died last week, have an RSS background and Gandhi's comparison of the organisation with an Islamist outfit is "unforgivable". He demanded immediate apology from the Congress president for likening the choice of Indians in an election with an organisation which, the BJP leader said, is declared a terror outfit in many countries.

On Vijay Mallaya, Gandhi said that Indian prisons are "pretty decent" while commenting on his ongoing extradition case. "Indian prisons are pretty decent as far as Mallya is concerned," he said. In July, Mallya appeared before the Westminster Magistrates' Court in London where both defence and prosecution presented clarifications on Barrack 12 at Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai, where Mallya is to be held post-extradition.

Judge Emma Arbuthnot asked the Indian authorities to submit within three weeks a video of the Barrack 12 of the Arthur Road Jail. Fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya is currently undergoing an extradition trial in a UK court over fraud and money laundering charges by Indian authorities. Mallya is separately fighting extradition to India on fraud and money laundering charges worth an estimated Rs 9,000 crores.

Asked whether he supported attempts to ban books, Gandhi said: "I don't believe in banning books unless there is a clear indication that it would lead to violence". Asked about the Congress' strategy for 2019 general elections, Gandhi said "the Opposition in our conversation is very clear that the first and most important challenge is to stop the RSS, the BJP from attacking and destroying Indian state and institutions. "There is absolute acceptance and unity on that point. We are not getting into any conversation that distracts us from that goal".Congress president Rahul Gandhi, in London said that his party has an issue with the 'criminalisation' aspect of the Triple Talaq Bill

London: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Saturday said that the party has an issue with the "criminalisation" aspect in the Triple Talaq Bill.

Responding to a question by ANI on Congress stonewalling the Triple Talaq Bill in courts and in Parliament, the Congress president said, "We have an issue with the criminalisation (part of the Bill) but we have not stonewalled anything. Our issue is with the criminalisation aspect."

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been accusing the Congress of stalling the passage of the landmark bill which was passed in the Lok Sabha on 29 December, 2017. The bill is yet to be introduced in the Rajya Sabha. The BJP's aim was to get the Bill passed in the Budget Session which commenced on 29 January and adjourned sine die on 6 April. The Congress-led Opposition, however, has demanded that the bill should be sent to the Select Committee for further scrutiny.

On 9 August, the Cabinet proposed three amendments in the Muslim Women Protection of Rights on Marriage Bill, 2017. The changes proposed are, firstly only the victim, a blood relation or relation by marriage are allowed to lodge FIR in the case; secondly, the case can be dropped if husband and wife agree to settle their differences and thirdly, a magistrate can grant bail to men found guilty of giving instant Triple Talaq to their wives. However, the offence still remains non-bailable. After the bill is passed in the Upper House, it would go back to the Lok Sabha for approval of the amendments.

The draft of The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill 2017, also known as the Triple Talaq Bill, says, "Any pronouncement of talaq by a person upon his wife, by words, either spoken or written or in electronic form or in any other manner whatsoever, shall be void and illegal".

The Bill proposes a three-year jail term for a Muslim man who divorces his wife in any form of spoken, written or by electronic means such as email, SMS, and WhatsApp.In Vietnam, Sushma Swaraj said if any Non-Resident Indian gets stuck anywhere in the world, they believe that the government would protect them.

Hanoi: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who is in Vietnam for a two-day visit, on Monday hailed the Indian embassies across the world for their efforts.

Speaking at the Swami Vivekanand Cultural Centre in Vietnam, Swaraj said, "If any Non-Resident Indian gets stuck anywhere in the world, they are confident that their government will save them. Relief is just one tweet away. What was never a priority in embassies has become the top priority now."

Highlighting the efforts made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi towards improving the situation, she said, "Today, they believe that the Indian passport is their security cover. Prime Minister has made overseas Indians proud and External Affairs Ministry made them confident."

Swaraj also lauded the Prime Minister for his efforts aimed at boosting political and trade relations between India and Vietnam. "In 2016, when Prime Minister Modi visited Vietnam, a new foundation in the relations between India and Vietnam was laid. After that, there were many high-level meetings," she added.

She further encouraged the Indians diaspora in Vietnam to visit India and said, "India has not just changed, but transformed. Today India has opportunities and, we want to reap the benefits of these opportunities. The 'Make in India' programme not just invites people to manufacture goods in India, but you can also export those goods. There are many flagship programs like Clean India, Start-up India, and Stand-up India.

Swaraj is on a four-day, two-nation tour to Vietnam and Cambodia from 29 August to strengthen bilateral ties with these two countries.The commission would recommend amendments to the Constitution and the Representation of the People Act to ensure simultaneous polls.

New Delhi: The Law Commission will this week recommend a tough legal framework, which includes changes in the Constitution and election law, to hold Lok Sabha and assembly polls together, highly-placed sources on the panel said on Monday.

The commission would recommend amendments to the Constitution and the Representation of the People Act to ensure simultaneous polls, they said, adding that without these changes the mammoth exercise cannot be held.

The recommendations of the commission are not binding on the government, but the report will allow an informed debate among political parties and stakeholders.

Simultaneous elections to Lok Sabha and state Assemblies can be held in two phases beginning in 2019, provided at least two provisions of the Constitution are amended and ratified by majority of the states, a Law Commission study paper had said in April.

According to the working paper, the second phase of simultaneous polls can take place in 2024.

The document stated that the leader of the majority party be elected prime minister or chief minister by the entire House (Lok Sabha or state Assembly) to ensure stability of the government as well as the Lok Sabha or the Assembly.

The document proposed amending the Constitution (Articles 83(2) and 172(1) dealing with tenures of Lok Sabha and state Assemblies) and the Representation of the People Act to extend the terms of state legislative assemblies to effect the move.

It suggested that in case a government fell mid-term, the term of the new government would be for the remaining period "and not for a fresh five-year term".

"As an abundant caution and in order to avoid a challenge (in the courts) to amendments on the ground of not having obtained ratification by majority of the states, such ratification could be obtained for the proposed (constitutional) amendment," the working paper said.

Based on a suggestion made by the Election Commission, the working paper also said a no-confidence motion against the government should be followed by a confidence motion. This would ensure that if the Opposition does not have numbers to form an alternative government, the regime in office cannot be removed.The Supreme Court on Monday is set to hear a petition seeking the scrapping of Article 35A in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, three weeks after the court was adjourned.

The Supreme Court on Monday is set to hear a petition seeking the scrapping of Article 35A in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, three weeks after the court was adjourned. The Jammu and Kashmir government had moved an application and sought to defer the hearing of the case, citing upcoming panchayat and urban local body elections.

According to ANI, the apex court will hear only lawyer and BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay's fresh plea against Article 35A, while the main hearing in the case is likely to take place on 31 August.

Article 370 of the Constitution grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir, while Article 35A disallows people from residing in Jammu and Kashmir, buying or owning immovable property in the state, settle permanently, or get state government jobs.

A non-governmental organisation, We the Citizens, filed a petitioned in the Apex Court in 2014 to abolish the law on the grounds that it was "unconstitutional". There are apprehensions, among sections of Kashmiris, that if the law is repealed or diluted, outsiders would settle in Jammu and Kashmir.

On Sunday, the National Conference engaged former solicitor general of India Gopal Subramanium to defend Article 35A of the Constitution, the party said.

"Party president and member of Parliament from Srinagar constituency, Farooq Abdullah, yesterday (Saturday) held detailed discussions with senior lawyers in Delhi in the context of petitions challenging the state's special status in the Supreme Court," an NC spokesman said. He said Abdullah met Subramanium and engaged his service to represent the party's intervention plea in the apex court.

Subramanium is a former chairman of the Bar Council of India and has been a part of numerous landmark cases. He was awarded the National Law Day Award for being an outstanding jurist, presented to him in 2009 by the president.

Fresh plea in SC challenges the constitutional validity of Article 35A

A fresh plea was moved in the Supreme Court on Friday challenging the constitutional validity of Article 35A that empowers the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly to define "permanent residents" for bestowing special rights and privileges to them.

The petitioner, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) 'Ikkjut Jammu', sought quashing of the provision which has been challenged by several others including civil society groups, individuals. There have also been petitions supporting the retention of Article 35A of the Constitution.

The fresh petition, filed through advocate Sumit R Sharma, says that Article 35A furthers "two nation theory which is against the theory of secularism".

"It is an enabling provision for the creation of a theological state within secular territory of India. It ensures that the character of J&K's Legislative Assembly shall remain Islamic," the petition stated.

Strike observed in Poonch's Mendhar tehsil in favour of Article 35A

A strike was also observed in Poonch district's Mendhar tenshil on Saturday in support of Article 35A of the Constitution and the NC also took out a rally cautioning against tinkering with the provision.

Shops and business establishments remained closed and public transport remained off roads in response to a strike call given by local social and religious organisations in favour of Article 35A, officials said. They said several rallies were taken out during the strike which passed off peacefully.

Senior NC leader and local MLA Javed Ahmed Rana led the protest march and said dilution or scrapping of Article 35A would have serious ramifications.

"This provision (Article 35A) is the pride and identity of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. We will fight tooth and nail for its retention," Rana said.

With inputs from agenciesExternal Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Sunday night arrived at Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, on the first leg of her four-day two-nation tour, which aims at deepening India's strategic cooperation with Vietnam and Cambodia

Hanoi: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Sunday night arrived at Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, on the first leg of her four-day two-nation tour, which aims at deepening India's strategic cooperation with Vietnam and Cambodia - the key countries in the ASEAN region.

Swaraj was received by Ambassador P Harish, Indian children who greeted the minister with flowers and senior officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Vietnam, the Indian Embassy in Hanoi tweeted.

India's ties are on an upswing with Vietnam and Cambodia - the two major countries in the powerful Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) grouping.

India has been particularly scaling up its cooperation with Vietnam in areas of maritime security and energy.

"A strategic partner and an important friend in ASEAN! EAM @SushmaSwaraj arrives in Hanoi, Vietnam to a warm welcome. Two days of packed programme on 27-28 August during EAM's first leg of the two-country visit to South East Asia," Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Ravish Kumar tweeted.

A strategic partner and an important friend in ASEAN ! EAM @SushmaSwaraj arrives in Hanoi, Vietnam to a warm welcome. Two days of packed programme on 27-28 August during EAM's first leg of the two-country visit to South East Asia. pic.twitter.com/kZG7nMABSK  Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) August 26, 2018

In Vietnam, Swaraj will co-chair the 16th meeting of the Joint Commission, along with the country's Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh.

She will also call on Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc.

Swaraj will also inaugurate the 3rd edition of the Indian Ocean Conference.

The External Affairs Minister's visit to Vietnam and Cambodia will provide an opportunity to hold in-depth discussions with the political leadership on a wide range of global, regional and bilateral issues, and advance our strategic engagement with these countries and the ASEAN region, the MEA had said in a statement on Saturday.

Swaraj will visit Cambodia on 29 August.

In her first official visit to Cambodia, Swaraj will hold extensive talks with her counterpart Prak Sokhonn, covering the entire expanse of bilateral and regional issues of mutual interests.

She will call on Prime Minister Hun Sen and President of the Senate Say Chhum.

During Vietnamese president Tran Dai Quang's visit to New Delhi in March, both the sides had vowed to join hands for an open and thriving Indo-Pacific, besides ensuring an efficient and rules-based regional security architecture.

Vietnam and several other ASEAN member countries have territorial disputes with China over the resource-rich South China Sea.

China has been opposing India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) exploring oil in areas claimed by Vietnam in the South China Sea (SCS). India has been asserting that the ONGC's exploration is a commercial operation and not connected with the dispute. Oil exploration in the SCS is a sensitive issue in the Vietnam-China relations.External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj is likely to meet her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi in New York next month, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly's (UNGA).

New Delhi: External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj is likely to meet her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi in New York next month, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly's (UNGA).

Both the foreign ministers will be present at the 73rd session of the UNGA which will begin on 18 September. The development comes days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Imran Khan on being sworn-in as the new Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Last week, Pakistan signaled that Imran Khan may not be able to attend the meet in order to cut down government expenses. However, senior Pakistani diplomats urged him to reconsider the decision, saying that representing Pakistan was not a waste of funds, particularly on key issues like Kashmir and Afghanistan, Dawn reported.

Earlier on 22 August, Khan expressed interest with regards to a meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi, stating that both the countries must engage in dialogue to resolve their differences.External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will begin her four-day tour if Vietnam and Combodia to strengthen strategic ties with the ASEAN nations

New Delhi: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will begin a four-day tour of Vietnam and Cambodia on Monday with an aim to deepen India's strategic cooperation with the two key nations in the ASEAN region.

Swaraj will visit Vietnam on 27 and 28 August, while she will begin her two-day trip to Cambodia on 29 August, the ministry of external affairs said.

"The visit of the external affairs minister to Vietnam and Cambodia will provide an opportunity to hold in-depth discussions with the political leadership on a wide range of global, regional and bilateral issues and advance our strategic engagement with these countries and ASEAN region," it said.

In Vietnam, Swaraj will co-chair the 16th meeting of the Joint Commission along with the country's deputy prime minister and foreign minister Pham Binh Minh. She will also meet Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and inaugurate the third edition of the Indian Ocean Conference.

During her visit to Cambodia, Swaraj will hold extensive talks with her Cambodian counterpart Prak Sokhonn, covering entire expanse of bilateral and regional issues of mutual interests. It will be her first official visit to Cambodia.

She will call on Prime Minister Hun Sen and President of Senate Say Chhum.

India's ties are on an upswing with both Vietnam and Cambodia, the two major countries the powerful ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) grouping.

India has been particularly scaling up its cooperation with Vietnam in areas of maritime security and energy.

During Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang's visit to New Delhi in March, both the sides had vowed to join hands for an open and thriving Indo-Pacific, besides ensuring an efficient and rules-based regional security

architecture.

Vietnam and several other ASEAN member countries have territorial disputes with China over the resource-rich South China Sea.

China has been opposing India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) exploring oil in areas claimed by Vietnam in the South China Sea (SCS). India has been asserting that the ONGC's exploration is a commercial operation and not connected with the dispute. Oil exploration in the SCS is a sensitive issue in the Vietnam-China relations.Manmohan Singh has written to Narendra Modi, urging him to not make changes to the Teen Murti complex, a memorial dedicated to Jawaharlal Nehru.

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh has joined other Congress leaders opposing the central government's plans to set up a museum on all prime ministers in the Teen Murti complex, which is dedicated to the memory of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The Teen Murti complex houses the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), Nehru Planetarium, Nehru Memorial and the headquarters of the Sonia Gandhi-headed Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Manmohan accused the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance at the Centre of being guided by an "agenda" to change the nature and character of the NMML and Teen Murti complex. He urged the government to leave the 25-acre memorial for Nehru undisturbed. The content of his letter is in sync with the Congress' allegation that the Narendra Modi regime was trying to "obliterate" Nehru's legacy.

Manmohan's letter needs to be debated as he is not just a senior Congress leader but is also a former Prime Minister of India, which would mean that his life and work would also be on display at the proposed museum. From the published excerpts of his letter, it appears that he is not objected to the idea of a museum on all prime ministers being built, but he does not want this honor for posterity at the NMML premises, 200 meters from the memorial dedicated to Nehru.

It is also interesting that Manmohan's objection comes around a month after Home Affairs Minister Rajnath Singh chaired the 43rd annual general meeting of the NMML Society, at which members broadly approved of the construction of the new museum within the Teen Murti complex.

Manmohan is apparently guided more by the rhetoric of the Congress and loyalists of the Gandhi-Nehru family than by facts, considering that he believes the proposed museum for prime ministers would wipe out Nehru's legacy.

The current dispensation has already undertaken a massive renovation-cum-reconstruction project to showcase Nehru's legacy at the existing premises. The idea is to beautify and add value to the memory of India's first prime minister, not modify his legacy. In contrast, the state of the memorial deteriorated over the last 50 years, even though the NMML Society was under the control of nominees of the Congress' first family and the Centre was under Congress rule. NMML director Shakti Sinha had said that the captions and photos at the memorial had faded, and the negatives were either destroyed or not stored.

Manmohan's allegation is that the Modi government has an "agenda" to "obliterate" Nehru's legacy. The proposed changes  mentioned in the "New Design for the Nehru Museum" section of the NMML's official website  include rearranging the display at the memorial to showcase the following:

- Five big moments of Nehru's life till 1947

- Nehru's personal life from childhood in Anand Bhawan to 1964

- Crisis management in 1946-47

- India wins freedom

- Foundation of the Indian democracy

- Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi's relation

- Nehru's vision of education

- Nehru and science

- Nehru and cartoons

- Nehru's take on an inclusive state policy

One can now judge whether the proposed changes to the memorial will enhance Nehru's legacy or destroy it.

Teen Murti House, as it is now called, was known as the Flagstaff House in the pre-Independence era and used to be the residence of the commander-in-chief of the British armed forces. In June 1948, the property was officially designated as the prime minister's official residence. In an interview to this reporter, the NMML director said that even after Nehru's death, there was an opinion within the government that the Teen Murti House should continue to be the official residence of the Prime Minister of India, and that NMML should be built or shifted to Travancore House in Delhi. But later, it was decided that the Teen Murti House would be turned into a memorial for Nehru.

The new buildings that hold the library and planetarium were later additions. The Nehru Memorial Fund, a private organisation chaired by Sonia Gandhi, h4as also been allotted a complex inside the premises. In fact, the first gate of the Teen Murti complex at the roundabout opens into the Nehru Memorial Fund. Visitors are not allowed into that part of the complex.

If a museum on all the prime ministers of India is indeed established at the complex, it would not be the first time a new structure would be built there. The problem lies elsewhere  so far, all new structures and allotments inside the Teen Murti complex have borne Nehru's name, almost making the entire property an exclusive Nehru preserve. The proposed museum would take away from that as it would serve as a museum for all other prime ministers, from Lal Bahadur Shastri to Narendra Modi and whoever holds the post in future.

Although the new structure is proposed to be built around 200 meters from the main Nehru museum building, both would have the same main entry gate, and the NMML would run both. There were arguments for a different body to operate the new museum and for a separate entry.

The government is in no mood to yield to these demands. A top minister said that the government's decision is final. "A decision to build a museum for all prime ministers was made after due deliberation, and now, there is no scope for any review. As it is, the renovation work of the existing Nehru museum is on, and you will see that it will have a much better look and feel. All concerns in this regard are unfounded," the minister said.

Sinha said that the NMML was a government property, which meant that the government in power had the authority to build something within the premises to add to the reputation of the place and serve researchers and tourists significantly.Party sources said the Congress had extended support to the TMC to keep the alleged communal forces at bay and hence some of its members were present at the site of the clash between the two Trinamool Congress groups.

Malda/Kolkata: Two persons were killed and four injured in Malda as violence erupted over formation of panchayat boards in some districts of West Bengal, even as Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee appealed for maintaining peace.

The BJP claimed that two of its workers were killed in police firing in Purulia which was not immediately confirmed by police.

The chief minister said in Purulia, one police personnel was in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) after being seriously injured and "probably two have died there". She, however, did not elaborate.

"I have got information that at some places there were direct confrontations with police. In Purulia, one policeman was seriously injured and is in the ICU and probably two have died there. It is not right to attack the administration. There are democratic ways to protest," Banerjee told reporters at the state secretariat.

According to police, two persons were killed and four, including a three-year old boy, injured when two groups allegedly belonging to the Trinamool Congress (TMC) clashed over formation of Gopalpur gram panchayat board in Malda district.

"Firearms and bombs were used during the clash. Of the four injured, the boy and a Congress supporter were admitted to Malda Medical College and Hospital, while the rest were admitted to a rural hospital at Manikchak," police said.

Party sources said the Congress had extended support to the TMC to keep the alleged communal forces at bay and hence some of its members were present at the site of the clash between the two Trinamool Congress groups. The two killed in the clash have been identified as Salam Sheikh and Azahar Sheikh.

Superintendent of Police Arnab Ghosh rushed to the spot and the Rapid Action Force (RAF) started patrolling the area. "The situation is now under control," the police said.

District Congress general secretary Kali Sadhan Roy said his party was not involved in the clash.

"The Trinammol Congress was unable to decide on the gram panchayat board chief and we did not put up any candidate. It is entirely their own fight," he claimed.

Manikchak block TMC president and former minister Sabitri Mitra claimed a Congress supporter made a provocative speech outside the panchayat office that led to the clash.

She said there is no tension near the panchayat office where the voting took place and there were no candidates from the opposition parties for the post of the chief of the 10-member gram panchayat board.

BJP state general secretary Sayantan Basu alleged that two workers of his party were killed at Jaipur in Purulia in police firing when they were attacked by the TMC activists.

"TMC workers backed by the police and goons attacked and stopped the BJP workers from forming panchayat board at Jaipur. The police opened fire on the BJP workers", he claimed.

Appealing to the people to maintain peace, the chief minister said "I do not support violence. Every death is sad. I feel bad if a person dies in violence irrespective of his political affiliation. The people have voted in gram panchayat elections and there is no need to indulge in violence."

Banerjee said that she had called up "about 15 to 20 places" and requested them to maintain peace. "I have told my party to maintain peace while forming the panchayat boards", she said.

She said people must remember that political parties should not indulge in vandalism, violence, or in any form of confrontation.

Without naming the BJP, she claimed, "They are bringing in people from different states. We have information that outsiders are being brought in from Bihar. They are hiring goons from other states and bringing them to Bengal."

Asked about the role of Central forces, Banerjee said, "We have information and evidence that in Midnapore the central forces have taken sides and are helping in bringing in people."Hindu College, Jesus and Mary College, Kamala Nehru College and Gargi College, are among the colleges that have been warned by the UGC.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has warned 21 colleges under the Delhi University (DU) that unless they appoint regular principals, their grants would be withheld. The UGC has given colleges time till 31 August to do so.

UGC secretary Rajnish told ANI, We have issued a letter to all the colleges, particularly to the governing bodies of the colleges, for appointing principals on an urgent basis...It's a very serious issue. We may withhold certain benefits if they do not do so (appoint a regular principal)."

Hindu College, Jesus and Mary College, Kamala Nehru College and Gargi College, are among the colleges that have been warned, reported Hindustan Times. UGC officials said that the institutions rely greatly on the funds provided by the body for their everyday functioning.

Hindu College has been without a regular principal since 2012. The other colleges have had acting heads for eight years or more.

The commission, on 13 August had written a letter to the colleges and the DU registrar, asking them to expedite the appointment process. It is once again requested to expedite the process of the selection of a full-time regular (principal) in your college. Further, you are hereby requested to inform the date of interview for the post of principals latest by 31 August 2018, failing which the UGC will be constrained to withhold the release of grants, reads the letter.

"We've received communication from a few colleges. One college said it has appointed a principal, another said it has fixed the dates. Some said that they are advertising the post," said Jain to ANI.

The Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry had earlier directed the UGC to take action against the colleges in question, as they had ignored instructions from the Presidents office to appoint the principals, despite repeated warnings.Yogi Adityanath was speaking to media persons after the state Assembly was adjourned following noisy protests by Opposition members over the Deoria shelter home case.

Lucknow: The law and order situation in Uttar Pradesh is the best the state has seen in the last 15 years, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath claimed on Monday as he lashed at the Opposition for disrupting the state Assembly on the issue of handling crime.

"Not just in the state but in the entire country it has been accepted that law and order situation in Uttar Pradesh has improved and an indicator of this is that investment is flowing in," Adityanath said as he accused the Opposition parties of working with a "negative attitude".

The chief minister was speaking to media persons after the state Assembly was adjourned for the day following noisy protests by Opposition members over the Deoria shelter home case. It is very unfortunate that the House, which is meant for discussing serious issues, is being used for raising unnecessary slogans, the chief minister said.

"I feel to hide their own incompetence and avoid becoming a laughing stock, they are raising a matter (Deoria case) that is sub-judicious and being monitored by the high court," Adityanath said.

The House has 403 elected MLAs but a handful of people are holding it hostage and encroaching upon the rights of others, Adityanath said adding it was "not a good sign" for democracy. Referring to the Deoria shelter home case, he said the facts that had emerged in the probe indicated that if anyone was to be blamed, it was the previous governments. The shelter home got recognition in 2009 and was getting grants till 2017, he said.

"We have taken action against the District Magistrate and the Superintendent of Police (SP) and all those found lax and have also recommended a CBI inquiry. A three-member committee is carrying out the probe till the CBI takes over and high count is monitoring the matter," he said.

On 6 August, 24 girls were rescued from a shelter home in Deoria after allegations of abuse came to light.

We have emphatically curbed loot and other activities of criminal elements who had entered politics," Adityanath said. "I can understand the problem of the SP, the Congress and others in this regard," he said. He said the crime rate in the state was lesser than what was under the previous government and FIRs were being lodged. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) clearly believes that crime control is determined by the common people's perception, he said.YMA leaders have asked Rajasekharan to take steps to strengthen the security along the Mizoram's international borders to curb the influx of illegal foreigners from neighbouring countries

A major NGO wants the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to be introduced in Mizoram in order to check the inflow of illegal immigrants in the Christian-dominated state, an official said on Monday.

The official from the Mizoram government's Directorate of Information and Public Relations (DIPR) said that the all-powerful NGO, Young Mizo Association (YMA), met Governor Kummanam Rajasekharan at the Raj Bhavan in Aizawl and raised the NRC issue.

"The YMA emphasised to prepare the Mizoram's own register of citizens on the lines of Assam's NRC to check illegal immigrants," a DIPR statement said. It said the YMA leaders have asked Rajasekharan to take steps to strengthen the security along the Mizoram's international borders to curb the influx of illegal foreigners from neighbouring countries.

Mizoram has an unfenced international border of 510 kilometres with Myanmar and 318 kilometres with Bangladesh. The Border Security Force has been guarding the Bangladesh border and Assam Rifles troopers are posted along the Myanmar frontiers.

The YMA is a non-political voluntary organisation set up in June 1935, with over 800 branches spread across Mizoram and several other northeastern states including Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura. The YMA is a registered body and it has over three lakh members.Many women from project-affected families have been displaced to resettlement colonies across Mumbai over the years by infrastructure and transportation projects.

In May 2017, Sakshi Lads house in Andheri's MIDC neighbourhood was one of the nearly thousands along the Tansa water pipeline that were razed to the ground by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Until then, Lad, 30, an employee with an electronics company, had walked the two-kilometer distance to work on foot. Relocated to a room in Mahul's resettlement colony, she then had to cover the 30-km commute by bus, train and shared rickshaw, taking up to two hours. Three months after moving, she was asked to leave her job for reporting late to work and calling in sick.

I had to leave home by 6 am every day. The long commute made me feel weak and tired, says Lad, who has been suffering from an undiagnosed low-fever for the past few months. I also had to attend to the household chores  cook, wash, clean, fill water. Even though I wanted to continue working, it became increasingly difficult to manage.

Visible work, invisible women

Lad is among the many women from project-affected families displaced to resettlement colonies across the city over the years by infrastructure and transportation projects. Most rehabilitation projects in Mumbai are those which are in-situ, which means they are at the same site. Resettlement projects, on the other hand, are those which involve the shifting of sites. Here, in addition to the uphill task of adjusting to a completely new neighbourhood located several kilometres away from their former homes, the women also bear the risk of losing their supplementary sources of income. In our experience, we have found that it was the men who really work and earn for the family, but there is some support income which is also provided by the women, said an official from the planning authority, who did not wish to be named. However, it is very difficult to individually identify in which family which women are contributing in some way. They may not necessarily report everything in the baseline survey.

As per the state rehabilitation and resettlement policies, families that are affected by work on infrastructure projects like road widening, constructing flyovers or foot over-bridges under the Mumbai Urban Infrastructure Project have been relocated to Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) Housing. Under the Mumbai Urban Transport Project, families living along the railway tracks and roads are relocated to permanent dwellings and given legal title to their new housing. The long distances and meagre payments, coupled with nearly five hours of unpaid domestic work in their own households, have begun to take a toll on womens participation in the labour force. The overall paradigm has been of looking at resettlement as a replacement of shelter. All other dimensions are completely lost, said Dr Amita Bhide, who heads the Transforming M-Ward Project. M-Ward, which is situated at the citys edge, is home to the largest resettlement colonies in Mankhurd, Mahul and Vashi Naka. In resettlement settings, activities that require a community space like drying papads or vending are difficult the buildings cannot accommodate them.

Making ends meet

Some women from project-affected families grapple to break free from the building format to survive, day-in and day-out. They clock-in nearly 18 hours of work, alternate between multiple jobs and travel long distances to make ends meet. Young, school-going children in the household are often pushed to partake in the daily grind.

For instance, it has been nearly a decade since 55-year-old Kalavati Sauda was relocated to the densely packed Lallubhai Compound, an SRA resettlement colony in Mankhurd. For nearly four decades until then, Sauda, a migrant from Sonepat, had been working as a domestic helper and cook in five houses in Tilak Nagar. Since all families living in this compound had been relocated, there were no job opportunities for me here in Lallubhai. And in the adjoining middle-class housing societies, nobody wanted to employ a new person in their homes. Sauda had to return to her old jobs even after being relocated; the electricity and maintenance bills coupled with additional costs on transportation between Lallubhai Compound and Tilak Nagar left her with little savings. It was getting difficult to survive I was waking up earlier than usual and even losing money for no fault of mine. An additional source of income became a necessity, says Sauda, who lives with her daughter and grandchildren.

Last year, Sauda sensed a business opportunity in the resettlement colony she had been compelled to call home. A neighbor worked as a night watchman in a housing society in Gautam Nagar. A casual conversation with him made me realise that there were watchmen employed in societies in the nearby areas, who craved for home-cooked meals during their late night work hours. Soon after, she and her daughter started preparing dinners comprising rice, dal, chapatis and a curry for 15 watchmen every night. Her school-going grandchildren help deliver boxes. I work for nearly 18 hours every day, says Sauda. I dont have a choice.

Self-help collectives

In most cases, the project-affected women remain invisible, and their labour unaccounted for. The International Labour Organisation ranks Indias Female Labour Force Participation rate at 121 out of 131 countries, one of the lowest in the world. In this kind of project-affected displacement, poor women are treated as objects, not as citizens. None of their citizenship rights or entitlements is granted to them, said Dr Vibhuti Patel, chairperson, Advanced Centre for Womens Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. They lose out on their social capital, which has a drastic impact on their livelihood opportunities. In addition, their household work remains invisible as it is ignored in estimating national income.

The idea of building a collective becomes easier when there is a common thread linking the women  a common sense of ownership. For instance, at New Vidarbha Co-operative Housing Society in Santacruz (East), a group of 15 women living on different floors of a 10-story SRA building meet every day to stitch pouches and bags.

Armed with sewing machines, creativity and newly learned marketing skills, the women get together at a common space located on the ground floor of the building. We struggled for several months to claim this space for ourselves, says Nasreen Khan, 28, who helped put together the Unnati Udyog Gad in 2017. The women in the group had spent eight years in a transit camp next door fighting big rats, sludge and space shortage, when their tenements located in Nehru Nagar slum, Golibar were being replaced with the new SRA buildings. Most of us were engaged in home-based work even back then to support our families. It was really difficult to work from the temporary tenementsthey had promised us that our pukka houses would be ready in two years, says Mehzabeen Rizvi, 48, who stuck decorative sequins on dress materials and made imitation jewellery to earn a supplementary income of Rs 50 a day. Since we now live in a building, there are very few opportunities to see each other. Working together does not grant us an income alone it is also our only platform to discuss household problems, Khan pitches in.

Reetika Revathy Subramanian is a Mumbai-based journalist and a senior research consultant with Aajeevika Bureau, an NGO working on informal labour migration in western IndiaThe Congress has condemned the stone pelting incident at Vasundhara Raje's meeting in Pipad town of Rajasthan's Jodhpur division and said it does not employ such tactics.

The ruling BJP in Rajasthan said on Monday that the Opposition Congress was intimidated by the popularity of Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and was trying to disrupt her statewide Gaurav Yatra using "various means".

Former Rajasthan BJP president Ashok Parnami said Congress national general secretary Ashok Gehlot was "afraid" of Raje's popularity after a few people pelted stones at Raje's meeting on Saturday in Pipad town of Jodhpur division.

Raje and other BJP leaders have accused the Congress of staging the incident.

The Opposition party has condemned the incident but said it does not adopt such kind of tactics. "Congress doesn't want the yatra to proceed and is trying to disrupt it through various means, including by filing a writ petition in the High Court and then pelting stones on Raje's Rath in Pipad. Why is Ashok Gehlot afraid of Raje's rising popularity," Parnami said at a press conference in Jaipur. He showed videos in which a group of people could be seen supporting Gehlot and inciting the crowd to pelt stones on Raje's cavalcade.

Congress has a stronghold in Pipad and they cannot shy away from responsibility by only condemning the incident, he added. Fifteen people have been arrested in connection with the incident, Additional Superintendent of Police (Jodhpur rural), Khinv Singh said, adding, five of them were taken into custody on Monday.

The BJP leader said the people arrested would reveal their identity during police interrogation. Gehlot and state Congress chief Sachin Pilot on Sunday condemned the stone-pelting incident and said it was unfortunate that the BJP was holding their party responsible. "It is a highly condemnable act if someone has thrown stones during the visit of the Chief Minister," Gehlot had tweeted.

Parmani said the people of Rajasthan have been supporting Raje's yatra, which began from Udaipur division on 4 August. This is the second phase of the yatra. On Saturday night, a few miscreants disrupted Raje's yatra and pelted stones during a meeting. Stones were also hurled on the chief minister's rath in Pipad, police said.

Earlier that day, a few miscreants pelted stones on Health Minister Kalicharan Saraf's vehicle near Khairwara town, breaking its rear windshield. Saraf told reporters on Monday that he holds Congress and its supporters responsible for the incident.BJP and Congress are sparring over the demonstrations held against Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje's Gaurav Yatra

Jaipur: A recent incident of stone-pelting and black-flag demonstration against Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje during her ongoing Gaurav Yatra in Jodhpur has sparked a slugfest between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and opposition Congress with both blaming each other for the violence.

BJP leader and State minister Rajendra Rathore called the yatra disruption "unprecedented," saying that it was clear as to who was behind the mischief.

"Some protestors had raised slogans in favour of a former chief minister. So, we know who started it," said Rathore.

"The huge reponse to the yatra as well as the fact that the Rajput and other communities have promised us support has unnerved the Congress," Rathore added.

However, Congress leader and former chief minister Ashok Gehlot trashed the allegations. "Police are yet to confirm if there was stone-pelting. Also, I have come to know that it was BJP activists who raised slogans against the chief minister," said Gehlot.

"I strongly condemn violence. Our party president Rahul Gandhi has also told us to keep away from violence," he said.

"She was shown black flags in Jhunjhunu during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent visit also. This shows people are annoyed with her," Gehlot added.MOSS POINT, Miss. -- Moss Point police arrested a man and woman on Friday after they were accused of stealing materials from VT Halter Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, according to Chief Brandon Ashley.

Police say Mechell Duvall and Dakota Cunningham gained access to the business using a boat. Both were arrested and charged with petit larceny and felony possession for stealing copper wires and other electrical equipment.

Investigators also located five grams of methamphetamine inside Cunningham's vehicle. The narcotic investigation is being handled by the Jackson County Metro Narcotics Task Force.

Anyone with additional information about this crime is asked to contact Detective Kevin Johnson or the Moss Point Police Department at 228-474-0168.

You may also contact Crime Stoppers at 800-787-5898 or visit the Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers website at mscoastcrimestoppers.com.Taking note of Rahul's assertions in the UK and Germany, economist and columnist Rupa Subramanya took to Twitter and supported Rahul's claims and said, 'In India, problem always comes down to lack of data.We don't even have credible jobs data so no way we can test anything. But in the US there's ample evidence Trump won big in states that faced rising unemployment and stagnant wages. So Rahul Gandhi is right.'

While Congress chief Rahul Gandhi's speeches during his four-day visit to the United Kingdom and Germany have sparked a political war of words back in India, the comments of the party president regarding rising unemployment in the country and the 'divisive politics' of the Sangh and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have also stoked a debate on social media.

"It is very dangerous in the 21st Century to exclude people," Rahul said at the Bucerius Summer School in Hamburg, accusing the BJP of excluding tribals, Dalits and minorities from the development narrative. "If you don't give people a vision in the 21st century, somebody else will. And that's the real risk of excluding a large number of people from the development process." In his address in Hamburg, Rahul traced the creation of Islamic State to warn against a similar situation at home if people are excluded from the development process. Rahul was on a four-day tour of the United Kingdom and Germany as part of the Congress' NRI outreach programme.

Taking note of Rahul's assertions in the UK and Germany, economist and columnist Rupa Subramanya took to Twitter and supported Rahul's claims and said, "In India, problem always comes down to lack of data.We don't even have credible jobs data so no way we can test anything. But in the US there's ample evidence Trump won big in states that faced rising unemployment and stagnant wages. So Rahul Gandhi is right." In a series of tweets, the economist slammed the ruling party for attacking the Congress chief for his remarks on the current political dispensation in the country, the rising "right-wing politics" and said that in an anti-intellectual country like India, one can't "criticize India because "RW" illogically assumes it's indictment of current govt. Anti-intellectuals."

Leaders of the BJP slammed Rahul and demanded his apology for "maligning Indian government" on foreign soil. Questioning the need to politicise comments which are not that out of the norm, Rupa said that in an "anti-intellectual Indian discourse space", remarks about extremism and rising-unemployment-can-fuel-the-rise-of-populist-leaders, are mocked and derided.

#THREAD In any other place if a politician had said exclusion of groups can lead to rise of extremism or rising unemployment can fuel the rise of populist leaders, it would be totally uncontroversial. But in the anti-intellectual Indian discourse space, it's mocked and derided.  Rupa Subramanya (@rupasubramanya) August 27, 2018

Rahul claimed that the incidents of lynching in India were due to "anger" emanating from joblessness and "destruction" of small businesses due to demonetisation and the "poorly implemented" GST by the ruling BJP.

He also alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi "demonetised the Indian economy and destroyed the cash flow" of all small and medium businesses rendering millions jobless. "They imposed a badly conceptualised GST which complicated lives further," Rahul said. "Large numbers of people who worked in small businesses were forced back to the villages and these three things that the government has done has made India angry. "And that's what you get to read in the newspapers. When you hear about lynchings, when you hear about attacks on Dalits in India, when you hear about attacks on minorities in India, that's the reason for it," Rahul said.

Backing the Congress president's claim, Rupa gave the example of US presidential elections and said that in America, the then presidential candidate Donald Trump rode on the anger fuelled by overall economic discontentment which caused unemployment and stagnant wages. "Doesn't rule out other factors such as race, ethnicity etc but doesn't negate the importance of economics."

Adding that this is happening all over the world, the columnist gave the example of Brexit, Greece and the rise of far-right or far-left parties all over Europe. "This issue is prominent in the agenda of both radical-left and extreme-right parties. It seems that the leftright divide is being replaced by the confrontation between parochial and cosmopolitan values. At least to some extent, this has been driven by the vulnerability of the lower-middle classes to job polarisation caused by trade and technological progress, which in turn has brought up outsourcing and increased competition from low-wage countries, and automation," said a 2017 column by prominent economists.

The column used regional data for 26 European countries to explore how the impact of the Great Recession on labour markets has affected populist voting, political attitudes, and trust. The results indicate a strong link between unemployment and voting for non-mainstream (especially populist) parties.

"Struggling to find jobs...younger generations are propelling anti-establishment parties to new heights of power". This in much richer Europe with better state capacity/welfare state. Indians think factors that affect everyone else won't affect them. https://t.co/GW3fRMHhTB  Rupa Subramanya (@rupasubramanya) August 27, 2018

Rupa backed the Congress chief and said that while there should not be the need to provide evidence "for something so basic", it's a "shame" that experts in India not only remain quiet but they also are encouraging "while the uninformed and partisans degrade discourse."

Usual response from the uninformed/motivated:"you can't prove one caused the other blah blah".They don't know the first thing about social science research. You can't establish physics like certainty but doesn't mean you take a nihilistic view that we can't learn from the data.  Rupa Subramanya (@rupasubramanya) August 27, 2018

Mounting criticism on the BJP leaders for attacking Rahul for making those comments, the economist in her tweet said, "There was a time not too long ago you could have debates about inequality, north-south divide, unemployment etc without it being politicized. But we're in an age where you can't criticize India because 'RW' (right-wing) illogically assumes it's indictment of current govt. Anti-intellectuals."

Slamming the "RW" politics, Rupa said that Indian discourse is "reduced to relitigating first principles whether it's economics, sociology" or political science. Alleging that partisan loyalty wins over everything else, the tweet claimed that the "political right-wing" in India is ignoring important indicators. "The political "RW" believes basic laws of economics,demography etc do not apply to India."

We're in an age where Indian discourse reduced to relitigating first principles whether it's economics, sociology, political science etc.The political "RW" believes basic laws of economics,demography etc do not apply to India.Partisan loyalty at any cost trumps everything else.  Rupa Subramanya (@rupasubramanya) August 27, 2018The Madhya Pradesh unit of Congress Seva Dal has called upon controversy by issuing a press statement praising its rival and right-wing group, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)

The Madhya Pradesh unit of Seva Dal, which is the grassroots front organisation of the Congress, has called upon controversy by issuing a press statement praising its rival and right-wing group, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

According to CNN-News18, during a national training camp of the Seva Dal, a press statement was issued which called RSS a disciplined organisation like the military and termed its founder KB Hedgewar, a patriot. The CNN-News18 report said that the Seva Dal commented on the incident by saying that they were only "trying to tell history" through the release and that the blatant praise was just a "printing mistake".

However, Seva Dal chief Lalji Desai told CNN-News18 that the press statement is a "scam" and that nobody from their organisation has released any such statement as the group is vehemently opposed to the RSS ideology.

This incident comes days after Congress chief Rahul Gandhi compared RSS with terrorist outfit, Islamic State and linked it to the "Muslim Brotherhood", during his trip to UK and Germany.Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said the demand has been made since there are doubts on the credibility of electronic voting machines (EVMs) and asked the Election Commission to reintroduce ballot papers from the next election.

New Delhi: The Congress on Monday said that over 70 percent of political parties have put forth a demand before the Election Commission for reverting to the old voting system of ballot paper.

Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said the demand has been made since there are doubts on the credibility of electronic voting machines (EVMs) and asked the Election Commission to reintroduce ballot papers from the next election.

"Around 70 percent political parties have demanded that the Election Commission revert to the old system of ballot paper during elections. The BJP was singled out today," he told reporters in New Delhi after the Election Commission held a meeting with national and regional parties.

The Congress leader said alternatively the Opposition parties have suggested that in at least 30 percent of the polling booths there should be paper trail of EVMs to check the authenticity of votes cast.

The Congress has demanded that ceiling be imposed on the expenditure by political parties during poll campaign, Singhvi said.

Currently, there is a limit on poll expenses by a candidate in Lok Sabha and state assemblies but there is no limit on the expenses made by a political party during elections.

"Unregulated party expenditure is a dangerous proposition....There should be a ceiling on the expenditure by political parties," he said.

The Opposition party has demanded weeding out of all duplicate and false voters from the voters list to ensure a free and fair election.

The party has alleged that there are 60 lakh duplicate names in the voters list for Madhya Pradesh and another 45 lakh for Rajasthan. Both the states go to polls later in 2018.Election Commission said on Monday that it would provide 'satisfactory solution' to the concerns raised by political parties on the infallibility of electronic voting machines.

New Delhi: The Election Commission said on Monday that it would provide "satisfactory solution" to the concerns raised by political parties on the reliability of electronic voting machines (EVMs), after several of them pitched for returning to the ballot paper system at an all-party meeting.

Briefing reporters after the meeting, Chief Election Commissioner OP Rawat said, "We will definitely look into all the suggestions given by them (political parties) and there will be a satisfactory solution to them."

The Election Commission convened the meeting ahead of elections to several state Assemblies later this year and the Lok Sabha polls scheduled for early next year.

It is customary for the poll panel to listen to political parties ahead of elections.

In the meeting, several Opposition parties raised the issues of EVM tampering and technical glitches in the voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) system.

Representatives of the Congress, Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Trinamool Congress were among those who raised these issues and many of them also suggested going back to the ballot paper system, representatives of parties and EC officials present in the meeting said.

Though EVM tampering and VVPAT glitches were not on the agenda, parties raised these issues.

Some parties also suggested that the number of constituencies where results of EVM and paper audit trail device are matched be increased to enhance the confidence of voters and parties in the reliability of the voting mode.

"Nothing final has been decided yet, but one way to allay fears is to increase the number of constituencies where EVM and paper trail machine results are matched," a senior Election Commission functionary said after the meeting.

Responding to repeated questions on EVMs, Rawat said the Election Commission takes a comprehensive view.

"Some of the parties said going back to ballot is really bad as it will bring back booth capturing...we don't want (that). At the same time, some parties said there are problems with EVMs, there are issues with VVPAT slip count so why not Election Commission takes a call on this," Rawat said.

Asked about the stand of the Election Commission on EVMs and whether it remains the "same" as it was in the past, the chief election commissioner dubbed it as a "hypothetical question".

In June last year, when the Election Commission had invited parties to prove that the EVMs can be hacked, only two parties accepted the challenge but they too opted out of the event.

As many as 13 parties had last year questioned the reliability of the EVMs.

Then chief election commissioner Nasim Zaidi had maintained that the EVMs used by the Election Commission were "non-tamperable" and with 100 percent use of paper trail machines in all future elections the issue of tamperability of the machines "stands closed".

The "failure rate" of EVMs in most elections has been 0.7 percent.

EVMs were first used in election in India in May, 1982 in a Kerala byoll.

But since there was no law prescribing its use, the Supreme Court struck down the election.

The Representation of the People Act was amended in 1989 to allow use of EVMs. But a general consensus on its use was evolved only in 1998.

Over 11 percent of the 10,300 VVPAT machines across 10 states had developed faults and had to be replaced during the bypolls on 28 May this year.

This prompted the EC to make ingenious changes to ensure that the failure rate goes down.

Voter-verifiable paper audit trail machines dispense a slip with the symbol of the party for which a person has voted for. The slip appears on a small window for seven seconds and then drops in a box. But the voter cannot take it home.

VVPATs are used in all polling stations. But as of now, results of EVMs and VVPATs are matched in one polling station per constituency.DMK president-in-waiting MK Stalin should be wary of what his brother Alagiri could do if he joins hands with former AIADMK leader TTV Dinakaran.

When expelled Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) leader MK Alagiri announced at M Karunanidhi's final resting place at the Marina Beach in Chennai that he has the support of his father's "true and loyal followers", most likened him to Tamil Nadu deputy chief minister O Panneerselvam. After all, OPS  as he is also known  had also chosen late chief minister J Jayalalithaa's samadhi at the Marina Beach to announce his rebel status on that dramatic evening in February 2017.

That the GPS had led both Alagiri and OPS to the same location was not the only common factor. Both politicians had decided to revolt against the well-entrenched party hierarchy. In Panneerselvam's case, it was against Jayalalithaa's close aide VK Sasikala, and Alagiri's banner of revolt is against his younger brother, DMK working president MK Stalin. While OPS had revolted within a day of being unseated as the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Alagiri went public with his battle against Stalin less than a week after Karunanidhi's death.

Those who draw the OPS-Alagiri comparison do so on the basis of the two having been in positions of political importance when Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi were around. Jayalalithaa had twice chosen OPS to act as the chief minister when she had to step aside from the post. He held the office for the third time after her demise in December 2016. Similarly, Alagiri was drafted into the Cabinet of the United Progressive Alliance as the chemicals and fertilisers minister and had presided over the fortunes of the DMK in southern Tamil Nadu.

But these facile comparisons apart, calling Alagiri the OPS of the DMK, would be wrong. In the context of the present-day politics of Tamil Nadu, Alagiri is more a TTV Dinakaran than an OPS. In fact, given the manner in which their political careers have played out, it is surprising to see how the DMK and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) are mirror images of each other.

Both Dinakaran and Alagiri have had a tumultuous relationship with their party leadership. Dinakaran was shown the door by Jayalalithaa in 2011 and till her death, he was not reinstated into the AIADMK. Alagiri shared the same fate  he was expelled by Karunanidhi in 2014, and despite his attempts to broker peace using family members, the Madurai strongman was unsuccessful in making a comeback. In this sense, both are outsiders trying to take control of the party, despite the ignominy of having been discarded by the larger-than-life regional chieftains.

Just like Dinakaran tried to convey that incumbent Chief Minister Edappadi Palaniswami and OPS had usurped the mandate given to Jayalalithaa, Alagiri's attempt is to make it seem like Stalin is not fit enough to step into Karunanidhi's shoes. On Monday morning, a Twitter handle that claims to be that of Alagiri put out a tweet with Karunanidhi's photograph, calling him "our permanent thalaivar (leader)".

During their heyday, Dinakaran and Alagiri operated in areas that were in close proximity to each other. Madurai is just 80 kilometres away from Periyakulam, the Lok Sabha constituency Dinakaran represented in 1999. Although Alagiri's clout is much diminished now, theoretically speaking, if the two have a tacit understanding, they could play spoiler in at least 25-odd Assembly constituencies in the politically important southern parts of Tamil Nadu.

Stalin knows what the duo is capable of. The by-election to the Thirumangalam constituency in 2009, when the DMK was in power, was Alagiri's tryst with notoriety. The DMK, under Alagiri's stewardship, had reportedly paid Rs 5,000 per vote to ensure the party's victory. Although Tamil Nadu had a history of cash-for-votes before Thirumangalam, this bypoll raised the cash component in elections significantly. It figured in a WikiLeaks document released in 2011, as well. "From paying to dig a community well to slipping cash into an envelope inside the morning newspaper, politicians and their operatives admitted to violating election rules to influence voters," the document read. The episode became infamous as the "Thirumangalam formula".

The RK Nagar Assembly bypoll last December, where Dinakaran triumphed, defeating both the AIADMK and DMK, saw a repeat of the Thirumangalam formula. Several households were given Rs 20 notes, with a promise that they will be exchanged for up to Rs 8,000 after the polls end.

Most Tamil Nadu observers reckon that Alagiri comes with the reputation of a politician given to using muscle power. The most infamous incident in which his supporters were allegedly involved was the firebomb attack at the office of Tamil newspaper Dinakaran in 2007, which killed three people. His supporters were enraged that a survey on who the political heir to Karunanidhi was showed 70 percent support for Stalin and just 2 percent for Alagiri. In 2011, Jayalalithaa had interpreted the DMK rout in southern Tamil Nadu as "people's anger" against the "rowdy raj" of Alagiri and his men.

In contrast, Dinakaran is a more suave political operator, but he, too, has a case under the Foreign Exchange Management Act against him, apart from being accused of trying to bribe the Election Commission to get the AIADMK's two leaves party symbol.

With Alagiri's chances of returning to the DMK next to nil, he could float the Kalaignar DMK to keep himself politically alive. Just like Dinakaran used the "Amma" moniker to position himself as the true inheritor of Jayalalithaa's legacy, Alagiri could use the "Kalaignar" title to appropriate Karunanidhi's legacy.

At the end of the day, however, both Dinakaran and Alagiri are up against formidable party units. Although Alagiri would want to ensure that the DMK under Stalin comes a cropper, it is also quite likely that he will end up like Jayalalithaa's niece J Deepa, who had also tried to grab a slice of the former chief minister's political legacy.The election of Stalin as the DMK president is likely to be a smooth affair as all the 65 district secretaries of the party have proposed his name for the top post and his is the only nomination.

Chennai: MK Stalin, virtually anointed as his political heir by the late leader M Karunanidhi, is all set to be elected the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) president on Tuesday.

His final "coronation" is expected to be announced formally on Tuesday at the party headquarters when the DMK's general council is set to meet.

The election of Stalin as the DMK president is likely to be a smooth affair as all the 65 district secretaries of the party have proposed his name for the top post and his is the only nomination.

He will be the second president of the party, a post which was held by his father Karunanidhi for 49 long years.

Stalin was given the role of working president in January 2017 after his late father and former chief minister Karunanidhi was largely confined to his home due to age-related ailments.

The elevation of Stalin as the party president became a necessity after Karunanidhi passed away early in August.

The 65-year-old son of Karunanidhi will relinquish the post of treasurer and senior leader Duraimurugan is set to be elected unopposed to that post as no other nomination has been filed for that post.

The path to the ascension of throne by Stalin was paved at the party's executive committee meeting held on 14 August where senior leaders one after another urged the 'waiting prince' to lead them by taking over the party's mantle.

But whether the tenure is going to be smooth for Stalin has to be seen as he has to face the challenge of leading the party to victory in the ensuing by-elections in two Assembly constituencies: Tiruvarur (which fell vacant after Karunanidhi's death) and Tiruparankundran (vacant after the death of AIADMK lawmaker AK Bose).

DMK's candidate in the RK Nagar by-election in Chennai lost his deposit and came a poor third after independent candidate TTV Dinakaran and AIADMK leader E Madhusudhanan.

There is also a complaint that Stalin as the working president was not able to lure some of the disgruntled AIADMK legislators and come to power.

Stalin's elder brother MK Alagiri, who opposed his leadership and was later dismissed from the party by Karunanidhi for anti-party activities, may work against the DMK party in the by-elections.

Alagiri has announced his plans to hold a rally in Chennai early in September to show his strength. On Monday, he warned that if he was not taken back into the party, then DMK would have to face "consequences".

The Alagiri-Stalin rivalry has plagued the DMK for a long time but Karunanidhi kept a fragile peace.

"I feel Alagiri himself may contest in Tiruvarur. He may like to ride on the wave of being Karunanidhi's own son. It is immaterial if he loses provided DMK also loses," political analyst Raveendharan Dhuraiswamy told IANS.

He said Alagiri may not be a challenge for Stalin within the party but may pose a hurdle from outside.

According to Dhuraiswamy, the poll scene in Tamil Nadu has changed to a three-corner contest between the AIADMK, DMK and AMMK led by Dhinakaran.

Stalin will also be under intense scrutiny and would be compared with Karunanidhi for a long time time. It may take some time and some election victories for Stalin to come out of his father's shadows.Out of the total 58 recognised national and state political parties, 41 attended the all-party meet convened by the Election Commission.

New Delhi: Some political parties, including the ruling BJP, urged the Election Commission on Monday to link Aadhaar number of voters with electoral rolls to weed out duplicate names, the poll panel said.

"Political parties urged the commission to link Aadhaar numbers with electors' detail for better electoral roll management," an Election Commission statement said after an all-party meet convened by it ahead of the Assembly polls in four states later in 2018 and the Lok Sabha polls due in 2019.

Seven recognised national parties and 51 recognised state political parties were invited for the meeting. Out of the total 58 parties, 41 attended the meeting.

At least two Election Commission functionaries, who attended the meet, said, "25 percent" (nearly 10 parties) of the 41 parties, which attended the meeting, made this demand.

In a statement, the BJP said that it told the poll panel that immediate steps are required for maintaining voter list in alphabetical order, so that duplicate names can be deleted.

"Initiative could be taken for making a pan-India initiative. This could be successfully implemented if the voter registration is linked to Aadhaar," the BJP said.

In August, 2015, a Supreme Court order on Aadhaar card had put brakes on the Election Commission's project to link the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) (Aadhaar) number with voters' electoral data to check multiple entries in electoral rolls.

The commission had then asked its chief electoral officers in all states and Union Territories to "suspend with immediate effect till further orders" all activities to collect and feed Aadhaar numbers of voters as part of its National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP).

In its August, 2015 judgement, an apex court bench has made it clear that Aadhaar card will be optional for availing various welfare schemes of the government and no personal information of the holders of such cards shall be shared by any authority.

"The UIDAI/Aadhaar will not be used for any other purposes except PDS, kerosene and LPG distribution system," it said.

Political parties also expressed concern over paid news and suggested to make it an electoral offence to curb this menace, the statement said.

Seeking to provide a level-playing field for parties in elections, the Election Commission had proposed making paid news an electoral offence to provide a strong deterrent in a bid to stamp out the menace. But its proposal is pending with the law ministry since 2012.

Political parties also asked the commission that on the lines of Doordarshan and All India Radio (AIR), free airtime to political parties should be provided on private media for electoral campaigns.While the Congress president is under fire for his scathing attack on BJP and RSS on foreign soil, his speeches on divisive politics, saying that his thoughts are inspired by Guru Nanak, his remarks attacking the poor employment situation in India and bringing up the 1984 riot have started a vicious war of words.

Rahul Gandhi's visit to United Kingdom has garnered a lot of attention, and created a lot of noise back here in India.

While the Congress president is under fire for his scathing attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on foreign soil (London, Hamburg, Berlin), his speeches on divisive politics, saying that his thoughts are inspired by Guru Nanak, his remarks attacking the poor employment situation in India and bringing up the 1984 riot have started a vicious war of words.

While spokersperson for the BJP Sambit Patra criticised the Congress president's remarks and said that Rahul should apologise for "maligning Indian government", Congress came to the rescue of its chief senior Congress leader P Chidambaram pointed that Rahul, at the time of the riots, was a teenager and thus can't be held accountable. "You can't hold Rahul Gandhi responsible for that, he was 13 or 14. He hasn't absolved anyone," he said.

Chidambaram, who served as a finance minister in the UPA government, added that former prime minister Manmohan Singh had already apologised on behalf of the Congress. "Congress was in office in 1984. A very terrible thing happened in 1984 for which Dr Manmohan Singh apologised in Parliament," Chidambaram said.

However, Patra took strong objection to the Congress president's statement and slammed Rahul for undoing the Congress party's apology made in 2013.

"Rahul Gandhi has undone everything, any leadership qualities that he had... I remember that in 2013 then prime minister Manmohan Singh had apologised for the 1984 riots. And here is a leader who undoes all of that to begin the vicious cycle once again," Patra told CNN-News18 on Saturday.

Calling Rahul an "incorrigible liar", the BJP posted a video on Twitter on Monday, where Rahul reportedly "admitted" to the role of some Congressmen in the 1984 riots in an interview with Arnab Goswami in 2014.

Now Rahul Gandhi wants us to believe that No One Killed the Sikhs! #RahulLiesOn1984 pic.twitter.com/wQ4OSXmnnU  BJP Delhi (@BJP4Delhi) August 27, 2018

In fact, the party was in a fire-fighting mode all of Sunday after Rahul's 1984-riots remark in London where he claimed that the Congress party had no role to play in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots that claimed over 3,000 Sikh lives.

Responding to a question on the Sikh riots at the UK Parliament meeting, Rahul had said, "I have no confusion in my mind about that. It was a tragedy, it was a painful experience. You say that the Congress party was involved in that, I don't agree. Certainly, there was violence, there was a tragedy."

As the BJP and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) scaled their attack on Rahul over the remarks, Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh asserted that the party was not involved in the 1984 massacre. He also said that 'whosoever was involved' in the senseless killings in 1984 should be "hanged".

Singh's remarks came after the SAD on Saturday hit out at Rahul over his comments and said that by disagreeing with the view that his party was involved in the "genocide", he had "rubbed salt into the wounds" of the Sikh community.

Akali Dal leader Bikram Singh Majithia also condemned the statement and demanded an apology from Rahul over his remark. "When asked about the riots, Rajiv Gandhi had then said, 'When a big tree falls, the earth shakes'. Jagdish Tytler went on record to say that Rajiv Gandhi accompanied him to recce different parts of Delhi to see how successful the massacre was.... He should apologise for this blatant lie," Majithia was quoted as saying by News18.

Castigating SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal, Singh said the Congress chief was in school when Operation Bluestar and the subsequent riots took place. "To blame him (Rahul) for 'anything' was totally absurd. To hold Rahul Gandhi responsible for an act, of which he was not even aware when it happened, was completely ridiculou ," said Singh, in a hard-hitting statement issued in Chandigarh.

Rahul Gandhi likens RSS to Muslim Brotherhood

Comparing the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world, Rahul on Friday unleashed a no-holds-barred attack on the Narendra Modi-government and the ideological parent of the BJP while addressing students in the Strategic Studies Institute in London.

"RSS is trying to change the nature of India. Other parties haven't tried to capture India's institutions. RSS's idea is similar to the idea of Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world," Rahul had said.

His words invited the ire of BJP spokesperson Patra, who asked Rahul if he had taken supari to attack Indian culture and said that he should apologise for his comments.

Rahul, in his address, while referring to the dearth of jobs for minorities, had also cited the example of Islamic State, and argued that the exclusion of a large number of people from the development process could lead to the creation of insurgent groups anywhere in the world.

Responding to this, Patra had said, "What you (Rahul) have said is unforgivable...The headlines of newspapers in Pakistan tomorrow will say that India is ruled by a government which is akin to the Muslim Brotherhood."

He further said, "Is a terrorist organisation ruling in India at present? Have the people of India voted for a terrorist organisation?...Jawaharlal Nehru had invited the RSS at a Republic Day event when he was the prime minister. Was it a terror organisation then?"

In a press conference in Delhi, BJP spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi questioned Rahul's justification of the terrorist outfit and said that he is incapable of being a good Opposition leader.

Specifically responding to his comments about the Islamic State, Trivedi asked how Rahul could so easily equate terrorism with unemployment. "Was the world's biggest terrorist, Osama bin Laden, merely a helpless youth? No, he was a billionaire! And those responsible for 9/11; were they also just lost youths? No, they were fully equipped and capable to have a good life in the US," he said.

He also said that if Rahul plans to lead a party which was formerly led by people such as Mahatma Gandhi, Lokmanya Tilak, Sardar Patel, Sri Ram Gopal Achari, and Babu Rajan Prasad, then he will likely not be able to fill in those shoes. He concluded his statement by saying "I would urge Rahul Gandhi to stay in India and study the current scenario before insulting India on foreign land. Perhaps his eyes of wisdom would be more open, and he would be able to understand Indian culture, economy, and politics."

Defending Rahul's comments, Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said what the party chief had said is true about jobs, but his remarks on Islamic State have been "distorted".

"Rahul Gandhi was talking about extreme views and vision, in which he cited many examples including that of exclusion of women. I do not feel anything wrong in this statement, as it cites one of the extreme views of the RSS like many organisations of other religions have.

"If you take one sentence out of context and distort it, then definitely it will be distorted," he told reporters.

BJP hits back over Rahul's unemployment, women safety jibes

BJP leader Patra also spoke about Rahul's comment on women's safety in India on Thursday. The Congress president in his speech in Hamburg had stated that Indian men do not view the women in the country as equal and they should change their outlook towards women.

"I think it is a cultural issue, it is an issue of how Indian men view Indian women and I think it requires a huge amount of work to fix that problem," he had said. Patra attacked Rahul for insulting India's culture.

Patra said, How can Rahul point fingers at the great Indian culture when his mother, Sonia Gandhi, is at top of Indian politics because of the great Indian culture?

Patra said that in Rahul's speech he could only hear the word, China. Outlining his idea of India's foreign policy, Rahul had said there are different visions in the world, including that of the US, China and India. He said India's role should be to balance the US and China  much like Europe's role. Patra asked Gandhi if this is all he thinks of India. "You have a false estimate of India and India's potential," said the BJP spokesperson.

The Congress president in his speech had also claimed that the Modi government had struck down a law protecting the Dalit minority. Patra aggressively defended the government stating that in the Monsoon Session of the Parliament, where Rahul was present, a more stringent law was passed. He asked Rahul to do his homework.

"You might not do your homework, but at least tell your team to," said Patra, while also questioning Rahul's facts regarding the numbers he has about China giving 50,000 jobs in 24 hours, and India giving 450.

"Where did you get this data from? Did you make them up in your house?" asked Patra.

"You also lied that money for the poor is being diverted to corporates, but remember what your father said about only a small amount reaching to the poor due to pilferage. Today, the entire amount is being directed to accounts," Patra said.

With inputs from agenciesThere is nothing to suggest that Rahul Gandhi consults his peers in the Opposition before his frequent overseas forays.

Rahul Gandhi is on a roll. He has learnt that in a world of post-truths, facts need not come in the way of politics. Travelling through Germany and the United Kingdom, on a mission to launch himself as a rising star on the world geo-political stage, he fired on multiple cylinders across a wide spectrum of topics, ranging from Islamic State to RSS, Doka La to demonetisation, lynching to womens rights and farms to factories.

Rahuls critics will say he was short on both substance and specifics. A few bloopers along the way are par for the course, and Rahuls image managers would have factored them in. So, he did not balk at denying the role of Congressmen in the 1984 Sikh genocides or comparing the RSS to the Muslim Brotherhood. However, who cares as long as an alternate narrative is being set? So, his fans rejoiced at the media traction it generated.

Rahuls messages were directed as much at the cherry-picked foreign audience as they were for the commentariat at home, who lapped up everything he did or said, including some very odd photographs that the Congress social media cell posted on Twitter. However, undeniably, he made them feel much more reassured about his capacity to take on Narendra Modi in 2019.

It is not just Rahuls opponents and detractors who would have been following his discourse on foreign shores, his potential allies too would have been listening with equal interest. In all his public interactions, Rahul carefully underplays his prime ministerial ambitions and acknowledges that the Congress by itself will not have the majority numbers to form the government. However, while admitting the inevitability of a coalition, Rahul Gandhi seems to be taking the mantle of "thought-leadership upon himself. It is not clear, however, if his allies would be entirely comfortable with Rahul being the intellectual face of the Opposition.

There is nothing to suggest that Rahul Gandhi consults his peers in the Opposition before his frequent overseas forays. It is not known if all parties feel the need to mobilise support among the Indian diaspora and foreign powers for throwing out Modi in what is purely a domestic battle.

It is also doubtful if leaders of other parties have any prior inkling about his likely line of attack on the trips abroad. Rahul Gandhi appears to be going about on the assumption that it is his and the Congress prerogative to set the agenda while other parties will supply the numbers to defeat the BJP.

It could have been smart strategy if there was there was a shared understanding that Rahul would provide aerial cover for the other partners to do the laborious groundwork in their respective strongholds. Otherwise, carpet bombing could lead to unintended consequences. That is exactly what happened with the denial of Congress role in the 1984 Sikh pogrom or by comparing the RSS with the Muslim Brotherhood.

But, at the moment, all efforts of the Congress are going into building an international profile for Rahul Gandhi to compensate for his image deficit at home. The attempt seems to be to project Rahul Gandhi as a nice guy with a progressive liberal outlook abroad, someone who could be trusted by the global community as one of their own. The bogey of democracy is in danger and trumped-up (pun intended) scare of the rising right-wing (the new political equivalent of WMDs) is expected to enhance his appeal to westerners.

Back in India, he is being painted in the image of a firebrand rebel for all causes and every season, the new messiah of the poor, downtrodden and minorities. Both are pretty old formulae, coming from a position of privilege and entitlement. This is in sharp contrast to most of the other leaders in the fray, including Narendra Modi, who claim to have themselves come up from the subaltern classes. This contradiction (that Modi pithily captured as naamdar vs kaamdar) is bound to haunt any pre-poll Opposition alliance.

Secularism is ostensibly the common plank on which the Opposition parties are coming on board, though the unstated objective is to unseat Narendra Modi at any cost for their own long-term political survival. Rahul, therefore, may be right in predicting a simple binary construct of a straightforward contest between all Opposition parties on one side and the BJP alone at the other.

However, Rahul is not stopping at that. He has gone a step further by directly attacking the RSS. He is positioning himself as the knight in shining armour leading the ideological charge against the RSS, which he portrays as a fascist organisation on a mission to change the idea of India by capturing every democratic institution.

Rahul is trying to give an ethical dimension to the fight. He is billing the elections as a classic clash between good and evil, a 2019 edition of the battle of Kurukshetra, the favourite war analogy of every Indian, as it were. He fancies himself in the role of a divine charioteer who is destined to rescue the country from the stranglehold of a dictatorial Modi.

Such an extreme position may not suit all his potential allies. They would be wary of greater polarisation which would be hard to contain. Besides, many of them would not like to permanently burn their bridges with the BJP and RSS, which are here to stay. In any case, many leaders such as Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee would not allow Rahul Gandhi to become the prima donna of the Opposition by default. All this might change the contours of the proposed mahagathbandhan.

Meanwhile, the BJP juggernaut seems to be floundering a little. The party and government PR machinery have been bombarding the public with statistics. However, data is not as sexy as drama. So, no one seems to be listening. Even the prime ministers Independence Day address presenting a report card of sorts failed to make a strong enough impact to turn the narrative. After four years, the monthly Mann Ki Baat addresses are beginning to sound tired and strained. It is difficult to gauge the efficacy of Narendra Modis other digital outreach programmes such as the NaMo App.

In such a situation, Rahul has done a great favour to Narendra Modi. By his intemperate and ill-advised comments, he has managed to fire up the RSS cadres who would now go all out to ensure Modis victory.

He deserves an advance thank you note from Narendra Modi.The RSS is reportedly set to invite politicians, including Rahul Gandhi, to a three-day lecture series titled 'Future of Bharat, an RSS Perspective'.

The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) is likely to invite Congress president Rahul Gandhi to a three-day lecture series it has scheduled for 17 to 19 September, according to reports. At the conclave, titled "Future of Bharat: An RSS Perspective", RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat will interact with a "select audience comprising prominent citizens".

Besides Rahul, the RSS is likely to invite several other Opposition leaders to the event at New Delhi's Vigyan Bhavan, CNN News 18 reported. This list could include Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury.

As per the report, RSS spokesperson Arun Kumar said the guest list will be decided by members of the Sangh, and that leaders across the Indian political spectrum will be invited. Kumar also said that the RSS plans to reach out to all strata of society at the conclave.

India Today quoted sources as saying that the Congress will issue a statement only after it receives a formal invitation from the RSS. The Congress also wants to look at the language used in the invitation before making any public acknowledgements, the report added.

The news of the Hindutva group's supposed invitation to Rahul comes days after the Congress leader made multiple statements against it during his tour in Europe. While addressing students at the Strategic Studies Institute in London, Rahul said: "We are fighting an organisation called the RSS, which is trying to change the nature of India. There is no other organisation in India that wants to capture India's institutions. RSS' idea is similar to the idea of Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world."

Elaborating on the comparison with the Muslim Brotherhood, he said: "Both organisations were founded in the 1920s. Both organisations believe in institutional capture. Both organisations view the electoral process as a means of capturing institutions, and their idea is that an ideology should run through every institution; one idea should crush all other ideas."

In his address in Hamburg, Rahul traced the creation of the Islamic State group to warn against a similar situation in India if people are excluded from the development process. "In the 21st Century, it is very dangerous to exclude people. If you don't give people a vision in the 21st Century, somebody else will give them one," he said.

The Congress president's statements elicited sharp criticism from the Bharatiya Janata Party. BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said: "What you (Rahul) have said is unforgivable... The headlines of newspapers in Pakistan tomorrow will say that India is ruled by a government that is akin to the Muslim Brotherhood."

Another party spokesperson, Sudhanshu Trivedi, said that the BJP strongly condemned Rahul's statements that have "belittled" Indian politics in the eyes of the world. He went on to cite several examples to refute Rahul's claims about the BJP's "divisive politics" in his speech in Hamburg on Saturday.

The Congress on Friday defended its chief's remarks, saying Rahul's comments had been distorted and should not be viewed in isolation.tech2 News Staff

Nokias very own PureView trademark has returned to the Finnish company from Microsoft. HMD Global, who owns the Nokia brand, has acquired the trademark.

Technology website NokiaMob.net first spotted the transfer on HMD Globals European Union Intellectual Property Office page. The trademark has been bought by the Finnish manufacturer.

To give a background about the PureView, it was considered as a monster smartphone camera in earlier times and in all honesty, it could still be.

In the pre-notch or pre-dual camera lens age, when demands from life were simple but innovation was skyrocketing, Nokia came with a mammoth of a Carl Zeiss smartphone camera lens of 41 MP. The Nokia PureView was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress 2012 and had the biggest image sensor at that time. Following this, Nokia Lumia 920, 1020, 1520, Lumia 950 also followed suit.

An earlier report from 2012 when Tech2 had a hands-on experience with the Nokia 8 PureView, this is what was said about the camera, The camera and the optics on the PureView are nothing that you will find on your existing smartphone. In a time gap of 0.09 seconds between two snaps, the dedicated GPU was working like a charm behind the scenes.

While one can go on and on about the nostalgic times, recently, HMD Global also bought the Asha trademark from Microsoft.

Since Nokia has been working on bringing the nostalgia factor which included devices like the Nokia Sirocco, 3310, and the Nokia 8110 4G which goes by the moniker banana phone, probably we can also see a PureView smartphone.tech2 News Staff

The Motorola P30 was announced very recently in China and it is being reported that the Moto P30 Note and P30 Play are soon going to be added to the P30 lineup. Now another report has claimed that the P30 Note will, in fact, come out as the Motorola One Power outside of China.

As per the report by 91Mobiles, if the P30 Note will be called as Motorola One Power, then the Motorola P30 will most likely be called the Motorola One. Chances are that the either or both the device will be revealed for the global audiences at IFA 2018.

The report states that Motorola One Power will be arriving with a unibody design of either polycarbonate or metal. On the front, there will be a 6.1-inch FHD+ IPS LCD screen and huge display notch on the top which makes the front of the phone quite reminiscent of the iPhone X.

Inside the phone is powered by a Snapdragon 636 chipset that includes 1.8 GHz octa-core processor along with 32 GB storage and 3 GB of RAM. There are other storage options as well alongside the option to expand your storage using a micro-SD card. The software hasn't been revealed in the report, but going by all other Moto devices, we can expect the Motorola One Power to

As far as optics are concerned, the phone has a dual-camera setup at the back with a 16 MP primary sensor and 5 MP secondary sensor. On the front, we see that the phone has a 12 MP front-facing camera. Powering the device is a gigantic 5,000mAh battery which supports 15W fast charging through USB-C.

Will we see the Moto One Power at IFA 2018? Only time will tell. Tech2 will be present at Berlin for IFA so be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook as we provide live coverage of the event from the venue.tech2 News Staff

Realme 2 is soon going to hit the Indian market as the launch of the phone gets closer by the minute. The launch event for the phone is being held tomorrow i.e 28 August, 12.30 pm in New Delhi.

Realme which recently broke up with its parent company, Oppo, and now is being headed by Sky Li, seems to be ready to hit the ground.

It would seem that Realme will be boarding the notch-express with the Realme 2. The company has been stressing on the phone's notch and also boasting the phone by punning on the word notch by saying, "#ANotchAbove". So what all there is to know about the phone so far?

The company has confirmed the battery capacity, screen size and the camera setup through its Twitter handle. It shows the phone to be equipped with 4,230 mAh battery, a 6.2-inch display which is said to give 88.8% screen-to-body ratio.

Also, it seems to have a horizontally aligned dual-camera setup for the rear. If the camera configuration stands to be true like the battery capacity then the phone will sport a combination of 13 MP primary camera and a 2 MP secondary sensor on the back along with an LED flash.

We can expect a Snapdragon chipset to power the phone, as a tweet by the company also showed it to have partnered with Qualcomm.

#Realme2 with @qualcomm_in Snapdragon processor is designed to provide you #ANotchAbove experience with spectacular performance, ultrafast speed, astonishing graphics, and a long lasting battery.

Like if youre as excited for the launch as we are. pic.twitter.com/33a6LrOv52  Realme (@realmemobiles) August 23, 2018

The device was leaked by mistake by the company's official website which gave a glimpse of fingerprint scanner at the back.

The image renders that were leaked before showed the phone to be similar to premium notch-bearing Oppo devices like Oppo F7.

The device is expected to be priced under the Rs 10,000 to Rs 20,000 category which is filled with the likes Honor 9N, Redmi Note 5 Pro, Asus ZenFone Max Pro M1, Moto G6, Mi A2 and also the Huawei P20 Lite

The phone has become a part of Flipkart's 'Notify Me' page and has added all the available details of the phone.tech2 News Staff

In what comes across as a shocking revelation, WhatsApp has notified its users that its end-to-end encryption feature that it safeguards every user's chats with, does not remain encrypted once backed up on Google's servers.

In an update on its FAQ section, WhatsApp added a note labelled as 'Important' which read, "Media and messages you back up aren't protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive."

The update from WhatsApp comes just days the Facebook-owned app informed users that it had struck a deal with Google which ensures that chat backups will no longer be eating into their Google cloud storage space, beginning 12 November.

As noted by the Economic Times in a report, WhatsApp had clarified back in 2017 that data backed up and stored on Google Drive is not encrypted. But it was assumed that WhatsApp had reached a consensus with Google to leave user data encrypted while it is backed up on Google Drive.

This would raise further eyebrows on WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption feature which has fallen under the government's scanner lately. The Centre has called on the messaging platform to offer traceability of messages sent on the app to which WhatsApp responded saying that the company cannot access user messages because of end-to-end encryption.

Experts, however, argue that it is a feature offered by WhatsApp to ensure users don't lose their chats while switching devices. Krishna Kothapalli, an independent security researcher speaking to Economic Times mentions, "As a WhatsApp user you have the choice to not backup your data to Google Drive. They (WhatsApp) are not forcing you to back up. It is a feature. So, if you trust Google, you can enable it."

Looking at it from a privacy point of view though, you can sit back and not be too bothered because Google at their end already does encrypt files on their servers. But unlike WhatsApp, Google also ultimately controls the keys for encryption which they may let out to law enforcement authorities on the basis of a warrant.tech2 News Staff

Remember the movie Hidden Figures that released in 2016 about black female mathematicians who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the Space Race? Remember Katherine Johnson played by the Taraji P Henson? The human-computer?

Well, on the 26 August NASA joined Katherine Johnson on her 100th birthday. Johnson overcame racial and gender discrimination and went on to become a crucial part of the USs space programme. Her calculations of orbital mechanics were critical to the success of the first and subsequent manned space flights in the US. Along with two of her colleagues, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan, she worked at NASAs Langley Research Centre located in Hampton, Virginia.

Jackson and Vaughan were also in the movie played by actresses Janelle Monae and Octavia Spencer respectively.

You are as good as anyone in this town, but you are no better than any of them, NASA quoted Johnson in a tweet wishing her a Happy Birthday. Wishing a #happybirthday to Katherine G Johnson on her 100th birthday today. She worked at @NASA_Langley as a human-computer starting in 1953. Her calculations were critical to our early human spaceflight programme (you've probably seen that in the movies), NASA history office tweeted.

You are as good as anyone in this town, but you are no better than any of them, says retired @NASA_Langley mathematician Katherine Johnson, who celebrates her 100th birthday today. Discover other life lessons from this trailblazer: https://t.co/FliCMfFYDt #Happy100Katherine pic.twitter.com/s0KIhj704W  NASA (@NASA) August 26, 2018

Today the University community gathered to dedicate a statue and scholarship in honor of our amazing alum Katherine Johnson. The statue will serve as a source of inspiration to current and future students of all that is possible through dedication, hard work and perseverance. pic.twitter.com/iFOqxnr1eH  WV State University (@WVStateU) August 25, 2018

West Virginia State University gathered to dedicate a statue and scholarship in honour of our amazing alum Katherine Johnson, who studied maths and science there, after graduating from high school at the age of 14. After graduating, with degrees in both Maths and French, she joined NASA where she worked to help calculate trajectories and launch windows on a series programmes. One of them was the one when Alan Shepard before the first American in space in 1961.

As she's completed a century, we at Tech2 are also sending her good wishes for a healthy life, as she continues to be an inspiration for young women.Agence France-Presse

All mines need regular reinforcement against collapse, and Hallstatt, the world's oldest salt mine perched in the Austrian Alps, is no exception.

But Hallstatt isn't like other mines.

Exploited for 7,000 years, the mine has yielded not only a steady supply of salt but also archaeological discoveries attesting to the existence of a rich civilisation dating back to the early part of the first millennium BC.

So far less than two percent of the prehistoric tunnel network is thought to have been explored, with the new round of reinforcement work, which began this month, protecting the dig's achievements, according to chief archaeologist Hans Reschreiter.

"Like in all the mines, the mountain puts pressure on the tunnels and they could cave in if nothing is done," Reschreiter told AFP.

Hallstatt was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1997 and the work aims to protect it for "future generations", said Thomas Stelzer, governor of Upper Austria state where the mine is located.

Towering over a natural lake  today frequented by masses of tourists, particularly from Asia, who come to admire the picture-perfect Alpine scenery  the Hallstatt mine lies more than 800 metres (2,600 feet) above sea level.

The vast deposit of sea salt inside was left by the ocean that covered the region some 250 million years ago.

3,000-year-old stairs

Among the most striking archaeological discoveries was that of an eight-metre-long wooden staircase dating back to 1100 BC, the oldest such staircase found in Europe.

"It was so well preserved that we could take it apart and reassemble it," Reschreiter said.

Other items date back much further. Excavated in 1838, an axe made from staghorn dating from 5,000 BC showed that as early as then, miners "tried hard to extract salt from here," Reschreiter said.

In the mid-19th century, excavations revealed a necropolis that showed the site's prominence during the early Iron Age.

The civilisation became known as "Hallstatt culture", ensuring the site's fame.

"Thousands of bodies have been excavated, almost all flaunting rich bronze ornaments, typically worn by only the wealthiest," Reschreiter said. "The remains bore the marks of hard physical labour from childhood, while also showing signs of unequalled prosperity."

Priceless 'white gold'

Salt  long known as "white gold"  was priceless at the time. And Hallstatt produced up to a tonne every day, supplying "half of Europe", he said, adding that the difficult-to-access location "became the continent's richest, and a major platform for trading in 800 BC".

Testifying to this are sword handles made of African ivory and Mediterranean wine bowls found at the site.

A second series of excavations  started by Vienna's Museum of Natural History some 60 years ago  produced more surprises.

In tunnels more than 100 metres below the surface, archaeologists discovered "unique evidence" of mining activity at an "industrial" scale during the Bronze Age, Reschreiter said.

As well as revealing wooden retaining structures more than 3,000 years old which were perfectly preserved by the salt, the excavation unearthed numerous tools, leather gloves and a rope  thick as a fist  as well as the remains of millions of wooden torches.

Continuously active

Also used by Celts and during the Roman era when salt was used to pay legions stationed along the Danube River  it is the origin of the word "salary"  the mine has never stopped working since prehistoric times.

Today, about 40 people still work there, using high-pressure water to extract the equivalent of 250,000 tonnes of salt per year.

"Salt doesn't have the same value as in antiquity anymore. But some of its new uses, such as in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, are still highly profitable," said Kurt Thomanek, technical director of salt supplier Salinen Austria.

Tourism linked to the archaeological discoveries is also "a pillar of our activities", Thomanek added.

Last year, some 200,000 people visited the Hallstatt mine.Agence France-Presse

The yellow fever virus lurked deep in the Amazon jungle until around July 2016 when it leapt toward the highly populated south of Brazil, carried by monkeys and the mosquitoes that liked to bite them.

At a speed of about two miles (3.3 kilometers) per day, the virus made its way to the outskirts of the big cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, places it had not circulated in decades, and where more than 35 million people were not vaccinated against the illness.

Two years later, 676 people were dead in the worst epidemic of yellow fever in Brazil in a century.

Yellow fever can kill a person in less than 10 days, wreaking havoc on the body with symptoms like jaundice, abdominal pain, vomiting, and bleeding from the mouth, nose, eyes and stomach.

Now, for the first time, the virus's path has been retraced in detail by an international team of scientists, and experts say this new genetic and geographic mapping could help fight future outbreaks of the disease.

"This is the first time that we are able to estimate how rapidly the virus is moving in space and time," said Nuno Faria, professor in the zoology department at Oxford University, co-author of the study in the journal Science.

Their work rules out the long-feared hypothesis that yellow fever was jumping from person to person  via the bites of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes  in an urban environment.

Instead, the latest outbreak was carried to people by wild jungle mosquitoes that had previously bitten contaminated monkeys.

'Great potential'

The people infected  85 percent of them men in their 30s, 40s and 50s  lived or worked within a few miles of the jungle habitat of these monkeys.

Researchers tracked the movements of the virus by noting when and where monkeys, and then people, began to be contaminated and turn up dead.

Cases among monkeys tended to precede humans by about four days, they found.

But the virus moved even faster than the monkeys did, which suggests that people had a role in moving the disease to new areas, such as by illegally trafficking monkeys or driving vehicles in which mosquitoes had hitched a ride.

Analyzing the genomes of people and monkeys that were infected confirmed the source of the epidemic.

Researchers say this combined method could help better tailor real-time responses to future outbreaks.

"It's high-end work," David Hamer, professor of global health and medicine at Boston University, told AFP.

"Their approach is intriguing and has great potential, although it requires a lot of data," added Hamer, who was not involved in the study.

That means the findings are not likely to help much in poor countries in Africa, where yellow fever often strikes, because they do not have the infrastructure necessary to create such a surveillance system or alert network, Hamer said.

Vaccine shortages

The best tool against yellow fever is the vaccine, which has been around since 1938.

The Brazilian government launched a massive campaign to vaccinate millions of people at the beginning of this year, primarily in the regions of Sao Paulo, Rio and Bahia.

But there were not enough doses, sparking shortages in the country of 208 million people.

Researchers say priority needs to be given to those at high risk, including those nearest to rural areas and forests, such as the middle aged men at the center of the outbreak in southeast Brazil.

"We need this information to control future outbreaks -- to vaccinate the right people, in the right place, at the right time," said co-author Oliver Pybus, professor of evolution and infectious disease at Oxford University.

Vigilance is needed, even though the virus did not enter a cycle of urban transmission, as feared.

"We're learning that so many of our most worrisome infectious diseases are emerging in humans due to deforestation and closer proximity of humans to animals," said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

"For example, Ebola in Sub-Saharan Africa now appears to have originated from bats, as did SARS and MERS coronaviruses in China and Saudi Arabia, respectively, and Nipah virus as recently described in India."A rare Republican critic of Trump, McCain had accused the president of 'naivete,' 'egotism' and of sympathising with autocrats, especially after Trump's widely criticized appearance in Helsinki alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin.

America paid tribute on Sunday to John McCain, the Vietnam War hero and two-time presidential candidate with a legendary temper whose personal courage and insistence on treating even his foes with respect earned him near-universal admiration.

McCain died on Saturday, four days shy of his 82nd birthday, following a yearlong battle with an aggressive form of brain cancer. He is survived by his wife Cindy and seven children, three of them from an earlier marriage. Flags flew at half-mast over the White House and US Capitol in honor of McCain, as organisers announced he will lie in state at the US Capitol Rotunda.

That honor has been accorded to only a few notable Americans, including John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

A memorial service will take place at the massive National Cathedral overlooking Washington on Saturday before McCain is laid to rest according to his wishes at the US Naval Academy in nearby Annapolis, Maryland, on September 2, his office said.

Ahead of the national ceremonies, McCain will lie in state at the Arizona State Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday and a memorial service will take place at the North Phoenix Baptist Church.

"This is a rare and distinct occurrence for a truly special man," said Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, adding: "John McCain is Arizona."

In Phoenix, a succession of ordinary Arizonans left flags or flowers at McCain's office or a local mortuary to honor the man who represented them in Congress for 35 years.

Former presidents George W Bush, a Republican, and Barack Obama, a Democrat  his successful rivals in, respectively, the 2000 and 2008 elections  are set to speak at the national memorial service, according to The New York Times.

Media reports earlier this year said the senator had expressly asked that President Donald Trump not be invited. Instead, Vice-President Mike Pence is expected to attend.

'Deepest sympathies'

As tributes poured in from the US and abroad, Trump said simply that he sent his "deepest sympathies and respect" to the McCain family.

A rare Republican critic of Trump, McCain had accused the president of "naivete," "egotism" and of sympathising with autocrats, especially after Trump's widely criticized appearance in Helsinki alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin.

McCain cast a decisive vote last year that killed Republican attempts to repeal Obama's health care reforms. The repeal was a Trump priority, and the president never forgave McCain.

The hawkish McCain was an unrelenting critic of Obama's foreign policy, saying the Democratic president was weak on Libya, Iraq and Syria.

Still, Obama said he and the senator "shared, for all our differences, a fidelity to something higher -- the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched and sacrificed."

Bush, whose tough campaign against McCain in 2000 left both sides bruised, praised the Arizonan as "a man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order."

Ordinary Americans also paid tribute, many of them in Phoenix, McCain's hometown.

"I didn't agree with him all the time," said Michelle Hasnelle of Phoenix "(but) he was always for the people of Arizona -- he was one of us."

McCain spent more than three decades in the Senate, looming large in debates over war and peace and the moral direction of the nation.

As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he was a powerful advocate for the nation's veterans.

'A great statesman'

As a fervent Atlanticist, a persistent critic of authoritarian leaders, and a frequent congressional traveler, he earned respect around the globe.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called McCain "one of the great political figures of our time (who) fought tirelessly for a strong transatlantic alliance." Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was "an inspiration to millions."

McCain "embodied the idea of service over self," according to British Prime Minister Theresa May, while French President Emmanuel Macron saluted "a true American hero."

Across the Pacific, the China Daily referred to him as a "titan of American politics."

Sarah Palin, whom McCain plucked from obscurity to become his 2008 White House running mate, described him as "a fighter, never afraid to stand for his beliefs." McCain drew criticism from the left for giving a platform to Palin's right-wing views, which contributed to the rise of the conservative Tea Party movement.

But he also earned respect from liberals for his steadfast opposition to torture and his push for immigration reform. Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said he would seek to rename a Senate building in his honor.

Praise for McCain however was not universal: Chinese social media users called him an "enemy of China" for his hawkish foreign policy views. And comments on the US far-right Breitbart website slammed the senator for his key vote against the Obamacare repeal.

McCain had been away from the Senate floor since December, remaining at his Arizona ranch for treatment of glioblastoma  the same form of brain cancer that took the life of another Senate giant, Democrat Ted Kennedy, in 2009.

The son and grandson of four-star admirals, McCain will be buried in the cemetery of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, on a peaceful hillside overlooking the Severn River. As a student at the academy, he had a reputation as a rebel, but with a wit and charm that drew people to him.

In 2015, McCain himself revealed the simple epitaph he wanted on his tombstone, which will stand alongside those of naval heroes going back to the 1800s: "He served his country."The support for Australia's coalition government has dropped to its lowest in a decade after it installed Scott Morrison as the prime minister.

The support for Australia's coalition government has dropped to its lowest in a decade after it dumped Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister and installed Scott Morrison last Friday following a week of chaos, an opinion poll showed on Monday.

The latest Newspoll, published by The Australian, also showed Opposition Labor leader Bill Shorten, who had long trailed Turnbull, is now the preferred prime minister. The poll also showed that voters considered Julie Bishop, and not Morrison, to be the right person to head the Liberal Party. The popular foreign minister has since resigned and moved to the backbench.

Bishop announced she would move to the backbench and had not yet decided whether to contest the next election, which is due by May 2019. She had been foreign minister since 2013 and was replaced by former defence minister Marise Payne in the new Cabinet line-up announced by Morrison after Bishop resigned.

Morrison was sworn in as prime minister Friday after winning a Liberal Party leadership challenge against incumbent moderate Malcolm Turnbull. The challenge had been instigated by home affairs minister Peter Dutton, whom Morrison defeated in a secret ballot.

Turnbull has endured discontent with his leadership in recent months, fuelled by poor opinion polls, by-election losses, and general mistrust, according to The Guardian.

Even though he survived the initial leadership challenge, several ministers who backed the failed challenger offered their resignations. Even as Turnbull rejected any retribution against ministers suspected of supporting Dutton, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister James McGrath, Minister for International Development and the Pacific Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, and Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar confirmed within hours that they had offered their resignations.

Dutton tried again after the resignations and it turned into a three-way contest with Dutton, Morrison and Bishop. Morrison won a party vote 45-40 and, was officially sworn in as Australia's 30th prime minister late Friday in a ceremony in the capital.

He has inherited leadership of a coalition between the Liberal and National parties whose one-seat majority will have to be defended when a by-election is held for a safe Sydney seat that Turnbull is set to vacate. The new prime minister unveiled his "new generation" cabinet on Sunday.

"This new Liberal-National team is a next-generation team," Morrison told reporters in Canberra of the governing coalition between the Liberals and the rural-based Nationals party. "What we have done today in pulling this team together is provide for stability... it does begin the process of healing."

The environment and energy portfolio, which was held by the man who is now Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, was also broken up in an acknowledgement of the tensions the two issues caused within the party.

Environment and energy policies were key bones of contention between Turnbull and the right-wingers, who wanted him to prioritise older electricity generation sources such as coal over renewables and emissions mitigation.

Angus Taylor was chosen as energy minister, tasked with the job of lowering soaring electricity prices. MP Melissa Price, who represents major mining and agriculture centres in Western Australia state, picked up the environment ministry.

Marise Payne, the former defence minister, was given the foreign affairs portfolio after Bishop's resignation. Moderate Christopher Pyne was promoted to defence minister.

Morrison promises stability

Promising a stable government, Morrison said, "We will provide the stability and the unity and the direction and the purpose that the Australian people expect of us." "The work of government continues. I want to assure all Australians that those normal wheels are turning," he added.

Morrison has been dubbed the "accidental prime minister" because he had no plans to nominate until Thursday, when Turnbull declared he would not recontest his job.

He also admitted the extraordinary scenes in the nation's capital had taken a heavy toll on Parliament and the Liberal Party.

"Our job... is to ensure that we not only bring our party back together, which has been bruised and battered this week, but that will ensure we bring the Parliament back together, that we can continue to work to ensure that our country stays close together."

He said his top priority was to help farmers in New South Wales struggling through one of the worst droughts in half a century. "This is our most urgent and pressing need right now," Morrison said.

Turnbull likely to quit politics

Turnbull became the fourth prime minister to be dumped by his or her own party since 2010 in an extraordinary period of political instability that frustrates most Australians. He said he would quit politics "not before too long" and blamed his downfall on a campaign by hard-right lawmakers backed by "powerful voices" in the conservative media.

"There was a determined insurgency from a number of people," Turnbull said. "It was extraordinary. It was described as madness by many and I think it's difficult to describe it in any other way." Turnbull said he was impressed by his party's decision not to reward Dutton and to elect Morrison, whom he descried as a "very loyal and effective treasurer."

With inputs from agenciesLONDON (Reuters) - A detained British-Iranian aid worker sentenced to five years in jail in Iran was returned to prison on Sunday after a request to extend her three-day temporary release was rejected, her husband said. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 at a Tehran airport as she was heading back to Britain with her two-year-old daughter after a family visit

LONDON (Reuters) - A detained British-Iranian aid worker sentenced to five years in jail in Iran was returned to prison on Sunday after a request to extend her three-day temporary release was rejected, her husband said.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 at a Tehran airport as she was heading back to Britain with her two-year-old daughter after a family visit.

She was convicted of plotting to overthrow Iran's clerical establishment, a charge denied by her family and the Foundation, a charity organization that is independent of Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News.

Her husband Richard Ratcliffe, who is in Britain, said in a statement she returned to prison in Tehran to continue serving her sentence despite hopes her release would be extended.

Iranian authorities and her lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment. Britain's foreign ministry declined to comment on her status.

"We do not think it is in the best interests of any of our dual national detainees to provide a running commentary on individual cases," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

(Reporting By Andrew MacAskill and Babak Dehghanpisheh; Editing by Nick Tattersall, Richard Balmforth)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.The Donald Trump administration and Mexico have reached a preliminary accord to end the North American Free Trade Agreement and replace it with a deal that the administration wants to be more favorable to the United States.

Washington: The Donald Trump administration and Mexico have reached a preliminary accord to end the North American Free Trade Agreement and replace it with a deal that the administration wants to be more favorable to the United States.

US president Donald Trump, in announcing the tentative agreement Monday at the White House, said a new deal would be called "the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement. Trump has frequently condemned the 24-year-old NAFTA trade pact as a job-killing "disaster" for the United States.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer says periodic reviews will be required once a new agreement is signed. Lighthizer says the agreement will be in force for 16 years. But every six years will bring an opportunity to resolve issues or modernize aspects of the agreement. The parties then would agree to continue the agreement for another 16 years. Mexico is on board with that process; Lighthizer says he hasn't discussed the new proposal yet with Canada.

Still, any new agreement is far from final. The administration still needs to negotiate with the third partner in NAFTA, Canada, to become part of any new trade accord. Without Canada, America's No. 2 trading partner, it's unclear whether any new U.S. trade agreement with Mexico would be possible.

Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is cutting short her diplomatic trip to Europe to head to Washington for trade talks with the United States.

Freeland will fly to Washington on Tuesday after the Trump administration and Mexico said they have reached a preliminary accord to end the North American Free Trade Agreement and replace it.

A spokesman for Freeland says Canada will only sign a new trade deal that is good for Canada.

The president said that he will be calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

"If they'd like to negotiate fairly, we'll do that," Trump said.

Trump put pressure on Canada by threatening to tax Canadian auto imports and to leave Canada out of a new regional trade bloc.

NAFTA reduced most trade barriers between the three countries. But Trump and other critics say it encouraged U.S. manufacturers to move south of the border to exploit low-wage Mexican labor.

Talks to overhaul the agreement began a year ago and have proved contentious.

U.S. and Mexican negotiators worked over the weekend to narrow their differences. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said Monday that Mexico had agreed to ensure that 75 percent of automotive content be produced within the trade bloc (up from a current 62.5 percent) to receive duty-free benefits and that 40 percent to 45 percent be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour.

It remain unclear where Monday's announcement leaves Canada.

Adam Austen, a spokesman for Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, said: "Canada is encouraged by the continued optimism shown by our negotiating partners. Progress between Mexico and the United States is a necessary requirement for any renewed NAFTA agreement."

Austen said the Canadians had been regular contact with the NAFTA negotiators.

"We will only sign a new NAFTA that is good for Canada and good for the middle class," he said, adding that "Canada's signature is required."

The No. 2 Senate Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, hailed the "positive step" but said Canada needs to be party to a final deal. "A trilateral agreement is the best path forward," he said, adding that millions of jobs are at stake.DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) - Journalist Mesale Tolu, released from Turkish prison in December but banned from leaving the country until this week, returned to Germany on Sunday vowing to continue fighting for colleagues imprisoned in Turkey's crackdown after a failed coup in 2016.

DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) - Journalist Mesale Tolu, released from Turkish prison in December but banned from leaving the country until this week, returned to Germany on Sunday vowing to continue fighting for colleagues imprisoned in Turkey's crackdown after a failed coup in 2016.

Charged with being a member of a terrorist organisation and publishing terrorist propaganda, German citizen Tolu was one of tens of thousands of civil servants and journalists detained after the attempt to depose President Tayyip Erdogan.

"I may be here today, but hundreds of colleagues, opposition activists, lawyers, students - 70,000 students are in prison - are still not free," she told reporters at Stuttgart airport after arriving from Istanbul.

"So I can't be really happy about leaving the country where I was in prison because I know that nothing has changed there."

Tolu described how masked armed police officers stormed her home in the middle of the night in April last year, waking her sleeping son and subjecting her to abuse as they searched the apartment before arresting her.

Her husband Suat Corlu is still in prison in Turkey on terrorism charges brought after the attempted coup and she said she would return to the country to appear in court despite the fear that she might be arrested again.

Germany has demanded the release of several of its citizens, some of Turkish origin, as a necessary step towards improving ties with Turkey.

Relations between the NATO partners soured after Germany condemned Turkey's arrests of some 50,000 people, and the suspension or firing of 150,000 others, including teachers, judges and soldiers.

Ties have improved in recent months, especially after Turkey released German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yucel in February.

(Reporting by Katie Stephens and Reuters TV; Editing by David Goodman)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.Pope Francis 'begged for God's forgiveness' on Sunday for multiple abuse scandals within the Irish church but faced accusations by a former Vatican official that he had personally ignored allegations against senior clergy.

Dublin: Pope Francis "begged for God's forgiveness" on Sunday for multiple abuse scandals within the Irish church but faced accusations by a former Vatican official that he had personally ignored allegations against senior clergy.

In front of 45,000 supporters at the rain-soaked Knock shrine in the west of Ireland, the pope spoke of the "open wound" of the Church's sexual abuse scandal and demanded "firm and decisive" measures to find "truth and justice".

Later Sunday he said Mass to tens of thousands of flag-waving worshippers at Dublin's Phoenix Park, before heading back to Rome after his two-day visit to the former Catholic stronghold.

He also acknowledged other abuses by the Irish church, including at its so-called "mother and baby" homes for unwed mothers.

But in the centre of the Irish capital around 5,000 abuse victims and their supporters braved the weather to attend the "Stand for Truth" rally.

A woman dressed as a nun, with fake blood on her hands, and a man handing out homemade placards reading "the church protects pederasts" were among those protesting.

"I think it's obviously causing quite a lot of distress," abuse victim and campaigner William Gorry said of the visit.

"Healing is something that's going to take a long, long time if it's going to happen at all," he told AFP.

At another "Nope to the Pope" demonstration, protesters called for gay and transgender recognition, a clearer separation of religion and state in Ireland and the acceptance of contraception by the Vatican - as well as action on abuse.

"I think he should get on his knees and beg forgiveness of the people of Ireland," Lisa Barcaen, who was dressed as a nun with fake blood on her hands, told AFP.

Papal 'cover up'

The scandal has dogged the pope's visit, and intensified overnight when a former Vatican envoy to the United States accused Francis of personally ignoring sexual abuse claims against prominent US cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was forced to resign last month.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano wrote in a letter published in the National Catholic Register that he had told Francis of the allegations in 2013, but that he had responded by lifting sanctions imposed on McCarrick by his predecessor pope Benedict.

"He (Pope Francis) knew from at least June 23, 2013, that McCarrick was a serial predator," wrote Vigano," adding that "he knew that he was a corrupt man, he covered for him to the bitter end."

The pope declined to comment on the letter, telling journalists on his plane back to Rome: "I will not say a word about that. I think that the communique speaks for itself."

Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar on Saturday directly urged the pope to take action against abuses and ensure justice for victims worldwide.

"Holy Father, I ask that you use your office and influence to ensure that this is done here in Ireland and across the world," he said, calling the scandals a "stain" on the church and state.

The pope met eight abuse victims on Saturday, including a woman assaulted by a priest when she was in hospital aged 13.

Speaking on the plane back to Rome, Francis said he "suffered a lot" in the meeting, from which came the proposal to ask forgiveness at Sunday's mass.

The pope was particularly moved by the plight of unmarried girls forced to give up their children for adoption.

"I had never heard of it," he said. "It was painful for me, but accompanied by the consolation of being able to help clarify these things," he said.

Paul Jude Redmond, who was illegally adopted from a Church-run "mother and baby home" because his mother was unwed, also met the pope and said he appeared "genuinely shocked" by the stories of abuse.

Silent vigil

The pontiff went to Ireland to close the 2018 World Meeting of Families (WMOF) - a global Catholic gathering that addressed issues including the treatment of gay people in the Church.

It was the first papal visit to Ireland since John Paul II spoke in front of 1.5 million people during a visit in 1979.

The Church's role and standing has been badly dented by the abuse scandals and the Irish have shed traditional Catholic mores, voting earlier this year to legalise abortion after approving same-sex marriage in 2015.

In Tuam, a town in western Ireland not far from Knock, hundreds joined in a silent vigil on Sunday in solidarity with victims of the "mother and baby" homes - institutions accused of being punishment hostels for unwed pregnant women.

"Significant quantities" of baby remains found in makeshift graves at the site of one such home in Tuam last year shocked the country.

Multiple probes in Ireland have found Church leaders protected hundreds of predatory priests and former Irish president Mary McAleese revealed this month that the Vatican had sought to keep Church documents inaccessible to government investigators.

The abuse scandals in Ireland are part of a worldwide crisis for the Vatican.

A devastating report earlier this month accused more than 300 priests in the US state of Pennsylvania of abusing more than 1,000 children since the 1950s.The Israeli leader identified what he termed new existential threats facing the Jews, with Iran and Islamist movement Hamas being among them.

Vilnius: Israel's prime minister said on Sunday that Jews were still at risk even decades after the Holocaust as he wrapped up a groundbreaking visit to Lithuania, a Baltic state once home to his forefathers.

"For the Jewish people, what has changed in these 75 years? Not the attempts to destroy us, they still seek to destroy us," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told around 300 Lithuanian Jews gathered in Vilnius's Choral Synagogue.

The Israeli leader identified what he termed new existential threats facing the Jews, with Iran and the Islamist movement Hamas which runs the Gaza Strip being among them. "What has changed is our ability to defend ourselves by ourselves... This is a magnificent change of history," added Netanyahu, who is the first-ever Israeli premier to visit Lithuania, a Baltic EU state.

Pre-war Lithuania was home to a thriving Jewish community of more than 200,000 people, with Vilnius a hub of learning known as the "Jerusalem of the North". But historians contend that around 195,000 perished at the hands of the Nazis and local collaborators under the 1941-44 German occupation, nearly the entire Jewish population. Today, there are around 3,000 Jews living in the EU and NATO member state of 2.9 million people.

Netanyahu said he spent Saturday touring the Vilna Ghetto and recalling Lithuanian Jews taken to Paneriai  also known as Ponar or Ponary  on the outskirts of the city, the site of the Ponar massacre. Up to 100,000 people including Jews, Poles and Russians were slain there by the Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators during World War II. "What a distance we have travelled in 75 years from the death pits of Ponar to a rising power in the world," Netanyahu said.

His groundbreaking visit has not been without controversy, and Netanyahu has come under sharp criticism from top Israeli Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff for warming to Lithuania. Arguing that Vilnius has not done enough to come to terms with the role Lithuanians played in the Holocaust, Zuroff charged in a Facebook post on Sunday "that to praise the Lithuanian government's efforts to commemorate the Shoa is like commending the KKK for improving race relations in the US".

A Lithuanian research centre has identified 2,000 Lithuanians suspected of taking part in the Holocaust, either by killing Jews, sending them to execution or by confiscating their wealth. At the same time, nearly 900 Lithuanians hold the honorary title of "Righteous Among The Nations", awarded by Israel to gentiles who risked their lives to save Jewish neighbours.

The Holocaust was either distorted or ignored in Lithuania under five decades of Soviet rule that followed the war. An honest examination only began after it became the first republic to split from the USSR in 1990.Presidents past and present joined members of Congress from both parties and world leaders in mourning Senator John McCain and praising him for a lifetime of service and accomplishments.

Washington: Presidents past and present joined members of Congress from both parties and world leaders in mourning Senator John McCain and praising him for a lifetime of service and accomplishments.

Former presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama, who blocked the Arizona Republican's own White House ambitions, are among those expected to speak at McCain's funeral.

"These were bitter contests, both of them," said Senator Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, and "to ask them to speak at your funeral, and for them to be honoured at the opportunity, that tells you all you need to know."

Flake told CBS' Face the Nation that McCain "was quick to forgive - certainly put the good of the country above himself, and the fact that his former opponents will be there speaking says all we need to know."

McCain is expected to be remembered at ceremonies in Arizona and Washington this coming week or next, if the family prefers to give more time for Congress to return to the Capitol from its summer recess.

McCain is to be buried at the US Naval Academy Cemetery on a peninsula overlooking the Severn River in Annapolis, Maryland.

On Saturday, his grave was marked where he had written he wanted to be buried  next to his best friend from his Naval Academy days, Admiral Chuck Larson.

President Donald Trump, who once criticised McCain for being taken prisoner during the Vietnam War, said his "deepest sympathies and respect" went out to McCain's family.

First lady Melania Trump tweeted thanks to McCain for his service to the country.

McCain, 81, died Saturday at his ranch in Arizona after a yearlong battle with brain cancer.

A black hearse, accompanied by a police motorcade, could be seen driving away from the ranch near Sedona where McCain spent his final weeks. For 50 miles along Interstate 17 southbound, on every overpass and at every exit ramp, people watched the procession. Hundreds, including many waving American flags, parked their cars and got out to watch.

Governor Doug Ducey, R-Arizona, does not plan to announce his selection of a Senate successor to McCain until after McCain's burial. Under state law, the governor's appointee to serve until the next general election in 2020 must come from the same political party.

A statement from Ducey's office said that "now is a time for remembering and honoring a consequential life."

Trump's brief Twitter statement said "hearts and prayers" are with the McCain family.

My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 26, 2018

Trump and McCain were at odds until the end. The president, who as a candidate in 2016 mocked McCain's capture in Vietnam, had jabbed at the ailing senator for voting against Republican efforts to roll back President Barack Obama's health care law.

Earlier this summer, McCain issued a blistering statement criticising Trump's meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Obama, who triumphed over McCain in 2008, said that despite their differences, McCain and he shared a "fidelity to something higher - the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched, and sacrificed."

Obama said they "saw our political battles, even, as a privilege, something noble, an opportunity to serve as stewards of those high ideals at home, and to advance them around the world."

Bush, who defeated McCain for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, called McCain a "man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order" and a "friend whom I'll deeply miss." Other tributes poured in from around the globe.

French president Emmanuel Macron tweeted in English that McCain "was a true American hero. He devoted his entire life to his country."

Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said McCain's support for the Jewish state "never wavered. It sprang from his belief in democracy and freedom."

And Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, called McCain "a tireless fighter for a strong trans-Atlantic alliance. His significance went well beyond his own country."

McCain was the son and grandson of admirals and followed them to the US Naval Academy. A pilot, he was shot down over Vietnam and held as a prisoner of war for more than five years. He went on to win a seat in the House and in 1986, the Senate, where he served for the rest of his life.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, called McCain a "fascinating personality."

"He would occasionally be in a bad place with various members, including myself, and when this would blow over it was like nothing ever happened," McConnell said Saturday after a GOP state dinner in Lexington, Kentucky. "He also had a wicked sense of humor and it made every tense moment come out better."

Former vice president Joe Biden, who developed a friendship with McCain while they served together in the Senate, said the Arizona lawmaker will "cast a long shadow."

"The spirit that drove him was never extinguished: we are here to commit ourselves to something bigger than ourselves," Biden said.

The Senate's top Democrat, New York's Chuck Schumer, said he wants to rename the Senate building that housed McCain's suite of offices after McCain.

"As you go through life, you meet few truly great people. John McCain was one of them," Schumer said.

"Maybe most of all, he was a truth teller - never afraid to speak truth to power in an era where that has become all too rare."In the decades following the Vietnam War, McCain  who died Saturday at the age of 81  forgave the enemies who once held him captive, and helped reconcile the two countries that today enjoy strong ties.

Hai Phong: As a prisoner of war in the "Hanoi Hilton", Navy pilot John McCain was known as uncompromising, frank and an avid reader who fiercely debated the war with his Vietnamese jailors.

One of them, the former director of the infamous Hoa Lo prison, recalls verbally sparring with the famous inmate and says McCain's refusal to budge on his views eventually earned his admiration. "It was his stubbornness, his strong stance that I loved when arguing with him," retired colonel Tran Trong Duyet told AFP.

In the decades following the Vietnam War, McCain  who died Saturday at the age of 81  forgave the enemies who once held him captive, and helped reconcile the two countries that today enjoy strong ties. His five and a half years in prison began in October 1967 when McCain was thrown into the French-built jail after his Skyhawk divebomber was shot down over Hanoi's Truc Bach lake.

Fished out with a broken leg and two broken arms he was shipped to the cold, crowded facility where some 500 prisoners of war were held. His captors quickly learned McCain's father was a navy admiral, and the young prisoner soon developed the nickname "Crown Prince".

The early years were grim. McCain was held in solitary confinement and suffered from dysentery. For months on end, he was fed only bread and pumpkin soup. He communicated with fellow inmates by tapping codes on the thick concrete walls. In his memoirs, McCain wrote that solitary "put me in a pretty surly mood" and that he would ward off depression by hollering insults at guards.

And then there were the interrogations and beatings. "Ropes were put on me and I sat that night bound with ropes," McCain wrote after his 1973 release, recalling one brutal session. "For the next four days, I was beaten every two to three hours by different guards. My left arm was broken again and my ribs were cracked."

English classes, jokes

Duyet denies McCain or others were mistreated and says he punished any fellow guards who stepped out of line. "There was no torture, Vietnamese people saved him," Duyet said in an interview earlier this year at his home in the port city of Haiphong, where he displays both photos of American POWs and more recent images of himself in military uniform posing with US officials.

By the end of his long years in prison, Duyet said his relationship McCain started to warm. "Out of working hours, we considered each other friends," he said. "He taught me English... he had good teaching skills." In his post-prison writings, McCain said things got easier for him in the early 1970s, which he called the "coasting period".

He read propaganda texts about Vietnam communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, and was allowed to roam the prison yard with fellow Americans, who named different sections of the compound after Vegas hotels.

His former jailor preferred to focus on the rosier memories, recalling how they joked, shared stories about family and travel, and even dished about women. "We laughed together and agreed that women are the same everywhere  they like flattery, they like to sulk, and they're jealous," he told AFP, smiling.

'America's POW'

McCain left the navy in 1981 for a long career in politics, most notably as Republican Senator for Arizona. But his "Hanoi Hilton" experience resonated throughout his life. Donald Trump said during the campaign for the presidency that McCain was "not a war hero" because he was captured in Vietnam.

The controversial comments inflamed his throngs of supporters, many of whom saw his time as a POW as a defining experience. "John McCain will always be America's prisoner of war, that experience is now inseparable from the name John McCain and the person that has been JohnMcCain," said Alvin Townley, author of "Defiant" about American POWs held in Hoa Lo.

McCain was also celebrated for his role in reconciling the United States and Vietnam, which in the half-century since the war's end have become close allies. "(His) openness towards Vietnam and the willingness to revisit not only the country but his experiences there have certainly helped heal a lot of wounds," Townley said.

McCain visited the Southeast Asian country several times after the restoration of diplomatic ties in 1995, even returning to the "Hanoi Hilton"  now a popular tourist attraction  for an emotional meeting with another former jailor. Duyet never got a chance to reconnect with McCain, but imagined what he might say if he had.

"If he came to Vietnam, I would greet him, not as a former prisoner and a jailer, but as two veterans, from both sides of the battlefield, now meeting again in the spirit of reconciliation," he said. When informed of McCain's death, Duyet said Sunday he was "so sad." "Please if you can, convey my condolences to his family for me."President Uhuru Kenyatta is the second African leader to meet with Trump at the White House. Kenyatta's office says he and Trump will focus on trade and regional security.

Nairobi: Kenya's president will meet with President Donald Trump on Monday as East Africa's commercial hub emerges from months of electoral turmoil.

President Uhuru Kenyatta is the second African leader to meet with Trump at the White House. Nigeria's president visited earlier this year.

Kenyatta's office says he and Trump will focus on trade and regional security.

Kenya is the third highest recipient of US security aid in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Security Assistance Monitor.

Both Kenya and the US have troops in Somalia, and the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group has crossed the border to carry out dozens of attacks inside Kenya, calling it retribution for sending troops.

Nearly 100 Kenyan police officers have been killed since May 2017 in bombings and ambushes.

The Kenyan president during his Washington visit also is meeting with US business leaders to promote investment.

The meeting with Trump will help Kenyatta's image after a crisis in which the Supreme Court overturned the August presidential election, citing irregularities, and the opposition boycotted the fresh vote, said political commentator John Githongo.

Kenyatta then hosts British Prime Minister Theresa May on Thursday.

Kenya's foreign minister has said this is May's first visit to Africa since taking office in July 2016.

Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Monica Juma has said May's choice of Kenya shows the country's importance among the community of nations.

Kenyatta and May are expected to discuss strengthening existing security agreements, Kenyan officials have said.Nawaz Sharif, along with his daughter Maryam and son-in-law Captain Muhammad Safdar are already serving jail terms of ten, seven and one years respectively in Rawalpindi's Adiala Jail in, after the accountability court convicted them over the family's illegal ownership of four luxury flats in London.

Islamabad: Pakistan's Supreme Court on Monday ordered the accountability court in Islamabad to conclude the remaining two corruption cases against jailed former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his family within the next six weeks, according to a media report. The 68-year-old PML-N leader appeared before the Islamabad-based court for hearing in the Al-Azizia Steel Mills and the Hill Metal Establishment cases.

The court also directed accountability judge Mohammad Arshad Malik to submit a progress report of the case to the apex court on a weekly basis, Dawn newspaper reported.

During a hearing of the application seeking an extension in the deadline, Chief Justice Saqib Nisar remarked that he hoped that the defence counsel would complete his defence within the stipulated time. A three-judge bench headed by Nisar ordered a six-week extension in the deadline for concluding the remaining two corruption cases, it said. Last week, Malik had submitted a written request to the top court, seeking a fifth extension in the trial of ousted prime minister Sharif.

Sharif, along with his 44-year-old daughter Maryam, and his 54-year-old son-in-law Captain Muhammad Safdar are already serving jail terms of ten, seven and one year respectively in the Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, after the accountability court convicted them on 6 July over the family's ownership of four luxury flats in London through illegal means.

The pending corruption cases against Sharif and his two sons were transferred by the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on 7 August on the application of Sharif to another accountability court headed by judge Malik.

Three corruption cases were filed against Sharif and family in 2017 following a decision by the Supreme Court on 28 July of the same year. The formal trial of the Sharif family started on 14 September and was to be completed in six months, but later the deadline was extended at least thrice.

Apart from Sharif, his two sons  Hassan and Hussian  are also co-accused on all three corruption cases. The court has already declared the two sons as absconders due to their persistent failure to appear before the court. They have been blacklisted by the authorities, barring them from travelling on their Pakistani passports.Pakistan has banned the VIP culture at airports for 'influential people' including politicians, judges and military officials as part of the new government's austerity plan. In case any Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) official is caught giving protocol to a VIP, he would face strict action, the ministry warned in a letter sent to all zones of the agency.

Islamabad: Pakistan has banned the VIP culture at airports for "influential people" including politicians, judges and military officials as part of the new government's austerity plan, media reports said on Monday.

The decision will be strictly implemented to provide equal opportunities to all travellers without any discrimination, Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry was quoted as saying by Dawn.

The move, which came under effect from Sunday, comes days after the new government led by Prime Minister Imran Khan banned the discretionary use of state funds and first-class air travel by officials and leaders, including the president and the prime minister, as part of its austerity drive.

The interior ministry has directed the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) that no government official or other VIPs would be given protocol at airports. The VIP protocol was given by the FIA.

Such decisions had also been taken by previous governments but they could not implement them in a letter and spirit, the report said.

It had been observed that influential people were given VIP protocol at airports so that they could avoid standing in long queues and get cleared their luggage without any hustle, Chaudhry said.

"We have seen that influential people used to seek assistance of FIA officials at airports who (officials) accompanied them to promptly clear their luggage," he said.

The VIP protocol was usually given to politicians, legislators, senior bureaucrats, judges, military officials and journalists.

In case any FIA official is caught giving protocol to a VIP, he would face strict action, the ministry warned in a letter sent to all zones of the agency.

According to the interior ministry, immigration counters at airports would be monitored and if any VIP was seen being given special treatment, the immigration staff and official in charge of their shift would be immediately suspended, the report said.

The ministry had also directed the FIA to not harass passengers leaving the country.

The investigation agency was also directed to facilitate passengers of international flights at the time of their arrival at the country's airports.

All previous governments had decided to eliminate the VIP culture at airports but there was a VIP lounge at Benazir Bhutto International Airport in Islamabad where VIPs sat before their luggage was cleared by officials of the FIA, Airport Security Staff or Civil Aviation Authority.The Vatican's retired ambassador to the United States accused senior Vatican officials of knowing as early as 2000 that the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, regularly invited seminarians into his bed but was made a cardinal regardless.

Dublin: The Vatican's retired ambassador to the United States accused senior Vatican officials of knowing as early as 2000 that the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, regularly invited seminarians into his bed but was made a cardinal regardless.

The letter, an extraordinary allegation from a one-time Holy See diplomat, also accuses Pope Francis of knowing about McCarrick's behavior in 2013 but rehabilitating him  a claim of cover-up against the pontiff himself.

The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published the letter attributed to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano on Sunday as the pope wrapped up a two-day visit to Ireland dominated by the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Vigano, 77, a conservative whose hard-line anti-gay views are well known, urged the reformist pope to resign over the issue and what he called the "conspiracy of silence" about McCarrick.

He and the pope have long been on opposite ideological sides, with the pope more a pastor and Vigano more a cultural warrior.

The Vatican did not immediately comment on the letter or confirm its authenticity.

In it, Vigano accused the former Vatican secretaries of state under the previous two popes of ignoring detailed denunciations against McCarrick for years. He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer.

Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as cardinal last month, after a US church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

Since then, another man has come forward to say McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary.

The accusations have created a crisis of confidence in the US hierarchy, because it was apparently an open secret that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house, and into his bed.

Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report  which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses  the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.

Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions. His letter identifies by name the Vatican cardinals and archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair, an unthinkable expose for a Vatican diplomat to make.

He said documents backing up his version of events are in Vatican archives.

The Vatican's ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2016, Vigano said his two immediate predecessors "did not fail" to inform the Holy See about accusations against McCarrick, starting in 2000.

He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on 23 June, 2013, at the Vatican's Santa Marta hotel where the pope lives, three months after Francis was elected pope.

Vigano wrote that he told Francis: "Holy Father, I don't know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance."

Soon thereafter, Vigano wrote, he was surprised to find that McCarrick had started traveling on missions on behalf of the church, including to China. McCarrick was also one of the Vatican's intermediaries in the US-Cuba talks in 2014.

Vigano's claim that McCarrick had been ordered by Benedict to stay out of public ministry and retire to a lifetime of prayer is somewhat disputed, given that McCarrick enjoyed a fairly public retirement. Vigano provides no evidence that such sanctions were imposed by Benedict in any official capacity, saying only that he was told they were.

The letter also contains a lengthy diatribe about homosexuals and liberals in the Catholic church. It often reads like an ideological manifesto, naming all of Francis' known supporters in the US hierarchy as being complicit in a cover-up of McCarrick's misdeeds.

"Now that the corruption has reached the very top of the church's hierarchy, my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths regarding the heart-breaking case of the archbishop emeritus of Washington," Vigano wrote.

Vigano, however, also has had his own problems with allegations of cover-up, and he and Francis had a major dust-up during Francis' 2015 visit to the US, which Vigano organised.

In that incident, a leading US opponent of gay marriage, Kim Davis, was among those invited to meet with the pope at Vigano's Washington residence. Francis was so enraged that Davis' supporters had leaked word of the meeting that the Vatican subsequently insisted he only held one private audience while there: with one of his former students, a gay man and his partner.

The cover-up accusation, which Vigano denied, concerned allegations that he tried to quash an investigation into the former archbishop of St Paul-Minneapolis, Minnesota, John Nienstedt, who was accused of misconduct with adult seminarians.Two Reuters journalists in Myanmar face a ruling on Monday that could see them each jailed for up to 14 years, a landmark case that ignited global outcry after they were arrested while investigating a Rohingya massacre

Yangon: Myanmar court has postponed the verdict for two Reuters journalists in Myanmar who are facing a ruling that could see them each jailed for up to 14 years, a landmark case that ignited global outcry after they were arrested while investigating a Rohingya massacre.

Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, have been in Myanmar's Insein prison since December after they were invited to a dinner with police in Yangon and pounced on as they left the restaurant. They were charged with violating a colonial-era state secrets act for possessing classified documents about Rakhine state, claims undercut by a police witness who said his superior had ordered a set-up and by arguments that the documents had been published in state media. Reuters denied the charges and hired prominent rights attorney Amal Clooney to help, arguing the journalists were simply doing their job in working to expose abuses.

"We tried for them as much as we could the whole time," Than Zaw Aung, one of the lawyers for the journalists, told AFP a day before the verdict. "Our journalists will be free if the judiciary is free and fair."

Myanmar's former junta routinely jailed and censored the media, and journalists fear the Reuters trial shows that the repressive reflexes are on the rise even under civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The trial on the outskirts of the former capital has been packed with well-wishers and family, with Wa Lone flashing a trademark double thumbs up upon arrival and Kyaw Soe Oo embracing his young daughter in emotional reunions. Wa Lone's wife gave birth to their first child this month.

The two consistently gave stirring defences of their work when speaking to reporters at the courthouse. "We are not wrong and the things alleged by the prosecution are baseless," Wa Lone told the media after closing arguments last week.

Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone were probing the September 2017 massacre of 10 Rohingya men and boys in the Rakhine state village of Inn Din, a week after the military launched a sweeping crackdown on members of the stateless Muslim minority. The United Nations and Washington have labelled the campaign "ethnic cleansing", after some 7,00,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine to Bangladesh, bringing with them testimonies of rape, arson and indiscriminate killings in the northern part of the state.

The Myanmar army leadership has denied most allegations of abuses, and said they were responding to attacks on police posts. But they conceded about a month after Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested that the Inn Din massacre occurred, prompting speculation that authorities had attempted to thwart the story.

In February, Reuters published its account of the murders, which contradicts the military's claim that the killings happened after the village came under seige by Rohingya fighters. If convicted, the two journalists can appeal and would also be eligible for a possible pardon by Myanmar's civilian president, a staunch Suu Kyi ally.According to the independent rights group Agora, 43 people were given prison terms for internet posts and memes in Russia in 2017, up from 32 in 2016.

Moscow: In 2015, Eduard Nikitin shared a joke on social media about Russia's bleak future. Three years later he is facing trial on extremism charges over this and one other meme. The case against the 42-year-old is part of a wider trend that has seen Russian authorities bring charges against people for seemingly innocuous, humorous posts in increasing numbers.

Lawyers say the Kremlin is trying to force people to think twice before sharing opinions online  one of the last remaining spaces where the opposition is relatively free to organise. "It turns out that for a harmless joke, anybody who doesn't agree with our country's leadership can be prosecuted," Nikitin's lawyer Maxim Kamakin told AFP after a preliminary hearing in Saint Petersburg on 20 August. "It seems that in our country only optimists have the right to exist."

In one of the incriminating posts from Nikitin, who is disabled and currently unemployed, a father crudely tells his son that nothing will be getting better in Russia any time soon. The other features a drawing of a "vatnik"  a padded coat popular during the Soviet period that is also slang for uneducated Russians who uncritically follow those in authority.

The "absurd" case has seen Nikitin's bank account blocked, his computer briefly confiscated and left the activist unable to participate in any opposition campaigns, according to his lawyer. The vaguely worded charges he faces  inciting hatred or degradation of human dignity  carry a maximum six-year jail term, though most convictions lead to a shorter sentence, fine or community service.

Such cases are not new but several high-profile investigations, along with an intervention from the operator of Russia's largest social networks, has dragged the issue back into the spotlight recently.

'Jon Snow is Risen'

In the Siberian Altai region, legal proceedings were opened more than a year ago against Daniil Markin, a 19-year-old film student who shared memes including a picture of Jon Snow, a character from the HBO TV series Game of Thrones.

Under the image was written "Jon Snow is risen  Truly he is risen!", a play on the Orthodox Easter greeting, which has led to the teenager's ongoing prosecution on the grounds of religious hatred.

Maria Motuznaya, a 23-year-old who, like Markin, comes from the Altai city of Barnaul, faces separate extremism charges for images saved on the VKontakte network  Russia's Facebook equivalent, which rights groups say cooperates with security services. One of them, featuring apparently African children holding out empty bowls, carries the caption: "black humour is like food  not everybody gets it".

Markin and Motuznaya have both said they were pressured by police into signing confessions.

"Too often the actions of law enforcement agencies clearly do not correspond to the potential threat and their reaction to posts or memes are groundlessly harsh," Mail.ru, which owns VKontakte, said earlier in the month. The company, itself owned by the Kremlin-friendly billionaire Alisher Usmanov, called for a change in the law and an "amnesty" for "those who were unjustly convicted and serving time on such charges".

The Russian communications ministry has also supported a relaxation of the law.

According to the independent rights group Agora, 43 people were given prison terms for internet posts in Russia in 2017, up from 32 in 2016.

Authorities 'going crazy'

Sarkis Darbinyan, a Russian digital rights lawyer, welcomed the request by Mail.ru as a step in the right direction but said he did not expect to see any immediate changes. "The main idea behind these policies is to create fear amongst internet users. The aim is to create the impression that authorities are following every network user," he told AFP. "Many users are already scared of sharing their own thoughts, they're self-censoring their content, they're deleting what they shared earlier," he added. "That reduces the level of free speech on social networking sites in Russia."

Dmitry, a 21-year-old from the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, is one internet user who has changed his behaviour because of the steady drip of news of arrests. "I've just been deleting a lot of my photos and posts from my wall that have been building up there for the last couple of years," he said of his VKontakte profile.

He told AFP he would refrain from posting any thoughts on politics to the network, keeping these instead for other channels. "Now there's a definite fear  the state's going crazy and you can be arrested just for 'liking' something. I don't want to get caught up in all that, I want to be safe."By Michele Kambas and Renee Maltezou ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras saw his interior minister take up a key post in his leftist Syriza party on Monday, heralding a cabinet reshuffle to shore up waning support after painful bailouts. In a rousing speech, Tsipras ruled out early elections, telling his party faithful that polls would be held as scheduled in the autumn of 2019, but that his government and the Syriza movement needed 'new blood'. The country emerged from the biggest bailout in economic history last week but jaded Greeks found little reason to celebrate after nine years of cuts and job losses.

By Michele Kambas and Renee Maltezou

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras saw his interior minister take up a key post in his leftist Syriza party on Monday, heralding a cabinet reshuffle to shore up waning support after painful bailouts.

In a rousing speech, Tsipras ruled out early elections, telling his party faithful that polls would be held as scheduled in the autumn of 2019, but that his government and the Syriza movement needed 'new blood'.

The country emerged from the biggest bailout in economic history last week but jaded Greeks found little reason to celebrate after nine years of cuts and job losses.

"It will be the mother of all battles," Tsipras declared, referring to the election next year, effectively firing the opening salvo to what appears to be a long-drawn out election campaign.

"To give all these battles victoriously we need to rally together, unity and renewal. Our country, the government and the party, need new blood and more appetite to get to work," he said.

Greece holds parliamentary elections every four years, with the next expected by October 2019 at the latest.

Based on the latest three opinion polls conducted by Greek media, Syriza is trailing the main opposition New Democracy conservatives by between 5.3 and 11.6 percentage points.

Panos Skourletis, the interior minister nominated by Tsipras to become new Secretary of Syriza's Central Committee, is a party stalwart with widespread support at a grassroots level. He was backed by a wide majority of central committee members and was elected for the post late on Monday.

Tsipras was elected in 2015 promising to end years of austerity for Greece, imposed by international creditors. But he was forced to reverse course by the prospect of the country being kicked out of the euro zone and pursue deeper reforms under a third international bailout programme.

"From now on... we no longer have the alibi of implementing a programme which is not ours," Skourletis told the central committee, adding that he saw potential for reform but also challenges for the party in the post-bailout period.

Austerity and political turmoil followed as the economy shrank by a quarter, pushing a third of the population into poverty and forcing the migration of thousands abroad.

The bailout programmes concluded last week. Greece has received 288 billion euros in financial aid since 2010.

Tsipras said the government now had the fiscal space to alleviate some tax burden on business and individuals, but was not specific. "We are ready to proceed with brave interventions," he said.

Government officials have previously said the government may scrap plans for further pension cuts next year.

Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos, who steered the country's exit from the third bailout, was likely to remain in his post, sources said.

Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, instrumental in brokering an accord ending years of dispute with Macedonia over its name, was also expected to stay on board.

(Reporting by Renee Maltezou and Michele Kambas, writing by Michele Kambas; Editing by Alison Williams and Toby Chopra)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.Myanmar has vehemently denied allegations of ethnic cleansing, insisting it was responding to attacks by Rohingya rebels.

Geneva: United Nations (UN) investigators on Monday called for an international probe and prosecution of Myanmar's Army chief and five other top military commanders for genocide against the country's Rohingya minority.

"Myanmars top military generals, including Commander-in-Chief Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing, must be investigated and prosecuted for genocide in the north of Rakhine State, as well as for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan States," a UN-backed fact-finding mission said.

Some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fled northern Rakhine state to Bangladesh after Myanmar launched a brutal crackdown last August on insurgents amid accounts of arson, murder and rape at the hands of soldiers and vigilante mobs in the mainly Buddhist country.

Myanmar has vehemently denied allegations of ethnic cleansing, insisting it was responding to attacks by Rohingya rebels. But in Monday's report, the UN mission insisted the army tactics had been "consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats."

The mission, which was created by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2017, concluded in a report that "there is sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the Tatmadaw (Myanmar Army) chain of command." "The crimes in Rakhine State, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts," the report said.

The investigators named Min Aung Hlaing and five other top military commanders, adding that a longer list of names could be shared with "any competent and credible body pursuing accountability in line with international norms and standards."

Criticism was also directed at Myanmar's civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been the target of global vitriol for a perceived failure to stand up for the stateless minority. The report found that she had "not used her de facto position as head of government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events."

While acknowledging that she and other civilian authorities had little influence on military actions, it said that they "through their acts and omissions... have contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes."

The investigators called on the UN Security Council to refer the Myanmar situation to the International Criminal Court, or for an ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal to be created. They also recommended an arms embargo and "targeted individual sanctions against those who appear to be most responsible."Bowing to pressure, US President Donald Trump on Monday ordered American flags at U.S. buildings lowered to half-staff for Sen. John McCain until his burial on Sunday. Trump's proclamation came just hours after the White House flag had been returned to full-staff, drawing complaints from right and left.

Washington: Bowing to pressure, US president Donald Trump on Monday ordered American flags at U.S. buildings lowered to half-staff for Senator John McCain until his burial on Sunday. Trump's proclamation came just hours after the White House flag had been returned to full-staff, drawing complaints from right and left.

Trump, who had traded bitter criticism with McCain since before the election, declared his order "a mark of respect." At the same time, he said he'd accede to the family's request that he stay away from McCain's funeral services.

"Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain's service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment," Trump said in a statement.

The statement came two days after McCain died at 81 from brain cancer  and after objections at Trump's silence from lawmakers and others, including the American Legion, which demanded that he do more to honor the Vietnam War hero and six-term senator. Trump initially tweeted condolences to McCain's family, but made no mention then of the Arizona Republican with whom he feuded for years.

Even as flags remained at half-staff Monday at the Capitol, the Washington Memorial and elsewhere, the White House flag was raised. That seemed to be the breaking point for a key Trump constituency, veterans.

"On the behalf of The American Legion's two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCain's death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nation's flag be half-staffed through his internment," said a statement to Trump from Denise Rohan, the organization's national commander.

By day's end, Trump had done just that, with no immediate explanation from the White House. But evidence of Trump's feud with McCain remained. The senator's family had requested that Trump stay away from the funeral services, which will culminate with McCain's burial at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Trump said Vice President Mike Pence will address a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol on Friday. Others in the administration  Chief of Staff John Kelly, Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser John Bolton  will represent the administration.

With the proclamation and statement, Trump was conforming to standard protocol when a prominent member of government dies.

McCain was a frequent critic of Trump on everything from his leadership style to his Russia policy. Trump questioned the decorated Navy pilot's Vietnam heroism and chafed at McCain's vote to kill the president's "Obamacare" repeal.

McCain died on Saturday at 81 after a 13-month struggle with brain cancer. Trump tweeted condolences to McCain's family but made no reference to the Arizona senator.

U.S. Flag Code states that flags be lowered "on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress."

After Democratic Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts died in 2009, President Barack Obama ordered flags at the White House flown at half-staff for five days.A drone strike conducted by the US in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province has killed Islamic State leader Abu Sayeed Orakzai and 10 other militants

New York: A US drone strike killed an Islamic State affiliate - Abu Sayeed Orakzai in Afghanistan on Sunday.

Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani's deputy spokesperson announced the death of Orakzai, US Forces-Afghanistan spokesman Lt. Col. Martin O'Donnell was quoted as saying by the Fox News.

"I would also add that the US unrelentingly continues its counterterrorism efforts against Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and other regional and international terrorist groups," O'Donnell said in a statement.

The Islamic State leader was responsible for a number of bombings that claimed lives of hundreds of civilians.

Ten other Islamic State fighters were also killed in the airstrikes, which was launched in the Nangarhar province, near the border with Pakistan.

The air strikes by the US military in Afghanistan has been increased over the past year.By MacDonald Dzirutwe HARARE (Reuters) - Emmerson Mnangagwa urged Zimbabwe to unite behind his presidency on Sunday, as he took the oath of office following a divisive election that U.S. observers said had called the country's democratic credentials into question. The Constitutional Court confirmed Mnangagwa as president on Friday, dismissing a challenge by the man he beat in the July 30 ballot, Nelson Chamisa.

By MacDonald Dzirutwe

HARARE (Reuters) - Emmerson Mnangagwa urged Zimbabwe to unite behind his presidency on Sunday, as he took the oath of office following a divisive election that U.S. observers said had called the country's democratic credentials into question.

The Constitutional Court confirmed Mnangagwa as president on Friday, dismissing a challenge by the man he beat in the July 30 ballot, Nelson Chamisa.

Thousands of Zimbabweans, some bussed in, and foreign leaders including South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa and Paul Kagame of Rwanda gathered at Harare's national stadium for Sunday's swearing-in.

"I exhort us to commit ourselves collectively to develop our motherland... what unites us is greater than what could ever divide us," Mnangagwa told election participants in his inauguration speech.

He also reaffirmed pre-election pledges to revive Zimbabwe's crippled economy and settle outstanding debts with foreign lenders, and reiterated he would call an independent inquiry into a "regrettable and unacceptable" army crackdown following the vote in which six people died.

"Now is the time for us all to unite as a nation and grow our economy," Mnangagwa said.

He took the oath before Chief Justice Luke Malaba who, together with eight other judges, had ruled on Friday against opposition leader Chamisa's petition.

In the election, Mnangagwa just reached the threshold of 50 percent of votes that he needed to avoid a runoff.

NO LONGER A PARIAH?

The ballot was touted as a crucial step towards shedding the pariah reputation Zimbabwe gained under Mnangagwa's predecessor Robert Mugabe, and securing international donor funding.

But hours before Mnangagwa's inauguration, the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute said the country lacked a "tolerant democratic culture" in which political parties were treated equally and citizens allowed to vote freely.

The election was marred by procedural lapses and followed by the crackdown against opposition supporters, which recalled the heavy-handed security tactics that marked Mugabe's 37-year rule.

Those events tarnished promises that Mnangagwa made during campaigning to break with the corruption and mismanagement that become endemic under Mugabe, who was removed in a coup in November.

Mugabe, who has accused Mnangagwa - his former head of intelligence and defence minister - of betrayal, did not attend Sunday's ceremony, though the 94-year-old former leader's daughter Bona did. In keeping with an earlier promise, Chamisa also stayed away.

Citing the Constitutional Court ruling, the U.S. observers also urged all parties "to rely on peaceful expression and to avoid acts or threats of retribution against political rivals."

Washington has maintained travel and financial sanctions on senior ruling party officials, including Mnangagwa, as well as some state-owned firms. Washington's support is key if Zimbabwe is to get any funding from the International Monetary Fund.

The European Union, meanwhile, has progressively removed sanctions and they only remain in place on Mugabe and his wife Grace.

(Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe; editing by John Stonestreet)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.As part of the South Caucasus tour, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Armenia, where the visit was called historic. Germany is Armenia's third largest trade partner after Russia and China. According to the National Statistical Service, in the first half of this year Armenian-German trade increased by 53.6% compared to the same period of last year to $216.6 million. Armenia exports copper, ferromolybdenum and aluminum foil production to Germany, in recent years clothes and other goods also have been exported in small amounts. There are 150 companies with German capital in Armenia, the largest of which is the Zangezur Copper and Molybdenum Combine.

Armenia imports more than 800 types of goods from Germany, including cars, medicines, household items, various equipment. For more than 20 years, Germany has been a donor country for Armenia and contributed to its reforms, as well as the development of hydropower and regional structures. Merkel highly appreciated the peaceful nature of the "velvet" revolution, which took place in the spring and said that Germany "wants to help Armenia in making these bold changes." During the visit, the sides specified areas for deepening cooperation. In particular, they discussed education, research and economics.

Armenian experts drew attention to the fact that Merkel's visit coincided with the new conditions that emerged in the country after the "April" revolution: an active fight against corruption, the creation of more healthy and equal business conditions, the protection of small and medium-sized businesses from the previous heavy taxation burden. These and other circumstances can play a significant role in providing a new impulse in the development of bilateral relations, including attracting German investments in the Armenian economy.

"In political terms, we have a dynamic and reliable partnership with Germany, however, the great economic potential has not been used yet," Armenian Ambassador to Germany Ashot Smbatyan said.

During the Chancellor's visit, foreign policy issues were also discussed. Merkel again advocated the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. They also touched on Armenia's cooperation with the EU, including the implementation of the EU-Armenia Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan said that Armenia does not build foreign policy on the principles of counterbalance and has no intention to make sharp changes in its foreign policy: "We intend to develop relations with Russia within the Eurasian Economic Union and CSTO. At the same time, we intend to develop relations with the EU." In response, the German Chancellor expressed the opinion that Armenia could serve as an example of how a country can cooperate with Russia and the European Union at the same time.

Armenian experts note that against the background of the processes taking place in some post-Soviet republics, namely their aspirations to enter the EU and NATO, the European leader heard what she wanted to hear in Armenia. Given a number of serious issues, including Russia's painful reaction to these trends, the Germans seek to place the issues of possible accession of the former Soviet republics to the EU on hold. Given the existence of certain contradictions between Germany and the United States, Berlin seeks to find the right format for its relations with Russia, avoiding all sorts of problems and complications in every possible way.Apple on Saturday announced that it will be donating Rs 7 crore towards the ongoing relief work in Kerala. To remind you, Apple started accepting Mercy Corps Donations through the App Store and iTunes Store for Kerala floods. Users can donate up to $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, or $200, 100% of which goes to Mercy Corps.

Since the start of floods in Kerala, over 400 have lost their lives, while hundreds are stranded homeless. Apple said that it is heartbroken by the catastrophic flooding in Kerala and this fund is to bring back life in the state and help the displaced and rebuild homes and schools. It is making the donation to Mercy Corps India and the Chief Ministers Distress Relief Fund to support such efforts.

Apple in a statement said:

Were heartbroken by the catastrophic flooding in Kerala. Apple is donating Rs 7 crore to support the life-saving work Mercy Corps India and the Chief Ministers Distress Relief Fund are undertaking to support survivors, help those who have been displaced and rebuild homes and schools.Apple often uses the iTunes Store and App Stores to raise money for donation during major disasters. We have also activated a donation button on iTunes and the App Store so customers who wish to donate to Mercy Corps efforts can do so easily.

Samsung recently said that it will contribute Rs. 1.5 crore to the Kerala Chief Ministers Distress Relief Fund (CMDRF) alongside donating 10,000 bedding sets to the people of the state. It has also deployed its Customer Service Vans and will set up a relief camp in the state of Kerala to help people affected by the floods.

In addition, Xiaomi, LG, Huawei have waived off service charges on repairs and 50% discount on spare parts. However, the deadline for the same is 31st August.

Source 1,Samsung Electronics today has announced the roll out of CJ79 34-inch and CJ89 43-inch curved monitors. The CJ79 features Intels Thunderbolt 3 connectivity and is designed for creative and business audiences. It was introduced at the CES earlier this year, and is compatible with Macs and PCs, the CJ79 features two Thunderbolt 3 ports that transmit display, data, and power at a processing speed of up to 40 Gigabits per second, eight times faster than USB 3.0, and simultaneously charges devices up to 85 watts(W).

The Samsung CJ79 34-inch (34401440) features an ultra-wide curved display with its 21:9 aspect ratio. It supports Picture-by-Picture (PBP) feature, professionals can display two sources and for optimal multi-tasking, the Picture-in-Picture (PIP) feature allows users to resize the second source to up to 25 percent of the screen and position.

It comes with height-adjustable stand and tilt functionality allowing users to customize the positions. The monitor features Quantum Dot technology with across a 125% sRGB color spectrum. The curved VA panel technology produces a 3,000:1 contrast ratio far surpassing conventional monitors and amplifies previously hidden details across the entire screen through pristine shades, deeper blacks, and brighter whites.

The AMD FreeSync synchronizes the refresh rate of graphics cards to reduce image tearing and stutter. As for the CJ89 43 / 49-inch curved monitor, these come with 3840 x 1200 resolution, 32:10 aspect ratio, built-in KVM switch, two USB-Type C ports and built-in stereo speakers.

The Samsungs CJ79 and CJ89 (43 and 49) monitors are currently available in Europe, and will eventually roll out worldwide. These are also available in Hong Kong at HK$9,080 (US$ 1,155 / Rs. 81,065 approx), HK$11,980 (US$ 1,525 / Rs. 1,06,970 approx) and HK$ 13,980 (US$ 1,780 / Rs. 1,24,90 approx), respectively.

Seog-gi Kim, Executive Vice President of Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics said:

Over the years, Samsung has revolutionized the viewing experience for professionals alike. The CJ79 is our latest endeavor in taking curved monitors to the next level that highlights our commitment to innovation. The addition of Thunderbolt 3 connectivity aligns to that vision and connects customers to infinite possibilities.

Jason Ziller, General Manager, Client Connectivity Division at Intel said:Enhancing immune health has become a growing priority for consumers across the globe, and as many as six in ten consumers say that they have become more conscious about... Read MoreThe Permian Basin, which stretches across western Texas and the southeast corner of New Mexico, is the fastest-growing oil-producing region in the world. Output currently stands at around 3.3 million barrels per day (BPD) and has increased an astounding 800,000 BPD over the past year, which represents more than half of the worldwide production increase. That fast-paced growth, however, is about to come to a screeching halt because there is only enough pipeline capacity to move 3.6 million BPD. While the industry is building new pipelines as fast as it can, the current bottleneck could last until late next year.

Because the Permian expects to slow to a crawl in the next year, it's opening the door for the Powder River Basin (PRB) of Wyoming to emerge as the industry's new growth engine. That gives producers with land in the region a leg up on the competition, which is why investors should put this area on their radars.

A monster discovery

Shale giant EOG Resources (NYSE:EOG) has been one of the leading developers of the PRB over the past few years. In May 2015, the company said that it discovered two formations in the PRB -- Turner and Parkman -- that contained high-return drilling locations. However, after increasing its return hurdle rate in 2016, only the Turner formation -- which holds an estimated 200 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) -- met its criteria to deliver a premium drilling return.

That didn't stop the company from continuing to explore its vast acreage position in the region. Because of that, the company was able to uncover two more formations that hold a treasure trove of oil resources. EOG announced these discoveries earlier this month, detailing that the Mowry and Niobrara shale plays held a stunning 1.9 billion BOE of recoverable resources, a more than tenfold increase. That put the PRB right behind the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford shale as the company's third-largest asset.

The new growth engine

Chesapeake Energy (OTC:CHKA.Q) is also excited by what it sees in the PRB. The shale driller pointed out in its second-quarter report that the region was "quickly establishing itself as the growth engine of the company." That's after output in the area surged from an average of 18,000 BOE/d at the end of last year to 32,000 BOE/d by mid-July. Chesapeake expects its PRB production to reach 38,000 BOE/d by the end of this year and for it to more than double in 2019 compared to this year's average.

Driving Chesapeake's growth is its focus on the Turner. However, the company is looking at adding another drilling rig next year to possibly explore some of the region's other formations, including the Teapot, Parkman, Sussex, Niobrara, and Mowry. Given EOG's recent success in those latter two plays, Chesapeake Energy's acreage could also hold a treasure trove of oil riches in the region.

Brimming with optimism

Devon Energy (NYSE:DVN) and Anadarko Petroleum (NYSE:APC), meanwhile, have been scooping up drillable land in the Powder River Basin over the past few years. Devon Energy made a bold bet to buy acreage in the area in late 2015, spending $600 million for 253,000 net acres, which more than doubled its position. In the meantime, Anadarko Petroleum recently announced that it had invested another $100 million to lease land in the PRB, boosting its position to more than 300,000 acres.

While both Devon and Anadarko are still in the early stages of developing their acreage in the PRB, they believe it has the potential to be a meaningful growth driver in the coming years. Devon's production in the region is already on pace to grow more than 20% from last year's average. However, with its plan to double its activity level next year, the PRB could emerge as a third growth engine to complement its positions in the Permian and STACK shale play.

Anadarko, on the other hand, is still in the appraisal phase, where it has experienced success tapping into the Turner formation. Newly drilled wells from that play are delivering more than 2,000 BOE/d, with oil accounting for more than 80% of that output. Consequently, the company appears poised to pour more capital into the region next year, setting it up to potentially drive meaningful growth in the future.

It's the PRB's time to shine

With pipeline constraints expecting to slow the Permian down over the next year, several drillers are turning their sights to the emerging Powder River Basin. Given the strong drilling results companies like EOG, Anadarko, Devon, and Chesapeake have delivered this year, it suggests the region could fuel fast-paced growth for producers that operate in the area. Their ability to grow at a time when many rivals can't has the potential to give them an advantage over the competition, which could then enable these oil stocks to outperform their peers in the next year.The big bet Constellation Brands (NYSE:STZ) made in craft beer looks like it's going awry. Having jumped into the industry with both feet and a $1 billion acquisition of Ballast Point Brewing in 2015, the owner of the U.S. based-rights to sell Corona beer has only seen its craft beer ambitions deflate, and it's even had to take impairment charges on its investment.

Now, hidden beneath the recent announcement of its massive $4 billion investment in Canadian marijuana grower Canopy Growth, industry news site Beer Street Journal says the brewer and distiller has fired as much as 60% of its craft beer sales team and folded the remnants into its imported beer division. Constellation Brands isn't throwing in the towel on craft beer -- it recently announced it was building its 10th Ballast Point brewpub -- but it's clear it sees that its priorities now lie elsewhere.

Craft beer is going flat

The craft beer industry is every bit as divided as the beer industry as a whole. The biggest brewers are suffering from falling sales while the smallest breweries are witnessing tremendous growth. Analysts at market research company IRI say craft brewers producing 10,000 barrels or less per year saw volumes soar 31% over the first six months of 2018, while those producing more than 1 million barrels experienced a 2.5% drop.

Ballast Point Brewing was one of the fastest-growing craft breweries in the U.S. when it was just a small, independent regional beer. After Constellation acquired it however, and took its distribution national, the parent company began identifying "negative beer trends" in the brand's portfolio, leading Constellation management to write down $87 million related to Ballast Point's trademark asset.

But not so with its Modelo and Corona brand families, which it acquired from Anheuser-Busch InBev (NYSE:BUD) in 2013. The imported Mexican beer helped drive beer segment sales 11% higher in the second quarter as depletions, or sales to wholesalers and retailers (an industry proxy for consumer demand), jumped 9% for the period, far outpacing the industry.

Big bets to change course

The craft beer purge is reminiscent of what happened at Anheuser-Busch last year when it scrubbed 90% of its craft beer sales team during a reorganization. It said it was largely giving up making more craft beer acquisitions and would instead attempt to grow organically.

Yet Constellation transferring its sales agenda to a staff that will still be prioritizing Corona -- particularly its two new additions, Premier and Familiar, which have been well received by consumers -- suggests Ballast Point and fellow large craft acquisition Funky Buddha will be relegated to the backseat. While it's smart to lead with your strengths, and Corona is showing substantial potential for future growth, Constellation's management does a lot of swinging for the fences, only to strike out occasionally in the process.

Its latest big bet on marijuana can be seen in a similar light, one the market apparently doesn't approve of since it knocked Constellation's stock down about 10% after the company announced the investment (though as of this writing, "STZ" shares have since gained back some of that lost ground).

Corona remains key

Management's record with acquisitions has been spotty over the years, and it has only really been able to grow to its current level because the Justice Department forced Anheuser-Busch to sell off its Grupo Modelo portfolio. Before that, Constellation was largely a mid-level wine and spirits distributor, though it was also a joint venture partner with Grupo Modelo for U.S. distribution rights of Corona.

The gift of Corona ownership, though, catapulted Constellation to the forefront of the beer industry in a steadily growing segment, which management sought to build on by overpaying for Ballast Point even as the industry was shifting to slower growth.

The mass firings in its craft beer sales team shows Constellation Brand's original craft brew strategy was a mistake. Although it's adjusting to the industry trend of small and local by opening more brewpubs, the brewer is also apparently now counting on Corona to carry the entire beer division forward.The new U.S sanctions against Russia related to alleged Moscow's involvement in former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal's poisoning came into force today.

Washington announced its new anti-Russian sanctions over Moscow's alleged use of chemical weapons in Salisbury on August 8. US State Department spokesperson said earlier that the new package of sanctions against Russia was due to come into effect on Monday August 27 Washington DC time following the official publication in the Federal Register.

The US government announced two rounds of sanctions on August 8.

The new restrictions include a total ban on the supply of electronic devices and other dual-use products to Russia. More tough measures may be taken in November. The US authorities said however that Russia may escape the harsher sanctions if it provides credible guarantees not to use chemical and biological weapons and allows the United Nations and other international organizations to carry out inspections on the countrys soil.

Earlier this month, a senior State Department official said that the US authorities intend to make exceptions to the new sanctions on Russia imposed over the Skripal incident.

According to him, "there are a number of carve-outs that we are making under the sanctions that are required by the act. Not everything that is mandatory under the act we will be proceeding with at this time."

"We will have a waiver for the provision of foreign assistance to Russia and to the Russian people," the official noted.

"We are also waiving sanctions with respect to space flight activities, because of course there are space flight actions in which we are engaged with the Russian Federation upon which we depend in some regards. Those will be free to continue on a case-by-case licensing basis," the State Department official went on to say. "And we are also having a carve-out for safety of commercial passenger aviation because some of these national security sensitive goods in question are ones that perhaps might be important for safety of flight issues, so we are allowing ourselves the ability to continue on a case-by-case basis with those items. And there are a couple of more things like purely commercial end users for civilian end uses will be on a case-by-case basis," he added.

Former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious in Salisbury, UK on March 4. London was quick to accuse Russia of orchestrating the poisoning of the Skripals with a nerve agent. Russian government has repeatedly denied involvement in the Skripals case, pointing at the complete lack of evidence provided by London as well as no cooperation with Moscow in investigating the incident.

However, the State Department claimed that after Washington concluded that Russias alleged involvement in the Skripal attack represented a breach of international statutes, it would impose the new wave of sanctions.

"These measures shall be implemented by the responsible departments and agencies of the United States Government and will remain in place for at least one year and until further notice," according to the note signed by Christopher A. Ford, assistant secretary at the State Department's Bureau Of International Security And Nonproliferation.

Professor of the RANEPA faculty of Finance, Money Circulation and Credit, Yuri Yudenkov, speaking with Vestnik Kavkaza, said that the banking sector and new information technologies would suffer the sanctions' worst effects.

"The Americans are banning us from their dual-purpose electronic devices and components, which can be used in the military sphere. And since all electronic devices can be used in the military sphere, in fact it will include all information technologies," the expert explained.

At the same time, he noted that, being under the sanctions pressure, Russia in will have to reorient to the Asian market.

"We produce 20 times less microcircuitry than Malaysia. We will have to look for new sources somewhere in Southeast Asia and the East," Professor Yudenkov said.

The vice-rector of the Academy of Labour and Social Relations Alexander Safonov noted that now the U.S. only extends the old sanctions aimed at limiting the supply of technologies related to the military-industrial complex. "Today's sanctions relate to a wider range of dual-purpose goods, mostly related to modern navigation systems, bionics and calculations. Of course, it will complicate the process of applying modern technologies, but it will mostly affect the military-industrial complex, which will have to search for detours, using intelligence assistance or gaining access to dual-purpose technologies, purchasing it from third countries - or developing Russian counterparts," he said.

"The new sanctions will have no special effect on the Russian economy. The problem of GDP growth is connected with completely different problems. First of all, with a low level of domestic consumption of citizens. The export of Russian weapons now amounts to about 17 billion rubles, and the main share comes from civil-use products. In addition, our main commodity turnover of civilian products is contacted with Japan, South Korea, China, Europe, but not the United States," Alexander Safonov concluded.Iranian Minister of Defense Amir Hatami said that Iran can assist Syria in developing military equipment alongside efforts for the reconstruction process in the war-stricken country.

Irans private sector has high enough capacities to help the Syrian people and government in the reconstruction process, Hatami said, speaking at a press conference in Damascus following a meeting with his Syrian counterpart General Ali Abdullah Ayyoub.

Hatami added that the Islamic Republic also possesses a strong defense power and can help Syria to develop military equipment,"

The Iranian minister condemned any foreign intervention in the internal affairs of Syria and the region, stressing the need for cooperation in Syrias reconstruction, particularly by making use of the private sector capacities.

The Syrian minister of defense, for his part, thanked the efforts of Iranian advisers in helping Syrian nation, government and Armed Forces to fight against terrorist groups, adding the planned global war launched against the Syrian people and government has been thwarted with the help of the Resistance Front and Irans effective role in eradicating terrorism in Syria.

General Ayyoub maintained that Syria has now been cleansed from terrorism and the Syrian Army and Armed Forces will soon take control over Idlib.

The Islamic Republic of Iran and the Syrian Arab Republic have highly strategic relations that are unbreakable and unwavering, Mehr news agency cited Ayyoub as saying.Europe needs to launch a new dialogue on cybersecurity, chemical weapons and a number of other security issues with Russia, French President Emmanuel Macron said today during his speech to French ambassadors.

Macron revealed a new push for the European defense project, adding that continent's security shouldn't depend on the US. "Europe can no longer rely on the United States for its security. It is up to us to guarantee European security," he said in a major speech to relaunch his diplomatic agenda.

"We need a strategic partnership with Russia and Turkey," Macron said, explaining that "we are talking about important countries that need to be" attached" to Europe."

At the same time, the French president noted the first results of the joint Russia-French mechanism on the Syrian settlement.

"The mechanism of coordination with Russia, created in St. Petersburg, has produced first results, in particular in the humanitarian sphere," Macron told ambassadors in Paris, as broadcast by his official Twitter account.News

editor's pick centerpiece

Westover Park residents worried about flood plans

kelseywalling / KELSEY WALLING/The Daily News Westover Park residents George Turski, from left, Joe Hans and Diane Turski discuss the plans for this drainage area behind their neighborhood off Maple Leaf Drive in League City on Friday, Aug. 24, 2018. kelseywalling / KELSEY WALLING/The Daily News photos George Turski points to where the past retention pond ended behind Westover Park in League City on Friday, Aug. 24, 2018. kelseywalling / KELSEY WALLING/The Daily News LEFT: Diane Turski, center, talks about her concerns regarding drainage from the Westwood neighborhood with Joe Hans, left, as George Turski listens in Westover Park in League City on Friday, Aug. 24, 2018. kelseywalling / KELSEY WALLING/The Daily News photos George Turski uses maps to help visualize his concerns regarding drainage from the Westwood neighborhood in League City on Friday, Aug. 24, 2018. kelseywalling / KELSEY WALLING/The Daily News George Turski holds a map of the Westwood and Westover Park neighborhoods that surround Maple Leaf Drive in League City on Friday, Aug. 24, 2018. Future development is planned for the southwest side of Maple Leaf Drive. kelseywalling / KELSEY WALLING/The Daily News Drainage feeds into a lake located near Maple Leaf Drive in League City on Friday, Aug. 24, 2018.

LEAGUE CITY

Joseph Hans was at home in the Westover Park subdivision during Hurricane Harvey when two retention ponds in the neighboring Westwood development overflowed and sent water pouring across Maple Leaf Drive, he said.

The water eventually invaded several houses in the neighborhood, said Diane Turski, another resident of the subdivision.

More than a year after Hurricane Harvey dropped more than 50 inches of rain on parts of Galveston County, the two now join a group of residents in the subdivision asking questions about what happened and what the city can do to alleviate flooding as development comes to the southwestern part of the city.

Ideally, wed like to get an engineering study that would show that overflow from that development wont affect Westover Park during a 500-year event, Turski said.

A 100-year storm has a 1 percent probability of happening in any given year, while a 1,000-year storm has a 0.1 percent probability of happening in a given year, officials with the National Weather Service in League City said.

Meanwhile, city officials argue they dont have documented proof that homes actually flooded in the subdivision and that the development must include plans to detain a 100-year flood, according to a letter provided to The Daily News.

The developer of Westwood could not be reached for comment by deadline Friday.

Both Westwood and Westover Park are developments in the southwestern part of League City, just north of a large swath of undeveloped land.

Those developments would be built to new regulations, said George Turski, Diane Turskis husband.

Were worried it will all drain more quickly onto Westover Park, he said.

After Hurricane Harvey, some residents in the subdivision formed a group to contact the city about preventing future flooding, but the city hasnt given clear answers, Diane Turski said.

I dont believe I have a record of a home flooding in Westover during Harvey, City Engineer Christopher Sims said to the group in an Aug. 21 letter.

League City requires developments to detain a 100-year storm, but Harvey was much more severe, Sims said.

I dont believe we will ever be able to prevent flooding in these types of situations, Sims said.

The Westwood development includes plans to build two more retention ponds in addition to the two already in existence, but that wont be enough, Diane Turski said.

The development still has about five sections until its complete, and will continue to add retention ponds or modify existing ponds when each of those are finished, Sims said.

They always talk about being able to withstand a 100-year flooding event, George Turski said. But last year alone, we had two 500-year floods. All of the canals are going to fail that are built to 100-year floods.

City officials are looking at options with the Dickinson Bayou and Clear Creek watersheds to detain more water or get it out to Galveston Bay more quickly, thus reducing flooding, Sims said.A man attending a music festival died in Anaklia on August 24 night.

Georgia's Ministry of Internal Affairs has started an investigation but did not reveal possible reasons behind his death while awaiting autopsy results.

Another festival attendee was also transported to Zugdidi hospital.

According to the manager of the hospital, the girl had been intoxicated by a undefined substance and feels better now.

In addition, police have arrested 4 people for drug trafficking on the territory of the festival. Two of them are citizens of Georgia and the other two are citizens of Iran.

They were found to be in possession of various drugs which are now being analysed, Agenda,ge reported.

The Echowaves festival in the coastal town of Anaklia started on August 23 and ended on August 26.

The festival organizers have called on attendees to take care of their health, as well as of their friends and to timely appeal to medical aid groups in case of illness.Iran expects the remaining partners in its nuclear agreement to act quickly to preserve it, the country's President Hassan Rouhani said today in a phone call to French President Emmanuel Macron, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported.

Iran has acted upon all its promises in the nuclear agreement and, with attention to the one-sided withdrawal of America ...expects the remaining partners to operate their programs more quickly and transparently, Rouhani was cited as saying.Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN! Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2021.Hikurangi Cannabis are now the first company in New Zealand to receive a legal cannabis licence from the Ministry of Health. This licence allows them to legally cultivate and grow cannabis plants for medicinal use.

This is good news not only because it's a progressive step in the right direction for New Zealand, but will create a huge amount of jobs for the community surrounding Hikurangi Cannabis. Hikurangi Cannabis is located near a small and impoverished East Coast town called Ruatoria, so this is a great opportunity for the area.

Over 1500 families and New Zealanders have invested around 2.5 million dollars into this, which has funded the beginning of the project.

Co-founder, Manu Caddie, is stoked to finally be able to execute a pharmaceutical industry in the Ruatoria area, with all the benefits in tow.Jean and Tod Manspeaker inherited a working farm in 2006 and decided to plant a couple acres of grapes, digging a bit into a passion grown from visiting the Finger Lakes and other wine regions during their marriage.

Jean Manspeaker: 'I feel like I am selling my baby and I want the person who takes over to love it as much as I have.'

That led to the opening of Briar Valley Vineyard & Winery in Bedford, a couple hours west of the state's capitol, and began to build their clientele. As far out in the country as their business is located, they have tended to get overlooked by many of the state's consumers.

But word has been spreading about the quality of dry wines that Jean has been making, thanks to the fruit that Tod has been cultivating.

So that makes writing that the winery is up for sale even more difficult, as much for Jean and Tod as for those who have followed their progress.

"I feel like I am selling my baby and I want the person who takes over to love it as much as I have," Jean said in a recent email. But it is time, she said, to sell the business and step away from it.

Here's a story that the Pa. Winery Association published on her, as part of its Meet the Winemakers series. Here's a link to the real estate listing.

Sent some questions about the winery, she returned these responses.

1, What drew you two into opening the winery in the first place?

A, Upon reflection, there were a couple of things that probably led to our wanting to start a winery. When I was a kid, my grandparents were second generation German immigrants. Having a vineyard was in their blood. My gents planted a small vineyard on a steep sloped farm around a dam. When I was a kid, I followed my grandfather around as he pruned and cared for his vineyard. He sold his grapes for use in jams, juice and home wine production. I loved it, but as a child never imagined I would want a vineyard. Years later, when Tod and I visited the Finger Lakes on a regular basis, I once again fell in love with the vineyards. My Dad had raised grapes and made homemade wine, but once again, I never considered that a viable career. Having been raised on a dairy farm, I knew how much work and heart ache went into agriculture of any kind and wanted something less weather and economy dependent. But I loved the vineyards and on one visit to the Finger Lakes, I made that terrible statement, "Gee Tod, I think we can do this." Tod made the mistake of saying let's go for it and the rest is history. We knew we could not have a vineyard without a winery and so the adventure began.

2, What have been a couple of the biggest changes from the first year to the 14th?

A, We knew that in order to make award-winning wine, we had to have a great vineyard. Our mission statement from the beginning was, "It's all about the wine." So we did our homework.

3, Just the basics: how many acres planted, grapes planted, size of the winery and the number of wines? What is the ratio of sweet to dry that you sell?

A, We read everything we could get our hands on about grapes that would grow well in our climate. As we were the only vineyard in Bedford County and the surrounding area, we were truly pioneers. We planted what we now refer to as our learning vineyard, a 3-acre site on a southerly slope with 12 foot deer fencing. We initially started with Chardonnay, Riesling, a trial plot of Gewurztraminer, Lemberger and Cab Franc. Since that original planting, we have learned that these are good varieties for our area. As a result, we have kept all but the Gewurztraminer in our Stein Road vineyard. We did a great job with our Gewurztraminer. In fact, we won the Governor's Cup with it, but it is a hard sell in our area. We did a great job with Gewurztraminer, but what is difficult to pronounce and is not on the popularity screen is difficult to sell. I am happy to see other winery's beginning to make headway with it ... In 2014 when we had the -6 degree temp drop in March, the vines were coming awake. We lost half of our Gewurtz and rather than replant it, we ripped it out and planted more Riesling and Lemberger.

In the beginning we were told by the viticulturist that we should not plant vinifera because it wouldn't do well here. We decided to plant all vinifera and to do all dry wines. We went against the norm. It has been an uphill battle, but little by little we established our brand. We now have case club members from Napa who like the more European-style that we produce. Also, we have gone against the norm and planted Malbec, which is bearing its first crop this year. Fourteen years ago, we would have been too afraid to take that chance. We also grow Petit Verdot along with Merlot. We make a true Bordeaux style blend which is one of our bestselling wines. In 2011, we planted our Stein Road vineyard. It is 10 acres. In the beginning, we had to buy grapes to supplement what we could produce. Now we are all estate grown wines. Our production is small, but that was also part of our mission --to remain small and produce excellent wines. It's all about the wine.

We have 10 acres planted now with room to plant more. We grow Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Riesling, Lemberger, Malbec, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Cab Franc. We have a 7200 square-foot production facility and produce around 1000-2000 cs annually. We could easily produce 5000-7500 cs. We do all dry wines with the exception of a semi-dry Riesling this year for the first time. Occasionally, I will make a late harvest Riesling. Our wines consist of Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Gris, Rose, Lemberger, Merlot, Cab Franc and our red blend.

4, Where do you feel like you have the winery positioned at this point in terms of a following, the quality of the wines and profile?

A, We have a strong following from Pittsburgh, Washington and northern Virginia. I feel we have brand recognition in those areas. We are located 2 miles from the Omni Bedford Springs Resort. Many of their guests have become loyal clients. The resort handles our wine which is a good introduction and encourages their guests to visit our Tasting Room. Last year our Cab Franc was named one of the top ten wines in PA at the Sommelier judgment event held in Philadelphia. Our wines are handled by several of the top restaurants in Pittsburgh. I believe, at this point we are positioned to grow and become more widely known. Our wines have also been served at the United States State Department for the 75Th anniversary of the Blair House.

5, And how would you like to see it grow and evolve?

A, I would love to see someone take our winery to the next level. I would love to see it grow but remain true to our mission, ideals and values. We have done the hard work of getting it started and growing it within our region. Now it is time for someone else to take it to the next level. Someone with a strong marketing background and a love of elegant, classic vinifera varieties, who is passionate about what they do. Someone with the drive to make it happen and to do it well. Someone to carry our mission forward.

There are 10 acres of vines planted at Briar Valley in Bedford, Pennsylvania, a couple hours west of Harrisburg and about a 30-minute drive east from the Flight 93 National Memorial.

6, Most gratifying part of owning/running a winery?

A, The most gratifying part of owning a winery is to see the end result of the passion and hard work we have put into producing an award-winning wine. It is a joy to have people appreciate and want to share our wines with their friends and families. Also, when we are traveling further away from home and someone says, Oh, I've heard about your wines and would love to try them."

7, Most difficult part of owning/running a winery?

A, The most difficult part of owning a winery is depending on Mother Nature to work with us to produce a great vintage. As for the winery, it takes expertise in marketing to expand our territory. It is time for someone else to take on that role as we want to retire. Tod and I have done most of the hands on work to make this winery a success and it now needs someone else's expertise to grow it.Russia's government has made virtually all decisions concerning the sanctioned Russian companies, the country's Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak said.

"Today, all necessary decisions with respect to all companies affected by restrictive measures have been made," he told RBC.

Kozak stressed that the government supports Russian businesses and takes measures to minimize the effects of the administrative barriers created by sanctions. Assistance is provided, first and foremost, by "maintaining demand for the companies products in the domestic market, increasing access to financial resources for them, because sanctions imply primarily restricting access to financial resources in Western markets," he recalled.

On April 6, the US authorities announced sanctions against a number of Russian officials, businesspeople and companies. Among the sanctioned entities were several companies controlled by Oleg Deripaska. These include Agro-Holding Kuban, EuroSibEnergo, Russian Machines, GAZ Group, B-Finance, Basic Element and En+.

The sanctions imply that these companies assets in the US are frozen. They also provide for a ban for US citizens to do business with them. The restrictive measures also affected other businessmen and companies.Russia can top a soviet coal production record of 420 million tonnes in 2018, while investments may amount to 130 billion rubles a year, Russia's Energy Minister Alexander Novak said, speaking at a meeting with government officials and top managers of energy companies.

The energy minister said that Russia is increasing its coal production, which this year should exceed 420 million tonnes and surpass Soviet-era production levels, and expects global demand to remain strong in the next decade.

"The threshold of 420 mln tonnes will be exceeded this year. We will most likely exceed the highest level of Soviet times mining reached in 1988. Washing volumes are also expected to grow to 195 mln tonnes, up 28%. Investments will reach 130 bln rubles per year ($1.9 bln) and tax deductions will be above 100 bln rubles ($1.5 bln)," the minister said, adding that coal mining in Russia surged 15.5% to 410 mln tonnes from 2012 to 2017.

"Production targets set for 2030 have already been achieved at present. If comparing with the updated program of 2014, we are three years ahead, and revision is required for the program and for the task of facilities commissioning, quality of coal supplied, and the share of export in supplies," Novak noted.

The minister added that exports can total more than 200 million tonnes in 2018.

Novak said that exports to Europe have limited chances to rise but Eastern exports can double by 2025, and the market share can rise to almost 20% from 9.3%.

According to him, Russias coal exports to Asia are seen at around 100 million tonnes this year, Reuters reported.

The executive vice-president of NewTech Services, professor of the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas, Valery Bessel, speaking to Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that coal is an important part of the raw materials produced in Russia. "Although coal accounts for about 8% in the structure of Russian energy consumption (120 million tons in oil equivalent), we still export a lot of coal," he said in the first place..

"China is located next to us, which accounts for half of the world's coal consumption, 67% of China's energy consumption is coal, and the republic buys it from all its neighbors. In addition, it should be noted that we are likely to be able to produce coal longer than oil," Valery Bessel assured.

"In addition to China, we sell coal to India, Japan, South Korea. At the same time, it should be noted that if in the oil and gas market we are represented very well, then the situation on the coal market is different. Once we had one of the world's most powerful production bases, and it would be right to restore it now,as mining and processing of coal could become one of the locomotives for the development of our economy," the expert stressed.

A leading analyst of the National Energy Security Fund, a lecturer at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Igor Yushkov, also stressed that in connection with the significant global consumption of coal, Russia can confidently increase its production. "Russia has large coal reserves, we are second only to the United States with 17.6% of the world's reserves. Our production is around 185 million tons in oil equivalent per year. We are not leaders in extraction - China, Australia, India and Indonesia produce more coal, just like the U.S., Poland and Kazakhstan. And look, the main critics of coal in Europe are those countries that do not have their own coal reserves," he said.

"Russia consumes a significant share of its coal, which is mainly used for power generation. The prospects for our coal industry are quite interesting, but we will need to modernize our mines, make them safer and more technological. We also need lower tariffs for transportation by rail. If the government takes measures to stimulate these tariffs, then the coal industry situation will be rather good," Igor Yushkov concluded.Microsofts workplace app Teams receives new update News oi-Sandeep Sarkar The app gets new features such as Skype integration, accommodation for over 250 participants in meetings and others.

Microsoft has recently announced a new update for its workplace app "Teams". The new update introduces a bunch of new features for the workplace app. With the latest update, the app gets new features such as Skype integration, accommodation for over 250 participants in meetings and others.

James Skay, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Intelligent Communications Product Marketing Group took it to the company's official blog post to mention that, "Teams would now support cloud-based meeting recording, "meeting lobby" for dial-in callers to qualify before they join the meetings and dial-in fallback support to ensure joining a meeting even in the event of network issues," James Skay, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Intelligent Communications Product Marketing Group, Microsoft wrote in a blog post on Friday.

The latest update also brings some additional features such as call queues, delegate support, auto-attendant, group call forwarding, out-of-office support, delete support, and do-not-disturb breakthrough. The workplace app as also got a feature called 'Direct Routing'. This feature will provide the users with additional choices for dial tone in the Microsoft Teams.

Skay also added that"Not every organization has dedicated IT resources to manage their transition to Teams. In order to assist these customers, we will begin offering them Microsoft-driven automated upgrades to Teams".

Microsoft is majorly focusing on making workplace operations smoother with the addition of the new features and enhancements to the devices ecosystem for "Teams". Also, the addition of the updated Skype Room Systems, USB support, an app for Surface Hub in the Microsoft Store assures that the working on the updated 'Teams' apps will give a smooth working experience.

The post further said that "We will communicate directly with customers regarding their upgrade options through email and in the Office 365 Message Center."

Apart from the above-mentioned features, the 'Teams' app will also receive cloud video interop services in order to support 'Teams' meetings with the already existing video teleconferencing (VTC) systems. It is expected that this feature will be available for the 'Teams' users by later this year.

Best Mobiles in India'Rootless' Pixel Launcher is now available for download on Play Store News oi-Sandeep Sarkar The Rootless Launcher is compatible with all the smartphones running on Android 5.0 or above.

The ''Rootless Pixel launcher is among the popular stock Android launcher apps, has finally made its way to the Google Play Store. The stock Android launcher app earlier received updates from the GitHub page. Now, the app has been listed on the Play Store by the name of 'Rootless Launcher'.

The 'Rootless Launcher' is available to download for free and at the moment is based on Android Oreo. In terms of features and functionalities, the Rootless Launcher brings functionalities including the support for adaptive icon packs, Pixel Launcher's bottom search bar, icon shape and wallpapers-based theme selection among others.

However, there is a small catch. If the users want to run the latest 'Rootless Launcher' on their non-Pixel smartphones, then they will need to first download the 'Rootless Pixel Bridge' companion app. Upon downloading the app, it will unlock the complete set of features which comes along with the Pixel launcher. Also, after downloading the companion app, the launcher will get additional features like the Google feed by simply swapping left on the home screen. Users will also receive At A Glance information about weather, traffic, and events.

To keep it simple, the 'Rootless Pixel Launcher' is nothing but a basic stock Pixel launcher which comes with some additional set of features and also some omissions. As far as the UI of the Rootless Launcher is concerned, it borrows the UI from the Pixel launcher with the similar home screen layout and the ability to open the app tray by simply swiping up. The launcher also shows the 'app suggestions' list at the top.

The Rootless Launcher is compatible with all the smartphones running on Android 5.0 or above. Even as the Rootless Launcher is presently based in the Android Oreo, the Pixel Bridge's app listing page on APKMirror suggests otherwise. The app's listing page suggests that the Pixel Bridge app will get a support for gesture navigation along with the Overview page.

Interested users can download the 'Rootless Launcher' app from Google Play Store to get a Pixel-like UI on the non-Pixel devices, whereas, the companion Rootless Pixel Bridge app can be downloaded from the APKmirror.

Image Source

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Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow NotificationsNotch-display

The Realme 2 will have a display with a notch design offering a massive 88.9% screen to body ratio for an immersive smartphone experience. The device is expected to come equipped with a 6.2-inch display with a 19:9 aspect ratio. Similarly, the smartphone is speculated to feature an IPS LCD panel with FHD+ resolution.

Dual-camera

The Realme 2 will have a dual camera setup. According to rumours, the phone is expected to come with a 13 MP primary sensor and a 2 MP depth sensor to offer bokeh effect. Regarding video recording capability, the Realme 2 is expected to provide at least 1080p video recording and other exciting camera features like HDR, Depth mode, Panorama, and manual mode to tweak with the camera settings.

Big-battery

Compared to the Realme 1, the Realme 2 will offer a bigger 4230 mAh battery with supposed fast charging capability. The bigger battery is expected to last more than one day of usage on a single charge.

Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC

The Realme 1 was powered by the MediaTek Helio P60 SoC, whereas the Realme 2 will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. As of now, there is no information about the chipset that powers the Realme 2. However, as the company has confirmed that the Realme 2 will support dual VoLTE, the smartphone is likely to feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 series chipset.

Fingerprint sensor

The Realme 1 was slightly criticised as the smartphone did not fingerprint sensor. The Realme 2 will have a fingerprint sensor on the back of the smartphone along with Face Unlock using the front-facing camera.

Price

Last but not the least, the Realme 2 is expected to retain in India for less than Rs 10,000. However, do note that the high-end variant with more RAM and storage is expected to cost more than Rs 10,000.

Conclusion

Considering all these features combined with the less than Rs 10,000 price range, the Realme 2 seems like a great smartphone with an impressive set of features.Man detained with 4200 stolen Xiaomi smartphones worth Rs. 87 lakhs News oi-Abhinaya Prabhu Xiaomi smartphones have been stolen in India.

In the past, we have come across cases where people have been detained for stealing iPhones and other Apple products from stores and warehouses. Now, in India, a man has been arrested for stealing Xiaomi smartphones worth Rs. 87 lakhs. This incident has happened in New Delhi and the police are investigating the matter.

Theft of Xiaomi smartphones

According to media reports, a man has been detained in Gurugram on the basis of allegations that he stole nearly 4200 units of Xiaomi smartphones from the company's warehouse. From the initial investigation, it is claimed that the overall worth of the stolen Xiaomi phones is around Rs. 87 lakhs. There is no word regarding the exact models those were stolen from the Xiaomi warehouse.

According to a report by The Economic Times, Ramesh from Bihar has been detained for stealing the Xiaomi smartphones. The report states that three of his accomplices helped him break into the company's warehouse in Gurugram in May. The thieves have stolen phones and other appliances such as washing machines and more. However, it has to be noted that Xiaomi hasn't launched any washing machine in the country as yet.

The report further cites Shamsher Singh, ACP of Crime claiming to have recovered almost all the missing units. More details regarding the burglary might be revealed later after a detailed investigation.

Why Xiaomi smartphones?

The popularity of Xiaomi smartphones could be one of the reasons for the theft. Currently, Xiaomi is the topmost smartphone brand in the country alongside Samsung. Both the companies have an equal market share in the Indian smartphone arena. Especially, the Redmi smartphones are quite popular.

Xiaomi smartphones are available starting Rs. 5,999 and go up to Rs. 32,999. These smartphones are quite popular that they end up going out of stock after every flash sale in just a matter of a few seconds. And, the offline availability of these smartphones come at an additional cost of Rs. 500 than the online pricing. Eventually, this could have been a prime reason for the theft of the Xiaomi smartphones. However, further investigation by the police might bring more details to light.

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Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow NotificationsHMD Global acquires Nokia PureView trademark from Microsoft News oi-Abhinaya Prabhu Upcoming Nokia smartphones might use PureView cameras.

HMD Global, the licensee with the rights to make and sell Nokia smartphones has now acquired the PureView Trademark from Microsoft. PureView owned by Nokia was acquired by Microsoft as a part of the deal in 2014. With the recent development, HMD is expected to use the PureView camera in the upcoming Nokia smartphones.

Going by the trademark listing on EUIPO website, the PureView trademark was filed in January 2012. Now, a Nokiamob report claims that HMD Global has acquired the rights from Microsoft. Notably, the Nokia 808 PureView launched in 2013 is the first one to feature the PureView camera. It was later used by the Windows Phone-powered smartphones such as Lumia 920, Lumia 1020 and Lumia 1520.

Android smartphones with PureView camera

As HMD Global owns the rights of the PureView brand now, we can expect the company to launch Android smartphones with this technology sometime soon. However, Nokia has already collaborated with Carl Zeiss to implement the high-end Zeiss optics on the Nokia smartphones. And, the Nokia 8 flagship smartphone of last year was the first smartphone to be launched by HMD with the Zeiss optics. Eventually, there persists a confusion regarding which one the Finnish company might consider using in its upcoming models.

Success of PureView brand

The last smartphone to be launched with the PureView camera is the Lumia 950. Notably, the Nokia 808 PureView and Lumia 1020 smartphones made the brand strong enough to ensure that there is no other camera prowess in the smartphone arena from rival manufacturers such as Sony, Samsung and HTC.

HMD Global is known for playing the nostalgia game pretty well. It has brought success to the Nokia 3310 and new Nokia 8110 4G. So, there is a fair chance for the company to release smartphones with this camera capability. Having said that, we need to wait for a considerable time to know what else the company has to roll out.

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Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow NotificationsApple donates Rs. 7 crore for Kerala flood relief; accepts donations via iTunes and Apple.com News oi-Karan Apple has donated Rs 7 crore to help the victims of Kerala flood. The company has also opened portals on Apple.com and iTunes so that people can donate something for the flood victims.

Cupertino based tech giant Apple on August 26 announced that it is making a donation to help the victims of Kerala flood. The news has been reported by Gulf News, along with its own donation, the brand is also opening up a donation portal so that users can also make their donations via Apple.com and iTunes.

In an announcement, Apple said it is "devastated" by the flooding in Kerala and that it needs to help "survivors and help the individuals who have been uprooted." Apple itself is making an Rs7 crore approx $1 million donations to Mercy Corps India and the Chief Minister's Distress Relief Fund to help such endeavours.

Moreover, the company has added the donation buttons to the Apple.com homepage and to iTunes. This initiative is to encourage users to make some donation to the relief efforts. Apple users are open to donating starting at $5 and it goes like $10, $25, $50, $100, or $200 tiers. According to Apple the 100 percent of your donation amount will be directly going to the Mercy Corps.

"We're heartbroken by the catastrophic flooding in Kerala. Apple is donating Rs7 crore [Rs70 million] to support the life-saving work Mercy Corps India and the Chief Minister's Distress Relief Fund are undertaking to support survivors, help those who have been displaced and rebuild homes and schools.

We have also activated a donation button on iTunes and the App Store so customers who wish to donate to Mercy Corps' efforts can do so easily," Apple said in a statement.

This is not the first time Apple is making a donation for the natural disaster relief efforts. Even last year, the company has donated $2million to Hurricane Harvey relief efforts. The company has also donated a lot of time for the Southern California areas which are affected by the wildfires.

Kerala was hit by heavy rains that caused extraordinary flooding, dislodging more than 500,000 individuals and more than 200 are killed in this natural phenomena. The flooding is said to be the worst floods in a century.

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Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow NotificationsRussian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova commented on the new U.S. sanctions on Russia over the Skripal case.

According to her, exceptions in the new American sanctions against Moscow just confirm the hypocrisy and bias of Washingtons actions.

"All the articulated charges are ephemeral, but the restrictions launched today are quite real, although they are similar to the operating ones in many aspects,"she stressed. "Among them are the end of technical support programs, the prohibition of the sale of military products to Russia, the end of financing Russian military programs, the suspension of state credits and financial help granted to us and the suspension of the issuance of licenses by the US Department of Commerce for exporting dual-use goods and technologies for Russian companies with public ownership and public financing," the diplomat noted.

"The stipulated exceptions from the restriction regime - deliveries under space programs or in the sphere of civil aviation flights just confirm the hypocrisy and bias of the US authorities actions," Zakharova stressed.

"We consider Washingtons decision to be part of a deliberate policy aimed at diluting the international mechanism of arms control and non-proliferation, including the chemical weapons ban," Zakharova said. "Unlike the United States, Russia remains committed to its obligations - we completely eliminated our chemical weapons and it has been properly verified, particularly by U.S. experts," she stressed.

"By taking steps of this kind, Washington continues obstructing the opportunities for dialogue on the current problems in the multilateral and bilateral formats," she pointed out. "It is highly regrettable the US political elite cannot assimilate the very simple truth that sanctions will not force Russia to swerve from the path of resolute defense of its national interests," Zakharova noted. "Quite naturally, such steps on the part of Washington do not facilitate a respectful and civilized bilateral dialogue and collaboration that would be appropriate for our two powers," the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman concluded.U.S. Navy Statements on Passing of Sen. John McCain

Navy News Service

Story Number: NNS180825-01

Release Date: 8/25/2018 10:36:00 PM

From the Office of the Navy Chief of Information

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson and the commanding officer of USS John S. McCain (DDG 56), Cmdr. Micah Murphy, released statements Aug. 25 on the death of Senator and Navy veteran John S. McCain III who died Aug. 25 at age 81.

Statement by Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer:

"Today, the Navy and Marine Corps team lost a friend and one of our own when Senator John McCain passed.

"From the Naval Academy to flight school and throughout his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, McCain displayed unfailing honor and duty to country. If that was the end of his service, he would still be renowned as a hero, but McCain's desire to serve didn't stop when his uniform came off. He continued to serve as a representative and senator from Arizona. Throughout his life, McCain never ceased serving our nation or fighting for what he believed.

"My heartfelt condolences go out to the McCain family, their friends and loved ones. Everyone on the Navy and Marine Corps team shares this loss with all who had the fortune of knowing Sen. John McCain."

Statement by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson:

"The nation has lost a great patriot and warrior. Whenever we were in a tough spot, we knew Sen. McCain would be on our side with his characteristic toughness and integrity. The U.S. Navy mourns the loss of a true shipmate. Our prayers go with him and to his family, that they find consolation. May Sen. John McCain, who never flinched from a worthy fight, rest in a well-deserved peace."

Statement by USS John S. McCain (DDG 56) commanding officer Cmdr. Micah Murphy:

"On behalf of the crew of USS John S. McCain, I offer our support and prayers to the McCain family, our gratitude to the senator for his years of service to our nation, and a heartfelt traditional Navy sendoff: 'Fair winds and following seas.' It is an honor to have our mighty warship carry on your name and continue your legacy."

DDG-56's name honors three generations of dedicated service to the Navy and nation. Sen. McCain's father, Adm. John S. McCain, Jr. served as U.S. Pacific Command commander. Sen. McCain's grandfather, Adm. John S. McCain was a distinguished World War II carrier task force commander.

Sen. McCain continued this proud legacy as a naval aviator during the Vietnam War. As a prisoner of war, he endured more than five years of captivity, representing America honorably and selflessly.

After retiring from the Navy, he continued national service in Congress, first as a representative and later as a senator from Arizona. Sen. McCain took an active interest in the destroyer and its crew, including a visit to the ship during a port visit to Cam Ranh International Port in Vietnam on June 2, 2017. The ship had visited ports in Vietnam several times before over the years in honor of the McCain legacy.

Editor's note: This article was updated Aug. 26, 2018, to include Murphy's statement and background about DDG-56's namesakes.

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Ethiopia's Somali Region Hopes New Leader Will Bring Peace

By Salem Solomon, Sahra Abdi Ahmed August 25, 2018

Earlier this month, Mustafa Omer lived in exile. Now, he's the acting president of Ethiopia's Somali region and one of the country's most powerful people.

The dramatic turnaround comes less than three weeks after federal forces stormed the regional capital, Jijiga, and forced the previous regional president, Abdi Mohamoud Omar, also known as Abdi Illey, to step down.

With no political experience and no mandate from the 4.5 million people he will lead, Mustafa faces formidable challenges addressing ethnic tensions and balancing Somali peoples' desire for self-determination with their role within Ethiopia's federalist government.

But Mustafa's popular rhetoric and personal history have raised hopes that he's the right person to lead the Somali region through a period of challenging transition.

Focus on human rights

Mustafa, an iconic activist, told VOA's Somali service that he will prioritize human rights in his new role.

"Since 1954, when the region came under Ethiopian rule, there was no democracy and human rights," Mustafa said.

"Over 27 years, people in the region were living under harsh crimes against humanity, the most painful ones committed in the past 10 years, so we will restore human rights."

Mustafa added that he plans to create space for dissenting voices critical of his administration.

'A lot of things to clean up'

"Expectations are genuinely high. People feel that he's the right man for the job at this time," Juweria Ali, a doctoral candidate in Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster in London, told VOA.

"There's a lot of things to clean up," Juweria added.

In the Abdi era, violence, displacement and imprisonment touched many Somali people's lives.

For 10 years, Abdi ruled the Somali region as a warlord, punishing critics with impunity and overseeing the Liyu police, a special force that human rights groups say committed atrocities and agitated ethnic violence, particularly between Somalis and Oromos, Ethiopia's largest ethnic group.

Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch called for an extensive, independent investigation into years of abuses, human rights violations and war crimes to redress wrongdoing and hold perpetrators accountable.

Personal ties

Mustafa has long been an outspoken critic of Abdi Illey's policies, and that has made him a target.

Years ago, Abdi threatened to harm Mustafa's family if he continued to criticize the government. Mustafa refused to stay quiet and, in 2016, his brother Faysal, an engineer, was killed.

The family was coerced into saying Faysal took his own life, Juweria said. Their property was confiscated, and they were forced to flee to Kenya.

Mustafa, 45, also fled. Prior to his selection as acting president, he had been living in Somalia, where he'd been working with the United Nations for the past few years, Abdinasir Mohamed Abdullahi, an attorney in Minnesota and close friend, told VOA.

Other critics of Abdi's regime have faced similar consequences.

"[Mustafa] effectively symbolizes thousands like himself who had to flee and whose families had to flee because of their outspokenness against Abdi Illey," Juweria said.

"He has, first-hand, experienced the horrors of Abdi Illey's administration, which is why people are hopeful that Mustafa, more than anyone else, will know what the people need at this time, and will know what the people need in order to be healed and move forward."

Retribution?

Those deep personal ties have left some who follow the region wondering if Mustafa will use his newfound role to exact revenge, hunting down those loyal to the old administration.

But Mustafa said retaliation doesn't have a place in his reform agenda, and close friends don't think it's consistent with his character.

"Based on my personal views, [what's happened] will not have an impact on my administration. As a human being, I can love and hate someone, but that has no effect on my administration. What was existing before me was a kind of kingdom, which we need to terminate," Mustafa said.

Now, he added, the regional government will promote togetherness through peace and unity.

Politics at play

Senior leaders of the Ethiopian Somali People's Democratic Party (ESPDP) unanimously selected Mustafa, an economist, after meeting in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, for several days.

It was an unlikely pick. Mustafa doesn't belong to the party, nor does he have any prior experience in politics.

Some in the Somali region see his selection as another example of the federal government encroaching on Somali sovereignty.

ESPDP doesn't belong to the ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front. But the EPRDF created ESPDP in 1998, and some in the region see it as an extension of the federal government's interests.

One particularly vocal critic has been the Ogaden National Liberation Front, a political party and armed group that, earlier this month, declared a ceasefire against what they term the "Ethiopian Security Apparatus" in the region.

Rights groups have also accused federal forces of committing war crimes.

Identity

ONLF enjoys a good deal of support, and Mustafa will need to engage with the group to be successful, Juweria said.

Discussions about identity and autonomy will propel those talks.

"The question of self-determination is going to be a test," Juweria said. "[The ONLF] still finds it problematic that the federal government hand-picked the person who's going to take charge of the region."

Mustafa met with an ONLF delegation in Addis Ababa Saturday, and the sides appear ready to move forward together.

Questions of identity, ethnicity and nationality permeate Ethiopian politics. An ethnic-federalist approach to government, in which political parties based on ethnicity represent regions within a national parliament and executive coalition, has held the country together for nearly 30 years.

But ongoing conflicts and underrepresentation have raised doubts about the viability of the model. Secessionist groups such as ONLF have pushed for independence, and the powerful central government has, at least until recently, maintained stability through violent crackdowns and suppression.

New way forward?

Mustafa, like the country's new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, represents a decisive departure from the old way of doing things.

Improving relations between Somalis and Oromos is one of Mustafa's priorities.

"This is a politicized issue. There is a lot of propaganda that looms inside the two brotherly communities, led by former administrations who want to profit from this fighting. But we will prevent that and unite the two communities."

New political players like Mustafa have created an opportunity for change, but the issue of identity has not been fully settled.

Abiy, an Oromo, has underscored respecting differences and empowering Ethiopia's many ethnic groups, while emphasizing shared Ethiopian values and identity.

Mustafa, on the other hand, has prioritized Somali identity, saying on social media this week that Somalis will no longer allow their heritage or identity to be compromised.

"Our historical, cultural, social, economic and political ties to the Somali race across the Horn of Africa region is a fait accompli. No one can change it or wish it away," Mustafa wrote on Facebook.

"We will therefore embrace symbols of Somalinimo no matter what angry oppressors say," he added.

A complex clan system within the Somali region further complicates matters of identity and efforts toward reconciliation across Ethiopia's diverse populations.

But Juweria is optimistic that Mustafa will be able to build bridges across long-standing divisions and animosities.

"Oromos and Somalis alike feel that Mustafa is the right answer," Juweria said. "I think this marks a new era."

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Guard Integral to DoD Effort to Build Lethality, Alliances, Mattis Says

Aug. 26, 2018

By Jim Garamone

DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON -- Enhancing lethality and restoring readiness is at the heart of the National Security Strategy and the National Guard is an integral part of that strategy, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis told the National Guard Association of the United States, yesterday.

The secretary spoke in New Orleans to the 140th General Conference of the group.

The secretary used his speech to describe how the National Guard fits into the strategy. Great power competition with China and Russia has replaced terrorism as the primary focus, he said, adding that the U.S. military continues the fight against terrorists.

'We're Going to Restore Readiness'

Moving to this priority means restoring military readiness across the board, the secretary said.

"We're going to restore readiness  and we're going to build a more lethal force in the process," Mattis said. "Second, we are going to strengthen alliances with partners and allies and we're going to create new partners and allies."

He noted the American Revolution would have failed without help from allies like France.

The third line of effort is to reform and modernize DoD for greater performance, accountability and affordability, Mattis said. This strategy is key to gaining bipartisan support for the military on Capitol Hill, he said. He noted that 87 percent of Congress approved the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act.

But, he said, the key to the strategy is a lethal military force. "We Americans have no God-given right to victory on the battlefield. So we need you, my fine young National Guardsmen, at the top of your game," Mattis said. "Lethality begins when we are physically, mentally and spiritually fit to be evaluated by the most exacting auditor on Earth -- and that auditor is war."

The secretary added, "Readiness is being most ready, when our country is least ready. And, readiness depends of preparation."

He pointed to the World War II battle for Bataan and the first months of the Korean War as examples of what happens when military readiness is lacking. Leaders must exemplify this readiness, Mattis said, and hold their personnel to the standards.

'We Need You Fit, Deployable And Team Players'

"We need you fit, deployable and team players -- never advantaging yourself at the expense of your comrades," he said.

The National Guard is uniquely prepared to help America build alliances, Mattis said. He praised the State Partnership Program. Mattis spoke about the state partnership between Argentina and Georgia, Chile and Texas, Colorado and Jordan and Alaska and Mongolia.

"This is not a one-time mission and the Guard is uniquely suited to sustain allied efforts over many years, thanks to the amount of corporate continuity you maintain in your ranks," he said.

Mattis said building alliances is a two-way street, and he urged the Guardsmen to listen and learn from foreign military partners.

"Recognize that not all good ideas in warfare come from the nation with the most aircraft carriers," he said. "When the tough times come and the thin veneer of civilization is stripped away from us we are tempted to close ranks, interacting only with those who look like us, dress like us, speak like us and think like us. You must not fall into that trap."

Mattis said even the closest allies will disagree at times, and the United States has dealt with this in the past. He noted the disagreements that led to the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the discussions around deploying nuclear capabilities in Europe in the 1970s.

Those who believe today's disagreements are unprecedented have not read history, he said.

Even with disagreements, "we have always been able to fight together on the battlefield with like-minded nations," Mattis said. "There is nothing new under the sun."

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Yemen targets Saudi military base with missile

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, Aug 26, IRNA  In reaction to attacks on civilians and killing innocent people, Yemen has shot a ballistic missile toward Saudi military base in Najran, southern Saudi Arabia.

According to Yemeni TV Channel 'Al-Masirah', Yemeni Army missile units and popular committee targeted Saudi base with a 'Badr-1' ballistic missile.

Yemeni Army had also shot a ballistic missile to Saudi mercenaries in Jizan two day ago.

Yemen believes that missile attacks on Saudi military bases are its legal rights and also legitimate defense of its people against Saudis' military aggression.

Saudi Arabia and its regional allies attacked Yemen in March 2015 to bring back to power the deposed president of Yemen Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. Since then, the invaders have committed horrible war crimes against Yemeni civilians.

9376**1397

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Israel to start building new housing units in East al-Quds next month: Report

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 05:13PM

Israel plans to commence a new settlement project in the heart of occupied East Jerusalem al-Quds early next month, a report says.

Palestinian Ma'an news agency, citing a Hebrew-language news outlet, reported on Sunday that the provocative project, which has been named Nof Shmuel, slated to be constructed within the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina in early November.

Aryeh Orange, a candidate from the right-wing Me'uchadim (United) political faction running for the city council, announced that the new housing units "are being sold to Jews only," it added.

The report, citing some unnamed sources, further said that around 124 Israeli settler units had already been approved for the project, out of a total of 324 ones. The housing units are reportedly to be sold to ultra-orthodox Jews at reduced prices.

On Wednesday, the so-called Israeli Civil Administration Higher Planning Council approved construction of 2,000 settler units in the West Bank.

Less than a month before US President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2334, calling on Israel to "immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem" al-Quds.

Since the inauguration of President Trump, the regime in Tel Aviv has stepped up its construction of settler units on occupied Palestinian land in a blatant violation of international law.

About 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds.

Palestinians want the West Bank as part of a future independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem al-Quds as its capital.

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Daesh leader in Afghanistan killed in airstrikes in Nangarhar: Government

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 02:32PM

The leader of the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in Afghanistan has been killed in airstrikes in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

According to a statement released by the National Directorate of Security in the capital Kabul on Sunday, Abu Saad Erhabi was killed during airstrikes jointly conducted by Afghan and foreign forces on Daesh hideouts in Khogyani district on Saturday night.

The statement added that at least 10 other members of the terror outfit had been slain during the ground and air anti-terror operation in the province. A large amount of heavy and light weapons and ammunition had also been destroyed during the strikes in the vicinity of the village of Khogyani.

Erhabi was the fourth Daesh leader in Afghanistan to be killed since July 2017, the provincial governor's spokesman, Ataullah Khogyani, said, confirming Erhabi's death.

Daesh has managed to establish a stronghold in Nangarhar, on Afghanistan's porous eastern border with Pakistan, and become one of the country's most dangerous terror outfits.

Since late last year, Daesh, which has already lost all its urban strongholds in Syria and Iraq, has taken advantage of the chaos in Afghanistan and established a foothold in the country's eastern and northern regions, launching brutal attacks against civilians and security forces alike.

According to Afghan intelligence documents, Daesh is present in nine provinces, from Nangarhar and Kunar in the east to Jawzjan, Faryab, and Badakhshan in the north, and Ghor in the central west.

In November last year, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the United States was colluding with Daesh in Afghanistan and allowing the Takfiri group to flourish in the war-stricken country.

The exact number of Daesh terrorists in Afghanistan is difficult to calculate since they frequently switch allegiances, but the US military estimates that there are about 2,000.

Early this month, more than 150 Daesh terrorists surrendered to Afghan security forces in the northern province of Jawzjan, where the group is fighting for control of smuggling routes into neighboring Turkmenistan.

Crisis-hit Afghanistan also suffers from scores of deadly terror attacks by the Taliban militant group almost across the country.

The Taliban's five-year rule over at least three quarters of Afghanistan came to an end when the United States and its allies invaded the country on October 7, 2001 as part of Washington's so-called war on terror, but, ever since, the group has been involved in widespread militancy, killing thousands of civilians as well as Afghan security forces and displacing tens of thousands of people across the country.

Many parts of the country remain plagued by militancy despite the presence of foreign troops.

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Yemeni forces launch drone, missile strikes against Saudi mercs in Bayda, Jizan

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 02:30PM

Yemeni army soldiers, backed by allied fighters from Popular Committees, have reportedly launched an airstrike against a position of Saudi-sponsored militiamen loyal to Yemen's former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, in the country's central province of al-Bayda.

A Yemeni military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Yemeni soldiers and their allies attacked Saudi mercenaries in the al-Jaribat area of the al-Bayda district after they had carried out aerial reconnaissance by an unmanned aerial vehicle.

Later in the day, Yemeni troopers and Popular Committees fighters fired a domestically-designed and manufactured Zelzal-1 (Earthquake-1) ballistic missile at the gatherings of Saudi soldiers in Na'shaw military base of the kingdom's southwestern border region of Jizan.

There were no immediate reports about possible casualties or the extent of damage caused.

On Sunday evening, Yemeni soldiers and their allies launched another Zelzal-1 missile at Hisn al-Hammad military base in Saudi Arabia's southwestern region of Najran, leaving a number of Saudi troopers killed and injured and their military vehicles destroyed.

Yemeni snipers, supported by allied fighters from Popular Committees, also fatally shot three Saudi soldiers at al-Shabakah military base in the same Saudi border region.

A further Zelzal-1 missile targeted Saudi forces stated at Hamiyah base in Jizan.

Separately, Saudi fighter jets carried out three airstrikes against an area in the Harf Sufyan district of the northwestern Yemeni province of 'Amran. No reports of casualties were quickly available though.

A civilian also sustained critical gunshot wounds when Saudi border guards fired shots at al-Raqou area in the Monabbih district of Yemen's mountainous northwestern province of Sa'ada.

Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched a devastating military campaign against Yemen in March 2015, with the aim of bringing the government of Hadi back to power and crushing the country's popular Houthi Ansarullah movement.

The aggression has killed some 15,000 people and injured thousands more.

More than 2,200 others have died of cholera, and the crisis has triggered what the United Nations has described as the world's worst humanitarian disaster.

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Two Armenian citizens were killed as a result of the car accident in Russia's republic of Kalmykia.

Kalmykias internal affairs agencies launched an investigation into two road accidents that left three people killed, the country's Ministry of Internal Affairs reported.

According to the source, during the first accident, the driver lost control and the vehicle rolled over. Two Armenian nationals died. The driver and other two passengers, who are also the citizens of Armenia, were hospitalized.

The source added that a 59-year-old was killed as the result another accident as the driver also lost control and rolled over, News.am reported.Zimbabwe president takes oath of office following disputed win

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 10:04AM

Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa has been sworn in following an election victory disputed by the opposition and amid questions raised over the country's democratic credentials by United States observers.

Mnangagwa, who won the presidential election on July 30, took the oath of office before Chief Justice Luke Malaba on Sunday.

Thousands of people gathered at the country's national stadium in Harare to witness the swearing-in of the new president.

Earlier in the day, the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute (IRI-NDI) released a joint critical statement, saying the African country "has not yet demonstrated that it has established a tolerant, democratic culture" that would allow the opposition to be treated fairly and the people to vote freely.

The statement said its final election report is yet to come.

The IRI-NDI mission released the statement hours after Zimbabwe's Constitutional Court upheld Mnanaggwa's narrow election win on Saturday.

Mnanaggwa narrowly avoided a runoff by winning 50.7 percent of the votes late last month.

Opposition leader Nelson Chamisa, however, rejected the results, saying the vote was marred by "mammoth theft and fraud."

Chamisa also rejected the Constitutional Court's ruling. He said he had a "legitimate claim" to leading the country and staging peaceful protests.

Even though the election passed off peacefully on July 30, several people were killed in clashes between the army and the opposition supporters two days later. Army soldiers reportedly used live ammunition in the clashes.

Mnangagwa allowed international observers into Zimbabwe for the first time in 16 years in a bid to use the vote to bolster his international legitimacy.

European and American observers, however, expressed reservations over the vote, saying that, though peaceful, the poll had been preceded by intimidation and state domination of the media.

They also said that the results had been announced with a delay, an issue that the opposition had also complained about.

Several international observers had also criticized the "excessive" use of force by security forces after the vote.

European Union (EU) observers, who called on all parties to accept the court verdict, suggested, however, that Mnangagwa had benefited from an "un-level playing field."

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Islamic State Leader In Afghanistan Reported Killed

August 26, 2018

Authorities say the head of Islamic State militants in Afghanistan has been killed in a strike on the group's hideouts in Nangarhar Province.

The National Security Directorate said that in addition to Abu Saad Erhabi, 10 other members of the militant group were also killed in a joint ground and air operation by Afghan and foreign forces on August 25.

The August 26 statement said a large amount of heavy and light weapons and ammunition were also destroyed.

There was no immediate confirmation of the report.

Amaq, the extremist group's news agency, carried no comment on the issue, and there was no reaction from the NATO-led Resolute Support mission.

Sometimes known as Islamic State Khorasan, the group has built a stronghold in Nangarhar, on Afghanistan's porous eastern border with Pakistan. It's now one of the country's most dangerous militant groups.

It's unclear exactly how many Islamic State fighters are in the country, because they frequently switch allegiances. The U.S. military estimates that there are about 2,000.

Based on reporting by AFP and Reuters

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/islamic-state-leader-in- afghanistan-reported-killed/29454167.html

Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Afghan President Declines Resignations Of Top Security Officials

RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan August 26, 2018

KABUL -- Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has rejected the resignations of three senior security officials in his cabinet, after the country's national security adviser stepped down and was replaced, his office says.

An August 26 statement said Ghani asked Defense Minister Tariq Shah Bahrami, Interior Minister Wais Barmak, and Masoom Stanekzai, head of the National Directorate of Security, to remain at their posts and "work toward the betterment of the security situation."

On August 25, a spokesman for Ghani confirmed to RFE/RL that the president had accepted the resignation of Mohammad Hanif Atmar, his national security adviser, and replaced him with Hamdullah Mohib, who previously served as the ambassador to the United States.

Hours thereafter, media reports said Bahrami, Barmak, and Stanekzai had also resigned.

The officials cited policy differences with the government amid a deteriorating security situation as the main reason for their decisions, according to Reuters.

TOLOnews published a copy of what it said was security adviser Atmar's resignation letter explaining that he was resigning due to "serious differences over policies and approaches at the top level of government."

The authenticity of the letter could not immediately be confirmed.

Atmar had previously served as the country's interior minister under former Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

He has served as a close aide to Ghani since 2014.

The developments come amid a deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, which in recent weeks has been hit by several deadly attacks carried out by suspected Taliban or Islamic State (IS) militants, including a rocket attack near the presidential palace in Kabul.

The Kabul government has struggled to fend off a resurgent Taliban, as well as IS and Al-Qaeda militants, nearly two decades after a U.S.-led coalition drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan in 2001.

Taliban leaders have so far ignored an offer by the Afghan government of direct peace negotiations, calling instead for direct talks with the United States. IS and Al-Qaeda militants were not included in the government offers of talks or cease-fires.

Russia says it has invited the Taliban and 12 countries, including Afghanistan and the United States, to talks next month in Moscow.

The United States and Afghanistan both said they would not attend the talks, with Kabul asserting it prefers instead to hold direct talks with the Taliban.

With reporting by AP, TOLOnews, The New York Times, and dpa

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/afghan-ghani- security-cabinet-resigns/29453531.html

Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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World Leaders, Ex-Presidents Pay Tribute To Veteran Senator John McCain, Dead At 81

RFE/RL August 26, 2018

Tributes from former U.S. presidents, lawmakers, and world leaders poured in for U.S. Senator John McCain, a day after the veteran Republican politician, war hero, and former presidential candidate died of brain cancer.

With flags at the White House flying at half staff, President Donald Trump, who frequently clashed with McCain and even mocked his time in captivity in North Vietnam, hailed the Arizona senator.

"My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you," he said in a post to Twitter.

Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, who defeated the Republican senator in the 2008 presidential election, said that "we are all in his debt."

"John McCain and I were members of different generations, came from completely different backgrounds, and competed at the highest level of politics," Obama said in a statement. "But we shared, for all our differences, a fidelity to something higher -- the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched, and sacrificed."

British Prime Minister Theresa May said McCain "embodied the idea of service over self," and French President Emmanuel Macron called the senator "a true American hero [whose] voice will be missed."

In Germany, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said McCain stood for an America "that is a reliable and close partner... that takes strong responsibility for others and sticks to its values and principles even at difficult moments."

In a statement released on August 25, his family said McCain had died at 4:28 p.m. in his home state. His wife, Cindy, and other members of his family were present. He died less than 48 hours after his family announced that he was discontinuing treatment for the brain cancer that was first diagnosed in 2017.

McCain will receive a full-dress funeral service at the Washington National Cathedral, his family said.

News reports said both Obama and former President George W. Bush would speak at his funeral.

Trump, however, will not. Vice President Mike Pence is expected to represent the current administration at the ceremony. Citing family friends, CNN reported that McCain told his family he did not want Trump to attend.

McCain was particularly critical of Trump's praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders McCain called foreign "tyrants."

After Trump met Putin in Helsinki in July, McCain castigated Trump, calling their joint news conference "one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory."

He said Trump was "not only unable but unwilling to stand up to Putin."

McCain was often praised for his willingness to cooperate with Democrats on difficult issues.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis hailed the man many considered a war hero, saying, "We have lost a man who steadfastly represented the best ideals of our country."

McCain, a longtime chairman of the Senate's Armed Services Committee, was considered an expert on defense and foreign policy issues.

In 2017, McCain made a key vote in the Senate to reject Trump's effort to overturn Obama's signature health-care plan. That angered Trump.

The son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals, McCain endured almost six years of torture and captivity in a North Vietnam prison after his plane was shot down in 1967 on a mission during the long U.S. war.

After learning of his family connections, his North Vietnamese captors offered him early release in what would have been a propaganda ploy. McCain refused to leave and said those captured before him should be the first to leave.

McCain returned home 5 1/2 years later on crutches and never regained full mobility in his arms and leg.

Early in the 2016 election primary season, before he had secured the Republican nomination, Trump mocked McCain's time in captivity, asserting that he wasn't a war hero because he had been captured by the North Vietnamese.

The vacancy created by McCain's death narrows the number of Republican-held seats in the 100-member U.S. Senate to 50, with Democrats controlling 49.

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, was expected to appoint a member of his own party to succeed McCain.

With reporting by AP and Reuters

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/senator-former-presidential -candidate-mccain-dies-age-81/29453538.html

Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Thousands Protest Against Government In Moldovan Capital, Chanting 'Down With The Mafia'

FE/RL's Moldovan Service August 26, 2018

RCHISINAU -- Thousands of people have rallied in Moldova's capital to protest against the Democratic Party-led government.

The August 26 rally was the latest in a series of protests against the government, protests that have been driven in large part by Romanians and Moldovans living out of the county.

Participants are angered by the policies of the government led by the Democratic Party, which is headed by controversial billionaire Vladimir Plahotniuc. Popular anger has also been stoked by recent court decisions that annulled the results of the mayoral election in Chisinau.

Waving Moldovan and Euopean Union flags, they chanted slogans such as "Down With The Mafia" and "Send Plahotniuc To Jail."

The demonstration was organized by the pro-European Action and Solidarity Party, the Dignity and Truth Platform, and Liberal Democrat Party in Moldova.

Two other gatherings were also scheduled to be held on the central square, including a rally by drivers demanding lower fuel prices.

Speaking at the antigovernment demonstration, protest leader Maia Sandu called on opposition supporters to separate themselves from the two other rallies, which she said were organized to disrupt the protest.

Supporters of Ilan Shor, the mayor of the eastern town of Orhei, also came to the central square to attend a concert.

At a similar protest in Brussels, around two dozen activists gathered outside the headquarters of the European Commission, criticizing the Chisinau mayoral election decision and other recent electoral changes.

Several waved Romanian and Moldova flags and held a banner reading "Do Not Support Corrupt Oligarchs In Moldova."



Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/thousands -protests-in-moldovan-capital-chanting-down -with-the-mafia-/29454081.html

Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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US Troops Poised to 'Stay' in Syria as DoS Official Visits Kurdish-Held Areas

Sputnik News

16:39 26.08.2018

In late June, the US reportedly started to establish a new military base near the northern Syrian city of Manbij, already the third in the area, amid previous reports about the US forces' upcoming withdrawal from Syria.

Visiting the cities of Manbij and Kobani in northern Syria's Aleppo province on Sunday, State Department representative William Roebuck pointed out that the US troops are "prepared to stay here, as the President [Donald Trump] has made clear, to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS [Daesh*]."

Roeback added that Washington also "remains focused on ensuring the withdrawal of Iranian forces and their proxies as well", in an apparent nod to the Lebanon-based Hezbollah movement.

He is also due to pay visits to Hasakah province's town of Shaddadah and some areas in the province of Deir ez-Zor held by US-backed Kurdish militants.

Roeback's visit to Manbij and Kobane came after the Russian Defense Ministry on Saturday accused the US, the UK and France of preparing to carry out new strikes against Syria under the pretext of chemical weapons use by Syrian government forces.

In late June, Helil Bozi, a commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)'s local military council, told Sputnik that "the US is establishing a new military base near Manbij", in addition to the Americans already having two such bases in the city, "along the road leading to Aleppo, and in Eyn Dedat close to the Sajir River."

In a separate development that month, an SDF source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Sputnik that the US is boosting its military presence in Deir ez-Zor, sending 250 trucks as well as Hummers, heavy weapons, and pick-ups to the SDF, as part of the operation against Daesh.

In April, Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the US military's Central Command, reportedly arrived in Israel to reassure the head of the National Security Council, the IDF Chief of Staff and other senior defense officials that Americans have no "immediate plans" to leave Syria.

Earlier that month, President Donald Trump announced that the US troops would be withdrawing from Syria "very soon," in a move that was reportedly followed by Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holding a "tough" phone conversation with Trump.

Netanyahu allegedly voiced his concerns that if US forces leave Syria, it would enable Israel's enemies, Iran and its affiliates, to gain a foothold in the area.

Both Russia and Iran, alongside Turkey, are the guarantor states of the Syrian ceasefire agreement. There are Iranian-backed armed groups fighting on the side of Damascus in the Syrian conflict, with President Bashar Assad saying, however, that no Iranian troops are operating on Syrian territory.

There are some 5,000 troops currently deployed at more than 20 US military bases set up in areas of northern Syria controlled by the SDF.

Since September 2014, the United States and its allies have been carrying out airstrikes on what they describe as Daesh targets without a UN mandate or Damascus' authorization; the military campaign has consistently been denounced by the Syrian authorities as "illegal."

*Daesh (ISIL/ISIS/Islamic State), a terrorist group banned in Russia

 Sputnik

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Airstrike Kills Daesh Group's Local Head in Eastern Afghanistan - Reports

Sputnik News

15:43 26.08.2018

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Afghan security forces killed Sad Irhabi, the local head of the Daesh terror group (banned in Russia) during an air raid in the east of the country, the 1TV broadcaster reported on Sunday.

Irhabi was killed in a village located in the Khogyani district of the Nangarhar province late on Saturday, 1TV reported, citing sources. The security forces conducted an operation there after receiving intelligence information from the National Directorate of Security.

Ten other militants were also killed in the air strikes.

According to the broadcaster, Irhabi is the fourth Daesh Afghan head to be killed by the army since July 2016. In addition, the Tolonews broadcaster reported on Sunday that Irhabi also went under the name of Abu Sayed Orakzai.

The Afghan Armed Forces have been waging operations against Daesh and the Taliban movement for years. However, the bloodshed in the country continues.

*Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS), Taliban are terrorist groups banned in Russia.

 Sputnik

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NATO Spots 50 'Suspicious Vessels' Spying on US in Aegean Sea  Reports

Sputnik News

15:07 26.08.2018(updated 15:26 26.08.2018)

Greek media has reported that Washington has stepped up its military activities in the Aegean Sea, which they claimed is turning into a US training ground.

NATO has handed Athens a list of 50 "suspicious vessels" it accuses of conducting reconnaissance missions in the Aegean Sea near the coast of Greece, according to the Greek newspaper Real.

"The vessels include fishing, sailing and leisure ships which are sailing across the Aegean Sea in order to gather information. Apart from Greek military facilities and activities, they are also interested in the movement of Americans, which is currently gathering pace in Greek territory," the Real reported.

Citing ever-increasing US military activity in the region, the newspaper noted that the Aegean Sea already has started to resemble "a US training ground" amid a recently-clinched deal on the deployment of US MQ-9 unmanned aerial vehicles in the area.

The Real addressed Athens' relations with Ankara separately, claiming that Turkey's "reliability as a NATO ally is openly questioned" by American think tanks.

Relations between Greece and Turkey have worsened since a Turkish patrol boat rammed into a Greek coast guard vessel in the Aegean Sea in mid-February.

While the Greek boat only suffered minor damages and nobody was injured, the incident underscored the existing tensions between the two countries, which contest control over certain territories in the Aegean Sea.

 Sputnik

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Afghan President Ghani Rejects Resignation of Top Officials - Reports

Sputnik News

00:43 26.08.2018(updated 09:21 26.08.2018)

Four top security officials in Afghanistan's government resigned on Saturday, sources in the country's government said. Afghan President has later rejected the resignations of three of them.

Afghanistan's minister of defense, minister of interior as well as two other high-ranking security officials have resigned from their posts, Reuters reported quoting sources in the government.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani rejected the resignation of Defense Minister Tariq Shah Bahrami, Interior Minister Wais Ahmad Barmak and the National Directorate of Security chief, Masoom Stanekzai, local media reported on Sunday.

Ghani had ordered the officials to continue their work, the Pajhwok news agency reported.

An official in Afghanistan presidential office was quoted as saying that they had received four resignations by two ministers and two senior security officials.

The resignations of Defence Minister Tariq Shah Bahrami, Interior Minister Wais Barmak and the head of the National Directorate of Security Masoom Stanekzai came after National Security Advisor Hanif Atmar also quit his post.

Later, TOLO News reported quoting the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's office that the president had rejected the resignations of Wais Ahmad Barmak, Masoum Stanikzai, and Tariq Shah Bahrami, asking them to continue their work.

The security officials referred to the security situation as the main reason for their resignation, the sources reported.

Afghanistan has been in a state of long-standing armed conflict between the government and a number of terrorist groups, which carry out attacks all over the war-torn country.

 Sputnik

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Drone Strike Kills IS Chief in Afghanistan

By Ayaz Gul August 26, 2018

A drone strike has killed the leader of Islamic State in Afghanistan, Abdu Saad Erhabi, along with his nine commanders.

The overnight missile attack occurred in the Khogyani district of the troubled eastern Nangarhar province where the terrorist group, locally known as ISK-P, is headquartered.

Provincial government spokesman Attaullah Khogyani told VOA the strike also destroyed two of the group's bases.

Afghan intelligence officials said international forces assisted in the counter-terrorism operation.

A U.S. military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Martin O'Donnell, confirmed to VOA U.S. forces conducted a counter-terrorism strike Saturday that "targeted a senior leader of a designated terrorist organization."

Afghan Presidential Spokesman Shahussain Murtazawi tweeted the strike dealt a "major blow to Daesh in Afghanistan" and it also demonstrated the resolve of the Afghan government against terrorism. He used the Arabic acronym Daesh for the Middle Eastern-based terrorist group.

Erhabi is the fourth leader of ISK-P to have been killed since the group launched its extremist activities in Afghanistan in early 2015 from bases in Nangarhar next to the border with neighboring Pakistan.

ISK-P militants have been plotting deadly suicide bombings in the war-shattered country and battling U.S. backed Afghan forces as well as the Taliban insurgency.

U.S. military commanders maintain ISK-P operates several southern districts in Nangahrar and in parts of the adjoining Kunar province. The militants had also established a strong base in the northern Afghan province of Jowzjan near the border with the Central Asian state of Turkmenistan.

But Taliban insurgents early this month eliminated ISK-P from the province after a month-long offensive against the rival group, killing and capturing a large number of its fighters.

Afghan authorities confirmed at the time about 250 militants surrendered to government forces after fleeing the Taliban onslaught in Jowzjan.

Kabul estimates the number of ISK-P fighters in the country is not more than 2,000 and downplays Russia's assertions the terrorist group is increasing its influence in Afghanistan and the number of its fighters is more than 10,000.

Moscow is worried about the emergence of ISK-P in parts of Afghanistan that border Russian-allied Central Asian states.

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Iranian lawyers asked the International Court of Justice today to order the United States to lift its sanctions imposed against Tehran.

The presiding judge of the U.N. body informally known as the World Court began the hearing by calling on Washington to respect its outcome. During their decades of animosity, both the United States and Iran have ignored some rulings at the court.

The lawsuit filed with the ICJ says the U.S. sanctions, which are damaging the already weak Iranian economy, violate terms of a little-known friendship treaty between the two countries.

"The U.S. is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran's economy and Iranian national companies, and therefore inevitably Iranian nationals," said Mohsen Mohebi, representing Iran, at the start of four days of oral hearings. "This policy is plainly in violation of the 1955 Treaty of Amity."

He said Iran had sought a diplomatic solution to the countries' dispute but was rejected, Reuters reported.

The United States said in an initial written reaction displayed in court that it believes the ICJ has no jurisdiction in the case, and that Iran's assertions fall outside the bounds of the treaty.

U.S. lawyers led by State Department adviser Jennifer Newstead, appointed by Trump in 2017, are due to respond Tuesday. A ruling is expected within a month, though no date has been set.

The ICJ is the United Nations tribunal for resolving international disputes. Its rulings are binding, but it has no power to enforce them.

U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of a 2015 pact between Iran and major world powers under which sanctions were lifted in return for Tehran accepting curbs on its nuclear program. The Trump administration then announced unilateral plans to restore sanctions against Tehran. Although Washington's European allies protested against Trump's move, most Western companies intend to adhere to the sanctions, preferring to lose business in Iran than be punished by the United States or barred from doing business there.

At the start of today's hearing, the court's president, Abdulqawi Yusuf, leading a 15-judge panel, urged the U.S. to adhere to any provisional decision the court may make.

The deputy head of the Council of the Russian Diplomats Association, Andrey Baklanov, speaking to Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that Tehran has chosen the right strategy for responding to U.S. sanctions. "The Iranians, in my opinion, did the right thing. They raised the issue of the correlation of international legality, the existed agreements and treaties with the current actions of the U.S. administration. Now a large number of countries face the question of some reaction to these unilateral sanctions from the U.S., as a rule, there is talk about a so-called tit-for-tat response, within which trade and economic responses to Washington look inadequate, as it harms interests of their own export companies. Therefore, it is necessary to expand the range of negative reaction to the actions of the U.S.," he explained.

"And in this regard, Iran's current actions is a qualitatively new element in attracting international mechanisms in order to qualify the new practice of Americans. Others also should do something similar, including Russian representatives, the actions of which at the WTO look rather poorly. Depending on whether these hearings will give any real results, it is very important to use international channels to create moral-political, moral-economic and moral-financial action against the U.S.," Andrey Baklanov stressed.

The deputy head of the Council of the Russian Diplomats Association does not expect that the hearings at the UN can lead to any coordinated practical step against the U.S. "The UN can impose sanctions only on the basis of the decision of the Security Council. I think it is unrealistic, because the U.S. will not allow to impose any sanctions on it. But using other mechanisms, primarily related to trade and economic relations, is really an open direction to work on it," the diplomat concluded.US Stepping up Armed Drone Efforts in Niger

By Ibrahim Ahmed August 26, 2018

The U.S. Air Force is months away from completing the construction of an air base in Niger for armed drones that will target militant groups operating in the region, a U.S military official told VOA.

"To date, the Air Force has spent approximately $86.5 million on the construction project at Nigerien Air Base 201," Auburn Davis, a spokesperson for U.S. Air Force Europe and Air Force Africa, told VOA.

"The total estimated construction cost, including FY19 planned projects, is $98.5million," Davis added.

She said that the base, which is located in Agadez city in northern Niger, is the biggest U.S Air Force-led construction project in its history.

Agadez is a strategic city located in the Sahara Desert with easy access for militants and smugglers to cross to and from Libya, Algeria, Mali and Chad.

About 650 U.S. military personnel will be deployed to the base once it's operational. An undetermined number of military drones, including MQ-9s, currently operating from the capital, Niamey, would be transferred to the base, according to the U.S military.

Militarization of the Sahel

Some security analysts, such as William Assanvo, a regional coordinator for West Africa at the Institute for Security Studies Africa, believe that this move indicates the region is becoming increasingly militarized.

"This trend raises some concerns about foreign powers taking roots in the Sahel to pursue national interests that are not always clear, and that may not match [the] national interests of hosting countries," Assanvo told VOA.

"It could also trigger an escalation of attacks and clashes or be a justification for the so-called Jihad some of the extremists groups pretend to be fighting," Assanvo added.

Nigerien officials, however, see the building of the Agadez base as a necessity to address the growing menace of terrorism that poses a threat to the security of Niger and the region.

"Our problems emanate from Libya. The area [between Agadez and the Libyan border] is vast, unpopulated. Terrorists move about freely there," Kalla Mountari, Niger's minister of defense, told VOA, adding that militants use the area to smuggle weapons and ammunition back and forth.

The U.S military says the decision to relocate assets from Niamey to Agadez and to construct the base there was reached in consultation and coordination with the government of Niger.

"The government of Niger requested U.S. Africa Command [AFRICOM] to relocate ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] assets from Niamey to Agadez," Davis, the US Air Force Africa spokesperson, told VOA.

Assanvo, of Institute for Security Studies Africa, believes that the move could also be part of an effort by the U.S military to have a low profile presence in the region without triggering potential opposition from the local population.

"The Agadez base has the advantage of making the U.S presence less visible, far from Niger capital, Niamey," Assanvo said. "This is important, given the clear opposition a significant part of the Niger [population] have voiced about the increasing Western presence in the country."

Assanvo is referring to several demonstrations held in various cities across Niger in February after Italy said it would send several hundred troops to the West African country.

Foreign troops a necessity

But Defense Minister Mountari said the presence of these foreign troops are necessary and critical in the country's ongoing fight against terror and other trans-national criminal groups.

""We requested the current [U.S] operations ourselves. Everything has been done with the knowledge and cooperation and at the request of our government because it is for the good of our country," Mountari said.

"Our Agadez base is obsolete with no good runway or navigational equipment. That's why we encouraged the work the U.S. is doing to rebuild Agadez air base since it has become a hub for our fight against terrorists," he added.

The U.S. started operating ISR drones in Niamey in 2013, in support of the French military operations in neighboring Mali and "other regional requirements", according to the U.S. Air Force.

While some critics are voicing concerns over the increased footprint of the U.S military in the region, Nigerien officials charge that U.S. help has been effective and has paid dividends in terms of curbing militancy and terrorism in the Sahel region.

"I will say we are successful already because what the terrorists were able to do to us in the past has decreased significantly because we now have the means to detect and take care of a threat simultaneously," Defense Minister Mountari said.

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Zimbabwe President Mnangagwa Calls for Unity After Being Sworn In

By Columbus Mavhunga August 26, 2018

President Emmerson Mnangagwa is calling for unity in Zimbabwe after being sworn in Sunday to start his five-year term.

"I Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa swear that as president of the republic of Zimbabwe I will be faithful to Zimbabwe [and] will obey, uphold and defend the constitution and all other laws of Zimbabwe... so help me God," he said.

Emmerson Mnangagwa takes the oath of office from Chief Justice Luke Malaba, while thousands of Zimbabweans cheer to start his five year term in office.

Friday, the same judge confirmed Mnangagwa's July 30th victory over Nelson Chamisa of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change Alliance. Chamisa sought the poll's nullification, accusing the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission of rigging for the ruling Zanu PF presidential candidate Mnangagwa.

In his inaugural speech Sunday Mnagangwa asked his political political foes to bury their differences for the task ahead.

"We are all Zimbabweans, what unites us is greater than whatever divides us," he said. "Let me assure you that tomorrow is brighter than yesterday. Let us look forward to a journey ahead will work together as one people. A united people. Together let us explore new frontiers in every facet and sphere of our economy and society."

The Movement for Democratic Change boycotted an invitation to the inauguration. The party wants to take its objections to the election to the African Union, led by Rwanda's Paul Kagame who, with presidents Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Edgar Lungu of Zambia, Joseph Kabila of Democratic Republic of Congo, was among leaders attending the inauguration in Harare.

The opposition says the Constitutional Court should have nullified Mnangagwa's victory after the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission twice revised the July 30th presidential election results.

Movement for Democratic Change Alliance Secretary-General Douglas Mwonzora says the swearing in does not finalize the political dispute.

"That means therefore political solution remains and there are a lot of solutions that can be found," he said. "Whatever we are going to do, we are going to do these things within the law. ... Legal solutions does not mean going to court only. It means exercising our rights in terms of the constitution of Zimbabwe we have the right to demonstrate peacefully. There are other political solutions that can be found to the Zimbabwean problem because the Zimbabwean problem has not gone away."

Mnangagwa read a letter he said was from former leader Robert Mugabe explaining he did not attend the Sunday event because he is ill. Mugabe's daughter attended the inauguration.

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LMA - Light Multipurpose Aircraft Carrier

The 44,000 ton Light Multi-purpose Aircraft carrier [LMA] design provides a flight deck equivalent to a much larger carrier with a displacement of over 60,000 tons. The innovation of the LMA is that the hangar below the flight deck is used for aircraft maintenance, rather than storage. The result is a rather large flight deck on a relatively small hull. The LMA is a "fair weather" carrier for which the default location of the air wing is on the flight deck, rather than below on the hangar deck. Aircraft are transported between the decks by relatively small elevators along the flight deck center-line, rather than large elevators on the edges of the flight deck. Naval architects note that steel is cheap and air is free, but this evidently is not strictly true. A radical reduction in the functionality and volume of the hangar deck results in a substantial reduction in total displacement, and project cost. This is the most significant innovation in aircraft carrie design since the twin island design of the Royal Navy's Queen Elizabeth class.

The fate of a bold project - the light multi-purpose aircraft carrier Storm-KM - with a displacement of 37 to 44 thousand tons, first introduced to the general public, is also unclear. His heavy nuclear fellow Storm, KGNC showed at the International Maritime Defense Show in St. Petersburg in 2013. The project of a ship with a displacement of 100,000 tons turned out to be too large-scale. So Krylov decided to start with a smaller aircraft carrier.

The Krylov State Research Center (KGNC) presented the model of a Light Multi-purpose Aircraft carrier [Legkii Mnogocelevoi Avianosec / Legkogo Mnogocelevogo Avianosca] at the Army-2018 International Military-Technical Forum for the first time in August 2018. The original configuration of the hull made it possible to make a huge deck and place on the aircraft carrier a full displacement of 44,000 tons to 46 aircraft, including heavy and light fighters, various helicopters and long-range radar surveillance aircraft. For comparison, on a heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov with a displacement of 60,000 tons, the project provides for the deployment of 50 aircraft and helicopters, in reality they were always much less.

The design maximizes the area of the deck used for the storage and maintenance of aircraft, with a minimum hangar, mainly for aircraft repair. There are three narrow elevators, along the centerline of the flightdeck, rather than on the edges as is normal practice. "The light multipurpose aircraft carrier is designed to ensure combat sustainability of the fleets forces and weapons which are engaged in hostilities in blue and green waters by fulfilling anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense tasks as well as by destroying air, surface, underwater and onshore targets," KGCN said in its documents. There are no exhaust stacks, the "exhaust" will be drained down along the sides. This, in particular, will also reduce the visibility of the ship.

According to the representative of KGNC, the project was developed for export, including to Latin America and South-East Asia, which are not regional superpowers. Compared with the full-size aircraft carrier, the new ship turned out to be cheaper to create and operate. The closest analogue is the Indian light aircraft carrier "Vikramaditya".

According to the head of the center, Vladimir Nikitin, the air wing of the novelty is identical to the heavy aircraft carriers. "This aircraft carrier is different in that it has a high-quality air wing the same as a heavy aircraft carrier. These are heavy Su-33 fighters, light MiG-29K fighters, multipurpose and rescue helicopters, four radar patrol aircraft, and only 46 aircraft." Nikitin also noted that the cost of a new ship could be several hundred billion rubles, that is, almost half as much as a full-sized one.

Most likely, the new ship will accommodate the new generation aircraft, based on the Su-35. In this case, light fighters are likely to remain in the same version - the MiG-29K, since this aircraft is "developed and serially produced." "Such a nomenclature ensures high-quality performance of any tasks," Nikitin stressed.

Among the shortcomings of the ship, the creators note restrictions on the stock of aircraft fuel and aircraft ammunition, which reduces the intensity of combat operations of the aircraft carrier. However, this problem is solved by using a complex supply ship, which will replenish the aircraft carrier with ammunition and fuel. As a result, the new aircraft carrier received full functionality: the ship can carry out air defense, strike, search for submarines and effectively deal with them, but it must always be supplied and transported, said Sudostroenie.info from KGNC.

According to the information provided by the "Krylovians", the LMA is designed to ensure the combat stability of the grouping of forces and equipment of the fleet when it performs combat operations in the far sea and ocean areas by solving air defense, air, surface, underwater and coastal targets. The main dimensions of the light multi-purpose aircraft carrier (on the constructive waterline) are 304 (260) meters x 78 (38) meters x 23 (8.5) meters. LMA is supposed to be equipped with a gas turbine main power plant of four turbines with a total design capacity of 81,000 kW. According to the developers, this will give an opportunity to develop a course of 28 knots. The autonomy of the LMA for provisions should be 60 days. Its deck aviation will be able to carry out take-off and landing operations at roughness up to 7 points.

Ship borne arms include four Pantsyr-ME anti-aircraft missile gun systems with target detection units. The Paket complexes comprising four 324 mm torpedo launchers ensure protection against torpedoes. Four rocket-assisted bomb throwers as well as active and passive electronic warfare systems can be deployed on the ship. Air-launched weapons stock is up to 600 tons; Aviation kerosene stock is up to 2,000 tons.

As for the current stage of the creation of the ship, the conceptual design was completed in 2017. At present, the technical feasibility of the project has been confirmed, estimates of the cost and location of construction have been carried out (the most likely candidate is Sevmash). Everything is ready for further design, add in the Krylov SRC.

The question of the possibility of building an aircraft of the "aircraft carrier" class in modern Russia, as well as the very demand for such a ship in the Russian Navy, are extremely polemical topics. Among other things, this is proved by the practice in the domestic defense industry, in which public statements by representatives of the country's military and political leadership on the need to build aircraft carriers do not lead to the beginning of the relevant design work.

It is not for nothing that recently the Russian Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov correctly informed that issues related to the construction of an aircraft carrier for the Russian Navy are under discussion. In addition, the minister was able to "accurately say that helicopter carriers in the pure sense of the word will not be built."

Thus, the hopes of the "Krylovites" that the model of the heavy multi-purpose aircraft carrier "Storm" demonstrated by them in July 2013 will someday turn into a real ship, weakened literally every year. With this in mind, the Krylov State Research Center decided to follow the strategy of "a better bird in the hand than a crane in the sky." In addition to the previously developed concept of a heavy aircraft carrier with a total displacement of 100,000 tons, carrying up to 90 aircraft, the Krylovites offered the Navy a new conceptual project of an "economy class". They became the concept of a light multi-purpose aircraft carrier (LMA).

The head of the sector of the project department of FSUE Krylov State Research Center Alexei Litsis justified the demand for such a ship with the following arguments. First, if our navy claims to be an oceanic, then it can not do without an aircraft carrier in the ocean zone. To build the same LMA, capable of providing a proper air cover to a ship grouping away from its native coasts, is objectively simpler, faster and cheaper than if it is immediately aimed at a heavy aircraft carrier. Secondly, the LMA export potential is much higher than that of the same "Storm".

On 25 April 2018 Deputy Commander of the Navy for armament V. Bursuk (the customer) stated: "The fleet believes that it is inexpedient to build light aircraft carriers for Russia from the economic point of view (price-quality ratio) for Russia ... The project of a prospective aircraft carrier has not yet been developed and its TTX is still called early, but it is already clear that the displacement will be about 70,000 tons, which will allow carrying more aircraft on board." But in August 2018, the newly-appointed general director of the Nevsky Design Bureau (the developer of all domestic aircraft-carrying cruisers) S. Orlov said that "KGNC has its own vision of the future aircraft-carrying complex of Russia, and we try not to argue with them."

A light aircraft carrier with a semi-submarine submarine part was proposed to be built by the staff of the Krylov State Research Center. According to TASS, the project was presented at the Army-2018 forum in late August 2018. Previously, such a technical solution during the construction of catamarans was not offered.

The new advance project of the Russian aircraft carrier received a unique submerged part in the form of a semi-tatamaran, such a scheme has not yet been offered to aircraft carriers. The a new non-nuclear multi-purpose aircraft carrier pre-project had not yet received the name.

The main feature of this project is the construction of the underwater part. It implements the semi-tamaramara form of the hull, a center representative told TASS. The catamarans have two parallel hulls connected by a superstructure platform. The scheme of the new aircraft carrier is called a Polukatamaranom [semi-catamaran], since two separate ship hulls in the stern converge into one at the bow.

The hull of virtually all conventional ships and boats has a so-called monohull-configuration. The term "monohull" denotes a hull which is constructed of a single water displacing body. A monohull typically narrows in cross-section toward the front thereof to define a pointed bow which facilitates the ship's ability to cut efficiently through the water. But a monohull is otherwise relatively wide and a good portion thereof remains submerged at all times below the water surface. This enables a monohull to withstand and to remain more stable in rough seas. However, because a large portion of the monohull is submerged at all times, a monohull produces greater drag at high speeds, i.e. resistance to motion, which results in a ship whose top speed is limited and/or which requires more powerful engines.

A catamaran is a type of a ship which has a different hull structure which has been known for a long time to reduce drag and to result in a faster ship or boat. The hull of a catamaran consists of a pair of hulls each of which is comparatively narrow and long. The catamaran hulls are laterally spaced and typically held together by the deck or by the superstructure of the ship.

Catamarans offer the advantages of reduced drag which permit catamarans to attain speeds not possible with a monohull and/or the option of being equipped with less powerful and therefore less expensive engines. However, as is well known to those skilled in the marine arts, catamarans suffer from the serious disadvantage that they are considerably less stable in rough seas and from a propensity for submarining their forward hulls into large head seas which can result in the forward end of the hull "digging in" and the vessel flipping end for end.

The hull of virtually all conventional ships and boats has a so-called monohull-configuration. The term "monohull" denotes a hull which is constructed of a single water displacing body. A monohull typically narrows in cross-section toward the front thereof to define a pointed bow which facilitates the ship's ability to cut efficiently through the water. But a monohull is otherwise relatively wide and a good portion thereof remains submerged at all times below the water surface. This enables a monohull to withstand and to remain more stable in rough seas. However, because a large portion of the monohull is submerged at all times, a monohull produces greater drag at high speeds, i.e. resistance to motion, which results in a ship whose top speed is limited and/or which requires more powerful engines.

The V-hull design provides capabilities of traversing waters with significant waves while lessening their jarring effects by virtue of its ability to "cut" through the waves. However, a V-hull is also susceptible to greater rolling, for example due to steering changes, and is less efficient when moving at high speeds across relatively calm waters than are flatter bottom hulls or catamarans which will normally plane more easily. By the same token, those hulls that plane most easily, and hence are more efficient for travel at higher speeds, are also more susceptible to being adversely affected by larger waves, and their uses can be limited by their difficulties in handling turbulent waters.

According to a company representative, the new scheme allows using a wide flight deck with a smaller displacement, as in heavier-class aircraft carriers. From the area of the deck depends on the composition and number of aircraft. "As a result, a ship with an average displacement can accommodate a full deck wing," the expert explained. According to him, earlier when creating aircraft carriers, this form of hull was not used.

The center specified that for the new aircraft carrier the estimated total displacement is 44 thousand tons, length - 304 m, deck width - 78 m, draft - 8.5 m, full speed - 28 knots, range - 8 thousand miles. The aircraft wing should consist of 46 aircraft, including 12-14 Su-33 fighters, 12-14 MiG-29K / KUB, four long-range radar detection and control aircraft, 12-14 Ka-27 helicopters. For comparison: the only Russian medium aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, with a substantially larger total displacement of 59 thousand tons (more than 15 thousand tons) has practically the same air group - up to 52 airplanes and helicopters.

The latest Russian fifth-generation fighters, the Su-57, will be able to base themselves on a new aircraft carrier provided they are adapted to the ship, that is, wetted, Pavel Filippov, head of the Krylovsky State Scientific Center, said 10 July 2019 in an interview with RIA Novosti. The Krylovsky Center has developed a new concept for a non-nuclear multi-purpose aircraft carrier for the Russian Navy with a displacement of 40 thousand tons. Its cost is 200 billion rubles, the construction time is five years.

Theoretically, it is possible to take a certain amount of these aircraft (Su-57, - ed) on board provided they are wetted , that is, lighter weight, changes in some structural elements. This is possible during adaptation work, Filippov said. At the same time, he noted that so far this aircraft has not been considered as a carrier-based aircraft of the Russian Navy.

Military observer, retired colonel Viktor Litovkin on Sputnik radio noted that various models of aircraft are suitable as carrier-based aviation. While there is no approved aircraft carrier design, its still too early to say which aircraft will be based on it. But why not - the Su-57 can be placed on an aircraft carrier. In principle, any fighter can be adapted to land and take off We need a hook - a device so that it clings to the aerofinisher on the deck, we need stiffer chassis, a lot of things. But first you need to decide which aircraft carrier we need. We also need to have docks of a sufficiently large size for the construction of an aircraft carrier - they only st swarm. And then you can talk about airplanes, "said Victor Litovkin.

At the same time, according to him, there is a need to talk not only about fighters for a new aircraft carrier. "We need to talk not only about multi-functional fighters. An aircraft carrier, in principle, also needs a long-range radar patrol and guidance aircraft. And, of course, an aircraft carrier also needs a motorcade of cruisers, destroyers, frigates and so on. Therefore, the theme of an aircraft carrier is a very big one , a complex and costly topic," said Victor Litovkin.

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UK to start work on post-Brexit satellite system to rival EU's Galileo: Report

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 02:06PM

UK Prime Minister Theresa May has ordered officials to start work on a British satellite navigation system to rival the European Union's Galileo because the UK's access to sensitive security information could be restricted after Brexit, according to British media.

The Sunday Telegraph reported that an official announcement will be made this week about the work on the satellite navigation system which is to rival Galileo, a satellite program which the EU has been developing to rival the US Global Positioning System (GPS).

UK Finance minister Philip Hammond has approved 100 million pounds to explore the massive satellite system.

Britain's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy would not comment on the report in the Sunday Telegraph. However, it comes amid other reports suggesting that the EU would exclude Britain and its companies from sensitive future work on Galileo, a 10 billion euro ($11.44 billion) project, after the country leaves the bloc in March.

Estimates suggest that Britain will have to spend about 3 billion pounds to build a system that could rival Galileo. The country can also be refunded up to one billion pounds for the work it has carried out on the project which has been underway since 2003 and is expected to be completed by 2020.

Britain can continue to use Galileo's open signal in future but its military could be barred from the encrypted version when the European project becomes fully operational, according to EU officials.

Britain and the EU are in the midst of some breathtaking and complicated negotiations over Brexit.

A plan by May in early July sparked fresh concerns about the future relations between the two sides as EU refused to accept key demands from it.

Many in May's own cabinet have warned that there is a high chance for Britain to crash out of the EU without a deal. The government insists there are still common grounds for reaching an agreement.

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North Korean blasts 'double-dealing' US for hatching 'criminal plot'

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 02:05PM

In the freighted atmosphere surrounding the relations between Pyongyang and the Washington, a North Korean newspaper has lambasted the administration of US President Donald Trump for its "double-dealing" and "hatching a criminal plot."

The Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in an editorial issued on Sunday that American special units based in Japan were staging an air drill aimed at "infiltration into Pyongyang."

"Such acts prove that the US is hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK and commit a crime, which deserves merciless divine punishment in case the US fails in the scenario of the DPRK's unjust and brigandish denuclearisation first," the paper said, referring to North Korea's official name the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"We cannot but take a serious note of the double-dealing attitudes of the US as it is busy staging secret drills involving man-killing special units while having a dialogue with a smile on its face."

The editorial urged Washington to give up the "pointless military gamble" and implement the Singapore agreement.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met with Donald Trump in Singapore in June. The two sides agreed to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. While the summit was seen as a test for diplomacy that could end the long-running nuclear standoff, foreign policy experts say the stakes are high if it does not result in a nuclear agreement.

In part to reassure North Korea, Trump delayed joint military drills with South Korea, but smaller exercises continue.

The North Korean leader has already told Trump that denuclearization depends on ceasing antagonism between the two nations, while the United States says tough sanctions will remain in place against Pyongyang until its complete denuclearization.

Trump has partly blamed China for the lack of progress with North Korea and suggested that talks with Pyongyang could be on hold until after Washington resolved its bitter trade dispute with Beijing. The Chinese government has expressed "serious concern" about the matter.

Experts say dismantling Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program and verifying it would be a large and complex task.

North Korea has said its nuclear arsenal is a deterrent against potential aggression by the United States.

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North Korean Media Slams 'Double-Dealing' US After Pompeo's Visit Cancelation

Sputnik News

14:22 26.08.2018(updated 14:54 26.08.2018)

Earlier, US President Donald Trump stated that he was directing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to delay his visit next to North Korea.

North Korea's state newspaper Rodong Sinmun blamed the United States of "double-dealing" and "hatching a criminal plot" against Pyongyang, after Pompeo's visit was postponed.

"Such acts prove that the US is hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK and commit a crime which deserves merciless divine punishment in case the US fails in the scenario of the DPRK's unjust and brigandish denuclearisation first," the newspaper said.

The newspaper stressed that US special units in Japan were staging an air drill targeted at "the infiltration into Pyongyang", according to a South Korean media outlet.

"We cannot but take a serious note of the double-dealing attitudes of the US as it is busy staging secret drills involving man-killing special units while having a dialogue with a smile on its face," it noted.

According to a spokesman at the US Embassy in Seoul, there was no information on the alleged drill in the newspaper.

The relationship between the US and North Korea improved in the last months, with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attending a top-level summit with Trump in June in Singapore.

Though, the US has repeatedly stressed that sanctions against DPRK will remain in place until the communist country attains complete denuclearization.

 Sputnik

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Iran wants enhanced ties with Qatar: President Rouhani

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 02:38PM

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says the Islamic Republic always seeks to strengthen relations with Qatar as a friendly country in the sensitive Middle East region.

"There are numerous capacities and grounds for the expansion of cooperation between Iran and Qatar in political and economic fields and there is no obstacle in the way of improving joint cooperation," Rouhani said in a telephone conversation with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani on Sunday.

He added that Tehran would continue to support Doha in the face of illegal sanctions against the Arab country.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt cut off diplomatic ties with Qatar on June 5, 2017, after officially accusing it of "sponsoring terrorism."

Libya, the Maldives, Djibouti, Senegal and the Comoros later joined the camp in ending diplomatic ties. Jordan downgraded its diplomatic relations as well.

Qatar's Foreign Ministry later announced that the decisions to cut diplomatic ties were unjustified and based on false claims and assumptions.

On June 9, Qatar strongly dismissed allegations of supporting terrorism after the Saudi regime and its allies blacklisted dozens of individuals and entities purportedly associated with Doha.

Elsewhere in the phone call, Rouhani pointed to the US unilateral move to withdraw from a 2015 historic nuclear agreement and commended the political stance adopted by European countries, Russia, China, Turkey and Iran's neighboring countries such as Qatar on support for the agreement and their objection to the US illegal sanctions.

"These positions must be complemented with practical measures," the Iranian chief executive pointed out.

The United States has ramped up pressure on Iran after US President Donald Trump withdrew Washington in May from the landmark Iran nuclear agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), reached between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries in 2015, and decided to re-impose unilateral sanctions against Tehran.

Under the deal, Iran undertook to put limits on its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of nuclear-related sanctions.

Rouhani also invited the Qatari emir to take part in the 3rd Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD) summit in Tehran.

Qatar opposes Iran nuclear deal violation

The Qatari emir, for his part, said his country is against the violation of the JCPOA and any intensification of relations between Iran and the US.

The Qatari government always seeks to bolster relations with Tehran and supports the settlement of political issues through peaceful approaches.

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Iran's Parliament ousts finance minister

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 10:16AM

Iran's parliament has voted to remove Minister of Economic Affairs and Finance Masoud Karbasian from office.

A total of 137 MPs voted for Karbasian's removal while 121 voted in favor of him remaining in office.

He follows Ali Rabiei, Iran's former minister of labor and social welfare, who was voted out by the parliament only two weeks ago.

A motion to impeach Karbasian was submitted to the parliament's presiding board with 33 signatures on August 19.

The MPs, who set forth the motion, sought impeachment for the minister over a range of issues that included the inability to manage the country's economic affairs, failure to implement policies for bolstering resistance economy, lack of proper supervision of financial transactions and the inability to promote economic transparency.

Rabiei was ousted with 129 votes against, 111 votes in favor and 3 abstentions.

The main issues for which he was impeached included an increase in unemployment, closure of small and medium-sized industrial units, insurance policies for pensioners and the status of Iran's leading pension fund  the Social Security Investment Company (SHASTA).

President Hassan Rouhani has three months to present replacements for Karbasian and Rabiei to the parliament for approval.

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US unable to achieve goals against Iran: FM Zarif

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 09:13AM

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says the United States has failed to achieve its goals following its withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and is now waging a "psychological war" on Iran and its partners.

"Today, the Americans' main focus is on a psychological war and they are doing the most work to exert psychological pressure on Iranians and our international partners," he said in a live TV program on Sunday.

The Americans, he said, are trying to tell Iran's partners "if you don't want to come to the US, why you are doing business with the Iranians?"

Back in May, President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), despite objections from other signatories.

Earlier this month, the US president signed an executive order, re-imposing the first round of sanctions on Iran, which had been lifted under the JCPOA. The second phase of US bans will come into effect in November.

Iran has lodged a complaint with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over Washington's move to re-impose sanctions against Tehran.

Elsewhere in his remarks, the Iranian foreign minister said the "illegal" US withdrawal from the JCPOA violated not only the deal but also the Treaty of Amity and Economic Relations signed by the two countries in 1955.

He said even close US allies and the countries that are not in good terms with Tehran, such as Canada, have stood against Washington regarding the JCPOA.

"From the time Trump announced pulling out of the nuclear deal, the Americans have not achieved any of their desired goals," he said.

The top diplomat further reiterated that Iran does not trust the US and relies on its own people for security and progress.

Iran's difference with other regional countries is that they are seeking security through buying arms or acqiuring nuclear weapons, Zarif said.

Unlike them, "the Islamic Republic sees itself relying on its people in the fields of security and progress," he added.

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Iran's defense minister in Syria for new cooperation

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 08:55AM

Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami has arrived in Syria for a two-day visit to discuss a number of issues, including ways of expanding defense and military cooperation.

Hatami told reporters at Damascus airport on Sunday that the aim of the visit was to boost bilateral cooperation under the new conditions in Syria and its transition to the reconstruction phase.

"We hope to be able to have a productive role in the reconstruction of Syria," Fars news agency quoted him as saying.

Hatami, who is being accompanied by a high-ranking delegation on the invitation of his Syrian counterpart General Ali Abdullah Ayyoub, is due to meet senior defense and military officials as well as President Bashar al-Assad.

Fars said the most important topics for discussion were the review of the regional developments, the fight against terrorism, the strengthening of the resistance axis and the study of strategies for expansion of defense and military cooperation.

The two sides were also expected to sign an agreement on defense and military cooperation which will define the framework for bilateral cooperation.

At the start of his visit, Hatami congratulated Syria on its victories in the battle against terrorists, hailing them as a turning point in "the axis of resistance's regional cooperation".

His visit follows Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Baqeri's trip to Syria last October.

Iran and Syria enjoy strategic relations. Syria was the only Arab country that supported Iran during the Iraqi-imposed war in 1980s.

At the request of Damascus, Iran has been providing military advisory assistance to the Syrian government forces who are fighting an all-out foreign-sponsored militancy.

Iran's military presence in Syria is a thorn in the side of Israel. On April 9, an Israeli airstrike against the T-4 airbase in Syria's Homs Province killed more than a dozen people, including seven Iranian military advisers.

Tel Aviv wants Syria to ask Iranian advisers to leave the country and dismantle what it claims to be Iranian military bases.

In an interview with the al-Alam News Network in June, Assad said Iran does not have any military bases in Syria, but if there is "a need for Iranian military bases, we will not hesitate."

Assad said Damascus had invited Iran and Russia to Syria, unlike the American, French, Turkish and Israeli troops who are occupying forces.

In his remarks in Damascus Sunday, Hatami said, "No third party can affect the presence of Iranian advisers in Syria."

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Iranian Defense Minister In Syria To Discuss Cooperation

RFE/RL August 26, 2018

Iran's Defense Minister Amir Hatami has arrived in Syria on a two-day visit aimed at further developing bilateral cooperation, Iranian media report.

"We hope to have a productive role in the reconstruction of Syria," Hatami was quoted as saying upon arrival in Damascus on August 26.

Iran, along with Russia, has backed President Bashar al-Assad in the seven-year Syrian conflict, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and uprooted millions since it began with a government crackdown on protesters in March 2011.

Iran's semiofficial Tasnim news agency reported Hatami was scheduled to hold talks with Syria's top military and political officials on the latest developments in the region, joint action against terrorism, and ways to deepen military cooperation between Tehran and Damascus.

The Iranian minister was also scheduled to hold talks with Assad, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.

The visit comes as the conflict in Syria has turned heavily in Assad's favor, with rebel forces being routed in many parts of the country. Syrian pro-government forces are preparing to launch an assault on the northwestern province of Idlib, the last major rebel stronghold.

Last week, White House national security adviser John Bolton urged Moscow to help end Iran's military presence in the war-ravaged country.

The United States supports rebels fighting against Assad's government.

After meeting with Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russian President Vladimir Putin's Security Council, Bolton said in Geneva on August 23 that the two had discussed a "series of steps" that would lead to the removal of Iran's military presence in Syria.

Before the meeting, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said the U.S. insistence on the withdrawal of Iranian forces is a "reflection of the dominating aspiration in Washington to dictate to everyone else their own beliefs about what is good and what is bad."

Israel has also expressed concern over Iran's growing influence in Syria, accusing Tehran of seeking to establish a foothold near the frontier with the Jewish state.

During a visit to Lithuania on August 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized an EU economic aid plan for Iran, saying the money will "go to the missiles and the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East."

In recent months, Israeli jets have carried out a number of air strikes against suspected Iranian forces in Syria.

Iranian officials say their military presence in Syria is at the invitation of the Damascus government and they have no immediate plans to withdraw.

"No third party can affect the presence of Iranian advisers in Syria," Hatami told reporters in Damascus.

More than 1,000 Iranians, including senior members of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), have been killed in Syria since 2012, according to Reuters.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, Tasmin, and IRNA

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/iranian-defense -minister-in-syria-to-discuss- cooperation/29453744.html

Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Iranian Economy Minister Impeached

Sputnik News

11:17 26.08.2018(updated 11:44 26.08.2018)

Abbas Payizadeh, conservative MP in a speech ahead of the impeached vote, said that "inefficiency and lack of planning have nothing to do with sanctions."

Iran's parliament impeached Economy Minister Masoud Karbasian as the country tries to confront an economic crisis.

Masoud Karbasian lost the vote of confidence by 137 votes to 121. He became the second minister to have to step down this month.

"Wrong decisions have harmed the people and led to individuals looting public assets," Abbas Payizadeh said.

Earlier, the Iranian parliament prepared a list of questions concerning the cabinet's policy on coping with economic challenges facing the country and has given President Rouhani one month to present his answers to lawmakers, the ISNA news agency reported.

The cabinet of the Iranian President Rouhani will have to provide an explanation for the country's economic recession.

In May, US President Donald Trump said that the United States would leave the nuclear agreement with Iran that stipulated Tehran should ensure the peaceful nature of its nuclear program in exchange for the gradual lifting of sanctions.

The 2015 nuclear deal, also known as the JCPOA, eased sanctions earlier imposed on Iran in exchange for Tehran curtailing its nuclear weapons program.

 Sputnik

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Senior Daesh militant commander killed in Iraq's Diyala infighting

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 12:46PM

A high-ranking commander of the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group have been killed when members of two rival foreign-sponsored militant groups operating in Iraq's eastern province of Diyala turned on each other and engaged in a fierce exchange of gunfire.

Ahmed al-Shimary of the Diyala Operations Command said the high-profile militant, better known by the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed, was killed in a clash between two Daesh groups at an orchard in the village of Mkheisa, located some 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) northeast of the provincial capital Baquba.

Shimary added that Ahmed was one of the aides of the former founder of the al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in a US airstrike in 2006.

Ahmed, who is an Iraqi national, joined Daesh terrorist group in 2014, and became one of its main commanders in Diyala province.

Separately, two Daesh Takfiris were killed in a clash with security forces in the province.

10 Daesh militants killed in anti-terror raid south of Mosul

Meanwhile, a total of 10 Daesh terrorists were killed in an operation against a militant hideout south of Mosul, located some 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of Baghdad.

Iraq's Joint Operations Command spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasoul said the Interior Ministry's elite rapid response forces, backed by Iraqi Air Force fighter jets, raided the Daesh position near al-Shoura area.

Provincial police forces also captured five suspected Daesh terrorists in Mosul.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is also the commander-in-chief of Iraqi forces, pledged on June 30 to hunt down Daesh militants across Iraq after a series of attacks and abductions carried out by the terrorist group.

"We will chase the remaining cells of terrorism in their hideouts and we will kill them, we will chase them everywhere, in the mountains and the desert," Abadi said.

Abadi declared the end of military operations against Daesh in the Arab country on December 9, 2017.

On July 10 that year, the Iraqi prime minister had formally declared victory over Daesh extremists in Mosul, which served as the terrorists' main urban stronghold in the conflict-ridden Arab country.

In the run-up to Mosul's liberation, Iraqi army soldiers and volunteer Hashd al-Sha'abi fighters had made sweeping gains against Daesh.

Iraqi forces took control of eastern Mosul in January 2017 after 100 days of fighting, and launched the battle in the west on February 19 last year.

Daesh began a terror campaign in Iraq in 2014, overrunning vast swathes in lightning attacks.

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S Korean President May Encourage Kim to Negotiate With US - Reports

Sputnik News

18:51 26.08.2018

TOKYO (Sputnik) - South Korean President Moon Jae-in may help advance talks between Washington and Pyongyang by acting as a mediator during his visit to North Korea for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in fall, the Yonhap News Agency reported citing an official from the presidential office.

"I believe President Moon's role has only become greater Objectively, [Moon's] role as a facilitator and mediator to help expand the range of mutual understanding between the US and North Korea has become greater," the official was quoted by the media.

The summit is expected to take place in Pyongyang around September 12-13.

The upcoming event will be the third meeting held between Moon and Kim in 2018, after they first met on April 27 and then on May 26, before the US-North Korean summit.

In June, US President Donald Trump and Kim met despite the tense relations between the two leaders and agreed to work toward "a complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula." Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was supposed to travel to North Korea next week, however, on Friday, the US president announced that he told the official to cancel the trip.

 Sputnik

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Moscow says UK's interception of Russian aircraft over Black Sea 'dangerous'

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 02:41PM

Moscow has lashed out at the UK's Royal Air Force (RAF) for intercepting Russian patrol aircraft near Russia's own shores over the Black Sea, warning that such provocative actions are 'simply dangerous'.

The comments were made in a Saturday press release by the Russian Embassy in London after the RAF intercepted a Russian Be-12 heading south west over the Black Sea from Crimea on Thursday.

The embassy emphasized that the country's armed forces "strictly comply with international law and pose no threat to Britain."

"What kind of threat to Britain or its allies does a Russian patrol aircraft hypothetically pose while conducting flights off Russia's own shore, some 1,500 miles away from the UK?" the Russian embassy said.

The interception came less than two weeks after another similar incident, during which the RAF fighter jets stationed as part of a NATO mission in Romania were scrambled to intercept Russian bombers flying over the Black Sea.

The Russian embassy's remarks came in reaction to an earlier statement by the British Ministry of Defense on the interception of the Russian maritime patrol aircraft, which claimed the interruption was a response to Russia's "provocation."

The UK's Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson said in the statement that the RAF was "collectively ready to respond to any act of aggression" and will support the UK's "Eastern European allies to deter any threats faced."

The Russian embassy, however, says Williamson and other British politicians who present such "routine Russian activity" as provocative incidents are themselves "behaving in a highly irresponsible manner."

It also noted that the recent British interceptions were indicative of "how harmful is the very idea of deploying RAF and other NATO forces in Romania, Poland or Baltic states."

"Instead of strengthening anyone's security, such military presence is being used by the British authorities for provocative actions of their own - not only through verbal statements, regrettable as they are, but also in real military terms, which is simply dangerous," the Russian embassy added.

Such encounters between Russian and British air forces have occurred almost on a regular basis in the past.

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Russia Mocks British Military After Jets Scramble From Romania

RFE/RLAugust 26, 2018

The Russian Embassy in London mocked the British military and says its armed forces "pose no threat to Britain" two days after U.K. Typhoon jets based in Romania scrambled to investigate Russian aircraft heading toward NATO airspace.

"What kind of threat to Britain or its allies does a Russian patrol aircraft hypothetically pose while conducting flights off Russia's own shore, some 1,500 miles away from the U.K.?" the embassy said in a statement on August 25.

On Twitter, the embassy wrote: "A TYPHOON is SCRAMBLED to DETER a 50-years-old Russian PATROL plane off Russia's own shore, 1,500 miles away from Britain. Reckless and provocative. Congrats to UK taxpayers."

The comments came after British Typhoon jets based in Romania twice in three days scrambled to investigate what the British Ministry of Defense said were "provocative" Russian aircraft flying on a path toward NATO airspace.

On August 23, the jets launched from the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base near the Romanian city of Constanta in response to a Russian Be-12 maritime patrol aircraft heading south over the Black Sea from Crimea.

The Typhoons were operating in accordance with NATO's enhanced air-policing mission designed to deter "Russian aggression, reassure Romania and assure NATO allies of the U.K. commitment to collective defense," the ministry said.

On August 21, two British Typhoon jets from the same Romanian air base scrambled to investigate suspected Russian fighter aircraft operating in the region.

The ministry said the Typhoons launched when two suspected Russian Su-30 Flanker aircraft appeared to be heading toward NATO airspace from Crimea.

The statements did not say if the aircraft actually entered NATO airspace.

Britain's defense secretary, Gavin Williamson, said after the incidents that "our commitment to NATO and European security is unwavering. Whether in the skies over the Black Sea and the Baltic, or on the ground in Estonia, our actions send a clear message -- we are collectively ready to respond to any act of aggression and will support our Eastern European allies to deter any threats faced."

Encounters between Russian and NATO warplanes have increased in recent years as Moscow has demonstrated its resurgent military might. Russia also has increased the presence of its navy in the Mediterranean, Black Sea, and other areas.

Tensions are high in the region since Moscow's 2014 takeover and illegal annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, a move that led to Western sanctions being imposed against Russia.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-mocks-britain-after-uk- jets-scramble-in-romania/29453541.html

Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Russia Sends Warships to Syrian Shores as US Suspected of Preparing Strike

Sputnik News

17:09 26.08.2018(updated 17:18 26.08.2018)

The Russian Defense Ministry warned that militants in Idlib may be preparing to stage a chemical weapons attack against the local civilian population and thus create a pretext for a US strike.

The Admiral Grigorovich and the Admiral Essen, two frigates of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, are heading to the Mediterranean Sea in order to bolster Russia's military presence in the region, according to a statement issued by the Russian Defense Ministry's press service.

While en route to their final destination, the two vessels reportedly conducted a series of naval exercises, including the detection and tracking of a simulated enemy submersible target.

This development occurred as the Russian Defense Ministry accused the United States, the United Kingdom and France of preparing to carry out new strikes against Syria under the pretext of the Syrian government forces using chemical weapons.

As ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov explained, militants in Idlib province are preparing to stage a false flag chemical weapon attack against civilians in order to blame Damascus, while the United States stands ready to launch a punitive strike against Syria as soon as the necessary pretext becomes available.

"This provocation with the active participation of the British special services will serve as another pretext for the US, UK and France to conduct a missile strike on the Syrian government and infrastructure," Konashenkov claimed.

Earlier, US National Security Adviser John Bolton also reportedly warned Russian Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev that Washington is prepared to take forceful military action against Syria if Damascus uses chemical weapons, stressing that America is prepared to respond with greater force than before.

The US, UK, and France coordinated a massive airstrike on Syria in April 2018 after the alleged use of chemical weapons in Douma had been reported by the controversial NGO "White Helmets", which has repeatedly been caught staging false flag attacks.

In July, however, OPCW experts announced that they had found traces of organic substances containing chlorine, reportedly used in the attack in Douma. Yet there was no evidence that nerve agents had been used in the attack.

 Sputnik

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Iran defense minister: Fight against terrorists in Syria at final stage

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Damascus, Aug 26, IRNA -- Fight against terrorism in Syria under the leadership of the country and Resistance Front forces is at its final stage, Iran's Defense Minister Brigadier-General Amir Hatami said on Sunday.

Speaking at a joint press conference with his Syrian counterpart in Damascus, Hatami said, 'Islamic Republic of Iran respects the sustainable security and territorial integrity of regional countries.'

Noting that Iran has had good relations with Syria in all areas over the past 40 years, the minister said that Syria stood by Iran and its leadership during the eight-year Iraqi imposed war on Iran, and Tehran, too, supported the Syrian government and nation from the very beginning of the war against terrorism.

Iran's private sector, with its high capabilities, is ready to help the Syrian government and nation in reconstruction of the country, Hatami said.

Iran is also highly capable in the area of defensive power and can help Syria to strengthen its military equipment.

The Syrian defense minister, said for his part, that an international war was planned against Syria since around eight years ago which was brought to failure with the support of Resistance Front.

Iran has had an important role in rooting out terrorism in Syria, General Ali Abdullah Ayoub said, adding that Damascus has to be grateful of these helps.

Most parts of Syria have now been cleared from terrorists and the Syrian Army will soon take control of Idlib province too.

Iran defense minister arrived in Damascus for a two-day visit earlier in the day.

Mostafa Kavakebian, a member of Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission as well as some Iranian military officials are accompanying the defense minister in his visit to Syria.

A meeting between the Iranian defense minister and Syrian President Bashar Assad has begun.

9341**2050

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Iran, Syrian defense ministers discuss issues of mutual interests

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Damascus, Aug 26, IRNA -- Syrian Defense Minister Lieutenant General Ali Ayyoub said on Sunday that by cooperation and participation of resistance axis, especially the Islamic Republic of Iran, Syria could finally win the war against terrorism after about eight years.

He made the remarks in a meeting with visiting Iranian Minister of Defense Brigadier General Amir Hatami in Damascus.

Lieutenant General Ayyoub reminded that without Iranian helps Syria could not win war against terrorists, and added that Iran, Syria bilateral relations is extensive and concentrated and both states are using each other experiences.

He stressed that victories in Syria has caused concerns of enemies, on top of them the US and the Zionist regime.

Lieutenant General Ayyoub underlined that bilateral relations between the two countries are firm and Syria will not allow any country to disrupt such relations.

General Hatami thanked for invitation of his Syrian counterpart to pay a visit to Syria and said that relations between the two states has passed ordinary ties and has reached to strategic relations.

He expressed Iranian government and nation felicitations for recent big victories of Syrian government against terrorism and underlined that Iran will stay with Syrian nation by the end.

General Hatami added that liberation of Syria from existed terrorists causes stability and security in the region and ruins pretext of alien interferences.

'Iran will spare no efforts to protect Syrian territorial integrity, because security in Syria helps stability in the region,' he said.

The Iranian Defense Minister added that extra-regional countries intended to sow discord and create instability in Syria and Iran will spare no efforts to create stability in Syria.

Brigadier General Amir Hatami at the head of delegation arrived in Damascus on Sunday morning for a 2-day visit. He is to meet with President Bashar al-Assad as well.

1391**2050

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Iran confident about Syria's full defeat of terrorism: Defense chief

Iran Press TV

Sun Aug 26, 2018 04:58PM

Iran's Defense Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami has hailed the steadfastness of the Syrian people and government forces in their battle against terrorism, expressing confidence that they will achieve a final victory in this path.

"Not only regional people, but people around the world are indebted to the fight carried out against terrorists in Syria," Hatami said in a meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Sunday.

He expressed confidence that the Syrians have the ability to continue their fight against terrorists until achieving a complete victory and defeating terrorism.

The Iranian defense chief reiterated his country's support for Syria's unity regardless of threats and pressure from some countries, which are supporting terrorism.

He said Iran stood by the Syrian people and nation since the beginning of war there more than seven years ago and is currently ready to participate in the reconstruction process of the war-stricken country.

"The private sector of the Islamic Republic of Iran has good capabilities and capacities in this regard and can use them in the reconstruction of Syria," Hatami pointed out.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies are aiding Takfiri terrorist groups wreaking havoc in the country.

Iranian First Vice President Es'haq Jahangiri said in June that the Islamic Republic would stand by Syria in the reconstruction process of the war-stricken country.

"As the Iranian government and nation stood by the Syrian government and people in the fight against terrorist groups, they will also stand by the Syrian people now that major parts of Syria are under the control of the country's government," Jahangiri said in a meeting with Syrian Minister of Economy and Foreign Trade Mohammad Samer al-Khalil in Tehran.

His comments came after Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Iran was ready for cooperation with other states to help reconstruct the violence-torn Arab country.

A UN spokeswoman said on Friday that United Nations Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura had invited Iran, Russia and Turkey to talks due to be held in Geneva next month on forming Syria's Constitutional Committee.

"Special Envoy de Mistura continues his consultation on the establishment of a Syrian-led, Syrian-owned and UN facilitated Constitutional Committee within the framework of the Geneva process and in accordance with Security Council Resolution 22-54 2015," Alessandra Vellucci said at a news conference.

Iran, Russia and Turkey, as guarantor states for peace process in Syria, expressed their firm determination in late July to counter any plot aimed at partitioning the Arab country.

Iran, Syria must outline long-term cooperation plans: Assad

The Syrian president, for his part, said Tehran and Damascus must outline plans to improve long-term cooperation in order to enhance the steadfastness of the Iranian and Syrian nations in the face of the enemies' plots.

Assad said the US positions on the Iranian nuclear deal, the imposition of sanctions on Russia and attempts to prolong the war in Syria by supporting terrorists affirm the correctness of the policies pursued by the anti-terrorism axis.

Heading a high-ranking delegation, the Iranian defense minister arrived in Damascus earlier on Sunday to discuss a number of important issues, including the latest regional developments, the fight against terrorism, the strengthening of the resistance axis and the study of strategies for expansion of defense and military cooperation.

In a meeting with his Syrian counterpart, General Ali Abdullah Ayyoub, in Damascus, Hatami warned of extra-regional countries' plots to sow discord in Syria, vowing the Islamic Republic's full support for the war-ravaged country in a bid to preserve its territorial integrity and improve its stability.

"Iran will spare no effort to maintain Syria's territorial integrity, because security in the country will help [improve] regional stability," the Iranian defense minister said.

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Return to Peace: Syrian Military Continues to Clear Homs From Explosives - MoD

Sputnik News

17:31 26.08.2018

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Syrian engineering units disposed 59 explosive devices in the country's Homs Province over the past 24 hours, the Syrian office of the Russian Center for the Reception, Allocation and Accommodation of Refugees said on Sunday.

"Over the past 24 hours, Syrian army engineering units carried on mine clearance operations in the Homs province, having cleared 4.3 hectares of territory, three buildings and one kilometer of roads. They found and defused 59 explosive devices, including 13 improvised explosive devices," the center said.

To date, Syrian engineers found and defused 7,612 explosive devices including 2,370 improvised explosive devices, in Homs and Damascus provinces, clearing up 262.3 hectares of the territory, 808 buildings and 56.8 kilometers of roads.

Syrians Return Home

The center also noted that over 200 Syrian refugees have returned to their home country from neighboring Lebanon over the same period of time.

"Over the past 24 hours, 202 refugees (61 women and 103 children) returned to Syria from Lebanon through the Jaydet-Yabus checkpoint," the center said in a daily bulletin.

Since July 18, over 8,000 Syrians had returned to their home country from abroad, the statement added. The center specified that 8,522 people had returned from Lebanon, including 4,089 people who had returned through the Jaydet-Yabus checkpoint, 3,108 people who had returned via the Zemrani checkpoint, 802 people who had returned through al-Dabusiyah checkpoint and 523 people who had returned via al-Qusayr checkpoint. The bulletin noted that 318 had returned from Jordan through the Nasib checkpoint.

According to the refugee center, 714 internally displaced persons (IDPs), including 245 women and 338 children, and 10 pieces of equipment have been evacuated from the Idlib de-escalation zone over the past 24 hours.

Since September 30, 2015, over 1.2 million Syrian IDPs had returned to their homes, the center pointed out.

Syria has been devastated by years of violent civil war which had prompted millions of people to flee hostilities from the areas where they lived to other locations in Syria and outside the country. The war-torn state has been receiving assistance from Russian Center for the Reception, Allocation and Accommodation of Refugees since late July which was initially launched by Moscow to help Syria in the process of the country's transition to peaceful life.

 Sputnik

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Thousands of Militants Preparing Attack on Syria Hama, Aleppo  Russian Military

Sputnik News

03:27 26.08.2018(updated 08:19 26.08.2018)

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Several thousand militants armed with heavy weaponry and armored vehicles are preparing for an offensive on the Syrian provinces of Hama and Aleppo, the Russian Defense Ministry said Saturday.

The ministry said that the leader of the Tahrir al-Sham group (affiliated with the Jabhat Nusra terror organization) called on all militants in the Syrian northwestern province of Idlib to prepare for an offensive against the Syrian government forces.

"Several thousand militants with heavy weaponry and armored vehicles have been gathered for an offensive on Hama and Aleppo," the Russian center for Syrian reconciliation's spokesman said.

The so-called drills, led by the White Helmets group, on actions "in case of chemical contamination," are currently being held in the town of Jisr al-Shughur in Idlib, the spokesman noted.

Earlier in the day, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said that the Tahrir al-Sham militants are preparing a provocation in Idlib to accuse the Syrian government forces of using chemical weapons against civilians. The militants had brought eight canisters with chlorine to stage the chemical attack in Jisr al-Shughur in Idlib. These containers were subsequently handed over to the militants of al-Hizb al-Turkistani al-Islami group and transported to the Haluz village near Jisr al-Shughur, Konashenkov added.

The chemical weapons provocation, currently being prepared by terrorists in Syria, is aimed at allowing France, the United Kingdom and the United States to carry out a strike on Syrian government's targets, according to the Russian military. For this purpose, USS The Sullivans destroyer with 56 cruise missiles on board arrived in the Persian Gulf several days ago, while a US -1 bomber carrying 24 air-to-surface AGM-158 JASSM cruise missiles was deployed at Al Udeid air base in Qatar, Konashenkov said earlier in the day.

*Tahrir al-Sham and al-Jabhat Nusra are terror groups banned in Russia US and many other countries

 Sputnik

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Iran, Syria sign defense cooperation document

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Damascus, Aug 27, IRNA -- The defense ministries of Iran and Syria signed a document on mutual defense cooperation in the presence of the two countries' defense ministers in Damascus Sunday night.

The document was signed by Iranian Minister of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics Brigadier General Amir Hatami and his Syrian counterpart General Ali Ayoub after their negotiations on issues of mutual interest in the Syrian capital city.

In a short speech, Hatami referring to the strategic relations between Tehran and Damascus, said Syria has left behind the war stage and entered the reconstruction era.

The Syrian minister, for his part, said his country has attained great victories over the terrorist organizations thanks to the support and cooperation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

During his talks with Hatami, Ayoub said through cooperation and participation of resistance axis, especially the Islamic Republic of Iran, Syria could finally win the war against terrorism after about eight years.

Lieutenant General Ayoub reminded that without Iranian helps Syria could not win the war against terrorists, and added that Iran-Syria bilateral relationship is extensive and concentrated and both states are using each other experiences.

Brigadier General Amir Hatami at the head of delegation arrived in Damascus on Sunday morning for a 2-day visit.

1396**1396

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By The Associated Press

Aug. 25, 2018 | LEXINGTON

By The Associated Press Aug. 25, 2018 | 11:46 PM | LEXINGTON

Kentucky Republican Gov. Matt Bevin says he will run for re-election in 2019, ending months of speculation as he has faced growing protests from public workers and teachers about his rhetoric and policies.



Bevin announced his campaign Saturday in a speech to the Republican Party of Kentucky's annual Lincoln Day Dinner in Lexington with characteristic bravado, saying simply: "You bet I'm running again."



"The reality is there is a lot of work yet to do. And to not continue keeping the foot on the gas would be, frankly, the wrong thing for the state, it would be the wrong thing for all those who had worked so hard, the wrong thing for our existing legislature," Bevin told reporters after his speech.



Bevin replaced a popular two-term Democratic governor in 2015, a victory seen as a precursor to President Donald Trump's surprise win in 2016. Saturday night, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told several hundred Kentucky Republicans in Lexington that she likes Bevin because "he reminds me a lot of President Trump. He's not afraid to buck the system, not afraid to break the status quo."



Bevin has mirrored Trump in his penchant for unscripted speeches and off-the-cuff remarks to reporters and on social media that have gotten him in trouble with some of the state's public workers. He drew the ire of teachers earlier this year when he criticized them for closing schools to protest a bill he signed into law that made changes to the state's pension system, which is among the worst funded public retirement plans in the country.



"I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them," Bevin said. He later apologized, saying "it is not my intent to hurt anybody in this process, but to help us all move forward together."



His remarks galvanized opposition against him from teachers, something Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear tried to capitalize on earlier this year when he announced his 2019 campaign for governor. Beshear has made teachers and public education a key part of his campaign, including selecting an assistant principal of a Kentucky high school as his running mate.



Saturday, Bevin again dismissed criticism of his pension reforms, saying "we have the worst funded pension system in America and we focus on the fact that people are fighting what is in their own best interest, which is saving the very system that people want."



Several other Democrats are considering challenging Bevin, including House Democratic Leader Rocky Adkins, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, state Rep. Attica Scott and former Auditor Adam Edelen.



"I'd take anyone," Bevin said. "There is not one of them that is even remotely worthy of carrying the torch for the people of Kentucky. That's a fact."



Bevin would not say if Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton would be his running mate in 2019. Saying all other campaign announcements would come later, he later praised Hampton as the state's first African-American elected to statewide office and noted the "incredible things she is doing in this state."The Obama administrations school discipline guidance helps protect students civil rights and addresses discriminatory practices, attorneys general for California, New York, and nine other states have told Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos .

In a Friday letter, the top law enforcement officials in 11 states urged DeVos not to rescind the guidance, which the U.S. Department of Education issued in 2014 and has proven to be one of the most controversial initiatives from Obamas education policy team.

DeVos has been weighing whether to rescind the guidance , which informed schools that they may be found in violation of federal civil rights laws if they enforce intentionally discriminatory rules, or if their policies lead to disproportionately higher rates of discipline for students in one racial group. The guidances supporters say its essential by pointing to a Government Accountability Office report that black students are consistently disciplined at higher rates than students in other groups.

However, critics charge that the guidance puts an onerous and unfair burden on school leaders. Theyve also told DeVos that out-of-school factors impacting black students help explain why theyre disciplined at disproportionate rates in school. The guidance has also been pulled into heated debates over school safety , especially after a former student at a Parkland, Fla., high school murdered 17 people on the campus. However, the Obama guidance was issued one year after a separate, controversial discipline initiative in the Parkland district thats been hotly debated since the shooting.



In their letter, the attorneys general tell DeVos that the guidance has helped her department fulfill its broad obligation to protect students from discrimination based on race, color, sex, disability, national origin, and other factors.

In short, exclusionary discipline harms students, the 11 attorneys general wrote. Additionally, discrimination contributes to a racial gap in administration of this discipline. The Guidance was issued to help schools address just these issues, and to rescind it now despite continuing disparities and other challenges would be counterproductive and harm our students, our schools, and our States.

The officials represent Democratic strongholds like California and New Jersey, as well as states with a divided government like Illinois, Iowa, and Massachusetts.



Xavier Becerra, California Attorney General

Maura Healey, Massachusetts Attorney General

George Jepsen, Connecticut Attorney General

Gurbir S. Grewal, New Jersey Attorney General

Karl A. Racine, District of Columbia Attorney General

Barbara D. Underwood, New York Attorney General

Lisa Madigan, Illinois Attorney General

Ellen F. Rosenblum, Oregon Attorney General

Tom Miller, Iowa Attorney General

Bob Ferguson, Washington Attorney General

Underwood highlighted the intent of the letter in a tweet the same day the letter was sent.

Betsy DeVos is leading a charge to rescind guidance that protects students of color, students with disabilities, & LGBTQ students from being disproportionately targeted for disciplinary measures in violation of their civil rights. Thats unacceptable. 11 AGs are pushing back. pic.twitter.com/RnapDBob48  NY AG Underwood (@NewYorkStateAG) August 24, 2018

Less than two months ago, district and charter school leaders also asked DeVos to maintain the guidance , our colleague Evie Blad reported.

Read the letter from the attorneys general to DeVos below:

Photo: U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press)

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .GREENWICH  Education experts and Greenwich Public School district leaders reminded teachers Monday that developing relationships with students forms the foundation for personal learning.

At the traditional convocation ceremony held just days before the new school year begins, Interim Superintendent Ralph Mayo addressed his full staff of Greenwich educators  which includes more than 70 new teachers  in his new role for the first time.

Mayo told his audience that he still remembers his first grade teacher at Byram School because she took the time to figure out the best way to teach him  a highly competitive student who could not sit still how to read.

Make connections with those students so they want to come back every day and see your smiling face, he said. You never know: You may have the next superintendent of public schools in your classroom.

His colleagues greeted him with a standing ovation, and Eastern teachers sported bright green In Ralph We Trust shirts.

Ralph is truly one of us, said Carol Sutton, president of Greenwich Education Association, the local teachers union.

Keynote speaker Eric Sheninger, an award-winning former principal of New Milford High School in New Jersey and best-selling author, told teachers how using technology can make learning personal and relevant for children.

Teachers laughed and cried during his 60-minute speech, which used recent research, funny clips of his kids and heartwarming stories to encourage educators to make teaching about forming connections first.

He complimented the Greenwich school districts innovative practices, which include pairing students with their own smart devices and assessing academic progress through self-directed projects.

Its awesome to have heard how you really are leading the charge of how you are personalizing learning here in Greenwich, Sheninger said.

He reminded teachers to examine classroom schedules and structures for ways to personalize learning even more. He also advised teachers to let children use the curriculum to develop their own voices and advocate for causes they care about.

Sheninger co-authored Learning Transformed with last years convocation speaker, Thomas Murray.

Chief Academic Officer Irene Parisi said she wanted thematic continuity between the speeches this year and last year.

Educators also heard from Board of Education Chairman Peter Bernstein, GHS student body President Alexander Kosyakov and Michele Giorlando DeRosa, the Greenwich representative for the Connecticut Teacher of the Year program.

Kosyakov told former Headmaster Chris Winters he will be missed and welcomed Winters interim replacement, Richard Piotrzkowski. The transition was announced in late July as Winters left to head the new Upper School at Greenwich Country Day School.

After warming up the audience with a few jokes about sleeping in during the summer, Kosyakov told teachers and administrators that their efforts, not the wealth of the town, best explain the school districts successes.

Its not easy to make a district this big this good, he said.

DeRosa said teachers should prioritize their daily interactions with students, from complimenting haircuts to listening to rambling jokes, as much as instructional time.

What we do is as important as what we teach, she said.

John Jones, a new physics and chemistry teacher at GHS, said the talks left him enthused.

Im ready to get the kids to create and learn through developing their ideas, Jones said.

jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.comGREENWICH  As the nations deadly opioid crisis grows, Greenwich Hospital announced a donation Monday that could help police officers save the lives of overdose victims.

Greenwich Hospital gave 37 two-dose vials of Narcan nasal spray, valued at $5,000 in total, to the Greenwich Police Department.

Greenwich is not immune to the scourge of drugs, Police Chief James Heavey said at a press conference Monday.

Every marked police vehicle, the three police boats and select unmarked cars, including those in the narcotics division, will carry the kits, which can reverse the effects of a drug overdose.

Were delighted that our town has come together the way we have to try and help combat the unnecessary deaths associated with drug overdose, said Norman Roth, president and CEO of Greenwich Hospital. Were very pleased Greenwich Hospital was part of the donation to the Greenwich Police Department for administering this antidote out in the field.

So far in 2018, GEMS has administered Narcan 20 times, of which six cases were confirmed opioid overdoses, GEMS Director of Professional Standards Christopher Tremblay said.

First responders administer Narcan to diagnose if a patient has overdosed. The remaining 14 patients who received Narcan had a negative drug screen at Greenwich Hospital, he said.

GEMS administered Narcan 31 times in 2017, but some doses were given to diagnose an unresponsive patient and not for reversing an opioid overdose, Tremblay said.

Last year, the town had 11 overdoses with one drug fatality, which occurred in October.

In 2016, 17 people overdosed on prescription drugs, including five fatalities, Heavey said.

On average, there are 115 fatal overdoses each day in the U.S., according to the U.S. Surgeon General.

This is a one-time donation, but Heavey said he hopes to continue his departments partnership with the hospital.

Greenwich Hospital has been very generous whenever we have asked for something, the chief said.

Narcan is one weapon in the Police Departments arsenal for combatting drug use, Heavey said. The department also has a prevention council, and it recently surveyed public and private schools on drug use in town.

The Greenwich Emergency Medical Service trained police officers to administer Narcan earlier this month.

One dose wears off after a few hours for a person who overdosed on heroin, but without the second dose, the patient can revert into an overdose state, Heavey said. Those who overdose on more potent drugs, including carfentanil, need both doses.

Narcan is good to have on hand for people with opioid-addicted family members, Tremblay said.

A lot of the overdoses we have are relapse overdoses, Tremblay said.

Roth cited statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reported last year there were more than 72,000 overdoses in the U.S., 42,000 of which were from prescription opioids.

He also thanked politicians in attendance: state Sen, L. Scott Frantz, R 36th, and state Reps. Livvy Floren, R-149th, Michael Bocchino, R-150th, and Fred Camillo, R-151st.

Were grateful for our state legislatures and what they did this year in passing legislation to limit the number of days that opioids can be prescribed, Roth said. Our medical staff has responded very favorably to that.

My hat is off to every first responder, who represents the ability to save lives under every circumstance, Frantz said.

Roth told attendees they are fortunate to live in Greenwich, where the towns departments work together.

When we see problems, we go after them, he said. Its pretty unusual to have the kind of cooperation that exists among all the professional disciplines here in Greenwich.

jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.comGREENWICH  Concerns about plastics and potential contamination of Long Island Sound had spurred a new study that will be performed by the towns Shellfish Commission and the University of Connecticut.

Plastic waste is accumulating rapidly in freshwater and marine environments, said Roger Bowgen, chair of the Shellfish Commission, adding that urbanized watersheds like Long Island Sound are considered to be particularly vulnerable.

Part of an ongoing partnership between UConn and the commission, the study will focus on what are known as microplastics  tiny, broken down components of trash that can be invisible to the human eye.

People are used to picking up large pieces of plastic from the water but the problem is more than that, Bowgen said. What UConn has found is that there are these minescule pieces of plastic, some of which you need a microscope to see, that are in the water. The shellfish are feeding in the water too and when these microplastics are ingested by the shellfish, they stay there because they cant be digested. These microplastics can damage the inside of a shellfish and that can lead to severe damage to the shellfish bed and the agriculture.

The microplastics and other pollutants can impair the growth, development and reproduction of oysters, clams and other aquatic organisms and seriously affect the health of the vibrant aquaculture industry along the Connecticut coast including Greenwich waters, Bowgen said.

The study has already begun and will take place over the next two weeks, Bowgen said. Five professors from UConn will use filters in the coves and in shellfish beds. They will take samples of water and shellfish.

This is what you might call a preliminary examination to see what they find and determine how serious things might be here, Bowgen said.

UConn is also looking at other harbors off Long Island Sound in addition to Greenwich.

The partnership between the commission and UConn was first announced in July 2016 with the goal of educating and engaging the public and helping state and local leaders make informed decisions to preserve the health and beauty of Long Island Sound. Under the partnership, a 10-acre research shellfish bed in Greenwich Cove was established where research has begun on algal blooms.

In March, town officials and UConn leaders said they plan to build a lab in part of the upstairs portion of the Innis Arden Cottage at Greenwich Point and create an endowment fund to allow a UConn professor to work out of the building with a staff of interns, researchers, associate professors and graduate and undergraduate students. The goal is to establish the cottage as the main research center for western Long Island Sound.

Commission members said the microplastics study can be envisioned as the first of a regular series of check ups focusing on the health of Long Island Sound.

If the distribution and abundance of microplastics are large, and they concentrate significant quantities of other pollutants, then additional efforts should be mobilized to understand the consequences of these biocides to species of concern, and to design steps to reduce or mitigate their presence in Long Island Sound, the commission said in a press release.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.comGREENWICH  The public schools may be starting up again this week, but summer is not quite done with Greenwich.

Greenwich  along with much of metro New York City  will be under a Heat Advisory from 11 a.m. Tuesday until 9 p.m. Wednesday, with temperatures expected to soar into the mid-90s, according to the National Weather Service. As a result, the town is warning residents to take precautions.

All residents, especially persons who are young, elderly, have medical or mental health conditions, use medications that impede body temperature regulation, those who do not have air conditioning, those whose work requires outdoor activities and people who are socially isolated are encouraged to pay special attention to the weather, the towns Department of Health said in a statement Monday.

According to Dr. Christopher Davison, medical director of Greenwich Hospitals emergency department, the towns warnings should be heeded. He also urged people who work outdoors to stay hydrated and for people who exercise outdoors to do it early in the morning or in the evening.

Six cases of heat stroke were treated at Greenwich Hospital after a road race on a hot day in 2016, he said. But no such major incidents have been reported locally this summer.

I wouldnt say that weve seen an increase in the number of heat illnesses or heat injuries, Davison said Monday. It may be that people are listening to what theyre told about how be careful. But when you have temperatures like were going to have this week, you always want to make sure people know what to do.

The town has issued several heat alerts this summer. But Michael Long, the towns director of environmental services, said Monday he wanted to remind residents of the proper steps to take.

The Department of Health said common-sense tips such as avoiding prolonged exposure to the heat and keeping hydrated can make a big difference. Residents should also keep children and pets indoors except for brief times outside and make sure pets have plenty to drink. Never leave a person or a pet in a parked vehicle, even if the windows are open.

With temperatures spiking so high, residents could become sick with a variety of heat-related illnesses.

The symptoms for heat stroke may include headache, confusion, nausea, dizziness, high body temperature, difficulty breathing and a rapid and strong pulse. If someone appears to be suffering from heat stroke, do not give fluids but rather call 911. If possible, move the victim into a cool or air-conditioned location.

Heat exhaustion is different and can cause heavy sweating, weakness and cool, pale and clammy skin as well as muscle cramps, dizziness, fainting, nausea and vomiting. To treat it, offer the victim sips of water in a cool environment and apply a cool, wet cloth. If vomiting persists, seek medical attention.

Heat cramps can cause painful cramps and muscle spasms in the or abdomen and cause heavy sweating. Move a victim to a cool spot and give sips of water, unless nausea occurs. Additionally, the cramping muscle should be gently massaged.

The town Senior Center, the civic centers and the libraries offer cool spots during regular business hours. The towns Public Safety Complex lobby will also be open for people to use as a cooling center if needed.

Students entering sixth grade and ninth grade will be reporting to class on Wednesday for orientation, although it will be an early release day. The official first day of school for all Greenwich Public School students is Thursday, when the high temperature is expected to hit 90 degrees.

North Mianus School will not have working air conditioning until October, an issue that has concerned parents. Delivery delays were blamed as the school installs a new heating ventilation and air conditioning system.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.comAmong the tributes for the late U.S. senator John McCain, a number came from the country that, for better or worse, formed an integral part of his life story: Vietnam.

"When I learnt about his death early this morning, I feel very sad," retired Vietnamese Col. Tran Trong Duyet was quoted as saying Sunday by Vietnam News.

During the Vietnam War, Duyet ran the Hoa Lo Prison, dubbed the "Hanoi Hilton" by American POWs. McCain, a Navy pilot, spent 5  years in the prison after being shot down over Hanoi on a bombing mission in 1967.

The future senator would spend nearly half of those years in solitary confinement; the beatings he endured in the prison left him with physical problems that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

"I had a lot of time meeting him when he was kept in the prison," Duyet was quoted as saying after McCain's death. "At that time I liked him personally for his toughness and strong stance."

Duyet also told Agence France-Presse that he admired McCain's stubbornness and enjoyed arguing with him. "Out of working hours, we considered each other friends," he said, adding that McCain had helped teach him English.

During a visit to Vietnam in 2000, McCain said that he could not yet forgive the guards who kept him at Hoa Lo Prison. "I still bear them ill will, not because of what they did to me, but because of what they did to some of my friends," McCain said.

But despite this, McCain became one of the most vocal supporters of normalizing relations with the Communist-led Vietnam. In 1994, he co-sponsored a bill with then-Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., that called for ending economic sanctions against the country.

He would go on to make more than 20 visits to Vietnam in later years. During one trip in 2014, he noted that he received a warm welcome in the city where he had been held prisoner so long ago.

After McCain's death Saturday at age 81, state-run outlets such as Vietnam News released articles that praised McCain for his work toward improving U.S.-Vietnamese relations.

On Monday, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh visited the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi and offered his own tribute to the late senator, calling him a "a symbol of his generation of senators, and of the veterans of the Vietnam war" in a message in a condolence book.

Vietnamese Ambassador to the United States Ha Kim Ngoc also praised McCain, telling Vietnam News that he could remember meeting the senator in the 1990s as he was working to improve relations with Vietnam.

"McCain deserves credit for promoting the Vietnam-U.S. relations and later, the comprehensive partnership between the two countries," Ngoc was quoted as saying. The ambassador added that even during his illness, McCain paid attention to Vietnam-related issues.

At Hanoi's Truc Bach Lake, a monument marks McCain's capture there on Oct. 27, 1967. Over the past couple of days, a number of Vietnamese well-wishers and foreigners have visited the spot to pay their respects to the late senator, leaving flowers and incense at a makeshift shrine.

"Although he was once our enemy, he did a lot to help restore relations between the U.S. and Vietnam," 60-year-old Hoang Manh Cuong told Bloomberg News. "That helped open the economy and improved our lives dramatically. We owe him for that."Huawei's Mate 20 Lite is the first handset in the series to become official. It's already up for pre-order in Poland and Germany, as we told you earlier today. It's no coincidence that the phone was introduced to the world in Poland, because the Mate 10 Lite used to be the best selling Huawei smartphone in the country.

The company is clearly hoping that the new model will beat its predecessor's sales numbers. A couple of Polish websites have already released detailed hands-on impressions of the Mate 20 Lite, and one of them created the video you can see below.

The device comes with a 158.3 x 75.3 x 7.6 mm footprint, and weighs 172g. Its 6.3-inch LCD touchscreen has 1080x2340 resolution (boasting 19.5:9 aspect ratio and 81% screen-to-body ratio) and, unsurprisingly, a notch. The phone is powered by Huawei's Kirin 710 SoC, aided by 4GB of RAM and 64GB of expandable storage.

It runs Android 8.1 Oreo with EMUI 8.2 on top. That's the absolute latest version of Huawei's UI overlay, and it comes with support for GPU Turbo. Dual-band Wi-Fi is in, as well as NFC, GPS, GLONASS, and Bluetooth 4.2.

There are four cameras on the Mate 20 Lite. The rear system is comprised of a 20 MP f/1.8 main snapper with a secondary 2 MP sensor for capturing depth information alone (which is needed for portrait mode shots). On the front sits a 24 MP f/2.0 camera, it too aided by a 2 MP depth sensor secondary lens.

The AI camera features from the P20 series are in too. The Mate 20 Lite can recognize 22 scenes. For selfies the AI operation is divided into two zones - the background and the face. Settings can be applied to both independently of each other, in order to create the best possible shots. Interestingly, you can enable the AI functionality with one tap, and you can also turn it on or off after you've already captured a picture. Additionally, you can see HDR mode doing its magic in real-time, through the camera's viewfinder.

The AR lens animated 3D elements and the Qmoji are in as well, the latter mimicking your facial expressions. The implementation seems to be pretty decent.

The 3,750 mAh battery paired with the chipset built on a 12nm process should provide ample working time. Filling the cell up occurs through an 18W USB-C charger.

The Mate 20 Lite employs glass on its back, which reflects light in interesting ways but also quickly manages to collect fingerprints. A 3.5mm headset jack is present.

The phone is priced at PLN 1,599 ($437 or 374) and will be on pre-order until September 9. You'll find it in stores in Poland from September 10, in black, blue, and gold.

Thanks for the tip, Good_advice!

Source 1 (in Polish) | Source 2 (in Polish)These are the best offers from our affiliate partners. We may get a commission from qualifying sales.The vivo X23 appeared numerous times in the past few weeks, including some live photos and official teasers by the company. Today the manufacturer announced on Weibo the official release date of the upcoming smartphone - September 6. It is the same day the vivo V11 Pro is being outed in India, meaning both phones might be the same but with a different moniker for different markets.

The upcoming vivo X23 will have fourth-generation under-display fingerprint scanner. It should be faster and more reliable than the one in the vivo NEX S, according to the company. The screen has evolved from the vivo X21 and now the notch for the selfie camera got even smaller while the speaker is embedded in the minuscule top bezel.

According to a Geekbench listing, the phone could have Snapdragon 710 chipset and 8 GB RAM, but a Chinese benchmark revealed a Snapdragon 670 with just 6 GB RAM. Other specs include Full HD+ resolution with 19.5:9 ratio and an AI dual camera, likely a 12 MP + 5 MP setup.



Some more vivo X23 live images for good measure

The company has the habit of promoting two phones under the same name (like it did with the vivo X21 and vivo X21 UD or the NEX S and the NEX A), so we might have a vivo X23 UD with the fingerprint scanner and the more powerful SoC and a regular vivo X23 with the SD670 and a sensor on the back panel.

Source (in Chinese) | Via 1  Via 2



Haiti - Politic : President Moise promises Haitian scholarship holders to travel to Cuba





Friday at the National Palace President Jovenel Moise received 23 young Haitian recipients of scholarships from the Cuban Government "They were ranked best in the competition, they come from all over the country and I wish them every success in their studies," said the Head of State, who promised to travel to Cuba to visit the young people of his country who study in the largest University of the West Indies.



The 23 students will begin their studies in September in different fields : medicine, pharmaceutical sciences, telecommunications, civil engineering, agronomy and medical technology, to return to the country in 60 months after graduating, to integrate into the communities that need their services and expertise.



These new scholars will join in Cuba, hundreds of Haitians currently studying and will add, we hope, 1,526 Haitians already graduated from Cuban universities



According to Moise, Haiti needs specialists in biotechnology, construction, agriculture, public administration "the opportunities offered by Cuba will allow the socio-economic development of our Nation."



The Head of State also thanked Cuba for its collaboration in the construction of micro hydroelectric power stations in Haiti https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-24264-haiti-politic-official-inauguration-of-dam-works-on-the-marion-river.html



See also :

https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-24870-icihaiti-education-scholarships-for-a-masters-degree-in-hydraulics-in-cuba.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-24264-haiti-politic-official-inauguration-of-dam-works-on-the-marion-river.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23797-haiti-politic-moise-visits-the-construction-site-of-the-dam-on-the-marion-river.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22357-haiti-politics-towards-a-cooperation-with-cuba-in-the-construction-of-dams.html



SL/ HaitiLibre























Haiti - FLASH : Results of the BAC 2018 Extraordinary session for 4 departments





After having published the results of the baccalaureate exams for the academic year 2017-2018, Extraordinary Session (August 13th to 17th, 2018) for the South-East and North-East, the Ministry of National Education has just made available those West and North West departments :



Results according to the National Bureau of State Examinations (BUNEXE) :



Results Bac extraordinary session 2018 :



South-East: Success rate 42.83% or 433 candidates admitted out of 1,011 participants;



Northeast: Success rate 18.38% or 248 candidates admitted out of 1,349 participants;



West: Success rate 34.84% or 5,990 candidates admitted out of 17,991 participants;



North West: Success rate 17.58% or 518 candidates admitted out of 2,946 participants;



Heads of schools are invited to remove the list of their school from the Departmental Education Directorate concerned.



The Ministry informs us that other results will be published shortly ...



NOTE : The Ministry of National Education has not yet made available online access to results per student. HaitiLibre will inform you as soon as access to the database is possible and will make available on its website the access to results per student form as each year.



To be continued...



HL/ HaitiLibre





















Haiti - Politic : End of consultations on the 10-year Education Plan





After presenting the Ten-Year Education and Training Plan (PDEF) to the technical and financial partners and the social partners during several meetings, the Ministry of National Education organized consultation workshops through the Departmental Directorates of Education. (DDE).



On Thursday, 23 (in the Center) and Friday, 24 August (in the South), the Ministry organized a workshop for the benefit of the main education stakeholders to present this important strategic document and to gather their comments and suggestions.



Thursday, Meniol Jeune, the Director General of the Ministry who chaired the work in the department of the Center, underlined the main objective of these exchanges, which aim at mobilizing the departmental actors to determine the orientations to give to the education and training over the next 10 years (2018-2028), as well as PDEF actions and steering strategies, to ensure that they achieve the objectives. According to Jeune, this strategic document could not be finalized without the contribution of departmental actors.



Friday in the South, at the last Departmental Consultations Workshop, Jackson Pleteau, proceeded to the opening in the presence of Delima Pierre, Director General of the National Office of Partnership in Education (ONAPE), Bayard Lapommeray Director of the Unit of Studies and Programming (UEP) and deputy departmental directors of the South. With this workshop, the Ministry of National Education has completed its consultation tour in the 10 departments of the country.



Recall that the PDEF is a crucial document for the reform of the sector which is composed of articulated reflections of pre-school education to higher education which must meet the challenges and the educational needs of the different segments of the population and provide among others the country the skilled human resources it needs to grow.



According to Pierre Josue Agenor Cadet, the resigning Minister of National Education the PDEF is an important tool for the advancement of the sector and the improvement of the quality of education, which remains a challenge affirming "We can reach our goal with a lot of efforts. "



HL/ S/ HaitiLibre





















Haiti - Social : Funeral of Claire Francois Duvignaud





On Saturday, many political authorities, personalities, relatives, colleagues and friends gathered at the St James Catholic Church in North Miami for the funeral of Claire Francois Duvignaud (born August 4, 1970 in Marchand Dessalines), an emeritus activist who devoted a large part of his life to the emancipation of Haitian women in Haiti.



Many were those who paid tribute to her, all of whom spoke of the natural benevolence of this great patriot and socio-political activist, who placed at the service of others to promote a socially inclusive and inclusive society.



In his eulogy of sadness and emotion, ONA's Director General, Mr. Chesnel Pierre did not fail to greet and honor the memory of his friend and collaborator at ONA Fanm who was his Deputy Director, declaring in front of the smiling image of the deceased, exposed near the coffin "Claire had the solidity of the oak and the flexibility of the reed... So, the sorrow of having lost her will not forget the happiness of having known her. Concluding "Far from our eyes, but always in our hearts. We love you forever, Claire."



The death of Claire Francois Duvignaud also deeply affects the members of "Fanm Yo La" who offer their condolences to her family, including her two sons, Jamar and Julian Duvignaud, and her spouse Jacques Duvignaud. Natacha Clerge, General Coordinator of "Fanm Yo La" said "We keep of Claire Duvignaud the memory of a woman who fought against the exclusion of women from the sphere of power and who has committed herself to the political life of his country despite, in particular, structural obstacles. We keep of her the memory of a frank, jovial, caring and supportive of friends and comrades of struggle."



Learn more about Claire Duvignaud :

She lived for several years in Miami where she was very involved with her spouse in the inclusion of children and teenagers living with a disability or drug addict who lost her bearings, young people that she welcomed in her private home which held of refuge.



In politics, she was nominated in 2015 to the senatoriales of 2015 for the Artibonite under the banner of the Party "Renmen Ayiti". In 2016, she was President of the Women's Political Tribune (TPF), which advocates for the participation of women in power. In 2017, she became Deputy Director of ONA Fanm, an ONA program designed to help poor women access credit and develop women's entrepreneurship. However, she will not stay long, suffering from breast cancer that has cut her off in the fullness of her strength and in her fight.



S/ HaitiLibre

















Havre Police Department

A hit-and-run vehicle crash was reported Friday at 8:53 a.m. at a First Street business.

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Two arrests were made during a vehicle stop at Lincoln Avenue and 14th Street West Friday at 12:58 p.m., but no details on the charges were provided.

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Jacob Clark of Helena, 22, was issued a summons at the police station Friday at 7:29 p.m. on a charge of criminal contempt related to a 24/7 Sobriety Program violation.

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Leslie Ann Seely of Havre, 56, was issued a summons at the police station Friday at 7:30 p.m. on a charge of criminal contempt related to a 24/7 Sobriety Program violation.

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Zachery James Flansburg of Havre, 24, was issued a summons at the police station Friday at 7:31 p.m. on a charge of criminal contempt related to a 24/7 Sobriety Program violation.

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Steven Allen Stanley of Box Elder, 43, was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct after a caller on Fifth Avenue reported a man was passed out in the bushes Friday at 8:04 p.m.

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Gerald Alex Belgarde Jr. of Havre, 35, was arrested on charges of possession of drug paraphernalia and parole violation after a caller on Second Street Northeast reported a disturbance in progress at 11:56 p.m. Friday.

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Joseph Daniel Isidor of Havre, 18, was arrested on charges of obstructing a peace officer or other public servant and minor in possession and Alejandro Jose Isidor of Havre, 20, was arrested on charges of resisting arrest and minor in possession by officers in a foot pursuit, after a caller at a First Street business reported suspicious activity at 2:12 a.m. Saturday.

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Beth Kay Hannah of Havre, 32, was arrested on charges of endangering the welfare of children after a someone stopped at the police station Saturday at 10:54 a.m. asking to speak to an officer.

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Milo Gerald Stiffarm of Hays, 26, was arrested on a Justice or City court warrant and a charge of obstructing a peace officer or other public servant after a caller at a First Street West business reported a driver left without paying for merchandise Saturday at 3:52 p.m. A second arrest was made, but no details were provided on charges.

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A two-vehicle crash was reported at 9:03 p.m. Saturday on Fifth Avenue.

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A caller at Montana State University-Northern reported Sunday at 2:50 a.m. someone had broken out a screen and window.

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Steven Lee Strike of Havre, 30, was arrested at the police station Sunday at 8:08 a.m. on a charge of criminal contempt related to a 24/7 Sobriety Program violation.

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A 14th Avenue caller reported Sunday at 8:32 a.m. two vehicles were hit sometime during the night.

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Heather Ann Durbin of Havre, 28, was arrested on two counts of theft and one charge of trespass to property after a Sixth Street caller reported a stolen snowblower Sunday at 10:40 a.m.

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Two 12-year-olds and a 14-year-old were each issued a summons on a charge of trespass to property, after a complaint came from a First Avenue organization Sunday at 5:41 p.m.

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A Seventh Street caller requested a well-being check on a man Sunday at 8:49 p.m.

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Jessica Ann Eder of Wolf Point, 36, was arrested on a charge of assault Sunday at 10:49 p.m.

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Maddison Elizabeth Brown of Ashland Kentucky, 19, was arrested on a charge of partner or family member assault after a caller at a U.S. Highway 2 West business reported a disturbance today at 2:46 a.m.

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Tanner Dunlap of Ashland Kentucky, 21, was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct after a caller at a U.S. Highway 2 West business reported a disturbance today at 3:34 a.m.

Hill County Sheriff's Office

Eric Lee Ambler or Havre, 42, was issued a state District Court warrant Friday at 3:28 p.m. at Hill County Detention Center.

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Joshua Aaron Golden of Box Elder, 34, was issued a summons on charges of driving with a suspended or revoked driver's license and operating a vehicle without valid registration, during a vehicle stop at the main boat launch at Fresno Reservoir Friday at 9:15 p.m.

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Kaleb Steven Dobrenz of Havre, 22, was arrested on charges of partner or family member assault with serious injury and all other offenses, after a Seventh Street East caller asked Saturday at 6:33 a.m. to speak to an officer about a domestic disturbance.

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An arrest was made related to a transport from Rocky Boy Police Department to Hill County Detention at 2:35 a.m. today. No details were provided on the charges.

Fire Department

Emergency medical personnel responded to two calls Friday and one call this morning. No dispatch log for Saturday was received by deadline.

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Firefighters responded to a report of a gas odor detected on the 1400 Block of First Street Sunday at 11:06 p.m. An odor was detected and the fire crew called NorthWestern Energy and turned the matter over to them.

Havre Animal Shelter

This morning the shelter held one short-hair cat, three medium-hair cats and six medium-hair kittens with gender listed as "unknown," one medium-hair female cat and one short-hair female cat.

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The shelter also held this morning a 1-year-6-month-old male German shepherd, a 2-year-1-month-old female pit bull terrier-German shepherd cross, one female 6-month-old Rottweiler-Australian cattle dog-blue heeler cross, a 1-year-old male border collie and a 1-year-10-month-old female Australian cattle dog-blue heeler-German shepherd cross. The shelter also has five 12-week-old Rottweiler-shepherd cross puppies.

Births

A girl was born Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, to Marty Stiffarm-Rosette and JR Rosette of Box Elder.

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A boy was born Friday, Aug. 24, 2018, to Aricka Wolf Chief and Jaron Calf Robe of Box Elder.Press release

The Havre Public Schools Education Foundation Board of Directors announced they were pleased to present a $500 check to Chad Edgar, superintendent of Beaver Creek Park.

The money was a portion of the funds raised last fall from the Blue Pony Bingo fundraiser.

After consulting with Edgar several times about the best use of these funds, the foundation voted to donate it to the park with the intention of it being used for a project to prevent future fires.

Blue Pony Bingo was first sponsored by the foundation in 2016 to help raise money for the HHS marching band traveling to Washington, D.C.

The 2017 bingo was held to raise money for scholarship and small grant requests, with Jody Toner winning $1,000. Due to the devastation of the fires at that time, the Board felt it was appropriate to donate a portion of their profit to the park.

No plans have been made for a third Blue Pony Bingo fundraiser, but the board is open to requests. Directors said they appreciate the overwhelming support of the community in furthering the causes of Havre Public Schools Education Foundation.The tweet caught the attention of Homer Hickman, a 75-year-old former NASA engineer now serving on the US National Space Council, who then replied: Language.

Unaware of Hickmans background, Naomi retorted with another vulgar tweet: Suck my d**k and balls Im working at NASA. The attack prompted the man to reveal he is part of the council that oversees NASA.

In a now-deleted blog post, Hickman said NASA eventually rescinded the internship offer after the agency picked up on the online behaviour of Naomis friends who supposedly took umbrage and said a lot of unkind things using the NASA hashtag.

This I had nothing to do with nor could I since I do not hire and fire at the agency or have any say on employment whatsoever, Hickman said.

People criticised Naomi for the content of her tweets, especially since they were directed toward one who plays a role in the space agency.The Pope used his visit to Knock to highlight the children "robbed of their innocence" and scarred by Church members.

He described the abuse of children by some members of the clergy as an "open wound".

"None of us can fail to be moved by the stories of young people who suffered abuse, were robbed of their innocence and left scarred by painful memories," said Pope Francis.

"This open wound challenges us to be firm and decisive in the pursuit of truth and justice."

He was applauded by members of the congregation as he read his address.

He prayed for victims of clerical abuse and peace in Northern Ireland as he visited the famous shrine.

He also offered a special prayer for those involved in the campaign for justice for victims of the mother and baby home scandal, including those involved in forced adoptions.

The pontiff flew into Ireland West Airport in rain and mist on an Aer Lingus coded EI1979 in recognition of the 1979 visit by Pope John Paul II.

After presenting a golden rosary to the Knock Shrine, Pope Francis offered comfort to victims of clerical abuse.

Suffering

"May Our Lady also look with mercy on all the suffering members of Her Son's family. In my prayer before her statue, I presented to her in particular all the victims of abuse of whatever kind committed by members of the Church in Ireland," he said. He noted his inability to include Northern Ireland in his two-day itinerary, but added: "My pilgrimage to Knock also allows me to address a warm greeting to the beloved people of Northern Ireland.

"Although my journey for the World Meeting of Families does not include a visit to the North, I assure you of my affection and my closeness in prayer.

"I ask Our Lady to sustain all the members of the family to persevere, as brothers and sisters, in reconciliation."

He also spoke of the importance of ecumenism and included a prayer for those in prison.

His visit west was brief, arriving shortly after 9.30am and leaving just after 11.30.

He was welcomed by the McCarthy family, with eldest child Saoirse Anne (11) presenting him with yellow and white roses which he later placed on the altar in the Apparition Chapel.

The Pope was greeted with a kiss by Mary McCarthy who said afterwards: "Time stood still."For Subscribers

How many COVID tests do you think Meritus has done? Here's the answerJohn McCain, a longtime Arizona senator who championed school choice and defended a landmark education law signed by a one-time political rival, died on Saturday at the age of 81.

As a two-time Republican candidate for president and for years perhaps the nations most famous member of Congress, McCain defended the No Child Left Behind Act, the landmark federal education law signed by President George W. Bush in 2002calling it a major milestone. However, as time went on, he also understood its shortcomings and unintended consequences, and called for the law to be revised. McCain also supported merit pay for master teachers, and fought to expand choice, specifically for students enrolled in Bureau of Indian Education Schools.

First elected to the House in 1982 after surviving years of imprisonment and torture during the Vietnam War as a U.S. Navy pilot, McCain did not make education policy one of his signature issues while in Congress. But he did emphasize several of his views on the subject during his presidential runs in 2000 and 2008.

During his 2000 GOP presidential primary battle with eventual winner George W. Bush, McCain said that, The most important thing we can do, my friends, to improve education in America is to commit ourselves to the cause of school choice.

In keeping with other parts of his political career, however, McCain was not afraid to break from GOP orthodoxy on education.

For example, in 2000 McCain drew a distinction between himself and Bush, arguing that while Bush wanted to fund vouchers by stripping money from public schools, he wanted to do so by eliminating corporate welfare doled out to the oil and gas industry, ethanol giants, and sugar barons. That was the basis of his $5.4 billion federal voucher plan.

And eight years later during his contest with Barack Obama, he pledged to fully fund NCLB education programs, a promise not echoed by other Republicans, although he also proposed covering much of the laws funding into block grants for districts.

While McCain expressed support for NCLB over the years, he also said in one interview that he thought it should put more emphasis on math and science . He also suggested that there be more flexibility in the law for measuring academic progress of English-language learners and students with disabilities. One common refrain from McCain was that the law should be fixed and not scrapped.

In 2008, McCain told the NAACPs Cincinnati chapter that he would help provide school choice for all who want it. He also criticized policy positions that went over well with teachers unions but that left students and their parents without options, and stressed how the federal bureaucracy made it harder for students to use money for tutoring services.

When a public system fails, repeatedly, to meet these minimal objectives, parents ask only for a choice in the education of their children, McCain said.

McCain backed alternative certification for educators, as well as additional federal aid to help districts recruit teachers from among college students who graduated in the top 25 percent of their classes. He also supported online learning programs.

In recent years, McCain also worked with Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., to introduce legislation that would provide education savings accounts to Native American students attending schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education. The accounts could be used for private school tuition, textbooks, and other education expenses.

We have no greater responsibility to our next generation than to help them prepare to compete in an increasingly competitive workforce, and this bill would provide Native American students the best opportunity to succeed in the classroom and beyond, McCain said in a statement at the time.

Last year, McCain criticized President Donald Trumps move to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, saying that children illegally brought to the U.S. should not be forced to return to a country they do not know.

Like Bush and others, McCain also placed the issue of education in momentous terms, saying at one point that education is the civil rights issue of this century.

Stands Above the Rest

Upon news of his death, tributes poured in from around the education world, including from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos:

My deepest sympathies & sincere prayers go out to Cindy & the entire McCain family. (2/2)  Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) August 26, 2018

Two of his Senate colleagues who lead the chambers education committee, Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Patty Murray of Washington state, said he was an inspiration to them and others for his leadership:

There is usually one U.S. Senator who stands above the rest and for the last several years that has been @SenJohnMcCain . His character, courage and devotion to our country have been an example for all of us. Honey and I send our prayers to Cindy and the entire McCain family.  Sen. Lamar Alexander (@SenAlexander) August 26, 2018

I will never forget my time working with John in the Senate. Whether it was side-by-side, or on opposite sides, he earned my respect every time and I truly believe the Congress and our country are both better places for his lifes work.  Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) August 26, 2018

Forrmer Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Bushs second secretary of education, praised him for his work:

We have lost a true national treasure who showed us all what public service means. I am honored to have know Sen. John McCain and worked with him on education and immigration.  Margaret Spellings (@MargaretEdu) August 26, 2018

Photo: Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain speaks during a rally in Henderson, Nev., in 2008. (Isaac Brekken/AP-File)

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .We are the children of India and India is our mother. In this way, while carrying out a sons responsibilities, we support the efforts to make Hindi the official language of the United Nations. This announcement by Sir Anerood Jugnauth, Mauritiuss minister mentor, minister of Rodrigues and minister of defence, evoked a long and rapturous applause from the audience at Port Louiss Abhimanyu Unnuth Convention Centre. Was this another announcement by a seasoned politician made just for the sake of formality?

Seen from a distance, it may appear so, since politicians the world over say such things to mislead people. But no, Mauritius is very different. Bhojpuri and Indianness have kept this island, located thousands of kilometres away, connected with India. A living example of this was the 11th World Hindi Conference co-hosted by the two countries. It was attended not just by politicians from Port Louis but representatives from various parts of Mauritius. When I compare it with the ninth edition of the World Hindi Conference in Johannesburg, I can discern a big difference. The South African government had left no stone unturned in making it a grand occasion, but there was little enthusiasm among the local people. Participants like us discovered that we were surrounded by indifference.

Mauritius was the exact opposite.

At Aapravasi Ghat, when we asked questions in English, the lady who was our guide said if we wanted, she could converse in Hindi. Aapravasi Ghat is a World Heritage site. Girmitya (indentured) workers from India landed here when they came to Mauritius. Since then, thanks to those who have settled abroad to earn a living, Hindi is spoken in 140 countries across the world and 1.2 billion people understand it. Do we still need to assert that Hindi opens the doors to a world of enormous possibilities? We simply need to open our eyes to them.

Consider Mauritius. The country has enormous strategic and economic potential. That is why Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Ramnath Kovind, during their visits to the country, strengthened the emotional bonds between India and Mauritius by unveiling a statue at Ganga Talab and planting a sapling of the venerated peepul tree. The message they were trying to send out: India and Mauritius share a common religion and culture. The World Hindi Conference was another such endeavour. Apart from this, India is playing a big role in the development of Mauritius. We are building a metro network and have carried out a number of projects including building high quality roads. It is worth noting that the roads built by Indians in Mauritius are much better than the other roads built there.

Still, I believe long-term goals cannot be achieved just by putting together a few resources in the name of language, religion, culture and economic progress. In Mauritius and other countries with a large Indian population, why shouldnt India set up institutes that impart technical knowledge and education in medicine and engineering where the younger generation can acquire the skills to become self-reliant? We already give an Overseas Citizen of India card to Indians settled in many countries. The recipients of this certificate can do business or work in India. They can buy residential land and are eligible for a host of other rights. There are restrictions on buying agricultural land and voting, but by acquiring the requisite skills, they can empower themselves in a way that can benefit both their own country and India. Helping the representatives of Generation Next become self-reliant wont just help India and Mauritius, it will also strengthen our socio-cultural links.

Theres a special reason I am saying this.

Indias policymakers have always suffered from not being able to envision long-term goals. They manage to give short-term solutions, but fail to look at the bigger picture. You may want to look at Chinas example. Through the One Belt One Road Initiative (OBOR) and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), China has begun to fulfil the long-term needs of its country and citizens. Its leaders know that theres a certain darkness that lurks behind the shiny facade of economic progress. Those who dream of progress also have to think about how theyll deal with an economic downturn. Where will they relocate polluting industrial units if the need arises? With the rising population, how will they create opportunities for their young people? How can they collaborate with other countries and utilise their natural and human resources for their own benefit? China is doing all this, but India is yet to do it.

Why cant we make a beginning with countries that have an emotional connect with us? In this ashwamedha yagna (traditional ritual by kings to prove their imperial sovereignty by sending a horse into other territories) if we take along the children of Hindi and other Indian languages, there cannot be any scope for failure.

Shashi Shekhar is editor-in-chief Hindustan

letters@hindustantimes.comRaksha Bandhan celebrations turned into a nightmare for thousands of Delhi Metro commuters on Sunday as trains on a portion of the Yellow line  that connects north Delhi to Haryanas Gurugram  came to a standstill due to a technical snag.

Passengers travelling on the Samaypur Badli-Huda City Centre corridor faced a harrowing time for over three hours  from 9:55am to around 12:40pm. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) said train operations came to a halt because of supply failure in the over head electrification (OHE).

The snag compelled DMRC to ask passengers to deboard using the emergency exits of the trains. We had to walk for almost 500 metres in the sun to get to the next station, Arjangarh. I had to go to my sisters house in Vasant Kunj. The station was so crowded that even getting out was a task. Once out, there were no autorickshaws near the station , said Neeraj Bhatt, who was coming from IFFCO Chowk Metro station in Gurugram and had to get down at Chhatarpur station.

The DMRC confirmed that passengers had to be de-boarded from four trains that were near Guru Dronacharya, Sikanderpur and IFFCO Chowk stations  all located in Gurugram. It also stated that services from HUDA City Centre to Chhatarpur, and vice versa were affected.

Delhi Metro, which has a daily ridership of about 26 lakh people, was scheduled to run 598 extra train trips on Sunday.

All the preparations by DMRC for Raksha Bandhan have failed. Trains were running only between Samaypur Badli to Qutab Minar station for more than three hour, said Sugandha Barman, a Delhi University student who wanted to travel to Gurugram from north Delhis GTB Nagar.

The snag compelled Delhi Metro Rail Corporation to ask passengers to deboard using the emergency exits of the trains. (Yogendra Kumar/HT )

The impact of the snag caused spillovers on Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road, which witnessed traffic snarls during the three hours.

After waiting for almost an hour at HUDA City Centre, I finally gave up and decided to look for other modes of tansportation. It took me a extra two hours to reach my destination, said Sajal Sehgal, a commuter who was travelling to Sultanpur from HUDA City Centre on Sunday around 10 am.

Huge crowds were spotted outside Chhatarpur, HUDA City Centre, IFFCO Chowk and MG Road stations. Metro authorities shut down entry gates at Huda City Centre and Iffco Chowk.

Some claimed it was a stampede-like situation at Chhatarpur station. Stampede waiting to happen at Chattarpur metro station.@DelhiMetro_ is there any plan to handle such crowds on holidays?, Anisha Dhawan, a commuter tweeted.

The DMRC in a statement said that repairing the snag took time because the maintenance team had to do physical identification of the exact location of the defective overhead wire. This was done by walking on foot in the section. Once the affected location was identified aroundnoon, repair work was carried out within 15 minutes and OHE supply restored at 12:15pm, the DMRC said in a statement.

Explaining the snag, DMRC spokesperson Anuj Dayal said the issue involved breaking of a copper split pin inserted in the insulator meant to support return current wire.  We have launched a drive to replace all copper pins of these insulators, Dayal said.The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would announce an alliance in October with a regional player in Tamil Nadu for the 2019 national election, a leader said quoting the partys president, Amit Shah, who gave the information to the state unit.

Tamil Nadu has the highest Lok Sabha seats (39) after Uttar Pradesh (80), Maharashtra (48), West Bengal (42) and Bihar (40). It is crucial for the BJP to make inroads into states like Tamil Nadu since it had in 2014 peaked in other big states like Uttar Pradesh, where it won 71 seats.

Shah told us during his visit in July that there will be an alliance between the BJP and a regional player and a formal announcement will be made by October, the leader said on condition of anonymity without elaborating on which party the BJP will ally with.

We have channels of communication open with both (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam patriarch Karunanidhis sons MK) Stalin and Alagiri, a second BJP leader said.

Karunanidhi, who passed away earlier this month, had named Stalin as his successor. Stalin is likely to succeed his father as the DMK chief while Alagiri has claimed support of Karunanidhis true and loyal followers. Shah is likely to attend a memorial meeting for Karunanidhi in Chennai on Thursday. There is no reason for us to reject the DMKs invite, a BJP leader said.

Shahs possibility of attending the event is seen in the light of the BJPs plans to forge the alliance.

P Muralidhar Rao, BJPs general secretary in-charge of Tamil Nadu, had held a 20-minute meeting with Alagiri ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Chennai to pay tributes to Karunanidhi on August 8. It was seen BJPs attempt to reach out to Stalins estranged brother.

Alagiri subsequently wrote to former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayees foster daughter after his death and described the BJP veteran as a great person, who showed great interest in Tamil language and culture.

The BJP had fielded nine Lok Sabha candidates in Tamil Nadu in 2014 when it contested the election in alliance with six smaller regional parties. It won just one and polled 22.22 lakh votes. The Congress drew a blank and polled just 17.51 lakh votes despite fielding 39 candidates.

The BJPs alliance disintegrated in 2016 when the assembly elections were held in Tamil Nadu. The partys votes dropped to 12.28 lakh. The Congress, which had an alliance with the DMK, polled 27.74 lakh votes.

We have more votes than the Congress in Tamil Nadu, a BJP general secretary said. When the regional parties will decide to align with a national party, the BJP will have an edge over the Congress.

Tamil Nadu is set to witness a multi-cornered contest with two main regional players  the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and the DMK  and over half a dozen other smaller parties vying for the 39 Lok Sabha seats.

The AIADMK is struggling with the leadership tussle between TTV Dhinakaran and chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami. Dhinakaran is the nephew of former late chief minister J Jyalalithaas loyalist, VK Sasikala.

Milan Vaishnav, the director and a senior fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Shah and the BJP have been working to shape Tamil politics to their advantage since Jayalalithaas death.

The Telugu Desam Partys exit from the National Democratic Alliance and a lack of understanding with the Shiv Sena for 2019, too, has made states like Tamil Nadu crucial for the BJP.

However, the BJPs leverage has declined over the past year with the narrowing of their perceived electoral advantage. Any potential Tamil ally will be able to drive a hard bargain, Vaishnav said.

Observer Research Foundations senior fellow N Sathiya Moorthy said a pre-poll alliance will be difficult for the BJP. Hindutva and minority-related issues will be a problem, particularly for a party like the DMK. He said the DMK left the NDA ahead of the 2004 election because it felt continuing with the BJP was hurting its interest.

AIADMK, under J Jayalalithaa, had transferable votes. That is questionable now. Moreover, an alliance with TTV Dhinakaran, against whom the Centre has filed so many cases, can hurt the prime ministers clean image.

Ashoka Universitys political science assistant professor Gilles Verniers said the national parties may have to keep renegotiating the terms as the situation unfolds. The first challenge for the BJP (or the Congress) is to find reliable interlocutors to negotiate an alliance, as both the DMK and the AIADMK are currently embroiled in a messy and poorly executed succession transition.Days after former prime minister Manmohan Singh urged PM Narendra Modi not to change the nature and character of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in New Delhi, the institutions director said on Monday that the governments proposed changes will in no way undermine the legacy of Indias first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Nehru belongs not just to the Congress, but to the entire nation, Singh had said in a letter to Modi on August 24 after reports that the government planned a museum for all prime ministers in the Teen Murti complex, which was the Nehrus home between 1947 and 1964, and where NMML is located.

Singh added that, during the six-year tenure of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who died on August 16, there was absolutely no attempt made to change the nature and character of the NMML and the Teen Murti complex in any way. But sadly, that seems to be part of the agenda of the Government of India now.

Shakti Sinha, the director of NMML said he was yet to read Singhs letter as he was not in India. But what I have learnt is that he is concerned about Nehrus legacy. I think he has some misunderstanding about the proposed Prime Ministers museum in the Teen Murti complex. The upcoming museum will no way undermine the legacy of Nehruji, Sinha said.

On the contrary, the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library is continuously working to enhance Nehrujis legacy. We are improving the museum by making Nehrujis work more thematic and theological, he added.

Six members of the NMML society had opposed a museum for all prime ministers in the existing Teen Murti campus. But the idea was cleared by Union home minister Rajnath Singh, who presided over the meeting.

Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said on Monday that attempts are constantly being made to change the identity and character of institutions such as NMML.

Dr Manmohan Singh is a person renowned for his sobriety and for using words of studied moderation. If at all, Dr Manmohan Singh can be accused of being too mild, too controlled and too moderate in the use of his words. I think the whole world has seen and the whole of India is seeing that by means direct and indirect -- much more by indirect and by stealth -- attempts are being made to change the integrity, character, identity and content of venerable institutions of this country of which certainly NMML is one. This is not limited to NMML and that is the tragedy, he said.

The Bharatiya Janata Partys Bhupender Yadav tweeted: As per clause 3(i)(d) of the MOA, One of the objects for which The #NehruMemorial Museum & Library society was established, was - To Acquire Maintain & Preserve papers of #Nationalist leaders of Modern India & Other #Eminent Indians who distinguished themselves in any field.

Singh said in his letter that no amount of revisionism can obliterate Nehrus role and his contributions. As Atal Bihari Vajpayeeji himself said in his moving speech to Parliament when Panditji (Nehru) passed away: Such a resident may never grace Teen Murti again. That vibrant personality, that attitude of taking even the Opposition along, that refined gentlemanliness, that greatness we may not again see in the near future. In spite of a difference of opinion we have nothing but respect for his great ideals, his integrity, his love for the country and his indomitable courage.

Let us respect this sentiment and keep Teen Murti as a memorial to our first Prime Minister Pandit Nehru and leave the Teen Murti complex undisturbed as it is. This way we will be respecting both history and heritage, Singh wrote.Union minister Harsh Vardhan has weathered a storm for insisting that India cannot rely on international estimates for air pollution-related disease and deaths, pushing through a controversial DNA Technology Bill that critics say threatens privacy, getting the countrys top labs to develop pollution-free firecrackers, and participating in his neighbourhood Ramleela.

He spoke to HTs Health & Science Editor Sanchita Sharma about the controversies and the successes in his ministries efforts to make India clean and green. Edited excerpts:

Should we expect cleaner air across north India this winter?

Absolutely, 100%. A lot of action has been taken to address all related aspects over the past couple of years.

There was reasonable improvement in air quality in 2017 compared to 2016, and we will ensure 2018 is better than 2017. The good and better days (in terms of Air Quality Index) are more in number as compared to last year, and the bad and worse days are decreasing. The dissemination of information through the national Air Quality Index (AQI) has led to higher awareness and the demand for action.

The Centre has allocated Rs 1,151 crore for agricultural mechanisation in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi-NCR from 2018-20 to reduce the burning of crop residue.

Apart from establishing farm machinery banks for custom hiring, financial assistance at 80% of the project cost to farmer co-ops, self-help groups... and 50% of the cost to individual farmers will be provided by the Centre.

Well also regularly review the graded action plan (to control of air pollution) implementation. Another example of our seriousness was the governments decision to leapfrog from BS-IV to BS-VI fuels, a step that no other country has taken.

Was there pressure from vehicle-manufacturers on the fuel change?

No, theres no pressure from the industry on banning vehicles not conforming to BS-VI emission norms by April 1, 2020. About three to six months will be provided to automobile manufacturers for the registration of the vehicles manufactured before April 1, 2020, to exhaust the inventory.

No new BS-IV vehicles manufactured before April 1, 2020, will be registered after June 30 (2020).

How is the work progressing on pollution-free crackers?

I have requested CSIR (Council for Scientific & Industrial Research) to get all related labs to produce pollution-free crackers. Im told they have made a significant headway, and they are constantly in touch with the cracker industry.

Can any firecracker be pollution-free?

You can say minimum polluting certainly a lot less than what we have today. Once the results are out, only then we can say how successful the project has been.

With cleaning the air high on the agenda, why have thermal power plants been granted extension till 2022?

The new norms for thermal power plants have been discussed for close to a decade, but it was this government that notified it. We have not amended our notification. What we have done is only to draw a clear roadmap for compliance by 2022.

Why were specific targets to reduce air pollution by 35% over three years and 50% over five years in 100 non-attainment cities removed from the national clean air programme (NCAP)? Do you plan to set a new timeline?

A blanket pan-India target of 35% reduction in three years and 50% reduction in five years may be difficult to evaluate and implement. A percentage reduction target and timeline can only be with respect to a specific city after reviewing its action plan and capacity.

But a general minimum indicative target for five years for the top 10 most polluted cities to begin with can be indicated in the NCAP based on general international experiences.

Has a budget been set for NCAP?

Rs 300 crore has been allocated to NCAP for a pollution abatement scheme for 2018-19 and 2019-20. The draft memorandum for expenditure has been sent to ministries concerned, including finance, for comments. The approval is yet to come and is subject to appraisal by a competent authority.

You and the NCAP say there are no conclusive data available to establish direct correlation of death/disease exclusively due to air pollution.

Do you expect air pollution to damage the health of Indians differently than other pollutants such as tobacco smoke and pesticide, chemical and heavy metal contamination?

We do acknowledge that air pollution has significant health impacts that have increasingly been becoming a major environmental challenge. But it is erroneous to refer to it as a major health crisis on modelling-based statistical estimation that has used no direct experimental data. Though various respiratory and other aliments can be attributed to air pollution, there is no concrete field-based experimental study to correlate death with air pollution in the country. The ministry is getting a comprehensive study done on the health impacts of outdoor air pollution on community health. It will be done simultaneously at 20 leading medical centres with the technical support from AIIMS (All-India Institute of Medical Sciences), ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research), PGI-Chandigarh, AMCHSS-Thiruvananthapuram etc.

There are fears that the DNA Technology (Use and Application) bill may lead to breach of privacy.

Id say these fears have been over-addressed. Over the last three years, the bill has been subjected to all sorts of technical scrutiny by stakeholders outside government as well as by the law ministry, home ministry and the high-powered committee headed by the home minister. There is no need to be worried about privacy issues. The bill has been introduced in the Lok Sabha and I sincerely wish it becomes law in the next session.

Why is Taj Mahal turning yellow? Whats being done to protect it?

There is as yet no scientific method to assess whether the Taj Mahal is turning yellow or not. Reports indicate that areas of the Taj that have undertaken cleaning using mud packs have regained colour, so its incorrect to say the Taj is turning yellow without adequate scientific evidence. Our ministry had requested ASI (Archaeological Survey of India) to institute a scientific method.

The main concern is air polluting industries. Since particulate matter deposits may make it look somewhat discoloured, theres a moratorium on orange, red and green (grades of pollution, white industries being the cleanest) industries.

The Compensatory Afforestation Rules 2018 to utilise Rs 660 billion for tree plantation are being criticised for giving gram sabhas no role in how the money is spent. Former environment minister Jairam Ramesh has called it a blatant breach of assurances given by your government. Whats your response?

Till now, the criticism was why hasnt it been notified. Now after all sorts of scrutiny it was put in the public domain, sent to state governments and related stakeholders and all concerned, and their views and comments were incorporated its in the stage where it is being implemented and states are going to be helped. Raising superfluous objections now carries no meaning. They may be for political reasons. And whenever there is a need, we will address all concerns to everyones satisfaction.

Which environment ministry successes are you especially proud of?

All of them, but I was particularly happy with the response to the campaign against plastic pollution. With increased awareness, state governments were able to push through new restrictions on single-use plastic.

Weve streamlined clearance processes, and environmental, CRZ (coastal regulation zone) and forest clearance processes have been moved online. The process is now transparent, speedy and efficient, which in the earlier days was a major hurdle for developmental projects, including strategic projects for national security. District, state authorities and regional offices of the ministry have been empowered to grant clearances to ensure speed and accountability. The average time taken is now around 160 days, down from over 600. The amendment of the Indian Forest Act, 1927, to take bamboo out of the definition of trees to encourage farmers to grow bamboo outside forests will enhance their income and give impetus to about 20 million people involved in bamboo-related activities. One tonne of bamboo provides 350 man-days of employment.

Do you support sex education in school?

It is necessary to educate everyone appropriately at a very young age. It is better that young children are informed about various body parts and their functions by their parents and teachers because it will help children discuss questions related to sex and gender with their parents and teachers and get correct answers. It would be disastrous if children get half-baked information from peers or other sources.

Tell us about your Ramlila experience.

(Laughs) I regularly visited Ramlilas in Geeta Colony, which was my constituency for 20 years, and once they practically forced me to participate. They assigned me to the role of Janak. Lav Kush (Ramlila committee) heard about it and requested me to play Janak. Since its in my parliamentary constituency, I agreed. Ive gone on stage thousands of time, but only once before to act.

Who will be BJPs face in Delhi elections in 2020? Is the party going to field you again?

I was approached by the party and RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) to join politics in 1993. Since then, till today, I have never, either directly or indirectly, decided what I want to do. I have always been guided by the decision and the wishes of the party.

Have you got any feelers from the party?

No, I havent. Not yet? (Laughs) No, not yet about it.The Tripura government has issued a dress code that bars officials from wearing jeans, cargo pants and sunglasses. It has instructed them against using mobile phones during meetings.

Revenue, education, information and cultural affairs principal secretary, Sushil Kumar, has directed magistrates and other top district officials to ensure the dress code at the meetings either chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb or his deputy, Jishnu Deb Barman, chair.

In a memo, Kumar said he had never seen any officer from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) or other central services going to the office wearing jeans or denim shirts while he was in the central government service for three years.

Kumar called the tendency of officials to use mobile phones during meetings a mark of disrespect for the people chairing them. He cited instances in which officials were seen taking calls during official meetings and said such things should be avoided.

Kumar recalled former chief minister Manik Sarkars advice to the officials asking them to keep their hands out of their pockets during conversations.

The Opposition Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM condemned the dress code. The dress code has no link with the welfare of people. A person should have the freedom to wear what he likes. The governments interference in this regard is not welcome, said CPM state secretary, Bijan Dhar.

Earlier, the Madhya Pradesh government had issued an advisory in October 2015, asking officials not to wear jeans and sunglasses during official functions.

The Chhattisgarh government had in May 2015 reprimanded Bastar district magistrate, Amit Kataria, for wearing dark glasses when he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to the state.A solo trekker from Bengaluru, Karnataka, has gone missing in Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh.

The last known location of 44-year-old Sathyanaryan Venkatachari was in Wangtu on July 25. After no contact with him for over a month, his family filed an online missing report with the Kinnaur police on August 24.

Missing trekkers wife Anuradha and family friend Kishor Reddy reached Kinnaur on Sunday and met superitendent of police (SP) Sakshi Verma. He last called on July 25 and since then, there is no trace of him, said Anuradha, adding that he was supposed to return home on August 22.

Apart from seeking police help, family and friends have also sought help of local trekkers and travel agents, besides Indo Tibet Border Police (ITBP), that has a large base in the tribal district and was recently involved in rescue of 22 trekkers, who had come from Maharashtra.

Venkatachari, who works at a Bengaluru office of a US-based multinational company Texas Instruments, intended to do a 5,500-metre high trek at Gunsarang, connecting Ropa valley in Kinnaur with Mane village in Spiti district.

He was then supposed to meet his friend and trekker Vikram Malik in Manali on August 2 and undertake a trek to Pangi in Chamba. He called Malik last on the same day when he called his wife and after that went incommunicado.

His friends have also spread the message about him missing on social media. Meanwhile, search parties including police and trekkers are on possible routes he would have taken.Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet chief ministers of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states in New Delhi on Tuesday to discuss plans about reaching out to beneficiaries of the governments welfare schemes as part of efforts to ensure the party returns to power.

BJP president Amit Shah will also attend the day-long meetings along with deputy chief ministers of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA)-ruled states. The countrys political situation and general preparedness for the 2019 national election will also be discussed, three BJP functionaries said. The BJP rules 15 states and has deputy chief ministers in four states, where it shares power with allies.

Each of these states has been asked to submit block-wise details of the beneficiaries of the government schemes, a BJP leader said on the condition of.

The BJP claims the governments welfare schemes had benefitted about 22 crore people. The party has drawn a plan to reach out to each of them for support in the next election.

The BJP has 11-crore plus members. If we can convert welfare schemes into voters, the BJP will return to power with a majority greater than 2014. The chief ministers conclave will discuss all these issues threadbare, said another leader.

Free LPG cylinders to BPL families, universal banking services, loan for startup, funds to promote self-employment among scheduled castes youth are some of the welfare schemes of the BJP government.

Each chief and deputy chief minister has been asked to come with a report.

The BJP faces challenges of unified opposition in states like Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra while in three election-bound states  Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan  the BJP faces a direct contest with the Congress.Opposition parties, including the Congress, on Monday reiterated their demand for a return to ballot papers and called for a cap on poll expenditure in a meeting with the Election Commission.

If going back to ballot papers was not possible for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the commission should at least ensure a sample check of electronic voting machines (EVMs), the Congress said, as the Opposition bloc raised complaints over alleged EVM malfunctions.

We will definitely look into all the suggestions given by them and there will be a satisfactory solution to them, chief election commissioner (CEC) OP Rawat told reporters after an all-party meeting in New Delhi.

The election commission convened Mondays meeting with all recognised national and state parties to discuss several issues, including the fidelity of electoral rolls, gender representation within party structures and ticket distribution, political expenditure, and the expenditure ceiling for legislative council elections.

Malfunctioning of EVMs is a major issue. VVPATs (voter verifiable paper audit trails) were introduced but are not being cross-checked. We demanded that at least 30% of the votes should be cross-checked, Congress leader Mukul Wasnik said.

Representatives of the Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Trinamool Congress, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Communist Party of India (CPI), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) also raised the EVM issue, which has become a sticking point before most state elections over the four years.

The CPI(M) stressed there should be more safeguards in the voting system.

Around 70% political parties have demanded that the EC revert to the old system of ballot papers during elections. The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) was singled out today, Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi told reporters.

The ruling BJP and Odisha CM Naveen Patnaiks Biju Janata Dal (BJD) said they were satisfied with EVMs. Tamil Nadus ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) said it was fine with both EVMs and ballot papers.

BJP leader and Union minister JP Nadda said the ECs move to cross-check EVM results with the help of VVPATs was a good one. We should think ahead. EC has properly replied to all questions raised about EVMs and we should look forward. (Using) VVPAT is a good move and it should be taken forward, he said. Rawat said the poll watchdog will take a comprehensive view on the EVM issue. Some of the parties said going back to ballot is really bad as it will bring back booth capturing...we dont want (that)... some parties said there are problems with EVMs, there are issues with VVPAT slip count..., he said.

Venkatesh Nayak of Delhi-based Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, which has worked on electoral reforms, too felt ballot papers will mean the return of the era of booth capturing and bogus voting. However, I would like the EC to publicly assure voters that EVMs are tamper-proof, he said .

CEC Rawat added that a major takeaway from the meeting was that parties were very positive and very constructive in suggesting ways to further boost the integrity of elections.

He also said parties raised the issue of simultaneous polls. A few supported and others opposed it, Rawat said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has backed the idea.

On the ceiling on spending, the Congress was in favour of cap on expenditure by political parties.

Kalyan Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress said his party was demanding state funding of elections to curb corruption and a ceiling on expenditures by a candidate. Nilotpal Basu of the CPI(M) said it raised the question of election funding because that was in the minds of the electorate.

Some parties, including the BJP, urged the Election Commission to link Aadhaar with electoral rolls to weed out bogus voters. In a statement, the BJP said that it told the poll panel that immediate steps are required for maintaining voters list in alphabetical order so that duplicate names can be deleted.The Congress is yet to shortlist candidates for the upcoming assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Mizoram in spite of an August 15 deadline set by party president Rahul Gandhi for the announcement, according to three senior functionaries familiar with the matter.

However, the functionaries added, the process is moving faster than usual and is likely to be completed by the end of September for the polls scheduled in November-December. The process of identifying candidates in the Congress usually begins a month before the elections and the list is out roughly at the time of filing of nominations.

In June, Gandhi had formed screening committees to kick-start the selection of candidates for the four states. But the panels are yet to meet because the process to get feedback from workers on the ground is taking longer than anticipated though the members have informal discussions, the functionaries said.

A screening committee shortlists the candidates after going through the recommendations of state units for ticket allocation and forwards the names to the partys central election committee for final approval. At a rally at Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh on May 18, Gandhi had said that 90% of the candidates will be finalised by August 15.

The head of the screening committee for Madhya Pradesh, Madhusudan Mistry, said the shortlisting of candidates will only start after September 4 and majority of contestants will be finalised by the end of next month. We have already visited Bhopal twice and held discussions with state leaders. We will clear majority of seats by September-end, Mistry said.

He is being assisted by Mahila Congress general secretary Netta DSouza and the Congress legislature party (CLP) leader in the Uttar Pradesh assembly, Ajay Kumar Lallu, as the other members of the panel.

In Rajasthan, the screening committee, headed by former union minister Kumari Selja, will formally meet for the first time on August 31 and September 1, according to a Rajasthan Congress office-bearer familiar with the development who asked not to be named.

Apart from Selja, the panel for Rajasthan has Karnataka leader Shakir Sanadi and Lalitesh Tripathi, a former legislator from Uttar Pradesh.

In Chhattisgarh, the committee, headed by former Assam Congress chief Bhubaneswar Kalita, will begin the process of shortlisting the candidates from September 15, according to a Chhattisgarh Congress office-bearer who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The panel members  Rohit Choudhary and Ashvinbhai Kotwal  are touring different districts with All India Congress Committee (AICC) secretaries to identify the winnable candidates from among 1,900 applicants for 90 seats, he added.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress are going head-to-head in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh in what is considered by experts as a precursor to the 2019 general elections. The BJP is in power in all three states.

In his Bilaspur rally, Gandhi had said that tickets will be given to workers dedicated to the partys ideology and not to those who parachute into the Congress at the time of elections.

We will not give tickets to those who have been airdropped from helicopters or have come from other parties, he had said, asserting that party workers will be consulted before fielding candidates.

Gandhi has often disapproved of granting tickets to those leaders who come to the party only to contest polls and fly out after getting defeated. He has also stressed the need for giving due respect to Congress workers in ticket allocation.Curfew was relaxed for four hours on Monday in violence-hit Malpura town of Rajasthans Tonk district where fifteen kanwariyas were injured in a clash with local people, police said.

Curfew is in force in Malpura town from the last four days and 30 people have been arrested so far, they said.

No fresh incidence of violence occurred in curfew-hit areas and considering the law and order situation, the clampdown was relaxed for four hours from 10 am to 2 pm on Monday. However, mobile internet services remain suspended, Station House Officer at Malpura Police Station, Navneet Bihari Vyas, said.

He said a few accused have been arrested under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Tension gripped the area after some miscreants hurled stones on kanwariyas while they were passing through a Muslim-dominated area on August 23.

The attack was followed by arson in which a vehicle was torched, forcing the authorities to impose Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which prohibits an assembly of more than four persons in an area.A Delhi court acquitted on Monday two people accused of waging war against the country by allegedly hijacking a Delhi-Srinagar Indian Airlines plane in 1981 and taking it to Pakistan.

Additional sessions judge Ajay Pandey said the prosecution failed to prove the charges against the accused Satnam Singh and Tejinderpal Singh, both of whom served life terms in Pakistan. Pandey also said the case was hurt because both the original FIR and the charge sheet filed in the main case couldnt be traced. .in the absence of identification and description of specific role of each accused by witnesses, this court is of the opinion that prosecution has miserably failed to prove the charge under section (121 or 121A IPC (waging a war or attempting to wage a war against the country) against either of accused, the judge said.

The court said the judgment of the Pakistan court, which awarded life terms to the two, and the proceedings in Pakistan were not relevant to this case.

On September 29, 1981, five members of the radical Sikh group, Dal Khalsa, allegedly hijacked Indian Airlines flight number IC-423 carrying 117 passengers from New Delhi to Srinagar, and forced it to land in Lahore. They were protesting against the arrest of Sikh militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale, who was at the forefront of a movement demanding a separate nation for Sikhs, Khalistan.

In 2005, Indian Airlines was merged with Air India, and the new entity was called Air India.

Pakistan launched a commando operation hours after the plane landed in Lahore, and arrested the five people. All were convicted and sentenced to life terms in prison by a special court in Lahore under the Pakistan Penal Code in 1986.

After serving a little over 13 years, Satnam Singh returned to India, surrendered and filed an application on December 9, 1999 in a Delhi court seeking discharge. In his application, he stated he had already undergone the imprisonment for hijacking the plane and hence could not be further prosecuted.

The trial court discharged him on February 11, 2000. Tejinderpal Singh also filed a similar discharge application, prompting the court to call for the records of the case. However, no record of the FIR was found and even the main charge sheet could not be traced. The court said the case was unique because it was launched not by the police but on the filing of a discharge application. Court requires proof of each ingredient of any offence to be brought on record. Merely because accused stated that he hijacked Indian Airlines Flight, without narrating the details and the manner in which the plane was purportedly hijacked by him, court cannot conclude that plane was hijacked or the passengers were abducted, the court held.

Satnam and Tejinderpal appeared before the court after a supplementary charge sheet was filed against them for waging a war against the country (121, 121A and criminal conspiracy 120B).

However, the sedition clause (section 124A of IPC), which was a part of earlier charge sheet, was dropped.

To prosecute people under section 120B of the IPC (criminal conspiracy), the Delhi Police requires sanction from the lieutenant governor. But the court observed that the lack of a charge sheet and main complaint meant that nothing could be sent to the L-G. ..letters for grant of sanction and consequent sanction were written without application of mind, the court said.

The court also observed that no official document, letter or communication was collected by the investigating officer (IO) to verify the names of the crew or the passengers. Hence the possibility of some specific witnesses being chosen by IO to support his case could not be ruled out.A Delhi court will on Monday rule on two Sikh separatists who are charged with treason for hijacking an Air India plane in 1981 and commandeering it to Lahore in Pakistan.

Tajinder Pal Singh and Satnam Singh were charged with waging war against India and sedition when they were deported to India in 2000 after serving life terms in Pakistan.

The plane carrying 111 passengers and a crew of six was hijacked on September 29, 1981 by five knife-wielding Khalistan supporters. In Lahore, Pakistani commandos captured the separatists and freed 45 hostages remaining aboard unharmed the next day. The hijackers had first released more than 60 of the passengers.

Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh had last year directed the states Legal Aid Team to extend help to the two men. While the hijacking was condemnable, any attempt to prosecute the two, who had already done life terms in Pakistan for the same crime, will amount to a serious travesty of justice, he had said in a statement.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE ONPakistan is expected to raise objections to two water storage and hydropower projects being built by India at the upcoming meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission to be held in Lahore this week.

The meeting will also be the first, between both the countries, since the new government headed by Prime Minister Imran Khan assumed office.

Unnamed officials were quoted by the media saying that Pakistan will raise concerns over the construction of 1,000-MW Pakal Dul and 48-MW Lower Kalnai projects at the two-day talks beginning on Wednesday.

An official told Dawn newspaper that Pakistan will raise its concerns over the construction of the projects on the two tributaries of the Chenab river despite Islamabads objections to their designs.

Pakistan wants India to modify the designs to make them comply with the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 or put the projects on hold until New Delhi satisfies Islamabad, the report said.

The official said the two sides will also finalise the schedule for future meetings.

The water commissioners of both India and Pakistan are required to meet twice a year and coordinate technical visits to project sites and critical river headworks.

The two-day session is expected to discuss ways for timely and smooth sharing of hydrological data on the rivers shared by both the countries.

Pakistan has alleged that India began work on the Pakal Dul project in May without addressing its reservations.

The project is expected to be completed in 66 months.

Islamabad has objections to the pondage and freeboard of the Lower Kalnai project and pondage, filling criteria and spillway of the Pakal Dul project.

Pakal Dul is a storage-cum-power project and can have a gross storage of about 108,000 acre feet of water.

Under the Indus Waters Treaty, waters of the eastern rivers Sutlej, Beas and Ravi were allocated to India, while the western rivers Indus, Jhelum and Chenab to Pakistan.

Islamabad believes the Pakal Dul projects reservoir violates the Indus treaty and had registered its objections at the last meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission held in New Delhi in March.Foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale visited Russia last week to follow up on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Vladimir Putins informal summit in May and to lobby for Indias Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) membership.

NSG is an elite club of countries that deals with the trade in nuclear technology and fissile materials. India is making a renewed bid for getting NSG membership. It expects Moscow to help India get it.

The 48-member NSG works on the principle of consensus for admitting new members. India has not signed the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for an entry into the group.

But New Delhi has maintained it has impeccable non-proliferation credentials that had enabled the country to get a waiver from the grouping to operationalise the India-US nuclear deal and get into nuclear commerce.

There was no Indian statement on Gokhales visit on August 24. But Russians said deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov held consultations with him in Moscow.

The officials discussed the main multilateral export control regimes, including the Nuclear Suppliers Group, cooperation in the framework of BRICS and other topical issues of mutual interest on the international agenda, a Russian statement said.

The NSG is the only major export control regime India is not part of.

India became a part of the Australia Group in January 2018, the Missile Technology Control Regime in June 2016 and the Wassenaar Arrangement in December 2017.

Putin is expected to meet Modi in October for their annual summit. India is expected to take up the NSG membership with the US again during the two plus two dialogue between foreign and defence ministers of the two countries on September 6.

The issue of getting NSG membership is an important issue for the government. Becoming member of the export control regimes remained the Modi governments key foreign policy priority, said an official. We are now part of three out three export control regimes. That says a lot about Indias non-proliferation track record as well.

Experts said the improvement in India-China ties could change Beijings stance against Indias NSG membership.

There has been a perceptible change in the bilateral ties after Modis meeting with President Xi Jinping in Wuhan on April 27 and 28. So if China withdraws its objection, India could be a member of NSG, said former foreign secretary Lalit Mansingh.Internet services were suspended in Shahjahanpur district of Uttar Pradesh on Monday after a clash broke out between two communities outside a gurudwara on Saturday, officials said.

At least 80 identified and over 200 unidentified people have been booked by the police for rioting and damaging public property.

District magistrate, Shahjahanpur, Amrit Tripathi said, There were reports of circulation of inflammatory content on social media platforms after which internet services were suspended to check any untoward incident.

We have identified people from both the sides who were found to be involved in violence. The administration will recommend action against them under the NSA (National Security Act), the DM said.

He said the situation was peaceful and no report of fresh violence had been received in the last 24 hours.

The DM and other district administration officials are camping in Banda area of the district where tension first erupted on Saturday.

Located about 30 km north of the district headquarters, Banda has considerable Sikh population.

According to police, tension erupted when a Sikh sewadar (volunteer) at Guru Nanak Dev Gurudwara in Banda area allegedly hit a Hindu girl on Saturday afternoon.

In his complaint to the police, the girls father alleged that the volunteer attacked his daughter when she resisted inappropriate advances of the accused.

A clash took place between Sikhs and Hindus and the situation escalated further when reports of clashes between the two communities started pouring in from different parts of Banda area.

Over 30 people, including police personnel, were injured in clashes. Half-a-dozen shops, public property and private vehicles were damaged in the violence.

Following the violence, the district administration declared prohibitory orders and deployed heavy police force in the area.

Superintendent of police (SP), Shahajahanpur, S Channappa said: Force from four police stations, four battalions of PAC and two battalions of paramilitary forces have been deployed in the area. We have imposed restrictions on the movement of people in and out of Banda. We are closely monitoring the situation.

He said three FIRs were lodged on complaints by the girls father, a resident of Banda, Rajesh Jain and the police, respectively.

In the FIR, at least 300 people have been charged with destroying public property and inciting violence.The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) is keen to get an equal number of seats in Maharashtra to contest the coming elections in alliance with Congress. NCP chief Sharad Pawar has conveyed this to Congress president Rahul Gandhi in a recently held meeting.

In order to reach a consensus, the parties have now decided to form a joint committee of two senior leaders each to discuss the issue in detail. This was disclosed by Pawar in a meeting called to discuss strategy for the coming 2019 Lok Sabha elections, said a senior NCP leader, requesting anonymity.

I have discussed the issue of seat-sharing with the Congress president. The committee comprises All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary Ashok Gehlot and state Congress president Ashok Chavan along with NCP general secretary Praful Patel and state NCP chief Jayant Patil, Pawar told reporters after the meeting.

In the meeting, the NCP chief has also asked party leaders to be prepared for both the Lok Sabha and assembly elections as there are chances that both the polls can be held at the same time.

Veering away from the election discussion, Pawar noted that the murderers of Dr Narendra Dabholkar and other rationalists follow an ideology which is spreading communalism.

They are not against only Muslims but are against all secular people be it Sikh, Christian or any other. The way rationalists were killed, I see it as an attack on secularism, the NCP chief said while meeting a delegation of Muslim scholars and leaders at YB Chavan on Monday.A controversial army major is likely to face a general court martial for his friendship with a local Kashmiri woman, and an attempt to meet her in a local hotel in Srinagar, and being away from his designated place of duty, two officials familiar with the move said on Monday.

Major Leetul Gogoi was detained by the police in a Srinagar hotel along with the woman in May this year. A court of inquiry (CoI) into the matter found him guilty of fraternising with a local in spite of instructions to the contrary and being away from the place of duty in operational area, said one of the officials cited above. His behaviour was in violation of the armys standard operating procedures. Orders have been issued to initiate disciplinary action against him, he added, asking not to be identified. The inquiry was conducted by a brigadier. The findings of the probe have been approved by the General Officer Commanding of Srinagar headquartered 15 Corps.

The disciplinary action could be in the form of a general court martial (GCM), experts said.

Gogoi became mired in a controversy last year after tying a Kashmiri civilian to the front of his jeep, apparently in an attempt to prevent stone-pelters from targeting his convoy. The incident evoked criticism from people in the Valley, human rights activists and political leaders. Gogoi was later awarded the Chief of Army Staffs Commendation card for sustained efforts in counter insurgency operations.

The next step in disciplinary action is recording of summary of evidence, followed by a pre-trial scrutiny of documents, which usually results in a GCM, said Major General Nilendra Kumar (retd), a former judge advocate general.

Kumar said in a case like Gogois, the award of recordable censure should suffice but the punishment could also be loss of seniority as the second charge amounts to being absent without leave in an operational area.

The disciplinary action against the officer is on expected lines.

Days after the hotel incident took place, army chief General Bipin Rawat said that the major would be given exemplary punishment if he was found guilty of violating standard operating procedures.

The army had backed Gogoi last year after the jeep incident that deepened the army-civilian divide and sparked violent protests in the militancy-hit valley.Former prime minister Manmohan Singh has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi not to change the nature and character of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in Delhi, asking his government to respect history and heritage.

Jawaharlal Nehru belongs not just to the Congress but to the entire nation, Singh said in a letter to Modi written on August 24. Singh wrote the letter after reports that the government planned a museum for all prime ministers in the Teen Murti complex, where NMML is located.

Singh said during the six-year tenure of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who passed away on August 16, there was absolutely no attempt made to change the nature and character of the NMML and the Teen Murti complex in any way. But sadly, that seems to be part of the agenda of the Government of India now.

Singh said that no amount of revisionism can obliterate Nehrus role and his contributions. As Atal Bihari Vajpayeeji himself said in his moving speech to Parliament when Panditji passed away: Such a resident may never grace Teen Murti again. That vibrant personality, that attitude of taking even the opposition along, that refined gentlemanliness, that greatness we may not again see in the near future. In spite of a difference of opinion we have nothing but respect for his great ideals, his integrity, his love for the country and his indomitable courage.

Let us respect this sentiment and keep Teen Murti as a memorial to our first Prime Minister Pandit Nehru and leave the Teen Murti complex undisturbed as it is. This way we will be respecting both history and heritage, said Singh.

Jawaharlal Nehru belongs not just to the Congress but to the entire nation. It is in this spirit that I have written to you.Almost eight years after he was sentenced to 28 years in jail by a London court for killing his wife Geeta Aulakh on November 16, 2009, Harpreet Aulakh, a UK-based Non Resident Indian, will be shifted from London to the Amritsar Central Jail on Tuesday.

This is the first international transfer of a prisoner to Punjab under the Repatriation of Prisoners Act signed by India and the UK. A three-member team of the Punjab prison department will take Harpreets custody from UK officials that is escorting him to the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi.

In the first week of July, we got a communique from the ministry of external affairs that Aulakh wanted to be shifted to Amritsar to serve the remaining term of his 28-year punishment. After completing formalities, the jail department issued a no objection certificate, and now he will be shifted to the Amritsar prison, Punjab minister of jails Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa said on Monday.

Formalities have been completed and Harpreet will land in Delhi on Tuesday from where he will be brought to the central jail in Amritsar, said inspector general (IG), prisons, Roop Kumar.

Crime File

On November 16, 2009, Aulakh, who was 32 at that time and a father of two boys aged eight and 10, got his wife, Geeta, then 28, murdered when she sought to end their decade-old marriage. Geeta was a receptionist with Asian radio station Sunrise Radio and was going to pick her sons up from a child-minders house at Greenford, London, when she was attacked by the two hired killers, Jaswant Singh Dhillon of Ilford and Sher Singh, a teenager from Southall.

She suffered head injuries and died soon after being brought to hospital. Her right hand was severed with a machete as she tried to shield herself from Sher Singhs repeated hacking.

Colleagues and friends said Harpreet routinely insulted his wife in public while developing an apparent infatuation for her sister, Anita. When Geeta finally left him, he became obsessed with the idea she was seeing another man. He confronted her male colleagues, hacked into her Facebook account, even went to her flat to pore over receipts, seeking evidence of a new attachment.

Geeta wa the UK-born daughter of Hindu parents who had come to London and set up a jewellery business in Southall. Harpreet was from a poorer Sikh family, and suspected by police of involvement in a series of violent crimes even before he entered the UK illegally in his early twenties. He was involved in drug and immigration scams later.

Harpreets plan fell apart when Dhillon approached the police, claiming to be a witness. He led them to the canal in Slough, Berkshire, where the killers had dumped the machete and Sher Singhs jacket. The breakthrough came when officers discovered the rare, Brazil-made weapon was stocked by a shop just half a mile from Aulakhs home in Hounslow, west London. CCTV footage showed three people buying a machete. Two were tracked down and still had the machetes at home; the third was Aulakh.

Sher Singh, who wielded the machete, and Dhillon, who acted as a lookout, were sentenced to 22 years in jail.SpiceJet Ltd. on Monday completed its maiden flight using a blend of aviation fuel and oil from jatropha seeds, furthering Prime Minister Narendra Modis push for greater use of alternative resources to cut Indias dependence on oil imports.

A Bombardier Q400 aircraft made the one-way trip to New Delhi from the city of Dehradun, about 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the capital. The private airline plans to blend a quarter of its energy requirement with bio fuel for flight operations, that would lower costs and help reduce carbon emissions by 15%, SpiceJet said Monday in a statement.

Bio jet fuel has the potential to reduce the cost of aviation, SpiceJet chairman Ajay Singh told reporters in New Delhi. This fuel is also clean, it creates less noise pollution, it creates far less carbon footprint, in fact it creates zero emission of greenhouse gases.

Airlines worldwide are seeking to power more flights with bio fuel to limit their dependency on oil and ease the impact on the environment. Using bio fuels will help Modis goal of cutting oil imports by 10 percent in next four years and increase the affordability of flying for Indias emerging middle class.

India is expected to become worlds third-biggest aviation market by 2025 on the back of a domestic-travel boom. That is leading to fierce competition and a bruising fare war. Bio jet fuel has the potential to halve the fuel cost of every flight and bring down fares, SpiceJet said.

The government has introduced a new policy that encourages bio fuel production from non-food feedstock such as solid and industrial waste and biomass.Opposition parties will on Monday discuss with the Election Commission their demand for the use of paper ballots instead of EVMs in future elections in the country.

At least 17 parties, including the National Democratic Alliance ally Shiv Sena, have been pitching for returning to ballot papers.

These include the Congress, Trinamool Congress (TMC), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Janata Dal(Secular) (JD-S), Telugu Desam Party (TDP), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Samajwadi Party, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), Communist Party of India (CPI), YSR Congress, Kerala Congress Mani (KCM) and AIUDF.

We will raise the issue of ballot papers in the meeting for fair and impartial elections. We want to make it clear that we do not consider EVMs (electronic voting machines) as tamper-proof, an opposition leader told news agency IANS.

Secondly, we would point out that the election expenses of political parties must also be limited along with the candidates, he added.

The latest demand to scrap EVMs underlines the aggressive mood of the opposition camp, which has over the past year often attributed the Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) victories in state assembly elections to EVMs.

The demand for ballot boxes has also brought an unlikely set of parties together, even those warring against each other  the Trinamool and the Left, the NCP and the Shiv Sena, and the TDP and the YSR Congress, among others. Among non-NDA parties, only the AIADMK, Telangana Rashtriya Samithi and the Biju Janata Dal are not supporting the demand.

Chief election commissioner OP Rawat has made public statements ruling out reverting to ballot papers in elections, asserting that the new EVMs have been designed with more stringent checks to rule out tampering or manipulation.

An EC official, who asked not to be named, said the body has also communicated to the political parties to refrain from raising doubts about the efficacy and safety of EVMs and voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPATs) machines when the poll outcome is different from what they expect.

The poll panel has called the meeting with seven national and 51 state recognised political parties to discuss various electoral issues such as electoral rolls, limiting political parties expenditure and timely submission of annual audited reports by parties among other things.

It also has not mentioned simultaneous polls in its official agenda of the meet released to the press, the issue is likely to come up for discussion. A majority of opposition parties have already told the Law Commission that they do not consider this proposal as practical or desirable.

The agenda for the meeting includes discussion on how to improve accuracy, transparency and inclusiveness of electoral rolls, measures to encourage enhanced representation of women in the political process, issues related to expenditure ceiling for parties, timely submission of annual audited reports and election expenditure reports among other things.

Also on the agenda are alternative modes of voting for domestic migrants and absentee voters.Main ab phir kabhi Dilli nahin aaongi (I will never come to Delhi again).

This is what the otherwise chirpy 15-year-old would keep repeating to her counsellor at a shelter home in south Delhi where she was brought by the police eight months ago after being rescued from the Nizamuddin railway station to where she had run off to escape abuse  both mental and physical.

The Class 2 drop-out hails from a village in Jharkhands Latehar district. She had heard stories about the good life people had in Dilli, and would often ask her eldest brother to take her there. Limited sources of income ensured her family did not object to the idea. Not long after, the brother and the teenager were in Delhi, meeting an acquaintance who would take her to a bungalow in Nizamuddin. Just like that, she had been hired to do all the daily chores for the family of five.

And then the abuse began.

She would be beaten up for the slightest delay in completing a task and was fed leftovers.

But the real horror began when the family patriarch, in his 60s, forced her to massage him and touch his private parts. She tried to run away after three months but was caught and brought back. The abuse increased. Last December, she managed to run away again, and reached the railway station where the police rescued her and took her to Prayas, the shelter home in Delhis Tughlaqabad.

Although the police have registered an FIR, investigations have not made much headway as the girl has been unable to provide police with the familys address.

Eight months on, the teenager has made many friends at the shelter home and is back to being her chirpy self.

I go to a non-formal school. After the class, I train at the skill centre inside the (shelter) home to become a beautician, she said.

Proposed laws highlights Maximum punishment for aggravated form of trafficking is life imprisonment and Rs 1-lakh fine Aggravated form of trafficking includes trafficking for forced labour, bonded labour, besides for surrogacy, false marriage and begging Relief and rehabilitation of the rescued person is a matterof right n Illicit assets of trafficking belonging to the accused will be confiscated. Anti-human trafficking units to be formed across India. Victims of cross-border trafficking have to be repatriated within six months

The new law

Her stay at home is coming to an end, though. She will be sent back to her village in a short while.

The 15-year-old is on top of the world. Though we are also happy that she will be reunited with her family, there is a gnawing concern. We have seen that in many such cases, the chance that the person would become a victim (of trafficking) and pushed into forced labour again is quite high, said Deepshikha Singh, the minor girls counsellor and the shelter homes in-charge.

It is this re-victimisation that the new Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2018 seeks to address with its rehabilitation framework. The bill was cleared by the Lok Sabha on July 26 and now awaits the Rajya Sabha nod.

At present, India has no mechanism to monitor the well-being and safety of someone like the 15-year-old once she is sent back.

For the first time, the proposed law provides for a comprehensive framework for rehabilitating trafficked victims. The victim will be able to claim compensation from the state as her right. A rehabilitation fund will be set up, which will be maintained and monitored by a high level National Anti-Trafficking Relief and Rehabilitation committee, said Amod K Kanth, general secretary of the NGO Prayas JAC (juvenile aid centre) Society.

Where a minor is involved, the bill provides for monitoring by the district anti-human trafficking unit to ensure her safety.

The confidentiality

Another important feature in the new bill, according to Kanth, is the de-linking of rehabilitation from criminal proceedings in trafficking cases. This will enable extension of rehabilitation services to survivors whose criminal proceedings fail through for no fault of theirs, or who do not want to participate in such proceedings, he added.

The bill also provides for maintaining confidentiality of the victim, if they do not want to appear before the court.

A year ago, we rescued a woman from a brothel in Delhis GB Road. A case was registered in West Bengal from where she was trafficked. Soon after, the victim got married and settled down. But now she is getting summons to appear before the court in person, to give her testimony, and she does not want to. Under the existing law she does not have a choice but to appear, said Rishi Kant of Shakti Vahini, an NGO that recues trafficked victims across India. Not anymore.

The proposed law provides for maintaining the confidentiality of the victim. If a trafficked victim does not want to appear before the court for reasons of safety and confidentiality, the designated court can record her statement through video conferencing. It will be her right now, Rishi Kant said. There are many such clauses in the new bill, Kant added, which has been drafted with the victim in mind.

Till now, the victim was never the focus. This will change now. For instance, if the victim chooses the inquiry into and trial of offences under the new law , it can be conducted in camera. In another first, the new law gives the victim the right to be heard in all bail matters. Under the existing system, the victim does not even get to know when the accused is granted bail, he added.

Flip side

To be sure, the bill has also come under flak from a section of activists and opposition leaders on grounds that it gives excessive power to the police and can be misused against transgenders and sex workers who are voluntarily in the sex trade. Ruchira Gupta, founder of Apne Aap Worldwide, the anti-sex trafficking organisation said that the bill in its present form wont be able to deter sex trafficking.

Of the 16 million women and girls who are trapped in prostitution in India today, majority of them were trafficked as girls and belong to the most marginalised groups such as Dalits and Adivasis. If this bill is passed these girls will not get any help as they will not be considered victims of the crime of trafficking on account of an existing law that punishes women for soliciting in a public place.

Thats a charge that the Union women and child development ministry, which is piloting the bill, has rebutted. The proposed law will not penalize any voluntary sex workers, only those who have been trafficked, said a senior WCD ministry official who did not want to be named.

Activists have also charged that the bill has not explicitly defined sexual exploitation, leaving grounds for misuse.

Sunitha Krishnan of Prajwala, an NGO involved in rescue and rehabilitation of sex trafficking victims, said Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code clearly defines sexual exploitation.

Defining it again will only amount to duplication. One needs to understand that this is the first time that a law acknowledges trafficking as an organized crime. The existing law focused on criminalization of offences related to trafficking. The new bill starts where Section 370 of IPC ends. It builds a framework to check organised crime, she added.

Management Update

Perth, Aug 27, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Australian Potash Limited ( ASX:APC ) (Company) is pleased to advise that a new management update has been provided by the Company's Managing Director and CEO, Matt Shackleton.Access to the management update dated August 2018 can be found under the News | Videos link on the Company's website at http://www.abnnewswire.net/lnk/6BJ8OL5W About Australian Potash Ltd

Australian Potash Limited (ASX:APC) is an ASX-listed Sulphate of Potash (SOP) developer. The Company holds a 100% interest in the Lake Wells Potash Project located approximately 500kms northeast of Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia's Eastern Goldfields.

Following the release of a Scoping Study in 2017, APC has been conducting a Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) into the development of the Lake Wells Potash Project. The Company is aiming to release the findings of the DFS in H2 2019.

The Lake Wells Potash Project is a palaeochannel brine hosted sulphate of potash project. Palaeochannel bore fields supply large volumes of brine to many existing mining operations throughout Western Australia, and this technique is a well understood and proven method for extracting brine. APC will use this technically low-risk and commonly used brine extraction model to further develop a bore-field into the palaeochannel hosting the Lake Wells SOP resource.

A Scoping Study on the Lake Wells Potash Project was completed and released on 23 March 2017. The Scoping Study exceeded expectations and confirmed that the Project's economic and technical aspects are all exceptionally strong, and highlights APC's potential to become a significant long-life, low capital and high margin sulphate of potash (SOP) producer.Sanatan Sanstha, which is currently under scanner from various agencies due to its alleged connection with the killing of rationalists, on Monday demanded that the word secular be removed from the Indian Constitution. It also denied being a part of any terror activity.

Sanstha spokesperson Chetan Rajhans said the words socialist and secular were added in the Constitution by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. So, if there is a provision to add words, these can also be removed by the same provisions, he said.

The organization also claimed that the people arrested in connection with seizure of explosives and arms from various parts of Maharashtra and those allegedly involved in the killing of rationalists were not its members.

Its spokesperson Chetan Rajhans told reporters that a few people with progressive mindset, along with political parties such as the Congress and the Left block, were putting the Sanstha in the dock without providing any evidence of wrongdoing.

The outfit is facing renewed calls of ban, after the arrest of several people in the state recently threw up the possibility of them having links with the Sanstha.

The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad carried out raids in Nallasopara in neighbouring Palghar district and Pune between August 9-11, and arrested five people for allegedly stockpiling crude bombs, explosives and firearms.

Vaibhav Raut, Sharad Kalaskar, Sudhanwa Gondhalekar, former Shiv Sena councillor Shrikant Pangarkar and Avinash Pawar were arrested between August 10 and 24 and are in ATS custody.

The CBI, investigating the August 2013 killing of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, recently arrested Aurangabad resident Sachin Andure and has told a court he was the main shooter along with Kalaskar.

The central agency also told a special Pune court yesterday that there was a link between the killing of Dabholkar and journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh in Bengaluru in September last year.

Karnataka Polices Special Investigation Team, which is probing the killing of Lankesh, had met Maharashtra ATS officials in Mumbai last week to exchange information on their respective investigations.

Our Sanstha is being targeted without any reason. The charges against us are baseless and mindless. None of the nine arrested accused is affiliated with our organisation. We have not even heard the names of Kalaskar, Andure, Surale brothers and Rege before this, Rajhans said.Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation officials had reportedly evacuated those residing in two wobbly blocks of a four-storey government building in Odhav locality on Saturday, but a few returned in the hours that followed. Consequently, nearly ten people were buried under the rubble when the Ahmedabad building collapsed on a rainy Sunday.

While nine were rescued from the debris by Monday morning, a person was declared dead. The rescue operation was wrapped up around 9.30 am.

Block numbers 23 and 24 of the 18-year-old government structure for the economically weaker section were declared unsafe on Saturday, and the occupants were asked to vacate all the floors, Odhav ward councillor Bharat Patel said. However, some of them returned on Sunday evening when it was raining.

Municipal commissioner Vijay Nehra made a similar claim. Around 150 occupants of the two blocks were evacuated on Saturday. Some of them returned on Sunday for some unknown reasons, he said. The two ill-fated blocks comprised 32 living quarters.

While 60 fire brigade personnel were initially sent for rescue operations, they were later joined by National Disaster Response Force teams from Gandhinagar. Police teams are also assisting in the rescue operation. Saving lives is our top priority at the moment, said joint commissioner of police Ashok Yadav.

However, a few residents have rejected the administrations claim that the evacuation notices were issued on Saturday. We were asked to move out only around 4 pm on Sunday. The building collapsed around 9 pm, before all of us could vacate our dwellings, said Pravin Sikotia, a resident.The RSS may invite Congress president Rahul Gandhi to attend a three-day lecture series by Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat in New Delhi next month, sources in the organisation said on Monday.

The idea is to invite people from different ideologies for the event, a source in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh said, adding that the list is being prepared and may also include CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury.

Indications that Gandhi could be invited came on a day the RSS criticised him for drawing parallels between the Sangh and Islamic radical outfit Muslim Brotherhood.

Giving details of the September event, RSS prachar pramukh Arun Kumar said the Sangh was for the first time organising a three-day lecture series of its chief Mohan Bhagwat on the theme Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective.

Bhagwat ji will address and interact with select audience comprising prominent citizens on Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective in a three-day lecture series, Kumar told reporters.

The event will be held at Vighan Bhavan from September 17 to September 19. Kumar said people across the country wanted to know and associate with the RSS.

This lecture series has been organised in this context... sarsanghchalak (RSS chief) Mohan Bhagwatji will present the Sangh views on various contemporary issues of national importance, Kumar said.

Replying to a question on whether Gandhi will also be invited, Kumar said the list had not been finalised.

It is our prerogative to choose who to invite or not. Leave this to us... But people from all walks of life, including from different political outfits, ideologies and religions, will be invited, he said.

In June this year, Congress veteran and former president Pranab Mukherjee attended an event at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur on the Sanghs invitation, for which he was criticised by party leaders.

The RSS, an ideological mentor of BJP, was the focus of Gandhis attack during his recent visit abroad.

Last week, at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Gandhi had said the RSS idea is similar to that of Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world.

He had also alleged that the RSS was trying to change the nature of India and capture its institutions.

The Sangh said the Congress chief cannot understand the saffron outfit as he does not know India. He had also alleged that the RSS was trying to change the nature of India and capture its institutions.The acquittal of Sikh activists Tejinderpal Singh (66) and Satnam Singh (67), both members of the radical outfit Dal Khalsa, buoyed many members of the Sikh community in Punjab, who said the men had already been punished in Pakistan.

The duo were part of a five-member team that hijacked a Delhi-Srinagar Indian Airlines flight on September 29, 1981, and forced it to land in Lahore, as a mark of protest against the arrest of militant Sikh leader Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale.

All were sentenced to life in jail by a Pakistan court. After being released in 1994, two of them, Karan Singh and Jasbir Singh, got asylum in Switzerland while a third, Gajinder Singh, chose to stay back in Pakistan and was granted an extension. Tejinderpal and Satnam returned to India.

This is victory of truth, though it was unfortunate to begin trial against them even after they served the punishment, said Dal Khalsa president Harpal Singh Cheema.

Gurdarshan Singh Dhillon, noted Sikh historian and former professor at Panjab University, called the trial unnecessary. Their act of hijacking was result of the provocation created by the government and should not be tried. Still they were forced to take rounds of the court. I will appreciate the judge who acquitted them, said Gurtej Singh, a former IAS officer and writer.

Satnam Singh, a resident of Himachal Pradesh, was the state president of the Shiromani Akali Dal, but founded the more radical Dal Khalsa in 1978. He demanded Khalistan, a separate nation for the Sikhs, besides supporting Bhindranwale. He was president of the Dal Khalsa from 2005 to 2007 and is an active member of the organisation.

Tejinderpal Singh hailed from Jalandhar and joined the Dal Khalsa in 1981. He is not in active politics anymore, and runs a shop selling religious literature in Jalandhar.A meeting between external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and her new Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi is possible in the US on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly session next month, a media report said on Monday.

This could be the first ministerial-level bilateral meeting since Prime Minister Imran Khan became Pakistans 22nd prime minister on August 18.

Such a meeting (between Swaraj and Qureshi) is possible but no decision (has been taken) yet, Dawn news quoted a senior Pakistani diplomat in the US as saying.

The external affairs ministry has not announced any such meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi.

In a letter to Khan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had expressed Indias resolve to build good neighbourly relations between the two countries.

In July, Modi had telephoned Khan and congratulated him on his partys victory in the general elections and expressed hope that both countries will work to open a new chapter in bilateral ties.

The 73rd United Nations General Assembly opens on September 18 in New York.

Swaraj will address the annual high-level UNGA session on September 29, according to the provisional list of speakers released by the UN.

Pakistan is reluctant to confirm its agenda for the UNGA meeting as it is still undecided who will represent the country at the world body, the report said.

Media reports in Islamabad has indicated that Khan may skip the UNGA as part of his efforts to cut down on government expenses. However, several Pakistani diplomats and political commentators have urged him to reconsider his decision.

Pakistani officials feel the prime minister Khans presence in New York will add a new dimension to an India-Pakistan meeting, even though he will not participate in minister-level talks, the report said.

Dawn news, quoting diplomatic sources in Washington, said Islamabad would like to see how productive this meeting could be, particularly because India has already said that it is not ready to resume bilateral or formal talks with Pakistan.

They point out that this week, India strongly rejected a suggestion that in his letter to Khan, Prime Minister Modi had expressed interest on resuming talks.

The Indian reaction forced Pakistan to clarify that the suggestion was a media interpretation of the letter and Foreign Minister Qureshi, in his comments on Modis letter, never said that the Indian Prime Minister had made an offer of a dialogue, the report said.

Last week, a key US official said America welcomes Khans statement emphasising the importance of peace on both sides of Pakistans borders.Violence continued over the formation of panchayat boards in Bengal with three persons being killed in clashes in two districts of the state, taking the death toll since August 25 to four.

While two persons were killed in Manikchak of Malda district on Monday, one person lost his life in Raghunathpur in Purulia. Clashes were also reported from Deganga in North 24 Parganas, Chopra in North Dinajpur and Howrah districts.

Salam Sheikh (34) and Azhar Sheikh (64), both residents of Gopalpur-Hukumattola area in Malda, about 345 km to the north of Kolkata, were killed when clashes broke out allegedly between two factions of ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC). Several persons, including three-year-old Jishan Sheikh, were injured.

Malda police superintendent Arnab Ghosh visited the spot but refused to comment. Police arrested three persons in connection with the incident.

From early morning on Monday, hundreds of armed youths encircled the gram panchayat office in Manikchak. Around 9:30 am, a clash broke out, allegedly among supporters of two TMC camps  one led by former minister from Manikchak, Sabitri Mitra, and the saha-sabhadhipati of the Malda zilla parishad Gour Mondal.

However TMCs Malda working president Babla Sarkar alleged local Congress MLA Md Mottakin Alam had led some goons to surround the gram panchayat office from Monday early morning so that TMC members couldnt reach the spot to form the board.

When our supporters tried to force their way, the Congress-backed goons started hurling bombs. They also used firearms. Two of our workers were killed, he alleged.

Alam dismissed the allegations. I am in Kolkata today. How could I lead the attack. Everyone knows that a month ago all five Congress members of Gopalpur gram panchayat joined the TMC, he said.

Even as clashes were reported allegedly between TMC factions, Maldas Congress unit president, Mausam Benazir Noor instructed her party leaders to support the ruling party in the 146 gram panchayats that are hung in the district.

We have decided to support all anti-BJP parties including the TMC to form hung rural body boards to prevent the BJP in West Bengal, she said. TMC district president Dulal Ghosh, too, said they are cooperating with Congress to keep BJP out.

In the other incident, Niranjan Gope, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) worker, was killed when party activists clashed with TMC supporters in Khajura village of Ghagra gram panchayat in Jaypur of Purulia, 276 km to the west of Kolkata.

Trouble started over submission of caste certificates on Monday, alleged locals.

Our worker, Niranjan Gope, died on the spot as bullets hit him when police and TMC men fired. More than 10 were injured, some of them critically, alleged Bidyasagar Charaborty, Purulia district BJP president.

Police rejected the BJPs charges.

Police did not fire. On the contrary, bombs were hurled and bullets were fired at us. Four to five cops were injured, Akash Magharia, police superintendent of Purulia, told the media.

Shantiram Mahato, district TMC president said his party was not involved: No one of our party is involved. It is the handiwork of the BJP. Several outsiders came and they created trouble.

In a cabinet meeting on Monday, chief minister Mamata Banerjee asked her ministers to ensure there is no trouble in their respective districts over the formation of panchayat boards, which are tasked with formulating plans and implementing schemes at the village level. A key task in setting up the boards involves the election of pradhan and upa-pradhan from the elected members to run the affairs of the panchayat.

Trouble broke out in certain places of the state over panchayat board formation. I have asked the administration and police to deal with such situations firmly. A group of people are targeting policemen. One of our police officers was badly injured, she said at the state secretariat.

On Saturday, Lal Mohammad, 45, a TMC worker was killed in Islampur of North Dinajpur district. Police said Mohammad was hit by a bomb as a clash broke out when members of Panditpota 1 gram panchayat were meeting to elect the president.

The panchayat elections in the state in May were marked by violence from the first hour of nomination on April 2. Opposition leaders have claimed that more than 50 persons lost their lives in the polls.Two people, including a compounder, were arrested on Monday for allegedly sharing a sarcastic message against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Meeruts Sardhana constituency Sangeet Som on WhatsApp, police said.

The post accused the MLA of being ignorant about an incident where a 14-year-old girl was set ablaze by six people on August 17. She is struggling for her life at a hospital in Delhi. The six accused were subsequently arrested.

In-charge of Sardhana police station Dilip Singh said on the complaint of BJPs Sardhana city unit president Vinod Jain, the police lodged a case under relevant sections of the Information Technology Act and arrested Aijaz Khatri and Mohd Anas for sharing the objectionable post.

Anas is a compounder at a clinic while Aijaz is jobless. They forwarded an objectionable post in a WhatsApp group of traders which also has a few BJP leaders as members, he said.

The WhatsApp post read: Som is missing since August 15. Please come back. No one will say anything to you in connection with the Sardhana incident. You do not worry about the issue because the victim was not your daughter. Your only concern is to get votes. No one will measure your chest.

The publisher of the post also announced a reward of Rs 101 to the person who would give information regarding Soms whereabouts.

Though Som had visited the hospital and assured the girls family that all possible help would be provided for her treatment and strict action would be taken against the accused.

However, people claimed that the MLA swung into action only after NGOs and local residents hit the streets to demand justice for the girl.

Som who is attending the assembly session in Lucknow could not be contacted for comments.Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath said on Monday his government will invite more than 190 countries around the world to the Kumbh Mela next year in Allahabad when millions will take a dip in the sacred waters of the Ganga.

Kumbh is the biggest congregation of culture and faith on earth. Invitations are being sent to 192 countries for Kumbh Mela. The government is also making arrangements to ensure that at least two people from each of the six lakh villages of the country visit Kumbh, Yogi said while inaugurating the two-day UP Travel Mart in Lucknow.

The chief minister is also personally extending an invitation to all visiting foreign dignitaries and has already invited the heads of countries he met during his foreign visits.

The state government is also planning to provide an international platform to Kumbh Mela through international tour operators, who have assembled in Lucknow for the fourth UP Travel Mart. Around 53 international tour operators from 23 countries and 19 prominent Indian tour operators are attending the event.

The nearly two-month-long Kumbh Mela will start from January 15 and end on Mahashivratri on March 4 next year. At least 150 million devotees and tourists are expected to attend the Kumbh Mela, which is among the 13 elements from India on UNESCOs list of intangible heritage.

The festival has its origins in Hindu mythology which says Lord Vishnu wrested a golden pot containing the nectar of immortality from demons. Four drops fell on the four locations across India, in the cities of Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nasik in a 12-day fight for possession. The Kumbh Mela is held at one of these spots every six years, with the festival at Allahabad the holiest of them all.

The Modi government has also directed all Indian ambassadors deputed in foreign countries to promote Kumbh Mela in their respective countries of posting. The Centre is also sending separate invites for Kumbh Mela through foreign ambassadors posted in India.

Commenting on the states tourist potential, Adityanath said the northern state would be the best destination for tourism in the country. Five world heritage sites are in Agra alone, he added.

The chief minister said there was immense eco-tourism potential in Dudhwa National Park in Lakhimpur Kheri district and Sonbhadra. He also spoke about the Ramayana, Krishna and Buddhist tourist circuits and air connectivity in the state while assuring security and adequate transportation facilities for tourists visiting the state.Jammu and Kashmir has been on a mission to turn itself into a hub for organic farming and there are good results forthcoming as well. A fruit that has emerged as the star of the show is walnut.

Over 95% of the land under organic fruit cultivation grows walnut. Deputy director, horticulture, Mohammad Yusuf Dar said, Under organic cultivation, 1.85 lakh tonne of fruit is produced in Kashmir and 85,000 tonne in the Jammu region.

Anantnag and Kupwara top the state in walnut cultivation with 11,939 and 8,797 hectares under the fruit, he added. Over the past 40 years, the state has seen an astronomical rise in walnut production from 10,500 tonne to 2.7 lakh tonne in 2012. The cultivation of organic fruit has also seen a steady rise over the past decade.

Organic apple in the works

Enthused the trend, the government itself plans to grow apples organically. The thought is in its infancy, but some farmers have started cultivating organic apples in Kanelwal village in south Kashmir on an experimental basis. The production of peaches, plums and apricots produced organically in some parts of Kashmir is negligible. The main organic fruit produced in the state is walnut, Dar added.

The owner of apple orchard in Sonmulla village, Kupwara, Adil Ahmad Malik, says that he has walnut trees adjacent to his orchard and is getting good returns.

Malik adds, We still use old techniques, however, if walnuts are termed as an organic fruit, the rates will sky rocket. In our neighbouring village, walnut tree (a softer, usually edible part of a nut, seed, or fruit stone contained within its shell) produces kernel that fetches a very high price.

He says for the past five years, he has been planting walnut trees with high-quality yield. In Kashmir, walnuts are grown on marginal land. Experts should produce varieties requiring less land to establish full-fledged orchards.

Maliks cousin Showket Ahmad, who owns an outlet at Sopore, Asias second-largest fruit mandi, says, Our focus is on apples and walnuts are our least priority. We need the government to help us export walnut kernels directly to Sopore mandi. Now, we usually sell it to traders in Jammu who are agents of big companies.

Kashmir produces 80% of countrys walnut

Officials claim that 80% of walnut produced in India comes from the villages of Kashmir and the kernel produced from Kashmiri walnuts are considered the worlds best kernels, which prove lucrative in the international market. Director organic farming centre, Sher Kashmir University of Agriculture Sciences and Technology (SKUAST), Mohammad Yusuf Zarger, said, It is not possible to grow apples organically on a large scale as it will have operational issues, however, on an experimental basis, some farmers have produced organic apples in south Kashmir and fetched a good amount.

He added that walnuts were100% organic and scientists are working to produce new varieties, which can fetch good harvest and money in the international market.

Scientists at SKUAST are working on selection of 25-30 varieties to produce new varieties of walnuts.

A researcher in the walnut, Imtiaz Lone, said, Five varieties of walnuts, Suleman, Hamdan, Central Institute of Temperate Horticulture (CITH) 1, 2, 3 are produced in different parts of Kashmir. The emphasis is to produce more varieties with better yield. We are in the process of releasing four or five varieties for the state.Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) chief and Union minister Upendra Kushwaha said on Monday he was talking about social unity after his comment over the weekend about making delicious kheer led to speculations that he was hinting toward a possible political realignment in Bihar.

Please dont connect it with any caste equation and an alliance with any political party, Union minister of state for human resource development Kushawaha was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

Kushwaha, whose party is an ally of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), made the comment during a function meant to mark the 100th birth anniversary of former chief minister BP Mandal on Saturday.

Union minister makes kheer comment sparking rumours of new alliance in Bihar

One can prepare kheer with milk from the Yadavs and rice from the Kushwahas. We will get the sugar from Brahmins, Tulsi from Choudharyji (RLSP Bihar chief Bhudev Choudhary) and make delicious kheer with dry fruits acquired from the backward classes and Dalits. Then we can sit together and have some delicious kheer, he had said.

The Rashtriya Janata Dal had welcomed Kushwahas observation, stating that such a caste equation holds the potential to uplift socially deprived classes.

RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, who has previously extended an invitation to Kushwaha to align with his party, said in a tweet that panchmewa (a delicacy prepared with five dry fruits on religious occasions) can not only restore one to good health but also help create an egalitarian society. Panchmewa gives energy and is a good food item, he added.

Tejashwis endorsement of his statement was seen as an attempt by the opposition party to woo the RLSP chief, given his clout among the other backward classes.

Speculations that Kushwaha was planning to join the RJD-Congress combine in Bihar had earlier cropped up when he visited RJD chief Lalu Prasad at AIIMS Hospital in March. Many senior RJD leaders, including Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, said they had no objection to aligning with the RLSP if it left the NDAs fold. However, Kushwaha had denied all reports of a possible political realignment back then.

The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Janata Dal(United) dismissed the possibility of Kushwaha switching sides. What Kushwahaji said sounded like nothing but a proverb to me. Rice, milk and sugar belong to everyone ... One should not try to read too much into it as Kushwahaji has resolved to make Narendra Modiji the prime minister in 2019 again, said BJP chief Nityanand Rai.

The JD(U) said the RLSP chief was only reading out a recipe. Its just a proverb. Upendra Kushwaha has played an important role in uprooting jungle raj from Bihar, and he is firmly with the NDA, said party spokesperson Niraj Kumar.

The Koiris comprise 10% of Bihars electorate, the largest vote bank after the Yadavs. Kushwaha had hoped to use this as leverage to seek a larger share of seats, besides nomination as the NDAs chief ministerial candidate in the next assembly elections, but the BJP has been largely silent on his demands.

(With agency inputs)

Exploration Update - Drilling Underway at Mulga Tank

Perth, Aug 27, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - A reconnaissance aircore drill programme is underway at Impact Minerals Limited's ( ASX:IPT ) ( OTCMKTS:IPPTF ) Mulga Tank project located 200 km north east of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia (see Figure 1 in link below).- Aircore drill programme underway to test 5 gold targets and 3 nickel targets at Mulga Tank, 200 km north east of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.- Drill programme still in progress at Clermont, Queensland.- Drill programme complete at Commonwealth, New South Wales.- Definitive Agreement in progress for Broken Hill Joint Venture with Bluebird Battery Metals Inc.- Sale of Pilbara gold Project to Pacton Gold Inc approved by the TSX:V.MULGA TANK PROJECT (IPT 100%)The programme will test 5 targets for gold mineralisation and 3 targets for nickel-copper-cobalt mineralisation hosted in Archaean greenstones and as identified in magnetic and gravity data together with anomalous drill results from previous explorers and work completed by Impact.This work has shown that the style of mineralisation and the nature of the rocks in the greenstone belt are similar to those that host the significant nickel deposits at Perseverance (1 Mt of contained nickel) and Mt Keith (>2 Mt of contained nickel) near Leinster in WA (see Figure 1 in link below). In addition the project area occurs in the same geological terrain as the recently discovered Gruyere deposit of more than 5 million ounces of gold (see Figure 1 in link below).Two of the five gold targets being drilled are conceptual analogues for Gruyere-style gold mineralisation, gold in quartz veins within a layer parallel granite intrusion (see Figure 2 in link below). The other three gold targets occur over notable deflections in structures and with evidence of anomalous gold from previous explorers.The three nickel targets have been identified as prospective for komatiite and dunite-hosted nickel sulphide mineralisation (see Figure 2 in link below). Impact discovered high tenor nickel and copper sulphides at the Mulga Tank Dunite in its maiden drill programme at the project (see announcement 29 January 2014).The aircore programme is designed to test for gold and nickel dispersion along the unconformity between the basement and younger cover of sand and alluvium as well as testing for primary mineralisation in the fresh bedrock.CLERMONTA drill programme to test five target areas for vein-hosted gold mineralisation at the Clermont Project located 30 km south of the town of Clermont in central Queensland and announced to the ASX on July 18th 2018 is now about 75% complete.The project is located in the southern part of the Drummond Basin in Central Queensland, a prolific epithermal gold-silver belt which hosts several world class gold deposits such as Pajingo (Vera-Nancy) (>5 Moz), Mt Leyshon (>3 Moz) and Mt Wright (>1 Moz).The five target areas being drill tested were identified on the basis of anomalous soil and rock chip geochemistry and Induced Polarisation ground geophysical anomalies together with previous drill results where available (see ASX Release July 18th 2018).A total of 14 RC drill holes for 2,190 metres have been completed with a further four RC holes and two diamond holes still to be completed. It is not possible to determine any gold content until laboratory assays are available. First assays are due within a few weeks.COMMONWEALTHAn eight hole diamond drill programme at Impact's 100% owned Commonwealth Project located 100 km north of Orange in New South Wales has now finished following the completion of an additional two drill holes at the Commonwealth South Prospect.All eight drill holes intersected varying widths of massive and semi-massive sulphide mineralisation with visual estimates from the first six drill holes, four from Main Shaft and two from Silica Hill, reported to the ASX on August 6th 2018.At Commonwealth South, located 400 metres south of Main Shaft, the two diamond drill holes tested the down plunge extension of a previous high grade drill intercept of 7 metres at 25.5 g/t gold, 62 g/t silver, 3.8% zinc and 1.6% lead in Hole CMIPT017 (ASX Release 22 September 2014).Hole CMIPT086 intersected 2.5 metres of semi-massive pyrite and zinc sulphide with lesser lead sulphide from about 96 metres down hole. Hole CMIPT087 intersected about 10 metres of vein and stringer mineralisation with narrow zones of semi-massive sulphide from about 96 metres down hole.The mineralisation is dominated by thicker layers of pyrite interlayered with up to 15% fine grained zinc sulphide (sphalerite) and up to 5% lead sulphide (galena). In a few places there are also zones with thick layers of sphalerite with lesser galena and pyrite.Assays from these final two holes are due in late September. Assays from the earlier drill holes are expected within a few weeks.All eight diamond drill holes successfully intersected mineralisation in the drill programme.BROKEN HILL JOINT VENTUREA Definitive Agreement is being drafted for the proposed joint venture with TSX:V-listed Bluebird Battery Metals on Impact's Broken Hill project in New South Wales and as announced to the ASX on July 11th 2018. The Agreement is expected to be completed in September.The principal terms of the joint venture are:- A non-refundable payment of CAD$25,000 cash (completed).- A cash payment of CAD$125,000 and the issue of 5,250,000 shares (Tranche 1) at a deemed price of CAD$0.40 (Tranche 1 price) in BlueBird on the later of the signing of a Definitive Agreement (DA) or the approval of the transaction by the TSX Venture Exchange. The Definitive Agreement is to be completed within 45 days of signing of the LOI.- On-ground exploration expenditures totaling CAD$2.25 million as follows:o A minimum of CAD$500,000 within one year of signing the DA (Year 1).o A further CAD$750,000 by the end of Year 2.o A further CAD$1.00 million by the end of Year 3.- The issue of a further $500,000 of shares in BlueBird at a price equivalent to the 30 day VWAP at the time of issue of the shares as follows:o CAD$125,000 in shares prior to the end of Year 1.o CAD$125,000 in shares prior to the end of Year 2.CAD$250,000 in shares prior to the end of Year 3.SALE OF PILBARA GOLD PROJECTThe Share Sale Agreement for the sale of the Impact's Pilbara gold Project to Pacton Gold Incorporated as announced to the ASX on May 29th 2018 has now been approved by the TSX Venture Exchange. Accordingly there are no impediments to finalising the transaction.Under the terms of the Share Sale Agreement, Pacton has purchased a 100% ownership interest in Impact's wholly owned subsidiary Drummond East Pty Limited which holds seven 100% owned granted Exploration Licences in the Pilbara region of Western Australia (E45/4971-72-73; E46/1171-72; and E46/1188-89).The total consideration to be paid by Pacton to Impact for the purchase will be CAD$350,000 and 2,125,000 common shares of Pacton as follows:- CAD$25,000 on signing of the Letter of Intent (completed);- CAD$325,000 and 2,125,000 common shares (current value CAD$1.06 million) in Pacton Gold Inc. The shares are subject to a four month escrow period from date of issue;- CAD$500,000 if an Inferred Resource of 250,000 ounces or greater is discovered on the licences;- A 2% NSR with Pacton retaining the right to buy back 1% of the royalty for CAD$500,000 at anytime.Impact also will provide on-going technical advice to Pacton's team and looks forward to working with them as exploration in the Pilbara progresses. Pacton has a strong business plan for its exploration in the Pilbara and is well funded following a recent CAD$5.5 million raising including CAD$2 million from Eric Sprott, a major direct and indirect shareholder in Novo Resources Corporation.Impact is focusing its exploration for conglomerate-hosted gold at the Blackridge Project located 30 km north of Clermont in central Queensland.COMPLIANCE STATEMENTThe new results presented here are Exploration Results comprising:- visual descriptions and estimates of sulphide mineralisation in two diamond drill holes from the Commonwealth South Prospect.Further details on the new results can be found in the Appendix (see link below).To view tables and figures, please visit:About Impact Minerals Limited

Impact Minerals Limited (ASX:IPT) is an exploration company listed on the ASX in November 2006. The Company manages extensive tenement holdings (>2,000 km2) within Australia featuring significant potential for high-grade mineral deposits of gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, nickel and PGM's. The Directors of the Company have extensive experience in mineral exploration and a strong history of exploration success, business development and corporate management. Impact Minerals intends to build wealth for its shareholders through a vigorous campaign of project generation and evaluation with a view towards profitable mining operations.Can Sanatan Sanstha be banned, is the question that has arisen as there have been voices seeking a government ban on the Hindu right-wing organisation.

The group can be banned by the government based on the administrative findings of the investigating agencies, but the legality of the ban can be challenged and its effectiveness will remain a question, said legal experts.

Sanatan Sanstha, which proclaims itself to be an organisation with a mission to protect the country and the Hindu religion, made headlines when its alleged members were arrested for planting a bomb at a theatre in Panvel in 2008 during the screening of Bollywood film Jodhaa Akbar.

Since then, alleged members of the group have been named in or linked to various incidents, including the killings of rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar, Kannada scholar MM Kalburgi, Communist leader Govind Pansare and journalist Gauri Lankesh. But investigations in these cases are still in progress, and there is no concrete evidence yet to prove the culpability of Sanatan Sanstha as an organisation in these crimes.

Based on these findings, the government can move to ban Sanatan Sanstha. But the ban can be challenged when one learns that there is no umbrella organisation known as Sanatan Sanstha to which all these allegations can be attributed, said a senior advocate representing the state, requesting anonymity.

A senior IPS officer said since being registered as a trust in 1991, Sanatan Sanstha has flourished over a period of 27 years and its members have carried out due diligence, in terms of registering the organisation under different entities, to ensure there are no direct links to its key leaders.

There are more than 80 organisations registered under the name of different individuals in Maharashtra alone bearing different registration names, numbers and offices. None of these bodies can be directly linked to any of the crimes, the officer said, requesting anonymity.

Chetan Rajhans, spokesperson of Sanatan Sanstha, said on Monday, None of the five persons arrested by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) owe allegiance to Sanatan Sanstha.

Sanjeev G Punalekar, advocate of Sanatan Sanstha, said, We hold our annual convention in Goa, where members from more than 140 Hindu groups participate. We do not keep a check on the activity of members from other organisations. Around 10 lakh people follow the Sanatan dharma, but are not active members of Sanatan Sanstha. If any of them carry out any crime, we cannot be held responsible.Death of former Union minister Gurudas Kamats death has compounded the problems for the Congress in Mumbai. The partys plan to revive its fortunes in Indias financial capital has suffered a setback. Kamat, a senior party leader and former chief of Congress Mumbai unit, died of a heart attack on August 22.

His death came at a time when the Congress is preparing for the next years Lok Sabha and assembly elections, and needed him. The party is desperate to regain lost ground in the upcoming elections and its leadership is hoping to wrest back power at the Centre from the BJP-led coalition that got a strong mandate in 2014 elections.

One of the areas the Congress is hoping to make gains is Mumbai, which sends six members to the Parliament and 36 to the state assembly. The party suffered electoral reverses in 2014 elections. It lost five out of six Lok Sabha seats. In assembly elections, BJP won 15 out of 36 seats, Shiv Sena 14. But Congress tally slumped to five from 17.

Since 2014, the Congress has been continuously losing to the BJP. Earlier, the voters in the city were largely divided between the Congress and Shiv Sena-BJP in different combinations, including Marathi and non-Marathi. Taking advantage of the Modi wave, the BJP successfully took the non-Marathi voters away from the Congress, which barely managed to keep its control over areas dominated by minority and Dalit voters in the city.

Apart from the Gujarati-speaking community, the BJP also succeeded in securing support of North Indians  the second largest group after Marathi speaking population in Mumbai and other communities such as south Indians.

Last years civic election was an opportunity for the Congress to get its voters back, but it failed. On the other hand, the BJP retained its newly gained voters. While the BJP won second highest number of seats after the Sena in the civic houses, the Congress was pushed to a distant third position. Ahead of the election year, the worry for Congress is how to win back its lost supporters in the city.

History

For more than four decades since Independence, the Congress was a dominating political factor in Mumbai. It was the main political party with other parties having their limited area of influence. Even as the Shiv Sena created its Marathi vote bank and has managed to retain power in Mumbai civic body for more than three decades, it could not dominate assembly or Lok Sabha seats in the city. They were always divided between the Sena-BJP alliance and the Congress depending on the prevailing political atmosphere. Since 2014, the Congress has been losing ground to the BJP.

In the past, presidents of Congress Mumbai unit were always seen as political heavyweights. Politicos such as SK Patil, Rajani Patel and the late Murli Deora had strong influence in the party. For a long time, even though he did not hold any ministerial position, Deora had more influence on the corporate world than ministers handling relevant ministries at the Centre. Kamat, who was later made chief of Congress Mumbai unit, was also seen as an influential Congress functionary. The position seems to have lost that influence. Congress losing at the Centre and in the state is of course a major factor.

Infighting

What they jokingly say about the Congress in political circles is applicable to its Mumbai unit as well: Congress doesnt need rivals. It is defeated by its warning leaders. The factionalism and infighting in the party has often led to the Congress losing elections. The party has failed to win civic elections in past three decades as warring leaders preferred the Shiv Sena to be in power in Indias richest civic body rather than the competitors from within the party. This was seen in the past and most recently in 2012 and 2017 civic polls.

Even now, incumbent Congress chief [Mumbai] Sanjay Nirupam is facing strong opposition from rival factions. Kamat himself had resigned from all party posts in protest of decisions being taken in Mumbai. Nirupam and his bosses will have to find a way to handle the infighting before they prepare to take on the BJPs massive election machinery, which is gearing up for a grand battle.On a day when liquor baron Vijay Mallya was asked to remain present in the Special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court, failing which he would be declared a fugitive offender under the new law, a host of entities filed applications to intervene in the proceedings, before any order was passed to confiscate properties worth 4,234.84 crore belonging to the beleaguered businessman. The entities include his stepmother Ritu Mallya, Heineken NV and the official liquidator appointed by Karnataka HC, among others.

Mallya is contesting his extradition case in London filed by the Indian government on behalf of the ED and CBI, who have cases against him for an alleged bank loan default of around 9,000 crore, including interest.

Apart from the intervention applications, Mallya made a representation in the court through his lawyer, Amit Desai, on Monday that although they had received a notice to appear before the court, the ED had not provided them with a copy of the complaint. In absence of the copy, how can we submit a reply, Desai argued. Responding to Desai, EDs lawyer, Niti Punde, said there is no provision in the law to provide a copy of the complaint. However, to give both parties a fair hearing, the court directed the agency to supply a copy of the complaint to defence.

The ED has so far attached assets worth 4,234.84 crore, claiming these properties had direct or indirect connection with Mallya and his two companies, Kingfisher Airlines Limited (KAL) and United Breweries Holdings Limited (UBHL).

The court, however, has now fixed September 3 as the next date of hearing, after Ritu Mallya and many other companies approached the court stating that their properties were attached by the agency.

Mallyas stepmother, through her lawyer Annapurna Bordoloi, filed an intervention application, claiming the ED had falsely attached 17% of shares of two companies that belonged to her. She has sought to be heard before the ED confiscates it. The official liquidator appointed by the Karnataka HC, too, approached the PMLA court. The liquidator was appointed to take over UBHL, after a single-judge bench of the Karnataka HC passed the order to wind up UBHL in 2017. This was done to recover the money owed to banks and others. Lakshmi Iyengar, counsel for the official liquidator, was directed by the Karnataka HC to appear and make submissions before the special court earlier this month.

The ED, meanwhile, pleaded that Mallya be directed not to create any third-party interest or alienate or sell any of the properties. The court asked the defence to file a reply on the EDs plea and asked the agency to file a reply on the pleas of Ritu Mallya, official liquidator of the Karnataka HC and Heineken NV.A Nigerian national was arrested from an area near Salisbury Park society in Pune in possession of cocaine worth over 7 lakh on Saturday night. The man was identified as Anthony Maxwell, 35, a native of Nigeria and a resident of an area near Mantri Estate building close to Salisbury Park.

Based on his passport, head constable Shailesh Jagtap of the Lashkar police station, who found the intel, said that his name is Uguchuku Emanuel (who was known as Anthony Maxwell in the area).

Jagtap told the anti-narcotic cell about the narcotic substance in the 35-year-old man's possession. The anti-narcotics cell, supervised by Jyotipriya Singh, deputy commissioner of police, economic offences wing (EOW) and cyber crime, made the arrest.

Anthony was found in possession of 58.5 gram cocaine, a digital weighing machine and cash, collectively worth 7,38,000, according to the police.

"He was remanded in four days police custody (by a local court). We will investigate the matter further," said police sub-inspector (PIS) Rajesh Usgaonkar of the Bharati Vidyapeeth police station who is investigating the case. Police inspector Sunil Dorge of the anti-narcotics cell made the arrest and handed over the case to the Swargate police station. A case under Sections 8(c) and 22 (b) of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985, was registered at the Swargate police station.Almost eight years after he was sentenced to 28 years in jail by a London court for killing his wife Geeta Aulakh on November 16, 2009, Harpreet Aulakh, a UK-based NRI, will be shifted from London to the Amritsar Central Jail on Tuesday.

This is the first international transfer of a prisoner in Punjab under the Repatriation of Prisoners Act signed by India and the UK. A three-member team of the Punjab prison department will take Harpreets custody from UK officials escorting him at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi.

In the first week of July, we got a communique from the ministry of external affairs that Aulakh wanted to be shifted to Amritsar to serve the remaining term of his 28-year punishment. After completing formalities, the jail department issued a no objection certificate, and now he will be shifted to the Amritsar prison, Punjab minister of jails Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa said on Monday.

Formalities have been completed and Harpreet will land in Delhi on Tuesday from where he will be brought to the central jail in Amritsar, said inspector general (IG), prisons, Roop Kumar.

Crime file

On November 16, 2009, Aulakh, who was 32 at that time and a father of two boys aged eight and 10, got his wife, Geeta, then 28, murdered when she sought to end their decade-old marriage. Geeta was a receptionist with Asian radio station Sunrise Radio and was going to pick her sons up from a child-minders house at Greenford, London, when she was attacked by the two hired killers, Jaswant Singh Dhillon of Ilford and Sher Singh, a teenager from Southall.

She suffered head injuries and died soon after being brought to hospital. Her right hand was severed with the machete as she tried to shield herself from Sher Singhs repeated hacking.

Colleagues and friends said Harpreet routinely put down his wife in public while developing an apparent infatuation for her sister, Anita. When Geeta finally left him, he became obsessed with the idea she was seeing another man. He confronted her male colleagues, hacked into her Facebook account and even went to her flat to pore over receipts, seeking for evidence of a new attachment.

Geeta was the English-born daughter of Hindu parents who had come to London and set up a jewellery business in Southall. Harpreet was from a poorer Sikh family, suspected by police of involvement in a series of violent crimes even before he entered the UK illegally in his early twenties. He was involved in drug and immigration scams later.

Harpreets plan fell apart when Dhillon approached police, claiming to be a witness. He led them to the canal in Slough, Berkshire, where the gang dumped the machete and Sher Singhs jacket. The breakthrough came when officers discovered the rare, Brazilian-made weapon was stocked by a shop just half a mile from Aulakhs home in Hounslow, west London. CCTV footage showed three people buying such a machete. Two were tracked down and still had them at home; the third was Aulakh.

Sher Singh, who wielded the machete, and Dhillon, who acted as a lookout, were sentenced to 22 years in jail.The Punjab assembly, led by chief minister Amarinder Singh, on Monday unanimously passed a resolution asking the Central government to pursue with Pakistan the issue of opening of the Kartarpur Sahib corridor during the 550th birthday celebrations of the first Sikh guru Sri Guru Nanak Dev.

The resolution was moved by the Chief Minister on the second day of the monsoon session of the Assembly.

All members of the House, cutting across party lines, were of the view that the opening of the corridor would enable millions of Indian devotees to pay obeisance at the historic Sri Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara.

The gurdwara, where the first Sikh guru spent the last years of his life, is located in Pakistan across the International Border, though it is clearly visible from Dera Baba Nanak in Punjabs Gurdaspur district.

Moving the resolution, the chief minister informed the House that he had already written to Union External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to take up the issue with her Pakistani counterpart.

The Punjab government, he said, had been urging the government of India, time and again, to take up the matter with Islamabad.

The opening of the corridor was a cherished dream of the Sikh community, he added.Facebook Inc. has removed accounts and pages linked to Myanmars top military officials as a new United Nations report accused the countrys armed forces of committing war crimes against the countrys Muslim Rohingya minority.

On Monday, Facebook removed 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages that were followed by nearly 12 million people, the company said in a blog post. It is banning 20 individuals and organizations, including commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing and the militarys Myawaddy television network.

We want to prevent them from using our service to further inflame ethnic and religious tensions, Facebook said on Tuesday.

The move comes on the same day that a United Nations Human Rights Council-mandated fact-finding mission issued a report accusing the senior general and other top commanders of acting with genocidal intent toward the Muslim Rohingya, nearly 1 million of whom have fled into neighboring Bangladesh. The UN report, which calls the militarys so-called clearance operations a human rights catastrophe, quotes a 2017 Facebook post from the general as proof the military pre-planned its attacks on the Rohingya.

A Myanmar government spokesman did not answer a call for comment on the UN report. Previously, Myanmar government officials have blamed Rohingya for launching attacks on state security forces and for setting fire to their own homes.

While we were too slow to act, were now making progress  with better technology to identify hate speech, improved reporting tools, and more people to review content, Facebook said. Today, we are taking more action in Myanmar.

Fighting Abuse

Facebook has been criticized in a number of Asian countries as its platforms, including Instagram and the widely-used WhatsApp messaging service, are used to spread hate, misinformation and fake news or rumors that can help fuel mob violence.

In India, fake rumors spread through WhatsApp led to mob attacks and numerous deaths, while President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines has been accused of using Facebook to target critics. These developments, in part, led WhatsApp to begin labeling forwarded messages, in an attempt to crack down on fake news and rumors.

In its post, Facebook noted that the nascent state of the news media and the rapid adoption of smartphones made Myanmar particularly vulnerable.

We have a responsibility to fight abuse on Facebook, wrote Facebook product manager Sara Su in a blog post earlier this month. This is especially true in countries like Myanmar where many people are using the internet for the first time and social media can be used to spread hate and fuel tension on the ground.The Vatican on Monday rolled back on Pope Francis recommendation that parents seek psychiatric help for children who show homosexual tendencies.

The pope made the comments to journalists as he was flying back to Rome from Ireland, but the Vatican later removed his phrase from its official account, saying he had not meant to suggest that homosexuality was a mental illness.

Francis was asked by a journalist what he would say to parents who observe homosexual traits in their children.

When it shows itself from childhood, there is a lot that can be done through psychiatry, to see how things are. It is something else if it shows itself after 20 years, he said.

The pope added that ignoring a child who showed homosexual tendencies was an error of fatherhood or motherhood.

However, when the Vatican later published the popes answer, the reference to psychiatry had been removed.

When asked why, a Vatican spokeswoman told AFP it had been done in order to not change the thoughts of the Holy Father.

When the pope referred to psychiatry, it is clear that he was doing it to highlight an example of things that can be done.

But with that word he didnt mean to say that it (homosexuality) was a mental illness, she said.

Francis trip to Ireland was fraught with controversy amid accusations that he ignored sexual abuse allegations against prominent US cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

Drilling to Commence at Estelle Gold Copper Project

Melbourne, Aug 27, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - The directors of Nova Minerals Limited (Nova or Company) ( ASX:NVA ) ( FRA:QM3 ) are pleased to announce that its 2018 exploration field season has commenced with a Reverse Circulation drilling program underway at the Estelle Gold Copper Project in Alaska.- Installation of all camp facilities at the Estelle Gold Copper Project completed- 8,000m drilling program to commence immediately- First assays to be delivered to ALS laboratories in Fairbanks within three weeksThe 114km2 landholding sits adjacent to the 6.3Moz Au, 28.7Moz Ag, 480kt Cu Whistler project (Gold Mining Inc.) and on the same assemblage of rocks that hosts the pebble partnerships giant Pebble copper-gold-molybdenum-silver deposit (105Moz Au, 81b lb Cu, 5.64b lb Mo, 515Moz Ag).Nova is anticipating drilling at least 8,000 metres over a 6 to 8 week exploration program where the Company has already established 1.1Moz Au to 2.3Moz Au exploration target on less than 1% of the Estelle gold camp (refer to ASX announcement 26 February 2018).The drilling program is designed to test along strike north and south of the historic discovery hole SE12-001, which cut 387metres at 0.40g/t, most of the mineralisation was found from 31.79m to 397.06m and returned 0.43 g/t Au over 365.27m (refer to ASX announcement 27 April 2018).Hole SE12-04, drilled to the southeast of the discovery hole in 2012, cut 41.5 meters averaging 1.1 g/t gold (refer to ASX announcement 27 April 2018), indicating the drilling was vectoring towards higher gold grades as it approached a strong geophysical anomaly further southeast which will be immediately tested as the potential centre of the intrusion-related gold mineralised system (see Figure 1 in link below).The initial 8,000 metre first pass RC drill program planned at the Oxide prospect will focus on the strong geophysical anomaly vectoring off drill hole SE12-04. The program is also designed to convert the exploration target into the company's maiden JORC compliant resource at the Oxide prospect with the view of expanding this zone (see Figure 1 in link below). Nova is planning further drill programs with more than 15 targets of interest prospective for major discovery. The project has an established ice road paralleling the Iditarod trail and Skwentna River built by previous operators that can be used to transport equipment to the site for year round drill programs and project development activities.Nova will adhere to strict Quality Assurance - Quality Control (QA/QC) standards with blanks and/or standards to be utilised; and will collect and submit representative samples at one metre intervals to ALS laboratory in Vancouver, Canada; after being prepared at the preparatory laboratory in Fairbanks, Alaska. Gold will be analysed by Fire Assay and AAS using a 50 gram nominal sample weight (ALS method code Au-AA26). Other elements (33 in total including copper, silver and molybdenum) will be analysed by a four-acid digest and an ICP-MS finish (ALS method code ME-ICP61).NVA Managing Director, Mr. Avi Kimelman said:"It's great to be finally through the planning phase and into our maiden drill program. A great deal of work has gone into being well prepared and ensuring we deliver the most cost effective and efficient exploration campaign over the next few weeks at Estelle. It has been an outstanding effort by the site crew on putting this program and logistics together.""With previous work on the Estelle project establishing great targets, Nova Minerals is fortunate to have a 5 year head start on the project and we believe the project shares many similarities both in size and scale to the Pebble and the Donlin Creek discoveries.""We look forward to seeing what the initial holes within the strong geophysical anomaly uncovers and keeping our shareholders updated throughout the program. Our maiden JORC remains on schedule for end-2018."To view figures, please visit:About Nova Minerals Limited

Nova Minerals Limited (ASX:NVA) (FRA:QM3) (OTCMKTS:NVAAF) is a dynamic explorer and developer of its flagship Estelle Gold district in the Tintina gold belt. Nova's strategy is to substantially increase the current 4.7Moz resource on the Korbel prospect. Subsequently to continue to lock in value through moving Korbel towards production whilst increasing the resource base across the pipeline of targets within the Estelle gold district. Nova Minerals also holds strategic investments in Snow Lake Resources Ltd (Thompson Brothers Lithium Project), Torian Resources Ltd (ASX:TNR) and RotorX Aircraft Manufacturing Co.Appointment

27 August 2018

Wilson most recently served as General Manager in Training, an in-house training program within Remington, where she worked alongside senior management to ensure success across all divisions at Lakeway Resort & Spa in Austin, Texas. She has held multiple catering positions and operated as the director of catering for Lakeway Resort & Spa and Austin Country Club, where she was named Employee of the Year in 2014. Before joining the hospitality industry, Wilson had an impressive career in dance.

Rich in tradition, Le Pavillon Hotel serves an infamous peanut butter and jelly sandwich as a late-night snack in the lobby. An evening ritual stemming from a weary businessman's cravings, the nightly treats are served with hot chocolate and cold milk. Illuminated by a majestic Czechoslovakian chandelier, Le Pavillon Hotel's signature restaurant, The Crystal Room, embraces New Orleans' culinary heritage with French cuisine, heavily infused with creole influences. Serving daily nosh and libations from a vintage Brunswick mahogany bar, The Gallery Lounge is surrounded by a marble railing from the Grand Hotel in Paris.Opinion Article

27 August 2018

The sharing economy came with the promise of revolutionizing the way we purchase goods and services, creating a frictionless world where buyers are connected to sellers, thereby cutting out the middleman and bringing down costs to consumers.

The promise came to fruition. Today, an innovative breed of startups are giving consumers more choice, control, and convenience than ever before  nowhere more so, than in the travel industry.

Yet there are signs that sharing economy accommodations are losing appeal. Since launching a decade ago, Airbnb has become the undisputed poster child of an alternative form of travel. Its rise to fortune has been nothing short of breathtaking, with a valuation of $31 billion in May 2017.

However, the world's second largest startup (after Uber) is not having things all its own way. There are signs that the sharing economy bubble might have burst, and that Airbnb's growth is stuttering amid a shift in travel preferences.

While far from a crisis, Airbnb's unrelenting success appears to be slowing, giving hotels a chance to win back some valuable ground.

A series of unfortunate events

Airbnb has suffered a series of setbacks in recent times, leading commentators to speculate on whether the company needs to go back to basics. Most recently, its New York bookings risk getting slashed by half as the New York City Council voted for the company to hand over the names and addresses of its hosts in the city in order to crack down on illegal short-term rentals.

Things are more turbulent in Europe where the EU has issued Airbnb an ultimatum over a lack of price transparency. Separately, city officials across Europe are clamping down to keep Airbnb's rental prices in check and restrict short-term stays. In Japan, almost 80% of Airbnb's listings have been removed as a result of the country's new home share (or minpaku) law.

In addition to the regulatory issues, Airbnb frequently seems to be in the headlines with stories of misbehaving guests and lawsuits. Just recently, Paris forced the home-sharing giant to take down tens of thousands of listings that didn't comply with local laws. Frustrated local residents in various cities have also been vocal about rising rental costs and mobs of tourists due to Airbnb's presence.

With citywide crackdowns, regulation battles, and lots of PR plate spinning, this industry heavyweight has been left slightly bloodied and bruised. Arguably, it might be just a case of riding the waves. Yet beyond the headlines and disputes, there are signs of something a little more troubling.

Growth seems to be slowing

Relatively speaking, Airbnb continues to see impressive growth. But a new report by Morgan Stanley (as covered by Skift), reveals how overall adoption is slowing.

In a survey of over 4,000 adults, the amount of travelers using the platform during the 12 months up to October 2017 rose by 25%, which is an increase of 330 basis points. By contrast, last year's survey saw an increase of 800 basis points.

Morgan Stanley found that brand awareness of Airbnb has never been so high. Yet that hasn't translated into more beds being filled. So what might be going on?

Morgan Stanley's analysts feel that the company might simply be too big, or that it's just become so mainstream that the same level of growth is too hard. Some cite the fact that more travelers are concerned over privacy and security. But is there something else at play?

Reevaluating the hotel proposition

The story of decline might be less about Airbnb, per se, and more about a reevaluation of the benefits hotels offer. Historically, the hospitality industry has sold itself on a form of uniformity that guarantees reliability in both service and experience.

Airbnb arrived on the scene as a fresh and exciting alternative to this format a rebuff to chain hotels and stuffy corporate values. The company's focus on localness and experience-based travel led it to great success, especially among younger generations seeking a deeper connection to the destinations they visited.

Yet according to two recent surveys, overall interest seems to be waning. In MMGY Global's recent Portrait of American Travelers (POAT) survey, 33% of respondents said that they are interested in using shared economy accommodations this year, compared with 41% last year.

There's also an indication that travelers are warming once more to the hotel proposition  even Millennials, Airbnb's largest audience. In a report by Allianz Global Assistance, 33% of this demographic said they believed traditional services provide the best overall experience, which is up from 22% in 2017. A significant 38% of Millennials also said traditional services provide better customer support when things go wrong.

In a written statement, Daniel Durazo, director of communications at Allianz Global Assistance noted, "This is the first time we've seen intent to use sharing economy services decline, particularly among Millennials, which is surprising as they led its early adoption."

So why the change in attitudes? It may well all be the consequence of a maturing demographic whose life circumstances are dictating new priorities. As many become parents or seek greater comforts, the traditional services and amenities that a hotel provides has undoubted benefits.

Is the love affair really over?

Slowdown in brand adoption is, of course, inevitable. Growth cannot be exponential, and the world's biggest companies all face tough times. Competitors up their games. Consumer preferences change. The love of a brand begins to wane. This is the nature of the marketplace.

So what we might be seeing with Airbnb is an inevitable consequence of consumer behavior, magnified by its own impossibly fast success. Yet it's important to remember that the company is hardly floundering. The love affair might be on the rocks, but it certainly isn't over.

Airbnb is enjoying substantial growth in competitive markets. According to its own data, a 90-day cap on its London listings hasn't stopped the company reaching close to 20,000 rentals a week in the UK capital; that's up from 1,000 listings as of just 2013.

In addition, it's worth pointing out that Airbnb might be worth more than any other hotel company, rivaling that of the world's largest OTAs.

As we discussed in a recent post, a raft of improvements including major product changes may also help it win new audiences and reignite interest among its loyal base of customers.

Good news for hotels?

On the whole, it might be argued that a decrease in growth and stay intent is good for hotels. But there are some who don't see Airbnb as a direct competitor. More than that, they feel it could be an ally.

Recently, Airbnb began welcoming boutique hotels onto its platform  (something that HomeAway has also started doing), charging commission fees between just 3-5%. This could prove a profitable alternative for hotels compared with distributing through OTAS, where commission fees range between 15-30%. If enough hotels make the move, this could force OTAs to bring down their commission fees to remain competitive.

In the end, Airbnb may actually become a bigger rival to OTAs as it expands its platform towards becoming an end-to-end travel company.

Where are things heading next?

Airbnb has enjoyed incredible success since launching a decade ago. It has become synonymous with a more authentic, local style of travel, while promoting the idea of new experiences over reliable comforts. Loyal customers have bought into its ethos and the rest is history.

But a new chapter may be about to be written  one where the untouchable industry giant sees expansion slow as travelers revert back to traditional hospitality offerings.

Airbnb most certainly has the resources to pivot, but hotels will always be able to offer their own unique mix of appealing qualities, including luxury on-site amenities, and around-the-clock service. Given the changing sentiments among travelers, now's the time for hotels to capitalize on their value proposition.Opinion Article

27 August 2018

Amazon dominates the world of e-commerce. Could it do the same in online travel bookings? Consumers would happily use the platform to book their travel plans if given the chance, according to a recent survey by flight travel intelligence company OAG.

OAG surveyed 2,164 U.S. travelers to find out which platforms and methods they would be comfortable booking travel through. Amazon was the clear winner, with 44% of respondents saying they would consider using the e-commerce giant to book travel if it offered the service.

This result is particularly impressive considering that the second most favored option was Facebook, which only received 14% of the vote. Pinterest (2%), Twitter (3%), and Instagram (4%) all lagged way behind, gaining minimal interest.

Why was Amazon considered so much more appealing as a travel booking platform? In the following post, we'll address that point while analyzing some of the specific lessons hotels can learn from Amazon's way of doing business.

The mass appeal of Amazon

While social platforms are heavily used for trip planning and inspiration, the OAG survey indicates that travelers are far less keen to use them as booking platforms. Arguably, concerns over data security are an issue. In light of Facebook's data-harvesting scandal, it's fair to assume that consumers would have concerns about handing over their credit card details.

In contrast, millions of consumers see Amazon as a place to buy with confidence. In fact, a new survey by NPR/Marist found a huge 67% of US online shoppers had "quite a lot" or "a great deal" of trust in Amazon to protect their privacy and personal information. This figure was significantly higher compared with the level of trust towards online retailers in general.

Alongside its rock-steady credibility, Amazon makes shopping easy and gives customers unrivaled levels of choice and convenience. These qualities readily translate to the travel booking sphere, so perhaps it's no coincidence that Amazon was seen as an appealing alternate provider in this space.

All of this leads to an important question: what specific strategies underpin Amazon's success, and what can hotels learn from its customer service and core e-commerce principles?

1. Personalized shopping

Amazon has mastered the ability to anticipate customer needs and personalize the shopping experience. The company's recommendation system now runs on a totally new machine-learning infrastructure that allows it to learn the unique preferences of each customer with even greater precision.

Based on customer data such as previous browsing history and spending habits, Amazon integrates tailored content into virtually every aspect of its purchase process. Recommendations are neatly bundled into lists, including "Inspired by your browsing history", "Related to items you viewed", and "Frequently bought together".

Photo: Pegasus

These bundled suggestions encourage additional purchases, serving as an easy-to-digest shopping list among Amazon's vast product range. This helps to simplify and speed up the shopping process, ultimately leading to more conversions.

Takeaway for hotels:

Most hotels feature the same content on their website to all of their visitors. This means that every potential guest gets an identical experience, regardless of their unique needs and preferences. Yet without the need for huge investment, hotels can personalize their own websites to offer a tailored user experience.

Website personalization technology allows hotels to intelligently customize their website messaging based on criteria such as a user's previous online interactions, buying intent, and stage in the booking journey. With context-aware integrations, visitors are more likely to convert because the online experience is no longer rigid but designed around them.

Just like Amazon, hotels can also smooth the path to purchase by minimizing choice to make the decision-making process easier. For instance, rather than showing all available rooms, rates and added extras in one page, these options can be staggered across separate pages on the hotel website to prevent customers feeling overwhelmed.

2. Buying made simple

Amazon make shopping fast and frictionless. Consumers can easily find the products they love, and buy them with minimal fuss. This is underpinned by the company's friction-killing tactics that are designed to reduce cognitive overload and increase conversion rates.

These tactics include removing avoidable steps between browsing and buying, pre-selecting options to help consumers with choices, and allowing customers to carry on where they left off during a previous session.

Amazon's 1-click purchase system also helps to reduce the odds of shopping cart abandonment by allowing customers to buy with just one click. This instant purchasing removes the hassle of entering billing details, thus eliminating another potential barrier in the buying process.

Photo: Pegasus

Takeaway for hotels:

Hotels need to make the checkout process fast and simple. Think about things from the perspective of your guest: if they're used to 1-click purchasing from companies such as Amazon, they'll likely balk at having to fill out long-winded booking forms. Keep the amount of information you ask for to a minimum.

In addition, try to reduce the amount of pages and clicks needed to go from browsing to booking. Unnecessary extra steps represent an invitation to abandon a purchase. It's also worth setting the most popular room/rate options as the default to simplify the booking process.

3. Exceptional customer service

Amazon prides itself on offering exceptional customer service. In fact, it's embedded in the company culturenot just as a method to solve problems, but to anticipate customer needs and evolve its range of services.

In a 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders, the company's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos talked about having a "customer-obsessed culture" and that happy customers are "always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied".

This desire to constantly improve the customer experience is integral to the way Amazon innovates, leading to new services such as Amazon Prime, their unlimited One-Day Delivery option, Amazon Fresh, and the Dash ordering buttonall of which ensure that customers get the products they want with convenience and speed.

Amazon's customer service team also has a track record of going beyond the call of duty to surprise and delight. In an interview last year, Amazon's former long-time executive Jeff Holden explained how one Christmas, a customer traveling to Russia contacted Amazon's customer service team "worried sick" her presents weren't going to arrive there on time.

As Holden recalls, "We spent probably $500 or $600 to overnight her $1,000 worth of gifts, and she was so completely blown away that she couldn't stop saying,'Oh my god, you saved my Christmas!'"

Takeaway for hotels:

Great customer service doesn't require endless financial resources. One of the most important things hotels can focus on is having better communication with guests. Contact guests with pre-arrival emails or questionnaires to find out the reason for their stay, and discover if they have any specific requirements.

Simple things such as remembering a guest by name, periodically checking they're happy during their stay, and responding to complaints with an effective service recovery policy can all help your hotel maintain brand credibility, build rapport and earn their repeat business.

4. Social proof is crucial

Social proof is baked into the Amazon shopping experience. Every product is accompanied by prominent customer reviews and star ratings so consumers are given the confidence to buy without needing to validate their decision elsewhere online.

Photo: Pegasus

Amazon also uses the highly effective "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" call to action to incentivize additional purchases. This messaging is based on something called market basket analysis (MBA), which analyzes relationships between the combinations of products people buy in a transaction.

Photo: Pegasus

This serves to prompt additional purchases based on the actions of like-minded othersyet another great conversion-driving tactic.

Takeaway for hotels:

Amazon's relentless focus on social proof is one that all hotels can adopt. And there are no end of ways to use social proof on your hotel website.

Feature guest reviews throughout your website to add booking confidence. Include testimonials, review site widgets, and star ratings to add additional validation from past guests. If your hotel is working with influencers, you could also feature their content on your hotel website to raise your profile as visitors move closer to a booking decision.

5. Endless testing

Test, test, and test again. Amazon carries out thousands of usability experiments on its website each year through its "Weblab" experimentation system. Even though it has an incredibly refined user experience, the company understands that standing still is not an option.

This dedication has led Amazon to make some invaluable changes. For instance, it increased its annual profits by tens of millions of dollars after moving credit card offers from its home page to its shopping cart page. The Amazon mindset is that there is always room to refine and improve, and it's this granular approach that helps it stay ahead in a hyper-competitive online shopping space.

Takeaway for hotels:

While you might not have the resources to test every element of your hotel's website, you can make major improvements by focusing on the elements likely to drive the most conversions.

Start by checking out your Google Analytics reports (particularly the User Flow analysis) to see which pages have the highest bounce rates. Next, run A/B tests on different variations of a given page to see which changes lead to improvements. This might involve simplifying the design by adding a progress bar, testing different images, or adding a more prominent call-to-action button.

The point is to keep making incremental changes until you've found the conversion sweet spot.

Amazon as a travel player?

Amazon has been here before. Back in 2015, it launched, and then swiftly shut down, its travel booking site, Amazon Destinations! It also decided to stop selling hotel rooms through the now defunct Amazon Local. While there are no obvious signs it wants to reignite its interest in travel bookings, it would be foolish to imagine it might not try again.

Amazon's popularity in the OAG survey is perhaps most useful as a guide to other travel brands  a hint at the kind of experience consumers want when they book trips and accommodation. By working with the right technology partner, your hotel can use the latest techniques and tools to create a website based on some of Amazon's key principles, helping you to inspire your guests, anticipate their needs, and provide a great online experience that makes it easy for them to browse and buy.

+20% Zinc as Second Project Expands

Perth, Aug 27, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Inca Minerals Limited ( ASX:ICG ) (Inca or the Company) wishes to update the market on developments at its Cerro Rayas Project. Reconnaissance mapping and sampling has identified further very high-grade zinc (Zn), silver (Ag) and lead (Pb) mineralisation along extensions of a major NW-SE trending mineral belt. Three additional concession applications have been lodged covering these mineralised areas. These three new concessions are in addition to the five concession applications now nearing approval and the two original concessions.HIGHLIGHTS- Further high-grade mineralisation in reconnaissance samples at Cerro Rayas Project:o Sample IM-001328: 20.96% Zn, 174g/t Ag, 17.27% Pbo Sample IM-001369: 14.16% Zn, 150g/t Ag, 36.45% Pbo Sample IM-001327: 10.27% Zn, 13.3g/t Ag, 4.66% Pb- Applications for additional concessions lodged- First round of concession applications nearing approvalNew Mineralisation on New Concessions at Cerro RayasThe Company has lodged applications for three additional concessions: Yacuna (200ha), Intihuanunan (100ha) and Huaytapata Sur (100ha) covering very high-grade mineralisation and important extensions of the NW-SE mineral belt (see Figure 2 in link below). The Cerro Rayas Project area (granted and pending) stands at 3,000ha.At Yacuna very high-grade mineralisation is associated with a brecciated structure bearing NE-SW within dolomitised limestone. Three channel samples were taken from visible mineralisation (gossan with smithsonite and galena) in outcrop (see Figure 1 in link below), IM-001367 (channel length: 0.70m), IM-001368 (channel length: 0.40m), IM-001369 (channel length: 0.50m). Sample IM-001369 contains 14.16% Zn, 150g/t Ag and 36.45% Pb and sample IM-001368 contains 4.08% Zn, 25g/t Ag and 4.31% Pb.Like at Yacuna, high-grade mineralisation at Huaytapata Sur is associated with a brecciated structure within dolomitised limestone. In this instance, mineralisation is exposed in a historic shallow mine working called Irapata. Sample IM-001328 contains 20.96% Zn, 174g/t Ag and 17.27% Pb; sample IM-001327 contains 10.27% Zn, 13.3g/t Ag and 4.66% Pb; and sample IM-001331 contains 3.5% Zn, 166g/t Ag and 10.37% Pb.Previous Concession Applications Nearing Approval - Strong Mineralisation Early Exploration FocusThe Company's five previous concession applications, namely Vicuna Puquio, Vicuna Puquio II, Puyuhuan, Tablamachay and Huaytapata, are nearing approval. As previously released (ASX announcement 7 February 2018), these concessions host strong Zn-Ag-Pb mineralisation at a number of historic mine workings and also host very significant extensions of the parallel NW-SE mineralised corridors (see Figure 3 in link below) (see Tables 1, 2, 3 in link below). All five applications are due to be granted in September.The early exploration on these five concessions will focus on the seven new historic mine workings occurring on this ground. Like the mine workings at La Elegida (Vilcapuquio, Torrepata and Wari), the Company will undertake detailed mapping and channel-sampling to understand the nature of the Zn-Ag-Pb mineralisation. Exploration will also focus on the NW-SE trending structures (mineralised corridors) believed to be importation conduits for mineralisation. Results of this work would be used to design a drilling program to test high priority targets.New Mineralised Belt Parallel to the Chonta Mineral Belt at RiquezaIncluding granted and soon to be granted concession areas, Cerro Rayas now hosts an eight-kilometre strike length of an important Zn-Ag-Pb mineral belt comprising many more kilometres of mineralised structures and faults. This mineral belt is parallel to the Chonta Fault System which controls regional basin development and basin compression (see Figure 5 in link below) as well as porphyry, skarn and carbonate replacement mineralisation. The Company believes the extensive fault system at Cerro Rayas has the same potential as the Chonta Fault System for hosting mineralisation. Indeed, numerous Tertiary-aged intrusions and mines (operating and historic) are known along its course (see Figure 6 in link below)."The Cerro Rayas Fault System is believed to be a repeat of the Chonta Fault System" says Inca's Managing Director, Mr Ross Brown. "As such, the NW-SE and SW-NE trending structures at Cerro Rayas are important conduits for mineralisation and a focal point for exploration.".To view tables and figures, please visit:About Inca Minerals Limited

Inca Minerals Ltd (ASX:ICG) is a junior resource company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange with a track record of exploration, discovery and the generation of positive newsflow. Inca has been exploring in Peru since 2012 which is one of the best places in the world to search for metal deposits.

Inca now also explores in the Northern Territory and Queensland. "Whether in Peru or the outback of Australia, our objective is to find tier-1 sized economic deposits" says Inca's Managing Director. "Our focus is gold-copper porphyry deposits, copper and zinc skarn deposits and iron ore-copper-gold deposits." Inca also knows the value of forming partnerships with major mining houses as a way to conduct highly effective and substantive exploration. The ultimate purpose is to make discoveries and to generate shareholder wealth.JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.



You should upgrade or use an You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.You should upgrade or use an alternative browserThe management at the Odisha-based hospitality group decided to adopt Hotelogixs enterprise-grade PMS, as the previous on-premise PMS could not offer them centralized control over all their properties spread across multiple locations.

Hotelogix, a cloud-based Property Management System provider has been selected as the technology partner by Toshali Group of Hotels & Resorts. The management at the Odisha-based hospitality group decided to adopt Hotelogixs enterprise-grade PMS, as the previous on-premise PMS could not offer them centralized control over all their properties spread across multiple locations.

Incorporated in 1982, with 5 eco-friendly resorts operating in the three states of Odisha, Goa and Himachal Pradesh, the group is a well-known brand among leisure travelers. They are also coming up with a new property in Jaipur, Rajasthan.

Speaking on this new association, T Banambar Patra, Managing Director at Toshali Group of Hotels & Resorts said, With Hotelogix PMS, we aim to ensure ease of operations across all our properties. As a group, we plan to grow big year-on-year, and we are sure that Hotelogix would technologically empower us in this.

According to Saroj Mahapatra, the groups Corporate Revenue Manager, the management had to face several operational bottlenecks that obstructed their growth, due to the inefficiency of the previous on-premise PMS. It was difficult for us to manage all our properties from a centralized location. Distribution of inventory and rates on OTAs were done manually. There was no clarity on accounts and guest profile management was also a big challenge. Mahapatra said.

The hospitality group decided to implement Hotelogix PMS due to its multi-property capabilities. Hotelogix has helped us have centralized control over rates and inventory with real-time connectivity to both online and offline sales channels. Plus, we now have real-time access to business insights on our member properties, which empowers us to make data-driven decisions. Mahapatra added.

Speaking on this development, Aditya Sanghi, Co-founder & CEO at Hotelogix said, We are happy to have Toshali Group adopt our PMS to manage their entire groups operations. Post transition, we now look forward to helping them overcome the challenges they had to face with the previous on-premise system, in order to achieve their business goals.

About Hotelogix



Hotelogix provides a robust cloud-based Hotel PMS that helps hotels to automate and manage their end-to-end operations with ease. It also assists hotels to drive growth, increase revenue and to enhance their online reputation. The PMS is hosted on Amazon Web Services, and thus offers the much-needed stability and security to hoteliers. The company has rich experience in serving global markets with customers in 100 plus countries including developed geographies such as North America and Europe.

Media Contact



Debi Prasad Sarangi

Corporate Communications

Mail: debiprasad.sarangi@hotelogix.com

Ph: +91 9986496849

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 2021 Hotel News ResourceSet in heart of the city center (and facing the sea), the hotel gives visitors the ability to discover both the modern and ancient sides of Larnaca's culture - including its thriving sea port and waterfront lined with palm trees.

Radisson Blu announced a new hotel opening  the Radisson Blu, Hotel Larnaca in Cyprus.

Yilmaz Yildirimlar, Area Senior Vice President, Central and Southern Europe, Radisson Hotel Group, said: "We're delighted to open our first Radisson Blu hotel in one of Europe's favorite destinations, and a popular seaside retreat for visitors from around the world. As the third largest island in the Mediterranean, Cyprus attracts more than two million tourists annually, appealing to a wide range of travelers. With its strong identity and personality, the Radisson Blu Hotel, Larnaca is the ideal base for business travelers and those guests wishing to explore the country's third-largest city and Cyprus's glittering southern shores."

Set in heart of the city center (and facing the sea), the hotel gives visitors the ability to discover both the modern and ancient sides of Larnaca's culture - including its thriving sea port and waterfront lined with palm trees. It's exactly the kind of iconic setting that resonates with the design heritage of Radisson Blu - especially with the stunning sea views available from the distinctive hotel building. Sunbathers and swimmers are also well catered for; the hotel is located just 2km from a gorgeous Mediterranean beach where they can spend the day relaxing on by the sea.

The hotel's 106 rooms and suites showcase modern design highlighted with local flourishes. All rooms have a balcony with spectacular views of the vibrant coast and bustling harbor scenery. Guests are also in for a treat with a fitness center and an outdoor swimming pool that allows them to soak up the best of Cyprus in this amazing city.

When it comes to dining, the ultimate experience awaits guests on the fifth floor. Diners can enjoy the finest international cuisine (featuring locally inspired dishes) alongside panoramic views of Larnaca at the hotel's remarkable restaurant. The Radisson Blu Hotel, Larnaca is also home to three different bar concepts  including the Lobby Lounge & Bar with its cosmopolitan atmosphere and the stunning Skybar on the 16th floor, which allows guests to unwind with ocean views and craft cocktails.

This presents an opportunity to enter the market with unprecedented business and meeting facilities, which will give Radisson Hotel Group the leverage to build on its award-winning Radisson Meetings offering. The hotel has a prime location in the city.

Beyond its gorgeous location, one of the stand-out features of the hotel is its modern meetings and events space, featuring 5 meeting rooms and a spacious conference room able to rise to any and every occasion. Part of the Radisson Hotel Group's award-winning Radisson Meetings service, business travelers are guaranteed an event unlike any other  especially in the rooftop conference room with exactly the views you'd expect from such a vantage point.

Christos Kyriakides, General Manager of Radisson Blu Hotel, Larnaca said: "We're honored to open the first Radisson Blu hotel in Larnaca, and in one of the city's most vibrant and welcoming neighborhoods. My passionate and well-trained team is looking forward to providing new and returning visitors to the island of Cyprus with a brand-new world-class hospitality experience and the very best of our Yes I Can! service. To all travelers, we say: welcome to Larnaca  your gateway to exploringthe past, present and future of the magnificent island of Cyprus."

Radisson Blu Hotel, Larnaca, will be operated by Radisson Hospitality AB under an international license agreement.

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 2021 Hotel News ResourceCan a hotel room be so groundbreaking that it deserves a patent? If it's the WorkLife Room, billed as the 'guestroom of the future,' the answer apparently is yes.

Excerpt from Forbes

Can a hotel room be so groundbreaking that it deserves a patent? If it's the WorkLife Room, billed as the guestroom of the future, the answer apparently is yes.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just approved InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)'s application for its new WorkLife Room at its Crowne Plaza Hotels & Resorts brand. It's part of an ambitious $200 million overhaul of the hotel chain and an unusual achievement in an industry where, if you've seen one room, you've seen 'em all.

But it's no joke. Meredith Latham, a regional vice president for Crowne Plaza, said the company is "redefining" the guestroom experience.

"Guests can expect to love the modern, purposeful design that puts them in full control of their stay," she told me.

The WorkLife room is unusual, tech-enabled, and focuses on the sleep experience.

It's rare to patent a new hotel room design. None of IHG's competitors in this space, including Accor and Marriott, are thought to have applied for or received comparable patients. Similar room-of-the-future projects at Hilton are still in the development stage. The last company to patent a room concept is Disney, which filed an application to patent its Star Wars-themed hotel rooms in 2016.

Click here to read complete article at Forbes.

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 2021 Hotel News ResourceKenya Barris just recently signed a multi-million dollar deal with Netflix to create exclusive content and programs for the streaming service, effective immediately. Before his departure from mainstream television, he sold one last idea to ABC that follows a Bewitched reboot, but with an interracial family, Deadline reports. The project is helmed by Kenya and writer/producer Yamara Taylor.

"In Bewitched, written by Barris and Taylor, Samantha, a hardworking black single mom who happens to be a witch, marries Darren, a white mortal who happens to be a bit of a slacker. They struggle to navigate their differences as she discovers that even when a black girl is literally magic, shes still not as powerful as a decently tall white man with a full head of hair in America."

The original Bewitched aired from 1964 to 1972 and followed a married couple and the wife had magical powers. In 2005, the show was made into a movie starring Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman.

There's been no word on who will star in the Kenya reboot, but keep it locked for more details.Brockhampton is ready to drop new music. The self-appointed boy band was rocked with a scandal earlier this year, when founding member Ameer Vann was accused of mental and emotional abuse by several women. It was also revealed that Vann had a relationship with an underage girl. Brockhampton proceeded to kick Vann out of their group, cancel their tour, and regroup into the comfort of each other's company. The boy band also shelved their two albums Team Effort and Puppy. Now, de facto frontman Kevin Abstract has announced that the group's new project is on the way.

Brockhampton's Twitter posted a colorful inverted photo announcing the new album. "Brockhampton's 4th studio album will be released this September," reads the tweet. It also reveals the name of the new album, Iridescence, and the fact that the project was recorded in London. Abstract hopped on his Twitter to reveal more details. "Brand new music brand new feelings iridescence," he tweeted. "Not tryna lead anyone on or anything," he continued. "I just want us to keep making stuff were proud of and put it out when were ready i mean it from the bottom of my heart when i say thank you for your patience."President Donald Trump has essentially ignored the fact that Senator John McCain passed away, ever since the news of his death broke on Saturday. Although reporters have asked him to comment on the loss, Trump remained tight-lipped, flagrantly dodging any questions pertaining to McCain. Finally, a statement has been officially issued by the president.

"Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCains service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment."

Trump's letter goes on to state all the other steps that are being put into motion as the country mourns its loss.

The flag had been lowered to the middle position, a signifier of mourning, Saturday evening. Then, it was pulled back into its regular position just after midnight on Sunday. This occurrence was strange considering the fact that other government buildings, including the US capitol, still held their flags halfway up their pole in honor of the deceased senator.

Although Trump made no time to officially acknowledge his fellow politician until now, he had time to honor Kim Kardashian and praise her for being a "good wife."All 11-year-old Sofia Sanchez wanted for her birthday was to meet the Drake. The adorable young girl has been confined to Lurie Childrens Hospital in Chicago, as she recovers from one heart surgery while waiting for a new heart altogether. Sanchez made an In My Feelings Challenge video, where she does the viral dance after hopping out of her wheelchair instead of out of a car, and it got Drake's attention. After seeing the video, and Sanchez's request that he come to visit her for her birthday, Drizzy pulled up.

A video of the moment Drake walks into Sanchez's room shows just how excited the young girl was at Drizzy's arrival. As soon as he peels the curtains back, Sanchez screams as if she just won the lottery. The excited young girl cannot believe her eyes, and is stunned into a moment of paralyzation as Drake asks her for a hug. "I'm so happy you came," squeals Sanchez in the most adorable voice ever. "I kinda canceled a concert so I could come and see you, to be honest with you," admits Drake as he sits down. Sanchez's face is priceless as she takes in the news that Drizzy put her above his own concert.Last Monday, Drake cancelled one of his tour stops in Toronto so he could spend an extra day in Chicago. The nature of his visit was something special since he hit up the Lurie Childrens Hospital to meet Sofia Sanchez who was waiting for a heart transplant and had been in the facility for several weeks. Sofia said her birthday wish was to meet Drizzy and get a new heart.

The first half of her wish came true and now the second half of her wish has finally arrived. In the video below, Sofia is being told by her mother that she's finally getting a heart and her reaction is priceless. Check it out below.

"Sofia was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a condition that often leads to heart failure and need for heart transplantation in order to survive," a description on Sofia read. "Three weeks ago, she underwent open heart surgery in order to connect a VAD (ventricular assist device), which is a mechanical pump that helps support the heart and blood flow in people with heart failure. Most often, it serves as a bridge to heart transplantation. Each year Lurie Childrens performs only four VADs."This past Friday, Dreamville's Bas dropped his Milky Way project after only about two weeks of promo. That promo included a pre-release drop of its most newsworthy track, "Tribe," which features his label boss J. Cole. The track certainly did its job of drumming up hype for Milky Way, as it quickly climbed to the top of our chart and now makes its debut at #1.

Bryson Tiller and Wiz Khalifa both have two tracks apiece in this top ten, tying for most appearances of the week. New tracks barely missing out on spots include Bryson Tiller's "Normal Girl" (#12), YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Kevin Gates' "2 Hands" (#13), Lil Baby's "Need Mine" (#14), and Kyle, Kehlani, and Logic's "Playinwitme" remix (#15).

----

10. Bryson Tiller - Canceled

After showing up on a new Tory Lanez song two weeks ago, Bryson Tiller shared three new ones this past week: two remixes and this original called "Canceled." No word yet if this is from his upcoming project Serenity or just a loosie. "Canceled" debuts at #10.

9. Bryson Tiller - Leaning (Remix)

Tiller must be a pretty big T. Lanez fan. Not only did he just collaborate with the Canadian on "Keep In Touch," but one of his two new remixes is of Lanez's track "Leaning" (the other is of SZA's "Normal Girl"). This new version debuts at #9.

8. Wiz Khalifa - Where Iz Da Bud

Khalifa and producer TM88 already collaborated a ton on the recently-released Rolling Papers 2, but clearly they have more in the stash. "Where Iz Da Bud" popped up on SoundCloud last week, and debuts at #8.

7. Lil Yachty Feat. Chief Keef, Trippie Redd, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Gunna & K$upreme - Birthday Mix 3

For the third straight year, Lil Yachty dropped off a "birthday mix" of unreleased music. For his 21st, he linked up with Keef, Trippie, YoungBoy, Gunna, and longtime collaborator K$upreme. The 16-minute mix debuts at #7.

6. Lil Durk Feat. Future - Spin The Block

Lil Durk's been teasing his Signed to the Streets 3 project all year, and now it looks like it'll finally be arriving next month. "Spin The Block" is a single featuring Future taken from the upcoming release, and it debuts at #6.

5. Wiz Khalifa & Travis Scott- Trippin

Two weeks ago, versatile producer DP Beats dropped the third installment of his Dponthebeat series, and just a few days prior, shared "Trippin" as a pre-release single. The Wiz Khalifa and Travis Scott-led banger is now in its second straight week in the top ten, and it remains at #5.

4. Logic - The Return

Logic's back to releasing music after taking a break for a few months following the release of Bobby Tarantino 2. First came the Ryan Tedder-assisted "One Day," and now comes "The Return," a new burst of bars. This one debuts at #4.

3. Ty Dolla $ign & Jeremih Feat. Lil Wayne - New Level

Ty Dolla $ign and Jeremih's joint release MihTy has his some roadblocks on the way to release, but as consolation for another week without the project, the duo gave us a track from it that features Lil Wayne. "New Level" debuts at #3.

2. Young Thug - Rocket Man (Remix)

Rumored to be in existence for years, Young Thug's "remix" of noted fan Elton John's classic "Rocket Man" finally surfaced last week. Clearly, Thugger didn't get full clearance for use of the song, because in addition to that three-year delay, it's now been taken down from SoundCloud. Nevertheless, the "Rocket Man" remix debuts at #2.

1. Bas Feat. J. Cole - Tribe

A Cole verse is a true rarity these days, one that even outweighs a Wayne verse or a long-lost Elton John cover by Young Thug, it seems. The latest one lands on Bas' Milky Way single "Tribe," and pushes it to a #1 debut.

1H18 Results Webcast and Transcript

Sydney, Aug 27, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - To listen to a replay of the webcast discussing MYOB's ( ASX:MYO ) financial results for the six months ended 30 June 2018 please click through to the Investor Centre here: http://www.abnnewswire.net/lnk/9554F3HX To view the transcript of the webcast, please visit:About Myob Group Ltd

MYOB Group Ltd (ASX:MYO) is a leading provider of online business management solutions. It makes business life easier for approximately 1.2 million businesses and accountants across Australia and New Zealand by simplifying accounting, payroll, tax, practice management, CRM, job costing, inventory and more. MYOB operates across three core segments  Clients and Partners (business solutions to SMEs and Advisers); Enterprise Solutions (larger businesses) and Payment Solutions. It provides ongoing support through client service channels including a network of over 40,000 accountants, bookkeepers and other consultants. It is committed to ongoing innovation, particularly through its Connected Practice Strategy and through the development of the MYOB Platform. For more information, follow @MYOB on Twitter or visit http://investors.myob.com.au/InvestorsAlthough Trippie Redd cites Kanye West as one of his favorite artists of all time, he does believe the Yeezy creator should be doing more for the city of Chicago.

Trippie Redd recently sat down with Power 106 in Trippie Redd to discuss a variety of topics including his upcoming tour with Travis Scott, Life's A Trip and more. Trippie then spoke on a recent concert in Chicago where he ended up talking to his fans from the city in an effort to "change the youth." Clearly, his connection with his fans touched him to a degree. The rapper spoke on the fact that there's only one hospital that people could go to if they get shot and said that he feels some of the bigger artists who've made it out of the city should do doing something about it, including Kanye West.

"There's only one hospital in Chicago that got a place you can go after you get shot, so if you get shot 40 minutes away from the hospital you gotta go 40 minutes," he explained. "That's sad. And they got so many artists that done made it out of there... Not even trying to diss Kanye 'cause I love Kanye, but I mean, Kanye, like, that's where he from bruh. Go show Chi-Town some love. Go give 'em $30M to build a new hospital."

Peep the clip below with the Kanye comments coming in around the 10:35 mark.Paul Manafort's multiyear tax fraud and Michael Cohen's ability to easily arrange campaign contributions as hush money could have been intercepted sooner based on existing tax and campaign rules.

But decisions by policymakers and lawmakers to defang regulation and defund investigations, particularly through political pressure aimed at the Internal Revenue Service, helped the behavior to go unnoticed.

On Tuesday, Manafort, President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, was convicted of eight tax- and bank-fraud charges - the same day Cohen, Trump's former attorney, pleaded guilty to tax fraud and campaign finance violations. The felonies slipped past multiple agencies and were unearthed by prosecutors and journalists only after they began digging into Trump's inner circle. White-collar crime experts believe similar behavior is flourishing throughout the political system, exploiting the yawning gaps in government scrutiny.

"Had it not been for their relationship with President Trump, these crimes would have ultimately gone unprosecuted," said Eugene Soltes, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and expert on white-collar crime.

The Washington Post

Such worries come amid a steady, multiyear decline in the number of financial fraud cases the government has pursued, erosions that began during the Obama administration after Republicans took control of Congress.

The IRS, for instance, conducted audits on just 0.6 percent of tax returns last year, the lowest level in 15 years. For incomes above $1 million, a category that likely would have included Manafort, the IRS audited just 4.4 percent of returns, down from 12.5 percent in 2011.

The Washington Post

Overall, the number of new white-collar crime prosecutions brought by federal investigators has fallen to its lowest level in more than 20 years, according to data from Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. There are projected to be fewer than 6,000 of these prosecutions in 2018, down from more than 10,000, when the number peaked in 2011.

Meanwhile, penalties against corporations and their executives imposed by the Justice Department sank from $51.5 billion in 2016 to $4.9 billion during Trump's first year in office, according to consumer advocate Public Citizen.

Manafort's lawyers said the IRS never audited his taxes, despite his complex financial relationships with Ukranian officials and wire transfers to Cyprus bank accounts - actions that can be red flags for investigators. Prosecutors proved he had avoided paying his full tax obligations for years.

IRS spokesman Matthew Leas declined to comment on whether the agency audited Manafort, saying the agency was prohibited from discussing specific taxpayers.

Manafort is also accused of failing to notify the Justice Department about his lobbying work for the Ukraine government, which is required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Manafort faces trial next month on violating FARA law, but a prior inspector general review concluded the FARA enforcement system had been frequently ignored by lobbyists in years past, partly because officials at the FBI and Justice Department had different notions of how such cases should be pursued.

Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman, said the agency has "spent significant effort" in the past year reaching out to entities that they believe should register under FARA, "and we have made our determination findings more fulsome." This has led to a large increase in FARA registrations, he said, with the number jumping by more than 50 percent from 2016 to 2017.

Cohen pleaded guilty to eight crimes, including two acts of arranging illegal campaign contributions to pay hush money to two women who claimed they had had an affair with Trump.

The Federal Election Commission has civil jurisdiction over violations of campaign finance law. But it largely relies on campaigns to self-report their activity as well as whistleblowers to uncover illicit activity.

What's more, Cohen directed the payments through two business entities outside of the scope of the FEC, making it even harder for agency officials to know what he was doing. Cohen was later reimbursed through "sham" invoices billed to the Trump Organization, prosecutors said.

Christian Hilland, an FEC spokesman, declined to comment on the Cohen case.

The use of obscure limited liability companies, which enables white-collar criminals to mask how they move money, presents particular challenges for federal investigators, former federal officials said.

"Right now in the United States, there is a massive problem of anonymous companies," said Elizabeth Rosenberg, who served in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, combating terror financing and financial crimes.

The Obama administration tried to bring more transparency to such entities, proposing in 2016 changes to federal law that would require people to disclose the "beneficial ownership" for limited liability companies. But Congress did not pass the bill.

"I think that everything is now being set up so that it is possible to hide money, whether it is foreign money or money like [the Cohen case], and it's almost impossible to detect it," said Ann Ravel, a Democrat and former FEC chairman.

Trump last week did not dispel the idea that the acts committed by Manafort and Cohen are common. The president told Fox News, regarding Manafort, that "some of the charges they threw against him, every consultant, every lobbyist in Washington probably does." And Trump said Cohen's "campaign violations are considered not a big deal, frankly."

IRS spokesman Leas, while not addressing the Manafort and Cohen cases, said the agency's criminal investigation unit "uses sophisticated data analytics tools to detect fraud and identify criminal activity. But it's important to note that these analytics alone frequently do not indicate tax fraud on the surface since many situations are outside the scope of our normal processes," such as foreign financial activity, he said.

The IRS' ability to expose fraud cases on its own has diminished, particularly related to political figures. The IRS has faced a torrent of pressure from Republicans in Congress to stay out of politically charged cases while dealing with budget cuts in recent years.

Its budget fell from $13.1 billion in 2008 to $11.5 billion last year, and the White House has proposed more cuts. The number of IRS special agents who can pursue tax-related crimes fell from 2,683 in 2007 to 2,157 in 2017, about the level the agency had 50 years ago.

"Their systems have gotten so weak," said Paul Streckfus, a former tax lawyer at the IRS and editor of the EO Tax Journal, a newsletter that tracks the agency's activity. "The IRS isn't doing much. Criminal enforcement is way down."

The chief of IRS criminal enforcement acknowledged weaknesses in his most recent annual report.

"[R]esource issues make it impossible to be involved in every investigation in which we are asked to participate," Don Fort wrote. "We have the same number of special agents - around 2,200 - as we did 50 years ago. Financial crime has not diminished during that time - in fact, it has proliferated in the age of the internet, international financial crimes and virtual currency."

Republicans and the Trump administration have resisted calls from Democrats to make the IRS pursue more fraud cases, arguing that the agency is bloated and needs to be overhauled. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas, said last year he wanted a "bust up [of] the IRS as it is today."

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said Thursday that the agency has not come to Congress and sought more funding for investigations.

"If they feel they don't have sufficient resources, they should let us know that," Thune said. "We'll obviously deal with it accordingly."

He has proposed further cuts to the IRS's already shrinking budget, and the Treasury Department recently instituted a new policy that blocked more scrutiny of donors to most nonprofit groups with political agendas. It said this would save money because it would remove reporting requirements.

The violations that Cohen pleaded guilty to relate to restrictions on who can make monetary or in-kind contributions to a federal candidate, and how much - rules that are overseen by the FEC.

But there are structural and political obstacles that cripple the FEC's ability to take aggressive enforcement actions, and it likely wouldn't have known about Cohen's activities in the absence of news reports or a complaint, campaign finance experts said.

For about a decade, the FEC has been divided on party lines over whether it should more aggressively pursue enforcement, and whether it should launch investigations even if they aren't prompted by formal complaints, experts said. The FEC now typically opens investigations only if there is a complaint, and the law requires approval from four of the commission's six members to open an investigation. Two of the FEC's seats are vacant, making it even less likely that a case will be brought.

Hilland, the FEC spokesman, said in a statement: "In exercising its regulatory and enforcement authority, the Commission uses a variety of methods to uncover possible election law violations including reviewing campaign finance reports, conducting financial audits of political committees, and investigating complaints filed with the agency by members of the public."

After the Wall Street Journal reported on the payments to Daniels in January, Common Cause filed a complaint later that month asking the FEC and Justice Department to investigate the payments.

"I have a hard time imagining how those violations [by Cohen] would have come to attention of the FEC absent the investigative journalism that brought these violations to the public light, that led Common Cause to file our complaints," said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause.

Trevor Potter, a former Republican FEC commissioner and founder of the campaign-finance advocacy group Campaign Legal Center, said the FEC could be a powerful deterrent if it were aggressively pursuing enforcement action and referring more potential criminal cases to the Justice Department.

"Every few years, there's a sort of scandal like this with criminal penalties, and people going to jail," Potter said. "That reminds campaigns and their lawyers and accountants that these are laws that have serious teeth, and that even though the odds of a violation being discovered may be small, the effect of discovering a criminal violation is life ruining."

- - -

The Washington Post's Seung Min Kim and Devlin Barrett contributed to this report.Bloomberg photo by Alex Kraus

The nation's third-largest wireless carrier said late Thursday that it had discovered a data breach potentially affecting some of its customers' account information.

No financial data was stolen in the incident, the company said, but some personal details such as customer names, email addresses, phone numbers and account numbers may have been compromised.If your companys CEO feels underpaid and under-appreciated, you better update your resume.

CEOs who are paid a third less than their peers are four times more likely to announce layoffs within a year, according to a new study from the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. Apparently, the underpaid CEO believes a short-term bump in earnings will get him or her a raise.

And it works.

Rutgers researchers collected data from 140 S&P 500 companies from 1992-2014. They focused on consumer staples, financial services, and information technology and tossed out companies with a clear business reason for laying off workers, such as a merger or bankruptcy. They then normalized the data to compare oranges with oranges.

RELATED: Highest paid CEOs generate sub-par performance

Scholars have known for years that executives always worry about what their peers are earning. Evidence suggests that executives make risky management decisions specifically to boost their pay or compensation from stock options. Angry workers often accuse CEOs of laying them off to benefit themselves.

But does jealousy or envy play a role?

Research suggests CEOs view compensation as a symbol of prestige and status. Even with a seven or eight-figure salary, they might feel slighted if they are earning less than executives at other firms, said Scott Bentley, who led the study as a doctoral student at Rutgers and now serves as an assistant professor at Binghamton University.

Every CEO knows two basic tricks to quickly stock values and earnings: merge with another firm or lay off workers. Cutting employees is the easier of the two.

CEOs do not need shareholder approval; the company doesnt incur additional costs and investors instantly reward layoffs with higher stock valuations.

Given the perception that layoffs can increase firm performance, we argue that CEOs paid below their peers are likely to use layoffs as a means for increasing their own pay, Bentley added.

CEOs paid significantly less than their counterparts typically laid off 7 percent of their companys workforce within a year, shedding 1,200 people per company on average. Profits typically rose 8 percent as a result, while the companys performance, based on stock price or dividends, rose 2 percent.

Boards of directors rewarded these CEOs with an 18 percent hike in compensation, or an average of $600,000 the following year.

This research raises difficult questions for boards and shareholders, said Rebecca Kehoe, an associate professor and co-author of the study along with associate professor Ingrid Fulmer. On one hand, weve seen a push to rein in excessive CEO compensation packages by giving investors a say on pay. On the other hand, underpaying CEOs could lead to layoffs, which have lasting negative effects on the terminated employees and may harm the firms reputation.

The study, which will appear in the academic journal Personnel Psychology, found that boards only rewarded CEOs when company performance improved, not just for ordering layoffs. And there is a significant risk that shedding workers will hurt a company.

The Rutgers study dovetails nicely with a study last year that found CEO pay rarely correlates with corporate performance. MCSI, an investment research firm, found that underpaid CEOs produced better results than those taking home better than average pay.

MCSI also found that delayed compensation plans, designed to encourage CEOs to focus on the companys long-term success, also fail to boost results. In 60 percent of the companys MCSI studies, CEO pay did not line up with the companys success by any metric.

Meanwhile, the average CEO pay among Americas 350 largest publicly-held companies jumped to $19 million in 2017, an 18 percent raise over 2016, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The S&P 500 only went up 14.5 percent during the same period, while the average America saw a 2 percent raise.

Ive written countless columns on the cozy relationship between CEOs and the corporate boards appointed to oversee them. A group of senior business leaders has no interest in clamping down on CEO pay because their companies might follow suit and reject their requests for a raise.

RELATED: Annual outrage over CEO pay brings little change

The average CEOs pay is now 321 times higher than the average workers. Study after study shows that CEOs are not that special, and outside economic factors play a far more significant role in a companys success. Yet the myths that a CEO is worth that much money and wont work hard unless they get it persist.

The disparity between the raises given to CEOs and the average worker is accelerating income inequality, creating an American class system between oligarchs and the working class. And when oligarchs profit from laying off workers, tensions are bound to grow.

Corporations, sadly, are not willing to tackle this threat on their own. Dont be surprised if you start hearing chants of Workers of the World Unite!

Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about business and economics.

chris.tomlinson@chron.com | twitter.com/cltomlinsonCrude closed at the highest in almost three weeks, largely influenced by moves in the U.S. currency.

Futures settled 0.2 percent higher in New York on Monday. Trading in benchmark American oil futures was almost 60 percent below normal, in part because of a U.K. holiday. Meanwhile, the fading greenback breathed life into commodities priced in dollars.

"London's closed, you have an end-of-summer situation where liquidity is just really not there," said Bob Yawger, director of futures division at Mizuho Securities USA LLC.

Crude has averaged about $67 a barrel this month as trade tensions between China and the U.S. threatened the economic growth that fuels energy demand. At the same time, American sanctions against Iran are expected to deflate crude outflows from OPEC's No. 3 producer.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and allied suppliers achieved 109 percent adherence to self-imposed supply caps in July, according to people familiar with the data. A key monitoring committee was said to have decided to engage in more consultations during the second week of September to discuss how supply increases will be shared out.

West Texas Intermediate crude for October delivery added 15 cents to settle at $68.87 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest since Aug. 7.

Brent for October settlement rose 39 cents to end the session at $76.21 on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange, the highest since early July. The global benchmark crude traded at a $7.34 premium to WTI, the widest since June.

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index fell as much as 0.5 percent, declining for a second session.

In the U.S., refiners may curtail some crude purchases as the waning days of the summer driving season provide an opportunity to idle some equipment and plants for maintenance work.

"You have the end of gasoline season in very plain sight," said Thomas Finlon, director of Energy Analytics Group LLC in Wellington, Florida. "It's kind of difficult to be long crude in a period where demand is clearly going to slacken by a considerable amount."

Oil-market news:

Gasoline futures climbed 0.6 percent to settle at $2.0896 a gallon.

U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. is signing a new trade accord with Mexico to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement and called on Canada to join the deal soon or risk being left out.

Crude stockpiles at the closely watched storage complex in Cushing, Oklahoma, rose by an estimated 50,000 barrels last week, according to a forecast compiled by Bloomberg.

Nationwide, American crude inventories probably fell 1.49 million barrels last week, according to the median estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

--With assistance from Heesu Lee, Tsuyoshi Inajima and Paul Burkhardt.

2018 Bloomberg L.P.WASHINGTON - The United States and Mexico have reached a preliminary agreement to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement, President Donald Trump announced at the White House on Monday.

"It's been a long time, and this is something that is very special for our manufacturers and our farmers," Trump said. "It makes it a much more fair bill."

OIL IN PERIL: As Trump, Pena Nieto rush to finish NAFTA, oil industry faces loss of key protection

The two sides had been locked in negotiations for close to a year on a wide range of issues, including car manufacturing and the sale of agricultural products. Trump was short on the details on the new agreements, but he said he planned to do away with the name NAFTA and rename the pact, the "United States-Mexico trade agreement."

Now Playing: Trump Announces Trade 'Understanding' with Mexico Video: Time

"[NAFTA] has a bad connotation in the United States," he said. "It was a rip off. It was a horrible deal for our country.

"The announcement will come as some relief in Texas, where trade with Mexico and Canada accounts for close to 1.1 million jobs, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

And while there is still work to be done to reach a final trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, Democrats and Republicans alike hailed Trump's announcement.

"This is a positive step, and now we need to ensure the final agreement brings Canada in to the fold and has bipartisan support," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

"While this entire process could have been avoided without the dramatization and harsh rhetoric from the administration, which has created uncertainty for business and stifled growth, this preliminary deal presents us with the opportunity to modernize the trilateral agreement," Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo.

The Trump administration plans to submit the deal with Mexico to Congress by Friday. With the required 90-day review period, Congress could complete its review before Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto leaves office Dec. 1, to be replaced by the populist President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

BORDER TRADE: Businesses along Texas-Mexico border and NAFTA

In recent months the United States, Canada and Mexico have focused on a relatively short list of negotiating points.

Among them was NAFTA's existing investment protection rules - known as Investor State Dispute Settlement, or ISDS. Championed by oil companies and corporate America at-large, the provision allows companies to challenge foreign government policies through an independent arbiter and win compensation for losses caused by those policies.

Trump has pushed to eliminate the arbitration provision, arguing that it impinges on U.S. sovereignty.

For now Canada is not in the trade agreement. But on a phone call with Trump, broadcast live on television, Pena Nieto said he hoped to see Canada become part of the pact as well.

Trump said he planned to begin negotiations with Canada "immediately," to either add them to the agreement with Mexico or sign on to a new agreement with the United States.

"One way or another we'll have a deal with Canada. It'll either be a tariff on cars or it'll be a negotiated deal. Frankly, a tariff on cars is a much easier way to go. Perhaps, the other would be much better for Canada."ABC-13 weekend anchors Mayra Moreno and Chauncy Glover are moving on up.

The pair are trading in their weekend slot for a new 3 p.m. weekday newscast. They announced it on air Sunday. The 3 pm. news is "all about helping you jump start your evening with the biggest breaking stories of the day," Moreno said. Also, weekend meteorologist Elita Loresca is making the move with them.

Glover, a native of Alabama, was recently featured in the Chronicle for his Chauncy Glover Project, which mentors and empowers boys and teens of color. Moreno, a native of Houston, is also a graduate of the University of Houston. The proud Latina is known for saying, "Buenos dias" at every newscast.

Now Playing: ABC-13 weekend anchors Mayra Moreno and Chauncy Glover are moving on up. The pair are trading in their weekend slot for a new 3 p.m. weekday newscast. They announced it on air Sunday. The 3 pm. news is "all about helping you jump start your evening with the biggest breaking stories of the day," Moreno said. Also, weekend meteorologist Elita Loresca is making the move with them. Video: Courtesy of Chauncy Glover's Facebook

At HoustonChronicle.com: ABC-13 TV anchor Chauncy Glover mentors boys to become college-bound kings

Moreno, Glover and Loresca are also among Houston's most stylish on-air team. They actually coordinate their looks, down to the colors, for TV.

Their weekend replacements are Erica Simon and Steven Romo, both natives of Dallas who attended the same elementary school and lived on the same block. Small world.

DIFFERENT VIEWS: Rare look at Houston TV news anchors, meteorologists outside of work

Channel 13's new 3 p.m. newscast starts Monday, Sept. 10.As Ben Kingsley talks about his new movie, Operation Finale, hes trying to digest the news, just relayed by his agent, that he may soon have a chance to play Groucho Marx.

Nothing definite and he cant say much (there is a movie in development by Rob Zombie, of all people), but what he can say is that hed like to do more comedy, and playing a comedian would be a good place to start.

The Oscar winner is known for his serious roles (he took home his statuette for Gandhi), Operation Finale (opening Wednesday) being an example. He plays Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in a movie based on Eichmanns capture in Argentina by Israeli agents.

From Eichmann to Groucho?

Its a transition worthy of a punchline that only Marx himself could conjure.

But its the kind of challenge actors crave, and its especially appealing to Sir Ben. Playing the twitchy, restless slapstick legend would give Kingsley a chance to move around a bit. I mention to Kingsley that hes one of cinemas most motionless performers, comfortable in stillness the way most actors are not.

Its a vital part of my currency as an actor. I liken it to grace notes in music. In the course of a performance, it may be in that moment of stillness that the viewer gets a view into whatever process is going on inside the character, he said. I think those spaces in movies are precious. They invite the audience to come in and rest in the space created by it, to appreciate the story being told.

On screen, Kingsley is a less is more kind of guy, and he said so to Finale director Chris Weitz.

I told him, very modestly, that if he wanted two takes, I will probably give him less on the second, and that if he wanted five takes, I might give him even less on the fifth, and so forth, Kingsley said.

Not less effort, but less wasted motion.

When I feel very insecure in a role, its usually when my stillness tends to elude me, he said.

I asked him if stillness becomes even more important in close-up, the aspect of cinema that makes film so different from theater, where Kingsley got his start. He said the great dramatists had a way of addressing the difference.

The first crucial years of my journey as an actor occurred onstage, sometimes with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and I was able to eventually play Hamlet, amongst other challenging roles. And of course the plays included the device of the soliloquy, and I think that was Shakespeares version of the close-up. To be or not to be. Those moments when the character revealed himself to the audience, opened up his mind to the audience. Certainly, working with Richard Attenborough on Gandhi, I dont think I could have come anywhere close to those moments of stillness without having explored them onstage doing Shakespeare, he said.

That skill comes in especially handy in Operation Finale. As Eichmann, he is captured by Israeli agents and held in a safe house in Argentina, blindfolded and tied to a chair. In the role, Kingsley must find a way to project Eichmanns evil, his predatory nature, without moving a muscle. Much of the film involves the psychological gamesmanship that defines his back-and-forth with Israeli agent Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac), who is trying to get him to sign a document while Eichmann pursues his own perverse agenda.

He is determined to manipulate Malkin for his own ends, even if it gives him just a moment of satisfaction.

Kingsley also starred in Schindlers List, and he played Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in Murderers Among Us. After all of that, hes entitled to a turn at comedy. Though to hear Kingsley describe it, comedy is no picnic for an actor.

Its like the Edmund Kean observation  dying is easy and comedy is hard. Its very technical. Its not the slow burn of drama. Its a quick, rapid fire. The repartee can be highly technical. And I think there is something else at work. Great comic actors have great timing, and I think they also have a hidden rapport with the audience, and that may be part of comedy, too.

Kingsley has been funny, of course, perhaps most memorably  and unexpectedly  playing the villain in the Marvel movie Iron Man 3. His character, the Mandarin, was a failed actor named Trevor playing a part.

He remembers meeting with Marvel honcho Kevin Feige and being immediately excited by the idea of playing a mediocre actor who reaches the zenith of his power for criminal gain. And I must give Kevin and Marvel praise keeping that whole side of the plot completely secret until the film opened.

I asked whether being around actors for several decades helped Kingsley understand and play the vainglorious Trevor.

There are several little sketches of people Ive worked with, he said. And a few of myself.

Alls well that ends well.

Kingsley sneaked into a theater to see Iron Man 3 with his wife and was pleased with the results.

The woman in front us practically collapsed with laughter. What a lovely character to play on my journey. I hope there are many more.After a year, they can joke about it now. Bobby and Janice Jucker proudly wear the mantle of expert survivalists.

Weve become really good at disasters, Bobby said.

Janice poses it in more regal terms: We are the King and Queen of Disaster.

At the first anniversary of Hurricane Harvey in Houston, the Juckers can muster a joke at their own expense. Their business, Three Brothers Bakery, on South Braeswood, which has been part of the neighborhood since 1960, has been flooded repeatedly: by Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 with 3 feet of water; the Memorial Day flood in 2015 with another 3 feet of water; and Tax Day flood in 2016 with minimal water but it still got into the store. And then there was Hurricane Ike in 2008 when wind damage destroyed the roof, allowing in rain that rendered the building and production area inoperable. They were closed for nine agonizing months.

AMONG THE BEST: Three Brothers Bakery owner Bobby Jucker named one of the top bakers in the country

A year ago, Harvey did them in again.

The Juckers remember the scenario well. They were looking forward to a rare vacation last summer where they could enjoy the mountains, trees and natural hot springs of southwest Colorado. Before they left for Pagosa Springs, Colo., a tropical depression moving into the Yucatan Peninsula and inching its way toward the western Gulf of Mexico was initially no cause for alarm. But within days, their vacation mindset was replaced by a haunting, familiar scenario that residents and business owners of Braeswood and Meyerland know too well. Flooding.

We couldnt get back, Bobby said. We just watched CNN and the Weather Channel all day long.

And not for a moment did the thought leave them: Here we go again.

Harvey slammed into Texas the night of Aug. 25 as a Category 4 storm, the most powerful hurricane to strike Texas in 56 years. When Harvey reached Houston, the stalled storm hung over the area, dumping enough water to cause the worst flooding in the citys history.

When they finally made it back to Houston on Aug. 30, the Juckers saw for themselves the devastation Harvey inflicted. About 4 feet of water spilled over nearby Brays Bayou and entered their retail store and production facility. In photos, it looks like the bakery is a toy bobbing in a lake. The flooding not only ruined perishable inventory, it shot the motors of delivery vans and bakery equipment such as large sheeters and mixers. The bakery is the brands nerve center, servicing the two other Three Brothers Bakery locations in Memorial and on Washington.

The Juckers went to work and reopened in 17 days, an astonishingly quick turnaround. They consider themselves fortunate given the flood damage so many other homeowners and small businesses suffered.

ONE YEAR LATER: A look at where we were, and where we go from here

After several flooding incidents, they are weary but not broken. And their ability to quickly recover  tapping the right people for flood-claims adjustment, restoration contractors, bank loans  did not go unnoticed on the national level. In April, the U.S. Small Business Administration awarded Bobby and Janice Jucker the 2018 Phoenix Award for Outstanding Small Business Disaster Recovery. The Juckers are proud of the award recognizing small businesses that demonstrate ingenuity and tenacity in the aftermath of disaster.

The couple restored their business after Harvey thanks to a significant SBA loan. But now they look at a future burdened by debt and the more-than-likely possibility of another flood.

The Juckers are among thousands of small businesses the SBA assisted after Harvey. The SBAs Houston District Office received nearly 103,000 referrals from FEMA for assistance after the storm. Of that number, 12,651 applications for financial assistance were submitted and 3,883 (including the Juckers) were approved for a total of $445 million in loans for disaster recovery. Though that number takes into account the entire Harvey swath in Texas from Corpus Christi to Beaumont, 90 percent of the SBA applications were from Greater Houston.

That the Juckers were chosen for the SBA Phoenix Award in a year of many disasters affecting American small businesses is remarkable, said Tim Jeffcoat, district director of the SBA Houston District Office.

Its truly significant if you think about last year where there was Harvey, Maria, Irma and a number of wildfires and mudslides, Jeffcoat said. Out of that immense population, the Juckers were chosen. They are truly resilient. They had a level of preparation for disaster that isnt completely common in small business. They had a game plan. And they had an amazing staff that was dedicated to the company.

After so many brushes with catastrophe, the Juckers say they could write the playbook for how to rebound after flooding. Small businesses often call Janice, the business manager, about where to turn and what to do with the bureaucratic paperwork required for financial assistance and compensation from insurance companies.

If you dont have money or quick access to money, theres no reason to muck out your business. Youre not going to make it, Janice said. Harvey really amplified this.

Its not like they didnt consider giving up. Bobby remembers that after filling eight 40-foot dumpsters of ruin from their store after Ike, he became severely depressed. I was ready to toss it in, he said. Janice, luckily, talked him out of it.

Adversity has made them wiser but not bitter. Theyre able to chuckle about Three Brothers being a poster child for small-business disaster recovery.

Even so, theyre mindful of people who lost more, who lost their home and belongings. This was our business, not our home, Janice said. So, it wasnt as emotionally devastating.

The Juckers are survivors  its part of the family legacy. Bobby Jucker is a fifth-generation baker whose family business began in Poland. Three Brothers Bakery was founded in Houston in 1949 by three brothers who survived the Holocaust and made their way to America. Next year the business will mark its 70th anniversary.

By that time, the Juckers may be well into a plan theyre considering that will change the way Three Brothers does business. They may move the retail part of the original store and leave production at South Braeswood. Whatever decision they make, the Juckers are mindful of the Jewish community they serve.

How do we survive without our customers? Bobby said. We cant. Even now, business is down 25 percent compared to pre-Harvey sales. It could take them at least three more years, Janice said, to get back to normal, and thats still with bank loans to repay.

The Juckers, however, look on the bright side. They cared for their employees during the flood, they got their business back, and they have the knowledge to literally weather any storm.

Out of everything bad comes something good, Janice said.

Greg Morago writes about food for the Houston Chronicle. Follow him on Facebook or Twitter. Send him news tips at greg.morago@chron.com. Follow him on the podcast BBQ State of Mind to learn about Houston and Texas barbecue culture.OROVILLE, Calif. - Butte County has filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) for damages sustained in the Lake Oroville Incident and its aftermath.

According to Bruce Alpert of the Chico City Council, Butte County is seeking reimbursement for road damages and other costs, which are expenses and services not covered by FEMA funding for the Oroville Spillway Emergency.

The expenses amount to over 10 million in damages.

Butte County and DWR officials have engaged in settlement discussion over recent months in an attempt to resolve Butte County's claim for damages, but the parties were not able to come to an agreement.

There are now four lawsuits and the FERC Intervention administrative proceeding filed by Butte County against DWR.For years, when Rev. Kathy Sebring stood at the lectern, preparing to give her Sunday morning sermon, shed face rows and rows of pews. Some would be empty.

The pews are gone. So are the floors they were bolted down into. And the walls? Theyre still just studs, as the church awaits FEMA funding to replace the drywall.

A year ago this weekend, Sebring had to call off Sunday morning service for the first time in her memory, texting parishioners, telling them to stay home and stay safe, as Hurricane Harveys wild and muddy waters rolled through the small town of Dickinson, inching up the exterior walls at the First Presbyterian Church of Dickinson, before flooding the churchs interior.

Stacks of bibles were flung out on the curb, among a slowly constructed high-rise of debris. The organ that had loomed large at the front of the church for decades was added to the heap. And the pews. The floors. At first glance, the lawn - where the congregation worshiped under tents for the first few weeks after the storm - looked like a receptacle for all the tattered pieces that come together to make a church.

Except it wasnt. Not really.

Last week, we read that Solomon was building a temple after his father died, Sebring said on Sunday morning, as a dozen parishioners - about a fifth of the churchs total membership - sat listening intently. The temple is mentioned in the scripture, but its not around anymore.

She paused for a moment.

I mean, things happen to buildings, she said. But we as a people of God are in a covenant relationship with God, and we need to be reminded, as we were a year ago, that we are the church. Not our building. We hope and pray were going to be able to bring it back around. But the building is not the church. We are.

Out in the front row, LuAnn Ash sat listening intently. Ash was one of many members of this small congregation that had to evacuate her home during Harvey. She packed up her two cats and hitched a boat ride to safety, courtesy of a neighbor, who helped her find space in one local shelter, then another, where she stayed for a total of four days.

This church has been so strong and steady through it all, even through all the damage we got, said Ash, who pitched in to help with the churchs relief drives in the days and weeks following Harvey. It gave her something to do. Familiar faces to keep her world steady. A chance to stand near the large stained-glass cross at the very front of the church - the decorative beacon that first drew her to First Presbyterian. I cant tell you what this church means to me.

A few months ago, she attended a funeral service at a church in Texas City.

We didnt realize how much we missed things like soap in the bathroom and a mirror until then, she said, laughing. There is soap in the bathroom at First Presbyterian now, and working toilets again - finally. It makes you think: It might have been pretty there, but this is home.

Its a home that Dian Groh has considered leaving more than once in the dozen years since she joined the church. Somehow, the gravitational pull of the churchs community always brings her back though.

I feel like God is here, she said, tearing up. Ive tried to leave this church. But I cant. I go to other churches with my daughter, and it just doesnt feel the same. So here I am. Bare walls, doesnt matter. It doesnt feel any different here - it just looks different.

When Groh lost everything in her one-story home not far from the church, it was the members of her church who rallied together to pitch in.

Harvey was a tragedy in some ways, but also a blessing. So many helped, it was just amazing, she said.

Even in the midst of such chaos, she saw light. And never once felt alone.

That, Sebring said during her sermon, is the greatest truth revealed by Harvey.

In the days after the flood, a tractor trailer of supplies made its way to the church, from a congregation in Louisiana. It was absolutely loaded with blue plastic totes, carrying linens and cleaning supplies to help the community replace some of the basic necessities lost in the storm. That in itself felt like a blessing. But when Sebring opened the first tote, she couldnt believe her eyes. There, on the bottom of the blue lid was a hand-markered note.

When you pass through the waters, I will be there with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.

Its a passage from the book of Isaiah. And it was written carefully on the underside of each totes lid, along with signatures from faraway strangers.

In her sermon on Sunday, Sebring reminded her congregation of these words, and of the meaning behind them.

I chose this scripture for today, because it is a promise that God gives us that he will never forsake us, she said. Now it doesnt say in the scripture that I will keep you from the water, or that I will keep you from the fire. But it says that I will be there with you as you go through it.

Sebring pointed over her right shoulder, where one of those blue plastic lids sat on an easel for her congregation to see.

As long as youre walking on two feet and breathing, there will be a crisis, she said. Know that God is with you, that theres not a breath that you take that he is not beside you. Have the faith that youre not alone.

maggie.gordon@chron.com;

twitter.com/MagEGordonA Houston death row inmate whose lawyer says he has a hole in his brain on Friday was denied a retrial, a loss in federal court that moves his case one step closer to a possible execution date.

Dexter Johnson was sent to death row in 2007 for carjacking and killing 23-year-old Maria Aparece and her boyfriend Huy Ngo after abducting them as they sat in their car on a summer night a year earlier.

Given the now-30-year-old's extensive brain damage from a severe childhood injury, attorney Patrick McCann has since argued that he shouldn't be held as morally culpable as other adults.

"If you have an actual hole in your brain that you could basically run water through at that point you have to recognize that this is a person who's not fully responsible for what they're doing," he said.

Prosecutors during his trial described Johnson as a cold and calculating killer who had "fun" when he and four of his friends took the young couple's car and drove them around town demanding money, credit cards and ATM access.

Afterward, they parked near a patch of thick woods and forced Ngo to listen as Johnson raped Aparece in the backseat.

Then, Johnson shot Ngo in the head before slaughtering Aparece. At trial, Johnson's defense team argued that it was someone else who walked the couple into the woods and fired the fatal shot.

During his trial, the then-19-year-old hurled a chair across the courtroom and at one point refused to come to his own court dates. When he heard the verdict, he covered his face and then stormed out.

Since then, Johnson's defense has filed appeals claiming earlier bad lawyering, brain damage and schizophrenia, along with alleging "a lengthy history of mental disability and psychotic breaks."

In his latest filing before the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, McCann asked for a new trial, raising technical arguments claiming courts didn't fully dismiss his request for one before.

Specifically, McCann said, the courts didn't decide on arguments alleging that his client lacked the brain functioning to be held to the same standard as adults. Instead, he drew parallels to past court decisions that ban executing juveniles and the intellectually disabled, saying similar reasoning should be applied to Johnson's brain damage.

But the Harris County killer lost out on the procedural argument. Now, his next chance is to take his claims to the Supreme Court.

If he loses out in the nation's highest court, there could be more appeals down the road. In light of a landmark 2017 Supreme Court decision that upended the way Texas determines intellectual disability, McCann said it's possible he could raise claims that Johnson's IQ is too low to render him eligible for execution.

In the case last year - that of another of McCann's clients, Houston-area killer Bobby Moore - the Supreme Court determined in a 5-3 ruling that Texas had been relying on a non-scientific and dated measure of intellectual disability.

The ruling set off waves of requests from inmates wanting their death sentences overturned in exchange for life behind bars, but ultimately the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decided that even under a more modern measure, Moore didn't qualify as too intellectually disabled to face execution.One man is dead after a family disturbance early Sunday ended in gunfire in the Cypress area.

It's not clear what led up to the fight between two cousins the 23700 block of Longenbaugh.A northeast Texas couple is under arrest after they allegedly locked an elderly relative in a dog kennel and starved her.

According to KLTV, the Malakoff Police Department took Tommy Lee Anderson, 49, and Leonnia Darlene Anderson Castillo, 47, into custody on Aug. 25, after a 70-year-old woman approached an officer and told them she had been assaulted at a Malakoff-area home.

POLICE: Texas parents leave young daughter home alone for days to see concert in Detroit

An arrest affidavit obtained by the news organization states the victim told officers she had been staying with her female relative and that relative's boyfriend.

The relative, later identified as Castillo allegedly coerced the elderly woman into buying a dog kennel. Then they reportedly forced the victim to stay outside until she threw up, at which point she was locked in the kennel and starved.

In addition, the victim claimed that Castillo forced her to strip naked down to her panties and walk on broken glass, kicked her in the crotch, and held her to the ground with her knee.

Police were also told that Castillo and Anderson held the victim's credit and debit cards, and used them to withdraw her disability money.

The abuse allegedly started on Jan. 5 and continued through Aug. 22 when relatives were able to pick the elderly woman up.

Both Castillo and Anderson were taken to Henderson County Jail. Castillo is facing a first-degree felony charge of injury to an elderly individual causing serious bodily injury. Anderson was charged with unlawful restraint exposing to serious bodily injury.

According to the police report Castillo remains in custody on $50,000 bond. Anderson posted bail on a $15,000 bond and was released Monday, Aug. 27.

Daniela Sternitzky- Di Napoli is a digital producer covering Texas news and pop culture. | Daniela.DiNapoli@chron.com | @Dani_DiNapoliFormer MD Anderson Cancer Center President Dr. John Mendelsohn, battling brain cancer, is retiring after 22 years at the elite Houston research hospital.

Mendelsohn, 81, will become president emeritus Friday, Dr. Peter Pisters, the center's current president, wrote in a campus-wide email last week. Mendelsohn had previously emailed select colleagues announcing the retirement.

My time at MD Anderson has been the capstone of my career, Mendelsohn wrote members of the Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy, where he has served as co-director since 2011. It is bittersweet to step away, but it is the right decision for my family and me.

Mendelsohn, a star researcher before coming to MD Anderson, was the center's third president, serving from 1996 to 2011.

Neither email made any mention of Mendelsohns cancer.

Mendelsohn was diagnosed last fall with glioblastoma, the disease that Saturday took the life of John McCain, the former naval aviator and Vietnam POW, 2008 Republican presidential nominee and longtime Arizona congressman. The cancer previously killed fellow politicians Sen. Edward Kennedy and Beau Biden, the son of former vice president Joseph Biden, who initially was treated at MD Anderson. The Houston hospital later created the Beau Biden Chair for Brain Cancer Research.

Mendelsohn has declined Chronicle requests for an interview or information about his treatment since the diagnosis, including last week.

Glioblastoma, which is annually diagnosed in about 14,000 Americans, is the most common and lethal form of brain cancer, considered incurable. Average survival time is under 18 months.

The disease also killed an MD Anderson neurosurgeon who frequently treated such tumors, Dr. Samuel Hassenbusch; and a Memorial Hermann pediatric resident, Dr. Marnie Rose, whose ordeal was chronicled in the short-lived network television show Houston Medical.

Standard treatment is surgery, followed by a combination of radiation and chemotherapy. Though such treatment is usually beneficial initially, the cancer eventually comes roaring back, seeded by microscopic, tentacle-like cells deep in the tissue.

There has been little new treatment for glioblastoma over the years. The last drug to improve survival, by an average of about two months, was approved in 2005, and none of two dozen drugs tested in clinical trials for newly diagnosed glioblastoma since has provided a benefit.

Immunotherapy, the new frontier of cancer treatment, has shown promise in some glioblastoma trials, but those are in the early stages. They involve therapeutic vaccines that prime the immune system to attack molecules on cancer cells; and viruses that attack the cancer and trigger an immune response. Drugs that release a brake on the immune system, an approach pioneered by MD Anderson scientist Jim Allison, has not proved beneficial.

It is not known if Mendelsohn enrolled in any clinical trial of experimental therapy.

During Mendelsohns 15-year presidency, MD Anderson more than doubled in size and scope, and its operating and research budgets increased more than four-fold. The Houston cancer center also moved ahead of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in U.S. News and World Reports annual hospital rankings, consistently capturing the No. 1 cancer hospital slot after years of finishing No. 2.

In June, Mendelsohn was awarded the prestigious Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science for his research, targeting cell signaling pathways, that resulted in a smart drug for colon cancer and head and neck cancer.

Dr. Mendelsohn is an unparalleled servant leader, Pisters wrote in his email to employees. I am personally inspired and motivated daily by his example and his contributions to our mission to end cancer.

Mendelsohns son Eric said the family is overwhelmed by the support of the community and grateful for the tremendous care hes received from his colleagues at MD Anderson.

todd.ackerman@chron.com

twitter.com/chronmedA Houston man has been charged with his second driving while intoxicated offense after he was allegedly involved in a fatal crash in north Harris County on Sunday.

Hugo Flores, 29, was released on $2,000 bond on Monday for the misdemeanor charge, according to Harris County court records.A Colorado mom said her nine-year-old son killed himself after he was bullied for coming out as gay.

Fourth-grader Jamel Myles took his own life less than a week into the school year.

His mom, Leia Pierce, said Myles had come out to her over the summer.

"He looked so scared when he told me," Pierce told KDVR. "He was like, 'Mom I'm gay.' And I thought he was playing, so I looked back because I was driving, and he was all curled up, so scared."

"And I said, I still love you," Pierce said.

She said Myles planned on telling others at school he was gay because he was proud of himself.

LATEST: How the first Texas town to face Harvey's Category 4 fury is doing one year later

"Four days is all it took at school," Pierce said. "I could just imagine what they said to him."

According to Myles' big sister, classmates told him he should kill himself, Pierce said.

"I'm just sad he didn't come to me," the Denver mom said.

Tragic incidents like Myles' death are all too common. A study by the Centers for Disease Control found that nearly one-third of LGBTQ youth, or 29 percent, have attempted suicide at least once in the past year, compared with 6 percent of heterosexual youth.

You can reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 if you are having thoughts of suicide or need confidential support.

Fernando Ramirez covers Texas news and politics. Read him on our breaking news site and on our subscriber site. | Fernando.ramirez@chron.com | @fernramirez93



Timothy and Sharlotte Mott are still searching for their daughter three years after her death.

In a mystery that haunts the Motts, the body of their daughter Julie disappeared from a local funeral home and has yet to be found.

The couple won a negligence lawsuit in January against Mission Park North Funeral Chapel, but to the family, there was no victory. The case failed to provide the answers the Motts need most.

What happened to Julie? Where is she?

I cry quite easily all the time, Sharlotte Mott said in a soft, trembling voice recently. Theres a lot of sadness in the fact that we dont know where she is. Nothing has changed.

No arrests have been made in the disappearance, which is still under investigation by San Antonio police, but there could be a new development.

READ ALSO: Wife of Sutherland Springs gunman Devin Kelley speaks for first time about day of the massacre

Now Playing: Three years later, the parents of Julie Mott wonder where her body is and wish that one day they can put her ashes to rest. Video: San Antonio Express-News

We recently discovered some new information that we are actively pursuing with the hope that it leads us to Julies whereabouts, said Lt. Jesse Salame, deputy chief of staff for Chief William McManus. Because we dont want to jeopardize the case, we cant reveal yet what that new information is.

As they go about their everyday lives, the Motts, who spoke with the San Antonio Express-News on the third anniversary of their daughters disappearance, carry on as best they can. Julie, who died of cystic fibrosis, would have been 26 the day of her funeral services on Aug. 15, 2015.

She is never far from the Motts thoughts.

A jacket Julie used to wear when she would get a chill is draped over the passenger seat of Sharlotte Motts car. When she drives, she clutches at the sleeve.

It stays with me all the time, she said of the jacket.

Timothy Mott sits outside in his yard each day, waiting for a red bird, hoping that the cardinal he sees in his yard is a nod or a wink from Julie.

When a cardinal appears in your yard, its a visitor from heaven, they said, quoting folklore shared with them by a relative. Since the day they moved into their house, two months after she died, they spend as much time as they can in their backyard, where they said they can spot at least six red birds daily. If its in the morning, they say, Good morning, Julie.

The Motts speak proudly of Julie, referring to her as tiny, but tough. They talk about the things she loved  spending time outdoors with friends and family, and especially horses. She competed in some equestrian events, her father said.

But in an instant, their moods change to despair. Their grief is fresh, as if everything just happened.

I always thought of myself as a tough guy, said Timothy Mott, 69, who was a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army. His voice breaks: But this is ... I cant even put it into words.

Originally from Fort Worth, the Motts made San Antonio their home in 1989.

Sharlotte Mott, 65, the registrar for the North East Independent School District, said she took a job in education so she could be close to her children while they went to school, and be off with them during the summer. Mostly, it allowed her to be Julies caregiver. Her only daughter, Julie was 2 years old when she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.

READ ALSO: Rockport, Port Aransas salvage their coastal communities after Harvey

August is particularly difficult for them. Its the month their daughter was born, when she died, and when her body disappeared.

Julie Mott died Aug. 8, 2015. She was 25. Her wish was to be cremated, which was to occur a day after her funeral at Mission Parks Northwest Side facility. When employees arrived Aug. 16, 2015, they found a damaged casket at Mission Park North on Cherry Ridge. Julie was gone.

That morning, Sharlotte called the funeral home to make arrangements to retrieve Julies jewelry and other personal items. According to testimony established during the trial, at around the same time as the call, employees were frantically looking for Julies body.

In their lawsuit, the Motts accused the company of negligence and lax security. They accused the funeral home of hiding the fact that they use third-party contractors to handle some services, like cremations. These contractors had unlimited access to their facilities. And the security codes and locks were outdated and hadnt been changed in years.

In January, a Bexar County jury found that MPII Inc., which does business as Mission Park Funeral Chapels and Cemeteries, was negligent and responsible for the loss of the body, awarding the Motts an $8 million judgment.

The company, through its owner, Robert Dick Tips, and his wife, Kristin, company president, have appealed the judgment and have posted a $9.2 million surety bond to cover the cost of the cash judgment and to stay it during the appeals process. The case could go all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, and take years to settle.

Originally represented by Ricardo Reyna, MPII Inc. has retained Kirsten M. Castaneda, an appellate attorney out of Dallas. She declined to comment on the case.

READ ALSO: Nonprofits drive reunification efforts

Testimony during the nearly three-week trial established that when funeral home employees arrived, the doors were locked, the alarm was still on, and the back doors were locked with a chain.

The company, through the Tipses, denied wrongdoing and accused Julies ex-boyfriend, Bill Wilburn, of stealing her body. They said the Motts did not share that Wilburn was obsessed with calling and texting Julie. They said Wilburn did not want Julie cremated, which gave him a motive to take her body.

Wilburn was charged with criminal trespass in June 2016, about a year after Julies body disappeared. He was spotted by Mission Parks security cameras on two occasions trying to get inside the facility and reportedly called staff there 200 times in one day, seeking information about the case.

According to court records, he pleaded guilty to one of the charges on March 28 and was sentenced to two days in jail.

Ultimately, the jury did not believe that Wilburn  or anyone else  stole her body.

The jury did not find that a criminal or a third-party was responsible. The jury didnt find someone else did it. They found Mission Park was responsible. So,wheres the body? asked Mark Greenwald, who along with Alex Katzman and Ron Salazar represented the Motts in the civil case.

When he testified, Timothy Mott told the jury that his daughter knew in January 2015, when she was denied a lung transplant, that she didnt have much time left.

A little before she died, she told her father that she wanted to be cremated. She wanted part of her ashes buried with a favorite horse, some left with her parents, and the rest scattered elsewhere.

She was pretty sick, Timothy Mott testified. She was aware she was getting close, and she didnt want to be buried. She didnt want to be in a coffin.

Julie died at their home.

She died peacefully, we could tell, said Timothy Mott.

The fact that they couldnt carry out her funeral as she requested, eats at him and Sharlotte, who have been married for 45 years.

READ ALSO: Man arrested in case of missing priest in South Texas

The biggest thing is that she wanted to be cremated, Timothy Mott said.

In a small corner off the living room of their far West Side home, they have a shrine to her. There are photographs of Julie, and a large urn with the bust of a horse where her ashes were to rest.

Theres a piece of paper (on the urn) blocking the place to put a picture. But we cant put a picture on it, Timothy Mott said. Shes not there.

Its a reminder to us that we wont be able to complete her final wishes, Sharlotte Mott said through tears.

Her dogs still miss her, too, they said. Biff, a Papillon, was always by her side, Timothy Mott said. Whiskey, a Chow mix, still looks for her.

Wheres Julie, Timothy Mott asks, and the dog begins to bark and claw at the floor.

Five years her senior, Jonathan Mott misses his sister so much, he cant talk about her. He declined to be interviewed for this story. But he maintains a public Facebook page in her memory.

He took what the family deemed as the most important pictures of Julie, from birth until death, and placed them in a slideshow that was shown during her funeral services.

You can see by the video how Jon and Julie were really close, Timothy Mott said.

Through the sadness, the Motts faces light up when they talk about their first and only grandchild  Olivia Nicole Mott, 14 months old, who shares her aunts middle name.

Jonathans little girl looks a lot like his sister. A frame with baby pictures of Olivia and Julie at the same age is uncanny.

I see a lot of similarities, Timothy Mott said.

Near the back door that leads to the backyard, the Motts have framed pictures of red birds. Outside, bird houses of all types, shapes and sizes line the fence. Never much into birds, their yard now welcomes them in droves.

Sometimes we will sleep out there, thinking about all of this, knowing that ... hoping that we find her, Timothy said. But we doubt it.

Elizabeth Zavala is a courts and crime reporter in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | ezavala@express-news.net | Twitter: @elizabeth2863I had hope. The Watchdog even prayed on it.

State and federal authorities would see, in the aftermath of monster Hurricane Harvey and his 55 inches of rain, that Texas consumers need help.

How do we stop crooked home builders, roofers and contractors who under Texas law are not required to hold a basic license?

Reasons to be hopeful for a bit more government oversight abounded. Texas House Speaker Joe Straus asked lawmakers to focus this year on the effect of local and state licensing requirements and regulations and how they affect post-Harvey recovery.

A second hopeful sign: Federal law enforcement authorities announced they formed a South Texas task force with state and local officials, including the FBI, to prosecute Harvey-related fraud schemes.

Wow.

I made a note to check the progress of both on Harvey's first anniversary. Does the Texas Legislature care? Did the feds go after anyone? Who's protecting you?

Can government solve?

Lets start with the Texas Legislature, set to meet in January. At a recent hearing in Houston, witnesses testified before state lawmakers about post-Harvey life.

One issue in the Legislature will be whether roofers and others should carry a new state license or a certification or, at minimum, a listing on a state registry.

At the hearing, the Better Business Bureau was asked to pick one consumer witness to represent South Texans. The BBB chose Anita Hamilton.

When you see what happened to Hamilton at this hearing, it's as if you peer into a crystal ball and see the future.

Hamilton was questioned by state Rep. Jonathan Stickland, R-Bedford. Sticky, as he's called, is a three-term lawmaker who not only disrupts all that he can as a point of pride, but also is an accomplished bill killer.

A bill can make it all the way to the House floor for a vote, and when Sticky is done, that and dozens of other bills are shot down by him in a parliamentarian pique of libertarian anger.

Here, you'll see the early makings of another bill-killing.

I, too, was a victim, Hamilton began.

Her contractor promised he was a man of good character. Hes a Christian, she recalled him saying. Hes a family man.

She paid the contractor. He didnt finish. She terminated the contract. Now hes threatening to hurt her with a lien.

Sticky began with a joke. Mr. Chairman, it sounds like we need a True Christian Registry. Only True Christians can be approved. We'll have some religious test for them.

Then he spoke to Hamilton: I have an honest question, and I dont mean to offend at all. It sounds like you got screwed over. I understand that. But as I'm listening to your story and the lady before, you both seem like very capable people.

I picked up in your testimony that you have a rental home, and just having that, and the amount of money for he repairs, and some of the upgrades that you said you were doing, kind of tells me that you are very successful, high-end. You are in the top couple of percent.

I am, she confirmed, a certified paralegal.

Yes. OK. All right, Sticky said. So you work at a law firm. You're very successful. All of these things. What can government do to protect in a situation like this? You are very capable, and you still got hurt.

Im not convinced that us having a registry or handing out a piece of paper or anything else will stop some of this stuff from happening. Do you know where I'm coming from on that?

There's nothing I can hand out to the majority of folks to get them to the intellect at which you're operating. And it still happened to you.

Can government solve the solution  or do we need to return to a buyer beware situation where everyone doesn't have this false sense of security?

I feel like a lot of cases where government tries to come in and gives these licenses or the different things that I've heard creates a false sense of security. How could this guy exist? I expect government to protect me from people like this. We can't.

I fully agree, she said. With a general contractor not required to have a license, it is a buyer beware.

Sticky mentioned plumbers. They're licensed, but some still do shoddy work. This isn't working either, he said.

Right, right, Hamilton said. You can have a licensed electrician or plumber come in and still do inadequate work.

At this moment, Sticky had seemingly turned the consumer witness into an anti-consumer.

A bad person is a bad person, he said.

She joked that the solution is to get rid of contractors.

He joked, Well get the True Christian Registry going.

Then Hamilton remembered why she was there, saying: If you're going to be a contractor, you have to be licensed. That way youre held to a higher standard. Storm chasers, to me, are like general contractors are. There are some excellent general contractors out there. I, myself, wasnt fortunate to get that right person.

Good for her. But you see a sneak preview of Stickys coming bill killing next year. Government is evil. Buyer beware. Even smart, rich people get hurt. Too bad. So sad.

I called Sticky to talk to him about this exchange.

I'm not speaking with The DMN anymore, he texted.

Task force fails

How about the feds? Howd that Harvey task force do? Somebody got busted, right?

My colleague Marina Trahan Martinez could find only one task force-related case: A man was indicted for trying to get a home loan using someone else's identity. So much for that.

I had hope. I even prayed. But I'm not dumb enough to ignore the warning signs.

Ideological conservatism doesnt believe in government help. Forget the governor or top legislative leaders. Getting any meaningful change past Sticky is what keeps me up at night.

WATCHDOG NOTE: If this fight to protect property owners from con artists matters to you, join our group of 2,000 North Texans concerned about this and other top consumer issues (property tax reform and retail electricity reform).

Email watchdog@dallasnews.com to subscribe to my periodic newsletter. Or join our DallasNews Watchdog Posse group on Facebook.

Staff writer Marina Trahan Martinez contributed to this report.

---

2018 The Dallas Morning News

Visit The Dallas Morning News at www.dallasnews.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Twenty-three years ago I was arrested for attempted forcible entry after jumping a fence at the University of Texas at El Paso. I spent a night in the El Paso County Jail, was able to make bail the next day, and was released. Three years later, I was arrested for drunk driving  a far more serious mistake for which there is no excuse.

But those mistakes did not ultimately define me or stop me from what I wanted to do in my life or how I wanted to contribute to the success of my family and my community  as a father, small business owner, city council member, and congressman. The chance that I had, and which I have made the most of, is denied to too many of our fellow Texans, particularly those who dont look like me or have access to the same opportunities that I did.

On Wednesday, I toured the Harris County Jail with Sheriff Ed Gonzalez and met men from this community who have made a mistake from which they may or may not recover. Men who dont have the resources to post bail. Some of whom got arrested on purpose to get the treatment and care they need, care they wont be able to afford or access on the outside. In fact, the Harris County Jail is the largest provider of mental health services in our state, a state that is the least insured in the nation. Of the 10,000 inmates in the Harris County Jail, one quarter of them are being prescribed at least one psychotropic medication. The jail has more people receiving psychiatric treatment every day than the nine state mental hospitals in Texas combined.

But beyond those who need health care, there are many more languishing behind bars for nonviolent crimes  sixty percent yet to even be convicted. Unable to work, to pay taxes, to raise their kids, to contribute to our society, to realize their full potential. And its happening at the average cost of $87 per person, per day, and more than $400 per person, per day for prisoners requiring medication or medical treatment. That tab is ultimately picked up by the taxpayers of Harris County.

The jail I visited is not an outlier. Rather, it is part of the worlds largest prison population. One that is disproportionately comprised of people of color, though we know that people of all races use illegal drugs at roughly the same rate. Many have called this the New Jim Crow, and for good reason. One in four black children have had a parent in the criminal justice system, compared to just four percent of white children. That rate is nearly two times what it was in the 1980s. And it begins with a school-to-prison pipeline that starts as early as kindergarten, where a black child is four to five times as likely to be suspended or expelled as a white child.

Following my visit, I am more convinced than ever that Texas can and must take the lead in building a criminal justice system that is more fair and that urgently puts our country closer to the words written above the highest court in our land: equal justice under law. This is how I propose we do it.

First, we should eliminate private, for-profit prisons from our justice system. Locking someone up is a power that should be reserved for our government, not outsourced to corporations that have the perverse incentive of getting more people behind bars so that there are more profits for their shareholders.

Second, we need to end the failed war on drugs that has long been a war on people, waged on some people over other people. Who is going to be the last man  more likely than not a black man  to languish behind bars for possessing or using marijuana when it is legal in more than half of the states in this country? We should end the federal prohibition on marijuana and expunge the records of those who were locked away for possessing it, ensuring that they can get work, finish their education, contribute to their full potential and to the greatness of this country.

Third, we must stop using mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent drug offenses  a practice that costs taxpayers dearly and destroys lives in the process by locking up people who could safely re-enter society. And we replace this practice with policies that begin treating addiction like the public health concern it is.

Fourth, we can end the current use of bail bonds that punish people for being poor. This is a tactic that wastes resources on incarcerating those who are not a threat to anyone, not a flight risk, not likely to be repeat offenders. In the Harris County Jail, its estimated that 500 to 600 of the inmates at any given time fit this description  in for misdemeanors but without the resources to post bail as I did more than twenty years ago.

Finally, we should provide meaningful reentry to help cut down on recidivism for those who committed non-violent crimes. That starts with strong rehabilitation services, counseling and access to preventative health care. It continues by banning the box on job applications so those formerly incarcerated can work and pay taxes, returning drivers licenses so they can get to that place of employment, allowing them to apply for loans that can unlock skills trainings, and ensuring their constitutional right to participate in civic life by voting is protected.

And because I have worked with my colleagues  Republicans and Democrats alike  on legislation to achieve these things, I know that they are fully within our capacity to change.

At the end of the day, this is about ensuring that every single one of us can live to our full potential and contribute to our maximum capacity. Giving low-level offenders a second chance no matter the color of their skin or the economic status they hold can create opportunity for all of us. It will help build a future that is more just, more fair, and more prosperous for every single person in this state and this country. It is time for Texas to lead the way.

Beto O'Rourke is a Congressman representing El Paso and a candidate for the U.S. Senate.I was in IT for a good part of my career, so I can actually look at this in two parts; IT and HR, she told us. From an IT perspective, you need to ensure youre partnering with a partner whos constantly innovating and committed to agility. They need to be able to help your company pull products through that enable your strategic goals. Secondly, you need an HRIS system thats easy to integrate. It should plug into your organization in a way which allows the system to grow and evolve alongside your businesses in a seamlessly efficient manner.

From an HR stand point, remember that both employers and employees need consumable information at their fingertips. One of the things Id be looking at would be ease of use. It needs to be able to make complex information very simple and turn out reporting in an easy way. If you want management to use it, the HRIS needs to be intuitive. You dont need a complex system that requires a huge training manual to navigate.

Jane Watson, Head of People and Operations at Actionable, agrees that ease of use is important in an HRIS  however, she also cited flexibility as a key component.

I want a system that allows me to shape it into my ideal, she explained. One major area that myself and colleagues have been pushing lately is allowing workers to choose their own pro-nouns. A lot of systems simply arent set up that way; however, some smaller vendors are recognizing the need for this and implementing it.

Essentially, I think it depends on the purpose behind the implementation. With any technology, you need to assess what business problem youre trying to solve with the new system  this would then drive the selection criteria.On the first day of school we followed El Paso Superintendent Juan Cabrera on school visits including several of the nine EPISD schools that belong to the New Tech Network.

Young Womens Academy

As a second year middle school, the Young Womens STEAM Research & Preparatory Academy is alive with ideas. EPISD board member, Mickey Loweree, appreciates how girls empower each other. She said her daughter Marlow is thriving at Young Womens and that all the girls are more likely to dive into a tough STEM problem in the single gender environment.

They jump in and lead, added Loweree. They dont worry about what they look like.

Young Womens is the first single-gender academy in El Paso and in the New Tech Network. It will become a 6-12 school as the middle school it shares the building with is phased out.

The New Tech model features integrated team-taught project-based blocks. In preparation for opening a New Tech school, EPISD takes down walls and creates combined classrooms. Glass walls (see above) add natural light and transparency to the environment.

Brown New Tech

On the first day of school, the Cheer Squad met new students at the door of Brown New Tech. While the principal met with parents, students started the day (as they do every day) in circle time where teachers check in with learners and reinforce shared norms: share the air, actively participate, challenge your comfort zone, use meaningful communication, be supportive and respectful, show pride.

In its third year as a member of the New Tech Network, Brown teachers are skilled project facilitators. On the first day of school, sixth graders (below) were already preparing for an integrated science and art project using new Macbooks. The districts 1:1 initiative, Power Up, which started in high school, added middle schools this year.

Hart New Tech

Starting with grades 3-5, Hart New Tech became the first is first dual-language school in the New Tech Network and just the second New Tech elementary in Texas.

Dual language programs are available K-5 in all 58 El Paso elementaries and in nine middle schools and six high schools. A unique competency-based partnership with UTEP supports the districts expansion of dual language learning opportunities.

Hart Principal Angelica Negrete (below) said teachers appreciated the chance to visit other New Tech Elementaries including Katherine Smith in San Jose and Napa Junction near Napa. They also visited Manor New Tech near Austin and nex+Gen Academy in Albuquerque.

East of downtown El Paso in a lower income Hispanic community, Hart New Tech sits on the Mexican border and next to Guillen Middle and Bowie High School, also members of the New Tech Network (just the sixth K-12 New Tech feeder pattern in the country). Some students walk across the border every day to attend the three schools.

The New Tech approach has its advantages for dual language students when learning a second language said Scott Gray , New Tech Network coordinator for EPISD. Students with varying abilities in English and Spanish work collaboratively to learn and build their language capacities.

They tend to succeed because theyre building context, Gray added. They are taking ownership of their learning and tying what theyre learning to real world problems and solutions.

Gray works closely with EPISDs nine New Tech campuses and has been tracking data that shows New Tech students tend to outperform their traditional classroom peers nationally and within EPISD. He also said attendance rates are dramatically higher for students in New Tech programs.

Oso New Tech

In its third year, Oso New Tech serves 9th, 10th, and 11th graders on the Bowie campus.

Celeste Cano (@ celestecano0422 ) teaches Algebra, one class not in an integrated block. It is taught as problem-based course where tasks are one or two days rather than two or three weeks. In the first two years of the school, Oso algebra results were the best in the district.

Skeptical at first, art teacher Mauricio Olague heard about teaching integrated projects at Oso New Tech at Bowie High and decided to give it a try. He teaches a unique art and biology mash up and loves the new challenge of team teaching. As a lifelong resident of the neighborhood, he sees this high engagement approach motivating students and preparing them for what lies ahead. (listen to Olague and Cano describe their first two years in this podcast ).

In their first three few years, New Tech schools in El Paso have achieved district leading academic results. They exemplify the " active learning at the heart of the districts strategy. They have rejuvenated teachers careers and created quality options for families across the city. It looks like they are off to a good start for the new school year.

For more, see:



The photos above were taken by Tom Vander ArkIsraeli naval forces arrest 2 fishermen

August 27,2018 | Source: PCHR

Israeli naval forces continued their attacks against Palestinian fishermen in the Gaza Strip, prevented them from practicing their job freely and denied them access to areas where fish breed.



The Israeli naval forces chased the fishermen, attacked them and detained their fishing boats and equipment, despite sailing within the allowed fishing areas.



These violations refute the Israeli authorities claims regarding easing the ongoing naval blockade and expanding the fishing area to 9 nautical miles off the Gaza shore.



According to investigations conducted by the Palestinian center for Human Rights (PCHR), at approximately 06:40 on Sunday, 26 August 2018, Israeli gunboats stationed off al-Waha Resort shore, north of the Gaza Strip, opened fire at Palestinian fishing boats sailing within 2 nautical miles and then surrounded a fishing boat belonging to Hasan Mohamed al-Abed al-Sultan (47), from al-Salateen neighborhood. The fishing boat was manned by Uranus Sharif Mohammed al-Sultan (22) and Hasan Mahmoud Abed al-Malek al-Sultan (23). The Israeli naval soldiers ordered the fishermen to take off their clothes, jump into the water and swim towards the gunboat. The fishermen were arrested and their fishing boat was confiscated.



In light of the above, PCHR strongly condemns the Israeli ongoing attacks against Palestinian fishermen in the Gaza Strip. Therefore, PCHR:



-- Calls upon the international community, including the High Contracting Parties to the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, to intervene to stop all Israeli violations against fishermen and allow them to fish freely in the Gaza Sea.



-- Calls upon the Israeli authorities to stop chasing the fishermen and enable them to fish freely, especially that they do not pose threat to the Israel authorities; and



-- Calls for releasing the arrested fishermen and fishing equipment detained by the Israeli authorities.

 2016 IMEMC

Theme(s): Communities and Organisations.German fishermen headed for choppy waters as Brexit looms

by Volker ter Haseborg and Christian Ramthun

August 26,2018 | Source: Handelsblatt Global

Brexit poses a threat to Germanys 2.5 billion ($2.9 billion) fishing industry and could deal a damaging blow to the countrys poorer coastal regions of the Baltic and North Sea.



When Britain leaves the European Union, its coastal waters could become out of bounds to EU fishing fleets  unless Brussels and London secure a deal. It would take away 50 percent of our fishing opportunities, said Kai-Arne Schmidt, managing director of the Kutterfisch fleet, a group of 10 fishing vessels based in the North Sea port of Cuxhaven.



The fleet has rights to fish in the waters of Norway, Britain, the Faroe Islands and of EU member states with North and Baltic coastlines.



The EU has for decades controlled fishing rights and quotas tightly. Year after year, European leaders hammer them out in meetings that often drag deep into the night. Emotions can run high  in what were called the Cod Wars of the 1970s, Icelands navy attacked West German and British trawlers in a confrontation over fishing rights in the North Atlantic.



Brexit could also deprive EU vessels of fishing rights in Norwegian waters, which would be even worse than losing access to British territory. Thats because Norway, which is not an EU member, allows EU fleets to fish cod in its waters in exchange for the rights to fish blue whiting and Atlantic mackerel that are available off Britains coasts.



However, after the UK exits the bloc in March next year, most mackerel and blue whiting will remain in British waters. This means that the rest of the EU would have nothing to offer Norway in exchange for cod rights. And so Norway may ban German fishing boats from its territorial waters.



On the plus side, the industry has a powerful ally in Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose northeastern constituency is home to Baltic fishing crews and fish-processing factories. She takes a keen interest in the industrys fate and has been known to ask the agriculture minister, Julia Klockner, detailed questions about fishing in cabinet meetings.



But Brexit isnt the only problem. Climate change is driving cod ever further north to find cooler waters. One of the Kutterfisch captains, 58-year old Fritz Flint, has been going to sea since he was 15 and commands a 40-meter trawler with a crew of six. He remembers cod being plentiful in the German Bight, virtually on his doorstep.



Nowadays, though, he is netting fish you would expect to catch in the Mediterranean, like squid and European bass. The cod is gone. And its not coming back, said Captain Flint. The water of the German Bight is now too warm.



The newcomers from warmer waters cant compensate for this loss. The same is true in the Baltic, where herring supplies are falling and anchovies and red mullet cant make up for the losses.



The German fishing industry is among the losers of global warming, said Christopher Zimmermann, director of the Thunen Institute of Baltic Sea Fisheries.



For now, Kutterfisch can follow the cod northwards, to the Skagerrak strait between Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and all the way to the Faroe Islands, halfway between Scotland and Iceland. The fleet has just invested 17 million in two new vessels equipped with measuring systems to track global warming and cameras to prove that its trawlers arent overfishing. Every seven days Captain Flint delivers his catches  around 40 to 60 tons  in the Danish harbor of Hanstholm before heading out again.



But if Brexit fails to produce a deal on fishing rights, the elusive cod will escape his nets for good.

 2018 Handelsblatt GmbH

Theme(s): Post Harvest Technology and Trade.Five Malaysian-registered boats detained for illegal fishing

August 26,2018 | Source: Bernama

Five Malaysian -registered fishing vessels with 36 Vietnamese crew have been detained for illegal fishing in Labuan waters.



Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) Labuan commander Che Adnan Md Isa said the vessels were detained at about 11pm Saturday, some 10 nautical miles from the popular fishing site of Semerang and 26.6 nautical miles northeast of Tg Kubong, Labuan.



During the patrol operation, one of our maritime vessels located the positions and subsequently inspected the boats, he said at a press conference today.



Upon inspection, all the crew in the fishing boats failed to produce valid travel documents besides not having an official written permit to fish in Malaysian waters, he added.



The case is being investigated under the Fisheries Act 1985.



Che Adnan said the MMEA welcomes information from the maritime community to report on any unlawful activities directly to its Labuan Maritime Operations office at Jalan Rancha-Rancha or contact its operations room at 087-427999.

Theme(s): Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods.Indonesia sinks 86 Vietnamese fishing boats

by Nguyen Quy

August 24,2018 | Source: VNA

Indonesia has destroyed hundreds of foreign boats caught illegally fishing in its waters; 86 of these were Vietnamese.

Indonesian authorities on Monday scuttled 125 foreign vessels at 11 different locations in the country as part of greater efforts to prevent illegal poaching in its waters, The Star Online reported Thursday.



Among the sunk vessels were 86 Vietnamese-flagship boats, 14 from the Philippines and 20 Malaysian.



Indonesias Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry spokeswoman Lily Pregiwati was quoted as saying the operation had not been announced earlier to avoid straining relations with neighboring countries.



The Indonesian government has said that illegal fishing is threatening the local fishing industry.



Vietnam has several times called on Indonesia not to use violations against Vietnamese fishing boats and fishermen in a way that goes against the strategic partnership between the two countries.



Earlier this year, in a meeting with Indonesian President Joko Widodo in India, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc had expressed his hope that Indonesia would reconsider its policy of destroying foreign boats caught fishing illegally in its waters.



The controversial policy, enforced since President Joko Widodo took office in 2014, is part of Indonesia's tough measures to tackle what it says is a long-standing issue. So far, 488 fishing boats have been destroyed, many of them from Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and China.



The Indonesian government last month released 42 Vietnamese fishermen after detaining them for more than three months.



Vietnams Fisheries Resources Surveillance Department has said it is trying to raise awareness of maritime boundaries and international maritime laws among its fishermen. It is also conducting frequent patrols to prevent potential violations.

 1997 VnExpress.net

Theme(s): Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods.Hurricane Irma cost Florida fishing industries almost $200 million

by NANCY KLINGENER

August 24,2018 | Source: WLRN

Hurricane Irma cost Florida's fishing industries almost $200 million, according to a damage assessment released by the state and federal governments.







The storm crossed the Florida Keys as a Category 4 hurricane last Sept. 10, then traveled to Southwest Florida and up the state.



The Keys are Florida's most valuable commercial fishery, ranked 12th in the nation by value of landings. The area is also home to a thriving recreational fishing industry, both in offshore fishing in the Atlantic and the flats of Florida Bay and the Lower Keys backcountry.



According to the damage assessment, Florida's seafood industry is worth $5.9 billion a year, while the recreational fishery is worth $7 billion.



Irma wrecked plenty of boats, but that wasn't its only impact. It also damaged fish houses, bait-and-tackle shops, marinas and hotels booked by charter boat clients.



"Some for-hire operations in the Keys reported losing all their pre-booked charters through the middle of January 2018," the report states.

 2018 WLRN

Theme(s): Communities and Organisations.150 years of shifting global fishing: new data set

by Gemma Conroy

August 22,2018 | Source: Hakai

For thousands of years, seafood has sustained communities, livelihoods, and economies across the world. In ancient Rome, wealthy entrepreneurs snapped up beachfront property and built elaborate fish farms. In 15th-century Chile, coastal people bartered shellfish for inland resources. The Vikings living on Norways Lofoten Islands were fierce and powerful raiders, but they were also prodigious fishers of Atlantic cod. Over millennia, shifts in politics and changing technology have drastically altered when and where people go to fish. But accurate scientific records of this vast history of fishing activity capture, at best, a tiny sliver of the whole.



Most scientific studies of global fishing patterns only extend back to the 1950s, when groups such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization began keeping detailed records. Today, these mid-century records are used as the baseline against which modern fisheries data is compared when making decisions about fisheries management and marine conservation. But Reg Watson, a fisheries ecologist at the University of Tasmania, was unsatisfied with this truncated view of history.



In a new research effort, Watson and his colleague Alex Tidd, a fisheries scientist at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology in Ireland, scoured online databases, regional management records, vessel-tracking satellites, and historical records dating back to 1869 to produce the first comprehensive maps of global marine fishing over the past 150 years. The study doesnt account for the full history of fishing, of course, but it does reveal detailed patterns of fishing across countries, including differences in catch composition and fishing gear, for a much bigger period of history than previous records. Watson and Tidds reconstructed records also estimated the rates of illegal, unreported, and discarded catch.



Watson says examining fishing trends over such a long period offers a glimpse of how fishing has changed marine biodiversity. Looking back in time gives researchers a clearer idea of historical fish populations before they were heavily exploited by modern industrial fishing. This information can be used to assess the sustainability of modern fishing activity.



Its like playing a detective game, says Watson. Theres a lot you can do with these maps, from figuring out greenhouse gas emissions produced by fleets to seeing how fishing impacts wildlife.



Fisheries ecologist Chris Wilcox was not involved in the research effort but is already putting Watsons findings to use. Wilcoxs team at the Australian governments Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is using the data to investigate the link between fishing activity and seal entanglement. By examining fishing levels in regions where there are seal colonies, the researchers will be able to gauge whether discarded fishing gear is the main cause of seal entanglement.



Many organizations, such as Global Fishing Watch, keep an eye on large-scale commercial fishing. But Wilcox says Watsons maps reconstruct the difficult aspects, such as how much smaller vessels caught or the amount of illegal catch.



It has a lot of value for people who are trying to understand how fisheries are depleting ecosystems, explains Wilcox.



The findings show that before 1900, the United States, Canada, and Japan had the most active fisheries. Even still, landings were recorded in kilograms, not tonnes, and the majority of fish were bottom-dwellers and small pelagic species. After the turn of the century, the United Kingdom caught up, with recorded landings peaking in the 1930s and 1940s.



Technological change spurred a new era of offshore fishing in the first half of the 20th century as sails and oars were replaced with diesel and steam, enabling vessels to travel farther and withstand stormy seas.



While the Second World War slowed fisheries expansion, the industry rebounded to full force during the 1950s economic boom. The worlds first freezer trawler, the Fair Try, was launched in 1953 and paved the way for more distant voyages and global trading. Fleets began to trawl the seafloor and undertook long voyages to catch tuna, squid, and shrimp. Some poorer countries reduced their own commercial fishing and allowed foreign fleets into their waters. Japan, Peru, and Russia crept to the top of the list for global fisheries landings.



Today, China dominates. The country ramped up its global fleet in the early 2000s, its vessels roaming foreign waters more than its own. Technological advancements, such as sonar and radar, have enabled fishing vessels to track sea conditions and work through the night.



While industrial fleets are traveling farther and fishing deeper than a century ago, the number of fish caught has actually been falling since the 1990s. Watson says the reasons differ across the world. In some areas, fishing has been curtailed in the interest of sustainable management. In others, the sea has simply been overfished.



Global fisheries have evolved greatly over the past 150 years. According to Watson, the next 150 could see important changes, too. In particular, he sees a number of challenges. Demand for seafood may rise even further as food systems on land falter under climate change, he says. But if fuel becomes a more limited resource, fleets may not be able to travel as far offshore as they currently do. This may result in an expansion of aquaculture, which could place even more pressure on coastlines.



Were beginning to see how everything is connected, says Watson. Its not just about looking at where catch comes from, but the bigger picture of fishing and our dependency on it.

 Tula Foundation and Hakai Institute family

Theme(s): Communities and Organisations.Good news for Kenyan fishers as Uganda considers tariff review on Lake Victoria

August 27,2018 | Source: Businerss Daily

Ugandan authorities have hinted at repealing high fishing tariffs imposed on non-citizens to discourage fishermen from venturing in its waters in Lake Victoria.



Non-citizens fishing in Uganda's waters must part with an annual fee of Ush2 million (about Sh54,000) per vessel, according to the country's fishing regulations.



Uganda State minister for East Africa Community Affair Julius Wandera Monday said the review of the said tariff is right on schedule after its implementation more than two years ago.



It was a trial kind of regulation on the lake in terms of tariffs. The council of ministers on trade and finance is in Arusha (Tanzania) to discuss the common external tariffs they had drafted as a policy, said Mr Wandera.



The push for the review, he added has been topping the agendas of civil society groups, traders and other interested parties who said the fees are exorbitant.



Soon we will be announcing new measures that are agreeable to all member partner states especially on water and land tariffs that already exist and need review. If we agree on the details we will give it another period to see the successes of their implementation, he added.



The announcement is a welcome note for Kenyan fisher folk who last week appealed to the government to initiate fresh bilateral talks with Kampala to remove the fees.



However, it not yet clear whether Uganda authorities will go ahead with implementation of the tariffs after they gave fishermen one-month ultimatum to remit the fees of risk being arrested.



The deadline lapses on August 31.



Kenyan fishermen have been on the forefront opposing the fees and have on several occasions accused Ugandan marine officers of subjecting them to harassment by arresting them and ordering them to "eat raw fish.



These tariffs have limited our movement in the lake for fear of being arrested by Uganda marine officers. Such regulations defeat the spirit of East African Community, said Budalangi-based Omena Beach Management Unit Chairperson Felix Musee in an interview with the Nation last week.



Mr Tom Guda, the Chairman of Lake Victoria Beaches Association, last week promised to push for the review of the regulations in a bid to encourage a fair playing ground and promote cohesion.



The fees are said to have arrived at by both countries with Kenya being the first to enforce it.

 Nation Media Group

Theme(s): Others.Philippines to regularly import fish as part of conservation efforts

by Madelaine Miraflor

August 27,2018 | Source: Manila Bulletin

I dont see anything wrong with importation. Thats what Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Pinol said when questioned about the forthcoming importation of 17,000 metric tons (MT) of galunggong, which will be sold directly to local markets  the first time to happen since imported galunggong is normally meant for processing and canning purposes only.



To recall, the government recently allowed the importation of fresh, chilled, and frozen galunggong (round scad) to augment the local supply in the fresh markets as well as stabilize the prices.



And for the purpose of conserving the countrys fish supply, Pinol said in an interview that importation will now be a common practice at the fisheries sector.



Its part of fish conservation program. We really have to put up a system and importation is only one of them. We also have to develop our aquaculture and mariculture program, Pinol said.



The pending galunggong importation is set to take effect on September 1, just in time for the closed fishing season across different municipal waters. The closed season in the countrys major fishing grounds stretches from October to February.



Pinol said that during the same period next year, the country may import again as part of a long-term program the administration will implement and amid the declining fish supply.



This program, according to him, involves re-shaping what would comprise the countrys fish supply  which should only be 40 percent captured fish and 60 percent aquaculture and mariculture.



Pinols statement came at a time when a lawmaker said the decision of DA to bring in some P1.4 billion worth of galunggong imports is only a band aid solution.



It is a band-aid solution that does not really address the problem of falling fish production. It is a miserable supply side intervention, Buhay Representative Lito Atienza, the senior deputy minority leader, said.



The 17,000 MT of imported galunggong is expected to have a landed cost of P75 to P80 per kilo and would be sold directly in local wet markets.



What difference will 17 million kilos make? That is just equal to 17 million households consuming one kilo each in a day. Ubos na yan sa loob ng isang araw lang, Atienza said.



The best way for the government to fight off rising fish or food prices for that matter is by producing more fish and more food, he added.



But for the record, Pinol said that there is really no shortage of galunggong in the country. The problem is the fishermen couldnt catch them.



We are coming up with a new design for fishing boats that will help fishermen increase their catch as well as reach areas where they catch more fish, Pinol said.



In the meantime, the government may also allow bigger commercial fishing boats to enter certain fishing zones to let them catch what small fishermen couldnt.



The annual fishing ban was enforced by BFAR through a Fisheries Administrative Order mainly to implement the agencys fisheries resource management program.



For its part, BFAR assures that the importation and unloading activities will adhere to a stringent set of guidelines and will be strictly monitored by the BFAR and Philippine Fisheries Development Authority (PFDA).



More importantly, the general consuming public is assured that the imported galunggong will be unloaded only in BFAR accredited cold storage facilities and will undergo thorough inspection to ensure that the fish commodity that will enter Philippine markets are safe and free of harmful substances.

 2016 mb.com.ph | Philippine News

Theme(s): Fisheries Resources.Get AfricaFocus Bulletin by e-mail! Format for print or mobile Africa: Migration Reports Show Complex Realities AfricaFocus Bulletin

August 27, 2018 (180827)

(Reposted from sources cited below) Editor's Note "In the case of Africa, the very idea that the situation to be faced is a rapidly increasing migration crisis driven by a growing number of young men and women desperately trying to enter Europe denies the basic facts [such as that] the vast majority of Africans move within the continent; most Africans move for reasons of work, study and family; and most Africans living abroad are not from the poorest sections of their societies of origin." - UN Economic Commission for Africa, Situation Analysis The images of African migrants drowning in the Mediterranean or trying to cross the barbed-wire fences between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, while anti-immigrant politicians in the European Union rant against migrant "invaders," are real. But their prominence in the news is misleading, as made clear by reports by international agencies and scholars as well as news coverage by journalists willing to take the time to explore in greater depth. In fact, notes the report cited above and excerpted in this AfricaFocus Bulletin, "African migration is not necessarily essentially different from migration in and from other world regions. In fact, Africans are underrepresented in the world migrant population and Africa has the lowest intercontinental outmigration rates of all world regions." Moreover, as stressed in the latest report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development, cited below, migration and development as normal phenomena should be mutually reinforcing. Instead of trying to curb migration, both source and destination countries should be trying to maximize the benefits for both sides, while at the same time protecting both voluntary and forced migrants from human rights abuses. Increasing restrictions with walls and stepped-up policing of borders, argues a recent analytical book, are themselves fueling violence, in contrast to an approach that would regulate but not close off borders. [See Violent Borders, by Reece Jones, Verso Books, 2016. https://amzn.to/2PDu3fP] This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts from the two reports cited above, as well as suggestions for sources to follow for regular in-depth coverage of migration issues. Journalists face a difficult task in calling attention to crises while not reinforcing stereotypes. But readers also have the obligation to put the stories in context of deeper analysis. One example, of internal migration within Africa, illustrated below with a graphic and links to relevant sources, is the migration from West Africa to North West Africa (the Maghreb), not only as a route to Europe but also for education and employment within the Magheb. That migration, as with migration out of Africa, features both "normal" migration and the violence which comes from the attempts to curb migration by destination-country states. For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on migration, visit http://www.africafocus.org/migrexp.php ++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++ Sources for In-Depth News Reporting on Migration For articles that give background as well as first-hand reporting on migration, two regular sources to follow are IRIN News (http://www.irinnews.org/migration) and Refugees Deeply (http://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees). You can bookmark these sites and subscribe to regular email updates from either site. A selection of recent articles from the two sites shows the range of topics: Refugees Deeply, Aug. 16, 2018

Fear Dampens Hope Among Eritrean Refugees in Ethiopia

http://tinyurl.com/y987ymxs Refugees Deeply, Aug. 16, 2018

School Started by Refugees Becomes One of Ugandas Best

http://tinyurl.com/y83pd5lx IRIN News, Aug. 16, 2018

Returning from Libyan detention, young Gambians try to change the migration exodus mindset

http://tinyurl.com/y85ktsvz IRIN News, Aug. 7, 2018

Meet Baba IDP: the local hero making sure Boko Haram victims get healthcare

http://tinyurl.com/y8npyu2z Refugees Deeply, Aug. 2, 2108

Unlike Salvini, Italians Still Believe in Welcoming Strangers

http://tinyurl.com/ya74nuo9 IRIN News, July 19, 2018

From the hopeful refugee to the frustrated detainee, meet the real people stuck in Libya

http://tinyurl.com/y9r839h2 Refugees Deeply, July 10, 2018

Why Algeria Is Emptying Itself of African Migrant Workers http://tinyurl.com/y7l3hn8s IRIN News, July 5, 2018

Thousands of Sudanese fled Libya for Niger, seeking safety. Not all were welcome

http://tinyurl.com/y96wewa4 African Regional Consultative Meeting on the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration Addis Ababa, 26 and 27 October 2017 Draft report 1 Situation analysis Patterns, levels and trends of African migration United Nations Economic Commission for Africa http://www.uneca.org  Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/y9vgjake [Excerpts only  see full 33-page report for footnotes, graphs, and references.] This document has been drafted by Hein de Haas, and incorporates insights from the subregional reports prepared by Papa Demba Fall, Pierre Kamdem, Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, David Gakere Ndegwa and Ayman Zohry. Introduction 1. More than migration in other world regions, African migration is commonly portrayed as a phenomenon driven by poverty, violence and other forms of human misery. Media images and political narratives routinely portray African migrants as victims, who easily fall prey to unscrupulous smugglers and human traffickers who ruthlessly exploit their desperation to reach the European Eldorado. Images of rickety boats packed with African migrants and refugees arriving on European shores and the increasing death toll this involves add to the image of an increasing migration crisis. In the media, in policy and in some academic circles, a dominant narrative is that fast population growth and persistent poverty and conflict in Africa combined with environmental degradation and climate change threaten to lead to a possibly uncontrollable increase in the number of young Africans desiring to cross towards Europe and other overseas destinations (see Collier 2013). Such ideas of an African exodus tap into deep- rooted fears of an impending migration invasion that may well spiral out of control and that therefore needs to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. 2. The most common solutions for the perceived migration crisis proposed by Governments and international organizations typically consist of a blend of:

(a) Preventing unauthorized migration by [sic] fighting and combating smuggling and trafficking (through intensified border patrolling and policing in transit countries);

(b) Deportation or pressuring unauthorized migrants and rejected asylum seekers into voluntary return or soft deportation (Boersema, Leerkes and van Os 2014; Pian 2010) (through readmission agreements with origin and transit countries such as Libya, Morocco, Senegal and Turkey);

(c) Addressing the root causes of migration by reducing poverty and increasing employment in African countries (particularly through aid (Bohning and SchloeterParedes 1994), which has increasingly become conditional on collaboration with readmission of unauthorized migrants);

(d) Informing and sensitizing prospective migrants about the dangers of (unauthorized) migration and the arduous circumstances in Europe (through media campaigns, artistic events, and other activities (see Pelican 2012)); 3. Such narratives tend, however, to be based on a number of questionable assumptions about the nature and drivers of African migration, in particular, and migration from and towards developing countries more generally. In the case of Africa, the very idea that the situation to be faced is a rapidly increasing migration crisis driven by a growing number of young men and women desperately trying to enter Europe denies the basic facts that: The vast majority of Africans move within the continent.

Africa is the least migratory region in the world.

Most Africans move for reasons of work, study and family.

Most Africans living abroad are not from the poorest sections of their societies of origin.

Unauthorized overland and maritime journeys represent a minority of all moves.

Only a very small fraction of unauthorized migration can be characterized as trafficking (see Kihato 2017). 4. Such basic facts also make it clear that African migration is not necessarily different in its essence from migration in and from other world regions. The whole idea that African migration is somehow exceptional seems  largely unconsciously  to tap into European stereotypes and colonial ideologies about Africa as a continent of general disorder, violence and poverty, which partly served to justify colonial occupation, with Europeans intervening to impose order, peace and prosperity (see Davidson 1992). Such stereotypes perpetuate the idea that African countries somehow need to be helped to foster development and manage migration  which in practice often amounts to externalizing European political agendas aimed at an increased policing of African borders and the overall criminalization of migration and smuggling (Brachet 2005; Kihato 2017). That, in turn, often clashes with the desire of African Governments to liberalize internal movement and to proceed to the full implementation of the various treaties signed on the protection of migrants and refugees. 5. Furthermore, the idea that African prospective migrants need to be informed about the dangers of the journey, that they need to be rescued from the hands of smugglers and traffickers and that they would be better off if they had stayed at home, is based on the paternalistic assumption that most African migrants do not know what is in their own best interest. Many African (and other) migrants must deal with exploitative recruiters and employers and although many migrants expectations of life at their destination will remain unfulfilled, and notwithstanding the fact that thousands of migrants have died while crossing borders in recent decades (see Crawley and others 2016b; Perkowski 2016), the idea is, nevertheless, deeply problematic that African migration is a largely desperate and generally irrational response to poverty, violence and human misery at home. First, it reduces (poor, African) migrants to victims and denies their capability (their agency) to make reasoned and rational decisions for themselves. Second, it taps into stereotypes about Africa as a region of poverty, violence and general disorder in which a deepening humanitarian crisis is causing an increasing exodus of desperate young people from the continent. Such stereotypes about African misery migration continue to be fuelled by media images about the phenomenon of trans-Mediterranean boat migration and political narratives about an impending migration invasion. 6. Third, it misinterprets the nature and causes of African migration as essentially different and exceptional compared to migration elsewhere. This does not of course mean that poverty and violence are irrelevant for understanding African migration, but that there is a risk of pathologizing African migration as a largely desperate flight from misery and a response to destitution and population pressures. 7. Fourth, and most crucially, such representations of migration as the antithesis of development are based on flawed assumptions of the fundamental causes of this migration. In particular, they ignore increasingly robust scientific evidence that, particularly in low-income countries, processes of economic and human development tend to increase internal and international outmigration (Clemens 2014; de Haas 2010b; Skeldon 1997; Zelinsky 1971), 8. Such evidence upsets popular but misleading push-pull models, which predict that most migration should occur from the poorest communities and societies. This illustrates the need for a fundamental rethinking of the nature and causes of human migration. That is particularly relevant in the context of African migration, which is still predominantly cast in essentialist portrayals driven by sensationalist media images and political crisis narratives. To contribute to such an effort, this situation analysis aims to achieve an evidence-based understanding of the nature and drivers of African migration over the post-Second World War period. 9. The present report will start by reviewing the main patterns and trends of African migration over the past decades. While focusing on international migration, the analysis will not artificially ignore internal migration, based on the understanding that movement within and across borders are intrinsically interlinked (King and Skeldon 2010) and that they stem from the same processes of social transformation and development (de Haas 2010b). 10. The analysis will draw mainly on, first: our own analysis of available migrant population (stock) and migrant flow data, such as that obtained from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Determinants of International Migration project; second: it will draw on available empirical studies from African countries and also on the subregional reports that have been prepared for the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in concordance with this regional report (Fall 2017; Kamdem 2017; Kihato 2017; Ndegwa 2017; Zohry 2017). Where appropriate, however, this analysis will occasionally draw on evidence gathered in other developing regions or global analyses in order to assess the extent to which African experiences resemble  or differ from  more general evidence on the characteristics, patterns and drivers of human migration as well as the role that policies play in affecting these. ... Conclusion 56. The preceding analysis highlights interesting figures and trends on African migration. Although political narratives and media images focus on the purported exodus of Africans to Europe, the bulk of African migrants move within the continent. However, the overall intensity of intra-African international migration has remained stable in recent years. This stagnation of migration intensities seems to be related to the imposition of migration barriers which reduce unrestricted migration. Given the dominance of intra-African migration, it is appropriate that the migration discourse, policy responses and research interests should focus more on this form of migration. 57. The idea that African migration is somehow exceptional seems to tap into stereotypes. African migration is not necessarily essentially different from migration in and from other world regions. In fact, Africans are underrepresented in the world migrant population and Africa has the lowest intercontinental outmigration rates of all world regions. Africa has also re-emerged as a migration destination, particularly for Chinese workers and merchants as well as European skilled workers, retirees and other expats. The absolute number of international migrants living on African soil has grown from an estimated 20.3 million in 1990 to an estimated 32.5 million in 2015. 58. The share of African-born people living outside of the continent has shown a slight increase  from 1.1 per cent in 1990 to 1.4 in 2015. This increase is high and rising in absolute terms  although still relatively small in terms of the proportion of Africans in the global migrant population. This increase has, however, been largely due to legal, registered and thus orderly migration rather than to a rising, disorderly and potentially uncontrollable tide of 59. Although more research is needed to corroborate this hypothesis, the increasing policy focus on selection of skilled migrants by OECD countries has facilitated the emigration of educated and relatively well-off Africans, but visa requirements and border controls have decreased access of relatively poor Africans to legal migration opportunities, particularly to Europe. On the one hand, this seems to have increased their reliance on smuggling and unauthorized border crossings  the unauthorized status of migrants increases the risks of labour exploitation, discrimination, violence and other forms of abuse, which can sometimes evolve in situations of trafficking. 60. On the other hand, the limited opportunities for legal migration to OECD countries for lower-skilled workers seem to have partly stimulated the partial geographical reorientation and diversification of African migration to countries in the Gulf, China and elsewhere. Other explanatory factors behind this geographical diversification of African emigration may include the waning influence of (post-) colonial ties to Europe and the growing politico-economic and cultural influence of China and the Gulf countries in Africa as well as the more liberal entry regimes in the new destination countries. Destination Maghreb For a report on recent expulsions from Algeria, see "Inside Algerias Mass Expulsions of Sub-Saharan Migrants Aug. 7, 2018 - http://tinyurl.com/ydxao9or For a report analyzing the nuances of "Changing Migration Patterns in North Africa," May 2, 2018, see https://www.csis.org/analysis/destination-maghreb Economic Development in Africa Report 2018: Migration for Structural Transformation. UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), May 2018 http://unctad.org / Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/ybj28u8l Foreword Images of thousands of African youth drowning in the Mediterranean, propelled by poverty or conflict at home and lured by the hope of jobs abroad, have fed a misleading narrative that migration from Africa harms rather than helps the continent. The latest edition of the UNCTAD flagship Economic Development in Africa Report takes aim at this preconceived notion and assesses the evidence to identify policy pathways that harness the benefits of African migration and mitigate its negative effects. This year, 2018, offers the international community a historic opportunity to realize the first global compact for migration, an intergovernmentally negotiated agreement in preparation under the auspices of the United Nations. Our contribution to this historic process is the Economic Development in Africa Report 2018: Migration for Structural Transformation. Migration benefits both origin and destination countries across Africa. The report argues that African migration can play a key role in the structural transformation of the continents economies. Well-managed migration also provides an important means for helping to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, both in Africa and beyond. The report adopts an innovative, human-centred narrative that explores how migrants contribute to structural transformation and identifies opportunities for absorption of extra labour in different sectors across the continent. African migrants include from highly skilled to low-skilled persons, who migrate through legal channels and otherwise.These migrants not only fill skills gaps in destination countries, but also contribute to development in their origin countries. Children remaining in the origin country of a migrant parent are also often more educated than their peers, thanks to their parents migration. The connections that migrants create between their origin and their destination countries have led to thriving diaspora communities. They have also opened up new trade and investment opportunities that can help both destination countries and origin countries to diversify their economies and move into productive activities of greater added value. Contrary to some perceptions, most migration in Africa today is taking place within the continent. This report argues that this intra-African migration is an essential ingredient for deeper regional and continental integration. At the same time, the broad patterns of extra-continental migration out of Africa confirm the positive contribution of migrants to the structural transformation of origin countries. We believe this report offers new and innovative analytical perspectives, relevant for both long-term policymaking and for the design of demand-driven technical cooperation

projects, with a shorter time frame and will help Governments and other stakeholders in reaching informed decisions on appropriate migration policies in the context of Africas regional integration process. It is our hope that these findings will improve policy approaches to migration for African Governments, as well as for migration stakeholders outside the continent. Mukhisa Kituyi

Secretary-General of UNCTAD AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter. AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please write to this address to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about reposted material, please contact directly the original source mentioned. For a full archive and other resources, see http://www.africafocus.orgIllegal fishing crackdown on Cambodia's Chomrouk lake

by Or Sreypich

August 27,2018 | Source: Khmer Times

Fisheries administration officials and local authorities in Cambodia on Saturday cracked down on banned types of fishing along Chomrouk lake in Kampong Cham province and seized fishing nets, wooden poles and various types of fish, the provincial police said.



Provincial police chief Em Kosal said yesterday that the raid was launched following reports of people using banned items to fish on the lake in the provinces Kang Meas district.



Provincial agriculture department director Kim Savern said yesterday that cases of illegal fishing in Kampong Cham rise during the banned fishing period.



During this season, farmers take advantage of the high tides to fish, he said. But the methods they employ are illegal because they use banned items, like fishing nets and equipment that can ensnare small fish.



We are conducting checks in Kampong Cham province and find two or three cases daily where we advise farmers not to use such tools, Mr Savern added.



A provincial police statement yesterday said that authorities seized 29 fishing nets, 1,950 wooden poles, and 250 kilograms of various types of fish during Saturdays crackdown.



It added that the seized tools were burnt on the spot and all the fish were freed back into the lake.



Last week, Pursat provincial police and fishery administration officials cracked down on illegal fishing on the Tonle Sap lake and also seized equipment, including more than 5,300 fishing nets in Kandieng districts Raing Til commune.



Last month, Agriculture Minister Veng Sakhon ordered authorities to monitor and crack down on illegal fishing activities, especially on the Tonle Sap. He called on officers to increase enforcement and cooperate with provincial, city and district authorities.



According to a ministry report, there were 1,444 cases of illegal fishing during the first half the year, 206 fewer during the same period last year.

 2018 Khmer Times

Theme(s): Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods.Some airlines have a brand. Others don't think it's worth it. Getty Images

Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.

If I asked you to choose between flying the cattle car or the airline that's "Going for Great," which would you choose?

Oddly, a remarkable number of people choose the cattle car.

You see, that's how American Airlines CEO Doug Parker describes Southwest Airlines.

"Going for Great" is how he describes his own airline.

It's a fascinating juxtaposition, rooted, some might moot, in a confusion bordering on delusion.

Oddly, Parker has lately been trying to, well, mimic at least a little of Southwest's offering.

He's trying to standardize the configuration of his planes. Southwest only flies Boeing 737s that all feel the same.

Yet American's version means seat pitch (the distance between the back of one seat and the back of the one in front) that's down to 30 inches, reduced legroom even in First Class, no seatback screens, and bathrooms barely wider than Economy Class seats.

Here's something that rarely gets mentioned: Southwest has the same tiny bathrooms on its 737 MAX planes.

You don't, though, hear an outcry. That, as View from the Wing's Gary Leff recently pointed out, is because Southwest didn't make the rest of its plane inhospitable.

It didn't, for example, shrink its legroom to painful proportions.

Its seat pitch is 32 inches. And goodness, two inches on a plane can feel like two feet in real life.

It's easy to compare product features and conclude that some are better than others.

There's something more fundamental here.

It's the strategic attitude toward the customer.

For American, it's What can we get away with? For Southwest, it's How can we keep them coming back for more?

When American introduced its 737 MAX planes, Parker freely admitted he'd never flown on one.

He didn't understand why this would upset anyone, as if a CEO trying his new product wouldn't seem, well, a fundamental thing to do.

I was moved, therefore, when news seeped out that he'd finally flown on one--yes, in Economy Class--from Miami to Quito in Ecuador.

The airline offered me his review:

He said it was a nice main cabin experience--in line with U.S. carrier main cabin products with a couple of pleasant surprises. The overhead bins are large and it had a nice array of movies. But most of all, they had a great crew of Flight Attendants who kept customers happy.

If your strategic aim is to be "in line with U.S. carrier main cabin products," your ambition seems slight.

You're happy being Generican Airlines and trying to squeeze every single dime out of that strategy.

Would Southwest say it just wanted to be in line with its rivals? I wonder.

The airline understands the value not only of being different, but of using its points of difference to create a positive emotional bond with its customers.

It's inescapable to conclude that American's core approach favors lucre over anything else.

Southwest appreciates that the flow of lucre comes from customers who happen to be real human beings with feelings.

So if you make those human beings feel good, they're more likely not only to give you repeat business, but also to forgive you when things go wrong.

As I described when comparing American to Delta last week, some airlines have a brand identity that at least tries to focus on the customer, while other brands just, well, want the customer to show them the money.

Southwest doesn't charge baggage fees (for the first two bags). It doesn't charge change fees either.

Why? Because it knows that these things don't fit its brand character.

These things actually distinguish the airline and create a bond with humans who loathe the excessive nickel-and-diming so beloved by certain airlines.

American, on the other hand, seems to believe that any change, however painful, may be appropriate if it makes the airline money.

Recently, American's president, Robert Isom, confessed that the airline wouldn't improve things for customers unless it could make a profit from that particular thing.

The fact that American's executives are so open about their strategy is, in its way, charming.

They have extreme faith in their strong network, with dominant hubs in Charlotte and Dallas.

But when you're confronted with the choice of flying American and many other airlines--including Southwest--what would make you actively choose American, other than its network?

Not comfort. Not customer service. And, I suspect, not your affection for the brand.Modsy's office is lovely. That's a given.

Interior design is the startup's dog food--which, in accordance with Silicon Valley mores, it must eat.

Modsy makes software that helps independent designers craft personalized room-renderings, complete with product recommendations. The venture-funded company is in fast-growth mode; in 2017, Modsy's volume of orders increased 10 times over the previous year, and its number of customers grew about 500 percent. Since what it sells is interior design, it's no surprise that the company's almost 60 employees work in a San Francisco headquarters decked from door to door with thoughtful, spirited design. Shell chairs in a rainbow of gelato-case-worthy shades dot one room. Walls are adorned with geometric decals, carefully arranged from floor to ceiling. Tall plants or hanging sheaths of wallpaper draw the eyes upward. In one room--the bathroom--there's a gallery wall tribute to design pioneer Elsie de Wolfe.

When Modsy set out to design its own office, the company had recently raised $2.8 million in seed funding and was determined to stay frugal. The goal was to spend around $5,000 for furnishings and decor. With that tiny purse, it wouldn't be hiring a "starchitect," or constructing a three-story-tall living wall, as did Airbnb down the street. Instead, the company managed to outfit its first major headquarters itself, in an imperfect space, to perfectly suit its needs as a company. Modsy is a case study not only in how to pull together a stylish office on the cheap, but also how to really make it your own.

48 Hours to a New Office

Founder Shanna Tellerman incubated the idea for Modsy within Google Ventures and officially launched the design app to the outside world in 2015. At the time, her team worked in a house--a "live-work" situation.

Once the staff passed the 20-person mark, it was clear that cramming more desks into every corner, closet, and hallway would no longer cut it. So in 2016, Tellerman found an affordable sublet on the second floor of 121 Minna, formerly an industrial building.

Some of the team raised an eyebrow about the space initially. One employee recalls it had a "frat-house bedroom" vibe, thanks to large national flags hanging on the walls. Then there were the antiquated architectural quirks: a weird nook above the kitchen, a creaky freight elevator, and, mysteriously, a tiny attic tucked inside one closet.

In retrospect, it was the perfect challenge for an interior design startup. Once the lease was signed, the team moved out of the house in a dash. They had one weekend to decorate the new space. The following week, Modsy was scheduled both to debut its app to the public and to throw a big launch party for friends, family, partners, and investors. The strange new office with the frat-bedroom conference room had to look put-together--and look like Modsy--in two days.

The scrappy 28-person team made up of interior designers, artists, and style-minded engineers, dove in. "Design was really important to us, but we didn't want to be that Silicon Valley horror story of pouring all of our money into expensive furniture," says Alessandra Wood, the company's director of style.

They stayed on budget both by doing all the furniture assembly themselves and by scouring for deals. They found knock-off Eames chairs (pictured below) for roughly $125 for a set of four (the real thing sells for $450 per chair). A team-member scored coordinating antique tables on Craigslist for $100 each. The geometric wall decals came free, thanks to a partnership with Los Angeles-based wall graphic company Blik. Retailers who work with Modsy's designers also gave the company some free sample furniture.

Make a Plan--and a Layout

To make the process as efficient as possible, the Modsy team laid out the furniture virtually before moving it in. Using Modsy's own software, they 3-D modeled the seating arrangement for the common space, which had to do double duty as a cafeteria and all-hands meeting room. They also modeled out several seating nooks and conference rooms and furnished them using their service's own recommended products.

When a freelance designer uses Modsy's software to create a photorealistic model of the customer's room, she mocks up the space with real furniture and decor. The 360-degree rendering is zoomable, moveable, and entirely shop-able. Customers pay $59 or $149 per room, and the designer receives a substantial chunk of the fee. Modsy makes most of its revenue by referring customers to the retailers selling the products featured in the mock-up. So, the company's secret sauce is not its advances in 3-D photorealistic renderings, but rather nailing the customer's individual style preferences and suggesting the right products. Modsy does this by giving customers a style quiz and then categorizing the results into one of several "style genomes," such as "Atomic Industrial" or "Rustic Minimalist."

The new office space was a chance for the company to show off some of these popular style genomes. At the time of the 2016 move, "Mod Visionary"--a sort of minimalist, eclectic take on Mid-Century Modernism--was a customer favorite. So the team put together a typical Mod Visionary nook, complete with a deep purple wall, a designer couch sent to the company by partner Interior Define, and a black-and-white wallpaper called "Queen of Spain," sent by F. Schumacker. (The pattern apparently had been used in Mick Jagger's London flat.) They hung the beloved wallpaper on a dowel rather than applying it to a wall. This office was a sublease; they loved the paper too dearly.

In another corner, staffers assembled a vignette from the "Industrial Chic" genome, with a red bar-cabinet ($600) from West Elm and a colorful rug ($200) that several Modsy staffers have since purchased for their own homes. Now, with multiple Modsy-designed rooms of the sort typically served to a customer, the small staff was not only ready for their launch party--but they were really eating their own dog food.

What Really Makes a Cool Office?

Months after settling into their Minna digs, the team members still adored their new space. It wasn't necessarily for the style, though they were proud of the aesthetics. Their attachment to it was personal: each of them had put in the sweat and the creativity to make it what it was.

Employees genuinely liked being in the office, despite the long hours and complex challenges of growing an early-stage startup. Thursday nights you'll find much of the team working late and then gathering for "Retro," a team-building, game night/project presentation all-hands meeting. One recent Retro featured a Wheel of Fortune. On another night, there's office "curling"--pushing one another around on wheeled desk chairs. And there's frequently in-office karaoke (because: They have an in-office karaoke machine).

"We've used that central space for so many fun team events--it contains the feeling of the memories we've made and the fun we've had there," Tellerman says. "That's what actually makes you happy in a space."

Not that she wants her staff to get too comfortable. Among the many innovative policies Tellerman has developed for her staff is one that sounds at first blush like a productivity nightmare: Every few months, the entire seating chart is redesigned. Everyone moves.

"It's fun," says Victor Gama Sabbithi, the company's lead engineer for its 3-D team. He explained that with the rapidly growing headcount, roles change frequently enough that the quarterly shuffle is necessary. It serves another useful purpose: Teams that will be working together most intensively the following quarter are seated near each other.

After the first quarterly shuffle, Modsy's collections manager, Jacqueline Bott, noticed some subtle changes. "It really unlocked some of our ability to work together--fast," she says. "Everything felt a lot more collaborative."

Replicating the Magic

Now that Modsy has grown to nearly 60 people, soon it will be time once again to take down the wall decals, ditch the wobbly knock-off Eames chairs, and move into a more spacious office in San Francisco's South Park. Executives say it will be clean, bright, and newer construction.

"Every inch will be useful," says Tellerman.

Modsy's design-oriented employees are salivating at the prospect of a new office: It will be a fresh canvas, and much larger, at more than 8,000 square feet. An office-design committee is project-managing the move and soliciting ideas the company's own style team. They surveyed the needs of everyone in the company, asking questions like, Do you use video conferencing? Do you want more silence or more music? Do you ever use our white boards?

Some features of the old office will make the move--the karaoke machine is one. The fancy wallpaper is the other. In the new space, entire rooms will be devoted to each of the company's favorite styles, from Atomic Industrial to Rustic Warmth.

"I think it helps creativity to feel like you are moving into a different environment [when you go into a new room for a meeting or conversation]," says Elisa Marszalek, a senior creative stylist. "It's also fun to be able to do what we do for our customers for ourselves."

Modsy, now equipped with a total of almost $34 million in venture funding, is yet again working with a limited budget, which the company says was in the "low tens of thousands." Fortunately, there will be no need to move and decorate in a single weekend this time around. When the company moves on September 1, employees won't have to get up on ladders to apply decals, or spend their days off scavenging Craigslist for furniture deals.

Good morning family and friends. GR founder and Age of Autism founding Editor JB Handley has written a striking book called "How to End the Autism Epidemic," that we think will reach the moveable middle - those parents, grandparents, providers who have a niggling feeling "something" is going with our children, but haven't yet come to terms with possibility of vaccination as a cause. These folks are legion in numbers. They are smart, curious, concerned - but haven't taken the direct body blows that so many of us have with our kids in terms of critical health and developmental status. These are not the full pro-vaxxers in the media and on social media who will not budge. Nor as they they full anti-vaxxers who believe no one should ever accept any vaccination and want a complete moratorium. Both sides are entitled to their spaces on the bell curve.



Many loyal, appreciated AofA readers are staunchly against all vaccination, and we are happy to educate our readers with their knowledge and promote and share their work, views, etc. We acknowledge that MOST of the nation simply is not there. Folks will not leap from "Wait, there's a problem," to "OK, let's end the program." That said, we can speak to the moveable middle and push them toward vaccine choice, safety, full denial for their families if they so choose - and away from mandates, punitive laws and piling on more vaccines.

100% of proceeds will go to autism charities. Already ranked #1 in new books on Vaccinations, Autism & Asperger's Syndrome and Immunology, J.B. Handleys book How to End the Autism Epidemic is an eye-opening revelation and a must read! Pre-order your copy today: bit.ly/AutismEpidemic #defeatautismnow #cureautismnow #endautismnow #myautism #berniewasright #readthebook #theautismbook why would you #boycotthandley ?



JB's publisher is a Vermont company called Chelsea Green. They have been fearless in taking on this book and making it shine. And their publicity efforts rival the biggest publishers in America. They have gone full out with a series of memes, a "book a signing" program and much more. Jenny McCarthy is lending her time, talent and voice to the campaign to make How To End the Autism Epidemic a New York Times best seller. The book has to sell X copies in a finite time to make the list. And WHEN it does - the book goes on the list or we raise holy hell if they try to squelch its success.



So, head over to Google Drive to pick up a meme and start sharing! Contact JB via Facebook to participate in a book event at ANY bookstore in your area. Barnes and Noble, Books A Million, Independents. ALL of them. Here's his Facebook page.

Make sure you check out his blog: J.B. Handley is the father of a beautiful child with Autism. He and his wife co-founded Generation Rescue, a national autism charity, in 2005. He spent his career in the private equity industry and received his undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford University in 1991.

His first book, "How to End the Autism Epidemic," will be published in September 2018 by Chelsea Green Publishing and is available for pre-order on Amazon.Early onset Parkinson's disease cost Bill Evans his job in a placement agency and complicated efforts to grow Current Staffing, his basement-based startup. Then a cold call to Comcast landed the first of several blue-chip clients eager to work with a company whose founder is disabled. Here Evans talks about his lucky break, strategies for working around his Parkinson's, and plans to help others with disabilities find employment. --As told to Leigh Buchanan

In 2006, I was working for a staffing business in Connecticut when my hands started to shake. The doctors told me I had familial tremors--a common, benign movement disorder--and put me on medication. The medication caused depression. It slowed me down and interfered with my work.

Two years later, I learned I had been misdiagnosed. It turned out I have Parkinson's disease, which is very unusual in someone as young as 40. I stopped the wrong treatment and started the right one. The depression and slowness went away. But by that time, the damage to my career was done. The economy had crashed. For years, I'd been underperforming at my job. I found myself unemployed.

At my old job, I'd done work for the Pentagon. One of my contacts there had moved to a company in New York. One day, he called me and asked for help with some tough-to-fill tech positions. I found three great people in four weeks. When it came time to pay me, he asked, "What is your corporate tax ID number?" I said, "My what?" That is how my business started.

At first, I worked out of my basement, targeting companies that publicly state they make accommodations for people with disabilities. I landed a few clients but was barely making ends meet. If my son, who was a fussy eater, didn't want to eat what we'd bought with the week's budget, he didn't eat. No one should have to see that.

In early 2014, I cold-called Comcast and got L. Jay Burks, their manager of supplier diversity. The timing was perfect: Jay was scheduled to become the chairperson of the supply chain track for a nonprofit dedicated to disability inclusion. He wanted to prove that a company headed by someone with a disability could compete. Jay said, "Bill, you have been doing this for 20 years. You have convinced me you know what you're doing. I'm going to change your life. I am going to make you a tier one vendor for Comcast."

If you're a supplier for Comcast, other companies want to work with you. On the strength of that account, I've signed up The Hartford, Exxon Mobil, Center Point Energy, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Last year, I moved out of the basement and into an office.

People with disabilities represent a huge, underutilized pool of talent. So in addition to our specialty in IT staffing, we also help place members of that population. Sometimes I'll assist people even if they're not going to work for one of our clients. For example, I recently persuaded Amazon to remove the timing element from an online test to accommodate a job candidate who has PTSD and finds countdowns stressful.

I'm working on a spinoff business called Operation Able Inclusion that will put people with disabilities and their caretakers to work in call centers. Research shows companies can reduce the normal call center attrition rate by hiring such candidates and letting them work remotely with appropriate accommodation. The business plan won Microsoft's inaugural Infinite Perspective pitch competition. I am also talking to several Fortune 500 companies about building the first help desk where people with disabilities can call and get someone with the same disability to answer disability-related questions.

About half of Current Staffing's own employees have disabilities of some kind. I personally manage my Parkinson's by scheduling meetings for when I take my medication, which minimizes the shaking. I have an assistant, and there are several inexpensive tools that help me work. The speech-recognition software Dragon Naturally Speaking is phenomenal.

I'm a fifth-degree black belt and teach karate here in Southbury, Connecticut. Those lessons helped us survive financially when we were struggling. Now, there's new research showing that exercise can slow the effects of Parkinson's. So the fact I was forced to keep teaching is actually what made it possible for me to work. It's been a blessing in disguise.

When I call people, I have a standard line. I say, "I have Parkinson's disease. That makes it difficult for me to type and tie my shoes. On a positive note it is not painful, and it does not kill you early. Also, the shaking helps me keep my weight under control." That gets a laugh. I have just become a human being to the person I'm speaking to. I am no longer just a salesperson. And that is a big leap forward in the sales world.

EXPLORE MORE Inc. 5000 COMPANIESJohn Cho wont blame you if you have reservations about his latest film Searching. Though its narrative is traditional thriller fare, with the actor playing a father on the trail of his missing daughter, its a story told in a bracingly unusual manner  entirely within the confines of a computer screen. At first, the concept seemed implausible for Cho.

I was, like, Can this be a movie? he explains. Can this possibly be a movie? And, on that suspicion, I turned it down initially. Thankfully, he changed his mind  and has now become one of the genres greatest cheerleaders.

While Cho may not be a household name, youve almost certainly seen him in something. Perhaps you know him as Harold from 2004 stoner comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Or Sulu in the recent Star Trek films. As the horndog who popularised the term Milf in 1999s American Pie. Or as Steve in Justin Lin's excellent Better Luck Tomorrow.

Perhaps you recognise him from his countless TV roles, including How I Met Your Mother, FlashForward and Difficult People. Searching, however, is his biggest role yet and represents a watershed moment in cinema: hes become the first Asian-American to play the lead in a mainstream Hollywood thriller.

John Cho as Hikaru Sulu in the Star Trek reboot film series (Paramount Pictures)

The film itself also sits on a frontier. Yes, the internet may have been around for a while now, but Hollywoods lagged badly behind when it comes to visualising the role it plays in our lives. Indeed, filmmakers are still reliant on what Cho calls the over-the-shoulder of the typist shot: a close-up of an actor assertively hitting keys, saying out loud every word written. As drama, it just doesnt work, he adds. Searching is here to fix that dramatic rut.

Not that its the first of its kind, with the computer screen genre already fairly well-known from 2014s Unfriended and its recent sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web. Scroll back further and theres the popular 2013 short film Noah, which recounts a teenage breakup as spread over Skype, Facebook, and Chatroulette. Yet its hard to think of the formats use here as much more than a clever gimmick; it was down to Searching, and its director Aneesh Chaganty, to fulfil its potential to tell sincere, emotionally layered stories.

As a species, all these emotions that we used to experience, albeit exchanged face-to-face, are now happening inside the computer, Cho says, as he argues that Searching is boundary-breaking in Chagantys ability to communicate that shift on screen. What he did was go inside the computer so that he could then reproject it onto the big screen. And make those interactions inside the computer feel as big as they feel to us internally. Thats what I loved about it.

Cho (left) in American Pie (Universal Pictures)

However, Cho first received what was described to him as scriptment  something that, to me, was between script and prose, like novel-writing, a way to communicate the intricacies of Searchings onscreen action. Though invested in the story, he turned the project down simply on that basis that, I just didnt want to do it on a computer screen. It took a second meeting, in which Chaganty diligently walked Cho through his plans for the film, including the use of two cameras (one on his face, one looking at the screen), for Cho to finally be won over.

The best films of 2018 (so far) Show all 17 1 /17 The best films of 2018 (so far) The best films of 2018 (so far) The Guardians From its slow-burning beginning, The Guardians develops into an epic melodrama. Its a wartime story in which, for a change, the men are relegated to supporting roles. It follows in a tradition of French rural family sagas like Jean De Florette or Manon Des Sources. The landscapes and the changing seasons play as much of a part in the story as the main characters. The best films of 2018 (so far) Dark River Dark River offers little such consolation. It has some lyrical and delicate moments but the mood is generally overwhelmingly bleak and lugubrious. Incest and abuse dont leave much space for any comic interludes. This is a powerful film with a grinding intensity about it. Light relief it isnt but Dark River still has quite an impact. Alamy The best films of 2018 (so far) Zama Late on in Argentinean director Lucrecia Martels startling, highly original new feature, Zama, a character who has just had both his arms cut off, is advised to shove your stumps in the sand  if you dont bleed out, youll survive. Its a grisly, darkly humorous moment in a film that continually surprises us with both its brutality and its lyricism. The Match Factory The best films of 2018 (so far) The Breadwinner The most dispiriting aspect of this otherwise enrapturing Oscar-nominated animated feature is that its storyline still seems so current. The film depicts an Afghan society in which women dont have a face. It is set during the Taliban rule, which lasted from the mid-1990s until late 2001, but this doesnt feel like a period piece. Seventeen years after the Taliban were ousted from power in Afghanistan following the US invasion, the plight of women in the country appears hardly to have improved. GKIDS The best films of 2018 (so far) BlacKkKlansman Spike Lees work sometimes risks sensory overload. He fires off so many different ideas and storytelling styles that audiences can become bamboozled by his scattergun approach. BlacKkKlansman is one of his very best films because the digressions are as entertaining as ever but dont get in the way of the main story. AP The best films of 2018 (so far) Early Man Much of the pleasure in Aardman films has always lain in their gently ironic, Alan Bennett-like humour. They take very exotic characters and subject matter but then deal with them in a matter-of-fact fashion. They make a virtue out of their own relative modesty. Early Man isnt the flashiest animated feature that youll see this year but it is certainly the most likeable. The best films of 2018 (so far) Isle of Dogs Like all of Wes Andersons work, Isle Of Dogs is very stylised, very offbeat and characterised by its extremely dry and often ironic humour. This Japanese-set stop-motion fable is also gorgeous to look at  packed full of intricate visual detail. It deals with some weighty themes (ethnic cleansing, fascism and corruption) but does so in an idiosyncratic fashion. The best films of 2018 (so far) Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri Writer-director Martin McDonagh has a host of award-winning plays behind him but his movies havent always lived up to his stage work. This one certainly does. It shares some of the dark and nihilistic humour found in McDonaghs previous film, Seven Psychopaths. The best films of 2018 (so far) A Quiet Place In an era of wearisome poltergeist movies, haunted house stories and torture porn, A Quiet Place is a refreshingly pared-down and very original affair. Director John Krasinski relies on editing, sound effects and off-screen action to crank up the tension. We do see the creatures from time to time, sometimes even in extreme closeup. They are very grotesque, bigger versions of the polyp-like succubus which exploded out of John Hurts stomach in Alien. However, the most terrifying moments here come when the humans are waiting for them to appear, desperately hoping that they wont. Paramount Pictures The best films of 2018 (so far) Lady Bird Lady Bird is one of the best American coming-of-age films since Barry Levinsons Diner. Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, it offers an utterly winning mix of humour, poignancy and sharp-eyed social observation. Gerwig approaches her subject matter with the same tenderness and affectionate irony with which the adolescent Lady Bird regards Sacramento. Gerwig also shows Lady Birds heroism as the young heroine strives against the odds to become the very best version of herself she can be. A24 The best films of 2018 (so far) Phantom Thread If Phantom Thread is indeed Daniel Day-Lewiss final film as an actor, he is going out on a wondrously bizarre note. This must be the oddest film in his career, one in which he gives a typically commanding but very idiosyncratic performance. Almost everything here is jarring  but generally in a very positive way. The best films of 2018 (so far) First Reformed It is not so long ago that Paul Schrader seemed to be giving up on cinema. The American writer-director (whose credits include Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and Affliction) had taken to making movies like the sour Hollywood satire The Canyons with Lindsay Lohan and the cartoonishly violent Dog Eat Dog, shot cheaply, aimed at a VOD audience. The former had a montage of closed-down movie theatres. In interviews, Schrader struck a gloomy note about the future of the industry. This is why First Reformed is so refreshing. This is not just Schraders best film in a very long while. It is also a re-affirmation of the directors belief in the medium. Rex The best films of 2018 (so far) The Happy Prince Oscar Wilde goes to ruin in Rupert Everetts debut feature as director. Everett also wrote and stars in the film, giving a grandstanding performance as the Irish writer at the end of his life, after his release from prison, where he has been doing hard labour for gross indecency. This is a moving and surprising biopic that squeezes out every last drop of pathos from its subject matter. BBC Films The best films of 2018 (so far) Black Panther Black Panther is not only one of the most entertaining recent superhero films but has an intelligence and a political dimension that such inchoate offerings as Suicide Squad and Justice League completely lacked. It is an action movie which touches on Pan-Africanism and which owes as much to Malcolm X as it does to Batman or Captain America. Marvel Studios/Disney The best films of 2018 (so far) Sicilian Ghost Story Sicilian Ghost Story is a genre-bending affair that combines elements of teen romance, gothic psycho-drama and political thriller. It is loosely based on a true story of a boy called Giuseppe Di Matteo whose father, an ex-member of the Sicilian Mafia, turned grass against his erstwhile associates. The Mafia responded by kidnapping Giuseppe and keeping him in captivity for nearly 800 days. Altitude The best films of 2018 (so far) First Man First Man is all about understated heroism. Its affecting precisely because Armstrong (played with quiet intensity by Ryan Gosling) doesnt feel the continual need to boast about his mission. The film is a tearjerker but a very subtle one. AP The best films of 2018 (so far) Dogman Dogman is one of the best Italian films of recent times, a modern day neo realist fable that bears comparison with the great work of Fellini, Rossellini, De Sica et al. Its main character, the dog groomer Marcello (Marcello Fonte), is a wonderful creation: loveable, vulnerable, seedy and comic all at the same time. Curzon Artificial Eye

The next obstacle was his own performance. By his own admission, the 46-year-old actor sits within a middle generation of technological acceptance, especially when it comes to existing naturally in front of a webcam. Hes not quite the Luddite his parents are (They dont even remember to put the camera in a position so that we can see them. Theyre so unaccustomed to the idea of being filmed that they kind of treat Facetime as television). But neither is it second nature to him, as it is to his co-star Michelle La, who plays his daughter Margot. Im very uncomfortable in real life in front of a webcam, he says. So, I sort of had to trick myself. I was playing it like everyone was in the room with me. But, thats not quite the reality.

Perhaps its an offshoot of his middle-generation mentality, but Chos larger perceptions of technology are refreshingly balanced  hes not quite embittered himself yet into thinking the world is one massive Black Mirror episode. One would assume Searching, and its various shocking revelations, would come as a stern warning about our online behaviour. For Cho? He actually picked up a few handy tips, having never realised that laptops can be used to send text messages (hed been laboriously reaching for his phone each time, but no more).

Hes appreciative of how his parents can now connect to relatives and friends in South Korea, sharing grandkid pictures over the ocean, while also remaining wary of the internets failure to judge facts, or these fake news stories and conspiracy theories that are going around on the internet. He adds: Technology is neutral, but that neutrality itself is problematic.

Wherever technology may take us in the future, however, Cho sees Chagantys work as a vital step in how those changes will be reflected on screen. I told Aneesh, as soon as I saw the movie for the first time, that I was blown away, because he added to the vocabulary of cinema, he says. And its just so hard to do in 2018. What hes done is show people that this is possible and, when that does happen, I think it becomes a part of the toolbox of filmmaking.

'Searching' is in UK cinemas from 31 August.Cant decide what to wear?

Uniqlo, the Japanese fast fashion chain, has a solution: a chatbot that gives clothing recommendations based on human input, as well as your purchasing history  and your horoscope.

The technology, which has been years in the making, is just one example of the extremes that retailers are going to as they try to build computer algorithms that can intuit the intangibles of fashion.

Recommended Luxury brand Helmut Lang hires elderly women for new fashion campaign

Instead of making something thats purely mechanical  you bought this last month, so you might like this  were infusing humanity into the process, said Rei Inamoto, founder of Inamoto & Co, the New York-based firm behind Uniqlos technology. When somebody asks, What should I wear? theyre looking for a personalised answer.

As retailers race to offer customisation and convenience, they increasingly turn to stylists and personal shoppers to win over consumers and to help fine-tune algorithms that might give them an edge in the $3trn (2.3trn) global fashion industry.

Stitch Fix, the online styling subscription service, has assembled about 3,700 remote stylists  from stay at home mums to full time lawyers who fancy themselves fashionistas  to select clients outfits based on a combination of sales data, artificial intelligence and their own taste. The pay: $15 an hour.

Meanwhile, tech giant Amazon has hired dozens of fashion designers, photo editors and retail workers in recent years to help shape its proprietary software. The companys researchers have also developed an algorithm that analyses images of clothing and then designs similar items, according to an MIT Technology Review report. (Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)

Companies are realising that you can squeeze even more juice out of the orange if you combine data analytics with the human stylists, said Wendy Liebmann, chief executive of consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail. We all know that artificial intelligence is a valuable tool, but it so often misses the nuances.

***

Sarah is in her mid-30s, lives in Massachusetts and works in client services. Shes looking for summer workwear that can transition into the fall.

She likes: polka dots, floral and lace.

She dislikes: stripes, jackets and black.

Rachel Gee, a preschool teacher turned Stitch Fix stylist, knew all of this the moment she glanced at Sarahs profile. The companys algorithms have distilled Sarahs body measurements and clothing preferences (which she provided when she signed up for the service), as well as three years worth of purchases, into easy to read data points. Sarah has long legs and a short torso, and she tends to spend $50 to $100 per item.

Gee scrolled through her clients Pinterest page, which is full of bohemian styles, embroidered details and geometric prints, then checked her Twitter and Instagram accounts for more clues.

I can see shes very romantic and edgy, stylewise, Gee said. Shes outdoorsy and has a casual vibe. I feel like I know her  like shes my friend, almost.

Now, Gee said, she was ready to pick five items to send to her client.

The algorithms top suggestion was a pair of distressed denim shorts. Not today, Gee said. She sent Sarah a pair of shorts the week before, and, plus, Sarah was looking for officewear.

She found an olive green Calvin Klein dress with a subtle floral print. The computer told her that Sarah loves Calvin Klein and predicted a 51 per cent success rate. Were more than halfway there, Gee said. Thats a pretty high probability that shes going to keep that dress.

She picked four more items: a navy pencil skirt, a magenta Calvin Klein blouse, an off-white knit blouse and a fun statement necklace with stones. Each item cost between $50 and $100.

This whole process is like a partnership between me and the data, said Gee, 29, who lives in San Francisco and now works full time for Stitch Fix.

Pickers load their carts with boxes before heading out into the rows of clothing to pack orders (The Washington Post/Nick Otto)

Stitch Fix, with its 3,700 stylists, had only 100 five years ago. Executives say they look for workers with a background in fashion, styling, customer service or retail. (They also want someone with solid writing skills, including grammar and punctuation, a spokeswoman said, because stylists send personalised notes in each shipment.)

As we learn more about each client over time, both our algorithms and stylists become more accurate, said Meredith Dunn, the companys vice president of styling and client experience. Our stylists read and digest feedback from clients and our algorithms ingest that data, too.

The company has also used that data to create 18 private-label brands to fulfill consumer demand for items such as funky printed dress shirts and sexy (but timeless) first-date wear.

Some in the industry, though, say the model isnt sustainable. Working with a personal stylist at Bergdorf Goodman or Saks Fifth Avenue is one thing; relying on machine learning and stylists in far off cubicles is another, and it seems like a stretch, said Milton Pedraza, chief executive of the Luxury Institute, a market research firm in New York.

Algorithms and one-size-fits-all stylists keep costs down, but it doesnt mean that theyre particularly good matchmakers or can understand tastes and lifestyle, Pedraza said. Having a stylist is about creating a personal relationship, and that just doesnt happen if someone is styling you from a computer on the other side of the country.

***

Andrea Alder was a year out of fashion school when an Amazon recruiter approached her with a top secret job offer: to train the companys machines to become arbiters of style.

For the next year, she spent 40 hours a week, sometimes more, sitting in a cubicle and voting on peoples outfits. Her mission was twofold: to provide real-time feedback to consumers who sought Amazons advice on what to wear and to teach the companys algorithms how to assess clothing for fit, trend, silhouette and, eventually, style. (The outfit compare feature on Amazons app allows Prime members to ask for guidance on which of two outfits looks better. Trying to decide between a blue blouse and a purple one? Amazon promises human judgment within minutes.)

Stitch Fix has grown massively over the last five years (The Washington Post/Nick Otto)

Alder began her shift at 5.30am most mornings, condensing her fashion education and styling experience into split-second decisions. Shed see two photos side by side, and quickly vote on which outfit looked better. There was no time to ask questions (Was this stuffy suit on its way to a corporate job or a wedding?) or to explain her decisions  either to the person she was styling or the algorithm she was training.

The way the machine learns is through a lot of repetition, said Alder, 24, who like many of her peers signed a nondisclosure agreement before taking the job. Everything has to be very simple. Its like explaining to a little kid why something works or doesnt.

Alder found a certain rhythm to her work. Demand for outfit input swelled at certain times, like right before work and in the run up to New Years Eve. She learned to be quick  and deliberate  in her judgments.

But she was wary of what her split-second decisions might be teaching Amazons machines about fashion and style.

Machines want black and white, and so much of fashion is subtle, she said. If you pick a dress over a pair of pants, you dont want the algorithm to think its because dresses always look better than pants. So how do you make it understand that this particular dress fits well and is on trend while the pants are outdated?

Amazons hope, she said, was that hiring enough stylists with different tastes  and backgrounds and locations  would help create a universally trendy master stylist.

(An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment on the companys proprietary algorithms, but she confirmed that dozens of stylists are helping fine-tune the machines understanding of things such as style, current trends, fit and colour.)

In the end, Alder said her position at Amazon didnt allow as much creative freedom as she had hoped.

Being a stylist, whats fun about my job is getting to have a voice, she said. When youre at a desk just telling people what to wear, you dont have a connection to the customer.

When her contract ended last summer, she got a job as an editorial stylist for the e-commerce site Zulily. She also works as a personal stylist for private clients.

Working at Amazon made me excited for the future of technology, she said. But it also made me realise that Id rather do more hands-on work.

 The Washington PostFrom foundation pens to ballpoints, neon highlighters and mechanical pencils, we all love stationery, but why?

Perhaps its the back-to-school, comforting feeling that youve got your life somewhat organised or the endless creative possibilities that come when youre armed with a beautiful new pen and a pristine pad of paper.

It makes sense then that the beauty world should tap into a concept that promises to unleash your artistic potential.

Recommended Three new beauty buys that will leave you smelling like summer

An industry that loves itself a bit of nostalgia, cosmetic brands have started taking inspiration from the stationery cupboards of our school days. Remember those four-colour retractable pens, where you clicked down each shade? Well, theres now a makeup version of that.

A product that wouldnt look out of place in your pencil case, Benefits latest launch, the Brow Contour Pro, is arguably the brands most genius invention yet.

The pen takes the same concept as the novelty school supply and applies it to your beauty routine by replacing the barrels of ink with four different shades of soft pencil.

Available in five different shades, each pen contains a lighter shade, deeper shade, highlighter and definer to help you carve out and contour your brows.

Benefit Brow Contour Pro, 28.50, Benefit

Earlier this year, Clarins also launched a similar product with a multi-functional pen that contains three colours of eyeliner and a lip liner.

Depending on the type of look youre going for there are three different versions to choose from. Harmony 1 includes black, blue and green eyeliners, as well as a deep nude lip liner, while Harmony 2 offers a more classic look with black, grey and brown eyeliners, and a bold red lip liner to finish.

Clarins 4-Colour Pen, 28, Clarins

A summer version called Miami is also available with black, turquoise and plum eye liner, and a bright pink lip liner.

The beauty worlds obsession with back-to-school staples doesnt stop there though. Launching exclusively on Asos in June, Crayola introduced its very own cosmetics range inspired by its line of brightly coloured crayons.

Crayola, Colour Crayon Trio, 18, Asos

Offering an impressive 58-pieces, which are all vegan, the range includes everything from face crayons and cheek crayons to colour-changing lip crayons, highlighters and mascaras available in a total of 95 shades.

Even better, the colour names are all taken from shades of Crayola crayons including Fuzzy Wuzzy, a dusty rose, Tumbleweed, a cool beige, and Outer Space, a metallic slate blue.Meghan Markle was a bona fide fashionista long before she met Prince Harry, but since marrying into the Royal Family in May, the former Suits star has been thrust into the sartorial spotlight with supreme force.

Now, the Duchess of Sussex has become a global style icon, renowned for her contemporary and elegant aesthetic, which is characterised by an orbit of slim-fitting pencil skirts, stiff collegiate shirts and modish millinery.

Such is her reverence within the fashion industry, that many have taken to speculating as to whom Markle is drawing on for inspiration, with notable guesses including her former Suits character, Rachel Zane, and the late Princess Diana.

However, according to fashion stylist Alex Longmore, theres only one person whose style the 37-year-old is really comparable to: Angelina Jolie.

Her wardrobe choices are very similar to Jolies, sometimes identical, Longmore tells The Independent, referring to the Hollywood actor as the royals style muse on her website.

The cut, the style and even the colour scheme are so Angelina, she continues, identifying both womens preference for nude high heels, tailored coats and killer black ensembles for public events.

Angelina Jolie pictured wearing a tuxedo suit at the BAFTAs in 2014 (Getty)

Even Markles beauty choices resemble Jolies, Longmore continues, with both often sporting natural make up and free-flowing up-dos to offset their most glamorous outfits.

She adds that Jolies style is one of the most sought-after in her experience as a stylist, with clients often naming her as their sartorial icon.

The fact that Angelina is a respected humanitarian, like Markle, might also have something to do with the new royal wanting to emulate her fashion choices, Longmore suggests.

Markle was pictured wearing a very similar trouser suit in Dublin in July. (Getty)

I think its what Angelina represents as a woman that Meghan is wanting to emulate.

She is taken seriously as an actress, is a humanitarian and is exceedingly well respected, she continues.

Longmore adds how Markles style couldnt possibly be inspired by her former Suits character due to sheer economics.

Markle opted for a white coat by Line the Label in her official engagement photos (Getty)

Her character was a paralegal secretary just out of law school who categorically could not afford the designers Meghan wears, such Roland Mouret and Givenchy, Longmore explains.

Jolie arrives at the Irish Premiere of 'Alexander' at the Savoy Cinema in 2005 in Dublin wearing a white coat that is similar to the one worn by Markle (Getty)

With pieces costing thousands of pounds, she adds that these brands hardly conform to the budget of a paralegal summer intern.

One similarity between the two, she adds, is the conservative aesthetic that undercuts both of their dress senses.

I think this is down to the fact that they are both working women who have to look a certain way for the job, Longmore explains.

Other parallels between the two are the distinct lack of patterns in their outfits and a penchant for streamlined tailoring.

However, as for replications of exact outfits, she adds that this is somewhat lacking: It may coincide that they both wear a pencil skirt but really that is about it.

Since moving to the UK and marrying Prince Harry, Longmore explains that Markle favours showing off her shoulders and waist and and has done so for practically every royal engagement so far.

Yes, her style has become more conservative like Rachels, but it is infinitely more polished and glamorous, she says.

Rachel Zane could only dream to emulate the new Duchess of Sussex style.A trendy pub is selling the countrys most expensive draft pint - available for a pricy 22.50.

Speedway Stout is sold by The Craft Beer Co, which has bars across the UK and sells the stout for more than five times the cost of an average beer.

Fortunately, it packs a punch, as the US-brewed stout is 12 per cent alcohol by volume (ABV).

Recommended Beer costs four times less in Russia than England

Per millilitre, the stout works out as more expensive than a bottle of luxury Belvedere vodka - which cost 45 each.

According to a barman in the chains Old Street pub, the beer is so costly because of its ingredients.

The beer, which is made in California by San Diego-based AleSmith Brewing Company, contains Blue Mountain Coffee from Hawaii as well as other expensive ingredients that give it its black colour, thick, syrupy consistency, and coffee-flavoured taste.

However, you dont need to order an entire pint - as the bar is happy to serve a more affordable third of a pint.

This is the most expensive pint (SWNS)

Martin Hayes, managing director of The Craft Beer Co, said: "We sell the AleSmith Speedway Stout Hawaiian Special Edition by the 1/3 pint as standard.

"We do not stop people buying a 1/2 or even full pint should they wish, in the same way we do not stop people buying two or even three pints of standard strength lager.

"When we import into the UK and showcase some extremely rare and unusual beers that tend to be incredibly high in ABV - they do come at a premium prices."

The beer is brewed in California (SWNS)

AleSmith brewery in San Diego, California, USA, invented the stout, with hints of chocolate and malts as a flagship export brew.

According to the AleSmith website, the brews ominous, pitch-black appearance juxtaposes with the fine carbonation and creamy mouthfeel that make it very smooth and surprisingly easy to drink.

The beer is black and coffee-flavoured (SWNS)

Another bonus is the lasting power of the beer - as the website states: "This beer ages very well and will continue to mature for many years to come."

In defence of the price, Martin added: "Being the original Craft Beer focused pubs in London, our business is curation, offering people an unmatched choice with unmatched hospitality and knowledge.

It has a surprisingly smooth taste (SWNS)

"We offer people a huge choice and our prices are always carefully calculated and incredibly good value."

The poshest beers Show all 10 1 /10 The poshest beers The poshest beers Budweiser Budweiser, famous for its bullfrog adverts, came in 5th. 38 per cent of those who buy the beer are middle class. Spencer Platt/Getty Images The poshest beers Peroni Italian beer Peroni topped the list, as 50 per cent of its customers are middle class Jason Carter Rinaldi/Getty Images for Peroni The poshest beers Heineken Dutch beer Heineken came second. 45 per cent of its customers are middle class. Getty Images The poshest beers Kronenbourg 1664 Tastemaker Alex James joins the celebrations of the 350th anniversary of the first Kronenbourg brewery at Le Cafe Du Marche Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Kronenbourg The poshest beers Beck's Beck's, a German beer, came 4th with 38 per cent of its customers being middle class The poshest beers A Belgian beer, Stella Artois came 6th with 36 per cent Mark Renders/Getty Image The poshest beers 35 per cent of the customers of Dutch beer Grolsch are middle class Piutus/Flickr CC The poshest beers Fosters lager Australian beer Fosters came in 8th. 33 per cent of its customers are in the AB social group GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images The poshest beers Carling 31 per cent of Carling customers are middle class Graeme Robertson/Getty Images The poshest beers Carlsberg came join last with Carling, with 31 per cent. Niklas Morberg/ Flickr CC

The average price of a pint of beer in London was marked at 5.20 in 2018 - but nationwide that figure is 4.40.The sun made a last-minute appearance to shine on the worlds second-biggest street party, attended by more than a million people over the bank holiday weekend.

But police made more than 370 arrests at this years Notting Hill Carnival and Monday night was marred after a man was stabbed, receiving non-life-threatening injuries at around 8.10pm in Ladbroke Grove.

Scotland Yard also said 30 officers were injured in the line of duty.

During the event, revellers also fell silent for 72 seconds to pay their respects to the 72 victims of the Grenfell Tower fire.

Musicians set down their instruments and sound systems were turned off briefly to honour those who died in the blaze last year.

Tributes were held at 3pm on each day of the carnival to mark the tragedy, which unfolded minutes walk from the parade route.

The fire, Britains deadliest on domestic premises since World War Two, swept through the 24-storey Grenfell Tower in North Kensington in the early hours of 14 June last year.

Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Show all 54 1 /54 Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures PA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AP Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Reuters Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AP Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures PA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Carnival goers brave the heavy rain during the Children's Day parade PA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures The crowd pauses for 72 seconds silence in remembrance of all those lost in the Grenfell Tower fire at the Red Bull Music Academy Sound System at Notting Hill Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Dancers brave the heavy rain during the Children's Day parade at the Notting Hill Carnival PA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Revellers dancing to music following the Children's Day parade PA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Images Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Images Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Images Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Images Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Images Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Images Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Getty Images Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Revellers take part in the Notting Hill Carniva Reuters Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Early morning revellers celebrate Jouvertin Ladbroke Grove Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Performers take part in the Notting Hill Carnival Family Day EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Dancers perform during the Children's Day parade PA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Reuters Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Reuters Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Reuters Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures PA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Police march before the Notting Hill Carnival Family Day EPA Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures AFP/Getty Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures Reuters Notting Hill Carnival 2018  in pictures EPA

Some carnival-goers wore green, a colour that has come to be associated with Grenfell, while street art and posters were also on display in the Notting Hill area.

However, not all in attendance appeared to get the message about the tribute, as the party continued in pockets despite music being turned off with announcements barely audible.

And on Sunday, the silence was broken at the Rampage sound stage, just off Colville Square, with cheers, whistles and the voice of the late Aretha Franklin singing Respect.

In total Officers detained 156 people on drugs offences, 69 on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon and nine on suspicion of sexual offences. Among the items seized were knives, a metal pole and a taser.

Last year some 313 arrests were carried out.

Notting Hill Carnival Gold Commander Dave Musker said: We would like to thank all those who took to the streets to celebrate everything that the carnival stands for, in a kind and considerate manner.

However Monday night was marred by the news of a non-life-threatening stabbing at around 8.10pm in Ladbroke Grove. Thankfully this was the only incident of this nature throughout the whole weekend.

Police were operating with enhanced stop-and-search powers in a bid to crack down on violence.

I am confident that the Section 60 order imposed yesterday prevented these dangerous items being brought to carnival, and based on the intelligence at my disposal, I consider it proportionate and necessary to ensure a safe carnival today, Commander Musker added.

The bank holiday weekend party was policed by almost 7,000 officers on Monday, the highest police presence at the carnival in six years.

Additional reporting by agenciesCampaigners for a fresh Brexit referendum have urged supporters not to damage or undermine Jeremy Corbyn, as they bid to win Labours crucial backing.

The Labour leader has been targeted by some opponents of leaving the EU who believe his acceptance of Brexit stands in the way of the party signing up to a new public vote  a potentially decisive shift.

The clash will come to a head at Labours annual conference next month, when up to 200 local party branches will attempt to make a further referendum official party policy.

Now a leaked memo from the Peoples Vote has told supporters: This campaign is not about Jeremy Corbyn and we must not  will not  use it to damage or undermine the partys leadership or attack them personally.

Penned by the groups head of communications, Tom Baldwin, it comes amid growing confidence that there will be a showdown at Labours conference in Liverpool.

The ruling body of the grassroots pro-Corbyn group Momentum will meet on Saturday to decide whether to canvas opinion, after more than 4,000 members signed a petition calling for a conference vote.

The pressure illustrates a growing clamour from Labour members within Mr Corbyns base on the left of the party, as well as among many mainstream MPs.

Pro-referendum motions are being considered by more than 200 constituency Labour parties and have already been passed for submission to conference by at least 13, Momentum says.

People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Show all 30 1 /30 People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Rex People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty Images People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal A young protestor shouts as she takes part in the People's Vote demonstration against Brexit Getty Images People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Reuters People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal A protester's pro-EU t-shirt EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty Images People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Gina Miller and Caroline Lucas EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Tens of thousands of people march through London EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EPA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Demonstrators at the People's Vote March Getty People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal 'Two months too young to decide on my future' REUTERS People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal A young girl joins in the march PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal An EU flag is draped across the statue of Winston Chruchill in Parliament Square REUTERS People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal AFP/Getty Images People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Vince Cable MP, Pro-EU campaigner Gina Miller, Tony Robinson and Caroline Lucas MP join with crowds PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Crowds gather on Pall Mall PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal A man resembling Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, joins EU supporters Reuters People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Reuters People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal People gather in Trafalgar Square REUTERS People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal Pro-EU campaigner Gina Miller and Tony Robinson PA People's Vote march  demanding vote on final Brexit deal EU supporters, calling on the government to give Britons a vote on the final Brexit deal, participate in the 'People's Vote' march REUTERS

Labour hopes to force Theresa May into another general election if her Brexit deal is rejected by parliament this winter, or if she fails to strike any agreement at all.

However, the party has been edging closer to backing a referendum, with both John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, and Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, insisting it must remain an option.

Significantly, polling has found strong support among Labours target voters with 59 per cent of non-supporters who might or would seriously consider getting behind the party favouring a fresh referendum.

Mr Baldwins memo, seen by the BBC, stresses that the tone of the Peoples Vote campaign will be crucial to its success in winning Labour backing.

It emphasises that whatever views supporters have about the overall direction of the Labour Party, the campaign should not be used to attack Jeremy Corbyn personally.

The Independent is joining forces with the Peoples Vote to jointly stage a rally in London on 20 October, called The Peoples Vote and The Independent March for the Future.

More than 712,000 people have signed our Final Say petition to give the final decision on any Brexit deal to the British people, while around 215,000 are backing the very similar Peoples Vote campaign.

However, the push was strongly criticised today by Andy Burnham, Labours mayor of Greater Manchester, who argued it would deepen that rift in the country.

My frustration with those leaping to a second referendum is it further inflames this idea of an arrogant political class which isnt listening, and isnt dealing with the issues that gave rise to the referendum in the first place, Mr Burnham told the Politico website.Emmanuel Macron has dealt Theresa May a major blow by rejecting the PM's plea to rescue her Brexit plan, ruling out any compromises that risk the EU unravelling.

In his first response to their emergency talks, the French president said he respected the UKs decision to leave the bloc  but vowed to protect the EUs integrity at all costs.

The comments appear to be a severe setback to Ms Mays hopes that the pairs surprise talks earlier this month could achieve a breakthrough to rescue her beleaguered Chequers proposals.

Significantly, No 10 had refused to say whether any progress had been made, at an island fortress off the French Mediterranean coast  beyond describing it as a good meeting.

Speaking to Frances diplomatic corps, Mr Macron showed no sign of breaking ranks  in a speech in which he also lashed out at Donald Trump's aggressive isolationism.

France wants to maintain a strong, special relationship with London but not if the cost is the European Union's unravelling," he told the gathering of ambassadors.

Brexit, Mr Macron said, is a sovereign choice, which we must respect, but it can't come at the expense of the European Union's integrity.

Downing Street played down the implications, insisting: We remain confident of securing a good deal that is firmly in the interests of both the UK and the EU.

But Ian Murray, a Labour MP supporting the Peoples Vote campaign for a fresh Brexit referendum, said Mr Macrons response had left the Chequers plan dead in the water.

It is filled with contradictions and can clearly satisfy neither her own MPs nor our European negotiating partners, Mr Murray said.

Persisting with the Chequers car crash, and praying for a last-minute change of heart from the EU, is not a credible negotiating strategy. It simply increases the chances of a disastrous no deal Brexit.

And Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrat Brexit spokesman said: The prime ministers ridiculed Chequers deal has been given its verdict. It is a no in the UK, and a 'non' in France. It is 'nul points' from Macron.

"Theresa May is now fast running out of options, leaving the UK facing the harsh consequences of her Brexit mess.

Brexit casualties Show all 10 1 /10 Brexit casualties Brexit casualties Andrea Jenkyns - Resigned from Parliamentary Private Secretary at the ministry for housing, communities and local government role May 2018 - The Morley and Outwood MP said: We want to see a new relationship with Europe, with a new model not enjoyed by other countries  nothing that leaves us half-in, half-out. And in order to achieve this, we need to leave the customs union. Ms Jenkyns also said she wished to dedicate more of her time to Parliaments influential Exiting the European Union select committee, after a series of unbalanced reports produced by MPs PA Brexit casualties David Davis - Resigned from Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union role July 2018 - quit following a major row with May over her plans for post-Brexit relations with the EU. Davis resignation letter said: As you know there have been a significant number of occasions in the last year or so on which I have disagreed with the Number 10 policy line, ranging from accepting the [European] Commissions sequencing of negotiations, through to the language on Northern Ireland in the December Joint Report. At each stage I have accepted collective responsibility because it is part of my task to find workable compromises, and because I considered it was still possible to deliver on the mandate of the referendum, and on our manifesto commitment to leave the Customs Union and the Single Market. I am afraid that I think the current trend of policy and tactics is making that look less and less likely. He went on to argue that the general direction of Ms Mays policies would leave the UK in at best a weak negotiating position, and possibly an inescapable one. AFP/Getty Brexit casualties Steve Baker - Resigned from Minister at the Department for Exiting the European Union role July 2018 - Mr Baker, a key Tory figure in the Leave campaign, was David Daviss main lieutenant at Dexeu, and was hailed as courageous and principled by other Brexiteer Tories as he also left. Reuters Brexit casualties Boris Johnson - Resigned from Foreign Secretary role July 2018 - resigned over May's Chequers plan. In his resignation letter to the prime minister, Mr Johnson said: "On Friday, I acknowledged that my side of the argument were too few to prevail and congratulated you on at least reaching a Cabinet decision on the way forward. "As I said then, the government now has a song to sing. "The trouble is that I have practised the words over the weekend and find that they stick in the throat." Reuters Brexit casualties Conor Burns - Resigned from Parliamentary Private Secretary to Foreign Secretary role July 2018 - A Brexit supporter who worked alongside Boris Johnson stated in his resignation letter: I've decided it's time to have greater freedom. I want to see the referendum result respected. And there are other areas of policy I want to speak more openly on. Rex Brexit casualties Chris Green - Resigned from Department for Transport role July 2018 - The Bolton West MP said: "Parliament overwhelmingly decided to give the decision of whether to leave or remain in the European Union to the British people and they made an unambiguous decision that we ought to leave. "I have always understood the idea in 'Brexit means Brexit' is that the final deal should be clear to me and my constituents - that we have, in no uncertain terms, left the European Union. Twitter Ads info and privacy "The direction the negotiations had been taking have suggested that we would not really leave the EU and the conclusion and statements following the Chequers summit confirmed my fears. "I recognise that delivering Brexit is challenging, however I had hoped at tonight's meeting that there would be some certainty that my fears were unfounded but, instead, they have been confirmed. "I have been grateful for the opportunity to serve as Parliamentary Private Secretary and it is with regret that I offer my resignation with immediate effect." PA Brexit casualties Maria Caulfield - Resigned from Conservative Party vice-chair for women role July 2018 - resigned over May's Chequers plan. Lewes MP warned that the direction of travel did not fully embrace the opportunities that Brexit can provide. Ms Caulfield said in her letter to the PM: The policy may assuage vested interests, but the voters will find out and their representatives will be found out. This policy will be bad for our country and bad for the party. The direct consequences of that will be prime minister Corbyn. PA Brexit casualties Ben Bradley - Resigned from Conservative Party vice-chair for young people role July 2018 - resigned over May's Chequers plan. The Mansfield MP said: I admit that I voted to Remain in that ballot. What has swayed me over the last two years to fully back the Brexit vision is the immense opportunities that are available from global trade, and for the ability for Britain to be an outward looking nation in control of our own destiny once again. I fear that this agreement at Chequers damages those opportunities; that being tied to EU regulations, and the EU tying our hands when seeking to make new trade agreements, will be the worst of all worlds if we do not deliver Brexit in spirit as well as in name, then we are handing Jeremy Corbyn the keys to No10. PA Brexit casualties Robert Courts - Resigned from Parliamentary Private Secretary role July 2018 - resigned over May's Chequers plan. MP Mr Courts said: I have taken a very difficult decision to resign my position as [parliamentary private secretary] to express discontent with the Chequers [plans] in votes tomorrow. I had to think who I wanted to see in the mirror for the rest of my life. I cannot tell the people of Woxon that I support the proposals in their current form. Getty Brexit casualties Scott Mann - Resigned from Parliamentary Private Secretary role July 2018 - resigned over May's Chequers plan. "I fear elements of the Brexit white paper will inevitably put me in direct conflict with the views expressed by a large section of my constituents. I am not prepared to compromise their wishes to deliver a watered-down Brexit. "The residents of North Cornwall made it very clear that they wish to have control over our fishery, our agricultural policy, our money, our laws and our borders. I will evaluate those principles against the Brexit white paper and ensure that I vote in line with their wishes." Rex

In France on 3 August, Ms May is believed to have issued a Chequers deal or no deal message, insisting she could not compromise further on the package thrashed out in June, which sparked two cabinet resignations.

She turned to Mr Macron after a firm rejection from Michel Barnier, the EUs chief negotiator, who ruled out both her plans for customs and for the UK to follow EU rules on goods but not services.

Mr Barnier warned that Chequers would undermine our single market which is one of the EU's biggest achievements and insisted there would be no rethink.

The government holds out hope that Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is willing to be more flexible and viewed Mr Macron as the next  and probably toughest  nut to crack.

However, last week, David Lidington, the effective deputy prime minister acknowledged that hopes of a deal by the original deadline of October are fading fast.

Instead, an emergency summit is possible in November  if any progress has been made behind the scenes  or there will be a last-gasp push for an agreement in December.

In theory, only withdrawal issues  notably, the Irish border  need to be nailed down before Brexit day, but Tory MPs will strike down any agreement without progress towards an eventual trade deal.

The Independent is joining forces with the Peoples Vote to jointly stage a rally in London on 20 October, calling for a further referendum on any Brexit deal.

More than 712,000 people have signed our Final Say petition to give the final decision to the British people, while around 215,000 are backing the very similar Peoples Vote campaign.

Brussels has hit back at the UK government, insisting it will not be to blame if no agreement can be reached because its negotiators are working day and night, 24/7, for a deal.

Meanwhile, the government says it is stepping up preparations for crashing out of the EU without a deal, despite open clashes between cabinet ministers over the economic damage.

Philip Hammond, the chancellor, has reiterated the Treasurys warning of a 7.7 per cent hit to GDP and an 80bn black hole in the public finances, under a no deal exit.

But Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, dismissed those fears, insisting most such predictions proved to be wrong.Planes will be grounded if Britain crashes out of the EU unless a specific aviation deal can be struck with Brussels, Theresa May is warned today.

Falling back on World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules would not grant the UK air traffic control rights if it leaves the EU without an overall agreement, a report by a thinktank concludes.

Leaving the EUs Single Aviation Market (Sam) in March without a replacement arrangement would strip most UK-based airlines of their operating licences for the 27 countries, said the Institute for Economic Affairs.

Sam currently covers the UKs rights to the so-called freedoms of the air, which include overflights of countries without landing and operating internal flights in foreign countries.

The UK would also lose air traffic rights involving countries including the United States, Canada and Switzerland because they had been made through the EU.

If there are no alternative arrangements in place, it would be as bad as the worst fears suggest: planes would not be allowed to fly, said Julian Jessop, the IEAs chief economist.

However, the report said the government would have options, even in a no-deal Brexit, including:

* Joining other non-EU countries Norway and Iceland as members of the European Common Aviation Area (ECAA)  although this would mean following EU rules and fudging the governments Brexit red lines.

* Negotiating a bespoke free trade agreement for aviation, although this could mean reduced access to the EU market and would also take longer to agree.

Brexit casualties Show all 10 1 /10 Brexit casualties Brexit casualties Andrea Jenkyns - Resigned from Parliamentary Private Secretary at the ministry for housing, communities and local government role May 2018 - The Morley and Outwood MP said: We want to see a new relationship with Europe, with a new model not enjoyed by other countries  nothing that leaves us half-in, half-out. And in order to achieve this, we need to leave the customs union. Ms Jenkyns also said she wished to dedicate more of her time to Parliaments influential Exiting the European Union select committee, after a series of unbalanced reports produced by MPs PA Brexit casualties David Davis - Resigned from Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union role July 2018 - quit following a major row with May over her plans for post-Brexit relations with the EU. Davis resignation letter said: As you know there have been a significant number of occasions in the last year or so on which I have disagreed with the Number 10 policy line, ranging from accepting the [European] Commissions sequencing of negotiations, through to the language on Northern Ireland in the December Joint Report. At each stage I have accepted collective responsibility because it is part of my task to find workable compromises, and because I considered it was still possible to deliver on the mandate of the referendum, and on our manifesto commitment to leave the Customs Union and the Single Market. I am afraid that I think the current trend of policy and tactics is making that look less and less likely. He went on to argue that the general direction of Ms Mays policies would leave the UK in at best a weak negotiating position, and possibly an inescapable one. AFP/Getty Brexit casualties Steve Baker - Resigned from Minister at the Department for Exiting the European Union role July 2018 - Mr Baker, a key Tory figure in the Leave campaign, was David Daviss main lieutenant at Dexeu, and was hailed as courageous and principled by other Brexiteer Tories as he also left. Reuters Brexit casualties Boris Johnson - Resigned from Foreign Secretary role July 2018 - resigned over May's Chequers plan. In his resignation letter to the prime minister, Mr Johnson said: "On Friday, I acknowledged that my side of the argument were too few to prevail and congratulated you on at least reaching a Cabinet decision on the way forward. "As I said then, the government now has a song to sing. "The trouble is that I have practised the words over the weekend and find that they stick in the throat." Reuters Brexit casualties Conor Burns - Resigned from Parliamentary Private Secretary to Foreign Secretary role July 2018 - A Brexit supporter who worked alongside Boris Johnson stated in his resignation letter: I've decided it's time to have greater freedom. I want to see the referendum result respected. And there are other areas of policy I want to speak more openly on. Rex Brexit casualties Chris Green - Resigned from Department for Transport role July 2018 - The Bolton West MP said: "Parliament overwhelmingly decided to give the decision of whether to leave or remain in the European Union to the British people and they made an unambiguous decision that we ought to leave. "I have always understood the idea in 'Brexit means Brexit' is that the final deal should be clear to me and my constituents - that we have, in no uncertain terms, left the European Union. Twitter Ads info and privacy "The direction the negotiations had been taking have suggested that we would not really leave the EU and the conclusion and statements following the Chequers summit confirmed my fears. "I recognise that delivering Brexit is challenging, however I had hoped at tonight's meeting that there would be some certainty that my fears were unfounded but, instead, they have been confirmed. "I have been grateful for the opportunity to serve as Parliamentary Private Secretary and it is with regret that I offer my resignation with immediate effect." PA Brexit casualties Maria Caulfield - Resigned from Conservative Party vice-chair for women role July 2018 - resigned over May's Chequers plan. Lewes MP warned that the direction of travel did not fully embrace the opportunities that Brexit can provide. Ms Caulfield said in her letter to the PM: The policy may assuage vested interests, but the voters will find out and their representatives will be found out. This policy will be bad for our country and bad for the party. The direct consequences of that will be prime minister Corbyn. PA Brexit casualties Ben Bradley - Resigned from Conservative Party vice-chair for young people role July 2018 - resigned over May's Chequers plan. The Mansfield MP said: I admit that I voted to Remain in that ballot. What has swayed me over the last two years to fully back the Brexit vision is the immense opportunities that are available from global trade, and for the ability for Britain to be an outward looking nation in control of our own destiny once again. I fear that this agreement at Chequers damages those opportunities; that being tied to EU regulations, and the EU tying our hands when seeking to make new trade agreements, will be the worst of all worlds if we do not deliver Brexit in spirit as well as in name, then we are handing Jeremy Corbyn the keys to No10. PA Brexit casualties Robert Courts - Resigned from Parliamentary Private Secretary role July 2018 - resigned over May's Chequers plan. MP Mr Courts said: I have taken a very difficult decision to resign my position as [parliamentary private secretary] to express discontent with the Chequers [plans] in votes tomorrow. I had to think who I wanted to see in the mirror for the rest of my life. I cannot tell the people of Woxon that I support the proposals in their current form. Getty Brexit casualties Scott Mann - Resigned from Parliamentary Private Secretary role July 2018 - resigned over May's Chequers plan. "I fear elements of the Brexit white paper will inevitably put me in direct conflict with the views expressed by a large section of my constituents. I am not prepared to compromise their wishes to deliver a watered-down Brexit. "The residents of North Cornwall made it very clear that they wish to have control over our fishery, our agricultural policy, our money, our laws and our borders. I will evaluate those principles against the Brexit white paper and ensure that I vote in line with their wishes." Rex

Nevertheless, the IEA said there were reasons for optimism which meant the risk of flights being grounded was conceivable, but still very unlikely.

The UK was a world leader in aviation, which meant it had plenty of leverage as the largest market in Europe and the third largest in the world.

The report pointed to strong mutual interests, saying: Grounding UK airlines would be hugely damaging for the EU economy, particularly in areas like tourism.

And, of course, foreign airlines presumably want to continue to fly to and from the UK as well.

Since these agreements are reciprocal, it is unlikely that other countries would deny the UK the most important rights when they would then almost certainly lose them too.

Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, first admitted it was theoretically possible that a failure to reach a Brexit agreement would halt air traffic between Britain and the EU, speaking in October last year.

At the time, he insisted he did not think anybody seriously believes that is where we will get to, arguing an air travel deal would be struck regardless.

Mr Jessop said there were also several quick fixes available, including a temporary extension to current arrangements through a simple memorandum of understanding.

The key question for the EU is whether the necessity of keeping planes flying outweighs any threats to the integrity of the single market or the risks of giving the UK special treatment  the answer must surely be yes, he argued.Equality campaigners have said a minister's comment indicating she is uncomfortable with the number of transgender treatments taking place in the UK reflects a widespread lack of understanding about the reality of life for trans people.

Womens minister Victoria Atkins referred to an increase in the number of young people identifying as trans and seeking treatments, and said she was cautious about such procedures.

We need to get down to the reasons why this is happening, she told The Telegraph, noting that groundbreaking progress had been made in improving transgender rights.

It may simply be a case of greater awareness, it may be that for some they see it as an answer to questions they are perhaps not asking themselves. We need to be particularly alert to this with regard to young people, she said.

The treatments are so serious and life-changing. Im a little cautious of the use of those treatments because of the potential for the rest of their lives.

Responding to her remarks, a spokesperson from LGBT+ rights charity Stonewall said: "It is a positive thing that young people feel confident exploring their identity and that they are getting the information they need to do so.

Victoria Atkins comments reflect how much more understanding there needs to be about the reality of life for trans people, the support they receive and how and when they receive that support.

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They noted that based on their own research, two in five trans young people have tried to take their own life and two in three are bullied for just being themselves.

Its crucial that trans young people can access the help and advice they need in a safe and informed manner, so they are able to get the best care," they said.

We look forward to working with the minister for women on this issue and on reforming the Gender Recognition Act.

Ms Atkins said a proper, grown-up conversation is needed about changes to the Gender Recognition Act, which would allow transgender people to more easily gain legal recognition as their preferred gender.

Critics of these changes have claimed the proposed changes would make women-only spaces such as refuge centres unsafe for women.

Ms Atkins acknowledged that debate on the subject had in some quarters, fallen into extraordinary abuse and aggression.

This years Pride in London march was disrupted by a small group of anti-trans protesters who briefly led the parade before lying down and described the trans movement as anti-lesbianism. Their actions were broadly condemned by other LGBT+ groups.Six children were among eight people killed when a fire tore through a Chicago apartment building, described by officials as one of the worst blazes the city has seen in a long time.

We have not had this in many, many, many years  this amount of fatalities and injuries in one location, said the city's fire commissioner Jose Santiago, adding that two adults and a dog were killed in the fire.

A teenager and young adult have been taken to the hospital in critical condition for burns and smoke inhalation.

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The fire was noticed first by a passerby who saw smoke at the rear of the building at around 4am on Sunday, according to the Chicago Fire Department. No fire detectors were found in the building.

Our death count would have definitely been lower or non-existent if working smoke detectors were in this structure, Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford said.

While officials said that the relationship between the deceased was unknown, one individual who later showed up at the scene said that the dead were his family  siblings, and cousins.

By the time we got here, the whole house was on fire. They were taking out my cousins, my brothers, Marcos Contreras, 15, told the Huffington Post website. Just knowing that the fact Im never gonna see them again. My brother, coming to my room, messing with me for no reason. It just  I dont have words to explain the pain Im feeling right now.

 Police officers race against time to save animals in a shelter from a wildfire

The cause of the fire is yet to be determined by officials, who have said that their preliminary investigation found that the fire started on the second floor  where the family was living  before engulfing the rest of the building. The first floor was not occupied.

Public records that the building had two code violations during its last inspection, in June. One of those violations indicated that an extension cord feeding power between two buildings was dangerous and hazardous.

The fire was so intense that siding on buildings as far as 200 feet away melted. A separate building two buildings down also caught on fire, but not injuries were reported.Pope Francis has refused to say whether he knew about child sexual abuse claims against the former archbishop of Washington, five years before his resignation last month.

Theodore McCarrick was forced to quit after a US church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible. He was one of the highest-ranking church officials accused in a scandal that has rocked the faiths 1.2 billion adherents since reports of systemic abuse were first published by the Boston Globe in 2002.

Since his resignation, another man has come forward to say McCarrick molested him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said he abused and harassed them when they were in seminary.

An 11-page text subsequently penned by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the Vaticans retired ambassador to the US, has subsequently claimed that Pope Francis has known about the allegations since 2013.

He claimed that that the pair had discussed the allegations against McCarrick at the time. McCarrick was already under sanction at the time, but Francis rehabilitated him, he said.

Asked about the document, the pontiff declined to confirm or deny the claims it made.

It speaks for itself, he said, adding that he would not comment on it.

He said he had read Archbishop Viganos document and trusted journalists to judge for themselves. Its an act of trust, he said. I wont say a word about it.

The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published Archbishop Viganos text over the weekend, as the Pope ended a two-day visit to Ireland dominated by the clerical sex abuse scandal.

There, Francis begged forgiveness for the open wound of church abuse in the country during an address to pilgrims at a shrine in Knock, Co Mayo. Later, in Dublin, he admitted the Catholic Church hierarchy had been guilty of cover-ups and failing to show compassion.

In his letter Archbishop Vigano, a conservative with well-known, hardline anti-gay views, urged the reformist Pope to resign over what he called Franciss own culpability in covering up Mr McCarricks alleged crimes.

Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarricks abuses, and resign along with all of them, the 77-year-old wrote.

Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report  which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses  the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.

Archbishop Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions.

His letter identified by name the Vatican cardinals and US archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair. He said documents backing up his version of events are in Vatican archives.

Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Show all 55 1 /55 Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis celebrates the Holy Mass at the Phoenix Park, in Dublin AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis arrives at Phoenix Park for a Papal Mass of the World Meeting of Families in Dublin EPA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A vigil takes place at the site of the mass grave which contained the remains of 796 named babies from the Bon Secours Mother and Baby home in Tuam. The vigil coincides with the Phoenix park mass which is taking place in Dublin held by Pope Francis. Excavations at the site in 2017 revealed underground structures which held babies bodies with ages ranging from 35 weeks to three years old with most of the dead buried in the 1950s when the facility was run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic religious order of nuns who received unmarried pregnant women to give birth Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures An aerial view of the crowd at Phoenix Park Getty Images Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Children queue for communion during Pope Francis' closing Mass PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures The Stand4Truth rally gathers outside a former Magdalene laundry in Dublin as part of the demonstrations against clerical sex abuse PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis leads the Holy Mass at Phoenix Park AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis arrives to celebrate the Holy Mass at the Phoenix Park AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures The names of the victims are read out as a vigil takes place at the site of the mass grave which contained the remains of 796 named babies from the Bon Secours Mother and Baby home Getty Images Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis leads the Holy Mass at Phoenix Park AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A member of the clergy carries a bowl of incense PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A vigil takes place at the site of the mass grave which contained the remains of 796 named babies Getty Images Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Members of the public pray as they watch Pope Francis deliver a Papal Mass of the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park EPA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis passes by a banner of a protester as he leaves St Mary's Pro-Cathedral AP Pope Francis 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visits Ireland  in pictures WMOF2018/Maxwell Photography/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis memorabilia on sale on O'Connell Street PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis arrives at St Mary's Pro-Cathedral during his visit to Ireland to attend the 2018 World Meeting of Families AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis waves to the waiting crowds on O'Connell Street PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis addresses the congragation at St Mary's Pro-Cathedral AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Stephen O'Brien selling bottles of holy water from the St Mary's Pro Cathedral PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis prays inside St Mary's Pro Cathedral Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A man waves a rainbow flag behind a model of a pope which stands in the window above a bar Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures People hold a banner against Pope Francis on the way to St Mary's Pro-Cathedral AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Nuns wait by the side of the road for Pope Francis Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A model of a pope is placed in the window above a bar as crowds wait for Pope Francis to travel through the city Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Crowds on O'Connell Street, Dublin waiting to see Pope Francis as he travels in the Popemobile PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis waves to wellwishers as he arrives at Dublin Airport Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures His visit, the first by a Pope since John Paul II's in 1979 is expected to attract hundreds of thousands of Catholics to a series of events in Dublin and Knock PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis talks to journalists aboard a plane flying from Fiumicino aiport to Dublin AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures LGBT protestors from Dublin Pride and We Are Church with flags and umbrellas on Ha'Penny Bridge, Dublin to remember the victims of clerical sex abuse ahead of the start of the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis disembarks from the aircraft as he arrives at Dublin Airport Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Woman wait for Pope Francis to drive past, in Dublin Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Taoiseach Leo Varadkar delivers a speech watched by Pope Francis in St. Patrick's Hall at Dublin Castle WMOF2018/Maxwell Photography/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Protesters hold banners during a demonstration against clerical sex abuse, in Dublin Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis plants a tree during a meeting with Irish President Michael D Higgins, at Aras an Uachtarain PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis walks with the President of Ireland Michael Higgins at Aras an Uachtarain WMOF2018/Maxwell Photography/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis, center, is flanked by Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, right, as they arrive to meet authorities, in Dublin AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Protestors wearing baby shoes, to signify the children who died in mother and baby homes in Ireland, protest in Dublin ahead of the start of the visit to Ireland by Pope Franci PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis exchanges gifts with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis speaks with President Michael D Higgins in his study during a visit to Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park, Dublin PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Navy band march prior to the arrival of Pope Francis at the Presidential residence in Dublin AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Eddie McGuinness from Dublin LGBTQ Pride carries a rainbow flag across Ha'Penny Bridge, Dublin ahead of the start of the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A message left by Pope Francis in the visitors book at Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park PA

The Vaticans ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2016, Mr Vigano said his two immediate predecessors did not fail to inform the Holy See about accusations against Mr McCarrick, starting in 2000.

Archbishop Vigano said he himself sent at least two memos about him.

He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer, and to no longer celebrate mass in public or travel.

He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on 23 June 2013, three months after he was elected to the papacy

The meeting took place at the Vaticans Santa Marta hotel where the Pope lives, he added.

There, Archbishop Vigano claimed that he told the new pontiff: Holy Father, I dont know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.

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Shortly afterwards Archbishop Vigano wrote that he was surprised to find that McCarrick had started travelling on missions on behalf of the church, including to China. He was also one of the Vaticans intermediaries in the US-Cuba talks in 2014.

Archbishop Viganos claim that McCarrick had been ordered by Benedict to stay out of public ministry and retire to a lifetime of prayer is somewhat disputed, given that he enjoyed a fairly public retirement.

But Archbishop Vigano insisted the sanctions had been imposed, and said a former counsellor in the embassy at the time was prepared to testify about the stormy meeting when Mr McCarrick was informed of them.

Barry Coburn, McCarricks civil attorney, said the allegations in the letter were serious.

Archbishop McCarrick, like any other person, has a right to due process. He looks forward to invoking that right at the appropriate time, he said in a statement.

Additional reporting by agenciesPresident Donald Trump has announced that the United States and Mexico have reached a preliminary trade agreement that he says will replace the existing North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), and benefit citizens of both countries.

The agreement was announced in the Oval Office on Monday, where the president spoke to Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto via speaker phone. Mr Trump said that he will now begin negotiations with Canada, and said that the existing name for the current trade deal will be terminated entirely.

They used to call it Nafta, were going to call it the United States-Mexico trade agreement, Mr Trump said, claiming that Nafta has a negative connotation.

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It is not clear if Canada will be a part of any revised agreement to trade policy between the countries, but Mr Trump indicated that a failure to negotiate would lead to heavy tariffs on autos coming into the United Sates its neighbours to the north.

But, Mr Trump said that he will now focus his negotiating energies on reaching an agreement with Canada, and would be speaking with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau soon. If they are unable to come to an agreement on trade, Mr Trump said, then he would be forced to put in place steep tariffs on imported autos from Canada.

In response to the Oval Office event, a spokesperson for Canada's minister of foreign affairs indicated that the country is encouraged by the agreement reached between the presidents of Mexico and the US  but stressed that Canada would need to be party to any actual changes to Nafta.

 Trump Slams Bill Clinton's NAFTA as 'Worst Trade Deal Ever'

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. 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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

"Canada is encouraged by the continued optimism shown by our negotiating partners," the spokesperson said. "Progress between Mexico and the United States is a necessary requirement for any renewed Nafta agreement. We are in regular contact with our negotiating partners, and we will continue to work toward a modernised Nafta. We will only sign a new Nafta that is good for Canada and good for the middle class. Canada's signature is required".

Experts weighed in on Monday to praise the push to modernise the existing trading agreements between the US and its North American partners, but suggested that pushing a deal without the consent of Canada could revert circumstances to a more fractured, pre-Nafta era.

"When one adds in the effect of changes in the way markets operate as a result of technological developments like the internet, trade patterns have developed in ways that have produced uneven benefits among the various industries as well as among the three Nafta countries. So a rethinking is certainly timely if not overdue," Steve Nelson, a former State Department lawyer who is now partner at the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney, told The Independent.

"But going back to the more fragmented pre-Nafta markets would clearly have made no sense, as that would have upset the plans of businesses that have made very logical decisions predicated on the enormous opportunities and efficiencies Nafta afforded," Mr Nelson continued.

The agreement announced on Monday focuses narrowly on auto manufacturing, but the president suggested that the deal could end up standing in for Nafta. The deal would require 75 per cent of automobile parts and content to be made in the US or Mexico, up from current levels of 62.5 per cent. The deal also stipulates that 40 to 45 per cent of auto content be made by workers who earn at least $16 an hour, according to Reuters.

"It's a big day for trade. It's a big day for our country," Mr Trump said.

The reported deal between Mr Trump and his Mexican counterpart is by no means finalised, in spite of the celebratory mood in the Oval Office.

As the president himself noted, the deal must be sent to Congress and would then undergo a 90-day process before it could be approved. The president also does not have the power to unilaterally strike a new trade deal without the approval of Congress  a limitation on presidential power that kept his predecessor from pushing through the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.Japans government is trying to ensure the safety of a tourist who was reportedly detained in North Korea after filming a military facility while on a group tour of the isolated state.

Authorities in Pyongyang claimed to have expelled the Japanese national after detaining him on unspecified charges.

The official Korean Central News Agency said Tomoyuki Sugimoto had been kept under control for questioning about his crime, without specifying what he had been accused of.

Recommended North Korea freezes tourist visa applications

In a two sentence report, the news agency said the authorities decided to to leniently condone him and expel him on humanitarian grounds.

Japanese chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters his government was doing its utmost, but refused to give further details, citing the sensitivity of the issue.

Japans government confirmed about two weeks ago that it was looking into reports that one of its citizens was being held in North Korea, but has not identified the person by name.

Japans Kyodo News agency, citing a government source, said the person was believed to be a videographer in his thirties and may have been suspected of shooting video of a military facility while on a group tour to Nampo, a port city in western North Korea.

The government had sought his release through the North Korean Embassy in Beijing, Kyodo said.

Japan does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea.

The 330-metre tall Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang's tallest building (Getty)

North Korea has also arrested other foreign nationals.

Three Korean-Americans accused of anti-state activities and detained for more than a year were released and returned home in May with US secretary of state Mike Pompeo when the two sides were preparing for the June summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

American college student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested by North Korean authorities in January 2016 after being accused of stealing a propaganda poster and sentenced to 15 years in prison, died in June 2017, days after he was repatriated to the US with severe brain damage.

Their arrests were widely seen as politically motivated and had compounded the dire state of relations over North Koreas nuclear weapons programme.

If the Japanese mans release is confirmed, his repatriation will have come quicker than some earlier cases.

A Japanese correspondent for the Nikkei newspaper was detained in North Korea for more than two years after being taken into custody on spying charges in Pyongyang in December 1999.

His release was seen as an attempt by North Korea to get Japan to make concessions ahead of their planned normalisation talks.

Japan and North Korea have also had disputes over abductions of Japanese citizens decades ago.

Japan says North Korea abducted at least 17 Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train agents in Japanese language and culture to spy on South Korea.

Pyongyang has acknowledged abducting only 13 of them and said eight of them had died.

Five others allowed by the North to visit Japan in 2002 stayed.

Associated PressNorth Korea has accused the US of double-dealing and hatching a criminal plot against Pyongyang after Donald Trump abruptly cancelled a visit by the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.

Negotiations have made little progress since Mr Trumps summit with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un in Singapore in June.

Mr Pompeo has pressed for the North to show its dedication to abandon its nuclear arsenal, while Pyongyang has demanded Washington first makes concessions of its own.

In an editorial, the state-controlled newspaper Rodong Sinmun said US special forces units based in Japan were staging an air drill aimed at the infiltration into Pyongyang, citing a South Korean media outlet.

Such acts prove that the US is hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK and commit a crime which deserves merciless divine punishment in case the US fails in the scenario of the DPRKs unjust and brigandish denuclearisation first, the paper said, using the official name for North Korea - the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

We cannot but take a serious note of the double-dealing attitudes of the US as it is busy staging secret drills involving man-killing special units while having a dialogue with a smile on its face, it noted.

 Mike Pompeo meets with North Korean officials on visit to Pyongyang

The editorial, which did not mention Mr Pompeos cancelled visit, urged Washington to give up the pointless military gamble and implement the Singapore agreement, in which the leaders pledged to work towards a complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

Since the summit, both sides have struggled to narrow differences over the Norths nuclear weapons programme.

Pyongyang is calling for a declaration of peace as part of security guarantees designed to encourage it to abandon its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, while the Trump administration says a peace deal and other concessions will only come after more progress on denuclearisation.

In part to reassure North Korea, Mr Trump cancelled or delayed joint military drills with South Korea, but smaller exercises continue.

Escape from North Korea Show all 16 1 /16 Escape from North Korea Escape from North Korea Jeong Min-woo A hat belonging to Jeong Min-woo in Seoul. Min-woo is from Hyesan, on the border with China. He was a commissioned officer in the Korean People's Army, and left in his uniform. South Korean intelligence confiscated it, but he persuaded his North Korean military contacts to send him a new one. Reuters Escape from North Korea Jeong Min-woo Jeong Min-woo, 29, poses for a photograph in Seoul Reuters Escape from North Korea Kang Kang, 28, who wanted to be identified only by her surname, poses for a photograph in Seoul. The parents of Kang sent out a coat across the Chinese border after she reached the South in 2010. "I didn't ask my mother to send me this coat," said Kang. "But she knew I feel the cold easily and sent it to me. She sent some honey too, but it went missing on the way. The coat is made of dog fur. I don't know what kind of dog. In 2010, it cost about 700,000 North Korean won ($88 at the unofficial rate). It was really expensive. A North Korean friend went to China to pick it up for me. I liked this coat when I got it. I thought my mother must've spent quite a lot of money on it. Reuters Escape from North Korea Kang The dog fur coat belonging to Kang, "My father was a party officer. Our family had a car and we lived in a special apartment. Ordinary people couldn't afford to wear this kind of coat, not even soldiers. Commissioned officers could afford them. Border guards would wear them. It wasn't easy to buy this kind of coat, but as time went on, fake ones began to appear. The state often clamped down on this item. It's technically military supplies so the state monitored people who altered the design of the coat. I know just from looking at this coat that it's a counterfeit one, not the official version. The counterfeit ones look quite different from the original ones. Military officials preferred the fakes to the original because the design looked much better. The children of rich families would wear them. I look too chubby in this, so don't wear it here. I thought I could probably wear it if I altered it." Reuters Escape from North Korea Lee Oui-ryuk Lee Oui-ryuk is from Onsong, near the border with China. He defected in 2010, and brought his ID card with him. "I brought my ID with me when I left North Korea. Juche 95.11.7 (the date in the North Korean calendar, which equates to Nov. 7, 2006) is the date I was issued with my ID. It says here my blood type is "A", but I'm actually an "O." For the 23 years I lived in North Korea, I thought my blood type was "A." They wrote down my blood type without even doing a test. They just wrote whatever they wanted to. I was caught trying to defect to South Korea around Kim Jong Il's birthday. They strengthen border security just before and after that date." Reuters Escape from North Korea Lee Oui-ryuk "The bottom of the lamp is dark," as the saying goes, and I thought I'd be able to cross right under their noses. The soldiers shot at me as I tried to run away from the Tumen River. I managed to get away and hid, but someone reported me and I was caught. That's when I was taken to the bowibu (North Korean secret police) for three months of interrogation. The state ruled that I had tried to defect to South Korea, and I was sent to a camp for political prisoners. I escaped when they were transferring me to the camp. I hid and managed to make it to my big sister's house - that's when I grabbed these photos. I couldn't go home easily, so decided I had to hide in the mountains or somewhere remote. I needed my ID to move around without getting caught. and I took these 12 photos with me in case I wanted to look back and reminisce. I wrote on the back of them so as not to forget." Reuters Escape from North Korea Ji Sung-ho Ji Sung-ho, 35, from Hoeryong, near the border with China. He left North Korea in 2006 with a pair of wooden crutches. "I lived as a child beggar in North Korea. I was stealing coals from a train when I fell off and lost my leg and my hand. I had to bring the crutches with me. If I didn't have them, I wouldn't have made it here. The state doesn't help you in North Korea, and people who need crutches make their own. Mine are therefore not factory-made, so they're not perfect and break easily. I had several pairs of crutches but they all broke, and this was the last pair. I used these crutches for 10 years, until I was 25, when I arrived in South Korea. I would steal coal from moving trains and fall off, destroying my crutches. Or I would get beaten up by the police and they'd take and then break my crutches. When they broke, I would make new ones. When I had new ones, I could go back outside." Reuters Escape from North Korea Ji Sung-ho "When I first arrived in South Korea I thought about throwing them out. South Korea's intelligence agency gave me a prosthetic leg. My friends said I should throw the crutches out and not think about North Korea. They said I should show Kim Jong Il I was living a new life in South Korea and throw out everything I had from the North. Some asked if I got upset when I saw my crutches. But I couldn't just throw them out. To make my crutches, my friends had given me some wood that they had bought, and someone I knew in North Korea who had carpentry skills had made them. It was my father who added the final touches. There is a lot of love from my North Korean friends and family in these crutches. So I didn't throw them out. The South Korean government gave me some new crutches because the wood from my North Korean ones is hard and painful. But I still keep them, so as not to forget those memories." REUTERS Escape from North Korea Kim Ryen Hui Kim Ryen Hui, 48, is from Pyongyang. She says she never wanted to defect. In 2011, she says, a broker helped her go to China for treatment on her liver. But the broker tricked her, she said, and she ended up in South Korea. She is campaigning to return, which Seoul says would be against the law. "I miss my parents even more than I miss my daughter. They're everything to me. For the first few years, I couldn't even breathe properly when I thought of them. My little brother lives with them in Pyongyang now. My mother can't see out of one eye. The thing I fear the most is finding out they've passed away before I have the chance to go back. Reuters Escape from North Korea Kim Ryen Hui "My daughter and I have been writing letters and sending photos to each other. My cousin lives in China, so she's been sending them on. My daughter's name is Ri Ryon Gum. She was born on February 15, 1993. I don't want her to live out her life with me here. When she was young, she did taekwondo. She wanted to get involved in espionage operations against South Korea. She was so fearless. That's why she was doing taekwondo - to get involved in anti-South espionage. So I was really surprised to hear she became a chef. In a video of her I received, she explained why. She said that after I had left, she moved in with her father in Pyongyang and had been cooking for him. She said she decided to become a chef so she could fulfill my role at home. I was sad when I heard that." Reuters Escape from North Korea Lee Min-bok Lee Min-bok, 60, was a researcher at North Korea's Academy of Agricultural Science. He first tried to defect, unsuccessfully, in 1990. He eventually left North Korea in June 1991 and came to South Korea in 1995. His family sent him these diaries. "I have a bit of an academic side. According to Kim Il Sung's teachings, people are supposed to keep diaries. Everyone in North Korea should strictly follow Kim Il Sung's teachings, so I did as I was supposed to and kept a diary. Even though Kim Il Sung is a villain here, in North Korea he's above everything. We learned that he studied well and gave our lives purpose. I lived according to those teachings. I wrote these out of loyalty to the Leader. That was our ideology, and I lived my life in strict adherence to it. No one could think differently." Reuters Escape from North Korea Lee Min-bok "I got hold of these diaries 10 years after I arrived in South Korea. I had been sending money to my family in the North and they sent them to me. I didn't write any complaints in diaries. I would've been in big trouble if I did. My diaries are a record of my history in North Korea. I am thinking about turning these diaries into a book. I'd like to publish a book about how to change North Koreans' thinking when unification happens. These diaries show how North Koreans think and how their minds are constructed. People need to make these into a textbook, because they need proof. Talking is not as effective." Reuters Escape from North Korea Song Byeok Song Byeok was a propaganda artist. His father drowned trying to cross the Tumen river, in 2000. When the artist finally left North Korea in 2001, he brought photos of his family with him. "We left that August to find food," Byeok recalled, describing the first attempt. "We were from a town further inland, and we weren't sure where the river was high and where it was low. I didn't know at the time but the river was swollen because of the rainy season. I thought we had to cross it anyway. All I could think about was getting to China to buy food. I took off my clothes and tied them into a rope to strap us together. I told my father not to let go. As we approached the middle of the river, the strap felt lighter. I looked back and saw my father drifting away. I was devastated." Reuters Escape from North Korea Song Byeok "He was going under the water and couldn't get out. I rushed up to the (North Korean) border guards and asked them to save him but they just said why did I come out, why didn't I die too. They handcuffed me and took me away. It was Aug. 28. I was tortured by the "bowibu" (North Korean secret police) in Hoeryong, then jailed for four months in Chongjin prison camp. But after I was released from the camp I felt like I needed to survive and carry on living. Right before I tried to defect again, I went back home and grabbed my family photos. Even if I died trying, I thought, at least I would have this picture with me. I never found my father. After I came to South Korea, I went back to China in 2004 and held a memorial service for him by the river. My heart still aches." Reuters Escape from North Korea Baek Hwa-sung Baek Hwa-sung, 33, left Sinuiju, on the border with China, in 2003 and resettled in South Korea in 2008. He kept a diary as he defected. "In 2004, I started to write down all my thoughts in a diary. I didn't know if I'd get caught. I just wanted to let it be known where I was from, and where I wanted to go. After I left the North, I became very depressed, hiding in the mountains alone for a while. The people who were watching over me told me not to come down to the village and left me by myself in a mountain shelter. Alone, with no one to engage with or talk to, I felt like I would go insane. So I wanted to leave something behind in case I died there or got caught - that's why I started to write. Reuters Escape from North Korea Baek Hwa-sung "Alone in the mountains, I desperately sought something to talk to. That was my diary. My diaries are proof of my life's journey. I read them when I want to remember home. I can't return home, and I already have no memories of my hometown. But when I go through my diaries, there are notes which detail the vivid memories of that time. Sometimes I might forget my father's birthday, but when I go back to my diary, his birthday and my mother's birthday are there. My diaries are a record of my life. They prove I'm alive." Reuters

Mr Trump partly blamed China for the lack of progress with North Korea and suggested talks with Pyongyang could be on hold until after Washington resolved its bitter trade dispute with Beijing.

China expressed serious concern about Mr Trumps comments, which it called irresponsible.

Additional reporting by ReutersForeign secretary Jeremy Hunt will visit Myanmar "to seek answers" after a damning United Nations (UN) report on the army's violent crackdown on the country's Rohingya muslims.

Investigators have declared the systematic targeting of the Rohingya to be a campaign of genocide, involving crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The human-rights observers said Myanmars commander-in-chief and five other named generals should face prosecution for acting with genocidal intent.

Recommended UN investigators call for Myanmar generals to be tried for genocide

Mr Hunt said the report was "deeply disturbing", adding there should "never be a hiding place for those who commit these kind of atrocities".

Taking to Twitter, he wrote: "Deeply disturbing to read UN report on crimes against Rohingya people. There must be never be a hiding place for those who commit these kind of atrocities. Have decided to visit Burma to seek answers at the earliest opportunity".

Save the Children has called on Mr Hunt to "show leadership by pushing to refer the perpetrators of these systematic, ruthless and deliberate attacks to the International Criminal Court.

It was this time last year that the Myanmar military launched a purge of Rohingya muslims in Rahkine state in what was widely thought to be a case of brutal ethnic cleansing.

Refugees who fled to neighbouring Bangladesh described the burning of entire villages, the gang rape of women and mass extrajudicial killings of civilians.

Drawings by Rohingya children Show all 18 1 /18 Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Save the Children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children

The UNs fact-finding team, which investigated under the mandate of the Human Rights Council, today called for the resignation of military commander Min Aung Hlaing after estimating 10,000 people were killed in the purge.

The investigators also said the situation in Myanmar should be referred to the International Criminal Court.UN investigators have for the first time declared the violence against Rohingya Muslims in northern Myanmar to be a campaign of genocide.

In a damning final report from their fact-finding mission, observers said Myanmars commander-in-chief and five other named generals should face prosecution for acting with genocidal intent, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

It is by far the strongest condemnation yet from the international community for a widespread military crackdown by the authorities in Rakhine state, which began on 25 August last year. The army said it had been responding to violent attacks by a Rohingya Muslim militant group.

Recommended Meet the Rohingya who had parents gunned down before their eyes

But hundreds of Rohingya in exile spoke to the UNs fact-finding team, working under the mandate of the Human Rights Council, to describe the burning of entire villages, gang rape of women and mass extrajudicial killings of civilians.

The violence sparked the exodus of more than 700,000 Rohingya to neighbouring Bangladesh, where they have been given shelter and support by the government and NGOs but still lack basic rights and citizenship.

Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the investigative team, said Myanmars military commander Min Aung Hlaing should step down in the wake of the report.

Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Show all 30 1 /30 Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya women and children wait in line for a food distribution of super cereal at Action Against Hunger Getty Images Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugees gather near the fence in the "no man's land" zone between Myanmar and Bangladesh border AFP/Getty Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya women cry as they shout slogans during a protest rally to commemorate the first anniversary of Myanmar army's crackdown AP Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures A Rohingya Muslim child holding an umbrella while under the rain AFP/Getty Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugees cry as they pray during a gathering to commemorate the first anniversary of Myanmar army's crackdown which lead to a mass exodus of Rohingya Muslims to Bangladesh AP Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Police stand near the checkpoint at the Shwe Zar village in Maungdaw township, Rakhine State, western Myanmar EPA Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures A group of Rohingya refugee children stand at a makeshift camp EPA Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugee Juhara, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, poses for a portrait at the Kutapalong refugee camp near Cox's Bazar in southern Bangladesh. Juhara passes her days carting water with difficulty to thirsty bricklayers working in a bustling corner of Cox's Bazar. She has just one hand - the other was cleaved off in a raid on her village after the August 25 clampdown started last year. Her husband and parents were killed. The 40-year-old said she ran for her life but was hunted down and savagely attacked AFP/Getty Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugees walk on a road along a makeshift camp in Kutubpalang EPA Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugees are seen outside of their makeshift tent in the Kutupalong camp in Cox's Bazar Reuters Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Thousands of Rohingya refugees staged protests for "justice" on August 25 on the first anniversary of a Myanmar military crackdown that forced them to flee to camps in Bangladesh AFP/Getty Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures A Rohingya refugee child looks through a window at a makeshift camp in Teknuf EPA Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugee women hold placards as they take part in a protest at the Kutupalong refugee camp Reuters Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures A young Rohingya boy waits in line for a food Getty Images Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugees shout slogans during a protest march AFP/Getty Images Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugee girl with other children at a makeshift camp in Teknuf in Cox's Bazar EPA Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya women protest on the first anniversary of the Rohingya crisis Getty Images Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya women and children receive super cereal at Action Against Hunger Getty Images Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya girls share a laugh in Kutupalong, the largest refugee camp housing the Rohingya Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugees gather near the fence in the "no man's land" zone between Myanmar and Bangladesh border AFP/Getty Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugees attend a ceremony organised to remember the first anniversary of a military crackdown that prompted a massive exodus of people from Myanmar to Bangladesh AFP/Getty Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rashida Begum, a Rohingya refugee woman walks on the Kutupalong camp in Cox's Bazar Reuters Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures A Rohingya refugee bursts into tears as she shouts slogans during a protest march AFP/Getty Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugee baby Nur Sadek two years old undergoing treatment at a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital in Teknuf in Cox's Bazar EPA Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugees protest Getty Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugees perform prayers AFP/Getty Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rashida Begum, a Rohingya refugee woman bathes her son in the Kutupalong camp Reuters Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugees protest Getty Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya refugees walk on a muddy road EPA Rohingya crisis one year on  Myanmar camps in pictures Rohingya women and children wait in line for a food distribution of super cereal at Action Against Hunger Getty

The only way forward is to call for his resignation and stepping down immediately, he told a news conference in Geneva.

In its report, which also relied on satellite footage and other corroborating information, the UN team cited a conservative estimate that some 10,000 people were killed in the violence.

Myanmars government refused the UNs team access to the affected region, and the report released on Monday decried a lack of cooperation or even response from the government, which received an early copy of the report.

In dismissing the Myanmar armys justification for the crackdown, it read: Military necessity would never justify killing indiscriminately, gang raping women, assaulting children, and burning entire villages. The Tatmadaws [the militarys] tactics are consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats, especially in Rakhine state, but also in northern Myanmar.

They are shocking for the level of denial, normalcy and impunity that is attached to them. The Tatmadaws contempt for human life, integrity and freedom, and for international law generally, should be a cause of concern for the entire population.

The investigators said the situation in Myanmar should be referred to the International Criminal Court, and if not, to a special tribunal. Myanmar is not a treaty member of the ICC  but it is one of the 47 member states of the Human Rights Council, meaning Mondays report will carry greater weight than any that have come previously.

In naming six generals as prime candidates for prosecution at the ICC, the UNs report admits that the civilian government in Myanmar has little power to control the countrys military.

Nonetheless, it includes damning words for the civilian government of Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Oxford graduate Aung San Suu Kyi, saying that through their acts and omissions, the civilian authorities have contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes.

Drawings by Rohingya children Show all 18 1 /18 Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Save the Children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children Drawings by Rohingya children

State Counsellor Suu Kyi has not used her de facto position as head of government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events in Rakhine State, it says.

The report does not suggest that the crisis, which began a year ago, was a surprise  rather, it refers to a catastrophe looming for decades as a result of the severe, systemic and institutionalised oppression from birth to death of the Rohingya people.

The UN mission found the violence of August 2017 was underpinned by numerous examples of hate speech and incitement, including when in November 2012 a leading Rakhine political party cited Hitler, arguing that inhuman acts were sometimes necessary to maintain a race.

The UNs human rights agency said the report relied on 875 in-depth interviews with victims and eyewitnesses as well as satellite imagery and authenticated documents, photographs and videos. The team will next present a fuller report, with analysis of the next possible legal steps, to the Human Rights Council on 18 September.

Mark Field, the UK foreign office minister, said he welcomed the UN missions work and said Britain believes the gravity of the report warrants the attention of both the UN Human Rights Council and the UN Security Council.

And Michael McGrath of Save the Children, one of the leading charities working to support Rohingya refugees, said it was time [for] the UN Security Council to refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court without delay.

He said: The international community needs to send a firm signal to all perpetrators, including the Myanmar military, that crimes of this magnitude will not be allowed to pass unaccounted for.An Iraqi man whose asylum application was rejected by Austrian authorities over claims he was only acting gay has said the prospect of returning to his home country makes him fear for his life after he was outed by immigration officials during their interrogation of his family.

The 27-year-old, who gave his name only as Firas, had his application rejected following a six-hour interview because he was deemed to be acting up to the stereotype of a gay man.

He said his sexuality had been revealed to his father and brother during questioning despite assurances the information he had provided to Austrian officials would remain confidential.

He now plans to challenge the decision in the Austrian courts.

I told the interviewer my family dont know everything [about my sexuality] because of my culture and religion, he told The Independent during a phone interview from Graz in southern Austria.

The interviewer said it was private. But then my father was asked [by Austrian immigration officials] if he knew his son was gay, and my father said I wasnt and that I had invited girlfriends round for lunch.

After that, my application was rejected. They said I was acting and trying to look like a girl. I was told I could move back to Iraq and keep my sexuality a secret as I had already done that when I was growing up.

He said returning to his home country, which he left aged 24, would now be too dangerous.

LGBT+ rights around the globe Show all 9 1 /9 LGBT+ rights around the globe LGBT+ rights around the globe Russia Russias antipathy towards homosexuality has been well established following the efforts of human rights campaigners. However, while it is legal to be homosexual, LGBT couples are offered no protections from discrimination. They are also actively discriminated against by a 2013 law criminalising LGBT propaganda allowing the arrest of numerous Russian LGBT activists. AFP/Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Brunei Brunei recently introduced a law to make sodomy punishable by stoning to death. It was already illegal and punishable by up to 10 years in prison AFP/Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Mauritania Men who are found having sex with other men face stoning, while lesbians can be imprisoned, under Sharia law. However, the state has reportedly not executed anyone for this crime since 1987 Alamy LGBT+ rights around the globe Sudan Both male and female same-sex sexual activity is illegal under Sudanese law. Men can be executed on their third offence, women on their fourth Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Saudi Arabia Homosexuality and gender realignment is illegal and punishable by death, imprisonment, whipping and chemical castration Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Yemen The official position within the country is that there are no gays. LGBT inviduals, if discovered by the government, are likely to face intense pressure. Punishments range from flogging to the death penalty Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Nigeria Both male and female same-sex sexual activity is illegal and in some northern states punishable with death by stoning. This is not a policy enacted across the entire country, although there is a prevalent anti-LGBT agenda pushed by the government. In 2007 a Pew survey established that 97% of the population felt that homosexuality should not be accepted. It is punishable by 14 years in prison Reuters LGBT+ rights around the globe Somalia Homosexuality was established as a crime in 1888 and under new Somali Penal Code established in 1973 homosexual sex can be punishable by three years in prison. A person can be put to death for being a homosexual Reuters LGBT+ rights around the globe Iraq Although same-sex relationships have been decriminalised, much of the population still suffer from intense discrimination. Additionally, in some of the country over-run by the extremist organisation Isis, LGBT individuals can face death by stoning Getty

What should I do with my feelings? Now I am living apart from my family here in Austria because I am scared.

His comments followed a warning from campaigners that Austrias toughened immigration policy was effectively sentencing LGBT+ asylum seekers to death in their home country, after several cases emerged of men having their cases rejected for apparently trivial reasons.

Joe Niedermayer, of the group RosaLila PantherInnen (Pink Purple Panthers), which is handling Firas case, said political changes in Austria were affecting decisions made by the countrys immigration office.

It is a death sentence to send them home, he told The Independent.

They dont want refugees here right now. But in the cases we work with, if the people go home they could be killed.

It comes after an Iranian man seeking asylum in Austria was told his application had been rejected because he could not explain what the colours of the rainbow flag  a gay pride symbol  signified.

And an Afghan asylum seeker had his application denied after being told his walk, behaviour and clothing suggested he may not be gay.

 The countries where it's illegal to be LGBT

Commenting on Firas case, Mr Niedermayer added: We had documents where we had partners who certificated that they had sex with him, but even this was not valid proof. They didnt look at all the facts we had.

The interviewer was asking his father, do you know your son is gay? said Mr Niedermayer.

But even if his father had been aware of his sexuality, Mr Niedermayer said it was unlikely he would have admitted to it because of his conservative beliefs.

His fathers denial of any knowledge of his sons sexuality was then used by the immigration officials as evidence that he had lied, the activist said.

A spokesman for Austria's asylum office had earlier denied their response to Firass application contained "cliched phrasing and said they had not requested "evidence of his sexual contacts with men".

Under the right-wing coalition government headed by Sebastian Kurz, Austria has pursued policies to reduce immigration both domestically and across the EU.

Amnesty International said problems surrounding LGBT+ asylum applications in Austria were "structural" and the refusal to grant the Afghan man settled status was not an "isolated case".

Annemarie Schlack, Amnesty's Austria director, said the "inhumane language" in the asylum process "does not meet the requirements of a fair, constitutional procedure".

Human Rights Watch says Iraq has no laws that explicitly criminalise consensual same-sex acts but LGBT+ people still face discrimination and persecution.















Ontario's new Premier Ford wants his government will deliver on its pledge to create a regional transportation system, but will first consult with Toronto and other municipalities in the area. Ford says it would be a benefit to Toronto if the province took over the city's transit system, something Premier Doug Ford promised to do during the spring election campaign.



Ford's idea to create an integrate a regional transit system sounds good. Sure, in theory, the idea of commuters being able to travel from Mississauga to Newmarket to Oshawa and back into Toronto sounds like a very forward thinking concept. But Ford's idea of basically destroying and replacing the extremely experienced and North American award-winning Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) with a far less experienced and comparatively incompetent Government of Ontario owed system would be a horrific idea.



I used to live in Thornhill and in Richmond Hill and have travelled on the provincial owned GO system for years. Have you been on a system owned by the Government of Ontario? Horrible and disorganized service - Queen's Park bureaucrats don't know what they're doing.

I wouldn't be surprised if Ford's real agenda is to sell the TTC to one of his friends who then tears up the street cars and then cuts service, and then slap the name of "Ontario Government" on this capitalist venture so Ford can make it look like he fulfilled a campaign promise.



I have a much better idea than Ford's. Tell me what you think.

The TTC has already been forward-thinking enough to extend the subway into Vaughan which is in York Region. If Ford was actually smart and not trying to pull the wool over Greater Toronto Area residents, why not ask the TTC to take over and run a regional transportation system.

Let's replace the "GO Train" and the "GO Bus" which are pathetically inconvenient, along with all those horrible transit systems in Brampton, Mississauga, York Region and in Durham Region. The TTC could create separate departmental structures for each part of the region ie TTC York Region, TTC Mississauga and Peel Region, and TTC Pickering, Durham Region and Oshawa. Each of these regions would benefit from the TTC's many years of experience which would create a regional system which works for everyone in the GTA.Thousands of refugees are living in perpetual fear and at risk of developing serious illnesses as the situation on the Greek island of Lesbos reaches absolute breaking point, new research shows.

A report by Refugee Rights Europe warns that physical and mental health problems are rife on the island, as unsanitary conditions contribute to the spread of disease and growing desperation grips the men, women and children who are stuck there.

Reports of violence and racially motivated attacks on refugees by police have also become commonplace, with nearly half of the 311 asylum seekers surveyed for the report saying they had been attacked by officers  usually with tear gas.

There are currently an estimated 8,000 refugee men, women and children on Lesbos, making it the largest host out of the Greek islands. A third come from Syria, 27 per cent are from Afghanistan, 13 per cent are Iraqi and the remaining are mainly from African countries.

A series of accounts from asylum seekers in the report exposes the squalor and dangers they endure, including only having access to a shower once every few weeks and being unable to access medical care for their sick children.

Respondents also reported being too afraid to leave their tents at night due to lack of security in the camps. Others expressed suicidal thoughts, with one refugee telling researchers: "I prefer to die than be here".

The research, seen exclusively by The Independent, warns that severe overcrowding and a lack of resources have led conditions to deteriorate at a rapid pace following the EU-Turkey Statement in March, which banned asylum seekers from travelling to mainland Greece.

While people identified as "vulnerable" are supposed to be exempt from the ban, significant delays in this process meant many were being told they must wait until 2019 or 2020 to be assessed, the researchers said.

(Refugee Rights Europe (Refugee Rights Europe)

The majority of respondents (66 per cent) said they never felt safe on the island, with 48 per cent saying they had witnessed a death while being there  most of which occurred as a result of violence.

Nearly half of refugees surveyed for the report said they had experience some form of police violence, with 85 per cent of these exposed to tear gas, 34 per cent being physically abused, 36 per cent subjected to verbal abuse by officers.

Nahzley Anvarian, field researcher and coordinator at Refugee Rights Europe, told The Independent: Violence against refugees is apparent  instances of racially motivated physical and verbal abuse are commonplace from both citizens and police.

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"Many of the individuals we interviewed had been exposed to tear gas, which in some cases brought on serious health concerns and seemed to amount to the excessive use of force.

The report, which constitutes one of the largest research projects on the Greek islands to date, also warns that unsanitary conditions in the camps on Lesbos risk contributing to the spread of disease, inflammation, scabies and skin infections.

Refugees reported only being able to have a shower every 15-20 days, with access to water in the camp for bathing and using the toilets cut off during the night time and for several hours in the afternoon.

One male asylum seeker who had been in the camp for more than seven months told researchers: I crave having a shower. I beg to have a shower, we are human not animals.

The report warns that the treatment of physical and mental health issues is particularly underresourced, due to the high costs of accessing to services at the main hospital, as well as the transport to get there.

(Refugee Rights Europe (Refugee Rights Europe)

One man said that his son had fallen over and hit his head and they had to wait for half an hour for an ambulance while his child was bleeding profusely. He said the hospital did not give them any medicine or bandages to keep the wound clean, only a list of medication to buy at a cost of 22.

The man told researchers that the next day his son was crying and vomiting but they could not afford to take him to the hospital.

Other respondents raised concerns regarding the substandard response from medical professionals. One refugee explained: Whatever your disease, you will get the same medicine which is a painkiller only.

In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Show all 12 1 /12 In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee children at the Moria camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees queuing for food at the Kara Tepe camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees' tents at the Kara Tepe camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees at the Oxy transit camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees waiting to board ferries to the Greek mainland in Mytilene, Lebos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees waiting to board ferries to the Greek mainland in Mytilene, Lebos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees waiting to board ferries to the Greek mainland in Mytilene, Lebos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos The graves of drowned refugees in Mytilene, Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos A building used to house unaccompanied children at the Moria camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees queuing to register at the Moria camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees at the Moria camp in Lesbos In pictures: Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugees arriving on smugglers' boats from Turkey in Lesbos

The vast majority of respondents had experienced a health problem since arriving in Greece  one in six of whom said that they had not received any medical care.

Alice Lucas, programme manager at Refugee Rights Europe, said: Most new arrivals on the island have been told they will have to wait until 2019 or 2020 for an initial vulnerability assessment in order to be considered for a move to the mainland.

"This reality has caused many to lose all hope, leading to deteriorating mental health, tensions and instances of violence between refugees due to the heightened despair and desperation.

The local police in Lesbos have been approached for comment.Global tech hub may not be the first three words that spring to mind when describing the besieged and war-ravaged Gaza Strip. But a group of young Palestinians in the tiny territory, home to some 1.8 million people, are trying to change assumptions.

Every young computer programmer in Gaza Sky Geeks graffiti-clad headquarters has lived through three brutal wars, but the trendy workspace resembles a scrubby startup in a Hackney warehouse more than an office in one of the most conflict-ridden cities in the world.

Inspirational quotes (say yes to new adventures), references to Pirates of the Caribbean, and cartoon drawings are scrawled over the walls. Under the logos of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, young men and women crowd around laptops in a hive of activity.

The initiative was first launched with Google and Mercy Corps charity in 2011, to try to help youth find work. Gaza, where more than half the population is under the age of 29, suffers from a crippling 60 per cent youth unemployment rate  currently one of the highest in the world.

Last year they launched Gazas first coding academy together with London-based computer training company Founders and Coders. Now the tech hub is trying to expand into the other side of Palestine, the geographically separate West Bank.

Most of the young population have never left Gaza because of a crippling blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt since the Hamas militant group seized control of the territory in 2007.

Despite the physical barrier, Gaza Sky Geeks hopes to launch the West Banks first coding academy in October and even send its best coders there if they can get permits to travel from the Israelis.

The idea came out of necessity. The unemployment rate in Gaza is so high, due to blockade and now aid cuts. There is nothing in the private sector or in NGOs, you cant open your own company without a solid infrastructure, said Moamin Abu Ewaida, one of Gaza Sky Geeks founding members.

So people started to think about the internet, whether its coding, freelancing, entrepreneurship or offering tech solutions. Because of the blockade the only gateway for us is the internet. With the internet there is no blockade, he added.

Last year the team began six-month training courses in Gaza, as much of the population were still rebuilding their lives and livelihoods following the destruction of the 2014 war with Israel.

During the 50-day conflict, more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed in the Strip, along with 66 Israeli soldiers and seven civilians in Israel. Over the summer tensions have reached boiling point again. Only interventions from the United Nations and Egypt have dragged both sides back from the brink of war.

Despite the challenges, this month Gaza Sky Geeks held an initial signup meeting in the West Bank city of Hebron to get the ball rolling. The course not only teaches coding but helps its students offer prototypes to companies and charities, and in the final two months acts as a kind of job agency, securing them full-time work.

We want to take our skills and our networks to the West Bank. We are already working with different companies, different brands like Amazon, Facebook, Google. We need to share that, Mr Abu Ewaida continued.



Ultimately our mission is having Gaza as the tech hub for the Middle East, North Africa region and even the world, he said.

How young Gazans are using tech to take control of futures Show all 7 1 /7 How young Gazans are using tech to take control of futures How young Gazans are using tech to take control of futures Coders build websites at the headquarters of Gaza Sky Geeks in Gaza City Bel Trew/The Independent How young Gazans are using tech to take control of futures Gaza Sky Geeks headquarters is home to Gaza's first coding academy Bel Trew/The Independent How young Gazans are using tech to take control of futures Students from the Gaza Sky Geeks six-month coding course brush up their skills Bel Trew/The Independent How young Gazans are using tech to take control of futures Graffiti along the walls of the coding academy's headquarters Bel Trew/The Independent How young Gazans are using tech to take control of futures The coding academy is into its fifth round of students in Gaza Bel Trew/The Independent How young Gazans are using tech to take control of futures The coding academy hopes to open a branch in the West Bank Bel Trew/The Independent How young Gazans are using tech to take control of futures How young Gazans are using tech to take control of futures Bel Trew/The Independent

The West Bank, which is controlled by the largely secular Palestinian Authority, is arguably more open to the world than Gaza, that faces tougher sanctions and controls. And so the West Bank youth were surprised by the skills of their Gazan counterparts.

Honestly people here were pretty shocked, said Rand Safi, 26, from the West Bank city of Ramallah where Gaza Sky Geeks held a meet up session in July, although only the international mentors were permitted to leave the Strip and travel there.

Ms Safi, who is working with Mercy Corps, said a lot of people, particularly women, also joined the introductory coding session in Hebron, arguably the most troubled city in the West Bank. Applications close next month for the new coding course.

We are hoping this will be a way for Gaza to share their knowledge with their peers in the West Bank, we too have an unemployment problem here. There are thousands of graduates each year who have nowhere to go, she added.



Matt Davies, a British tech expert from Founders and Coders, who is also part of the international mentor team, said it was already having a profound effect.

People are excited to change perspectives from thinking of Gaza, and Palestine as a war zone to a tech zone, he said.

Ultimately our mission is having Gaza as the tech hub for the Middle East, North Africa region and even the world Moamin Abu Ewaida, Gaza Sky Geeks

Back in Gaza the programme has changed lives. Hanein Shahwan, 25, a computer engineer from Gaza, was desperate for a job after graduating from university with flying colours. She is in the closing stages of the coding academys fifth round of students.

Honestly I tried so hard to find other work but the situation in Gaza is so difficult right now. Of 50 people who graduate, two or three will be lucky enough to land a job. So I turned to coding, she told The Independent from the Gaza Sky Geeks headquarters.

Now I can work from anywhere from home, from a cafe. With the sufficient software skills, I can apply for jobs on websites, and crucially can find one easily.Walking down Vaernedamsvej, between Copenhagens Vesterbro and Frederiksberg neighbourhoods, you could be in Pariss first arrondissement.

Maybe its the galettes from Cafe Viggo, the Gauloises being chain-smoked over pavement coffees, or the scurry of schoolchildren speaking only French. Its not very Scandinavian: its Copenhagens Little Paris.

Vaernedamsvej is one Copenhagens most likeable streets. Its an alternative to Nyhavn with its candy-coloured houses, the busy harbour, and many of the citys most overpriced restaurants. This miniature Paris remains a favourite among locals for its boutique shopping, gastronomy and cafe culture  and the Lycee Francais Prins Henrik.

Lycee Francais Prins Henrik (Alexandra Pereira)

Its the Lycee, established in 1954, that is to blame for the streets Frenchness, along with its long history as a butchers street. Since Vaernedamsvejs naming in 1733, the street became known for specialised food and luxury goods  selling things like wine and cheese (or absinthe, available at Juuls Vin og Spiritus).

So whats here?

Theres florist Blomsterskuret, owned by Martin Reinicke, who grew up in Frederiksberg. He has always loved Vaernedamsvej: It used to have a proper French bakery too, and the school has long been around. Now I get French parents coming into the shop, commenting on how Parisian it feels. Thats nice.

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Theres one thing that isnt very French about him, though. Hes a committed vegan, although he admits to one annual indulgence: steak tartare at Granola. Its such high quality and sometimes the body just needs things. My body responds well, he states in matter-of-fact Danish fashion. People here really care about their produce and about the quality of living. Its this philosophy that also gives Copenhagen a breeziness that isnt found in London or Berlin, I think.

There's also bistro Falernum, which serves (I think) the rarest tartare on the street. Plus, the waiters speak French.

Not far away is the Grand Teatret cinema that hosts French Mondays; great French-inspired coffee and shopping can also be found at places such as the uncompromisingly French Pastis and the low-key bistrotheque LEducation Nationale. Its ideal for a long lunch or dinner  and on Sundays there are sometimes live performances.

Its uncharacteristically grey on the Sunday evening that I step into candlelit restaurant Les Trois Cochons. Roumegous and Gillardeau oysters appear on ice, before a bowl of moules mariniere turns up and a platter of cote de boeuf is delivered alongside a pinot noir. The restaurant, despite its elegant interior and service, turns up the French rap, which soon moves into disco. The clientele spans all ages and all groups.

Les Trois Cochons, in a renovated butchers shop, serves knockout French food (Les Trois Cochons)

Where are the actual Parisians, though? Frenchman Alex Papatheodorou, an event and activation manager at Vice Scandinavia, has lived in the Danish capital for a few years. French culture is still really popular in Denmark, he says. I remembered when I moved here and said I was from Paris, people seemed excited and thought it was nice and exotic. I didnt really get it: Id just moved from Berlin where people didnt care about it or were pretty annoyed by French people.

His Copenhagen picks include Ma Poule in food market Torvehallerne and cafe Voulez Vous. He adds: I go to Rosfort and Rosfort, Pompette and Den Vandrette for good natural and French wines. And everyone adores Pastis. I know a lot of Danish chefs who moved to Paris to work for some time. It reflects somehow in the new restaurants opening around the city, mixing new Nordic and French cuisine.

Dont be fooled by the bikes  this street is pure Paris (Alexandra Pereira)

Its a balmy August evening and restaurateur Henrik Breum and I are sharing a wine and a cigarette outside his cheekily named brasserie, Je taime, which he opened four years ago close to Vaernedamsvej. The name was a bit of fun, and we dont remain fixed and traditional with our menu or wine selection. Were inclusive and we play around, he says. That extends to the dishes: a light beetroot, pear, goat cheese and walnut salad is followed with veal tartare.

Then more cigarettes are smoked on the terrace. It gets late. I hit the espresso. Thats fine  were in Copenhagens Little Paris.

Travel essentials

Getting there

EasyJet and Norwegian fly direct to Copenhagen from various UK airports.

Staying there

The one-bedroomed Central Hotel, just off Vaernedamsvej, is 2,500 DKK (300) per night including breakfast.Anyone in Kenya who does business outside the country, especially with American, British, or European customers, will be familiar with the three letters KYC.

Standing for Know Your Customer, this is the growing collection of laws, rules and regulations for international financial transactions designed to root out money-laundering and illegal cash flows.

KYC compels banks and other financial institutions to identify who they are dealing with, and to assess the risk that their services might be used for illegal purposes.

Questions about reasons for certain transactions might be an irritation for people running legitimate businesses. But KYC has become an important and effective safeguard against those who are not. We now urgently need something similar not just for international movements of money, but for the import and export of products globally, too.

Space for Giants, the conservation organisation I work for, has just published the results of an extensive study of wildlife crime prosecutions in North Central Kenya. Among evident progress on trial preparation and increasing convictions for ivory, sandalwood and rhino horn crimes - now at 67% in the courts we surveyed - one finding stood out.

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The majority of prosecutions are still focused on the poachers and low-level middlemen rather than any of the bigger players higher up the criminal networks.

Why dont the bigger fish end up in court? Chief among the reasons is that it is currently very hard to identify the source of seized consignments of illegal wildlife or forestry products, or to track precisely where they were heading. This often stalls investigations.

Agents facilitating transactions and shipments hardly vet their customers or their consignments. They are not compelled to collect sufficient, accurate information, and what they do collect is rarely comprehensive enough for investigations that may start long after the transaction.

Kenya should lead the world in tackling this with new legislation compelling import-export agents, shippers and brokers to know their customers, and carry out the same checks on their business as banks must for financial transactions.

This would be of deep benefit not just to conservation, but to all Kenyans. New catch-all Know Your Customer laws would make it far more complicated to move weapons, counterfeit medicines, drugs, stolen goods, and even people, as well as tusks, horns and scales.

Director of Public Prosecutions Noordin Haji agrees, saying that this idea from Space for Giants comes at an opportune time as Kenya aggressively counters organised crime, corruption, and terrorism.

This concept is one of several approaches that, if adopted, can support law enforcement and financial regulatory bodies safeguard our financial systems against exploitation and manipulation by criminals, DPP Haji told us. We at ODPP look forward to initiating and leading this discussion with law enforcements agencies and other stakeholders to realise the application of this concept.

The impact on wildlife crime would be enormous, because Kenya is now one of the worlds great transit routes for illegal wildlife products.

Between 2000 and 2017, there were more large ivory seizures in Kenya than anywhere else in Africa, and more than anywhere else in the world aside from Vietnam and Hong Kong, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency.

Fourteen separate incidents uncovered 24 tonnes of tusks, mostly moving through Jomo Kenyatta International Airport or the Mombasa Port. Prosecutions have started in 10 of those cases. To date only one has led to a conviction, which has now been overturned on appeal.

It is reasonable to assume that most of that ivory was not from Kenyan elephants. Frontline protection is robust here. It was likely from the great elephant killing fields of central Africa, and being trafficked through Kenya on its way to Asian markets.

The effects of new Know Your Customer laws in Kenya would therefore disrupt criminal networks in Africas remote hinterlands, in Asias mighty ports, and in backstreet shops still selling Africas precious heritage as trinkets, bangles, and show-pieces.

How would it work? A Task Force should be established to assess the ideas viability, using the banking industry precedent and translating it to the contexts of Kenyas ports and borders. It should include the Kenya Maritime Authority, the Asset Recovery Agency, the Attorney Generals Office, the ODPP, the Financial Investigations Unit, the Kenya Ports Authority, KRA and the Customs and Immigration authorities.

In the meantime, the East Africa Community Customs and Management Act 2004 already puts the onus to prove the lawfulness of transactions and shipments on accused parties. These stipulations should be robustly applied immediately.

To those who say that this cannot be done, that the criminal networks are too interwoven with corrupt systems that reward some in positions of power in Kenya, I say only this: look to banking.

Money-laundering and moving illicit funds were far harder to track and far higher in volume and reward than wildlife crime. Yet Know Your Customer has had a huge and swift positive impact there.

Kenya should lead Africa and the world, not for the movement of illegal products, but for enacting the legislation that adds to law enforcement agencies arsenals to defeat that movement in a positive and meaningful way.As a ranger in a national park in Zambia, Vorster Mweenes strategy to deal with poachers was so successful that he and his family received death threats, and he had to be transferred to work in another far away area.

In Gabon, Hamed Salvadord regularly leads weeks-long patrols deep into the central African hinterland, arresting suspected poachers targeting elusive and highly-endangered forest elephants.

Asha Mnkeni, Tanzanias first female ranger, is today part of an elite unit whose work includes persuading villagers that elephants are worth more alive than dead and that they should direct authorities to poachers in their midst.

What unites these three rangers is their work to deal with the sustained threat to wildlife from poachers feeding demand for animal parts in Asia, and in particular in China.

So it is perhaps striking that they are among 50 African rangers honoured as part of a new scheme backed by a group of Chinas richest entrepreneurs, including Jack Ma whose Alibaba Group includes Chinas largest online retailer, and the founder of Tencent, which runs WeChat, Chinas leading mobile messaging service.

They and a handful of others formed an environmental charity, the Paradise Foundation. Its first foray into funding the fight to protect Africas wildlife, with the support of the Alibaba Foundation, is the African Ranger Awards. Each year for 10 years, 50 rangers will each win a 2,000 cash prize, a recognition of their dedication and bravery.

Eleven of the winners recently attended an award ceremony in Cape Town in South Africa.

Its really a great motivation to us as rangers that people all over the world hear about our work and see what we do, and decide to give these kinds of awards, said Walter Odokorwot, community conservation warden at Kidepo Valley National Park in Uganda.

The job is hard, and as well as working all the time away from our families, we are often at great risk, said Nanyuki Lapalee, a former elephant poacher turned ranger at Kenyas Lewa Conservancy.

The award winners represent some of the estimated 20,000 to 25,000 frontline staff who risk their lives every day to protect Africas rich and diverse natural wildlife.

A 2016 survey found that 82 percent of Africas conservation rangers had faced mortal danger at work, and 60 percent had been directly attacked. More than 1,000 rangers lost their lives protecting wildlife and wild habitats between 2000 and 2016. Five of the 50 rangers honoured by the Paradise Foundation won posthumously, having been killed at work.

These rangers are sacrificing so much to protect Africas wildlife against illegal hunting and trading. With this award, we hope both to recognize their important work and to bring greater attention to the ways in which we can all contribute to protecting the natural world, said Jack Ma.

It is up to all of us to work together to safeguard our planets wildlife and resources for future generations. We don't want our children to ask us in 50 years, 'What are elephants?', or 'What are tigers?'. We don't want these animals only to be seen in museums.

Philanthropy in China is a new and fast-growing activity as the countrys newly-minted elites - Mr Ma used to be a schoolteacher and is entirely self-made - look to use their wealth to do good in China and beyond.

It has been Chinese demand for products derived from parts of African animals, including endangered animals like elephants and rhinoceroses, that has prompted the poaching crisis in the first place. The involvement of Chinese business in trying to address the crisis has been criticised as too little, too late.

Max Graham, CEO of Space for Giants, an international conservation charity based in Kenya and working to protect elephants and their habitats in eight African countries, disagrees. Space for Giants patron is Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of The Independent.

Its not just business, its the Chinese government, who you must remember acted to ban their domestic ivory trade, which was driving a huge proportion of the illegal killing of elephants, Dr Graham said.

Thats had a huge impact already, but it would be wrong to say its fixed the problem. The illegal wildlife trade affects many, many more animals than just elephants.

When people like like Mr Ma, or the founders of organisations of the size and influence of Tencent, stand up and say, we fully endorse the conservation of Africas biodiversity and we will put our money where our mouth is, that has a huge ripple effect through Asia, which is where most of these products still end up. Its a huge step and very, very welcome.

Beyond describing the rangers as heroes, Mr Ma in his address to the awards ceremony highlighted how conservation can drive African economies. Many Africans see conservation and wildlife tourism as an activity for foreigners that brings them few benefits.

But Mr Ma highlighted that tourism and community conservation were among Africa's fastest growing economic sectors, and both relied on the survival of wildlife currently targeted by poachers.

Rangers are the heroes because they protect the natural world for us and by doing that they protect jobs. I'm very honored to be able to do this very meaningful thing and recognize their work, Mr. Ma said.The key that would unlock a referendum on the terms of Brexit is the Labour Party. If the official opposition were to support giving the people the final say, then it would become likely that it would happen. Without that support, a new referendum is something that could come about only if the Brexit talks collapse in crisis.

Hence the advice from the Peoples Vote, the leading group that is campaigning with The Independent for another referendum, to its supporters to refrain from attacking or undermining Jeremy Corbyn.

This is wise advice. It ought to be obvious  sadly in this polarised, social media age it appears not to be  that the way to persuade people is to work with them, to engage respectfully and to build the widest possible alliances.

In this case, when the stakes are so high and Mr Corbyn has already kept his options open, it would be profoundly against the national interest for the debate to be contaminated by the sectarian grievances that are currently tearing Labour apart.

Mr Corbyns history as a Eurosceptic is not irrelevant, but he has never been dogmatically opposed to the European Union itself. His criticisms of it in the past have been for its weak accountability, its tendency as he saw it to favour capital over labour, and its rules against state aid for industry.

Those are all pertinent arguments, and lent credibility to his stance in the 2016 referendum of being, on balance, in favour of the UKs continuing membership. He has been criticised for an ambiguity born of trying to appeal to Leavers and Remainers alike, which he did surprisingly successfully in the 2017 general election. But if there is to be another referendum, the pro-EU side may need as much of that coalition as it can get, and Mr Corbyn would be important in helping to deliver it.

It was notable, too, that in recent interviews the Labour leader refused rather inelegantly to say whether he thought the UK would be better off out of the EU. The most plausible reading of such reluctance is that he believes the opposite, but does not want to offend Labour supporters who voted Leave. Supporters of a Final Say should cheer his implied view and applaud his attempt to keep the Labour coalition together.

The debate in the Labour Party is building up to a crucial phase at the annual conference in Liverpool next month. Opinion polls suggest that 78 per cent of party members support a new referendum. Many constituency parties have asked the conference to debate the question, and most trade unions have not ruled it out.

Most important, perhaps, Momentum, which began as Mr Corbyns leadership campaign, will meet this weekend to decide whether to put the question to its members, after 4,000 of them signed a petition calling for a conference vote.

Those who want to give the British people the right to a final say over the terms of our departure from the EU, when they are known, should focus on persuasion rather than criticism. That means understanding the so-called left-wing arguments against EU membership, and it means helping Mr Corbyn make the case for why they might be mistaken.The foreign secretary demands the PERMANENT release of an innocent woman let out on a three-day furlough. As it expires she is denied an extension and sent back to jail.

That would be frustrating on a Monopoly board  in real life it is a crushing disappointment as Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen puts it.

Jeremy Hunts strongly worded tweet on Thursday failed to secure the extension of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from Evin prison, in Tehran, where she has been held since April 2016, with eight months in solitary, and is now serving a five-year sentence for doing nothing. On Sunday she was sent back to prison after just three days to spend with her daughter.

According to the Free Nazanin Facebook page, as she was being returned to jail, she said: You can't send a small child her mummy, and then take her away again after three days. It is cruel. It is beyond cruel.

The 39-year-old added: Who would take a child from their mother? I was so happy yesterday walking in the street seeing normal life again, but I also envied the people in the street yesterday walking holding their children's hands. I just want a normal life.

 One Night of Freedom: comedy in solidarity with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

There is, however, comeback from the cruelty in recognising a fact: her temporary release was never the Iranian government softening its stance on Nazanin  it was the British government softening its stance on its own citizen.

Defeating all expectations, Hunt met Zaghari-Ratcliffes husband Richard Ratcliffe twice after becoming foreign secretary in July. This level of responsiveness is unheard of for the Free Nazanin campaign. It took a year and a half to, finally, gain the attention of big politicians.

Zaghari-Ratcliffes mayor, Sadiq Khan, for instance, has to this day said nothing about her case bar calling for Boris Johnsons resignation over his comments last year, when he mistakenly claimed she was in Iran to teach journalism. Ironically, it was this gaffe that actually put her case on the map nationally and internationally.

The Free Nazanin campaign now has the British government onside in a way that it couldnt have dreamed of two years ago. Hunt has used upper case, for goodness sake. And he must continue to because Britain has the upper hand.

Flying in the face of US wishes, Britain earlier this month reopened the bank account for the Iranian embassy which was blocked owing to sanctions in 2009. The UK is also risking the ire of its special-relationship ally in saying all the things Iran wants to hear about the 2015 nuclear deal.

The Iranian currency is falling at a rate that makes daily life next to impossible. British Airways, citing commercial viability, last week stopped flights to Tehran from London.

It is now the Iranian governments turn to soften its stance on Zaghari-Ratcliffe  and all political prisoners in Iran. This must be the demand from the UK government.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures 2018 Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe hugs her daughter Gabriella, in Iran after she was allowed to leave the Iranian prison, she is being held in, for three days. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested during a holiday with her toddler daughter in April 2016. Iranian authorities accuse her of plotting against the government. Her family denies this, saying says she was in Iran to visit family. Free Nazanin Campaign/AP Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe with her husband Richard Ratcliffe and their daughter Gabriella. Nazanin is serving a five-year prison sentence for allegedly plotting to overthrow Iran's government. PA Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures June 2016 Richard Ratcliffe's daughter Gabriella had her British passport confiscated and was stranded in Iran with her grandparents after her mother Nazanin was jailed. He left left a giant birthday card on the doorstep of the Iranian embassy in central London to mark her second birthday in June 2016. PA Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures Nazanin has spent some of her prison sentence in solitary confinement. PA Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe with her husband Richard and daughter Gabriella. Family Handout Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures July 2016 Richard Ratcliffe delivering a letter of petition with his mother Barbara Ratcliffe and MP Tulip Siddiq, to 10, Downing Street on the 100th day of her detention, on July 12, 2016. Getty Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures Supporters of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe held a vigil outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to mark her 707 days in captivity. Getty Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures January 2017 Richard Ratcliffe holds a '#Free Nazanin' sign and candle during a vigil for for wife on January 16, 2017. The vigil, being held outside the Iranian Embassy in London marks one year since the Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian and other US-Iranian dual-nationals were released from prison in Iran. Getty Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures Nazanin with her daughter Gabriella before they were detained by Iranian authorities. Change.org Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures September 2017 Gabriella, who is three-years-old in this picture, has now spent two years away from her mother. Richard Ratcliffe Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures November 2017 Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson meets with Richard Ratcliffe over Nazanin's case. They meet just days after Johnson told a parliamentary committee that she was in Iran "training journalists". WPA Pool/Getty Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures November 2017 Actor Emma Thompson braved pneumonia to support Richard Ratcliffe in leading demonstrators before a march in support of Nazanin in November. Reuters Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures November 2017 Richard Ratcliffe after the march said: 'It is profoundly moving to see so many people here.' REUTERS Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures November 2017 A picture of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe shown on Iranian state TV as part of a report that made fresh allegations against her. They said she had been recruiting for banned broadcast services, as well as 'opposition cyber teams'. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures December 2017 Iranian president Hassan Rouhani greets British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson at the presidential office in Tehran, Iran. Johnson visited Tehran to discuss the fate of detained Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. EPA Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe with her daughter Gabriella. PA Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures December 2017 Photos of Richard Ratcliffe and his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe on display at their home in north London. Mr Ratcliffe said he believed there was "still a chance" she may be released from an Iranian prison in time for a dream Christmas together. Unfortunately that didn't happen. PA Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures February 2018 Richard Ratcliffe delivers a petition and a letter addressed to the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to demand her release, at the Iranian Embassy in London on February 21, 2018. He also left support letters for his spouse in the country's embassy, amid a visit by a deputy foreign minister. AFP/Getty Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures August 2018 Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt meeting Richard Ratcliffe. Hunt has pledged to do everything possible to secure the release of a charity worker jailed in Iran Jeremy Hunt/PA Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe  in pictures August 2018 Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe hugs her daughter Gabriella, in Iran after she was allowed to leave the Iranian prison, she is being held in, for three days. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested during a holiday with her toddler daughter in April 2016. Iranian authorities accuse her of plotting against the government. Her family denies this, saying says she was in Iran to visit family. PA

Whether or not the issue of Britains historical debt of 400m is the reason Nazanin is being kept is neither here nor there  Britain must take a leaf out of Richard Ratcliffes book, be bold and see his wifes incarceration as part of systematic human rights abuses in Iran.

Read the Free Nazanin campaigns Twitter feed and you will see concern for all political prisoners in Iran.

The case of Nasrin Sotoudeh, the outstanding human rights lawyer who started a hunger strike on Saturday after being arrested in June and detained in the same prison as Nazanin, has nothing to do with the money Britain owes Iran.

Nor does the case of Farhad Maysami, the human rights activist jailed at the beginning of the month, whose beatings at 4am his mother was reportedly woken up to hear down the phone.

Pressure must be brought to Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and foreign secretary Javad Zarif to stop human rights abuses.

Zarif, who charms interviewers with idiom-packed English language skills, picked up in the US where he obtained his PhD, is ever keen to point out, as the Saudis do, and the Mugabes do, that the judiciary is independent of the government  a judiciary that locks up an innocent mother, charged and convicted behind closed doors.

But then Zarif is a man who has also claimed that, as an academic, he has taught human rights since 1988.

What a year to cite. At this time 30 years ago, the Islamic Republic was conducting what are known as the summer of 1988 killings  5,000 opponents of the regime murdered and buried in mass graves.

Still, Zarif and Rouhani have the power to demand that Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Sotoudeh are freed with other political prisoners to follow.

If they cant or wont, well, of course, the British government cant ask them to resign. But to bring a mummy back to her daughter, its back to the Monopoly board, and one place that can take a tougher stance on Rouhani and Zarif and see them for the ruthless hardliners they truly are: Fleet Street.As a spectacularly lapsed Roman Catholic of Irish heritage (though one who journeyed to see the pop star-like Pope John Paul II on his last visit to the UK in 1982), I dont suppose I have much claim to tell his holiness what to do.

I will though, because  like every other political and religious leader  he has a duty, in his case a god-given one, to do the right thing. And the time for action, not words, has arrived.

The latest news that the Pope was told back in 2013 about the sexual abuse of children at the hands of a cardinal and did nothing about it has prompted calls for him to resign from top Vatican officials. As far as Im concerned, the onus is on the Catholic Church, not one individual pope, to tackle this issue head on.

As it happens, like to many Catholics, the revelations came as no great shock to me. When I was growing up, in England, we had a priest, or monk, hanging around my Roman Catholic primary school who, in retrospect, showed inappropriate and potentially paedophillic behaviour. The kids used to gossip about him and warn each other to stay away from him. I wondered later on what might happen to him and then, about twenty years on, I heard that the police were on his case and he died after driving into a motorway bridge. So he escaped justice.

It irks me to this day, and I also think about how many of his fellow clergy, the teachers at our Roman Catholic school or the hierarchy in the diocese knew about his predilections. We now know that many serious assaults were allowed to occur through the Church and its schools up and down the country  and the world. Its easy to ask why nothing was ever done.

We now know that there was plenty of Church-enabled sexual abuse  including horrifying physical cruelty  inflicted upon scores of children, and there seems to be no end to the revelations of corruption and cover ups. Ireland was surely one of the countries that most suffered.

Almost every child of Irish heritage will have heard of or suffered the pride that their parents, grandparents, teachers and priests would take in inflicting harsh physical punishment for minor misdemeanours. They were at times almost terrorist-like in their taste for the belt, the rod, tawse, cane or any other device used to scar the legs, hands and backsides of infants and children. It was widespread. In Ireland, the state itself was so closely intertwined with the Church that it can and should be held responsible.

Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Show all 55 1 /55 Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis celebrates the Holy Mass at the Phoenix Park, in Dublin AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis arrives at Phoenix Park for a Papal Mass of the World Meeting of Families in Dublin EPA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A vigil takes place at the site of the mass grave which contained the remains of 796 named babies from the Bon Secours Mother and Baby home in Tuam. The vigil coincides with the Phoenix park mass which is taking place in Dublin held by Pope Francis. Excavations at the site in 2017 revealed underground structures which held babies bodies with ages ranging from 35 weeks to three years old with most of the dead buried in the 1950s when the facility was run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic religious order of nuns who received unmarried pregnant women to give birth Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures An aerial view of the crowd at Phoenix Park Getty Images Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Children queue for communion during Pope Francis' closing Mass PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures The Stand4Truth rally gathers outside a former Magdalene laundry in Dublin as part of the demonstrations against clerical sex abuse PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis leads the Holy Mass at Phoenix Park AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis arrives to celebrate the Holy Mass at the Phoenix Park AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures The names of the victims are read out as a vigil takes place at the site of the mass grave which contained the remains of 796 named babies from the Bon Secours Mother and Baby home Getty Images Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis leads the Holy Mass at Phoenix Park AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A member of the clergy carries a bowl of incense PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A vigil takes place at the site of the mass grave which contained the remains of 796 named babies Getty Images Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Members of the public pray as they watch Pope Francis deliver a Papal Mass of the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park EPA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis passes by a banner of a protester as he leaves St Mary's Pro-Cathedral AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis speaks during his visit to the Capuchin Day Centre for Homeless in Dublin AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis waves to the waiting crowds on Christchurch PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis waves to the waiting crowds on College Green PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Members of the public wave at Pope Francis as he travels through the city Getty Images Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis laughs as he leaves St Mary's Pro Cathedral during his visit to Dublin Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Two boys wave flags after climbing a post as they wait for Pope Francis Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pairs of baby shoes are hung from black ribbons on Gardiner Street in Dublin in memory of the children who died at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co Galway PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Crowds on O'Connell Street PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures WMOF2018/Maxwell Photography/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis memorabilia on sale on O'Connell Street PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis arrives at St Mary's Pro-Cathedral during his visit to Ireland to attend the 2018 World Meeting of Families AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis waves to the waiting crowds on O'Connell Street PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis addresses the congragation at St Mary's Pro-Cathedral AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Stephen O'Brien selling bottles of holy water from the St Mary's Pro Cathedral PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis prays inside St Mary's Pro Cathedral Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A man waves a rainbow flag behind a model of a pope which stands in the window above a bar Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures People hold a banner against Pope Francis on the way to St Mary's Pro-Cathedral AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Nuns wait by the side of the road for Pope Francis Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A model of a pope is placed in the window above a bar as crowds wait for Pope Francis to travel through the city Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Crowds on O'Connell Street, Dublin waiting to see Pope Francis as he travels in the Popemobile PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis waves to wellwishers as he arrives at Dublin Airport Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures His visit, the first by a Pope since John Paul II's in 1979 is expected to attract hundreds of thousands of Catholics to a series of events in Dublin and Knock PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis talks to journalists aboard a plane flying from Fiumicino aiport to Dublin AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures LGBT protestors from Dublin Pride and We Are Church with flags and umbrellas on Ha'Penny Bridge, Dublin to remember the victims of clerical sex abuse ahead of the start of the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis disembarks from the aircraft as he arrives at Dublin Airport Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Woman wait for Pope Francis to drive past, in Dublin Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Taoiseach Leo Varadkar delivers a speech watched by Pope Francis in St. Patrick's Hall at Dublin Castle WMOF2018/Maxwell Photography/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Protesters hold banners during a demonstration against clerical sex abuse, in Dublin Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis plants a tree during a meeting with Irish President Michael D Higgins, at Aras an Uachtarain PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis walks with the President of Ireland Michael Higgins at Aras an Uachtarain WMOF2018/Maxwell Photography/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Reuters Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis, center, is flanked by Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, right, as they arrive to meet authorities, in Dublin AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Protestors wearing baby shoes, to signify the children who died in mother and baby homes in Ireland, protest in Dublin ahead of the start of the visit to Ireland by Pope Franci PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis exchanges gifts with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar AFP/Getty Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Pope Francis speaks with President Michael D Higgins in his study during a visit to Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park, Dublin PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Navy band march prior to the arrival of Pope Francis at the Presidential residence in Dublin AP Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures Eddie McGuinness from Dublin LGBTQ Pride carries a rainbow flag across Ha'Penny Bridge, Dublin ahead of the start of the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis PA Pope Francis visits Ireland  in pictures A message left by Pope Francis in the visitors book at Aras an Uachtarain in Phoenix Park PA

The manifold abuses are well known now, and regretted as Ireland goes modern and secular. What the Church needs to do is threefold, not only to achieve justice but to shore up its position in one of its last relative strongholds.

First it needs to set up a Church tribunal with powers, country by country, to pay substantial damages to those with a case. In Ireland, these cases are often decades old so the evidence can be sketchy, but the very presence of the Church in a single mothers institution, for example, or its involvement in cases of forcible adoptions suggests there were people who were exposed to some hardship at the Churchs hands. The Vatican can afford it.

Second, the old sods still at large need to be brought to Church and civilian justice. There should be no hiding place, and Pope Francis needs to set aside personal loyalties or misplaced compassion in prosecuting them. Theyll have to suffer more than reciting a dozen Hail Marys.

Lastly, he should carry on making his speeches and using frank language to condemn those who use his/our church for evil. Words are valuable and necessary to admit fault, error and culpability, but mea culpa in this case is not enough.

That would be a holy trinity of reform for Rome, and one that every catholic, devout or otherwise, should pray for.Conservative backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg said the UK is well used to a hard Border, given its experience of the Troubles in the North

Sterling will fall to 95 pence to the euro and approach parity in the early part of next year if a hard Brexit is still on the cards, according to analysts at Investec Ireland.

Currency volatility, and unfavourable rates, are a big risk to Irish exporters into the UK, particularly in lower margin sectors including food.

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Weakness in sterling versus the euro also potentially hurts the overall competitiveness of the Irish economy.

The euro will strengthen to 95 pence versus the pound by the end of the year, and 97 pence in the second quarter of 2019, if there's a hard Brexit, according to Investec's head of treasury, Aisling Dodgson (pictured).

That view is based on a UK exit from the EU without a transition period or agreement on regulatory alignment and Britain leaving the EU customs union.

It does not allow for an even more destabilising so-called worst-case scenario - where planes don't fly and medicine supplies run out.

An alternative scenario, of an orderly transition, would boost the pound - to 87 pence in the final quarter of this year and 88 pence versus the euro in early 2019, Investec thinks.

With scant progress in talks to date, traders are increasingly pricing in a harder scenario.

Sterling fell to 90.390 pence per euro on Friday - an 11-month low.

"The markets increasingly sense that the risk of no deal is greater. I don't think anyone would really suggest otherwise," Aisling Dodgson said.

"At the end of the day our baseline case is if you strip it down to fundamentals it's in no one's interest for there to be no deal, but there are a couple of situations where you could see relationships breaking down," she added.

Infighting - and lack of communication - within the UK's ruling Conservative Party is now a major issue, she noted.

Conservative backbencher - and Brexit hardliner - Jacob Rees Mogg was lambasted over the weekend for holding up the Troubles-era Border regime as a model for post-Brexit controls.

"There would be our ability, as we had during the Troubles, to have people inspected," the Tory MP said.

"It's not a Border that everyone has to go through every day. But of course for security reasons during the Troubles, we kept a very close eye on the Border to try and stop gun-running and things like that," he said at a meeting in the UK.

The Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney branded the comments "ill informed".

The uncertainty around Brexit is starting to weigh on sentiment here, according to Bank of Ireland's regular 'Economic Pulse' sentiment tracker.

The index, which combines the results of consumer and business sentiment gauges, weakened in August versus July and compared to August last year.

Bank of Ireland's chief economist, Dr Loretta O'Sullivan, linked the more subdued mood to uncertainty around the Brexit negotiations, coupled with renewed sterling volatility.

"Amid political divisions in the UK government and the EU's lukewarm response to elements of the White Paper (setting out the UK negotiating position), there has been increased chatter about the possibility of a 'no deal' outcome to the negotiations. This is weighing on sentiment and is also impacting currency markets."

There is now just over a month until the initial deadline for Europe and the UK to reach a deal.

However, the talks are deadlocked, with a failure to settle arrangements that square the circle of the UK government's agreement to retain an open Border on the island of Ireland, with its plan to leave the European customs union.Richard Kennedy, group CEO of Devenish Nutrition, with some of the companys herd. Photo: David Conachy

During the July drought, an archaeological dig of the parched garden beside Dowth Hall, an 18th-century mansion in the Boyne Valley, revealed a 5,500-year-old passage tomb likely built by Ireland's earliest farmers.

The tomb, described as the most significant megalithic find in Ireland in the last 50 years, was unearthed on an estate owned by Owen Brennan, the executive chairman of agri-technology company Devenish Nutrition.

He bought Dowth Hall and its 430-acre estate at auction in 2013 for a reported 5m and has already turned some of its land into a Devenish research farm.

Richard Kennedy, Devenish's chief executive, says the company set up the farm at Bru na Boinne for the same reason Ireland's first farmers did - because of its fertile soil and location beside the River Boyne.

However, the Belfast-based company, which has long operated on both sides of the Border, has bigger plans in mind for Dowth: it will be home to its Global Innovation Centre.

That's been made possible by a long-term funding deal worth 118m that Devenish secured earlier this month. The refinancing of the private company's capital base comprises 40m from the European Investment Bank (EIB) - the largest-ever EIB funding for an Irish agri-business - and commitments from the company's new commercial finance partners, Ulster Bank and Danske Bank.

The financing will enable Devenish to accelerate its revenue growth over the next three years through R&D, mergers and acquisitions, and new manufacturing sites as it strives to become the world's leading provider of integrated animal, human and environmental health products and solutions.

By 2021 Devenish aims to boost its turnover by more than 100m (111.3m) to 315m and add some 100 jobs to its current 450-strong international workforce.

The deal is part of a strategic plan put in place at the low-profile farming and food company five years ago to structure its expansion, Kennedy says. It came about after the EIB saw Brennan give a presentation about Devenish at a Dublin conference two years ago.

The 40m in quasi-equity from the EIB will enable Devenish to commercialise its innovations. The company makes pre-mixed and speciality feed for pigs, poultry, cattle, sheep, horses and dogs, among other animals.

But it has increasingly been using technology to improve the use of nutrients throughout the entire food chain to capitalise on consumer appetite for healthy and sustainable food, through its R&D and innovation programme, dubbed One Health: From Soil to Society.

This programme will be based at the new Global Innovation Centre, which will house its group R&D board and 30 staff.

Kennedy says Devenish has research work "going on in a variety of locations throughout the US, Africa, Asia and Middle East. This new hub will bring all of this together, analyse it, provide direction and initiatives to engage with those local markets and ensure the research is commercially applicable in those regions".

However, the financing from the European Union's long-term lending institution was nearly scuppered by Brexit.

"It faltered and stuttered around Brexit, because of the EIB being a European bank and because of the uncertainty around Brexit," Kennedy says. The deal "took a bit longer than expected. That was to ensure we were able to mitigate all the risks and to have a strategy in place to deal with any eventualities around a hard Brexit and a soft Brexit.

"The patient equity the EIB put in will go across the UK and Ireland. We are not going to allow Brexit take those opportunities away."

Devenish generated about half its sales outside the region last year.

As it continues to diversify, it will deploy the new funding to pursue additional markets both within and outside the EU and strengthen existing ones.

In 2017, it bought a 50pc stake in a Yem-Vit, a Turkish maker of poultry, ruminant and aquaculture products.

Devenish is now in talks to buy as many as seven companies in Europe, Africa, Asia, the US, the UK and Central America.

Kennedy says: "They are small acquisitions - bolt-ons that will give us the opportunity to expand into those markets and partner with people who have experience in that market."

Devenish's international reach is a far cry from its humble origins. It was set up as a trading-based feed company in 1952 and now has 10 manufacturing sites across Ireland, the UK, the US, Turkey and Uganda, offices in the UAE, Uganda, Mexico, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic and India, and exports to 40 countries around the world.

Kennedy himself grew up in a family that owned a livestock mart, where he helped out from the age of seven.

"The livestock mart provided me with a love for the business of agriculture," says 53-year-old Kennedy.

After graduating in 1989 with a degree in agricultural science from UCD, Kennedy went into the animal nutrition industry. After working with Brennan in a Tallaght-based company throughout the 1990s, the pair decided it was time to have their own business. So when Brennan led a management buyout of Devenish in 1997, Kennedy joined the company, later taking a stake.

"Devenish has flowed in my veins over the last 20 years and it's as much a part of me as I am part of it," he says.

Back in 1997, Devenish was a feed company with just 23 employees and a 5m turnover - 90pc of which was generated in Northern Ireland.

"Now we have 23 different nationalities working for us and a presence in 30 countries," Kennedy says.

Sales have grown every year since then and are poised to hit 250m in 2018, says Kennedy.

"We've been profitable every year but we do reinvest all our profits in our business to grow it and ensure we continue to be innovative," he says.

"We knew if needed to grow even more exponentially, we would need a different method to fund it and that's why the financing deal was so important."

One of Devenish's biggest breakthroughs was the world's first omega-3 enriched chicken. It spent a decade researching and developing it with poultry producer Moy Park. By 2016, high-end British supermarket chain Waitrose was selling chicken fed with Devenish product OmegaPro, an algae-based source of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, and reared on Moy Park farms in Northern Ireland. Devenish is also one of the industry participants in VistaMilk, a new Science Foundation Ireland agri-technology research centre run by Teagasc. It will use data analytics on milk production to develop precision technology that can enable the expanding Irish dairy sector become more efficient.

Kennedy says: "It has the potential to help farmers develop an even higher quality product and to access and utilise nutrients in milk that have the potential to improve human health."Romania has confirmed an outbreak of deadly African swine fever at the countrys largest pig breeding farm and all 140,000 animals will be culled, the national food safety authority ANSVSAs office in the affected region said on Saturday.

The farm complex, which consists of three adjoining properties and is located in the southern county of Braila, is owned by Romanian company TEBU Consult.

On Friday morning I sent samples to the national reference lab and tests confirmed the existence of the virus. From Monday, all pigs at the farms, or 140,000, will be culled, DSV Braila director Gicu Dragan told state news agency Agerpres.

Dragan said the farms have used water from the nearby river Danube. The official said he had heard reports that some smallholders had been dumping the corpses of infected pigs into the Danube, suggesting the highly contagious virus might have been spread by river water.

Weve been focusing on mainland and the virus might have emerged from the waters, he said.

Romania has reported hundreds of outbreaks of the disease among pigs kept in backyards and smallholdings as well as several large private farms located especially in the south of the country. About 100,000 pigs have been culled so far.

African swine fever affects pigs and wild boar and has spread in Eastern Europe in recent years. It does not affect humans.

Hungary, Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Romania are among the countries affected, alarming governments and pig farmers due the pace at which it has spread.The RSPCA is considering whether to prosecute after an undercover investigation revealed horrific cruelty and abuse behind the scenes as sheep were sheared on British farms.

Animals could be seen writhing in agony as they were violently hit, punched and stamped on, and had their limbs twisted.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which carried out the secret filming.

A Peta investigator reported seeing illegal cruelty in every one of the 25 English farming sheds visited by two shearing contractor companies over 15 days.

In the first secret footage ever taken of shearing in Britain, the witness saw panicked sheep being:

punched

beaten

stamped on

cut with shearing equipment

sewn up roughly with needles but no pain relief

held down with booted feet

slammed into a wooden floor by the head

thrown off lorries to the ground

left without veterinary care when painfully lame

killed and the carcasses thrown away

Donald Broom, professor of veterinary medicine at Cambridge University, said that sewing up a cut with no anaesthesia and throwing sheep  as the witness reported  caused pain and suffering to a degree that breached guidelines for legal practice by the World Organisation for Animal Health and other international bodies.

Such cruelty is illegal in most countries.

The footage shows how shearers stood on sheeps heads and necks, pinning them down to stop them moving, threw animals on and off the back of lorries, twisted their necks and limbs, and hit their heads and bodies on hard floors.

In other cases workers kicked animals in the stomach, violently punched them in the face and jabbed them in the head with heavy metal clippers. Some of the clips were too horrific for The Independent to show.

After rough shearing caused bleeding open wounds, shearers used needles  which the witness said did not appear to have been sterilised  to sew them up, without anaesthetic.

The investigator said a shearer earned on average 200 a day if there are a lot of sheep, and an even faster shearer could earn more.

When the investigator visited, workers were filmed angrily swearing, saying Bas****, Cut your f****** throat and What the f*** is wrong with ya? as they used metal tools to beat or hold the animals down.

A farmer was reportedly seen dragging two sheep who were unable to walk into a shed and left them without veterinary care. They eventually died. Several more died during shearing of a condition that a farmer said was a heart attack.

In a statement, British Wool told The Independent it was shocked and saddened by the behaviour of the two contractors filmed secretly.

As a farmer-owned organisation, British Wool collects and sells the wool on behalf of British farmers. We are passionate and committed to continuously seeking to improve shearing skills and good practice in the UK, a spokesperson said.

Every year we train more than 1,000 people in all parts of the UK on two-day training courses that are tailored to their existing level of experience and skill.

It is not within our remit to police the shearing industry: this responsibility lies with the government and the RSPCA.

The RSPCA will be making a full investigation into the footage, the statement said, adding: We will provide them with any support required.

We would like to point out that the vast majority of the thousands of shearers in the UK operate to the highest standards of animal welfare, which is an integral part of all our shearing courses.

The RSPCA, which has prosecution powers, said on Twitter: We share Petas concerns in particular of the poor handling, shearing technique and aggression shown toward the sheep. Our Inspectorate are now investigating the footage to determine any further action.The former billionaire, Sean Quinn claims he is "not losing any sleep" over his ambitions to buy back the business empire he founded and spectacularly lost after gambling on Anglo Irish Bank's share price.

"If they want to just wreck it, so be it, on their head it is. If they want me to save it, I can do that. I have the raw materials, the support of the staff, the support of the community, and the support of everybody to do it, and the ability and the knowledge and the know-how to do it," he said. "I am not losing sleep over it. It is entirely up to them".

Quinn emerged in public last Tuesday for the first time in years, to allege to a crowd of local supporters that he was "knifed in the back" by the new owners of his former empire who have turned around the business to deliver a 200m turnover and a 59pc increase in profits.

In an "impulse" call responding to queries from the Sunday Independent, Quinn said he was invited to address the meeting of supporters in the Border town of Ballyconnell, Co Cavan.

"They asked me to go public over the last number of years which I refused to do," he said. But he thought it "would only be right to fill in the Quinn supporters on what the position was, they were reading in the paper about how well the company was doing and all this sort of craic". He added: "I went and I explained things as I saw them and that was it."

He claimed that while it was true sales and employment had increased at his former concrete and plastics business, it had run out of raw materials "because nobody in the local community are going to sell to what they would consider as traitors and what I would consider as traitors".

Once Ireland's richest man, Quinn was ousted from his businesses over his 2bn debt racked up buying shares in the former Anglo Irish Bank. He was jailed for contempt of court and declared bankrupt. An Irish consortium, backed by American investors, bought back part of his businesses, with Quinn's blessing, and hired him as a consultant on 500,000 a year. Quinn left that role in 2016, claiming it was by "mutual consent" but told the Sunday Independent last week that he was "sacked in writing".

Quinn's public address last Tuesday marks a ratcheting up of tensions in the area in recent months. A new Facebook page, Sean Quinn community, was launched in April by a group claiming to include current and former employees. A previous Facebook page was shut down by the High Court.

Separately, the Sunday Independent has learned that Quinn Industrial Holdings has recorded 19 separate incidents since taking over the business in December 2014. These include an alleged physical assault on a relative of one of the group's senior management in May, while threatening and hostile signs have been erected in the area.

Sean Quinn has consistently condemned threats and intimidation against his former business, and repeated this weekend that he has had no hand, act or part in any campaign.

Having told the public meeting last week he wanted to buy back the business, Quinn told the Sunday Independent it was "not the top of our agenda". He added: "Top of our agenda is winning the court case next year and growing Quinn Bet," referring to the online betting firm, he launched last year and which is run by his family.

He said the business has left the family "in a much more stable position, mind wise and money wise".

A legal action by Quinn wife's Patricia and her children, denying liability for the 2.3bn debt, is due in the High Court in January. The family is also being pursued over the alleged asset stripping by Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, Anglo's successor.

As for his troubles of the past years, Quinn said: "Let's put it this way. Whatever I have to do in life, I just get on with it and do it. So if you are asking me was it a very worrying time? I slept every night from the time they took it [the business] off me eight years ago."

Quinn Industrial Holdings was invited but did not attend the meeting in Ballyconnell.

A statement said the representations of the company's prospects at the meeting were "inaccurate".

"Quinn Industrial Holdings DAC reported a 59pc increase in pre-tax profits last year, and this year has seen a continuation of the trend of increased turnover, profits, investment and employment. Due to the hard work of the company's 830 staff, the company's long-term future is bright."Members of the UrbanVolt team, from left, Maura Ryan, supply chain manager; Edel Kennedy, head of marketing; and Fiona Cairns, commercial pricing manager

Dublin-based UrbanVolt has become the first Irish firm to join an eclectic international club of companies that includes everything from Ben & Jerrys ice-cream, to Danone, to outdoor clothing company Patagonia.

The innovative Irishenergy services company, established in 2015, has been accorded the international B Corp status, which denotes that a firm has met rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, governance, accountability and transparency.

About 2,600 companies spread acrossin 60 countries and overmore than 150 industries have reached the standard but this is a first for an Irish company.

Edel Kennedy, head of marketing at UrbanVolt, said the company had been inspired by Patagonias desire to use the power of business to fundamentally change the world for the better.

Businesses have to make money to survive, thats a given. But thats not enough anymore. You have to use the power of business to do good and influence positive change in the world, especially when it comes to the environment, she said.







Of recent, the Inuit have continually claimed the end of the world is nearby. Inuit are the native people of the arctic regions of US, Canada and Greenland.

In an interview with Insuma TV, quoted on Express.co.uk, one Inuit elder says the Earth is wobbling and that the sky has changed. The elder, Ludy Pudluk said: This change is noticeable. The daylight is a lot higher on the horizon. Another Inuit, Inookie Adamie, said: Where [the sun] rises has not changed much, but the sunset has shifted way over. Perhaps the Earth has tilted on its axis. A third, Elijah Nowdlak added: The Earth has changed its tilt. I dont know exactly when it happened, but I do know the sun used to set close to the highest mountain peak. After the shift, the sun now sets past the mountain peak.

The elders all had one message in common, they warn humanity that Nibiru is approaching

The Nibiru cataclysm is a supposed catastrophic meeting between the Earth and a large planetary object which certain groups believe will take place in the early 21st century. It is considered a mere conspiracy theory in many quarters. The Nibiru itself, also popularly referred to as planet X is the large mysterious planet.

Some Christians also believe in Nibiru, popularly supported by a bible passage; Revelation 12:12 which reads: "And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of 12 stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth."

David Meade an American Christian conspiracy theorist who wrote a book called Planet X  The 2017 Arrival, had suggested last year that the mysterious "Planet X" - or Nibiru  could be headed towards Earth to destroy it on September 23, 2017, however when nothing had happened on that date, Meade claimed his messages had been interpreted and instead suggested that October 15 would usher in the start of the doomsday.

Despite the coming and going of the several dates appointed for this doomsday apocalypse, believers in planet X keep believing that the end is nearer than the rest of humanity seems to think.

Just this year, David Meade, again released a new interpretation of the Book of Revelation that pegs the date of the rapture to April 23. He suggested once again, that this is the day planet X was going to crash into our world.

A most recent prediction is that of July 27, 2018 with the appearance of a blood moon eclipse.

Christian preacher and conspiracy theory purveyor Pastor Paul Begley quoted in The Sun, made a video arguing why he thinks the Blood Moon is a "sign of the end times".

It is a sign of the end times. We are in the era of the apocalypse and this Blood Moon which will be the longest Blood Moon of this century is happening in the 70th year of the Israel being a nation. Its happening the same year also that Jerusalem has been declared the eternal city of God. Once again this date has passed without any dramatic events.

Interestingly, Nostradamus, the man who saw tomorrow, predicted the end of the world to fall in the year 3797, it is a pity that by then none of us here now, would be there to witness if this particular doomsday prediction turned out true.If you have a great fondness for department stores, be careful what you read these days. For many months now, the newspapers have been increasingly full of tales of woe, coming especially from the British retail sector.

The 'rescue' of the House of Fraser is just the latest news bulletin from a beleaguered sector that is struggling to come to grips with the impact of the internet. But as most people's granny will have wisely said at one time: "God never closes one door, but he opens another."

The same customers who are deserting the luxury goods counters in the old high-street department stores are flocking to the shops where these same (well, similar) luxury brands are selling at a discount.

Our company this week, the US group TJX, owner of TK Maxx, has been to the forefront of this trend.

Founded in the 1970s, it is a holding company for a number of retail chains and online shopping sites.

TJX has both thrived and been a worthwhile investment. It sells apparel, footwear, jewellery and home goods at between 20pc to 60pc below the full price.

Last year, customers 'treasure-hunting' for clothing and footwear accounted for 53pc of sales. Jewellery and accessories represented 15pc of turnover, while home products accounted for 33pc.

TJX's value business model works. Since it opened its first store in Framingham, Massachusetts, 41 years ago, in only one year did it fail to increase its revenue.

Today, it has more than 4,000 stores on three continents, employing a quarter-of-a-million people.

It has a market value of $67bn (57.6bn), sales of $36bn, net income of $2.6bn and is ranked 85th among the Fortune top 500 companies.

Sourcing products at a discount is critical for TJX. To achieve this, it has more than 1,000 worldwide buyers dealing with 20,000 companies in 100 countries across four continents.

Its buyers take advantage of opportunities as they arise and keep a close eye on order cancellations, manufacturing over-runs, previous years' designer fashions or brand closures.

The US is its largest and most profitable division, with sales of $22bn and operating profits of $2.9bn.

The business has 2,300 stores for its retail chains trading as TJ Maxx and Marshall. Sales last year of its 670 Home Store operations exceeded $5bn for the first time and generated profits of almost $1m per store.

The Canadian operation is much smaller than the US one, with 450 outlets, but shows the highest profit at $1.2m per store.

The group's international segment is Europe and, recently, Australia.

Europe accounts for 95pc of the business. It trades as TK Maxx in six European countries, including Ireland. Its 520 stores contributed $5bn to group sales but profits of $250m disappointed.

The group has seen some interesting trends. Sales have increased by $2bn each year over the last five years and net profit shows a similar trend, increasing by $0.2bn each year over the same period. These results have been driven by more than 200 additional bricks and mortar stores each year.

It must concern competitors that the company plans to increase its store numbers to 6,000.

Surprisingly, its e-commerce business contributes less than 2pc to group sales but, according to the company, it is an important complement to its retail outlets.

TJX has a healthy balance sheet and one of the strongest rating (A+) in the retail sector. Its share price at $106 is just below its yearly high and shows an increase of more than 50pc on the year.

The group also generated $3bn in cash from operations, has a price earnings multiple of 25 and earnings per share of $4.

US President Donald Trump's tax cuts were beneficial to the company, which used them to increase its dividends and share buybacks. But then the group is committed to increasing its dividend and has been doing so for over two decades.

However, while the group and its brand continue to be successful and the share is attractive, I would still worry about online disruption in the longer term.





Nothing in this section should be taken as a recommendation, either explicit or implicit to buy any of the shares mentioned.Facebook's announcement on Monday that it was removing accounts connected to Myanmar's military effectively cuts off the armed forces' main channel of communication with the public.

Facebook dominates the social media landscape in Myanmar, where millions of people have come online for the first time since reforms to liberalise the telecoms sector began in 2013.

The government uses Facebook to make major announcements, including the resignation of the country's president in March.

Facebook said it had banned 20 individuals and organisations to prevent the spread of "hate and misinformation" after reviewing the content.

Clare Wareing, a spokeswoman for the Menlo Park, California-based company, told Reuters by email that it was the first time the company had banned members of a military or state actors.

Military spokesman Colonel Zaw Min Tun declined to comment on Facebook's action. Government spokesman Zaw Htay did not answer calls seeking comment.

The ban included two pages dedicated to the army's commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, that have been the military's primary outlet for information, especially around the crisis in the western state of Rakhine last year.

More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fled the state for Bangladesh after a security crackdown launched in response to attacks by Rohingya militants.

Min Aung Hlaing's pages - one of which was "liked" by 1.3 million people - gave detailed running commentaries of what it said were battles with the militants.

Other posts showed the bespectacled commander in civilian clothing giving alms to monks, or viewing potential weapon purchases abroad. The accounts showed military doctors treating the sick and soldiers performing public works in rural areas.

The military also operates its own newspaper and television station, but Facebook has allowed it to communicate in real time, even as operations unfolded on the ground. Facebook said the accounts it banned on Monday had 12 million followers.

Read More

"Facebook has been the key channel enabling the military's communication with the public and this ban will hit their communication ability hard," said Richard Horsey, a Yangon-based independent political analyst and former U.N. diplomat to the country.

Horsey said Min Aung Hlaing was a politically-savvy operator whom some analysts and diplomats have tipped as a potential candidate at the next election in 2020, when Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy is likely to face opposition from nationalists aligned with the military.

"He has built a significant political profile for himself extending well beyond his narrow military role and has used Facebook to project it onto the public," said Horsey.

Reuters was unable to contact Min Aung Hlaing on Monday.

The social media giant has been accused of acting too slowly to remove content that has fuelled violence, especially in the western Rakhine state that is home to the stateless Rohingya Muslim minority.

Facebook said on Monday it was making progress on preventing "the spread of hate and misinformation" in Myanmar, admitting it had been "too slow to act". Many of those banned were found by international experts to have committed or enabled human rights abuses, Facebook said.

Facebook's action today comes a week after Reuters published an investigative report that found more than 1,000 posts, comments and images that attacked Rohingya and other Muslim users on the platform.

U.N.-mandated investigators said in a report published earlier on Monday that Facebook had been "a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate, in a context where for most users Facebook is the Internet."It might work out better for Angela Merkels Germany if a non-German takes over at the ECB but pursues the same policy. Photo: Reuters

The biggest barrier to Jens Weidmann's candidacy for the European Central Bank has a name: Manfred Weber.

Mr Weber, a Bavarian who leads the largest bloc in the European Parliament, is said to be preparing a bid to replace Jean-Claude Juncker when he stands down as European Commission president next autumn.

The problem for Mr Weidmann, the current Bundesbank chief, is that convention dictates that Germans can't occupy two of Europe's most senior posts at the same time.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has concluded that it is more useful to Germany to secure the commission post than the top ECB job, according to sources familiar with her thinking.

Yet Mr Weber, a member of Ms Merkel's Bavarian sister party, isn't a shoo-in, according to the sources, who asked not to be identified while discussing internal party deliberations.

Some in her Christian Democratic Union favour Peter Altmaier, a Merkel confidant and Germany's economy minister.

It's a sign that jockeying by the European Union's governments, its political factions and Europe's leaders is heating up.

Their choices will influence the EU's course for years to come on everything from monetary policy to how the bloc deals with populist challengers. In fact, Germany's shift away from Mr Weidmann was under way six months ago, according to the sources. It is coming to the fore now because the selection of candidates to head the commission opens in early September, one of them said.

Ms Merkel, when recently asked about the race, framed her reply in the context of who the European People's Party - the umbrella body which includes her CDU - will nominate as its candidate for commission president. That post and the ECB presidency are up for grabs in the autumn of 2019, after elections to the European Parliament next May.

"The discussion about upcoming personnel decisions in connection with the European Parliament election is slowly starting now," Ms Merkel said in Tbilisi, Georgia.

"There has been no decision whatsoever and the post of European Central Bank president comes up only much later."

Ms Merkel has reason to hedge her bets: she and her Bavarian allies are fresh from a clash over migration that led to a coalition rift in June.

While Mr Weber and Mr Altmaier are broadly pro-European, they have differed in tone on refugee policy and come from opposite sides of the recently patched-up divide.

Mr Weber (46) declined to comment when asked about his ambitions. The European People's Party is likely to need the support of liberal parties to install the next European Commission head.

If the maths doesn't come together, Germany might shift its sights back to the top ECB post, one of the sources said.

The calculation in Berlin may be that having a German in charge at a time of disruption - ranging from US protectionism to Russian aggression - outweighs the ECB chief's powers.

According to one of the people familiar with the government's thinking, it might be better for Germany if a non-German takes over at the ECB but pursues the same policy.

That could indicate a fellow northern European.

Finland's Erkki Liikanen or Olli Rehn, Estonia's Ardo Hansson and Klaas Knot of the Netherlands are among the names being mentioned by economists.

If Ms Merkel holds back, French President Emmanuel Macron might gain more room to push candidates from his country, such as Bank of France governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau or ECB executive board member Benoit Coeure. (Bloomberg)'A US official confirmed Washington was asking for talks to be put on "a much faster timeline" but gave no specific date.' AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Washington is pressing the European Union to speed up trade negotiations launched after last month's meeting between US President Donald Trump and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, two German and a US official have said.

Emily Haber, Germany's ambassador to the United States, told reporters a working group formed after the Trump-Juncker meeting had convened for the first time this week, and US officials were pressing "for very rapid results".

She said EU officials would need a clear mandate to move beyond the current "scoping exercise" and a deal would need to be reached before European Parliament elections in May 2019.

"The Americans are in fact pressing for very rapid results," Ms Haber said at an event to unveil plans for more than 1,000 events in the United States next year aimed at strengthening bilateral ties.

"As far as the timelines go, I would point out that we have European Parliament elections next year, and an agreement would have to be reached in a timely manner before these elections," she said.

A US official confirmed Washington was asking for talks to be put on "a much faster timeline" but gave no specific date.

A European Commission spokesman confirmed a meeting of the EU-US working group took place this week, but gave no details.

Mr Trump agreed during the meeting with Mr Juncker to refrain from imposing threatened car tariffs on European firms while the two sides launched negotiations to cut tariffs on steel, aluminium and other goods. That surprise agreement eased the threat of a transatlantic trade war. (Reuters)















Andrew Scheer reiterated his opposition to the governments carbon pricing scheme on Friday 24, August in a speech that emphasized the Conservatives election year priorities. At the gathering of party faithfuls at the Nova Scotia capital, with about three thousand supporters, Scheer explained his vision for a Conservative government in 2019.

Ive travelled all over this country. There is a carbon tax revolt brewing, Scheer said as his party supporters applauded

Conservatives know the carbon tax isnt just bad for big business; its bad for absolutely everyone. And thats why, come 2019, my first act as prime minister will be to get rid of it once and for all.

According to TheStar.com, party insiders told reporters that there was a lot riding on Scheers keynote address, given that this policy convention is a springboard for the partys pitch to Canadians in the lead-up to the 2019 election.

Scheers speech which several times addressed the notion of political correctness,condemned the city of Victorias resolution to get rid of a statue of John A. Macdonald, he called critics of Macdonalds policies against First Nations radical voices.

If we look back on our history and our leaders and only see the blemishes, we miss out on a beautiful story of a country that has progressed into one of the safest, freest and most prosperous in the world, Scheer said.

This statement is suspected to be a shot at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Sheer also referred to an incident which occurred recently between Trudeau and a woman at a campaign event in Quebec, where the prime minister deflected questions about the cost of irregular border-crossers coming into the province with accusations of racism and intolerance.

Trudeau "wants to impose his personal views on the country and demonize those who don't accept them," Scheer said, he also said he would hold the minister responsible for "smearing and name-calling those who criticize him."

The speech also addressed aspects of Scheer's personal life, part of the party's ongoing effort to allow Canadians a closer look at a leader who for many has remained an enigma since taking the Tory helm 15 months ago, reports the Huffington Post.

He regaled listeners with bits and pieces of his own family's history and his growing up in Ontario, He said he grew up in a small townhouse in Ottawa with little income and few luxuries which he says is evidence that he shares more in common with ordinary Canadians than his Liberal rival. In his speech, he targeted to destroy many ideologies of his opponent, Trudeau and his "tax-hiking, rule-breaking, perk-loving, deficit-spending, debt-mounting, virtue-signalling" ways. And he called on his party members to begin to work hard on inspiring support for the party in the 2019 elections.

"If we stay united, if we continue to work hard, if we remain true to our principles  in a few months, the path of Conservative victories will cross the whole country."The Court of Appeal has overturned the High Court's refusal to allow a teacher at a south Dublin private fee-paying school legally challenge how it dealt with a complaint alleging he called a male student a little bitch.

In 2016 the High Court ruled Pierce Dillon was not entitled to judicial review against Catholic University School for reasons including a final written warning issued to the teacher had expired, there was no record of it on his personnel file and because scarce court time should not be allocated to trifling matters.

Mr Dillon, who denies calling the student a little bitch, appealed that decision.

In its judgement on Monday the three Judge Court of Appeal, comprised of its President Mr Justice George Birmingham, Mr Justice Gerard Hogan and Ms Justice Marie Whelan, allowed the teacher's appeal and remitted the matter to the High Court for a fresh determination on the merits of Mr Dillon's arguments.

Mr Dillon had sought judicial review of the formal procedure adopted by CUS in dealing with a complaint by the boy's parents over events on May 8/9th 2014.

The teenage student claimed, after he was late on May 8th 2014 for Mr Dillon's class due to talking to another teacher, Mr Dillon told him he was continually disrupting the class, always moaning and was a little bitch.

The student also claimed, after telling Mr Dillon the following day he could not attend class due to a school sports commitment, he was told he would be kicked out of class for three weeks. The boy alleged he told Mr Dillon he was not allowed call him a little bitch and Mr Dillon had denied doing so

Following the complaint a meeting was held on March 27th 2015 to discuss disciplinary action, leading to a final written warning being issued to Mr Dillon in April 2015.

Mr Dillon was told CUS was a Marist Catholic school known for the kindness and humanity with which it treated its pupils, that his behaviour had fallen short of the schools expectations and a final warning would be active for 12 months after which, subject to his satisfactory performance, it would expire.

He claimed the handling of the complaint was unfair, breached his rights and the schools own procedures, and caused him hurt and distress after 34 years service as a teacher. He also claimed it allowed no appeal. The school argued it had implemented the appropriate procedure and Mr Dillon had been treated fairly.

In 2016 Mr Justice Michael Twomey said the court was being asked to intervene and quash a final written warning to a teacher concerning one incident of inappropriate name calling.

The court should not intervene on grounds of mootness (pointlessness) because, when the matter was first heard, the warning had expired. It had also been removed from his record within 12 months.

The judge said he was also refusing judicial review on the de minimis principle (a legal principle by which the court refuses to consider trifling matters) as the final warning was just a warning to be removed after 12 months and treated as it if had not existed. There was no imposition of any liability, he said.

He also refused judicial review based on the need to avoid unnecessary use of the scarce public resource of court time.

On Monday while giving the Appeal Court's decision Mr Justice Birmingham said the High Court was wrong in law to dismiss the case on the grounds it was moot. The terms of the final warning given to Mr Dillon had potentially significant implications for his good name and his employment prospects.

This was sufficient to justify the conclusion that the proceedings Mr Dillon sought to advance were not moot or a small matter. While the court said it was not expressing any view on the merits of the arguments advanced it was allowing the appeal and sending the matter back to the High Court for a fresh determination.

In his concurring judgement Mr Justice Hogan said he was concerned about deeming a final warning as minor. In his view such a warning should not happen lightly and cannot be regarded as a "trifle."

Mr Justice Birmingham said he was allowing the appeal despite his "strongly held view" that disciplinary actions in a industrial relations context, falling short of a dismissal, should rarely find their way to the courts.Gavin Duffy emphasised the 'soft power' of the Irish presidency. Photo: Gerry Mooney

Presidential hopeful Gavin Duffy has said that the Irish people won't be electing a Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump in October.

Appealing to councillors in Meath County Council for their support to get on the ballot paper in the race for Aras an Uachtarain, the Dragons' Den star and businessman emphasised the 'soft power' of the Irish presidency.

Mr Duffy said he has studied the constitution and those who have held the presidency in the past.

He said he welcomes the constitutional constraints on the office of the president.

"The President is the custodian of our democracy, our representative on State occasions at home and abroad.

"The President has no executive power or responsibility.

"At the end of October, the people will elect a President of Ireland  we're not electing a Putin or an [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and, dare I say it, not a Trump."

Mr Duffy pointed to the Presidencies of Erskine Childers, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese as Irish presidents that used soft power.

He mentioned Ms Robinson's visit to Somalia and Ms McAleese's role in the Northern Ireland peace process.

He said his presidency would be focused on five pillars - Youth; Age and caring for older people; diversity and inclusion; respect; and working together.

Under the heading of respect he said that he wants discuss how to end "shaming in our society" and highlighted cyber-bullying.

When he was challenged on how he would tackle cyber-bullying Mr Duffy said he's making no false promises admitted "I don't think I have the magic wand for cyber-bullying".

But he said currently the "pressure seems to be on parents" in terms of dealing with it.

He added: "I think the pressure should be on social platforms so they don't allow people to prey our children".

Mr Duffy is among a number of presidential hopefuls making pitches to county councils today.

They must win the support of four local authorities to get on the ballot paper.Vera Twomey-Barry from Aghabullogue. co. Cork pictured with her daughter Ava, who suffers from Dravet's Syndrome. Pic. Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision

Vera Twomey has announced that her daughter Ava is now "pharma free" and using forms of medical marijuana instead.

Ava (8) suffers from a severe form of epilepsy called Dravet's Syndrome, which at one point caused her to suffer 16 seizures in just 36 hours.

Vera and her daughter travelled to the Netherlands last summer so Ava could receive cannabidiol (CBD) oil and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) oil to help alleviate the symptoms.

Towards the end of 2017, Ava was granted a special licence which allows her to receive cannabis treatments at home in Aghabullogue, Co Cork.

Taking to Facebook, Vera said they are "scared and excited" about Ava's future without medical treatment.

"In the last number of weeks Ava has become officially pharma free. We were scared and excited at the same time to know what it would bring," she said.

"The last couple of photos of Ava I think speak for themselves and as it happens so does Ava as she is singing the beginning of nursery rhymes now more and more."

Vera continued that her daughter, who uses CBD and THC, is anticipating the return to school this September.

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"Her health and well being is now solely being treated by medical CBD and medical THC.

"Happy and healthy as we can be we move forward better and brighter and looking forward to getting back to school."

Vera made national headlines with her determined campaign to secure access to medicinal cannabis in Ireland for her daughter.

The Cork mother 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.

In April, Ms Twomey received news that her daughter's cannabis treatments, which costs up to 12,000 a year, would be funded by the state.Survivors of clerical abuse have branded the visit of Pope Francis as abysmal and appalling because he failed to identify an action plan about what he is going to do to address the issues of hurt caused by the Church in Ireland.

Speaking after the Pontiff admitted he was not aware of the Magdalene Laundries or the mother and baby homes, they questioned how he could be so out of touch with the deep pain and ongoing anguish that emanated from such institutions.

It is unbelievable. Its an inescapable reality and truth to us here in Ireland. No matter what happened he should have been fully briefed about what he was coming to regarding the pain and suffering here, said Mark Vincent Healy, who was abused by two priests in his time in school in Dublin.

One thing is for certain, he didnt know. You can blame it on himself for not asking questions, or those who surrounded him. I cant imagine that the Archbishop didnt brief him, and there are other service providers to the Pope who are feeding him information on what hes coming to in Ireland, he added.

Another survivor of abuse, Peter Isely from America, was also critical of Pope Francis.

Against the backdrop of the former Magdalene Laundry on Sean McDermott Street he said it is a place of silence, horror, and trauma, and it represents for every survivor in the world the silence of that horror.

What the Pope has said many times is that he is sorry, that he feels bad. And we appreciate that even though some have difficulty with what that means. The opportunity he had here was telling what he was going to do about it. If you want this to end, how are you going to end it? That he didnt do, he added.

Mr Vincent Healy and Mr Isely were speaking as a group documenting the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church added the names of seven clergy to its public database of clerical abusers in Ireland.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Aiden Corless lights candles in an artwork of clay childrens shoes at the site of the former Tuam home for unmarried mothers in Co Galway yesterday. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Protesters at the visit of Francis demonstrate on the Hapenny Bridge. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay Catherine Corless and husband Aiden (Niall Carson/PA) People read aloud names of children as they gather at Tuam (Niall Carson/PA) The faithful wait in the rain ahead of a visit from Pope Francis to Knock Shrine. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez Pope Francis leads the Angelus at Knock Shrine. Photo: REUTERS / Facebook

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Whatsapp Aiden Corless lights candles in an artwork of clay childrens shoes at the site of the former Tuam home for unmarried mothers in Co Galway yesterday. Photo: Niall Carson/PA

The co-director of BishopAccountability.org, Anne Barrett Doyle, said that although the list now stands at more than 90 individuals it is still only a fraction of the number of abusers who have sexually assaulted children in the Republic and in Northern Ireland.

According to the Irish Churchs own safeguarding audits they admit to more than 1,300 accused clergy since 1975. We have barely seven percent of those priests listed in our database, said Ms Barrett Doyle.

More than 1,200 accused priests remain unidentified to the public. Many may still be in ministry, others may have left the priesthood and may work and live in unsuspecting communities. What are the implications of such concealment for child safety, for survivors, and how has this massive ongoing concealment affected the ability to hold Irish Churchs to account? she asked.















PLEASE NOTE: The following article doesn't reflect the views of The Canadian or its writers

I have a confession to make.

Our Police Chief Charles Bordeleau is a very nice very guy out of uniform.

In fact, he's one of the nicest guys you could ever meet out of uniform. He's a friend of mine.

But once the Chief gets into his police attire he turns into a devil I must say.

And when the Police Chief turns into a demon that's when law enforcement in our city turns upside down.

My colleagues pick on black people they sometimes refer to as the "niggers", the poor and whoever else seems to be an easy target.

One favourite passtime has been to detain homeless people for no reason and dump them somewhere among the corn fields outside the city.

Speak to any homeless people you find on the street in downtown Ottawa, if you don't believe me.

I asked a friend of mine of the force why she joins in on this. She told me, "It's just something to do."

Or sometimes we just beat-up people for no reason.

We have nothing to fear because management at the Ottawa Citizen, the Ottawa Sun and other media including large national media like the CBC, CTV and Global all belong to the same "behind-the-scenes" cliques that the Chief belongs. So there's no fear among fellow officers of anyone getting into trouble unless one of us gets caught on camera.

That's what happened to some friends of mine who got caught on camera beating-to-death Abdirahman Abdi, a Somali-Canadian on July 24, 2016.

But, what motivated me to write this article is the ongoing bullshit by Detective Robert Griffin Jr against Dezrin Carby-Samuels.

While the Chief is a nice guy when he's not in uniform, Robert is just a "nice piece of work".

Now I too have a mother, like many of you readers out there. I also respect women. I cannot say the same for Robert.

This guy has no business being in the force. I know lots of good and hard working people who work as officers.

Sometimes some of them do bad things. However, there's small minority of what in my opinion are devil-worshippers that terrorize the public and Robert is one of them.

And when Charles, the Chief puts on that uniform there's nothing that the likes of Robert can do that the Chief won't excuse while he's also in uniform.

The fact that Robert can come to work with the smile on his face that he does while he has tortured "little old ladies" like Dezrin, in my view, could only be done so effortlessly by a sociopath.

On one police call after Robert got Dezrin's son evicted, Dezrin kept asking for her son Raymond before she lost her voice due to Robert's abuse.

Robert couldn't give a f-ck about Dezrin's well being though. He just wanted to make sure that the son was kept away from Dezrin even though he had been taking care of her and she wanted to keep seeing him.

So I naturally became very curious about WTF is going on with Robert's obsession with keeping Dezrin and her son from seeing each other when they have wanted to.

So a good friend of mine tells me off-the-record - and I can't say this for a fact - that Robert is just doing a "job" for Marcella who is Dezrin's daughter.

Apparently, Marcella wants her parent's house and whatever else she can get her hands onto when her parents die and she doesn't feel like sharing any of it with Raymond, her brother.

So, I said "What?! Is Robert getting paid for this?" My contact couldn't say. But, apparently Marcella who has worked for some shady people in big organizations was able to pull in some favours in her quest for the "Family Estate".

I said "You mean to tell me this Mom's daughter is such a sick bastard? Dezrin gave birth to a monster."

I felt like resigning from my job right then. Unlike the handful of sociopaths in the force who run amuck under the Chief, terrorizing, abusing and falsely arresting "suspects" I have a conscience.

Fortunately, having written this article, I can safely say now that I can be more at peace when I go to work everyday.

I hope that Dezrin's gets justice very soon and needed emotional support and medical treatment and that Robert's "House of Torture" that he has been operating against Dezrin for over three years gets the public attention that it now deserves.

Do me a favour and repost this article to as many social media sites that you know!Pope Francis pledged to examine the horrors of the Tuam mother and baby home as he returned to the Vatican last night.

Infant bones have been found at the site, and up to 800 babies may have been buried in a septic tank at the home, which was managed by the Sisters of the Bon Secours between 1925 and 1961.

The issue was raised by Children's Minister Katherine Zappone, who met Pope Francis on Saturday. The Pope had known nothing of the controversy until then. And returning to Rome last night on board an Aer Lingus flight, the Pontiff pledged to look into the matter further.

He said that Ms Zappone had informed him: "'Holy Father we have found common graves, children buried. And we are investigating. The Church is involved in this.' But she said it in a very polite way, with much respect. I thanked her for this. It touched my heart, that is why I wanted to repeat it during my speech.

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"Then she said she would send a memo. She was very, very balanced... But she let me know that the Church had something to look into.

"And now I have the memo that I will study at home."

It was the latest development in a weekend dominated by attempts to tackle the clerical abuse controversy in Ireland.

In a wide-ranging press conference, the Pope also said that parents should pray and not condemn their children if they tell them they are gay - and mentioned potentially taking them to a psychiatrist. And he claimed that the maternal instinct of women meant they were less likely to report abuse and often, it is parents who "cover up" the abuse of priests.

"Many times it is the parents (who) cover up abuse of priests. Many times. They don't believe or convince themselves," he said. "It is true that for a mother, better this (is) not true. If it were fantasy. Speak out to the right person. Speak with the magistrate, bishop, speak with the parish priest if he is a good one. (It) must not be covered up."

Pope Francis prayed for victims at Dublin's Phoenix Park, Knock Shrine and at a bishops' meeting while also describing the grim legacy of the controversy as a gaping "open wound" for the Church.

Read more: 'We have all had our eyes opened' - Pope Francis holds special meeting with Irish bishops

At the Phoenix Park, the Pontiff specifically asked for forgiveness for the hierarchy of the Church who didn't act to prevent or tackle abuse.

But last night, Pope Francis refused to respond to a public demand from a former Papal Nuncio calling on him to resign over the handling of clerical abuse in the United States.

Former Papal Nuncio to the US, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano (77), publicly called on the Pope to resign after issuing an 11-page dossier about alleged abuses and the failure to properly act on them.

Expand Close Two pilgrims awaiting the Pope in Phoenix Park. Photo: Gerry Mooney / Facebook

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However, Pope Francis refused to comment.

"I read the communique this morning. I will say sincerely to you who are interested - read carefully the communique and you judge," he said. "I will not say a word about this. I think it speaks for itself and you judge for yourself. With your professional maturity."

He was specifically asked about homosexuality by a Vatican journalist after Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who is gay, praised the role same-sex couples now play as family units in Ireland.

"What do I say to a father if the son or daughter has this tendency? Pray not condemn. Understand - make space for your son or daughter to let them express themselves," the Pope said. "Maybe to do with a psychiatrist (if old enough). Silence is not a remedy - ignore (the) child is lack of being a parent."

Speaking about Ireland, the Pope said: "I found much faith in Ireland. Irish people suffered for scandals, but there is faith. People can distinguish from truth and half truths. It is in a process of healing. But Irish people have faith."

Pope Francis also said he will explain to abuse rights campaigner Marie Collins, in person at the Vatican, why he does not favour a special tribunal to try bishops worldwide for the failure to properly tackle clerical abuse cases.

"Marie Collins is a bit fixated - I hold her in high regard," he said. "At times we call her in the Vatican to give conferences on the idea of madre amorevole that it would be good to judge bishops... to have a special tribunal. But we saw this wasn't practical for different reasons - for the different cultures of the bishops that had to be judged.

"I told Marie the spirit of the recommendations will be done. But not the same tribunal, as it is not possible. She did not understand this. I care for her, when she comes to Rome I will explain to her."Photos emerged yesterday evening of makeshift tents in the park as well as dirty needles in the vicinity of where the troops claimed to be sleeping in the Phoenix Park.

A military representative association have described claims that troops slept in poor conditions in the Phoenix Park during the Papal Mass as appalling.

Over 3,000 Defence Force personnel were deployed over the weekend, which saw Pope Francis visit Ireland as part of the World Meeting of Families event.

Some members were tasked with securing the perimeter of the Phoenix Park from 6am on Saturday as part of the broader security operation surrounding the Papal visit.

Members of the Defence Forces also assisted Gardai in securing the grounds at Ireland West Airport and the Marian Shrine in Knock.

Photos emerged yesterday evening of makeshift tents in the park as well as dirty needles in the vicinity of where the troops claimed to be sleeping in the Phoenix Park.

The Permanent Defence Force Other Ranks Association (PDFORRA) described the potential exposure to diseases from the needles as deeply worrying.

Expand Close The Permanent Defence Force Other Ranks Association (PDFORRA) described the potential exposure to diseases from the needles as deeply worrying. / Facebook

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Whatsapp The Permanent Defence Force Other Ranks Association (PDFORRA) described the potential exposure to diseases from the needles as deeply worrying.

"The images of hypodermic needles strewn in an area where members were deployed were appalling, and gave rise to serious Health and Safety concerns within the Association," Gerard Guinan, general secretary of PDFORRA told Independent.ie.

While members of the Defence Forces expect to endure robust conditions during their careers, the apparent exposure of members to the potential of infectious diseases is deeply worrying.

Mr Guinan added that a delegation from PDFORRA will meet with the Chief of Staff in the coming days to address the concerns.

"PDFORRA intends to fully investigate the circumstances with its members in the coming days and to subsequently address any issues arising with military authorities," he said.

The Defence Forces have since responded to the claims, stating that there were tents available for personnel to sleep in.

A number tents were available as rest areas throughout the operation, and troops also set up their own rest areas by bivouacking in their specific areas of responsibility in order to rest between patrols, a spokesperson told Independent.ie.

This is standard practice and some of these patrolled areas were unfortunately left in unsanitary conditions prior to the operation and were treated with due caution.

For meals, troops were rotated through McKee Barracks and provided with supplementary rations for use.

As well as securing the perimeter, the Defence Forces provided assistance to the Gardai in a support role by assisting with the movement of patrons, assisting patrons with directions and assisting Gardai in the event of an emergency.

Angry social media users described the conditions as a disgrace.

Many times I've been in accommodation that bad. It's a joke and a disgrace, a member of the Defence Forces said.

In the weeks leading up to the Pope's visit, reports emerged of members of the defence forces being paid a lower wage than Gardai for over time during the event.

Mr Guinan previously told the Irish Independent that the amount they were set to receive was "pitiful".

"If they're doing 60 hours in overtime during the Pope's visit, they will earn about 130. This would then be reduced to half after tax."CHILDRENS Minister Katherine Zappone told the Pontiff that the Church should share responsibility for the scandal of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home with the State.

She has asked the Vatican to contribute to the cost of either excavating the bodies buried in a sewage system at the site or to create a memorial.

It is believed hundreds of infants belonging to unmarried mothers were buried in Tuam between 1925 and 1961.

During his address in Dublin Castle on Saturday, Pope Francis went off-script to mention his earlier conversation with Ms Zappone when she welcomed him to Ireland at Aras an Uachtarain.

Expand Close Outside the venue of the meeting, hundreds of children's toys were laid out in a display by some residents of Tuam. At its centre was a sign saying: 'Bury our babies with dignity.' Photo: Ray Ryan / Facebook

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Whatsapp Outside the venue of the meeting, hundreds of children's toys were laid out in a display by some residents of Tuam. At its centre was a sign saying: 'Bury our babies with dignity.' Photo: Ray Ryan

He said her words were echoing in his heart.

The minister has now revealed she only spoke to the leader of the Catholic Church in Italian for 30 seconds.

She said: I am responsible for the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. Childrens remains were found in a sewage system there.

I hope the Church will make reparation for its part in this shameful chapter. It is important and I will write to you in detail.

Pope Francis replied in English, saying: Thank you for saying that.

Speaking on RTEs Today with Miriam OCallaghan, Ms Zappone said she practiced her piece repeatedly prior to meeting the Pope.

As a professional I knew I wanted to get a very straight message. Im just beginning learning Italian but I knew enough to communicate to him in his own language, she said.

On his flight back to Rome last night, Pope Francis referenced the fact that he will now study a memo provided to him by the Minister.

She intends to release the two page letter later today.

Ms Zappone said a clear sense of recognition crossed his face when she mentioned Tuam.

She admitted to being blown away when the Pope went on to reference their interaction during his Dublin Castle speech.

Asked whether Pope Francis should have visited the Tuam site while in Ireland, Ms Zappone replied: I am certain that he is hearing the strength of what the people of Tuam are saying. Hes hearing the message and thats the most important thing.Sr Concepta, Sr Mary and Sr Mary Agnes of The Little Sisters travelled over from the UK to be at a mass given by Pope Francis in the Phoenix Park. Photo: Tony Gavin 26/8/2018

Daniel and Sarah, 4, Brannigan from Co Down at a mass given by Pope Francis in the Phoenix Park. Photo: Tony Gavin 26/8/2018

Emer Short and Conor Ranaghan from Kedy, Co Armagh at a mass given by Pope Francis in the Phoenix Park. Photo: Tony Gavin 26/8/2018

Pilgrims pray at a mass given by Pope Francis in the Phoenix Park. Photo: Tony Gavin 26/8/2018

John and Mary Connors with daughter Allie and son Tom from Carlow arriving in the Phoenix Park for Pope Francis closing Mass. Picture By David Conachy.

Bernard and Mary Mac Mahon from Navan arriving in the Phoenix Park for Pope Francis closing Mass. Picture By David Conachy.

John Murphy and his daughter Liadan from Dublin arriving in the Phoenix Park for Pope Francis closing Mass. Picture By David Conachy.

John Murphy and his daughter Liadan from Dublin arriving in the Phoenix Park for Pope Francis closing Mass. Picture By David Conachy.

Pte. Shauna Bennett and Pte. Caoumhe Molly helping Kathleen Ryan and Elizabeth Spencer from Dublin arriving in the Phoenix Park for Pope Francis closing Mass. Picture By David Conachy.

An aerial view of the crowd at Phoenix Park in Dublin as Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire

An aerial view of the crowd at Phoenix Park in Dublin as Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday August 26, 2018. See PA story IRISH Pope. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire

An aerial view of the crowd at Phoenix Park in Dublin as Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families, as part of his visit to Ireland: Liam McBurney/PA Wire

On the face of it, what was different about this Papal Mass was the vivid rainbow of colours. A sea of red, yellow and blue hi-tech rainwear replaced the 1979 sea of sludge gabardine.

The Pope himself was in green.

But the real differences lay much deeper.

This Papal Mass may not have been quite as iconic as the first. It was far from being all-encompassing and attracted a fraction of the crowds, for a start.

There is still too much pain and too much water under the bridge for people to have embraced this event as completely and as joyously as they did back then.

How many in that vast crowd of one million people in 1979 had been hiding shame and suffering of their own?

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A daughter in a Magdalene Laundry, perhaps, or maybe unknowingly, a young son who was too frightened to tell his parents what he was being subjected to?

Will people ask each other where they were in 2018 as they still do about 1979? It is highly unlikely.

Ireland is now older, sadder - and much wiser.

We have lost our innocence - but, perhaps, regained our wits and our courage. So perhaps, just perhaps, this Mass was much more important as a result because we can see how far we have come - and how much further we need to go in our story.

There can be no more hidden wretchedness, no more dirty secrets. No more shame or scandal.

Back in 1979, they prayed for peace in the North. This time, the problems addressed were both ours and the Pope's, intertwined and inseparable. And they lay at the Pope's own doorstep.

The fulcrum of this Mass was, in fact, a Papal confession.

And though we have heard Pope Francis apologise many times for the failings of the Church, this time it felt different as we watched the happy families gathered before him, two young children running around in the foreground with Papal flags tucked into their T-shirts.

Expand Close Retired Parish Priest Fr. Leo Quinlan, from Skerries, Co. Dublin awaiting the Popes arrival at the Phoenix Park. Photo: Maxwells / Facebook

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And it brought something of a lump to the throat to see it playing out in full colour - the hurt of the past acknowledged and, perhaps, a hopeful future.

From early in the morning they came trooping up along the Liffey and towards the Phoenix Park amid torrential downpours, in plastic ponchos and carrying stools, some portable and some less easy to carry. It felt like the pilgrimage that it was. And the city streets were otherwise as deserted as they are on Christmas Eve.

The Pope zipped around on his popemobile. Some were thrilled to get a closer view than they had expected.

Clodagh Gibbon, from Castledawson, Co Derry, almost wept as she showed the picture she had taken on her phone.

It was only by chance, she said, explaining that she had queued for the toilets for two hours and her family were "stuck miles away down there".

Emma Mhic Mhathuna brought up one of the offertory gifts, accompanied by her children, Natasha, Seamus, Mario, Oisin and Donnacha.

Also in the procession was Olive Foley, widow of former Munster rugby player Anthony 'Axel' Foley, who died in 2016.

And struggling with a buggy through the crowd was Margaret Cash, the mother of seven whose plight graphically highlighted the homelessness crisis.

As the Pope began his confession, there seemed to be a stunned pause from the crowd. Nobody had expected this and it had not been scheduled.

To hear the long list of abuses perpetrated on so many separate groups of people felt particularly poignant.

"In a special way, we ask pardon for all the abuses committed in various types of institutions run by male or female religious or other members of the Church," Pope Francis said.

"We ask forgiveness for the times that as a Church we did not show survivors of whatever kind of abuse compassion and the seeking of justice and truth through concrete actions. We ask for forgiveness."

He mentioned the sexual crimes by the Church and the Magdalene Laundries through his plea for forgiveness for the "exploitation through manual work". And there was a special mention of single mothers separated from their children amid claims their births had been a 'mortal sin'. "This is not a mortal sin," the Pope declared, earning him the largest outburst of applause.

Afterwards, the Mass over, survivor of institutional abuse Seamus Kelly from Cork, who came with his wife Patricia, told the Irish Independent that this Mass had "healed" him.

"I didn't come here to be apologised to," he said. "I came here to witness what was going on."

Seamus said he had done time in the past and it had been a prison chaplain, Fr Michael Kidney, who had taught him how to begin his life again and how to love. "I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Patricia," he said.

He believes the Church now needs to sit down with survivors "with cameras" and have everything all out in the open.

But he thinks many survivors are still so angry that they need to deal with these emotions first before they can do anything else.26th August 2018. Pope Francis seen at Dublin Airport before departing for Rome. Photo: Justin Farrelly.

Pope Francis listens to a journalists question aboard a flight to Rome at the end of his two-day visit to Ireland (Gregorio Borgia/AP)

Pope Francis has declined to confirm or deny claims by the Vatican's retired ambassador to the United States that he knew in 2013 about sexual misconduct allegations against the former archbishop of Washington.

Francis said the 11-page text by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano "speaks for itself" and that he would not comment on it.

Francis was asked by a US reporter during an airborne press conference on Sunday if Mr Vigano's claims that the two discussed the Theodore McCarrick allegations in 2013 were true.

The pope was also asked about Mr Vigano's claims that McCarrick was already under sanction at the time, but that Francis rehabilitated him.

Expand Expand Previous Next Close 26th August 2018. Pope Francis seen at Dublin Airport before departing for Rome. Photo: Justin Farrelly. Pope Francis aboard a flight to Rome at the end of his two-day visit to Ireland (Gregorio Borgia/AP) / Facebook

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He said he had read Mr Vigano's document and trusted journalists to judge for themselves.

"It's an act of trust," he said. "I won't say a word about it."

The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published Mr Vigano's text on Sunday as the pope wrapped up a two-day visit to Ireland dominated by the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Mr Vigano, 77, a conservative whose hard-line anti-gay views are well known, urged the reformist pope to resign over what he called Francis' own culpability in covering up McCarrick's crimes.

Expand Expand Previous Next Close 26th August 2018. Pope Francis seen at Dublin Airport before departing for Rome. Photo: Justin Farrelly. Pope Francis with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, signing the visitors book at Dublin Castle. Photo: Arthur Carron / Facebook

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Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as cardinal last month, after a US church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

Since then, another man has come forward to say McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary.

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The accusations have created a crisis of confidence in the US and Vatican hierarchy.

Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report - which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses - the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.

Mr Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions.

His letter identifies by name the Vatican cardinals and US archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair. He said documents backing up his version of events are in Vatican archives.

The Vatican's ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2016, Mr Vigano said his two immediate predecessors "did not fail" to inform the Holy See about accusations against McCarrick, starting in 2000.

Mr Vigano said he himself sent at least two memos on him.

He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer, and to no longer celebrate Mass in public or travel.

He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on June 23, 2013, at the Vatican's Santa Marta hotel where the pope lives, three months after Francis was elected pope.

Mr Vigano wrote that he told Francis: "Holy Father, I don't know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance."

Soon thereafter, Mr Vigano wrote, he was surprised to find that McCarrick had started travelling on missions on behalf of the church, including to China.

McCarrick was also one of the Vatican's intermediaries in the US-Cuba talks in 2014.

Mr Vigano's claim that McCarrick had been ordered by Benedict to stay out of public ministry and retire to a lifetime of prayer is somewhat disputed, given that McCarrick enjoyed a fairly public retirement.

But Mr Vigano insisted the sanctions had been imposed, and said a former counsellor in the embassy at the time was "prepared to testify" about the "stormy" meeting when McCarrick was informed of them.

Barry Coburn, McCarrick's civil attorney, said the allegations in the Vigano letter are "serious".

"Archbishop McCarrick, like any other person, has a right to due process. He looks forward to invoking that right at the appropriate time," he said in a statement.Pope Francis attends the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park in Dublin, as part of his visit to Ireland. Photo: PA

Pope Francis has asked for forgiveness for the treatment of single mothers and children who were exploited and abused by the Catholic Church in Ireland.

In an unprecedented move, the Pope made a statement at the beginning of the Papal Mass in the Phoenix Park, in which he admitted that the hierarchy had "kept quiet" about abuse and "did not take charge" of painful situations.

"We ask forgiveness for the abuses in Ireland - abuses of power, conscience and sexual abuses perpetrated by members with roles of responsibility within the Church," he said.

Significantly, he acknowledged not just the problem of sexual abuse in the Church but also referenced events that happened in mother and baby homes, Magdalene Laundries and industrial schools.

At the close of his visit to Ireland, Pope Francis acknowledged that the scandals of recent years "have tested the traditionally strong faith of the Irish people".

Speaking to the Irish hierarchy at a private meeting at the Papal nunciature in Dublin, before flying back to Rome, the Pontiff said a recurrent theme of his visit was the Church's need to acknowledge and remedy with honesty and courage past failures in the protection of children and vulnerable adults.

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He paid tribute to the Irish bishops' efforts to move forward with the help of the National Board for Safeguarding through "a stringent set of norms aimed at ensuring the safety of the young person".

Admitting that the Church in recent years had had its eyes opened to the gravity and extent of sexual abuse, the 81-year-old said the honesty and integrity with which the Church in Ireland had chosen to confront this "painful chapter of her history could offer an example and a warning to society as a whole".

At the beginning of the Mass, which was attended by a crowd of around 200,000, the Pope asked for forgiveness for those members of the hierarchy who "did not take charge of these painful situations".

In unscripted prayers beseeching forgiveness, prompted by his meeting with eight survivors of clerical abuse on Saturday, the Pope asked for pardon for all the abuses committed in various types of institutions run by male or female religious and by others Church members.

In a reference to the Magdalene Laundries and residential institutions, he begged forgiveness for those cases of exploitation through manual work to which so many were subjected.

He also asked for forgiveness for the times when many single mothers were told that to seek their children, who had been taken from them, was a mortal sin and whose sons and daughters were told the same.

"Survivors of abuse of power, conscience and sexuality, picking up on what they have told me, I would like to put these crimes before the mercy of the Lord and ask forgiveness for them," he prayed.

"We ask forgiveness for the times in the Church when we did not show survivors of whatever kind of abuse compassion. The seeking of justice needs concrete actions," he said.

In his homily, the Pope spoke about the need to protect the rights of the unborn, the elderly and to welcome migrants.

In his words of welcome at the start of the Mass, the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, said the Church in Ireland had gone through "challenging times".

He continued: "People have been wounded in the depth of their being by Church people.

"People's faith has been challenged and the Church of Jesus Christ has been wounded."

He recalled the times when people had called for the removal of the Papal Cross in the Phoenix Park.

Amid torrential downpours, Dr Martin said they were now gathered around the cross "in the hope of a spring for the Irish Church", a spring that would not wish to cover up the "harshness of dark days".Taking a trip to South Africa, whether for three days or three weeks, would not be complete without a visit to the famous city of Cape Town.

Nestled beautifully between the sandy coast and the stunning Table Mountain, Cape Town is pure traveling bliss.

Shopping, food, scenery, adventure and relaxation - this city has it all. Although often considered one of the most romantic honeymoon destinations in the world, you dont have to be tying the knot to treat yourself to some time here. With lots of family-friendly activities, Cape Town has something for everyone.

Here are some of the top places to visit during your stay.

V&A Waterfront

Cape Towns central hub, the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, is the most visited destination in South Africa. The stunning working harbour is buzzing with restaurants, cafes, bars and shops. This is a great area to stay if you want to be close to everything and there are tonnes of accommodation options to choose from.

For five-star luxury, the Table Bay Hotel which overlooks the water is the height of sophistication. Be sure to treat yourself and book a treatment at their award-winning spa while youre there.

Families will love the Waterfront Village hotel, with its spacious apartments and views of the yacht basin. Kiddies will love splashing around in the outdoor pool, and the views from the deck are truly gorgeous. You can see Cape Town Wheel right from the pool side  the citys 40m observation wheel.

Bo-Kaap

The neighbourhood of Bo-Kapp is situated above the city centre, on the slopes of Signal Hill. Distinctive by its brightly-painted buildings, cobbled streets and quaint houses, this area is the perfect place to get those Instagram worthy shots. With a street locally known as Cartoon Colour Avenue, this place brings the name Rainbow Nation to life.

Be sure to visit the Bo-Kaap Museum while you are there to learn about the areas deep history and the important role it played in changing social history in South Africa.

Robben Island

Robben Island is famous all around the globe for being the prison where former South African president, Nelson Mandela, was incarcerated for 18 years. Mandela, who spent most his life fighting for equality in South Africa, was kept on the island from 1964 to 1982.

Today, the building is no longer used to hold prisoners. Instead, it stands as a testament to Mandela and his historic achievements. Visitors can take a 30-minute ferry ride out to the island and experience a tour of the grounds and buildings.

The tour will take you on an emotive journey through the islands 500-year-old history, and finishes with a viewing of Nelson Mandelas cell.

Table Mountain

Taking a trip up Table Mountain is an unmissable stop when visiting Cape Town. The flat-topped mountain is a popular tourist attraction and boasts spectacular views of the city and harbour below. Choose between lacing up your boots and hiking, or sit back and relax in a cable car.

There are five main trails to hike, the quickest taking approximately two hours. One route travels directly beneath the cable car so you wont miss out on these views, while other more challenging routes will reward you by giving you panoramic views of the 12 Apostles, Lions Head and the Atlantic Seaboard.

Taking a cable car is the quickest way to reach the top and its very reasonably priced. A return adult ticket costs just under 4 and kids under four travel for free. The four to five-minute journey will have you gazing out in amazement as you ascend upwards, leaving the city behind.

Cape Peninsula

Driving from Cape Town down along the coast of Cape Peninsula can take some time, as there are so many wonderful spots to stop and enjoy along the way.

The prosperous suburb of Campus Bay is popular for its fine cuisine and upmarket vibe. The white sandy beach is loved by all who visit, and the natural rock swimming pools are the perfect place to relax and take in the sunny South African weather.

Further down the coast, Chapmans Peak mountain sits on the edge of the ocean. The road around it was purposely built to be one of the most striking drives in the world and has won engineering awards for its brilliance down through the years.

The Cape of Good Hope is a rocky headland at the southern end of Cape Peninsula. The area is rich with wildlife and is a great place for bird watching. The penguins who live here are by far one of the areas most loved creatures.

If you want to get closer to these little guys, then continue on to Boulders Beach. Home to a colony of African penguins, this place is ideal for animal lovers. The best time to visit is in the morning or late afternoon, when the birds are at their most lively.

Fly to South Africa from Dublin via Istanbul with Turkish Airlines.

Sponsored by:Twenty years ago legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk completed a gravity-defying 360-degree ramp  The Loop.

The Loop is infamous for its difficulty and the 50-year-old has praised it as a badge of honour in the skate world.

Now that badge has just been earned for the first time by a female skater, Lizzie Armanto  take a look.

Congratulations to @Lizziearmanto on becoming the first woman to complete the infamous loop yesterday. She pulled it just after our @nextvr event ended. It was an inspiring display of fierce determination and skill, and we at @birdhouse are incredibly proud. pic.twitter.com/8ekbUrxkOr  Tony Hawk (@tonyhawk) August 27, 2018

If that spectacular trick wasnt impressive enough, in the next video posted by Hawk he explains some of the history behind The Loop, which he first came across from pictures of failed attempts in a magazine.

My brief history of looping, made for BBHJ tour when we added one to the show in 2003. On Sunday at 3:30pm PST a whole new crew will be trying it for the first time. You can watch it live for free on any VR headset or on your phone through the @nextvr app.  pic.twitter.com/TrMacuwkrn  Tony Hawk (@tonyhawk) August 24, 2018

Hawk himself hasnt completed The Loop for 15 years, last doing so on tour in 2003, and has injured himself many times trying it, once breaking his pelvis.

Its hard to explain it, Hawk said. If youve done it, youve checked it off the list. Im not going to get the same gratification.

Its not like a trick you do and want to keep doing. And I have paid the price for it.

Hawks latest adventure with The Loop was part of a live virtual reality broadcast in San Diego with NextVR, which allowed viewers to watch the skaters in 3D.

None of the skaters Hawk invited to try The Loop had completed it before, and included in the group was Felipe Nunes, a teenage double-amuptee  seen here practising with stunt pads.

Heres Felipe Nunes getting a test run in preparation for our live loop challenge, tomorrow at 3:30pm PT, only in the @NextVR app. #HawkLoopinVR pic.twitter.com/Wn7sdooH4O  Tony Hawk (@tonyhawk) August 26, 2018

Hawk said they use pads so people can start to get used to the timing and feel of doing it in its natural state.

If you dont know what youre doing and you go at it without ever trying it and there are no pads in place, it can be very dangerous, he said.Wrapping up this round of guest bloggers is Brendan Bell, my uber-talented research assistant. Before coming to AEI, Brendan served in the Alliance for Catholic Education and taught US history and government at Cristo Rey High School. Hell be writing about some of the debates surrounding social studies curriculum and teaching methods, drawing on his experiences working in Catholic education.

As someone who spent time teaching 12th-grade US government, its easy for me to get wrapped up in the seeming consensus that civics education deserves more attention in policy and classrooms alike. It only takes a quick Google search and scan of articles to read headlines saying that civics education is more important than ever before , and asking questions like, Can teaching civics save democracy ? To my count, three national newspapers (The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal) alone ran 30-plus editorials and op-eds in the past two years about civics education. This appetite exists in schools, too; in a recent Education Week survey , more than half of principals said their schools devote too little time to civics education.

Meanwhile, legislators, advocates, and lawyers are trying to offer solutions to whats been deemed a civics education crisis. In their last legislative sessions, 27 states considered bills or other proposals to expand civics instruction. And now, a federal lawsuit is being filed to challenge, on 14th Amendment grounds, that the provision of civics education is inequitable.

Im strongly in favor of channeling this energy for increased civics into meaningful change in classrooms. But, just like during my days teaching government, I have to ask what exactly this should look like in practice.

After all, just beneath the surface of what seems to be consensus, there are still a handful of conversations that states, schools, and practitioners will need to have about how to effectively implement civics instruction. Here are four key tensions that school leaders and practitioners will have to weigh when considering how to expand civics education:



Revamping existing courses versus introducing new ones: A 2018 Brookings report has tracked that, currently, 35 states plus DC require two or more civics courses as a high school graduation requirement, seven states require only one civics course for graduation, and eight states still have no such requirement. An obvious option is to simply expand course requirements and class time for civics. But another choice is to change how extant social studies classes are taught. For instance, states could follow the lead of Idaho , which has focused on introducing civics education at an early age, and has integrated a civics component into social studies classes from kindergarten through 12th grade. These state level policy decisions are important, but still dont entirely address questions of practice and instruction. Balancing civic reasoning skills and civic content: Most teachers will recognize that there is always at least some tension between delivering skills and introducing content knowledge. One can easily point to lacking student performance along both dimensions. As one example of the failures to develop civic reasoning skills, a 2016 study from Stanford History Education Group found that a full 80 percent of middle school students surveyed could not distinguish between a paid advertisement and a legitimate online news source. But perhaps even more shocking is that, consistently over the last two decades, less than 25 percent of eighth-grade students demonstrate proficiency on the NAEP civics exam. When taught well, skills and content are intertwined and interdependent, but there are still obvious tradeoffs between prioritizing either objective. Defining success: Relatedly, what will define success or help us determine whether new civics education initiatives or laws have worked? Is increased activism, through an outcome like higher voter participation rates, the primary objective, or would we be more satisfied with greater knowledge about the functions of the branches of government? Of course, the answer to this question will determine which outcomes we attempt to measure, and what initiatives we push. For instance, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill this July that would require schools to coordinate student-led civics projects, and will join Maryland and DC in requiring a service requirement prior to graduation. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, will now administer a statewide test for grades 7-12, focusing on content knowledge, and incorporating information from the naturalization test. Gauging success can be more subjective than in many content areas, as notions of citizenship are framed by personal priors and values. Incorporating current events: Current events can be great teaching toolsthey engage students and help them see connections between content and the real world. In many cases, they also provide outlets for discussion on difficult topics like immigration or poverty. Of course, there are many challenges to such an approach. For one, current events are constantly evolving, so creating relevant assessments can be especially challenging. Two, some issues are less salient than initially anticipatedI learned this the hard way by having my students analyze far too many 2016 Republican presidential candidate platforms. And three, when not done well, such methods also risk introducing more of teachers opinions and biases into the classroom than one would hope.

I wont offer here any definitive answers for where states, schools, and teachers should put their thumbs down on these scales. (I will sketch out a few suggestions in my next post.) Ill just note that, as a teacher, I certainly found myself struggling with these decisions at times. Fortunately, none of these tensions involve choices that are necessarily mutually exclusive.

The good news is that great teachers do their bestand already often succeedat threading these needles. Social studies classes can provide teachers a fair amount of discretion and room for creative lesson planning and instructionwhich can offer fantastic opportunities for learning. But its also the case that more and more gets bundled into what civics education entails, meaning that teachers have more dumped on their plates, stretching their ability to do any of it well.

Im thrilled that were recognizing that problems around civics education exist, but wed do well to spend more time articulating the precise remedies before moving forward.

Brendan BellThai police are investigating a rape allegation made by a British tourist who claims that officers refused to file charges on her behalf when she initially reported the crime.

Police Colonel Krissana Pattanacharoen, deputy police spokesman, said an independent committee was established on Sunday to investigate claims that police on a Thai resort island had failed to file charges when the tourist reported she had been raped.

He said the committee would take seven days to come to a conclusion.

According to a report in the local online newspaper Samui Times, an unidentified 19-year-old British national claimed that she was drugged, robbed and raped on the island of Koh Tao on June 26.

The report claimed that Thai police "were happy to make a report of the robbery but refused to take any details of the rape" when the teenager told police on a nearby island what had happened.

Thai officials claim that she never included allegations of rape in her initial report.

"They (police) have already said before that the person filing the charges did not include this (rape) charge," Defence Minister Prawit Wongsuwan said on Monday.

"They only reported that they lost their belongings, so what can we do? Police have already talked about it. She didn't file charges saying she was assaulted or raped or anything."

Mr Prawit also denied speculation that there were influential people behind the alleged police cover-up.

He said "influential people have all been arrested already".

A number of unexplained tourist deaths have taken place in recent years on Koh Tao.

The most notorious case of late was of the murders of British nationals Hannah Witheridge and David Miller, who were beaten to death in 2014.

That case has been plagued with speculation that the arrested suspects were made scapegoats.Rohingya children stand next to a bamboo fence overlooking an expanse of makeshift bamboo and tarp shelters at Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh (Altaf Qadri/AP)

Burmese military leaders should be prosecuted for genocide against Rohingya Muslims, investigators working for the UNs top human rights body have said.

They took the unusual step of identifying six by name among those behind what they called deadly, systematic crimes against the ethnic minority.

The call, accompanying a first report by the team of investigators, amounts to some of the strongest language yet from UN officials who have denounced alleged human rights violations in Burma since a bloody crackdown began last August.

The three-member fact-finding mission and their team, working under a mandate from the UN-backed Human Rights Council, meticulously assembled hundreds of accounts from expatriate Rohingya, as well as satellite footage and other information to assemble the report.

"In all my life, I've not known even five minutes of peace."

Four generations of a Rohingya refugee family describe a lifetime of injustices  and their hopes of returning to Myanmar.pic.twitter.com/GCDEUgbl3e  United Nations (@UN) July 27, 2018

The militarys contempt for human life, dignity and freedom  for international law in general  should be a cause of concern for the entire population of Myanmar, and to the international community as a whole, said fact-finding mission chair Marzuki Darusman, a former Indonesian attorney-general, at a news conference.

The council created the mission in March last year  nearly six months before a string of deadly rebel attacks on security and police posts set off a crackdown that drove Rohingya to flee into neighbouring Bangladesh.

The UN estimates that more than 700,000 have fled.

The team compiled accounts of crimes including gang rape, the torching of hundreds of villages, enslavement, and killings of children  some before the eyes of their own parents.

The team was not granted access to Burma and has decried a lack of co-operation or even response from the government, which received an early copy of the report.

The crimes in Rakhine state, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contextsUN report

The team cited a conservative estimate from aid group Reporters Without Borders that some 10,000 people were killed in the violence, but outside investigators have had no access to the affected regions  making a precise accounting elusive, if not impossible.

Above all, the investigators said the situation in Burma should be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC), and if not, to a special tribunal.

Last week, Burmas government rejected any co-operation with the ICC, to which it is not a party.

China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power over whether the issue will be brought before the ICC, has been reticent about condemning Burmas government during the crisis.

UN leaders, foreign government officials and human rights watchers have for months cited evidence of genocide in Burma, and the United States late last year said that ethnic cleansing was occurring in Burma.

But few experts have studied the issue as in-depth, and in such an official way, as the fact-finding mission with a mandate from the 46-nation council.

The United Nations does not apply the word genocide lightly.

Expand Close Rohingya refugees carry a banner during a protest rally to commemorate the first anniversary of the Burmese armys crackdown which led to a mass exodus of Rohingya Muslims to Bangladesh, at Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh (Altaf Qadri/PA) / Facebook

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The teams assessment suggests the crimes against the Rohingya could meet the strict legal definition, used to highlight and condemn state-supported abuses in places such as Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudans Darfur region.

Human rights watchers say that determining genocidal intent is perhaps the most difficult criteria to meet: In essence, its the task of assessing the mindsets of perpetrators to determine if ethnicity, race, religion or another attribute had motivated them.

The crimes in Rakhine state, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts, the report said, alluding to a region of Burma that is home for many Rohingya.

They added into their assessment: The extreme brutality of the crimes; hate rhetoric and specific speech by perpetrators and military commanders; policies of exclusion against Rohingya people; an oppressive context; and the level of organisation indicating a plan for destruction.

The investigators cited six Burmese military leaders as priority subjects for possible prosecution, including Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing.

A longer list of names is to be kept in the office of the UN human rights chief for possible use in future judicial proceedings.

The United States and European Union have already slapped sanctions on some Burmese military leaders, though Min Aung Hlaing is not among them.

The main perpetrator, the people that we want the spotlight on, is the Tatmadaw, said mission member Radhika Coomaraswamy, a Sri Lankan former UN undersecretary-general, referring to Burmas military.Computer gamers as young as 12 have suffered potentially deadly deep vein thrombosis (DVT) after becoming so absorbed in their games they hardly moved for more than three hours, a new study has revealed.

Computer gamers as young as 12 have suffered potentially deadly deep vein thrombosis (DVT) after becoming so absorbed in their games they hardly moved for more than three hours, a new study has revealed.

The cases have alarmed medical experts who say its virtually unknown for children so young to suffer DVT. DVT, in which blood clots form from lack of movement in the legs, is normally restricted to older patients who have thicker blood, are less active and are more likely to be overweight.

It is more commonly associated with long-haul air travel but studies led by the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand has shown an increase due to computer working, TV and film viewing and gaming.

The 12-year-old had played for four hours with his legs in a kneeling position when he suffered a blood clot. Like other cases including a 15-year-old, he was young, healthy and with no other known risk factors.

The DVT and resulting pulmonary embolism (PE) were generally in their legs and followed three hours of non-stop playing without moving, although one player had it in his arms after playing lying on his back for three hours.

It was also associated with dehydration as they were so absorbed they ignored their body's "thirst reflex" to drink, said the researchers at Royal Perth Hospital.

Professor Richard Beasley, director of New Zealand's Medical Research Institute and world expert in DVT and PE, said: "It really illustrates the strength of the risk that it can affect a person aged 12 who you would never expect to develop a blood clot."

He said there needed to be greater public and medical attention to the risks from immobility due to the demands of modern office work and leisure pursuits.

"It really needs to be a research area of priority just as it has been with air travel which is now well recognised. People are now sitting for longer periods than they are even in long-distance air travel," he said.

His research showed immobility at work and at home could treble the risk of DVT and/or PE.

There are more than 2,000 deaths a year from PE or thrombosis in the UK. The latest figures show those among under-30s doubled from nine to 18 in 2016, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Professor Beverley Hunt, medical director of Thrombosis UK, said they had dealt with a number of cases involving young patients with thrombosis aged under 18, who were so addicted to gaming that they played into the early hours.

She urged gaming firms to introduce alerts into games and labels telling players to take breaks at least every 90 minutes.

Dr Jo Twist, chief executive of UKIE, the gaming industry's trade body, said there was no conclusive evidence to link video games directly to DVT but added: "We encourage all games players to take regular breaks of roughly five minutes for every hour of play and there are parental controls on all consoles that can set restrictions on the amount of time spent playing games. We promote this and other safe and sensible gaming advice wherever we can." ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]The women were pronounced dead at the scene. Photo: PA

A mother and daughter have been stabbed to death in the street in an early-morning attack in the West Midlands.

Police are urgently trying to arrest a male suspect after the women, aged 49 and 22, were killed in Solihull on Monday.

Officers were called just after 12.30am and the pair were pronounced dead at the scene on Northdown Road.

Detective Inspector Caroline Corfield appealed to the suspect to come forward.

She said: "We are still in the very early stages of our investigation but we believe the offender is known to the victims.

"We are appealing to him to come forward as a matter of urgency."

She described the deaths as "truly devastating and heart-breaking".

The area has been cordoned off and house-to-house inquiries are being carried out.

CCTV footage is being examined, West Midlands Police said, adding that there will be a visible presence in the area in the coming days.Lanny Davis has backtracked on previous claims made about what his client Michael Cohen knows (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

The lawyer of Donald Trumps former fixer is walking back claims his client can confirm the US president knew about Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 election.

Lanny Davis is backpedalling on claims that Michael Cohen could tell a special prosecutor that Mr Trump had prior knowledge of a meeting with a Russian lawyer to get damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

I should have been much clearer that I could not confirm the story, Mr Davis said on Monday, attempting to clean up his comments in interviews last week after Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, tax evasion and bank fraud.

Expand Close Michael Cohen was Donald Trumps former lawyer (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File) / Facebook

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Mr Davis told The Washington Post over the weekend that he could not independently confirm the claims he made on television last week that Cohen witnessed Mr Trumps eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, telling his father about the Trump Tower meeting beforehand.

I take responsibility for not communicating more clearly my uncertainty, Mr Davis said. I regret the error.

Mr Davis is also hedging suggestions he made on television last week that Cohen could tell special prosecutor Robert Mueller about whether Mr Trump was aware of and encouraged Russian hacking during the 2016 campaign before it became publicly known.

After suggesting to US news channel CNN last Wednesday that Cohen was an observer and was a witness to Mr Trumps awareness of those emails before they were dropped, Cohen told the Post: Theres a possibility that is the case. But I am not sure.

The prospect of Cohen telling Mr Mueller that Mr Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 meeting has hung over the Russia probe since CNN, citing anonymous sources, reported last month that Cohen was willing to share the information.

Mr Davis told The Associated Press at the time that the basic substance of the CNN report was correct and told CNN last Wednesday that Cohen was present during a discussion with junior and dad pertaining to the Trump Tower meeting.

Mr Davis, citing a lack of independent verification, apologised to the AP on Monday. I express my regrets that I could not confirm what I told you, he said.

Mr Trump, who has denied knowing about the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, seized on Mr Davis U-turn.

Michaels Cohens attorney clarified the record, saying his client does not know if President Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting (out of which came nothing!), Trump tweeted on Saturday. The answer is that I did NOT know about the meeting. Just another phony story by the Fake News Media!

CNN said it stands by the story, which included reporting from Pulitzer Prize-winning Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein.

Mr Trump Jr tweeted that CNN was defending literal fake news and derided Mr Bernstein as a leftist hack.Donald Trump has threatened he "may have to get involved" after launching another attack on the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Days after his former campaign manager and former lawyer were convicted of fraud, the US president complained that special counsel Robert Mueller was "having a field day".

Mr Trump claimed that the FBI should be looking into his former opponent Hillary Clinton instead, tweeting: "I feel sure that we will soon be getting to the bottom of all of this corruption. At some point I may have to get involved!"

Critics interpreted it as another indication that the president is considering intervening in the Russia investigation.

"This latest thread implies a willingness to obstruct justice," historian Timothy Naftali, clinical associate professor of public service at New York University, told CNN. "He is sending a signal that he wants to stop this process."

Mr Trump also repeated his criticism of attorney-general Jeff Sessions, who recused himself from the Russia investigation and has said he will not allow the Department of Justice to be influenced by political considerations.

"Jeff Sessions said he wouldn't allow politics to influence him only because he doesn't understand what is happening underneath his command position," the US president tweeted.

It follows speculation that the president could use his powers to pardon Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen.

Mr Trump has already pardoned the highly controversial former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of contempt of court.

Last month, Mr Trump claimed that he also had the "absolute right" to pardon himself in relation to the Russia investigation, while insisting he had done nothing wrong.

Meanwhile, a federal judge has dealt a blow to Mr Trump's efforts to "promote more efficient" government, ruling that key provisions of three recent executive orders "undermine federal employees' right to bargain collectively" under federal law.

District judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said Mr Trump had "exceeded his authority" in issuing the orders.

The White House had no comment and referred questions to the Justice Department, which said it was reviewing the judge's ruling and considering options. Federal worker unions that had sued to block Mr Trump's use of his executive authority in this area applauded the outcome.

"President Trump's illegal action was a direct assault on the legal rights and protections that Congress specifically guaranteed to the public-sector employees across this country, who keep our federal government running every single day," said J David Cox Sr, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest of the federal worker unions.

Mr Cox's organisation, which represents about 700,000 of the approximately two million federal workers, was first to challenge the executive orders.

The executive orders, which were issued by the White House in May, covered collective bargaining rights, grievance procedures and use of "official time".

Andrew Bremberg, the president's domestic policy adviser, said at the time that the orders would "promote more efficient government" by overhauling civil service rules to make it easier to remove under-performing employees.

Departments and agencies were directed to engage in tougher negotiations over collective-bargaining agreements and to conclude talks in under a year to limit the expense of "drawn-out bargaining".

Contracts were to be renegotiated to limit the amount of time authorised employees could spend on union business during official work hours, known as 'official time'.

Lobbying and pursuing grievances on taxpayer-funded union time were to be curtailed and the orders also aimed to streamline the amount of time needed to terminate a federal worker for poor performance or misconduct.

The process currently takes between six months and a year and can last longer if the employee appeals the dismissal.

The unions argued that the executive orders were illegal because federal law requires the government and federal employee unions to negotiate over such changes.

The judge agreed, ruling that Mr Trump had overstepped his authority. It is unclear whether the administration plans to appeal. (London Independent)Pope Francis listens to a journalists question aboard a flight to Rome at the end of his two-day visit to Ireland (Gregorio Borgia/AP)

Pope Francis has declined to confirm or deny claims by the Vaticans retired ambassador to the United States that he knew in 2013 about sexual misconduct allegations against the former archbishop of Washington.

Francis said the 11-page text by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano speaks for itself and that he would not comment on it.

Francis was asked by a US reporter during an airborne press conference on Sunday if Mr Viganos claims that the two discussed the Theodore McCarrick allegations in 2013 were true.

The pope was also asked about Mr Viganos claims that McCarrick was already under sanction at the time, but that Francis rehabilitated him.

He said he had read Mr Viganos document and trusted journalists to judge for themselves.

Its an act of trust, he said. I wont say a word about it.

The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published Mr Viganos text on Sunday as the pope wrapped up a two-day visit to Ireland dominated by the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Mr Vigano, 77, a conservative whose hard-line anti-gay views are well known, urged the reformist pope to resign over what he called Francis own culpability in covering up McCarricks crimes.

Francis accepted McCarricks resignation as cardinal last month, after a US church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

Since then, another man has come forward to say McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary.

The accusations have created a crisis of confidence in the US and Vatican hierarchy.

Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report  which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses  the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.

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Mr Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions.

His letter identifies by name the Vatican cardinals and US archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair. He said documents backing up his version of events are in Vatican archives.

The Vaticans ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2016, Mr Vigano said his two immediate predecessors did not fail to inform the Holy See about accusations against McCarrick, starting in 2000.

Mr Vigano said he himself sent at least two memos on him.

He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer, and to no longer celebrate Mass in public or travel.

He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on June 23, 2013, at the Vaticans Santa Marta hotel where the pope lives, three months after Francis was elected pope.

Mr Vigano wrote that he told Francis: Holy Father, I dont know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.

Soon thereafter, Mr Vigano wrote, he was surprised to find that McCarrick had started travelling on missions on behalf of the church, including to China.

McCarrick was also one of the Vaticans intermediaries in the US-Cuba talks in 2014.

Mr Viganos claim that McCarrick had been ordered by Benedict to stay out of public ministry and retire to a lifetime of prayer is somewhat disputed, given that McCarrick enjoyed a fairly public retirement.

But Mr Vigano insisted the sanctions had been imposed, and said a former counsellor in the embassy at the time was prepared to testify about the stormy meeting when McCarrick was informed of them.

Barry Coburn, McCarricks civil attorney, said the allegations in the Vigano letter are serious.

Archbishop McCarrick, like any other person, has a right to due process. He looks forward to invoking that right at the appropriate time, he said in a statement.Experts speak to reporters in Geneva at the UN summit (AP Photo/Jamey Keaten)

International experts are meeting to discuss ways to define and deal with killer robots.

The week-long gathering is the second of its kind this year at UN offices in Geneva to focus on futuristic weapons systems that could conduct war without human intervention.

It aims to examine such lethal autonomous weapons systems and explore ways of regulating them.

In theory, fully autonomous, computer-controlled weapons do not exist yet, according to UN officials. The debate is still in its infancy, and the experts have at times grappled with basic definitions.

The United States has argued that it is premature to establish a definition of such systems, much less regulate them.

Decisive action needed to ban killer robots - before its too late. @amnesty & its partners in @BanKillerRobots are here at the #CCWUN in Geneva to call on states to negotiate a legally-binding instrument which bans fully autonomous weapons. https://t.co/0ASAezoyTz #killerrobots  Rasha Abdul-Rahim  #SaveSheikhJarrah  (@Rasha_Abdul) August 27, 2018

But top advocacy groups say governments and militaries should be prevented from developing such systems, which have sparked fears and led some critics to envisage harrowing scenarios about their use.

As the meeting opened, Amnesty International urged countries to work towards a ban.

Amnesty researcher on Artificial Intelligence Rasha Abdul Rahim said killer robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction, warning that technological advances are outpacing international law.

Part of the trouble for campaigners, however, is that the UN-supported organisation works by consensus, meaning that any one country  like big military powers  could foil efforts to reach an international ban.

Amandeep Gill, a former Indian ambassador to the UN-backed Conference on Disarmament who is chairing the meeting, said progress is being made. He summarised three general camps of countries: One seeks a formal, legal ban on such weapons; another wants a political, but non-binding agreement; and a last one wants no changes at all.

We are coming closer to an agreement on what should be the guiding principles  guiding the behaviour of states, and guiding the development and deployment of such systems around the world, Mr Gill told reporters. And this is not an insignificant outcome.The American flag files at half-staff at the White House (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

President Donald Trump has ordered American flags at US buildings lowered to half-staff for senator John McCain until his burial on Sunday.

Mr Trumps proclamation came just hours after the White House flag had been returned to full-staff, drawing complaints from right and left.

Mr Trump, who had traded bitter criticism with Mr McCain since before the election, declared his order a mark of respect.

At the same time, he said it would be vice president Mike Pence and other officials who would represent the administration at Mr McCains funeral services.

Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCains service to our country and, in his honour, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment, Mr Trump said in a statement.

The statement came two days after Mr McCain died at 81 from brain cancer  and after objections at Mr Trumps silence from politicians and others, including the American Legion, which demanded that he do more to honour the Vietnam War hero and six-term senator.

Mr Trump initially tweeted condolences to Mr McCains family, but made no mention then of the Arizona Republican with whom he feuded for years.

pic.twitter.com/8wmi9ExUhU  The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) August 26, 2018

Even as flags remained at half-staff on Monday at the capital, the Washington Memorial and elsewhere, the White House flag was raised. That seemed to be the breaking point for a key Trump constituency, veterans.

On the behalf of The American Legions two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCains death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nations flag be half-staffed through his internment, said a statement to Mr Trump from Denise Rohan, the organisations national commander.

By the end of the day, Mr Trump had done just that, with no immediate explanation from the White House.

Natl Cmdr Denise Rohan sent the following letter to President Trump, urging the White House to issue a proclamation... Posted by The American Legion National Headquarters on Monday, August 27, 2018

But evidence of Mr Trumps feud with Mr McCain remained. People close to Mr McCain and the White House said the family had requested that Mr Trump stay away from the weeks services and ceremonies, which will culminate with Mr McCains burial at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Mr Trump said vice president Pence would address a ceremony at the US capital on Friday. Others in the administration  chief of staff John Kelly, defence secretary James Mattis and national security adviser John Bolton  will also represent the administration.

With the proclamation and statement, Mr Trump was conforming to standard protocol when a prominent member of government dies.

Mr McCain was a frequent critic of Mr Trump on everything from his leadership style to his Russia policy. Mr Trump questioned the decorated Navy pilots Vietnam heroism and angered by Mr McCains vote to kill the presidents Obamacare repeal.

Mr McCain died on Saturday at 81 after a 13-month struggle with brain cancer. Mr Trump tweeted condolences to Mr McCains family but made no reference to the Arizona senator.

US Flag Code states that flags be lowered on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress.

After Democrat Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts died in 2009, then-president Barack Obama ordered flags at the White House flown at half-staff for five days.The US flag over the White House has been lowered to half-staff again after criticism (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

US President Donald Trump has said he respects John McCains service to our country and has signed a proclamation to fly the US flag at half-staff until the senators burial.

The flag at the top of the White House flew at half-staff over the weekend but was raised on Monday and then lowered again amid criticism.

Mr Trump and Mr McCain have feuded for years. Mr Trump tweeted about Mr McCain after his death on Saturday but has passed up several chances to comment publicly on the Arizona senator.

Mr Trump said in a written statement on Monday that he has asked vice president Mike Pence to speak at a ceremony honouring Mr McCain at the capitol on Friday.

The president also says he has agreed to the McCain familys request for military transportation of Mr McCains remains from Arizona to Washington.The fanfare and love that Indian actors receive is extremely special indeed. But the kind of reception they receive in the country of Indonesia is fantastic. Time and again, we see actors being received with immense love there and we were in to witness another actor receiving the same.

The actor was in Indonesia recently and was in fact really looking forward to being there. Amazingly, his experience in the country turned out to be fantastic and he posted a message to share about the same-

Featured Video

It seems the love of Indonesians certainly sees no bounds!Please dont tell me you never bunked any class in your entire life? If you havent please do it now. You can bunk office as well, its all the more fun. Leaving home and not going to the class you are supposed to will give you a feeling that no other thing can. What crazy stories can you possibly tell to your grandchildren otherwise?

We asked a few people to share some of the best bunking stories and we are all laughing out loud.



1. "My friends and I bunked school for like an hour to get ourselves some party snacks which we were planning. While we were coming back very confidently, not the guard but the principal saw us. She kept all our snacks and told us to go. A punishment wouldve been better."

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2. "We once bunked our class in Masters and went to a shady bar nearby and saw our lecturer having a pint of beer. He said, ''Aaj mera bhi mann nahi tha!''

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3. "I once bunked school and went to watch a movie. My brother was in the same theater as he had bunked college. Both stood silent and said ''Chal Koi Ni!''

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4. "My brother bunked school, took my dad's Chetak and rammed it into the barrier after seeing the traffic police. What a story. Bunked school and landed up in the police station!"

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5. "We didnt feel like going to the first lecture that one day. As we were walking in the college corridor we saw our professor with books looking confused. He stopped and asked us if we know any first-year English honours students. We found out no one went for the class and he was looking for students."

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6. "A message popped up on the class group about mass bunk and my friend and I decided to not go. Not bothering about the rest of the messages we thought of chilling anyway. As we were entering the class, we saw the room full of students. Turned out the mass bunk got cancelled and we were taken to the principal after."

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7. "I successfully bunked the entire day in 7th class. Days after I was showing my mom the positive note my teacher wrote to me. It was then she saw the absent note too. Ill always remember the sound of that slap."

UnsplashA 58-year-old man whose car was stolen turned detective and tracked it down in just two hours. Relying on the GPS tracker installed in the Eeco van, he succeeded not only in recovering his car, but also got the thief arrested.

Harjeet Singh, a transporter, owns five cars that he hires out to an online retail company. When he bought the Eeco two years ago, he had it fitted with a GPS device, and it proved its worth. On Thursday night his driver brought back the car at 10.30 as usual and parked it near his home in Hari Nagar in west Delhi.

When I took a stroll, I saw the van. But on my morning walk the next day, I noticed that the car was missing, said Singh. I called the driver, and we looked for the van in the neighbourhood, but couldnt find it.

Singhs first thought was to go to the cops. But he had some misgivings. I thought of the various procedures one has to go through after registering a missing-car case, he explained.

He also remembered that he had a GPS tracker installed in the Eeco and that the hiring company was linked to it. Without wasting time, I called up the company and asked it to share my cars location with me, Singh said.

He was told that the tracker showed the car active in Dwarkas Sector 7. I rushed there, but didnt find my car. When I called the company again, I learnt my car was running in Pushp Vihar near Saket, Singh narrated. Without another thought, I headed for Saket.

Half an hour later, when he reached Saket, he figured that it was time he informed the police as he alone wouldnt be able to nab the culprit and retrieve his car. After informing the police control room, I received a call from a cop posted at Saket. I also got a call from Hari Nagar police station and police started coordinating with me, Singh said. All this while, he was getting live updates about his cars location.

The cops the man spoke to werent in the vicinity of the cars GPS location in Saket. But Singh spotted a PCR van and told them about his case. They decided that I should drive from one direction, they from another, to intercept the Eeco, he said, adding that it was a thrilling experience that he had only seen in movies.

Singh spied the Eeco five minutes later and alerted the cops and the PCR personnel nabbed the car thief, Ashish Kumar, a resident of Sagarpur.In a major feat, the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) has constructed the world's highest motorable road in Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, passing through Umlingla Top at a height of over 19,300 feet.

bccl/representational image

The feat was achieved under 'Project Himank' of the organisation.

Being close to Hanle, the 86km long strategic road connects Chisumle and Demchok villages, located 230 km from Leh. These villages are stone's throw away from the India-China border in the eastern sector, a spokesman of BRO said.

Felicitating the BRO personnel for completing the herculean task, chief engineer, Project Himank, Brigadier DM Purvimath, said constructing the road at the altitude of over 19,300 feet was filled with life-threatening challenges.

bccl/representational image

"During peak summers, the temperature hovers around minus 10-20 degrees Celsius, and in winters, it dips to minus 40 degrees. Oxygen level at the altitude is 50 per cent less than at normal places," Purvimath said.

"Efficiency of machines and manpower declines by 50 per cent due to the harsh climate and less oxygen level. Also, machine operators have to come down every 10 minutes for oxygen," he said.

Purvimath said because of this gradation, the personnel faced serious health problems like loss of memory, eyesight and high blood pressure.

bccl/representational image

"Such a construction does not come without a cost, but given the national and strategic importance of the road, our men and machinery worked overnight to meet the targets set out by Director-General, Border Roads," he said.

Pradeep Raj, Commander 753 BRTF, who looks after road construction of this sector, said the BRO personnel were acclimatised through a tedious process and lot of training before being assigned the job.

"Acclimatisation of men is done at three stages  Leh, Shakti and Numa  before being inducted into the sector. The physical and mental fitness of men is emphasised upon for working in the area as the working season is limited in the region," he said.

The Project Himank has already constructed roads like Khardangu La at an altitude of 17,900 ft and Changla Pass at 17,695 ft in Leh by connecting Nobra valley and Durbuk valley in the cold desert.On Sunday, German bomb disposal team diffused a World War II bomb that had forced the evacuation of 18,500 people in the city of Ludwigshafen.

The 500-kilogramme (1,100-pound) aerial bomb, believed to have been dropped by American forces, was discovered during construction work earlier in the week.

"Good news: the bomb has been defused! Citizens may return to their homes," the city of Ludwigshafen said on its official Twitter feed.

It also posted a picture of the freshly unearthed, corroded bomb, strapped to a pallet before being removed from the area.

Authorities in the western city had ordered all those living within a 1,000-metre (0.6-mile) radius of the bomb site to leave their homes from 08:00 am (0600 GMT) as a precaution ahead of the defusing operation.

It took the bomb squad just over an hour to complete the delicate task, and the all-clear was given shortly after 2:00 pm.

More than 70 years after the end of World War II, Germany remains littered with unexploded ordnance, a legacy of the intense Allied bombing campaign against Nazi Germany.

In the biggest post-war evacuation to date, some 60,000 Frankfurt residents were evacuated last year so that an unexploded 1.8-tonne British bomb dubbed the "blockbuster" could be defused.

In April, thousands had to clear an area around Berlin's central railway station after another British bomb was discovered on a building site.

Unexploded munitions have also complicated the work of firefighters this summer, with forest fires sparked by a spell of hot, dry weather setting off long-buried ordnance, causing small explosions on several occasions.A United Nations report today called for Myanmars military leaders to be investigated and prosecuted for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The report comes after a massive ethnic cleaning of Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar, a religious minority, by the Myanmar army, known as the Tatmadaw.

The damning report contains allegations of murder, imprisonment and sexual violence against the Rohingyas.

"Military necessity would never justify killing indiscriminately, gang raping women, assaulting children, and burning entire villages. The Tatmadaw's tactics are consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats, especially in Rakhine State, but also in northern Myanmar," the report said.

This, perhaps, is the strongest condemnation of the military actions in the country.

Reuters





Myanmars army commander and other top generals must face trial in an international court for genocide against Rohingya Muslims, said United Nations experts.

A report detailing military campaigns involving atrocities against the ethic community that undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law, names Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief of Myanmars army as priority subject for investigation and prosecution by a United Nations Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar.

The Buddhist-majority security forces unleashed a ferocious campaign against Rohingyas and the UN has levelled the most serious charge, genocide, against the military leaders.

The campaign forced more than 7,00,000 Rohingyas to flee the state and cross into Bangladesh.

Myanmar has rejected the claims of widespread atrocities, asserting that the countrys security forces were only responding to the attacks by Rohingya militants.

reuters





In an 18-page report released on Monday, the panel described the Rakhine operations as a foreseeable and planned catastrophe.

For long, Myanmar has falsely classified the Rohingya as Bengali immigrants from Bangladesh. They have been denied citizenships, making them vulnerable to attacks.

The UN panel said that Nobel Peace prize winning Myanmar leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and other civilian authorities contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes.

Reports suggest that so far more than 10,000 Rohingya Muslims have been killed and hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee the state.

Just after the report was released, Facebook took a massive step and removed 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages  including that of the commander in chief, Min Aung Hlaing. The accounts had 12 million followers.

reuters





International experts, most recently in a report by the UN Human Rights Council-authorized fact-finding mission on Myanmar, have found evidence that many of these individuals and organizations committed or enabled serious human rights abuses in the country, Facebook said in a post. We want to prevent them from using our service to further inflame ethnic and religious tensions.In March 2018, a Bangladeshi airliner with 71 people on board crashed in Kathmandu which killed 51 people. An investigation by the Nepal government revealed that the pilots mental condition wasnt satisfactory while he was flying the airplane.

S 211 of US-Bangla Airlines was coming to land when it burst into flames. Both the pilots had died in the crash. An investigation has now suggested that the captain of the flight, Abid Sultan lied to the Air Traffic Controller (ATC) about carrying out proper procedures before landing. Infact, Sultan was incessantly smoking during the flight.

The pilot was not only mentally unstable but he had even lost track of the runway. Nepal daily, Kathmandu Post had accessed the report which suggests that Sultan displayed signs of troublesome behaviour. He had not only lit a cigarette before beginning with the planes landing process but had also lied about locking down the planes gear.

Photo: India Today/Reuters

The report suggested that Sultan was under extreme mental stress which ultimately led to the plane crash. The pilot had informed ATC that he had locked down the gear before landing however, when the co-pilot conducted a final landing check, she found out that the gear wasnt locked down.

"He seemed to be fatigued and tired due to lack of sleep," said India Today in its report based on the data revealed by the Kathmandu Post. An analysis of the voice recording conversation revealed that he was suffering from stress and was crying on several occasions.

Photo: India Today

"I don't f---ing care about the safe flight, you f--- your duty," Sultan said at one point inside the cockpit, according to the report. The Kathmandu Post even disclosed that Sultan had a history of depression which went unaccounted during his hiring.

At one point, he could even be heard abusing a female colleague with whom he had a long standing dispute. He had been removed from active duty in the Air Force after a psychiatric assessment in 1993. However, he rejoined in 2002. His latest medical tests didnt indicate of any mental health issues that would debar him from flying.Mars, the red planet on which humans have long explored an alternative life is experiencing an intense dust storm since June this year. The storm is so strong that its surface looks hazy when seen from a telescope.

NASAs prized possession, Opportunity robotic rover is active on Mars since 2004. It is the longest-lived robot on the planet. Though the vehicle was meant to last only three months, it is 15 years old now.

NASAs Opportunity rover scours the land, constantly exploring and analysing its surroundings. However, it fell asleep on the job on June 10 due to a massive dust storm. The opportunity hasnt been able to phone back home and it has been two months since the robot went into a state of coma.

Photo: BI/ How Mars looked before (left) and after the dust storm (right)

Infamous for its dust storms, usually these rusty red swathes cover Mars once every few years. However, NASA believes this is "one of the most intense" global dust storm ever recorded, quoted Business Insider.

MER Principal Investigator Steve Squyres, of Cornell University, told The MER Update, I'm not sure what to say other than this is the worst storm Opportunity has ever seen, and we're doing what we can, crossing our fingers and hoping for the best.

Why Is Opportunity In Danger? Here Are Some Of The Possible Reasons

1)The dust storm has thrown the planet into a perpetual state of darkness. The Martian weather, therefore, has blocked light for the poor opportunity which runs on solar panels. Due to this, it has lost the ability to store and recharge itself with electrical energy.

2) The climate of Mars has aroused curiosity among scientists for decades now. It can be very hot and biting cold at the same time. On Mars, winter temperatures can drop to minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit near the equator. Such cold weather can shrink pieces of metal in electronic circuits and break them.

3) Plutonium -238 nuclear buttons help keep Opportunitys circuit warm but it is not only well-decayed but a short-term solution as well. Therefore, the robot still needs electricity to charge itself, run circuit warm heaters and to contact NASA mission back home.

4) Draining the batteries excessively is also another issue. The longer they are inactive, the more electrical storage capacity they lose. If Opportunitys solar panels dont clear itself of the dust then the batteries could dip in voltage.

If the dust storm doesnt die down then it will become difficult for the robot to recover from a variety of fault modes and Opportunity will join the likes of Spirit, an identical sister rover which stopped talking to NASA in March 2010 during a Martian winter.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS)/This series of images, created with imagery processed by the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) crew at Malin Space Science Systems, shows simulated views of the epic dust storms path.

Light At The End Of The Tunnel

The good news is that the storm has started weakening and is in its decay phase. According to BI, NASA said that opportunitys batteries were in a relatively good condition before the storm took place so there is not likely to be too much degradation. Dust storms also tend to warm up the environment, so that will help buffer against the circuit-busting cold.

However, it might take a lot of time for the skies to be clear enough so that Opportunity could rejuvenate its batteries. Though the six-wheeled robot is in severe threat, scientists are optimistic about the rover.No one can fight with the ill-fate of life and this doctor couple had to endure what was in store for them. Last year in December, this couple from Amravati not only lost their 4-month-old daughter but they also could not donate her organs despite their best efforts.

In a bid to do something on the occasion of their deceased daughter's birthday, Umesh Sawarkar and Ashwini funded two heart surgeries 8 months later, on what would have been their daughter's first birthday.

Two children from Wagholi and Deogaon villages of Amravati will now have a normal life, thanks to this generous couple who thought of giving lives to other kids on the occasion of their daughter's birthday. Both the kids had a hole in their heart.

Maharashtra doctor couple funds heart surgeries of 2 kids on dead daughter's birthday https://t.co/LfuuzGK2Dw via @TOIMumbai pic.twitter.com/Lav6y3RVAF  Times of India (@timesofindia) August 27, 2018

For the last three months, the couple was going from one hospital to another in search of kids who are in dire need of help. This is when they reached Shri Sant Acchyut Maharaj Heart Hospital (SSAMHH) where they found Payal and Aswashil's case files.

Hats off!! Truly heart touching What a nice way of paying tribute to their child.

Thats the true religion of humanity

Doctor couple funds heart surgeries of 2 kids on dead daughter's birthday

https://t.co/C1NSWMT4n9  Bhavika Agrawal (@agrawal_bhavika) August 27, 2018

Nothing can fill the vacuum created by Meeras death, but the smiles on the faces of these children can help us cope with the pain, said Ashwini.Kids are the masters of ruination. The best part is, they can get away with almost anything. So, meet this kid who ruined his mom's proposal by peeing on it.

When Kevin Przytula proposed his partner Allyssa Anter on Saturday in Bay City, Michigan, little did he know that his future son will not only photobomb the entire proposal but also take his pants down and pee in all his glory.

So just when the 27-year-old mom was buzzing with happiness, her own son, Owen took away all the attention. When the couple took their precious moment to social media, their friends and family were more interested in talking about how Owen stole the show, instead of their proposal.

"Oh my God, he's peeing, are you serious?" Kevin said, laughing, reports LadBible. "He pees outside at home, sometimes in the yard and we went and got ice cream the other day and he did it in the parking lot there," Allyssa said.

This clip has managed to rack up over 50,000 views and we have no doubts. "That is so funny. I hate to say it, but I think you got upstaged. LOL," one user wrote.

Seriously, though - someone needs to tell Owen to not treat all of the land available to him as a toilet.The groups Australian broking business reported an 8.7% rise in profit contribution, to $35.5 million (FY17: $49.2 million), while its specialist underwriting agencies SURA posted an 11% rise in profit contribution to $13.9 million (FY17: 12.5 million).

Im very happy with the significant success weve achieved to date in executing our total risk solutions strategy, which is delivering results, Searles said. Im excited to use the coming year to focus efforts on executing the next phase, and to building upon the growth momentum weve achieved this year. On a personal level, I look forward to developing a non-executive career once my current role with AUB Group has been transitioned to my successor.

David Clarke, AUB Group chairman, said Searles decision creates a very manageable timeframe in which to oversee a smooth leadership transition.

Mark has steered AUB Group through a period of substantial change over the past six years, to great effect. We look forward to working with him on the continued execution of the strategy, Clarke said.

AUB Group said it expects adjusted NPAT to grow 7-12% over FY18 in the context of a mid-single digit premium rate environment, partner investment, and a degree of economic uncertainty.Michigan Department of Insurance and Financial Services Andrea Miller told The Associated Press that the departments officials are reviewing the complaint.

Eighteen residents had originally filed the lawsuit, but Mayor Duggan later joined "to protect the rights of all Detroit residents," the document said.

"This law is causing thousands of people across Michigan to break the law by driving without insurance because they simply can no longer afford it," Duggan commented. "We are asking the court to provide residents the relief they need from these unjustifiably high insurance rates."

According to the lawsuit, Michigans average auto insurance premium is over $3,000  compared to the national average of just $1,500. Detroit, in particular, has the highest auto insurance rate of any US city, the lawsuit continued, with residents paying an average of approximately $6,200 for insurance.

The lawsuit has requested the court to give the state six months to change the system; if a compromise cannot be reached, the plaintiffs have called for shift to the tort system for auto insurance claims.

"If that deadline is not met, the No-Fault Act should be deemed null and void and the tort system, used by a significant majority of states, should be reinstated," the lawsuit read.

Related stories:

Fraud and overcharging driving up premiums - Insurance Alliance of Michigan executive

Overcharging hospitals? Greedy lawyers? Why Detroit's auto insurance is so expensiveHome-rental providers Airbnb Inc. and HomeAway are suing New York City over a recently passed law that allows the collection of data on the websites hosts, claiming the ordinance violates users constitutional rights.

Airbnb is hoping to avoid millions in losses when the law, designed to police short-term home rentals, takes effect this winter. The New York City legislation, which passed with a 45-0 vote, would require Airbnb and similar sites to share the names and addresses of their hosts with the citys Office of Special Enforcement. After Airbnb sued Friday morning, Expedia Inc.s HomeAway filed a similar case, saying the new legislation violates privacy laws.

The ordinance is an unlawful end-run around established restraints on governmental action and violates core constitutional rights, Airbnb said in a claim filed in New York court on Friday.

New York, which faces an affordable housing shortage, has struggled with how to enforce regulation to control Airbnb and other home-rental services. Regulators argue that short-term rentals, which can be more profitable than long-term leases, disrupt neighborhoods and drive up rents. The new legislation is designed to give officials enough information to catch Airbnb hosts who operate outside of strict home-sharing laws.

This law provides the city with the critical data it needs to preserve our housing stock, keep visitors safe and ensure residents feel secure in their homes and neighborhoods, Christian Klossner, executive director for the mayors special enforcement office, wrote in an emailed statement. The city will defend it.

Some people close to Airbnb said the new bill is a devastating blow for the company. New York is one of Airbnbs most popular markets and the legislation could inspire other cities to take a harder line on short-term home-rentals. However, Airbnb says it wont hurt the company and other cities dont have the same incentive to act so probably wont pass similar rules.

The New York City Council is a wholly owned subsidiary of the hotel industry, and they arent interested in working together, said Chris Lehane, Airbnbs head of global policy. Airbnb says its successfully partnering with officials in France, Australia, China and India.

In New York, Airbnb has tussled with regulators for almost a decade. In July, the company funded a civil rights lawsuit against the city. A few days later, the city sued Airbnb to force compliance with a subpoena related to an investigation into an illegal hotel.

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Lawsuits Legislation New York Sharing EconomyNew Jersey Transit has been rejected for additional federal money as it scrambles to install a required safety system by years end.

The Federal Railroad Administration on Thursday announced more than $200 million in grants for 28 railroads to implement positive train control, but NJ Transit didnt make the list. An NJ Transit spokeswoman confirmed the agency applied for a grant.

An FRA spokesman didnt comment Friday on NJ Transits application.

In a progress report covering the first six months of 2018, the FRA reported Thursday that NJ Transit is lagging behind all but two other railroads in installing positive train control hardware. Positive train control is an emergency braking system designed to prevent train-to-train collisions and derailments due to excessive speed and trains passing through switches left in the wrong position.

NJ Transit has received a two-year extension until the end of 2020 to complete testing and implementation but must install hardware by the end of 2018.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics New JerseyCanada ought to require stronger tank cars for transporting flammable liquids sooner than the current deadline in 2025, Transportation Safety Board Chair Kathy Fox said on Thursday, noting that crude-by-rail shipments are expected to rise in the country.

We understand that it cant happen all at once. But wed like to see it sooner, Fox said in an interview, without giving a specific alternative date. We do have an ongoing concern that flammable liquids be transported in the most robust tank cars.

Canada and the United States have introduced new requirements to more safely transport flammable liquids, after a 2013 runaway train explosion carrying crude killed 47 in the Canadian province of Quebec.

Older DOT-111 cars, used during the tragedy in Lac Megantic, Quebec, have already been replaced in Canada by CPC-1232 cars for moving crude oil, but even these must be completely phased out by May 1, 2025 for the transport of flammable liquids, according to the TSB.

They will need to be replaced by TC-117 cars, or retrofits that meet the same standard, which has thicker steel.

The U.S. Department of Transportation expects flammable liquids to be carried in comparable DOT-117 rail tank cars, or retrofits, by May 1, 2029.

Canada has not experienced a major derailment of a crude train since 2015, Fox said. But in the United States, a BNSF Railway Co freight train carrying crude oil derailed in northwest Iowa in June, sending some 230,000 gallons of oil into a state waterway.

Crude-by-rail transports, which have declined in Canada in recent years on declining oil prices, are showing signs of a resurgence.

Canada exported a record 204,558 barrels per day of crude by rail in June, the National Energy Board said on Wednesday, as oil shippers coped with congested pipelines.

That volume jumped 86 percent from a year earlier, but expanding oil producers have said they need to move much more to reduce a steep discount on their heavy crude prices.

Recommendations following Lac Megantic have led to improved oversight and standards for tank cars, Fox said. But she remains concerned over a recent rise in uncontrolled train movements that could be prevented with better training, less reliance on air or hand brakes and improved physical defenses.

Were encouraged to see the progress made since Lac Megantic, she said. But there is still more work to be done.

(Additional reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg; editing by David Gregorio)

Related:

Topics USA Energy Oil Gas CanadaTen Senate Republicans have introduced legislation that would reinstate Obamacare rules that prohibit insurers from turning away people with pre-existing conditions if a new lawsuit that seeks to invalidate the healthcare law succeeds.

The legislation comes two weeks before oral arguments begin on September 5 in Texas v. United States, a Republican-led lawsuit brought by 20 states, which contends that the 2010 health-care law is unconstitutional after Congress neutered the tax penalty for those who dont comply with its individual mandate to buy coverage.

In an unusual move, the Trump administration sided with the suing states and declined to defend the federal law in court. That leaves Republicans in a difficult position, just two months before the Nov. 6 congressional election, where health care is a top motivating issue for many voters, and one in which Democrats enjoy an advantage, according to surveys.

An Associated Press-NORC poll released Friday found that Americans disapprove by a margin of 36 percent to 64 percent of how Trump is handling the issue of health care.

The move comes as Democrats hammer Republicans in campaign ads for their unpopular efforts last year to repeal the Affordable Care Act, possibly further propelling GOP lawmakers to show support for continuing certain protections. A Reuters poll in June and July found 84 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Republicans support Medicare for All. Medicare currently is the U.S. health program for the elderly and disabled.

The Ensuring Coverage for Patients with Pre-Existing Conditions Act was announced Friday by Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Dean Heller of Nevada, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Lindsey Graham or South Carolina, John Barrasso of Wyoming, and Roger Wicker of Mississippi.

Heller faces a tough re-election in Nevada this fall.

Nevadans and Americans throughout the country with pre-existing conditions should be protected  period, Heller said in a statement. This legislation will make sure that Nevadas most vulnerable have access to coverage, and Im proud to join my colleagues to introduce it.

Stewart Boss, a spokesman for Hellers Democratic opponent Jacky Rosen, responded by calling it a weak and panicked move from the senator, noting that he has supported his partys proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Larry Levitt, the senior vice president for health reform at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, said the legislation includes loopholes that would make preexisting condition coverage less robust than it is under existing law.

It prohibits individual premiums from varying based on health, but allows them to vary based on age, gender, occupation, and leisure activities. It would allow premium variation based on health in the small business market, Levitt said in an e-mail. The big loophole is that it would allow pre-existing condition exclusions, which were common in individual market plans before the ACA.

An insurer would have to give you insurance if you have a pre-existing condition, but it could exclude any services associated with your pre-existing condition, he said. This would make protections for people with pre-existing conditions a bit of a mirage.

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Legislation Politics NevadaTexas Mutual Insurance Company reported that a Travis County district court has sentenced Christopher Colligan of Baytown on workers compensation fraud charges.

The company said Colligan reported a job-related injury while working as a driver for Macro Oil Company Inc. and claimed he was unable to work because of the injury.

Texas Mutual began paying income benefits to him, but it was then discovered that he was working as a truck driver for another company.

The Texas Department of Insurance Division of Workers Compensation prosecutor in Travis County presented the case for indictment. The court sentenced Colligan to a Class A misdemeanor with one-year deferred adjudication. He will pay $9,835 in restitution to Texas Mutual.

Source: Texas Mutual Insurance Company

Topics Texas Workers' Compensation Fraud Abuse MolestationA state inspection that took place days after an immigration raid at a Tennessee slaughterhouse has resulted in more than $41,000 in fines for working conditions at the plant.

The Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration lists 27 violations, including 23 deemed serious. The violations include lack of appropriate eye or face protection, inadequate safety training, hazardous chemicals inadequately labeled and toilet facilities not maintained.

James Brantley, the owner of Southeastern Provision meatpacking plant in Bean Station, agreed last week to plead guilty to employing unauthorized immigrants, tax evasion and wire fraud. An attorney for Brantley did not respond to an email Friday seeking comment about the violations.

Civil rights activists have said the April raid may have been the biggest employment crackdown under President Donald Trumps administration.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics TennesseeWho says you need a college degree to be one of Americas top chief executive officers (CEOs)? Well, the law of averages does. While there are a few exceptions, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, having a formal education is a standard requirement for the top tier of the business world. The path to becoming a Fortune 500 CEO can include more than a college degree, but make no mistakeit often includes a stop at one (or two) of the countrys colleges or universities.

While a bachelor's and a graduate degree are common for top CEOs, there is no single major or graduate degree that they all share. Although business and computer science degrees are solidly represented, there are some less common inclusions. And of course, the majority of the CEOs obtained a Master of Business Administration (MBA). Keep reading to discover the undergraduate and graduate degrees of some of the countrys top CEOs.

Key Takeaways Undergraduate and graduate degrees are common for some of the world's top CEOs.

Many CEOs earn an MBA, which hones their business acumen while helping build a foundation of management and leadership skills.

Notable exceptions to this rule include Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

Doug McMillon: President and CEO

Company: Walmart (WMT)

Walmart (WMT) Undergraduate Degree: B.S. Business Administration, University of Arkansas

B.S. Business Administration, University of Arkansas Graduate Degree: MBA, University of Tulsa

A native of Jonesboro, Arkansas, McMillan began his career at Walmart as a summer associate at the companys distribution center. He was also an assistant manager and a buyer trainee. Before he took the reins as CEO of Walmart, McMillon led the company's Sams Club division, and then Walmart International. McMillon is also a member of the Business Roundtable and serves on a number of boards including the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board.

Darren Woods: Chair and CEO

Company: ExxonMobil (XOM)

ExxonMobil (XOM) Undergraduate Degree: B.S. Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University

B.S. Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University Graduate Degree: MBA, Northwestern University

Born in Wichita, Kansas, Darren Woods has a long history with ExxonMobil. Woods joined the company in 1992, working both domestically and internationally in positions for Exxon Company International, ExxonMobil Chemical Company, and ExxonMobil Refining and Supply Company. He was elected president of ExxonMobil and a member of the board of directors in January 2016. He succeeded Rex Tillerson as chair of the board and CEO in January 2017.

While there are a few exceptions, having a formal education is standard for the top tier of the business world.

Warren Buffett: Chair and CEO

Company: Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A)

Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) Undergraduate Degree: B.S. Business Administration, University of Nebraska

B.S. Business Administration, University of Nebraska Graduate Degree: M.A. Economics, Columbia University

Almost everyone has heard of Warren Buffett, the man behind Berkshire Hathaway. Investing is a family trait that Buffett inherited in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, from his father, a stockbroker and U.S. congressman. At the age of 11, Buffett made his first investment, and by the age of 13, he was selling horse racing tip sheets and operating a paper delivery service. Buffett has a long history of operating success and an incredible investing track record that's made him one of the best value investors of all time.

Tim Cook: CEO

Company: Apple (AAPL)

Apple (AAPL) Undergraduate Degree: B.S. Industrial Engineering, Auburn University

B.S. Industrial Engineering, Auburn University Graduate Degree: MBA, Duke University

Born in Mobile, Alabama, Tim Cook took the reins as head of Apple in August 2011. Before joining the company, he served as the North American fulfillment director at IBM (IBM) and as a chief operating officer (COO) at Intelligent Electronics. He was also vice president of corporate materials at Compaq Computer Corporation.

Andrew Witty: CEO

Company: UnitedHealth Group (UNH)

UnitedHealth Group (UNH) Degree: B.A. Economics, University of Nottingham

Andrew Witty is another company man, joining the health industry in 1985 with British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. Witty previously served as executive vice president of UnitedHealth Group before becoming CEO in February 2021. He also serves as chief executive officer of UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Optum.

Brian S. Tyler: CEO

Company: McKesson (MCK)

McKesson (MCK) Undergraduate Degree: B.A. Economics, University of California Santa Cruz

B.A. Economics, University of California Santa Cruz Graduate and Postgraduate Degrees: Master's and Ph.D. Economics, University of Chicago

Brian Tyler has well over twenty years of experience with McKesson, having served in many leadership roles. Tyler became CEO in 2019 after having led several major businesses within McKesson. He was also the COO, overseeing the companys global business operations, CEO of McKesson Europe, as well as president of McKesson Specialty Health.

1:24 Mohamed El-Erian: Inside Track

Karen S. Lynch: President and CEO

Company: CVS Health (CVS)

CVS Health (CVS) Undergraduate Degree: B.S. Accounting, Boston College

B.S. Accounting, Boston College Graduate Degree: MBA, Boston University

Born and raised in Ware, Mass., Karen Lynch has been working in the healthcare industry for more than three decades. Prior to becoming president and CEO of CVS in February 2021, Lynch served in a variety of leadership positions in the company and its subsidiary, health insurance company Aetna. Lynch also has an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Becker College.

Andy Jassy: President and CEO

Company: Amazon (AMZN)

Amazon (AMZN) Undergraduate Degree: B.A. Government, Harvard University

B.A. Government, Harvard University Graduate Degree: MBA, Harvard Business School

Born in Scarsdale, New York, Andy Jassy joined Amazon in its early stages in 1997, starting out as the company's marketing manager. He led many leadership positions in Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, including CEO. Jassy became CEO of Amazon on July 5, 2021, after founder Jeff Bezos stepped down from the role.

John T. Stankey: CEO

Company: AT&T (T)

AT&T (T) Undergraduate Degree: BBA Finance, Loyola Marymount University

BBA Finance, Loyola Marymount University Graduate Degree: MBA, University of California Los Angeles

John Stankey has worked with AT&T since 1985. He has served as CEO for several of AT&T's subsidiary companies, including WarnerMedia, AT&T Entertainment Group, and AT&T Business Solutions, among other leadership positions. He was the president and COO of AT&T prior to becoming CEO of the telecommunications giant in July 2020.

Mary Barra: Chair and CEO

Company: General Motors (GM)

General Motors (GM) Undergraduate Degree: B.S. Electrical Engineering, Kettering University

B.S. Electrical Engineering, Kettering University Graduate Degree: MBA, Stanford University

Born in Waterford, Michigan, Mary Barras first job at GM was as a co-op student in the Pontiac Motor Division. She was also senior vice president (SVP) and executive vice president (EVP) of global product development, vice president of global human resources, and vice president of the company's global manufacturing engineering division.

Sundar Pichai: CEO

Company: Alphabet (GOOG)

Alphabet (GOOG) Undergraduate Degree: B.S. Metallurgical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

B.S. Metallurgical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur Graduate Degrees: Masters Material Sciences and Engineering, Stanford University and MBA, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Pichai was born in Chennai, India, and took over as CEO of Google's parent Alphabet in 2019 following the decision by co-founder Larry Page to step down from the role. Pichai has also been the CEO of Google since 2015. With his education and early work experience at Applied Materials, Pichai joined Google in 2004 as head of product management and development. Pichai became a project manager leading initiatives on Google Chrome, Chrome OS, and Google Drive. He oversaw product development for Gmail and Google Maps as well as the debut of Chrome OS and the Chromebook in 2011.

The Bottom Line

Americas top CEOs have degrees in a number of majors. Each leader has a strong academic background that helped them develop discipline, inventiveness, and analytical skills. Those who pursued an MBA increased their business acumen while honing their management and leadership skills.IRELAND: Pope's Visit: Public act of contrition helps to clear the air for a festival of the faithful

IRELAND: Doubts have been cast over a proposal by an American university to site a European campus on an Office of Public Works site in west Waterford

IRELAND: The Pope is to study a report into the Tuam mother and baby home given to him on his Irish visit.

WORLD: Pope Francis has declined to confirm or deny claims by the Vaticans retired ambassador to the United States that he knew in 2013 about sexual misconduct allegations against the former archbishop of Washington.

VIEWS: Apologies from the Pope simply not enough, writes Daniel McConnell

SPORT: Tearaway Tipp tear up the script to derail Cork train in the U21 Final

SPORT: ANTHONY DALY: Cork need to put steel fist into silk glove

... SOME DISTRACTION

FEATURE: The truth about single shaming: Ciara Courtney is single and happy  so why, she wonders, are people so determined to change her?

CULTURE: The Beat and The Specials' 1981 Cork appearance

VIRAL: How popular is your use of emoji?By Louise Walsh

A 5,500-year-old passage tomb, described as the find of a lifetime was only discovered because of stringent planning laws.

One of the richest tapestries of archaeology in Ireland, the Boyne Valley is the gift that just kept giving this summer, with three separate discoveries to send experts worldwide into an excited tizzy.

Thousands will flock to see a significant Neolithic passage tomb cemetery, unearthed during works at Dowth Hall in Co Meath and revealed to the world in July.

A kerbstone at the site is heavily decorated with Neolithic carvings and represents one of the most impressive discoveries of megalithic art in Ireland in decades.

Meanwhile, we have the sun to thank for revealing crop marks which showed an apparent henge that dates back to 2,900 BC.

And as all this was going on, the first archaeology dig at Newgrange in 30 years uncovered an ancient processional way to the site.

The discovery at Dowth is still attracting international attention with requests from camera crews and media for interviews arriving daily.

The archaeological gem was found during an excavation undertaken by Devenish in partnership with University College Dublin (UCD) School of Archaeology, as part of the restoration and redevelopment of Dowth Hall.

To date, a large passage tomb about 40m in diameter with two burial chambers in its western part, as well as a further two possible satellite tombs, have been discovered, The six kerbstones that have been identified so far would have formed part of a ring of stones that followed the perimeter of the large passage tomb.

One kerbstone is heavily decorated with Neolithic carvings and represents one of the most impressive discoveries of megalithic art in Ireland for decades.

Cliodhna Ni Lionain: I dont think Ill ever beat this discovery in my time as an archaeologist.

Cliodhna Ni Lionain, who described the tomb as the find of a lifetime, is Devenishs project archaeologist for Dowth Hall.

Its quite an unusual position to be resident archaeologist for a private landowner but Devenish and the Brennan family made the decision to employ a full-time archaeologist because the estate has a number of upstanding monuments and they felt a duty of guardianship as stewards of the land, said Dr Ni Lionain.

Originally, I was brought in to monitor and protect the condition of existing monuments and to collaborate with UCD School of Archaeology in their ongoing research, including two seasons of a research dig in another part of the estate.

Prior to applying for planning permission to renovate and restore Dowth Hall, Devenish brought together an expert team, including Dr Ni Lionain, Steve Davis of UCD, and Mullarkey Pedersen conservation architects, who, over two years, developed a pre-planning document for the house.

We always thought that, when the house was built in the 18th century, it may have disturbed a passage tomb as we found megalithic art not too far away, said Dr Ni Lionain.

However, a geophysical survey around the house didnt show up anything particularly significant and it was only during the initial excavations we detected something very special.

It turns out that the 18th century builders had dug a hole in the centre of a large passage tomb, where they built the house using some of the stone from this prehistoric monument.

Excavations were long and began last summer but were kept under wraps until the full extent of the find was

revealed.

Our initial work focussed on removing the layers of 18th century soil and building rubble that concealed the remains of the tomb, said Dr Ni Lionain.

Its only really since June that we have been investigating the prehistoric layers of this passage tomb, which may originally have been about half the size of Newgrange and Knowth.

Dr Ni Lionain said experts could only surmise the reason the Boyne Valley was so rich in these passage tombs.

There is definitely a concentration here and the Neolithic farmers could obviously afford the time and resources to build these structures, 5,500 years ago, she said.

These middle Neolithic tombs were communal burial sites, but continued to be a focus for ritual activity long after, into the Bronze Age and Iron Age.

She explained that the impressive kerbstone took weeks to uncover.

We found the upper left hand side first and it took a couple of weeks to excavate through the layers of soil to expose it, she said.

Its a stunning piece of art that in different light at different times shows even more features. You never

get tired of looking at this kerbstone.

I dont think Ill ever beat this discovery in my time as an archaeologist.

She pointed out that the site would probably never have been discovered if the decision to restore Dowth Hall had not been taken, as well as stringent local planning laws.

The geophysical survey didnt detect it and it wouldnt have shown up as a crop mark because of all the stone infill covering it, she said.

Excavation was the only way to find it.

As Dowth Hall is located in an area of high archaeological potential, Meath County Council included a condition on the planning permission that stipulated the presence of an archaeologist during all ground-works.

This find really shows how well the planning permission process can work in discovering and protecting our archaeological heritage, said Dr Ni Lionain.

Her colleague on the dig, Claire Ryan, who worked for many years as a tour guide at Newgrange, said that being involved in a find of this magnitude was pretty spectacular.

I worked around Newgrange, not knowing what was hidden nearby, she said. It just shows that no matter how long you spend excavating the Boyne Valley, there is still so much more to be uncovered.

The significance of this site will really only emerge down the line and a chance to work here is pretty amazing.

Tickets for guided tours around the new excavations at Dowth during heritage week were snapped up almost immediately, which delighted owner and executive chairman of Devenish, Owen Brennan.

Owners Owen Brennan and Alice Stanton: We are keen to share our archaeological finds with the wider community.

The monuments here, created by some of Irelands first farmers capture our imaginations and those of our visitors to the Devenish lands of Dowth.

We are keen to share our archaeological finds with the wider community and National Heritage Week has provided the perfect opportunity for use to invite people to come to see the megalithic finds of this excavation.

Dr Davis of the UCD School of Archaeology said: This is the most significant megalithic find in Ireland

in the last 50 years, since the excavation of Knowth.

The spate of archaeological discoveries in Bru na Boinne in recent weeks highlights what a globally significant place this is.

As Dowth was unveiled to the media, the first excavations at nearby Newgrange were underway after a geophysical survey showed the most definite, complex and ordered feature ever seen in a geophysical survey in Ireland, according to noted medieval expert and archaeologist Matthew Stout, who led the dig alongside his wife and Bru na Boinne expert Geraldine.

The survey suggested numerous large pits, forming two parallel sets extending more than 75m, indicating an ancient processional way to Newgrange that was ritual in nature.

Material from a small part of the site has now been sent for dating and as the four-week dig ended, it was summed up by Mr Stout as the most impressive geophysical underground site that Ive ever seen and most difficult site that Ive ever worked on.

This dig was to be the focus of photographs by historian and author Anthony Murphy, before he stumbled on another remarkable discovery  crop marks exposing a possible henge, which have since been recorded by the National Monuments Service Anthony had flown his drone the previous evening to take pictures of the

excavations by the Stouts, but did not realise that the crop marks lay waiting to be discovered  if his drone had turned around 180 degrees.

It was another of a number of buried archaeological sites, which appeared as crop marks because of the extremely dry weather.

It was an incredible, strange and wonderful month for the Boyne Valley, said the historian, who has written a number of books on the area.

I spent such a long time writing, researching and photographing the area that this discovery was like a

reward for all my hard work  and it was worth it.

Something told me to go back out again the next night. I didnt expect to find anything new but I did maybe think Id see some new features of an existing monument.

It was on the second flight that I saw the broken circular feature and I shouted to a friend, Ken Williams, who had joined me.

The monuments, created by some of Irelands first farmers capture our imaginations and those of our visitors, says Owen Brennan.

There were two outer circles of dots which appeared to be giant post holes to support wooden timber posts.

It looks like what we found was a likely henge dating to 2,900 BC  some 200 years after Newgrange.

At 175m, it seems to have been a ceremonial structure which held huge crowds of visitors.

Throughout the remarkable discoveries, there was one noted visitor to the Boyne Valley to assess and admire what had been found  since he began excavations at nearby Knowth 50 years ago.

Esteemed professor George Eogan remarked on the Stout excavations: Its not totally a surprise to find a new site here as Bru na Boinne is a crucially important archaeological site.

This was preliminary work. What is exciting is that it appears a new form of structure has emerged of a henge monument or pathway.

It also appears this very large site may have been used as a ritual site.

Prof Eogan added that he has worked at Bru na Boinne in excavation or in research every year since 1960 and never tires of finding out more about it.

The discoveries at the Unesco heritage site do reveal one thing for certain  though millennia old, Bru na Boinne still has many more secrets to reveal across an area heaving with mystery.By Christy Parker

Doubts have been cast over a proposal by an American university to site a European campus on an Office of Public Works site in west Waterford, with any likely development now expected to be downscaled.

Two years ago, Mercyhurst University, in Erie, Pennsylvania, signed a memorandum of understanding with Waterford Council officials, authorising them to conduct a feasibility study for the venture.

The university sought to establish the campus on a 2.9-acre site at Shandon, Dungarvan.

The move to create a fully-fledged campus was mooted by Fine Gael TD for Waterford, John Deasy, who graduated from Mercyhurst.

The politician acknowledged the aspiration has always been to make Dungarvan a university town.

Mercyhursts connection with Dungarvan dates to its foundation by the Sisters of Mercy, in 1926. It began an enhanced relationship with Dungarvan, through a recruitment project involving St Augustines College, Abbeyside, Dungarvan, in the 1980s.

In 2010, Mercyhurst began hosting its biennial global intelligence forum in Dungarvan, and, in 2012, established the Mercyhurst College Ireland programme there.

Since 2012, Mercyhurst students have spent full semesters in Dungarvan, studying at WIT and in Dungarvan. Meanwhile, third-level west Waterford students have travelled to Erie.

With little apparent progress since the memorandum of understanding, questions have arisen locally, regarding the projects future.

Waterford Council CEO Michael Walsh did not elaborate on the plans current status, but said that the council was in continuing communication with Mercyhurst, with a view to the expansion of their programmes and presence in Dungarvan.By Olivia Kelleher

Medicinal cannabis campaigner Vera Twomey, who secured a licence for the medication for her ill daughter Ava Barry, has said the eight-year-old is now pharmaceutical free.

In a post on Facebook Ms Twomey says the child is solely being treated by medicinal cannabis CBD and THC.

Ava has become officially pharma free. We were scared and excited at the same time to know what it would bring. The last couple of photos of Ava I think speak for themselves and as it happens so does Ava as she is singing the beginning of nursery rhymes now more and more.

Happy and healthy as we can be, we move forward better and brighter and [with Ava] looking forward to getting back to school.

Ms Twomey spoke in the the House of Commons in London earlier this summer where she explained the benefits of the alternative medicine in treating conditions such as severe epilepsy.

She became friendly with British mother Hannah Deacon when they lived on the same street in the Netherlands when they were both medical refugees.

She was in the Hague to receive medicinal cannabis for her daughter Ava while Hannah was in the same position with her son Alfie Dingley.

Ms Twomey from Aghabullogue, Co Cork, rose to national prominence in a three-year campaign to secure access to medicinal cannabis to treat Avas rare form of epilepsy called Dravet syndrome. Her campaigning included two 260km walks from Cork to the Dail to capture the Governments attention. She also mounted a social media campaign. She and husband Paul had to live abroad with Ava to guarantee THC cannabis supply.

Ms Twomey says she continues to campaign for others who are in need of medicinal cannabis. She recently climbed Croagh Patrick with Noreen ONeill from Co Kerry, who is hoping to get a licence for medicinal cannabis for her two-year-old son Michael.

Michael has a neurological condition called bilateral frontal polymicrogyric.

- Ms ONeill has set up a petition seeking the legalisation of medicinal cannabis: www.change.org/p/simon-harris-minister-for-health-simon-harris-legalise-medicinal-cannabis- in-ireland-nowJustice Minister Charlie Flanagan has said he wants a review carried out into contempt of court rules and defamation laws.

His comments come after concern about the use of social media during trials. This included concerns about online comments in the Belfast rape trial and the Jobstown protest case.

Former chief justice Susan Denham previously warned that rules were needed to control social media use in and around court cases.

A particular concern is how online communication may influence jurors.

Ms Denham said the fundamental right to a fair trial should not be disrupted by new means of communication. Draft guidelines on the issue were since issued to presidents of all the courts.

Speaking to the Irish Examiner, Mr Flanagan said a lot of department legislation was pending. Nonetheless, the Fine Gael minister wants a review to be done on contempt of court rules.

I would be keen that we can advance matters in terms of a review of that issue, with particular reference to the unsatisfactory nature of the contempt of court at present.

However, we have a very full-on legislative programme here. As well as my own priorities, with criminal and civil and a piece of legislation on Northern Ireland issues. I also have a large number of private members bills, between 40 and 50 outstanding pieces currently on the books.

Culture Minister Josepha Madigan has proposed legislation to make contempt of court a statutory offence and to protect jurors from undue social media influence during trials. Her Bill was first introduced last year but stalled after she entered Cabinet.

Under her proposals, existing contempt of court rules for traditional media such as newspapers, TV or radio would be extended to cover social media. There could also be take down orders for websites and the blocking of certain hashtags that may be considered inflammatory.

Under the proposals, trial judges would decide any level of fines imposed if a media company fails to comply. The Contempt of Court Bill also gives the law on contempt of court a statutory footing for the first time. Such regulations have been trialled in New Zealand.

Mr Flanagan also wants a review completed on libel laws. This issue is a huge concern for the newspaper industry. Editors have called for juries to be abolished in defamation cases and a cap placed on damages, as is the case in the UK.By Anne Lucey

A hospital group has rejected claims that University Hospital Kerry (UHK), the southern regions third-biggest acute hospital, is being downgraded.

If anything, staff numbers at the Tralee facility have increased, the South/South West Hospital Group insists.

Furthermore, new plans across all departments have been released to the Irish Examiner to ease public concerns. The move follows unease in the county about the future of the 300-plus-bed hospital, which was renamed two years ago from Kerry General.

Last month, nurses from the emergency department and their families took to the picket line outside the hospital on their own time to highlight the fact that while most A&E units got extra staff after national protests in 2015-16, Kerry did not.

The Tralee hospital serves north Cork, west Limerick and Kerry and, on average, admits 100 patients a day, many of whom are acutely ill. Figures point to 20 patients daily, on average, on trolleys waiting for admission to wards.

The hospital has also lost key staff and is without a full-time consultant cardiologist specialist, despite the fact that heart diseases remains the biggest killer in Kerry. It now also has just one geriatrician for the region, despite boasting one of the oldest populations in the country.

Councillor Toireasa Ferris expressed fears about the hospitals future. Referring to breaks in fluoroscopy equipment which will take nine months to repair, the Sinn Fein councillor referred in radio interviews to previous warnings that the machines needed to be replaced three years ago.

She believes the hospital is being deliberately downgraded. Ms Ferris indicated she had shared the belief for some time.

I remember speaking to a consultant in Nenagh in Tipperary in 2008 when they were downgrading that hospital, and she said to me you know that the same thing will be happening in Kerry within 10 years and it seems she was right, Ms Ferris said.

Kerry TD Michael Healy-Rae said hip and knee replacements had been halted for the past few months and were only due to resume next week.

Fianna Fails John Brassil recently wrote directly to the chief operations officer of the hospital group to express his concerns about staff shortages in the diabetic and stroke unit and cardiology.

It cannot be allowed to continue, he said, also suggesting patient safety could be put at risk.

However, the South/South West Hospital Group, which was set up to improve nine acute hospitals across counties Cork, Kerry, Waterford, Tipperary, and Kilkenny, dismissed the claims, saying there is no question of downgrading UHK.

All services currently provided at the Kerry hospital will continue, a spokesperson said, in a statement. The group said it was supporting the Kerry hospital, pointing to developments such as a new stroke unit, palliative care unit, and theatre upgrades.

It also pointed to proposed increased services.

There are also plans for a new blood science laboratory, a new medical oncology unit, and new obstetric operating theatre, it said.

Staff numbers, the group said, now stood at 1,993, up from 899 in 2014, and 10 consultants were being hired.

This is a hospital that is developing and expanding with the support of the hospital group.Midleton GAA club has to put its plans to move to new grounds in the town on hold following an objection to the development of new facilities by a local resident.

The club, one of the largest in east Cork, must await a ruling by An Bord Pleanala to see if it can proceed with the development of a large new clubhouse at Park South on the Youghal Road.

The project also provides for new changing rooms, storage areas, a hall and toilets, as well as a ball wall training facility, a multi-use synthetic pitch, and four grass pitches.

Brendan OShea, who lives near the new grounds, has appealed the decision made by Cork County Council in July to grant planning permission for the project.

Consultants acting for Mr OBrien stressed that he was making the appeal with some reluctance, as he had hoped his earlier submissions and concerns expressed to the council, which he also raised directly with the club, would have been taken into account.

They claim that the club had made no reference in its planning application to his new home, which is on the eastern boundary of the proposed new grounds.

They stressed that Mr OShea had no objection to the project in principle but was concerned about the impact of the plans on his property, including the proximity of one of the pitches to his house, and the issue of light pollution from floodlights.

Mr OShea also expressed concern about the potential noise from playing activities, spectators, and vehicles for long periods during evenings and night time hours.

He said a proposed walkway near his property would pose a security risk as it would attract individuals other than those involved in GAA.

Mr OShea claimed that the all-weather pitch that appears to be closest to his property should at the very least be relocated to an alternative location within the site. He also noted that part of the proposed new site has been identified as prone to flooding under the Midleton Local Area Plan.

Mr OShea said that the proposed over-development of the site through its current design would subject him and his family to issues relating to light, noise, security, increased flood risk and consequent devaluation of his property. However, he said he believed that a redesign of the plans could reduce the negative and disruptive impacts of the development on his home.

Midleton GAA bought the 37-acre site of its proposed new clubhouse in 2016 from Irish Distillers for 380,000.

The club, which has 10 adult teams and 50 underage teams, has outgrown its facilities at Clonmult Park, its home since 1958.

The first 750,000 phase of the development is set to provide an entrance, car parking and three pitches including one floodlit one.By Pet OConnell

A rural community has appealed to the developers of a nearby 38-turbine windfarm to reconsider plans to drive up to 55 lorry loads of concrete a day through the heart of a village, where children are being collected from pre-school.

Work was due to start last Tuesday on pouring concrete into foundations for turbines at Grousemount windfarm near the Cork-Kerry border.

However, the development by ESB subsidiary Kerry Wind Power stalled after it emerged an appropriate traffic management plan allowing concrete lorries to be driven through the village of Cuil Aodha had not been approved by Cork County Council.

A flashing speed warning sign had already been erected in the Gaeltacht village by the developers in response to safety concerns during previous construction phases.

Increasingly frustrated by what they view as a lack of meaningful consultation by Kerry Wind Power on issues that also include road resurfacing, members of the community are now furious at plans to carry through the village about 55 loads of structural concrete and up to 30 tonnes of reinforcing steel for each of the 38 turbines, as quantified in the companys environmental impact statement.

Next week at the naionra [pre-school] there will be 24 children under the age of four and a half being dropped off there; the national school will open. Were worried about pedestrians, other drivers, and most of all about the lack of information, said Gerard Lynch of community group Cuil Aodha Road Committee.

It doesnt really engender much trust in the whole process if a company intends routing that much traffic through a community and theyre not open about their plan to do that.

Concerns over the speed of construction trucks, he said, had been a huge problem for months. Its only because we were shouting and gnawing at them that someone would die that they eventually put up a flashing digital display.

Fianna Fail councillor Gobnait Moynihan urged the developers to engage in discussion with the community and to reconsider the use of an alternative route via Clonkeen for construction traffic. That route uses a non-public forestry road and is one of three possible access routes identified.

The other routes are through Cuil Aodha and a narrow road from Morleys Bridge in Co Kerry, for which approval had been granted.

Ms Moynihan said that at a recent public meeting in Cuil Aodha, company representatives said they had obtained permission from Kerry and Cork county councils to bring trucks through Cuil Aodha as part of a one-way system.

It was decided by ESBi that they would go up, full, through Cuil Aodha and down, empty, out by Morleys [Bridge] but the original permission was to drive both up and down Morleys, said Ms Moynihan.

I had already checked with Cork County Council and they hadnt got permission from them. The ESBi presumed that no reply from Cork County Council was permission.

Cork County Council, she said, wrote a reply last week to the companys revised traffic management plan, stating it was not giving permission. She said another option was the Clonkeen forestry road, which the developer claimed was not viable.

In response to detailed questions from the Irish Examiner, the company said: Kerry Wind Power continues to engage with the local community, as well as Cork County Council and public representatives, on the traffic plan for this phase of construction.

We are reviewing the traffic plan at present and expect to have a finalised decision in the next week or so. We will communicate with the local community via public meeting on the plan before the first pour.

The plan is entirely in line with what was set out in planning permission granted by An Bord Pleanala and sets out to minimise disruption during the construction period. Acutely conscious of the inconvenience caused to the local community during the ducting works, Kerry Wind Power went over and above its planning obligations and is resurfacing both sides of the road following feedback received from locals.

This will provide a significant gain for the local area, long after the development construction is completed. We are continuing a constructive dialogue with Cuil Aodha residents door-to-door, via newsletter, local text system, leaflet drop, and by way of public meetings and via our community liaison officer.A marine biologist with a passion for scuba diving is going deep with a new venture which aims to unlock the underwater tourism potential of Cork Harbour.

Dave Quinlan, 31, who grew up on the shores of one of the worlds greatest natural harbours, has secured grant-aid to expand his dive school business in a bid to introduce more people to the underwater wonders of the harbour.

And he said he hopes that by introducing young people to the beauty of and the challenges facing our oceans and marine life and educating them about it, he will create a new generation of advocates for Corks underwater world.

Growing up on the shores of Cork Harbour, I always had a great appreciation and fascination for our diverse marine world. Cork Harbour needs to be showcased more, he said.

As a marine biologist and professional diver, Mr Quinlan has spent the last decade working all over the world, including in Thailand, Madagascar, Indonesia, Mexico and the Seychelles.

He said this experience has fuelled his passion for the marine world and his desire to share it with others.

He launched his Oceans of Discovery dive school last year, operating out of a converted ambulance.

However, he is now one of several people to secure a slice of the Fisheries Local Area Group Development (Flag) funding for coastal projects. The grants are co-funded by the Government and the EU.

Eighteen coastal community projects in Cork, from Baltimore to Fountainstown, will benefit from an estimated 241,100 in FLAG funding this year.

Mr Quinlan has used his grant-aid to buy diving gear, including tanks, wetsuits, regulators and masks, to open his dive school to larger groups.

My aim is to introduce people from all walks of life and ages to scuba diving, while also showcasing the amazing underwater world that is right on our doorstep, he said.

I am of the belief that you dont have to travel halfway across the world to learn to dive when we have such a great resource right here. Once people get trained up here, they also become advocates that help further promote Corks underwater world.

Dave Quinlan hopes the expansion of his dive school will help unlock the underwater tourism potentialof Cork Harbour.

Mr Quinlan is offering courses for children aged 10 and up and says they can be diving in depths of up to five metres within an hour.

Sure, people are slightly nervous at the start. But we start at the beach and its all very gradual. Once you get them into the water and practice a few basic skills, you can see them growing in confidence, and before you know it, theyre diving, he says.

Most of his courses are run in the sheltered waters of Roberts Cove which he says provides the perfect conditions and abundance of marine life to get people into the sport.

Cork Harbour is home to some well-known wrecks, including the Aud and the UC42 submarine.

Dave Quinlan is offering courses for children aged 10 and up and says they can be diving in depths of up to 5m within an hour.

Others to benefit from Flag funding include Bantry Inshore Search and Rescue Association, which received 40,000; Clean Coasts Ballynamona and Passage West Maritime Museum, which got 15,000 each; as well as ZT Fish, ODriscolls Fish and Eire Bass.

Funkytown Adventure Centre, Castletownbere Rowing Club, Courtmacsherry Rowing Club, Baltimore Seafood Festival, Schull Regatta, Ellen Hutchins Festival and Cobh Summer Swing will also benefit from Flag grant aid.The Irish Banking Resolution Corporation (IBRC), formerly known as Anglo Irish Bank, remains party to a staggering 138 legal actions, despite its wind down in 2013.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe has revealed the number of cases the failed bank is still involved in, both as a defendant and as the applicant.

Compared to last year, the figures show the overall reduction in cases since the last report is 43  when you take into account the four new proceedings.

Two new proceedings have been taken against IBRC in recent months, bringing the total number to 138 cases.

Mr Donohoe has said the estimated liquidation fees of up to 306m should be considered in the context of the scale of the activities undertaken by the special liquidation which has seen almost 22bn of assets prepared and brought to market since 2013 and raised inflows to date of 17bn which has been to repay the outstanding liabilities of IBRC.

Kieran Wallace of KPMG was appointed special liquidator by then finance minister Michael Noonan on February 7, 2013, as part of his move to end the controversial 3bn annual promissory note payment from the State to the failed bank.

Mr Donohoe was responding to questions from Fianna Fails finance spokesman Michael McGrath.

The figures released show that the IBRC is defending 111 cases, which is down from 143 the year before. IBRC is the plantiff in 25 recovery and enforcement actions, the documents show.

Mr Donohoe said many of these cases were instigated prior to the special liquidators appointment, which IBRC continues to pursue.

In other instances, and in accordance with the special liquidators strategy, IBRC has issued proceedings with a view to maximising recovery, for debt due and owing, to enforce judgments obtained, for asset recovery or protection, or seeking damages for acts of professional negligence, he said.

The special liquidators are separately managing 113 proceedings in which IBRC is defendant. According to Mr Donohoe, these proceedings involve various allegations (predominantly of mis-selling of financial investment products, mismanagement, negligence, breach of contract/breach of duty) in which various reliefs are sought against IBRC (generally to include a claim for damages and/or declarations concerning the validity of security).

IBRC continues to attempt to reduce its exposure to defendant litigation, he said.

The special liquidators assess the merits of defending such litigation and, where deemed appropriate, IBRC Group legal implements the special liquidators strategy of reducing the number of defendant cases in the most cost effective manner possible, Mr Donohoe said.

Late last year, debt campaigner David Hall initiated a legal action against Mr Donohoe for allegedly failing to have proper oversight over fees tied to IBRCs liquidation up until February.

The liquidators said earlier this year they expect the liquidation of IBRC should be substantially completed by the end of 2022.A UCC economist is warning that a no-deal Brexit is becoming more likely.

Dr. Declan Jordan says as there is little evidence the UK government will agree on a deal with the EU, it leaves the Irish economy in a precarious position.By Anne Lucey

For next years 50th anniversary of the moon landing, Tralee, in Co Kerry, has erected a plaque to commemorate the visit to the town of the late US astronaut, Neil Armstrong. He was the first man to step on the moon in 1969.

The unveiling of a monument on the Neil Armstrong Way by Ohio Rose Erin Stefancin took place last week. She was chosen because Armstrong was from Ohio.

Tralee mayor Graham Spring said the Exploration of Space exhibition in Tralee, 21 years ago, held in conjunction with Nasa, was a historic achievement for the town, and it also needed to be remembered.

Considered a recluse  he turned down thousands of invitations  Mr Armstrong lived quietly, but was persuaded to come to Tralee by then tanaiste, Dick Spring.

The two gentlemen who were in charge of the exhibition, John Griffin and Michael Connolly [now tourism officer and county archaeologist with Kerry County Council, respectively], wanted a big name to perform the official opening, and, back then, they didnt come much bigger than astronaut Neil Armstrong, said Mr Spring.

Mr Armstrong was a humble man and kept a low profile, which led to the belief that he had become a recluse. He turned down most interviews and very rarely made public appearances. So the chances of him travelling the 3,500 miles to Tralee were considered remote.

However, the older Mr Spring, the then deputy government leader, used his influence with the Irish ambassador. They wrote directly to National Aeronautics & Space Administration (Nasa), who, in turn, contacted Neil Armstrong. He lived on a remote farm. And, in the end, he agreed to their request.

During his visit to Tralee, the astronaut addressed a massive crowd in Denny St. The path he used to walk to Siamsa Tire, where he later attended the traditional folk show, and where he was made a freeman of Tralee, is now the Neil Armstrong Way.

Works have been carried out on the Neil Armstrong Way to improve its appearance. Extra signage was erected to mark the name of the walk. An information panel about Armstrongs life has also been installed there.

The story of how it came to be, that a pathway in the town park in Tralee was called after the most famous astronaut in history, needed to be told, the mayor said.By Michael McHugh

The Pope has paid tribute to the dignity of the homeless as he kissed a baby at a day centre in Dublin.

The Capuchin religious order runs a lifeline service for those without shelter and in need of food and infant supplies.

Bella Rose, 11 months old, came face-to-face with the pontiff, her proud mother said, after he dismounted from his Popemobile and entered the centre through an unassuming back door from a narrow alleyway lined with well-wishers.

Candice Hartigan, 37, added: He blessed all the children but she was the only one that got the kiss.

The centre is non-judgmental, said Ms Hartigan.

They ask you nothing, they dont ask you why you want something, they dont ask you why you want to be fed, she said. They dont ask you why you want baby food and nappies, they dont ask you anything. You just put your name down and that is it, you are not asked anything else.

Addressing a gathering of the disadvantaged who use the centre, the Pope thanked them for trusting the Capuchin fathers.

They help you without taking away your dignity, he said. Thats the face of Jesus Christ.

Br Kevin Crowley is a co-director at the centre.

He said: The message he gave was that we should show dignity and respect to every person in need, that was his real message.

That respect extends to every person who uses the centre.

Br Kevin added: It is very sad to think that little children have to go back to hostels in the evening time when they leave our centre.

So his concerns were the dignity and respect of each and every poor person.

Wherever he went, he always made sure the poor were his priority and I think that is one of the greatest gifts for us here today that the Pope came to visit the centre and showed his great love for the poor and for the homeless.

He said not enough houses were available in Dublin and urged the Irish Government to get its act together and build more homes.

Fr Bryan Shortall, a Capuchin parish priest, recalled the leader of the worlds Catholics said some beautiful things to the friars and the homeless.

The Pope was affirming Br Kevin and Fr Sean in what they do in the day centre, because they ask no questions, said Fr Bryan. They have an open door, people are welcome, people will not get the third degree or quizzed, they will be welcomed. It was a wonderful occasion, a wonderful experience and something I am never going to forget.

Shortly after arriving at Dublin Airport for the first visit of a pope to Ireland in almost 40 years, Pope Francis arrived at Aras an Uachtarain in a grey Skoda.

He was greeted by President Michael D Higgins and his wife Sabina.

A spokesman for President Higgins said that during the meeting, the President raised with the Pope the immense suffering and hurt caused by child sex abuse perpetrated by some within the Catholic Church.

In a statement issued after the meeting, the spokesman said President Higgins also told Pope Francis of the anger which had been conveyed to him at what was perceived to be the impunity enjoyed by those who had the responsibility of bringing such abuses for action by the appropriate authorities and have not done so.

The President welcomed the honest and forthright language that His Holiness used when addressing the issue in his Letter to the People of God, said the spokesman.

He conveyed to Pope Francis the widely-held view that all would benefit from a set of actions that gave the necessary assurances to all citizens past, present, and future, of all faiths and none.

The two men also agreed on the importance of protecting vulnerable communities and individuals, and discussed issues including homelessness, health, education and nutrition.

The Pope completed his visit to Aras an Uachtarain by planting a tree in the grounds of the property.

Francis planted an Irish oak tree on the lawn in front of the south portico. In doing so, he became the second Pope to plant a tree on the grounds of the residence.Latest: A Presidential hopeful has said she would welcome Donald Trump to the Aras an Uachtarain and would do so wearing a Marilyn Monroe outfit if asked.

Sarah Louise Mulligan made a pitch to Meath County Council alongside seven others.

Kildare and Westmeath Councils have also been hearing from those who want to be Ireland's next President.

Sarah Louise Mulligan, who's a Marilyn Monroe impersonator, raised some eyebrows in Meath when asked about her support of Donald Trump.

She said: "I would love to welcome President Trump to Aras an Uachtarain."

When asked if she would dress up as Marilyn Monroe "in the position of president of the country", she replied: "At the end of the day right, politics can't always be serious."

Eight Presidential hopefuls made their pitches to Meath Co Council today and some took issue with Trump's America.

Journalist Gemma O'Doherty said she wants to target corruption so Ireland does not become like the States.

She said: "Corruption has been allowed to thrive. People feel it on the ground. We can pretend it's not happening but I believe it is now rampant and widespread."

Journalist Gemma O'Doherty

Artist Kevin Sharkey said he would use the role of President to send a different message to young people about drugs.

"We look at them with a pint in our hand and a fag in the other and tell them don't do drugs and they look at us and think 'hypocrite'."

It is expected the official order to hold the election will be given in the coming days

Earlier: Three county councils will hear from people hoping to get a Presidential nomination today.

Meath, Kildare and Westmeath Councils will hear from candidates hoping to get on the ballot to run for the Aras.

Joan Freeman

It will be a sprint around the commuter belt for presidential hopefuls today as they pitch to three county councils for support.

First up is Meath Co Council - with businessman Gavin Duffy hoping he can win support in his native county.

Independent Senator Joan Freeman, artist Kevin Sharkey and former Aer Lingus worker Patrick Feeney will all make their third pitches to county councils.

While a number of potential candidates will be making their first bids for a nomination.

Gavin Duffy

Farmer John Groarke from Roscommon, burlesque dancer and Donald Trump supporter Sarah Louise Mulligan, musician Jimmy Smyth and Athlone woman Marie Goretti Moylan are all due to address councillors.

Because the three meetings are all running today not everyone will pitch to all of them.

Meath Council meet at 10am, with Kildare at 2pm and Westmeath at 4 o'clock this evening.

Sean Gallagher

Meanwhile, there is mounting speculation that businessman Sean Gallagher will announce he is entering the race in the coming days or weeks.

He penned an article on the back page of the Sunday Independent yesterday criticising the lack of leadership when it comes to dealing with the housing crisis.

A number of councillors across the country have encouraged Gallagher to make a second bid for the Aras and take on Michael D Higgins.

Digital DeskIt was all a bit last-minute but Pope Francis had something important to do before saying Mass in the Phoenix Park. He had to go to confession.

Not in the oppressive dark of a spooky confessional, but out in the fresh air with fields before him and open sky above.

Not with the breath of an invisible priest wafting through a distorting grid but in front of a crowd of unhidden, expectant faces numbering into the hundreds of thousands.

Flags are flown from the plane carrying Pope Francis as it arrives at Dublin International Airport, at the start of his visit to Ireland. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

Six times he asked them for forgiveness  for the hurt caused to survivors, for the actions of the perpetrators, for the exploitation of those forced to labour in institutions, for the demonisation of single mothers, for the members of the hierarchy who kept quiet, for the failure to respond with compassion and justice.

He could have thrown in the bad language that he famously used the night before too, but that had gone down well so he was already off the hook on that one.

The rest of his unbosoming was also well received, with the crowd erupting into applause. So taken were they with this confession that they forgot to dish out any penance.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin had put it up to the Pope, welcoming the pilgrims with a lyrical introduction full of references to bleak weather and hopes for spring.

At first it appeared to refer to the conditions that left the crowd with well-soaked rain ponchos billowing in the wind, but quickly the realisation dawned that he was talking about the abuse scandals that hung over the papal visit like a Venetian fog.

Now that it had been cleared sufficiently for the Pope to see his way through to the end of the trip, he began the Mass proper.

This was what the crowd of disputed numbers had come for. Some of them had been up since the small hours, travelling across the country.

Theyd beaten their fitbit record by 9am, had their prime spots picked by 10am, their picnics raided by 11am, and their cardboard self-assembly chairs reduced to papier mache by noon.

A 12-hour programme of slickly produced music and song had been arranged to distract from the ticking of the clock, but when the Popemobile came into view at 2.30pm, the excitement of having Pope Francis whizz by, one hand waving while the other gripped a safety bar for dear life, watched by pilgrims with one hand waving while the other gripped a mobile phone as if it was life itself, was palpable.

Photos taken and elephants in the room put at least temporarily out in the yard, the Mass was able to proceed.

It was a perfectly polished ceremony with nods to the Ireland of tradition and of today. Emma Mhic Mhathuna, whose battle against cancer and cover-ups has captured the countrys hearts, brought up one of the gifts in the offertory procession.

Also in the procession was Olive Foley, widow of Munster rugby star Anthony Axel Foley, and representatives of Irelands African community, the bereaved from the Omagh bombing and the All Are Welcome Mass run monthly in Dublin for LGBT people and their families and friends.

Pope Franciss homily was uncontroversial and his concluding remarks gracious.

The inevitable delays, as the perfectly ordered corrals and painstakingly arranged departure routes turned into a sea of good-natured confusion, gave pilgrims time to share some reflections.

Amazing was a word many of them used to sum up the experience.

Awesome, declared 87-year-old Mary Fingleton from Dublin, whod come with her sister Kathleen Cashin from Charleville, Marys daughter, son-in-law and their two children whod disappeared to collect greenery from the altar displays as a memento of the day.

Mary was using a wheelchair and could not praise highly enough the organisation of the event.

Mum wasnt very encouraged by all the talk of how hard it would be to get here but we stood our ground, said daughter Beatrice, who was pleased Francis addressed the abuse scandals.

It was very important that he said what he did and try to put things back on the right track. There was a lot of apprehension leading up to this and I think he cleared the air very well.

Kathleen, who made the even longer journey from Charleville to Drogheda in 1979, agreed.

It was beautiful, she said. Im very glad I came.

Chris Murray, aged 20, from Letterkenny was overwhelmed. He plans to enter a seminary in the next few years and found the day very emotional.

Im hoping this will be a turning point for the Catholic Church, he said.

The Meacle family from Mountbolus, Co Offaly, felt the same.

It was very emotional, said mum Annette. I thought it would be more hostile because there was quite a negative build-up.

The media had something to do with that, husband Brian couldnt resist interjecting.

But the Pope said what needed to be said, continued Annette, and hopefully we can move on.

As the crowd of uncertain size moved on, no-one needed to say again that Ireland was a country changed utterly since 1979.

Pope Francis leaves St Mary's Pro Cathedral in Dublin, after meeting with recently-married couples, and couples preparing for the Sacrament of Marriage. Pic: PA

Nobody questioned could imagine the next newborn boy in the family being named after the pontiff for example. Except for the Coveneys.

Tanaiste Simon revealed that when he and his family went to Dublin Airport to greet the Pope on Saturday, youngest daughter Annalise had a sudden bout of cold feet and announced she wouldnt present the bouquet as planned.

We promised her pizza, the use of my iPad, anything  and she wouldnt budge.

So the Tanaiste resorted to the time-honoured political tool of bribery.

I said she could have a kitten. So now were getting a kitten. And were calling him Francis.By Dan Buckley

Pope Francis appeared to be unaware of the details of abuse suffered by many Irish victims at the hands of Catholic clerics, according to one of the survivors who met him in Dublin on Saturday.

Damian OFarrell, 53, was one of eight victims who met the Pope at the Papal Nuncios residence.

The 90-minute meeting came hours after the Pope acknowledged Irish people had a right to be outraged by the Churchs response.

He possibly did not have a briefing on the eight of us, Mr OFarrell told RTE radio, adding that the Pope also seemed to know little or nothing about the Magdalene laundry and Tuam babies scandals.

In June, the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, said the Pope would be briefed about the abuse of women and children in Irish Catholic-run institutions.

He will know when he comes to the Pro Cathedral in Dublin, Dr Martin said at the time. Many people dont know that but theres a candle that has been burning there for years reminding people of the suffering that took place.

However, Mr OFarrell, a Dublin city councillor who was sexually abused by a Christian Brother at the age of 12, said the Pope talked mostly about South America and his homeland of Argentina, as well as the odd story about his own experience.

Also at the meeting were Paul Jude Redmond and Clodagh Malone, who were born in mother and baby homes. Pope Francis was given a copy of Mr Redmonds book, The Adoption Machine, which details the thousands of deaths and horrors of the homes.

The Pope was genuinely shocked to hear about the 6,000 babies who died and the 3,000 banished babies and the vaccine trials and lifted his hands to his head in shock, said Mr Redmond.

Ms Malone described the meeting as very powerful.

He listened with a genuine interest, she said. And he asked many questions about mother and baby homes.

Mr OFarrell said the Pope came across as warm and fatherly. He said he told him he would hold an investigation into the cover-ups of abuse by Church hierarchy.

I told him that he owed an apology to the Catholic faithful in Ireland who are appalled at the abuse and that he needs to ensure accountability, reparation, and truth, said Mr OFarrell. He said he would do that.

Earlier on Saturday, at Dublin Castle, the pontiff referred to steps taken by his predecessor, Pope Benedict, as he insisted the Church was acting on abuse.

It is my hope that the gravity of the abuse scandals, which have cast light on the failings of many, will serve to emphasise the importance of the protection of minors and vulnerable adults on the part of society as a whole, he said.

With regard to the most vulnerable, I cannot fail to acknowledge the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the Church charged with responsibility for their protection and education.

"The failure of ecclesiastical authorities  bishops, religious superiors, priests and others  adequately to address these repellent crimes has rightly given rise to outrage and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community. I myself share those sentiments.

The Pope said he wished to acknowledge women who in the past had endured particularly difficult circumstances.

Later, he passed close to the site of a former Magdalene laundry as he arrived on Sean McDermott St in the north inner city to meet wellwishers outside Our Lady of Lourdes Church.

A number of abuse survivors expressed disappointment with the Popes speech at Dublin Castle. Survivor Colm OGorman called his remarks a staggering effort at deflection that failed to acknowledge the Vaticans role in covering-up the crimes.

It was quite shocking actually in some ways, he said. He could have talked to us all in a way that was blunt, that was clear, that was frank, that was human, that was accessible.

He refused to do so. And thats a huge shame. I think frankly its rather disgraceful.The Bond debate rumbles on, but Idris Elba is just happy to making his directorial debut with Yardie, writes Laura Harding.

IS IDRIS Elba the man who would be Bond? Its is almost impossible to look at him now and not picture him dressed in a tuxedo, martini in his hand.

While it has been widely rumoured he could acquire a licence to kill when Daniel Craig returns his Aston Martin to the garage, reports that Elba is the next 007 have gathered furious pace in recent weeks.

Indeed Elba himself fanned the flames when he wrote on Twitter: My names Elba, Idris Elba, and played the famous Bond theme tune during a DJ set.

So its more than a little bit disappointing that we have been told firmly that the man himself does not want to discuss his prospects for taking on one of the biggest roles in showbiz.

But right now he has a very different role, and one he has wanted for years, that of director.

I know it sounds like a cliche but there comes a time as an actor when youre just like, I wouldnt mind sitting in the hot seat, the 45-year-old admits.

So Elba, star of The Wire, Luther and the Thor films, set about making it happen and his directorial debut, Yardie, based on the 1992 book by Victor Headley, is finally hitting cinemas.

This was a piece of material that I could definitely say Ive lived with some version of it in my head for 30 years.

The book was one of the first books I read. So you go, Right OK, if youre going to make a film, do you make a film about a deep sea diver that discovers a golden dolphin...

He pauses for a moment, looking baffled with himself. Dont know where Im going here, he laughs before resuming his train of thought.

No, because I know nothing about that. But I do know about this culture.

Indeed Yardie is set in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1970s and Hackney in the 1980s and follows a young Jamaican man named D who has never really recovered from the murder of his older brother.

After growing up under the wing of a Kingston Don, he is sent to London when he reconnects with his childhood sweetheart and where he hooks up with a soundclash crew and embarks on a quest to avenge his brothers death.

For Elba, who himself grew up in Hackney, the world of the story felt incredibly familiar.

Victor Headleys book was one of the few books I read as teenager. Im not a big reader, so this was a big deal to me at the time and the story stuck to my ribs for many years.

I could relate to the lead character of D. His anger  teenagers are always angry  his drive and charisma.

Victors novel captured my imagination and that of the many people that made this book a cult 80s classic.

I grew up in a similar environment to D; being a DJ, the music, the time period.

In the 80s, when the majority of this film takes place, that was my coming of age. Thats why I thought this would be the best film to go for.

But the golden dolphin film is coming, he adds with a cheeky grin.

I personally shied away from some of the violence in the book but in this film I wanted to tell the human story, the human toll on people that live violent lives or are forced to live in violent climates.

Elba says he also learned some valuable new skills from his time in the directors chair.

Patience, having incredible amounts of patience.

You cannot over-prep for a movie because you never know what might happen and theres always instances that change immediately.

So having patience to take the time to prep, to ask the questions, to ask the what ifs, to explore it even further.

Sometimes, you come up with a really good idea and its amazing and then two hours later its different, but its deeper and its better for a million reasons. And thats something I learned.

Idris Elba giving instructions to actor Aml Ameen on the set of Yardie. Picture: PA Photo/StudioCanal

I didnt act in this film, which is my other big love affair of my life, but I got really amazing actors to play the parts and I had the opportunity to work with some of the most talented filmmakers existing.

As an actor, I always love my crew  but as director, I was my crew and they were there for me 100%. It was a very bonding time.

It also gave the passionate DJ, who recently set up his own record label 7Wallace the chance to curate a whole soundtrack.

Crafting the music was probably one the most exciting and frustrating parts of making this film.

I love music and I often agonised about the choices I was making and why.

It was an honour to have @SkipMarley cover a @bobmarley classic, "Johnny Was", for the soundtrack of my new film @YardieFilm . Check out the full video here: https://t.co/tAcQZgUh7r and listen to the Yardie soundtrack, out today, through https://t.co/e6vCDcYlId pic.twitter.com/LxB7E1WFXk  Idris Elba (@idriselba) August 24, 2018

In the end, it has become one of the strongest parts of the film. So directing Yardie has definitely changed the trajectory of my career.

I want to direct more now, and perhaps merge acting, music and directing in the future.

Whether he plays James Bond or not, it seems like Elba will have plenty to keep him busy.

- Yardie is released on FridayPope Francis is criticised as both too open to change and not being open enough, writes Dan Buckley

There is one thing that campaigners and abuse survivors in Ireland, the US, UK, and elsewhere agree on: While the words and mea culpas of Pope Francis are welcome, it is now time for him to take action and root out not only the abusers but those who covered up for them.

According to Maeve Lewis, chief executive of One in Four, that has to include mandatory disclosure of cases of child abuse, the immediate dismissal of clergymen who shield offenders, and giving civil authorities access to the Vaticans own vast archives on allegations of abuse so that criminal proceedings can be launched.

At a session last Saturday, during the World Meeting of Families, on safeguarding children, campaigner Marie Collins echoed those demands and called on the Pope to face down powerful forces within the Curia  the Vaticans governing body  who are resisting change.

Having served on the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, set up as an advisory group by Pope Francis, she quit last year in frustration at the failure of the Vatican to act on its recommendations.

The Pope must know who they are. Its these people who must be dismissed, and dismissed immediately, she said.

The Pope has got powers over and above everybody else and he really needs to face down this resistance.

This absolutist view of papal power is one shared by many lay people, clerics, and even theologians.

Maeve Lewis

Among those who attended Saturdays meeting was American Tom Doyle, a canon lawyer, former priest, and advocate for victims who sees the Pope as the worlds last absolute monarch with direct authority that reaches down to individual members of the Church.

That may be an overstated or even a mistaken view of what the catechism of the Catholic Church calls the Popes full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church. It is true that within the Vatican there is no separation of Church and state and that the executive, legislative, and judicial roles are all vested in the Pope, but tradition makes clear that Popes must govern the Church with the bishops  a principle known as collegiality.

The Popes power is not  and never has been  either full, supreme, or universal even when it comes to his prime function, that of appointing bishops.

In any event, such perceived papal power is a historical novelty. It dates no further back than the fall of the Papal States to the Kingdom of Italy in 1870 when bishops from around the world, fearful of the rise of anticlerical governments, declared the Pope infallible on matters of faith and morals and recognised the primacy of his jurisdiction over the Church worldwide.

Up until that time, the Pope could only appoint bishops from within the Papal States. All other bishops were selected by local clergy and the Vatican was simply informed of the decision.

Even today, the Popes power to choose bishops isnt absolute in practice. In February, Pope Francis backed down in a long struggle over a Nigerian diocese with priests who had refused to accept a bishop from another ethnic group. In April, the prospect of him agreeing to let Chinas Communist government control his selection of the countrys Catholic bishops stirred huge controversy, with critics calling the plan a betrayal and a capitulation.

The Vatican hopes that an agreement on the appointment of bishops could open the way for an eventual resumption of diplomatic relations with the Holy See nearly 70 years after they were cut during the Communist takeover of China.

Catholics in China are split between those in underground communities that recognise the Pope and those belonging to a state-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association where bishops are appointed by the government in collaboration with local Church communities.

I would make a cartoon showing the Pope kneeling and offering the keys of the kingdom of heaven andsaying, Now, please recognise me as Pope, Cardinal Joseph Zen, retired bishop of Hong Kong, the most prominent critic of the prospective deal, told an interviewer. The advisers of the Pope are giving him the advice to renounce his authority.

Francis also faces a challenge to his authority from doctrinal conservatives, a group that used to pride themselves on their unswerving loyalty to the Pope but have now become dissenters. Principal among them is US Cardinal Raymond Burke who has publicly admonished the Pope for his 2016 apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, that envisions a way for some divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.

He angered traditionalists in April when he appointed three women as consultors to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, an institution formerly run by Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI.

Pope Benedict XVI

It marks the first time women and lay people have been named as active contributors rather than support staff to the institution which has its origins in the notorious Inquisition.

Thus, Pope Francis is between a rock and a hard place  criticised by ultra conservatives for being too open to change and by liberals for not being open enough.

The scandals of clerical abuse and cover-ups, which have festered for decades, have brought that conflict into the open, exposing Francis to the accusation of being a pontifical lightweight.

While Popes through the ages have always been keen to exercise soft power by aligning themselves with powerful monarchs, in modern times the success of that attempt to influence has tended to rely on the personality of the holder of the office.

While even his most trenchant opponents would agree that Pope Francis is a kindly, affable man, he has neither the charisma of John Paul II nor the intellect of Benedict.

He may, though, have more diplomatic skills than either of his immediate predecessors to enable him to exercise moral authority on a grand scale. History reveals that, whatever Church doctrine may declare, a Popes power is contingent on political realities, both inside and outside the Vatican.

He has already shown a willingness to circumvent the senior ministry of the Catholic Church and appeal directly to the worldwide communion of 1.5bn souls.

He did so with a lengthy apology in the wake of the grand jury report in Pennsylvania, finding that 301 priests in the US state had sexually abused more than 1,000 minors in a cover-up lasting 70 years.

He did so again in Dublin, meeting directly with abuse survivors and making clear his abhorrence of abuse and cover-ups, using surprisingly vernacular language to get the message across.

This direct appeal to the masses has the capacity to either undo his papacy or make him into a 21st-century crusader.Whenever a prime minister departs for good, there is talk of his or her legacy. And this time it is no different; in the case of Malcolm Turnbull, who was scythed down last week by right-wing ideologues in his own party, that talk has already begun. But Turnbull has little to show on the tech front, even though he has often been lauded as a politician who "gets tech".

Every resident of this big brown land who is now struggling with the horrible reality of using fibre-to-the-node and HFC as the means for their NBN connections will, no doubt, remember Turnbull with distaste.

He was the man who brought in what I call the Malcolm-technology mix  what he called the multi-technology mix  after he was made communications minister in 2013 by Tony Abbott. His stance towards the NBN  indeed, the party's stance  was foreshadowed by the fact that the policy launch during the election campaign was held at Foxtel Studios  a property owned by Rupert Murdoch, the fear of whom has driven much of the broadband policy (or more accurately the lack of it) in Coalition ranks since the days of John Howard.

Not that the original NBN policy as articulated by Labor in 2009 was perfect. The idea of trying to derive a profit from the investment, in what everyone with even the IQ of the common cockroach acknowledges is a necessary utility like water, gas and power, defies logic and can only be justified through the use of neo-liberal logic (if indeed, such a thing exists).

But the technology mix was right  fibre everywhere, except where impossible, where fixed wireless and satellite would have to do the job. Australia has a lot of very inhospitable terrain and this was a mere acknowledgement of the fact.

Turnbull was sold on the idea of HFC from the start. So too, FttN. And there began the saga of slow connections, stuttering connections, erratic connections, sometimes no connections, which has gone on and on and on for the last five years.

The silver-haired toff from Wentworth, armed with a document that claimed an incredible $90 billion would be spent by Labor to implement its NBN  I still have a copy  had no lack of things to say about this "waste" and his mission to supply everyone the NBN much faster and for much less cost.

In one respect, he stuck with the Labor policy: the NBN had to make a profit, it was not going to be on-budget.

The move to use both Optus and Telstra HFC backfired when it was found that the Optus network was a dog's breakfast. The negotiations with Telstra, still the most bloody-minded of companies as it was during its days of monopoly, took up an enormous amount of time. In November 2017, the truth emerged and HFC installations were stopped.

One does not need to belabour the point; ever since that fateful day when the MTM was implemented, things have gone backward. In 2018, Australia is still struggling with the so-called fast broadband that we were promised. It is a national disaster and those among us who use fruitier language would have no hesitation in describing it as the greatest cluster**** in Australian tech history.

The irony of the situation is that, in the end, when Turnbull got his mansion in Point Piper wired up, he also had to depend on HFC. But given that he can just reach into his left or right pocket and fish out the thousands needed to go all-fibre  one phone call by his lackeys to the NBN Co will have technicians out there on the morrow setting things up  it is really no loss to him at all.

The problem is that you and I, dear reader, have only a few coins in either of those pockets. If we even have that.The US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have launched an investigation into Microsoft over possible bribery and corruption in connection with software sales in Hungary.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the probe was similar to others that had been undertaken in 2013 over software sales in five other countries.

Microsoft sold its software such as Word and Excel to middlemen firms in Hungary at steeply reduced prices. They then on-sold the software to government departments in 2013 and 2014 at much higher prices, the report said, quoting "people familiar with the matter".

The investigation is looking at whether the companies in the middle used their profits to bribe government officials.

Microsoft's deputy general counsel David Howard told the WSJ the company had opened its own investigation into the matter after coming to know of "potential wrongdoing" at the Hungarian office in 2014.

Were committed to ethical business practices and wont compromise these standards, he said. Four employees were sacked in Hungary, including country manager Istvan Papp and business ties were cut with four partner firms.

This is not the first time that Microsoft software has figured in alleged shady deals.

In October 2016, iTWire reported that a former Romanian minister and three others, who were jailed in March that year for embezzling the discount offered by Microsoft for software provided to schools, had their appeals dismissed and their fines and jail terms increased.

The Romanian case was based on a system which was begun in 2003 and allowed the country's authorities to avoid public tenders for IT services and permitted Microsoft to sell Windows licences at inflated prices to the state through a third party.The conditions that vendors have to satisfy to bid for a massive US Defence Department contract appear to be sharply skewed to favour the online retail giant Amazon, the American magazine Vanity Fair claims.

The contract, known by its acronym JEDI  Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure  is meant to unite all Defence services under one cloud vendor as the CIA did in 2013 with Amazon at a cost of US$600 million, the magazine said in a detailed investigative report.

As iTWire has reported, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle Corporation are said to be in the running for the contract which is expected to be awarded by the end of September. It will be worth US$10 billion.

Microsoft was said to have improved its chances by winning a deal to supply cloud services to 17 intelligence agencies in May.

But now that assumption may have to be revised, given the criteria laid down for the company that will ultimately get the contract.

Vanity Fair quoted insiders as saying that the 1375-page request for proposal contained a number of conditions that only Amazon could satisfy.

One was that a bidder must already be pulling in more than US$2 billion a year in revenue from a commercial cloud implementation. A second is that any bidder must keep its data centres at least 150 miles (241 kms) apart and provide 32GB of RAM, both specs that few apart from Amazon can satisfy.

The report said although talk of the Defence Department joining the cloud had been going on for some time, the call for bids was only put out after the Defence Secretary James Mattis hired Sally Donnelly, a lobbyist from Washington DC who had been a consultant for Amazon.

Donnelly worked as an adviser to Mattis while the JEDI specifics were being finalised and Mattis visited Amazon's headquarters in Seattle while she was still working for him. And as the contract details were being bedded down, Donnelly's former lobbying company, SBD Advisers, was bought by an investment fund that was connected to Amazon's cloud-computing arm.

The report said questions had been raised over the level of access that Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos had in Washington. It quoted John Weiler, an industry expert who runs a trade group that includes many leading IT firms, as saying: "When you have that kind of access during a $10 billion procurement, that compromises the integrity of the procurement. Amazon was basically able to write the playbook.

In a response provided to the magazine, Amazon Web Services said it was "eager to participate in a fair, open, and competitive bidding process that allows the customer to thoroughly analyse the various providers and select the solutions that best meet their needs".The Australian Communications and Media Authority has released a new report entitled "NBN consumer experience: Households and businesses  the end-to-end journey", and Labor sees bad news.

The new report reveals some worrying statistics abut NBN reliability for small businesses.

Labor isn't traditionally seen as the party of small business, but when there's an opportunity to savage the Liberal Party that is traditionally seen as the party of small business, there's clearly an opportunity to strike hard  especially with the recent political leadership ructions in the government still reverberating.

The stats Labor is relying upon are as follows:

Forty-two percent of small and medium businesses have complained to the NBN Co or their retail provider about poor service during connection.

Forty percent of small and medium businesses had NBN downtime, with nearly one in seven being left without Internet or phone for more than a month.

Seventy-two percent of businesses have also reported having further NBN faults with dropouts and slow speeds following initial connection.

As you'd expect, Labor states "these latest results are a clear indictment of a second-rate NBN that has been botched by this divided government.

"The competitiveness of small business will continue to suffer under non-existent leadership which has been seen under [Communications Minister] Mitch Fifield and the Liberals.

"While the Liberals have been fighting amongst themselves, Labor has been focused on consumers.

"If elected, a Shorten Labor Government has announced it will establish an NBN Service Guarantee to safeguard small businesses from excessive downtime that result from faults and delays.

"Labors policy will establish the right structural incentives to ensure NBNCo and retail providers are focused on delivering a better experience.

"What is clear is that this dysfunctional government must get its house in order and start putting policies in place which are focused on consumers and not themselves."

As for the ACMA, it states that its report was commissioned "to investigate the experience of households and small and medium-sized businesses moving to and using services delivered over the national broadband network".

"This report contains detailed analysis of both households and businesses, following a snapshot of findings for households published in March 2018."

"The research focused on the experience of consumers who had migrated to services delivered over the NBN in the 12 months prior to the research fieldwork  that is, those who began using their new services between:

November 2016 and December 2017 for households; and

January 2017 and February 2018 for businesses.

The ACMA concludes by stating that "improving the NBN consumer experience is a key priority for the ACMA. This research provides important evidence that has been used to inform recent telco rules to deliver better consumer outcomes and will continue to inform ACMA education and regulatory activities".

You can read more about the report and download it here.This Week in Review

A weekly review of the best and most popular stories published in the Imperial Valley Press. Also, featured upcoming events, new movies at local theaters, the week in photos and much more.Ashley Ridge High senior Chase DuPree operates a hydraulic excavator on a simulator in the new Heavy Equipment

Operation class at the Dorchester County Career and

Technology Center on Aug. 23.Reddit Email 42 Shares

By Judith Coburn | 

(Tomdispatch.com)  Now that we know we are surveilled 24/7 by the National Security Agency, the FBI, local police, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, hackers, the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, data brokers, private spyware groups like Black Cube, and companies from which weve ordered swag on the Internet, is there still any right to be forgotten, as the Europeans call it? Is there any privacy left, let alone a right to privacy?

In a world in which most people reveal their intimate secrets voluntarily, posting them on social media and ignoring the pleas of security experts to protect their data with strong passwords  dont use your birth date, your telephone number, or your dogs name  shouldnt a private investigator, or PI, like me be as happy as a pig in shit? Certainly, the totalitarian rulers of the twentieth century would have been, if such feckless openness had been theirs to abuse.

p>As it happens, tech  or surveillance capitalism  has disrupted the private investigation business as much as its ripped through journalism, the taxi business, war making, and so many other private and public parts of our world. And its not only celebrities and presidential candidates whose privacy hackers have burned through. Israeli spyware can steal the contacts off your phone just as LinkedIn did to market itself to your friends. Google, the Associated Press reported recently, archives your location even when youve turned off your phone. Huge online database brokers like Tracers, TLO, and IRBsearch that law enforcement and private eyes like me use can trace your address, phone numbers, email addresses, social media accounts, family members, neighbors, credit reports, the property you own, foreclosures or bankruptcies youve experienced, court judgments or liens against you, and criminal records you may have rolled up over the years.

Ten years ago, to subscribe to one of these databases, I had to show proof that I was indeed a licensed investigator and pass an on-site investigation to ensure that any data I downloaded would be protected. I was required to have a surveillance camera and burglar alarm on the building where my office was located, as well as a dead bolt on my office door, a locked filing cabinet, and double passwords to get into my computer. Now, most database brokers just require a PI or attorney license and you can sign right up online. Government records  federal and state, civil and criminal  are also increasingly online for anyone to access.

The authoritarian snoops of the last century would have drooled over the surveillance uses of the smartphones that most of us now carry. Smartphones have, in fact, become one of the primo law enforcement tools other than the Internet. Find my iPhone can even find a dead body  if, that is, the victim left her iPhone on while being murdered. And dont get me started on the proliferation of surveillance cameras in our world.

Take me. I had a classic case that shows just how traceable we all now are. There was a dead body, a possible murder victim, but no direct evidence: no witnesses, no DNA, no fingerprints, and no murder weapon found. In San Franciscos East Bay, however, as in most big American cities, there are so many surveillance cameras mounted on mom-and-pop stores, peoples houses, bars, cafes, hospitals, toll bridges, tunnels, even in parks, that the police can collect enough video, block by block, to effectively map a suspect driving around Oakland for hours before hitting the freeway and heading out to dump a body, just as the defendant in my case did.

Once upon a time, cops and dirty private eyes would have had to attach trackers to the undercarriages of cars to follow them electronically. No longer. The particular suspect I have in mind drove his victims car across a bridge, where cameras videotaped the license plate but couldnt see inside the car; nor, he must have assumed, could anyone record him on the deserted road he finally reached where he was undoubtedly confident that he was safe. What he didnt notice was the CALFIRE video camera placed on that very road to monitor for brush fires. It caught a cars headlights matching his on its way to the site he had chosen to dump the body. There was no direct evidence of the murder he had committed, just circumstantial, tech-based evidence. A jury, however, convicted him in just a few hours.

A World of Tech Junkies

In our world of the unforgotten, tech is seen as a wonder of wonders. Juries love tech. Many jurors think tech is simply science and so beyond disbelief. As a result, they tend to react badly when experts are called as defense witnesses to disabuse them of their belief in techs magic powers: that, for instance, cellphone calls dont always pinpoint exactly where someone was when he or she made a call. If too many signals are coming in to the closest tower to a cell phone, a suspects calls may be rerouted to a more distant tower. Similarly, the FBIs computerized fingerprint index often makes mistakes in its matches, as do police labs when it comes to DNA samples. And facial recognition systems, the hottest new tech thing around (and spreading like wildfire across China), may be the most unreliable of all, although that certainly hasnt stopped Amazon from marketing a surveillance camera with facial recognition abilities.

These days, its hard to be a PI and not become a tech junkie. Some PIs use tech to probe tech, specializing, for example, in email investigations in big corporate cases in which they pore through thousands of emails. I recently asked a colleague what it was like. Its great, he said. You dont have to leave your office and for the first couple of weeks you entertain yourself finding out whos having affairs with whom and whos gunning for whom in the targets office, but after that its unspeakably tedious and goes on for months, even years.

When I started out, undoubtedly having read too many Raymond Chandler and Sue Grafton novels, I thought that to be a real private eye I had to do the old-fashioned kind of surveillance where you actually follow someone in person. So I agreed to tail a deadbeat mom who claimed to be unemployed and wanted more alimony from her ex. She turned out to be a scofflaw driver, too, a regular runner of red lights. (Being behind her, I was the one who got the tickets, which I tried to bill on my expense report to no avail.) But tailing her turned out to make no difference, except to my bank account. Nor did tech. Court papers had already given us her phone and address but no job information. Finally, I found her moonlighting at a local government office. How? The no-tech way: simply by phoning an office where one of her relatives worked and asking for her. Not in today, said the receptionist helpfully and I knew what I needed to know. It couldnt have been less dramatic or noir-ish.

These days, tech is so omnipresent and omnivorous that many lawyers think everything can be found on the Internet. Two lawyers working on a death-penalty appeal once came to see me about working on their case. There had been a murder at a gas station in Oakland 10 years earlier. Police reports from the time indicated that there was a notorious trap house where crack addicts were squatting across from the gas station. The lawyers wanted me to find and interview some of those addicts to discover whether theyd seen anything that night. It would be a quick job, they assured me. (Translation: they would pay me chump change.) I could just find them on the Internet.

I thought they were kidding. Crack addicts arent exactly known for their Internet presence. (They may have cell phones, but they tend not to generate phone bills, rental leases, utility bills, school records, mortgages, or any of the other kinds of databases collect that you might normally rely on to find your quarry.) This was, I argued, an old-fashioned shoe-leather-style investigation: go to the gas station and the trap house (if it still existed), knock on doors to see if neighbors knew where the former drug addicts might now be: Dead? Still on that very street? Recovered and long gone?

In a world where high-tech is king, I didnt get the job and I doubt they found their witnesses either.

Youd think that, in a time when tech is the story of the day, month, and year and a presidential assistant is even taping without permission in the White House Situation Room, anything goes. But not for this aging PI. I mean, really, should I rush over to a belly-dancing class in Berkeley to see if some guys fiancee and the teacher go back to her motel together? (No.) Should I break into an ex-lovers house to steal memos shed written to get him fired? (Are you kidding?) Should I eavesdrop on a phone call in which a wife is trying to get her husband to admit that he battered her? (Not in California, where the law requires permission from every party in a phone call to be on the line, thereby wiping out such eavesdropping as an investigative tool  only cops with a warrant being exempt.)

I certainly know PIs who would take such cases and Im not exactly squeaky clean myself. After all, as a journalist working for Ramparts magazine back in the 1960s, I broke into the basement of the National Student Association (with another reporter) to steal files showing that the groups leaders were working for the CIA and that the agency actually owned the very building they occupied. In a similar fashion, on a marginally legal peep-and-trespass in those same years, another reporter and I crawled through bushes on the grounds of a VA Hospital in Maryland where we had been told that we could find a replica of a Vietnamese village being used to train American assassins in the CIAs Phoenix program. That so-called pacification program would, in the end, kill more than 26,000 Vietnamese civilians. We found the village, secretly watched some of the training, and filed the first piece about that infamously murderous program for New Yorks Village Voice.

Those ops were, however, in the service of a higher ideal, much like smartphone videographers today who shoot police violence. But most of surveillance capitalism is really about making sure that no one in our new world can ever be forgotten. PIs chasing perps in divorce cases are a small but tawdry part of just that. But what about, to take an extreme case in which the sleazy meets the new tech world big time, the FBIs pursuit of lovers of kiddy porn, which I learned something about by taking such a case? The FBI emails a link to a fake website that its created to all the contacts a known child pornographer has on his computer or phone. It has the kind of bland come-on pornographers tend to use. If you click on that link, you get a menu advertising yet more links to photos with titles like my 4-year-old daughter taking a bath. Click on any of those links and youll be anything but forgotten. The FBI will be at your door with cuffs within days.

Does someone who devours child porn have a right to be forgotten? Maybe you dont think so, but what about the rest of us? Do we? Itshardly a question anymore.

The Good and Ugly Gotchas of This Era

When all the surveillance techniques on those information databases work, its like three lemons lining up on a one-armed bandit. Recently, for instance, a California filmmaker called me, desperate. She was producing a movie about the first Nepalese woman to climb Mount Everest. Her team had indeed reached the summit, but were buried in an avalanche on the way down with only one survivor. The filmmaker wanted to find that man.

Could I do so? She didnt have enough money to send me to Nepal. (Rats!) But couldnt I find him on the Internet? His name, she told me, was Pemba Sherpa. Whats his family name, I asked? Thats when I found out that sherpa isnt just a Western term for Nepalese who guide people up mountains; its the surname of many Nepalese. Great! Thats like asking me to find John Smith with no birthdate, social security number, address, or even the Nepalese equivalent of the state where he lives. In my minds eye, I could instantly see my database search coming up with the always frustrating your search criteria resulted in too many records found. I also had my doubts that, despite the globalization of our tech world, most Nepalese were on the Internet.

Amazingly, however, checking out sherpas, I promptly found a single Pemba in my search, unfortunately with  the bane of a PIs life  not another piece of information.

Okay, Google, I thought, its all yours. No Pemba on the first five pages of my search there. (Groan.) But it was late at night and I was feeling obsessive, so I kept going. (Note to home investigators: dont give up on Google after those first few pages.) From earlier research, I had discovered that one of the main Nepalese communities outside that country was in Portland, Oregon, where many mountaineering companies are also based. On maybe my 28th Google page, I suddenly saw a link to a Portland alternative newspaper story from the mid-1990s. (Who was even scanning in such articles back then?)

I clicked on it. The piece was about a Portland Pemba Sherpa who had gone back to his native village to help its inhabitants get electricity. The article went on to say that he had left Nepal because too many of his friends had died on the mountain. Hmmm. It also reported that he was married to a mathematics teacher at a Portland community college.

Were talking about a more-than-20-year-old article! Still, the next morning I doggedly called the college and yes, his wife was teaching math there. I was patched through to the math department where, yes again, the wife picked up and, yes, her husband was the sole survivor of that climb, and she was sure hed want to be interviewed for the movie.

Bingo! The actual wonders of the Internet and a heartwarming story about someone who needed to be found. Finding an ancient nanny to invite to the wedding of a guy she had raised  after they had been out of contact for decades  proved a similarly happy search. But thats rare. The question, not just for PIs but for all of us, is this: Should everyone be so track down-able, even if they dont wish to be? Some investigators, in the spirit of the moment, think that if theres an unknowable about anyone, it should be uncovered. The journalist who outed novelist Elsa Ferrante really thought hed done something, but it was just another in an increasing number of mean-spirited gotchas of our era.

Why do people need privacy anyway? The freedom and community that Internet utopians promised us has led instead to the scraping open of our lives by law enforcement, social media, hackers, marketers, and the worlds governments. Now were left largely to our own devices when it comes to what little we can do about it and the global surveillance culture that its enmeshed all of us in.

Back in the late 1960s, Erwin Knoll, editor of the Progressive magazine, made President Richard Nixons enemy list. That qualified him to be wiretapped by the FBI, so he asked his wife Doris to call female friends every day and discourse on grisly gynecological matters to disturb the listening agents (mostly male in those days). Erwin wondered if they wouldnt think it was some kind of code.

Alexa! I just got back from my gynecologist and

After 40 years as a journalist for a variety of media outlets, none of them fake, TomDispatch regular Judith Coburn became a private eye, specializing in death-penalty cases and searches for people whom filmmakers and writers want to find for their movies and books.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorskys novel Every Body Has a Story and Tom Engelhardts A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoys In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dowers The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffers dystopian novel Splinterlands.

Copyright 2018 Judith Coburn



Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

CBS This Morning: TSA acknowledges Quiet Skies surveillance programReddit Email 150 Shares

BETHLEHEM (Maan)  The United States Donald Trump administration will announce a suspension of funding to the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and the rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

According to Hebrew-language news outlets, the US administration is expected to announce its new policy early September, which would effectively cancel the right of return for Palestinians through several steps.

UNRWA reported that the US administration will start enforcing its new policy with recognizing the existence of only half a million Palestinian refugees, who are legitimately considered refugees, out of the total of 5.3 million Palestinian refugees demanding the right of return.

The US administration intends to form a plan in which it rejects the United Nations designation under which millions of descendants of the original refugees are also considered refugees.

Sources also reported that the US administrations new policy would from its point of view, essentially cancels the right of return.

Israeli MK, Israel Katz, commended on the reports of the US administrations future announcement by saying This measure joins the historic decision to transfer the US embassy to Jerusalem and as such annuls two UN resolutions.

The right of return is one of the core issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinians claim that about 5.3 million Palestinians, including tens of thousands of refugees who fled in the1948 and 1968 wars from what is now known as Israel, and their descendants, have a right of return to their homes.

Israel rejects the Palestinian demand, fearing that Palestinians would destroy Israels Jewish-majority state after the arrival of millions of non-Jewish individuals.

Currently, Israels population is nearly nine million, three-quarters of whom are Jewish citizens.

Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the UN created UNWRA, to help resettle nearly 600,000 Palestinians after the war; UNRWA says that there are 5.3 million Palestinian refugees in the world.

UNRWA included descendants of the original Palestinian refugees in its total sum of refugees who fled or were expelled from their homes after the 1948 war, as well as those refugees who fled during the 1967 Six Day war.

Article and photo courtesy Maan News Agency.Reddit Email 36 Shares

By Fizz Perkal | 

(Inequality.org)  A nationwide strike takes charge at everything from slavery to sentencing. Organizers say it could be the largest U.S. prison resistance action to date.

As wildfires rage across California, some of the people risking their lives to fight them are paid only a few dollars a day. These workers stand little chance of ever earning the $74,000 average salary California firefighters generally receive. While it may be hard to believe theres an entire class of workers who are paid sweatshop wages in the United States, thats the reality for 2.3 million incarcerated workers.

Slave wages are just one of the many reasons why incarcerated individuals in state, federal, and immigration prisons around the US are going on strike from August 21st to September 9th. The strike was organized in response to deadly violence at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina earlier this year, a result of the prisons abysmal living conditions.

In an interview with Shadowproof, an individual incarcerated at Lee spoke of the prisons dehumanizing environment. We need open yards again, not just enclosed rec yards, we need these open rec yards again, where prisoners can move. We need prisoners to start being treated like humans.

This months strikes are just the most recent in a long history of using work stoppages to resist abhorrent prison conditions. But theyre reflective of a shifting approach to organized prison protest, Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, says. Up until ten years ago, strikes generally happened on a prison-by-prison basis, Wright told Inequality.org. But new technology makes it possible to coordinate nationwide resistance.

A few decades ago, strikes were organized through phone calls and letter writing. But now organizers are able to take advantage of social media with contraband cellphones and the help of outside organizers. I remember trying to organize statewide strikes in the 90s and how difficult that was, Wright says. I think that a lot of the barriers are a lot lower now than they were 15 years ago. This explains the increase in coordinated national actions. Its how folks were able to organize the largest prison strike in the U.S. to date in 2016.

And now, in only four months, incarcerated organizers and outside allies are putting together an act of resistance that they hope will top their recent record. Organizers have a list of ten demands, which include the need for prompt improvement of prison conditions and policies. They also call for the immediate end to prison slavery, which is legal thanks to a constitutional loophole.

Language in the 13th Amendment outlaws slavery except as a punishment for a crime, which is how the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program was created in 1970. In theory, the program was meant to establish work opportunities for incarcerated people so that they could both earn money and develop skills, increasing their chances of getting a good job upon release. However, this is hardly the case. These work programs teach few relevant skills and, on average, pay less than $1 an hour, if they do pay at all.

Earned income is essential for folks on the inside because it allows them to buy necessities not provided by the prison, like soap, calling cards, and tampons. Incarcerated people are also required to offset the cost of their imprisonment, as a report from the Brennan Center for Justice details. The U.S. criminal system is filled with fees that shift imprisonment costs from the government onto the people accused of crimes, often leaving them with piles of debt when they leave prison. Fair wages during incarceration are doubly important due to the stark barriers to employment upon release.

Read the demands

Heres why prisoners across the U.S. are on strike

Incarcerated workers deserve to be paid a prevailing wage, just like anyone else doing the same work. But theres also an economic argument to be made about the benefit of paying such a wage that extends beyond the prison system. In 2000, five U.S. economists conducted a study on the impact of prison labor and found that it benefits the overall economy if incarcerated workers are paid more, given the opportunity to unionize, and have access to workers compensation.

While workers lose out, companies certainly turn a profit off the work of incarcerated people. For-profit corporations like Geo Group and Core Civic  formerly the Corrections Corporation of America  benefit from incarceration in general and prison slavery specifically. Over the years, many corporations  including Victorias Secret, Starbucks, Microsoft, Dell, Boeing, and Whole Foods  have also profited by paying incarcerated people substandard wages to do everything from sewing garments to producing plane parts.

Going on strike is the best way for incarcerated folks to contest the inequality they face and leverage what little political power they have. Frankly, its the only way to challenge their slave status, Wright says of the strike. Since theres no legal or judicial way to challenge the institutionalized slavery through the courts in U.S. prisons, the only option available is for incarcerated workers is to withhold their labor.

National strikes also draw attention to an issue where media is generally silent. Even in cases like the massacre that occurred in Lee County earlier this year prisoners were not given space to respond or share their experiences with the press, Amani Sawari, an outside organizer for Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, explained in an email to Inequality.org. It wasnt until the call for the strike that prisoners were beginning to receive media attention directly.

Organizers are asking people to support the strike by educating themselves on the conditions in prisons and the list of demands put forth by incarcerated people. People can spread the word by posting stickers and flyers, using the hashtags #August21 and #PrisonStrike on social media, or organizing call-in campaigns and solidarity demonstrations.

Via Inequality.org

Content licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License



Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Democracy Now!  National Prison Strike Begins: Prisoners in 17 States Demand End to Slave Labor Behind BarsSURREY, BC / ACCESSWIRE / August 27, 2018 / Gungnir Resources Inc. (TSX-V: GUG; OTC PINK: ASWRF) (''Gungnir'' or the ''Company'') is pleased to report that on-going drilling at its Knaften project has intersected a new, wide zone of conglomerate-hosted sulphide mineralization including the presence of chalcopyrite. The newly discovered sulphide mineralization is located 400 metres west of the Company's 2017 discovery of copper-nickel bearing sulphides and approximately 5 km northwest of the Knaften 300 Gold Zone. Select photos of the drill core are available for viewing via the home page link on the Company's website at www.gungnirresources.com. All assays are pending.

''This is definitely a significant core length of sulphide mineralization, and unique that it is hosted in a conglomerate. With chalcopyrite in the mix, we are anxious to see assay results to determine where this new sulphide target ranks in our exploration plans,'' stated Gungnir's CEO, Jari Paakki.

The mineralized zone was discovered with hole KN18-07 which was testing part of a newly identified 300-metre wide electromagnetic (EM) conductor outlined in a ground geophysical survey completed by the Company in 2017. The 209-metre long hole cut a 120.6-metre interval of mineralized conglomerate starting at 1.3 metres below surface. Mineralization is hosted in a black (carbon-bearing) matrix-supported, polymictic conglomerate with sub-angular to rounded clasts. Sulphide mineralization consists of predominantly pyrrhotite, lesser pyrite and some variably scattered chalcopyrite, occurring as veins, stringers, disseminations, clast replacements and locally semi-massive and narrow massive accumulations. The black matrix likely also contains appreciable very fine-grained pyrrhotite as it is magnetic. Local sphalerite occurs in the conglomerate as well as in intercalated siltstone and in a potential barite vein.

The most chalcopyrite mineralization was noted between 36 and 88 metres down-hole (52 metre core length). Mineralization also occurs below the conglomerate in silicified rocks and underlying gabbro. A total of 133 samples from 150 metres of mineralized core in hole KN18-07 will be assayed.

In addition to mineralization encountered in hole KN18-07, hole KN18-06 collared 380 metres to the northeast of KN18-07, close to the site of last year's copper-nickel bearing sulphide discovery, cut a 15-metre magmatic sulphide zone consisting of disseminations, blebs, net- and flow-textured, and brecciated sulphides consisting of predominantly pyrrhotite with some chalcopyrite. Chalcopyrite also occurs scattered in the largely gabbroic host rock down to about 300 metres down-hole. Over 60 samples are being assayed from this hole.

Hole Locations (RT90 co-ordinates)

Hole ID Easting (m) Northing (m) Azimuth/Dip Length (m) KN18-06 1631120 7153220 230/-60 320 KN18-07 1630812 7153012 060/-65 209

The Company is continuing to drill in the area of this newly discovered conglomerate-hosted sulphide mineralization and to evaluate the geological setting of this promising target area. Samples for hole KN18-06 are in the process of being cut for assaying. Logging has just been completed for hole KN18-07. Assays for earlier drilled 2018 holes (1 to 5), which targeted gold in the south part of the property near the Company's Knaften 300 Gold Zone, will be released once all assays have been received.

The technical information in this news release has been prepared and approved by Jari Paakki, P.Geo., CEO and a director of the Company. Mr. Paakki is a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. All drill intersections of sulphide mineralization are core lengths, and at this time true widths are not known. There is no assurance that economic grades will result from samples assayed. Drill core was logged and tagged for sampling by an independent contractor.

About Gungnir Resources

Gungnir Resources Inc. is a Canadian-based TSX-V listed mineral exploration company (TSX-V: GUG) with gold and base metal permits in northern Sweden within a region hosting 12 million ounces of gold delineated in existing and mined resources plus several past-producing and producing base metal mines. The Company's key gold project, Knaften, is situated at the southern extension of the ''Gold Line'' which hosts a number of gold deposits including Faboliden and Svartliden (Dragon Mining), and Barsele (Agnico Eagle and Barsele Minerals). The Company holds a royalty stream from the sale of the Kenville Gold Project in BC with $3,000,000 still due in three further annual advance cash payments of $1,000,000 each. Further information about the Company and its properties may be found at www.gungnirresources.com or at www.sedar.com.

On behalf of the Board,

Jari Paakki, CEO and Director

For further information contact:

Jari Paakki, CEO

Tel: 705-507-4470

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Chris Robbins, CFO

Tel: 604-683-0484

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Neither the nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements made herein may contain forward-looking statements or information within the meaning of Canadian securities laws. In certain cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as ''plans,'' ''expects,'' ''is expected,'' ''budget,'' ''scheduled,'' ''estimates,'' ''forecasts,'' ''intends,'' ''anticipates'' or ''believes,'' or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results ''may,'' ''could,'' ''would,'' ''might'' or ''will be taken,'' ''occur'' or ''be achieved,'' or the negative of these words or comparable terminology. By their very nature forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual performance of the Company to be materially different from any anticipated performance expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements or information include, but are not limited to, statements or information with respect to Gungnir Resources' plan for future funding, and exploration and development of its properties. Forward-looking statements or information are based on a number of estimates and assumptions and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements or information. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying estimates and assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements or information. For example, there is no certainty, that any economically viable mineral deposit will be located on the properties, or that the Company will receive or be able to raise sufficient capital to complete all of its exploration programs. Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements or information. Gungnir does not expect to update forward-looking statements or information continually as conditions change, except as may be required by securities law.Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCwire) - Belmont Resources Inc. (TSX.V: BEA; FSE: L3L1; DTC Eligible  CUSIP 080499403); (Belmont, or the Company).

Kibby Basin Drilling update:

Harris Drilling has reached a depth of 1798 feet (548 metres) into the playa sediments in hole KB-3, the first hole of the 2018 drilling program at Kibby Basin. The first section of the hole was drilled to a depth of 1270 feet using a mud rotary method, and the remaining 528 feet was completed with a diamond core tail. 126 samples of drill cuttings from the mud-rotary section of the hole have been collected and have been prepared at ALSs preparation lab facility in Reno, Nevada for forwarding to ALS Laboratories for assaying. Lithium and multi-element assay results from these samples will be compiled once testing is complete.

The borehole targeted the southern portion of a large robust MT conductor, which may represent saturated sediments containing lithium-rich brines. The hole drilled through lacustrine playa sediments  dominantly calcareous clays and silts grading to lithified claystones and siltstones at depth. Sand and gravel zones, which may represent brine-bearing aquifers, were encountered at depths of 150-170 feet, 210-230 feet, 260-300 feet, and 900-920 feet, where a potentially major aquifer in a cobble gravel was intersected.

Oxidized clay zones at 400-640 feet and several thinner zones of clay deeper in the hole are being evaluated as potential lithium-bearing bedrock mineralization. Thin intervals of altered rhyolite ash and possible hot-spring sinter were encountered at 1411-1412 feet, 1488-1490 feet and 1589.5-1590 feet. Operation of a paleo-geothermal system is evidenced by the silicified intervals and fronts of pyrite and magnetite alteration increasing below a depth of 1500 feet.

Jim Place, CEO/President of Belmont Resources Inc. comments: KB3 has encountered multiple brine prospective layers that may represent lithium enriched aquifers in Kibby Basin. Our team is looking forward to sample results and continued drilling.

A down-hole geophysical survey including gamma-caliper-temperature-fluid resistivity and SP, SPR logging will be conducted on the hole to identify permeable aquifer zones and conductive brine zones. Water samples will be collected after the geophysical logging, and will be assayed for lithium, associated elements and physical properties. Sections of drill core from 1270 to 1798 feet will be split and similarly assayed as above mentioned.

Final confirmation and scheduling for the second 2018 drill hole (KB-4) on the Kibby property are being discussed. The drills will be mobilized to the second site as soon as possible

NI 43-101 Disclosure

Robert (Bob) G. Cuffney, Certified Professional Geologist, a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical information in this news release.

About Belmont Resources Inc.

Belmont is an emerging resource company engaged in the acquisition, exploration and development of mineral properties in Canada and Nevada, U.S.A.

For further information see our Website at: www.BelmontResources.com

-Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Nevadalithium/

-Twitter https://twitter.com/Belmont_Res

Belmont has recently optioned 31 mineral claims encompassing approx. 7 sq.km; located 24 km northwest of Saint John, New Brunswick  the Mid Corner/Johnson Croft  a Zinc, Cobalt prospect.

On March 30, 2016; the Company acquired sixteen placer (16) mining claims, representing 1036 hectares (2,560 acres) in Esmeralda County, Nevada, U.S.A. The Kibby Basin property is located 65 km north of Clayton Valley, Nevada-U.S.A. The Company believes the property to be highly prospective to host lithium. Subsequent ground geophysics & gravity surveys, surface sampling and a two hole- 2046 ft. diamond drill program have confirmed the presence of lithium on Kibby.

In June 2018; the Company has updated its land position staking, and now holds 126 x 20 acre additional placer mineral claims totaling approx. 1,020 hectares (2,520 acres), adjoining the Kibby 16, for a total Kibby Basin land position (the Property) to 2,056 hectares (5,080 acres).

In 50/50 ownership with International Montoro Resources Inc., Belmont has acquired and is exploring joint venture opportunities for its two significant uranium properties (Crackingstone  982 ha & Orbit Lake  11,109 ha) in the Uranium City District in Northern Saskatchewan, Canada.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Gary Musil

Gary Musil,

Corporate Secretary/CFO/Director

Belmont Resources Inc.

#600  625 Howe Street, Vancouver, B.C. V6C 2T6

Ph: (604) 683-6648 Fax: (604) 683-1350

E-Mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

This Press Release may contain forward-looking statements that may involve a number of risks and uncertainties, based on assumptions and judgments of management regarding future events or results that may prove to be inaccurate as a result of exploration and other risk factors beyond its control. Forward looking statements in this news release include statements about the possible raising of capital and exploration of our properties. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Companies forward-looking statements and expectations. These risks and uncertainties include, among other things, that we may not be able to obtain regulatory approval; that we may not be able to raise funds required, that conditions to closing may not be fulfilled and we may not be able to organize and carry out an exploration program in 2016; and other risks associated with being a mineral exploration and development company. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release and, except as required by applicable laws, the Company assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results differed from those projected in the forward-looking statements.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as the term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cameo Cobalt Corp. (TSX Venture: CRU) (OTC: CRUUF) (FWB: SY7N) (the Company or Cameo Cobalt) is pleased to announce it has entered into a share purchase agreement (the Share Purchase Agreement) to acquire Forrest Kerr Resources Inc. (Forrest), a privately-held British Columbia corporation which holds the Big Mac gold property, a large and prospective exploration project located in British Columbia's Golden Triangle. The Big Mac Gold Project shares more than 30 kilometres of contiguous claim boundaries on the east and west sides of Aben Resources Ltd.'s Forrest Kerr gold project. The Big Mac Gold Project is also located just north of properties owned by Garibaldi Resources Ltd. and Colorado Resources Ltd.

Project Highlights

Claims are contiguous with Aben Resources in the Golden Triangle;

Positions Cameo Cobalt in the Golden Triangle;

Known skarn-style mineralization on western property containing historic rock grab samples of up to 2.9 grams per tonne(g/t) gold (Minfile No. 104B367) and 9.0% copper (Minfile No. 104B493); and

Eastern claim block overlie Hazelton volcanics/volcanoclastics.

Akash Patel, CEO of Cameo states, the acquisition of the Big Mac Gold Project gives Cameo access to a strategic land package located in British Columbias prolific Golden Triangle. The project is adjacent to Aben Resources and located immediately north of projects owned by Garibaldi Resources Ltd. and Colorado Resources Ltd. Given the success of this years exploration season, management is of the belief these mineral claims would be virtually impossible to assemble using traditional staking means. Cameo is working to engage a supplier with extensive regional experience to perform a late season work program. The Company plans to execute upon these contracts in the coming weeks, with the objective of identifying actionable targets for upcoming exploration initiatives. Cameo wishes to convey to its loyal shareholders that the Company is continuing to pursue its energy metals focus. However, the Company will always consider new opportunities to increase shareholder value.

About the Big Mac Gold Project

The Big Mac Gold Project consists of 12 mineral claims structured into three tenure blocks. The project comprises a total of 9,264 hectares (about 22,881 acres). The project offers close proximity to the Eskay Creek access road and the newly constructed Alta Gas McLymont hydro-power facility.

The Big Mac Gold Project is the largest claim package contiguous with Aben Resources' Forrest Kerr gold project which recently disclosed drill results indicating multiple high-grade zones including 62.4 g/t gold over 6.0m within 38.7 g/t gold over 10.0m at its Forrest Kerr project (see Aben Resources news release dated August 9, 2018).

The specific location of the Big Mac Gold Project is notable as it not only surrounds much of Aben Resources Forrest Kerr gold project, but it also contains significant tenure held in the past by Barrick Gold. Aben Resources recently provided an update announcing discovery of a "south boundary" mineralized zone 1.5km south of north boundary zone at its Forrest Kerr project in BC's golden triangle (see Aben Resources news release dated August 23, 2018).

The Barrick Gold area is of interest to the Big Mac Gold Project as it is situated in a comparable environment to the Carcass Creek and Boundary zones recently drilled by Aben Resources, being both situated east of the Forrest Kerr fault structure and mapped within Hazelton group volcanics, specifically the Hazelton group volcanics. The target environment at the Big Mac Gold Project is the volcanic settings (Stuhini group and Hazelton group volcanics) known to host mineralization elsewhere in the immediate area.

Receding glaciation within the Golden Triangle has opened new exploration opportunities and physical access not previously available under historic exploration activity. Additional regional activity has yielded encouraging drill results including Golden Ridge Resources announcement of a copper-gold porphyry discovery on its Hank Property intersecting 327m with grades of 0.31% Cu, 0.35 g/t Au, 1.94 g/t Ag.

The Big Mac Gold Project claims map can be found by following the below URL link: Click Here

The Share Purchase Agreement and Private Placement

The Big Mac gold project is owned by Forrest, subject to a 2% net smelter royalty. Forrest is a private British Columbia company the shareholders of which are all at arms length to Cameo Cobalt. Under the Share Purchase Agreement, Cameo Cobalt will acquire 100% of the issued and outstanding shares of Forrest through the issuance of an aggregate of 4,000,000 common shares of Cameo Cobalt to the Forrest shareholders.

It is a condition of closing under the Share Purchase Agreement that Cameo Cobalt complete a non-brokered private placement financing having gross proceeds of $300,000 through the issuance of 1.5 million units at a price of 20 cents per unit. Each unit will consist of one share and one half of one transferable common share purchase warrant, with each whole warrant entitling the holder thereof to purchase one additional share at a price of 30 cents per share for a period of two years. The private placement is a condition of and is integral to the transaction under the Share Purchase Agreement, and therefore Cameo Cobalt will be relying on the part and parcel pricing exemption under TSX Venture Exchange Policy 4.1.

No finders fees are payable in connection with the Share Purchase Agreement or the private placement. The Share Purchase Agreement and the private placement are subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. The securities issued under the Share Purchase Agreement and the private placement will be subject to a hold period of four months and a day form the date of issuance of such securities.

Qualified Persons

Harrison Cookenboo, Ph.D., P.Geo., is a qualified person as defined in National Instrument 43-101. He has reviewed and is responsible for the technical information in this news release.

CAMEO COBALT CORP.

 Akash Patel

For more information contact:

(778) 549-6714

Or Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

www.cameocobalt.com

Reader Advisory

This news release contains certain forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as plan, expect, project, intend, believe, anticipate, estimate and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions may or will occur. In particular, forward-looking information in this press release includes, but is not limited to, statements with respect to the Companys proposed acquisition, exploration program and the expectations for the cobalt industry. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. We cannot guarantee future results, performance or achievements. Consequently, there is no representation that the actual results achieved will be the same, in whole or in part, as those set out in the forward-looking information.

Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking information. Some of the risks and other factors that could cause the results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: general economic conditions in Canada and globally; industry conditions, including governmental regulation and environmental regulation; failure to obtain industry partner and other third party consents and approvals, if and when required; the availability of capital on acceptable terms; the need to obtain required approvals from regulatory authorities; stock market volatility; liabilities inherent in water disposal facility operations; competition for, among other things, skilled personnel and supplies; incorrect assessments of the value of acquisitions; geological, technical, processing and transportation problems; changes in tax laws and incentive programs; failure to realize the anticipated benefits of acquisitions and dispositions; and the other factors. Readers are cautioned that this list of risk factors should not be construed as exhaustive.

The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. We undertake no duty to update any of the forward-looking information to conform such information to actual results or to changes in our expectations except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information.

Neither 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.Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - August 27, 2018) - RosCan Minerals Corporation (TSXV: ROS) ("RosCan" or the "Company") is pleased to provide an update of its exploration program conducted from April to July 2018 at its gold prospective Kandiole Project in west Africa. The exploration program consisted of reconnaissance prospecting, mapping and grab sampling. The purpose of the program was to complete a "first-pass" look at the permits, generate a surface geological map, complete an inventory of all artisanal sites and collect grab samples from artisanal workings and other areas of interest. A total of 233 grab samples of rock were collected for assaying (the grab samples are selected samples and not necessarily representative of the mineralization hosted on the property). Assay results of 0.5 grams of gold and higher are presented in map below (Figure 1).

In addition to the reconnaissance program, a detailed program of soil and termite sampling was completed in specific areas of the Mankouke and Moussala Nord permits. A total of 4,908 samples were collected. The map below (Figure 1) identifies the areas of this detailed sampling. The samples are now being analysed and the results will be released when received and evaluated.

A compilation of the limited amount of historical data is nearly completed and this information will be integrated with the recently acquired field data.

The Kandiole Project property is underlain by several, interpreted north-northeast trending structural zones that host recently discovered mineralized zones like Komet's Dabia zone (2.02 g/t gold over 62 metres1) and Oklo's Seko zone (2.17 g/t gold over 79 metres2). Recent sampling has identified 13 artisanal mining areas that have returned grab rock samples of more than 0.5 g/t gold with local highs exceeding 10 g/t gold in the Naraya 1 area. To the Company's knowledge, these newly identified mining sites have not been evaluated in the past and as such represent new evaluation opportunities for Roscan. In conjunction with the rock grab samples, several of the areas were covered with soil and termite mound sampling, which when the results are received and evaluated, will be used as guidance for the development of drill targets and additional, more detailed, exploration activities.

COMMENTARY

Gregory Isenor, President and CEO of Roscan, stated "that the Kandiole Project is located in an area of producing gold mines, gold resources and new discoveries. We have an extensive land package, several priority target areas and plan aggressive exploration. We are now designing an exploration program that is planned to start immediately after the rain season ends.

QUALIFIED PERSON AND SAMPLE PROTOCOL

The technical content in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Gregory P. Isenor, P. Geo, a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101.

The grab sampling program was designed to collect representative samples from primarily, areas of gold workings. Each sample site was located by GPS and plotted on base maps. All samples were sealed in individual bags and identified with appropriate sample tags. Samples were stored in a secure place at the field camp after which the samples were shipped to ALS Laboratories in Bamako, Mali by truck driven by Roscan employees. Sample preparation was carried out in the ALS lab in Bamako. Mali and then shipped to the ALS lab in Johannesburg for analyses.

ABOUT ROSCAN

RosCan Minerals Corporation is a Canadian gold exploration company focussed on the acquisition and exploration of gold properties in west Africa. The Company has assembled a significant land position of 100%-owned permits in an area of large gold deposits for its Kandiole Project in west Mali.

For further information, please contact:

Greg Isenor

President and Chief Executive Officer

Tel: (902) 832-5555 or (416) 293-8437

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.



Figure 1: Kandiole Project

Forward Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking information which is not comprised of historical facts. Forward-looking information is characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Forward-looking information involves risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events, results, and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking information include, but are not limited to, changes in the state of equity and debt markets, fluctuations in commodity prices, delays in obtaining required regulatory or governmental approvals, and other risks involved in the mineral exploration and development industry, including those risks set out in the Company's management's discussion and analysis as filed under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. Forward-looking information in this news release is based on the opinions and assumptions of management considered reasonable as of the date hereof, including that all necessary governmental and regulatory approvals will be received as and when expected. Although the Company believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking information in this news release are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, other than 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 release.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Radius Gold Inc. (TSX-V: RDU) is pleased to announce mobilization of a drill team to explore Radiuss high-grade gold-silver Amalia Project located in Chihuahua, Mexico. The drill program, operated by Radius and funded by Pan American Silver, is expected to commence in September. Radius is also pleased to announce it has completed a large detailed CSAMT geophysical survey, geological mapping and geochemical sampling at its 100% owned Coyote hot-springs epithermal gold project near Elko, Nevada and is on track to commence Radius-funded drilling this season at Coyote.

Amalia Project

The 9450 hectare Amalia Project is located 25 km SW of the historic Guadalupe y Calvo mining district in Chihuahua. Radius geologists discovered high grade epithermal silver-gold mineralization in several veins, vein breccias and disseminated zones over 3.5km of strike length and a 600m vertical interval following the trace of a large regional fault zone. An agreement to explore Amalia Project with Pan American Silver Corp. was announced 30th July 2018 and Radius has since upgraded the camp to accommodate a drilling team, and mobilized machinery to upgrade roads and build drill platforms. Management expects to commence drilling in September on multiple drill targets, including Campamento, Guadalupe and Dulces (see press release dated July 30th, 2018, and target details and Figure 2 below).

Coyote Project

On March 21, 2018, Radius announced an agreement to acquire a 100% interest in the Coyote gold property in Elko County, Nevada. The Coyote Project is located in a world class gold producing district near the intersection of the prolific Carlin trend (estimated 90Moz gold production since 1965) and the Independence trend (estimated 8Moz gold production since 1981).

In the last 3 months Radius completed at Coyote a 295 station CSAMT geophysical survey covering roughly 1.5km2 and combined soil geochemical and property wide geological mapping. The results of this work have defined compelling drill targets where co-incident rock and soil geochemical gold-antimony-arsenic-mercury anomalies occur within a surficial sinter hot spring environment. The CSAMT survey shows a large and coherent (950m by 250m) strongly resistive zone adjacent to and below the surface sinter that extends from surface to the bottom of the geophysical survey at 600m depth and is predicted to represent a sheeted vein system.

The main drill targets are the boiling zone estimated 200m below the surface sinters and where the system transitions from the Tertiary upper volcanic host rocks into the Jerritt Canyon Paleozoic meta-sediments (host of the 8Moz gold production from the Independence trend). The recent discovery of the Gravel Creek Gold-Silver Deposit (see note 1) by Western Exploration approximately 45km north of Coyote is an excellent analog where a hot spring sinter environment, anomalous geochemistry and geophysical programs led Western Exploration to target the Tertiary-Paleozoic boundary beneath the system with deep drilling resulting in discovery holes including;

WG373 from 470m to 762m with 291m at 13.52 g/t Au, and

WG374 from 457m to 646m with 189m at 34.6 g/t Au

With compelling drill targets defined (figure 1) at Coyote, Radius expects to have drill permission in the coming weeks and drill testing the targets at Coyote to commence before the snow arrives in Nevada.

Figure 1. Coyote Project - Elko Nevada. Interpreted CSAMT Profile:

Amalia Drill Targets

An initial 2000m diamond core drill program is planned at Amalia to test a minimum of three targets:

Campamento target is a 500m x 70m zone of intense silicification and brecciation with massive and stockwork veining. A chip channel (Radius news Sept 19, 2017) across the middle of Campamento graded 62m at 0.43 g/t Au and 98 g/t Ag from 30 continuous rock chip samples. In March 2018, Radius reported high grade zones at Campamento including a continuous rock chip channel assaying 4.5m at 10.3 g/t Au and 202 g/t Ag. The exposed Campamento system is Rhyolite hosted, high level banded chalcedonic silica veins and breccias. Radius and Pan American plan to initially test 100m to 250m below Campamento where mineralization is expected to transition to andesite hosted higher grade sulphide rich breccias as exposed along strike and deeper in the system at Guadalupe target.

Guadalupe target is a high grade andesite hosted structurally controlled breccia zone that outcrops 450m south along strike from Campamento and 250m lower in the geological section. Guadalupe sampling includes the previously published (Radius news Sept 19, 2017) continuous rock chip results: Guadalupe shaft - 7m at 3.62 g/t Au and 1048 g/t Ag, and Guadalupe tunnel - 4m at 3.92 g/t Au and 888 g/t Ag.

Dulces target is located 800m NE of Campamento, at similar elevation. The poorly exposed Dulces vein occurs within an extensive area of argillic altered andesite volcanics and related gold in soil anomaly. The main vein varies from 1 to 1.5m wide and with chip samples returning: 1m at 34 g/t Au and 13 g/t Ag and 1.5m at 114.5 g/t Au and 57 g/t Ag (Radius news Sept 19, 2017).

Geologically similar gold-silver epithermal deposits of the Sierra Madre belt have mineralization defined over a vertical interval of 600 to 700m. The transition from upper rhyolite hosted mineralization into higher grade andesite host at depth is commonly observed. Radius and Pan American plan drilling to target high grade mineralization at depth below the Campamento silica zone and at the Guadalupe and Dulces targets (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Amalia Project  Chihuahua, Mexico. Campamento and Guadalupe drill targets:

The Pan American Agreement

Radius has granted to Pan American Silver Corp. the option to earn up to an initial 65% interest in the Amalia Project by making cash payments to Radius totaling US$1.5 million (of which US$100,000 has been received) and expending US$2 million on exploration over four years. Pan American may earn an additional 10% by advancing the property to preliminary feasibility. Initially Radius will be the project operator.

Spring Peak Project

Radius completed a CSAMT geophysical survey, soil geochemistry and mapping at the Spring Peak project in Nevada. After evaluation of the data, Radius has terminated the option agreement and returned the project to the owners.

Technical Information

Bruce Smith, M.Sc. (Geology), a member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists, is Radiuss Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Mr. Smith participated in the reported programs and prepared and approved the technical information contained in this news release.

Note 1. Information on the Gravel Creek Gold-Silver Deposit was published in New Concepts and Discoveries: Geological Society of Nevada 2015 Symposium, O.D Christensen and J.G. Cleary. Geology and Discovery History of the Gravel Creek Silver-Gold Deposit, Elko County, Nevada.

Radius Gold Inc.

Radius has a portfolio of projects located primarily in the United States and Mexico which it continues to advance, utilizing partnerships where appropriate in order to retain the Companys strong treasury. At the same time, management is seeking out additional investment and project acquisition opportunities across the globe.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Simon Ridgway

President and CEO

Symbol: TSXV-RDU

Contact: Simon Ridgway

200 Burrard Street, Suite 650

Vancouver, BC V6C 3L6

Tel: 604-801-5432; Toll free 1-888-627-9378; Fax: 604-662-8829

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Website: www.radiusgold.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this news release constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. All statements included herein, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements which include, without limitation, statements about the possible acquisition by Pan American of an interest in the Amalia Project; the exploration plans for the Amalia Project and Coyote Project; the Companys business strategy, plans and outlook; the merit of the Companys investments and properties; timelines; the future financial performance of the Company; expenditures; approvals and other matters. Often, but not always, these forward looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as estimate, estimates, estimated, potential, open, future, assumed, projected, used, detailed, has been, gain, upgraded, offset, limited, contained, reflecting, containing, remaining, to be, periodically, or statements that events, could or should occur or be achieved and similar expressions, including negative variations.

Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by forward-looking statements. Such uncertainties and factors include, among others, the possible acquisition by Pan American of an interest in the Amalia Project; the plans for exploring the Amalia Project and Coyote Project; changes in general economic conditions and financial markets; the Company or any joint venture partner not having the financial ability to meet its exploration and development goals; risks associated with the results of exploration and development activities, estimation of mineral resources and the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; unanticipated costs and expenses; and such other risks detailed from time to time in the Companys quarterly and annual filings with securities regulators and available under the Companys profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended.

Forward-looking statements contained herein are based on the assumptions, beliefs, expectations and opinions of management, including but not limited to: that Pan American will acquire an interest in the Amalia Project; that the exploration activities at the Amalia Project and Coyote Project will proceed as planned; that the Companys activities will be in accordance with its public statements and stated goals; that all required approvals will be obtained; that there will be no material adverse change affecting the Company or its investments or properties; and such other assumptions as set out herein. Forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by law. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - August 27, 2018) - Cordoba Minerals Corp. (TSXV: CDB) (OTCQX: CDBMF) ("Cordoba" or the "Company") today announces that the Company, through its wholly-owned subsidiary Cordoba Minerals (USA) Corp., has entered into a joint venture and earn-in agreement (the "Joint Venture Agreement") with Bell Copper Corporation (TSXV: BCU) ("Bell Copper") and certain of its wholly-owned subsidiaries, to explore the copper porphyry project located in northwestern Arizona, USA (the "Arizona Copper Project"), which is drill-ready with initial drilling expected to commence in the coming weeks.

"Cordoba is pursuing an opportunity with the full support of High Power Exploration to drill test a copper porphyry target situated along the Arizona Volcanic Arc. This significant region has provided between 50-70% of the American copper supply over the last 100 years," commented Mario Stifano, President and CEO of Cordoba Minerals.

Joint Venture Agreement

Pursuant to the terms of the Joint Venture Agreement, and as part of the initial commitment to the project, Cordoba will subscribe for 2,857,143 units of Bell Copper on a private placement basis at a price of C$0.07 per unit. Each unit will consist of 1 common share in the capital of Bell Copper and 1 common share purchase warrant, with each warrant exercisable at a price of C$0.105 per share for a period ending 12 months from the date of issuance. The warrants are subject to a mandatory exercise in the event that, at any time prior to the expiry of the warrants, Bell Copper's common shares trade at or above $0.14 for 30 consecutive trading days. Following the completion of the unit private placement, but prior to the exercise of any warrants, Cordoba will own approximately 4% of Bell Copper on a non-diluted basis.

In addition to the unit subscription, Cordoba will also fund C$300,000 in cash for initial drilling expenditures at the Arizona Copper Project.

Following the completion of the initial drilling program, Cordoba will have the option to earn up to an 80% interest in the Arizona Copper Project (by way of acquisition of membership interests in the joint venture company MMDEX LLC, a wholly-owned indirect subsidiary of Bell Copper) by completing certain phased project expenditures over a 7.5 year period as follows:

Phase 1 C$1M within 18 months to earn 25% interest

Phase 2 Additional C$3M within subsequent 2 years for 51% interest

Phase 3 Additional C$3M within subsequent 2 years for 70% interest

Phase 4 Additional C$10M within subsequent 2 years for 80% interest

The completion of the transactions contemplated by the Joint Venture Agreement remain subject to, among other things, the receipt of all required approvals from the TSX Venture Exchange ("TSXV") by each of Bell Copper and Cordoba, and Bell Copper shareholder approval.

Technical Information & Qualified Person

The technical information in this release has been reviewed and verified by both Dale A. Sketchley and Eugene Schmidt, both Qualified Persons for the purpose of National Instrument 43-101.

Mr. Sketchley is a consulting geologist to Cordoba Minerals with more than 40 years of experience in the mineral exploration, mining and consulting industry. He is a Member of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia (APEGBC) and the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (CIMM). Mr. Sketchley is considered independent under National Instrument 43-101.

Mr. Schmidt is Cordobas Vice President of Exploration with more than 50 years experience as a geologist focused on mineral exploration, mining and industry consulting, 30 of which he has specialized in the southwest United States, Chile and Peru porphyry copper provinces. He is an SME Registered Member #4025503RM and Registered Geologic Engineer #227 (Washington).

Mr. Schmidt is not considered to be independent under National Instrument 43-101.

About Cordoba Minerals

Cordoba Minerals Corp. is a Toronto-based mineral exploration company focused on the exploration and acquisition of copper and gold projects in the Americas. Cordoba is currently focused on its 100%-owned San Matias Copper-Gold Project, which includes the advanced-stage Alacran Deposit, located in the Department of Cordoba. For further information, please visit www.cordobaminerals.com.

ON BEHALF OF THE COMPANY

Mario Stifano, President and CEO

Cordoba Minerals Corp.

For further information, please contact:

Evan Young, Director, Investor Relations

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Phone: +1 (647) 808-2141

Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release includes "forward-looking statements" and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. All statements included in this news release, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements including, without limitation, that future exploration could result in the discovery of a significant copper porphyry deposit; that Cordoba will fully execute its option to earn into an 80% interest in the Arizona Copper Project; the completion of the unit subscription; the completion of the drilling program; and the receipt of TSXV approval Forward-looking statements include predictions, projections and forecasts and are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "potential", "target", "budget" and "intend" and statements that an event or result "may", "will", "should", "could" or "might" occur or be achieved and other similar expressions and includes the negatives thereof.

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 Cordoba operates, are inherently subject to significant operational, economic, and competitive uncertainties, risks and contingencies. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results, and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations include actual exploration results, interpretation of metallurgical characteristics of the mineralization, changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined, future metal prices, availability of capital and financing on acceptable terms, general economic, market or business conditions, uninsured risks, regulatory changes, delays or inability to receive required approvals, and other exploration or other risks detailed herein and from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators, including those described under the heading "Risks and Uncertainties" in the Company's most recently filed MD&A. The Company does not undertake to update or revise any forward-looking statements, except in accordance with applicable law. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.Changes to the Board  Grant of stock options - Shareholders' meeting

MONTREAL, Aug. 27, 2018 /CNW Telbec/ - TOMAGOLD CORPORATION (TSXV: LOT) ("TomaGold" or the "Corporation") today provided an update on its exploration activities, including a realignment of its core activities to consider its strategic options for the development of the Corporation.

"Despite the excellent results of the Monster Lake resource estimates and our extensive land holdings around the deposit, we feel that the share price does not fully reflect the value and potential of our assets," said David Grondin, President and Chief Executive Officer of TomaGold. "We will therefore take the next few months to assess the various strategic options for developing the Corporation in the best interests of our shareholders."

The following is a summary of the exploration work that was done on the Corporation's projects:

Exploration projects

Monster Lake East property (100% TomaGold)

Hazeur property (70% TomaGold, 30% Visible Gold Mines)

On July 16, TomaGold announced the results of an induced polarization (IP) survey on Monster Lake East. The survey was conducted to a depth of 300 metres, and targeted a large copper geochemical anomaly discovered by a government survey. The anomaly was traced over a distance of several kilometres striking approximately 330 northwest of Lac des Trois Iles. The report submitted by Abitibi Geophysique recommends drilling on 14 high-priority gold and copper targets at depths of 100 to 350 metres.

In addition, a detailed compilation was performed on the Monster Lake East and Hazeur properties to correlate all the detailed aerial and ground geophysical survey data with the recent structural and stratigraphic interpretations.

Monster Lake East

In conjunction with historical data, the IP results provide a better understanding of the geology, structure and potential for mineralization of economic interest in the Monster Lake East sector. This sector primarily covers the Joe Mann-Guercheville deformation corridor, as well as the southern extension of the Genesis structures. The IP survey confirmed the existence of a fold in the area of the geochemical anomaly (basal till) shown on the ministry's compilation maps. Furthermore, brief prospecting was done in the past on the Joe Mann-Guercheville mineralized corridor on TomaGold's claims. Old trenches indicate the presence of felsic tuffs within this corridor, as well as an oxidized zone just south of Lac des Trois Iles (Smith showing). This showing returned a grade of 0.42 g/t Au over 18.00 m. Sampling farther east on the same horizon also returned zinc grades (grab sample: 4.00% Zn, 24.00 g/t Ag, 0.80% Cu and 0.45 g/t Au). A few historical drill holes also tested the base metal potential of this horizon.

Hazeur

The Hazeur property covers the Joe Mann-Guercheville corridor over a distance of more than 15 km. There are numerous gold showings all along the deformation zone. The deformation corridor also crosses the Winchester property (IAMGOLD 50%/TomaGold 50%) adjacent to the west, where grades of 0.24 g/t Au over 80.4 m (Source: SOQUEM hole 993-01-86) and 0.30 g/t Au over 70.0 m (Source: SOQUEM hole 993-01-88) were reported.

The property also covers a volcanic-sedimentary contact between the volcanics to the north and the Caopatina sediments to the south. This contact also appears to be very favourable for gold mineralization.

TomaGold also identified the western extension of the Philibert zone during drilling in 2016, with Hole HA-16-03 returning a grade of over 1.5 g/t Au over 15.0 m.

Obalski property (100% TomaGold)

3D modelling was carried out for the Obalski property based on core data and analysis from 320 surface diamond drill holes and core data from 22 underground drill holes.

The modelling results provide a better understanding of the structure and mineralization on this mining property, the site of an old gold mine. The results can be summarized as follows:

The stratigraphy strikes north-south and dips west (possibly 30).

A fracture zone oriented N-110 has been injected with irregular quartz veins containing high copper grades, as well as gold and silver (vein A production). This fracture zone has been intersected and displaced by a series of factures oriented N-80 enriched in gold and silver (vein D production).

The bedded zone of the Lac Dore Complex (magnetite-rich) appears to play a role in the occurrence of pyrrhotite associated with gold mineralization at depth.

Surface drilling has confirmed the extension of the mineralization at depth.

Lac Doda property (100% TomaGold)

This new property, which was acquired by staking, consists of 80 claims covering 4,478 hectares. The Lac Doda property covers a volcanic-sedimentary contact that is very similar to the contact on the Hazeur property and may simply be the southern expression of that same volcanic-sedimentary contact farther along a syncline. Geochemistry has identified many anomalies in the sediments, along with a large copper anomaly at the southern contact between the sediments and the volcanic rocks.

Changes to the Board

TomaGold announced that Robert Rosner has joined to its Board of Directors in replacement of Ciro Cucciniello.

Robert Rosner has significant experience as a mining industry entrepreneur and executive who currently acts as a Director, CFO and Executive Vice President of Lucky Minerals Inc., Director and CFO of Chimata Gold Corp. and Director and CFO of Emgold Mining Corporation. Early in his career he initiated the formation of a number of junior exploration mining companies, including Fortuna Silver Mines (NYSE: FSM) and Niogold Mining Corp. (TSX.V: NOX  Acquired and wholly owned by Osisko), and played instrumental roles in managing these, and other, resource ventures involved in early stage exploration, resource location, delineation, and development. He has successfully utilized his extensive experience in public and private company management for over 30 years.

Mr. Rosner has acted as an officer and director of both Canadian and U.S. listed companies, providing senior management of reporting compliance, oversight and fiduciary capacities, and directing corporate activities. He also has significant experience in Initial Public Offerings, Mergers & Acquisitions, and reverse takeovers.

TomaGold also announced that Jean Martineau will be a proposed director of the Board of Directors at the next shareholders meeting of the Corporation. He was previously on the Corporation's Advisory Board.

Jean Martineau has worked in the Canadian mining industry for more than 25 years as a director of junior exploration companies and an investment broker, and has been the CEO and President of Dynacor Gold Mines since the company was listed on the TSX in 2007. Over the last 20 years, he has focused on South America and has acquired in-depth knowledge of the management of natural resource companies in South America. His Latin American expertise has been of prime importance in the development of Dynacor Gold Mines' operations in Peru. Prior to work in the mining industry, he worked in the Pulp and Paper industry for more than 12 years, where his last assignment was in Venezuela.

The Board is proud of the interests of Messrs. Rosner and Martineau to TomaGold and would like to thank Mr. Cucciniello for his contribution, and wishes him success in his future endeavours.

Other Corporate Highlights

TomaGold has ceased the gold brokerage activities it was conducting in South America through its subsidiary, TomaSouth Corporation, preferring to focus on its core business.

The Corporation has also granted a total of 1,425,000 stock options to directors, officers and strategic committee members to acquire the same number of common shares of the Corporation at a price of $0.10 per share for a period of five years.

In addition, the Corporation's annual and special meeting of shareholders has been set for September 28, 2018, and the proxy circular containing the details of the matters to be considered will be published and filed on www.sedar.com within the next few weeks.

The technical content of this press release has been reviewed and approved by Claude P. Larouche, Eng., a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101.

About TomaGold Corporation

TomaGold Corporation is a Canadian mineral exploration company engaged in the acquisition, assessment, exploration and development of gold mineral properties. To optimize its chances of discovery and minimize its exploration risk, TomaGold aims to develop high-grade gold properties with major mining companies. It currently has joint venture agreements with IAMGOLD Corporation for the Monster Lake project, with Goldcorp Inc. for the Sidace Lake property, and with Goldcorp Inc. and New Gold Inc. for the Baird property. TomaGold has interests in six gold properties near the Chibougamau mining camp in northern Quebec: Monster Lake, Winchester, Lac-a-l'Eau-Jaune, Monster Lake East, Obalski and Lac Cavan. It also holds interests of 39.5% in the Sidace Lake property and 24.5% in the Baird property near the Red Lake mining camp in Ontario. Finally, it has an option to acquire a 70% interest in the Hazeur property, at the southern edge of the Monster Lake group of properties.

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. The statements in this news release that are not historical facts are "forward-looking statements". Readers are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance, and that actual developments or results may vary materially from those described in such "forward-looking" statements.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Balmoral Resources Ltd. (Balmoral or the Company) (TSX: BAR; OTCQX: BALMF) announced today that it has entered into an option agreement (the Agreement) to acquire the Gargoyle Property in Ontario where nickel sulphide mineralization was recently discovered in intermittent outcrop exposure over a strike length in excess of 1,000 metres. Grab samples collected from the property have returned grades of 0.25% to 0.71% nickel, with anomalous copper and cobalt values.

New nickel-copper-cobalt discovery traced in intermittent outcrop for over 1,000 metres

Hosted in 10+ kilometre long ultramafic unit with numerous associated and proximal airborne conductors which have never been drill tested

Geological sequence analogous to the prolific Kambalda camp - which hosts the most extensive collection of nickel sulphide deposits in Australia - and to other Abitibi region nickel sulphide camps, including Balmorals Grasset deposit.

GARGOYLE PROPERTY

The road-accessible Gargoyle Property is situated within the Lumby Lake greenstone belt, approximately 55 kilometres northeast of Atikokan, Ontario (Figure 1). The property, which is comprised of 42 claim units in two blocks, covers a series of recent nickel sulphide discoveries made by Bjorkman Prospecting (Figure 2). The nickel occurrences are hosted within a poorly exposed ultramafic komatiite sequence traceable through the property for over 10 kilometres in available government airborne magnetic data (Figure 3).

Figure 1



Figure 2



Figure 3



Like Balmorals Grasset nickel-copper-cobalt-PGE deposit, the Gargoyle nickel sulphide discoveries are disseminated in nature, and nickel dominant. The presence of numerous airborne EM conductors along the projected strike of the discoveries suggests potential for more massive, high-grade nickel sulphide mineralization on the property. There is no reported historic drill testing on the property.

The Gargoyle property acquisition supplements our renewed focus on nickel exploration and nicely complements the recently announced drill program at Grasset, said Darin Wagner, President and CEO of Balmoral. New, road accessible nickel sulphide discoveries in places like Ontario are very infrequent and we are excited by the opportunity this acquisition represents for the Company and its shareholders.

The Lumby Lake belt is one of the oldest known, and most primitive volcanic sequences in the Superior Province. It is similar in age range to the Kambalda nickel camp in Australia which hosts numerous active and historic nickel sulphide mines. Like the Kambalda camp, the Lumby Lake belts features numerous komatiitic volcanic and intrusive sequences intimately intermixed with sulphide-bearing exhalative sedimentary units, which provide an ideal sulphur source for the formation of nickel sulphide mineralization. As with the Companys Grasset deposit and the nickel sulphide deposits in similar host rocks in the Timmins, Ontario region, these primitive ultramafic sequences have the potential to host both high-grade underground and larger tonnage, open-pit nickel sulphide deposits with associated copper, cobalt, platinum, palladium, gold and silver.

The Agreement

Balmoral has entered into an Option Agreement (the Agreement) whereby the Company can acquire a 100% interest in the Gargoyle Property from Mr. Karl Bjorkman by making cash and share payments as outlined below:

Cash payments totaling $140,000 as follows:

$20,000 within 10 days of the approval of the Agreement by the TSX

$30,000 on the 1 st anniversary of the Agreement

anniversary of the Agreement $40,000 on the 2 nd anniversary of the Agreement

anniversary of the Agreement $50,000 on the 3rd anniversary of the Agreement

Share payments totaling 390,000 shares as follows:

60,000 common shares with 10 days of approval of the Agreement by the TSX

80,000 common shares on the 1 st anniversary of the Agreement

anniversary of the Agreement 100,000 common shares on the 2 nd anniversary of the Agreement

anniversary of the Agreement 150,000 common shares on the 3rd anniversary of the Agreement

Balmoral may accelerate the payment schedule. Upon successful exercise of the Agreement Balmoral will grant a 2% NSR royalty to the vendor, half of which the Company may repurchase at any time for the sum of $1,000,000. The Company also has a right of first refusal on the sale of the remaining NSR interest.

The share payments under the Agreement remain subject to the approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Exploration Plans

Balmoral plans to conduct a detailed airborne Mag/EM program over the Gargoyle Property during the fall of 2018, along with additional prospecting and mapping. This will be tentatively followed by ground based geophysical work during the winter of 2018-2019 in preparation for initial drill testing.

Mr. Michael Tucker (M.Sc.; P.Geo. B.C., Ontario), an employee of the Company, is the non-independent qualified person for the technical disclosure contained in this news release. Mr. Tucker has recently visited the Gargoyle Property and confirmed the occurrences of the nickel sulphide mineralization and approved of the technical information contained within this release.

About Balmoral Resources Ltd.  www.balmoralresources.com

Balmoral is a well-funded, multi-award winning Canadian-focused exploration company actively exploring a portfolio of gold and base metal properties located within the prolific Abitibi greenstone belt. The Companys flagship, 1,000 km2 Detour Gold Trend Project hosts the resource stage Bug and Martiniere West gold deposits and the Grasset nickel-copper-cobalt-PGE deposit. Employing an aggressive, drill focused exploration style in one of the worlds preeminent mining jurisdictions, Balmoral is following an established formula with a goal of maximizing shareholder value through the discovery and definition of high-grade, Canadian gold and base metal assets.

On behalf of the board of directors of

BALMORAL RESOURCES LTD.

Darin Wagner

President and CEO

For further information contact: John Foulkes, Vice-President, Corporate Development

Tel: +1 (604) 638-5815 / Toll Free: +1 (877) 838-3664

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

This press release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, forward looking statements) within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities laws. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein, including statements regarding the anticipated content, commencement, duration and cost of exploration programs, anticipated exploration program results, the visual continuity of certain mineralized intervals, the potentially open nature of the mineralized zones on the property and the potential for future discoveries of additional mineralization on the property are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as: believes, expects, anticipates, intends, estimate, postulate and similar expressions or are those which, by their nature, refer to future events. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, 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. The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements by the Company are not guarantees of future performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from the Companys expectations include those related to weather, equipment and staff availability; performance of third parties; timing of receipt of assay results from third party analytical facilities; risks related to the exploration stage of the Companys projects; market fluctuations in prices for securities of exploration stage companies and in commodity prices; and uncertainties about the availability of additional financing; risks related to the Companys ability to identify one or more economic deposits on the properties, and variations in the nature, quality and quantity of any mineral deposits that may be located on the properties; risks related to the Companys ability to obtain any necessary permits, consents or authorizations required for its activities on the properties; and risks related to the Companys ability to produce minerals from the properties successfully or profitably. Trading in the securities of the Company should be considered highly speculative. All of the Companys public disclosure filings may be accessed via www.sedar.com and readers are urged to review these materials, including the latest technical reports filed with respect to the Companys mineral properties.

This news release contains information with respect to adjacent or similar mineral properties in respect of which the Company has no interest or rights to explore or mine. Readers are cautioned that the Company has no interest in or right to acquire any interest in any such properties, and that mineral deposits on adjacent or similar properties are not indicative of mineral deposits on the Companys properties.

This press release is not, and is not to be construed in any way as, an offer to buy or sell securities in the United States.Drilling to test new infill and extension high-grade targets within western zone of the West Kasulu exploration target and newly identified southerly western zone

Three of the only four holes previously drilled by Kincora in the western zone intersected higher grade zones, with a >1km strike identified, benefiting from significant advancements in exploration activities since limited prior drilling

Exploration target supports one of largest copper-gold systems in Mongolia

IP survey commences to further refine targets to the west and advance pipeline of targets across second intrusive complex

VANCOUVER, Aug. 27, 2018 /CNW/ - Kincora Copper Ltd. (the "Company", "Kincora") (TSXV:KCC) is pleased to outline recent extensive exploration activities at its wholly owned Bronze Fox project and planned activities for the remainder of the current field season. The focus of these activities are multiple new target zones proposed for drilling at, or on the margin of, the western license relating to the western zone or south-western periphery of the West Kasulu target and Bronze Fox Intrusive Complex ("BFIC"), where Kincora previously has had only one field season of unimpeded drilling activities.

Previous drilling at the western zone of the West Kasulu exploration target, across a key regional fault, inadequately tested only 260 metres of a >1km strike. Three of the four holes drilled by Kincora returned higher grade mineralization, within boarder lower grade, including hole F62 which intersected 13 metres of 1.15% Cu or 1.41% CuEq within 794 meters at 0.40% CuEq1.

SJ Geophysics Ltd. ("SJ") has been contracted to complete a series of DC resistivity and induced polarization ("IP") survey lines to further refine the identified high-grade targets before drilling this field season. The SJ survey will extend detailed coverage to the west and is expected to be completed in September, advancing a newly identified southerly western target zone and a second interpreted intrusive complex where surface exploration has yielded encouraging results.

Sam Spring, President & CEO of Kincora, commented: "When last drilling the western zone of West Kasulu, Kincora had a $40-50 million market capitalization, attracted NDAs with 14 industry players, an offer for the Company and separate period of exclusivity. There have only been two field seasons of unencumbered drilling at the Bronze Fox project, one by Ivanhoe (2006) and the other by Kincora (2012). Our understanding of the project has been significantly advanced since this time, with Kincora, post the IBEX merger, also now holding the dominant position in the rest of the Oyu Tolgoi-Tsagaan Suvarga copper belt".

Senior Vice-President of Exploration, Peter Leaman, stated, "Earlier this year we announced a large-scale copper-gold exploration target. More important than this tonnage was the improved geological understanding, including the identification of a key regional fault and change in lithology that bisects the West Kasulu mineralized system at Bronze Fox.

Our team has relogged 24,000 metres of drill core and a full reinterpretation of previous geophysics has been undertaken by specialist consultant Barry de Wet. West Kasulu is already one of the largest copper-gold systems in Mongolia and with only modest drilling. Recent activities have identified a number of high priority drill targets to the west where previous exploration was impeded by access issues".

Upon completion of the geophysical review and proposed SJ survey, specialist consultant Barry de Wet stated: "A number of significant scale and very attractive coincident geophysical anomalies have been identified at Bronze Fox, particularly in the western zone of West Kasulu that complements limited drilling and warrants priority follow up. There is an extremely large mineralized system that remains under explored at Bronze Fox, the main target zones to the west of previous drilling.

The Bronze Fox project is one that was previous excluded by Ivanhoe from the joint venture I was involved with at BHP. Successful drilling of the outlined targets is likely to attract the attention of further industry players".

Figure 1: Bronze Fox, and its two intrusions, in the wider Southern Gobi copper belt





Background to the Bronze Fox project

The Bronze Fox project has an extensive mineralized footprint of over 40km2 within the Bronze Fox Intrusive Complex ("BFIC") and also covering 15km2 at the western neighbouring Tourmaline Hills Intrusive Complex ("THIC"). These were supported by only two unencumbered drilling exploration field seasons (one by Ivanhoe Mines and one by Kincora) within the current two-license portfolio that hosts the full BFIC.

The BFIC includes a western central portion where 76 holes were drilled for 24,139 metres across a 1.4 km by 2.4 km zone at a prospect named by Kincora as West Kasulu (known as "Bronze Fox" by Ivanhoe Mines, who undertook drilling in 2006).

Figure 2: Mineralized system again consolidated - Drill targets advanced; Key milestones for the western license exploration target zone at Bronze Fox

Since the last drilling at the West Kasulu prospect in 2012 by Kincora, which included only 4 holes in the now defined western exploration target zone and covered a 6-month period, there have been the following key exploration activities:

higher resolution and deeper penetrating "Search" contractor Induced Polarization (IP) survey (noting access at the time restricted just to the eastern license);





initial lithogeochemical/petrographic studies (Professor Tony Crawford );





); Mining Associates block model and review (better understanding of faults/lithology and tonnage/grade with an independent exploration target announced);





detailed relogging of core from drilling at West Kasulu (initially 8000m by a copper major under exclusivity, then the full 24000m reviewed and relogged by Kincora);





by a copper major under exclusivity, then the full reviewed and relogged by Kincora); further mapping and a maiden pan concentration survey on the full western license; and,





a full geophysical review by specialist consultant Barry de Wet.





drill targets refined by new Technical Team

The review of the West Kasulu prospect by Mining Associates announced earlier in the year (refer to the January 25th, 2018 press release) supported an exploration target of:

416 Mt to 428 Mt grading 0.26% to 0.30% copper for up to 2,437Mlb of copper and 0.84Moz gold , ranking as one of the largest potential in-situ copper-gold systems in Mongolia and with only modest drilling.The underexplored and open on strike western zone included 141Mt for 890Mlb of copper and 0.25Moz gold.





, ranking as one of the largest potential in-situ copper-gold systems in and with only modest drilling.The underexplored and open on strike western zone included for 890Mlb of copper and 0.25Moz gold. The potential quantity and grade ranges are conceptual in nature and based on nearest neighbour and ordinary krige estimates2. There has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource.

More important than the large-scale exploration target, the Mining Associates review included an independent block model that advanced the understanding of the mineralized system at West Kasulu, which is bisected by a key regional fault within the western central portion of the BFIC.

Since the Mining Associates review, 24,000 metres of drill core at West Kasulu has been reviewed and relogged by Kincora, benefiting from the 8000 metres previously relogged by a copper major under a period of exclusivity (when the western license was still under dispute). This relogging exercise also upgraded the geological dataset's quality to be sufficient for NI 43-101 purposes.

Previous geophysics was excluded from the scope of the Mining Associates review. With the improved geological knowledge, relogging of core and further surface geology, specialist geophysical consultant Barry de Wet has undertaken a detailed geophysical review. This included a full reinterpretation of the Search IP survey, which was completed the year proceeding the last drilling at West Kasulu.

Resulting chargeability and conductivity interpretations correlate well with previous drilling results, the Mining Associates block model and identified faults, and various magnetic and gravity surveys. In particular, different lithologies are clearly illustrated by conductivity, with significantly more favourable chargeability profiles inadequately tested in the western sections of the system.

Figure 3: Large intrusion drives bulk tonnage system - Western strike and system trend untested

Demagnetisation (with clear large intrusion extending to depth) is also coincident with these higher chargeability zones on the western zone of fault, both immediately on strike from the Mining Associates block model, where 260 metres of a >1km strike was drill tested, as well as a potentially significantly larger and newly understood southerly western zone.

New high-grade infill and extension drill targets within the western zone of the West Kasulu exploration target zone and a newly identified southerly western target zone have been refined.

These include looking to test the central portion of the interpreted target on a section of the aforementioned hole F62.

Figure 4: Grade on margin - Significant untested strike

The previously intersected higher grade zone in hole F62 corresponds to a coincident moderate chargeability and smaller magnetic low zone, which projects to the south of the Tov fault with strengthening chargeability resolution and thickening coincident magnetic low. This latter zone offers significant strike potential with F62 previously intersecting the interpreted periphery of the main target zone, which remains open to the west.

Success confirming the updated geophysical coincident chargeability high/magnetic low model and strike to the south of the fault with favorable grade would significantly and positively upgrade immediate target area (both tonnage and grade) and its strike potential to the west.

A similar detailed systematic approach has been undertaken at the other high priority high-grade drill targets proposed for drilling this field season.

A series of 6 North-South lines will be undertaken by the SJ survey, for 33.4 line kilometres, ahead of the proposed drill program. The survey will provide more detailed IP coverage to the west of the previous Search survey (which at the time was restricted due to access issues to the western license). The SJ survey will provide coverage across a second intrusive complex where first phase pan concentration survey results, coupled with previous geophysics, have refined a coincident area for follow up mapping and soil sampling.

SJ is a Canadian specialist geophysical group, also engaged to undertake a more detailed 3D survey at Kincora's wholly owned East Tsagaan Suvarga project and was selected following a detailed review process with specifications of both projects targets.

Notes:

The potential quantity and grade is conceptual in nature, and based on nearest neighbour and ordinary krige estimates within an interpreted 0.2% Cu grade shell based on 81 drill holes spaced approximately 200 x 200 m within the West Kasulu prospect within the western central portion of the Bronze Fox Intrusive Complex. The drill spacing is too broad to define grade continuity, but does illustrate geological continuity. No assumptions regarding eventual economic extraction have been applied. The potential quantity and grade is conceptual in nature, there has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource.



F62  13m of 1.15% Cu (or 1.41% CuEq) from 595m , within 37m grading 0.83% copper and 0.14g/t gold (1.01% CuEq) from 573m , within 391m @ 0.50% CuEq (0.41% copper and 0.08g/t gold) and 794m at 0.40% CuEq. The Copper Equivalent (CuEq) calculation represents an estimate for the total value for each metal, multiplied by the conversion factor, summed and expressed in equivalent copper percentage based on spot prices (Cu $3.11 /lb, Au $1279 /oz and Mo $7.1 /lb). Grades have not been adjusted for metallurgical or refining recoveries and the copper equivalent grades are of an exploration nature only and intended for summarizing grade. The copper equivalent calculation is intended as an indicative value only.

About Kincora

Kincora is a junior resource company engaged in the acquisition, exploration and development of mineral properties, with a focus on Tier 1 copper-gold projects in Mongolia. For further information: www.kincoracopper.com.

Qualified Person

The scientific and technical information in this news release was prepared in accordance with the standards of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum and National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") and was reviewed, verified and compiled by Kincora's geological staff under the supervision of Peter Leaman (M.Sc. Mineral Exploration, FAusIMM), Senior Vice-President of Exploration of Kincora Copper, who is the Qualified Person for the purpose of NI 43-101.

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.The retrial of former Rwandan Planning Minister Augustin Ngirabatware is to take place on September 24 to 28 before the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), which is the residual mechanism of the UNs Rwanda tribunal.

According to an order posted on the Mechanism website, the calendar for testimonies of any defence and prosecution witnesses will be announced at a later date.

Ngirabatware, who holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), was sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to 30 years in jail for genocide and crimes against humanity. The judges found that in April 1994 he incited, aided and encouraged militia in his native Nyamyumba commune of Gisenyi prefecture (north) to kill their Tutsi neighbours. In a submission to the MICT on July 8, 2016, the former minister said he had new facts that would clear him of the crimes for which he was convicted, and requested a retrial. On June 19, 2017, the Mechanism granted his request, making him the first ICTR convict to get a retrial.

Meanwhile Thameur Mekki, editor of Tunisian website Nawaat, took a critical look at his countrys main media and how, according to him, they have adopted a hostile attitude to transitional justice institutionalized in 2014 through the creation of the Truth and Dignity Commission. Mekki says these media, motivated by a convergence of political and economic interests, are serving to restore the image of fallen dictator Ben Ali. Favouring current events over remembrance, their coverage promotes transitional justice bashing, supports a proposed presidential law against accountability, and has turned its back on the importance of truth seeking, the need for reparations and reform, he writes.

Difficult peace process in Mali

In Mali, one of the main challenges facing newly re-elected president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita is to implement the peace and reconciliation accord signed three years ago by the government and a mainly Touareg rebel coalition. Implementation of this agreement, which aimed to restore stability in the north of the country, has experienced a series of delays due mainly to a climate of distrust between the signatories.

President Keitas camp may claim that separatist plans have been abandoned in the north, but, according to researcher Baba Dakono of the security studies institute, opponents point out that the interim authorities in the north are having trouble being accepted by the local population. JusticeInfo correspondent Sidi Ahmed cites Dakono as saying that for many Malians, the peace accord commits only the government and the armed groups that signed it.

Lost generation

Also this week, UNICEF warned of a lost generation of Rohingya refugee children in Bangladesh. If we dont make the investment in education now, we face the very real danger of seeing a lost generation of Rohingya children, UNICEF Bangladesh Representative Edouard Beigbeder said in a statement. Children who lack the skills they need to deal with their current situation, and who will be incapable of contributing to their society whenever they are able to return to Myanmar. According to UNICEF, there are more than half a million children from Myanmar in the refugee camps of southern Bangladesh.In an open letter to the Tunisian president, two NGOs urge him to approve a recommendation by the Commission on Individual Liberties and Equality to scrap the death penalty.

On August 8, President Beji Caied Essebsi received a letter from the Tunisian Coalition against the Death Penalty (CTCPM) and another NGO, Together against the Death Penalty (ECPM). The two organizations bring their support for a report by the Commission (COLIBE), headed by feminist MP Bochra Belhaj Hmida, which includes abolishing the death penalty as part of the global movement against capital punishment. The Commission submitted two options, either abolition of the death penalty for all crimes, so that Tunisia meets its international obligations, or at least reducing the field of application of the death penalty. The Commission cites Article 22 of the Constitution to suggest restricting capital punishment to the most serious crimes.

77 prisoners sentenced to death

The 233-page report published on June 12, 2018, continues to provoke various debates, notably on equal inheritance rights, which is opposed by Muslim conservatives. And although the debate sparked by the Commission is currently focusing mainly on this point, the team led by Bochra Belhaj Hmida has the merit of raising the capital punishment issue which has been on hold in Tunisia for years.

Certainly, Tunisia has not carried out any executions since 1991, when it introduced a moratorium on this punishment. But on July 24, 2015, Parliament approved a new law on fighting terrorism and money laundering which widens the field of application of capital punishment by making it applicable for crimes linked to terrorism. Also, the new Tunisian Constitution maintains the death penalty. Article 21 says that the right to life is sacred and that it can only be violated in extreme cases defined by law. A proposed amendment to scrap the death penalty was defeated by 102 votes to 50, with 15 abstentions. Judges continue to pronounce death penalties. According to the Tunisian Coalition against the Death Penalty, 11 people were sentenced to death in 2017 and 44 in 2016. More than 77 people sentenced to death are currently in detention.

Convicts from underprivileged regions

Tunisia, which has been undergoing a democratic transition since the fall of Ben Alis dictatorship, had nevertheless given some signs of hope to those campaigning against the death penalty, and there was an abolitionist president, Moncef Marzouki, from December 2011 to December 2014. Another positive sign is that since 2012, the country regularly votes in favour of the UN General Assembly resolution for a universal moratorium on application of the death penalty. As a result, these convicts have since March 2011 seen an improvement in their prison conditions, as described by Chokri Latif, president of the Tunisian Coalition against the Death Penalty: Their situation has improved a bit. They now have the right to receive visitors and are no longer isolated on death row but mix with other prisoners. That said, some prisoners are still in terrible situations, suffering isolation, psychological pressure and torture.

The authors of a report initiated by Together against the Death Penalty

(ECPM), whose results were published in a 2012 collective work entitled The Siliana syndrome: why must the death penalty be abolished in Tunisia?, made several findings. The most important shows that the majority of those condemned to death come from the isolated, poor and marginalized region of Siliana, in the northwest of the country. And so this makes us aware that in Tunisia, as elsewhere, the death penalty is always an instrument of political and social repression that serves those in power, writes Raphael Chenuil-Hazan, president of EPCM. In their letter, the two NGOs call on the Head of State to maintain the vote for the resolution in favour of a moratorium which takes place in December 2018 and ratify the second protocol of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights with a view to abolishing completely this iniquitous practice.Two Reuters journalists in Myanmar accused of breaking a state secrets law while investigating a massacre of Rohingya Muslims face another week of uncertainty after the verdict in their trial was delayed on Monday.

Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, have been detained in Myanmars infamous Insein prison since December in a case which has sparked a global outcry.

The reporters had been investigating the September 2017 killing of 10 Rohingya Muslims in conflict-scarred Rakhine state, a week after Myanmars military launched a sweeping crackdown on members of the stateless Muslim minority.

They were invited to dinner with police in Yangon, handed some documents, and then arrested as they left the meeting and accused of possessing classified material on operations in the area.

The pair were charged with violating the state secrets act, which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years.

The expected ruling at the court in northern Yangon had drawn a crowd of diplomats, well-wishers and media, some wearing t-shirts with the words Journalism is not a crime.

But district judge Khin Maung Maung said the presiding judge was ill and the verdict would be announced on September 3.

Wa Lone told reporters as he left the courthouse that they were not afraid, whatever the decision.

We have the truth with us and we did not do anything wrong, he said.

 Suu Kyi under fire 

The case has sparked fears of eroding press freedoms under civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose international reputation has been tarnished by the treatment of the Rohingya.

Defence lawyer Khin Maung Zaw said the delay could be linked to global developments on Myanmar.

A UN fact-finding mission on rights abuses in the country is due to release a report on Monday and the UN Security Council will discuss the Rohingya crisis on Tuesday.

If the verdict is today and its negative for the defence, it may be seen as a negative approach to democracy, he said.

Reuters has robustly denied the charges. The defence has said the supposedly secret documents had already been published, and the prosecution case hit a hurdle when a police witness said his superior had ordered his men to entrap the pair.

The company said after the court announcement that it was disappointed.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have already spent more than eight months in prison based on allegations of a crime they did not commit, a statement said.

We look forward to receiving the verdict next week, when we very much hope that they will be acquitted and reunited with their families.

The journalists have described in detail what happened after their arrest, saying they were hooded and deprived of sleep in initial interrogations, which included questions about their work on Rakhine.

The news agency launched a worldwide advocacy campaign that included diplomats, celebrities and the legal assistance of prominent rights attorney Amal Clooney.

But it was not enough to keep the court in the Buddhist-majority country from pursuing the charges.

The United Nations and Washington have called the military campaign ethnic cleansing, after some 700,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine to Bangladesh, bringing with them testimonies of rape, arson and killings in the northern part of the state.

Myanmar rejects the charges. But it has admitted that the killing of 10 men and boys investigated by Reuters in the village of Inn Din took place and sentenced seven soldiers for the crime.

Rights groups say security forces should be investigated for crimes against humanity in Rakhine, but so far only a handful of targeted sanctions have hit figures in Myanmars armed forces.

burs-joe/smUnited Nations investigators on Monday called for an international probe and prosecution of Myanmars army chief and five other top military commanders for genocide against the countrys Rohingya minority.

Some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fled northern Rakhine state to Bangladesh after Myanmar launched a brutal crackdown in August last year on insurgents amid accounts of arson, murder and rape at the hands of soldiers and vigilante mobs in the mainly Buddhist country.

Myanmar has vehemently denied allegations of ethnic cleansing, insisting it was responding to attacks by Rohingya rebels.

But on Monday, a UN-backed fact-finding mission into violations in Myanmar said the countrys top military generals, including Commander-in-Chief Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing, must be investigated and prosecuted for genocide in the north of Rakhine State.

 Grossly disproportionate 

They should also be investigated and prosecuted for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan States, it said, insisting that the army tactics had been consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats.

The mission, which was created by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2017, concluded in a report that there is sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the Tatmadaw (Myanmar army) chain of command.

The crimes in Rakhine State, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts, the report said.

The investigators named Min Aung Hlaing and five other top military commanders, adding that a longer list of names could be shared with any competent and credible body pursuing accountability in line with international norms and standards.

 Suu Kyi also criticised 

Criticism was also directed at Myanmars civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been the target of global vitriol for a perceived failure to stand up for the stateless minority.

The report found that she had not used her de facto position as head of government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events.

While acknowledging that she and other civilian authorities had little influence on military actions, it said that they through their acts and omissions  have contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes.

Myanmar never permitted the UN investigators access to the country, but they said that in the course of their investigation they had interviewed 857 victims and eyewitnesses, and had used satellite imagery and authenticated documents, photographs and videos as a basis to reach their conclusions.

The report detailed a horrifying list of atrocities committed against the Rohingya, including murder, enforced disappearance, torture, as well as rape and other sexual violence perpetrated on a massive scale.

Information collected by the investigators suggested that an estimate by the Doctors Without Borders charity that up to 10,000 Rohingya had been killed in the 2017 crackdown was conservative, the report said.

 Rape as war tactic 

They also found that soldiers had carried out large-scale gang rape, sometimes of as many as 40 girls and women at once, in at least 10 Rakhine villages.

The scale, brutality and systematic nature of these violations indicate that rape and sexual violence are part of a deliberate strategy to intimidate, terrorise or punish a civilian population, and are used as a tactic of war, the report said.

Warning that impunity is deeply entrenched in Myanmars political and legal system, the investigators insisted the only chance of obtaining accountability was through the international justice system.

They called on the UN Security Council to refer the Myanmar situation to the International Criminal Court, or for an ad hoc international criminal tribunal to be created.

They also recommended an arms embargo and targeted individual sanctions against those who appear to be most responsible.

 Spreading hate on Facebook 

The investigators also highlighted the role Facebook had played, describing it as a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate.

The social media company plays an outsized role in a country that has only recently come online and boasts 18 million accounts among the population of around 50 million people.

Although improved in recent months, Facebooks response has been slow and ineffective, the report said, calling for an independent investigation of the extent to which posts and messages on the platform had led to real-world discrimination and violence.307 Shares Share

So lets get down to it. Everyone is tired of shooting sprees. If youre a gun owner, youre tired of seeing weapons abused and misused to harm the innocent. If youre a gun opponent, you feel the same way but cant imagine why anyone has these weapons in the first place. I get it. I hope both sides get it.

Ive thought about this a lot. Im a gun owner. I have been since childhood. That was the culture in which I was raised. Guns everywhere. In dads dresser, in the closet, in the neighbors truck. Its what I knew. There are about 80 million (with an M) gun owners in America, many of whom come from a similar background.

I dont have an AR-15. I have something similar called a Mini-14, but it just doesnt look as angry as the standard image of the semi-automatic weapons we see in news stories. It has meaning to me. It was a Fathers Day gift from my wife and family. It lives in a gun safe with many other happy, quiet firearms.

I am, however, a reasonable person. At least I think I am. I have looked at numerous good analyses of American active-shooter events, and I cant see many ways that proposed rules would have changed them. But I understand the call to do something.

However, let me just say that some things arent going to happen. The 2nd Amendment isnt going to be repealed. (Im talking to you in particular, American College of Emergency Physicians.)

Likewise, no buy-back or confiscation scheme will work here. America has a deeply entrenched gun culture that other countries lack, and it has been so since colonial days. Please understand that even the Australian scheme only got something like one third or one-half of those weapons; the rest are still in circulation. In the U.S.? The numbers Ive seen suggest that there are between 8 and 20 million AR-15 rifles in circulation. In addition, there are oodles of other types of semi-automatic, military-style rifles. (M-1, M-1A, AK-47, SKS and assorted other civilian versions of those weapons may constitute 10 million more  I have no idea how to figure that number).

So for one thing, the feds have neither the money nor manpower to go and get them. And nobody has the political will, or disdain for Americans, to do so. In addition, the numbers in circulation suggest that as tragic as every shooting is, statistically we are a remarkably law-abiding and peaceful bunch of gun nuts here in the U.S. Thats pretty well born out in research on crimes by concealed weapons permit holders.

But I want to come to the table and make an offer, a suggestion, an olive branch. And I want to do it without being accused of heresy by fellow gun owners. Folks, I believe in our cause. Because I believe the founders understood the potential for tyranny in every age and the value of having the means to resist. The rest of the constitution ultimately depends on the 2nd Amendment, even though you may think that sounds extreme. Humans descend into totalitarianism with remarkable ease, no matter how nice we may seem for now.

So heres my suggestion.

I have a concealed weapons permit. It took fingerprints, a fee, about two months of waiting for a background check and then a four-hour class. I was cool with that. With that, in SC and some other states with reciprocity, I can carry a firearm on my person in public.

What if we had a similar permit process for semi-automatic, military-style rifle purchases? Heres how it would look.

From 18- 21, long gun purchases of standard rifles and shotguns would still be acceptable. Id still allow purchase of .22 semi-autos and some others. It would take some negotiation and discussion among gun owners. Those in active or reserve military status could buy at 18. If you can go to war, you can be trusted.

At 21, one needs to go through the standard process that most of us do for concealed carry permits. Fingerprints, background check then a class to discuss legalities and assess competence.

After that, you can buy the rifles when you present your card. Youve been vetted. Mind you, this isnt carte blanche to carry rifles in public. States will have to decide that. Again, Im not a fan. But I wouldnt mind being able to keep a rifle in my truck without being considered a danger to society.

People with concealed carry permits have remarkably low rates of criminal gun use. This has been well documented. So that process seems to have value. Not just because of background checks, but also selection effect. Those willing to go to the state for the permit are unlikely to have criminal history or intent.

So what would us gun nuts get out of the deal? National concealed carry permit with reciprocity. No more crossing state lines and being charged with a felony for what was acceptable two miles back. A national recognition that were willing to be evaluated and that we are as interested in safety and security as everyone else. A national recognition that we arent the problem, but may be part of the solution.

The permit could be called a firearms purchase and carry card. It wouldnt be necessary to purchase handguns as long as instant background checks are in place, and it wouldnt be necessary for standard rifles and shotguns for the same reason. (But could be used to expedite both).

This permit would not constitute gun registration, which is a hot-button topic for many gun owners.

But for carrying sidearms and purchasing the rifles in question (which by the way are used in a very, very small proportion of crimes statistically) this permit would seem to accomplish two things.

First, it would demonstrate our willingness to work with the other side and second, it would offer us the freedom to do what weve wanted for so long, which is carry across the country.

Im open to thoughts and comments. Please, please, be civil. Im just trying to think through this.

Edwin Leap is an emergency physician who blogs at edwinleap.com and is the author of the Practice Test and Life in Emergistan.

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Support our mission and join our community now.For the first time in many years a local group will perform William Shakespeares classic play, The Merchant of Venice.

The newly formed Shakespeare Company has been busy rehearsing in Castlecomer for the last number of weeks.

Performances will take place in Rothe House on Monday and Tuesday at 8pm nightly.

The Shakespeare Company is different from other local drama groups.

Its sole focus is on looking at plays through intensive rehearsal and work shopping.

Formed by a chance meeting of local actor Michael Somers and Theatre professional Janice De Broithe, both of whom set out to bring Shakespeare to the South-East.

We are dipping our first toe in the water doing this kind of thing, said Michael.

Our plan is to develop and perform other Shakespeare plays in the future through workshops and monologues. We have been overwhelmed by the reaction so far, he added.

Director Janice De Broithe has been very busy building her theatre career. After studying drama in UCC she headed to the bright lights of London to study directing in LAMDA.

Her shows are of exceptional quality while her track record of giving new actors and developing their talent is second to none.

We would encourage the audience to partake in the show, she said. If they have masquerade masks or Venetian masks bring them as the audience will be central to this show.

But, the last piece of the jigsaw was finding someone who was knowledgeable on Tudor music.

That was to be found in the shape of Castlecomer Arts Academy director Claire McHugh. With a cast of Kilkenny and Carlow people, Castlecomer became the ideal rehearsal venue.

The staging of this play will happen in Rothe House. As many history buffs know this is Irelands finest mansion from Tudor times.

More interesting is that it was built in 1603, the very same year as the first performance of Merchant of Venice.

We are excited to show Roth House off, said Patricia Duff.

This play fits into everything we try and do here. Were happy to give local talent an outlet to perform, the Rothe House manager said.

The play is set in Venice, the epicentre of consumption, speculation and debt, rivalry and prejudice reign.

Antonio requests a loan from the ostracised Jewish moneylender Shylock, who agrees.

If he fails to repay his debt, Antonio must give Shylock a pound of his flesh by way of recompense.

Shakespeare dramatises the claims of tolerance and intolerance, justice and mercy, while in the character of Shylock, the bard created one of the most memorable outsiders in all theatre.

We have given everything to this play, said Janice De Broithe.

The director thanked her cast of Aoife Cody, Sorca Cox, Sean Gordon Dalton, Rosie Hayes, Paul McManus, John Rice, Eimear Roche and Kevin Tynan.

They have made this project, she said. Hopefully the fun we have had can be seen in our interpretation of this comedy. Tickets, priced 15, are available at Eventbrite, 083-8673114 or The Shakespeare Company on Facebook.Stuff reports:

The Department of Corrections has set up a paedophile village  outside the wire and a short walk from multiple schools  at Rimutaka Prison. While the move has shocked a nearby parent who only found out after it was a done deal, a prison expert says Corrections is dealing with the tricky situation of housing child-sex offenders in the most-realistic way. Mike Williams, head of penal reform organisation the Howard League, said prisoners had to be released eventually under supervision and nobody wanted them to move into their community so housing them on prison land was a solid compromise.

Sounds pretty sensible to me. A sort of halfway house.

So is it really near schools and childcare centres as the headline claims?

The prison grounds are 1.5 kilometres from Hutt International Boys School, 1.8km from St Brendans School, and Silverstream School is 2.8km away.

That is not near a school. I suspect there is no location in urban New Zealand that is not within 1.5 kms of a school. We have 2,500 schools in NZ.

As an example, there are 64 schools in Wellington City. Lets assume they are equally spaced out. If each school has a circle around it with a 1.5 km radius then each schools takes up 7 square kms. 64 schools would take up 448 square kms.

The urban area of Wellington City is 442 square kms.

Being within 1.5 km of a school is not close to a school. That is fear mongering. Being 100 metres from a school is close. Being 1.5 km from a school just means you live in a city.

Local mother Gina Roberts on Thursday received an email from her daughters school and was immediately concerned as there were four schools or early childcare centres within 4km of the site.

If you say nothing can be within 4 km of a school or early chilldhood centre you are saying nothing can be within 50 square kms of a school or early child centre.

There are 8,000 schools and ECEs in NZ. So the exclusion zone for them would need to be 400,000 square kms. The total area of NZ is 268,000 square kms.

So this really is hysterical nonsense.

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Photos on display to mark 20th anniversary of capital relocation



By Kwak Yeon-soo





A photo of Baiterek Tower showcased at the "Exhibit Dedicated to the 20th Anniversary of the Capital Relocation of the Republic of Kazakhstan" Courtesy of Korea Foundation

A photo exhibition in Seoul showcases the lives and landscape of the world's youngest capital city Astana, Kazakhstan, two decades after the relocation of its capital from Almaty, an initiative taken by President Nursultan Nazarbayev.



The "Exhibit Dedicated to the 20th Anniversary of the Capital Relocation of the Republic of Kazakhstan" opened Monday at Korea Foundation (KF) Gallery in Seoul and will run until Sept. 1. It was organized by the nonprofit group Foundation of the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, in collaboration with the Embassy of Kazakhstan in Seoul and KF.



The exhibit is divided into two thematic sections: "Astana, the Pearl of the Great Steppe" and "Undiscovered Kazakhstan."



The first half of the exhibit features 36 photos of various buildings in Astana, including Baiterek Tower which symbolizes the tree of life, and the Palace of Peace and Accord designed by the famous British architect Norman Forster. The photos of the city, which embodies both modern and traditional elements, personify the ideas and hopes of its citizens.



The capital of Kazakhstan was relocated from Almaty, the country's largest city, to Astana in June 1998. Due to its cold winter weather, the capital is known as one of the coldest capital cities in the world. Astana, which means "capital city" in Kazakh, is home to over 1 million urban dwellers.





A photo of the Palace of Peace and Accord at the "Exhibit Dedicated to the 20th Anniversary of the Capital Relocation of the Republic of Kazakhstan" Courtesy of Korea FoundationPlane ride to spread fathers ashes ends in tragedy

This is one of those stories that we really, no really, shouldnt giggle about. And yet its also one of those stories that it is impossible not to giggle about, at least a little.

So, the background. A few weeks back the father of these two brothers dies. No, thats not funny. So, they have the funeral, the body is cremated and they take delivery of the ashes. No, thats not funny either. Then the idea is that they fly up in a small plane so that they can spread the ashes over the countryide. Hey, if thats what makes all happy why not?

Well, heres why not:

One of two brothers on a flight to spread their fathers ashes died on Saturday after their small plane crashed in a pond in Massachusetts.

Thats really not a good outcome to this process:

Scott Landis, a National Guardsman from Hanson, was piloting a single-engine plane, ready to sprinkle his fathers ashes with his brother, when the planes engine lost power on takeoff and crashed into a pond, killing him and severely injuring his brother, according to friends and officials.

Yep, the brother who died was the pilot.

Don Conway, the Landis brothers uncle, told CBS Boston that the pairs father died two weeks ago after battling cancer [agh!]. Scott Landis had apparently been on leave from the Army to memorialize his father by scattering his ashes when his untimely death occurred.

Nope, thats not funny either, is it? Army pilot takes leave to sort out his fathers dying wish to spread his ashes and.well, yes, that does raise a giggle. Perhaps not a funny ha ha one but theres something so dreadfully inapposite about it all that a snort of laughter at least is just what is going to happen. Yes, obviously, we feel for the rest of the family but still, its a punchline, isnt it?

Tim Worstall

Posted: 27th, August 2018 | In: Strange But True Comment | TrackBack | PermalinkMegarectum! British mans colon was so full of poo it burst

If you need the toilet, then for the love of god, go! Via Ars Technica comes news of a 24-year-old British man whose colon was so full of poo it burst. This caused reduced consciousness, much pain and his kidneys to fail. The case features in the latest BMJ Case Reports, in which we learn that the mans plight it called megacolon or megarectum. (Call me Marvel, I have ideas.)

The man, who had a deep history of constipation, arrived at hospital complaining of severe pain. He was given laxatives and a home enemas kit and sent on his way. Some days passed. He returned to hospital, where medics cut into him to scoop out the excess poo.

And how was your day?

Mike Kritharis

Posted: 27th, August 2018 | In: Strange But True Comment | TrackBack | PermalinkRabat, Aug 26 (AFP) Hundreds of Moroccans have signed a petition urging authorities to provide urgent medical and psychological care to a teenage girl who says she was gang-raped.

Khadija Okkarou, in a video posted online Tuesday, said she was abducted in mid-June outside the home of a relative in central Morocco by young men alleged to belong to a "dangerous gang".

"They held me for about two months, and raped and tortured me," the 17-year-old said, showing what appeared to be scars from cigarette burns and tatoos carved into parts of her body.

"I will never forgive them. They have destroyed me," she said.

Her testimony has sparked anger in Morocco with social media users launching the "we are all Khadija" hashtag and a petition urging King Mohammed VI to provide her with medical and psychological care.

More than 3,400 people had signed the petition by Sunday night.

The girl's father, Mohammed Okkarou, said three suspects had been arrested on Saturday in connection with her abduction and that a trial was set to begin on September 6.

Naima Ouahli, of the Moroccan Association of Human Rights, told AFP that a total of 12 suspects had been rounded up.

Moroccan authorities were not immediately available for comment. Sexual harassment is commonplace in Morocco, despite the adoption of a new constitution in 2011 that enshrines gender equality and urges the state to promote it.

And in January 2014, Morocco scrapped a controversial law that allowed child rapists to escape punishment if they marry their victims.

Last year 1,600 cases of rape were heard by Moroccan courts, twice as many as previous years. (AFP) SCY

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)



Still day 4 and just finished visiting the incredible Cliffs of Moher, our final destination for the day is the charming city of Galway. We plugged Galway on the GPS and went our merry way. The thing with Ireland I noticed is there are so many of the country lanes and very few national or motorways. So you end up driving in a country road more than you like. And While I enjoy seeing charming small towns, grazing sheep, rolling hills and plenty of wide open spaces, the trip gets long and longer even when driving in the dark, as we were doing.We went past ocean side and then went inland. Along the way we passed by an imposing church St. John the Baptist church and we decided to stop at a parking spot across the street from the church. The signage says we are in Ballyvaughan, a small harbor village. It was twilight, and the decision to see the church came quickly. I was curious about the interiors, hoping it was open, for one thing.It was open, but without light, photography was difficult to do. We did not linger as there are more miles to go before our destination.Leaving the church, we hit the road once more following the directions of our trusted GPS. However, as we went around the curve, there was a street sign for Galway pointing to the opposite direction our GPS was telling us. We listened to the GPS, only to find ourselves back at the front of the church. This time around, we followed the street signs and good for us. The sign took us to the main road. The GPS was giving us the fastest route, but it made us go through all the muddy, rocky country lanes in the middle of nowhere. If we blew a tire, we'd be there forever. No one would find us.It was very dark when we reached Galway. Thankfully, we found our hotel. It was located near a busy roundabout, and a very nice hotel. However, the lift was out, under repair at that time, so we have to use the stairs. Fortunately, they have us on the firstfloor only, and the porter brought our bags to the room.For dinner, we wanted to go out and eat at Riordan's at Quay Street in Latin Quarter. Reviews were good online for this small hole in the wall in the touristy part of town.Getting there was a challenge. We couldn't find the Latin Quarter in the first place. We knew it was close to the waterfront and since we were in the waterfront, we thought we'd grabbed the first street parking we found and just walk there, where ever it is. According to the GPS, from here Latin Quarter is two minutes away. So it was decided that we would park here, in this dimly lit, quiet, industrial-looking part of the waterfront. We found the parking meter and for the love of us, we just couldn't get a parking ticket. No one was around at that time. Very few people were out in this dreary and frosty night. I thought, hey, it's nighttime and no one is going to park here, why bother paying for parking ticket - we were not able to make the machine cough up a ticket anyway.Thus blindly, we went away from the waterfront and walked the length of another long empty street in the rain. Hardly anyone is still out and most of the stores are closed. I got really nervous and for a touristy area, even in the off season, there should have been people still walking around. I got the husband to go back to the car and try our luck finding Latin Quarter by driving.Luckily we happened upon Latin Quarter. True it was a very short drive away from where we parked. Despite of it all, we managed to snag a street parking in front of St. Nicholas Church. The church was closed, but you can peek inside.Latin Quarter is full of bars, restaurants, and shops. I cannot wait to see it in daylight.Riordan's is easy to find. The small restaurant was quite confusing. We entered through the door and climbed up to the second floor (or first floor, by Europe's standards) and no one was there. On the way back down, we were ushered in the ground floor where a handful of tables were set up. Two elderly gentlemen sitting separately looked so comfortable as they enjoy their meal in lingering fashion - both of them having their end-of-meal coffee and reading the papers. I love the vibe of this restaurant - looks like a local hangout, but a tourist like me felt very at ease too.We ordered seafood chowder (my new favorite) and Shepherd's Pie and an Irish coffee. After dinner we walked around the area for a bit and noticed most of the restaurants and bars we researched are in this area, including the pub we marked as a must-go.Still raining, we left for the hotel. Along the way, we saw a grocery store, Lidl, and stopped for some supplies - bread, cheese, fruits and juice. I love this grocery store, it has a lot of Polish goodies. On this trip, we have visited Lidl a few times.(ANSA) - Rome, August 27 - A probe against Interior Minister Matteo Salvini for allegedly kidnapping 177 Eritrean migrants aboard the Diciotti coast guard ship will be a "boomerang", Salvini said Monday.

An Agrigento prosecutor has placed Salvini under investigation for kidnapping the migrants, who were allagedly unlawfully held for five days at sea and then another five days at Catania harbour.

Salvini said he was not "cowed" and that he would not ask the Senate to refuse to lift his immunity from prosecution.

"I only did my job as minister and I'm ready to do it again," Salvini said.

Some 100 of the migrants will go to a Catholic centre at Rocca di Papa near Rome, Pope Francis said.

Albania and Ireland will take about 20 each.

Three Egyptians and a Bangladeshi have been arrested on charges of being the migrant traffickers.

Washington DC, [USA] Aug 26 (ANI): From starting the day with the sound of the alarm, till finally hitting the bed at night, we are constantly surrounded by noise. It's everywhere, from people talking in the office to the never-ending traffic jams, to road constructions.

In an attempt to solve this issue, a group of researchers is working on improving this noisy frustration. Current noise cancelling technology comes in the form of headphones and earbuds. To cancel noise, these headphones emit an anti-noise signal to contrast the external sounds.

The time available for the headphones to produce this anti-noise signal is extremely short. This results in some noise getting through, which is why all these devices must cover the entire ear with the noise-canceling material. However, wearing such ear-blocking devices for long periods of time is not comfortable, and can even be harmful.

Sheng Shen, one of the researchers said, "Our goal is to not block the ear canal, we envision a behind-the-ear device that still achieves noise cancellation as good as the best headphones or earbuds available today."

The research involves combining wireless IoT networks with noise cancellation. A microphone is placed in the environment that senses sound and sends them over wireless signals to an earpiece. Since wireless signals travel a million times faster than sound, the earphone can receive the sound information much faster than the actual sound itself.

Explaining the concept further, Romit Roy Choudhury, another researcher said, "This is similar to lightning and thunder, the lightning arrives much before the thunder, allowing people to prepare for the loud rumble. Similarly, our ear device gets the sound information in advance, and has much more time to produce a better anti-noise signal."

With this technology, the person who wants to cancel noise would place the IoT microphone away from her, say on their office door. The noise from their coworkers' conversation in the hallway is picked up by this IoT device and transmitted to their earpiece over a wireless connection. The actual sound arrives at the earpiece later, and because of this lead time, the noise can be fully canceled. As a result, it is no longer necessary to block the ear canal.

There are, however, a few limitations. The IoT microphone needs to be between the noise source and the person. If noise is coming at them from all directions, a couple more IoT devices would need to be placed around them.

In tests conducted during the research, the device designed by Shen and Choudhury's group outperformed a leading headphone in overall noise cancellation and was rated better by the human participants.

When asked about the potential privacy concerns involved with the device, Shen said "The most common privacy concern is that the device will secretly record someone's voice. This device is analog, so it has no capacity to record the sound. The moment the device hears the sound it is sent out wirelessly."

This differentiation is what separates this device from many IoT devices commonly used today, which must record voice samples in order to operate. The researchers are still working on the final product.

The research was discussed in the SIGCOMM 2018 meeting. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)New Delhi, Aug 27: India has initiated probe into alleged dumping of a certain type of steel imported from Brazil, China and Germany following a complaint BY a domestic player. The commerce ministry's investigation arm - Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) - has stated that there is an evidence of injury to the domestic industry caused by dumped "High Speed Steel of Non Cobalt Grade" from these three countries. Graphite India Ltd has filed an application before the DGTR for imposition of anti-dumping duty on imports of the product from Brazil, China and Germany. This steel is used for making high speed steel cutting tools.

"There is prima facie evidence of injury to the domestic industry caused by dumped imports from subject countries to justify initiation of an anti-dumping investigation," DGTR has said in a notification. In the probe, the directorate would determine the existence, degree and effect of any alleged dumping. If established that dumping has caused material injury to domestic players, the directorate would recommend imposition of anti-dumping duty on the imports of the chemical from these nations.

The period of investigation covers 2017-18. However, for the purpose of injury investigation, the period will also cover the data of 2014-17. Anti-dumping duties are levied to provide a level playing field to local industry by guarding against cheap below-cost imports. Imposition of anti-dumping duty is permissible under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) regime. Both India and China are members of the Geneva-based body. The duty is aimed at ensuring fair trading practices and creating a level-playing field for domestic producers vis-a-vis foreign producers and exporters.Ranchi, August 27: In the latest development, the Jharkhand High Court has lifted the ban imposed on Popular Front of India (PFI). The court observed that the state government did not follow the procedures to ban an organisation. The case filed regarding it has also been quashed. Justice Rongon Mukhopadhyay passed the order in a case in which general secretary of Jharkhand PFI Abdul Wadod had challenged the governments decision.

Advocate A Allam filed the case on behalf of Wadod. Allam told ANI, "No incriminating material was found that calls for a ban. No anti-social or anti-national activities were found. The PFI has registration in Society Registration Act. The organisation works for social issues." In February this year, the Jharkhand Government banned the PFI for spreading anarchy in the state.

The action was taken after the Law department gave its consent on the proposal of the Home Department. The PFI was banned under Section 16 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1908. It also prevents anyone from becoming a member of the organisation or giving any donation. The government also alleged that the organisation has links with Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence wing. Various books and documents of the PFI were also seized by the government.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 27, 2018 08:20 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).Shillong, Aug 27: Fate of Chief Minister Conrad Sangma and other candidates who contested in the by-elections for the assembly seats of South Tura and Ranikor will be determined today. The State Election Commission (SEC) is scheduled to declare the bypoll results today. The counting of votes is scheduled to begin at 8am. Stay tuned here for the live news and updates of early trends and results.

In the bypolls held on Thursday, a collective voter turnout of over 77 per cent was recorded. In South Tura, where the electorate size is 30,231 voters, 72.82 per cent of the voters exercised their right to franchise. The voter turnout in Ranikore, with an electoral strength of 29,685 was recorded as 82.1 per cent.

South Tura Assembly By-elections: Candidates in Fray & Reason for Bypoll

- Chief Minister Conrad Sangma is contesting from the ruling National People's Party (NPP). The victory is essential for Sangma to continue as the CM as he is currently not a member of the legislative assembly.

- The Congress candidate is debutant Charlotte W Momin. Independent candidates John Leslee K Sangma, who is a former MLA, and Chris Kabul A Sangma are also in the fray.

- The bypoll was necessitated as the incumbent MLA and Sangma's sister, Agatha Sangma resigned in July to pave way for her brother's election.

Ranikor Assembly By-elections: Candidates in Fray & Reason for Bypoll

- The bypoll was necessitated as the incumbent MLA, Martin M Danggo, resigned and joined the NPP. He was in the fray again, constesting on the NPP ticket.

- The Congress fielded Jackiush Sangma, whereas, the UDP an ally of the NPP, had given the ticket to Pius Marwein.

In the 60-member Meghalaya assembly, the NPP with 19 MLAs leads a coalition government, with support from seven UDP MLAs, four PDF MLAs, two Independents, two MLAs each of the BJP and the HSPDP. The rainbow alliance, as pundits call it, also includes one legislator each from NCP and KHNAM. The Congress, which is the single-largest party with 20 seats, is serving as the prime Opposition.Islamabad, Aug 27: Pakistan will reiterate its serious objections over two water storage and hydropower projects being built by India during a meet with New Delhi this week in Lahore.

A government official told Dawn news on Sunday that Indian Water Commissioner P.K Saxena, along with a delegation, was expected to reach Lahore on Tuesday to begin the discussions with his Pakistani counterpart Syed Mehr Ali Shah from Wednesday.

The official said Pakistan would raise its concerns over the 1000MW Pakal Dul and 48MW Lower Kalnai hydroelectric projects on two different tributaries of River Chenab despite Islamabad's serious objections over their designs.

Pakistan has been raising reservations over the designs of the two projects and would like India to either modify it to make them compliant to 1960 Indus Waters Treaty or put the projects on hold until an understanding is reached between the two sides.

The official said Islamabad and New Delhi would also finalise the schedule of future meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission and visits of the teams of the Indus commissioners.

He said that the water commissioners of Pakistan and India were required to meet twice a year and arrange technical visits to projects' sites and critical river head works, but Pakistan had been facing a lot of problems in timely meetings and visits.

The two-day session is also expected to discuss ways and means for timely and smooth sharing of hydrological data on shared rivers.

Pakal Dul is a storage-cum-power project and can have gross storage of about 108,000 acre-feet of water. The project design envisages its filling every monsoon season between mid-June and end-August.

Pakistan believes that the tunnel spillway of Pakal Dul should be raised closer to the dead storage level because its placement 40 metres below the dead storage level could allow drawdown flushing not permitted to India under the 1960 water treaty, reports Dawn news.

On the 48MW Lower Kalnai project, Pakistan has raised objections to its freeboard, pondage and intake and is of the view that the depth of bridge girder and provision of freeboard should be close to one metre and considers two-metre freeboard as "excessive".

The Lower Kalnai project is on a left bank tributary of Chenab and can have gross storage of about 1,508 acre-feet of water.

Under the provisions of the Indus Water Treaty 1960, waters of the eastern rivers - Sutlej, Beas and Ravi - had been allocated to India and the western rivers - the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab - to Pakistan, except for certain non-consumptive uses for India.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 27, 2018 08:45 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).After a month of blood-letting through suicide attacks at various targets carried out by Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan, Afghan and Coalition forces carried out targeted airstrikes that killed the Islamic States Afghanistan chief.

Abu Sayed Orakzai, also known as Sad Arhabi, and 10 other Islamic State fighters were killed Saturday night in an airstrike in Nangarhar province, according to provincial spokesman Attaullah Khogyani.

The strike was carried out by Afghan and coalition forces after receiving intelligence from Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, Khogyani said.

U.S. Forces-Afghanistan spokesman Lt. Col. Martin O'Donnell confirmed that the U.S. targeted a "senior leader of a designated terrorist organization" in Afghanistan on August 25. He pointed to a statement by a spokesman for Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani that the head of ISIS -- called Daesh by the U.S. military -- in Afghanistan was killed in the strike.

"I would also add that the United States unrelentingly continues its counterterrorism efforts against ISIS-K, Al-Qaeda, and other regional and international terrorist groups," O'Donnell said in a statement.

The air attacks on a village in Khugyani district, near the border with Pakistan, also destroyed a large number of weapons, explosives, and ammunition, the agency said.

Erhabi was the fourth IS leader killed in Afghanistan since the group emerged there in early 2015. Erhabi succeeded Abu Sayed who was killed in a U.S. drone attack in early July.

Islamic State has a relatively small but potent presence in Afghanistan, mainly in Nangarhar - the birthplace of the group's Afghan branch - but more recently in the northern province of Jowzjan where it is fighting for control of smuggling routes into neighbouring Turkmenistan.

Hours before Saturday's air raids, the group claimed a deadly suicide attack that targeted a sit-in protest outside an election commission office in the city of Jalalabad. Islamic State has claimed a number of attacks in recent weeks, including assaults on several government installations in Kabul and a bombing at a school in a Shia area of the capital that killed at least 37 people.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 27, 2018 05:24 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).Europes biggest volcano, Italy's Mount Etna has erupted with immense strength - sending large blocks of flaming lava 500 feet into the air. The eruption from Mount Etna also sent ash plumes into the sky, with officials remarking that the lava spewing down Mount Etna appears to be "non-stop".

The volcano, which is the most active volcano sites in the world, first "re-awoke" in late July of this year. The National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (IGNV) in Italy recorded an intense escalation in volcanic eruptions over the weekend.

WATCH: Italy's Mount Etna, on the island of Sicily, has roared back into volcanic action, sending up plumes of ash and spewing lava. pic.twitter.com/XPlncQVFNf  CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) August 24, 2018

Photographs of the spectacle on Saturday showed streams of red magma spilling down the volcano's slopes and plumes of ash extending skywards. Ash plumes could also be seen spreading several hundred meters above the crater.

Etna a hugely popular tourist destination is on the UNESCO list of heritage sites. But authorities haven't ordered any nearby villages to evacuate as of yet.

In March, scientists found that Mount Etna is actually sliding into the Mediterranean Sea. Etna  located on the Italian island of Sicily  is edging towards the Mediterranean at a rate of around 14mm per year. While its movement may seem too slow to cause any concern, scientists studying the geology of the volcano have said the situation will require careful monitoring. This is the first time downward basement sliding of an entire active volcano has been directly observed.

This is the first time its been observed in an active volcano, the studys lead author, John Murray of the Open University, said back then. While it has been known to happen in extinct volcanoes, this is the first time its been demonstrated for the whole volcano to be moving like this. Apart from the eruptions themselves, the shifting of an active volcano can potentially trigger disastrous landslides, and even tsunamis.

Mount Etna was first recorded erupting in 1500 BC, and since then it has erupted around 200 times, with a burst of activity in recent decades. It is a huge 40 kilometres wide and 10,926 feet high. Etna produces around 7 million tonnes of steam, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide every year.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 27, 2018 05:55 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).Nigeria, August 27: In a shocking case, a Nigerian woman has been arrested by local police for allegedly selling her six-week-old baby so that she can buy a cell phone with the money. According to a Times Now report, the accused a 23-year-old Miracle Johnson reportedly sold her baby to an orphanage in exchange for N200,000, according to a PUNCH Metro report. The mother has said that she was prompted to sell the baby by her friend Mama Joy, who is currently on the run. Two-Month-Old Infant in Chhattisgarh Dies as Ambulance Door Gets Jammed, Parents Stopped From Breaking Window

Reportedly, her friend also suggested her to use some of the money in buying a motorcycle for her husband or help jump-start a business. The mother is now expressing regret over her decision, and that she said that she sold her baby due to frustration because her husband is unable to provide the basic needs for her and her two children.

In July this year, in India, the Jharkhand government started investigating the allegations of child trafficking against the Missionary of Charity. The organisation is set up by Nobel laureate Mother Teresa. The Child Welfare Committee (CWC) already launched an investigation after a couple filed a complaint against the organisation.

The couple approached the CWC after staffers at Missionaries of Charity took away an infant from them. According to a report published in India Today, the couple had paid Rs 1.2 lakh for the 14-day child. The police have detained a sister-in-charge for questioning. Two others have also been arrested in connection with the case.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 27, 2018 04:56 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).Aug 27, 2018, 2:57pm ET

FCA exec gets 5.5-year prison sentence in UAW corruption fiasco

Alphons Iacobelli could receive a reduced sentence if his cooperation leads to other convictions.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' former head of employee relations, Alphons Iacobelli, has been sentenced to 5.5 years in federal prison for his role in a corruption scandal with the United Auto Workers.

The disgraced executive pled guilty to conspiracy to violate the Labor Management Relations Act and submitting a false tax return.

Prosecutors claim Iacobelli and UAW officials misused funds that should have been spent on a joint training center. Iacobelli allegedly used the funds to buy a Ferrari, ultra-expensive pens and construct an in-ground pool at his home.

"It is difficult to imagine a more egregious offense and a more impactful offense of corrupting the labor management process," said US District Judge Paul Borman.

Iacobelli is the highest-ranking FCA executive to be arrested for the scheme. Reporting directly to the late FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne, he allegedly orchestrated more than $1.5 million in illegal compensation to UAW officials.(ANSA) - Rome, August 27 - A probe against Interior Minister Matteo Salvini for allegedly kidnapping 177 Eritrean migrants aboard the Diciotti coast guard ship will be a "boomerang", Salvini said Monday.

An Agrigento prosecutor has placed Salvini under investigation for kidnapping the migrants, who were allegedly unlawfully held for five days at sea and then another five days at Catania harbour.

Salvini said he was not "cowed" and that he would not ask the Senate to refuse to lift his immunity from prosecution.

"I only did my job as minister and I'm ready to do it again," Salvini said.

Some 100 of the migrants will go to a Catholic centre at Rocca di Papa near Rome, Pope Francis said.

Albania and Ireland will take about 20 each.

Three Egyptians and a Bangladeshi have been arrested on charges of being the migrant traffickers.

The other deputy premier, Industry and Labour Minister Luigi Di Maio, said in the next such case Italy "will negotiate directly with individual States".

He said the government was defending Italy's interests.

Most of the Eritrean migrants from the Diciotti will be moved from a Messina hotspot to a Catholic Church centre at Ariccia near Rome, the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI) told a news agency on Monday.

"They will be moved as soon as possible, in the coming hours, to the Arccia centre run by Auxiluim, pending their transfer to the many diocese who have given their availability: Turin, Brescia, Bologna, Agrigento, Cassano all'Jonio, Rossano Calabro, to cite only those I know about," CEI's head of social communications, Father Ivan Maffeis, told the SIR religious news agency.

The CEI agreed to take in about 100 of the migrants while Albania and Ireland took 20 each to end a stand-off after Interior Minister Matteo Salvini kept them aboard saying they would not land until the EU agred to take them.

Meanwhile Germany said funding the EU budget is an obligation laid down in the EU's founding treaties, commenting on Italy's threat to withhold some of its payment unless the EU agreed to take in the Diciotti migrants.

EU budget funding "was ratified in the European treaties, and it is valid for all," said Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert.

European Parliament President Antonio Tajani said Monday that said you can't criminally try a policy like Salvini's hardline stance on migrant non-reception.

"You can't try a political line, in the end Salvini will be acquitted by the ministerial court and then it becomes only a propaganda clash that doesn't solve the real problem: neither the immigration one nor the that of the separation of powers," Tajani said.

"The affair strongly highlights the problem of justice reform, we can't waste any more time".

Italians overestimate the presence of migrants in their country more than any other nationality in the EU, according to a survey by think tank Istituto Cattaneo out on Monday.

The study on the phenomenon of immigration in Italy and its perception said those polled overestimated the presence of migrants by 18%.

Immigrants in Italy account for roughly 8% of the overall population.

The poll also found that 74% of the Italians interviewed were convinced that immigrants were responsible for higher crime rates against a European average of 57%.

A reported 58% of those interviewed for the survey also said they thought more immigration would imply fewer jobs for residents in Italy against a European average of about 14%.

There are "points of convergence" between Italy and Hungary on immigration policy, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on the eve of Tuesday's meeting between Premier Viktor Urban and Salvini.

Szijjarto said "the defence of Europe's borders consists in managing immigration.

"Hungary has already demonstrated that land borders can be defended.

"Australia and Italy have shown that maritime borders can be defended too".

Aug 27, 2018, 1:20pm ET

US, Mexico near bilateral trade pact to replace NAFTA

Trump administration negotiators will now turn their attention to Canada.

President Donald Trump has announced a surprise plan to establish a bilateral trade agreement with Mexico.

Negotiators from the US and Mexico have apparently made progress toward a new trade pact that could serve as a replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"We're going to call it the United States - Mexico Trade Agreement," Trump said in a statement.

The president plans to restart negotiations with Canada in the near future. The wording of his announcement appears to be a threat that Canada will be left out, however, if both sides cannot come to an agreement.

"Mexico and the United States have reached a commercial understanding," Mexico President Enrique Nieto wrote on Twitter. "We wish the reincorporation of Canada to the talks to achieve a successful trilateral negotiation of the NAFTA this week."New information is being gathered by the Diocese of Allentown about a priest accused of sending nude photos of himself to a 17-year-old girl he met through his work at an Allentown parish.

Matt Kerr, the diocese's external affairs secretary, said Sunday several calls and emails about The Rev. Kevin Lonergan were received by the diocese after the district attorney last week announced charges against Lonergan.

Lonergan, of Pottsville, is charged with one count each of corruption of minors and indecent assault. He could face a maximum of nine years in prison if convicted of both counts. He was arraigned on the charges and released on $50,000 unsecured bail.

Lonergan allegedly met the victim in August 2017 before Mass at St. Francis of Assisi church on 11th Street in Allentown, where he was assigned. He got her cellphone number from another member of the church and communicated with her, mostly via Snapchat, through January, the district attorney had said.

Some of those messages allegedly included nude photos. Kerr said the latest information has been sent to the Lehigh County District Attorney's Office.

Lonergan was assigned to St. Jane Frances de Chantal in Easton from June 2014 to May 2016. In a homily delivered at St. Jane Frances de Chantal Parish Sunday by Monsignor Stephen Radocha, he told parishioners the charges in Lehigh County have no connection to the Easton church.

Radocha said there was no credible allegations made against Lonergan while he was assigned to St. Jane's. However, there was a concern in 2016 about him raised by a third party, but Northampton County Children and Youth investigated and determined that concern to be unfounded," he said.

The Diocese, Radocha said, then took immediate action upon receiving the information. Lonergan was forbidden from ministry and the allegation was reported to law enforcement in accordance with the church's Zero-Tolerance Policy, he said.

Then Bishop John Barres later assigned Lonergan to become assistant pastor at the Cathedral of St. Catharine of Siena in Allentown.

"Had the allegation here at St. Jane's been judged credible by the authorities, Bishop Barres would not have given Father Lonergan another assignment," Radocha said.

"The Diocese did not report this allegation to you at the time, or after Father Lonergan left, because the allegation was ruled unfounded by the proper authorities," he added.

Radocha is urging any victims of abuse to come forward and report it.

The criminal charges against Lonergan came one week after the Pennsylvania attorney general released an 884-page grand jury report detailing decades of sexual abuse and coverups across six dioceses, including the Diocese of Allentown.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.A Philadelphia teacher was forced to empty his pockets, taken to the security office and escorted out of Dorney Park and Wildwater Kingdom after he was wrongly accused of theft based on his skin color, according to a lawsuit.

The federal lawsuit filed in June by Benjamin Slater says he was singled out as a theft suspect because he "matched the description" of someone going through purses and stealing wallets at the park on June 17, the lawsuit says.

Slater, who is black, had just gotten off his first ride when he was approached by a security officer and told, "I am going to be frank with you. Your pockets are bulging. I want to see what you have in them," the lawsuit says.

He took his phone, keys and wallet out of his pockets, then was taken to the security office, the suit says. After the "embarrassing and humiliating" walk through the park with police, he was questioned by all-white park security officers and officers with South Whitehall Township police, the suit says.

After Slater was cleared of wrongdoing, he was escorted from the park, the lawsuit says. He sued in federal court on the basis of discrimination and for a civil rights conspiracy. He seeks in excess of $75,000.

"Upon information and belief, Dorney Park trains its security officers to apprehend black customers and detain them when any black person is suspected of any alleged theft at the park," the lawsuit says.

Dorney Park's attorney, Joseph S. D'Amico Jr. of Upper Saucon Township, filed papers Aug. 3 asking a federal judge to throw the case out of court.

The second count should be dismissed because Dorney Park didn't engage in a civil rights conspiracy, according to D'Amico. The entire lawsuit should be thrown out of court because it was mailed to Dorney Park rather than served on the defendant as required by rules of civil procedure, according to D'Amico.

D'Amico had no comment on the lawsuit Monday.

Slater's lawsuit was filed by attorney Gary Schafkopf of Bala Cynwyd.

Slater was at the park with his girlfriend and two friends, the lawsuit says. He lives on East Washington Lane in Philadelphia and has been a special education teacher for 10 years, the lawsuit says.

Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook.New Jersey has joined a handful of states that require seat belts in school buses. On Saturday Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill stipulating that all newly manufactured school buses must have lap and shoulder seat belts.

The change was prompted by a deadly school bus crash on Interstate 80 in May. Shortly thereafter, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended all states mandate safety belts in school buses.

Only eight states require seat belts in large school buses. Pennsylvania does not. Legislators in Harrisburg have introduced several bills over the years to do so, all of which have failed.

There's no argument that lap and shoulder belts help protect kids in serious crashes, particularly rollovers and side impacts. The NTSB reports that over a decade ending in 2016, on average 128 people died each year in school transportation-related crashes. Just nine percent of those were occupants on school buses.

What do you think? Should Pennsylvania require seat belts in new school buses? Have a say in our informal, unscientific poll, and feel free join the debate in the comments section.They're becoming a familiar sight in the skies, and there's good reason for it.

Businesses and other entities are using drones for a variety of functions these days including real estate photography, search-and-rescue efforts, farming, roofing projects and more.

Warren County Community College has taken notice and last week unveiled its newest program at its Phillipsburg Education Center. The college dedicated the Edward J. and Eileen Smith Drone Lab at a ceremony last Wednesday. It is the first of its kind in the region, the college says in a news release.

Edward Smith, the Warren County freeholder director and a former WCCC trustee, dreamed up the program, says WCCC President Will Austin, a certified drone pilot. "With his guidance we have been able to put together one of the best drone labs in the country," Austin says.

Smith calls drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), a game changer in business. "When traditional jobs go away due to drones we want to be in a position to get people the new drone-related jobs that will take the place of them," he says.

He also sees an opportunity because of Warren County's "unique air space in the metro area." FAA regulations place heavy restrictions on drone flying near major airports, but the county is outside of those zones.

"We have the capability of being a cottage industry here because of the air space," Smith says. "You can't do this in places like Essex or Hudson counties. As a result, Warren County can be the drone mecca of the Northeast."

In honor of Smith and his wife Eileen, who has supported her husband's public service for many years, a permanent plaque was unveiled last Wednesday in Phillipsburg to commemorate the occasion and the lab.

For those in the public interested in learning more about the program, the Washington Business Improvement District on Sept. 13 is hosting a Lunch 'N Learn on drones at the Warren County campus.

Presented by Austin, there will be an overview and demonstration on how drones are now being used and how they can be of help to many businesses. That program starts at 11:45 a.m. The fee for that includes lunch. Advanced registration is recommended. For registration information on that program, visit washingtonbid.org.

For more about the drone program and how you can become a certified pilot, go to warren.edu.

Nick Falsone may be reached at nfalsone@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @nickfalsone. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.A brilliant new light hearted comedy play that looks into class prejudice in Ireland through the lens of two girls who meet at Electric Picnic, is set to take to The Hazel Wood stage at the festival this weekend.

The play ran for two weeks in Theatre Upstairs in Dublin in April and completely sold out its last 10 nights. It has received a five star review from The Arts Review and four stars from The Reviews Hub.

Speaking to the Leinster Express, writer and actor, Ali Hardiman, explained more about the play.

I set the play at Electric Picnic because I think it's a fantastic place where people from all walks of life meet and party without prejudice for 72 hours straight.

The play takes you on a journey with Scarlett and Joni through their weekend at Electric Picnic as they sing, dance and overcome the boundaries that divide them.

I play Scarlett, Ericka Roe plays Joni and we both play all the other characters along the way. The show is completely underscored with original music composed by my genius brother Sam Hardiman, she said.

The play comes to The Hazel Wood at Electric Picnic this Saturday, September 1 at 3pm.

With baby wipes, glitter and cans at the ready, Joni and Scarlett head off on their respective weekends.

From two sides of Dublin City and residing on two sides of the festival, the pair unexpectedly meet in the neon fields of Electric Picnic.

Hysterically riotous and soul-stirring, ELECTRIC probes our innate prejudices and preconceived notions of who we are while taking you on the session of a lifetime!

The play is written by Ali Hardiman, starring Ericka Roe and Ali Hardiman and directed by Clare Maguire with original beats by Sam Hardiman.A fundraising appeal has been launched to get a Laois man home from Tenerife after he suffered a three metre fall off a wall while on holiday with his girlfriend.

Daniel Wolski (20) from Portlaoise and has undergone two serious surgeries since the fall on August 1, which caused instant paralysis in his legs and he has spent weeks in the Intensive Therapy Unit in a Tenerife hospital.

A huge fundraiser has been set up to bring Daniel back to hospital in Ireland to begin his recovery. He needs to be transported with medical assistance from the Canary Island and the associated costs are huge.

Daniel and his girlfriend Sara ukaszewska went on holiday to Tenerife and their lives were turned upside down. They both work in the Killeshin Hotel, they are from Poland but moved to Portlaoise in 2006, Sara is a past pupil of Portlaoise College and Daniel attended St Marys CBS.

Speaking to the Leinster Express, Sara said after a tough few weeks, Daniel is getting stronger.

[He is] still fairly weak after the two operations. And he is suffering with pneumonia at the moment. But he is getting better with each day, she said.

Over 8,000 has been raised in just 15 hours since the fundraiser went live online.

On the fundraiser page, Sara outlines what happened:

Our lives were turned upside down on the 1st of August. On the first day of our holiday in Tenerife, my boyfriend lost consciousness as he was sitting on a wall that was dividing the pathway from the beach and fell approx. 3 meters down. The loss of consciousness was probably due to the sun and the fact he suffered an infant epilepsy. The fall resulted in a spinal injury which caused an instant paralysis in his legs. Ambulance was called and he was brought to a hospital. We were informed that he will have to be transported to a hospital on a different side of the island because it is more than likely he will have to be operated. I couldn't go with him because I was told he will have to undergo many scans and medical examinations and I wouldn't be able to see him until very late in the evening.

When I arrived at the hospital where he was transferred to I was told Daniel was placed in Intensive Therapy Unit. I still couldn't see him. After few hours I eventually got to speak to a doctor who told me Daniels injury is severe and he will have to be operated but we will have to wait 6 days for the surgery to happen.

Daniel's spine surgery took place on the 6th of August. It took about 4 hours. There was no complications. After his surgery Daniel returned to the Intensive Therapy Unit to be monitored. After few days he was moved to a neurosurgery unit.

On the 11th of August, when we thought nothing worse could happen, and it could all only get better, Daniel was diagnosed with Anemia, due to a huge blood loss. His parameters were getting worse and worse with each hour. A surgeon then diagnosed him with a duodenal ulcer which was bleeding. The surgeon told us that his medical condition is critical and he will have to be operated urgently.

Daniel underwent 2 serious operations within 5 days. He then returned to the Intensive Therapy Unit again. And was kept there for few days. He was then transferred to a post surgery unit.

Few days ago Daniel was diagnosed with pneumonia and possibly a bacteria that causes a fever. It's been 25 days since we arrived to Tenerife and Daniels biggest wish is to be transported back home - Ireland.

Unfortunately we were informed by the doctors that he will not be able to be transported without medical assistance. The costs of a medical transport from Tenerife to Ireland are huge and Daniels private insurance doesn't cover the costs of repatriation.

He has secured a place in a hospital in Dublin so we wish for him to start his rehabilitation process as soon as possible.

We are collecting funds to bring Daniel home where we believe he will feel better mentally and will receive a better medical care.

Thank you all for your support in this extremely difficult time.

DONATE HERE.Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald is set to visit Laois this week on a constituency tour that will also take in Offaly as the party prepares to battle to retain a seat in the key midlands constituency at the next General Election.

Ms McDonald will split Wedesday, August 29 between towns in Laois and Offaly taking in Portlaoise, Birr and other areas.

During her visit she will meet various groups including the Portlaoise Hospital Action Committee which as been campaigning against the downgrade of the Midland Regional Hospital Portlaoise.

She will also meet childcare providers, community alert groups, autisim campaigners and parents supporting the building of a new school in Portlaoise.

She tours the constituency with sitting Laois TD Brian Stanley who will be in a battle to retain a seat for the party in the reunited constituency at the next General Election.

Dep Stanley won a seat in the former bigger two-county five seat constituency in 2011. He retained a seat in the new three seat Laois constituency in 2016 when Dep Carol Nolan won a seat in Offaly for Sinn Fein.

Dep Nolan resigned from the party this year after opposing the party's support for a Yes vote in the abortion referendum.

Retaining the seat will be a key target for Sinn Fein because of Dep Nolan's resignation and Fianna Fail targeting of Laois Offaly as a possible gain.

A large chunk of Laois Offaly that takes in Portarlington is going into Kildare South at the next election.

Dep Stanley said the visit is party of a tour of constituencies around Ireland. She is also due to visit Tipperary this week.With the new school year fast approaching pharmacists are urging parents and guardians to act to prevent the spread of head lice. It is estimated that 1 in 10 children suffer from head lice at any one time, with 80% of head lice infestations occurring in children between the ages of four and 16. According to the Irish Pharmacy Union (IPU) all children should be screened for head lice once a week when they return to school.

Caitriona O Riordan, Pharmacist and member of the Executive Committee of the Irish Pharmacy Union said, There is no way to completely eliminate the risks of head lice but identifying an infection early will make treating it far easier. This will also help prevent the spread of infection through your family, or amongst school friends. Our advice to parents is to check their childrens hair regularly, ideally once a week.

If an infection is detected it is important to start treatment as soon as possible, lice are a normal part of life and are nothing to be embarrassed about. There are several treatment options available, and you should seek advice from your pharmacist about which is the most appropriate for your child. This is particularly important for any child suffering from asthma, allergies or those with a pre-existing skin condition, as they are the most likely to suffer a reaction.

According to Ms O Riordan, It is also extremely important to only take treatment if a living, moving louse is found. Using head lice products as a preventative measure is not effective, and unnecessarily exposes children to these products.

Head Lice  Advice from Pharmacists:

1 - Check childrens hair for lice regularly, ideally once a week: Use a wet comb made for the purpose. Combing through wet hair makes the process easier. Good light is important.

2 - Itching and scratching are common signs of head lice: As well as live lice, which crawl around the head, look out for nits. Nits are tiny eggs that may look like dandruff but cannot be flicked off the hair.

3 - Check close to the scalp, behind the ears, around the nape of the neck, top of the head and under the fringe.

4 - Treat the hair only if live lice or unhatched eggs are present: Treat the child as soon as possible. Always ask your pharmacist for advice on the most appropriate treatment to use.

5 - Inform the school, contacts and friends when your child has head lice: The school can then inform other parents that there is an outbreak, so everyone can check and treat their own children.

6 - Always follow the instructions on the treatment pack, and any advice given by your pharmacist: Products used to treat head lice do not prevent the infestation from occurring and should never be used just in case.Kildare County Councillors heard presentations from four potential candidates for president at their meeting this afternoon.

The four, Gavin Duffy, Joan Freeman, James P. Smyth and Kevin Sharkey, were seeking a nomination from the councillors. They will need four councils to back them to go forward for election.

And although invited, two more, Marie Goretti Moylan and Mr John Groarke, failed to appear.

Mr Duffy spoke first, outlining his personal links to Kidlare. His mother was a Cooke from Naas and he himself attended school in Newbridge College.

Read also: New chapter ahead as Duck & Cup cafe gets ready to close in Naas

He said he believed there was nothing in his past, either in his personal or business life which would be embarrassing to him.

And he added that he would fund his campaign by re-mortgaging his house. He said he feared that people might think he was being funded by large funders.

Duffy says his presidency would be built on a solid foundation of five key pillars - Youth, Age, Diversity, Respect and Working Together.

In particular, he focused on: "Ending 'shaming' in our society, attacking one another over body image or sexual orientation, particularly as it affects our young people who suffer severe cyber bullying."

Ms Freeman also emphasised that her mother was Kildare.

She said that she had been campaigning since she was 17 for improved mental health services.

She referenced other countries where people get a mental health checkup and where specific measures are in place to improve resilience.

The present president gave us dignity and global recognition. Everytime I saw him I was so proud to be Irish, she said, but added that Ireland is a different place than it was seven years ago.

This country is letting so many people down. One in four of us will need mental health services. We're the fourth highest in Europe for teenage suicides, she said.

Senator Joan Freeman arriving at Aras Cill Dara earlier today. Photos: Tony Keane

She said she was "under no illusion that any government will ever change this. I sometimes wonder if they have a conscience.

"I want to open the doors of the Aras and be that conscience."

She noted that as a senator she is chair of the Oireachtas Mental Health committee, the first such committee in Europe, and said that she could bring leadership to the campaign for better mental health services.

Cllr Sorcha ONeill asked her how she thought shed get on with Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. She responded that shed be well able for Mr Trump.

Cllr Fiona McLoughlin Healy asked how she thought Mr Trump could deal with her compassion. Ms Freeman suggesed that when it came to her compassion, her children might think otherwise.

As regards campaign finance, she said she wouldnt be mortgaging her house like Mr Duffy, as it was already mortgaged to the hilt to help Pieta House. She said she hoped to rely on donations from the public.

Mr Smyth spoke next. He has worked as a lecturer and as an artist in the past.

He said that Ireland has been in a state of quarrel with itself for some time where citizens were being reduced to customers and our elected officials are 'service providers'.

"Frankly, I will not stand for it!"

He was not as a cynic, or a malcontent, but as a proud Irishman who has lived abroad and represented this country all over the world.

When asked for specifics on what he would do about homelessness, he suggested that he could use his presidential salary. Well as a president, on quarter of a million? I'd feed them.

He said that he liked Michael D Higgins, but was disappointed he didnt keep his promise to only serving one term.

He also suggested that he he would put Robert Ballagh, or Bono in charge of the arts for a time. He was not impressed with the current or previous arts ministers.

Kevin Sharkey told his own personal story of a welcoming childhood in Donegal and, later, of abuse, and his fight against it.

I tell you this, not for your sympathy, but so that you will know that even at that young age, as a wee small boy, that Kevin Sharkey knew the difference between what was right and what was wrong.

He said that in Ireland, people have a sense of fair play, and that this would be a theme to his presidency.

He was questioned by Cllr Brendan Young about his support for Tommy Robinson. He admitted that while he was not a pleasant individual, he was a father of five children.

His presentation touched on everything from diplomacy to tourism, Trump, lonliness, Tommy Robinson and the state of rural towns.

Read also: KILDARE PROPERTY WATCH: Horse trainer, Tony Martin's Arodstown Stables to go under the hammer

Cllr Paul Ward noted that he had worked for many years on the Ryan Commission as a barrister and that the work of Mr Sharkey, who had been speaking about abuse as far back as 1996, had lead to the creation of that commission and the Laffoy Commission.

Mr Sharkey also recalled that Mary Raftery, who made the States of Fear programme had referenced his appearance on the Late Late Show talking about abuse.

Im a gentleman, I can be diplomatic, said. And I'm from Donegal, and we're not known for being diplomatic!

On Donald Trump he said that while he wouldnt like to be stuck in a lift with him, but it was necessary to work with him for the sake of the Irish undocumented in the US.

The council must vote on the presentations by September 26.

The Leinster Leader was present at the presentations earlier today. You can read our liveblog of the meeting by clicking here.(ANSA) - Siena, August 27 - Vintner Jacopo Biondi Santi, a member of the seventh generation of Brunello di Montalcino makers, is under investigation for alleged tax crimes, La Nazione newspaper reported Monday.

Police have seized some 4.8 million euros in assets from the classic-wine maker, the Florence daily reported.

The probe aims to establish "the circulation of invoices between companies aimed at paying fewer taxes," La Nazione said.

Investigators are reportedly probing an operation with the French EPI Group, who own top champagne brands including Charles Heidsieck.

A judicial review process into a planning decision on Maynooths proposed ring roads continues to grind on.

The review, one of a number of projects being judicially reviewed in the north Kildare area, relates to the Moyglare Road to Dunboyne Road Ring Road Via Moygaddy.

It concerns the Part 8 passed on October 12 2016 in relation to the road, considered a critical piece of infrastructure in the Maynooth Outer Orbital Route.

Kildare North Labour party general election candidates said Meath County Council (MCC) had advised him that the Judicial Review in relation to its decision to approve the road was ongoing.

MCC have lodged their Statement of Opposition and are now awaiting a court date. This put the alternative case set out by the applicants who lodged the Judicial Review, Brian Clerkin and Kilcloon Environmental Action Association.

SEE ALSO: Progress on major ring road project in Maynooth

The developer who will deliver the Ring Road is Skycastle Limited. It is awaiting the outcome of discussions with Irish Water in relation to water and waste capacity issues, and consultants are currently investigating short term and long term solutions for improving the foul sewer network capacity across north Kildare.

Mr Stagg said Skycastle must await the outcome of the judicial review also.

He said Mycete Homes have already lodged their contribution to the cost of the Kildare section of the ring road with Kildare County Council which covers the cost of completing the road leading to Moyglare Hall estate to the county boundary.

Mr Stagg said that construction of the ring road is vital. He hoped that a successful conclusion to the court case and the investigation in relation to short term solutions to improving the foul network capacity across north Kildare would be forthcoming.Last Friday, IFA was shocked and deeply saddened to learn of the sudden passing of friend and colleague Richie Flynn, Rowanberry, Farnaught, Mohill, on August 24 last at Mullingar General Hospital.

Richie worked in IFA for 27 years, joining in 1991 when he took up a role in the IFA Press Office. In 1996, he moved to IFA's aquaculture section, where he represented fish farmers around the coast for the last 22 years.



Richie was the first President of the EU Aquaculture Advisory Council, which was established in 2016.

He was a former board member of the Marine Institute; he chaired the EU Advisory Committee on aquaculture from 2001 to 2011 and he served as President of the European Shellfish Federation from 2012 to 2016.



He is also former member of the Irish Council of the National Union of Journalists and was involved in a range of voluntary work for organisations and community groups around the coast and in his home county of Leitrim.



Jan Feenstra, who worked closely with Richie as Chairperson of the Irish Salmon Growers Association, said he would always remember him for his loyalty and his fearless work in promoting fish farming.

IFA President Joe Healy said everybody was very shocked at the news that Richie had passed away early on Friday morning.



Richie was a well-respected colleague and somebody who was utterly dedicated to his work in IFA. His commitment to farmers for his entire working life was steadfast, said the IFA President.

On behalf of everybody in IFA, I want to offer our condolences to his family, in particular his wife Trish and their two children Liam and Roisin, his mother Helen and his sister Sinead.

He was recently predeceased by his father Liam.



Richie Flynn will be reposed at his home tomorrow, Tuesday, August 28 from 4pm to 9pm. His removal will be held on Wednesday, August 29 to St Patrick's Church, Mohill, to arrive for 11am Funeral Mass. House strictly private outside of the set times.



As a mark of respect, IFAs National Office in the Irish Farm Centre and the Roscommon regional office that services Leitrim, Sligo, Roscommon and Longford will be closed on Wednesday, August 29.Bundoran RNLI has responded yesterday evening (Sunday 26 August) to a false alarm with good intent.

The volunteer lifeboat crew was requested to launch their inshore lifeboat at 5.16pm following a request by the Irish Coast Guard to go to the assistance of three stand up paddle boarders thought to be in difficulty near Mullaghmore.

The lifeboat helmed by Killian OKelly was launched in five minutes and immediately made its way to the scene.

Weather conditions at the time were poor with heavy rain and reduced visibility.

Once on scene, the crew observed that the experienced trio who had been competing in a downwind race from Mullaghmore to Bundoran, were not in any difficulty.

Speaking following the call out, Bundoran RNLI Helm Killian OKelly said: Once we arrived on scene we observed that all three stand up paddle boarders were safe and well. They were all wearing lifejackets and carrying a method of communication. While this was a false alarm with good intent, we would like to commend the member of the public who raised the alarm as conditions at sea were not good at the time. We would always much rather launch to find all is well than not launch at all.

With a lot of visitors enjoying the long northern Bank Holiday weekend here in Bundoran, we would remind everyone planning a visit to the beach or the sea, to always respect the water. Plan your activity in advance, always wear a lifejacket and always carry a means of communication. Should you get into difficulty, call 999 or 112 and ask for the Coast Guard.The worst of this Summer's weather did not deter the crowds to see Pope Francis in Knock on Sunday, August 26.

It is understood close to the expected 45,000 people attended Knock and waited to see the Pontiff from very early morning in very wet weather.

Volunteers from Leitrim helped with the event, while many more locals attended the shrine complex and lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the pope.

Pictured above: Kitty Shannon, Handmaid from Boyle, Martin Hanmore, Stewart from Boyle and Willie Keaveney Stewart, Mary Cregg, Handmaid from Boyle pictured in the Basilica in Knock. Pic Mary Regan.

The chair Pope Francis had his moment of quiet prayer in the Apparition Chapel, Knock was created by ICS Furniture, Dromod.

The chair was designed by Gavin Duignan MD of ICS Furniture. The chair's design is purposefully understated and crafted using a combination of maple and walnut. The Papal crest adorns the back of the chair and the Knock shrine symbol is placed on the front.

Desmond Wisley Ecclesiastical Supplies, Ballinamore provided ecclesiastical accessories for the event. He also had designed a number of candles and vases marking the World Meeting of Families event.



Pope Francis flew into Ireland West Airport, Knock and toured in the popemobile before having a quiet prayer in the Church of Apparition and then delivering an address to the crowd in Italian and the Angelus in Latin.

The event lasted about 40 minutes in total.

He also spoke of his joy to visit the Knock Shrine.

Photo on left: Leitrim stewards in Knock on on duty on the occasion of Pope Francis' visit on Sunday, August 26 - John McDonagh, Paddy ODonnell and Muredach Tuffy,

Pic Mary Regan.

Staff of ICS Furniture Supplies, Dromod pictured with their specially created chair for the Pope in Knock.

Also read: Handcrafted in Dromod: Months of work went into the Pope's chair in KnockLifeStyle

The best Lifestyle shows are right here, from Australia and around the world. Catch up with the experts on home design and interiors, food and cooking, the property market, and get fresh ideas with the savviest of renovators. Whether you need inspiration for cooking up a storm, to refresh a tired room, or tips to sell your property, Foxtel Lifestyle will always something new for you to watch. Enjoy your favourite experts like Andrew Winter and Neale Whitaker, or Shaynna Blaze and Jamie Oliver live or On Demand.MORE than 100 frontline healthcare workers are facing an uncertain future with their agency set to be wound up today.

A creditors' meeting this Monday morning is expected to formally place TLC Homecare and Healthcare into liquidation, with staff being asked to attend to lodge claims for redundancy.

Based in Dooradoyle, TLC provides homecare, social care and nursing care staff to University Hospital Limerick (UHL), St Camillus Hospital and Milford Care Centre among others. The HSE logo is included on its website, and its widely known the health service uses agency staff.

Union sources have told the Limerick Leader that company founder Therese Begley Luke indicated she planned to close the firm down, as she could no longer afford to keep it going.

Sinn Fein Senator Paul Gavan, a former Siptu union health official said this shows: the foolhardiness of relying on agency workers for key parts of our health service.

Its understood staff at Milford Care Centre are being given a special contract to ensure their continued employment. But the fate of staff at other healthcare providers is less clear: It just shows how vulnerable our health service is right now, Mr Gavan said, How can we have a situation where our health service is significantly dependent on agency workers?

The senator claimed the HSE is only employing agency staff to avoid giving out full-time contracts.

The last accounts filed by the company covered the period up to the end of 2016.

They showed the firm was owing 317,919 to various creditors. This figure had fallen from a total of 548,361 owing at the end of 2013.

According to company documents, TLC Homecare and Healthcare employed 105 people at the end of 2016.

Ms Begley Luke declined to comment when contacted by the Limerick Leader.

However, the businesswoman  who hails from Croom  has told friends on the social networking site Facebook that she has retired and Friday was TLCs final day trading.

In a statement, the HSE said: The agency in question is not currently providing staff to UL Hospitals Group and as such patient care and staffing are unaffected by the situation.A NEW BRAND for Limerick will be unveiled in the coming months, with the hope of transforming the city and county into an investment hub and enhanced visitor destination.

This follows the announced, this Monday, that Limerick City and County Council has appointed renowned global creative agency M&C Saatchi to create the new brand.

The UK-based agency has been responsible for capturing the strengths of large cities while generating creative narratives for smaller ones, allowing them to compete internationally.

Mary Harris, M&C Saatchi managing partner, said Limerick is undergoing an exciting transformation

As an agency, M&C Saatchi has a history of building some of the worlds most enduring destination brands, and what excites us is working with ambitious clients to maximise the effect that these brands can have both domestically and internationally.

We intend to create a brand that will have a lasting and pivotal impact for Limerick, and are now very much looking forward to getting underway and helping the county realise its significant potential, she said this week.

The councils head of marketing and communications, Laura Ryan said they were delighted at the announcement and that Limerick has been revitalised over the past five years at a pace matching our own high expectations.

With the help of M&C Saatchi, we will be in a position to tell the rest of the world in a very clever and creative way the very exciting proposition that Limerick is today so we can win more investment and encourage more people to come to live, work and visit here. The decision to seek tenders for the re-brand was the latest move by Limerick City and County Council aimed at enhancing the competitiveness and attractiveness of the region. It sought an agency to create a brand that would reflect its rising status as a leading Irish destination to live, work and play.

Welcoming the news, Mayor the City and County of Limerick, Cllr James Collin said it was a very positive move.

This would not have happened a decade ago for sure and its down to the collective work of all the stakeholders in the city and region that has one of the worlds leading agencies wanting to work with us.

The council said that 13,000 jobs have been created over the past five years in Limerick.

The success of the plan is reflected by the 1.7 billion plus of investment by new or existing companies in Limerick that has been announced since it was published, the spokesperson said.

The new Limerick brand will be unveiled and rolled out in early 2019.A LIMERICK mans touching video about his journey from Dubai for the All-Ireland final has been viewed nearly 20,000 times.

Paul Carmody, from Kildimo, documented his weekend spent in Dublin and Limerick, celebrating the historic hurling win.

The video, uploaded this Sunday, has struck a nerve with Limerick people, having been shared over 300 times - but it was originally only intended as a way of sharing the experience with family and friends on Facebook.

It was only when a friend of mine, Nathan, who is living in Vietnam, asked me to make it possible for him to share it with his Irish friends that he worked with, and thats the only reason at all why it ever went public, said Paul.

A few people shared it then and it obviously spread like wildfire. Im a very proud Limerick man and Im just so happy that I could make something that made other Limerick people happy, and thats really the essence of why I did it.

The proud Limerick supporter said that he has been moved by the number of beautiful messages he has received from strangers since uploading it.

Its magical to think that something you can create for free can make others so happy. For me thats what makes me really happy about the whole thing.

When the final whistle blew in the semi-final, Paul was on holidays in Denmark with his wife, Caroline, who is originally from Denmark.

I hummed and hawed over what I should do about the final, because Ive never missed a game like this before. I said I would think about it for 48 hours, and I had a chat with my brother, and he said to me that we might be waiting another 11 or 45 years before we get a chance to do this again. So without a match ticket, I bought my ticket home, hoping that something would come through.

And something did: Pauls sister Connie won a raffle for two tickets, and passed them on to two of her brothers - Paul, and Jon, who was home from Philadelphia.

Thats really all the organisation that went into it. It was blind faith, and Im glad I did it. My wife is actually six months pregnant, so I have to say, she has been very supportive, and she knew that this meant a lot to me, so she let me go, for want of a better word!

We just had the absolute time of our lives.

And it was a proud day for Paul to see a fellow Kildimo lad, Kyle Hayes, named Man of the Match.

We are over the moon for Kyle Hayes, bursting with pride for the guy, hes such a brilliant example to that whole generation of hurlers. Absolutely buzzing for the guy, buzzing for the parish, buzzing for the whole county. Even right now, I cant stop looking at Youtube videos or reading stuff about the match, I think I am still kind of living through it, he said.

See the video on Pauls hurling pilgrimage below:HIP-hop legends Arrested Development are to make their debut showing in Limerick, it has been announced.

The trailblazing group, best known for the hit Mr Wendall, will play Dolans Warehouse on Tuesday, November 6.

Neil Dolan of Dolans Presents said: Arrested Development are a group who have had a huge influence on the global hip-hop scene.

We are delighted to be able to welcome them to Limerick for the very first time. This gig is certainly not to be missed.

Arrested Development, who have long championed colorful sounds while spreading a unique mixture of consciousness and musicality around the globe, were named as one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time by VH-1 and have two MTV Awards to their credit.

Their song Tennessee was voted one of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Mr Wendal brought much needed attention to the plight of the homeless and the group gave half of the royalties to the National Coalition of the Homeless. They also donatde to the African National Congress (ANC) to end the pains of apartheid and shared a stage with Nelson Mandela in South Africa in 1994.

Arrested Development play Dolan's Warehouse on November 6. Tickets go on sale this Wednesday at 9am and can be purchased from www.dolans.ie.No one likes getting wrinkles, but a new study suggests that some wrinkles may be more than just a sign of aging  they might signal heart disease risk.

The study, from researchers in France, found that people with numerous, deep forehead wrinkles  more than is typical for their age  were more likely to die from heart disease, compared with those without forehead wrinkles.

The study authors said that, if the findings are confirmed with additional research, looking at forehead wrinkles could be an easy, low-cost way to help identify people at high risk for heart disease.

"You can't see or feel risk factors like high cholesterol or hypertension," lead study author Yolande Esquirol, an associate professor of occupational health at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Toulouse in France, said in a statement. "We explored forehead wrinkles as a marker because it's so simple and visual. Just looking at a person's face could sound an alarm; then we could give advice to lower [the] risk" of heart disease," said Esquirol, who presented the findings in Munich yesterday (Aug. 26) at ESC Congress 2018, the annual conference of the European Society of Cardiology.

However, the study found only an association between forehead wrinkles and an increased risk of heart disease; and so the findings don't mean that wrinkles definitely indicate heart disease.

Moreover, the researchers noted that looking at forehead wrinkles wouldn't take the place of assessing people for classic risk factors, such as high blood pressure and cholesterol levels. But if a person has a lot of deep forehead wrinkles, it could raise a red flag, they said. "Forehead wrinkles may be a marker of atherosclerosis," or hardening of the arteries due to plaque buildup, Esquirol said. [9 New Ways to Keep Your Heart Healthy]

The exact reason for the link is unknown, but "some factors that may lead to premature aging of the skin can contribute to premature aging of the arteries" and atherosclerosis, said Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the study.

Previous studies have found a link between other visible features  including male-pattern baldness, earlobe creases and xanthelasma (pockets of cholesterol under the skin)  and heart disease risk.

In the new study, the researchers analyzed data from more than 3,200 French adults who were ages 32, 42, 52 and 62 at the start of the study. The participants underwent an exam in which doctors assessed their forehead wrinkles and assigned the participants a score based on the number and depth of the wrinkles. A score of zero meant no wrinkles, while a score of 3 meant "numerous deep wrinkles."

The participants were followed for about 20 years, during which 233 of the participants died of various causes.

People with a wrinkle score of 1 were five times more likely to die from heart disease, and people with a wrinkle score of 2 or 3 were nearly 10 times more likely to die from heart disease, compared with people with a wrinkle score of 0.

The findings held even after the researchers took into account factors that could affect people's risk of death from heart disease, including their age, gender, education level, smoking status, blood pressure, heart rate, lipid levels and whether they had diabetes.

The new findings "suggest that the presence or absence of forehead wrinkles may provide some insight into future [risk of early death], and  could potentially be considered more than skin-deep," Fonarow told Live Science.

Still, Fonarow said that future studies are needed to confirm the findings and to evaluate the link in broader populations of adults.

The study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Original article on Live Science.The PREDICT Ebola Host Project team processed samples collected safely and humanely from bats in the field. The team is active in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, where they are sampling wildlife and domestic animals to learn more about potential host species for Ebola viruses.

Scientists have discovered a previously unknown species of Ebola virus, called Bombali virus, that's carried by at least two species of bats in Sierra Leone. This is the first Ebola virus species detected in a healthy animal before having been detected in sick animals or humans.

Although researchers believe the virus is capable of infecting humans, it's unclear if it would cause disease.

The Bombali virus joins the five already-known Ebola virus species: Zaire virus, Bundibugyo virus, Sudan virus, Tai Forest virus and Reston virus. Of those five, all except the Reston virus are known to cause severe and often fatal disease in humans. [The 9 Deadliest Viruses on Earth]

The most devastating Ebola outbreak in recent history was caused by the Zaire virus and lasted from 2013 to 2016 in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. In that time, more than 28,000 people were infected with Ebola and 11,325 died. And the current Ebola outbreak, which started in early August in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is also caused by the Zaire virus, according to the World Health Organization.

The source of Ebola viruses has been tricky for scientists to pin down, even after four decades of research. (The virus was discovered in 1976, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) The reservoir, or organism that the viruses naturally live and reproduce in, is still unknown. Previous research has made a strong case that bats are the primary reservoir species, but until now, scientists have been unable to isolate and recover a complete Ebola virus genome from bats.

So, in an effort to identify Ebola viruses in their host species before the virus spreads to humans, scientists with the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) PREDICT Ebola Host Project collected biological samples from 535 animals in Sierra Leone  244 bats, 46 rodents, 240 dogs and five cats  and tested them for the presence of Ebola viruses.

"If you want to prevent Ebola outbreaks, it's important to know which species are hosts and can shed the virus," Tracey Goldstein, co-lead study author and an associate director of the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis, said in a statement. "Then, we can help target changes in behavior [in those animals], so we can protect people, which is the overarching goal of our work."

In the study, the scientists found four bats that tested positive for an Ebola virus; all other animals tested negative. These bats were captured inside three human dwellings within 12 miles (20 kilometers) of one another, where livestock and crops were being raised for local consumption. Three of the bats were little free-tailed bats (Chaerephon pumilus) and one was an Angolan free-tailed bat (Mops condylurus). Both species are widely distributed across Africa and often roost together.

When the team sequenced the genome of the bat-dwelling Ebola virus, the researchers found that the virus was different enough from previously identified Ebola viruses to represent a new species. The researchers named the new species after the location where they first detected it: the Bombali district of Sierra Leone.

Although the Bombali virus has been detected only in bats thus far, the scientists identified a binding protein that would facilitate the transfer of the virus into human cells, suggesting that human infection is possible. But even if the virus is able to infect humans, there's no evidence that it will cause any symptoms. It's unclear whether the Bombali virus will behave more like the Reston virus, which doesn't cause disease in humans, or the Zaire virus, which causes severe disease.

The authors of the study pointed out that the purpose of their work is not to incite panic or a fear of bats. These animals play an important role in the ecosystem as insectivores, pollinators and seed dispersers, the authors wrote. Previous studies showed that killing bats doesn't reduce disease transmission but instead can increase the number of susceptible bats and enhance disease transmission.

The researchers published their findings today (Aug. 27) in the journal Nature Microbiology.

Editors Note: This article was corrected on Nov. 7, 2018. The original article stated this was the first Ebola virus species detected in animals before humans.

Original article on Live Science.Neuroscientists have made a rosy discovery: a new type of human brain cell.

The newest neuron has been named the "rosehip neuron," thanks to its bushy appearance. The brain cell, with its unique gene expressions, distinctive shape and diverse connections with other neurons, has not been described before and, what's more, it isn't present in neuroscientists' favorite subject: mice. [3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain]

An international group of researchers reported their finding today (Aug. 27) in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

"It's very bushy," said Trygve Bakken, one of the lead authors of the paper and senior scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Neurons have long branches called dendrites that receive signals from other neurons. In the rosehip cells, these dendrites are "very compact with lots of branch points, so it kind of looks a little bit like a rosehip," Bakken told Live Science. (Rosehips are a type of fruit produced by rose plants.)

Also adding to the rosehip appearance are the large bulbs at the end of their axons that release neurotransmitters or chemical signals to other neurons, Bakken added.

The new neuron is named after the small, red fruits of a rose plant, called rosehips. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

The new finding is the result of a collaboration between Bakken and his team and researchers at the University of Szeged in Hungary. Both teams independently identified the distinctive-looking neurons and, when the teams learned they were looking at the same thing, they decided to work together, Bakken said.

The researchers at the Allen Institute documented the strange new neuron by examining the brain tissue of two deceased middle-age men. When the researchers looked at the genes of the rosehip neuron in this post-mortem tissue, they found that the neurons acted differently. "There are a number of genes that are turned on just in that cell and not in other[s]," Bakken said

Meanwhile, the team in Hungary further documented the rosehip neuron by studying the electrical activity and shapes of neurons in brain tissue that had been removed from people's brains during surgery and kept alive in a solution.

A rare neuron

One reason rosehip neurons eluded neuroscientists for so long is likely because the cells are so rare in the brain, Bakken said. Another reason, he added, is because human brain tissue is difficult for scientists to obtain for study. Indeed, in the study, the researchers examined only one layer of the brain. It's possible, however, that rosehip neurons could be found in other layers, too, Bakken said.

Specifically, the researchers found that the rosehip neurons make up about 10 percent of the first layer of the neocortex  the most recently evolved part of the cortex that's involved in sight and hearing. They also found that rosehip neurons connect to neurons called pyramidal cells, a type of excitatory neuron that makes up two-thirds of all the neurons in the cortex, according to Cell.

The full extent of the rosehip neurons relationship to the pyramidal neurons is unclear, but the researchers did find that the rosehip neurons act as inhibitory neurons, or those that restrain the activity of other neurons. "They have the potential to sort of put the brakes on the excitability" of pyramidal neurons, Bakken said. But as to how this influences the brain's behavior, "we don't really know yet," he added.

Absent in mice

All mammals have a cortex, and within it a neocortex, Bakken said. But there are about "a thousand times more cells in the human cortex compared to the mouse," he said. In other words, it makes up a much bigger part of our brain than it does a mouse's. So then, perhaps it's not surprising that the team didn't find any genetic hint of rosehip neurons in mice.

"Finding cell types that are uniquely human helps our understanding of the physiological differences that under[lie] our higher cognitive abilities and may better inform upon treatment strategies for brain-related disorders," said Blue B. Lake, an assistant project scientist in the bioengineering department at the University of California, San Diego who was not part of the study.

The absence of the rosehip neuron in mice brains might serve as a cautionary reminder that the results of some brain studies done on rats can't be translated to humans, the researchers said.

"Mice have been a wonderful model organism for understanding how brains work in general and can help us understand how human brains work," Bakken said. "But I think finding a part of that circuit that is not seen in a mouse that points to needing to study actual human tissue."

There are enough parts of the brain conserved among mice, humans and other mammals that people can make "inferences about things we learn in the mouse and sort of, at least, hypothesize that something similar is likely to be happening in the human brain," Bakken said. But, sometimes things present in human brains are "just not there" in mouse brains.

Editor's note: This story was updated on Aug. 28 to clarify that the rosehip neuron doesn't have a unique set of genes, it activates a unique set of genes.

Originally published on Live Science.Alvin, a submersible deployed by the research vehicle Atlantis, collects a sample of Lophelia pertusa from an extensive mound of both dead and living coral.

For thousands of years  perhaps hundreds of thousands  a sizable coral reef has stretched across the seafloor in the Atlantic Ocean, near the southeastern part of the U.S. And its existence remained a well-hidden secret until a recent deep-sea expedition brought the thriving ecosystem to light.

Scientists on board the research vessel (RV) Atlantis discovered the reef last week, about 160 miles (257 kilometers) off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, the HuffPost reported. Cameras on a submersible deployed from Atlanis  the human-operated vehicle (HOV) Alvin  captured the unexpected sight of dense, cold-water coral populations seeding the sea bottom about 0.5 miles (0.8 km) below the ocean surface.

The site was covered with living corals  "just mountains of it"  growing atop the massive, skeletal remains of dead corals that had likely been inhabiting the area for millennia, expedition lead scientist Erik Cordes, an associate professor in the Department of Biology at Temple University in Philadelphia, told the HuffPost. [In Photos: Diving in a Twilight Coral Reef]

Scientists used Alvin to explore the reef and collect coral samples during dives on Aug. 23 and Aug. 24, according to the HuffPost. The researchers discovered copious amounts of Lophelia pertusa, a branching, whitish coral that prefers cold waters and that has previously been found growing at record depths in the Gulf of Mexico.

While tropical corals typically rely on symbiotic algae to survive, L. pertusa does not, and it uses stinging tentacles to stun its prey and guide food into its stomach, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The submersible Alvin is lowered into the water, where swimmers will disconnect the lines and communicate with the pilot inside to ensure that the sub is ready for descent. (Image credit: Image courtesy of Deep SEARCH 2018/BOEM/USGS/NOAA)

Corals detected by the Atlantis were found about 16 miles (26 km) to the northwest of corals found earlier this summer by the NOAA RV Okeanos Explorer, which was mapping hundreds of seamounts on the ocean floor, HuffPost reported. Together, the coral-covered area explored by Okeanos and the Atlantis extends for an estimated 85 miles (137 km), layered with enormous, rocky piles of dead coral that likely accumulated over many thousands of years, Cordes told HuffPost.

The RV Atlantis embarked on its 15-day expedition on Aug. 19, part of a 4.5-year collaborative project known as the Deep Sea Exploration and Research of Coral/Canyon/Cold seep Habitats (Deep SEARCH), according to the mission website.

Until Sept. 2, scientists on the Atlantis will explore deep-sea habitats near the southeastern coastal U.S. They will collect critical data on the distribution of ecosystems and wildlife of the sea bottom in order to more accurately predict how these fragile communities could be disrupted by human activity, NOAA reported on the Deep SEARCH website.

Original article on Live Science.One of the "hunger stones" exposed by the low level of water in the Elbe river is seen in Decin, Czech Republic.

Old stones bearing ominous messages have resurfaced in a river in Central Europe, according to news reports.

Over the course of centuries, Europeans marked low water levels during droughts by carving lines and dates into boulders along the Elbe River, which runs from the Czech Republic into Germany. The idea was that if water levels dipped low enough to reveal an old carving, it would signal to locals that dry, hungry times  similar to those experienced in the marked year  were coming. Over a dozen of these "hunger stones" have reappeared in the Elbe this year, amid a record-setting European drought, the Associated Press reported Aug. 23. [7 Surprising Health Effects of Drought]

And the stones' warnings aren't wrong. Agence France-Presse reported that northern Europe's current drought has not only brought with it record-setting temperatures and wildfires but also significant threats to local food production. In Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, AFP reported, the grain harvest is expected to be down between 30 and 60 percent, depending on the region. England and France may also be significantly impacted. Farmers in northern Europe might have to "send much of their herds to slaughter due to a lack of feed," according to AFP.

While research indicates that climate change will exacerbate droughts in Europe  and make them more frequent around the world  these stones reveal how dangerous these sorts of events were when they occurred in previous centuries.

The oldest stone carving to emerge was carved in 1616 and is considered the oldest hydrologic landmark in Central Europe, according to the AP.

It "bears a chiseled inscription in German," the AP reported, "that says, 'when you see me, cry.'"

Originally published on Live Science.Divers visiting New Zealand's south coast of Wellington were looking for a nice spot to go spearfishing Saturday morning (Aug. 25) when they spotted one of the ocean's most impressive creatures of the deep: a dead, but fully intact, giant squid.

"After we went for a dive we went back to [the squid] and got a tape measure out, and it measured 4.2 meters [13 feet] long," one of the divers, Daniel Aplin, told the New Zealand Herald.

A representative from the New Zealand Department of Conservation told the Herald that the divers most likely found a giant squid (Architeuthis dux) and not a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni). [Photos of the Stunning Deep-Sea Squid Feeding]

Both species of squid are formidable sea creatures, with giant squid typically reaching 16 feet (5 m) long, according to the Smithsonian, and the colossal squid reaching over 30 feet (10 m) long, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Scientists know very little about these deep-sea-dwelling species, because the animals are so rarely seen. Most observations come from the occasional specimen washing ashore, as in this case, or getting accidently captured by fishers.

The enormous tentacled creature's cause of death is unknown. Aplin told the Herald that the squid appeared unscathed except for a scratch that was so tiny that the diver "wouldn't think that's what killed it." When the divers checked the squid out again after their dive, they thought it had shrunk a little, but no animals had decided to make a meal out of the dead beast, Aplin said.

He called a friend from New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) who arranged for the squid to be collected, the Herald reported.

Aplin is an employee of Ocean Hunter Spearfishing & Freediving Specialists, and posted his photos of the giant squid on the company's Facebook page, which elicited a wealth of commentary. "Imagine that swimming past!" wrote one commenter. "Who's up for calamari?" wrote another.

Original article on Live Science.An iconic part of the San Antonio skyline will play host to its own beer festival for the first time this year, featuring more than 70 different craft brews.

The Tower of the Americas has scheduled the event for Oct. 6, according to the Facebook event page.A 30-year-old Mexican attorney said during a sentencing hearing that he tried smuggling heroin because he wanted to buy a new car, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Nestor Omar Duenas-Jimenez, of Villa de Alvarez in Colima, Mexico, pleaded guilty May 1 to conspiracy to import heroin and importation of heroin.

An arrest affidavit filed March 6 states he tried to smuggle 32.31 pounds of heroin with an estimated street value of $450,000.

READ ALSO: 'Operation Report Your Competition' yields four arrests in Webb County

U.S. District Judge Marina Garcia Marmolejo sentenced Duenas-Jimenez to 63 months in prison. He is expected to face deportation proceedings after serving his sentence.

The case unfolded March 4. At about 9:15 a.m., Duenas-Jimenez tried to enter the country via the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge in a silver Chevrolet Cruze.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers identified the driver as Duenas-Jimenez. He stated the vehicle belonged to his brother-in-law. He added that he had borrowed the vehicle to go shopping in McAllen.

He was referred to secondary inspection due to the inconsistencies in the vehicle's crossing history and multiple drivers, according to court documents.

"Duenas-Jimenez also displayed signs of nervousness by sweating profusely as he was asked about crossing history," states the affidavit.

RELATED: Traffic stop in central Laredo ends with 4 men facing drug charges

In secondary inspection, CBP officers said they discovered several bundles concealed within the rocker panels. The bundles tested positive for heroin.

Homeland Security Investigation special agents took over the case. Duenas-Jimenez refused to speak to special agents.

"Duenas-Jimenez stated he was an attorney and he knows what his human rights were," states the affidavit.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Giselle S. Guerra prosecuted the case.(ANSA) - Rome, August 27 - A probe against Interior Minister Matteo Salvini for allegedly kidnapping 177 Eritrean migrants aboard the Diciotti coast guard ship will be a "boomerang", Salvini said Monday.

An Agrigento prosecutor has placed Salvini under investigation for kidnapping the migrants, who were allegedly unlawfully held for five days at sea and then another five days at Catania harbour.

Salvini said he was not "cowed" and that he would not ask the Senate to refuse to lift his immunity from prosecution.

"I only did my job as minister and I'm ready to do it again," Salvini said.

Some 100 of the migrants will go to a Catholic centre at Rocca di Papa near Rome, Pope Francis said.

Albania and Ireland will take about 20 each.

Three Egyptians and a Bangladeshi have been arrested on charges of being the migrant traffickers.

The other deputy premier, Industry and Labour Minister Luigi Di Maio, said in the next such case Italy "will negotiate directly with individual States".

He said the government was defending Italy's interests.

Most of the Eritrean migrants from the Diciotti will be moved from a Messina hotspot to a Catholic Church centre at Ariccia near Rome, the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI) told a news agency on Monday.

"They will be moved as soon as possible, in the coming hours, to the Ariccia centre run by Auxiluim, pending their transfer to the many diocese who have given their availability: Turin, Brescia, Bologna, Agrigento, Cassano all'Jonio, Rossano Calabro, to cite only those I know about," CEI's head of social communications, Father Ivan Maffeis, told the SIR religious news agency.

The CEI agreed to take in about 100 of the migrants while Albania and Ireland took 20 each to end a stand-off after Salvini kept them aboard saying they would not land until the EU agred to take them.

Meanwhile Germany said funding the EU budget is an obligation laid down in the EU's founding treaties, commenting on Italy's threat to withhold some of its alleged 20 billion euro EU budget payment unless the EU agreed to take in the Diciotti migrants.

EU budget funding "was ratified in the European treaties, and it is valid for all," said Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert.

The EU must change its tune on migrants or Italy's budget veto will be "certain", Deputy Premier Luigi Di Maio said Monday.

Di Maio was speaking after European Budget Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said Monday that Italy doesn't pay 20 billion euros a year to the EU budget as stated by Di Maio in threatening to cut it unless the EU took in the Diciotti migrants, but 14-16 billion.

"Taking into account what it receives from the EU budget that leaves a net contribution of three billion a year," Oettinger said.

Di Maio replied that Oettinger's description of his claim as a "farce" "shows what consideration they have of our country".

"They're evidently used to Italian premiers and ministers going cap in hand to Brussels".

"Funding is not a dogma," said Di Maio, leader of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, and also industry and labour minister.

"The music in Europe is going to change," he said, saying that soon there would be talk of "real solidarity and not restrictions that are unsustainable from both the social and economic standpoint".

European Parliament President Antonio Tajani said Monday that said you can't criminally try a policy like Salvini's hardline stance on migrant non-reception.

"You can't try a political line, in the end Salvini will be acquitted by the ministerial court and then it becomes only a propaganda clash that doesn't solve the real problem: neither the immigration one nor the that of the separation of powers," Tajani said.

"The affair strongly highlights the problem of justice reform, we can't waste any more time".

Italians overestimate the presence of migrants in their country more than any other nationality in the EU, according to a survey by think tank Istituto Cattaneo out on Monday.

The study on the phenomenon of immigration in Italy and its perception said those polled overestimated the presence of migrants by 18%.

Immigrants in Italy account for roughly 8% of the overall population.

The poll also found that 74% of the Italians interviewed were convinced that immigrants were responsible for higher crime rates against a European average of 57%.

A reported 58% of those interviewed for the survey also said they thought more immigration would imply fewer jobs for residents in Italy against a European average of about 14%.

There are "points of convergence" between Italy and Hungary on immigration policy, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on the eve of Tuesday's meeting between Premier Viktor Urban and Salvini.

Szijjarto said "the defence of Europe's borders consists in managing immigration.

"Hungary has already demonstrated that land borders can be defended.

"Australia and Italy have shown that maritime borders can be defended too".

Meanwhile a cargo of boat people reached Australia from Vietnam as Australia's No Way naval blockade against migrants - which Salvini says he wants to emulate - showed its first 'hole' in four years.

The migrants were promptly arrested.

Salvini said "this is the model I want to arrive at! "Long live the civilised and serious Australia".

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Monday Germany would soon strike a deal with Italy on the secondary movement of migrants. An accord is needed so that asylum seekers already registered in Italy, and therefore with their fingerprints in the Eurodac database, can be sent back by Germany within 48 hours, the minister recalled.

Germany signed bilateral accords with Spain and Greece between the end of July and the start of August.

What's the cost of a two-second stammer in a recorded interview?

If you're Kansas congressional candidate Sharice Davids, it's $1.7 million.

That's how much the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has reserved in airtime in Kansas's 3rd district. Davids, a former White House fellow making her first run for office, is now the subject of a CLF-backed ad saying she supports the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, based on a brief clip from an interview she gave to a left-wing politics podcast last month.

In the spot, which began running last week, a CLF narrator warns that "Davids wants to abolish ICE - the law enforcement agency that deports criminal illegal aliens," making her "liberal on illegal immigration." The evidence for that comes from an interview published on July 21 by Millennial Politics, in which host Jordan Valerie Allen presses Davids to clarify whether she, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic candidate for Congress from New York, would support scrapping the agency.

"And just to clarify, you do support abolishing ICE," says Allen.

"I do, I would, I would," says Davis.

But Davids now says that she does not support abolishing ICE at all, and that the CLF ad mangled her position by chopping up a couple of seconds of throat-clearing while leaving out her answer.

In the clip, "I would" is not the end of Davids' sentence. The quote appears several minutes into a discussion of immigration that begins with a question of how Davids would "dismantle this white supremacist immigration system." Davids responds in kind, talking about her experience as a Native American taught how the federal government long "institutionalized oppression."

Allen then asks about "the efforts to abolish ICE," asking if Davids would defund ICE; the candidate says that "we have to get away from thinking that everyone coming to the United States is a threat," and that "we need to have something that is re-worked, that deals with immigration, that is not thinking in terms of policing."

It's at that point that Allen asks to clarify if Davids wants to abolish ICE; her full answer is "I do, I would, I would - well, you asked me about defunding, which is essentially the same thing, you know?"

Two weeks after that interview, Davids won her primary, defeating Brent Welder, a candidate backed by Ocasio-Cortez. The ICE issue did not play an issue in that race; Welder did not support abolition, and Ocasio-Cortez did not mention it at a pre-primary rally for him.

But according to Davids, she had never endorsed abolishing ICE, and had instead stammered briefly while explaining the nuance in her position.

"Let me clear, I do not support abolishing ICE," Davids told The Washington Post in an emailed statement. "I do support comprehensive immigration reform to fix our broken system. What I also believe - and what I was addressing - is that the practice of ripping families apart at the border is inconsistent with our core values as Americans and an ineffective deterrent to illegal immigration."

There's precedent for what Davids is claiming happened between the interview and the attack ad. During his brief 2015 presidential campaign, Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wis., was tripped up when he answered a question about whether he would eliminate "birthright citizenship" by saying "yeah, to me it's about enforcing the laws of our country." Walker's campaign, in vain, explained that the governor had a common verbal tic - he often said "yeah" or "sure" at the start of a sentence, where someone else might use a neutral word like "so" or "well."

The problem in Davids' case is that her "I would, I would" lived online and not rebutted for a month. In a tweeted response to The Washington Post, Allen said that she came away from the interview believing that Davids would support abolishing ICE. The day after the interview posted, liberal policy analyst Sean McElwee, who is often credited with popularizing the "abolish ICE" slogan, tweeted that Davids had a "scoop," and that the Kansan was the latest Democrat to call for abolition.

Reached over the weekend, McElwee said that Davids "pretty clearly says she supports abolishing ICE" in the tape. But after he tweeted, other reporters who had talked to Davids said that she'd previously stopped short on that question.

"I took a quick listen and didn't see any reason that this wouldn't be true," said McElwee. "There are lots of Democrats who want to abolish ICE, and I want to promote their work. It doesn't make a ton of sense for me to drag a candidate who doesn't want to be an abolish ICE candidate into attacks they're uncomfortable with."

Millennial Politics explained on Twitter: "When @jordanvalallenasked about abolition, she answered affirmatively. She later said that defunding & abolition are effectively the same thing. We believe in abolishing ICE & after our conversation with her, we wrapped the interview believing we agreed on the subject."

What confused reporters about the Millennial Politics interview was that Davids had always navigated around the "abolish" part of the policy. In a July 4 interview with The Post, when she was asked if she would abolish ICE, Davids explained at length that she wanted to rethink the immigration system, which would include moving some of ICE's law enforcement functions to other agencies.

"We need to see reforms," she said. "We can say 'abolish,' but no matter what, it will be reformed. There are functions in there that are not part of the problem we're trying to address. The root of the problem is that we have a system with policies geared toward specific people."

Davids' stumble put an exclamation point on the problem swing district Democrats have had with the "abolish ICE" slogan. It arose in early 2017 not out of the idea that there should be no immigration enforcement, but that ICE, under the Trump administration, was carrying out raids and deportations targeting people who did not have criminal records.

Several Democrats - more than have called for abolishing ICE - have taken a more nuanced position. In his primary race against Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., said, "Simply abolishing the agency does not take it out of the hands of Jeff Sessions in Washington," while Ocasio-Cortez said that he was adding "more paperwork" to cover a "moral problem."

Ocasio-Cortez's victory pushed the "abolish" campaign into the media and political mainstream - and just as soon, Democrats in tough races explained why they were not on board with it. In several recent speeches, Ocasio-Cortez has not mentioned the abolition of ICE in the quick list of ideal Democratic priorities.

But in a friendly interview, weeks before her primary, Sharice Davids tried to swerve around the question. Republicans plan to make her six-word partial answer a weapon in the next few months.

"Sharice Davids is a typical politician who is willing to say and do anything to get elected," said CLF communications director Courtney Alexander. "Let me be crystal clear, Sharice Davids has said she supports abolishing ICE, and we look forward to running several ads highlighting her position, end of discussion."Bayer AG and Johnson & Johnson's blood-thinning drug Xarelto didn't prevent clotting in high-risk patients after they were released from the hospital, a setback for one of the manufacturers' best-selling drugs.

About 12,000 medically ill patients at increased risk of blood clotting took part in the trial, known as the Mariner study. The results were presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Munich, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.While the University of North Carolina is grappling with what to do with a Confederate statue toppled by protesters last week, its neighbor Duke University is also confronting its complicated past -- and present.

Historians at Duke have asked the university to change the name of the Carr Building, which houses their department. It honors the wealthy industrialist Julian Carr, who donated the land that now comprises Duke's East Campus -- and who made a now-infamous speech dedicating the Confederate statue known as "Silent Sam" at UNC.

Carr's remarks were sweeping and personal. Confederate soldiers had saved the Anglo-Saxon race in the South, Carr said in his lengthy speech, and "to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States - Praise God."

He also talked about a "pleasing duty" of his own: "I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady."

Protesters at UNC alluded to Carr's words on one of the banners held aloft as Silent Sam was being pulled down last week.

At Duke, his legacy has been debated for years, as reported by the Chronicle, the student newspaper. Carr is one of many names and symbols of the past that universities and other communities across the country are reconsidering; in polarized times, making such changes is seen by some as urgently needed and by others as a heavy-handed cultural rewriting of history.

People have expressed anxiety and concern about the Carr name in the past, said John Martin, a professor of history and chair of the department. But after a rally by white nationalists and white supremacists over a Confederate statue turned violent in Charlottesville last year, a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee at Duke was vandalized, and the university's president removed the statue and initiated a process to examine the historical legacy of names and monuments on campus.

A framework for changing names and memorializations at the university grew out of that, Martin said, so the faculty followed that process.

The history department faculty voted unanimously at the end of the spring semester to rename the Carr Building to honor a longtime professor, Raymond Gavins. He was the first African-American professor of history at Duke and taught there 45 years before dying in 2016. "He was a mentor to generations of undergraduate and graduate students," Martin said, "a superb scholar, a very quiet and humble but powerful individual."

Michael Schoenfeld, a spokesman for Duke, said the request to change the name was being reviewed according to those procedures.

In 2014, Duke renamed a dorm that had honored a former North Carolina governor who was a white supremacist. But this is the first request since the university created a framework for considering names and symbols, said Don Taylor, a professor of public policy and chair of the Academic Council at Duke. Taylor said it seems to him a more complicated case because the former governor had no tie to Duke, whereas Carr gave crucial help to the school.

"We need to reckon with the dual truths," Taylor said. "Duke probably wouldn't exist without Julian Carr's generosity. And Julian Carr was a virulent white supremacist."

Carr was an enthusiastic supporter of secession, a Confederate veteran who supported white supremacy politically and financially, said Robin Kirk, faculty co-chair of the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute and chair of a local committee looking at Confederate memorials.

But Carr was a complex figure, Kirk said -- he also worked with black entrepreneurs. "He was a great philanthropist," Kirk said. "At the same time, he was an absolutely committed, out-front white supremacist."

Adam Domby, an assistant professor of history at the College of Charleston who found Carr's speech at the Silent Sam dedication, agreed that Carr was complex -- like all humans, Domby said. Carr donated money to schools for African-Americans. And he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

As times change, Martin said, "our understanding of Julian Carr's role in the early 20th century made it increasingly evident that it was not appropriate for a building at Duke to be named after him."

Someone such as Gavins, he said, represents the best to which they could aspire.

He also said changing the name of the building would not mean erasing the memory of Carr. "He will remain in the history books," Martin said. "It's more a statement about the values of our community."

It's not just an abstract idea. This weekend, someone vandalized the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture at Duke, writing a racial slur over the word "Black."

The Chronicle reported that by Saturday afternoon, someone had taped blue paper over the slur. Duke President Vincent Price told the campus he was sorry that his early words for a new semester were marked with "sadness and anger."

"While we can't undo or unsee this painful assault on our right to live and study in a civil and respectful environment," he said, "we can and do promise that odious acts like this will be acknowledged and challenged at every opportunity, especially at a time when some seek deliberately to provoke hatred and distrust."Steve Wozniak was giving it away free.

The Apple co-founder tweaked and soldered computer circuit boards in the mid-1970s from his cubicle at Hewlett-Packard and an apartment in Cupertino, California. He shared the design freely, showering enthusiasts in Silicon Valley's Homebrew Computer Club with gratis innovation.

The members were wowed by the intricacy and beauty of crisp lines and symmetry of Wozniak's handcrafted, meticulous design. One early club attendee, a local computer enthusiast, made note of the potential as talk of the board surged in the valley.

We'll come back to him shortly.

Steve Jobs saw the design - and the interest at the club - in July 1976, Wozniak told Bloomberg. That was three months after co-founding Apple with Wozniak. Why not sell the boards? The Byte Shop in Palo Alto agreed, but store owner Paul Terrell would only buy completed boards that did not need further tweaking at home.

Those computers became the Apple I.

Now more than 40 years later, one of about 60 surviving machines out of 200 made - and rarer still, fully functioning and untouched by modifications - will be auctioned on Sept. 24. It is expected to fetch upward of $300,000 next month.

"This computer tells a lot of about the history and genesis of the largest tech company in the world," Bobby Livingston, a spokesman for RR Auction, told The Washington Post on Monday.

Even the manual points to the scrappy, renegade early days of the company - it has handwritten notations from an Apple employee, Livingston said.

Since then, Apple has moved from Wozniak's cubicle and Jobs's garage to be the first company worth $1 trillion (yes, with a T). The Apple I, one of the first home personal computers, was modestly powered and ran very basic games and programs. It set the stage for the Apple II; its lower price point and accessibility completely changed how people interacted with computers.

A buyer paid $666.66 for this particular Apple I sometime between late 1976 and early 1977, the auction house said. But the buyer apparently wasn't as wowed as the club members.

The enthusiast, a co-worker of the buyer, got it secondhand about a year later. He paid $300 and learned programming languages to work the machine. He kept it ever since. An imprint on the board reads: "Apple Computer 1, Palo Alto, Ca. Copyright 1976."

RR Auction did not say who the man was, citing his privacy concerns. He tried selling it back to Wozniak for $10,000 in 1982, but the offer went unanswered, the auction house said.

The Apple I's condition is exceptional not just because of the computer's age, but the way users handled their machines. The boards were sold without cases, Apple I expert Corey Cohen said, and buyers typically made them at home. They soldered chips and sliced boards with razor blades to make modifications on the board.

But this machine is untouched in that way, Cohen told The Post. He evaluated the Apple I in June for the auction house. He fired up the system with a surplus keyboard the professor had originally used and hooked up a power transformer and vintage security monitor.

It boots up just as it would have all those years ago, Cohen said, and it ran with no issues for eight hours. He made minor restorations like cleaning some connections and carefully brushing away the remains of four decades worth of storage.

"The dust was not vintage 1977 dust," he said.

Cohen certified the machine with an 8.5 condition rating. That was estimated from the baseline 9.5 rating given to an Apple I computer that was preserved under glass just a few years after production, Cohen said. The Henry Ford Foundation acquired it for $905,000 in 2014.

There have been a recent auction run of Apple Is in recent years, but that does not indicate a glut, Cohen said.

About 60 are confirmed to exist on a registry, but only about 15 are still working, Cohen said. People who held on to them are getting old, and they are either selling them or leaving them in wills. In a few years, the circulation at auction will likely dry up, he said.

"Whoever purchases [this Apple I], it will not change hands again in our lifetime," he predicted. "They're either going to be in a museum or someone will not sell."

Perhaps the buyer can boot up software the way Cohen did in his test. The Apple I used audio tape to run software. But the tapes have the drawback of needing to be rewound.

He did not have to deal with that for his program, which depicted the Apple logo in stark monochrome along with an image of a young Jobs.

To do that, Cohen used audio from another Apple invention that changed the world - an iPod.

---

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Video: A fully functional Apple-1 computer from the first batch of about 200 machines is being auctioned off and expected to reach a price of $300,000.(RR Auction)

Embed code:As students returned to school last week, the sixth graders of Jacksonville School District 117 attended their first week in a new wing of Jacksonville Middle School.

The middle school was renovated, finishing last school year, to provide a new space for the districts sixth graders, transferring them from their home elementary schools to the middle school.

For the students, this is a change from what theyre use to at their elementary schools.

We have a lot more freedom then we did in grade school, said sixth-grader Nate Tracy.

From having just one classroom, to moving between rooms and teachers and having their own lockers, the move to Jacksonville Middle School gave the students a sense of freedom and responsibility that theyve enjoyed the first week.

Jack Borgman said he enjoys having different teachers.

We only saw one person in grade school, Borgman said. It helps to have a lot of different teachers.

Principal Gary Barlow said the movement in between classes isnt something the sixth graders are use to, but have responded to well since the move to the middle school.

The students love being able to get up and move around in between classes, Barlow said. They are being treated like they are older and they seem to be fitting in very well. It lets them grow up.

Jera Waters said she likes being able to change classes.

I like having different classes and you get to move in between classes, Waters said. I like being able to think I need this for my next class and being able to go get it from my locker and being able to move around. You have time to do the things you need to do.

She said the ability to move about helps her to feel older and more responsible.

I like having that responsibility, Waters aid. At the elementary school, you are treated like you are young. Here, youre not treated like that.

In addition to the new freedom, Samantha Lawson said theyve also gotten to meet a lot of new people.

While going to elementary school, Lawson said they saw the same people everyday, and while she had friends, she likes seeing more students every day.

We get to see a lot more friends and meet more people and teachers, Lawson said.

Tracy said he is able to expand his group of friends.

You dont have to stick with the same groups every hour, Tracy said.

And, they are enjoying the new building as well.

I didnt have walls at Eisenhower, so we could always hear other classes, Borgman said. It was a bit distracting, so I like the separate classrooms here.

Barlow said in addition to the added responsibility, the student are also given access to other classes and activities they wouldnt be able to at the elementary school.

Weve added some electives and they get some choices on what they want to do, Barlow said. They get to do a bunch of new things.

Samantha McDaniel-Ogletree can be reached at 217-245-6121, ext. 1233, or on Twitter @JCNews_samantha.It has been 50 years since the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an event marred by protests and violence.

President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not seek reelection and the convention was to select a presidential nominee to run for the DemocratsThe court battle reportedly brewing between the FBI and Facebook could have a bigger impact on the average smartphone user's privacy than the bureau's legal showdown with Apple posed in 2016.

Per Reuters, the FBI is asking a federal judge in California to force Facebook to break the encryption on its Messenger app so investigators can listen in on an alleged MS-13 gang member's voice conversations. The case, which remains under seal, raises some of the same privacy concerns as the FBI's unsuccessful effort to force Apple to engineer a way into the encrypted iPhone of one of the San Bernardino mass shooters.

But the FBI's request in the Facebook case could have a broader impact, since the bureau reportedly wants to intercept communications in real time. Rather than seeking access to a smartphone they've already seized, investigators reportedly want Facebook to help them wiretap a suspect just like a phone company would.

"It essentially applies to any smartphone user," said John D. Villasenor, a professor of technology and public policy at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Most of us would be able to say our phones haven't been in the custody of law enforcement, but we all use messaging platforms of one kind or another."

"The Apple case, as important as it was, involved a physical device that the government already had possession of," he told me, "whereas the Facebook matter involves communications between users and the question of what obligations companies like Facebook have with respect to communication services they offer." The Apple case caused an uproar in the privacy community, and was seen as a proxy for the debate over whether companies should be forced to create built-in ways for law enforcement to bypass encryption in their products. (Ultimately, the FBI found an outside contractor to crack into the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, putting the fight to rest.)

Although it's not entirely clear what each side is arguing in the Facebook case - again, the records are under seal and the only reporting on the matter has come from Reuters - experts agree that prosecutors are likely basing their case on a law called the Wiretap Act. Passed in 1968, it requires telephone companies to provide technical assistance to law enforcement in tapping a phone if they present a court order.

Whether that applies to Messenger is the key question - and the law might favor the feds, writes Russell Brandom of the Verge.

"Facebook's biggest problem is the Wiretap Act," Brandom writes. "The system was designed for companies like AT&T, and it's relatively uncontroversial for the past 30 years, sometimes put forward as a model of how courts can hold otherwise-invasive surveillance techniques in check. There are ways to contest a given order, arguing it's too disruptive to the service or otherwise burdensome - or simply that messaging services aren't subject to the Wiretap Act - but the government's argument is far more straightforward than what Apple faced."

A ruling in the government's favor probably wouldn't stop with Facebook Messenger, Villasenor said. The government might seek to compel other messaging services such as WhatsApp to help the government listen in on voice conversations.

It could also reverberate outside the United States, he added. "Regardless of what one thinks of the U.S. government's assertions regarding a right to access the conversations in this particular case, if Facebook is forced to comply and shows that it is technically able to do so, other governments - including authoritarian governments - will take notice. That will put Facebook in a very challenging position when faced with requests in the future from governments in countries where there are far fewer privacy protections than we have in the U.S."

Facebook is pushing back, saying a technical solution might be too onerous, according to Reuters. The company is arguing in court that Messenger voice calls "are encrypted end-to-end, meaning that only the two parties have access to the conversation," Reuters reports. "Facebook says it can only comply with the government's request if it rewrites the code relied upon by all its users to remove encryption or else hacks the government's current target, according to the sources."RICHMOND, Va. - A Virginia state senator's support for Syrian President Bashar Assad is prompting a Democratic delegate to try to unseat him.

State Del. John Bell, D-Loudoun, will announce Monday that he is seeking the right to challenge state Sen. Richard H. Black, R-Loudoun, in elections next year. Bell joins an already crowded Democratic primary field, with four others hoping to take on Black, one of the state's most socially conservative legislators.

Black is a perennial target for Democrats, who have long argued that his vocal opposition to abortion rights is out of step with a changing Virginia.

But it is Black's more recent focus on Syria that convinced Bell he should take him on, the delegate said in an interview with The Washington Post over the weekend. Black traveled to Damascus in 2016 for a sit-down with Assad and suggested, in a 20-minute floor speech this year as the Virginia Senate gathered for a special session on the state budget, that the Syrian president might have been framed for a suspected chemical attack.

"We were in dire need of a budget and debating Medicaid expansion - the most important issue Virginia's faced in many years," Bell said. "To go off and talk about Syria - which quite frankly, unless it's a trade issue, I don't think the General Assembly should be focusing on international issues - that, to me, was the epitome of not focusing on what this district needs."

Black, who spent eight years in the Virginia House before joining the Senate in 2012, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A decorated Vietnam War veteran and retired Pentagon lawyer, Black avidly follows news from the Middle East. He regards Assad as a protector of Syrian Christians and a buffer against Islamist extremism. The Trump and Obama administrations blamed Assad for chemical weapons attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians in rebel-held areas during Syria's civil war.

In 2014, Black wrote a letter of praise to Assad, which the Syrian president posted on Facebook. He followed that up with a visit to Damascus in 2016.

Bell, who is in his second term in the House, is a retired Air Force officer and former management consultant. Other Democrats vying for the nomination are Suhas Subramanyam, a former technology adviser in the Obama White House; Kyle Green, a former Marine who served in Afghanistan; activist Jasmine Moawad-Barrientos; and Lucero Wiley, who has worked in investment banking.

Black defeated his last Democratic challenger by five points in 2015, despite being outspent by a 2-to-1 margin.

But Democrats see an opportunity in the fact that the district, which covers parts of Loudoun and Prince William counties, has been bluer than the state as a whole in recent election cycles. In the 2016 presidential race, Democrat Hillary Clinton beat Republican Donald Trump in the district by six points, better than her 5.3 percent margin statewide. In the 2017 race for governor, Democrat Ralph Northam beat Republican Ed Gillespie by 11 points in the district while winning the state as a whole by nine percentage points.(ANSA) - Rome, August 27 - A probe against Interior Minister Matteo Salvini for allegedly kidnapping 177 Eritrean migrants aboard the Diciotti coast guard ship will be a "boomerang", Salvini said Monday.

An Agrigento prosecutor has placed Salvini under investigation for kidnapping the migrants, who were allegedly unlawfully held for five days at sea and then another five days at Catania harbour.

Salvini said he was not "cowed" and that he would not ask the Senate to refuse to lift his immunity from prosecution.

"I only did my job as minister and I'm ready to do it again," Salvini said.

Some 100 of the migrants will go to a Catholic centre at Rocca di Papa near Rome, Pope Francis said.

Albania and Ireland will take about 20 each.

Three Egyptians and a Bangladeshi have been arrested on charges of being the migrant traffickers.

The other deputy premier, Industry and Labour Minister Luigi Di Maio, said in the next such case Italy "will negotiate directly with individual States".

He said the government was defending Italy's interests.

Most of the Eritrean migrants from the Diciotti will be moved from a Messina hotspot to a Catholic Church centre at Ariccia near Rome, the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI) told a news agency on Monday.

"They will be moved as soon as possible, in the coming hours, to the Arccia centre run by Auxiluim, pending their transfer to the many diocese who have given their availability: Turin, Brescia, Bologna, Agrigento, Cassano all'Jonio, Rossano Calabro, to cite only those I know about," CEI's head of social communications, Father Ivan Maffeis, told the SIR religious news agency.

The CEI agreed to take in about 100 of the migrants while Albania and Ireland took 20 each to end a stand-off after Interior Minister Matteo Salvini kept them aboard saying they would not land until the EU agred to take them.

Meanwhile Germany said funding the EU budget is an obligation laid down in the EU's founding treaties, commenting on Italy's threat to withhold some of its payment unless the EU agreed to take in the Diciotti migrants.

EU budget funding "was ratified in the European treaties, and it is valid for all," said Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert.

European Parliament President Antonio Tajani said Monday that said you can't criminally try a policy like Salvini's hardline stance on migrant non-reception.

"You can't try a political line, in the end Salvini will be acquitted by the ministerial court and then it becomes only a propaganda clash that doesn't solve the real problem: neither the immigration one nor the that of the separation of powers," Tajani said.

"The affair strongly highlights the problem of justice reform, we can't waste any more time".

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, AUGUST 27 - Palestinian delegations have postponed talks in Cairo on a possible long-lasting truce with Israel, supported by Egypt and the UN, and on a reconciliation among various Palestinian factions, Hamas official Husam Badran was quoted by Palestinian media as saying.



The talks - which were scheduled to resume on Monday - will be delayed for a few days, he said. Badran did not provide further details on the reasons for the postponement.(ANSAmed).

The Alamo Citizen Advisory Committee will have two meetings this week on an updated plan that proponents say would improve the mission and battle site as a pedestrian-friendly place of reverence and learning.

The first meeting, at 6 p.m. today at the Menger Hotel downtown, will include design presentations by John Kasman, vice president of PGAV Destinations, and Erik Kramer, principal with Reed-Hilderbrand Landscape Architects.

The 30-member committee, appointed by city officials and the Texas General Land Office, also is expected to meet in executive session afterward to discuss real estate matters related to the proposed site strategies identified in the comprehensive interpretive plan.

RELATED: Preservation work on Alamo church and barrack to move forward

That part of the meeting will be closed to the public.

The committee also will discuss the next steps in the plans implementation.

Alamo Plan Meetings Monday: 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., Menger Hotel, 204 Alamo Plaza; Open house, with self-guided tours of the plaza, starts at 6:30 p.m. Thursday: 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., City Council Chambers, Municipal Plaza Building, 105 Main Plaza. See More Collapse

An open house for the public with self-guided tours in Alamo Plaza is set for 6:30 to 8 p.m. today during the closed session.

Another meeting is set for Thursday in the City Council chambers with a briefing on the process by City Councilman Robert Trevino and committee tri-chairs Sue Ann Pemberton and Lionel Sosa, followed by discussion and a possible vote on site strategies. Officials said the committee is likely to advance the plan to a six-member Alamo Management Committee, then to the Alamo Executive Committee, composed of Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush.

Neither agenda includes a public comment portion, although people have already been addressing the City Council about the plan.

The City Council is expected to vote on the public-private site plan in September, initiating a process to close parts of Alamo, Crockett and Houston streets to traffic and develop a repair plan for the Alamo Cenotaph. City and state officials have said the 1930s monument needs extensive repair and should be moved about 500 feet south, to provide an open plaza to serve as an outdoor museum, with better views of the Alamos original structures.

The plan update is expected to include improvements in pedestrian access to the plaza, and renderings that show why the Cenotaph needs to be relocated.

Scott Huddleston is a staff writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | shuddleston@express-news.net | Twitter: @shuddlestonSAThe United States Coast Guard rescued 17 people from a sinking fishing boat near South Padre Island Friday afternoon.

Crews at Air Station Corpus Christi received a distress call from the captain of a 46-foot fishing boat named the Thunderbird, according to a news release from the Coast Guard.

The captain told them that the boat was taking on water and that the pumps couldn't keep up.

RELATED: SAPD: Woman's 'blood instantly ran cold' after seeing robbery suspect on the news

The Coast Guard sent an aircrew, as well as a 45-foot response boat to rescue the passengers.

All 17 passengers, who were wearing life jackets, were saved by Coast Guard crews, and no injuries were reported.

A Coast Guard engineer installed a new pump, making it safe for the Thunderbird to return to the Sea Ranch Marina.

The Coast Guard credited the boat's captain for his quick thinking.

"The captain of the Thunderbird's quick distress call to the Coast Guard and the passengers proactively donning lifejackets was very instrumental to the safety of all people on board," said Lt. J.G. Brandon Reed, command duty officer at Sector/Air Station Corpus Christi. "His preparedness definitely made a difference today."San Antonio firefighters fought a quick-moving blaze Sunday that had already damaged two Northeast Side homes when they arrived, and threatened to spread to nearby structures.

More than 30 units responded to the fire just after 2 p.m. in the 4700 block of Desert Poppy. The flames and thick smoke didnt injure anyone, but firefighters worried about the trees and homes standing within feet of the fire.

Something like this can get out of control very quickly, said Woody Woodward, spokesman for the San Antonio Fire Department.

Alex Sanchez, a renter of one of the homes, said he was busy cleaning a carpet when he heard a neighbor banging on the window and yelling. Sanchez, whose children werent home at the time, bolted outside and said the fire had already engulfed both houses.

It was a matter of seconds, Sanchez said.

Standing in the hot sun with a towel covering his head, Sanchez gazed at the remains of the house that had all his belongings. A garage packed with boxes was intact, but the fire had scorched other parts of the home.

Sanchez said he had no idea how the fire started.

Its a total loss, Sanchez said. The combined damage at both homes was $400,000, according to the Fire Department.

Woodward said arson investigators will examine the cause and point of origin of the fire. By the time firefighters showed up, both structures were ablaze. First responders immediately requested assistance and soon the subdivision was packed with firetrucks.

The good news is, the fire was contained to just these two homes, Woodward said. It was a close call.

John Tedesco is a staff writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | jtedesco@express-news.net | Twitter: @John_TedescoSerraj govt orders attacks on outlaw Libya militias Violent clashes in Tripoli, 'no room for chaos' says PM

(ANSAmed) - ROME, AUGUST 27 - Libyan Presidential Council chief Faeyz al-Serraj said Monday in an official statement that he gave orders in the Tripoli region to deal with the militias involved in clashes on Sunday evening in the city. ''There is no longer any room for chaos,'' Serraj said, underscoring that ''anyone involved in this treacherous attack in the capital will be considered outlawed and punished in line with international law.'' According to the television station al-Ahrar, at least 8 people have been killed and 18 injured in the ongoing clashes between rival militias in several areas of Tripoli. Eyewitnesses say that armoured vehicles are in the streets and that checkpoints have been set up with artillery. The clashes reportedly involve the 7th Brigade, originally from Tarhouna, and forces answering to the Government of National Accord (GNA). Clashes are taking place in the intersection of Wadi Al-Rabee, southeast of Tripoli, and in al-Khaila, the Yarmouk camp in the south. The authorities have put all hospitals and private clinics, urging them to give emergency care to those injured. At least two civilians are among those injured, reports Al Jazeera. (ANSAmed).



Ballymahon attracted crowds from all over the world last weekend for the annual Still Voices Short Film Festival, which took place from Thursday to Sunday, August 16 to 19.

And this year's success has really secured Still Voices' position as a prominent festival in Longford, according to Festival Director, Ronan O'Toole.

Its been a fantastic Still Voices 2018, he told the Longford Leader on Sunday night as the four-day festival drew to a close in Skelly's Bar.

Im genuinely blown away by the audiences and crowds weve seen from Thursday onwards at every event, screening and panel discussion and even this morning (Sunday) at 'Mary and the Witch's Flower' - the number of children and parents and families at that was excellent.

Still Voices Short Film Festival kicks off in Ballymahon

To see it grow this way year on year is truly heartening and kind of cements what we already think - that Ballymahon is the perfect place for a film festival and can host some of the worlds finest filmmakers like Emer Reynolds, Rebecca Daly, all these brilliant people down here, discussing films.

And then all the local people from Ballymahon and surrounding areas and from across the world coming to Ballymahon to see their film screen...

Judges had a very difficult time picking winners in the various categories of this year's in-competition films, but the well-deserved winners were announced at a cheese and prosecco reception in Skelly's bar on Sunday.

The winner of the Best Irish Award was 'Late Afternoon' by Louise Bagnall.

The Best Non-Fiction Award went to Norwegian duo, Edvard Karijord and Bendik Mondal for their film, 'I'm Free'.

French filmmaker Ayce Kartal nabbed the Best Animation Award for her stunning and imaginative short, 'Wicked Girl'.

And finally, the winner of the Best International Award at this year's festival was UK short 'Wren Boys' by Harry Lighton.

Ballymahon's Still Voices Short Film Festival: a local festival with a global reach

As far as Im concerned, this year has really cemented Still Voices as a festival for the future. Absolutely, Ronan concluded.

For updates on Still Voices 2019, visit www.stillvoicesfilmfestival.com or follow Still Voices on Facebook.Longford's arts scene is buzzing now more than ever, with festivals springing up left, right and centre, art exhibitions, music events and plenty of activities that cater for all interests.

But that doesn't stop the locals from creating new artistic opportunities as local actor Niall Brewster has proven with the establishment of Further Theatre Company.

Niall has been away acting with various theatre companies and groups across the country but says that every time he came back to Longford, there was nothing here for him.

So I decided if Muhammad can't go to the mountain, then let's make the mountain in Longford, he said.

I talked to a few like-minded individuals with a view to creating a theatre company, so we can have theatre here in Longford all year long and bring quality theatre to life in the midlands.

Longford's Niall Brewster nabs a starring role in Galway Fringe Festival

The plan for down the road, Niall added, is to have not only professional theatre, but also something for amateur actors to give people an opportunity to try acting.

We'll also do courses ourselves and then come back and upskill everyone else, and in the future we might explore screen acting and video.

At the moment, the company is looking at putting on its first play - 'Tillsonburg', written by Malachy McKenna.

Mac (Daire OMuiri) and Digger (Sean Rooney) are two Irish lads, working for five weeks on an Ontario tobacco farm.

Jon (Shane Crossan), the owner of the farm, is in dispute with Pete the Indian (Frank Farrell) about land rights, while Billy (Niall Brewster), a farm labourer, seems trapped in a life of hard labour and alcohol.

As the play progresses, all is not as it seems between the two Irish friends as they revisit the truth behind their departure from New York the previous summer.

Niall is directing the play himself and said he took on the smaller role of Billy to ensure he could give the proper attention to the rest of the actors.

TEDx Longford goes down a storm at Backstage Theatre

Most importantly, this is Niall's first time to direct a play.

It's exciting and scary and then exciting again and then scary again, he laughed.

'Tillsonburg' will be staged in the Backstage Theatre on November 27 at 8pm. For tickets, see www.backstage.ie.Libya: Macron wants to implement accord on elections in Dec. French president: Syria regime could lead to new crisis

(ANSAmed) - PARIS, AUGUST 27 - French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday stressed his determination in pushing forward an agreement forged in May in Paris among different factions in Libya which provides for elections in December, among other things. ''I believe very deeply in restoring Libyan sovereignty'', Macron told French ambassadors in Libya. ''Our role is to push forward the Paris accord in this country that has become the scenario of all external interests''.



The president also spoked about the situation in Syria which he called ''alarming''. The regime, he said, ''threatens to create a new humanitarian crisis in the Idlib region'', the last controlled by rebels. Macron launched an appeal to ''further boost pressure on the regime and its allies'' to find a political solution to the conflict. (ANSAmed).



EASTHAMPTON -- A candle company that focuses on employing women who escaped from war-torn countries earned a visit from U.S. Rep. Richard Neal and state Rep. John Scibak on Monday.

Prosperity Candle, located in the Eastworks Building, is a "mission-driven company" that strives to make a profit while doing the right thing, said co-founder Ted Barber.

"It's not us only helping them," said Barber of his employees. "They are helping us build this business. We are building it together."

"We work with refugees," said Patsy Kaufman Barber, Barber's wife and business partner. "We have five candle makers who were resettled through UN and federal programs. We were originally connected with them through Lutheran Social Services of West Springfield."

The Barbers said two candle makers have already attained U.S. citizenship, and that a third just passed her test.

Sai Aye and Sui Pai, who fled from Burma via refugee camps in Thailand and Malaysia, poured and finished candles as Neal, Scibak, Mayor Nicole LaChapelle and Will Bundy -- the developer and longtime owner of Eastworks -- talked about entrepreneurship and economic development.

Neal, a Springfield Democrat, said he learned of the company at a Grow with Google event in Springfield and wanted to stop by. He said LaChapelle and Bundy helped make that happen.

"This is a great example of small business development at work, while doing social good," said Neal.

Scibak, a South Hadley Democrat, said he was inspired by the company and impressed with Bundy's longstanding commitment to community and craft manufacturing at the once-derelict mill he purchased in 1997.

Prosperity Candle treats its employees well, said Barber. Candle-makers start at $15 an hour and average $18 producing hand-crafted candles poured with all-natural waxes.

"We're not a factory," Barber said. "We're a studio of like-minded people working side-by-side to make a quality product entirely by hand, and in a socially and environmentally responsible way."

He said there is a market for products that are sustainably produced. For instance, in addition to consumers, many large corporations, small businesses and nonprofits with aligned with social and environmental values order client, employee and donor gifts, or will give custom designed candles to conference speakers and attendees.

"Of course, our margins are much tighter than companies who manufacture candles overseas," he said. "But people support our mission, and we're proud of the fact that as a social enterprise that prioritizes positive impact over everything else, we're succeeding."

The company has been in business for nine years, six of those at Eastworks, the mixed-use mill at 116 Pleasant St.

Bundy told Neal about the mill district's history -- from completion of the Manhan Rail Trail in 2003, to an ambitious infrastructure project spearheaded by mill owners in cooperation with the city, to the opening of breweries and restaurants and the launch of the outdoor concert series "Millpond Live."

"Everyone wants to think that they arrived just as Easthampton started its upswing," Bundy said. "But Easthampton has always been on an upward trajectory."

Bundy talked about how mill space lets small businesses grow at their own pace in a flexible manner.

Neal said that tax incentives are central to incentivizing the redevelopment of old buildings into affordable housing, business incubator space and more. He said he opposed the Trump tax plan, but worked across the aisle to preserve three programs -- the new market, historic preservation and low-income housing tax credits.

"I was vehemently opposed to the bill. But we saw we were going to lose. So I appealed to my colleagues to preserve those incentives," Neal said. "Look at the redeveloped brownstones on Mattoon Street in Springfield. The numbers would not have worked without the historic preservation tax credits."

LaChapelle led Neal and Scibak on a mini-tour of the mill district, including its geographical relationship with the Lower Mill Pond and rail trail.

"We've accomplished a lot, but there's still a lot more to do," LaChapelle said. "Obviously, we're looking for some action at One Ferry," a run-down, vacant mill complex not far from Eastworks.

The city recently created a "district improvement financing zone," or DIF, at One Ferry, and the area has been designated as a federal opportunity zone. "We're putting together a package of incentives," LaChapelle said.Most people know Manny D. Rovithis simply by his first name.

You see the name Manny on television commercials advertising his eight, appliance stores throughout New England.

And you see his name and face on glass bottles of Manny's Olive Oil in grocery stores around the area.

Now, Manny has a third business venture - Manny's Three Faces Wine. That's where the name of the wine came from, his three businesses.

And let me say right up front that all three wines taste absolutely outstanding.

Like Manny's Olive Oil, the three wines (Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon) all come from the Greek island of Crete, where Manny was born and raised, he explained during a recent interview in his office at his Manny's TV & Appliances store in Wilbraham.

"The oil is from our trees," Manny said. "Those are our trees. We tried with the oil and it's been very good."

Manny travels back to Crete three or four times a year and owns a house there. Around three years ago, someone from Crete approached Manny about selling Greek wine in the United States. "He kept bugging me to try the wine, try the wine," he said.

It wasn't hard to convince Manny. Ever since Manny was a young boy growing up in Greece, he's been interested in wine. "In Greece, there's no water on the table," he said. "It's wine on the table."

He also recalled stomping the grapes as a kid to make wine growing up in Greece. "I'm into wine," he added. "I'm not a connoisseur but I do like a good bottle of wine. It's something I regularly have with dinner."

Manny personally prefers a good, dry Cabernet Sauvignon. Although like his wife, he also sometimes enjoys drinking a nice, dry Chardonnay.

So a few years ago, Manny brought a few bottles of the wine he was considering selling to the United States and tried it with several local wine professionals. "We tried it and we agreed, it's great," he said.

Manny then spent the next year obtaining all the necessary approvals to sell the wine in the United States. Around one month ago, Manny started selling his wine in Massachusetts.

And like anything Manny does, he does it big. He imported 16,000 bottles to sell in the United States. "Look, if you're going to do something, you have to do it right," he said. "And if people like the wine, that means you have to have the merchandise."

This year, Manny imported the three wines currently for sale. But next year, he said he hopes to add two more wines for sale - a Pinot Grigio and Rose. "People have been asking for them," Manny said.

TASTING NOTES

2017 Manny's Three Faces Chardonnay ($11.99 at Table & Vine in West Springfield)

Like all three wines, this one tastes dry and understated with slight citrus notes, including a hint of orange and grapefruit. But let me emphasize again that this delightful Chardonnay has a very dry, refreshing finish that's perfect for a hot, summer day.

2016 Manny's Three Faces Merlot ($13.99 at Table & Vine)

This smooth red wine tastes great straight out of the bottle. Greek red wines are often hard to find in the United States and this one will make you wish you could find more of them here. Absolutely no bite. Dry and clean and smooth right from the start.

2016 Manny's Three Faces Cabernet Sauvignon ($13.99 at Table & Vine)

Like a father being asked to pick his favorite child, there's never an easy answer for which one is the best. But if I had to pick one wine out of the three, this beautiful Cabernet Sauvignon would likely come in first. The smoothest of the three wines, I was thoroughly impressed by how dry and understated this wine tastes from start to finish. But why pick one when you can enjoy all three?

Cheers!

Wine Press by Ken Ross appears on Masslive.com every Monday and in The Republican's weekend section every Thursday.

Follow Ken Ross on Twitter or Instagram.Fifty years ago, this week, six thousand federal troops were airlifted to Chicago for duty during the Democratic National Convention in that city. They were on hand to support over 11,000 Illinois National Guardsmen and the Chicago police. The troops were stationed at federal installations in the Chicago area and it would require a request from the state before they would be activated.

From the August 26, 1968 edition of The Springfield Union

Ten years later, this week, the College of Cardinals meeting in Vatican City chose Albino Luciani, 65, as the next pope. He succeeded the late Pope Paul VI who died at age 80 on August 6. Luciani chose the name John Paul I.

From the August 28, 1978 edition of The Morning Union

And back in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson celebrated his 60th birthday. His birthday was celebrated at his daughter Luci's home in Austin, Texas.

From the August 28, 1968 edition of The Springfield Union

These are some of the headlines you'll see from Page 1 of The Republican and its predecessors over the past fifty years for the week of August 26 - September 1. Each week I'll put together a slideshow of Page 1 images from selected years over the course of that week. We're starting with a look back at one, five, thirty, forty and fifty years ago, with Page 1s from each day of the week for those years.

The slideshow for August 26 - September 1 is embedded at the top of this article.

We'll also find some humor printed out on page one over the years. In 1968 'Dennis The Menace' could be found on the bottom of page one six days a week.

From the August 26, 1968 edition of The Springfield Union

Back in 1968, a U.S. Army Green Beret from Greenfield, Mass., married an Army nurse from Manchester, Conn., at an Army base in Duc Lap, South Vietnam. Ramon Charles Reed and Jean Kerrigan were married eight months after meeting in a bunker during a Communist attack. A return of fighting around the base almost postponed the wedding, but Kerrigan insisted that the ceremony proceed saying, "even if we had to get married in the bunker."

From the September 1, 1968 edition of The Springfield Union

And a year ago, Tropical Storm Harvey drowned out the city of Houston, Texas and the surrounding area after days of unprecedented rains from the storm.

From the August 28, 2017 edition of The Republican

As you'll find with looking through the slideshow, that while many stories come and go, many of the issues and topics that affected lives in the past, continue to have an impact on our lives today.

Copies of these and other stories can be found in the online archives. The Historic Archive includes stories from 1824 to 1989, and the Newsbank Archive covers 1988 through the present day.HOLYOKE -- A near-capacity crowd filled the Mont Marie Chapel in Holyoke Saturday, August 25 for the Jubilee Celebration of three Sisters of St. Joseph of Springfield of the Class of 1968. Sisters Kathleen Livingstone and Virginia Maitland celebrated their Golden Jubilee. Sister Shirley Anne Campbell commemorated 40 years of service in religious life, representing a combined total of 140 years of service and ministry.

The sisters gathered with their friends and families for a prayer service and reception at the Congregation's former motherhouse Mont Marie in Holyoke.

A quote from the first Book of John, Chapter 1, Verse 19, "From God's fullness we have all received grace upon grace" was selected by the Sisters as the theme for their gathering. During the ceremony, the Jubilarians shared blessings, songs, and prayers and thanked the community of St. Joseph, their families, friends and colleagues for sharing their journey.

"When we looked back on what it has meant to be a Sister of Saint Joseph we were aware of the countless blessings of these years," Sister Virginia Maitland said. "God's grace has come to each of us, and comes to everyone, and in this time in our country, we want people to think more about God's presence and God's blessing to us, and that we are then called to be that grace and goodness in the world in need and everyone we come in contact with."

Born in Montreal, Canada, Sister Shirley Anne Campbell is currently a member of the 2017-2022 SSJ Springfield Leadership Team. A former case manager at Baystate Noble Hospital in Westfield, she also worked for many years in the mental health field. In 1992 she co-founded Weston Rehabilitation Services at Mont Marie in Holyoke with Sister Eleanor Spring, and worked there for 20 years until it closed in 2012. She earned a B.A. in English and psychology from (then) Worcester State College and an M.A. in psychiatric rehabilitation counseling from Springfield College, where she also earned a Certificate of Advance Graduate Studies in psychiatric rehabilitation and substance abuse. She entered SSJ Springfield from St. Mary of the Hills Parish, Morningdale, MA in 1979.

Sister Kathleen Livingstone, a native of Northfield, Mass., is a former junior high teacher at Blessed Sacrament School, Holyoke, and Worcester Central Catholic School. She worked for the Y.W.C.A. of Central Massachusetts and was an associate director at the Center for Transportation and Environmental Education at Assumption College, Worcester. She entered SSJ Springfield from St. Patrick Parish, Northfield, MA in 1968, and earned a B.A. degree from the College of Our Lady of the Elms, Chicopee, an M.Ed. in Natural Sciences from (then) Worcester State College, and an ED.D in Curriculum and Science Education from Boston University. She lives in Worcester, and now works for H & R Block as a tax preparer and instructor. She also ministers at St. Peter's Parish in Worcester, MA.

Sr. Virginia Maitland, originally from Pawtucket, RI, entered the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1968 from St. Teresa Parish, Pawtucket. She served as pastoral minister at St. Mary Parish, Milford, Mass. and later became director of Counseling Services at Elms College. She was a psychotherapist at pastoral counseling centers in both Springfield and Worcester, and has also worked as a counselor in Newton, MA and a hospice chaplain in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. She earned a B.A. degree from the College of Our Lady of the Elms, Chicopee, and both a Master of Divinity and a Doctor of Ministry from Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Center. She received an Advancement to Fellow through the American Association of Pastoral Counselors and a certificate in organizational development and human resource consultation through the Boston University Institute for Psychotherapy. Sister Ginny was a member of the 2011-2017 SSJ Springfield Leadership Team. Currently she serves as Chaplain at Baystate Medical Center, and lives in Chicopee.A police cruiser in Attleboro was shot at least twice early Monday morning, police told WCVB.

Police are responding to the shooting on Route 1A in Attleboro.

NBC 10 reports that police shut down part of Route 1A, a four-lane roadway, while the investigation is underway. A gunman allegedly shot a police cruiser twice, and an officer returned fire, according to the televisions station.

A dispatcher for the Attleboro Fire Department told MassLive police will be sending a news release with more information.

This is a developing story and will be updated.John McCain's Vietnamese jailer said he respected the former prisoner of war and felt sad about his death.

McCain was part of a 20-plane mission to bomb a power plant in Vietnam's northern city of Hanoi in October 1967. After his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down, he was taken prisoner and held in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison for more than five years.

Former Col. Tran Trong Duyet, who ran the prison at the time, said he met with McCain many times during his confinement.

"At that time I liked him personally for his toughness and strong stance," Duyet told the Vietnam News newspaper. "Later on when he became a U.S. senator, he and Sen. John Kerry greatly contributed to promote Vietnam-U.S. relations so I was very fond of him."

He added, "When I learnt about his death... I feel very sad. I would like to send condolences to his family. I think it's the same feeling for all Vietnamese people as he has greatly contributed to the development of Vietnam-U.S. relations."

McCain, 81, died on Saturday from brain cancer.

Scores of people in Hanoi paid their respects to the Arizona Republican at the U.S. Embassy and at a monument by Truc Bach lake, where he landed after parachuting from his damaged plane on Oct. 26, 1967, according to ABC News.

McCain suffered broken arms and a shattered leg in the crash. He was subjected to solitary confinement for two years and beaten frequently. Often he was suspended by ropes lashing his arms behind him. He attempted suicide twice. His weight fell to 105 pounds.

Since his father was an admiral in charge of the United States Pacific Command, McCain had value to his captors. He rejected early release to avoid a propaganda coup or risk demoralizing his fellow prisoners.

The torture McCain endured at the hands of his captors produced lifelong physical effects, including the inability to raise his arms above his head and a slight limp.

His experience also notably shaped his opposition to the CIA's use of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" while in Congress.

The Vietnam War ended with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on Jan. 27, 1973. Nearly two months later, on March 14, 1973, McCain was freed.SPRINGFIELD -- About 20 family members of victims, some in tears, were in the courtroom Monday as Stewart Weldon denied three counts of murder and 49 other charges in Hampden Superior Court.

Judge Michael K. Callan ordered Weldon held without right to bail.

Weldon, 41, faces of 52 counts involving a total of 11 victims.

A pretrial conference was scheduled for Jan. 18.

The offenses spanned "over a year's time," the district attorney's office said.

The indictments allege that Weldon "did assault and beat" each of the women found dead in an around his Page Boulevard home in May.

In addition to the murder indictments, Weldon is charged with eight counts of strangulation, nine counts of aggravated rape, two counts of rape, five counts of aggravated kidnapping, four counts of kidnapping, and two counts of assault with intent to rape.

Weldon is represented by Brian Murphy in the case being prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney Max Bennett.

The discovery of the bodies came three days after Springfield officers arrested Weldon during a traffic stop. Police charged him with kidnapping and other offenses after a woman in his car -- his girlfriend and the mother of his children -- told officers he'd been holding her captive for a month.

Court records show a resident at 1333 Page Blvd. called police on the evening of May 30 to report a "rancid smell." Police sources have told The Republican the caller was Weldon's mother, Constance White, who owns the home.

Investigators descended on the property and found the bodies of Kayla Escalante, 27, of Ludlow, and Springfield residents Ernestine Ryans, 47, and 34-year-old America Lyden.

Weldon, who has a long criminal history, was arrested twice on default warrants in 2017 before leading police on a car chase on Oct. 14 after officers responded to a report of Weldon assaulting a woman on the street. He allegedly fought with officers after crashing his car, and is accused of biting one of them on the leg.

He was initially held on $2,500 bail but petitioned a Superior Court judge for a reduction. On Nov. 21, Judge David Ricciardone set his bail at $1,000, and ordered him confined to his home with a GPS bracelet.

In February, Weldon allegedly cut off his bracelet and left it outside the Springfield courthouse. Weldon eluded officers who went to the home on Feb. 21 to arrest him on a warrant, according to Springfield police.

Police returned to 1333 Page Boulevard on March 8 but could not locate him.

According to the indictments, Escalante and Ryans died after Weldon cut off the GPS device, and after the Feb. 21 attempt to arrest him. Escalante died between April 1 and May 30, and Ryans died between March 1 and May 30, according to the indictments.

The indictments listed a wider window for Lyden's death: between Aug. 1, 2017, and May 30, 2018.A 48-year-old man wanted for allegedly raping a child by force was apprehended as he was boarding a plane to leave the country to head to his native Guatemala.

Octavianano Boche was arrested Thursday at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. He is accused of raping a young boy who he knows in Framingham, Massachusetts State Police said.

He is being held in Texas pending his rendition to Massachusetts, police said.

Framingham Police with Trooper Erik Karlon, of the Violent Fugitive Apprehension Section, worked together to track down Boche and eventually learned he was in Texas and preparing to fly to Guatemala, police said.

Karlon then contacted troopers who work at Logan Airport, in Boston, who then connected him with the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport police and Customs and Border Protection officials, police said.

Officers in Texas set up surveillance, spotted Boche at the airport and took him into custody, police said.A federal judge in Seattle has blocked the distribution of online plans for 3D-printed guns.

US District Judge Robert Lasnik issued a temporary injunction Monday in response to a multi-state lawsuit against a Trump administration settlement that would allow the company Defense Distributed to post online files on printing guns with 3D printers.

"The instability and inaccuracy of 3D printed firearms pose threats to the citizens of the plaintiff States, including both users and bystanders, while the toy-like appearance increases the risk of unintentional discharge, injury and/or death," he wrote.

"Guns that have no identifying information, guns that are undetectable, and guns that thwart the use of standard forensic techniques to link a particular projectile to a particular weapon will hamper law enforcement efforts to prevent and/or investigate crime within the States' respective jurisdictions," the judge said.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey joined her counterparts from more than a dozen other states in the lawsuit.

"In granting the preliminary injunction, the court recognized making untraceable guns that cannot be picked up by metal detectors would undermine state laws across the country and threaten public safety," Healey said in a statement.

"While this federal court order remains in place, my office will continue the fight to permanently block the Administration from allowing criminals and terrorists to make 3D-printed guns," she added. "It's dangerous, it's illegal, and it must be stopped."

The preliminary injunction comes after the prosecutors won an initial temporary restraining order.

Healey, the state's top prosecutor, and other law enforcement officials issued a notice saying the 3D printing of guns is a violation of Massachusetts laws.

The temporary injunction is available below.Migrants: 608 apprehended at sea by Turkish coast guard In operations during the past week, migrants were EU-bound

(ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL, AUGUST 27 - Turkish coast guard over the past week apprehended 608 migrants and refugees who were trying to leave the country without regular documents to reach the European Union's coasts, the Turkish interior ministry reports. The route from Ankara has regained momentum this year.



During the first seven months of 2018, authorities apprehended 14,470 people who were trying to reach European shores, especially in the Aegean Sea, with an annual increase of about 60%.



Since the controversial agreement signed in March 2016 with Brussels, the number of people reaching Europe on a daily basis from Turkey had decreased significantly. (ANSAmed)HOLYOKE - A man fatally shot early Sunday in the downtown section of the city has been identified as 19-year-old city resident Mark Diaz.

The Hampden District Attorney's office released the name Monday morning.

Police received a report of a man injured at 1:22 a.m. at 256 Maple St. When they arrived they found the man with a gunshot wound to his chest, Lt. James Albert said.

The victim was declared dead on the scene by the State Medical Examiner's Office, he said.

James Leydon, spokesman for the district attorney's office, said the shooting remains under investigation.

The investigation is being conducted by the Holyoke Police Department, the Massachusetts State Police Detective Unit assigned to the Hampden District Attorney's Office, and the Murder Unit of the Hampden District Attorney's Office.

Those with information are urged to call Holyoke police at 413-322-6940. Tips can be forwarded anonymously by Text-a-Tip. Text the word CRIMES (274637) and type the word SOLVE into the body of the message followed by the tip.Patrick Landis, one of two brothers involved in a plane crash in Hanson Friday, has been paralyzed from the waist down, according to a GoFundMe campaign set up by his family.

Landis, whose brother, Scott, was killed in the crash, suffered a spinal injury and numerous broken bones, according to the page. Scott Landis was piloting an Aeronca7AC Champion on a trip to spread his father's ashes when it went down around 4:15 p.m. near Cranland Airport.

The brothers were from Hanson.

Scott Landis, 34, was a pilot in the Army National Guard. The Boston Globe reported that he had been awarded medals for his service in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as several other commendations.

"It's a family tragedy, and everybody's heartbroken, them in particular," family spokesman Adam Proulx told the newspaper. "They're doing OK, all things considered, but this is a tragedy nobody should have to go through."

Proulx told the Globe that Patrick Landis, 29, opened his eyes at Tufts Medical Center and was able to squeeze family members' hands. His recovery is expected to take a year or more.

The ashes of the brothers' father, Richard, were recovered from the wreckage. There are plans to finish spreading them, the newspaper reported.

A GoFundMe campaign for Scott Landis' wife, Staci, and child, Jack, raised more than $43,000 by Monday morning. The separate campaign for Patrick Landis has raised nearly $10,000.Massachusetts officials are moving to set up an independent audit unit that will oversee the State Police after a series of scandals tarred the law enforcement agency.

The creation of the special unit was included in the state budget passed by lawmakers and signed by Gov. Charlie Baker in July, as current and former troopers were hit with federal charges of overtime abuse. Two troopers have already pleaded guilty to the embezzlement charges, while a total of 46 remain under investigation.

Now the state Inspector General's Office is posting a job listing for the director of the State Police audit unit. The job, based in Boston, comes with a salary range of $100,000 to $110,000 a year.

The unit will be "responsible for monitoring the quality, efficiency and integrity of MSP's operations, organizational structure and management functions." The unit will also focus on prevent and detecting fraud and waste of public funds.

The unit is housed inside the Office of the Inspector General and independent of the governor's public safety departments and the State Police.

The director will supervise a "staff of investigators, attorneys and/or analysts (and such additional expert, clerical or other assistants as the work of the Unit may require," the job listing says.

The inspector general, Glenn Cunha, has the power to appoint the director of the special unit. The director has a four-year term and will also have the title of assistant inspector general.

The state inspector general was a position created in 1981, after a state commission uncovered corruption in the awarding of state and county building projects, particularly the shoddily constructed UMass Boston campus in the city's Dorchester neighborhood.

The requirements for director of the unit include being a member of "good standing" with the Massachusetts bar and at least 10 years of experience as a prosecutor, along with a minimum of 3 years of management and supervisory experience.

The job listing calls for cover letters and resumes to be submitted by Sept. 7.

The eruption of multiple scandals within the State Police, starting in 2017, led to state lawmakers including the creation in the special audit when they passed the budget in late July 2018.

Gov. Baker has called the State Police's overtime abuse scandal a "conspiracy" and a "scam" going back years.

But that hasn't been the only scandal tarnishing the State Police. Col. Richard McKeon retired in November after rank-and-file troopers accused State Police leaders of forcing them to scrub the arrest report of a judge's daughter. His retirement was announced late in the day on a Friday.

And just after 9 p.m. this past Friday, the State Police dumped the news of an internal affairs investigation on Leigha Genduso, who was hired by the department despite participating in narcotics dealing and drug use. Genduso resigned and she was issued a dishonorable discharge.

In the late Friday statement, a State Police spokesman said the investigation laid blame on Genduso, instead of department officials, for not disclosing her involvement with a drug dealing operation.

Col. Kerry Gilpin, installed by Baker to clean up the department, has created new procedures for background checks of recruit candidates.SPRINGFIELD - A four-day student march from Worcester to Smith & Wesson that called for less gun violence and more gun control was as personal for Chinaly Chanvong, a 17-year-old city resident, as it was for David Hogg, a survivor of Parkland, Florida shooting.

The SABIS International Charter School senior, who lives right behind the gun maker, was in the fourth grade when a classmate was shot in the leg while she was shopping.

When her childhood friend was hurt, Chanvong said she suddenly realized the neighboring business has contributed to shootings - locally and across the country - in a subconscious way.

"I knew I had to be a part of this," she said. "We want to be part of the change that is happening around this country."

Students from Somerville and Boston to Springfield and Longmeadow joined together 40 strong to hold the 50-mile March for our Lives to call for an end to gun violence. They began in Worcester and when they finished in Springfield Sunday, they were joined by hundreds of other local supporters. The group of about 250 then marched a short distance from Blunt Park to Smith & Wesson for an ending rally.

Just as the rally was breaking up at around 1 p.m., officials were announcing multiple people were killed in a shooting during a video game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida. Preliminary reports said at least 11 people were shot and three killed, including the suspected shooter.

Hogg, who became one of the students who turned to activism to end mass shootings, and Manuel Oliver, whose son Joaquin died in the Parkland School shooting started the march with students in Worcester.

The group held signs and chanted as they marched:

"USA over NRA."

"Peace is Possible."

"Show me what democracy looks like. This is what Democracy looks like."

"Stop the silence. End gun violence."

When the group arrived at Smith & Wesson they paraded down the sidewalk past counterprotesters set up across the street on Roosevelt Avenue. Those demonstrators held "Don't Tread on Me" and American flags and signs declaring their support for the 2nd Amendment.

The two groups eventually gathered on the same side of the street but Springfield and State Police, who provided security and directed traffic, separated the two groups by at least an eighth of a mile and discouraged anyone from walking between the two saying there is no trespassing on private property.

"I'm a vet. I believe in the Bill of Rights," said Samson Racioppi, of Salisbury. "Even in liberal Massachusetts we don't support the gun control agenda that is being forced down many Americans' throats," he said.

The issue was so important to Chad Hidler, he drove from Concord, New Hampshire to demonstrate. He carried an American flag and wore a black T-shirt saying "Second Amendment," which gives people the right to bear arms.

"It is a direct attack on our 2nd Amendment rights," he said. "I encourage their 1st Amendment right to speak their opinion but what they are promoting takes away my 2nd Amendment rights."

While the protest was personal for Chanvong it was also personal for Jennifer Raschilla, of East Longmeadow, who carried a "Western Mass Backs Smith & Wesson" sign.

"I want to show the diversity of 2nd Amendment supporters. I'm a mom and I'm not the boogeyman," she said.

She said she has a family member who has worked at Smith & Wesson for many years and knows other employees as well.

Smith & Wesson, which changed its name in December 2016 to American Outdoor Brands, has about 1,750 full-time employees according to past reports.

Students said they ran into others who told them they didn't agree with them - sometimes in nasty ways - during the march, but they received plenty of encouragement too. In one case, an older woman stopped them and handed them a note saying their efforts give her hope, said Jack Torres, a junior at Somerville High School.

"It was awesome. We had a lot of supporters cheering us on and it kept us going when we started to get tired," said Felix Brody, a Somerville High student.

Students stayed overnight in churches and community centers and residents would offer them water and food as they passed by their homes, Brody said.

The teens do not want to shut down Smith & Wesson, but they think they can talk to officials about finding ways to reduce gun violence.

During the event, they also pushed participants to register to vote and to cast ballots in upcoming elections. Several political candidates also attended the event handing out literature to both groups.

The same day students walked out thousands of schools for the National Student Walkout to protest gun violence in March, local students held a separate after-school protest at Smith & Wesson and have been periodically doing so ever since, said Sarah Reyes, a junior at Longmeadow High School.

This is the next step in that protest, she said.

"They produce the weapons used in some of the most horrific mass shootings," Reyes said.

So far students have written letters asking to speak to P. James Debney, the chief operating officer of the company, only to be rebuffed. He has told the teens he does not think would be productive even though one letter was signed by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, said Amelia Ryan, a Longmeadow High senior.

"We are here to engage them to ask them to be part of the solution," Reyes said. "They need to be part of the solution because they are very concretely part of the problem."Authorities have identified the man who allegedly shot at two police officers in Attleboro Monday morning as Eric Lindsey.

Lindsey, 41, of Coventry, Rhode Island, is being charged with two counts of firearm-armed assault to murder; four counts of attempted assault and battery with a firearm; four counts of assault with a dangerous weapon; and three counts of possessing a large capacity feeding device.

He is also charged with one count each of breaking and entering; unlawful possession of a large capacity firearm; unlawful possession of ammunition; discharging a firearm within 500 feet of a building; carrying an illegal firearm; and carrying a loaded illegal firearm, officials said.

An arraignment date for Lindsey to appear before a judge at Attleboro District Court has not yet been set, according to a statement from the office of Bristol County District Attorney Thomas M. Quinn III.

Lindsey allegedly shot at two Attleboro police officers, who then returned fire.

The officers were taken to the hospital as a precautionary measure and have been released, Quinn's office said in a statement.

Lindsey is recovering at Rhode Island Hospital.

"By the grace of god, the officers were not seriously injured or killed," Quinn said. "This case highlights the dangers officers face on a daily basis while responding to calls. I commend them for their professionalism in their response to a most dangerous and potentially fatal situation."

Attleboro Chief Kyle Heagney said the officers were responding to reports of an armed man in a church at about 6:45 a.m.

The officers searched the area and came across a Lindsey, who opened fire. The officers returned fire.

At least one police cruiser sustained bullet holes in its windshield. A passing truck was also reportedly struck by the gunfire.

The investigation remains ongoing.

No further information is expected to be released before Lindsey's arraignment.

Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.Have you heard the one about the comedy club opening in Worcester? Well you will come October.

The WooHaHa! comedy club is set to host a grand opening celebration Oct. 17, with its first act hitting the stage the following day. Most of the venue's comedy shows will run Thursday through Saturday nights, with some open mics and live podcasts on the days in between.

John Tobin, who owns and produces events for Laugh Boston, Nick's Comedy Stop and other venues throughout the state, has partnered with the developers of Worcester's Grid District to bring programming WooHaHa! Tobin, who has deep ties to Worcester, said he's excited to become a part of the city's ongoing renaissance.

"I love Worcester's history, I love its story," he said. "Worcester is really, in a lot of ways, the comeback kid of Massachusetts and to see what's happening there now is pretty great and just to be a small part of it is awesome."

Tobin said the 126-seat club will provide an intimate experience featuring both local and national acts. Its layout includes a drink rail that goes around the back of the room with high-top stools, tables and chairs.

Most comedy shows will range from 90 to 105 minutes.

The venue will also cater to the city's large college population by hosting produced open mics, live podcasts and social media influencers from YouTube and Instagram.

"We have access to just about every comedian in the country," Tobin said, adding his production company will focus on bringing in a diverse range of acts.

And the Worcester Regional Airport's new JetBlue flights to New York City are making the process even easier, Tobin said.

The club will open for its first weekend with Worcester comedians Dan Smith and Orland Baxter, who will perform Thursday through Saturday. Tobin has booked the venue through December.

"It's only fitting that we do that, have Worcester people open it up," he said. "Then we're off to the races. It will be a mixture of Worcester and Boston comedians, but we're also mixing in national headliners."

Tobin himself has longstanding ties to the city. He began his career in the comedy business 26 years ago working as a door man at a club. Two jobs later, he found himself at the Aku-Aku in Worcester, where the 99 Restaurant now sits. Every weekend, he would make the drive from West Roxbury in his Honda Del Sol to work at the restaurant and comedy club.

Tobin also used to sit on Boston's City Council in the early 2000s, where he met now-Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Tim Murray. He said the two became fast friends.

"Tim, five or six years ago, said, 'You've gotta come down to Worcester, you've gotta open something in Worcester,'" Tobin recalled.

Now that it's all come together, Tobin said he couldn't be happier.

"We're excited to finally get it going and to be part of such a great city that's just experiencing such a great renaissance," he said. "We take a lot of pride in being part of it."

For more information about WooHaHa!, including a full schedule, click here.We won't be seeing the likes of John McCain again anytime soon. Because truly heroic men so rarely come along.

McCain, who died from brain cancer on Saturday at the age of 81, had served as U.S. senator from Arizona since 1987, was the Republican Party's unsuccessful presidential nominee in 2008, was the co-author of landmark legislation meant to lessen the influence of big money in electoral campaigns, worked across the aisle repeatedly with Democrats, including in an attempt to reform our nation's broken immigration system. And that merely scratches the surface of his life in politics. Before that, McCain was a U.S. Navy pilot who was shot down and captured on a mission over Hanoi, was held prisoner for five and a half years, was repeatedly tortured, but refused early release -- because it would have been a violation of military code.

When McCain's captors learned that they were holding a man they termed the "crown prince," the son of an admiral, they offered to release him early.

McCain would have none of it. Though he'd been beaten nearly to death, he refused to take a pass to exit the Hanoi Hilton before those who'd been captured earlier than he had. Because that wasn't how it was done.

After refusing early release, he was beaten, again nearly to death.

This story has been told so many times that it can be easy to forget just how astonishingly brave, how heroic, was such a selfless move. He put what was right first, ahead of his own safety, his own well-being, his own life.

How many of us would have had such courage, such an unbending hold on what was the right thing to do?

That quality would surface again and again throughout McCain's life. One moment that stood out during the 2008 presidential campaign showed how honorable McCain remained. At a town hall-style meeting, a woman spoke disparagingly of then-Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, calling him "an Arab."

McCain wouldn't stand for such nonsense. Taking the microphone back from the questioner, he answered, plainly, clearly:

"No, ma'am. He's a decent family man, (a) citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that's what this campaign is all about."

Imagine that -- a candidate who puts the loonies in their place rather than feeding their frenzy, their fears.

Though McCain would go on to lose that election, badly, his conduct on the campaign trail made him a true winner in the minds of anyone who cared even a whit about decency.

No one, no matter his or her politics, can view McCain's life and legacy as anything less than an inspiration for all of us. No one, no matter his or her politics, can rationally reflect on McCain's life and not stand in awe.

He loved our nation, and tried always to conduct himself in a way that reflected that love. He lived by a code of honor to which others only give lip service.

McCain was so often referred to as a maverick that it was easy to forget how rare was that quality in today's Congress. He believed what he believed, and charted his own course. He believed in our nation, our ideals, and endeavored, as much as was humanly possible, to live by, and up to, them.

John Sidney McCain III was a great man, a great American, an inspirational force in the U.S. Congress and in Washington since his election to the House in 1982. The nation salutes him. He'll be greatly missed.The Federal Election Commission has given Democratic congressional candidate Tahirah Amatul-Wadud until Aug. 30 to file a report on money her campaign has raised and spent ahead of Massachusetts' primary election -- information due last week.

FEC officials, in a Friday letter sent to the Democrat's campaign, noted that Amatul-Wadud had failed to file a pre-primary financial report covering receipts and disbursements made between July 1 and Aug. 15 by the agency's Aug. 23 deadline.

Stressing that such information is required by the Federal Election Campaign Act, Deborah Chacona, of the FEC's Reports Analysis Division, said the campaign will have until 5 p.m. on the fourth business day from the notice -- or Aug. 30 -- to file such information or be cited as a "non-filer."

Chacona added that "the failure to timely file this report may result in civil money penalties, an audit or other legal enforcement action."

Amatul-Wadud, who will face longtime U.S. Rep. Richard Neal in the state's Sept. 4 primary election, confirmed on Monday that her campaign "hit a glitch" in filing its pre-primary report. She did not elaborate on the glitch, but stressed that her campaign "will be filing shortly."

"We are buzzing with excitement as we enter the last few days of the campaign," the Democrat said in an email.

FEC spokesman Myles Martin said the commission expects to publish a list of any Massachusetts candidates considered to be "non-filers" on Friday, Aug. 31, if necessary.

According to the agency, "an election-sensitive report is considered late if it's filed after the due date, but more than four days before the election." It's considered "not filed" if it is not submitted more than four days before the election.

Neal's campaign, which had submitted its pre-primary filing, reported that the incumbent had a cash balance of nearly $3.1 million as of Aug. 15 -- down from the $3.4 million he reported as of the end of June.

The congressman raised more than $167,000 over the month-and-a-half-long period -- about $25,000 of which came from individuals, according to the FEC filing.

The Democrat, meanwhile, spent $521,406 from July to mid-August. The bulk of that spending -- more than $394,000 -- went toward campaign advertisements, his campaign reported.

The campaign has since filed a handful of "48 hour contribution notices," which note additional funds given to Neal in wake of the pre-primary report.Quentin Palfrey, a former Obama administration official with a broad resume, wants to take what he describes as a lifelong fight against inequality to Beacon Hill.

"I've been motivated throughout my career by the fight against poverty and inequality," Palfrey said.

Palfrey is running against Jimmy Tingle for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor.

The winner of the Sept. 4 primary will join a ticket with the Democratic nominee for governor, either Jay Gonzalez or Bob Massie.

Republican Gov. Charlie Baker and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito are running for re-election, and Baker has a primary challenge from controversial Springfield pastor Scott Lively.

Palfrey, 44, grew up in Southborough and graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is the great-great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt.

After law school, Palfrey clerked for a judge, then worked briefly in private practice in New York before joining Democratic U.S. Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004, running Kerry's voter protection effort in New Hampshire.

Palfrey then took a job working for the Massachusetts attorney general's office, first as an assistant attorney general, then as the first chief of Attorney General Martha Coakley's health care division, which worked on implementing the state's 2006 health care reform.

When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, Palfrey did voter protection work for his campaign. When Obama was elected, Palfrey was hired to work in the Commerce Department, then the White House, helping shape economic policy, particularly with regard to intellectual property issues.

Palfrey had a short stint working for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and in a private law firm before taking a job as executive director of JPAL-North America, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab dedicated to using research to fight poverty. He left that job in 2017 to run for lieutenant governor.

He lives in Weston.

The lieutenant governor's job can vary depending on who holds the role. Polito has focused heavily on municipal issues.

Palfrey said he wants to be a bridge between the governor's office and cities and towns, understanding and addressing the varied issues facing different regions.

Palfrey also wants to use his expertise from working in the Obama administration to navigate the state's relationship with the federal government and take care of areas like social services and consumer protection when the federal government steps back.

"Particularly important in the Trump era is navigating the broken, dysfunctional and sometimes immoral federal system," Palfrey said. "There are important choices we have to make as a state whether we're going to fight back against (President Donald) Trump's divisive agenda or whether we're going to cooperate with it. Too often, Gov. Baker made the decision to cooperate with them."

Although Baker did not vote for Trump and has often opposed his policies, Palfrey pointed to a decision Baker made and then rescinded to send National Guard resources to the southern border, as well as Baker's fundraising for the national Republican Party.

As a lawyer, Palfrey said he is well-suited to the lieutenant governor's role of chairing the Governor's Council, which confirms judges.

"I can play an important role in making sure we have a set of judges who respect the rule of law, respect the challenges ordinary people face and who are compassionate about some of problems with the criminal system," he said.

Palfrey's views on issues are generally consistent with the types of progressive Democratic policies that have been considered -- though not always passed -- on Beacon Hill.

He supports the Safe Communities Act, a bill that generated a lot of attention this year, which would have prohibited state and local police from cooperating with federal immigration officials.

On health care, Palfrey wants to move toward a single-payer system. He noted that today, health care costs are increasing, including the amount individuals are paying out of pocket, but health outcomes are not better than in systems that cost less money.

Palfrey said the state should be spending more money on preventative care, to address areas like substance abuse, mental health problems, obesity and diabetes. "If you invest early, you can improve people's lives and reduce the health care burden," he said.

He argued that a single-payer system would eliminate wasteful administrative spending and create a system that incentivizes quality care and prevention.

Palfrey generally supports the criminal justice reform bill that passed the Legislature this year but also thinks "we have a long way to go to make our criminal justice system fair."

"We imprison too many people for too long for too little," Palfrey said. "Race has too much to do with who ends up in the criminal justice system."

Palfrey would eliminate all mandatory minimum sentences, including for violent crimes. "Mandatory minimums are the wrong way to think about how we impose punishment," he said.

He wants to change the bail system so that poor people are not incarcerated for not being able to pay bail that a wealthier person could have paid. He said the state should also invest more in services that help prisoners with mental health or substance abuse problems re-enter their communities.

"Too often the criminal justice system is used as a bad proxy for a set of functioning services for people who need help," Palfrey said.

On transportation, Palfrey supports expanding Boston to Springfield passenger rail. He argued that the state must invest more money in fixing and expanding the entire state transportation system, whether the MBTA, commuter rail or roads and bridges. He criticized Baker for "a lack of vision and a lack of investment in the public transportation system."

Palfrey also wants to invest more in schools, starting with updating the state education funding formula to more accurately reflect the cost of educating students.

Asked where the money would come from for these additional investments, Palfrey said he supports some form of a more progressive income tax, such as a higher tax rate on millionaires. The Supreme Judicial Court struck down a ballot question that would have asked voters to raise taxes on income over $1 million.

He said regional ballot initiatives, where cities and towns vote to raise taxes for particular projects, could raise more money for transportation projects. He supports studying congestion pricing by changing the cost of tolls at peak hours. He also favors putting a price on carbon, both to raise money and limit dependence on fossil fuels.

Palfrey has raised $244,000 so far for his campaign.SPRINGFIELD -- Incumbent state Sen. James Welch, D-West Springfield, is hoping voters will choose experience when they go to the polls during the primary election Sept. 4. His challenger, Amaad Rivera, hopes people looking for a change will cast their votes that day.

The two candidates for the Hampden County District seat representing Chicopee, Springfield and West Springfield will outline their different approaches to representing the region during a televised forum on Focus Springfield Aug. 29. at 6 p.m.

"Candidate forums are one of the signature activities of the League of Women Voters," said Linda O'Connell, who leads the group's Springfield chapter, which is hosting the forum.

"The League believes in a democracy where every person has the desire, the right, the knowledge and the confidence to participate. As a non-partisan organization, we have been providing trusted voter information for almost a century and highly value our nonpartisan platforms for community interaction with candidates," she added in a statement.

The forum is co-sponsored by Focus Springfield Community Television and the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts. It will take place at the TV studio at 1200 Main St.

Since there is no Republican candidate for this Senate seat, the winner will run unopposed in the general election on Nov. 6.

Welch has first elected to the seat in 2010.

"If there is something that needs to be done, a project locally that needs to move forward, I think I have the ability to get that to the forefront," he said, citing building a replacement for the Roderick L. Ireland Courthouse on State Street in Springfield as one of his goals if re-elected.

Welch said throughout the years he has developed relationships in the Legislature that make it possible for him to highlight the needs of the Hampden District.

"I'm not good at tooting my own horn, but I chair the health care finance committee. It's probably the second most powerful committee behind Ways and Means Committee. That gives me a considerable ability to influence policy in many areas and more importantly gives me ability to bring resources back to the region," he said.

Rivera, a former policy adviser to U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and a former Springfield City Councilor, said it is time for a fresh perspective and better representation for all three cities in the district.

"We have allowed for people to create false divisions that there is a huge difference between Springfield, West Springfield and Chicopee," he said. "Chicopee is struggling to fund their schools just as much as West Side, they are breathing the same air Springfield residents do, there are gun violence problems crossing rivers and opioid problems that don't respect gender, class or geographic boundaries. These issues are at the center of these communities."

The 90-minute forum will include prepared questions from the League of Women Voters and co-sponsors, a media panel, an exchange of questions between the candidates and questions submitted by the studio and online audience.

Station manager Stephen Cary said Focus Springfield has tried to increase local coverage of elections over the years.

"We are thrilled to partner with the League of Women Voters and the Food Bank to help inform voters about their political choices with a live candidates debate on TV, and in an archived format online until the polls close," he said.

The event will be broadcast live on Focus Springfield TV (Comcast cable channel 17) and West Springfield Community TV (Comcast cable channel 15). It will also be available on-demand on the Focus Springfield website and on the League of Women Voters and Food Bank of Western Massachusetts Facebook pages.

The community can submit questions for the candidates to the League at SpringfieldLWV@gmail.com. A team of League volunteers will review submissions, combining similar questions and choosing ones that allow for the greatest range of topics.

Seating for the forum is by reservation only. Reservations can be made online or by calling the League at 413-655-1837 with name, email address and phone number.Russian authorities identified a suspect in the scrawling of anti-Semitic graffiti on the wall of a Jewish center in the Russian village of Lyubavichi, the cradle of the Chabad Hasidic movement.





The suspect was a man from Murmansk, a city located hundreds of miles north of Lyubavichi, according to Yuri Ivashkin, the mayor of the village in western Russia.





"We knew immediately this was not the work of a local," Ivashkin told JTA. "Police are still working on identifying an accomplice."





The inscriptions, reading "Jews out of Russia, our land" and featuring the Baltic variant of the swastika, were spray-painted on the wall of the Hatzer Raboteinu Nesieinu Belubavitch earlier this month.





Ivashkin's statement followed a ceremony in which several of Russia's senior-most rabbis attended the dedication of a perimeter fence around one of the Jewish cemeteries in and around Lyubavichi.





The rabbis, including Yitzhak Kogan of the Moscow synagogue Bolshaya Bronnaya, and Jehoshua Raskin, traveled Sunday from Moscow to the village of 200 people to celebrate the completion there of a preservation project headed by the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, or ESJF, a nonprofit organization that has completed similar projects in 102 cemeteries across Eastern Europe with funding from the German government.





"Initiatives like these are vital because of neglect, economic and agricultural development, and vandalism," said Rabbi Isaac Schapira, the founder and chairman of the ESJF board. The project in Lyubavichi was his organization's first in Russia since its founding in 2015.





Joseph Popack, a Jewish-American donor, funded the new fencing at a cost of $100,000.ISTANBUL - At least 147 people were killed and 702 injured during nine days of holiday for Eid al-Adha, the Muslim Feast of sacrifice. During the holiday, officially declared by the Cabinet and which ended on Sunday evening, some 192 occurred according to Hurriyet. Like every year, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of the country to spend their days with relatives living in other provinces or went to holiday spots.

The authorities had conducted several awareness-raising campaigns in recent weeks to encourage Turkish citizens to drive more carefully and wear seatbelts.Diciotti probe will boomerang, no immunity says Salvini 'I'd do it again' says interior minister,EU corrects budget data

(ANSAmed) - ROME, AUGUST 27 - A probe against Interior Minister Matteo Salvini for allegedly kidnapping 177 Eritrean migrants aboard the Diciotti coast guard ship will be a "boomerang", Salvini said Monday.



An Agrigento prosecutor has placed Salvini under investigation for kidnapping the migrants, who were allegedly unlawfully held for five days at sea and then another five days at Catania harbour.



Salvini said he was not "cowed" and that he would not ask the Senate to refuse to lift his immunity from prosecution.



"I only did my job as minister and I'm ready to do it again," Salvini said.



Some 100 of the migrants will go to a Catholic centre at Rocca di Papa near Rome, Pope Francis said.



Albania and Ireland will take about 20 each.



Three Egyptians and a Bangladeshi have been arrested on charges of being the migrant traffickers.



The other deputy premier, Industry and Labour Minister Luigi Di Maio, said in the next such case Italy "will negotiate directly with individual States".



He said the government was defending Italy's interests.



Most of the Eritrean migrants from the Diciotti will be moved from a Messina hotspot to a Catholic Church centre at Ariccia near Rome, the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI) told a news agency on Monday.



"They will be moved as soon as possible, in the coming hours, to the Ariccia centre run by Auxiluim, pending their transfer to the many diocese who have given their availability: Turin, Brescia, Bologna, Agrigento, Cassano all'Jonio, Rossano Calabro, to cite only those I know about," CEI's head of social communications, Father Ivan Maffeis, told the SIR religious news agency.



The CEI agreed to take in about 100 of the migrants while Albania and Ireland took 20 each to end a stand-off after Salvini kept them aboard saying they would not land until the EU agred to take them.



Meanwhile Germany said funding the EU budget is an obligation laid down in the EU's founding treaties, commenting on Italy's threat to withhold some of its alleged 20 billion euro EU budget payment unless the EU agreed to take in the Diciotti migrants.



EU budget funding "was ratified in the European treaties, and it is valid for all," said Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert.



The EU must change its tune on migrants or Italy's budget veto will be "certain", Deputy Premier Luigi Di Maio said Monday.



Di Maio was speaking after European Budget Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said Monday that Italy doesn't pay 20 billion euros a year to the EU budget as stated by Di Maio in threatening to cut it unless the EU took in the Diciotti migrants, but 14-16 billion.



"Taking into account what it receives from the EU budget that leaves a net contribution of three billion a year," Oettinger said.



Di Maio replied that Oettinger's description of his claim as a "farce" "shows what consideration they have of our country".



"They're evidently used to Italian premiers and ministers going cap in hand to Brussels".



"Funding is not a dogma," said Di Maio, leader of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, and also industry and labour minister.



"The music in Europe is going to change," he said, saying that soon there would be talk of "real solidarity and not restrictions that are unsustainable from both the social and economic standpoint".



European Parliament President Antonio Tajani said Monday that said you can't criminally try a policy like Salvini's hardline stance on migrant non-reception.



"You can't try a political line, in the end Salvini will be acquitted by the ministerial court and then it becomes only a propaganda clash that doesn't solve the real problem: neither the immigration one nor the that of the separation of powers," Tajani said.



"The affair strongly highlights the problem of justice reform, we can't waste any more time".



Italians overestimate the presence of migrants in their country more than any other nationality in the EU, according to a survey by think tank Istituto Cattaneo out on Monday.



The study on the phenomenon of immigration in Italy and its perception said those polled overestimated the presence of migrants by 18%.



Immigrants in Italy account for roughly 8% of the overall population.



The poll also found that 74% of the Italians interviewed were convinced that immigrants were responsible for higher crime rates against a European average of 57%.



A reported 58% of those interviewed for the survey also said they thought more immigration would imply fewer jobs for residents in Italy against a European average of about 14%.



There are "points of convergence" between Italy and Hungary on immigration policy, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on the eve of Tuesday's meeting between Premier Viktor Urban and Salvini.



Szijjarto said "the defence of Europe's borders consists in managing immigration.



"Hungary has already demonstrated that land borders can be defended.



"Australia and Italy have shown that maritime borders can be defended too".



Meanwhile a cargo of boat people reached Australia from Vietnam as Australia's No Way naval blockade against migrants - which Salvini says he wants to emulate - showed its first 'hole' in four years.



The migrants were promptly arrested.



Salvini said "this is the model I want to arrive at! "Long live the civilised and serious Australia".



German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Monday Germany would soon strike a deal with Italy on the secondary movement of migrants. An accord is needed so that asylum seekers already registered in Italy, and therefore with their fingerprints in the Eurodac database, can be sent back by Germany within 48 hours, the minister recalled.



Germany signed bilateral accords with Spain and Greece between the end of July and the start of August.(ANSAmed).



by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, August 27, 2018

The question with this new drama series coming this week to CBS All Access -- as with any new series made for SVOD (streaming video on demand) -- is this: Is it worth paying for?

Naturally, one could ask the same question about any form of TV we pay for, such as basic and premium cable.

Some of us find the monthly bills from our cable companies more or less acceptable, even if we wish they could magically be reduced instead of gradually inching upward each year.

With reductions in mind, some of us seek ways to cut out some of the items on the bill. We consider smaller tiers or decide that channels such as HBO and/or Showtime are just not worth the money.

Today, however, considerations of where and how to spend our TV dollars encompass a slew of content services. People cutting their cable cords in order to arrange all of their video consumption in the world of streaming services still have bills to pay.

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Into this fray comes CBS All Access, the broadcast network's growing subscription streaming service known mainly for The Good Fight, the sequel to the former network show The Good Wife, and Star Trek: Discovery, the newest series in the never-ending Star Trek saga.

The service's newest entry is titled One Dollar, premiering this coming Thursday (August 30). It's a 10-part drama series of (roughly) one-hour episodes that tells the story of a small fictional town in Pennsylvania called Braden, outside of Pittsburgh.

There is a lot going on in Braden, including a multiple murder with no bodies, steel mills facing uncertain economic times, a series of thefts, rich people having marital problems and poor people having money problems.

How it all ties together is the show's overriding mystery, although the real central mystery surrounds this bloody crime and the missing bodies (but lots of blood).

And I almost forgot: There is a dollar bill that keeps changing hands in the story -- which is how the show gets its name.

However, so much is going on in this show that the task of keeping track of who has this dollar seemed superfluous in the first two episodes the TV Blog previewed for this review.

Perhaps this dollar emerges as more than just something that ultimately has little meaning. Hitchcock famously called such things MacGuffins.

On the whole, One Dollar is a very good show. It has an authentic small-town feel, because it was being filmed on location somewhere in Pennsylvania.

The small-town atmosphere is enhanced by the show's large ensemble of actors. Few are well-known, but they play well off of each other -- like people who have lived near each other all of their lives.

At the same time, however, the actors sometimes seem too much like they are acting -- "pretending to be real people rather than 'being' real people," as I wrote in my notes at one point. But this is a minor complaint.

In addition, except for some of the characters unabashedly (and gratuitously) sprinkling their conversations with f-words, this show could just as easily air on network television, where bloody murders and their grisly aftermath are a nightly occurrence, especially on CBS.

One Dollar starts on CBS All Access on Thursday (August 30).Amazons Alexa may still be the it girl of smart speakers, but theres evidence that says Amazons Echo brand is being pressured by Google Home and its efficient but nameless Assistant.

New international data from Strategic Analytics marks some loss of affection for Ms. Alexa, reporting that Amazons global share of smart speaker shipments fell to 41% in Q2 2018 from 44% in Q1 and 76% in Q2 2017.

Those were the days, when Amazons Echo had a huge share of the smart speaker market almost to itself.

But Google has increased its share to 28% in Q2 of this year, Strategic Analytics reports, all the way up from 16% last year. And unit shipments increased from 600,000 units in 2017s second quarter to 3.2 million this year.

Still, while Amazon and Google may be duking it out at the top, names unfamiliar to most Americans may really be carving up the market.

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In short, marketers in China are speaking a different language, notes Strategic Analytics David Watkins. Amazon and Google accounted for a 69% share of global smart speaker shipments in Q2 2018, down from over 90% in Q2 2017.

He says thats an indication of Amazon and Googles inability to break into the fast-growing Chinese market that is dominated by local powerhouse brands such as Alibaba, JD.com and Baidu.

Google is on the case: It signed a $500 million strategic partnership with JD.com, a Chinese ecommerce giant, in an effort to get a firmer foothold in that huge market.

In the global ranking of top smart speaker sales in Q2,after Amazon and Google comes Alibaba, Apple and JD.com. Two out of three of those brands were barely in the picture a little while ago.

In the United Kingdom and some other Commonwealth nations, a bankers holiday is a real thing. One occurs Monday when Amazon is deeply discounting Echo speakers across the ocean.

But Google has a better footprint in most places around the world than Amazon, which is a relatively newer player.

One other advantage Google might have in the U.S. and beyond is that its not Amazon. In an article in Salon, an analyst for research firm Canalys notes that some brick-and-mortar stores may be more inclined to push Google Home devices than Amazons Echo because Google is not (overtly at least) trying to put them out of business.by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, August 27, 2018

When Dave Eggers' book "The Circle" was published in 2015, it walked a fine line: part dystopian novel about the future, and part a look at the current state of things inside large digital platform companies.

The book is about a young woman named Mae who lands a dream gig at a Google-like company. Her job is in "customer experience," which has her begging customers for a perfect feedback score -- and getting in hot water with her manager when she receives anything less than five stars.

At first the idea of ranking services seemed a bit far-fetched. After all, how could a company even manage all that data?

Then Uber began enforcing its controversial passenger ranking system and making it clear it would remove drivers whose ranking fell below pre-determined limits. That minimum rating requirement varies. In Atlanta, the average driver rating is a 4.8.

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You are encouraged to maintain at least a 4.6 average over your most recent 100 trips, Uber cautions drivers online. If your rating over the most recent 100 trips is below a 4.6, your profile may be at risk of deactivation. Yikes.

But in the past few months, I've noticed more and more companies end customer interactions with "Would you stay on the line and complete a brief survey?"

In my last five calls to customer support -- to a telco, a health care provider, and a web hosting company -- I've been asked to rank the quality of support.

There are a few problems with this practice. First, while the surveys are said to "last less than two minutes," those minutes add up. More seriously, when I'm left unhappy, more often than not it's with the company's policies -- not an individual service provider.

Uber figured this out, so when a rider gives anything fewer than five stars, Uber prompts the rider with the question what could be improved? and a drop-down of options including too many pickups, bad route by Uber, and co-rider.

An issue with "driving" is an option, but it's the last one on the list, and only that reason makes the negative vote impact the driver's star rating.

The question is, does this automated system of review and punishment actually improve the quality of the service that we're receiving?

The on-demand economy is driving a growing workforce of employees who are contracted and terminated at will, often based on little more than user ratings: dog-walking services like Rover and Wag, house-cleaning services like Handy and on-demand technical resources like Upwork.

Ratings help on0demand companies manage scale without having to employ supervisors for a growing remote workforce.

Rating systems have typically been described as a way of establishing trust between strangers. Now trust goes both ways. In Ubers system, drivers can also rate customers. So if you don't tip, or you're rude or leave the car with trash in the back seat, next time you may find you're not getting picked up by drivers on a busy night. Transparency works both ways.

Harvard Law professor Benjamin Sachs told The Verge: "Customers have always had power, theres always been feedback, and workers could always be disciplined because a customer complained about you. Whats new is the ease with which customers can give reviews and the almost complete substitution of customer reviews for management."

But in the near term, the gig economy is replacing managers with robots. Algorithms can fire at will, putting workers in a position of being at risk of termination for often capricious reasons. Does giving a worker a positive rating allow them to earn any rewards or positive feedback? Nope. The only thing that these ratings do is automate punishment and dismissal.Another day, another mea culpa from Facebook for failing to properly police its platform. This time, the social giant is admitting that it didnt act quickly enough stop the spread of ethnic hate and violence across Myanmar.

We were too slow to act, Facebook stated Monday.

Trying to redeem itself, the company just removed 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages for fueling discord in the region. Together, these properties reached nearly 12 million people, by Facebooks calculations.

Perhaps the most prominent figure losing his Facebook privileges is Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, while the militarys Myawady television network has also been banned from Facebook.

Among other expert resources, Facebook said the crackdown was guided by the U.N. Human Rights Council-authorized Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar and its a report detailing serious human rights abuses in the country.

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Amid reports of ethnic and religious genocide in Myanmar, human-rights officials have accused Facebook of having blood on its hands.

In March, Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, said the tech titan played a determining role in the country. More recently, an investigation by Reuters found Facebooks efforts to curb hate speech in the region were coming up short.

Reuters found more than 1,000 posts, comments, images and videos on the social network attacking the marginalized Rohingya people and other minorities in Myanmar.

On Monday, Facebook insisted it is developing better technology to identify hate speech, improve its reporting tools, and add additional human content reviewers.

While still producing questionable results, these efforts are costing Facebook significant resources. In fact, the company recently said it expects total expenses to grow by as much as 60% from last year to this year -- largely due to efforts to clean up its network.A new study reinforces this idea. It was presented by Dr. Marc Allard-Ratick, of the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, GA, at the European Society of Cardiology Congress , held in Munich, Germany.

In fact, some recent research has suggested that high levels of it may actually raise the risk of premature mortality.

However, little is known about people with very high levels of this type of cholesterol.

This protective effect is thought to be due to the HDL molecules, which flush cholesterol from the blood into the liver and out of the body.

Physicians typically advise that people maintain high levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol on the basis of the assumption that it prevents heart disease and stroke .

New research challenges the popular belief that high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, also known as the good kind, is beneficial to ones health, regardless of its levels.

Dr. Allard-Ratick and colleagues examined the link between good cholesterol levels and the risk of heart attack and cardiovascular death in almost 6,000 individuals aged 63 years, on average.

Most had heart disease; the researchers followed them up over the course of 4 years, grouping them according to their levels of HDL cholesterol, measured in milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL).

During the follow-up period, 13 percent of the participants experienced a heart attack or died from cardiovascular disease.

Participants whose HDL cholesterol levels were 4160 mg/dL were the least likely to experience a heart attack or die from a cardiovascular event.

However, for people with very low HDL cholesterol levels (less than 41 mg/dL) and those with very high levels (higher than 60 mg/dL), the risk of adverse cardiovascular events and death increased.

Specifically, people with cholesterol levels higher than 60 mg/dL were almost 50 percent more likely to have a heart attack or die from cardiovascular disease than those with levels at 4160 mg/dL.

Dr. Allard-Ratick comments on these findings. Our results, he explains, are important because they contribute to a steadily growing body of evidence that very high HDL cholesterol levels may not be protective, and because unlike much of the other data available at this time, this study was conducted primarily in patients with established heart disease.

It may be time to change the way we view HDL cholesterol. Traditionally, physicians have told their patients that the higher your good cholesterol, the better. However, the results from this study and others suggest that this may no longer be the case. Dr. Marc Allard-Ratick

He cautions that the reasons for the associations revealed remain unclear; but, he speculates, one possible explanation is that extremely elevated HDL cholesterol may represent dysfunctional HDL which may promote rather than protect against cardiovascular disease.

One thing is certain, concludes Dr. Allard-Ratick: the mantra of HDL cholesterol as the good cholesterol may no longer be the case for everyone.Montenegro steps up Albania border control After 2,800 irregular migrants enter since January

(ANSAmed) - BELGRADE, AUGUST 27 - Montenegro authorities have stepped up checks and surveillance of the border with Albania, from which over 2,800 migrants have entered the country since January. Local media report that for the past week divisions of the Montenegro army have been deployed on the border with Albania to support police forces and prevent further arrivals of migrants and refugees. Over the past few months, a new 'Balkan route' has been activated by migrants from the Middle East, Turkey and Greece, a flow that instead of heading towards Macedonia and Serbia - as occurred during the 2015-2016 crisis - seek to reach Western Europe through Albania, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. From there they try to cross into the European Union by entering Croatia or Slovenia to then reach Austria, Germany or Italy. (ANSAmed).



MILFORD  Jonathan Gibbons first made his mark on the New Haven food truck scene with his Fryborg brand specializing in fresh fried potatoes and specialty dipping sauces.

He still has the wheels, but recently he opened a small eatery at 215 Bridgeport Ave. offering his unique fries and a small menu of other signature foods.

Its definitely exhausting but I enjoy it, Gibbons, 40, said. I get excited when I come up with a new sauce.

And when people love his food?

Its the best thing ever, he said.

The idea to someday serve homemade French fries with dipping sauce was hatched when Gibbons was 25 and backpacking through Europe after college. He has a bachelors degree in English. While in Belgium he tasted Pomme frites  or fried potatoes  with sauces to pour over them, fell in love with the taste and thought, Nobody really does this back home.

But it wasnt easy to start a business, so he worked in high-end restaurants and bars for 10 years before taking the leap six years ago and buying a food truck.

I decided I was ready not to answer to someone. I wanted to be my own boss, Gibbons said.  It was terrifying to take that leap of faith

He opened the Fryborg truck in New Haven in August 2012, tweaked the offerings as he went along and became a favorite among the Yale crowd and others downtown.

The name of the business  Fryborg  is a takeoff on the Cyborg fictional aliens from the Star Trek movies. The cyborgs forcibly transform individual beings into drones. They are linked to the phrase, You will be assimilated; resistance is futile. And since Gibbons believes resisting his French Fries is futile it was perfect for his business slogan, Resistance is Futile.

At the new eatery, there are two tables  much of the business is to go  and the decor is simple, the dark walls intended to reflect a Cyborg space ship.

He cuts his fries from real potatoes and his unique, homemade dipping sauces  recipes he devised  including curry ketchup, thousand island, pesto mayo, garlic siracha, buffalo ranch, mango, herbes de provence, and dip specials that change every day, including recently, date, bacon and apple mayo, avocado and jalapeno.

There are also more substantial toppings, including, The Dutch,  mayo, curry ketchup and raw onion; Cheesy Bacon, with cheese and bacon; Italian with pesto mayo, tomato and parmesan and Assimilation  another cyborg play  topped with fried eggs, cheese sauce, thousand island dressing and raw onion.

These days he has a staff and the Fryborg truck is mainly used for catering of birthday parties, weddings, bar mitzvah, anniversaries, big event after parties, corporate gatherings. This weekend the truck was headed to a gig in Long Island and he has had some pretty special ones, including outside the Belgium consulate in Manhattan, where he received raves from the organizer who invited his truck.

He does some food-truck festivals, and the truck still appears in New Haven, but not regularly. He bought a spot at College and Grove streets where he returns three days a week for six months when Yale University is in session.

He describes his menu as Simple food, but we try to do it well.

His hot dogs are Hummels brand, because,  I wont mess with perfection, theyre local, theyre the best, and his Angus burgers are specially seasoned; the steak on his steak sandwiches from grass-fed beef.

He also carries his own brand of soda, Fryborg Fizz, and created flavors such as pistachio cream, coconut cream pie, lavender lemon. The coconut cream pie was specially created for a wedding customer. Gibbons will also design special recipes for catering customers.

Gibbons, who grew up in Bethany and graduated from Amity High School, said I was always fascinated by the food industry and didnt know why.

His first job was as a hot-dog vender for the New Haven Ravens and Gibbons said he loved it, because he got to sell good hot dogs and meet Derek Jeter.

Gibbons, who lives in Milford, said his girlfriend, Julie Avellino, is fabulously supportive and helpful with social media, staff organization and getting him centered again when he goes too far afield creatively.CHESHIRE  Police seized about 70 marijuana plants from the property of a local business that was being grown by a former Cheshire resident.

Michael Desbiens, 43, was charged with interfering with an officer, criminal trespass, possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of more than four ounces of marijuana and illegal manufacturing.EAST HAMPTON  As the somber anniversary of the 9/11 attacks draws closer, East Hampton will host two ceremonies honoring the service and the sacrifice of first responders.

The town will hold a ceremony of remembrance Sept. 11 to honor the 414 first responders  police, fire and ambulance personnel  who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., as well as the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

There will a separate event Sept. 22, an Appreciation Day picnic lunch at Sears Park to honor East Hampton first responders and their families.

The 9/11 remembrance will take place on lawn of the East Hampton Congregational Church in the Village Center beginning at 6 p.m. The ceremony, which will also acknowledge and honor the service of East Hamptons first responders, is being organized by resident Ann McLaughlin.

McLaughlin is the person responsible for the Yellow Ribbon ceremonies that honor the men and women of East Hampton serving in the armed forces and deployed overseas.

A special field of flags will be installed on the church lawn to honor the 343 New York City firefighters, 37 Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officers and the 23 New York Police Department officers who died at the World Trade Center, as well as 11 other first responders who worked at the WTC.

In all, some 2,977 people were killed in the coordinated attacks: 2,753 in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 people on board Flight 93, according to an article on CNN.com. The total includes both passengers on the three airliners as well as the victims on the ground.

Anyone who knows of an East Hampton resident who was a first responder at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon on 9/11 is asked to contact either McLaughlin at 860-267-2316, or Cathy Sirois, the town managers executive assistant, at Town Hall at 860-267-4468 or via email at csirois@easthamptonct.gov.

The Sept. 22 event is being arranged by resident Sherry Engel and a group of volunteers to show their gratitude for the towns first responders.

The town and the Parks and Recreation Department have graciously donated Sears Park for this event, Engel said in an email Monday. Too often, our first responders are forgotten about until we need them.

I am reminded often  and especially recently  of how difficult, heart wrenching and, at times, terrifying their jobs are. Most are volunteers who we forget about, but we need them, as well as our paid personnel, who go above and beyond during these trying times. Ive been wanting to do something for a while now, Engel said.

She originally wanted to host the event in her backyard, but I wanted to include all of our first responders and their families, which turned out to be more people than I had originally thought.

Consequently, she approached town officials and won their commitment to allow her to use Sears Point.

This is a community event in the truest sense of the word, and Engel is asking her fellow residents and local businesses to lend their support as well.

To ensure we have plentiful food/water/soda and deserts for our first responders and their families, I am asking local businesses and residents to donate what they can. Financial donations would be most appreciated. No donation is too small. And all donors will be recognized at the event with much gratitude, she said.

To donate items or funds for the event, call 860- 614-6826 or email sengel45@aol.com.

Reporter Jeff Mill covers East Hampton, Cromwell and Portland for the Middletown Press. Contact him at jeff.mill@hearstmediact.com.Pope says Diciotti migrants must be integrated - 'only way' 'Hosting system needs to be managed in a reasonable way'

(ANSAmed) - PAPAL PLANE, AUGUST 27 - Pope Francis on Monday spoke about the Diciotti migrant crisis during his flight from Dublin to Rome, as well as migrant hosting in general, saying that ''it's better not to receive if you can't integrate''.



-INTEGRATING MIGRANTS IS A CONDITION. The pontiff urged to ''welcome'' in a ''reasonable'' way, ''integrating'' migrants.



''The virtue of prudence is the virtue of governance: prudence on the number and possibility of integrating. It's better for the population that cannot integrate not to receive. The method is dialogue'', he said, referring to Europe. ''It is necessary to continue, solutions will be found''.



-DICIOTTI. Talking about the fate of the 137 migrants who disembarked Sunday from Italian coast guard ship Diciotti, the pope joked he had not played a role but the ''devil takes a hand'', discussing how the Italian Church had agreed to host the majority of the migrants. ''They will go to Mondo Migliore, in Rocca di Papa - they will be hosted there, they will start learning the language and to be integrated migrants''.



-DON'T GIVE MIGRANTS BACK TO TRAFFICKERS- ''I saw in a video what happens to those who are sent back and taken back by traffickers. Sending them back? It is necessary to think well, well, well''. (ANSAmed)WASHINGTON - To hear President Donald Trump tell it, threats to America's security range far beyond the usual realms of enemies and foreign and domestic.

Illegal and even legal immigrants, refugees, transgender military forces? All must be curtailed in the name of protecting the country.

Separating children from their illegal immigrant parents? A needed national security step.

Imported steel and aluminum? They "threaten to impair the national security." That new Mercedes-Benz? May also be a security risk, but he'll decide later.

Revoking security clearances retained by former senior government officials who happen to be critics of the president? A needed step to protect classified information from former officials whose television commentary the president deems "unglued."

Propping up ailing coal and nuclear power plants? "Essential to support the Nation's defense facilities."

"In times of war, in times of conflict, you can blow up those windmills, they fall down real quick," Trump said Tuesday evening, during a campaign rally in West Virginia. "You can blow up those pipelines. They go like this, and you're not going to fix them too fast. You could do a lot of things to those solar panels, but you know what you can't hurt? Coal. You can do whatever you want to coal."

The Trump administration is increasingly using national security as the public or legal justification for controversial policies and decisions by the president - even when there seems to be little connection between the issue at hand and threats to the nation.

"It's patently obvious that the president is using national security as a cloak to hide his domestic political agenda," said Ned Price, a former national security spokesman for President Obama and a career CIA officer and who resigned from the agency last year in protest of Trump's policies.

Price and other Trump critics say Trump is cheapening the claim that presidents must act to shield the nation from threats by lumping in political priorities far afield from wartime concerns.

"All presidents are attracted to the idea of putting policies under the aegis of national security because it's the one place where executive authority is almost unarguable," said Thomas Nichols, a national security affairs professor at the U.S. Naval War College, who spoke in his personal capacity and not on behalf of the military school.

"It's almost totally under executive control when that magical incantation is uttered," Nichols said. "The difference with this president is that he is using it to shift the debate, and the danger is that the public eventually gets numb to the term 'national security.'"

The term itself has only been in common use since World War II, but carries a weighty Cold War resonance made modern by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 2001.

President George W. Bush used national security as justification for post 9/11 counterterrorism tactics now widely considered torture. President Barack Obama cited national security imperatives for conducting the risky raid inside Pakistan - without Pakistan's permission - that killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Trump appears to use the term and its implication of patriotism and strength as a symbol to his political base - statistically older, whiter, and poorer - that he will champion their economic and social priorities as well as their safety.

Trump built his campaign partly on the claim that he could confront threats to the country's standing and sovereignty where other presidents - most notably Obama - had been too timid.

Trump's emphasis on securing national borders and rolling back all immigration was always wrapped in the argument that the nation would be safer - from crime, drugs and low-wage job stealers.

But in office, Trump has carried the notion farther than his campaign rhetoric, and farther than other presidents, said Philip Zelikow, a government and history professor at the University of Virginia who served in five administrations.

Like other recent presidents he is often acting in the vacuum created by a Congress that has removed itself from many major decisions, such as whether or not to declare war, Zelikow said.

"The big thing here, the big phenomenon, is the persistent growth of presidential power because of Congress's inability or unwillingness to act on its latent power," to set priorities or constrain the White House, Zelikow said.

And under Trump, that trend has expanded further, he said, "to trade, which is the constitutional prerogative of Congress. That is new."

The administration moved this spring to impose stiff tariffs on imported metals, including from Canada and Europe, in what Trump called "protection" for U.S. industries. He credits his threat to widen the trade penalties to include European cars for forcing European trade concessions.

Trump's claim that close allies such as Canada pose a risk to U.S. national security because of products they export to the United States is an object of discomfort for many congressional Republicans.

Trump's claim that close allies such as Canada pose a risk to U.S. national security because of products they export to the United States is an object of discomfort for many congressional Republicans, although efforts to confront the president legislatively have gone nowhere.

"Tariffs are taxes on American consumers," Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., said in June. "They hurt American workers, families, and employers. Imposing them under the false pretense of 'national security' weakens our economy, our credibility with other nations, and invites retaliation."

That Republicans have not more directly confronted Trump over his rejection of GOP free trade orthodoxy helps Trump fuzz up the difference between a real national threat and political expediency, Nichols said.

The blurred lines complicate the debate over whether Trump was justified last week when he revoked the security clearance held by former CIA director and frequent Trump critic John Brennan.

Trump has not directly accused Brennan of compromising classified material or of risky or illegal conduct that would automatically imperil his clearance. But Trump has implied a national security risk by saying that Brennan acted recklessly and out of personal malice to Trump.

"Has anyone looked at the mistakes that John Brennan made while serving as CIA Director? He will go down as easily the WORST in history & since getting out, he has become nothing less than a loudmouth, partisan, political hack who cannot be trusted with the secrets to our country!" Trump tweeted on Saturday.

The president acknowledged in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he had moved against Brennan in part because of his role in the beginning of the investigation into whether Trump's campaign conspired with the Russian government. Special counsel Robert Mueller is now leading that inquiry.

Trump is deliberately conflating the protection of national secrets or national security with the idea that it is improper for former government officials to criticize his behavior as commander in chief, said Price.

"He didn't even try," to say Brennan had committed an offense that another president would have deemed serious enough to yank a security clearance, Price said.

"This is just red meat for his political base," Price said.

Trump threatened Monday to revoke the security clearance of another former U.S. intelligence official, in this case after watching him in a heated debate on cable television.

In a tweet, Trump said former CIA and FBI official Philip Mudd was "totally unglued and weird" during a CNN appearance Friday night.

"Mudd is in no mental condition to have such a Clearance. Should be REVOKED?"

"Is agriculture national security? Well, soldiers have to eat," Nichols joked.

- - -

The Washington Post's John Wagner, Felicia Sonmez and Shane Harris contributed to this reportChesty XIV is all grown up and headed into the retired life -- and you might now see the adored English bulldog skateboarding around the nation's capital.

After five years of service, the Marine Corps' mascot transferred his responsibilities to a younger model Friday night during a ceremony at Marine Barracks Washington. Col. Donald Tomich, the barracks' commanding officer, presided over the sergeant's retirement ceremony.

The bulldog's owner told NBC she planned to purchase a skateboard for the retired mascot, who finally gets to relax those strict Marine Corps standards in retired life.

"All the things I would not let him learn how to do because he might embarrass the Marine Corps, he's going to learn how to do them," Christine Billera told NBC News.

Related Content: A Very Serious Look at Chesty the Marine Corps Mascot

Chesty XIV grew into his responsibilities during his time at 8th and I. That included lots of nights on the parade deck in miniature dress blues or attending other events in the Washington, D.C. area in his service or utility uniforms.

"When he was young, he was feisty and energetic just like most Marines are when they come out of recruit training," Gunnery Sgt. Aaron Calderon, the drill master at 8th and I, told NBC Washington. "As he progressed and got a little bit older, he brought that wisdom, knowledge and experience."

The service's canine mascots are named for revered Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis Burwell "Chesty" Puller, who earned five Navy Crosses while serving nearly four decades in the Corps.

Pvt. Chesty XV, who arrived at the Barracks as a 10-week-old puppy in March, has completed his entry-level training, where he was even issued his own physical-training safety belt. The private will immediately begin representing the Marine Corps at ceremonial events in the nation's capital.

Not everyone was ready to see the service's 14th canine mascot go. Sgt. Chesty XIV will always be remembered at 8th and I, Calderon told NBC Washington.

Others thought the English bulldog might've been skirting his weight standards and dodging PT during his last days on active duty.

"Time to retire when you can't button that uniform," one Facebook user joked.

--Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @ginaaharkins.Still undetermined is whether the impact caused the October leak, or if the line was hit by something else at a later date.Kosovo: new talks Vucic-Thaci on Sept. 7 in Brussels Serbian, Kosovan presidents with EU foreign policy chief

(ANSAmed) - BELGRADE, AUGUST 27 - A new meeting between Serbian and Kosovan presidents, Aleksandar Vucic and Hashim Thaci, has been scheduled on September 7 in Brussels as part of EU-sponsored talks for the normalization of relations between Belgrade and Pristina, Serbian media reported on Monday. Reports added that the meeting will be hosted, as mediator, by EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.



Media in Belgrade also said that President Vucic will announce his proposals to solve the problem in Kosovo in a speech to the Serbian community during his visit to Kosovo on September 8-9. The plan would reportedly be at the center of a referendum in Serbia.



Over the past few weeks the debate on the controversial issue of the final phase of dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina has intensified with local media insisting on a possible official demarcation of the border between Serbia and Kosovo and an exchange of territories - with Serbian-majority northern Kosovo going to Serbia and the Albanian-majority Presevo Valley going to Kosovo.



Belgrade does not recognize the independence proclaimed in Pristina on February 17, 2008, and has never spoken about a border between two sovereign states but about an 'administrative line' dividing Serbia from Kosovo's 'territory', which it still considers its southern province under UN administration.



(ANSAmed)Troops with security clearances who have low credit scores or past-due bills could be at greater risk of having those clearances revoked, thanks to a change to the frequency at which background check officials look at financial data.

"The Department of Defense (DoD) will now 'continuously' monitor the financial status of servicemembers with security clearances," the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced in an Aug. 20 release. "This means that a past-due bill or an error on your credit report could jeopardize your clearance status."

Currently, background check reviews for clearance holders look at credit and financial data of clearance holders once every five to 10 years, the release says.

But a change directed by the White House earlier this year shifts the administration of background checks from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to the Pentagon, and with that comes the new automated monitoring plan, officials said.

"This new process might impact your DoD security clearance and prevent you from being deemed 'deployable,' which could greatly impact your military career unless you can prove to DoD that you were the victim of identity theft, fraud or a mistake, and that you're currently living within your means and are making a good-faith effort to resolve your unpaid debts," the CFPB release warned.

Pentagon officials did not respond to a request for clarification on how much a service member must be in debt or how low a credit score must be before a clearance is revoked or what troops who believe they could be impacted should do to address the problem.

Financial stability is just of one of many risk factors investigators considered when determining whether or not troops and other employees can hold or keep a security clearance, according to the National Security Adjudicative Guidelines, last updated in July, 2017.

"Failure to live within one's means, satisfy debts, and meet financial obligations may indicate poor self-control, lack of judgement, or unwillingness to abide by rules and regulations, all of which can raise questions about an individual's reliability, trustworthiness and ability to protect classified or sensitive information," the guidelines say.

Other facets considered by investigators include sexual behavior, alcohol consumption and personal conduct, according to the guidelines.

Troops who are notified that their security clearance is being denied or revoked can appeal the decision with a hearing before the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals. Financial experts who specialize in military issues recommend troops take simple steps to avoid problems like monitoring their credit reports and working to paying bills on time.

The shift of background check responsibility from OPM to DoD was made after a series of security incidents, including the 2013 attack on the Navy Yard, exposed background check system flaws.

The DoD is expected to complete its takeover of the background check program in the next three years, according to the Associated Press.

As of early July, 58 workers had their security clearances revoked as a part of the Pentagon's new monitoring system, according to the Associated Press. Officials did not respond to requests for an update.

-- Amy Bushatz can be reached at amy.bushatz@military.com."It's been quite a ride," John McCain said in one of his books of his ever impatient, sometimes flawed, and always unscripted journey through a life in service to a "cause greater than oneself." That journey caught national attention aboard a campaign bus called the "Straight Talk Express."

I wasn't there for the christening of the bus, but spent a lot of time aboard it during McCain's two runs for the presidency. He lost the Republican nomination to George W. Bush in the 2000 primaries and lost the national election to Barack Obama in 2008.

The bus stops included endless early morning grip-and-greets at New Hampshire diners and countless no-holds-barred town hall meetings, where he'd get hit with conspiracy theories about fluoride in the water.

Then there was that time in backwoods South Carolina in 2000 when the bus almost didn't make it up the dirt road to an unventilated American Legion post where the Boy Scouts in the honor guard were passing out from the heat.

A Perpetual Underdog

During his runs, he was the perpetual underdog, always catnip to reporters, and his willingness to engage with the press and go off-message contrasted with the tightly controlled campaigns of other candidates.

It only added to his appeal. At times, he would seem surprised by the positive coverage and tell us, "Do you guys even know I'm a conservative?"

We would annoy his political guru, John Weaver, in 2000. The running jibe was, "Who needs your spin when we can just walk up to the candidate or sit next to him on the bus?"

The only aide he really seemed to need, at least in the early stages, was ace advance man Lanny Wiles, who appeared to be the only one who knew where the bus was supposed to go next.

Lanny always made sure there were enough donuts aboard in case we got lost, which we did one night, looking for a pizza joint in Mystic, Connecticut.

The same free-wheeling nature prevailed at the start of the 2008 campaign, but the atmosphere changed after McCain won again in New Hampshire. Access was limited, and the campaign took on a more traditional feel as advisers Steve Schmidt and Mike Murphy came aboard.

McCain knew, and we knew, that it was a two-way street. He was considered an outlier by the Republican establishment and the hard right, and never had the big-money funding for TV blitzes that could power through negative coverage.

Sure, he would rip us. Part of his usual opening at an event was to refer to the "Trotskyite hippie weirdo anarchists" of the media at the back of the hall, but it was just McCain being McCain. He never called us "enemies of the people."

'Gotta Talk Slow'

My turn in McCain's sights came somewhere in Pennsylvania. I was working for the New York Daily News at the time, and my desk was pressing for a local angle from the McCain campaign on the upcoming state primary in 2000.

As usual, I was clueless, but there was a brief gaggle on the tarmac with the candidate before boarding a plane. This was my shot. I jumped the gun and shouted out a question above everybody else who was shouting at him.

I don't remember what it was about -- probably something brilliant on what he was going to do about the subway fare, or maybe alternate side of the street parking. That would make the desk happy. I just recall that he turned to me with an amused look. I suspected that I was dead meat.

"Well, Richard," he began.

Not bad, I thought initially. He remembers my name. Then he pounced. He began talking extremely slowly to the point where somebody interrupted to ask if anything was wrong.

McCain said he was fine and then came the punchline: "Gotta talk slow when you talk to Marines."

I had had no idea he was aware I had served in the Marine Corps.

All I could do was applaud at what was another contribution to the usual banter that goes on between sailors and Marines. Some of it is even good-natured.

In his tribute to McCain, who was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, the ranking member of the committee, noted that he had also occasionally been the target of McCain's inter-service jibes.

Reed was an Army Ranger and a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. McCain would often begin committee hearings by warning witnesses that Reed had gone to a school that was far inferior to his alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy, and so might be a little slow on the uptake.

In a statement, Reed said that McCain's death was the nation's loss.

"America lost a true patriot and one of the most unique, hard-charging legislators in modern American history," he said. "I have lost a colleague I am proud to call my friend and chairman. I will miss his good-natured jabs at West Point, his fierce independence, and wise counsel."

Tough and Terse

While presiding over the committee, McCain was often tough and borderline rude to the generals and admirals who came before him on a range of issues from readiness and acquisitions to strategy.

In the several books he wrote with co-author and long-time aide Mark Salter, McCain admitted to a hair-trigger temper that could get out of hand and later cause him regret.

He was particularly tough on Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, the former Marine commandant, at a September 2016 hearing.

Dunford broke with the usual response of the high command to McCain's barbs, which was to absorb the criticism and pledge to do better. Several tense exchanges resulted.

Dunford infuriated McCain by calling the strategy against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) a "success."

"It is clear we have the momentum," he said.

McCain shot back, "So as far as you're concerned, we ignore the 400,000 dead and the six million refugees caused by [Syrian president] Bashar al-Assad."

Upon McCain's death, the incident was forgotten.

"Through his tenacious and selfless leadership in the Senate, he fought hard to ensure our Armed Forces remained strong and had the support and resources needed to succeed when placed in harm's way," Dunford said in a statement. "While we mourn Senator McCain's passing, we are eternally grateful for his distinguished service to our nation, his advocacy of the U.S. military, and the incredible example he set for us all."

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a retired Marine four-star general, said, "His was a life well-lived, one whose actions epitomized the motto of his alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy: Non sibi, sed patriae: 'Not for self, but for country.' "

Life Aboard the Bus

Aboard the bus, McCain was usually available, although he would sometimes go silent when the campaign got personal, possibly fearing that his temper would get the best of him.

Once in 2000, the on-board TV began to work for a change. Local TV was airing a segment on a Republican fundraiser in Texas who was spreading false rumors about McCain's older sister, Sandy.

McCain had been in the back, jabbering with us about the previous event. He stopped talking and stared at the screen in disbelief. He stalked forward to the front of the bus and sat by himself for the rest of the trip.

In New Hampshire in 2000, McCain had shocked the Bush campaign by winning the primary handily. The next stop was the South Carolina primary, and it quickly turned ugly.

Those attending McCain events would emerge to find fliers on their windshields calling McCain the "Manchurian candidate," a term McCain detractors had used for years in dredging up outlandish allegations of how he had been coddled while a prisoner of war for five years in Vietnam.

The fliers also mentioned his "little black baby," a reference to the McCains' adopted daughter.

I can't prove it, but I picked up vibes that McCain's advisers wanted him to hit back. McCain decided that he would not dignify the allegations with a response.

Following his loss in South Carolina, McCain said, "I will not take the low road to the highest office in this land. I want the presidency in the best way, not the worst way."

Was that a self-serving dodge, as his critics maintained? Maybe, but McCain in 2000 also would never take the bait on a prime GOP target: Hillary Clinton.

Occasionally, he would be asked about something the then-first lady had said or done. He would always brush off the question. Bill Clinton was fair game to him, Hillary was not.

I had solo interviews with McCain years before he began running for president, and again after his unsuccessful bids for the presidency, but my most revealing time with him came aboard the bus in the company of two other reporters.

If it was going to be a long trip between stops, he would sometimes have two or three of us come up front and let us have at him for as long as it took. It was my turn after an event in midtown Manhattan in which he spoke about the threats facing the nation.

To the everlasting annoyance of my colleagues, I went first and asked him whether he had ever read Paul Fussell's seminal work on World War I, "The Great War and Modern Memory."

Maybe it was a gotcha question. I knew McCain had been an indifferent student at best at Annapolis and had the reputation of being a carouser. He frequently referred to finishing fifth from the bottom in his class.

It was also a backdoor way of asking a policy question, the kind editors hate, but I wanted to hear the thoughts of someone of his unique experience, who was running for president, on war and those called to fight in it, and where that all fit with the purpose of the nation as he saw it.

It turned into a tutorial on warfare and the policies that brought it about, but it was more about, as McCain put it, "How in the hell do we get to peace?"

I was surprised, but shouldn't have been, at his response. The indifferent student had plainly become an avid one and had worked hard to prepare himself for elective office.

Yes, he had read the Fussell book and referenced it to other works on the so-called "lost generation" of World War I. He was versed on the theories of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, and the implications of the Von Schlieffen plan and the Zimmerman telegram and the influence of the tank on land warfare.

He related Homer's Odyssey to the plight of veterans returning from battle, and cited numerous other works and studies to support his belief that the nation must never abandon the leadership role that had been thrust upon it.

His critics called him an interventionist. He accepted that. He never stopped talking until we reached the next stop.

A Fair Opponent

The last weeks of the 2008 campaign were bitter ones. He knew he was likely going to lose to Barack Obama, and the crowds coming to his events also knew it. It became nasty, but McCain tried to rise above it.

In recent days, the footage has resurfaced everywhere of the time he grabbed a microphone away from a woman who called Obama an "Arab." That was the least of it.

At his events, there was usually a warm-up act before he arrived -- a local talk-radio type or local politician to rev up the crowd. They were increasingly walking it up to the edge on Obama.

At a rally in the Philadelphia suburbs, I was sitting by myself in the press section while waiting for McCain to show up. The warm-up types were blasting away at Obama, but I was only half-listening. Then came a loud shout from the stands: "Kill the [N-word.]"

The Secret Service came running up to me, asking, "Richie, you see where that came from?"

I pointed to a section where I thought the guy was. I don't know if they ever found him. A similar thing had happened earlier in Wisconsin.

On election night in Arizona, McCain urged the nation to come together behind Obama in his concession speech.

Nicole Wallis, a former aide to Bush who worked on the McCain campaign and now is an MSNBC host, recalled the speech on air Saturday night and said she cried as McCain hailed the nation's first African-American president.

"This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight," McCain said.

"A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt's invitation of Booker T. Washington to visit -- to dine at the White House -- was taken as an outrage in many quarters," McCain said.

"America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States. Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth," he continued.

Carrying a Grudge

McCain could carry grudges against real and perceived slights. He could carry them for a long time, but they usually receded.

He once had one against The Arizona Republic. For years, he was furious over the newspaper's coverage of Cindy McCain's struggles with painkillers and refused to speak to the Republic's reporters.

At times, it became silly. During the 2000 campaign, he found out that a Republic reporter was aboard the bus and ordered her off at a remote gas station in California. But the storm passed, as it usually did with McCain.

At his death, the newspaper ran an editorial under the header, "John McCain Never Quit On Us -- Not On Arizona, the U.S. Senate, America Or The World."

The newspaper's editorial board wrote, "If you sat down with him to talk issues, it wouldn't take long before the conversation drifted to sports. And it is there you find the metaphor that best describes McCain: 'He left it all on the field.' Which is to say, he never quit on us."

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.Exchange Discounts for MILITARY STAR Cardholders

From Aug. 17 through 30, new MILITARY STAR account holders will receive 15 percent off their first day's purchases instead of the 10 percent discount regularly offered. The discount will appear as a credit on the customer's first monthly billing statement. MILITARY STAR card benefits include: (1) 1wo points per dollar on purchases; (2) the lowest flat-rate APR (11.99 percent) among store cards; (3) no annual, late or over-limit fees; and (4) a reduced-interest deployment plan with no payments required for eligible customers. The MILITARY STAR card is administered by the Army & Air Force Exchange Service and is accepted at all military exchanges and commissaries. For more information, visit MyECP.com.

For more discounts for military members and families, visit the Military.com Discount Center.The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently ran this article regarding security clearances and credit reports:

Situation: New security clearance rules

The federal government recently implemented new security clearance guidelines that make it more important than ever for servicemembers to stay on top of their bills and monitor their credit histories.

Mission: Continuous monitoring

The Department of Defense (DoD) will now "continuously" monitor the financial status of servicemembers with security clearances. This means that a past-due bill or an error on your credit report could jeopardize your clearance status.

General instructions: Changes to background investigation

Military personnel are subject to a full background investigation. Many servicemembers, including all officers, are required to have national security clearance checks that include detailed reviews of their credit history and ability to meet their financial obligations. Prior to this change in policy, the federal government performed an initial credit check when servicemembers applied for their security clearances and performed follow-up checks every five to 10 years, depending on clearance level.

Following a number of publicized security breaches, the President of the United States issued a directive that all federal employees (including servicemembers) in national security positions shall be subject to continuous evaluation. This means that a person who is able to access classified information can have their background reviewed at any time, including an automated review of their credit file, to see if they have a history of failing to meet their financial obligations, being in excessive debt, or having a high debt-to-income ratio.

This new process might impact your DoD security clearance and prevent you from being deemed "deployable," which could greatly impact your military career unless you can prove to DoD that you were the victim of identity theft, fraud or a mistake, and that youre currently living within your means and are making a good-faith effort to resolve your unpaid debts. Two of the most reported issues to the Bureau from servicemembers, veterans, and their families are issues with credit reporting and debt collection.

Special instructions: How to make sure your credit doesnt harm your security clearance

To safeguard your credit record and prevent problems with your security clearance, follow these tips.

1. Check your credit report

You are entitled to a free credit report every 12 months from each of the three major consumer reporting companies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion), which you can access at AnnualCreditReport.com . This is the only authorized source under federal law that provides free credit reports from the three major national credit reporting companies. You can dispute any item on your credit report you know to be inaccurate, and the companies are required to conduct a reasonable investigation upon notice of a dispute. Other websites that promise free credit reports may require you to sign up for "free trials" that eventually charge you or try to sell you other products or services you may not need.

2. Consider setting up a fraud alert or security freeze

Recent legal changes will provide servicemembers with free credit monitoring in the future to help better protect their credit record. This law takes effect in May 2019, and in the meantime, you can still contact Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion and ask them to put a freeze on your credit reports. A freeze prevents prospective lenders from accessing your credit file unless you lift the freeze for that lender or for a specified period of time. There is also a special "active-duty alert" available to servicemembers on active duty who are assigned to service away from their usual duty station. The alert notifies credit reporting companies of your military status and limits new credit offers while youre away.

3. Monitor your credit score

There are numerous credit-reporting services that provide free credit scores, but servicemembers and their spouses can get a free credit score courtesy of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) investor education foundation. This free credit score is intended to help you understand how your decisions alter your score in a positive or negative way. Get your free credit score by contacting a personal financial manager at your closest military installation .

4. Call in reinforcements

If you believe that your credit record is inaccurate, you can try to clear it up with the company that reported that information and the major credit reporting companies. You can also submit a complaint to the Bureau online or by calling (855) 411-2372.

The Office of Servicemember Affairs is dedicated to aiding servicemembers, veterans, and their families with their financial challenges throughout their military financial lifecycle. Its part of the CFPB's mission and they are honored to help those who answered the call of service on behalf of a grateful nation. To stay connected to their work, sign up for updates on the CFPB website.We've got the trailer for Bruce Willis' new World War II thriller, "Air Strike," coming to theaters and on demand on October 26th.

Willis plays a U.S. Army colonel sent to China to train their aviators to battle the Japanese invaders who are bombing the city of Chongqing. One of his trainees is a hotheaded pilot who wants to fly a bomber that he believes can stop the attacks. There's also a team of spies and refugees trying to escape with a war-changing decoder device. Adrien Brody and Rumer Willis (Bruce's daughter) join a mostly Chinese cast.

"Air Strike" is directed by Xiao Feng from a screenplay by Ping Chen and Tie Dong Zhou. Funded mostly by Chinese studios, it's another in a series of recent movies that have attempted to give a different perspective on World War II.The facts of the late Senator John McCain's service in the Navy are well-known: a Naval Academy graduate, he flew an A-4E Skyhawk while serving in Vietnam and was shot down and captured on October 23, 1967. He spent 5 1/2 years in the notorious Hanoi Hilton, where Medal of Honor recipients Air Force Col. Leo Thorsness, Navy Vice Admiral James Stockdale and Air Force Col. Bud Day were also held captive during the war. McCain reportedly never cracked under interrogation, enduring torture that left much of his body broken (his wartime injuries left him permanently incapable of lifting his arms over his head).

Upon his return from the war, McCain embarked on a career in public service that led to two terms in the House of Representatives and 31 years as a Senator from Arizona. He was both a strong advocate for the military and a fierce critic of the Pentagon when he believed money was being wasted on the wrong defense programs. He ran for president in 2000 and was the Republican Partys nominee in 2008.

McCain was an often-controversial, sometimes grouchy presence in Washington. He stood by his principles as his party shifted course and insisted on maintaining civil if not outright friendly relationships with members of the opposing party. Many gave his thoughts about national security issues (especially enhanced interrogation) extra weight because of his own wartime experiences.

However, not everyone was impressed with his resume. President Donald Trump attacked him soon after he began his own campaign in 2015, announcing at an early Iowa campaign rally: Hes not a war hero. Hes a war hero because he was captured. I like people that werent captured.

RELATED:

Upon learning of McCains passing over the weekend, Trump offered sympathies to the family, wording his tweet in a way that some took as one last swipe at the Maverick.

White House staffers told the Washington Post that they prepared a statement that gave the decorated Vietnam War POW plaudits for his military and Senate service and called him a 'hero, but that President Trump rejected the statement and issued the tweet shown above.

What do you think? Will Americans remember McCain as a hero for his service? Or will he be mainly remembered for the ups and downs of his political career, and President Trump's remarks about him?Key

Select Mineral List Type Standard Detailed Gallery Strunz Dana Chemical Elements

Mineral List  Ice

1 valid mineral. 1 valid mineral.

Detailed Mineral List:  Ice Formula: H 2 O Habit: Large Stalagtites, up to several feet in length, filled fissures Colour: Water clear, glassy. sometimes discolored or turgid in summers with high percipitation levels. Reference: Ref.1) Potter County Historical Society QUARTERLY BULLETIN # 83 January 1987

Gallery:

List of minerals arranged by Strunz 10th Edition classification Group 4 - Oxides and Hydroxides  Ice 4.AA.05 H 2 O

List of minerals arranged by Dana 8th Edition classification Group 4 - SIMPLE OXIDES A 2 X  Ice 4.1.2.1 H 2 O

List of minerals for each chemical element H Hydrogen H  Ice H 2 O O Oxygen O  Ice H 2 O

References

Sort by Year (asc) Year (desc) Author (A-Z) Author (Z-A)

Edwin Swift Balch (1921) The Coudersport Ice Mine. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 60, No. 4 (1921), pp. 553-559 Potter County Historical Society QUARTERLY BULLETIN # 83 January 1987 F. Scully, PENNSYLVANIAS "Ice Mine And the Lost Silver" Potter County Historical Society.

External Links

Other Regions, Features and Areas containing this locality

North America Plate Tectonic Plate

This page contains all mineral locality references listed on mindat.org. This does not claim to be a complete list. If you know of more minerals from this site, please register so you can add to our database. This locality information is for reference purposes only. You should never attempt to visit any sites listed in mindat.org without first ensuring that you have the permission of the land and/or mineral rights holders for access and that you are aware of all safety precautions necessary.

Cavern formations within Catskill formation (IX). A shaft opened/discovered in 1887 on the John Dodd Farm, in search of a Silver ore deposit.Ice Mountain had long been believed to be an area where the local Native Americans had mined a rich Silver ore. The discovery of this shaft was one attempt at locating this elusive silver deposit. This legendary ore body, to date, has never been located. The shaft exhibits a typical example of a coldness trap, called a Glaciere.When the shaft was discovered, the cracks in the rocks were already filled with ice. The miners joked, that they found an ice mine instead of a Silver mine, and so the mine got its name. The cavern has little ice in the winter, but instead the ice grows in the summer . The explanation for this is that the cave is always cold enough to freeze water. In winter all the water is frozen, the cracks in the rock are sealed by the ice, preventing more water from entering. In spring the temperatures rises slowly until it gets at least warm enough, that the ice melt begins again. The amount of ice which forms is dependant on the volume of water allowed to enter the shaft. As a result, the cavern is filled with crystal clear Ice formations in the summer, and relatively free from ice in the winter.The site had been a major tourist attraction throughout most of the early 20th century, but is now currently closed to visitors. (2004)Reopened in 20141:57pm: SNYs Andy Martino tweets that its likely the two sides will work something out, but theres no agreement believed to be close just yet. Fancreds Jon Heyman tweets that the Mets have told the Phillies they wont simply let Bautista go on waivers, so it seems the two sides will have to match up on a minor leaguer or at least agree to a group of names from which the Mets can select a player to be named later.

1:47pm: The Phillies have claimed Mets outfielder Jose Bautista on revocable trade waivers, reports Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic (via Twitter). The two sides are discussing a deal and have until tomorrow to complete a swap, Rosenthal adds. Technically, the Mets could also just let Bautista go to the Phillies, though with the Mets only paying him the league-minimum rate, there wouldnt be any real cost-savings associated with doing so; theyd have to replace him by calling up another player earning at that same rate.

Bautista, 37, started out hot after signing with the Mets, hitting at a .266/.438/.506 pace with three homers and 10 doubles through his first 105 plate appearances with his new club. However, his offensive production cratered over the next few months, and hes posted a dismal .178/.306/.307 slash in 193 plate appearances since that time. As Rosenthal points out, hes swung the bat a bit better as of late, getting on base at a .368 clip over the past two weeks, but the veteran slugger simply hasnt produced much since the calendar flipped to July.

Then again, the Phillies may not be looking at Bautista as much more than a right-handed pinch-hitting option to carry throughout the month of September once rosters expand. He wouldnt cost them anything more than the pro-rated minimum, and its likely that the cost of acquisition would be negligible.

The Phils dont have much in the way of right-handed bench bats on the current roster, nor do they possess many intriguing right-handed-hitting options at the upper levels of their minor league ranks. Aaron Altherr figures to rejoin the club, and Trevor Plouffe is still in the organization, but neither has been demonstrably better than Bautista at the plate in 2018. Journeyman Matt McBride and 26-year-old Joey Meneses are other righty bats whove had some success in Triple-A this season, but the roster could be expanded to give manager Gabe Kapler multiple options. Ultimately, so long as the Phillies dont need to give up anything of real substance, theres little harm in adding Bautista and his overall .340 OBP to the bench  even if the addition doesnt do much to move the move the needle as the Phillies try to make up ground in both the NL East (3 games back) and the NL Wild Card race (2 games back).Fiat Chrysler says it is recalling more than 150,000 newer SUVs and minivans in the United States and another 55,000 in Canada and Mexico due to a brake issue.

The Auburn Hills, Michigan-based automaker says in a news release the recall affects the 2018 Dodge Journey, 2018-2019 Dodge Grand Caravan, 2018-2019 Jeep Compass and 2019 Jeep Cherokee. Affected drivers should receive recall notification soon, and that dealers will "inspect and bleed their brake systems, as needed."

"An investigation by FCA US discovered certain shipments of a supplied brake-system component had not been manufactured to specification and were inadvertently installed on vehicles during spring 2018," the automaker reports in the release.

"In new vehicles with very low mileage, these components may cause gas bubbles to form in a vehicle's brake fluid. Brake function would remain in such circumstances, but stopping distances may be increased."

One-third of affected vehicles are thought to already be in dealer hands, and that the automaker is not aware of any related crashes or injuries related to the recall. Any questions can be directed to FCA at 1-800-853-1403.

To search active recalls, use the NHTSA's website to search your 17-character VIN at this link. VIN numbers are typically located under the driver's side windshield, or along the inside of the doors behind the seat or under the steering wheel. To sign up for NHTSA safety alerts for a specific vehicle, sign up at this link.PITTSFIELD TWP., MI - A man accused of racing with another driver down Ecorse Road and causing a crash that killed a third motorist has been charged with murder.

Duane Che Cochran, 25, was arraigned Monday, Aug. 27 on one count of open murder for his involvement in the alleged street race in Ypsilanti Township that killed 62-year-old Michael LaChance.

LaChance was pulling out of a diner when his vehicle was struck.

Cochran said little during his arraignment, other than stating he intends to hire his own lawyer.

LaChance, of Whitmore Lake, was killed in the three-vehicle crash Wednesday, Aug. 22, when he pulled out of the Big Sky Diner, 1340 Ecorse Road in Ypsilanti Township, and was stuck by the two racing vehicles, Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office spokesman Derrick Jackson said.

The two vehicles were heading east on Ecorse Road when one of them lost control and struck LaChance's car, Jackson said.

The two racing vehicles continued a short distance before crashing along Ecorse Road, Jackson said. Police said each vehicle only had one occupant.

Cochran is believed to be the driver of one of the vehicles, a gray Audi. He was caught by security cameras exiting the vehicle and walking away from the crash, according to police.

Cochran met with police later that day, but was not truthful with them and was arrested two days later, a Washtenaw County Sheriff's detective said during the arraignment.

A 31-year-old Ypsilanti man who was driving the other car in the incident -- a white Chrysler 300 -- was found near the scene and taken to a local hospital for treatment, and to be detained for questioning, Jackson said.

It was unclear if he will be charged for his involvement in the crash.

A preliminary examination for Cochran is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Sept. 11. He was being held at the Washtenaw County Jail without bond.

Open murder allows a jury to decide the degree of murder, if the suspect is convicted.

Cochran is currently awaiting resolution on two unrelated misdemeanor cases, one for possession of marijuana and one for domestic violence, according to court records.

In 2012, Cochran pleaded guilty in Washtenaw County Trial Court to second-degree home invasion and unlawful possession and use of a harmful device, irritant, causing injury, according to Michigan Department of Corrections records.

He was sentenced to serve one year and seven months to 15 years in prison on the home invasion charge. He was released in January 2017.FLINT, MI - A fifth teen charged with throwing rocks and other items off a highway overpass that led to the death of a 32-year-old man has been bound over to circuit court.

Kyle Anger, 18, of Vienna Township, waived his preliminary exam in Genesee District Court on Monday, Aug. 27.

Anger is charged with second-degree murder, conspiracy to commit second-degree murder, malicious destruction of property and other felony and misdemeanor charges in connection with the death of Mt. Morris resident Kenneth A. White.

Anger's court appearance Monday before Judge William H. Crawford II took four minutes as he waived his preliminary examination and Crawford bound him over to Genesee Circuit Court.

"We're trying to negotiate this thing," said Anger's Attorney Edward Farrell. "It's unfortunate that this happened. I'm especially sorry for Mr. White's family. I hope at some point they can forgive my client for his role in this."

Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton declined to comment on the case.

Four other teens charged in the case have already reached plea agreements.

Mark Sekelsky, 17; Mikadyn Payne and Alexzander Miller, both 16; and Trevor Gray, 15; reached plea agreements last month to have 10 of the 11 charges they face dropped and have a second-degree murder charge amended to manslaughter. The agreements are pending acceptance by Genesee Circuit Court Judge Joseph J. Farah.

The four teens would testify against Anger as part of their plea agreements if his case were to proceed to trial.

White died after a rock was dropped Oct. 18 from the Dodge Road overpass onto southbound Interstate 75, crashing through the windshield of a vehicle he was riding in.(This story has been updated to include information on previous health advisory levels for two types of PFAS.)

FLINT, MI -- Testing of the Flint River showed rising levels of PFAS contamination before it was used as the city's water source four years ago.

But while that information was shared within state government in a report authored by a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services division director, it may have never been shared with decision-makers in city government.

The report -- "Measuring Perfluorinated Compounds in Michigan Surface Waters and Fish" -- showed that two samples from the river -- both taken downstream, north of Flint -- had the second- and third-highest concentrations of PFAS -- per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances -- in testing at 13 separate sites in the state in 2011 and 2013.

PFAS are a group of manmade chemicals that have been used in a variety of products to make them resistant to heat, oil, stains, grease and water since the 1940s, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The chemicals can accumulate over time in the body and in the environment, and exposure to PFAS has been linked to increased risk for cancer, thyroid and liver damage.

It's not clear whether the report's principal investigator, former DHHS Division Director Linda Dykema, shared information about the Flint River contaminants with key city and state decision-makers who were defending the safety of the city's water at the time the report was released without fanfare in May 2015.

DHHS spokeswoman Angela Minicuci said the report was shared with three other state agencies -- the Department of Environmental Quality, Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development -- as well as EPA.

But Minicuci said can't say whether the information ever made its way to locally elected officials or state-appointed emergency managers in Flint City Hall who were in a position to shift policy on the city's water source.

"I'm not aware of it being shared with the city, as that's not how we would utilize a grant such as this," Minicuci said in an email to MLive-The Flint Journal. "We completed this report to fulfill a grant reporting requirement, and then used the data we gathered from this grant to update the Eat Safe Fish guidelines."

The report was funded by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, an Obama-era plan for dealing with water pollution threats and a program that's been targeted for massive cuts by President Donald Trump.

Former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling said he does not remember ever having been told of PFAS issues before ceremonially pushing the button to change the city's water source to the Flint River in April 2014.

"I don't recall seeing this report before and its findings are disturbing," Walling wrote in an email to MLive-The Flint Journal.

The report was released roughly a year after the switch to the river, a change that ended in October 2015 -- shortly before state and federal recognition of the Flint water crisis.

But the document included data collected by the DEQ from the river and other water bodies in the state between 2011 and 2013.

Through a state-appointed attorney, Dykema, who retired in 2016, declined to comment on the report or who she shared it with.

Like other state government employees, her legal expenses tied to the water crisis are being paid by taxpayers.

"I think it went up on the (DHHS) website. Beyond that, I don't know what happened," said Rick Zambon, an attorney for Dykema. "She's retired. She does not have any interest discussing her prior work at all."

Dykema's report lists her as the principal investigator, and two water samples collected from the Flint River -- at M-13 in Saginaw County and in the Montrose area in Genesee County -- are included in it.

The Flint River samples registered concentrations of PFAS at 87.1 and 72.1 parts per trillion -- above the current federal advisory threshold for drinking water of 70 ppt and more than six times higher than the state's standard for surface water quality.

Before 2016, EPA's lifetime health advisory was higher --400 ppt for PFOA and 200 ppt PFOS.

Those readings trailed only test results from Clark's Marsh, a wetland area where fish have been found to have the highest levels of PFOS ever recorded anywhere. Michigan has a "Do Not Eat" advisory for all non-migratory fish caught from wetlands and the lower Au Sable River south of Wurtsmith Air Force Base in the Oscoda area due to that pollution.

PFOS stand for perfluorooctane sulfonate,part of a larger family of compounds known as PFAS.

"This (level in the Flint River) is above the level we would be concerned about," said Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist with the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization that describes its purpose as protecting human health and the environment.

Those water sample results "should have raised a red flag under Michigan Rule 57 surface water protection standards for source waters for nondrinking (12 ng/L) and drinking water (11 ng/L), an enforceable standard for lakes and rivers," Stoiber wrote in an email to MLive.

Rule 57 standards were developed by the DEQ starting in 2011.

When the agency identifies elevated surface water concentrations of PFAS -- and if the state has no data for fish from the water source -- it's targeted for sampling to determine if a fish consumption advisory is needed.

"We'll also decide what, if any, further investigation is needed to determine sources of the contamination," said Joseph Bohr, aquatic biologist in the DEQ's Water Resource Division.

That's happened at the Flint River since the Dykema report was issued.

The state this year carried out testing at sites around Gilkey Creek, a tributary to the river downstream of the city's former water intake, in an effort to identify potential sources of PFAS and identified two confirmed sites of contamination -- the creek and a landfill on Coldwater Road.

It has also found elevated levels of PFAS, specifically PFOS, at two locations in the vicinity of Lapeer Plating & Plastics and the Lapeer Waste Water Treatment Plant.

Earlier this year, downstream of Mott Dam, the state issued new advisories for carp, largemouth and smallmouth bass, rock bass and walleye because of testing that showed elevated levels of PFOS in fish samples.

Flint tested for six PFAS chemicals in drinking water from 2013 until 2015, according to EWG.

But while the contaminants were not detected in finished water, the chemicals could have still been making it into the city's water due to the way the test results were reported.

During that period of testing through the EPA's Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Program, water systems reported any reading of less than 20 ppt for PFOA and 40 ppt for PFOS as zero, Stoiber said.

Flint's water plant produced water with elevated levels of regulated contaminants like lead and total trihalomethanes during the 17 months it treated river water.

Dykema herself was aware of water quality and safety issues in Flint even before her report was issued, as well as the potential that further problems could harm Gov. Rick Snyder and others.

The former director of the Division of Environmental Health for DHHS, Dykema is identified in state records as a point of contact on Flint water in the department and emails show she was involved in discussions about rising lead levels in city water as well as Legionnaires' disease outbreaks in Genesee County that coincided with the city's use of the river.

Dykema testified at the preliminary examination for Dr. Eden Wells, the state's chief medical executive, at the end of May, telling Genesee District Court Judge William Crawford that she had discussions with another DHHS official about Flint water issues in January 2015 and the potential for them to be "embarrassing" or "a difficult situation" for Snyder.

That same day, Dykema warned employees in her division of a "political situation that we don't want to stumble into" should the department get calls on a public health hotline from Flint residents about their water.

Dykema directed those same employees to send any call about Flint water directly to her.

"We discussed the political ramifications," she testified about her conversations about Flint water fallout with Corinne Miller, a former state epidemiologist at DHHS who accepted a plea deal with prosecutors in 2016.

Special prosecutor Todd Flood has alleged that Miller was among DHHS employees who knew children in Flint were being poisoned by lead and suppressed the information.

"It may make the governor look bad ... That's where your mind was, correct?" Flood asked Dykema about her conversation with Miller.

"Yes," she answered.

Flood briefly asked Dykema about her 2015 study in court, and she said it included the results of testing of water from the Flint River for PFAS.

Two months after her report was published, Dykema advised Snyder's Chief of Staff Dennis Muchmore that Flint was in compliance with the federal action limit for lead levels in water but apparently did not mention the issue of PFAS, according to state emails.

Another Dykema email downplayed reports on lead contamination in Flint water, saying EPA whistleblower Miguel Del Toral's report on the subject "was a result of his own research and was not reviewed or approved by EPA management."GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- A Kent County man in his 80s has died from West Nile virus -- the second reported death this year in Michigan.

The Kent County Health Department announced the death Monday, Aug. 27, saying the man was hospitalized and died from complications with the illness.

Department officials did not disclose the person's name and said only that the man was in his 80s.

Last week, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services confirmed eight human cases of West Nile virus have been reported so far this year, one of which ended in death.

The fatality occurred in Wayne County.

Kent County has seen large increases this summer in the populations of mosquitoes which carry West Nile virus. Through trapping efforts, the county health department estimates there's four times more than last year, or about 16,000 in all.

Recent testing on a sample of those mosquitoes showed that 26 percent carried West Nile virus, an amount that health officials characterized as higher than usual.

There is no vaccine or cure for West Nile virus.

Only 20 percent of people infected will notice minor symptoms, and most will completely recover, the Kent County Health Department reports.

"West Nile can develop into a severe illness that can affect the central nervous system," according to a health department release. "Some damage to the central nervous system can be permanent. In rare instances the disease can lead to death."

The health department recommends wearing light colored long-sleeved shirts and long pants and applying bug spray containing DEET. Mosquitoes are most active at dusk and dawn.GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Grand Rapids will use a lottery system to determine the order in which medical marijuana facility proposals will be considered by the city planning commission.

In anticipation of a rush of proposals when the city begins accepting applications on Nov. 1, officials decided on a lottery to avoid individuals lining up to be first in line to apply.

The city will allow a limited number of medical marijuana facilities in Grand Rapids based on separation distances from residential districts, parks, schools, religious institutions, treatment facilities and other marijuana facilities.

"We've heard from other places that they can have a ton of applications," said Landon Bartley, senior city planner for Grand Rapids. "We originally were going to do first-come, first-served and had this whole plan for queuing and a lineup and people camping out. We know Ann Arbor had people camping out for four days.

"We're not going to do that. I think this is going to work out better."

Some who are interested in getting into the medical marijuana industry locally would prefer a score-card system that rewards applicants who have experience in the Grand Rapids community, instead of the lottery, which provides equal opportunity for non-local applicants.

"A lot of what was said in city commission and planning commission meetings was that local residents' ability to get into this market was important and critical," said Tami Vandenberg, a local business owner and activist who supported the pro-marijuana campaign, "Smart & Safe GR."

"The lottery benefits people from out of town as opposed to a scoring system, where you'd have more locally known entities with a reputation for contributing to the community for the good of the city," she said.

On July 24, the city commission voted 6-0 to adopt an ordinance that allows medical marijuana facilities in Grand Rapids with special land use approval. The ordinance included separation distances that allows for a maximum of 53 dispensaries and up to 83 growers, processors, secure transports and safety compliance offices.

The ordinance was a hybrid between a more conservative proposal by the city planning department and a less conservative proposal by the planning commission.

Earlier this month, the planning department hosted a medical marijuana workshop to explain the application process and answer frequently asked questions. A video of the session is available on the city's Facebook page.

The lottery will only be for applications submitted during business hours on Nov. 1. Priority will be given to applicants who have a voluntary equitable development agreement (VEDA) -- a three-party agreement that shows the proposal benefits the investor, city and a community-based organization.

An example of how Grand Rapids will conduct its medical marijuana lottery for applications submitted Thursday, Nov. 1, 2018.

Bartley said the lottery will be a public event likely held on Nov. 2, though event details have not yet been finalized.

While Vandenberg understands the reasoning behind choosing a lottery approach, she said she'd be amazed if there were a large number of applications ready by Nov. 1.

The consensus she's heard is that a lot of individuals have had trouble finding properties that would fit the separation distances, as well as trouble getting pre-qualified by the state.

"I'm not sure the need for the lottery exists," Vandenberg said. "One huge challenge is the city still has a clause where you need to be pre-qualified to apply ... the state is moving insanely slow to pre-qualify someone."

Beyond Nov. 1, applications will be handled on a first-come, first-served basis each day.

Applications can only be submitted in person to the city's development center, 1120 Monroe Ave. NW. Once an application is submitted, the planning staff will review it to determine if it's complete.

The application checklist includes:

Statement of consent by property owner

LARA application documents

Documentation of required separation distances

Proof of insurance

Building elevations and site plan

Sign and lighting plans

Operations and management plan

Draft of good neighbor plan

Crime prevention through environment development plan

Voluntary Equitable Development Agreement (VEDA)

"A lot of this stuff is going to take time," Bartley said. "Time is important to you. Neighborhood engagement is important for you, too."

The $5,000 application fee approved by the city commission includes the $2,015 fee for special land use requests.

Once an application is deemed complete by the planning staff, it will be placed on the next available planning commission meeting agenda to be considered. Each meeting has six or seven slots for items, and three slots will be set aside each meeting for non-marijuana-related proposals.

Based on public notification requirements, the earliest a medical marijuana facility proposal will go before the planning commission will be at its Dec. 13 meeting. After the commission's ruling, there's a 16-day appeal process in which the applicant, or members of the public, can appeal the decision.

Some of the more than 35 attendees at the Aug. 10 workshop raised questions about the risk involved in the process.

If one proposal gets planning commission approval and goes on to get its proper state licensing, that location could ruin another proposal that falls inside a separation distance and has received similar approval but hasn't gotten its state licensing.

City staff couldn't immediately answer those questions, but acknowledged the risk. They asked for input from guests on how the process could be easier. One suggestion was to publicly disclose the parcel location of each requested and/or approved application.

Bartley said it's the planning department's goal to set up a map to view the progress of each application. The city uses a variety of online interactive maps.

Michigan voters will decide on Nov. 6 whether or not to legalize recreational marijuana statewide.BOYNE CITY, MI - A Northern Michigan city is a semifinalist in a national competition honoring the best main streets in America.

Boyne City in Charlevoix County is one of 10 cities in the semifinals of the Great American Main Street competition hosted by the National Main Street Center.

The competition annually recognizes communities whose main streets are a "model for comprehensive, preservation-based commercial district revitalization."

"As a result of hard work and an extreme belief in downtown, the city of Boyne City fits the definition of a Great American Main Street," said Michigan Economic Development Corporation Senior Vice President of Community Development Katharine Czarnecki.

"Boyne City has worked diligently to enhance the sense of place and improve the character of its downtown and is well-deserving of this recognition."

Boyne City is an active participant in MEDC's Michigan Main Street program, which was created in 2003. In recent years, city leadership has completed 37 facade rehabilitations for a total investment of nearly $28 million, logged more than 49,175 volunteer hours and brought in 85 net new businesses to the downtown.

Boyne City is in the semifinals with Alberta, Oregon, Chillicothe, Missouri, Ellensburg, Washington, Evanston, Wyoming, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Hammond, Louisiana, San Marcos, Texas, Wausau, Wisconsin and Wheeling, West Virginia.

"Boyne City Main Street is honored to be named a semifinalist for the Great American Main Street Award," said Boyne City Main Street Executive Director Kelsie King-Duff.

"Being named to the top 10 not only honors and validates everything our community, and most importantly our volunteers have worked towards over the last 15 years but sets the stage for the goals yet to be reached."

The 2019 Great American Main Street winners will be announced in March at the 2019 Main Street Now Conference in Seattle.LANSING, MI -- Judge Rosemarie Aquilina refused to grant Larry Nassar a new sentencing on Monday.

The hearing went off at the Ingham County Circuit Court despite last-minute motions filed by Nassar's attorneys.

About ten minutes before Aquilina took the bench, the state Court of Appeals denied a request from Nassar's attorneys that would have postponed the hearing.

The ruling allowed Aquilina to deny the motion.

"There is no reason to withdraw a valid plea and a valid sentence," she said.

Aquilina previously declined to disqualify herself from the case. Nassar's attorneys claim the judge has displayed bias since accepting the former Michigan State University doctor's guilty pleas.

Monday's ruling came after a considerable amount of legal maneuvering in recent weeks as Nassar mounts his appeals in two state cases and a federal case.

Nassar was sentenced to serve 40-175 years in prison in January by Aquilina after he pleaded guilty to seven counts of first-degree criminal sexual assault.

In July, Nassar's attorneys filed two motions with the Ingham County Circuit Court, one to disqualify Aquilina and another to be granted a new sentencing. Aquilina denied the motion to disqualify herself, a decision that was later upheld by Chief Judge Richard Garcia.

The second motion for a re-sentencing, however, remained to be addressed. It was put on Aquilina's docket for 3:30 p.m. Monday.

Nassar's attorneys from the State Appellate Defender Office filed motions with the Court of Appeals around noon on Monday in an attempt to postpone the hearing. The attorneys filed a motion to stay, which essentially suspends the proceedings, and a motion for the appeals court to immediately consider that motion.

The Court of Appeals granted Nassar's motion to immediately consider the motion, then denied the motion to suspend the case around 3:20 p.m.

Nassar's attorney from the the SADO, Jacqueline McCann, gave brief remarks and said the defense would rely on the arguments presented in the motion. The defense is arguing Nassar deserves a re-sentencing because the judge was biased.

Part of the argument is that Nassar wasn't treated fairly during the case which received worldwide attention.

Chief Deputy Attorney General Laura Moody said Nassar brought the attention on himself when he committed the numerous crimes to which he pleaded guilty.

Moody said Nassar himself is responsible for the "vortex and outrage" of the public response. Moody pointed out that Nassar agreed to the sentence.

"The sentence he's now complaining about is the sentence he bargained for," she said.

When denying the motion, Aquilina said Nassar is having "buyer's remorse" about the sentence, but that he has no remorse about his admitted crimes.

"He takes no responsibility," she said. "He has no remorse."

Aquilina did agree to amend the sentencing to reflect that it should be concurrent to his Eaton County case, but that it was out of her power to make the sentence concurrent with the federal child pornography case.

Nassa was sentenced to 60 years in the federal case, which was upheld on appeal Aug. 22.

Nassar was sentenced 40-125 years in the Eaton County case. He is appealing that conviction, as well. The Attorney General's office said there is no update on that appeal.Michigan is full of hard-working, blue-collar men and women.

It's flagship city, Detroit, was built on the backs of the auto industry; a field revolutionized by the assembly line where each person pulls his or her weight and accomplishes a single task.

But according to a study released by the personal finance website Wallethub on Monday, Aug. 27 titled "Hardest-working states in America," Michigan is dead last.

To determine where Americans work the hardest, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 10 key indicators including average workweek hours, share of workers with multiple jobs and annual volunteer hours per resident.

The Great Lakes State received an overall score of 28.94, nearly a full point behind N0. 49 Rhode Island. Michigan was 49th in the direct work factors category which includes average workweek hours, households where no adults work, workers leaving vacation time unused, engaged workers and idle youth.

It was 45th in the indirect work factors which includes average commute time, workers with multiple jobs, annual volunteer hours per resident and average leisure time spent per day. Michigan was near the top in rankings of lowest average workweek hours and highest average time spent on leisure.

Oregon, New Mexico and West Virginia joined Rhode Island and Michigan in the bottom five. Alaska, North Dakota, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska are the hardest-working states in America, according to Wallethub. Ohio was ranked 45th.LIBERTY TWP., MI - Six people were taken to the hospital Sunday afternoon after a crash on U.S. 127 in Liberty Township.

Crews were dispatched around 4:45 p.m. Aug. 26 to Meridian Road between Cook and Reed roads in Liberty Township.

Preliminary investigation shows a minivan was backing out of a driveway along Meridian Road, said Trooper James Wojton of the Michigan State Police. A Chrysler 200 was traveling down the shoulder and rear-ended it.

Two children and four adults were taken to Henry Ford Allegiance Health in Jackson, according to an official from the Liberty Township Fire Department.

The highway reopened at 7:04 p.m., according to the Michigan Department of Transportation.ST. JOSEPH, MI -- A Skokie, Illinois, man was killed in a crash along I-94 early Monday, Aug. 27, according to police.

The Berrien County Sheriff's office responded about 6 a.m. Monday to a two-car crash on the I-94 bridge over the St. Joseph River, according to a news release from the sheriff's office.

Myles Ullenbrauck, 56, was driving a 2013 Chrysler van and was killed in the crash, according to the release.

The second vehicle involved, a 2002 Jeep Liberty, was driven by Stephen Byers, 29, of St. Joseph.

Byers was transported to Lakeland Medical Center. The extent of the second driver's injuries were not specified in the release.

Neither driver was wearing a seat belt, the release said.PARCHMENT, MI -- State officials said people hooked up to Parchment's municipal water system can turn on the tap, but hesitated to call the water "safe" while low amounts of toxic contaminants remain.

The most recent test from the Parchment water system, now supplied from wells in the city of Kalamazoo, showed 6-8 parts per trillion of PFOA and PFOS, two among a larger group of compounds known collectively as PFAS.

Michigan uses a 70 ppt guideline for lifetime exposure to the two compounds, set by the EPA to determine at what level adverse health effects are anticipated to occur. But state officials acknowledged during a Monday, Aug. 27, press conference that what is considered a "safe" amount of PFAS could change.

Monday, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and Michigan Department of Health and Human Services lifted a drinking water advisory in place since July 26.

Residents of Parchment and portions of Cooper Township were told to stop using their tap water after per- and polyfluorinated substances, or PFAS, were found entering Parchment water during a statewide initiative to test public water systems.

There is no standard for total PFAS, which includes the sum of all perfluoroalkyl compounds. MDEQ tests from samples taken Aug. 15 found 24-33 ppt of total PFAS.

When asked if he could definitively say the water is safe, Gov. Rick Snyder said expert opinions show water in Parchment is within drinking water standards.

But those standards could change.

What is safe

PFAS are a collection of chemicals used in firefighting foam and everyday consumer products like pizza boxes, fast food wrappers, shoes, leathers and non-stick cookware.

Contamination in Parchment is suspected to have come from paper manufacturers in the city, and the legacy they left behind.

Exposure to PFOS and PFOA has been linked to pregnancy-induced hypertension, liver damage, increased cholesterol, increased risk of thyroid disease, decreased antibody response to vaccines, negative impacts on fertility and decreased birth weight.

Michigan's PFAS Action Response Team, assembled by Snyder in 2017, created an independent advisory panel to review research on PFAS and make recommendations. The panel will determine if the state should change its groundwater clean-up criteria.

A June draft report released Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry showed PFAS chemicals may be more dangerous than previously acknowledged by the EPA.

It found "minimum risk levels" should be roughly to 7 ppt for PFOS and 11 ppt for PFOA. It also suggested a roughly 70 ppt standard for PFHxS and 10.5 ppt for PFNA, two PFAS compounds for which there are no federal standards.

Dr. Eden Wells, Michigan's chief medical executive, said Monday the minimum risk levels signal further investigation is needed.

"Safe is not what I would -- what I would say is that the water tests we are doing right now, that have been reviewed, are well within the safe drinking water (guidelines)," Wells said. "I do agree with the ongoing sampling plan. We must be responding to any further levels that do come back."

MPART submitted comments to ATSDR, and a full report is expected later this year. In the meantime, other states have set lower standards.

Snyder said Michigan has "been more proactive than any other state in the nation" in looking for PFAS. But he put pressure on the EPA to provide scientific data.

"We've got a great scientific advisory board that needs to work with our federal officials to look at more long-term research on what it can do to humans, what it can do to wildlife, what it can do to fish; all these areas still need to be investigated and more," Snyder said.

A Harvard University study estimated 1 ppt as the safe PFAS level in drinking water.

Olga Naidenko, a senior science adviser for the Environmental Working Group said independent scientists recommend that PFAS levels in drinking water follow the Harvard study's advice.

The group considers the combined PFAS levels in Parchment to be too high, Naidenko said.

The Michigan League of Conservation Voters said Michigan should reduce the 70 ppt advisory for PFOA and PFOS.

"There is a growing body of evidence that this threshold is far too high to protect public health," said Communications Director Katie Parrish. "The state Legislature can and must move swiftly and pass a scientifically-backed, enforceable drinking water standard to protect our communities right now."

U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, stood to the left of Snyder during Monday's press conference.

Upton is among members of Congress who asked the EPA to update the safe level of exposure after seeing the ATSDR draft report. A letter sent to the EPA in July asks the agency to adjust the health advisory for PFOS and PFOA and create a recommended level for PFHxS and PFNA.

Exposure Assessment Study

It is not clear how long PFAS contaminated Parchment's water supply.

Wells said an exposure assessment study will research possible health impacts on residents. A similar study announced earlier this month will focus on Kent County residents exposed to PFAS in their drinking water.

"This is a way that we can get an assessment of what people have been exposed to ... and then how we can correlate that to the level of exposure and any particular health outcome that may merit future health studies," Wells said.

Wells said "the science isn't there yet" to determine if blood level tests will show a person's risk of experiencing negative health effects.

Eric Oswald, MDEQ director of the drinking water and municipal assistance division, said "extensive" monitoring will continue in homes this week. Additional PFAS testing will continue on a monthly basis.

Private wells

Residents of Cooper Township and Parchment who use private groundwater wells are still advised not to drink their water.

MDEQ began testing private wells in a one-mile radius of Parchment's contaminated municipal well field. Thirteen residential wells were found to contain high levels of PFOA and PFOS, according to results released on Aug. 17.

The most-contaminated well showed 340 parts-per-trillion of total PFAS and 209 ppt for PFOS and PFOA.

All homes tested in Parchment and Cooper Township will have NSF-approved filters installed for free starting this week. Roughly 182 residential wells were tested.

The filters are effective up to 1,500 ppt, according to MDEQ.

UA Local 357, Kalamazoo County's pipe-fitters and plumbers union, will perform the installation for free of charge. Officials will have a badge indicating they are qualified to perform the work, and residents should ask to see it.

Lead in Parchment

Tammy Cooper expects the focus on PFAS will "fade into oblivion" now that the drinking water advisory is listed, but she's more concerned with high levels of lead found in her water.

"I think it's preemptive to lift this water advisory," Cooper said. "Hell no, I'm not going to think this is totally fine ... I think a lot of people are going to be hesitant about (the drinking water) but a lot of people are going to jump back on it."

Cooper said she was told over the phone that 53 parts per billion of lead was discovered in one of five tests taken from her sink this month. The amount is 3.5 times greater than the state action level of 15 ppb, but all of the other tests were below the action level.

Cooper said she will receive a lead filter from the state. High levels of lead and copper were found in a handful of homes, though more recent tests found less evidence of those substances.

Officials expected to find particulates stirred up after Kalamazoo's water supply was connected to Parchment. Kalamazoo Public Services Director James Baker said the presence of lead and copper is not linked to corrosion of Parchment water mains.

MDEQ officials said water being provided by Kalamazoo meets standards set by the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The Parchment water distribution system was tested for lead, copper, pH, alkalinity, chlorine, sulfate, iron, manganese, disinfection by-products, residual chlorine, residual phosphate and other substances.SCHOOLCRAFT, MI -- The man charged with open murder after a weekend shooting in the Vicksburg area appeared before a Kalamazoo County judge Monday, Aug. 27.

Thomas Wyatt, 25, is facing up to life in prison on an open murder charge tied to the Saturday morning shooting of William Bolton, 28.

Wyatt was arraigned by video Monday in Kalamazoo County's 8th District Court.

"I'm not guilty, ma'am," Wyatt said to Judge Tiffany Ankley during the hearing.

A formal plea has not yet been entered in the case.

Deputies from the Kalamazoo County Sheriff's office responded to a report of a shooting about 12:45 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 25, at a home in the 13000 block of West Tremblay Drive in Schoolcraft Township, just west of Vicksburg.

Police found Bolton dead with a gunshot wound at the scene.

When asked if he had family in the area or if he was a flight risk, Wyatt, who is originally from Arkansas, said he considered Bolton's family his "adopted family."

"They love me as their own," Wyatt said. "I would never run out on them."

Ankley said she was concerned that he was not from Michigan and had no ties to the community beyond Bolton's family.

Wyatt said he and Bolton rented a home together for over a year. He requested permission to return to work, saying the home was the only thing he had left.

Ankley denied bond, citing the seriousness of the accusations brought against him. He will continue to be held at the Kalamazoo County Jail.

He is expected back in court for a probable cause conference 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 5.MUSKEGON, MI - The city of Muskegon will pay City Manager Frank Peterson's $33,000 student loan debt as well as a $10,000 salary raise, according to terms of his new contract.

Peterson's base salary was increased to $140,000, up 7 percent from his previous base salary of $130,088.

In addition, the city agreed to pay off a significant portion of Peterson's student loan debt from his time at Western Michigan University. In return, Peterson committed to stay with the city at least until June 30, 2023.

The $600 monthly payments will be placed in an educational savings account.

The student loan agreement was added to his contract after Peterson withdrew his application for the open city manager position in Grand Rapids, said Muskegon Finance Director Beth Lewis. The Grand Rapids position has since been filled by Mark Washington.

Peterson said his student loan debt is just over $33,000. City commissioners capped that student loan payments at $33,000, according to the new contract.

Peterson, 38, said the student loan payments were an incentive for him to continue his work with the city. He said longevity pay for student loans is becoming more common for mid- to high-level municipal employees because of the pervasiveness of student debt.

Peterson's contract also calls for the city will contribute an amount equal to 15.23 percent of his wages -- or more than $21,000 -- into a Municipal Employees Retirement System (MERS) account for Peterson. He is mandated to contribute 3 percent to the MERS account.

The 15.23 percent contribution is not typical for non-unionized employees, Lewis said. The city's MERS contribution for members of the city's police and fire unions is 11.5 percent.

Peterson's contract includes 11 holidays off and 30 days of vacation each year, and allows up to 20 vacation days to be rolled over to the next year. The city does not put a cap on the number of times Peterson can roll those vacation days from one year to the next.

The city manager would also have any outstanding vacation time reimbursed if he chooses to resign, leaves for another job or is terminated without cause, according to the contract.

Peterson can also be reimbursed for unused sick time if he accumulates more than 160 hours. Peterson can either take 50 percent of that overage for retirement purposes or 100 percent of overage if it's going toward college savings for his children.

Other items of note in Peterson's contract include:

A 2 percent stipend in addition to his base pay for living in the city of Muskegon. The stipend is offered to all non-union city employees.

Short and long-term disability of insurance valued at 60 percent of pre-disability earnings.

Membership dues paid to the Michigan Municipal League Local Government Association, the International City/County Management Association and at least one civic organization.

Reimbursement of expenses to attend two MML conferences and two ICMA conferences annually.

The city commission conducted Peterson's annual evaluation in July. Overall, Peterson scored high marks across the board on a five-point scale, averaging a score of 4.4 out of 5 points.

His lowest score was 3.4 out of 5 points for his handling of the ongoing labor dispute between the city and its firefighters union.MUSKEGON COUNTY, MI - Early estimates indicate some Muskegon area residents will be without power until Tuesday afternoon following storms that rolled on shore Sunday evening.

Thousands lost electricity according to Consumers Energy's outage map. Hard hit areas include Fruitport Township/Spring Lake areas, where more than 1,000 lost power, as well as the Twin Lake/Holton areas with more than 1,700 outages.

Estimated restoration time was 4 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 28.

Outages were widespread throughout the Muskegon area, including Muskegon, Muskegon Heights, Norton Shores, Whitehall and Montague.

Storms moved into West Michigan around 10 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 26, and moved across the state causing widespread havoc.

The heaviest rain overnight fell in Muskegon County, with a large area of five to six inches of rain. Twin Lake, northeast of Muskegon, reported 6.34" of rain as of 7:30 a.m. Monday.WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump announced Monday that he will kill the North American Free Trade Agreement as he moves closer to a trade deal with Mexico.

Details of that agreement could be announced later today, according to the Associated Press.

The new deal will be named "the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement" and would exclude Canada from the agreement -- at least temporarily.

Trump intends to discuss an agreement with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, saying "If they'd like to negotiate fairly, we'll do that."

Trump went on to say that if Canada were to negotiate a deal, it could be worked into the agreement with Mexico or it could be a separate deal between the U.S. and Canada.

Should Canada not negotiate the way Trump wants, he has threatened to tax Canadian auto imports.

A longtime opponent of NAFTA, Trump has called the 24-year-old trade pact a job-killing "disaster." Monday's announcement was made with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto was on speakerphone, according to the AP.

Nieto said he hopes that Canada will be involved in the new trade agreement.With temperatures expected to reach the 90-degree mark and little relief expected, the National Weather Service has placed Southeast Michigan under a proactive heat advisory for the next two days.

The advisory kicks in at noon Monday, Aug. 27 and will remain effect until 8 p.m. Tuesday in Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties. That air conditioning might get a little extra work overnight, as temperatures are expected to remain north of the 80-degree mark.

"High temperatures in the upper 80s to lower 90s coupled with dewpoints well into the 70s will yield peak heat indices around 100 degrees this afternoon and early evening," the NWS reports.

"Little overnight relief will occur as heat indices largely remain above 80 degrees. Heat indices will again reach into the upper 90s during peak heating Tuesday."

--

--

The NWS adds that there is a chance of scattered thunderstorms north of I-69 through Wednesday as hot and humid conditions continue to develop. There is also a slight rise of severe weather Tuesday evening.

While most of the state gets rained on Monday, MLive meteorologist Mark Torregrossa reports that Detroit, Ann Arbor, Jackson, Lansing and Kalamazoo will have to wait until Tuesday evening to get "widespread rain and thunderstorms."

"A third round of storms will develop across the southern half of Lower Michigan Tuesday afternoon and evening. All of southern Lower should get rain and possible severe storms Tuesday night into Wednesday morning," Torregrossa says in his weather forecast.

"Most of Michigan should pick up at least an additional inch of rain. That's even in the parched area of southern Lower."

--

With the high temperatures not looking like they're going anywhere, the American Red Cross recommends the following for those suffering from heat-related illnesses:A line of severe thunderstorms is moving into southwest Lower Michigan and western Lower Michigan as of 10:00 p.m. Sunday. This line of thunderstorms looks like it can produce scattered severe wind gusts along the line of storms.

Here's a look at the always updating radar animation:

As of 10:00 p.m., severe thunderstorm warnings are in effect for Muskegon, Newaygo, Ottawa and Kent Counties. A few trees have been blown down at Whitehall and Montague in Muskegon County.

The strongest wind gust reported so far was at Whitehall, with a 49 mph gust.

Here is a radar forecast for the next 18 hours:

Several rounds of thunderstorms are expected across the central part of Lower Michigan overnight. It could be a noisy and wet night for Ludington, Manistee, Clare, Mount Pleasant, Midland, Saginaw and Bay City.

Storms will likley stay out of the southern third of Lower Michigan tonight. Northern Lower Michigan will have some rain overnight, but not severe storms. Northern Lower will have to watch for severe storms Monday afternoon and evening, and again Tuesday and Wednesday.

The storms tonight should be "low end" severe storms, meaning a few isolated wind gusts to 60 mph.

The rain will be heavy at some point in central Lower Michigan. By morning some locations could have over two inches of additional rain.

Get set for finally some thunderstorm outbreaks over Lower Michigan from tonight through Wednesday.

By the time this stormy stretch is done, the very dry areas of northern and central Lower Michigan won't be dry anymore.

The southern third of Lower Michigan will probably just have a nice rain or two Tuesday into Wednesday. It won't be a drought-buster for southern Lower however.

Keep updated with MLive as the weather turns more stormy over the next few days.The Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security has just written me a letter that smacks of all that is flimsy and cheap in government. The letter, which no one in our state office of Homeland Security would dare sign, told me  in essence  that if I get just one more speeding ticket in the next 12 months my license will be suspended. Mind you, I have had only one speeding ticket in the last 10 years.

I have been a strong proponent of fair play my entire life. I have helped many friends wiggle past almost as many toothpick chewin weasels who work for the state and I also have warm relationships with law enforcement types and judges across this state. No matter what side I was trying to help it was because  I was convinced -- the right thing to do.

The State of Tennessee is vividly flaunting a misuse of power on I-75 as it sweeps north and south of us. Some pariah took some small 55 MPH signs to a section of I-75 highway adjacent to Hamilton Place Mall and the Tennessee Highway Patrol can quite gleefully skin any driver on the highway. Be honest: You have never gone 55 MPH on an interstate in your life and Saturday, as I now test it whenever Im that way, the average speed was 73 miles at the very spot where I was written up yesterday...

Just so youll know, 73 MPH on I-75 by Hamilton Place Mall is reckless driving. Anything that is 15 miles over the posted speed limit is the unsafe operation (reckless driving in a motor vehicle in addition to speeding, and if you pay the fine rather than appear, it will cost you a touch more than $350.)

Thats absurd, obscene and in no way would you treat either your neighbor or a total stranger in such a manner. But some havent the values, the character, or the moral compass. So the huge voice from Elephant in the Room, What if you are next? I would give anything to stand a post under such direction.

If youll check the Tennessee Homeland Security website it will tell you, in a nutshell, the mission of Homeland Security is to keep the citizens safe. There is a specific focus on terrorism prevention as well as planning and training for terrorism response. It is written: "Cyberspace safety and disaster resilience are also two key focus areas.

What a bunch of Hollywood tinsel. Im telling you that this bunch of yahoos just wrote me a letter that explained what? Some nameless imperial wizard on the far side of Roane Mountain or maybe in a Maury County barber shop -- just decided that each driver with a Tennessee license gets 12 points credit against, and this hardly a stretch, harassment by authority figures on, what?

On June 8, I was stopped for going 82 in a 55. It was an easy challenge of the state. That means I spent five of my points for speeding and got billed for another three for unsafe operation. If the Highway Patrol starts the points game with the first offense, as they did in my case on June 8, I was charged with eight points and, logically, have four points remaining for the next 12 months.

Is it reprehensible that we live in a state where two speeding tickets can cost you your drivers license? Do you know much money and agony people in Hamilton County endure daily to get their drivers license reinstated? Thats an absolute travesty, and by the time a new governor is elected in November Ill have had a word with as many candidates as I can about ridding Tennessee of its pariahs and frauds.

A real truth: When I first wrote I had a speeding ticket and paid it off in criminal court, I had a dozen people contact me and tell me that was stupid. There are more ways to get traffic tickets quashed since the second coming and I am so blessed because of the way I love to help others, there was indeed a rumbling at my door. Bottom line: I should have squelched that ticket immediately. And, very candidly, if I can do it for others I should have it done it for me.

But I wanted to see for myself if the rumors that there was a rotten core in the interstate business, and that we needed to cast the money-changers from the temple.

Again Im a big boy, maybe with a tiny touch of swag, and my biggest thrill on earth is trying to do something for someone else that will lighten another load. I know full and well I can get out of any jam but its my friends who are far more important and, if I am going to waste bullets, let it be for them instead of me.

I have no worry about my future and its luck but thats simply not true for the masses. Heres a scenario: Its not a fault the girl behind the wheel is blonde and pretty and that may be why she was singled from the herd, the Highway Patrol vultures can absolutely pick.

Well, lets say they got her at 75 MPH. Its a fact  they can get anyone! Just drive the road and see. So lets assume this girl is a single mother, working two jobs, and trying to get her daughter in pre-K. Do you have any idea how decimated her budget would be with a $360 court buyout? So help me the I-75 stretch from the start of 153 to Bonnie Oaks is no more than sickening barrel shoot on an interstate highway. So, as we welcome Labor Day, lets sniff out a go to the very core of police abuse.

Readers, help me: I want the name of who it was who authorized a speed trap on I-75 in Chattanooga so I can whisper it to the governor-elect. Others needs to know the name as well because some, mind you, have children struggling right now and to relieve our community of a true pariah would be a nobles day work in everyones sight.

I betcha I can arrange for the lout to get some Homeland points that carefully might become tattooed to said jackals carcass: Loser.

royexum@aol.comFuture Retail said the resolution plan will be done as per the RBI's Resolution Framework for COVID-19 Related Stress. (File image: Future Group Chairman Kishore Biyani)

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After acquiring Hypercity from Shoppers Stop, demerging Home Town (home furniture segment) into Praxis Home Retail, undertaking cost rationalisation initiatives in eZone (electronics segment), entering into a franchise agreement with 'WH Smith' (a UK-based bookstore brand) to foray into travel retailing, and selling 6 percent of its stake to PremjiInvest for $251 million, Future Retail is in the news yet again.

As per media reports, the Kishore Biyani-led company is considering offloading a part of its stake to either Amazon or Google-Paytm Mall over the next 2-3 months. This may be done via a combination of a primary issue (leading to a dilution in earnings of Future Retails existing shareholders) and secondary issue.

How will Future Retail benefit?

The move should help Future Retail pare its debt, which stood at Rs 1,224.74 crore as on March 31, 2018. This, in turn, will improve profitability.

Furthermore, the company can bolster its omnichannel presence by having dedicated product pages (or a separate section on the webpage) for its own private labels as well as other brands on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Paytm Mall.

By streamlining its operations and boosting revenue generation prospects, Future Retail would be better-positioned to take on deep-pocketed competitors such as Reliance Retail and Walmart-Flipkart.

How can Amazon/Google-Paytm Mall benefit?

By virtue of the stake purchase in Future Retail, the online giants can reap the benefits of physical retail, an integral aspect in the Indian context (given the importance of touch and feel before buying), without investing heavily in real estate.

Amazon/Google-Paytm Mall will be able to set up product display, consumer experience and grievance redressal centres in Future Retails 1,035 outlets (Fashion at Big Bazaar, Big Bazaar, Hypercity, eZone), which are spread across 26 Indian states and attract nearly 500 million customers annually.

The arrangement should help Amazon even more, as it attempts to tap the grocery retailing network aggressively in India, after failed attempts to take over Big Basket in the past. Consequently, the Jeff Bezos-led retailer hopes to replicate the success it achieved in retailing food items in the US by acquiring Whole Foods, in India.

Which of these 2 prospective deals could augur well for Future Retail?

On the valuation front, Future Retail stands to benefit. This is apparent from the steep premium that Amazon and Google-Paytm Mall are willing to offer as consideration. The underlying theme of this development underscores the importance of having the right blend of brick-and-mortar and online presence in a business where margins, more often than not, can be very thin.

Prima facie, scenario 2 (Google-Paytm Mall) appears to be more favourable for Future Retail since it is likely to raise more funds for the latter. However, from a qualitative standpoint, there are numerous other factors (terms related to profit sharing, product differentiation, discounting, overhead apportionments, display space, among others) that would determine the partner-of-choice for Future Retail.

Clearly, the landscape of Indian retail seems to be changing for the better as the countrys leading names expand their footprint, consolidate their strengths, explore inorganic growth opportunities and leave no stone unturned to grab a higher pie of the market. A formal announcement by Kishore Biyani in this regard, is, therefore, one to watch out for.

Follow @krishnakarwa152SpiceJet will today fly India's first biofuel-powered flight from Dehradun to Delhi on its Turboprop Q400 plane.

The fuel has been developed by Indian Institute of Petroleum, based in the capital of Uttarakhand. The low-cost carrier will use a blend of the aviation turbine fuel and biofuel to power the flight.

"In a first-of- its-kind experiment in India, biofuels developed by Indian Institute of Petroleum - Dehradun, will power an aircraft. A huge step towards encouraging sustainable and alternative fuels for the transportation & aviation sector as envisaged in NationalBiofuelsPolicy, Dharmendra Pradhan, minister for petroleum and natural gas tweeted this morning.

The low-cost carrier has called for a press conference later in the day to announce the same.

Spicejet promoter Ajay Singh, Pradhan along with colleagues, Cabinet minister for aviation Suresh Prabhu and Minister of State for Aviation Jayant Sinha will be present on the occasion.

Safety regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation and oil marketer Indian Oil Corporation found the oil safe to be used as a jet fuel.

Billionaire Richard Bransons Virgin Atlantic was the first airline to have used biofuel to fly London-Amsterdam ten years ago.

If the test is successful, India will be among the first developing nations to adopt the sustainable alternative jet fuel. Fuel is the biggest cost item for an airline, accounting for as much as one-third of the total cost of operations.

While India has the fastest growing domestic aviation market in the world  more than 125 million passengers flew in 2017-18 at a growth rate of 18 percent  most of its airlines are either loss-making or struggling.Answer: Baidu (Image: Reuters)

Moneycontrol News

Chinese search giant Baidu is joining Alibaba and Tencent in a move aimed to distance itself from cryptocurrency-related activities.

According to a report by Coindesk, Baidu is distancing itself from cryptocurrencies amid Chinas crackdown. It is planning to censor and ban forum topics that discuss crypto-related activities on Baidu Tieba, the firm's Reddit-like online community business.

Some of its most popular cryptocurrency-related forums such as Post Bar services have recently shut-down. Among the forums that are taken down are Digital Currency Bar and Virtual Currency Bar. Baidu has toughened its scrutiny and will not allow sub-forums under this theme.

China began its crackdown on cryptocurrencies in September last year when it banned domestic cryptocurrency exchanges and initial coin offerings from the country. This move forced various companies to move abroad.

Authorities in the country are set to block access to 124 cryptocurrency-related websites in the country to stop Chinese citizens from trading crypto.

The search giants move comes shortly after Tencent and Alibaba revealed they were cracking down on crypto. Baidus forum business was launched back in 2003 and notably has over 300 million monthly active users.

As according to a recent report, cryptocurrency market cap has dropped from a high of about USD 800 billion to USD 215 billion.Moneycontrol News

Didi Chuxing, China's cab-hailing giant has suspended its ride-sharing service Didi Hitch, after police said a driver had raped and killed a woman passenger.

In a statement, the company said that the incident showed there were deficiencies in its procedures and that it would suspend its Hitch system for re-evaluation.

The company has also fired the head and vice president of Didi Hitch service.

A BBC report, citing police statement suggests that the incident took place at 13:00 local time in Wenzhou city, China.

A 20-year-old woman, whose body has been recovered, had messaged a friend for help after an hour of getting into the car and losing contact post that, the news report adds.

Zhong, the 27-year-old driver who has been detained, has confessed to the crime, the report adds.

According to the cab-hailing company, although Zhong had no previous criminal record, there had been a complaint against him earlier by a passenger of misbehaviour.

Previously, there had been a similar death of a 21-year-old flight attendant, who had availed the firm's service in Henan province, China.

China's transport ministry condemned Didi Chuxing for violating life and safety of passengers and has demanded prompt action to improve its services.

The ministry has claimed that Didi has not kept promises that it has made about its passenger safety, the report suggests. Police investigations have continued.

According to the report, the company has completed more than one billion journeys in the last three years. In 2016, Didi Chuxing had acquired rival Ubers local business.The Doklam standoff between India and China at the Nathu La border resulted in a 90 percent drop in trade between the two countries in 2017.

According to the Department of Commerce and Industries of the Sikkim government, the value of exports from India to China in 2016 was Rs 63.38 crore while import was at Rs 19.30 crore. The following year, exports dropped to Rs 7.82 crore while imports stood at just Rs 1.02 crore.

Subrata Lakra, Superintendent of Customs at Serathang Land check-post told The Hindu, In 2017, trade was closed for a few months because of Doklam. This year, the trade reopened on May 1 but it has not returned to what it was in 2016.

Trade resumed in the region during May and June this year and the value of exports was Rs 7.3 crore and imports were at Rs 0.45 crore.

History of trade at Nathu La

When the Old Silk Route reopened in July 2006, trade at the Nathu La border started between India and China. At least 100 traders from either side have been crossing the border between May and November. The border is at an elevation of 14,410 ft and is open four days a week.

India exports more because 36 articles are allowed to be exported from the country while only 20 articles can be imported, said Ujjwal Rai, Deputy Secretary in Sikkims commerce department. He added that Indian traders can carry goods worth Rs 2 lakh every day and Chinese traders are allowed to carry goods of the same value in Yuan.

The articles imported mainly include garments and shoes while processed food, blankets and wheat flour are the main exports from India.

In 2017, a standoff took place between the Indian Armed Forces and the Peoples Liberation Army of China over Chinese construction of a road in Doklam near a trijunction border area. Both the countries withdrew their troops from the site after over two months.

The condition in Doklam is said to be stable now, but the traders and businessmen in the vicinity have admitted to a slowdown in business after the face-off.NPA_NPA_Non_performing_assests

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The Allahabad High Court has refused to grant interim relief to power sector defaulters that had appealed for a stay on being dragged to the National Company Law Tribunal.

The order means financial institutions can initiate proceedings against defaulting companies in the NCLT under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). Power sector companies together owe banks roughly Rs 1 lakh crore.

Close to 60 companies, including power firms, have turned loan defaulters and will have to be taken to the NCLT by lenders after the 180-day grace period granted by the Reserve Bank of Indias February 12 circular ended on August 27.

Currently, bankers are trying to resolve the pile of stressed power assets under the Samadhan scheme working with the power companies.

State Bank of India (SBI) said it is in advanced stages to resolve seven to eight power sector loan accounts worth about Rs 17,000 crore. Bank of India is looking at around 5-7 accounts. Power is one of the highly stressed sectors with close to Rs 1 lakh crore loans having turned sour or been recast.

SBI has already referred 16 large power accounts to the NCLT, while about 7-8 accounts are being resolved under the Samadhan scheme.

We have not factored in the court judgment, it will not make much difference. The resolution process will take its own course, the judgment does not make a difference. Lot of numbers are being discussed.T he issue of how many accounts will go the NCLT will be discussed because we have another 15 days time to decide (on taking them to NCLT). We have exposure to the tune of Rs 6,000 crore to the power sector, said Rajkiran Rai G, CEO and Managing Director of Union Bank of IndiaNitin Gadkari

The Centre and six states of North India will sign a memorandum of understanding on August 28 for construction of Lakhwar multi-purpose project in the Upper Yamuna basin in Uttarakhand, the Ministry of Water Resources said today.

Water Resources Minister Nitin Gadkari will sign an MoU with Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, Vasundhara Raje of Rajasthan, Trivendra Singh Rawat of Uttarakhand, Manohar Lal Khattar of Haryana, Arvind Kejriwal of Delhi, and Himachal Pradesh's Jai Ram Thakur in Delhi for the project worth Rs 3,966.51 crore.

The Lakhwar project envisages construction of a 204 metre high concrete dam across the Yamuna near Lohari village in Dehradun district of Uttarakhand with a live storage capacity of 330.66 million cubic metre (MCM).

This storage will provide irrigation to 33,780 hectares land and availability of 78.83 MCM water for domestic, drinking and industrial use in the six basin states.

The project, which is to be executed by Uttarakhand Jal Vidyut Nigam Limited (UJVL), will generate 300 MW of power.

Out of the total project cost of Rs 3,966.51 crore, the power component of Rs 1,388.28 crore will be borne by the Uttarakhand government, which will get the benefit of the total power generation once the project is complete.

Out of the remaining Rs 2,578.23 crore, which forms the irrigation and drinking water components, 90 percent will be borne by the Centre (Rs 2,320.41 crore), the statement said.

The rest 10 percent will be divided between Haryana - Rs 123.29 crore (47.82 percent), Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand Rs 86.75 crore (33.65 percent), Rajasthan - Rs 24.08 crore (9.34 percent), Delhi - Rs 15.58 crore (6.04 percent) and Himachal Pradesh - Rs. 8.13 crore (3.15 percent), the ministry said.

Storage created as a result of implementation of Lakhwar project will be shared by the basin states in proportion to their overall annual allocations as given in the mother MoU signed between the six states on May 12, 1994.

"Allocation of water from storage created by Lakhwar Dam Reservoir will be regulated by UYRB as per this MoU. Except the sharing of stored water, all other resultant economic benefits including generation of hydropower due to construction of the dam are assigned to the state of Uttarakhand," the statement added.

Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi are the six Upper Yamuna Basin states. Upper Yamuna refers to the stretch of the Yamuna from its origin to the Okhla Barrage in Delhi.

The six states had signed an MoU on May 12, 1994, regarding allocation of surface flow of River Yamuna. The agreement had recognised the need to create storage facilities in Upper Yamuna Basin to conserve and utilise the monsoon flows of the river in a regulated manner.

The MoU had also laid down the interim seasonal allocation of the annual utilisable flow of the river pending creation of storage facilities.

MoUs for other major projects being envisaged in the Upper Yamuna reaches which are Kishau Multi-Purpose project and Renukaji Multi-Purpose project.

A fourth project is the Vyasi project, a run-of-the-river scheme under which a concrete dam across Yamuna river, is being constructed near Vyasi village in Dehradun district. The Vyasi project is scheduled for commissioning by December 2018.

The Kishau Multi-purpose project, which includes construction of a 236-metre-high concrete dam across Tons river, a tributary of Yamuna in Dehradun district with a live storage capacity of 1,324 MCM, will create irrigation potential of about 97,000 hectares, make available 517 MCM drinking water and generate 660 MW of power.

The Renukaji Multi-Purpose project, which has been conceived as a storage project on Giri river, another tributary of Yamuna, in Sirmour district of Himachal Pradesh, envisages construction of 148 metres high rock filled dam for supply of 23 cubic metre per second (cumec) water to Delhi and generate 40 MW of power during peak flow.

As per the MoU of 1994, separate agreements will have to be done between the six basin states for each water storage project in the upper reaches of the Yamuna.

After completion of all these storage projects in Upper Yamuna Basin (including Lakhwar), the total benefits in terms of additional irrigation potential created will be 1,30,856 hectares, water availability for various uses will be 1,093.83 MCM and power generation capacity will be 1,060 MW.you are here:Representative Image

Higher foreign portfolio outflows are expected to turn Indias balance of payments (BOP) into deficit for the first time in six years, says a State Bank of India report.

The financial account surplus is expected to come around USD 59 billion, lower than previous fiscal's USD 91.4 billion due to foreign portfolio outflows which have already amounted to USD 9.3 billion till June 18, said SBI groups chief economic adviser Soumya Kanti Ghosh in the Ecowrap report.

Balance of payments is a statement of all monetary transactions made between entities in one country and the rest of the world over a defined period of time, such as a quarter or a year.

A country's balance of payments tells you whether it saves enough to pay for its imports or service its debt repayments.

Portfolio outflows have happened this year since the US economy and dollar started strengthening. This is expected to turn Indias overall Balance of Payments into deficit mode after 6 years, thereby implying forex reserves depletion of USD 16 billion (0.6 percent of GDP) in the current fiscal, it said.

Current account deficit

The report also said that against the backdrop of rising oil price and lukewarm export growth, current account deficit is expected to touch 2.8 percent of GDP (USD 75 billion) in FY19, with merchandise trade imbalance likely to increase to USD 187.8 billion as against USD 160.0 billion in FY18, the report said.

When it comes to financing the current account deficit, non-debt creating (Foreign Direct Investment & Foreign Portfolio Investment) capital inflows - constituting around 44 percent of the total capital flows - are expected to be the major source.

However, debt creating inflows which increased in the last fiscal year are expected to remain on the higher side this year as well. This will imply pressure on rupee in case there is a sudden reversal of capital flows, the report pointed out.

Amidst the recent devaluation of the Chinese Yuan, India's imports from China increased in May 2018 and June 2018 after witnessing a decline in April 2018. However, the good thing is that the growth remains modest in yearly terms.

According to the SBI report, the trend of the manufacturing goods imports remains the same and within manufacturing, imports of electronic goods have declined on annual basis, though marginally so far this fiscal.

Thus, the argument that depreciation of the Chinese currency is responsible for increased imports from the country does not seem appropriate. However, on the downside, electronic imports have stayed at the same level now for almost a year indicating our inability to contain imports. Thus the huge increase in trade deficit is more linked to the average export performance in FY19 so far, Ghosh said in the report.

Oil import bill

Oil import bill has increased owing to increase in oil price increase as well the as increase in quantity of oil imported.

The data from PPAC (Planning and Analysis Cell) reveals that while the volume of oil imports by India has increased by 5.6% in the first three months of this fiscal, average oil price (Indian basket) has increased 46% during the same period.Iron & Steel | Imports from China, 2019: 4 percent. (Image: Moneycontrol)

Indian Commodity Exchange (ICEX) today said it is launching trading steel long futures on its trading platform from Tuesday August 28.

With this, ICEX will widen its product offerings to its existing product portfolio of diamond derivatives, a statement issued here said.

The futures trading in steel long will provide the industry with a more structured and healthy price discovery platform as well as a national level benchmark price as a ready reference for the participants, enabling them to mitigate price risk.

Initially, three contracts expiring in November 2018, December 2018 and January 2019 will be available for trading. The trading lot size and delivery unit of the contract is 10 MT, with compulsory delivery at Ghaziabad the designated delivery location.

The price will be quoted ex-warehouse Ghaziabad (basis centre) exclusive of GST and other levies, but inclusive of basic customs duty and other related duties in case of imports, the release said.

Elaborating about the launch, Sanjit Prasad, managing director and CEO, ICEX, said, "Steel industry is exposed to tremendous price volatility. In the last 1-year steel spot prices rose by 40 percent to reach peak in June 2018 and then came down by 10 per cent from its peak and are currently again on an upward trend. The launch of steel long futures contract will serve the immediate need of market participants."

"Post GST, the commodity will see participation from the stakeholders including, traders, importers, exporters, manufacturers and infrastructure industry among others, who are looking to hedge their price exposure," he added.

With India well poised to become the second largest manufacturer of steel, producing approximately 100 million MT, amid high price volatility of around 16 per cent annualised, ICEX steel futures could not have come at such a right time.

Around 50 percent of Indian steel production is used directly in the construction sector, which is the second biggest contributor to Indian GDP.

With the government pushing infrastructure development such as road construction, laying of railway lines, construction of new airports, a strong need for a domestic benchmark steel price is being felt by the steel long value chain participants, Prasad said.New Delhi: Union Minister for Commerce & Industry and Civil Aviation Suresh Prabhu speaks duing a conference on 'Promoting Scientific interventions for Transforming India through CSR', in New Delhi, on Tuesday, May 28, 2018. (PTI Photo/Kamal Singh)(PTI5_29_2018_000037B)

The government is working on a comprehensive strategy to double the country's exports by 2025, Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu said today. Issues related to exporters were discussed during a stakeholders' meeting to discuss a strategy for revitalising India's exports and doubling the exports by 2025.

"This is necessary in view of challenges like uncertainty of global trade, rigid approach of banks affecting availability of credit, high logistics cost and productivity standards and qualities," an official statement quoting Prabhu said.

Minister of State for Commerce and Industry C R Chaudhary will be the chairperson of this mission and will review the work of different export promotion councils and divisions of the ministry.

In 2017-18, the country's merchandise exports grew by 10 per cent to USD 303 billion, while services exports rose by 18.8 per cent to USD 195 billion in the same period.

The ministry is also taking meetings with key ministries for preparing sectoral export strategies.

Prabhu stated that a special strategy is being prepared for the services sector to achieve broad-based growth instead of the existing pre-dominance of IT-ITeS.

The ministry said that commodity and territory specific strategy is also being prepared for items like gems and jewellery, textiles, engineering, electronics, chemicals, pharma, agri and marine products.

Territory specific strategy will cover North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Europe, North East Asia, ASEAN, South Asia, Latin America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

The commerce minister said that apart from traditional markets, India must also look at boosting trade with smaller countries.

He also said that exporters should not miss the opportunity presented by China's consumer market.New Delhi: Union Minister for Commerce & Industry and Civil Aviation Suresh Prabhu speaks duing a conference on 'Promoting Scientific interventions for Transforming India through CSR', in New Delhi, on Tuesday, May 28, 2018. (PTI Photo/Kamal Singh)(PTI5_29_2018_000037B)

Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu has asked Indian businesses to carry out a market study to identify priority areas for expanding cooperation with Kenya, as the country eyes fresh avenues to boost bilateral trade with the African nation.

The Eighth Session of the India-Kenya Joint Trade Committee meeting was held in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya from August 22-25.

"Addressed the India-Kenya Joint Business Council today in the presence of industry leaders & business representatives from both countries. Invited Kenyan businesses to invest in India and urged Indian businesses to research key priorities & design products specific to Kenyan needs," Prabhu tweeted after the meeting.

During the visit, he also met Kenya's Foreign Affairs Chief Administrative Secretary Ababu Namwamba and discussed with him on exploring new avenues of cooperation, mutual growth and strengthening of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

"We are keen to explore new opportunities in logistics, agriculture, energy, pharma and many other sectors with Kenya," the minister had tweeted after landing in Kenya.

The joint trade meeting took place against the backdrop of India's exports to Kenya dropping to $1.97 billion in 2017-18 from from $4.11 billion in 2014-15.

India's imports from Kenya too slowed down from $117.42 million to $72.57 million during the same period. In his address to the Kenyan and Indian business leaders, Prabhu emphasised on research and design in products specific to Kenyan needs.

India also explored opportunities to increase exports of petroleum products, cars and motorcycles, and mobile phones to Kenya during the meeting, sources said.

The meeting covered India's contribution in implementation of Kenya's Big Four Agenda food security, affordable housing, universal healthcare and manufacturing, expansion and diversification of bilateral trade an official statement said.

The two sides also deliberated upon issues like Kenya's readiness to join the International Solar Alliance, implementation of Lines of Credit of over $220 million, extended by India in power transmission, SMEs development, revival of the Rivatex factory and agricultural mechanisation.

A meeting of India-Kenya Joint Business Council was held on the sidelines of the joint trade committee meeting.

India is one of Kenya's largest trade partners and the second largest foreign investor in Kenya. Indians are the third-largest group of tourists to Kenya.live bse live

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Moneycontrol News

GVK Group, is in talks with at least four companies to sell a significant minority of its stake in Mumbai International Airport Pvt. Ltd, the company that operates the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, according to a report by Mint.

The report suggests that the development comes as GVK is looking to free up cash for its upcoming projects, especially the construction of the Navi Mumbai airport, at a cost of approximately Rs 14,000 crore.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the story.

GVK Group has been discussing a stake sale with four potential bidders, including Singapores Changi Airport, German airport operator AviAlliance, Indias sovereign wealth fund National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA).

The report cities a person close to the development as saying that the bidders have been given data room access. The offers will have to be made by September 10, an internal deadline set by Citigroup, which is managing the transactions.

GVK Power & Infrastructure, which runs the airport business, is looking towards the recovery of Rs 4,000 crore to Rs 6,000 crore from the transaction. The company had a debt of Rs 12,854 crore at the end of March, the report suggests.

GVK will continue retain a stake in Mumbai airport. GVK Power & Infrastructure runs the airport business through GVK Airports Holdings Pvt Ltd, the report adds.

A AviAlliance spokesperson told the newspaper that it is always on the lookout in the global market for new airport projects but refused to confirm getting involved in any project.High GDP growth in the last decade, riding on the back of elevated credit offtake of 28-31 percent owing to indiscriminate lending, had led to the current bad debt crisis, said Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Monday.

His remarks come at a time when the Congress and the BJP are sparring over the GDP back series data.

The back series calculations by a committee appointed by the National Statistical Commission (NSC) show that the economy grew in the double digits twice  10.23 percent in 2007-08 and 10.78 percent in 2010-11 during the tenure of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Jaitley said when growth is engineered on the strength of a 31 percent or a 28 percent credit offtake in a given year, then history will certainly record it as some indiscriminate lending, which is bound to show its impact.

The finance minister was speaking via video conference, addressing the 71st Annual General Meeting of the Indian Banks' Association (IBA), held in Mumbai on Monday.

I do not believe in a blame game, because a blame game doesnt resolve the roadmap for the future. But it is extremely important for all of us to learn the relevant lessons, he added.

The calculations have been made by a sub-committee headed by NR Bhanumurthy, professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), within the committee on real sector statistics headed by Sudipto Mundle, emeritus professor at the institute.

Further, the average growth rate in the 10 years of UPA rule was over 8 percent against the 7.35 percent witnessed in the four-year tenure of the Narendra Modi government.

Jaitley said that one lesson that he had learnt was when one desires to have a high growth rate, it must be accompanied by strong macro-economic fundamentals.

If we start sacrificing our macro-economic fundamentals, in order to temporarily push up growth, then we are hurting ourselves elsewhere, he said.

According to him, this was bound to strike back at the economy at some point of time. For the management of the economy, he said, there had to be growth with fiscal prudence, growth with macro-economic fundamentals and therefore growth with reasonable credit offtake.

"I would say we have created a system where we have reduced the ability of our bankers to find solutions because the regime under which they functioned was not a regime of accountability. Everybody must be accountable but we were holding them accountable even for honest decisions," the minister added taking a dig at the UPA regime.

Bankers must take commercial decisions

Some commercial judgments must be left to the wisdom of bankers itself, he added.

He also said one of the key domestic challenges for the last few years had been the challenge to banking institutions.

The result of this [indiscriminate lending] was that we ended up creating surplus capacities when we did that kind of discriminate lending about a decade ago. We ended up funding projects which were unable to service the kind of debt that they created, he said.

Jaitley added that the banking industry then started dressing up assets, and evergreening them.live bse live

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Shares of Bharti Airtel rose 3 percent on Monday afternoon as investors cheered its partnership with streaming platform, Netflix.

"Airtel and Netflix announced an expansion of their partnership in India through which subscribers of select Airtel Postpaid and V-Fiber Home Broadband plans will receive a three month gift of a Netflix subscription," company said in press release.

"Post these three months, these subscribers will be able to pay for their Netflix subscription seamlessly, using their Airtel postpaid or home broadband bill."

"Existing Netflix subscribers will also be eligible for this gift. Subscribers not eligible for the gift will be able to sign up to Netflix through Airtel's apps and pay for their subscription using their Airtel bill," it added.

Airtel will announce details of eligible postpaid mobile and home broadband plans over the coming weeks.

Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO (India & South Asia), Bharti Airtel said, "Affordable high speed data services and growing smart devices have created a massive opportunity, perhaps one of the biggest in the world, for the uptake of content - both local and global. We look forward to working closely with Netflix to leverage this huge potential and continue delighting customers with some amazing offerings."

At 14:08 hrs Bharti Airtel was quoting at Rs 376.90, up Rs 8.40, or 2.28 percent on the BSE.

Posted by Rakesh Patillive bse live

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In Q1FY2019, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) continued to deliver another strong constant currency (CC) revenue growth, while the remaining top five Indian IT companies reported CC revenue growth on expected lines or ahead of our modest expectations. The higher incremental revenue contribution from TCS has been a major driver for the acceleration of overall CC revenue growth of the top five IT companies, registering 9.9 percent Y-o-Y growth in Q1FY2019 against 5.3 percent and 7.9 percent Y-o-Y growth in Q1FY2018 and Q1FY2017, respectively.

However, reported revenue in dollar terms growth remained weak during the quarter, owing to cross currency headwinds (impact of 130 BPS to 250 BPS on a Q-o-Q basis). TCS again led the pack in terms of CC revenue growth, with CC revenue growth of 4.1 percent Q-o-Q, followed by HCL Tech (2.7 percent Q-o-Q, organic revenue growth of 0.7 percent Q-o-Q), Infosys (2.2 percent Q-o-Q), Tech Mahindra (Tech Mahindra, 0.3 percent Q-o-Q) and Wipro (0.1 percent Q-o-Q).

Cognizant delivered revenue growth of 2.4 percent Q-o-Q at the lower-end of its revenue guidance band. Mid-size IT companies continued to impress with strong revenue growth in Q1FY2019, with 5.1 percent Q-o-Q CC growth for L&T Infotech and 5.7 percent Q-o-Q growth in dollar terms for Persistent Systems.

Margin: Headwinds largely offset by currency tailwinds: EBIT margin of most companies under our coverage remained in-line/marginally better than our estimates despite wage hikes, higher visa costs, seasonality in portfolio companies and integration issues, driven by rupee tailwinds and operational efficiencies.

EBIT margins of top five companies declined on a sequential basis during the quarter except Wipro (adjusted EBIT margin) and HCL Tech. TCS reported higher-than-expected margin performance, while Infosys and HCL Tech delivered on expected lines. Wipro and Tech Mahindra reported marginally better than our modest expectations.

Mid-cap IT companies (L&T Infotech and Persistent Systems) continued to beat our estimates on account of change in business mix, gaining efficiencies, higher realisation and rupee tailwind. The benefit from rupee depreciation has helped to mitigate the sector update good quarter IT Q1FY2019 results review pressure from renewals, wage revision, investments in digital and local hires in key developed markets.

BFSI on track to healthy revival: Management commentary of most IT companies remained optimistic on the revival of BFSI vertical in the remaining period of FY2019, though the performance of BFSI vertical was volatile for top five IT companies (strong growth for TCS/Tech Mahindra, weak for Wipro/Cognizant and decline for HCL Tech and Infosys) during Q1FY2019.

TCS and Infosys expect pick-up in BFSI revenue in the coming quarters because of signing of large deals, higher demand from regional banks, stabilisation of insourcing concerns, embracing of digital technologies by large banks in the US for growth and rising adoption of digital from insurance customers. Demand outlook in the retail vertical remains healthy on account of large deal wins and higher adoption of digital by brick and mortar players to compete with online players.

Though revenue growth of the communication vertical continued to disappoint during the quarter, management of Tech Mahindra sees positive growth in its telecom segment for the remaining FY2019 (signed LOIs with two customers). With healthy demand outlook in key verticals, management commentary across the board indicated better overall performance in FY2019 backed by robust TCV of deal wins (USD 4,900 million for TCS, USD 1,100 million for Infosys, record bookings for HCL Tech, and USD 270 million for Tech Mahindra) and strong client additions during Q1FY2019.

Despite positive outlook for the remaining period of FY2019, Infosys, HCL Tech and Cognizant have retained their revenue growth and margin guidance for FY2019, whereas Wipro provided in-line revenue guidance for Q2FY2019.

Outlook: On a positive foothold: Acceleration of the overall industrys CC revenue growth in Q1FY2019 validates our earlier conviction on better revenue growth for the industry in FY2019E compared to FY2018. Management commentary around record bookings/deal flows (though almost equal distribution of new and renewals), improving environment in the US, revival in BFSI space and continued growth momentum in the digital business during the quarter also provides optimism on the revenue growth trajectory in FY2019E. However, increasing deflationary pressure in the non-digital segment (around 67-74 percent of revenue), renewal pressures, account-specific issues, and aggressive investments/acquisitions in non-strategic areas remain key hurdles for the overall industrys growth.

Most global companies are gradually embracing new-age digital technologies to realign their business models, creating tremendous opportunities for the Indian IT sector. Rupee depreciation against USD will benefit margins in the near term, though we believe material rupee benefit will be tapered off with the additional investment in building capabilities and renewal negotiations with clients going ahead.

Valuation: Earnings acceleration to support stock performance: YTD outperformance of CNXIT index of 30 percent to all other broader market indices reflects the improving demand environment, convergence of gap in relative valuations compared to other sectors and rebalancing of overall institutional ownership.

Further, strong deal inflows, recovery in hiring and rupee depreciation provide incremental support to investors optimism. We believe mid-cap companies would continue to maintain their track record for double-digit revenue growth in FY2019. In order of preference, we are positive on TCS (leading organic growth), Infosys (expect growth to accelerate), HCL Tech (reasonable valuation) and Tech Mahindra (turnaround in the telecom space) in the large-cap space; while in the mid-cap space, we remain positive on L&T Infotech (superior earnings growth) and Persistent Systems (higher digital penetration).

Q1FY2019 Leaders: TCS, HCL Tech, Infosys, L&T Infotech and Presistent Systems

Q1FY2019 Laggards: Wipro and Tech Mahindra

TCS, Infosys, HCL Tech and Tech Mahindra (in the large-cap space); LTI and PSL (in the mid-cap space).In BJP manifesto, the opening letter by Modi said they have taken a lot of tough action in the last five years and now swift action will be taken, going ahead. Hence, India will do well as the country has its own canvas. It has seen re-rating in the last five years and will see earnings growth in the next five years.

The market opened at record highs on Monday with the Sensex hitting 38,643.57 and Nifty at 11,671 for the first time, backed by positive global cues and driven by index heavyweights Reliance Industries, ITC and banks stocks.

In fact the Nifty has gained nearly 11 percent in 2018 on top of over 28 percent rally in the previous year and has surged more than 16 percent from 2018-lows seen in March.

Reasons for the up move are many but the key factor is in line to better-than-expected earnings for June quarter while others were stability in rupee and crude oil prices, positive global cues and easing trade war tensions for the time being.

"Earnings is always the foundation of market but apart from that, other factors are liquidity, fund flow, political situation, world economy and the US economy," Raamdeo Agrawal, Co-Founder of Motilal Oswal Financial Services told CNBC-TV18.

While talking on risk, he said there is always some risk to the market and 5-10 percent correction is always healthy. "So the answer to question of should you focus on risk or should you focus on record high is depend on the person?."

He believes currently there is no bubble in terms of earnings. "Generally when earnings growth move into triple digits then one has to be cautious. For e.g. Infosys had triple digit earnings in 1999, 2000, 2001."

PSU Banks

PSU banks had been facing a risk related to rising provisioning but Q1 earnings and commentary indicated that NPA cycle seems to bottoming out in FY19.

Any performance of the company is always depend upon its management and the same is the case with PSU banking space, Agrawal said, adding opportunities in banking space are unprecendent considering 7 percent plus growth in economy.

In fact, PSU banks have amazing franchisee model, pan India network, brances but we need drastic change or turnaround in the space as values are moving from PSU to private banks, he said.

Global Risk

Agrawal said economists have been saying about unwinding of quantitative easing but when they start tightening this rope, what will break down - whether it is commodities or emerging markets - is the question?

MF flow

Monthly mutual fund flows have been moderating to around Rs 10,000 crore for couple of months compared to average of Rs 21,000 crore from last year, but experts feel that is still good and keep supporting the market.

Agrawal expects the flow will pick up going ahead. "For e.g. there has been lull in IPO market in 2018 compared to strong 2017 but will not last for long. As the time passes, everthing would pick up."

Midcaps

He sees rural boom coming as we move closer to elections. "Government will not lose the opportunity of elections through rural roads, minimum support prices. So motorcycle, trucks, FMCG stocks particularly consumer space will continue to grow. Volume growth is likely in double digit."August 27, 2018 / 03:47 PM IST

Market at Close: What a cracker of a Monday that was for the market! Bulls had it their way throughout the session, gaining with every passing hour. Benchmarks ended the day at record high levels. The Nifty managed to clock 11,700-mark as well.

Positive global cues also supported the rally as investors took note of cues coming in from Jackson Hole symposium. Jerome Powell, the US Fed Chair, has hinted at slow, but steady rate hikes ahead on the back of strong economic growth in the US as well. Along with it, likely easing tensions and softening of dollar helped the indices end well above key milestones.

Banks led the gainers chart as intense buying was visible across the financials space. The Bank Nifty and Nifty PSU bank index were one of the top gainers. Additionally, metals, too, were one of the strong gainers, up over 1.5 percent. Other gainers included auto, FMCG, infrastructure and IT as well. In the broader markets, midcaps saw very good upmove. The Nifty Midcap index rose over a percent. The rupee, meanwhile, hovered around 70.01 levels.

At the close of market hours, the Sensex ended up 442.31 points or 1.16% at 38694.11, while the Nifty rose 134.90 points or 1.17% at 11692.00. The market breadth is positive as 1,431 shares advanced, against a decline of 1,282 shares, while 207 shares were unchanged.

Bharti Airtel, Power Grid Corporation, and Hindalco were the top gainers, while Sun Pharma and Bajaj Finserv lost the most.live bse live

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Shares of Reliance Industries rose 1 percent on Monday morning as investors cheered good revenue data for its telecom business, Reliance Jio. The stock has also hit a fresh 52-week high.

The stock touched an intraday high of Rs 1,291.85 and an intraday low of Rs 1,280.00.

According to a report in The Economic Times, the firm is now the second-largest company by revenue market share. It has now pipped Vodafone India.

The report further added that strong performance in rural mobile markets and competitive pricing aided the performance.

The companys revenue market share (RMS) rose to 22.4 percent for the June quarter, the publication reported, citing data from the telecom regulator.

Meanwhile, Vodafone Indias RMS fell to 19.3%, while Idea Cellulars share too shrank to 15.4%. Bharti Airtels RMS is currently the leader, with RMS of 31.7%.

Additionally, the company is in the news for expansion of its stake in Genesis Colors as well. In a filing to the exchanges, the company said that Reliance Brands, its subsidiary, purchased an additional 3.07% equity holding in Genesis Colors Limited (GCL) for about Rs. 8.32 crore, taking its total stake in GCL to 49.46%.

No regulatory approvals were required for the said acquisition of shares. The investment does not fall within related party transaction and none of RILs promoter / promoter group / group companies have interest in GCL, the company further added in the statement.

At 09:32 hrs Reliance Industries was quoting at Rs 1,291.20, up Rs 13.15, or 1.03 percent, on the BSE. It touched a 52-week high of Rs 1,291.85.

Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd.Tata Elxsi Q4 | Profit rises to Rs 82.08 cr versus Rs 71.29 cr; revenue increases to Rs 438.88 cr versus Rs 405.1 cr YoY. (Image: Reuters)

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The shares of Tata Motors and Tata Consultancy Services  both flagship companies of the Tata Group  have moved in opposite direction in the last one year. While TCS rallied 69 percent from its 52-week low, Tata Motors has fallen 45 percent from its 52-week high.

Despite the sharp fall in the commercial and luxury vehicle maker, most experts still continue to hold Tata Motors in their portfolio. They don't see any major need to pare exposure to the stock.

Geography-wise, there are major concerns to Tata Motors main revenue driver Jaguar-Land Rover (JLR), but its domestic business have been lending support due to new passenger vehicle launches and increasing demand in the commercial vehicle segments.

Vineeta Sharma, Head of Research, Narnolia Financial Advisors, said Tata Motors has witnessed multiple global headwinds in the last 2 years. Currency headwinds, a US-China trade war, loss of sales on account of reduction in import duty in China and softening of US car market have had a bearing on its global auto sales numbers.".

Sumit Bilgaiyan, Founder, Equity99, feels JLR volumes can continue to remain muted due to headwinds in major markets like the UK, Europe and to some extent the US.

Despite these global challenges, which hammered the stock so badly, experts now find the stock attractive for the long term. They expect the stock to start its northward journey again, but caution that the pace may not be similar to that seen a year-and-half back.

The recent 2.61 crore share block deal around Rs 255.8 apiece by Tata Sons shows the managements confidence in future growth. Previously, Tata Sons had bought shares worth Rs 670 crore on August 13 and August 20, respectively. This is the third such transaction in the last 14 months. These transactions have raised Tata Sons holding in the auto manufacturer to 33.40 percent from 25.22 percent in 2015. "Purchase of close to a percent stake by the promoter indicates confidence of the management in the future of the company and comfort at current valuations," Anita Gandhi, Whole Time Director, Arihant Capital Markets, said.

Majority of experts find the stock at attractive levels and see it rallying up to 60 percent from current levels.

Tata Motors remains a cheap stock in the auto space due to multiple reasons. The management seems to have addressed most of these concerns in its recent analyst presentation. If they can start to deliver, then the stock can outperform. An upside of 10-15 percent looks possible in 5-6 months.Current valuations are quite attractive. Any improvement in JLR margins going forward will lead to renewed interest in the stock. It has the potential to return 20-25 percent from current levels, if JLR margins improve.Domestic CVs and PVs are likely to deliver healthy double-digit volume growth driven by new models launches and distribution expansion. We have a positive outlook on the stock with target price of Rs 400 per share.The only positive working for Tata Motors stock right now is its attractive valuation. A re-rating would require improvement in JLRs performance. We have an accumulate rating on the stock with a target price of Rs 290 per share.We see more correction in the counter going forward due to continuous weakness in its financial performance. Hence, we advise investors to wait and make a fresh entry in the stock anywhere between Rs 200 and Rs 220 per share for the long term.Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts on Moneycontrol are his own, and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.Mahindra Logistics (MLL) and Future Supply Chain Solutions (FSCS), two of the largest third-party logistics (3PL) players in the country, reported healthy topline and operational performance in Q1 FY19.

FSCS reported year-on-year (YoY) revenue growth of 50 percent, while earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) improved over 33 percent. Similarly, MLL reported 9 percent topline growth, while EBITDA surged 53 percent compared to the previous year.

The sector merits attention as growth in manufacturing and consumption demand is driving need for logistics in the country. Introduction of the Goods & Services Tax (GST) and e-way bill has further bolstered existing tailwinds in the sector and should propel the industry to double-digit growth. Investors should keep a close watch on the sector, especially 3PL players, as these companies are expected to outpace industry growth over the next few years.

FSCS ended Q1 with a topline of Rs 228 crore, a growth of 50 percent YoY. Revenue growth was aided by strong performance of its contract logistics segment, which contributes more than 60 percent of total revenue. Revenue for contract logistics surged to Rs 169 crore, up 51 percent YoY. Other business segments - express logistics and temperature-controlled logistics - grew 30 percent and 13 percent, respectively.

Gross profit margin declined to 31.7 percent as fixed costs increased due to addition of new distribution centres as well as new warehousing space. Despite a dip in margin, growth in operating profit and profit after tax was aided by higher topline.

During the quarter gone by, FSCS added around 1 million square feet (including 0.2m sq ft from integration with Vulcan Express) of warehousing space for its contract logistics segment. The total warehousing space at the end of the quarter stood at 5.6m sq ft. The management also signed 2.62m sq ft of space for setting up nine distribution centres. Commercial operations at these facilities is expected to commence over the course of FY19 and FY20.

The company continues to diversify its revenue stream by adding non-anchor customers. During Q1, FSCS added Haldirams, Crompton Greaves and Myntra to its list of clientele. Revenue visibility looks strong, considering the sales pipeline of Rs 400-500 crore (consisting majorly of non-anchor customers), which are various stages of discussion.

FSCSs integration with Vulcan Express, a logistics subsidiary of Snapdeal which it acquired in February for Rs 35 crore, remains well on track. During Q1, FSCS integrated six Vulcan warehouses with itself and also initiated discussions with new clients to increase utilisation of existing assets. The subsidiary reported Rs 31.7 crore in revenue and gross profit of Rs 1.5 crore in the quarter gone by. The company is in the process of rationalising Vulcans cost structure and aims to lower cost by 15-20 percent over the next few quarters.

MLL posted a Q1 revenue growth of 9 percent at Rs 928 crore. Strong performance from warehousing and other valued-added services business from the non-Mahindra vertical drove revenue growth. EBITDA jumped 53 percent to Rs 41 crore as the company benefitted from margin expansion. Operational efficiencies, along with nil strategic consulting fees (versus 3.9 crore in Q1 FY18), boosted margin profile.

Revenue from the supply-chain management grew 9 percent to Rs 838 crore. Within this segment, revenue from Mahindra group clients increased 11 percent to Rs 521 crore while the same from non-Mahindra supply chain business grew 6 percent to Rs 317 crore. Revenue from people transport solutions grew only 5 percent due to stagnation and restructuring of major customers.

Revenue growth moderated as some of its clients are still evaluating the business impact from GST implementation and are taking longer than usual to sign new contracts. Besides, it also witnessed some pricing pressure due to logistic start-ups (funded by private equity players).

The company continues to focus on warehousing and value-added services to drive revenue and expand margin. The warehousing facility in Gurugram is reaching near optimum capacity utilisation. Recently, the company leased 280,000 sq ft warehousing facility in Chakan (Pune), which is an automotive hub. The company is evaluating setting up new warehouses across locations: Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai.

The company is increasing investments in technology to automate processes and optimise costs across divisions. It is also planning to integrate the IT systems with clients to increase customer stickiness. It plans to incur capex of Rs 20-25 crore on technology and material handling equipment in FY19.

Industry tailwinds along with pan-India presence and strong customer relationships should help these 3PL post secular earnings growth (20-25 percent) going forward and also gain market from unorganised market players whose share currently stands around 95 percent.

FSCS has a concrete relationship with Future group companies and therefore remains well positioned to grow through strong presence in the fast growing consumption sectors, while MLL aims to leverage experience gained through its association with Mahindra group to add new business clients.

Both these companies trade at rich valuations given the high growth prospects in light of sector opportunities (GST, e-way bill and axle norms). On a one-year forward basis, FSCS trades at a price-to-earnings multiple of 28 times compared to MLL, which trades at a P/E multiple of 42 times.

FSCS is expected to grow faster than MLL (owing to its small revenue base) and trades at a significant discount to the latter. We remain confident of the growth prospects of the company and expect margin and return ratios to improve as the asset utilisation moves higher from current levels. We therefore advise long-term investors to accumulate FSCS on any correction.

Follow @Sach_PalA common worry of many mutual fund investors is how to redeem money after achieving a certain financial goal. Redemption is nothing but a process of withdrawing units from a mutual fund scheme and getting the money back from your investment at the net asset value prevailing on that day.

An investor can redeem the fund units either online or offline. Through online, they can visit the registered website of the concerned Asset Management Company and when it comes to offline, they can file a redemption request by submitting the Redemption Request Form.

Heres all you need to know while withdrawing/redeeming your units after the accomplishment of a financial goal.

Duration

One of the primary benefits of investing in mutual funds is the liquidity element that this savings/investment vehicle provides. At the time of withdrawing units from a mutual fund, the amount which an investor wants to get back in his/her bank account, also known as redemption proceed, directly goes into his/her registered bank account within 3-4 business/working days.

Ajit Narasimhan, Chief Marketing Officer, Sundaram Mutual Funds said that the time it takes to get the credit after redemptions typically depend on the category of mutual fund. For example, Redemption proceeds for liquid or low duration fund or other debt funds are usually paid within one working day. The MF industry also offers instant redemption funds in the liquid category where your money is credited via IMPS instantly into your bank account. However, theres a cap with such redemptions of Rs 50000 or 90% of the value of the investors holding whichever is lower. For equity mutual funds, the investments are credited to investors within 3 working days, he explained.

Ways of making redemption

Investors can use both online and offline mode to redeem their investments. To redeem offline, the investor has to submit duly signed redemption form with all relevant details, including Folio No, scheme name, plan details, etc to his mutual fund distributor. Alternatively, he can also submit redemption form directly at the office of the concerned AMC or Registrar & Transfer Agent (RTA).

Manish Kothari  Director, Head of Mutual Funds, Paisabazaar.com said that online redemption is much easier and faster. All that an investor has to do is log in to his online mutual fund account, press the redemption button and confirm the transaction. Redemption amount will be credited to his bank account within turn-around time. Investors can visit the websites of mutual fund houses and RTAs to redeem their funds online. Those having invested offline too can redeem funds through online fund house and RTA websites. Note that Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) can be only be redeemed through the trading accounts provided by stockbroking firms," he added.

Applicable Charges

In many cases, you may not have to pay any charge but in certain situations, the investors may have to pay an exit load or certain charges while withdrawing the unit.

Narasimhan said mutual funds may have an exit load if redeemed before a given period. For example, A scheme may charge an exit load of 1 per cent if redeemed before a year from purchase. At the same time, there are some schemes such as liquid funds or ultra short-term funds, which do not have an exit load. In cases of funds with an exit load, the exit load will be deducted from the NAV which is applied for your redemption per unit, he said.International real estate consultant JLL recently released the latest edition of Premium Office Rent Tracker (PORT). This is the fourth iteration of the annual ranking which highlights achievable rent in the highest quality buildings in premier office districts of 61 cities. The ranking takes into account occupancy costs such as rent, taxes and service charges. Here are 10 markets where owning an office space, comes with a hefty price tag:

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The Hyderabad bench of National Company Law Tribunal today ordered the liquidation of Lanco Infratech after the committee of creditors rejected the revised resolution plan submitted by Thriveni Earthmovers, a Tamil Nadu-based infra and mining firm.

The bench headed by judicial member Ratakonda Murali in his orders appointed the interim resolution professional (IRP) Savan Godiavala as the liquidator of the company.

The Reserve Bank had last June directed IDBI Bank, lead lender of Lanco Infratech, to initiate insolvency proceedings for the company under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC).

The company, among 12 firms identified by the RBI with high debt for proceedings under IBC, owes over Rs 44,000 crore to the IDBI Bank-led lenders consortium.

The Committee of Creditors (CoC) of Lanco Infratech had earlier rejected the resolution plan submitted by Thriveni Earthmovers, which subsequently submitted a revised resolution plan on April 1 which was also rejected.

On August 7, 2017, the NCLT, suspending the powers of the Board, appointed Savan Godiawala as Interim Resolution professional as part of the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process (CIRP) for the company.Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway is expected to pick up a small stake in One97 Communications Ltd, the parent company of payment gateway Paytm, says a news report, quoting people aware of the development. The news comes at a time when the bigger players in the global e-commerce space are clambering over each other for a foothold in the Indian market space.

So is this the coming of age moment for the Indian digital economy?

Lets take the case of Paytm first and look at what might have drawn Buffett to the company.

Paytms business model is indeed the sort that would get someone like Buffett interested. Paytms core business is that of a payment gateway through which incoming and outgoing transactions pass, something like the toll bridge business that fascinated Buffett in his childhood.

The other factor is that Paytm gets to enjoy the float of money residing in its wallet when the customer is not using it to transact. Next is the growing acceptance and trust of Paytm as a transaction gateway. Paytm has achieved an annual run rate of 5 billion transactions and registered $50 billion gross transaction value (GTV) in a year. GTV is the total transaction value through the platform.

It has been reported that Paytm has processed over 400 million BHIM UPI transactions in last six months achieving 500 percent growth in money transfer transactions in the June 2018 quarter.

Thus you have the key ingredient in place to attract Buffett. Details of valuations are not available, but if Buffett is interested it clearly meets his growth-at-reasonable-price criterion.

The story for India is not in the growth numbers of Paytm but from where the numbers have come. Paytm has witnessed the tremendous growth in adoption of digital payments in tier II and tier III cities that constitute 50 percent of its total user base. Surat, Durgapur, Rajkot, Meerut, Imphal, Rohtak, Panipat, Mangalore, Ranchi, Puducherry, Rajamundri, Warangal, Jodhpur, Thrissur, Karnal, Madurai, and Jamnagar are among the fastest adopters and are leading the wave of digital payment adoption.

That is the big India story.

The Indian e-commerce market is expected to grow from $38.5 billion in 2017 to $200 billion by 2026. According to a study by The Boston Consulting Group and Google, internet users in India are expected to grow from 390 million to 650 million users in 2020. This number is more than the total number of users in G7 countries.

From 2008-13, China went through a period of rapid internet penetration, doubling in five years. The same story is expected in India. More than half of Indias internet growth is expected to come from rural India, taking the share of rural internet users from 33 percent to 50 percent in 2020.

Rural penetration has posed a challenge to e-tailers. Nearly 50 million online shoppers dropped out in the last 12 months. A nine-month long research conducted by Google, consultants Bain & Company, and philanthropic venture fund Omidyar Network found that 54 million users stopped online transactions after their first purchase in the last year. Those dropping out were mostly first-time internet users from lower income groups who were more comfortable with vernacular languages than English.

Paytm seems to have broken the code of attracting customers. Its 500-percent growth is primarily on account of its multilingual app. Around 25 percent of its users prefer using the app in their regional languages. Hindi is the most used language after English, followed by Gujarati, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, and Kannada among others.

Presently only 14 percent of Indias internet users shop online, compared with almost 64 percent in China. This is the potential of the Indian market that is attracting some of the biggest players in the world.

Now e-commerce is a big boys game. The smaller players are either swept under or are bought out by the giants. Flipkart, which was bought out by US retail giant Walmart for $16 billion had gobbled a number of smaller companies, most of which were funded by the same private equity players who had funded it.

Chinas Alibaba is scouting for partners while Amazon is ready to increase its investment in India. Indian markets are now the new battlefield for global giants. Even if we exclude the huge Walmart deal, the e-commerce industry in India witnessed 21 private equity and venture capital deals worth $ 2.1 billion in 2017 and six deals worth $ 226 million in January-April 2018.

The only thing missing in the India story is a robust and transparent policy. The draft policy on e-commerce was criticized by most players in the industry. The government will have to balance foreign interests and growth opportunities in the space.

Too much control on the sector will scare away the investors -- remember, Buffett ran away from his intrest in the insurance company Bajaj Allianz in India because of excessive regulation.A bushel of soybeans are shown on display in the Monsanto research facility in Creve Coeur, Missouri, July 28, 2014. Monsanto engineers designed a chipper to shave a tiny tissue sample off a seed to analyze the seed's genetics. If the sample is positive for desirable genetic traits, the seed is still viable so a breeder can plant it in a field test and use it in the breeding process to create more seeds of its kind. Picture taken July 28, 2014. 20 of 25 Monsanto Stand Alone Picture Package. REUTERS/Tom Gannam (UNITED STATES - Tags: ENVIRONMENT FOOD SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AGRICULTURE) - RTR42TJN

Angel Commodities' report on Soybean

NCDEX Oct Soybean falls for the second consecutive week to touch 7 months low last week due to profit booking initiated by market participants due to forecast of beneficial rains in central India which will enhance soybean production. The area under soybean in the country increased by 6 % at 11.13 lakh ha as of last week compared to last year sowing, according to data released by the farm ministry. Earlier, government has increased the export incentives on soymeal to 10% of the free - on - board value from the current 7% till Mar 31. According to the latest report by the SOPA, India's soymeal exports rose 12% on year to 102,000 tn in July. Soymeal exports in August are expected to double on year to over 100,000 tn due to robust demand from European countries. There was strong demand from Bangladesh, France and Israel boosting export of the oilmeal.

Outlook

Soybean futures are expected to trade sideways due to good rains and production prospects. However, higher crushing demand for soy meal exports may keep supporting prices in coming weeks.

For all commodities report, click here

Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts/broking houses/rating agencies on moneycontrol.com are their own, and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.

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Here are the stocks that are in news today:

Results Today: Jet Airways, Alok Industries

Reliance Industries: Subsidiary Reliance Brands purchased an additional 3.07 percent equity holding in Genesis Colors (GCL) for about Rs 8.32 crore, taking its total stake in GCL to 49.46 percent.

DHFL proposes to issue NCD worth Rs 1000 crore also Greenshoe option of Rs 1000 crore on private placement basis

Fortis Healthcare: Company & RHT Health Trust have agreed to amend the long stop date in the master purchase agreement.

LIC Housing Finance: Q1 profit rises 18.4 percent to Rs 567.9 crore versus Rs 479.7 crore; revenue increases 10.8 percent to Rs 4,019 crore versus Rs 3,626.9 crore (YoY).

Munjal Auto entered into the design and manufacture of composites components and assemblies via acquisition of a majority holding in Indutch Composites Technology

Sundaram Finance: Q1 profit rises to Rs 140.72 crore versus Rs 111.75 crore; revenue from operations increased to Rs 753.2 crore versus Rs 614.7 crore; provisions and write off declined to Rs 18.7 crore versus Rs 21.4 crore (YoY).

JBF Industries: Promoter sells 4.1 percent stake in open market from August 3-14.

SAIL set to exit non-performing, non-operational JV firms

Manpasand Beverages inaugurates new manufacturing plant in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh

Indian Overseas Bank: International Credit Rating Agency Moody's Investors Service, Singapore has re-affirmed its ratings and has also assigned a new rating i.e. Counterparty Risk Rating (CRR) for the bank. CRR for banks is a new rating class introduced by Moody's.

Filatex India approved raising of funds upto an amount of Rs 150 crore via issue of ADR/GDR/others

Royal Orchid Hotels: Rating agency ICRA upgraded its rating for company's subsidiary Icon Hospitality Private Limited's term loan of Rs 20 crore to BBB(SO) (Stable) from BBB- (SO)(Stable).

Schaeffler India: Name of the promoter entity of the company i.e. 'FAG Kugelfischer GmbH' has been changed to 'Schaeffler Schweinfurt Beteiligungs GmbH' w.e.f. August 1.

NHC Foods: Board members approved sale of undertaking(S) of the company situated at Valsad, Gujarat and Santacruz, Mumbai.

Suncare Traders: The meeting of board of directors of the company is scheduled to be held on August 30 to consider to issue of bonus equity shares.

IL&FS Transportation clarified on the news - IL&FS firms have brush with wilful default tag- company unable to comment on any implications of the matter referred to in the News Item

Anil Ambani resigned as director of Reliance Naval

Punjab Chemicals repaid the entire outstanding debt to Export Import Bank of India (EXIM Bank)

Reliance Infrastructure AGM scheduled to be held on September 18, 2018

Duke Offshore bagged two high speed crew transfer contracts with an international company operating in India

Bodal Chemicals acquired land aggregating to about 27876.36 Sq mtrs

V2 Retail opens new store at Jharkhand

Mangalam Cement - CARE revised long term rating to CARE A+ from CARE AA-

JK Paper - contract workers at Odisha have resorted to illegal and unlawful stoppage of work

Goa Carbon: AJO Emerging Markets Small-cap Master Fund bought 65,681 shares of the company at Rs 826.91 per share on the NSE.

Hexaware Technologies: Promoter HT Global IT Solutions Holdings sold 2.5 crore equity shares of the company at Rs 447.83 per share while Citigroup Global Markets Mauritius bought 38,53,600 shares at Rs 447.5 per share and Societe Generale purchased 41,00,000 shares at Rs 447.5 per share on the NSE.

Ruchi Soya Industries: Disha Foundation sold 95,60,000 shares of the company at Rs 9.44 per share on the NSE.

Ramkrishna Forgings: Invesco Asset Management Company sold 1,94,261 shares of the company at Rs 615 per share on the BSE.

Disclosure: Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd.live bse live

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Tata Power today said its wholly-owned arm Coastal Gujarat Power Ltd has raised Rs 2,700 crore via issuance of non-convertible debentures on private placement basis.

The proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes of Coastal Gujarat Power, including refinance of foreign currency debt, funding of hedge unwinding costs relating to refinancing of foreign currency debt, capital expenditure, and augmentation of working capital, Tata Power said in a BSE filing.

Coastal Gujarat Power Limited (CGPL) issued and allotted the non-convertible debentures (NCDs) in two series {Series I NCOs amounting Rs 1,700 crore for a tenor of 5 years and Series II NCOs amounting Rs 1,000 crore for a tenor of 1O years), the filing said.

"The NCDs have been rated AA (SO) by CARE Limited and India Ratings Limited. The Series I NCDs will carry a coupon rate of 9.70 percent and the Series II NCDs will carry a coupon rate of 9.90 percent, both payable annually," it said. The debt obligations of CGPL under the NCDs are guaranteed by the company, it said.Two senior leaders from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) recently quit the party citing personal reasons. Ashutosh and Ashish Khetan actively represented the party on television and were avid campaigners.

Many senior leaders of the party have left since it came to power in New Delhi in 2015. This has raised many questions around the leadership of AAP chief and Delhi Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal.

There were reports suggesting that Ashutosh left the party because he was upset about not being offered a Rajya Sabha seat. He was part of the partys Political Affairs Committee. Khetan maintained that he was quitting to pursue a career in law and that this should not reflect badly on the party.

Khetan also resigned as vice-chairman of the Delhi Dialogue and Development Commission, saying the tussle between the Kejriwal government and Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal was frustrating.

After the departure of Yogendra Yadav, Ajit Jha, Anand Kumar and Prashant Bhushan, many other senior leaders including Medha Patkar and Mayank Gandhi have also left the party.

Pankaj Gupta, national secretary of AAP, told Scroll, They left due to personal reasons. It is laughable the things that are being said about their exit. It is a big loss to the party but there is no animosity. We respect their personal decision.

AAP has been in self-destruction mode ever since it ousted its founding members, said Praveen Rai, a political analyst. The anarchist brand of politics practiced by AAP with a strong pitch on false propaganda earned some political brownie points initially, but it proved detrimental in the long run, he added.

The party is seen to be one which is always in a hurry. Its work has been lauded in the state, especially for healthcare and educational initiatives. However, incessant resignations of senior leaders have left people questioning what the party stands for.

Mayank Gandhi, who was AAPs national executive in Maharashtra, said the recent resignations have been more about position and power than principles. Gandhi wrote an open letter to Kejriwal after AAP lost Delhi municipal elections last year. He accused Kejriwal of wanting to manipulate the support to his party to protect himself as a candidate for prime minister.

Commenting on the partys prospects in 2019 after major leaders resigning, Rai said, The defeat of AAP in the municipal polls revealed that the electorate of Delhi has rejected the kind of party politics it ushered in. The desertion of prominent leaders is creating negativity among the people of Delhi and AAP runs the risk of being wiped out from the political landscape of the national capital.

Pankaj Gupta, however, said it is the partys work which speaks volumes for it. People will keep leaving and new faces will keep joining. We have to fill the void they leave and create a new push.The Bharatiya Janata Party may announce an alliance partner from Tamil Nadu for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls as soon as October, according to a source quoted by Hindustan Times.

The BJP had won only a single seat from Tamil Nadu in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls but after the death of Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi, there has been infighting in the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). With the Telugu Desam Party pulling out of the alliance and Shiv Senas recent campaign against the party, Tamil Nadu will become an important state for the BJP.

Shah told us during his visit in July that there will be an alliance between the BJP and a regional player and a formal announcement will be made by October, a BJP leader told the daily.

Another leader quoted by the newspaper said that the party has been communicating with both of Karunanidhis sons, Stalin and Alagiri. Amit Shah is likely to be at the memorial meeting for Karunanidhi in Chennai.

After Karunanidhi passed away, Alagiri claimed to have the support of the leaders true followers trying to stake claim of the party over the successor named by Kalaignar, Stalin.

DMK was part of the NDA government of 1999 but pulled out in 2003 and formed an alliance with Congress to win all the 39 seats in the 2004 Lok Sabha Elections. Earlier, there have been reports of improving relations between DMK and BJP.

In the 2016 state election, BJPs vote share had decreased compared to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in Tamil Nadu.

The BJP has been working to shape Tamil politics to their advantage since Jayalalithaas death, according to Milan Vaishnav, the director and a senior fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

However, the BJPs leverage has declined over the past year with the narrowing of their perceived electoral advantage. Any potential Tamil ally will be able to drive a hard bargain, he said.A day after a Congress leader demanded scrapping of the Rafale fighter aircraft deal, the Jammu and Kashmir BJP today accused the Congress of "fabricating lies" in a "desperate" bid to corner the NDA government ahead of the Lok Sabha polls next year.

Terming the allegations over the deal "half-backed, false, misleading and confusing", it alleged that Congress' insistence on making the contents of the deal public was aimed at helping the intelligence agencies of China and Pakistan.

Congress leader and Rajya Sabha MP Partap Singh Bajwa had yesterday termed Rafale deal the "biggest scam in the country's defence sector post-Independence" and demanded its cancellation.

State BJP spokesperson Brigadier Anil Gupta (retd) said, "In a desperate bid to corner the Narendra Modi government prior to the 2019 polls, the Congress is fabricating lies and scams in the hope that it may succeed in maligning the image of the BJP-led NDA government."

He claimed the Congress which made a "record of scams" during UPA II, is "trying desperately" to paint the BJP with the same brush.

"Terming the Rafale deal a scam is an attempt of the Congress at mud-slinging, hoping that some mud would definitely stick and at least sow a seed of doubt in the mind of the gullible public before the 'do or die' elections for the party which is struggling for its survival," Gupta said, adding the Congress would never succeed in its "nefarious design".

Countering the allegation that a loss of Rs 41,205 crore has been caused to national exchequer in the deal, the BJP leader said till 2014, the then UPA government failed to negotiate the contract with the manufacturer due to difference of opinion in fulfilling certain conditions of the Request for Proposal (RFP) pertaining to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL).

He said the purchase of 36 aircraft in 'fly-away' condition is custom-made and includes a lethal weapon package, performance based logistical support (ensuring 75 per cent serviceability of fleet at all times), 13 India-specific capabilities, 50 per cent offset, supply of spares, servicing, training of pilots, and state of the art avionics.

"Also, the difference in value of dollar in 2012 and 2016 also needs to be kept in mind. You cannot compare apples and oranges, Gupta said, adding the present contract also includes five year maintenance guarantee.

He said Congress president Rahul Gandhi had to eat a humble pie on the floor of Parliament during the "no-confidence motion" debate on the issue of "secrecy clause" in the deal, which was also subsequently clarified by the French Ambassador.

"Still, Congress continues to rake up the issue just to mislead the people," Gupta said adding operational capability of a strategic platform depends on its configuration and no nation discloses it.

"By insisting for the same, Congress is trying to help the intelligence agencies of China and Pakistan," Gupta alleged.

On the allegation that the prime minister did not follow the laid down procedures and bypassed cabinet committee of security (CCS) while making the deal, the BJP leader said the panel had given clearance to the proposal of purchasing 36 aircraft on government to government basis prior to Modi's departure for Paris on April 9, 2015.

"All procedures laid down in Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) 2016 for Inter-Government Agreement (IGA) have been meticulously followed," he said.

As regards favouring Reliance Defence, the BJP leader said, "IGA was signed between two sovereign governments. No private individual, entity or firm was involved from the Indian side. The procurement process also does not involve any Indian private company.Representative image

India and Pakistan will resume their talks on various aspects of the Indus Waters Treaty in Lahore on Wednesday, the first bilateral engagement since Prime Minister Imran Khan took office.

India's Indus Water Commissioner P K Saxena is expected to reach here today to begin the two-day discussions with his Pakistani counterpart Syed Mehr Ali Shah on Wednesday, Dawn quoted a government official as saying.

The last meeting of the Pakistan-India Permanent Indus Commission was held in New Delhi in March during which both the sides had shared details of the water flow and the quantum of water being used under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty.

The talks will be the first official engagement between India and Pakistan since Khan became prime minister on August 18.

In a letter to Khan on the day he was sworn in as Pakistan's 22nd prime minister, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed India's resolve to build good neighbourly relations between the two countries.

On July 30, Modi telephoned Khan to congratulate him on his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party's victory in the general elections and expressed hope that both countries will work to open a new chapter in bilateral ties.

The Pakistani side will reiterate its objections over two water storage and hydropower projects being built by India during the two-day talks scheduled for August 29-30.

The official said Pakistan would raise its concerns over 1000MW Pakal Dul and 48MW Lower Kalnai hydroelectric projects on the Chenab river.

The official said that the two sides would also finalise the schedule of future meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission and visits of the teams of the Indus commissioners.

He said that the water commissioners of Pakistan and India were required to meet twice a year and arrange technical visits to projects' sites and critical river head works, but Pakistan had been facing a lot of problems in timely meetings and visits.

The two-day session is also expected to discuss ways and means for timely and smooth sharing of hydrological data on shared rivers.

The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank and signed by then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan's president Ayub Khan, administers how the water of the Indus river and its tributaries that flow in both the countries will be utilised.Representative image

The Kerala government is planning to approach the World Bank to raise around Rs 3,000 crore to aid reconstruction of public infrastructure damaged by the recent floods, according to a Mint report. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said discussions will begin shortly after the financial cost of the damage is assessed.

The worst floods to hit Kerala in a century has claimed 384 lives, displacing millions, rendering homes uninhabitable and causing irreparable damage to infrastructure. Around 80,000 km of roads and 39 bridges were damaged in the floods. The reconstruction of public utilities is estimated to set the state exchequer back by Rs 20,000 crore.

Reports of taking on debt from multilateral agencies like the World Bank come at a time when the Centre has refused foreign aid. The Centre has maintained that the challenge of rebuilding flood hit Kerala will be met domestically. It has sanctioned aid of only Rs 600 crore as opposed to Keralas demand of Rs 2,000 crore.

However, sources told the news daily that the Centre will not object to Kerala taking on debt from the World Bank. In a meeting with Kerala Governor P Sathasivam on Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi clarified that the Rs 600 crore released by the Centre was only a preliminary offer of assistance and that additional funds will be disbursed in the future. He added that supplementary funds will be released from the National Disaster Response Fund.

The federal structure of the country gives individual states the right to take up international loans. If Kerala were to approach the IMF, it would not be without precedent. In the aftermath of the 2005 tsunami, Tamil Nadu sought a $100 million loan from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Kerala, which has long maintained strong ties with foreign countries through its diaspora, has received offers of aid from different quarters. On August 22, Shashi Tharoor, who represents Thiruvananthapuram in the Lok Sabha, sounded out officials from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the International Red Cross over funding.

If Kerala were to approach multilateral lenders, it would fly in the face of ethos of the ruling Communist Party of India, which has staunchly opposed the free market policies advocated by institutions like the World Bank.

The appointment of Harvard academic Gita Gopinath, who has previously worked with the IMF and the World Economic Forum, to a state government post drew flak from cadres of Keralas CPI. Disenchantment died down soon after Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, the state head of the CPI, put his weight behind the Chief Ministers appointee.The Armys Court of Inquiry has ordered to initiate a disciplinary action against Major Leetul Gogoi after he was found with a local Kashmiri woman at a Srinagar hotel earlier this year.

The Court of Inquiry (CoI) has held him accountable for fraternising locals in spite of instructions to the contrary as well as being away from the place of duty while in an operational area.

After the Corps Commander approves the findings of the CoI, the Army authorities would frame charges against him under relevant sections of the Army Act. Subsequently, the Army will decide whether to punish Major Gogoi or convene a court-martial to try him.

Gogoi was detained by the Jammu and Kashmir Police from a Srinagar hotel with a woman on May 23 this year. The officer had allegedly showed up with a woman and a man at Hotel Grand Mamta and had gotten into an argument followed by an altercation after the hotel staffers refused to let the woman in.

After questioning by the Srinagar police, the officer was handed over to his unit. A week later the Jammu and Kashmir police, in their report to a Srinagar court, had cited that no case is made out against Gogoi and neither the hotelier nor the girl had filed any complaint.

The CoI, which is headed by a Brigadier, had taken the testimonies of Major Gogoi and other army officers concerned besides checking the documents dealing with the case.

Army Chief General Bipin Rawat had earlier said that Major Gogoi will be given an exemplary punishment in the case he was found guilty of any offence and the punishment will set an example.

Last year, Gogoi, belonging to 53 Rashtriya Rifles, had stoked a controversy after tying a civilian to a Jeep in order to use him as a shield against locals who were pelting stones at the army convoy during polls in Budgam. At that time, he was awarded by the Indian Army with the chief of Army Staffs commendation card for his efforts in counter-insurgency operations.A journalist from Rajasthan, who was arrested and held in a Bihar jail, claimed that his arrest was a political conspiracy, according to an Indian Express report.

Durg Singh Rajpurohit was arrested under IPC Section 406 along with sections of the SC/ST Act by the Barmer rural police after a court complaint was filed against him by Rakesh Paswan. However, according to multiple reports, Paswan said he never filed a case against the journalist.

The accused had taken the complainant (Paswan) to Barmer six months ago where he engaged him in mining work. After the complainants father fell ill, he returned to Patna without being paid any remuneration for his work by the accused, the complaint said.

Rajpurohit, a journalist with a private news channel, allegedly went back to Patna to convince the complainant to come back but when he refused, Rajpurohit assaulted and hurled casteist abuses at Paswan, according to the complaint.

However, the journalist claimed that he never visited Patna and he was being framed by some politicians for doing a story on a woman who had run away with a man from Jammu and Kashmir. He claimed that the police did not follow procedures.

I have been framed by highly influential politicians for my work as a journalist. The police harassed me on the way and kept maintaining that mine was a high-profile case. I am still getting threats and my life is in danger. Some miscreants fired at me a couple of months ago, Rajpurohit told the daily.

However, Barmer superintendent of police Manish Agrawal denied any wrongdoing. In its warrant, the court had directed the station house officer of Barmer rural police station to execute the same. The person was arrested as per directions of the court. Our job was limited to that. Every procedure was followed, Agrawal told the newspaper.

Rajpurohit is currently out on bail after Bihar CM Nitish Kumars intervention.Congress President Rahul Gandhi

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is likely to invite Congress president Rahul Gandhi and other opposition leaders, for an event in September, according to media reports.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury is also likely to be invited for the event.

The event will be attended by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.

The three-day event is expected to take place on September 17-19 at the Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi, reports suggest.

On Friday, Gandhi had likened the RSS to Islamist group Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world and alleged that the outfit is trying to "change" the nature of India and "capture" its institutions.

Speaking in Berlin, Gandhi said that the Congress party "binds the people of India", while the BJP-RSS "divides them and spreads hatred".

The Congress president had also alleged that women have no place in the RSS where they are treated as "second-class citizens".

The RSS conclave comes at a time when opposition, especially Congress president Rahul Gandhi has launched a frontal attack on the BJP, hyphenating the policies and decisions of the Narendra Modi government with its ideological moorings in the RSS.

In June, former president Pranab Mukherjee had attended a function of the RSS in Nagpur -- a move for which he was criticised by the Congress.The Supreme Court today adjourned its hearing on a fresh plea challenging the constitutional validity of Article 35-A, which empowers the Jammu and Kashmir assembly to define "permanent residents" for bestowing special rights and privileges to them.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud did not take up the matter as the petitioner had circulated a letter in the apex court registry seeking adjournment of hearing on the plea.

Lawyer and Delhi BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay, in a fresh plea, has sought a direction to the central and state governments to declare Article 35A of the Constitution as "arbitrary" on the ground that it was contrary to fundamental rights like the right to equality, dignity of women, freedom of speech and expression and the right to life and personal liberty.

Article 35-A, which was incorporated in the Constitution by a 1954 Presidential Order, accords special rights and privileges to the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir and bars people from outside the state from acquiring any immovable property in the state.

It also denies property rights to a woman who marries a person from outside the state. The provision, which leads to such women from the state forfeiting their right over property, also applies to their heirs.

Earlier, the apex court had adjourned the hearing on a batch of petitions including the one filed by NGO 'We the Citizens', through lawyer Barun Kumar Sinha, till the week commencing today.

It had said that a three-judge bench would decide whether the pleas challenging the Article should be referred to a five-judge constitution bench for examining the larger issue of alleged violation of the doctrine of basic structure of the Constitution.

The apex court is hearing a batch of pleas seeking quashing of the Article which confers special status to permanent residents of the state.

Political parties, including the National Conference and the CPI(M), have moved the Supreme Court in support of Article 35-A that empowers the state assembly to define "permanent residents" for bestowing special rights and privileges to them.

An NGO, 'Ikkjut Jammu', has also filed a plea seeking quashing of the provision. It has said that Article 35-A furthers the "two nation theory which is against the theory of secularism".

The state government, while defending the Article, had cited two verdicts of the constitution benches of the Supreme Court in 1961 and 1969, which had upheld the powers of the President under Article 370(1)(d) of the Constitution to pass constitutional orders.A meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her new Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi is "possible" in the US on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly session next month, a media report said today.

This could be the first ministerial-level bilateral meeting since Prime Minister Imran Khan became Pakistan's 22nd prime minister on August 18.

"Such a meeting (between Swaraj and Qureshi) is possible but no decision (has been taken) yet," Dawn news quoted a senior Pakistani diplomat in the US as saying.

The External Affairs Ministry has not announced any such meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi. In a letter to Khan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had expressed India's resolve to build good neighbourly relations between the two countries.

In July, Modi had telephoned Khan and congratulated him on his party's victory in the general elections and expressed hope that both countries will work to open a new chapter in bilateral ties.

The 73rd United Nations General Assembly opens on September 18 in New York. Swaraj will address the annual high-level UNGA session on September 29, according to the provisional list of speakers released by the UN.

Pakistan is reluctant to confirm its agenda for the UNGA meeting as it is still undecided who will represent the country at the world body, the report said.

Media reports in Islamabad has indicated that Khan may skip the UNGA as part of his efforts to cut down on government expenses. However, several Pakistani diplomats and political commentators have urged him to reconsider his decision.

Pakistani officials feel the prime minister Khan's presence in New York will add a new dimension to an India-Pakistan meeting, even though he will not participate in minister-level talks, the report said.

Dawn news, quoting diplomatic sources in Washington, said Islamabad would like to see how productive this meeting could be, particularly because India has already said that it is not ready to resume bilateral or formal talks with Pakistan.

They point out that this week, India strongly rejected a suggestion that in his letter to Khan, Prime Minister Modi had expressed interest on resuming talks.

The Indian reaction forced Pakistan to clarify that the suggestion was a media interpretation of the letter and Foreign Minister Qureshi, in his comments on Modi's letter, never said that "the Indian Prime Minister had made an offer of a dialogue", the report said.Senior Congress leader Saifuddin Soz today said an all-party delegation from Jammu and Kashmir should call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and urge the Centre to defend Article 35 A in the Supreme Court. Article 35A, which accords special rights and privileges to the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, is facing a legal challenge in the Supreme Court.

"Let the delegation of mainstream parties call on the PM and Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and propose that the Government of India take a position before the Supreme Court," Soz said in a statement here.

The former Union minister said it was ridiculous for the central government to watch the situation from a distance and be unmindful of the turmoil that can be caused by any attempt to amend Article 35A, against the will of the people of the state.

He said the people of Kashmir have shown a unique sense of solidarity on the need to safeguard Article 35A of the Constitution of India.

"It is a heartening situation that certain sections of society in Jammu and Ladakh have also realized that Article 35A cannot be abrogated".

Earlier today, spontaneous shutdown was observed at several places in Kashmir after clashes broke out between youths and security forces following rumours about scrapping of Article 35A, police officials said.

Stone-pelters clashed with security personnel in Anantnag and Safakadal area here in the wake of the rumours, they said.The ruling BJP in Rajasthan said today that the opposition Congress was intimidated by the popularity of Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and was trying to disrupt her statewide Gaurav Yatra using "various means".

Former Rajasthan BJP president Ashok Parnami said Congress national general secretary Ashok Gehlot was "afraid" of Raje's popularity, after a few miscreants pelted stones at Raje's meeting on Saturday in Pipad town of Jodhpur division.

Raje and other BJP leaders have accused the Congress of staging the incident. The opposition party has condemned the incident but said it does not adopt such kind of tactics.

"Congress doesn't want the yatra to proceed and is trying to disrupt it through various means, including by filing writ petition in high court and then pelting stones on CM's Rath in Pipad. Why is Ashok Gehlot afraid of CM Raje's rising popularity," Parnami said at a press conference in Jaipur.

He showed videos in which a group of people could be seen supporting Gehlot and inciting the crowd to pelt stones on Raje's cavalcade.

Congress has a strong hold in Pipad and they cannot shy away from responsibility by only condemning the incident, he added.

Fifteen people have been arrested in connection with the incident, Additional Superintendent of Police (Jodhpur rural), Khinv Singh said, adding, five of them were taken into custody today.

The BJP leader said the people arrested would reveal their identity during police interrogation. Gehlot and state Congress chief Sachin Pilot yesterday condemned the stone-pelting incident and said it was unfortunate that the BJP was holding their party responsible.

"It is a highly condemnable act if someone has thrown stones during the visit of the Chief Minister," Gehlot had tweeted.

Parmani said the people of Rajasthan have been supporting Raje's yatra, which began from Udaipur division on August 4. This is the second phase of the yatra.

On Saturday night, a few miscreants disrupted Raje's yatra and pelted stones during a meeting. Stones were also hurled on the chief minister's rath in Pipad, police said.

Earlier that day, a few miscreants pelted stones on Health Minister Kalicharan Saraf's vehicle near Khairwara town, breaking its rear windshield. Today Saraf told reporters that he holds Congress and its supporters responsible for the incident.The BJP would launch its campaign for the Madhya Pradesh assembly polls at a convention to be held here on September 25, a senior leader said today.

The gathering Mahakumbh is being organised to mark the birth anniversary of RSS ideologue and Bhartiya Jana Sangh co-founder Deendayal Upadhyay, at the BHEL Jamboree Maidan.

State unit BJP president Rakesh Singh said they would invite Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the event to be attended by party chief Amit Shah, leaders of the BJP from Madhya Pradesh and party workers.

"The Madhya Pradesh BJP would launch its poll campaign by holding 'Mahakumbh' on the birth anniversary of Deendayal Upadhyay on September 25. Party president Amit Shah will attend the convention," Singh told reporters.

Singh also said that Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan's ongoing "Jan Ashirwad Yatra", which was earlier scheduled to be culminated at the convention, would continue even after September 25.

Assembly polls are slated to be held in the central state later this year, schedule for which is yet to be announced by the Election Commission. Singh said the BJP had organised similar gatherings ahead of the assembly polls in 2008 and 2013.

Responding to a query on the photos purportedly showing some leaders of the state BJP laughing while carrying the urns containing ashes of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Singh said these photos are doctored.

The photos had gone viral on the social media. Madhya Pradesh has a 230-member assembly. The Congress has been out of power in the BJP-ruled state since 2003.Manmohan Singh has written a letter to PM Narendra Modi elucidating his concerns over the Centres proposal to convert the Teen Murti complex into a museum for all prime ministers, as per a report in The Indian Express.

In the letter, Singh has raised concerns over the NDA governments agenda to change the name and character of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) and the Teen Murti Complex.

Asserting that Jawaharlal Nehru belongs not just to the Congress, but to the entire nation, Singh requested that his residential complex, the Teen Murti Bhavan, should be left undisturbed.

Invoking former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Singh said that there was no attempt during his six-year tenure to change the nature and character of the Teen Murti complex, but now it seemed to be the agenda of the government.

Clarifying that no amount of revisionism can obliterate Nehrus legacy, Singh quoted Vajpayees speech in the parliament after Nehru passed away. Singh wrote: As Atal Bihari Vajpayeeji himself said in his moving speech to Parliament when Panditji passed away: Such a resident may never grace Teen Murti again. That vibrant personality, that attitude of taking even the opposition along, that refined gentlemanliness, that greatness, we may not again see in the near future. In spite of a difference of opinion we have nothing but respect for his great ideals, his integrity, his love for the country and his indomitable courage.

Singh urged that the Teen Murti Complex should be kept as a memorial to the first Prime Minister of independent India, which would be respecting history and heritage both.

He said that the museum must retain its primary focus on Jawaharlal Nehru and the freedom movement that he engineered. On Nehru, he wrote, His distinctiveness and greatness have been acknowledged even by his political opponents and rivals.Congress President Gandhi

The Congress said today it has not received any invite for its president Rahul Gandhi to attend an RSS event in Delhi next month and would respond to questions on the matter only after an invitation is received. "I do not answer hypothetical, speculative questions... This is purely imaginary at the moment," Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi told reporters.

He said the Congress will come out with a response when it gets an invitation for Gandhi to attend the three-day lecture series by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat.

"I have said to you categorically upon checking that we have received no invitation as I speak," Singhvi reiterated.

"As and when we receive an invitation, the Congress party receives an invitation, there will be an appropriate (and) proper response and you all will be shared with that response," he stressed.

RSS sources said earlier today that the organisation may invite the Congress president to the lecture series.

The idea is to invite people from different ideologies for the event, a source in the Sangh said, adding, the list is being prepared and may also include CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury.

Indications that Gandhi could be invited came on a day the RSS criticised him for drawing parallels between the Sangh and Islamic radical outfit Muslim Brotherhood.

Giving details of the September event, RSS prachar pramukh Arun Kumar said the Sangh was for the first time organising a three-day lecture series by Bhagwat on the theme, 'Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective'.Jabin T Jacob

Chinese defence minister General Wei Fenghes visit to India last week is an occasion to consider the state of India-China military exchanges.

While military-to-military exchanges are important, there seems little to them in the India-China case beyond merely keeping up appearances. Weis visit was preceded by the late July visit of General Liu Xiaowu, deputy commander of the Western Theater Command (WTC) with charge of the border with India and in mid-August, of the head of the Eastern Command of the Indian Army, Lt General Abhay Krishna.

Even the business of familiarisation as is the case with these visits of theatre commanders does not mean much because these visits do not have any regular schedule and can be easily disrupted. For instance, in July 2010, after China denied a visa to the head of the Indian Armys Northern Command on the grounds that he held command over disputed territory, it would take over five years before another head of the Northern Command would visit China.

Indias defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Wei decided to expand engagement between the two militaries in terms of training, joint exercises and other professional interactions. In fact, Chinese officers are already attending courses in some higher-level Indian defence institutions, but these need to be scaled up in order to actually have any impact.

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Nevertheless, the mere conduct of such interactions now seems to be seen as an unalloyed good without considering that they remain at a sub-optimal level.

At the same time, the reality is that there is great mistrust between the two militaries on the ground, which cannot be overcome by cosmetic exchanges of visits and personnel.

One has to be particularly thick to imagine that what obtains at the present juncture between India and China is anything but a temporary detente. Or that there will not be another significant boundary transgression by the Chinese before long, even if one were to ignore Chinas current activity in Doklam as an issue between it and Bhutan.

Meanwhile, a hotline between the two militaries, first proposed in 2013, remains mired in protocol issues. The Chinese believe it should be their deputy commander of the WTC who should operate the hotline while the Indian side, which has proposed their director-general military operations to run the hotline, is arguing for a Chinese equivalent in Beijing to take charge.

New Delhi  rather than tying itself into knots over perceived slights from Beijing regarding the hotline proposal  ought to first address the service and protocol inequalities between its own civilian officials and military officers that is the source of much greater heartburn within the Indian military.

Instead of half-baked attempts at military diplomacy  or at least alongside it  India should impart greater clarity of expression and purpose to its military relationship with China. Is China a strategic partner as our diplomatic documents indicate or a strategic competitor as our military planners and sections of the policymaking elite believe it is? Can it be both?

In the case of Pakistan, Indias domestic political dynamics and convenience end up aligning the message with the actions that the military has perforce to undertake on the ground. In the case of China, however, the messaging from the government is more complicated, even confused, as far as the military is concerned.

Does the Indian Army co-operate and follow the rules as laid down in the bilateral confidence-building agreements of 1993, 1996 and 2005 or does it do as the Chinese do with their salami slicing strategy (where a larger goal is achieved through a series of small actions at various fronts) along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and other deliberate violations of the agreements?

While there is absence of capacity  in terms of infrastructure, equipment, etc.  on the Indian side of the LAC, there are still ways of countering or making up for weaknesses in one front by action elsewhere, whether on land or at sea or by implementing the necessary reforms in force restructuring and indigenous defence production that India requires.

But the several official reports and notes on these issues gathering dust in government ministries tell their own story.

(Jabin T Jacob is a New-Delhi based China analyst. He tweets @jabinjacobt. Views expressed are personal)3. Beware of the start-stop scam. A common method pumps use to scam motorists is filling up a lower amount by mistake. For example, say you have asked for fuel worth Rs 1,500. The attendant fills up only Rs 500 worth and after being pointed out his mistake goes ahead and pretends to reset the machine and fills up to Rs 1,000. All the while, you could be under the impression that you received Rs 1,500 worth of fuel. (Representative image)

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Petrol pump dealers have been asked to put up posters of Narendra Modi at their pumps or face supply cut from state owned oil marketing companies (OMCs), as per a report in The Hindu.

They are asking us to display the picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in retail outlets and those who refuse are threatened with blocking of supplies, SS Gogi, president of the Consortium of Indian Petroleum Dealers (CIPD) told the daily.

The dealers quoted by the daily said that the area officers of Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) and Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) conveyed verbal instructions to them.

However, an IOC official denied threatening to cut supply to the pumps. No OMC has threatened to choke supply as the dealers are alleging. Also, the fact that many are saying that the petrol pumps are being used to promote Prime Minister Narendra Modis photographs is incorrect, the official told ThePrint.

What we are doing is promoting the schemes. Now many of the schemes have been initiated by this government and therefore have his photograph. So, while promoting the schemes, his photograph automatically comes up. There is nothing more to it, he added.

The oil companies had recently run into trouble when they asked the consortium to furnish details of the employees working at the pumps, including their caste, religion, Aadhaar number among other details. The CIPD refused to divulge these details as they believe the data will be used to profile them.

An OMC official quoted by The Hindu said that the data was sought for the Recognition of Prior Learning scheme under the PMs Skill Development Ministry.The Congress today claimed that public sector Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC) owes Rs 12,000 crore in loans to various banks, and accused the Narendra Modi government of trying to prevent the company from being declared bankrupt.

Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh claimed at a press conference that a Rs 20,000-crore scam has come to light in GSPC, 13 years after then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi announced in 2005 the discovery of a natural gas block in the Krishna-Godavari basin.

He cited two reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) that noted that GSPC took loans of Rs 20,000 core from 15 banks and gave contracts for drilling to "four-five companies".

Money was spent but gas was not found and today GSPC is in a financial state that it needs to be referred to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, the Congress leader alleged.

"Last year in August, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pressure, ONGC was forced to buy GSPC gas block and GSPC got a relief of about Rs 8,000 crore. It still has to pay Rs 12,000 crore to banks," Ramesh alleged.

He also cited the February 2, 2018, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) circular, under which if a company on March 1, 2018 owes banks more than Rs 2,000 crore and if it defaults, it should be declared bankrupt after 180 days.

Ramesh claimed that for the first time in 70 years, the cental government has filed an affidavit in the Allahabad High Court against the RBI circular.

Noting that the 180-day window for GSPC ends today, Ramesh said all eyes were on State Bank of India to which the corporation owes over Rs 1,200 crore as to whether it would declare GSPC bankrupt or succumb to "government pressure".

"Does State Bank of India have the courage to declare GSPC bankrupt," he asked.A vehicle burns inside a church in Nuagoan village in the Kandhamal district of the eastern Indian state of Orissa August 25, 2008. Authorities imposed a curfew in parts of an eastern Indian state on Tuesday after two people were burnt to death and more than a dozen churches torched by suspected Hindus angry over the murder of their leader. Picture taken August 25, 2008. REUTERS/Stringer (INDIA) - GM1E48Q1D6F01

Between August 25 and 28, 2008, riots in Odishas Kandhamal district allegedly set off by the murder of Swami Lakshmananda, a revered preacher in the area left 39 Christians dead, over 395 churches vandalised, 600 villages ransacked; over 5,600 houses were looted and over 54,000 people were left homeless.

The riots set off an investigation that, 10 years on, has yet to reach its conclusion.

What happened in Kandhamal?

On the evening of August 23, 2008, around 20 masked men barged into the quarters of Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati in Jalespata village, opening fire as they did so and, once inside the quarters, killing two of the Swamis associates.

Their target was the Swami, who had settled in the area in 1968 and had established his first ashram in 1969.

The assailants found their target inside a bathroom, and killed him on the spot.

The attack had left five dead, including the Swami and his associates. Although the police blamed Maoists for the murder, locals believed that the attackers were from the local Christian tribes, and they proceeded to retaliate, resulting in the riots.

Who was Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati?

According to reports, Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati had spent over four decades in the district, establishing schools and ashrams and dedicating his life to re-converting what he and the local units of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Sangh Parivar maintained were converted Christians.

Saraswati had decided to become a sanyaasi at the age of 25, by which time he had worked as a cook in different places and had been married for eight years. Saraswati had played a role during the anti-cow slaughter agitation of 1966, and had reportedly spent 18 days in Tihar jail.

Who killed the Swami?

The polices initial reaction was to pin the blame on Maoists, but reports indicate that the police did so because they feared a repeat of violence between the two communities just six months earlier, in December 2007. Kandhamal had been simmering ever since, and the murder of the Swami could, authorities figured, spark large-scale rioting.

The authorities were right, but their assertion failed to stop the impeding violence.

In October 2008, senior Maoist leader Sabyasachi Panda claimed responsibility for the attack, stating that the Maoists were under pressure from Christians and Dalits to eliminate the preacher. Reports indicate that the Maoists claimed the responsibility because they predicted that the killing would trigger a spate of riots as they did which would in turn force minority communities in the area to join forces with the Maoists.

Subsequent investigations charged seven people, all of them Christians, and a Maoist leader for the attack. They were sentenced to life imprisonment.

That said, Ajit Patnaik, lawyer representing the majority community, told Indian Express that they are dissatisfied, and claimed that blaming the Maoists was a deliberate misdirection that needs to be examined.

Where do cases on the riots stand?

In 2010, a fast track court convicted the Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) sitting MLA Manoj Pradhan for the murder of Bikram Nayak on August 26, 2008.

The court had also slapped a fine of Rs 15,500 on him for inciting communal violence and setting ablaze houses of people belonging to the minority community.

Out of the 827 registered cases, 512 cases resulted in filing of chargesheets.

In 2016, the Supreme Court had asked the state government to re-open investigation into 315 cases, which the police had closed claiming that the offenders could not be found or that no offence was made out.

 In 315 cases, either no offence was found to have been made out or the offenders could not be detected. Such large proportion is quite disturbing. The State could do well in looking into all these 315 cases and see that the offenders are brought to book the Bench observed.

The Bench had also added that out of 362 trials which stand completed, only 78 have resulted in conviction, which again is a matter of concern.10) Adelaide, Australia | The capital city of the state of South Australia made it to the top 10 list of the most liveable cities in 2018, achieving a score of 96.6 percent. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

09) Copenhagen, Denmark | The capital of Denmark and the country's most populous city is one of the only two European cities to make it to the top 10 in the EIU's list with a score of 96.8 percent. (Image: Public domain pictures)

07) Toronto, Canada | The capital of Ontario and home to the 553-meter-high CN Tower came in joint seventh place in the top 10 list of the most liveable cities in 2018. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

07) Tokyo, Japan | Japans ultramodern yet traditional capital, known for its neon-lit skyscrapers and historic temples scored its second highest ranking ever which can be attributed to a consistent decline in crime rates as well as improvements in public transportation. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

06) Vancouver, Canada | The coastal seaport city in western Canada is the second of the three Canadian cities to make it to the list, achieving a score of 97.3 percent. Vancouver is also called Hollywood of the North. (Image: Flickr/Alex Costin)

05) Sydney, Australia | The home of the Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge also referred to as The Coat Hanger, Sydney achieved a score of 97.4 percent in the EIU ranking. (Image: Flickr/Hai Linh Truong)

04) Calgary, Canada | The city in the Canadian province of Alberta, moved one place up from fifth to fourth from last years EIU rankings. Over the years, it has emerged as the culinary and cultural hotspot of the country. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

03) Osaka, Japan | Improved public transportation coupled with a consistent decline in crime rates has landed Osaka, six positions above last year's EIU ranking. Osaka has also been known as the nations kitchen and has served as the centre for rice trade during the Edo period. (Image: Flickr/Pedro Szekely)

02) Melbourne, Australia | After enjoying seven years at the helm of the annual EIU list, Melbourne finally dropped to the second spot, losing out by just 0.7 percent to the most liveable city in the World in 2018. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)forest

Around 30 irregular migrants are believed to be in hiding inside the crocodile-infested Daintree rainforest in Queensland, Australia, after their boat foundered near the mouth of Daintree River, according to a report by The Guardian.

The police have reportedly detained 11 men, all Vietnamese, while the search operation for 30 other continues.

The mangroves are infested with deadly salt-water crocodiles, where the people are believed to be hiding.

It remains unclear if any of those migrants had requested for protection or asylum from Australian authorities.

Boats carrying asylum seekers from Vietnam are usually intercepted upon reaching Australian waters. The people are usually sent back to Vietnam.

Julia Leu, Douglas Shire Council mayor, told the newspaper, I am concerned about anyone who is unfamiliar with the rainforest. Anyone who finds themselves in crocodile habitat needs to exercise extreme common sense, especially in the Daintree."

Dave Patterson, Operator of Daintree Fishing and Photography Tours, told the newspaper that at around 8.30 am, he saw an odd-looking wooden boat that looked like a Vietnamese-Chinese-Indonesian fishing boat," believing it to be a gill netting boat.

There were people on it that just bailed out of the boat, he said.

The Australian Border Force now has a contingent of officers on site and is grateful for the support provided by Queensland police service, a border force spokesman said, according to the report, adding that their top priority is to ensure the safety of the people on the boats.Foreign exchange earnings totaled USD 24 billion in January-October 2019, with a growth (year-on-year) of two percent.

Israel's ColorChip, a maker of communication components for telecom providers and data centres, is close to being bought by an unnamed Chinese company for as much as $300 million, Israeli media reported on Monday.

ColorChip, which was founded in 2001, was not immediately available for comment.

Newspapers said ColorChip has raised $112 million in private funding to date and that the firm has a workforce of about 250 people.

Israeli companies and technologies have attracted significant interest from China in recent years.Pope Francis said on Sunday he would not respond to a former top Vatican official who accused him of having known for years of allegations of sex abuse by a prominent US cardinal, calling on the pontiff to resign in an unprecedented broadside against the pope by a Church insider.

Francis, speaking to reporters on the plane returning from a trip to Dublin, said dismissively that a statement containing the accusations "speaks for itself".

In a detailed 11-page bombshell statement given to conservative Roman Catholic media outlets during the pope's visit to Ireland, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano accused a long list of current and past Vatican and US Church officials of covering up the case of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who resigned last month in disgrace.

In remarkably blunt language, Vigano said alleged cover-ups in the Church were making it look like "a conspiracy of silence not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia".

"Pope Francis has repeatedly asked for total transparency in the Church," wrote Vigano, who has criticised the pope before.

"In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, his extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarricks abuses and resign along with all of them," Vigano said.

The statement, which contained no supporting documents, was the latest blow to the credibility of the US Church. Nearly two weeks ago, a grand jury in Pennsylvania released the findings of the largest-ever investigation of sex abuse in the US Catholic Church, finding that 301 priests in the state had sexually abused minors over the past 70 years.

On the plane returning from a trip to Dublin, reporters asked the pope about the statement, which was published by the National Catholic Register and several other conservative media outlets in the United States and Italy.

"I will say sincerely that I must say this, to you (the reporter) and all of you who are interested: Read the document carefully and judge it for yourselves," he said.

"I will not say one word on this. I think the statement speaks for itself and you have sufficient journalistic ability to reach your own conclusions," he said.

In his statement, Vigano said he had told Francis in June 2013, just after he was elected pope by his fellow cardinals, about the accusations against McCarrick.

Vigano, the papal envoy in Washington from 2011 to 2016, also said he had informed top Vatican officials as early as 2006 that McCarrick was suspected of abusing adult seminarians while he was a bishop in two New Jersey dioceses between 1981 and 2001. He said he never received a response to his 2006 memo.

He also accused McCarrick's successor as archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, of having been aware of the abuse allegations. Wuerl has said he did not know of them.

In a statement, the Washington Catholic Archdiocese said: "In spite of what Archbishop Viganos memo indicates, Cardinal Wuerl did not receive any documentation or information during his time in Washington regarding any actions taken against Archbishop McCarrick."

McCarrick in July became the first cardinal in living memory to resign his position in the Church leadership after a review concluded that claims he had sexually abused a 16-year-old boy were credible.

He was one of the highest-ranking Church officials accused of sex abuse in a scandal that has rocked the 1.2 billion-member faith since reports of priests abusing children and bishops covering up for them were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002.

Since then, patterns of widespread abuse of children have been reported across the United States and Europe, in Chile and Australia, undercutting the Church's moral authority and taking a toll on its membership and coffers

McCarrick, 88, has said he had no recollection of alleged abuse of the minor, but has not commented on widespread media reports that he would force adult men studying for the priesthood to sleep with him at a beach house in New Jersey.

Vigano's statement railed against "homosexual networks present in the Church" - the word "homosexual" appears 18 times, while the word "child" appears only twice, in both cases in the titles of Church documents Vigano cites.

Francis asked for forgiveness on Sunday during his highly charged visit to Ireland for the "scandal and betrayal" felt by victims of sexual exploitation by Catholic clergy. On Saturday, he said the corruption and cover-up of abuse amounted to human excrement, according to victims.Representative Image

Pakistan's Supreme Court today ordered the accountability court here to conclude the remaining two corruption cases against jailed former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his family within the next six weeks, according to a media report.

The 68 year old PML-N leader appeared before the Islamabad-based court for hearing in the Al-Azizia Steel Mills and the Hill Metal Establishment cases.

The court also directed accountability judge Mohammad Arshad Malik to submit a progress report of the case to the apex court on a weekly basis, Dawn newspaper reported.

During a hearing of the application seeking an extension in the deadline, Chief Justice Saqib Nisar remarked that he hoped that the defence counsel would complete his defence within the stipulated time.

A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Saqib Nisar ordered a six-week extension in the deadline for concluding the remaining two corruption cases, it said.

Last week, Malik had submitted a written request to the top court, seeking a fifth extension in the trial of ousted prime minister Sharif.

Sharif, along with his daughter Maryam, 44 and his son-in-law Capt (retd) Muhammad Safdar, 54, are already serving jail terms of 10-years, seven years and one year respectively in the Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, after the accountability court convicted them on July 6 over the family's ownership of four luxury flats in London through illegal means.

The pending corruption cases against Sharif and his two sons were transferred by the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on August 7 on application of Sharif to another accountability court headed by judge Malik.

Three corruption cases were filed against Sharif and family last year following a decision by Supreme Court on July 28 of the same year.

The formal trial of the Sharif family started on September 14 and was to be completed in six months but later the deadline was extended at least thrice.

Apart from Sharif, his two sons -Hassan and Hussian are also co-accused on all three corruption cases.

The court has already declared the two sons as absconders due to their persistent failure to appear before the court. They have been blacklisted by the authorities, barring them from travelling on their Pakistani passports.Spanish police arrested a suspect Jos Brech (55) in Spain, for the murder of a Dutch boy in 1998.

The arrest was made after a Europe-wide manhunt, triggered by what could be the largest DNA testing programme in the country's history.

According to a report by The Guardian, 11-year-old Nicky Verstappen went missing on the night of 9 August 1998, from a summer camp at the Brunssumerheide nature reserve, near the German border. His body was discovered the next evening, near the camping site, and the case has remained an unsolved mystery since then.

The key evidence in the case was foreign DNA that was discovered on Verstappen's clothing. As part of the DNA testing programme, nearly 15,000 men voluntarily shared their DNA samples with the investigation team, but none turned out to be suspects.

A pair of old pyjamas, which belonged to Berch, was handed over by his relatives as part of the programme. DNA testing then flagged him as a potential suspect after a perfect 'one-on-one match'.

Berch's relatives said that he had left for a supposed wilderness hiking trip to Spain in October last year. Spanish police have now taken him into custody and he will be handed over to the Netherlands.

The police confirmed that over 200 people called in after a public appeal was made to know about the possible whereabouts of Brech, who is a former scout and playgroup worker. Brech is a survival specialist, who can survive for days in the wild, and he was last known to be in a cabin, situated in the mountainous Vosges region of eastern France.Myanmar's military carried out mass killings and gang rapes of Muslim Rohingya with "genocidal intent" and the commander in chief and five generals should be prosecuted for orchestrating the gravest crimes under law, UN investigators said on Monday.

The civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi has allowed hate speech to thrive, destroyed documents and failed to protect minorities from crimes against humanity and war crimes by the army in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan states, they said in a report.

In doing so, it "contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes", the report said.

A year ago, government troops led a brutal crackdown in Myanmar's Rakhine state in response to attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on 30 Myanmar police posts and a military base.

Some 700,000 Rohingya fled the crackdown and most are now living in refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh.

The UN report said the military action, which included the scorching of villages, was "grossly disproportionate to actual security threats".

The United Nations defines genocide as acts meant to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part. Such a designation is rare under international law, but has been used in countries including Bosnia and Sudan and in the Islamic State campaign against the Yazidi communities in Iraq and Syria.

"The crimes in Rakhine State, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts," said the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar.

In the final 20-page report, it said: "There is sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the Tatmadaw (army) chain of command, so that a competent court can determine their liability for genocide in relation to the situation in Rakhine state."

The Myanmar government, which was sent an advance copy of the UN report in line with standard practice, has not commented. Contacted by phone, Myanmar military spokesman Major General Tun Tun Nyi said he could not immediately comment.

The UN panel, led by former Indonesian attorney-general Marzuki Darusman, named the Myanmar army's commander in chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, and five other generals who should face justice.

They included Brigadier-General Aung Aung, commander of the 33rd Light Infantry Division, which oversaw operations in the coastal village of Inn Din where 10 Rohingya captive boys and men were killed.

Reuters was unable to contact Min Aung Hlaing or Aung Aung on Monday.

The massacre was uncovered by two Reuters journalists Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28 - who were arrested as a result last December and are being tried on charges of violating the country's Official Secrets Act.

The court had been due to deliver its verdict on Monday, but at a brief hearing earlier the proceedings were postponed until September 3. In April, seven soldiers were sentenced to 10 years in prison with hard labour for participating in the massacre.

The report said Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, "has not used her de facto position as Head of Government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events, or seek alternative avenues to meet a responsibility to protect the civilian population".

Suu Kyi's spokesman, Zaw Htay, could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday.

The top UN human rights official Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein has called the crackdown against the Rohingya a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing".

Suu Kyi's government has rejected most allegations of atrocities made against the security forces by refugees. It has built transit centres to receive Rohingya returnees to western Rakhine state, but UN aid agencies say that it is not yet safe for them to return.

CALL FOR INDIVIDUAL SANCTIONS

The UN Security Council should ensure all perpetrators are held to account, preferably by referring Myanmar to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or by creating an ad hoc tribunal, the investigators said.

The Security Council should "adopt targeted individual sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against those who appear most responsible for serious crimes under international law" and impose an arms embargo on Myanmar, they said.

The four other generals the UN panel said should be prosecuted were named as the army deputy commander-in-chief, Vice Senior-General Soe Win; the commander of the Bureau of Special Operations-3, Lieutenant-General Aung Kyaw Zaw; the commander of Western Regional Military Command, Major-General Maung Maung Soe; and the commander of 99th Light Infantry Division, Brigadier-General Than Oo.

Reuters was not able to contact those four generals on Monday.

The panel, set up last year, interviewed 875 victims and witnesses in Bangladesh and other countries, and analysed documents, videos, photographs and satellite images.

Decades of state-sponsored stigmatisation against Rohingya had resulted in "institutionalised oppression from birth to death", the report said.

The Rohingya, who regard themselves as native to Rakhine state, are widely considered as interlopers by Myanmar's Buddhist majority and are denied citizenship.

"The Tatmadaw acts with complete impunity and has never been held accountable. Its standard response is to deny, dismiss and obstruct," the UN report said.

The report also criticised Facebook's response to allegations, including by members of the same UN panel in March, that the social media giant had been used to incite violence and hatred against the Rohingyas.

"Although improved in recent months, Facebook's response has been slow and ineffective. The extent to which Facebook posts and messages have led to real-world discrimination and violence must be independently and thoroughly examined," it said.

Facebook declined to comment in an emailed statement, saying it had not yet seen the report.

Facebook said in a statement issued 10 days ago following a Reuters investigative report into its failure to combat hate speech against the Rohingya and other Muslims that it had been "too slow" to address the problem in Myanmar and was acting to remedy the situation by hiring more Burmese speakers and investing in technology to identify problematic content.

International courts have a mixed record on prosecutions for genocide.

In 2008, a UN court sentenced former army colonel Theoneste Bagosora, accused of masterminding the slaughter of 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994, to life in prison on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. His sentence was later cut to 35 years on appeal.

In 2016, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was convicted by UN judges of genocide for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. He is appealing against the conviction.

The ICC issued arrest warrants for Sudan President Omar al-Bashir in 2009 and 2010 over his alleged role in war crimes including genocide in Sudans breakaway Darfur province in 2003. He remains in office.Foreign exchange earnings totaled USD 24 billion in January-October 2019, with a growth (year-on-year) of two percent.

Noble Group Ltd won approval on Monday from a majority of shareholders for a $3.5 billion debt restructuring plan that should ensure the survival of what was once Asia's biggest commodity trader.Saudi Arabia, the second largest producer of crude oil to world, faced an attack on its oil infrastructure facilities on September 14, which caused a sharp increase in fuel prices. Do you know where petrol prices were the highest? Here's a list of the countries where petrol is the cheapest and most expensive. (Note: All price comparisons are on rupee terms only. Global rates as of September, 16 2019 - Image: Reuters)

Oil prices dipped slightly on Monday on concerns that a US-China trade dispute will erode global economic growth, although looming US sanctions against Iran's oil sector kept crude from falling further, traders said.

International Brent crude oil futures were at $75.75 per barrel at 0122 GMT, down 7 cents from their last close.

US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were down 9 cents at $68.63 a barrel.

"Falling US rig counts and last week's decline in US inventories are supporting oil prices amid a protracted US-China trade war that could dampen global growth and weigh on oil demand," said Stephen Innes, Head of Trading for Asia/Pacific at futures brokerage OANDA in Singapore.

US energy companies cut nine oil drilling rigs last week, dropping to 860, the biggest reduction since May 2016, energy services firm Baker Hughes said on Friday.

"Despite growing concerns about potential oversupply, the markets will continue to get a fillip from US sanctions against Iran," Innes added.

Washington will target Iran's oil exports with sanctions from November.

OPEC-member Iran has exported around 2.5 million barrels per day of crude oil so far this year. Most analysts expect this figure to fall by at least 1 million bpd once sanctions kick in.Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and British Prime Minister Theresa May discussed bilateral economic and trade ties and investments in a telephone call, private broadcaster CNN Turk said on Monday.

The two leaders agreed that Turkish Treasury Minister Berat Albayrak should meet his UK counterpart as soon as possible, it said.The Supreme Court, on 23 February 2018 had ordered an investigation into affairs of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC India). The Enforcement Directorate (ED), the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) and the Government were tasked with the investigations.

One of the major issue flagged by the apex court was in respect of receipt of grants of Rs477.64 crore by PwC India from PWC Services BV during 2009 to 2013.

The Supreme Court had observed that, .having regard to the statutory framework under the Chartered Accountant (CA) Act, current foreign direct investment (FDI) Policy and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) circulars, it may prima facie appear that there is violation of statutory provisions and policy framework effective enforcement of which has to be ensuredThe law enforcing agencies are expected to see the real situation

Another major transaction that had to be investigated was in respect of an alleged benami investment of Rs41.42 crore made by Netherlands-based PwC Services BV to acquire Dalal & Shah, an Indian audit firm based in Mumbai. In this respect, the Court had stated that, It is not possible to rule of violations of FDI policies, FEMA regulations and the CA Act...

The message from the Supreme Court is loud and clear. Statutory regulatory provisions intended to advance the object of law have to be enforced meaningfully. No vested interest can flout the same by manifesting compliance only in form. Compliance has to be in substance.

Aircel-Maxis case

The Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) charge sheet claims that P Chidambaram, the then finance minister, had deliberately ignored the extant guidelines for granting FDI approval to Maxis to invest in Aircel.

Maxis, through its Mauritius-based subsidiary, Global Communication Service Holdings (GCSH), had sought approval to buy 18 crore shares of Aircel in 2006 at Rs10 each, totalling Rs180 crore, which would have taken its share in the Indian company to 74%. With premium, the sale price was Rs197.78 per share and assuming a conversion rate of Rs44.50 per US dollar, the actual investment was Rs3,650 crore ($800 million).

According to a 2003 government order, the finance minister could approve foreign investment only up to Rs600 crore. Beyond this amount, the proposal was to be submitted to the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA).

What Wrong Did PC commit?

The only but critical wrong that Mr Chidambaram is alleged to have committed is that he approved a FDI proposal for which he did not have the requisite powers. Probably, the proposal would have been approved even if it had gone to the CCEA.

Approval of the FDI proposal caused no harm to the nation. Neither did Maxis gain additional shareholding or voting power in Aircelthese are determined only with reference to the face value of shares. Some could even argue that it helped to bolster our foreign exchange reserves. So why this much ado about nothing?

The Important Message

Authority can be delegated but not assumed. Mr Chidambaram allegedly approved something without the necessary authorisation. If the allegations are correct, this was, indeed, wrong.

The existing laws have to be followed in letter and spirit. Carving out unauthorised exceptions cannot be tolerated at all. Violators must be punished. Neither can ends justify the means. If allowed, people could rob banks on the pretext of donating to the poor. This is a dangerous proposition, which deserves immediate rejection.

PwC and Aircel-Maxis Comparison

Maxis FDI proposal was at least allegedly approved by the Government, though at the wrong level and the law is now taking its course.

In PwCs case, FDI approval was not even sought, let alone approved. Facts were misrepresented. The benami investment by PwC Services BV, in financial years ended 2009 and 2010, involved infusion of funds of Rs41.42 crore, more than 100,000 times the combined capital of 15 partners. Not surprisingly, the SC noted that It is an undisputed fact that there are remittances from outside. The same could be termed as investments even though the remittances are claimed to be interest free loans to partners..It is not possible to rule of violations of FDI policies, FEMA regulations and the CA Act.

The Supreme Court was equally scathing in its criticism of ICAI for failing to detect the prima facie illegal humongous inflows of almost Rs500 crore and stated that A premier professional body cannot limit its oversight function on technicalities and is expected to play proactive role for upholding ethics and values of the profession by going into all connected and incidental issues...

Neither has the ED covered itself with glory. Despite the facts being made known to it some five years back, it is yet to finish its investigations, although the matter could involve issues of national security. One hopes that it will at least not be in contempt of the orders of the Supreme Court.

The Registrar of Companies (RoC) has established that the funds received by PwC India were not used for the purpose for which they came. Where did they go? In Augusta Westland (VVIP chopper) scam also, funds came from overseas based on fictitious invoices and were allegedly used to pay bribes. The hitherto sacrosanct credibility of the armed forces has been tarnished. Can the nation afford this?

What happened to the controls in the banking system? Why were multiple inflows of humongous amounts from overseas firms into PwC India not detected? Who all have connived, including the public servants?

Consistent & Correct Approach Is Paramount

Extant laws must be enforced ruthlessly. Investigating authorities, regulators, law enforcement authorities need to work in tandem, follow a consistent 'no-nonsense' approach and act swiftly. Besides ensuring success and respect, it will avoid the regular criticism that they face: political witch-hunt and/or the Rich and Powerful getting away despite making mockery of the Law.

Authors Disclaimer: The above analysis is only intended to highlight the glaring difference in approach of various law enforcement agencies based on the limited facts available in the public domain but is not intended to comment on merits of any case.This is a distressing case of alleged sexual harassment of five women working as research associates or project assistants (PA) of a chief scientist at the prestigious Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute (Bhavnagar, Gujarat) of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR). An inquiry, based on the charge sheet in 2014, is going on endlessly. One PA walked out of the research project in disgust, while another one has used the route of RTI (the Right to Information) Act, to seek justice.

This is the story of the RTI applicant (name withheld for obvious reasons), the latest in it being the order of the Central Information Commission (CIC) of 27 July 2018, directing the Research Institute to provide documents to the victim to know the status of the fact finding committee which was established way back in 2014, to look into the alleged sexual harassment by chief scientist Dr Bhavnath Jha. He had also sought legal intervention in this matter but did not get any reprieve.

In his order on 27 July 2018, Central Information Commissioner Prof Sridhar Acharyulu, has rightly observed in his order, It is a tragedy and harassment that the complaints of sexual harassment, though found prima facie cognisable, are pending since 2014. And one of the complainant research scholars, appellant in this case, is fighting with the help of RTI instrument braving the pressures from the accused professor and his friends in office of the organisation. It is highly unreasonable for this public authority to put the victims to further harassment by delay and denial of information besides inaction.

Prof Acharyulu further observed: The CSIR has a duty to create a fearless and free atmosphere for lady scholars to research and rescue them from this ordeal. To expedite the inquiry is in the interest of justice, complainants, and accused besides the reputation of the organisation.

The Institute has finally woken up, as stated by CIC in the order, to the fact that: the officers representing the Public Authority stated that the disciplinary proceedings against Prof Bhavnath Jha, chief scientist, CSIR-CSMCRI are under way and chairman of internal complaints committee (ICC) requested for extension by 90 days beyond 17.06.2018 to complete the inquiry in view of large number of witnesses who need to examined/cross-examined during the regular inquiry by the ICC and the matter has been submitted to the Vice President, CSIR for consideration. The department is keeping a strict tab for ensuring that the process be completed expeditiously. Further, the officers stated that the department shall keep the complainant informed of the progress of case time to time.

Earlier records of CIC show that CSIR has received five complaints alleging sexual harassment in 2014. The Commission has heard second appeals filed by this appellant earlier and central public information officer (CPIO) and vigilance officer have already been issued show-cause notices and penalty proceedings were disposed of. However, the penalty was not collected by the public authority nor was action taken in right earnest, which CIC states is a serious lapse on the part of the public authority reflecting their procrastination. The public authority has a duty to facilitate the inquiry panel to complete their task within period prescribed by law. The Commission directs the compliance of its order and report the same. The Commission hopes that Ms Lakshmy Parameswaran, chief scientist and chairperson of ICC, CSIR, will take reasonable and justifiable amount of time and inform the appellant the status of inquiry. The CPIO is directed to submit a status report, within one month.

Here is the chronology:

23 April 2014: The RTI applicant filed an RTI request regarding her complaint of sexual harassment against Prof Bhavnath Jha.

She sought the following information:

(i) current status of the fact finding committee (FFC) report of ICC;

(ii) date on which FFCs report was received;

(iii) designation of authority processing the FFC report;

(iv) findings of FFC on the charge of sexual harassment.

Information Denied

The CPIO, through his reply, stated that the inquiry on the matter was still pending, hence, information sought could not be furnished. The CPIO quoted Section 16 of Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, and refused the information. Information was rejected under Section 8(1)(h) of the RTI Act saying that the disclosure of a pending inquiry report, which was yet to reach finality, would impede the process of investigation into charges of sexual harassment or apprehension or prosecution of offender/accused.

CICs order of 2016 observed:

The Act of 2013 does not talk about preliminary or final inquiry reports. It mandates the copy of report to be given to the victim complainant. The expression report ordinarily means both the preliminary, if any, and final report.

If FFC has concluded a preliminary stage of inquiry and gave a report to the authorities, the public authority has a duty to share the same with the victim complainant.

It is mandated by principles of natural justice, judgement of Supreme Court, the Act 2013 and the Rules 2013, and the Right to Information about action taken or report submitted after inquiry into her complaint is specifically guaranteed and made enforceable by the RTI Act, 2005. The preliminary report falls under the category of information held by public authority under Section 2(f) of the RTI Act, 2005 that has to be provided to the appellant.

Merely because the process of investigation or prosecution of offenders is continuing, the bar stipulated under Section 8(1)(h) of the RTI Act cannot be invoked. The PIO has to show how disclosure of the information would impede the process of investigation or apprehension or prosecution of offenders.

It is impossible to imagine that giving a copy of preliminary report of inquiry will impede the further proceedings, investigation or inquiry. The respondent authority did not raise this point and did nothing to explain to the Commission about possible reasons about how the disclosure would impede apprehension/prosecution by such disclosure.

Thus, in April 2017, CIC directed CSIR to expedite the investigation process and intimate the conclusion of this sexual harassment case along with delivering a copy of the inquiry report to te Commission on or before 27.08.2018, failing which the Commission will be left with no other option/alternative to take stringent actions on the concerned authority for protracting the investigation process on some or the other pretext.

On its part, CSIR gave an excuse for the delay stating that the chief scientist, the alleged accused, raised complaint of prejudice and bias against one of the members of the inquiry committee, which consumed around one year. A fresh investigation was conducted in 2015 in which the accuseds alleged inappropriate conduct was further established.

Meanwhile, the accused Dr Bhavnath Jha took the matter to High Court of Gujarat (Ahmedabad) for quashing of the first information report (FIR) which was lodged against him and which was dismissed on 4 March 2016.

The records show that accused made several allegations against the scholars, who complained against him, and also against the professor who appointed them. The RTI applicant alleged that accused chief scientist was wielding all power to stall the inquiry and even tried to get elevated as the director of the institution. Her main contention was delay and denial of action and information.

When she did not get information even after CIC ordered in 2017, she again went into second appeal. Now, as per CICs order of 27 July 2018, one hopes the victim gets justice.The agency said the purpose of a Red Corner Notice is to only locate an absconding accused.

India can seek extradition of fugitive billionaire Mehul Choksi without an Interpol Red Corner Notice as it is not a mandatory requirement for the process, the CBI has told the Ministry of External Affairs.

New Delhi: India can seek extradition of fugitive billionaire Mehul Choksi without an Interpol Red Corner Notice as it is not a mandatory requirement for the process, the CBI has told the Ministry of External Affairs.

In a communication to the ministry earlier this month, the agency said the purpose of a Red Corner Notice (RCN) is to locate an absconding accused which has already been achieved in Choksi's case after confirmation from Antigua that he is their citizen, officials said.

They also said that having an RCN is of little value now as Antigua has granted him citizenship and Choksi is now an Antiguan passport holder.

The agency has communicated to the ministry that it has already written to its counterpart agency in Antigua for the provisional arrest of Choksi, who is the alleged mastermind of the over 2 billion USD bank fraud in the Punjab National Bank.

"The contention of Antiguan authorities that the only way the movement of Choksi could be restricted is through issue a Red Corner Notice is not legally sound as primary objective of locating the subject has already been addressed," the letter said.

The subsequent steps for a provisional arrest and an extradition will have to be taken by Antigua for which an RCN is not a "prerequisite", the officials said.

Choksi has appealed to the Interpol to not issue an RCN against him as the charges are politically motivated, they said.

He also said the conditions of jails in India are not good and staying their would violate his human rights, the officials said.

Choksi, the uncle of his alleged partner in crime Nirav Modi, also said the charges against him have been hyped by the media and he might not get a fair trial in India as courts may be influenced by news reports, they said.

The Interpol, after receiving Choksi's plea, sought the CBI's reply which the Indian agency has sent denying all allegations levelled by him.

The promoter of the Gitanjali group, Choksi, had left India in the first week of January, nearly a fortnight before the biggest banking scam was detected in the Punjab National Bank's Brady House branch.

He had taken an oath of allegiance in Antigua on January 15, 2018, thus completing his citizenship, which was granted to him in November, 2017.On 8th August, I wrote about an unprecedented case where the independent director and audit committee head of Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City) had filed a public interest litigation (PIL) alleging that the showpiece Rs70,000-crore project had virtually been gifted away. The beneficiary was its private sector partner, Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS), at a huge cost to the government and the people of Gujarat. (Read: Is GIFT City Gujarats Gift to IL&FS through One-sided Deals?

What made this particularly newsworthy is the fact that IL&FS is cash strapped and a series of its projects are in deep trouble. It has outstanding loans of over Rs1.2 lakh crore (source: Moneycontrol) and has been directed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to reduce debt exposure of group companies by March 2019 (source: Business Standard). This infrastructure group, with a large footprint and massive debt, has been repeatedly accused of gold-plating projects in several states.

While everybody has stories about IL&FSs inefficiencies, very few are willing to speak openly, or on record, because IL&FS and its network of 174 direct and indirect subsidiaries, joint ventures and associate companies has an army of powerful former bureaucrats and politically connected persons on its payroll as employees, consultants, advisers and directors.

In the circumstances, the fact that an independent director and audit committee head of a 50:50 joint venture with a state government (that, too, Gujarat) chose to take the matter to court on behalf of the people of Gujarat is bold and admirable.

My article provoked a sneaky reaction from GIFT City, which provides an insight into the hostile reaction that DC Anjaria, a highly regarded senior finance professional, is up against. Moneylife had asked GIFT City as well as Hari Shankaran, vice-chairman of IL&FS (who is now occupying the chairmans office without a formal appointment) for comments before we published our report of 8th August. Neither of them has responded so far.

Instead, on 13th August, Ajay Pandey, the MD and CEO (managing director and chief executive officer) of GIFT City, chose to respond through a advertorial by a third-party (Skoch Development Foundation), published in Business Standard (see image). The advertorial about Gift City included a half-page interview of Mr Pandey, which makes no reference to Moneylife while countering the charges made by Mr Anjaria reported in my column. A Skoch representative confirmed that Mr Pandeys interview was to counter Moneylife.

The advertisement, in the form of an interview, had a screaming headline: Allegations are false, malicious, factually incorrect and misleading. Since an advertisement apparently does not have to follow editorial norms, it does not say who made the allegations or where they were published.

Much of the interview is a defamatory attack on the petitioner, Dr Anjaria, ascribing motives to his courageous whistle-blowing. In the process, Mr Pandey glosses over key facts and details, which are part of the PIL. This column will not go into the allegations against Mr Anjaria simply because he and his lawyers are in the process of taking up the matter of his defamation with GIFT City, Mr Pandey and the newspaper.

What is of concern is that the MD&CEO of a joint venture with a state government has breezily made several factually inaccurate statements mainly to defend the financially beleaguered IL&FS , whose giant debt exposure is worrying RBI. Here are some of the issues with Mr Pandeys advertorial interview.

The main allegation in Mr Anjarias PIL against GIFT City is that IL&FS, a 50% partner, picked a consortium led by an entity called Fairwood Holdings, without following due processes, to prepare a master plan, concept and design. This was done before GIFT City formally came into existence.

The backdated contract was pushed for ratification by the GIFT City board of directors without even tabling the contract at the meeting. Further, that Fairwood Consultants were paid over Rs400 crore in fees and did not deliver on their contract.

Mr Pandey, in the advertorial, responding to Moneylifes article, alleges that Mr Anjaria was an independent director throughout the period when the contract was awarded and acquiesced with the decisions.

He cleverly does not provide any dates, although the PIL (copy available with us) is packed with details and chronology of events, the formation of GIFT City and how the contract was brought to the board. Nor does he answer the simple question of whether bids were invited, in line with the Gujarat Infrastructure Development Boards guidelines, before handing out the contract.

Mr Pandey ends up proving Mr Anjarias allegationsof the lack of competence of Fairwood Holdings to handle the projectby admitting that the contract was terminated within two years of its appointmentputting paid to the claims that it was selected after great deliberation.

Further, he says that GIFT City is in arbitration with Fairwood Holdings to recover money paid for work not done by the consortium. Anyone with any dealings with the state or Central government knows what a Herculean task it is to recover even legitimate reimbursements. And, yet, here is GIFT City, a 50% state undertaking, saying it is in arbitration with Fairwood since December 2014 to reclaim money paid for work that was not delivered.

Mr Pandey says that 25 hearings have already taken place and the next one is scheduled for 25th Augusttwo days hence! Since arbitration tends to be an expensive process, it is pertinent to ask how much GIFT City has spent on these 25 arbitration hearings over four years, because it apparently failed to choose the a major consultant with adequate due diligence.

Perhaps deliberately, there is no mention of the sum claimed from Fairwood by GIFT City through arbitration. Sources tell us it is a whopping Rs5,740 crore. And, yet, we understand that the balance-sheet of Fairwood, as on 31 March 2010, showed that it had a net worth of Rs77 crore. What does this tell you about Gift Citys chances of recovering anything from Fairwood? My sources say that Fairwood has not even been paying salaries to its employees on time.

So, is the expensive arbitration meant to cover up a bad decision and how the consultant was selected? Meanwhile, typical of IL&FSs projects, the cost of the project has soared from Rs25,000 crore in 2008 to over Rs70,000 crore and the project itself looks very different from the original videos available on YouTube. The irony is that Mr Pandey, who chose a half-page advertorial to defend the deal, wasnt even with GIFT City when the contract was awarded.

Heres another shoddy falsehood by the Gift City MD&CEO. In response to a question, he says that the PIL No 260 of 2015 in the Gujarat High Court (filed by Mr Anjaria) is against GIFTCL (GIFT City), IL&FS and the Government of Gujarat. On the contrary, Mr Anjaria had strategically ensured that the Government of Gujarat is not a party to the litigationin fact, he considers it to be a victim.

That the MD&CEO of a large and prestigious joint venture of the government would make such a silly mistake in an advertorial to defend the project, smacks of arrogance. It also raises questions about the causal manner in which he has chosen to defame the petitioner, who was selected as an independent director because of his contribution to the very concept of Gift City. It is shocking that the head of a government venture would resort to such a stratagem and distortion.

My sources believe that Mr Pandeys interview was at the behest of IL&FS, a company that ought to be focusing on reducing its debt, answering questions raised by a whistleblower, and drastically shedding or closing down pointless ventures which it had no business starting in the first place.There are many kinds of financial sector companies: banks, non-banking finance companies (NBFCs), leasing & hire-purchase companies, microfinance companies, life insurance companies, general insurance companies, re-insurance companies, housing finance companies, asset management companies, investment companies, holding companies Accounting standards are prescribed for each category or...The Indian government has, early this month, suddenly decided to stop non-resident Indians (NRIs) from filing online applications under Right to Information (RTI) through the e-IPO way, which they fought for so hard for in 2013. With a whopping 176 Indian Missions abroad showing favourable responses to RTI applications from Indians abroad, the latter is upset at this knee-jerk decision.

This decision was revealed not through an announcement but in the Lok Sabha on 8 August 2018, when Jugal Kishore, member of Parliament (MP) asked, Whether non-resident-Indians (NRIs) are also eligible to file online RTI applications and if so the procedure aid down in this regard. ( http://164.100.47.190/loksabhaquestions/annex/15/AU3535.pdf)

Dr Jitendra Singh, minister of state in the ministry of personnel, public grievances and pensions and who is also the minister of state in the prime ministers office (PMO), stated, Only citizens have the right to seek information under the provisions of RTI Act, 2005. Non-residents are not eligible to file RTI applications.

The minister blundered in saying only citizens have the right to file applications under RTI and NRIs cannot. This is because NRIs are Indian citizens. What the minister probably meant was all Indians abroad.

This is in total contrast of the office memorandum issued on 22 March 2013 by the department of personnel & training (DoPT) under the ministry of personnel, public grievances & pensions.

This circular states that a special service called e-IPO (electronic Indian Postal Order) has been launched for Indians living abroad to facilitate them to seek information from the central public information officers (CPIOs) under the RTI Act. Debit and credit cards were allowed to be used to purchase e-IPO.

Also, the government then in its circular had stated under Right of NRIs: under the current provisions of the RTI Act, NRIs can file RTI applications seeking information from either from a particular Mission or Post abroad or from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) itself. Accordingly, a fee of Rs10 per application equivalent in local currency is accepted by Missions and Posts abroad.

Thereafter, the campaign focused on e-IPO where you could buy the Indian postal online and the citizens triumphed.

Electronic postal order was a big achievement for Indian citizens abroad, who had been pressing the government for the five years to facilitate them in nation building by exercising their right to know. Their victory finally came in 2012 after several Indians living in different countries sent a petition to the then Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh.

Expressing shock over the development to bar NRIs from using RTI, Commodore Lokesh Batra, a noted Delhi-based RTI activist, who had been at the helm of this campaign to facilitate e-IPO so that Indians abroad can use RTI, states, the Centres response in the Lok Sabha is misleading. NRIs are shocked and are raising questions over the government statement denying their right to file RTI when they have been doing so since the last five years. What has changed they ask. They also find this ridiculous that they are allowed to vote from their countries of karma but have been thrown out from the arena of transparency.

Commodore Batra had filed more than 150 RTI applications in various relevant departments since 2008 and consistently pressured the government to provide online payment facilities for RTI fees.

He questions the sluggish attitude of the central information commission (CIC) in fighting this out with the government. He also slams the government for lack of public knowledge and consultations regarding this vital issue.

The efforts That went into empower NRIs in filing RTI applications:

4 February 2011: Department of Posts wrote to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) stating, The Department of Posts has developed a portal called e-portal office. We have received a reference from the Secretary, DoPT requesting to include a provision for the purchase of Indian postal orders by Indian citizens living abroad to enable them to seek information under the RTI Act, 2005. The challenge faced by the Indian citizens is in remitting the prescribed fee for seeking information as per the specified mode of the Act. The post office can provide a solution to this challenge, since the Indian postal order is one of the most prescribed modes of payment under the RTI Act. To put a system in place to facilitate this, we would require clearance to accept credit card/debit card for online payment from abroad through e-portal.

15 June 2011: RBIs reply to Commodore Batras RTI query on the status of letters from the Department of Posts stated: The RBI has not taken a final decision on the request of the Department of Posts. As such this information cannot be given as per Section 8 of the RTI Act.

3 February 2012: RBI (which had earlier denied Commodore Batra information under Section 8 of the RTI Act) it had sent its no-objection to the government. Anita Kumari, manager of the RBI, in a letter to the Ministry of Communications & IT, Department of Posts, on 3 February 2012 had stated, the payment gateway provider will be Axis Bank and online payments from abroad should be made only through debit and credit cards issued by the bank having affiliations with one of the card payment networks authorised under the PSS Act 2007.

12 December 2012: Department of Posts sets a deadline of 15 January 2013.

Some of the milestones in this citizen campaign include:

2008: Commodore Batra steered the campaign for Indians abroad, when he had a personal experience in 2008 when he was in the US. The date for his appeal before the Information Commission in Delhi was fixed while he was abroad, and then chief information commissioner, Dr Wajahat Habibullah, allowed the hearing through audio-conferencing. However, when he began to ask about regular RTI applications filed from the US, he found that Indians there faced many hurdles.

The Indian embassy in Washington threw its hands up, saying that it could only accept RTI applications pertaining to queries related to its office, or at the most those related to the ministry of external affairs. Indians tried to impress upon the embassy that under Section 6(3) it is the duty of the PIO to forward applications not relevant to him, to the concerned departments. But the embassy refused to take responsibility. This triggered off his campaign.

2009: Commodore Batra filed a complaint with the CIC in April 2009 against the ministries for not providing him the required information. Information Commissioner Annapurna Dixit gave an order on 16 April 2010 asking the DoPT to formulate a system to facilitate accessibility of the Act by Indians abroad.

2010: Commodore Batra was joined by activists abroad. The campaign abroad was steered by RTI activist Vishal Kudchadkar, member of Association for Indias Development (AID), living in California. In 2010, a delegation of US-based Indian activists submitted their petition to the then prime minister Singh, carrying signatures from 316 Indians residing in Australia, Burundi, Canada, Dubai, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Holland, Japan, Kuwait, Maldives, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, South Africa, UAE, the UK and the US. However, the PMO was silent on this issue (not surprising).

What the petition to the PM stated:

The petition said: Our suggestion is that just as the government has facilitated APIOs by the postal department in India for all public authorities, along similar lines, the government should facilitate an APIO in each Indian Mission/Post in local embassies and charge fees equivalent to rupees.

Alternatively, we suggest that arrangements may be made by the MEA, the administrative ministry for Indians abroad, for missions to accept RTI fees in foreign currency from applicants filing RTI to central public authorities, using the same procedure as they are hitherto doing for RTI applications concerning their own ministry. The missions role would be to accept the fee along with a copy of the passport to verify the citizenship and issue a receipt/E-receipt to the applicant for the fee. Thereafter, either the mission or the RTI applicant can forward the application to the concerned central public authority (PA) online Any additional costs for providing the information can be remitted to the mission in the same way and the receipt/E-receipt given by the mission can serve as proof of payment.

Our earlier stories:Incessant project delays, dodgy activities of some developers and land litigation issues have plagued the Indian real estate sector over the past several decades, not helping its domestic and international image. Realising the significance of real estate on the economy of the country, the Government has, over the last few years, been taking active measures to bring in greater transparency and efficiency.

However, despite the implementation of game-changing policies like Real Estate Regulation & Development Act 2016 (RERA) and Goods and Services Tax (GST), the issue of stalled or delayed projects that has primarily been at the core of buyers discontent is yet to be addressed satisfactorily.

If we add up the numbers for the top seven cities, it emerges that the residential real estate launched in or before 2013 that is stuck in various stages of (non) completion is collectively worth a whopping Rs4.64 lakh crore for a total of 576,000 units that are yet to be delivered to their respective homebuyers.

This is apart from the other inventory under construction which, judging my visible construction progress will assuredly get delivered over the next three-four years. These 576,000 units have been stuck since 2013 or before.

As per ANAROCK data, Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) and National Capital Region (NCR) are the two major regions where maximum units with significantly high values have been delayed since their launch in 2013 or before. As many as 410,000 units across these two regions are grappling with some deployment issue or the other over the years, resulting in delayed possession.

The collective value of highly delayed units in MMR and NCR is a whopping Rs3.60 lakh crore. On the other hand, Hyderabad has seen the least project delays during the period, with around 8,900 units worth Rs5,500 crore delayed since 2013 or before.

Causes for Projects Delays

Major factors contributing to delayed possession of properties across the country include the prolonged liquidity crunch, delayed environmental clearances, land disputes and the non-RERA compliance prevalent across some of the states. Another major hurdle in timely delivery of projects is the shortage of skilled manpower to execute projects and streamline organisational processes.

It is estimated that real estate and construction will require over 66 million workforce by 2022 across different skill-sets while the shortage of these is pegged at nearly 2 million to 3 million during the same period. The scarcity of skilled labour invariably leads to project delays. Thus, the Government and the industry need to collectively address the issue by creating the required infrastructure for training the workforce.

Market Impact

The most profound impact of the housing delay, is, obviously, on buyers who have already invested in the said projects, affecting their overall financial planning, and increasing the burden of rent along with EMIs (equated monthly instalments). However, the concerned developers are also impacted. To begin with, they have in many cases invested gargantuan amounts of capital which remain locked into these non-performing assets. Secondly, they face severe loss of revenue due to lack of production and loss of profit for their contractors due to higher overhead costs.

In the more serious cases, accelerating the process of the project can also, sometimes, affect the product quality, at the cost of customer satisfaction, reputation and therefore future business viability (apart from the fact that serious quality deviations will run a developer afoul of RERA, resulting in legal consequences).

Will RERA be Effective in Freeing Up this Stock?

The stringent penalty clauses under RERA, increasing awareness among homebuyers, and a pro-customer judiciary have forced real estate firms to focus on timely project delivery and be accountable for the promises made. Besides having to defend themselves against aggrieved customers in courts of law, developers technically no longer have the choice of delaying projects because this is the real essence of the new RERA.

However, RERA policies have been flouted across many states where several projects that have been ongoing since years and, thanks to the dilutions, do not come under its ambit. For instance, in Karnataka, all projects that are completed by 60% or more are currently exempt from RERA purview. This is significant since maximum project delays occur post a projects major structure formation and during the time of final finishing.

To this extent, RERA may be effective in freeing only a limited amount of the stuck inventory. In short, despite RERA, buyers are still at the mercy of the developers actual intent to deliver in many cases.

Advice to Buyers Who Have Invested in a Stuck Project

Project delays have become so pervasive that most buyers consider a delay of two to four quarters normal. It is only after a year of continued non-delivery that suspicions are aroused. The problem is endemic and there is no magic solution. Nonetheless, buyers can now take advantage of various reformatory changes brought into the Indian real estate sector including RERA.

 In case of a project delay that has run into several years, affected buyers must get proactive, form an association of all those affected and hold regular meetings with the developer to put pressure on him to deliver the project at the earliest. If this does not work, the association could try and highlight the case across social media platforms or mainstream media. Most real estate companies are today wary of negative publicity.

 If the project is under the ambit of RERA, the association can register a case against the builder with the state RERA complaint tribunal and seek hefty penalties. The regulator will have the power to adjudicate on disputes between the developer and the buyer, with the power to impose fines. This, of course, depends on whether or not RERA has been diluted in the state, and to what extent

 If nothing else works, the association can file a case in the consumer court. For a case involving a sum of up to Rs20 lakh, one can go to the district court; for up to Rs1 crore, the state-level court; and for amounts above Rs1 crore, the national level court. There are instances in NCR where the apex court has directed some builders to pay hefty penalties to homebuyers for delayed projects.

(Anuj Puri is chairman of ANAROCK Property Consultants)Oh, the audacity of dopes. The crimes of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen are notable not just for how blatant they were but also for their lack of sophistication.

The two men did little to hide their lying to banks and the Internal Revenue Service.

One can almost sympathize with them: If it wasnt for their decision to attach themselves to the most unlikely president in modern history, theres every reason to think they might be still working their frauds today.

But how anomalous are Mssrs. Manafort and Cohen? Are there legions of K Street big shots working for foreign despots and parking their riches in Cypriot bank accounts to avoid the IRS? Are many political campaigns walking felonies waiting to be exposed? What about the world of luxury residential building in which Cohen plied his trade with the Trump Organization?

The answer is more disturbing than the questions: We dont know. We dont know because the cops arent on the beat. Resources have been stripped from white-collar enforcement. The FBI shifted agents to work on international terror in the wake of 9/11. White-collar cases made up about one-tenth of the Justice Departments cases in recent years, compared with one-fifth in the early 1990s. The IRS criminal enforcement capabilities have been decimated by years of budget cuts and attrition. The Federal Election Commission is a toothless organization that is widely flouted.

No wonder Cohen and Manafort were so brazen. They must have felt they had impunity.

How could they not? Any person in any bar in America can tell you who was held accountable for the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, which peaked 10 years ago next month: No one. No top officer from any major bank went to prison.

But the problem goes beyond big banks. The Department of Justice  in both Democratic and Republican administrations  has lost the will and ability to prosecute top executives across corporate America, at large industrial firms, tech giants, retailers, drug makers and so on. Instead the Department of Justice reaches settlements with corporations, which pay in dollars instead of the liberty of their top officers and directors.

Beginning with a charge to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, special counsel Robert Mueller has fallen upon a rash of other crimes. In doing so, he has exposed how widespread and serious our white-collar fraud problem really is, and how lax enforcement has been for years.

At least he is also showing a way out of the problem. He and his team are demonstrating that the proper attention, resources, technique and experience can go a long way to rectify the white-collar prosecution crisis.

Whats Muellers secret? For one thing, he has a focus. He and his team have sufficient resources to go after a discrete set of investigations. In the early 2000s, the Justice Department had similar success setting up the Enron Task Force, a special SWAT team of government lawyers that prosecuted top executives of the failed Texas energy trader. That contrasts with the financial crisis, when the Justice Department never created a similar task force. No single department official was responsible for the prosecutions of bankers after the global meltdown.

The investigations techniques are also instructive. The Southern District of New York, which was referred the Cohen case by Mueller, raided President Trumps former attorneys offices and fought for access to the materials, even as Cohen asserted attorney-client privilege. When federal prosecutors investigate large companies, out of custom and deference they rarely use such aggressive tactics. They place few wiretaps, conduct almost no undercover operations and do almost no raids. Instead government attorneys reach carefully negotiated agreements about which documents they can review, the product of many hours of discussion with high-powered law firms on behalf of their clients. All the battles over privileged materials happen behind closed doors and without the benefit of a disinterested special master, as the Cohen case had.And just like that, Australia has another Prime Minister we didnt elect.

This is becoming some sort of joke. And the joke is on us.

At some point we must ask, what is the underlying structure that delivers our political leaders to us? Who are these people? What are they in it for? Why do they find it so difficult to forge a bond with us, and with their political allies? What are their motives?

So now Scott Morrison is our leader. Meh! He didnt even challenge for the leadership. He got the job due to the machinations within the Liberal Party and not through any personal desire to have the job now.

Although giving a politician an opportunity for more power is like waving a red flag at a bull. Of course they will go for it.

So, who is Scott Morrison? Well, he had the tourism portfolio initially, followed by a stint as immigration minister, and until last week he was Turnbulls treasurer. Josh Frydenberg now takes on that role.

Its fair to say that Morrison has done a good job in the treasurers seat. But the harsh spotlight that comes with being the nations PM is a different beast.

In terms of stability, the petulant Liberal Party may be a little better now given Morrisons ideology is more conservative than Turnbulls. But the risk is that this leadership change gives the socialist Bill Shorten a good shot at winning the next election.

Failing that, protest votes made in disgust will ensure another few years of a fractured parliament, as any substantive bills will fail to get through.

Scott Morrisons relationship to Hillsong

What you wont read in the mainstream press is Morrisons affiliation with the Hillsong Church. But I think its worth pointing out. This is after all the new head of the country (after the Queen, that is). Heres an excerpt of Morrison maiden speech when first entering parliament in 2008:

Growing up in a Christian home, I made a commitment to my faith at an early age and have been greatly assisted by the pastoral work of many dedicated church leaders, in particular the Reverend Ray Green and pastors Brian Houston and Leigh Coleman.

Brian Houston is the founder and leader of the Hillsong Church. When his father, Frank Houston, was exposed as a paedophile, Brian tried to cover it up. Hillsong is big business. According to a Good Weekend article from 2015, Hillsong (both Australian and overseas) generated $100 million in revenues in the prior year. They should list it on the ASX

I dont know about you, but using the Bible/God/Jesus Christ to make such vast sums of money leaves a sour taste.

Im not suggesting anything untoward in relation to Scott Morrison. But as your newly (unelected) leader, his affiliation with the church is something you should be aware of, even if the mainstream media wont tell you about it. But dont take my word for it, look it up for yourself.

By the way, Im not having a go at religion here. I am a Christian. Its the organised nature of it, and the hierarchical and patriarchal structure of it, that is problematic.

The instances of abuse that this structure enables are far too numerous around the world for it to be a good thing.

You dont need a church or someone to sermonise to you to have a relationship with God.

The recent political turmoils affect on the stock market

Anyway

Lets bring it back to the markets.

Investment experts top picks: The three ASX stocks with the biggest potential for 2018. Get your free report now.

The recent political turmoil has no doubt unsettled the market over the past week. The S&P 500 popped its head up to a new all-time high on Friday, but the Aussie market has actually been a bit weak.

Thats thanks to this ongoing political circus and a few underwhelming earnings results from the likes of Woolworths [ASX:WOW] and BHP Billiton [ASX:BHP].

Still, there hasnt been too much damage done and the Aussie market continues to look relatively healthy, notwithstanding the current political uncertainty. Having said that, this uncertainty has been a feature of the post-GFC environment so perhaps the market will get over it pretty quickly.

Who do you think the biggest winner is in the reporting season so far? The answer will probably surprise you

Its Telstra! As you can see in the chart below, the beleaguered Telco has had a strong past few weeks. Since bottoming in late June, the stock has rallied 23%. I think that much of the recent rally has been about short-covering. That means traders who previously bet on Telstras share price falling are now covering and buying back shares.

Source: BigCharts

[Click to open new window]

I expect the share price to re-trace some of those gains over the next few weeks. But this could be early signs of a turnaround for Telstra. What you want to see now is a higher low form on the charts.

If, for example, the stock price falls back to say, $3, then rallies again, it will have formed a higher low on the chart. This is a sign that a new upward trend may be emerging.

Telstra is one to keep an eye on.

The other thing to keep an eye on is US politics. If youve been reading my Monday Money Morning articles over the past few weeks, youll know Ive talked about the US political situation heating up.

If you follow the narrative painted by the mainstream media, you wont really get it. Its all about how Trump is an imbecile and an embarrassment to the country.

Put simply, Trump is a threat to the establishment, which is why they are going after him with such gusto. Just look at how The Financial Times politicised the death of Senator John McCain over the weekend, by making it about Trump. Heres the headline, followed by the sub-head

McCains death sparks mourning across political divide

Death of war veteran and statesman robs Congress of its most powerful Trump critic

No mention of how McCain was an integral figure in creating ISIS to overthrow Assad in Syria. No, just that his death has robbed Congress of a powerful Trump critic. Wow.

So why are things heating up?

Well, the mid-term elections are coming up. The Democrats want to impeach Trump and are throwing everything they can to try and do so.

Ill take up that story tomorrow

Regards,

Greg Canavan, |

Editor, Crisis & Opportunity

PS: If you want to lay down a little money on the hottest corner of the ASX right nowbut you dont know your way around the small-cap sectorthis report is for you. Get access now (free).The filmmaker recently returned to Mumbai and the first thing he did, was donate 21 lakh to CM's Distress Relief Fund.

Mumbai: Bollywood filmmaker Rohit Shetty is among those compassionate celebrities who believe in helping the people in need for the well-being of society. Shetty recently extended his support to Kerala flood victims by donating a considerable amount to a cause.

The filmmaker recently returned to Mumbai from Argentina and the first thing he did, was donate 21 lakh to Chief Ministers Distress Relief Fund. Rohit Shetty, who believes in doing his bit towards helping people in Kerala, wasted no time in taking this decision and donating the money.

Also read: Women power, Rohit Shetty style! Ranveer Singh shows how it is done through Simmba

A source said, For a few years now, Rohit has been actively supporting cancer patients and girls education. His office stays in touch with certain office-bearers from charitable organisations and hospitals who treat the less-privileged. He asks his trusted team to make him aware of how much money is needed to help patients who cant afford treatments. The same holds true for education of children. Of course, the latest cause he chose to associate with is the Kerala flood relief work. The filmmaker knew he had to extend his support to those affected in his own way. He did that quietly without letting anyone know.

Also read: After wrapping Simmba schedule, Rohit Shetty gets busy with Khatron Ke Khiladi

Rohit Shetty is currently busy working on his next action-comedy Simmba with Ranveer Singh and Sara Ali Khan in the lead. Co-produced by Karan Johar, the film is set to hit screens on December 21.The multimillion-dollar verdict on Aug. 10 against Monsanto over glyphosate weedkillers, including the Roundup brand, is concerning for Bayer (BAYRY), which acquired the company in June, but we dont expect a major change to our fair value estimate. Bayer is appealing the ruling. If there are other lawsuits, they are likely to be litigated slowly, over many years, and, historically in cases like these, the final results tend to be more minor than the initial cases.

The Roundup product line makes up a small portion of Bayers revenue and profits. Based on pro forma numbers from the two companies, we estimate that glyphosate, the chemical used in the Roundup brand, would account for less than 10% of Bayers total sales and even less of Bayers profits. For context, we expect all of the crop science segment to make up about 44% of Bayer's total revenue in 2019.

Bayer does not break out glyphosate-specific sales, but in 2017, herbicides accounted for just 7.5% of total sales. We note that Bayer did have to divest some of its glyphosate assets (to BASF) to complete the Monsanto acquisition. Glyphosate has been off patent for nearly two decades, and margins are likely on the lower end of Bayers crop chemicals. Based on this, we believe glyphosate accounted for a low-single-digit percentage of Bayers profits.

In 2017, Monsantos crop chemicals segment, called agricultural productivity, accounted for around 25% of total sales, but only 11% of profits. Monsanto, like Bayer, did not break out specific brands, but it sold only two major crop chemicals: glyphosate (under the Roundup brand) and dicamba. The majority of Monsantos crop chemicals profits were from glyphosate, so we estimate Roundup profits to be 8%-9% of Monsantos total profits.It will help us and allow us to have transparency, which is always a good thing, continued Hinojosa, who added she isnt the least bit surprised about the Supreme Courts ruling.

I think consumers right now crave real transparency, and this creates transparency in the housing market.

Litigation began seven years ago, when the Competition Bureau sued the Toronto Real Estate Board for anti-competitive practices, positing that Canadas largest real estate board was hoarding data that could support newer business models. The real estate board, for its part, maintained that it was protecting consumers privacy.

However, Sarita Samaroo, principal lawyer at SST Law Professional Corporation, believes TREB, in fact, took a protectionist position.

Im quite surprised that TREB has been against the decision as it stood, said Samaroo. I thought it was quite strange, given who they represent, and that there should be as much real estate data as possible. I understand the protectionism, because they want to ensure the public hires realtors to access that information, but I dont see how it can harm realtors for the public to have more information on hand. I thought it strange that TREB has been against this from the beginning.Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier?

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Please enable notifications in your browser and reload the page.Several homes currently or previously owned by some of the worlds most famous people are listed for sale.

Madonna is now living in Lisbon, Portugal, but her former Beverley Hills mansion on Sunset Boulevard which she listed in 2013 for $19.5 million, is now back on the market.

The 9-bedroom, 15-bathroom home which is reached via a 500-foot driveway, has been completely remodeled and is listed at a cool $35 million."By leveraging Ellie Mae's Encompass platform, we're able to provide our customers with a simplified process, online access to documentation, and a substantial reduction in their loan closing time, all of which will dramatically enhance the mortgage lending experience, said Rick Bechtel, EVP, Head of U.S. Mortgage Banking, TD Bank.

He added that the new solution will also provide the lenders employees with tools to increase efficiency and streamline processes.

Weve worked together to successfully transition TD from a legacy origination system to an agile solution equipped to handle the complexities and loan volume experienced by a leading national bank, said Jonathan Corr, president and CEO of Ellie Mae. We value the opportunity to partner with TD Bank to help them grow the mortgage lending arm of their business.Two individuals and two companies have been charged by the SEC with securities law violations over allegations that they ran a fraudulent $135 million real estate investment scheme.

The SEC filed an emergency action against Jerome Cohen and Shaun Cohen and their companies, Equitybuild and Equitybuild Finance, for alleged violations of antifraud and registration rules. The complaint also seeks injunctions against future violations, disgorgement of the defendants' ill-gotten gains, and civil penalties.

The SEC alleged that since 2010, the defendants have sold promissory notes to at least 900 investors in relation to real estate located primarily on Chicago's South Side. They allegedly raised the funds by falsely promising safe investments fully secured by income-producing real estate.Kelsey Tanner would say she was born and raised in a dance studio. For the most part, shes not wrong. Growing up in her mothers dance studio in Monroe, Louisiana, dance was most certainly a way of life.

It is all Ive ever known, she said.

Tanner is continuing the family tradition with JK Dance Center, which opened on Aug. 10. The road that led her here is a star-studded one that has taken her from a small town to an Oscar-winning movie and Dancing with the Stars.

Her studios grand opening featured one of those stars.

I met Paul Barris doing Dancing with the Stars tour in 2008-09 and weve been friends since, Tanner said. I was honestly surprised he said Yes to coming to the grand opening.

Growing up in the very rustic Monroe, dancing wasnt as high on the list as hunting and fishing. On weekends, she and her mother would drive to bigger cities for classes and competitions. She began taking dance seriously when she was 14 and temporarily living in New York City.

We had moved there for the summer to be in front of choreographers, and Brian Freedman convinced me to move to Los Angeles to dance professionally, she said.

That was not bad advice from a choreographer whos worked with Britney Spears, Beyonce and Cher. The move to L.A. wasnt immediate, though. On graduation night in 2005, Tanner drove to Dallas for auditions, went to New York and then ended up dancing for the cruise liner Royal Caribbean for two years.

When she was 19, Tanner was chosen for Dance War: Bruno vs. Carrie Ann, which was filmed in Los Angeles; the show lasted one season. She also had opportunities to dance for Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift and others.

More Information JK Dance Center is located at 3211 W. Wadley Ave. Classes include ballet, jazz, hip-hop and ballroom for students from toddlers to adults. Private and group lessons are also available. Visit jkdancetexas.com for more information. See More Collapse

It was really about being in the right place at the right time, she said. I was very lucky, and for six years, kept working and working.

She then stepped in for Julianna Hough on the DWTS tour, which brought her to Midland.

Thats so funny to look back on that tour and see that we were here, she said. Little did I know Id end up living here.

After the tour, she worked on Entourage the Movie, with the Pussycat Dolls, appeared on the Grammys and did charity events for Jennifer Lopez. Then a friend asked for some help on the movie La La Land.

She said her friend needed help with the movies choreography, but her family was going to come first.

Mother needed help running the studio because my grandmother was ill, so I was in the process of moving back to Louisiana, she said. I flew back and forth to help out on the film.

The movie was an Oscar- and Golden Globe-winner.

If I had known how good it was going to be, I may not have made such a rash decision, but you have no idea, she said. It was honestly bittersweet, and I wished I could have invested more time.

She also had her own family to think about: her then-new husband and baby soon after. That would lead to her decision to open a dance studio.

As a mom, I wanted to share what I know with people and children, but I was waiting for the right time to present itself, she said.

Then her husband was offered an oilfield position in Midland.

We moved here a year ago. I was in L.A. and told him Id stop in Midland as a pit stop and really never left, she said. We knew wed end up making a life here, so it was now or never.

And with that, she celebrated a soft opening of classes over the summer and then the grand opening earlier this month.

Her goal is to share the thrill of dancing.

My mother is 66 and she dances all day every day. I inherited that from her, so I plan to keep dancing and teaching until I cant. What a blessing to do what I love.After several rounds of talks, there has been indication from Maldives about its willingness to keep helicopters along with crew and staff.

The lease agreement of the two helicopters, given to Maldives in 2013, has expired and the island nation had conveyed to New Delhi that it would not like to retain them. (Representational Image | AFP)

New Delhi: The two Indian military helicopters, gifted to Maldives, are likely to stay back along with a 48-member crew and support staff for at least next few months as talks between the two countries on their continued deployment in the island nation were "positive", diplomatic and military sources told PTI on Sunday.

The lease agreement of the two helicopters, given to Maldives in 2013, has expired and the island nation had conveyed to New Delhi that it would not like to retain them.

After several rounds of talks, there has been indication from Maldives about its willingness to keep the two helicopters along with the crew and support staff, the sources said.

They said the preliminary outcome of the talks between the two countries on the issue has been positive and there was a possibility of the choppers being kept there for a longer duration.

"The helicopters and the support staff are not being brought back," a highly-placed source said.

The lease agreement of one helicopter operated by the Coast Guard had expired earlier this year, while the pact for the second chopper operated by the Indian Navy expired on June 30. One chopper is deployed in the Indian Ocean nation's southern-most island of Addu and the other in the strategically-located Lammu.

As relations between the two countries nosedived after India opposed the imposition of Emergency in Maldives, the Maldivian government indicated that it would not renew the lease agreement for keeping the two choppers along with the support staff.

The sources said the Maldives is extending visas of the Indian team comprising personnel from the Indian Navy, Coast Guard and support staff from Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), the manufacturer of the choppers.

The development comes less than a month before the presidential election in Maldives and it is seen as an indication of slight easing of ties between the two countries.

The strategically-located Indian Ocean island nation is an important neighbour for India and both countries were enhancing defence and security cooperation, particularly in the maritime sphere, in the last several years.

However, the ties came under strain after Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen declared Emergency in the country on February 5, following an order by the country's Supreme Court to release a group of Opposition leaders, who had been convicted in widely criticised trials. The Emergency was lifted 45 days later.

India had criticised the Yameen government for imposition of the Emergency and urged it to restore the credibility of the electoral and political process by releasing political prisoners.

Last month, India expressed concern over announcement of the elections without allowing democratic institutions, including Parliament and the judiciary, to work in a free and transparent manner.

India had said it wanted "credible restoration" of the political process and the rule of law in the island nation before the elections were conducted.

However, despite strain in ties, both sides were in touch with each other on the issue of Indian choppers stationed there.

There has been considerable disquiet in New Delhi over China's growing influence over Male. Maldives had inked a free trade agreement with China in December last year, triggering concerns in New Delhi.A two-day undercover prostitution sting in north Harris County netted 11 men at prostitution hotspots near schools and businesses in the area of Cypress Station and Willowbrook, according to Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman.

One suspect, Robert Leger, remains at large after he fled from officers, Herman said. In addition to a misdemeanor prostitution charge, Leger has also been accused of felony evading arrest and unauthorized use of a vehicle.

"Those who plan to proposition a prostitute might want to think again," Herman said. "It can be an undercover investigator."

Herman said his office started investigating the prostitution activity after they received complaints from nearby residents.

He said he did not want to name the exact schools near the prostitution hotspots, but he said the operation was intended to coincide with the start of the school year. He said three major high schools are located in the targeted area.

In one instance, a suspect was arrested after soliciting prostitutes at a daycare in the area, Herman said.

He said the operation included more than 40 uniformed officers and multiple female undercover deputies posing at prostitutes.

The suspects' ages range from the early 20s to late 70s. See their mugshots in the gallery above.

Julian Gill is a digital reporter in Houston. Read him on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, houstonchronicle.com. | julian.gill@chron.comLast week, the city of Midland announced an agreement with Concho Resources, The Scharbauer Foundation and The Downtown Midland Management District (DMMD) for an expanded and much improved $15 million Centennial Park on the site of the former Midland County Courthouse.

After more than two years of negotiations and planning, the parties finally came to terms on various agreements that will be taken to the Midland City Council this Tuesday for final consideration. This is the right project at the right time for downtown Midland and the old courthouse block and here is why.

First, this project (including annual maintenance) is funded with agreements materially complete. The former Midland County Courthouse has been the sight of various proposals since its purchase and demolition by the city of Midland in 2015, and this community and council are ready to move on from the hole in downtown and finally see a project come to fruition. The new Centennial Park will have a ground breaking this year and will be completed no later than 2020.

Second, downtown Midland is home to public and privately held companies with values, including pending acquisitions, of more than $70 billion. This includes more than 1 million net Permian acres and tens of thousands of drillable locations that will take decades to develop and explore, all headquartered in downtown Midland. If you look for another town of our size with $70B in value headquartered in their central business district, and multi-billion dollar annual budgets, you wont find one. Midland is unique in this regard, and we should all be proud to have these companies and community partners headquartered in our downtown.

Third, this park will not require a single property tax dollar from city of Midland taxpayers for funding. The citys initial contribution of $2 million and $500,000 annually will come from Hotel/Motel tax receipts in the city of Midland.

Finally, the Centennial Park project is a perfect example of a public-private partnership. These kinds of partnerships and leveraging resources at the public, private and foundation level, are going to be essential for Midland's growth going forward. This community should expect to see more of these partnerships in the future.

The new Centennial Park reaffirms the city of Midlands commitment to downtown and will be the premier park in all of Midland. It will have something for everybody and was only made possible through the collective efforts of many. Midlands nickname is the Tall City, and we now have another reason to be proud of that moniker.Singh urged PM Modi to leave Teen Murti complex 'undisturbed' and said it would be respecting both history and heritage.

Singh said the NMML is dedicated to the memory of the country's first prime minister and prime architect of the Indian nation-state. (Photo: File | PTI)

New Delhi: Former prime minister Manmohan Singh has expressed concern over attempts to change the "nature and character" of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, saying Jawaharlal Nehru did not just belong to the Congress but to the entire nation.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he urged him to leave the Teen Murti complex "undisturbed" and said this would be respecting both history and heritage. The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) was established in the memory of India's first prime minister and the museum at the Teen Murti House has preserved some rooms as they were at the time of Nehru's death.

Former PM Manmohan Singh writes a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi; says, 'Nehru Memorial Museum & Library is dedicated to memory of India's first Prime Minister. It should be left undisturbed. Jawaharlal Nehru belongs not just to Congress, but to the entire nation' pic.twitter.com/a88abtAKuP  ANI (@ANI) August 27, 2018

Singh said during former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's tenure there was no attempt to change the nature and character of the NMML. The former premier had described Nehru in Parliament as a "vibrant personality" and said "such a resident may never grace Teen Murti again", the senior Congress leader said.

"Let us respect this sentiment and keep Teen Murti as a memorial to our first prime minister Pandit Nehru and leave the Teen Murti complex undisturbed as it is. This way we will be respecting both history and heritage," Singh said in the letter. "Jawaharlal Nehru belongs not just to the Congress but to the entire nation. It is in this spirit that I have written to you," he said.

The letter comes amid reports of dedicating the NMML in the memory of all former prime ministers, an idea strongly opposed by the Congress. Singh said the NMML is dedicated to the memory of the country's first prime minister and prime architect of the Indian nation-state.

Nehru has left behind an incredible imprint on our country and the world, he said. His distinctiveness and greatness have been acknowledged even by his political opponents and rivals, Singh said.

Recalling the six-year tenure of Vajpayee as prime minister, he said there was no attempt made to change the nature and character of the NMML and the Teen Murti complex.

"But sadly, that seems to be part of the agenda of the Government of India now," the former prime minister said. Singh said the NMML must remain a centre of first-rate scholarship and professional excellence and the museum itself must retain its primary focus on Nehru and the freedom movement.

"No amount of revisionism can obliterate that role and his contributions," he said. Singh also said Vajpayee had said in Parliament that Nehru took the opposition along and was a refined gentleman and said such "greatness we may not again see in the near future".In the wake of Sen. John McCain's death on Saturday, tributes and memorials to his long and storied life have poured out. McCain was an honored veteran, a respected statesman and a beloved family man.

He was one of the few politicians admired by both sides of the aisle - and his likability only grew more when he appeared in movies and television shows, often playing himself.

McCain was a mainstay on the talk show circuit, appearing several times on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" and even showing up in series as random as "WWE Raw," "Rachael Ray" and "Last Comic Standing." But he also appeared in scripted movies and television shows, and his presence was always delightful.

Threaded throughout his performances was a certain lack of egotism. McCain never minded being the butt of a joke, if it was funny enough. Take his short cameo in "Parks and Recreation," in which he is entirely blown off by Amy Poehler's downtrodden Leslie Knope. The crux of the joke is that Knope completely snubs McCain, without ever realizing who he is.

One of his more surprising cameos comes in "Wedding Crashers," a hard-R comedy about two men who crash weddings with fake identities to meet women.

In a short clip, the main characters (Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson) are preparing to crash a wedding hosted by the fictional treasury secretary, played by Christopher Walken. For a brief moment, Walken's character shakes hand with McCain and famed political strategist James Carville.

What's so striking about the scene is how completely unnecessary it is. The audience can't even really hear either of the famous political men speak, but there they are, for a fleeting moment in a movie that's 119 minutes long.

Then again, these brief appearances were something of a specialty for McCain, as anyone who watched the show "24" with a sharp eye might remember. In 2006, McCain appeared as a minor staffer in an uncredited role, the kind that's easy to miss if you happen to blink at the wrong moment.

One of McCain's earliest pop-culture moments came in 2002, when he became the first sitting U.S. senator to host "Saturday Night Live."

Throughout the monologue, he tells self-deprecating jokes, makes absurd faces and even begins his costume change for the first sketch. It was one of his first stabs at comedy, but he already appeared as comfortable as a seasoned comic.

He appeared again in 2008, during the midst of his presidential campaign, to sit down with Seth Meyers on the "Weekend Update" segment. Throughout the bit, McCain unveils new strategies to beat his opponent Barack Obama in the polls. Again, his sense of humor shined through as he suggested strategies such as the "Reverse Maverick" and the "Double Maverick."

The best, though, was the "Sad Grandpa."

"That's where I get on TV and go, 'C'mon, Obama's gonna have plenty of chances to be president. It's my turn!' " he said. "Vote for me!"

By all accounts, McCain was a delight to work with, both kind and quick-witted. Several celebrities took to social media to offer their condolences as news of his death broke, including comedian John Mulaney. The former SNL writer had encountered McCain on the show, and he shared an anecdote of just how sharp the senator was.

"SNL meeting after dress rehearsal," Mulaney tweeted. "McCain was on (a week before 2008 election) [Jason] Sudeikis said 'Where the [expletive] do I stand' during notes on a sketch then apologized for swearing when he realized McCain was behind him. McCain immediately: 'Jesus Christ, I was in the Navy.' "

---

Video Links:

"Parks and Recreation"

https://youtu.be/xAszeGSkcw4

"Mr. Celebrity"

https://youtu.be/Myu9USHP61o

"24"

https://youtu.be/9H18Yy6h3sE

"Saturday Night Live"

https://youtu.be/qiNyaBroqmsGov. Bruce Rauner has vetoed a measure that would encourage immigrants cooperation with police investigations by offering protection from deportation, one of three immigrant-related bills the Republican nixed in a week of rising tensions over national policy because of the death of an Iowa college student, allegedly at the hands of an immigrant.

Rauner rejected the plan to push police into speedier approval of protective visas . He said its aggressive timeline was too burdensome and carries penalties that are too harsh.

Immigrants who face deportation if discovered are eligible for the visas allowing them to seek federal protection if they are victims of specified crimes and cooperate with criminal investigations. But immigrants advocates say police often ignore the requests for help.

This is a slap in the face to crime victims who happen to be immigrants, the bills sponsor, Senate President John Cullerton, a Chicago Democrat, said in a statement. The whole idea was to foster trust between police and immigrant communities.

It was one of three immigrant-related pieces of legislation to meet with a veto In a week of increasing attention on immigration. A man suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, Cristhian Bahena Rivera, was charged in the abduction and stabbing death of 20-year-old college student Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa. Its prompted President Donald Trump to rail against the nations immigration system.

Rauner said police dont have the resources to verify crime-victim claims and face significant backlash if they err.

Requiring certification within a tight timeline, but also subjecting law enforcement to perjury if a mistake is made, is an unacceptably risky position to put law enforcement in, Rauner said.

Rauner approved two immigrant-related measures, including Cullertons legislation to bar the state from spending money on or sharing demographic information with any agency creating a registry based on religion, national origin, disability, or other categorical characterizations. Trump inspired that idea when he suggested as a candidate in 2016 that Muslims should register with the government. He has backed off the idea.

Rauner also signed a law to allow professional licenses to be awarded regardless of immigrant or citizenship status. That makes it easier for those in the country legally because they were brought here as youngsters under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals rule to get licenses theyve earned to be a pharmacist or barber.

But Rauner turned thumbs down on two other proposals. One would make safe zones of public buildings such as schools, state-funded health centers, courts and libraries off limits to immigration-law enforcement. And he nixed a proposal to bar landlords from evicting or reporting tenants based on immigration status.

The governor is trying to score political points during a week when anti-immigrant rhetoric is high, said Sen. Iris Martinez, a Chicago Democrat who co-sponsored the tenant bill, but also sponsored the professional licenses plan. Its a shame that he cares more about appealing to certain voters than really reading this legislation and understanding that it is beneficial to the many immigrants living in our state.

Rauner said in veto messages that the proposals would violate federal law prohibting anyone from refusing to disclose to the government information about any persons citizenship or immigration status.

Illinois continues to be a welcoming state for all and continuously strives to protect the rights of all residents, Rauner said. However, we must comply (with) federal law.

.

The bills were SB34 , SB35 , SB3103 , SB3109 and SB3488.The year 1968 was a tumultuous time in America, rife with assassinations and social upheaval. And politics were often at the center of it.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which remains a seminal episode in the unrest of the decade. The war in Vietnam was the main cause of the Aug. 26-29 riots, though other factors fueled the angst that was broadcast to millions on live TV.

Norman Mailer, the author, was on target in labelling the convention the siege of Chicago. From start to finish, the convention was surreal said Taylor Pensoneau of New Berlin, who covered the convention as a political writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. However, it was a very ugly surrealism.

I watched the violent disruption at the seams of a great American city, continued Pensoneau, and witnessed vicious, unimaginable discord I never thought Id see, and hoped Id never see again.

The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy earlier that year, along with lingering civil rights issues, helped create a tinderbox among activists, who started pouring into Chicago in the days and weeks prior to the convention.

That April, Chicago police were blasted for their actions in race riots that turned deadly. Chicago mayor Richard Daley, whom some believe was second only to President Lyndon Baines Johnson in terms of political power, boldly declared that protesters at the convention would be controlled.

As long as I am mayor, Daley remarked, there will be law and order in Chicago. Nobody is going to take over this city.

He eventually established the largest military buildup in an American city since the Civil War. Supplanting the 11,900-man Chicago police force were 7,500 Illinois National Guard troops, 7,500 riot-trained federal troops, hundreds of state and county police, a private security force at the convention site, and countless Secret Service agents. The combined forces dwarfed the 10,000 dissidents in town by five-to-one.

Pensoneau, then 27, arrived in Chicago several days before the convention, as did the Youth International Party, or the yippies. That group, led by Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and others, convened near the Civic Center by the famed Picasso sculpture and nominated a 145-pound pig, named Pigasus, for president.

Theyd picked up this pig somewhere on the way to Chicago, and brought it in with a station wagon, said Pensoneau. They demanded that the pig be given Secret Service protection, and be included in foreign policy briefings in the White House.

The police swept the group out and charged them with disorderly conduct. Many were hit with $25 fines. Pigasus, however, did not appear in court.

I grabbed Rubin by his arm as he was being led away and asked him, where do you go with the pig, laughed Pensoneau. And he said, if we cant have the pig in the White House, well have him for breakfast.



That was one of the few episodes of laughter created by the dissidents, who were an odd mix. Many supported the candidacy of Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy, a vocal war opponent.

Most of protesters came with peaceful intentions, commented Pensoneau. But there were radical groups led by the yippies, Students for a Democratic Society, Maoists, known anarchists, and others who bent on creating disruptions. And they succeeded.

Some possessed marijuana, while others carried North Vietnamese flags. In at least one instance, dissidents attempted to insert a Viet Cong flag in the General Logan statue at Grant Park, one of the centers of the protests.

At both Grant Park and Lincoln Park, protesters and police clashed throughout the week. Meanwhile, the convention opened inside the International Amphitheatre, near the stockyards, on Monday, Aug. 26, which did little to stem the confrontations.

Protesters barricaded themselves inside Lincoln Park, and police used tear gas to disperse them. Reporters and some resident bystanders were attacked during the ensuing exchange.

Pensoneau says he remembers violent clashes throughout the week. The protesters would taunt the National Guard and the cops, throwing bottles, cans, clumps of dirt, pieces of concrete, plastic bags of urine, and a lot of other things, he said. They continued with insults, like calling the cops pigs, and the like.

The worst rioting was occurring in Grant Park, in the alleys, on streets around the scene, recalled Pensoneau. I just witnessed stuff I never thought Id see. The police were slamming nightsticks and billy clubs into shoulders and backs of protesters. Some of the protesters grabbed nightsticks away from the cops, and beat them in turn. It was complete bedlam.



Two days later, the situation came to a head when the convention delegates voted to defeat a peace plank in the platform. At Grant Park, protesters replaced an American flag near the band-shell with a shirt that appeared either red or blood-splattered.

Thousands of protesters then started moving toward the Amphitheatre, many chanting Peace Now! Peace Now! Waiting for them were thousands of police, in line shoulder-to-shoulder with nightsticks visible.

The ensuing clash became the signature moment of the week. In a seventeen-minute confrontation that resembled a massive street riot, hundreds of protesters were beaten, while others were pushed back with tear gas. The bloody chaos was captured nationally on live television as many in the crowd chanted, the whole world is watching!

Tempers also boiled inside the convention hall. In a nomination speech, Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff derided the Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago. On the floor, Daley appeared to respond with a profanity.

Pensoneau was just a few feet away from the exchange, and is visible in at least one photo taken at the moment. I had just interviewed Francis Lorenz, a potent Chicago Democrat in the Daley machine, and was moving on to someone else when Ribicoff made the statement, he said. Daley cuffed his mouth with hands, starting booing. Then all of the Chicago Democrats around him started booing as if Daley had pushed button.

Many people have quoted Daley as saying something negative or prejudicial, added Pensoneau. I didnt hear him say that, but I cant say for sure. Cameras also filmed numerous squabbles on the floor, and some reporters claimed they were shoved.



The convention finally closed on Thursday, Aug. 29, and Hubert H. Humphrey, another Minnesota senator, left with the nomination for president. He would lose to Richard Nixon by only 500,000 votes in November.

Politically, the convention pretty much doomed the candidacy of Humphrey, said Pensoneau. It put a monkey on his back that proved almost insurmountable, and provided a political gift to Nixon, giving him a much wider open door to the White House.

Seven of the protest leaders were tried early the next year, and turned courtrooms into circus-like atmospheres with their insolence. But Daley and the Chicago police bore the brunt of the criticism, which haunted both the city and the Democratic Party for years.Two different stories describe how Morgan Countys only river port got its name.

One tale says that founders of the village of Meredosia combined the French word for sea, mer, and the name of a French priest, Antoine DOsia, a missionary who worked among the Indians just north of where the town is today.

The other version of how the town was named says that Meredosia is derived from the French and means sea of willows.

Morgan County history books say that Meredosia, which was founded Dec. 26, 1832, is the fifth oldest town in the county, after Jacksonville (1825); Arcadia (1829); Lynnville (1831) and Franklin (April 7, 1832). Originally, Arcadia was known as New Lexington.

One of the first merchants in Meredosia was Daniel Waldo, a native of New Hampshire, who, along with his brother, J.E., opened a general store there a year before the town was founded.

The Waldos merchandise was shipped by boat from Boston and New Orleans, and was the largest stock in the county at that time, according to the 1878 history of Morgan County.

At that date there was no money of any kind in the settlement, and in lieu of it, the common currency of the frontier was used. This consisted of coonskins, furs of all kinds, honey, beeswax, or whatever the settlers had to give in exchange, wrote a local historian.

In 1835, the Waldo brothers built a whiskey distillery in Meredosia. They also started Meredosias first blacksmith shop and, later, a sawmill.

In the 1830s, Meredosia was said to be a thriving, energetic town. An 1837 travelers guide to Illinois gave the following description of the village: Meridosia [sic] is a place of considerable business. It is situated on an elevated sand ridge, with a good landing, when the water is not too low. Here are two mills, several stores, and near 300 inhabitants. The great railroad, extending from the Wabash River across the state to the Mississippi, will pass through this town.

Most likely the writer was referring to the then-proposed Northern Cross Railroad, which did not cross the entire width of Illinois, but, instead, began in Meredosia and was built east from the river port.

The Northern Cross is one of Meredosias biggest claims to fame because it started there and was the first railway built in Illinois. Surveys for the Northern Cross were made in the spring of 1837, and construction began soon thereafter.

Ground was first broken in Meredosia  with great ceremony and the presence of a vast concourse of citizens, wrote a historian for the book Historic Morgan and Classic Jacksonville, published in 1885.

Speeches were made by Mr. J.E. Waldo and Hon. O.M. Long. Mr. Daniel Waldo was selected to dig the first shovelful of dirt, which he did amidst the shouts of the multitude. This labor so exhausted himself and the multitude that no more work was done that day.

The railway was completed to Jacksonville in 1840 and to Springfield in 1842. However, income proved to be insufficient to maintain the railroad, and it was finally abandoned. A portion of the old Northern Cross Railroad later became part of the Wabash Railroad.

This Way We Were story was first published Sept. 3, 2007.We feel intimidated and compelled to ...'Heard and dismissed,' said the bench also comprising justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra refused to entertain a PIL filed by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay that sought to make electoral offences cognisable. (Photo: File ANI)

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a plea that sought a minimum punishment of two years for electoral offences, including bribery, false statement, undue influence, by candidates and political parties.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra refused to entertain a PIL filed by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay that sought to make electoral offences cognisable.

"Heard and dismissed," said the bench also comprising justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud.

In his plea, Upadhyay had alleged that since 2000, apart from general and state assembly elections, bribes were also given to garner support for particular political parties and candidates in by-polls.

"The change in law has become necessary as there have been increasing incidents of bribery being detected in all elections, from local body polls to Lok Sabha elections. "This is because, currently, bribery is a non-cognisable offence attracting only minimal punishment," the petition said.

Upadhyay, in his plea, had also said in 2012, the Election Commission of India had recommended to the Home Ministry to amend the existing law to make bribery during elections (both in cash and in kind) a cognisable offence, enabling police to arrest violators without a warrant and to enhance the punishment up to two years. He said the Home Ministry has conveyed to the poll panel that it has initiated the process to amend sections 171B and 171E of the Indian Penal Code for the same.

However, the government has not done anything in this regard till date, the petitioner claimed.The chief minister said he had visited camps and some gurdwaras in Delhi after the riots broke out.

Chandigarh: The Congress was not connected with the 1984 anti-Sikh riots but a few party leaders could have been involved at an individual level, Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh said in the state Assembly on Monday.

The Punjab chief minister named four Congress leaders  H.K.L Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar, Arjan Das and Dharamdas Shastri  whose names he had heard at camps after the riots.

The Congress, as a party, was never involved in the riots, Amarinder Singh said in the state Assembly after the matter was raised by Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal and his partymen.

The chief minister said that it was individuals, and not the Congress, who were involved in the riots, a stand similar to the one taken by Congress chief Rahul Gandhi in London where he said that the Congress, as a party, was never involved in the carnage.

The chief minister said he had visited camps and some gurdwaras in Delhi after the riots broke out. People in the camps named some individual Congress leaders. I heard names of H.K.L. Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar, Arjan Das and Dharamdas Shastri, which I have over the years revealed to the public, he said.

I have been naming these people for the past almost 34 years, Amarinder Singh said, while clarifying that he had named the people who were mentioned to him, and not out of any personal knowledge.

Nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed in the riots in 1984 following the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards when the Congress government was in power at the Centre.

Mr Badal later told reporters that the chief minister should present himself as a key witness before the Supreme Court in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots case and get all the accused convicted.

He also hit out Amarinder Singh for not naming his party colleague Jagdish Tytler, the prime accused in the Sikh riots case, along with the other four leaders allegedly involved in riots.

According to the Punjab chief minister, these people (H.K.L. Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar, Dharamdas Shastri, Arjun Das) have caused the riots. But, interestingly, he did not take Tytlers name as he has a soft corner for him, said Mr Badal.

Captain sahab said that all the people he named caused riots in their individual capacity not as Congress leaders. I would like to ask, what is this individual capacity? asked Mr Badal.J&Ks additional DGP Munir Ahmed Khan warned miscreants of strict action over what he said was rumour-mongering.

Srinagar: Parts of the Kashmir Valley erupted on Monday after some television channels reported that the Supreme Court was resuming hearing on petitions challenging Article 35-A of the Constitution later in the day, instead of August 31 as scheduled. The police blamed the situation on rumour-mongering by miscreants.

Officials were quick to clarify it was actually a fresh petition by a right-wing activist, Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, before the court challenging Article 35-A that was listed for admission around 2 pm on Monday, not the cluster of petitions clubbed into one that may come up on August 31. The court later dropped the hearing on the fresh plea after an adjournment request by the petitioner, a report from New Delhi said.

But surging crowds had already taken to the streets in many parts of the Valley, including Srinagar and the southern towns of Anantnag, Shopian and Pulwama, as well as Sopore and Baramulla in the northwest, to chant slogans. They soon clashed with the security forces, witnesses said, adding that the latter had fired teargas canisters and pellet shotguns to quell stone-pelting mobs. Street violence was also reported from Ganderbal on the Srinagar-Kargil highway. Around three dozen people were injured in these clashes, and many got pellet injuries, hospital sources said.

In many areas, marketplaces were closed and vehicles withdrawn from roads amid chaos, witnesses said. Many schools were shut and their students and staff sent home for security reasons. Earlier, students of various educational institutions in Shopian, Anantnag, Pulwama and Ganderbal were seen in the forefront of the spontaneous protests.

The authorities urged people to remain calm and understand the situation in its right perspective. A state law department official reiterated that the cluster of petitions challenging Article 35A and clubbed in one petition was likely to be taken up for hearing on August 31. He said the exact date will, however, be known only on Wednesday. The official also said the Supreme Court was likely to add on the fresh petition with those others pertaining to the subject.

J&Ks additional DGP Munir Ahmed Khan warned miscreants of strict action over what he said was rumour-mongering. He tweeted: A rumour is being spread by miscreants that hearing of Article 35A case in the Supreme Court is today. This is not a fact. We will investigate all these rumour-mongering cases and deal with the culprits strictly.

Mr Khan later told this newspaper: It was total rumour-mongering. Theres a (Facebook) page which started it. It was deliberate attempt to incite people. We have been able to trace the people who started it. He added it was a tamasha started by miscreants but were thankful to the people who understood the design quickly... Now everything is under control.

Separatist leader and J&Ks chief Muslim cleric Mirwaiz Umar Farooq also sought to clarify the issue through a tweet: Confusion is being created among people about the hearing of case pertaining to Article 35A in the Indian Supreme Court for today. In this regard, what has been reported in the media is that a fresh case has been filed challenging Article 35A.

An alliance of key separatist leaders has urged people to observe a two-day shutdown across the state from August 30. Life in the Kashmir Valley and some parts of the Jammu region had come to a standstill on August 5 and 6 in response to a similar call issued by the alliance called Joint Resistance Leadership, which includes Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the Mirwaiz and Muhammad Yasin Malik, and backed by several political, social and religious outfits and trade and civil society groups.

The Supreme Court had on August 6 adjourned the hearing on the petition as Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, one of three judges on the bench, was not present. The court said: Let it be listed before a three-judge bench in the week commencing August 27 to determine (if) it should be heard by a Constitution Bench or not.

Article 35A guarantees special rights and privileges to permanent residents of J&K and thus prohibits non-permanent residents from permanent settlement and from acquiring immovable properties, government jobs and scholarships in the state. It also empowers the state legislature to define permanent residents and provide special rights and privileges to them. It was added to the Constitution by a presidential order in 1954 issued by the then President in exercise of the powers conferred by clause (1) of Article 370, with the concurrence of the government of J&K. Article 370 guarantees a special status to Jammu and Kashmir within the Indian Union.

A petition seeking removal of Article 35A is pending before a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court. An NGO, We the Citizens, believed to be an RSS think tank, challenged Article 35A in the court in 2014 on the grounds that it was not added to the Constitution through an amendment under Article 368 and it was never presented before Parliament, and that it came into effect immediately.Moscow city authorities have ordered most people to stay off work for at least 11 days, to stem coronavirus infections as new daily cases and deaths from COVID-19 in Russia surged to all-time highsStarting Sept. 1, Stephen Stookey will take on a new role as Dean of the School of Religion and Philosophy at Wayland Baptist University. Stookey will replace Clinton Lowin who resigned in June to become a chaplain in Germany.

Stookey came to Wayland in 2016 as a professor of religion and has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses in face-to-face and online settings. As Dean, he will take on more administrative duties and is looking forward to the challenge of leading the School of Religion.

"Few schools boast the diverse academic talent and ministry expertise found at Wayland," Stookey said. "I am humbled and honored to serve alongside these gifted scholars across the Wayland system."

An active member of Baptist life, Stookey currently serves as a trustee for the T.B. Maston Foundation and is on the Board of Directors of the Baptist History and Heritage Society. He has been a member on two commissions with the Baptist World Alliance and has served with The Fellowship of Baptist Historians and the Texas Baptist Historical Society. Stookey is a member of the American Academy of Religion, and the American Society of Church History.

Stookey earned his Ph.D. in church history from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He also holds a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern. He completed his undergraduate degree in religion at Baylor University.

A native of Kankakee, Ill., Stookey said he got to Texas as quickly as he could. His professional career includes teaching at Southwestern Seminary from 1995-2004, as well as Dallas Baptist University from 2006-2014. He spent two years as an adjunct professor at The Evangelical College of Theology in Sierra Leone, and a year as a resident fellow at the B.H. Carroll Theological Institute before coming to Wayland in 2016.

Stookey said his major goal in leading the School of Religion and Philosophy is to help Wayland and its constituency to navigate the "shifting landscape of church and denominational life.

"The challenges facing the global Christian community are complex," he said. "Wayland is uniquely positioned to collaborate with the global Christian family. My task as dean is to support our faculty, students, and constituent partners in their pursuits of kingdom service."The agenda of good governance and running pro-poor policies has been a key feature of the chief ministers meetings.

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah and 15 chief ministers of the party will attend a meeting here on Tuesday as it gears up for the Lok Sabha polls, which are less than eight months away.

BJP sources said the conference of chief ministers, in which the top brass takes stock of works going on in states ruled by the party and issues them directions, has assumed added significance due to the upcoming Assembly elections in three states and the Lok Sabha polls and these would be likely discussed in the day-long meeting.

Assembly polls are due in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, all ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), later this year.

The agenda of good governance and running pro-poor policies has been a key feature of the chief ministers meetings, which have been taking place regularly since Mr Modi took over as Prime Minister in 2014.

BJPs deputy chief ministers in different states will also attend the meeting.Covenant Health Plainview continues to grow for your family as the hospital is proud to welcome its new pediatrician, Dr. Sanjeev Silwal.

"I'm really, really excited to be in Plainview," said Silwal, who starts his practice

Sept. 3 at Covenant Healthcare Center Plainview, located at 2222 West 24th St.

"The people are so warm and welcoming here. Also there is so much potential here in Plainview. There's a real need for pediatric care and we want to build a really good practice here in this community."

Silwal will join fellow Covenant Health Plainview pediatrician Dr. Hima Jyothi in the Covenant Plainview clinic.

"We are so happy to have Dr. Silwal join Covenant Health Plainview's team of talented physicians," said Covenant Plainview CEO, Bob Copeland.

"Dr. Silwal is a very kind and caring physician who is truly devoted to his patients and their families. He will definitely expand on our hospital's mission to offer exceptional and high quality children's services."

Silwal is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics and comes to Plainview from New Jersey where he completed his pediatric residency at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center's Children's Hospital.

Before that, Silwal's journey into becoming a Lone Star State physician started in the capital of Nepal.

"I was born and raised in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal" explained Silwal.

Silwal said he seemed to always have a knack for his studies, especially when it came to sciences.

However his interest and passion for medicine developed during a very difficult time for his family.

Silwal explained that growing up his sister had a severe case of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) an inflammatory disease caused when the immune system attacks its own tissues.

"It was a very traumatic time in our lives. Especially because our hospitals in Nepal didn't have the capabilities to properly treat her," said Silwal.

Silwal's sister suffered with the disease for years before she eventually started receiving monthly treatments in India.

"She started to get better and is doing very well now. It was a true blessing from God," said Silwal.

But Silwal said it was during that time the young kid was inspired to become a physician so he could help patients like his sister.

Silwal studied medicine at the Universal College of Medical Sciences in Nepal and earned his M.B.B.S degree in March 2009.

After receiving his medical degree, Silwal said he was contracted to work two years for Nepal government as a physician.

"I was sent to work in the rural villages of Nepal. We worked as family physicians and served the people of very medically underserved populations," Silwal said.

"It felt really nice to be a doctor there and make such a difference in these people's lives. We really made a big impact in those rural areas when it came to primary and preventive health care."

Though he treated every age group in the rural villages, Silwal said the most rewarding feeling came from treating the younger population.

"It's just the satisfaction of seeing a sick kid smile back at you when you treat his or her pain. I also enjoyed the bond you make with the parent," Silwal said.

After his two years, Silwal said his mentor, Dr. Mahit Upentra was planning to move to New York to start a pediatric residency. Loving the idea, Silwal followed suit.

Silwal arrived first in Dallas where he took his mandatory medical exams.

"I loved it, everything was so big," said Silwal with a laugh as he talked about his first experience in America.

After passing his tests and also serving as a Clinical Observer at the Boston Children's Hospital at the Harvard School of Medicine, Silwal was accepted to the pediatric residency program at Newark Beth Israel where Dr. Hima was also completing her residency. The two befriended each other.

In 2017, Hima accepted a positon in Plainview and after completing his residency, Hima told Silwal about the opportunity to make a difference in the community.

"I loved Plainview and I was getting tired of the big cities and the traffic," said Silwal with another smile.

"I love the atmosphere here, as well as the potential to build a strong practice here."

Silwal and his wife Chanchal Pradhan, moved to the community a few months ago.

Silwal is scheduled to start his practice at Covenant Healthcare Center of Plainview in September. To schedule an appointment call the clinic at 806-291-5100 or visit at 2222 West 24th Street.Thousands of Walt Disney World employees would receive raises under a new contract settlement between the company and a group of unions that increases the minimum starting pay to $15 an hour by 2021, capping nine months of tense wage negotiations that led to large protests in Central Florida.

The unions, which represent 38,000 service employees at Walt Disney World  about half the total number working at the park  announced the agreement in a statement on Saturday, calling it historic.

Most of the workers make less than $11 an hour, said Jeremy Haicken, the president of Local 737, the largest of the six unions at the negotiating table.

Jessica Lella, 24, a union steward and ride operator at the parks DinoLand USA, has been working for Disney full time for nearly six years and currently earns $10 an hour, the same rate as a new hire. Now that wages are set to increase, she said, she plans to stay at the company and hopes to start a family in the near future.

I love working for Disney; its just that I couldnt live off of it, Lella said. She and her wife currently reside at Lellas parents home to save money. Theres no doubt that this is going to change peoples lives.

Members will vote on the new contract on Sept. 5 and 6.

Im very, very confident that our members will vote to accept the agreement, Haicken said.

The new contract would gradually raise the minimum pay in $1 increments. By September of next year, the starting wage will reach $13 an hour, followed by $14 in October 2020 and $15 in October 2021, the Service Trades Council Union said in a statement. Those who make more than $10 an hour will receive at least $4.75 in raises by October 2021, the statement said.

The raises are expected to bring an estimated $1 billion of additional wages into Central Floridas economy during the four-year contract, the Service Trades Council Union said.

Robbin Almand, vice president of labor relations for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, said in a statement: We are thrilled our cast members will have the chance to vote on what is one of the highest entry-level service wages in the country. This represents a 50 percent bump in pay bringing starting wages to $15 an hour by 2021.

The agreement came about a month after the Disneyland Resort in California announced it would raise its minimum wage for 9,700 union employees to $15 an hour by 2019. The employees, who were represented by Master Services Council, included those working in attractions, store operations and costuming.

The California state minimum wage is $11 an hour for employers with 26 employees or more and is set to increase to $15 an hour in 2022. In Florida, the state minimum wage is $8.25 an hour; John Morgan, a lawyer in Orlando, is aiming to put a measure on the 2020 ballot that would eventually raise it to $15.

During the negotiations with Walt Disney World union members, the company initially offered a 2.5 percent salary increase and no change to the starting minimum wage. In October, hundreds of union workers marched near a Disney World entrance, blocking traffic, one of many rallies that took place during the contract talks. A later proposal to raise wages by 50 cents was also rejected by workers.

In January, after a tax cut passed by Congress, Disney said it would give $1,000 bonuses to employees but announced that union members would not receive the bonus during pay raise negotiations. Unions representing the workers in Florida and California filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, which sided with Disney.

Finally, the two sides agreed to a wage increase in exchange for what Haicken called minor changes, such as a decrease in how often an employee can transfer from one job to another.

I have to give Disney credit, Haicken said. Yes, there was a lot of public pressure for them to raise their wages, but they did do it.

Haicken said the raises could lead to wage improvements for nonunion employees in Florida, citing earlier decisions by Universal Orlando Resort and SeaWorld Orlando to raise their minimum wages to $10, following in Disneys footsteps.

Disney is such a large employer, they really set the standard for employment in the region, he said.

Revenues at Disneys theme park division increased 6 percent to $5.2 billion during the fiscal quarter ending in June. Operating income increased 15 percent, to $1.3 billion, in part because of higher ticket prices and hotel room rates at Walt Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California.During the Presidential visit, the Czech Republic will press for direct flights between India and his country, Mr. Masarik said.

New Delhi: President Ram Nath Kovind will visit the Czech Republic on a four-day official visit from September 6 to 9, the Czech Republic Embassys Deputy Head of Mission (DHM) Roman Masarik announced on Monday in New Delhi.

During the Presidential visit, the Czech Republic will press for direct flights between India and his country, Mr. Masarik said.

The European country is expected to push for closer ties with India and wants more Indian tourists to visit. Mr. Masarik was speaking at an event where it was also announced that UAE-based low-cost carrier Air Arabia will start flights from Sharjah in the Gulf to Prague in December this year. This will help facilitate movement of Indian tourists to Prague since 13 destinations in India are already connected by the Gulf-based carrier to the UAE currently.Theres a new spot to catch a buzz in Southtown, this time courtesy of caffeine.

Don Martins Coffee Co., a long-awaited project from the team behind Bar America, announced via Twitter it will sling its first cup of joe 7 a.m. Tuesday Aug. 28 at 540 S. Presa St.

The project has been more than nine months in the making  give or take 35 years. Bar America and Don Martins co-owner Brian Correa told the Express-News in November that shop is named for his late grandfather, Martin Ramirez, who bought the coffee shop space in the 1980s to use as storage.

RELATED: Tower of the Americas to host 1st beer festival in October

Don Martins will serve a wide range of coffee-based drinks, pastries, pan dulce, aguas frescas, beer, wine and more. Additional details at 210-223-1285, donmartinscoffee.com or Facebook: @DonMartinsCoffee.

Paul Stephen is a staff writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pstephen@express-news.net | Twitter: @pjbites | Instagram: @pjstephenANSONIA  A piece of the citys past may become part of its future.

About a hundred feet of cement-encased trolley tracks have been unearthed by J. Iapaluccio Construction company workers during the ongoing $5.2 million rebuild of Wakelee Avenue, which runs from Seymour to Derby passing Nolan Field on the citys west side.

The tracks have been found between Jackson Street and Westfield Avenue.

But Mayor David Cassetti believes more will be uncovered as the construction process makes its way to the projects end at Franklin Street near Nolan field.

These tracks are part of Ansonias past, Cassetti said. I want to make them part of our future.

So Cassetti would like to see some of the tracks used as T-bars for a sign over the newly completed section of the Riverwalk on Pershing Drive.

Greg Martin, Cassettis director of constituent services, said the idea is to construct 10-foot-high flanking support posts and crossbar which would display a suspended entrance sign. The section has been named the DellaVolpe-Cassetti Passway, recognizing former Mayor James Della Volpe and Cassetti, who were instrumental in creating and finishing this section.

Martin said this would require about 34 feet of track.

A second proposal would use the track to spell out ANSONIA in polished block six-foot-tall letters somewhere downtown, maybe near the Maple Street intersection with Main or near Nolan Field. The letters would be constructed under a Welcome To wooden sign. A marker outlining the citys trolley history would be underneath.

Historic rail line

Sheila OMalley, the citys economic development director, said the city is considering putting the remaining tracks out to bid and use that money to pay for the signs.

Some trolley and rail museums have expressed interest, she said.

The uncovered tracks have been taken to JRD Restoration on Derby Avenue, Derby.

There John DelGado said he has gotten about two truckloads.

Some are in pretty bad shape, he said. Some are bent, badly rusted, encased in concrete...Im going to have to hammer off the concrete, grind them down and smooth out the edges.

However DelGado believes hell have enough for the citys use.

John William Tuohy, the city historian, has done extensive research on the tracks..

This was the second oldest trolley line in America, he said.. At the time transportation to and from the factories was an issue. This was an effective mass transportation system that ran from Seymour to Ansonia through Derby all the way to West Haven near what was Savin RockConnecticuts answer to Coney Island.

Tuohy said he has seen photos of some of the cars containing Wakelee Avenue in their message line as well as one with Ansonia, Derby, Birmingham imprinted on its side.

Rocket ship transportation

Much of the lines birth may lie with Charles Van Depoele, a Belgium-born inventor dubbed The Flemish Edison, Tuohy said. Van Depoele had several patents on trolley technology which earned him the nickname the father of commercial street operation.

Van Depoele arrived in the U.S. in 1845 and built a line in Scranton, Pa., which was admired by the Derby Horse Railway Co., according to Tuohys research. He said the Derby firm purchased a motor car and three 12-foot long passenger cars.

They began building a three and a half mile rail line in 1887 which stretched from State Street in Ansonia and ran through Birmingham and ended at Derby landing, where boats would then take passengers across the Naugatuck River, Touhy said.,

He said the electric plant located on the Derby docks would power the 15 horsepower trolleys to a maximum 20 mph.

The first run took place on May, 1888, but Tuohy said there was an issue. The passenger cars roofs were higher than a tunnel they had to pass under. The roofs had to be lowered, but doing so left very little headroom.

By October 1890, Tuohy said the line was carrying 1,500 passengers each day and could cover the distance in less than 20 minutes.

A lot of people worked in the factories around the clock, Tuohy said. For them this was a safe, quick method of getting to and from work.

Bankruptcies and mergers led to the creation of the Derby Street Railway company headed by Col. Holton Wood, who served in the state legislature.

Tuohy said the first motor car for the line was pulled from a scrap pile in 1912 and redesigned into four-foot scale models, one of which is now on display at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

The last run ended 11:15 a.m. on June 18, 1937. Tuohy said its 49 years in service made it the oldest line in New England and the second oldest line in the United States.

The tracks were made here, Tuohy said. This was rocket ship transportation back then and Ansonia was on the cutting edge. Beautifying these tracks and reusing them should be part of the citys renaissance.EDWARDSVILLE  The Edwardsville District 7 Board of Education is considering hiring the Illinois Association of School Boards to lead the search in replacing current District 7 Superintendent Lynda Andre, who announced shell be retiring at the end of the 2018-19 school year.

During the boards general meeting on Aug. 13, the board heard a presentation from representatives with the Illinois Association of School Boards Executive Searches team.

The representatives explained their search process and how they assist school boards with identifying candidates through their online application process and narrowing down the top candidates based on information and criteria provided by the board, community members and staff.

The organization provides assistance from the point of announcing the vacancy through initial interviews to narrow down top contenders to the actual hiring of the new superintendent. Additionally, it assists the board with follow-up training for the new superintendent.

The fee for the search services would cost anywhere from $9,900 to $17,400 depending on extra services such as community or staff focus groups that the board may choose to add.

The entire search process, through the IASB Executive Searches, would be expected to take approximately six to eight weeks.

The District 7 Board did not take any action on this at the last board meeting. It was an informational presentation only.

In action taken, the board unanimously approved Little Caesars as the food service pizza vendor for the 2018-19 school year, a resolution to continue District 7s participation in the Mississippi Valley Intergovernmental Insurance Cooperative (MissVIC) and appointed Dave Courtney, Assistant Superintendent of Business Operations, as the districts voting member for this group. Nancy Spina, District 7s Assistant Superintendent of Personnel, and Susi Miller, the districts Finance Assistant, were approved as alternate voting MissVIC members.

The board also approved to continue offering the Delta Dental dental insurance plan to District 7 employees through Sept. 30, 2019. The plan was changed to a voluntary participation plan with Delta Dental in 2003 and employees pay for premiums through the MissVIC, but the plan is exclusive to the Edwardsville School District.

Premium rates offered by Delta Dental will increase 4.6 percent for the 2018-19 plan year. Current rates are $24.92 per month for single coverage and $78.06 per month for family coverage. Renewal rates are $26.08 per month for single coverage and $81.68 per month for family coverage.

In addition, the board approved the displaying of the 2018-2019 tentative budget. Public hearings on the budget have been set for 10 a.m. on Sept. 28 at Hadley House and 6 p.m. Sept. 24 at Woodland Elementary School prior to the districts regularly scheduled board meeting.

The finance committee will review the tentative budget at its August and September meetings and the board will be asked to adopt the final budget at the Sept. 24 board meeting.

Andre pointed out that District 7 financial updates will be available again this year through the districts website.

Beginning next week and weeks to come, the administration will be presenting updates to the community through Blueprint for Excellence and Focus on Family reports for implementation of the second year of the prop E plan, Andre said. Well be doing that periodically throughout the school year so that everyone is aware of progress were making on that four-year plan and that we are delivering on the promises we made to the public.

The next Board of Education general meeting is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 27 at Woodland Elementary.U.S. farmers will get $4.7 billion in a first round of direct government aid to compensate for market losses caused by Chinese tariffs in a trade war that's hurting some of President Donald Trump's core supporters.

Growers of soybeans, the hardest hit, will get $3.6 billion, according to the plan the government released Monday. Pork will receive the second-highest payment of $290 million, and dairy producers are also eligible for assistance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said. Sorghum, corn, wheat and cotton producers will also receive aid of different amounts based on the same formula.

Signups will start Sept. 4, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said, just as harvest season begins and before Nov. 6 congressional elections in which rural districts may play a key role in determining which party controls Congress. Payments may start going out as soon as mid-September.

The Trump administration "will not stand by while farmers are targeted by countries who are acting in bad faith," Perdue said on a conference call.

The USDA will spend an additional $200 million promoting U.S. agricultural exports as part of the aid. The government also will step up commodity purchases to help boost prices, making at least $1.2 billion of purchases, including $559 million of pork.

The total size of the package, which the department estimated at $12 billion when it was announced last month, may be less than that should trade conditions change, said the agency's chief economist, Rob Johannson.

Extra farm aid would help producers who are seeing prices drop and inventories rise because of disputes with China, Canada and other trade partners who are significant purchasers of U.S. pork, soybeans and other crops.

Farmers are a key part of the rural political base that elected Trump, who has promised they will emerge better off from a trade war. Many farmers are accepting that message. Still, an extended trade dispute that lingers into the fall harvest -- and the election -- holds the potential to shake that support. Trump has been under pressure from lawmakers representing rural districts to back away from imposing tariffs.

The price-support funds don't need congressional approval, as they are administered under USDA disaster procedures that date to the Great Depression.A federal judge on Monday blocked the release of blueprints for 3-D printed firearms online, ruling in favor of more than a dozen attorneys general who argued their publication increases the threat of gun violence across the country.

The Seattle court order effectively criminalized publication of the gun design files, banning Texas-based company Defense Distributed from posting them on the Internet.

The decision presents a new hurdle in the company's fight to make weapon-design files publicly available, a case that has sparked a national conversation about the implications of untraceable plastic weapons and constitutional rights.

Judge Robert Lasnik of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington cited risks to public safety in granting the injunction.

He wrote that the attorneys general for 19 states and the District of Columbia who filed the lawsuit have "a legitimate fear that adding undetectable and untraceable guns to the arsenal of weaponry already available will likely increase the threat of gun violence they and their people experience." The proliferation of digital weapon files, Lasnik said, "will hamper law enforcement efforts to prevent and/or investigate crime."

The decision stems from a suit filed July 30 against the State Department, which had agreed to allow Defense Distributed to publish an arsenal of firearms blueprints online in a planned settlement. The states argued that the release of 3-D printable designs threatened national security and abridged their ability to pass and police gun laws.

Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson called the court's decision "farcical."

"I'm happy to publicly suffer these clownish indignities to demonstrate how unprincipled the judiciary and different state attorneys general are capable of being when forced to confront an outcome they don't approve of," Wilson, who is still involved in four pending lawsuits, told The Washington Post on Monday.

Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, one of the chief law enforcement officers involved in the suit, lauded the court's decision: "I'm glad we put a stop to this dangerous policy."

The contentious fight over weapon-design files dates back to 2013, when Wilson manufactured the first printed handgun. Soon after, he sued the State Department over its demands that he remove blueprints from the Internet. In June, the federal government reversed course and entered into an agreement permitting Wilson to publish his firearm blueprints online. He intended to do so Aug. 1, but hours before publication, Lasnik stopped him.

Wilson's critics have said his plan could put unregulated and difficult-to-detect weapons in the wrong hands.

Gun-control supporters, such as the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, also argued that 3-D printed weapons - that avoid layers of federal and state gun-control policies, such as permits and background checks - are not "typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes," and, therefore, are not protected under the Second Amendment.

Monday's order ignored the Justice Department's argument accusing the states of exceeding their constitutional powers to restrict a person from sharing information with other Americans.

Other legal experts have focused on the wide-reaching First Amendment implications of barring Wilson from releasing the files. They suggested that prohibiting publication of computer code - which has been available for download since at least 2013, according to State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert - amounts to a violation of free-speech rights.Damage caused by a tornado that brought destruction to Hale Center more than 50 years ago is mostly gone but there's one structure it damaged that's just now getting replaced.

Johnny Ruiz, public works director for Hale Center, said there's dents at the top of the water tank located behind the stage at the park in Hale Center. It's unclear what caused the dents.

Hale Center Mayor William H. (W.H.) Johnson, said the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality has been telling city officials for years to get it fixed. The city just hasn't had the money  until now.

Hale Center was one of countless rural cities around the country chosen to receive money from the United States Department of Agriculture to aid its water towers.

In some cases, Hazlett said, that may mean a whole replacement of the water tanks.

"In other places, it might be a new treatment facility," she said. "It really ranges. Sometimes there's new technology that these systems need, like electronic monitoring, metering of the levels of water that have been used. There really is a wide variety."

In Hale Center's case, the costs to fix the water storage tank far outweigh the cost to just build a new one. The cost to replace the water storage tank, which is the smaller of two that can be seen behind the park off Interstate 27, is estimated to be about $418,900 and the USDA provided a loan to foot the bill.

Anne Hazlett, assistant to the secretary for Rural Development of the United States Department of Agriculture, stopped through Hale Center Wednesday during a three-city tour  which also included Kress and Lamesa  to see the progress.

City and Hale County officials took the opportunity to thank Hazlett for the USDA's assistance.

Hale Center City Manager Dennis Burton said the city was granted a 40-year low-interest loan to pay for the project.

During the presentation, Kenny Friar, of Kimley Horn Engineers in Lubbock, said the project is projected to take a year or just more than one year to complete from planning to finish.

Ruiz said there's no danger to the water supply. The current tank simply doesn't meet TCEQ standard.

The damaged tank, he said, is the one that holds the water supply while toxins are eliminated before piping it through to the big tower that says "Hale Center" on the side where it's then funneled around through the community.

Hale Center was Hazlett's second stop of the day. She visited Lamesa first then made a stop in Kress after leaving Hale Center.

Heidi Tiffin, city secretary for Kress, said the town's water tower had been leaking and was also flagged by TCEQ for replacement.

"TCEQ said we either had to fix the leak or get a new one," she said.

The water tower was old and it was difficult to safely climb up and down for repairs, Tiffin said. So the city opted to just get a new one.

"Ours is done," she said Friday. "They (USDA) paid for it. We got a brand new water tower."

Construction on the Kress water tower was wrapped up a few months ago, she said.

Hazlett said there are other planned projects and the USDA is working to fund them as much funding as quickly as it can, particularly in places "like West Texas where water quantity is such a challenge."

"It's important to quality of life for people living there to have clean, safe, affordable, reliable water supply," she said. "It's important for economic growth in the region."A Beaumont lawyer owes thousands of dollars in legal fees for a "frivolous" lawsuit filed five years ago against a former Jefferson County District Judge, a federal court ruled earlier this week.

At least one of Port Arthur attorney Stella Morrison's claims in a lawsuit against former 252nd District Court Judge Layne Walker was "frivolous, unreasonable or without foundation," according to U.S. Magistrate Judge Keith Giblin, who ruled that her Beaumont attorney, John Morgan, should incur some of Walker's legal fees.

On Aug. 22, Giblin ruled that Morgan "unreasonably and vexatiously multiplied" court proceedings "in reckless violation of a duty he owed to the court," according to court documents, ordering that Morgan pay nearly $30,000 in fees. Morgan could not be reached for comment Friday.

According to court records, Morgan "failed" in his duties to "perform a reasonable inquiry under the circumstances to determine that the factual contentions" in his client's amended complaints "had evidentiary support."

On May 22, 2013, Morrison filed a lawsuit against Walker, Jefferson County and the State of Texas, saying she was a victim of conspiracy subjecting her to "an ongoing pattern of harassment, retaliation, unconstitutional actions, grossly negligent conduct and intentional Texas torts," according to the petition. Giblin's office declined to comment on the case.

Morrison accused Walker of "unlawful conduct" against her, "intentionally harming Morrison's legal practice" and "intentional racist discrimination against African-Americans" through longer sentencing, according to court documents.

The fourth amended complaint accuses Walker of an "ongoing personal and racial vendetta against Morrison," which she contended was connected with her husband, Kermit Morrison, who ran against Walker in the March 2006 primary.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Zack Hawthorn dismissed Morrison's claims with prejudice in November 2015, meaning the claims could not be brought back to court. While Morrison attempted to replead some of her claims, Hawthorn said in court documents that "the only live claim against Walker" was the false perjury claim, which was "eventually shown to be frivolous, unreasonable and without foundation," according to Giblin.

Based upon information presented in court, Giblin wrote that "the most likely scenario" was that Morgan "did not adequately interview his client about the facts, Morgan jumped to improper and false conclusions to try to make the case against Walker stronger, and Morrison allowed Morgan to plead false contentions (either by her own ignorance or malice)."

"All I know is that I sued Walker and I feel within my rights of suing him," Morrison, 71, said on Friday.

Walker, who was Jefferson County's 252nd District Court Judge from 2003 until his 2014 resignation to take a job in the private sector, said he was pleased with Giblin's Wednesday ruling.

The five-year lawsuit "has been a ridiculous journey," said Walker, 53.

PSuy@BeaumontEnterprise.com

Twitter.com/PhoebeSuyWhen asked whether Mr Gandhi will also be invited, Mr Kumar said the list had not been finalised.

New Delhi: The RSS is organising a first of its kind lecture series by its supremo Mohan Bhagwat next month and speculation is rife that an invitation could also be sent to Congress president Rahul Gandhi who had compared the organisation with Islamist radical group, Muslim Brotherhood.

The event titled Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective, will see Mr Bhagwat addressing and interacting with a select audience comprising prominent citizens and politicians of various ideologies including CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, who may also be invited.

Reacting to Mr Gandhis recent statements against it, the RSS said someone who does not understand India cannot understand the Sangh, referring to the Congress presidents old statement that he is trying to understand India.

Last week at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Mr Gandhi had said the RSS idea is similar to that of Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world and had alleged that the RSS, an ideological mentor of the BJP, was trying to change the nature of India and capture its institutions.

Responding to the Congress chiefs charges, RSS prachar pramukh (publicity in-charge) Arun Kumar said that Mr Gandhi is unaware of the concept of Muslim brotherhood. The entire world today is facing the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. He is unaware... He does not understand the gravity of the situation thats why he is making such statements, said Mr Kumar.

Referring to Mr Gandhis old statement that he is trying to understand India, the Sangh leader said, One who doesnt understand India cannot understand the Sangh.

The RSS leader claimed that the Congress president is ignorant about India and its cultural ethos of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, which means the world is one family.

Giving details of the September 17-19 event, Mr Kumar said the Sangh was for the first time organising such an event, which will be held at Vigyan Bhavan, as people across the country want to know and associate with the RSS.

This lecture series has been organised in this context... Sarsanghchalak (RSS chief) Mohan Bhagwatji will present the Sangh views on various contemporary issues of national importance, Mr Kumar said.

When asked whether Mr Gandhi will also be invited, Mr Kumar said the list had not been finalised.

It is our prerogative to choose who to invite or not. Leave this to us... But people from all walks of life, including from different political outfits, ideologies and religions, will be invited, he said.

The RSS had invited Congress veteran and former president Pranab Mukherjee to its event in June this year at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur.

The Congress said it has not received any invite for its president Rahul Gandhi to attend the RSS event and would respond to questions on the matter only after an invitation is received.

I do not answer hypothetical, speculative questions... This is purely imaginary at the moment, Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi told reporters.TOKYO - North Korea's main newspaper accused the United States on Sunday of staging military drills to prepare an invasion while at the same time pursuing dialogue with "a smile on its face."

Rodong Sinmun, the official mouthpiece of the Workers' Party of Korea, cited alleged U.S. troop movements in the region, which it called "extremely provocative and dangerous" and said they threatened to derail the dialogue between the United States and North Korea.

The U.S. military called the accusation "far fetched."

The opinion piece came two days after President Donald Trump canceled a planned trip to North Korea by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, citing a lack of progress in getting North Korea to surrender its nuclear weapons.

The Rodong Sinmun piece did not mention Trump by name or the decision to cancel Pompeo's trip. Media outlets controlled by the Pyongyang regime have been careful not to criticize Trump directly since his June 12 meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, reserving occasional ire for Pompeo and other members of the administration. But the timing of the piece may be more than coincidence.

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Rodong Sinmun cited a South Korean radio broadcast claiming that U.S. "special units" had recently flown to the Philippines, arguing this was a drill simulating "infiltration into Pyongyang." It also claimed that the USS Michigan nuclear submarine had transported "Green Berets, Delta Force and other special units" from Okinawa, Japan, to the Jinhae naval base in South Korea in late July or early August.

Col. John Hutcheson, the director of public affairs for U.S. Forces Japan, said he wasn't sure what drills the piece was referring to.

"U.S. aircraft routinely fly from Japan to the Philippines and other nations around the region for a variety of training and operational reasons, so the notion that any single flight is related to North Korea is a bit far fetched," he wrote in an email.

Cmdr. Clay Doss, public affairs officer at the U.S. Seventh Fleet, said the North Korean report, including the mention of the USS Michigan, is "completely false."

But Rodong Sinmun argued that the acts "prove that the U.S. is hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK" in case Washington fails to achieve denuclearization.

That would be a crime that deserves "merciless divine punishment," it said.

"We cannot but take a serious note of the double-dealing attitudes of the U.S. as it is busy staging secret drills involving man-killing special units while having a dialogue with a smile on its face," the opinion piece continued.

"The U.S. would be sadly mistaken if it thinks that it can browbeat someone through trite 'gunboat diplomacy' which it used to employ as an almighty weapon in the past and attain its sinister intention."

Trump announced the suspension of the U.S. military's annual exercises with South Korea when he met Kim, calling those exercises "provocative."

In his Friday tweets, Trump put some of the blame on China for the lack of progress with North Korea, tweeting that because of his "tougher Trading stance," the Chinese were not "helping with the process of denuclearization as they once were."

Beijing said those remarks showed a "total disregard of the facts."

In a statement released Saturday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said China is making "unremitting efforts" to abide by the U.N. Security Council's resolutions and urged all parties to "stick to the direction of seeking a political settlement."

Meanwhile, South Korean President Moon Jae-in convened a meeting of his National Security Council on Sunday to discuss the cancellation of Pompeo's trip.

A spokesman said Moon's planned trip to Pyongyang in September - his third summit with Kim this year - now took on added significance.

"The circumstances show that President Moon has a bigger role as the facilitator and a mediator unblocking the impasse between North Korea and the U.S. and widening the scope of mutual understanding," South Korean presidential Blue House spokesman Kim Eui-keum told reporters Sunday.

---

The Washington Post's Min Joo Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.WASHINGTON - The Trump administration said Monday it had reached a new, 16-year trade deal with Mexico, setting in motion a rapid chain of events that could redraw the world's largest trade agreement.

The ultimate scope of the deal could hinge on whether Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, after months of feuding with President Donald Trump, decides to sign on.

White House officials said the agreement, centered largely on manufacturing, would help U.S. workers by making it harder for countries like China to ship cheap products through Mexico and then into the United States.

Harmonizing labor and environmental rules would also protect U.S. jobs and salaries, the officials said, by making it less attractive for U.S. companies to move operations to Mexico.

A senior administration official acknowledged the changes could make certain products, such as automobiles, more expensive for American buyers because the costs that go into production were expected to increase.

A number of key factors remain unresolved in Trump's effort to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement - with Canada's role the biggest among them. Trump and Mexican leaders also failed to resolve whether the U.S. tariffs on metals imports will remain in place.

The next phase of negotiations will pose a major test for Trump's unique style of diplomacy, which has shown flashes of both creativity and impulsiveness throughout the process.

"It's a big day for trade. It's a big day for our country," Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office, where they watched him speak at length by phone with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Trump has long told top advisers that once he was able to cut a single trade deal with another country, it would lead to a flurry of agreements. That's because it would prove to other leaders that he is serious about cutting deals. Some aides are hopeful that the Mexico agreement could serve as a template for other talks.

But Trump also has a tendency to tout deals before they are complete, and a rebuke from either Congress or Canada could scuttle the talks before they are finalized.

Top White House officials appeared split on whether they would proceed at all if Canada didn't sign on to the agreement. Trump left open the possibility of cutting Canada out of the final deal, but U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told reporters later that every effort would be made to include Canada, even if it took weeks or longer for them to agree to changes.

There were also signs of division about what the agreement means for NAFTA. Trump said that the new deal with Mexico would lead to the termination of NAFTA and that he would rename it the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement. "NAFTA has a lot of bad connotations for the United States because it was a rip-off," Trump said.

He said that he would terminate "the existing deal," although it was unclear whether Trump has the power to do so unilaterally and Lighthizer cautioned that no decision had been made about this.

Lighthizer said the White House planned to send Congress a letter by Friday that formally starts a 90-day process for changing NAFTA. He said it was still unclear precisely what the letter would say. It could say the United States has reached a deal with Mexico, he said, or it could say that an agreement has been reached with Mexico in the hopes that Canada would be brought into the package at a later date.

The agreement announced Monday will run for an initial 16 years, with an option to revisit issues in six years, and to extend for another 16 years.

It would increase the percentage of each car that must be made in the United States or Mexico to qualify for duty-free treatment. Currently 62.5 percent, the figure would go up to 75 percent.

The agreement would also require a significant portion of each vehicle to be made by workers making at least $16 per hour - a big increase for Mexico.

The White House and Mexican officials were unable to reach an agreement about the steel and aluminum tariffs Trump imposed several months ago, and those discussions are ongoing. "That's the issue we still have to deal with. It's not dealt with," Lighthizer said.

And there were fundamental questions marks about the role of Canada and the future of a regional trade agreement. Pena Nieto, speaking with the president on speaker phone, mentioned several times that he wanted Canada to be involved.

The surprising scenes of Trump and the Mexican president congratulating each other in front of news cameras on successful bilateral negotiations that left Canada out appeared designed, in part, to pressure Canada.

Pena Nieto wrote on Twitter that he had spoken with Trudeau and expressed the "importance of rejoining the process, with the goal of concluding the trilateral negotiation this week."

Pena Nieto's administration wants to reach an agreement soon so that the Mexican Congress has enough time to ratify the deal before President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador takes office on Dec. 1.

Lopez Obrador has been supportive of the negotiations but would be likely to seek changes if the treaty is not completed before he assumes the presidency.

Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is expected to rejoin negotiations in Washington on Tuesday.

A spokesman for Freeland said an agreement would require careful review and more discussions.

"We will only sign a new NAFTA that is good for Canada and good for the middle class," the spokesman said. "Canada's signature is required."

Leading congressional Republicans cautiously welcomed Trump's announcement, while making it clear that they would not embrace a NAFTA 2.0 that leaves out Canada.

"A final agreement should include Canada" to ensure that NAFTA continues to benefit American businesses and families, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said.

No. 2 Senate Republican John Cornyn, R-Texas, said, "This is a positive step, and now we need to ensure the final agreement brings Canada in to the fold and has bipartisan support."

Even if a deal does make its way to Capitol Hill, Congress is certain to struggle to pass it, given divisions over trade within both parties. The difficulties would only increase if the pact is not finalized before the November midterm elections and Democrats retake control of the House.

Trump has made renegotiating NAFTA a centerpiece of his economic and foreign policy agendas, arguing that the trade deal disadvantages American workers by luring U.S. jobs and companies overseas.

This approach has alarmed many Republicans, who support NAFTA's free trade roots and worry about how Trump's approach would affect farmers. Democrats have been split, as some agreed with Trump's focus on manufacturing jobs and others worried about Trump's take-it-or-leave-it negotiating style.

The NAFTA renegotiation has been a rocky one. The president over the past year repeatedly lambasted the 1994 treaty, calling it a "bad joke."

One year ago, Lighthizer kicked off the negotiations by calling for a major overhaul of trade rules to take into account nearly a quarter-century of economic changes and to rectify the imbalance in trade between the United States and its southern neighbor.

Trump, he said, was "not interested in a mere tweaking of a few provisions."

Though trade deals are complex affairs that typically require years of glacial bargaining, administration officials initially hoped to finish the job by the end of 2017. They failed to meet that ambitious timetable and also blew through revised deadlines for the end of March and late May.

This time, the deadline may be real, given a congressional requirement for 90 days notice of an impending trade deal. If the administration doesn't formally notify Congress that it has reached agreement with both Canada and Mexico by the end of August, Pena Nieto, the outgoing Mexican president, will not be able to sign it before he leaves office.

---

The Washington Post's Joshua Partlow in Mexico City and Alan Freeman in Ottawa contributed to this report.Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and a top aide to Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, is depicted in a trailer for a coming Netflix film as one of "Israeli Intelligence's most precious assets of the 20th century."

"The Angel," a thriller by Israeli director and screenwriter Ariel Vromen, appears to put a definitive stamp on Marwan's enigmatic life as the spy who tipped Israel off to Egyptian and Syrian plans for a surprise attack on Yom Kippur 1973 and helped to avert an Israeli defeat.

"Why are you helping Israel?" a voice asks in the trailer.

"Because millions of innocent people will die, on both sides, that's why!" the actor depicting Marwan answers urgently, his voice shaking.

But the truth, according to both Israeli and Egyptian writers, politicians and historians, is far more complicated and, ultimately, may never be known. Marwan died in 2007 in an apparent fall from the balcony of his London home in what appeared to be a suicide. No final ruling on the cause of death has been made, and his family has suggested he was murdered, adding to the intrigue over the 63-year-old's life.

According to the Telegraph, in the months before his death, Marwan told his wife unnamed enemies were out to kill him, and a manuscript of his memoirs had been stolen from his home around the time he died.

After his unmasking as a possible intelligence asset for Israel's Mossad in 2003, Egypt quickly claimed him as a cunningly effective double agent who was, in fact, duping Israel into costly mistakes ahead of the 1973 war.

His disputed status and sudden death briefly became fodder for theories exploring the shady sources of his wealth and his proximity to the top echelons of Egypt's political elite. But Marwan's story, and significance, faded as the 2011 popular revolt against longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak erupted.

Netflix, which is popular in Egypt, has reignited the dormant debate - much to the chagrin of the nationalists dominating Egypt's public life under President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, who assumed power in 2014.

The film is "part of a concerted effort by Israel to make the Mossad look good and to continue to malign and slander Egyptian national symbols," Egyptian lawmaker al-Husseiny Tag al-Din is quoted as saying in the newspaper al Watan.

The article says Mona, Marwan's widow and the daughter of Nasser, declined to comment on the film's trailer but has said in the past her husband worked for the interests of Egypt and anything said by Israel about him is baseless and bereft of any truth.

Egyptians on social media slammed the film and wondered whether their government would add Netflix to its growing list banned websites, which number in the hundreds. Some criticized the filmmakers' decision to cast an Israeli actor to play Sadat, while others said they are curious to see it and suggested it would probably be a closer portrayal of the truth than anything the Egyptian government has offered up.

Most, like a YouTube user called An Edgy Egyptian, dismissed it as "propaganda."

"An incredibly one sided story," the user commented under the trailer on YouTube.

While the Egyptian government has not provided a fuller narrative to back up the claim Marwan was deceiving Israel, Egyptians have pointed to vague instances of government recognition of his service.

Marwan's funeral, at which his coffin was draped in an Egyptian flag, was presided over by the nation's top imam and attended by Mubarak's younger son and onetime heir apparent, Gamal Mubarak, along with Egypt's powerful spy chief, Omar Suleiman.

After Marwan's death, the elder Mubarak told state media that Marwan "carried out patriotic acts that it is not yet time to reveal."

"The Angel" is based on a book by Israeli historian Uri Bar-Joseph, "The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel" that portrays Marwan as an undeniable mole who provided Israeli intelligence with unimpeachable information on Egypt's war plans. The 2016 book suggests he was possibly motivated by Nasser's early distrust of him as both a son-in-law and aide.

Nasser allegedly only reluctantly agreed to Marwan marrying his daughter, seeing the young operative as more motivated by political ambition than love.

Still, after Nasser's death in 1970, Marwan ascended to become a close aide to Sadat, putting him in proximity to the regime's most closely held secrets. The film tracks his efforts to relay war plans to a dedicated Mossad handler and how they were used to counter Egypt and Syria's attack.

According to author Howard Blum, who had spoken with Marwan before his death, the story is not quite so neat. Within Israel's security apparatus, there was a fierce debate over Marwan's loyalties despite a Mossad inquiry that concluded he was not a double agent.

Marwan had warned Israel that Egypt planned to attack in May 1973, provoking a massive deployment of troops and a heightened state of alert over a war that did not materialize - costing Israel millions of dollars and perhaps faith in "The Angel."

When another warning from Marwan came on the eve of the October 1973 war, Israeli military officials were wary and ordered a significantly smaller mobilization that initially struggled to repel the Egyptian and Syrian attack.

For some Israeli military officials, Marwan's initial head-fake in May was proof he was a double agent, Blum wrote.AAP leader said party is on lookout for activists who will pick up local issues, fight for justice and take up problems faced by common man.

AAP leader Rakesh Kumar Sinha said the party leadership will decide if it will contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in West Bengal. (Photo: File | PTI)

Kolkata: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Sunday said it is aiming to emerge as the "best alternative" to the ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and increase its organisational strength at the grassroots level in the state over the next six months.

"We will try to explain to the masses that the best alternative to the ruling Trinamool Congress or other opposition parties in West Bengal can only be AAP. We plan to spread our network in every district of the state. From Delhi, we will visit the state in every six months to monitor the progress," senior AAP leader Rakesh Kumar Sinha said.

He said the party is on the lookout for activists who will pick up local issues, fight for justice and take up the problems faced by the common man.

He was in the city to participate in the third state convention of the party on Sunday.

He said the party leadership will decide if it will contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in West Bengal.

AAP National Spokesperson and head of Delhi Women's wing of the party, Richa Pandey Mishra said, the West Bengal women's wing of AAP was launched during the convention on Sunday.

"We would fight for women's issues - from safety to empowerment," she said listing the priorities of the wing.

An estimated 300 members from 14 districts of the state participated in the convention where a state-level working committee of AAP was also formed.The apartment fire that killed one and injured two others last week on the Northwest Side was caused by someone cooking food on a stove, according to officials with the San Antonio Fire Department.

No criminal charges will be filed in connection to the blaze, according to San Antonio Fire Department spokesman Woody Woodward.

The blaze erupted around 10 p.m. Aug. 20 at the Ashler Oaks Apartments in the 4100 block of Parkdale Street and eventually consumed four apartments and displaced 10 people. It remains unclear in which unit the fire originated.

ON EXPRESSNEWS.COM: Fatal apartment fire: 'like end of the world'

Barbara Ann Lowe, 68, was killed in the fire. Firefighters found her dead in her bed, officials said. According to the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office, she died of injuries related to the fire and a dilated heart.

Lowe's son was one of the people injured in the blaze. A neighbor said Lowe's son tried to rescue his mother from the blaze but was overpowered by the flames.

Another resident, Tai Bannister, fell from his second-floor apartment while saving his dogs from the fire. His family said he fell on his head and required treatment at University Hospital's intensive care unit.

Resident Luis Solis, 28, said the building was not equipped with a sprinkler system, and said he and other residents heard no fire alarms. He also said he spoke with managers, who told him residents are responsible for ensuring their smoke detectors are working.

RELATED: One dead in Northwest Side apartment complex fire

The apartments were built in 1968, according to Bexar County Appraisal District records. San Antonio doesn't require multifamily properties that old to be retrofitted with fire sprinklers unless they go through a major remodel or a change in occupancy, said SAFD spokesman Joe Arrington. The latter means a change in the number of apartment units or the purpose for which the buildings are used.

Since 2003, the city has required all newly constructed apartment complexes, multifamily dwellings and hotels to be equipped with fire sprinkler systems, regardless of how many stories they are, Arrington said.

Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com

Caleb Downs is a crime reporter for mySA.com. Read more of his stories here.| cdowns@mysa.com | Twitter: @calebjdownsAn off-duty San Antonio firefighter was arrested Sunday after he threw an object at his girlfriend's face, causing a cut, authorities said.

David Ruiz, 49, faces a Class A misdemeanor domestic violence charge. He was booked into the Bexar County Jail on a $3,500 bond and has since posted bail and been released.The governor will obviously meet groups of people from all these areas and will need to be a quiet listener.

Jammu and Kashmir has a new leadership at the helm with the departure of its long-standing and well-respected governor, N.N. Vohra. With the state under Governors Rule, the new incumbent is now head of the state and its chief executive too. He has a team of experienced advisers who will need to ensure the governor is briefed appropriately and made conversant with the challenges facing J&K and, through it, the nation. The situation in J&K is highly complex and for someone completely new to the environment it will take some time to grasp the core issues and their nuances. That is why the advisers must lead the governor through initial briefings in a deliberate manner, concentrating on each challenge, its gravity and effect on the stability and security of the state. Besides anything else, it is history that needs to be focused upon in two clear segments  pre-1989 and after the start of the proxy war, which entirely altered the environment. A clear understanding of the aspirations of different segments of the population must be grasped. Ladakh, including Kargil; Kashmir, including all its different segments; and the Jammu division, with its own diversity  all have different perceptions of the challenges. The governor will obviously meet groups of people from all these areas and will need to be a quiet listener. His political experience will stand him in great stead in this exercise. The mismatch in perceptions and ideas will have to be carefully identified to extract where challenges lie and how they must be prioritised. Besides these meetings, the governor will be well advised to allow access to representatives of different groups, cutting across sub-regions. Politicians, teachers and academics, businessmen, prominent media people, lawyers, youth leaders, womens organisations, administrators and many such others will give the governor their differing perceptions and ideas, which are often lost in the maze of security-related focus that J&K sees at most times. One of the most important issues which will emerge in all these sunwais (interactions) is the aspect of administrative accountability for the large financial outlay that J&K receives and whose positive effect at the population end is always considered doubtful. Governance before anything must be the governors priority. There are languishing projects which were under the former governors gaze for revival with additional funds which the state is seeking. These must get impetus and the credibility of ensuring project completion must be demonstrated at least in some projects. In the case of the Kashmir Valley, my advice has always been to make serious attempts to give two continuous good winters to the people; good here means no shortages of resources, adequate snow clearance, functioning medical centres when the heavy snow comes and rescue and relief wherever required.

Noticeably, security is being given second priority among the challenges before the leadership. That is because it remains a work in progress, though much can be done beyond just the conduct of operations to neutralise terrorists. If at the outset the governor can give importance to the Unified Command and comprehend its utility beyond just being a meeting and conference point for the security agencies, it would be a transformation in approach. With infiltration attempts on the rise, the aim of the Deep State in Pakistan is to work towards the next season in terms of filling terrorist numbers and leadership, both being deficient in north Kashmir. The Army must remain focused on preventing this. In south Kashmir, the three challenges in particular are the increasing recruitment of local youth, the killing of local policemen to cause turbulence in the ranks of the J&K police and the attempt to radicalise young people. The efforts towards neutralising all three have been in progress, but there is apparent insufficient success in these. There have been successful efforts in obtaining the cooperation of the clergy to message the youth on the needs to remain moderate in outlook and follow the traditional path of faith in the Valley. These efforts must multiply manifold and social media platforms should be provided for these. Attempts to run such programmes from New Delhi must be curbed except in the field of professional content writing. There is nothing like giving a local colour to the communication efforts with youth. For this, dedicated organisations have to come up under the Unified Command with pooling of resources. A divided effort in this field will not get us the dividend we seek. As to the security of local policemen and soldiers on leave, a community security system must be established, exploiting the negative public response towards terrorists. Policemen can find their own solutions locally if sufficient focus and empowerment is given to them.

As regards the issue of radicalization, the problem has to be recognised, understood and accepted. There is a trend in Kashmir to deny the issue and relate the current practices with the manner in which the faith has always been practiced. This denial is not doing any good and even intellectuals kowtow to it, more out of fear than anything else. The necessity of getting the intelligentsia to remove their fear and speak out against the atrocities of terrorists is essential to trigger a pushback against radicalism and terror.

Finally, two oft-repeated points for the leadership on the basis of long experience. The Pir Panjal must cease to be a physical and mental barrier between the Jammu and Kashmir regions. The leadership must work towards creating more opportunities for the meeting of minds to eventually remove suspicions and fears about the other. The second is that political activity at the grassroots must be encouraged following the panchayat and municipal polls. Outreach activity by the political community, with officials doing follow-up, will greatly assist in confidence-building. The security forces must consider it a part of their responsibility to enable such activity through creation of a secure environment in areas which have not witnessed this for long.

There are many more serious issues to contend with  including the question of Article 35A. The leadership must keep these in mind but work incrementally towards creating an environment to enable more interaction before serious discussions on these matters.The $6.5 billion deals may be minuscule for US defence manufacturers, but the industry does not scoff at any business coming its way.

The defence ministrys big-bang announcement on its approval of purchases worth Rs 46,000 crores for guns, missiles and helicopters must please Indias military. Any focused purchase of sophisticated defence systems like missiles and combat-ready helicopters must go towards propping up preparedness, which is a primary task to be handled, besides being the price to pay for securing our freedom and protecting our borders. Its quite another matter that the timing lends itself easily to this being a sop in military trade and ties with the United States, as the 2+2 India strategic dialogue featuring the US secretary of state and the defence secretary and their Indian counterparts is just over a week away. While Russia remains Indias top military supplier and is also to supply the $5 billion S-400 Triumf air defence missile system, the approvals for the current US purchases will balance Indias strategic ties.

The Rs 46,000-crore deal may be mild compared to what the Rafale deal would potentially do for the Air Force, which is in desperate need of squadrons and fit-to-fly fighters and bombers. The deals, however, also encompass several proposals for the Make in India initiative, including 111 utility and surveillance helicopters for the Navy, besides multi-role copters for submarine warfare intent. The initiative itself has not truly taken off, nor paid good dividends over the years despite efforts made by successive governments to indigenise arms production. A large portion of Indias purchases as the fifth biggest defence spender in the world are still to be paid for in foreign exchange. The $6.5 billion deals may be minuscule for US defence manufacturers, but the industry does not scoff at any business coming its way. At a time of some dissent over trade thanks to the declaration of trade wars by Donald Trump against the rest of the world, such arms procurement must help bilateral ties.

The very fact that India is considering arms purchases with greater ease now is a relief. The Indian defence ministry has been tied down by such inhibitions in the wake of the accusations over Bofors bribes that there have been an atmosphere of fear ruling arms purchases for 30 years. A UPA defence minister had taken this to such an extreme that nothing moved in terms of defence preparedness for years. Given the history, the announcement coming well before any of the earmarked funds lapsing at the end of a financial term is to be welcomed. A pitiful paralysis had struck defence deals for a while. But, even at a time when they are being done to take care of defence needs, the poisonous atmosphere of sharp polarisation in our society means that none of this will go unchallenged. The biggest fear is still about the atmosphere of suspicion spoiling the delivery schedules of Rafale fighters in a time-bound manner to enhance Air Force capabilities.Pope Francis letter to the Catholic faithful last week was remarkable in that the Holy Father apologized not only for the sexual abuses carried out by Catholic priests but also for the cover-up of that abuse carried out by Catholic bishops.

The heart-wrenching pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven, was long ignored, kept quiet or silenced, Francis wrote. To acknowledge the truth of what has happened, in itself this is not enough he added, promising to make all those who perpetrate or cover up these crimes accountable and expressing deep regret that we have delayed in applying these actions and sanctions that are so necessary.

Those are welcome words. But unless they are backed up by action, they will be meaningless. The episcopacy as an institution has been corrupted. A culture of silence allowed a culture of abuse to flourish. Bishops consumed with what the pope called the thirst for power have through both action and inaction allowed evil to spread through the church. That evil must be rooted out.

It is time for the Catholic Church to experience its own #MeToo moment. And it should start here in Washington. Theodore McCarrick, the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, faces credible allegations that he abused not only a 16-year-old altar boy and an 11-year-old boy whose family McCarrick knew but also countless seminarians and young priests who were under his authority. (He has denied abusing the boys and refused to comment on the other allegations.)

McCarrick is the Harvey Weinstein of the Catholic Church. Who knew these allegations against him and failed to act? San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy, for one. A few years ago, McElroy was approached by Richard Sipe, an expert on clergy abuse, who said McCarrick and nearly a dozen other priests and bishops abused children and seminarians. Sipe was so disturbed by what he perceived as McElroys lack of interest during their meetings that in 2016 he sent a 13-page letter  delivered by a process server  in which he told McElroy that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been reported by numerous seminarians and priests of sexual advances and activity.  I have interviewed twelve seminarians and priests who attest to propositions, harassment, or sex with McCarrick, who has stated, I do not like to sleep alone. One priest incardinated in McCarricks Archdiocese of Newark was taken to bed for sex and was told, this is how priests do it in the U.S.

A spokesman for McElroy says he asked Sipe for more information and that he was given essentially gossip, not evidence. But Sipe explained to McElroy that the victims were afraid to come forward. One priest was told by the chancery office, if you speak with the press we will crush you, he wrote.

McElroy did nothing. Sipe shared his letter with the papal nuncio and the pontifical commission for the protection of minors, led by Cardinal Sean OMalley, who also failed to act. A New York priest, Father Boniface Ramsey, says he wrote a similar letter in June 2015 to OMalley, who says he never saw it but should have. Who buried that letter? And who else failed to act?

According to a Pennsylvania grand jury report, the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, moved predator priests around the Diocese of Pittsburgh when he was the bishop there and silenced victims with settlements that included confidentiality agreements. His resignation letter is on Francisdesk, as all bishops must submit their resignations at 75. The Holy Father simply needs to accept it. The same day Francis issued his letter, Wuerls successor in Pittsburgh, Bishop David Zubik, appeared on Fox News Special Report, where he told Brett Baier, There was no cover-up. But Zubik knows there was a cover-up because he was at the epicenter of it as director of clergy personnel under Wuerl.

The bishops were responsible for protecting priests and parishioners but were more concerned with protecting their own positions and power. The bishops should have trembled last Wednesday when they heard the first reading for that days Mass in every Catholic Church throughout the world: Thus says the Lord God: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing themselves!  My sheep have been given over to pillage, and  have become food for every wild beast  because my shepherds did not look after my sheep.  I swear I am coming against these shepherds. I will claim my sheep from them and put a stop to their shepherding.  I will save my sheep.

Holy Father, put a stop to their shepherding. Save your sheep.I have long been skeptical of the political wisdom or evidentiary basis of efforts to impeach President Donald Trump.

My reasons: Being a terrible president and a wretched person are not impeachable offenses. Robert Muellers investigation has so far produced evidence that can be interpreted as obstruction of justice but not as clear proof. Impeachment in the House would be unlikely to translate into conviction in the Senate, even if Democrats win both chambers in the fall. Impeachment without conviction could strengthen Trump politically, much as it did for Bill Clinton after his own 1998 impeachment.

And, like it or not, Trump remains popular with tens of millions of Americans. To overturn the results of an election for anything less than unambiguous evidence of criminal behavior is a danger to democracy itself.

At least that was my view until last week. Michael Cohens guilty plea changes this. The Constitutions standard for impeachment is Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. The standard is now met.

Trumps longtime fixer acknowledged in court that he violated campaign finance laws by paying hush money to two women in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office. That means that, as a candidate, Trump is credibly alleged to have purposefully conspired with Cohen to commit criminal acts. That means the duo did so for purposes of influencing (an) election for Federal office, which is the legal definition of a campaign contribution.

It also means that as president, Trump allegedly sought to conceal the arrangement by failing to note in his 2017 financial disclosure forms his reimbursements to Cohen.

The Trumpian rebuttal to these charges is that Cohen is a sleazy lawyer and proven liar. And that the most prominent attempt to prosecute a political figure for violating campaign-finance laws  involving former Democratic Sen. and 2004 vice-presidential candidate John Edwards  failed in court. And that campaign-finance violations dont rise to the level of impeachable offenses, anyway.

Cohens sentencing isnt until December, when hes expected to be sent to prison for up to five years. Ask yourself: Does he look like a guy eager to have his sentence doubled?

As for Edwards, his case failed because prosecutors could not prove that the former North Carolina senator received campaign donations from benefactors to influence an election, rather than simply to cover up an embarrassing affair. In Trumps case, there is little doubt about the purpose of the payment to Stormy Daniels: to prevent disclosure of their alleged liaison, less than a month before the election and barely two weeks after the Access Hollywood tape came to light.

The president is now, in effect, an unindicted co-conspirator on charges already criminally prosecuted by the government against Cohen. Why should a lighter standard apply to Trump, since hes the one at whose direction Cohen claims to have carried out the payments?

That question should especially engage those conservatives who demanded Clintons impeachment (as I did). Take South Carolinas Lindsey Graham, one of the House managers overseeing the case against the 42nd president.

He said, Today, Republicans, with a small handful of Democrats, will vote to impeach President Clinton. Why? Because we believe he committed crimes resulting in cheating our legal system. We believe he lied under oath numerous times, that he tampered with evidence, that he conspired to present false testimony to a court of law. We believe he assaulted our legal system in every way. Let it be said that any president who cheats our institutions shall be impeached.

The emphasis here is mine. Ask yourselves the following questions:

If breaking the law (by lying under oath) to conceal an affair was impeachable, why is breaking the law (by violating campaign-finance laws) to conceal an affair not impeachable?

If cheating the electoral system (by means of a burglary) was impeachable, why is cheating the electoral system (by means of illicit hush money) not impeachable?

If cheating our institutions (by means of an assault in every way on the legal system) is impeachable, why is cheating those institutions (by means of nonstop presidential mendacity and relentless attacks on the Justice Department and the FBI) not impeachable?

What the Constitution demands is the impeachment and removal from office of this lawless president.This is a portion of a speech given by now-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the floor of Congress:

And, as everyone in America knows, the president lied to the nation. I do not need to recite the defiant, indignant, finger-wagging denial that the president gave to 270 million Americans who had placed their trust in him as the chief law enforcement officer of this land.

This speech was given during the Bill Clinton impeachment hearings. Mr. McConnell seems to have a short memory because he should apply it to the current occupant of the White House.

Andres Luevano

Hitting back

Re: The deadly trap that is fake news, Editorial, Aug. 16:

If I can get my two cents worth. Your editorial wasnt nearly as nasty and anti-Donald Trump as Im sure the Boston Globe would have liked. Of course, it failed to mention some valid points it should have, but Ill skip all that except to say that President Trump has a very good reason for hitting back  yes, hitting back  at the liberal press. Anyone reading newspapers or listening to TV news knows that. This paper knows it too.

What I really wish to say, however, is thank you very much for publishing that excellent letter by Richard McDonnell (Press hypocrisy, Your Turn, Aug. 16). His letter was right on the money and echoes my views 100 percent.

As for columnist Josh Brodesky (Trump attacks on press a dangerous game, Aug. 12), I once thought I saw a modicum of evenhandiness in his columns, but now I realize he is just another young brainwashed liberal, and I view what he writes through that prism.

Thats it, except to say that Im dumbfounded that the McDonnell letter found its way into print, especially that day. Maybe you have a closet conservative lurking somewhere in the shadows.

Robert E. Blake

The big dog

There is an old familiar saying: If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas.

In keeping with the characteristics of the present political scene, perhaps we need to bring that old adage up-to-date: If you lay down with the Big Dog youre likely to wake up with an indictment.

Robert Paul

Definitely witch hunt

Re: A guilty plea, a conviction, peril ahead, Editorial, Thursday:

The Express-News tells us the investigation of President Donald Trump is not a witch hunt. They must have their own definition of witch hunt. Websters defines it as the searching out of those with unpopular views for punishment. Cambridge defines it as an attempt to find and punish people whose opinions are not popular. Sound familiar?

We were told that Trump colluded with the Russians. After 18 months and $17 million there is no collusion. Paul Manafort was guilty of tax evasion from income he got from some Ukrainians 12 years ago, and Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations for paying off some women. Neither involves any crime committed by Trump.

But we do know that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $9.2 million for a dossier of false information put together by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele working with Russian contacts to use against Trump. Was this collusion with Russians?

We also know that Clinton had top-secret classified documents on her personal server. Each one of these constitutes a crime. Is she being prosecuted? Biased FBI and Justice Department officials violated the law by using false information to secure FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and his supporters. Is anyone being prosecuted?

Mueller has 17 lawyers assisting him, (according to Politifact), 13 are Democrats. Some of them were donors to Clinton.

This entire investigation has been a prosecution in search of crimes of Trump and his supporters. But theres no witch hunt here, says the Express-News.

Liam Harvie

No charter changes

Re: Unions S.A. First campaign rings of MAGA, Brian Chasnoff column, Thursday:

Thank you, Brian Chasnoff, for succinctly defining the San Antonio Fire Associations actions. I have been following its machinations, but having them spread out over time has made it confusing.

I had already decided to vote against the charter revisions because watching the fire union head-butting with the city over the years has not inspired me to believe in its unselfishness. And truly it should understand that if you behave as if you have something to hide, then people will think you do. That we learned in kindergarten.

They have made it harder to believe that they have San Antonios best interest to heart. Im hoping that the voters will realize that at the polls.

Sue Snyder

Immigrant hypocrisy

For weeks, the left-wing media, in an attempt to aid and abet the Democrats, bombarded the public with the plight of illegal immigrant children separated from their parents. They neglected to be stressed when President Barack Obama was implementing the same policy.

Now sadly, like Kate Steinle, another beautiful life, that of Mollie Tibbets, was snuffed out because of an illegal immigrant who should have never been in the USA. As soon as the fake news media found out it was an illegal arrested in the killing of Mollie, they lost interest in the coverage of the story.

These are just two among scores of children separated from their families, and there wont be any happy reunion. And there are actually morons out there demonstrating to abolish ICE. Some especially corrupt left-wing pols think this is a winning issue. God help us if these kooks ever get back in power. I can see it now  open borders, soaring crime, higher taxes and an endless stream of phony scandals prompting a never-ending barrage of hearings, investigations and special prosecutors.

If it werent for double standards, the left would have no standards at all.

Gene PetersonThe city of San Antonio asked the Texas Supreme Court on Monday to dismiss a lawsuit challenging its transfer of land next to the Hays Street Bridge that is set to be developed with a controversial apartment complex.

The Hays Street Bridge Restoration Group, a nonprofit that led the restoration of the bridge, sued the city in 2012 to prevent it from transferring the property, at 803 N. Cherry Street, to Alamo Beer Co. The group arranged the donation of the 1.7 acres to the city and claims it was supposed to be turned into a park, but the city disputes that.

Alamo Beer owner Eugene Simor, and developer Mitch Meyer want to build a five-story apartment complex on the property, but they have run into staunch opposition from East Side residents who worry that it would be out of character for the neighborhood and block views of the bridge.

RELATED: Hays Street Bridge apartments closer to reality after neighborhood associations support

City Manager Sheryl Sculley approved the complex last month after the citys Historic and Design Review Commission rejected it twice.

The city claims that nothing is left to be decided in the case because it already did what it was ordered to do in a 2014 judgment from Bexar County District Court, which said it must devote the proceeds from the land sale to the bridges restoration, City Attorney Andy Segovia said Monday.

After the property was sold in 2015, the city used its $291,000 in proceeds to offset its share of the cost of the bridges conversion into a pathway for pedestrians and cyclists, which was completed in 2010, city spokeswoman Thea Setterbo said.

Amy Kastely, an attorney for the restoration group, questioned why the city would have kept pursuing its appeal of the 2014 decision if it had obeyed the order.

To read more about the Hays Street Bridge battle, see Tuesdays Business section or click here to visit our subscriber website, ExpressNews.com.

Richard Webner is a San Antonio-based staff writer covering real estate and development. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | rwebner@express-news.net | Twitter: @RWebnerWeek of August 27



Mayfield Elementary hosts the Scholastic Book Fair all week.Grandparents luncheons will be held Wednesday and Thursday during students regularly scheduled lunchtimes, and the fair will have extended hours on Wednesday and Thursday. Visit the Book Fair and shop for the whole family! For more information click here or contact Amelia Grubb, 423-472-4541, agrubb@clevelandschools.org.



Cleveland High hosts an Air Force JROTC Town Hall Meeting on Tuesday, 6:00 pm in the Betsy Vines Memorial Theater. Students and parents are invited to find out more about the JROTC program. For more information contact Whitney Harden, wharden@clevelandschools.org.



The Cleveland City Schools Board of Education Curriculum Retreat will be Thursday at the Denning Center. For more information contact Andrea Byerly, 423-472-9571, abyerly@clevelandschools.org.



Cleveland Middle School's 4th AnnualHealth Fairwill be Friday. All students will tour theinformation and education booths set up in the gym about the health/wellness resources that are available in our community. Sixth and eighth grades students will also receive the required health screenings.For more information contact Stephanie Pirkle, 423-479-9641, spirkle@clevelandschools.org.



Blythe-Bower Elementary will host the All Pro Dad Breakfast on Friday, 7:40 am. All students andfathers are invited to attend this breakfast program.For more information contact Laura Murray, 423-479-5121, lmurray@clevelandschools.org.



Cleveland City Schools will observe Labor Day on Monday, September 3. Schools and administrative offices will be closed. Classes

will resume on Tuesday, September 4.AvatarMind and companies like it are rethinking plans for international expansion in the face of widening tariffs.

Analysts say there is an obvious link to direct tariffs on industrial machinery and robot parts.

At a trade show in southern Beijing, children and parents crowd around a group of pink and blue dancing robots that resemble toddler-sized Power Rangers.

The robots  wired with wide LED smiles and cutesy personalities  are the brainchild of Chinese-American company AvatarMind, built to be futuristic retail workers, teachers assistants and household helpers.

But even as the company polishes off production of 2,000 units, AvatarMind and companies like it are rethinking plans for international expansion in the face of widening tariffs.

We want to sell them for the price that is affordable for families, not just institutions. And Trumps tariffs may affect that, AvatarMind chief executive Dr John Ostrem said at the World Robot Conference, which ends Sunday.

The main competitor to AvatarMinds iPal humanoid robot is a similar but much pricier bot called Pepper, which is made by Japans SoftBank Group Corp.

Annualised growth rates for robot production in China dropped from 35.1 per cent in May to just 6.3 per cent in July, according to the countrys bureau of statistics

Chinas National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) says the slowdown is not related to trade.

But analysts say there is an obvious link to direct tariffs on industrial machinery and robot parts, as well as domestic manufacturers putting off production during trade talks.

How could it not be related? said Iris Pang, economist for Greater China at ING Wholesale Banking in Hong Kong. The trade war may have already deferred some decisions of export-related manufacturers.

US tariffs on $16 billion worth of Chinese goods came into effect at midnight on Wednesday, alongside retaliatory Chinese tariffs on an equal amount of US goods.

Although robots arent directly named, the US list includes electronics, auto parts and other items that require automated manufacturing and robots. An earlier round of $34 billion tariffs on Chinese goods lists industrial robots.

The situation could worsen for Chinese robotics manufacturers, analysts say, if the US imposes a further $200 billion in tariffs on a range of consumer goods that create manufacturing demand for robots in China.

China has included robotics as one of 10 industries to get state support under the countrys Made in China 2025 industrial plan, which aims to make it a world leader in key technologies within the next decade.

Some Chinese companies hope the countrys cornerstone One Belt One Road foreign policy initiative will provide a boost even if trade with the United States evaporates.

Others said the low cost of Chinese manufacturing would - for now - compensate for tariffs in the US, where competing products like Pepper are still more expensive.

Li Shuai, a manager at Chinese medical robot firm Remebot, said her company is seeking FDA approval for its robots.

There is a similar product abroad in France, Li said. Its domestic price is probably in the tens of millions, and the price of our equipment is controlled at about five or six million. Therefore, there is still a great advantage for us.

(Source)The Cross River state House of Assembly is mourning the death of one of its lawmakers, Hon Simon Nkoro, who died after a protracted illness just three months after his colleague slumped and passed.

Premium Times reports that Nkoro represented Ikom constituency 2 until his death and was said to have died on Saturday, August 25.

Meanwhile, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Governor Ben Ayade has expressed shock and sadness over the demise of the lawmaker.

READ ALSO: APC leaders react as Governor Obaseki is attacked by thugs in Edo

The governor, in a statement signed by his spokesperson, Christian Ita, said the death of the lawmaker was a loss so painful to bear.

Mr Nkoros demise leaves a sour taste in my mouth and ache in my heart. But then, we cannot question God, Him and only Him alone has prerogative over life.

However, as a human, my heart is heavy, filled with sorrow. I agnoise and mourn this death.

While decrying that the late lawmaker departed at a time his service to the state was most needed, Ayade described him as a dedicated lawmaker.

He said that the late lawamaker was a consumate politician, a team player and loyal partyman, whose death is a huge loss to the people and government of Cross River.

The governor offered his heartfelt condolences to Nkoro-Egbungs family, colleagues and constituency.

He prayed God to grant them the strength to bear the irreplaceable loss, saying: We are together with you in prayers in this moment of unspeakable sadness.

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His death was reportedly confirmed by Friday Okpechi, his colleague representing Obubra constituency 1, in the afternoon of Sunday, August 26.

The report said the late Nkoro was a two term lawmaker.

Legit.ng reports that in May, 2018, the state had lost Stephen Ukpukpen, who represented Obodu constituency.

Even Atiku knows he cannot spend only a term in office| Legit.ng TV

Source: LegitThe campaign office of former vice president of Nigeria, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, on Sunday, August 26, debunked the story from a section of the media that the presidential aspirant for the 2019 election had defected from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

A statement by the office described the report as a malicious attempt to confuse the public about the aspiration of Atiku ahead of the forthcoming presidential primaries election of the PDP.

For the avoidance of any doubts, Atiku remains the frontline aspirant for the presidential ticket of the PDP, the statement obtained by Legit.ng said.

READ ALSO: APC leaders react as Governor Obaseki is attacked by thugs in Edo

Explaining further, the statement noted that in the past two months, Atiku Abubakar had moved across states in the country consulting with stakeholders of the PDP and explaining to them his agenda.

The agenda, according to the statement is encapsulated in the acronym JOBS (Jobs, Opportunity, Being united and Security) for Nigeria.

The nationwide consultations continue this week with visits to the south west, north west and north central zones of the country.

Atiku's passion and commitment to winning the PDP primaries is without any compromise and to assume that he will abandon the hard work he has done with the positive results he is getting from the stakeholders of the party is to say the least preposterous and unthinkable, the statement said.

PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app

The campaign office called on the supporters of Atiku to remain steadfast and see the contrived news of defection as an attempt to distract him from the set task of winning the PDP ticket and the 2019 presidential election.

The Next President of Nigeria. Who Will Win the 2019 Elections? | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- A 23-year-old mother was arrested for selling her baby in Edo state

- The woman reportedly sold her six-week-old child for N200,000

- She reportedly used part of the money to buy a mobile phone

A 23-year-old mother, Miracle Johnson, has been arrested by operatives of the Edo state police command for allegedly selling her six-week-old baby.

Police commissioner, Johnson Kokumo, said the suspect sold the baby to an orphanage in Onitsha for N200,000 and used some part of the money to buy a mobile phone.

The Punch reports that Miracle, a mother of two, blamed her action on frustration and the inability of her husband to take care of her and her other children.

READ ALSO: APC not troubled by defections ahead of governorship election - Aregbesola

She said: My baby was born on July 2. I sold her due to frustration. My husband was just struggling (to provide for us). My friend (Mama Joy) said that since my husband was not taking care of me, if I did it (sold the baby), I could give the money to my husband to start a business or buy a motorcycle.

Two weeks later, she came back. I did not know what happened to me. So, I carried a bag, picked some things and left. I sold her to an orphanage in Onitsha. The orphanage bought the child for N200,000. I just bought only a phone; I did not want to buy it, but she (Mama Joy) forced me to do so.

I told my pastor what I did and that it was a mistake for which I would never forgive myself. So, my husband and I went to a police station to report. I know what I did was not good. I pray that my child will forgive me.

Her husband, Johnson Omovuokpor, expressed anger that his wife went ahead with her plan, in spite of his disapproval.

Miracle, a mother of two, blamed her action on frustration. Photo source: Punch

The husband said: When she told me about her plan, I told her to forget about it and exercise patience. On that day, I took my motorcycle out for repairs. When I went back home to get some money, I saw my first daughter with my neighbour.

When I asked about my wifes whereabouts, I was told that she went out with a bag, saying that she was going to buy something. So, I remembered what she said she wanted to do with the baby. When she called me later in the afternoon to tell me that she had sold the baby, I cursed her and ended the call. I became confused afterwards and could not do anything for the rest of that day.

The commissioner of police said the baby would be rescued and the mother and buyers would be charged to court.

PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 news app

He said: It is an act against laws in Nigeria. Now that we have the woman in our net, we will definitely charge her to court. The baby will be rescued.

Legit.ng earlier reported that a 28-year-old man named Ugochukwu Nwachukwu and his 30-year-old wife Glory Ugochukwu reportedly sold three different babies including their own child for N600,000.

According to Vanguard, the couple made this confession at the Imo state Police Headquarters, when they were paraded by the state commissioner of police, Dazuki Galadanchi, alongside 17 other suspects.

Mom's Blog: How to Talk to Your Child on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- The Akwa Ibom APC has declined declaring Senator Godswill Akpabio as the leader of the party in the state

- The party also resolved that the state's caucus chairman Atuekong Don-Etiebet will continue as Akwa Ibom APC leader

- The decision followed resistance by stakeholders in the party after the defection of the former minority leaders from PDP

The All Progressives Congress in Akwa Ibom state has resolved that the state's caucus chairman of the party Atuekong Don-Etiebet would continue as the leader of APC in the state.

The decision of the Akwa Ibom state chapter followed a meeting by stakeholders of the party over plans to make the former Senate minority leader, Godswill Akpabio, the leader of the APC in the state.

It was gathered that in its meeting which held on Friday, August 24, Don-Etiebet, a former minister of petroleum and national chairman of the defunct ANPP, was given the mandate to continue as the leader of the party in the state.

READ ALSO: If you're not loosing sleep over impeachment, reconvene Senate - APC dares Saraki

Sources privy to the meeting said the decision to allow Don-Etiebet continue as leader of the party was sealed after the meeting on Saturday, August 25, which was attended by Senator John Udoedehe, Sam Enwang, Obong Nsima Ekere, Umana Umana and Obong Rita Akpan.

Although Akpabio had promised to abide by the decision of the stakeholders upholding the status of Don-Etiebiet as leader of the party and chairman of caucus after his plea to be made an alternate chairman of caucus was roundly resisted by stakeholders.

Following the resistance, Enwang had argued that it was contrary to the APC's constitution.

Also, the decision by the stakeholders to retain Don-Etiebet as leader of the party over Senator Akpabio was part of a six-point resolution adopted at the meeting.

READ ALSO: Drama as mother sells baby to buy phone in Edo state (photo)

Other resolutions adopted during the meeting included that: "A vote of confidence is passed on President Muhammadu Buhari, the chairman of caucus and leader of the party Atuekong Don-Etiebiet as well as the chairman of the party Mr. Ini Okopido.

"That senator Godswill Akpabio is welcomed to the party; and that there is no zoning, hence there will be no automatic ticket or right of first refusal for members of the party who are currently holding elective positions."

Sources said some members of the caucus had threatened to leave the APC if Akpabio had insisted on leading the party in the state because they were yet to know the former minority leader's purpose for joining the party.

A source said the resolution by the APC stakeholders in the state was a saving grace intended to forestall more defections from the party.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that members of the APC in Akwa Ibom had kicked against the speculated defection of the minority leader of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio.

PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app

The party members under the aegis of Akwa Ibom Progressives Watch petitioned the national chairman of the APC, Adams Oshiomhole, warning on the impending dangers of defection of Akpabio, a former governor of Akwa Ibom state to the APC.

The group said it had noted with deep concern the broad chorus of disapproval and complete despondency among different strata of members of the APC in Akwa Ibom state over the defection of Akpabio to the party.

Nigeria News 2018: Buhari Reacts To APC Senators Betrayal | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit Nigeria- The Coalition of Niger Delta Agitators have threatened to resume attacks in the Niger Delta if the country is not restructured

- The militants also reacted to the recent freezing of the Akwa Ibom state government account by the EFCC; advising the agency to desist from such acts of official recklessness

- They further condemned the recent threat made against Senate president Bukola Saraki by a leader of the Miyetti Allah association

Niger Delta militants, under the umbrella of the Coalition of Niger Delta Agitators, have threatened to resume attacks if the country is not restructured.

The militants issued the threat in a statement signed by the leader of the Niger Delta Watchdogs, John Duku, in Uyo on Saturday, August 25, Punch reports.

Legit.ng gathers that the militants said the threat became necessary following what they described as the anti-democratic actions of the federal government and the All Progressives Congress (APC).

They further condemned the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for the recent freezing of the account of the Akwa Ibom state government.

READ ALSO: We won't step down for you - 12 PDP aspirants tell Ortom

The statement read in part: After carefully studying the recent political development in Nigeria in general and the Niger Delta in particular, the Coalition of Niger Delta Agitators hereby wishes to state as follows:

We hereby condemn the recent freezing of the Akwa Ibom state government account by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and we view it as an act of intimidation by the agent of the federal government and the APC in order to weaken the smooth running of government in the Niger Delta state.

We hereby warn the EFCC and other agents of government to desist from this act of official recklessness and breach of the constitution.

The action of the EFCC and the federal government is against the laid-down procedure of investigation stipulated in the EFCC acts; the EFCC has no right or basis whatsoever to freeze any state government account.

Doing so against the Akwa Ibom state government is therefore a calculated attempt to cripple the activities of the state government, label its officials as corrupt, and punish the innocent people of Akwa Ibom state.

From all indications, the attack is not on Governor Udom Emmanuel but on the good people of the state because of the personal hatred the APC-led government has for the people of the state in particular and the Niger Delta as a whole.

We want to ask, why is it that EFCC singles out opposition states like Akwa Ibom and Benue states for this unjust act? Why are they not seeing the glaring corruption perpetrated by other state governors and other APC states?

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The group also condemned the recent threat made against Senate President Bukola Saraki, by a leader of the Miyetti Allah association.

It said: We hereby condemn the recent anti-Saraki threat by Miyetti Allah leaders and describe it as treasonable.

We also warn that any further attempt to attack or forcefully remove the Senate president from office shall be met with stiff resistance from the Coalition of Niger Delta Agitators and we promise that all business activities in the Niger Delta shall be completely shut down.

Recall that Legit.ng previously reported that the Coalition of Niger Delta Agitators called on President Muhammadu Buhari to resign over the under achievements recorded by his administration.

The group, which made the demand in a statement, said the Buhari administration had achieved little in terms of infrastructural development since it assumed office.

Meet Sunny Ofehe, the new face of Niger Delta development - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng- Pope Francis has asked for forgiveness over the sexual abuse scandal rocking the Catholic Church

- The pontiff asked for forgiveness for the time that passed without showing compassion to the survivors

- He also asked for forgiveness from the families of child sex abuse victims who had killed themselves as a result of their trauma

Pope Francis on Sunday, August 26, in Dublin, renewed his plea for forgiveness for all kinds of abuse of power practiced by members of the church and all its institutions.

In a speech during mass before 500,000 people in Dublin on Sunday, the pontiff spoke of meeting eight survivors of sexual abuse on Saturday, August 25, NAN reports.

We ask forgiveness for the time that passed without showing compassion to the survivors he added. We ask for forgiveness for the persons in charge within the church hierarchy who did not take charges against this kind of abuse," he said.

READ ALSO: Restructure Nigeria or well resume attacks - N/Delta militants threaten FG

The pope had earlier said that clergy sex abuse scandals were an open wound that must be treated with firm and decisive action.

He said this at the Marian Shrine of Knock on Sunday, his second day in Ireland.

This open wound challenges us to be firm and decisive in the pursuit of truth and justice, Francis said in an Angelus message at the Marian Shrine of Knock, drawing applause from the crowd.

Pope Francis had on August 15 asked for forgiveness from the families of child sex abuse victims who had killed themselves as a result of their trauma. He equally commended one survivor for telling his story.

In comments published in German tabloid, Bild, the pope described Daniel Pittets memoir Father, I Forgive You as a testament to how deeply embedded evil can be in the heart of a servant of the church.

PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app

Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that thirty-four Chilean bishops offered their resignation to Pope Francis over allegations that they covered up clergy sex abuse scandals.

In a statement read out in a press conference, the bishops said all placed their mandates in the hands of the Holy Father, so that he would decide freely over each of them.

Catholic faithful protest killings in a church in Benue - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit- The APC has condemned any attempt to weaken INEC ahead of 2019 general elections

- Yekini Nabena, the party acting national publicity secretary, called on Nigerians to resist desperate politicians

- Nabena also urged citizens of the country to support President Buhari's second term bid

The All Progressives Congress (APC) has asked Nigerians to resist desperate politicians and their political parties bent on deploying illegal, undemocratic and sinister means, including violence to manipulate elections.

Nigerian Tribune reports that the APC made this known in a statement by its acting national publicity secretary, Yekini Nabena.

The statement read: Our call comes against the backdrop of the recent seizure of a Nigerian-bound ship detained in South Africa for carrying arms and explosives. Nigerians will also recall recent arms seizures by the Nigeria customs service.

READ ALSO: Drama as mother sells baby to buy phone in Edo state

This is a red-flag security agency must note and be alert to as political activities heighten in the leadup to coming elections.

We invite the opposition to wake up to new realities where votes count and the peoples will prevail in all elections. We also call on all well-meaning Nigerians to support ongoing progressive efforts by the President Muhammadu Buhari-led APC administration to ensure that our elections are transparent, free, fair and credible.

Finally, we call on the National Assembly to urgently do the needful by reconvening to consider and pass the 2019 election budget of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). We condemn any attempt to weaken INEC ahead of the 2019 election.

We alert our supporters, members and indeed the general public to a purported membership registration website of the All Progressives Congress (APC), apcregistration.com. The website which is trending on social media is unauthorised and a scam.

Our internal investigation has revealed that the fake website is sponsored by one of the main opposition political parties in its desperate and criminal plot to harvest APC members ahead of the 2019 general elections.

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We have deliberately not named the political party and hereby call on relevant security agencies to urgently investigate the website and its sponsors.

Meanwhile, we urge our teeming supporters and members to take advantage of the ongoing Continuous Nationwide Membership Registration exercise in all 36 States and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

The exercise will include both fresh registrations and revalidation of existing membership for the purposes of issuance of the Partys permanent membership cards

Meanwhile, Legit.ng had reported the APC accused INEC of leaking information on its congresses and primary elections submitted to the commission.

The party made the allegation in a statement issued by its national publicity secretary, Yekini Nabena, on Friday, August 24, in Abuja.

It said that there was need for INEC to look into its internal handling of official correspondence in order to put a stop to such leaks.

Nigeria Latest News: Buhari Reacts To APC Senators Betrayal | on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit- Atiku Abubakars constituents are praising President Buhari over the flag-off of the N22.699 billion reconstruction of the Mayo-Belwa-Jada-Ganye-Toungo road

- One resident said the issue could affect the outcome of the 2019 election, in which Atiku is an aspirant for the presidency

- Mustafa Shehuri, the minister of state for power, works and housing, stated that the 112 kilometres road project was in fulfillment of the APCs campaign promises

The flag-off of the N22.699 billion reconstruction of the Mayo-Belwa-Jada-Ganye-Toungo road in Adamawa has elicited positive reactions from residents of the area.

The residents made their feeling known at the ceremony marking the flag-off of the project on Saturday, August 25, Daily Trust reports.

Legit.ng gathers that the area is also home to former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, who is also an aspirant for the presidency in the forthcoming 2019 elections.

The rehabilitation of the road had been started two decades ago by the defunct Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), under the leadership of Muhammadu Buhari.

READ ALSO: Nigeria is doomed if we do not restructure - Attah

Since that time, the road did not receive any attention; even during the eight year administration of Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar.

One resident, a certain Gambo Tardo, said the issue could affect the outcome of 2019 election; not only in Toungo, Jada, Ganye and Mayo-Belwa, but also in some communities in Taraba state.

Another resident reportedly stated: Our kinsman should have influenced this project when he was in government; he could have taken the credit.

The minister of state for power, works and housing, Mustafa Shehuri, who was present at the ceremony, stated that the 112 kilometres road project was in fulfillment of the campaign promises made by the All Progressives Congress (APC) to the people of the area.

He said: The 112 kilometre road which terminates at Toungo serves as a vital link between Taraba state and the Republic of Cameroon, as well as, to the Mambilla Hydro Power Plant, the Gashaka-Gumti National park and several agricultural communities.

Consequently, due to the strategic nature of the important towns and cities it cuts across, the road attracts high vehicular traffic, all year round.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that Alhaji Abdullahi Sugar, an associate of Atiku Abubakar, said the former vice president will send President Muhammadu Buhari back to Daura, come February 2019.

Sugar said Atikus nationwide appeal would enable him defeat Buhari; not minding the incumbency factor.

He said if the former vice president gets the PDP ticket, he would send Buhari out of the Presidential Villa through popular votes.

Atiku versus Buhari: Who will win? - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng- The Nigeria police force said it has complied with the directives for the overhaul and reformation of SARS

- It said it has set up a committee to monitor the SARS operatives to ensure full compliance

- The force pledged that there will be no more rights violations

The Nigeria police say they are giving Nigerians a new special anti-robbery squad (SARS) that will not violate human rights.

Police spokesman Moshood Jimoh said in Abuja that henceforth citizens will see a squad that meets the standard demanded by the government, The Nation reports.

Recall that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo recently ordered the re-organisation of SARS following incessant complaints from Nigerians about rights violations by policemen attached to the unit.

READ ALSO: Drama as mother sells baby to buy phone in Edo state (photo)

We have fully complied with the directives for the overhaul and reformation of SARS, Moshood said.

Measures have been taken to curb indiscipline and alleged human rights violations, he added, saying: SARS as a strike unit of the Force has been making progress in tackling armed robbery, kidnapping, cattle rustling and other violent crimes but the presidential directive is limiting their operation to armed robbery and kidnapping and we have sent a circular round.

The IGP has equally set up a committee of senior police officers and NGO, CSOs, including the people behind the EndSARS campaign; they are part of the committee and they will be going out to ensure compliance.

We also have the IGP X-Squad, the IGPs Monitoring Unit, we have the Police Public Complaints Rapid Response Unit, and the Police Complaint Unit under the Force Public Relation Office  all these arms are part of the committee and they are accessible to members of the public so that those who have complaints can reach out to us.

We have carried out necessary steps. At the state level, SARS will be commanded by a Chief Superintendent of Police or higher rank and the IGP has equally directed that a medical/psychological evaluation be carried out on this personnel.

Also, a new branded uniform is being fashioned for SARS personnel and the uniform will have Federal SARS boldly written behind and in front of it. We have the uniform on the ground already but more are being produced.

You will no longer see anybody wearing mufti. Some of the uniforms are being distributed and more are being procured for distribution.

So, in a few days from now, people will see a new branded SARS because we are equally mindful of the criminal elements that would want to cash in on the opportunity of the reform and that is why the Commanders of SARS were directed to go for relevant lectures while their second in command and others will continue to carry out his responsibility."

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Legit.ng previously reported that operatives of SARS arrested two private security guards over an alleged theft of N5 million from the coffers of the Maiduguri Specialist Hospital.

A competent source told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the suspects were nabbed in Maiduguri on Saturday, August 25, in following a tip-off by men of the command.

The source said that the suspects were already placed on SARS wanted list since May. NAN gathered that the suspects gained access to the money through the ceiling in the office of the cashier in the hospital on May 1, where they allegedly broke the safe and stole the amount."

Nigeria Latest News: Osinbajo Orders Overhaul Of The Dreaded SARS | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- Tiv Area Traditional Council in Benue state has banned marriage festivities

- The council says such party-like activities are alien to Tiv culture

- It also declares that total expenses on marriage, including dowry or bride price as well as sundry issues, must not exceed N100,000

The practice of holding festivities in the house of a bride's parents during traditional marriages has been banned by the Tiv Area Traditional Council (TATC) in Benue state.

Daily Trust reports that the practice was banned on the ground that such party-like activities are alien to Tiv culture.

Legit.ng gathers that the council also pegged total expenses on marriage, including dowry or bride price as well as sundry issues, at N100,000 in any part of Tivland.

The council stated this in a communique issued at the end of the general assembly of the Tiv nation held at the TATC chambers on Friday, August 17, and was chaired by the Tor Tiv, Professor James Ayatse.

READ ALSO: APC cries out over cloned website, accuses opposition party of being responsible

The communique read: "The practice of holding festivities in the house of the girls parents popularly known as traditional marriage involving cutting of cake, dances, parties, should be discontinued as it is alien to the Tiv way of life. Celebration of a new wife is done by the Tiv people only in the husbands house.

"Love should be the primary issue between the families concerned in marriage discussion and transaction but not money. Therefore, total expenses on marriage including dowry or bride price (kem kwase) and all sundry issues (Azaan a kwase), which at the moment vary from one community or family to another, should not exceed one hundred thousand naira (N100,000.00) in Tivland."

It abolished the practice of inviting large numbers of friends and well-wishers to traditional marriage ceremony where bride price is to be paid. It stated that this occasion shall involve only the elders of the two families concerned.

According to the council, Tiv girl to be given out in marriage must attain the age of 18 years and above. It stated that traditional rulers and elders would boycott traditional marriage that violates the marriage tradition.

The council said that denial of traditional marriage registration, including other traditional sanctions the community may deem appropriate, would be part of consequences of violating the marriage tradition.

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According to Ter Makurdi, Chief Joseph Sule Abenga, the change will encourage young men to marry ladies of their choice without much stress and reduce incidences of elopement due to high bride price.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that Tiv Youth Organisation (TYO) in a statement by the president general, Comrade Timothy Hembaor, alleged that there was a plot to assassinate Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue state after his tenure as governor in 2019.

Hembaor, who spoke at a news conference in Makurdi on August 7, maintained that the plan was being perfected by Abuja Forces as the next action after the impeachment move (against the governor) seems to have failed.

Street Gist: What Is Wrong With a Woman? Bride Price! | on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ngThrough RTS, the presiding officers were supposed to transmit results to returning officers and to the Election Commission Pakistan in real-time.

Islamabad: The ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) on Sunday claimed that it had the required support of lawmakers to win the September 4 presidential election.

Information minister Fawad Chaudhry said that the PTI would not face any difficulty in getting its candidate, Dr Arif Alvi, elected as Pakistans next President in the upcoming polls as it had garnered the required support.

The PTI enjoys support of all of its allied parties, including the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q), the Balochistan Awami Party (BAP) and the Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA) besides other smaller allies, he said.

On Saturday, three senators from formerly Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) also announced to join the PTI after their meeting with Prime Minister Imran Khan. These senators are Aurangzeb Khan, Sajjad Turi, and Momin Khan Afridi. The newcomers expressed full confidence in partys leadership and manifesto and resolved to play their due role in bringing change. The PM warmly welcomed all new members into the party. senator Haji Fida and defence minister Pervez Khattak were also present in the meeting, said a PTI statement.

Meanwhile, an inquiry committee has recommended PM Imran Khan to immediately remove a few senior officials of the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), including its chief Usman Yousuf Mobeen over failure of NADRA-made Results Transmission System (RTS) on the election day.

The committee, headed by the PTI Senator Azam Khan Swati, was mandated to probe into collapse of a mobile phone app  the RTS  designed and operated by NADRA and meant to transmit 2018 general election results electronically.

In its preliminary report, the committee concluded that NADRA chairman, DIrector General Projects Zulfiqar Ali, and DG Software Development Ahmareen Ahmed, who happens to be a close relative of Chairman Mobeen, should be removed from their positions immediately as their criminal negligence created unnecessary doubts over free and fair election.

Through RTS, the presiding officers were supposed to transmit results to returning officers and to the Election Commission Pakistan (ECP) in real-time.

However, the system collapsed, as acknowledged later by the ECP also, on the night of election when the process of compilation of final results was in progress.

NADRA had rebutted the ECPs claim saying nothing went wrong with the RTS which, it said, slowed down given the sudden influx of results. After the July 25 election, the PTI had tasked Senator Swati to probe whether RTS actually collapsed. The committee was assisted by experts including engineers and IT professionals.

According to a statement issued by the PTI Central Media Department, Senator Azam Khan Swati held one-on-one meeting with PM Imran Khan and presented before him the preliminary report of the committee.

The premier advised Mr Swati to get the opinion of forensic experts before making the report public, the PTI statement said.

It said Mr Swati also requested the PM to suspend NADRA officials, including its chairman, and two of its director generals, maintaining that a transparent inquiry was not possible in their presence.- The US says there is a massive perpetration of corruption at all levels of the Nigerian government

- It also indicted the EFCC for failing to follow due process while prosecuting corruption charges

- The country further listed various human rights issues which have occurred in Nigeria

The United States says the failure of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration to implement laws against corruption has led to the perpetration of such practices.

The country made the remarks in its 2017 Human Rights Report, The Cable reports.

Legit.ng gathers that the US said numerous cases of corruption were evident across all levels of government. It added that impunity remained widespread at all levels of government, even though the government had taken steps to investigate alleged human abuses.

READ ALSO: Troops kills 3 Boko Haram terrorists on looting, extortion spree in Borno

It said: Although the law provides criminal penalties for conviction of official corruption, the government did not implement the law effectively, and officials frequently engaged in corrupt practices with impunity.

Massive, widespread, and pervasive corruption affected all levels of government and the security services. The constitution provides immunity from civil and criminal prosecution for the president, vice president, governors, and deputy governors while in office.

The report also indicted the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for failing to follow due process while prosecuting corruption charges.

It pointed out that despite court orders demanding his release, a former national security adviser, Sambo Dasuki, has been in custody of the Department of State Services (DSS) since 2015.

Among the most significant human rights issues which have occurred, it listed the following: Extrajudicial and arbitrary killings; disappearances and arbitrary detentions; torture, particularly in detention facilities, including sexual exploitation and abuse; use of children by some security elements; looting and destruction of property; civilian detentions in military facilities, often based on flimsy evidence.

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Also included are: Denial of fair public trial; executive influence on the judiciary; infringement on citizens privacy rights; restrictions on freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and movement; official corruption; lack of accountability in cases involving violence against women and children; trafficking in persons; and early and forced marriages.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that during a bilateral meeting, President Donald Trump of the USA commended President Muhammadu Buhari for the success recorded in the fight against corruption.

He also said the US was ready to support Nigeria in the war against insurgency; noting that the country had sold 12 Tucano fighter jets to Nigeria.

Buhari is the general overseer of corruption - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit- American musician Kanye West recently showed the world how much he truly loves his reality star wife Kim Kardashian

- He is said to have bought her a Mercedes Benz G-Wagon SUV worth N86 million

- The rapper made the purchase after seeing how good Kim looked in a similar SUV

Forget what you heard about him, Kanye West sure knows how to take care of his wife, reality star Kim Kardashian.

The American rapper, producer and fashion designer reportedly splashed out an estimated $240,000 (N86.4million) on a new neon yellow Mercedes Benz G-Wagon for his wife, Kim.

Taking to her Instagram page to share photos of the generous present, Kim excitedly reveals: Oh my gosh, I just got out of the gym and was surprised by this new baby. I loved it so much in Miami and I kept on talking about it.

READ ALSO: Celebrating famous actress Funke Akindele with 4 beautiful photos

Ooh, look who surprised me with this baby. You guys, I got the truck of my dreams because I was so excited in Miami. Im so excited.

The mum of two is referring to her recent trip to Miami where she was seen riding around the city with a similar G-Wagon, which matched the yellow wig she was putting on at the time.

Not done showing off her luxury new ride, Kim then drove the G-Wagon over to her younger sister Kylies house.

On getting to Kylies house, Kim brags: When you just pull up to your sisters house to say good morning and you guys have matching neon trucks. Alright, Ky  where are we going today?

This is coming after musician turned Instagram star Tunde Ednut revealed he doesnt like Wizkid. He did not give reasons for his declaration.

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How Smoking Weed Made Me Go Into Music - Jim Iyke | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- Pastor Tunde Bakare has warned Nigerians ahead of 2019 general elcetions

- He warned that Nigeria was on a collision course again as the 2019 elections draw near

- Bakare said he worked closely behind the scenes with the two leading candidates in the presidential elections in 2015

Pastor Tunde Bakare of the Latter Rain Assembly (LRA), says he worked with President Muhammadu Buhari and former president Goodluck Jonathan to ensure Nigeria escaped disintegration in 2015.

Bakare who disclosed this while speaking in Glasgow, UK, to the African forum Scotland and the Association of Nigerians in Scotland also warned that the country was on a collision course again as the 2019 elections approach.

READ ALSO: Drama as mother sells baby to buy phone in Edo state

Unknown to many observers, in 2015, following the lifting of the embargo, I worked closely behind the scenes with the two leading candidates in the presidential elections at the time, then President Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP and General Muhammadu Buhari of the APC, towards ensuring that the election results were upheld and that the transition was smooth, he said.

Going further, preacher said that: I saw at close quarters how the fate of a nation could hang on a single decision. Therefore, believe me when I tell you that we escaped disintegration by the whiskers.

Now, four years after that escape, our nation is once again headed on a collision course with probable instability unless the tense atmosphere associated with our four-year electocratic insanity is managed with utmost wisdom.

Once again, I have found myself in the inner workings of the chaotic political process and I can tell you that we live in precarious times. How long can our nation stand if we continue along this path? Is it not time to address the foundations once and for all?

What, then, is the way forward and what is the role of the diaspora? Answers to these questions will constitute the concluding aspects of this address.

PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 news app

Meanwhile, Legit.ng had reported that the United States said the failure of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration to implement laws against corruption has led to the perpetration of such practices.

The country made the remarks in its 2017 Human Rights Report. Legit.ng gathered that the US said numerous cases of corruption were evident across all levels of government.

Buhari is the general overseer of corruption - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng NewsReno Omokri, who was spokesperson for former President Goodluck Jonathan has taken to social media to talk about ugliness. The controversial Nigerian noted that being ugly or being perceived as ugly is a circumstance of poverty.

In a Tweet, Omokri explained that poverty and heartbreak are the causes of ugliness. It expressed that poverty also leads to sad incidences.

The former spokesperson focused his statement on women being ugly. He noted that no woman is ugly, adding that ugliness is a negative circumstance of poverty and heartbreak.

According to him, if the woman's circumstances changes her transformation would amaze a lot of people.

READ ALSO: Femi Fani Kayode shows off triplets as they clock 3 months

He wrote: "No woman is ugly. What you see as ugliness is just her negative circumstance. Poverty, heartbreak and things like sickness draw out ugliness. When her circumstances change, you will be amazed at her transformation. Never call a woman ugly. It is a circumstantial lie #RenosNuggets."

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Reno Omokri is an author and a lawyer who was the host of Transformation with Reno Omokri, a Christian teaching television show.

The lawyer is known for addressing hot topics and making controversial statements, Legit.ng had recently reported that he raised a topic addressing how wife materials should be.

What Do Women Really Want From Men? Nigerians Speak | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng- Bolaji Abdullahi, the former APC spokesman, has disclosed that he is interested in occupying the Kwara state governorship seat

- He said he is seeking the governorship position because he wants to make a difference in the state

- Abdullahi pledged that if elected, he will be the governor that unites all for the good of Kwara state

The former spokesman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bolaji Abdullahi, has disclosed his interest in the Kwara state governorship seat.

He made the intention known in Ilorin, the Kwara state capital, on Thursday, August 23, when he received friends and family at his residence for the Sallah festivities, The Cable reports.

READ ALSO: US punctures Buharis anti-corruption crusade

Legit.ng gathers that Abdullahi said he wants to make a difference in Kwara; and that is why he is seeking the governorship seat.

He lamented over the fact that the young people of the state are divided along the line of those who hate Senate President Bukola Saraki and those who like him.

He said: As of today, it is unfortunate that the young people of Kwara are being divided along the line of those who love Saraki and those who hate him. It is wrong, and unconscionable that the youth should be exploited this way.

He added: If Insha Allah, I am elected, I will be the governor that unites all for the good of our state.

If anything goes wrong, I will take responsibility and fix it; and if things go right, I will share the glory with all of you here who place your trust in me.

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Recall that Legit.ng previously reported that the All Progressives Congress national publicity secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, left the ruling party.

Abdullahi said his resolve to resign from his office followed certain developments in the ruling party.

He further said that on several occasions, his loyalty to the party had been brought into question, adding that he had suffered insubordination from some of his deputies.

How Kwara state governor is changing the face of the state - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit- The only Dapchi schoolgirl still in Boko Haram captivity has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to rescue her

- Leah Sharibu, who was held back by the insurgents when her schoolmates were released, was said to have appealed that her family members be assisted

- Sharibu has been in Boko Haram captivity for seven months

Leah Sharibu has reportedly called on President Muhammadu Buhari to rescue her from Boko Haram captivity.

Sharibu is the only Christian among the abducted 119 students of Government Girls Secondary School, Dapchi, Yobe state.

The Cable reports that it exclusively obtained Sharibu's latest picture as well as the audio of her plea to Buhari.

Legit.ng gathers that in the audio tape, the girl, who has been held in captivity for seven months, appealed that her family members be assisted.

READ ALSO: Fake Buhari's aide allegedly defrauds 14 job seekers of N4.2m in Niger state

She reportedly said in the audio: I am Leah Sharibu, the girl that was abducted in GGSS Dapchi. I am calling on the government and people of goodwill to intervene to get me out of my current situation.

I also plead to the members of the public to help my mother, my father, my younger brother and relatives. Kindly help me out of my predicament. I am begging you to treat me with compassion, I am calling on the government, particularly, the president to pity me and get me out of this serious situation. Thank you.

You can listen to the audio here.

Recent picture of Leah Sharibu. Photo credit: The Cable.

Recall that the Nigerian Army had assured that there were ongoing military operations to rescue her. The army's deputy chief of policy and plans, Major General Attahiru Ibrahim, who stated this on Wednesday, May 30, said that the operations also included rescue of the Chibok girls.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) warned the federal government not to allow Leah Sharibu die in captivity, to avert religious crisis in Nigeria.

The special assistant on media and communications to CAN president, Adebayo Oladeji, on Friday, May 18, in an exclusive interview, said CAN would not stop to agitate for the release of the schoolgirl, adding that her death could spell doom for the country as she was being detained because of her religious inclination.

Street Gist: Mixed reactions trail Boko Haram's release of Dapchi Girls - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng- According to reports, famous actor Jim Iyke was arrested by police in the afternoon of August 27, 2018

- He was said to have been picked up at the Lagos airport

- The dad of one was accused of assaulting a staff of one of the airlines at the airport

News reaching Legit.ng indicates that popular Nigerian actor Jim Iyke was arrested at the domestic wing of the Muritala Mohammed Airport in Lagos state on August 27, 2018.

Iyke was allegedly arrested after he was said to have assaulted the staff of one of the airlines domiciled at the airport.

The actor assaulted one of the security personnel who attempted to search him after he arrived for a flight. Unknown to the security man, Jim had missed his flight because he arrived late.

READ ALSO: Celebrating famous actress Funke Akindele with 4 beautiful photos

Perhaps irritated because he missed his flight, Jim lashed out at the security man slapping him in the process.

As a result of the altercation, management of the airline immediately alerted airport police and Iyke was whisked away.

Watch a video of the incident below:

This is coming after actor turned politician Yul Edochie revealed that he is under no pressure to fill his father veteran actor Pete Edochies shoes.

It is not my plan to fill my fathers shoes; I have just set out to play my part in the society. I am not under any pressure to surpass my fathers achievements in the movie industry. I am just here, being myself. I have always loved acting and mimicking people.

At a very early age, it was obvious that I was also going to become an actor. I was named after an actor called Yul Brynner. However, I am not under any pressure to surpass my father, he told Punch.

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How Smoking Weed Made Me Go Into Music - Jim Iyke | Legit.ng TV

Source: LegitThe chairman of the Lagos state chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Monday, August 27, announced that he had defected to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) with many other members.

Salvador spoke in Lagos at a press conference where he also gave a figure of 15,000 members of the PDP joining the APC.

He is expected to formally declare on Monday, September 3 at the Agege stadium in Lagos state.

READ ALSO: APC not troubled by defections ahead of governorship election  Aregbesola

When you have people or leadership that cannot give you encouragement to carry out your vision, you take it to another place where it will be appreciated.

I am not happy that I am abandoning what I laboured for, but I have to move on with my supporters because I cannot continue to labour in vain.

Today, the chairman of PDP Board of Trustees called me on the defection and I told him to allow me consult with my people before feedback.

The PDP National Chairman, Prince Uche Secondus, also called me for the first time since my travails.

He never called since I was put in jail on a cooked up murder charge; he called me today to ask why I want to defect.

And I told him it is not possible for me to be in the same party with Bode George because he undermined all my efforts to reposition the party.

He was doing all these things and the national leadership was allowing him, saying he is an elder.

Bode George also cooked up things to put me in jail in the murder case of late Aborishade.

Enough is enough. I am leaving the party with my supporters and I am taking them to APC where they would be recognised and appreciated, he said.

There had been frictions in the opposition in Lagos state even when it formed the government at the centre for 16 years.

Legit.ng earlier reported that Moshood Salvador, has claimed that he was framed up by the former deputy national chairman of the party, Chief Bode George, in the murder of Adeniyi Aborishade.

Aborishade was a member of the party until he was murdered recently after a meeting in Lagos. But George has reportedly denied the allegation. Daily Sun reports that while he was addressing members of the PDP in the Maryland area of Lagos, Salvador alleged that George and his supporters cooked up the story that he was behind the killing of Aborishade.

We did the first and second assemblies in Oregun and about 4,000 members were in attendance in each gathering.

We were doing the assemblies in Oregun because our party secretariat could not accommodate more than 1,000 people. Each assembly costs me about N10 million and I spend about N3 million on the party monthly.

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What I want is the success of the party at the polls. I want to win Lagos for the PDP in my time. You can imagine that we lost seven out of eight members of the PDP in the state House of Assembly to the All Progressives Congress (APC) last year and yet these people are not moved.

They want to be the de facto leaders. I will work hard to put our people in public offices to stop us from suffering, he said.

Pastor Adeboye, Imams Should Join Politics to Move Nigeria Forward - Olulade | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit Newspaper- Torben Gettermann wants Nigerians to hold politicians and some individuals accountable for the corruption in the country

- Gettermann notes that Denmark is one of the least corrupt countries in the world because the people hold their politicians accountable

- The envoy commends Buhari in his fight against corruption

The outgoing ambassador of Denmark to Nigeria, Torben Gettermann, on Monday, August 27, stressed the need for Nigerians to hold politicians, companies and individuals accountable to win anti-corruption crusade in the country.

Gettermann, who said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja, said such was what helped his country to become one of the least corrupt countries in the world.

READ ALSO: APC not troubled by defections ahead of governorship election - Aregbesola

Denmark is one of the least corrupt countries in the world because we hold our politicians and our companies to account.

We need to do that for our politicians, individuals, companies to not only subscribe to the ideal of being transparent and non-corrupt but also to actually live it out.

We have a code of conduct for Danish companies. As public servants, we have to sign a declaration and we have to go through courses so that we know what corruption means, he said.

He, however, said that Denmark could assist Nigeria in addressing the challenge in some ways.

What we can do is to highlight the situations and make sure that people talk about it, that action is taken to an extent possible.

Also go into cooperation with Nigeria on education in terms of understanding how much money corruption actually takes out of the system, money that the people in general could benefit from.

We have had Danish companies active in some of the task forces that have been set up here in Nigeria, he said.

While noting that corruption in Nigerian ports was tremendous, he commended the efforts of the federal government to reduce it, stressing however that there was still much more to be done in the sector.

He commended the present administration in the country for laying a good foundation in fighting corruption.

The current government in Nigeria has made a mark with the President Muhammadu Buhari being the anti-corruption champion in the AU," he said.

Legit.ng earlier reported that John Campbell, who served as the United States ambassador to Nigeria, described former First Lady Patience Jonathan as an arrogant and flamboyant person who was greatly disliked.

This was contained in a piece he wrote titled Nigerian President Buharis Sisyphean Efforts and published on Council on Foreign Relations website on Friday, October 6.

Nigeria News 2018: Osinbajo Oighlights Reasons for Incessant Herdsmen Troubles | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit NigeriaLambert here: Were ready for the Jackpot, though

By Christine Crudo Blackburn, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University; Andrew Natsios, Director of the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs and Executive Professor, Texas A&M University, and Gerald W. Parker, Associate Dean For Global One Health, College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences; and Director, Pandemic and Biosecurity Policy Program, Scowcroft Institute for International Affairs, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. Reposted from Alternet.

One hundred years after the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918, global health leadership stands at a crossroads. The United States continues to expand its policy of isolationism at a time when international cooperation in health could not be more important. The state of pandemic preparedness and the necessary steps for protecting the people throughout the world was the topic of The Scowcroft Institute for International Affairs 2nd Annual White Paper.

As pandemic policy scholars, with two of us spending the majority of our career in the federal government, we believe that it is essential to prepare the country and the world for the next pandemic. It is not a matter of if, but when, the next disease will sweep the world with deadly and costly consequences.

There are many topic areas that national leaders must address to create better preparedness and response capabilities, but we believe three are most urgent. These include targeting the resistance to antimicrobial agents that has come about because of overuse and misuse of antibiotics; ensuring continuity of supply chains; and improving and strengthening leadership.

Overuse of a Wonder Drug

Prior to Alexander Flemings discovery of penicillin, even the smallest scratch could be deadly. Its discovery, however, helped contribute to the perception that man had conquered disease, despite Flemings warning that the thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of a man who succumbs to infection with the penicillin resistant organism. Now, 70 years later, society is quickly reaching the precipice of that reality.

The problem of antibiotic overuse and misuses is extensive. In fact, in the United States, 80 percent of all antibiotic use occurs in the agricultural sector and the majority of this use is nontherapeutic, meaning it is not medically necessary. Misuse of antibiotics also occurs frequently in the human health sector, however. The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance estimated that if changes are not made, the world could witness 10 million deaths annually due to antimicrobial resistant infections.

To help prevent this public health threat from reaching that level of crisis with potential catastrophic implications, we recommend four actions.

First, an increase of investment needs to be made by the federal government and the private sector into research, development and production of new antimicrobials. In 2014, WHO also called for greater investment in discovering new antimicrobials, but ain the last 50 years, only one new class of antibiotics has been discovered.

Second, governments throughout the world need to create stronger internationally harmonized regulatory systems for agriculture production and veterinary use of antimicrobials. For example, in the United States, antibiotics cannot be purchased without a prescription from either a medical doctor or a veterinarian (for the agricultural sector). But many countries in the developing world have no oversight for animal or human use of antibiotics. In some places, particularly African countries, many antibiotics can be purchased over the counter.

You may already have experienced the third recommendation, if your doctor has sent you home from an appointment without an antibiotic prescription because your illness was viral. Health care providers and consumers need to decrease misuse and overuse of antimicrobials in human health by only prescribing antibiotics in cases of bacterial infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued guidelines for this, including recommendations for patients.

Last, governments throughout the world need to understand that fighting antimicrobial resistance requires a collaboration between animal health, human health and environmental health. This idea, known as One Health, works to bring together researchers and professionals from these three areas to address disease-related challenges. While these actions require monetary and time investments, they are essential. Without taking these actions society may find itself in a post-antibiotic world. This world, as former Director-General of the World Health Organization Margaret Chan explained in 2012, means the end of modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a childs scratched knee would once again kill.

Will Global Supply Chains Collapse?

Modern society is able to function and flourish in large part because of the global supply chains transporting parts, equipment and supplies with speed, efficiency and just-in-time delivery, which allows business to keep carrying costs low because they can order what they need and have it shipped quickly, or just in time. Global supply chains, which consist of production specialization through comparative advantage, has enabled great economic development, but their just-in-time structure also leaves them exceedingly vulnerable. Components of the critical medical infrastructure, such as components essential to running life support machines or insulin for diabetics, arealways in transit.

This means that even a localized disease could deprive people of needed medical supplies. For example, if an epidemic hits a town in Asia where N95 masks, which are used to protect people from hazardous substances, are manufactured, there may no longer be any N95 masks to be shipped to the United States or elsewhere. The United States experienced supply chain breakdown when Hurricane Maria caused a disruption in the supply of small bag IV saline. A manufacturer in Puerto Rico that produces nearly half of all the saline utilized in the U.S. had to halt production because of the hurricane.

This interconnectedness of the global economy and the expansiveness of medical supply chains means that a disruption anywhere along the line could spell disaster worldwide. To help prevent such a disaster, the federal government needs to understand the United States critical supply chains. The federal government and private sector should be aware of likely points of breakdown.

Once there is understanding, the U.S. must implement new policies that enable private sector innovation to diversify production and transportation where possible. Diversification of production and transportation means that there is not just one production source for critical supplies. Thus, a disruption in one geographical location would not cripple the entire supply chain.

Centralized, Involved Leadership

Diseases do not respect borders, and for this reason, pandemics are a global threat. Therefore, the U.S. must address the threat of pandemics in cooperation with all other nations and with multilateral institutions such as the World Health Organization, the U.N. Security Council, UNICEF and more. We believe that investment in global health security, such as the establishment of a permanent fund for influenza preparedness and response, and remaining engaged with the international community to prevent an outbreak from becoming a pandemic is the best way to protect the American people.

Additionally, we believe that the U.S. should commit to pandemic preparedness by creating a position of authority within the White House that transcends administrations and elevates pandemics as existential threats to a national security priority. There is a need to have decision-making authority and oversight vested at the highest levels of government.

In the midst of a pandemic, decisions must be made quickly. Quick decision-making can often be hindered by the absence of high-level leadership. The need for high-level leadership, coordination and a new strategy are essential to mitigate the threat of pandemics, but these fundamental pandemic preparedness gaps persist.

The next great pandemic is coming. The true question is: Will we be ready when it does? Right now, that answer is no, because the country lacks the sufficient safeguards we have outlined. But if the United States chooses to elevate the issue of pandemic preparedness and biosecurity as a national security priority, we could be. Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are not if we take action now.by Nirmala Carvalho

Yesterday the 108th anniversary of the birth of the saint was celebrated. Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity: "For many people the quality of life is measured in the possession of material goods. For the Mother, the quality of life comes from love ".

Mumbai (AsiaNews) - Mother Teresa "has chosen life, for the Mother, life was the most precious gift and it is full if it belongs to Jesus" said Archbishop Thomas D'Souza of Calcutta, where Mother Teresa lived and worked dedicating herself to the most needy.

Yesterday the archbishop celebrated a Mass in memory of the 108th anniversary of the birth of the saint "Mother Teresa - he said - drew her life on Jesus. She lived for the poorest among the poor and served unselfishly to give life to the poorest of the poor ".

Msgr. D'Souza said that "the celebration was splendid". He reminded those present that the founder of the Missionaries of Charity "has spent her entire life protecting and promoting life. For her, the fullness of life was in Jesus, who nourishes us every day with the Eucharist. This life enriches us, gives us life and this must be shared with others ".

After the ceremony, the celebrants and sisters prayed and sang hymns on the tomb of the saint, illuminated by the glow of candles. Speaking of the foundress, Sr. Mary Prema, current superior general of the congregation, said: "For many people the quality of life is measured in the possession of material goods. For the Mother, the quality of life comes from love ". "Love - she emphasized - gives dignity to the human person. In turn, this dignity gives quality to life ".

The celebrations continued in the Archbishop's residence, where there were also high dignitaries of the Republic of Macedonia, the birthplace of the saint, were present. Here a floral tribute was offered in front of the bronze statue donated in 2016 by Namit Bajoria, honorary consul of Macedonia. In the evening the archbishop blessed a statue at Cossipore, about 15 km north of Calcutta.Over a series of posts, we will discuss how CalPERS Marcie Frost, who joined the pension system as CEO in October 2016, even on paper was not qualified for the job. She was only a high school graduate. And even putting that aside, her experience was also wanting. The Washington agency she headed prior to joining CalPERS, the Department of Retirement Services, is essentially a pension back office plus a call center, vastly smaller and less complex than CalPERS.

But it turns out the papers Frost submitted were not all that they were cracked up to be either.

Frost made significant misrepresentations and omissions in the hiring process, in her resume, and in the resume search firm Heidrick & Struggles prepared based on information she provided. Frost may also have made false statements on her employment application, a document filed under penalty of perjury. Implausibly, CalPERS claims not to possess any of the pages from it that show her education and work history.

Frost told her biggest whopper to Heidrick & Struggles by inflating her educational status, apparently to obscure that she was only a high school graduate 1. She doubled down on the fabrication in the press release announcing that she was joining CalPERS and on an ongoing basis.

Specifically, Frost has repeatedly claimed she is actively enrolled in dual bachelors/masters degree program at The Evergreen State College. Yet Evergreen has never had a dual undergraduate-graduate degree program of any kind. Even worse, Frost was never enrolled in any degree program whatsoever at Evergreen.

Frost has never made a serious effort at getting a college degree. At Evergreen, the only post-secondary institution she has ever claimed to have attended, Frost was only a non-admitted student who took a writing course for two quarters in 2010.

Frost also omitted an employer on her resume, which has been found to be a serious misrepresentation in employment-related lawsuits, and made false claims about her accomplishments in some of her roles.

Moreover, not only did Frost make false statements to CalPERS, but also to the Governor of Washington prior to being appointed Director of Washington Retirement Systems on a questionnaire filed under penalty of perjury.

Bear in mind that Chief Financial Officer Charles Asubonten was dismissed from CalPERS recently,

based on our investigation into his own inflated resume claims. From CalPERS statement of the reasons for his being rejected during his probationary period (emphasis original):

you are rejected during your probationary period for reasons relating to your qualifications, the good of the service, and failure to demonstrate merit, efficiency, fitness, and moral responsibility.because of misrepresentations you made regarding your work history prior to and after your hire at CalPERSyou made false, incomplete, incorrect, and misleading statements as set forth below. Title 2 of the California Code of Regulations, Section 324 states If the conduct, capacity, moral responsibility, or integrity of the probationer is found to be unsatisfactory, it shall be the duty of the appointing power to reject that probationer from the position. (Emphasis added.) As described in detail above, you repeatedly provided false, incomplete, incorrect, and misleading information about your work history as it pertains to Transmax/RSA Capital, and failed to be forthright during the investigation

CalPERS cited falsehoods on Asubontens resume to support their dismissal. As the text above indicates, Asubonten was on probation, so the bar for his removal was low. Frost is effectively in the same position, since as CEO she is a permanent at-will employee.

As we will discuss in a later post, CalPERS claims it cannot find the pages of Frosts employment application that required her to certify her educational and work history under oath. That suggests that someone at CalPERS has destroyed documents to hide evidence of Frost having committed perjury.

This post will review:

Frosts misrepresentations about her educational status Frosts other omissions and misrepresentations during CalPERS hiring process

The later posts in our series will cover:

How Frost attempted to cover up for the most glaring falsification, that of her educational status How Frosts resume as a stand-alone document raises red flags about her competence How Frost, even leaving aside her educational background, is not even remotely qualified for the role of CEO of CalPERS

Neither Frost nor the chairmen of the two state public pension committees, Dr. Richard Pan in the California Senate and Freddie Rodriguez in the Assembly responded to our request for a comment on our findings.

We did not go looking for this story. A CalPERS insider pressed us to make a Public Records Act request for Frosts resume and employment application. That was based on the concern Frost had personal reasons for her reckless defense of resume fabricator and now departed Chief Financial Officer Charles Asubonten, specifically of not wanting to set the precedent of pushing an executive out over resume misrepresentations. That hunch looks to be accurate.

Frosts Misrepresentations About Her Educational Status

We made a Public Records Act request seeking Frosts employment application, all versions of her resume, and all e-mails, including attachments, with the word Frost in them from shortly after former CEO Anne Stausboll announced her departure in early 2016 through July 14, 2016, when CalPERS issued a press release saying the system had hired Frost as CEO.

We have embedded Frosts resume at the end of this post. You will note that it is completely missing a section on Education. We will discuss its other considerable shortcomings in a later post.

Frost represented to Heidrick & Struggles that she was a matriculated student in a dual degree program:

CalPERS July 16, 2016 press release announcing Frosts hiring, which would have been subject to her review, states2:

Frosts alleged enrollment at Evergreen was picked up by Bloomberg, Chief Investment Officer, Wealth Management, and other specialist publications.

On a SecuriCheck release form signed 6/15/16, embedded at the end of the post, Frost describes herself as having last attended Evergreen in 2014 and not degreed yet, implying she was in the process of obtaining a degree.

On November 4, 2016, after Frost had joined CalPERS, I asked the head of communications Brad Pacheco via e-mail:

A reader informed me that [Investment Committee Chairman] Henry Jones had told external parties that Marcie Frost was to be awarded a college degree by the end of October [2016]. If that is the case, can you please tell me the name of the school and the degree awarded (such as AB, BA, BSc)?

Pacheco replied:

Ms. Frost is still pursuing a degree so your post remains accurate. Ill correct with Henry.

Frosts official biography, published on March 17, 2017, courtesy the Wayback Machine, has this statement at the end:

Frost represents on her most recent LinkedIn profile, which she appears to have put up in August 20183, that she has studied Business Administration and Management:







All of this is false and all came directly or ultimately from Frost.

We obtained records of Frosts enrollment at the Evergreen State College from the National Student Clearinghouse, which is contracted by Evergreen to provide definitive verification of student enrollment and degrees awarded. We have embedded a screenshot at the end of this post.

We also spoke at length, and in some cases multiple times, to four senior officials at Evergreen, a professor and three senior administrators. Among them, we received multiple confirmations of every statement listed below:

Evergreen has never had a dual bachelors/masters program of any sort. The only dual degree program Evergreen offered was for a dual undergraduate degrees, a bachelors of art and a bachelors of science. That was discontinued in 2014.

Frost was never enrolled in any degree program at Evergreen. She never applied to be admitted as an undergradute and only took courses as a special student. She therefore was never a matriculated student nor pursuing a degree4.

Frost attended Evergreen for only two quarters in 2010, not 2014.

Frost never studied business or management at Evergreen. The Evergreen sources took exception to how Frost characterized her course work. The only course Frost took was a four credit experiential writing course. She was also conferred eight credits for prior learning experience as in her work experience. She did not have to do any course work for those eight credits.

Even if Frost had been a matriculated student in 2010, which she was not, that status would have lapsed at the beginning of 2012. Evergreens policy is that students in degree programs can only take a one-year leave of absence. If they have been un-enrolled for longer than that, they need to reapply and hopefully be re-accepted.

On top of that, CalPERS posted an updated bio for Frost on May 23, 2018, shortly after Asubonten was dismissed for lying during the hiring process. The new version makes no statement whatsoever about Frost pursuing degrees. This change looks an awful lot like an admission of guilt.

Frost made similar misrepresentations to the State of Washington in a Gubernatorial Appointment questionnaire filed under the penalty of perjury. Unlike CalPERS, the State of Washington makes these records public without redactions. We have embedded the document at the end of this post.

Notice how calculated this lie is. The claimed enrollment dates, and especially the use of the dash in 2009- effectively assert that Frost has been actively studying at Evergreen every year from 2009 through the date Frost signed the form, 1/31/13. As we have shown, Frost was not enrolled in 2009 at all, took non-degree classes only for only two quarters in 2010, and was never enrolled thereafter.

The form contains a second misrepresentation. The certification language over the signature line states: I certify under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of Washington, that the information above is true, complete, and correct to the best of my knowledge.

The information is not complete. Frost skipped this section:

Frosts maiden name was Bowen. Her first husband was Lamb. Internet records show Frost has used the name Marcie Lamb, so she should have answered this question in the affirmative. Why the erasure? We can only speculate.

Frosts Other Omissions and Misrepresentations During CalPERS Hiring Process

We will focus on two additional clear misrepresentations and discuss a probable third one.

Omission of Frosts job at the credit union WSECU. Both the resume below, and the version prepared by Heidrick & Struggles, show an apparent period of unemployment from May 2008 to March 2009. This is consistent with what she showed on the Washington questionnaire. (Note that she was not required to show a full employment history there, but the same gap shows in the jobs she did present in that document.) Before and after, Frost worked for the Department of Retirement Services.

Yet Frosts latest LinkedIn profile, which she put up in August, and an older one both show her working at the Washington State Employees Credit Union, or WSECU, and the more recent one shows dates from 2009 to 2010.

One of our Evergreen sources is a member of the credit union and volunteered that, Even though it has a lot of branches, it is a rinky-dink operation. They must outsource almost everything they do.

This is from Frosts new LinkedIn profile:

Curiously, she seems to have gotten a retroactive promotion. This is from an older profile that appears to date from when she was at WSECU:

Note that the dates that Frost now shows for her time at WSECU are for different years than the employment gap on her resume. It seems more likely that the dates on LinkedIn are the correct ones. First, a BizJournals story states that she re-joined the Department of Retirement Services in 2010, not 2009:

Frost began working with the Washington pension system in 2000, and served as a leader in several departments, including human resources, information services and operations. She worked for a year in information technology with the Washington State Employees Credit Union, before being named deputy director of Washingtons state retirement system in 2010. She was appointed director of the state pension system in 2013.

Second, LinkedIn also shows that Frosts son Ryan Frost had a summer job at WSECU in 2009. That would be consistent with our understanding of when she worked at the credit union, and her having helped him get the position while she was there, even though WSECU has an anti-nepotism policy (summer jobs may be seen as too inconsequential to enforce it for them).

Moreover, Frost admitted to having worked at WSECU only when she filled in the SecuriCheck form for her credit check, when she was at CalPERS on the day of her interview with the board on June 15. This means the existence of that job was apparently only disclosed for purposes of the credit check, not as part of the hiring evaluation process. It would have been logistically impossible to get the new information in that form to board members for their consideration, even assuming Frost filled out the form before, rather than after the interview.

In addition, as you can see if you look at the form and at the resume, the information she provided to SecuriCheck was false. She said she held position at WSECU between two employers listed above. But Frosts resume says she went from the first employer she had listed on the form, the Department of Labor and Industries to the Department of Retirement Services in November 2000, with no gap in employment. In fact, she went to WSECU from the Department of Retirement Services and then returned, and not between employers as she lied to SecuriCheck and therefore to CalPERS.

If Frost indeed was at WSECU from 2009 to 2010, that means her resume is false in another regard, by giving inaccurate dates for the jobs she held at the Department of Retirement Services. Her resume shows her as being the Deputy Director of the Department of Retirement Services from March 2009 through January 2013, when her newest LinkedIn (which we have downloaded) shows a shorter tenure, of May 2010 to January 2013. And that is consistent with the BizJournal article, which was presumably based on information from CalPERS and/or the Department of Retirement Services press office.

It is also worth noting that Board President Rob Feckner sent Frost a written job offer and Frost accepted the offer in writing on June 24, before CalPERS had received the results of the credit check.5

Note also since the form itself was released to me, any e-mails or further discussions about it would have been subject to disclosure. The only ones provided were of discussion of lower-level staff about the delay in getting the credit information. So this falsehood about her work history apparently never reached any decision-makers.

Omitting an employer from a resume is such a serious breach that it has been used by employers as after acquired evidence to argue that the employee engaged in a fraud in the hiring process and a termination is warranted on those grounds.

Frost wildly exaggerated her accomplishments at the Department of Labor and Industries. This is from Frosts description of a job she held from 1997 to 2000:

Implemented the first human resource technology systems for the State of Washington.

Anyone over 50 who has been in a large organization and is moderately observant would recognize the implausibility of claiming that large state agencies didnt use computers as part of human resources systems prior to the turn of the millennium. And indeed, her claim is false. Washington State records show the use of computers in human resources dating back to the 1970s.

From the State of Washingtons Department of Personnel, Human Resource Management System (HMRS):

HRMS is the primary focus of this document. As the enterprise HR and payroll system for Washington State government, HRMS captures and distributes a wide variety of financial and HR data. System data and functionality support state HR practices, central services (such as employee benefits, labor management, and financial management), and strategic planning across state government. Summary In 2002, the Washington State Legislature funded a modern enterprise-wide payroll and HR management computer system to replace the states 30-year-old mainframe system (PAY1).

So the current Washington system (HRMS) is 2002-vintage. The states own records document that there has been a human resouces technology system since the 1970s. This is what youd expect; government was either the first or a very early adopter for computerised replacements of paper-based systems.

Frost made implausible claims about her accomplishments in working on Washingtons adoption of hybrid pension plans. Washington states that it was the first pension system to institute hybrid, meaning joint defined benefit/defined contribution plans.

Here is Frosts description of her role as Project Manager, her first position at the Department of Retirement Services. Note that she was in this position only for seven months, from November 2000 to June 2001:

Responsible for delivering high impact projects across the organization within scope, budget and schedule. Implemented new hybrid retirement plans and large technology projects including a comprehensive imaging management system that had two components, business process workflow and back file. Managed vendor deliverables in accordance with delivery-based contracts. Created a project management framework with associated course certification materials. Prepared and conducted change management sessions to transition people from old processes to new. Developed expert level skills in contract negotiation and management and subsequent escalation management.

As anyone in IT land will tell you, seven months is barely enough time to put out a contract for bid and then negotiate it and sign it in the private sector, and the timetables are almost without exception longer for government contracting. It is simply impossible for a system of this type to have been contracted for, coded, debugged, gone through the inevitable user change orders, and have been rolled out in this time frame. Yet if you read the text carefully, that is precisely what Frost claims: that she negotiated the contract, oversaw the vendor, got the project done within budget, and trained employees on the new system (which cannot be done until the development is complete).

Also bear in mind that Frost went from this position to be head of Human Resources. Had she been doing something essential on the hybrid pension system develoment/rollout project, she would have had to stay in the IT Department to see it through.

But if this claim is miraculously true, Frost has a different problem, that she looked the other way while the Department of Retirement Systems was defrauding retirees.

The system had a known issue about how it calculated beneficiaries interest. If Frost was as deeply involved in this hybrid development project as she says she was, she either ignored or did not follow through in response to concerns from a member or members of the DRS staff on that issue. Benficiaries who enrolled in the hybrid plans before 2002 entered into a class action lawsuit against the Department of Retirement Services that was eventually settled for $5.5 million after an appellate court ruled against the pension system. From that ruling (emphasis ours):

In 1992, in conjunction with developing a new database system, the DRS considered whether to continue using its quarterly interest calculation method. The agency considered  alternatives including continuing its existing practices or moving to one of several methods for  compounding interest monthly. In evaluating this decision, the agency recognized that the  quarterly interest calculation method was unfair because an employers late transfers to the DRS could lead to the employee being denied interest, a similar problem to the denial of interest that  later occurred with transfers to Plan 3. Despite this problem, the DRS elected to continue using  the quarterly interest calculation method. Nothing in the record shows that the DRS considered  any advantages in continuing the quarterly calculation method; rather, the DRS elected to  continue using the existing method despite the recognized unfairness it created.

Moreover, it is hard to imagine that Frost in her next position in HR didnt hear about the objections made to the interest calculation:

Furthermore, in 2002, a DRS employee raised concern that the quarterly interest  calculation method did not conform to industry standards. The record reflects that a DRS  manager agreed that the matter should be considered. But the record does not show that the  DRS undertook any consideration of the benefits and drawbacks of retaining the quarterly  calculation method. The decision to continue using the quarterly interest calculation method was therefore undertaken in 

wilful and unreasoning disregard of the facts and circumstances, making it arbitrary and  capricious.

This lawsuit also gives a window into the culture of the Department of Retirement Services:

Ignore any issues which are in the Sounds Hard box Fob staff off when they raise concerns Dont do anything to address problems even when the warnings pile up Dig your heels when the dirty laundry gets aired in even if it involves expensive and futile litigation

So is this who CalPERS wants as CEO? Someone who puts public relations for the employees and board over performance of fiduciary duty on behalf of beneficiaries and ultimately California taxpayers? Worse, someone who lied to the State of Washington under penalty of perjury and told repeated and not even consistent lies to CalPERS? How can the board, employees, beneficiaries and the legislature put an iota of trust in Frost when she cant even tell the truth on a sworn document when she has big promotions at stake?

CalPERS needs to launch an investigation of Frosts apparent misrepresentations and omissions during her hiring as it did with Asubonten. She is already damaged goods by virtue of her extensive lies. CalPERS cannot afford to make the bad optics even worse by treating a white woman more leniently than it did a black man.

_____

1 Frosts maiden name was Marcie Lynne Bowen. She graduated from Forks High School in 1982. Her first husband was Mitchell C. (Mitch) Lamb and her second husband was Robert Frost.

2 The CalPERS site was down on an unscheduled basis starting on Saturday late afternoon PDT. The error pages said it would be back up on Monday August 27, 2018 at 6:00 AM PDT. We have a screenshot of the press release. The site was back up on Sunday, but if it has another seizure, you can also view the press release on the Wayback Machine.

3 We started looking into Frosts history when we received a response to our Public Records Act request on August 6. When we first earched for a LinkedIn profile, we found two sketchy ones for Frost with hardly any followers. A colleague we contacted said that was not unusual, that there were actually quite a few half-hearted profiles on LinkedIn. As far as we can tell, the profile for Frost as CalPERS CEO was published in the first half of August.

4 Officials at Evergreen stressed that they have a robust student tracking system so as to assure that students who have changed their name or made other personal changes have all their information associated with a single student number. I had three independent checks made of the records made to be absolutely sure that the information provided by the National Student Clearinghouse was accurate and complete. The only way Frost could have taken classes at Evergreen and not have them included in the enrollment records would be if she received a grade of Incomplete and did not satisfy the class requirements in the next quarter.

5 CalPERS was not completely reckless. It did not announce that Frost had been hired until it received the results from the credit bureaus.We suggest that you start with the first post in this series: CalPERS CEO Marcie Frosts Misrepresentations Regarding Her Education and Work History During and After Her Hiring.

One sign that CalPERS CEO Marcie Frost recognizes that she is skating on thin ice as a result of her misrepresentations about her background during the hiring process and after she joined CalPERS is that CalPERS claims not to have records that would establish whether Frost committed perjury by making false statements on her employment application.

Another sign is that when we started re-checking the information we had gotten from the Evergreen State College about Frosts enrollment history, records that had been readily accessible were suddenly on restricted access. Fortunately, we were dealing with sufficiently senior administrators so as to be able to be able to surmount this hurdle.

The Serious Legal and Practical Implications of Frosts Missing Employment Application Pages

We understand from senior officials at CalHR, the department in charge of personnel issues at all state

agencies, that all California state employees, even their CEOs, are required to fill out an employment application STD 678, as a condition of employment.1 That document is also disclosable in a Public Records Act request.1

In keeping with this disclosure requirement, we obtained the first four pages of former Chief Financial Officer Charles Asubontens employment application earlier his year and have embedded that document at the end of this post. You will see the Employment section, on the top of page 2, is completely unredacted.

We later requested Marcie Frosts employment application, as well as her resume and other records. CalPERS provided only the first page. Pages 2 through 4, where the applicant sets forth their education, licenses, and work history, were missing.

The instructions for filling out Form STD 678 make clear the form must be completed in full (emphasis original):

All questions must be answered completely and accurately, except as noted. Question 5  Employment History/Discharges. Question 5 must be answered by all applicantsApplicants are also required to provide factually correct information on the Employment History section of the application. Education  You must include a complete record of your training and educational background.

My message to the head of CalPERS communications department:

From: Susan Webber

Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2018 9:00 AM

To: Pacheco, Brad

Subject: Seeking complete versions of incomplete records from PRA #3867 Dear Mr. Pacheco, Thank you for overseeing the timely production of records for my recent request, #3867. However, one record requested specifically was not produced properly, namely (quoting from my request on June 24): 2. Marcie Frosts employment application The documents supplied include only the first page of her employment application, the then-current version of this form: https://jobs.ca.gov/pdf/std678.pdf. In response to PRA #3698 [related to Asubonten], CalPERS provided the first four pages of this document, supplying the Education and Employment History sections. Moreover, as you can see if you compare the responses to the two PRAs, the version number for this form in #3867 is identical to the one in #3698: STD 678 (REV. 10/2013). See page one of img-411145509-0001.pdf attached versus page one of PRA #3867 Webber_Part1.pdf attached. Please send me the missing pages from the employment application requested in PRA #3867. Further note that the only portions of the missing pages 2-4 that are subject to redaction are the ones redacted in response to PRA #3698. Since your staff has already located this record, it should take only minimal effort to find the missing three pages and send them on as required. Since these are overdue items from a supposedly completed PRA response, I trust they will be sent to me promptly. I know the upcoming board week is a busy time for many CalPERS staff members, but I would assume the members of the Public Records Act Unit are well insulated from that. I hope I can receive the missing pages from the employment application by the end of Friday, August 10, or at worst, by the end of day Monday, August 13. Thanks for your help in this matter. Susan Webber

The reply:

From: Pacheco, Brad

Subject: RE: Seeking complete versions of incomplete records from PRA #3867

Date: August 10, 2018 at 6:03:36 PM EDT

To: Susan Webber

Ms. Webber, I asked our Human Resources Division to check our records for Ms. Frosts state employment application, STD 678. You have all the documents responsive to your PRA. There are no additional pages to the employment application in our records Brad

Even though CalPERS may be providing a dog ate my homework level excuse for impermissibly withholding records that it is required to deliver under the Public Records Act, we have no choice but to take CalPERS claim at face value.3

And that claim does not reflect at all well upon CalPERS and Frost above all.

Since there is every reason to believe that Frost did complete Form STD 678 in full, Pachecos remark is tantamount to saying that CalPERS destroyed records. That is a crime:

Government Code 6200.

Every officer having the custody of any record, map, or book, or of any paper or proceeding of any court, filed or deposited in any public office, or placed in his or her hands for any purpose, is punishable by imprisonment pursuant to subdivision (h) of Section 1170 of the Penal Code for two, three, or four years if, as to the whole or any part of the record, map, book, paper, or proceeding, the officer willfully does or permits any other person to do any of the following:

(a) Steal, remove, or secrete.

(b) Destroy, mutilate, or deface.

(c) Alter or falsify.

However, no prosecutor would ever bother pursuing a state official solely on records tampering; it would most likely be invoked as an additional charge in connection with a different crime, like embezzlement. Moreover, CalPERS would claim, despite it being facially ludicrous, that Frost had provided only the first page of the document and so nothing was amiss. But the statutory language is nevertheless relevant because it shows how serious an offense it is to remove or destroy state records.

Keep in mind that California requires that Form STD 678 be delivered as a hard copy. I asked CalPERS as a separate Public Records Act request to search and provide scanned and e-mailed versions of Frosts employments record, since as IT experts will tell you, it is very difficult to remove all of the versions of a document once it has been committed to electronic form.

The original paper version would be part of Frosts personnel file. Access to that is highly restricted, and likely limited to the head of Human Resources, her secretary and/or deputy, and Frost herself. While the General Counsel Matt Jacobs could certainly ask to see Frosts records when his job made that necessary, even he would presumably have to go through channels to get to relevant documents. You cant have subordinates ruffling though confidential information about their boss.

The claim that CalPERS destroyed records to protect Frost may seem like a stretch to some readers. Remember that this is the same CalPERS that has board members signing blank, undated expense forms, has staff members forging board member signatures, and regularly has the General Counsel and other senior executives tell obvious lies on tape at public board meetings.

The interference we encountered in re-verifying Frosts enrollment history at Evergreen lends credence to the notion that CalPERS, or Frost personally, tried to stymie our investigation. Fortunately, the attempt at Evergreen was both too late as well as ultimately unsuccessful.

Interference at Evergreen State College

I had obtained what by normal standards would be considered to be official information about Frosts attendance at Evergreen, in the form of a report from National Student Clearinghouse. Evergreen, like many other schools, has agreed to provide data to National Student Clearinghouse, although some information, like transcripts, requires the consent of the student. However, I was already speaking to a senior individual at Evergreen State College about its policies, and said I would like to make sure the report I had gotten was accurate, and that party was able to do so.

Given how inflammatory the findings were, I thought it was critical to re-check both the policy information as well as the fact that Frost had attended for only 2 quarters in 2010. The additional parties I contacted reconfirmed what I had already been told and found on line about Evergreens programs. One, who was particularly upset that Frost had claimed to be enrolled in dual bachelors/masters program, went to pull up Frosts records. That individual found that access to it was limited, and said that was the first time that had ever happened (this officer was very familiar with the student records system). I had asked the first person to recheck. They were also blocked and said it was the first time ever that ever happened in their entire long career at Evergreen. Both agreed that it was no exaggeration to say that someone was trying to cover up for Frost; in fact, one of them called it a cover up unprompted.

However, I was introduced to yet another senior administrator who was able to review Frosts records and validated what I had found.

This is a very long-winded way of documenting a simple point: Frost is acting like she has something to hide. That should give even more weight to the information we provided in our original post.

_____

1 Even though the language at the beginning of Form STD 678 gives the impression that the agency has the option of whether or not to fill out the form (for vacant positions where a department requests an application), senior individuals at the California Department of Human Resources take the position that all state employees must fill out a Form STD as a condition of employment. That would seem to be consistent with the fact that Frost was required to fill out the form even though CalPERS had already committed to hiring her, via giving her a written job offer on June 22 that she had accepted on June 24, and issuing a press release announcing her hiring on July 14. You can see that the date Frost signed the employment application form is July 26, nearly two weeks after CalPERS told the world she was joining. Clearly someone thought it was important to get this form completed even though it was now appeared to be a mere formality.

2 From the First Amendment Coalition:

Under section 6254(c) of the California Public Records Act, certain personnel files are protected from disclosure under the personal privacy exemption.However, with respect to public employees such as a school district superintendent and assistant superintendent, the kind of information that would be included in a resume, curriculum vitae or job application to demonstrate a persons fitness for his or her job, in terms of education, training, or work experience, is not a matter of personal privacy. The California Court of Appeal has held in Eskaton Monterey Hospital v. Myers, 134 Cal. App. 3d 788, 794 (1982) that information as to the education, training, experience, awards, previous positions and publications of the (employee) . . . is routinely presented in both professional and social settings, is relatively innocuous and implicates no applicable privacy or public policy exemption.Evolution might favor survival of the laziest Science Daily. Theres good news tonight!

The Big Melt NYRB

Rain dancing 2.0: should humans be using tech to control the weather? Guardian

Public Bravado, Private Doubts: Inside the Unraveling of Elon Musks Tesla Buyout WSJ

Musks U-turn on Tesla deal could intensify his legal, regulatory woes Reuters

These Crypto Tycoons Are About to Learn How Rich They Really Are Bloomberg

Signs of a Strong Economy: Hedges Are Overgrown and Lawns Need Mowing WSJ. Readers, is this true where you are?

Illicit drug use could be higher than previously thought; soars during special events American Chemical Society

Kansans drank contaminated water for years. The state didnt tell them. Wichita-Eagle

3 dead, including suspect, in mass shooting at Jacksonville Landing Florida Times-Union. At a video game tournament.

How Experts Can, and Cant, Change Policy: Economics, Antitrust, and the Linked Evolution of the Academic and Policy Fields SocArXiv. From 2017, still germane.

Brexit

EU aims to abolish planned obsolescence Retail Detail

Testimony (PDF) His Excellency Carlo Maria Vigano, Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana Apostolic Nuncio. Worth a read, if you can stomach it. The moral Vigano draws is that [t]he homosexual networks present in the Church must be eradicated, and that further the Pope should resign. IIRC, 20% of the Pennsylvania abuse victims were girls; I personally can vouch for one victim. Presumably, these girls were not assaulted by homosexuals. The moral I draw from reading Vigano on office politics at the Vatican is that Everything Is Like CalPERS.

Pope will not say a single word on cover-up claims RTE

Syraqistan

Toward A Smaller, Smarter Force Posture in the Middle East Defense One. If Defense Secretary Mattis wants to fulfill the [National Defense Strategys] mandate to focus on China and Russia, the U.S. militarys posture in the Middle East must get smaller and smarter. Theres that word, smart. A deal to give Iran breathing space  and the US its victory FT

The Madness of Military Intervention in Venezuela The American Conservative

China?

India: the north-south disparity The Interpreter

Cancer eating the heart of Australian democracy Kevin Rudd, Sidney Morning Herlad

New Cold War

McCain, the Man Who Should Have Been President Daily Beast

A Maverick, Revisited Rolling Stone. More McCain, from 2008.

The Man Who Never Was Vanity Fair. McCain, from 2010.

Do Leaders Matter? National Leadership and Growth Since World War II (PDF) Quarterly Journal of Economics

Trump Transition

No, a Teen Did Not Hack a State Election Pro Publica

Should Companies Be Allowed to Revenge Hack? New York Magazine. What could go wrong?

Tech Industry Pursues a Federal Privacy Law, on Its Own Terms NYT

Click Here to Kill Everybody by Bruce Schneier FT

Developers rebel against Apple/Google tax Axios

Class Warfare

As prison strikes heat up, former inmates talk about horrible state of labor and incarceration USA Today

Twilight in the Box Aeon. Solitary confinement.

The Humanities Are in Crisis The Atlantic

Antidote du jour (via):

Bonus Antidote:

2/2 The owl of Malle Babbe, as so brilliantly executed by Frans Hals. This is real painterly sprezzatura! pic.twitter.com/VxnxrCO7KM  Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) August 26, 2018

See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here.Using state of the art CGI and the latest underwater technology and working alongside divers, wreck investigators and archaeologists, Ocean Wreck Investigation tells the stories of the final moments of ships and those on board.

Thursdays from 9:30pm AEDT.Fire fighters battled into the early hours of this morning to put a major fire at a former Clonmel meat factory under control and an investigation is now underway to establish its cause.

Extensive damage was caused to a large building at the former Clonmel Foods Factory site at Upper Irishtown and Tipperary Fire Service only left the site at 9am today after a long night of dampening down the smouldering structure and monitoring the situation.

Clonmel Fire Service Senior Officer Tadhg O'Driscoll said the Fire Service handed over the site to the property's owners at 9am and the owners are now working to secure the area.

The Emergency Services were alerted to the fire around 6pm yesterday.

Five fire tenders from Clonmel, Cahir and Carrick-on-Suir along with an hydraulic lift based at Clonmel Fire Station attended the blaze, which billowed black smoke that enveloped the surrounding area.

The two fire tenders from Cahir and one from Carrick-on-Suir departed the site at 1am as the fire had been put sufficently under control at that stage. Fire fighters from Clonmel remained there until this morning.

There were road closures in the area around the factory until early this morning due to the fire and smoke but they have now been re-opened.

Mr O'Driscoll said the excellent work carried out by fire crews minimised the damage and stopped it from spreading to the entire complex. He confirmed there was no asbestos in the building that went on fire.

A spokesperson for Clonmel Garda Station said an investigation into the fire is underway but at this stage it was not possible to establish the cause.From 23 to 24 August 2018, Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Lieutenant General Steven Shepro was in Italy where he visited the NATO Joint Forces Command in Naples, the NATO Strategic Direction South Hub and the NATO Alliance Ground Surveillance Force in at the Sigonella Air Base.

On 23 August in the morning, Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Lieutenant General Steven Shepro was welcomed at the NATO Joint Forces Command in Naples (JFC Naples) by its Commander Admiral James Foggo. During their meeting, Lieutenant General Shepro commended the Commander and his staff on the invaluable work they have been doing implementing NATOs enhanced Defence & Deterrence. The Deputy Chairman added that JFC Naples leads NATOs KFOR mission in Kosovo, you head the Headquarters Multinational Division South-East (HQ MND-SE) in Romania as well as the NATO Force Integration Units (NFIUs) in Bulgaria and Romania. You actively contribute to NATOs effort to deter aggression and contribute to the effective defense of NATO territory and forces.

During the visit, Lieutenant General Shepro also received a briefing on NATOs largest exercise in years, Trident Juncture which will take place in Norway from 25 October to 7 November 2018 and will gather over 40,000 participants from more than 30 nations. Lieutenant General Shepro highlighted the importance of such exercises: Trident Juncture 2018 is a prime example of NATO Allies and partners working together to ensure that NATO forces are trained and ready. It will be an important test, and a tremendous display of our collective capabilities. The lessons we will learn are very real and so are the benefits for our resilience and our strength.

In the afternoon, the General received a tour of the NATO Strategic Direction South Hub, NATOs latest capability to improve its regional situational awareness and understanding of the threats, challenges and opportunities emanating from the South. The centre is designed to promote and enhance partnership, dialogue and cooperation amongst NATO and its regional partners on major issues like terrorism, radicalisation, destabilisation, migration and environmental issues. The Hub was declared fully operational at the NATO Summit in July and is vital to connect NATOs Allies and Partners as we work to Project Stability while supporting the rule of law and sound governance, emphasised Lieutenant General Shepro.

On the final day, Lieutenant General Shepro travelled to the Sigonella Airbase, home to NATOs Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) Force where he received a tour of the facilities and a progress report. Back in 2010, NATO realised it needed AGS to achieve its 3 core tasks so 15 Allies Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the United States) decided to acquire five Global Hawk remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) and the associated command and control base stations that make up the AGS system. NATO will then operate and maintain them on behalf of all 29 Allies.(Natural News) According to a review, patients with asthma may soon find relief thanks to a form of alternative medicine called acupuncture.

The paper reviewed several clinical trials and outcome studies concerning cases that used acupuncture to treat asthma. It is of note that none of the trials had a large sample size. The authors also encountered problems often faced by researchers involved in acupuncture trials: defining what comprises appropriate treatment and a suitable control.

The outcome studies found a way around some of these issues; however, several of them lacked lack rigor or an accurate description of measurements used.

Acupuncture is an alternative form of medical treatment that involves inserting very thin needles through a patients skin to target specific points on the body and at different depths. Research posits that acupuncture may help relieve pain, and the treatment is used for different kinds of complaints.

There are those who believe that acupuncture works by balancing life/vital energy, while others think that the treatment has a neurological effect. (Related: Large-scale survey concludes that traditional Chinese medicine can be used to remedy infantile cerebral palsy.)

The Evidence Series of Briefing Papers aims to provide a review of the key papers in the literature, which provide evidence of the effectiveness of acupuncture in the treatment of certain health conditions. This series of briefing papers will present, discuss, and critically evaluate the evidence.

How the study was done

At least 10 percent of people in the U.K. have asthma, and reports of the disease and resulting mortality are increasing.

No single definition of asthma exists, but according to J. Howell, asthma has three elements:

Reversible airways obstruction with episodic attacks of breathlessness and wheezing

Responsiveness to asthma medication (e.g., cromoglycate and/or corticosteroids)

Bronchial hypersensitiveness

However, in practice, none of these elements can provide a definitive way of distinguishing asthma from other breathing problems. Patients with asthma are defined as individuals with reversible airways obstruction and/or clear responsiveness to asthma medication.

Managing the condition usually requires the regular use of medication on a prophylactic basis while severe attacks may require hospitalization. Serious asthma attacks may also result in death.

Asthma is linked to high economic and personal costs. G.T. Lewith and A.D. Watkins posit that asthma costs the National Health Service (NHS) around 400 million yearly; the Department of Social Security, 60 million (via sickness benefits); and the economy overall (via lost productivity), 350 million.

The study authors used the Acupuncture Research Resource Centre (ARRCBASE) to search for the clinical trials and outcome studies referenced in the review. The researchers searched various articles from the British Librarys Allied and Complementary Medicine Database (AMED) and the US MEDLINE using the terms acupuncture, asthma, and breathlessness.

One the search was done, the authors found 61 references, with 22 more taken from citations in these papers.

Some papers were excluded because:

There was no English translation

The paper was unobtainable from the British Library

The paper wasnt focused on presenting or reviewing clinical evidence

The study involved other therapies aside from acupuncture or didnt involve needles.

The papers referenced in the review were separated into three categories:

Reviews  Only reviews published after 1990 were included since earlier publications would have been superseded. Descriptions of a randomized controlled trial (RCT)  Some RCTs were excluded on the grounds of their weak methodology. Trials from before 1990 followed a system of evaluating methodological quality, determined by J. Kleijnen and his fellow researchers, that was used to exclude trials that scored below 40. Trials since 1990 were included only if they were fully randomized. Descriptions of an outcome study  Outcome studies were included if they involved sample sizes significantly larger than the RCTs.

The papers finally selected for the study included six reviews, 11 controlled trials, and four outcome studies.

Study findings

For the paper, the authors reviewed trials that properly referenced methodological terms and trials that had outcome studies with rather large samples. The trials were classified into two groups. The first treated patients as part of normal clinical management while the second group treated patients who experienced an induced asthma attack.

Findings from the first group were inconsistent, especially concerning objective measurements for lung function. But they also provided proof that acupuncture can help improve the patients subjective experience of their symptoms, reduce their use of medication, and improve immunological parameters.

The second group, which involved a smaller number of trials of induced asthma, was more consistently positive. Most of the trials were lacking a rationale for the acupuncture points used while few were linked to the way acupuncture is practiced by British Acupuncture Council members.

The outcome studies provided an overall positive picture of the diagnostic criteria utilized, and it revealed more consistently positive results than the trials. However, the methodology of the former was often weak.

The paper concluded with a discussion of several issues that must be addressed to develop clinically relevant and methodologically sound research.

Read more articles about effective traditional cures for asthma-like acupuncture at AlternativeMedicine.news.

Sources include:

Acupuncture.org.uk

MedicalNewsToday.com(Natural News) Dr. Khaw Kim-sun, a 53-year-old Malaysian national residing in China, has been charged with two counts of murder in the deaths of his wife, Wong Siew-fung (47), and youngest daughter, Khaw Li-ling (16). The mother and daughter were found unconscious on the side of the road in a locked yellow Mini Cooper back in 2015, and were pronounced dead on arrival at the same hospital where Khaw was employed as an anesthetist.

Prosecutors allege that Khaw gassed his wife and child to death by using an inflatable yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide. A deflated ball was discovered in the back of the Mini Cooper in which the women died.

It is believed that Khaw was having an affair with one of his students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he was an associate professor, and that his wife refused to divorce him. He has pleaded not guilty to both counts of murder. (Related: James Homes  Three ways to get set up for murder.)

He urged his daughter to stay home

Investigators were initially stumped as to the womens cause of death, until the post mortem established that they had died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Some of Khaws associates at the university reported seeing him filling two balls with carbon monoxide before the incident. While he told his colleagues that he needed the carbon monoxide to kill some rabbits, he later told the police that he had planned to use it to get rid of rats in his home.

Prosecutors believe that Khaw fully intended to murder his wife, but do not believe that he intended to harm his daughter. (Related: Missouri teen murders neighbor child in cold blood after an increase in Prozac dosage.)

The familys domestic worker, Siti Maesaroh, told the court that though the three oldest children went to school as normal on the day of the murders, the youngest daughter, known as Lily, had the day off and stayed home. She also testified that Lilys father strongly encouraged her to stay at home and finish her homework.

The U.K.s Daily Mail reported:

Khaw, 53, cried as the pathologist who examined the bodies was called to testify and began to give details about the autopsy he carried out on his daughter.

According to Maesaroh, all the children, including Lily, were very close to their parents. The relationship between Khaw and his wife had clearly broken down completely, however, with the domestic worker reporting that they slept in separate bedrooms and even ate their meals separately.

For more stories on strange behavior visit Twisted.news.

Sources for this article include:

DailyMail.co.uk

News.Sky.com

GulfNews.com(Natural News) George Soros, Bill Gates, the Ford Foundation, and the Google News Lab are all running a massive censorship scheme to silence and suppress certain independent media sources across social media platforms while promoting their own investments in online media.

Google has become a tool of censorship  a totalitarian nightmare  banning influential media sources such as InfoWars, while funding a leftist organization that praises Googles own censorship of InfoWars.

This leftist organization that Google promotes on their own behalf, The Center for Investigative Reporting, is funded by a slew of wealthy string pullers: George Soros Open Society Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and most peculiarly, Googles own News Lab. This Center for Investigative Reporting now runs The Hate Report which is a recurring column that glorifies the violent, left-wing terror group Antifa, while attacking InfoWars as the gateway drug for white supremacists.

Basically, the Center for Investigative Reporting is a bought-off publication, brought to prominence by a few wealthy donors who need a publication to do their dirty work and promote their dying ideas of race baiting, speech control, and fact-burying. Google funds this publication and promotes it above other inferior censored media sources; all the while the publication praises Googles ban of InfoWars on the basis of some righteous eradication of racism campaign. The censorship of InfoWars and the shadow banning of the true free press is motivated by business interests and the lefts quest for power over the minds of the public.

The internets true free press is stifled by wealthy manipulators working with the technology giants. These leftist organizations are given a platform to succeed, and on top of it all, they are given free access to smear and libel their competition. All the while, the free press is banned across social media, with no due process and no evidence required to justify the censorship and demonetization. These coordinated bans across social media accuse the free press of anything from inciting hate or division to being Russian agents or spreaders of disinformation. People like Bill Gates believe they know which information is true or false, which information is fit for consumption. So drunk on power, Bill Gates believes he can eradicate the world of information that doesnt support his political and business interests.

Google-funded and favored Hate Report smears InfoWars as gateway for white supremacy

The latest Google-funded Hate Report tells the story of Andrew Anglin, editor of The Daily Stormer. The report says Anglin was convinced to become a neo-Nazi just by listening to Alex Jones radio show. The Hate Report says Anglin was radicalized by the white supremacy gateway conspiracy hub called InfoWars.

This Hate Report does not represent the free press; it is not the independent media. It is a well-funded, coordinated platform allowing progressives, leftists, political operatives, and special interests a place to attack independent media so it can be justifiably banned across social media sites. After Google decided to ban Alex Jones from their platforms, these Hate Reports became reinforcement to justify their doing. These anti-trust violations are an attempt to control the narrative using both censorship and false accusations simultaneously.

How can millions of individuals decisions and behaviors be blamed on a media source anyway? Information can be used by individuals in different ways. People should be free to make up their own minds on how they interpret media. A select few should not decide who can write, speak, do videos, and podcasts. At the end of the day, there is no justification to ban Alex Jones and all the other independent media, independent thinkers, and eclectic voices that are on the internet. We should not be forced to think like George Soros or Bill Gates. This is America and there should be consequences for this kind of money laundering and manipulation of media online.

For more on the censorship front, visit Obey.news.



Sources include:

InformationLiberation.com

RevealNews.org

RevealNews.org

NaturalNews.comThose with "strong religious beliefs" must be re-educated or expelled. Spreading "political rumours" and distorting the countrys history are banned.

Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies)  Chinas ruling Communist Party has issued a revised set of regulations governing members behaviour, noting that the latter must give up their religious beliefs and refrain from spreading political rumours or damage the partys unity.

The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection released the new rules yesterday, but their implementation had already started on 18 August and represent practices already in place for some time.

Violating these rules is generally punished with expulsion from the Communist Party. In case laws are broken, criminal prosecution may follow.

Party members who have religious belief should have strengthened thought education. If they still dont change after help and education from the party organisation, they should be encouraged to leave the party, the new rules say.

Another new clause calls for punishment of those who distort the history of the country, rather than just party or military history as before.

The new disciplinary framework is part of the Partys strict control of its me members, who are not allowed to belong to a religion even after retirement.

According to data from a few years ago, almost a quarter of Party members hold some religious beliefs.

Since he came to power a few years ago, President Xi Jinping has led a campaign to control Party members, fight corruption (often at the expense of his political rival), and crack down on religion.

The Communist Party has also pursue a policy of sinicisation of various religious so as to assimilate them into Chinese culture and society and, above all, subordinating them to the Party.(Natural News) The Los Angeles chapter of the left-wing domestic terrorist group Antifa is calling for a sea of armed masses to take to the streets with weapons, using revolutionary violence against the enemies of the people  meaning conservatives, Trump supporters, and pretty much anyone else who supports traditional American values and the rule of law.

According to the news outlet Far Left Watch, the group, known officially as Serve the People  Los Angeles (STPLA), issued what amounts to a call for an American revolution during a recent demonstration in South Central Los Angeles. Dozens of protesters wearing red bandannas and carrying the groups flags, various banners, and pinata-effigies of President Trump rallied the masses and caused chaos in the streets over the recent detaining of an illegal alien woman by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Upset that Gladis Hernandez, a Hispanic woman who had previously entered the United States illegally, could be on the verge of being deported back to her home, STPLA decided that the only response is to advocate for total anarchy in one of the largest cities in the country  and one that just so happens to have a very high population of illegal aliens who dont belong in the country.

As relayed by PJ Media from the extreme-left Incendiary News Service, agitators present at the rally were reportedly chanting in Spanish, La migra, la policia, la misma porqueria! which translates in English as, ICE, the police, the same sh**! These rabble-rousers were also heard chanting other vulgarities, including, F*** ICE! F*** the pigs! referring, of course, to our countrys law enforcement officers.

Much of the tumult occurred outside of the new Banc of California Stadium, where militant leftists passed out fliers containing information about the detention of Hernandez, and calling for militant escalations to defend the undocumented working-class immigrant communities by any means necessary.

Batten down the hatches, patriots

Its not as though the conservative patriot community wants to engage such nonsense. In the past, law enforcement would have taken care of it, ordering these disturbers of the peace to either leave the area or face arrest and prosecution. But this no longer seems to be the case, and the threat of violence from lawless fascists is becoming chillingly tangible with each passing day.

There have been so many instances of Antifa violence since the election of Donald Trump as president, including at the recent Patriot Prayer meeting in Portland, Oregon, that good-hearted, hard-working American patriots no longer have the option to simply ignore it.

While Natural News would never advocate for provoking violence against these anti-American thugs, there does come a point where a call to arms is necessary to combat its encroachment in defense of freedom and liberty. That moment hasnt yet materialized, but it seems to be on the doorstep.

Our hope with all of this is that law enforcement will continue to do its job in nabbing illegal aliens while also keeping this insane Antifa rhetoric at just that: rhetoric. Theres no place in civil American society for Antifa violence of any kind, especially when it threatens the safety of law-abiding Americans who arent at all interested in having our nations borders scrapped simply to appease the treasonous demands of the far-left.

This is why we have the Second Amendment, of course: to take matters into our own hands, if need be, in order to maintain the peace, defend the innocent, and protect against enemies, both foreign and domestic, who would try to unravel the very foundations of our country in the name of tolerance and equality. This is our right as Americans, after all.

For more news on the anti-American agenda of the far left, check out Libtards.news.

Sources for this article include:

PJMedia.com

NaturalNews.comScientists have come up with yet another way the Earth could get destroyed by cosmic objects way beyond the planet's reach.

This time, it involves gravitational waves colliding to create a black hole that could lay waste to Earth. Fortunately, this appears to be an unlikely way for the apocalypse to occur.

The Two Types Of Gravitational Waves

Gravitational waves are ripples in space that are produced in a disturbance or movement in massive cosmic objects.

Most gravitational waves, New Scientist explains, are spherical and move outward the way ripples do in a pond. However, it can also be plane-fronted and move forward like a tidal wave. This type of gravitational wave is produced when the object or particle is moving at the speed of light.

According to Science Alert, the collision of two plane-fronted gravitational waves would result in a singularity that's the same kind found at the core of a black hole. While this sounds quite ominous, it's not a cause for concern, as the singularity usually just disappears quickly.

However, there is a specific sequence of events that may not be as harmless as what usually happens.

An Unlikely But Deadly Collision

New research, published in the pre-peer review website arXiv, reveals how a different type of collision involving gravitational waves could spell doom for the planet.

Physicists Frans Pretorius and William E. East calculated the effect of a collision between one point of a spherical gravitational wave and a plane-fronted gravitational wave  and it's not a very comforting hypothetical scenario.

If enough energy is expelled, space-time could actually envelop the singularity and create a black hole around it. This would absorb the powerful energy from the wave.

Science Alert points out that there's nothing in the universe that's known to expel the necessary amount of energy to form a black hole from gravitational waves.

However, if it does happen and it happens close enough to Earth, destruction would be certain for the planet. After all, gravitational waves that are strong enough to create a black hole would definitely obliterate all traces of nearby life.

"You wouldn't want it to be nearby, and if it were it would stretch Earth by thousands of kilometers and everything would be destroyed," astrophysicist Vitor Cardoso, an astrophysicist from the University of Lisbon, says in a New Scientist report by Leah Crane. "As soon as we learned about it, we would die."The Krylov State Research Center (KGNC) has presented the model of a light multi-purpose aircraft carrier at the Army-2018 International Military-Technical Forum for the first time. It is on display at the Krylovs exhibition stand.

The Krylov State Research Center (KGNC) has presented the model of a light multi-purpose aircraft carrier at the Army-2018 International Military-Technical Forum for the first time. It is on display at the Krylovs exhibition stand.

The light multipurpose aircraft carrier design unveiled by Kryloc at Army 2018 exhibition in Moscow.



"The light multipurpose aircraft carrier is designed to ensure combat sustainability of the fleets forces and weapons which are engaged in hostilities in blue and green waters by fulfilling anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense tasks as well as by destroying air, surface, underwater and onshore targets," KGCN said in its documents.

The light aircraft carriers standard displacement is 37000 tons; normal displacement - 40500 tons and full displacement - 44000 tons. The length is 304 meters. The length on design waterline is 260 meters. The width is 78 meters. The width on design water line is 38 meters; sea gauge is 8.5 meters. Full speed is 28 knots; cruising speed is 16 knots. Range on 16 knots is 8000 miles; autonomous navigation on food supplies is 60 days. Aviation seaworthiness is up to 7 points. The main propulsion plant consists of a two-shaft gas turbine with partial electric propulsion. The capacity is 81000 KWT or 110000 horse-power. The electric power system consists of 3 power plants with a total capacity of 32MWATTS (6.3 kW/50Hz).

Poster showing an artist impression of the light aircraft carrier at sea



Shipborne arms include four Pantsyr-ME anti-aircraft missile gun systems with target detection units. The Paket complexes comprising four 324 mm torpedo launchers ensure protection against torpedoes. Four rocket-assisted bomb throwers as well as active and passive electronic warfare systems can be deployed on the ship.

The light aircraft carriers air wing consists of 46 aircraft, including 12-14 Su-33 and 12-14 MiG -29K/KUB fighter jets.

The light aircraft carriers air wing consists of 46 flying craft, including 12-14 Su-33 and 12-14 MiG -29K/KUB fighter jets; four long-range radar detection and control aircraft; 12-14 Ka-27-class helicopters. Air-launched weapons stock is up to 600 tons; Aviation kerosene stock is up to 2,000 tons.

Shipborne arms include four Pantsyr-ME CIWS



The Krylov State Research Center presented a project for a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier of project 23000E (Storm). Its displacement is 95,000-100,000 tons. Its air wing consists of 80-90 flying craft.

 Copyright 2018 TASS. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.The family of the famous YouTuber who caused a deadly, fiery crash on Interstate 805 on Thursday expressed condolences Saturday to the victims' family.

Trevor Heitmann's family said they are devastated over the loss in a statement released to NBC 7 San Diego by the family's attorney.

"Our family is devastated over the tragic loss of our beloved Trevor Heitmann," the statement reads. "We express our deepest condolences to the Pizarro family and anyone impacted by this incident."

Heitmann's was driving a McLaren the wrong way on I-805 HOV lane Thursday near Marine Corps Air Station Miramar during evening rush-hour commute and slammed into an SUV driven by Aileen Pizarro, 43.

He was driving in excess of 100 mph, the California Highway Patrol said. The impact of the crash caused Pizarro's vehicle to explode and become engulfed in flames, killing her and her daughter, 12-year-old Aryana.

Heitmann, 18, was also killed in the crash. He was a YouTube star who goes by the name of McSkillet. He became known for trading "skins" or moderations that alter the appearance of characters for the first-person-shooter video game, "Counter Strike: Global Offensive."

"That car in front of me swerved, slammed and exploded within a fraction of second  all I could do was hold on to my steering wheel and run over everything that exploded," witness Hector Puga said.

CHP investigators believe Heitmann got onto the northbound I-805 HOV lane from the Carrol Canyon Road direct access ramp going southbound before colliding with the Hyundai near Governor Drive.

The son and brother of the two victims, Dominic Pizarro, said his mother was a family therapist who most recently worked with abused children.

"I really am devastated that one person's actions could take my family away from me," he said.

Dominic said he can't find it in his heart to blame Heitmann for the damage he caused and instead will try to remember what his mother would want him to do.

"He was not in his right frame of mind and that was the reason he found himself going the wrong way on the highway," he said. "My prayers and thoughts are for his soul and his family as well."

Prior to the crash, San Diego police responded to an incident at Ashley Falls Elementary School in Carmel Valley where Heitmann's McLaren crashed through a gate on the campus. He left the scene before officers arrived.

Investigators still don't know the motive behind the incident at the elementary school or Heitmann's decision to enter I-805 against traffic.

"We want to thank the first responders for their valiant efforts and dedication," the Heitmann family's statement reads. "We are piecing together the facts and circumstances that lead to this incomprehensible tragedy. We thank the community in advance for privacy and respect during this difficult time."The union that represents San Jose police officers says its board of directors on Monday will sign an agreement that will give the independent police auditor more oversight authority.

The agreement will give the independent police auditor, who is tasked with investigating complaints against police, more power to review use of force incidents, internal investigations and police records. The hope is that the move will result in more transparency and trust.

Aaron Zisser, the former independent police auditor, stepped down Friday after the San Jose Police Officers Association (SJPOA) called for his resignation.

The union alleges that Zisser attended an anti-police rally. Zisser denies the allegation.

In June, the SJPOA also turned in a petition with more than 500 signatures to the mayor's office to demand Zisser be fired for misconduct.

The police union said Zisser's annual report excluded important data and misled the public about racial disparities in the department's use of force.

Speaking Friday, Zisser said the SJPOA's tactics seemed "focused on derailing the community's own efforts to expand oversight and thereby accomplish broader needed reforms at SJPD."

"The reality is that San Jose has not structured the IPA office with protections to ensure independence. The oversight model is not designed to accomplish real reform," Zisser said.

The SJPOA said it's important to note that although the union had issues with the judgement and actions of Zisser, "the SJPOA never questioned the vital and essential role that the Office of the IPA plays in the administration of justice for all San Jose residents."

The Assistant Independent Police Auditor, Shivaun Nurre, will serve as the Acting IPA until Mayor Sam Liccardo appoints a permanent replacement, officials said.Police are investigating a reported home invasion and armed robbery in San Francisco's Parkside neighborhood.

The incident occurred just before noon Monday on 22 Escolta Way, near Pine Lake Park and just east of Sunset Boulevard.

Police said two masked suspects robbed the homeowner of $1,000.

No other information was immediately available.As the largest California wildfire ever recorded continued to devour bone-dry brush in the northern portion of the state, firefighters lending a hand from Utah came across a desperate sight: a German shepherd hunkered down under a tree.

Days later, the "stunning" dog is in much more comfortable confines. He has been adopted by one of the firefighters who found him, according to the Mendocino County Animal Shelter.

After making the discovery while battling the Mendocino Complex Fire, firefighters from the Draper Fire Department befriended the pup and aptly named him Mendo, according to the shelter. He was treated at the Mendocino Animal Hospital and later taken to a shelter in Ukiah.

From the get-go, a Draper firefighter by the name of Patrick wanted to adopt Mendo if his owner didn't come around to retrieve him, according to the Mendocino County Animal Shelter.

After being neutered and determined to be in good health, Mendo was transported on Saturday to Reno, Nevada, where he was reunited with his firefighter friend and new owner.

Mendo's arrival likely brings some curative powers to Patrick and the firefighters he works with. The Draper Fire Department lost one of their own, Battallion Chief Matthew Burchett, when he was struck by falling tree debris while fighting the Mendocino Compex Fire.

"We know Mendo will help them heal," the Mendocino County Animal Shelter wrote on Facebook.Montana Gov. Steve Bullock is apparently testing the presidential waters in New Hampshire, the state that holds the first primary in the race for the White House.

Bullock, a popular two-term Democratic governor, is headlining fundraisers for state legislative candidates and helping the New Hampshire Democratic party kick off canvassing this weekend. But he's also meeting with a number of influential Democrats in multiple stops across the state.

Bullock tells the AP that when it comes to potential presidential aspirations, he's "listening quite a bit'' as he travels the country, adding "that, for now, is as far as it goes.''

He adds that he hasn't "set any timetables to do anything else.'' He's helping New Hampshire Democrats running for the state legislature in 2018 during a two-day swing.Springfield police are searching for a man wanted for unarmed assault and burglary as well as other charges.

According to police, the suspect is identified as 41-year-old Kristian Boyd.

He is wanted for unarmed assault and burglary as well as other charges for an incident in the Indian Orchard neighborhood of Springfield, Massachusetts, police said.

Boyd's last known address is on Wheatland Avenue in Chicopee, police said.

Springfield police ask anyone with information on his whereabouts to contact the Warrant Apprehension Unit at 413-246-7600.Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo has ordered flags in the state lowered to half-staff to mark the death of Sen. John McCain.

The Arizona Republican died Saturday of brain cancer at his Arizona ranch. He was 81.

Raimondo said Monday that flags will return to full staff at sunset on Sunday, the day of McCain's private burial service. McCain was a decorated Vietnam War veteran, former prisoner of war and six-term senator.

The Democratic governor described him as a ``war hero, dedicated patriot and true fighter until the very end.'' She says his death is a loss for the nation.

McCain will be buried on a grassy hill at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland.A twenty year old girl was killed by a driver of the popular taxi service Didi. Another similar case occurred in May. The police summoned the top management of the company, which has initiated an internal investigation. The Chinese carpooling market is valued at 56 billion dollars Apple and SoftBank among the investors.

Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies)  A second murder in a three-month period linked to the Didi's taxis, a popular Chinese carpooling service. On Friday, August 24, a girl was raped and killed by a driver while traveling from the suburbs of the city of Leqing to the nearby county of Yongjia. Last May, a hostess was killed and thrown into a river by a driver. The authorities have put a temporary halt to the service, which is suspended from today.

Meanwhile, the police have already stopped the driver who admitted the crime. The Ministry of Transport stated that the company has "unequivocal responsibilities" in the murder. Yesterday morning, the police summoned the top management of the company to request internal reforms and to make the passenger service safer. The company is held to be co-responsible for the death of the woman. In a statement, the company apologized and promised compensation for the victim's family members.

Didi is considered the Chinese answer to Uber and offers a taxi-on-call service. In 2016, Apple invested a billion dollars in the company. Among the investors there are also SoftBank and the American Booking Holdings Inc. The company is valued at 56 billion dollars and has 550 million users.

"In the last three years since the hitch service was launched, we are lucky to have provided billions of rides, read a Didi statement released on Sunday. We are very sorry that the service has to be taken offline temporarily  We are sorry that we let you down because of our own problems.

After the murder of the hostess in May, Didi tried to renew the service, including the introduction of mandatory facial scanning for all drivers on the app before taking any order. This is to prevent the theft of the identity of registered drivers.At least 10 people have been shot and wounded in shootings across the city of Chicago Sunday.

A 22-year-old man is in critical condition after he was shot multiple times in the 3300 block of West Schubert around 2 a.m., police said.

The man was on foot when he was shot in the head, neck, and shoulder. He was rushed to Illinois Masonic Hospital in critical condition, and no one is in custody in connection with the incident.

In the citys most recent shooting, a 19-year-old man was shot during a physical altercation in the 3500 block of South Indiana, police said.

The individuals involved got into an altercation just after 6 p.m., and one of the men pulled out a gun and fired shots, striking the victim in the chest. The victim was rushed to University of Chicago Hospital in serious condition, police said.

No one is in custody in connection with the shooting.

Here are the rest of the days shootings:A Severe Thunderstorm Watch has been issued for Kenosha County in southern Wisconsin as rough weather moves into the area.

The watch expires at 9 p.m. Sunday night, according to the National Weather Service.

A line of storms is hammering areas north of Milwaukee on Sunday evening, and is forecasted to the east through the evening hours. More storms could develop on the southern end of the line, putting Kenosha County in harm's way.

The Chicago-area could see rain later in the evening, but is not impacted by the severe weather watches.

A Heat Advisory will expire at 7 p.m. in parts of Illinois, including Kankakee and Grundy counties, but it will resume at 1 p.m. Monday afternoon as high temperatures and heat indices are expected.John McCain, the longtime senator and 2008 GOP presidential nominee who refused to leave fellow prisoners of war behind to escape years of torture in Vietnam, and whose maverick streak as Arizonas senior statesman at times frustrated fellow Republicans and confounded President Donald Trump, has died, his family confirmed in a statement Saturday.

He was 81 and had been diagnosed with brain cancer in July 2017.

His wife of 38 years, Cindy McCain, said the senator "passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the the place he loved best."

His daughter Meghan McCain said of her father: "He was a great fire who burned bright, and we lives in his light and warmth for so very long. We know that his flame lives on, in each of us."

McCain had decided to discontinue medical treatment for the glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, his family announced on Aug. 24. He had surpassed expectations for his survival, but "the progress of disease and the inexorable advance of age render their verdict," the statement said.

McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee who was in his sixth term representing Arizona, had a reputation for sticking to his convictions even if it meant disagreeing with his fellow Republicans. He was a fierce critic of President Donald Trump, who in turn repeatedly insulted the ailing senator.

McCain's brain tumor was discovered last year after he underwent surgery to remove a blood clot. He recovered quickly from the surgery and in late July entered the Senate to a standing ovation.

On the Senate floor, he said that his service there had been the most important job he had held.

"And I am so grateful to the people of Arizona for the privilege  for the honor  of serving here and the opportunities it gives me to play a small role in the history of the country I love," he said.

In one of his most dramatic final votes, he gave a deciding thumbs-down to the GOP's last attempt to overturn "Obamacare," the health-care law approved under President Barack Obama. The early-morning vote earned McCain praise from Democrats and Trump's fury.

But he stuck with his party on the contentious GOP-backed tax reform bill in December though he was too ill to return to Washington for the final vote.

His disputes with Trump became especially nasty, and his allies had told the White House that the president was not welcome at McCain's funeral. That antipathy was on display in August when the president failed to mention McCain as he signed a defense bill intended to honor the senator.

"My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!" Trump tweeted Saturday night.

After his cancer diagnosis, McCain spent a good deal of his time at his Arizona ranch, where he underwent physical therapy and received visitors, including his daughter, "The View" co-host Meghan McCain, and former Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Beau Biden died in 2015 after being diagnosed with the same brain cancer.

Among those who paid tribute to McCain were former presidents, fellow lawmakers and world leaders.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said "the nation mourns the loss of a great American patriot" and called it "an understatement to say the Senate will not be the same" without him.

"In an era filled with cynicism about national unity and public service, John McCain's live shone as a bright example," McConnell said. "He showed us that boundless patriotism and self-sacrifice are not outdated concepts or cliches, but the building blocks of an extraordinary life."

McCain announced in a book excerpt released at the start of May that cancer forced him to acknowledge he would not be running for re-election.

John Sidney McCain III was born on Aug. 29, 1936, in the Panama Canal Zone to John Sidney and Roberta McCain. The son and grandson of Navy admirals and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he served in the U.S. Navy until 1981, when he retired with the rank of captain. He was elected to the House of Representatives from Arizona in 1982 and to the Senate in 1986.

During the Vietnam War, after his Navy bomber was shot down in 1967, he was held as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese for five and a half years. In 1968, after McCain's father had been named the commander of the U.S. forces in the Pacific, he was offered an early release but refused until those who had been at the prison longer than he were let go.

In 2000, he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination in a bus he called the "Straight Talk Express," to capitalize on his reputation for independence. During the South Carolina primary, he and his family endured perhaps the ugliest incident of the race: a phony poll that was actually designed to spread the false story that he had fathered a black child during an affair. In fact, the McCains' daughter Bridget was adopted from an orphanage in Bangladesh. Other rumors pegged McCain as a traitor in Vietnam and his wife, Cindy, as a drug addict. (Cindy McCain has said she became addicted to Vicodin and Percocet in 1989 after back surgery for ruptured disks.)

The campaign of George W. Bush, his opponent and the ultimate winner, denied it was responsible.

McCain was the Republican nominee for president in 2008, running with then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She seemed a popular choice at first, but as time went on, opinions about her turned negative.

At a campaign meeting in Minnesota, McCain famously told a woman who said she could not trust Obama because he was an Arab that the then-Illinois senator was a decent family man and a citizen.

Trump, while campaigning in 2015, belittled McCain by saying he was not a war hero.

"He's a war hero because he was captured," Trump said. "I like people who weren't captured."

Politicians from both parties quickly rallied around McCain.

The week before McCain had said Trump had "fired up the crazies" in the Republican party with his inflammatory talk about illegal immigration from Mexico.

When McCains family announced his decision to stop treatment, Meghan McCain thanked everyone for the love and generosity shown to the family over the last year, and wrote, We could not have made it this far without you  youve given strength to carry on.

Cindy McCain tweeted, "I love my husband with all of my heart. God bless everyone who has cared for my husband along this journey."

John McCain's marriage to his first wife, Carol, ended in divorce.

He is survived by another daughter, Sidney, and sons John Sidney McCain IV, or Jack, and Jimmy McCain. While he was married to Carol McCain, he adopted her two sons from an earlier marriage, Doug and Andy.A Meriden elementary school is rolling out a new program this year aimed especially at helping students displaced after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico last fall.

Hanover Elementary School psychologist Amanda Gonzalez is thrilled for the new school year.

"NBC Connecticut helped me. After you guys shared my story, within days my project got funded," Gonzalez said.

She's receiving more than $600 in bilingual books through DonorsChoose.Org to help students express their emotions.

"Each donor, I want them to realize when they donate to these projects, no matter how small your donation, you do a huge difference for that teacher and not only are you impacting the teacher, but you're inviting 20+ students in my classroom," she said.

It's a huge relief for this educator who would have had to reach into her own pocket.

"It's so costly sometimes to go out and purchase those items on your own so I just think the Donors Choose is just such an amazing resource for educators to use," she said.

The materials will help students who lost everything when Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico.

There are about 60 students at Hanover Elementary this school year who were displaced from Puerto Rico and that number could rise.

Bilingual teacher Alicia Lorenzo says the new program is a tremendous help in the classroom.

"This year, I'm going to be focusing more on their social, emotional learning because I think they'll have more success when they're taken care of as a whole," Lorenzo said.

It's a fresh start for students and teachers.

"I'm really excited for this school year and getting the materials and putting them to good use. Think everybody from the staff to the students will benefit so I'm really grateful," Gonzalez said.A local library is thinking outside the box  and outside the books, for that matter  in an effort to bring stories to life in a whole new way.

The Cozby Library in Coppell will host a Human Library" from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sept. 15.

For the event, people will be able to check out five people for 30-minute conversations  where no questions will be off-limits - designed to create dialogue and increase understanding of subjects that are often misunderstood.

The "human books" are volunteers and Coppell residents who will act as representatives of these communities: a refugee, a police officer, a Muslim, someone with a multi-ethnic background and the parents of a child with special needs.

I think this is an awesome idea, said Sharon Graybill, the "special needs parent."

Graybill hopes to have a frank and open conversation with others because she says she would've benefited from one decades ago.

I needed to talk to people and there wasnt as much information, Graybill said. And the best advice came from people who are living it, and who have lived it. I thought they understood.

Nasr Boukadoum, the book of "ethnicity," was born in Algeria to a French mother and an Arab father. The petroleum engineer, who is now a U.S. citizen, said he seized the chance to participate in the Human Library because, throughout his adult life, he has had multiple versions of the conversations that he anticipates he will have during the session.

It doesnt faze me. What it does is it saddens me that we still live in such an environment, Boukadoum said about the times he has experienced what he considers to be prejudice and cultural ignorance. [When it happens] I do my best to educate the offender.

Sgt. Kirk Smith of the Coppell Police Department will be the book of law enforcement.

When I found out what this was about I jumped at the opportunity because I have things to say, and I want people to ask those questions, said Sgt. Smith, who has been a police officer for more than 20 years. I think that we are ready as law enforcement to answer those tough questions. And I think we have the answers that might show other people that we are human, too.

Mohamed Elmougy, a Coppell business owner who has lived in the city for 25 years, will be a representative of Islam.

I remember after 9/11 people were asking questions, saying, We dont know much about Islam and Muslims. And it was hard for them to accept them, so I am a true believer that knowledge leads to acceptance, Elmougy said about why he volunteered for the project.

The fifth human book will be a refugee. She was not immediately available for comment.

The Human Library concept began in Denmark in 2000, and later spread to other libraries in Europe, according to a representative of the Cozby Library.Several school districts in North Texas are partnering with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center to address mental illness and mental health among teenagers.

Plano ISD, along with Dallas ISD, Fort Worth ISD, Frisco ISD and Richardson ISD will be including a mental health component as a part of their health curriculum. A health care professional, trained by UT Southwestern psychiatrists, will teach curriculum emphasizing risk and resilience.

Topics will include depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and suicide. Instructors will interject role playing sessions and provide information on symptoms of mental illness and awareness.

Teenagers experience their highest points of anxiety between 8th and 9th grade and 12th grade to college, said Dr. Madhukar Trivedi who is leading the program. Teenagers are in a state of transition during these two periods. If we can take some preventative measures, and get in front of the mental illness, we can positively impact generations to come.

The program has the potential to impact thousands of teenagers who attend high school within the four districts. Certified UT Southwestern mental health professionals will instruct students for five weeks during their health class, starting late August and early September. There are two goals of the program. One, to identify students who need care immediately, and two, to identify students who are at risk for developing mental illness.

When this happens to teenagers and young adults, it changes the course of their life," Trivedi said. "Their ability to form relationships, their ability to finish their education, their ability to have a meaningful work life, and their performance is much less if they would have been treated for depression.

Last year more than 6 percent of the students that participated in the program expressed thoughts of suicide.

Students who are at risk will be asked to participate in a 10-year research project. Trivedi is leading the project, which involved brain and blood research. The data collected will help doctors identify signs and symptoms at an earlier stage. Currently there are 250 students who have signed up to participate in the research portion. Parents are also asked to participate, so doctors can uncover any genetic links between parents and children.

If you would like to enroll students in the program, contact Dr. Madhukar Trivedi, who oversees the network at UT Southwesterns Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care, part of the Peter ODonnell Jr. Brain Institute. You can reach him by emailing Madhukar.Trivedi@utsouthwestern.edu or calling 214-648-6262.The Russian hackers indicted by the U.S. special prosecutor last month have spent years trying to steal the private correspondence of some of the world's most senior Christian Orthodox figures, The Associated Press has found, illustrating the high stakes as Kiev and Moscow wrestle over the religious future of Ukraine.

The targets included top aides to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who often is described as the first among equals of the world's Eastern Orthodox Christian leaders.

The Istanbul-based patriarch is currently mulling whether to accept a Ukrainian bid to tear that country's church from its association with Russia, a potential split fueled by the armed conflict between Ukrainian military forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The AP's evidence comes from a hit list of 4,700 email addresses supplied last year by Secureworks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies.

The AP has been mining the data for months, uncovering how a group of Russian hackers widely known as Fancy Bear tried to break into the emails of U.S. Democrats, defense contractors, intelligence workers, international journalists and even American military wives. In July, as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, a U.S. grand jury identified 12 Russian intelligence agents as being behind the group's hack-and-leak assault against Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

The targeting of high-profile religious figures demonstrates the wide net cast by the cyberspies.

Patriarch Bartholomew claims the exclusive right to grant a "Tomos of Autocephaly," or full ecclesiastic independence, sought by the Ukrainians. It would be a momentous step, splitting the world's largest Eastern Orthodox denomination and severely eroding the power and prestige of the Moscow Patriarchate, which has positioned itself as leading player within the global Orthodox community.

"If something like this will take place on their doorstep, it would be a huge blow to the claims of Moscow's transnational role," said Vasilios Makrides, a specialist in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Erfurt in Germany. "It's something I don't think they will accept."

The Kremlin is scrambling to help Moscow's Patriarch Kirill retain his traditional role as the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and "the more they know, the better it is for them," Makrides said.

The Russian Orthodox Church said it had no information about the hacking and declined comment. Russian officials referred the AP to previous denials by the Kremlin that it has anything to do with Fancy Bear, despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary.

Ukraine is lobbying hard for a religious divorce from Russia and some observers say the issue could be decided as soon as next month.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko flew to Istanbul in April in an effort to convince the patriarch to agree to a split, which he has described as "a matter of our independence and our national security." Moscow's Patriarch Kirill is flying to Turkey later this week in a last-ditch bid to prevent it.

Hilarion Alfeyev, Kirill's representative abroad, has warned that granting the Tomos could lead to the biggest Christian schism since 1054, when Catholic and Orthodox believers parted ways.

"If such a thing happens, Orthodox unity will be buried," Alfeyev said.

The issue is an extraordinarily sensitive one for the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Reached by phone, spokesman Nikos-Giorgos Papachristou said: "I don't want to be a part of this story."

Other church officials spoke to the AP about the hacking on condition of anonymity, saying they did not have authorization to speak to the media.

Bartholomew, who is 78, does not use email, those church officials told AP. But his aides do, and the Secureworks list spells out several attempts to crack their Gmail accounts.

Among them were several senior church officials called metropolitans, who are roughly equivalent to archbishops in the Catholic tradition. Those include Bartholomew Samaras, a key confidante of the patriarch; Emmanuel Adamakis, an influential hierarch in the church; and Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, who heads a prestigious seminary on the Turkish island of Halki. All are involved in the Tomos issue; none returned recent AP messages seeking comment.

Spy games have long been a part of the Russian Orthodox world.

The Soviet Union slaughtered tens of thousands of priests in the 1930s, but the Communists later took what survived of the church and brought it under the sway of Russia's secret police, the KGB, with clerics conscripted to spy on congregants and emigres.

The nexus between Russia's intelligence and religious establishments survived the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and the KGB's reorganization into the FSB, according to Moscow-based political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin.

"Our church leaders are connected to the FSB and their epaulettes stick out from under their habits," Oreshkin said. "They provide Vladimir Putin's policy with an ideological foundation."

That might make one target found by the AP seem curious: The Moscow Patriarch's press secretary, Alexander Volkov.

But Orthodox theologian Cyril Hovorun said he wouldn't be surprised to see a Russian group spying on targets close to home, saying, "they're probably checking him out just in case."

Volkov did not return AP emails seeking comment.

Hovorun is unusually qualified to speak on the issue. In 2012 he  like Volkov  was an official within the Moscow Patriarchate. But he resigned after someone leaked emails showing that he secretly supported independence-leaning Ukrainian clergy.

Hovorun has since been targeted by the Russian hackers, according to the data from Secureworks, which uses the name Iron Twilight to refer to the group.

Hovorun said he believes that those who published his emails six years ago weren't related to Fancy Bear, but he noted that their modus operandi  stealing messages and then publishing them selectively  was the same.

"We've known about this tactic before the hacking of the Democrats," Hovorun said, referring to the email disclosures that rocked America's 2016 presidential campaign. "This is a familiar story for us."

The Russian hackers' religious dragnet also extended to the United States and went beyond Orthodox Christians, taking in Muslims, Jews and Catholics whose activities might conceivably be of interest to the Russian government.

John Jillions, the chancellor of the Orthodox Church in America, provided the AP with a June 19, 2015, phishing email that Secureworks later confirmed was sent to him by Fancy Bear.

Fancy Bear also went after Ummah, an umbrella group for Ukrainian Muslims; the papal nuncio in Kiev; and an account associated with the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, a Byzantine rite church that accepts the authority of the Vatican, the Secureworks data shows.

Also on the hit list: Yosyp Zisels, who directs Ukraine's Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities and has frequently been quoted defending his country from charges of anti-Semitism. Zisels said he had no knowledge of the attempted hacking. Vatican officials did not return messages.

Protestants were targeted too, including three prominent Quakers operating in the Moscow area.

Hovorun said Protestants were viewed with particularly intense suspicion by the Kremlin.

"There is an opinion shared by many in the Russian establishment that all those religious groups  like Quakers, evangelicals  they are connected to the American establishment," he said.

Secureworks' data shows hacking attempts on religious targets that took place in 2015 and 2016, but other material obtained by the AP suggests attempts to compromise the Ecumenical Patriarchate are ongoing.

On Oct. 16, 2017, an email purporting to come from Papachristou, who was just being appointed as spokesman, arrived in the inboxes of about a dozen Orthodox figures.

"Dear Hierarchs, Fathers, Brothers and Sisters in Christ!" it began, explaining that Papachristou was stepping into his new role as director of communications. "It's a very big joy for me to serve the Church on this position. Some suggestions on how to build up relations with the public and the press are provided in the file attached."

The file was rigged to install surveillance software on the recipients' computers.

The email's actual sender remains a mystery  independent analyses of the malicious message by Secureworks and its competitor CrowdStrike yielded nothing definitive.

Church officials told the AP they were disturbed by the hacker's command of church jargon and their inside knowledge of Papachristou's appointment.

"The one who made this is someone who knows us," one official said.

Priests and prelates don't make obvious targets for cyberespionage, but the stakes for the Kremlin are high as the decision on Tomos looms.

Granting the Ukrainian church full independence "would be that devastating to Russia," said Daniel Payne, a researcher on the board of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University in Texas.

"Kiev is Jerusalem for the Russian Orthodox people," Payne said. "That's where the sacred relics, monasteries, churches are ... it's sacred to the people, and to Russian identity."

Francesca Ebel and Nataliya Vasilyeva contributed to this report.Learning to drive may seem like a simple skill you pick up in high school, but for the hundreds of refugee families in San Diego, transportation is one of the biggest challenges they face, as they try to thrive in their new home country.

A new program, called Women at the Wheel, is focused on getting Syrian refugee women behind the wheel. The program is organized by the non-profit, Syrian Community Network.

I need to learn to drive because I have children who go to school, said Abir Aldabbagh, a mother of four living in El Cajon.

Abir has been taking driver training courses, but shes still a little nervous behind the wheel. Like any mother, shes determined to make sure her four children get to school.

Yes. Many schools, in different areas, Abir Aldabbagh said.

Abir moved to El Cajon a year ago. She became a refugee after her home near Syrias capital was destroyed in the war.

Women at the Wheel is trying to empower refugee women like Abir, who have settled in San Diego County.

We were able to fund about 50 women to participate in our program. But our waiting list is nearly a hundred women, said Lida Dianti, Communications Manager at the Syrian Community Network.

One of the young women hoping to go through the program is Abirs daughter Raghad.

Im now going to City College to continue my education. I want to become a doctor in the future, said Raghad Aldabbagh, a 19-year-old refugee.

Raghads talent is obvious. She recently graduated as valedictorian at Urban Corps Charter School. But commuting from El Cajon to downtown San Diego can be an excruciating commute without a car.

I take the trolley or the bus. Sometimes the trolley breaks, so Ill be late for class, or sometimes the bus doesnt run at night, said Raghad Aldabbagh.

The families transportation problems may seem small compared to what they dealt with in Syria, but its the small things that will keep their drive for the American dream moving.

Were trying to start a new life, start a new future here, said Raghad Aldabbagh.

The Syrian Community Network has set up a crowdfunding website for people who are interested in donating to the Women at the Wheel campaign.What to Know The Holy fire started Aug. 6 in Cleveland National Forest

An arson suspect was charged in connection with the nearly 23,000-acre wildfire

Containment is expected this week after nearly a month of fighting the fire in sweltering summer heat

Firefighters responded Monday to a flare-up of the nearly 23,000-acre Holy Fire that sent a towering smoke plume over Cleveland National Forest.

The fire was 95 percent contained as of Saturday, but some small spots continued to smolder in rugged terrain along the rim of the burn zone. Crews have been working to establish containment lines since the alleged arson blaze erupted on the afternoon of Aug. 6 in the Holy Jim Canyon area, on the Orange County side of the national preserve.

The flare-up was deep within an area that burned earlier, but the fire crossed containment lines and burned about 150 acres by late Monday afternoon.

Air tankers, water-dropping helicopters and hand crews were dispatched to the flare-up. Firefighters are attempting to prevent flames from burning near communications towers on nearby Santiago Peak.

"Their objective will be to protect communication towers, but there are no residential structures threatened," said Orange County Fire Authority Capt. Tony Bommarito.

Winds in the area were gusting to 26 mph, but temperatures were cooler than earlier this month when firefighters faced sweltering triple-digit heat.

By the evening, the flare-up was 10 percent contained.

The fire has blackened an estimated 22,986 acres -- about 36 square miles -- in Orange and Riverside counties. Flames damaged or destroyed 24 structures, officials said.

The remaining crews assigned to the blaze were digging and filling in pits made by bulldozers to starve the flames of fuel.

Forrest Gordon Clark, 51, is charged with aggravated arson resulting in damage to at least five inhabited structures, arson of inhabited property, arson of forest and criminal threats in connection with the blaze.

Clark has a cabin in Holy Jim Canyon, and arson investigators allegedly uncovered evidence indicating the fire was ignited in the immediate vicinity of his property, according to the Orange County Fire Authority.

A volunteer fireman, Mike Milligan, who has a cabin near Clark's, told reporters the defendant has had a long-running feud with a neighbor and other cabin owners. In the days prior to the fire, Clark ran through the area screaming and sent Milligan a message warning that "this place will burn," he said.

Clark is being held in lieu of $1 million bail and is undergoing a court-ordered evaluation for mental illness.

The Holy Fire bore down on Lake Elsinore and surrounding communities for six days, prompting mandatory evacuations and road closures. The Ortega (74) Highway between San Juan Capistrano and Lake Elsinore was closed from Aug. 8 to Aug. 14 due to the monster blaze.

Several firefighters were injured battling the flames, though none of the injuries were life-threatening.

Along with USFS crews, Cal Fire, Riverside County, Corona, San Bernardino County and personnel from other agencies deployed to the brusher, aided by multiple air tankers and water-dropping helicopters.

The OCFA asked anyone who may have been in the Holy Jim Canyon area on Aug. 6 around the time the fire began to contact investigators at 714-573-6700 or 714-573-6709.Fire officials in Delaware say a man they pulled from a sewer system told rescuers he'd spent at least a day stuck underground.

Around 30 firefighters and paramedics were called to a Wilmington intersection around 1:45 p.m. Saturday after a passer-by reported hearing a voice coming from a nearby sewer grate.

Michael Schaal is a battalion chief with the city's fire department. He told the News Journal two rescuers were lowered into the sewer, found the man and pulled him out about 22 minutes after the department arrived on scene.

Schaal says the man told firefighters he fell in about a mile from where he was rescued and had been lost for at least a day.

The man, who wasn't immediately identified, was taken to a hospital with injuries not considered life-threatening.Eight million are allocated to the private sector, another eight to finance environmental projects and two in the fight against drugs. Brussels renews its commitment to keep the nuclear pact alive. The Iranian Parliament fires the Economy Minister. The holder of the Defense flies to Damascus and meets Assad.

Teheran (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The European Union has allocated 18 million euros in development aid to Iran, in an effort to curb the effects of US President Donald Trumps pulling out of the 2015 nuclear agreement (the JCPOA) and introduction of the toughest sanctions in history . This was announced by the head of the EU foreign policy, Federica Mogherini, confirming the commitment of the 28 countries to keep the atomic pact alive in spite of Washington.

For weeks Brussels has been engaged in an economic and diplomatic effort to keep trade links with the Islamic Republic alive. The 18 million allocation is part of a larger - and already approved - 50 million euro package of measures for the benefit of citizens.

The package - part of those "practical measures" requested by Teheran - provides for the destination of eight million to the private sector, including aid to small and medium-sized enterprises and the National Chamber of Commerce. Another eight million will instead be used to support environmental projects; the last two will be used to combat the damage caused by drugs.

Also because of the new US sanctions, in the last period the Iranian economy has been hit hard and the weakest and most vulnerable part of the population are the first to feel the cponsequences. Hence the decision of the Iranian Parliament to expel Economy Minister Masoud Karbasian, following a vote of no confidence - three weeks after his colleague Ali Rabiei - because he is unable to handle problems in the banking, tax and production sectors.

Meanwhile, the Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami arrived yesterday in Damascus, for a two-day talks during which he met President Bashar al-Assad and his Syrian counterpart. At the center of the talks the fight against extremist and jihadist groups present in the territory and a renewed collaboration on the military level. "Not only the peoples of the region - said Hatami - but the whole world is in debt to Syria for the battles against the terrorists", hoping at the same time that the whole country will be "freed" and the displaced can return to their homes .What to Know Liberty Island was evacuated Monday as three propane tanks caught fire near a construction site where a new museum is being built

One worker was hurt in the fire, but those injuries were believed to be minor, authorities said; 3,400 tourists were told to leave

Each of the three tanks had about 100 pounds of propane, posing a potentially catastrophic threat should one have exploded

Liberty Island was evacuated as a precaution Monday as three 100-pound propane tanks suddenly caught fire, posing a potentially catastrophic risk to thousands of tourists gathered to see the Statue of Liberty, officials said.



One worker suffered minor injuries in the blaze, which broke out at a construction site on the island near where a new museum is being constructed. The flames were out within two hours. Officials said about 3,400 people had been on the island at the time, and "we had no choice" but to evacuate.



Had one of the propane tanks exploded, "anybody near it, shrap metal would have been flying for quite some distance plus a tremendous ball of fire," said FDNY Manhattan Borough Commander Chief Roger Sakowich.



The worker who was hurt was doing something with the tanks at the time, though it's not clear what, Sakowich said. A cause of the fire remains under investigation, but Sakowich said any kind of spark could have ignited it.

Liberty Island reopened by early afternoon. It was the second large-scale evacuation of the tourist hotspot in less than two months.



On the Fourth of July, the island was evacuated after a woman scaled the base of the Statue of Liberty during an "Abolish ICE" protest. She spent hours sitting on Lady Liberty's green cloak, weaving her way around corners as specialized NYPD crew tried to coax her down. Eventually, they did.



She was charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct and other crimes and pleaded not guilty to all the charges in Manhattan Federal Court the next day.What to Know A 29-year-old man was arrested and charged with murder in the June 20 death of Lesandro Guzman-Feliz, known as "Junior"

Guzman-Feliz was attacked with a machete outside a Bronx bodega; the attack was caught on camera

The NYPD announced the arrest of Ronald Urena; previously 12 alleged gang members had been indicted in the case

A 29-year-old man has been arrested Sunday and charged with murder in the caught-on-camera machete attack that killed a 15-year-old boy outside a bodega in the Bronx, police said.

Ronald Urena, of the Bronx, was charged with murder, manslaughter, gang assault, conspiracy and criminal possession of a weapon, the NYPD said. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Monday.

The June 20 killing of Lesandro "Junior" Guzman-Feliz captivated the nation for its caught-on-camera brutality. Video shows the teen being dragged outside the bodega and attacked by a gang of five men who stabbed him with knives and hacked him with a machete as he struggled to defend himself.

The boy was slashed in the neck and died after running to a hospital three blocks away.

Guzman-Feliz had been part of the NYPD's Explorers program, a group for youths interested in a law enforcement career. The New York City Police Foundation announced it planned to set up a scholarship in his name.

Twelve other people have been indicted in Guzman-Feliz's death. All are alleged gang members.

Authorities say they do not believe Guzman-Feliz was affiliated with any gang.What to Know The SUNY professor attacked by a shark in the water off Cape Cod has been released from a hospital

The 61-year-old from Scarsdale, suffered "deep puncture wounds" to his torso and leg; it's still not clear what kind of shark bit him

There have been numerous shark sightings off Cape Cod in recent weeks, including several close calls involving fishermen

The 61-year-old SUNY professor bitten by a shark while standing in the water just 30 yards off a Cape Cod beach earlier this month has been released from the hospital, a spokesman said Monday, days after a great white shark washed up on the beach near where he had been swimming when he was attacked.

The great white that washed up on a beach in Truro last week was about 9 feet long and was said to be a male; a necropsy will be conducted to determine how it died. It's still not clear what kind of shark attacked William Lytton, but Massachusetts' leading shark expert has been looking into whether his wounds were consistent with a bite from a great white.

The SUNY Downtown professor from Scarsdale, New York, suffered "deep puncture wounds" to his torso and leg in the attack near Long Nook Beach Aug. 15. A spokesman for Tufts Medical Center in Boston said Monday that Lytton had been recently released, but that person couldn't say when Lytton left or whether he was transferred to another facility or sent home, citing patient privacy laws.

Lytton had been in serious condition for days following the attack. He was the first person to be attacked by any kind of shark in Massachusetts waters since 2012. It's not clear if anyone saw the creature before the attack.

A group of nursing graduate students were at the beach at the time of the attack and stepped in to help the bitten man until emergency crews arrived.

"We just kind of gave him towels, wrapped his leg up because there was clearly a shark bite there," said Molly Tobin, one of the grads. "A bunch of people helped with carrying him down the beach."

There have been a number of close encounters in recent weeks, with sharks leaping out of the water after fishing lines and one even jumping at a shark scientist who was on a research boat.

There have been 10 great white shark sightings in the last week or so, and more than 60 over the last month off Cape Cod, according to the Sharktivity app.Catholic bishops, tiny Albania and Ireland agreed to take the 140 migrants blocked aboard an Italian coast guard vessel, Premier Giuseppe Conte said Saturday, announcing the end of 10-day standoff over the asylum-seekers but making clear an angry Italy could avenge a perceived lack of overall European Union solidarity by refusing to approve the bloc's next multi-year budget.

"Italy must take note that the 'spirit of solidarity is struggling to translate into concrete acts," Conte said in a statement. Conte referred to declarations made at an EU summit in late June promising to help Italy and other Mediterranean countries deal with the burden of migrants rescued from human traffickers' unseaworthy boats.

In his role as head of a nearly three-month-old populist coalition government, Conte said Italy under current conditions "doesn't consider it possible to express adhesion to a proposed budget that underpins a policy so incoherent on the social level."

Earlier in the week, some in the government threatened to withhold nearly 20 billion euros ($23 billion) in contributions to the EU if member nations didn't volunteer to take the last group of rescued migrants reaching Italy. Brussels sharply reminded Italy it was legally obliged to pay.

Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who leads the anti-migrant League party, refused to let the migrants off the coast guard vessel Diciotti until other EU nations pledged to take the asylum-seekers, most of them young men from Eritrea.

Just before Conte announced the drama's resolution, Salvini told party supporters at a rally in northern Italy that a Sicily-based prosecutor, Luigi Patronaggio, had put him under investigation for suspected abduction for refusing to let the migrants disembark.

If the prosecutor "wants to interrogate me or even arrest me because I defend the borders and security of my country, I'm proud of it," Salvini tweeted. Many of his supporters blame migrants for crime.

Earlier in the week, the government's rights office for detained persons concluded this week that the migrants were being unjustly held by the government.

Salvini took credit for convincing bishops to take many of the migrants. The bishops agreed to "open up their doors, heart and wallet," he told the rally.

Fifty others of the 190 people rescued at sea on Aug. 16 by the Italian coast guard were previously allowed off the ship, including all the minors and ailing adults.

A few hours before Conte's announcement, Italian Red Cross ambulances waiting at dockside took away six ill men, suspected of having tuberculosis, pneumonia or other infections, and seven of the 11 women who were still aboard.

Authorities had said the women recounted how they had been raped while in Libya for months, awaiting the opportunity to leave in migrant smugglers' boats.

Four other women chose not to leave the ship because their husbands were blocked aboard.

The standoff had prompted an impassioned appeal at the height of the standoff Saturday by the U.N. refugee agency's chief, who asked Italy to let the migrants disembark and urged EU countries to take responsibility for the asylum-seekers.

In Geneva, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said it's time to end a "race to the bottom on who can take the least responsibility for people rescued at sea." He urged European countries "to do the right thing and offer places of asylum for people rescued from the Mediterranean Sea in their time of need."

Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero Milanesi expressed appreciation for Albania's "sign of great solidarity and friendship," his ministry said.

Albania, which isn't in the European Union, saw thousands of its citizens flee to Italy across the Adriatic Sea aboard dramatically overcrowded rickety ferries and fishing boats in hopes of a better life in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, Sicily-based prosecutors took their investigation of the migrant standoff to Rome. Prosecutor Patronaggio left without speaking to reporters after questioning two Interior Ministry officials at the Italian capital's prosecutors' office, the Italian news agency ANSA said.

Prosecutors would have to seek permission from a special panel to question Salvini. As a lawmaker, Salvini also holds immunity from prosecution that could only be lifted by fellow lawmakers.

Italian Red Cross official Stefano Principato in Catania told reporters that Italy's health minister had ordered an inspection of sanitary conditions for the migrants, who have been sleeping on the ship's deck and coping with a baking sun and limited toilet facilities.

Doctors have said many of the migrants on the ship have scabies but "more than a health emergency, it would be better to speak of a psychological emergency," Principato said.As the #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct began snaring politicians, state legislatures across the country vowed to re-examine their policies to prevent harassment and beef up investigations into complaints of sexual wrongdoing.

About half of all state legislative chambers have followed through with at least some sort of change to their sexual harassment policies, most often by boosting their own training, according to a 50-state analysis by The Associated Press. But the others have done nothing this year, even as sexual misconduct allegations against lawmakers have been mounting.

The mixed response highlights both the political pressure to act and the institutional resistance to do so that exists in many state legislatures, where women now serve in record numbers yet remain outnumbered 3-to-1 by men.

"In the wake of Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement that swept across different industries, we had to act," said Democratic Assemblywoman Nily Rozic of New York, which mandated more robust sexual harassment policies for government agencies and private employers.

But "I think we have a long ways to go in addressing sexual harassment in legislatures across the country," she said.

Since the start of 2017, at least 30 state lawmakers have resigned or been kicked out of office following allegations of sexual misconduct, according to an AP tally. The most recent was Maine Rep. Dillon Bates, a Democrat who quit this past week while denying claims of inappropriate relationships with students.

An additional 26 lawmakers have faced repercussions such as the loss of party or committee leadership positions since last year, including Maryland Del. Curt Anderson, a Democrat who was removed from his leadership posts Friday after an investigation into sexual misconduct. Numerous others have had allegations brought against them.

Most of those cases came to light since October, when media reports about sexual misconduct allegations against Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul now facing sexual assault charges in New York, led to a national movement of people going public with claims that they also had been sexually harassed or abused, sometimes years ago.

Rhode Island Rep. Teresa Tanzi was among the first to come forward, asserting that a high-ranking legislator whom she did not identify had told her that sexual favors would help her bills go further. The disclosure prompted the House to offer sexual harassment training and to place Tanzi, a Democrat, in charge of a task force to recommend changes to state law.

But the experience ultimately left Tanzi frustrated. With this year's session nearing its end, the panel's work was put into a package of bills that would have barred confidentiality agreements in civil rights violations, extended employee protections to interns and volunteers, and required employers to conduct sexual harassment training. None of the bills passed.

"It really to me felt as though it were just a dog-and-pony show," Tanzi said.

When the AP surveyed state legislatures in early January, about three-quarters of the House and Senate chambers nationwide indicated they were considering or had recently made changes to their sexual harassment policies. As of August, the AP's follow-up survey found that about half of the 99 state legislative chambers actually had made changes. More than two dozen that previously indicated they were reviewing policies have yet to make any substantive changes, though some are still considering it.

The AP's analysis also found:

The most common response among lawmakers has been to boost their own training about sexual harassment. About half the legislative chambers have done so, typically by making it mandatory or providing it more frequently. But legislative chambers in one-fifth of the states still do not require lawmakers to participate in sexual harassment training.

Legislative chambers in about a half-dozen states have taken action to increase the public disclosure of sexual harassment complaints against lawmakers and to ban the use of public money in sexual harassment settlements.

Legislatures in about one-fifth of the states added provisions since the #MeToo movement allowing for the external investigation of complaints, which some experts say is an important way of avoiding conflicts of interest and encouraging the targets of harassment to come forward. Even so, fewer than half the legislative chambers nationwide now allow for the external review of complaints.

Only a few legislatures passed measures that apply beyond state government. Lawmakers sought to strengthen sexual harassment protections for private-sector employees in Arizona, California, Maryland, New York, Tennessee, Vermont and Washington.

"If all you ever do is concentrate on the statehouse ... maybe you're protecting a few hundred people," said Democratic Rep. Sarah Copeland-Hanzas, who sponsored the Vermont law applying to all employers. "But what about the rest of your workforce? What about all of the restaurants where the waitress doesn't want to have to go into the back storeroom because she knows that the prep cook is looking for an opportunity to proposition her?"

California has been among the states with the most complaints against lawmakers and the greatest debate over sexual harassment policies.

After about 150 women signed a public letter last October calling out "pervasive" harassment at the Capitol, lawmakers adopted new whistleblower protections for legislative employees who report harassment and began publicly disclosing substantiated complaints against lawmakers and high-level staff members.

A new investigative process, which is expected to be in place in early 2019, will create a special office to handle sexual misconduct complaints. Its fact-finding then will be turned over to a group of outside experts to determine whether complaints can be substantiated and to recommend discipline.

Adama Iwu, a lobbyist behind the letter that sparked the Legislature's soul-searching, called the plan "bold" because it largely takes the process of evaluating complaints out of legislators' hands. The Legislature's leadership, though, will still have the ultimate say on discipline.

Until the new process is in place, people who brought complaints in the wake of #MeToo are still going through an old process that has prompted concerns.

Earlier this summer, for example, legislative leaders reopened an investigation into Democratic Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia after her accuser claimed an initial review that failed to substantiate a groping complaint was unfair and incomplete.

California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon called the new policies the year's "biggest accomplishment," but acknowledged "there has been a pall over the Capitol."

"It's one thing to change policies and procedures. That's good and that's a start," he said recently at the Sacramento Press Club. "But ultimately nothing changes until the culture changes. That cultural change takes a while."

In some cases, the very politicians who were supposed to be addressing sexual harassment have been accused of misconduct.

Garcia had been the head of the California Legislative Women's Caucus and a leading figure in the state's anti-sexual harassment movement before she was accused of it herself.

Illinois Rep. Nick Sauer had been a member of the House Sexual Harassment and Discrimination Task Force until an ex-girlfriend claimed he had posted nude photos of her on a fake Instagram account set up under her name. Sauer, a Republican, resigned from office earlier this month.

Rep. Sara Wojcicki Jimenez, the ranking Republican on the Illinois task force, called the situation "shocking and disappointing" but also an indication that allegations are being taken seriously.

"You're thinking, 'Well gosh, we're trying to do all this good work for reform and new things keep popping up each month,'" Jimenez said. But "because the awareness is raised, people feel more comfortable coming forward. Hopefully then the next step will be that it starts to decline."

They are among a least 76 lawmakers from 34 states who have been publicly accused or rebuked since January 2017 for sexual misconduct that occurred in recent years, according to the AP's tally. That amounts to a little over 1 percent of the 7,383 state lawmakers nationwide.

Sexual misconduct was one of the most talked about topics when Florida's annual legislative session began in January. A Republican lawmaker had just resigned after a Senate investigation found he likely committed sexual misconduct, and a Democratic senator had stepped down after acknowledging an affair with a lobbyist.

Despite bold proclamations, nothing passed to address sexual harassment.

The Florida legislative session was thrown into a chaotic final two weeks as lawmakers scrambled to pass a school safety bill in response to a shooting that killed 17 people at a Parkland high school. Democratic state Sen. Lauren Book, whose constituents were affected by the shooting, said that's only partly to blame for the demise of sexual harassment legislation.

She also cited "political games" and an "old boy" culture at the Capitol.

"Until we start changing minds and until we continue to push the narrative, we're not going to get anywhere," Book said.

Contributing to this report were Associated Press data team editor Meghan Hoyer and writers Kathleen Ronayne and Brendan Farrington.Firefighters battled a junkyard fire in the Tacony section of Philadelphia.

The fire started at a junkyard on the 5200 block of Unruh Street Monday around 4:20 p.m. Several fire crews as well as hazmat units responded to the scene and were able to place the flames under control at 4:50 p.m.

No one was injured during the incident. Officials haven't revealed the cause.

It was at least the third junkyard fire in Philadelphia this month. A fire that occurred at a junkyard near train tracks in Northeast Philadelphia back on Aug. 19 led to major delays for Amtrak, SEPTA and New Jersey Transit.Pennsylvanians who want a drivers' license that allows them to board commercial airliners and enter certain secure federal buildings can soon get one.

Pennsylvania's Department of Transportation on Saturday will begin pre-qualifying residents to receive one of the so-called Real IDs when they become available next March. The IDs cost $30 and meet federal anti-terrorism standards, but are optional and aren't necessary to legally drive.

Residents who want a Real ID must provide proof of current address, a Social Security card and proof of identification, such as a passport or birth certificate, if they received their first Pennsylvania drivers' license before September 2003.

Federal Real ID standards take effect in Pennsylvania on Oct. 10, although the Wolf administration is asking the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for an extension.What to Know Christina Carlin-Kraft was found dead Wednesday night by police performing a welfare check at her Ardmore condo.

An autopsy on Thursday revealed she was strangled and the manner of death was ruled homicide.

On Monday, police released images of a person of interest in the death of the model who once posed for Playboy.

Nearly a week after a former model who posed for Playboy was found strangled inside her upscale condominium near the popular Suburban Square shopping center on Pennsylvania's Main Line, authorities have released images of a person of interest in her killing.

The body of 36-year-old Christina Carlin-Kraft was discovered Wednesday night inside her bedroom at a condo complex on Sibley Avenue in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele said. Police performing a welfare check found Kraft's body.

The Montgomery County coroner on Thursday ruled the manner of death as homicide.

On Monday, the DA's office released images showing a man who had contact with Kraft in the area of Broad and Locust streets in Philadelphia early Wednesday morning. Video near the 15th and Market entrance to the SEPTA subway captured the man.

Surveillance images released by Montgomery County detectives

The person of interest possibly used a ride-hailing service from 13th and Locust in Center City to Sibley Avenue in Ardmore, investigators said.

Detectives spent much of Thursday combing the Ardmore condo and the complex for evidence. They collected surveillance video from nearby businesses. The complex sits adjacent to the Ardmore Farmers Market and Suburban Square.

AP

In addition to the person of interest, police are also searching for a man who they say is not connected to Kraft's murder but instead burglarized her apartment several days before her death.

An arrest warrant was issued for Andre Melton, 31, of Southwest Philadelphia. Police say Melton stole from Kraft's condo on Sibley Avenue and they continue to search for him. He is not considered a suspect or person of interest in her murder, however.

Kraft's modeling credits include Playboy, Maxim, David Yurman and MAC Cosmetics, according to a profile on a modeling website. In 2016, she was charged with assault in New York City for striking a restaurant staffer. The charges were later dropped.

Family remembered Kraft as "more than a Playboy model."

Only NBC10 talked to family members of a former model found murdered in her Mainline condo.

"She was the sweetest girl, loving and kind and generous and thoughtful," Kraft's aunt, Angelique Carlin, said. "Those are the things I will miss about my niece."

Prosecutors asked anyone who recognizes the man seen in the video to call Lower Merion police at 610-649-1000 or county detectives at 610-278-3368. You can also submit tips through the STOPit app by using the code "MONTCOPA."Pope Francis declined Sunday to confirm or deny claims by the Vatican's retired ambassador to the United States that he knew in 2013 about sexual misconduct allegations against the former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, but rehabilitated him anyway.

Francis said the 11-page text by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, which reads in part like a homophobic attack on Francis and his allies, "speaks for itself" and that he wouldn't comment on it.

Francis was asked by a U.S. reporter during an airborne press conference Sunday if Vigano's claims that the two discussed the McCarrick allegations in 2013 were true. Francis was also asked about Vigano's claims that McCarrick was already under sanction at the time, but that Francis rehabilitated him.

Francis said he had read Vigano's document and trusted journalists to judge for themselves.

"It's an act of trust," he said. "I won't say a word about it."

The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published Vigano's text Sunday as the pope wrapped up a two-day visit to Ireland dominated by the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Vigano, 77, a conservative whose hardline anti-gay views are well known, urged the reformist pope to resign over what he called Francis' own culpability in covering up McCarrick's crimes.

Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as cardinal last month, after a U.S. church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

Since then, another man has come forward to say McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary. The accusations have created a crisis of confidence in the U.S. and Vatican hierarchy, because it was apparently an open secret that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house, and into his bed.

Coupled with the devastating allegations of sex abuse and cover-up in a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report  which found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over 70 years in six dioceses  the scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.

Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions. His letter identifies by name the Vatican cardinals and U.S. archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair, an unthinkable expose for a Vatican diplomat to make. He said documents backing up his version of events are in Vatican archives.

The Vatican's ambassador to the U.S. from 2011 to 2016, Vigano said his two immediate predecessors "did not fail" to inform the Holy See about accusations against McCarrick, starting in 2000. Vigano said he himself sent at least two memos on him.

He said Pope Benedict XVI eventually sanctioned McCarrick in 2009 or 2010 to a lifetime of penance and prayer, and to no longer celebrate Mass in public or travel.

He said Francis asked him about McCarrick when they met on June 23, 2013, at the Vatican's Santa Marta hotel where the pope lives, three months after Francis was elected pope.

Vigano wrote that he told Francis: "Holy Father, I don't know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance."

Soon thereafter, Vigano wrote, he was surprised to find that McCarrick had started traveling on missions on behalf of the church, including to China. McCarrick was also one of the Vatican's intermediaries in the U.S.-Cuba talks in 2014.

Vigano's claim that McCarrick had been ordered by Benedict to stay out of public ministry and retire to a lifetime of prayer is somewhat disputed, given that McCarrick enjoyed a fairly public retirement. But Vigano insisted the sanctions had been imposed, and said a former counselor in the embassy at the time was "prepared to testify" about the "stormy" meeting when McCarrick was informed of them.

Barry Coburn, McCarrick's civil attorney, said the allegations in the Vigano letter are "serious."

"Archbishop McCarrick, like any other person, has a right to due process. He looks forward to invoking that right at the appropriate time," he said in a statement.

The letter also contains a lengthy diatribe about homosexuals and liberals in the Catholic church. It often reads like an ideological manifesto, naming all of Francis' known supporters in the U.S. hierarchy as being complicit in a cover-up of McCarrick's misdeeds.

"Now that the corruption has reached the very top of the church's hierarchy, my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths regarding the heart-breaking case of the archbishop emeritus of Washington," Vigano wrote.

Vigano, however, also has had his own problems with allegations of cover-up, and he and Francis had a major dust-up during Francis' 2015 visit to the U.S., which Vigano organized.

In that incident, a leading U.S. opponent of gay marriage, Kim Davis, was among those invited to meet with the pope at Vigano's Washington residence. Francis was so enraged that Davis' supporters had leaked word of the meeting that the Vatican subsequently insisted he only held one private audience while there: with one of his former students, a gay man and his partner.

The cover-up accusation, which Vigano denied, concerned allegations that he tried to quash an investigation into the former archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis, Minnesota, John Nienstedt, who was accused of misconduct with adult seminarians.

In 2016, the National Catholic Reporter said Vigano allegedly ordered the investigation wrapped up and a piece of evidence destroyed. The report cited a 2014 memo from a diocesan official that was unsealed following the conclusion of a criminal investigation into the archdiocese. No charges were filed.

In a statement provided to the AP Sunday about the Nienstedt case, Vigano said a Vatican investigation of the allegation found no wrongdoing on his part.

He said the allegation that he destroyed evidence was false and that his efforts to have the archdiocese correct the record have been met with silence.

Nienstedt was forced to resign in 2015 over complaints about his handling of sex abuse cases.

Vigano's name also made headlines during the 2012 "Vatileaks" scandal, when some of his letters were published. In them, he begged not to be transferred to the Vatican embassy in Washington from the administration of the Vatican City State.

He claimed he was being punished for having exposed corruption in the Vatican. The letters showed a clash with Benedict's No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who is also a target of his McCarrick missive.

The document's authenticity was confirmed to The Associated Press by an Italian journalist, Marco Tosatti, who said he was with Vigano when the archbishop wrote it Wednesday.

"He was very emotional and upset at the end the effort," Tosatti told AP, adding that Vigano left Tosatti's home afterward without saying where he was going.Ryan Michael Willis was one of two men who died in a small plane crash in Descanso overnight Wednesday.

Willis, who was flying with 15-year-veteran pilot David Alan Derby, 77, was a pilot himself, as well as a commercial diver, but of all the hats Ryan Willis wore, nothing was more important to him than being a husband and a father, his wife, Krista, said in a statement.

Willis was 36 years old and had a two-year-old son, Hank.

Krista Willis also called her husband an adventure enthusiast, traveler, loyal friend, dedicated son, [and] humble talent.

The plane left from Gillespie Field in El Cajon on Wednesday but did not return that evening as expected.

Hours after the plane failed to return, a plane making a steep descent was spotted via radar by the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services.

Words cannot express the amount of heartache and grief felt, she added.

The family is asking all donations be directed to their Go Fund Me page to support his wife and son.The circular drawn up following the strong controversy stirred up in the country by the latest case of "blasphemy". Last week, the Medan court sentenced a woman who had complained about the volume of the call to prayer in the prison.

Jakarta (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The muezzin of the Indonesian mosques "must be in tune". It is one of the provisions contained in a circular of the Ministry for Religious Affairs on azan (the Islamic call to prayer). The note contains guidelines on when and how it should be disseminated. From the title "The use of loudspeakers in mosques, langgars and musholla (Islamic prayer houses)", the document was drawn up following the strong controversy stirred up in the country by the last case of "blasphemy".

On 21 August, the Medan District Court (North Sumatera Province) sentenced a Buddhist lady of Chinese descent to 18 months in prison for "offenses against Islam": in 2016 she had complained about the volume of the voice of the muezzin of a nearby mosque. Civil society and moderate Islamic organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama (Nu) and Muhammadiyah opposed the ruling, asking the government for a revision of the controversial legislation on "religious defamation".

The provisions on azan, issued by the Ministry three days ago, are divided into six points:Several local school districts fall below a national recommendation for police resource officer staffing levels, a review by the News4 I-Team found.

A recommendation by the National Association of School Resource Officers, a non-profit organization that helps train and advise school resource officers, recommends one officer for every 1,000 students.

But an I-Team review of school resource officer deployments in five of the largest Washington, D.C.-area districts shows nearly 40 high schools are well below the recommendation. Those schools each had more than 2,000 studentsbut only one school resource officer.

Some of the largest schools in the region, including Chantilly High School in Fairfax County, Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County, Washington-Lee High School in Arlington County and High Point High School in Prince Georges County, had between 2,200 and 3,100 students but just one resource officer per school.

Prince Georges County Public Schools, Fairfax County Public Schools and Montgomery County Public Schools said they supplement school resource officers with school security staffers. A spokesman for Montgomery County Public Schools said they have eight security employees at Montgomery Blair High.

The District of Columbia Public Schools is the only local district to meet, and even exceed, the national recommendation, according to the I-Team review, with a ratio of one officer per 827 students in the District.

However, the Metropolitan Police Departments system assigns multiple officers to share responsibility for policing schools, with 110 police officers assigned to serve approximately 90,000 public school and public charter school students.

Don Bridges, past president of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said having properly trained school resource officers working with law enforcement is critical.

You have to do whatever is in the best interest of students, he said.

Some local officials say lack of funding and recruiting problems are to blame.

Montgomery County Council Education Committee Chairman Craig Rice has long advocated for more licensed police officers in schools but said, When you think about the number of schools we have in Montgomery County ... the price tag adds up quickly.

A school resource officer costs the county about $100,000 annually, he said.

Hes called for increased funding to place at least 10 officers at Montgomery Countys middle schools. Separately, a spokesman for the school system said police are in talks with a state advisory board about what adequate coverage would entail.

The reality is we need so many more of these officers as our school continues to grow and our population continues to explode, Rice continued.

Not every system is making moves to expand.

A spokesman for Arlington Public Schools said APS hasnt requested additional school resource officers for this fiscal year but will continue to evaluate the [school resource officer] program and will make any adjustments needed for future funding cycles.

A Fairfax schools spokesman said hiring additional school resource officers would require further discussion and collaboration with Fairfax County.

Like Montgomery County, Fairfax is among the school districts that have hired security guards to bridge the gap.

Fauquier County Public Schools added a dozen part-time security guards at high schools and middle schools, according to Fauquier County Sheriff Bob Mosier.

He hears from parents who want even more officers, especially in elementary schools, he said.

Reported by Scott MacFarlane, produced by Rick Yarborough and Katie Leslie, and edited by Steve Jones.D.C.-area leaders are remembering Sen. John McCain as a respected hero and determined patriot following the news of his death on Saturday.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until sunset on Sunday in the Senator's honor.

Hogan said in a statement that McCain "long stood as a shining example of doing the right thing and standing up for his principles even  and especially  when the going gets tough."

I am lucky to count myself among those privileged enough to have known him. All of us join Senator McCains family and colleagues in taking pride in his legacy of selfless service, grit, and determination. A grateful nation will be forever in his debt," Hogan said in part.

Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered all D.C. flags to fly at half-staff shortly after news of the longtime senator's death.

"Today, our country lost a hero and a patriot," Bowser said on Twitter. "Rest in peace to one of the most courageous public servants our country will ever know."

Sen. Tim Kaine called McCain "a champion of servicemembers, campaign finance reform and innumerable other causes."

"In the past 13 months, John has urged us to listen to each other and restore the American peoples confidence in their government. May we be responsible enough to heed to his plea, wise enough to follow his example, and fortunate enough to have a career in service as long and accomplished as his. My condolences go out to the McCain family and the people of Arizona, Kaine said in his statement.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen from Maryland gave the following statement:

Senator John McCain was a statesman, a veteran, and an American hero. His passion and determination were unsurpassed in the U.S. Senate, and his moral compass was unfailing. The loss of Senator McCain will be felt deeply throughout the Senate and the country  where countless Americans have benefited from his service. My prayers go out to Senator McCains friends, family, and constituents during this time  you are in our hearts.

"We lost a hero tonight," said Virginia U.S. Sen. Mark Warner.

"John McCain served this country with honor, purpose and courage for his entire life, regardless of the personal cost. He was a giant of the Senate. His service, sacrifice and patriotism should be an inspiration to every American," Warner said in a statement. "My heart goes out to Cindy and the entire McCain family. The prayers of a grateful nation are with them during this difficult time."

Episcopal High School, which McCain attended for three years, said the country has lost a great public servant.

"Sen. McCain has given all of us powerful lessons in what living an honorable life can mean," the statement read.

Senator McCain will be buried at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis. He graduated there in 1958 and wrote in his book released in May that it was where he wanted to be buried.Glowering in public and near-silent for two days, President Donald Trump relented under pressure on Monday by tersely recognizing Sen. John McCain's "service to our country" and re-lowering the White House flag.

While much of the nation remembered McCain's record as a war hero, longtime senator and presidential nominee over the weekend, Trump had nursed his grievances. McCain had been an infuriating foil in a long-running feud over style and policy that did not end with the senator's illness and death.

Trump's reluctance to participate in the national remembrance was awkward and uncomfortable, even by the standards of a leader who acknowledges he doesn't act like a typical president. The episode highlighted the outsider president's impulse to harbor personal resentments regardless of political repercussions.

Before Trump's Monday afternoon statement, his only commentary on McCain's death had been a perfunctory tweet on Saturday. The lack of a formal statement  combined with the fact that White House flags were flown at half-staff only briefly  drew strong criticism from Republicans and veterans' groups as well as Democrats.

When he finally did comment, in a printed statement, Trump was sparing with his praise for the six-term senator: "Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain's service to our country."

Later, at an evening dinner honoring evangelical leaders, he said "our hearts and prayers" are going to the family "and we very much appreciate everything that Senator McCain has done for our country."

Earlier in the day, a stone-faced Trump sat mute as reporters at several photo sessions invited him to comment on McCain. As he was peppered with questions about McCain's legacy, the usually talkative president made no response.

Publicly, Trump has frequently railed against McCain's dramatic thumbs-down vote against the president's efforts to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law. Privately, he has groused about such slights as his belief that McCain did not appreciate his endorsement in the senator's 2016 re-election bid. McCain, for his part, recently slammed Trump's Helsinki meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin as "one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory."

Against that backdrop, the flag above the White House spoke volumes.

The Stars and Stripes were briefly lowered to half-staff over the weekend, then went back up to full height on Monday while flags at the U.S. Capitol and elsewhere stayed at half-staff. Shortly before Trump issued his written statement, the flag was lowered again to half-staff.

That was after complaints had risen all day from both right and left, and then from a group the president assuredly does not want to offend.

"On the behalf of The American Legion's two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCain's death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nation's flag be half-staffed through his internment," said a statement directed to him from Denise Rohan, the organization's national commander.

While the president's statement sought to defuse the controversy, the upcoming weeklong celebration of McCain's life is likely to bring new awkwardness. Former presidents will speak at McCain's funeral on Saturday, but the senator's family made clear they did not want Trump to attend.

Trump said he had asked Vice President Mike Pence to speak at a ceremony honoring McCain at the Capitol on Friday and that other administration officials would attend memorial services. He also said he'd agreed to the McCain family's request for military transportation of the senator's remains from Arizona to Washington. Burial will be Sunday at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

In death, McCain himself had more to say. In a final letter released Monday, McCain appeared to repudiate Trump's politics one last time, saying: "We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe."

Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma allowed that McCain "was partially to blame" for the rift with Trump, saying: "He was very outspoken that he disagreed with the president in certain areas and wasn't too courteous about it."

As Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, a Trump friend, put it, "I think there's a lot of hard feelings on both sides."

Just a few weeks ago the president signed into law a defense bill named in honor of the senator without a single mention of his name.

Back in 2015, McCain had gotten under then-candidate Trump's skin by saying he had "fired up the crazies" at a rally in Phoenix. Trump later told a crowd in Iowa that McCain was only a war hero "because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."

McCain said Trump owed veterans an apology for that, but he continued to back the celebrity businessman as the Republican nominee. He later withdrew his support after the release of the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape in which Trump bragged about groping women.

After Trump took office, McCain established himself as a leading critic, opposing Trump's immigration-limiting order, warning him against coziness with Moscow and lecturing him on the illegality of torture.

Friction increased earlier this year after word surfaced that a West Wing aide had been dismissive of McCain during a closed-door meeting. The aide told colleagues they should disregard McCain's opposition to Trump's CIA nominee because "he's dying anyway."

In death, McCain attempted a last word in his farewell letter.

"Do not despair of our present difficulties," he wrote. "But believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here."Two former presidents are expected to speak at Sen. John McCain's service and he will lie in state in both the nation's capital and Arizona as part of a cross-country funeral procession ending with his burial at the U.S. Naval Academy, according to plans taking shape Sunday.

McCain had long feuded with President Donald Trump, and two White House officials said McCain's family had asked, before the senator's death, that Trump not attend the funeral services. Vice President Mike Pence is likely to attend, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

A day after McCain died of brain cancer at 81, his family, friends and congressional and state leaders were working out details of the farewell to the decorated Vietnam War hero, prisoner of war and six-term senator.

His office said that McCain will lie in state in the Arizona State Capitol on Wednesday. A funeral will be conducted at North Phoenix Baptist Church on Thursday with former Vice President Joe Biden speaking.

The procession will then head to Washington, where McCain will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda on Friday with a formal ceremony and time for the public to pay respects. The next day, the procession will pass the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and head to a funeral at Washington National Cathedral. A private funeral is planned for Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Trump tweeted that his "deepest sympathies and respect" went out to McCain's family. First lady Melania Trump tweeted thanks to McCain for his service to the country.

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who blocked McCain's own White House ambitions, are among those expected to speak at McCain's funeral at Washington National Cathedral.

"These were bitter contests, both of them," said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and "to ask them to speak at your funeral, and for them to be honored at the opportunity, that tells you all you need to know."

Flake told CBS' "Face the Nation" that McCain "was quick to forgive  certainly put the good of the country above himself, and the fact that his former opponents will be there speaking says all we need to know."

McCain died at his Arizona ranch after a yearlong battle with brain cancer.

A black hearse, accompanied by a police motorcade, could be seen driving away from the ranch near Sedona where McCain spent his final weeks. For 50 miles along Interstate 17 southbound, on every overpass and at every exit ramp, people watched the procession. Hundreds, including many waving American flags, parked their cars and got out to watch.

Congressional leaders announced that McCain would lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, though they did not give a date. "The nation mourns the loss of a great American patriot, a statesman who put his country first and enriched this institution through many years of service," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Arizona will accord McCain that honor on Wednesday, when he would have turned 82. "This is a rare and distinct occurrence for a truly special man," GOP Gov. Doug Ducey said in a tweet.

Ducey does not plan to announce his selection of a Senate successor to McCain until after McCain's burial. Under state law, the governor's appointee to serve until the next general election in 2020 must come from the same political party. A statement from Ducey's office said that "now is a time for remembering and honoring a consequential life."

Trump's brief Twitter statement said "hearts and prayers" are with the McCain family.

Trump and McCain were at bitter odds until the end. The president, who as a candidate in 2016 mocked McCain's capture in Vietnam, had jabbed at the ailing senator for voting against Republican efforts to roll back President Barack Obama's health care law.

Earlier this summer, McCain issued a blistering statement criticizing Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Obama, who triumphed over McCain in 2008, said that despite their differences, McCain and he shared a "fidelity to something higher - the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched, and sacrificed."

Obama said they "saw our political battles, even, as a privilege, something noble, an opportunity to serve as stewards of those high ideals at home, and to advance them around the world."

Bush, who defeated McCain for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, called McCain a "man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order" and a "friend whom I'll deeply miss."

Other tributes poured in from around the globe.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted in English that McCain "was a true American hero. He devoted his entire life to his country." Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said McCain's support for the Jewish state "never wavered. It sprang from his belief in democracy and freedom." And Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, called McCain "a tireless fighter for a strong trans-Atlantic alliance. His significance went well beyond his own country."

McCain was the son and grandson of admirals and followed them to the U.S. Naval Academy. A pilot, he was shot down over Vietnam and held as a prisoner of war for more than five years. He went on to win a seat in the House and in 1986, the Senate, where he served for the rest of his life.

"He had a joy about politics and a love for his country that was unmatched," said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. "And while he never made it to the presidency, in the Senate, he was the leader that would see a hot spot in the world and just say, we need to go there and stand up for that democracy," she told CNN's "State of the Union."

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who developed a friendship with McCain while they served together in the Senate, said the Arizona lawmaker will "cast a long shadow."

"The spirit that drove him was never extinguished: we are here to commit ourselves to something bigger than ourselves," Biden said

The Senate's top Democrat, New York's Chuck Schumer, said he wants to rename the Senate building that housed McCain's suite of offices after McCain.

"As you go through life, you meet few truly great people. John McCain was one of them," Schumer said. "Maybe most of all, he was a truth teller - never afraid to speak truth to power in an era where that has become all too rare."

Associated Press writer Ken Thomas contributed to this report.Presidents past and present joined members of Congress from both parties and world leaders in mourning Sen. John McCain and praising him for a lifetime of service and accomplishments.

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who blocked the Arizona Republican's own White House ambitions, are among those expected to speak at McCain's funeral.

"These were bitter contests, both of them," said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and "to ask them to speak at your funeral, and for them to be honored at the opportunity, that tells you all you need to know."

Flake told CBS' "Face the Nation" that McCain "was quick to forgive - certainly put the good of the country above himself, and the fact that his former opponents will be there speaking says all we need to know."

McCain, 81, died Saturday at his ranch in Arizona after a yearlong battle with brain cancer. He is expected to be remembered at ceremonies in Arizona and Washington this coming week or next, if the family prefers to give more time for Congress to return to the Capitol from its summer recess. McCain is to be buried at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery on a peninsula overlooking the Severn River in Annapolis, Maryland. On Saturday, his grave was marked where he had written he wanted to be buried  next to his best friend from his Naval Academy days, Adm. Chuck Larson.

Cindy McCain was by her husband's side with other members of the family when he died Saturday at 4:28 p.m., according to a statement from McCain's office. On Friday, the family had announced that McCain was ending medical treatment for brain cancer.

"My heart is broken," Cindy McCain said on Twitter. "I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the the place he loved best."

McCain's daughter Meghan posted a lengthy note about her "beloved father" on Twitter, writing, "I was with my father at his end, as he was with me at my beginning."

"All that I am is thanks to him. Now that he is gone, the task of my lifetime is to live up to his example, his expectations, and his love," she wrote.

She said that in her sorrow she took comfort that "John McCain, hero of the republic and to his little girl, wakes today to something more glorious than anything on this earth."

President Donald Trump, who once criticized McCain for being taken prisoner during the Vietnam War, said his "deepest sympathies and respect" went out to McCain's family. First lady Melania Trump tweeted thanks to McCain for his service to the country. Trump's brief Twitter statement said "hearts and prayers" are with the McCain family.

Trump and McCain were at odds until the end. The president, who as a candidate in 2016 mocked McCain's capture in Vietnam, had jabbed at the ailing senator for voting against Republican efforts to roll back President Barack Obama's health care law.

Earlier this summer, McCain issued a blistering statement criticizing Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Obama, who triumphed over McCain in 2008, said that despite their differences, McCain and he shared a "fidelity to something higher - the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched, and sacrificed."

Obama said they "saw our political battles, even, as a privilege, something noble, an opportunity to serve as stewards of those high ideals at home, and to advance them around the world."

Bush, who defeated McCain for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, called McCain a "man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order" and a "friend whom I'll deeply miss."

[NATL] Sen. John McCain: A Life in Photos

Other tributes poured in from around the globe.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted in English that McCain "was a true American hero. He devoted his entire life to his country." Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said McCain's support for the Jewish state "never wavered. It sprang from his belief in democracy and freedom." And Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, called McCain "a tireless fighter for a strong trans-Atlantic alliance. His significance went well beyond his own country."

McCain was the son and grandson of admirals and followed them to the U.S. Naval Academy. A pilot, he was shot down over Vietnam and held as a prisoner of war for more than five years. He went on to win a seat in the House and in 1986, the Senate, where he served for the rest of his life.

Colleagues from both sides of the aisle issued heartfelt statements remembering their fellow lawmaker. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called McCain a "fascinating personality."

"He would occasionally be in a bad place with various members, including myself, and when this would blow over it was like nothing ever happened," McConnell said Saturday after a GOP state dinner in Lexington, Kentucky. "He also had a wicked sense of humor and it made every tense moment come out better."

House Speaker Paul Ryan called McCain's death "a sad day for the United States."

"Our country has lost a decorated war hero and statesman," he tweeted. "John McCain was a giant of our timenot just for the things he achieved, but for who he was and what he fought for all his life."

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said of his colleague that "America and Freedom have lost one of her greatest champions."

He added that he'd "lost one of my dearest friends and mentor."

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whom McCain tapped as his running mate for vice president in 2008, tweeted that he "was a maverick and a fighter, never afraid to stand for his beliefs. John never took the easy path in life - and through sacrifice and suffering he inspired others to serve something greater than self."

Palin added in another tweet that McCain was her friend and she "will remember the good times."

Former President Clinton and his wife, former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, said that McCain was a "skilled, tough politician, as well as a trusted colleague alongside whom Hillary was honored to serve in the Senate."

"He frequently put partisanship aside to do what he thought was best for the country, and was never afraid to break the mold if it was the right thing to do," the statement said.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who developed a friendship with McCain while they served together in the Senate, said the Arizona lawmaker will "cast a long shadow."

"The spirit that drove him was never extinguished: we are here to commit ourselves to something bigger than ourselves," Biden said

The Senate's top Democrat, New York's Chuck Schumer, said he wants to rename the Senate building that housed McCain's suite of offices after McCain.

"As you go through life, you meet few truly great people. John McCain was one of them," Schumer said. "Maybe most of all, he was a truth teller - never afraid to speak truth to power in an era where that has become all too rare."

Gov. Doug Ducey, R-Ariz., does not plan to announce his selection of a Senate successor to McCain until after McCain's burial. Under state law, the governor's appointee to serve until the next general election in 2020 must come from the same political party. A statement from Ducey's office said that "now is a time for remembering and honoring a consequential life."

America and Freedom have lost one of her greatest champions.



.And Ive lost one of my dearest friends and mentor.  Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) August 26, 2018

NBC's Daniel Macht contributed to this report.Maine Gov. Paul LePage has been released from the hospitalized and is on the mend.

A statement released by Peter Steele, a spokesman for the Republican governor, said, "Governor LePage is back in the Blaine House resting and getting ready to return to work in the next couple of days. He and his family thank everyone for their concerns and well wishes."

WCSH reported that LePage's daughter, Lauren LePage, said he is "on the mend."

Steele said the 69-year-old LePage experienced discomfort on Saturday while visiting family in New Brunswick, Canada.

Steele said doctors decided to keep the governor hospitalized at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor overnight Sunday for more observation. He added that the governor was stable and expected to make a full recovery.

Steele did not provide more details about the nature of the discomfort.

LePage first went to a hospital in New Brunswick, accompanied by his wife, Ann LePage. He was then taken by ambulance to Presque Isle in northern Maine, and then transported to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. He arrived in Bangor late on Saturday night.Hundreds of people have gathered outside City Hall in Portland, Maine, to protest Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court.

The 53-year-old Kavanaugh is a conservative who could push the court more toward the right for a generation.

Organizer of Sunday's protest Marie Follayttar tells WGME-TV Kavanaugh could reject Medicaid expansion and roll back protections for people with preexisting conditions. Other protesters criticized Kavanaugh's views on abortion.

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins previously said she would not decide on how she would vote until after the Senate Judiciary Committee holds confirmation hearings next month.

Maine's Republican party issued a statement after the protest, saying Kavanaugh will ``faithfully interpret the law and protect the Constitution, not legislate from the bench.''A Mass of thanksgiving, reconciliation and grace was held on 25 August. For the Archbishop of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, "God works in our lives and in the life of the Church through mysterious ways. The blood of the martyrs of Kandhamal has brought many blessings upon the Church in Odisha and in the country.

Cuttack-Bhubaneswar (AsiaNews)  A ceremony that was both solemn and sober was held last Saturday to remember the Christian victims of the 2008 Kandhamal pogrom. Thirteen bishops and 90 priests co-celebrated the Mass of thanksgiving, reconciliation and grace. Scores of men and women religious as well as ordinary believers from every walk of life took part in the event. Some bishops from other Christian denominations also attended.

Referring to the tragedy, the Archdiocese of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar in a statement said, What was heartbreaking was that the massacre of the innocents continued unabated for months. Indeed, what happened ten years ago was terrible and painful.

The anti-Christian wave of violence followed the murder of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati and four of his followers. The attackers snuffed out human lives, the statement says, destroyed and demolished churches, homes, schools, hospitals, dispensaries, offices, and centres working for the uplift and development of the poor and marginalised people especially tribals, Dalits, OBC and others. Women and young girls were gang raped and thousands had to flee to the jungles in fear and despair.

The local archbishop, Mgr John Barwa, also spoke during the service, saying that God works in our lives and in the life of the Church through mysterious ways. The blood of the martyrs of Kandhamal has brought many blessings upon the Church in Odisha and in the country.

In his homily, Mgr Theodore Mascarenhas, secretary general of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI), said that that like the people of Israel we are very often helpless but the power of God gives us such strength that no human clout can give. He confessed that we feel the pain but no anger as Christ teaches us to forgive.

The prelate went on to ask those present to pray for those who still suffer from the tragedy as well as those who engage in violence. May the Lord convert their hearts and minds," he said.

At the end of the commemoration, the decree that opened the beatification process of Fr Marian Zelazek was read. The latter was a Polish missionary who chose to live in Odisha and give his life for the poor, the marginalised, lepers, children and tribal people.

Lastly, Rev Udayanath Bishoyi presented Flames of Faith in Kandhamal, a book that traces the origins of Christianity in Kandhamal and the persecution of 2008.The search continues for a man who allegedly yelled at a 16-year-old girl to get into his car as she was walking in Needham, Massachusetts.

The encounter was reported at approximately 4:30 p.m. Saturday when the teenager was walking near the intersection of Hunnewell Street and Hillside Avenue. A vehicle described as a "newer" model white Land Rover Discovery passed the girl three times then yelled at her to get in the car, according to the Needham Police Department.

Jackie Sandler, a friend of the victim's family, described the teen as very sweet and expressed concern over the incident.

"It's really frightening because my daughter walks around everywhere and she's out at night," Sandler said. "Now, I don't even want her walking alone during the day."

Police advise Needham residents to look out for a man believed to be in his 20s or 30s and muscular. The suspect is also said to have brown hair, blue eyes and a tattoo on one of his upper arms.

One family that lives nearby is keeping their eyes peeled.

"I don't like it at all," said resident Richie McMahon. "This has always been a safe neighborhood, and a big reason why people move to Needham."

"It's pretty frightening to think it could happen in Needham," Sandler said.Student gun control advocates and one of the survivors of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting on Sunday completed a 50-mile, four-day march in Massachusetts to the headquarters of gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson, where they protested gun violence and weapons manufacturing.

More than 100 protesters rallied outside company headquarters in Springfield. They held American flags and signs that read "We Can End Gun Violence" and "Books not Bullets."

The marchers condemned Smith & Wesson for making the rifle used in the February mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. The group wants the company to donate $5 million to gun violence research.

Protesters said they also want the company stop making weapons outlawed under Massachusetts' 2004 assault weapons ban. That law mirrors a federal ban that expired in 2004.

Their protest came as news broke of a fatal mass shooting during a video game tournament at a riverfront mall in Jacksonville, Florida.

Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, who spoke at the rally, called the march empowering. He said Massachusetts shows how commonsense gun laws work.

Manuel and Patricia Oliver, whose 17-year-old son Joaquin Oliver was shot and killed in the Parkland attack, also participated in the march.

Counter-protesters held signs across the street from Smith & Wesson supporting the gun-maker and the Second Amendment, which protects the right to have weapons. They held signs that read "I love S&W." Others held signs with images of firearms.

State and local police kept the two protests separated on opposite sides of a four-lane road.

Smith & Wesson didn't respond to requests for comment.

The company has become a target for gun control activists because its military-style rifles were used not only in the Parkland shooting but in a number of other recent massacres, including the 2015 shooting at a California holiday party where 14 people died and the 2012 shooting at a Colorado movie theater where 12 died.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who met with some of the students, tweeted that most of the students were born after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting and are determined to come together to fight gun violence.

"This is how change happens," the Massachusetts Democrat tweeted.DANBURY  The new freshman class at Western Connecticut State University began their college careers with the ceremonial walk through the Midtown campus black iron gates on Friday afternoon.

But the annual college tradition held a special place in the hearts of one Southbury family filled with WCSU alumni.

To begin the march, 1982 graduate William Gernert handed the class of 2022s official flag to incoming freshman Keith Gernert  his son and the familys third generation at the college.

I couldnt be happier, he said. I just loved it when I was here and Im so glad hes going to get this experience. Three generations and five total alumni. Were definitely big fans of WestConn.

This is not the same school it was in 1982 at all, he said. Its just tremendous. Its so strong in so many different areas.

Keith Gernert led hundreds of his new classmates through the gates to mark move-in day on the schools two Danbury campuses.

The class of 919 freshmen is a 10.5 percent increase over last years class  the first time the enrollment has increased since 2010, university spokesman Paul Steinmetz said. The new crop of students brings the schools total enrollment, including part-time and graduate students, to just under 5,500 students.

WCSU President John Clark implored the new class to enjoy their time on campus but not miss class, which earned a loud round of applause from parents.

I dare say for myself and most of us in this audience today, we were not born with the proverbial silver spoon, but a good wooden one, he said. We were brought up to believe that to achieve the great American dream, we have to possess the work ethic, the skill and the knowledge to do so. Thats our mission here at WestConn.

Keith Gernert is excited to finally move in to campus on his own without having to go too far from home and without the heftier price tags of a major university. He visited other campuses but as soon as he stepped on the Midtown campus, he knew his college search was over.

He plans to study psychology and wants to get practical experience as a peer counselor, which he was able to do with the guidance counselors in his high school.

Everyones like, You need the college experience, he said. But I can get all of that right here with my classmates and studies and all the programs they have here ... I just gravitated toward it.

New Milford High School grads Victoria Pascento and Alexis Turian moved into Litchfield Hall and will study nursing, while several friends of theirs live in Danbury and will commute to campus.

Four childhood friends from Westchester  Clinton McKeel, Daniel DiSanzo, Ryan Melendez and Andrew LaSala  made the move across the state line to study business and are all looking forward to living on their own for the first time. Theyre participating in the WCSU program that lets students in New York and New Jersey receive in-state tuition.

The squad didnt get to room with each other, but that just means they might be able to add to it, they laughed.

Itll be a lot of fun, DiSanzo said. Its far enough away that our parents cant just surprise us, we dont think, but were close enough that we can get back home for some good food.

zach.murdock@hearstmediact.comTwo previous requests were rejected because its name contains a reference to the 1988 protest movement. The new party will not be able to take part in local election and 13 Peoples Assembly by-elections set for 3 November. It will have to wait until the 2020 general election.

Naypyidaw (AsiaNews/Agencies)  Myanmars Union Election Commission (UEC) approved a bid by the 88 Generation group to register a new political party, the Peoples Party, state media reported.

The pro-democracy group, which led a protest movement against the countrys former military regime 30 years ago, had applied for registration twice before but had been turned down.

in December 2017, it had tried unsuccessfully to register as the Four Eights Party; last April, it tried again as the Four Eights People's Party, winning approval. However, upon receiving objections, the UEC reversed is decision.

The number, four eights, is a reference to the date  8 August 1988  a mass protest movement against the rule of General Ne Win peaked, until it was crushed by Myanmars military.

In July, the group filed another request, without the historic date, and achieved its goal. According to government regulations, the new party will have 90 days to present to the UEC its membership list and the names of the members of its central committee.

Meanwhile, the new party has already opened political offices in the cities of Yangon and Mandalay, in the regions of Ayeyarwady, Bago and Magway, and in the States of Shan and Mon.

However, due to the delay, it will not be able to field candidates in local elections or in 13 by-elections for the Peoples Assembly scheduled for 3 November. Instead, it will have to wait until the 2020 general elections before it can seek office.Long-term antiplatelet monotherapy after stenting is safe but does not reduce the risk of death or heart attack compared to standard dual antiplatelet therapy, according to late breaking results from the GLOBAL LEADERS trial presented today in a Hot Line Session at ESC Congress 2018 and published in The Lancet.

Ischaemic heart disease is the top global cause of death. In this condition, arteries supplying oxygen-rich blood to the heart become narrowed due to the build-up of fatty material. Treatments include medication, surgery to bypass the arteries, and keyhole surgery to open clogged arteries by inserting a stent (percutaneous coronary intervention; PCI).

Among patients undergoing PCI, dual antiplatelet therapy (aspirin plus a P2Y12 inhibitor) reduces the risk of blood clots and heart attacks but also increases the risk of bleeding. A shorter duration of dual antiplatelet followed by single antiplatelet therapy with a P2Y12 inhibitor might reduce adverse events with no increase in bleeding.

GLOBAL LEADERS is the largest trial to date testing one month of dual antiplatelet therapy versus the standard of more prolonged dual antiplatelet therapy after drug eluting stent implantation.10 The trial enrolled 15,991 patients scheduled to undergo PCI for stable coronary artery disease or acute coronary syndromes. Patients were recruited from 130 centers in 18 countries in Europe, North and South America, and Asia Pacific.

Patients underwent PCI with a drug-eluting stent, were treated with the direct thrombin inhibitor bivalirudin, and then randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to the experimental or standard treatment arm.

The experimental arm received one month of dual antiplatelet therapy with aspirin plus the P2Y12 inhibitor ticagrelor, followed by ticagrelor monotherapy for 23 months. The standard treatment arm received 12 months of dual antiplatelet therapy with aspirin plus a P2Y12 inhibitor (clopidogrel for patients with stable coronary artery disease, ticagrelor for those with acute coronary syndromes), followed by aspirin monotherapy for 12 months.

Patients were followed up for the primary endpoint of all-cause death or non-fatal myocardial infarction at two years. Myocardial infarction diagnoses were confirmed by a central committee that examined electrocardiograms (ECGs) at discharge, three and 24 months. The secondary endpoint was the rate of moderate or severe bleeding (grade 3 or 5 on the Bleeding Academic Research Consortium scale) within two years.

At two years the primary endpoint had occurred in 304 (3.8%) patients in the monotherapy group and 349 (4.4%) in the standard treatment group (rate ratio [RR] 0.87, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.75-1.01, p=0.073). All-cause mortality occurred in 224 (2.8%) patients in the monotherapy group and 253 (3.2%) in the standard treatment group (RR 0.88, 95% CI 0.74-1.06, p=0.186), and the incidence of non-fatal myocardial infarction was 1.0% versus 1.3%, respectively (RR 0.80, 95% CI 0.60-1.07, p=0.142). Rates of moderate or severe bleeding were 2.0% versus 2.1%, respectively (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.78-1.20, p=0.766).

Professor Patrick Serruys, principal investigator, Imperial College London, UK, said: "Ticagrelor, in combination with aspirin for one month, followed by ticagrelor alone was not superior to one-year standard dual antiplatelet therapy followed by aspirin alone for reducing deaths or heart attacks during the two years after stenting."

Professor Serruys noted that the trial was not designed to assess non-inferiority, meaning that further studies are needed to confirm that monotherapy is not less effective than extended dual antiplatelet therapy. But he said: "The risk of monotherapy compared to extended dual therapy was 0.75-1.01, suggesting that monotherapy is relatively safe."Projects focused on providing simple, low-cost modifications to surgical techniques that could reduce pain or damage from these procedures dominated this year's Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) challenge. The DEBUT challenge, a biomedical engineering design prize competition for teams of undergraduate students with prizes worth $65,000, is an annual contest supported by a public-private partnership between the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of the National Institutes of Health, and VentureWell. VentureWell is a not-for-profit organization that supports an emerging generation of science and technology inventors and the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems critical to their success. This is the third year that NIBIB has joined with VentureWell, extending the collective reach and impact of the DEBUT awards.

Of the 36 eligible entries received from 25 universities in 15 different states, NIBIB selected three winning teams based on the significance of the problem being addressed; the impact on clinical care; the innovation of the design; and the evidence of a working prototype. VentureWell selected two additional winners based on market potential and patentability. The prizes will be awarded in a ceremony at the annual Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) conference in Atlanta on Oct. 18.

"The designs show how fresh eyes can develop simple, low-cost solutions that can improve healthcare and it is clear that students like these are the future of biomedical engineering," said Jill Heemskerk, Ph.D., acting director of NIBIB.

NIBIB's first-place prize of $20,000 went to a team from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, for a minimally invasive brain retractor, Radiex, that provides safer surgical access to the brain for neurological operations. Currently, in about 9 percent of neurosurgical operations, the retractor-;a tool used to help surgeons access the brain-;causes unintentional damage such as brain swelling, hemorrhage, or brain infarction. The Radiex's rounded design distributes forces around a circular opening, and the small diameter easily accommodates minimally invasive surgeries, limiting damage to the brain.

"This team set out clear technical specifications and went through many different prototypes to achieve their target. Their device has the potential to decrease recovery time, reduce major complications that endanger the patient and prevent the need for post-operative care," said Zeynep Erim, Ph.D., the program director managing the DEBUT challenge at NIBIB. "The detailed testing of the prototype, in collaboration with neurosurgeons, using brain phantoms and cadavers, also impressed our judges."

The second place NIBIB prize of $15,000 was awarded to a team from Clemson University, South Carolina, for developing a device that can assist in the resection of the tibia (one of two bones in the lower leg), helping reduce the amount of vein and ligament damage and other complications during total knee replacement procedures. It also allows for the complete resection of the tibia without any other tools or technicians, making the procedure quicker and easier for surgeons.

NIBIB's third place prize of $10,000 was awarded to a team from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, for their device called the Neuraline. It was developed to facilitate the placement of epidural anesthesia during labor and delivery. The current method of epidural insertion requires the technician to feel a loss of resistance in order to identify the epidural space in the spine. However, the loss of resistance can be highly variable depending on the individual patient and skill of the technician. One in eight attempts at this procedure results in complications ranging from post-dural puncture headaches to cardiac arrest, and even death. The Neuraline is designed to provide an objective measure of bioimpedance-;the resistance that different tissues have to electricity-;that will alert the technician to the needle's location and when it has reached the correct epidural space.

The Venture Prize of $15,000 was awarded by VentureWell to another team from Clemson University who designed a device to help guide surgeons when they place orthopedic screws to set and repair broken bones. If the screw is misaligned with the hole that was initially drilled, it can lead to unnecessary pain as well as additional surgeries. The Concentracizor 4 is a simple device that uses gyroscopes to record the drilling alignment and guides the surgeon back to the proper angle for screw placement using LED lights. The device is handheld, light, and can accommodate any size surgical drill.

VentureWell's Design Excellence Prize of $5,000 went to a team from the University of California, Riverside, for the Talaria-;a magnetic ankle brace that aims to provide personalized support. Using sensors, it is able to detect when the ankle has rolled past its natural threshold (after being personally calibrated to each user's range of motion) and employs magnetorheological fluid to instantly support the ankle when needed. This type of personalized brace could help decrease both recovery time as well as the chance of further injury.

"The DEBUT Competition draws top design and innovation projects from undergraduates at universities and colleges across the U.S., and this year's winners once again represent a compelling group of health and healthcare innovations," said Phil Weilerstein, President of VentureWell. "The DEBUT submissions demonstrated the application of effective design principles to apply emerging science and technologies to create innovative solutions and the attention to regulatory and safety requirements. The winning teams emerged from a rigorous external review by panels of industry and technical experts. We are impressed with the ingenuity of the winners and are excited by the potential of their innovations to improve patient experience and outcomes."

Descriptions and videos of the winning projects can be found here: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/training-careers/undergraduate-graduate/design-biomedical-undergraduate-teams-debut-challenge/2018-debut-challenge-winnersThe European Commission (EC) has approved a personalized cellular therapy developed at the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center, making it the first chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy permitted for use in the European Union in two distinct indications. The EC granted the approval today to Novartis for Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel, formerly CTL019) for the treatment of relapsed or refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in pediatric and young adult patients up to 25 years of age, as well as relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) in patients over 18. The decision follows approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for Kymriah in B-cell ALL and DLBCL in the United States.

"This is another milestone in the fight against cancer, allowing patients across the European Union to benefit from these potentially lifesaving therapies," said Carl June, MD, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies in Penn's Abramson Cancer Center. "This approval demonstrates the global impact of the therapies we developed in Philadelphia, and the far-reaching potential of these therapies to change the way cancer is treated across the world."

Investigators at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine led research, development, and clinical trials of CAR T therapy in collaboration with Novartis and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). In August 2017, Kymriah became the first therapy based on gene transfer ever approved by the FDA when it was authorized for children and young adults with relapsed or refractory B-cell ALL. Approval for relapsed or refractory DLBCL followed in May 2018.

The treatment modifies patients' own immune T cells, which are collected and reprogrammed at the Novartis manufacturing facility to potentially seek and destroy the patients' cancer cells. Once they are infused back into patients' bodies, these newly built cells both multiply and attack, targeting cells that express a protein called CD19. Tests reveal the army of hunter cells can grow to more than 10,000 new cells for each single engineered cell patients receive  producing durable remission rates in refractory ALL and DLBCL  and can survive in the body for years.

The approval in the EU is the latest accomplishment in the alliance between Penn and Novartis, which entered into a global collaboration in 2012 to further research, develop, and commercialize Kymriah and other CAR T-cell therapies for the treatment of cancers. Specifically, the action of the European Commission is based on two global CAR T cell trials.

The first global trial, known as ELIANA, evaluated patients in 25 centers in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and in Europe in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Norway and Spain. The trial involved 75 children and young adults with relapsed or refractory B-cell ALL and showed 81 percent of patients achieved a complete remission at three months follow up, with 80 percent of responders still in remission at six months. Overall survival at six months was 90 percent.

The second trial, called JULIET, is the largest study examining CAR T therapy in DLBCL, enrolling patients from 27 sites in 10 countries across the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Europe in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands. The trial showed an overall response of 52 percent, with 40 percent of patients achieving a complete response, among the 93 infused patients with three or more months of follow-up or earlier discontinuation.

Many patients in both trials experienced a side effect called cytokine release syndrome (CRS). CRS is a toxicity associated with CAR T therapy, which includes varying degrees of flu-like symptoms, with fevers, nausea, and muscle pain, and can require ICU-level care. In the ELIANA trial, 47 percent of patients experienced grade 3 or grade 4 CRS. In the JULIET trial, the number was 22 percent, using a CRS grading scale developed at the University of Pennsylvania. Patients with severe CRS required treatment with tocilizumab, a therapy initially implemented at Penn and CHOP, and now FDA-approved for CAR T cell-induced severe or life-threatening CRS, or corticosteroids. All of those patients recovered from their CRS. Other toxicities included infections, cytopenias or low blood count, neurologic events such as confusion, febrile neutropenia, and a metabolic abnormality called tumor lysis syndrome. All of those issues resolved on their own or with treatment, and there were no treatment-related deaths.

Novartis is working to create a registry to follow patients for 15 years after being treated to monitor their progress and any potential, future side effects.

The Novartis-Penn Center for Advanced Cellular Therapeutics (CACT) opened in 2016 and hosted Vice President Joe Biden at the launch of his Cancer Moonshot initiative, cementing Penn's role as international innovator in the development and manufacturing of personalized cellular therapies.

Patients who are interested in T-cell therapies at Penn Medicine can call 215-316-5127 for more information.Masimo announced today the findings of a study recently published in Anesthesia & Analgesia in which researchers at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and Ghent University, Belgium, investigated the ability of Masimo ORi (Oxygen Reserve Index) to show trends in oxygenation in the moderate hyperoxic region (partial pressure of oxygen in arterial blood [PaO 2 ] in the range of 100 to 200 mmHg). ORi is available outside the U.S. and is intended as a noninvasive, relative indicator of a patient's oxygen reserve during moderate hyperoxia. ORi can be trended and has optional alarms to notify clinicians of changes in oxygenation.

Noting that monitoring oxygenation using pulse oximetry alone "gives little information on PaO 2 " during conditions of normoxia and hyperoxia, Dr. Jaap Jan Vos and colleagues sought to evaluate the correlation of ORi to PaO 2 during moderate hyperoxia. They collected data from 20 healthy adult volunteers, who breathed a series of standardized oxygen concentrations ranging from mildly hypoxic (inspired oxygen = 14%) to extremely hyperoxic (inspired oxygen = 100%). ORi and SpO 2 were noninvasively and continuously measured by sensors on both the second and fourth fingers and displayed on a Masimo Radical-7 Pulse CO-Oximeter. At baseline and at each induced oxygenation stage, arterial blood samples were taken for blood gas analysis and PaO 2 was measured invasively using a Siemens Rapidpoint 405 CO-Oximeter.

The researchers collected 1,090 paired data points of simultaneous ORi and PaO 2 values. In the "ORi-sensitive" range of 100-200 mmHg, the mean ORi value was 0.16, with associated oxygen saturation (SpO 2 ) values of  97% at all points. Correlation between ORi and PaO 2 was positive at all points (p < 0.0001), with R values of 0.78, 0.83, and 0.84 for sensor 1, sensor 2, and mean of both sensors, respectively. To assess ORi's trending ability, the researchers used a 4-quadrant plot and calculated that ORi trending of PaO 2 within the range of 100-200 mmHg had a concordance rate of 94%.

The researchers concluded, "In this prospective volunteer validation study, a strong and positive correlation between PaO 2 and ORi was found, together with a good trending ability. Based on these data, the future use of ORi as a continuous noninvasive monitoring tool for assessing oxygenation status in patients receiving supplemental oxygen might be supported." They also noted that "in healthy volunteers, ORi provides reasonable trending information of PaO 2 around the moderate hyperoxic range of PaO 2 for which its use is intended. Also, changes in PaO 2 are well reflected by changes in ORi, with good concordance. The trend in ORi can be used to track changes in PaO 2 levels in the moderate hyperoxic region, and absolute values should not be interpreted for PaO 2 levels."

The researchers noted several limitations of the study, including that "additional studies are required to confirm these findings in a clinical setting" and that the influence of factors such as patient comorbidity and clinical circumstances requires further research. In addition, the researchers observed differences between the absolute values of simultaneously measured ORi values from sensors placed at different sites on the subject, which may require further studies in order to clinically rely on absolute ORi values as a direct measure of oxygen reserve, especially in situations where accurate oxygenation assessment may be necessary.

Study co-author Professor Thomas Scheeren commented, "ORi fills a gap in the monitoring of patients receiving supplemental oxygen by noninvasively and continuously trending the course of arterial oxygen tension. It may help to better titrate oxygen therapy to avoid both hypoxia and unintended hyperoxia."

ORi has not received FDA 510(k) clearance and is not available for sale in the United States.The main reasons why people die after noncardiac surgery are revealed today in a study of more than 40,000 patients from six continents presented in a late breaking science session at ESC Congress 2018. Myocardial injury, major bleeding, and sepsis contributed to nearly three-quarters of all deaths.

"There's a false assumption among patients that once you've undergone surgery, you've 'made it'," said study author Dr Jessica Spence, of the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI), a joint institute of Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) and McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. "Unfortunately, that's not always the case, and now we have a much better sense of when and why people die after noncardiac surgery. Most deaths are linked to cardiovascular causes."

The VISION study included 40,004 patients aged 45 years or older undergoing noncardiac surgery and remaining in hospital for at least one night. Patients were recruited from 27 centers in 14 countries in North and South America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia, and monitored for complications until 30 days after their surgery.

The researchers found that 715 (1.8%) patients died within 30 days after noncardiac surgery. Of those, 505 (71%) died in hospital (including four [0.6%] in the operating room), and 210 (29%) died after discharge from hospital. Dr Spence said: "One in 56 patients died within 30 days of noncardiac surgery and nearly all deaths occurred after leaving the operating room, with more than a quarter occurring after hospital discharge."

Eight perioperative complications - including five cardiovascular - were associated with death within 30 days postoperatively. The top three complications, which contributed to nearly three-quarters of all deaths, were myocardial injury after noncardiac surgery (MINS; 29%), major bleeding (25%), and sepsis (20%).

"We're letting patients down in postoperative management," said principal investigator Professor Philip J. Devereaux, director of cardiology at McMaster University. "The study suggests that most deaths after noncardiac surgery are due to cardiovascular causes, so cardiologists have a major role to play to improve patient safety. This includes conducting blood and imaging tests to identify patients at risk then giving preventive treatment, including medications that prevent abnormal heart rhythms, lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and prevent blood clots."

Earlier findings from the VISION study showed that a simple blood test can identify MINS, enabling clinicians to intervene early and prevent further complications. The blood test measures a protein called high-sensitivity troponin T which is released into the bloodstream when injury to the heart occurs.

Regarding cardiovascular complications, MINS occurred in 5,191 (13%) patients and independently increased the risk of 30-day mortality by 2.6-fold; major bleeding occurred in 6,238 (16%) patients and increased risk by 2.4-fold; 372 (0.9%) patients had congestive heart failure, which raised risk by 1.6-fold; 152 (0.4%) patients had deep venous thrombosis which raised risk by 2.1-fold; and 132 (0.3%) patients had a stroke, which increased risk by a factor of 1.6.

Regarding noncardiovascular complications associated with 30-day mortality, sepsis occurred in 1,783 (4.5%) patients and independently increased risk by 5.7-fold; infection occurred in 2,171 (5.4%) patients and raised risk by 1.9-fold; and 118 patients (0.3%) had acute kidney injury resulting in new dialysis, which increased risk by 4.7-fold.

"Combined, these discoveries tell us that we need to become more involved in care and monitoring after surgery to ensure that patients at risk have the best chance for a good recovery," said Dr Spence, who is also an anesthesiologist at HHS and a PhD candidate at McMaster University.

Source: https://www.escardio.org/The-ESC/Press-Office/Press-releases/study-reveals-when-and-why-people-die-after-noncardiac-surgeryby Franco Pisano

At the end of the trip to Ireland, Francis renews his appeal for forgiveness for the abuses committed by people in the Church. But a dossier by the former nuncio in the US accuses him of covering the misdeeds of former Cardinal McCarrick and calls for him to resign.

Rome (AsiaNews)  The call for Pope Francis to resign is just the latest chapter in the ongoing conflict within the Church between "conservatives" and "progressives". Of course it is an unprecedented fact. Above all for the motive behind the call: that the pope would have covered the misdeeds of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, accused of sexual harassment against young seminarians.

The charge is made all the more serious by the fact that it came at the climax of the Pope's trip to Ireland, during which Francis repeatedly expressed "shame" and "sorrow" for the abuses that occurred in the past years within the Church, not only Irish.

Again yesterday, during the Mass that concluded the World Meeting of Families, in the Confiteor he read a thought written in Spanish, and therefore evidently in his own hand: " Yesterday, I met with eight survivors who have suffered abuse of power, of conscience and sexual abuse. Taking up on what they said to me, I want to place before the mercy of the Lord these crimes and ask forgiveness for them. We ask forgiveness for the abuses in Ireland, abuses of power, of conscience and sexual abuse perpetrated by members with roles of responsibility in the Church. In a special way, we ask pardon for all the abuses committed in various types of institutions run by male or female religious and by other members of the Church. Furthermore, we ask forgiveness for the cases of exploitation through manual work that so many minors were inflicted.

We ask forgiveness for the times that as a Church we did not show survivors of all kinds of abuse: compassion and the search for justice and truth through concrete actions. We ask forgiveness.

We ask forgiveness for some members of the Churchs hierarchy who did not take charge of these painful situations and kept quiet. We ask forgiveness.

We ask forgiveness for the children who were taken away from their moms and for all those times when many single mothers were told that to seek their children who had been separated from them  and the same was told to their daughters and sons who were looking for their mothers  that this was a mortal sin. This is not a mortal sin but the Fourth Commandment. We ask forgiveness.

Lord, sustain and increase this state of shame and repentance and give us the strength to commit ourselves so that these things never happen again and justice may be done. Amen".

This is the context behind the accusation against Francis, contained in a long and complex dossier of the former apostolic nuncio in the USA, Msgr. Carlo Maria Vigano: He claims Francis did not listen to complaints that for years had been weighing against McCarrick, who reportedly sponsored his election during the conclave, even if in July removed him from the College of Cardinal, precisely because of the abuse. It is also alleged that Benedict XVI had tried to impose the isolation of McCarrick, without succeeding because the US cardinal enjoyed protection from the highest levels of the Vatican hierarchy. In the dossier dozens of names of prelates, accused in various ways, appear.

As for Francis, he was allegedly personally informed by Msgr. Vigano in June 2013.

Francis was questioned about the dossier and the allegation sit contains yesterday, during his flight from Ireland to Rome, during his usual meeting with journalists. "I read that statement this morning," Francis replied. "I read it - he added - and I sincerely have to tell you this: read the statement carefully and make your own judgment. I believe that the communique speaks for itself, and you have enough journalistic capacity to draw conclusions It is an act of trust: when some time has passed and you have drawn conclusions, perhaps I will speak again. But first may your professional maturity do this job: it will do you good, really.By Dr Ananya Mandal, MD

Driving under the influence of alcohol may not be a good idea because one is not in control. A new study has shown that that driving with a hangover is also not a good idea. Researchers have found that the cognitive impairment that is caused by alcohol may last longer than previously thought and may spill over to the next day.

A Systematic Review of the NextDay Effects of Heavy Alcohol Consumption on Cognitive Performance. Image Credit: Vadim Zakharishchev / Shutterstock

Psychologists from the University of Bath tested the attention, memory and psychomotor skills including coordination and speed among people with little or no alcohol in their blood, a day after their drinking episodes. The participants were found to perform poorly. They write that these findings are important for people driving or performing other activities while still being hungover. They explain that most workplaces have strict policies about alcohol intoxication at work but few are aware of the impairment that remains from alcohol even after it has left the blood stream. They add that in some cases, for example for heavy machinery operators, this may compromise safety and employers should reconsider their safety guidelines.

The meta-analysis titled, A Systematic Review of the NextDay Effects of Heavy Alcohol Consumption on Cognitive Performance, appeared in the latest issue of the journal Addiction.

Statistics show that hangovers cost the UK economy around 1.9 billion annually mainly due to absenteeism. It is known to one of the most common side effects of alcohol consumption. Despite these huge numbers, there has been little research on the actual physical effects of the hangovers, write the researchers. Lead author Craig Gunn explained that they gathered data from 19 studies and noted that hangovers impaired psychomotor speed, short and long-term memory and sustained attention. They looked at 770 relevant articles he said. He added, Impaired performance in these abilities reflects poorer concentration and focus, decreased memory and reduced reaction times the day after an evening of heavy drinking. Our review also indicated limited and inconsistent research on alcohol hangover and the need for future studies in the field.

Dr Sally Adams, senior author explained that this study shows that hangovers can have serious consequences in day to day performances such as driving and workplace skills. It can affect memory and concentration she added. She said, These findings also highlight that there is a need for further research in this field where alcohol hangover has implications at the individual level in terms of health and wellbeing, but also more widely at the national level for safety and the economy.'Microvascular dysfunction, or small vessel disease, can be an important cause of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (preserved pumping capacity), an international team including researchers from Karolinska Institutet and AstraZeneca report in a study published in The European Heart Journal. The results can play a crucial part in identifying people in the risk zone for this type of heart failure and in the development of effective drugs.

Heart failure is the most common reason for hospitalisation and causes much suffering. Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, which is one of the two main types of heart failure, lacks scientifically proven treatments and more research is needed to understand how the disease develops and is to be treated.

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet, along with colleagues from AstraZeneca and four other groups in Sweden, the USA, Finland and Singapore have now conducted a study of over 200 patients with this type of heart failure.

An innovative coronary imaging protocol developed

The study involved the use of an innovative coronary imaging protocol developed by Professor Li-Ming Gan's research group in the IMED Biotech Unit in order to obtain a patient-friendly, cost-effective way to test coronary artery's ability to increase its blood flow (Coronary Flow Reserve - CFR) in addition to the traditional imaging approach to generate overall picture of the heart's structure and function.

"Being able to identify patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction is not only key to improving patient outcomes through early diagnosis but also for us to understand the causal mechanisms underlying the disease so we can develop future targeted therapies", says Professor Li-Ming Gan, Chief Scientist and Senior Medical Director, IMED Biotech Unit, AstraZeneca.

Damage to the endothelium

The results of the study, which is the first of its kind, show that 75 per cent of the patients had what is known as microvascular dysfunction. This is a disease in which the coronary artery shows no sign of narrowing or plaque in radiographs, but has damage to the endothelium that coats the inside of the blood vessels. The blood vessels do not work as they should, which can lead to adverse changes in the heart muscle. The researchers therefore draw the conclusion that microvascular dysfunction can be a critical underlying disease mechanism in patients with heart failure in which the ejection fraction is preserved.

"The results will be useful in identifying patients at risk of developing the disease, but above all they'll make an essential contribution to the development of drugs for patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction," says Lars Lund, Senior Consultant and Professor at Karolinska Institutet's Department of Medicine in Solna.

Source: https://ki.se/en/news/microvascular-dysfunction-a-common-cause-of-heart-failure-with-preserved-pumping-capacityScientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute (VTCRI) have found evidence that may disrupt conventional understanding about how electrical activity travels in the heart -; a discovery that potentially can lead to new insight into medical problems such as heart arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death.

The research study, now online but scheduled to appear as a final version on Tuesday, Sept. 4, in the journal eLife, may inform the development of new classes of drugs to treat heart rhythm disorders, which occur when someone's heart beats too quickly, slowly, or irregularly.

Led by Rob Gourdie, a professor at VTCRI, the international team of scientists revealed how electrical impulses might travel through heart muscle in steps, jumping between cells in a rapid, almost on-off fashion, like a digital wave -; rather than through a smooth, continuous flow of current, like an analog wave.

"Our goal is to find ways to control heart rhythm disturbances," said Gourdie, who is also a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics with the Virginia Tech College of Engineering. "Learning how bioelectricity works in the heart at the nuts-and-bolts, molecular level is important for human health, because it will help us understand why the heart sometimes beats out of rhythm, and potentially point to a new path for treatment. With heart disorders increasing as the population grows older, new strategies for preventing arrhythmias including new drugs are urgently required to help heart patients."

Atrial fibrillation is the most common type of arrhythmia, affecting an estimated 2.7 million to 6.1 million people in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And while the number of people living with some form of arrhythmia is expected to increase with the aging of the U.S. population, the movement of potential new drugs to treat the conditions are lagging in the development pipeline, including in clinical trials.

Gourdie said the new discovery could be a paradigm shift in the understanding of electrical activation in heart muscle.

The researchers showed that sodium channels from neighboring heart muscle cells may cooperate to move electrical current that leads to regenerative impulses from one heart muscle cell to the next.

"Sodium channels are literally stuck together between cells in way that seems to ensure that the firing of channels in one cell sparks partnering channels in the neighboring cell," Gourdie said. "The molecular machinery seems to be in place for bioelectrical signals to step between heart cells, not wholly unlike how impulses jump between nerve cells in a stepping-stone-like manner at neural synapses."

It is commonly thought that bioelectrical signals smoothly flow in the heart in an analog fashion, moving continuously from cell to cell through conducting structures, called gap junctions, that directly couple cells together.

The new study from Gourdie and his colleagues challenge this idea.

The researchers, which include Gourdie's former postdoctoral associate Rengasayee Veeraraghavan, now at The Ohio State University; and his current postdoctoral associate, Daniel Hoagland; conducted experiments in cardiac cell cultures from animal models using an array of analysis techniques.

Together with Steven Poelzing, an associate professor, and James Smyth, an assistant professor, both at VTCRI, along with researchers from the University of Michigan, Case Western University, and Imperial College London, the team showed the key to this cell-to-cell electrical interaction is a component of the membrane sodium channel called a beta subunit, which also serves an adhesion function to bind the sodium channel complex together, forming a structure that the team calls an ephapse.

"During our experiments, we have shown that we can unglue ephapses and cause heart arrhythmias," Gourdie said. "What we are looking for now is a drug to stop the ephapses from becoming unglued. We believe that if we can find a drug that can hold this tiny area between heart muscle cells together in disease states, we might have a new way of stabilizing heart rhythms that have gone awry."

During the course of the research, the scientists used a variety of sophisticated analysis techniques including super-resolution microscopy, electric cell-substrate impedance spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, isolated myocyte electrophysiology, surface scanning confocal microscopy, and optical mapping and electrocardiography.

"Our paradigm for the propagation of impulses in the heart is very simplistic," said Igor Efimov, a professor and chairman of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at George Washington University, who commented on the study but was not involved in the research. "We teach that electrical conduction in the heart is regulated primarily by connexin 43 or sodium channels. But it is more complicated than that. This paper elegantly reveals the role of a regulatory subunit which is not just involved in electrical conduction-;it also regulates adhesion, and thereby creates a cleft or gap to provide a basis for cell-to-cell communication."

Efimov and Gourdie both mentioned the research supports a theory by physiologist Nicholas Sperelakis in 1977 at the University of Virginia. Sperelakis proposed an electric-field mechanism of electrical activity between excited heart cells, as a precursor theory to what has come to be described as ephaptic conduction.

"Gourdie and his colleagues are showing a strong basis for the ephaptic conduction theory," Efimov said. "The traditional view of electrical coupling through low-resistance channels is not the only explanation. This new point of view could change the way we teach students, and the evidence as presented in the study also explains why a number of cancer drugs cannot be used because of their cardiotoxicity." Waterhouse Public Relations has expanded its team with the addition of Kelsey Chastain, an experienced communications professional and award-winning journalist. In her role as an account executive, she will focus on client needs, strategy and media relations.

Ms. Chastain comes to Waterhouse with knowledge and experience as a communications professional across several areas including broadcast news, print media and radio. Previously as marketing and communications manager of a Chattanooga-based lifestyle magazine, Ms. Chastain steered the layout and content generation of the monthly publication and led communications with clients and the community.

Kelsey is a well-rounded communicator and a great addition to the energy of our team, said Albert Waterhouse, president and CEO. Her experience and drive will be a tremendous asset to the firm as we grow client relationships and help create impressions that count.

Ms. Chastain has several years of experience capturing, writing and sharing stories. In a prior role as a reporter at WTVC NewsChannel 9, she received a first place award from the Tennessee Associated Press for her comprehensive journalism abilities.

Because of her unique communications experience, Ms. Chastain is skilled at cultivating and maintaining relationships, creating relevant and timely news pitches and providing specialized media training for clients. In her role at Waterhouse, Ms. Chastain will capitalize on her diverse experience base and relationship-minded approach, said officials.

Ms. Chastain is an Atlanta-area native and proud to call Chattanooga home with her husband and dog.by Sumon Corraya

Half of Bangladeshs Catholics are tribal. Because of their humble origins and high rate of illiteracy, they are the easiest target of wealthy landowners. Santal families only thanks to women.

Dhaka (AsiaNews)  Tribal Catholic families, who account for half of Bangladeshi Catholics, face many difficulties, most notably poverty, lack of education, loss of religious faith and persecution over land.

More than 50 different tribal groups live in the South Asian country. Half of them continue to practise indigenous traditions, whilst the rest have heeded the Gospel message.

Evangelising activities by Christian missionaries take place mostly among these groups: every year many new converts join the flock.

Tribal people, however, because of their humble origins and high rate of illiteracy, are the easiest target of wealthy landowners, who often seize their land using force with complicity of criminal gangs.

Robert Rama, an ethnic Garo, got married two years ago. Instead of going to live in his bride's house, as tribal tradition dictates, he chose to bring her to live with him.

"Traditions change," he told AsiaNews. However, today he is separated from his wife and their son lives with her.

"There have been so many changes in society, he notes. Husbands do not want to obey their wives and vice versa. Selfishness is the biggest problem. In couples, everyone wants to dominate the other."

James Kisku, an ethnic Santal and a Catholic, works for an NGO, the Mennonite Centre Committee. "In the Santal community, poverty is the biggest problem, he said. Most of us work as day labourers; few have an education or live in good socio-economic conditions."

Santal families "survive only thanks to women. Our women are very patient. Even if drunken husbands mistreat them, they do not abandon the family."

Noting that tribal people converted only in the past generation, he said that "their faith is not as strong as that of Bengali Catholics. Many do not attend mass or pray the rosary. Priests and nuns should visit families more often and provide them with spiritual guidance."

"Challenges are also the effect of globalisation, said Fr Simon Hacha, an ethnic Garo clergyman from the Diocese of Mymensingh. Families deal with them around the world and we are not far behind.

"Modern technologies, social media, the Internet have changed people's lives. Some use them in a positive way, others in a negative way, and that's where problems arise. Many do not want to follow the matriarchal setting of society."

For this reason, "we have decided to organise seminars dedicated to married couples, premarital courses and so on, so as to reduce the problems of families."The Sinister Six: Learn the comic book history of Spider-Man's greatest foes before No Way Home

What do Marvel comic books tell us about the Sinister Six in the MCU?GamesRadar+ is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn moreRanchi : Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das said on Sunday that a 26-member farmers' team left for Israel on a four-day trip to study farming techniques.

" You (farmers) are going to Israel on the pious day of Raksha Bandhan with an aim to increase farmers' income. Learn Israel's technique of farming and adopt it in our state and share the experience with others," Das said while seeing off the team.

"Israel is smaller than Jharkhand area wise but the country's per capita income is more than India due to farming. We should always learn from a place where something better is happening. Today Jharkhand is a deficit state as far as foodgrain production is concerned. But those days are not far when Jharkhand will become self dependent and export foodgrains to other states."

The farmers will learn dairy farming, production of vegetables and fruits, drip irrigation and other things.

The team is being led by Agriculture Secretary Pooja Singhal.Bengaluru : Aiming to expand their engineering services to US-based manufacturers, Bengaluru-based global tech provider AXISCADES has announced a new centre in Tucson, Arizona.

It also plans to create a projected 320 jobs over the next five years, primarily in mechanical and electrical engineering, finance, research and development, HR, sales, as well as project management, the company said in a statement on Saturday.

The new Tucson operation will expand the company's ability to provide engineering services particularly, mining clients in Southern Arizona.



"The entire (Tucson) region is strong not only in mining but also other key AXISCADES strategic growth areas such as aerospace, defence and healthcare," said Mritunjay Singh, CEO and Executive Director of AXISCADES.

The company plans to work closely with the University of Arizona and Arizona State University, in recruiting and training graduates.Rome : Sicilian prosecutors are investigating Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini over his refusal to allow migrants off a coastguard vessel.

The Diciotti docked in the Sicilian port of Catania on Monday.

The Italian government is refusing to most of the migrants disembark until a solution is reached regarding their relocation with other European states.

Prosecutors have now opened an inquiry into possible illegal confinement, illegal arrest, and abuse of power, BBC reported on Sunday.

Salvini responded to the news by shrugging of the threat, saying those still on board would be allowed off "in the coming hours".

According to Salvini, they would be taken in "by bishops who are opening their doors, their hearts and their wallets".

So far only small groups have been allowed in, including unaccompanied children and the sick, two of whom are said to have tuberculosis.

The fate of the more than 100 migrants, most of whom are Eritrean, has prompted local protests throughout the week and attracted international attention.

The UN appealed for EU members to "urgently" offer relocation places to the migrants on Saturday, a day after a meeting of 10 EU envoys in Brussels failed to provide a solution.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a statement that Europe has recognised "a fundamental and legal obligation" to help "people fleeing war, violence and persecution" throughout its history.

"The time has come to end the back-and-forth that has seen countries competing in a race to the bottom on who can take the least responsibility for people rescued at sea," he said.

"It is dangerous and immoral to put the lives of refugees and asylum-seekers at risk while states engage in a political tug-of-war on long-term solutions."

Under EU rules, people must seek asylum where they arrive, but Italy has increasingly barred boats from docking.

Salvini refused the vessel permission to disembark until the EU agreed to distribute the migrants among other countries.

He has maintained they are working to achieve a "positive and concrete solution" that was not a "burden" on Italian citizens.

"I want to say that the dozens of complaints, insults and threats levelled at give me more and more strength to go on, and for me are badges of honour on my chest," he said of criticism.

Sixteen people were allowed to disembark on Saturday on doctors' orders after inspectors from the Italian Healthy Ministry and the Red Cross went on board the vessel.

Earlier this week 27 unaccompanied minors and 13 people in need of urgent medical help were also allowed to get off.

Some of those left onboard are reported to be refusing food in protest.

Since 2014, more than 640,000 migrants have landed on Italy's shores. Although many have since left for other countries, some remain.

The UN says that more than 1,600 people have lost their lives trying to cross into Europe in 2018, despite overall numbers being down.

In July, 450 migrants were allowed to disembark in Sicily once France, Germany, Malta, Portugal and Spain had each agreed to take 50 migrants each.Dublin : Pope Francis has met eight Irish victims of abuse committed by the clergy, on the first day of his historic trip to Dublin, where he is to participate in the IX World Meeting of Families.

The meeting, which was announced by the Vatican prior to the trip, took place in the Apostolic Nunciature in the Irish capital on Saturday, Efe news reported.The meeting was with "eight survivors of clerical, religious and institutional abuse," Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said in a statementTwo persons from the Irish Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors (CMABS) who attended the meeting said Francis condemned corruption and cover ups within the Church, referring to these practices as "caca", which the interpreter politely translated as "filth you would see in the toilet".Among the victims who were present was Marie Collins, who resigned last year from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors after denouncing the lack of cooperation by some members of the Vatican CuriaThe other victims who attended the meeting include reverends Patrick McCafferty and Joe McDonald, Damien O'Farrell, Paul Jude Redmond, Clodagh Malone, and Bernadette Fathy, while the eighth victim, who was abused by priest Tony Walsh, asked to remain anonymous.Clodagh Malone, who was born in the Saint Patrick's Mother and Baby Home in Dublin and was adopted after 10 weeks, "asked the Pope to clearly and publicly state that the natural mothers who lost their babies to adoption had done nothing wrong and call for reconciliation and reunion for these families broken by the Catholic Church both in Ireland and around the world."According to the statement by CMABS, the Pope "agreed to include the message in his mass tomorrow".Redmond, who was born in the Castlepollard Home and adopted after 17 days, asked the pope to demand that the nuns who ran the homes "acknowledge their actions and issue an unqualified apology to all the survivors of their institutions," as well as to "commit to paying the full cost of the current inquiry."The Pope apologised for what happened in the homes, Redmond said in the statement.During the meeting, the Pope received a copy of Redmond's book "The Adoption Machine," which contains details of thousands of deaths and other horrors that took place in the Mother and Baby homes."The Pope was genuinely shocked to hear about the 6,000 babies who died and the 3,000 babies who were banished and the vaccine trials," the victims' statement says.Chandigarh : The Punjab Assembly, led by Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, on Monday unanimously passed a resolution asking the Central government to pursue with Pakistan the issue of opening of the Kartarpur Sahib corridor during the 550th birthday celebrations of the first Sikh Guru, Sri Guru Nanak Dev.

The resolution was moved by the Chief Minister on the second day of the monsoon session of the Assembly.

All members of the House, cutting across party lines, were of the view that the opening of the corridor would enable millions of Indian devotees to pay obeisance at the the historic Sri Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara.

The Gurdwara, where the first Sikh Guru spent the last years of his life, is located in Pakistan across the international border, though it is clearly visible from Dera Baba Nanak in Punjab's Gurdaspur district.

Moving the resolution, the Chief Minister informed the House that he had already written to Union External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to take up the issue with her Pakistani counterpart.

The Punjab government, he said, had been urging the government of India, time and again, to take up the matter with Islamabad.

The opening of the corridor was a cherished dream of the Sikh community, he added.Sorry!

This content is not available in your regionTomoyuki Sugimoto was detained for videotaping a military facility in Nampo. Talks between Japan and North Korea remain difficult. Tokyo wants the truth about the Japanese abducted in the 1970s and 1980s, but for Pyongyang the question is settled. Talks with Washington suffer a setback after Mike Pompeo cancels visit, a step that also undermines the inter-Korean dialogue.

Tokyo (AsiaNew/Agencies)  North Korea has released a Japanese tourist on "humanitarian" grounds. Tomoyuki Sugimoto, who had been arrested in early August, arrived today in China, where he was welcomed by Japanese officials, the Kyodo news agency reports, citing diplomatic sources.

On Sunday, North Korean state-run media had reported that North Korean authorities had decided to expel him "on the principle of humanitarianism."

Sugimoto, in his 30s, was visiting the country on a tour arranged by a China-based travel agency. He may have been suspected of shooting video footage of a military facility when he visited the western port city of Nampo with the tour group.

Sugimotos arrest touches an open wound in relations between North Korea and Japan. For months, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been trying to arrange a summit with Kim Jong-un to solve what he calls "his lifes work", namely finding out what happened to Japanese nationals seized by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.

However, the question seems destined to remain unsolved since Pyongyang insists that it was already "resolved". For its part, North Korea has not stopped criticising Japan, calling on Tokyo to atone for its past military occupation and colonial rule of Korea.

Meanwhile, talks between North Korea and the United States suffered another setback, after a scheduled visit by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was cancelled last Friday.

For the United States, North Korea has not satisfactorily progressed in dismantling its nuclear weapons programme.

The decision has also negatively affected intra-Korean dialogue. Today South Korea said that it was re-evaluating the opening of a joint liaison office with North Korea, which was planned for this month.

This could be embarrassing to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is expected to visit Pyongyang next month for the third summit with Kim Jong-un. North Korea could ask Seoul to ease the sanctions, something that South Korea might not be able to do.

In any case, some experts believe the US move is directed more against Beijing  accused of interfering with denuclearisation  than against Pyongyang.

For their part, South Koreans appear united in the search of dialogue with the North.

In a survey by Gallup Korea on 21-22 August, 71.8 per cent of the respondents said that South Koreas National Assembly should ratify the 27 April summit declaration.The Securities & Exchange Commission levied a $97 million sanction on affiliates of TransAmerica and parent company Aegon, stating portfolio managers used flawed modeling for mutual funds that were the basis for billions of dollars in investments on behalf of its clients.

TransAmerica handles retirement or benefit plans for the state of Connecticut and multiple municipalities in the state, including the town of Greenwich.Views from atop Ferris wheels, the smell of fried dough filling the air and the sound of children cheering as they see farm animals can only mean one thing -- Connecticut's country fair season is upon us.

Bring your appetite for fun and unique flavors. Fairs across the state offer a chance to indulge in drool-worthy foods and old-fashioned activities, like antique tractor pulls, livestock shows and pie-eating contests.

We have rounded up several of the state's "major" fairs, as designated by CTAgFairs.org. The fairs, which are slated for August, September and October, are some of the largest events in the state.

Click through the slideshow above for a look at some of the state's major country fairs, and here for the full list.

According to the Connecticut Office of Tourism website, the Orange Country Fair will feature "craft exhibits, antique cars, tractor pulls, children's games, country music, contests, flower and vegetable exhibits, carriage rally, and much more." The 44th annual event will be held September 15 and 16.

In its 67th year, the Bridgewater Country Fair is "a long standing tradition that preserves the character of the quintessential country fair," the state's tourism site said. Head to the fair between August 17-19.

While the largest fair in New England isn't located in Connecticut, it attracts residents from across the area. The Big E features 17 days of activities, including one specifically set to celebrate all things Connecticut. This year's Connecticut Day is scheduled for Wednesday, September 19.Millennials are often a point of contention in the realm of public debate. Whether it's their upbringing, work ethic or consumption of avocado toast, everyone on the internet has an opinion about the large and diverse generation born in the waning phase of the 20th century.

Now millennials are all adults -- many of them graduating and joining the workforce during the Great Recession -- and the scrutiny of financial stability and employment is more than familiar to them.Before it takes flight from the kiln, it catches the eye of its creator.

Oh, Im liking my bird in there, says Alison Palmer, observing the perky flyer perched atop one of several containers.

Palmer, a ceramicist who works out of a studio adjacent to her Kent home, is spending a rainy summer morning unloading dozens of pieces from her soda kiln. Carefully and deliberately, she places dozens of cups, bowls and vases of other potters, as well as her decorative pieces, on wooden shelves behind her.

Many of those cups and pots were created by Will Talbot of Bell Hill Pottery, who is helping to clear the kiln, along with Palmers husband, Steve Katz. Moments earlier when asked whether any of the pieces were his, Katz just smiled and said no. His forte is music. A guitarist, Katz is a founding member of the band Blood, Sweat & Tears and still performs.

Given Palmers hand-built pieces take some time to make, the works of others (including those who have taken her workshops) often accompany her creations, so as to keep her production moving quickly and maintain a packed kiln for each firing.

All this does take a long time, she says, of making the work, prepping the kiln, stacking the shelves and the pieces, firing it, waiting for it to cool, unpacking the pieces, breaking down the shelves and getting it ready again. But, its fun; its all really fun.

Since she was a child, Palmer has found artistic expression in one of humans oldest mediums. As she evolved as an artist, her works became inspired by fauna of all shapes and sizes, as well as ancient cultures and ceremonial vessels. It has resulted in a menagerie throughout the years, including pigs, deer, dogs, birds, otters, lizards, bears, squirrels, boars and your occasional dragon.

Ancient vessels that use the animal and the functional form integrated has always intrigued me, she says. That is the journey I chose to go on and that feels right for me. I have diverted at times, and gone into printmaking and photography, but I always get back to the clay and animals. I dont even fight it or try and change it. Its just my voice and I feel comfortable with that. I just try and make the pieces better and better, and ever more functional.

In her studio, a two-headed goat basket sits ready for glaze and a second firing. The horns, intricately ridged, are intertwined into a handle. Lattice work links the sides, while the base gives the impression of tiny hooved feet, but without the hooves. It will end up a perfectly workable basket, albeit one where the form outshines the function.

I try to make animals out of pots and pots out of the animal form, she says.

Palmer was born and raised in New York before heading out to the Kansas City Art Institute and the California College of Arts and Crafts, where she earned her degree in ceramics. In the 1980s, she and her husband launched a business of dishware and home decor pieces, such as plates, salt-and-pepper shakers, serving bowls and canisters (some of which still sit on her kitchen counter). By the mid-1980s, Palmers pieces were being exhibited in fine craft galleries in New York City and elsewhere. About 10 years ago, a slumping market and a desire to try something new caused a shift and she began hand building her creations.

Her menagerie is not constrained to animals built out of material that has taken centuries to develop. For several years, she has employed a much quicker medium.

During the couples many trips to Mexico, she has created a series of colorful papier-mache masks that are often inspired by found objects, like the red glittery bicycle hand grip that makes a perfectly serviceable nose in one, or flat metal pieces that are the eyes of another.

In Mexico, it is all about color and celebration and that is what the masks are, says Palmer of her work during her trips to Merida, Yucatans capital.

There is not really a lot of clay where I go  so I wanted to do some art work that was inspired by the Mexican people and get in to the culture. Everyone there does papier-mache, which is cheap and accessible. You see pinatas hanging all over the place.

Bright colors  orange, pink, purple, green and red  form the background base for building out the features to create eye-catching cows, birds, deer and other animals. The palette for her ceramics is a bit more subdued  a conscious choice, that for the moment, provides Palmer with the look she is going for.

Whether its clay or papier mache, Palmer has long understood that the medium can suggest where it needs to go. Its what has led her to new works, opportunities, adventures, friendships and creative expression.

The goat baskets that I am working on now started  with a simple bowl and then I thought I would switch and do horns over the top, she says. It developed into  the horned animals series.

She thinks about where it will lead. This will probably keep me going for a year, you know, adding animals, she says. You go with the flow and keep an open mind and it will take you to different places.

Alison Palmers upcoming shows include one at the Sharon Historical Society and Museum in Sharon from Sept. 8 to Oct. 19, and the Our Clay Way Tour, Oct. 6 to 8, which features work from more than a dozen ceramicists in the northwest corner.

chennessy@hearstmediact.com; Twitter: @xtinahennessyA liberal political action group has apologized for being duped into endorsing the establishment Democrat who was trounced in the 5th District primary by progressive newcomer Jahana Hayes.

MoveOn Political Action said it never would have endorsed the Democratic primary loser, Mary Glassman, had her campaign not ignored the groups rules and distributed an endorsement vote form to her supporters who were not registered MoveOn members.

We regrettably screwed this up and take this extremely seriously, wrote Ilya Sheyman, executive director of MoveOn Political Action, in a 770-word apology posted on its website. MoveOn wrongly endorsed Mary Glassman in the CT-05 primary, and we take responsibility for our error and apologize to MoveOn members in CT-05, Jahana Hayes, her campaign, and her supporters.

Is that enough for Hayes?

Absolutely I accept their apology - they didnt have to do that, Hayes said on Monday. I think they are committed to making sure their members stay informed with a level of transparency we dont see very often.

It helps that MoveOns apology contains more than words.

The group intends to make the maximum $5,000 contribution to Hayes campaign and work our hearts out to help elect her in the Nov. 6 midterm election.

More News Jahana Hayes enters the national spotlight with 5th District primary win

Hayes is a former National Teacher of the Year who will be a fierce advocate for public education, she supports Medicare for all and she has been a vocal advocate for immigrants and against the Trump administrations family separation and detention policy, Sheymans statement says. Shell be a fantastic champion and leader in Congress.

Hayes faces Manny Santos, a former mayor of Meriden who is running as a Trump Republican. He supports the White House crackdown on illegal immigration, its opposition to Obamacare, and its position that gun control will not make schools safer.

MoveOn, which endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, said it was committed to learning from its mistake.

The mistake happened when the group called for a vote of its registered members in Connecticuts 5th Congressional District  just days before the Aug. 14 Democratic primary -- to see whether Glassman or Hayes had more support.

[T]he Glassman campaign ignored our clear endorsement rules and shared the ballot vote page with their supporter list, said Sheyman, adding the organization should have spotted the unauthorized votes for Glassman before it was too late.

Attempts to reach Glassman and two of her top campaign staff for comment were not successful Monday.

Hayes, whose victory over Glassman has earned her national media attention as a rising star in the party, is helping take Democrats minds off the scandal caused by U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty.

Esty, a three-term Democrat, dropped re-election plans and raised the stakes for Connecticuts most competitive Congressional seat when she admitted she covered up an office abuse scandal involving her former chief of staff.

rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342According to a study released by Janrain, 74 percent of online consumers surveyed said they were frustrated with websites that show content in the form of ads, offers and promotions that arent related to their personal interests. What this means is that youre alienating your site visitors every time you let an irrelevant offer pop up on their screen.

Related: Deep Learning and 'Hyper-Personalization' are the Future of Marketing Automation

When your content isnt personalized, you neither make a sale nor develop a good rapport with your target audience.

And that mistake is understandable. But it's also avoidable: To get your online marketing right, you need to customize your website in a way that reflects your target audience's interests. Science supports this move: Research reveals that 40 percent of those surveyed said they would buy from retailers that personalized the shopping experience consistently across all channels.

Personalizing your website will create customized experiences for your visitors inspired by their needs and desires. That way, you can foster a deeper relationship between your company and your audience, and boost sales.

So, how do you actually implement personalization?

Although studies say that 77 percent of businesses agree that real-time content personalization is crucial, 60 percent struggle to implement it. They shouldn't give up the effort: The boost that personalization gives your website might be what makes the major difference for your business.

Related: This Is How You Discern the Person in All That Customer Personalization Data

And the good news is, its surprisingly easy to launch calls to action, widgets and other conversion-oriented design elements to reach different site visitors. You can actually target them depending on their location, devices they use, past visits to your site and any number of other factors.

Its a great opportunity for your clients to run special promotions triggered by a date, time, visitor location and more, Aaron Pitre of Duda wrote on his blog. For example, a site visitor from Chicago could trigger a notification for a special, one-day offer. If your client has planned a series of promotions or sales throughout the year, its easy to schedule them all at once.

There are additional ways to increase your conversions, with website personalization. All you need are some small tweaks, and you'll be able to sit back and watch your conversion rates increase. Here are three simple but effective tricks to start raising your conversion rates today.

1. Target opt-ins based on category or tags.

Most blog content is filed according to category or tags. This helps blog visitors to have quick access to valuable content based on a category or a tag. These categories and tags subtly segment blog visitors according to their interests. This makes it easier for the generated leads to sign up to the email list, and get converted.

For example, a case study by Authority Hacker observed that the HealthAmbition blog Authority Hacker was working on had a "juicing" category that was receiving a considerable number of visits. In a bid to get more email list sign-ups, the marketers used a simple opt-in with a free juicing ebook as a lead magnet in the juicing category.

That simple trick resulted in 821 conversions, with a conversion rate of over 4 percent with that pop-up.

The lesson here was that most blog content is filed according to categories or tags. This helps blog visitors gain quick access to valuable content based on the category or tag they're interested in.

2. Use product recommendation engines.

Ever wondered how ecommerce sites tend to read your mind on the type of products youd like to buy? Product recommendation engines are what you see on Amazon and other ecommerce websites. A product recommendation engine is a filtering tool that uses algorithms and data it gathers from your behavior online to personalize the kind of products you get to see on the website.

At Home in the Country, a U.K. gift site, wanted to increase its sales and deepen its connection with their online visitors. To achieve this, the company set up product recommendations which appeared directly below the main product image.

Each time visitors clicked on a product, these potential clients would see a product that matched their preferences, thus giving them only content that piqued their interest. This trick increased At Home in The Countrys revenue by 13 percent.

3. Set up an effective remarketing or retargeting campaign,

Watchfinders, one of the largest watch dealers in the U.K., got impressive results from its remarketing campaign. Its conversion rates went up by 350 percent and the company was able to make an ROI of 1,300 percent! That means that for every $1 it spent, it earned $13 for the trouble.

Watchfinders did this by first hiring Periscopix to help improve its sales. Periscopix was able to achieve those results by doing a comprehensive audit of Watchfinders's website visitors. A case study revealed that what Periscopix did was to understand the type of site visitors Watchfinder had and how those visitors interacted with the watch dealer's ecommerce platform.

Using Google Analytics to track the activities of those website visitors, Periscopix grouped the audience into different segments. Using that data, it created ads specifically tailored to appeal to each segment.

Related: Fueled By Data: The Benefits Of Personalization Engines For Brands

Market to an audience of one.

Improving your conversion rates is not as complicated as you think. In fact, it all starts with understanding the concept that potential customers value only what theyre interested in. And if youre able to channel content or products that are specially tailored to the unique segments of your target audience, those moves will help sustain your potential clients' interest long enough to get them to convert.

Related:

3 Easy Website-Personalization Tricks That Will Boost Your Conversion Rates

3 Takeaways from Adidas's Use of Personalized Content at the Boston Marathon

Deep Learning and 'Hyper-Personalization' are the Future of Marketing Automation



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reservedDemocratic donors are often leading with their hearts rather than their heads when it comes to funding this fall's congressional campaigns.

Brimming with enthusiasm and fueled by anger at President Donald Trump, Democrats are funneling cash to long-shot and sure-bet candidates with strong personal appeal sometimes at the expense of lower-profile races that will be more pivotal to party efforts to win the House and Senate.

Perhaps the most dramatic illustration is in Texas, where Rep. Beto O'Rourke raised $23.6 million through the second quarter for his against-the-odds bid to topple Sen. Ted Cruz, R. His haul put him in the unusual position of having more cash on hand than an incumbent, $14 million versus $9.3 million, heading into the peak campaign season.

That money combined with the candidate's charisma -- the word "Kennedyesque" frequently appears in profiles -- has helped O'Rourke pull within four to six percentage points of Cruz in recent polls. And the enthusiasm he's generating may aid turnout for Democratic candidates in three competitive House races in the state.

But he still faces stiff odds running in Texas: Republicans control all statewide offices, both houses of the Legislature and a Democratic presidential candidate hasn't carried the state since 1976. In the March 6 primary, 1.3 million Republicans turned out to vote for Cruz compared with 641,000 Democrats who cast ballots for O'Rourke.

"I'm trying to do what I can do to make sure Democrats get elected into the House and the Senate," said Betsy Hill, a college medical professor from South Carolina who can't vote in Texas but has made five donations totaling $200 to O'Rourke. "I know it seems like I'm just throwing money at things, but it's a thoughtful donation."

More than 40 percent of the money raised by O'Rourke has come from Democrats like Hill giving $200 or less. That's more than three times the average for Senate campaigns in the last midterm election in 2014.

Some Texas Republicans say they're happier seeing O'Rourke get the money than Democratic candidates in competitive races. "I think the Democrats should send as much money as they can," said Dallas investor Doug Deason, whose family has given millions to Republican candidates.

Democrats are fighting to flip at least 23 Republican-held House seats in November to win a majority. The party will have a tougher time gaining control of the Senate, where they have 26 seats to defend, compared with just nine for Republicans.

Democratic House challengers taking on high-profile Republicans -- even those that face worse odds than O'Rourke -- have also been awash in cash.

Fresno County prosecutor Andrew Janz has collected $2.9 million in his contest against Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and an outspoken Trump ally, in a district the incumbent won by 36 percentage points in 2016. In much more competitive districts -- those rated by the independent Cook Political Report as tossups -- only five Democrats have raised more than Janz.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a liberal star despised by Wall Street, has raised the third-most money in the current two-year election cycle among Senate candidates: $20.7 million. That fundraising success has happened even though the possible 2020 presidential candidate is virtually assured of re-election.

Campaign aides for Warren and O'Rourke didn't respond to emails seeking comment about their fundraising.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., at the same time, is fighting for her political life in a state that Trump won by 36 percentage points in 2016. She had $5.2 million in her campaign account at the start of July, but that was only $2.8 million more than her well-connected Republican challenger, Rep. Kevin Cramer.

Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida is another Democrat who could use all the money he can get. Although he's among the top Democratic candidates in fundraising, he's facing a strong challenge from Gov. Rick Scott, R, a multimillionaire former health care executive who has shown a willingness to invest tens of millions of his own money into past campaigns, in what's expected to be 2018's expensive campaign.

The impact of Senate fundraising isn't always comparable from state to state because the cost of paying for television ads in a state like North Dakota is dramatically different from Florida or Texas.

Outside groups like super PACs are likely to play an important role in bolstering spending on both sides. But money in the hands of candidates is important because it goes further. Federal law guarantees them the lowest rates for television ads, unlike super PACs that are often forced to pay top dollar.

"The strong grassroots support Democratic Senate campaigns are receiving is more proof that we hold the enthusiasm advantage and that voters are fired up to oppose the GOP agenda," David Bergstein, a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman, said in a statement. "Our candidates across the country -- including in the most competitive races -- are out-raising their opponents, powered by a wave of small dollar, grassroots contributors."

Earlier this month, the DSCC sent out a fundraising solicitation that sought to leverage O'Rourke's popularity among the Democratic base. While the emailed pitch said donations would support "candidates like Beto," Bergstein declined to say how proceeds would actually be distributed.

Campaign finance experts say candidates from bigger states or those with high national profiles -- something that's easier to accomplish now with social media -- tend to have an easier time draw money from small donors.

"Candidates are all prospecting in the same national donor pool," said Robert Boatright, a political science professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. "There is a lot of Democratic money out there and internet fundraising is pretty unpredictable."

To be sure, long-shots sometimes pay off. Democrats elected Doug Jones to the Senate late last year in a special election in deeply Republican Alabama, and in March Democrat Conor Lamb won a special election for a Pennsylvania House seat that had been in Republican control for 15 years.

In this election cycle, Democrats running for the House collectively have raised $170 million more than Republicans, with individual donors pouring $416 million into their coffers. But that advantage evaporates in districts rated by Cook as competitive.

In those districts, Democrats have raised $133 million, compared to $132 million for Republicans. But GOP candidates in those districts, many of whom didn't have to spend much on primaries, had $74.6 million in their campaign accounts, $15 million more than Democrats, according to the latest Federal Election Commission filings.Contributed photo

BROOKFIELD  A Brookfield man has been accused of crashing into another car and then speeding away with the victim on his hood.

State Police said 56-year-old Kerri Walsh tried to drive away Friday night from a minor accident with another car near Exit 12 of Route 7 North. The other driver stood in front of Walshs car to stop him, but Walsh sped away with the victim clinging onto the hood of the car, according to police.If you're a college student who rents an apartment, you might be wondering how to sublet an apartment, too. After all, whether you plan to head home for the holidays or the summer, you don't want your apartment sitting empty, since you still have to pay rent. Subletting is the solution.

So how do you sublet your apartment without ruffling your landlord's feathers? In this latest installment of our College Student's Guide to Living on Your Own, we'll lay out what the experts say about subletting without landing in trouble.

Is subletting legal?

Subletting is legal in most states, says Melissa McKinney, an attorney at the Hive Law in East Atlanta, GA. The one big rule, regardless of where you live, is that your landlord has to approve of a sublet.

"Most leases include a subletting clause telling you whether you're allowed to sublet or not, and if you are, they usually will have some caveats," McKinney says. "Must look for the clause [in your lease] with the heading 'subleasing/subletting.' They'll include all the do's and don'ts in that section."

For example, your landlord may want to meet and approve your subletter. She might also limit the sublet to a certain amount of timeperhaps just the summer.

Your landlord may even be willing to find a subletter herself, saving you the hassle of searching, interviewing, and collecting a rent check.

Subletting on Airbnb

Airbnb and similar short-term rental sites can be rather tempting. After all, you upload some photos and basic info onto the website, and potential subletters come straight to you! Plus, since they're often staying for only a night or two, you can charge a premium and possibly even make a profit.

But you'd better check your rental agreement carefully, and make sure your landlord's all right with it.

"Many landlords who allow subletting nonetheless will not approve short-term sublets like Airbnb, because of the added 'stranger danger' that comes with it," McKinney explains. "It's more difficult to vet the various tenants, versus simply vetting one friend who's staying the entire summer."

You'll also need to check on zoning regulations in your neighborhood. An increasing number of municipalities are banning Airbnb-type sublets or tossing in extra hoops to jump through, including obtaining a special permit.

"Sometimes the zoning will dictate whether or not you can share your home. Sometimes it's allowed if you're 'living like a family,' meaning you're still in the property, too," McKinney explains. "Otherwise, the zoning board might try to say you're running a business and fine you for not having paperwork and certifications. With the rise in popularity of Airbnb comes a lot of rules."

How to find a subletter

Leery of posting your sublet on Craigslist? We don't blame you. It's always better to find someone you knowpersonally or through your social networkto sublet. It's not only easier dealing with a known quantity, it also provides you more peace of mind. You'll feel a lot more comfortable knowing there isn't a stranger using your stuff.

In particular, check for pals in dorms who may be taking summer classes. No friend in need? Cameron Margeson of Spaces Real Estate in Chicago suggests heading to Facebook and asking friends if they know anyone or if they'll share your post about subletting.

Another option is to ask your college for any listing boards for students. Or, if not, post an ad on collegestudentapartments.com, where posting for sublets costs as little as $25 per month and gets syndicated in the "apartments" section for all colleges within 25 miles of your property's location.

If you're struggling to find someone to move in, Margeson suggests sweetening the deal by lowering the expected rent. It will cost you to make up the difference to your landlord, but it will still save you money in the long run if you're getting at least a portion of your rent covered by subletting.

Questions to ask a subletter

Maybe you know your subletter well. So you can just let her move in, right? Wrong!

Margeson says every potential subletter needs to answer the same sorts of questions you answered when you rented your apartment. After all, this person is going to be using your space and you'll be depending on her to be responsible about maintenance issues, respectful to the neighbors, and actually pay up each month.

A few good questions to ask:

How long do you need to stay in my place, and will you guarantee staying the entire time?

Do you have a job or other source of steady income (or parents who will be guaranteeing rent)?

Are you willing to share your credit information?

Will you supply personal references?

How to oversee a sublet

Yes, you're moving out (for now anyway), but when you're subletting, your name remains on the lease. And fulfilling asks from your landlord is important if you want to remain in that apartment.

"As the tenant-subletter, you're oftentimes still responsible for agreements made in the lease," McKinney explains. "This means that the landlord can still come to you for damages or money due, even if it technically wasn't your fault. This is why making sure you can trust all parties is important."

The post The College Student's Guide to Subletting an Apartment appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.YORKSHIRE, N.Y. -- An Erie County woman is accused of biting and trying to stab a good Samaritan after fleeing from troopers at a traffic stop, according to New York State Police.

Cassie D. Craft, of Chaffee, led police on a pursuit, crashed in the backyard of a home and assaulted a neighbor who tried to help her, state police said.

Craft, 41, was charged at about 9:25 p.m. Saturday with the following charges, according to state police:

Third-degree unlawful fleeing from an police officer

Third-degree assault

Fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon

Reckless driving

Leaving the scene of a property damage accident

Multiple vehicle and traffic tickets.

A trooper pulled over Craft on West Yorkshire Road in the town of Yorkshire in Cattaraugus County because she only had one working headlight, state police said.

Craft initially stopped on the shoulder of the roadway, but before the trooper was able to approach her vehicle, Craft fled the scene. She traveled on numerous roadways before hitting a mailbox on Grove Street. The trooper stopped the pursuit at that time, state police said.

A short time later, Cattaraugus County dispatch received a call that Craft had driven into a backyard of a home on Grove Street. A neighbor went outside to see if Craft was injured and she attempted to flee again, state police said.

The good Samaritan attempted to get the keys out of the ignition, and Craft then bit him multiple times, tried to stab him with scissors and sprayed him with a can of air conditioner aerosol, state police said.

Troopers arrived on scene and took Craft into custody.

She was arraigned in the town of Yorkshire and remanded to the Cattaraugus County Jail, state police said.The head of the navy of Irans Revolutionary Guards, General Alireza Tangsiri, said on Monday that Iran had full control of the Gulf and the U.S. Navy did not belong there.

Tangsiri said Iran had full control of the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz that leads into it. Closing the strait would be the most direct way of blocking shipping.

We can ensure the security of the Persian Gulf and there is no need for the presence of aliens like the U.S. and the countries whose home is not in here, he said in the quote, which appeared in English translation on Tasnim.

He added, All the carriers and military and non-military ships will be controlled and there is full supervision over the Persian Gulf. Our presence in the region is physical and constant and night and day.

Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the most senior authority in the Islamic Republic, said last month that he supported the idea that if Iran is not allowed to export oil then no country should export oil from the Gulf.

One-third of the worlds oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

Nextbigfuture opinion is that US will not recognize Irans control

The US will not recognize Irans control of the Strait.

If Iran tries to control US military ships then this would likely trigger a shooting conflict.

Irans forces versus US

Iran test-fired a ballistic missile last month. The test of an Iranian Fateh-110 short-range ballistic missile coincided with a large-scale naval exercise by Irans Revolutionary Guard forces late last week involving over 50 small gunboats in the Strait of Hormuz to rehearse swarm tactics which could one day potentially shut down the vital waterway.

Iran has previously harassed US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf and around the Strait of Hormuz, with the most notable case being Irans capture of 10 US Navy sailors in January 2016, who had drifted into Iranian waters after experiencing mechanical problems.

Iran has various anti-ship missiles. The Nasr-1 is a domestically-manufactured Iranian short range anti ship missile capable of evading radar. It has a range of about 35 kilometers (20 miles) It has the capability of destroying 1,500-tonne targets such as small warships like frigates. Nasr-1 missile can be launched from both inland bases and offshore military vessels, and is being modified to be fired from helicopters and submarines.

Iran has thousands of sea mines, torpedoes, advanced cruise missiles, regular-sized and mini-submarines, and its flotilla of small fast-attack boats.

When commanding CENTCOM between 2010 and 2013, now-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis developed a multinational plan to minimize disruptions to maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz by preventing Iranian efforts to lay mines and systematically clear mines that have been deployed  assumed to be the major means to hinder traffic as it is difficult to sink a modern double-hull oil tanker by torpedo or missile attack. They would try to make larger paths through the minefields.

U.S. military planners believe that American and allied forces would defeat Iran if it attempted to close the Strait of Hormuz. The most optimistic planners believe U.S.-led forces could reopen the Strait within a few days while others think it could take up to three months to restore maritime traffic to normal levels.

Even in the optimistic scenario, an actual shooting war and conflict would spike oil over $100 per barrel even if a crisis was mostly resolved in days. In the short scenarios there is pipeline and other capacity and in the longer scenarios there are strategic reserves. A bigger crisis would be if a desperate Iran hit the Saudi Arabian Abqaiq oil processing facility. This would disrupt 7 million barrels per day until it was fixed.

There are US bases and US troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Turkey.

The US 5th Fleet is currently deployed in the Persian Gulf with carriers, ships, strike aircraft, sailors and marines and has been involved in periodic confrontations with Iranian forces.

According to the US Navy, from January 2016 to August 2017 there was an average of 2.5 interactions per month between US troops and Iranian maritime forces.

Irans navy mounted a locally-built advanced defensive weapons system on one of its warships for the first time.

Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi reiterated that coastal and sea testing of the short-range defense Kamand system was concluded successfully. The system will be mounted on a second ship soon.

SOURCES- Dailyoilbulletin, Reuters, PressTVThe U.S. and Mexico struck a trade deal on Monday that paved the way to replace NAFTA, the current agreement between the two nations and Canada. Mexican officials promised the Latin American country would start buying as farm product as possible from the USA.

Nextbigfuture notes that the USA was always the 800-pound gorilla in the NAFTA (Canada-Mexico-USA) trade deal. The US could always have forced more lopsided terms. Other administrations had chosen towards long-term relations.

Canada has remained on the sidelines of trade talks recently while the U.S. aimed at first striking a deal with Mexico.

Once the bilateral issues get resolved, Canada will be joining the talks to work on both bilateral issues and our trilateral issues, Chrystia Freeland, Canadas foreign minister, said Friday. And will be happy to do that, once the bilateral US-Mexico issues have been resolved.

There was some hope that a new NAFTA could be solidified before Mexicos government turnover on Dec. 1.HARTFORD  There was a time many believed Monsignor Kevin Wallin was on a fast track to become Bridgeports next bishop.

All you had to do was look at his accomplishments: chaplain of the Order of Malta, trustee at Sacred Heart University, head of the Inner City Educational and Charities Foundation and a, founding member of Connecticuts AIDS Ministries Program.

He even served as secretary to Walter W. Curtis and later Edward Egan, both Bridgeport bishops.

Then there were his homiliesparishioners were so moved they opened their wallets to pay for thousands in renovations and repairs first at St. Peters Church in Danbury and then St. Augustines Cathedral in Bridgeport during Wallins terms as pastor.

On Thursday afternoon Wallin, whose addiction and prior drug dealing earned him the nickname Monsignor Meth, may be heading back to federal prison, this time for nine months as a result of his continued use of methamphetamine. His incarceration could be followed by another four years of U.S. Probation supervision.

Thats what U.S. District Court Senior Judge Alfred V. Covello warned Wallin on April 19. At that time Wallin was charged with violating his probation by possessing and using a controlled substance and lying to U.S. Probation Officer Jorge Vargas.

On Aug. 23, Vargas applied for a summons accusing Wallin again with violating the terms of his supervised release.

In the petition, Vargas charged that Wallin again tested positive for amphetamine after being tested Aug. 10 at Connecticut Renaissance Inc.

It was back in June 2011, that Wallin resigned from the church amidst talk of cross-dressing, drug use, sexual acts with men in the rectory and the discovery of sex toys in his room.

Two stints in rehab centers where he was sent by the church did not help.

After his resignation, he cut all ties to the church.

He moved into a second-floor Waterbury apartment where federal agents say he dealt Mexican-made methamphetamine.

Known as crank, crystal and ice on the street, the drug became a household word thanks to Breaking Bad, the popular TV series.

Sales of the mind-altering, highly addictive drug proved profitable for the disgraced clergyman. In a four-month period, federal agents believe Wallin took in $300,000  more than enough to pay for a planned 12-day trip to London.

But that trip was canceled forever when federal agents armed with undercover sales and wiretaps came knocking on his door Jan. 3, 2013. Two years later he was sentenced to 65 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to sell four pounds of methamphetamine.By Newsroom Staff / Photo courtesy of Hamden Police

HAMDEN  A man arrested Aug. 21 was wanted on numerous felony warrants, according to a press release.

Jared Lee Mende, 36, of Aspen Glen Drive, Hamden, was charged with being a fugitive from justice. He was held in lieu of $250,000 bail and is scheduled to appear in court Aug. 29, judicial records show.NEW HAVEN - Kareem Martin got the alarming news that his then 2-year-old daughter showed a blood lead level reading more than nine times what is considered dangerous for young children.

That was on Nov. 14, 2017 when Dream Martins blood lead level had reached 37 micrograms per deciliter of blood.

Nine months later, she and several other siblings under 6 years of age, continue to live in the unabated property at 130 Grafton St.

The case is similar to others that were the subjects of four lawsuits by the New Haven Legal Assistance Association where the courts agreed that the abatements were not being done in a timely manner.

Two separate judges then ordered that the city pay to move the families to hotels, take over the abatement work and put liens on the properties.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines state that blood lead levels in excess of 5 micrograms per deciliter are associated with adverse, life-long healtlh effects in children under 6 years of age.

Failure to abate led the New Haven Health Department to apply for a warrant for the owner of the two-family house at 128-130 Grafton St., Mary E. Anderson.

It is unclear if it was ever issued as the warrant was signed by an assistant states attorney but not by a judge.

Anderson, 60, is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday, Aug. 30.

As of this weekend, no work had been done on the house where Martins large family, which includes six children, lives, months after Dreams lead poisoning was first discovered.

Marx, who brought the four suits against the city, on Sunday said New Haven Legal Assistance Association is representing Kareem Martins family.

She said she has told the city that it is unacceptable that a child with extreme lead poison remains in that house and she wants the city to take over the abatement and move the family to a hotel. If it fails to do so, she will pursue another lawsuit.

Anderson, according to city officials, has applied for a $30,000 loan from the lead hazard control fund made available through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help with abatement.

In a second blood test taken a day later on Nov. 15, 2017, Dreams lead level remained high at 32 micrograms per deciliter of blood. This triggered an inspection by Andrew Carnevale of the citys Department of Health on Nov. 17 and Nov. 20.

Carnevale found toxic levels of lead in paint, both intact and defective, that contained more than 0.50 percent lead by dry weight or lead at or above 1.0 milligram per square centimeter of surface.

The readings in all the rooms, including bedrooms, hallways, front porch, clapboard exterior were high, particularly for window jams, sashes, wells and casings. A total of 175 locations were tested with some readings reaching 37.

In the arrest warrant application, Carnevale said a lead paint order letter was sent on Nov. 20, 2017, to Anderson, who received it on Nov. 28.

He said on Jan. 3, 2018, he found that no work had been done on the premises despite being ordered to submit an abatement plan within five days of receiving the order.

The order gave Anderson 30 days to fully comply with the provisions of the citys lead paint code and to post notices that warn of toxic lead levels at the entrance to the house.

Martin said Dream was hospitalized twice because of the high lead blood levels. In subsequent tests, the child, who has since turned 3, had a lead blood level of 25 on Nov. 28, 2017; 18 as of Jan. 3, 2018 and 14 as of July 25.

Martin has a 4-year-old, Nevaeh Martin, who on Nov. 20, 2017 had a blood lead level of 13 micorgrams per deciliter that as of June 4 was down to 6. Her twin, Heaven Martin, who showed a blood lead level of 7 on June 4, was down to 4 on June 14.

Despite the ongoing lawsuits, the NHLAA said it hopes to work with the city on better protocols. Mayor Toni Harp said city officials were also meeting on the issue.

The previous suits were based on a variety of things from untimely notification by the city, and/or inadequate followup, as well as a failure to take over the abatement process itself, if the landlord was recalcitrant, with the cost later reimbursed by putting a lien on the property.

Superior Court Judge Walter Spader Jr., in a lead case heard last month involving 969 Elm St., told the city it could not use the excuse that it did not have the funds for abatement, given its ability to lien property, while delays put the safety of children in jeopardy.

He also remarked that depending on arrest warrants didnt seem like the best protocol for ensuring abatements are done as quickly as possible.

In the 969 Elm St. property, a 2-year-old was found to have a measure of 6 micrograms of lead per deciliter last August, which jumped to 17 when it still was not abated by December 2017. In June 2018, his then 11-month-old brother had a level of 9.

Spader ordered the city to pay for the family to move out and for the abatement to be done by the end of July.

One other aspect of review for homes older than 50 years is a check list on their historic significance. Aicha Woods, a City Plan staffer, said it usually only takes a few days to make a determination.

The two-family home on Grafton Street is potentially eligible for listing as a contributing resource in the Quinnipiac Historic District.

Woods said the city did an historically conforming abatement plan for the property. Its July 3 review found the scope of the work would not have any adverse impact in the district.

mary.oleary@hearstmediact.com; 203-641-2577A response to Christina Polizzi, Connecticut Democratic Party spokeswoman concerning the race for Connecticut governor:

Christina, I disagree with your comment in the New Haven Register that Lets call this contest what it is: a litmus test for Trump loyalty. This election has everything to do with high Connecticut taxes from income tax to property tax, job growth/opportunities for people, and an educational environment that allows students to graduate prepared for the future.When CherylAnne and Mike Amendola decided to expand and renovate the kitchen in their Lincoln Park home, they knew it would be a big job.

They decided to turn to Lowe's.

"My family chose Lowe's to complete our kitchen project mostly because of their safety guarantee," CherylAnne Amendola said, noting she felt comfortable with Lowe's taking on the responsibility of selecting the contractor for the job.

The Butler store said the kitchen, totaling $43,849 for labor and materials, should be completed in about eight weeks, documents show.

But now, more than four months later, the job remains unfinished.

The couple signed the contract on April 18. It included everything from plumbing and electrical to cabinets, flooring and appliances - the whole kitchen, soup to nuts.

Lowe's assigned a New City, N.Y.-based business, Charles J. Sarracino Contracting, also known as CJS Contracting, to do the job, documents show. Charles J. Sarracino Contracting has a valid Home Improvement Contractor (HIC) registration in New Jersey, according to public records.

The Amendolas said their CJS contact was Brett Gotay of Brett Gotay Enterprises of West Haverstraw, N.Y. That company is not registered with New Jersey nor does it have an HIC registration, according to the Division of Consumer Affairs.

Gotay told Bamboozled the problems with the project were all because of Lowe's. More on that in a moment.

There were delays from the start, the couple said.

A month after they entered into the contract, the couple learned from the town that the company hadn't yet filed for permits.

The Amendolas said they asked Lowe's for a timeline, but Lowe's said it couldn't get CJS to commit to a schedule, documents show.

"On May 24, CJS told our Lowe's project manager that they had filed for the permit, but they did not, according to the town," Amendola said. "After chasing after them for a permit, they finally filed for it on June 4, five days after they demoed our kitchen."

On June 1, work stopped without reason, Amendola said, and no one returned to the house for more than a month - until July 6.

Frustrated and getting no answers from CJS, Gotay or Lowe's, Amendola started posting videos on social media to document her experiences. She calls her series of videos, "My Lowe's contractor doesn't care, and Lowe's doesn't either."

Amendola next wrote a letter to the CEO of Lowe's. This resulted in a call from the executive office, and a Lowe's rep promised to help get the job back on track, Amendola said.

But that didn't happen.

Over the next several weeks, the couple said, they had disputes with contractor Gotay in person and over text messages, but nothing seemed to get the job moving.

The family of four, including two boys, 7 and 3, was living without a stove or a kitchen sink - they washed dishes in a bathtub - and they didn't have a washer or dryer, either.

There were disputes over what was supposed to go above the cabinets over the refrigerator, how the floor was installed, a missing door and why a paid-for Dumpster to collect construction debris was never delivered.

Those issues were overshadowed by a bigger problem discovered on July 26.

"The kitchen was measured incorrectly [by Lowe's] and therefore the cabinets and dishwasher will not fit," Amendola said.

Lowe's promised to reorder the correct sizes and said the order would be expedited. That meant another seven to 10 business days.

After more complaints to Lowe's, the company told Amendola it had decided to replace the contractor.

But that meant it would take time for a new contractor to be found. He would have to get his pricing approved by Lowe's, new permits would be needed, and more.

So the work was suspended.

"We want Lowe's to make this right as quickly as possible," Amendola said. "Not only do we need several mistakes remedied, but we also would like to renegotiate what we're paying for this kitchen given the circumstances."

MOVING RIGHT ALONG

Bamboozled reached out to Lowe's to see what could be done to get this family their kitchen.

The company said it would look into it.

On Aug. 4, a new contractor came to the home.

"He was professional, polite, and seems to genuinely care about our situation," Amendola said.

By Aug. 8, the contractor gave his proposal to Lowe's, Amendola said. Lowe's confirmed it received the paperwork, but "their process will take two weeks to authorize work," Amendola said she was told.

We checked in with Lowe's for an update.

"Lowe's is working as quickly as possible to address Ms. Amendola's concerns," a spokeswoman said in an email. "It is our understanding she is satisfied with our plan going forward."

Not exactly, we explained. But we had other questions, like how Lowe's selects its contractors. Lowe's responded with a general statement.

"Lowe's absolute focus is on resolving the Amendolas' concerns and providing the best customer service," the spokeswoman said. "We determined the best way forward, and we have apologized for the Amendolas' experiences as we worked toward a resolution. Our goal is their satisfaction, and we're doing everything we can to earn that."

So we went to the contractors. Charles Sarracino said he sold the company two years ago, but he wouldn't confirm if he sold the company to Brett Gotay or someone else.

"I had a contract with Lowe's and sold it to another establishment," Sarracino said. "Whatever allegations they're making, you need to go to Lowe's. Lowe's never gets anything right."

We explained the job at the Amendola's listed CJS on the contract and the permits, and questioned if someone else was working under Sarracino's HIC registration number.

"I'd have to check with that," he said, and he hung up the phone.

We reached Gotay by text message.

Gotay described himself as "a field manager that has some interest in the business," and he said all his subcontractors are licensed.

He also placed the blame on Lowe's.

"I do not design the job. I do not accept money from the customer. I don't order material," Gotay said in a text response. "I put out as many fires as I can."

He said the disputes were "mostly a scheduling problem" and the delays were caused by wrong measurements.

"I do not design anything but I am the person [the homeowners] see every day so they take it out on me," he said.

He also said he wasn't let go by Lowe's, but his future relationship with the company is still to be determined.

In the meantime, Amendola learned the cabinets came in and the new contractor was approved by Lowe's.

Demolition of the existing work began on Aug. 22, but there is still no official timeline for the project.

If you'd like to see what happens next, Amendola invites you to stay posted by watching her Facebook videos. She changed her Facebook privacy settings so you can see those here.

Have you been Bamboozled? Reach Karin Price Mueller at Bamboozled@NJAdvanceMedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @KPMueller. Find Bamboozled on Facebook. Mueller is also the founder of NJMoneyHelp.com.

Stay informed and sign up for NJMoneyHelp.com's weekly e-newsletter.JERSEY CITY  Hudson County's freeholders violated the state Open Public Meetings Act last month when they took a surprise vote to renew the county's controversial contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seven Jersey City religious leaders and the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey say in a lawsuit they filed Monday morning.

The plaintiffs want the freeholders' decision voided, saying the nine-member body acted "in secret on a matter affecting the public" when it voted on July 12 to renew the contract with ICE, which pays the county to house immigrant detainees at the Kearny jail. Freeholders had published an agenda for the meeting indicating the contract renewal vote would not take place.

The freeholders' decision to tell the public the ICE contract vote would be postponed was "intentional and calculated to mislead" immigrant advocates who would have attended the meeting to share their thoughts, according to the lawsuit, filed in Hudson County Superior Court.

"The publication of the July 12 agenda with an annotation that the ICE contract renewal was postponed was an intentional omission of a planned agenda item and was designed to deceive the public, thereby giving rise to a statutory violation," the lawsuit says.

The freeholder board, which approved the ICE contract renewal by a 5-2 vote, is listed as the defendant. Its chair, Anthony Vainieri, declined to comment through a spokesman.

Vainieri, a North Bergen Democrat, has previously defended the contract by saying it allows immigrant detainees to stay close to their family and friends. Most of the detainees in the Kearny jail are from New York. He has also argued that ending the contract would lead to big tax hikes countywide. The county expects to receive $19.3 million from ICE this year, about a third of its total Department of Corrections budget.

The Open Public Meetings Act, enacted in 1975, says the public has a right "to be present at all meetings of public bodies, and to witness in full detail all phases of the deliberation, policy formulation and decision making of public bodies."

The county's Democratic leadership has faced intense criticism from liberal Democrats for their decision to renew the agreement with ICE, which itself has been a target for Democrats nationwide because of an increase in arrests of immigrants accused of violating immigration laws. The federal agency said those arrests jumped 30 percent in 2017.

The county's contract dates to the mid-1990s. It was renewed in 2002 and expired in January 2018. Activists planned to argue against a second renewal, citing complaints about conditions at the jail and the Trump administration's vow to increase deportations, an unpopular position in parts of this county where more than 40 percent of the population is foreign born.

When the freeholders met for their July 10 caucus, they voted unanimously to postpone a vote on the contract renewal until their August meeting. The agenda for their July 12 meeting listed the ICE contract renewal as "carried." Immigrant advocate Serges Demefack, with the American Friends Service Committee, said the freeholders' clerk, Kearny Mayor Al Santos, told him that meant the vote would be postponed, according to the lawsuit.

But on July 12, Vainieri asked for the ICE contract to be returned to that meeting's agenda. Freeholders Bill O'Dea and Joel Torres, both of Jersey City, objected, but the freeholder board voted 5-2 to add the item to the agenda and to renew the contract. Two freeholders were absent.

The Rev. Tom Murphy, of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, is one of the plaintiffs. Murphy told The Jersey Journal he is not necessarily looking for the freeholders to sever its ICE contract. He is seeking a "full and open discussion" and freeholders in favor of the contract should have to defend their position to the public, he said.

"They went about this in what appears to me to be a very underhanded way," Murphy said.

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.The case of the beleaguered North Bergen Housing Authority and its embattled former head of security has taken a new turn.

Geoff Santini, who was fired from the position in March after accusations he spent only a few hours a week at the facility, has filed a lawsuit against the NBHA and Executive Director Gerald Sanzari alleging he was fired for being a whistleblower.

In the lawsuit he cites a number of instances in which he says Sanzari -- a former North Bergen deputy police chief -- violated NBHA policies or ignored complaints of violations -- including drug-dealing -- at the NBHA site.

Phil Swibinski, a spokesman for North Bergen and the housing authority, said township officials firmly believe Santini's termination was justified.

"The housing authority denies all allegations made by Santini and his retaliatory lawsuit and we will vigorously defend this matter in court," Swibinski said.

Santini owns and operates New Jersey Animal Control and Rescue, an animal control company with a number of municipalities in Hudson County -- including a $166,000 annual pact with North Bergen.

Besides running the animal control company and his position as head of security at the NBHA, Santini was assistant building manager at the Renaissance, a private housing complex managed by the NBHA, and an aide to Hudson County Freeholder Chairman Anthony Vainieri.

He was also fired from the Renaissance position ($25,000 annually plus a rent-free studio apartment), but not the freeholder post ($5,000 annually). His company has retained the animal control contract with the township.

The North Bergen Housing Authority has had its issues as well. In February, the NBHA settled a lawsuit by two sisters who had worked at the NBHA for $150,000, HudsonCountyView.com reported. The lawsuit accused the agency of firing the sisters because they refused to engage in corrupt practices. The suit also said the agency rewarded politically friendly people by expediting their requests for housing.

NBC4 New York also did a series of stories, with one detailing allegations that politically connected people and NBHA employees received preferential treatment in terms of housing and rent.

Some of the allegations made in Santini's lawsuit:

-- Sanzari allowed a housing authority official who lived at the Renaissance to consort with a felon who was engaging in narcotics activity there. "Leave it alone for now," Sanzari said, according the lawsuit;

-- Sanzari allowed a government employee to live in a NBHA facility, even they he was not eligible. "This is the way it's always done," Sanzari said, according to the lawsuit;

-- Sanzari took no action when he was made aware that an NBHA resident had "various reported criminal activities and arrests on her property," including an incident in which her dog attacked another tenant;

-- Sanzari interfered with drug testing results in order to avoid firing an NBHA employee; and he hired his daughter's boyfriend, even though the boyfriend did not live in North Bergen and was not eligible.

"All of these claims were investigated internally by the housing authority when they were brought to the executive director's attention," Swibinski said. "Due to employee and tenant privacy restrictions we cannot comment on the details of any of the individual matters."

Santini claims he was fired without cause or due process and that the proper performance of his duties was never an issue prior to termination.The New Jersey couple who received worldwide praise last Thanksgiving after trying to pay back a homeless man is now fighting a flurry of theft allegations and death threats, after the recipient of their good deed claims they're holding his money captive.

Kate McClure and Mark D'Amico launched a GoFundMe last November, hoping to raise around $10,000 for Johnny Bobbitt, a homeless veteran who spent his last $20 to help McClure when she ran out of gas on Route 95 in Philadelphia.

The campaign far exceeded anyone's expectations, garnering more than $400,000 from some 14,000 donors around the world. For a man like Bobbitt, who had lived a quiet life and wanted to get out of Philadelphia, the influx of attention and funds proved overwhelming.

It seems Bobbitt's sudden change of luck has done little to lift him up as of yet, as he's back on the streets of Philadelphia. And less than a year later, the couple is dealing with a massive fallout, fighting accusations that they've taken the money from him.

Appearing on NBC News' Megyn Kelly TODAY on Monday morning, McClure and D'Amico denied allegations that they pocketed tens, or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars meant to get Bobbitt off the street.

Instead, they say, they had Bobbitt's, and the donors', best interest at heart when they shielded the money in their own accounts, preventing the former Marine from using the hefty sum to feed the very drug habit that first landed him on the streets, jobless and cutoff from his family.

The allegations first arose in a Philly.com story published last week. Bobbitt, 35, admitted he had used drugs again, and the couple revealed they had kept control of money, only rationing Bobbitt small amounts they thought he could manage.

But Bobbitt aired his suspicions about lavish vacations and a new car the couple allegedly purchased in the months since the campaign, lighting a fire and launching the viral campaign back into the news cycle.

In Monday's emotional interview, the couple detailed how their good deed has descended into squabbling and drama. Just as Bobbitt's supporters rushed to donate to him last year, some have rushed to judgement, sending death threats directed at the Burlington County couple.

"It's so hard to deal with when we know we did a good thing," McClure said, tearing up. "I would do it all over again. I would do it all over again for him."

McClure and D'Amico said they first held the money themselves because Bobbitt did not have the identification needed to claim it, and no bank account to deposit the funds in. They say they spent hours tracing the fragments of his life across three states to secure paperwork.

Kate McClure and Johnny Bobbitt pose together in a photo used on the GoFundMe that raised more than $400,000 to get Bobbitt off the streets.

They also bought Bobbitt a trailer and parked it on their property, where they felt he would be safe. They left their door open for him, so he could come and go from their house as he pleased.

"He was our family. He is our family," McClure said. "I still think to this day he is our family."

They eventually opened an account for Bobbitt, but felt uneasy about giving him the full $350,000, the amount remaining after GoFundMe fees were paid.

So, they gave him $25,000 while they left town to visit family, D'Amico said. But Bobbitt returned to old habits, they said, burning through the money in 13 days.

"He ended up right back where he was." D'Amico said Monday on NBC. "Every dollar he ever touched was used for drugs."

The couple said they helped Bobbitt enter rehab facilities of his choice, but there was no quick fix to the addiction.

The couple denied spending any money on themselves without Bobbitt's knowledge. D'Amico told both TODAY and Philly.com he did take $500, but has since paid it back.

Regardless, a legal dispute is still brewing. A GoFundMe spokesman told NJ Advance Media last week that the company was investigating the issue and would cooperate with law enforcement.

"When there is a dispute, we work with all parties involved to ensure funds go to the right place," the spokesman said. "We will work to ensure that Johnny receives the help he deserves and the donor intentions are honored."

McClure and D'Amico described the scenario as a Catch-22: Turn the money over to Bobbitt, and face criticize for letting donors' money fall into the hands of drug dealers, or hold it themselves and come under fire.

So far, money has been spent on the trailer and an SUV, legal fees, as gifts to other members of Bobbitt's family, on clothes and food, and the $25,000 put into his bank account, the couple said Monday. But they noted Bobbitt has more than $150,000 left, and the couple is working with an attorney of their own to set up a trust.

That's something that already should've existed, according to updates posted to the GoFundMe account last year.

"This is a well thought out plan that Johnny, his lawyer and financial advisor came up with in order to give Johnny the means to acclimate back into a 'normal' life and also to protect him and ensure he has a bright future," the fundraiser reads.

It's not completely clear why the money was not turned over to financial advisors and trustees to begin with, and why the couple continued to manage it.

McClure and D'Amico could not be reached for comment Monday. An attorney for Bobbitt did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Amanda Hoover can be reached at ahoover@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @amandahoovernj. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tipsTry again.

That's the message that Gov. Phil Murphy is sending to state lawmakers after vetoing a proposed fee on plastic and paper single-use shopping bags in New Jersey.

Murphy announced Monday morning he vetoed bill, which would have placed a five-cent fee on single-use plastic and paper bags handed out by retailers statewide.

The money collected by the fee would have been placed in a new fund administered by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to help pay for lead abatement projects.

In his statement on the veto, Murphy made it clear that he didn't think the bill went far enough. He called the issue a "critical policy area" and detailed the environmental threats posed by plastic waste, from clogging urban water infrastructure to littering New Jersey's parks and beaches.

"While well intentioned, the approach reflected in this bill strikes me as incomplete and insufficient," Murphy wrote. "Instituting a five-cent fee on single-use bags that only applies to certain retailers does not go far enough to address the problems created by overreliance on plastic bags and other single-use carryout bags."

Murphy quipped on the campaign trail that he wanted to make New Jersey more like California. The Golden State has a statewide ban on single-use plastic bags and places a fee on single-use paper bags. California Gov. Jerry Brown is now considering whether or not to sign a ban on plastic straws.

A new bill (S2776) sponsored by state Sen. Bob Smith (D-Middlesex,) the head of the Senate environment committee, follows the California lead by banning retailers across the state from providing single-use plastic bags, plastic draws, and polystyrene food containers to customers. Under the bill, violators would be fined up to $5,000 for each offense.

The bill Murphy just vetoed, meanwhile, would have put New Jersey more on par wth Washington, D.C.

Environmental groups were split on Murphy's veto.

Supporters of the five-cent fee had hoped the Governor would return the bill with a conditional veto, a move that would've attempted to fix weaknesses in the bill rather than killing it outright. They would've like to have had the fee system as a stepping stone to a full bag ban in the future.

"Gov. Murphy had the chance to reduce New Jersey's plastic pollution by closing loopholes and allowing the legislature to pass a stronger bill," said Ed Potosnak, the executive director of the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters. "Without any kind of law to reduce single-use bags, our state will continue to be overrun by dangerous pollution that threatens the health of New Jersey families and businesses."

Environmentalists who opposed the bill, however, applauded Murphy for pushing for stricter regulations.

"Sometimes, when a Governor vetoes an environmental bill, its actually good for the environment," said Jeff Tittel, the director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. "This bag fee bill would have undermined all efforts in reducing plastic waste. The reason is because fees do not work as well as a ban."

The American Progressive Bag Alliance continues to oppose any types of restrictions on single-use bags. After it came to light last week that Murphy intended to veto this bill, the group issued a statement arguing against any fees or bans.

"Bans and taxes make groceries more expensive for families and senior citizens who can afford them the least, while incentivizing products that government-funded studies say are worse for the environment," Matt Seaholm, the group's executive director, said at the time.

The New Jersey Food Council, which represents the state's grocery stores and food retailers and supported the statewide fee proposal, also issued a statement responding to the governor's veto.

"We believe the proposed fee on single use bags was the most impactful solution to reducing both paper and plastic bags in our solid waste stream and a giant first step towards a plastic bag ban," said Linda Doherty, the group's president.

Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MSolDub. Find NJ.com on Facebook.An employee of the state's child welfare agency took her own life at the Department of Children and Families office in Paramus on Monday morning, police said.

According to a statement from Paramus Police, officers were called to 240 Frisch Court at 9:45 a.m. The victim, a 57-year-old woman, had shot herself with a handgun inside her office, police said.

She died at Hackensack University Medical Center.

Department Commissioner Christine Norbut Beyer issued a statement Monday that did not mention the employee's name or other details.

"This morning, our Bergen Central Office in Paramus experienced the tragic loss of a dedicated colleague. Law enforcement and agency leadership are on the scene supporting employees who are dealing with this crisis," Beyer's statement said. "We are offering counseling and other supports to assist employees in processing this tragedy."

"For anyone reaching out to our Department for assistance in the area, please know that your calls will be answered, and that we have engaged emergency protocols to route calls intended for the Bergen Central office to sister-offices within the region," according to Beyer's statement.

"We are cooperating fully with law enforcement to determine the circumstances around this tragedy," Beyer added. "We are still learning what happened, and at this time, we would defer to law enforcement for any additional information that can be shared."

The case is being investigated by detectives from the Paramus Police Department, assisted by the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office and investigators from the NJ Division of Child Protection and Permanency.

Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.Holmdel volunteer wins international award in dog photography competition

The Kennel Club in London recently announced the winners of its annual Dog Photographer of the Year competition with Sonya Kolb of Holmdel selected as the winner of the competition's 'Rescue Dog' category.

The award comes with a PS500 prize for the charity of the winner's choice. Kolb has chosen to donate the money to the Monmouth County SPCA where she has been taking photos for seven years.

The dog in Kolb's winning photograph is rescue dog Cooper, whose family adopted him after their first rescue dog tragically died before they had even brought him home.

"I am extremely grateful to have won the Rescue category in the Dog Photographer of the Year competition," said Kolb. "I can remember every second of this photo shoot as if it were yesterday. This image reveals what is so important in life - our emotional connections with others. Dogs fulfill our deepest emotional needs, giving us so freely an abundance of love, comfort and joy. I love creating images that spread happiness and connect us heart to heart, hand to paw, with our most positive emotions."

Monica van der Maden from the Netherlands was chosen overall winner of the competition with an image of Noa the Great Dane which placed first in the 'Oldies' category. The other first place category winners were:

Elinor Roizman, Israel, 'Dogs at Play';

Klaus Dyber, Germany, 'Puppy';

Carol Durrant, the UK, 'Portrait';

Tracy Kidd, the UK, 'Dogs at Work';

Joana Matos, Portugal, 'Man's Best Friend';

Dean Mortimer, the UK, 'Assistance Dogs';

Tamara Kedves, Hungary, 'I Love Dogs Because...;

Mariah Mobley (age 11), United States, 'Young Pup Photographer'

All of the winning images plus the photos that placed second and third for each category will be on display at the Kennel Club in London from through Oct. 5. To view all the winning images, go to dogphotographeroftheyear.org.uk.

Greg Hatala may be reached at greghatalagalleries@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @GregHatala. Find Greg Hatala on Facebook.If I warn you today's column is about the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, you might yawn and turn the page.

But if you notice it's really about who's entitled to call themselves citizens, you might want to stick around. It's now one of the hottest topics in both pro- and anti-immigrant circles.

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

That's the first paragraph of the amendment, adopted in July 1868, and it was designed mainly to stop individual states from denying citizenship to freed slaves.

After the Dred Scott decision stating Americans descended from African slaves could not ever become citizens of the United States, Congress knew something needed to be done to shore up the Emancipation Proclamation.

Twenty-eight states approved the amendment, but New Jersey seemed unable to make up its mind. The Legislature originally ratified it in September, 1866, then rescinded the ratification in two votes in February and March, 1868.

Some 135 years later, April 2003, New Jersey got around to ratifying it again. Of course, the vote was totally unnecessary at that point, but it was symbolic.

At the time the amendment was being considered, some people tried to derail it because it could also give citizenship to Chinese immigrants and Roma, then called gypsies. Chinese were suspected of taking jobs away from "real" Americans, especially on the west coast, and gypsies were just generally disliked.

Of course, there were also some political concerns in the years right after the Civil War. Southern states didn't want former slaves to be able to vote, feeling certain they'd vote their former masters out of office.

On the other hand, northern and western states didn't want all those new voters either, as they'd beef up population numbers and give southern states greater representation in Congress.

Eventually, enough states overcame their worries and voted to approve the amendment.

Today anti-immigrant groups are using the syntax of the amendment to make the case that children and grandchildren of people in the U.S. without legal authorization could not become citizens. That would eliminate not only Dreamers but also any babies born in the U.S. while their parents held citizenship elsewhere.

They're saying the phrase any person "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means only people who entered the country legally. The Supreme Court ruled long ago that phrase was intended to exempt only diplomats and others who are in this country with permission despite having pledged allegiance to another country.

It's also pretty obvious that, except for diplomats, anyone actually here is subject to our government's jurisdiction -- or else we'd have no obligation to protect and no ability to punish those who are convicted of crimes here.

If they were not subject to our jurisdiction, they'd have a kind of immunity, just like diplomats. We couldn't jail them, try them, force them to do community service or make them pay fines.

The anti-immigrant folks suggest the president should issue an executive order specifying the children of non-citizens can never become citizens. Some pro-immigration folks snicker that maybe he ought to make it retroactive a generation or two and see how many loudmouths he could disenfranchise.

A former Assemblywoman from Jersey City, Joan Quigley is the president and CEO of North Hudson Community Action Corp.

Submit letters to the editor and guest columns at jjletters@jjournal.comAt last, President Trump's massive tax cut for the ultra-rich has produced the predicted trickle-down.

Not for the general public, for whom it hasn't been a big selling point, given that most of the rewards go to the wealthy. The middle-class saves some money, but in reality, gets only 23 percent of the benefits.

And while Trump promised that the economic boost would be passed down to workers through wages and new jobs, corporations have instead taken their windfall and given it to shareholders, in the form of stock buybacks.

Even others in his party, like Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. acknowledge this: "There's no evidence whatsoever that the money's been massively poured back into the American worker."

But fret not! The ultra-rich are giving back - to a super PAC aligned with Speaker Paul Ryan, which is now paying for attack ads against Democrats trying to regain control of the House in the midterm elections, the New York Times reported.

Trump got the trickle-down part right, at least. Who could have predicted that it would be to politicians?

One of these deceitful ads just falsely accused Rep. Leonard Lance's Democratic challenger Tom Malinowski - the former head of Human Rights Watch, who led the bipartisan effort to ban torture - of being "so out of touch, he lobbied for terrorist rights."

Yes, the ultra-rich are accusing someone else of being out of touch. And you can bet that embattled Trump loyalist Tom MacArthur, the sole member of our delegation to back the tax bill that hurt New Jersey more than any other state, will benefit from their spin dollars too.

How else is this backer of a repeal effort that would have stripped health care from 23 million, author of a notorious amendment to make coverage prohibitively expensive for those with pre-existing conditions, and voter for a tax plan that screwed his own constituents going to fight for his seat?

The Ryan-linked super PAC, called the Congressional Leadership Fund, is allowed to raise unlimited donations from megadonors like casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave $30 million - a small price to pay for the nearly $700 million in savings his firm reported from Trump's tax law earlier this year.

Another big contributor is the Texas oil refining company Valero Services, which gave $1.5 million, but reported a whopping $1.9 billion benefit from the tax cuts.

Despite promises from Trump officials that 70 percent of the wealth from the corporate tax cuts would be returned to workers, companies largely went the route of telecom equipment giant Qualcomm. After the tax cuts, it laid off 1,500 workers, saving $1 billion -- then announced $10 billion in stock buybacks one month later.

Now, executives are flush with cash to help re-elect people like MacArthur, who argues the buybacks are still to the benefit of "most Americans," who invest in stocks and will ultimately retire and sell them back to these companies for a profit.

"I don't think that's usually a good way to create value for a company, to buy back its own stock," MacArthur has said. "But let's not forget who they buy their stock back from."

Right: Shareholders profit exponentially, while you take in a relative pittance.

His spokesman points out that some of the ultra-rich give to Democrats. True. Let's hope it's enough to elect someone who will fight for tax reforms that matter to ordinary people, like restoring our ability to deduct state and local taxes from our federal tax bills - an option Trump curbed to help pay for these massive giveaways to the rich.

So when you see attack ads against Democratic challenger Andy Kim, recall who is likely paying for them, and why they're really backing Tom MacArthur.

Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.Sen. John McCain made his share of mistakes, let's face it. He wanted the bombing to continue in Vietnam. He pressed regulators to lay off a distressed bank that had given him money, leaving taxpayers with a bailout bill of $3.4 billion, a mistake he considered his biggest stain. He chose Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, breathing life into the crazy wing of the Republican Party that ultimately gave us Donald Trump.

But when you see the flags at half staff this week, take a moment to consider his entire life, and to acknowledge what a treasure this man was.

McCain was a rowdy student at the Naval Academy, in constant trouble for breaking the rules. He blew off studies that didn't interest him, and graduated near the bottom of his class, ranked 894 out of 899. But as a Navy pilot in Vietnam, he volunteered to fly combat missions and won two medals for valor. It was during his 23rd mission that he was shot down near Hanoi and captured, enduring ferocious beatings that nearly killed him, along with two years of solitary confinement.

He was offered freedom by the North Vietnamese, who saw propaganda value in giving special treatment to the son and grandson of famous Navy admirals. But McCain refused to jump the line, insisting that those who had been in prison for longer stretches go first.

Mark that as the first of many remarkably courageous and principled acts that defined his life, and that seem so threatened in today's America.

In his book, "The Restless Wave," he not only opposes torture as ineffective and immoral, he notes that American prisoners drew strength from knowing that our side didn't behave that way. "Your last resistance, the one that sticks, the one that makes the victim superior to the torturer, is the belief that were the positions reversed you wouldn't treat them as they have treated you."

McCain admitted mistakes and learned from them. He tried to atone for his role in the Keating Five scandal by drafting the most significant campaign finance reform in modern history -- and joining with Democrats to get it done.

On immigration, he saw the sensible middle ground and helped lead the bipartisan "Group of Eight" in drafting a bill that strengthened border security and provided for a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants living among us. In 2013, that bill passed the Senate with 68 votes, a high water mark, before dying in the more partisan House.

He drew on his reputation as a hawk, and his personal history, to press for normalization with communist Vietnam, a gracious move that prompted Vietnamese to place flowers after his death at a monument marking the spot where he was captured, beaten and stabbed in 1967.

Agree or not, McCain brought a civility to politics, making close friends among Democrats like former Sen. Joe Lieberman, whom he later said he regretted not choosing as his running mate in 2008 over Palin.

At a town hall meeting during that 2008, he famously pushed back when a woman attacked Obama as untrustworthy and "an Arab."

"No, ma'am," McCain shot back. "He's a decent, family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign is about."

That kind of decency is disappearing from American life. Our political culture is in a free fall, and McCain proved powerless to stop it in the end, as Trump's brand has taken over the Republican Party.

McCain did more than most. He was graciously restrained when a president who dodged service in Vietnam over bone spurs disputed his heroism. He voiced contempt for Trump's embrace of authoritarian rulers, and his attacks on the role of the free press. He cast the deciding vote against the craven repeal of Obamacare. He withdrew his endorsement of Trump after a tape revealed Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. It wasn't enough.

Gov. Phil Murphy on Monday morning ordered state flags flown at half staff. After some prodding by veterans and politicians in both parties, Trump finally agree to do the same in Washington on Monday afternoon. He issued no official statement on McCain's death that goes beyond a perfunctory Twitter burst.

We can only hope that, someday soon, the tide will turn back towards the kind of decency in public life that McCain showed us during his long career. Until then, we can only remember, with enormous gratitude, the sacrifices he made and the example he showed.

More: Tom Moran columns

Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or call (973) 836-4909. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.While Pope Francis was in Ireland confronting the church's past sex abuses and forced adoptions in that country, a new sex scandal emerged.

The Vatican's retired ambassador to the United States accused senior Vatican officials of knowing as early as 2000 that the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, formerly of the Archdiocese of Newark, regularly invited seminarians into his bed but was made a cardinal regardless.



Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a conservative whose hard-line anti-gay views are well known, urged the reformist pope to resign over the issue and what he called the "conspiracy of silence" about McCarrick.

The Vatican did not immediately comment.

Vigano, who says there are documents in the Vatican to back up his accusations, accused the former Vatican secretaries of state under the previous two popes of ignoring detailed denunciations against McCarrick for years.

Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as cardinal last month, after a U.S. church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

It was apparently an open secret that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house, and into his bed. The scandal has led to calls for heads to roll and for a full Vatican investigation into who knew what and when about McCarrick.

Vigano apparently sought to answer some of those questions. His letter identifies by name the Vatican cardinals and archbishops who were informed about the McCarrick affair.

Do you feel there should be a full Vatican investigation? Vote in our informal and unscientific poll and share your thoughts in the comments section.

Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.New Jersey voters will be asked this fall if they want to approve the state borrowing $500 million to pay for a series of public school projects after Gov. Phil Murphy forced the price tag to be sliced in half Monday.

With a Tuesday deadline looming, Murphy and state lawmakers agreed to a last-minute plan to place the referendum on the Nov. 6 ballot.

If OK'ed by voters, the money would go toward improving security at K-12 schools, upgrading water infrastructure to protect students from lead, and expanding vocational and county college programs.

Both houses of the Democrat-controlled state Legislature overwhelmingly approved the ballot question (S2293) last month -- but sponsors increased the figure from $500 million to $1 billion, to pay for an increase in funding for school security.

Murphy, though, vetoed the plan early Monday morning, saying the $1 billion figure was too costly for the state. He suggested dropping the total back to $500 million.

Both houses of the Legislature convened in special emergency sessions shortly thereafter Monday to reluctantly sign off on Murphy's changes. The state Senate voted, 31-0, and the state Assembly, 64-0, in favor.

Murphy signed the plan into law just hours later.

If the governor and lawmakers didn't act by Tuesday, they would have missed the deadline for getting the question on this November's ballot.

The state's constitution requires any bonding to be approved by voters.

Murphy, a Democrat, said in his veto message the state couldn't afford a $1 billion bond because New Jersey already carries massive debt.

"While I certainly endorse the priorities established in this bill, I also believe that their long-term fiscal implications must be carefully considered," he wrote.

Murphy noted the state's debt service in the current fiscal year is more than $4 billion, and the nonpartisan state Office of Legislative Services estimated in the original referendum would have cost between $1.7 billion and $2.2 billion in debt service payments.

State Senate President Stephen Sweeney said he wasn't "overjoyed" by what happened but that Legislature needed to proceed.

"Even though the governor reduced the amount, we felt we were right," Sweeney, D-Gloucester, said. "But we need to move forward."

But at least one Republican, state Sen. Anthony R. Bucco, criticized Murphy for cutting the additional money for school security. Bucco, R-Morris, called it a "total lapse in judgement."

"If the governor is so concerned about keeping our schools safe from gun violence, then I question why he would mandate such a drastic cut in school security," Bucco said of Murphy, a strong proponent of gun control.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.A 29-year-old man is wanted for an attempted murder in New Orleans East on Sunday (Aug. 26), New Orleans police said.

Police say Cleavon Brown and another person, known currently only as "Dino," approached a person who was sitting in a vehicle in the 14000 block of Chef Menteur Highway at about 12:22 p.m. Sunday.

Police say Brown and "Dino" were both armed with guns when they approached the vehicle. The pair opened fire, police said, and the person inside the vehicle was hit in the abdomen.

Police say Brown will be arrested for attempted second degree homicide, aggravated assault with a firearm, aggravated criminal damage to property and illegal discharge of a firearm during commission of a crime in connection with this incident.

Investigators ask for the public's assistance in identifying and locating "Dino" as well as in locating Brown. Anyone with information is asked to contact 7th District detectives at 504-658-6070, or Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111 or toll-free at 1-877-903-STOP.New Orleans police reported a non-fatal shooting in Mid-City Sunday night (Aug. 26) involving a 38-year-old man.

The man was shot in the foot, according to police.

The shooting happened around 7:08 p.m. in the 2900 block of Palmyra Street, NOPD said, but no additional information was immediately available.

Earlier Sunday evening a 53-year-old man was killed in a fatal stabbing during a separate incident near the corner of St. Bernard Ave. and N. Dorgenois Street in the 7th Ward.The man accused of fatally stabbing another man Sunday evening (Aug. 26) outside a 7th Ward convenience store fled on a bicycle after a verbal fight turned deadly, a New Orleans police detective said.

The Orleans Parish Coroner's Office on Monday (Aug. 27) identified the man who died at the scene in the 1700 block of North Dorgenois Street as 53-year-old Ronald Pitts. NOPD arrested Kelvin Boykins, 49, just under 2 miles away from the scene and booked him on a charge of second-degree murder.

A warrant for Boykins' arrest, sworn by NOPD Homicide Detective Brett Mathes, states there were "multiple" witnesses to the stabbing, which occurred about 6 p.m. outside the Manchu Food Store.

Two witnesses identified Boykins as the perpetrator, the warrant states. One of them said the man police apprehended, Boykins, "engaged in a verbal argument" with Pitts, then "produced a knife and stabbed Mr. Pitts in the upper chest area" before fleeing the scene on a bicycle. That witness stayed on the phone with a 911 dispatcher as he or she followed Boykins for nearly two miles until police apprehended him near the corner of Law Street and Franklin Avenue, Mattes wrote. Another witness relayed the same story to police, that Boykins stabbed a man after an argument, the warrant says.

One of the owners of the Manchu Food Store, Pham Thu, told a reporter the man who was stabbed came into the store moments earlier, took a six-pack of beer from a cooler and left without paying.

She said a man who often hangs out at the store, occasionally picking up odd jobs in exchange for food and drinks, chased the thief down the street and began fighting with him.

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An NOPD report containing preliminary information on the stabbing gives a similar account of what led up to the fatal encounter between Pitts and Boykins. The preliminary report states the man who died exited the store with a six-pack of beer and was chased by a female employee when a "bystander stepped in." The bystander tried to help the female employee, the report states, "when a struggle ensued." During the struggle, the warrant states, the bystander "pulled a knife and stabbed the victim."

Boykins, who was booked into the Orleans Justice Center jail about 11:40 p.m. Sunday, was given a $250,000 bond by Orleans Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell during his his first appearance hearing on Monday morning. Cantrell appointed the Orleans Public Defender's Office to represent him.

The public defender representing Boykins in court on Monday filed a motion seeking to bar police from interrogating Boykins without his lawyer. His next hearing was scheduled for Sept. 24.

New Orleans Murder Map 2018

Staff writer Maria Clark contributed to this report.Update: A 49-year-old man has been charged with second-degree murder in the fatal stabbing.

--

A 53-year-old man is dead after a stabbing was reported "around 6 p.m." in the 7th Ward, New Orleans police said Sunday (Aug. 26). A person of interest has been detained, police said.

Police say the man was stabbed in the upper torso area.

The stabbing was reported at St. Bernard Avenue and North Dorgenois Street, police said.

The victim's name won't be released until an autopsy has been completed and his family has been notified, police said.

Police at the scene appeared to focus their attention on the nearby Manchu Food Store, walking in and out of the business, and black screens typically used to shield bodies from view could be seen on North Dorgenois Street in front of a beige home.

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Immediately before the cutting, one of Manchu's owners, Pham Thu, said she was busy with a customer when a man she didn't recognize walked inside Manchu. The man removed a six-pack of beer from a cooler and left the store without paying.

Outside, Thu said, a man who often hangs out around the store and occasionally picks up odd jobs in exchange for food and drinks, chased the thief down the street and began fighting the man.

As police continued their investigation at Manchu, Thu stood outside with two of her fellow co-owners, including one woman, who was receiving a shoulder massage and was called "Mama" by several neighbors. Thu said the store had been on the block for 32 years, and the owners "try to help people like" the man who picks up odd jobs.

Meanwhile, other neighbors gathered at the scene, shouting at police to close down the store, and a group of bicyclists with blinking lights on their wheels rode past.

"Hey," one cyclist asked, "is this a block party?"

Additional details were not immediately available.In Spain, tapas aren't just small plates of food. They're an entire activity that deserves their own verb: tapear. Estano, the new Basque-style tapas bar on St. Claude Avenue, gets that.

Starting at mid-day, a half dozen plates of pintxos, the Basque name for tapas, goes out on the counter. For either $4 or $6, tax included, you can order a pair of pintxos, which might be croquettes, skewers of anchovies, olives and pickles, rounds of toast topped with tuna, salsa verde and a fried quail egg or slices of potato and egg tortilla.

For its seafood, Estano uses "conservas," the highly prized canned seafood from Spain. Meats are sourced from local vendors. All the bread is baked in house. And once Estano receives its liquor license, it will serve Spanish wines and dry ciders.

In the morning, a small menu offers light breakfast items like truffled egg toast or pan con tomate ("bread with tomatoes").

For now, Estano is only open for breakfast and lunch, but in the fall (or sooner) it will add nighttime hours and open a courtyard in the back.

Mowgli Pierlas, who owns Arabella Casa di Pasta on the same block, created Estano with local musician Bruce McDaniel. Pierlas learned some lessons at Arabella, his first restaurant, that he is applying at Estano.

"If I learned anything," he said, "it's that if you're generally nice it comes back."

Food and restaurant news in your inbox Every Thursday we give you the scoop on NOLA dining. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up

Opened: Aug. 24 (grand opening planned for early September)

On the menu: A rotating list of tapas.

Need to know: The furniture at Estano, including the bar, was custom-built from a single, 30-foot piece of sinker cypress.

Hours: Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (evening hours will be added soon)

Estano: 2266 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans

***

Got a tip? Know some restaurant news? Email Todd A. Price at TPrice@NOLA.com or call 504.826.3445. Follow him on Twitter (@TPrice504), Facebook (ToddAPriceEatsDrinks) or Instagram (@tprice504).The University of Louisiana at Lafayette says a $1,000 online textbook that prompted anger from students over the weekend was a "misunderstanding,'' the Lafayette Advertiser reported Monday (Aug. 27).

Students saw a $999 price tag for an online version of an accounting class textbook and shared their shock on social media. Soon, their Facebook posts had gone viral, the Advertiser reported.

The university responded with a message saying the class, accounting 202, requires students have hard copies of the book's pages for class. The university said the online price, $999, was set with the intention of encouraging students to purchase hard copies of the book at the university bookstore.

The book and access codes for online supplementary materials can be purchased at the university bookstore for $313, the university said in the story. The university said it worked with the publisher to set the high online price to encourage students to purchase from the bookstore.

"We are not aware of any students who purchased the materials online; if they did so, they should contact the College of Business Administration, which will work with them to rectify the situation,'' university Provost Jaimie Hebert said in a statement.

"But again, let me stress, this is a misunderstanding. The University wants students enrolled in the course to spend only $313, and I am grateful for the chance to encourage them to do so."The controversial debate surrounding a Roman Catholic school's hair policy literally landed on the school's doorstep Monday morning (Aug. 27), WWLTV reported.

WWLTV said someone placed signs outside of Christ the King School in Terrytown with messages supporting the school's hair policy. Two families have sued the school and the Archdiocese of New Orleans after the school removed two girls from class this month due to their hair extensions.

"Rules are rules," according to one sign that alluded to the debate. Another sign stated "we pay a lot of money to support our Catholic School," followed by a hashtag with the phrase "Not a public school." The signs were later removed by a school worker Monday, WWLTV stated.

A Civil District Court judge issued a temporary restraining order last Thursday to allow 6th graders Faith Fennidy and Tyrielle Davis to return to school, according to a copy of the order sent to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune by a family attorney. However, James Williams, an attorney for both families, said Friday the girls have not returned to school. The school system late Sunday also stated the two girls were not expected at school Monday.

The archdiocese announced last week that the Office of Catholic Schools is reconvening the Superintendent's Advisory Council to address school policies, particularly those that might affect cultural differences in school communities, as well as other topics such as racial harmony, social justice and urban Catholic education. Schools Superintendent RaeNell Billiot Houston confirmed last week the archdiocese is meeting with Faith's family on Monday.

. . . . . . .

Wilborn P. Nobles III is an education reporter based in New Orleans. He can be reached at wnobles@nola.com or on Twitter at @WilNobles.Students and staff at Harriet Tubman Charter School happily returned to campus last week in the charter's newly renovated school building.

School principal Julie Lause Thursday (Aug. 23) said somewhere near $20 million was invested in renovations and additions at the 2013 General Meyer Avenue campus. Lause said they're thrilled to be back on campus, where their building has been restored to its "original beauty" after "five long years." She said the building houses 600 students this year, including 200 new students.

"I really believe that the beauty and the efficiency of the building makes it feel like something positive for the community. It really gives people dignity when they come in (here). This neighborhood deserves a great school," Lause said.

The first floor of Tubman Charter now has a renovated library room and computer room where there used to be bathrooms. The school also has its own room with a shower and laundry machines to serve students with special education services.

The Tubman school was originally constructed in 1917 with an addition on the building in 1924, according to a document from the Mahlum/Scairono Architects. In 2016, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places, under its original name, Adolph Meyer Elementary School.

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Tubman Charter students have attended classes at the O. Perry Walker High School building at 2832 General Meyer Avenue in Algiers during Tubman's renovations. Lause, who said their enrollment has expanded to nearly 1,000 students this year, said their kindergarten through 2nd grade students are still located at the Walker campus. The school's 3rd through 8th grade classes are on Tubman's campus.

Lause said the school is working to install smart boards in every class. She stressed the school is currently seeking help in creating a playground on campus.

See the photos above for illustrations of the new renovations throughout the school. The renovations were funded through the FEMA settlement money allocated to repair buildings damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

. . . . . . .

Wilborn P. Nobles III is an education reporter based in New Orleans. He can be reached at wnobles@nola.com or on Twitter at @WilNobles.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Community Reporter

Erica Welch is the special sections editor for The News-Review, mother of two and a native of Roseburg. She is an alumni of RHS, UCC and Western Oregon University. Contact her at ewelch@nrtoday.com or 541-957-4218.

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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.I was in Los Angeles [on set] for five months, and maybe this says it all: I had chunks of time off, but I could never come back to New York as Adora. For some reason, I couldnt be home in my New York apartment as Adora. Something took over me. I dont want to sound like a pretentious actor, but this character infiltrated me in a way that was very hard  by Episode 5, I could not extricate myself from the sheer brutality, and yet sadness and excruciating pain, that I felt sometimes physically. I had to get those nails off, I had to realign myself. I had to shift my organs. [Laughs.] I had to just let go and come back to Patricia here in New York City, which is a different life than Adora in Wind Gap.



Had you had that experience with a character before?

I have at times, but they are few and far between. Id say the last time it got like this  of course playing Blanche [DuBois, from A Streetcar Named Desire in 2004], because you never recover from playing Blanche. I dont think its anything rare, or special; its just what happens in our lives as actors. But Adora, it was episodic, so scene to scene, episode to episode, storm clouds gathered. And I needed a poncho. [Laughs.]

As we get to know her, it becomes apparent that shes really just an open wound  theres so much trauma in her life. Which I can imagine is a difficult thing to embody for a long period of time.

It is. Im fortunate to come from a very good family, very good parents, very middle-class, very All-American. I had unconditional love, which is something that I cannot imagine living without. So thats where I began with Adora, a woman who I dont think ever had true, real love, and who had this generational violence, and trauma, and abuse that has been with her for so long. It was literally breathtaking to play her. The air goes out of the room at times with Adora, and it has to. It becomes this claustrophobic, insular world where you think no one will escape.

The scene where she tells Camille she never loved her is one of the most devastating, because its also the nicest that Adora has been to Camille up until that point. A mass shooting at a video game tournament in Florida left three dead, including the gunman. [The New York Times]

 The police in Turkey forcefully broke up a weekly vigil to protest disappearances decades ago. A well-known member of the so-called Saturday Mothers, said to be in her 80s, was among those briefly detained. [The New York Times]

 Women in England will legally be allowed to take an abortion pill at home for the first time, the British government announced over the weekend. [The New York Times]

 The German Lost Art Foundation, which helps to return art looted by Nazis during World War II, is being challenged for removing 63 works by Egon Schiele from public view. Dealers say the paintings by the Austrian Expressionist were never stolen. [The New York Times]

 Egyptian investigators found no evidence of toxic gas in the hotel room where a British couple died. But their daughter thinks something in the room killed them. [BBC]

 Everything isnt so cheery after all in the Nordic states: A new analysis finds that an average of 12.3 percent of the population is struggling or suffering in the countries, which regularly appear at the top of the World Happiness Report. [The New York Times]In June, Planters iconic Mr. Peanut popped up on social media to peddle a canister of Cheez Balls.

How much would you give to try my Cheez Balls? No. Really. Theres a canister up on eBay, read a mischievous tweet from the account of the top-hatted Mr. Peanut. The crispy snack was a favorite among some in the 1980s and 90s before being discontinued about 12 years ago, and the tweet caused some commotion online. The canister wound up selling for more than $2,000.

We got almost 1.5 billion impressions, said Eduardo Luz, president of the United States grocery business at Kraft Heinz, which owns Planters Cheez Balls. Its a marketers dream.

Ten days after the canisters sale, the company announced that Cheez Balls would return for a limited time.

Planters is among a growing number of brands reintroducing products for new generations.

Whats old is new again, said Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, a research company. Brands are trying not to be static.But there were 400 other students in the school the day of the shootings. The oldest  fourth graders at the time  are now in high school, and have gradually begun to realize the power they wield by speaking out. And in increasing numbers, Newtowns teenagers are joining a network of young activists around the country who say they have had enough.

Those students remember the hourslong lockdown on Dec. 14, 2012. They knew something terrible had happened, but they did not know exactly what. They did not know if they were safe, or if they would see their families again.

Last fall, Natalie joined a handful of students at the first meeting of the Junior Newtown Action Alliance club, run by two seniors, Jackson Mittleman and Tommy Murray. She felt a little uncomfortable, she said  talking about guns and shootings and death is emotionally draining for a teenager who lost her brother in the Sandy Hook massacre. But she stuck with it.

The club had struggled to attract members; at times just a few students showed up to meetings, Jackson and Tommy said. (Tommy Murrays mother, Po Murray, founded the Newtown Action Alliance after the shootings, and her children have been active in the junior club.)

In February, when 17 people were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Natalie said she knew she needed to take decisive steps. I decided that I just needed to do more, she said.This is where we are now: building coalitions around causes, often with those to whom we take offense or even despise. The enemy of my enemy is my temporary tool.

Hopefully these coalitions will not need to be longstanding. Trumps fortress of fraudulence is showing cracks. A life lived on the edges of the law is inching into full view. Justice is yearning to be served.

Last week, not only did Cohen implicate Trump in a criminal conspiracy, Cohens lawyer, Lanny Davis, told MSNBC: Mr. Cohen has knowledge of certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel and is more than happy to tell the special counsel the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election.

Cohen flipped, and Trump flipped out.

He gave a rambling, nearly incoherent interview to Fox News, in which he not only seemed to confess to a campaign finance violation, one of the things Cohen pleaded guilty to, but he also made himself sound more like a mob boss than a law-and-order president. He told the network:

If somebody defrauded a bank and he is going to get 10 years in jail or 20 years in jail, but you can say something bad about Donald Trump and you will go down to two years or three years, which is the deal he made, in all fairness to him, most people are going to do that.  And I have seen it many times. I have had many friends involved in this stuff. Its called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal.

The use of informants is a central part of how some criminal prosecutions are executed. This is how the justice system works.WASHINGTON  Technology companies have taken plenty of hits on privacy this year. In May, Europe began enforcing a sweeping new law that lets people request their online data and restricts how businesses obtain and handle the information.

Then in June, California passed its own law that gives people the right to know what information companies are collecting about them, why the companies are collecting that data and with whom they are sharing it  setting a privacy benchmark for the United States.

Now top tech companies are going on the offensive.

In recent months, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft and others have aggressively lobbied officials in the Trump administration and elsewhere to start outlining a federal privacy law, according to administration officials and the companies. The law would have a dual purpose, they said: It would overrule the California law and instead put into place a kinder set of rules that would give the companies wide leeway over how personal digital information was handled.

We are committed to being part of the process and a constructive part of the process, said Dean Garfield, president of a leading tech industry lobbying group, the Information Technology Industry Council, which is working on proposals for the federal law. The best way is to work toward developing our own blueprint.Eight people, including six children, died after a fire broke out at an apartment in Chicago early on Sunday, officials said.

The deaths raised the number of fatalities from residential fires in the city so far this year to 39, surpassing the 27 killed in such fires in all of 2017, a Chicago Fire Department spokesman said.

The fire on Sunday was reported just before 4 a.m. in the Little Village neighborhood, the spokesman, Larry Langford, said.

The victims included an infant and adults but their specific ages were unavailable. Mr. Langford said two people were hospitalized in critical condition, with severe second-degree burns and smoke inhalation.The inmates at North Carolinas Hyde Correctional Institution hung three banners from the prison fence last week as supporters gathered outside. One sign asked for better food; another requested parole; the third said, In solidarity.

The protest came in support of a nationwide prisoner strike to call attention to the low inmate wages, decrepit facilities and harsh sentences that organizers say plague prison populations across the country. Though it is unclear how widespread such demonstrations have been, activists said they had shown a new ability to reach inmates across state lines at a time when prison unrest and in-custody deaths are frequently in the news.

Prisoners arent oblivious to their reality, said Paul Wright, the executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center and a longtime critic of prison conditions. They see people dying around them. They see the financial exploitation. They see the injustice.

Inmate protests have been happening for generations, but it is only in the last few years that organizers have had success coordinating from penitentiary to penitentiary and state to state. In 2010, Georgia inmates used contraband cellphones to coordinate protests across at least six prisons. And in 2016, prisoners in several states stopped reporting for work to protest their wages.RIO DE JANEIRO  Had it gone as planned, an exhibition that opened last year in Brazil  which included a drawing of smiling children with the words transvestite and gay child stenciled across them  would likely have been a mere blip in the countrys lively art scene.

Gaudencio Fidelis, the curator who assembled the 264 pieces that made up the Queer Museum exhibition, had expected at least a whiff of criticism for the art show. But nothing could have prepared him for the torrent of controversy that set off protests and shut down the exhibition within days.

Even after the show was closed, the storm of criticism kept the project in the news, inciting a heated, monthslong national debate about freedom of expression and what qualifies as art.

After nearly a year of arguments, the exhibition  which also included a painting of the Virgin Mary cradling a monkey, and sacramental wafers with words like vagina and penis written on them in neat cursive  reopened this month in Parque Lage, a public park in Rio de Janeiro that is also home to a renowned art school.National Center for Youth Issues, a Chattanooga-based, youth development group, in conjunction with the Hamilton County Schools, will host the 13th Annual Healthy Minds, Healthy Lives - Chattanooga Summit at Christ United Methodist Church in East Brainerd on Friday, Sept. 7, from 8 a.m.-3:30 p.m.

The main speakers at the Summit will be Dan St. Romain and Scott Ridgeway.

Mr. St. Romain is a nationally acclaimed educational consultant who provides staff development and consultative services to K-12 school counselors and other educators. He is passionate about helping individuals shift their perspective on behavior, understanding the best ways to provide support given the challenges posed in todays society. Mr. St. Romain regularly presents on topics impacting school climate, brain-based instruction, developmentally appropriate educational practices and presentation skills. Although his sessions are interactive and engaging, his greatest asset lies in his ability to offer participants insight into the connectedness between educational practices and student behavior. His sessions at the Summit are titled: Teach Skills and Break Habits: Growth-Mindsets for Better Behavior in the Classroom and Positive Behavior Principles.

Mr. Ridgeway has served as Tennessee Suicide Prevention Networks executive director since 2001. He works closely with TSPNs gubernatorially-appointed Advisory Council to implement suicide prevention strategies within the state of Tennessee. His session at the Summit is titled: Suicide Prevention in Schools - Putting a Plan in Place and Responding to a Suicide Death at School or in the Community.

The Summit will provide professional development training for 250+ school counselors, social workers, psychologists and principals in 95 Hamilton County public and private schools. Fifteen local, regional and national organizations that provide support services to this group of professionals will have exhibits at the event to share the programs and services they have to offer.

In addition to training, participating schools will be given $250 in counseling resources to supplement their schools library of materials available to help counselors and social workers.

Tennessee Valley Federal Credit Union is the lead corporate sponsor of the event, and they join the Weldon F. Osborne Foundation, the Ward Family Foundation, the Hamico Foundation, Inc., Ace Hardware, Covenant Transport and Southern Champion Tray as major supporters. The Hamilton County Department of Education is also contributing support, as well as several other corporations, foundations, and individuals.

For more information on the 2018 Healthy Choices for Youth Chattanooga Summit, call Robert Rabon at National Center for Youth Issues at 309-4300.SEOUL, South Korea  North Korea has decided to expel a Japanese man accused of committing a crime while visiting the isolated country on a tourist visa, the countrys state media reported.

The man, Tomoyuki Sugimoto, has been held in North Korea for an investigation of his crime against the law, the Korean Central News Agency said in a brief dispatch late Sunday.

It did not provide details of the alleged crime. But it said the North Korean authorities had decided to leniently condone him and expel him from North Korea on the principle of humanitarianism.

Japans Kyodo News agency reported earlier that a Japanese videographer on a group tour appeared to have been detained in North Korea after shooting footage of a military facility while visiting Nampo, a port city south of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.In the end, the St. Petersburg government evicted the university from the palace  because of the plastic windows, which were only temporary  forcing it to move to an ordinary building across the street.

University officials say they were never clear why the teaching license was revoked. They say the authorities cited the failure of the universitys political scientists to work outside the campus, and its lack of a proper gym.

I am sure the reason we cannot study has nothing to do with fire safety regulations, said Roman V. Popov, a student of economics, who had to transfer to another college in St. Petersburg to receive his degree. It might be political, or perhaps someone just wanted to have our building.

While the university may now to be back on its feet, some faculty members said they were disappointed with what they described as the administrations subservient stance over the past year.

The ability to make a deal with the government was good, but at one point, it turned into a catastrophe, said Yevgeny V. Anisimov, one of the leading historians in Russia. We lost students, we lost our building. The one we have now is still empty.Didier Lestrade, a French journalist and co-founder of the Paris chapter of Act Up, an AIDS protest group, said in a phone interview that Mr. Haches views had resonated with young people in the country. France is stuck in terms of integration and visibility of minorities, he said. On the national level, we can see that there is still a lot of racism.

By contrast, Kiddy is one of the very few black artists in France who are out and really up front in terms of L.G.B.T. rights, Mr. Lestrade added. He represents the change of attitude among young people, straight and gay: They have more tolerance.

Tolerance and inclusion are also hallmarks of the ballroom scene, which originated in Harlem in the 1920s and has been catching on in Paris in the past 10 years. There are now 16 teams, or houses, in Paris that compete at regular balls.

There was never a place where I could feel like myself until ballroom, Mr. Hache said. He grew up in low-income housing in Groussay, southwest of Paris, where his parents had moved from Cameroon. Though he knew he was gay from an early age, he said, Fat is never associated with sexuality, so nobody was asking why I didnt have a girlfriend.

He took hip-hop dance classes in Groussay and later moved to Paris, where he met more gay people. But he still felt like an outsider, he said, recalling them saying: We dont really like where you come from. The projects, thats not us.The 96-year-old French painter and author Francoise Gilot  famously known as the former lover and muse to Pablo Picasso, and the mother of two of his children, Claude and Paloma  has a book of sketches out this week that she completed during her travels to India, Senegal and Venice between 1974 and 1981.

While most artists use sketchbooks to harness their impressions into material for their work  to help them remember  Ms. Gilot has used hers to forget.

Things I have seen, I want to take them out of my mind, she told me as we sat in her brightly-lit living room on Manhattans Upper West Side. (Ms. Gilots home doubles as a studio in which she still paints nearly every day. Canvases are hung on the two-story-high walls, stacked on the floor and displayed on easels.) Art doesnt come from what is around you, but from what is inside of you.Fukuyama is more sympathetic to that need in Identity. The assertion of particular identities, and the insistence that respect be paid to them, is a hallmark of our age. And it is, in his telling, not because people are bad at reasoning or narrow, but because of how discombobulating our age has been.

Image

Globalization, the internet, automation, mass migration, the emergence of India and China, the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of women and their displacing of men in more service-oriented economies, the civil rights movement and the emancipation of other groups and the loss of status for white people  these are just some of what we have lived through of late. Yes, the world has gotten better for hundreds of millions. But Fukuyama reminds us that across much of the West, people have suffered dislocation and elites have captured the fruits.

Amid these changes, Fukuyama writes, identity politics has come to the fore, and it has become our common culture, no longer the province of a party or side. In American politics, for example, the left used to focus on economic equality, he argues, and the right on limited government. Today, the left concentrates on promoting the interests of a wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalized, whereas the right is redefining itself as patriots who seek to protect traditional national identity, an identity that is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity or religion.

Fukuyama suggests that we are living in an era in which the sense of being dismissed, rather than material interest, is the locomotive of human affairs. The rulers of Russia, Hungary and China are driven by past national humiliations. Osama bin Laden was driven by the treatment of Palestinians. Black Lives Matter has been driven by the fatal disrespect of the police. And a large swath of the American right, which claims to loathe identity politics, is driven by its own perception of being dissed.

Unlike many avuncular critics of identity politics, Fukuyama is sympathetic to the good such politics does  above all, making the privileged aware of their effect on marginalized groups. Outsiders to those groups often fail to perceive the harm they are doing by their actions, he writes.

Fukuyama does have his criticisms, however. He fears identity politics has become a cheap substitute for serious thinking about how to reverse the 30-year trend in most liberal democracies toward greater socioeconomic inequality. Fukuyama worries that the woker the left gets on identity issues, the weaker it gets on offering a critique of capitalism.

Unlike Appiah, Fukuyama doesnt seem to think its possible or desirable for humans to see themselves as human before all else. He is a believer in the nation-state as a healthy unit of human affairs, and he spends the final part of his smart, crisp book exploring how countries can cultivate integrative national identities that are rooted in liberal and democratic values  identities large enough to be inclusive, but small enough to give people a real sense of agency over their society.A top federal official in charge of handling complaints about student loans stepped down on Monday, blasting the Trump administration for protecting predatory lenders at the expense of borrowers.

Seth Frotman, the student loan ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in his resignation letter that millions of borrowers had been harmed by sweeping changes at the bureau under Mick Mulvaney, President Trumps budget director, who became the bureaus acting director in November. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

You have used the bureau to serve the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America, Mr. Frotman wrote to Mr. Mulvaney. The current leadership of the bureau has abandoned its duty to fairly and robustly enforce the law.

A spokesman for the consumer bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Frotmans position was mandated by Congress eight years ago, when it created the bureau, to serve as a watchdog over the $1.5 trillion student loan market. The office fields about 23,000 complaints a year, covering problems with lenders, debt collectors and a growing number of companies selling debt relief services  a market often plagued with fraud. Mr. Frotman had held the job since 2016.WOLFSBURG, Germany  Nearly three years after Volkswagen admitted to a vast emissions cheating scheme, the company has only just begun to take steps necessary to prevent future scandals.

That was the main takeaway from a report issued Monday by a prominent American lawyer appointed to monitor the companys behavior. Among other things, Volkswagen still has work to do to create an adequate whistle-blower program, the lawyer, Larry D. Thompson, wrote in the report.

In interviews before the report was issued Monday, Mr. Thompson said it was intended not as a criticism of the company but rather as recommendations for future action.

My mandate is a forward-looking one, he said in Wolfsburg, Volkswagens base.

Still, the implication was that Volkswagen has made insufficient progress toward repairing the shortcomings in company culture and internal controls that led to one of the biggest corporate scandals ever.The birthrate among women under 30 has been falling steadily since 2010 while the rate among women in their late 30s, 40s and 50s has been rising, according to National Center for Health statistics.

Image Ava helps women precisely identify their five most fertile days each month.

In my mind, if you had [unprotected] sex, you got pregnant and that was it, said Kate Campbell, a 32-year-old Nashville resident, who was measuring her body temperature and taking ovulation tests twice a day for months to try to conceive  without success. I wasnt getting any positives. I was really shocked. How do people get pregnant by accident?

After purchasing an Ava bracelet in April 2017, she discovered she had been missing her fertility window by about a week because her cycles were longer than normal and regular period-tracking apps didnt pick that up. By August, she was pregnant, and her son, Canaan James, was born on April 27, 2018.

The internet is filled with women on forums, Facebook and videos seeking fertility advice. They say the problem is highly misunderstood and deeply underestimated.

For someone, especially a family member, to say, Well, are you doing it right? or Do you know what youre doing?  I know theyre joking  but its not funny to me. Its just rude, said a woman who identifies herself as Jolene Grizzle in a YouTube video, as she described her struggle with fertility, which included using Ava. (It didnt work for her.)

The Ava bracelet collects data on nine parameters, including skin temperature, resting pulse rate, breathing, sleep movement, and stress levels, while the woman sleeps. Once the bracelet is synced to the persons phone in the morning, Avas proprietary algorithm achieves an 89 percent accuracy rate at detecting 5.3 fertile days each cycle, according to the company.

By measuring temperature and other variables, Ava is able to track changes in both progesterone and estrodial levels, Ms. Von Bidder said.The Bowery already has a restaurant called Great NY Noodletown. But these days, that name could describe the entire city, which suddenly seems awash in noodle menus.

Its not all lo mein and chow fun. Young, savvy Chinese-Americans are leaning into the regional dishes of their heritage, building restaurant groups that leverage Chinas diverse noodle canon.

This fall, Dunhuang, a northwestern-Chinese restaurant whose signature offering is an aromatic beef noodle soup from Lanzhou, will open its sixth outpost, near Grand Central Terminal. A spot near Columbia University is planned for the Tang, a contemporary noodle bar from the 25-year-old restaurateur Yu Li, serving varieties like dan dan mian, a Sichuanese dish made with skinny noodles and dry-fried pork. (He already runs two other Tang restaurants in Manhattan.) And Junzi Kitchen, a Chipotle-like fast-casual place, will soon open its third New York restaurant, near Bryant Park, offering bings (savory crepes) and bowls with a choice of two northern Chinese noodle styles (knife-cut and spring), along with sauces like tomato egg and furu sesame.Working in a family business can be both a privilege and a burden. If you are a young person with a last name that looms, it is perhaps natural to want to create something of your own.

So it is with Oliver Zabar, a son of Eli Zabar, whose name blankets the Upper East Side on food markets, takeout shops, wine and beer bars, a wholesale bakery, a restaurant and a wine shop. For the last few years, the younger Mr. Zabar, 27, has managed Elis Night Shift at 79th Street and Third Avenue, a grab-and-go cafe by day and a busy, convivial beer bar by night.

Now, he is stepping out and away. This fall, he will open Devon, a casual restaurant and cocktail bar, in an old tenement building on the Lower East Side, with an adjacent retail bakery that will supply the restaurant with breads and pastries. Devon will offer what Mr. Zabar calls elevated American bar food with a French influence.

In a departure from family tradition, Devon is named after his mother, Devon Fredericks, who Mr. Zabar said is a creative behind-the-scenes force in the Elis empire.Rice was one of the chef Joseph Johnsons first loves and first heartbreaks.

His earliest remembered taste of it was in his grandmothers asopao, a Puerto Rican dish that is not quite stew, not quite soup. Its made of rice simmered in chicken broth and white wine, with collapsed tomatoes, sofrito and olives leaching their brine.

This is food that warms you, changes you from within. Mr. Johnson, known as JJ, called it simply soupy rice, and drank it by the cup. But after his grandmother died, the only rice that appeared on the table was this Uncle Bens nonsense, he said  bland and mushy. It was never right.

He held a grudge all through culinary school, failing at pilaf and doing his best to avoid the grain. The turning point came on a trip to Ghana with the restaurateur Alexander Smalls, an owner of the Cecil in Harlem, where Mr. Johnson was the executive chef until last summer.

In Ghana, the men were served jollof rice, hot and smoky. Im sweating, but its really good, Mr. Johnson said. He wanted to know: Why is their rice better than ours?There are few phrases in the dining lexicon less inviting than hotel restaurant, a term that has traditionally called up images of serviceable food in corporate settings.

But the veteran hotelier Ian Schrager seems to have sidestepped all that. Over the years, he has been able to attract marquee chefs to run the restaurants and food services in his global portfolio of hotels. Decades ago, he hired accomplished chefs like Larry Forgione and Claude Troisgros, and hes still at it, with Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Jason Atherton running his kitchens.

Mr. Schragers latest recruit is John Fraser, who will be executive chef for the Times Square Edition hotel, now under construction on Seventh Avenue at 47th Street. In the 1990s, Mr. Fraser was a cook at Mr. Schragers Mondrian hotel in Los Angeles.

Mr. Schrager, who rose to prominence as a partner in Studio 54, said he hit on the formula early on in his career. I did not want just hotel guests in my restaurants, so at first I focused on creating a scene, he said. But almost immediately I knew I had to have restaurants that have good food.It was only a matter of time before Greenpoint became a magnet for restaurants.

With the L train shutting down next spring for 15 months of repairs, next-door Williamsburg is already losing its appeal as a dining hub. That may allow Greenpoint to emerge as a less expensive alternative for restaurateurs and diners, but one that offers similar amenities: proximity to Manhattan, waterfront views and plenty of new stores and apartments.

Once largely industrial and still known for its Polish immigrant population, Greenpoint this year has had several openings, including Di An Di, a stylish pho spot; Oxomoco, an airy Mexican restaurant with wood-fired grills; Annicka, a cafe and bar specializing in New York-made beer, wine, cider and spirits; and Bernies, a faux-retro diner.For years, the chef Pierre Thiam has been planning to open a restaurant and call it Teranga. Translated from Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal, teranga means hospitality  though as Mr. Thiam explained it, the meaning is more significant, and more complex, than any English translation will allow.

Its such an important word in our culture, and its high up in our values, said Mr. Thiam, who was born and raised in Senegal until he moved to the United States as a student in the late 1980s. Teranga is about the way we treat our guests. Its about the way that when you come into a Senegalese household, everyone moves so that you can fit in the circle and share their food and drink.For all of its attractions, the Upper West Side has stubbornly remained a desert for destination restaurants. Except for brunch at Barney Greengrass and the options around Lincoln Center , theres been little to tempt those who dont live nearby.

But change has come. Tom Valentis popular Oxbow Tavern, which opened this year at Columbus Avenue and 71st Street, was a step in the right direction, and a consolation for those who miss his last great local outpost, Ouest. Then the chef Marco Canora extended his reach uptown with a Brodo branch at 75th Street and Broadway.

Much more is on the way for the fall. Adam Leonti, a chef who worked at the esteemed Vetri in Philadelphia and has been cooking in Europe for the last couple of years, moved into the neighborhood after he was approached by the owner of the former Dovetail space.For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus from the United States  specimens needed to develop vaccines and treatments, according to federal health officials.

Despite persistent requests from government officials and research institutions, China has not provided samples of the dangerous virus, a type of bird flu called H7N9. In the past, such exchanges have been mostly routine under rules established by the World Health Organization.

Now, as the United States and China spar over trade, some scientists worry that the vital exchange of medical supplies and information could slow, hampering preparedness for the next biological threat.

The scenario is unlike shortages in aluminum and soybeans, said Dr. Michael Callahan, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School.Marijuana is more widely available than ever, but what does it do to babies?

Theres no answer to that yet, but nursing mothers are being warned to avoid it: Traces of the drug can show up in breast milk, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana that gets people high, can be detected in breast milk up to six days after use of the drug, according to a study published on Monday by the journal Pediatrics.

The study found that tetrahydrocannabinol was detectable in 63 percent of 54 samples of breast milk from women who said they had used marijuana before pumping.

In response to evidence that babies are being exposed to marijuana, the A.A.P. recommends that women avoid the drug altogether when they are pregnant or breast-feeding.Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.

For New York Times readers interested in watching the paper in action, there will soon be a slew of new options. A coming cable news show, The Weekly, will combine Times journalism with immersive storytelling. Netflix is working on a documentary series inspired by Dr. Lisa Sanderss New York Times Magazine column, Diagnosis, that will investigate mysterious illnesses. And a new narrative film will tell the behind-the-scenes story of how the Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor exposed decades of sexual harassment and assault allegations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

As those projects come together, anyone looking for a window into the papers inner workings can check out these five documentaries, all now streaming online, for similar glimpses inside The Times.The party bosses, the sister-in-law also noticed, were running a lot more candidates this year to fill county committee seats, of which there are more than 2,700.

I have no doubt that if one name was used without permission there are others who dont know they are on the ballot as well, the sister-in-law told her.

To me this sounded like a leap, a lefty conspiracy theory. But I owed my friend a polite response.

Jillian, this is very interesting though I dont quite get it, I wrote. If party leaders are putting people on the ballot without their knowledge, What do they expect these people to do when they find out?

What they would do, it turns out, was yell at the reporter who told them.

But that came later. First I did a little research and found out that this kind of thing had happened before in New York City, where dirty tricks and politics go back a very long way. It wasnt so far-fetched.

I needed to call candidates. But the party machine had nominated more than 1,300 of them, most presumably legitimate. Where to begin? I tried to think like a corrupt party hack. Scammers prey on the elderly. Call older candidates first.Last year WGOITGraph? was monthly, but this school year, well be publishing the feature weekly, most Wednesdays from September to April (calendar below). We hope youll join us.

Each week well select an engaging Times graph and pair it with a simple set of questions  asking students what they notice, what they wonder, and what they think is going on in the graph. As students comment, we provide live moderation by statistics teachers (on Wednesdays). Then, at the end of the week, we post an end-of-activity reveal which shares the original article containing the graph, highlights from the moderation, related statistical concepts and helpful vocabulary.

Heres the weekly schedule:

Thursday afternoons: We publish a new graph and update the previous weeks graph with the reveal. Wednesdays: Teachers provide live moderation of student comments from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

The philosophy behind our approach is to let students begin analyzing graphs with the skills they will most naturally and successfully use  simple noticing and wondering. From there, students can simultaneously build confidence and acquire new conceptual understanding. Over time, as their critical thinking skills develop and their vocabulary grows, students analyses become more sophisticated.

Why do this weekly? Because we thought this new schedule would enable teachers to more easily incorporate WGOITGraph? into their classroom routines. Also The Times publishes scores of engaging graphs we wanted to take advantage of. And, perhaps most of all, because teachers told us how powerful this feature was in their curriculum, and how much students enjoyed it.

This summer we spoke to several STEM teachers who used WGOITGraph? in their classrooms. Here is what they told us:

1. Whats Going On in This Graph? fits easily into the curriculum.

Doug Tyson, a statistics teacher at Central York High School in York, Pa., said:

What I really appreciate about this feature is that its scalable; if you have 10 minutes in class, you can catch a few basic statistical ideas.  But sometimes I can actually use a particular graph throughout a whole lesson that Im teaching, like scatterplots. In those cases, this feature can scale to a longer time and bigger statistical concepts.

When he decided to use our Hurricane Harvey precipitation graph-map, Gavin Smith, a biology teacher at the John D. OBryant School of Mathematics and Science in Boston, wasnt sure what to expect from students:

I wondered myself what would happen with this graph; how long could I have my students work on this? In years past my students have struggled with putting together their thoughts and thinking critically. I tried it, we took the whole period, and it was amazing to see how thoughtful they were and the questions they came up with. It got students who dont normally participate to participate and be excited about an activity.

2. It inspires rich discussion, which yields deeper understanding.The executive order temporarily suspends the sunset provisions in the laws relating to the cameras. The order also directs the state Department of Motor Vehicles to share information with the city so it can match the license plates of speeding vehicles to their owners and assess fines  all without the need for a new state law.

At the same time, leaders in the City Council have promised to pass a local law that mirrors the speed camera provisions of state law, Mr. Cuomo said at a Manhattan news conference.

Officials have previously said that only the state could authorize the city to collect fines with evidence from the cameras. Yet city officials now seem to be saying that they can pass their own law and make it work, as long as they have access to license plate data from the Motor Vehicles Department.

This is an aggressive legal action, said Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who is running for re-election. I believe we are also in extraordinary circumstances, and Im not going to be a governor who sits by and because the State Senate is playing politics and refusing to come back, we jeopardize human life, especially the lives of children.

The City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, who appeared with the governor, said that the Council will hold a special session on Wednesday to pass the law. Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Twitter he will sign it before the start of classes next week.In the history of presidential scandals, it is often hidden things that end up proving decisive. Think, for example, of Monica Lewinskys stained blue dress or of Richard M. Nixons secret Oval Office tapes.

But in President Trumps recent scandal involving Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels, something that was never there to begin with could soon play an unexpected role.

The missing item is the signature that Mr. Trump failed to place on Ms. Cliffords non-disclosure deal. If her lawyer has his way, there is a chance that inch-long blank space could force Mr. Trump to testify about what he knew of the arrangement.

Last week, the man who structured the payment, Mr. Trumps former lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, pleaded guilty to several charges in federal court. Under the arrangement Mr. Cohen helped make, Ms. Clifford was paid $130,000 just before the 2016 elections to not speak publicly about an affair she said she had with Mr. Trump.On Monday, the United Nations released an explosive report saying top military officials in Myanmar should face trial in an international court for genocide against Rohingya Muslims.

The video op-ed above reveals shocking footage that Rohingya refugees have gathered, documenting the genocide occurring in Myanmar. The only way the international community will end up on the right side of history is if perpetrators are prosecuted for these mass atrocities, and we know Myanmar is unable and unwilling to ensure justice at home. This situation is precisely why the International Criminal Court exists. The United Nations Security Council should waste no time. It should pass a resolution referring the situation in Myanmar to the I.C.C., and once that happens, prosecutors can start to build a case. U.N. member states should also create leverage to persuade China to abstain from blocking such an effort.

Prosecutors will need to work closely with refugees who have evidence of genocide, including raw footage that can help prove crimes or corroborate other evidence of crimes. But that evidence and witnesses are in danger of disappearing as monsoon season and squalid refugee camp conditions threaten phones and lives. U.N. member states should quickly create a new mechanism through the U.N. General Assembly or the U.N. Human Rights Council to collect and preserve this crucial evidence to be used for future prosecutions.

Matthew Smith is the founder of Fortify Rights, a nonprofit human rights organization that investigates and documents human rights abuses.Theres a historical haze confounding plans to observe the coming 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

It descends, first, in definitions: Thats the one that guaranteed a right to vote to all American women, right? Not exactly. The womens suffrage amendment, like the 15th Amendment before it, which sought to protect the political rights of former slaves, guaranteed nothing. It simply told states that being female could no longer be a reason to bar citizens from voting. To African-American women living in states with systems in place to block African-American men from voting, the amendment provided neither clarity nor power.

Haze also makes it difficult to see what merits celebration. With the most prominent advocates of womens voting rights having come under scrutiny for their racial exclusiveness, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul, can we honor their activism? Can we celebrate a transformation that broke mens monopoly on political power while we simultaneously face up to ways that the ugliest aspects of American history influenced how citizens achieved this victory and how they behaved afterward? That is possible if we tell a documented story and use appropriate lenses.

A popular, national reform movement cannot be measured simply by the actions of a few leaders. Multitudes worked to overcome strong resistance to sharing political power with women. Under many leaders across seven decades, they battled in arenas of state and national politics that were infested with racial conflict. Eventually, a movement that began among opponents of slavery, who at least talked the talk of racial equality, grew to embrace the whole range of American opinions on race.And there is very little that is democratic about the West Bank model. Consider: 15 percent of West Bankers who are Jewish settlers vote in Israeli elections and the 85 percent of West Bankers who are Arabs can vote in the elections of the Palestinian Authority (when these are actually held). In practice, this means that West Bank Jews are voting for the government of a state they dont live in but whose army exercises sovereign authority over the territory they do live in.

For West Bank Arabs, it means their democracy is doubly a sham: They can vote for a Palestinian Authority that fails to live up to any minimal standard of democracy, or, for that matter, of governance itself. But they cant vote in the elections of Israel, the state that actually controls the territory in which they live. Practically, the Jewish minority in the West Bank enjoys a monopoly of civil, political and social rights, and its supremacy is guaranteed by the presence of a large military force from Israel to protect it and its privileges. That is, ipso facto, the West Bank model.

This isnt even the worst of it. The Jewish minority in the West Bank enjoys a Western standard of living by nearly every measure  income, education, health care, life expectancy, infrastructure, etc. Because of the political situation, because it is dependent for its survival on a corrupt Palestinian Authority, the Arab majority manifestly has no realistic hope of closing the gap. This is simply not the case for the admittedly imperfect relationship between Jews and Arabs inside Israel.

Maybe slight border adjustments could bring the Israeli model to the tiny bits of West Bank land where large numbers of Jewish settlers live. These could be reciprocal if made in the context of an overall peace  but theres no sign that the Palestinian Authority will do anything other than refuse to negotiate under reasonable terms. Indeed, pointing out the awfulness of the West Bank model in no way absolves the Palestinians of responsibility for their refusal to make any kind of peace with Israel. But the bottom line is this: The Israeli model, such as it is, is not being exported to the West Bank.

Quite the opposite. If there is any future for the West Bank settlement enterprise  not the border adjustments, but the fanatical ideological settlements deep in the territory  it wont be because of an export of the Israeli model but rather because of an import of the West Bank model into Israel. And this is what the corruptive nation-state law clearly starts to do: secure the power of the far-right wing by making Israel less democratic, more Jewish, more tribal, less representative.

The law is only a start: Tellingly, to ensure its passage, certain provisions were edited out of the final bill, including a section to allow the formation of Jewish-only communities that would have effectively denied the mixing of peoples and individuals that is Israels aspiration and also its reality. A provision like this gives a good sense of where the bills authors want to go next.

For lovers of Israel, this is the time to make our voices heard. Delegitimization of Israel cannot be tolerated from any quarter. It cant be tolerated from the increasingly vocal Marxist-influenced contingent of the left for whom all oppression is like all other oppression, and for whom the Palestinians have succeeded Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua and Venezuela as vehicles for its utopianism. But the calumnies of the left do not, ever, justify supporting the delegitimization of democratic Israel from Israels right-wing government and the messianic idolaters it bows before.

The Israeli model cannot be exported into the West Bank: It is a fact of historical circumstance. The present law  accidentally or not, and probably not  will import the West Bank model into Israel. That will be a catastrophe.

Martin Peretz edited The New Republic for 35 years and taught at Harvard University for nearly a half century.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.It was that other P.O.W.-turned senator, the unfathomably brave Jeremiah Denton, who first signaled to United States military intelligence  via blinking out T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code during a propaganda video  that our prisoners of war in North Vietnam were being treated in gross violation of the Geneva Convention. But it was John McCain who brought that mistreatment viscerally into American living rooms, through a harrowing hospital-bed interview broadcast by CBS News in the fall of 1967.

Fearful eyes bugging out of his head, Mr. McCain speaks haltingly, in obvious physical pain, while fighting a losing battle to keep his lips from quivering. I would just like to tell my wife, he says at the end, barely keeping it together, I will get well. The prediction did not inspire confidence.

Mr. McCain, who died Saturday at 81, spent more than a half-century trying to teach us about torture  that it produces faulty intelligence, that every man has a breaking point, that military personnel derive a motivational pride from America having higher moral standards than its debased adversaries. Your last resistance, he writes in his latest book, The Restless Wave (written as usual with Mark Salter), the one that sticks, the one that makes the victim superior to the torturer, is the belief that were the positions reversed you wouldnt treat them as they have treated you.

That lesson is fading from view in 2018, disregarded both by a president who believes that torture absolutely works, and by a #resistance cadre of ex-national security officials whose own brazen lies about the practice have yet to put a noticeable dent in either book sales or cable-TV contracts.To the Editor:

Re My New-Mom Friends (Sunday Review, Aug. 19):

J. Courtney Sullivans article about friendships forged in the throes of caring for a newborn brought me back to my own days as the mother of newborn twins. Faced with little sleep, postpartum anxiety and the oddity of becoming a milk factory overnight, I had intimate conversations about my babies (and my body) with anyone who would listen. I reconnected with two women  also mothers of twins  I hadnt talked to in 15 years to get their advice about nipple soreness and nap schedules.

My third child recently turned 1. The second time through the newborn phase was sleep-deprived, but not nearly as harrowing.

Everything is precious and unique the first year of motherhood. Its an intensely vulnerable time. Eventually, though, you realize that your kid (and you) are far more resilient and ordinary than you thought. Thats a beautiful thing, too.

Cloe Axelson

Belmont, Mass.

To the Editor:

I just read J. Courtney Sullivans article and was immediately thrown back in time to November 1979, when I returned from Anchorage to Cold Bay, Alaska, with my 2-week-old daughter. How I could have used a new mom friend to text in the middle of the night! I have never felt so alone as I did then with a newborn baby in that isolated community of 150 people on the Alaskan peninsula.To the Editor:

Re Full-Spectrum Corruption, by Peter Wehner (Sunday Review, Aug. 26):

While I respect Mr. Wehners concern for his party and our country, it is disingenuous and self-serving of many other Republicans to denounce President Trump for the bits they find distasteful while celebrating the benefits he has showered on them. Mr. Trumps populism appeals to voters who fled the Democratic Party in protest of civil rights and voting-rights legislation into the open arms of the Republican Party.

Before he helped refine the rhetoric of Mr. Trumps racist appeals, Paul Manafort did the same for Ronald Reagan, morphing Richard Nixons Southern strategy into dog whistle politics. And respectable Republicans made a deal with the devil long before they put Mr. Trump in power. Mr. Trump is able to pack the courts with extremist conservative judges because Senator Mitch McConnell refused to consider President Barack Obamas nominee.

President Trump may be corrupt to the core, but in politics he only personifies the Republican corruption that preceded him.

Annlinn Kruger

Bar Harbor, Me.

To the Editor:

As I began reading Full-Spectrum Corruption, I inwardly moaned: another hysterical screed about President Trump. But as I read, I began to realize that this essay was much different. I began to feel a deep sense of pride and gratitude, even patriotism, in Peter Wehners eloquent language. He was railing against Mr. Trump, yes, but his words amounted to a moral imperative, a call to arms.These centers would be modeled on those operating in Canada and some European countries. They invite visitors to use heroin, fentanyl and other deadly drugs without fear of arrest. The policy is B.Y.O.D.  bring your own drugs  but staff members help people abuse drugs by providing needles and stand ready to resuscitate addicts who overdose.

Last year, San Francisco assembled a task force to establish an injection site, and last week the California State Senate passed a bill that would allow San Francisco to operate such sites and grant legal immunity to the drug users who visit them. In May, the mayor of New York City announced a plan to open four injection sites. A Seattle task force approved a similar plan, and city officials have pitched outfitting a van as a mobile injection site. Numerous states, including Colorado, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine, have explored similar options to help their residents use hard-core drugs.

One obvious problem with injection sites is that they are illegal. It is a federal felony to maintain any location for the purpose of facilitating illicit drug use. Violations are punishable by up to 20 years in prison, hefty fines and forfeiture of the property used in the criminal activity. The law also authorizes the federal government to obtain civil injunctions against violators. Because federal law clearly prohibits injection sites, cities and counties should expect the Department of Justice to meet the opening of any injection site with swift and aggressive action.

Proponents of injection sites say they make drug use safer, but they actually create serious public safety risks. Many people addicted to opioids use illicit fentanyl or one of its analogues, which can be up to 5,000 times more powerful than heroin. Users often have no idea what they are actually buying from criminal drug dealers. Moreover, a bystander or emergency medical worker who comes into contact with such drugs can be gravely harmed.

Additionally, injection sites destroy the surrounding community. When drug users flock to a site, drug dealers follow, bringing with them violence and despair, posing a danger to neighbors and law-abiding visitors. For instance, the area near an injection site in Vancouver, British Columbia, was described by a member of the Redmond, Wash., City Council as a war zone with drug-addled, glassy -eyed people strewn about and active drug dealing going on in plain sight.A new poll on voters attitudes in the nations most competitive House races showed that when it comes to perceptions of racism, there are two Americas  one in which people of color are distressed by President Trumps rhetoric and policies and another in which white Americans are far less convinced that theres a problem.

Conflicting perceptions of racism have always existed and should be expected, but this year, the divide may shape the outcome of the midterm elections.

This poll, a survey conducted for the N.A.A.C.P. by the African-American Research Collaborative, Latino Decisions and Asian Decisions, analyzed the views of African-American, white, Latino, Asian-American and Native American voters in 61 of the nations most competitive midterm races. We found that African-Americans stand to play a key role in 21 of these races, making up from 7 to 24 percent of the voting-age population. In 31 of the key races, voters of color represent 20 to 78 percent of the voting-age population and are positioned to have a significant impact.

Based on this, we expect their perceptions of Mr. Trumps racism and his partys acceptance of it will motivate them to cast votes for Democratic candidates.The importance of not challenging church teaching is seen in the contrast of two gay-priest scandals of the Francis pontificate. The first is the case of Msgr. Battista Ricca, a Vatican diplomat who, while stationed in Uruguay, reportedly lived with a man, was beaten at a cruising spot and once got stuck in an elevator with a rent boy. (In Uruguay, the age of consent is 15.) These facts were concealed from Pope Francis, who in 2013 appointed Monsignor Ricca to a position of oversight at the Vatican Bank.

After Monsignor Riccas sins were exposed, Francis chose to stand by him, famously saying, Who am I to judge? Msgr. Krzysztof Charamsa suffered a less happy fate. The priest, who worked at the Vaticans Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, announced in 2015 that he was gay and had a male partner, and asked the church to change its teaching. He was immediately fired. Both Monsignor Ricca and Monsignor Charamsa had sinned, but only one had stepped out of line.

The other rule of the clerical closet is not violating the civil law  or at least not getting caught. Francis defended Monsignor Ricca by distinguishing between sins and crimes: They are not crimes, right? Crimes are something different. This distinction provides cover for sex abuse. When countless priests are allowed to live double lives, it is hard to tell who is concealing crimes. Cardinal McCarrick was widely seen as merely preying on adult seminarians. Now he has been credibly accused of sexual abuse of a minor.

Corrupt as this situation is, many Catholic leaders prefer it to the coming civil war. That seemed to be the attitude of Bishop Robert Barron when he called for an investigation that avoids ideological hobby horses like priestly celibacy and homosexuality. Bishop Barron is right to insist that accountability comes first. This is why anyone implicated in cover-up  up to and including Pope Francis  needs to resign.When I think of all the black art being ushered in by this new era, I feel conflicted. As a black person, I enjoy seeing artists whose careers are finally being given due praise and whose voices are at last being amplified. However, a question arises of what it means to be truly represented. Is it enough to look like the artist if you do not recognize yourself in the art?

When the film Black Panther was released in theaters, it was regarded as a historic moment for black representation in the comic book world. During the premiere weekend and for months after, my social media feeds were flooded with family members, colleagues and strangers affirming the importance of the film. I saw myself in this film, many of them claimed.

When I finally saw the film, I did not recognize much of myself in it. Sure, I saw my old neighborhood in Oakland, Calif. I saw black people who looked like me, dressed like me and spoke like me. However, the film did not reflect my experience as a black American, my relationship to slavery or my interactions with other members of the African diaspora. I walked away feeling wholly unrepresented.

My father argued that I was ungrateful, and that the film was historic for black people, as it demanded Hollywood finally recognize the value of black talent. He asserted that this was a watershed moment in how our stories would be told, ones in which black people were allotted dignity and dimensionality. I shrugged in acquiescence, but in reality I knew the film was not my story. In fact, it was no ones story. The film is wholly fiction. There is no Wakanda, no place on the African continent where slavery, colonialism or occupation did not occur, and no diasporic war between continental Africans and black people abroad. It was simply a story, told using black actors and black historical references.What about developments at the national level? Thats where things get really scary. Were currently sitting on a knife edge. If we fall off it in the wrong direction  specifically, if Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November  we will become another Poland or Hungary faster than you can imagine .

This week Axios created a bit of a stir with a scoop about a spreadsheet circulating among Republicans in Congress, listing investigations they think Democrats are likely to carry out if they take the House. The thing about the list is that every item on it  starting with Donald Trumps tax returns  is something that obviously should be investigated, and would have been investigated under any other president. But the people circulating the document simply take it for granted that Republicans wont address any of these issues: Party loyalty will prevail over constitutional responsibility.

Many Trump critics celebrated last weeks legal developments, taking the Manafort conviction and the Cohen guilty plea as signs that the walls may finally be closing in on the lawbreaker in chief. But I felt a sense of deepened dread as I watched the Republican reaction: Faced with undeniable evidence of Trumps thuggishness, his party closed ranks around him more tightly than ever.

A year ago it seemed possible that there might be limits to the partys complicity, that there would come a point where at least a few representatives or senators would say, no more. Now its clear that there are no limits : Theyll do whatever it takes to defend Trump and consolidate power.

This goes even for politicians who once seemed to have some principles. Senator Susan Collins of Maine was a voice of independence in the health care debate; now she sees no problem with having a president whos an unindicted co-conspirator appoint a Supreme Court justice who believes that presidents are immune from prosecution. Senator Lindsey Graham denounced Trump in 2016, and until recently seemed to be standing up against the idea of firing the attorney general to kill the Mueller investigation; now hes signaled that hes O.K. with such a firing.

But why is America, the birthplace of democracy, so close to following the lead of other countries that have recently destroyed it?

Dont tell me about economic anxiety. Thats not what happened in Poland, which grew steadily through the financial crisis and its aftermath. And its not what happened here in 2016: Study after study has found that racial resentment, not economic distress, drove Trump voters.

The point is that were suffering from the same disease  white nationalism run wild  that has already effectively killed democracy in some other Western nations. And were very, very close to the point of no return .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.About 25,000 years ago in Western Europe, the last cave bear drew its final breath and the species went extinct.

But a study published on Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution finds that some cave bear DNA lives on in modern brown bears, much like humans carry around a bit of Neanderthal.

The finding challenges our view of extinction, said Ludovic Orlando, a professor at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who was not involved in the research.

Extinction does not imply that genetic material is gone forever, he said via email.

In the new study, researchers initially set out to learn more about the cave bear by studying its genetics. Almost as a lark they compared the genetic sequence theyd derived for the cave bear with an existing sequence of a brown bear, said Axel Barlow, the lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Potsdam in Germany. The results surprised them.SAN FRANCISCO  Since Uber started a self-driving car program in 2015, it has insisted on developing its own driverless technology and operating its own fleet of autonomous vehicles.

Now the ride-hailing company is starting to shift away from that own-it-all strategy.

Uber is receiving a new $500 million investment from Toyota, which would value the company at $76 billion, according to a person briefed on the deal, who was not authorized to speak publicly. With that investment, Uber plans to provide its self-driving technology to a fleet of Toyota minivans, which may be operated by the Japanese automaker or a third party, the companies said in a joint announcement.

The fleet will also be equipped with Toyotas safety software, called Guardian, and will pick up passengers on Ubers ride-hailing network. The companies anticipate starting a pilot program by 2021.

This agreement and investment marks an important milestone in our transformation to a mobility company as we help provide a path for safe and secure expansion of mobility services like ride-sharing that includes Toyota vehicles and technologies, Shigeki Tomoyama, executive vice president of Toyota Motor, said in a statement. Toyotas investment was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.New research contains a message for high school students, especially low-income ones, who want to go to college: Take the SAT early and often.

Its already clear from earlier studies that lack of information is a big reason many less affluent students dont make it to college. They get less help navigating the complex process of applying. A new study finds another specific instance of this: Underrepresented students are less likely to take college admission tests more than once.

Encouraging them to retake tests  as many of their high-income, white and Asian-American peers do  could close a substantial portion of the income and racial gap in enrollment at four-year colleges. Thats the conclusion of a working paper released on Monday by Joshua S. Goodman, Oded Gurantz and Jonathan Smith.

The three economists studied over 10 million students who took the SAT reasoning test, one of two standard college admissions exams (along with the ACT), and analyzed the effect that retaking the exam had on the students subsequent scores and college prospects.The health care system in the United States costs nearly double that of its peer countries, without much better outcomes. Many scholars and policymakers have looked at this state of affairs and dreamed big. Maybe theres some broad fix  high deductibles, improvements in end-of-life care, a single-payer system  that can make United States health care less expensive.

But what if the most workable answer isnt something big, but hosts of small tweaks? A group of about a dozen health economists has begun trying to identify policy adjustments, sometimes in tiny slices of the health care system, that could produce savings worth around 1 percent of the countrys $3.3 trillion annual health spending. If you put together enough such fixes, the group points out, they could add up to something more substantial.

This is a shift from the kind of research that is typically rewarded by big journal editors and tenure committees, but it could turn out to have a crucial role in understanding why our health care system is so expensive, and so unusual.

I think focusing on the forest misses the fact that there are trees encroaching out of the forest, said Fiona Scott Morton, a health economist at the Yale School of Management. And we need to start cutting them down.Were getting nothing done, my friends. Were getting nothing done. It was a few days before the historic Obamacare repeal vote, and Republicans desperately needed John McCain. It was a dramatic and consequential return for John McCain to the Senate floor. What a dramatic morning this is turning out to be, with John McCain making that surprise return to Washington. And McCains vote is going to give leadership a lot more breathing room. But the maverick of the Senate had just been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and he was playing hard to get. Weve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues, because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle. But would he vote with his party, or would he defect? I will not vote for this bill as it is today. This was the kind of moment that John McCain lives for. He is going to be the deciding vote, and hes got control of a major piece of legislation in his hand. You heard John McCain. A really historic moment. Trying to set a new tone when it comes to fixing our health care system. When you go against the grain in Washington, you get a lot of attention. Shutting down the government injured the people of my state. Why? Why would we want to do that? John McCain had a big ego, and he liked the attention. But also, I do think that the maverick aspect to McCain was real. He saw a lot of the things that went on in Washington as semi-idiotic, or corrupt. I think the Congress of the United States  both Republicans and Democrats  should be ashamed of themselves. These may be worthy projects. They may be. Generally they arent. How many more lawmakers, staffers, government officials, and contractors have to go to jail before we actually fix this process? He liked challenging authority. It may be part of that is just growing up in a military family and having all that military experience, where youre subject to so much authority. I have trouble with this. More than two-syllable words  In the political phase of his life, he was willing to step up, take a chance, and shake up the system. Eleven million people live in the shadows, and they live here in de facto amnesty, and, by God, they are being exploited every single day. Of course, he switched back and forth when it suited his politics. We will secure the borders first when I am president of the United States. I am proud that Republicans are the party of lower taxes. I cannot in good conscience vote in favor of tax cuts. There have been so many John McCains over the years. He came to Congress as this exalted war hero whod already had a national reputation because of his time as a P.O.W. in Vietnam. McCain was shot down, held for years in terrible conditions in the Hanoi Hilton. He had a high profile because of his father. The commander in chief of our Pacific forces, Admiral John S. McCain Jr. As you know, we are living in a troubled world  They knew that they had something of a celebrity prisoner there. He was tortured, subjected to really unthinkable experiences. He resisted and resisted, but ultimately did make a confession. That really haunted him through the rest of his life. He felt that he had caved and betrayed his country. When he returned from Vietnam, to much acclaim, he was an ambitious guy, and he quickly turned to politics. John McCain, a name Arizonans are talking about. He ran for the House. Came in as a pretty conventional conservative  somebody who wanted to get on board the Reagan Revolution. Speaker, like a poor fellow who brought his horse to water but could not make it drink, Walter Mondale proposes to throw more tax money at the deficit with little chance of making it shrink. But there was a watershed moment coming for John McCain   a major congressional scandal  The Keating Five Scandal. Charles Keating, a millionaire banker who has come to embody the savings and loan scandal  A group of senators  a bipartisan group  had interceded on behalf of a big businessman, and they tried to help him out of a regulatory problem. It was a big scandal at the moment, because the S&L crisis was huge back then. Do you swear under oath to this committee you were unaware of that at the time? McCain was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing. But I understand why the committee made the arrangements they did. He thought it be besmirched his honor, which is probably the most important thing to John McCain besides his family, is his honor. This was a searing experience for McCain, and it really helped shape his later image as a maverick, because he immediately became someone, I think, who wanted to shake up the system and rein in the influence of money and politics. Theres too much money washing around, and this money makes good people do bad things, and bad people do worse things. John McCain was ready to do that. His party really wasnt. They liked the campaign system the way it was, particularly Mitch McConnell. To effectively discuss issues in this country, one must have access to money. He was the leading foe of John McCain. Who do you want to be the next president of these United States? McCain! Thats right. So McCain had presidential ambitions. 2000 seemed like a good opportunity for him. This was the year of the famous Straight Talk Express. He was really letting it hang out in a lot of ways. If I were a tree, I would be a  If I were a tree, I would be a root. What does that mean? Id be glad to tell you  But he ran into a real buzzsaw with the Bush family and Karl Rove. Let me finish. Let me finish. All right, then. The Bush campaign did some really tough negative advertising. McCains campaign is crawling with lobbyists. His conservative hometown paper warns  Its time the rest of the nation learns about the McCain we know. McCain was stung when he came back to the Senate, you could tell. Gentlemen  Senator John McCain, the Republican, and Senator Barack Obama, the  In 2008, this was really John McCains last opportunity. He took the nomination, but he was really in trouble from the start. Obama, the celebrity candidate, the economic collapse  The fundamentals of our economy are strong   picking Sarah Palin as his running mate. This is absolutely overwhelming. People really questioned John McCains judgment on that. Even at the end, McCain was still fighting the leaders of his party. Yesterday, I received a call from President Putin of Russia  Being cozy with the Russians, pulling back in Asia. To John McCain, this was anathema. He wouldnt mention Trump by name, but he would talk about failures of American foreign policy and the conduct.  refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems. This was amped up more after the diagnosis of brain cancer. I think that was also part of his vote on the health care repeal. At the climactic moment, he walked out onto the floor, turned thumbs down, and killed the repeal effort. It was one of his last big acts as a U.S. senator. Making news in the 11th hour  The resistance to President Trump had its biggest victory yet. This is a major defeat. You could look at this one moment like a Renaissance painting. It was unbelievable. McCain wasnt going to go quietly.WASHINGTON  When a lawyer for one of Russias most powerful reputed crime bosses arrived at F.B.I. headquarters one day around 2006, he wanted to cut a deal. The Russian, Semion Y. Mogilevich, had been indicted three years earlier by the department on charges of defrauding a company outside Philadelphia out of $150 million and could not travel for fear of arrest.

As the lawyer made his pitch, a supervising F.B.I. agent and a senior career Justice Department official, Bruce G. Ohr, both listened intently, according to a former bureau official who described the meeting. The case was significant for American law enforcement. It had made headlines and laid the groundwork for Justice Department efforts to combat Russian organized crime overseas.

Finally, the F.B.I. agent spoke. No deal, he said; Mr. Mogilevich must surrender. Mr. Ohr said little, but his unwillingness to negotiate was signal enough: The Justice Department would not compromise with the Russian mafia.

Occasionally you run across people from the Justice Department who have an air of superiority toward agents, and Bruce had none of that, said Chris Swecker, a former senior F.B.I. official who worked with Mr. Ohr. He was just the opposite. He was well liked at the F.B.I. and fought for their cases.Well, at the time I thought we were making a mistake, if you check your background very carefully, I thought that we were not putting enough money into child care or transportation or housing for welfare recipients. We eventually, in the second term, added more resources to support welfare recipients. The changes in welfare were consensus changes, not simply between the Democrats and the Republicans. But the Democrats themselves felt that the welfare system needed to be an opportunity to people to transition into work.

We tried to do everything we could to build a support system for low-income people that went to work. We need to do much more than that now. As the economy is transitioning, I believe we need to look at guaranteed income. But we also need to think about mobile benefits: health care, child care, vacation time, family leave. There are a lot of things that every employer is not going to build in. These ought to move with you.

This is certainly no longer Bill Clintons Democratic Party. And when you say something like guaranteed income people will inevitably say, Well that sounds like socialism.

Its not socialism. Its very far from socialism. Progressive Republicans and progressive Democrats are all talking about this kind of thing, and its not socialism.

But certainly there are elements of the Democratic Party right now that are embracing socialism. Is that a mistake?

The Democratic Party has always had a big tent, and has always had people to the left, people to the right and people to the center. Whether there are more or less in each of these camps depends on what year youre talking about. The most important thing is to come together on the things that will improve the lives of Americans.what was said

This is one of the largest trade deals ever made. Maybe the largest trade deal ever made.

 President Trump, in a phone call with President Enrique Pena Nieto of Mexico on Monday

the facts

False.

Mr. Trump announced on Monday that the United States and Mexico had reached a preliminary agreement to revise key portions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. That is not the same thing as signing a new bilateral deal.

Nor would a United States-Mexico trade agreement potentially rank as the largest trade deal ever made.

It is premature to consider the bilateral agreement a done deal. Canada, the third country that was a party to Nafta in 1993, has not yet agreed to the changes. Participating in Mondays announcement via conference call, Mr. Pena Nieto, the outgoing Mexican president, said he hoped Canada would rejoin the negotiations.

Congress would also need to approve the changes before the trade deal could go into effect.

Even if Mexico eventually agreed, and Congress approved the two-country deal, it would by definition be smaller than Nafta, a three-country deal. In 2017, trade between the United States and Mexico totaled $615.9 billion in goods and services. That same year, trade between the United States and Canada was about $57 billion more, at $673.1 billion.The president has found success wading into contested governors primaries in South Carolina, Georgia and Kansas, and he may have had the most impact with his early support for Representative Ron DeSantis, who is leading in the polls in the Florida governors primary.

If a president wants to reshape the party in his own image, theres no better way to do that than to impact the outcome of primaries, said Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and nominee for governor who got a late endorsement in his primary from Mr. Trump.

The presidents endorsements have largely been done to repay supporters, but Mr. Trump has also sought to solidify new alliances by lending a hand to some former critics. For example, he helped ensure that Senator Dean Heller of Nevada would not have a primary challenger, propelled Representative Martha Roby of Alabama in her runoff, and he even got behind Mitt Romneys Senate bid in Utah. Each of them, to varying degrees, had criticized the president in 2016.

The White House political director, Bill Stepien, said that Mr. Trumps endorsement is powerful, but there are many tools in his political tool kit, including not engaging openly in a race but working behind the scenes as party leader. He said that Nevada was an important example of where the president and his team worked behind the scenes to clear the Senate primary field by nudging a Heller challenger to run for the House instead.

Mr. Lewandowski was even blunter, recalling a Las Vegas dinner he attended in 2017 with Mr. Heller, in which he bluntly told the senator that if he did not fall in line with Mr. Trump, the presidents allies would aggressively target him. I said, With all due respect, I will not miss, Mr. Lewandowski recalled.

This is not to say that Mr. Trump has totally forgiven and forgotten those who denounced his campaign  or that the presidents advisers do not strategically highlight past critiques when they believe it is best for him to stay out of races.Under the changes agreed to by Mexico and the United States, car companies would be required to manufacture at least 75 percent of an automobiles value in North America under the new rules, up from 62.5 percent, to qualify for Naftas zero tariffs. They will also be required to use more local steel, aluminum and auto parts, and have 40 to 45 percent of the car made by workers earning at least $16 an hour, a boon to both the United States and Canada and a win for labor unions, which have been among Naftas biggest critics.

Automakers urge the U.S. and Mexico to quickly re-engage with Canada to continue to build on this progress, the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, which represents most carmakers that sell vehicles in the United States, said in a statement. The industry is hopeful that any changes to Nafta auto rules of origin continue to strike the right balance by incentivizing production and investment in North America while keeping new vehicles affordable for more Americans.

In a briefing Monday, administration officials said the United States and Mexico had also reached an agreement over a sunset clause, proposed by the Trump administration, that would cause Nafta to automatically expire unless the three countries voted to extend it.

The two countries agreed to a review of the trade pact every six years that would extend its lifetime for 16 more years, officials said. That longer time horizon would give lawmakers a chance to review the pacts progress, while giving businesses certainty for the near future.

The countries also agreed to limit the kinds of legal challenges that investors can make against foreign governments under Nafta. The oil and gas, infrastructure, energy generation and telecom industries are exempted from these more restrictive rules, and will operate under the previous terms, Mr. Lighthizer said  a win for those industries.

One contentious issue that remains unresolved is whether the administration will exempt Mexico from its steel and aluminum tariffs. Mr. Trump hit Mexico, along with Canada, the European Union and other nations, with 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent tariffs on aluminum, in part to force concessions on other trade issues. Mexican officials said they expected the tariffs to be addressed down the road.

I dont think it was necessary to address them now, Mr. Videgaray said. Wed like those to be addressed alongside Canada. It would be great if we could have a trilateral agreement on lifting those and our retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods.Who is to blame for fattening up Americans and killing their hearts? McDonalds, it seems, is not even in the running. In fact, when you compare the fare under the Golden Arches with many of the dishes served at chain restaurants around the country, a Big Mac with large fries and soda begins to sound like health food.

Hungry for a hearty breakfast? You could  if you dare to test the resilience of your heart  try the Cheesecake Factorys Breakfast Burrito: warm tortilla filled with scrambled eggs, bacon, chicken chorizo, cheese, crispy potatoes, avocado, peppers and onions, over spicy ranchero sauce. Nutritional information: 2,730 calories (more than a days worth, so I hope youll skip lunch and dinner), 4,630 milligrams of sodium (two days worth) and 73 grams of saturated fat (more than three days worth).

Youd have to eat seven Sausage McMuffins from McDonalds to equal the cardiovascular and waistline damage done by one burrito, according to the latest Xtreme Eating Awards bestowed by the Nutrition Action Healthletter, published by the nonprofit advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, in Washington.

Or maybe youd prefer another 2018 awardee to start your day: Chilis Honey-Chipotle Crispers & Waffles that dishes up Belgian waffles topped with battered fried chicken, bacon, jalapenos and ancho-chili ranch sauce and fries with honey-chipotle sauce. With 2,510 calories, 40 grams of saturated fat, 4,480 milligrams of sodium and 105 grams (26 teaspoons) of sugar, its like eating five Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts with 30 McDonalds Chicken McNuggets and five packets of barbecue sauce.Miss Dearborn was inexperienced but essentially benign, and Mr. Phillips was inept and offended Anne gravely by making her sit next to a boy who had teased her (spoiler alert: reader, she married him, but not till several books later in the series). Miss Brownell, the teacher who greeted the newly orphaned 9-year-old Emily of New Moon (also by Lucy Maud Montgomery) in her new school, after she had also been taken in by her elderly aunts on Prince Edward Island, was known to be a strict disciplinarian, and she was truly bad news.

Emily is already excruciatingly embarrassed to be sent to school in a terrible gingham apron and an equally terrible gingham sunbonnet, and the other little girls are not nice about it  aah, the shame of the sunbonnet. Why dont you like me? she asks, and one of the other girls says, Because you aint a bit like us. To which Emily responds, scornfully, I wouldnt want to be.

Emily eventually cows her classmates through sheer force of personality, and actually comes to enjoy school, but the teacher, Miss Brownell, is no good, right from day one, when Emily made up her mind that she did not like Miss Brownell and never would like her. And Miss Brownell, over the course of the book, slaps Emilys face and mocks her poetry.

My favorite old-fashioned first-day-of-school scene is in a book just over a hundred years old, Understood Betsy, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. The author was a strong proponent of Maria Montessoris methods and translated her works into English, and much of Betsys school experience leads back to Montessoris precepts of progressive education and the importance of giving children a chance to engage with the real world.

Betsy is a nervous urban third grader, being scientifically brought up by her Aunt Frances, who sympathizes with all her fears and anxieties and thereby encourages her to dwell on them; when Betsy goes to live with her Vermont cousins, she is deeply shocked to be sent off to school on her own. Aunt Frances had never, no never, let her go to school alone, and on the first day of the year always took her to the new teacher and introduced her and told the teacher how sensitive she was and how hard to understand; and then she stayed there for an hour or two till Elizabeth Ann got used to things!

But Betsy triumphs  she finds the little one-room country school, she takes her place, and then she is disconcerted to realize that she will work at different grade levels in her different subjects, reading in the seventh reader, doing arithmetic at the second-grade level, spelling at the third. In despair she asks the teacher, What grade am I? And the teacher tells her, you arent any grade at all, no matter where you are in school . whats the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you dont know your multiplication table?

Betsy is completely shocked at this, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher explains, never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up.

The narrative of life in school is important for every child, and reading the stories of other children in distant times and places can help children understand and shape their stories.MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan  An airstrike killed six Taliban insurgents along the border of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, an area where cross-border attacks are rare, Afghan officials said on Monday.

The officials said the strike was carried out on Sunday by Tajikistans Air Force. Tajik forestry officials surrounded and attacked a group of Taliban drug smugglers who had crossed the border and were just inside Tajik territory, according to Ahmad Jawad Hijri, a spokesman for the governor of Takhar Province in northern Afghanistan.

Two forestry officials were killed in the confrontation, he said, and the Tajik Air Force then responded with the strike, which killed six Taliban insurgents.

But that account seemed to conflict with what is known about Tajikistans capabilities. The country has a tiny air force that is not known to include armed jets, according to World Air Forces 2017, an aerospace industry publication.GENEVA  Myanmars army commander and other top generals should face trial in an international court for genocide against Rohingya Muslims and for crimes against humanity targeting other ethnic minorities, United Nations experts said on Monday after a yearlong investigation.

Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief of Myanmars army, is one of six generals named as priority subjects for investigation and prosecution by a United Nations Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar in a report detailing military campaigns involving atrocities that undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law.

The three-member panel leveled the most serious charge, genocide, over the ferocious campaign unleashed by the Buddhist-majority security forces against Rohingya Muslims a year ago. That campaign, in the state of Rakhine, sent more than 700,000 fleeing across the border to Bangladesh.

Myanmar has rejected allegations of widespread atrocities, asserting that its security forces were simply responding to attacks by Rohingya militants on Myanmar police posts and an army station on Aug. 25 last year. But the panel said there was enough information to warrant investigation and prosecution of senior officers so that a competent court can determine their liability for genocide.WASHINGTON  North Korean state media criticized the United States over the weekend for extremely provocative and dangerous military moves in Pacific waters and warned that the diplomacy forged between the two countries leaders during their Singapore summit meeting in June could be in jeopardy.

The belligerent articles were the first official comments from North Korea since a frustrated President Trump announced on Friday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was canceling his most recent plan to travel to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

Mr. Trumps announcement, made in a series of tweets, was the first acknowledgment by the American president that the diplomatic process with North Korea had stalled.

He said the United States had not been making sufficient progress on getting North Korea to halt or dismantle its nuclear weapons program, and blamed China for the slow progress. Some American officials and analysts in Beijing, however, have said China generally has adhered to an American-led economic sanctions plan against North Korea.SYDNEY, Australia  At a regular Sunday morning service, before the praise songs and a sermon on resilience, a pastor at one of Sydneys largest Pentecostal churches mentioned a congregant who was usually among those worshiping there.

Church had always been a part of his life and for the past decade, his spiritual home has been this bustling sanctuary with a cross formed from bright lights.

But he was not with them this past Sunday. On Friday, he became Australias newest prime minister.

Im incredibly hopeful  hopeful for the future of our generation, said Alison Bonhomme, a senior pastor at Horizon Church, reflecting on the political tumult that led Scott Morrison to become the countrys leader.

A burst of applause followed.

Mr. Morrison and his faith represent a break with tradition in Australia, where politics has long been ardently secular. He is the first prime minister to come from one of the countrys growing evangelical Christian movements, leading many experts and voters to wonder how his Christianity might affect various issues, from foreign policy to social policy.BRUSSELS  For 20 years, the Dutch police investigated the rape and murder of an 11-year-old schoolboy, and the Dutch news media chronicled the cases many twists and turns.

Now, after an investigation in which 17,500 Dutchmen voluntarily took part in DNA profiling, a suspect has been arrested in Spain.

The boy, Nicky Verstappen, had attended a summer camp at a nature reserve in the southern Netherlands in 1998. On a night that August, he left his tent and never returned. His body, pajama-clad and barefoot, was discovered the next day, hidden in a dense pine forest about a mile away. He had been raped and killed.

DNA found on the boys clothes was of male origin. But no samples in Dutch and international criminal databases matched it. Nor did hundreds of samples initially taken from men living near the nature reserve and from men linked to Nicky or the camp.What are the ideological divisions in the church?

The most volatile disputes have to do with social issues on which public opinion in Western countries has moved away from church teaching  among them homosexuality, abortion, divorce and remarriage.

The popes defenders say it is less a matter of changing church doctrine than of how the church treats people who have broken with that doctrine. Critics say Francis is undermining established and immutable principles.

Francis sent shock waves through the Catholic world soon after his election as pope in 2013 by saying, If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge? He did it again less than two months later, saying that the church cannot be obsessed with issues like abortion, homosexuality and birth control.

His 2016 statement on the family urged priests and congregations to be more welcoming of people it long castigated as sinners, and to focus more on social missions like caring for the poor. And he broke with tradition in proposing a less centrally governed church, urging elements of the church around the world to find their own approaches to difficult issues.

The church also still has older, simmering ideological disputes dating to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. There are archconservatives within the church who oppose the changes made since then, like having priests celebrate Mass in languages other than Latin and allowing them to place communion wafers in parishioners hands rather than on their tongues.

Who opposes Francis within the church, and why?

There is a sizable faction of traditionalist prelates who have resisted the popes moves to liberalize the church to accommodate modern attitudes  which they see as a weakening of doctrine. They include Cardinals Gerhard Muller and Walter Brandmuller, who are German; Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, an American; and Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, an Italian who died last year, among others.

There are bishops who like what Pope Francis is doing, bishops who dont like what Pope Francis is doing and hope he goes to his eternal reward, and bishops who are just confused by Pope Francis, said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest who writes for The National Catholic Reporter. Certainly the ones who dont like him, who are most ideological, are the most vocal.MOSCOW  Russias highest-profile opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, was sentenced to 30 days in jail on Monday for a protest that happened seven months ago  a move that he maintained was intended to prevent him from organizing nationwide protests against plans to raise the retirement age in Russia.

The ruling, handed down by the Tverskoi District Court in Moscow, held that Mr. Navalny, whom the police detained on Saturday, broke the law by holding an unsanctioned protest in the capital in late January.

In a Facebook post on Sunday, Mr. Navalny accused the authorities of detaining him to disrupt the planning of nationwide protests scheduled for Sept. 9, and to prevent him from attending those demonstrations.

Usually, they try to detain me on the eve of the protest, but this time it was a whole two weeks in advance, he wrote as he awaited the latest in a long string of rulings sentencing him to short jail terms. It is his fifth such administrative arrest since the start of 2017.WASHINGTON  The top American air commander in the Middle East is urging the Saudi-led coalition of Arab nations to be more forthcoming about an investigation into an airstrike in northern Yemen earlier this month that struck a school bus, killing more than 40 children.

The comments by Lt. Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian reflected increasing exasperation by United States officials over the conflict that has spiraled into a humanitarian disaster.

Theres a level of frustration we need to acknowledge, General Harrigian said in a wide-ranging telephone interview last week. They need to come out and say what occurred there.

His comments were the latest, and bluntest, public critique of the Saudi-led air campaign against Houthi rebels that have been voiced by a growing number of senior American military, Pentagon and diplomatic officials seeking to distance the United States from the conflict  but who are facing increasing questions about American support for the air war with every errant strike.For years, the assumption has been that texting and social media would eventually sentence email to the communications graveyard alongside fax machines and word processors, but an August Adobe survey found that email usage is actually increasing in the workforce.

The survey, which polled U.S. white-collar workers who own smartphones, found that a majority of respondents  72 percent  reported that email remains the most commonly used method for communicating with colleagues.

And while the total number of hours employees spend each day dedicated to work email has remained the same compared to 2017, the survey found employees are now spending more time on average  2.5 hours more  checking their personal email this year.

A majority of employees  52 percent  said they check their personal email every few hours while at work , and nearly the same number  49 percent  said they check their work email outside of normal business hours. Nearly a third  28 percent  said they occasionally check their work email while theyre on vacation, and 42 percent said they check their personal emails during this time. 44 percent said they check their email while theyre getting ready, eating breakfast or having coffee in the morning. A quarter  25 percent  said they believe they check their email too much.

Not surprisingly, 85 percent said smartphones are the means by which they check their emails. Most respondents  especially older respondents  said they expect their work and personal email use to remain the same over the next two years.

Due to its continued popularity, email also retains enormous potential as a marketing tactic. Half of the respondents surveyed across all age groups  50 percent  said email is their preferred contact method to receive an offer from brands, and 31 percent said some email offers theyd seen over the past year were compelling enough to open.

For workers over 35, emails preference as a top choice for receiving branded content was higher, at 55 percent. Not surprisingly, it was much less popular among younger professionals. Only 32 percent of those 18 to 24 and 44 percent of those 25 to 34 said email was their preferred venue for receiving branded content.

When asked what respondents would change about branded emails if they had a choice, 39 percent of all respondents expressed a desire to make content more informative as opposed to promotional. Making content more personalized was also cited by 27 percent of respondents.

Research for the 2018 Adobe Consumer Email Survey was conducted by Canadian market and social research firm Advanis. Research was conducted online in late June.A silver lining has finally emerged amid the carnage that is Team Trump.

And it's not coming from the glorious parade of flippers (it should be illegal, right Donald) led by Trumps personal consigliere Michael Cohen, Trump Organization bookkeeping supremo Allen Weisselberg and American Media Inc. publisher David Pecker.

The twitter-in-chief deserves accolades for the terrific job that hes done in restoring the publics confidence in the media, which is on the upswing just as action heats up in Trumps battle to remain in his government job.

The Poynter Institutes just released survey of the media landscape shows a surge during the last two years in the level of trust in the media. That trust is up 22 percent since roughly the time that Donald Trump stormed onto the Washington scene.

Poynter noted that the upswing in media trust really began to take off in 2017, which was the time that the tweeter-in-chief began Operation Fire Comey and rigged witch hunt attack on special counselor Robert Muellers probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election with possible collusion from Team Trump.

Poynters poll follows the Aug. 15 survey released by Quinnipiac University that found a solid majority of Americans rejected Trumps attack on the media as the enemy of the people.

A healthy 65 percent of respondents rebuffed Trump, calling the media an important part of democracy. Only 26 percent of those surveyed bought the enemy of the people line.

The Quinnipiac results also should make Donald think twice before firing Mueller as he steps up the investigation that threatens to torpedo Trumps presidency and toss some of his most trusted lieutenants in jail.

More than half (51 percent) of those polled believe the special counsel is conducting a fair investigation into the possible coordination between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government.

Both surveys from Poynter and Quinnipiac show that Americans are rallying around the media in defiance of Trumps relentless attacks on fake news.

Unlike Trumps current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a majority of Americans understand that truth IS truth. They also say "nyet" to Trump's advice to not believe what you see and hear in the media.

People of all political stripes should thank president Trump for beginning his Make America Great Again campaign with the media, which is on the comeback trail after years of decline.

Now if only Donald would lift his burdensome tariffs on newsprint....Catholics in Ireland have come to feeling like an 'oppressed minority' has co-incided with Leo Varadkar's elevation to Taoiseach according to a Laois Offaly General Election candidate.

Cllr John Leahy, who is also RENUA Ireland leader, called on Leo Varadkar to deliver on a promise to build a new and more mature relationship between the Catholic Church and the Irish State.

"Mr Varadkars words are welcome and we hope they are more than words. Since this man took office Catholics have felt like an oppressed minority," said Cllr Leahy.

"Many are now, for the first time since the Penal Days, afraid to disclose their Catholicism to friends and employers. The Phoenix Park mass indicates how deep the roots of faith are. That faith, the faith of the people should be respected.

"There can be no doubt the church has committed grave sins. The Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, industrial schools, illegal adoptions and clerical child abuse are stains on the church that no amount of apologies can erase," he added.

He insisted that the State played its part.

"We should also though be clear that the state colluded in keeping people in dark corners, behind closed doors and cries of help that went unheard.

"And the state, too often still, when it comes to the abuse of citizens and children plays a similar role," he said.

The Offaly county coucillor wen ton to say Leo Varadkar's call for zero tolerance extends to other areas.

"The current attack on the church for historical sins sits ill when coming from the lips of an administration that stands idly by, makes false promises and pretends it does not know about current scandals such as Cervical Check.

"Mr Varadkar is correct in saying there can only be zero tolerance for those who abuse innocent children or who facilitate the abuse.

"But that must apply to everyone and every institution of the state. We are a changing state and a warmer more understanding country. Tolerance however cuts both ways.

"The fundamentalist style rage with which the church is being excised from communities, hospitals and schools has to stop. The church has committed many sins.

"Those who have faith do not only feel excluded and alienated from the Church, they also feel excluded from a state which treats them as the enemy within."

"Its time Mr Varadkar practised what he preaches and engages in real dialogue with the church and those who remain within the faith.

"Only then can we rebuild a genuine relationship that will allow both the state and church to thrive independently," John concluded," concluded the councillor.Offaly shop owners Monica and Jacob Campbell from The Village Store XL at Carrig, Birr, Offaly recently visited the set of TG4's Ros na Run as part of a sponsorship deal.

The show's XL retailer Vince de Burca, actor Paul McCloskey, is in for some tough times when the new season of TG4s flagship soap opera Ros na Run returns to the screens next month.

This year, the 23rd season, will see the popular character forced to confront his past mistakes, when an unexpected visitor arrives in the village, this puts his relationship with his partner Caitriona under serious strain, some of it hilariously entertaining!

TG4 and BWG Foods, owners and operators of the XL brand in Ireland, last year announced a new sponsorship agreement to open an XL store on the set of Irelands only Irish language soap. The three-year agreement, saw the introduction of a newly branded XL local Siopa to the Ros na Run streetscape, and that was marked by a visit of real XL owners to the set.

Now, entering its second year on set, the XL store is at the heart of the action, a hub where characters meet daily to gossip, clash and make peace.

Ros na Runs partnership with XL is an ideal one, as BWG Foods, the owners of the XL brand, pride themselves on serving local communities, both rural and urban. Of course, Ros na Run is not unlike any other rural community. Set in the Connemara Gaeltacht, Ros na Run depicts a life less ordinary, loaded with mystery, humour and pathos.

John Moane, Managing Director Wholesale, BWG Foods, owners and operators of the XL brand, said, Our partnership with TG4 and Ros na Run has been a great success in year one. We are delighted with how the XL Siopa has been such a central hub for the programme, and Vince is a great retailer! This is a very exciting sponsorship for Irish television - one that brings the XL brand directly to over 150,000 viewers across Ireland twice a week."

Viewers of Ros na Run were left on tenterhooks by this year's season finale. Audiences saw baby Jay in peril at the pier side, while his concerned parents searched for him in vain on the streets of Ros na Run.

The show returns for its 23rd season in September, and viewers can expect more drama and unexpected twists to unfold as secrets emerge, romances are kindled and families are torn apart. The coming season promises intrigue and betrayal, as well as Ros na Runs trademark warmth and comedy.

TG4 begin broadcasting Season 23 on Tuesday 4th September 2018. Ros na Run airs every Tuesday and Thursday at 8.30pm on TG4 with an omnibus edition Sunday evenings.

In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!7th Pay Commission: DA for CG employees likely to be at 31%

7th Pay Commission: Here is why basic monthly pay of CG employees will not increase

7th Pay Commission: When will the new DA hike be effective from

7th Pay Commission latest news today: This big announcement coming in January 2019

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 27: The latest 7th Pay Commission news today is that the government has begun discussions regarding a pay hike.

With Arun Jaitley back in the hot seat, several officials of the Union Finance Ministry have begun deliberations on the subject. Highly placed sources confirmed to OneIndia that the 7th Pay Commission would be the last.

7th Pay Commission jobs: Check vacancies pay scale and how to apply

This would mean in January 2019, the government would make a big announcement regarding the pay hike and more importantly the structure on which it would be based.

From January 2019 onwards, the government is contemplating announcing a yearly hike for Central Government employees. This would mean that the decision relating to the hikes would be based on several factors, which would include price rise among other things.

This would also ideally mean that the pay hike would go beyond what the 7th Pay Commission had fixed. The pay was fixed at Rs 18,000 and CG employees have been demanding an increase of up to Rs 26,000.

7th Pay Commission: Good news, 16 per cent hike announced for these employees

Meanwhile there were several major announcements made last week relating to the 7th Pay Commission. Let us take a look at what they were.

7th Pay Commission latest news today:

HRA of 23,000 staff in Puducherry has been hiked at a cost of Rs 6 cr every month.

16 per cent of basic pay has been cleared for those in Puducherry. Staff in Mahe, Yanam and Karaikal would get 8 per cent.

Tripura government has cleared the implementation of National Payment System (NPS). The demands for a 7th Pay Commission to be implemented have also been cleared.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 7:10 [IST]In a first, EC invokes Article 324 in West Bengal: What you should know

Why EVMs can't be tampered with? Former CEC explains

All party meet: EC takes note of concerns over EVMs, VVPATs

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

New Delhi, Aug 27: Chief Election Commisioner (CEC) OP Rawat on Monday said that the concerns expressed by some parties over the EVMs and VVPATs have been taken into account.

Speaking to the media after an all-party meeting in the national capital, Rawat said parties came with 'positive and constructive' suggestions to improve the integrity of elections.

"The Commission will take all the suggestions, examine and whatever needs to be done to improve the delivery of elections will be done." he said

"Some political parties have said that there are problems with EVMs and VVPATs. These things have been noted down by the Commission," he added.

The EC has called the meeting with seven national and 51 state recognised political parties to discuss various electoral issues.

[EC convenes all-party meet: Congress pitches for ballot paper]

The Congress earlier appealed to the Election Commission of India (ECI) that 2019 Lok Sabha polls be conducted on ballot papers. At least 17 parties, including the NDA ally Shiv Sena, have been pitching for returning to ballot papers.

The EC periodically holds consultations with all recognised political parties to elicit their views on important issues so as to strengthen the democratic system by improving electoral systems and practices.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 16:30 [IST]'Amarinder should write to SC over 1984 anti-Sikh riots', says Sukhbir Singh Badal

India

oi-Madhuri

Amritsar, Aug 27: Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal on Monday said that Amarinder Singh should write to the Supreme Court that he is the biggest/main witness in 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Speaking to media, Badal said,''He (Capt Amarinder Singh) should write to the Supreme Court that he is the biggest/main witness in the case.''

''Amarinder Singh took five names, but he has a soft corner for Tytler (Jagdish Tytler). So he didn't take his name,'' Badal also said.

Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh had earlier said,''The incident took place when Indiraji was killed, at that time Rajiv Gandhi was at an airport in Bengal. There was no Congress involvement other than some people. I have named few people, Sajjan Kumar, Dharamdas Shastri ,Arjun Das & 2 more people.''

Earlier in the day, Sukhbir Singh Badal had slammed the Congress President for saying his party was never involved in the 1984 riots and said he had "rubbed the salt into the wounds" of the Sikh community. "Rahul Gandhi has rubbed salt into the wounds of Sikh 'quom' by saying that Congress was not involved in 1984 anti-Sikh riots. It shows the thinking of Gandhi towards the Sikh community," he said.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 18:19 [IST]Has 3rd wave started in India? Here's how many cases of AY.4.2 reported in country, so far

At 2+2 dialogue, India to raise with US ban on Jaish chief Azhar

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 27: India is likely to raise the issue regarding Jaish-e-Mohammad chief, Maulana Masood Azhar with the United States during the 2+2 dialogue to be held on September 6.

The move to designate Azhar has been blocked several times by China at the insistence of its all weather friend Pakistan. While there is no fresh proposal to proscribe Azhar at the UN, India feels that it could work along with the US and ensure that China stops blocking this move.

Maulana Azhar's close aide among those killed in 'very significant' Tral encounter

The last time at the UN, China blocked a US led move to proscribe Azhar. Sources tell OneIndia that this issue would be raised when Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defence, James Mattis travel to India next month. The key focus of the meet would be defence and security.

Following the meet at India, Pompeo would head to Pakistan, where he will meet with the new establishment led by Imran Khan. India feels that Pompeo is expected to deliver a strong message to Pakistan during his visit. This would also include the case relating to Azhar, who is the mastermind of the Pathankot attack.

Fresh batch of Jaish men being trained to release prisoners from Kashmir jails

The visit to Pakistan by Pompeo would be a crucial one. It would be interesting to see how Imran Khan would handle the situation. After he came to power, he has expressed his willingness to improve ties with India. He said that Pakistan is willing to take two steps for every one step that India takes.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 12:42 [IST]Ahead of 2022 UP polls, BJP sends Diwali gifts to its 30 lakh booth-level workers

Prashant Kishor in viral video: With or without Modi, BJP will be centre of Indian polity for decades

With eye on upcoming polls, PM Modi and Shah hold day-long meeting with BJP CMs

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Aug 27: Ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah presided over a meeting of the Chief Ministers of BJP ruled states in Delhi on Tuesday.

BJP sources said the conference of chief ministers, in which the top brass takes stock of works going on in states ruled by the party and issues them directions, has assumed added significance due to the upcoming assembly elections in three states and the Lok Sabha polls and these would be likely discussed in the day-long meeting.

Assembly polls are due in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, all ruled by the BJP, later this year.

The agenda of good governance and running pro-poor policies has been a key feature of the chief ministers' meetings, which have been taking place regularly since Modi took over as prime minister in 2014.

BJP's deputy chief ministers in different states also attended the meeting.Bogus companies misuse PAN: This Delhi man becomes 'tycoon' without wanting

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

New Delhi, Aug 27: No matter how stringent measures government comes up with, the tax evaders and those indulging in scrupulous transactions will always try to find a way to cheat the system.

According an Indian Express report, a 27-year-old middle-class man from Delhi was startled to find out that his PAN number was used, without his knowledge, to carryout high value transactions abroad. He was also shocked to find out that he was a director of 13 companies.

Even he came to know about this when he got a notice from the Income Tax department in January this year.

He rushed to the police and the Enforcement Directorate to complain that his PAN number had been used without his knowledge by bogus companies, said the Indian Express report.

The man, who hails from Bihar, said that he initially did not take the notices seriously. Then he got a call from the IT department and was informed that his PAN number was used to carryout a transaction worth Rs 61.37 lakh .

Rs 61.37 lakh was allegedly remitted from one Maxkart Impex company to Dynamic Telecon Trading Ltd situated at Bright Way Tower in Mong Kok Road, Hong Kong, the Delhi man was quoted as saying by the report.

[In a dare TRAI chief makes Aadhaar details public, Twitter responds with his PAN, phone number]

When the man further delved into the case, he found out that the transaction was carried out with him as the proprietor of Maxkart Impex company.

"I got a call from an IT official who informed me that the transaction was carried forward from Janakpuri branch of a national bank," he told Indian Express.

[Trafficking, terror and now hawala: India sits on a ticking time bomb of 40,000 Rohingya Muslims]

To his amazement, when he approached the bank, the manager showed the photocopy of his voter ID card, PAN card and my photo, but the signature did not match, he said.

[How to Apply For Duplicate PAN Card/Reprint PAN Card - Your Complete Guide]

The case is now being investigated by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Delhi Police.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 11:19 [IST]Can FIRs be lodged online? Govt seeks to know

India

oi-Madhuri

New Delhi, Aug 27: Can people be allowed to lodge a first information report (FIR) online or an e-FIR from the confines of their homes, the home ministry has asked the Law Commission.

Registration of FIR is mandatory under Section 154 of the CrPC if the information discloses commission of a cognisable offence and no preliminary inquiry is permissible in such a situation, according to a November 2013 Supreme Court order.

The law panel, while examining the issue, has come across suggestions that if the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) is amended to allow people to lodge FIRs online, one of the fallouts could be that some may use the facility to tarnish the image of others.

11 revenue officials on strike booked in UP

"Yes, people do find it difficult to go to police stations to lodge an FIR. It would be much easier to lodge one from the comforts of your home. But most find it difficult to lie before police," explained a senior law panel functionary.

"Policemen understand the demeanour of the complainant. But anyone can use the online facility to tarnish the image of someone. This is what we have understood so far. But we have just begun to understand the concept. So, there is no finality," the functionary said.

In 2016, a total of 48,31,515 cognisable crimes comprising 29,75,711 Indian Penal Code (IPC) crimes and 18,55,804 Special and Local Laws (SLL) crimes were reported, according to Crimes in India of the National Crime Records Bureau.

This was an increase of 2.6 per cent over 2015 when the figure stood at 47,10,676 cases.

Requesting anonymity, a former law secretary said if the law panel recommends that FIRs can be lodged online, it will also have to provide a legal framework on how to go about it.

"Though as per law, FIR is compulsory for a cognisable offence, they will have to suggest how to check its misuse," he said.

The commission has already interacted with several police officials from various states to understand the issue.

During the DGP/IGP conference held in January, "it was suggested that there should be an amendment to Section 154 of the CrPC for enabling online registration of FIR," the home ministry informed the law panel.

In a letter, its judicial cell said, "It has since been decided to request the Law Commission to consider the suggestion during the course of comprehensive review of criminal laws being carried out by them."

Rights activist Kavita Krishnan welcomed the suggestion that people be allowed to lodge online FIRs.

"It will give greater control to people over FIR. Then police cannot say no ... For certain offences, police forces ask people to file FIRs over email. But they only accept complaints and not lodge FIR, no (FIR) number is given. It becomes an FIR much later," she told PTI.

She said the poor availing the facility will reman an issue as they do not have access to the internet. "But it is a welcome move," the activist said.

Responding to a question, Krishnan rejected suggestions that online FIRs would open 'floodgates'. "FIR is a right under law. Be it online or not, police have to register it. That's the law," she said.

In the Lalita Kumari versus the Uttar Pradesh government and others case in November 2013, a Supreme Court bench had made it clear that "registration of FIR is mandatory under Section 154 of the Code (CrPC), if the information discloses commission of a cognisable offence and no preliminary inquiry is permissible in such a situation."

The bench had also observed that if the information received does not disclose a cognisable offence but indicates the necessity for an inquiry, a preliminary inquiry may be conducted only to ascertain if the cognisable offence is disclosed or not.

Woman, daughter booked for sexual assault on 17 year old boy

"If the inquiry discloses the commission of a cognisable offence, the FIR must be registered. In cases where preliminary inquiry ends in closing the complaint, a copy of the entry of such closure must be supplied to the first informant forthwith and not later than one week.

"It must disclose reasons in brief for closing the complaint and not proceeding further," it had said

Former Uttar Pradesh director general of police Vikram Singh said for petty offences and accidents, a provision of online FIR already exists.

Singh said that an online FIR "on the face of it is very good." But if people get the freedom of lodging it, then there would be a "flood".

"Ten per cent of the population is involved in lodging fake cases against political rivals or people from other castes and others... To that extent it is not a good idea," he told PTI.

He suggested that section 182 of the IPC dealing with "false FIRs" should be reworked to ensure that those indulging in such activities are punished with a jail term of five years.

This he said will prevent burden on police. He also said a process to "sanitise" the FIRs is also required to prevent its misuse.

"In India, there is an unhealthy practice of minimalising crimes among police stations" and it prevents "free registration" of FIRs, he said.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 6:41 [IST]Bulandshahr: 'If Akhlaq's family got compensation, why can't Sumit's family get it'

Curious case of 'missing' Sangeet Som

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Lucknow, Aug 27: A sarcastic social media post claimed that BJP MLA Sangeet Som had gone missing and urged the leader to return. The post is aimed at taking a dig at Som over the law and order situation in Meerut District, the region he represents in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly.

The post specifically mentions the Sardhana incident, in which a 14-year-old girl was set ablaze by six people at her house, and says "Aap kyon tension le rahe ho vidhayak ji vo aapki beti nahi thi (Why are you worried over the incident, she was not your daughter)".

The post further accuses Som of being a "blot on society". The post further said that anyone who gives information about Som's whereabouts will be given a reward of Rs 101.

The post was then shared on a Whatsapp group by one Aijaz Khatri, said reports. Khatri along with two others have been arrested under the IT Act in connection with the case after an FIR was filed.

[Taj Mahal built by traitors, should not get place in history: BJP MLA]

"My opponents are maligning my image by such posts. All the BJP leaders, including me know about the case of the 14-year-old and girl and are concerned about her health as well," Som was quoted as saying by a News 18 report.

[Sangeet Som seeks ban on screening of riot-themed film]

After the girl was set ablaze, Som along with BJP MP Sanjeev Baliyan had visited the girl in the hospital.

This is what the contentious post said:

"Sangeet Som, MLA from Sadhana-Meerut, is missing since August 15, 2018. You come back and remain in India. No one will say anything to you regarding Sardhana case. Why are you worried MLA ji, she was not your daughter. You just want want votes. You are a blot on the society. Anyone who gives information (on Som) will be rewarded Rs 101. No one is going to measure your chest," the post read.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 13:13 [IST]It is because of Congress that PM Modi is more powerful: Mamata Banerjee

EC convenes all-party meet: Congress pitches for ballot paper

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

New Delhi, Aug 27: The Congress on Monday appealed to the Election Commission of India (ECI) that 2019 Lok Sabha polls be conducted on ballot papers. At least 17 parties, including the NDA ally Shiv Sena, have been pitching for returning to ballot papers.

The EC has called the meeting with seven national and 51 state recognised political parties to discuss various electoral issues.

The meeting will discuss preparations for the Lok Sabha polls due next year where the issue of vulnerability of EVMs is likely to remain in focus. Some political parties are set to raise the issue of alleged vulnerability of EVMs to hacking and tampering, a PTI report said earlier.

The parties that are likely to attend are: the Congress, Trinamool Congress (TMC), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S), Telugu Desam Party (TDP), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Samajwadi Party, CPI-M, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), DMK, CPI, YSR Congress, Kerala Congress Mani (KCM) and AIUDF.

In a press release on Friday, the Commission said considering that political parties are stakeholders in the Indian electoral system, it has been periodically holding consultations with all recognised political parties to elicit their views on important issues and to strengthen the democratic system by improving electoral systems and practices.

The Commission will also bring up the issue of fidelity of electoral rolls and will have the views of improve the accuracy, transparency and inclusivity in the system. It will also invite views that parties can undertake to enhance representation of women within the organisational structure of the political party as well as in the candidate selection for contesting elections to legislative bodies.

The issue of election expenditure, regulation, expenditure ceiling for legislative council election and limiting political parties expenditure would also be discussed. Discussion on enforcement measures to ensure timely submission of annual audited reports and election expenditure reports are also on the agenda.

The panel will also discuss the election campaign silence period in the meeting. The discussion on this topic would also cover inclusion of print media within the ambit of the provisions of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 and the issue of online canvassing to promote or prejudice the electoral prospects of a party or candidate on social media during last 48 hours before conclusion of polling.

Important issues like alternative modes of voting for domestic migrants and absentee voters, and the views and feedback of the political parties regarding efforts to encourage participation of voters with disabilities will also be discussed.Flood ravaged Kerala would have to wait long for central aid, here is why

India

oi-Madhuri

New Delhi, Aug 29: Flood-ravaged Kerala may have to wait a few months to get the complete financial aid package from the Centre as the process of assessing the extent of damage and fund release is time-consuming, officials said.

After the initial release of funds, the central government follows certain rules and guidelines before awarding the final aid to any state for a natural calamity, a Home Ministry official, privy to such circumstances, said.

The Centre has so far released Rs 600 crore for Kerala, which witnessed its worst flood in a century. The death toll in Kerala floods has touched 293 since August 8 while 15 people are still missing.

Also Read | More funds sent to flow in for Kerala flood victims

According to the existing guidelines on disaster relief funds, the central government's contribution to the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) is 75 per cent for general category states and 90 per cent for special category states of hilly regions.

But the amount is released in each financial year in two instalments -- in June and December.

However, the central government, upon being satisfied that exigencies of a particular calamity so warrant, may recommend an earlier release of the central share but that too up to just 25 per cent of the funds due to the state in the following year.

But this release will be adjusted against the instalments of the subsequent year.

Similarly, for getting relief from the National Disaster Response Fund (NDRF), the state government will have to first submit a memorandum showing sector-wise damage with proper justification for requirement of funds and then it is assessed whether a case for additional assistance from NDRF is made out under the existing guidelines.

This itself is a time-consuming exercise for a state which is still trying to recover from the disaster, the official said.

Also Read | Kerala Floods: Pinarayi Vijayan urges Malayalis to donate one month's salary to help rebuild state

An official statement from the Ministry of Home Affairs, which was issued on August 23 giving details of the flood relief measures taken by the central government in Kerala, noted that the submission of the memorandum by the state will take time.

The memorandum from the state government, when comes, will be examined to assess the likely requirement of funds as per items and norms of expenditure under the SDRF/NDRF.

If the preliminary examination reveals that there are adequate funds in SDRF for providing relief as per norms, the state would be advised accordingly.

If the preliminary examination reveals that the state is in need of assistance, a central team will be deputed for making an on-the-spot assessment, the guidelines say.

After the tour and assessment, the central team will submit a report.

The report of the central team will be examined by the sub-committee of the national executive committee (SC-NEC) headed by the Union Home Secretary.

The SC-NEC will assess the extent of assistance and expenditure which can be funded from the NDRF as per norms and make recommendations.

Also Read | When Mahatma Gandhi mobilised Rs 6,000 for flood relief in Kerala

Based on the recommendations of the SC-NEC, a high-level committee, headed by the Union Home Minister, will approve the quantum of relief to be released from the NDRF.

The release of assistance from NDRF will be subject to adjustment of 50 per cent of the balance in the SDRF as on March 31 of the preceding financial year.

Upon the approval of the high-level committee, the Ministry of Finance will release assistance from the NDRF to the state.

Another official said the whole exercise normally takes three to six months and hence the final award from the central government to a state comes late.

Expenditure from the NDRF is meant to assist a state to provide immediate relief in those cases of severe calamity, where the expenditure required is in excess of the balance in the state's SDRF.

According to the guidelines, the expenditure on reconstruction, restoration, disaster preparedness and mitigation should not be part of the SDRF or NDRF and is to be met from the normal budgetary heads or plan heads.

On August 21, the central government had released Rs 600 crore as immediate relief to the Kerala government.

Citing a 2004 decision, the central government has announced that it would not accept any assistance from a foreign government, which created a huge controversy.

The statement of the Ministry of External Affairs came after Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said that the United Arab Emirates had offered to give Rs 700 crore as assistance to his state.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 10:18 [IST]Gujarat: Court dismisses govt's plea to cancel Hardik Patel's anticipatory bail

India

pti-PTI

Ahmedabad, Aug 27: A city civil court dismissed the Gujarat government's application seeking cancellation of Patidar quota leader Hardik Patel's anticipatory bail.

Patel was granted anticipatory bail in April last year in a case of rioting outside a BJP corporator's house, with the court laying down that he would not enter the Ramol police station limits where the incident happened.

The state government had sought cancellation of Hardik's anticipatory bail on the ground that he had violated this condition and had entered Ramol area on January 3 this year. City civil court judge P C Chauhan dismissed the state government's application and also dismissed Patel's plea seeking the removal of the condition that he would not enter the Ramol police station limits. Patel's plea stated that he needed to visit Ramol area as his uncle lived there.

The case was registered in April last year after Vastral BJP corporator Paresh Patel complained that the Patidar leader and several supporters created ruckus outside his house and burnt a BJP party flag.

Hardik, out on bail in two cases of sedition filed in Surat and Ahmedabad, is currently sitting on an indefinite fast at his residence near here, demanding reservations in jobs and education for the Patidar community and waiver of farm loans.

PTIAbout time: Why the Hurriyat Conference must be banned with immediate effect

Masarat Alam will remain a non-starter in J&K thanks to Centres zero tolerance towards separatism

Hurriyat fades in the Kashmir Valley as Al-Qaeda ideology gains steam

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Srinagar, Aug 27: Fresh trends emerging from Jammu and Kashmir show that several local youth have been joining the newly formed Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind, a group which subscribes to the ideology of the Al-Qaeda.

The group is headed by Zakir Rashid Bhat alias Zakir Musa, who had broken away from the Hizbul Mujahideen to form the outfit. The acceptance of this group is steadily increasing as Musa emerged as the only terrorist who ended the 27-year-old show of separatists leaders from Hurriyat Conference and threatened them of beheading if they termed Kashmir as a political issue.

Musa's slogan of "Shariyat ya Shahadat" (Enforcing Islamic law or death) has replaced many age-old pro-Pakistan slogans, feel the officials who have been monitoring the security situation in the Kashmir Valley.

Also Read | Kashmir: Why Musa's breaking away from Hizbul is good news for India

The 24-year-old engineering college drop-out has been able to capture the imagination of youths, especially after the death of Hizbul Mujahideen poster boy Burhan Wani, who was killed in 2016.

Meanwhile data shows, till July 31, around 131 youths have joined various terror outfits with South Kashmir's Shopian district contributing the maximum of 35 so far. The number of local recruits last year was 126.

Zakir Musa:

Believed to have been influenced by Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American preacher killed by allied forces attack in Afghanistan in September 2011, Musa has been mainly focussing on recruitment for his outfit and brainwashing the youths to pick up arms. Awlaki too was considered the brain behind recruitment for Al-Qaeda.

His motivational skills left terror groups such as Lashkar-e-Tayiba also in a fix when he was able to draw Abu Dujana into his group, the officials said. Abu Dujana was killed.

Though the Jammu and Kashmir Police has time and again termed Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind as a non-starter in the valley, the growing popularity and graffiti of his name and slogans have taken maximum spaces of towns and villages.

Also Read | Burhan Wani 2.0: Hizbul resorts again to photo strategy

ISJK, an affiliate of the banned ISIS, was also a source of attraction for youths but after the killing of its chief Dawood Sofi, the group does not find many takers.

The officials of security agencies said the highly-volatile South Kashmir comprising Shopian, Pulwama, Anantnag, Kulgam and Awantipora districts continued to contribute more youths to the militant groups and together these five districts have contributed over 100 youths to various terror groups operating in the Kashmir Valley.

This year's figures were the highest since 2010, according to a recent data presented in the state assembly and Parliament.

Also Read | ISJK could be active in Kashmir, police chief dispels previously held notion

There has been a steady rise in the number of youths taking up arms in the valley since 2014 onwards as compared to the period from 2010 to 2013 when the figure stood at 54, 23, 21 and 6 respectively. In 2014, the number shot up to 53 and in 2015, it reached 66 before touching the highest mark of 88 in 2016, the data showed.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 15:45 [IST]India can seek extradition of Mehul Choksi without Red Corner notice: CBI

India

oi-PTI

New Delhi, Aug 27: India can seek extradition of fugitive billionaire Mehul Choksi without an Interpol Red Corner Notice as it is not a mandatory requirement for the process, the CBI has told the Ministry of External Affairs.

In a communication to the ministry earlier this month, the agency said the purpose of a Red Corner Notice (RCN) is to locate an absconding accused which has already been achieved in Choksi's case after confirmation from Antigua that he is their citizen, officials said.

They also said that having an RCN is of little value now as Antigua has granted him citizenship and Choksi is now an Antiguan passport holder.

Extradition of Choksi possible from Antigua, Barbuda for India being Designated Commonwealth country

The agency has communicated to the ministry that it has already written to its counterpart agency in Antigua for the provisional arrest of Choksi, who is the alleged mastermind of the over 2 billion US dollar bank fraud in the Punjab National Bank.

"The contention of Antiguan authorities that the only way the movement of Choksi could be restricted is through issue a Red Corner Notice is not legally sound as primary objective of locating the subject has already been addressed," the letter said.

The subsequent steps for a provisional arrest and an extradition will have to be taken by Antigua for which an RCN is not a "prerequisite", the officials said.

Choksi has appealed to the Interpol to not issue an RCN against him as the charges are politically motivated, they said.

He also said the conditions of jails in India are not good and staying their would violate his human rights, the officials said.

Choksi, the uncle of his alleged partner in crime Nirav Modi, also said the charges against him have been hyped by the media and he might not get a fair trial in India as courts may be influenced by news reports, they said.

Now Choksi follows Vijay Mallya, cites poor jail conditions in India

The Interpol, after receiving Choksi's plea, sought the CBI's reply which the Indian agency has sent denying all allegations levelled by him.

The promoter of the Gitanjali group, Choksi, had left India in the first week of January, nearly a fortnight before the biggest banking scam was detected in the Punjab National Bank's Brady House branch.

He had taken an oath of allegiance in Antigua on January 15, 2018, thus completing his citizenship, which was granted to him in November, 2017.

PTIBusinessman in Kolkata shot at after his car was stopped by 18 men

Junior doctors strike after assault

India

oi-Madhuri

Kolkata, Aug 27: Junior doctors stopped working at the emergency services department at state-run NRS Hospital today for several hours in protest against alleged assault on their colleagues, including a woman doctor, by relatives of a patient who died in the facility.

Hospital sources said a critically ill patient was brought to the emergency ward by a group of about 30 people this afternoon.

The 40-year-old patient Pervez Hussein was recommended a CT scan and he died while being taken for the test. The people accompanying him then went on the rampage and allegedly assaulted the junior doctors present, including a woman, the sources said.

Demanding security, the junior doctors went for ceasework running for hours, the sources said.

During the ceasework, a patient, injured in road accident, was seen lying before the emergency ward triggering protest by his family who tried to block the nearby road in protest but refrained from doing so after the patient was later admitted to emergency ward.

Junior doctors resumed work late in the evening after talks with the superintendent of hospital.

The sources said a meeting will be held on August 30 in which representatives of the doctors, the hospital authorities and Patients' Welfare Committee of the hospital will be present to discuss certain issues including healthcare facilities and security.

Police sources said a force from Entally police station went to the spot in the afternoon and the situation was normal now.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 10:43 [IST]Major Gogoi likely to be indicted by Army CoI for hotel incident

After loss of seniority, Major Gogoi will now be shifted out of Kashmir valley

Court of Inquiry orders disciplinary action against Major Gogoi

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

New Delhi, Aug 27: An Army court on Monday ordered disciplinary action against Major Leetul Gogoi who was detained by police in a Srinagar hotel after he was seen with a local woman in May.

A court of inquiry has found him accountable for "fraternising with locals [in violation of] instructions to the contrary" and "being away from the place of duty while in operational area."

Gogoi was detained by police in May following an altercation when he was allegedly trying to enter a Srinagar hotel with an 18-year-old woman.

The officer, who was at the centre of the human shield row after his decision to tie a civilian to the bonnet of his vehicle in Kashmir last year, will now face summary of evidence before court martial proceedings are initiated against him, the reports said.

The CoI has held him accountable for "fraternising" with a local in spite of instructions to the contrary and "being away from the place of duty while in operational area", they said.

The CoI had submitted its findings to the convening authority earlier this month following which further proceedings have been initiated, the sources said.

The Army had ordered the CoI following the May 23 incident.

Army chief Gen Bipin Rawat had said in Pahalgam that exemplary punishment would be given to Gogoi if he was found guilty of "any offence".

Gogoi had hit the headlines last year after he tied a man to a jeep in Kashmir purportedly as a shield against stone pelters during polling in the Srinagar Lok Sabha by-election on April 9.

Rawat had supported the young officer's action and honoured him with the Army chief's 'Commendation Card' for his 'sustained efforts' in counter-insurgency operations.Sadhvi Pragya Singh told to appear before court once a week in Malegaon blasts case

Not the way to treat people says Sadhvi Pragya after court appearance

Malegaon blasts: Colonel Purohit moves SC seeking SIT probe into alleged torture in custody

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

New Delhi, Aug 27: Lt Col Prasad Purohit, an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case has filed a plea before the Supreme Court seeking SIT probe in the matter of his "abduction and torture" by ATS in 2008.

Purohit had in a 24-page letter to National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) alleged that he was tortured in the custody of the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS).

It may be noted that Purohit has been, since 2014, claiming that the confessions had been made under pressure created by the ATS. He has urged that the matter needs to be looked into under a court-monitored SIT so that 'he could get justice'.

Last year, the Supreme Court granted bail to Purohit in the 2008 Malegaon blast case.

Lt Colonel Purohit is accused of floating Abhinav Bharat, a right wing Hindu organization for collecting funds to procure arms and explosives and also organising meetings where the Malegaon attack was planned.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 16:05 [IST]IAS officer Kannan Gopinathan, who shot to fame during Kerala floods, resigns over restrictions

Rahul writes to Centre seeking help for flood relief works in Kerala

More funds sent to flow in for Kerala flood victims

India

oi-Madhuri

New Delhi, Aug 27: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has assured Kerala governor P Sathasivam that the flood ravaged state would get more central funds from the National Disaster Response Fund as per laid down procedure.

The Rs 600 crore released by the Centre to the state was only the advance assistance, Modi informed the governor when he met him in New Delhi yesterday to brief about the hardships suffered by Keralites in the recent floods.

He also briefed the Prime Minister on the pace of the relief and rescue operations being carried out in the southern state, a Raj Bhavan release said here on Sunday.

When Mahatma Gandhi mobilised Rs 6,000 for flood relief in Kerala

"Prime Minister has clarified that the Rs 600 crore released by the Centre is only the advance assistance and assured that additional funds will be released from National Disaster Response Fund as per laid down procedure," it said.

The amount was released in advance, pending assessment by the Inter-Ministerial Central Team (IMCT) and the high-level committee, considering the possible delay in preparing and submitting the additional memorandum.

Modi said that this amount was in addition to the Rs 562.45 crore already made available in the State Disaster Response Fund of the state.

He highlighted the fact that normal rules and procedures have been set aside in view of the emergency nature of requirement in Kerala.

Did UAE even offer RS 700cr aid, asks Kerala BJP

Besides this financial support, the Centre has provided large quantities of emergency food, water, medicines and other essential supplies,including foodgrains as required by the state, the release said.

The governor also met and apprised Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on the law and order situation and the pace of the relief measures in Kerala.

Singh also assured the release of additional funds on completion of assessment of damages as per set procedure, the Raj Bhavan release added.

The murderous floods have so far claimed 302 lives and left about four lakh people in relief camps.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 6:27 [IST]Now Choksi follows Vijay Mallya, cites poor jail conditions in India

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 27: Mehul Choksi has followed in the footsteps of Vijay Mallya and cited poor jail conductions in India to contest the Interpol Red Corner Notice against him. The PNB scam accused said that the conditions in Indian jails are not good.

The plea filed before the Interpol cited the poor jail conditions in India and also added that it violated human rights conditions. He further alleged that there was a media trial on against him and the judicial system could be influenced as a result of this.

He also said that the entire case is hyped by the media and none are going into the genuineness of the allegations. The judicial system may get influenced due to this, he also said.

Also Read | Western-style toilet, LCD television, 3 fans at Cell number 12 for Vijay Mallya

Earlier this week, the CBI had replied to Choksi's contentions. In its reply, the agency has said that jails in India are maintained according to the jail manuals. The CBI said that media reportage is based on their sources and the probe agency has nothing to do with it... It has maintained that the judicial system is robust and cannot be influenced by external sources, including the media. On human rights violation, the CBI has said that every state has its own human rights commission panel and the Union government has the National Human Rights Commission. Any allegation can be looked by both these bodies and there is no reason to worry.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 8:49 [IST]No party gives as much space to women as BJP does: BJP chief JP Nadda

PMJAY to cover Rs.5 lakh per family per year: JP Nadda

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

New Delhi, Aug 27: Union Health Minister JP Nadda on Monday address a press conference on Ayushman Bharat-National Health Protection Mission - that the prime minister rechristened as the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana at National Media Center, New Delhi.

JP Nadda said, "Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana to cover Rs.5 lakh per family per year. Approximately 10.74 crore poor and vulnerable families are there, which are entitled under Socio- Economic Caste Census (SECC) data."

"States given flexibility to decide on mode of implementation,if they want to go for insurance model or trust model or mixed model. Benefits will be portable across the country, payments will be done cashless and paperless to panel hospitals, said the Minister.

22 new AIIMS to come up across the country: Nadda

"Over 1,300 packages and 20+ specialties would be provided under Ayushman Bharat. To improve health system, every hospital should become National Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Healthcare Providers (NABH) accredited," he added.

Under PM Jan Arogya Yojna there is no cap in the number of family members or age of the members. All existing health conditions are also covered in the scheme.

The EHCP network will provide completely cashless and paperless access to services for the beneficiaries at the both public and private hospitals. The services will include 1350 procedures covering pre and post hospitalization, diagnostics, medicines etc.

India gifts 30 ambulance to Nepal on Independence Day

The health scheme primarily targets the poor, deprived rural families and identified occupational category of urban workers' families as per the latest Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC) data for both rural and urban areas as well as the active families under the Rashtriy Swasthya Beema Yojna.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 16:37 [IST]RSS decides not to make any comment on Rahul equating it with Muslim Brotherhood

India

oi-Vinod

By Vinod

New Delhi, Aug 27: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological guide of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has decided not to react to the provocative comments made by Congress president Rahul Gandhi who had equated the RSS with Muslim Brotherhood (Akhwanul Islam) of the Egypt. The RSS decided to completely ignore the statement of the Congress president.

A very senior RSS functionary said that there was not at any need to react to Rahul's comment on the particular issue. The RSS does not want to make any comment on such issue rather the RSS is working for the entire Hindu society of which even Rahul Gandhi is part of. So why to give so much importance to this.

The RSS believes that these are baits in which the RSS does not want to get trapped. Let him say whatever he wants to say but the RSS will refrain from making any such statement.

Also Read | Rahul equates RSS with Muslim Brotherhood, attacks Modi in London address

This is to recall that Rahul Gandhi had said that RSS was trying to change India's nature unlike any other political party in the country while speaking at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. "RSS is trying to change the nature of India. Other parties haven't tried to capture India's institutions. RSS' idea is similar to the idea of Muslim Brotherhood," said Rahul.

Another RSS leader said that Rahul needs to know and understand RSS before making any comment on it or against it. The working of the RSS is very transparent and it is spread every nook and cranny of the country.

By making such comment, he is not only disrespecting many leaders who had served the country but also the nation. The RSS is not responsible for his such thinking but will definitely not indulge in any reaction business.

Also Read | Rahul Gandhi can't be blamed for what happened in 1984: Chidambaram

So much so that he held the RSS accountable for demonetization being imposed in the country by the incistance of the RSS, Gandhi said that the very idea came from the saffron outfit. "The idea of demonetisation came directly from the RSS, bypassed the Finance Minister and RBI, and was planted in Prime Minister's head". But the RSS refused to say anything on him.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 8:41 [IST]Rahul Gandhi meets party leaders from Gujarat, asks them to be prepared for assembly polls

Rahul has lunch at roadside eatery in Goa, rides pillion on two-wheeler taxi for few kms

After Pranab Mukherjee, RSS may invite Rahul Gandhi for its event next month

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

New Delhi, Aug 27: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is likely to invite Congress president Rahul Gandhi for an event in September, according to media reports.

The three-day intellectual meet, to be attended by RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat, will be held from September 17-19 at Vigyan Bhawan in Delhi.

Apart from the Congress president, several other opposition leaders, like Sitaram Yechury of the Left, are also likely to be invited.

RSS decides not to make any comment on Rahul equating it with Muslim Brotherhood

RSS's conclave comes at a time when Congress president Rahul Gandhi has launched a continued attack on the BJP, hyphenating the policies and decisions of the Narendra Modi government with its ideological moorings in the RSS.

In an interaction during his Europe tour, Rahul had even compared RSS with Muslim Brotherhood.

"RSS is trying to change the nature of India. Other parties haven't tried to capture India's institutions. RSS's idea is similar to the idea of Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world," said Rahul in London.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a Sunni Islamist organisation founded in Egypt and is considered to be a terror outfit by Russia and six west Asian nations.

Rahul equates RSS with Muslim Brotherhood, attacks Modi in London address

Accusing the RSS of dividing the country, Rahul had said "The BJP-RSS people are dividing our own people. They are spreading hatred in our own country. Our job is to bring the people together and take the country forward and we have shown how to do it," he said.

He said that RSS men have been planted in all departments and ministries of the government and blamed it for demonetisation.

In June, the Congress was upset when former president Pranab Mukherjee, a veteran leader of the party, attended an event at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur and addressed workers.SBI PO Main Result 2018 releasing on this date: Check on sbi.co.in

India

oi-Madhuri

New Delhi, Aug 27: The SBI PO Main Result 2018 will be declared soon. The results once declared will be available on the official website.

The results are expected to be declared by the end of this month. A notification published on the official website of SBI PO 2018 recruitment said the results are expected to be declared by August 31, 2018.

The SBI PO Main exam was held on August 4, 2018. Prelims results were declared in July third week.

"Candidates are requested to please note that the result of the Main Examination for POs is expected to be declared by 31.08.2018," said a notification posted on the official website.

As per the SBI PO 2018 exam schedule, the main exam result date was August 20, 2018.

As per the schedule released by SBI career session, after the SBI PO Main results are declared, the interview and group exercise process will be done to complete the recruitment process. According to the schedule, the SBI PO Interviews will begin from September 24 and continue till October 12. The interview admit cards are expected to be released on September 1, 2018. The results once declared will be available on sbi.co.in.

How to check your SBI PO 2018 results:

Go to sbi.co.in .

. Click on the career section of the website provided on the homepage

Go to Probationary Officers recruitment link

Click on the results link

View results

Take a printoutSC grants wish of woman, allows her to go to parents instead of husband's home

India

pti-PTI

New Delhi, Aug 27: The Supreme Court accorded primacy to the wish of a 23-year-old Jain woman that she wanted to live with her parents instead of her husband who had allegedly relinquished Islam and converted to Hinduism to tie the nuptial knot with her.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, who had directed the Chhattisgarh police to bring the woman before it for an interaction, posed some queries in chaste Hindi to ascertain her wishes.

The bench, which also comprised Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, asked her several questions like "What is your name", "Did your marriage actually take place" and "Why don't you want to live with your husband".

The woman replied to the queries and said she was a major, she has not been coerced by anyone and though she married Mohd Ibrahim Siddhiqui alias Aryan Arya, she wanted to live with her parents voluntarily.

The bench considered her unequivocal statement and modified the order of the High Court that had asked her to either live with her parents or be accommodated in a hostel and had allowed her to go to her parental home straightaway. The top court said it would not get into the legality and validity of the marriage, as it would be dealt the competent courts.

After taking note of the statements of the woman, it said "she has categorically stated that she does not want to go with her husband and wants to go back to her parents. In view of the aforesaid, we permit her to go back to the parents... "We refrain from commenting on the marriage. As she is major, she is entitled to take her decision as to where she wants to go". Jugal Kishore Gilda, Advocate General for Chhattisgarh, appeared and argued on behalf of the state government.

Earlier, Mohd Ibrahim Siddhiqui alias Aryan Arya had filed a plea in the apex court seeking the release of his wife from her parents' custody. The court had then directed the superintendent of police of district Dhamtari in Chhattisgarh to produce Anjali Jain, daughter of Ashok Kumar Jain, before it.

Siddhiqui had converted to Hinduism and taken the name of Aryan Arya to marry the woman. He had challenged the Chhattisgarh High Court order directing the woman to either go to a hostel or her parental home.

PTIHyderabad rape case: The rapist will be caught and killed in encounter, Telangana minister

Timeline: 2007 Hyderabad twin bomb blasts case

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

Hyderabad, Aug 27: A Hyderabad court on Tuesday pronounced its judgment against four alleged Indian Mujahideen operatives for triggering twin bomb blasts in August 2007 that left 42 people dead in the city. The court pronounced the judgment 11 years after the blasts.

25 August 2007: Two bombs exploded almost simultaneously Hyderabad, capital of the Indian state of Telangana. The first bomb exploded in Lumbini Amusement Park at 19:45 hrs IST. The second bomb exploded five minutes later at 19:50 in Gokul Chat Bhandar , a popular restaurant.

25 August 2007: At least 42 people were reported to have died in the two bombings.

Also Read | Judgment in 2007 Hyderabad twin bomb blasts case today

25 August 2007: Foreign Affairs Adviser of Bangladesh Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury described claims linking Bangladesh with the bombings as 'baseless'

26 August 2007: The police discovered 19 unexploded bombs across Hyderabad at bus stops, by cinemas, road junctions, and pedestrian bridges and near a public water fountain.

27 August 2007: The Hyderabad police released the news that the bombs were constructed from Neogel-90, an ammonium nitrate-based explosive used commercially in road construction.

October 2008: The accused were arrested by the Mumbai's ATS in October 2008 and were then handed over to the Hyderabad police in February 2009.

June 21, 2009: The Octopus filed the final 1195-page chargesheet against seven accused in the Criminal Court in Nampally. Of the seven accused named in the charge sheet, four are in judicial custody while the rest are absconding.

Also Read | Telangana man who raped minor and impregnated her, let off by elders with Rs 2.5 lakh fine

August 7, 2018: Completion of arguments and counter-arguments. Sessions Judge Srinivas Rao had posted the case for judgment on August 27.

Sep 4, 2018: Aneeq Shafeeq Sayeed and Ismail Chaudhary were convicted. Two more accused in the case have been acquitted.Where did the 'out of control' Chinese rocket debris land after re-entering Earth?

Planning a trip to Maldives: You can do so from July 15

Two Indian military choppers gifted to Maldives to stay back

India

oi-Madhuri

New Delhi, Aug 27: The two Indian military helicopters, gifted to Maldives, are likely to stay back along with a 48-member crew and support staff for at least the next few months as talks between the two countries on their continued deployment in the island nation were "positive", diplomatic and military sources told PTI on Sunday.

The lease agreement of the two helicopters, given to Maldives in 2013, has expired and the island nation had conveyed to New Delhi that it would not like to retain them.

After several rounds of talks, there has been indication from Maldives about its willingness to keep the two helicopters along with the crew and support staff, the sources said.

Why India preferred US made Apache over Russian Mi-28N helicopter?

They said the preliminary outcome of the talks between the two countries on the issue has been positive and there was a possibility of the choppers being kept there for a longer duration.

"The helicopters and the support staff are not being brought back," a highly-placed source said.

The lease agrement of one helicopter operated by the Coast Guard had expired earlier this year, while the pact for the second chopper operated by the Indian Navy expired on June 30. One chopper is deployed in the Indian Ocean nation's southern-most island of Addu and the other in the strategically-located Lammu.

As relations between the two countries nosedived after India opposed the imposition of Emergency in that country, the Maldivian government indicated that it would not renew the lease agreement for keeping the two choppers along with the support staff.

The sources said the Maldives is extending visas of the Indian team comprising personnel from the Indian Navy, Coast Guard and support staff from Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), the manufacturer of the choppers.

The development comes less than a month before the presidential election in Maldives and it is seen as an indication of slight easing of ties between the two countries.

The strategically-located Indian Ocean island nation is an important neighbour for India and both countries were enhancing defence and security cooperation, particularly in the maritime sphere, in the last several years.

However, the ties came under strain after Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen declared Emergency in the country on February 5, following an order by the country's Supreme Court to release a group of Opposition leaders, who had been convicted in widely criticised trials. The Emergency was lifted 45 days later.

SC dismisses PIL seeking probe into AgustaWestland chopper purchase by Chhattisgarh govt

India had criticised the Yameen government for imposition of the Emergency and urged it to restore the credibility of the electoral and political processes by releasing political prisoners.

The presidential election is due in that country on September 23.

Last month, India expressed concern over announcement of the elections without allowing democratic institutions, including Parliament and the judiciary, to work in a free and transparent manner.

India had said it wanted "credible restoration" of the political process and the rule of law in the island nation before the elections were conducted.

However, despite strain in ties, both sides were in touch with each other on the issue of Indian choppers stationed there.

There have been considerable disquiet in New Delhi over China's growing influence over Male. Maldives had inked a free trade agreement with China in December last year, triggering concerns in New Delhi.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 6:11 [IST]Uma Bharti calls Rahul Gandhi 'mentally unstable'

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Bhopal, Aug 27: Union Minister launched a blistering attack on Rahul Gandhi for saying that the Congress had role in 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots. Bharti said that there was a time when the Congress was led by stalwarts, but today it is being led by someone "who is mentally unstable".

Rahul Gandhi, during his two-day visit to London, had told an audience of UK-based parliamentarians and local leaders in London on Friday that the incident was a "very painful tragedy", but disagreed with the view that the Congress was involved.

"What Rahul speaks and what he does was seen by all in Parliament. But what he had stated in London also stunned fellow Congressmen. Rahul's statement that the Congress was not involved in 1984 anti-Sikh riots was a blatant lie as all cases related to the riots were filed against Congress leaders. Rahul is mentally ill and I pray to the god to grant him wisdom," Bharti reportedly said.

[HS Phoolka challenges Rahul Gandhi for a debate on 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots]

Bharti further said, "Congress has a vast background since the era of stalwarts such as Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. But today a person, who is mentally unstable, is running the party."

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Sunday came out in defence of Rahul Gandhi.

[Amarinder Singh defends Rahul Gandhi, says Congress 'as a party' was not involved in 1984 riots]

Singh said the Congress chief was in school when Operation Bluestar and later the riots took place. To blame him for 'anything' was totally absurd, said Amarinder Singh, in a hard-hitting statement issued. To hold Rahul Gandhi responsible for an act, of which he was not even aware when it happened, was completely ridiculous, said the chief minister.

Singh even said that Congress 'as a party' was was never involved in the riots that continue to haunt the Sikh community.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 15:35 [IST]Western Odisha may get heavy rains in next 24 hrs, fishermen warned

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Bhubaneswar, Aug 27: The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has issued a heavy rainfall warning for Western Odisha and advised the fishermen not to venture into the water.

As per news agency ANI, IMD Bhubaneswar on Monday said that heavy rains may lash Western Odisha in the next 24 hours.

Weather forecast for Aug 27: Light to moderate rains likely in Mumbai

Under the influence of a cyclonic circulation, a low pressure area has formed over coastal areas of West Bengal, north Odisha and adjoining northwest Bay of Bengal, the Meteorological Centre had said on Saturday.

Under its impact, moderate rain and thundershower are likely to occur at most places, while heavy to very heavy rainfall is forecast at some places in Dhenkanal, Angul, Deogarh, Sambalpur, Bolangir, Jhaesuguda, Baragarh and Keonjhar districts, it said in its forecast on Saturday.

Schools, colleges shut over heavy rain warning in Himachal

Most parts of Odisha have been lashed by heavy rains since the beginning of this month due to several spells of low pressure.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 15:06 [IST]Why has Whatsapp not appointed grievance officer yet, asks SC

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

New Delhi, Aug 27: The Supreme Court on Monday sought to know as to why the global messaging giant Whatsapp has not been appointed a grievance officer in India. The apex court, has in this regard, issued a notice to WhatsApp, IT and Finance ministry and sought a detailed reply from them within four weeks.

This comes almost a week after IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad met WhatsApp Head Chris Daniels and expressed concerns over "sinister developments" like mob lynching due to rumours spread on the messaging app.

The government had last week put forth the following demands to Whatsapp:

WhatsApp must have a grievance officer in India.

WhatsApp must have a proper compliance of Indian laws.

WhatsApp must have a proper corporate entity located in India.

Last month, WhatsApp top executives including COO Matthew Idema had met IT Secretary and other Indian government officials to outline various steps being taken by the company to tackle fake news in India.

[WhatsApp has to follow Indian laws: IT minister warns CEO amid fake news row]

Over the past few months, fake messages circulating on WhatsApp have incited incidents of mob fury across parts of India. The government has sent out two notices to the Facebook-owned company directing it to take urgent measures to curb false information and rumours being spread on the messaging platform.

[WhatsApp forwards limited to just 5: Here is how it works]

The IT ministry has, in the past, said that the platform cannot escape its responsibility for such rampant abuse and needed to find originators of provocative messages. It had also warned that in the absence of adequate checks, it will treat the messaging platform as abettor of rumour propagation and legal consequences will follow.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 11:43 [IST]Will the Lotus bloom down south? Here is what the BJP has in mind

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 27: The southern states account for 130 Lok Sabha seats and in the run up to the 2019 general polls, the BJP is leaving nothing to chance. With states up north likely to throw up a mixed verdict, winning big in south would be crucial for the BJP in case it has to return to power in 2019.

Of all the states down south, the BJP is very optimistic about Karnataka, where it had emerged as the single largest party in the recently concluded assembly elections. This leaves the BJP to strategise in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Kerala.

In Tamil Nadu, the BJP would look for an alliance, while in Karnataka, it would fight the battle by itself. In the case of Andhra Pradesh, the party would look to ally with smaller parties. The TDP, which was part of the NDA until recently had broken away and it appears certain that the Chandrababu Naidu led party would go with the Congress.

In BJP's southern push, where does Tamil Nadu stand: Will DMK remain a neutral force in 2019

A BJP leader tells OneIndia that there would be no truck with the YSR Congress ahead of the polls. However, we are confident that the YSRCP would better its tally in Andhra Pradesh this year. If the YSRCP remains neutral, then the BJP could seek its support in case the numbers are short, the source also informed.

The Telangana strategy of the BJP looks more or less clear. The federal front proposed by K Chandrashekar Rao has not taken off. Off late, KCR and his party the TRS have been cozying up to the BJP. This was evident when the TRS walked out during the no-confidence vote and also backed the BJP in the election to the post of deputy chairman, Rajya Sabha.

In Telangana, the BJP is likely to fight the battle alone and there is a chance of a post poll tie up with the TRS, if the need be. The Telangana strategy would be applied in Odisha as well, where the BJD had recently backed the BJP in the Rajya Sabha and also staged a walk out during the no confidence vote.

In Tamil Nadu, the plan would be an interesting one. Both the BJP and DMK have of late shared good vibes. There appears to be a clear change in posturing by both the DMK and BJP. Stalin had refused to invite the BJP for a programme held to commemorate Karunanidhi's 60 years in politics. When asked, why the BJP was not invited, Stalin had said that the party does not believe in Dravidian parties. However six months later, there is a change in thinking, with the DMK inviting the BJP for the August 30 meet. In 2014, the BJP had won just one of the 39 seats in Tamil Nadu.

Mood of the Nation: BJP may fall short of 27 seats to reach magic number

While the party has a strategy in place for all these states, the battle in Kerala would be a hard fought one. The party has increased its vote share considerably, but in terms of victory, there has not been much to talk about. The BJP is likely to fight the battle by itself in Kerala and look to better its performance.

Winning south is crucial for the BJP. Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala - and the Union Territory of Puducherry together elect 130 MPs to Lok Sabha.

Although the BJP put up an impressive overall performance in 2014, in the above mentioned states, the party was able to win just 20 seats, a majority of which came from Karnataka.

The BJP is banking on the weakening of the Congress to better its southern performance.

The BJP feels that the weakening of the Congress would not just worsen its performance, but also it would find it hard to stitch up alliances. This would work in the favour of the BJP, sources also say.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 12:14 [IST]With sons of Dawood and Shakeel becoming maulanas, who will run the D-Syndicate?

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Aug 27: It appears as though the succession battles within the underworld have taken a turn. While it was largely expected that Dawood Ibrahim would be succeeded by his son and Chhota Shakeel his, there has been a major twist in the tale.

Reports have suggested that like Dawood's son, Chhota Shakeel's son too has become a maulana in Pakistan. The decision to embrace the spiritual path was taken by Shakeel's 18 year old son, Mubashir Shaikh.

Shaikh, who is Shakeel's third and youngest son is said to have memorised the Quran, before which he embraced the spiritual path. An officer with the intelligence confirmed this development to OneIndia and said that it is now clear that the Dawood syndicate will be handled by Anees Ibrahim, the brother of the fugitive don.

Also Read | Chhota Shakeel is dead: Here is the ISI's impersonator who runs the D-Syndicate now

This development comes close on the heels of Dawood's son Moin becoming a maulana. This revelation was made by Iqbal Kaskar, Dawood's brother who was arrested Anti Extortion Cell. He said that Dawood was in a state of depression after Moin decided not to follow the family business and become a Maulana instead.

The succession battle:

Shakeel, who was Dawood's closest aid would have hoped that his son too over the reigns from him.

The news relating to the death of Shakeel has been confirmed by many. In fact rumour has it that it was Anees with the help of the ISI, who ordered the hit on Shakeel last year.

Also Read | The don is depressed, brother in charge and not all is well in Dawood paradise

Dawood on the other hand would have hoped that his son took over his empire, but with Moin becoming a maulana and Shaikh following suit, the doors are wide open for Anees. There are reports that Anees and Shakeel could not get along as the former wanted a bigger pie in the underworld.

Moreover Dawood was keen that Shakeel handled the India business, while Anees took care of international affairs. The underworld in Mumbai is more comfortable working with Shakeel when compared to Anees. However with now Shakeel and his son going out of the picture, the take over for Anees becomes clear.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 16:08 [IST]Members of farmers' body detained in Lucknow for trying to burn effigies of PM Modi, Shah

Yogi ji is doing politics over BRD college tragedy, says Dr. Kafeel Khan

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

Lucknow, Aug 27: Dr. Kafeel Khan, one of the accused in the Baba Raghav Das (BRD) medical college tragedy in Gorakhpur, has accused UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath of lying about children's deaths and using this issue for political gains.

Dr. Kafeel Khan, said, "What CM has said is incorrect. Many newborns also died in the incident, newborns don't get Encephalitis. The supplier of oxygen had written to hospital authorities to clear his dues,to cont. oxygen supply."

"Yogi ji is doing politics and trying to mislead people," Khan said. He was granted bail by the Allahabad High Court on April 25 in 2018. He faces charges under attempt to commit culpable homicide, criminal breach of trust and criminal conspiracy, which fall under Sections 308, 409 and 120 B of the Indian Penal Code, respectively.

Almost a year after the deaths of scores of infants were reported from the BRD Medical College in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has said the incident may have been blown out of proportion due to the institute's "internal politics".

Opposition Congress on Sunday termed it as a move by the Uttar Pradesh chief minister to hide his shortcomings.

(With PTI inputs)Detained Japanese 'tourist' expelled from North Korea

International

pti-PTI

Tokyo, Aug 27: Detained Japanese 'tourist' was expelled from North Korea on Sunday. Tomoyuki Sugimoto, the detainee had been "kept under control" for questioning about "his crime" said the official Korean Central News Agency. It did not say what he had been accused of.

The brief report said authorities had decided "to leniently condone him" and expel him on the principle of humanitarianism. It described Sugimoto as a tourist. The Japanese government confirmed about two weeks ago that it was looking into reports that one of its citizens had been detained. It has not identified him by name. Japan's Kyodo News service quoted a government source saying the man was believed to be a videographer and may have been suspected of shooting video of a military facility.

PTIIndia - Pakistan to resume negotiations over Indus Waters Treaty in Lahore

International

pti-PTI

India - Pakistan to resume negotiations over Indus Waters Treaty in Lahore

Islamabad, Aug 27: The first bilateral engagement between India and Pakisten since Pakistan prime Minister Imran Khan took office will begin from Wednesday in lahore on various aspects of the Indus Waters Treaty.

India's Indus Water Commissioner P K Saxena is expected to reach Lahore today to begin the two-day discussions with his Pakistani counterpart Syed Mehr Ali Shah on Wednesday, Dawn quoted a government official as saying. The last meeting of the Pakistan-India Permanent Indus Commission was held in New Delhi in March during which both the sides had shared details of the water flow and the quantum of water being used under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. The talks will be the first official engagement between India and Pakistan since Khan became prime minister on August 18.

In a letter to Khan on the day he was sworn in as Pakistan's 22nd prime minister, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed India's resolve to build good neighbourly relations between the two countries. On July 30, Modi telephoned Khan to congratulate him on his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party's victory in the general elections and expressed hope that both countries will work to open a new chapter in bilateral ties. The Pakistani side will reiterate its objections over two water storage and hydropower projects being built by India during the two-day talks scheduled for August 29-30.

The official said Pakistan would raise its concerns over 1000MW Pakal Dul and 48MW Lower Kalnai hydroelectric projects on the Chenab river. The official said that the two sides would also finalise the schedule of future meetings of the Permanent Indus Commission and visits of the teams of the Indus commissioners. He said that the water commissioners of Pakistan and India were required to meet twice a year and arrange technical visits to projects' sites and critical river head works, but Pakistan had been facing a lot of problems in timely meetings and visits. The two-day session is also expected to discuss ways and means for timely and smooth sharing of hydrological data on shared rivers.

The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank and signed by then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan's president Ayub Khan, administers how the water of the Indus river and its tributaries that flow in both the countries will be utilised. Under the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty 1960, waters of the eastern rivers - Sutlej, Beas and Ravi - had been allocated to India and the western rivers - the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab - to Pakistan, except for certain non-consumptive uses for India.

PTIDNA of those who burst firecrackers in India on Pakistans win cannot be Indian: Anil Vij

J-K cops detain 6 over derogatory video after Pakistan's victory against India in T20 match

Shoaib Akhtar takes mic off, walks out of TV show after being asked to leave by the PTV host

New ISI chief: Gen Bajwa showed Imran Khan who is the boss of Pakistan

Pakistan quietly allows Taliban-appointed diplomats to take charge of Afghan missions

Pak railway official applies for 730 day full pay leave citing boss ill manners

International

oi-Madhuri

Lahore, Aug 27: In an unusual move, a top Pakistan Railways official has requested for a 730-day full pay leave, saying the attitude of the new minister for railways, Sheikh Rasheed, is "extremely non-professional and ill-mannered".

Hanif Gul, a Grade-20 officer, said in his application letter that as an honourable member of the Civil Services of Pakistan, it is not possible for him to continue to work under him, Geo news reported.

The application letter has since gone viral on social media in the country.

"With due respect, it is submitted that the attitude of new minister is extremely non-professional and ill-mannered.

All outstanding issues including Kashmir to be resolved through dialogue says Pak

"As an honourable member of the Civil Services of Pakistan, it is not possible for me to continue to work under him. The minister is fully entitled to work with a team that shares his vision. It is therefore submitted that 730 days leave may kindly be allowed to the undersigned," the letter reads.

Rasheed recently chaired a meeting of railways officials where he reportedly admonished them for telling "stories" about the department's better performance, the report said.

Rahul equates RSS with Muslim Brotherhood, attacks Modi in London address

The minister also asked them not to praise "any minister" in front of him.

Rasheed has often criticized former railways minister Saad Rafique's performance.

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 6:34 [IST]For safekeeping: Congress alliance candidates flown to Jaipur ahead of May 2 counting

Curfew announced in Jaipur from 6 pm to 5 am

4 calves, three cows rescued from jeep in Rajasthan

Jaipur court sentences rapist 20 years in prison within 9 days of committing crime

3 bike borne men killed in road accident

Jaipur

oi-Madhuri

Jaipur, Aug 27: Three members of a family were killed after their bike was hit by an unidentified vehicle in Rajasthan's Bhilwara district, police said today.

The deceased were identified as Ashok Regar (17), Rakesh Regar (20) and Chandra Prakash Regar (24), they said.

The three were killed after an unidentified vehicle hit them near Piploond crossing late last night, Station House Officer at Jahajpur Police Station Panna Lal said.

Also Read | Delhi: Railway employee killed in road accident

He said the bodies were handed over to their family members after post-mortem and a case was registered.

For More Jaipur News, Click Here

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Story first published: Monday, August 27, 2018, 15:33 [IST]Members of farmers' body detained in Lucknow for trying to burn effigies of PM Modi, Shah

Eight year old girl goes to buy rakhi, becomes a victim of rape

Lucknow

pti-PTI

Muzaffarnagar, Aug 27: A man was thrashed and handed over to the police after he allegedly tried to rape an eight year old girl when she had gone to buy rakhi from his shop in Muzaffarnagar, Police officials said.

The man was arrested yesterday (Aug 26) after the girl's family lodged a complaint, Circle Officer Rizwan Ahmad said. He said the accused attempted to rape the girl in his shop, but was rescued by locals after she shouted for help. The man was thrashed by locals who handed him over to the police, the officer said.

For more Lucknow news, Click Here

PTIDelhi: Railway employee killed in road accident

New Delhi

oi-Madhuri

New Delhi, Aug 27: A 55-year-old railway employee was killed allegedly after a truck hit his motorcycle in northwest Delhi's Hakikat Nagar, the police said.

Rakesh Kumar, posted at the New Delhi railway station, was returning home after his duty last night when the Delhi-registered truck allegedly hit his motorcycle near the red light at Hakikat Nagar, a police officer said.

The accused driver fled the scene, leaving the truck behind, the officer said.

Also Read | 20 years on, killer of 4 year old boy nabbed from Bihar

Kumar was rushed to hospital where doctors declared him brought dead, the officer added.

The truck was taken into police custody and a case was registered, police said, adding that the matter is being investigated.

For More New Delhi News, Click HereBANK of Papua New Guinea Governor Loi Bakani has urged private sector firms to act responsibly as the foreign exchange market improves.This call also included foreign exchange dealers in regards to ensuring that only current import orders were brought to the market and companies to refrain from front-loading future import orders.Bakani said this in the Quarterly Economic Bulletin March Quarter 2018 yesterday, which also contains economic updates.The bank anticipates that foreign exchange inflows will continue to improve to reduce this imbalance, he said.Current import orders should be met at a reasonable timeframe.With improvements in the international commodity prices and the recommencement of production of two major mines and the LNG project following the earthquake in February 2018, foreign exchange inflows have improved significantly.In July, foreign exchange inflows had reached the levels of 2017, mainly reflecting higher production by OK Tedi and Porgera mines and the LNG project, coupled with the commencement of corporate tax payments to the Government by the operator of PNG LNG project.In addition, the final drawdown of US$190 million (K629mil) of the Credit Suisse Syndicate Loan in June 2018 also assisted in providing the necessary foreign exchange.Other inflows expected in the coming years include the Budget support loans from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank.The first component of ADB loan of US$100 million (K331mil) is being drawn down in August, while the US$150 million (K496mil) of the World Bank loan is expected to be drawn down after the approval by the World Bank board.Out of the Credit Suisse loan, a total of US$143.8 million (K47mil) was used by BPNG to intervene in the foreign exchange market.The bank plans to utilise future inflows to support and clear import orders.The Papua New Guinea Government aims to have all citizens registered with the National Identification and Civil Registry Office by 2021, says acting Registrar-General Michael Kumung.So far about 500,000 people have been registered since October 2017. This in an increase from the 60,000 registered (at the end of) 2014 for NID cards and about 100,000 for people below 18 issued birth certificates.Kumung yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding with the Pomio District Development Authority to carry out registration in the district.The Government-funded national identification project started in 2014 to provide reliable information and data needed for proper planning.The target is to have all registered by 2021. The challenges are enormous, he said.So partnerships with Government agencies, provincial governments, district development authorities, local level governments and non-government organisations such as churches are important.On public servants, Kumung said the Personnel Management Department and the Education Department wanted all registered by the end of the year. National Planning Minister Richard Maru has said that if public servants are not registered, they will not be paid. Although it will be difficult to register all public servant by the end of this year, at least we are keeping the momentum going.Meanwhile, Kumung said the two NID card printing machines had been fixed and now operating after facing problems in the past three months. The National/ONEPNGLaxman Pai, Opalesque Asia:

The world's first public bond - bond-i (blockchain operated new debt instrument) - created and managed using only blockchain exceeds market expectations, said Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA).

The biggest bank in Australia said that it has received support from seven investors for the bond-i that helped raising A$110m ($80.48m) for the World Bank.

Commonwealth Bank executive general manager James Wall said that the deal, designed to test how the technology might improve decades-old bond sales practices, had exceeded expectations and interest had been "overwhelming".

Investors in the bond include CBA, First State Super, NSW Treasury Corporation, Northern Trust, QBE, SAFA, and Treasury Corporation of Victoria. CBA and the World Bank will continue to welcome investor interest in the bond throughout its life cycle, and enquiries from other market participants in relation to the platform.

James Wall added: "It is clear the market is ready and open to the uptake of emerging technologies and sees the potential evolution of the capital markets. It has been a pleasure to work on such a ground-breaking transaction with a forward-thinking organisation like the World Bank."

This launch also marks the first time that investors have supported the World Bank's development activities in a transaction that is fully managed using the blockchain technology.

The 'bond-i' bond forms part of a broader strategic focus of the......................

To view our full article Click hereChile en Nogada Now on the Menu at Kaiser Maximilian

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - Kaiser Maximilian owner Andreas Rupprechter loves Mexico so much that he's not waiting until September to start celebrating El Mes de la Patria. Chiles en Nogada, the Mexican dish that is most emblematic of the holiday, is already on the menu at this popular south side Puerto Vallarta restaurant.

A specialty of Puebla, Chiles en Nogada are not your everyday chiles rellenos. Made from red, white and green ingredients to symbolize the colors of the Mexican flag, they are roasted chiles poblanos stuffed with a sweet-savory pork and fruit picadillo filling and served at room temperature with a delicate fresh walnut cream sauce topped with pomegranate seeds.

The story behind this traditional Mexican dish is just as unique as the combination of ingredients used in making it. According to ancient stories, Chiles en Nogada were created when nuns in Puebla, Mexico needed something to serve to Agustin de Iturbide when he returned to Puebla after signing Mexico's Declaration of Independence from Spain in 1821.

To commemorate the occasion, the nuns combined the unique ingredients of (green) poblano peppers stuffed with a mixture of meats and fruits, a white creamy walnut sauce and bright red pomegranate seeds to represent the colors of the country's newborn flag and Mexico's newfound independence.

Iturbide eventually became the First Constitutional Emperor of Mexico in 1822 - just as Chiles en Nogada eventually became one of Mexico's most famous dishes.

Today, this culinary creation is found all over the country during the patriotic month of September, but at Kaiser Maximilian, you can enjoy it in the restaurant's air conditioned dining room or at one of its "very European" sidewalk tables, from now until October 6th.Global Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Market 2018 | Major Kay Players  Oracle, Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP), Workday, SAP, IBM, Accenture, Epicor Software

Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Market

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WiseGuyRerports.com Presents Global Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2018-2025 New Document to its Studies DatabaseThis report focuses on the global Human Capital Management (HCM) Software status, future forecast, growth opportunity, key market and key players. The study objectives are to present the Human Capital Management (HCM) Software development in United States, Europe and China.Human capital management software (HCM software) refers to applications that are intended to help an organization manage and maintain its workforce. ... Human capital management software is also referred to as a human resource management system (HRMS) or human resource information system (HRIS).Core HR software is a very basic requirement for any organization to administer its employee for functions, such as payroll and compensation management, benefits and claims management, personnel management, learning management, pension management, compliance management, and succession planning. Furthermore, considering the rising workforce of organizations, it becomes critical for the HR department to track and monitor the employees in order to efficiently manage the widespread workforce.In 2017, the global Human Capital Management (HCM) Software 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.The key players covered in this studyOracleAutomatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP)WorkdaySAPIBMAccentureEpicor SoftwareCeridianNetSuiteKronosUltimate SoftwareThe Payroll CompanyEPAY SystemsInfinisourceCornerstone OnDemandRamco SystemsEmpxtrackPeopleStremeAscentisHR MantraRequest For Sample Report @Market segment by Type, the product can be split intoCloud-basedWeb-basedOn-PremisesMarket segment by Application, split intoHealthcareTelecomEnergyMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaCentral & South AmericaComplete Report Details @Table Of Contents:1 Report Overview1.1 Study Scope1.2 Key Market Segments1.3 Players Covered1.4 Market Analysis by Type1.4.1 Global Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Market Size Growth Rate by Type (2013-2025)1.4.2 Cloud-based1.4.3 Web-based1.4.4 On-Premises1.5 Market by Application1.5.1 Global Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Market Share by Application (2013-2025)1.5.2 Healthcare1.5.3 Telecom1.5.4 Energy1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered2 Global Growth Trends2.1 Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Market Size2.2 Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Growth Trends by Regions2.2.1 Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Market Size by Regions (2013-2025)2.2.2 Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Market Share by Regions (2013-2018)2.3 Industry Trends2.3.1 Market Top Trends2.3.2 Market Drivers2.3.3 Market Opportunities..12 International Players Profiles12.1 Oracle12.1.1 Oracle Company Details12.1.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.1.3 Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Introduction12.1.4 Oracle Revenue in Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Business (2013-2018)12.1.5 Oracle Recent Development12.2 Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP)12.2.1 Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP) Company Details12.2.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.2.3 Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Introduction12.2.4 Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP) Revenue in Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Business (2013-2018)12.2.5 Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP) Recent Development12.3 Workday12.3.1 Workday Company Details12.3.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.3.3 Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Introduction12.3.4 Workday Revenue in Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Business (2013-2018)12.3.5 Workday Recent Development12.4 SAP12.4.1 SAP Company Details12.4.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.4.3 Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Introduction12.4.4 SAP Revenue in Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Business (2013-2018)12.4.5 SAP Recent Development12.5 IBM12.5.1 IBM Company Details12.5.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.5.3 Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Introduction12.5.4 IBM Revenue in Human Capital Management (HCM) Software Business (2013-2018)12.5.5 IBM Recent DevelopmentContinued.CONTACT US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)ABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.Address:WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaFood Allergy and Intolerance Products Market Segmentation, Opportunities, Trends & Future Scope to 2026

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Food allergy is caused due to consumption of particular food which stimulates unusual reaction in the immune system of the human body. Food tolerance is caused due to lactose, gluten and sugars and other ingredients which is oppressed by the consumption of gluten-free, sugar-free and lactose-free products such as Dr. Schar classic gluten-free hamburger buns, le veneziane spaghetti corn gluten-free pasta, dairy-free frozen desserts made with rice or soy., gelatin desserts without milk or whipped cream, fruit ices & sorbets. According to American Diabetes Association non-starchy vegetables, such as spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, peppers, cucumbers and celery are the one food group that diabetic patients can eat freely, with little or no limitation.Food allergy is an alarming issue within the consumers as small intake of food causing allergy could lead to swollen airways, digestive problems, trigger hives and also cause death or fatal sickness. Food tolerance as compared to food allergy do not involve the immune system and the symptoms of reaction of the specific food is slower in food tolerance which maybe caused due to a specific food ingredient or chronic illness. Lactose free food products are consumed by lactose intolerant consumers that lack enzymes to digest sugar milk. Similarly, celiac patients are intolerant and are not able to digest gluten food items such as barley, wheat and others.Download PDF Brochure @The global food allergy and intolerance products market is expected to grow at a significant rate during the forecast period due to increase in number of people suffering from food allergies and digestive conditions coupled with the increase in consumption for gluten free, lactose free and sugar free food products. The food allergy and intolerance products market is driven by increasing demand for gluten free and lactose free products, increasing healthcare awareness, availability of intolerance food items in super markets, restaurants and retail stores. Owing to these factors global food allergy and intolerance products market is expected to increase at a significant growth rate over the forecast period (2017-2025).According to Health Canada, the sensitivities due to the reaction of the human immune system to food proteins causes food allergies.Gluten free products are gaining traction by product innovations by manufactures such as Boulder Brands, Inc. Enjoy Life Natural Brands, Llc, Inc., Dr. Schar AG/SPA, H.J. Heinz Company and others and FDA regulation which has made the purchasing of gluten free products easier. Energy bars, baking ingredients/mixes, cookies topping, cookies, and savory snacks are some of the luten free products. The global food allergy and intolerance products market is estimated to be driven by various gluten free ingredients such as starches, seeds, flours and grains to make baked items such as bagels, muffins, entrees, cookies, cakes, doughnuts, pastas, and cereals. Lactose free products are also gaining traction due to changing food trends and consumer awareness towards healthier lifestyle and increasing number of diabetic patients across the globe which is expected to drive the global food allergy and intolerance products market during the forecast period.Food Allergy and Intolerance Products Market Outlook North America is expected to be the fastest growing market due to increasing food allergies and sensitivities in U.S. which is anticipated to drive the global food allergy and intolerance products market during the forecast period. North America is followed by Europe and Asia Pacific due to high innovations in food industry and growing consumer awareness for healthy food items among others. Rise in lactose intolerance is expected to drive the lactose free food products due to food allergy and innovations in dairy products. Spain, Germany, Australia, U.K., Brazil and Italy is expected to have the largest market for gluten free food products such as almond milk, avocados, coconuts, olives, nuts, shellfish, molluscs, bell peppers, cucumber, tomato, zucchini, buckwheat, rice (brown, white, wild), millet, and quinoa along with other products.Over the couple of decades, specialty food manufacturers of intolerance products and gluten-free food items has increased at a significant rate with technological advancement and product innovations such as Alpro UK Ltd. a U.K. based company has food products which are 100% suitable for people with a dairy allergy or lactose intolerance as all the products are produced plant-based ingredients such as almonds, hazelnut, coconut, rice and oat and therefore naturally free from any animal protein and lactose.According to - U.S. National Library of Medicine- Lactose intolerance is caused by lactose nonpersistence in which there is reduction in production of lactase after the infancy. The individuals with lactose intolerance may experience bloating, abdominal pain, flatulence, diarrhea, and nausea after consuming lactose-containing products. In congenital lactase deficiency or congenital alactasia, infants are unable to digest lactose present in formula or breast milk. This form of lactose intolerance results in severe diarrhea. The affected infants should be given lactose-free infant formula, otherwise there will be severe weight loss and dehydration in such infants.Lactose intolerance in infancy resulting from congenital lactase deficiency is a rare disorder. Its incidence is unknown. This condition is most common in Finland, where it affects an estimated 1 fin 60,000 newborns. The ability to digest lactose is reduced after infancy in65% of the global population. 90% of the East Asian descent have lactose intolerance.Lactose intolerance is also very common in people of Arab, West African, Jewish, Italian, and Greek descent. Lactose intolerance prevalence is lowest with people with an elongated history of use unfermented milk containing products as a significant food source. For instance, only 5% of Northern European descendants have lactose intolerance.Some of the key participating players in the food allergy and intolerance products market are Alpro UK Ltd., Amy's Kitchen, Inc., Barry Callebaut, Daiya Foods Inc., Doves Farm Foods Ltd., Dr. Schar, Ener-G Foods, Inc.,Galaxy Nutritional Foods, Inc., General Mills, Inc., Gluten Free Foods Ltd., Glutino Food Group, Green Valley Organics, Kellogg Company, The Kraft Heinz Company, Nature's Path Foods, Inc., Pamela's Products, Inc., Roma Food Products, Semper AB, Sweet William Pty., Ltd., The Hain Celestial Group, Inc., and others.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.Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comArgentina: Country Intelligence Market Report 2018 Analysis Of Key Major Players Telecom Argentina-Cablevision, Movistar Argentina, Claro Argentina, Personal Argentina, Cablevision, Fibertel, Telecentro, DIRECTV

Argentina: Country Intelligence

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"Argentina: Country Intelligence Report", a new Country Intelligence Report by GlobalData, provides an executive-level overview of the telecommunications market in Argentina today, with detailed forecasts of key indicators up to 2023. Published annually, the report provides detailed analysis of the near-term opportunities, competitive dynamics and evolution of demand by service type and technology/platform across the fixed telephony, broadband, mobile and pay-TV segments, as well as a review of key regulatory trends.Major Companies Mentioned:Movistar ArgentinaClaro ArgentinaTelecom Argentina-CablevisionPersonal ArgentinaCablevisionFibertelTelecentroDIRECTVTotal telecommunications and pay-TV service revenues in Argentina will increase to $12.2bn by 2023-end, supported primarily by growth in mobile data and fixed-broadband segments. Mobile data revenue will increase at a CAGR 2018-2023 of 9.7%, supported by an increase smartphone penetration and the growing adoption of 4G services with higher ARPU. Fixed broadband revenues will increase at a CAGR 3.7% over the period 2018-2023 to reach $2.2bn by year-end 2023, driven by steady growth in fiber-optic segment. Investments from major operators to improve and expand their fixed networks will contribute significantly to the growth of fixed broadband segment.Get Sample Copy Of This Report atThe Country Intelligence Report provides in-depth analysis of the following -- Demographic and macroeconomic context in Argentina.- The regulatory environment and trends: a review of the regulatory setting and agenda for the next 18-24 months as well as relevant developments pertaining to spectrum licensing, national broadband plans, tariff regulation and more.- Telecom and pay-TV services market outlook: analysis as well as historical figures and forecasts of service revenue from the fixed telephony, broadband, mobile voice, mobile data and pay-TV markets.- The competitive landscape: an examination of the positioning of leading players in the telecom and pay-TV services market as well as subscription market shares across segments.- Company snapshots: analysis of the financial position of leading service providers in the telecommunications and pay-TV markets.- Underlying assumptions behind our published base-case forecasts, as well as potential market developments that would alter, either positively or negatively, our base-case outlook.Scope- Argentinas mobile subscription penetration of population will reach an estimated 140.4% by year-end 2018, 27.4 pp above Latin Americas average of 113%.- Smartphone subscriptions will reach an estimated 34m by the end of 2018, a CAGR of 7.2% over 2018-2023 period, reaching 47.9m by 2023.- The number of 4G connections will surpass 3G in 2018, becoming the leading mobile technology with an estimated share of total mobile subscriptions 49.5% at the end of 2018, expanding to 85.8% by 2023.Make an Inquiry before Buying@Reasons to buy- This Country Intelligence Report offers a thorough, forward-looking analysis of Argentinas telecommunications markets, service providers and key opportunities in a concise format to help executives build proactive and profitable growth strategies.- Accompanying GlobalDatas Forecast products, the report examines the assumptions and drivers behind ongoing and upcoming trends in Argentinas mobile communications, fixed telephony, broadband markets, including the evolution of service provider market shares.- With more than 20 charts and tables, the report is designed for an executive-level audience, boasting presentation quality.- The report provides an easily digestible market assessment for decision-makers built around in-depth information gathered from local market players, which enables executives to quickly get up to speed with the current and emerging trends in Argentinas telecommunications markets.- The broad perspective of the report coupled with comprehensive, actionable detail will help operators, equipment vendors and other telecom industry players succeed in the challenging telecommunications market in Argentina.Table of ContentsTable of contents 3Market highlights 4Demographic, macroeconomic, and regulatory context 5Demographic and macroeconomic context 6Regulatory context 8Telecom and pay-TV services market outlook 9Total telecom service revenue 10Mobile services market 12Fixed services market 18Pay-TV services market 22Competitive landscape and company snapshots 25Competitive landscape 26Movistar 28Claro 29Cablevision (Telecom Argentina + Fibertel) 30About Us:Orbis Research (orbisresearch.com) is a single point aid for all your market research requirements. We have vast database of reports from the leading publishers and authors across the globe. We specialize in delivering customized reports as per the requirements of our clients. We have complete information about our publishers and hence are sure about the accuracy of the industries and verticals of their specialization. This helps our clients to map their needs and we produce the perfect required market research study for our clients.Contact Information:Hector CostelloSenior Manager  Client Engagements4144N Central Expressway,Suite 600, Dallas,Texas  75204, U.S.A.Phone No.: +1 (214) 884-6817; +9164101019Email: sales@orbisresearch.comCoil Coatings Market Industry Overview, Trends and Growth Opportunities Forecasted till 2023

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http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/global-silicones-market-to-reach-us-22000-mn-by-2026-consistent-demand-for-silicones-in-construction-689723091.html

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The coil coatings market features a fairly fragmented landscape as the top four players accounted for a combined share of 56% of the market in 2014, finds Transparency Market Research (TMR). These leading companies are Beckers Group, PPG Industries, Inc., Valspar, and Sherwin Williams. The market demonstrates a relatively high degree of competition. With the acquisition of Valspar by the Sherwin-Williams Company in 2017, the competition is likely to intensify in the coming years, observes TMR. The acquisition will enable Sherwin Williams, a company majoring in paints solutions, to capitalize on the worldwide presence of Valspar. This is anticipated to open up lucrative growth avenues in various regions, particularly in emerging markets of Asia Pacific and the Middle East and Africa.Read Report Overview @Several leading players are manufacturing high-performance coil coatings that also help end users meet a variety of purposes. Furthermore, top manufacturers of coil coatings are actively developing their distribution channels in a move to consolidate their presence.Rising at a CAGR of 5.20% from 2015 to 2023, the opportunities in the coil coatings market is expected to reach US$6.3 bn by the end of the forecast period. The market was valued at US$4.0 bn in 2014.Burgeoning Construction Activities in Asia Pacific to Boost ConsumptionRegionally, the coil coatings market is segmented into Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). Of these, the Asia Pacific market held the leading share and is projected to attain a share of 44.2% by the end of 2023. The growth of the market is driven by the rapidly growing construction activities, particular those of non-residential buildings, in several key economies in the region.Based on product, the market is segmented into polyurethane coatings, polyester coatings, plastisol coatings, silicone modified polyester coatings, polyvinylidene fluoride coatings, plastisol epoxides, and acrylics. Of these, the polyester coil coatings segment contributed the major share in 2014, in terms of aggregate demand, attributed to their versatility and high-performance. The segment is projected to reach a share of 64.2% by the forecast period.Multi-purpose Coil Coating Solutions in Construction Sector to Bolster UptakeThe growth of the coil coatings market is primarily driven by the rising number of construction activities world over in the residential as well as non-residential sectors. The rapid pace of urbanization in a number of advanced and emerging nations such as the U.S., China, India, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, and Turkey has accelerated the construction of new buildings, thereby boosting the demand for coil coatings. Compared to other coating options and alternative substrates, the use of coil coatings is stimulated by the several benefits they offer in the metal fabrication process. Coil coatings are characterized by being corrosion- and abrasion- resistant and are thermally reflective. In addition, some high-end coating coils possess antibacterial and self-cleaning properties. Furthermore, coil coatings are extensively used in metals to impart aesthetic finishes to metals used on roofs, and walls, thereby boosting the market.Request to view Sample Report:However, the marked stagnation of various industries in several European nations is expected to negatively impact the coil coatings market to some extent. Nevertheless, the advent of innovative coil coatings, such as bio-based coating solutions, and its demand in the construction of buildings is expected to open up exciting opportunities for manufacturers. Furthermore, coil coatings are witnessing a variety of emerging applications in industries such as automotive, consumer appliances, and packaging. This is anticipated to accentuate the market in the coming years.The study presented here is based on a report by Transparency Market Research (TMR) titled Coil Coatings Market (Product - Polyester, Silicone Modified Polyester, Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF), Polyurethane (PU), Plastisol Epoxides, and Acrylics; Application- Construction, Automotive, Appliances, Packaging Furniture, and HVAC) - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2023.For More Information: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:Depression Therapeutics Market Forecast till 2025

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Antidepressants are used to treat a wide range of mental disorders, including depression, anxiety, and major depressive disorder. Certain neurotransmitters in the brain exist in chemical form such as dopamine and serotonin, which are responsible for maintaining emotional balance such as mood and behavior. Antidepressants cover a wide range of drug categories, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs), monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), and serotonin receptor modulators (SRMs). These medications exhibit different pharmacological action in the brain once administered to regain the chemical balance in the brain, associated with behavioral disorders such as depression. Commercially available antidepressants include Citalopram (Celexa), Escitalopram (Lexapro), Fluoxetine (Prozac), Paroxetine (Paxil), Vilazodone (Viibryd), Sertraline (Zoloft), Venlafaxine (Effexor), Levomilnacipran (Fetzima), Aripiprazole (Abilify), and Vortioxetine (Trintellix).Request Sample Copy of this Business Report @Rising prevalence of mental disorders such as depression and anxiety is expected to boost growth of the depression therapeutics market over the forecast periodMental disorders such as major depressive disorder, anxiety, and associated co-morbidities have high global prevalence. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2017, around 300 million people are estimated to be affected with depression, globally. Furthermore, WHO passed a World Health Assembly resolution in 2013, to address mental disorders in a comprehensive and coordinated manner and has covered depression under its Mental Health Gap Action Program. According to Anxiety & Depression Association of America (ADAA), major depressive disorder is the leading cause of disability in the U.S., among people aged between 15 years and 44.3 years, and affects around 6.7% of the U.S. population aged 18 years and above. Furthermore, according to a report published by Italian Medicines Agency, in 2013, the consumption of antidepressants rose by 4.5% in Italy between 2004 and 2012, which is attributed to rising prevalence of depression and high availability of generic medicines in the country. According to World Health Organization (WHO), in 2015, top five mental problems in the Asia Pacific region are depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicidal behavior, and substance abuse disorder. As the prevalence of mental disorders increases, the consumption of depression drugs is also expected to increase over the forecast period.The global depression therapeutics market was valued at US$ 12,406.8 million in 2016 and is expected to witness a CAGR of 2.1% over the forecast period (20172025).Low costs of antidepressant medication along with lack of affordable alternative therapies are expected to boost growth of the global depression therapeutics market over the forecast periodMental disorders such as depression and anxiety are treated either with medication or psychotherapy, which involves cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). According to American Psychiatric Association, 2017, although both the therapies exhibit similar levels of effectiveness with 30% to 40% remission rates, the cost-effectiveness of these therapies plays an important role. Patients often do not get access to advanced psychotherapy due to lack of resources, social stigma associated with mental disorders, and lack of skilled psychotherapists, wherein, medication proves to be useful. Antidepressants are widely available due to high presence of generic drug manufacturers, who offer cost-effective drugs, whereas, cost for psychotherapy is relatively higher and is unavailable everywhere due to lack of skilled psychiatrists. According to Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA), costs for psychotherapy single session range from US$ 60 to US$ 150, whereas, costs for one branded drug tablet ranges from around US$ 5 to US$ 10. Newer treatment options include brain stimulation therapies such as electroconvulsive therapy and vagus nerve stimulation, which are not widely available and are expensive as well. For instance, Fisher Wallace, created a U.S. FDA approved stimulator, Fisher Wallace Stimulator to treat depression, anxiety, and insomnia, costing around US$ 700, which majority of the population cannot afford.Various side effects such as increased suicidal tendency, sexual dysfunction and anxiety has limited the adoption of depression drugs. Moreover, due to these side effects manufacturers have been dragged in court many a times which has demotivated them to invest more in this market. For instance, in 2017, GlaxoSmithKline Plc was asked to pay US$ 3 Mn to a woman whose husband committed suicide after taking generic version of Paxil, an antidepressant drug, even though the generic drug was manufactured by another company, Mylan N.V. The jury ruled that since GlaxoSmithKline plc controls the drugs design and label, applied to both generic and branded, the company is liable and will have to pay US$ 3 Mn to the complainant.Ask for customization @Some major players operating in the global depression therapeutics market are Pfizer, Inc., Eli Lilly and Company, AstraZeneca, Plc, Allergan Plc, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Intellipharmaceutics International, Inc., Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited, H.Lundbeck A/S, Otsuka Holdings Co.,Ltd., Apotex, Inc., Shionogi & Co. Ltd., Zhejiang Hua Hai Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd, and Chengdu Kanghong Pharmaceutical Group Co.,Ltd.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.Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comGeneric Drugs Market - Global Competitive Analysis

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Generic drugs market growth is buoyed by increasing number of patented expiries for drugs each year. According to the IMS data small-molecule products worth US$ 121 Bn are expected to lose patents in developed markets, such as U.S and Europe between 2014 and 2018. The IMS also forecasts that biologic products valued at US$ 48 Bn are expected to lose patent protection over the next three years i.e from 2017 and 2020, which is expected to drive growth of the generic drugs market. Global generics market is highly competitive with many Asia Pacific companies entering the developed markets such as the U.S., Germany, France, and UK. Recent past has witnessed spurt in mergers and acquisitions between generic drug manufacturers, with major players focusing on enhancing their product portfolio through such inorganic strategies. For instance, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Pvt. Ltd., Pfizer, Inc., Mylan, Sun Pharmaceutical, and Fresenius Kabi entered into acquisitions to increase their revenue share in the generic drugs market.Request Sample Copy of this Business Report @Competitive Analysis - Top 10 generic drug manufacturers, in terms of revenue, in 2016, are as follows:TEVA PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRIESMYLAN N.V.NOVARTIS INTERNATIONAL AGPFIZER, INC.ALLERGAN PLCSUN PHARMACEUTICALSFRESENIUS KABIENDO INTERNATIONALLUPIN LIMITEDSANOFITeva Pharmaceuticals Industries strengthened its position in the generic drugs market through acquisition of the generic segment of Allergan, plc for US$ 40.5 billion in August 2016. This resulted in significant growth in revenue contribution of its generic drug segment, pegged at US$ 9.5 billion in 2016.Mylan ranks second in the list of generic drug manufacturers, and this is due to the acquisition valued at US$ 7.2 Bn of Swedens Meda by Mylan, in year 2016. This also aided Mylan to increase its sales of over-the-counter drugs and expand its presence in new emerging markets such as China, Southeast Asia, Russia, and the Middle East.SandozNovartis Groups business segment dealing in generic medicinesreported rampant growth of 9% Y-o-Y in 2016, in sales volume, with revenue pegged at US$ 9 Bn. However, it was partially offset by a 6% erosion in price. Pfizer is at the fourth position (US$ 4.6 Bn revenue in 2016). Pfizer acquired Hospira in 2015, in order to increase its product portfolio of both generic and branded products. Pfizer offers over 220 injectable medications, plus other off-brand products, which is expected to aid in gaining high revenue in near future. Patent loss of Viagra in 2017, will lead to significant generic competition from Teva and Mylan.Allergan though ranked at fifth position, sold its generics assets to Teva in 2015, and the deal closed in August 2016, which takes the company out of the race for generic drug manufactures for 2017, till the company receives new approval for generic drug manufacturing. This can favor Aspen Pharma to enter the top 10 generic drug manufacturers league in 2017. Sun Pharmaceuticals Ltd., headquartered in Mumbai, India, generated over US$ 3.6 Bn in generic sales in 2016. Sun Pharmaceutical doubled its size by the acquisition of Ranbaxy Laboratories in 2015, thus expanding its product portfolio. However, growth was hampered when the FDA issued a warning letter in 2015 for the Halol, India, API plant, which supplies the generic products in the U.S. Owing to this, Sun Pharmaceuticals is unable to receive new generic drug approvals.Fresunius Kabi, a generic arm of the Fresenius German Healthcare Group, reported a 4% growth in revenue from the U.S. in 2016 driven by strong sales of sterile injectable drugs. In 2017, the company entered into agreement to buy Akorna generic drugs manufacturerfor US$ 4.5 Bn, further strengthening its position in the market. For Endo Pharmaceuticals, till 2014, the generic segment did not generate significant revenue. However, following its acquisition of Par Pharmaceutical in 2015, revenue of Endo Pharmaceutical increased by 12.2% from 2012-2014. Following the acquisition, Endo enhanced its product portfolio with the addition of around 100 products, which also included profitable generic products.Lupin, in 2016, completed acquisition of U.S.-based Gavis and obtained its first manufacturing site in the U.S., along with 60 ANDA filings pending approval with the FDA. This aided the company to increase its footprint in the highly lucrative U.S. market.Access Table of Content (TOC) Of the Report @Increase in number of competitors for generic drugs market put the pressure on manufacturers of pricing. Moreover, price celling actions by respective governments is further aggravating the profit margins of generic drug manufacturers. Considering the challenges of pricing pressure as generics outfits feel the pinch with thin margins, the market is expected to exhibit steady growth in the future.Being a very lucrative market with a number of patent expires in the near future, it is essential for competitive analysis for market players. This could aid one in devising a unique strategy and process to sustain in this highly competitive generic drugs market.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.Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comThermal Barrier Coatings Market: Emerging Industries, Potential Revenue, Consumption, Cost Structure Analysis and Global Key Players  Metallisation, Praxair Surface Tech, ASB, Thermion, H.C. Starck | Future Prospects 2022

Thermal Barrier Coatings Market

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Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market Report 2018 report provides the newest industry data and industry future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving Revenue growth and profitability. The industry report lists the leading competitors and provides the insights strategic industry Analysis of the key factors influencing the market.Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market Overview:The report spread across 118 pages is an overview of the Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market Report 2018. The Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market is projected to grow at a healthy growth rate from 2018 to 2022 according to new research. The study focuses on market trends, leading players, supply chain trends, technological innovations, key developments, and future strategies.Available Exclusive Sample Copy of this Report @This report studies the Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market over the forecast period of 2018 to 2022. The Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market is expected to grow at an impressive Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from 2018 to 2022. Increasing demand for advanced heat resistant coatings from several end-use industries including energy, automotive, and aerospace is expected to have a positive impact on the market growth in the coming years.Growing scope of Applications in Gas Turbines, which are widely used across the energy sector, is also expected to propel the market demand. Increasing number of stationary power plant installations in emerging economies is projected to drive the demand further. In addition, increasing product penetration in aerospace application would also benefit market growth.Increasing adoption of Air Plasma and High-Velocity Oxygen Fuel (HVOF) technologies in automotive and aerospace applications is expected to drive product demand in these sectors. Heavy investments by leading industry participants, such as the Praxier Surface Technologies, for the development of advanced and innovative coating solutions will also have a positive impact on the market growth.A complete analysis of the competitive landscape of the Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market is provided in the report. This section includes company profiles of market key players. The profiles include contact information, gross, capacity, product details of each firm, price, and cost. This report investigates new project feasibility with a purpose of enlightening new entrants about the possibilities in this market. In this report, thorough SWOT analysis & investment analysis is provided which forecasts imminent opportunities for the Thermal Barrier Coatings Market players.Purchase this report online with 118 Pages, List of Tables & Figures and in-depth Table of Contents on Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market Report 2018 @Major Key Players:1 Metallisation Ltd.2 Praxair Surface Technologies Inc.3 Metallizing Equipment Co. Pvt. Ltd.4 ASB Industries5 Thermion Inc.6 H.C. Starck Inc.7 Metallizing Equipment Co. Pvt. Ltd. and More....................Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report covers:1 North America Country (United States, Canada)2 South America3 Asia Country (China, Japan, India, Korea)4 Europe Country (Germany, UK, France, Italy)5 Other Country (Middle East, Africa, GCC)Grab Your Report at an Impressive Discount @This study answers to the below key questions:1 What will the market size be in 2022 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 Thermal Barrier Coatings Market.Major Points in Table of Contents:Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market Report 20181 Thermal Barrier Coatings Product Definition2 Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market Manufacturer Share and Market Overview3 Manufacturer Thermal Barrier Coatings Business Introduction4 Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market Segmentation (Region Level)5 Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market Segmentation (Product Type Level)6 Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market Segmentation (Industry Level)7 Global Thermal Barrier Coatings Market Segmentation (Channel Level)8 Thermal Barrier Coatings Market Forecast 2018-20229 Thermal Barrier Coatings Segmentation Product Type10 Thermal Barrier Coatings Segmentation Industry11 Thermal Barrier Coatings Cost of Production Analysis12 ConclusionAbout usBusinessindustryReports.com is digital database of comprehensive market reports for global industries. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well-defined  we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Media ContactBusiness Industry ReportsPune  Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940Global Mobile Enterprise Application Market 2018 Analysis By Key Players  Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, BlackBerry, Capgemini, Accenture

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SummaryWiseGuyReports.com adds Mobile Enterprise Application Market 2018 Global Analysis, Growth, Trends and Opportunities Research Report Forecasting to 2023 reports to its database.This report provides in depth study of Mobile Enterprise Application Market using SWOT analysis i.e. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat to the organization. The Mobile Enterprise Application Market report also provides an in-depth survey of key players in the market which is based on the various objectives of an organization such as profiling, the product outline, the quantity of production, required raw material, and the financial health of the organization.This report studies the global Mobile Enterprise Application market size, industry status and forecast, competition landscape and growth opportunity. This research report categorizes the global Mobile Enterprise Application market by companies, region, type and end-use industry.This report focuses on the global top players, coveredIBMAT&TTata Consultancy ServicesInfosysBlackBerrySAPOracleCapgeminiAccentureHCL TechnologiesDeloitteMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoAndroid Operating SystemIOS Operating SystemWindows Operating SystemMarket segment by Application, split intoFinancial ServicesCommunicationRetailMedicalEducationLogisticsGovernmentOtherRequest a Sample Report @Major Key Points in Table of ContentGlobal Mobile Enterprise Application Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Mobile Enterprise Application1.1 Mobile Enterprise Application Market Overview1.1.1 Mobile Enterprise Application Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Mobile Enterprise Application Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.2.1 United States1.2.2 Europe1.2.3 China1.2.4 Japan1.2.5 Southeast Asia1.2.6 India1.3 Mobile Enterprise Application Market by Type1.3.1 Android Operating System1.3.2 IOS Operating System1.3.3 Windows Operating System1.4 Mobile Enterprise Application Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Financial Services1.4.2 Communication1.4.3 Retail1.4.4 Medical1.4.5 Education1.4.6 Logistics1.4.7 Government1.4.8 Other2 Global Mobile Enterprise Application Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Mobile Enterprise Application 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 IBM3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Mobile Enterprise Application Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2 AT&T3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Mobile Enterprise Application Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3 Tata Consultancy Services3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Mobile Enterprise Application Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4 Infosys3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Mobile Enterprise Application Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5 BlackBerry3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Mobile Enterprise Application Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6 SAP3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Mobile Enterprise Application Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.7 Oracle3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Mobile Enterprise Application Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.8 Capgemini3.8.1 Company Profile3.8.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.8.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.8.4 Mobile Enterprise Application Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.9 Accenture3.9.1 Company Profile3.9.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.9.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.9.4 Mobile Enterprise Application Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.10 HCL Technologies3.10.1 Company Profile3.10.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.10.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.10.4 Mobile Enterprise Application Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.11 Deloitte4 Global Mobile Enterprise Application Market Size by Type and Application (2013-2018)4.1 Global Mobile Enterprise Application Market Size by Type (2013-2018)4.2 Global Mobile Enterprise Application Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.3 Potential Application of Mobile Enterprise Application in Future4.4 Top Consumer/End Users of Mobile Enterprise ApplicationAt any Query @Continued....Contact Us: sales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US) ; Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Address:Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt LtdPune  411028Maharashtra,Ph: +91 841 198 5042Know About Big Data Analytics In Tourism Market Growth with Trends, Analysis by Regions, Type, Application and Top Companies

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It is essential to a business to understand traveller trends to provide convenient and exciting travelling experiences to the tourists. Big Data helps in analysing the traveller trends by collecting the information from different consumer centres and developing a specific marketing strategy for the target audience. Big Data technologies such as Hadoop and cloud-based analytics provide ample data storage space and presents information collected from a wide range of sources in a structured manner. It enables businesses in the travel and tourism industry to take immediate decisions as per the changing customer demand.Get Sample Copy of this Report@:New report takes a close and analytical look at the various companies that strive for a higher share of the global Big Data Analytics In Tourism market. Data on the leading and fastest-growing segments along with what drives them has been given. This report implements a balanced mix of primary and secondary research methodologies for its analysis. The market is segmented on the basis of key criteria. For this purpose, a section dedicated to company profiles has been included in the report.After studying key companies, the report focuses on the startups contributing towards the growth of the market. Possible mergers and acquisitions among the startups and key organizations are identified by the report's authors in the study. As leading companies take efforts to maintain their dominance in the global Big Data Analytics In Tourism market, the right way to do so is by adopting new technologies and strategies. The report highlights major technological developments and changing trends adopted by key companies over a period of time. For a stronger and more stable business outlook, the report on the global market carries key projections that can be practically studied.Get Reasonable Discount on this Premium Report @:Big Data Analytics In Tourism market is segmented on the basis of various parameters. The factors which are impacting the markets growth are studied in detail. The report also presents a overall weaknesses which companies operating in the market must avoid in order to enjoy sustainable growth through the course of the forecast period. Besides this, profiles of some of the leading players operating and encouraging in the growth of the global market are included in the study. Additionally, using SWOT analysis, markets weaknesses and strengths are analyzed. It also helps the report provide insights into the opportunities and threats that these companies may face during the forecast period.Table of ContentsGlobal Big Data Analytics In Tourism Market Research ReportChapter 1 Big Data Analytics In Tourism 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 Big Data Analytics In Tourism Market ForecastFor More Information:If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.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,Global OSS-BSS Software Industry Market Analysis & Forecast 2018-2023 Major Eminent: Wipro Limited Comptel Convergys Oracle Elitecore Technologies HP Development Company Intec Systems Ltd.

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Research N Reports announces the addition of a new research report titled Global OSS-BSS Software Industry Market Analysis & Forecast 2018-2023. The statistical surveying comprehensive publication studies the current market landscape and makes forecasts about its future growth prospects. Making use of tables and figures, the report packages various data and trends in a more informative manner.The report provides a product analysis and discusses the present competitive landscape. Facts and figures for the period between 2018 and 2023 with respect to price, production, cost, revenue, and sales are provided in the report. It segments the market based on various parameters.In the following section of the study, the growth of the water and wastewater filtration market in North America, Europe, LMEA, and Asia-Pacific has been analyzed. It discusses their respective market sizes, estimates future growth rates, and their key players.For Sample copy of this report@Major Eminent:- Comptel Convergys Oracle Elitecore Technologies HP Development Company Intec Systems Ltd. Subex Limited Wipro Limited XaltedKey organizations operating in the market are profiled in the report with details such as product pictures and specifications, production and capacity figures, cost, price, gross, and revenue. Their dominance is measured by considering their geographical reach. A feasibility study of new project investments is also done in the report by the analysts. The manufacturing base of each key player and their share in the market for each product and application segment of the virtual private network market have been described in the report. It also describes various marketing channels and strategies likely to give positive results in the 2018-2023 so as to help readers in formulating winning tactics.Moving further, information on the research and development taking place in the market has been presented. In addition, the sources of raw materials used for manufacturing by the key manufacturers in 2017 have been detailed in this study.Avail Discount on this report@Market segment by Application, split into:-OSS Software BSS SoftwareMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report covers:- United States Europe China Japan Southeast Asia India Central & South AmericaTable of Contents1 Report Overview1.1 Study Scope1.2 Key Market Segments1.3 Players Covered1.4 Market Analysis by Type1.5 Market by Application1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered2 Global Growth Trends2.1 OSS BSS Software Market Size2.2 OSS BSS Software Growth Trends by Regions2.2.1 OSS BSS Software Market Size by Regions (2013-2025)2.2.2 OSS BSS Software Market Share by Regions (2013-2018)2.3 Industry TrendsFor More Information on this Report@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 United States 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.Sunny Denis(Sales Manager),(Research N Reports)10916, Gold Point Dr, Houston, TX, Pin - 77064,+1-8886316977,sales@researchnreports.com ,Join the Community Clean-Up in Col. Emiliano Zapata

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - The JG Group's Colonia Clean-ups continue through the summer to keep raising awareness and getting residents and visitors alike involved in keeping our colonia clean. If you are going to be in Puerto Vallarta on the first Saturday of the month, make plans now to join us on September 1st, and share the love.

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Please RSVP to alejandra(at)jggrouppv.com if we can count on you Saturday morning, then meet us in front of our offices at Lazaro Cardenas 421 by 9:30 am. We'll finish working by 11:30 am, but be sure to stick around for hot dogs, with all the fixings and cool refreshments afterwards.

If you cannot participate but would like to contribute to this community effort, you can donate $100 pesos so we can hire some of the neighborhood kids to help with the clean-up. Please swing by our offices anytime between 9 am and 6 pm during the week and we'll be happy to take your pesos.

We love our Bay, so timing is critical. Now that the summer rainy season is here, we can do our part to minimize the garbage that floats down into the ocean. Join us!Batter & Breader Premixes Market Report 2018: Segmentation by Application (Meat, Seafood, Vegetables, Others) by Batter Type (Adhesion, Tempura, Beer, Thick, Customized, Others) by Breader Type (Crumbs & Flakes, Flour & Starch, Others)

Batter & Breader Premixes Market

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Global Batter & Breader Premixes market research report provides company profile for Showa Sangyo (Japan), McCormick & Company (US), Euroma (Netherlands), Newly Weds Foods (US), Coalescence (US), House-Autry Mills (US), Lily River Foods (US), Blendex Company (US) 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.Request for Free sample copy of ready Report @Report Coverage:Top Manufactures/vendors of Batter & Breader Premixes market:Newly Weds Foods (US)Coalescence (US)House-Autry Mills (US)Lily River Foods (US)Blendex Company (US)Showa Sangyo (Japan)McCormick & Company (US)Euroma (Netherlands)Others (Note: We can profile additional players without any additional charges)Based on batter premix type , the market has been segmented as follows:Adhesion batterTempura batterBeer batterThick batterCustomized batterBased on batter premix application, the market has been segmented as follows:MeatPorkChickenSeafoodVegetablesOnion ringsOther vegetablesOthersBased on breader premix type, the market has been segmented as follows:Crumbs & flakesDry bread crumbsFresh bread crumbsCracker crumbsOthersFlour & starchCerealWheatRiceCornOthersPulsesBlendsOthersBased on breader premix application, the market has been segmented as follows:SeafoodCrabFishOthersChickenVegetablesRegions covered in Batter & Breader Premixes 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 Batter & Breader Premixes Market analysis report covers detailed value chain analysis of Global Batter & Breader Premixes 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 Batter & Breader Premixes 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? Batter & Breader Premixes 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 @ marketreportscompany.com/report.php?report=food-and-bever......Table of Content:1 Introduction1.1 Objectives of the Study1.2 Market Definition1.3 Market Scope1.4 Periodization Considered1.5 Currency Considered1.6 Units1.7 Stakeholders........................Continue (What does Report Include?Historic Data: What was the Batter & Breader Premixes 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Ventricular Assist Devices Market 2017 to 2023 - Abiomed, Inc., Asahi Kasei Corporation (Evaheart Medical U.S.A., Inc.), Abbott Laboratories (St. Jude Medical, Inc.), Berlin Heart GmbH, Calon Cardio-Technology Ltd.

Ventricular Assist Devices Market

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Global Ventricular Assist Devices Market was valued at $809 million in 2016, and is estimated to reach $1,773 million by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 11.8% from 2017 to 2023.Ventricular assist device (VAD) is used to assist a damaged or weakened heart in pumping blood. The device is surgically attached to one or both intact ventricles and thus assists cardiac circulation.The major factors that contribute to the market growth include technological advancements in ventricular assist devices, awareness among patients about monitoring of the heart, and treatment options for management of cardiac disorders. Moreover, increased presence unmet medical needs in the developing and the under developed regions of the world is anticipated to provide lucrative opportunities for the market growth. However, the main challenge in the market is high cost of the VAD procedure. Also, bleeding complications and other associated risks hamper the growth of the ventricular assist devices market.Also you can request for sample pdf with more details and graph:The major companies profiled in the report are Abiomed, Inc. Asahi Kasei Corporation (Evaheart Medical U.S.A., Inc.) Abbott Laboratories (St. Jude Medical, Inc.) Berlin Heart GmbH, Calon Cardio-Technology Ltd. CardiacAssist Technologies Jarvik Heart, Inc. Medtronic plc ReliantHeart, Inc. Terumo Medical Corporation.By product, LVADs accounted for the major share of the global ventricular assist devices market in 2016. By application segment, bridge-to-transplant generated the maximum revenue, thus accounting for more than 49% of the global ventricular assist devices market in 2016. In addition, destination therapy segment is expected to witness the highest CAGR of 13.4% during the forecast period. By design, implantable ventricular assist device dominated the market with three-fourths share in the global ventricular assist devices market in 2016.Key Findings of the Ventricular Assist Devices Market: The left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) segment is projected to grow at a significant CAGR of 11.7%, during the forecast period (2017-2023). Transcutaneous ventricular assist device is projected to grow at a significant CAGR, during the forecast period. Destination therapy accounted for more than one-fourth share of the global market in 2016. Germany and France are the major shareholders, and together accounted for more than one-third share of the European market in 2016. Japan is the major shareholder, accounting for more than one-third share of the Asia-Pacific market in 2016.The Asia-Pacific market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR of 14.9% during the forecast period, owing to increase in awareness about the benefits of digital wound measurement devices in healthcare industry and rise in expenditures in emerging markets (such as India and China) to cater to the unmet medical needs.LIST OF TABLESTABLE 01. GLOBAL VENTRICULAR ASSIST DEVICES MARKET REVENUE, BY PRODUCT, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 02. LEFT VENTRICULAR ASSIST DEVICES MARKET REVENUE, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 03. RIGHT VENTRICULAR ASSIST DEVICES MARKET REVENUE, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 04. BIVENTRICULAR ASSIST DEVICES (BIVADS) MARKET REVENUE, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 05. GLOBAL VENTRICULAR ASSIST DEVICES MARKET REVENUE, BY APPLICATION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 06. VENTRICULAR ASSIST DEVICE MARKET REVENUE FOR BRIDGE-TO-TRANSPLANT THERAPY, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 07. VENTRICULAR ASSIST DEVICE MARKET REVENUE FOR DESTINATION THERAPY, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 08. VENTRICULAR ASSIST DEVICE MARKET REVENUE FOR BRIDGE-TO-RECOVERY THERAPY, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 09. VENTRICULAR ASSIST DEVICE MARKET REVENUE FOR BRIDGE-TO-CANDIDACY THERAPY, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 10. VENTRICULAR ASSIST DEVICES MARKET REVENUE, BY DESIGN, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 11. TRANSCUTANEOUS VENTRICULAR ASSIST DEVICES MARKET REVENUE, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION).TABLE 106. TERUMO: OPERATING SEGMENTSTABLE 107. TERUMO: PRODUCT PORTFOLIOBrowse here for full report with Toc:About Us:Allied Market Research, a market research and advisory company of Allied Analytics LLP, provides business insights and market research reports to large as well as small & medium enterprises. The company assists its clients to strategize business policies and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain.Contact:Shriram Dighe5933 NE Win Sivers Drive#205, Portland, OR 97220United StatesToll Free: +1-800-792-5285UK: +44-845-528-1300Hong Kong: +852-301-84916India (Pune): +91-20-66346060Fax: +1855550-5975help@alliedmarketresearch.comWeb:New Report On Vibrating Feeder Market 2018 Global Analysis Report By Key Players- Eriez, Carrier Vibrating Equipment & Global Forecast

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The Report published on UpMarketResearch.com about Vibrating Feeder Market is spread across 94 pages and provides newest industry data, market future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving Revenue growth and profitability. The industry report lists and studies the leading competitors, also provides the insights with strategic industry Analysis of the key factors influencing the market.Get Free Sample Report Before Buying @Vibrating Feeder Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state which focuses on the major drivers and restraints for the key players. Vibrating Feeder Industry research report provides granular analysis of the market share, segmentation, revenue forecasts and geographic regions of the market.The report begins with the overview of the Vibrating Feeder market and updates the users about the latest developments and future expectations. It presents a comparative detailed analysis of all the regional and major player segments, offering readers a better knowledge of areas in which they can place their existing resources and gauging the priority of a particular region in order to boost their standing in the global market.In Vibrating Feeder Market Report, there is a healthy amount of coverage of the market economies such as the demand and supply, cost and profit of the Vibrating Feeder Market. This holds key importance for users and hence this information is well supported with due statistics that are represented in easy to consume graphs, charts, and tables.The report compiles exhaustive information obtained via proven research methodologies and from trusted sources within the industries.Buy this report @The report segments the Global Vibrating Feeder market as:Regional Segment Analysis (Regional Consumption Volume, Consumption Volume, Revenue and Growth Rate 2018- 2025): United States Europe China Japan Other RegionsProduct Type Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume, Average Price, Revenue, Market Share and Trend 2018- 2025): Electromagnetic Feeders Electromechanical Vibratory FeedersApplication Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume and Market Share 2018- 2025; Downstream Customers and Market Analysis Automotive Electronic Food Processing Pharmaceutical Packaging Metal Working OthersKey Players/Competitor Segment Analysis (Company and Product introduction, Vibrating Feeder Market Sales Volume, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin) Eriez Carrier Vibrating Equipment Vibromatic General Kinematics PIA Evansville National Air Vibrator Compa C & M Topline Manufactures California Vibratory Feeder Carter Enterprises CDS-LIPE Cleveland Vibrator Dixon Engineering & Sales Fortville FeedersIn this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of Vibrating Feeder are as follows: History Year: 2013-2017 Base Year: 2017 Estimated Year: 2018 Forecast Year 2018 to 2025The Report covers in-depth analysis as follows: Chapter 1 Study Coverage Chapter 2 Executive Summary Chapter 3 Market Size by Manufacturers Chapter 4 Vibrating Feeder Production by Regions Chapter 5 Vibrating Feeder Consumption by Regions Chapter 6 Market Size by Type Chapter 7 Market Size by Application Chapter 8 Manufacturers Profiles Chapter 9 Production Forecasts Chapter 10 Consumption Forecast Chapter 11 Value Chain and Sales Channels Analysis Chapter 12 Market Opportunities & Challenges, Risks and Influences Factors Analysis Chapter 13 Key Findings in the Global Vibrating Feeder Study Chapter 14 AppendixFor more information @Key Reasons to Purchase: To gain insightful analyses of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the Vibrating Feeder and its commercial landscape. Assess the Vibrating Feeder production processes, major issues, and solutions to mitigate the development risk. To understand the most affecting driving and restraining forces in the Vibrating Feeder market and its impact on the global market. Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by your competitors and leading organizations. To understand the future outlook and prospects for Vibrating Feeder MarketCustomization of the Report:UpMarketResearch provides free customization of reports as per your need. This report can be personalized to meet your requirements. Get in touch with our sales team, who will guarantee you to get a report that suits your necessities.About UpMarketResearch:The UpMarketResearch () is a leading distributor of market research report with more than 800+ global clients. 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.Contact Info:Name: Alex MathewsEmail: alex@upmarketresearch.comOrganization: UpMarketResearchAddress: 500 East E Street, Ontario, CA 91764, United StatesPhone: +1 347-377-7033Latest Research On Insulation Tester Market 2018 Global Analysis Report By Key Players- Fluke, KYORITSU & Global Forecast

Insulation Tester

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The Report published on UpMarketResearch.com about Insulation Tester Market is spread across 95 pages and provides newest industry data, market future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving Revenue growth and profitability. The industry report lists and studies the leading competitors, also provides the insights with strategic industry Analysis of the key factors influencing the market.Get Free Sample Report Before Buying @Insulation Tester Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state which focuses on the major drivers and restraints for the key players. Insulation Tester Industry research report provides granular analysis of the market share, segmentation, revenue forecasts and geographic regions of the market.The report begins with the overview of the Insulation Tester market and updates the users about the latest developments and future expectations. It presents a comparative detailed analysis of all the regional and major player segments, offering readers a better knowledge of areas in which they can place their existing resources and gauging the priority of a particular region in order to boost their standing in the global market.In Insulation Tester Market Report, there is a healthy amount of coverage of the market economies such as the demand and supply, cost and profit of the Insulation Tester Market. This holds key importance for users and hence this information is well supported with due statistics that are represented in easy to consume graphs, charts, and tables.The report compiles exhaustive information obtained via proven research methodologies and from trusted sources within the industries.Buy this report @The report segments the Global Insulation Tester market as:Regional Segment Analysis (Regional Consumption Volume, Consumption Volume, Revenue and Growth Rate 2018- 2025): United States Europe China Japan South Korea Other RegionsProduct Type Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume, Average Price, Revenue, Market Share and Trend 2018- 2025): Analog DigitalApplication Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume and Market Share 2018- 2025; Downstream Customers and Market Analysis Electrical & Electronics Automotive OthersKey Players/Competitor Segment Analysis (Company and Product introduction, Insulation Tester Market Sales Volume, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin) Fluke KYORITSU Hioki Keysight Chauvin Arnoux Megger Robin-Amprobe Gossen Metrawatt Extech Instruments Yokogawa Amprobe SPS Electronic KharkovEnergoPribor Ltd. B&K Precision.In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of Insulation Tester are as follows: History Year: 2013-2017 Base Year: 2017 Estimated Year: 2018 Forecast Year 2018 to 2025The Report covers in-depth analysis as follows: Chapter 1 Study Coverage Chapter 2 Executive Summary Chapter 3 Market Size by Manufacturers Chapter 4 Insulation Tester Production by Regions Chapter 5 Insulation Tester Consumption by Regions Chapter 6 Market Size by Type Chapter 7 Market Size by Application Chapter 8 Manufacturers Profiles Chapter 9 Production Forecasts Chapter 10 Consumption Forecast Chapter 11 Value Chain and Sales Channels Analysis Chapter 12 Market Opportunities & Challenges, Risks and Influences Factors Analysis Chapter 13 Key Findings in the Global Insulation Tester Study Chapter 14 AppendixFor more information @Key Reasons to Purchase: To gain insightful analyses of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the Insulation Tester and its commercial landscape. Assess the Insulation Tester production processes, major issues, and solutions to mitigate the development risk. To understand the most affecting driving and restraining forces in the Insulation Tester market and its impact on the global market. Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by your competitors and leading organizations. To understand the future outlook and prospects for Insulation Tester MarketCustomization of the Report:UpMarketResearch provides free customization of reports as per your need. This report can be personalized to meet your requirements. Get in touch with our sales team, who will guarantee you to get a report that suits your necessities.About UpMarketResearch:The UpMarketResearch () is a leading distributor of market research report with more than 800+ global clients. 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.Contact Info:Name: Alex MathewsEmail: alex@upmarketresearch.comOrganization: UpMarketResearchAddress: 500 East E Street, Ontario, CA 91764, United StatesPhone: +1 347-377-7033Mass Spectrometry Market 2023 - Agilent Technologies, Inc., Danaher Corporation, Waters Corporation, Bruker Corporation, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.

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Global mass spectrometry market accounted for $4,598 million in 2016, and is estimated to reach at $7,922 million by 2023, registering a CAGR of 8.0% from 2017 to 2023. North America was the highest contributor in the mass spectrometry market in 2016; however, Asia-Pacific is anticipated to witness the highest growth rate throughout the forecast period.Mass spectrometry is an analytical technique that determines and identifies quantities of a compound within a sample, and it can also identify traces of components at minute concentrations. It is utilized both quantitatively and qualitatively to detect unknown compounds and calculate isotopic composition of a particular element in a molecule. It can also be used to observe fragments of a compound to determine its structure.A mass spectrometer provides information about the molecular weight of compound. When combined with combustion analysis, it can also produce relative percentage of oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen present, thus being beneficial to determine molecular formula of an unidentified compound. Moreover, it can detect presence of certain elements based on availability of their isotopes in large quantity. Mass spectrometry and combination of other identification techniques can be applied for detection of an unidentified compound, for example, carbon and proton NMR and IR spectroscopy.Also you can request for sample pdf with more details and graph:The report provides extensive analysis and profiles of key market players, such as, Agilent Technologies, Inc. Danaher Corporation Waters Corporation Bruker Corporation Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. Perkinelmer, Inc. Shimadzu Corporation. Kore Technologies, Ltd. Dani Instruments S.P.A. Leco Corporation.The pharmaceutical segment was the highest revenue generator in 2016, and is anticipated to continue this trend in future, owing to high need of accurate analytical techniques. Hybrid mass spectrometry is expected to grow at highest rate in the technology segment due to development in hybrid mass spectrometry sector.In 2016, North America accounted for highest contribution to the total revenue generated, owing to the high investment in R&D activates and abundance in use of mass spectrometry analytical techniques. However, Asia-Pacific is expected to witness the highest CAGR during the analysis period, attributable to growth in disposable income, increase in government initiatives to modernize healthcare infrastructure, and rise in healthcare expenditure.Key Findings of the Mass Spectrometry Market: The hybrid mass spectrometry segment is projected to grow at the highest rate during the analysis period. The pharmaceuticals segment was the highest revenue contributor in 2016, and is expected to continue its dominance in future. North America dominated the global mass spectrometry market, and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 7.5%. China is expected to grow at the highest CAGR of 9.7% in the Asia-Pacific market. The food & beverage segment is anticipated to grow at the highest CAGR of 8.5%.LIST OF TABLESTABLE 1. GLOBAL MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY TECHNOLOGY, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 2. HYBRID MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY TYPE, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 3. HYBRID MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 4. TRIPLE QUADRUPLE (TANDEM) MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 5. QUADRUPLE TOF( Q-TOF) MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 6. FTMS MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 7. SINGLE MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY TYPE, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 8. SINGLE MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 9. ION TRAP MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 10. QUADRUPLE MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 11. TIME OF FLIGHT (TOF) MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 12. OTHER MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 13. GLOBAL MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY APPLICATIONS, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 14. PHARMACEUTICAL MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 15. BIOTECHNOLOGY MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 16. INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 17. ENVIRONMENTAL TESTING MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)TABLE 18. FOOD & BEVERAGE TESTING MASS SPECTROMETRY MARKET, BY REGION, 2016-2023 ($MILLION)Browse here for full report with Toc:About Us:Allied Market Research, a market research and advisory company of Allied Analytics LLP, provides business insights and market research reports to large as well as small & medium enterprises. The company assists its clients to strategize business policies and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain.Contact:Shriram Dighe5933 NE Win Sivers Drive#205, Portland, OR 97220United StatesToll Free: +1-800-792-5285UK: +44-845-528-1300Hong Kong: +852-301-84916India (Pune): +91-20-66346060Fax: +1855550-5975help@alliedmarketresearch.comWeb:Editors note: This is the second installment of Platforms 2018, a series on the policy positions and records of Oregons two leading gubernatorial candidates.

Hillary Borrud | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The Republican candidate for governor, Knute Buehler, hews to conservative orthodoxy on plenty of issues.

Abortion and birth control arent among them. An orthopedic surgeon by trade, Buehler has repeatedly said that decisions to end pregnancies should be left to women and their doctors, and he championed a law to allow pharmacists to prescribe birth control pills.

In doing so, the Bend legislator alienated Oregon Right to Life but established a socially liberal position from which to run against Gov. Kate Brown. Womens health care and reproductive rights have been central themes in her political career.

Womens right to choose is fundamental to women achieving full political, economic and social parity in this country, the Portland Democrat told The Oregonian/OregonLive last week. Ive been fighting for this issue my entire life.

Buehler says his abortion views stem from his perspective as a doctor. The sanctity of that patient-physician relationship is very important, he said in an interview last week. Thats a decision between a woman and her physician and should not be political or government-influenced.

Don't Edit

The Oregonian | Ross William Hamilton

In this May 2007 file photo, then-Gov. Ted Kulongoski signs the access to birth control act outside the Oregon Capitol as then-Senate Majority Leader Kate Brown reacts.

One of the longest battles of Brown's career was passing a law requiring health insurance companies to cover contraceptives. Brown said she started working on the legislation in 1993, while serving in the Oregon House, but it didn't pass until 2007, when Democrats took control of both chambers of the Legislature. "It is gender discrimination not to provide it," Brown said of birth control.

Buehler made accessible birth control a priority during his first legislative session representing House District 54 in 2015, when he pitched the idea of allowing women to obtain on-demand prescriptions for birth control pills.

He ran into opposition from Democrats, who suggested taking a year to vet the idea with health care interests. Groups including Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon complained they hadn't been consulted on one of their signature issues. Buehler was thought to be positioning himself for another run at statewide office following his strong 2012 showing against Brown for secretary of state, so Democrats had to decide whether to hand him a policy win that could make him more appealing to women voters.

Don't Edit

AP Photo/Jonathan J. Cooper

Gov. Kate Brown signs a bill requiring insurers to pay for a full year of birth control in 2015, while Rep. Knute Buehler and other lawmakers watch.

Buehler's plan ultimately passed in the Legislature with help from then-House Majority Leader Val Hoyle, and Brown signed it into law. Oregon was the second state to pass such a law, after California.

Both candidates supported another 2015 contraception bill which required insurers to cover 12 months of birth control at a time, rather than requiring women to obtain it incrementally.

In 2017, Buehler co-sponsored House Bill 2527 with Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward to expand pharmacists' contraceptive prescribing to cover hormonal patches and injectable contraceptives and allow them to administer the injections. Brown signed it into law.

Don't Edit

Mike Zacchino | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Protestors for and against abortion rights demonstrate outside the Northeast Portland Planned Parenthood office in this 2017 file photo.

Where Brown and Buehler diverged was on House Bill 3391, passed with zero Republican votes in 2017. The law requires health insurers to cover abortions at no out-of-pocket cost and uses state money to provide abortions for non-citizens who are not covered by the federal Medicaid program.

With abortion rights proponents worried that conservative U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh could chip away or overturn Roe v. Wade, Brown and reproductive rights advocates are describing HB 3391 as a way of enshrining the landmark federal decision in Oregon law.

My opponent had an opportunity vote to protect and guarantee the women of Oregon access to reproductive health care, Brown said. In my mind, he is faux choice, not pro-choice.

Its true HB 3391 includes a prohibition against governments within Oregon restricting access to abortion. However, since it is a statute rather than a state constitutional amendment, the Oregon Legislature can change it simply by passing a new law.

Don't Edit

Mike Zacchino | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Protestors for and against abortion rights demonstrate outside the Northeast Portland Planned Parenthood office in this 2017 file photo.

Brown didnt specifically address why it was necessary for the state to fund abortions for non-citizen women. Instead, she said that the bill extended reproductive care more broadly to low-income, non-citizen women  including post-partum care.

Its really critical that all women, regardless of their income, regardless of their zip code and regardless of their immigration status have access to the full complement of reproductive services, Brown said.

Buehler said he voted against the bill because he disagreed with adding new services to the state budget at a time when lawmakers were trimming existing programs and failing to fully fund a 2016 voter-approved education initiative, in order to balance the budget. Oregon officials estimated the state would spend $300,000 a year on abortions for non-citizens.

As for Buehlers contention that theres no threat to Oregons pro-choice status, Brown disagreed. We have an initiative on the ballot right now that would do that, Brown said. It would deprive public sector employees from access to the full complement of reproductive health services.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Hillary Borrud

503-294-4034; @hborrud

Don't Edit

WHERE THEY STAND | ABORTION

Don't Edit

Dave Killen

Here's a recap of Brown's work and positions on abortion and birth control.

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Tom James | AP

Here's a rundown of Buehler's votes and positions on abortion and birth control.

Don't Edit

PLATFORMS 2018

The Platforms 2018 series will run on Mondays through October. Check back if you want to learn more about the candidates' stances on:

Gun regulation

Abortion/reproductive rights

State spending

Taxes

Education

Homelessness

Affordable housing

Health care

Public Employees Retirement System

Climate change

Transparency

Don't EditUpdated 9:55 a.m.

A Lewis & Clark College sophomore survived a 150-foot fall during a "free solo" climb Sunday at Smith Rock State Park, according to authorities and the man's family.

Benjamin Schulman, 20, was using no safety ropes or equipment as he scaled a rock face not typically known as a climbing route in the southern section of the park, the Deschutes County Sheriff's Office told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

About 4 p.m. he fell, the sheriff's office said.

After Schulman's 150-foot plunge from the rock face he rolled another 100 feet down a steep hill before coming to rest mid-slope, authorities said.

It took emergency personnel more than two hours to remove the young man from the hillside, given the rugged terrain and his injuries, the sheriff's office said.

Schulman, who grew up in the Washington, D.C., area, was then flown by helicopter to St. Charles Hospital in Bend with life-threatening injuries, the sheriff's office said.

His condition stabilized Sunday night and he was later taken to OHSU, Schulman's father said.

"He suffered no neurological damage, his heart and lungs are healthy, but he has multiple fractures," Steven Schulman told The Oregonian/OregonLive. "I did speak with him after the fall, and while of course he was in a lot of pain, he was coherent."

Roy Kaufmann, a college spokesman, said Schulman was not taking part in an outdoor activity through the school when the accident occurred.

The sheriff's office said it did not know whether Schulman was an experienced climber. Social media profiles list him as a former indoor climbing instructor and an employee of Lewis & Clark's outdoor program.

Steven Schulman said his son is also a wilderness emergency medicine technician.

"His mother Everlyn and I are very grateful to the first responders and hospital staff who have been attending to him with great care and compassion," Steven Schulman said.

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

skavanaugh@oregonian.com

503-294-7632 II @shanedkavanaughUpdated at 3:20 p.m.

Sheriffs in more than a third of Oregon's counties are calling for voters to support an initiative on the November ballot that would repeal a 30-year-old sanctuary state law.

Clatsop County Sheriff Thomas Bergin issued the letter Monday morning, signing it along with 15 other sheriffs from rural counties in southern, central and eastern Oregon.

Sheriffs from Coos, Curry, Deschutes, Douglas, Gilliam, Grant, Harney, Klamath, Lake, Malheur, Morrow, Sherman, Umatilla, Union and Wheeler counties also signed the letter. Their support for the anti-sanctuary law initiative, Measure 105, is not surprising given that 28 of Oregon's 36 counties voted for Republican Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Trump has taken a hard line against all forms of immigration, including his short-lived "zero tolerance" policy that called for separating migrant families.

His Democratic rival Hillary Clinton still won Oregon, where most voters live in a handful of urban counties. One is Multnomah County, where Sheriff Mike Reese has implemented one of the most liberal interpretations of Oregon's sanctuary state law.

Clatsop County, where Bergin is sheriff, is actually the only county represented by sheriffs who signed the letter that supported Clinton in 2016.

"Certainly, immigration-law violations are federal offenses," Bergin wrote. "But they are precursors to other crimes illegal immigrants routinely commit in their efforts to conceal their illegal presence  crimes, like identity theft, that harm everyday Oregonians at every level."

The letter drew a swift response from the Oregon Justice Resource Center. Erin McKee, co-director of the civil rights group's Immigrant Rights Project, says it's troubling that "elected officials continue to perpetuate the myth of the criminal immigrant.

"Studies have shown, repeatedly, that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens." McKee said in a news release. "There is no factual basis for the assertion that a civil immigration violation leads to a life of crime. Sheriff Bergin's statement not only ignores facts and statistics, but it also relies on tired, fear-mongering rhetoric that misleads the public on how the law works."

Oregon's 1987 sanctuary law prohibits state and local law enforcement from using public resources to arrest people whose only violation of the law is being in the country illegally. Simply being in the country without authorization, such as overstaying a visa, is a civil offense rather than a crime. Crossing the border illegally is a federal misdemeanor the first time; it is a felony under federal law for someone who was deported to return to the U.S. without authorization.

Read the letter here.

Hillary Borrud

503-294-4034; @hborrudPortland Archbishop Alexander Sample got straight to the point Sunday at a special mass for victims of sexual abuse.

"I am sorry beyond words for what priests and bishops have done to harm the children of God," he said at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. "I am ashamed of them."

A recent grand jury report outlined decades of abuse by hundreds of Pennsylvania priests. The report has shaken the country's Catholic community, already facing regular revelations of sexual abuse.

Sample called for change. Incidents must be fully investigated, he said, and priests and bishops must be held accountable, "no matter how high this goes."

Hundreds of churchgoers clapped, interrupting Sample.

"I have outlined some concrete steps and actions which should be taken," he continued.

Sample's 15-minute homily also touched on Portland's own history of abuse. Settlements with more than 100 victims forced the archdiocese into bankruptcy in 2004.

Churchgoers should not fear new revelations here, Sample said. All cases are public. "Nothing is hidden," he said.

Yet a lawsuit filed against the archdiocese last Wednesday makes clear that allegations of decades-old abuse live on.

The case

"Jack Doe 550," as he is referred to in legal documents, who is in his mid-30s, was a student and altar boy at the Holy Cross Parish and School in the 1990s when he claims two clergymen abused him sexually.

When he was a boy, Doe's abusive father would sometimes drive him out of his home, according to the complaint, and the archdiocese would allow him to stay the night at the rectory.

Deacon James Creel and Father Cathal Brennan both worked at Holy Cross at the time, according to the suit. The men "groomed" Doe and, between 1993 and 1996, fondled or performed oral sex on him at least five times, the suit alleges.

Doe is seeking $16.25 million in damages, alleging sexual battery of a child, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligence.

A spokesman for the archdiocese said that "every new claim we receive is taken seriously, just as the most recent one will be." Archbishop Sample declined to comment on the case, saying it was in attorneys' hands.

The accused

Creel, 64, now lives in St. Helens. He denied the allegations in the lawsuit, saying he hardly spent any time at Holy Cross. He didn't perform oral sex on an altar boy, he said.

"That's just nauseating to me to even think about," Creel said.

Creel pleaded guilty in 1995 to five counts of sexual abuse after repeatedly fondling a girl's breasts and served five years probation. The girl was a family member, Creel said.

He readily admitted to the fondling, which happened around the same time that he allegedly abused Doe. But that girl was his sole victim, Creel said, seeming baffled that he was named in the suit.

Creel said he left the church around the time he was convicted. He is not a defendant in the case.

Father Brennan died in 2013 in his native Ireland, according to the Catholic Sentinel.

Doe put the blame for his alleged abuse squarely at the archdiocese's feet.

Church leadership knew of Creel's propensity towards sexual abuse, the suit claims, and knew of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in general. Yet the archdiocese allowed Doe to spend the night in the rectory with Brennan and Creel. And the church never warned Doe or his parents about the potential danger posed by abusive priests.

What's next

Doe's attorney, Kristian Roggendorf, said the archdiocese should be more transparent. Some records of abuse are still under seal, he said, and the archdiocese hasn't released a list of all credible allegations against priests.

"It's easy to say the right things," Roggendorf said. "It's a lot harder to do the right things."

After the service, Archbishop Sample stood outside and shook hands with the parishioners filing out and thanking him. Sample's homily had made an impression.

Linda van Wart, 75, said Sample is the church's primary hope for change and will be an aggressive advocate for victims. The church has a "complete cancer," van Wart said, so she will pray for Sample's strength and courage.

Sample has outlined measures to protect victims, both in his homily and in a statement released last week.

Investigations should include those who covered up abuse, not just the abusers themselves. Bishops should be held to the same standards as priests. And Sample proposed an independent investigation process that would involve people outside of the clergy.

"A body investigating itself does not inspire confidence in the objectivity of the outcome," he wrote.

Everyone who works with children in the archdiocese gets a background check and goes through special training, Sample said Sunday. Suspected abuse must be reported both within the church and to law enforcement.

For Teresa Whalen, 57, the sexual abuse crisis means that Catholics have to stay strong in their faith while holding abusers accountable.

"This is satan fighting the church," she said. "He wants to destroy it."

-- Fedor Zarkhin

desk: 503-294-7674|cell: 971-373-2905|@fedorzarkhinIt's been a dream of Democrats and "Never Trump" Republicans since January 2017:

President Donald Trump forcibly removed from office.

A popular satirical video on YouTube even shows Trump and his team in handcuffs being dragged away by the FBI, all to the soundtrack of "From Russia With Love" -- a jaunty nod to the accusation that the 2016 Trump campaign "colluded" with Russian operatives.

Such wild fantasies always help the opposition get through hard political times. Republicans had dreams of destruction and humiliation about President Bill Clinton, Democrats about President George W. Bush.

But at the end of a week in which talk of impeachment grew and grew -- thanks to stunning legal developments involving various key people in Trump's orbit -- University of California public-policy professor Robert Reich said Trump's impeachment and removal from office wouldn't be enough. That even his indictment wouldn't be enough.

He wrote that the Trump administration "should be annulled," in toto.

To be sure, Reich admits such an outcome is a very, very long shot. "In all likelihood, we'll have [Trump] for another two and a half years," he wrote on his website last Friday. He then added:

"Don't bet on him losing in 2020, either."

But Reich, who served as secretary of Labor in Clinton's administration, then returned to his annulment argument.

He asked his readers to consider the possibility that Special Counsel Robert Mueller "finds overwhelming and indisputable evidence that Trump conspired with [Russian President] Putin to rig the 2016 election and that the rigging determined the election's outcome," leading to even congressional Republicans and Fox News to seek Trump's ouster.

Such a finding may seem like la-la land (Trump insists there was no collusion and calls Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt"), but Reich asks us to humor him.

"In other words," he wrote of this scenario in which there's hard evidence that Trump worked with Russia to win the election, "Trump's presidency is not authorized under the United States Constitution."

Reich continued:

[I]mpeachment would not remedy Trump's unconstitutional presidency because it would leave in place his vice president, White House staff and cabinet, as well as all the executive orders he issued and all the legislation he signed, and the official record of his presidency.

The only response to an unconstitutional presidency is to annul it. Annulment would repeal all of it -- recognizing that such appointments, orders, rules, and records were made without constitutional authority.

There is, no surprise, a problem with this argument. Reich acknowledges that the U.S. Constitution says nothing about an administration being wiped from official history like a purged Stalin crony.

But the 72-year-old scholar and policy wonk believes the U.S. Supreme Court -- or the states and Congress through constitutional amendment -- could bring presidential annulment into existence. It should be noted that if this unique political solution were a thing, November's midterm elections would be even more important, which just might be the reason Reich is floating this far-out idea.

"After the Trump administration was annulled, the speaker of the House (third in the order of presidential succession) would take over the presidency until a special election," he wrote.

Of course, Reich might want to be careful what he wishes for. Few notions are more likely to drive Republicans to the polls -- or infuriate independent-minded progressives, for that matter -- than that of a Nancy Pelosi presidency.

-- Douglas PerryMoments after news broke of John McCain's death Saturday evening, social media was inundated with messages of grief and condolences. McCain, who fought many battles in his lifetime, died of brain cancer at 81.

NY TIMES OBITUARY: John McCain, war hero and presidential contender, dies at 81

McCain suffered as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, made waves in politics as a U.S. Senator and toughed it out as a contender for president during his illustrious career.

Cindy McCain said of her husband's death on Twitter, "My heart is broken. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the place he loved the most."

President Donald Trump, who had until Saturday remained silent on the matter, tweeted "My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!"

READ: Latest Associated Press updates

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz described his fellow GOP member as "a patriot, and an extraordinary American war hero," in a statement to the press. "Although he and I sometimes disagreed, I was deeply privileged to serve with him and proud to call him a friend. Heidi and I send our heartfelt thoughts and prayers to Cindy, and to the entire McCain family, as they grieve the loss of a loving husband, father, and grandfather. May he rest in peace."

Many of McCain's political dissenters also tweeted kind messages as tragedy transcended politics.

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President Barack Obama, who ran against McCain in the 2008 presidential election, wrote that few people "have been tested the way John once was or required to show the kind of courage that he did."

See more messages of sympathy in the gallery above.

tulsi.kamath@chron.com

@Tulsi_KamathMid-Michigan's Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) saw varied increases in their non-seasonally adjusted jobless rates in July.

"The local rates varied in magnitude, but all showed increase as did every MSA in the state," said Evan Linskey, Economic Analyst Department of Technology, Management, and Budget Bureau of Labor Market Information & Strategic Initiatives.

Midland had the smallest gain of any MSA in the state, at 0.2 percentage points. The statewide rate was up by 0.5 percent in July. Even with the monthly upswing, Bay, Midland and Saginaw MSAs all have jobless rates well below July 2017 levels.

Over the month, local metro areas all experienced small reductions in the labor force. Each MSA had reductions in employment. The number of unemployed increased in every market by varying amounts," Linskey said.

During July 2018, the Midland MSA saw its jobless rate increase from 4.2 percent to 4.4 percent while unemployment rose from 1,700 to 1,800. The number of employed fell from 39,500 to 39,000 while the labor force also decreased from 41,200 to 40,800.

In July 2017, the jobless rate was 5.4 percent, unemployment stood at 2,200, employment was 38,900 and the labor force was 41,100.

The jobless rate for the state during July increased from 4.3 percent to 4.8 percent. The July 2017 number was 5.4 percent.

The Bay City MSA's jobless rate increased from 5.1 percent to 5.4 percent during July 2018 while employment showed a slight uptick from 2,600 to 2,700. Unemployment fell from 48,900 to 48,500 while the labor force also dropped from 51,500 to 51,300.

The July 2017 jobless rate stood at 6.5 percent while unemployment was 3,300, employment was 48,100 and the labor force 51,500.

The Saginaw MSA saw its jobless rate rise from 5 percent to 5.8 percent in July 2018 while unemployment took a significant leap from 4,400 to 5,100. Employment dropped from 84,500 to 83,100 while the labor force went from 88,900 to 88,200. The July 2017 jobless rate stood at 6.5 percent.One of the main failures of the Affordable Care Act was assuming that Republican governors would cooperate with the plan to give their constituents more health care. A central part of so-called Obamacare relied on governors accepting what was essentially free money from the federal government to fund Medicaid expansion. For the uninitiated, Medicaid is how a lot of poor people pay for health care in America. There are a lot of bizarre financial exceptions (ie: means testing) that make Medicaid more restrictive than it should be, and the ACA flooded the coffers of state government to expand this program. Many Republican governors decided it was better for them politically to reject free money for poor peoples health care, and instead make a big show of standing up to Americas first black president.

Per Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts on his own website:

Proponents of Medicaid expansion here in Nebraska are not giving up. This week, the Nebraska Legislature is scheduled to debate whether to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. Since the last time I wrote about this issue two weeks ago, proponents of expansion released a study claiming that expanding Medicaid would be an economic boon for our state. Nebraskans, however, should not buy into claims that expansion of government entitlement programs are justified as something that save(s), create(s) and support(s) jobs. Nebraskans have never used subjective measures touting saved or supported jobs when determining the efficacy of entitlement expansions, and it would be irresponsible to begin doing so today.

History has shown that taking money from taxpayers and giving it to another group of individuals through an entitlement program does not result in real or sustainable economic development. If you could simply grow an economy through the transfer of wealth by government, poverty would not have existed under Soviet rule of Russia and our Federal Government could simply spend its way out of any recession. Expanding Medicaid will not result in the tax relief and good-paying jobs we need to grow Nebraska for the next generation.

This exact dynamic played out in Maine last year, where dumber version of Trump, Republican Governor Paul LePage, refused Medicaid expansion multiple times over his seven-year tenure. Proponents of Medicaid expansion finally got the measure to expand Medicaid on the ballot, and the voters overruled their intransigent governor and expanded Medicaid. This process has the potential to repeat itself in Nebraska now that Medicaid expansion has garnered enough signatures to land on Novembers ballot. It will no doubt face intense opposition, as two GOP State Senators sued to try to stop the voters from even having a choice to decide on this matter.

However, this is not some plucky aberration, as Utah and Idaho also have measures to expand Medicaid on the ballot later this year. This is all the result of a concerted grassroots effort to enforce something resembling the popular will of both Republicans and Democrats (as majorities of both support Medicare for All). So far, 34 states have approved expanded Medicaid under the ACA, and we could add a few more deep-red states to that list in November. Our current system is so cruel and unsustainable that health care is emerging as a unifying issue amongst the intensely divided American electorate.

Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.Editors note: The following contains spoilers from Season Four of Better Call Saul.

Better Call Saul has weathered little brother syndrome for years in the shadow of Breaking Bad. But its lower stakes, its more grounded drama, and its more subtle characters were never meant to work the same way. If Breaking Bad was the ultimate genius dude has a midlife crisis show, Better Call Saul is what happens when the same crisis hits the rest of us: frustration, complacency, and failure. As the series fourth season inflicts real tragedy upon its characters, its a catalyst for listlessnessand in Better Call Saul, idle hands are the Devils workshop in BCS and everyones open for business.

Critic Matt Zoller Seitz recently tweeted about TV characters and change. He said that most of the major television series of last 20 years have been about people changing over the course of a long period of time. Sure. Characters develop. Sam Malone becomes an aging, depressing lothario. Walter White becomes TVs greatest monster.

But most people arent meant for greatness, whether that means seducing every single woman in Boston or becoming a meth kingpin. Many of the most interesting/haunting stories are about people who never figure things out, or remain set in their ways, Seitz wrote. Or who simply endure. But Better Call Saul sees even endurance as a goal most people fail to achieve, perhaps because of some innate American frustration burrowed in its mediocre middle-men.

In the aftermath of Chucks death and Hectors stroke, everyones boat is rockedJimmy (Bob Odenkirk), Kim (Rhea Seehorn), even Howard (Patrick Fabian). The series central questions (How does a small-time criminal become a lawyer who then becomes a criminal? Whats fueling this trip around the ol legal merry-go-round?) get closer to their answers, while new ones flesh out its worlds utterly realistic chaos. The death itself is treated with arms-length briefness that affects Jimmy inwardly and Kim outwardly. Howard, the pompous moral enigma, may most make Chucks death about himself, but so, too, do Jimmy and Kimjust more subtly.

Better Call Saul invests much of its dialogue-light, action-heavy screen time in the couples routine. They get takeout, they watch movies on the couch, they drink to reach complacent numbness. This season makes a setup that screenwriting beginners learn is the least engaging way to start their indiealarm goes off, protagonist starts their dayinto a cycle of infinite breakfasts, coffees, and newspapers that provide the seductive security of simplicity. But the death has jostled them from this routine. Kim snaps at Howard, finding brief catharsis in anger, but its only a brief respite from her boring, soul-sucking Mesa Verde job. And Jimmy? He cant practice law, so hes temporarily in the purgatory of unemployment.

But that, like much of the series small dramas, is his own damn fault. Jimmy interviews to be a copier salesman, crushes it, then turns it down, rubbing the employees noses in it. The self-defeating interview is a way to maintain his detached status quo (Im better than this) while moving from a relatively benign con (screwing with job interviewers) to a slightly less benign one (swapping a valuable figurine with a worthless one). Its a visual metaphor for Jimmys search for some intangible valueeverything always looks the same. The mundane artifice by which we assign worth, whether to a porcelain kid or to a lifestyle, is the ever-present con society plays on Better Call Sauls characters.

If the work of director Andrew Bujalski frames the mundane life as an attempt at stability (slackers want to settle down), Better Call Saul treats it as a form of entropy: The series universe is constantly decaying, not because of the actions of a central supervillain, but because it is its nature, and the nature of its world. Complacency in emotion (Jimmys tepid reaction to his late brothers praise-filled letter), stagnation in intimacy (Kim and Jimmy drifting apart as they seek satisfaction elsewhere)its when things slow down and become routine that are the dangerous times for normal people.

Were not going to turn into Walter White-scale monsters; were not going to drop everything to build an empire. But we will find a way to rock the boat, and in the world of Better Call Saul, people usually dont have the ability to want to change and effect that change. If you want it, you cant have it. That conflict is at the heart of good drama, which is why Better Call Saul is such an engrossing watch, but the way the series delights in its lulls makes you itch along with the characters. It make you root for your own worst impulses. It makes you squirm when you know the characters will give in. Even though you want them to.

If Walt became a god-king doomed by his hubris, Saul and his co-stars are long-suffering Greeks always pissing off the pantheon. These arent hot-blooded characters, like so many people in TV dramas and so few outside them. Theyre not impulsive. They seethe. They fester. They may be in Albuquerque, but theyre as Midwestern as they come. Everything is bottled up until the small, void-screaming eruption rattles their lives just enough to stave off an ulcer. Theyre mundane as hell, and theyre not going to take it anymore. Mike (Jonathan Banks) will do the crossword in the same diner with the same waitress with the same order, but he wont just accept checks he didnt earn. Hell go stir the pot just so he can quiet a small, nagging voice. He wont just smile and nod at someones bullshit in group therapy; hell call them out. Its in his DNA.

And the series knows this. It knows boredom, breathes unfulfillment. It offers three camera angles in just as many shots of Jimmy playing wall ball in tonights episode, Talk, before the man desperate to succeed pulls yet another stupid, self-aggrandizing move thats just up its own ass enough to be sad. Sad because you can see the hunger; sad because the context (courtesy of series creator Vince Gilligan and team) has taught you that the hunger will never, ever be sated. And thats not because its bottomless, but because its indecisive. Its the hunger of digging through your full fridge and not finding anything to eat. The hunger of holding out on job listings or relationships because perfection may be one small move away. Its a petty hunger that the shows fiery tragedy amplifies by evaporating everything else. All thats left in the ashes is a charred, selfish, misinterpreted message to be discontent.

And the thing that makes it stick in Season Four is that its shown to be so essential to these characters. The mundane crises exist at rock bottom and they exist in the future, when things are supposed to be fixed. The flashes forward, showing a noir-ish future in which Jimmy runs an Omaha Cinnabon as Gene, speak to the tension and instability of normalcy when your normal state rejects it. Jimmy freaks out after the hospital runs his identification because his past haunts his fears and coats his conversations. You cant just slap a mustache and a new Social Security number on a crook and make them straight, just like you cant bottle ambition in a dead-end job. When a chronic malcontents hands are idle, theyll try to fix their unfixable problem and find that Promised Land where theyre better, smarter, than everyone else. When exceptional people fall prey to that trap, things break bad. When its the scrappy average, there is instead the constant, violent, tedious shuffling of Better Call Saul.

Better Call Saul airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on AMC.



Jacob Oller is a writer and film critic whose writing has appeared in The Guardian, Playboy, Roger Ebert, Film School Rejects, Chicagoist, Vague Visages, and other publications. He lives in Chicago, plays Dungeons and Dragons, and struggles not to kill his two cats daily. You can follow him on Twitter here: @jacoboller.Perfect Privacy doesnt have the most advanced interface, but it does offer some helpful information. Theres no hard limit on the amount of devices you can use simultaneously, but you will pay double or more what you would with other service. We also have some concerns that the leaders of this company prefer to remain anonymous.

Perfect Privacy in brief:

P2P allowed: Yes

Yes Business location: Sweden, Panama, and Latvia

Sweden, Panama, and Latvia Number of servers: 54

54 Number of country locations: 23

23 Cost: 119.99 (about $138 at this writing)

119.99 (about $138 at this writing) VPN protocol: OpenVPN

OpenVPN Data encryption: AES-256-CBC

AES-256-CBC Data authentication: SHA-512

SHA-512 Handshake encryption: TLSv1.2 (first option)

Some VPNs are built for users who want information, and thats what Perfect Privacy aims to deliver. Weve seen VPN services that offer even more information, but Perfect Privacy offers some key bits of data right up front for every server location.

Note: This review is part of our best VPNs roundup. Go there for details about competing products and how we tested them.

Features and services

After you sign in to Perfect Privacy youre confronted with a long list of server locations37 total in 23 countries. Each server location lists the country, city, and available bandwidth on each server by default. Theres also a ping column that you can activate by clicking the Ping Servers button at the bottom of the window.

IDG Perfect Privacys default view.

The available bandwidth indicator is particularly helpful. Many other VPN services offer this feature, but its usually displayed as a percentage. Perfect Privacy, by comparison, shows you how many megabits are free on each server. At this writing, for example, 967Mb were free on the Miami server out of 1,000Mb and 1,650 out of 2,000Mb were free on a server in Luxembourg.

To connect, you click the plug icon for your server of choice on the far right of the window.

While Perfect Privacy is fairly straightforward, the interface is very dated and utilitarian. The long list, the gray background, the small text, and the large buttons at the bottom of the window all add up to a very old look. That may be fine for those who just want to click a button and get rid of the VPN window, but this app could be a lot easier to use.

Perfect Privacys settings area offers a bunch of features you can tweak. When you first sign in you have the option to use the OpenVPN protocol or IPSEC. By default, Perfect Privacy chooses OpenVPN, and helpfully it includes a short explanation about who should use which protocol.

Perfect Privacy has some of the key options most VPNs offer including the ability to start Windows and autoconnect on startup. Helpfully, these two options are not selected by default, which is a big plus in our book.

Advanced users will want to look under Settings > Cascading and Stealth. Here you can enable the ability to create a connection via multiple VPN servers. You can start with an American server, for example, and then hop to a British one. Perfect Privacy allows up to four hopsi.e. four different servers before you hit the open internet.

IDG Perfect Privacys primary settings tab.

Perfect Privacy is super expensive at 120 (approximately $138US) for a year compared to other services, many of which are available at half that. The one thing Perfect Privacy does offer for that higher price, however, is no hard limit on the amount of devices you can connect to the VPN at once as long as they are devices owned by you.

Performance

In our tests, Perfect Privacy did very well. Overall, it retained around 36 percent of the base speed. Thats not an outstanding score, but a lot of the key locations were very fast including the U.S., UK, Germany, and Australia. The Asian servers we tested were a little weaker and varied quite a bit. Still, Perfect Privacy should be fast enough for most uses.

Privacy, anonymity, and trust

To sign up for Perfect Privacy it requires you to choose a username and an email address. That makes it pretty easy to keep your identity anonymous since it doesnt ask for a real name. Perfect Privacy accepts credit cards (via Paymentwall), PayPal, Bitcoin via Bitpay, and regular old cash. Perfect Privacy doesnt provide detailed instructions about how to pay with cash, but the best thing to do would probably be to include the money and a letter with your username and account email. When the payment is processed Perfect Privacy will send you a confirmation message.

Paying via cash isnt the safest way to make a payment to an overseas company, but the risk can be worth it for those who want maximum privacyjust watch out for the postmark as that can give away your general location.

The company doesnt provide whos behind it, and the actual location is also a little confusing. The company is officially registered in Switzerland as Vectura Datamanagement LTD. The technical offices, meanwhile, are in Panama. If you want to pay in cash, however, you have to send your money to 14-2 Terbatas Street Riga, LV-1011 Latvia.

As the fictional version of Woodward and Bernstein told us in All the Presidents Men, Follow the money. Id bet that where the cash gets sent is where Perfect Privacys seat of power truly lies.

As for its privacy promises. Perfect Privacy says it doesnt log any of your browsing data or your accounts login activity. It does, however, record the total usage ratio of the servers. Thats how you can see how much bandwidth is available on each server.

Conclusion

Perfect Privacy is a good service based on performance. It has great speeds, good encryption, and is very respectful of users needs. The privacy policy says all the right things, but without knowing who exactly is at the helm, its hard to know how much stock to put in this. Its also expensive considering you can get similar or better performance for less.

Editors note: Because online services are often iterative, gaining new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change in order to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article.There remain no named suspects in the strangulation of former Playboy model Christina Carlin Kraft inside her Ardmore, Montgomery County, Pa., apartment on Wednesday night.

But police are pursuing a suspect in the burglary that occurred in the 36-year-old model's Lower Merion Township apartment the weekend before she was killed, 6ABC in Philly reports.

That suspect is identified as Andre Melton, 31, who is wanted for the burglary of designer bags and jewelry from inside the apartment last weekend.

Melton is believed to be driving a rented 2018 burgundy Kia Sorento with Virginia plates. Police tell 6ABC the car was spotted Friday in Upper Darby, Pa., by police equipped with plate recognition software.

However, by the time the police cruiser turned around, the suspect vehicle was gone.

Melton remains at large, but he is not being called a suspect in Kraft's killing at this time - only in the burglary, 6ABC notes. He was identified using surveillance video from the apartment, and when police searched his address, they say they found some of the burglarized items there.

It is not known if the burglary is connected in any way with Kraft's killing just days later.

Police say Andre Melton, 31, is wanted for the burglary of designer bags and jewelry from inside the model's apartment last weekend.

Indeed, the killing of Kraft remains a mystery.

The former model with credits that include a "tasteful photo shoot for Playboy that was beyond Hollywood glamour," along with photo shoots for Vanity Fair, Victoria's Secret, and Maxim, was found dead inside her apartment bedroom at 9:15 Wednesday. She had been strangled.

Sources tell 6ABC surveillance video shows a man following Kraft into the building the night before her body was discovered. Police believe the man left by jumping off the balcony.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Lower Merion Police Department or the Montgomery County Detective Bureau.Starbucks's Pumpkin Spice Latte is back.

If the drink's arrival on Aug. 28 is any indication, fall seems to arrive earlier every year.

This marks the earliest launch ever for the PSL, as it is nicknamed. Last year, Starbucks released the drink on Sept. 1.

Many say Starbucks has moved up the release to battle its growing woes. This summer it announced it is closing 150 poorly-performing stores in the United States.

The company said it is three times the number of stores the company usually closes.

In May, the chain closed for several hours so employees could take racial bias training following the arrest of two black men at one of its stores in Philadelphia.

This marks the 15th season for the most popular drink at Starbucks. It is made with pumpkin spice sauce with real pumpkin, cinnamon, ginger, clove and nutmeg, espresso and steamed milk.

It is topped off with whipped cream and a dash of pumpkin pie topping.On Friday, April 6, 1917, the United States officially entered World War I after the Senate voted 82-6 to declare war against Germany and the House agreed by a vote of 373-50.

The front page of The Evening News that day - "War Declared 1.13 P.M.; 91 German Ships Seized."

"War was declared by the United States on Germany at 1.13 this afternoon when the President signed the war resolution. Vice President Marshall, as president of the senate, affixed his signature to the document at 12.12. President Wilson, after declaring this country at war issued a call for volunteers for the navy. Immediately after war was declared, the whole government machinery, which had been primed and oiled, was set in motion and the United States was launched in a war to avenge the murder of its citizens on the seas."

The next day, on April 7, 1917, the entire front page of The Evening News was an Uncle Sam poster declaring, "You! Enlist Today! Your Country Needs You!"

World War I started in Europe in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the thrown of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and his wife.

"During the conflict, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Regime (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers). Thanks to new military technologies and the horrors of trench warfare, World War I saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction. By the time the war was over and the Allied Powers claimed victory, more than 16 million people - soldiers and civilians alike - were dead," according to www.history.com.

At the start of the war, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had said that the United States would remain neutral. However, that opinion changed after the sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania by the Germans in 1915.

In May of 1917, Congress passed the Selective Service Act to reinstate the draft. By the end of World War I, also called the Great War, 2.8 million men had been inducted into the U.S. military while another 2 million served voluntarily.

By the end of the war, more than 53,00 American soldiers had died from combat and another 63,000 died from the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918.

World War I ended on Nov. 11, 1918, when an armistice agreement was signed by the Allies and Germany. The armistice took effect the "11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month" of 1918.The coroner's office has released the identity of a man who shot his gun at an officer and was killed when the officer returned fire Saturday evening in York County.

The victim has been identified as 29-year-old Logan Montgomery, according to the coroner's office.

State police investigating the shooting.

The shooting took place at about 8:30 p.m. at the Motel 6 on the 100 block of Arsenal Road in Manchester Township, according to Trooper James Spencer, a spokesman for the state police.

A West Manchester Township officer and a Northern York County Regional officer responded to the motel after learning that Montgomery, who was a suspect in a retail theft from earlier that day, was staying there.

Officers found Montgomery in the hallway. That's when he pulled a gun and shot it. The West Manchester Township officer returned fire, hitting him.

Montgomery was taken to York Hospital where he later died from his injuries just before 9:30 p.m.

An autposy has been scheduled for Tuesday morning at Lehigh Valley Hospital.Three and a half years after he pleaded guilty to corruption charges, former state Treasurer Rob McCord is about to face a reckoning.

It will occur in a federal courtroom in Harrisburg on Tuesday when McCord, a one-time Democratic candidate for governor, will be sentenced by U.S. Middle District Judge John E. Jones III on his pleas to extortion charges.

Then, McCord will learn whether he has a date with a federal prison cell.

How much credit McCord will get for aiding federal investigators in the failed 2017 bribery prosecution of an eastern Pennsylvania businessman remains to be seen. That case against Richard Ireland crashed and burned last year when Jones abruptly ended the trial and dismissed the bribery charges after McCord testified for the prosecution. Jones found prosecutors hadn't made a case that a crime had in fact occurred.

McCord himself pleaded guilty to the extortion charges in early 2015 soon after resigning as treasurer. He admitted trying strong-arm donors to get money for his failed 2014 campaign for governor.

McCord is the third Pennsylvania treasurer since the 1980s to face criminal charges.

Last November, ex-Treasurer Barbara Hafer was sentenced by Jones to 3 years of probation for lying to the IRS and FBI about financial support she received from Ireland after leaving office in 2005.

McCord's sentencing will occur almost 31 years after another treasurer, R. Budd Dwyer, committed suicide during a live televised news conference after being indicted on federal conspiracy charges.Gov. Tom Wolf has ordered that U.S. and Commonwealth flags on public buildings be flown at half-staff in honor of Sen. John McCain until Sunday.

The order came even as the flags at the White House, which were lowered over the weekend, returned to full-staff.

Flags continue to be flown at half-staff at the U.S. Capitol and in half a dozen states across the country in tribute to the Arizona Republican who died Saturday of brain cancer.

President Donald Trump offered his condolences on Twitter to McCain's family , but hasn't issued a presidential proclamation with an order lowering the flags.

U.S. Flag Code states that flags should be lowered "on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress."

After Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts died in 2009, President Barack Obama ordered flags at the White House be flown at half-staff for five days.

The White House didn't immediately respond to questions Monday.

Wolf said U.S. and Commonwealth flags on public buildings in Pennsylvania will fly at half-staff until the sunset on the day McCain is buried, which will be Sunday. He invited all Pennsylvanians to participate in this tribute.

Issuing similar orders were governors of Arizona, Ohio, Maryland, Wisconsin and Oregon.

The rules governing how long the flag should fly at half-staff on various occasions were spelled out in a proclamation signed by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954: 30 days for the death of a president or former president, 10 days for the death of vice presidents, chief justices and House speakers, and so on.

But presidents have exercised wide latitude in ordering flags lowered on many other occasions. Among the most recent was when Trump ordered flags flown at half-staff when five people were killed in a mass shooting at the Capital Gazette in Maryland.

According to an article in the July 3 edition of USA Today, Obama ordered flags lowered on 74 occasions, more than any other president. He is followed by Bill Clinton, who ordered flags at half-staff on 57 occasions, and President George W. Bush, who gave that order 50 times.The former CEO and controller of a Lancaster County energy company were charged Monday in connection with more than $1 million in theft from company funds to pay off personal debt.

Jeffrey B. Lyons, 57, and Karen L. Connelly, 64 were charged by the Northern Lancaster County Regional Police Monday. Lyons, former CEO of Worley & Obetz, a Manheim-based energy company, and Connelly, the company's former controller, worked together to use funds that covered $1 million in Lyon's credit card debt, police said. Connelly authorized most of the payments.

The payments covered items such as trips and plane fare, online shopping purchases, gym memberships, home projects, spa services, dining costs, college costs for a relative and other costs, police said.

Lyons and Connelly were charged with two felonies: dealing in proceeds of unlawful activities, and conspiracy to commit theft. Lyons was also charged with felony theft by unlawful taking.

Both were arrested Monday morning, police said. Lyons is being held on $1 million bail. Connelly was released after posting a bond for her $50,000 bail.

Connelly mentioned a "package deal" that involved paying Lyon's credit card debt, police said. The owners of the company, Seth and Robert Obetz, said no such arrangement was made to have the company pay the debt.

Police also learned Connelly had an inflated salary, as authorized by Lyons. After Connelly's retirement, her gas and home heating were paid by the company, police said.

Connelly continued to have access to the company accounting system after retirement, using a company laptop computer at home to gain access, police said.

The investigation is ongoing and involves other agencies, police said.

Police began investigating in May 2018 and met with a co-owner and the current controller. The misuse of funds were found to be recorded in company paperwork as "cost of goods" by Lyons and Connelly.

Police said the CEO and Controller were the only people with access to these company funds.

In all, police found documentation that $1.015 million in company funds went to the card accounts. The largest payments, $811,371 were made since 2010 on a Chase Sapphire account.Hotter temperatures and higher humidity levels are expected to start moving into central Pennsylvania on Monday, according to forecasters.

"Hot and humid weather will make a comeback early this week in central Pa. The heat should peak on Tuesday during the midday and afternoon hours," according to the National Weather Service at State College.

Heat index values, the temperature combined with the humidity, could reach 100 for the Harrisburg area on Tuesday, forecasters said.

High temperatures are expected to approach 90 on Monday and then top 90 for Tuesday and Wednesday.

MONDAY: There will be a 20 percent chance of isolated rain showers and thunderstorms after 2 p.m. Mostly sunny, with a high near 87. Low around 74.

TUESDAY: Sunny and hot, with a high near 92. Heat index values as high as 100. Low around 74.

WEDNESDAY: There will be a 20 percent of rain and thunderstorms after 2 p.m. Sunny and hot, with a high near 92. Low around 74.

THURSDAY: There will be a 40 percent chance of rain and thunderstorms after 8 a.m. Partly sunny, with a high near 83. Low around 66.

FRIDAY: There will be a 30 percent chance of rain. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 80. Low around 67.

You can see live weather updates via the National Weather Service and other Twitter sources below.

Tweet us at @pennlive with photos of inclement weather at your place, incidents you see on your commute or send a submission to submissions@pennlive.com.A juvenile male in Steelton is facing charges that include rape.

Steelton police say they began an investigation into a sexual assault Aug. 9.

The investigation ended with the Monday arrest of a juvenile male. According to police, he was charged with rape, indecent assault and simple assault.

The rape charge is listed as intercourse with a victim less than 13 years old.

The juvenile's age was not released.Nearly three years after a Lebanon man was convicted of having sexual contact with a minor, he was accused of contact with the same victim, this time in a threatening manner.

South Londonderry Township Police charged Andrew Sears, 27, Sunday with intimidation, retaliation or obstruction in child abuse cases, retaliation against a victim or witness, and harassment, according to a release.

Sears was first charged with several child sex abuse crimes in December 2014 for having sexual contact with a minor. Sears was 23 at the time and the individual was 11, police said.

In October 2015, Sears was convicted of indecent assault, unlawful contact with a minor, corruption of a minor and intimidation of a victim or witness, police said.

Sears' sentence included incarceration and two years of probation, police said. He was also found to be a sexually violent predator by the state Sexual Offender Board, and was required to register as a sex offender under Megan's Law.

Police said that Sears on Sunday was driving a vehicle in Campbelltown, South Londonderry Township, where he encountered the victim of the prior case, one block from that persons's house. The unidentified victim is now 15 years old, police said.

Sears is accused of rolling down his window, threatening that person and driving away, police said. The individual reported the incident to a family member, who then contacted police.

Police found Sears leaving a church in the area, where he was parked, police said. Sears was taken into custody and transported to Lebanon County Central Booking for arraignment.

Sears was placed in Lebanon County Correctional Facility in lieu of $50,000 bail.John Root Hopkins III told a Dauphin County judge Monday that he was just trying to ease his 83-year-old mother's chronic pain when he gave her a fatal dose of fentanyl-laced heroin.

"It's a terrible thing that happened," said the 57-year-old Hopkins, who has been a drug user and dealer for well over 30 years. "I blame myself. I'll never get over it."

Hopkins should blame himself, his sister, Delaware attorney Melissa, told President Judge Richard A. Lewis. He has been lying to and preying on his own family for decades, she said.

And even now, Melissa Hopkins insisted, her brother is lying about how he killed their mother, Odette, in her Derry Township home in January 2017.

"He chose to do what he did. It sickens me," she said. "Who would give an 83-year-old woman a plate with white powder and a straw?"

"He's spent 35 years, on an off, using and dealing drugs. That's his legacy," she added. "I ask you to finally hold him accountable."

Chief Deputy Attorney Jennifer Gettle also urged the judge to hit John Hopkins hard. "In essence, he's been a parasite to this family for years," she said.

Lewis sentenced John Hopkins to 8 1/2 to 17 years in state prison on his guilty plea to a drug delivery involving death charge. The case is an unusual and sad statistic of the state's and nation's opioid crisis which is running up a frightening death toll.

John Hopkins told Lewis he provided his mom with heroin after her prescription pain medications were cut off. "I was just trying to give her something so she could function...I only gave her a little bit."

"This is not someone who had evil intent," defense attorney Brian Perry insisted. "It was a mother calling out to her son for help."

Melissa Hopkins didn't buy it. She said there were far better ways to help her mother, a former employee of Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center who became addicted to prescription painkillers after undergoing repeated back surgeries.

She said she repeatedly warned her mother about her brother when he started coming around after finishing another stint in prison. Then, she said, her mom confirmed reports from friends and neighbors that John was giving her a white powder to inhale.

Five days before her mother's death, she texted her brother. "I asked him if he was giving her heroin," Melissa Hopkins said. "I never got a response."

Her mother died in her bathroom, she said. A neighbor found her body. Right afterward, her brother kept using and selling drugs, she said.

Gettle noted that soon after the death John Hopkins was arrested for shoplifting at the Capital City Mall. Heroin was found in his pocket, she said.

John Hopkins is serving a 21- to 42-month sentence on that Cumberland County conviction. Perry urged Lewis to run the Dauphin County sentence concurrently with that penalty, which the judge did.

Sergeant Gregory Day, who led the investigation into Odette Hopkins' death, asked Lewis to consider one equation, part of the opioid epidemic's deadly math. "We know heroin kills. We know fentanyl kills," Day said. "The people living that lifestyle, they know it, too."

In imposing sentence, Lewis noted John Hopkins' first drug arrest occurred in 1980.

"You knew darn well what heroin is. You knew darn well what fentanyl is. You knew darn well what you were giving to your mother," the judge said. "The kindest thing I can say is that your actions were reckless. You were, in essence, poisoning your mother."Two people are facing charges that Steelton police say are related to the abuse of a child.

According to the Steelton police, an investigation into suspected child abuse was launched July 5 with the Dauphin County Children and Youth Services. Officers on Wednesday arrested Johnathan Ortiz, 21, on charges of aggravated assault of a child less than 6 years of age, strangulation and endangering the welfare of children.

Margarita Medina, 19, was also charged with endangering the welfare of children.

Both are scheduled for preliminary hearings Sept. 4.By Matt Baker

All over our country, many Americans continue to struggle to pay for health insurance coverage. Premiums for Americans who buy their own insurance, rather than receiving it from an employer, have doubled since the implementation of Obamacare.

Matthew Baker (U.S. Dept. Health & Human Services)

Those increases have hurt Pennsylvania communities and put too much strain on the lives of our families, friends, and neighbors. Rising premiums have especially hurt the millions of middle-class Americans who aren't eligible for Obamacare subsidies.

President Donald Trump promised to help those left behind by Obamacare, and he's taken action.

Earlier this month, the Trump Administration finalized new regulations for a type of insurance plan that will help the 28 million forgotten men and women who remain uninsured under Obamacare. In many states, these plans, known as "short-term, limited-duration" insurance, have for decades offered insurance for Americans for up to 12 months.

The Obama administration limited the plans nationally to just three months, effectively eliminating this affordable option for many. Subject to state regulation, the Trump administration will now allow these plans to last up to 12 months once again, and allow them to be renewed for up to 36 months in total. These plans may be a welcome relief to consumers in states covered by Region III of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, premiums rose 120 percent from the implementation of Obamacare's major regulations through the end of President Obama's term in office. Here are some things you should know about these plans:

What will they cost? While state regulations can affect prices, short-term, limited-duration plans are expected to be 50 to 80 percent cheaper on average nationally than Obamacare plans.

How many people will buy them? Experts estimate that as many as 2 million or more Americans will enroll in one of these plans.

What do these plans cover?

Coverage of medical services and levels of co-pays and deductibles will vary by insurer and depend on state regulation. The Trump administration has instituted robust requirements for informing consumers about the limits of this option: Insurers offering short-term, limited-duration policies will be required to prominently display in the contract and in application materials that the policy is not required to comply with federal requirements for health insurance, including the rules created by Obamacare.

What kind of consumers do they make sense for?

Short-term, limited-duration insurance makes sense for Americans who don't have or cannot afford other sources of coverage. That includes Americans who:

Don't have access to health insurance coverage through their employer, perhaps because they work multiple part-time jobs

Are independent contractors or self-employed in today's "gig economy," and can't afford Obamacare plans

Are between jobs or other sources of coverage, like young people who have graduated from college but aren't yet employed

Will I be able to keep these plans if I get sick? The federal government has said that consumers can be allowed to purchase plans with guaranteed renewability of up to 36 months. Based on this flexibility, consumers may be able to lock in their premiums at a certain level and keep their coverage for up to three years, protecting them from rate increases during this time in the event that they get sick. The availability of these options will depend on insurers' decisions and state regulation.

Do these plans satisfy the individual mandate for health insurance?

No. However, beginning in January 2019, thanks to legislation signed by President Trump, the individual mandate for health insurance will no longer carry any penalty.

Eliminating the individual mandate penalty and expanding access to these short-term, affordable plans are just part of the Trump Administration's efforts to ensure that as many Americans as possible have access to affordable health insurance.

We have also expanded access to association health plans, which allow small businesses and self-employed Americans to band together to buy insurance, and continue to work with states to open up more affordable options and bring down premiums.

The Trump administration is working hard to ensure that healthcare is affordable and accessible for all Americans, and the recent news about short term plans is just one more example of President Trump living up to one of the promises he made to the American people.

Matt Baker, a former state House member from Bradford County is the

Region III Director for the

U.S. Department of Health and Human ServicesMT. LEBANON, PA. -- Politics are on the menu here at The Coffee Tree Roasters.

At a patio table early one sunny August morning recently, a quartet of friends debated President Donald Trump's latest headache - the guilty plea by his longtime lawyer and personal fixer Michael Cohen.

U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb (D) PennLive file

Inside, newspapers are piled high on cafe tables. And men and women in serious suits huddle in serious conversation over steaming coffee mugs and pastries.

It's a fitting enough setting for a nationally watched congressional race that may not only determine control of the U.S. House in 2019, but may well also be an early indicator of whether President Donald Trump's 2016 win in a key Rust Belt state was an aberration or a genuine shift in a state that had been Democratic blue for three decades.

Nestled in Pittsburgh's South Hills, Mt. Lebanon (pop. 32,349) is one of the critical battlegrounds in the fight for the redrawn 17th District.

It's a contest that pits two incumbent congressmen -- Democrat Conor Lamb and Republican Keith Rothfus -- against each other in the political equivalent of a steel cage match.

Come November, only one of them will emerge.

"This is a great race to watch," said Joseph DiSarro, a political science professor at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pa., who's been monitoring congressional contests in southwestern Pennsylvania for years. "You have candidates with contrasting styles. And this is an area that's in transition."

It's also one of at least six Pennsylvania districts that could hand national Democrats the 23 seats they need to flip to recapture the majority in the U.S. House.

Lamb, 34, a former Marine and federal prosecutor, first captured public attention in March, winning a special election in a district that Trump carried by 19 points just two years ago.

Often described as a Democrat "straight out of central casting," Lamb narrowly defeated Republican state Rep. Rick Saccone, a culture warrior who styled himself as "Trump before Trump," and had the backing of the White House.

U.S. Rep. Keith Rothfus (R) PennLive file

Shortly after that win, a congressional map imposed by the state Supreme Court thrust Lamb into the new 17th District, where the 56-year-old Rothfus, himself an early Trump supporter, had been the incumbent since 2012.

The new seat, entirely within Pittsburgh's western suburbs, is far friendlier to Democrats.

The district would have gone to Trump by 2.5 percent, compared to 20 percent for the former 12th District, where Rothfus coasted to re-election in 2014 and 2016. It's now listed as "lean Democratic" in the latest ranking of competitive seats compiled by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Reliable polling in the race has been scarce. Lamb led Rothfus 51-39 percent in a July 24 Monmouth University poll. The margin is likely to tighten between now and Election Day, though some are skeptical on how much.

But in Lamb, who is pro-labor, but pro-Second Amendment and personally opposed to abortion, but who also does not believe new anti-abortion laws are necessary, Democrats hope they've found a template to win back their voters who crossed over to Trump in 2016.

"This is a House seat traditionally held by moderates," including the late U.S. Sen. John Heinz, said Dennis Roddy, a former speechwriter for Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who now works as a Pittsburgh-based GOP consultant. "It's when people go outside that, that they get into trouble."

Mount Lebanon is Lamb's hometown. His family home, a solidly modest brick house, is set a bit back from the road on the way into the bustling downtown.

Rothfus, whom DiSarro describes as a "Wall Street Republican," has earned both praise and scorn at home for his support of the GOP-authored tax cuts.

At a recent appearance in suburban O'Hara, Pa., Rothfus touted the benefits of the tax cuts to business leaders, even as a clutch of protesters gathered nearby.

The cuts have led to a "healthy, dynamic economy," Rothfus said, according to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that has allowed employers to begin hiring again and to boost wages.

And that's an issue that Galen Raza, 48, a self-described independent, is following closely.

"Economically, this is the best it's been in 20 years," Raza, who works in commercial real estate financing, said. He's fine with things staying that way.

Those issues are Rothfus' wheelhouse, DiSarro said.

And, more importantly, "Keith Rothfus is not Rick Saccone," who ran what was widely considered a lackluster campaign, even with a presidential visit on his behalf.

Rothfus "is a hard worker and will prosper, I believe," DiSarro said. And pro-Trump voters in the district won't desert him.

"He has instant name-recognition," DiSarro continued. "And Republicans are starting to campaign for him."

But just to make sure, Rothfus recently launched his first ad of the campaign, which features Rothfus' mother, Alice, who has appeared in past ads, The Beaver County Times reported.

Lamb has yet to enter the general election air wars. But he has been a vigorous presence on the trail, where he's worked to as he worked to meet - and introduce himself - to voters, particularly in Beaver County, where he is less well-known.

"The biggest thing we're hearing from people is that they're tired of the gridlock and want Washington to work," Coleman Lamb, the candidate's younger brother, and spokesman, said. "[Conor] will do that. He's not one for inaction. And that, more than anything, is what people are responding to."

With about six weeks to go before Election Day, the race will come down to that political alchemy of voter outreach, money, advertising and enthusiasm.

"It's a race between the tortoise and the hare," Roddy, the Republican consultant reflected. "And this time, the hare won't take a nap."Making mental health screenings be part of the school physicals, having mental counselor counselors in every school, and relying on law enforcement and trained officials for school security are among the recommendations to emerge from a task force that looked at improving school safety in Pennsylvania.

The task force created by Gov. Tom Wolf and state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale issued its final report on Monday. The panel was created in March to figure out ways to improve safety in schools. It was triggered by the February mass school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff.

The 32 recommendations listed in the report were developed out of input from students, teachers, law enforcement officials, parents, school officials and others who serve on the front line in schools at six regional meetings held last spring as well as in online comments.

"This is a report that is launching today but the work is never going to end. It's going to require moving forward constant communication among all the people involved in this issue to make sure we're continually updating what needs to be done," DePasquale said at a Capitol news conference about the report's release.

State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale said lack of access to mental health services was a concern raised at every one of the six regional meetings held by the school safety task force.

While there was a recognition in the report that there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to school safety, DePasquale highlighted a crying need that became evident at the regional meetings for students to have access to mental health counselors.

He shared that at one of the regional meetings a student reported feeling lost in trying to find help for a friend suffering from depression.

"Every single student that we talked to privately and publicly all said mental health [service] access was absolutely critical regardless of the setting whether it be urban, suburban or rural," DePasquale said. "Social and emotional education support systems, community involvement, these are all aspects of mental health awareness that students said were lacking in their districts."

The state is going to have to step up and help some of the rural and poorer school districts that lack funding or access to county mental health service providers to meet this need for service access, he said.

And, although it is not specifically addressed in the report, DePasquale said it also became clear to him that more funding is needed for the state police to enable it to respond to school district's requests for security assessments of their buildings.

"They have a great team that goes out and assesses the infrastructure of the schools," he said, adding but "they do not have nearly enough people to do all the buildings in Pennsylvania."

Joining him at the news conference were 10 others including state Homeland Security Director Marcus Brown who said the report addresses ways the state, locals, schools and communities can create a safe environment where learning is the priority.

Additionally, Brown noted this year's state budget included $60 million for grants to schools to address their most pressing security needs. He said Wolf and many legislators believe this funding should become a permanent part of the state budget.

A 17-member School Safety and Security Committee with the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency will decide how much each school district will receive but all are guaranteed to receive some.

Among the concerns heard frequently at task force's regional meetings are the need for a process to deal with online bullying, building enhancements to improve safety, clear guidelines when it comes to intruder drills and lockdowns, DePasquale said.

"Not surprisingly, the topic of arming teachers came up in most if not every meeting we had. But we did hear many varying opinions on the topic of guns. The overwhelming majority of people said they do not want teachers to be armed," he said. "School security should not rest in the hands of teachers. We need trained law enforcement professionals ... to handle violence and try to prevent violence in our classrooms."

DePasquale also made a point of saying that armed officers that are in schools "need to be trained to deal with students and not just criminals."

Senate-passed legislation would give school districts the option of having policies that allow teachers and other school personnel to be armed but that bill has yet to be considered in the House of Representatives.

Among the recommendations were ones that called for families to be actively engaged in their child's social media usage, districts to hold teacher in-service days for school safety training, and more information-sharing about student's disciplinary or arrest history.

Education Secretary Pedro Rivera said a review is underway in looking policies and laws to develop guidelines on what student information can be shared across agencies and what is protected under the law.

"I think there's an umbrella that seems to be placed around protected information and not all of that information is actually protected," Rivera said.Petoskey projects increase in expenditures in next year's city budget

The spending increase is largely associated with planned improvements to the citys parks, streets and sidewalks.Deflated:

Passion Has Side Effects - No Bad Days:

Deep Summer 2018 - Hailey Elise:

Richie Rude - Heavy Flow:

Williams Lake - A Fresh Start:

Dawn to Dusk - The La Sal Peak:

Vincent Tupin and Eliott Lapotre's Wild Ride in Les Vosges:

LongHairMetal:

Bicheno Build and Trail Preview:

This Is My Canvas  Robin Wallner:

Shooting the Sh*t Vol. 2:

Schladming - Getting Skitz At Europe's Best Bike Park:

Dakota Roche - Cinema BMX:

Franco Morales - Welcome To The Team:

'Til The End:

Daedalus:

Hungry Life - Yellowstone River:

The Dawn Wall - Trailer:

WC Jameson:

Hearing Colours:

Dewey has a deep dark secret that he has never had to share with anyone. He's finally had enough and tries to quit biking.Passion has a funny way of rubbing off on people. Whether you plan on it or not. Riders: Dillon Butcher, Adam Piatek, and Tom Van Steenbergen. Video: Calvin Huth.72 hour photo contest Crankworx.The day after Richie Rude narrowly missed out on a podium at the Whistler EWS we dragged him out for a hot lap recap on Stage 4 - Heavy Flow to Hind Sight to Lower Tunnel Vision. I guess you could call this a recovery ride!2017 was a difficult year for Williams Lake. The town was nealry burnt down from three directions. With sheer luck of winds, the town was saved and the community is more motivated than ever to build trails and provide the world class mountain biking they are so proud of.The Fezzari La Sal Peak is a long travel 29er for the down and ups.Riders: Vincent Tupin and Eliott Lapotre. Video: Edgar Hans.Basil Weber is the vice Swiss champion in DH for 2018, so he's fast... ridiculously fast. Video: Roland Ogg.Hamish's slice of Tassie paradise is coming along nicely.Good to see Robin crushing it on the EWS circuit.Just some random footage of the boys having a session at the local jumps. Calgary jump scene is alive and well. More sessions to come! Hope you enjoy. Riders in order: Liam Baylis, Stephane Pelletier, Andrew Young, Palmer Crerar, Marco Perizzolo, Speedy, Scott Thornhill, Paul Harrop, and Max Langille.Probably the sickest place in the world to take your downhill bike. Sam Robbie and Jacob O'Donoghue-Price take it through the motions down the best Schladming has to offer.Watch Dak put it down with two minutes of fresh footage in Cinema's latest Signature Sessions video.Franco Morales forma parte del team de Vans Argentina y nos muestra su poder patinando en Mar del Plata.To say the Santa Cruz squad is stacked is an understatement. This vid showcases some soon-to-be household names, as well as the OGs. Now sit back and enjoy this feature presentation...An eclectic cast of shredders tackle terrain in Americas Southern Hemisphere, with some special footy from Brazilian legend Rodrigo TX.Making food part of every adventure is Chef Eduardo Garcias mission. With fellow chef Ranga Perera, they create a most-enviable meal on the banks of the Yellowstone River with a few found ingredients, a hand-constructed oven, and time to fish  a rarity in itself. Pour yourself a whiskey sour muddled with charred pine and check out the film.In January, 2015, American rock climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson captivated the world with their effort to climb The Dawn Wall, a seemingly impossible 3,000 foot rock face in Yosemite National Park, California. The pair lived on the sheer vertical cliff for weeks, igniting a frenzy of global media attention. But for Tommy Caldwell, The Dawn Wall was much more than just a climb. It was the culmination of a lifetime defined by overcoming obstacles. At the age of 22, the climbing prodigy was taken hostage by rebels in Kyrgyzstan. Shortly after, he lost his index finger in an accident, but resolved to come back stronger. When his marriage fell apart, he escaped the pain by fixating on the extraordinary goal of free climbing The Dawn Wall. Blurring the line between dedication and obsession, Caldwell and his partner Jorgeson spend six years meticulously plotting and practicing their route. On the final attempt, with the world watching, Caldwell is faced with a moment of truth. Should he abandon his partner to fulfill his ultimate dream, or risk his own success for the sake of their friendship?Directed and Photographed: Mack Fisher & Taylor McIntoshThe life of Neil Harbisson is like something out of a sci-fi novel. Neil was born with achromatopsia, a rare condition that leaves 1 in 30,000 people completely colourblind. But Neil isnt colourblind, far from it. After convincing his doctors to implant an antenna into the back of his head, Neil now possesses a new sense  the ability to hear coluors.Title Photo by: Hailey Elisee To check out videos submitted by fellow Pinkbike members that didn't quite make Movie Mondays here4k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

It is no exaggeration to state that if a Republican in Congress is not corrupt, they are at the bare minimum corrupt for covering up their fellow Republicans malfeasance while in office. It is why, although encouraging on the surface, these meager calls to investigate Trump will go nowhere. In fact, it would not be out of character for Republicans in the GOP-controlled Congress to praise Russian spies and Vladimir Putin for giving them a rubber stamp in the White House. Even more likely is they will blame Democrats, Hillary Clinton, President Obama and federal regulations for inciting Russia to attack America; it is just how they operate.

A similar situation occurred late last week when Republicans in the House quietly closed the investigation into Michigan Governor Rick Snyders disastrous actions that poisoned Flint residents water supply.

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), issued two separate letters announcing that his investigation was finished and that Snyder was without guilt because it was the Environmental Protection Agencys fault Flints water source was shifted to a poisoned source. What was missing was even a word about, or concern over, Rick Snyders appointment of a local dictator (emergency manager) who is responsible for forcing Flynn residents to drink, cook, and bathe in toxic water; water that still is not safe to drink.

Chaffetzs closure came on the heels of President Obama signing legislation authorizing $170 million to address the lead problem in Flints drinking water. And of course, Chaffetz closed the investigation with no new information and simply reiterated what everyone and their pet hamster already know about the crisis.

To give Snyder complete cover, Chaffetz also quietly closed the investigation without receiving any of the committees requested information from the Republican governor and several of his staff. Apparently, Chaffetz likely regards the Michigan Republicans refusal to testify or turn over crucial information and documents to the House committee as the EPAs fault as much as Chaffetzs claim the agency is guilty of forcing Flint residents to drink toxic water.

Of course, nothing will come of it, but hours before Chaffetzs announcement, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Elijah Cummings (D-MD), called for a subpoena of the Republican governor, Rick Snyder. It was, after all, Snyder who was responsible for appointing the emergency manager who switched Flints water supply. No need for a subpoena or testimony from Snyder or members of his staff because Chaffetz concluded that Michigans Department of Environmental Quality and the federal Environmental Protection Agency caused the water crisis. It was unthinkable that Republican Rick Snyder or his appointed emergency manager were responsible for switching Flints water supply to a well-known lead-tainted source.

In typical Republican fashion, Chaffetz said the water was poisoned because of federal regulations that he claimed set up states to fail. His solution was shifting all EPA funding to study and combat climate change to water pipe improvement. And just for good measure, he also called for abolishing the prevailing wage for federally-funded construction projects under the Davis-Bacon Act. Surprisingly, Chaffetz stopped short of blaming Flints poisoned water supply on prevailing wage or the Davis-Bacon Act.

Elijah Cummings refused to sign Chaffetzs letters closing the investigation and a spokeswoman for the committees Democrats noted that Snyder defied requests to provide documents for the investigation. Mr. Cummings also claimed that Snyder obstructed the investigation by not providing key documents that would have clarified when he learned about the poisoned water. In response to Chaffetzs letter, Cummings wrote:

Requiring Governor Snyder to finally comply with the committees request will allow us to complete our investigation and offer concrete findings and recommendations to help prevent a catastrophe like this from happening again. In contrast, allowing Governor Snyder to flout the committees authority will deny the people of Flint the answers they deserve.

Mr. Cummings also noted that besides Governor Snyder, 15 past and current members of the Republican governors administration refused to respond to the powerful House Oversight Committee.

They have repeatedly delayed responding to the committee, and they have treated the committees requests as an afterthought that they respond to only after addressing other inquiries that they view as higher priorities.

Now that there is no Oversight Committee investigation, Snyder will never release the requested documents and his past and current cohorts will never testify; because they are Republicans and there is still an Environmental Protection Agency to blame for forcing Flint residents to bathe, cook and drink toxic water.6.7k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

The list of areas that Republicans expect Democrats to investigate if they take back the House has leaked, and it numbers more than 100 items. Trumps White House is totally unprepared for this level of oversight.

Axios obtained the Republican list of likely Democratic investigative targets that include:

 President Trumps tax returns

 Trump family businesses  and whether they comply with the Constitutions emoluments clause, including the Chinese trademark grant to the Trump Organization

 Trumps dealings with Russia, including the presidents preparation for his meeting with Vladimir Putin

 The payment to Stephanie Clifford  a.k.a. Stormy Daniels

 James Comeys firing

 Trumps firing of U.S. attorneys

 Trumps proposed transgender ban for the military

 Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchins business dealings

 White House staffs personal email use

 Cabinet secretary travel, office expenses, and other misused perks

 Discussion of classified information at Mar-a-Lago

 Jared Kushners ethics law compliance

 Dismissal of members of the EPA board of scientific counselors

 The travel ban

 Family separation policy

 Hurricane response in Puerto Rico

 Election security and hacking attempts

 White House security clearances

Trump is unprepared for this onslaught of oversight

The list above didnt come from guesswork. It came from actual investigative requests that House Democrats have already made, so it presents more than a reliable roadmap of where Democrats are likely to go if they win the House.

Unlike what Republicans used their investigative powers for during the Obama administration, investigating Fox News and talk radio conspiracy theories, Democrats have several current investigations of Trump both civil and criminal that justify serious congressional oversight. The Trump White House is woefully understaffed and not prepared in any way for what is about to hit them if Democrats win in November.

These investigations matter because what they uncover could lead to impeachment and the destruction of the Trump presidency.

The investigative process is a critical step in the process of holding Trump accountable.

Many Trump critics want him impeached, but he cant be impeached without evidence, and that proof is going to come either from the Special Counsels investigation and/or congressional investigations.

House Democrats are preparing to unleash oversight hell, and Trump has no idea what is coming his way.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

Follow Jason Easley on Facebook.38.7k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

The five-time draft dodger in the White House refused to release a prepared statement from his staff that praised John McCains record as a war hero a day after he passed away from brain cancer in Arizona.

According to The Washington Post, President Trump nixed issuing a statement that praised the heroism and life of Sen. John McCain, telling senior aides he preferred to issue a tweet before posting one Saturday night that did not include any kind words for the late Arizona Republican.

The half-assed tweet Trump posted shortly after McCains death mentioned nothing of the Arizona senators service in Vietnam, where he spent over five years enduring torture as a prisoner of war.

My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 26, 2018

Despite the fact that Trumps staff had finalized a statement recognizing McCains heroic service, Trump declined to release it.

More from The Washington Post:

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and other White House aides advocated for an official statement that gave the decorated Vietnam War POW plaudits for his military and Senate service and called him a hero, according to current and former White House aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. The original statement was drafted before McCain died Saturday, and Sanders and others edited a final version this weekend that was ready for the president, the aides said. But Trump told aides he wanted to post a brief tweet instead, and the statement praising McCains life was not released.

We elected a president with no redeeming qualities as a human being.

As former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau tweeted on Sunday night following the Posts report, We elected a president with no redeeming qualities as a human being.

Donald Trump, a man who happily praises Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Saddam Hussein, couldnt muster the humanity to give the same respect to John McCain, an American hero who spent a lifetime fighting for this country.

McCain served America for decades, doing more in ten seconds of service in Vietnam than Trump will ever do in his life. A respectable president has an obligation to honor that service, regardless of whatever petty grudge he might have. Thats what a commander-in-chief does.

Trump? He just stomped off to his sandbox like the whiny third-grade boy that he is. Its no surprise that the late, great John McCain wanted this president nowhere near his funeral.

Follow Sean Colarossi on Facebook.927 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Fired-up Florida Democrats went to early voting sites in droves over the weekend giving the blue party an early voting advantage over Republicans. The surge in early voting also closed the gap in turnout between the two parties on the day before the nationally important Florida primary.

Statewide totals were released by the state on Monday and showed that primary turnout is now over 14 percent of the total electorate. The state said that nearly 1.9 million ballots have been cast so far. More people have voted in the 2018 primary than voted in the presidential election primary of 2016.

The overall Republican advantage in turnout, which includes early voters and all voters casting mail ballots, has decreased to just two percentage points (46 percent to 44 percent).

Because of a huge surge in voting over the weekend, on Sunday Democrats overtook Republicans in early voting for the first time. It was a day when candidates and their supporters mobilized large numbers of voters. In addition, the statewide Souls to the Polls initiative resulted in mass marches to early voting sites throughout the Sunshine State.

In Broward, a huge amount of activity by all three Democratic candidates for governor saw the early voting total surge to 64,680, larger than any other Florida county on Sunday. In Ft. Lauderdale, former Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine was photographed marching with a baby.

At the Souls to the Polls march in Ft Lauderdale, @MayorLevine knows you get extra credit for bringing a baby

At the Souls to the Polls march in aft Lauderdale, @MayorLevine knows you get extra credit for bringing a baby pic.twitter.com/KuXL4Odv8U  David Smiley (@NewsbySmiley) August 26, 2018

Another candidate, former representative Gwen Graham, whose father Bob was once Florida governor, sent her own tweet, saying

Thankful Dad was able to join Senator Chris Smith and leaders in Fort Lauderdale for their huge Souls to the Polls march through the streets. We were reminded today this election is to save lives and the soul of our state.

Thankful Dad was able to join Senator Chris Smith and leaders in Fort Lauderdale for their huge Souls to the Polls march through the streets. We were reminded today this election is to save lives and the soul of our state. pic.twitter.com/tMyfSVMyk1  Gwen Graham (@GwenGraham) August 27, 2018

Pinellas County was the top vote-by-mail county over the weekend, with nearly 121,000 voters returning their ballots, while Miami-Dade County was second and Hillsborough County was third.

Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday as voters will vote for candidates for governor, attorney general and agriculture commissioner.

The Florida Democratic field for governor is crowded, as it includes not only Graham and Levine but also Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum and Palm Beach billionaire Jeff Greene. On the Republican side there is a battle between Agricultural Commissioner Adam Putnam and Congressman Ron DeSantis, who has been endorsed by President Trump.932 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Attorney Alan Dershowitz argued on Monday that all Americans are at risk of being targeted by special counsel Robert Mueller. In so doing he accomplished two of the biggest goals of right-wing media:

He undermined the credibility of law enforcement officials, such as the FBI and the Department of Justice, and He furthered the idea that there is a conspiracy being run to harm Donald Trump and his associates, who have done nothing wrong.

During an interview with Dershowitz on Fox & Friends, host Brian Kilmeade said that President Donald Trump is being targeted and attacked unfairly, as shown by the many investigations into his campaign, into his business dealings, and into his charitable foundation.

Apparently Dershowitz and Kilmeade believe that numerous violations of federal and state laws, and even violations of the U.S. Constitution, are no big deal. They seemed to imply that Trumps violations could happen to anybody if prosecutors looked long and hard enough at their business dealings. And therefore all of the investigations are being run by Trumps political enemies who are seeking to hurt him because they dont like him.

(Remember that earlier in the summer Dershowitz gave his legal opinion that that, as president, Donald Trump is above the law and can legally obstruct justice.)

In this mornings show Kilmeade asked:

Im looking at this and Im asking myself, why? Why do you need to get to the bottom of this now? All those things were good or bad before he ran. This is an attack on a president because you dont like him. Why is that allowed?

Dershowitz immediately agreed, saying:

Theres no doubt about that. They have targeted the president, they have targeted his business The vulnerability is in the business and they have targeted. They have said, Look, weve known about Mr. Trumps business dealings for years. Weve never looked into them. But now, were going to start looking into them.

If you look deeply into any complicated business, youre going to find a loan somewhere in which income is overstated, liabilities are understated.

At that time another brilliant expert from Fox & Friends chimed in, when co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked:

What happens to our republic? We are criminalizing political differences. Were weaponizing government. Whats the outcome for us as a people?

Dershowitz responded by saying:

The biggest crime you can commit in America today is to be associated with Donald Trump. Theyre going to Manafort you, theyre going to Cohen you. Theyre going to do all of these things to you.

He then warned that any businessman running for office could expect a legal colonoscopy.

Its targeting people! Dershowitz shouted. And if they can target President Trump, they can target you, they can target anyone. Thats the problem.

Actually the problem is people like Dershowitz who think that Donald Trump should be able to get away with committing numerous crimes simply because he is president. There is a conflict between Fox News and the rest of the world, but there is no doubt that in the end it is the prosecutors who will have the last say in the matter.516 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Theres something that happens in red states where Republicans take over state government and run it like a business. What happens is that instead of respecting its citizens, the state government tries to screw over people like any for-profit enterprise does to its customers  if it can get away with it. (See Flint, Michigan for an example of this phenomenon.)

And in GOP-dominated Kansas, the state government found out about contaminated water that people were drinking in the Wichita area in 2011, but didnt tell them until recently.

Where is Erin Brockovich when you need her?

According to The Wichita Eagle newspaper, several hundred area residents drank the contaminated water without knowing about it. The water was tainted by a dry cleaning chemical known as perchloroethylene that had leaked into the areas groundwater water supply.

The government discovered the problem with the water in 2011 while looking into the expansion of a Kwik Shop convenience store. But it took over six years for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) to let the residents know about the problem with their water. In addition, KDHE did not bother to test wells owned by private citizens that were located less than a mile away from the tainted site.

One community resident, Joe Hufman, said it was seven years before he learned his well was contaminated by a local dry cleaner, located in Haysville.

Haysville knew it. KDHE knew it. Kwik Shop knew it, Hufman told The Eagle, but they didnt tell me about it.

There were more contaminated dry cleaning sites also. Two other sites near Wichita were contaminated but the state didnt notify residents of more than 200 homes for years that their drinking water contained harmful chemicals.

In total, KDHE has found 22 contaminated sites across the state, and in none of them have the private wells in the area been checked for contamination, even now. What has been discovered so far may be only the beginning.

The KDHE said that they had ignored the contamination in Haysville because they assumed groundwater was traveling southwest, away from private wells. But in fact it was traveling toward the private wells instead of away from them.

Hufman said he and his family have been drinking their well water for 25 years, but they have no idea when the poisonous chemicals from the dry cleaning site reached them. When their water was tested they found it had 49 parts per billion of PCE, which is nearly ten times the allotted level. (PCE is the abbreviation for the dry cleaning chemical perchloroethylene.)

Consuming the PCE leads to serious harm to the nervous system, liver, kidneys and reproductive systems. Exposure over long periods of time leads to mood, memory, attention and reaction time changes as well as vision problems. Studies have shown that higher levels of exposure can lead to a risk of bladder cancer, multiple myeloma or non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

Hufman said he doesnt know why those in his neighborhood werent told about the chemicals years ago, even if it was thought to be moving away from their wells. Now they know that their street was among the worst hit with at least three wells over the limit.

You think they would have notified everybody, taken some precautions until something was done, Hufman said. Instead, they all kept quiet. They didnt let anybody know about the contamination, so we all continued to drink the water.

The chemical contamination was allowed to happen when the dry cleaning industry lobbied for and got passed The Kansas Drycleaner Environmental Response Act of 1995. This protected the dry cleaning industry from the high cost of environmental cleanup.

Once again, a government has been corrupted by money from special interests, and the citizens are the one who pay the price.1.9k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Former active duty officer in the U.S. Air Force, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) is urging Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to defy Trump and honor Senator John McCain with the flag at half-staff as it should be.

Dear @SecPompeo: You served on active duty. As a nation mourns McCain, it would be appropriate to lower the flag to half staff at all @StateDept buildings. I respectfully request you give that order, regardless of the views of @realDonaldTrump. It is the honorable thing to do. https://t.co/yIllKANhMq  Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) August 27, 2018

Even the cabinet is closed confused about honoring McCain. Flag at Energy is half staff. At Agriculture, across the street, flag is at full staff. pic.twitter.com/gs0fr85kcr  Joe Heim (@JoeHeim) August 27, 2018

Trump has refused to issue a presidential proclamation lowering flags to half-staff in memory of the late Sen. John McCain, so after being lowered over the weekend, the White House flag has been raised to full staff again.

Rep. Lieu currently serves as a Colonel in the Reserves and has won medals like the Air Force Humanitarian Service Medal and multiple Meritorious Service Medals, and thus brings his respect for a fellow service member with him when he urges Pompeo to do the right thing in spite of his boss.

Trump supporters often tell me that in spite of all of Trumps faults, they support him because he supports the military. They say this but are unaware and uninterested when I ask them if they are aware of the great effort and support put in by the Obamas and Bidens, the Bidens had a son who served with great honor as well. The Obamas donated part of their income to support the military.

These facts do not register with the Trump supporter who claims to care about the military, and neither did Trumps public humiliation of a Gold Star family.

But now here we are, with President Trump and many Republicans spitting on John McCain right after he passed.

It should be odd that a Democratic Representative is trying to push the Republican president to do the right thing to honor the Republican Senator. But it isnt, because Democrats from the House, Senate and former President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama were quick to issue moving statements honoring the Senator.

No president of either party has ever been so petty or low.

In the reaction to Trumps pettiness over John McCain we need to realize that this is the reaction of every group whom he has spit upon; for example, the p*ssy hats Republicans mocked were the equivalent of former service members outrage over the way Trump is reacting right now. Sexual assault often causes PTSD similar to what some service members face.

Instead of judging the reaction as the media has been wont to do, the time has come to judge the behavior that is creating the reaction.

Over the weekend I realized it is not that this country is so divided and partisan. It is that we look that way because of the heated reactions to this president from various marginalized groups. Yes, we were divided on issues of race and sexism that that was exploited by the Russians, but in truth we are more united in our values than we appear right now.

Standing up against the kind of hate Trump enacts is not partisan or a divide. It is actually a great act of unity and love for our fellow humans.

I didnt agree with Sen John McCain on much, but I respected him. Having just watched a loved one lose a family member with the exact same brain cancer, Im gutted imagining how his family must feel right now with the President behaving this way.

There is simply no empathy or compassion in Trump. He doesnt support the troops. He supports no one and nothing but the Trump brand, and the Trump brand is trash that spits on an American hero in public right after he has died.1.1k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

The horrible saga of right-wing Congressman Duncan Hunter from California just keeps getting more pathetic and disgusting each day.

It was bad that he misused campaign funds, spending the money on personal items. It was bad that he attempted to shift responsibility for his financial fraud, blaming both his wife and the Deep State for the crimes he committed.

But perhaps the worst thing yet to come out of this sad story is the fact that this huge pro-military Trump supporter was partying with donated money when he said he was helping military veterans. But instead of helping the veterans he was living the high life and partying at expensive bars and restaurants in Washington, D.C..

On Tuesday Hunter we reported that:

U.S. Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican from California, was indicted on charges that he and his wife used campaign funds to pay for personal expenses and filed false campaign finance reports, federal officials said.

Then, later in the week Hunter went on Fox News and did an interview saying that he was not responsible for the misuse of funds since his wife handled the money in the family, and he didnt know what was going on.

Whatever she did, that will be looked at, too, Im sure, he said. I didnt do it. I didnt spend any money illegally.

Which was ridiculous, since he and his wife both used the money to take trips together, go to concerts together, and go to fancy restaurants together. He also said he couldnt afford to live on the $174,000 annual salary paid to him by the taxpayers of the United States for being a Congressman, which led to widespread ridicule from people living on the minimum wage.

So after all of that, the New York Times has published a lengthy article about Hunter that details the shocking lifestyle he lived in Washington, spending money that wasnt his to spend. It says that back home in San Diego Hunter was a normal suburban husband and father. But when in Washington, he paid hundreds of dollars for tequila shots and spent thousands on fancy dinners.

He was here a lot, some days he was in here multiple times a day, said Stephanie Connon, a manager of the Capitol Hill bar Bullfeathers.

Hunters problems began around Christmas of 2009, when he wrote on his website about a need for greater financial freedom and complained about the national debt. Most often, I hear concerns from working Americans about the future of their children and grandchildren, and the debt burden they will unfairly inherit, he wrote at the time. He also wrote, The federal government is like a family that has overspent and racked up too many bills.

It was in 2009 that Hunters theft of funds began, when he didnt have enough money to pay for a ski weekend at Lake Tahoe. So, he dipped into campaign funds to pay for the trip, according to the indictment. Charges appeared for a rental car and for the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe Resort Spa and Casino. The $1,359 he spent in Tahoe was just the beginning. Later there was a family trip to Italy that cost $14,261.33, and many more trips, concerts and fancy dinners. The indictment details that Hunter and his wife eventually started paying even mundane household expenses from the campaign account, including trips to the grocery store.

The couple tried to claim that the personal expenses were meant for charitable causes, including veterans charities. When keeping the campaign books they often labelled personal expenses as donation to veterans charity. Some veterans are now referring to him as a blue falcon, a term that means a person who sacrifices his friends for his own benefit.

According to military veterans who sought help from his office, it grew clear that Hunter wasnt going to help them unless it meant a photo op or some camera time on Fox News.

At some point, it became clear I shouldnt be talking to his office, said Kristofer Goldsmith, of High Ground Veterans Advocacy.

Hunter took over his fathers Congressional seat in San Diego after three combat tours of duty in Iraq.

But someone who has known Hunter for a long time, former California Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, said, This is a tragic unraveling of someone who should probably never have gone to Congress.

It is true that Duncan Hunter should never have gone to Congress. It is also true that the time has come for him to resign and find a different line of work.2.1k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Trump caved to the nearly universal outrage over his behavior and finally released a statement about the death of Sen. John McCain.

Here is the text of the proclamation lowering the flag from the White House as it was sent to PoliticusUSA:

As a mark of respect for the memory and longstanding service of Senator John Sidney McCain III, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset, on the day of interment. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at halfstaff for the same period at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-seventh day of August, in the year of our Lord two thousand eighteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-third.

Someone finally convinced the pouty president that he was not helping himself by giving John McCains passing the cold shoulder treatment. Trump is making it sound like he is undertaking a series of grand gestures for McCain when the truth is that he is caving to public outrage and a mountain of bad publicity that he caused.

The pouty president has finally done the bare minimum. For this, he deserves no credit, as Trump has only reinforced the negative perception that the majority of the country holds of him.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

Follow Jason Easley on Facebook.1.7k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

Trump is threatening to put tariffs on US cars that are assembled in Canada, as the president has no idea how trade and tariffs work.

Video:

Trump said, Ill be calling the prime minister very soon, and well start negotiations, and if theyd like to negotiate fairly, well do that. You know, they have the tariffs of almost 300% on some of our dairy products. We cant that. I think with Canada, frankly, the easiest thing we can do is tariff their cars coming in. Its a tremendous amount of money and a simple negotiation that could end in one day and weve taken a lot of money the following day, but I think well give them a chance to probably have a separate deal. We could have a separate deal that we could put it into this deal.

Trump is threatening a tariff that will hurt GM and Ford

A Moodys report on Trumps auto tariff found, Tariffs would be a negative for both Ford and GM. The burden would be greater for GM because it depends more on imports from Mexico and Canada to support US operations. In addition, a significant portion of GMs high-margin trucks and SUVs are sourced from Mexico and Canada  Both manufacturers would need to absorb the cost of scaling back Mexican and Canadian production and moving some back to the US.

Trump isnt bending countries to his will with this trade war. He is hurting US companies and killing jobs.

Trump still has no clue how tariffs work

A tariff is a tax. The United States government does not get that revenue directly. Automakers are not going to pay the government more money to bring parts into the US from Canada. The cost of a tariff is passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. The US government is not going to take in a lot of money, as Trump inaccurately claimed. The president keeps getting it wrong on tariffs because it appears that he has no idea how tariffs and trade work.

Trump thinks that he is winning when he is really harming the US economy.

A Trump auto tariff will harm US companies and cost more people their jobs, but clueless Trump thinks that he is making good deals while American workers and consumers pay the price for his ignorance.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

Follow Jason Easley on Facebook.Cheniere Energys LNG plant, with 27 million tons per year nameplate capacity at the Sabine Pass River on the Louisiana-Texas border, was commissioned in 2016 and was the first of its kind in the U.S. Dominion Energys Cove Point plant on the Chesapeake Bay, which can produce 5.25 million tons of LNG per year, started to stream last month. At least four more natural gas liquidation facilities are set to start operating in the coming months, and dozens of companies have submitted long-term application forms for LNG exports with the U.S. Department of Energy.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that the countrys liquefied natural gas exports had increased to 2.8 billion cubic feet per day as of November 2017. That followed the completion of the fourth liquefaction unit at the Sabine Pass terminal, which has the largest capacity in the lower 48 states.

Brusselss and Washingtons efforts to open and diversify the natural gas market in Europe are perceived by some Russian observers as a gas war being waged by the U.S. against Moscow.

However, the demand for de-monopolization and diversification of the market is a requirement of the European Unions Third Energy Package, which stipulates separation of companies production and sale operations from their transport networks.

Russia's state-controlled energy giant Gazprom has consistently pushed to increase the volumes of its natural gas deliveries to Europe, by building the Turkish Stream pipeline in southern Europe through the Black Sea and by pressing affected countries to permit the construction of Nord Stream 2, the second edition of the disputed pipeline under the Baltic Sea. All of this violates the Third Energy Package.

The first edition of Nord Stream, both lines of which were completed in 2011, was actually built to circumvent any land transit for Russian gas through the Baltic states and Poland, therefore directly influencing the supply of gas to Western Europe. Currently, at least a third of Europes gas comes from Russia, and Gazproms shipments to the continent reached a record high last year and are only expected to grow.

In 2011, the energy package was already in force, and merely inaugurating the Nord Stream pipeline violated EU laws. Gazprom, the majority owner of North Stream AG, the operator of the pipeline, is actually the sole producer, seller and transporter of the gas.

However, while the launch of Nord Stream violated EU law, protests by officials in Poland and the Baltic countries were futile at that time, given that Moscow was playing energy geopolitics, with Gazprom signing one-on-one gas deals with many EU member states.

Over the course of natural gas payment disputes with Kyiv, Russia interrupted the supply of gas to Ukraine and Ukraines EU neighbors on at least three occasions between 2009 and 2011. The Russian government-owned media outlet RT also twisted the facts surrounding Russias energy supply pressure, which Polygraph.info fact-checked in March.

Each of these gas cuts interrupted the market, leaving several European countries without natural gas supplies during the winter. On the heels of skyrocketing oil prices - gas prices follow oil prices with a delay of several months - Russia found a new tool to influence the domestic policies of the affected countries. Playing geopolitics with energy followed Vladimir Putins infamous anti-Western speech in Munich in 2007.

Fast-forwarding to the present day, Europeans are still depend on cheap Russian gas. The Russian media and government continue to portray Washington as the aggressor, spinning the recent visit of Jean-Claude Junker, the president of the European Commission, as a way for U.S. President Donald Trump to persuade Europe to build more terminals for American LNG.

Russia has dominated the European energy market for decades and even RIA Novosti has said Russias gas cannot be simply replaced by American LNG, which is a small supply compared to the continents overall gas consumption. Polygraph.infos January fact check detailed the fact that the U.S. LNG supplies do not reduce the energy security in Europe as RT claimed, but actually contribute to energy stability in Europe.Food editor and chief critic

Eating all of the chicken livers just as fast as I can.Get the SC business stories that matter.

Our newsletter catches you up with all the business stories that are shaping Charleston and South Carolina every Monday and Thursday at noon. Get ahead with us - it's free.Paul Bowers is an education reporter and father of three living in North Charleston. He previously worked at the Charleston City Paper, where he was twice named South Carolina Journalist of the Year in the weekly category.Lauren Sausser is the Health & Science Editor at The Post and Courier. She also writes about health care issues in South Carolina.Charity Missionary Baptist Church pastor Nelson B. Rivers III and The Charity Foundation executive director Nashonda Hunter showed one of the parcels for development as affordable housing in the Liberty Hill community on June 18. It is at the corner of Mint Avenue and Mint Street. Wade Spees/StaffMichael Majchrowicz is a reporter covering crime and public safety. He previously wrote about courts for the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Massachusetts. A Hoosier native, he graduated from Indiana University with a degree in journalism.Pastors Lawrence Meadows (left) and Roderick Cummings are the owners of First Family Funeral Home in Spartanburg. They have been indicted on charges of desecration of human remains in connection with a decomposing corpse that was left to rot inside their funeral home for three years, authorities said. ProvidedSyndicated and guest columns represent the personal views of the writers, not necessarily those of the editorial staff. The editorial department operates entirely independently of the news department and is not involved in newsroom operations.The Post and Courier provides a forum for our readers to share their opinions, and to hold up a mirror to our community. Publication does not imply endorsement by the newspaper; the editorial staff attempts to select a representative sample of letters because we believe its important to let our readers see the range of opinions their neighbors submit for publication.Flags fly at half-staff atop the S.C. Statehouse on Monday to honor the passing of Arizona Sen. John McCain. Flags at the White House were not lowered until Monday afternoon after a barrage of criticism directed at President Donald Trump. Andy Shain/StaffLOWER POTTSGROVE  There was a bit more than the usual first-day-of-school excitement Monday morning at Pottsgrove High School.

According to a note posted on the districts website, the school went into medical lockdown first thing in the morning.

That means students and teachers had to clear the halls so a student could be taken by stretcher to an ambulance.

Gary DeRenzo, the districts director of community relations, said the student had a pre-existing medical condition that had been triggered Monday morning.

The student was taken by ambulance to Pottstown Hospital, DeRenzo told Digital First Media.

Our students and faculty/staff responded quickly to the Medical Lockdown, we appreciate their assistance and cooperation, Pottsgrove High School Principal William Ziegler wrote in his post.Last week, I received an inquiry from a Christian theologian interested in showing that the postures of Yoga (asana) are directly tied to Hinduism and thus, cannot be easily incorporated into daily life by Christians. While the origin of yoga is undoubtedly tied to the Hindu sacred texts, the Vedas and Upanishads, I struggled with his idea of researching asana divorced from yoga in its entirety.

As we at the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) have repeatedly said, asana alone is not yoga. It is but one of the eight limbs of yoga, albeit the most well-known and the limb through which most people begin to explore yoga. But to attempt to draw conclusions on the theistic nature of yoga by examining only posture is problematic. If posture alone is religious, then what is difference between a headstand in gymnastics and shirshasana in yoga practice? If its only about posture, then are all gymnasts who do headstands also doing something religious?

A cursory exploration of the sacred yoga texts, particularly Patanjalis much-revered Yoga Sutra, will easily demonstrate that more important than the posture itself is the intention behind it. It is the intention  on and off the mat  that determines whether a practice is yoga or not. If the intention is to purely reap physical health from posture  strength, flexibility, stress reduction  then the asana practice is not theistic and thus, not yoga.

But its important to step back for a moment to look at the bigger picture and examine what the reason is for all the postures as they relate to Hindu practice and philosophy? In Hindu scripture, asana is primarily used to be mean seat, and more importantly, a seat for meditation on the Divine. The postures in yoga were developed with the intention that by their regular practice, the individual will remain healthy and fit enough to sit comfortably for extended periods and meditate on the Divine. The average person cannot suddenly sit down one day and start meditating. Our bodies have not been trained to sit still for even a few minutes, and as many of us have undoubtedly experienced, various limbs begin to fall asleep within minutes. Second, our mind has not been trained toconcentrate (Patanjali differentiates between concentration  dharana  and meditation  dhyana). Anyone who has closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on a mantra or any single object can attest to the difficulty of staying focused. The mind has a tendency to constantly wander, jumping from one thought to the next because we have not spent time training it to concentrate.

In Ashtanga yoga (as taught by Pattabhi Jois), which is what I practice, the body is trained through the various asanas and the mind is trained through focus on the breath combined with drishti (or gaze). The postures keep us engaged in the practice. By focusing our gaze at the the tip of our nose, for example, we no longer pay attention to what is happening on the neighboring mat and thereby, enhance our ability to focus on our own breath. Slowly, the body opens up, and the power to concentration strengthens.

Naturally, that begs the question, why do we need to concentrate? Because concentration, or being present, allows us to focus inwards on our Divine self. As we further develop this focus, we find that we can focus on making our every thought, word, and action selfless and thus, worthy offerings to the Divine that resides in us all.But therein lies what I see as the fundamental disconnect with the teachings of yoga and exclusivist traditions that insist on acceptance or belief in a particular, external, and patriarchal God.

Yoga is one of the six schools of Hindu thought, and Hinduism is a pluralistic tradition. Hinduism, and thus yoga, teach that ALL beings can reach union with the Divine, regardless of which name one chooses to call God, be it Shiva, Jesus, or Allah, because the Divine is One and within each of us. It is not the religion or God an individual professes to that matters. It is her karma that matters. And by karma, I mean the combination of ones thoughts, actions, and intention behind actions. Part and parcel of karma is being in the present and focusing on the task at hand without worrying about the future result or reminiscing about the past. The past is gone, and we cannot change it or relive it. The future is out of our control. It is only our present actions and thoughts that we can control. Yet, most of us are motivated by or attached to the future intended results of our actions. In Ashtanga yoga, the combination of posture, breath, and gaze teaches us how to be in the present. And when we commit to its regular practice over a long period of time, we notice that we are better able to focus on the present throughout our day, even when we are not on the yoga mat.

Karma also simplistically refers to a metaphysical principle of cause and effect; our thoughts and actions produce appropriate and corresponding outcomes. And these outcomes may span over lifetimes. How else can we explain why bad things happen to good people? Thus, along with a genuine belief in karma comes the corollary concept of reincarnation of the soul. Both are absolutely necessary, not only to fully understand the eight limbs of yoga, but to truly benefit from the intended purpose of asana.

The point of yoga is to help us reach such a stage in our spiritual development, which has occurred over countless births in various physical bodies, where our actions no longer accrue new karma, or corresponding outcomes that must be experienced. Thus, we are freed from the need to experience those outcomes, and freed from this continuous cycle of birth and death. This freedom from reincarnation, also known as moksha, is open to all, regardless of religion, race, gender, or sexual preference.

Thus, in yoga there are no saved or condemned people. There are only individuals at various stages in their journey toward moksha. And, just as importantly, there is no one single path to moksha because we are all inherently different in nature. What works for me may not work for you. Hinduism recognizes that and because of its universal and pluralistic nature, anyone, regardless of their professed religion, can practice asana without converting to Hinduism. However, the intended purpose of asana in the practice of yoga  to prepare the mind and body for samadhi, and ultimately, moksha  may place some practitioners in a metaphysical or religious quandary.It is easy to tell when an energy source is dumbi.e. inefficient, unreliable and expensive. Smart energy sources like coal, nuclear, hydroelectric and natural gas, exist because they satisfy a permanent demand for cheap and reliable energy. Dumb energy sources, on the other hand, exist because government has put its thumb on the scale in the form of subsidies and mandates. The most valuable employees of companies that sell dumb energy are lobbyists, not engineers. If an energy source exists by virtue of government favoritism, you know it is dumb.

Which brings us to Norman Rogers brand new book, Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy. Dumb Energy is reviewed in the current The Week That Was by the Science and Environmental Policy Project:

Dispelling myths is difficult, particularly when strong vested interests profit from them. In a clearly written, short book, Norman Rogers explains why wind and solar power are Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy. Electricity generation from wind was invented in the 1880s, shortly after Thomas Edison opened the first electrical coal-fired power plant with the necessary infrastructure to use electricity for practical purposes. Particularly after the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893, Americans demanded electric power and light. Reliable electricity became the mark of modern civilization.

In the early 20th century, systems of delivering reliable electric power, called the grid, were developed, and regulated by local and state governments. In 1935, the Federal Power Act was passed, largely written by power engineers and scientists. It recognizes the grid is an energized system of delivering power, not electrons, for the benefit of all on it. Contrary to myth, it is impossible to distinguish which electrons come from which generators and the grid does not recognize political boundaries. Reinforced by Supreme Court decisions, the Power Act divides the power industry in three categories  generation, local distribution, and transmission. States were given jurisdiction over generation and local distribution. The federal government over transmission. A large part of the costs of transmission is created by the need for stability on the grid, not than just delivering power.

Wind power was initially used in many communities and rural areas. Because wind power is inherently unreliable, it lost to the reliability of the grid. Human preference demonstrated that reliable electricity is of high-value, while unreliable electricity is of low-value. Wind power will continue to be unreliable until a low-cost system of storing electricity on a massive scale is created. Solar power has similar issues and the sun sets daily. Massive subsidies and accounting tricks hid the high costs of unreliable wind and solar energy from the public.

Rogers addresses many of the weaknesses of wind and solar and accounting tricks used to make them appear to competitive with traditional power. These include heavy subsidies in the form of tax credits that can be sold to corporations desiring to reduce their taxes. Rogers does not clarify the costs (subsidies) that transmission companies (gird operators) must pay for making the unreliable electricity reliable, raising the value of unreliable electricity.

These costs are passed on to the consumers, not the generators of unreliable electricity. Thus, the US public pays a double subsidy for unreliable energy from wind and solar. It subsidizes the capital costs of construction through tax credits, etc., and it subsidies the costs of making unreliable electricity reliable. On top of these subsidies, over half of the states require these low-value types of electrical generation.

In addition to the myth that wind and solar are a low-cost substitute for fossil fuels and hydropower, Rogers addresses many other myths about electricity and its generation. No doubt, this valuable book will receive great criticism from those who benefit from current myths.Last week, it was determined that the leniency-for-drug felons legislation being pushed by Democrats and some Republicans will not be brought to the Senate floor before the November elections. Left open was the question of whether it will be brought to the Senate floor afterwards.

The answer to that question lies, I believe, in the position President Trump takes. If he supports leniency-for-felons legislation, it might well get a floor vote, though it still might not if theres substantial opposition within the Republican caucus. If Trump opposes the legislation, it seems likely that Majority Leader McConnell will keep it bottled up. And if Trump opposes the legislation strongly enough to veto it, then McConnell almost certainly will kill it.

Where does Trump stand on the leniency legislation? According to this report in the Washington Free Beacon, he strongly opposes it.

This makes sense. As I noted here, it seems unlikely that a president talking about getting tough on fentanyl dealers, and indeed about the death penalty for some of them, would back a bill that reduces their jail time.

The Free Beacon article confirms that the irrationality of such a posture is at the heart of Trumps opposition to leniency legislation:

[Trumps concerns with the bill] first came up during a Thursday morning meeting between Trump and a number of Senate Republicans. . .a Senate source close to negotiations said. Trump and the group spent the final ten minutes of the meeting trashing the bill, with Trump explicitly saying that he would never support a bill that lets fentanyl traffickers go free. Similar concerns arose in the following meeting, in which Trump told Kushner and Attorney General Jeff Sessions that he was a no go on FIRST STEP. Sessions and Trump agreed that reduced sentences for drug traffickers was not the way to go, a senior administration official familiar with the meeting told the Free Beacon. In fact, the two men concluded that Congress should consider strengthening trafficking sentences, especially for fentanyl dealers, up to and including the death penalty.

Team Leniency is quite unlikely to satisfy Trumps desire to punish anyone more harshly than current law provides. Sen. Mike Lee, a key Republican supporter of leniency for drug felons, has said as much.

Thus, assuming the Free Beacons reporting is accurate, we can expect that President Trump will continue to oppose leniency legislation and that, therefore, the legislation will go nowhere. But this outcome is hardly assured. Opponents cannot let down their guard. And with Sen. Tom Cotton leading the opposition, Im confident it wont.The news for the Roman Catholic Church keeps getting worse and worse. But lets stop right there for just a moment. News is exactly thatit is what we know from the news media, whose accuracy and depth Power Line readers, among others, know to distrust. There are some first-hand documents (more on this in a moment) to go on, but do we really want to place complete credulity in the report of a Pennsylvania grand jury led by the hand by an ambitious prosecutor? Mike Nifong anybody? The McMartin pre-school witch hunt anybody?

I emphatically do not think the news of massive sexual abuse is fake news. (Just wait till you see where I end up with this.) If only half of the Pennsylvania grand jury report is true, it would represent the most massive moral failure of the Church since the pre-Reformation era, and might yet result in a convulsion in the Church just as earth-shaking, with consequences impossible to foresee, but likely not good. Does anyone think this kind of moral ugliness is limited just to Pennsylvania? It could be the tip of the iceberg. We know from many previous proven cases that pedophilia among Catholic clerics took place, and that the Church hierarchy covered it up, stonewalled, and in some cases attempted to declare bankruptcy to avoid civil damage judgments (unsuccessfully in most cases). It should also be noted that sex abuse cases have occurred in Protestant denominations. I know that the Mormon Church has quietly settled a number of sex abuse cases, and cases involving the Boy Scouts continue through the courts, but these cases havent received any commensurate media coverage because the media hate the Catholic Church (also the Boy Scouts), which makes their troubles a big story. The media dont much care about Lutherans or Presbyterians.

I want to unroll this post patiently. I am not a Roman Catholic, though I have large Catholic sympathies both on philosophical and theological grounds. The Catholic Church is the most important conservative institution in the world, which makes its current scandal all the more significant. Whittaker Chambers once wrote to William F. Buckley that he thought the Catholic Church was the only coherent conservative institution in the modern world. (Chambers remained a Quaker, however, in part because he didnt think of himself as a conservativea topic for another day.) My favorite modern novelist, Walker Percy, converted to Catholicism, though always saying, directly for himself and through his main characters in his novels, that he was a bad Catholic, which is the right kind, if you know what I mean. The reason I am a Catholic, he said, is that I believe that what the Catholic Church proposes is true. We might also invoke Evelyn Waugh, author of the very Catholic Brideshead Revisited, who by all accounts was a nasty piece of work personally. He received a letter once from a lady complaining about his unpleasantness, demanding to know how he could possibly profess to being a devout Catholic and be such an awful human being, to which he gave the best answer (going from memory here): Madamcan you imagine how much more awful I would be if I was not a Catholic?

Among the reasons I decided against becoming a Catholic is my worry that someday we might get a Pope like . . . Pope Francis. I loved John Paul II and Benedict XVI, but feared that what has come to pass would come to pass. It is bad enough that Francis is a left-wing liberation theologue (liberation theology being merely Marxism with salsa), but there is credible testimony that he has covered up for pedophile priests, bishops, and cardinals.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano of Ulpiana (a diocese in the Balkans) has released his full testimony about the matter here, in which he declares that the [sex abuse cover up] corruption has reached the very top of the Churchs hierarchymeaning Pope Francis himself. In 2006 Bishop Vigano and several other senior clerics warned Pope Benedict about Cardinal McCarrick (who ought to rot in a cell somewhere for the rest of his life if even a quarter of the stories about him are true):

I ended my memo by repeating to my superiors that I thought it was necessary to intervene as soon as possible by removing the cardinals hat from Cardinal McCarrick and that he should be subjected to the sanctions established by the Code of Canon Law, which also provide for reduction to the lay state. . . Pope Benedict had imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis: the Cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living, he was forbidden to celebrate [Mass] in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance. But none of this happened. Instead, McCarrick was transferred to Washington DC and kept his Cardinals mitre. Bishop Vigano believes Pope Francis was directly involved in this transfer. This paragraph of Viganos testimony is especially interesting: Immediately after, the Pope [Francis] asked me in a deceitful way: What is Cardinal McCarrick like? I answered him with complete frankness and, if you want, with great naivete: Holy Father, I dont know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance. The Pope did not make the slightest comment about those very grave words of mine and did not show any expression of surprise on his face, as if he had already known the matter for some time, and he immediately changed the subject. But then, what was the Popes purpose in asking me that question: What is Cardinal McCarrick like? He clearly wanted to find out if I was an ally of McCarrick or not. This is where things get interesting and speculative. Why did Pope Benedict resign the papacy? There have been rumors circulating for years that some kind of scandal was used to force him out. Bishop Vigano doesnt talk about this, but mentions the curious detail that Cardinal McCarrick was prominent among the boosters of Cardinal Bergoglio (Pope Franciss name before becoming Pope) for the papacy. The clear subtext of Bishop Viganos missive is that what drives Pope Francis in these matters is wanting to make the American Catholic hierarchy more liberal. He reports that Pope Francis said to him: Yes, the Bishops in the United States must not be ideologized, they must not be right-wing like the Archbishop of Philadelphia. He means here Archbishop Charles Chaput, one of the most notable conservative bishops today. Cardinal McCarrick said the exact same thing to Bishop Vigano, as though McCarrick and Pope Francis share talking points with one another. Theres a lot more in Bishop Viganos explosive testimony, which is very detailed and specific. And it seems very credible to me. Worth reading the whole thing if you have time. Rod Dreher reports today: Veteran Vatican journalist Marco Tosatti, writing in the Italian newspaper La Verita today, called the Vigano declaration one of the most dramatic and important documents which I have ever read in 40 years of covering religious news (and in a half century of journalism). Heres where I want to try to extend the story. If the Pennsylvania grand jury report is to be believed, what took place there was not just a handful of isolated, troubled priests with a pedophilia problem. The grand jury report details organized pedophilia, with active cooperation among clergy whoif the allegations are truedeserve the kind of punishment the Spanish Inquisition is supposed to have applied to heretics. Others have rightly called this episode the American equivalent of the Muslim grooming gangs of Rotherham in England, which also drew a blind eye from the authorities. The Rotherham grooming gangs got away with it for so long in England because of political correctness. The same problem is at work here in this matter. I have heard rumors for years that there are active, organized homosexual cells in Catholic seminaries that have attracted people with an inclination to pedophilia. (Rumors about Cardinal McCarrick have been circulating for years apparently.) If true, it would help explain what took place in Pennsylvania. Between the shortage of priests for Catholic churches in America and the drift toward liberal theology that no longer believes in traditional sexual morality, no one has thought to look too closely at this. I have no idea whether these persistent rumors are true. But isnt this something the media should look into, if only to debunk it if it isnt true? The Boston Globe rightly won a Pulitzer Prize (dramatized in Spotlight) about how the Catholic hierarchy covered up clergy sexual abuse in Boston, behaving exactly like any bureaucracy would according to what public choice theory would predict. How about looking into seminary culture to see whether some of them are housing incubators for predatory behavior. Dont hold your breath. Such an inquiry would require journalists to probe into matters that run afoul of liberal orthodoxy today. It is one thing to probe into bad behavior from unpopular and easily demonized cardinals. Blowing open a cover-up is standard Watergate Journalism 101. Its another thing to open the door to uncomfortable questions about sexual morality in our anything-goes times. And thats almost as great a moral failing as the bishops and cardinals who cover up the evil in the first place. The point is, while the media will gladly blast the most lurid and awful (but unproven) details of a grand jury report about what took place in Pennsylvania without question, they are unwilling to look deeper into the potential causes and enablers of this evil. That is nearly as contemptible as the cowardly behavior of the Church hierarchy. Pope Francis should resign. Yesterday. P.S. Pope Francis said today that he will not comment on Viganos testimony. Cue whoever is the Martin Luther of our time.PR-Inside.com: 2018-08-27 13:00:43

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FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for CIBT Education Group Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - CIBT Education Group Inc. (TSX:MBA). has issued a press release with the following headline:CIBT Ranks #79 on the 2018 Business in Vancouver 100 Fastest-Growing Companies in B.C. ListTo 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 CIBT Education Group 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/CIBT Education Group Inc.Source: CIBT Education Group Inc. (TSX: MBA, OTCQX: MBAIF, ISIN: CA17163Y1025)Date: August 27, 2018Time: 7:00 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of CIBT Education Group 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: 2018-08-27 03:01:02

- Partnership for education content and local teacher training to expand user base in Taiwan

- To raise its standing in Taiwan education market and accelerate the expansion of Asian business

- Classting awarded Ministerial Prize by Taiwan Ministry of Education for contributions to Taiwans digital education environment earlier this year

Classting Signs MOU with Top3 Taiwan Publisher Nan-I

Classting

Lin Li-Hsing, +886-920-041-329

lin@classting.com

Education Social Platform Classting forged a partnership with top-three Taiwan publisher Nan-I Publishing Company. The two companies will expand their user base through collaboration on education content and teacher training in Taiwans K-12 schools.

Nan-I is a 60-year-old major publishing company in Taiwan, famous for its textbooks and reference books. Based on this partnership, Classting will strengthen its global competitiveness and cooperate in school promotions to attract new users. It also will expand its user base in Taiwans education market and accelerate the expansion of Asian business in Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam and Hong Kong.

Wei-Chuan Su, CEO of Nan-I Publishing Company, said, Classting is an education social platform that best matches the educational environment in Taiwan. We hope to work with Classting to provide more high-quality digital textbooks and e-learning content to more students.

Hyun-gu Cho said, Classting is making various efforts to solve education issues in Asia and expand global partnerships to provide more innovative edutech services. Classting aims to be a global education social platform that creates an environment where students around the world can have fun in studying.

Meanwhile, earlier this year, Classting was awarded the Ministerial Prize by Taiwans Ministry of Education for its contribution to Taiwans digital education environment and mobile learning. Classting has subsidiaries in the United States, Japan, and China (Shanghai), serving 12 languages in 25 countries around the world, with more than 4.3 million members in 15,400 schools and educational institutions.

About Classting

Classting is a K-12 education social platform that supports classroom communication, teaching and learning management for teachers, students and parents. More than half of Korean teachers (about 180,000) and over 4.3 million members in 14,400 schools and educational institutions have joined Classting. It is also spreading among teachers who see the same need in Asian countries such as Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and Singapore. Classting provides personalized learning based on students diverse educational activities, aiming to improve the educational environment through technology.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180826005PR-Inside.com: 2018-08-27 03:00:08

St. Louis and Houston, Aug. 26, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Curium and RadioMedix Inc. announce an exclusive agreement to develop and commercialize 64Cu-Dotatate, an investigational positron emission tomography (PET) diagnostic agent for patients with suspected Neuroendocrine Tumors (NETs). RadioMedix is currently engaged in Phase III clinical trials of the agent and expects to file a New Drug Application with the Food and Drug Administration in 2019. This partnership builds on the initial development work conducted by RadioMedix and will benefit from Curiums regulatory, manufacturing, distribution, and commercial expertise.

64Cu is a PET isotope that can be produced at a central location in quantities to meet the commercial needs of hospitals and imaging centers without the supply limitations of nuclear generator-based PET isotopes, said Ebrahim Delpassand, MD, CEO of RadioMedix. Once approved, 64Cu-Dotatate will be available to patients in medical centers with PET capability across the country. This will address the shortage or lack of availability of somatostatin analogue PET agents that we are currently experiencing in many parts of the U.S.

This agreement demonstrates our commitment to bringing new diagnostic agents to the U.S. market, said Curium CEO, North America, Dan Brague. We have a long history of helping patients suffering from neuroendocrine tumors and we are excited to partner with RadioMedix to introduce 64Cu-Dotatate in the U.S. following FDA approval. Upon market launch of this agent, we expect to be the largest commercial scale manufacturer of 64Cu and are excited by the promise of this new isotope.

To learn more about previous studies on 64Cu-Dotatate visit:

http://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/58/3/451.full

http://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/56/6/847.full

http://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/53/8/1207.fullPR-Inside.com: 2018-08-27 15:45:17

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SINGAPORE, Aug 27, 2018 - (ACN Newswire) - CWX Global Limited ("CWX Global", SGX: 594), announced higher 4Q FY18 gross profit of US$0.9 million, an increase of 204% from US$0.3 million in 4Q FY17. This was mainly due to a 16% growth in revenue coupled with a 49% decrease in depletion cost of the Group's oil and gas properties in 4Q FY18 as compared to 4Q FY17.Stringent cost measures were carried out Group-wide, while the Group builds its investment business to balance the reliance on its 20% stake in the Thailand oil concessions. Operating expenses including administrative, other expenses and other charges, decreased by 76.0%, from US$8.8 million in 4Q FY17 to US$2.1 million in 4Q FY18.Net profit after tax reversed from US$13.0 million in 4Q FY17 to a net loss after tax of US$1.8 million in 4Q FY18, mainly due to the absence of a one-off gain on derecognition of deferred consideration of US$22.0 in 4Q FY17. Excluding this gain, the Group would have narrowed its net loss after tax from US$9.0 million in 4Q FY17 to US$1.8 million in 4Q FY18.Commenting on the performance, Mr. Jeffrey Pang, CEO and Executive Director of CWX Global said, "We continued to strengthen the Group through bolstering our balance sheet and building sustainable, profit-generating businesses for the long-term over the last financial year. These efforts will take time to bear fruit.The Group's diversification into investment-related business is progressing well, albeit at a more modest pace amidst the geopolitical uncertainties, particularly the trade war between the United States and China. The oil and gas business segment continues to contribute positively with the higher oil prices, and we will continue our work on the Thailand concessions to realize more value over time.Overall, the Group will continue to actively seek investment opportunities in a prudent manner to generate value for all shareholders." While it is comforting that the oil prices have recovered from its lows, production from the older wells is seeing natural decline. The Joint Venture of the Thailand oil concessions is stepping up on its drilling efforts with the aim to reverse the decline in production and to take advantage of the current oil prices. At US$67, the post-tax cash flow is approximately US$30 per barrel.The 2018 drilling campaign has successfully completed recently, with three out of three wells encountering hydrocarbons. The first two wells are in-fill/appraisal wells and have added more than 400 barrels of oil production a day to the existing production volume. Currently, flow testing on the third well, which is an exploration well, is underway. The initial flow results have been encouraging but further test is required to confirm its commercial viability. If it is successful, the new found reserves will be booked upon certification by an Independent Qualified Person.The Joint Venture is also looking to build on the success of this drilling campaign with a new drilling campaign for follow-up wells in the first half of 2019. Currently, the profits and cash generated from the oil sales are sufficient to fund the drilling campaign.For its investment business, the Group's associate, FIT Global, has just set up a bilateral trading business, providing access and quotes for exchange-traded and over-the-counter markets to its counterparties. The unit has been generating revenue since the commencement of operations in the second half of 2018. The Group expects its investment business to contribute as the businessgrows.As at 30 June 2018, the Group's balance sheet remains strong with net asset value at US$51.8 million. The net asset value per share was 1.60 US cents.This press release is to be read in conjunction with the Company's results announcement posted on the SGX website on 24 August 2018.About CWX Global Limited (Stock Codes - SGX: 594 | Bloomberg: CWX SP| Reuters: 594.SI)CWX Global Limited ("CWX Global", SGX: 594), through the reorganisation of its business activities will be focusing on fund management, investment and trading. The Group, with its own team of professionals as well as through FIT Global Pte. Ltd., a strategic joint venture, will seek to offer a holistic suite of fund management and trading services for managed funds which are accessible to corporate and institutional investors.The Group will be primarily involved in: (i) investments, including private equity deals, pre-initial public offerings (mature stage), initial public offerings, fixed income and hybrid instruments; (ii) trading, including the trading of equities, commodities and other financial instruments, including cryptocurrencies; (iii) fund management; and (iv) market making for commodities.The Group's 20% stake in the Thailand onshore oil concessions located at Phetchabun Basin is presently its key investment. These concessions currently generate a steady income stream from its existing oil producing wells which, together with substantial proven reserves for development as well as significant potential exploration upside, holds the promise of value enhancement and sustainable long-term growth.The Group believes diversifying into the investment and trading platforms will benefit both investors and shareholders alike, enhancing risk management and creating values for all.For more information, please visit the company's website at www.cwxglobal.com This press release has been prepared by the Company and its contents have been reviewed by the Company's sponsor, ZICO Capital Pte. Ltd. (the "Sponsor"), for compliance with the Singapore Exchange Securities Trading Limited (the "SGX-ST") Listing Manual Section B: Rules of Catalist. The Sponsor has not independently verified the contents of this press release.This press release has not been examined or approved by the SGX-ST and the SGX-ST assumes no responsibility for the contents of this press release, including the correctness of any of the statements or opinions made or reports contained in this press release.The contact person for the Sponsor is Ms. Alice Ng, Director of Continuing Sponsorship, ZICO Capital Pte. Ltd. at 8 Robinson Road, #09-00 ASO Building, Singapore 048544, telephone +65 6636 4201.PR-Inside.com: 2018-08-27 17:58:16

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FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Gungnir Resources Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Surrey BC (FSCWire) - Gungnir Resources Inc. (TSX Venture:GUG). has issued a press release with the following headline:Gungnir Drills 120 Metres of Mineralized Conglomerate at Knaften in SwedenTo 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 Gungnir Resources Inc., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/Gungnir Resources Inc.Source: Gungnir Resources Inc. (TSX Venture: GUG, OTC Pink: ASWRF, FWB: AMO1, WKN: A116WL, ISIN: CA40281L1094)Date: August 27, 2018Time: 11:58 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Gungnir Resources Inc. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.)PR-Inside.com: 2018-08-27 17:11:18

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FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Namibia Critical Metals Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Halifax, Nova Scotia (FSCWire) - Namibia Critical Metals Inc. (TSX Venture:NMI). has issued a press release with the following headline:Namibia Critical Metals Identifies Multiple Targets from Airborne EM Survey Over Kunene Cobalt-Copper ProjectTo 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 Namibia Critical 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/Namibia Critical Metals Inc.Source: Namibia Critical Metals Inc. (TSX Venture: NMI, WKN: A1H9VG, ISIN: CA62988F1027)Date: August 27, 2018Time: 11:11 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Namibia Critical 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.)Disclaimer: If you have any questions regarding information in this press release please contact the company added in the press release. Please do not contact pr-inside. We will not be able to assist you. PR-inside disclaims the content included in this release.PR-Inside.com: 2018-08-27 20:04:18

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FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Vangold Mining Corp.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Colimbia (FSCWire) - Vangold Mining Corp. (TSX Venture:VAN). has issued a press release with the following headline:Vangold Mining Corp. Signs Binding LOI to Acquire Intermont Resources LLCs Vast Nevada, USA Property AssetsTo 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 Vangold Mining Corp., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/Vangold Mining Corp.Source: Vangold Mining Corp. (TSX Venture: VAN, OTC Pink: VGLDF)Date: August 27, 2018Time: 2:04 PM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Vangold Mining Corp. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.)PR-Inside.com: 2018-08-27 19:01:01

Visit us at the main entrance at the 1000 aisle for giveaways and demonstrations of the most-comprehensive online marketplace dedicated to life science research

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. USA and BERLIN, Germany, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- To celebrate its rapid growth and success in becoming the largest and fastest-growing online marketplace for the research scientist, Zageno Inc., is delighted to support Biotech Week Boston as a BioProcess International Conference & Exhibition Hall Food Court Sponsor. The conference takes place September 5  7, 2018, at the Hynes Convention Center Boston.





Since the company was founded in 2015, the Boston area has been our home, said Zageno Chief Executive Officer David Pumberger, Ph.D. So, we are thrilled to act as co-hosts of Biotech Week Boston and help welcome the thousands of people from around the world who are expected to attend. Many of our customers and vendor partners will be there and we look forward to catching up in person. For those who may not be familiar with how Zageno helps world-leading biotech companies, startups, and the vendors that supply them, large and small  we welcome the opportunity to talk.

Zageno Chief Revenue Officer Florian Wegener, M.D., M.B.A., Ph.D., commented, If you look at the total scope of what Zageno delivers, there is no other offering that compares to the breadth and functionality of our platform. We have built a complete process bridge between the product comparison/selection and ordering aspect of the scientific workflow and the administrative procurement process.

Zageno overcomes challenges of comparing and selecting appropriate research products with an industry-specific tool  Zagenos Scientific Score  which enables scientists to choose the best products to advance their science, using a ranking score based on millions of unbiased scientific publications, among other factors. The company also helps customers simplify and streamline their procurement process, typically saving substantial time and money, through better integration into their existing processes.

And when additional assistance is needed, Zageno is staffed with experts that are accessible, knowledgeable, and helpful. A contingent of Zagenos US-based team members will be available at a Zageno table located near the food court at the main entrance at the 1000 aisle.

About Zageno Inc. (www.zageno.com; twitter: @ZAGENOteam)

Founded in 2015, Zageno is eliminating bottlenecks to breakthrough science and research through curated connections linking scientists and their institutions procurement offices with leading life-science vendors. World-renowned academic and government research facilities, global pharmaceutical companies, and biotechs large and small are already users of our unique online biotech marketplace, currently comprising about five million products. What do we do? 1) We make purchasing transactions more efficient for both buyers and sellers. 2) We help scientists choose the optimal laboratory kits and materials for each unique experiment setup. 3) We provide a valuable, expanded sales channel for our vendor partners. The growing Zageno team of 60 in Cambridge, USA, and Berlin, Germany, includes accessible experts in science, e-commerce, systems integration, and customer support. Our people work directly with customers to enable smarter, faster processes  allowing more time and resources for value-added science and better research results.

AttachmentThe Foreign Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland, embroiled in a diplomatic row with Saudi Arabia, called for German support on Monday in Ottawas Campaign to promote human rights around the world.

The German government, trying to repair its own strained relationship with Riyadh, has been silent on the spat between Canada and Saudi Arabia, drawing criticism from some politicians and rights groups.

Ms Freeland, speaking at an annual gathering of German ambassadors in Berlin, did not specifically mention Saudi Arabia in her address.

However, she touched indirectly on the row which was triggered by her tweet demanding the release of jailed human rights activists in the kingdom.

In response, Riyadh has frozen new trade with Canada, expelled the Canadian ambassador and ended state-backed educational and medical programmes in Canada.

Ms Freeland said Canada would always stand up for human rights even when we are told to mind our own business and even when speaking up brings consequences.

She added: We count on and hope for Germanys support.

Ties between Berlin and Riyadh have been strained since former foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel denounced adventurism in the Middle East in November 2017, comments that were seen as criticism of Riyadhs actions in the region.

Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador to Berlin and, since early 2018, has excluded German healthcare companies from public tenders.

Riyadh is at loggerheads with many European countries which have criticised its intervention in Yemens civil war and support dialogue with its arch-enemy Iran.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas stressed at the conference Europe and Canadas shared interest in preserving a rules-based international order in the face of U.S. President Donald Trumps unilateralism.

It hits Europe and Germany when the United States, suddenly and without consulting, introduces random sanctions against Russia, China, Turkey and in the future perhaps more of our important trading partners, he said.

Europe needed to become more autonomous in order to defend its commercial and trade interests, Mr Maas said. It wont be easy, he added.

(Reuters/NAN)Late U.S. Senator John McCain will be buried on September 2 in Annapolis, Maryland, his office said.

McCain died at the age of 81 of brain cancer on Saturday.

On September 2  a private memorial service will take place in the U.S. Naval Academy Chapel in Annapolis, Maryland, honouring the life of Sen. McCain.

Following the service, a private burial ceremony will be celebrated at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery and Senator McCain will be laid to rest next to his Naval Academy classmate and lifelong friend, Adm. Chuck Larson, the statement said.

Mr McCains body will also lie at the Arizona State Capitol on Wednesday and at the U.S. Capitol on Friday, his office said.

Arizona Governor, Doug Ducey, a Republican, is expected to choose McCains replacement after his funeral, according to the governors aide.

Out of respect for the life and legacy of Sen. McCain and his family, Gov. Ducey will not be making any announcements about an appointment until after the senator is laid to rest, Daniel Ruiz II said, as quoted by The New York Times.

Mr McCains widow Cindy is among potential candidates to take the late senators seat until the special election in 2020, the media reported.

U.S. President Donald Trump rejected the issuance of an official White House statement, which was praising McCain along with condolences, The Washington Post said citing anonymous officials.

Instead, Trump only wrote a tweet, with White House Press Secretary, Sarah Sanders and Chief of Staff, John Kelly, speaking in favour of a full-fledged statement.

The six-term U.S. Senator and former prisoner of war in Vietnam was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2017.

On Friday, the politicians family said he had decided to halt his treatment.

Mr McCain was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982, and, after serving two terms, was elected to the U.S Senate in 1986.

Mr McCain ran as the Republican Partys presidential nominee in the 2008 U.S. election against then-Senator Barack Obama, who won the vote.

(Sputnik/NAN)Tobacco control advocates across Africa were thrown into mourning last Saturday following the death of Sheila Ndyanabangi, who worked as the Principal Medical Officer in charge of mental health and substance abuse at the ministry of health in Uganda.

Ms Ndyanabangi, 62, passed on at the Mulago National Referral Hospital after a long battle with uterine cancer, Ugandan health ministry officials said.

I am still in shock since hearing of the passing of the Ugandan tobacco control focal person  Dr Sheila Ndyanabangi, said Lekan Ayo-Yusuf, a professor and the Director, Africa Centre for Tobacco Industry Monitoring and Policy Research (ATIM).

Although we knew she was ill, but nothing could prepare anyone for the passing of such a significant figure in our struggle to protect the lives of current and future generations from the tobacco industry. Her passing only strengthens our resolve to continue the struggle.

Akinbode Oluwafemi, Deputy Director of the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, described the late activist as a strong woman and a courageous fighter who at every point stood bold to confront and resist the tobacco industry.

She was a rallying point not only in Uganda but for the continent. The tobacco control community in Uganda and indeed Africa will surely miss her.

Achieng Otieno of the Kenya Tobacco Control Alliance said Ms Ndyanabangis death was a shock to the continent and the global tobacco control fraternity.

Her commitment to a tobacco free Africa was evident by what she stood for and was very strong when confronting the tobacco industry in all fronts.

Wondu Woldermariam, the Focal Person of the Consortium of Ethiopian NCD Associations, described the news as a deep shock.

It is indeed Uganda, we all here in Africa and the world at large lost one of our tested leaders in our war on tobacco.

Although we miss her a lot, but her passing only strengthens our resolve to continue the struggle she has been leading to protect Africa from tobacco epidemic.

In a condolence message to Ms Ndyanabangis family, the Makerere University, Kampala, where she had been a member of the steering committee of the Centre for Tobacco Control in Africa; stated that her unwavering loyalty and service were exemplary and self-evident.

To everyone who knew and had an opportunity to work with her, she was a person of enormous influence and an outstanding ability, said Rhoda Wanyenze, an associate professor and the dean, Makerere University School of Public Health.

We will forever celebrate her life and achievements.

At the University of Pretoria, which worked closely with Ms Ndyanabangi ahead of the first ever World Conference on Tobacco or Health on African soil  in Cape Town last March  the late activist was hailed for her role in the success of the programme.Media practitioners have been tasked to make government accountable on expenditure of funds in the fight against HIV in Nigeria.

Premium Times Publisher, Dapo Olorunyomi, gave this advice at a media parley organised by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in Abuja on Monday, against the backdrop of limited contribution by government to funding the fight in Nigeria.

Foreign donors, especially the United States Government, provide about 95 per cent of the funds for the treatment of people living with HIV in Nigeria.

Uncomfortable with the situation, Mr Olorunyomi called on journalists, as society watchdogs, to make the government accountable to citizens on health, especially those living with HIV/AIDS.

He made the appeal in the keynote address at the unveiling of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinkas Keep the Promise to AIDS video campaign, which set a tone for government and partners in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Nigeria.

The publisher advised journalists to understand the connection between the HIV community care givers and those working in the front line of HIV/AIDS, as this will enable them do their job better.

Mr Olorunyomi said as journalists, they need to look at where the problem is in order to propound solutions.

He said looking at the varying statistics of about 3.1 to 3.4 million people in 18 states living with HIV/AIDS in Nigeria, the question journalists should be asking themselves is how they would feel if they suddenly realise that a whole state is the target of the problem the country is facing.

It is at this interface of the good commitment that I want to try to bring the statutory grounds for us to understand the direction to go. This is the framework in which I am charging my colleagues here to look at this as a serious problem we are dealing with here, he said.

He challenged health journalism in the country to go back to the first principle of their profession, which is why do we do journalism?

Mr Olorunyomi said the Nigerian Constitution itself offers only the media, not the parliament or other institutions, the power to hold all forms of power accountable and as such, journalism needs to be accountability driven.

We need to use that power to entrench the public health matter we have all been talking about. I think health journalism is the most important part of journalism. It is impossible to build a nation where people are not healthy, the whole goal and aspiration comes to nothing.

If it is truth that the society deteriorates to the extent that journalism has deteriorated, I am proposing that health journalism should take the problem we are facing with HIV/AIDS funding as one of the most basic things to try to respond to, he added.

Mr Olorunyomi lamented that Nigeria still largely depends on foreign donors in the fight against the disease as 95 per cent funding for HIV treatment in the country comes from the US government and Global Funds.

The point that is most scandalous for me is when you look at the aggregate, it is clear that out of pocket spending for health in Nigeria is one of the highest in Africa, at 72 per cent. There is no way this can be something acceptable, he said.

The Director-General, National Agency for Control of AIDS, Sani Aliyu, in his remark said Nigeria now has about 1.1 million Nigerians on treatment for HIV.

Mr Aliyu admitted 95 per cent of those on treatment are predominately funded by the U.S. government and Global Funds but said the Nigeria government is not comfortable with the situation and is committed to changing those figures.

This is a huge number. Most of them are doing very well, they are able to access their treatment, they are able to go out and look after their families by bringing bread to the table and they are living a normal life. All thanks to the availability of treatment, he said about those living with the disease.

The DG said in other to change the narrative, the media needs to improve on its advocacy and get more state governments to invest in the cause.

He said the fight against HIV and putting more people living with the disease on treatment would be achievable if state governments fund HIV programmes in their states.

We have to invest in HIV treatment. Globally, the rest of the world is moving on and people are placed on treatment, so it should not be a problem for Nigeria.

We want the state governments to implement the cost of HIV programmes in their budget. It was agreed that one per cent of their monthly federal allocation will go to HIV treatment. If this is done, the fight against the disease would improve tremendously, he said.The Director-General of National Agency for Control of Aids (NACA), Sani Aliyu, has appealed to state governments to start providing money for treatment of their residents living with HIV/AIDS.

He made the appeal against the backdrop of a plan by the Nigerian government to take ownership of the fight against the disease in the country following a decline in foreign funding.

About 95 per cent of the funds for the treatment of HIV patients in Nigeria is provided by foreign donors and the United States Government.

The state governments early this year promised to contribute one per cent of their monthly federal allocations to the fight against the disease, but this has not been carried out.

At a media parley organised by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) in Abuja on Monday, Mr Aliyu said though Nigeria has come a long way in the fight against the deadly disease, more still needs to be done.

The media event was to unveil Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinkas Keep the Promise to AIDS video campaign, which sets the tone for stakeholders to pick the gauntlet in response to the fight against the disease in Nigeria.

Mr Aliyu said though the treatment for HIV in Nigeria was started by the federal government about 20 years ago, 95 per cent out of the 1.1 million Nigerian patients are sponsored by the U.S. government and Global Fund.

The government of Nigeria actually started putting people on treatment but not long after, partners, particularly the US government, started supporting.

We now have about 1.1 million Nigerians on treatment for HIV and most of them are doing well, all thanks to the availability of treatment. But the treatment is being funded predominantly by the US government and Global Fund, he said.

Mr Aliyu said though Nigeria is conducting a national HIV survey to have a relatively accurate statistics on the burden of the disease in the country, much would not be achieved in owning the fight against the disease if state governments do not fulfill the promise they made earlier this year to contribute one per cent of their monthly federal allocation to funding HIV/AIDs in their states.

As far as government is concerned, access to HIV treatment is a right because that is what will enable those living with HIV to survive. Everybody has a right to life and right to life for people living with HIV includes access to medication, he said.

Mr Aliyu explained that part of the efforts the government was taking to improve HIV treatment in the country include playing a strong role in bringing pharmaceutical companies to Nigeria to manufacture anti-retroviral drugs and HIV kits.

As government, we are committed that those people who are placed on treatment continue to be on treatment, and most importantly, identifying those that are not on treatment and ensure they have access to drugs.

We owe it to the present generation and we also owe it to the future generation. Our partners have done a lot of job in the past few years, it is about time we step forward and take responsibility to our citizens, he added.

AIDS Healthcare Foundation Country Director, Echey Ijezie, in his welcome remark at the event, said the video campaign serves as a wake up call for policy managers of HIV in Nigeria to step up effort to ensure that access to HIV treatment and prevention services is enhanced and that Nigeria is ready to own and push the process.

Mr Ijezie, a medical doctor, said there is a need for the government to keep the promises made on AIDS in Nigeria.

Quoting the UNAIDS data, Mr Ijezie said 36 million people currently live with AIDS globally, while experts predicts that by 2030, 100 million people would have been infected with HIV virus.

He said despite this alarming number, the world has made great strides in HIV treatment as it is no longer a death sentence.

However, the challenge being faced is the dwindling of funds for AIDS research, treatment and prevention across the world.

In Nigeria, we are happy about the impressive effort the government is making to bridge the gap, but importantly, government at the state level must join this effort and fund AIDS in their respective states. The same for the private sector, he said.

Mr Ijezie explained that funding AIDs locally in Nigeria is achievable because the figure gotten from NACA signified that it only cost N47, 885 per unit cost to put one person living with HIV on treatment for a year.

This puts the cost of putting 50 per cent of the estimated people living with HIV on treatment as N20 billion, he said.

Modupe Oduwole, UNAIDS Strategic Intervention Advisor, in her remark, called on civil society organisations working on HIV/AIDS to improve on their advocacy, noting that their campaign against the disease has dwindled in recent times.

Ms Oduwole who represented UNAIDS Country Director, Erasmus Morah, said speakers at the event had given Nigerians, the policy makers, HIV care givers and the media a lot to think about on how the country can own the fight against the disease because it is not encouraging that 95 per cent of the fight is sponsored by foreigners.

Also speaking at the event, the Executive Secretary, Association of Civil Society on HIV/AIDS in Nigeria (ACSAN), Nwakamma Ikenna, agreed with Ms Oduwole that advocacy on HIV in the country has dwindle due to funding.

He said the same problem affecting HIV funding and treatment is affecting the CSOs.

Mr Ikenna said most CSOs are not funded by indigenous organisations.

Most funding is from international donor and you know how donors are. As funding for treatment is going down, same way advocacy activities will be going down. To sustain this, that is why we are asking for a sustainable funding for CSOs which will not be affected by government interference or by donor declining.

That is why we want the media to come in. The campaign has gone beyond HIV is real to treatments. We intent to engage state governments to fund HIV in their budget as most of them claim to drop specific amount for HIV, yet it is never released, he said.The Osun State Government has reacted to a PREMIUM TIMES investigation on the poor state of the MKO Abiola International Airport, Ido Osun, despite billions spent.

In a statement by the states Commissioner for Information, Adelani Baderinwa, the government said the project only suffered a temporary setback due to the failure of the concessionaire to deliver.

The government also admitted it had spent about N3 billion public funds on the airport so far.

The statement also highlighted the efforts of the state government in ensuring the completion of the airport project which has been awarded twice and failed twice.

The two-part series by PREMIUM TIMES chronicled anomalies inherent in the concession and incompetence of the concessionaire, AWOL International Limited.

Read the first and second part of the story.

But the state government said it is still committed to completing the project even though Mr Aregbesola has a few more months in office as governor. Election to elect a new governor in the state will hold on September 22.

The government of the State of Osun will like to state that the administration of Governor Rauf Aregbesola is still very much positive and focused on having the project done and that the temporary setback suffered cannot be the reason for anybody to declare the airport project as a failure. In fact, with a sense of pride, we say that the project has not failed, it will not fail with the kind of attention it gets from Governor Aregbesola.

Rather, we say with utmost sense of responsibility that it is the concessionaire, All Works of Life International Limited, (AWOL) that has failed in living up to its responsibility and the picture of its stated capability and competence. Government of the state of Osun, under Aregbesola meant so well in having the project executed and completed in the bid to complement its set agenda of promoting the states infrastructure to ensure fast economic development of Osun has been the basis for its pursuit abinitio. And we state that the Aregbesolas administration is still fully committed to the airport project and all efforts are being channeled towards making the project a successful reality, the statement reads.

The statement notes that the state has begun discussions with interested investors, including the African Development Bank (AfDB), in a bid to ensure the completion of the project.

May we note that many rational and reasonable local and international investors who appreciate the essence of the project have been showing sufficient interest and these include the Afrian Development Bank (AfDB) with whom official discussions have begun with a view to ensure that the airport project was achieved and made to provide the needed services for the good of the people and the growth of the state.

It also set out to correct what it described as factual errors in PREMIUM TIMES report.

The government stated that all necessary procedures were followed in the concession. But it failed to address issues raised in the report.

The first part of the investigation questioned the state governments style of awarding contract without recourse to the state public procurement law and its failure to conduct due diligence on AWOL, a company that has never handled an aviation project.

PREMIUM TIMES made an FOI request to the state Ministry of Works but got no reponse close to two months after.

The newspaper also contacted the state Public Procurement Agency whose head declined to comment.

In the report, Mr Baderinwa justified the lapses on the peculiarity of the project and the states lack of funding capacity.

He told PREMIUM TIMES in June: It wasnt as if we had ready hands that wanted to do the job. So, if you find one that is interested the peculiar situation of that particular projects warrants such. You are able to see somebody who is interested in it, you know how much that is going to be expended and its not going to be governments money. On the basis of that, the concession agreement was done properly.

However, the commissioner in the statement, instead of providing evidences of the due process that were claimed to have been followed re-worded his comments, without a mention of procurement or procurement law.

To start with, government states that all necessary procedure and due process were followed in the concession arrangement between the state government and AWOL. This is in the style and normal operation of the Aregbesola administration as could be fact-checked in all its transactions in the last eight years or thereabouts. We are very proud to say that the Aregbesola government has not been found wanton in its operations which has been subjected to audit scrutiny on regular basis by necessary authorities.

The transparency exuded by the government gave it the confidence to terminate AWOLs contract on March 5 and as a follow up to inform the police on April 20, the statement noted.

The statement gave a breakdown of what has been expended on the airport site. It also noted that works had reached 75 per cent completion before AWOLs takeover in 2017.

As at today, the total amount that has been expended on the project is N2,926,207,948.05, including those spent by the previous administration. This was expended on the construction of runaway, perimeter fencing, land clearing, etc. Specifically, the site for the 3.5km runway, taxiway, aircraft parking apron, has been cleared.

The Substructure (foundation) of the terminal building, fire building and control tower is complete. However, only 50 per cent of work had been done on the superstructure (main building) of the control tower, and fire building. Three main single culverts and 4 3m x 3m Double Culvert have been completed remaining two for the entire runway.

The total cost of the work done so far on the airport project before the concession arrangement was 3,667,178,112.15, out of which the government paid N2,926,207,948.05, leaving the outstanding of 740,970.164.10.

The contract was originally commenced by the immediate past administration which had an agreement with the federal authority to co-sponsored it financially. There was no indication that the federal government lived up to that agreement.

The statement also traced the history of the airport project. It noted that it would be the third airport with cargo and hanger only after South Africa and Egypt in Africa had the concessionaire not failed.

The statement insinuated PREMIUM TIMES investigation would have focused on the work completed while emphasising that the project has not failed.

Government finds it essential to state that if the tenet of developmental journalism which is being espoused and promoted by the international community and specially recommended for Africas quick growth is anything to go by, then the focus of any researcher should be on the extent of work done, especially on the runway and the watch tower which are the main heart of airports development.

This will undoubtedly help investors in making up their minds on the visibility of the project. To roundly condemn the totality of the project is a disservice to humanity and the strenuous efforts being made here by the Government of the State of Osun to develop needed infrastructure in anticipation of buoyant economy in which life will be more abundant for our people.

It is unfortunate that the concessionaire failed but the pursuit of having a standard airport with special features envisioned by Ogbeni Rauf on MKO Airport has not failed, it is dear to the Aregbesolas administration and the government is committed to completing the project, it added.The Bible has been under attack in the western world for over 200 years but never more intensely than today. These attacks have taken different forms and have come from many different corners of the academic world, from philosophers, to scientists, to textual critics. In the specialized world of archaeology the attacks have increased dramatically in the past 50 years. Once a specialization filled with Bible believing individuals, the field of archaeology is now overrun with atheists and skeptics, agnostics and those committed to the destruction of the Bible as a source of true historical information.

These attacks on the Bible are a part of a sweeping movement in western culture. Spearheaded by academic elitists in the university and the public educational system, the news and popular media, and the entertainment industry, these revisionists cloak themselves with supposed objectivity, purity of motives, and the superiority of science over the "uninformed", "unscientific", religious community.

They regularly mock those who question their world-view and their conclusions by name-calling and the worst forms of anti-Bible and anti-Christian propaganda. They have powerfully infected the church by turning Bible believing Christians against the very Scripture which is the foundation of truth and life in this world. Instead of contending for the Bible, Christian academics, pastors, and lay-persons are making egregious accommodations to these destroyers of faith and truth.

In these days of intense spiritual battle, God has called ABR to step into the gap to contend for the truth and to assist the church in this critical hour. ABR is a non-profit ministry dedicated to demonstrating the historical reliability of the Bible and to give answers to questions being asked by believers and non-believers alike. We do this by using original archaeological fieldwork and research along with studies in other apologetic disciplines. We take on the bold claims of skeptics and critics. We challenge the bizarre anti-biblical propaganda that is purveyed upon the public as gospel through television and print media. We uphold the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is God's message for the salvation of all mankind!In this interview with reporters Musikilu Mojeed and Abdulaziz Abdulaziz, Governor Samuel Ortom chronicles his ordeal as chief executive of Benue, saying the instability in the north-central state is deeper than herdsmen-farmers clashes.

The second part of the interview will run later this week.

PREMIUM TIMES: We observed that it has been politically turbulent in your state for a while. What is really going on?

Samuel Ortom: Well its unfortunate. What is happening here wouldnt have been an issue in civilised society. But in Nigeria, its like we are challenged. When you stand to say the truth, when you stand to fight for equity, fairness and justice, it becomes a challenge to several people and that is what is playing out in Benue today.

The whole thing is a result of fighting for my people; looking for justice. Equity and fairness are all that I demand. [I have] No intention to fight the powers that be or fight any individual.

I came in 2015 and, of course, you are aware that the killings in Benue and other parts of Nigeria had subsisted for several years. From 2011 in Benue for instance, these killings were going on, branded to be what is called herdsmen-farmers clashes.

Of course you have seen that of recent it is deeper that what we call herdsmen and farmers clashes. So for us, we look at it on the surface as herdsmen and farmers clashes and we decided to do some thorough work. We tried to analyse the issues and we concluded that if it is about herdsmen and farmers, what is it that is obtainable in South Africa, Switzerland and Kenya that you dont have this kind of crisis? Globally, there is farming activities and cattle rearing but we have not witnessed this kind of destruction, killings and stealing that has been going on in Nigeria.

So we looked at it globally and we concluded that, in the 21st century the modern way of animal husbandry is through ranching and we felt that Benue State shouldnt be an exception. We looked at it, we went through due process; presented an executive bill, went through the House of Assembly, public hearings were conducted and because of the sensitivity of it, apart from doing it in three senatorial districts, we did it in four, just to capture everybody.

PT: Four districts?

Ortom: We did it in four places: three senatorial districts and then we did it in the state capital so that makes it four, so that all the people will be captured and we did enough enlightenment. Eventually when the bill was approved by the House of Assembly and sent to us, before signing we also did a lot of advocacy and campaigns to educate the people. It was signed publicly before a stakeholders meeting and a lot of people received it with jubilation and this

PT: But there was opposition from Miyetti Allah

Ortom: Of course, but the stakeholders here received it with jubilation because we felt that this will solve the problem of herdsmen and farmers clashes. And of course if all these were about herdsmen and farmers clashes we wouldnt be having problems again because it is a win-win law that was meant to regulate the activities of farmers and even herdsmen. You ranch your cattle, dont move them out to stray and destroy peoples farm, which is the main cause of these clashes.

PT: So what was their own complain about if this is all you are trying to do?

Ortom: What they said was that that thing (law) cannot be implemented

PT: Who said that?

Ortom: The Miyetti Allah. That it is their right to move with their cattle all over the place, that nobody can stop them.

PT: And you were proposing ranching?

Ortom: Ranching, yes! You do ranching, you restrict your cattle, provide feeds and water for them so they dont stray and go to anybodys farm.

PT: But you said this is deeper than farmers/herdsmen conflict, what is it?

Ortom: Yes, that is where I am going. We signed the law on the 22nd of May 2017 and by June, Miyetti Allah came out with a press statement that that law can never see the light of day. That they will not accept it. That it is obnoxious and that they can never restrict their cattle. That they will move with them anyhow and anywhere. That their members will be mobilised not to obey that law. So, I immediately wrote to the presidency, and followed it up with a visit, wrote to security agencies that look these people are threatening and that, as far as I know them, when they give threats they still come for the people and so I even called for the arrest of the leadership of Miyetti Allah, who issued this press statement. Later in the year, another Fulani socio-cultural organisation also wrote that they were out to enforce jihad in this country.

PT: They wrote to the state government.

Ortom: They issued a press statement. They called it FUNAM. They did a press conference and it was widely circulated on the social media and all that. I got wind of all these, so I made copies of all these and attached. Others came to say that it is not about cattle rearing, it is about occupation. That this land where we are today in the Benue valley belongs to them. That it is their land, their forefathers were here so we are strangers here. That they are coming to occupy and take over their land. But others say its jihad, that they are mobilising Fulani from all over the place, they will come and fight with guns and also money, mobilised resources to come and sponsor and ensure that they occupy this land whether we like it or not. So these were the issues and I felt they were life-threatening and the security agencies should come. I wrote to the security agencies and I also followed it up with a visit and letters of reminder to the presidency.

PT: Apart from these letters did you hold meetings with the president?

Ortom: I did. I said I did a follow-up visit to the president. I told him that these are the threats that are coming and they told me they will act on it but nothing came until 1st of January when eventually after we started implementation on November 1st because we signed this Law on May 22nd, 2017 but decided again to give a grace period for those who were not ready and even went to provide some incentives to most of these people. We said once you can do something that can control the cattle from moving about and destroying peoples farms, we are willing to accommodate you, and for those who were afraid of moving out their cattle, in case they dont want to ranch they were free to find alternative states where they can go and do their open grazing.

Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue state.

But we woke up on the 1st of January while people were celebrating the New Year to hear about the attack from the herdsmen. They came and burnt down children, women, anyone they saw they would just kill and even after shooting people dead they still used their swords to machete them and cut them into pieces. Eventually I reported this and the president directed that the IG should relocate to Benue State to ensure that this did not continue, but it continued. The IG came in for one day and relocated to Nasarawa State so it was a big challenge and we kept calling for reinforcement from the police, the army, the civil defence and the SSS. They came forth and to a large extent, they were able to control this but it continued, the killings continued. Eventually Exercise Cat Race came. We had thought initially that they were coming to give support but when it was tagged an exercise I tried to make inquiries from the Chief of Army Staff who told me it wasnt a full operation, it was more of a training for their new recruits, but that in the course of doing it, they were going to contend with criminals from both sides, whether they are natives, herdsmen or mercenaries, if they are found they would be dealt with. They did that. I know a couple of arrests were made. But it was not as a strong as an operation so it was a little bit of a challenge but one thing that happened again during the exercise here was the so-called attempt to make peace between herdsmen and farmers and inviting herdsmen to come, they even produced a pamphlet.

PT: You mean the Army?

Ortom: Yes! They produced a pamphlet that was trying to mediate between herdsmen and farmers that they should come and live together. So that gave encouragement to a lot of cattle that came into Benue State and they were not firstly against them so they formed shield to host the machineries that they had and these killings continued. When Mr President came on a condolence visit we told him that we appreciate the presence of the Exercise Cat Race but it was not really meeting up with the challenge of these killings that we had and so we appealed to him to send a full operation and I tell you until Operation Wild Stroke came here, we were at the mercy of these mercenaries. This is a combination of the security agencies in total, it is coordinated by the defence headquarters.

PT: So that has helped?

Ortom: Yes, this is what has really helped us.

PT: During that Operation Cat Race, there was a time the Army said they arrested your security adviser and accused you of sponsoring militia.

Ortom: You know those are the issues. Its a matter of giving a dog a bad name to hang it. I am not into the business of militia. Everybody that knows me and the people of the state know. When I came in 2015, the first assignment I did was to disarm people with illegal weapons because assassinations, killings, kidnapping all those things were the order of the day. I organised that and was able to retrieve all the arms that I could lay my hands on. When these latest attacks started coming, I was blamed by my people for collecting arms from the natives. The inspector general of police came here, and I told him where these people were camping and launching attack on Benue State.

PT: You told him?

Ortom: I told him and he said okay he would go there and see. He went to Nasarawa State, and announced for several days that he was going to the place but by the time he got there he made mockery of what security agents should be doing, asking people around, where are the militia? Who will tell him that? That was something that needed proper work to be done. These are some of my issues with the inspector general. Initially he did not even believe that these killings were anything. He said it was a communal clash, until he met with the stakeholders here in Benue. They told him to his face that it was so disappointing for an inspector general of police to tag this a communal clash when the real issues are clear, and he had been given prior notice that these people were coming to attack.

PT: So those militia that they said were associated with you where are they now?

Ortom: I dont know! That is the thing! Even me when we started the amnesty programme for those criminals we launched it in two folds. First was the carrot approach. We said look, bring back arms, whatever illegal arms you have bring it to us, we would even give you something for bringing it back. We paid for those things, and as many as possible brought it back just to give them some compensation. This was what we discussed in the security council meeting.

When the carrot approach expired, the next one was to go after them, using the security agencies to retrieve these arms forcefully wherever they are and this was a directive that the state security council gave to the security agencies and this too recorded a lot of successes. If you ask the SSS, you ask the police they apprehended some of these criminals and retrieved those arms so when they came with the story that we had 6,000 militia I said how? If I have 6,000 militia armed with AK47 why should my people be killed like chicken? What is the essence of having militia? Have they told you anywhere where a Fulani man was killed apart from one incident in Gboko which was addressed. These were not even Fulani people. They were labourers going to do farm work in the west and some hoodlums approached them and said they are Fulani, and started beating them, and killed them and burnt them. We went there and directed that the security men should arrest them. So where the 6,000 militia was, up to today I dont know.

PT: So you dont have an appointee

Ortom: No Tishaku is a different thing, I am coming to that. Tishaku I inherited him. I didnt employ him. He was in the employment of the Benue State Government that I inherited and he was brought in here by a former deputy inspector general of police to support the then government, to ensure that the issue of Fulani herdsmen do not escalate. So I came, I inherited him and he was working with Fulanis, he was working with indigenes and all that in this place and he was said to be a repentant Boko Haram member.

I inherited him with a number of youths that he was working with to ensure that there is peace for farmers and herdsmen in the state before the enactment of the law. When we enacted the law, the law makes provision for livestock guards. So we now said okay instead of going to recruit other people from outside since these people were already working and there were Fulanis alongside with the indigenous people let them be turned into livestock guards. We didnt need to go out to employ people. That was what happened.

Even when Mr. President came here he (Tishaku) spoke and narrated how he was a Boko Haram member but later repented and became a good citizen. That he was even supported by the current National Security Adviser when he was framed up and detained. That it was him (NSA) that pulled him out. That he was brought here by then a serving deputy inspector general of police before I became governor. So it was not that there was anybody arming somebody. He is a known person, even far before I came here. They are just trying to change the narrative and push it back to me but the real issue is that the people who are there are not happy with me for enacting that law.

PT: I recall that the Presidency even issued a statement at a time saying that your enactment and implementation of the law worsened the crisis in Benue.

Ortom: Well, when you hear a minister of interior saying that, when you hear a minister of defence saying that, when you hear an inspector general of police saying that, when you hear the chief of army staff saying that, you understand why I am in trouble. But let me ask you this: if you say it is the enactment of the law that has caused problem in Benue, how about Zamfara? How about Adamawa? How about Taraba? How about Plateau? Is there any law in Plateau? How about Kaduna? Is there any law in Kaduna? These are the issues. The main thing is what these people (Fulani organisation) are saying. That it is not about grazing or rearing cattle. It is about occupation, that is the truth.

PT: Are you saying the federal government is supporting external forces to occupy Benue?

Ortom: Well I dont know. But that is what they have said, it is not coming from me. When they said it is Jihad it is not me that is saying its Jihad. It is they. Those group that are saying that this is what they are coming to do and they are still coming.

PT: Before you enacted the law, did you sit with the president or did you receive any security report to say this thing youre going to do is likely to be a problem?

Ortom: At no time did I receive any security warning. And the presidency was duly informed about this law too. When we were doing the processes, these things were very clear. These were issues that were discussed at security meetings. The SSS, the police and other security agencies are also part of the security meeting; they are aware.

PT: You seem to be alleging a gang-up against you and Benue? Why will anyone gang up against you?

Ortom: Maybe they can explain why it is like that. But as far as I know, this law we enacted wasnt my own making. Of course I am a democratically elected governor and my understanding about democratic governance is about doing what the people want and as far as I am concerned the people were being killed, not just from 2015 when I came in. Right from 2011 towards 2015, the people were crying. Every year, hundreds of people were being killed from Agatu to Makurdi to Guma, where I come from.

Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue state.

In 2013, when I was serving as minister this people came one day, burnt my farm, my rice farm of over 200 hectares, burnt the entire village, killed 53 people and burnt my ancestral home and several other homes that were around and left. So it was a pain to every single person in Benue state. If youre not affected directly, your niece or uncle, someone related to you was affected. Economically, camping IDPs is a big burden to a lot of our people. So this is the issue and we had to do that law and everybody was aware of this. Nobody told me whether by security report, because these things were discussed in our security meetings, and I am sure that the people operating in the state here, they give their reports to their superiors in Abuja. Nobody came out with anything and in all that I did I made it known in my interviews, in my meetings and all that.

PT: Were you targeting Fulanis with this law?

Ortom: There is no mention of Fulani in the law. We are talking about herdsmen.

PT: Do you have natives who are herdsmen?

Ortom: Of course we have them. We have them. Even in my farm I have cattle.

PT: So you are a herdsman too?

Ortom: Im a herdsman, yes!

PT: Are you complying with the law as a herdsman?

Ortom: I have complied with it already. If you go to my farm in Makurdi it is ranched. Until the attack on my village I have a ranch in my farm. So, this is something I have been doing long ago, and of course globally that is what is obtained.

PT: The Fulani are arguing that open grazing is part of their customs and tradition. Did you consider that argument in the making of the law.

Ortom: Your culture should not be at the detriment of any other person. If your culture is inconveniencing people. I know that in our own culture, Tiv culture, we used to smoke native tobacco. The odour is not pleasant to anyone .We could not have continued like that. We used to walk barefooted, we are no longer walking barefooted, just for the convenience of others and all that. Our culture is that is that you stay for one month or even more without taking a bath, and if you see an elderly man coming the whole environment would be polluted with some kind of odour. So, there are several cultures of the world, not just in Nigeria that as the population is growing the world is civilising more you try to do without it. Those who talk about open grazing is our culture, yes that would have been accommodated in the 1950s that is when people give analysis of cattle areas and grazing routes and grazing reserves, and they go further to talk about those of them that were gazetted and those that were not gazetted. Those designated but not gazetted and all that. But that was in the 50s. Ask yourself, in the 50s what was the total population of Nigeria? Less than 40 million people. In 2017 what is the total population of Nigeria? Close to 200 million people. Now what is the land mass of Nigeria? In the 50s it was 923,000square kilometres, the same thing as at 2017 but even less because of the ceding of Bakassi to the Cameroon. The desert encroachment also have made the land to shrink into a smaller size but you have to contain with 200 million people compared to in the 50s when you have less than 40 million people. So you see that there are several activities, human activities; settlements, road network, hospitals, schools and all, they have taken over all this land.

One of the things that added to our promoting ranching was because Benue State is known as the food basket of the nation. We are a civil service state, actively supported by agriculture, peasant farming. So the land is no longer there. In the 50s we are talking about I wonder if we were up to 500,000 people but today we are approaching 8 million people. So, the whole land is occupied. My policy as a governor in 2015, when I came and inherited over N69 billion in arrears of salaries, pension and gratuity and I knew I cannot cope, one thing I did was to say look let everyone go back to the farm. If you dont have salaries at the end of the month at least you have food on your table. Your children dont come crying. So actively we have encouraged the people to go back to farm, all the civil servants are farmers. I am a farmer too. We are all into the farming business. So, the land is no longer there to say that people will do open grazing. There is no one kilometre you take that you have empty land somewhere for people to do open grazing, they will encroach into peoples farm and then there will be crisis.

TO BE CONTINUED PART TWO WILL RUN THIS WEEK. THERE, THE GOVERNOR SPOKE ABOUT HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH SENATOR GEORGE AKUME, HIS BATTLE WITH ADAMS OSHIOMHOLE, THE CORRUPTION ALLEGATION AGAINST HIM, THE REAL REASON HE LEFT APC, AMONG OTHER ISSUES.British Prime Minister Theresa May is to visit Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya from Monday for the first time in order to forge new trade links for post-Brexit Britain.

Ms May becomes the first British leader to visit sub-Saharan Africa in five years, making a three-day trip that includes meetings with the presidents of South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.

She is expected to meet with Nigerias President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday afternoon in Abuja, a source at the State House told PREMIUM TIMES.

She is one of the two top Western leaders the Nigerian leader will host within three days.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the Nigerian leader will on Friday play host to German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

For her visit, the British prime minister will bring a trade delegation with her in an attempt to boost Britains post-Brexit export prospects, although her visit comes at a time when the British government has been accused of a paying insufficient attention to the region.

Speaking ahead of her flight to South Africa on Monday evening, the prime minister said, Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy and that a more prosperous, growing and trading Africa is in all of our interests.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that Ms May will become the first British leader in five years to visit sub-Saharan Africa.

The prime minister will bring a trade delegation with her on a chartered RAF Voyager in an attempt to boost Britains post-Brexit export prospects, although she comes at a time when the government has been accused of a paying insufficient attention to the region.

The last time a British prime minister visited sub-Saharan Africa was in December 2013 when David Cameron attended Nelson Mandelas funeral.

He had intended to return in the summer of 2016 in the final days of his premiership but the planned visit was abandoned when May took over as Conservative leader earlier than anticipated.

May has never visited sub-Saharan Africa. Her only previous trip to the continent was a visit to Tunisia in 2015 in the aftermath of the Sousse hotel terror attack.

Speaking ahead of her flight to South Africa on Monday evening, the prime minister said: Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy and that a more prosperous, growing and trading Africa is in all of our interests.The Lagos State Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Moshood Salvador, has dumped the party for the All Progressives Congress (APC).

He said his exit marks the end of PDP in the state.

Mr Salvador announced his defection on Monday while addressing his supporters in Lagos.

He said he took the decision because all his efforts to move the PDP in the state forward had been frustrated by some elements in the party.

Mr Salvador alleged that a former deputy national of the party, Olabode George, had done everything possible to undermine the progress of the party in the state.

He said he could no longer labour in vain, adding that the national leadership of the party had done nothing to support or appreciate his efforts as PDP Chairman.

When you have people or leadership that cannot give you encouragement to carry out your vision, you take it to another place where it will be appreciated.

I am not happy that I am abandoning what I laboured for, but I have to move on with my supporters because I cannot continue to labour in vain.

Today, the chairman of PDP Board of Trustees called me on the defection and I told him to allow me consult with my people before feedback.

The PDP National Chairman, Prince Uche Secondus also called me for the first time since my travails.

He never called since I was put in jail on a cooked up murder charge; he called me today to ask why I want to defect.

And I told him it is not possible for me to be in the same party with Bode George because he undermined all my efforts to reposition the party.

He was doing all these things and the national leadership was allowing him, saying he is an elder.

Bode George also cooked up things to put me in jail in the murder case of late Aborishade.

Enough is enough. I am leaving the party with my supporters and I am taking them to APC where they would be recognised and appreciated, he said.

Salvador said he had since handed over the PDP structure to his deputy who would continue the affairs of the party.

He said his exit meant that the PDP was dead in Lagos as he was moving with about 15,000 supporters, including party executive members at council and ward levels.

Mr Salvador insisted that he was innocent in the murder case of Aborishade, saying all the things said about his involvement were all lies.

He said he would stage a show of strength rally on Monday to show his former party that he was going to the APC with thousands of his followers.

Hours before Salvador announced his defection, Mr George said Mr Salvador has the right to leave the party if he wished to do so.

Mr George made the statement in Lagos while launching a trust fund for the family of the late Adeniyi Aborishade, a chieftain killed at a meeting of the party in Eti-Osa on July 21.

He was reacting to media reports that Salvador and some others had concluded plans to defect to the APC.

Mr George said Mr Salvador could not be stopped from leaving as he is an adult, competent enough to make decisions for himself.

He, however, questioned why the PDP chairman would want to leave the party now, especially as Aborishades murder case, to which he was earlier linked, had not been resolved.

You see, whether he is going to APC or wherever, we cannot stop him; he is an adult, not a young man.

So, he can decide for himself. But we have a question to ask: Why now?

I am a deep-rooted politician and as a master mariner, I know you do not jump ship when you are in a stormy weather.

Or do you swim against the tide? No, you will drown. Now, who is drawing Salvador to come to APC?

To get cover or what? No, that will not stop justice for Aborishade, he said.

On allegations that he was responsible for the friction in the party, Mr George said it was wrong for Mr Salvador to have made the allegations.

He said the PDP Chairman was actually the one running the party like his private estate, causing rancour and unnecessary wrangling in the party.

Mr George said Mr Salvador failed to honour agreements reached on executive offices after the Supreme Court verdict affirming Senator Ahmed Makarfi as National Chairman.

He said then that the party had agreed that 65 per cent of the offices should go to Makarfis followers in the state while 35 per cent should be given to followers of ousted Senator Ali Modu-Sheriff.

Rather than following the agreement, he was imposing people as party executives, taking decisions that did not go down with members.

He was running the party as if it was his personal estate, he said.

Mr George said PDP was based on strong democratic foundations and so impunity and indiscipline could not be allowed to reign in the party.

He condemned the violence in which Aborishade was killed, saying the party was saddened by the incident.

Mr George said the party was not satisfied with the handling of the case by the police in Lagos and called on the Inspector General of Police to set up a special panel to probe the incident.

He said the party would not take anything other than justice for the slain chieftain and that the party would continue to pursue the cause.

Mr George said he was launching the trust fund to raise money for the deceaseds family to support them.

He urged party members to contribute to the fund to identify with the family at this trying period.

Speaking on the issue of vote-buying, Mr George said the practice endangers democracy.

He said the practice was symptomatic of the pervasive corruption in the country, calling on citizens to stand up against the practice.

We must all stand up against the practice and protect our democracy, he said.

(NAN)The Presidency on Monday confirmed that there was an audio recording purported to be the voice of Leah Sharibu, the last Dapchi schoolgirl still in Boko Harams captivity.

It said the State Security Service is analysing the leaked audio tape.

Miss Sharibu was one of the 110 girls abducted by Boko Haram from Dapchi Government Science and Technical School, Yobe State, on February 21.

About 33 days after their abduction, the sect released 104 of the girls. Five were said to have died while Miss Sharibu was said to have been held back because she refused to denounce her Christian religion.

In the audio tape published by the Cable, an online medium Monday, Miss Sharibu who celebrated her 15th birthday with her abductors, was allegedly calling for help, asking President Muhammadu Buhari to come to her rescue.

Reacting to the development in a tweet, President Buharis spokesperson, Garba Shehu, said the secret service was analysing the audio tape.

He promised that the president would spare no effort to ensure all the girls in Boko Harams captivity are freed.

We are aware of the audio in circulation concerning the unfortunate situation of our daughter, Leah Sharibu. In dealing with terrorists, nothing is too trivial.

The secret service is analysing the voice. Our reaction will follow the outcome of the investigation. For President Buhari, nothing will be spared in bringing all our girls home. He will not rest until all of them are freed, Mr Shehu twitted on his Twitter handle, @Garshehu.

President Buhari had in the past assured Nigerians that he will not relent in his effort to ensure the release of the teenager. Over six months after her kidnap, however, the president has failed to rekindle hope for her release.

Many Nigerians have criticised the government, accusing Mr Buhari of not doing enough to secure the release Miss Sharibu.

There have also been controversy over the payment of ransom to the Boko Haram to free Nigerians held by the group.

Few weeks ago, a report submitted to the UN Security Council showed Nigeria paid ransom to free Miss Sharubus fellow schoolgirls, but Nigerias Information Minister, Lai Mohammed, as in the past, insisted no ransom was paid.

The Boko Haram activities in Northern Nigeria have caused about 100,000 deaths, according to the Borno State Government.

The efforts of Nigerian security forces have in the past three years limited the terrorists to three North-eastern states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe. The group is, however, still able to carry out attacks on civilians and military formations in those states.The first set of Nigerian pilgrims airlifted back to Nigeria have landed safely at the Abuja airport.

Flynas Flight XY7744 which departed King Abdulaziz International Airport Jeddah at about 7:40am Saudi time (5:40am Nigerian Time) landed at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport Abuja at about 10:30am Nigerian time.

The flight carried 225 pilgrims from the Federal Capital Territory and one official.

Also, Flynas flight XY7738 which departed Jeddah airport at about 09:40am Saudi time carrying 259 pilgrims from Sokoto, is expected to land at Sultan Abubakar International Airport, Sokoto at about 1pm Nigerian time.

Another batch of about 446 pilgrims from Kogi state who were the first to be airlifted to Saudi Arabia for this years Hajj exercise are also on their way to Abuja aboard Max Airline.The National Hajj Commission of Nigeria (NAHCON), has called for patience and understanding from pilgrims as the return airlift for this years Hajj exercise commences.

NAHCON chairman, Abdullahi Mohammed, who made the call on Sunday in Makkah at an interactive session with the media, said unlike the inbound journey from Nigeria, the return airlift has some challenges.

Mr Mohammed said while 15 departure centres were used in Nigeria to ferry pilgrims into two airports in Jeddah and Madina in Saudi Arabia, only one, Jeddah airport, is now being used for return journeys.

Some of the luxuries enjoyed inbound cannot therefore, be expected, besides, Nigeria will alongside other countries of the world used the same airport, he said.

The NAHCON boss also said when pilgrims were coming into Saudi Arabia, they had their Basic Travel Allowance (BTA), with them, but such must have been depleted now, making them to request for early airlift back home.

He said the Hajj exercise must have also taken its toll on some of the pilgrims owing to trekking long distances.

He said no matter how NAHCON loves to ferry Nigerian pilgrims back home, as early as possible, that can only be done within the slots allocated to the three airlines ferrying the pilgrims.

He added that slots are also often based on arrival arrangements, such that those who came early leave earlier than those who arrived Saudi Arabia late.

He also called on the media to sensitize the pilgrims on the need to adhere strictly to the one 8kg hand luggage allowed.

According to him, carrying multiple hand luggage or more than 8kg could lead to delay and a delay by one passenger could have multiplier effect on flights take off.

Mr Mohammed, who commended the media for the effective coverage of Hajj 2018 also used the opportunity of the interactive session to commend president Muhammadu Buhari for the passionate concern about the conduct and management of Nigerian pilgrims.

He said Mr Buhari, his vice, Yemi Osinbajo, and the secretary general of the federation had kept close tabs on how the Hajj operation was going and had directed, admonished and counsel where necessary to make sure the comfort and welfare of our pilgrims is maintained.

The countys leadership always give appropriate guidance and directive for us to hajj the successful Hajj that we just had, he said.

Mr Mohammed also thanked the Nigerian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Isa Dodo and the consul general in Jeddah, Mohammed Yunusa for their support during the Hajj operations.

The NAHCON chairman said overall, Hajj 2018 is a huge success made possible by King Salman and the crown prince, Mohammed Salman as well as several other agencies, both in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.

Mr Mohammed said although Hajj management has improved tremendously, the commission has observed some lapses and the need to improve on feeding arrangements in Makkah as well the need to centralise accommodation for Nigerian pilgrims also in Makkah.

There is no excuse for serving pilgrims substandard food and we will improve on our monitoring duties to put a stop to it, he said.

Mr Mohammed also paid special tribute to the staff of NAHCON as well as the State Muslim Pilgrims Welfare Boards and Agencies, who, he said, are the engine room of Hajj operations and without them, a successful Hajj is simply impossible.The United State President, Donald Trump, after an April meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari described the Nigerian leader as lifeless, Financial Times (FT) has reported

Mr Trump hosted Mr Buhari on April 30 in Washington as the two leaders discussed issues including fighting terrorism and other threats to peace and security.

According to an article titled, Africa looks for something new out of Trump, Financial Times on Monday said Mr Trump told his aides he never wanted to meet with someone as lifeless as the Nigerian president again.

The first meeting, with Nigerias ailing 75-year-old Muhammadu Buhari in April, ended with the US president telling aides he never wanted to meet someone so lifeless again, according to three people familiar with the matter, FT reported.

The special adviser on media and publicity to President Buhari, Femi Adesina, declined to comment on the report when PREMIUM TIMES reached out to him on Monday.

No comments please Mr Adeshina said.

However, Nigerians have taken to Twitter to react to the report. One @Veekid said, Trump is a honest man. He spoke what everyone knows about Buhari.

 I watched their joint press conference. Buhari could hardly mutter a coherent statement and could not think on his feet.

@iyaboawokoya on Twitter said, Well Trump surely is not a reference. To him every African nation is a shithole.

Our President stands shoulder high in morals and values to Trump so what the heck? Trumps opinion does not matter to me. PMB is taciturn, terse & stern even back home. Was he to joke with Trump?President Muhammadu Buhari says an initiative on dairy farming being championed by Denmark and the Kaduna State Government will go a long way in curbing clashes between cattle herders and farmers in Nigeria.

According to a statement by his spokesperson, Femi Adesina, Mr Buhari stated this on Monday while receiving Torben Gettermann, the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Denmark, in a farewell audience at State House, Abuja.

He said establishment of dairy farms, as being promoted by Denmark, will save the country from the almost perennial problem of clashes between herders and farmers, made worse by population explosion.

President Buhari observed that when the dairy farms are economically viable, the cattle herders will see the need to stay in one place, as they will realise that productive considerations, rather than the number of heads of cattle, are more important.

Explaining the concept of dairy farming further, Mr Gettermann said the plan was to have 1,000 families of herdsmen with 12,000 heads of cattle in a location, where they will have veterinary attention, schools for their children, and generally live as a small community.

He said a Danish company, Arla, will then buy the milk off the cattle farmers.

Mr Gettermann further explained that the Danish government will bring investors through its Agriculture Counsellor in the country, while the Kaduna State government will provide initial infrastructure and funding.

Dairy farming is not exactly the same thing as ranching. It will yield better meat, and the Danish company will buy the milk from the farmers.

A pilot project will start in Kaduna, and then move to other locations, as it becomes commercially viable, the ambassador, who spent four years in Nigeria, said.

Mr Gettermann is proceeding on retirement after 40 years in the service of his country.The Tertiary Education Fund (TETFund), says it released N7.9 billion to the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) between 1999 and 2017 as grants.

Abdullahi Baffa, the Executive Secretary of the fund, disclosed this on Monday when the Chief of Army, Tukur Buratai, a lieutenant general, paid him a courtesy visit.

Mr Baffa said that from the amount so far released the NDA had completed some 36 physical infrastructure projects, while four projects were ongoing.

He added that there were 12 projects that had been approved, however, they were yet to commence in the institution.

The executive secretary also said that other military institutions had benefited from the grants, adding that those physical infrastructure projects were aside scholarships given to lecturers for further studies.

Earlier, Mr Buratai said the army needs to have a unique institution that would serve as a solution centre which informed the establishment of its university at Biu in Borno State.

He said such institution which would serve as solution centre in science and technology to boost capacity and innovation regarding equipment needed by the military, particularly the Nigerian army.

These days, you cannot just fight in the conventional sense  way, warfare has transformed greatly and requires more scientific approach, more intellectual approach than it used to be in those days.

We need to have such university that will tailor our needs in a specific innovative, as well as solution centre in science and technology.

This will go a long way in developing our country, developing the technological and indeed the scientific base of our country by which we will develop and progress in the right direction, he said.

Mr Buratai commended the TETFund, saying that the vision behind its establishment was by no means a great one.

According to him, TETFund has transformed the education landscape of our country.

Hitherto, we used to have several dilapidated infrastructure, many equipment, training equipment, laboratories and the rest were left unattended to or under equipped.

But with the establishment of TETFund, a lot of changes have taken place in the universities and Nigeria is moving to greater height in terms of educational attainment and this is made possible by TETFund, he said.

(NAN)As Nigerian graduates enlisted in the next batch of the National Youth Service Corps begin their orientation course on August 28 at various camps across the country, prospective applicants trooped to social media to seek for the latest information about their postings.

It, however, served as another opportunity for Nigerians to remind the corps that it is now 50 days since the finance minister, Kemi Adeosun, was accused of forging her NYSC exemption certificate.

PREMIUM TIMES on July 7 exposed how Ms Adeosun skipped the mandatory one year scheme and forged a certificate that showed she had been exempted from participation.

The revelation elicited a public outrage from Nigerians, with the Human and Environmental Development Agenda, a nongovernmental organisation, petitioning the police inspector general demanding an investigation into the claims against the minister.

The corps only response was a short statement on July 9 saying that it would investigate the claims.

Nothing has been heard of the matter ever since.

Two weeks ago, a civic group, the Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) sued the NYSC over its failure to disclose details of the certificate paraded by the minister.

The group had earlier made a freedom of information request to the NYSC which the agency refused to honour.

Nigerians react

On Sunday, exactly 50 days after the scandal broke, Nigerians trooped to social media to berate the government over its silence on the incident.

Today is the 50th day since the NYSC exemption certificate forgery allegation against Adeosun broke. Buhari is yet to speak about it but may be considering a pardon for the minister.  Bashir (@Vashosr) August 26, 2018

Thank God you're correcting my grammar. And am learning. Starting from kindergarten. Tell your Idol Kemi Adeosun to show her NYSC forged certificate. Simple thing to do  Augustina F. Ogiator (@akperomo) August 26, 2018

#AdeosunGate is a slap on all who served Nigeria with dedication and selflessness under the NYSC scheme. I won't forget those who paid the supreme price in pursuit of discharge certificate, their death should not be in vain @MBuhari  Gibson (@I_am_Gibson) August 26, 2018

NYSC is sacred. Adeosun where is your integrity. You cannot do this if you were in Japan, South Korea, Uk and Israel. https://t.co/eS7RtZpQnU  iheanyichukwu Okocha (@OkochaOcenuno) August 26, 2018

The silence  of @nysc_ng is a pointer to the fact that they're backed up in a corner. Their only way out which I believe they're brewing is to come up with a 'gist' that will exonerate her hence the deafening silence   BEAUtiful  (@Daknexx) August 26, 2018

We are not even asking @nysc_ng to speak against anyone. But it is their constitutional and moral duty to let the whole world know the status of that Kemi Adeosun certificate. The world will be laughing at Nigeria now that a liar & forger is in charge of our money#AdeosunGate https://t.co/GY3BkEyJRP  Broda Ayo (@deyemiayo) August 26, 2018

Minutes passed away. Minutes grew into hours; and hours flew into weeks, but @NGRPresident @MBuhari has not broken his undignified silence over @HMKemiAdeosun's NYSC Certificate forgery scandal. And he is an anti-graft crusader and a man of integrity. Integrity my foot! @segalink  The Great Sage (@myunicy) August 26, 2018

The problem isnt about non-possession of Nysc certificate which ordinarily should matter for public service,the issue is forgery of same,thats a criminal offense  Sola Adewale (@soloks1) August 26, 2018

Also on Sunday, an advocacy group, EnoughisEnough Nigeria, began a social media campaign to highlight the governments inaction despite a strong evidence showing that Ms Adeosun forged her ceriticate.

Yemi Adamolekun, EiE Nigerias executive director, said they are trying to ensure that the story doesnt go away by making sure it remains on the front burner.

50 days later, theres been no response either from the minister or the government, which basically means you either get over it or you forget it, Ms Adamolekun told PREMIUM TIMES on Sunday night.

The main thing is the impunity of it, that government had been asked to address the fact that a serving minister did not fulfill the requirement to be a minister of the country and there has been no response.The House of Remy Martin has launched a competition that culminates in Cognac, France where some of the world's best bartenders go head to head for the title of Best Bartender at the Remy Martin Bartender Talent Academy.

Nkuli Khanyile from Gauteng was the winner of this competition and will be going to Cognac in October to compete against the worlds best. She is truly a great mixologist and one of South Africas top up-and-coming female bartenders. She plans to show the world that women from Africa are a force to be reckoned with in the bartending industry.We sat down with her, and this is what she had to share:I am currently a student at the University of Witwatersrand studying a BCom PPE (politics, philosophy, and economics). Baking has always been my number one passion, so when I decided that I needed to earn some extra money whilst studying, bartending seemed to fit well. I thought it would be an easy job that involves generic shots and mixers  but I could not have been any more wrong. I was introduced to a world of art that I never knew existed. Ive had a new profound outlook and respect for this industry in South Africa.I feel as though I am part of a community of ladies that are always growing and supporting each other. In this industry, I feel as though men and women are on an equal platform in terms of respect and opportunities, which I deeply value. The only challenge I have witnessed is having the courage to break into certain spirit categories such as cognac and making it known that women too can enjoy drinking and talking about them.I want to show people that you can find a passion and love for a part-time job. For me, this was an industry that I never knew I could fall in love with and it has influenced my career path in a massive way. Just because you have a working job, doesnt mean that you have to suffer through it. For me, this is something Ive learnt whilst being in this industry and it has slowly taken away the fear that you can be successful in different ways. I am now so much more confident in stepping out and being bold with my career and the drinks I make. Very true to the Remy Martin One Life/Live Them campaign.It means the world to me. It has sparked a passion for Cognac within me and has given me the opportunity to gain knowledge  something I value greatly for my future in bartending and cooking.A former Vice president, Atiku Abubakar, has said he has no plans of leaving the opposition PDP and believes he will get the partys presidential ticket for next years election.

Mr Abubakar stated this in a statement by his campaign office on Sunday.

The campaign office of former Vice President of Nigeria Atiku Abubakar debunks the story from a section of the media that frontline presidential aspirant for the 2019 election, Atiku has defected from the PDP.

A press statement on Sunday describes the report as a malicious attempt to confuse the public about the aspiration of Atiku ahead of the forthcoming presidential primaries election of the PDP.

For the avoidance of any doubts, Atiku remains the frontline aspirant for the presidential ticket of the PDP.

In the past two months, Atiku Abubakar has moved across states in the country consulting with stakeholders of the PDP and explaining to them his agenda encapsulated in the acronym JOBS: Jobs, Opportunity, Being united and Security) for Nigeria. The nationwide consultations continues this week with visits to the South West, North West and North Central zones of the country.

Atikus passion and commitment to winning the PDP primaries is without any compromise and to assume that he will abandon the hard work he has done with the positive results he is getting from the stakeholders of the party is to say the least preposterous and unthinkable.

The Campaign calls on supporters of Atiku to remain steadfast and see the contrived news of defection as an an attempt to distract it from the set task of winning the PDP ticket and the 2019 presidential election by the grace of God.

Apart from Mrs Abubakar, other PDP presidential aspirants include Governor Aminu Tambuwal and ex-governors Sule Lamido, Rabiu Kwankwaso, and Attaching Bafarawa.Former Kano State governor and presidential aspirant on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Rabiu Kwankwaso, has given reasons why he is not declaring his presidential ambition in his home state of Kano.

Mr. Kwankwaso, who is at loggerheads with his state governor and longtime political associate, Abdullahi Ganduje, had announced Wednesday as the day he will declare his 2019 presidential ambition.

The announcement was contained in a statement by Mr Kwankwasos Presidential Campaign Committee on Sunday.

The declaration, according to the statement, would hold at the Eagle Square, Abuja, by 11 a.m.

Speaking to PREMIUM TIMES on Monday, Mr Kwankwasos spokesperson, Binta Sipikin, said Abuja is the nations capital and many of Mr Kwankwasos political associates and supporters from across the country would be attending the event, hence the choice of Abuja.

She said it is not a Kano event, and it will be more convenient for people to come from any part of the country to the nations capital.

He is declaring in Abuja because it is the nations capital, and this is a national event, she said.

We are considering people from various parts of the country who may want to come, but could find a meeting in Abuja easier than in Kano.

Messrs Kwankwaso and Ganduje were political allies with the latter serving as deputy governor when Mr Kwankwaso was the state governor.

They have since parted ways with Mr Kwankwaso leaving the All Progressives Congress (APC) to rejoin the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), where he left in 2014 in hoping to achieve his presidential ambition.

Mr Kwankwaso last visited Kano over two years ago.

The governor has been accused of using security as an excuse to abort a rally to welcome Mr Kwankwaso back to Kano.Former aviation minister, Femi Fani-Kayode, has written the Nigeria Police Force in response to a letter inviting him to appear over allegation of inciting comments.

Mr Fani-Kayode responded via a letter addressed to the office of the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, dated August 27, asking the Force for detailed information on his alleged offence, and an extension of time for him to appear for questioning.

The police had in a letter dated August 20 and signed by an officer, Habu Sani, the Commissioner of the IGPs monitoring unit invited Mr Fani-Kayode for questioning for alleged acts of conspiracy, criminal and inciting publication.

The police said the purpose of the invitation was for fact finding.

In his reply, Mr Fani-Kayodes lawyers requested a rescheduling of the interview.

We have our clients instruction to inform you that he will honour the said invitation and possibly respond to questions on all facts which may be limited to his knowledge, Mr Fani-Kayodes lawyer, Kayode Ajulo, said.

However it is essential to unequivocally state that the invitation letter under reference appears vague and ambiguous in its form. Your office for reasons best known to them did not mention the name (s) or person (s) complaining against our client and on what particular subject matter his presence is required.

Therefore in view of the short notice apparent in your letter under reference, our client is constrained to politely request for a rescheduling of the interview date and also that he be furnished with essential particulars of the purpose of his visit to your office, so as to adwquately prepare for the said interview.

The letter further explained that Mr Fani-Kayode requested the extention of time, partly because of his current engagement at the ongoing national conference of the Nigeria Bar Association.

The letter was signed by Mr Fani-Kayodes lawyers, Raphael Oyewale and Idunnu Ajina.The police in Lagos said they arrested 57 men for alleged homosexual activity at Kelly Ann Hotel/ Event Centre in Egbeda, Lagos, on Sunday morning.

Imohimi Edgal, the state police commissioner, told journalists during a press conference Monday that police, led by the divisional police officers of Shasha and Idimu, acting upon an information provided by a reliable source stormed the hotal at 2 am.

On arrival, young men numbering about 80 were met in a hall taking different types of drinks including banned substance like Tramadol, Shisha laced with substances suspected to be Marijuana, Mr Edgal added.

When the men sighted the police, they took to their heels but the police arrested 57 of them.

One of the arrested suspects, Wealth Olasunkanmi, a 25-year-old graduate of Mass Communication from the Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, told journalists they were attending a birthday party.

It was a birthday party and majority of us dont know one another. I was invited by my friend Muyiwa for the party, and we were not only guys in the party, few ladies were with us and other ladies were in the hotel rooms getting dressed for the party. Since it was a party, a social gathering, there were lots of males than females.

The police just barged in and arrested people, I was outside the hall buying a drink when I was arrested. They also arrested few ladies but they let go of the ladies. The police didnt allow us know our offence until we reached the police station yesterday. At first, the police told us that they found some illegal drugs with us such as shisha, tramadol and others but those that owned this came out and claimed possession of it, it is not a general thing.

They also accused us of being homosexuals, I am not one, I went there to party. They also accused us of being initiated but no initiation material was founded with us or at the venue.

Another suspect, Samuel Rotimi, 22, said, We were contributing gate pass for the party when the policemen emerged. It was a birthday party and there were ladies there too, we are not gays.

James Brown, 20, said he went to perform at the party when he was arrested.

I went there to work and get paid. The party was on Saturday and it is (was) meant to be overnight. I was arrested and have been denied to even take my drugs which is for medical reasons.

Smart Jones, another suspect, said he had gone to have fun on Saturday night and on seeing the activities in the hotel, decided to go in.

I am not gay and I dont know any of them, it was even when we got to the police station that I got to know that it was a birthday party.

Daniel Sokari, 23, said he had come to the hotel to lodge on his way back from a pageant, Mr Toursim Nigeria, which held in Lekki.

I left there (Lekki) at 6 pm, there was traffic due to the Third Mainland Bridge closure, we took alternative route which was a long tour that was why I got to the hotel late to lodge.

I live in Rivers State and only came for the pageantry. I was at the reception when the police came and they told me to lie down which I gladly did since I knew I had not committed any crime. But I was accused of being a gay.

All efforts to explain to the police and show them the evidence of my invitation to the pageantry and pictures proved abortive, he added.The Pan-Yoruba socio-political organisation, Afenifere, says it believes Nigeria needs a strong and healthier president to run its affairs for the next four years from 2019.

Yinka Odumakin, the National Publicity Secretary of the group, stated this on Monday against the backdrop of a statement credited to the U.S. President, Donald Trump, that his meeting with Mr Buhari sometime in April was lifeless

An article published in Financial Times said Mr Trump told his aides after the meeting that he never wanted to meet a person so lifeless again.

The US President may have some issues, but on this one, he is right, Mr Odumakin told PREMIUM TIMES on the phone.

He said Nigeria is certainly one of the important nations of the world and would not be doing well to have Mr Buhari, who has a history of medical vacation abroad, to manage her sundry challenges beyond 2019.

Nigerian presidency is one of the most demanding in the world, and one of the most powerful presidents in the world and therefore, he needs to be extra fit, both physically and mentally to be able to cope with the demands of the office, he said.

If the health of our President is in such a state for the President of America to make such comments about his health, it shows clearly that if there is love for the country, the president should at the end of this four years, retire to his home and go and take care of his health and wanting to inflict another four years on this nation.

Asked why he would trust Mr Trumps judgement given the latters disrespect for leaders, Mr Odumakin said Nigerians did not need the U.S. presidents comments to know the true state of affairs with Mr Buhari.

He added that the various medical vacations to London clearly showed that there was something wrong.

Meanwhile, the Buhari Media Organisation (BMO) has described Mr Trumps hate speech as disrespectful.

The group also disagreed with critics that President Buhari was unfit to run for the 2019 elections and to oversee the affairs of the country in the next four years.

The chairman of the group, Niyi Akinsiju, said on Monday that it was not the first time the U.S. President was heard to make such derogatory remarks at world leaders, noting that Mr Buhari would not be distracted by the latest comments from the U.S. leader.

We are aware that President Trumps disrespect for World leaders is not new; his comments on Canadas Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, calling him meek and mild; his reference to Germanys Leader, Angela Merkels actions as insane, or his outlandish Tweet at the UKs Theresa May, and more recently, the alleged remarks he made after meeting President Buhari, Mr Akinsiju said.

It is indeed not the first time President Trump would be heard to lower the standards of respect for his colleagues on the world stage.

We are not surprised; we know that this age-long character of the U.S. President would not change anytime soon. But it is important that we put it on record that President Buhari remains fit and sprightly, even for the next decade.The Nigerian Army says its troops killed three Boko Haram insurgents while on fighting patrol in Kukawa in Baga Local Government Area in Borno on Sunday.

The Director, Army Public Relations, Texas Chukwu, disclosed this in a statement released in Maiduguri on Monday.

Mr Chukwu said the terrorists were intercepted by troops of 82 Division Task Force Brigade Deployed in the area.

He said that the troops, while on fighting patrol at Kukawa general area, got information on the terrorists activities in Kalamari village, 30 kilometres to Kukawa town.

He said the insurgents who were on a looting and extortion spree in the village were intercepted by troops of Operation Lafiya Dole.

During the encounter following a superior fire power of the troops, three members of the Boko Haram terrorists were neutralised, he said.

The director listed items recovered from the terrorist to include, three AK 47 rifles; two magazines and four rounds of 7.62mm ammunition.

Meanwhile, the gallant troops have continued with aggressive fighting patrol, as efforts are ongoing by the troops to track down other fleeing members of the Boko Haram Terrorists from any hideouts.

Members of the general public are advised to report any suspicious movements or activities in their general area to the law enforcement agents for prompt action, he said.

(NAN)Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue has advised George Akume to showcase his achievements in his 11 years sojourn as senator, instead of castigating me at every opportunity.

Akume should showcase his score card. He has been in the Senate for more than 11 years and the constituents want to hear what he has done.

He appears obsessed with abusing me every minute; that is not what the people want to hear, Mr Ortom told journalists on Monday in Makurdi.

The governor spoke through his Special Adviser on Media and ICT, Tahav Agerzua, at a special interaction with the media.

The man (Akume) keeps insulting me at every turn. But, while he is raising questions about me, more questions are being raised about whether he has been an asset or liability to the people, he said.

He also criticised a situation where politicians arrogate divine powers to themselves, stressing that only God had the power to decide the fate of man.

Nobody should boast that he can make someone governor. Only God can do that. Mr Aper Aku became the first civilian governor of Benue without anyones support. Rev. Fr Moses Adasu moved from the Church to the Government House without a political godfather.

So, it is wrong for anyone to claim that he made me governor and could unseat me, he said.

The governor dismissed claims that he recently gave N2 billion to PDPs eight governorship candidates, and wondered where such money could have come from.

He also rejected claims that he was afraid to contest the PDP governorship tickets with other aspirants, pointing out that he ran the entire PDP governorship primary before moving to the APC to pick its ticket in 2014.

Mr Ortom alleged that Mr Akume was struggling to pit him against PDP governorship aspirants because he rejected the automatic ticket offered by the APC.

PDP will not force Ortom on its members. Let all aspirants canvass for votes from the delegates and refrain from media wars, he said. (NAN)The Institute of Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR) says it will deploy a team of researchers to Zamfara State to ascertain the causes and dynamics of the conflicts in the area.

The Acting Director-General of the Institute, Bakut T. Bakut, said this on Monday in Abuja at a news conference on the security challenges in the state.

Mr Bakut said the decision to send a fact-finding technical committee to the state was to proffer solutions that would restore lasting peace to the area.

The institute will by September 3rd mobilise a team of researchers to the senatorial zones to ascertain the current causes and dynamics of the conflicts and proffer solutions that will bring lasting peace back to the area.

We are aware that conflict is dynamic and the entrepreneurs change along with the conflict.

We, therefore, shall be having series of stakeholders meeting at various levels of the state, local government and communities and re-energise the early warning mechanisms in the state.

He said the project would take three to four weeks of fieldwork, adding that outcome would be shared with various stakeholders, especially the federal and state governments, security and other relevant agencies.

He said the findings would also be shared with development partners for more informed, positive and proactive interventions.

IPCR acknowledges that without peace there cannot be development. Therefore, for development to reach all the nooks and crannies of the state, there must be that enabling environment which is a peaceful society.

We also realise the large unsecured space and forest in the state as well as the porous borders.

Our finding will, therefore, try to reach all the agencies associated with security and border controls to enable our citizens to enjoy the full benefits of the agenda of the present administration, he said.

Also speaking, the Chairman, Governing Council of ICPR, Mohammed Aji, expressed regret that financial constraints had greatly hampered the institutions abilities to operate at full capacity.

He, however, said that the council intended to take all necessary steps to deal with the situation in Zamfara by first sending a fact-finding technical committee.

This fact-finding Technical Committee will visit and meet with the state and local officials, victims, relevant agencies, groups and other stakeholders in order to obtain pertinent information that will enable IPCR to restore peace in Zamfara State.

Indeed, we will soon be adequately interfacing with federal and state governments on this and other insecurity issues in other parts of the country in order to effectively deal with the insecurity, he said.

(NAN)The Joint Task Force (JTF) in the Niger Delta and oil major, Shell, on Monday denied allegations of coercing the leadership of Aghoro 1 community in Bayelsa to sign a disputed report on oil spillage.

A disagreement in the areas impacted by an oil leak on the Trans Ramos Pipeline within Shells oilfield at Aghoro communities in Bayelsa has stalled the release of a Joint Investigation Visit (JIV) report of the oil spill.

Some community leaders, who participated in the JIV to determine the cause of the spill, reportedly refused to sign the report.

The refusal was attributed to wide disparity between the impacted areas claimed by Shell and the community.

Victor Akamu, chairman of the Community Development Committee of Aghoro 1, had alleged that Shell connived with the JTF to force and intimidation, to compel the community to sign the report.

Mr Akamu told News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday in Yenagoa that JTF summoned the communitys leadership to Yenagoa on August 23 to force them to sign the JIV report but that the leaders refused to sign.

He said the team from Aghoro were labelled pipeline vandals and were profiled into the database of the JTF.

We were taken to a room where detailed profiles of all of us were taken, including our finger prints, biometric details and our photographs.

We were temporarily held down for almost three hours profiling before we were eventually told to go.

I wanted to ask if it is part of JTFs job to force a community to sign a JIV report.

Shell should stop using JTF to intimidate our community. For the past 20 years, there is no history of pipeline vandalism.

This leak was due to a ruptured pipeline, due to corrosion yet they call us vandals, it is unacceptable, Mr Akamu said.

However, reacting to the allegation of intimidation, Bamidele Odugbesan, Shells spokesperson, denied use of force to compel the companys host communities to sign the JIV report.

Yes, there are issues with the JIV report. The representative of Aghoro 1 community did not agree with a portion of the JIV report but we have not used force.

SPDC does not coerce parties to sign JIV reports, Mr Odugbesan said.

Similarly, the commander of the JTF, Apochi Suleiman, dismissed the allegations of intimidation made by Aghoro community.

He said that the military waded into the crisis to encourage both parties to adopt dialogue to resolve their differences to avert breach of peace.

We conduct our duties in compliance with our rules of engagement. We invited the parties to mediate and encourage them to dialogue and use the established channels of resolving conflicts.

I told them to resolve their differences on the negotiating table so that the operation is not disrupted. Our mandate is to safeguard oil facilities and we do not want the disagreement to degenerate further.

We got reports that some persons were disrupting ongoing repairs of the ruptured pipelines and that was why some people were profiled.

I was emphatic that we cannot tolerate anyone taking the law into his hands, Suleiman said.

NAN investigations showed that the leak, which occurred on May 17 this year, discharged about 1,114 barrels of crude oil into the environment and polluted the Ramos River and farmlands.

The draft JIV report said the 1,114 barrels of crude impacted a total land area of 113.3 hectares in Aghoro 1 but the community claimed that the impacted area was 1825 hectares.

(NAN)Two children were on Monday feared dead in an early morning fire at Igbudu in Warri South Local Government Area of Delta.

News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the fire, which occurred at about 2 a.m, also destroyed property, worth millions of naira.

The victims included one-year-old Wealth Enorke and four-year-old Kesiena Lucky, said to be children of two sisters, Elohor Lucky and Ufuoma.

Eyewitness account said the incident might have been caused by a lighted candle allegedly put by the grandmother of the deceased children.

The account further said that the grandmother, a kerosene retailer, might have purchased adulterated kerosene, which caught the flame from the burning candle.

It was learnt that the woman succeeded in rescuing four of the children in her custody before she raised the alarm that attracted their neighbours.

The fire was said to have spread to other parts of the building and trapped the deceased before help could come to them.

Speaking on the incident, Luckys mother said that she left their apartment at about 1 a.m. for one Mama Solas apartment before she was alerted about the fire.

I later left Mama Solas apartment for Tuwere place and while I was still there, a neighbour alerted me about the incident at about 2 a.m.

Before I got there, everything had been razed down completely, said Elohor, who was reported to be a single mother.

The Commissioner of Police in the state, Mohammed Muatafa, confirmed the incident to NAN and described it as unfortunate.

Its true. It is an unfortunate incident. Two children, one-year-and-four-month with four-year-old died in the fire, he said.

(NAN)Shirley Zinn's is a Cinderella story. A tale of a tenacious woman, who rose above the poverty of the Cape Flats to ivy-league lecture halls and the boardrooms of some of South Africa's biggest enterprises. It is also an account of how immense personal tragedy, and picking yourself up and carrying on, shapes you.

Professor Shirley Zinn

Humble is not a weakness. It takes courage to be humble.

Do acts of kindness. It sounds soft and waffley in a boardroom, but it is important.

When you show gratitude, there is a shift in your mindset.

Deliberately surround yourself with people who will uplift you.

Dont be angry or disappointed for too long.

Live your life with meaning and purpose.

From a human resources perspective, create a humanistic environment. Its very important for sustainability to create an organisation that cares about people.

Every building block on your journey is another level of complexity that you are being prepared for. We think things get easier, but we need to bed down our wisdom as we go.

Adversity and trauma do come. It is important to stay optimistic in turbulent times.

My parents understood that education would be our liberation, she says. They also instilled in her the values of respect, humility, hard work ethic, service to others and excellence.However, it was a conversation with two teachers in her matric year, who believed in her potential, that put her on the path to her first degree. Zinn went on to Harvard for a doctorate in education, but it wasnt easy journey. Even having very little money didn't stop her from pursuing dreams.Armed with her impressive qualifications, Zinn applied for a job at the Department of Education, only to be told that she did not have the right profile for the job. There were many the ups and downs, and Kevin, her husband, selflessly supported her as they ventured into the unknown.Her journey took her to Pretoria, and later, to Johannesburg. What was meant to be a three-year stay became a 17-year stay, Zinn says.During her career, Zinn has held human resources director positions in companies such as Reckitt Benkiser, SARS, Nedbank, Standard Bank and Woolworths Holdings. She has her own business called Shirley Zinn Consulting, and is an extraordinary professor of human resources management at University of Pretoria and an adjunct professor at University of Cape Town.But in 2005, her life was devastated when her only child, Jamie, was killed in a car crash returning from a family holiday. So, in 2015, and prompted by her husband, she published her autobiography,focusing on her personal and professional journey. She aims to motivate and inspire youth and women to see what they can achieve despite adversity.Here are some of her lifes lessons:Last weekend, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) presented the names of 48 political parties cleared to contest the September 22 governorship election in Osun State.

Several crise trailed the conduct of primary elections in different political parties and till this period, some are yet to be addressed.

For instance, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) conducted two primary elections with two candidates emerging from same party.

The Bayo Faforijis faction elected Iyiola Omisore as the partys candidate while another faction led by Ademola Ishola chose Kehinde Atanta as the partys flag bearer. However, Mr Omisore was given the certificate of return by the national leadership of the party in Abuja.

The All Progressives Congress (APC) encountered several challenges following the adoption of direct primary method which was the first of its kind in the partys history as party members chose the flag bearer from 332 wards.

The method was criticised by about 17 governorship aspirants of the party and many alleged that the method was adopted to favour Gboyega Oyetola tagged to be the anointed candidate of the outgoing governor, Rauf Aregbesola and the partys national leader, Bola Tinubu.

Some aspirants pulled out of the race while the Secretary to the State Government dumped the party to Action Democratic Party (ADP) to become the sole flag bearer of the party. Following his defection, several members of APC also left the party.

The crisis in Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is yet to be settled as some members have again filed a fresh suit against the partys flag bearer, Ademola Adeleke, over his certificate.

Mr Adeleke emerged as the partys flag bearer with seven votes more than that of Akin Ogunbiyi, who wrote a petition to the national body alleging fraud during the primary.

PREMIUM TIMES takes a look at the five major contenders and their experience in politics.

These include a former secretary to the state government, Fatai Akinbade of the ADC; immediate past secretary to the state government, Moshood Adeoti of the ADP; the candidate of the governing APC, Adegboyega Oyetola; a senator, Ademola Adeleke of the PDP; and a former senator, Iyiola Omisore of the SDP.

The winner will succeed outgoing governor, Rauf Aregbesola of the APC.

Iyiola Omisore  SDP

The candidate is not new to politics. He once served at the deputy governor of Osun state before defecting to Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the platform which he used to emerge as senator representing Osun East Senatorial District.

Iyiola Omisore

Mr Omisore several times attempted to become the governor of Osun. He contested against the outgoing governor, Mr Aregbesola in 2014. The Ife-born politician dumped PDP to join SDP after he realised he was not going to secure the ticket of his former party.

Mr Omisores arrival in SDP brought about controversy after he allegedly installed his followers as executives of the party.

However, Mr Omisore being SDP flag bearer has made the party one of the leading parties in Osun State.

Gboyega Oyetola  APC

The rulling All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate has been said by majority to be the continuation of Mr Aregbesolas administration as he is currently the Chief of Staff in the state.

Gboyega Oyetola, Governor of Osun State.

He is definitely the candidate to beat as he enjoys state support by both Osun and the federal government.

Mr Oyetolas emergence was said to have been influenced by Mr Tinubu.

He bagged his first degree in Insurance and Masters degree from University of Lagos. Mr Oyetola worked in several insurance firms before establishing his own firm, Silvertrust Insurance Brokers LTD.

The Iragbiji born politician in Osun Central Senatorial district became the state Chief of Staff in 2011.

Ademola Adeleke  PDP

The sudden death of his brother, Isiaka Adeleke in April 2017, brought Ademola Adeleke into lime light.

Senator Ademola Adeleke,[Photo: Pulse.ng]

He joined the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) after the rulling APC failed to give him ticket to replace his brother. Mr Adeleke contested the by-election and emerged as the senator of Osun West Senatorial District.

He has been enmeshed in certificate scandal involving his secondary school certificate. He was also disowned by the American university he claimed to graduate from.

Fatai Akinbade  ADC

The ADC candidate, Fatai Akinbade, joined the Osun State government, working for over 16 years under three military administrators and then under a civilian governor, Olagunsoye Oyinlola.

In 2003, he was appointed Secretary to the State Government by Olagunsoye Oyinlola and became the leader of the Party in the Iwo Federal Constituency in 2004.

Mr Akinbade was a contender to become PDP candidate for governorship of Osun State in the 2011 election.

He is seen as one of the major contenders in the September 22 governorship election.

Moshood Adeoti  ADP

The candidate once served as the state chairman of Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) in Osun.

Mr Adeoti was appointed the Secretary to the State Government following his role in the emergence of Mr Aregbesola. He left APC after alleging that all machineries in the primary were put in place to favour Mr Oyetola.

Mr Adeotis exit from APC has left the party with a major loss as 12 executive members and some other elders of the party followed him and declared their support for him.

The Iwo born politician in Osun West senatorial district is also a major contender in the race.An Ado-Ekiti Chief Magistrates Court on Monday ordered the remand of 42-year-old man, Omoniyi Stephen, over alleged murder.

The accused, whose address was not provided, is being tried for murder.

The prosecutor, Johnson Okunade, alleged that the accused committed the offence on August 20 in Ikole-Ekiti.

Mr Okunade said that the accused murdered Oba Gbedebo Ibiloye Olowoselu, the Onise of Odo-Oro Ekiti, in Ikole-Local Government Area.

According to him, the offence contravenes Section 319 of Criminal Code, Laws of Ekiti State 2012.

The prosecutor urged the court to remand the accused in prison pending legal advice from office of Director of Public Prosecution (DPP).

The accused plea was not taken by the court.

The defence counsel, Adefolaju Ayobiolojas application for bail was refused by the court.

The Chief Magistrate, Adesoji Adegboye, however, ordered the remand of the accused in prison and adjourned the case until September 21 for mention.

(NAN)The Ogun State Government has appointed Mosunmola Dipeolu as the acting chief judge of the state, following the retirement of Justice Olatokunbo Olopade on Tuesday

The Secretary to the state government, Taiwo Adeoluwa, who announced the appointment in a statement on Monday said the appointment is effective from Tuesday.

The acting chief judge holds a Bachelor of Law Degree (LL.B) from the University of Buckingham, England, attended the Nigerian Law School, Lagos and was called to the Nigerian Bar in July 1981.

She started her career as a Pupil State Counsel at the Lagos State Ministry of Justice in August, 1981. In January 1985, she was appointed to the Bench as a Magistrate in the Lagos State Judiciary and rose to the position of a Senior Magistrate in 1991.

Mrs Dipeolu left the Lagos State Judiciary in December 1991 and was engaged in private practice until November 1995 when she was appointed as a Chief Magistrate 1 in the Ogun State Judiciary where she rose through the ranks to become a High Court judge in May 1999. The acting Chief Judge has attended several national and international seminars and workshops.

Earlier in the day, the state government thanked the outgoing Chief Judge, Mrs Olopade, for her contributions to the development of the judiciary in particular and the state in general.

Governor Ibikunle Amosun and members of his cabinet dedicated the State Executive Council meeting as a valedictory session in honour of the Chief Judge.

Mr Amosun said Mrs Olopade brought a lot of innovation and professionalism into the state judicial system, adding that, her efforts contributed to the overwhelming position the state has attained in the area of justice delivery among the comity of states.

Also speaking, the Deputy Governor, Yetunde Onanuga, and the Secretary to the State Government, Mr Adeoluwa, noted that she proved her mettle as the first female Chief Judge and discharged her duty with all sense of dedication and professionalism.

In their separate remarks, the Chief of Staff to the Governor, Tolu Odebiyi, and the Head of Service, Abayomi Sobande, described her as a team player who cared and was committed to the dispensation of justice for equity and justice for the development of humanity.

The Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Olumide Ayeni, and his Agriculture counterpart, Adepeju Adebajo, also lauded Mrs Olopades exemplary leadership which has led to improved justice delivery in the state.

Responding, Mrs Olopade appreciated members of the Executive Council for the honour done to her, commending the administration for not interfering in the judicial system, noting that this allowed members of the judiciary to deliver their duties effectively.

Meanwhile, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Wole Olanipekun, has described federal character laws enshrined in the constitution and statutes as a principle that militates against meritocracy while breeding mediocrity in government organisations.

Mr Olanipekun made the submission at a valedictory public lecture with the theme, An Anatomical of Analysis of the Principle of Federal Character; A Case for the Enthronement of Institutionalism and Meritocracy and book presentation, in honour of Mrs Olopade, at the Cultural Centre, Kuto, Abeokuta.

He defined federal character as a concept which denotes a principle of fairness and equity in the distribution of public posts and socio-economic infrastructures among the federating units, emphasizing that to sustain and nurture the judiciary and enthrone meritocracy, government at all levels should refrain from retiring High Court Judges at the age of 65 and Justices of the Court of Appeal/ Supreme Court at 70 within same country, as it takes years to build cerebral justice system.

He described the retiring CJ who led the state judiciary for seven years, as a brilliant, matured and disciplined administrator who added value to the administration of justice in Ogun State and Nigeria.The non-academic staff union, NASU, and the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Polytechnics (SSANIP) branches of Ibadan Polytechnic have suspended a week-old strike action.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the workers commenced an indefinite strike over eight months unpaid arrears and the alleged meagre subventions by the Oyo State Government.

The chairmen of NASU and SSANIP, Raji Akande and Ajibola Oyetunde respectively, told PREMIUM TIMES that the decision to call off the strike was as a result of the intervention of the institutions governing council.

The governing council had a meeting with us last week and they have given us their words, Mr Oyetunde said.

According to Mr Akande, after the meeting with the council, the congress of NASU members met on Monday.

Our members have also decided that we should consider the suspension at the congress. Although, some of the resolutions of the governing council do not go down with us, he said.

Also, in a letter of suspension sent to the governing council to notify them of their decision, obtained by PREMIUM TIMES, NASU stated that After much deliberations the leadership of the union appealed to the Congress, to allow the management admit students for the 2018/2019 admission, which we believe the process would be done within two months.

The union frowned at the letter sent by the governing council and have no trust in it. The council as matter of urgency should go back to the government to request for bail-outs to defray the (8) eight month salary arrears.

Thereafter, the chairmen of the two unions told their members to resume work on Tuesday and allow peace reign in all their offices.

The state government, through the commissioner for education, Adeniyi Olowofela, stated that the government is not owing the staff as highlighted in the unions demands and that the governing council of the school should respond to the workers grievances.It may be an unconventional topic, but the speakers at Future Females' August 2018 monthly event all spoke on 'how to fail successfully'. Here's why entrepreneurs, in particular, can benefit from embracing when things don't go quite to plan.

The Future Females founding members.

Dallas and Bezuidenhout telling their story.

#hustle #startups #push #motivation A post shared by Bevan Nel (@bevan.nel) on Aug 12, 2018 at 12:36pm PDT

Success is relative, as is failure

Ellen Fischat.

But if youre not failing, or feeling uncomfortable or stressed, youre not growing. You are a survivor of your failures, fears and fu@k ups. Own that and incorporate your failures into your success story.

If you fail, acknowledge it and try fix it, dont beat yourself up about it.

Learn to be your own hero, as she is the only one who knows whats really in, your heart and mind, so take care of her first.

Fail your way to success. Be bold, be daring and use those 'failures' to learn what you can do differently.

I have felt broken and like my wings were clipped, but then I remember the saying, 'they broke my wings and forgot I had claws'.

Im done tweeting about @Future_Females for tonight but seriously, #female #entrepreneurs around the world, join the movement, or start a chapter in your city. #FutureFemales has invented an amazing recipe to channel the positive power of human connection!  #WomensMonth  Dr. Carolina Odman (@carolune) August 22, 2018

Read more

The Future Females group celebrated their first birthday at Workshop 17 at the V&A Waterfront on Wednesday, 22 August. Turn out was amazing, with the space absolutely packed with males and females alike, because while the group is pro-women, it's definitely not anti-anything.In fact, it was so full that when I got up to grab a Zang caffeinated chocolate from the back of the room to keep going, my seat vanished and I had to make do with a comfy corduroy beanbag chair or stand at the gin bar. And thats just the people who arrived on time.I felt especially sorry for the latecomers, because by the time we reached the event's designated start time of 18:30, clean glasses were a rare find and all the mini burgers, eggy parcels, crispand melba toast bites were long gone. Luckily there was still lots of liquid refreshment, the glasses were restocked and there was also a delicious cake for later.But I digress, the deliciousness of the evening wasn't limited to the food and drink. Co-founders Cerina Bezuidenhout and Lauren Dallas also kicked off the special version of their monthly event with food for thought, by explaining that they'd conducted research on the Future Females members and found they dont celebrate their own failures enough - that may sound odd but bear with me, it makes sense!As a result, they began their first birthday celebrations by giving us all a taste of what's gone on 'under the hood' these past 12 months.Many dont realise that Bezuidenhout and Dallas met just a year ago, as they're so good at bouncing the conversation off each other. They also listen to the communities they've built, often asking for their input and experiences.For example, the 10 Future Females communities across the globe were asked how they had benefitted over the past year, with key responses pointing out the excellent sense of collaboration and gathering both online and offline, realising you're not alone out there in your entrepreneurial journey.The video responses shown all featured different accents, which goes to show how Future Females gives local entrepreneurs the opportunity to expand globally.Bezuidenhout and Dallas said it's necessary to have a few failures to learn from when looking back at their journey, which is why they reflected beyond just then positive. Their main speaker for the evening did the same.We heard from Ellen Fischat who has been involved in the incubator space as former MD of Silicon Cape, built up many of her own businesses and has also recently been appointed by the Dutch Embassy to head up the #InspiringFifty initiative, as one of the first Inspiring Fifty SA winners from last year.Fischat said its a huge honour to be asked to present at an event like Future Females, but she joked that she wasn't sure whether to be scared when asked to talk about failure. She explained that she had only prepared pictures, not words as it's as hard to prepare a speech on failure. After all, if we planned for our failures, would they still be failures?Sharing her own beginnings, Fischat was born in South Africa and spent her early years growing up in the Korsten area of PE. Her parents fled SA in 1982 for Amsterdam, making the move as refugees. She doesnt consciously remember this time, just that she was always cold and didn't understand others when they spoke. She said, "We had effectively moved from one ghetto to another."She then got us all to privately write down three things we have "epically failed" at, and to be brutally honest about it as no one else would see this list - we were soon scribbling away. Then, Fischat said to write down five things we do incredibly well. This was the much harder task of the two. It goes to show the role failure plays in our lives and the way we speak to ourselves internally.Fischat then spoke of success as a series of favourable triumphs but added that success is relative and different to different people. For some, its finishing a degree after many years, for others its reaching private banking status. Its something we are taught in our own circles.And failure is Fischat's biggest fear, but it's also what gets her out of bed every day. Just like success, failure is also relative and we need to learn to see it that way. For some, it's that we didnt become a doctor or haven't yet met our soul mate. For others, it's that we're not at our ideal weight or cant afford to live where we do.Fischat shared that the 'personal museum of failure' she carries with her is extensive, ranging from realising that spreadsheets are not her thing to picking up her children late from school and disappointing them.This wasn't a depressing presentation at all, as Fischat also mentions that it's taken her 43 years to realise she is the best me she can be. When something goes wrong, others try to lessen the blow by saying everything happens for a reason, but its tough to accept that when it happens - especially if you did prepare.Fischat ended with some advice for everyone, whether you're an entrepreneur, intrapreneur or other:Fischat ended:Cue tremendous applause from the audience!If that's what Future Females has accomplished in just one year, I can't wait to see what's next.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.



ROCKVILLE, Maryland, August 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

A stellar growth trajectory of the cocoa market is anticipated owing to the rising demand from the flourishing chocolate industry across the global regions. Levels of chocolate production and consumption are the prime fillip helming the cocoa market, where rising discretionary income have dramatically bolstered the purchase of chocolates. Historically known for its limited consumption as a luxury item, popularity of chocolate is driven by growing palate for cocoa flavor worldwide. Apart from its extensive application in the food and beverage industry, cocoa is exploited by pharmaceutical, cosmetics, confectionery and functional food industries among others, representing future lucrative opportunities for the cocoa market.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/713666/FactMR_Logo.jpg )



Fact.MR report on the cocoa market envisages an impressive CAGR of 11.23% during the forecast period of 2018 - 2028. As the most preferable flavor ingredient, cocoa-based products are highly exploited by the multiple industry verticals. Cocoa is also explored by pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries for their health benefits. With the incremental demand for cocoa products among multiple manufacturing industries, the business-to-business distribution is poised to report over 5,500,000 tons of sales by 2028 end in the cocoa market. Evident demand in the food and beverage sector is ensued with the sales of 4,500,000 tones by the end of 2028 in the cocoa market.

Request For Sample Report- https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=44

Intensifying demand for cocoa liquor in the food and beverage industry against the backdrop of growing appetite for cocoa flavor has led the cocoa liquor form type to outnumber cocoa powder and cocoa butter with the sales of over 2,200,000 tons of cocoa by end of 2028 in the cocoa market.

Between the two primary processes of cocoa powder production in the cocoa market, Dutch process cocoa powder segment is expected to dominate the cocoa market despite a sizable share of natural cocoa powder. As most bakery and confectionery products include leaveners in recipe, demand for Dutch process cocoa is preferred by major end-users. As per Fact.MR valuations, Dutch processed cocoa powder segment is estimated to surpass sales of 3,500,000 tons, contributing over half of the total sales in process types in the cocoa market.

As the chocolate industry is well-established in Europe, Europe cocoa market is observed as matured market. In addition, the Europe cocoa market is strictly regulated by regulatory authorities such as European Cocoa Association, Association of German Confectionery Industry, and Organic Cocoa Farmer's Association among others. With the food and beverage industry at the core of region's economy, the cocoa market is flourishing in the industry. Countries in European Union such as Germany, Belgium, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom among others are expected to contribute to the thriving market for cocoa in Europe in the coming decade. Given that Europe is expected to lead the global space with over 30% of the cocoa market share.

To Get more Information on Cocoa Market, Visit - https://www.factmr.com/report/44/cocoa-market

As the tropical agricultural products face critical challenges of sustainable production, cocoa is the most affected crop. Although at a steady pace, effective measures are underway to address sustainability challenges of cocoa market. Extensive research to improve cocoa market sustainability, cocoa development strategies such as diversification of crops, identifying role of small stakeholders and large plantations, strengthening network of SMEs and agro processing industry are underway. These are likely to assist government as well as non-government partners to enhance cocoa production by supporting farmers and ensure future sustainability in the cocoa market.

Growing awareness regarding challenges of sustainable cocoa production against the background of campaigns that focus on child labor and rising interest of media to spread public awareness are factors inviting the trend of certification and higher standards in cocoa market. Multiple standard bodies including UTZ Certified, Rainforest Alliance/SAN (RA), and Fairtrade International (FT) set standards to maintain better quality and quality check processes. According to World Cocoa Foundation, currently only 22% of the traded cocoa is certified, which does not meet the regulatory standards. This explains challenges to fulfill the global cocoa demand as well as restraints to realize sustainable cocoa production in the cocoa market and to bring about effective increase on cocoa farmers income.

To Buy Cocoa Market Report, Visit- https://www.factmr.com/checkout/44/S

About Fact.MR

Fact.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; that's why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.

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SOURCE Fact.MRNEW YORK, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Arlo Hotels, an independent, four-star lifestyle hotel brand, today announced the launch of Arlo Cares, a sustainability program designed to spark eco-conscious changes in travel and serve as a home base for green-minded travelers. Arlo Cares encourages guests, locals and partners to embrace a more earth-ethical way of living, and is launching with an educational speaker series, community outreach opportunities, documentary screenings, charitable celebrations and more.

Known for pushing the boundaries in the independent hotel sphere, Arlo was one of the first hotel brands in New York City to commit to phasing out single-use plastics throughout all hotel activity. Arlo NoMad and Arlo SoHo have proudly eliminated more than 1.1 million pieces of plastic waste to date, and a real-time counter at arlohotels.com displays this climbing number, which is currently growing at a pace of 158 items of plastic saved per hour. This ticker serves as a constant reminder of how careful choices about plastic consumption can make a big impact on the local and global community.

"We have always been committed to sustainability, looking to not only preserve the living environments surrounding our projects, but to actually enhance the ecospheres in which we're working," said Oleg Pavlov, CEO of Quadrum Global and founder of Arlo Hotels. "Hotels are a gathering place for so many people in various walks of life, and we hope that as conscious travelers walk through Arlo's doors, they will be inspired to become friendly ambassadors for this great cause."

Arlo is not only committed to a sustainable vision of hospitality through operational adjustments and eco-friendly building functionalities, but is turning a new leaf for the industry by cultivating a community dedicated to inspiring change and reducing our collective carbon footprint. Upcoming Arlo Cares programming includes:

Renowned for forward-thinking programming and engaging partnerships, Arlo is excited to forge a new platform for those interested in learning more about sustainable living:

"Community is at the core of our brand; we're always trying to create an organic, social environment that encourages creative connections and friendly interactions between guests, staff and the local community," said Javier Egipciaco, Managing Director of Arlo Hotels. "As a native New Yorker, I know what this city can accomplish when it's inspired to overcome a challenge. We're excited to serve as a home base for the eco-conscious community, and do our part to leave the world a more beautiful place."

About Arlo Hotels

Arlo is the essential homebase for urban explorersa launchpad for local experiences; a place to rest up and recharge between adventures. Refined but approachable design elevates everyday occasions. Thoughtful spaces invite visitors to express their creativity. For work, play, or any purpose, Arlo provides guests the foundation and inspiration to reach their goals, their way. With hotels throughout New York City and expanding to other cities across the country, plan your next city stay at arlohotels.com.

Media Contact:

Hannah Redfield

Director of PR

[email protected]

267-567-0524

SOURCE Arlo Hotels

Related Links

http://www.arlohotels.com

Security forces beat and detained at least four journalists covering protests in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, on August 20, and confiscated or damaged their equipment. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned the attacks and called on Ugandan authorities to hold those responsible to account.

Security forces detain a protester in Kampala on August 20. Security personnel beat and detained at least four journalists who were covering unrest in Uganda's capital. Credit: AP/Ronald Kabuubi/CPJ.

Violent beatings

Targeted

The journalists were arrested while covering protests in Kampala to demand the release of lawmakers, including opposition MP Robert Kyagulanyi, known as Bobi Wine, who were arrested last week in connection to unrest in the northern town of Arua on August 13, during which President Yoweri Museveni's convoy was stoned, according to reports In an August 22 blog post , President Museveni, who has been in power since 1986, condemned the actions of security forces beating journalists, but added that "the journalists working for foreign interests or for our own local parasites tell lies".On August 19, the president published a blog post about the recent political unrest in which he referred to news outlets including Monitor and NTV as "fake news generators"."President Museveni's public disdain for the news media is especially alarming given the ongoing crackdown by police and military personnel on journalists working to keep Uganda's public informed," said Muthoki Mumo, CPJ's sub-Saharan Africa representative. "Ugandan authorities should conduct rigorous investigations into the assaults on journalists, hold accountable those responsible, and commit to preventing future violence and detentions by security personnel."Journalists attacked and detained on August 20 include Reuters photojournalist James Akena, Alfred Ochwo, a photojournalist with privately owned newspaper The Observer , and NTV journalists Ronald Galiwango and Juma Kirya, according to journalists with whom CPJ spoke. Footage of the attack on Akena, broadcast on local stations and shared on social media, show at least two military officers beating the journalist with long wooden sticks, even after he dropped to his knees. The soldiers transported Akena to Kampala Central Police Station where he was detained for several hours before being released unconditionally, according to Isaac Kasamani, a freelance photographer with Agence France-Presse, and Michael O'Hagan, co-chairperson of the Foreign Correspondents Association of Uganda.Kasamani, who went to the police station when he heard of his colleague's arrest, told CPJ that the military had yet to return Akena's camera, which they had confiscated, and that a subsequent hospital visit revealed Akena suffered a fractured index finger and a broken ring finger on his left hand, as well as injuries to his head and back.A statement that Reuters' public relations department shared with CPJ condemned the attack on Akena and said that the news agency would "evaluate how to address this situation with the local authorities in the coming days".Ochwo told CPJ that he was returning to his newspaper's office after photographing protests when about seven soldiers confronted him. Some of them beat him with wooden sticks and threw his camera to the ground, damaging it. He said he was put in a police pick-up truck, where he found two other journalists, NTV's Galiwango and Kirya, already held. Ochwo and Kirya told CPJ that one of the soldiers used pliers to pinch and pull Ochwo's and Galiwango's flesh, leaving wounds on their shoulders and back.The journalists were detained for several hours in Central Police Station in Kampala, where they were forced to delete pictures and footage on their cameras. Ochwo told CPJ that he left his camera at the station as evidence for a report of malicious damage and assault that he filed against security personnel.Ochwo and Kirya told CPJ that the security personnel appeared to be going after anyone recording the protests. They said that three more people who had been recording and taking pictures with their phones were arrested put into the truck with them. Kasamani told CPJ that on the day of the protests he saw military personnel confiscating the phone of a young man who had been filming security forces at the protest and in a separate incident an officer warned a man against filming from a shop balcony. "The guy got scared and ran away," Kasamani said.In a statement circulated on Twitter,army spokesperson Richard Karemire said the military was displeased over the "unprofessional conduct of soldiers who molested some journalists". He added that the chief of Defence Forces has ordered the arrest and punishment of those involved had been ordered. Karemire on August 21 declined to specify to CPJ if any arrests had been made. Karemire on August 17 made similar statements to CPJ following the assault of journalists in Arua.Speaking to CPJ via telephone on August 21, police spokesperson Emilian Kayima reiterated statements he made to CPJ the week prior that security personnel did not target journalists and termed the assault and detention of Akena as "unfortunate," saying that he had asked the photojournalist to record a statement with police.Security minister General Elly Tumwine on August 21 told CPJ not to "waste" his time, and that he was concerned with the security of all Ugandans and not "isolated groups" like journalists, before hanging up. When CPJ called him back to ask about journalists being specifically targeted during their coverage of the protests, Tumwine repeated earlier comments that he was concerned about the security of everyone, before hanging up.CHICAGO, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Athena Blockchain announced today its agreement to partner with 303 Alternatives LLC, a FINRA regulated broker dealer.

With offices in Chicago, Miami, and Santa Monica, Athena Blockchain provides investment banking, structuring, and advisory services to issuers, sponsors, and promoters of securities by leveraging its deep legal, compliance, technical, and financial experience to structure offerings and provide access to capital markets. Now, Athena Blockchain will expand its capabilities and provide compliant investment banking and structuring to the marketing and placement of tokenized investment products by operating under the oversight of the SEC and FINRA.

With the addition, Athena Blockchain's ranks have grown to over 20 employees, including investment bankers and advisors hailing from established investment banks (including UBS, Nomura Bank, and Goldman Sachs), and renowned capital markets firms (including Cantor Fitzgerald, Magnetar Capital, Chicago Trading Company, and Greenhill). Athena brings an unparalleled combination of crypto expertise and capital markets experience, allowing issuers of tokenized securities and traditional investment products compliant access to capital.

"With the addition of 303, Athena can help clients achieve their financial goals by issuing private and public securities in both tokenized and traditional formats," said Founder & CEO Eric Gravengaard. "Coupling 303 Alternatives' investment banking experience with Athena's considerable advisory and marketing capabilities, enables us to provide an unbeatable combination of experience, knowledge, and access to capital markets for securities issuers."

Michael Savini, Managing Principal and President of 303, said "joining forces with Athena is exciting for us and our clients. Our existing clients will now have unparalleled access to the cryptocurrency and digital assets markets. We are excited about the future and the additional services we can now provide."

About Athena Blockchain (www.athenablockchain.com)

Athena Blockchain is a privately-held investment, financial, and advisory business with offices in Chicago, Miami, and Santa Monica. The firm provides advice and execution across a full range of transactions. Media inquiries may be forwarded to [email protected].

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain matters discussed within this press release are forward-looking statements. Although Athena Blockchain believes the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, it can give no assurance that its expectations will be attained. Athena Blockchain does not undertake any duty to update any statements, (including forward-looking statements) contained herein except as required by law. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations include general industry considerations, regulatory changes, changes in local or national economic conditions and other risks.

Informational Purposes

This material has been prepared for informational purposes only and is not an offer to buy or sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy or sell any security or instrument, or to participate in any trading strategy. Athena Blockchain does not provide legal, tax, investment, or accounting advice.

SOURCE Athena Blockchain

Related Links

http://www.athenablockchain.com

HOUSTON, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- To better serve its customers, investors and stakeholders, CenterPoint Energy (NYSE: CNP) today announced it is incorporating the Edison Electric Institute's (EEI's) Version 1 environmental, social, governance, and sustainability-related (ESG/sustainability) reporting template into its annual sustainability reporting. This approach is part of an ongoing EEI-led initiative to help provide the financial sector with more uniform and consistent ESG/sustainability data and information.

Version 1 of the EEI ESG template is the first and only industry-focused and investor-driven ESG reporting framework.

"We recognize that key ESG-related issues are integral to our performance and are important for our investors and other stakeholders," said Scott M. Prochazka, president and chief executive officer of CenterPoint Energy. "We believe the EEI ESG template complements the Corporate Responsibility Report we published earlier this year. Combined, these disclosures highlight our approaches on supporting environmental stewardship, enriching our communities and providing a safe, inclusive workplace."

In order to develop industry-focused and investor-driven ESG/sustainability reporting practices, CenterPoint Energy joined an EEI working group comprised of financial industry specialists in asset management, ESG/sustainability, and investment banking; buy-side and sell-side analysts; and electric company officials from various disciplines, including accounting, environmental, ESG/sustainability, finance, treasury, investor relations, and legal.

"The electric power industry is leading the way to a clean energy future, having reduced carbon dioxide emissions nearly 27 percent below 2005 levels as of the end of 2017," said EEI President Tom Kuhn. "EEI's ESG/sustainability template will enable CenterPoint Energy to present its ESG and sustainability-related efforts in an accurate, timely, and concise manner that is favored by investors."

Over the past two years, CenterPoint Energy and EEI-led stakeholder working groups developed the EEI ESG template, which encourages voluntary reporting of ESG/sustainability information in both quantitative and qualitative formats. Within the quantitative section, companies are able to report sector-specific information, including data on a company's portfolio, emissions, capital expenditures, and resources. The qualitative section provides an opportunity for companies to elaborate in greater detail regarding their governance and strategy. The EEI ESG template provides information in a measurable and consistent format for investors and customers to accurately assess the long-term ESG/sustainability progression toward a clean energy future.

As a participant in Version 1 of the EEI ESG template, CenterPoint Energy is publishing its 2017 data today under the Environmental, Social and Governance section of our Investor Relations website.

More information is available here on EEI's website.

CenterPoint Energy, Inc., headquartered in Houston, Texas, is a domestic energy delivery company that includes electric transmission & distribution, natural gas distribution and energy services operations. The company serves more than five million metered customers primarily in Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas. The company also owns 54.0 percent of the common units representing limited partner interests in Enable Midstream Partners, LP, a publicly traded master limited partnership it jointly controls with OGE Energy Corp. Enable Midstream Partners, LP owns, operates and develops natural gas and crude oil infrastructure assets. With more than 8,000 employees, CenterPoint Energy and its predecessor companies have been in business for more than 150 years.

For more information contact

Media:

Leticia Lowe

Phone 713.207.7702

Investors:

David Mordy

Phone 713.207.6500

SOURCE CenterPoint Energy, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.centerpointenergy.com

HONG KONG, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Diginex, a global blockchain solutions company, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with anti-slavery business association The Mekong Club, to create a blockchain-based system to protect workers from being exploited.

Of the 40 million people trapped in what is known as "modern slavery",[1] more than half are trapped in forced labour situations with unsafe working conditions[2]. Diginex and The Mekong Club will work together to create tools for the private sector to identify and eradicate forced labour from their supply chains.

The Mekong Club runs a 32-member strong anti-slavery business association and has to date trained over 8,000 organisations and delivered over 15 innovative tools such as a multi-language e-learning, interactive maps and smartphone apps.

Diginex will work with The Mekong Club and its partner organisations, large multinational companies to create a pilot project that uses migration data to help companies track the migration of workers (and the associated costs) on a transparent and immutable ledger. The project will also create a mobile app for workers to ensure all contracts and documentation are maintained in their original form to stop migrants from becoming trapped in forced labour situations.

Mr. Mark Blick, Head of Government Projects, said: "We know blockchain has the potential to transform the lives of migrant workers and we are honoured to be part of this project. The Mekong Club is a well respected and trusted organisation that works hand in hand with the business community. We see this MOU as the beginning of a long relationship with The Mekong Club and a firm commitment by Diginex to support the eradication of modern slavery."

Mr. Jose Perez, Chief Innovation Officer at Diginex, said: "Using a blockchain-based system to ensure protection of migrant workers is the perfect example of the power of decentralised technology. Blockchain was born out of a desire to reduce the need of expensive and opaque intermediaries, a prevalence of which we see currently with migrant workers."

The Mekong Club's CEO, Mr. Matt Friedman, added: "Every day we hear the same tricks being applied to migrant workers to ensnare them into forced labour situations. Employment contracts get changed as a worker moves from one country to another and extortionate fees are added for transportation, accommodation and recruitment. This means that once a worker arrives at their destination, they owe more than their salary to their employee, leaving them with little reprieve. We hope this project with Diginex will help companies spot where the biggest vulnerabilities are in their supply chain and dramatically reduce the abuse in the system."

Press Contacts:

Heather Dale Diginex E: [email protected] Tel: +852 9274 3312 Phoebe Ewan The Mekong Club E: [email protected] Tel: +852 2292 2108

About Diginex

Diginex develops and implements blockchain technologies to transform businesses and enrich society. At the core of Diginex is our people. We are a blend of financial service professionals, passionate blockchain technologists and experienced project managers. We work with corporates, institutions & governments to create solutions that build trust and increase efficiency. For more information on Diginex, please visit www.diginex.com

About The Mekong Club

The Mekong Club is a catalyst for change - engaging, inspiring and supporting the private sector to eradicate modern slavery from their business. With 25 million victims - 62% of the total - trapped in forced labour, companies are ideally placed to help turn the tide of this global epidemic. The Mekong Club run a 32-member strong anti-slavery business association and has to date trained over 8,000 organisations and delivered over 15 innovative tools such as a multi-language e-learning, interactive maps, smartphone apps, and more. www.themekongclub.org

[1] According to International Labour Office, 2017 link [2] Forced labour amounts to 60% of modern slavery, forced marriage amounts to 40%

SOURCE Diginex

Related Links

http://www.themekongclub.org

"This is such an amazing milestone for ENA. This beautiful, vibrant building shows how far the association has come over the years, and it will be a launching point for a promising future filled with ideas and innovations focused on improving the emergency nursing profession," said ENA President Jeff Solheim, MSN, RN, CEN, TCRN, CFRN, FAEN, FAAN.

Monday marks the culmination of a four-year process to find a new home for ENA, which spent the previous 19 years in nearby Des Plaines. In October 2017, the ENA Board of Directors cited the association's strong financial position in approving the purchase of the building from the American Academy of Dermatologists. ENA partnered with Savillis Studley on the location search and project management; architect Box Studios; and BIG Construction, which served as the general contractor on a total revamp of the space where 100 staff members are now located.

"To see our new home go from vision to reality has been really exciting," ENA Executive Director Nancy MacRae said. "We accomplished many great things in Des Plaines to advance ENA's legacy. This building gives us an opportunity to enhance our ability to serve members, further our efforts to improve patient safety and continue to promote excellence in emergency nursing."

The Schaumburg headquarters becomes ENA's seventh home since founders Anita Dorr and Judith Kelleher originally launched the association from Dorr's home in Tonawanda, New York in 1970. In the last five decades, ENA has been based in New York; East Lansing, Michigan; at two locations in Chicago; Park Ridge, Illinois; and Des Plaines.

About the Emergency Nurses Association

The Emergency Nurses Association (ENA) is the premier professional nursing association dedicated to defining the future of emergency nursing through advocacy, education, research, innovation, and leadership. Founded in 1970, ENA has proven to be an indispensable resource to the global emergency nursing community. With more than 43,000 members worldwide, ENA advocates for patient safety, develops industry-leading practice standards and guidelines, and guides emergency healthcare public policy. ENA members have expertise in triage, patient care, disaster preparedness, and all aspects of emergency care. Additional information is available at www.ena.org.

ENA Media Contact:

Dan Campana

Senior Manager, PR and Communications

847-460-4017

[email protected]

SOURCE Emergency Nurses Association

Related Links

http://www.ena.org

LEWISTON, Maine, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- If cold temperatures, above-normal snowfall, and biting winds aren't your favorite, you're not going to like the forecast from the 2019 Farmers' Almanac. "Teeth-chattering," "biting," and "stinging" cold are a few of the adjectives the Farmers' Almanac is using to describe the upcoming winter, and not only in northern areas.

Farmers' Almanac Forecasts a Teeth-Chattering Cold Winter

"Contrary to some stories floating around on the internet, our time-tested, long-range formula is pointing towards a very long, cold, and snow-filled winter," reports Editor and Philom., Peter Geiger, adding, "we stand by our forecast and formula, which accurately predicted most of the winter storms last year as well as this summer's steamy, hot conditions."

The 2019 Farmers' Almanac forecasts the coldest weather of this winter season to pour south from Canada and blow into the Northeast, New England, Great Lakes, Ohio Valley, and Southeast during mid-February.

Snow holds barred

The Farmers' Almanac, which bases its long-range forecast on a mathematical and astronomical formula developed in 1818, forewarns of "significant snowfall for parts of its seven zones." Some of this snow may start early with snow predicted in New England and Mid-Atlantic regions during December 2018. Above-normal snowfall is predicted for the Great Lakes states, Midwest, and central and northern New England. The Pacific Northwest and Mid-Atlantic regions of the country are also forecast to have an abundance of snow and wet/icy conditions this winter.

Long Lasting Cold

"According to the calendar spring 2019 starts on March 20th, however, according to our outlook, winter conditions may delay spring for several weeks," states Managing Editor and Philom., Sandi Duncan. In particular, the Farmers' Almanac is "red-flagging" March 20-23 for a potent East Coast storm that could deliver "a wide variety of wintry precipitation just as we are making the transition into spring."

Spring, Summer, Fall Predictions

The 2019 Farmers' Almanac, which features an orange and green cover, breaks the country into 7 zones and provides weather forecasts in 3-day intervals. Each edition includes weather summaries for all four seasons. The 2019 summer forecast calls for "near-normal temperatures for most areas, except for the Southwest states which are predicted to be unusually hot."

For more information on how the Farmers' Almanac makes its long-range forecasts, where and when the cold weather start, go to FarmersAlmanac.com.

SOURCE Farmers' Almanac

Related Links

www.farmersalmanac.com

SANTA ROSA, Calif., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Charles M. Schulz  Sonoma County Airport (STS) announced today that United Airlines will begin air service from to Denver International Airport (DEN) starting March 8, 2019. Expansion of air service to/from Wine Country is a strategic move for both United and STS. Denver and Sonoma County are popular tourism and business destinations and Denver is a major United hub where STS travelers can connect to over 145 destinations on United Airline's expansive worldwide network. Tickets for these daily flights are available for purchase at www.united.com.

The new flights with midday arrival and departure from STS will be operated with Bombardier CRJ 200 regional aircraft.

"This new flight between Sonoma will give Wine Country residents hundreds of options to connect through our mid-continent Denver hub to destinations all over the Midwest, East Coast and to our international network," United President of California Janet Lamkin said. "And the new flight will make it easier for customers in the Midwest and East Coast to plan Wine Country vacations. We are committed to connecting California to the world and bringing the world to California."

Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore says, "This is fantastic news. Denver flights open up Sonoma County to the rest of the United States and beyond for easy and efficient travel. The entire team at the airport, the county and its business partners came together to make this happen. I personally plan to be on the first flight to Denver. Who wants to join me?"

"Sonoma County Tourism is elated with a non-stop flight between Santa Rosa and Denver. Denver is an important feeder market into Sonoma County for both leisure and business travelers and provides a gateway for international travelers as well. Sonoma County Tourism is committed to working with the airport, United Airlines and all affiliated partners to ensure this flight is successful and leads to additional airlift into the destination," says Claudia Vecchio, president/CEO of Sonoma County Tourism.

"It's exciting to welcome new air service to Denver, and United Airlines' decision to open up the Santa Rosa market speaks to Sonoma County's increasing appeal both in the business and leisure markets," said Peter Rumble, CEO of the Santa Rosa Metro Chamber. "We are particularly excited about the opportunity to attract more in-bound travelers from the high-tech sector. Santa Rosa's appeal as a world-class destination and United's addition of nonstop service to Denver addresses a growing need in our market."

"We are excited that United Airlines is extending their service to Denver," said Brad Calkins, executive director of Visit Santa Rosa. "Adding non-stop air service from a strong market like Denver gives both local residents and visitors more travel options including the ability to reach many Midwest and East Coast destinations with one stop from United's major hub in Denver."

Denver has been a targeted destination for over a decade. We are thrilled to finally see this route come to fruition. We are grateful to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, Sonoma County Tourism, Visit Santa Rosa and local chambers and businesses that supported our bid for this service.

For more information about United Airlines, service options and to book a flight, visit www.united.com.

About Charles M. Schulz  Sonoma County Airport (STS)

Located in the heart of Northern California's world-renowned Wine Country, STS is the only airport that offers scheduled air service into the North Bay region. Daily nonstop flights include Alaska Airlines to Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, Portland and Seattle; American Airlines to Phoenix Sky Harbor; Sun Country Airlines to Minnesota and Las Vegas; and United Airlines to San Francisco and Denver. All airlines offer a wide range of connecting flights to destinations in the continental U.S., Mexico and beyond.

Offering a hassle-free experience with shorter lines, the Charles M. Schulz  Sonoma County Airport also features convenient ground transportation, easy and affordable parking, the Alaska Airlines Wine Flies Free program and the on-site Sky Lounge Steakhouse & Sushi Bar.

For additional airport information about Charles M. Schulz  Sonoma County Airport, visit flysts.com. Follow STS on Facebook and Twitter.

For further information, journalists are asked to contact airport manager Jon Stout at [email protected] or (707) 565-7243.

SOURCE Charles M. Schulz - Sonoma County Airport

Related Links

http://flysts.com

WASHINGTON, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The City of Galax, Virginia and Giles County, Virginia, represented by Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP, Kaufman & Canoles, P.C., and The Cicala Law Firm PLLC today initiated legal action against opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) for their role in creating the public health emergency caused by prescription opioids.

Galax and Giles County filed the lawsuits in state court against more than 15 opioid manufacturers, distributors, and PBMs  including pharmaceutical titan Purdue Pharma and worldwide distributor McKesson. The lawsuits allege that each defendant contributes to the opioid crisis in Southwest Virginiadrug manufacturers make the drugs and mispresent the truth about their benefits and addiction risks to doctors and patients; wholesale distributors ignore their responsibilities to report and stop suspicious orders of opioids leading to drug diversion to the black market; and PBMs leverage their role as middlemen to increase the flow of opioids into the marketplace. Galax and Giles County have alleged violations of statutory and common law public nuisance, the Virginia Consumer Protection Act, fraud, common law conspiracy, negligence, and unjust enrichment.

The defendants include manufacturers Purdue Pharma, Abbott Laboratories, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals; Teva Pharmaceuticals, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Cephalon, Inc., Barr Laboratories, Inc., Actavis Pharma, Watson Laboratories, Inc., Allergan PLC, and Insys Therapeutics; distributors AmerisourceBergen Drug Corp., Cardinal Health Inc., and McKesson Corp.; and PBMs Express Scripts, Inc., CVS Health; United Health Group Inc., and OptumRx, Inc.

The harmful impact of opioids in Galax and Giles County cannot be overstated. The rate of emergency department visits for opioid overdoses, which was high in Galax to begin with, jumped from four times the statewide rate in 2015 to five times the statewide rate in 2016 and more than six times the statewide rate in 2017. In Giles County, the rate of Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome has been alarmingly high, and peaked in 2014 at more than eleven times greater than the statewide rate in Virginia. The rate of reported Hepatitis C cases in Galax and Giles County has been high, and in Galax, it peaked at an alarmingly high rate of 2,832 cases per 100,000 adults in 2015. That rate is more than thirty times greater than the statewide rate that year. Both communities have lost numerous citizens to opioid overdoses in recent years.

As relatively small municipalities, the financial cost of the opioid epidemic has been tremendous for Galax and Giles County. For example, the influx of opioids into Galax has led to a startling rise in the need for foster care and other child placement services in the City. Over the last five fiscal years, the City's spending on foster care and related child-placement services increased 178%. Giles County has borne a similarly significant financial burden as a result of the opioid epidemic. For example, the County's mandatory contribution to the New River Valley Regional Jail has increased by 49% over the last seven years because of an increase in the number of inmates from Giles County. This increase in the inmate population is directly correlated with an increase in criminal activity attributable to the opioid epidemic. The lawsuit aims to recover these costs and costs associated with the purchase of opioids prescribed to City and County employees.

"We are pleased to represent Galax and Giles County as they seek to hold the defendants accountable for their reprehensible actions and recover the funds these communities have spent to address the impact of the opioid crisis. The citizens of Galax and Giles County deserve justice for the harms inflicted upon them by the defendants and our respective firms are proud to take on this fight on their behalf," said Kevin H. Sharp of Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP.

Joanne Cicala added, "the opioid epidemic is not accidental. It is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made crisis. And worse  the companies that did this were not just seeking to build market share  they knew they were creating addicts. No local government wants to have to file a lawsuit. Local governments have enough to do already, providing services to the public on tight budgets. But this man-made crisis is costing Galax, Giles County, and communities like them dearly  and so they must respond. Those responsible for this epidemic  those who profited from it  must be held accountable for its costs."

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, Nashville, Baltimore, San Francisco, and San Diego. 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 specializes in civil rights and general public interest cases, representing plaintiffs with claims of employment discrimination, labor and wage violations, predatory lending, consumer fraud, 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.

About The Cicala Law Firm PLLC

The Cicala Law Firm PLLC is a plaintiff's civil litigation firm with particular expertise in prosecuting commercial, consumer and health care fraud matters on behalf of individuals, businesses and governmental clients. It maintains a diverse, experienced and nimble team comprised of attorneys, analysts, health care and IT professionals. The firm is committed to taking advantage of cutting edge technology to identity claims and particularize damages, including through data mining. The firm has the ability to do this work in-house which permits substantial cost savings for its clients. In addition to its litigation and big data services, The Cicala Law Firm is available for health care cost containment efforts such as pharmacy benefit claims evaluation. It welcomes strategic partnerships with other firms where its competencies may complement those of the collaborating firm.

For more information go to www.cicalapllc.com or call (512) 275-6550 or email [email protected].

Media Contact: Jamie Moss, newsPRos, 201 788 0142; [email protected]

SOURCE Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP

Related Links

http://www.sanfordheisler.com

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) will host a conference call for investors at 8:00 a.m. (Eastern Time) on Monday, August 27th, to review the Phase 3 MARINER and COMMANDER HF studies for XARELTO presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2018. James List, M.D., Ph.D., Global Therapeutic Area Head, Cardiovascular & Metabolism, Janssen Research and Development, LLC.; Vanessa Broadhurst, President, Cardiovascular & Metabolism, Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Christopher DelOrefice, Vice President, Investor Relations 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 September 6, 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 13682919.

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PORTLAND, Oregon, August 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Significant increase in adoption of battery cases and rise in demand for wireless accessories in the Asia-Pacific region are the major factors boosting the growth of the global battery case market.

Allied Market Research published a report, titled, Battery Case Market by Price Range (Low, Medium, and Premium) and Distribution Channel (Online and Offline): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2018-2025. According to the report, the global battery case market was valued at $4.12 billion in 2017, and is expected to garner $8.98 billion, registering a CAGR of 10.0% from 2018 to 2025. The report includes insights on the top winning strategies; dynamic factors such as driver, restraints, challenges, and opportunities; leading market players; and key strategic moves.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/636519/Allied_Market_Research_Logo.jpg )



Surge in demand for smartphones, advancements in battery technology, and increased penetration of internet for personal and business activities are the major drivers of the global battery case market. Moreover, rapid surge in demand for wireless accessories has supplemented the growth of the market. However, frequent compatibility issues faced by consumers has proven to be detrimental for the market growth. On the contrary, high demand for portable battery packs for use in applications ranging from power tools to small electronic devices offers remunerative opportunities for the market players in the long run.

Request Sample Report at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/5031

Medium-priced battery cases to experience highest demand by 2025

The report classifies the battery cases market on the basis of price into low, medium, and premium. The premium segment accounted for $145.3 million in 2017, contributing more than 58% of the total market share. However, medium-priced battery cases would portray the highest demand, registering a CAGR of 12.7% during the forecast period.

Online distribution channel segment to grow at a CAGR of 10.5% by 2025

The global battery case market report splits the distribution channel segment into online and offline. In 2017, offline distribution channel accounted for one-fourth share of the total market revenue. However, the online distribution channel would demonstrate the fastest growth through 2025, generating $6.84 billion.

For Purchase Enquiry: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/5031

Asia-Pacific to manifest fastest growth throughout forecast period

The geographical regions analyzed in the report include North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and LAMEA. North America region dominated the global battery case market in 2017, contributing nearly half of the market share. However, Asia-Pacific region is expected to witness the highest demand for battery cases, growing at the fastest CAGR of 14.0% from 2018 to 2025, followed by LAMEA.

Money-makers in the market

The major market players are discussed in the report, including Apple, Inc., Otterbox, Incipio, ZeroLemon LLC, Maxboost, Samsung, ZAGG Inc., EMTEC, Alpatronix, and Anker Innovations Ltd. These market leaders have adopted various market strategies such as new product launch, mergers & acquisitions, partnerships, and collaborations to gain a strong foothold in the global battery case industry.

Access KNOWLEDGE TREE (Premium on-demand, subscription-based pricing model) at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/knowledgetree

Knowledge tree is a cloud-based intelligence platform that offers more than 2,000 selective, off-the-shelf reports on niche markets to enable our clients gain deep insights on the latest trends, dynamic technologies, and emerging application areas.

Similar Reports:

U.S. Mobile Phone Accessories Market - Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2018 - 2025

Wireless Charging Market - Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2017 - 2023

About Us

Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business-consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Portland, Oregon. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports" and "Business Intelligence Solutions." AMR has a targeted view to provide business insights and consulting to assist its clients to make strategic business decisions and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain.

We are in professional corporate relations with various companies and this helps us in digging out market data that helps us generate accurate research data tables and confirms utmost accuracy in our market forecasting. Each and every data presented in the reports published by us is extracted through primary interviews with top officials from leading companies of domain concerned. Our secondary data procurement methodology includes deep online and offline research and discussion with knowledgeable professionals and analysts in the industry.



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Web: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com

SOURCE Allied Market ResearchVANCOUVER, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Namaste Technologies Inc. ("Namaste" or the "Company") (TSXV: N) (FRANKFURT: M5BQ) (OTCMKTS: NXTTF) is pleased to announce that the Company has signed a bulk cannabis supply agreement (the "Supply Agreement") with GTEC Holdings Ltd. ("GTEC") (TSXV: GTEC) (OTCPK: GGTTF), whereby Namaste's wholly owned subsidiary and Health Canada's Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes ("ACMPR") late-stage applicant, Cannmart Inc. ("Cannmart") will purchase bulk cannabis flower and oil from GTEC for resale in Cannmart's online platform. Cannmart will be Canada's first ACMPR Licensed Producer ("LP") with a "sales-only" license, allowing the Company to leverage its e-commerce expertise to become Canada's leading cannabis online retailer.

This Supply Agreement further demonstrates Namaste's ability to secure a strong supply chain to help service Namaste's growing list of patients, and execute on its strategy to create Canada's largest online retail cannabis platform. GTEC is a Kelowna-based LP which owns and operates several cultivation facilities, and Namaste anticipates GTEC becoming a key supplier for Cannmart's platform. With the upcoming roll-out of recreational cannabis and with an anticipated short-term national supply shortage, cannabis supply agreements are now more important than ever to Namaste's long-term strategy. This Supply Agreement further demonstrates Namastes ability to secure a strong supply chain with multiple LP's.

Namaste's e-commerce platform and technology will continue to drive innovation that will have a major impact on the way in which patients can access medical cannabis online. Namaste's goal is to create the most comprehensive user experience possible by personalizing product and strain recommendations through the integration of its AI technology, by providing convenient access to healthcare practitioners, and by driving cannabis sales through Cannmart.

With the recent launch of NamsteMD's ("NamasteMD.com") Google Android App, the company expects to see exponential growth having recently reached over 14,000 registered users. The continuous acceleration and strong supply channels have Namaste well-positioned to integrate cannabis sales within its e-commerce platform. The Company has been overwhelmed with support from its LP partners who see Namaste's vision to become the global leader in online retail for all things cannabis.

Management Commentary

Norton Singhavon, Chairman and CEO of GTEC comments: "GTEC is actively pursuing long-term supply agreements with Licensed Producers whose core competencies are complementary to our own. Accordingly, we are very excited about our partnership with CannMart and Namaste. We believe that GreenTec's ability to cultivate and market high-quality craft cannabis provides an excellent fit with Cannmart's packaging and distribution capabilities, and Namaste's ability to develop a robust network of medical cannabis patients".

Sean Dollinger, President, and CEO of Namaste comments: "We have been working on securing this Supply Agreement with GTEC for several months and are thrilled to see this come together nicely. GTEC operates multiple facilities and will be launching a new production facility in Kelowna shortly. We're pleased to have secured another strong supplier for Cannmart.

We're expecting to receive our sales license very soon and are highly focused on expansion of our patient network and in curating a high-quality offering of cannabis products for our customers. During a time where inventory remains on shortage with many vendors, we are proud to have partners like GTEC who see value in the platform which we've created. Thanks to GTEC's management team for supporting Namaste in its efforts to become Canada's leading online cannabis retailer and we're looking forward to a strong partnership together"

About GTEC Holdings Inc.

GTEC was founded in 2017 to capitalize on opportunities in the nascent and rapidly growing legal cannabis industry. GTEC is focused on growing premium quality craft cannabis in purpose-built indoor facilities. The Company also has a number of retail cannabis initiatives in Western Canada. GTEC currently holds a 100% interest in GreenTec Bio-Pharmaceuticals Corp., Tumbleweed Farms Corp., Falcon Ridge Naturals Ltd., Alberta Craft Cannabis Inc., Grey Bruce Farms Inc., Zenalytic Laboratories Ltd. and Spectre Labs Inc. GTEC is a publicly-traded corporation based in Kelowna, British Columbia. The Company's shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange and OTC Pink Sheets.

About Namaste Technologies Inc.

Namaste Technologies is Your Everything Cannabis Store. Namaste operates the largest global cannabis e-commerce platform with over 30 websites in 20+ countries under various brands. Namaste's product offering through its subsidiaries includes vaporizers, glassware, accessories, CBD products, and the company will soon be selling medical cannabis in the Canadian market, subject to approval by Health Canada.

Namaste has developed and acquired innovative technology platforms including NamasteMD.com, Canada's first Health Canada compliant telemedicine application, and in May 2018 the Company acquired a leading e-commerce AI and Machine Learning Company, Findify AB. Findify uses artificial intelligence algorithms to optimize and personalize a consumer's on-site buying experience. Namaste is focused on leveraging its cutting-edge technology to enhance the user experience throughout its platforms. Namaste will continue to develop and acquire innovative technologies which will provide value to the Company and to its shareholders as well as to the broader cannabis market.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

"Sean Dollinger"

Chief Executive Officer

Direct: +1 (604) 355-6100

Email: [email protected]

Further information on the Company and its products can be accessed through the links below:

NamasteTechnologies.com

NamasteMD.com

NamasteVapes.ca

Everyonedoesit.ca

FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION This press release contains forward-looking information based on current expectations. These statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements. Although such statements are based on management's reasonable assumptions, Namaste assumes no responsibility to update or revise forward-looking information to reflect new events or circumstances unless required by law. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. These statements speak only as of the date of this press release. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks including various risk factors discussed in the Company's disclosure documents which can be found under the Company's profile on www.sedar.com. This press 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. The TSXV has neither reviewed nor approved the contents of this press release.

SOURCE Namaste Technologies Inc.Strategic portfolio of 6 granted exploration licenses and 2 exploration licenses under application (357.5 km 2 ).

and (357.5 km ). Rights to explore and mine for any Conglomerate Gold on the Property.

Directly adjacent to Haoma Mining's Marble Bar tenements where numerous nuggets have been recovered from conglomerates at the Just in Time deposit (Haoma report for quarter ended September 30, 2017 ).

). Calidus has recovered nuggets adjacent to a mapped conglomerate and has mapped various sulphidic conglomerates in the conglomerate gold rights area (Calidus 23 November 2017 ).

). Conglomerate Gold rights are part of the tenement package that Calidus is exploring that currently hosts the expanding Warrawoona gold project (Figure 3 below). Warrawoona's current global resource is estimated to be 10.5M tonnes @ 2.11g/t Au for 712,000 ounces of gold. (See details below.) .

tonnes @ 2.11g/t Au for 712,000 ounces of gold. (See details below.) . Calidus is embarking on a pre-feasibility study in the first half of 2019. If a standalone gold plant is built at Warrawoona, Pacton has a right to negotiate access on commercial terms following plant construction.

"Securing the conglomerate gold rights over this significant portfolio of tenements from Calidus further consolidates Pacton's position in the Pilbara region of Western Australia." commented Alec Pismiris, Interim President and CEO of Pacton.

The Conglomerate Gold rights encompass eight tenements that cover all known Mt Roe basalt occurrences on Calidus' tenements. In total, the tenements have 40 km of outcropping Mt Roe basalt that have seen limited exploration. Access is very easy with all outcrops being within a few kilometres of major roads, thereby allowing rapid access for Pacton.

The Marble Bar application lies along strike from Haoma Mining's Just in Time prospect, where the discovery of numerous gold nuggets was announced in Haoma's September 30, 2017 quarterly report.

The Callidus Warrawoona project is an orogenic deposit which is currently being aggressively drilled. Warrawoona's global resource is currently represented as 10.5M tonnes @ 2.11g/t Au for 712,000 ounces of gold. (Published by Calidus on December 17, 2017)

the Klondyke Prospect has a current 2012 JORC Code compliant Inferred Resource of 9.9M t at 2.06g/t Au for 654,000 ounces, and includes 532,000 ounces in the Indicated Category;

t at 2.06g/t Au for 654,000 ounces, and includes 532,000 ounces in the Indicated Category; the Copenhagen Prospect has a current 2012 JORC Code compliant Inferred Resource of 180,000t @ 6.1g/t Au for 36,000 ounces;

the Fieldings Gully Prospect has a current 2012 JORC Code compliant Resource of 0.4Mt @ 1.65g/t Au for 22,000 ounces;

LOI Terms

Under the terms of the LOI, which will be formalized by a definitive agreement among the parties, the Company will pay a non-refundable payment of CDN$10,000 and issue to Calidus or its nominees 7,000,000 common shares. The LOI includes a right to deferred compensation whereby Calidus may receive up to 3,000,000 additional common shares of Pacton on the first anniversary of completion of the transaction based on the 30-day VWAP of Pacton's shares on the date of such issuance.

This transaction is subject to the acceptance of the TSX Venture Exchange.

The Company also announces that Alfred Stewart has resigned as a director.

About Pacton Gold

Pacton Gold (TSXV: PAC) (OTC: PACXF) is a well-financed Canadian junior with key strategic partners focused on the exploration and development of conglomerate-hosted gold properties located in the district-scale Pilbara gold rush in Western Australia. The Company recently raised approximately $5.5 million, currently controls the third largest conglomerate-hosted gold property portfolio totaling in excess of 2,500 km2, and continues to aggressively review additional accretive acquisitions.

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Peter Caldbick, P.Geo., a director of the Company and a Qualified Person pursuant to National Instrument 43-101. The qualified person has not yet verified the data disclosed, including sampling, analytical, and test data underlying the information or opinions contained in the written disclosure.

On Behalf of the Board of Pacton Gold Inc.

Alec Pismiris

Interim President & CEO

This news release may contain or refer to forward-looking information based on current expectations, including, but not limited to the Company acquiring the Conglomerate Gold rights, the prospect of the Company achieving success in exploring the Property and the impact on the Company of these events, including the effect on its share price. Forward-looking information is subject to significant risks and uncertainties, as actual results may differ materially from forecasted results. Forward-looking information is provided as of the date hereof and we assume no responsibility to update or revise such information to reflect new events or circumstances. References to other issuers with nearby projects is for information purposes only and there are no assurances the Company will achieve similar results.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange, the Toronto Stock Exchange nor their 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 Pacton Gold Inc.KIRKLAND, Wash., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Prevencio, Inc. today announces data demonstrating its HART PAD test accurately diagnoses peripheral artery disease (PAD) in diabetes mellitus (DM) patients, a patient population in which PAD prevalence has traditionally been difficult to assess. Researchers believe these important findings, presented August 25 at the 2018 European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress in Munich, Germany, could lead to early identification of PAD and improve patient clinical outcomes, as well as prevent patients without PAD from undergoing unnecessary, expensive, and invasive tests.

The study is follow-on to data presented at the American Diabetes Association (ADA) 2018 Scientific Sessions in June 2018 demonstrating Prevencio's HART CAD and HART CVE tests accurately diagnose coronary artery disease (CAD) and predict the risk for major adverse cardiac events (MACE) in DM patients. Similar to CAD, PAD is commonly due to atherosclerosis, a plaque buildup in the arteries which restricts blood flow.

In this study, researchers assessed the company's AI-driven HART PAD diagnostic test on patients enrolled in Massachusetts General Hospital's (MGH) Catheter Sampled Blood Archive in Cardiovascular Disease (CASABLANCA) study. The HART PAD test algorithmically assesses six biomarkers linked to atherosclerosis, as well as a patient's history of hypertension. In patients with DM, the HART PAD panel had excellent performance for diagnosis of PAD. Using a 5-point score, a score of 1 had a 100% Negative Predictive Value (NPV) and a score of 5 had a 95% Positive Predictive Value (PPV). Additionally, the HART PAD panel was highly accurate in predicting the need for revascularization in patients with PAD. These results were comparable to those patients without DM.

Principal investigator James L. Januzzi, MD, practicing cardiologist at MGH and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, said, "The HART PAD test may allow for the diagnosis and treatment of many more patients with currently undetected PAD. In the clinical setting, these findings could assist physicians to identify peripheral artery disease earlier, provide guideline-recommended care, and monitor at-risk patients for vascular complications. We believe HART tests could also play an important role in identifying high risk patients for enrollment in clinical trials, thereby saving time and lowering overall trial costs."

PAD affects more than 202 million people worldwide and is often underdiagnosed and undertreated until the disease has reached advanced stages. Patients with DM are at substantial risk of developing PAD. Patients with PAD have increased risk of CAD, heart attack, or stroke, and, if left untreated, PAD can lead to foot or leg amputation. Prevencio has also developed the HART AMP to accurately predict a patient's risk for amputation.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 30 million Americans have diabetes and the total direct and indirect costs associated with patients diagnosed with diabetes total $327 billion annually.

"This ESC presentation adds to the growing volume of presented and published scientific literature supporting the accuracy and clinical benefit of our novel HART tests," said Rhonda Rhyne, Prevencio's Chief Executive Officer. "The potential of our HART tests to fulfill the urgent need for alternative, reliable, and cost-effective cardiovascular diagnostic and monitoring solutions is encouraging, especially for diabetic patients. For this underserved patient population, PAD and CAD can result in significant morbidity and mortality due to lack of diagnosis and timely treatment."

Rhyne added, "On behalf of the Prevencio team, I would like to extend sincere gratitude to Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Januzzi and his researchers, and Myriad RBM for their significant contributions to date and their continued dedication in developing and validating Prevencio's novel HART tests."

About Prevencio HART Tests:

Powered by AI, Prevencio is revolutionizing blood tests for cardiovascular disease. Employing this novel approach, the company has produced five blood tests to date that significantly improve diagnoses for a variety of heart and blood vessel-related complications.

These tests are:

HART CAD   obstructive coronary artery disease diagnosis HART CVE   1-year risk of heart attack, stroke or cardiac death HART PAD   peripheral artery disease diagnosis HART AS   aortic valve stenosis diagnosis HART AMP   risk of amputation

HART test results have been presented at leading cardiovascular meetings  (European Society of Cardiology Congress Scientific Sessions  2016, American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions  2017, American Heart Association Scientific Sessions  2017, American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions  2018, American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions  2018, and European Society of Cardiology Congress Scientific Sessions  2018).

HART test results have also been published in top-tier cardiology journals (Journal of American College of Cardiology  March 2017, American Journal of Cardiology  July 2017, and Clinical Cardiology  June 2018).

About Prevencio, Inc.:

Prevencio's value proposition is "Preventing the Preventable  That is, preventing unnecessary procedures and related side effects, as well as improving patient outcomes and clinical trials through more accurate blood tests for Cardiovascular Disease conditions. Prevencio utilizes Machine Learning (Artificial Intelligence) + Multi-Proteomic Biomarkers + Proprietary Algorithms to deliver cardiovascular diagnostic & prognostic tests that are significantly more accurate than standard-of-care stress tests, individual biomarkers, genetic markers and clinical risk scores. The company is headquartered in Kirkland, Washington. For additional information, visit www.PrevencioMed.com. PrevencioPreventing the Preventable.

About the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress:

The ESC Congress is the world's largest meeting on cardiovascular disease. Over 30,000 healthcare professionals and 500 journalists from 150 countries attend the five-day event.

Forward-Looking (Safe Harbor) Statement:

Except for historical and factual information contained herein, this press release contains forward-looking statements, such as market need, acceptance, size, and penetration rates, the accuracy of which is necessarily subject to uncertainties and risks including the Company's sole dependence on HART technology and various uncertainties characteristic of development-stage companies. The Company does not undertake to update the disclosures contained in this press release.

Company Contact:

Prevencio, Inc.

(425) 576-1200

[email protected]

SOURCE Prevencio, Inc.

Related Links

https://www.prevenciomed.com

NINGBO, China, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Risen Energy Co., Ltd. recently announced that the company has signed an agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), whereby the two sides will engage in a series of in-depth collaborations concerning technology R&D, talent development and retention, as well as information sharing.

Established in 1948, the MIT ILP is dedicated to creating and strengthening mutually beneficial relationships between MIT and corporations worldwide. ILP, the largest program of its kind worldwide, is a division established by MIT specifically to communicate and collaborate with the outside world. It is also a key portal and guide through which global companies can reach out to communicate with MIT. Nearly 100 industry leaders including Apple, 3M and Samsung have joined the program.

According to the agreement, ILP will monitor and analyze cutting-edge technologies and innovative applications across the global PV power sector, and provide technically innovative solutions in line with Risen Energy's own business development and technology planning needs. In addition, ILP will introduce professors and researchers in related fields to Risen Energy and assist the company in cooperating with professors at MIT.

Risen Energy said, "The market demand for high-efficiency, high-quality products is increasing. Through the cooperation, Risen Energy expects to achieve breakthroughs in product R&D and technology development by leveraging the superior resources of MIT and ILP. We believe that the successful cooperation between us will allow Risen Energy to assume a leadership role in the global PV industry."

In order to further promote grid parity, Risen Energy has accelerated the development and large-scale application of innovative technologies in recent years. With a focus on boosting the performance and reliability of its products while lowering costs, the company has undertaken significant efforts to improve the efficiency and optimize the structure of its battery modules, enhance product quality and eliminate outdated capacity. In terms of the core strategy concerning its half-cut cell product line, Risen Energy plans to develop conventional, double-glass, bifacial and smart half-cut cell modules in phases according to market demand. Looking ahead, the company will continue its focus on development in the renewable energy and new material fields, and building a business portfolio encompassing battery modules, energy storage and new materials.

SOURCE Risen Energy Co., LtdNEW YORK, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum revs up Labor Day this summer by partnering with Harley-Davidson for its 115th Anniversary Celebration. Held in Milwaukee from Wednesday, August 29 to Sunday, September 2, the festival includes five full days of festivities and plays host to an exclusive mobile museum featuring the outside-the-lines work of biker and tattoo artist Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins, the American-made rum's namesake. Spike TV's "Ink Master" star Oliver Peck will be onsite during the festival, giving a limited number of free Sailor Jerry flash art tattoos to lucky attendees, the art selected at random from his famous gumball machine. The event will also feature select bikes from the Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum and Harley-Davidson's joint "My Work Speaks for Itself" design contest, with winners from across the nation showcasing their Norman Collins' inspired designs on 2018 Street Bobs. Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum's presence at the festival salutes the father of American tattooing's legacy by spotlighting his iconic work and the link shared between these two true legends of Americana culture.

"The partnership between Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum and Harley-Davidson is brought to life with the mobile museum installation at the Harley-Davidson 115th Anniversary Celebration," said Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum Ambassador Ashley Thomas. "There is no better way to spotlight the lasting impression of this American legend than within a curated space honoring Norman Collins' famous work and life's passion. Showcased in the hometown of American motorcycle culture, Norman, an avid rider, would feel right at home."

Featuring the culture-defining, self-defined art from Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins himself, the installation is a must-see for tattoo fanatics across the nation. In true Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum fashion, select bars and restaurants throughout Milwaukee will be serving smooth-as-hell cocktails alongside the five-day event.

Both Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum and Harley-Davidson are deeply rooted in rich American history. After serving in the U.S. Navy during WWII, Norman Collins dedicated his life honing the art of tattooing out of his shop on Hotel Street in Honolulu, where his shop became the must-stop destination for sailors on shore-leave. His unique flash-art style started a movement that endures to this day. Harley-Davidson, named after founders William S. Harley, Arthur Davidson, William A. Davidson and Walter Davidson, has been an American icon dating back to its establishment in 1903. Since its first motorcycle, Harley-Davidson has been dedicated to fulfilling dreams of personal freedom  from exceptional custom experiences, innovative products and precise manufacturing. The continued partnership between the two brands at Harley-Davidson 115th Anniversary Celebration cements two iconic legends within the cultural pantheon and honors their respective values and passions.

To learn more about Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum, log onto www.sailorjerry.com.

To learn more about the Harley-Davidson 115th Anniversary event visit www.harleydavidson.com.

RESPECT HIS LEGACY. DRINK SAILOR JERRY RESPONSIBLY. NEVER DRINK & DRIVE.

2018 Sailor Jerry Rum, 46% Alc./Vol. William Grant & Sons, Inc. New York, NY.

About Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum

Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum was created to honor Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins, a Navy vet who built his rep inking soldiers and sailors in WWII-era Honolulu where he established his legendary tattoo parlor and himself as the undisputed father of American old school tattooing. Crafted in the traditional Navy way by William Grant & Sons, Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum is bold and smooth, with hints of caramel and vanilla. Just like the man who inspired it, this 92 proof rum speaks for itself and holds itself to the traditional values and standards of craftsmanship that Norman Collins espoused. Made in America from Caribbean Rum and blended with spices including ginger, cinnamon, clove and vanilla, Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum is an exceptionally smooth drink with an ABV of 46%. From the liquid itself to the packaging, every detail of Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum stays true to the vision of Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins. For more information, visit www.sailorjerry.com or follow www.twitter.com/sailorjerry and www.facebook.com/SailorJerry.

About William Grant & Sons

William Grant & Sons Holdings Ltd is an independent family-owned distiller headquartered in the United Kingdom and founded by William Grant in 1887. Today, the global premium spirits company is run by the fifth generation of his family and distills some of the world's leading brands of Scotch whisky, including the world's most awarded single malt Glenfiddich, The Balvenie range of handcrafted single malts and the world's third largest blended Scotch, Grant's, as well as other iconic spirits brands such as Hendrick's Gin, Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum, Tullamore D.E.W. Irish Whiskey, Monkey Shoulder Blended Malt Scotch Whisky and Drambuie Scotch Liqueur.

William Grant & Sons has been honored as "Distiller of the Year" by the prestigious International Wine & Spirit Competition and International Spirits Challenge 11 times over the past 12 years.

Founded in 1964, William Grant & Sons USA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of William Grant & Sons, Ltd. and features one of the fastest growing spirits portfolios in the USA with brands including Glenfiddich, The Balvenie, Hendrick's Gin, Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum, Tullamore D.E.W. Irish Whiskey, Drambuie, Milagro Tequila, Grant's, Hudson Whiskey, Gibson's Finest, Monkey Shoulder, Clan MacGregor, Reyka Vodka, Solerno Blood Orange Liqueur, Montelobos Mezcal, Ancho Reyes, Flor de Cana Rum, The Knot and Raynal French Brandy. For more information on the company and its brands, please visit www.grantusa.com.

SOURCE Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum

Related Links

https://sailorjerry.com

INDIANA, Pa., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- S&T Bank, a full-service financial institution with assets of $7.1 billion, and locations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, is proud to announce today that it has been awarded a 2018 Top Workplaces honor by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for its dedication to cultivating a positive workplace culture. The award recipients were chosen based on positive reviews and feedback from employees.

"Building relationships is at the heart of what we do, and that all starts with our employees," said Todd D. Brice, president and CEO of S&T Bank. "Our Bank's culture is centered not only on serving our customers, but ensuring that our employees have the support, resources, and relationships they need to grow personally and professionally. I am humbled to know that our employees are proud to work for S&T Bank. They truly define who we are."

The third-party survey was 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.

"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."

S&T Bank was also recognized as a 2018 Forbes Best-In-State Bank in early July, ranking second out of all banks in Pennsylvania, based on customer satisfaction. Both of these honors emphasize the positive impact S&T Bank continues to have on employees and customers alike.

For more information about S&T Bank, please visit www.stbank.com.

About S&T Bancorp, Inc. and S&T Bank: S&T Bancorp, Inc. is a $7.1 billion bank holding company that is headquartered in Indiana, Pa. and trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol STBA. Its principal subsidiary, S&T Bank, was established in 1902, and operates locations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. For more information visit www.stbancorp.com, www.stbank.com, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

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.

SOURCE S&T BankHANGZHOU, China, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Recently, a promotion from the Tourism Bureau of Xiaoshan Hangzhou, with the slogan of "Tourism improves the world and life", has become a highlight on the large screen overlooking New York's Times Square. Passers-by took notice of the promotion and stopped to take in the beautiful scenery of Xiaoshan on the digital screen overhead. They observed an aerial view of Xianghu, a scenic area in China surrounded by mountains, with the reflection on the water of the lake, mirroring the sunset glow in the sky. Siting Bridge, with its oriental charm, straddles the lake, telling the story of the area's 8,000-year culture built up around the bridge. At Times Square, Xiaoshan was sincere in its invitation to visitors from all over the world.

With abundant tourism resources and a long history, Xiaoshan is known in China as the place of "heaven and treasure". In 2016, the G20 Hangzhou Summit was held nearby, at Hangzhou International Expo Center. It was also the year that Xiaoshan climbed onto the international stage for its beauty.

In December 2017, the World Tourism Alliance (WTA) established its headquarters in Xianghu, the "Mother's Lake" of Xiaoshan, creating an important platform through which Hangzhou was able to demonstrate its brand to the world. It was also a milestone event in the development of the district, accelerating the growth in tourism. This September, WTA will hold its 2nd annual meeting, the board of directors event and the "WTA - Dialogue in Xianghu" series of campaigns in Xiaoshan, where business and tourism leaders will gather. Accordingly, the international tourism community will have a brand campaign named after Xianghu.

With a focus on three priorities including the establishment of the WTA headquarters, the development of Xianghu as a key national tourism destination and the building of A-rated scenic villages, Xiaoshan has accelerated the pace of the growth of its tourism sector this year with the goal of attracting international visitors, promoting the district's development through a combination of tourism, conventions and exhibitions.

Xiaoshan is home to one National Tourist Resort and five national scenic spots that have received AAAA ratings from the China National Tourism Administration. The Xianghu-rim region has already developed several scenic spots that have received the coveted rating including Hangzhou Paradise Park, Polar Ocean Park and Oriental Culture Park. Other key tourism projects including Kaiyuan Forest Xianghu Resort and Xianghu Carefree Manor will soon open their doors to travelers from around the world. With the establishment of the WTA headquarters there, Xianghu is well on its way to becoming a world-class tourism destination.

In line with Zhejiang province's goal of converting 10,000 villages into tourist attractions, Xiaoshan has put in place a five-year action plan for implementing a rural revitalization strategy and transforming Xiaoshan, aiming to have available an array of authentic redeveloped villages by the end of the five-year period. For the first time, this year's Xiaoshan International Tourism Festival will feature a variety of events with local characteristics including the Waxberry Festival, the Cherry Festival, the Sanqing Tea Culture Festival and the Nian Gao (New Year Cake) Festival.

Taking advantage of the opportune period between Hangzhou's hosting of the G20 summit and its hosting of the Asian Games, Xiaoshan has embarked on a new journey to take its place on the international stage.

SOURCE The Tourism Bureau of Xiaoshan HangzhouTORONTO, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- 7D Surgical Inc announced today that it has entered into a new supply agreement for the distribution of 7D Surgical's innovative image guidance technologies with LifeHealthcare Group Limited. LifeHealthcare is a leading independent provider of medical devices and healthcare solutions in Australia and New Zealand. 7D Surgical develops advanced optical technologies and machine vision-based registration algorithms to improve surgical workflow in spine and cranial image guidance. This is 7D Surgical's first partnership outside of North America.

"Finding the right partner is paramount as 7D Surgical expands into key global markets. We could not be more pleased to select the experienced and passionate team at LifeHealthcare to represent the MvIGS technology," said Beau Standish, CEO of 7D Surgical. "Surgeons in Australia and New Zealand have demonstrated wide adoption of image guidance technology over the last decade. We think that our significant improvements to surgical workflow, efficiency, and accuracy, while eliminating the unnecessary radiation exposure, will be a hit with this group."

Matt Muscio, LifeHealthcare's CEO, stated, "I am very pleased to announce a new three-year contract with 7D Surgical through 2021. As Australia and New Zealand's largest distributor of spinal prosthesis, we are looking forward to working with 7D Surgical to solve some of the problems experienced by surgeons in traditional image guided surgery, such as slow registration processes that rely on intraoperative X-rays. We are excited by 7D Surgical's strong innovation pipeline and believe their low-cost value proposition focusing on theatre efficiency is appropriate for ANZ in the face of rising healthcare costs."

About 7D Surgical

7D Surgical is a privately-owned Toronto based company that develops advanced optical technologies and machine vision-based registration algorithms to improve surgical workflow and patient care. 7D Surgical's flagship FDA 510(k)-cleared and Health Canada approved MvIGS system delivers profound improvement to surgical workflows in spine surgery, and similar benefits for its newly FDA 510(k)-cleared Cranial Application. The underlying technology provides the promise of similar future advancements for other surgical specialties. See Flash Registration: https://7dsurgical.com/7d-surgical-system/spine-navigation/. See Flash Fix: http://7dsurgical.com/7d-surgical-system/flash-technology/.



About LifeHealthcare

LifeHealthcare has been recognized as one of the Financial Times 1,000 High Growth Companies in Asia-Pacific. In May 2018 LifeHealthcare was acquired by Australia's largest private equity fund, Pacific Equity Partners, a market leader that has been recognized as a Top 20 Consistent Performer Globally by Prequin.

7D Surgical joins LifeHealthcare's growing list of distribution partners of spinal implants and associated technologies including K2M, Australian Biotechnologies, Mazor Robotics, Samsung Neurologica Mobile CT and Mizuho Osi.

For further information contact:

Beau Standish, CEO

7D Surgical

+1 647 484-0078

www.7Dsurgical.com

[email protected]

Kristine James

General Manager Corporate Development

LifeHealthcare

+61 2 8114 1534

[email protected]

www.lifehealthcare.com.au

SOURCE 7D Surgical

Related Links

http://www.7Dsurgical.com

SEATTLE, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lumber prices in the US have experienced a spectacular surge in 2017 and the first half of 2018. By the end of the 2Q/18, the benchmark lumber price index reported by the market report Random Lengths reached its highest level in at least 30 years. From January 2017 to June 2018, average prices for commonly traded lumber in the US increased by 40%. During the same period, sawlog prices were practically unchanged in the US South and rose about 28% in Western US, resulting in higher gross margins in 2018 for sawmills in both regions. Similar developments have occurred in Canada, leading to record high profitability for many of the country's sawmills thanks to the high lumber prices in the US.

Wood costs are by far the largest and most important cost component when manufacturing softwood lumber and are often the factor that determines a lumber company's competitiveness. The Wood Resource Quarterly (WRQ) has tracked quarterly sawlog prices worldwide since 1995. This publication also discusses quarterly sawmill gross margins for key lumber-producing regions around the world. In its latest issue, quarterly sawlog costs, lumber prices and gross margins for sawmills in eight key regions worldwide are reported for the period 1Q/05 to 2Q/18. The gross margin is defined as the net wood costs (sawlog costs minus the income from sawmill residuals) deducted from lumber revenues and is a reliable indicator of the changing trend in profitability in a region's sawmill sector.

In the 2Q/18, profits for sawmills in North America reached their highest levels since at least 2005, primarily because lumber prices have risen faster than sawlog prices. In Europe, the gross margins in early 2018 were close to the highest they have been in four years in the Nordic countries, while they reached levels not seen in over a decade in other parts of the continent.

However, not all countries have experienced positive earning trends the past few years. Sawmills in Eastern Russia, New Zealand and Brazil saw their gross margins decline from 2015 to early 2018 as sawlog prices rose faster than lumber prices. In Siberia, the gross margin has fallen 21% in three years with the 2Q/18 levels being the lowest since 2013. Most of the decline has been the result of higher costs for sawlogs for a growing sawmilling sector in Eastern Russia.

Global lumber, sawlog and pulpwood market reporting is included in the 56-page quarterly publication Wood Resource Quarterly (WRQ). The report, which was established in 1988 and has subscribers in over 30 countries, tracks sawlog, pulpwood, wood chip, lumber and pellet prices, trade and market developments in most key regions around the world. To subscribe to the WRQ, please go to www.WoodPrices.com

CONTACT:



Wood Resources International LLC

Hakan Ekstrom

[email protected]

www.woodprices.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/wood-resources-international-llc/r/a-surge-in-lumber-prices-and-modest-increases-in-sawlog-costs-resulted-in-record-profits-for-lumber-,c2601864

The following files are available for download:

http://mb.cision.com/Main/1902/2601864/898202.pdf A surge in lumber prices and modest increases in sawlog costs have resulted in record profits for many lumber companies in North America and Europe in 2018

SOURCE Wood Resources International LLC

Related Links

http://www.woodprices.com/

WASHINGTON, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Federation of Government Employees today announced its endorsement of Stephany Rose Spaulding for the U.S. House of Representatives for Colorado's 5th Congressional District.

"Stephany Rose Spaulding is a first-time candidate for political office who was inspired to run for Congress after participating in the historic Women's March on Washington on Jan. 21, 2017," AFGE District 11 National Vice President Gerald Swanke said.

The largest federal employee union, the American Federation of Government Employees, has endorsed Stephany Rose Spaulding for election this November to the U.S. House of Representatives for Colorado's 5th Congressional District.

"Born and raised by public-school teachers in Chicago's South Side, Stephany overcame adversity to achieve a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University before joining the faculty at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs  where she would rise to become chair of the Women's and Ethnic Studies program," Swanke said.

"Stephany Rose Spaulding is the right candidate for the right time to flip Colorado's 5th Congressional District and provide a new voice and fresh perspective on how to tackle the critical issues facing our country," Swanke said.

About 55,000 federal employees live in Colorado  caring for veterans, supporting our military, protecting our natural resources, and getting Social Security recipients their benefits accurately and on time. There are more than 21,200 current and retired federal workers in Colorado's 5th Congressional District.

AFGE is the largest federal employee union in the country, representing 700,000 federal and D.C. government workers in all functions of government. District 11 represents more than 56,000 federal employees in Alaska, Colorado, Guam, Idaho, Montana, Okinawa, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the largest federal employee union, representing 700,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia.

For the latest AFGE news and information, visit the AFGE Media Center. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.





SOURCE American Federation of Government Employees

Related Links

http://www.afge.org

Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, with additional locations in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, and Corona, California, Goettl Air Conditioning is one of the largest providers of residential HVAC and plumbing services in the region. Founded in Phoenix in 1939, the Goettl Air Conditioning name is synonymous with superior cooled air technology in the Southwest, having been granted more than 100 patents for its HVAC technology.

Serving more than 50,000 homeowners per year, Goettl Air Conditioning is the premier service provider in the Southwest and is primed to continue its rapid expansion. Goettl was recently named to the 2018 Inc. 5000 list of Fastest-Growing Private Companies in the United States.

Jonathan Baum, Managing Partner of BCP, noted, "We are thrilled to partner with Ken Goodrich, a proven leader who will continue as the CEO of Goettl and will remain a significant shareholder in the company. Working together with Ken and his team, we intend to provide the resources necessary to enable Goettl Air Conditioning to reach its full potential as the leading residential services company in the United States through continued organic growth and strategic acquisitions in new and existing geographic markets."

"It is truly an honor to be part of the leadership legacy of Goettl Air Conditioning, following industry icons such as Adam and Gust Goettl, Bill Goettl, David Murdock and Dan Burke," said Goodrich, CEO of Goettl, HVAC industry veteran and successful entrepreneur.

"I am humbled by Goettl employees past and present, and applaud the hard work, innovation and dedication that each one has contributed to build our brand's legacy. This partnership with BCP represents yet another leap forward for Goettl Air Conditioning toward realizing our mission of becoming the nation's gold standard residential services company. The capital and unique insight that BCP brings to the table will be a cornerstone for our continued growth and success. At Goettl Air Conditioning, we do things the right way, not the easy way."

The transaction was supported by debt financing from Tree Line Capital Partners and Bridge Bank. Tree Line Capital Partners also provided an equity co-investment. Perkins Coie LLP served as legal counsel to BCP.

About Baum Capital Partners

Baum Capital Partners is a private investment firm that provides equity capital and strategic resources in support of dynamic companies in the lower middle market. BCP seeks to invest in technology-enabled and service-based businesses with exceptional prospects for growth and focuses on opportunities where a financial partner is being sought to solve a corporate or ownership need including investments to support growth, generational ownership transfers and management-backed recapitalizations. Working in close partnership with entrepreneurs and managers, BCP has a passion for helping promising companies reach their potential, and the resources required to make it happen. For more information, please visit www.baumpartners.com.

About Goettl Air Conditioning

Goettl Air Conditioning, established in 1939, offers the highest quality AC and heating equipment and a full range of maintenance, repair and replacement services. Goettl operates in the Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas and Southern California areas. All Goettl technicians are background-checked, drug-tested and receive continuous technical training to make them the best in the industry. Goettl Air Conditioning was recently named the "Best HVAC" company by readers of Arizona Foothills Magazine's "Best of Our Valley 2018" and named to the 2018 Inc. 5000 list of Fastest-Growing Companies in the United States.

SOURCE Goettl Air ConditioningCOCHISE COUNTY, Ariz., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Easterseals Blake Foundation is proud to announce that The Blues in Bisbee Festival to benefit Easterseals Blake Foundation will be Saturday, September 8th, 11am - 10 pm. Safeway, an Albertsons Company, is the Presenting Sponsor!

Tickets are available at bluesinbisbee.com or in Bisbee at The Bisbee Breakfast Club, Old Bisbee Brewing Company, St Elmos, or The Queen Mine RV Park.

A $15 ticket purchased in advance or $20 ticket purchased on the day of the event gets you all day access to City Park in Old Bisbee, featuring award-winning artisan beers from Old Bisbee Brewing Company, local bands and headlining acts including:

"We are thrilled for this opportunity to partner with Safeway and other Cochise County businesses to benefit our programs serving Arizona's most vulnerable children," said Ema Kammeyer, CEO, Easterseals Blake Foundation.

About Easterseals

For nearly 100 years, Easterseals has been the indispensable resource for people and families facing disability. Through the work we do in communities across America, Easterseals is changing the way the world defines and views disability by making positive, profound differences in people's lives every day. For more information visit www.easterseals.com.

About Easterseals Blake Foundation

Easterseals Blake Foundation (EBF) is dedicated to the vision of a Southern Arizona community where all people live healthy, productive, and independent lives. Founded in Tucson in 1950, EBF serves more than 30,000 children, adults, and families throughout Southern Arizona annually. Visit easterseals.com/blakefoundation to learn more.

About Albertsons Companies

Albertsons Companies, Inc. is one of the largest food and drug retailers in the United States, with both a strong local presence and national scale. Albertsons Cos. operates stores across 35 states and the District of Columbia under 20 well-known banners including Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Shaw's, Acme, Tom Thumb, Randalls, United Supermarkets, Pavilions, Star Market, Haggen and Carrs, as well as meal kit company Plated based in New York City. Albertsons Cos. is committed to helping people across the country live better lives by making a meaningful difference, neighborhood by neighborhood. In 2017 alone, along with the Albertsons Companies Foundation, the Company gave nearly $300 million in food and financial support. These efforts helped millions of people in the areas of hunger relief, education, cancer research and treatment, programs for people with disabilities and veterans outreach.

SOURCE Easterseals Blake Foundation

Related Links

http://www.easterseals.com/blakefoundation

GREENWICH, Conn., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- BridgePoint Risk Management continues to expand its national footprint with the addition of several new team members in Arizona, California, Rhode Island and Virginia. The infusion of experienced talent to its personal risk management team reinforces the firm's commitment to providing a truly consultative experience to accomplished families across the country. "We continue to search for the best and brightest our industry has to offer, as we strive to exceed the service expectations of our valued clients," said John Paolini, CEO. "Adding these highly qualified advisors complements our national expansion strategy and ensures the consistent delivery of holistic risk management solutions to family offices, successful business owners, and athletes and entertainers."

Jimmie Banta will serve as a Personal Risk Advisor and will be stationed in Los Angeles, California. Over the past 13 years, Jimmie has managed the risk management needs of affluent families on both the East and West coasts. He will bring tremendous value to BridgePoint's local team, clients, and business partners.

John Pugliese joins BridgePoint Risk Management as a Personal Risk Advisor working from Bristol, Rhode Island. John brings several years of consultative experience and valuable expertise insuring yachts and personal watercrafts. He will work closely with established business partners in New York City and throughout New England.

Leighann Sargent is one of our newest Personal Risk Advisors and will be based in the Phoenix office. She brings 18 years of personal insurance experience and will serve affluent and high-net-worth clients living in Arizona, Nevada and Southern California.

Elizabeth Staley joins BridgePoint Risk Management as a New Business Specialist, working from Haymarket, Virginia. Elizabeth brings over a decade of professional experience to the team, having worked both on the broker and carrier side of the industry. She will leverage her expertise in coastal risk as she supports BridgePoint's Risk Advisors located in the Southeast.

"We are very excited to have these four seasoned professionals join our team. They will help expand the BridgePoint brand, as a specialized independent insurance advisor. We are confident our clients and business partners will quickly appreciate their consultative approach and commitment to personalized service," expressed Jim Schwarzkopf, CSO.

About BridgePoint Risk Management

BridgePoint Risk Management is one of the few firms nationwide with a focus on providing commercial and personal risk management solutions for successful individuals, families, and family offices. We operate on a national platform, with associates throughout the country. We maintain property and casualty insurance licenses in all 50 states, enabling us to respond to our clients' evolving needs. Our team has extensive experience managing the complex needs of business owners, high-profile executives, athletes and entertainers, and collectors of fine art, jewelry, wine, and automobiles.

For more information, please, visit www.bridgepointrm.com

Interview Contact:

Meredith Schwarzkopf, BridgePoint Risk Management

Phone: 419.794.7037

Email: [email protected]

bridgepointrm.com

Media Contact:

PJ Phillips, TDC Companies

Phone: 419.891.9999

Email: [email protected]

tdc-marketing.com

SOURCE BridgePoint Risk Management

Related Links

http://www.bridgepointrm.com

CHICAGO and ATLANTA, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Earlier this year, CareerBuilder announced that it was collaborating with Google Cloud to transform the industry standard for job search. All of the job search on careerbuilder.com and its 4,000 talent networks is powered by Google's cloud-based machine learning solution (Google Cloud Talent Solution), enabling faster, easier connections between candidates and employers.

CareerBuilder logo (PRNewsfoto/CareerBuilder)

Today, CareerBuilder is excited to announce the availability of the Google Cloud Talent Solution feature on its job site (careerbuilder.com) that allows US military service members to enter their military occupational specialty code (MOS, AFSC, NEC) and find relevant civilian jobs that require similar skills to those used in their military roles.

"One of the biggest challenges veterans face is understanding how their military skills translate in the civilian world," said Irina Novoselsky, President and COO of CareerBuilder. "Veterans have fought for the freedom and opportunities our nation enjoys today, yet a significant number of them are underemployed or working in low-paying jobs. CareerBuilder is passionate about providing veterans with the resources they need to find fulfilling work that pays well  and we are excited that Google Cloud's new feature will help to expedite that process."

"We owe a debt of gratitude to America's service members and were committed to helping them thrive in civilian life," said Tarquin Clark, Director of Partnerships & GTM, Google Cloud. "By working with industry leaders like CareerBuilder, we can help veterans transition from the military to relevant, impactful civilian jobs."

According to CareerBuilder research, 40 percent of employers reported that they plan to actively recruit U.S. veterans for their jobs in 2018. Sixty-eight percent said that, if they had two equally qualified candidates and one was a veteran, they would hire the veteran.

An estimated 250,000 military members enter civilian life each year. By creating a feature for transitioning service personnel to use their MOS codes to find civilian jobs, Google Cloud is helping CareerBuilder to ensure that the skills they acquired in the military transfer to their new profession and that they can connect with top employers.

Key Features of Google's MOS Code Functionality:

Veterans can now enter their MOS, AFSC or NEC code directly into the search bar of careerbuilder.com or the talent networks for any of CareerBuilder's clients and instantly see civilian jobs that match their experience in any location.

Military rank codes are supported in the system. For example, both "11A" for Infantry Officer and " 11B " for Infantryman are supported.

CareerBuilder has a long-standing commitment to helping veterans and their families. Last year, CareerBuilder announced a partnership with Rally Point, one of the largest military-focused online networks in the world. The partnership brings together CareerBuilder's network of hundreds of thousands of employers with RallyPoint's 1.5 million military members. CareerBuilder also has a long-term partnership with the Military Times, powering the career site for one of the leading sources of news and information for military members and their families.

About CareerBuilder

CareerBuilder is a global, end-to-end HR tech company that helps employers hire and manage great talent and helps workers build careers. Leading the industry in innovation for nearly 25 years, CareerBuilder is the only company that offers both software and services to cover every step of hiring. Specializing in recruiting solutions, employment screening and human capital management, CareerBuilder is the largest provider of AI-powered hiring solutions serving the Fortune 1,000. CareerBuilder is majority-owned by funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management, LLC and operates in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.careerbuilder.com.

Media Contact

Jennifer Grasz

773.527.1164

[email protected]

http://www.twitter.com/CareerBuilderPR

SOURCE CareerBuilder

Related Links

http://www.careerbuilder.com

JINING, China, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- China YCT International Group, Inc. (OTCQB: CYIG) (the "Company") today announced that it plans to hold its Annual Meeting of Stockholders for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2018 (the "Meeting") at 10:00 a.m. Beijing time on October 8, 2018, which is 10:00 p.m. EDT on October 7, 2018. Stockholders who owned shares of common stock the Company as of the close of business on August 24, 2018, the record date, will be entitled to vote at the Meeting.

The Meeting will be held at the Company's headquarter located at: Economic Development Zone, Gucheng Road, Sishui County, Shandong Province, 373200, P.R. China.

About China YCT International Group, Inc.

Based in Jining, Shandong Province and founded in January 1989, China YCT International Group, Inc., through its subsidiaries, engages in the business of (i) distributing health care supplement products manufactured by Shandong Yongchuntang Group Co., Ltd. in the PRC, (ii) developing, manufacturing, and selling Huoliyuan capsules and tablets, a prescription medicine, (iii) developing acer truncatum bunge planting bases, and manufacturing and selling acer truncatum bunge seed oil in the PRC. Acer truncatum bunge plants are a species of maple tree. For more information about the Company, please visit http://zgyct.yongchuntang.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events or performance, and underlying assumptions and other statements that are other than statements of historical facts. These statements are subject to uncertainties and risks including, but not limited to, product and service demand and acceptance, changes in technology, economic conditions, the impact of competition and pricing, government regulations, and other risks contained in reports filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All such forward-looking statements, whether written or oral, and whether made by or on behalf of the Company, are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement and any other cautionary statements which may accompany the forward-looking statements. In addition, the Company disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof.

For more information, please contact:

At the Company:

Zecheng Shao, Vice President

Phone: +86-156-5377-2006

Email: [email protected]

Investor Relations:

Tony Tian, CFA

Weitian Group LLC

Phone: +1-732-910-9692

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE China YCT International Group, Inc.CHICAGO, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Hispanic Network Magazine (HNM) has named Combined Insurance, a leading provider of individual supplemental accident, disability, health and life insurance products, and a Chubb company, as one of the top diversity employers in the nation for 2018. This is the company's fourth consecutive year on the HNM Best of the Best Lists, which identifies organizations that embrace a wide range of perspectives, attract the very best talent and understand the demographics of the marketplace and its needs.

This year alone, 34 percent of the company's new staff hires are bilingual in Spanish and English.

"We are honored to be named a top diversity employer for the fourth year in a row," said Rolando 'Roly' Orama, SVP of Claims at Combined Insurance. "At Combined, we value the talent that bilingual individuals bring to the work force, and we recognize the importance of serving an increasing number of customers in their native language and understanding their diverse cultures."

Orama is a Senior Advisor to Chubb's Multicultural Business RoundtableMosaic and also a mentor for the Claim Diversity Council. He also served as a guest speaker and is a current member for the Combined Latino Resource Group at their Chicago headquarters.

The company also donates and sponsors various charitable events for organizations, such as Casa Central, Casa Norte, HACE (Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement, and Mujeres Latinas en Accion.

Founded by W. Clement Stone in 1922, the charitable endeavors at Combined Insurance continue to build off Stone's tradition and legacy of "making the world a better place."

Hispanic Network Magazine, now celebrating its 26th year of diversity, polled hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies for its 2018 Best of the Best evaluations. HNM is one of the nation's fastest-growing magazines, promoting the advancement of Hispanics in all aspects of education, business and employment to ensure equal opportunity.

For more information about bilingual careers at Combined Insurance, visit combinedinsurance.com or visit our Combined Latino Facebook page to learn more.

About Combined Insurance

Combined Insurance Company of America (Chicago, Ill.) is a leading provider of individual supplemental accident & health, disability, and life insurance products and a Chubb company. With a tradition of nearly 100 years of success, Combined Insurance is committed to making the world of supplemental insurance easy to understand. The company has an A+ rating by the Better Business Bureau and is one of Ward's Top 50 Performing Life-Health Insurance Companies. Combined Insurance is ranked the number one Military Friendly Employer in the over $1B revenue category for 2019 by VIQTORY. This is the company's eighth consecutive year on the top 10 list and fifth consecutive year in the top 5Combined Insurance was previously named the number one Military Friendly Employer in the nation for 2015 and 2016.

For more information, please visit combinedinsurance.com.

About Chubb

Chubb is the world's largest publicly traded property and casualty insurance company. With operations in 54 countries, Chubb provides commercial and personal property and casualty insurance, personal accident and supplemental health insurance, reinsurance and life insurance to a diverse group of clients. As an underwriting company, we assess, assume and manage risk with insight and discipline. We service and pay our claims fairly and promptly. The company is also defined by its extensive product and service offerings, broad distribution capabilities, exceptional financial strength and local operations globally. Parent company Chubb Limited is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: CB) and is a component of the S&P 500 index. Chubb maintains executive offices in Zurich, New York, London and other locations, and employs approximately 31,000 people worldwide. Additional information can be found at: chubb.com.

SOURCE Combined Insurance

Related Links

http://www.combinedinsurance.com

MUNICH, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Corvia Medical, Inc., a privately-held company with a first-in-class structural heart device to treat heart failure, today announced one-year follow-up data from the REDUCE LAP-HF I clinical study of its Interatrial Shunt Device (IASD). The IASD is the world's first transcatheter device for heart failure with preserved (HFpEF) and mid-range (HFmrEF) ejection fraction. Data was presented in the late-breaking scientific session at the European Society of Cardiology meeting. Dr. Ted Feldman from Evanston Hospital in Illinois presented the results on behalf of the investigators and research staff.

REDUCE LAP- HF I is a prospective, double-blind, mechanistic study of 44 patients randomized to IASD or sham control. Primary study endpoints at 30 days included effectiveness of the IASD as measured by exercise pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (PCWP) reduction compared to sham control, and procedural safety as assessed by major adverse cardiovascular, cerebral, or renal events (MACCRE). The study met its primary endpoint.

The one-year results demonstrate shunt patency (blood flow from the left to right atrium) for all participants who received the implant. Results further showed the IASD is safe, improved quality of life and is associated with favorable trends in heart failure hospitalization and reduction in New York Heart Association (NYHA) heart class. Results are published today in JAMA Cardiology.

"The REDUCE LAP-HF I clinical study is of tremendous interest to me because HFpEF is a clinical problem for which there is no effective therapy," commented Ted Feldman, M.D., Evanston Hospital in Illinois and co-principal investigator. "We've now studied the IASD in several consecutive trials. The early single-arm studies demonstrated that people felt better and their exercise capacity improved. Now, a sham-controlled randomized study conclusively proves the mechanism of action and again suggests clinical efficacy in midterm follow-up."

Sanjiv Shah, M.D., Northwestern Memorial Hospital's Center for Heart Failure at the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute in Chicago, and co-principal investigator, commented "I am pleased with the results of the REDUCE LAP-HF trials so far. By leading and taking part in these studies, we hope to make a significant difference for patients who suffer from the devastating effects of this type of heart failure."

"The data presented today by Dr. Feldman once again demonstrate the potential benefit of IASD therapy for the large underserved heart failure population," said Jan Komtebedde, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Corvia Medical. "While this particular study was focused on demonstrating a mechanistic effect and by design, underpowered for other outcome measures, the clinical results are consistent with prior trials confirming the IASD provided symptom relief, improved quality of life, and reduced heart failure events. We now are focused on demonstrating, in the ongoing REDUCE LAP-HF II study, that these positive clinical outcomes are robust enough, in a larger patient population, to carry this new technology into clinical practice."

REDUCE LAP-HF II is a large multi-national prospective, double-blind, sham-controlled trial randomizing 608 HFpEF and HFmrEF patients. Recruitment is ongoing.

About the InterAtrial Shunt Device (IASD)

The Interatrial Shunt Device is the world's first transcatheter device approved in the European Union to treat heart failure with preserved (HFpEF) or mid-range ejection fraction (HFmrEF). After creating a small opening in the atrial septum, the IASD implant is deployed, forming a passage between the left and right atria that enables the left atrium to decompress at rest and physical activity, with the aim of lowering left atrial pressure. By facilitating continuous and dynamic decompression of the left atrium, the IASD aims to improve heart failure symptoms and quality of life, decrease heart failure hospitalization rates, and reduce the overall cost burden of managing heart failure patients. For more information, please visit http://treatmyheartfailure.com/. The IASD is an investigational device and not available for commercial distribution in the United States

About Corvia Medical, Inc.

Corvia Medical, Inc. is dedicated to revolutionizing the treatment of heart failure with first-in-class transcatheter structural heart devices. Privately held, the company is backed by Third Rock Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, AccelMed, Lumira Ventures and an undisclosed strategic investor. For more information, please visit http://corviamedical.com/.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Jennifer Fitzgerald

+1-484-678-5018

[email protected]

SOURCE Corvia Medical, Inc.

Related Links

http://corviamedical.com

Dell and VMware help customers modernize data centers to support IT Transformation goals through expanded and enhance product integration

Scalable, end-to-end approach delivers superior ease of use and unrivaled flexibility

Accelerate time to business value through new Dell solutions with best-in-class VMware integrations

Full story

Dell is announcing additional leading capabilities to its broad portfolio of VMware solutions, spanning from the edge to the core to the cloud. These new solutions and enhanced integrations are designed to help customers achieve IT transformation goals with a unified, seamless experience across PC and mobile devices, software-defined data centers, hyper-converged infrastructures and multi-cloud platforms.

According to ESG's 2018 IT Transformation Maturity Study commissioned by Dell EMC and Intel, 88% of IT leaders said their companies are under pressure to deliver products and services faster. This requires having a more agile approach to IT. At many companies, the time it takes for a product or service to go from concept to general availability depends on where a company is on its IT transformation journey A more responsive IT department allows the business to respond more quickly to evolving external customer demands. i

"From the moment an employee first boots up their device, they're generating information that can  and should  be used across the enterprise to make smarter, data-driven decisions. When technology infrastructure exists in siloes, businesses can't outpace competitors, can't grow and can't scale," said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman, Products and Operations, Dell Technologies. "Working together across the entire spectrum of IT infrastructure, Dell and VMware empower customers to clear unnecessary administrative tasks off IT to-do lists while making users happier and more productive."

The benefits of the enhancements to Dell's portfolio of VMware-based solutions include:

At the Edge:

A ready-to-work experience enabling employees to boot up, log in, and be productive in minutes. Preconfigured apps and settings reduce time and resources associated with manual device imaging, repackaging and shipment. The Dell Provisioning for VMware Workspace ONE service enables automatic device setup and extends the efficiencies of cloud management to configuration and deployment.

enabling employees to boot up, log in, and be productive in minutes. Preconfigured apps and settings reduce time and resources associated with manual device imaging, repackaging and shipment. The Dell Provisioning for VMware Workspace ONE service enables automatic device setup and extends the efficiencies of cloud management to configuration and deployment. Simplified PC lifecycle management with expanded Dell PC-as-a-Service offerings for more customers and regions, including PCaaS for Business (20 to 300 units) and PCaaS for Enterprise (more than 300 units). Dell offers the latest PCs, deployment options - including Dell Provisioning for VMware Workspace ONE, software, peripherals, lifecycle services and financing  at a single, predictable price per seat per month.

with expanded Dell PC-as-a-Service offerings for more customers and regions, including PCaaS for Business (20 to 300 units) and PCaaS for Enterprise (more than 300 units). Dell offers the latest PCs, deployment options - including Dell Provisioning for VMware Workspace ONE, software, peripherals, lifecycle services and financing  at a single, predictable price per seat per month. Scalability and stability with a consistent foundation from edge to distributed core to cloud with the new Dell IoT Solution for Surveillance, which automates scaling enterprises on day one with customer data, speeding up return on investment.

To the Core:

Increase workload capacity, performance, scalability and control with the new Dell EMC VxRail G560, which delivers greater density in a 2U form factor. The Dell EMC VxRail G560 outperforms the previous Dell EMC VxRail G Series with 1.75X more cores; 2X increase in processing power; 4X more memory; and 3X capacity increase improvement in the boot device.

with the new Dell EMC VxRail G560, which delivers greater density in a 2U form factor. The Dell EMC VxRail G560 outperforms the previous Dell EMC VxRail G Series with 1.75X more cores; 2X increase in processing power; 4X more memory; and 3X capacity increase improvement in the boot device. Save time and lower operational expenses with synchronized Dell EMC VxRail Appliance and VMware vSAN update releases, so customers get the latest technology features as quickly as possible to rapidly address changing business needs.

with synchronized Dell EMC VxRail Appliance and VMware vSAN update releases, so customers get the latest technology features as quickly as possible to rapidly address changing business needs. Continuous innovation and reduction of risk with Dell EMC VxRack SDDC engineered with Dell EMC VxRail E, P, V and now S Series models, all based on 14th generation PowerEdge servers.

with Dell EMC VxRack SDDC engineered with Dell EMC VxRail E, P, V and now S Series models, all based on 14th generation PowerEdge servers. Faster time to production with the Dell EMC Networking Fabric Design Center, now including Dell EMC VxRail. The Fabric Design Center, an intuitive online tool, helps ensure the most efficient and effective networking design for deployment success.

with the Dell EMC Networking Fabric Design Center, now including Dell EMC VxRail. The Fabric Design Center, an intuitive online tool, helps ensure the most efficient and effective networking design for deployment success. Investment protection with Dell EMC's Future-Proof Loyalty Program protects customers' core, edge and cloud investments, now including first-time HCI solution support with Dell EMC VxRail, for a set of advanced technology capabilities and programs that enable Dell EMC solutions to offer value for the entire lifetime of customers' applications.

with Dell EMC's Future-Proof Loyalty Program protects customers' core, edge and cloud investments, now including first-time HCI solution support with Dell EMC VxRail, for a set of advanced technology capabilities and programs that enable Dell EMC solutions to offer value for the entire lifetime of customers' applications. Software-defined storage environment flexibility is further extended with Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes support on the new Dell EMC PowerEdge MX, which provides a highly flexible platform for vSAN Ready Nodes as HCI building blocks. The PowerEdge MX can hold up to eight vSAN Ready Nodes and help create a foundation for a self-sustained VMware Cloud Foundation cluster. It offers right-sized compute, storage and top-of-rack switching all in one high-density package, with the infrastructure managed through a single interface. The PowerEdge MX also supports SATA, SAS and NVMe storage devices, offering the cost benefits of storage tiering with VMware vSAN.

To the Cloud:

Enhancements to Dell's cloud-enabled infrastructure solutions and services portfolio are designed to help customers maximize the value of their IT ecosystem and multi-cloud environments. Read more about it here .

Availability:

Dell PC-as-a-Service for Business and Dell PC-as-a-Service for Enterprise are available today.

The Dell EMC VxRail G560 is available today through Dell EMC and its partners.

Dell Provisioning for VMware Workspace ONE will be available Sept.12.

The Dell EMC Networking Fabric Design Center is available today through Dell EMC and its partners and features Dell EMC VxRail.

Dell EMC vSAN Ready Node for PowerEdge MX is available September 12, 2018 .

. The synchronous releases between Dell EMC VxRail and VMware will be available starting in Q4 2018.

Additional Resources:

About Dell Inc.

Dell Inc., a part of Dell Technologies, provides customers of all sizes  including 99 percent of the Fortune 500  with a broad, innovative portfolio from edge to core to cloud. Dell Inc. comprises Dell client as well as Dell EMC infrastructure offerings that enable organizations to modernize, automate and transform their data center while providing today's workforce and consumers what they need to securely connect, produce, and collaborate from anywhere at any time.

Copyright  2018 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell, Dell Inc. and the Dell logo are trademarks of Dell Technologies in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

i The Dell EMC and Intel-sponsored research was conducted by ESG between Sept. 19, 2017 and Nov. 6, 2017, with a web-based survey of 4,000 senior IT executives and IT decision makers from enterprise-class and large midmarket organizations from the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia and the United Kingdom. The respondents represented a variety of industries.

SOURCE DellCLEVELAND, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- As the popularity of ebooks and audiobooks continues to grow, so has the high-tech Digital Bookmobile, celebrating its 10th anniversary this month. This traveling exhibit tours public libraries and schools throughout North America to promote their digital catalog of ebooks, audiobooks and other digital content to their communities. During its 10 years of operation, over 225,000 readers of all ages have been introduced to the seamless process of browsing and borrowing digital books through library apps including Libby, the award-winning one-tap reading app. The Digital Bookmobile is powered by OverDrive, the leading digital reading platform for libraries and schools.

Beginning its journey on August 10, 2008 in New York City's Central Park, the Digital Bookmobile (DBM) has visited 48 states, 3 Canadian provinces, and traveled more than 200,000 miles to host 900 free public events. Fully ADA accessible and equipped with Gadget Gallery devices adjustable for height, the DBM provides all guests with a fun and informative interactive digital learning experience.

Hundreds of libraries and schools along with thousands of librarians have hosted Digital Bookmobile events and effectively connected with their communities. "So many patrons said they had their questions about our library answered," said Margo Burkhardt, staff member of West Chicago Public Library. "We were very glad that those who aren't versed in the digital experience were introduced to ebooks." Patty O'Connor, a staff member of Marysville Public Library, added that, "People thought it was a really cool vehicle. We heard a child on his way out excitedly telling his mom he was going to go home and download the Libby app right away."

During its 10-year run, the Digital Bookmobile has participated in unique events in all corners of North America. For example, Tulsa City-County (OK) Library's first Digital Festival hosted the DBM to illustrate their efforts in adapting to their customers' 21st century needs. Ashland Public Library's (OH) Touch-a-Truck event parked the DBM alongside different types of trucks such as an armor truck, bomb squad and landscaping truck. Carnitas & Taquizas, Quiroga De Laragoza, a local California business, served free tacos to patrons who explored the Digital Bookmobile at the Buena Park Library District event. Weatherford Public Library (OK) embraced the Digital Bookmobile with a large event featuring food trucks, giveaways, a local radio station's live show and a visit by the mayor of Weatherford.

To learn more about the Digital Bookmobile including photos, tour schedule and media coverage, visit https://digitalbookmobile.com

About the Digital Bookmobile

The 42-foot long Toterhome provides devices, internet connectivity and expert guidance to the local library's digital collection of ebooks and audiobooks. This traveling exhibit first launched in 2008 in Central Park, New York, and has since traveled more than 200,000 miles and welcomed 200,000 visitors at over 900 events. For images and more information, visit www.digitalbookmobile.com. To browse libraries, ebooks and more, visit www.overdrive.com.

About Rakuten OverDrive and Libby

Rakuten OverDrive is the leading digital reading platform for libraries and schools worldwide. We are dedicated to "a world enlightened by reading" by delivering the industry's largest catalog of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and other digital media to a growing network of 40,000 libraries and schools in 70 countries. Named one of Google Play's Best Apps of 2017, Libby is the "one-tap reading app" for libraries. Founded in 1986, OverDrive is based in Cleveland, Ohio USA and owned by Tokyo-based Rakuten. www.overdrive.com

Contact:

David Burleigh

Director of Marketing

[email protected]

SOURCE OverDrive

Related Links

http://www.overdrive.com

PORTLAND, Oregon, August 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Novel inventions in radar technology namely, Plextek's micro radar system and NASA's FINDER are expected to create lucrative opportunities for the players in the global incident and emergency management market.

A new report published by Allied Market Research, titled, Incident and Emergency Management Market by System Type, Communication Technology, Service, Solution, and Industry Vertical: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2018-2025 studies the current market trends as well as growth prospects in the global market for the next seven years. Moreover, it includes market drivers, restraints, challenges, opportunities, and marketing strategies adopted by leading market companies across the globe. According to the report, the global incident and emergency management market was valued at $75.46 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $423.32 billion, registering a CAGR of 24.2% from 2018 to 2025.

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Increase in the number of natural calamities and frequent acts of terrorism are the key factors driving the growth of the global incident and emergency management market. Moreover, stringent government regulations toward public safety have supplemented the market growth. However, high costs of installation and maintenance detriment the market growth. On the contrary, increase in adoption of advanced security devices is expected to create lucrative opportunities for the market players in the near future.

Request Sample Report at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/936

Type of incident and emergency management systems

The report bifurcates emergency management systems based on type into mass notification system, surveillance system, traffic management system, safety management system, earthquake warning system, disaster recovery & backup system, and others. In 2017, the surveillance system segment garnered the highest revenue of $20.04 billion, contributing about 26% of the total market share. However, disaster recovery and backup system segment is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR of 26.9% through 2025.

Emergency response radar technology to portray highest demand by 2025

The report divides communication technology into first responder tools, satellite phones, emergency response radar, vehicle ready gateways, and others. The emergency response radar technology would demonstrate the fastest growth of 27.1% CAGR during the study period. In addition, the other segment, which comprises CBRNe/Hazmat Detection system and tsunami warning system, would grow at the fastest CAGR of 27.9% during the forecast period.

Training and education services to gain traction by 2025

The report splits services segment into training & education services, consulting services, design & integration services, and support & maintenance services. In 2017, design and integration services segment contributed almost one-third share of the total market revenue. However, training and education services segment would manifest the fastest growth, registering a CAGR of 26.3% by 2025.

For Purchase Enquiry: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/936

Healthcare segment to demonstrate highest demand by 2025

The report discusses the major industrial vertical, including BFSI, public sector, healthcare, telecom & IT, energy & utilities, manufacturing, aerospace & defense, transportation & logistics, and others. In 2017, energy and utilities garnered $13.04 billion, contributing about 17% of the total market share. However, the healthcare sector would register the highest CAGR of 28.3% through 2025.

Disaster recovery solutions segment to grow at 26.8% CAGR

The global incident and emergency management market report discusses various solutions, including geospatial solutions, disaster recovery solutions, and situational awareness solutions. The disaster recovery solutions would register the highest CAGR of 26.8% through 2025. In addition, the remaining segments are expected to demonstrate gradual growth in the forecast period.

Request Customization: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-for-customization/936

Asia-Pacific holds substantial share in the market

The report offers a country-level study of major regions such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and LAMEA. In 2017, Europe gathered the highest revenue, contributing nearly 40% of the market share. However, Asia-Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing region throughout the study period, registering a CAGR of 27.2% from 2018 to 2025, followed by LAMEA.

Torchbearers of the industry

The report discusses the major players of the global incident and emergency management market, including Esri Inc., IBM Corporation, Intermedix Corporation, Motorola Solutions, Inc., Rockwell Collins and Siemens AG, Honeywell International Inc., Intergraph Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation, NEC Corporation. These key market players have adopted various strategies such as product launch, joint ventures, partnerships, collaborations, and mergers & acquisition to maintain their position in the market.

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Knowledge tree is a cloud-based intelligence platform that offers more than 2,000 selective, off-the-shelf reports on niche markets to enable our clients gain deep insights on the latest trends, dynamic technologies, and emerging application areas.

Similar Reports:

Enterprise Performance Management Market - Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2018 - 2025

Storage as a Service Market - Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2017 - 2023

About Us

Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business-consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Portland, Oregon. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports" and "Business Intelligence Solutions." AMR has a targeted view to provide business insights and consulting to assist its clients to make strategic business decisions and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain.

We are in professional corporate relations with various companies and this helps us in digging out market data that helps us generate accurate research data tables and confirms utmost accuracy in our market forecasting. Each and every data presented in the reports published by us is extracted through primary interviews with top officials from leading companies of domain concerned. Our secondary data procurement methodology includes deep online and offline research and discussion with knowledgeable professionals and analysts in the industry.

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SOURCE Allied Market ResearchDALLAS, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Employer Direct Healthcare (the "Company") is excited to announce its contract with the Florida Department of Management Services (the "State") to provide the state employee health plan participants with its SurgeryPlus product offering beginning January 1, 2019. SurgeryPlus, the Company's flagship product, is a supplemental benefit for non-emergency surgeries, providing high-quality care, a better experience, and lower costs. SurgeryPlus was selected by the State of Florida after a competitive procurement.

With the new SurgeryPlus benefit, state employees and their dependents will receive access to full health concierge service with personal Care Advocates who will help members navigate their health needs and identify qualified providers.

John Zutter, Chief Executive Officer of Employer Direct Healthcare, said, "Following on our success with other government benefit plans, we are extremely excited to partner with the State of Florida in improving the quality of care for its almost 400,000 members. Through our Care Advocates, we will help members navigate the opaque healthcare ecosystem to seek out top-quality care at fair prices."

SurgeryPlus will create substantial savings, for both the state and its members, through pre-negotiated and discounted bundled rates with providers. By packaging surgical expenses into one simple bundled rate with high-quality providers, SurgeryPlus will help save money for members and help them avoid unexpected medical bills. Members will also receive meaningful financial incentives, potentially saving members thousands of dollars.

About Employer Direct Healthcare and SurgeryPlus

Employer Direct Healthcare is an innovative healthcare service business providing a high-quality and cost-efficient solution for large, self-funded employers and their members. The company's lead product, SurgeryPlus, is the premier narrow network surgical solution in the marketplace, offering a supplemental, surgical benefit that includes a national network of 100% board-certified Surgeons of Excellence and high-quality facilities. SurgeryPlus covers hundreds of non-emergent procedures with pre-negotiated bundled rates, resulting in consolidated costs for each episode of care. Dedicated Care Advocates provide full-concierge service to covered members, guiding members through their healthcare needs. Employer Direct Healthcare is majority owned by Dundon Capital Partners LLC, a Dallas-based private investment firm founded by Tom Dundon.

Learn more at www.edhc.com or by calling (855) 200-9511.

SOURCE Employer Direct Healthcare

Related Links

http://www.edhc.com

BOSTON, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- FinMason, a rapidly growing fintech firm operating one of the largest investment analytics platforms in the world, today announced their integration with Orion Advisor Services LLC ("Orion"), the premier portfolio management solution provider for registered investment advisors. Through Orion's Insight dashboard, Orion users can now access the power of FinMason's institutional-grade investment analytics platform FinRiver to deliver dynamic financial plans quickly and at scale.

"The need in the wealth management community for financial planning tools that are simple to use, readily accessible and seamlessly integrated has never been greater," said Kendrick Wakeman, CEO of FinMason. "By embedding our financial planning analytics capabilities directly within Orion Insight, a platform so widely used and trusted, advisors can expand the scope of their planning efforts efficiently and easily."

Affordable, agile and not dependent on exhaustive levels of data from clients and prospects, the Monte Carlo-based FinRiver enables advisors to deliver simple yet dynamic financial projections based on current saving and spending patterns, including:

The probability of achieving future goals based on portfolio analysis of individual positions;

Potential outcomes of different savings and spending rates, pre- and post-retirement; and

The effects of special spending events, such as buying a house or paying for college.

With the ability to adjust these inputs in real time, advisors can create a collaborative planning experience, demonstrating for their clients how these factors directly influence financial outcomes.

Orion's industry-leading integration framework also enables data from FinMason's platform to be accessed from within Orion's advisor dashboard, client portal and Salesforce and Redtail integrations. As a result, advisors can create comprehensive and compelling reports showing both the performance of investments and the progress toward a financial plan.

"We believe advisors work best, and most efficiently, when they are empowered to build a tech stack that fits their unique business needs," said Eric Clarke, founder and CEO of Orion. "Our strong and open integration architecture enables Orion to deliver access to in-demand solutions like FinMason and supports our clients' efforts to strengthen their relationships through financial planning analytics."

The integration of FinMason's financial planning analytics engine launched today and is now available on the Orion Insight platform. FinMason will be demoing their new tool at Orion's Ascent user conference Sept. 5-7 in Miami Beach, Florida. For more information, sign up for the webinar on this integration.

ABOUT FINMASON

FinMason is the world's largest independent investment analytics engine for financial services platforms. The Boston-based financial technology firm provides access to more than 700 calculations on every publicly traded asset in the world delivered through one simple API. Developed by FinMason's team of seasoned data practitioners and nine Ph.D.s, the cutting-edge platform delivers institutional-grade analytics in milliseconds via two core products: FinRiver  a lightning-fast API that delivers any analytics anywhere in a financial services firm's platform with just a few keystrokes; and, FinScope  a bulk processing platform that can analyze millions of portfolios every night for compliance screening and performance attribution. For more information, visit www.FinMason.com and follow FinMason on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

ABOUT ORION ADVISOR SERVICES

Orion Advisor Services LLC (Orion) is the premier portfolio accounting service provider for advisors. Orion frees advisors from back-office tedium so they can enjoy their business again by devoting their time and energy to better serving clients. Orion provides the integrated and fully customizable technology solutions that advisors need to build great advisory firms. Orion's technology solutions empower more than $675 billion in AUA and over two million accounts. For more, please visit www.orionadvisor.com or follow our news and insights via our blog.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Jessica Taylor Shores

Impact Communications

913-649-5009

[email protected]

SOURCE FinMason

Related Links

https://finmason.com/

MINNEAPOLIS, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Foodsby, Inc., a leading lunch delivery service connecting office professionals with local restaurants, has secured $13.5 million in Series B funding, bringing total funding to $21 million. The funding round was led by Piper Jaffray Merchant Banking and included investments from Series A funding partners Greycroft Partners, Corazon Capital, LLC and Rally Ventures. The additional funding will drive continued market expansion and talent investment.

Founded in 2012, Foodsby has redefined food delivery by enabling employees in office buildings to order lunch from local restaurants and get it delivered straight to their office. Busy professionals place orders online, orders are aggregated via Foodsby.com, and the restaurants delivers all the meals at once. As a trusted partner to thousands of office buildings and restaurants, Foodsby is truly a turnkey solution, offering a sustainable food amenity for offices, increased profits for restaurants, and a convenient and affordable lunch option for consumers.

"It is the hard work and dedication of our team that has allowed us to achieve this important next step," said Ben Cattoor, CEO, Foodsby. "We have established a successful model for new market entry with a tried and true combination of talent and technology. We look forward to building on our early successes and learnings to deliver continued growth for our investors and our team."

"Foodsby caught our attention because of its differentiated model and exceptional value proposition, not only for consumers, but also for restaurants and building owners/tenants," said Ted Christianson, managing director of Piper Jaffray Merchant Banking. "We are very excited to be partnering with the Foodsby team to help them continue their impressive growth."

Foodsby will continue its growth trajectory in 2018 through expansion to 15-25 new markets and deepening its talent base on the sales, marketing and development teams.

About Foodsby

Foodsby, Inc. is a network of local restaurants and commercial properties solving lunch for busy office professionals. Founded in 2012, Foodsby currently serves 15 major markets and is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minn.

About Piper Jaffray

Piper Jaffray Merchant Banking (PJMB) is a part of the asset management business of Piper Jaffray Companies (NYSE: PJC) and operates as the private equity arm of the firm. The group seeks investments in private, commercial stage businesses with strong growth prospects within the industry sectors covered by Piper Jaffray equity research and investment banking resources. Piper Jaffray Companies (NYSE: PJC) is a leading investment bank and asset management firm. Securities brokerage and investment banking services are offered in the U.S. through Piper Jaffray & Co., member SIPC and FINRA; in Europe through Piper Jaffray Ltd., authorized and regulated by the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority; and in Hong Kong through Piper Jaffray Hong Kong Limited, authorized and regulated by the Securities and Futures Commission. Asset management products and services are offered through five separate investment advisory affiliatesU.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registered Advisory Research, Inc., Piper Jaffray Investment Management LLC, PJC Capital Partners LLC and Piper Jaffray & Co., and Guernsey-based Parallel General Partners Limited, authorized and regulated by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission. Learn more at piperjaffray.com.

SOURCE Foodsby, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.foodsby.com

Yu Jun, President of GAC Motor, once remarked in the 2018 International Distributor Conference that Russia is a key market as the company continues to follow China's 'Belt and Road' Initiative, which marks further steps in exploring the more mature markets in Europe. Some of GAC Motor's vehicle models have already received sales qualification in Russia. There is strong confidence that the dynamics, durability and safety of these automobiles can win the heart of local buyers.

With a solid foundation in product development, manufacturing and global-scale operation, GAC Motor, as an independent Chinese brand, has made satisfactory progress in global markets with best-selling and award-winning vehicles as well as five-star services.

During MIAS, GAC Motor will be debuting its elite vehicle lineup, including sales champion GS4 SUV, the upmarket GS8 SUV, first minivan GM8, high-end sedan GA8 as well as all-electric SUV GE3. The star of GAC Motor's first exhibition in Moscow will be the GS8 SUV, the first mid- to large-sized 7-seat SUV from a Chinese brand that has sold over 10,000 cars in a month in the domestic market.

GAC Motor has followed a steady, innovation-driven and quality-oriented strategy since the brand was established 10 years ago. With a global research and development (R&D) network, world-class manufacturing facilities, international supply chain and marketing layout, the brand has launched a series of models that have achieved great success both at home and abroad

Moreover, GAC Motor has established global sales and service networks in 15 countries and regions, and has been praised as the "Best Chinese Car Brand" in multiple overseas markets. The automaker has made stunning appearances at top international auto shows such as the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) and Dubai Motor Show, and MIAS will mark another milestone in the brand's development.

"With a vigorous quality control system and leading domestic supply systems, GAC Motor is an extremely strong brand with an established, comprehensive quality guarantee. We want to show the best of the Chinese automobile industry in the Russian market through our debut at MIAS," Yu noted.

About GAC Motor

Founded in 2008, Guangzhou Automobile Group Motor CO., LTD (GAC Motor) is a subsidiary of GAC Group which ranks 202nd among Fortune Global 500 companies. The company develops and manufactures premium quality vehicles, engines, components and auto accessories. GAC Motor has now ranked first among all Chinese brands for five consecutive years in J.D. Power Asia Pacific's China Initial Quality Study SM (IQS), demonstrating the company's quality-centric strategy from innovative R&D), manufacturing to supply chain and sales & services.

For more information, please visit:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GACMotor

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gac_motor

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/gac_motor

Media Contact:

Sukie Wong

+86-186-8058-2829

[email protected]

SOURCE GAC MotorSAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Gastric Cancer Foundation launched its new website this month and introduced an online clinical trials navigator to help patients more easily identify clinical trials matched with their specific diagnosis, stage, and treatment history. A special grant from Stupid Strong Charitable Foundation, a Texas organization established by Jeff and Candace Netzer, is enabling Gastric Cancer Foundation to bring this new service to gastric cancer patients. The service is named in memory of Candace Netzer who lost her battle with the disease in November 2017. Jeff Netzer is a member of the Gastric Cancer Foundation's board of directors.

According to Jeff Netzer, "It was difficult for my wife and me to quickly identify and connect with clinical trials once her initial lines of treatment failed. Access to this type of compassionate and knowledgeable navigator would have lessened anxiety and fear during a critical time. Stupid Strong is proud to partner with Gastric Cancer Foundation on this project. I know Candace would be thrilled that the Foundation is able to provide this much needed service to patients and families now, and to support research towards better treatment alternatives in the future."

"One of the most frustrating experiences for patients battling gastric cancer is trying to find appropriate clinical treatment trials among the burgeoning national database of trials," noted Alice Leung, Gastric Cancer Foundation Co-Chair. "At the same time, researchers frequently report that they cannot enroll enough participants in their investigative trials. With this new navigator, we hope to match more gastric cancer patients with trials that can make a difference in their treatment while furthering promising research," explained Leung.

Patients and their families are encouraged to review the navigator and learn how they can easily participate by filling out a short online survey. The clinical trial database is hosted by EmergingMed and includes all treatment trials from clinicaltrials.gov along with updates reported directly by trial sponsors and sites. For more than a decade, EmergingMed has facilitated clinical trial searches for nearly 500,000 patients.

The Foundation's Board of Directors was most impressed with this navigator's commitment to privacy and its ability to provide patients with personalized guidance to find clinical trials that match their diagnosis and treatment history. The service can also update patients when new trials and sites open that match their profiles. "This clinical trials navigator is one more tool to further our mission of education, research, and advocacy for gastric cancer patients," said Foundation Board Co-Chair Paul Gottsegen.

Gastric Cancer Foundation has granted more than $2 million for gastric cancer research, elevating research funding for this cancer that receives only .04% of all federal funding for cancer research. Additionally, it created the first HIPAA-compliant Gastric Cancer Registry and a perpetual Research Scholar Award to fund talented young scientists who are pursuing research on this often-neglected disease. Since 2009, the Foundation has established a successful track record of strategic investments in early stage research efforts that have made breakthrough discoveries.

For more information about the Foundation and this navigator, visit gastriccancer.org or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

About the Gastric Cancer Foundation

The impetus for the Foundation came from JP Gallagher, a Silicon Valley marketing executive, who was diagnosed with stomach cancer at age 37 and could not find reliable information about the disease. He battled the disease for six years before passing in 2013, leaving behind a wife and three young children. Gallagher along with other families affected by the disease formed the Foundation to encourage more research funding and to give patients and families a place to turn to find resources.

Contact: Paul Gottsegen

[email protected]

1-504-522-4299

SOURCE Gastric Cancer Foundation

Related Links

http://www.gastriccancer.org

An estimated 250,000 military members enter civilian life each year. By creating a feature for transitioning service personnel and veterans to use their MOS codes to find civilian jobs, Getting Hired and Google are helping to ensure that the skills they acquired in the military transfer to their new profession.

Key Features of MOS Code Functionality:

Veterans can now enter their MOS, AFSC, or NEC code directly into the search bar of any career site or job board powered by Cloud Talent Solution and see the relevant civilian jobs available right now at Getting Hired.

Military ranks codes are supported in the system. For example both "11A" for Infantry Officer and " 11B " Infantryman are supported.

"We want to make looking for a job easier for veterans with disabilities, which is why we have integrated with Cloud Talent Solution. By adding this feature, our 150+ inclusive employer partner's job openings are easier for veteran job seekers with disabilities to find," says Jill Stutzman-Deaner, Director of Getting Hired.

"We owe a debt of gratitude to America's service members and we're committed to helping them thrive in civilian life," said Tarquin Clark, Director of Partnerships & GTM, Google Cloud. "By working with industry leaders like Getting Hired, we can help veterans transition from the military to relevant, impactful civilian jobs."

To learn more about Cloud Talent Solution and this announcement, review Google's blog here.

About Getting Hired

Getting Hired, an Allegis Group Company, is a recruitment solution dedicated to helping inclusive employers hire professional individuals and veterans with disabilities.

SOURCE Getting HiredPETALUMA, Calif., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- If an entrepreneur wants their company to be noticed, they should pay attention to client expectations. When a product, business or person is shown to a customer, it leaves an impression and it is up to entrepreneurs to find a way to make that impression meaningful. By focusing a brand on client expectations, entrepreneurs may increase success over a long period of time. Brandon Frere, CEO of Frere Enterprises and other companies, encourages entrepreneurs to think about their brand's impression from their customer's point of view.

Brandon Frere

"I don't care how good your product is if I don't understand it," said Frere. "The easier it is for me to understand what you offer, the more likely it is that I will care about what you do."

It may be wise to focus development of any project around client feedback. From this feedback, companies might be able to find the impression, or personality, that their brand has in clients' minds. Instead of creating a new impression, it is often useful to conform to the clients' expectations and make the business predictable and memorable. This concept is similar to an idea called "positioning," a concept popularized by Al Reis and Jack Trout in the book of the same name. Positioning operates on the idea that customers are more likely to buy off the positive assumptions they have regarding a brand, rather than whatever image the company is trying to frame for itself.

If a company is the first to make something, such as IBM with computers or Coca-Cola with soda, then the business' name will be associated with the product. If Coca-Cola starts suddenly making cars, then customers will have a mixed perception of Coca-Cola. If Coca-Cola chose a different brand name for their car company, then they might be able to have more success. If a product isn't the first-of-its-kind, then the business should often be framed in such a way that it is thought of as the first-of-its-kind, often through specializing. For example, it may be better to be known as the traveling company that specializes in trips to Africa than it is to be just another traveling company. By positioning the company in a way that conforms to clients' understanding of the company, it is more likely that clients will remember the company.

An entrepreneur should think about how to use their impressions. People may look deeper if the impression makes them think that exploring it is worth their time. For example, if a product called "Pocket Burger  the capsule that becomes a burger  just add water" is in the grocery store next to a frozen store-brand burger it will leave a different impression. While this burger may not have a stronger utilitarian purpose than the frozen burger, it sticks as a novelty in the client's mind, which may increase the chance of sales. In addition, the growth of a burger with water may cause people to ask about the product when they see it in action, effectively acting as free marketing. However, if the company ever developed a normal "high-quality" burger after this, there would probably be some expectations of a sense of novelty based on the previous burger and brand. If an entrepreneur wished to develop "gourmet burgers," they may want to create a different brand. By thinking about a project in terms of the impression in the client's mind, it may be easier to attract more attention.

"It is important to remember that the decision to look at your company costs a customer's time," said Frere. "I've seen a lot of great services in my time, but I don't often see ones that I knew were great the moment I saw them. Any business that can make me visualize myself using the product the moment I see it has already succeeded more than most."

About Brandon Frere

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 website, www.BrandonFrere.com, is used as a means of communicating many of the lessons, fundamentals and information that 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 often 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.

BrandonFrere.com

Related Images

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Related Links

Brandon Frere website

SOURCE Brandon Frere

Related Links

http://BrandonFrere.com

WASHINGTON, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The following is a statement from Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa about the bilateral agreement-in-principle announced today between the U.S. and Mexico to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

"The Teamsters Union has long been a leader in demanding real reforms to NAFTA to make it work for worker across all of North America. We have been working closely with the USTR on those demands and we believe that the Administration has taken real steps to deal with our concerns regarding cross-border trucking and highway safety.

"However, there is still much work to be done. Canada, for one, must be part of the agreement. The interests of all North American workers must be included as part of any trade agreement that is ultimately approved.

"NAFTA has been a failure. The Teamsters and other unions must see the final text to learn how this agreement will raise wages, ensure worker rights and freedoms, address enforcement, reduce outsourcing and put the interests of working families first in all three countries."

Founded in 1903, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents 1.4 million hardworking men and women throughout the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Visit www.teamster.org for more information. Follow us on Twitter @Teamsters and "like" us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/teamsters.

Contact:

Ted Gotsch, (202) 624-6911

[email protected]

SOURCE International Brotherhood of Teamsters

Related Links

http://www.teamster.org

NEW YORK and DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, August 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

GITEX Technology Week is the world's largest information and communication technology trade event to experience the most advanced technology and drive into digital transformation. The GITEX Technology conference is being held for the last 38 years and this year it is going to be a game-changer for all tech companies.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/708610/Hyperlink_Infosystem_Logo.jpg )



As an annual event, GITEX 2018 is expected to be attended by 1,46,000 industry leaders, developers, and professionals and they all are going to be under a single roof at the Dubai World Trade Centre. In GITEX Technology Week, the visitors would be well informed about the new technologies of all sectors & industries including IT Software & Hardware, Mobile Apps, Artificial Intelligence and much more.

GITEX opens up the door of opportunities for many startups & entrepreneurs to experience and introduce their innovations on cutting-edge technology. With the slogan 'Experience the Future Urbanism', the 38th GITEX Technology Week 2018 #GITEX2018 will be held between 14th to 18th October at Dubai World Trade Centre, Dubai.

Sectors that will be covered in #GITEX2018:

GITEX 2018 will highlight the amazing Technology Sectors across the show floor which is combined with this year's show experience.

Future Technology:

Artificial Intelligence

Blockchain

3D Printing

Robotics

Drones & UAV

VR/AR/MR

Consumer Technology:

Smart Home

Smart Workplace

Computer/Mobile Hardware & Software

Digital Imaging/Video

Health/Fitness/Wearables

Enterprise Network & Security:

Privacy and Cyber Security

Infrastructure Network & Security

Other Technology Sectors:

Future Transportation

Global Solution Providers

Gulfcoms-Telecom & Mobility

Global Smart Cities

Value Added Distributors

Cloud

IoT/Sensors

Printing & Business Solutions

Big Data/Analytics

Enterprise Software

Data Centres

In GITEX Technology Week, many mobile app development agencies will participate and get the chance to showcase their innovative ideas and grow their business. Being a top-notch IT company, 'Hyperlink InfoSystem' is consistently participating in GITEX Technology Week since past few years. Hyperlink InfoSystem is ready to exhibit in 38th GITEX technology week with the unique ideas and smart solutions on mobile app development, IoT & AI development, blockchain development, web development, game development, augmented & virtual reality app development, wearable app development, big data, enterprise software.

On the occasion of GITEX IT fair, Mr. Harnil Oza, the CEO of Hyperlink InfoSystem says, "GITEX technology week opens the business gateway for techies, IT Industrialists & the visitors. And this is the reason why anybody who has visited the event last time would surely not like to miss this opportunity. In GITEX 2018, we are quite excited to unlock the new opportunities and present our new innovations in the technology sector that will surely influence the future of the mobile industry."

Every start-up needs good technical guidance & cost-effective solutions. The representatives of Hyperlink InfoSystem will assist visitors with an extensive variety of IT services. All investors, startups and company delegates are most welcomed to visit the company stall at Zabeel Hall 1, Stand C1-20 at Dubai World Trade Centre, from 14th to 18th October, 2018.

To schedule a meeting, visit here: https://www.hyperlinkinfosystem.com/gitex-technology-week.html

About Hyperlink InfoSystem:

Hyperlink InfoSystem is a leading mobile app development company in UAE and also has presence across the globe. The company has successfully developed 3000+ mobile apps for more than 2000 clients around the world. Recently the company has been ranked as one of the top 10 mobile app development companies in India. The growth of Hyperlink InfoSystem is all because of 150+ talented professionals who work for client requirements and provide the best customized mobile apps with the use of latest technologies.

Contact Details:

Hyperlink InfoSystem

Harnil Oza

+1-805-744-1224

[email protected]



New York Address:

One World Trade Center,

285 Fulton Street suite 8500,

New York, NY 10007, United States



California Address:

607 Arcadia Terrace Unit 201

Sunnyvale, CA 94085

United States



SOURCE Hyperlink InfosystemHAUPPAUGE, N.Y., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- People have different ideas of what it means to be a pool owner. The idea of spending your days lounging in crystal blue water, chilled drink in hand, is the epitome of summer relaxation. The other idea high utility bills, sweaty maintenance, and a hefty price tag for only two or three months of summer enjoyment is less positive. People have these different ideas, but what's the reality? Inground pool liner company, LOOP-LOC, discusses pool ownership, blowing away 5 common misconceptions that distort the realities of having this big bed of water in your backyard.

Owning a pool is 24/7 relaxation: Many people view pool ownership as a vacation that never ends. The pool parties, lounge floats, and other add-ons like outdoor spas and pool slides give the impression of endless relaxation from the stress of life. However, the pool maintenance pre and post party can involve some time and work in order to keep your pool beautiful and sparkling clean. Pool maintenance is a hassle: Even though pools need to be taken care of, it's not a daily toil of baking in the hot sun, scrubbing your pool till it shines. In fact, you really only need to maintain your pool once or twice a week, for maybe an hour or so. Checking and balancing the chemical levels, vacuuming the floor, and skimming the top water are simple tasks to accomplish, and doing so on a strict schedule will keep the toiling maintenance people hate away. Consistency is key; pools are only hard to maintain if you're not good at maintaining them on time. A pool makes your utilities sky-high: The costs associated with running a pool are often overestimated in terms of utility costs. Older, inefficient pool systems used to take a toll on pool owner's bills, but the newest, best energy-saving models have cut this cost down significantly. Yes, you can expect to see increases, but only between $30 to $50 a month not hundreds. LED lights, variable speed pumps, and low-energy heaters can maintain low levels of utility costs without much variation. Installing a pool is expensive: Perhaps the most daunting task of pool ownership, walking into a pool store to be faced with a bunch of different models, prices, and systems can quickly turn off a potential buyer. Sure, inground pools can be expensive, but there are numerous options for people who don't want to kill off all their savings, like financing the purchase. Carefully researching the type of pool you want, along with the features you really need, can bring down the upfront cost. Be smart about what you're really expecting to get out of your pool ownership.

About LOOP-LOC: There's only one company known for manufacturing safety pool covers strong and tough enough to support an elephant: the legendary LOOP-LOC. LOOP-LOC is a global leader in the pool industry with a 200,000-square-foot headquarters in Hauppauge, New York, and 300 employees. Through its network of dealers, the company has sold safety swimming pool covers on every continent on earth except Antarctica. LOOP-LOC now also manufactures a line of luxury in-ground pool linerswith more exclusive designer patterns than any other companyas well as the BABY-LOC removable fencing, a convenient, cost-effective additional layer of protection to help deter toddlers from gaining access to a swimming pool. Media Contact: Jacqueline Routh, fishbat media, 855-347-4228, [email protected]

SOURCE LOOP-LOC

Related Links

https://www.looploc.com

New Global Certification is Called Certified Montessori Dementia Care Professional  CMDCP 

SPARTA, N.J., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The International Council of Certified Dementia Practitioners global headquarters based in NJ, United States of America has partnered with Center for Applied Research in Dementia (CARD) to provide a global Montessori Dementia course and CMDCP certification for our international health care professionals but also for health care professionals working in the United States of America. The course title is "Montessori Dementia Care Professional" and is presented by CARD. The ICCDP certification is called Certified Montessori Dementia Care Professional  CMDCP . The CARD online course is 6 - hours and upon passing the test, the qualified professional will be issued a CMDCP certification.

Worldwide, Dementia is the number one diagnosis in the elder adult and it is imperative that all health care professionals and front line staff are offered the opportunity to complete a comprehensive Montessori Dementia focused curriculum and the opportunity to receive a Certified Montessori Dementia Care Professional certification. This type of comprehensive education and CMDCP certification provides health care professionals the tools to provide compassionate and knowledgeable care to the most vulnerable people," said Sandra Stimson, CEO and Founder of the ICCDP and their sister company the National Council of Certified Dementia Practitioners. Mrs. Stimson went on to say, "Most countries do not have national standards regarding Dementia education and that is unacceptable. Health Care professionals can now obtain the Montessori Dementia Care Professional 6-hour seminar from the comfort and privacy of their home or office. ICCDP sister company, The National Council of Certified Dementia Practitioners NCCDP has been providing Dementia education and Dementia CDP, CADDCT, CDCM, CFRDT and CDSGF certifications to thousands of health care professionals worldwide for over a decade.

The Center for Applied Research in Dementia developed a globally recognized course and now offers the online course titled; "Montessori Dementia Care Professional". The curriculum focuses on an innovative method of working with persons living with cognitive and /or physical impairments based on the method and philosophy of famed educator Maria Montessori. This approach focuses on using the remaining capacities of persons with dementia, including their ability to learn new information and procedures. Most importantly, the course will focus on creating resident-driven communities within supportive physical and social environments. This is done by emphasizing the values of respect, dignity, and equality along with providing principles and realistic approaches for implementing this approach. Use of the Montessori Method in memory care has been shown to increase levels of activity, independence, and quality of life while reducing common challenges, such as responsive behaviors, use of psychotropic medication, and staff turnover. Participants in this workshop will have the benefit of learning from professional experiences and practical examples of peers from around the world.

Founded in 2011, the Center for Applied Research in Dementia specializes in translating research into practice, creating effective memory interventions. At the Center, we envision a new paradigm of memory care in which persons diagnosed with dementia are viewed as individuals with lives worth living. Within this new paradigm, abilities, interests, and preferences will be respected, encouraged and maximized. Our interventions and products have been translated into many languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Greek, Portuguese, Slovenian, Polish, Mandarin, and Japanese thus far. Our interventions take many forms and address the needs of all persons working with individuals with memory impairment.

Use of the Montessori Method for persons with dementia was developed by Dr. Cameron Camp, an international and revered speaker, and has continually practiced, studied and updated these methods and techniques for more than 30 years. He is a noted psychologist specializing in translating research into practice. Dr. Camp is Owner and Director of Research and Development of the Center for Applied Research in Dementia, in Solon, Ohio. Previously he served as Director of Research and Product Development for Hearthstone Alzheimer Care and Director of the Myers Research Institute of the Menorah Park Center for Senior Living. Dr. Camp gives workshops on designing cognitive and behavioral interventions for dementia internationally. He received his doctorate in experimental psychology from the University of Houston in 1979. For 16 years Dr. Camp served in academic settings, teaching coursework in adult development and aging and rising to the position of Research Professor of Psychology. He has co-authored three academic textbooks and published over 150 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, a Charter Member of the Association for Psychological Science and past president of Division 20 (Adult Development and Aging) of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Camp received the 2017 American Psychological Association award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research. His work has been funded by grants from the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Retirement Research Foundation, and the national Alzheimer's Association.

International Council of Certified Dementia Practitioners is open to health care professionals and frontline staff who qualify for certification, value certification, interested in comprehensive Dementia education and who are committed to ending abuse and neglect of our most vulnerable elders. ICCDP also offers the CDP certification. Both the CDP and CMDCP are resume worthy certifications for the individual but also a huge marketing advantage for corporations looking for a competitive edge.

International Council of Certified Dementia Practitioners was formed to promote standards of excellence in Dementia and Alzheimer's disease education and Dementia certifications. As the number of dementia cases continues to increase worldwide, there is a greater necessity to ensure that front line staff and health care professionals are well trained to provide appropriate, competent and sensitive direct care and support for the dementia patient.

There are several tracks and qualification to follow for the CMDCP certification. ICCDP also offers a grandfather option for those who have already completed a comprehensive Montessori Dementia focused curriculum or have a Dementia Montessori certification from a national, international, CARD or University. For companies interested in investing in their staff education and certifications, both ICCDP and CARD offer corporate group discounts. There is also an option to skip the CMDCP certification and only complete the course for those who either do not qualify for CMDCP certification or are only interested in the Montessori Dementia Care Professional 6 - hour online course. Everyone will begin the application process at www.iccdp.net and select which option that best fits the customer's needs.

For more information please contact Sandra Stimson CEO at [email protected] or visit the ICCDP web site at www.iccdp.net.

SOURCE International Council of Certified Dementia Practitioners

Related Links

http://www.iccdp.net

ST. LOUIS, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- KnowledgeLake, an independent software vendor of document processing solutions for Microsoft, will exhibit during the Microsoft Ignite Conference in support of being one of the core members of Microsoft's Content Services Partner Program. The sold-out event will be on September 24-28 in Orlando, FL, at the Orange County Convention Center and Hyatt Regency Orlando.

KnowledgeLake to announce their newest technology at the biggest Microsoft event of 2018.

KnowledgeLake has become one of the largest providers of software and solutions for Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 over the last 20 years. The KnowledgeLake platform provides powerful and flexible, browserbased document capture and processing in the cloud, leveraging all the Microsoft content services platforms such as SharePoint, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive.

At the conference, KnowledgeLake will be announcing their newest innovations in automation and intelligent capture. Attendees can expect to hear from KnowledgeLake experts in booth #1905, as they discuss how organizations are transforming business operations utilizing this new technology. It's a true innovation in the transactional content management market.

"As a long-standing Microsoft partner and Silver Sponsor of the conference, KnowledgeLake is dedicated to serving Microsoft customers with our newest AI and machine learning technology to really streamline the usage of Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365," said KnowledgeLake's CEO and founder, Ron Cameron. "As well, the company is proud to connect with other partners in the Microsoft Content Services Partner Program."

Attendees interested in discussing unique document processing challenges and learning more about KnowledgeLake's newest technology can reserve a time with an expert.

Microsoft Ignite is designed for IT professionals who are eager to explore tomorrow's technology and listen to industry leaders discuss trends and insights for the future. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will be the keynote speaker and discuss the latest strategies and offerings within the Microsoft ecosystem.

About KnowledgeLake

Since 1999, KnowledgeLake's singular focus has been to amplify worker productivity by eliminating paper, streamlining document processing and automating business-critical operations. With a team of enterprise content management (ECM) experts equipped with award-winning Microsoft-centric technology, KnowledgeLake delivers powerful solutions that put content to work. And after earning the Microsoft Partner of the Year award year after year, thousands of companies worldwide trust us to provide content management and process automation expertise in their Microsoft SharePoint, SharePoint Online and OneDrive environments.

Press Contact:

Taylor Stroot

Marketing Coordinator

314-898-0500

[email protected]

SOURCE KnowledgeLake

Related Links

https://www.knowledgelake.com

Stepp's arrival expands the presence of the firm's recognized International Trade Group into California, further broadening the global practice's reach to serve clients across the Pacific Rim.

"David's global customs experience represents a wonderful addition to our International Trade Group," said Philip T. Inglima, chair of Crowell & Moring. "Further building our highly-regarded trade practice is a firm priority, and David's presence in California presents new opportunities for us. He has a well-earned reputation as a trusted advisor, and his experience will be a tremendous benefit to many of the firm's clients."

Stepp's practice focuses on customs compliance and counseling, including tariff classification, valuation, country of origin marking, free trade agreements, Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (CTPAT) participation, and other international trade regulatory requirements. He also advises companies on their e-commerce strategies globally, conducts global customs and international trade audits, and counsels clients on improving, benchmarking, and coordinating compliance programs across borders. He also has experience in advising on trade remedies and coordinating government investigations, including FCPA matters. His clients span a range of industries, including retail, e-commerce, aerospace, motor vehicles, steel, food, agriculture, textile/apparel, footwear, electronics, cosmetics, and other consumer goods.

"Given the current trade wars and uncertainties of the global trade environment, clients are hungry for deft guidance to minimize tariffs, resolve supply chain disruptions, and secure market access," said John Brew, chair of the firm's International Trade Group. "David has a strong trade practice and skill set that meets all of these client needs, and is focused on the movement of goods and services in Asia. His practice meshes well with our existing trade group and expands our capabilities to provide counsel on emerging trade issues worldwide."

Stepp has practiced in Los Angeles, Singapore, and Washington. He joined Bryan Cave as a partner in 2005, and he later served as managing partner of Bryan Cave's Singapore office (2014-2017), coordinating regulatory issues for clients across Asia. While in Singapore, he led initiatives focused on strategic business and professional development in Southeast Asia. His previous experience includes working with a major U.S. customhouse broker where he advised the company's importing clients on U.S. customs practices and procedures. He is admitted to practice before the U.S. Court of International Trade and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

"The firm is strongly committed to strengthening our litigation and regulatory capabilities in California, and David's arrival provides further momentum in that effort," said partner Jason C. Murray, the head of Crowell & Moring's Los Angeles office and co-chair of the firm's global Antitrust Group.

Stepp is active in the international trade and legal communities in California. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Northern California World Trade Center. He also taught the Los Angeles Customs Brokers and Freight Forwarders Association's semi-annual course for ten years, preparing students to take the customs brokers licensing test. He previously served as chairman of the International Visitors Council of Los Angeles; president of the Global Legal Customs Association; and co-chair of the ABA Customs Law Committee.

"I am excited to join Crowell & Moring," Stepp said. "The firm's International Trade Group is well known and regarded, and I am pleased to help establish the group's West Coast presence and help us open further avenues to support clients in the Asia-Pacific region. The firm's full range of regulatory and litigation capabilities is a tremendous asset to my clients and my practice."

Stepp received his J.D. from the University of Georgia and his A.B. from Duke University. He is a frequent author and speaker on global customs and international trade issues. He authored a guidebook on NAFTA procedures for a major U.S. electronics trade association and lectured in Asia, Europe, and the Americas on the scope and effect of many bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements.

About Crowell & Moring's International Trade Group

Crowell & Moring's International Trade Group provides regulatory, dispute resolution, investigation, policy and litigation counsel on emerging trade issues worldwide. The group is recognized for its top international trade practices for export controls, sanctions, customs and trade litigation matters (including antidumping, countervailing duty and safeguards). Additionally, the group works closely with the firm's other core practices to provide a broad spectrum of client services and to publish their proprietary journal, This Month in International Trade.

About Crowell & Moring LLP

Crowell & Moring LLP is an international law firm with more than 500 lawyers representing clients in litigation and arbitration, regulatory, and transactional matters. The firm is internationally recognized for its representation of Fortune 500 companies in high-stakes litigation, as well as its ongoing commitment to pro bono service and diversity. The firm has offices in Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orange County, London, and Brussels.

Contact:

An Pham

Manager, PR & Communications

+1 202.508.8740

[email protected]

SOURCE Crowell & Moring LLP

Related Links

http://www.crowell.com

PALM BEACH, Florida, August 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

MarketNewsUpdates.com News Commentary

The shifting legal landscape in the legal cannabis market continues to provide incredible opportunities for a growing number public companies in the marijuana industry across North America. Anticipation and general overall excitement is definitely building around Canada's upcoming special day coming up in October for recreational marijuana to be completely legal. According to cannabis research firm ArcView, legal weed sales in North America catapulted higher by 33% in 2017, and they're on track to grow by an average of 28% per year through 2021, leading to nearly $25 billion in annual sales. Lately, cannabis stocks have been increasing at impressive rates since the maker of Corona beer boosted its investment in Canadian cannabis company Canopy Growth by $4 billion. The market has proven to be consistently successful over the past few months to years and as new legislation continues the public sentiment on cannabis is definitely changing to the positive, pointing to the idea the future of cannabis could be even more lucrative as more positive developments take place. Active cannabis companies in the markets this week include Player's Network, Inc. (OTC:PNTV), Medical Marijuana, Inc. (OTC:MJNA), Hemp, Inc. (OTC:HEMP), PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. (OTC:POTN), Sugarmade, Inc. (OTC:SGMD).

Player's Network, Inc. (OTCQB: PNTV) BREAKING NEWS: Player's Network, a rapidly growing company in the recreational and medical marijuana industry with licensed grow operations in 2 states, announced today they have achieved record sales of over $2.1 million since the recent acquisition of Green Leaf Farms Salinas Valley. They are hosting a live online webinar to discuss the Company's revenue and acquisition strategy at 4:20 p.m. PDT (7:20 P.M. Eastern) on Wednesday, August 29th, 2018. Online attendees are limited to the first 100 people who RSVP.



The purpose of this announcement is to provide an update to the Company's Shareholders and the investment community with regards to their recent and substantial increase in sales (unaudited). Additionally, the Company has filed an extension for their quarterly report while they implement the necessary compliance controls including but not limited to; books and records and standard operating procedures as they transition the acquisition from a private business to a wholly owned subsidiary of PNTV.



The Company has been in development stage until they recently completed an acquisition of a 56,000 sq ft existing grow operation in Salinas Valley that accounted for the majority of the revenue growth.



Online Webinar to Update Shareholders - The Company will hold a webinar to discuss the Green Leaf Farms Salinas Valley revenues and their growth by acquisition strategy at 4:20 P.M. Pacific (7:20 P.M. EDT) on Wednesday, August 29th, 2018. Mark Bradley, Chief Executive Officer and Brett H. Pojunis, Director, will provide an update to shareholders and perspective shareholders.



Shareholders, Analysts, and future investors are invited to participate in the webinar. The webinar will be open on a listen/view only basis to all interested parties. Questions may be submitted prior to the webinar on https://playersnetwork.com/questions . Read this and more news for PNTV at http://www.marketnewsupdates.com/news/pntv.html



Other recent developments in the legal marijuana industry include:



Medical Marijuana, Inc. (OTCPK:MJNA), the first publicly traded cannabis company in the United States, late last week announced that its subsidiary HempMeds Brasil will host the Third Meeting of Former Residents of Neurology at John Paul II Children's Hospital in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil on Aug. 25. "We are looking forward to having a discussion on the benefits of cannabis and expanded access to CBD in Brazil," said Medical Marijuana, Inc. CEO Dr. Stuart Titus. "We want to support CBD access around the world and further develop our ongoing relationship with Brazilian healthcare professionals."



Hemp, Inc. (OTCPK:HEMP), a global leader in the industrial hemp industry with the largest multipurpose industrial hemp processing facility in the western hemisphere, announced last Friday that the company was featured in an article by Colorado Springs Independent regarding Hemp, Inc.'s signing of an agreement with Alaska-based gas and oil drilling services company Quadco LLC to distribute DrillWall, a loss circulation material (LCM). LCM is a term for substances added to drilling fluids when drilling fluids are being lost to the formations downhole. The Colorado Springs Independent serves the Pikes Peak region of Southern Colorado both in print and online, and its website reaches over 100,000 unique monthly visitors. Hemp, Inc.'s 85,000 square foot industrial hemp processing and manufacturing facility, on 59 acres, in Spring Hope, North Carolina has been operational since August 2017 and creates products for the gas and oil drilling industries, among others.



PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. (OTCPK:POTN) announced this month that the Company's six month operating results have been posted on OTCMarkets.com in the form of unaudited financial statement and a supplemental disclosure. With revenues of $12,044,028, the Company has demonstrated the result of its continuously strengthening momentum. The year-to-date results are more than twice its 6-month revenues in 2017 of $5,077,625, an increase of 137% year-over-year. These six-month results will be included in the forthcoming audit and certification of the Company's financial statements by the Company's new PCAOB-member audit firm, Manohar, Chowdhry & Associates, which audited financial statements will be included in the Company's refiling of its Form 10 Registration Statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"). Completion of the Company's newly updated audit and resubmission of its Form 10 is anticipated before the end of the August.



Sugarmade, Inc. (OTCPK:SGMD), one of the largest publicly traded hydroponics supply companies, recently announced its application for the OTCQB Venture Marketplace for the trading of Sugarmade common shares. The Company had previously announced, in error, its return to the OTCQB Venture Market. Management had thought the return to the OTCQB would be automatic once fully reporting status was restored, this assumption was incorrect and thus Sugarmade has reapplied. Mr. Jimmy Chan, CEO of Sugarmade commented, "The OTCQB enables Sugarmade to build our visibility and expand liquidity for our shareholders without the rigid procedures and requirements that go along with an exchange listing. For these reasons, we have applied to the OTCQB and our application is under review. We believe we meet all the requirements and that the trading venue is optimal for Sugarmade."



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 twenty five hundred dollars for news coverage of the current press releases issued by Player's Network, 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:

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+1(561)325-8757



SOURCE MarketNewsUpdates.comAUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Luke Ellis, founding partner of the Texas-based litigation boutique Marrs Ellis & Hodge LLP, has been selected for recognition in the 2019 edition of The Best Lawyers in America.

Mr. Ellis was honored for his condemnation litigation skills, exclusively representing property owners against condemning authorities across the state of Texas. The Best Lawyers designation adds to Mr. Ellis' list of achievements, having been named to Texas Super Lawyers for the past three years and receiving the award for Austin's Outstanding Young Lawyer from the Austin Bar Association in 2009.

In addition to his trial practice representing property owners in eminent domain matters, Mr. Ellis also teaches a course on eminent domain and condemnation as an adjunct law professor at the University of Texas Law School. Along with one of his partners, he also authors the blog Texas Condemnation, which focuses on eminent domain issues in the state.

Mr. Ellis is an honors graduate of both the University of Texas and the University of Texas School of Law, where he was a member of the Texas Law Review. He served as a law clerk on the Texas Supreme Court. He is admitted to practice in Texas, New York, and the U.S. District Courts for the Southern, Northern, Western, and Eastern Districts of Texas.

The selection process for The Best Lawyers in America is based off of nominations and peer review from other leading attorneys in the same geographic region and practice area as the attorneys being chosen. The individuals selected to the list represent the top 4 percent of practicing attorneys in the nation.

Founded in 2012 by former classmates from the University of Texas School of Law, Marrs Ellis & Hodge LLP features trial and appellate lawyers with a wealth of expertise primarily in eminent domain law, as well as fiduciary, real estate, and trust and estate litigation. The firm's track record is substantial. To learn more about the firm, visit http://mehlaw.com/.

Media Contact:

Jennie Bui McCoy

800-559-4534

[email protected]

SOURCE Marrs Ellis & Hodge LLP

Related Links

http://www.mehlaw.com

SMYRNA, Ga., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Murata announced that is expanding its MEMS sensor manufacturing by building a new factory in Vantaa, Finland to increase the sensor production capacity. Total value of the investment is five billion yen. With the expansion, the company estimates to create 150200 new jobs in 20182019. The MEMS sensors manufactured by Murata in Finland are used in applications such as car safety systems and pacemakers.

Murata, a world leading manufacturer of electronic components, is significantly increasing global production capacity, including most recently its factory located in Finland. After having recently purchased the previously leased buildings, the company will construct a new building of approximately 16,000 square meters. The new facility is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2019.

The total value of the investment is five billion yen and is underpinned by the growing worldwide demand for MEMS sensors used in the automotive industry and various health and industrial applications.

"The market for advanced driver-assistance systems, self-directed cars, healthcare, and other emerging technologies are expected to be significant growth drivers. MEMS sensors are critical solutions for these applications and deliver proven measurement accuracy and stability in a variety of conditions," said Yuichiro Hayata, Managing Director for Murata Electronics Oy.

"With the construction of this new production building, we will significantly increase our MEMS sensors production capacity. Moreover, by responding to the strong demand of gyro sensors, accelerometers, and combo sensors in the automotive, industry and healthcare fields, this will strengthen our business base in the automotive market, industrial equipment and medical devices market, while contributing to the economy and employment of Finland," stated Makoto Kawashima, Director of Sensor Product Division in Murata Manufacturing.

Developing operations with long-term perspective

With the factory expansion in Finland, Murata will strengthen both R&D and manufacturing operations with a long-term perspective for increasing utilization of this facility. The company currently employs 1,000 people in Finland and estimates to create 150200 new jobs in 20182019.

Murata acquired the Finnish company VTI Technologies  today known as Murata Electronics Oy  in 2012. It is the only factory of Murata which manufactures MEMS sensors outside of Japan and has experienced tremendous growth over the last 10 years. This site in Finland also hosts R&D space and one of the biggest clean room facilities in the country.

About Murata

Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. is a worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and sale of ceramic-based passive electronic components and solutions, communication modules and power supply modules. Murata is committed to the development of advanced electronic materials and leading edge, multi-functional, high-density modules. The company has employees and manufacturing facilities throughout the world. For more information, visit Murata's website at www.murata.com.

Press Release

Contacts:

Amy Talley Jefferson Communications 703-323-8939 [email protected] John Sutherby Murata Americas 508-964-5117 [email protected]

SOURCE Murata

Related Links

http://www.murata.com

Oriental Yuhong Waterproof Technology Co., Ltd. was involved in the project since the beginning, providing high quality waterproofing system services and high-quality waterproof materials for this world-famous super project. The scope of services includes the Terminal Area's "five fingers gallery", service building, parking building and the flight zones.

The waterproofing project in the new airport project is difficult, and the quality of the Oriental Yuhong project was tested by the flood season's heavy rainfall.

In June, Beijing entered the flood season, with the heavy rainfall accounting for about 85% of the annual precipitation. The roof of the new airport had not been tested for waterproofing since it was built at the end of 2017, and there were concerns about whether the project could withstand the rainfall. The person in charge of the construction project responded that the roof system in the construction uses the Oriental Yuhong Thermoplastic Polyolefin (TPO) waterproof membrane, which can completely handle bad weather. This proved to be true as the roof remained unfazed by the rainfall, and the excellent quality of Oriental Yuhong's products won praise from the customers.

Li Jianjun, chief engineer of Oriental Yuhong TPO, said, "The products of our company are used in many sensitive sections of the new airport project, of which the TPO waterproof membrane is the most used. This is because TPO waterproof membrane joints are welded using hot wind, and the joints have high peeling strength. It is applied to the roof of corridors and the main terminal building and laid under the metal roofing board. It can withstand various types of abnormal environments and has the advantage of aging resistance. We have provided construction and professional waterproofing design services for this world-famous project."

Oriental Yuhong TPO products are successfully applied to many key international projects and are ready for the US market.

Oriental Yuhong's TPO mechanically fixed single-layer roof system has FM certification from US' FM Global, the European Union's CE and Russia's GOST. The TPO waterproof membrane is completely composed from LyondellBasell raw materials. Its high reflective surface has excellent energy saving performance and can be applied to LEED certified construction projects. Oriental Yuhong's TPO polymer waterproof membrane has been successfully applied in many public buildings, industrial buildings and commercial buildings such as C919's large aircraft manufacturing base, a seven-star international hotel, BMW Brilliance's new factory, and Jaguar and Land Rover's new factories. Oriental Yuhong's TPO has successfully reached US markets and joined the select list of important engineering construction options in the United States.

SOURCE Beijing Oriental Yuhong Waterproof Technology Co., Ltd.

Related Links

http://www.yuhong.com.cn/

NEW YORK, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- OTC Markets Group Inc. (OTCQX: OTCM), operator of financial markets for 10,000 U.S. and global securities, today announced Hugoton Royalty Trust (OTCQX: HGTXU), an express trust created under the laws of Texas pursuant to the Hugoton Royalty Trust Royalty Trust Indenture, has qualified to trade on the OTCQX Best Market. Hugoton Royalty Trust previously traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Hugoton Royalty Trust begins trading today on OTCQX under the symbol "HGTXU." U.S. investors can find current financial disclosure and Real-Time Level 2 quotes for the company on www.otcmarkets.com .

"We are pleased to welcome Hugoton Royalty Trust to the OTCQX Best Market," said Jason Paltrowitz, Executive Vice President of Corporate Services at OTC Markets Group. "Trading on OTCQX will allow Hugoton Royalty Trust to provide an investor-friendly trading experience, and a transparent, cost-effective alternative to a U.S. stock exchange listing."

"We are pleased for the Hugoton Royalty Trust to be part of the OTCQX Best Market and for the Trust Units to begin trading on OTCQX," said Ron Hooper, Senior Vice President of Simmons Bank, Trustee of the Hugoton Royalty Trust.

About Hugoton Royalty Trust

Hugoton Royalty Trust is an express trust created under the laws of Texas pursuant to the Hugoton Royalty Trust Royalty Trust Indenture entered into on December 1, 1998 between XTO Energy Inc. (formerly known as Cross Timbers Oil Company), as grantor, and NationsBank, N.A., as Trustee. The Trust holds 80% net profits interests in certain predominantly gas-producing properties located in Kansas, Oklahoma and Wyoming. Simmons Bank is now the Trustee of the Trust. For more information on the Trust, please visit its web site at www.hgt-hugoton.com .

About OTC Markets Group Inc.

OTC Markets Group Inc. (OTCQX: OTCM) operates the OTCQX Best Market, the OTCQB Venture Market and the Pink Open Market for 10,000 U.S. and global securities. Through OTC Link ATS and OTC Link ECN, we connect a diverse network of broker-dealers that provide liquidity and execution services. We enable investors to easily trade through the broker of their choice and empower companies to improve the quality of information available for investors.

To learn more about how we create better informed and more efficient markets, visit www.otcmarkets.com .

OTC Link ATS and OTC Link ECN are operated by OTC Link LLC, member FINRA/SIPC and SEC regulated ATS.

Subscribe to the OTC Markets RSS Feed

Media Contact:

OTC Markets Group Inc., +1 (212) 896-4428, [email protected]

SOURCE OTC Markets Group Inc.

Related Links

http://www.otcmarkets.com

DALLAS, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Parks Associates today announced executives from Alarm.com, IBM Watson Health, Providence St. Joseph Health, Qualcomm Life, and Uber Health will be the keynote speakers for the fifth-annual Connected Health Summit: Engaging Consumers, being held August 28-30 in San Diego at the Grand Hyatt Manchester.

Parks Associates: Strong Interest in Health Services

The conference's keynotes will address how technology is meeting the changing healthcare needs in both the consumer and commercial markets. The event also features a pre-show workshop, "Independent Living and Wellness: A Growing Opportunity," and sessions that examine consumer adoption and usage of connected health technologies and their expansion into the smart home, healthcare, and independent living ecosystems.

Keynote speakers:

New research from Parks Associates' 360 View: Health and Independent Living shows more than one-fourth of U.S. broadband households use an app to track or manage their health or wellness, with adoption highest among consumers ages 18-34.

"The number of consumers using health apps has increased since early 2017, and 40% of current app users have two or more health-related apps they use," said Jennifer Kent, Director, Research Quality & Product Development, Parks Associates. "With the consumerization of healthcare comes the realization among consumers that IoT solutions can help them stay healthyabout one-half of app users downloaded the app independently of a product or wellness program. At Connected Health Summit, we will track consumer adoption of these solutions and its wider impact on independent living solutions and the smart home ecosystem."

Connected Health Summit also features the special session "Improving Patient Outcomes through Connected Health," 2:00 p.m. on August 29, where speakers from DISH and Independa discuss new solutions and market partnerships to deliver personalized care to people in a meaningful way, through an integrated approach to remote engagement and care that leverages available resources in the home, including the TV screen as well as smart home and connected health solutions.

Parks Associates also announced Alarm.com as the exclusive registration and charging station sponsor for Connected Health Summit. Independa is the sponsor for the networking reception on August 29. Event Sponsors include Independa, Rapid Response Monitoring, MDLIVE, Alarm.com, BodiMetrics, GiftCard Partners, Nortek Security & Control, Personal Connected Health Alliance, Z-Wave, and Pathway OME.

Registration is open, and media are invited to attend. To schedule an interview with an analyst or to request specific data, contact Julia Homier at [email protected], 972-996-0214.

About Connected Health Summit

Connected Health Summit: Engaging Consumers analyzes the role of innovative connected health solutions in driving changes in consumer behaviors as well as healthcare systems, insurers, and hospital networks. The event focuses on four areas of consumer health, which require active consumer participation to be successful: remote health monitoring for accountable care, consumer-centric wellness and fitness solutions, independent living technologies and services, and innovative convenience care models. www.connectedhealthsummit.com

Contact:

Julia Homier

Parks Associates

972.996.0214

[email protected]

SOURCE Parks Associates

Related Links

http://www.parksassociates.com

YAKUM, Israel, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Paz Oil Company Ltd. (TASE: PZOL), Israel's leading Energy and Retail Group and a supplier of a third of Israel's fuel products, yesterday reported its consolidated results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2018.

Management Comment

Yona Fogel, CEO of Paz Group Commented: "We ended the second quarter with good results despite a reduction in the regulated gasoline octane 95 margin in Israel, which was updated in May 2018 and caused a decrease in our profitability. The refining segment is enjoying a good business environment with increased margins and Paz Ashdod Refinery maintained its strong premium compared to the benchmark refining margin. In addition, the off gas recovery (OGR) facility was completed and began operating during the third quarter of 2018 and is expected to generate an additional 0.40 dollar per barrel in profit, which amounts to an approximate $14 million in a representative year."

"Given expected developments in the energy and retail markets, we are continuously examining ways in which we can maximize returns and streamline the efficiencies in our current operations, as well as identifying investments in new synergetic areas that are relevant to our operations. We expect that these initiatives will increase Paz Group's activity and profitability in areas that are not affected by the changes in the transportation fuel market. This will reduce our potential exposure to the anticipated changes in this evolving market and we will continue to grow in parallel to our traditional operations."

"As part of the development of this future infrastructure, we are examining our operations as a significant player in the changing electricity sector and considering investments in desalination facilities. In addition, we are enhancing our real estate activities to maximize the potential and profitability from our unrealized real estate rights (approximately 150 thousand square meters).

"At the same time, as a large retail company operating in a continuously evolving market which is transitioning to increased online purchases, we are making ongoing investments in enhancing our retail activity, through the sale of non-fuel items in our convenience stores. We are entering the E-commerce world by integrating our gas stations as points of collection and distribution which offer a solution to the problem of the "last mile". We are doing this by offering delivery via our automated Yellowbox lockers which are already located at 140 stations across Israel. As part of this process, we have recently developed a new loyalty program for our customers through an innovative "app" that enables fast and convenient electronic payments for fueling and "non-fuel" products available on our Yellow Click and Pick site."

Main highlights for Paz Group by Segment

Retail and Wholesale Segment

Operating income for the Retail and Wholesale segment in Q2/2018 totaled NIS 107 million compared with NIS 109 million in Q2/2017 despite the reduction of the regulated gasoline margin of NIS 0.05 (5 agurot) per liter. This represents an additional annual cost amounting to approximately NIS 35 million, reducing the profitability from gasoline.

As mentioned earlier, in the Retail and Wholesale Division, the positive trends of increased demand for gasoline and diesel continued, as did the sales from "non-fuel" activities. The Company's emphasis in recent years on diversifying its fuel station sales, particularly the share of "non-fuel" sales, continues to bear fruit. Despite the reduced regulated gasoline margin, the segment's profit decreased by only NIS 2 million compared to Q2/2017 due to the increase in quantities sold which offset most of the decrease and the continued sales growth of the Yellow convenience store chain.

The Yellow convenience store chain demonstrated another strong quarter with revenue growth of 5% compared to Q2/2017 which is due to the increase in the number of transactions, with total revenues for the quarter amounting to NIS 232 million.

Refining Segment

The adjusted operating income of the Refining segment totaled NIS 49 million in Q2/2018 compared to an adjusted operating loss of NIS 54 million in Q2/2017 during which the periodic maintenance period occurred at the Paz Ashdod Refinery. The profitability in this quarter was reasonable, yet below expectations due to lower refining margins compared to the corresponding quarter last year, primarily as a result of lower gasoline margins and an increased price of oil. During the quarter, the Refinery maintained a high level of production and operated at an optimum level.

Paz Ashdod Refinery maintained a high premium compared to the benchmark refining margins. In Q2/2018, the Paz Ashdod Refining margin totaled $7.6/barrel compared to the Ural benchmark margin of $4.4/barrel, and the KBC benchmark margin of $4.7/barrel.

The construction of an OGR facility (off-gas recovery) was completed in June and began operating in July and is now close to operating at full capacity. The OGR facility is expected to contribute between $0.4-$0.7/barrel and to lessen the impact of the price of oil on Paz's refining margin by lowering the cost of self-consumption and losses of the Refinery.

Industries and Services Segment

The Industries and Services segment operating income was NIS 33 million in Q2/2018 compared to NIS 40 million in Q2/2017. The decrease is primarily due to competition in Pazgas' market and increases in the price of raw materials at Paz Lubricants and Pazkar. Paz Aviation Services and Assets continue to grow in quantities sold and maintained its profits due to the continued growth in the aviation sector.

Consolidated Statement of Income























Six months ended Six months ended Three months ended Three months ended Year ended, December 31,

2018 2017 2018 2017 2017 NIS Millions (except per share data) unaudited unaudited unaudited unaudited audited Revenues 6,724 5,182 3,674 2,323 11,285 Cost of Sales 5,837 4,274 3,210 1,988 9,480 Gross Profit 887 908 464 335 1,805











Selling and marketing expenses 474 455 242 226 935 General and administrative expenses 73 85 30 41 191 Other income, net 0 17 -1 20 13 Total operating expenses 547 557 271 287 1,139 Operating income 340 351 193 48 666











Financial income 28 117 9 53 201 Financial expenses 154 67 88 36 135 Financial income (expenses), net -126 50 -79 17 66











Income before income tax 214 401 114 65 732 Income tax expenses 47 86 24 19 157 Net income for period 167 315 90 46 575











Attributable to:









Equity holders of the Company 166 313 90 45 572 Non-controlling interests 1 2 0 1 3 Net income for the period 167 315 90 46 575











Net earnings per share attributable to equity holders of the Company:









Basic net earnings per share (in NIS) 16.31 30.83 8.81 4.45 56.35 Diluted net earnings per share (in NIS) 16.28 30.78 8.8 4.45 56.21

The information presented in this press release is presented solely for the convenience of the reader and does not constitute a basis for making any investment decisions or any recommendation or opinion nor is it a substitute for the exercise of judgment by an investor or a potential investor. This press release is presented in a condensed format only and in order to receive a full picture of the Company's operations, the reader is referred to the Company's full reports as submitted to the Securities Authority and to the Stock Exchange.

The Company has included in this press release forward-looking information, as defined in the Securities Law, 1968, in relation to itself and to its investees. Inter alia, such information contains forecasts, objectives, evaluations and estimates, which relate to future events or matters, whose realization is not certain and which are not under the Company's control. Forward-looking information does not constitute a proven fact and it is based solely on the Company's subjective evaluations. When making such assumptions, the Company relied, inter alia, on the analysis of general information available to it at the time of preparing this report, including publicly available information, research work and surveys, which did not contain a commitment as to the correctness or the completeness of the information therein and whose correctness has not been independently tested by the Company. In addition, the realization and/or the non-realization of the forward-looking information will be affected by factors that cannot be evaluated in advance and which are not under the Company's control, including the specific risk factors underlying the Company's operations, as detailed in the periodic report, as well as developments in the general environment and in external factors that affect the Company's operations. Accordingly, even though the Company believes that its expectations, as they appear in this press release, are reasonable, there can be no certainty that the Company's actual results in the future will be in accordance with said expectations, but rather, they may differ from the expectations presented in the forward-looking information presented in this report.

Contact Information:

Omri Arens

Investor Relations and Credit Risk Manager, Finance Division

Paz Oil Company, Ltd.

Office: +972-9-8930656

[email protected]

SOURCE Paz Oil Company, LtdBRENTWOOD, Tenn., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- U.S. patients and hospitals alike are sick of a system that leaves 25% of Americans with unaffordable healthcare expenses. But skyrocketing health expenses are causing a movement in healthcare. Patients and hospitals are demanding more control over the cost of the care they receive or provide, and healthcare disruptors like MDsave are making it possible.

MDsave, an online healthcare marketplace that lets patients shop and compare local prices on medical services for savings of up to 60%, has just been named#152 on the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest growing companies. The marketplace's rapid growth is proof that there is increasing patient demand for transparent, affordable, and shoppable healthcare.

The message is clear: with nearly half (43.2%) of Americans on high-deductible health plans, patients want more say in how they purchase medical services. Hospitals are who can provide that are being rewarded with reduced bad debt and increased patient satisfaction, which means greater financial stability.

This is the Age of Amazon.com, and patients are learning that they can take back control of their health spending with ecommerce platforms like MDsave.

"When people shop online at sites like Amazon.com, they have more control over their spending because of the ability to compare prices, track order history, and make informed purchase decisions based on a budget," said Paul Ketchel, MDsave CEO and Co-Founder. "Putting healthcare into a similar ecommerce environment brings that same dynamic of predictability and transparency to purchasing medical services."

About MDsave

MDsave is a healthcare technology company revolutionizing how hospitals and health systems increase access for the patient-consumer in an evolving market. The MDsave bundling solution allows providers to offer affordable, transparent pricing on complete episodes of care, increasing patient satisfaction while reducing bad debt and issuing payment to providers within 7 days of service. Through MDsave's patented collection software, patients pay one upfront price for prospective or retrospective care. MDsave empowers patients to take control over their healthcare decisions and gives hospitals a seamless way to collect from patients paying out of pocket for procedures. For more information, visit MDsave.com.

About Inc. Media

Founded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures, Inc. is the only major brand dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies, with the aim to deliver real solutions for today's innovative company builders. Inc. took home the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in both 2014 and 2012. The total monthly audience reach for the brand has been growing significantly, from 2,000,000 in 2010 to more than 18,000,000 today. For more information, visit www.inc.com.

The Inc. 5000 is a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the nation. Started in 1982, this prestigious list has become the hallmark of entrepreneurial success. The Inc. 5000 Conference & Awards Ceremony is an annual event that celebrates the remarkable achievements of these companies. The event also offers informative workshops, celebrated keynote speakers, and evening functions.

For more information on Inc. and the Inc. 5000 Conference, visit http://conference.inc.com/.

SOURCE MDsaveSHANGHAI and LOS ANGELES, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP is pleased to announce that Xiao Liu will join the firm as a litigation partner in the Shanghai office.

Xiao, who has law degrees from Harvard, Peking and Cambridge Universities, is admitted to both the bars of China and New York, and has deep experience representing Chinese clients in commercial disputes in federal and state courts in the U.S. Among his many successes, he has helped the following Chinese companies achieve dismissals of complaints filed against them in U.S. litigation matters: Weibo, Jumei International, Youku Tudou, AirMedia, VIPShop, NQ Mobile, and ChinaCache; he has also been involved in achieving multiple precedent-setting summary judgment and trial victories in U.S. courts. He also represents foreign companies as a liaison in Chinese litigation.

In addition to his commercial litigation practice, Xiao represents Chinese companies and citizens in U.S. government regulatory investigations and enforcement proceedings, as well as foreign companies who have come to the attention of Chinese regulators as liaison counsel. He has conducted numerous internal investigations for multinational companies from diverse industries regarding their business operations in China, particularly under the FCPA.

Managing Partner John B. Quinn said: "We think Xiao is the leading international litigator of his generation in China and that his experience in the commercial litigation and government enforcement arenas, as well as his sterling academic credentials, make him unique among lawyers practicing in China today. We know Xiao will provide invaluable advice to our clients in China and Chinese companies in disputes around the world."

Sam Williamson, Managing Partner of the firm's Shanghai office added: "I have been fortunate to know Xiao for many years and have been constantly impressed by his legal abilities and the value he provides to his clients. We have had numerous cases together, and each time my reaction has been, 'I wish this guy was on our side.' I can't describe how pleased I am that that is now the case."

Xiao Liu said: "Quinn Emanuel has the top global litigation force in the world. I believe it will provide the best platform for me to grow both my practice and the firm's as well: helping Chinese businesses resolve U.S. disputes and government enforcement actions, and helping multinational companies navigate the unique challenges of operating in China."

Xiao received his J.D. from Harvard Law School, he earned his L.L.M. from Cambridge University, and his L.L.B. from Peking University Law School. Xiao completed a half-year internship with the Chinese Supreme People's Court and practiced for multiple years in New York with Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, before relocating to China five years ago. Recently, Xiao was lauded by Chambers & Partners as a "rising star" in the China market for his "expertise in FCPA investigations and enforcement matters" and selected by China Law & Practice as a finalist for its upcoming 2018 Rising Star of the year award. Xiao is a native speaker of Mandarin and fluent in English.

Quinn Emanuel is a 780+ lawyer business litigation firmthe largest in the world devoted solely to business litigation and arbitration with 22 global office locations. Firm lawyers have tried over 2,600 cases, winning 88% of them. When representing defendants, Quinn Emanuel's trial experience gets better settlements or defense verdicts. When representing plaintiffs, Quinn Emanuel lawyers have won over $60 billion in judgments and settlements. Quinn Emanuel has also obtained five 9-figure jury verdicts, thirty-four 9-figure settlements, and fifteen 10-figure settlements. FTI Consulting named Quinn Emanuel the biggest litigation firm in the world. The American Lawyer named Quinn Emanuel the top IP litigation firm in the U.S. and the firm as one of the top six commercial litigation firms in the country. Four times in the last 5 years, we were voted as one of the four "most feared" firms by General Counsels at Fortune 500 companies  the lawyers they "least like to see" on the other side. The UK legal periodical, The Lawyer named us "International Firm of the Year." Law360 selected us as Antitrust, Appellate, Banking, Class Action, Insurance, Product Liability, IP, White Collar, and Trials "Practice Groups of the Year." Managing IP twice recognized us as having the "Best ITC Litigation Practice" and honored us with the "Patent Contentious West" award. Legal Business has named us "US Law Firm of the Year" three times, and our German offices have been named both IP Litigation and Patent Litigation Firm of the Year by JUVE, Germany's most prestigious legal publication. Global Investigations Review, a leading legal periodical covering global white collar investigations, named us the "Most Impressive Investigations Practice of the Year." Global Arbitration Review named us the 11th best arbitration practice in the world. Further information is available at www.quinnemanuel.com.

SOURCE Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP

Related Links

http://www.quinnemanuel.com

PUNE, India, August 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

According to the new market research report "Smart Mirror Market by Application (Automotive, Hospitality & Retail), Automotive Smart Mirror (Type and Functionality), Hospitality & Retail Smart Mirror (Component, Technology, and Augmented Reality), and Region - Global Forecast to 2023", published by MarketsandMarkets, the market is expected to grow from USD 2.82 billion by 2018 to USD 4.42 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 9.41% from 2018 to 2023. The growth of the smart mirror market can be attributed to the increasing demand for smart mirrors in the automotive industry, the transition from traditional stores to digital stores in the retail industry, the presence of a large number of start-ups in the smart mirror market, and new and innovative features of smart mirrors.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/660509/MarketsandMarkets_Logo.jpg )

Browse 65 market data Tables and 43 Figures spread through 139 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Smart Mirror Market - Global Forecast to 2023"

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/smart-mirror-market-71622395.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report



Automotive application to hold largest size of smart mirror market by 2018

The smart mirror market is segmented on the basis of application into automotive, hospitality and retail, and others; others include smart homes and healthcare applications. The automotive application is expected to hold a major share of the smart mirror market by 2018. Smart mirrors are widely used in cars and light commercial vehicles. The smart mirrors used in automotive applications include auto-dimming mirrors and connected mirrors, with functionalities such as temperature display, Bluetooth and hands-free connectivity, navigation, turn signals, and microphone. The wide adoption of auto-dimming mirrors owing to such capabilities is a major factor contributing to the largest share of the automotive application in the smart mirror market.

Automotive smart mirror market for exterior mirror to grow at higher CAGR during 2018-2023

Exterior mirrors, or outer rear-view mirrors, are mounted on the outer body of the vehicle to get rear-view images of the traffic on both sides of vehicles. Generally, the passenger cars are installed with 2 outer mirrors one on each side of the vehicle. The major manufacturers of the exterior smart mirrors for automotive are Gentex (US), Magna (Canada), Ficosa (Spain), and Murakami Co., Ltd. (Japan). OEMs are now focusing on the addition of more features to outer mirrors, as they plan to integrate the capabilities for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), such as blind spot indicator and lane departure warning indicator, along with park assist.

Ask for PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=71622395

Market for software component to grow at highest CAGR from 2018 to 2023

Software is an essential part of any smart mirror used in hospitality and retail, and healthcare and smart home applications. The software is used to display any information on the mirror screen. The information to be displayed varies according to the use of the mirror. The data required for displaying this information is sourced from various data sources. The predicted highest growth of the market for software for the said applications is attributed to the large adoption of AR-based mirrors in the hospitality and retail sectors. The advancement of the features such as 3D modeling is likely to result in the higher growth of the market for software during the forecast period.

Europe to hold largest share of automotive smart mirror market by 2018

Europe is the largest market for automotive smart mirrors. Europe is home to major automobile manufacturers such as Volkswagen (Germany), BMW (Germany), and Daimler (Germany), which are expected to create significant demand for auto-dimming smart mirrors. The region is also known for its stringent safety regulations and advanced technologies. The automotive OEMs in Europe are focused on developing new technologies to meet the increased demand for advanced features and increasingly stringent safety norms.

Major players in the smart mirror market are Gentex (US), Magna (Canada), Electric Mirror (US), Seura (US), Murakami Kaimeido (Japan), Ficosa (Spain), ALKE (Belgium), Ad Notam (Germany), Dension (Hungary), and Keonn (Spain).

Know more about the Smart Mirror Market:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/smart-mirror-market-71622395.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. Shelly Singh

MarketsandMarkets INC.

630 Dundee Road

Suite 430

Northbrook, IL 60062

USA: +1-888-600-6441

Email: [email protected]



Research Insight: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ResearchInsight/smart-mirror-market.asp

Connect with us on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarkets



SOURCE MarketsandMarketsBALTIMORE, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- T. Rowe Price today launched a new U.S. mass media advertising campaign, "The Full Story," showcasing its strategic investing approach. The campaign is designed to dispel some of the inherent complexity in investing by demonstrating how the firm's investment professionals conduct research, going beyond the numbers and into the field to identify and analyze investment opportunities for its mutual funds and other investment products. The advertisements illustrate for investors T. Rowe Price's investing process, which is driven by rigorous research, independent thought, and prudent risk management.

Beginning today, the campaign is running nationally in digital and print properties, social media channels, and select local TV markets. T. Rowe Price plans to launch its national TV spots in September.

"The new campaign helps us convey the benefits of T. Rowe Price's strategic investing approach, highlighting the strengths of our fundamental, kick-the-tires research process," said Sylvia Toense, head of global brand marketing for T. Rowe Price. "Our research shows that many investors may not be familiar with the depth of our investment process, which presents us with an opportunity to shed some light on how we are uniquely positioned to deliver value to our clients and help them reach their financial goals."

The campaign articulates T. Rowe Price's approach through examples ranging from advancements in bio-technology to the impact of e-commerce on cardboard demand.

"There is an immense gap between what investors have currently saved and what they will need in retirement," said Robert Higginbotham, head of global investment management services for T. Rowe Price. "High-quality active management can make a real difference to investors' future financial lives. At T. Rowe Price, our strategic investing approach has enabled us to deliver strong performance over the long term to help investors bridge that savings gap."

As part of the campaign, T. Rowe Price is also creating a series of videos to capture some of the stories its hundreds of investment professionals encounter when they explore opportunities and analyze the markets and the companies within them. The company plans to post additional videos to its website over the next few months.

More information is available at www.troweprice.com/fullstory. T. Rowe Price worked with marketing communications agency J. Walter Thompson New York to develop the campaign.

"This campaign was created to help pull back the curtain and show that T. Rowe Price goes beyond the numbers and out into the field to examine investment opportunities," said Carina Hueber, global business director for J. Walter Thompson New York. "Ultimately, showing this process helps convey the value of T. Rowe Price's strategic investing approach, while helping investors feel more confident in their decisions."

ABOUT T. ROWE PRICE

Founded in 1937, Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. is a global investment management organization with $1.07 trillion in assets under management as of July 31, 2018. The organization provides a broad array of mutual funds, subadvisory services, and separate account management for individual and institutional investors, retirement plans, and financial intermediaries. The company also offers sophisticated investment planning and guidance tools. T. Rowe Price's disciplined, risk-aware investment approach focuses on diversification, style consistency, and fundamental research. For more information, visit troweprice.com, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, or Facebook.

SOURCE T. Rowe Price Group, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.troweprice.com

LONDON, August 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Gas Turbine Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Capacity (?200 MW, >200 MW), By Technology (Open Cycle, Combined Cycle), By Application (Power Generation, Industrial, Aviation), And Segment Forecasts, 2018 - 2025



Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/5491671



The global gas turbine market size is projected to reach USD 30.08 billion by 2025, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc., witnessing a CAGR of 4.8% during the forecast period. The market is expected to be driven by increasing pressure from international agencies to reduce carbon footprint, along with low shale gas prices.



Incentives provided by regional governments to gas-based power generation companies to combat increasing carbon footprints are likely to drive market growth.Gas turbines witnessed a distinctive increase in 2015, hinting a change in policies by power generators to capitalize on low gas prices.



Some of the largest gas turbine shipments are estimated to be heading toward Latin America, U.S., and Europe. However, Asia Pacific will likely exhibit the fastest growth rate in the foreseeable future.



Post 2016, steam turbine orders are picking up as well, mimicking the trend in gas turbines, owing to rising CHP installations across the globe.Combined cycle power generation is the most efficient form of technology to generate electricity.



This technology segment also accounts for the largest share in the gas turbine market.



Gas power production in Asia Pacific is still at a nascent stage, but with aggressive development programs undertaken by the regional governments to improve gas infrastructure, the region is slated to witness rapid growth. India is also increasing its focus on the use of cleaner resources.



In January 2017, Siemens and Marubeni announced plans to build a 1,200 MW combined cycle power plant in Thailand.In 2015, the company sold approximately 18 models of SGT-800 industrial gas turbines to Thailand.



Six of these turbines had a capacity of 53 MW each, while the capacity of the remaining twelve units was 50.5 MW each. The units were intended to be installed in nine combined cycle cogeneration power plants with a total installed electrical capacity of 1100 MW.



Further key findings from the report suggest:

 The global capacity addition for gas turbines in 2016 was estimated to be 62.87 GW and is expected to reach 91.81 GW by the end of the forecast period

 There is rising investment in Latin America for CHP-based power generation where gas turbine orders account for the majority share in comparison to steam turbine orders

 China's market size for gas turbine orders was estimated to be 8.07 GW in 2016. This regional market is likely to expand at a CAGR of 5.2%

 Asia Pacific excluding China will likely witness stunted growth owing to established infrastructure of thermal-based power generation and Japan's economic slowdown

 Europe will witness an increase in gas turbines as majority of the thermal-based power generations are likely to shut down by the end of the forecast period

 Siemens is currently the leader in the gas turbine market. This market operates on aggressive mergers and acquisitions

 The service-oriented market for gas turbines is also an excellent contributor to overall revenue.



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NEW YORK, August 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --



The hemodynamic monitoring systems market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 6.4% during the forecast period.



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p04073944



The global hemodynamic monitoring systems market is expected to reach USD 1,167.4 million by 2023 from USD 857.8 million in 2018, at a CAGR of 6.4% during the forecast period. Technological advancements in hemodynamic monitoring systems, increasing research into hemodynamic monitoring systems, influx of VC funding, rising prevalence of cardiovascular diseases & diabetes, and government focus on critical care infrastructure & services are expected to drive the growth of the hemodynamic monitoring systems market. However, the risk associated with invasive hemodynamic monitoring, such as sepsis, bleeding, hemorrhage, thrombosis, air embolism, and pulmonary capillary necrosis is expected to restrain the growth of this market to a certain extent.

 By product, the monitors segment is expected to grow at the highest rate during the forecast period.



Based on product, the global hemodynamic monitoring systems market is segmented into two broad categoriesmonitors and disposables.The monitors segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.



This can be attributed to the increasing prevalence of CVDs; technological advancements in monitoring systems; increasing funding by government authorities for improving patient-centered care, safety, and efficiency; and the ability of hemodynamic monitors to improve cath lab efficiency.



By type, the noninvasive systems segment is expected to grow at the highest rate during the forecast period (20182023).

On the basis of type, the hemodynamic monitoring systems market is segmented into invasive, minimally invasive, and noninvasive systems.The noninvasive hemodynamic monitoring systems segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast owing to the benefits it offers such as reduced staffing costs, treatment expenses, and hospital stay.



Furthermore, the rising incidence of respiratory disorders; fewer complications of noninvasive hemodynamic monitoring compared to invasive methods, enhanced portability & precision, and ease of use are additional factors driving the growth of this market segment.



By end user, the clinics and ambulatory care centers segment is expected to grow at the highest rate during the forecast period.

On the basis of end user, the global hemodynamic monitoring systems market is segmented into hospitals, clinics and ambulatory care centers (ACCs), and home care settings. The clinics and ACCs segment is expected to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period due to the growing number of ambulatory care centers globally, improving reimbursements for ACCs, growing number of patients visiting clinics & ACCs, and increasing number of initiatives by governments.



The Asia Pacific hemodynamic monitoring systems market is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

Asia Pacific is expected to witness the highest growth from 2018 to 2023. This high growth rate is attributed to Japan's growing healthcare industry; extensive government reimbursement coverage for critical cardiac procedures; improving healthcare infrastructure in India and China; high diabetes prevalence in Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, China, and India; and government initiatives in Australia and Singapore.



Break of primary participants was as mentioned below:

 By Company Type  Tier 155%, Tier 225% and Tier 320%

 By Designation  C-level43%, Director Level32%, Others25%

 By Region  Europe38%, North America23%, Asia Pacific29%, RoW10%



The key players in the global hemodynamic monitoring systems market are Edwards Lifesciences Corporation (US), PULSION Medical Systems SE (Germany), LiDCO Group plc (UK), Cheetah Medical (Israel), Deltex Medical Group Plc. (UK), ICU Medical (US), Osypka Medical GmbH (Germany), CareTaker Medical (US), CNSystems (Austria), NI Medical (Israel), and Uscom (Australia).



Research Coverage:

The report analyzes the hemodynamic monitoring systems market and aims at estimating the market size and future growth potential of this market based on various segments such as product, type, end user, and region. The report also includes competitive analysis of the key players in this market along with their company profiles, product offerings, recent developments, and key market strategies.



Reasons to Buy the Report

The report can help established firms as well as new entrants/smaller firms to gauge the pulse of the market, which in turn would help them garner a greater share. Firms purchasing the report could use one or any combination of the below mentioned five strategies.



This report provides insights into the following pointers:

 Market Penetration: Comprehensive information on the product portfolios of the top players in the hemodynamic monitoring systems market. The report analyzes the market based on product, type, end user, and region

 Product Development/Innovation: Detailed insights on upcoming technologies, research and development activities, and product launches in the hemodynamic monitoring systems market

 Market Development: Comprehensive information about lucrative emerging markets. The report analyzes the markets for various hemodynamic monitoring systems across regions

 Market Diversification: Exhaustive information about products, untapped regions, recent developments, and investments in the market

 Competitive Assessment: In-depth assessment of market shares, strategies, products, distribution networks, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players in the market



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p04073944



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ATLANTA, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The NRP Group, a vertically integrated, best-in-class developer, builder, and manager of multifamily housing, today announced the hire of Johnson Bazzel as Vice President of Development in Atlanta, Georgia. The hire marks NRP's entrance into the Atlanta market, as it aims to build-out its presence in multifamily development in the Southeast.

Like other markets where The NRP Group is active, Atlanta is a massive transportation hub with a booming economy, experiencing rapid job growth fueled by diverse business sectors spanning technology, media, finance, and government. As the city continues to attract population flows from both the Atlanta suburbs and other cities, demand for rental housing is expected to be a constant.

"We are thrilled to have Johnson join our team," said J. David Heller, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at The NRP Group. "Johnson has a proven track record developing unique large scale urban and suburban multifamily communities that build on our national expertise and will accelerate our Atlanta market expansion."

Bazzel will be responsible for site acquisition, design, equity and debt capital raising, as well as management of both the construction and sale processes for The NRP Group. An industry veteran, Bazzel previously served as the Vice President of Development for Wood Partners, where he was responsible for all phases of multifamily and mixed-use deals.

"Atlanta is my home and I'm extremely excited to continue to play a role in the urban renaissance taking place in our city," Bazzel said. "While new to Atlanta, The NRP Group is respected throughout the nation's multifamily sector, and I look forward to playing an integral role in growing the company's presence in the Southeast."

About The NRP Group

The NRP Group is a vertically integrated developer, owner, builder, and manager of best-in- class multifamily housing. Since its founding in 1995, NRP has delivered more than 33,000 apartment homes, and currently manages over 17,000 residential units. The company utilizes the entire breadth of its in-house capabilities to fulfill its mission: creating exceptional rental housing opportunities for individuals and families, regardless of income.

Through its disciplined approach to vetting opportunities, NRP has established a track record of delivering impressive returns for investors. The company's formidable size and depth of talent provides the experience and infrastructure necessary to execute developments of varying degrees of complexity and scope in both urban-infill and suburban locations, including market- rate, affordable, and senior housing. As a three-time recipient of the National Association of Builders Multifamily Development Firm of the Year and recognized Top 25 Developer by Multifamily Executive, NRP is leveraging its decades of practice by also providing construction and property management services to outside owners and developers. For additional information, visit www.nrpgroup.com.

CONTACT:

Marynia Kruk

Beckerman

[email protected]

347-452-7753

SOURCE The NRP Group

Related Links

https://www.nrpgroup.com

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- MusicLife announced today that it has closed a $5 million Series A investment, led by Metropolis VC. MusicLife will use the funds to continue building the world's first music exchange.

MusicLife is a blockchain music exchange ecosystem that allows fans own "stocks" of songs and purchase music. Every shareholder can earn dividends directly from their song shares. MusicLife is also pioneering a model that lets users mine cryptocurrency by listening to songs on musical wearables. Since launching this June, over 600,000 people have signed up on the MusicLife exchange, which has over 30 million users in its ecosystem.

"We're thrilled to be working with Metropolis VC to achieve our vision of decentralizing the music industry," said Dr. Kaiming Liu, the founder and chairman of MusicLife. "The music industry is currently dominated by giants, burdened by copyright restrictions, and lacking fairness and transparency for artists. MusicLife will funnel more profit to artists while giving fans the opportunity to become song owners."

On MusicLife, music holders (artists or record companies) can license their copyrighted music to the platform where it will be free to listen to until it hits 50,000 plays. Once a song reaches this threshold, an AI-powered mechanism will set a price for it based off frequency of plays and create a MusicToken. MusicTokens represent the property rights of songs and are split into multiple shares. Music holders will own 95 percent of shares and MusicLife will own five percent of shares. Fans will have the opportunity to purchase up to 45 percent of existing shares from music holders.

While paying for music, fans can get song shares in the equivalent amount of the song's listening price, which will remain at a low rate of around one dollar. In addition to paying to listen to songs, users can purchase and exchange shares of songs with MitCoin (MITC) on the music exchange directly. As songs increase in popularity, MusicToken shareholders earn MITC dividends.

"MusicLife is an amazing platform that has the potential to completely change the economy of music," said BMAN Lee, the founding partner of Metropolis VC. "MusicLife's team has an impressive track record in the music and blockchain spaces and we feel privileged to join them on their journey to improve every aspect of the music industry."

MusicLife also allows other softwares to embed their music libraries for free via an SDK. Software linked to MusicLife will share in the profits generated by users purchasing music. The first software embedded is the app echo Music which provides innovative music services and has 30 million users worldwide.

"This will be a great music library solution for us, it's free and will help us to earn profit. MusicLife lets us focus on application services without worrying about copyright issues," said Junyi Liu, the founder of echo Music.

MusicLife has also developed a model which lets users mine cryptocurrency by simply listening to song on connected musical hardware. Musical wearables can connect to MusicLife through an SDK which allows the hardware to collect listening data and establishes MusicLife's song prices. In exchange for their listening data, users who opt in will earn MITC directly, effectively mining cryptocurrency by listening to music. The audio glasses, MusicLens will be the first piece of hardware to connect to MusicLife's ecosystem.

MusicLens are trendy glasses that use bone-conduction technology to play music without headphones. MusicLens glasses also have sensors which can verify that a human is listening to a song, allowing MusicLife to accurately set song prices in their ecosystem. MusicLens will be in mass production in late 2018.

About MusicLife

MusicLife is operated by the Singapore-based non-profit organisation, MusicLife Foundation, and the Japanese company, MusicLife Co. Itd. MusicLife is a blockchain-based music ecosystem that is comprised of a software SDK, a hardware embedded system, and a Music Exchange trading program. MusicLife seeks to help the current music industry and break the deadlock between copyright infringement and piracy and truly benefit every aspect of the music industry. To learn more about MusicLife, visit http://www.musiclife.io/

About Metropolis VC

As one of the first Asian blockchain investment firms, Metropolis is dedicated to pushing the frontier of the widespread blockchain innovation forward. Metropolis is not only experienced in traditional finance and Internet industry, but also has the most extensive experience in the emergent blockchain technology. The Metropolis team has strong relationships with the most promising entrepreneurs and top investors in Asia and is bringing industry-specific value-add resources to its portfolio companies to create star projects in the space, such as IOST, DATA and HYDRO, etc.

Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE MusicLife

Related Links

http://www.musiclife.io

"Combining efforts with Uber, one of the predominant global ride-sharing and automated driving R&D companies, could further advance future mobility," said Shigeki Tomoyama, executive vice president, TMC, and president, Toyota Connected Company. "This agreement and investment marks an important milestone in our transformation to a mobility company as we help provide a path for safe and secure expansion of mobility services like ride-sharing that includes Toyota vehicles and technologies."

As Uber and Toyota look ahead to a self-driving future, this partnership will be critical in realizing self-driving technology at scale. Uber and Toyota anticipate that the mass-produced autonomous vehicles will be owned and operated by mutually agreed upon third party autonomous fleet operators.

"The deal is the first of its kind for Uber, and signals our commitment to bringing world-class technologies to the Uber network," said Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's CEO. "Our goal is to deploy the world's safest self-driving cars on the Uber network, and this agreement is another significant step towards making that a reality. Uber's advanced technology and Toyota's commitment to safety and its renowned manufacturing prowess make this partnership a natural fit. I look forward to seeing what our teams accomplish together."

The initial "Autono-MaaS" (autonomous-mobility as a service) fleet will be based on Toyota's Sienna Minivan platform. Uber's Autonomous Driving System and the Toyota Guardian automated safety support system will both be integrated into the Autono-MaaS vehicles. Toyota will also utilize its Mobility Services Platform (MSPF), its core information infrastructure for connected vehicles. Pilot-scale deployments will begin on the Uber ride-sharing network in 2021.

"Uber's automated driving system and Toyota's Guardian system will independently monitor the vehicle environment and real-time situation, enhancing overall vehicle safety for both the automated driver and the vehicle," said Dr. Gill Pratt, Toyota Research Institute CEO and TMC Fellow. "We look forward to this partnership accelerating both companies' development and deployment of automated driving technology."

Toyota's investment in Uber and the proposed collaboration are subject to standard regulatory approvals.

About Uber

Uber's mission is to bring reliable transportation to everyone, everywhere. We started in 2010 to solve a simple problem: how do you get a ride at the touch of a button? We've since completed 5 billion trips and remain committed to building a platform that enables the safe, efficient movement of people around the world. Today, the team at the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) is tackling another challenge: how do you build and deploy self-driving technology at scale? The ATG is comprised of world-class engineering talent dedicated to vehicle safety, self-driving software, mapping, and more. Uber is taking a holistic approach to bringing self-driving vehicles to market through a variety of partnerships, with the ultimate goal of creating autonomous ridesharing at scale.

About Toyota

Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) (NYSE:TM) is the global mobility company that introduced the Prius hybrid-electric car in 1997 and the first mass-produced fuel cell sedan, Mirai, in 2014. Headquartered in Toyota City, Japan, Toyota has been making cars since 1937. Today, Toyota proudly employs 370,000 employees in communities around the world. Together, they build around 10 million vehicles per year in 28 countries and regions, from mainstream cars and premium vehicles to mini-vehicles and commercial trucks, and sell them in more than 170 countries and regions under the brands Toyota, Lexus, Daihatsu and Hino. For more information, please visit www.toyota-global.com.

Media Contacts

Toyota Motor Corporation

Japan

Media line, +81-3-3817-9170, [email protected]

US (Toyota Motor North America):

Brian Lyons, [email protected], +1-469-292-3573

Toyota Research Institute

John Hanson, [email protected], +1-657-331-1291

Uber

Media email: [email protected]

SOURCE Toyota Motor North America

Related Links

http://www.toyota-global.com

Keating will manage the bank's relationships with some of its most affluent clientele, providing comprehensive, holistic solutions for their complex financial needs, including wealth planning, investment management, estate and business planning, as well as banking and lending products and services.

"Union Bank is committed to providing sophisticated relationship management and tailored financial solutions that help families, business owners and individuals with their unique wealth management needs," said Roberts. "We are excited to add Jeff to our team of experienced Wealth Advisors. His extensive financial and client services experience along with his knowledge of the Bay Area market will help us serve our local clientele and grow our business in the area."

Prior to joining the bank, Keating served as Director, Investment Strategist at BlackRock in San Francisco, where he oversaw the day-to-day operations of the largest defined contribution plan in the United States. Prior to that he served as Executive Director, Senior Relationship Manager for JP Morgan in Hong Kong, where he handled securities lending client relationships for global clients based in Asia. He began his career at State Street Bank and Trust, where he held a number of management positions in asset servicing and securities lending.

"I am excited to join Union Bank's talented Wealth Markets team, which is highly respected for its experienced advisors and customized financial solutions," said Keating. "I look forward to working with Lisa and the Wealth Management team to assist our clients and grow our presence in the Bay Area."



Keating holds an MBA from the Sawyer School of Management at Suffolk University in Boston, and a bachelor's degree in business from Worcester State College in Worcester, MA.

About The Private Bank

The Private Bank is an exclusive part of Union Bank dedicated to the financial needs of high net worth individuals, non-profit organizations, business owners, corporate executives and professional service firms. The Private Bank is built around teams of wealth management professionals who deliver customized solutions centered on each client's unique goals and dreams.

About MUFG Union Bank, N.A.

As of June 30, 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 22 PurePoint Financial Centers. 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 $123.8 billion, as of June 30, 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 299.1 trillion (JPY) or $2.7 trillion (USD), as of June 30, 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=110.5 (JPY) as of June 29, 2018

Wealth planning strategies have legal, tax, accounting and other implications. Prior to implementing any wealth planning strategy, clients should consult their legal, tax, accounting, and other advisers.

2018 MUFG Union Bank, N.A. All rights reserved. Member FDIC.

Union Bank is a registered trademark and brand name of MUFG Union Bank, N.A.

SOURCE MUFG Union Bank, N.A.

Related Links

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NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) will host a conference call for investors at 10:00 a.m. (Eastern Time) on Thursday, September 13th, to review its Pharmaceutical Business. Joaquin Duato, Vice Chairman of the Executive Committee; Jennifer Taubert, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Chairman, Pharmaceuticals; Mathai Mammen, Global Head, Janssen Research & Development and Lesley Fishman, Senior Director Investor Relations 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 September 21, 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 13681049.

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 ROCHELLE, N.Y., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- With serene beaches and glorious sunsets, WatermarkPointe Westchester condominiums deliver a truly inspiring lifestyle that allows residents to delight in all that Westchester has to offer. WatermarkPointe shares how residents can enjoy the best waterfront living in all of Westchester.

Stunning, idyllic location on the Long Island Sound. Nothing beats living on the Long Island Sound. The shoreline is wrapped with spectacular ribbons of beaches to relax on. Wander along the surrounding walking paths with your camera to catch passing boats, spectacular sunsets and seaside birds. You can also kayak, sail, or boat off of the many marinas nearby.

Proximity to the Metro North and major highways. It's easy to take a day trip to surrounding areas such as New York City, White Plains, Greenwich, and Rye. Spend the day sightseeing, shopping, visiting local art galleries, or dining! With such a convenient location, the surrounding area is yours to explore.

A taste of local history. Take in some history Westchester-style! Explore the stunning trails at Glen Island Park or wander amongst its castles, which are reminiscent of those in Germany's Rhineland. Or experience Downtown, where architecture and history come together in New Rochelle. History buffs can tour Westchester's grand Rockefeller properties18th century homesteads and farming villages that are well preserved and quite picturesque. Visit the home of the father of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, which spotlights original 18th-century artifacts.

Enjoy spectacular amenities and breathtaking views. Of course, living at WatermarkPointe means that you can enjoy fabulous amenities and breathtaking waterviews from the comfort of your home. Your master suite and spa bath will give you the ultimate at-home spa experience. After a relaxing soak in the tub, stroll into the greatroom for a cup of tea and take in the breathtaking view of the Long Island Sound from your expansive windows. Or just step out onto your 30-foot terrace and breathe in the salty air.

About WatermarkPointe

WatermarkPointe is a high-end, luxury condominium complex offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enjoy waterfront living in a beachfront condo while being close to Manhattan. A strong, hands-on Westchester builder/developer, National Realty and Development Corp, whose diverse background encompasses residential, commercial and retail projects throughout the Northeast, is fully dedicated to creating a spectacular waterfront residential lifestyle.

SOURCE WatermarkPointe

Related Links

http://watermarkpointe.com

Miami, Aug 27 : Four people were killed in a shooting on Sunday in a mall in Jacksonville, Florida, media reports said.

Eleven people were wounded by the gunfire, of whom four have died, Efe reported.

The police said a mass shooting led to multiple fatalities and warned people to stay "many blocks" away.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said on Twitter that the shooting took place in Jacksonville Landing, a downtown market place, and warned everyone to stay "many blocks" away from the area, as the area "is not safe at this time".

While local law enforcement authorities have released no specific figures, they are speaking of "multiple" fatalities at the Jacksonville Landing mall, including many people taken to hospitals in the area.

"Mass shooting at the Jacksonville Landing. Stay far away from the area. The area is not safe at this time. STAY AWAY" said the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office on its Twitter account, adding in another tweet "Multiple fatalities at the scene, many transported".

In yet another Twitter message, the Sheriff's Office said: "One suspect is dead at the scene, unknown at this time if we have a second suspect. Searches are being conducted."

Sheriff Mike Williams said at a Sunday afternoon press conference that authorities are currently working with the hypothesis that there was just one shooter and that he died during the incident, but he said that the identity of the white male gunman had not yet been confirmed.

SWAT teams made a sweep of the area to rescue people who had hidden in the shops within the mall when the gunfire broke out.

Law enforcement also took to the social networks to ask people who were in hiding at the mall to remain under cover and "calm" until officers could find them.

At the press conference, Williams also said that the sweep of the mall by law enforcement had concluded and that no further victims or witnesses had been found, adding that within a few hours additional details would be provided to the media on the case.

The Jacksonville Landing mall is a popular shopping center with about 20 restaurants and some 70 stores that are visited each year by many thousands of local residents and tourists.

The massacre occurred in the GLHF Game Bar, which was holding a regional videogame tourney, and local media said that gunshots could be heard on a video retransmission from the site on the social network Twitch.

The latest mass shooting in Florida came on February 14, 2018, when a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, in South Florida, killed 14 students and three teachers and wounded 20 other people.Washington, Aug 27 : Hundreds of women, and some men, marched on Sunday through numerous cities in the US to show their breasts, demanding gender equality and to protest against the "commercialization and the double standards" which affects their lives and jobs.

In its eleventh edition, the mobilization known as International Go Topless Day held 20 marches across the US, to which must be added another 40 in cities in Germany, Canada, Chile, Colombia and France.

In New York, the first state in the US to pass a law allowing breastfeeding in public, and in other cities women were also joined by a group of topless men, Efe reported.

Some 1,000 people, many of them with their families and children, marched with their breasts covered or uncovered down the pedestrian mall that runs through downtown Denver.

"This is a way to show that men and women can go topless in the streets and still set respectful and healthy boundaries," one participant in the Denver march said, providing only her first name, Sandra.

"This is a way to promote gender equality and a reminder that nudity and sex are not the same," she said, adding that "to appreciate the female body does not mean to stop respecting women, because #NoMeansNo."

Some of the demonstrators carried posters with phrases like "Free the nipple", "Your body is not a mistake" or "Let's make the body normal again".

The marches, held annually on the Sunday before Women's Equality Day, which was established by the US Congress in 1971 in memory of August 26, 1920, when American women established the right to vote.

Topless is not prohibited in Denver and, although rarely practiced, is not considered "indecent exposure" by law.

In New York, women going topless was legalized in 1992, but in other cities such as Phoenix, Arizona, Corpus Christi, Texas or Madison, Wisconsin, it is not.

Because some of these local laws which prohibit going topless are not consistent with state legislation, there are a number of unresolved court cases regarding their constitutionality.

Only three states prohibit women to go topless: Indiana, Tennessee and Utah. And in another 14 states, including Arizona, Florida and Nevada, the laws are "ambiguous," meaning that while they don't prohibit going topless for women, they include it among the acts that are "disturbing the peace," which can lead to an arrest.Seoul, Aug 27 : North Korea has released a Japanese citizen held in custody for allegedly violating its law, saying that the decision was made "on the principle of humanitarianism", its state-run media reported.

Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Sunday night confirmed the release of Tomoyuki Sugimoto, a Japanese who had been under investigation for an unspecified crime, reports Yonhap News Agency.

He was "kept under control by a relevant institution to be inquired into his crime against the law of North Korea", the KCNA said in an English dispatch.

"The relevant institution of North Korea decided to leniently condone him and expel him from North Korea on the principle of humanitarianism," it added.

The North's media outlet did not provide detailed information about the crime he allegedly committed and from when he had been kept in custody.

Japanese media speculate that the man might be a 39-year-old video creator that they reported in mid-August to have been arrested in North Korea.

The man is presumed to have been sent to China either by train or airplane. The Japanese government is said to be working to confirm where he is now.

Japan has stepped up its demand for North Korea to resolve the issue of its people kidnapped by Pyongyang decades ago.

The North has claimed the issue was already resolved, while demanding Japan to apologise for its colonial-era atrocities and make appropriate compensation for the crimes.Naypyidaw, Aug 27 : A Myanmar judge on Monday postponed the ruling against the two detained Reuters journalists who were probing the persecution of the ethnic Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine state, to September 3.

Reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who have maintained their innocence, could face a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison if they are convicted of violating Myanmar's colonial-era law known as the Official Secrets Act, reports Efe news.

The journalists were arrested on the night of December 12, 2017, after meeting two policemen who, according to the defendants, handed them allegedly confidential documents.

Since then, both have been detained without bail and have appeared some 30 times before the court. The investigation began on January 9 and the charges were formally filed on July 9.

In April, Police Captain Moe Yan Naing testified that a senior officer had ordered him and his subordinates to offer secret documents to Wa Lone in order to set him up.

The arrested journalists were investigating the murder of a dozen Rohingya discovered at Inn Din village in Rakhine, a massacre for which seven Myanmar Army soldiers were later sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The Inn Din incident is related to an offensive started by the Myanmar Army on August 25, 2017, which resulted in an exodus of over 700,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh.

The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has demanded the release of the two journalists and said the freedom of press has to be respected, an appeal which the European Union, the US and several other international organisations have also joined.London, Aug 27 : UK Prime Minister Theresa May will embark on her maiden trip to the sub-Saharan Africa this week, making her the first British leader in five years to visit the region.

During her three-day trip this week, May will meet the Presidents of South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, reports the Guardian.

The Prime Minister will be accompanied by a trade delegation in an attempt to boost Britain's post-Brexit export prospects, although she comes at a time when the government has been accused of a paying insufficient attention to the region, informed sources said on Sunday.

The last time a British Prime Minister visited sub-Saharan Africa was in December 2013 when David Cameron attended Nelson Mandela's funeral.

He had intended to return in the summer of 2016 in the final days of his premiership but the planned visit was abandoned when May took over his post.

May has never visited sub-Saharan Africa. Her only previous trip to the continent was a visit to Tunisia in 2015 in the aftermath of the Sousse hotel terror attack.

Speaking ahead of her flight to South Africa on Sunday evening, May said: "Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy" and that "a more prosperous, growing and trading Africa is in all of our interests".

May will arrive in Cape Town on Tuesday for a bilateral meeting with the South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa.

She will then meet the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja before flying to Nairobi for a bilateral with his Kenyan counterpart, Uhuru Kenyatta.

It will be the first visit to Kenya by a British Prime Minister for 30 years.San Francisco, Aug 27 : Facebook is testing a feature that can point to the commonalities you have with other random users -- whether you share a neighbourhood with them or went to the same university.

The feature, called "things in common", may help you connect with random commentators on public posts, Engadget reported on Sunday.

The tool, currently available for a few users in the US, displays titbits of information a user has in common with people they are not friends with.

Facebook said the tags that the feature uses will not violate a user's privacy as they only show information that are publicly available, meaning the same information can also be seen by someone by visiting a user's profile.

The tool is being tested as part of Facebook's efforts to make public discussions more meaningful, the report said.

"Knowing shared things in common helps people connect," a Facebook spokesperson told Engadget.

"We're testing adding a 'things in common' label that will appear above comments from people who you're not friends with but you might have something in common with. Only information that people made publicly available on their profiles will be eligible to show up."Los Angeles, Aug 27 : Actress Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas stepped out for a brunch date here the first time after a trip to Mumbai, India, where they celebrated their engagement.

The couple enjoyed a brunch date at noted celebrity hangout Nobu in Malibu on Sunday. The "Quantico" star wore high-waist jeans with a black shirt tucked in while her fiance wore a blue shirt and brown pants, reports eonline.com.

Priyanka and Nick, along with their families and close friends, had gathered in Mumbai for pre-wedding festivities, including a traditional 'roka' ceremony, on August 18.

Nick left for the US with his family a day later, while Priyanka went back to shooting her new Hindi film "The Sky Is Pink".

Just last week, the former Jonas Brothers member released a song with Robin Schulz called "Right Now" and may or may not have some hidden messages to his bride-to-be.

"And I swear, the next time that I hold you/ I won't let you go nowhere/ You'll never be alone, I'll never let you go," Jonas sings.Taipei, Aug 27 : At least four people were killed and 143 injured following torrential rains in Taiwan that also caused agricultural losses worth more than 563.2 million Taiwanese dollars ($18 million), authorities said on Monday.

Central and southern Taiwan have suffered floods that have paralysed factories and work on farms in addition to causing power outages and damaging several roads, reports Efe news.

According to disaster management authorities, thousands of homes have been flooded and about 7,000 people have been evacuated, including 1,827 who are living in 20 temporary shelters.

Some 70,000 households have suffered power outages, according to fire agency data.

A Taiwanese weather expert on Monday forecast three more days of torrential rains and strong winds, warning residents of increased flooding, landslides and falling rocks, while evacuations continue.

The army has mobilized more than 37,000 troops and some 5,000 aircraft and vehicles to deal with the situation arising from the torrential rains.Mykonos, Aug 27 : British actress Elizabeth Hurley, 53, showed off her physique in a new photo shared on Instagram.

She wore a tiny pink bikini from her swimwear line Elizabeth Hurley Beach as she posed with a red hula hoop around her middle.

"Hula hoop practice," she captioned the picture.

Hurley has been having loads of fun in the sun recently. Earlier this week, she splashed around topless in a pool in Greece, reports people.com.

"Attempting to swim off the calories," she wrote alongside the video.

Hurley has a penchant for taking sexy swimsuit shots. Last year, she posed with a cat in another pink bikini, relaxed by the ocean in a paisley two-piece, laid in bed topless in a thong and flaunted her bright orange swimsuit in a selfie.

Hurley told people.com about her thoughts on getting older and looking good in 2015.

"If you've got time to think about aging then you're not busy enough. Being busy and interested is the key to being attractive. Narcissistic bores who stare at themselves in the mirror for hours are the dullest people on earth," she said.

Hurley's bikini photos are sometimes taken by Damian Hurley, her 16-year-old son.New Delhi : Taking a leaf out of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's book, Congress President Rahul Gandhi used his Europe tour to reach out to non-resident Indians, or NRIs -- a group largely known to support Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in recent years. Throughout the tour, he targeted Modi for his style and policies, bitterly attacked the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and tried to project him and the Congress party as a better alternative.

Gandhi comes from a family where access is carefully controlled and only a select few are allowed to reach its members. But in London, he gave the impression that he's accessible to the common man. He even mingled with the guests at his gatherings and shook their hands.

Speaking to journalists on Saturday (August 25), he mocked Modi for not talking to them openly. He accused the Prime Minister of not having the courage to answer reporters' questions. This was a reminder of Modi's public event in London in April, where he was accused of taking pre-planned and selected questions from the audience and not addressing even a single press conference. But one has to remember that Modi was also accessible to the media before he became Prime Minister. The question is, will Gandhi attend such open events and answer unscripted questions if he ever becomes the Prime Minister of India?

But still, this was a new Rahul Gandhi in London -- more mature, aggressive, confident and ready to challenge his rivals. His sustained attacks on Modi, the BJP and the RSS were deliberate and sounded like part of a well-planned theme. It's clear that he wanted to provoke the ruling party in India in order to set an agenda for debate. By comparing the RSS with Muslim Brotherhood, he wanted to plant a doubt in the minds of the Hindu right-wing organisation's new supporters in India. This was also an attempt to drive away some voters from the BJP.

By targeting Modi and raising the issue of the alleged threat to India's institutions under his government, Gandhi was trying to become the darling of the intelligentsia that supported the BJP in 2014. By praising Sushma Swaraj, who he's bitterly criticised in the past, and attacking Modi for isolating her, Gandhi sought to create a wedge in the cabinet and was trying to impress upon the audience that he favoured an inclusive government where individual ministers were as important as the Prime Minister.

But we all know that Modi'S style of functioning is very similar to Rahul Gandhi's grandmother, Indira Gandhi. And it's a fact that in present-day India, leaders of all political parties act like dictators and once in government they rarely allow individual ministers to have an independent voice.

In Europe, Rahul Gandhi cleverly avoided talking about his own ambitions of becoming Prime Minister. He didn't want other opposition leaders to stop dreaming about that ambition and thus jeopardise their support for an anti-BJP front during next year's elections. It also went with his theme of projecting himself as a consensus politician.

He fumbled at the press meet earlier when he seemed to agree with Pakistan's position that the main problem currently between the two countries was that India didn't want to talk. But later, in answer to a direct question about Imran Khan's election, he made it clear that relations with Pakistan couldn't improve as long as institutions like the ISI continued to export violence to India.

The Congress president rightly focussed on the unemployment issue and was honest in saying that most countries are facing that problem and don't know how to tackle it. He wanted India to follow China where he said small and medium industries had resulted in large-scale industrialisation and massive job creation. But he should know that a democratic India can't be compared to a totalitarian China. In India, no government can take a decision without attracting scrutiny by the opposition and the media.

But where Rahul Gandhi didn't come out really clever and mature is when he said that the Congress party was not responsible for the massacre of Sikhs after the assassination of his grandmother in 1984. For the second day in London, he failed to correct himself that members of his party were not only responsible but some of them led mobs to kill Sikhs. Although later his party didn't give them tickets for parliament and state assemblies, they were never expelled.

Gandhi's explanation that he condemned all violence and wanted the guilty to be punished, is similar to Modi and BJP leaders saying that they condemned all violence, including those by cow vigilantes, and wanted the perpetrators to be brought to justice. All of a sudden, just months before the general election, Gandhi, has given the BJP and the Akali Dal a major political issue. As Sikhs are in large numbers among the NRIs, he has only managed to provoke their anger against the Congress party.

Gandhi still has a long way to go. He still appears to lack new ideas and the political acumen required to take on Modi. But his Europe tour suggests Modi and the BJP will have to take him seriously. The man they dismissed as "Pappu" for a long time appears to have emerged as a tough challenger.

(Naresh Kaushik is a senior journalist based in London. He can be contacted at uknaresh@gmail.com)Ahmednagar (Maharashtra), Aug 27 : This is one war widow of Ahmednagar cast in the mould of her husband Kondaji Lakshman Malunjkar, who was killed in the 1965 India-Pakistan war.

Over five decades after she was widowed, Lahanbai Malunjkar is now waging a different battle with the local and state authorities to get possession of a 10-acre plot awarded to her as part of the compensation following the death of 23-year-old Kondaji on the war front.

"I am already 71. That land is my right, but I am too old and unable to take possession. I appeal to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to help me before it is too late," Lahanbai told IANS at her home in Rumbhodi village.

She said her simple life as a teenager was shattered when she was informed on October 2, 1965, that her young husband Kondaji, a soldier with the Maratha Light Infantry, had died in action in Jammu & Kashmir.

"My only son, 18-month-old Deepak was in my lap then. There were no other close male relatives on both sides in our families. I started all over as a widowed, teenager mother, and encountered huge difficulties, but somehow I managed," recalls Lahanbai.

In 1972, a ray of hope appeared: Defence authorities allotted her 10 acres of agricultural land in Aurangpur village, around 6 km from Rumbhodi.

"My grandmother's travails just began," says Sachin Malunjkar, Lahanbai's grandson.

"The people of Aurangpur would not allow us in. It meant that our land remained only on paper. We had no means to take physical possession of it," says Sachin Malunjkar.

After waging a four-year war of nerves with the villagers, the family retreated by seeking another plot of land -- measuring 2.5 acre -- which the district administration allotted to Lahanbai.

But that land was was more than 25 km away, most of it rocky and unfit for cultivation. So Lahanbai rejected it and finally surrendered it after 30 years in 2007, according to Sachin Malunjkar.

Lahanbai's son Dipak became adult, married and they have two sons, Sachin and Sagar. The joint family continued to eke out a modest living by farming on their own nine-acre ancestral plot in Rumbhodi, supported by Lahanbai's war-widow pension which started with Rs 27.50 in 1965 and is now around Rs 25,000 per month.

Ahmednagar Resident Deputy Collector Prashant Patil says that the plot in question belongs to the woman. "It has not been taken away, but she will have to take possession and start cultivation there," he said.

"If there are any legal issues, we are ever ready to help her, she can approach the local revenue official (tehsildar) for guidance," Patil told IANS.

Local Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) legislator Vaibhavrao Pichad has promised to raise the issue in the Maharashtra Assembly and through the NCP, even in Parliament.

Aurangpur villagers claim they are opposed to the land allotment in their village since they are facing a shortage of grazing land for their cattle. Possession of land by Lahanbai could result in some farmers losing their land, they say.

"Besides, it is a forest land and cannot be allotted for farming," said a villager.

Sachin pointed out that they had even approached former Maharashtra minister Babanrao Pachpute, tehsil officials, the collectorate and other officials, but nothing has happened in the last 46 years.

"My efforts with the tehsil office continue. Now they have asked us to measure and demarcate the plot, which we hope to complete soon," said Sachin.

Unaffected by her 45-year experience, Lahanbai is grooming her younger grandson Sagar to either the join the armed forces or the police.

(Quaid Najmi can be contacted at q.najmi@ians.in)Mumbai, Aug 27 : Actor Emraan Hashmi on Monday unveiled a teaser poster of his first production "Cheat India".

The 39-year-old took to his Twitter to give a glimpse of the film.

Along with the poster, he wrote a tagline which reads: 'Nakal mein Hi Akal Hai'." He asked fans if they agree to it or not.

Being directed by Soumik Sen, the film, which talks about the education system in India, the film had landed in a controversy earlier.

Filmmaker-actor duo Dinesh Gautam and Imran Zahid had claimed the storyline of the film was copied from their film titled "Marksheet".

Starring actors Emraan and Shreya Dhanwanthary in the lead roles, "Cheat India" is scheduled to release on January 25, 2019.Geneva, Aug 27 : Top military leaders in Myanmar, including the commander-in-chief, must be investigated and prosecuted for genocide in Rakhine state and crimes against humanity in other areas, according to a UN report released on Monday.

The report -- based on hundreds of interviews, research and analysis by a UN-mandated fact-finding mission -- is the strongest condemnation by the UN of the Myanmar military's actions following the crackdown on Rohingya Muslims last August.

It extended culpability for the humanitarian crisis in Rakhine state to Myanmar's civilian government, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. The civilian government, the report said, failed to speak out against unfolding events, spread "false narratives, oversaw the destruction of evidence in Rakhine state and blocked independent investigations".

"Through their acts and omissions, the civilian authorities contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes," it said. The UN report called for the case to be referred to the International Criminal Court of Justice, according to the BBC.

The Army's tactics were "consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats", it said.

The fact-finding mission went beyond the military's actions in Rakhine and investigated its conduct more broadly since 2011, a time when the world was celebrating the country's opening to the West and nominally democratic transformation.

The UN report found "patterns of gross human rights violations and abuses committed in Kachin, Rakhine and Shan state" that "undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law".

The Myanmar government has consistently said its operations targeted militant or insurgent threats. But the report said that the crimes it documented were "shocking for the level of denial, normalcy and impunity that was attached to them".

"Military necessity would never justify killing indiscriminately, gang raping women, assaulting children and burning entire villages."

The fact-finding mission concluded that there was "sufficient information" to open a genocide and war crimes investigation of senior Myanmar generals. A spokesman for Myanmar's armed forces could not be reached for comment.

The report also noted that Myanmar authorities "do not tolerate scrutiny or criticism and use various laws to arrest, detain or harass human rights defenders and journalists".

"The report will have a big impact internationally," Richard Horsey, a former UN diplomat in Myanmar and long time Yangon-based analyst, was cited as saying by the Washington Post.

"Its specific finding that there was sufficient ground for investigation and prosecution of military commanders for genocide was likely to have particularly serious diplomatic, not only legal, consequences," he said.

The UN fact-finding mission will present a detailed report to the Human Rights Council on September 18.Thiruvalla (Kerala), Aug 27 : A bishop now 100-years-old says the floods which have devastated Kerala are far worse than the one which choked the state way back in 1924.

The 1924 floods were not as horrific as the present one, says Philipose Mar Chrysostom, the senior most metropolitan of the Thiruvalla-headquartered Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian Church.

Ever since monsoon rains began lashing Kerala on May 29 this year, a total of 417 people have died and more than a million were forced to take shelter in relief centres following unprecedented destruction.

The 2018 floods have been described as the worst to hit Kerala after 1924.

The bishop was born in 1918 and his house was on the bank of the Pampa river in Thiruvalla.

When the 1924 floods came, he recalls seeing the river in spate, washing away houses and domestic animals.

Thiruvalla, the district headquarters of the now Pathanamthitta district, is located about 120 km form Thiruvananthapuram.

"In comparison, the current floods are much more devastating... I have painful memories of witnessing houses with helpless inhabitants and cattle being washed away in the Pampa almost a century ago," said the bishop.

"There were no relief camps and no one to prepare or deliver food to the homeless then. People huddled in groups in school or church buildings or temple grounds."

One day, his father, a Vicar, and his assistant took a small boat on a rescue mission. The boat capsized and his father fell into the river. He was saved by the assistant.

The bishop added that although more devastating in its magnitude, the present devastation had brought people together by breaking the barriers of creed, race and politics.

"This is a good sign... of the essence of humanity reaching out to one another."

Even though he is officially retired, the bishop remains active and leads an occasional prayer session.Dubai, Aug 27 : An Indian man has received a suspended jail term along with a deportation order for forging a parking ticket in Dubai.

The Court of First Instance heard that the 25-year-old Indian made a fake copy of a ticket using Photoshop to avoid paying for the parking lot. He was caught in Al Rafaa following the incident in March, the Khaleej Times reported on Sunday.

He received a suspended jail term along with a deportation order. The man admitted to the police that he copied an original Roads and Transport Authority ticket and placed the forged one on his car.Patna, Aug 27 : The Patna High Court on Monday directed the Bihar government to impose a ban on the usage of plastic bags.

A bench comprising Patna High Court Chief Justice M.R. Shah asked the state government to make a law on the ban and to use the media to create awareness.

It slated the next hearing for September 24.

Last week, a draft notification was circulated for a blanket ban on the manufacture, import, storage, transport, sale and use of plastic after seeking objections and suggestions from civilians, institutions and stakeholders.

According to the notification, the plastic bags are non-biodegradable, produce toxic gases on burning, cause blocking of sewers and drains, reduce soil fertility and pose a threat to the life of cattle.

No one will sell, store, distribute or use any kind of plastic bag for storing or dispensing edible or non-edible goods in the jurisdiction of all municipal corporations, municipal councils and nagar panchayats, it added.Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 27 : The death toll in the Kerala floods would have been much higher but for the timely help provided by the military, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has said.

The calamity would have been greater if the armed forces hadn't worked hand in hand with the Kerala government, Vijayan said at a formal farewell function held here on Sunday in honour of Central forces which played a key role in rescue and relief operations.

"We could directly witness the bold initiatives they took to rescue those who were stranded in the flood waters," said Vijayan at the function held at Air Force Station at Shanghumukham.

He appreciated the military and paramilitary forces who saved the helpless, braving adverse circumstances, an official statement said.

"All that we can say is that your services will be kept in mind in the times to come too, with gratitude and appreciation."

The Chief Minister presented citations to Air Marshal B. Suresh, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Southern Air Command, and Rear Admiral R.J. Nadkarni, Chief of Staff, Southern Naval Command, among others.

Air Marshal Suresh said they could act efficiently because of the clear directions given by the Chief Minister. "He was leading from the front."

The Air Marshal also appreciated the volunteers, fishermen and all those who were part of the rescue and relief activities and saluted the "indomitable spirit of Malayalis".

Hundreds have been killed and hundreds of thousands made homeless in the worst floods to hit Kerala since 1924.Lucknow, Aug 27 : The Uttar Pradesh government presented a Rs 34,833.24 crore supplementary budget for the year 2018-19 in the Assembly on Monday.

In the supplementary budget, almost one fourth of the provisions has been marked for the agriculture sector.

The state government has allocated Rs 5,500 crore for paying off cane arrears for the year 2016-17 and 2017-18, while Rs 500 crore was earmarked for direct benefit transfer (DBT) for farmers.

It has also allocated Rs 800 crore for the Zewar airport while Rs 850 crore was marked for the Kumbh Mela which will take place in Allahabad next year.

Based on the proposals by legislators, the state government has proposed the allocation of Rs 750 crore for the construction of roads and Rs 301 crore has been proposed to be spent on flood relief.

The House reconvened earlier on Monday after a four-day recess.

It was however adjourned till Tuesday soon after Opposition lawmakers created a ruckus, accusing the Yogi Adityanath-government of failing on all fronts, specially in maintaining the law and order.Madrid, Aug 27 : A suspect in the 1998 murder of a Dutch boy has been arrested in Spain with the help of mass DNA testing, the Spanish police announced on Monday.

Nicky Verstappen, 11, was found dead near a campsite in the southern Dutch province of Limburg on August 10, 1998, and the only piece of evidence police were able to find was some unidentified DNA on his body.

"A survival expert, who is the alleged perpetrator of the sexual attack and murder of the 11-year-old boy, has been found on a mountain near CastellerAol," the Spain's police said on Twitter.

In May 2017, the Dutch police launched a mass DNA testing campaign in Limburg to try to finally identify the alleged perpetrator, Efe news reported.

Some 14,000 men took part and though none was the suspect, the police were recently able to identify a 55-year-old man named Jos Brech through the DNA of a relative, who was a close match.

Brech was believed to be on the run, so, on last Wednesday, the police released images of the suspect to the public and a Dutch citizen who recognized him reported him to authorities on Sunday.

The Spanish police were able to arrest Brech within hours after having tracked him down to a tent in a wooded area near a house where he had been seen.

Spanish authorities expected to hand the suspect over to counterparts in the Netherlands.New Delhi, Aug 27 : Congress President Rahul Gandhi will visit flood-hit Kerala on Tuesday and Wednesday.

"I will be in Kerala tomorrow (Tuesday) and the day after, visiting flood-hit areas and relief camps. I will also meet fishermen, volunteers and others who have been working tirelessly and selflessly to help those in need," said Gandhi on Twitter.Jakarta, Aug 27 : Taiwan won the gold medal in the men's recurve archery team event at the 2018 Asian Games after defeating South Korea with a score of 5-3 on Monday.

The Taiwanese team, comprising Weimin Luo, Chihchun Tang and Chunheng Wei won in the first set 56-55 to go 2-0 up, reports Xinhua news agency.

They met resistance from the South Koreans in the second and third sets. In the second set, both teams collected 53 points and the score became 3-1. In the third set, South Korea hit top form to win 58-51 and tie the score at 3-3.

In the fourth set, Taiwan regained the momentum and closed the deciding set 56-55 for 5-3 overall.

"We are very pleased with this result and we gave our best," Chunheng said.

China won the bronze medal after beating Mongolia 6-0.Paris, Aug 27 : French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday said the European Union (EU) should take its security and defence projects into its own hands and become less reliant on the US.

"Europe can no longer leave its defence to the US. It is now up to us to take our own responsibility and to guarantee the safety and therefore the sovereignty of the EU," Macron said outlining his foreign affairs policies, in an address to French Ambassadors at the ElysAe Palace here.

In the coming months, he would promote a project to reinforce and restructure defence systems within the EU, in a move that could involve collaborating with third parties such as Russia, Xinhua news agency reported.Bengaluru, Aug 27 : Karnataka has so far received Rs 46.15 crore as funds for relief and rehabilitation of people in flood-hit Kodagu district, an official statement said.

"The Chief Minister's relief fund has received a total of Rs 46.15 crore through contributions from various state's institutions, private firms and employee associations," a statement from Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy's office said.

Demand Drafts (DD) worth Rs 14 crore were received through 153 different individuals and organisations, while more than Rs 9 crore was transferred to the relief fund through internet banking and digital wallets.

Kodagu's villages, towns and public infrastructure were severely damaged after torrential rains caused floods and landslips in the hilly district during the southwest monsoon from August 14-22.

According to preliminary estimates, the district has suffered losses worth Rs 1,140 crore to public and private property as a result of the rains, Kodagu Deputy Commissioner P. Sreevidya earlier said.

At least 34 village panchayats have been badly damaged.

Apart from the Chief Minister's relief fund, several Kannada media houses, private organisations and non-governmental organisations have also been collecting funds to help the region in distress.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman during her visit to the district last week announced Rs 1 crore aid from Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS), being a Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka.

She had also said Rs 7 crore will be given to the affected district from the state-run defence organisations' corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds.

While Karnataka has sought Rs 2,000 crore interim relief from the Centre for rehabilitation measures in the hilly district, Sitharaman had said the aid will be announced only after an assessment of the losses.New Delhi, Aug 27 : Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) patron Sharad Yadav on Monday demanded that the general elections be held through the ballot paper as there were doubts about the electronic voting machines in the minds of the voters.

"There are doubts over the EVMs in the minds of the people. And despite the Supreme Court order of May, 2017 the Commission has not fulfilled its promise over the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT)," he told a press conference here.

Yadav said that many people might not participate in elections because of their apprehensions over the voting machines which would be very dangerous. "So the elections should be done through ballot paper," he said.

"The Commission must take some robust step to clear the doubts of the voters. And I shall soon hold a rally in Delhi named 'Vote bachao, Desh bachao' (save vote, save country)," he said adding many developed countries are using the ballot paper now a days.

He said that he was not in favour of the idea of one nation, one election.

Yadav also attacked the Narendra Modi government accusing it of not helping Kerala.

"Following the devastating floods, the Kerala government demanded Rs 20,000 crore from the centre, but the central government gave only Rs 600 crore. And when the United Arab Emirates (UAE) tried to help Kerala, then it was rejected by the central government," he said.

Slamming the Prime Minister, Yadav said that during his 'Mann ki baat' monthly broadcast programme Modi said that the entire nation was standing with Kerala.

"Entire people of the country is standing with the people of Kerala except the central government, as it is not helping Kerala properly," he said.

Attacking the NDA government over the issue of employment, Yadav said that they are making big claims on employment but the facts were completely different.

Yadav said there is no rule of law of in the country as people are lynched in the name of cows and eating habits.

"Now mobs are killing people in the name of religion, lands from the tribals are being snatched, women in the country are not safe," he said.Panaji, Aug 27 : Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar on Monday appealed to the public in the state to donate for relief work in flood-hit Kerala.

In a statement issued here on Monday, Parrikar, who is currently undergoing treatment for advanced pancreatic cancer in a Mumbai hospital, asked Goans to reach out to Kerala, where more than 400 people have died on account of flooding over the last few weeks.

"The state of Kerala has been devastated by floods and rain causing loss to human life, destruction of properties, roads, etc." Parrikar said.

"This is a human tragedy and Goans should reach out to our brethren in this hour of crisis," the Chief Minister said while announcing the setting up of a special bank account 'Chief Minister of Goa Kerala Relief Fund'.Lucknow, Aug 27 : The Allahabad High Court on Monday dismissed a public interest litigation (PIL) filed against Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati demanding a CBI probe into an alleged land scam.

Petitioner Sandeep Bhatt had alleged that the former UP chief minister had got a vast stretch of land allotted in her family's name by misusing her position and got illegal construction done on it in Badalpur, her native village in Gautam Budh Nagar.

A bench of Chief Justice D.B. Bhonsle and Justice Yashwant Verma dismissed the petition.

Earlier the Allahabad High Court had in 2017 served a notice on the four-time UP chief minister, her brother Anand Kumar and father Prabhu Dayal in a case in which the Dalit leader is accused of getting the agricultural land use changed and transferring the land to her family members.

Mayawati has a huge mansion built on this land, the petitioner said, alleging that Mayawati, between 2002-2005, purchased over 50 bighas of agricultural land from farmers and got the construction done without following procedure.Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 27 : The Congress-led UDF on Monday demanded that the fund collection initiated by the Kerala government following the devastating floods should go into a special account and not into the Chief Minister's Distress Relief Fund (CMDRF).

Addressing the media here after a meeting of UDF leaders, Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala said the need of the hour was to have a separate account for the funds that have started to come in to rebuild Kerala.

"The state government should set up a special account for rebuilding the state. We are demanding this because when Ockhi struck last year, Rs 104 crore was received and till now only Rs 25 crore has been utilized," he said.

"Where has the rest of the money gone? We wish to know."

Chennithala also said that soon after Ockhi struck, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan announced a slew of measures but many of the announcements continued to be only on paper.

"In the light of how Ockhi was managed, the government cannot afford to do a callous job this time. First Vijayan announced Rs 3,800 to be given to all those affected by floods, then it was raised to Rs 10,000.

"We demand everyone should get Rs 25,000," he said.

So far more than Rs 500 crore has come into the CMDRF.

The United Democratic Front also demanded a judicial probe into opening of the dams' sluice gates, saying this was the single major cause for his largescale damage to the state.Mumbai, Aug 27 : The United States Consulate in Mumbai on Monday awarded 26 Indian shipping companies which participated in the US Coast Guard (USCG)'s Automated Mutual-assistance Vessel Rescue (AMVER) programmes.

The AMVER in a worldwide initiative that ensures quick and efficient rescue of disabled or distressed ships at sea, saving the lives of sailors and ensuring continuity of shipping operations.

US Consul-General in Mumbai Edgard Kagan said that AMVER, now in its Diamond Jubilee year, is an excellent example of mutual assistance and partnership.

"These awards are an opportunity to recognize the Indian merchant mariners and their efforts to facilitate world trade while preserving safety at sea," Kagan said.

Presenting the awards jointly with Kagan, India's Director-General of Shipping Malini V. Shankar said that AMVER is a unique and voluntary global ship reporting system used worldwide to arrange for assistance to ships and sailors in distress at sea.

"Instead of relying only on specialized rescue operations, this initiative provides an excellent opportunity for mutual cooperation on the seas. AMVER is an enduring example of international public-private partnership," Shankar added.

Established in 1958 and managed by the USCG, AMVER is a search-and-rescue (SAR) programme in which merchant ships sailing the high seas make themselves available for maritime emergency response on a voluntary basis without regard to nationality but with the main objective that no call for help should go unresponded.

Over 140 nations are participating in AMVER, providing a global safety net for mariners, comprising more than 7,850 ships available to carry out SAR services worldwide.

In 2017, AMVER mobilized 103 ships for providing such assistance to distressed ships and helped save 153 lives of mariners.New Delhi, Aug 27 : Nearly 37 years after an Air India plane was hijacked and commandeered to Pakistan, a Delhi court on Monday acquitted two of the accused in the case who were charged with waging war against the country.

Additional Sessions Judge Ajay Pandey acquitted Tajender Pal Singh and Satnam Singh of the charges under Sections 121 (waging war against the government of India) and 121A (conspiracy to commit certain offences against the state) of the Indian Penal Code by granting them the benefit of the doubt.

The court said that the prosecution had miserably failed to prove its case against them beyond reasonable doubt.

The case against the two dates back to September 29, 1981, when an Air India plane en route to Srinagar from New Delhi was hijacked and forced to land in Pakistan.

The hijackers were arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment in Pakistan, from where both were deported in 2000 after serving life terms. In 2011, the Delhi Police charge-sheeted them in the case.

"The accused have already been convicted by a competent court in Pakistan for the hijacking of the Indian airplane. Neither any charge sheet has been filed for those offences against them nor any charge framed. No sanction for prosecution of those offences was granted by the competent authority," the court said.

"Hence, in the absence of identification and description of specific role of each accused by the witnesses, this court is of the opinion that prosecution has miserably failed to prove the charge under Sections 121 or 121A of the IPC against either of the accused."Mumbai, Aug 27 : The Retailers Association of India (RAI) will help boost the fast growing retail sector in Andhra Pradesh especially in upcoming cities, besides promoting the state as an investment destination for retail and allied sectors, an official said on Monday.

The CEO of Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board (APEDB), J. Krishna Kishore, signed a MoU with the RAI CEO Kumar Rajagopalan in Mumbai for the initiative in the presence of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu.

With this, the APEDB and RAI will join hands to encourage, facilitate, support and partner retailers to modernize, expand and adopt best practices across technology, logistics, warehousing and infrastructure.

They will also collaborate on promoting Andhra Pradesh as an investment destination among the retail investors and allied sectors, improve policies, regulations and standards designed to foster growth and development retail and related sectors in the state.

"The MoU is a step in right direction as rising incomes, increasing tastes and preferences, emerging markets in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities make Andhra Pradesh an attractive destination for retailers," said Kishore.

"Andhra Pradesh is standing on the threshold of a 'retail revolution' and this collaboration will help give an impetus to the retail industry there," noted Rajagopalan.

The Indian retail market is estimated to be worth around Rs 47 lakh crore with a 7 per cent growth, but a significant share of the market remains untapped by modern retail which promises a huge opportunity for the country, especially Andhra Pradesh.New Delhi, Aug 27 : India can seek the extradition of fugitive diamantaire Mehul Choksi even without issuance of a Red Corner Notice (RCN) from the Interpol as his location has been revealed, the CBI has informed the Ministry of External Affairs, sources said on Monday.

A Central Bureau of Investigation source told IANS: "The CBI has informed the MEA, which is communicating with the Antiguan government that it can seek the extradition of Choksi even without the issuance of an RCN against him from the Interpol."

The source said since the location and nationality of Choksi is already known, he should be arrested or detained there.

According to the source, the Indian government in its request also informed the Antiguan goverenment that if Choksi moves out to any of the countries, then the host countries would also seek clarification from Antigua as he is travelling on their passport.

Earlier this month, the CBI, which is probing the Rs 13,500-crore banking fraud allegedly committed by the diamond jeweller and his nephew Nirav Modi, has communicated to the MEA that it has already written to its counterpart agency in Antigua for the provisional arrest of Choksi.

In its request to the Home Ministry, the CBI said Choksi's extradition was being sought "on grounds of principle of reciprocity and dual criminality".

India and Antigua are signatory to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), a multilateral treaty negotiated by the member-states of the United Nations and promoted by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the CBI pointed out in its request.

The source also revealed that the Gitanjali group owner has also appealed to the Interpol to not issue an RCN against him alleging that the charges against him are politically motivated and the condition of the Indian jails are very poor.

The Interpol, after receiving Choksi's plea, sought the CBI's reply. The CBI in its reply has denied all allegations levelled by Choksi.

Choksi is said to have fled India on an Indian passport in the first week of January 2018. The Antiguan government is believed to have cleared his application for citizenship in November 2017, for which he may have paid around Rs 1.3 crore.

Choksi had taken the oath of allegiance as a citizen of Antigua on January 15 this year. Days later, on January 29, the CBI filed a case and started investigating Choksi and Nirav Modi.The Hague, Aug 27 : The Indian diaspora in the Netherlands has been mobilizing funds over the last two weeks to aid victims of the floods in Kerala.

A number of Dutch nationals have also participated in the effort, according to a press release from the Indian Embassy here.

The Stichting International Yoga Day, which joined hands with the Indian Embassy to organize the International Day of Yoga celebrations in June, has donated Rs 10 lakh.

The Netherlands Malayalee Association (Nanma) has made an initial contribution of Rs 10 lakh for flood relief.

Rajni Nambiar, who runs The South India Kitchen together with her friends, hosted a fundraising dinner for the flood victims and raised Rs 1 lakh for the Kerala Chief Minister's Disaster Relief Fund.

The Indian Students Association of the University of Twente, University of Wageningen and other Indian Students Associations are also engaged in fundraising initiatives.

Rakesh Naduvathmana, a young architect from Kerala, has launched a crowdsourcing initiative through GoFundMe.com which has received a good response from both the Indian diaspora and Dutch nationals.

The Embassy is facilitating the routing of these contributions to the Kerala Chief Minister's Disaster Relief Fund.New Delhi, Aug 27 : A Supreme Court Judge on Monday recused from hearing a plea by Malegaon bomb blast case accused Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit for a judicial probe into his alleged abduction and torture by investigating agencies.

As the matter was called, a bench comprising Justice Abhay Manohar Sapre and Justice Uday Umesh Lalit directed for the listing of the matter before another bench as Justice Lalit recused himself.

Blaming the then UPA government for his implication in an alleged terror plot and eight-year-long incarceration for "personal political gains", the petitioner contended that as a consequence a "source network developed meticulously by him and other officers of the Indian Army was demolished".

Purohit was granted bail by the Supreme Court on August 12, 2017.

He is the main accused in the Malegaon blast, which killed six persons in the Muslim-dominated powerloom town in Nashik district on September 29, 2008.

Purohit's plea to seek a judicial probe into his alleged abduction and torture is based on revelation by former Home Ministry Joint Secretary R.V.S. Mani, in which he is said to have indicated that Purohit was "framed by some factions in the previous government for political reasons, including introducing a face of terror under the guise of 'saffron terror'."

Mani's revelation, Purohit said, had shocked him as he had "finally understood his role, of being used as a pawn, in the larger scheme of political spectrum by selfish political interests."

Mani, according to Purohit, had given interview to media houses and even written a book 'The Hindu Terror -- Insider Account of Ministry of Home Affairs 2006-2010'.

"In these circumstances, the perpetrators and schemers of such sinister modus operandi, compromising national security, are required to be identified and made accountable," the petitioner said.

He pointed out that there was "complete subversion of the criminal justice system by the state itself, and there is credible reason to fear that a citizen of this country, no less than an officer of the Indian Army, can be abducted, brutally tortured, labelled a terrorist and put away for nine years without a trial."Patna, Aug 27 : The CBI on Monday submitted an 'action taken report' (ATR) in a sealed cover to the Patna High Court on the alleged mass rapes at the Muzaffarpur shelter home.

The court had last week expressed unhappiness over the CBI's failure to submit a progress report and an ATR. The court told the CBI to submit the ATR at the next hearing on August 27.

A High Court bench headed by Chief Justice M.R. Shah had also directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to respond on the sudden transfer of a CBI Superintendent, J.P. Mishra, probing the crime. The Patna High Court is monitoring the CBI probe.

The CBI advocate on Monday informed the court that it has also submitted the report explaining the transfer of that officer in the sealed cover.

But the court questioned the CBI as to how its DIG, who was present in the court, managed to look after the work in three states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand while probing the Muzaffarpur shelter home case.

The court will hear the case on Tuesday.

J.P. Mishra, who was transferred to Patna barely two months ago, was last Tuesday shifted as the Superintendent in the office of the Deputy Inspector General (Patna Range).

Among those arrested and jailed for the multiple rapes is journalist Brajesh Thakur. Social Welfare Minister Manju Verma had to resign after it became known that her husband was in close touch with Thakur.

The Muzaffarpur horror came to light when the Bihar Social Welfare Department filed an FIR based on a social audit of the shelter home conducted by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.New Delhi, Aug 27 : Anglo-Dutch oil multinational Royal Dutch Shell's Indian arm on Monday said that it will acquire French oil major Total SA's 26 per cent stake in the Hazira liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Gujarat.

In a statement here, Shell Energy India, however, did not disclose the consideration involved in acquiring the stake in the company that operates the 5 million tonnes per annum capacity in Hazira.

"Shell Gas BV, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell plc, has signed a binding Letter of Intent (LoI) with Total Gaz Electricite Holdings France to acquire its 26 per cent equity in the Hazira LNG and Port venture in India, subject to regulatory approvals," the statement said.

"The move will allow Shell commercial and operational flexibility over Hazira to maximise integrated value and offer creative customer value propositions. This portfolio action is consistent with Shell's strategy to deepen its presence in the gas value chain in India, the fourth largest LNG consumer in the world."

The Hazira LNG and Port venture comprises two companies -- Hazira LNG that operates an LNG regasification terminal in Gujarat; and Hazira Port that manages a direct berthing multi-cargo port at Hazira.New Delhi, Aug 27 : Union Minister Nitin Gadkari will on August 28 sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with six states for the construction of Lakhwar multi-purpose project in the upper Yamuna basin, Water Resources Ministry said on Monday.

The six states are Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi.

To create storage facilities in upper Yamuna basin, the six states had signed an MoU to conserve and utilize the monsoon flows of the Yamuna, a Ministry statement said.

Under the MoU, a 204-meters high Lakhwar project will be constructed near Lohari village of Uttarakhand with live storage capacity of 330.66 Million Cubic Meter (MCM).

"This storage will provide irrigation for 33,780-hectare land and facilitate availability of 78.83 MCM water for domestic, drinking and industrial use in six basin states," said Ministry.

According to the MoU, the Centre will provide 90 per cent fund and the rest would come from the states. The total project is worth Rs 3966.51 crore.

The project will generate 300 mw of power and will be executed by Uttarakhand Jal Vidyut Nigam Limited (UJVL), it said.

"Except sharing of stored water, all other resultant economic benefits, including generation of hydro power due to construction of the dam, are assigned to Uttarakhand," said Ministry.New Delhi, Aug 27 : Citing an RBI notification, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Monday demanded that the SBI should declare Gujarat State Petroleum Corp (GSPC) bankrupt and said the company owed Rs 12,000 crore to several banks.

He accused the Modi government of trying to protect the company from being declared bankrupt.

Ramesh said that on February 12, the Reserve Bank of India issued a circular stating that any company that owed more than Rs 2,000 crore to banks should be declared bankrupt within 180 days.

"GSPC's highest debt is from SBI, which is Rs 1,200 crore. According to RBI's notification, SBI should declare GSPC bankrupt," said Ramesh.

"Last month GSPC submitted a 15-page document, entitled 'Gujarat State Petroleum Corp Debt Resolution Plan' to SBI for the restructuring of outstanding loan. Therefore, it is beyond any doubt that GSPC is not in a position to repay the loan," he added.

Ramesh said: "GSPC has also suggested to transfer a portion of this outstanding loan to the Gujarat State Financial Services (GSFS) and Gujarat State Investment Ltd (GSIL)."

During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's term as Gujarat Chief Minister, the GSPC was cited as one of the greatest examples of the Gujarat Model.

"In 70 years, for the first time the Central government has filed an affidavit challenging a circular of the RBI in High Court with the only intention of saving GSPC," said Ramesh.

"In its affidavit, the government said they are not in agreement with the RBI circular and the period of 180 days needed to be extended to 360 days. Some power companies have moved the court, which includes Adani Power. So, this is another big scam after Rafale Deal," he added.

He said SBI was under pressure to take a decision on the loan restructuring to avoid GSPC being declared bankrupt, because in case it was declared bankrupt, it would be a huge blow to the Prime Minister.

Even after the sanction of Rs 20,000 crore to GSPC, no oil or gas was extracted, he said.

Ramesh said this raised questions about the priorities and intentions of Modi. "The PM has not spoken a word on the GSPC issue after 2007. Why is he silent?"Bangkok, Aug 27 : India has decided to step up military-to-military engagement with Thailand by commencing bilateral Navy exercise besides expanding cooperation on maritime security, as per a statement.

The decision was taken in the bilateral talks between Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister General Prawit Wongsuwan.

"It was decided to step up military-to-military engagement by commencing bilateral navy exercises. In addition, both countries will explore enhancement of ongoing joint exercises, the MAITREE counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism Army Exercise as well as their SIAM BHARAT Air Force exercise," as per the statement.

"Both sides would also expand cooperation on maritime security, focusing on greater sharing of information to develop Maritime Domain Awareness."

It further said Sitharaman offered additional training opportunities for the Royal Thai Army in India, including through tailor made courses in specialised areas, which was welcomed by Thailand.

Sitharaman is on an official bilateral visit to Thailand from August 27 to 28. She also called on Prime Minister of Thailand General Prayut Chan-o-cha.

As per the statement, both sides discussed a gamut of issues relating to defence cooperation between both countries.

"The Ministers welcomed the positive momentum and substantive content of ongoing bilateral defence engagement and discussed measures to further enhance and deepen defence cooperation between India and Thailand," it said.

"The Ministers also discussed stepping up defence industry and R&D cooperation. The two sides identified specific areas for such engagement and would discuss this further through institutionalised dialogue mechanisms," the statement said.Bengaluru, Aug 27 : A special court on Monday discharged Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy from a graft case in which he was alleged to have freed government land in the city suburb for monetary benefit.

"Special Lokayukta (ombudsman) court judge D.B. Patil has allowed withdrawing Kumaraswamy's name from the case in which he was accused of taking bribe to de-notify 3.8-acre land acquired by the state-run BDA to form the Arkavathy residential layout in the city," chief minister's counsel Hasmath Pasha said.

Of the four co-accused in the case -- retired IAS officer K. Jothiramalingam and two officials Sriram and Raviprakash -- were also discharged on the lack of evidence.

The case pertains to freeing the land from the state control when Kumaraswamy was the chief minister of the then Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S)-BJP coalition government in 2006-07.

Barring the fourth co-accused -- former minister C. Chennigappa -- the three co-accused and Kumaraswamy had filed a discharge application in the anti-graft court here. Chennigappa did not file the application.

"The petitioner (Mahadevswamy) did not seek the government's permission to file the graft case against Kumaraswamy who was the chief minister and a legislator then," recalled Pasha.

The judge also noted that the case was filed in 2011, four years after the land was freed from the government in 2007 and the complainant failed to prove the irregularity charge, causing revenue loss to the government.

Kumaraswamy heads the JD-S-Congress coalition government in the state.Ahmedabad, Aug 27 : The Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank on Monday filed two criminal defamation complaints against Congress President Rahul Gandhi and party Spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala in a court here for their tweets regarding deposits made in the bank after demonetisation.

The complaints pertain to Surjewala's press statement about alleged conversion of over Rs 745 crore in old currency in five days following demonetisation on November 8, 2016.

He had later backed it with Twitter messages on the same. Similarly, Gandhi had posted tweets on the matter.

The court of Additional Metropolitan Magistrate ordered an inquiry under Section 22 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and posted the matter for September 17.

Pointing out that BJP President Amit Shah is a bank director, the Congress leaders had alleged that it was involved in a "national scam" after demonetisation.

Gandhi and Surjewala's tweets on June 22 had targeted both the BJP and Shah.

The cooprative bank and its Chairman Ajay Patel, through their counsel S.V. Raju, contested the allegations in the defamation suits and claimed that the allegations were false and defamatory.

IANS broke the story on June 22 about the bank netting the highest deposits among such cooperative banks of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes that were abruptly demonetised on November 8, 2016.

The information on the matter accessed under the Right to Information Act by a Mumbai-based RTI activist said that the ADCB had secured deposits of Rs 745.59 crore of the spiked notes in just five days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the demonetisation announcement.

On November 14, 2016, five days after demonetisation, all district cooperative banks were banned from accepting deposits of the banned currency from public amid fears that black money could be laundered through this route.New Delhi, Aug 27 : US Ambassador to India Kenneth Juster on Monday said that a full investigation will be carried out on the attack on Sikh leader Manjit Singh G.K. in California last week.

After an Akali Dal delegation led by Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal called on him, Juster tweeted: "Productive meeting with Minister @HarsimratBadal_ and the delegation of Sikh leaders. We assured Minister Badal that incidents of violence in the United States are taken seriously and fully investigated by local law enforcement authorities."

Akali Dal leader and President of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee Manjit Singh G.K. was attacked by alleged pro-Khalistan activists in Yuba City Gurdwara in California on Saturday.Lucknow, Aug 27 : Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Monday said that Uttar Pradesh's tourism potential remained untapped and reiterated his government's commitment to finish this task.

Inaugurating the fourth edition of the 'UP Travelmart', the Chief Minister said that the Bharatiya Janata Party government was working to strengthen infrastructure at tourist hotspots in Uttar Pradesh and interlink them for the benefit of tourists.

As many as 50 tour operators from 23 countries and 18 tour operators from India are taking part in the event.

Adityanath said that the state offered nature, historical, religious and cultural tourism and there was need to boost its capabilities to increase tourist footfall.

The Chief Minister said that Bundelkhand region was was not completely unexplored till date, though it has immense potential to draw both domestic and international tourists.

The government, he added, was trying to increase tourist attraction of places like Prayag (Allahabad), Ayodhya, Vindhyachal, Naimisharan, Chitrakoot, Vrindavan, and Mathura.

Adityanath said that his government had invited representatives and dignitaries from 192 countries to attend 'Kumbh-2019' in Allahabad. More than 12 crore devotees are expected to participate in the religious and cultural event.

The state will hold Uttar Pradesh NRI Day in Varanasi on January 20-23 next year.New Delhi, Aug 27 : The Delhi government on Monday said that its Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) has started providing DNA sample reports in cases of crime against women and in cases related to Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) within a month.

This came after Health Minister Satyendra Jain held a review meeting with the FSL Director on the functioning of the laboratory in Rohini.

"As per the direction of the Health Minister, this laboratory has brought down the pendency of DNA Unit and subsequently made a regular cycle to dispose of the DNA cases within a month pertaining to crimes against women and cases under Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses (POCSO)," stated the Crime Scene Management Division of the FSL in its report submitted to Jain.

Jain's office said a proposal of DNA capacity building with the infrastructure of 1,000 cases per year of DNA sample reports is under consideration of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs.

"New facilities such as examination of explosive materials and examination of finger prints are also on its way," it said adding the FSL is planning to set up 14 Mobile Crime Scene Units at each Delhi police district.

"The mobile units are essential for quick responses and instant collection of exhibits and evidence. These units will function round the clockA to reduce any chances destruction of evidence due to delay," the Health Minister's office said.

In 2017, total number of crime scenes registered in the laboratory was 488, for which 1,212 forensic teams were deputed to attend the scenes of crime round the clock.

"Our government is extremely sensitive about crimes against women, since Delhi reports a higher rate of crimes against women. In such cases, the laboratory is providing the forensic reports/inputs at the earliest," Jain's office said.New Delhi, Aug 27 : As the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) plans to invite Congress President Rahul Gandhi for a three-day lecture series, the party said it will respond only after receiving an invitation from the organisation.

"I do not answer hypothetical speculative questions. I have said to you categorically upon checking that we have received no invitation," said Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

"You can be rest assured, as and when the Congress receives an invitation, there will be an appropriate proper response and you all will be shared with that response, he said.

The RSS on Monday was critical of Congress President Rahul Gandhi for drawing comparisons of it with the Islamic State (IS) and the Muslim Brotherhood and plans to invite him for a three-day lecture series next month to enlighten people about the organisation.Kolkata, Aug 28 : Students of Jadavpur Presidency University and some other educational institutes on Monday alleged they were attacked by Trinamool Chhatra Parishad (TMCP) supporters outside a city-based college when they were campaigning for an upcoming joint convention on the educational policies passed by the Centre and purported corruption in college admissions in West Bengal.

A police official said they had received a complaint about some students being beaten and injured and said they were looking into the matter.

"We will talk about the Centre's policies, TMCP's mafia control during college admissions, etc in a joint convention on August 31. While distributing the leaflets outside Surendranath College, some people stopped us and started beating us. I was attacked with a brick," one of the students said.

Another student said that he could not say if the attackers were students "but the way they were making their points, they were clearly the supporters of the ruling party".

The students alleged they were stopped from distributing the leaflets ahead of the foundation day of the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad, scheduled on August 28.

"We were told we will have to bear the brunt for protesting against the TMC," another student said.Washington, Aug 28 : US President Donald Trump said on Monday that US and Mexican negotiators reached an agreement on revising the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.

The new pact will not be known as NAFTA, because that name "has a bad connotation," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

The US-Mexico Trade Agreement is "a really good deal for both countries," Trump said before telephoning Mexican President Enrique PeAa in the presence of the media.

Trump said he planned to contact Canada about signing on to the new document, while making it clear that Washington's pact with Mexico will go forward regardless.

"I'll be terminating the existing deal and going into this deal," Efe quoted the US President as saying in the Oval Office, calling it a "big day for trade".

The President called it "one of the largest trade deals ever made", adding that "they used to call it NAFTA, we are going to call it the US-Mexico Trade Agreement, and we will get rid of the name NAFTA. It has a bad connotation because the US was hurt very badly by NAFTA".

Trump said he would speak with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "in a little while", adding that he hoped Canada and the US could begin talks to resolve their own bilateral issues subsumed under NAFTA "almost immediately".

Trump was accompanied on the conference call to PeAa Nieto by Mexican Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo, Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray and Jesus Seade, designated to be the chief NAFTA negotiator by Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

On the US side, also participating in the call were US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Trump's adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Trump had been pushing to renegotiate NAFTA since he became president in January 2017, having repeatedly called the trilateral pact -- in force since 1994 and encompassing more than $1 trillion in annual trade -- a "disaster" for the US.New Delhi, Aug 28 : Pregnancy brings a lot of changes in a woman's life and also inhibitions around myths related to delivery day. Experts debunk many such myths for a woman to enjoy this beautiful phase.

Rinku Sengupta, Consultant Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Abhishek Bhartia, Director, Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research, list down few myths.Jerusalem, Aug 28 : Palestinians were able to use the Erez crossing point between the Gaza Strip and Israel on Monday for the first time since it was closed over a week ago due to recent protests and clashes along the frontier of the blockaded territory.

Israel's Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, on Sunday ordered the crossing, located near Beit Hanun in northern Gaza, to be reopened given the state of calm and decrease in demonstrations since it was closed on August 19, Efe reported.

During that time, people were only permitted to cross the buffer zone for humanitarian reasons or if they were able to present authorized press credentials.

Almost 160 Palestinians have been killed, including many as a result of Israeli army fire, during mass demonstrations near the border that have erupted sporadically since March, according to the Gaza Strip's Health Ministry.

Israeli authorities accused the Islamist group Hamas, which controls the territory, of masterminding the protests to incite violence.

Gaza has been blockaded by Israel since 2007.

Protests along parts of the buffer zone were ongoing on Monday.Homeloans Limited, the non-bank lender and diversified mortgage distribution company, says increased broker referrals helped drive a 19 per cent increase in settlements in the 2018 financial year.

Joint CEO Scott McWilliam said home loan customers were asking their mortgage borrowers to see offers from non-banks. Shares in Homeloans, which merged with Resimac during the year, were trading higher after it reported net profit for the year to June 30 of $26.2 million, up 40 per cent, on total settlements of $4.3 billion, up 19.4 per cent.

The company is not regulated by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority but by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission Homeloans said the number of mortgage borrowers in its prime lending book more than 90 days in arrears sits at 8 basis points, below the level of each of the major banks. Around 60 percent of the book is lent to owner-occupiers, and 40 per cent with investors. Homeloans principally-funded loan book reached $8.6 billion, an increase of 30 percent on 30 June 2017.

The results encompass the first full reporting year since the complete integration of Homeloans and RESIMAC.

The Companys strong performance is attributed to a number of factors including above-system sales growth, a market-leading funding program, quality and improved cost discipline. Homeloans continues to bolster its third-party broker and direct channels, and the results of this approach are evident in the strong settlements growth.The Aero Wireless Group, a recognized leader of innovation in the wireless industry, is pleased to announce it will be exhibiting and presenting at the 2018 National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) Annual Conference, Tuesday, August 27 to Wednesday, August 29th, at the Loews Hotel in Philadelphia, PA.

Sam Rodriguez, Vice President of Business Development for Aero Smart Communities will be a panelist on the Importance of Agile Infrastructure in Smart City Planning on Wednesday, August 29th at 2:15pm. Visit Booth 13 to learn about the companys municipal engagement to small cell master planning, infrastructure design, and right-of-way deployment. Sam will share examples of small cell wireless infrastructure designed to blend into the community and remain future-proof and agile against frequent changes in wireless and IoT technologies.

The Aero Wireless Group is leading innovation in the wireless industry and has supported major wireless carriers, municipalities, neutral host providers, and energy companies throughout the U.S. for 20 years. Aero Smart Communities supports municipalities and private communities through master development planning and responsible deployment of small cell densification. To learn more about the innovative solutions Aero Wireless Group and Aero Smart Communities are bringing to your community, visit http://www.aerowirelessgroup.com.

# # #4-hour professional session features hands-on instruction of Microsoft Azures key features for implementing and managing cloud services

WHAT:

The Minneapolis Azure Innovation Day, hosted by AHEAD, a leading provider of IT consulting and enterprise cloud solutions, is a workshop that will provide education on Microsoft Azure basics and focus on the most popular features for managing workloads on the platform. The workshop will include hands-on experience with the features of the Azure platform that are vital to a successful implementation and ongoing use of cloud services.

WHO:

The workshop is free to professionals seeking to increase their knowledge and understanding of Microsofts Azure platform. Participants should bring a personal laptop to access the Azure platform, along with a pre-established Azure account. If you do not have an existing Azure account, Microsoft provides a free 30-day account including $200 of credit; sign up here.

WHEN:

Tues., Sept. 11, 2018 at 1:00  5:00 P.M. CT

WHERE:

Microsoft Office

3601 76th St.

West Edina, MN 55435

For more information and to register: https://www.eventleaf.com/Attendee/Attendee/EventPage?eId=rXbfr7DrL0JHdvtIztLtzw%3D%3D&referralSource=Marketing

About AHEAD

AHEAD transforms how and where enterprises run applications and infrastructure. From strategic consulting to implementation and managed services, AHEAD creates tailored solutions at all stages of the enterprise cloud journey. Headquartered in Chicago, AHEAD maintains offices in Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. To learn more, visit http://www.ThinkAhead.com and follow AHEAD on Twitter at @ThinkAheadIT.ALM Intelligence, a division of ALM Media LLC, supports legal, consulting, and benefits decision-makers seeking guidance on critical business challenges. Demand for organization strategy consulting is at an all-time high, although the nature of that demand is shifting in the face of a client imperative for speed and tangible outcomes, said Liz DeVito, Associate Director at ALM Intelligence

ALM Intelligence  Consulting division, previously known as Kennedy Consulting, has released its 2018 ratings of Organization Strategy Consulting providers. Seven firms were identified as leaders in the consulting industry: Bain & Company, The Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, McKinsey & Company, and PwC. ALM Intelligence defines organization strategy as professional services focused on helping companies mobilize their resources to execute strategic objectives.

Demand for organization strategy consulting is at an all-time high, although the nature of that demand is shifting in the face of a client imperative for speed and tangible outcomes, said Liz DeVito, Associate Director at ALM Intelligence. While there is a diversity of providers catering to this market, there is a consistent pattern in new approaches to service delivery, where solutions design is a collaborative, iterative process between consultant and client. The soft factors of people and culture are emphasized earlier in the design process and management and operating systems are structured to maximize stakeholder engagement and alignment with the business strategy.

Providers that attained challenger status include: Camelot, Capgemini, Eagle Hill Consulting, EFESO, Kates Kesler, Korn Ferry, North Highland, Oliver Wyman, and Roland Berger. Other firms that were rated include: Accenture, A.T. Kearney, BearingPoint, Hitachi Consulting, IBM, L.E.K. Consulting, Marakon, PA Consulting, Porsche Consulting, Schaffer Consulting, The RBL Group, and The Ready.

ALMs Vanguard research series assesses firms in terms of their relative ability to create impact for their clients. In addition to its overall rating assessments of consulting providers depth and breadth of capabilities and best-in-class provider designations, this series includes detailed capability evaluations for each covered provider as well as a qualitative analysis of their consulting organization, approach, and service delivery model.

For more information or to obtain the full version of The ALM Vanguard: Organization Strategy Consulting, visit the ALM Intelligence website: http://www.alm.com/intelligence/consulting-industry

About ALM Intelligence

ALM Intelligence, a division of ALM Media LLC, supports legal, consulting, and benefits decision-makers seeking guidance on critical business challenges. Our proprietary market reports and analysis, rating guides, prospecting tools, surveys, and rankings, inform and empower business leaders to meet business challenges with confidence. Please visit http://www.alm.com/intelligence for more information.Atlas Technologies, Inc., a veteran-owned and veteran inspired company, is marking twenty years of business this month. Based in North Charleston with easy proximity to SPAWAR Systems Center Atlantic, this premier defense contracting company has always made giving back to the community a top priority.

Atlas was founded to meet the needs of their customers with innovative solutions to complex problems like designing and integrating networks that enable vital, secure maritime communication. The company aids multiple Department of Defense agencies and has four locations across the U.S. in Charleston, S.C., Chesapeake, VA, Alexandria, VA, and San Diego, CA.

Today, Atlas has over 170 employees, and this has proven to be a remarkable year of growth, prompting the addition of 52 new team members.

The company was recently voted #12 out of 49 for the Best Places to work in South Carolina by the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce. The company contributes thousands of volunteer hours annually. So ingrained is its generosity that during the 2008 economic downturn, company president Brian Miller recognized the impact of his companys giving and continued supporting local charities at or above the same levels prior.

We wouldnt be the company we are today without giving back to the community, says Miller, who served in the U.S. Navy. I strongly feel that it is our social responsibility to help organizations flourish by donating our time or financial support.

Organizations Atlas supports include One80 Place the Special Olympics and March of Dimes in Charleston, S.C. Along with the racing ducks for CHIP and Raise Against Hunger in Chesapeake, VA and the San Diego Blood Bank.

Since 2000, Atlas has contributed over $700,000 to charitable organizations. The anniversary celebration will be held on August 23th at the Marriott hotel in North Charleston. We just want to celebrate our success, employees and clients, said Miller.

About Atlas Technologies Inc.

Atlas Technologies, Inc. (Atlas) is Veteran Owned Small Business (VOSB) that provides life-cycle support for products and systems with a focus on the complete integration of tactical network technologies, protocols, and equipment. The firm specializes in the design, development, on-site engineering, integration, and testing of tactical networks. Atlas also provides research and development (R&D) and custom software development for complex networking systems using the latest technologies.

Atlas is highly qualified in the areas of networking, virtualization, data management, software engineering, hardware and software support, installation and integration services, and technical documentation.

The firm prides itself on delivering reliable, intuitive IT solutions for their customers which is supported by their ISO 9001:2015 approved Quality Management System and ISO/IEC 27001:2013 approved Information Security Management System.We are incredibly excited about celebrating our 15 years at this falls Open House events. Open Houses at AYA are always special occasions, but it obviously means even more to us this year, says Jessica Chaney, AYA Medical Spa Director.

AYA Medical Spa is excited to announce their upcoming anniversary. This September will mark 15 years of providing the metro Atlanta area with the best and latest medical-grade skincare treatments and services. To celebrate this momentous occasion, AYA will be hosting Fall Open House events at their Avalon and Phipps Plaza locations.

The Avalon Fall Open House will be held on Thursday, September 20th, 2018 from 3pm to 7pm at their Alpharetta location: 2130 Avalon Blvd, Alpharetta, Georgia, 30009. The Phipps Plaza Fall Open House will take place on Thursday, September 27th, 2018 from 4pm to 8pm at AYA Phipps Plaza: 3500 Peachtree Road, Atlanta, GA 30326. Attendees at either event can enjoy 20% off all skincare products, as well as exclusive discounts on several of the most advanced and in-demand skincare treatments available at AYA. This includes cosmetic injectable treatments, CoolSculpting non-surgical fat reduction, Sciton laser treatments, diVa vaginal laser rejuvenation, the Vampire Facelift, and more. In addition to offering complimentary skin care consultations with their team of estheticians, registered nurses, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners, Dr. Allyson Maske of Atlanta Plastic Surgery will be on-hand to perform complimentary plastic surgery consultations at both events.

To express their gratitude to everyone in attendance, AYA will also be offering several opportunities to receive bonus gifts at both Open House events. The first 15 attendees to spend $1,500 or more at each event will receive a special 15th Anniversary VIP Super Swag Bag valued at over $500. Additionally, bonus gifts will be available for any patient who purchases a predetermined number of eligible cosmetic treatments including CoolSculpting, facial fillers, microneedling, and more. Complimentary hors doeuvres, wine, and cocktails will be provided. There will be additional gifts for guests who RSVP.

We are incredibly excited about celebrating our 15 years at this falls Open House events. Open Houses at AYA are always special occasions, but it obviously means even more to us this year, says Jessica Chaney, AYA Medical Spa Director. In addition to celebrating our anniversary, our Fall Open House events provide us with the opportunity to give back to and visit with our amazing patients and the whole AYA community. All their love, support, and generosity over the last 15 years has been essential to help us come as far as we have since opening our doors back in 2003.

AYA Fall Open House attendees dont have to RSVP for these FREE events, but appointments are required for patients who want to enjoy a complimentary skincare analysis or consultation appointment. The 20% off skincare product promotion is also available by phone up until the day of the event. To RSVP and book your consultation, contact AYA Avalon at (678) 534-5035 or by email at avalon(at)ayamedspa.com or contact AYA Phipps Plaza at (404) 842-1772 or by email at phipps(at)ayamedspa.com.

About AYA Medical Spa

AYA Medical Spa is a growing and innovative Atlanta and Alpharetta-based medical spa specializing in medical-grade skin rejuvenation treatments for the face and body. They currently have three locations in Atlanta and Alpharetta. AYA is owned and operated by four board-certified plastic surgeons. For 15 years, AYA has been offering FDA-approved skincare treatments and minimally invasive anti-aging services in a relaxing, patient-focused, spa-like environment. All treatments and services at AYA are performed by certified and experienced physician assistants, estheticians, nurse practitioners, and medical assistants and overseen by board-certified plastic surgeons. Striving to stay up-to-date with the latest cosmetic technologies, AYA offers a varietal menu to help patients maintain healthy, radiant skin including: cosmetic injectable treatments, Sciton laser treatments, PDO Threads Non-Surgical Thread Lift, Ulthera skin tightening, diVa vaginal laser rejuvenation, chemical peels and facials, CoolSculpting non-surgical fat reduction, the Vampire Facelift, skincare products, and more. AYA is one of the Atlanta areas leading providers of CoolSculpting, recently being inducted into the CoolSculpting 1,000 Club, recognizing over 1,000 completed CoolSculpting treatments.

To learn more about the treatments at AYA or to schedule a skincare analysis appointment, visit https://www.ayamedspa.com or visit one of their Atlanta or Alpharetta locations (Avalon, Phipps Plaza, and Northside).Wed faced a big buy-in problem with a previous PLM solution, so we needed something intuitive. For us, BeProduct was like the Mac or iPhone of PLM; it was easy to use, built with designers in mind, and it allowed us to work smart and reclaim our most valuable asset: time.

Fashion technology house BeProduct announces the successful implementation of its design-focused Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform across all American branches of KASH Apparel.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, KASH Apparel develops comprehensive, womenswear collections under a flagship womenswear brand, SOCIALITE, as well as other additional in-house labels and private label. KASH apparel styles are sold through a network of department and specialty stores in the USA and Canada  including Nordstrom - and the companys supply chain spans continents. As part of a local sourcing initiative, some knitwear manufacturing is conducted in L.A., while other products are made in Mexico and China.

In 2017, KASH Apparels technical support structure was being strained by the demands of different retail clients, a complex supply chain, and the need to design on-trend products for a broad and evolving target market.

Before BeProduct, we did everything in Excel, and that was causing us serious problems in terms of coordination and visibility, explains Stephanie Kleinjan, Owner/Chief Creative Officer. Across all our departments, information was disjointed, and that had really started to have an impact on our speed to market. We needed a single place for everyone to find the right information.

The SOCIALITE team had previously attempted to move its product design and development processes over to traditional PLM software, but despite a significant investment, the solution had failed to gain traction and a replacement needed to be found quickly and at low cost.

We chose BeProduct mainly for its ease of use, adds Kleinjan. Wed faced a big buy-in problem with a previous PLM solution, so we needed something intuitive. For us, BeProduct was like the Mac or iPhone of PLM; it was easy to use, built with designers in mind, and it allowed us to work smart and reclaim our most valuable asset: time.

Following a smooth implementation and onboarding process, KASH now has 45 users of the BeProduct social product development solution, and that figure is set to rise as the partnership between the brand and the software house deepens.

We were excited to be able to step in and support the team at KASH with their immediate challenges, and at the same time I believe we have laid a stable foundation for the future, says Oshana Pinto, BeProducts Director of Business Development. We understand the way creative teams work and collaborate, and we believe strongly in developing close relationships that allow us to respond quickly to customers rapidly-changing needs.

KASH Apparel will soon launch its own direct-to-consumer eCommerce channel  something that Kleinjan is confident will be far simpler with BeProduct in place. On top of simply incredible customer service and support, with BeProduct were getting a level of visibility in one solution that we needed multiple systems to achieve before. Everything becomes so much easier when you have a single source of information, with all cross-department communication happening in the same platform. We intend to have a long and productive partnership with BeProduct.

To find out more about the future of social product development, visit http://www.beproduct.com.

To learn more about KASH Apparels flagship womenswear brand, SOCIALITE, visit http://www.socialiteclothing.com.

About BeProduct

Built by the brains behind some of fashions biggest technology install bases, BeProduct helps brands and retailers inhabit the things they make. Every sketch; every stitch; every step of design and development. Headquartered in New York City, hosted on the cloud and designed with collaboration at its heart, our PLM solution is uniquely flexible and as full-featured as market leaders, with none of the big enterprise bloat.

Manage apparel, footwear and accessories. Use our bulletproof API to design custom apps without a line of code. Create colour palettes by uploading street style snaps. Handle complex compliance requirements. Work more closely together on design and development. Do more of what you love, and let us worry about everything else. Sidestep the false choice between implementing off-the-shelf solutions or custom-building at huge cost. BeProduct is PLM done differently. For more information, please visit, http://www.beproduct.com.

About KASH Apparel

KASH Apparel was founded eight years ago by Stephanie Kleinjan. The companys inception was fuelled by Kleinjans passion for bringing manufacturing back to California.

Committed to being adaptive to the times, committed to California and for the livelihood and longevity of the fashion industry Kleinjan intuitively surrounds herself with a talented team of like-minded men and women.

The KASH team consistently delivers relevant, cohesive collections comprised of wardrobe and denim essentials with a unique brand aesthetic. Embracing the originality of their customers, applauding their individuality, SOCIALITE stands for and behind: quality, attainability, inclusivity, and wearability.

Kleinjan nurtures KASH Apparel by instilling innovation, embracing future thinking and identifying the range of possibilities.

SOCIALITE can be found at Nordstrom stores nationwide, and live and online this fall, at, http://www.socialiteclothing.com. For more information and press inquiries, please contact, shannon@socialiteclothing.com.

BeProduct is a registered trademark of Wink Software. All other brands and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.2012 Fisker Karma Kelly Falcone-Hall, President & CEO of Western Reserve Historical Society, says the vehicle will be an important addition to the collection, which now boasts 171 automobiles, along with scores of aircraft, motorcycles, carriages and other vehicles

A rare example of one of the worlds first luxury, high-performance hybrid vehicles, the Fisker Karma, will soon have a permanent home at Western Reserve Historical Societys (WRHS) Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum at the Cleveland History Center in University Circle in Cleveland.

The Bernie Moreno Companies is donating the extraordinarily rare car  one of fewer than 2,000 remaining worldwide  to WRHSs renowned collection just in time for it to be displayed at the 2nd Annual Cars in Cleveland celebration on Public Square on September 2, 2018.

The 2012 Fisker Karma, manufactured in Finland, features a jaw-dropping design, solar panels on its roof, a top speed of 125 mph, an amazing 52 miles per gallon fuel efficiency in electric mode and a 2012 sticker price of $107,000.

The Fisker Karma wasnt a commercial success, says Bernie Moreno, but the vehicle proved that electric cars didnt have to be slow, didnt have to be skimp on luxury and didnt have to look like a spaceship.

This car is too beautiful for us not to share with the community.

Kelly Falcone-Hall, President & CEO of Western Reserve Historical Society, says the vehicle will be an important addition to the collection, which now boasts 171 automobiles, along with scores of aircraft, motorcycles, carriages and other vehicles.

Between 1898 and 1931, Cleveland was home to about 115 different automobile manufacturers, says Falcone-Hall. We truly were the nations first motor city.

We actually have electric cars from 100 years ago, she adds. This vehicle allows us to carry the timeline of the evolution of alternative-fuel vehicles up to the present. It also happens to be a stunning, gorgeous car.

The gift being from one of Clevelands modern community and civic leaders also gives it historical significance, Falcone-Hall says.

A hundred years ago, WRHS would have jumped at the opportunity to collect a vehicle from a civic and business leader like John D. Rockefeller. Today, Bernie Moreno is an agent for change. His business, civic and philanthropic activities are helping transform our city and region. WRHSs mission is to capture this history as it happens.

The public will get a chance to view the 2012 Fisker Karma over Labor Day weekend at Bernie Moreno Companies Cars in Cleveland celebration, a free event on Public Square on Sunday, September 2, 2018.

After that, the vehicle will be initially displayed in a featured space on the main floor of the Crawford Auto-Aviation Musuem, according to Falcone-Hall.

For more information, photos of the vehicle or to set up an interview with Bernie Moreno, contact Ralph Stawicki at 440-567-9144.

To set up an interview with Kelly Falcone-Hall, contact Emily Poznako at 216-721-5722 ex. 1201.

About Bernie Moreno Companies: Since the purchase of its first dealership in 2005, Bernie Moreno Companies has become one of the fastest-growing and most-admired auto-dealership organizations in the country, earning awards for its growth, client service, community involvement and employee engagement.

About Western Reserve Historical Society and Cleveland History Center: Founded in 1867 as an historic branch of the Cleveland Library Association on Public Square in downtown Cleveland, the Western Reserve Historical Society preserves and provides access to the stories of Northeast Ohio and beyond  stories of the people, the artifacts and the archives that are the provenance for our region. WRHS operates six sites throughout Northeast Ohio, including the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum.Capital Jet Management, a growing aircraft management company based in Southern California has announced the addition of an office in Riverside, CA. The company has experienced growth in the private aircraft management sector of its business.

Ken Webster, Managing Partner explained the addition of the office, There are a number of aircraft owners in the Inland Empire who are looking for a local company to help them manage their aircraft. Right now their only options are to either engage with a company who are not members of the community or engage in local operators who are 100% focused on chartering their aircraft. We think we can help fill the niche for owners that do not want 100 hours of charter per month on their aircraft but are looking for a professional company to manage their aircraft safely and efficiently.

The company chose Riverside Airport because of its location within the Inland Empire. Its central location, business-friendly airport management, and close proximity to the FAA District Office were cited as to why Riverside Airport was chosen over Chino, San Bernardino, or Ontario. "We have a strong working relationship with the FAA. Our close proximity to the Riverside Flight Standards District Office allows us to quickly and effectively manage our regulatory requests.", explained John Jorgensen, Director of Operations. "I have strong roots to the Inland Empire and have lived in the area for over 20 years, we are looking forward to continuing the grow the business and help aircraft owners in Southern California."

The new office is located within the terminal building at Riverside Airport.

About Capital Jet Management

Capital Jet Management, or CJM, provides boutique aircraft management and jet charter services to clients within the United States. CJM manages a fleet of aircraft primarily based in Southern California, with offices at Santa Ana Airport and Riverside Airport. CJM operates under FAA Air Carrier Certificate Number 5GCA573N.Our clients are assured that our web-based tools, information storage solutions, and physical security are protected by comprehensive information security controls, risk management practices, and the prevention of IT architecture security risks, says Steven Thomas, Certrec IT Director.

Certrec Corporation, a leading licensing and regulatory compliance provider for NRC and NERC compliance, announced today it has maintained its ISO 27001:2013 certification for the fifth consecutive year and has successfully completed its second Type 2 SOC 2 examination.

An independent, third-party audit found Certrec to have technical controls in place as well as formalized IT Security policies and procedures. Certrec has implemented several physical security measures and countermeasures that protect it from unauthorized access or compromise, and IT personnel were found to be conscientious and knowledgeable in best practices. The certification and examination demonstrate Certrecs continued commitment to information security at every level. Compliance with these standards confirms that Certrecs security management program is comprehensive and follows leading practices.

We take threats to the availability, security, and confidentiality of our clients information seriously, says Ted Enos, President of Certrec. We lead our industries in data protection and security by investing in third-party examinations and certifications of our compliance to the most stringent standards and controls, says Enos.

Several Certrec clients have provided feedback indicating the ISO 27001 certification and Type 2 SOC 2 examination were a key part of their business decision. Certrecs certification and examination allow clients to qualify Certrec immediately as a secure vendor, relieving them of the burden of conducting an expensive and time-consuming audit and negotiation of security standards and protocols.

Our ISO certification assures our clients of the quality of our Information Security Management System and of the confidentiality of their data. This certification, combined with the independent Type 2 SOC 2 examination, precludes the customer from having to perform their own expensive security examination, notes Enos.

Cyber security threats are becoming more prevalent in the industries Certrec supports; therefore, Certrec is committed to maintaining or exceeding current levels of service and to performing the ISO 27001:2013 certification and Type 2 SOC 2 examination each year in the future.

Our clients are assured that our web-based tools, information storage solutions, and physical security are protected by comprehensive information security controls, risk management practices, and the prevention of IT architecture security risks, says Steven Thomas, Certrec IT Director.

ISO 27001:2013 and Type 2 SOC 2

ISO/IEC 27001:2013  Information technology  Security techniques  Information Security Management Systems  Requirements (ISO/IEC 27001:2013), part of the growing ISO/IEC 27000 family of standards, is an Information Security Management System (ISMS) standard published in October 2013 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). ISO 27001:2013 formally specifies a Management System that is intended to bring information security under explicit management control.

SOC 2 reports are attestation reports that opine on controls at a service organization relevant to the security, availability, or processing integrity of a system (security, availability, and/or processing integrity principles) or the confidentiality or privacy of the information processed for the user entities (confidentiality or privacy principles). Of the five Trust Services principles, Certrec was examined against the following principles for the review period of July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018:

Security - The system is protected against unauthorized access, use, or modification.

Availability - The system is available for operation and use as committed or agreed.

Confidentiality - Information designated as confidential is protected as committed or agreed.

By engaging an independent CPA to examine and report on a service organizations controls, service organizations can respond to meet the needs of their user entities and obtain an objective evaluation of the effectiveness of controls that address operations and compliance.

CERTREC

Founded in 1988, Certrec is an engineering and technology-based organization providing regulatory support services in the electric power industry. With more than 1,000 cumulative staff years of direct industry experience (including nuclear, fossil, and renewables), Certrec has developed exceptional capabilities to support regulatory activities emanating from regulatory entities such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and Regional Entities (NERC), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and other regulatory agencies. Certrec's Office of Licensing and Compliance (OLC), Office of Assessment and Recovery (OAR), Office of NERC Compliance (ONC), and Office of New Plant (ONP) services are used by utilities and entities across the United States to help manage the regulatory process to their advantage.

Certrec offers support from highly skilled and experienced industry professionals who possess degrees in a variety of engineering disciplines (Civil, Electrical, Mechanical, and Nuclear). Additionally, Certrec's staff has multiple degreed personnel in physics, communications, a variety of MBAs, and information technology. This highly skilled team of personnel has direct working experience in all regulatory areas of licensing, compliance, and engineering, including nuclear, fossil, and renewable generation and transmission.

For more than 30 years, Certrec has been applying its hundreds of years of industry experience to help clients develop and manage solutions to complex regulatory issues. Combining this direct industry experience with Certrec's Information Technology assets has led to development of technology-based solutions and tools directly targeted to the electric power industry and specifically focused on helping clients manage regulatory issues.Cuba Travel Services, a leading U.S. based travel company with offices in California, Florida, and Havana, welcomes the U.S. State Departments decision to amend the travel advisory to Cuba to Level 2. It is now listed in the same advisory category as France and Germany. Prior to the announcement, interest in traveling to Cuba has increased sharply over the past several months and projections for 2019 are trending upward.

Although we believe Cuba should be considered a Level 1 destination for U.S. citizens, we are encouraged by this positive development, stated Michael Zuccato, general manager of Cuba Travel Services. Our customers safety and security is paramount and Cuba Travel Services regularly conducts thorough and comprehensive inspections of its offered hotels and excursions in efforts to ensure a safe, secure, and rewarding experience for our travelers.

About Cuba Travel Services

Headquartered in Cypress, California, Cuba Travel Services is a premier travel service provider specializing in all things Cuba. As a leading tour operator and destination management company serving the destination, Cuba Travel Services offers hotels, cruise services, excursions, transportation, and tour programs as part of a turnkey travel solution for qualified individuals and organizations. The company has been arranging flights to Cuba for nearly 20 years and utilizes the most extensive network in the industry.

For additional information about travel to Cuba, please contact us at http://www.CubaTravelServices.com or at 1-800-963-2822.Businesses today face an unprecedented array of high-tech and low-tech threats to their security. Although there are innumerable ways to meet these threats, the sheer size of the commercial security market can make it hard to decide which options to choose. To help local business owners sort through their choices and design a fully-integrated security protocol, Texas Premier Locksmith is offering all Dallas business owners a free security assessment in August 2018.

Commercial Security Hardware

All commercial security hardware options can be sorted into three basic categories. Most businesses need items from all three categories.

Door Hardware: Door hardware for businesses includes such items as automatic door closers and panic bars. In some cases, state and local ordinances require certain types of businesses to provide one or both.

Door Locks: Commercial door locks can be a surprisingly complicated topic. Interchangeable core locks are much easier to change than traditional locks, so they are often preferred by companies with high turnover. Businesses with high security needs often select biometric locks or ID scanners. In addition, ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) access requirements must be considered. Many businesses choose different types of locks for different entry points, as well as for restricted-access areas.

Locking Storage: Employee and customer data, as well as sensitive equipment and pricey items, must be protected. Safes, locking desk drawers, and locking file cabinets can work together to protect a wide range of items and the data contained within.

Locksmith Services

No matter how high-end your system might be, no commercial security protocol is without occasional problems. If a former employee neglects to turn in her keys, a lock breaks, or a crucial employee is locked out, significant downtime and loss of revenue can result. Having a highly skilled, trustworthy locksmith on standby is vital to returning to full business operations as quickly as possible.

About Texas Premier Locksmith

Texas Premier Locksmith has established a strong reputation as a top-rated Dallas locksmith company. For immediate assistance, call the Texas Premier Locksmith Dallas location at (972) 301-2292. For more information, visit the storefront at 6959 Arapaho Rd, Ste 108, Dallas, TX 75248 or visit the website at http://www.txpremierlocksmith.com/.David Hula, a writer and photographer living in the Midwest, has completed his new book Corporate Secrets: a high-stakes thriller exploring corporate ethics and personal morals.

Author Hula writes about the mix of beauty and danger on Susans first day at GMA: The GMA Tower did in fact tower over the skyline of downtown Los Angeles. An imposing skyscraper with a blue-gray color mirroring the waters of the nearby Pacific Ocean, she took the elevator to her new office on the twenty-fifth floor. The window there afforded her a panoramic view of the northern half of the Los Angeles area and beyond, which was beautiful but unsettling. She thought of all the people in her field of view, and of all the trials and traumas they endured as a result of the wickedness of the human species. Although she did not have a pronounced fear of heights, this dizzying view would take some getting accustomed to. The GMA Tower was ultramodern and supposedly highly earthquake resistant, but for the time being she felt quite vulnerable here. She almost envied the seagulls that occasionally flew within view, for they could fly away if an earthquake threatened.

Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, David Hulas new book is a riveting exploration of the kind of widespread national tragedies that can arise from a powerful corporations clashing with ethics and integrity. Readers will relate with Susan as the underdog in a world that seems to benefit the corporate sociopaths.

Readers who wish to experience this gripping work can purchase Corporate Secrets at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708.

About Page Publishing:

Page Publishing is a traditional New York based full-service publishing house that handles all of the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing knows that authors need to be free to create - not bogged down with complicated business issues like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes and the like. Its roster of authors can leave behind these tedious, complex and time-consuming issues, and focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com.Dealer Solutions is a leading advisor in auto dealership mergers and acquisitions. "Working with a first-time seller, Dealer Solutions was able to help make the transaction go as smoothly as possible for all parties; our dedicated consultant went above and beyond in this unique deal."

Dealer Solutions North America, specialists in advising on and providing strategies for buying and selling automotive dealerships, has announced its first dealership transaction since entering the U.S. market.

Dealer Solutions worked with seller Mike Tyler of Tyler Jefferson Motors in Mount Vernon, Ill. The family-owned business has a long history in the area, opening in 1951 with Pontiac, Rambler, and other classic automotive brands. Through three generations, the Tyler family continued to grow the dealership, until the time was right for the family to make a change.

The Toyota, Buick and GMC dealership was purchased by Wes Monken, of Monken Auto. The family-run group is located in the neighboring town of Centralia, Ill., and includes Nissan, Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, and Chevrolet. The opportunity to bring in three new brands, and an additional location for customers, was the driving force behind the deal. This will be the third dealership for Monken Auto Group. The deal was completed earlier this summer.

Working with a first-time seller, Dealer Solutions was able to help make the transaction go as smoothly as possible for all parties, said Wes Monken, president, Monken Auto. Our dedicated consultant, Paul Hagan, went above and beyond in this unique deal, coming out on several occasions to help the selling dealership, from inventory to providing guidance, and Farid was also very involved in facilitating the sale.

Founded in 2012 by Farid Ahmad, a career car professional with extensive experience in retail, brand and real estate in Europe and North America, Dealer Solutions has advised on the successful closing of more than 115 dealerships amounting to more than $3 billion in value, with nearly 50 transactions pending. Within the past six years, the privately-held company, headquartered in Toronto, has become Canadas largest retail automotive M & A consulting firm.

We provide our clients with the highest level of service, guidance and support, through all steps of the buy-sell process, said Farid Ahmad, chief executive officer, Dealer Solutions North America. We are keenly aware of the intricacies of all types of dealership transactions, especially for family-owned groups who have such history and investment in the communities theyve served, and our experience allows us to provide a seamless experience for both sellers and buyers.

Dealer Solutions provides full-service, step-by-step guidance and support to acquiring or selling a car dealership. The company boasts a proprietary appraisal system that allows clients to understand the market value and potential for their dealership; to-date, Dealer Solutions has conducted more than 500 dealership appraisals. And, its extensive network of personal relationships allows buyers and sellers to tap into a wide-ranging group of contacts across Canada and the U.S.

To learn more about Dealer Solutions, visit http://www.DealerSolutionsNA.com/.

About Dealer Solutions North America

Dealer Solutions is a leading advisor in auto dealership mergers and acquisitions. Founded in 2012 by Farid Ahmad, Dealer Solutions has completed nearly 120 transactions in the last five years, representing dealership sales of more than $3 billion dollars. The company has offices in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, and Detroit. To learn more about Dealer Solutions N.A., please visit http://www.DealerSolutionsNA.com/.Marcie Bolt, License Partner of Engel & Volkers Melbourne Central Their international network, systems, tools and branding will help my team and I achieve a level of success higher than ever imagined.

Engel & Volkers today announced its latest franchise conversion in Melbourne, Florida; marking the companys second location in Brevard County. Marcie Bolt, former Broker/Owner of Tropic Coast Realty and her team of 15 agents have joined the world-renowned brand to become Engel & Volkers Melbourne Central.

Engel & Volkers offers so much support to me as a business owner, said Bolt. Their international network, systems, tools and branding will help my team and I achieve a level of success higher than ever imagined. I immediately knew this was where I wanted to entrust and grow my business.

As a 22-year Florida resident and 14-year real estate professional, Bolt was an ideal candidate to become the newest license partner of the Engel & Volkers network. Prior to entering real estate, Bolt also had a successful career in the food and beverage industry as the owner of a local-favorite restaurant but made the industry change to have more time with her family.

Engel & Volkers Melbourne Central, located at 524 N. Harbor City Blvd, is currently undergoing a redesign and renovation to offer its agents a superior place of business to best serve their clients. Bolt has ambitious plans to grow Engel & Volkers Melbourne Central into a fierce competitor for local market share. Her four-fold strategy includes recruiting local top producers as well as looking for merger, acquisition and roll in opportunitys with independently-owned brokerages. Bolt is already planning to expand her operations with a second location, Engel & Volkers Melbourne Beachside, to accommodate growth.

Melbourne and the many cities of Brevard county have a small-town feel but are close to everything like in a large city, said Bolt. Brevard has a very healthy luxury market and we have buyers moving here from all over the world. The international reach and exposure that Engel & Volkers offers is a massive benefit to those buying and selling real estate in Melbourne and all over Brevard County. Being able to leverage that reach and exposure to the international market played a huge role in my decision making.

While we are expanding our brands reach throughout Florida in strategic new markets, our team is also doing a tremendous job of growing within already established markets as is the case with Brevard county, said Timo Khammash, Managing Partner of Engel & Volkers Florida.

Engel & Volkers first expanded into the North American market in 2007, with Florida as its flagship Master License Partner. Engel & Volkers Florida has since operated from its regional headquarters, located in Naples and has consistently been the most successful region on the continent. Year to date, the company has signed eight new franchise agreements in markets across the state.Nicole and Gary are fantastic leaders within our brand and throughout the industry as a whole  I look forward to their continued success with our new shop.

International real estate brand, Engel & Volkers, brings first-class service to the luxurious Calabasas community. Industry leaders Nicole Van Parys and Gary Nesen, who together successfully own and operate Engel & Volkers Westlake Village, Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez look forward to running suite with their latest launch.

Calabasas is an ideal expansion point for us, says Gary. We have long been serving the Calabasas market and have built an established community of clientele  our shop will simply enhance our overall level of service.

Leading the Westlake Village team, the duo honorably achieved the highest GCI throughout all of California in 2017. It was a very proud moment for the two of us and for our team as a whole, Nicole says. We plan to take that momentum into launching an equally successful shop in Calabasas.

Calabasas is a perfectly fitting market for Engel & Volkers. The exquisite, family-oriented community and the high-end, desirable landscape emulate the values of the elite, lifestyle brand. Set in Gelsons Village Calabasas, the latest Engel & Volkers shop is conveniently located and ready to achieve real estate goals for the communitys premium clientele.

We are thrilled to be launching Engel & Volkers Calabasas, says President of Engel & Volkers California, Mathias Bode. Nicole and Gary are fantastic leaders within our brand and throughout the industry as a whole  I look forward to their continued success with our new shop.

Shop doors open September 1, 2018.

About Engel & Volkers

Since its establishment in 1977 as a specialty boutique providing exclusive, high-end real estate services in Hamburg, Germany, Engel & Volkers has become one of the worlds leading companies specializing in the sale and lease of premium residential and commercial property and yachts. Engel & Volkers currently operates a global network of real estate advisors in more than 700 residential brokerages and 85 commercial offices spanning 34 countries across 4 continents, offering both private and institutional clients a professionally tailored range of luxury services. It established its North America corporate headquarters in 2007 and opened its first brokerage in the same year. Committed to exceptional service, Engel & Volkers supports its advisors with an array of premium quality business services, marketing programs and tools, multiple platforms for mobile, social and web, as well as access to its global network of real estate professionals, property listings and market data.

For more information please contact:

Sheela Shouhed

Director of Communications

Sheela.Shouhed@evusa.comWe proudly welcome Flair and Sunwing to the Miami service area, said Miami-Dade Aviation Director Lester Sola. South Florida residents can now choose from multiple options for travel to Canada.

Canadian low-cost carriers Flair and Sunwing Airlines both announced last week that they will enter the Miami market beginning this winter, with Flair launching service from Miami International Airport to Edmonton, Winnipeg and Toronto in December, and Sunwing scheduling a total of 10 weekly flights from and to Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto and Ottawa starting in November and December. Edmonton, Quebec City, Ottawa and Winnipeg mark new routes for MIA, which will bring its total number of Canadian non-stop destinations to six.

Travelers arriving from Montreal and Toronto will pre-clear with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in those destinations and arrive at MIA as domestic passengers. Flair and Sunwing will become MIAs eighth and ninth and low-cost carriers, and will help serve more than 700,000 annual passengers between Miami and Canada.

I am pleased to congratulate Flair and Sunwing Airlines on their upcoming expansions into Miami-Dade County, said Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez. We look forward to increasing our communitys ties with Canada, as we will soon welcome new visitors from four new Canadian cities, as well as additional passengers from Montreal and Toronto.

Sunwing, which serves over 45 destinations across the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and Florida, will utilize 189-seat Boeing 737-800 NG and recently acquired 737-800 Max aircraft on the new routes. Last month, Sunwing received the Consumer Choice Award in the Greater Toronto Area in the category of Best Charter Airline and Vacation Provider for the fifth consecutive year. Established in 1987, the Consumer Choice Award is the only organization in Canada to conduct independent market research surveys to determine brand reputation and customer satisfaction.

We proudly welcome Flair and Sunwing to the Miami service area, said Miami-Dade Aviation Director Lester Sola. South Florida residents can now choose from multiple options for travel to Canada.Modern Steel Garage Door Installed by Garageworks on Tennessee Our customers have always been our top priority throughout the decade of our existence. This is why our dedicated team staffs are prepared to go lengths in helping our customers find the right solution for their garage door installation, repair or replacement needs.

With homeowners in Tennessee and surrounding areas struggling to keep the powerful summer heat out of their cars, the ever popular Garageworks is fast gaining prominence among their customers with their modern age innovative steel doors. These steel doors are said to have a totally different look from the common standards last seen by the industry and are known for their durability and exemplarily beauty. Many of the openers installed by the company are also wifi compatible, quite rare in the garage door industry.

One of the key spokesmen Casey Heinrich for the company was quoted as saying, Our customers have always been our top priority throughout the decade of our existence. This is why our dedicated team staffs are prepared to go lengths in helping our customers find the right solution for their garage door installation, repair or replacement needs. Whether you need a simple garage door repair or need a complete installation & replacement service with quality door opener solution, we offer you all the rights options that can help you find the best solution for your family without crossing your familys budget.

The company offers charge-free estimates with same day services and ensures best customer support through their dedicated support system. Their trained garage door specialists and expert installers not only helps in making the installation process smoother but also provides necessary advice about the different brands, materials, spring design selections, safety considerations and insulation methods that are deemed necessary. One of their most popular service in addition to steel glass door & opener installation & repair is their garage door spring repair & replacement service that promises a unique job based on the extensive variety of doors that have flooded the market in recent times.

One of their customers writes,  Garageworks answered the phone and kept in contact letting me know when a technician would be available. DeSean (hope it's spelled right) arrived before 8 am on a Sunday! He was polite, efficient, friendly and professional  The springs were quickly replaced, and my car was no longer a prisoner in the garage. Great customer experience!! I would recommend Garageworks to anyone!!

Those who want to know more about the kind of work this top Tennessee company do, should make it a point to visit https://garageworkstn.com/.

About Garageworks

Started in the year 2004, Garageworks is a Tennessee based garage door service company that is best known for its experienced and friendly technicians. The areas currently served by them include Davidson, Williamson, Sumner, Wilson, Montgomery, and Maury Counties. They offer a wide variety of garage door repair and installation services and boasts of a prolific track record.

Contact Information:

Contact Person: Casey Heinrich

Contact Number: (615) 207-7718

Email: garageworks2010@gmail.com

Website: https://garageworkstn.com/Register today for the 4th annual MR&H The entire team is excited to attend [MR&H] as Wyndham Hotels & Resorts for the first time ever. We believe with our breadth of brands there is so much opportunity in the region, and were looking forward to continued growth, says Geoff Ballotti.

Ahead of this years 4th annual Mediterranean Resort & Hotel Real Estate Forum (MR&H), Geoff Ballotti, President & CEO, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts shared his insights on emerging Mediterranean markets, major trends in hotel investment and development in the region and finding the right partners for growth in this exclusive Q&A.

A unique tourism and business destination, the Mediterranean is a major attraction for investors and developers in search for new projects. MR&H will provide hospitality investors and key market stakeholders a complete overview of the regions different investment climates, regulatory frameworks and targeted opportunities through keynote presentations, interactive discussions and interviews such as Ballottis, In the Hotel Operator Hot Seat: Global CEO One-on-One. With the recent addition of the word Resorts to the company name, Ballotti is geared up to share how important this segment is and the development opportunities it brings.

MR&H will be held in Greece, which happens to be a new market for Wyndham. The company entered the market in December of 2016 with the opening of Wyndham Grand Athens and has since added seven properties within the country to its portfolio. The entire team is excited to attend as Wyndham Hotels & Resorts for the first time ever. We believe with our breadth of brands there is so much opportunity in the region, and were looking forward to continued growth, says Ballotti.

When asked which markets the company is eyeing, Ballotti mentioned Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Turkey. In particular, Turkey is a key market for us. Not only is it the sixth largest market for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts globally, but we also are proud to be the largest international hotel group in Turkey. As of July 2018, we have 67 hotels all across this market. We are committed to maintaining our leading position through sustained expansion in this dynamic market.

The 2.5 day MR&H programme will also include roundtable discussions covering the major markets in the region, including Greece, Italy and Turkey. Another key area for discussion and networking at the conference will be identifying and forging relationships with the right local partners. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts partnered with local hotel management and consulting firm, Zeus International to open Wyndham Grand Athens. Overall, finding the right partner is crucial for a number of reasons. From identifying the right locations when entering a new market, to operating successfully, and very importantly ensuring guests have a great brand experience, with the right service and attention they deserve. Ultimately, successful partnerships of this nature not only benefit the businesses involved, but the local economy and the country as a whole, says Ballotti.

Meet with Ballotti and 300 senior leaders across the hospitality and tourism sectors at MR&H, from 17-19 October 2018 at The Divani Apollon Palace & Thalasso in Athens, Greece. The Advanced Rate is available through 7 September 2018, so we encourage you to secure your seat today.

For more information about MR&H, contact:

Alexandra Aldridge

Marketing Director, Questex Hospitality Group

+1-212-895-8284

aaldridge@questex.com

http://www.mrandh.comThe GRC Awards recognizes the contributions of these individuals to educational institutions and the geothermal community around the world.

The Geothermal Resources Council (GRC), one of the worlds premier geothermal associations, has announced awards honoring the best and brightest of the global geothermal energy community. These prestigious awards have been a highlight of the geothermal calendar since the late 1970's.

The GRC will present the prestigious Aidlin, Pioneer, Henry J Ramey Jr., and Geothermal Special Achievement awards at the GRC Annual Meeting in Reno, Nevada, October 14-17.

The recipients of these awards have a lifetime of achievement in the geothermal academic, scientific and commercial communities. The GRC Awards recognizes the contributions of these individuals to educational institutions and the geothermal community around the world.

This years award winners are:



Joseph W. Aidlin Award  Ron Barr: Recognizes outstanding contributions to the Geothermal Resources Council and to the development of geothermal resources.

Geothermal Pioneer Award  Zvi Krieger: Recognizes outstanding achievements in the development of geothermal resources.

Henry J. Ramey Jr. Award  Peter Rose: For outstanding achievements in the field of geothermal reservoir engineering.

Geothermal Special Achievement Awards  Roy Baria, Virgil Welsh and Kasumi Yasukawa: Recognizes special or outstanding achievements in any aspect of geothermal energy development and related areas.

For more information about the GRC Annual Meeting & Expo at the Peppermill Resort Spa & Casino, Reno, Nevada, USA visit http://www.geothermal.org or call (530) 758-2360.

About the Geothermal Resources Council:

The Geothermal Resources Council (GRC) will be celebrating 50 years of service to the global geothermal energy community in 2021. The GRC is dedicated to advancing geothermal development around the world through education, research, and outreach. For more information, please visit http://www.geothermal.org.

Get your daily geothermal news at Global Geothermal News. Become a fan on Facebook. Follow GRC on Twitter @GRC2001 and #GRCAM2018. Check out GRCs YouTube Channel. See geothermal photos on GRCs Flicker page.Gilbane Building Company, in association with JANEY Construction Management, has completed the 120,000 SF construction of Dearborn STEM Academy in Roxbury, Mass. Serving grades 6-12, Dearborn is the cornerstone of Boston Mayor Walshs plan to modernize the Boston Public School System. The school is steeped in innovation and embodies Gilbanes dedication to advancing 21st century learning: the design and construction are integrated into the science, engineering and technology curriculum, and the building features transparent and flexible spaces for collaboration and project-based learning among students and teachers. Highlights include open spaces designed for project-based learning, including a Fab Lab, makerspace and learning commons focused on STEM-related career clusters.

Commitment to Diversity

This project strongly reflected Gilbanes longstanding commitment workplace diversity. As Mayor Martin J. Walsh noted at the schools ribbon-cutting, 40 percent of the construction work (over 99,000 hours) was conducted by people of color, exceeding the City of Bostons minority work hour requirement by 15 percentage points. Thirty-nine percent of the work (almost 94,000 hours) was conducted by Boston residents; and 7 percent of the work was conducted by females (16,500 hours). In addition, Gilbane employed the first Boston resident/female of color labor steward in the history of the City.

21st Century Learning

Dearborn is the first school construction project of its kind where the building itself is integrated into the academic curriculum and will be used to stimulate the learning environment, helping to make difficult concepts easier to grasp. The architectural design features duct work, piping, and HVAC systems all in plain view, so students can see the inner-workings of building in action.

With Dearborn STEM Academy, Gilbane, our partners, and the City of Boston had the opportunity to build a school that will serve as a model for education for decades to come, said Ryan Hutchins, senior vice president of Gilbane Building Company and New England Division leader. Were excited to see the learning outcomes that result from the student study of the building and are gratified to know that this building will play a role in preparing todays students for 21st century careers.

The scope of work included the abatement and demolition of an existing school built in 1918, which Gilbane took great care to achieve with minimal impact to the vibrant city neighborhood that includes another school, four churches, and many homes. The company also preserved and salvaged many items from the original building, including a time capsule from 1912 which was delivered to the City Archives. Some prominent building components and statues were painstakingly refurbished and placed back on school grounds as a way for students to better appreciate the schools historical significance.

As the product of a STEM education, I know how important it is to have a state-of-the-art STEM school right here in our community of Roxbury, said Greg Janey, CEO of JANEY Construction. The fact that the school itself will be a part of the curriculum will help get students energized about STEM careers, creating a pipeline of strong contributors to Bostons workforce in the years to come.

The $73 million project was completed in partnership with the City of Boston, Jonathan Levi Architects, Daedalus Projects and JANEY Construction Management.

https://www.gilbaneco.com/project/city-of-boston-dearborn-stem-academy/

About Gilbane Building Company

Gilbane provides a full slate of construction and facilities-related services  from pre-construction planning and integrated consulting capabilities to comprehensive construction management, general contracting, design-build and facility management services  for clients across various markets. Founded in 1873 and still a privately held, family-owned company, Gilbane has 46 office locations worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.gilbaneco.com.

Gilbane has served as a leading construction manager in Massachusetts since 1946 serving private and public clients throughout the Commonwealth. Clients and projects include Boston Public Schools, Boston Red Sox, UMass Boston, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Reeboks Global Headquarters in the Seaport District, State Street Bank, Google, Northeastern University, PTCs Global Headquarters in the Seaport District and Tufts University. For more information, visit Gilbanes website at http://www.gilbaneco.com/boston.Thursday, September 21st, 2018 will be an exciting milestone for the collaborative divorce attorneys Gib Irons, Ben G. Irons II, Will Reaves, Misty Waldroup, and Allison Surratt, as they'll be celebrating their 11th business anniversary at Irons & Irons P.A. law firm, located in beautiful Greenville, NC.

History of the Greenville Collaborative Divorce Attorneys' Practice

Attorney Gib Irons and his father Attorney Ben G. Irons founded Irons & Irons P.A. in 2007. Initially, only three professionals worked at the firm. Today, 11 years later, the firm's team is more than twice the size that it once was. Irons & Irons P.A. are proud members of the Greenville-Pitt Chamber of Commerce located in Greenville, NC, The North Carolina Advocates of Justice, The North Carolina Bar Association, and, last but not least, the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals.

Irons & Irons P.A. takes pride in educating and helping clients make the best decisions during strenuous times. By helping education law matters and family law matters, specifically collaborative divorce, the law firm has established a reputation for being helpful, honest, and well-versed. Collaborative divorce is method of divorcing that works as an alternative to traditional divorce proceedings in that it encourages joint action, synergy, and coordination instead of confrontation. Once broken down, its easy to see how collaborative divorce allows a couple to end their marriage with mutual grace and poise while also ensuring that there is an inherent level of regard for one another and truthfulness throughout the divorce process. This is more of a mediation between the two parties that ends in a compromise and ultimately, becomes a better outcome for the children and the family.

Irons & Irons P.A. has a great understanding of the pros associated with successful collaborative divorce. Our experienced attorneys have a great understanding of what were fighting for and the ramifications the decisions youre faced with now have for your future and the future of your family. When you are facing a divorce or family law matter, you need to know that your rights are being protected and that the choices you are making will leave you well situated for the future.Jason Hill, Cybriants Director of Strategic Services, is slated to speak at the Chicago IIA/ISACA 5th Annual Hacking & Cybersecurity Conference on September 10-11, 2018 in Chicago, IL.

The conference is a two-day event containing the most real-world application of Information Security and Cybersecurity knowledge and skills that can be applied to the world of Internal Audit, IT Audit, InfoSec, Risk, and Compliance. This years theme addresses emerging threats by discussing solutions and how the union of Audit, InfoSec, and Risk/Compliance departments creates a strong force, allowing the united enterprise to strike back against cyber threats. Following the success of last years event, the dual-track format featuring concurrent technical and non-technical tracks is offered again for the 2018 conference.

Mr. Hill will present a management and audit session.

His presentation, The Compliance Saga ContinuesHow to Go from Jar Jar Binks to Han Solo will discuss how it seems there is a never-ending stream of acronyms that businesses now must learn and understand in order to be compliant. By taking a step back and creating a compliance baseline, youll be able to quiet the noise and provide a clear path towards meeting existing and yet to come compliance matrices.

For more information on the Chicago IIA/ISACA 5th Annual Hacking & Cybersecurity Conference please go to https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ereg/index.php?eventid=350132&eb=565886

About Jason Hill

With over 16 years of experience in the areas of IT Security, Infrastructure and Managed Services, Mr. Hill is an accomplished security consultant and security trainer. He has personally completed over 30 risk assessments utilizing the NIST-CSF and ISO 27001 frameworks. As an accomplished InfoSec speaker, He is also a leading certified instructor for AlienVault having delivered over 50 classes to end-users and MSSPS around the globe and across all industry verticals. And as a certified AlienVault engineer, he has also personally performed over 100 professional service engagements assisting companies in the implementation of AlienVault technology.

About Cybriant

Cybriant assists companies in making informed business decisions and sustaining effectiveness in the design, implementation, and operation of their cyber risk management programs. We deliver a comprehensive and customizable set of strategic and managed cybersecurity services. These services include Risk Assessments and vCISO, 24/7 Managed SIEM with LIVE Monitoring and Analysis, 24/7 Managed EDR, 24/7 Real-Time Vulnerability Scanning, and Patch Management. We make enterprise grade cyber security strategy and tactics accessible to the Mid-Market and beyond. Find out more at http://www.cybriant.comUsing machine learning to optimize government operations and reduce costs is a vital contribution to a more effective and efficient future for government agencies, said Rising Media CEO, Matthew Finlay.

Senior leaders, data scientists and digital analysts in government will learn from industry leaders in analytics at Predictive Analytics World for Government, produced by Rising Media and Elder Research, and being held in Washington DC, September 18 - 19, 2018.

PAW Government is a practically-focused, vendor-neutral conference that highlights case studies and emerging trends of how government agencies are currently using data analytics to solve real world problems. Using machine learning to optimize government operations and reduce costs is a vital contribution to a more effective and efficient future for government agencies, said Rising Media CEO, Matthew Finlay.

Predictive Analytics World for Government features both renowned analytics leaders and authors, as well as senior government stakeholders and practitioners already reaping benefits from machine learning strategies. Keynote speakers for the event include David Williams, Board of Governors (nominated) for USPS on Stealing Fire from the Gods; Tom Davenport, author of the forthcoming - - The AI Advantage: How to Put the Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work, speaking on The AI Advantage for Government and; John Elder, founder of Elder Research, Inc. on why Data Science is The Greatest Science.

In addition, speakers from federal agencies including EPA, FDA, IRS, Naval Air Systems Command, US Department of Transportation, Treasury, USPS, and other organizations including the Data Coalition, Deloitte, Heritage Foundation, Institute for Excellence in Government, NFA, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Toronto Police Service and UDC are all participating.

The event features two days of conference sessions and exhibition hall, plus three workshop days. Two management level tracks and one technical track ensure both practitioners and senior management will leave the event with an enhanced understanding of the possibilities machine learning and AI offer to government agencies.

Special panel discussions on Opportunities and Challenges for CDAOs in Driving Mission Strategies on Using Analytics to Drive Operational Excellence and Efficiency and on the Relevance of AI and Emerging Technologies to the Public Sector (Hype vs. Reality) round out the program.

Sponsors include Deloitte, Google, Datarobot, IBM, SAS, Alteryx, Esri and Neo4j.

Anyone who is interested in becoming a sponsor can learn more about sponsorship opportunities for Predictive Analytics World for Government here.

About Rising Media

Rising Media is a global events producer excelling in Internet and technology-related conferences and exhibitions. Rising Media-produced events include AllFacebook Marketing Conference, All Influencer Marketing Conference, AutosPlus, Building Business Capability, Data Driven Business, Data Performance Summit, Deep Learning World, Digital Analytics Hub, Digital Growth Unleashed, Email Innovations Summit, Global Online Marketplaces Summit, Inside 3D Printing, Marketing Evolution Experience, Predictive Analytics World (PAW) for Business, PAW Healthcare, PAW Government, PAW Industry 4.0, PAW Financial Services, RecPlus, RoboUniverse, Search Marketing Expo, SEMY Awards, Virtual Reality Summit, Web Effectiveness Conference, in markets including the US, Brazil, UK, France, Germany, Italy, India, South Korea and Australia.

For more information, visit http://www.risingmedia.com.

About Elder Research

Elder Research is the most experienced consultancy specializing in data science and advanced analytics solutions. The team create a sustainable competitive advantage for clients by combining creative people, proven systems engineering, and custom software to deliver actionable solutions that transform data into business value. Elder Research can provide analytics consulting support throughout the journeyfrom training and mentoring, to creating stand-alone analytic solutions, to helping build a team to develop solutions in-house. They solve business problems as well as data problems.

For more information, visit https://www.elderresearch.com/Walnut Creek Preschool Our new Montessori preschool program in Danville is open and ready for parents to stop by and visit.

Learn and Play Montessori, a leading Montessori program offering preschool and kindergarten opportunities in both Danville and Dublin, California, is proud to announce tour availabilities for late summer and early fall, 2018. Busy parents searching for one of the best Walnut Creek preschool options may find the right fit along their commute in Danville, California. Working parents can hop off the 680 freeway and tour the New Danville Montessori School, and see how "commute friendly" the new campus is.

"Our new Montessori preschool program in Danville is open and ready for parents to stop by and visit, explained Harpreet Grewal, director of Learn and Play Montessori. "Parents can contact us and well be happy to give then a personal tour during the day or after they get off work. We welcome Walnut Creek families as we are a convenient commuter-friendly option.

The new page for Learn and Play Montessoris Danville location can be reviewed at https://www.learnandplaymontessori.com/danville.php. The link can provide details regarding Danvilles new Montessori teaching facilities. Parents commuting along the I-680 freeway can tour one of the Walnut Creek preschool options. Daycare, pre-kinder and kindergarten programs can be reviewed at the new Montessori School location, which is convenient to Walnut Creek and Alamo to the North as well as Dublin and Pleasant to the South and East. Walnut Creek parents can check out the page at https://www.learnandplaymontessori.com/walnut-creek.php and then click to the "Contact Us" button to schedule a school tour.

BAY AREA PARENTS TAKE THE GRAND TOUR: ONE OF THE LEADING WALNUT CREEK PRESCHOOL OPTIONS IS A HOP OFF I-680

Here is the background on this release. Working parents in Walnut Creek may be looking for commute-friendly preschool options, especially those offering a high quality Montessori program. An easy drop off to daycare or preschool on the way to work may be a preference but not the main reason for choosing a Danville preschool. Preparing young children for elementary school via a Montessori program could be a priority. A close location and easy pick up schedule combined with a successful early learning curriculum for young children could be the right mix. Touring several of the top Walnut Creek preschool options before committing to one may be important to a Bay Area parent, but the smart parents will expand their search to include "commute friendly" options.

For these reasons Learn and Play Montessori has announced parent tours for their recently opened Danville location. Parents searching for Walnut Creek preschool options may find touring a facility helpful to choosing the right fit. A Montessori preschool located along the I-680 corridor could provide an easy drop off and pick up routine. Visiting a site before choosing from several Walnut Creek preschool options can provide insight to how the best daycare facility operates.

ABOUT LEARN AND PLAY MONTESSORI

Learn and Play Montessori aims to be one of the best Montessori schools in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Whether parents are looking for a Montessori School in Danville, a Blackhawk preschool or a top-rated Montessori School in Dublin / San Ramon, Learn and Play has a campus for their child or children. Bay Area parents searching for Walnut Creek preschool options could find the right fit in Danville. All schools use the famed Montessori method, offering programs from childcare to daycare, preschool to kindergarten, in not only Danville, Fremont, Dublin or San Ramon but also in nearby towns such as Alamo, Blackhawk, Diablo or San Ramon on the I-680 corridor as well as Walnut Creek.

Learn and Play Montessori

Media Relations

https://www.learnandplaymontessori.com/Leoni invites customers to the third annual Oktoberfest event at its facility in Lake Orion, MI for a chance to network with the leading automation professionals in North America. Leoni bridges the gap between automation and world-class manufacturing, said Jean-Marc Vico, General Manager of Leoni EPS. This is what we want to show you at our annual Oktoberfest event, with the best in class technology of today and the digital technologies of the future.

Leoni Engineering Products & Services, Inc. (Leoni EPS) celebrates its German heritage and innovations in factory automation at the third annual Oktoberfest-style event on September 20, 2018, at its facility in Lake Orion, Michigan.

The event, held from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., is open to representatives from industrial companies in North America, offering a varied selection of German food and beers. Along with demonstrations from each of the product groups at Leoni EPS  namely automation systems training, robotic cable management solutions and services, machine vision integration, and automation & drive cable solutions  guests will have the opportunity to see the latest innovations from Leoni using Deep Learning and other technologies in automation.

Leoni bridges the gap between automation and world-class manufacturing, said Jean-Marc Vico, General Manager of Leoni EPS. This is what we want to show you at our annual Oktoberfest event, with the best in class technology of today and the digital technologies of the future.

Numerous applications and technologies will be on display at the event, including Leonis standard cable management solution  the LSH 3  as well as custom cable solutions designed around the needs of specialized applications. An interactive tic-tac-toe demo incorporating both collaborative robotics and machine vision technology as well as the companys latest defect detection machine vision system utilizing Deep Learning will also be on display for guests.

In addition, Leoni will also highlight the latest updates to the B-Flex cable management system for collaborative and lightweight robotics, which has been updated for any type of small robot arm profile and diverse surfaces as well as packaging applications on bigger robots. To learn more or register for the event, visit leps-oktoberfest.com.

About the Leoni Engineering Products & Services, Inc.

Leoni Engineering Products & Services, Inc. (Leoni EPS), part of Leoni AG, is North Americas leading solutions-focused automation service provider serving customers in the areas of Robotic Cable Management, Automation Systems Training, Turnkey Machine Vision systems, and Automation Support services. Leoni EPS is helping customers in the general manufacturing, automotive, consumer packaged goods, utilities, and other related industries to solve their most difficult assembly, automated inspection, and quality-control challenges. Learn more about Leoni EPS at http://www.leoni- americas.com or call (248) 484-5500.

About the Leoni Group

Leoni is a global provider of products, solutions and services for energy and data management in the automotive sector and other industries. The value chain encompasses wires, optical fibers, standardised cables, special cables and assembled systems as well as intelligent products and smart services. As an innovation partner and solutions provider, Leoni supports its customers with pronounced development and systems expertise. The group of companies, which is listed on the German MDAX, employs more than 87,000 people in 31 countries and generated consolidated sales of EUR 4.9 billion in 2017.Little Sprouts, an award-winning provider of early education and child care, celebrated the opening of their 26th location this morning in Medford, MA. Conveniently accessible for families seeking childcare in the Greater Boston area, Little Sprouts newest school is located along bustling Main Street in Medford. Securely accessed by a rear entrance, the second-floor school boasts 10 sun-drenched classrooms that will serve children infant age to preschool. Two large, private outdoor playgrounds, in addition to a spacious indoor recreation room, will ensure children have plenty of space to spread out as they learn, play, laugh, and grow.

Missy Raduazzo, the newest member of the Little Sprouts team, will be assuming the role of Executive Director at the school. Carrying over 30 years of experience in the field of early education, Missy brings with her a sense of warmth and compassion that feels at-home with Little Sprouts. I am very excited to start my journey at Little Sprouts by leading our brand new school in Medford, says Missy. Equipped with the help of an inspired, wonderful staff, it will truly be a pleasure to bring the Little Sprouts experience to the community.

For more than 35 years, Little Sprouts has provided early education and child care to children throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The organization has been nationally recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a Preschool Center of Educational Excellence. With a focus on play-based learning, Little Sprouts employs an individualized approach to teaching in their curriculum, a method that recognizes every child is unique and learns at their own pace.

Melissa Leger, President of Little Sprouts, is enthusiastic about bringing Little Sprouts to Medford. We are thrilled to continue the expansion of Little Sprouts into Metro Boston with our Medford school. Delivering a premium early education experience to families continues to be our goal, and we are optimistic the community of Medford will find us to be a worthy addition.

Inquiring families are welcome to tour Little Sprouts Medford, meet the Executive Director and teachers, and learn more about Little Sprouts award-winning curriculum. Little Sprouts extends an open invitation to families that are interested in discovering the modern classrooms, brightly-colored hallways, and expansive playgrounds. For more information about Little Sprouts, and to find a location near you, visit http://www.littlesprouts.com.

About Little Sprouts: Little Sprouts has been a leader in providing award-winning early education and child care since 1982. Little Sprouts is home to 26 schools in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, supporting families that reflect 56 cultures, speaking 23 languages, from all different walks of social, economic, religious and ethnic backgrounds. To learn more about Little Sprouts and how they expand the power and potential of early education and child care, visit http://www.littlesprouts.com.Our focus and mission every day is to be the best copier and printer dealer for organizations of all sizes. Our clients always come first. Jim Loffler, Founder & CEO Loffler Companies

Loffler Companies, the largest privately owned business technology and managed services provider in the Upper Midwest, was presented an award by Xerox for its achievement of generating the most digital production press sales among all Xerox resellers.

Loffler is known in the market for its knowledge, technical analysts, and service teams in the digital production printing world. This Xerox Document Technology Partner of the Year Award for sales of digital production presses affirms its recognized value to clients and expertise.

We are so grateful for this honor, said Jim Loffler, Founder and CEO of Loffler Companies, Our focus and mission every day is to be the best copier and printer dealer for organizations of all sizes. Our clients always come first.

Clients also appreciate the ability of Loffler Companies to listen closely to their needs and make the best recommendation for them, choosing from digital presses offered by Xerox, Canon, Konica Minolta.

Congratulations to our winners for their tremendous achievements in 2017 and exemplifying what it means to be a great Xerox dealer, said Jim Morrissey, Vice President, Sales Document Technology Partners, Xerox Corporation. Morissey also mentions a strong market reputation, a customer first priority, and the client benefits of the combination of Xerox products with Lofflers service and support.

About Loffler Companies:

Lofflers over 500 employees support clients in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin who are local, national, and international in scope. Its offering include Copiers and Printers, IT Solutions, Phone Systems, Document Workflow and Management, Managed Print Services and on-site management of copy centers and mailrooms. Visit http://www.loffler.com or call 952-925-6800 to discover how Loffler can provide the best office technology and managed services solutions for your organization.

About Xerox

Xerox Corporation is a technology leader that innovates the way the world communicates, connects and works. Every day, our innovative print technologies and intelligent work solutions help people communicate and work better.We wanted to focus on two simple things: do fantastic work for clients and have fun while we do it. We trusted that the rest would take care of itself.

With a three-year revenue growth of 277%, Denver marketing firm Magneti ranked No. 1666 on the 37th annual Inc. 5000, a ranking of the nations fastest-growing private companies.

Were honored to be recognized on this years Inc. 5000 list, said Magneti CEO Adam Williams. Receiving this recognition is a milestone for our company. I could not be more thrilled to highlight our team, our clients, and our commitment to delivering outstanding work to a variety of industries.

Magneti attributes its growth to its commitment to create fantastic work with and for its clients. The agency has received numerous awards since its 2010 inception, including twenty-six Addy awards from the American Advertising Federation, Partners in Philanthropys Outstanding Fundraising Campaign Volunteers award, and the Small Business Person of the Year and Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards for its leadership team.

We said from the beginning we wanted to focus on two simple things: do fantastic work for clients and have fun while we do it. We trusted that the rest would take care of itself, stated Magneti CMO Jesse Marble. Our growth is purely by our clients and our team. Setting our eyes on creating great work is our core; the growth is just a positive by-product. Our team is a bunch dreamers and doers and Im honored to have my role on this squad.

The Inc. 5000 recognizes the most successful companies within the American economys most dynamic segmentits independent small businesses. Started in 1982, the list has become a hallmark of entrepreneurial success.

If your company is on the Inc. 5000, its unparalleled recognition of your years of hard work and sacrifice, said Inc. editor in chief James Ledbetter. The lines of business may come and go, or come and stay. What doesnt change is the way entrepreneurs create and accelerate the forces that shape our lives.

Not only have the 2018 Inc. 5000 companies been competitive within their markets, but the list shows staggering growth compared with those in previous years. The 2018 Inc. 5000 achieved a three-year average growth of 538.2 percent and aggregate revenue of over $206 billion in 2017, accounting for 664,095 jobs over the past three years.

Magneti is continuing its growth by expanding its national footprint through the onboarding of national clients, hiring more staff in Colorado in the next 12 months including sales and technical staff, and more excellent work for current clients.

About Magneti Marketing:

Magneti is a digital marketing and brand development agency with offices in Denver and Colorado Springs, Colorado. The firm thrives on building and sharing great ideas. With a team of diverse skills and deep belief in its ability to drive lasting impact, Magneti drives exceptional results for its wide variety of clients. For more information visit https://www.magneti.com/.

For more information contact:

Anna Hoglund

(720) 819-6615

anna@magneti.com

About the Inc. 5000:

The Inc. 5000 is a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the nation. The Inc. 5000 Conference & Awards Ceremony is an annual event that celebrates the remarkable achievements of these companies. The event also offers informative workshops, celebrated keynote speakers, and evening functions. For more information on Inc. and the Inc. 5000 Conference, visit http://conference.inc.com/.

For more information contact:

Inc. Media

Drew Kerr

212-849-8250

drew@four-corners.comBulacan (CNN Philippines, August 27)  Portions of Bulacan are still underwater due to heavy rains over weekend that affected almost 30,000 families in Central Luzon.

Even when the sun came out, floodwaters still remain. It has been long enough for fish to swim in the flooded areas, and for boats to become the new mode of transportation.

Barangay Captain Tirso Cruz of Meysulao, Calumpit, Bulacan said, "Ito pong Sitio Nabong, more than one year na nakalubog sa tubig. Lalo pa siyang umaangat during rainy days. Tag-ulan. Then, padagdag ng padagdag ang tubig, tapos walang nilalabasan, walang outlet."

[Translation: Sitio Nabong has been underwater for over a year. And water rises even more during rainy days, rainy season. The water keeps rising and it doesn't go anywhere. There's no outlet.]

Josie Quirona's family has been staying in an evacuation center, along with more than 70 others for almost two months. Although they are already used to this setup, she cannot help but be emotional while sharing about their daily struggles.

She said, "'Pag dumadating ang ganitong kalamidad, napakahirap po talaga, nakakaiyak. Nakakaiyak ho talaga ang buhay. Yung iba, nagsasalita na sa evacuation may rasyon. Minsan nasasabi namin na kung gusto nila, sila dito kami sa taas. Mahirap po talaga."

[Translation: When calamities like these happen, it's very difficult, pitiful. Our lives become pitiful. Others say there are rations distributed in evacuation centers. Sometimes we tell them, if they want they can stay here and we'll go upland. It's very difficult.]

Calumpit, Bulacan is among the catch basins in Central Luzon. The combination of high tide in Manila Bay and water flowing from higher ground through the Pampanga River are causing the perennial flooding problem in the area.

"Hindi na rin nila maisip na lumipat ng ibang lugar dahil ang kanilang source ng ikinabubuhay nandito, hindi nila maiwan. So ang adjustment, adaptation sa environment, mag-aadapt ka, ganito kayo mabubuhay. Kaya lang ang risk factor ay napakalaki," Cruz said.

[Translation: They can't even consider leaving for another place because their source of income is here and they can't leave it behind. The adjustment and adaptation to the environment, you really have to adapt, this is how your life will be. But the risk factor is very high.]

Residents of some barangays in Calumpit, Bulacan have been enduring knee- to chest-deep floods for months now, affecting their lives, especially children who can no longer go to school.

Classes in public schools in Barangay San Miguel have been disrupted since July. Some children are devoting their time to finding out how to earn a living.

Jojo Ricato, a grade six student, has been helping people by ferrying them with his boat.

"Pag malaki po ang tubig, namamangka lang po," he said.

[Translation:When the water is high, I ride my boat.]

But he said he misses going to school

Ricato's mother said she feels bad because her child is losing the opportunity to learn.

"Ang laki ng tubig sa eskwelahan... Nakaka-ano nga pong umano't wala ng natutunan ang mga bata. Simula July hanggang August, wala silang pasok," she said.

[Translation: The water is so high in the school... It's sad because the children aren't learning anything. From July to August, they haven't been back in school.]

From being submerged in floodwater, Ricato has also developed athlete's foot, like most people in the area.

Residents said local health clinics are providing medicine to cure skin diseases and prevent other health conditions such as leptospirosis.

But while affected residents have become resilient by circumstance, they are calling on the government to take concrete actions to mitigate the decades-long flooding problem in the area.

"Dapat palalimin ang ilog. Ilog talaga. Dredging. Talagang babaw na po ang ilog. Kailangang ang ilog na ang buhayin dahil yung takbo ng tubig, hindi na kaya ng capacity. Yung volume ng tubig na nanggagaling sa Candaba Swamp," Cruz said.

[Translation: The river should be made deeper. It should be dredged. The river should be rehabilitated because then water would flow again, it is above capacity now. The water is coming from the Candaba Swamp.]

After all, residents said they have suffered more than enough.Monica Eaton-Cardone, co-founder and COO of Chargebacks911, discusses the actions merchants need to take to prevent fraud. Merchants have become almost numb to cyberfraud, but they cannot afford to ignore it. Cybercriminals are always finding new vulnerabilities to exploit.

A Ticketmaster data breach announced in late June was subsequently discovered to be part of a widespread digital card-skimming campaign by cybercriminals known as Magecart, whose malignant code has infiltrated more than 800 eCommerce sites worldwide.(1) The new cyberfraud threat is particularly concerning in light of a new study that found the average cost per data breach has risen to $3.86 million.(2) Chargebacks911, a leading dispute mitigation and loss prevention firm, advises eCommerce merchants to stay abreast of Magecart-related activity and other emerging cyberfraud risks, and to take proactive measures to combat these threats.

While physical card skimmers are placed on ATMs, fuel pumps and other point-of-sale machines to capture consumers credit and debit card data, Magecarts digital skimmers are scripts that run on websites and harvest personal information and card details entered via online order forms. As revealed in a RiskIQ report, Magecart has transitioned from hacking individual websites to burying malicious code within the scripts of third-party (3P) functionality providers. This means a single attack can affect all of that providers clients, impacting hundreds or even thousands of websites. Ticketmaster was compromised via services supplied by Inbenta and SociaPlus, though RiskIQ also found Magecarts code on other 3P components from PushAssist, Clarity Connect and Annex Cloud.(1)

Two days after RiskIQ released its findings on the massive Magecart skimming campaign, IBM Security and Ponemon Institute published findings from their annual study on the cost of data breaches. The average cost per breach has climbed 6.4% to $3.86 million, though that number can be significantly higher depending on volumea mega breach of 1 million records averages $40 million, while 50 million compromised records will run about $350 million. The report also noted that cyberattack victims face a 27.9% likelihood of experiencing another material data breach within the next two years.(2)

Merchants have become almost numb to cyberfraud, but they cannot afford to ignore it. Cybercriminals are always finding new vulnerabilities to exploit, asserted Monica Eaton-Cardone, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Chargebacks911. eCommerce businesses need to stay abreast of new threats and continue to fight fraud on multiple fronts.

Eaton-Cardone adds that the Ticketmaster incident perfectly illustrates why businesses must verify compliance with all third-party service providers. If they allow an unsecure company to access internal systems, the vulnerability  and liability  falls to them, as well.

But PCI compliance isnt a guarantee. Eaton-Cardone emphasizes that its not enough to focus solely on the security of internal serversmerchants need to keep an eye on all potential access points and guard against many types of losses. Below, she outlines five essential steps to mitigate the risks and potential losses from the latest Magecart data-skimming threat:

1. ENCRYPTION: Encryption renders data useless to thieves, protecting customers and reducing the overall cost per breach.(2) Eaton-Cardone notes technological advances now allow data encryption at the application level, not just for stored data.(3)

2. 3P NETWORK CONNECTION TRACKING: its critical to control website access and permissions for outside entities. Conducting a firewall rulebase analysis can identify inbound connections that may have escaped notice.(4)

3. VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENTS: To pinpoint potential access points for digital skimmers, Eaton-Cardone advises merchants to run scans on external-facing hosts and cloud environments to identify services listening for inbound connections.(4)

4. INDICATORS OF COMPROMISE (IOCs): As soon as a breach is made public, Eaton-Cardone urges merchants to scan all code for cybercriminals domains/IP addresses. Any scripts with the webfotce.me domain indicate a Magecart breach.(1)

5. COMPREHENSIVE LOSS PREVENTION: Malicious attacks cause 48% of all data breaches; 52% are due to human error and system glitches.(2) To minimize losses, Eaton-Cardone says its vital to implement solutions that address both intentional and accidental data breaches as well as chargebacks and other financial hits.

Merchants need to view cyberfraud as an ongoing battle with many points of attack, counsels Eaton-Cardone. You cant sit back and play defense; you have to actively identify and address vulnerabilities, boost your fortifications and take the fight outside your walls.

She notes that merchants investments in data security and chargeback mitigation can save millions compared to the cost of a single breach or years worth of cumulative cyberfraud losses. The sooner you act, the more youll saveand the safer your company and customers will be, concluded Eaton-Cardone.

Chargebacks911 knows cyberfraud is not going to go awayand is dedicated to educating and supporting eCommerce merchants with services designed to boost revenue, shrink chargebacks and defeat fraudsters. To that end, Monica Eaton-Cardone and her team will be participating in a number of upcoming industry events, including Payments & Fraud 360 in Chicago and Toronto, EP@Home in London and INBOUND 2018 in Boston. For details on Chargebacks911s comprehensive risk management solutions, informative articles and other merchant resources, visit https://chargebacks911.com.

About Chargebacks911:

Chargebacks911, known as The Chargeback Company in Europe, safeguards over 2.4 billion online transactions every year, representing clients in 87 different countries. It is the first global company fully dedicated to mitigating chargeback risk and eliminating chargeback fraud, and the company has won the Customer Choice Award for Best Chargeback Management Solution at the CardNotPresent Awards for two years in succession. As industry-leading innovators, Chargebacks911 is credited with developing the most effective strategies for helping businesses maximize revenue and reduce loss in a variety of industries and sectors within the payments space.

Chargebacks911 provides comprehensive and highly scalable solutions for chargeback compliance, handling services and fraud strategy management. With unparalleled category experience and Intelligence Source Detection (ISD) technology, Chargebacks911 identifies the true source of chargebacks, optimizes revenue recovery opportunities, mediates disputes, safeguards reputations, monitors transactions 24/7 and helps proactively prevent future fraud. To learn more about Chargebacks911, visit http://www.chargebacks911.com.

1. Klijnsma, Yonathan and Jordan Herman. Inside and Beyond Ticketmaster: The Many Breaches of Magecart; RiskIQ report; July 9, 2018.

2. IBM Security and Ponemon Institute. 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study: Global Overview; July 11, 2018.

3. Robinson, Rick M. Fail-Safe Security: Protecting Data From Cloud and Third-Party Risks With Encryption; SecurityIntelligence; October 11, 2017.

4. Beaver, Kevin. Dealing With Third-Party Vendor Connections in Your Network; SecurityIntelligence; August 30, 2016.North American Title Company Logo Our goal is to become one of the top five title insurance agents in the state of Indiana within the next 10 years.

North American Title Co. (NATC) is expanding its footprint in Indiana, with a new office in Marion. The office, which opened its doors on Aug. 1, marks the fifth office the company has opened in Indiana since 2015.

The exemplary service offered by our very talented staff continues to fuel our growth throughout the state, said Laura Ormsby, NATC operations manager. Our goal is to become one of the top five title insurance agents in the state of Indiana within the next 10 years, and were excited to make Marion a part of that story.

Ormsby said Marions blend of culture, education and community continue to attract young professionals as well as families, ensuring a strong real estate market into the future.

We are pleased to open this branch to concentrate on the vibrant Grant County market, said Laura Ormsby, NATC operations manager. Escrow Officer Sandra Bowers will be anchoring the office, and we look forward to serving the areas real estate professionals, lenders and attorneys.

The new Marion office is located at 1309 W. Johnson Street, Marion, IN 46952, telephone number (260) 570-4197.

About North American Title

With well over 1,300 associates and a network of branches from coast to coast, North American Title Group, LLC (NATG) is among the largest real estate settlement service providers in the United States. Consisting of both agent and underwriter operations, NATG reported annual net revenues in fiscal 2017 of $272.7 million. The company also has the resources and stability of being a wholly owned subsidiary of an S&P 500 company with over $18.7 billion in assets as of its fiscal year ended Nov. 30, 2017. North American Titles agency network operates nationally under the name North American Title Co. and similar names (NATC) in 19 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Virginia, in addition to the District of Columbia. Through our relationship with our expanding affiliate network, NATC provides real estate settlement services in all 50 states. NATG is headquartered in Miami, Florida. To learn more, visit http://www.nat.com

-30-The OrCam MyEye is a game changer - it gives the blind and visually impaired the ability to read anything, anywhere, anytime, restoring their independence, Lesa Berg Kretschmer.

OrCam MyEye technology allows the blind and visually impaired to experience the world around them in a brand new, interactive way and regain their independence. With OrCam, the wearer can read newspapers, books, signs, labels on consumer products, identify currency, and even read text on a computer or smartphone screen anytime and anywhere they wish. MyEye comes equipped with facial recognition capabilities, allowing the wearer to identify friends and family who enter into the camera view.

OrCam MyEye 2 weighs in at a mere .79 ounces and attaches to the wearers own glasses with a small magnetic clip. Simple hand gestures like touching or swiping, or pointing to text, control the small, lipstick-sized unit. MyEye 2 also includes color recognition. It can read red and green signals at pedestrian crossings or help identify the colors of clothing. OrCams MyReader device has all of the portable reading functionality of the MyEye devices, but without the extras.

OrCam is partnering with the Florida Vision Technology Center to demonstrate OrCam MyEye and MyReader at two Florida events this September and October. One demo event will be held at the Florida Vision Technology Centers flagship store in central Fort Lauderdale on September 13th, and the other at their newest Largo location (inside the Lighthouse of Pinellas) on October 4th.

Lesa Kretschmer, Founder & CEO of Florida Vision Technology Center commented, Were excited to partner with Orcam to demo the MyEye and MyReader devices because we know it will enhance the quality of life of anyone who tries it. By partnering with OrCam to host 2 Florida events, Kretschmer hopes to reach out to more people in the community and show what it can do. Kretschmer adds, The OrCam MyEye is a game changer - it gives the blind and visually impaired the ability to read anything, anywhere, anytime, restoring their independence. It can help people navigate the world around them. Imagine meeting a friend for lunch and reading the menu, visiting a museum, or being able to go shopping without assistance - the possibilities are endless.

Kretschmer has been showcasing the new Orcam technology within the state including at the Division of Blind Services 75th Anniversary Celebration in Daytona Beach and at the Florida Council of the Blind State Convention in Jacksonville with an enthusiastic response. Kretschmer has also introduced the devices at several South Florida events including the Elder Services Referral Network Senior & Boomer Expo, the Lighthouse of the Palm Beaches Boot Up Club, the American Council of the Blind Miami Beach & Ft. Lauderdale Chapters, the National Federation of the Blind Miami Chapter, and the Blinded Veterans Association Broward Chapter.

About the Florida Vision Technology Center:

Florida Vision Technology Center is a minority certified small business based out of Fort Lauderdale. Lesa Berg Kretschmer, founder and CEO, has worked in the blindness and low vision industry for more than 24 years. Shes committed to placing the best adaptive technology and products available today within reach of blind and visually challenged people of all ages and walks of life.Author and career pathologist Jane Bennett Munro has released five novels in The Toni Day Series, with Murder Under the Microscope being the first installment.

The story follows pathologist and crime investigator Toni Day, M.D. as she finds herself accused of the murder of new surgeon, Sally Shore, M.D. in her hospital in Twin Falls, Idaho.

After Shore joins the hospital staff and takes an immediate dislike to Toni, she is found dead in Tonis office. Being the prime suspect, Toni is forced to solve the crime on her own to save her freedom and her life.

Murder Under the Microscope is an award-winning novel, having received an Crime Fiction IPPY from The Independent Publisher Book Awards, is a four-star reviewed book on Amazon, and has received critical praise.

Bennett Munro, who herself has over four decades in pathology experience, incorporates her own medical and forensic knowledge into her grisly descriptions of her books victims, offering readers a realistic and gritty story that will leave them riveted.

Murder Under the Microscope

By Jane Bennett Munro

ISBN: 9781450298629 (Softcover), 9781450298612 (Electronic)

Available at the iUniverse Online Bookstore, Barnes & Noble and Amazon

About the author

Jane Bennett Munro holds a medical degree from the University of California, Irvine, and is certified in anatomical and clinical pathology. A hospital-based pathologist for 41 years, Bennett Munro has some experience working in forensics. She currently resides in Twin Falls, Idaho. To learn more, please visit http://www.janebennettmunro.com.Reynaldo Roche "Mr. Roche can deliver a unique perspective of how one of the worlds largest Airlines and MROs consumes data in todays digital aviation environment", said Greg Schmidt, PartsBase President.

PBExpo, presented by PartsBase, is a revolutionary aviation, aerospace, and defense tradeshow focused on showcasing emerging e-commerce technologies, digital transformation, digital marketing and critical B2B tools for success. PBExpo will take place March 13-14, 2019 in Fort Lauderdale, FL and announced today that they will welcome Delta TechOps Director of Global MRO Operations, Reynaldo Roche as keynote speaker.

Joining Delta in 2007, Roche has held positions in in Finance, Marketing, TechOps, Supplier Operations, and MRO Services. He currently serves as the Director of Global MRO Operations at Delta TechOps and is responsible for leading all quantitative analysis, performance metrics, financial projections, forecasting and reporting for the group. In addition, hes responsible for managing the operations and service delivery for all maintenance, repair, and overhauls completed for third-party customers  helping the airline and its customers optimize profitability while achieving superior, world class, operational performance on safety, quality, reliability, cost and turn-around-time.

Delta is an innovation and best in class provider and is committed to efficiency. Their forward thinking usage of analytics to optimize performance is admired. Roches keynote presentation, Leveraging Data to Produce Valuable Metrics, Analytics & Intelligence: An Airline & MRO Perspective, will give attendees an insight in ways to use intelligence to implement actionable results.

"We are very excited that Reynaldo Roche from Delta TechOps will be joining us at PBExpo 2019 as one of our keynote speakers. Mr. Roche can deliver a unique perspective of how one of the worlds largest Airlines and MROs consumes data in todays digital aviation environment," said Greg Schmidt, PartsBase President.

About PBExpo

Presented by PartsBase, PBExpo is the only interactive environment that integrates the aviation, aerospace, and defense industries with technology and ecommerce solutions. PBExpo consists of multiple forums, over two days, and allows participants to discuss and demonstrate the newest innovations available in the marketplace, attend educational seminars presented by industry leaders, walk a vast and expansive industry-focused exhibit hall, and provide direct feedback and roadmap suggestions on the PartsBase website. The event is open to all parties who buy, sell, manufacture or repair aircraft parts, or those involved in B2B and B2C ecommerce and technology solutions.

In addition, PartsBase offers complete marketing and digital advertising opportunities to reach aviation and aerospace professionals and enthusiasts while theyre in procurement mode. Access to members in all facets of the aviation parts business, including major airlines, FBOs, OEMs, distributors, surplus dealers, brokers, military defense centers, charter operations, and MRO stations. In addition, our online community is continually growing as new members join the PartsBase family of aviation and aerospace professionals each day.

About Delta TechOps

Delta TechOps is the largest airline maintenance, repair and overhaul provider in North America. In addition to supplying maintenance and engineering support for Deltas fleet of more than 800 aircraft, Delta TechOps supports more than 150 other aviation and airline customers around the world. Deltas MRO Services is the aftermarket arm of Delta TechOps. Delta TechOps performs over 200 aircraft checks per year, overhauls over 700 engines per year, and repairs/overhauls over 250,000 components per year for Delta, SkyTeam Alliance partners and MROs third party customers. Delta TechOps employs more than 10,000 maintenance professionals and is one of the worlds most-experienced providers with more than 90 years of aviation experience. More about Delta TechOps is available at http://www.deltatechops.comFrank Lloyd Wright Portrait by Max Dalton Im proud to be contributing  in a very tiny way  with the preservation of Wrights legacy. - Max Dalton

Max Dalton is the artist behind some of the most well-known and widely celebrated pop culture illustrations over the past 20 years that have drawn international attention with iconic Wes Anderson films, Game of Thrones, The Beatles and Breaking Bad inspiring his sketches. Today, Dalton has taken on a new muse  Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Buenos Aires-based illustrator has joined forces with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to create a limited-edition illustrated map of the famous architects personal estate in Wisconsin, Taliesin, and the homes surrounding landmarks that span 800 acres. The illustration will appear in the Summer 2018 edition of the Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, a hard-copy magazine exclusively available to the Foundations members. With membership pricing starting from $50, members who join by Oct. 15 will receive the collectible issue featuring Daltons work.

Im a big fan of modern design and early 20th century architecture and, of course, Frank Lloyd Wright is one of my favorites, said Dalton. Just having the opportunity to work on something related to his work and being involved is such a great honor to me. Im proud to be contributing  in a very tiny way  with the preservation of Wrights legacy.

Regarded as one of Wrights most personal creations, Taliesin is the home, studio, school and agricultural estate of Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright built Taliesin on his favorite boyhood hill in the Wisconsin River Valley homesteaded by his Welsh grandparents and named it Taliesin in honor of the Welsh bard whose name means shining brow. Begun in 1911, Taliesin was rebuilt by Wright twice, following significant fire damage in 1914 and 1925.

Dalton was approached earlier this year by longtime fan and vice president of communication and partnerships for the Foundation, Jeff Goodman.

Ive long admired Max Daltons ability to take visuals created by other artists and display them in a way that respects the original intent while adding his own signature style to how the work is presented, said Goodman. Frank Lloyd Wrights designs and ideas are more relevant today than in his own lifetime, so we wanted an illustrator who could display the genius of Wrights work with a contemporary approach. Our collaboration with Max is another way we can introduce Frank Lloyd Wright to new audiences, and help preserve his legacy to inspire future generations to think differently about how we build and live.

Among his most well-known work is Daltons Greatest Moments in Film series that features character sketches from E.T., The Big Lebowski, Jaws and Pulp Fiction. Previous prints cataloging entire casts of Star Wars or locations in Wes Anderson films like The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Life Aquatic and The Royal Tenenbaums, top the fan-favorites list. Dalton also illustrated the childrens book The Lonely Phone Booth which was selected for the Smithsonians 2010 Notable Books for Children. He also designed illustrations and cover art for the New York Times bestseller, The Wes Anderson Collection.

The process of drawing every building in detail made me realize the brilliance of what it means to obtain all that beauty and all that simplicity in the forms of such complex structures. Ive also learned a few things about Wrights work that only reinforce for me what a genius he was. For instance, to know that he drew Fallingwater in about two hours just blew my mind.

For fans looking to add to their collection, Dalton explains, I researched the plans that Wright drew for Taliesin and selected a few of them to imitate his style, especially his handwriting and the way he made the trees and landforms that surrounded the buildings. On top of that, I planted all the buildings drawn in my own style. Thats something Ive never done before. I hope that everyone likes the result as much as I do!

The map of the Taliesin Estate includes Romeo & Juliet Windmill, Midway Barn, Hillside School, the Tan-y-Deri residence and surrounding cottages, and  of course  Taliesin itself.

Goodman hopes this is just the beginning of the partnership with Dalton. I have Max Daltons artwork framed and hung on the walls of my own home, so I was thrilled he agreed to create this incredible illustration for us, he says. Max is truly inspired by Wrights designs, so I dont know which one of us is more excited about working together, and I look forward to more opportunities to collaborate in the future.

To learn more about the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and become a member to receive the Quarterly magazine, visit FrankLloydWright.org/Membership. For more about Max Dalton and his inspiring collection of work, visit MaxDalton.com.

About the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, established by Wright in 1940, is dedicated to preserving Taliesin and Taliesin West for future generations, and inspiring society through an understanding and experience of Frank Lloyd Wrights ideas, architecture and design. Wrights legacy, reflected in contemporary work around sustainable and affordable architecture and excellence in design, is of even greater importance today than in his own time. The Foundation is forward-looking, but rooted in the history of the Taliesin communities. Please visit FrankLloydWright.org for more information on tour schedules, cultural and educational experiences and events.Sound Royalties genuinely supports my music and creativity. They are always available and ready to help fund me as an artist. I really enjoy that I have been able to develop a true artist to business relationship with them, said Hakizimana.

Sound Royalties, LLC, a specialty finance firm dedicated to the needs of music professionals, today announced that self-composing Houston rapper Daraja Hakizimana has joined the rapidly growing list of creatives whom the company has assisted with artist-friendly royalty advances. Hakizimana worked with Sound Royalties on his second royalty advance to kick off a successful 2018, after receiving special Sound Royalties hurricane funding after being affected by Hurricane Harvey last fall.

A multi-talented artist best known for his compilations that blend rap, jazz, R&B and electronica music, Hakizimana owns his own production company Blackwater Productions, which is home to five up-and-coming artists. As a recurring live performer in the Houston area, Hakizimana has worked with many other established artists including PARTYNEXTDOOR, Devin The Dude, K-Rino, That Boy Cayse, Z-Ro and many more.

Sound Royalties genuinely supports my music and creativity. They are always available and ready to help fund me as an artist. I really enjoy that I have been able to develop a true artist to business relationship with them, said Hakizimana. Working with Sound Royalties is proof that even without being on a major record label, you can have and fund a successful career as an independent artist.

Sound Royalties CEO and Founder Alex Heiche added: Our mission is to help music professionals reap the full benefits of their hard work and be able to access their earned funds when they most need them. Were excited to be working with more and more independent artists like Daraja to help them fund fruitful careers while maintaining the rights to their work. We are excited to follow the future of Darajas career and look forward to providing an open door for more artist-friendly royalty funding to many more talented creatives like him.

Sound Royalties has innovatively transformed the process of funding projects for hundreds of music professionals, including notable songwriters, producers and performing artists. The firm has a track record of standing behind artists with a vision to positively impact the community, especially in times of need. Its very own Director of Funding, Reggie Calloway, released a new charity single heading into the new year to benefit art programs in the Houston Independent School District affected by Hurricane Harvey.

About Sound Royalties

Founded by CEO Alex Heiche, Sound Royalties, LLC is a privately-owned specialty finance firm that helps music industry professionals fund personal and professional projects while allowing them to retain the rights to their music and royalties. The company's core business is offering royalty advances of anywhere from $5,000 to $10 million, without having to deal with credit issues, while preserving all rights to the artist's music. It does this by advancing artist royalties paid through music labels, digital performance royalties paid through Sound Exchange, songwriter royalties and performance royalties paid through music publishers and Performing Rights Organizations such as ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, and music streaming royalties from Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube. To date, Sound Royalties, LLC has worked with a wide range of leading music industry professionals, including Grammy Award winners, platinum recording artists and notable music industry executives in every genre. Learn more at https://www.soundroyalties.com.San Diego Council Member Mark Kersey with Utilis CEO Elly Perets Utilis chose San Diego for their second outpost due to the availability of quality talent, the strong support for the blue tech sector, and the interest in water conservation by the state.

Utilis Corp has cut the ribbon, officially opening their new United States based subsidiary, Utilis Inc, in San Diego. Elected officials and representatives from local utilities attended the August 23rd event to learn about new innovation in the leak detection sector and the impact Utilis is making in the global water conservation effort. Guests moved between five stations, covering a short presentation about the companys history and mission, an overview of their patented technology, previous case studies in the U.S., and finally debuting an upcoming pilot project for the City of San Diego, where Utilis will provide 100 points of interest signifying possible leaks.

Utilis is grateful for such a warm welcome by the San Diego community and we look forward to working with local officials and utility companies to find more leaks and save you water, said Elly Perets, CEO of Utilis.

Utilis is the worlds only leak detection provider that uses satellite remote sensing, which contributes to the conservation of one of earths most precious resources. Utilis chose San Diego for their second outpost due to the availability of quality talent, the strong support for the blue tech sector, and the interest in water conservation by the state.

Guests included San Diego City Council Member Mark Kersey, representatives from the offices of Congressmen Scott Peters, Congressional Candidate Sara Jacobs, and San Diego City Council President Pro Tem Barbara Bry, and organizations such as the City of Oceanside water utilities department, California American Water and SUEZ of North America. The guests were able to interact with Utilis employees, including the CEO, and ask questions. At the end, everyone was treated to a beer tasting provided by San Diego countys own S.T.E.M. outreach microbrewery, Wavelength Brewing Co., which shares a mutual mission of using space and science to save earths resources.The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) has launched its second annual machine learning challenge. The RSNA Pneumonia Detection challenge invites teams to develop algorithms to identify and localize pneumonia in chest X-rays.

The expectation that artificial intelligence will soon provide valuable tools for radiology continues to grow, said Luciano Prevedello, M.D., M.P.H., chief of the Division of Medical Imaging Informatics at The Ohio State University and chair of the Machine Learning Steering Subcommittee of the RSNA Radiology Informatics Committee (RIC). By organizing machine learning data challenges, RSNA is playing an important role in fostering and demonstrating these capabilities.

A machine learning data challenge is a competition among artificial intelligence researchers to create applications that perform a defined task according to specified performance measures. The Pneumonia Detection challenge will be based on a publicly available dataset published by the National Institutes of Health that has been carefully annotated by multiple expert reviewers. The RSNA Machine Learning Steering Subcommittee collaborated with volunteer specialists from the Society of Thoracic Radiology to annotate the dataset, identifying abnormal areas in the lung images and assessing the probability of pneumonia.

A successful Machine Learning challenge needs to begin with a data set accurate and large enough to provide ground truth, said Safwan Halabi, M.D., medical director of radiology informatics at Stanford University and chair of the Machine Learning Data Standards Subcommittee of the RIC. Developers build their applications by training them on the dataset and challenge organizers use a segment of the dataset to measure their performance.

This years challenge will be conducted using the competition platform provided by Kaggle, Inc. (a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc., which is also the parent company of Google). The Kaggle platform will provide a home page for the challenge, controlled access to the challenge datasets, a discussion forum for participants, and the repository where they submit their results. Kaggle has recognized the RSNA Pneumonia Detection Challenge as a public good and will provide $30,000 in prize money for the winning entries.

The challenge will have two phases: training and evaluation. During the training phase, which starts today and runs until October 17, participants will use the training portion of the dataset to develop algorithms that duplicate the annotations provided by the radiologist observers. In the evaluation phase, which runs October 18-24, participants will run their algorithms on the testing portion of the dataset, from which the annotations are withheld. October 24 is the deadline for submission of test results, which will then be compared to the ground-truth values supplied by the annotations of the expert observers to determine the winners. The results will be announced in early November, and the top submissions will be recognized November 26 in a session at the Machine Learning Showcase during the RSNA 2018 annual meeting at McCormick Place in Chicago.

Last years challenge had more than 200 participants, many of whom formed teams comprising both data scientists and radiologists. Radiologists have a critical role to play in the challenge, even if they dont have extensive experience with machine learning, Dr. Prevedello said. They can provide insight, based on their clinical experience, to refine or supplement the annotations on the training data set and help developers identify systematic errors in the results of their algorithms.

Radiologists interested in participating can set up a free account on the Kaggle site and express their interests and qualifications in the forum for the RSNA Pneumonia Detection challenge. Information is available on the challenge site: https://www.kaggle.com/c/rsna-pneumonia-detection-challenge or by contacting RSNA staff at informatics@rsna.org.

RSNA is an association of over 54,200 radiologists, radiation oncologists, medical physicists and related scientists promoting excellence in patient care and health care delivery through education, research and technologic innovation. The Society is based in Oak Brook, Ill. (RSNA.org)The EHS Daily Advisor is proud to announce the winners of its second set of Safety Standout Awards. These awards recognize companies who have made safety culture a priority.

These awards are sponsored by SafeStart, a global safety company focused on human error prevention training to reduce injuries 24/7, and will be presented to the winners at Safety Culture 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 12-14, 2018.

Best Overall Safety Culture Award: Kings Seafood Company

Kings Seafood Company is privately held and has been Delivering Great Seafood to America for over 70 years. The organization goes above and beyond when it comes to creating a strong safety culture. They demonstrated that their safety program is equitable to all other company objectives and that safety is a top priority and often interwoven with other company initiatives.

Best Safety Committee: Valero RenewablesAlbion

Valero RenewablesAlbion is a biorefinery located in Albion, Nebraska. Its safety committee is comprised completely of non-management personnel. Currently, there are fourteen members, selected on a voluntary basis and representing all departments of the facility for a continuous term of one year. The Editorial Board was impressed by not only the excellent structure, obvious team spirit, and diverse functions described by Valero Albions safety committee, but also their unique ways of promoting safety engagement among workers.

Exceptional Progress Award: Smith & Nephew

Smith & Nephew supports healthcare professionals in more than 100 countries in their daily efforts to improve the lives of their patients. The Editorial Board saw that the progress that Smith & Nephew has made in recent years with their safety efforts was undeniable. They noted that their greatest challenge was a familiar one for safety prosownership. But, the safety team at Smith & Nephew was up to the task.

Moving Beyond Compliance Award: City of Minneapolis Risk Management and Safety Committee

What stood out to the Editorial Board the most in the City of Minneapoliss application was the Risk Management and Safety Committees efforts to promote safe behaviors in areas that extend beyond the workplace. In particular, their recognition of the need for a distracted driving policy led to a team effort that included more than 15 labor unions. The City also has shown a great effort toward understanding and addressing human factors in their safety programs, taking a serious look at ergonomic assessment in safety, and creating a comprehensive motor vehicle accident reduction plan.

Read more about the winners on the EHS Daily Advisor.

Join the Safety Standout Award Winners at Safety Culture 2018

Theres still time to register for Safety Culture 2018. In addition to our awards ceremony, there will be a wide variety of educational speakers, excellent sponsors, an opening keynote from Scott Geller and closing keynote from Shawn Galloway, plus opportunities to network and other activities designed to help you build the best possible safety culture at your organization. Register todayseats are filling up fast!

About BLR

BLR (Business & Legal Resources) helps U.S. businesses simplify compliance with state and federal legal requirements. In-house experts and an exclusive attorney network provide comprehensive, reliable, state-specific information for businesses in all 50 states. Award-winning products and solutionsincluding training programs, events, online solution suites, reports, and subscription servicesgive businesses of all sizes and industries the best tools available at affordable prices. For more information on its offerings, visit https://www.BLR.com.

About Simplify Compliance

Simplify Compliance helps its customers learn, comply, and succeed by providing mission-critical regulatory and business information, analysis, and tools. Formed by Leeds Equity Partners in 2016, Simplify Compliance serves a range of industries, including financial services, healthcare, human capital management, and telecommunications. Simplify Compliance provides time-saving products and solutions that help U.S.-based businesses and their employees monitor compliance, optimize financial performance, and create and implement best practices. For more information on their its offerings, visit http://www.SimplifyCompliance.com.Seafood Expo Asia Seafood Expo Asia offers a wide range of activities alongside the trade exhibition to further enhanced participants experience with their sourcing and purchasing needs for fresh, frozen and processed seafood.

The 9th edition of Seafood Expo Asia organized by Diversified Communications will open its doors in less than two weeks with an exciting line up of expert speakers and exhibitors from around the world including Bulgaria, France, Korea, Spain, Thailand and the USA. Visitors will discover the latest trends, source all types of seafood products and do business with the global seafood community through the many networking opportunities at the expo taking place 4-6 September at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Seafood Expo Asia offers a wide range of activities alongside the trade exhibition to further enhanced participants experience with their sourcing and purchasing needs for fresh, frozen and processed seafood. This years event will feature an inspiring open market-concept Product Showcase, which will highlight a new Tasty Kitchen where buyers will be able to taste seafood products from around the world by sampling some of the exhibiting products.

The Demonstration Theatre will host a series of culinary demonstrations by professional chefs who will explain how to prepare special seafood species and the best way to consume them. The 2018 Young Chef Challenge, scheduled every day during the exposition, will spotlight eight young chefs eager to show off their culinary talents by using sustainable seafood species to create their dishes. The judging panel, consisting of Mr. Gerhard Passrugger, Executive Chef from Grand Hyatt Hong Kong, Mr. Pedro Samper, Executive Chef from The Langham Hong Kong, Miss Vicky Lau, Chef and Owner of Tate Dining Room & Bar, and the event ambassador Gabriel Choy, will deliberate on the winning contestant, which will be announced on the last day of the event (6 September 2018). Celebrity chef, Christian Yang, will also be joining the Young Chef Challenge as guest judge and host a master class on 4 September to demonstrate one of his creative seafood dishes.

The latest industry insights will be revealed by global industry players and professionals during the two-day conference program, which will be presented in the Conference Area. Euromonitor International, one of the worlds leading providers for global business intelligence and strategic market analysis will uncover the untapped business potential of processed seafood in Asia Pacific, while IGD (The Institute of Grocery Distribution) will present the changing face of retail in Asia, covering Asias grocery market development, trends, new retail innovation and best practice on fresh seafood in-store. Guangdong Evergreen Group will highlight how technology in aquaculture will ensure production of quality and safer seafood, Eachmile Technologies Pte, Ltd will examine blockchain application for data ecosystem for the global seafood industry. A panel discussion, led by SeafoodSources editor, Chris Chase, and fellow panelists from Grand Hyatt, KLG Fine Food, ADMCF and Dah Chong Hong will explore the business opportunities and consumer trends in Asia within the realm of sustainable seafood.

Conference - Highlighted Topics and Speakers

Topic: Discover The Untapped Business Potential of Processed Seafood in APAC

Speaker: Ms. Mandy Chan, Analyst, Euromonitor

Topic: Seafood Innovation Best Practice: The First Ever Yellowfin Tuna Slices

Speaker: Dr. Tunyawat Kasemsuwan, Group Director for Global Innovation, Thai Union Group PCL

Topic: Creating A Data Ecosystem for the Global Seafood Industry

Speaker: Alistair Douglas, Partner, Eachmile Technologies Pte. Ltd

Topic: The Changing Face of Retail in Asia

Speaker: IGD (The Institute of Grocery Distribution)

Topic: Whats the Catch  Knowing Your Fish - Shrimp & Tuna

Speakers: Royal Shrimp & Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA)

Topic: Technology for Safer and More Sustainable Aquaculture

Speaker: Guangdong Evergreen Group

Topic: Sustainable Seaculture Development in Vietnam and Future Opportunities

Speaker: Vietnam Seaculture Association

Topic: Sustainable Seafood Business Dialogue: Consumer Trends

Moderate by SeafoodSource. Panelists include: Grand Hyatt Hotel Hong Kong, KLG Fine Food, ADMCF, Dah Chong Hong Ltd.

Culinary Demonstrations - Highlighted Topics and Sponsors

Topic: Galician Seafood

Sponsored by: Conselleria do Mar  Xunta de Galicia

Topic: Australian Green Lip Abalone

Sponsored by: Ocean Grown Abalone

Topic: Alaskan Seafood  Wild Caught, Sustainable Seafood

Sponsored by: American Indian Foods

With over 220 exhibiting companies from more than 30 countries, this years Seafood Expo Asia will offer attendees opportunity to access authentic up-to-date business information and view and taste seafood products from around the world. Newly exhibiting countries in 2018 include: Bulgaria, Fiji, Greece, Kiribati, Monaco, Oman, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Romania, Solomon Islands and Tonga. They will be joining Thailand, Korea, USA, Spain, France and Taiwan that are among the 21 returning country pavilions. Trade visitors will also be able to explore seafood from the newly added pavilions from Ireland, China, Japan and Solomon Islands.

For more information or to register a free trade pass, please visit http://www.seafoodexpo.com/asia.



About Seafood Expo Asia

Seafood Expo Asia is a trade event where buyers and suppliers of seafood from around the world come together to network and conduct business in the lucrative Hong Kong and Asia Pacific markets. The events ninth edition takes place from the 4-6 September 2018 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wanchai, Hong Kong. SeafoodSource.com is the expositions official media covering industry news year-round. The exposition is produced by Diversified Communications and is co-located with Restaurant & Bar Hong Kong. http://www.seafoodexpo.com/asia.

About Diversified Communications

Diversified Communications is a leading international media company with a portfolio of face-to-face exhibitions and conferences, online communities and digital and print publications. As producers of these market-leading products Diversified Communications connects, educates and strengthens business communities in over 14 industries including: food and beverage, healthcare, natural and organic, business management and technology. The company's global seafood portfolio of expositions and media includes Seafood Expo North America/Seafood Processing North America, Seafood Expo Global/Seafood Processing Global, Seafood Expo Asia and SeafoodSource.com. Diversified Communications, in partnership with SeaWeb, also produces SeaWeb Seafood Summit, the worlds premier seafood conference on sustainability. Established in 1949 and headquartered in Portland, Maine, USA with divisions and offices around the world, Diversified Communications remains a privately held, third generation, family-owned business. For more information, visit: http://www.divcom.com

For Editors note:

For media interviews or photographs that accompany this announcement, please contact

HONG KONG

Ruby Cheung

Cred Communication Limited

Tel: 2110 3519

Mobile: 6742-9372

Email: ruby@credcommunications.com

USA

Christine Pedersen, Marketing Director

Diversified Communications

Phone: +1 207-842-5488

Email: cpedersen@divcom.comJJUMPP Australia Entrepreneurs and small business owners are looking for a better way to take control of their online presence.

Today Silicon Slopes startup JJUMPP announced their official expansion to the Australian market. As part of this expansion, the company now offers its full suite of small business marketing tools to customers in Australia. The expansion also includes agency and reseller partnership opportunities for Australian-based companies.

The company has already begun acquiring customers and reseller partners in Australia. JJUMPP representatives attended the recent Digital Marketer Down Under event in Brisbane and had the opportunity to meet the hardworking business owners of the Gold Coast.

Australia has an entrepreneurial spirit that serves as the business backbone of the country, said Jeff Mask, Chief Revenue Officer, There is such a compatible fit with JJUMPPs Purpose and the entrepreneurial spirit of Australia.

The company quickly found success in the Australian market as business owners and marketing agencies were drawn to JJUMPPs business model of an All-In-One Online Presence Platform to manage online reviews, social media, and search engine results. Their partnership with Digital Marketer has allowed the two companies to reach more Australian entrepreneurs searching for a simplified marketing solution for their business needs.

Entrepreneurs and small business owners are looking for a better way to take control of their online presence. This was made clear to me now more than ever with the reception we have received in Australia.

-Chad Ingram, CEO

As JJUMPP opens to the Australian market it continues to fulfill its purpose of serving entrepreneurs around the world by increasing recurring revenue and decreasing churn for small businesses, agencies, and strategic partners.

About JJUMPP

JJUMPP is the leading online presence management platform for small businesses. Through JJUMPPs centralized online tools like reputation and social media management, business owners can significantly impact customer decisions and grow their business.We can help school districts assess the status of their transportation operation, and develop an actionable process for how they can do more with less funding.

School districts across the country are feeling the pressure to pinch their pennies, as programs supported by government funding are expected to experience continued financial pressure. The TransPar Group of Companies (TPGoC), has partnered with school districts across the country to identify opportunities to lower cost and improve the service quality of their student transportation systems. Three key opportunities to ease the pain of funding cuts are maximizing reimbursements (where available); focusing on total cost of school bus fleet ownership; and identifying opportunities to drive operational efficiencies. How districts can assess these three concerns is a key insight from the TPGoC.

1. Minimizing the impact of funding cuts by maximizing your reimbursement - To fully evaluate the impact of changes to transportation, it is important to understand the budgeting process and inner workings of a states approach to funding. For example, there are generally two distinct sides to a school districts transportation budget:



Expenditure side: Driver salaries, benefits, fuel, new bus acquisition

Revenue side: State funding, Medicaid reimbursement, field trip reimbursement, paid riders

Additionally, there are four general types of approaches used to fund transportation:

Transportation block grants: Funding is provided as part of basic per-pupil foundation grants.

Per unit allocations: A fixed amount of funding is provided based on a specific unit of measure (e.g., per student, per mile).

Approved costs: A certain percentage of all costs incurred within specific categories are reimbursed (e.g., 85 percent of driver salaries).

Efficiency formulas: Funding is provided based on operational efficiency rather than cost.

While these approaches are all distinctly different, each approach takes into account fiscal, economic, administrative, and political perspectives. The relative importance of such factors varies from organization to organization depending on the circumstances they currently face. It is clear, however, that the fiscal challenges facing many school districts today, and the threat they pose to fleet replacement spending in these organizations, warrant the consideration of new ways of doing business.

2. Focusing on total cost of school bus fleet ownership - As a result of the looming budget cuts, school bus fleet replacement planning and fleet funding levels across the country are having to absorb the detrimental blows instead of using fiscal challenges to get ahead for the long-term.

Rather than simply defer replacement purchases to meet short-term budget balancing goals, many school administrators should use potential fiscal challenges to trigger a thorough reappraisal of their districts approach to fleet management, said Tim Ammon, Chief Business Development Officer of TPGoC. This approach can help school districts offset the budget cut pain and ensure the infrastructure of a schools transportation program isnt thrown under the train of budget cuts.

3. Identifying opportunities to drive operational efficiencies - Transportation and fleet reviews are beneficial to school districts because they can highlight areas where the operation could be more efficient, save money, and create a safer form of transportation for its students. Critical to the question of mitigating funding cuts is controlling the cost of transportation through routing efficiency. Identifying how school bell times, GPS, routing software, bus tracking apps, and route design impact the cost of transportation is crucial. The goal of each Transportation Manager should be to minimize the number of buses needed to transport the maximum number students within their district.

Transportation is not the only area for districts to consider. Fleet management can be a complex problem for businesses that lack functional, in-house expertise and nationally scaled resources of their own. Businesses need to make sure they have a knowledgeable fleet management partner on their side that will be able to provide the tools and techniques needed to develop a sensible, cost-effective fleet management strategy, and understand the tradeoffs between capital and operating expenditures. Reduced parts pricing, creative acquisition funding options, technology implementation and professional fleet data analysis, and the ability to stretch your dollars with total cost of school bus fleet ownership analysis and other strategic projections, are key elements that a transportation partner will help entities explore to build a long lasting, sensible and cost-effective fleet management system.

At the TransPar Group of Companies, we provide crucial insights when its not exactly clear what an organization might need -- or how to address issues and concerns, Ammon added. For example, more efficient routing, improved business processes, higher levels of safety and reliability, and better information flow all contribute to lowering the cost of a transportation operation. We can help districts assess the status of their operation, and develop an actionable process for how they can do more with less funding.

For more information about the TransPar Group of Companies and their portfolio of services and products, please visit http://www.TransParGroup.com and follow on Twitter at @TPGoC.

About TransPar Group of Companies

The TransPar Group of Companies offers a diverse portfolio of services and products which represent the most comprehensive offering in the industry. The three business units include TransPar, which provides Management and Staffing Services to develop solutions for difficult operational questions and problems; School Bus Consultants which offers Advisory Services to deliver resources and expertise that transportation contractors and organizations often cannot access on their own; and Transportation Services Co. providing Fleet Management Services and Training Products to help customers create the strong foundation necessary to support effective service delivery. TransPar Group of Companies is the all-inclusive solution for school districts looking to operate a successful, reliable, and effective student transportation program. For more information, please visit http://www.TransParGroup.com.The WISH/WISE Foundation is committed to supporting hundreds of students every year to realize their dreams, which we accomplish by partnering with organizations such as College to Congress and the University of Kentucky.

The WISE/WISE Foundation, in partnership with Washington Intern Student Housing (WISH), recognized two up and coming programs at a recent DC reception. The honorees, the University of Kentuckys WilDCats at the Capitol and College to Congress, both received Internships Change Lives Awards from the newly launched WISH/WISE Foundation. The WilDCats at the Capitol is a new program supported by the Office of the President of the University of Kentucky. College to Congress has expanded its DC footprint in only its second year.

DC internships are crucial to college students ability to pursue a rewarding career after graduation. The WISH/WISE Foundation is committed to supporting hundreds of students every year to realize their dreams, which we accomplish by partnering with organizations such as College to Congress and the University of Kentucky, said Hon. Jacqueline Lewis, founder of WISH and founder of the WISE/WISE Foundation. The WilDCats at the Capitol and College to Congress deserve to be supported by our Foundation to ensure every student, from every demographic, has the opportunity to experience an internship in Washington DC.

Chris Crumrine, representing the WilDCats at the Capitol, received the foundations Internships Change Lives Award and WISH/WISE foundation check. During its first year, the WilDCats had 13 students in the spring, eight in the summer and seven in the fall semester.

When the University of Kentucky identified a goal to expand and enhance its internship offerings in Washington, DC, we knew that facilitating safe, affordable, and high-quality housing would be an extraordinary benefit to our students. WISH has been an exceptional partner throughout the launch of our program, said Associate Professor Tiffany Barnes with the University of Kentucky. The generous support and award from WISH/WiSE acknowledges not only the UK students participating in the program, but the success and importance of partnership between UK and WISH/WiSE. Their support for our program will ensure financial need is not a barrier to an internship in our nations capital, and help our students succeed in an immersive learning experience that will prepare them for the future.

Audrey Henson, founder of College to Congress, accepted the Internships Change Lives Award. Hensons College to Congress actively works towards the goal of making internships attainable to students despite their economic status or political connections. In their second year, College to Congress has grown from seven students to 13. They fund the full internship experience removing the barriers that so many face.

"My internship in Congress changed the trajectory of my life, but it almost didn't happen. Washington, DC is an extremely expensive city which makes it out of reach for many students. That is exactly why I created College to Congress to open doors for low-income students to work on the hill, said Audrey Henson, founder of College to Congress. I am very grateful for the WISE Foundation award for our work and I am proud to partner with them to make these internships more accessible for all students."

WISHs mission is to:

1) Provide DC housing at no more cost than campus housing and

2) Provide internship opportunities outside the college campus to as many students as possible, regardless of income, through scholarships.

Jacqueline Lewis established the WISH/ WiSE Foundation to help achieve that mission.

ABOUT WISH:

For over 25 years, WISH has been the leading intern housing and residential life services provider in Washington DC. WISH works with Colleges and Universities around the world to provide thousands of DC interns student housing for the terms needed whether it be fall, spring, summer or all year. Faculty housing, classrooms, conference rooms, and reception room are all available for WISH residents needs. For more information go to http://www.internsdc.com.

ABOUT THE WISH/WISE FOUNDATION:

The WISH/WiSE Foundation was created to help make internships in the nations capital attainable to all students despite economic challenges. The Foundation makes scholarships available so that schools can increase their internship program enrollments allowing those students to take part. For more information contact Jean-Marie Leonard at jleonard@internsDC.com.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.The country was the best earnings contributor last year despite having the fewest subsidiaries compared to Uganda and Tanzania  which was the best performing market in 2016.

Data from the Central Bank of Kenya shows that Rwanda has 55 subsidiaries, behind Tanzania with 81 and Uganda with 105.

Subsidiaries operating in Rwanda accounted for the highest profits at 29.44 per cent of the total profits.

Subsidiaries operating in Uganda accounted for 19.54 per centsubsidiaries in Tanzania accounted for 17.85 per cent of the total profits, read a recent report by the regulator.

Increased tax bills by the Tanzanian government made it tough for foreign investors in the country last year.

Offshoots of local lenders in Rwanda helped contribute 29 per cent of the Sh8.79 billion pre-tax profit 305 bank units in the region netted last year.

In recent years, Kenyan firms operating in Tanzania have faced a challenging business environment which has seen trade volumes between the two neighbors continue to dwindle.

Apart from the two counties being members of the East African Community (EAC) they do experience trade tensions and suspicions which have led to several trade tariffs and barriers being imposed which continue to hurt local manufacturers and traders.

Kenyas exports to Tanzania in the 10 months to October 2017 plunged to a 10-year low.

Exports to Tanzania in the period to October stood at Ksh23.38 billion ($227 million), down from Ksh28.86 billion ($280.2 million) in the same period a year earlier  reflecting a 18.9 per cent drop.

Kenyan banks operating at the land of a thousand hills include Equity Bank, I&M, KCB Group and President Uhuru Kenyatta family-owned Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA).

It is not a one-way street affair though; in return, Rwanda and Uganda are starting to get a slice of the investment cake that has traditionally gone to Kenya.

The two east African countries are slowly emerging as favourite destinations in Africa for investment in ICT.The World Banks total lending to Kenya now stands at Sh581 billion ($5.8 billion) as at the end of June, slightly ahead of Chinas Sh557 billion ($5.5 billion), according to a new Treasury report.

Combined, the two foreign lenders now account for about one-fifth of Kenyas total public debt load, which has already crossed the Sh5 trillion mark.

As a result of the hefty loans owed to China and the World Bank, the two have a significant influence on the countrys economic policy planning.

Kenyan turned to China to fund the construction of the countrys largest infrastructure project since independence, the standard gauge railway (SGR), at an estimated cost of Sh327bn ($3.8bn) for the Mombasa-Nairobi phase of the project.

The loan, which China Exim Bank provided 90 per cent of, while the remaining 10 per cent was to be contributed by the Kenyan Government, saw China race ahead of the World Bank as at the end of December to become Kenyas biggest creditor for the first time ever.

Madaraka Express commercial viability has been and continues to be the subject of intense scrutiny.

China was still ahead of the World Bank as at end of March, but the ranking changed quickly in the three months leading to June.

The new World Bank loans were part of the borrowing intended to plug the Treasurys budget deficit for the fiscal year 2017/18.

The World Bank channelled the money mainly through its concessionary lending arm, the International Development Association.

Public debt levels have not yet reached Parliaments approved maximum of 74 per cent as a ratio to the gross domestic product, but repayment had already exceeded the recommended 30 per cent as a proportion of ordinary revenue, mostly comprising taxes.

A middle-income country like Kenya should spend no more than 30 per cent of its ordinary revenue in repaying debt. A developed country like Canada or Norway can spend as much as 35 per cent, but Kenya should not exceed 30 per cent.

"The public debt to GDP ratio is just one measure, but the one of servicing to ordinary revenues should be given more weight, International Budget Partnership (IBP) researcher John Kinuthia told a local business daily.Premium Times, an online news platform, reported over the weekend that the anti-graft agency arrested the bank CEO, Peter Amangbo, over the suspicious transactions.

But Victor Adoji, Zenith Bank's spokesman told Bloomberg on Monday, August 27, 2018, that the Amangbo was only invited and not detained.

He was invited to clarify certain aspects of our relationship with the Rivers State government, Adoji told Bloomberg over the phone.

Bloomberg says he did not give further details about the case and the EFCC's spokesperson was not available to react to the matter.

In the last few weeks, the Nigerian government has placed restrictions on state government accounts over alleged corrupt practices. Chief among them are the Benue and Akwa Ibom state government accounts.

Opposition says it is a witch-hunt

The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, believes that the clampdown on state treasury is a witch hunt by the President Muhammadu Buhari-led federal government.

Rivers state is controlled by the opposition party and one of the core oil producing states in Africa's largest economy. Many believe funding for the 2019 elections may come from the state.11 startups across 6 African countries will participate in the second class of the accelerator in Lagos, Nigeria.

Fola Olatunji-David, Head of Startup Success and Services, Launchpad Accelerator Africa, said, The growth of entrepreneurship in Africa is critical to the survival of our continent.

Were currently as a region creating about three million jobs per year, while more than 11 million job seekers are entering the market. Google believes that empowering entrepreneurs and startups is essential to drive employment growth, and enable both economic and social development on the continent.

Fola said the Launchpad Accelerator program in Africa has significantly improved the relationship between Google and the startups. He said if startups succeed, Google succeed.

How startups were selected

For the second class, Google extended applications to an additional 11 countries, competition for spots was even fiercer than in the first round. Google received more than 250 applications, including from graduates of previous Launchpad programmes, with others referred to the programme by Launchpad mentors.

1. AppZone (Nigeria): AppZone builds software as a service (SaaS) fintech ecosystems for digital banks, allowing them to reduce operational costs while improving service delivery.

2. Chalkboard Education (Ghana): Allows educational institutions to make their curricula available via mobile devices (USSD, SMS, and internet). It also lets those institutes gather insights into student learning patterns and helps them create and adapt curricula for the mobile space.

3. Cloud9xp (Kenya): Cloud9xp is an online marketplace and booking service that allows people to buy and sell experiences in various locations across Africa and the Middle East.

4. EzyAgric (Uganda): EzyAgric is an on-demand platform that provides inclusive and data-driven access to finance, production and marketing services for farmers and agribusinesses in Uganda. It does so through a network of youth agents equipped with smartphones and other forms of agricultural technology, providing employment and helping farmers improve yields and market access in one go.

5. Formplus (Nigeria): Formplus allows companies to collect online and offline data through the use of customisable digital forms. The startup also provides analytics based on form answers and allows for payment collection via PayPal, Stripe and Flutterwave.

6. Medsaf (Nigeria): Medsaf is a one-stop, curated medication marketplace for African hospitals and pharmacies.

7. Mintrics (Egypt): This social video intelligence platform helps brands and agencies understand how people are interacting with their social videos, giving them insight into what is and isnt working and thereby maximising their ROI.

8. PayGo Energy (Kenya): PayGos smart meter and connected software service allow players in the LP gas (LPG) value chain to better serve their customers, driving the adoption of clean cooking fuels.

9. Pineapple (South Africa): Pineapples unique machine learning technology allows users to easily ensure individual items using just a mobile app.

10. Preeva (South Africa): Preeva is an online platform that connects students with young educators who provide tutoring help at school and university.

11. Thank U Cash (Nigeria): Thank U Cash is an online rewards platform that allows consumers to save and earn loyalty points that can be swapped for cash and merchants to benefit from extra spend.

What they stand to gain

The finalists each receive:

- 3 months intense mentorship and support from Google

- Cloud and Firebase Credits

- Three weeks all-expense-paid training at Launchpad Accelerator Africa (Lagos and Johannesburg)

- Access to Google engineers, resources, and mentors, during and after the programme

- Inclusion in the Launchpad Accelerator Global Community and a network of alumni and mentors

Google Launchpad Accelerator Africa

The first Launchpad Accelerator Africa class saw 12 startups graduate, with more than 20 teams from Google and 40 mentors from nine countries supporting them. The startups, according to Google have directly created 132 jobs and, between them, have raised over US$7 million in funding. Their products are being used by approximately 4.5 million people.

First announced in July 2017, Launchpad Accelerator Africa forms an important part of Googles initiatives that support the African entrepreneurial ecosystem and builds on the Launchpad programmes already run in Africa, which have successfully connected over 200 African mentors with several hundred African tech startup entrepreneurs through one-week boot camp in six different African cities over the last two years.The company in a statement made available to Business Insider SSA said its service is now available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal.

The statement added that customers in these countries can now send money 24/7 directly to more than two billion bank accounts and mobile wallets across 200 countries and territories.

Alex Holmes, MoneyGram's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, explained that the move is to provide customers with the brand with more options in an ever-evolving tech-driven world.

"Innovative technology is changing the way we meet our customer's financial needs. In 2018 and beyond MoneyGram will continue to accelerate our digital expansion around the globe. We want to give MoneyGram customers more choice when they use money transfer services and to ensure we are well positioned to compete in today's fast-paced world," Holmes said.

Following its successful launch in Spain and France, Moneygram grew its revenue by 21%.

According to World Bank's Findex 2017 report, digital payments between 2014 and 2017 increased and the share of adults around the world making or receiving digital payments also rose by 11%, to reach 52%.

The platform is now available in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Austria.Their anger comes after Nigerians reportedly ignored Ghanaian artistes who performed at the launch of Zylofon Media and Menzgold in Lagos.

The event which happened last Friday, August 24, saw Stonebwoy, Shatta Wale, Becca, King Promise, Kumi Guitar, Obibini and Joyce Blessing deliver their best performances but were not cheered up by the Nigerian witnesses.

READ MORE: Sarkodie is the biggest Ghanaian artiste in Nigeria

The report said the Nigerian artistes who performed were well received.

This caused an outrage, with many Ghanaians accusing Nigerians of internationally ignoring their artistes.

While the argument and the blame games were ongoing on social media, Sarkodie shared Mr Ps latest song, titled Wokie Wokie featuring Nyanda.The unnamed victim is said to have suffered about nine to eleven stabs perpetrated on her by a male colleague who had sought her consent for a relationship, but she said she liked him as a friend not anything more.

Luther police chief David Randall told NewsOk that: There was one point where he approached her in reference to try to have some type of relationship, to which she said she wasnt interested in it.

She said she liked him as a friend not anything more and that they remained friends.

Unknown to the victim that her suitor who continued to slip notes into her locker to emphasise his desire to date her had been harbouring some evil thoughts against her for friend-zoning him, she kept being friends with him until the unexpected bloody attack.

Reports say the victim was airlifted to the hospital where she was treated and subsequently discharged, but has not returned to school yet.The meeting between Trump and his Nigerian counterpart in April this year at the Whitehouse was at the behest of the former, where matters bothering on diplomatic relationship, trade facilitation among others were discussed.

Nigerias presidential spokesperson, Garba Shehu hailed the meeting at the time, saying: No matter how Nigerians take our own country, this is hugely an important country and this recognition is being manifested in this visit.

Minister of information, Lai Mohammed is also on record to have said that: He (Buhari) is the president of the most populous country in Africa, the president of the country with the largest economy in Africa. And I think its probably the fact that the world is now understanding that Nigeria is very strategic not just to the sub-region but the entire Africa.

Donald Trump himself at a press briefing during his meeting with Buhari said: Nigeria has a reputation for very massive corruption. I also know that the President has been able to cut that down very substantially.

We talked about that, he is working on it and they have made a lot of progress and I think they will continue to make a lot of progress.

The meeting between the two heads of state was hailed by many analysts and other Africans as being significant and symbolic.

However, about four months after that meeting, the Financial Times is reporting that Donald Trump has warned his aides that he never wanted to meet someone as lifeless as Buhari again.

The news portal quoted sources it referred to indisputable to back the report.

Meanwhile, the Whitehouse is yet to confirm or deny the damning allegation.Accra-based Citi FM reports that staff of the defunct bank are set to be relieved of their duties from Monday August 27, 2018.

Also, tellers and other field service operators responsible for the collection of deposits are expected to be affected by the incoming dismissals.

The sacked staff have a two-week window to clear themselves and account for all the company assets.

All affected staff members have been asked to hand over all documents on all the accounts of their clients to the bank by September 7.

In all, a total of 490 staff members of the defunct BEIGE bank from all branches across the country will be affected.

BIEGE bank, together with the Construction, uniBank, Sovereign and Royal banks, have been merged by the Central Bank to form the Consolidated bank, following their insolvency.

Meanwhile, all workers of the five defunct banks are to undergo a skills set by the end of next month to determine their stay or exit from the Consolidated bank.

Government has also assured that it will do its best to ensure that dismissed staff of the defunct banks are not left jobless.Archbishop Duncan Williams was preaching to the congregation of the Action Chapel International.

He explained that Christians live by the rules of God and not man.

I want to caution every Christian shut your mouththe Bible says, judge, not that you may not be judged. So shut your mouth, stop talking about things you dont understand.

READ ALSO: BOST Board Chair steps down over Sovereign Bank collapse

He added that he was asked what he thought of the Otabil-Capital saga. He responded that the authorities should be left to do what they have to do.

Somebody asked me what do you think? I said I dont think anything, I dont understand, I dont know the details so let the authorities handle the situation. Dont talkChristians you talk too much.

He insisted that Im saying that to Christians as for unbelievers and the heathens they have the right to talk their day will come but for us Christians, we are under Gods constitution. We do not judge and we dont judge our own. Let the world talk and let the judge but you dont join the world to crucify your brother.

He went ahead to pray for all those involved in this matter that truth and justice will triumph. He also prayed that mercy will triumph where it is needed in this situation.

READ ALSO: 400 BEIGE bank staff sacked as restructure of Consolidated bank begins

Founder and General Overseer of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC), Dr. Mensa Otabil has come under public attack, following reports that he was aware of a GHc610 million liquidity support from the Bank of Ghana which was wrongly diverted into other businesses.

The banks licence was revoked in August 2017. Dr Otabil for a long while remained silent but some of his congregants supported him. He opted to break his silence for the first time a year after the bank collapsed.His response comes after Prince Kofi Amoabeng alleged that his firm contributed to the collapse of the indigenous bank.

However, addressing a press conference Sintim Aboagye said Mr Amoabeng rather colluded with staff of his company to defraud him of millions of dollars.

Mr Aboagye alleged that UT bank opened several accounts in the name of his company without their consent and then transferred the monies into offshore accounts.

The claim that Lushann was indebted to UT bank to the tune of GHc84 million is not true. It was the other way round. It was UT bank which colluded with two former employees of Lushann to rip off Lushann and the Ghana government. Kofi Amoabeng the Chief Executive Officer of UT bank defrauded Lushann and Ghana government to the tune of $102, 418, 204, approximately $102million. When he colluded with Kennedy Oham, a former project manager of Solpol producing company limited, Amoabeng falsely misrepresented Oham Company, Eclipser Energy, as a local subsidiary of Lushann and issued bank guarantee to enable the company to defraud Ghana.

READ ALSO: Ace Ankomah questions Menzgolds defense after deposit-taking allegationAce Ankomah questions Menzgolds defense after deposit-taking allegation

Amoabeng through an arrangement with Osencial Energy limited engaged in money laundering involving GHC61million using the name of Lushann. UT bank colluded in a theft of two shipments of crude oil worth about $2million belonging to the government of Ghana, Mr Aboagye alleged.The President noted that the governing council of the institution suggested the renaming of the HTU after the great musicologist.

He indicated that it was in the right direction to honour the late Ephraim Amu, who he described as a great Ghanaian cultural icon.

"Before I conclude, there is a significant matter I must address, and it relates to the decision taken by the Governing Council of Ho Technical University, in accordance with the Statutes of the University, to rename this institution after Ephraim Amu, the great Ghanaian cultural icon, who asserted that the creative faculty should embrace also the capacity to work with ones hands," President Akufo-Addo said.

He further described the decision to rename the Ho Technical University after the late musicologist as excellent, whiles assuring that the necessary parliamentary process will soon be set in motion to effect the name change.

"This decision is an excellent one, which has received the blessing of the President of the Republic, so that,once the parliamentary process has been completed, this University will, thereafter,be called the Ephraim Amu Technical University, Ho.The party said it is unfazed by the comeback of Mahama who has declared his intentions to contest the presidential race of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

According to the acting Director of Communications for the NPP, Yaw Adomako Barfi Mahama will be no match for the NPP even if he wins the flagbearership race of the NDC.

In an interview on Accra-based Citi FM, he said "we are not bothered at all. We are on sound footing and we are doing the right things. Ghanaians are the best judges so we are not worried. After all they have a lot of arsenal on them, Alban Bagbin has said Mahamas coming is a bomb, looking at what Goosie Tanoh has said, looking at what Ken Dzirasah has said. Im assuring Ghanaians that we are not disturbed at all and we are not even going to be disturbed because we have the mandate, and we need to deliver on the promises."

He said the NPP government is focused on delivering the promises it made to Ghanaians prior to the 2016 general elections.

On Thursday, August 23, Mahama has picked his nomination forms to contest the 2020 presidential elections of the NDC.

Ahead of his declaration, Mahama on Wednesday called on the founder of the NDC at his office in Accra.

Mahama and Jerry John Rawlings centered their discussions on the re-organization of the party, the upcoming regional and national executive elections as well as the presidential primaries for the party.

READ MORE: Mahama visits Rawlings

Mahama stated the need to consult the founder on party issues and commended him for re-energizing the partys Council of Elders and participating actively in its meetings.

He indicated that a re-energized Council of Elders will instill a strong sense of order in the party structure.Otiko Djaba has rejected President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's appointment to serve as Ghanas ambassador to Italy.

The former Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection who was thrown out of office in the Presidents first reshuffle has said shes calling it quits from active politics to enable her to enjoy her family life.

"At 56 years, I want to relax and enjoy my family and life and, therefore, I am not ready to take up the appointment as Ambassador to Italy," she said in a report by state-owned Daily Graphic.

Otiko explained that she was hanging her political boots to take care of her sick ex-husband.

"I am the one who has been taking care of him since he got sick and I cannot abandon him now," she noted.

Prior to her ministerial appointment, Otiko was the National Women's Organiser of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

But the group in a statement said Otiko is an icon for women in the NPP hence her decision to quit "politics at this time will extremely demoralize and quash our hopes".

"Were also urging the leadership as well as the rank and file of the NPP not to jubilate over her action and leave it to the dogs at a time the party is in power, lets be skeptic about the impact and correct the mess before it jeopardize our quest to retain power," the statement added.

Below is the full statement:

Otiko is our hope, we pleading with you to stay  Concerned NPP Women's Group

We the Concerned NPP Womens Group is appealing to former minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, former Womens Organizer of our party, Mrs Otiko Afisah Djaba to resent her decision of quitting politics.

We believe Mrs Otiko is a power broker who played instrumental role in the grassroot organization of the Womens Wing and the formation of "Girls-Girls" that fueled the electoral fortunes of the party in the 2016 elections, were worried.

"You gave us hope, you energized us, you made NPP very attractive to the ordinary Ghanaian woman, you propagated credibility and promoted gender equality "

"You were closely attached to the grassroot of the womens wing of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), your boldness, hardworking and inspiration won the heart of many women and served as a roll model to many ladies in the country.

You were a leading figure in mobilizing and responding to our night calls which was the principal strategy that gave birth NPP victory in 2016 general elections.

Were also urging the leadership as well as the rank and file of the NPP not to jubilate over her action and leave it to the dogs at a time the party is in power, lets be skeptic about the impact and correct the mess before it jeopardize our quest to retain power.

Avoiding limelight politics at this time will extremely demoralize and quash our hopes, were your daughters and sisters, remember the pledge and covenant you had with the ordinary Ghanian woman and consider our plead.

God bless NPP Women's

God bless the NPPThe government has defended the move which will result in the eviction of nine judges from their current official residence located in Accras prime area arguing that the National Cathedral was no ordinary building and needed the space.

We want to build [the national cathedral] in a strategic place, something that befits this countryand that is why were looking for a very prime area that will fit the status of the kind of building that the committee envisaged, otherwise we can put it anywhere, John Peter Amewu who was Lands and Natural Resources Minister told Joy FM.

Other structures as well as some 10 six-bedroom bungalows built by the judicial service to house Court of Appeal judges will also be demolished before the take-off of the project.

Critics have questioned the rationale behind pulling down all buildings from the Ridge Circle to the Scholarship Secretariat, the Judicial Training Institute at East Ridge and the Passport Office for the takeoff of the multipurpose cathedral.

However, Mr Amewu has defended the government arguing the judges whose official residences have been affected and who have been served eviction notices have no problem with the decision.

We have never had a complaint from any of those judges that are going to be affected he said.

For the trouble of evicting the judges, the government plan to spend $168,000 on building temporary accommodation for them for the next 18 months while permanent structures are constructed.

About 21 plush residential villas as well as a training facility for the judicial service, will be built to replace the structures to be knocked down, the former Lands Minister stated.

The National Cathedral of Ghana is a planned interdenominational Christian cathedral scheduled to be built in the nation's capital, as part of Ghana's 60th anniversary celebrations.

The design for the cathedral was unveiled by the President of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, in March 2018.In the testimony, shared on Facebook by the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), a woman praises God for removing the scary illness from the body.

The lady simply referred to as Sister Folashade narrates her testimony starting from when she discovered a cancerous lump in 2014.

In her words, "I give glory to the God of our daddy Adeboye for healing me from cancer. I just wanted to share this testimony because God is good and deserves to be praised and adored. I am a cancer survivor. In 2014 I discovered a cancerous lump in my breast, I underwent chemotherapy, radiotherapy and I had surgery to remove it. And with prayers and support of my family, it was successful and clear."

Sadly she had a relapse this year which was where the God of Daddy Adeboye comes in. Her story changed after the popular preacher prayed for her over the phone.

She narrates: "Early this year 2018, I had a relapse, I was diagnosed of metastatic cancer which means that cancer has spread all over my body and the doctors have speculated only 2weeks for me to live. I was at the point of death. My brother flew from Nigeria with the anointed handkerchiefs and oil daddy prayed on.

"He also connected me to daddy on the phone, he prayed a simple prayer and said God that did it before will do it again.. My brother applied all the anointed materials on me. All glory to God, all treatments went well and I'm now cancer free. God of our daddy Adeboye turn the reports of the doctors to testimony. Let someone shout hallelujah."

Powerful miracles in Pastor Adeboye's church

This is not the first time an incredible testimony has been attributed to the God of the RCCG G.O.

In April 2018, Pastor Timothy Owoade of RCCG revealed how his wife was raised from the dead with an anointed cloth from his overseer.

According to the Premium Times News report, "One morning, last month, a pastor, Timothy Owoade, woke up early to pray with his wife in the bedroom before joining their children for the larger family prayers. He recalled that as he prayed there was no response from his wife - not even the usual 'Amen.' Surprised, he tapped her and asked if she was okay, but there was no response. He quickly examined her and noticed she was dead.

"He raised alarm which attracted the children and neighbors. As they were taking her to the hospital, he remembered the clothes he wore to the March Holy Ghost Service, rushed for them to wrap around the corpse. Amid shouts of praise, he said his wife came back to life before they got to the hospital, where she was certified okay."

Pastor Adeboye himself has testified about the God he serves. During the 2017 Holy Ghost Congress, he revealed how a question from God led to the first Holy Ghost service.

Recounting the story of how he was asked to pick a birthday gift, he said, "I was in London preparing the Sunday school booklet for the mission when I heard from God. He said, 'Son, what do you want for your birthday?' I was shocked. The reason I was shocked was that: I didn't know God would be interested in my birthday., And secondly, I didn't know He could be asking me for about what I wanted as a present.

"So I said, 'Lord if that is you, please repeat the question.' He assured me it was Him and asked again what I wanted as a birthday present. I replied, 'What I want is that all my members will get miracles.' He asked, 'Is that's all?' I replied: 'That's all I want.' Then He said, 'In that case when you get home, call them together and I will give them whatever they ask for.' I needed to call the service a name, so I asked Him. And He said: 'Holy Ghost Service.'In a telephone conversation with PULSE, the talented actor said he was shocked by the news filtering the air about his arrest. According to him, he only had a delayed flight and was only being escorted by his two personal assistants and police escort.

"I am surprised at this news. I am presently seating at the Dana Air office about to board my flight. I missed my flight and when I got to the airport, I wanted to try and see if I could make it because the plane hadn't gone, they even tried speaking to the pilot but it was late. They had to put me on the next flight.

"My sister just called me to ask this same question because she said her old school friend called her and told she held about my arrest. I have been at the airport for two hours. I don't know why people will come up with stories like this," he said.

This is coming after some blog posted a video online with a caption saying that the actor was arrested at the airport for slapping a staff of an airline. Jim Iyke as we all know isn't one of those actors who has been known to be physically violent but isn't all that nice when it comes to throwing jabs at nosy followers on social media.

ALSO READ:Jim Iyke goes hard on some nosy followers on Instagram

Jim Iyke says he won't stop calling out people who throw jabs at him online

Let's just say if you think Jim Iyke is that celebrity you can throw jabs at and go scot-free then have a rethink because the actor said he would not relent to call you out. The talented actor made this known while granting an exclusive interview with PULSE. He was asked why he fights back dirty when people throw jabs at him online and the actor gave a calculative analysis (Lol) of why he does that.

"I am not in competition with anybody and I cant remember last time I looked left or right and that is why I extremely disagreeable if you come into my space and try to insult me or abuse my intellect and a lot of people say hes a little bit of a savage or extreme but no, before you came into my space, before you wrote what you wrote, it took time, it went through a process, so when I cut you out, you should understand that every action gets a double reaction.

"Mine is like a law of physics, dont think you can come into my space and expect an opposite or equal reaction, no I would give you a triple reaction because you had no business coming here and its a total abuse of my fundamental rights for coming into my space," he said.Johnson receives a sum of N200,000 after the transaction made in Onitsha, Anambra State. She reportedly used part of the money she realized to buy a mobile phone.

According to Punch News, the young mother got the idea to sell the infant from an acquaintance identified as Mama Joy. The latter is at large.

My friend (Mama Joy) said that since my husband was not taking care of me, if I did it (sold the baby), I could give the money to my husband to start a business or buy a motorcycle.

Two weeks later, she came back. I did not know what happened to me. So, I carried a bag, picked some things and left.

I sold her to an orphanage in Onitsha. The orphanage bought the child for N200,000. I just bought only a phone; I did not want to buy it, but she (Mama Joy) forced me to do so, Miracle Johnson tells Punch.

Having thought about her action, she makes a confession to her pastor. This results in the involvement of the police.

Husband unhappy with her action

Johnson Omovuokpor, the husband of the 23-year-old mother has condemned her action.

He earlier discouraged the idea of selling his child in a conversation they both had yet she went ahead with the goal.

When she told me about her plan, I told her to forget about it and exercise patience.

On that day, I took my motorcycle out for repairs. When I went back home to get some money, I saw my first daughter with my neighbour.

When I asked about my wifes whereabouts, I was told that she went out with a bag, saying that she was going to buy something. So, I remembered what she said she wanted to do with the baby.

When she called me later in the afternoon to tell me that she had sold the baby, I cursed her and ended the call. I became confused afterwards and could not do anything for the rest of that day.

According to Mr Johnson Kokumo, the Edo State police commissioner, the mother Miracle Johnson will be charged to court.Many reports confirm that the suspect operates from a health facility identified as the Obaahemaa Memorial Clinic.

Kwarteng who goes by different names has been apprehended by the police, as well as Ghana's Dental and Medical Council.

"From our investigations, we found that the man mainly did illegal abortions although if anyone visited with a headache or any other condition he treated them, but his speciality was illegal abortions," says Dr. Divine Banyubala, the Deputy Registrar of the Medical and Dental Council while briefing journalists.

His comments are captured in a report published by Graphic Online today, August 27, 2018.According to Punch, the suspect is 23 years old. He reportedly studies at the Federal Polytechnic, Nekede, Imo State.

At the base, he has taken part in vengeful killings that has resulted in the deaths of rival cult members.

A police spokesperson Andrew Enwerem confirms this in a report published byPunchon Monday, August 27, 2018.

"The suspect, a strong member of Black Axe, confessed to the crimes.

"He mentioned their gang members, nicknamed as Efizy, Ikalika,Shinshi, Bulldog, Baggy, Sky, now in Owerri Prison and X-money killed in an operation.

"He also confessed that they were the gang that killed one Michael, a student of Nekede Polytechnic, in 2015. In the same year, they killed one Mgbele on Douglas Road in Owerri and one Ifeanyi, a student of Nekede Polytechnic, in 2015.

"He confessed that they had killed so many people and had been on the run when he learnt he was being hunted by F-SARS operatives.

"Also, last year in Owerri, upon information that he was being trailed by the police, he jumped down from a two-storey building while receiving treatment in a private hospital for multiples bullets injuries," says the police rep.

ALSO READ:Eiye cultist kills himself to escape from stubborn ghosts

Suspected murderer says CBN staff begged him to kill him

A suspected murderer Alfred Leonard, has told policemen in Abuja that a Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Michael Iorkohol begged him to kill him.

Iorkohol who is 47 years old needed to fulfill an order given by a secret society he belongs to which is to ensure he is dead at a particular time.

Failing to do so will have resulted in the deaths of his daughters, says a Punch News report.

Leonard has an accomplice in Samson Agbo. On Monday, August 21, 2018, they were both paraded with 47 other suspects by FCT police commissioner, Bala Ciroma.

Initially, the family reported a case of a missing person at Karu Division on 17 July, 2018 at about 1930hrs but during investigation, we got to know that the principal suspect, Alfred Leonard, was the last person seen with him.

Following the circumstances surrounding his mysterious disappearance, Leonard, who was last sighted with the deceased, was arrested in Kaduna after discreet investigation.Just when we thought the Nigerian trekking episode for protests was over, it turns out we have only just started from the top like a symphony orchestra  our President as the conductor, holding his wand and controlling reactions while working hard.

It was an unnecessary spectacle. While this might be have deceived the average Nigerian into believing Buhari as a humble man, so interested in walking with his people, it was really unnecessary.

How convenient that hes only chosen to do so while close to election season, when approval ratings are low and he needs them high? Why do so on possibly the biggest celebration in the annual Islamic calendar?

As if that wasnt enough, Buharis Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu said the trek was testament to the Presidents fitness to seek reelection.

Abeg, wheres the correlation between exercise and election. How are Egbon Taju in Ikoro-Ekiti and Madame Genevieve in Paris related?

Since Shehu could find the correlation, he might finally be able to help us find that elusive x in math questions.

It was corny and quite simply another unwanted feather in his cap. Sadly, it would have worked in his favour.

The Atiku Reply

What a shame. Former Vice President, and perennial allegiance switch master, Atiku Abubakar peed the bed on a grand scale, trying to jump on the wave.

Admittedly, his PR team and social media guys were doing a splendid work before this debacle. It was near unthinkable that Buharis era of corny masterclass could be outdone. Enter Atiku

Right after Garba Shehus eagle eye correlation, Mr. Atiku intimated that he exercises better than the President. Excuse me, did we miss something? Is it a competition between two men now?

As if, Shehus masterful correlation comments were not cringeworthy enough, Atikus Twitter dropped a post that, I regularly jog more than a mile and exercise, but it will be pedestrian of me to ask Nigerians to vote for me because of that.

He then ended it with a line of rhymes to make Vic-o proud, I want my party  the PDP and Nigerians to vote for me because because I WORK, not because I WALK. I will create jobs. I wont walk to create an illusion.

Whoever manages his campaign or endorsed that for release should carry an L on his outfits for the rest of next week.

As far as trying too hard goes, this is the height of it. It was not only corny, it was unnecessary. While campaigns sometimes delve into pettiness, this was a terribly forced attempt at one.The cover of that issue, a multicolored post-impressionism, rainbow impression that strongly depicts the need for inclusion and the many ideals that influence our world was a major statement in itself  it was brave for a highly religious and cultural society where those values influence everything, at least publicly.

On July 5, 2018, Pulse profiled a Nigerian who was disgracefully persecuted by his own country for his sexuality  he was mobbed and almost killed. He had to escape to the United States of America to seek sanctuary of asylum, and he is now a Director of the RJD Refugee Shelter in New York and is helping raise awareness detained immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community in Africa.

Stigmatization

Our country, Nigeria is averse to LGBTQ+  at least, on the face of it. It is a discussion that the average Nigerian avoids like the plague, for fear of being stigmatized as he thinks it abominable and pursued by disturbed human beings.

Even worse, Nigerians feel being a homosexual human equates bad influence from boarding school and peer pressure, subjects like hormonal imbalance and natural disposition seem impossible to fathom. Questions like how do you explain a 5-year old boys attraction to other men hits a brick wall of pointless defiance.

While the concept of LGBTQ+ might seem unique to what human beings are accustomed to as normalcy, it is only abnormal because we have refused to employ the beauty of persuasive perspectives of this movement.

You cannot choose who to love

LGBTQ activists like Bisi Alimi, Shalom Shoremi and Edafe Okporo have been persecuted for loving who they love  even by their own families to the point of seeking sanctuary in western colonies. Society wants them to choose what is normal, someone of the opposite sex  It is a worrying turn of event.

Nigerians do not care to understand that you cannot force anybody to be in love with anybody. Its a natural disposition that comes with natural peculiarities. It doesnt matter the gender of whom a person chooses to love. The cardinal question of Can you choose who to love? even abides to heterosexual relationships where people seldom marry their type.

The New Media

Nonetheless, while the concept of LGBTQ+ and its legalization is an ongoing conversation that seems inevitable across the mainstream, it is still gloriously brave of Guardian Life to show such creativity in these times.

There are not only legal constraints of the Same Sex Prohibition Act of 2014 that outlaw LGBTQ+ acts, there are religiously and culturally inclined people who want to persecute you at every turn.

Yet, the role of the media in this ongoing quest for liberation cannot be overemphasized as a voice for the oppressed alongside organizations like The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIER). Nonetheless, with the ever-present possibility to judgement, persecution and loss of readership, even the media has to thread carefully.

It is why the bold statement by The Guardian Life, subscript of the household newspaper The Guardian deserves commendation. It required bravery and underlined the importance of having this conversation, so we do not rob people of their happiness and warmth of human existence.

Highlighting the bravery it required, Guardian Life Editor, Chidera Muoka tells Pulse that, Honestly, we were sceptical about the backlash, not only because of the household name and the tendency of most people to be ignorant and just read the cover just from the image. However, in taking up such a bold topic, we knew we had to objective, operate within the ethics of the profession and tell the story in such a way that we do not misrepresent all parties involved.

The piece was birthed off diverse in-house ideals

As Pulse discovers, the article was written off 3 diverse ideals from the team that births the article. Interestingly, the writers, Chidirim Ndeche and Urenna Ukiwe have different opinions on the LGBTQ+ subject. That in itself, underlines the balanced, yet forward thinking tone of the article. To complete the process, Guardian Online Editor, Tonye Bakare, inadvertently left off the article was the shade of grey that blurs the line and provides needed balance, to prevent bias and sentiment.

Just after admitting the necessity of such diversity, while crafting thought on a polarizing topic, Muoka says, A lot of people read the article and commended us on how balanced it was. In-house objections were from my team. The thought was that there was going to be a backlash. While there were sprinkles of negative comments, the bulk of the feedback weve got was positive.

The direction is topic-based

Pulse discovered that for Guardian, the direction has been topic-based for a while, contributing incredibly to the necessity of vocal contribution on subjects like rape, depression #EndSARS and other issues, in an otherwise disjointed society.

Muoka underlines the attitude to those stories as, Each of those topics was treated with a high level of diligence. We paid attention to details and those covers were all well received. This means weve done a good job on all those topics.

Despite the brave execution, Muoka was humble. She credits the readers and acknowledges the beauty of diverse opinions  negative comments on the sensitivity of LGBTQ+ as necessary for the growth while admitting that the general feedback was positive. This highlights the continued evolution of Nigerian mentality.

The team at Guardian feel it is time for media to play its role at the forefront of activism, providing the voice and the platform for the unheard. Muoka gave the reason for this as, Right now, a lot of Nigerians simply are incapable of empathising with these individuals who constantly struggle with expressing themselves and living their lives in a society that condemns them legally, socially, and religiously.

She continues, I do not categorise my decision for this topic as brave and I am grateful to have a team that embraced the challenge of writing an article they would otherwise not want to be involved with. We did not have one subject in mind, and we used Shalom Shoremi as a case study of what members of the LGBTQ community face in Nigeria and why the government have stood their ground on the law.Mimi Onalaja

Tv presenter and well-known fashion and lifestyle enthusiast, Mimi Onalaja, turned up in a gorgeous Navy Blue gown with flared sleeves from EMMA by Shop Emma, simple strapped heels and a silver clutch. She topped the look off with navy blue eyeshadow and complementary nude lips.

Sharon Ooja

Actress and leading lady, Sharon Ooja, stunned and stunted in a hot pink crop top and high waisted shirt with high slit from S.O.M.O by Somo. She paired that with a Versace medusa head necklace, lovely Balenciaga cuff, a gold Marco de Vincenz purse and multicoloured Christian Louboutin shoes.

Gbemi O

On air personality Gbemi O looked like a sparkling glass of champagne in her champagne gold mini dress from Tubo. She let her loose curls tumble down her shoulders and paired the dress with minimal makeup and simple clear sandals from her brand, Gbemisoke shoes.

Juliet Ibrahim

Actress and enterpreneur Juliet Ibrahim is frequent stunner. She attended the premiere in a bright yellow sleeveless dress from Sophie Couture that showed off her darling curves. Her furry pale pink straps, nude makeup and loose red hair helped emphasise the fact that she is a star.

Kate Henshaw

Kate Henshaw looked completely elegant in a playful navy blue dress and matching clutch. Her best accessories are her toned legs and bright charming smile.

Damilola Adegbite

Tinsel actress, Damilola, stepped out in a red lace and feather dress, paired with a cute blue patterned clutch and silver sandals.

Fade Ogunro

TV Producer Fade attended the premiere in a baby pink fringe jumpsuit by House of CB and a hot pink Mak Nisy bag.May will visit President Buhari in Abuja on Wednesday, August 29 and also spend some time in Lagos.

Nigeria is one of three countries May will be visiting this week. The others are Kenya and South Africa.

Merkel isexpected in Nigeria on Friday, August 31, after visits to Senegal and Ghana.

Here are 3 reasons why two of the most powerful women in the world are coming to Nigeria this week.

1. Migration and Terrorism

Germany is battling a migrant crisis, as a stream of refugees from Africa and elsewhere, empty into Europe every other day.

Her talks with Buhari will revolve around how to stem the influx of Nigerians to Germany and Europe through Libya.

Merkel and Buhari will also discuss combating the Boko Haram menace which has crippled most of Nigeria since 2009.

May will also discuss tackling Boko Haram and instability in the northern region with Buhari.

2. Post-Brexit trade ties

May's central message during her visit will be focused on a renewed partnership between the UK and Nigeria, as the UK seeks new business relationships outside of Europe, after the Brexit vote of June 2016.

May said: "Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy, and as longstanding partners, this trip is a unique opportunity at a unique time for the UK to set out our ambition to work even closer together.

"A more prosperous, growing and trading Africa is in all of our interests and its incredible potential will only be realised through a concerted partnership between governments, global institutions and business.

"As we prepare to leave the European Union, now is the time for the UK to deepen and strengthen its global partnerships. This week I am looking forward to discussing how we can do that alongside Africa to help deliver important investment and jobs as well as continue to work together to maintain stability and security.

3. Speaking with the private sectorAccording to Financial Times,Trump reportedly told his aides that he did not want to meet with Buhari, who he described as lifeless, again.

The US President reportedly said this after his meeting with the Nigerian President in April 2018.

Nigeria needs a strong President

According to Daily Post, Afeniferes spokesman, Yinka Odumakin said Nigeria needs a strong and agile President.

Odumakin also said the business of running Nigeria is not meant for somebody in vegetative status.

If someone who wants to be president of Nigeria had to be trekking 800 metres to convince us that he is fit, I have always pointed to the fact that it is an evidence that there is something wrong.

And now if the President of America could make that kind of observation, it is clear that the situation of things is not what the presidents handlers want us to believe.

Someone that went to spend months in hospitals, that is going on medical vacation every now and then to London, clearly something is wrong.

The job of the Nigerian president is not the job for anybody that is vegetative. We need a strong, agile president come 2019, he added.

Buharis trending 800m walk

President Buhari, during the Sallah break in his hometown, took a walk to greet Nigerians after Eid prayers.

His spokesman, Garba Shehu however told Nigerians that it was a show of fitness.

Here is what Shehu said "I think there are two things here; one is to say that the President is responsive to the enormous support and commitment of his own people that had come out in their numbers to see him and he just decided that he couldnt go on riding in a black vehicle and he came out and walked to the distance.

The second thing, he is curious that these days, one or two people who are aspiring to be president are campaigning on their youthfulness and good health.

I think the president has done one thing today  that the issue is not how old one is but how fit he is ; how healthy he is. Now that the president has proven his fitness and well-being to continue in office is a settled matter

I think that if people want to campaign against him they should do so on issues that are of significance to Nigerians. The President is fit, he is healthy; he is good to go for second term.BMO in a statement made available to newsmen, reacted to the US Presidents statement allegedly insulting President Buhari.

A report by Financial Times revealed that Trump told his aides that he did not want to meet with Buhari again, describing him as lifeless.

Nigerias President was in the US in April 2018, for a meeting with President Trump.

The group said President Muhammadu Buhari is fit and capable to run for the 2019 elections and oversee the affairs of the country for four more years President Donald Trumps hate speech notwithstanding.

Trump is disrespectful

According to Vanguard, BMO also said that President Trumps disrespectful attitude towards world leaders is not new.

We are aware that President Trumps disrespect for World Leaders is not new; his comments on Canadas Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, calling him meek and mild; his reference to Germanys Leader, Angela Merkels actions as insane, or his outlandish Tweet at the UKs Theresa May, and more recently, the alleged remarks he made after meeting President Buhari.

It is indeed not the first time President Trump would be heard to lower the standards of respect for his colleagues on the World Stage. We are not surprised, we know that this age-long character of the US President would not change anytime soon. But it is important that we put it on record that President Buhari remains fit and sprightly, even for the next decade.

We recall that during President Buharis visit to Trump in the White House, the US President commended the successes that the Buhari administration had recorded especially in the fight against insurgency and the war on corruption. The US President was full of admiration for Nigerias President during the visit, thus such outlandish remarks as reported by the Financial Times are not just to be taken with a pinch of salt but are untrue in themselves.

The celebrated 800m walk

BMO also stated that President Buharis 800m walk in Daura, Katsina state, though not a show-off, is a proof of his fitness.

The group also added that the President will not be moved by the statement of the United Sates President.Merkel is to spend Wednesday through Friday in the three countries, accompanied by an economic delegation, Deputy Government Spokeswoman, Ulrike Demmer said Friday in Berlin.

Migration politics, particularly Merkels campaign to tackle the causes resulting in a stream of refugees to Europe, are likely to feature on the discussion agenda.

Merkel is to meet Wednesday afternoon with Senegalese President, Macky Sall to discuss economic developments in the country and regional cooperation.

In the evening she will meet with civil society representatives.

Then its onto the Ghanaian capital of Accra to meet President, Nana Akufo-Addo, on Thursday to discuss economic affairs and foreign policy.

The chancellor is also to take part in a German business-organised round table that will focus on private investment linked to the G20 Compact with Africa initiative.

Finally, Merkel is to head to Nigeria on Friday to meet with the president of the ECOWAS economic alliance of West African states, Jean-Claude Brou.

She will hold talks with Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari.

NAN reports that on Oct. 7, 2016 Merkel visited three African countries before hosting leaders from Chad and Nigeria for talks in Berlin, as she seeks ways to stem a migrant influx to Europe.

Merkel first traveled to Mali and Nigeria before heading to Ethiopia where she is to visit the headquarters of the African Union in the capital, Addis Ababa.He said We should live together in peace and support President Muhammadu Buhari who God has sent to us to save this country and he is doing an excellent job.

According to Channels TV, the Governor said this while inaugurating a central mosque in Okene Local Government Area of Kogi state.

Warns politicians

Governor Bello also said that any act of violence by politicians in the state will not be condoned.

He called on youths not to allow themselves to be used to destabilise the peace of Kogi state.

I will die for Buhari

The Kogi state Governor has on several occasions expressed his admiration and loyalty for the President without apologies.Kwankwaso has also signified his interest to run for President on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

The former Governor said that other people who supported Buhari are also regretting their actions, Daily Post reports.

He said this while speaking to PDP members in Owerri, Imo state.

Nigerians are fed up with the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and would be happy seeing PDP return to power.

I am sure other people like me that dumped the PDP to support President Muhammadu Buhari in 2014 against the then President Goodluck Jonathan are currently regretting their actions.

"From North to South, the citizens are looking for a government that would not pay emphasis on religion, ethnicity and culture but national development. PDPs government in 2019 shall bring development and create the adequate platforms that provide jobs for teeming Nigerians.

I have been in Southeast in last few days and I want to say that the state of infrastructure in this region is incredible. It is either that the government lacks the capacity to improve the economy or something. Electricity is important in this country. The people need a government that will be just and provide jobs for teeming young Nigerians," he added.

Dino apologises to Nigerians

Senator Dino Melaye recently apologised to Nigerians for promoting President Buhari in 2015.When terrorists raided Government Girls Science and Technical College in Dapchi, Yobe, on February 19, 2018, Leah was abducted alongside 112 other hostages. After weeks of negotiations with the government, the terrorists released 107 of the 113 originally abducted on March 21.

While it was reported by some of the released hostages that five of them that were taken had died of heart attack and stress and buried in the bush, Leah Sharibu was reportedly kept in captivity by the terrorists because she refused to renounce her Christian faith.

In the proof-of-life statement published by TheCable, Leah begged (speaking in the Hausa language) to be treated with compassion and freed from captivity, six months after she was abducted.

She said, "I am Leah Sharibu, the girl that was abducted in GGSS Dapchi. I am calling on the government and people of goodwill to intervene to get me out of my current situation.

"I also plead to the members of the public to help my mother, my father, my younger brother and relatives. Kindly help me out of my predicament. I am begging you to treat me with compassion, I am calling on the government, particularly, the president to pity me and get me out of this serious situation. Thank you."Miss Sharibu was kidnapped by Boko Haram along with other girls from a secondary school in Dapchi, Yobe state.

The girls were later released by the terror group following several negotiations, and Sharibu was held back.

According to reports, the girl was not released because she refused to denounce Christianity.

Leah Sharibu begs Buhari

Leah Sharibu, in an audio message released by The Cable,called on President Buhari to save her.

The report quotes that she said "I am Leah Sharibu, the girl that was abducted in GGSS Dapchi. I am calling on the government and people of goodwill to intervene to get me out of my current situation.

"I also plead to the members of the public to help my mother, my father, my younger brother and relatives. Kindly help me out of my predicament. I am begging you to treat me with compassion, I am calling on the government, particularly, the president to pity me and get me out of this serious situation. Thank you.

We are on it

In a statement issued on Twitter, the Presidents spokesman, Garba Shehu said We are aware of the audio in circulation concerning the unfortunate situation of our daughter, Leah Sharibu. In dealing with terrorists, nothing is too trivial.

The secret service is analyzing the voice. Our reaction will follow the outcome of the investigation. For President Buhari, nothing will be spared in bringing all our girls home. He will not rest until all of them are freed.

ALSO READ: How Leah Sharibu tried to escape Boko Haram denThe Chairman of the joint committee, Sen. Suleiman Nazif, made this known after about 30 minutes joint session on Monday in Abuja.

He asked the INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu to appear before it on Tuesday by 1p.m., to re-present its budget to reflect N143 billion rather than the N189 billion earlier submitted.

The joint committee has sat and deliberated the position to adopt the N143 billion as presented by Mr President.

It is also the wish of this committee that INEC re-presents their budget of N143 billion as requested by Mr President.

INEC has the opportunity to re-prioritise, and this committee will be ready to receive their report tomorrow.

The committee will be reconvening tomorrow by 1 oclock so that we can consider the presentation by INEC, he said.

News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the Senate Committee on INEC on Aug. 16, queried the commission for presenting a budgetary proposal that was at variance with the one presented by the president for the polls.

The INEC chairman had presented a proposal of N189 billion to the Senate Committee on INEC and requested its approval at once.

NAN recalls that President Muhammadu Buhari had in a letter dated July 11, also requested the National Assembly to approve the sum of N189 billion for the 2019 General Elections.

ALSO READ: INEC reportedly budgets N6b for feeding of policemen

However, he requested the National Assembly to approve N143.52 billion in the form of virement from the 2018 Budget.

He added that the balance of N45 billion would be included in the 2019 Budget.The Lagos State Commissioner of Police, CP Edgal Imohimi, confirmed the arrest to newsmen during a news conference.

He said that the suspects were picked up on Sunday at 2 a.m. while they were performing gay-initiation for newly recruited members.

Intelligence gathered revealed that some youths will be initiated into a Gay/Homosexual Club between 1 a.m and 2 a.m., at Kelly Ann Hotel/ Event Centre, located at No. 3-7, Adenrele St., Egbeda, an action contrary to Section 1 (1) of Same Sex Marriage, Act 2014.

Consequent upon this, some operatives from the Shasha and Idimu Police Stations led by CSP Oke Olufunmilayo and SP Solomon Fayomi stormed the venue and met no less than 80 young men.

They were taking different types of drinks including banned substances like Tramadol, Shisha laced with substances suspected to be Marijuana.

As soon as they sighted the police, they ran into different directions but the team arrested 57 of them, he said.

The CP said that investigation into the case was ongoing and the suspects would be charged to court soon.

However, some of the suspects who spoke to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on the sidelines of the press conference, denied the allegations.

They said that they were at the hotel to attend a wedding and a birthday party.

One of the suspects, James Obialu, said that he was a dancer and had come to the party to perform before he was arrested.

I am not a gay, I am a dancer and I was there to perform before I was arrested. I am a responsible citizen and I work at the Alimosho General Hospital as a counsellor for those living with HIV, he said.

Another suspect, Samuel Olarotimi, 22, and also a graduate of Mass Communication from the Yaba College of Technology, said that there were other females in the hotel who were not arrested.

I was there for a birthday party which started late. About eight ladies were at the bar with us while some other ladies were dressing up in their rooms.

I dont know why the police refused to arrest the other females but brought us here as alleged homosexuals,  he said.According to a statement by the government of the United Kingdom, she'll be the first British Prime Minister to visit Sub-Saharan Africa since 2013. She'll also visit Kenya and South Africa.

She will meet President Buhari in Abuja on Wednesday, August 29, and also spend some time in Lagos where she is expected to visit victims of modern slavery.

May's central message during her visit will be focused on a renewed partnership between the UK and Africa, which will seek to maximise shared opportunities and tackle common challenges in a continent that is growing at a rapid pace - from the Sahara to South Africa, according to the statement.

She will also use the visit to announce further support to tackle instability across the region. Nigeria has been dealing with the insurgency of terrorist group, Boko Haram, for nine years.

May looking forward to African trip

Ahead of her visit, she noted that Africa will play a transformative role in the global economy, making it important to the world to ensure a "more prosperous, growing and trading Africa".

She said, "Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy, and as longstanding partners this trip is a unique opportunity at a unique time for the UK to set out our ambition to work even closer together.

"A more prosperous, growing and trading Africa is in all of our interests and its incredible potential will only be realised through a concerted partnership between governments, global institutions and business.

"As we prepare to leave the European Union, now is the time for the UK to deepen and strengthen its global partnerships. This week I am looking forward to discussing how we can do that alongside Africa to help deliver important investment and jobs as well as continue to work together to maintain stability and security.

"I am proud to be leading this ambitious trip to Africa and to become the first UK Prime Minister in over 30 years to visit Kenya."

The Prime Minister will be joined by a business delegation made up of 29 representatives from UK business - half of which are SMEs - from across all regions of the UK and its devolved administrations.

Delegates include the London Stock Exchange, Cardiff-based cooling technology firm, Sure Chill, solar tech provider, Northumbria Energy from North Tyneside, London-based start-up, Farm.ink, who have created a knowledge-sharing mobile platform for farmers, Northern Irish agri-tech leader, Devenish Nutrition, and the world-renowned Scotch Whisky Association and Midlands manufacturing giant JCB.

Also travelling are Trade Minister, George Hollingbery, and Minister for Africa, Harriett Baldwin. Secretary of State for Wales, Alun Cairns, will join the visit in South Africa to support the Welsh companies in the business delegation, while the Lord Mayor of London, Charles Bowman, is also accompanying the Prime Minister.On a working trip to the United States, President Buhari met with President Trump in the White House and they had a joint press conference after a closed-door meeting in the Oval office.

Even though Trump commended Buharifor fighting corruption and terrorism in Nigeria, the US president is now reported to have not enjoyed the meeting.

According to a report by Financial Times, sources revealed that Trump informed aides after his meeting with Buhari that he never wanted to meet someone so lifeless again.

"The first meeting, with Nigeria's ailing 75-year-old Muhammadu Buhari in April, ended with the US president telling aides he never wanted to meet someone so lifeless again, according to three people familiar with the matter," the newspaper claimed.

This revelation comes ahead of Trump's meeting with Kenya's Uhuru Kenyatta who advocates hope will have a better meeting with Trump to establish better US-Africa ties.

Trump has long been suspected to not have any concrete African policy and disparaged the continent in January when he described African countries as "shithole".

During the April meeting, President Buhari was asked if he questioned Trump on that comment, but he said he didn't because Trump had already strongly denied it.

Buhari's medical problems

It's unclear why Trump would have allegedly described Buhari as 'lifeless' behind closed doors, but the 75-year-old president has a well-documented history of ill health over the past one year.

He was away in London for a combined 154 days treating an undisclosed ailment on two separate visits. In fact, when he left the US after meeting Trump, he was 'missing' for two days before his aides reported that he was in London for a 'technical stopover'.

A few days later, it was disclosed that the president saw his doctor during the stopover and had been asked to return to London for another four-day medical trip.Theparagraphs that have got all of Nigeria talkingread as follows: Donald Trump will welcome Kenyas to the White House on Monday for what will be only the second one-on-one meeting the US president has held with an African leader since he took office last year.

The first meeting with Nigerias ailing 75-year-old Muhammadu Buhari in April, ended with the US President telling aides he never wanted to meet someone so lifeless again, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Trump and Buhari held bilateral talks at the White House on April 30, 2018.

Here are some Twitter reactions from Nigerians on Trumps alleged lifeless comment.

Trump once allegedly added Nigeria to his list of 'shithole' countries. He was also reported to have said that people in Nigeria live in huts back home The US President would later deny that he made those comments.According to Daily Post, Bakare said this while speaking at a lecture in Glasgow, Scotland, titled: Transforming Political Dynamics in Africa: The Role of the Diaspora.

The vocal clergyman also said that it is time to address issues once and for all.

He said Unknown to many observers, in 2015, following the lifting of the embargo, I worked closely behind the scenes with the two leading candidates in the presidential elections at the time, then President Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP and General Muhammadu Buhari of the APC, towards ensuring that the election results were upheld and that the transition was smooth. I saw at close quarters how the fate of a nation could hang on a single decision.

Therefore, believe me when I tell you that we escaped disintegration by the whiskers. Now, four years after that escape, our nation is once again headed on a collision course with probable instability unless the tensed atmosphere associated with our four-year electocratic insanity is managed with utmost wisdom.

Once again, I have found myself in the inner workings of the chaotic political process and I can tell you that we live in precarious times. How long can our nation stand if we continue along this path? Is it not time to address the foundations once and for all?

How Obasanjo messed things up

Bakare chided former President Olusegun Obasanjo for handing over what he described as a limping economy to his successors.

He also said that Obasanjo had the best economic team made up of prominent Nigerians like: Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Dr. Oby Ezekwesili; Dr. Charles Chukwuma Soludo and Mallam Nasir El-Rufai.

The most competent ever assembled by any government in Nigerias history till date.

one would have thought that this brilliant team that oversaw the Nigerian dimension of Africa Rising would be given priority in the succession plan of then President, Olusegun Obasanjo.

Instead, after a botched third term agenda, the Obasanjo administration bequeathed to Nigeria a legacy of lame and limping successor governments that first sunk Nigeria into a constitutional crisis and then oversaw the plundering of the nations wealth in a free-for-all corruption jamboree, he added.

Bakare has been known for his no-nonsense stand when it comes to issues about Nigeria and politics.

In an interview with Channels TV recently, the clergyman said that the person currently running the affairs of Nigeria is not the Buhari he knew.The presidential aspirant expressed his doubt in reaction to a new report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) that disclosed that Nigeria's gross domestic product (GDP) in the second quarter of 2018 has slowed down.

"Q2 2018 real GDP growth at 1.50% year on year compared to 1.95% in Q1 2018 and 0.72% in Q1 2017," the report read.

Atiku took to his Twitter account to point to the data as proof that Buhari's government has no idea how to improve Nigeria's economy. The former vice president also boasted that he's created more jobs for Nigerians than anyone else running for President in 2019.

He posted, "This report shows Nigeria's economic growth remains unimpressive. Also, the economy remains driven by the oil sector & economic diversification is yet to be achieved. As a consequence, we do not see how the FG can effectively fight the twin problems of unemployment & poverty.

"This is why I am running for President, to get Nigeria working again. I helped grow Nigerias economy as VP and have created more jobs than anyone running for President in 2019."The former Cross River State governor said this during his interview on "On The Couch" anchored by entertainer, Folarin Falana, aka Falz, and journalist, Laila Johnson-Salami.

Even though he was not specifically asked about homosexuality in Nigeria, Duke offered to express his thoughts on the country's stance on it.

According to him, he doesn't understand homosexuality, but he would offer protection to gay people and not criminalise them. However, he said he is uncomfortable with public display of affection by homosexual people and would be against such in the country.

He said, "I don't understand it (homosexuality) because I'm straight, the emotional feelings a gay person would have of their sexuality, I don't understand it, but I would not criminalise them.

"I would ensure that they have the protection of the law but if they want to exhibit their sexuality, that's an affront on the current norms of society.

"I arrived at New York and went through the airport, and at the passenger rank, two guys came together and were kissing. Keep it in your house. I'm sorry.

"I'm talking about the norms of society. The day you try and kiss me, the slap I'll slap you ehn. Don't even try it.

"You cannot jettison the norms of society. There are certain things you'll do in America or in England or Nigeria that you cannot do in Saudi Arabia, for instance, and you've got to respect the norms of the society.

"So when you're in Rome, behave like the Romans. Don't swim against the tide because we're not there."

When asked if he would appoint a gay person to his cabinet if he was elected president, he said that was not his business as long as the person can perform duties of office.

He said, "His sexuality is private to him, I don't want to know if you're gay. It's not my business. My business is 'Can he perform the assignment that has been assigned to him?'"

Duke is running for president next year and disclosed during the interview that he would soon announce the political platform he'll use to realise his ambition. He was Cross River State governor between 1999 and 2007.

Nigeria's anti-homosexuality law

In 2014, then-president, Goodluck Jonathan, signed the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Bill (SSMPA) into law. At that time, existing legislation already criminalised consensual same-sex activities in the country.

The law forbids any cohabitation between same-sex sexual partners and bans any 'public show of same sex amorous relationship'. The law also prohibits Nigerians from registering, operating, or participating in gay clubs, societies and organisations, or supporting such activities.

Punishment for violations of the provisions in the law range between 10 to 14 years imprisonment.Yes, expect the big announcement before the week runs out or sooner, one aide said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject at the time.

Saraki dumped the APC for the PDP in July and has been setting out his stall rather nicely for a presidential run. The senate president has paid courtesy visits to former military presidents Ibrahim Babangida, Olusegun Obasanjo and other kingmakers across the country.

Hes also been photographed waving at crowds in Ogun, Kwara and Akwa Ibom States as he tests his popularity ahead of crucial polls for Nigeria in 2019.

Battle in the PDP

APC godfather Bola Tinubu had taken on Saraki for leaving the APC because of his presidential ambition.

Returning to the PDP, he harbors dreams of the presidency but Tambuwals ambition will dwarf Sarakis when the two collide, Tinubu had written in a widely circulated press statement.

However, Pulse understands that Sokoto Governor Aminu Tambuwal who also defected from the APC to the PDP last month to pursue his dream of becoming Nigerias president, may ditch his presidential ambition to pursue a second term as governor instead.

Tambuwals governorship campaign posters are back on the streets of Sokoto. Its clear he is no longer running for president. Hes more realistic now and knows he doesnt stand a chance at the highest level, one resident of Sokoto told Pulse over the phone.

As Tambuwal pours cold water on his presidency goals, former Kano Governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso will be reigniting his. Kwankwaso will officially declare to run for the office of president of Nigeria on Wednesday, August 29.

Political pundits say the battle for the PDP presidential ticket will be a fierce one featuring the trio of Atiku Abubakar, Saraki and Kwankwaso.

Senate president throne in peril

It is believed that Saraki was promised the PDP presidential ticket as pre-condition for his eventual defection.

The PDP will hold its primary elections in the first week of October.WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  The first ever study abroad course in biological sciences at Purdue University returned from Colombia with new insights on local culture, conservation and ecology in one of the most biodiverse regions of the world.

The group, led by emeritus professor Morris Levy of the Department of Biological Sciences, research scientist Maria Levy, and professor Reuben Goforth of the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, spent 17 days trekking from the Andean forest to marshlands on the Caribbean coast. Technically, planes were involved, but they did a lot of trekking too.

The groups first stop was a woodland restoration site near Bogota. Next, they visited an animal rescue park called Los Ocarros, a haven for victims of illegal trading and abuse. The group helped veterinarians insert microchips in several animals, including a giant armadillo, and set up cameras to analyze animal behavior over a 48-hour period.

Captive animal behavior is typically every animal for themselves  but we found instances where that isnt true. There can be hierarchical enforcement of social behavior even in captivity, Morris Levy said. It was very odd, but the whole purpose of this course is to see things you wouldnt usually experience.

The group visited a private cattle ranch dedicated to wildlife conservation before heading to the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano (UJTL) in Santa Marta, on the northern coast of the country. This region is known for rich marine life and diverse coastal ecosystems.

Ecotourism has brought significant wealth to the area, but infrastructure to support it and coal mining have destroyed the local hydrology. Many of the mangrove forests, which are among the most productive and biologically complex ecosystems on Earth, are now gone.

We saw beautiful resort hotels and large malls just across from shanty towns, Levy said. In some ways, this was the whole point of the trip  for the students to see the juxtaposition of great wealth and great poverty, right next to each other, all because of environmental impact.

The group took snorkeling trips to study local coral reefs and monitor fishing practices. They also participated in coral taxonomy and fish biology labs and listened to lectures by UJTL professors.

Their next stop was another region threatened by mining and ecotourism: La Cienaga Grande (the big swamp) de Santa Marta. These brackish wetlands link the Caribbean to the freshwaters of the longest river in Colombia, Magdalena River. The students observed a unique amphibious human community where people rely on fish farming for survival, despite the quality of fishing being heavily compromised by the effects of tourism. Finally, they returned to Bogota and caught a redeye back to Indianapolis.

Throughout the trip, students kept journals in which they recorded their individual reflections on their experiences. Seeing the negative impact of human activities on diverse Colombian ecosystems and interacting with Colombians working hard to restore and sustain Colombias amazing biodiversity was inspiring and eye-opening for all of them, said Levy.

Students interested in the 2019 course may contact him directly at levy0@purdue.edu for more information.

Writer: Kayla Zacharias, 765-494-9318, kzachar@purdue.edu

Source: Morris Levy, 765-494-8134, levy0@purdue.eduWEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  A Boston-based think tank has selected Purdue Universitys Back a Boiler income share agreement program, which provides an alternative to Federal Parent PLUS and private student loans, as its winner of the 27th annual Better Government Competition.

The Pioneer Institute said it selected the Back a Boiler program after reviewing more than 80 entries from think tanks, universities, job training programs, nonprofits and state government agencies nationwide. Purdue University will receive the $10,000 top prize, which it will donate to the Back a Boiler ISA Fund.

Unlike student loans, ISAs have no principal balance or interest. The program offers students and their families an alternative financing option in which a student receives education funding in exchange for an agreed-upon percentage of post-graduation income over a set number of years. The Back a Boiler - ISA contract payback period is about 10 years.

Since launching the Back a Boiler program in the 2016-17 academic year, Purdue has seen the fund distribute $5.9 million through nearly 500 contracts and to students in more than 100 majors.

Although still new and relatively small, our ISA initiative continues to attract national attention and inquiries from other schools interested in emulating it, said Purdue University President Mitch Daniels. Even at this early stage, this vehicle shows great promise as another way we can help our students launch their lives with less debt and greater financial security.

The Purdue Research Foundation, a private, nonprofit foundation created to advance the mission of Purdue University, which is about to celebrate its 150th anniversary, announced in May that income commitment rates for the Back a Boiler-ISA would remain at the 2016 level.

Purdue has frozen tuition at 2012-13 levels through at least 2019-20. This means students at the West Lafayette campus will be paying nearly the same in tuition and fees as they were in 2012-13, and five graduating classes will have earned their Purdue degrees without ever having a tuition increase. When combined with room and board rates that have been held flat or lowered and potential textbook savings through Purdues Amazon partnership, current students total cost of attendance is lower than in 2012-13.

It is estimated that from fiscal years 2013-19 Purdue families have saved a total of about $465 million through the universitys deferral of tuition, fee, and room and board increases. Current Indiana resident students would be paying $1,400 a year more if Purdue had raised its tuition by the national average for four-year public universities; non-resident students would be paying $5,560 more per year if tuition had increased by the Big Ten average.

Jim Stergios, executive director at Pioneer, praised the Back a Boiler program.

Our country is at a crisis point where, on one side, the models for providing and financing higher education and workforce training are changing fast and, on the other, we have an old system that has saddled the young with debt that is a drag on their ability to pursue their dreams and fully participate in the economy, he said. The ideas Pioneer is honoring aim to allow Massachusetts to reimagine how we provide access to affordable higher education and training.

The 2018 winners were selected by a distinguished panel of judges with backgrounds in education, government, business, and workforce development. The Back a Boiler program will be honored at the Better Government Competition Awards Gala on Sept. 24 at the Seaport Hotel in Boston. Pioneer Institutes Better Government Competition, founded in 1991, is an annual citizens ideas contest that rewards some of the nations most innovative public policy proposals.

Purdue Research Foundation contact: Tom Coyne, 765-588-1044, tjcoyne@prf.org

Mary-Claire Cartwright764-588-1051, mccartwright@prf.orgThe Government has announced its proposed changes to the rules around rental properties, saying it's keen to hear the opinions of both landlords and renters before making them law.

"Our tenancy laws are antiquated and don't reflect the fact that renting is now a long-term reality for many of our families," Housing Minister Phil Twyford said on Monday morning.

"Insecure tenure can force families to continually move house. This is particularly tough on children whose education suffers when they have to keep changing schools."

Among the proposals are:

ending no-cause tenancy terminations, while ensuring landlords can still evict "rogue" tenants

increasing the notice a landlord must give tenants to terminate a tenancy from 42 to 90 days

limiting rent increases to once a year

better equipping both tenants and landlords to reach agreement about pets and minor alterations

introducing new tools and processes into the compliance and enforcement system.

The Government also wants to look at:

whether changes to fixed-term agreements could improve security of tenure

whether there should be limitations on the practice of 'rent bidding' (asking tenants how much they can pay, then renting to the highest bidder)

whether the obligations that tenants and landlords have remain fit for purpose

whether further controls for boarding houses are needed.

"As people rent for longer, they want to be secure in their homes and put down roots in their community," said Mr Twyford. "That's why making life better for renters is an important aspect of the Government's housing plan."

RadioLIVE Drive's Ryan Bridge spoke with Housing Minister Phil Twyford and National's housing spokesperson Judith Collins to debate the proposed changes.



The proposals to amend the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 were widely expected, and line up with what Labour promised ahead of last year's election.

The Government says when it was introduced in 1986, only 26 percent of children lived in rental homes - it's now 43 percent. Nearly 600,000 households now rent - the highest it's ever been.

Fifty-seven percent of Maori and 67 percent of Pacific people live in rental housing.

Letting fees are already on their way out, with the Residential Tenancies (Prohibiting Letting Fees) Amendment Bill at select committee already.

Public consultation will last eight weeks, ending 5pm on Sunday, October 21. Any changes that result are likely to come in force in 2020.

A discussion document detailing the proposals in full is available on the MBIE website.

Listen to the full commentary above.

Drive with Ryan Bridge and Lisa Owen, 3pm - 6pm Weekdays and streaming live on'rova' channel 9 - available on Android and iPhone.

RadioLIVE/Newshub.

CRRC Qishuyan has delivered a batch of DF8B diesel locomotives ordered by aluminium company Alpart for use in Jamaica.The two-year lawsuit alleging malpractice by Indian film and VOD service provider Eros International has finally ended.





In a filing dated 21 August 2018, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a Summary Order affirming the US District Courts earlier dismissal, with prejudice, of the putative securities class action that was originally filed in November 2015. In the original case, complaint alleged that Eros and certain individual defendants violated Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. On 26 September 2017, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed, with prejudice, the putative securities class action.

Eros previously disclosed that, on 23 October 2017, lead plaintiffs had filed a Notice of Appeal, individually and on behalf of the putative class, to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. On 21 August 21 2018, the Court of Appeals issued a Summary Order affirming the District Courts dismissal with prejudice.The dismissal of the action comes only days after Eros International announced its first quarter 2019 results and its likely strategy for the rest of the financial year.Voters looking to expand critical public services, reduce taxes, trim household energy expenses, and increase their states economic rankings dont have to look much further than their candidates proposed energy policies.

Take, for instance, New Mexico.

There, drilling rigs hit an all-time high in July, and producers set a new state record in the number of barrels pumped. Industry experts expect production from the basin that straddles the Texas-New Mexico border to double in the coming years.

As is the case in other energy-leading states, several factors contributed to the turnaround. They include increases in crude prices, better regulatory policies and initiatives  in many instances, courtesy of Gov. Susana Martinez  and billions of dollars in investment from the energy industry.

If youre shrugging, you shouldnt.

Record output and energy infrastructure investment have allowed lawmakers and Gov. Martinez to allocate more funding to programs that have helped sustain must-have infrastructure like roads, schools, and public safety. They have also left the state with strong cash reserves, a reversal from a year ago, when lawmakers wrestled with how to fill a ballooning budget gap.

Today, that funding is needed more than ever.

As in other states  Alaska, Pennsylvania, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and West Virginia included  New Mexicos growing energy industry is helping to finance more and more of what the state offers to families, reducing energy prices that had risen thanks to ongoing geopolitical disorder, which has historically caused wild fluctuations in global oil markets.

The way to reduce dependency on imports and meet fast-climbing demand is both obvious and, for some strange reason, increasingly polarizing: Voters need to elect leaders who support sensible energy solutions that encourage the safe development of domestic resources and energy infrastructure.

New Mexican state leaders have taken commendable steps forward in recent years. They rejected county ordinances to implement drilling setbacks that wouldve served as de facto bans on gas extraction, and they declined a redundant bill that wouldve restored a state agencys ability to penalize producers  even though protocols like shutting in wells, denying permits, and banning infringers already exist.

Such extra steps sound good in theory, but costly red tape and an unpredictable regulatory climate  paired with the steep costs of producing and transporting energy in the most eco-friendly ways possible  often force producers to consider whether staying in-state is a good idea or if fleeing to pastures next door, like Texas, and tapping the Permian Basin there is a better alternative.

New Mexico isnt alone in this struggle; overregulation is a risk in several other major energy-producing states, too. Oklahoma and Colorado both struggle to hold back calls from a few who want drilling setbacks that would kill the industry and its revenue-generating taxes. In Pennsylvania, pipelines are approved, then stalled, and theres an annual call for more taxation via a severance tax. West Virginia continues to fight to greenlight infrastructure expansion and save family-supporting jobs. Each state fights industry yet leans on it to fill critical budgetary items and improve the environment.

It is important to remember who exactly gets hurt when we fail to maintain sensible, realistic energy policies: you and me and our neighbors. These energy failings mean higher energy prices. This is not debatable.

And thanks to environmentally safer, state-of-the-art technology, improved techniques, and an array of stringent regulations thats second to none globally, the sector has steadily lowered industry-related carbon emissions to national levels not seen in decades. Why tempt producers to pack up shop if theyre producing energy more safely than ever?

Energy production is especially important to states like New Mexico, which remains behind in various economic rankings, including poverty, income, and child wellbeing, forcing families and small businesses to look to neighboring states like Colorado and Utah for better opportunities. How much worse off would New Mexico be without the energy industry  one of the biggest hands that feeds it?

Depending on Novembers elections, voters in New Mexico and elsewhere  and the state and municipal services they depend on  may soon find out.

David Holt is president of Consumer Energy Alliance.WASHINGTON (AP)  President Donald Trump said Friday he has directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to delay a planned trip to North Korea, citing insufficient progress on denuclearization.

Trump put some blame on Beijing, saying he does not believe China is helping because of our much tougher Trading stance.

The surprise announcement appeared to mark a concession by the president to domestic and international concerns that his prior claims of world-altering progress on the peninsula had been strikingly premature.

I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to go to North Korea, at this time, because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, Trump tweeted Friday, barely two months after his June meeting with the Norths Kim Jong Un in Singapore.

Trumps comment followed a report issued Monday by the International Atomic Energy Agency outlining grave concern about the Norths nuclear program. It came a day after Pompeo appointed Stephen Biegun, a senior executive with the Ford Motor Co., to be his special envoy for North Korea and said he and Biegun would visit next week.

The State Department never confirmed details of the trip, but it had been expected that Pompeo would be in Pyongyang for at least several hours Monday, according to several diplomatic sources familiar with the plan.

White House officials declined to specify what prompted Trump to call off Pompeos trip or what had changed since the presidents rose-colored-glasses assessments of the nuclear situation just days ago.

A senior White House official said Trump made the decision to cancel the visit Friday morning during a meeting with Pompeo, Biegun, chief of staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser John Bolton, who joined by phone. Intelligence and defense officials were not in the meeting, the official said, seeming to indicate that the breakdown was diplomatic in nature. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-hwa has talked with Pompeo over Trumps decision to delay Pompeos planned visit to North Korea because of what he saw as insufficient progress on denuclearization.

Seouls Foreign Ministry said late Friday that Pompeo during the telephone conversation explained the background of the decision to Kang. The ministry says Kang and Pompeo agreed that Washington and Seoul will work to keep the momentum of dialogue alive while pursuing the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and stabilizing peace.

The State Department had no immediate comment on the administration decision and referred questions to the White House.

Trump laid unspecified blame on China, North Koreas leading trade partner, which is widely believed to hold the greatest sway over Kims government.

The U.S. and China have been locked in a trade dispute for months, with each side ratcheting up tariffs on imports from the other country in what may be the opening salvos of a trade war.

Trump tweeted that Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved. He added: In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon!

After more a year of escalating tensions defined by nuclear and missile tests, new sanctions and fire and fury rhetoric, Trump made history meeting Kim earlier this year. In the run-up to the summit both nations engaged in hard-nosed negotiation, with Trump publically calling off the meeting in an effort to push Kim to agree to nuclear concessions. During the summit, the pair signed a vague joint statement in which the North agreed to denuclearize, but which left nearly all details undefined.

There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea, Trump declared on Twitter after the meeting.

Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem, he added. No longer - sleep well tonight!

Pompeo would have been hard pressed to return from Pyongyang with anything resembling progress on the denuclearization front.

Although it has halted nuclear and missile testing and taken some unrelated steps  dismantling portions of a missile engine facility and returning the suspected remains of American servicemen killed during the Korean War  its nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile development remain intact, according the U.N.s atomic watchdog and intelligence agencies.

In addition, recent statements from North Korean officials have ruled out any new concessions until it sees a reciprocal gesture from the U.S. beyond suspending military exercises with South Korea. North Korea has been demanding that the U.S. ease or lift crippling sanctions  something Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton have flatly ruled out until the its nuclear program is fully and verifiably dismantled.

Other than sanctions relief, the North, backed by South Korea, has been seeking a declaration of the end of the Korean War. The conflict stopped with the signing of an armistice rather than a peace treaty, meaning the war is not technically over. Both the North and South have vowed to end the open state of hostilities, and Seoul had been hoping to persuade the Trump administration to sign off on a non-binding end-of-war declaration as a goodwill gesture that would give Kim Jong Un domestic cover to proceed with denuclearization moves.

Pompeo and other administration officials have suggested some concessions short of easing or lifting sanctions are possible before verified denuclearization, but have refused to be specific about what they could be. And they have been skeptical about an end-of-war declaration in the absence of any progress on the nuclear matter.

At the same time, lawmakers from both parties, including GOP hawks who generally support Trump, have expressed concerns about such a move, as it could be used by the North to demand the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea and potentially Japan without anything in return.

Trump had kept up the positive tone as recently as Tuesday at a campaign rally in West Virginia. There Trump maintained were doing well with North Korea.

Theres been no missile launches. Theres been no rocket launches, he added.

At the same rally, Trump seemed to take a different tone too on China, saying he had withheld some criticism of China because I wanted them to help us with North Korea and they have.

__

Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.Dont mess with Texas, or so says the states famous phrase, but Democrats dont seem to have gotten the word. They are committed to messing with Republicans in the GOPs Lone Star State stronghold. Reliably red Texas has one of the most interesting Senate races this season and even party stalwarts are predicting a tight finish.

Republican Incumbent Ted Cruz is fighting off a strong challenge from Rep. Beto ORourke -- a rising star in Democratic ranks. Scar tissue from the 2016 campaign, combined with what one Republican described as a stellar candidate for Democrats, have made this race one to watch, even if flipping it will be tough.

A new NBC News/Marist poll shows that ORourke is within striking distance of Cruz among registered voters, trailing by just four percentage points. Both candidates are about even with independent voters, but ORourke does 10 points better with women and 11 points better with Latinos. He also has a whopping 35-point advantage among those who describe themselves as moderate. Cruzs numbers are considerably behind those of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who leads his challenger, Lupe Valdez, by 19 points. Nonetheless, Cruz still leads in RealClearPolitics average of polls by 6.2 points.

Republicans say Cruz has a major branding problem and has not recovered from the nasty 2016 presidential primary season. One GOP strategist in the state said Cruz lacks support from Republican business leaders who have long seen him as gumming up the works in D.C. Meanwhile, many Donald Trump voters still dont trust him after he declined to endorse the nominee during the Republican National Convention. Cruz finally endorsed Trump in a Facebook post a few months later.

He had a lot of credibility and clout, especially among Republican voters. When he ran for president he did very well, said the strategist. But I think the Trump moment  when he didn't back Trump at the convention  was a turning moment for him.

Cruz certainly had ample cause to resent Trump, reasons that went above and beyond losing the nomination to him. During the primaries, Trump dubbed Cruz Lying Ted, while questioning the sincerity of his religious faith. Trump issued a snarky tweet about the physical appearance of Heidi Cruz, while threatening to spill the beans on your wife, whatever that meant. Most bizarrely, Trump linked Cruzs father with John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

By way of response, Cruz called Trump utterly amoral and a bully who was proud of being a serial philanderer.

"This man is a pathological liar, Cruz added. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. In a pattern that is straight out of a psychology text book, he accuses everyone of lying."

The decision to finally back Trump, and to work with him as president, was seen as a political necessity, but some Republicans say it added to Cruzs authenticity problem. A second Republican strategist in the state said authenticity remains Cruzs biggest negative and is a reason why his numbers have taken a dip. After the presidential race hes a complete known entity -- and people, by and large, have made a judgment about him, said the strategist, adding that a second-place finish in the GOP presidential race did the senator zero favors.

Cruzs former political director, Jon McClellan, disagreed. I think right after the presidential race there was a much-needed cooling down period for everyone, he said. McClellan said Cruz did the right thing to try and unite the party and has helped the president accomplish major policy achievements, such as tax reform and advancing conservative Supreme Court nominees, which matter greatly to Texas voters. When asked about the closeness of the race with ORourke, McClellan said Cruz tends to underperform in polls ahead of Election Day, but wins in the end.

Most strategists agree, however, that this is a real race with a real opponent and that the senator will need to campaign effectively to win. They disagreed, however, about how Trump will play in this race. Some said a presidential campaign trip would galvanize Republican base voters. Others, pointing to the presidents legal troubles, arent so sure. With an endless stream of bad headlines surrounding Trump's legal woes on the horizon, Cruz and other Republicans have to bet that voters will pay attention to the strong job numbers and economy, as much as the soap opera happening in Washington, one strategist said.

The official party line is that Cruzs history of working with the White House will be an asset. The success President Trump, and the Republican-led Congress, has brought to the economy is incredible, said Sam Pohl, communications director for the Texas Republican Party. There are more jobs and higher confidence in the economy. He also noted that Cruz has said hed welcome the president to the state for a campaign visit.

For their part, Democrats are buoyed by the support they are getting from undecided voters, and say the ORourke-Cruz race is the matchup theyve been waiting for. Its the entire Republican brand thats the problem, including Ted Cruz, said Manny Garcia, deputy executive director for the Texas Democratic Party. He added that the party has been working on building up its influence in the state for the past few election cycles and that officials believe ORourke is the candidate that can take them over the hump.

Garcia also pointed out that Texas became a single-digit state for Republicans in 2016 when Trump won there by only nine points. When asked if a visit from the president to buck up the GOP base would simultaneously mobilize Democratic voters, Garcia replied, Ill roll out the blue carpet for him if he wants.Fifty-five years ago today, Washington, D.C., began filling up with Americans from every part of this country, especially the South. A crowd of 250,000 was expected on the National Mall, and Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota stood in the well of the Senate and uttered some of the most prescient words ever spoken in that chamber.

When this demonstration has been concluded, we will have evidence in abundance that the lamp of liberty still burns across these shores, he said. We will learn again the age-old lesson of liberty that America first learned 200 years ago and has been teaching the rest of mankind ever since. Humphrey then inserted into the Congressional Record the statement released that day by the 10 civil rights organizations coordinating the March on Washington.

A related event -- to my mind -- occurred 10 years ago tonight. In 1963, as HHH knew, it was mainly the Democratic Party that Martin Luther King and the hundreds of thousands of civil rights marchers were trying to reach. Ten years ago today, however, the Democratic Party reached a place that civil rights pioneers like Humphrey, King, and A. Philip Randolph could only dream of -- even as they helped bring it about. Im speaking about the nomination Barack Obama as Democrats 2008 presidential nominee.

John McCain served in the Senate with Obama. In truth, McCain didnt initially care for Illinois junior senator. McCain had hoped to run against Hillary Clinton, whom he liked and respected, as he confided to me over breakfast in 2007. McCain considered Obama too unaccomplished in national politics. Obama had not only cut in line, McCain believed, but hed made a dubious bargain to get there: Specifically, he helped scuttle a sweeping immigration reform bill that McCain and Sen. Edward Kennedy had cobbled together -- and which George W. Bush had promised to sign.

Yet in the summer of 2008, when Barack Obama scaled the mountaintop, becoming the first African-American nominee of a major political party, McCain took time out from his own campaign to offer a grace note of appreciation for this historical accomplishment. It came in the form of a 30-second videotaped spot in which McCain congratulated his general election opponent for his achievement. McCain did so warmly, while alluding subtly to the 1963 march.

That was one of my favorite John McCain moments. Others spring to mind too.

With a month to go in the 2008 general election, a woman at a town-hall event in Lakeville, Minn., told McCain that she didnt trust Barack Obama, who she described as an Arab, apparently referring to various conspiracy theories floating around about Obama being some kind of foreign-born Manchurian candidate with Muslim sympathies.

McCain wouldnt even listen to it. Taking the microphone from her hand, he cut her ad hominem criticism short.

No, maam, McCain said of his opponent. Hes a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and thats what this campaign is all about. With that, the audience of Republicans broke into applause.

This exchange was foreshadowed by one that took place months earlier, before McCain had the GOP nomination officially clinched. At a rally in Cincinnati, McCain was introduced by Bill Cunningham, a local conservative radio talk show host, who insulted the news media and the leading Democratic candidates -- twice referring to Obama as Barack Hussein Obama, stressing his middle name.

Although he wasnt on stage while this was going on, McCain heard about it, and he took the extraordinary step of going to the press section to disavow his own warm-up speaker.

I take responsibility, and I repudiate what he said, he told reporters. A person came out here before I arrived and made some disparaging remarks about Senators Obama and Clinton, and I regret that. I will not tolerate anything in this campaign that denigrates either Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton.

This doesnt mean that John McCain was a patsy on the campaign trail -- or that he didnt want to win. He showed how competitive he was in his very first campaign.

After finally being released from North Vietnam after five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war, McCain recovered his health enough to get his wings back as a Navy flier. Serving as a liaison between the Navy and the U.S. Senate, he got the political bug. Although hell always be remembered for his two presidential campaigns and his long tenure as a senator from Arizona, McCains political career began with a race for a House seat in that states sprawling 1st Congressional District.

McCain wasnt originally from Arizona. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, raised as a military brat, and attended college at the U.S. Naval Academy. But hed remarried, settled in suburban Phoenix, and set his sights on a vacant House seat.

He was opposed by several more experienced Republicans who believed they had a more solid claim to the seat. Running against a war hero isnt easy, so they played the obvious card: McCain, they said, was a carpetbagger whod only lived in the state for a year. What did he know about the needs of its constituents?

At first, McCain simply replied, correctly, that many people had moved into the district in recent years. But as Robert Timberg noted in his brilliant book The Nightingales Song, it was a weak answer, and McCain was getting hammered on it. One night, during a debate in which he was pressed on this issue yet again, he turned it all around.

Listen pal, he said. I spent 22 years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things.

As a matter of fact, he continued, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.

As Timberg wrote in describing this scene, the audience sat for a few seconds in shocked silence, then broke into thunderous applause.

We are applauding this man still, as we should.Good morning. Its Monday, August 27, 2018. Fifty-five years ago today, Washington, D.C., began filling up with Americans from every part of this country, especially the South. A crowd of 250,000 was expected on the National Mall, and Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota stood in the well of the Senate and uttered some of the most prescient words ever spoken in that chamber.

When this demonstration has been concluded, we will have evidence in abundance that the lamp of liberty still burns across these shores, he said. We will learn again the age-old lesson of liberty that America first learned 200 years ago and has been teaching the rest of mankind ever since. Humphrey then inserted into the Congressional Record the statement released that day by the 10 civil rights organizations coordinating the March on Washington.

But Im writing this morning about an event -- a related event, in my mind -- that occurred 10 years ago tonight. In 1963, as HHH knew, it was mainly the Democratic Party that Martin Luther King and the hundreds of thousands of civil rights marchers were trying to reach. Ten years ago today, however, the Democratic Party reached a place that civil rights pioneers like Humphrey, King, and A. Philip Randolph could only dream of -- even as they helped bring it about. Im speaking about the nomination Barack Obama as Democrats 2008 presidential nominee.

John McCain served in the Senate with Obama. In truth, McCain didnt initially care for Illinois junior senator. McCain had hoped to run against Hillary Clinton, whom he liked and respected, as he confided to me over breakfast in 2007. McCain considered Obama too unaccomplished in national politics. Obama had not only cut in line, McCain believed, but hed made a dubious bargain to get there: Specifically, he helped scuttle a sweeping immigration reform bill that McCain and Sen. Edward Kennedy had cobbled together -- and which George W. Bush had promised to sign.

Yet in the summer of 2008, when Barack Obama scaled the mountaintop, becoming the first African-American nominee of a major political party, McCain took time out from his own campaign to offer a grace note of appreciation for this historical accomplishment. It came in the form of a 30-second videotaped spot in which McCain congratulated his general election opponent for his achievement. McCain did so warmly, while alluding subtly to the 1963 march.

That was one of my favorite John McCain moments. Ill share of couple of others shortly. First, Id direct you to our front page, which aggregates, as it does each day, an array of columns and stories spanning the political spectrum. We also offer a complement of original material from our own reporters and contributors this morning, including the following:

* * *

Can Cruz-ORourke Senate Race Turn Texas Blue? Sally Persons explores Democrats hopes that the incumbents damage brand, aided by challenger Beto ORourkes charisma, can flip the seat long held by the GOP.

The Juror Who Helps Make America Great Again. In a column, I consider the scope of the Mueller investigation, the politics infecting all sides, and the Manafort trial juror who managed to rise above it all.

Chinas Expansion Demands Bold Action. In RealClearDefense, Pierce MacConaghy assails U.S. meekness in the South China Sea.

Confronting Cyberattacks to the U.S. Electricity Grid. In RealClearEnergy, Tim Walberg explains the importance of guarding the power grid.

How States Like New Mexico Depend on the Energy Industry. In RealClearPolicy, David Holt describes the benefits some state economies derive from energy production.

Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition. In RealClearBooks, Max Diamond spotlights Roger Scrutons recent work on conservative intellectual history.

* * *

With a month to go in the 2008 general election, a woman at a town-hall event in Lakeville, Minn., told McCain that she didnt trust Barack Obama, who she described as an Arab, apparently referring to various conspiracy theories floating around about Obama being some kind of foreign-born Manchurian candidate with Muslim sympathies.

McCain wouldnt even listen to it. Taking the microphone from her hand, he cut her ad hominem criticism short.

No, maam, McCain said of his opponent. Hes a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and thats what this campaign is all about. With that, the audience of Republicans broke into applause.

This exchange was foreshadowed by one that took place months earlier, before McCain had the GOP nomination officially clinched. At a rally in Cincinnati, McCain was introduced by Bill Cunningham, a local conservative radio talk show host, who insulted the news media and the leading Democratic candidates -- twice referring to Obama as Barack Hussein Obama, stressing his middle name.

Although he wasnt on stage while this was going on, McCain heard about it, and he took the extraordinary step of going to the press section to disavow his own warm-up speaker.

I take responsibility, and I repudiate what he said, he told reporters. A person came out here before I arrived and made some disparaging remarks about Senators Obama and Clinton, and I regret that. I will not tolerate anything in this campaign that denigrates either Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton.

This doesnt mean that John McCain was a patsy on the campaign trail -- or that he didnt want to win. He showed how competitive he was in his very first campaign.

After finally being released from North Vietnam after five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war, McCain recovered his health enough to get his wings back as a Navy flier. Serving as a liaison between the Navy and the U.S. Senate, he got the political bug. Although hell always be remembered for his two presidential campaigns and his long tenure as a senator from Arizona, McCains political career began with a race for a House seat in that states sprawling 1st Congressional District.

McCain wasnt originally from Arizona. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone, raised as a military brat, and attended college at the U.S. Naval Academy. But hed remarried, settled in suburban Phoenix, and set his sights on a vacant House seat.

He was opposed by several more experienced Republicans who believed they had a more solid claim to the seat. Running against a war hero isnt easy, so they played the obvious card: McCain, they said, was a carpetbagger whod only lived in the state for a year. What did he know about the needs of its constituents?

At first, McCain simply replied, correctly, that many people had moved into the district in recent years. But as Robert Timberg noted in his brilliant book The Nightingales Song, it was a weak answer, and McCain was getting hammered on it. One night, during a debate in which he was pressed on this issue yet again, he turned it all around.

Listen pal, he said. I spent 22 years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things.

As a matter of fact, he continued, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.

As Timberg wrote in describing this scene, the audience sat for a few seconds in shocked silence, then broke into thunderous applause.

We are applauding this man still, as we should.

Carl M. Cannon

Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics

@CarlCannon (Twitter)

ccannon@realclearpolitics.comFind a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale

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Steven Rogers is a senior entertainment reporter for Reality TV World and been covering the reality TV genre for two decades.

: Before the 90 Days featured the majority of couples questioning their relationships after hitting bumps in the road during the Americans' adventures abroad during Sunday night's episode on TLC.: Before the 90 Days features six Americans and their partners overseas trying to make a romance work. In order to pursue a fairy-tale ending, these couples must overcome immense odds and obstacles, including flying halfway across the world just to meet or spend time together.Each couple hopes a marriage proposal will take place within 90 days, or else one's Tourist Visa will expire.The two returning pairs on : Before the 90 Days are Darcey Silva , a 42-year-old who works in the fashion industry from Middletown, CT, and her boyfriend Jesse Meester , a 24-year-old from Amsterdam, Netherlands, as well as Paul Staehle , a 34-year-old who works in IT from Louisville, KY, and his girlfriend Karine Martins , a 21-year-old from Brazil.The four new couples starring on the series are Angela Deem, a 52-year-old nursing assistant for Hospice from Hazlehurst, GA, and her boyfriend Michael Ilesanmi, a 30-year-old from Nigeria; Rachel Bear, a 33-year-old from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and her boyfriend Jon Walters, a 34-year-old from England; Ricky Reyes, a 33-year-old photographer and videographer from Columbus, OH, and his love interest Melissa, a 28-year-old from Colombia; and Tarik Myers , a 43-year-old realtor and single father from Virginia Beach, VA, and his love interest Hazel Cagalitan from the Philippines.Below is the latest on each American and international pairing, according to the latest episode:Michael was afraid to introduce Angela to his mother given she's 22 years older and became the first white person to enter his neighborhood. Angela was very nervous about whether shead be accepted."My ex-girlfriends are not grandmas," Michael told the cameras of his fears going into the important meet and greet.When sitting down with Michael's mother, Duke -- who said she wants Angela to be "obedient" to her son regardless of the fact she's wealthier -- admitted she was afraid of gun violence in the U.S., but Angela assured her that she doesn't like guns and would keep Michael safe.Duke made Angela snails for the occasion, which disgusted her. Besides seemingly offending Duke a little bit by spitting out the food in Michael's mouth, Duke liked Angela a lot.Angela then met a couple of Michael's friends. Angela just wanted her picture on Michael's phone and hoped he was being honest when he told her the excuse that he could get arrested for having such a photo under the belief he's trying to scam an American white woman.Later on, Angela just wanted to relax after a stressful day, but he took her to a market instead so she could dress herself in African attire, which really wasn't Angela's style. Michael, however, wanted his girlfriend to embrace his culture.The couple then got into a disagreement over Angela's smoking habit. He didn't like it at all, but she promised she was trying to quit. Angela felt Michael was being a bit controlling, as she didn't believe she was doing anything wrong.Tension heightened when Michael called Angela "fat" in the store. She became very upset and said it was "embarrassing and insulting.""I feel it's going to be difficult to deal with her," Michael told the cameras.Meanwhile, Angela wondered if Michael was ashamed of her, as she was already self-conscious about her weight.Darcey was happy Jesse got along with her two daughters, and she envisioned a marriage proposal coming soon.Jesse wanted Darcey to stay off social media because of her mistake in the past, but she didn't like that and felt "bullied" by her boyfriend. Jesse then told the cameras Darcey was "sensitive and insecure."But Darcey said Jesse simply didn't like it when she tried to defend herself and be a strong, independent woman. The couple got into a fight at dinner that resulted in Jesse walking away and both individuals venting, "I'm done."Darcey felt it was wrong he was trying to shut her life down."My time in America, it should be just about building a future in the U.S. with Darcey and her daughters, but the only way I want to do that is if there is a foundation of harmony, and her behavior right now is crazy," Jesse said in a confessional.Darcey wanted Jesse to want a life with her for the right reasons, but the fight subsided when Jesse assured his girlfriend that he loved her for her.As Darcey cried in bed, Jesse told her, "I love you wholeheartedly and I mean that."But Jesse told the cameras Darcey needed to "fix herself" in order to have "a long lasting and workable" relationship.The next day, Darcey showed Jesse her hometown, because thatas where theyad live together. Jesse found it beautiful and could definitely imagine himself there. On the ride there, however, the pair bickered again, and she felt belittled. This was a running theme for these two, and they both knew it and were sick of it.The couple then got settled into an Air B&B together instead of the condo Darcey shares with her twin sister, whom Darcey said can be judgmental. Jesse added the sisters can be jealous of one another.That night, Jesse and Darcey met her sister Stacey for dinner. Stacey said she wanted them to be happy but she could sense some tension, and it escalated when the pair conducted interviews with producers later on.Ricky was deeply in love with Melissa and wanted her to be his wife. He was ready to explore Colombia with her after meeting her for the first time in a restaurant. Ricky thought Melissa was "hot, sexy, beautiful and intelligent."Although Ricky and Melissa made plans for the day after their meeting, Melissa said she couldnat hang out because she had a lot of homework to do. As a gentleman, Ricky didnat want to add any pressure, but he hoped she would change her mind. Ricky just hoped that wasn't Melissa's way of saying she was not interested in him.Ricky then revealed to his cousin via video chat that he had rejected Melissa for a kiss the night prior by turning the cheek. The cousin therefore wondered if Melissa was blowing Ricky off due to that awkward incident.Ricky immediately regretted his actions, but he didn't want Melissa to think he was focused on having a physical relationship with her. Regardless, Ricky was willing to do whatever it takes to win her back and win her over.Ricky said he was invested in his romance, but he was so disappointed to find out later that day Melissa was a no-show."I thought she was the one, but Melissa has no time for me. I was naive to think we had something real. It's heartbreaking she's not here,a Ricky said.Since Paul was in Brazil on a Tourist Visa, they had very little time to get married. Paulas documents needed to be approved so they could wed and she could eventually go back to the United States with him.Paul and Karine were told they could tie the knot in 30 days. The couple then looked at their future wedding venue and she was really happy.That night, Karine told Paul that she wanted to start a family with him as soon as possible, but he wasn't sure they were ready for that next big step in life. Karine argued, however, a baby would bring them closer together and help them to stop fighting.Karine was afraid to go to the United States and then have Paul leave her, so she wanted him to commit to her and promise a child.Paul agreed to make Karine happy, but he felt they were moving too fast. Later that day, Paul spoke to his mother via video chat about marrying Karine and potentially welcoming a child with her. Paul's mother said, "No," to both ideas, and she definitely wasn't onboard.Paul's mother called them "crazy" for rushing things and said they can't take care of a baby when they can barely take care of themselves. She added that Karine had plenty of time to become a mother down the road since she's young, not to mention having a baby is very expensive.Paul realized he had to make sure he could be financially stable with Karine first, and living together wasn't going well.Paul felt Karine could be lazy at times and acted like a teenager. She slept a lot and didn't cook or clean. Karine felt Paul bossed her around and acted like her dad.When they went grocery shopping together, they also butted heads. Karine was on social media while Paul was trying to pick out products in another language, and when he got angry with her, she called him "super controlling." Paul felt like they were on two totally different pages.Tarik said his first night with Hazel didn't go well when he was anticipating an incredibly romantic evening. They slept with a divider in the bed, and she questioned if he was still interested in his ex. He got a agoodnight peck,a but he wasn't going to push or rush her.After one day together, Tarik met Hazel's parents. Hazel was nervous because she cared very much what her parents thought about him. She just wished he was more religious.Tarik soon discovered Hazel's family was very poor. Hazel believed marrying Tarik could make them all happy and solve her family's financial problems.Tarik noted meeting her parents was "humbling" given the tiny quarters in which they lived. Hazel's parents then told Tarik that Hazel needed to be the only woman in his life and it was their hope Tarik would marry their daughter.In order to receive a blessing from Hazel's parents, he attended church with the family but found himself extremely uncomfortable during the five-hour ceremony. The mass was intense, with people yelling, crying and speaking in tongues.Tarik realized there were "land mines" standing in the way of his relationship with Hazel, especially her family's strong faith in God. However, Tarik believed there is a God, and he respected their religion -- even though he had no intention of following it or getting baptized.Rachel said it was the best morning of her life because it was the first time she woke up next to Jon. She called it "surreal" and said she really enjoyed herself the night prior. Rachel giggled and gushed about how they had amazing chemistry, and it was apparent the couple had sex for the first time.Rachel was then introduced to Jon's outspoken sister Abby as well as her children. Rachel anticipated Abby was going to speak her mind and wouldn't be worried about offending anybody."I could never keep track of Jonas girlfriends because there were so many," Abby admitted in a confessional.Jon told Abby that he had never felt more secure in a relationship, but Rachel felt Abby was trying to warn her about Jon's unflattering dating history. Abby even called her brother "a liar" when he said he had two previous girlfriends.Abby simply believed Jon and Rachel were still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship. It also became clear Jon knew nothing about kids.Jon later admitted to Rachel he felt Lucy calling him "dad" would be wrong. She thought the title was fitting considering Jon paid for her daycare and was in the picture while she was pregnant, but Jon thought the title meant nothing given his own dad wasn't even around much.Jon was going to let Lucy know he loved her, but he wasn't onboard with her viewing him as her father. Rachel, however, hoped Jon would change his mind because she wanted him to play that role in her daughter's life."First we have to decide if we want to spend the rest of our lives together," Jon told the cameras.Cyclists who frequent Barnett Shoals Road will now have the chance to do so safely, within the bounds of a protected bike lane.Athens is known for its slew of concert venues and the sheer amount of shows every night around town. The process of getting these shows plannThree bird scooters parked on the corner of Church and Baxter street in Athens, Ga on Aug. 26, 2018.SALISBURY  The late chef and restaurateur Charlie Trotter once said, A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, thats when cuisine is truly exciting.

The arrival of Below the Salt at 19F Main St. in July signaled the start of a seasons symphony in Asian food. Chef and owner Noah Sexton, 38, of Brooklyn, N.Y., had started small a few weeks ago but has crescendoed to a full-scale menu this month. Sexton said he eschews the phrase Asian fusion. Dinner guests at Below the Salt will not find, for example, hamburgers seasoned with hoisin sauce.

I was focused more on foods created with French techniques, he said. I try to avoid the word fusion.

Sexton said he has been cooking his whole life. As a child from Bay Ridge, N.Y., he regularly cooked for his familys household. I really liked it, he said. He also worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant at age 14. His adulthood took him to law school and then practicing civil litigation (he is licensed in both New York and Connecticut). Yet he had always wanted to get back into the restaurant business.

I traveled extensively throughout Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong, and have always been inspired by the food, Sexton said. He eventually established two Jersey City, N. J. eateries, which he sold in 2016. He also worked as a private chef for a family on the Upper East Side in New York.

I missed the creativity and the camaraderie of cooking in a restaurant kitchen, he said, explaining his return to the business.

The space for Below the Salt was most recently occupied by Liz and Eric Macaires The Lockup restaurant, which had offered a bar and restaurant area. Below the Salt is now open Fridays and Saturdays for prix fixe dinner seatings at 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.

The phrase below the salt originated in the Middle Ages among the social hierarchy of nobilitys dinner tables. Salt, a precious condiment back then, was set in the middle of the dining table. Those of high noble rank were seated close to the Lord and Lady of the house, or above the salt. Meanwhile, those in lower social standing were seated below it. Sexton explained the restaurants philosophy is a more egalitarian approach by serving the finest ingredients expertly prepared without the pretense.

Sexton said the restaurants future plans include expanded hours and service, including a Saturday and Sunday brunch. He has brought his kitchen staff of 12 with him from Brooklyn. They are a solid team, he said.

Below the Salt offers two dining experiences: the noodle menu and the prix fixe menu.

The noodle menu is served in the spaces bistro and lounge area and includes ramen noodles and small plates. Bistro seating is on a first-come, first-served basis from 5 to 11 p.m.

Meals can be accompanied by an assortment of wines, craft beers, and cocktails. Some small plates ranging in price from $4 to $10 include cucumbers with black vinegar, yuzu, and sesame; a crab claw with Jonah crab, shrimp, crispy tapioca, and smoked mustard; and pork buns, with pork belly, hoisin, scallion, and cucumber.

Bowls on the menu, which range from $14 to $16, include Lamb Dan Dan, which features bok choy, tahini, Sichuan oil, and sesame charred corn; Thai noodles, with shrimp, lemon grass, Thai chili, and peanuts; chicken ramen, which includes wood ear mushroom, shoyu broth, bamboo shoots, and Onsen tamago egg.

Main dishes include Tete de Cochon, a roasted half-pigs-head with steamed buns, smoked mustard, pickled vegetables, and bok choy; and a whole red snapper, which comes with leek-and-scallion cole slaw, rice noodles, cilantro, and sweet chili sauce.

Sextons kitchen associate Glen Rosengrant served the scallion potato pancakes dish. The dish is a play on mothers latkes, which brings fond memories, he said.

Another plate, the Sichuan chicken, arrives with a rice cake, smoked bacon, scallions, and chilis. When people think of spicy foods, they usually blow out the front of their palates, he explained. Notice the heat with this dish is at the back of your palate. It is an enjoyable sensation, but you are still able to taste the food.

The second dining option at Below the Salt is the prix fixe tasting menu  with two seatings at 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. in the main dining room.

The community has responded greatly to the tastings, he said. We have sold out. The food has been very well-received. He said the restaurant averages about 80 customers per evening.

Sexton added, What we are inspired to cook changes. This week as an appetizer, for example, we have a tagliatelle with caviar, mushroom, and shallot cream. The caviar is American sturgeon.

Menu items change but some dishes served in previous weeks included the following: A first course included a choice of grilled octopus with confit potato, pickled celery, and frisee, a curly endive; or Brussels sprout salad with smoked labne, grilled eggplant, and pistachio. In this menu, the second course included miso glazed cod with wood ear mushroom and green peas; or a hanger steak with trumpet royale mushrooms, latkes, and aji verde (or Peruvian green sauce). Desserts included a choice of peaches and cream or ricotta cherry custard. Prices range from $60 to $65 per person for the meal.

Local diners who have visited appear to be enchanted by the symphony of the food.

Jordan Rochelson, a local resident who teaches English at the Salisbury School in Salisbury, said, Below the Salt brings affordable and creative flavor to the area. I have tried amazing foods that Ive never been exposed to before, and have also been pleasantly surprised by twists on dishes that I had already been familiar with.

Rochelson added, All the ramen dishes are amazing and flavorful, and the crispy rice and the pork bun appetizers are terrific ways to start the meal. The cocktails are also exceptional!

Rochelsons supervisor, Salisbury School Dean of Faculty Rhonan Mokriski, also commented, It is exactly what the Northwest Corner needed  authentic Chinese food.

Online reviews have been equally positive. An AARP website users restaurant review, wrote in part: We moved here from NYC and have missed the creative Asian food that we were able to get in the city. Below The Salt has filled the void! The ramen is unbelievably tasty and well-seasoned, and the appetizers were authentic and homemade. The cocktails werent a slouch either. She had a gin cocktail, and I had the Thai Old Fashioned. Both were delicious.

Below the Salt is located at 19F Main Street in Salisbury. It is open Fridays and Saturdays for a prix fixe dinner with seatings at 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. The noodle menu is served in bistro seating on a first-come, first-served basis from 5 to 11 p.m. Below the Salts telephone number is 860-596-1127. For more information visit www.belowthesalt.com.BRIDGEWATER  While traditional fair rides, food and shopping were a draw for many families at the Bridgewater Country Fair on Saturday, most agreed the day wasnt complete without a visit to the animals.

The animals are the main attraction, said Mary Jane Fast, of Fairfield, who watched the Junior Dairy Show from the bleachers with her husband. We love to watch the cows  its a tradition thats being carried on for farmers in Connecticut.

Like any true country fair, hundreds of cows, pigs, sheep, birds and other farm animals were on display for families to meet. But most had traveled to the fair with their owners not only to greet excited fair-goers, but to compete for top prizes.

The Junior Dairy Show, one of the first livestock judging competitions of the day, brought cows out from their stalls one by one into a paddock where a judge inspected and announced a winner in each breed.

For Cwen Cole, a 15-year-old from Roxbury, the competition was her first time showing a calf  and, it turned out, her first time winning.

It was nerve-wracking, Cole said after her 7-month-old brown Swiss calf Frecklez was named the junior champion and grand champion. (When I won) it was kind of a relief.

Cole said she was inspired to start showing in livestock competitions while watching a girl who lives on a farm where she works compete and because of her love of the cows. The first show made her excited to come back next year, Cole said.

Other competitors were returning contestants, like 18-year-old Sara Pokrywka, of New Preston, who said

Saturday was her 11th and last time competing in the junior shows. Her 1-year-old cow, Twister, was the runner-up to Frecklez.

Seeing farmers and handlers who live nearby, like Pokrywka and Cole, is typical of most country fairs, said Don Nelson, a judge in the neighboring poultry barn.

A breeder, exhibitor and judge with the American Poultry Association, Nelson said he judges about a dozen of the 20 or so fairs in Connecticut each year.

Most, he said, attract different groups of animals because they are often local to that area. The Bridgewater fair has become one of the bigger livestock competition fairs in the state because there are still a lot of those local farms, he said.

Its still rural up here, so its not as developed, Nelson said.

On Saturday, there were about 240 birds to judge, but that number can jump up to 400 in other years. Robert Bernardo, who assisted Nelson, said the low number was probably because of the bad weather.

Nelson, who judges at the Bridgewater fair each year, said he started by showing birds of his own and got certified as a judge because he enjoyed it so much.

I enjoy seeing the birds, he said. Theres a lot of nice chickens, and a lot of nice people, too.If you remember a song called Roger Young you also have stirring memories of World War II. Roger Young was a young infantryman who was killed in battle when he covered a grenade with his body, saving the lives of a number of his buddies at the cost of his own life.

I was a kid, 10 or so years old, and our floor model Philco radio was devoted daily and nightly to war news and stories, and to patriotic music. There were dramatic presentations practically every night about the heroic exploits of our soldiers and sailors fighting in Europe and the islands of the Pacific. Jingoistic Americans listened with rapt interest. I remember the Roger Young story in detail, and another about an American submarine commander, mortally wounded after his vessel surfaced, ordering his second-in-command to take er down. All very dramatic to a 10-year old.

While I cant remember the full tune or lyrics of the ballad of Roger Young, I do recall this much: Roger Young, Roger Young, fought and died for the men he marched among . . . And then it went on to say musically that forever more, through the annals of U.S. warfare down through the years, will shine the name, shine the name of Roger Young. I believe Young died at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

On Thursday, Jim Vicevich, WTICs nonpareil morning talk show host, spoke about U.S. Air Force Tech Sgt. John A. Chapman, who a day earlier had received, posthumously, the Medal of Honor, our countys highest military award for valor.

Greatly outnumbered by al-Qaeda terrorists, and gravely wounded, Chapman, from Windsor Locks, performed heroically, saving the lives of 20 comrades. The action occurred 16 years ago on a mountain top in Afghanistan.

Chapmans story reminded me of the Roger Young saga. That musical salute has been running through my head ever since. However, it went beyond a story of exemplary heroism in war. Vicevich pointed out, with some vexation, that while Fox Broadcasting had used the Chapman story Wednesday evening, other major networks had ignored it. Of course, Jim was right on the money with this. It was a national story  a story to make Americans proud.

That day, I checked three newspapers that circulate heavily in this area. Only The Hartford Courant carried the story and that paper did it up right, with a long, detailed front page story and a large photo. Maybe other papers and electronic news outlets had announced that the Connecticut man was going to be so honored at an earlier date and let it go at that. Even if they did, it deserved coverage on the day of the event.

The ceremony took place in the East Room of the White House, with President Donald Trump presiding. Chapmans widow, Valerie Nessel, his two daughters and his mother were there along with a number of previous Medal of Honor winners. Trumps speech was outstanding and he introduced five of the 20 men whose lives were saved by Chapmans actions.

The president, who often leaves his audience aghast with his sometimes outrageous or vulgar pronouncements, came up big on this day and at this ceremony. It wasnt about him. He knew it, and he was proud and presidential as he led the tribute to the fallen patriot who gave the last full measure.

The event deserved full coverage for the sake of this modern-day Roger Young, for his family and for an appreciative America.3 1 of 3 Contributed photo Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Contributed photo Show More Show Less 3 of 3





WASHINGTON  The award-winning Gunn Historical Museum in Washington would like to borrow Washington related artifacts to display in a major upcoming permanent exhibit about the history of Washington.

The exhibit will be funded by a $100,000 grant from the State of Connecticuts Department of Economic and Community Development.The Chinese ride-sharing service Didi Chuxing has suspended its car-pooling app Hitch after a woman was raped and killed by a driver.



The service, which delivered more than one billion trips over the past three years, was suspended from Monday while it reviewed "mistakes" in its business model.



"The incident shows the many deficiencies with our customer service processes, especially in the failure to act swiftly on [a] previous passenger's complaint and the cumbersome and rigid process of information sharing with the police," the company said in a statement over the weekend.



Reuters reported that Hitch's general manager Huang Jieli and vice president for customer services Huang Jinhong have been removed from their posts.



The key suspect in the rape-and-murder case in the eastern city of Wenzhou on Friday had no prior criminal record, had provided the right documents, and had passed a facial recognition test before starting to take calls from users, the company said.



Hitch has already been suspended once before after the murder of a woman who booked it for a trip in May.



And an unconfirmed social media post retweeted by the MeToo China Twitter account on Monday accused Didi Chuxing of covering up earlier, unreported rape cases by paying off victims' families and asking them to sign nondisclosure agreements.



The company is no stranger to public anger, and has already been slammed over a "socialization" feature on the app enabling users to comment on the looks of female passengers, some of whom were tagged as "pretty girl" by drivers.



The company later redesigned the app to exclude personalized tagging and profiles, and introduced facial-recognition scanning on all drivers before they could start taking jobs.



Not enough checks



Rights activist Yu Yunfeng said there currently aren't enough checks by the company or the authorities to ensure that drivers using such apps are the right kind of person.



"The number of years' experience of driving a person has, whether they drink to excess ... whether they have done something bad in the past; all this can tell us whether they are fit to do this job," Yu said.



"This is very important."



Wenzhou police said in a statement that their first two requests for the identifying details of the driver and car involved in the case met with requests for more information and documentation, wasting around

92 minutes after the woman first raised the alarm.



Veteran journalist Zhu Xinxin said the authorities have failed to take seriously the possibility of such crimes.



"Law enforcement agencies don't take this seriously enough," Zhu said. "As well as solving this case, most importantly they need to act quickly to close any loopholes [that would enable such things to happen again]."



"They need to look at what parts of a person's journey aren't subject to monitoring and make every possible preparation to manage this," he said. "Fundamentally, it is the law enforcement agencies who are responsible for this."



Current affairs commentator Cao Jingxing agreed.



"Actually, it's the government that isn't doing its job here," Cao wrote via the social media platform Sina Weibo. "They knew very well that there are huge risks attached to Didi ride-sharing and security loopholes, but they didn't want to boost regulation."



"This is the main reason behind the repeated murder cases linked to Didi."



Reported by Yang Fan for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by the Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.Two members of a political party formed by the leaders of the 2014 pro-democracy Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong were detained recently by state security police across the internal immigration border in mainland China, it said in a statement on Monday.



The two members of Demosisto were detained and questioned by state security police in Guangzhou, provincial capital of the southern province of Guangdong, which borders the former British colony.



One member was detained on Aug. 17 as they prepared to leave Guangzhou at the end of a trip to mainland China, Demosisto said in a statement.



"As the member left the Guangzhou train platform at 8:30pm on 17th August 2018 (Friday), a group exited a seven-seat vehicle and approached them while showing their badges issued by the Ministry of State Security," the statement said.



The Demosisto member was told that police had received a "complaint" that they were trying to stir up trouble on the mainland Chinese side of the border.



The member and their companions had their phones confiscated, and were taken to a room in Guangzhou's Liuhua Hotel in connection with "state security" and "espionage," Demosisto said.



"The member was attached to a machine which resembled a polygraph, and was then asked about the process by which the member joined Scholarism and Demosisto, and the members role in the organizations and in the Occupy movement," it said.



"The [detention] lasted for five hours until 1:30 a.m., and the member left to return to Hong Kong the next day," the party said.



The detainee was unwilling to answer questions at first, but was threatened with a prolonged interrogation if they refused.



Pointed questions

They were asked whether they had brought any books across the border, and whether they felt guilty about participating in the 2014 pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.



They were also warned that to support self-determination for Hong Kong would amount to "incitement to subvert state power," a charge commonly used to jail outspoken Chinese dissidents.



The Demosisto member was also asked for a list of all Demosisto members, and about their role in organizing protests linked to visits by high-ranking Chinese officials, including President Xi Jinping.



The member was also asked to sign an apology letter, subject to threats, and was offered possible payments for future intelligence on Demosisto, it said.



A Demosisto member was also detained and questioned for more than three hours on March 26 by state security police in Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong.



"When the member was brought to the police station in Shenzhen, the member was asked to sit in a chair which had handcuffs and ankle-cuffs," the party said in its account of the detentions.



The member was also asked to write down a list of Demosistos members and staff members, and asked if they knew specific people, it said.



"Before leaving, [state security police] reiterated that the content of the questioning was not to be revealed online or to anyone else," forcing the detainee to sign a pledge not to reveal the details of their detention, it said.



Demosisto was founded in April 2016 by three former leaders of the 2014 Occupy Central movement for fully democratic elections: Joshua Wong, Nathan Law, and Agnes Chow.



Scholarism led public protests in 2012 against proposals from the ruling Chinese Communist Party for patriotic education in Hong Kong's schools that led to the plans being shelved.



Threat to personal safety

Scholarism activists Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow went on to play a key role in the Occupy Central democracy movement two years later.



Wong told RFA on Monday that the mainland authorities are now actively targeting Hong Kong pro-democracy activists.



"If people who have been involved in the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement go to the mainland, they are clearly facing an ever-greater threat to their personal safety, even if they haven't broken any laws," Wong said.



"There is a huge chasm between their understanding of the rule of law and ours."



Wong said it is the duty of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government under Carrie Lam to ensure its citizens' protection.



"Such cross-border incidents are becoming more and more common, and it's not just high-profile politicians who are being targeted. It's people who have played a fairly low-key role; rank-and-file members of politicial groups," he said.



Law said Demosisto doesn't know exactly what information the state security police hold on its members, but he assumes that it knows at least the basic details of its membership.



Neither of the two detainees had been members for very long, so he assumed that their questioning was intended to frighten off other members of Demosisto.



"I think they wanted to ensure that bad news, with overtones of threat, came of this, to warn the members of Demosisto to be more careful," Law said.



Law was elected just five months after Demosisto's founding as the youngest-ever member of Hong Kong's Legislative Council (LegCo), but was later stripped of his seat after Beijing intervened with a ruling on the validity of oaths of allegiance made by him and five other pro-democracy lawmakers.



Chow, meanwhile, was debarred by election officials from standing in the 2018 Hong Kong Island by-election, for advocating self-determination for the city, in a move that was widely condemned as a threat to the city's political life.



Under the terms of the 1997 handover agreement, Hong Kong people were promised a continuation of their existing rights and freedoms for at least 50 years, including freedom of speech, association and political participation.



But China's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress (NPC) issued a decree on Aug. 31, 2014 that potential election candidates would need to be acceptable to Beijing, sparking the 79-day Occupy Central movement for "genuine universal suffrage."



Reported by Lau Siu-fung for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.Recent threats by China's state security police against Muslim poet Cui Haoxin -- known by his pen name An Ran -- are a deliberate attempt to stop him speaking out about the mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other minority groups in its northwestern region of Xinjiang, a rights group has said.



Cui, a Hui Muslim, was visited and threatened by police on Aug. 16 after he sent and retweeted posts from his Twitter account about the detentions.



He was warned not to use overseas social media, and not to become a "tool" of hostile foreign forces, he wrote in a later blog post.



"As a group dedicated to safeguarding and cherishing freedom of expression everywhere, PEN America recognizes that Chinas policy of forced 're-education' in Xinjiang is a human rights disaster, one with dire implications for the right to free expression," PEN America said in a statement on its website.



"We call upon the government to immediately end and reverse these catastrophic and abusive policies."



Last April, An Ran was sent on a weeklong 're-education course' in eastern China and was briefly detained in connection with his poetry and other writings that reference Xinjiang, it said.



"An Ran, a poet, is speaking out on one of the most important human rights issues of our day," Summer Lopez, who heads PEN America's Free Expression Programs, said. "Instead of attempting to shut him down, authorities should be listening."



"This is a clear cut example of the Chinese government seeking to silence a critical voice through intimidation," said Summer Lopez, senior director of Free Expression Programs at PEN America.



PEN America cited "wide array of credible reports from journalists and human rights organizations [that] have revealed a broad system of state surveillance and forced detention of inhabitants ... in large [camps]."



Once inside, "they are subject to a mandatory patriotic regimen ... oriented around coercively discouraging detainees from expressing their ethnic and religious identity, including reported incidents where Muslim detainees were forced to eat pork, as well as other abuses," it said.



"While reported numbers vary, the number of detainees is widely believed to be in the hundreds of thousands," it said.



Cui told RFA he fully expects to face further retaliation, based on warnings from police during their visit that he should stop speaking out about the Xinjiang camps.



"The reason I am continuing to speak out is that there is a mass incarceration under way in Xinjiang on a huge scale," he said in a recent interview with RFA. "If we don't pay attention, we will leave [Uyghurs and other detainees] in utter despair and helplessness."



"I will continue to speak out until my last breath for these people, regardless of what happens next," Cui said.



Cui said the so-called "re-education camps" are targeting a specific ethnicity and their culture and religion.



"This is a mass incarceration targeting a specific ethnic group and a specific religion, which has similarities to the events that took place in Nazi Germany," he said. "The authorities say that they are in danger of being radicalized, and that this is an anti-terrorism measures, but I think that you can't solve social problems with concentration camps."



Turkey-based Uyghur Rafat told RFA that he has a number of friends and relatives who have been sent to the camps.



"The Xinjiang camps differ from the Nazi concentration camps in name only," Rafat said. "Anyone from the free world would see this in an instant, were they able to witness them with their own eyes."



Earlier this month, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed concerns over Chinas mass internment of ethnic Uyghurs and restrictions on their religious freedom.



The panel said it was "deeply concerned" by reports that China has turned the [Xinjiang] Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) into something that resembles a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy in the name of eradicating religious extremism and maintaining social stability.



Beginning in April 2017, Uyghurs and Kazakhs accused of harboring strong religious views and politically incorrect ideas have been jailed or detained in political re-education camps throughout the region. Many have done nothing more than go overseas, or have family members who have gone overseas.



Earlier this month, Chinas foreign ministry effectively expelled a BuzzFeed journalist who won a human rights award for her reporting on the mass incarceration and surveillance of Uyghurs and other groups.



The decision by Chinas foreign ministry not to renew the visa of BuzzFeed's China bureau chief, Megha Rajagopalan, came after she carried out extensive investigative reporting into heavy surveillance measures in Xinjiang, and the use of huge camps to detain Uyghurs and other minority groups for re-education, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in a statement.



Reported by Ng Yik-tung and Dai Weisen for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.Young North Koreans forced to rehearse displays of crowd loyalty at an upcoming national holiday are losing interest in the slogans they shout, with many showing open signs of resentment at being made to participate, North Korean sources say.



Some have been pulled from their workplaces to take part, while others have been denied their right to go home during breaks from school, a source in the capital Pyongyang told RFAs Korean Service.



All colleges are in the middle of [summer] vacation, but the city is full of young people whove been mobilized for practicing, RFAs source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.



Changwang Street, [founding national leader] Kim Il Sung Square, the Central Library, and the Juche Tower area all have traffic jams now at certain times of the day, he said.



Many are exhausted from the daily cheering practice in preparation for the Sept. 9 anniversary of the founding of the North Korean state, the source said, adding that those who come late or fail to attend risk severe criticism at the final review of their performance.



Meanwhile, students coming from schools outside Pyongyang have not been allowed by the countrys leaders to go home on their summer break, he said.



The students from other provinces are not happy with the Central Committee because they cannot return home for their 15-day vacation from classes.



College students are getting tired of their constant participation in the planning for the event, and they are criticizing [the government] for forcing them to be involved, he said. Some are adding negative words to their chants, or simply shout to relieve their stress.



Many just follow along



Also speaking to RFA, a second source in Pyongyang said that few of those taking part in the rehearsals care about or understand the slogans they are chanting.



If someone in the front cheers, the others just follow along or shout out something unrelated, the source said.



I was surprised when some college students who took part in the event for Kim Il Sungs birthday in April said they didnt even know what the event was about, he said.



Its pretty shocking when they say they dont know what theyre cheering, but just do whatever the person next to them does.



The level of dissatisfaction among North Koreas young is now reaching its limit, the source said.



College students are openly expressing their anger toward the authorities for making them take part in these events and for coercing their loyalty, he said.



Reported by Jieun Kim for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jung. Written in English by Richard Finney.A Vietnamese restaurant owner detained almost two weeks ago on unknown charges has died in police custody, with his body showing signs of trauma from a beating, family members say.



Hoang Tuan Long, aged about 39, was taken into custody on Aug. 18 without explanation and died on Aug. 24 at a hospital in Vietnams capital Hanoi, Longs wife Nguyen Thi Hang told RFAs Vietnamese Service.



On Aug. 24, at 7:55 in the morning, my mother-in-law got a phone call from a number we didnt recognize, and the person at the other end of the line told her that [Long] had died at Ha Dong General Hospital, Hang said.



We were very shocked to hear this, because he was perfectly healthy and had shown no sign of disease, she said.



Told that Longs body was now in a morgue, Hang was told by a doctor that he had bled from his ears and died because of a hemorrhage.



But they told my mother-in-law that he had had a stomachache and died because of that, she said.



Hang was later present at an autopsy conducted by military doctors at the familys request and observed a large dent at the back of Longs head, she said, adding, Four of his ribs were also broken, and there was stagnant blood in his heart and other organs were swollen.



Reached for comment by RFA, a staffer at the Tho Quan Commune police station, where Long had been taken after being detained, said that Long had been taken into custody for possessing drugs.



We followed protocol, said the officer, who declined to give his name.



We transferred him to the district police and then to Hoa Lo prison. He committed suicide, in spite of what you read on Facebook. He bit his tongue, he said.



Longs tongue was intact and showed no signs of injury at his autopsy, though, Hang told RFA, adding that her husband had never used or sold drugs.



Funeral disrupted by police



On Aug. 26, Longs family organized a funeral which was disrupted by plainclothes police, Hang said.



Our cousins used their mobile phones to record the moment when we put him in the coffin. We just wanted to keep a memory of him. But many plainclothes policemen stopped them and tried to snatch their phones away, creating a lot of noise.



"There were also some uniformed policemen at the funeral. They surrounded the area and monitored us very closely, she said.



New York-based Human Rights Watch has said that police brutality is systemic in Vietnam, whose Ministry of Public Security has admitted that 226 suspects and inmates died in police stations and detention facilities throughout the country between October 2010 and September 2014.



On Aug. 2, Hoang Anh, a 35-year-old farmer from Kien Giang province who joined large-scale June 10 protests over government plans to grant long-term leases to foreign companies operating in special economic zones (SEZs) and a controversial cybersecurity law, was found dead after having been interrogated by the local police, local rights group Defend the Defenders said in an earlier report.



The groups director, Vu Quoc Ngu, cited local activists who said that four police officers visited Anhs home in Chau Thanh district on Aug. 2 to question him about his involvement in the protest, and when his wife returned from making them tea, she found him collapsed with injuries to his neck and belly.



Anh died later that day after being brought to a district hospital, but police in Ken Giang said the farmer committed suicide. Local authorities reportedly forced Anhs family to bury him the following day.



Dozens of people continue to die mysteriously in custody, despite Hanoi ratifying the UN Convention against Torture in November 2014, the rights group said.



In May last year, authorities in Vietnams Vinh Long province announced that Hoa Hao Buddhist follower Nguyen Huu Tan had cut his own throat with a police investigators letter opener and died following an interrogation, but his family members questioned the official report, noting that his head showed signs of trauma and was nearly severed from his body.



Prominent blogger Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, one of the best-known of Vietnams nearly 100 political prisoners and also known as Mother Mushroom, had documented 31 cases of mysterious deaths in police custody before being imprisoned last year for her online writings criticizing the government.



Surge in sentences



On Aug. 27, New York-based rights group Human Rights Work called on the Australian government to press Vietnam to improve its rights record at a bilateral Human Rights Dialogue scheduled to be held on Tuesday in Hanoi.



Over the past year, weve seen a surge in lengthy prison sentences handed down to people peacefully calling for democracy and an end to one-party rule in Vietnam, said Elaine Pearson, Australia director at Human Rights Watch.



Australia should pressure Vietnam to set concrete and measurable benchmarks to improve its abysmal rights record, Pearson said.



Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Viet Ha. Written in English by Richard Finney.Afghan officials said unknown aircraft hit Taliban forces in a province along the border with Tajikistan, killing eight militants, a day after a shooting that left at least two Tajiks killed.

The origin of the aircraft was unclear. Tajik officials denied its warplanes or helicopters were involved, as did Russia, which has a sizable military contingent in Tajikistan.

Khalil Asir, spokesman for police in Afghanistans Takhar province, said the aircraft struck early on August 27 in the Darqad district near the border area. In addition to the dead, six other militants were wounded, he said.

Cross-border clashes are rare along Afghanistan's 1,400-kilometer border with Tajikistan. However, security in some border provinces, including Takhar, has deteriorated over the past few months and regular clashes have broken out between Afghan security forces and militant groups, including the Taliban.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, confirmed the attack, saying it broke out between drug smugglers and Tajik border guards. Mujahid said the aircraft bombed a forested area used by smugglers.

Mohammad Jawid Hejri, the provincial governors spokesman, also said the clash had occurred between drug smugglers in Afghanistan and Tajik border guards. He said the area is under Taliban control.

Asked by RFE/RLs Tajik Service about the reported airstrike, border guard spokesman Muhammadjon Ulughkhojaev said he could not confirm it.

An operation to search for and detain armed individuals is ongoing" in a neighboring region, he said. "But the Border Guards Service didn't use helicopters there."

The Russian Defense Ministry told the RIA Novosti news agency that Russian jets were not involved.

Other Tajik security agencies did not immediately respond to queries about other aircraft in the area.

The incident came one day after two Tajik foresters were killed in a shooting incident along the border. A Tajik security official, who asked not to be named, told RFE/RLs Tajik Service that the shooting -- either gunfire or mortars--- came from the Afghan side of the border.

A third Tajik forester was also wounded in the August 26 shooting, according to Sulton Valizoda, the head of the Farkhor district.

Foresters, along with an employee of a livestock farm, were out gathering hay. They had official permission, Valizoda told RFE/RLs Tajik Service. But they were attacked, and two were killed. The case is being investigated.

The Tajik Border Guard Service said in a statement on August 26 that the three were all forest rangers.Several hundred people on August 27 gathered in the center of Banja Luka in Bosnia-Herzegovinas predominantly Serb entity to protest against an attack on a reporter.

The demonstrators, who included journalists, opposition supporters, and activists, urged police to quickly find those responsible for the assault against Vladimir Kovacevic of the independent Bosnian Serb television station BNTV.

Kovacevic said two men beat him with metal bars late on August 26 as he was coming home after reporting from an antigovernment protest in Banja Luka, the administrative center of Republika Srpska.

"I tried to defend myself and cried for help as they beat me on the head and body," BNTV quoted him as saying. "Then they escaped in a car."

A photo posted on Kovacevics Twitter account showed his bloodied and bandaged head.

BNTV started its program on August 27 with a blackened screen and message, reading, "Open protest over the attack on a BNTV journalist. We are asking Republika Srpskas [police] to reveal the attackers."

In a statement, the Bosnian journalists' association blamed Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik for leading a campaign against independent media, saying it made reporters "open targets" for attackers.

Dodik, parliament speaker Nedeljko Cubrilovic, and other politicians condemned the attack against Kovacevic.

The U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo tweeted that the attacks on journalists were "unacceptable."

We strongly defend the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal. When journalists are silenced, society suffers, it added.

In a statement, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) media-freedom representative, Harlem Desir, said "the negative rhetoric being used against the media must end, in order to prevent further such attacks against journalists."

With reporting by AP and Balkan InsightMetro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 27)  The House of Representatives will be taking up the impeachment raps against seven justices by next week.

House Justice Committee Chair Doy Leachon told CNN Philippines' The Source that he is expecting to receive the complaints by Tuesday, and give congressmen one week to review the material. The hearing is set for 9:00 a.m. on September 4.

"Our target would be to meet the first committee hearing on the impeachment complaint by September 4," Leachon said.

"I am assuring 100 percent impartial ang committee at transparent tayo dito," he added.

[Translation: I am assuring (that) the committee will be 100 percent impartial and transparent here.]

Albay 1st District Rep. Edcel Lagman, Magdalo Partylist Rep. Gary Alejano, and Ifugao Rep. Teddy Baguilat filed complaints against seven Supreme Court Associate Justices on August 23. The subjects of the raps are Associate Justices Diosdado Peralta, Lucas Bersamin, Andres Reyes, Jr., Alexander Gesmundo, Francis Jardaleza, Noel Tijam, and newly appointed Chief Justice Teresita Leonardo-De Castro.

The congressmen alleged the respondents committed culpable violation of the constitution and betrayal of public trust over the judges' decision to unseat former Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno through a quo warranto petition. The landmark ruling was highly divisive  with the Integrated Bar of the Philippines and the Senate leadership maintaining that Sereno should have gone through impeachment.

The controversy is also the reason for mixed reactions to De Castro's appointment as top judge. A vocal critic of Sereno, De Castro even testified against her in House hearings before voting to oust her.

While Leachon respects De Castro's appointment, he says he understands the criticism that the high court should have let the impeachment process run its course.

"The other issue is whether an error of judgment can be viewed as an impeachable offense," he added.

The House panel is first expected to deliberate on whether the complaints are sufficient in form, and then whether they are sufficient in substance.

"Substance is determined by the allegations or recital of the allegations in the complaint, determinative of the jurisdiction of the committee. Then let's proceed from there," said Leachon.

Baguilat and company further argued that the complaint should have disqualified four justices  including De Castro -- from the shortlist for Chief Justice.

However, Leachon said that the issue was moot and academic since De Castro was already appointed. He maintained that the complaint did not reach the House of Representatives in time for it to be considered a pending case against Chief Justice nominees.

Nonetheless, the House will hear the impeachment case  and Baguilat said he remains hopeful regarding the process, despite the fact that the opposition is a minority in Congress.

"Admittedly, it's going to be very challenging, very difficult," said Baguilat. "But as I was saying earlier, many of our colleagues whispered that they didn't like the quo warranto... I always believe we have a fighting chance."On the occasion of the start of the new academic year, schoolchildren in the Russian city of Orenburg received notebooks with a portrait of the mayor and his advice on studying hard and becoming a "spiritually rich individual."

But there was one problem: The mayor, Yevgeny Arapov, was arrested two weeks ago on corruption charges.

"No one knew that the mayor was going to be arrested," Vladimir Ukhov, a businessman who says around half of the 20,000 notebooks he published were distributed to Orenburg schools, told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.

The notebooks garnered attention in Russia after Vladimir Tishin, a resident of the Urals city 1,500 kilometers southeast of Moscow, posted a photograph on Facebook showing the introductory page with Arapov's portrait and words of encouragement to students.

"Papa, who is that man on my notebook?" Tishin wrote in an irony-laden post accompanying the photograph. "That, my son, is Arapov. He will teach you everything that he knows and can do himself."

Regional investigators announced on August 14 that Arapov had been detained on suspicion of accepting a 600,000 ruble bribe ($8,900) from a businessman, 400,000 ($6,000) of which was allegedly earmarked for himself.

Arapov has been formally charged and placed under court-ordered arrest, investigators later said, adding that he denies the charges.

The Orenburg city government said in a statement carried by a local news outlet that it had been approached by an "individual businessman" in early 2018 about publishing the notebooks with introductory words from Arapov, information about the city, and emergency telephone numbers.

It added that it had cooperated with the businessman on the short texts in the notebook, which was to be distributed to parent groups, and that he gave "the necessary number" of copies to parents in March and April.

"The decision to use these notebooks or not should be made by the parents of students or the students themselves," the statement said.

Ukhov, the publisher, says he has previously printed similar notebooks for several Russian cities and that he is now searching for a way to minimize his financial losses on the Orenburg print run, RIA Novosti reported.

"I'm now racking my brain over how to repurpose these notebooks to recoup the investment," he was quoted as saying by the news agency, adding that he had taken out loans of 1 million rubles ($14,900) for the project.

"Perhaps we will paste over the pages with special paper and put a different picture there," Ukhov said.

Russia ranked 131st of 176 countries in the 2017 Corruption Perception Index of the international NGO Transparency International.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has called corruption a significant problem in the country, while his political opponents and other critics accuse him of overseeing a system of cronyism and corruption benefiting well-placed insiders and people close to him.Police in Georgia have detained three Iranian nationals on suspicion of selling illegal drugs.

The Interior Ministry said on August 26 that the trio was detained at an electronic music festival in the Black Sea port city of Anaklia while they were selling illegal drugs to visitors of the event.

The ministry statement did not disclose the identities of the three Iranians, but said they were in their 20s.

If convicted, they may face up to 11 years in prison.

Based on reporting by apsny.ge and InterpressnewsGerman journalist Mesale Tolu, who had been imprisoned in Istanbul on terror-related charges, returned to her home country and vowed to continue fighting for those still not free in Turkey.

"I may be here today, but hundreds of colleagues, opposition activists, lawyers, students -- 70,000 students are in prison -- are still not free," she told reporters on August 26 upon her arrival in Stuttgart.

Tolu, who was born to Turkish parents in Germany, was arrested in Turkey in 2017 on charges of terrorist propaganda and membership in the extreme-left MLKP party, which has been designated a terror organization by Ankara.

She denied the charges and has claimed "harassment" by the Turkish judicial system.

She was released from prison on December 18 but was barred from leaving the country until an Istanbul court on August 20 lifted a travel ban against her.

A trial for the 33-year-old Tolu, a journalist and translator for the leftist news agency ETHA, is still scheduled in Istanbul on October 16.

Tolu's support group, called Freiheit fuer Mesale Tolu (Freedom for Mesale Tolu), said it has been told her husband, Suat Corlu, who is facing similar charges, must remain in Turkey.

Tens of thousands of civil servants and journalists were detained after the failed coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016.

Based on reporting by dpa and ReutersThe defense ministers of Iran and Syria have signed an agreement on military cooperation in the war-torn country, Iranian media report.

The "defense and technical agreement" provides for the continued "presence and participation" of Iran in Syria, Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami said in Damascus on August 27, according to the Tasnim news agency.

It also quoted Syrian Defense Minister Ali Abdullah Ayub as praising Tehran for supporting the government of President Bashar al-Assad in the seven-year Syrian conflict.

Hatami was on the second day of a two-day visit to Syrias capital, during which he also held talks with Assad, Tasnim reported.

Iranian and Russian support for Assad throughout the war has helped turn the conflict in the Syrian leaders favor.

Rebel forces have been routed in many parts of the country. Syrian pro-government forces are preparing to launch an assault on the northwestern province of Idlib, the last major rebel stronghold.

Israel and the United States, which supports rebels fighting against Assads government, have expressed concern over Iran's growing influence in Syria.

But Hatami told reporters in Damascus on August 26, "No third party can affect the presence of Iranian advisers in Syria."

The war in Syria has killed hundreds of thousands of people and uprooted millions since it began with a government crackdown on protesters in March 2011.

More than 1,000 Iranians, including senior members of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), have been killed in the conflict since 2012, according to Reuters.

UN-mediated peace talks in Geneva between Syrian government delegates and the opposition broke up earlier this year without significant progress.

Meanwhile, Iran, Russia, and Turkey have sponsored a series of negotiations on the Syrian conflict in Kazakhstans capital, Astana, and cooperated to create "de-escalation zones" to reduce fighting while backing separate sides.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will travel to Iran on September 7, his office said on August 27, on a visit expected to include a summit with Russian and Iranian counterparts on Syria.

The tripartite meeting will take place in the northern Iranian city of Tabriz on September 7, according to Turkish state television.

The Kremlin has said that Russian President Vladimir Putin may take part in talks with Erdogan and Iranian President Hassan Rohani at the beginning of September.

The last such meeting between the three leaders took place in Ankara in April.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, and TasminIran accused the United States of "economic aggression" as Tehrans legal challenge against renewed sanctions went before the United Nations' highest court.

Tehran filed its complaint with the International Court of Justice in July, claiming that the sanctions reimposed by U.S. President Donald Trumps administration breach a decades-old friendship treaty between Washington and Tehran.

Trump ordered the sanctions renewed following Washingtons withdrawal from the landmark 2015 nuclear accord that curbed Tehrans nuclear ambitions in exchange for lifting crippling sanctions.

Speaking on August 27 at the start of four days of hearings, a lawyer representing Iran, Mohsen Mohebi, told the court in The Hague that the U.S. sanctions violate terms of the 1955 treaty signed by the United States and Iran.

"The U.S. is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran's economy and Iranian national companies, and therefore inevitably Iranian nationals," he said.

Mohebi also argued that the sanctions were unjustified since, he said, Tehran was abiding by the terms of the landmark 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and six world powers.

"This policy is nothing but a naked economic aggression against my country," the lawyer added.

In Washington, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rejected Irans claims.

"We will vigorously defend against Iran's meritless claims this week in The Hague," he said in a statement.

In an initial written submission to the court, the United States said it believed The Hague court has no jurisdiction in the case and that Iran's assertions fall outside the bounds of the treaty.

A court ruling was expected within a month, but no date has been set.

Rulings of the ICJ -- also known as the World Court -- are binding, but it does not have power to enforce them. Occasionally, they are ignored by countries involved.

The 1955 treaty, known as the Treaty of Amity, called for "friendly relations" between the two countries, encourages mutual trade and investment, and regulates diplomatic ties.

It was signed at a time of close relations between Washington and Tehran, a long before the 1979 Islamic Revolution brought about decades of hostility between the two.

While Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 nuclear pact, other signees of the treaty  mainly Washingtons European allies -- urged Washington to remain in the deal and have vowed to stay in it themselves.

The U.S. sanctions target Iran's car industry, trade in gold and other precious metals, and purchases of U.S. dollars crucial to support its oil exports and other global trade.

Further U.S. sanctions are due to go into effect in November specifically targeting Iran's banking sector and oil industry, which drives growth in the Iranian economy.

The sanctions have hit Iran hard, with the country's currency losing much of its value, leading to protests on the streets of many Iranian cities.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFPUkraine says two of its soldiers have been killed and six others wounded in clashes with Russia-backed separatists in the countrys east.

The Defense Ministry said on August 27 that the fighting also left three separatists dead and seven wounded.

The separatists violated a cease-fire 23 times during the previous 24 hours, firing artillery, machine guns, grenade launchers, and mortars, a statement said.

Meanwhile, the separatists claimed that Ukrainian government forces violated the cease-fire at least once, using mortars and heavy machine-guns.

On August 23, Kyiv announced that five Ukrainian troops were killed in clashes in eastern Ukraine, saying it represented the biggest daily loss of life among soldiers in months.

Since April 2014, more than 10,300 people have been killed in fighting between Kyiv's forces and the separatists who control parts of Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Cease-fire deals announced as part of the Minsk accords -- September 2014 and February 2015 pacts aimed at resolving the conflict -- have failed to hold.

A new cease-fire agreement was reached in late 2017 and was meant to begin on December 23, but both sides have accused each other of repeated violations since then.

With reporting by TASSJohn McCain, the U.S. senator and war hero who died of brain cancer on August 25, will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on August 31 followed by a memorial service the next day at the National Cathedral, officials say.

His office said he will be buried at the U.S. Naval Academy in nearby Annapolis, Maryland, on September 2 following a private memorial service at the academy chapel.



News reports said that two former presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, would speak at his funeral.

President Donald Trump, however, will not. Citing family friends, CNN reported that McCain told his family he did not want Trump to attend his funeral.

Trump and McCain had a tense relationship despite being in the same political party.

Among the criticisms of Trump that McCain was most vocal about was Trumps praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders McCain called foreign "tyrants."

After Trump met Putin in Helsinki in July, McCain castigated Trump, calling their joint news conference "one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory."

Trump offered a brief Twitter statement after McCains death.

My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you, he said in a tweet.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1033515425336885248

Other U.S. and international leaders, however, were more effusive in their praise for the son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals. McCain endured almost six years of torture and captivity in a North Vietnam prison after his plane was shot down in 1967 on a mission during the long U.S. war.

Obama, who defeated the Republican senator in the 2008 presidential election, said in a statement from himself and his wife, Michelle, that "we are all in his debt."

"John McCain and I were members of different generations, came from completely different backgrounds, and competed at the highest level of politics," the statement said.

"But we shared, for all our differences, a fidelity to something higher -- the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched, and sacrificed."

Prior to the ceremonies in Washington, McCain will lie in state at the Arizona State Capitol Rotunda on August 29. A memorial service will be held at the North Phoenix Baptist Church.

With reporting by AP and Reuters

ACHINSK, Russia -- A Russian court has sentenced a member of an outlawed Russian nationalist opposition movement to 3 1/2 years in prison for allegedly plotting mass disturbances, his wife says.

Roman Maryan was tried and sentenced in the Achinsk City Court in Siberias Krasnoyarsk Krai region, his wife Olga Maryan told RFE/RL on August 27.

Maryan, a member of the Artpodgotovka (Artillery Bombardment) movement, was arrested in November aboard a train on his way to Moscow where he intended to take part in a rally by nationalists.

Maryan's trial started in April.

He pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Hundreds of members of the Artpodgotovka movement were detained on November 5 at rallies in Moscow and other Russian cities ahead of the centennial of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Vyacheslav Maltsev, an outspoken Kremlin critic and leader of the movement, said the day would mark the start of a "new revolution" to topple Russian President Vladimir Putin's government.

In November, Maltsev told RFE/RL that he had become a "political refugee" in a European Union member state.

In May 2017, Maltsev was charged in absentia with publicly calling for extremist activities.

His Artpodgotovka movement was banned in October by an order from a regional court in the city of Krasnoyarsk.Moldova's leaders gathered in downtown Chisinau for a ceremony marking Independence Day as hundreds of protesters shouted antigovernment slogans nearby.

The August 27 demonstration on Grand National Assembly Square was the latest in a series of antigovernment protests that have been driven in large part by Romanians and Moldovans living outside of the country.

A day after thousands protested on the square against what they say is a corrupt government, fences installed and manned by hundreds of riot police separated the remaining demonstrators from the Moldovan officials and foreign dignitaries who attended a flower-laying ceremony at the monument to Stefan cel Mare (Stephen the Great).

Protesters carrying Moldovan tricolor flags, angered by the move to prevent them from reaching the monument, shouted "Down with the Mafia!" while waiting for the arrival of the countrys leaders.

A group of protesters spent the night near the statue of the medieval prince who is revered as a national hero both by Romanians and Moldovans.

Riot police forcibly removed them early on August 27, after ordering them to vacate the area to make way for government officials.

President Igor Dodon, parliament speaker Andrian Candu, and Prime Minister Pavel Filip were among the officials who laid flowers at the monument.

Protesters shouted antigovernment slogans, but their voices were gradually drowned out by a military brass band.

It was unusual for Moscow-friendly Dodon to appear together with pro-Western Candu and Filip.

The protests in Chisinau come a little more than two weeks after more than 100,000 Romanians -- many of them expatriates -- attended a huge anticorruption rally on August 10 in Bucharest.

The demonstration turned violent when paramilitary riot police used tear gas, water cannons, and batons to disperse the mostly peaceful protest. More than 400 protesters were injured and one person died more than a week later apparently as a result of inhaling tear gas.

Like the Romanians, with whom Moldovans share a common language and history, the protesters in Chisinau are angered by corruption, endemic poverty, and the policies of the government.

Moldova's cabinet is led by the Democratic Party, which is headed by controversial billionaire Vladimir Plahotniuc.

Popular anger has also been stoked by recent court decisions that annulled the results of the mayoral election in Chisinau.

Waving Moldovan and European Union flags, the antigovernment protesters on August 26 chanted "Send Plahotniuc To Jail."

The demonstration was organized by the pro-European Action and Solidarity Party, the Dignity and Truth Platform, and the Liberal Democrat Party in Moldova.

At a similar protest in Brussels, around two dozen activists gathered outside the headquarters of the European Commission, criticizing the Chisinau mayoral election decision and other recent electoral changes.

Several waved Romanian and Moldovan flags, which have identical red-yellow-blue colors and held a banner reading Do Not Support Corrupt Oligarchs In Moldova.

Written by Eugen Tomiuc with additional reporting by RFE/RL's Moldovan Service, unimedia.md, privesc.eu, and news.yam.mdRomania's ambassador to the United States is in trouble with his superiors after he criticized a letter from U.S. President Donald Trump's personal lawyer about Romanias leaders.

George Maior was recalled to Bucharest by the Foreign Ministry to discuss remarks he made about a letter penned from Rudy Giuliani and published by Romanian media on August 27.

In the letter addressed to President Klaus Iohannis and Prime Minister Viorica Dancila, Giuliani wrote he was concerned about "continued damage to the rule of law in Romania, committed under the pretext of law enforcement.

He also criticized what he called the "excesses" of Romania's anticorruption agency and the countrys Intelligence Service.

Maior, who has been ambassador to Washington since 2015 and is a former head of the Intelligence Service, responded by saying Giuliani's letter resulted from "a lobby initiated by people interested in defending figures who have problems with the justice system."

Ambassador George Maior had a stance that was not approved at the central level in the Foreign Ministry or the government and it does not represent the Romanian Foreign Ministry's stance, a ministry statement said. "His role is to promote the national interest ... and he is required to abstain from public statements that can negatively affect bilateral relations with other states."

It wasn't immediately clear why exactly Giuliani was wading into Romanian politics. Though he is currently Trumps personal lawyer, he has no official position in the Trump administration.

He does, however, have a successful management consulting and security consulting business that has done work in Eastern Europe. The company had a consulting contract with the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

Giuliani's positions on Romania's anticorruption moves are at odds with that of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Wess Mitchell, who has praised Romania's "historic headway" in fighting graft.

"Romania is an indelible symbol of the success of democracy," Mitchell also said in a speech at Bucharest University on June 18.

Giuliani's attack against Romania's performance in fighting corruption is not singular.

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh last week outlined in an interview with Forbes a five-point plan to "restore the rule of law in Romania."

Freeh, who was FBI director from 1993 to 2001, is now an independent consultant through his own firm, FGIS, which includes advising a Romanian defendant who is contesting his conviction by Romania's anticorruption body.

There has been growing concern in other European Union capitals about Romania backsliding on efforts to root out endemic corruption.

Last month, Iohannis fired Laura Koevesi, the head of the countrys anticorruption agency, amid growing pressure from the ruling Social Democratic Party.

The justice minister in February called for Koevesi's removal in February, accusing her of exceeding her authority.

The moves to undo some of the anticorruption policies has sparked anger, and led to widespread protests earlier this month.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Moldovan Service, AP and Balkan Insight



Russia's Foreign Ministry says that multiparty talks aimed at ending the war in Afghanistan have been postponed, after a request from Afghanistan's president.

The ministry said in a statement on August 27 that the 12-party talks, which were scheduled to include representatives from the Taliban, would be put off for another date.

The September 4 talks were set to be the biggest push for a peace deal in Afghanistan in years.

Last week, representatives for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said his government would not be attending, saying the process should be led by the Afghan government. Ghani also offered a monthlong cease-fire with the Taliban, a move that was supported by Washington.

The United States, which has thousands of troops in the country, also declined to attend the Moscow talks, asserting they were unlikely to be successful.

The decision comes as the Taliban escalates attacks across Afghanistan and has refused direct talks with Kabul.

U.S. officials last week said the White House intends to bring back Afghan-born diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad as a new special envoy on Afghanistan.

Alice Wells, a top State Department official overseeing the region, last month met Taliban officials in Doha.

With reporting by ReutersRussian news agencies say a Moscow court has sentenced opposition activist Aleksei Navalny to 30 days in jail after convicting him of violating protest laws.

The August 27 ruling by the Tverskoi District Court effectively bars Navalny from participating in a protest next month targeting a controversial government proposal to raise the country's pension age.

The court found Navalny guilty of breaking protest laws by helping to organize a street rally in Moscow in January despite authorities' refusal to sanction it.

That demonstration in Moscow, along with similar protests in other Russian cities, drew thousands of people opposed to the reelection of President Vladimir Putin.

Navalnys lawyers said they will appeal the ruling.

Navalny, who was arrested outside his home on August 25, has said that his latest case represents an attempt by the authorities to disrupt rallies across Russia planned for September 9 against the pension proposal.

A vocal foe of Putin, Navalny has organized large street protests on several occasions and published a series of reports alleging corruption in Russia's ruling elite.

He was barred from the March presidential race due to a conviction on financial-crimes charges he contends were fabricated by the Kremlin to sideline him from the March 18 vote.

Putin overwhelmingly won the election, garnering almost 77 percent of the vote -- more than he received in any of his three previous elections and the highest percentage handed to any post-Soviet Russian leader.

The government's proposal to raise the retirement age has stoked widespread anger across the country and has undermined Putins popularity.

The Russian parliament has given preliminary backing to the proposal that would raise the retirement age to 63 for women by 2034 and to 65 for men by 2028. Currently, the retirement age is 55 for women and 60 for men.



The plan sparked widespread anger after it was announced in June, and Putin's approval ratings have fallen.

With reporting by TASS, Reuters, and InterfaxPETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY, Russia -- Earlier this month, a local eparchy of the Russian Orthodox Church announced its "Bells Over Kamchatka" project.

Priests, it pledged in a small notice on its website, would "carry out meetings and conversations" at all the children's summer camps in the region before the beginning of the school year.

The church's article described one priest's visit to the Voskhod (Sunrise) camp, during which he lectured on the history of bells in the church and gave the children the chance to ring a miniature carillon. The visit was conducted under a joint program between the eparchy and the Kamchatka Krai Ministry of Youth and Education.

A week later, local resident Aleksei Nikolayev appealed to the regional prosecutor's office over what he saw as proselytizing to his 10-year-old daughter at the same camp this summer.

"I didn't care about this until it affected me personally," he said. "At summer camp, some priests spoke with my child and this made me mad. I read about it first on [local news website] Kam24 and then, naturally, spoke to the child."

Nikolayev asked prosecutors to file criminal charges against the clergymen and government officials who organized the events.

Kam24 reported on August 20 that children at another camp, Mettalist, had been baptized with the consent of officials at the camp.

"I saw several publications on the Kam24 website about how priests carried out a mass baptism of children at the camp," Nikolayev told RFE/RL. "There were reports that members of the National Guard were kissing some [religious] relics. Prosecutors, too. I don't know exactly what relics, but some sort of bones were brought around to all the offices."

A spokesperson at the eparchy acknowledged in the Kam24 report that there had been baptisms.

"Fourteen children from children's correctional home No. 3 who were vacationing at the Metallist children's camp were baptized," the spokesperson said. The church also reported that local nuns were made godmothers to the newly baptized children.

"We have bureaucrats who are growing fat at the expense of the people," Nikolayev said. "And now there is the church as well, which is also getting fat at our expense. I have very negative views of religion, of the church. And not just the Orthodox Church but all of them."

The director of the Voskhod camp, Olga Petukhova, told RFE/RL that she saw no problem with the church's presentation to the children at her camp.

"I was personally present during the entire lecture," she said. "Father Boris Murzin came and told the children about bells in Russia and gave the children the chance to ring a church bell. I don't understand why some parents are reacting in this way. After all, this is our history, part of our life. During the whole lecture, the word 'Orthodox' was not pronounced. The whole thing was about the historical side of the issue."

Although the Kamchatka eparchy declined to comment for RFE/RL's story, the article on the church's website describes the Voskhod visit as "a missionary trip."

Critics in Russia have expressed concern about the Russian Orthodox Church's close relations with the government under President Vladimir Putin and its perceived influence in cultural and social affairs.

Inna Zagrebina, a lawyer who specializes in church-state relations and who is participating in Nikolayev's appeal, told RFE/RL that the law forbids children under the age of 14 from being "drawn into the activity of religious organizations." Other laws protect children under the age of 18, she added, saying that the authorities are obliged to respond to complaints from parents of such children.

"Missionary activity should not be taking place in children's camps," she said. "It is another matter if in this particular case we aren't talking about missionary work but about exposing the children to historical and cultural values."

She said that prosecutors would likely be looking into the legal status of the event and whether there was "an agreement on cooperation between the camp and the eparchy."

"They will also have to check whether the parents agreed to this program or not," Zagrebina said.

Nikolayev recalled that last year, parents at his daughter's school were asked to choose an elective course for religious and moral education.

"They gave us the option of six or seven confessions," he said, "plus there was the choice of 'foundations of secular ethics.' That is the one that we chose, since I protect my daughter from everything religious. [In my daughter's class], 21 of the 28 children are studying secular ethics. Several are studying Islam, but not one is taking Orthodoxy."

Nikolayev said a few years ago parents were upset to learn that priests were teaching in public schools.

"People got angry and wrote to the prosecutor and so on," he said. "The priests stopped going to the schools. Now they are going to the camps. They don't give up. They are zombifying underage children and imposing their religion."

Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting by RFE/RL Siberia Desk correspondent Aleksandr MolchanovU.S. sanctions against Russia over the March poisoning in Britain of a former Russian agent and his daughter have gone into effect, targeting foreign aid, the sale of defense and security goods, and U.S. government loans for exports to Russia.

The new penalties, which took effect August 27, were announced earlier this month after the United States said that the Russian government had violated a 1991 U.S. law when it used a nerve agent in an attempt to "assassinate" Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

A second, potentially more serious set of sanctions could be imposed by the end of November if Russia does not allow international inspectors into the country to look for chemical weapons.

Those measures could include things like downgrading diplomatic relations and restricting flights by the state flagship airline Aeroflot.

WATCH: Yulia Skripal Says Recovery 'Slow, Painful' (published May 23, 2018)

The U.S. State Department said the new measures taking effect August 27 will terminate assistance to Russia except for urgent humanitarian issues, end some arms sales and financing, restrict access to U.S. credit or other financial assistance, and prohibit the export to Russia of restricted goods or technology.

Among the exemptions are goods and services related to space launches. Washington and Moscow continue to cooperate closely on sending personnel and goods to the International Space Station.

The Skripals were found unconscious on March 4 on a bench in the southern English town of Salisbury. They were seriously ill but later made a full recovery after spending several weeks in a hospital.

British officials said the two were poisoned with Novichok, a military-grade chemical weapon that was developed in the Soviet Union, and blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin's government for the attack. Russia rejects the accusation.

Russia has rejected the demands, with the Foreign Ministry saying the sanctions will create more tension between the two countries.

Putin has on numerous occasions said that he will do what it takes to protect our country's interests in the wake of such unfriendly steps," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on August 27.

Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in Russia's military intelligence agency, was convicted of treason in 2006 by a Russian court that found him guilty of spying for Britain. He was released from prison in 2010 and sent to Britain in a spy swap.

Relations between Moscow and the West have deteriorated to a post-Cold War low over issues including Russia's seizure of Crimea in 2014, its role in wars in Syria and eastern Ukraine, and its alleged election meddling in the United States and Europe.

With reporting by Reuters, RIA Novosti, and TASS

United Nations investigators have called for six top military figures in Burma to be prosecuted in an international court for genocide and war crimes against the country's Rohingya minority.

Burmas army chief and five other top military commanders should be investigated and prosecuted for crimes against Rohingya Muslims and other minorities, a fact-finding mission working under a mandate from the UN Human Rights Council said in an August 27 report.

"Military necessity would never justify killing indiscriminately, gang raping women, assaulting children, and burning entire villages," it said, calling for the case to be referred to the International Criminal Court.

At least 700,000 Rohingyas fled Burmas western Rakhine State after the military launched a brutal crackdown in August 2017 on rebels. Rights groups say thousands more have died.

Buddhist-majority Burma, also known as Myanmar, denies allegations of ethnic cleansing, insisting it was responding to attacks by Rohingya militants.

Based on reporting by AFP, AP, and the BBCLife-saving mobile apps may be coming of age. Aisling Irwin tracks their lofty promises and messy reality. For a few months in 2016 community health workers working with children in northern Malawi had a helping hand. A smartphone app led them through a standard protocol of examinations helping to boost both the accuracy of diagnoses, as well as their confidence. They told researchers they liked the app because it reassured them that their decisions were solid [1]. But, after eight months, the project was over and the app removed for fear that  with the funding gone  it could soon become out of date. This is hardly an isolated incident. mHealth makes a tantalising offer: to plug gaps in health provision in impoverished countries using cheap, widely available tools. But across Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and South America hundreds  perhaps thousands  of mHealth experiments done in the hope of improving healthcare disappear after a year or two.



Methodological woes

A 2016 review cast a harsh light on mHealth [2]. Led by Alain Labrique, a public health professor who heads the Global mHealth Initiative at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, it concluded that  with some exceptions  the strength of the findings to support the use of mobile interventions over alternate strategies is still limited. The review found that many interventions go undocumented; many are designed without academic rigour, making it hard to gauge their success; and often the chosen outcome measures mean they cannot be compared with other studies. Caroline Perrin, a PhD student in telemedicine at Geneva University in Switzerland, says that instead of measuring outcomes, studies tend to measure how much health professionals like their new apps, and are often too small to have the statistical sensitivity to detect a fall in mortality, for example. And this, she says, adds to the difficulty of demonstrating that a single digital element woven into a complex health system actually makes a difference. Perrins professor, Antoine Geissbuhler, adds that rigorous evidence is important not just to prove effectiveness, but to avoid harm. Even at pilot stage, he says, training sessions that focus on one health activity can eat up time and distort priorities. And governments need to make hard decisions between deploying eHealth and other activities, such as running vaccination campaigns. Some countries cannot do [it] all. Few studies ever get scaled-up because they cannot prove to donors that they are effective, says Labriques review. And many projects are simply unscalable due to poor choices during the design phase. Choice of software, for example, is crucial, says Garrett Mehl, a specialist in digital health at the World Health Organisation (WHO). A bespoke bit of standalone software might be fine for a few villages. But could it withstand the demands of 100,000 health workers  the help desks, the training and re-training, the community of knowledge thats in the background, keeping it ticking over? The reality is that unless they are using software thats a global good its unlikely to be able to scale, he says. But even then, other factors may come into play. Take the app that proved useful in diagnosing children in northern Malawi  the Supporting LIFE app (Low-Cost Intervention for Disease Control). Even though the software was open source, the ministry of health just doesn't have any internal capacity to roll out the software or even maintain it, says projects coordinator John ODonoghue, now an eHealth specialist at University College Cork, in Ireland. Realistically if the project was to be modified and maintained and implemented we're probably talking about a multimillion Euro effort per year.



Chasing success

Digital and health communities are trying to find better ways to capitalise on mHealths promise. For example, Perrin is helping researchers choose useful outcome measures when they set up pilots. Although a study may be too small to spot a drop in maternal or neonatal mortality, it might be able to detect an improvement in another parameter shown to decrease mortality. She has identified 70 such variables, all of which can be influenced by digital interventions  having four check-ups during a pregnancy, for example, or identifying danger signs that predict neonatal illness.* ODonoghue says such proxies were essential for Supporting LIFE. Thankfully, he says, no child passed away during our study, so they measured hospital referral rates for evidence that the digital system improved the accuracy of health workers referrals. Adding to efforts to impart rigour to mHealth pilots, a few years ago the WHO, with the International Telecommunications Union, published advice on how to scale mHealth non-Communicable Disease projects. The agency has also developed a lexicon for both health and digital specialists, whose first version was released earlier this year. Meanwhile, Principles for Digital Development written by a group of donors and implementers were endorsed by many international organisations in 2015, and a supporting forum launched last year. And the WHO produced the mHealth Assessment and Planning for Scale (MAPS) toolkit in 2015, which has been adopted by the new Malawi eHealth Research Centre at Mzuzu University, which ODonoghue helped found. This means that anyone proposing an mHealth intervention must go to the Centre and spend several days assessing it against the MAPS toolkit. If it fails to demonstrate it can meet the demands in areas such as human resources, finance and technical capacity, and no solution can be found, the proposal is abandoned. Toolkits and better study design may improve pilots and perhaps allow some scale-up. But if mHealth is to make a real difference in the developing world it requires scale-up to national level. Many people fail to grasp how formidable that challenge is, says Mehl. It requires the enabling environment of policies, the infrastructure, the tools  and knowing which work and which dont  and the training. As a rare example of success, he highlights the Indian governments messaging service Kilkari, designed by BBC Media Action, which delivers free audio messages about pregnancy, childbirth and childcare to women from the second trimester of pregnancy and continues until the child is one year old. Developed and tested in the state of Bihar in 2013, it went on to reach two million subscribers within 12 months of its launch. The government went on to adopt it in 2016, footing the bill for call costs and rolling it out in 13 states. Sarah Chamberlain, director of digital for BBC Media Action India, highlights three factors in its success. First, the government had already invested in registering pregnancies and births, and it saw Kilkari as a way of incentivising women to supply this data; second, long-term and patient investment by donors; and third, spending years cultivating a relationship with the Ministry of Health. You cannot imagine how much energy it takes to nurture a relationship with a national government, she says. You can't just fly in and fly out.



Cultural changeHeart scans for patients with chest pains could save thousands of lives in the UK, research suggests.

The life-saving scans helped to spot those with heart disease so they could be given treatments to prevent heart attacks.

Researchers say current guidelines should be updated to incorporate the scans into routine care.

The SCOT-HEART study tracked more than 4000 patients who were referred to a hospital clinic with symptoms of angina -- a condition that restricts the blood supply to the heart.

Half of the patients were given a scan called a computed tomography angiogram, or CTA, in addition to standard diagnostic tests.

After receiving the scan, the number of patients suffering a heart attack within five years dropped by 40 per cent, the study found.

The number of patients undergoing additional procedures increased within the first year but had levelled out by the end of the five-year period. This suggests that including the scans in routine care would not lead to a surge in costly tests or additional heart surgery, the researchers say.

Patients who are at risk of a heart attack are frequently diagnosed with a test called an angiogram. This involves inserting tubes into the body and heart to check the flow of blood and identify any obstructions that could pose a heart attack risk.

CTA scans enable doctors to look at the blood vessels from the outside the body, without the need to insert tubes into the heart. The scans are cheaper, quicker and safer than angiograms.

The study had previously found that around a quarter of patients had their diagnoses reclassified after receiving the scan, prompting new treatments in many cases.

This is the first study to look at the impact of the scans on long-term survival rates.

Lead researcher Professor David Newby, of the BHF Centre for Cardiovascular Science at the University of Edinburgh, said: "This relatively simple heart scan ensures that patients get the right treatment. This is the first time that CT guided management has been shown to improve patient outcomes with a major reduction in the future risk of heart attacks. This has major implications for how we now investigate and manage patients with suspected heart disease."Researchers have found a sweet spot of six to eight hours sleep a night is most beneficial for heart health. More or less is detrimental. Their findings are presented today at ESC Congress 2018.

Study author Dr Epameinondas Fountas, of the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Centre, Athens, Greece, said: "We spend one-third of our lives sleeping yet we know little about the impact of this biological need on the cardiovascular system."

The study investigated the relationship between sleep duration and cardiovascular disease using a meta-analysis, a statistical tool for combining the results of previous studies on the same topic. The meta-analysis included 11 prospective studies of more than one million adults (1,000,541) without cardiovascular disease published within the last five years.

Two groups, one with short (less than six hours) and another with long (more than eight hours) nightly sleep duration, were compared to the reference group (six to eight hours).

The researchers found that both short and long sleepers had a greater risk of developing or dying from coronary artery disease or stroke. Compared to adults who slept six to eight hours a night, short and long sleepers had 11% and 33% greater risks, respectively, of developing or dying from coronary artery disease or stroke during an average follow-up of 9.3 years.

Dr Fountas said: "Our findings suggest that too much or too little sleep may be bad for the heart. More research is needed to clarify exactly why, but we do know that sleep influences biological processes like glucose metabolism, blood pressure, and inflammation -- all of which have an impact on cardiovascular disease."

A strength of the current analysis is that only prospective studies were included, noted Dr Fountas. This avoids recall bias, a source of systematic error in statistics arising from the inability of participants to accurately recall information.

Dr Fountas concluded: "Having the odd short night or lie-in is unlikely to be detrimental to health, but evidence is accumulating that prolonged nightly sleep deprivation or excessive sleeping should be avoided. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to get into the habit of getting six to eight hours a night -- for example by going to bed and getting up at the same time every day, avoiding alcohol and caffeine before bed, eating healthily, and being physically active. Getting the right amount of sleep is an important part of a healthy lifestyle."Listening to yoga music at bedtime is good for the heart, according to research presented today at ESC Congress 2018.

Dr Naresh Sen, study author, Consultant Cardiologist at HG SMS Hospital, Jaipur, India, said: "We use music therapy in our hospital and in this study we showed that yoga music has a beneficial impact on heart rate variability before sleeping."

Previous research has shown that music can reduce anxiety in patients with heart disease. However, studies on the effects of music on the heart in patients and healthy individuals have produced inconsistent results, partly they did not state what style of music was used.

The body's heart rate changes as a normal response to being in "fight or flight" or "rest and digest" mode. These states are regulated by the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, respectively, and together comprise the autonomic nervous system. High heart rate variability shows that the heart is able to adapt to these changes. Conversely, low heart rate variability indicates a less adaptive autonomic nervous system.

Low heart rate variability is associated with a 32-45% higher risk of a first cardiovascular event. Following a cardiovascular event, people with low heart rate variability have a raised risk of subsequent events and death. Failure of the autonomic nervous system to adapt may trigger inflammation, which is linked to cardiovascular disease. Another possibility is that people with low heart rate variability already have subclinical cardiovascular disease.

This study investigated the impact of listening to yoga music, which is a type of soothing or meditative music, before bedtime on heart rate variability. The study included 149 healthy people who participated in three sessions on separate nights: (1) yoga music before sleep at night; (2) pop music with steady beats before sleep at night; and (3) no music or silence before sleep at night.

At each session, heart rate variability was measured4 for five minutes before the music or silence started, for ten minutes during the music/silence, and five minutes after it had stopped. In addition, anxiety levels were assessed before and after each session using the Goldberg Anxiety Scale. The level of positive feeling was subjectively measured after each session using a visual analogue scale.

The average age of participants was 26 years. The researchers found that heart rate variability increased during the yoga music, decreased during the pop music, and did not significantly change during the silence.

Anxiety levels fell significantly after the yoga music, rose significantly post the pop music, and increased after the no music session. Participants felt significantly more positive after the yoga music than they did after the pop music.

Dr Sen noted that holistic therapies such as music cannot replace evidence-based drugs and interventions, and should only be used as an add-on.

He said: "Science may have not always agreed, but Indians have long believed in the power of various therapies other than medicines as a mode of treatment for ailments. This is a small study, and more research is needed on the cardiovascular effects of music interventions offered by a trained music therapist. But listening to soothing music before bedtime is a cheap and easy to implement therapy that cannot cause harm."It was the second time in his life on an airplane, but this time Miguel Villalobos had his arms and feet shackled for the entire trip.

The 38-year-old undocumented immigrant had been locked up at the West County Detention Facility in Richmond since June, after a DUI arrest. On the night of Aug. 16, he was taken from the jail to Oakland International Airport and put on a red-eye flight, along with another 60 federal immigration detainees. He didnt know where he was going, but he knew it would be far from his family in San Jose.

After two hours, the plane arrived in Colorado. They were driven to the Denver Contract Detention Facility in Aurora.

There, the chains were removed. Later, at around 4 p.m. Aug. 17, Villalobos and the other men were put in a stifling hot room with a single toilet. They were kept there until the early morning hours of Aug. 20, when they were taken out, one by one, for processing.

This is the account given to me by Tess Feldman, a senior immigration attorney for Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto. She has been helping Villalobos fight deportation back to his native Mexico.

Now that hes 1,200 miles away, she may not be able to continue representing him  and he may have to start his battle against ICE from scratch.

In San Jose, Villalobos was the sole breadwinner of the household he shared with his wife, their 12-year-old son, his stepdaughter and her two children. He had come to the United States in 2000 for a better life. He worked three jobs. His main job was as a daytime restaurant cook. He cooked at another restaurant in the evening for 25 to 30 hours a week. He also collected recyclables.

His wife is a lawful permanent resident who is disabled and cant work. He was her caregiver. He knows his family is running out of money.

I dont know if theyre eating, if theyre not eating, Villalobos told me in an interview from West County on Aug. 8. Theyve got to pay the rent, but they dont have what they need to do that, because I was the only one who was working to support the family there.

This was the second time Villalobos was jailed. The first time, in 2008, followed a drunken driving arrest, and he eventually was released to his family. In May, he was arrested on another DUI. On June 14, federal immigration officers showed up at his apartment and took him.

Feldman is fuming that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred her client without giving her advance notice.

The federal government filed a motion to change Villalobos jurisdiction from San Francisco to Colorado, according to Feldman. According to immigration attorneys Ive spoken to, the common practice is that attorneys have 10 days to respond to such a motion, but an immigration judge in San Francisco granted the governments motion on Aug. 22, one day after it was filed.

Feldman told me she wasnt notified that the motion had even been filed until a day later.

Feldman said its now a challenge to represent Villalobos. Because her clients dont pay fees, she cant just hop on a plane to Colorado for meetings and court appearances.

I shouldnt be forced to find the means to travel around the country anytime immigration decides they want to make a change and not inform me of it in advance, she said.

When Contra Costa County announced in early July that it was severing its contract with the federal government to hold undocumented immigrants at a jail in Richmond, attorneys and immigrant rights activists scrambled to get detainees lawyers and to secure bail to get them released back to their families.

They thought that if there was an attorney on record it would reduce the chances detainees would be moved before their cases were adjudicated.

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.

They were wrong.

ICE moved all the detainees out of Richmond.

According to an ICE representative, about 60 detainees were moved to Colorado, and approximately 20 were moved to Washington state. Those were the last of the roughly 200 detainees that had been held at the jail.

When ICE is not allowed to work with local jurisdictions to house detainees closer to their families, friends and attorneys, farther facilities must be utilized, an ICE representative told me in an email.

Villalobos case hits especially close to home for Feldman, because she lives in the same San Jose neighborhood as his family.

I cant imagine the stress and the fear that she feels right now, Feldman said of Villalobos wife. It was incredibly traumatic when Miguel was arrested and detained, and for him to be ... moved thousands of miles away without any notice  if I were in her situation, I might feel hopeless.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjrJacom Stephens / Getty Images

A 33-year-old San Francisco man was struck and killed riding a motorcycle in the citys Potrero Hill neighborhood over the weekend, officials said Monday.

The victim was identified by the city medical examiner as Senoris Jinks Jr., a San Francisco resident.California Shakespeare Theaters Saturday, Aug. 25, opening night occasioned some theatrical blasphemy: Danny Scheies best scenes in The War of the Roses are when the actor isnt trying to be funny.

Normally, you should relish any chance to hear the Bay Areas foremost comic actor (there, I said it!) drop into one of his cartoon voices  like the reedy, lisping one that sounds like an effeminate space alien  or simply claw into a line of dialogue and wring every drop of juice out of it.

And Scheie does earn laughs as Richard III in Eric Ting and Philippa Kellys new adaptation, which combines four Shakespeare history plays  the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III  into a single, four-hour theatrical evening chronicling the epic battle between the houses of Lancaster and York for the English throne.

When the murderous usurper Richard stages a scene of false piety, proclaiming to a crowd that he would not be king, that hed rather hide me from my greatness and keep his nose stuck in his Bible, how can you not chuckle as Scheie widens and lowers his eyes, drifting reluctantly from kneeling prayer to public address, as if Richard floats above worldly cares, too angelic for ambition?

More Information The War of the Roses: Adapted by Eric Ting and Philippa Kelly from Shakespeare. Directed by Ting. Through Sept. 15. Four hours. $20-$92, subject to change. California Shakespeare Theater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda. 510-548-9666. www.calshakes.org See More Collapse

Yet, many of these laughs come limned in disappointment. As Richard kills and dissembles his way to the throne, leaving a trail of corpses  kings and princes, even Richards own brothers and wife  those zany Scheie voices and cockeyed expressions that usually fit just right here strain and slacken like an old bag of tricks.

For Scheie succeeds most as Richard when he gets to play against type: when he breathes his soliloquies into a handheld microphone, as self-serious and vacant-eyed as an emo bands frontman. Richard doesnt need to squall or stoop to comedy to command attention. He can speak low and direct his attention inward, paying obeisance at his own altar of self-worship, in Richards view the only arena worthy of consideration. Paradoxically, you convert to his church when he makes it so abundantly clear he doesnt require you.

Hes as mysterious and eerie as a cult leader, a vibe that owes just as much to the shows adrenaline-pumping music, composed by Byron Au Yong and performed by Josh Pollock (who doubles as many small ensemble roles). First guitar chords sound like a witch screaming in the distance. Instantly, the hills that always seem so idyllic and welcoming behind Cal Shakes Bruns Amphitheater become haunted, menacing, like clumped monsters starting to rear from dormancy.

The real monsters in The War of the Roses are mens bloodthirsty ambition and a system of government that cant check but rewards that ambition. Ting and Kellys cinematic adaptation, full of cross-cutting and transitions that let coming scenes seep into the the current one, never gives this rabble of would-be kings a moments breath. Theres no time for reflection or vulnerability, and thats exactly the point.

If the shows focus dilutes somewhat after Richard is crowned, Ting, who also directs, and his cast make enough illuminating choices to render the four-hour endeavor a worthy one. Cal Shakes veterans Stacy Ross and Lance Gardner bring surgical incisiveness to a variety of ensemble roles, cutting to the beating heart of thorny monologues.

Jomar Tagatac as Richard Plantagenet makes a speech that on paper is as dry as the begats from Leviticus into a celebratory, chest-pounding roar. As the warrior Queen Margaret, Aysan Celik augments her virtuoso curses with singing, and her ghoulish voice, spanning registers and sliding on semitones, seems to open up the earth to unleash demons below.

Joseph Patrick OMalley makes Henry VI painfully ripe for overthrow, hunching or flinching in jammies or a T-shirt, his tremulous voice and owls eyes as out of place in this world as if hed been teleported in.

Soon enough, hes untimely sent back to the alien land whence he came. But Henry VI might only be the most obvious outsider in The War of the Roses. Part of Shakespeares point in these history plays is that no human, not even Richard that dog, that had his teeth before his eyes, can survive long in a system of government so eternally ripe for coup.

Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicles theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniakUpdate as of Aug. 26 at 6:45 p.m.: A tweet from Burning Man's traffic account stated that the entry gate is now open, but new arrivals should expect long delays.

Burning Man attendees are settling into their first day at the weeklong event, but those arriving Sunday were hit with high winds, and plenty of dust and smoke  triggering organizers to close the entrance to the camp for hours Sunday afternoon.

Long wait times at the gate into Burning Man are a natural byproduct of welcoming an estimated 70,000 attendees onto the playa, with estimated waits extending to six hours at its peak. By 3:30 p.m. Sunday afternoon, however, the Twitter account monitoring traffic announced that "extreme weather" was forcing the gate to close amid rolling whiteouts.

"Extreme weather is expected to continue for several hours," read the tweet. "We are not allowing access from CR34 onto the playa and advise all to hold in Reno or return there if enroute. If on Gate Road, please shelter in place until conditions allow operation to resume."

By about 4:20 p.m., the Nevada Highway Patrol's Northern Command tweeted that the "extreme weather" consisted of 50- to 60-mile-per-hour winds that left drivers with "zero visibility" and cautioned that "travel conditions are extremely hazardous." Later tweets from the Burning Man traffic account asked Burners to remain in nearby cities, warning that cars are being turned away and that the weather could last "for several hours."

A livestream broadcasting from the Burning Man grounds showed some of the dusty conditions in Black Rock City Sunday afternoon.

The winds were initially estimated to hit 25 to 35 miles per hour and were expected to affect the playa until Monday night, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported. Add onto that the smoke from Northern California and southeast Oregon wildfires, which created a haziness that welcomed Burners "home."

The winds are expected to calm to the typical desert wind and temperatures that Burners are used to, bouncing back to the mid-80s during the day, with moderate winds, meteorologists said.

Photographer Sidney Erthal, a 14-year Burning Man veteran, shared some early images of the Burning Man event from its "Build Week" ahead of Saturday's midnight opening of the Burning Man gates. The colorful and showy cadre of cars typical of Burning Man lined up for registration at the "Department of Mutant Vehicles" creating an impromptu show of the moving art shows allowed on the playa for this year.

Take a look through the slideshow above for a preview of some of the mutant vehicles and art in its various stages of being built for the week.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 27)  As the country celebrates National Heroes Day, the Philippine Navy had a heroes' welcome of their own as they celebrated the return of two vessels that participated in a world renowned naval exercise.

The 700-man Philippine Navy contingent with the BRP Andres Bonifacio and BRP Davao Del Sur vessels arrived at South Harbor, Manila on Monday, after participating in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) Exercise in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Described as the world's largest international maritime warfare exercise, the month-long RIMPAC brings together 46 ships and submarines, 200 aircrafts, and 25,000 troops from 25 nations.

The exercise included missile engagement simulations, amphibious landing demonstrations, and explosive demolition operations.

It was the first time for the Philippines to participate in the exercise as contingents along with Vietnam, and Malaysia.

READ: U.S. trying to make friends, counter China with massive naval exercise

U.S. military leaders earlier said they invited new participants from the Indo-Pacific to "build relationships" especially among those who have claims in the South China Sea.

The U.S., however, disinvited China to the exercise for its militarization of contested islands.

"We work together, build relationships here, so later on ... it's hard to turn down a friend," said Vice Adm. John Alexander, commander of the U.S. Navy's 3rd Fleet.

The Philippine Navy also sent a contingent to participate in the Kakadu exercise in Australia and is set to deploy assets to Russia for a courtesy call visit next month.

CNN Philippines' Senior Correspondent David Santos contributed to this reportThose who follow San Francisco's vibrant food scene probably won't be surprised Che Fico was included in Bon Appetit's September cover story featuring a list of the 10 best new restaurants in America.

The buzzy Italian restaurant on Divisadero has been widely hailed for its stylish warehouse-like space and heavenly hand-made pastas and tasty pizzas with blackened sourdough crusts.

Anderson Cooper raved about this meal there on Instagram, and Gwenyth Paltrow described her dining experience there extraordinary.

San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer called it the most widely anticipated opening of 2018 and the city's most-sought-after reservation, and in a glowing review he wrote it lives up to the hype.

ALSO, Dinner as theater: The design force behind Che Fico and Protege

Bauer says Chef-owner David Nayfeld sets his Italian menu apart with a series of special dishes "reflective of Nayfeld's Jewish-Italian heritage." Here's his description of two of those:

Grilled chopped duck liver ($11) looks like a wreath with half-moons of purple daikon, sesame seeds and white leek blossoms providing a brilliant contrast to a deep blue plate. I've rarely seen such a rustic dish so elevated by presentation.

The suppli ($4 each), molten rice similar to arancini, are wrapped in a paper cone and are gooey with fontina and stained pink by tomatoes.

In order to make the cut on this year's list, Bon Appetit says they were specifically looking for restaurants taking a timeless concept and turning it on its head: "To cook the dishes your parents grew up on but make them your own." Nayfeld seems to be doing just that.

Across the Bay in Oakland, Nyum Bai also made Bon Appetit's list. "At her deeply personal restaurant in the East Bay, Nite Yun reimagines the Cambodian food of her childhood, from soulful bowls of Cambodian noodle soup to flavorful marinated pork chops, all set to a psychedelic Khmer playlist," the write-up in Bon Appetit reads.The White House returned its flag to half-staff Monday afternoon following a wave of criticism of President Trump for ending the tribute to deceased Senator John McCain just one day after he died.

Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCains service to our country, Trump said in a statement issued shortly after the flag was lowered. He added that he had ordered flags in the U.S flown at half staff until McCains burial, which will be Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.Ever since the Milo Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter for harassing actress Leslie Jones in 2016, fans have had fewer and fewer places to find himand soon, it seems, they might not have much reason to try.

In a Facebook post on Saturday, the conservative firebrand chastised his supporters for failing to stand up for him through recent financial and personal setbacks:

Over the past three years, I have spent literally millions of dollars trying to do talks speeches events rallies and protests, he wrote, in first line of the monolithic post. For my trouble I have lost everything standing up for the truth in America, spent all my life savings, destroyed all my friendships, and ruined my whole life.

Yiannopoulos, known for his opposition to PC-culture, atheism, feminism, Islam, and his polemical 2018 college tour, was a vocal proponent of the 2016 Trump campaigna topic of complaint in the recent post:

I was a significant factor in Donald Trump getting elected for which I have received zero credit. I almost single-handedly ignited the current debate about free speech on campus and NO ONE has ever matched my ability to draw attention to these issues.

The post comes on the tail end of a difficult few years for Mr. Yiannopoulos. In 2017, comments suggesting his advocacy of pedophilia lost Yiannopoulos his job as editor at Breitbart, a book deal with Simon and Schuster, and the financial backing of the Mercer family.

Most recently, he was dropped from the 2018 Politicon Convention in the wake of social media backlash.

"My events almost never happen, he lamented in the Facebook post. It's protests, or sabotage from Republican competitors or social media outcries. Every time, it costs me tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And when I get dumped from conferences, BARELY ANYONE makes a sound about it  not my fellow conservative media figures and not even, in many cases, you guys."

He also bemoaned financial lossessustained, he claims, in order to stay afloat.

All I ever receive is criticism and ingratitude he continued, You guys have no idea what Ive sacrificed for you.

As Salon points out, the financial facet of the post comes in response to criticism about Yiannopoulos extravagant lifestyle, exemplified by a recent Facebook post revealing a bill for over $7,500 worth of food and alcohol.

At some point you realize its occasionally better to spend the money on crabs and cocktails. If anyone has a problem with that then frankly they can go f---- themselves. He wrote.

At the end of his post, he turned back to his e-fans:

YOU WILL KEEP LOSING until you support those of us out there on the front lines while you tweet and Facebook from your living rooms.

Yiannopoulos gestured toward an apology a day later, in a Facebook post that included a picture of the commentators tear-streaked face:

Apologies for being a bit too "real" in the last day or two, if you were distressed! He wrote, Hate to break it to you, but even superheroes have off days once every few years. Ostensibly, he is the superhero in question.

You can read the original post here:

Emma Heath is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her with comments or questions at Emma.Heath@sfchronicle.com.













Fort Point Beer Company fans are currently a bit hard-pressed to find a Bay Area bar pouring the full range of the San Francisco brewerys beers. There are, in fact, just a couple: Mill Valley Beerworks, a sister brewpub-turned-Fort Point operation in Marin, and Fort Points diminutive Ferry Building outpost.

There had been an announced effort to open a new Mission District taproom and restaurant in San Francisco later this year, in a Shotwell Street space to be shared with bag manufacturer Timbuk2.

But things happen, as Fort Point co-founder Justin Catalana says, and plans changed.

Now, the brewery will instead be taking over the restaurant space at 742 Valencia Street, formerly occupied by the brewpub Brasserie St. James and before that, Abbots Cellar. Fort Point will turn it into a taproom, slated to open in early 2019.

Fort Point Beer Company was founded in 2014, and quickly thereafter found a fanbase by selling eye-catching, geometric-designed 12-oz. cans of crushable traditional German and English beer styles. In a few short years, it has become one of the biggest beer companies in San Francisco, even though it has been lacking a flagship taproom.

The Shotwell Street Timbuk2 option seemed like the answer at first. However, it had been an uphill battle to get the necessary brewery and restaurant permitting to transform the space into what they needed, and just as Fort Point was preparing to map out the design, a call came from a friend letting them know that a space on Valencia, only a few blocks away from Timbuk2, would be hitting the market. Plans quickly changed.

Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

It was financially a better situation for us, Catalana says. (It would be) much easier to take a space that had already been a brewery, restaurant (and) taproom, and turn it into what we wanted, than to take a totally raw space that had very little infrastructure and turn it into a taproom. It was just a better deal for us.

Yet even though the Valencia space had been a brewpub before, Fort Point wont be doing any brewing there.

Actually, Fort Points plan is to open a taproom that looks very different from both Brasserie St. James and Abbots Cellar.

(Abbots Cellar) were really trying to do the high-end food business plus beer and trying to make it quite fine dining, Catalana says. Then Brasserie St. James came in and wanted to do more beer, and said were going to cram this brewery in the back and add more bars. At this point (the space) is a little bit of a Frankenstein, so were changing it more dramatically than people think.

For starters, the menu will be pared down, though theyre not yet sure on the specifics. There will be around 14 taps  most of which will pour Fort Point beers and special variants on them. The layout of the space will be simpler, and it will be all-ages and casual. It will also be a lot brighter inside than people might remember, because Catalana and the team want to utilize the bars skylights.

We want to think of it as a nice, open, lively beer hall, he adds. We want this to be a place you can come in the middle of the day and have a beer and food. Very approachable like the Fort Point brand itself  about acceptability and introducing consumers to craft beer who havent had craft beer before.

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her atapereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira.Free tuition for a year will be available to students in the Contra Costa Community College District starting today under a statewide initiative to fund free tuition at the state's community colleges.



Students at Contra Costa College, Diablo Valley College and Los Medanos College can receive the free tuition via the California College Promise initiative if they meet various requirements.



They must be a first-time college student, have completed the district's Pledge Application, completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid or the California Dream Act application, completed an education plan, be enrolled in and complete at least 12 units, and maintain a 2.0 GPA.



There are no income requirements necessary to qualify for the free tuition. The district will cover for eligible students the $46 per unit fee, but students will still be responsible for any books, supplies, materials and non-course fees required for a class.



Gov. Jerry Brown signed the initiative into law last October to promote attendance in community college.



"We are very excited to have this opportunity to invest in our students' futures," Chancellor Fred Wood said in a statement. "We hope that many new students will take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to launch their college careers very cost effectively."





Copyright  2018 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.OAKLAND (BCN)



The Grand Lake Theatre was sold last week to Allen Michaan, the longtime leaseholder of the venerable Oakland movie palace.



Michaan purchased the Grand Lake for $3.75 million from descendants of Louis Kaliski and Abraham C. Karski, who built the theater in 1926.



Michaan had been operating the theater at 3200 Grand Ave. under a 95-year lease that would have ended in 2023.



He said today that he has many restoration and renovation projects in mind -- including work on the theater's vintage neon sign -- and will apply to have it listed with the National Register of Historic Places.



"The long-term preservation of the theater has been ensured by this purchase," Michaan said.



After he purchased the lease 38 years ago, Michaan began renovating and expanding. In 1981, the balcony of the main auditorium was split to create an upstairs auditorium.



In 1985, with the purchase of neighboring storefronts, Michaan created two smaller auditoriums, one with an Egyptian atmosphere and the other a Moorish palace.



The sale comes during the theater's most successful year, marked by three recent movies set in Oakland: "Black Panther," "Sorry to Bother You" and "Blindspotting."





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.MENLO PARK (BCN)



A 79-year-old man was found dead today in a Menlo Park alley, police said.



Officers responded at about 8:30 a.m. to a report of a man lying in the alley of the 1100 block of Willow Road. Officers found him with a visible head wound in an alley near his house, according to police. He was pronounced dead by emergency medical personnel at the scene.



Though there is no evidence of foul play, the Menlo Park Police patrol and detectives' units, San Mateo County District Attorney's investigators, crime lab investigators and the Coroner's Office have launched a joint investigation into the death.



Anyone with information regarding the incident can contact the Menlo Park Police Department Detective Unit.





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)



Lovingly echoing and re-imagining Beatles' iconic songs like "With a Little Help From My Friends" and "When I'm Sixty-Four," famed choreographer Mark Morris of the Mark Morris Dance Group celebrates the 50th anniversary of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band" with a new work called "Pepperland," making its Bay Area debut Sept. 28-30.



With original music by Ethan Iverson, the production comes to Zellerbach Hall on the University of California, Berkeley, campus for four shows, accompanied by an open house, an art exhibit, an artist's talk, a film series and a community dance class.



"Pepperland" is presented and co-commissioned by Cal Performances as part of its 2018-2019 season, and marks the 11th Morris work commissioned by Cal over the course of a 30-year artistic relationship.



Morris, who - like many people - grew up with Beatles' tunes, was invited to contribute to last year's celebration of the album in Liverpool, England, where he premiered "Pepperland" to enthusiastic audiences, according to Cal Performances.



Iverson's score blends original music with classic songs from the "Sgt. Pepper" album. And designer Elizabeth Kurtzman created vibrant costumes inspired by 1960s mod fashion.



The accompanying exhibit will feature Beatles and "Pepperland" memorabilia, costumes, art, music and video as well as a photo booth and a live theremin demonstration. A community dance class - open to all ages and abilities -- will be held at 11 a.m. Sept. 29 in the Bancroft Studio. A $10 fee and pre-registration online is required. And in collaboration with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Morris will guest-curate a series of seven films that showcase the innovation in the arts of the late 1960s.



Tickets for "Pepperland" range from $36 to $135 and are available by calling (510) 642-9988 or at calperformances.org.





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 motorcyclist died in a hit-and-run reported Saturday afternoon in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood, police said.



The man, identified by the medical examiner's office as 33-year-old San Francisco resident Senoris Jinks Jr., was involved in a collision reported at 3:44 p.m. in the area of 23rd and Arkansas streets.



Jinks was taken to a hospital but succumbed to his injuries there, according to police.



The driver of the vehicle that collided with Jinks' motorcycle fled but was later located and taken into custody, police said. The driver's name was not immediately released.







A man fatally struck by a Caltrain on Friday evening in Burlingame was identified today as Alexander Wolf, according to the San Mateo County coroner's office.



Wolf, 18, of Burlingame, was hit at 6:38 p.m. on the tracks at Morrell Avenue by southbound train No. 380, authorities said.



None of the 370 passengers on board were reported injured. Caltrain officials said it was the agency's seventh fatal collision this year.



The collision is still under investigation, according to the coroner's office.







A man killed early Sunday in East Oakland was identified by police today as Polo Demetrio Pablocalmo.



Pablocalmo, a 21-year-old Oakland resident, was found fatally shot at 12:57 a.m. by officers responding to shots fired in the 9500 block of E Street. Another man who was also shot was taken to a hospital in stable condition, police said.



In a separate case early Sunday morning, a 31-year-old Union City man was found fatally shot at 2:20 a.m. in the 1100 block of International Boulevard, according to police. His name has not been released pending notification of next of kin.



Two other victims in that shooting, a man and a woman, were hospitalized and are in stable condition, police said.







A 38-year-old man was killed and a woman was injured in a shooting Sunday evening in East Oakland, police said today.



The two victims were found by officers responding to reports of shots fired at about 7 p.m. in the 1300 block of 72nd Avenue, police said.



The man, an Oakland resident, was pronounced dead at the scene. His name has not been released, pending notification of next of kin.



The woman, whose age and hometown weren't released, was taken to a hospital in stable condition, police said.







A 20-month-old child was struck and critically injured by a vehicle on a driveway in Menlo Park on Sunday night, according to police.



The collision was reported around 8 p.m. but occurred between 6:30 and 6:40 p.m. in a private driveway about 30 feet from the roadway in the 200 block of Willow Road.



The toddler was riding a toy vehicle when a 26-year-old man, a relative of the child, was backing his gray Ford Fusion on the driveway and did not see the child, police said.



The child is in critical condition at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford but is expected to survive, according to police.



The driver is cooperating with investigators, who do not believe drugs or alcohol were factors in the case.







A switching issue that caused major delays this morning in the San Francisco direction between Antioch and Pittsburg/Bay Point has been fixed, BART officials said.



Normal service resumed as of 11 a.m., BART spokesman Jim Allison said.



The switching issue, caused by a track switch that was not operating, was first reported at 5:07 a.m. and was causing delays of up to 30 minutes, BART officials said.







Free tuition for a year will be available to students in the Contra Costa Community College District starting today under a statewide initiative to fund free tuition at the state's community colleges.



Students at Contra Costa College, Diablo Valley College and Los Medanos College can receive the free tuition via the California College Promise initiative if they meet various requirements.



They must be a first-time college student, have completed the district's Pledge Application, completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid or the California Dream Act application, completed an education plan, be enrolled in and complete at least 12 units, and maintain a 2.0 GPA.



There are no income requirements necessary to qualify for the free tuition. The district will cover for eligible students the $46 per unit fee, but students will still be responsible for any books, supplies, materials and non-course fees required for a class.







The city of Rohnert Park is seeking input from residents on the search for a new director of its Department of Public Safety.



Residents are invited to attend a community forum from 6-8 p.m. today in the multi-purpose room of the Community Center at 5401 Snyder Lane.



Public Safety Director Brian Masterson is retiring at the end of the month, and retired Sebastopol police Chief Jeff Weaver was selected as the department's interim director.



Weaver was with the Sebastopol Police Department for 29 years, 13 of them as police chief.



Rohnert Park has hired former Oakland police Chief Howard Jordan to lead the city's investigation of complaints that two of its public safety officers stopped vehicles on U.S. Highway 101 in northern Sonoma County to seize marijuana and money from drivers. One of the two officers has resigned.





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 30-year-old San Pablo man has been found guilty by a Contra Costa County Superior Court jury for the kidnapping and attempted rape of a woman near the Richmond Plunge in 2007, prosecutors said today.



Daniel Betancourt Jr. attacked the victim on Dec. 15, 2007, while she was out for a run. She was headed toward Ferry Point Tunnel when she was grabbed and dragged into bushes by Betancourt, Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office spokesman Scott Alonso said.



The suspect, who was using a knife during the attack, cut his hand and spilled blood onto the victim, Alonso said.



During the struggle, residents heard the commotion and started yelling, prompting Betancourt to flee, according to the district attorney's office.



Richmond police collected evidence, interviewed witnesses and the blood on the victim's clothes was tested. A DNA match was eventually made in 2017, after Betancourt registered as a sex offender following a separate conviction.



"The victim in this case persevered for many years as this case remained unsolved," Deputy District Attorney Jay Melaas said in a statement. "This unjust and unprovoked attack left her physically and emotionally harmed. Nonetheless she remained committed to seeking justice through this trial and bravely identified and confronted her attacker in court."



Betancourt was found guilty on Aug. 16 of kidnapping for rape, and assault with the intent to commit rape. He is set to be sentenced in October. The three-week trial took place before Judge Lewis Davis, prosecutors 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)



University of California-Berkeley police are searching for a man who was caught on video breaking into two vehicles today on the south edge of the UC-Berkeley campus.



UC police said the first break-in occurred at 12:07 p.m. today, when the man was seen smashing the window of a car parked in the Banway Building parking lot at 2111 Bancroft Way.



The same man was seen on security video breaking into a car parked in the Underhill parking lot at 2647 Haste St. at 1:46 p.m.



Items were taken from both vehicles, police said, and the suspect was also caught on camera peering into other parked vehicles in the area.



The suspect was driving a tan 1998 Nissan Pathfinder SUV, with California license plates "4DWF261." Police had not made an arrest as of 5:30 p.m. today.



Anyone with information about this suspect is asked to call UC Police investigators at (510) 642-0472 during weekday business hours or (510) 642-6760 during other times.





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.In a dance-and-jazz program marked most by captivating solos, Isaiah Bindel was just getting warmed up when he unfurled a stretchy, expansive turn at the top of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater bill on Friday, Aug. 24. By the end of the two-hour evening, a collaboration by DawsonDanceSF and saxophonist/composer Richard Howell, this dynamic stalwart of choreographer Gregory Dawsons troupe had made one keen impression after another.

In the fittingly titled Isaiahs Solo, a highlight of the Mangaku world premiere, Bindel seemed to have tapped a new mid-body power source, his torso flexing, compressing and bursting up straight. In Charlie Mac, a selection from Dawsons Floating in Mid-Air, Bindel demonstrated his knack for playing well with others, engaging the potent Erik Debono in a bare-chested game of leapfrog and other gambits. Bindel was back later on in Mangaku, teaming up with David Calhoun and Debono again in Dude in Black. And there this proud, commanding dancer was in the programs company finale, right at the center of it all.

Bindel was by no means the one only drawing focus. In a night when the men overall shone more brightly than the women, Lauren Worley insisted attention must be paid in her taut, gyroscopically torqued solo Floating. Taylor Jordan and Elizabeth Pischel led the way in Chef Says, a percolating female duet that kept adding and doubling its ingredients along the way.

Howell, performing onstage with an excellent band, was an essential solo force in his own right from beginning to end. By turns lyrical, tart and desperate, his soprano saxophone riffs served as both structure and sometimes divergent commentary on the dance.

Dawson didnt so much set his choreography to the music  although there were certainly passages of highly ordered movement, especially for the ensemble  but allowed Howells exploratory turns to unleash his dancers exuberant style.

The jazz seemed to free and excite everyone. The steps, some jazz-inflected in a Bob Fosse vein, with smartly angled elbows and ankles, or one arm sassily pinioned to the waist, had an insouciant, energetic drive. When he broke into sung lyrics, in Mangaku, Howell insisted the sky was the limit. Dance on the mountain, he urged in his throaty rasp. Sing to the stars. Later on, he made it more personal: Love is all I have to give.

It was invigorating, as it always is, to have live rather than taped music in the house. The score for the world premiere came from Howells recent album, Coming of Age  Mangaku.

Floating in Mid-Air, which premiered this year at the Bayview Opera House, was the stronger and tighter of the evenings two works. Dawson, who likes to put his dancers on the floor and bring them wriggling to upright life, did that early on in Floating. Some multiple partnering, done with the dancers backs to the audience, was strangely intimate, as if the viewers were being allowed behind the scenes to see how it was done.

Even when the dancing seemed to labor a bit, in an effortful pas de deux, there was something winning about the sometimes gawky struggles the dancers underwent. The bright-lights Broadway pizzazz gave the finale an exclamation point. No curtain call followed; it would have blurred the effect.

The 55-minute Mangaku, some of whose 13 sections bore such catchy if unilluminating titles as Liz Taylor and Moon Over Tiburon, was more diffuse and meandering. The duets began to run together and repeat themselves. Dawsons ensemble passages tended toward pattern-challenged crowd scenes or lines. Execution wasnt always crisp or precise. The multicolored long-sleeved costumes added visual interest without helping articulate the scene.

Whether alone onstage with the musicians or played off against a shadowed mass of dancers off to one side, it was Bindel and the other exhilarating soloists who made this collaboration pay off.

Steven Winn is The San Francisco Chronicles former arts and culture critic.WASHINGTON  The rallying cry from some liberals to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement isnt a likely winner this election year, as a new poll finds only a quarter of Democrats support eliminating the agency that carried out the Trump administrations policy of separating immigrant children from their parents.

But even as they dont want to fully dismantle ICE, 57 percent of Democrats view the agency negatively, including nearly three-fourths of those who describe themselves as liberal, according to a poll released Monday by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The findings demonstrate tension among Democrats about how to address the crisis at the border that intensified in June when the Trump administration instituted a family separation policy to deter illegal immigration.

Some potential Democratic presidential contenders, such as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, backed getting rid of ICE in response to the separations. Others, including Sen. Kamala Harris of California, urged a rethinking of the agency, but stopped short of calling for its abolition.

President Trump has seized on the Democratic criticism of ICE to paint the party as weak on immigration and national security. The administration reversed its separation policy amid an international outcry, but hundreds of children remain separated from their families.

Overall, opinions about ICE are divided along partisan lines. While a majority of Democrats view the agency negatively, Republicans largely have favorable views of ICE.

A sizable chunk  a full one-third of Americans  are too unfamiliar with the agency to form an opinion.

The public is largely critical of the administrations progress in reuniting families. Nearly 6 in 10 think the Trump administration is doing too little, though 8 percent say its doing too much, and a third think it is doing enough.

The partisan divide is dramatic: 85 percent of Democrats say the administration is doing too little to reunite children with their families, compared to 22 percent of Republicans. Still, that means nearly a quarter of Republicans feel the administration should be doing more.

Reviews of Trumps overall handling of immigration are also divided. More than three-quarters of Republicans have largely favorable views of the presidents immigration performance while more than 90 percent of Democrats disapprove. Nearly two-thirds of independent voters said they dont approve of Trumps handling of the issue.

The AP-NORC poll of 1,055 adults has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.

Thomas Beaumont and Hannah Fingerhut are Associated Press writers.As Hurricane Lane churned across the South Pacific last week, the Hawaiian Islands were drenched in torrential downpours.

The Big Island's east side was hit hardest, and a gauge in the small community of Mountain View, tucked behind Hilo, recorded a remarkable 51.53 inches in only four days.SEOUL  A close political ally of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea conspired with a team of online bloggers to illegally influence public opinion before Moons election last year, a special counsel said Monday.

The special counsel, Huh Ik-bum, whose investigation was authorized by the National Assembly, found no evidence that Moon himself was involved in the alleged scheme. Huh also did not determine whether or how much Moon profited politically from the online operation.

But the alleged involvement of Kim Kyoung-soo, one of Moons closest aides, is a political setback for Moon, who has vowed to set himself apart from South Koreas former presidents and their ethical scandals. Almost all of South Koreas presidents, including Moons immediate predecessor, Park Geun-hye, were entangled in corruption scandals.

Kim was accused of working with an internet blogger named Kim Dong-won, known widely by his blogging alias Druking.

Druking and his team of bloggers, in collaboration with Kim, posted numerous online comments or generated millions of likes or dislikes to enhance perceptions of Moon in the six months leading up to his May 2017 election, the special counsel said. Their operation continued until early this year, using special computer software to produce more than 99 million likes or dislikes, he said.

Kim, Druking and several others were indicted over the weekend on election-law violations and other criminal charges, the special counsel said. Kim was accused of promising an acquaintance of Druking a government job in return for his work, he said.

Kim, then a lawmaker affiliated with Moons Democratic Party, served as a key adviser for Moon when Moon campaigned for the snap presidential election that was called after Park was impeached and ousted on charges of bribery and abuse of power.

Kim has denied involvement in Drukings online operations and said he would prove his innocence at court. Despite the scandal, Kim was elected governor of South Gyeongsang province in southeastern South Korea in June.

Moons office also has denied that the president was involved.

Choe Sang-Hun is a New York Times writer.GENEVA  Myanmars army commander and other top generals should face trial in an international court for genocide against Rohingya Muslims and for crimes against humanity targeting other ethnic minorities, U.N. experts said Monday after a yearlong investigation.

Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief of Myanmars army, is one of six generals named as priority subjects for investigation and prosecution by a U.N. fact-finding mission on Myanmar in a report detailing military campaigns involving atrocities that undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law.

The three-member panel leveled the most serious charge, genocide, over the ferocious campaign unleashed by the Buddhist-majority security forces against Rohingya Muslims a year ago. That campaign, in the state of Rakhine, sent more than 700,000 fleeing across the border to Bangladesh.

Myanmar has rejected allegations of widespread atrocities, asserting that its security forces were simply responding to attacks by Rohingya militants on Myanmar police posts and an army station on Aug. 25 last year. But the panel said there was enough information to warrant investigation and prosecution of senior officers so that a competent court can determine their liability for genocide.

In a report released Monday, the panel described the Rakhine operations as a foreseeable and planned catastrophe building on decades of oppression of Rohingya Muslims. Myanmar has long falsely classified the Rohingya as Bengali immigrants from Bangladesh, denying them citizenship and making them vulnerable to attack, including previous assaults in 2012 and 2016.

The panel found evidence of genocidal intent in the operation, citing the prevailing rhetoric of hate directed at the Rohingya and statements by military commanders as well as the level of organization indicating a plan for destruction; and the extreme scale and brutality of the violence.

The panel said estimates of 10,000 deaths in the Rakhine campaign were conservative and cited harrowing witness accounts of mass killings, gang rapes of women and young girls, and the wholesale destruction of villages by the military, known as the Tatmadaw.

Myanmars civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and other civilian authorities contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes by failing to use their positions to stop them, the panel said.

Elsewhere, scorched earth operations by the military against Kachin and Shan ethnic minorities in northern Myanmar revealed similar patterns of attacks and sexual violence against civilians, the panel said.

Myanmar refused access and cooperation to the investigation. The panel said the U.N. Security Council should refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court or set up an international tribunal like those that investigated genocide and atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Nick Cumming-Bruce is a New York Times writer.STATEN ISLAND -- The controversial deer vasectomy program to curb the Island's rising deer population is in full swing into the third, and what is supposed to be, the final year of the program, according to the Parks Department.

The plunge into year three of the vasectomy program comes as deer-vehicle collisions and dead deer being picked up around the borough continue to plague to the Island.

From 2015 to 2018 Staten Island saw a 216 percent increase in deer-vehicle collisions.

Last year, 98 deer vehicle collisions occurred in the borough, or roughly eight collisions a month -- the highest number of collisions since 2015.

By the end of July, the Parks Department said 39 deer-vehicle collisions occurred in the borough.

Meanwhile, the number of deer carcasses the city's Department of Sanitation has been picking up around the Island has tripled too.

In 2014, the department collected 67 carcasses, and in 2017 -- 201.

To date this year, DSNY said 154 carcasses have been collected.

The borough also has experienced a sharp rise in Lyme disease, a jump which researchers say the Island's surging deer population is likely to blame for.

CITY SAYS PROGRAM A SUCCESS DESPITE MOUNTING COSTS

The three-year, $3.3-million program, which was set to run over budget going into the third year, entered its final run at the end of July, the Parks Department said.

White Buffalo, the city contractor overseeing the program, has performed 140 vasectomies on the Island's bucks since year three began, bringing the total number of vasectomies it has performed to 1,294, according to the department.

When the city awarded a contract to the company White Buffalo to perform the vasectomies, the contract was not supposed to exceed $3.3 million over the three-year research study.

But the city maxed its $3.3 million contract at the end of the second year of the program.

More than $2.3 million was spent during the first year of the program after the contractor realized there were more deer on Staten Island than expected, including more bucks in need of vasectomies.

And more than $969,000 was spent on year two of the program, which ended in March.

Earlier this year, the Parks Department said $314,000 was originally budgeted for year three, a figure the agency admitted then, could increase over the course of the third year.

It is unclear where that figure stands to date.

The Parks Department said "some degree of maintenance" will be required after year three of the study to "preserve the high percentage of sterilized males" and is currently "exploring options" to continue the study to perform upkeep as needed.

But despite mounting costs, the city says the vasectomy program has proven a success, resulting in an 8 percent drop in the borough's deer population in the second year of the initiative.

Last year, White Buffalo estimated Staten Island's deer population between 1,918 and 2,188, about four times the city's last count and a 9,000 percent increase in the herd since 2008.

The most recent survey conducted by White Buffalo and verified by the city's Parks Department estimated the borough's deer population in 2017 at 2,053 with a decrease to 1,884 in 2018.

GOAL IS TO STERILIZE 98 PERCENT OF ISLAND BUCKS

The Parks Department said year three of the vasectomy program will be broken down into two phases like in previous years. Phase one which the Island is currently in, will run through early October, and phase two will begin sometime this winter.

The agency said the goal of the third year of the program is the sterilize 98 percent of male deer on Staten Island, a target they say they are on track to meet by the end of this project year.

"We implemented this study to lessen the impacts of deer felt by Staten Islanders," said Richard Simon, Parks' wildlife unit director. "We have already seen a 50 percent drop in fawning after just two years of the study, so we expect the population will continue to decrease once we complete our third year and reach our ultimate goal of sterilizing 98 percent of bucks."

FOLLOW SYDNEY KASHIWAGI ON TWITTER.CITY HALL -- The Republican members of the Staten Island City Council delegation plan to vote against legislation to turn school zone speed cameras back on in time for the first day of classes.

New York City's school zone speed camera program expired at the end of July after state lawmakers failed to reach a deal on extending the program before finishing their regular session.

Since then, city officials have been trying to figure out how to turn them back on.

The City Council -- working with Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo -- have figured out a way to turn the cameras back on, Minority Leader Steven Matteo's (R-Mid Island) confirmed to the Advance.

The Council is set to discuss the legislation to expand the speed camera program Tuesday, and vote on it Wednesday, Matteo's office said.

However, it is unclear whether the council's legislation has actually been written yet.

TRAFFIC SAFETY SHOULD FOCUS ON 'REAL SOLUTIONS'

"As I have said in the past, I believe the city's traffic safety efforts should be focused on real solutions, such as implementing traffic-calming measures around schools to improve safety and increasing NYPD traffic patrols in areas prone to excessive speeding and crashes," said Minority Leader Steven Matteo (R-Mid Island).

Councilman Joe Borelli (R-South Shore) said that if the city "assumes the ability to end-around state law" there will be "no limit" to where the mayor will put speed cameras in the future.

"The real question should be: do people want to give Mayor de Blasio more control over generating revenue from drivers?" Borelli said.

The spokesman for Councilwoman Debi Rose (D-North Shore) said she will be away this week for the vote, but supports the Council's efforts to turn the cameras back on.

EXECUTIVE ORDER

On Monday, Cuomo signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency in New York City and halting the repeal of the bill.

The executive order temporarily suspends the sunset provisions in the speed camera program legislation, and gives the city the authority it needs to implement the program ahead of the school year. The order expires and would need renewal in 30 days.

"I refuse to sit idly by as Republican State Senators put politics over the lives of our children and jeopardize public safety," Cuomo said. "In the face of the Senate Republicans' shameful inaction and with the school year set to begin, we are taking emergency action to reinstate the speed cameras program and protect our children."

Meanwhile, Mattteo's office said the mayor has agreed on a "message of necessity" to fast track the bill through the legislative process.

The mayor could sign the bill as early as the day before school starts, Sept. 4, the New York Post reported.

Under the council's plan, those found speeding in school zones would still get hit with the same $50 dollar tickets, Matteo's office said.

The legislation would also allow the city more flexibility to expand the program.

The city does not disclose where speed cameras are located to not encourage drivers to speed in the areas the cameras are located.

But the Advance has spotted them:

At Page Avenue and Hylan Boulevard near PS 6

At Tysens Lane and Hylan Boulevard near St. Charles School

At Midland Avenue and Mason Avenue near Egbert Intermediate School and PS 38

On Goethals Road North near Staten Island School of Civic Leadership

At Targee Street and Rome Avenue near PS 48

On Forest Avenue at Morningstar Road near PS 22

A state bill sought to expand the number of speed cameras allowed in school speed zones. The bill passed the Assembly but didn't come up for a vote in the Senate before the session ended in June.

The proposed legislation would have extended the five-year program until 2022 and allowed the city to install speed cameras in an additional 150 school zones.

Since the implementation of the speed camera program, injuries on Staten Island decreased by 21 percent between 2014 and 2016 and fatal and severe injuries declined by 60 percent in camera enforced school zones, according to the city Department of Transportation (DOT).

FOLLOW SYDNEY KASHIWAGI ON TWITTER.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A New Jersey-based trash-hauling company has become the focus of a city investigation, following the death of a Staten Island man on the Gowanus Expressway, according to a New York Post report.

Robert Martinez, 64, of New Dorp, was driving to his job as a civilian steamfitter at NYPD headquarters when a tire came loose on a garbage truck allegedly owned by Centry Waste Services, and traveled through his windshield.

The city Business Integrity Commission, which licenses and regulates private sanitation companies, is conducting an "active investigation" of Century Waste Services, according to the report.

Century has received 74 federal safety violations since 2016, including a citation in 2018 for "loose and/or missing wheel fasteners," the report states.

Family of the company's owner were banned in the late 90s from the carting business in New York City, for employing a reputed associate of the Gambino organized-crime family, the Post reported.With Michael Cohen implicating Donald Trump in felony campaign finance violations, impeachment has moved from fantasy to distinct possibility. If Trump is removed from office, he would be replaced by Vice President Mike Pence. Pence has shown more restraint, and possesses vastly more governmental experience, than Trump. But detractors worry Pence is more of an ideologue, more indebted to big corporations, and would pass much more hard-line legislation than Trump. Who would you rather have in the White House?

PERSPECTIVES

While much of the country's liberal population is clamoring for President Trump's impeachment, some are preaching caution considering who is waiting in the wings. Before running for president, Donald Trump was known for his somewhat malleable political positions, even self-identifying as a Democrat as recently as 2004.

Pence, on the other hand, has made a name for himself as a hard-line Christian conservative and ally of the extremely libertarian Koch brothers. Per The New Yorker:

Pence has shown an affinity for and ability to pass regressive, conservative legislation.

Pence, though, has also shown that he can be swayed by public outcry. Per The Atlantic:

While he did sign a law that many saw as deeply discriminatory, he was quickly swayed by public sentiment. He appears, at least, to listen to the will of his constituents, as long as they make their voices loud enough.

Some, including erstwhile Trump advisor Omarosa Manigault Newman, believe Pence is unstable and would be a far worse leader. On an episode of episode of "Celebrity Big Brother," Manigault Newman questioned Pence's religious fervor.

Yet, it is Pence's penchant for passing regressive legislation that would make him a better president than Donald Trump. Proponents of replacing Trump with Pence say that his legislative agenda and lack of charisma will make him far easier to block, as he will inevitably alienate many of Trump's supporters.

Pence has shown, at the very least, an ability to comport himself with dignity.

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.There is a very tough race in Norway called SwimRun To The World's End and thanks to ace shooter Kai-Otto Melau we can share some beautiful images from the 5th edition of this race around the beautiful islands in Oslofjorden, what some folks call the most beautiful archipelago in Norway. Athletes run across 20 islands for a total distance of 52k, plus the swimming between these islands adds up to 9k. The longest run segment however is 8k and the longest swim 1.1k.

The race starts very early, and that allows the teams to experience the spectacular sunrise.

When your tethered partner is all in, you better also be ready to go all in, as team No Goubunku 2 members Onoda Wilcock and Onoda Baynham-Hughes show here.

The Norwegian Team Olympia Sport with Tore Hopen and Per Bergsj emerge from a swim on the way to 6th place in the men's race. It took them 7:43:42 to finish this race.

The eventually 6th placed mixed team Swimrunpodden with Annelie Stahl and Tomas Petersson hot on the heels of the male team Xreid Lp & Svm with Anders Aakre Jan-Sigurd Srensen. In the end however the 2 males were almost an hour ahead with 10:12:14 versus 11:07:51.

And back in the water we go, but first making sure that everything is in place.

Team Ironingman Xtd 2 with Jrgen Johannessen and Jo Gravas emerge after another swim. They ended up 11th in the male division in 8:18:16

The Team Colting Wetsuits Norway with Simon Bjornholm and Magnus Bru were in the hunt for the top spot all day but in the end these Swedes had to settle for the runner-up spot in 7:02:48.

What comes out must go back in. With all these transitions it is best to be fast and smooth.

A couple teams led by the Ironingman Team 4 of Roger Rnning

and Daniel Berenett complete another swim segment.

Not all teams swim with paddles or buoys. It really is a personal choice.

With all these swim and run segments a little cheat sheet is helpful.

Here is another team with the lead swimmer without paddles. Most folks opt to use paddles but some folks like to keep it simple.

Plus the paddles used in Swimrun are usually on the big side.

Some opted for the high road while others took the low road.

The Norwegian Sjpylsa Fangst & Fridykkarlag Sitt Swimrun Team of Arnt Eirik Landa and Jostein Langeland grabbed 5th place in 7:33:07

In hot pursuit of the 2 teams in front of them Team Swimrun Norway Rune & Are of Rune Kristian Stalstrm and Are Hotvedt ended up in third place in a time of 7:13:07

Team Xtreme of Erik Hanstein Andersen and Lars Erik Halvorsen can finally sense the finish. The grabbed 7th place at the end, but got no big gun salute for their effort.

All images  Kai-Otto Melau / Swimrun Norway



More info https://www.swimrun.no/race-info/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!New assistant treasurer Stuart Robert seemed to think it would be him. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

It was like watching a slapstick comedy as politicians and the financial services sector shrugged their collective shoulders and were left to speculating over who would oversee the scandal-ridden financial services sector.

The confusion was spawned by a decision to scrap the financial services ministry as a separate portfolio without making it clear who would be taking up its responsibilities.

It prompted shadow treasurer Chris Bowen to tweet banking reform is such a priority for [Prime Minister Scott Morrison] that he forgot to appoint a Minister for Financial Services. Pretty consistent for a guy who opposed the Banking Royal Commission and called it a 'populist whinge'".Has the grand adventure of Big Un finally come to an end with the appointment of administrators to the ASX-listed mothership on Monday?

CBDs eye was drawn to the part of the ASX announcement concerning a possible revival of the business.

Brandon Evertz and his father Richard Evertz are the co-founders of Big Un Limited.

During the course of initial discussions, the directors of the company indicated they may consider proposing a Deed of Company Arrangement (DOCA) to creditors at the second meeting, said the statement from Neil Cussen who is leading the team of administrators from Deloitte.

The administrators declined to comment on which board members are in this group, but the smart money is on the company's official visionary  Brandon Evertz.Higher almond prices, a bigger crop and productivity gains helped drive a big jump in the net profit of Australian-listed almond producer Select Harvests, as it warned that climbing water prices were a concern.

The company said it was well placed to meet the increased demands for almonds at home and abroad, as it reported a 120 per cent jump in net profit after tax to $20.4 million for fiscal 2018.

Almond producer Select Harvests has delivered a 120% profit hike. Credit:Erin Jonasson

The company said its water policy was "to have a portfolio of owned, leased and annual purchases of entitlements", in a bid to hedge against price volatility for water.

"This year's dry conditions are favourable for growing almonds, but the near doubling in annual water prices in the last few months is a concern," the company said.She was bantering with her friend, political journalist Annabel Crabb, and Blake says she decided to create an image with the slogan on a bag.

Blake told Fairfax Media the meme was "just a little Australian political joke" that she shared on social media.

Gwen Blake says the meme was "just a little Australian political joke" that she shared on social media. Credit:Stephen Blake

Frustrated as yet another prime minister was ousted , the packaging designer created a meme of a photo of a bag with the words "Ban the single-use prime minister" on it.

"I never had any intention to make it," she says. "Then the post got shared like a zillion times and everyone was asking for the bag. So I've created a business overnight."

Blake is the co-owner of Sydney packaging and design company Boxer and Co and says she already had the contacts in place to get manufacturing off the ground for the fledgling business she has called Sans Sheriff.

"I had just intended it as a funny visual joke but people thought it was an actual bag and then there were people saying they were going to make it," she said.

You can actually think 'I'll start a business' on a Saturday night and by Monday have decent sales happening.

"I thought 'Hang on a sec', I'll do it myself' - I have made merchandise in the past so I knew what I was doing. I quickly made a logo and created a store."Industry is looking past the anti-windfarm headlines that new energy minister Angus Taylor has generated in recent years and hoping his expertise in the sector will allow him to forge a national policy.

The ill-fated National Energy Guarantee played a central role in the downfall of Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministership this month, but the industry is urging Mr Taylor to not give up on energy reform.

The newly appointed Minister for Energy, Angus Taylor. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

He has strongly criticised energy policy in the past, particularly the favourable treatment of wind power under the renewable energy target.

The change in ministers did little to spook energy stocks, which had a relatively flat performance on the ASX on Monday, with wind power generator Infigen Energy's share price lifting 4.4 per cent on the back of surging profit.Canberra students received the highest results, on average, in the latest nationwide literacy and numeracy tests.

However, they did not dominate the country's ranks of top-performers.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority released aggregrate scores for each state and territory on Tuesday, from tests carried out earlier this year.

The ACT's average results were above the national average in each year group and discipline tested. Canberra also had the smallest share of children who failed to achieve a minimum standard in each skill: reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy.I thought I was familiar with Blairs work so I had been expecting to see glass that was sombre in hue with themes and images that were a little predictable. However, I was greeted with an exhibition full of colour, excitement and innovation.

This is a discernible step forward in the artists practice. While she has remained true to the original concepts that informed her earlier work, she has been able to carry her ideas into new areas in glass - exploring more refined imagery, forms and colour. This has meant developing the ideas that constituted the intimate personal approach of previous work into a more universal and sophisticated visual language.

Blair has always been attracted by nostalgia for the past and what constitutes her own personal memories of her close family and friends. Her early work was largely centred on the memorabilia of everyday objects that, like relics, come to be imbued with the essence of the person that has used them.

Annette Blair: 'The view outside', blown and coldworked glass, glass enamels.

The year 2013 is notable for a series of works by the artist with titles such as As you left it. In these works, she recreated in glass the utilitarian objects such as paint tins, hammers and oilcans left behind in the shed by her grandfather, and the mixing bowls in her grandmothers kitchen. Other family members and friends were also represented by objects recreated in glass. Sometimes, like memorial images, these were joined by painted portraits in enamel on glass.

In the work As you left it (in the Shed) 2013, the glass objects created in black coloured glass were readily identifiable and the image of Blairs grandfather painted on the glass dome that covered the objects reinforced the personal nature of the work. The dark glass and the dome suggested a memento mori. It was as if a moment in time had been frozen within a time capsule.For the faint-hearted, trying to decipher James Hallidays Wine Companion can be like trying to crack the Enigma code such is the detail of different symbols and type colours and stars.

But its a tried and tested formula that Australias leading wine critic has been employing for several editions now and theres no denying the man knows his stuff.

James Halliday, at the National Wine Show in Canberra, has given our regional wines the tick of approval. Credit:Melissa Adams

At 80, with 50 years in the wine game, Halliday is an unmatched authority on every aspect of the wine industry and the annual wine companion is the definitive guide to Australian wine.

For the 2019 edition 9289 wines were tasted and 68 new wineries were included. Fun facts include the number of glasses broken during the tastings, 15, and the approximate volume of the total wine tastings would fill six and a half standard bathtubs.Australian National University's Vice Chancellor Brian Schmidt holds one of the most coveted jobs in the higher education industry, but despite the university's number one status in some rankings, Professor Schmidt rates well below his fellow vice chancellors when it comes to pay.

As reported in Fairfax Media on Monday, Professor Schmidt took home $662,500 as a salary in 2017, well below the $1.445 million taken home by the University of Sydney Vice Chancellor Michael Spence and below the salaries of every other vice chancellor in Victoria, NSW and the ACT.

Australian National University's vice chancellor Brian Schmidt is paid much less than his counterparts across the country, but it's not the university driving his salary down. Credit:Karleen Minney

The $662,500 listed in the annual report is higher than what Professor Schmidt actually takes home. In June the university explained in a release alongside its annual report the figure includes $88,487 in superannuation, and $50,867 in annual leave and long service leave entitlements. Just $520,513 is the cash component.

Professor Schmidt declined the opportunity to talk about why his salary is so much lower than his counterparts on Monday, and has declined similar opportunities many times over the past three years he has been in the job. It's understood the pay packet, which lines up with similar positions internationally but is out of step at home, is due to Professor Schmidt's view that to be paid more would be inappropriate.Sanctions on one of Canberras newest and grandest aged care facilities imposed by the Department of Health is a reminder to all aged care providers to get their complaints and other systems in order.

Residents and family associated with the facility at BaptistCare Griffith were told on August 2 that The Australian Aged Care Quality Agency had found the experienced aged care operator had failed to meet 21 of the 44 accreditation standards, prompting the Department of Health to impose sanctions.

The sanctions come just four months after the same agency met all 44 standards following a scheduled visit by the Quality Agency to what is widely considered one of Canberras best facilities. BaptistCare Griffith, a purpose built aged care facility housing 160 residents, opened its doors in 2015 following the closure of Morling Lodge in Red Hill.

BaptistCare Griffith opened in 2015. Credit:Jamila Toderas

Breaches detected in the unscheduled visit by the Quality Agency in July were serious enough to trigger an audit and review of standards that revealed shortcomings in areas ranging from leadership and information systems to some human resources and clinical practices, effectiveness of staff education and continuous improvement processes.Australians are underestimating the danger of popular sleeping pills and sedatives "at their peril", as a record 142 people die every month in accidental drug overdoses, a major new report warns.

Annual drug deaths almost doubled in the decade to 2016, a period that claimed 13,471 lives through unintentional overdose and saw drug deaths overtake the road toll.

Legal pharmaceutical painkillers are the leading killer, but most people are dying with a combination of substances in their system, including alcohol, heroin, amphetamines and synthetic cannabis.

One dangerous combination is prescription painkillers, sleeping tablets and alcohol.

The Penington Institute, which published the overdose report, warned that benzodiazepines  sleeping and anxiety pills common in Australian homes  were now contributing to hundreds of deaths each year.A south coast grandfather has been sentenced to 32 years behind bars for the systemic child sexual abuse and "psychological mutilation" inflicted upon five of his own grandchildren for at least 11 years.

In the attic of his Sussex Inlet home, his car, his holiday caravan and a south coast motel, the 71-year-old man inflicted varying levels of sexual predation on the grandchildren entrusted to his care; plying them with drugs and alcohol and using them for the production and dissemination of child pornography.

The parents whose children were victims of the assaults. Credit:Georgia Matts

Police investigators and prosecutors maintain it is the worst case of child sex abuse they have ever seen.

The man, who cannot be named to protect the identities of the children involved, was handed the lengthy sentence, with a non-parole period of 24 years, at Penrith Court House on Monday.Fairfax buys up big

John Fairfax & Sons, proprietors of The Sydney Morning Herald, have, subject to Capital Issues consent, completed arrangements to purchase the whole of the unissued ordinary shares in Associated Newspapers Limited at par. This shareholding constitutes a controlling interest in Associated Newspapers Limited. Associated Newspapers Limited publish the Sun, The Sunday Sun and various magazines including Woman, People and Pix.

Rival operas

Last year, the opera groups of Sydney and Melbourne joined forces to present a season that gave Sydney music-lovers high hopes for the future of Australian opera. This year, the same two groups no longer allied or even friendly, have been giving separate competitive seasons of opera at the Sydney Tivoli and last years hopes have been deflated. A National Opera will not exist unless the Sydney and Melbourne groups merge or become full partners.

Westminster Abbey in dangerThe NSW Government has been ordered to release a raft of documents, revealing how it lands major tourism events and the money spent on them.

After a three-year legal battle with Fairfax Media, the publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald, Destination NSW must disclose details of investment agreements with key organisations including the Art Gallery of NSW, Vivid and the Sydney Festival.

Information previously withheld about the Vivid Festival will now have to be released. Credit:James Alcock

The decision by the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal found the balance of public interest sat in favour of disclosure of the information found in 79 documents withheld by the government body.

Exhibitions of works by renowned artists Picasso and Francis Bacon, the Bangarra theatres Corroboree event and the broadcast of Sydneys New Years Eve celebrations are some of the tourism drawcards in the documentation.A pair of recreational fishers who illegally took more than 60 coral reef fish have been fined $17,000. The Townsville men pleaded guilty in the Townsville Magistrates Court to taking 63 coral reef fin fish. There were 23 red throat emperor found on the vessel. Credit:David Abdo Agricultural Industry Development Fisheries Minister Mark Furner said the magistrate said their actions were deliberate and calculated and dismissed their argument the fish were taken for a social gathering. The black market supply of fish threatens the sustainability of the communitys fisheries resources and consumers should only buy seafood from licensed suppliers.

One fisher was fined $8000 for taking the fish while the other was fined $9000 for taking the fish and failing to stop his boat with Queensland Boating and Fisheries Patrol officers directed them to do so. It is understood the men, who did not have commercial fishing or boat licenses, were intercepted in September 2017 near Little Broadhurst Reef and officers found 103 fish on board, including 63 coral trout, 28 red throat emperor, 9 spangled emperor and 3 moses snapper with a total value of more than $2300. Recreational fishers can lawfully take 20 coral reef fish each. A bill is expected to be put to parliament later this year to pass the proposed reforms in the Fisheries Act. The reforms include creating an indictable offence for trafficking in priority fisheries resources with those convicted facing a fine of up to $378,450 and up to three years imprisonmentGargoyles around the main Quad Building at Sydney University. Credit:Peter Rae

Grotesque gargoyles have, as is their traditional role, staved off evil spirits at the University of Sydney since the mid-1800s.

They irreverently poked their tongues out at first prime minister Edmund Barton and, more recently, heart surgeon Victor Chang, former NSW governor Marie Bashir and former Wallabies rugby star Nick Farr-Jones for whom this revered seat of learning is their alma mater.

Their future, along with other historic colleges and gate lodges at the university, is now more secure as they were on Monday gazetted on the State Heritage Register.The new line would connect every major train line and will start to shift the rail network away from being a purely radial layout to an orbital design - one that includes circular links around the city, and not just in and out of the CBD. It would be built in stages over multiple decades and is designed to connect major employment, health services and education precincts. Business case development and the detailed design would start next year to determine exact station locations, route alignment and rolling stock. The loop would connect 15 stations in total, with interchanges built at 10 existing stations. Five new stations would be built at Doncaster, Bundoora, Burwood, Monash and the Airport, but commuters would not have a direct link to the city from these sites.

Work on a 25-kilometre section from Cheltenham to Box Hill will begin by 2022 and is expected to take about a decade to complete. Construction on the section between the Airport and Sunshine would also start in 2022. Construction of the new stations would start near Cheltenham. Existing stations including Glen Waverley and Box Hill would would be upgraded and may need to be rebuilt to link up to the underground service. Heading north, the new line would travel underground, with potential connections at Doncaster, Heidelberg, Bundoora, Reservoir, Fawkner and Broadmeadows. It would then join with the new airport rail link and Sunshine and Werribee.

Regional rail interchanges would be built at Sunshine, Broadmeadows and Clayton. Building the rail link would be highly disruptive. As with the Metro Tunnel project, massive tunnel boring machines will be used to dig underground from portals at different points of the tunnel. The rail project was never considered or recommended by Infrastructure Victoria, which has pushed for a different underground rail link connecting Newport and Clifton Hill, via Fishermans Bend. Premier Andrews said he expected there would be a private sector "stampede" to get involved in the project. "We will announce all of our costings, and all of the different elements of our complete package ... before November 24."

Opposition treasury spokesman Michael O'Brien said the proposal should be sent to Infrastructure Victoria, which provides independent advice for the government, for assessment and planning. He said the government could not say how the project would be funded. "They have no business case, no engineers' report and they wont rule out more sky rail across Melbourne," he said. "They refuse to say how many thousands of homes would be compulsorily acquired." Mr O'Brien accused the government of putting up a "plan for the next election rather than a plan for the next generation".

A spokeswoman for Infrastructure Victoria confirmed the advisory body had not seen any details of the proposal. She said the body's lack of knowledge of the plan proved Infrastructure Victoria was independent of government decision making. Mr Andrews told Triple M radio the government had been working on what he termed the "ring rail" for the past year. "[This] will deal with congestion," he said.

"Our train system is built at the moment based on everyone going to and from the city and that's just not the way our city and suburbs work. "This is the sort of rail system that all the great cities of the world are building." He pledged to start the project if re-elected in November. The project would deliver a "long-term pipeline of work", which is what the construction industry has been asking for, he said. Public Transport Minister Jacinta Allan told 3AW the government would look for contributions from the Commonwealth and the private sector and expected the project to be finished by 2050. "This is a big investment, I will certainly acknowledge that. The estimates that we have it will cost tens of billions, potentially up to $50 billion," she said.

Former premier Jeff Kennett in 2013 told The Age a Victorian government needed to borrow "whatever it takes" to build a comprehensive underground rail system for Melbourne. Mr Kennett said on Tuesday that an orbital rail loop around Melbourne should have bipartisan support. But he suggested the cost would be much greater than the government proposed. It is not going to cost $50 billion - that figure is just irresponsibly and fraudulently inaccurate, Mr Kennett said. Public Transport Users Association spokesman Daniel Bowen said the project was "incredibly ambitious" and a "game changer". "If they can pull it off, this project would have huge benefits for Melbourne," he said.

"To work well with the existing network, all rail lines, including the loop line, would need to run frequently all day every day." Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said that he ''liked the principle'' of the proposal but stopped short of offering funds to help build the loop. He told ABC Radio's Jon Faine the plan would have to be fully costed before such a pledge could be made. "We'd have to see the numbers ... but I think Dan Andrews is on the right track," he said. "I like the principal of it ... I think we have to applaud vision." Victorian executive director of the Property Council of Australia Matthew Kandelaars said the government must engage with industry early to "ensure the benefits of this project are maximised".A 14-year-old boy has been charged over an alleged violent crime spree committed over the past fortnight in Melbourne's south-east.

The boy, from Narre Warren South, was arrested on Monday morning and is facing 16 charges for a range of offences following a string of crimes in the area.

He was charged with five counts of motor car theft, two of unlicensed driving, evading police, conduct endangering life, robbery, assault, affray, driving at a dangerous speed, driving in a dangerous manner, careless driving and failure to remain at the scene of accident.

Detectives from the Casey Crime Investigation Unit detectives say the offences were all committed over the past two weeks, except for the robbery which was in July.

They all occured in the Casey area, which includes the suburbs of Dandenong, Narre Warren and Cranbourne. The boy is expected to appear at a childrens court later today.Results from the 2018 WA NAPLAN tests have been released, but there are calls for them to be thrown out altogether after a commissioned report found posting them on the My School website would be "inappropriate and misleading".

WA students sat the test in May this year, and the results have found WA students remained consistent with 2017's positive results throughout year 9.

Around one fifth of schools in Australia did their NAPLAN tests online in 2018. Credit:James Alcock

However, while WA remained consistent with its 2017 results overall, students fell below the Australian average across all five key competencies throughout years 3, 5 and 7.

University of Western Australia senior lecturer in social sciences Dr Glenn Savage said it was important to consider the results in context for individual children, but said NAPLAN's findings do help pinpoint some areas of concern for WA schools.Ancient Aboriginal rock art on the Pilbaras Burrup Peninsula will be nominated for UNESCO World Heritage Status in a long-awaited process launched by traditional owners on Monday.

The site near Karratha has more than one million rock engravings documenting human presence in the area over an estimated 45,000 years  the longest continuous production of rock art in the world. They include the oldest known picture of a human face on Earth, as well as images of extinct megafauna, Tasmanian tigers, hunting traditions, and mathematical and geometric forms.

An echidna rock engraving in the Burrup. Credit:MAC.

At Hearsons Cove on Monday, Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation gathered with representatives of the five local language groups  the Ngarluma, Yinjibarndi, Yaburara, Mardudhunera and Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo people  to sign a joint letter of support with Premier Mark McGowan for the state to begin the formal process.

Corporation chief executive Peter Jeffries said the Circle of Elders decision was unanimous.The Barr government has threatened to pull the pin on the second stage of light rail if it's forced to use Kings Avenue bridge to travel over the lake, saying it would cost at least $300 million more but take longer and pick up fewer passengers.

The federal parliament's joint standing committee has interrogated ACT government officials for the past few months over the decision to use Commonwealth Bridge to get light rail to Woden, amid concerns it will negatively impact on the Parliamentary Triangle.

An artist's impression of light rail travelling over Commonwealth Bridge.

Committee chair and Liberal MP Ben Morton has returned repeatedly to the question of whether Kings Avenue bridge would be preferable, given it would lend itself to an offshoot to the Russell offices and the airport.

That would require light rail to travel down Constitution Avenue, which is already earmarked for use on the future east-west spine between Belconnen and the airport.Tony Abbott delivers a speech at the Centre for Independent Studies on Monday. Credit:AAP

After last week, little in Australian politics has the power to surprise.

But Tony Abbott giving a speech in which he quotes both Ben Chifley and Oprah Winfrey, is an eyebrow-raiser, even in these cynical times.

The sympathetic CIS crowd applauded the former prime minister. Credit:AAP

Speaking on Monday at a luncheon at the Sydney-based conservative think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies, Mr Abbott channelled Ms Winfrey when he said his objective in politics has always been to try ... to help all of us come closer to being our best selves.Peter Dutton is incensed by the boat arrival. Credit:Photographer: Mark Graham/Bloomberg

Police have detained a group of people said to be asylum seekers on the run in crocodile country north of Cairns, as an incensed Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton warned the threat of people smugglers hasn't gone away despite it being the first such boat arrival on mainland Australia in four years.

Fifteen foreign nationals believed to be from Vietnam have been detained and authorities are searching for others who abandoned a fishing boat that ran aground in the Daintree, in what Mr Dutton said is the first "people smuggling vessel" to reach Australia in 1400 days.

It comes as new polling reveals the majority of Australians want refugee children to be removed from Nauru, after revelations of disturbing incidents of self-harm by minors on the island.The federal minister charged with easing traffic congestion and overcrowding in Sydney and Melbourne says the newly installed Morrison government will push for increased infrastructure investment and more even distribution of population growth across Australia.

Alan Tudge  the new Minister for Cities, Urban Infrastructure and Population who has been spruiked by Prime Minister Scott Morrison as the "minister for congestion-busting"  will be taking on a highly sensitive and complex portfolio linked, via immigration, to the Coalition's internal conflicts and broader community anxiety about population growth in the big eastern cities.

Shifting into the new portfolio shortly after Australia's population ticked past 25 million, Mr Tudge told Fairfax Media that population policy was "multi-faceted" and would require better co-operation between federal departments and agencies as well as state and local governments.

Incoming Cities, Urban Infrastructure and Population Minister Alan Tudge. Credit:Andrew Meares

"Immigration settings are clearly a factor that go into population policy," he said, "but the issues of congestion, which is what is most on peoples minds, is not just a one-dimensional issue about the immigration growth rate."The Lodge may be sitting empty for a while after last week's Liberal leadership coup with Prime Minister Scott Morrison giving no indication when or whether he would move into the Deakin residence.

While former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is expected out by the end of the week, Mr Morrison said he had no immediate plans for his family to move into the Lodge or the second official residence, Sydney's Kirribilli House.

The Lodge is empty after Malcolm Turnbull was shunned from the prime ministership last week. Credit:Gerrit Fokkema

"Were not thinking about any of that at the moment. Were just focusing on the job," Mr Morrison said, speaking to ABC Radio Sydney on Sunday.

"Im still sleeping in my flat down here in Canberra but the familys going home today. Its been nice to have them about the last couple of days."Members of the Australian Defence Force need greater support as they work through the profound psychological experience of leaving the military, with one in five reporting suicidal thoughts in their post-defence lives.

The Senate's Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade held a public hearing in Brisbane on Monday as part of its inquiry into the transition out of the military into civilian life.

Dr Madeleine Romaniuk from the Gallipoli Medical Research Foundation told the committee that while there had been significant improvements in the way the Defence Force handled transition processes, there was still more to be done.

Soldiers, sailors and airmen and women are at increased risk of taking their own life once they leave the Australian Defence Force. Credit:Glenn Campbell

What were missing is this understanding of theres a profound psychological experience that goes from changing from such an ingrained, all-encompassing system, to not being in that any more, she said.The Morrison government's surprise coupling of the public service and finance portfolios under senior Coalition minister Mathias Cormann has stirred union fears of cuts to federal bureaucrat numbers.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has triggered the alarm at the Community and Public Sector Union in handing responsibility for the bureaucracy to a defender of its strict wage policy and growing spend on contractors.

Senator Mathias Cormann is the new minister in charge of the public service. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

However Senator Cormann marked his entry to the portfolio on Monday praising the public service, and committing to modernise it.

Union national secretary Nadine Flood said Mr Morrison's reshuffle following the Liberal party's disastrous civil war last week had shown little promise he would abandon the Coalition's approach to the bureaucracy.Prime Minister Scott Morrison is facing his first foreign policy test ahead of a regional visit next week, as Pacific leaders urge him to deepen Australias cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and cement Australias commitment to the Paris agreement on climate change.

The moves heighten pressure on the new Prime Minister to confirm his stance on the global climate deal as two new cabinet ministers take on the Energy and Environment portfolios amid talk of a policy reset.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is greeted at Quilpie airport by David Littleproud. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Fiji Prime Minister Josaia "Frank" Bainimarama wrote to Mr Morrison on Monday to congratulate him on his elevation while also seeking a commitment to tackle carbon emissions.

We cannot settle for business as usual and we certainly cannot tolerate any backward steps, Mr Bainimarama said of the urgent need to address climate change.Foreign nationals who abandoned their boat in crocodile country in far north Queensland should be caught and sent to Nauru, one of Scott Morrison's new ministers says.

Border force officials have caught 15 people and are searching for others who fled a boat that ran aground off Cape Kimberley near the Daintree River on Sunday.

The stricken vessel spotted off the coast of Queensland. Credit:Seven News

Locals raised the alarm when they saw a large group of people fleeing the crippled vessel and making the risky swim to a nearby beach where some vanished into mangroves infested with

saltwater crocs.Many will find it hard to respect and trust particular ministers given the way they behaved and voted last week. People will question the truthfulness of their pronouncements and their overall commitment to progressive and fair policy-making. We will be watching for evidence of undue influence of hard-line conservatism. Sue Dyer, Downer Doubtful sentiment Was Jack Waterford (Abyss stares back at Libs, Forum, August 25) an officer cadet at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the mid-1950s?

His Australians ... want leaders who have a strong sense of where they are going, and why, and who regularly explain, confirm and reinforce to the public ... their confidence that events still fit within the roadmap was straight out of the General Montgomery leadership playbook as taught at the RMAS in that period. It was usually expressed as: Always keep your chaps fully in the picture, no matter how bad the situation, and rest assured theyll do anything you demand of them. The sentiment expressed in the last seven words tended to be doubted by the more cynical. Bill Deane, Chapman Parliamentary revamp

It is idle to think that a silver bullet is available that might target the malaise in our body politic, but here is a modest proposal. If our backbench parliamentarians were paid average weekly earnings (no extras because they favour incumbents and are unnecessary in this era of social media), there would be less incentive for careerists (who would have to take a haircut from well-paid legal practices and union positions) to come in merely to help themselves. It would not disadvantage those who genuinely wanted to serve the people but could not otherwise afford to do so. Ministers should be paid the average of CEO salaries, their remuneration thereby dependent on the state of the economy. The Prime Minister could have a modest loading above that. Would it make a difference? I dont know, but it could hardly produce a crop worse (with a few honourable exceptions) than the current mob. Allen Mawer, Acton Failed government

Scott Morrisons elevation to the role of Prime Minister has left me severely depressed. Turnbull lost me when he took emissions reduction out of the National Energy Guarantee (NEG). I shed no tears over his demise. But in climate and energy terms, Morrison is unlikely to be any better. He took a (lacquered) lump of coal into Parliament and told us not to be afraid of it. He compared the Tesla battery in South Australis to the Big Banana despite all commentators declaring the battery a success in averting blackouts. Morrison appears to endorse the ACCC recommendation to get rid of the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES) that has underpinned the rooftop solar revolution. Dutton may have been stronger on reducing immigration but as a hand-maiden of the far right, he was not a viable option. This government has failed and the sooner we are rid of it the better. I just hope Labor can deliver on a viable climate/energy policy.

Jenny Goldie, Cooma, NSW Shorten the big winner As the dust settles on the train wreck that the federal Liberal Party visited upon itself last week, surely a key question must be answered  what did the upheaval actually achieve? The answer is very little. Apart from replacing a relatively popular Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull with a much lesser known Scott Morrison, it laid bare the ideological and personal animosities that are rampant within the conservative side of politics. These tensions are sadly for the Liberals more than likely to persist as the hard right elements of the party will almost certainly continue their agitations. It also highlighted the extraordinary policy-making challenge confronting a Morrison-led Liberal government where his party could not even agree within its own ranks on something as vital as a coherent national energy policy. All that has been achieved in reality is that the disastrous Liberal disunity played out last week all but guarantees that Bill Shorten is in the box seat to become prime minister after the next election.

Jonathan Hayes, Hughes Duttons incompetence The Peter Principle argues that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence. One of the challengers to the Liberal leadership (whose Christian name is, appropriately, Peter) embodies the principle. Dutton was probably a competent policeman and maybe even an OK backbencher. The danger signs emerged when he was promoted to shadow health minister by Tony Abbott.

He was unable to put any pressure on his Labor counterpart and when he joined the Abbott ministry was voted by doctors, in 2015, as the worst health minister in 35years. It was clear by then that Mr Dutton had risen to his level of incompetence. Despite his failures, Malcolm rewarded this Peter with the super-ministry of Home Affairs.

The fact that 40 members of the Liberal party room were prepared to vote for him as PM shows an abysmal lack of judgment and/or a tendency to value factional purity above ability. Mike Reddy, Curtin Seselja out of line Regardless of ones personal political beliefs, I think we all need to consider the way in which our political representatives actually represent us as citizens, or represent their own personal views at a cost to us as citizens.

See Seseljas actions, among many others in the Senate when debating Senator Leyonhjelms bill to reinstate the rights of the ACT and NT to discuss euthanasia, removed many years ago by Kevin Andrews, have reminded me that senators appear to have forgotten that their role is to protect the interests of their state or territory, and not their personal view. The Senate is a chamber of review, countering the political issues coming from the House, but Zed and others like Andrews have made it a place to champion hard-right religious viewpoints on issues such as same-sex marriage and euthanasia. The debate was not about euthanasia per se, but the right of the ACT and the NT to debate the issue in the same way as the states can. Seselja voted against the interests of ACT residents by arguing that people living there have no right to do so. Seselja, and others, made it a vote on euthanasia, because they could, in a cynical exercise to further his own agenda.

That agenda was seen further in his support for Peter Dutton during this last week, where he proved that he cannot count. ACT residents of whatever political persuasion should consider giving Seselja the flick and electing someone who will defend the rights of the ACT in the Senate. Given the safe nature of a Liberal Senate seat under current provisions, there must be at least one Liberal who would do that. Surely? Charles Ironside, Moss Vale, NSW Disregard for majority By voting against the rights of Canberrans, such as same-sex marriage and legislative equality with Australian states, and now overthrowing a prime minister by backing Peter Dutton, Zed Seselja has shown an outstanding disregard for the majority views of people he claims to represent.

It is time Zed Seselja took stock of his professed principles and remembers he was elected to represent us, not himself. Gina Pinkas, Aranda Senator should go With yet another Prime Minister elected after party in-fighting, the position of Senator Seselja should be untenable. At one level, he has consistently failed to stand up for ACT constituents. For example, he did not oppose loss of thousands of public service jobs, which was based on misplaced ideology.

He failed to back the ACT and Northern Territory in the attempt to to be treated equally with all other jurisdictions. On national issues, Senator Seselja has paraded his ultra-conservative profile such as opposition to marriage equality But much worse, he joined the band of wreckers inside the Liberal Party who were determined to move the party to the far right, regardless of the consequences. He does not understand or accept the values of contemporary Australian society. By being part of this traitorous and deeply personal attack on his own party, he should remove himself from Parliament.

Keith Croker, Kambah Rid us of this extremist Senator Zed Seselja has blood-soaked hands. He was Peter Duttons henchman in the failed party room putsch against prime minister Turnbull. He, along with Dutton, must resign from Parliament immediately. They have traumatised the nation and torn down another prime minister. Seselja has form, having politically assassinated the competent and moderate Liberal senator Gary Humphries in the past.

No doubt self-serving Seselja will not resign. Which raises the question: when will the decent moderate and liberal constituency in the ACT Liberal Party rise up and rid us of this extremist? Or are there none left, in which case it will take the electorate, and a strong independent to do the job. David Perkins, Reid Three strikes ACT senator Zed Seselja has shown over the last couple of weeks why he should be voted out of office by the ACT electorate at the earliest opportunity.

First he allowed his personal religious views to outweigh his duty as a representative of the ACT in voting against the proposal to restore full legislative autonomy to the ACT and the Northern Territory. Secondly he abandoned his obligation to support due parliamentary and electoral process by playing an active role in the appalling and humiliating events which enveloped the Australian Parliament this last week. Again he put his own personal and ideological interests ahead of what he must have known were the views of his constituents  if indeed he bothered to ask. Thirdly in respect of his part in Duttons debacle he got it spectacularly wrong. Thats three strikes against you senator. Lets hope your constituents remember that when its your turn to face the ACT voters.

I certainly will. Jeff Hart, Kingston Reactionary views Zed might think he has won some sort of victory by just being a deck chair on the Titanic but he was never elected to impose his extreme reactionary religious views on Canberrans, which his pattern of voting has revealed. Zed has proven himself in the last week or so to be an untrustworthy politician, being quite willing to oppose a sitting and elected PM.

After the next election hopefully he will no longer represent Canberra. E. R. Moffat, Weston Bishop a class act Thanks Julie Bishop for being an amazing female trailblazer in politics. The real question to be asked is why would any smart women enter the Liberal Party now when it is so ruthless in not allowing them to become Prime Minister?

Ms Bishops achievements, her long-standing career and popularity in the electorate was not enough for her to be chosen to lead it to victory? Melina Smith, Brighton, Vic TO THE POINT APPROACH WITH CARE Putting Abbott into the ministry is like putting a bull in a china shop. Think about it ScoMo.

Jon Jovanovic, Lenah Valley, Tas POLITICAL PERILS Et tu, Mathias. T. Puckett, Ashgrove, Qld GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER

I have never voted for the Liberal Party but I would like to say this: Hey guys this is embarrassing. Get your act together. Antony Barry, Ngunnawal LESSER OF TWO EVILS Morrison is the lesser of two evils. Jeff Bradley, Isaacs

MIND YOUR BACK Senator Seselja says hes going to get behind the new PM. Best place for another backstabbing, hey Zed? Michael Barry, Torrens HATE TO SEE THE CHILDREN Its so good to see that the adults are in charge.

Peter Campbell, Cook CLOWNS RULING The only statesman gone. Send in the clowns. Happy now, Tony? Anne Willenborg, Royalla, NSW TIME TO CROSS THE DITCH

[After the events of last week] New Zealand looks good. Brenda Hartley, Bruce RED ALERT The outgoing prime ministers choice of a red tie for his farewell speech may not have been accidental. Peter Sesterka, Hawker

HOCUS POCUS FOCUS Same old, same old. Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg: hocus pocus focus. Annie Lang, Kambah SLIPPERY SLIDE The jump-up to Parliament increasingly looks like a spillway.

Chris Klootwijk, Macarthur TRUTH AND LIES If  as Rudy Giuliani maintains  the truth isnt truth, what is it? Michael Williams, Curtin GROUNDS FOR INQUIRY

With the level of dysfunction we have seen in Parliament House, I propose a royal commission! Gay von Ess, Aranda BAD BEHAVIOUR REWARDS Duttons still in, Barnabys back and Abbott has just had his first decent job offer in years. A lot of people seem to have been rewarded for some very bad behaviour. M. Moore, BonythonRegional Victoria is the economic laggard of Australia, contributing less per hour of labour to the nations wealth than any other part of the country.

A decline in the competitiveness of manufacturing and in offshore gas production in Bass Strait is responsible for the low output, a study has found.

Manufacturing accounts for 10 per cent of regional Victoria's economic output. Credit:Jason South

The study by economic consultants SGS has exposed the economic divide that exists between Melbourne and the rest of the state, with Melbournes economy ranked second only to Sydney among major cities for how much wealth is generated for each hour worked.

The study, which analysed changes in Australias gross domestic product over the past two decades, reveals how the decline in the manufacturing sector has had less economic impact in Melbourne than in regional Victoria.Her colleagues will miss her ability to draw a crowd (and their wallets) to Liberal fundraising events. There are two views inside the Liberal party relating to Ms Bishop and her tilt for the Prime Minister's office: one is that she was poorly treated by colleagues she campaigned for with her star-like magnetism, another is that the party who made here foreign minister and deputy leader owed her nothing more than that. Jostling begins for seat Bishop hasn't quite quit Although she has left open the question of whether she runs again in her safe seat, jostling is certainly under way. And Ms Bishop, even though no one really expects her to go around again (unless Mr Morrison implodes and the party begs her to lead it), will want a say in who succeeds her.

There is speculation that Attorney General and marginal-seat holder Christian Porter could contemplate a shift to Curtin, saving his political career. But this would send a shocking signal to the Western Australian electorate. Although there is precedent (Kim Beazley abandoned Swan in 1996 to move to Brand), if Mr Porter jumped ship, it would add to the stench of political death already wafting from the government. Further, his run would be complicated by his role in damaging Peter Dutton's run for the leadership by referring his eligibility to remain in parliament to the Solicitor General for legal advice, a move conservatives in the party are unlikely to forget. Senator Mathias Cormann, who supported Mr Dutton in the contest that followed Mr Turnbull's departure, could also be interested.

Some say he might be considering a move from the Senate into the safe seat if Ms Bishop departs. There has been no love lost between Senator Cormann and Ms Bishop over the past few years and the leadership tensions over the last few weeks would have driven them further apart. It is possible Ms Bishop would do what she could to hobble him if he decided to run. New Curtin MP has serious shoes to fill Whoever takes the seat will carry a significant responsibility for the Liberal party in the west.

Ms Bishop has been at the forefront of the party's success for more than two decades and the Curtin division will be looking to send to Canberra a replacement with the potential to replicate her electoral appeal. When Ms Bishop, who was born and bred in South Australia, won the seat of Curtin in 1998, the Liberal party held seven WA seats in the House of Representatives and six senators (a total of 13). Twenty years later, the Liberals send 11 MPs and six senators to Canberra (a total of 17). Loading In comparison, Labor send just nine (five MPs and four senators).

At the last election, the Liberal party won 45.7 per cent of the WA primary vote, compared to Labor's 32.5 per cent. Ms Bishop has been responsible for some of that success. 'New generation' of ministers, some from WA The federal Liberal party has identified two Western Australian MPs as its next generation of front benchers. Prime Minister Scott Morrison named Durack MP Melissa Price as the nation's new environment minister and Senator Linda Reynolds as assistant minister to Peter Dutton in the crucial home affairs portfolio.

But defence, an important portfolio in the competition between WA and South Australia over massive military contracts, has gone to South Australian Christopher Pyne. Some  including a number of talkback callers  think former SAS officer Andrew Hastie, who represents Canning and is the chairman of parliament's powerful Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence and Security, might have been a better pick in the portfolio, especially for WA. If recent polling is any measure  which it arguably shouldn't be after last week's political bloodshed  there are a number of Liberal seats in the electoral firing line, which again would lead to a long-term shake-up of the Liberal party's WA contingent and a reduction in its influence in the party room. Tweet of the week This week from 6PR's Brett Bonetti from inside the station's famed green room.When Facebook officials heard that a damning United Nations report would again make a link between hate speech on the social media site and atrocities in Myanmar, they knew they had to act, a person familiar with their thinking said.

For the next 24 hours, officials went back and forth on how to respond to the report's call for Myanmar's commander in chief  an active Facebook user  to be investigated and prosecuted for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes against the country's Rohingya Muslim minority.

Without consulting the Myanmar government, Facebook opted to remove Senior General Min Aung Hlaing's page from its platform, along with those of other top military brass, and pre-emptively banned others. The UN report "put a deadline on what they were planning on doing anyway," the person, who was not authorised to talk to the media, added.Tokyo: North Korea's main newspaper accused the United States on Sunday of staging military drills to prepare an invasion while at the same time pursuing dialogue with a smile on its face.

Rodong Sinmun, the official mouthpiece of the Workers' Party of Korea, cited alleged US troop movements in the region which it called "extremely provocative and dangerous" and said they threatened to derail the dialogue between the United States and North Korea.

Smaller remote cities, like Samjiyon, are said to be benefiting from an massive North Korean construction campaign. Credit:KCNA/AP

The US military called the accusation "far-fetched."

The opinion piece came two days after President Donald Trump cancelled a planned trip to North Korea by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, citing a lack of progress in getting North Korea to surrender its nuclear weapons.Moscow: A court in the Russian capital sentenced opposition politician Alexei Navalny on Monday to 30 days in jail, a sign of Kremlin jitters as an unpopular plan to raise the retirement age energises critics of the government.

The sentence, handed down for Navalny's role in organising unsanctioned protests in January, means that the anti-corruption activist will be behind bars when Russians vote in regional elections on September 9. Navalny, 42, had called for demonstrations the same day against the retirement-age plan, which has sent President Vladimir Putin's approval rating to its lowest level in more than four years.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny gestures in a court room in Moscow. Credit:AP

After the judge at Moscow's Tverskoy district court read out his sentence for a "repeat violation of the process for organising a public event," Navalny on Twitter called for the September 9 protests to go on. He said he was taken into custody Saturday outside his Moscow apartment building and brought to the police station in his shorts and slippers.Above all, the investigators said the situation in Myanmar should be referred to the International Criminal Court, and if not, to a special tribunal. Last week, Myanmar's government rejected any cooperation with the ICC, to which it is not a party. China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power over whether the issue will be brought before the ICC, has been reticent about condemning Myanmar's government during the crisis. UN leaders, foreign government officials, and human rights watchers have for months cited evidence of genocide in Myanmar, and the United States late last year said that "ethnic cleansing" was occurring in Myanmar. But few experts have studied the issue as in-depth, and in such an official way, as the fact-finding mission with a mandate from the 46-nation council. Rohingya refugees queue for a meal provided by a Turkish aid agency at a food distribution site in Coxs Bazar. The refugee camps in Coxs Bazar are home to over 900,000 Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar. Credit:Kate Geraghty The United Nations does not apply the word "genocide" lightly. The team's assessment suggests the crimes against the Rohingya could meet the strict legal definition, used to highlight and condemn state-supported abuses in places like Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan's Darfur region.

Human rights watchers say that determining "genocidal intent" is perhaps the most difficult criteria to meet: In essence, it's the task of assessing the mindsets of perpetrators to determine if ethnicity, race, religion or another attribute had motivated them. "The crimes in Rakhine state, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts," the report said, alluding to a region of Myanmar that is home for many Rohingya. Adding into their assessment: The extreme brutality of the crimes; "hate rhetoric" and specific speech by perpetrators and military commanders; policies of exclusion against Rohingya people; an "oppressive context;" and the "level of organisation indicating a plan for destruction." Jomil aged 2 lays unconscious whilst being treated for fever and breathing problems at the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kutupalong Camp. Kutupalong & Balukhali camps combined are the worlds largest refugee camp, home to approximately 400,000 of the 900,000 Rohingya who fled Myanmar. Credit:Kate Geraghty The investigators cited six Myanmar military leaders as "priority subjects" for possible prosecution, including Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing. A longer list of names is to be kept in the office of the UN human rights chief for possible use in future judicial proceedings. The United States and European Union have already slapped sanctions on some Myanmar military leaders, though Min Aung Hlaing is not among them.

"The main perpetrator, the people that we want the spotlight on, is the Tatmadaw," said mission member Radhika Coomaraswamy, a Sri Lankan former UN undersecretary-general, referring to Myanmar's military. Christopher Sidoti, an Australian human rights expert, acknowledged that no "smoking gun" linked the six military leaders directly to orders to carry out genocide, but pointed to inferences of their role based on a strict chain of command in Myanmar. They called for the creation of a special body, or "mechanism," to keep watch on the still-evolving human rights situation in Myanmar. They said the United Nations' own role in the country since 2011 should be reviewed to see if the world body did all it could to prevent such a crisis. They also faulted Aung San Suu Kyi for not using her role as head of Myanmar's government, nor her "moral authority" - she is a Nobel peace prize laureate - to stop the events in embattled Rakhine state. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is scheduled to give a briefing on Tuesday during a Security Council commemoration of the anniversary of the violent crackdown on the Rohingya. Guterres also has described what happened in Myanmar as ethnic cleansing.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters on Monday that Guterres urged all UN bodies and the international community to seriously consider the experts' report recommendations. The determination of whether "a genocide" occurred must be made by "an international judicial body," Dujarric said. "The secretary-general has for a long time underscored the violations of human rights in Myanmar" and stressed "that accountability is essential for genuine reconciliation," he said. Forum-Asia, an advocacy group, called the report "significant" and said the United Nations needed to heed its call. "If the UN fails to adequately address these findings it will be a monumental failure for the world body, which has already been criticised for not doing enough," said R. Iniyan Ilango, UN advocacy program manager for the group. Praise also came from the ground in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, where refugee camps have taken in hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from across the border."I thought they were just millennials who cared mainly about video games and lived their lives online," said Marie Antonia Bermudez, a literature professor at the University of Central America (UCA). "But I was wrong." With Nicaragua's opposition parties weak and divided, students have assumed a leading role in the protests. In the spring, they started taking over the universities, building barricades to fight off police and pro-government militias. Military forces have recently moved in and occupied campuses, but the students have achieved an iconic status among many Nicaraguans. CDs with songs like "Gracias, estudiantes" can be bought in local markets. Graffiti lining the streets of Managua praises the courage of the young protesters. A protestor holds a photo of one of the victims of the deadly protests during an anti-government march in Managua. Credit:AP The demonstrators have demanded Ortega step down and early elections be held. Ortega has claimed his political opponents and drug cartels are behind the fighting and insisted he will stay in office until the 2021 elections. International and local human-rights groups attribute most of the violence to government security forces and their allies.

For students, the crisis gripping the country has meant a complete disruption of their lives. Most universities have been closed for three months. Many scholarships have not been disbursed. Many students have returned to their families in the countryside because they have no money, and with the economy in a downward spiral, there is little chance to find work. Others have fled the country. Vinicio Gonzalez, 24, known in the student movement as "Yankee" because of his light skin, was a dance major at UCA before he joined the rock-throwing demonstrators confronting the police. He had planned to perform at a folkloric dance festival in Costa Rica this summer. Instead he is hiding out with Saballos at the church. "Rocks can't do anything against guns," he said through tears." But I have to take these risks. Our friends have been killed, and our rights taken away." Kim Angeles, 23, had a full scholarship to UCA and was studying sociology. She now spends much of her time at a safe house and tells her parents she is going to church when she attends protests.

"My biggest fear is being raped," she said. "We are just students. We don't know how to fight." In this divided country, Angeles' situation is complicated by her father's and uncle's support of Ortega. "My father thinks that students in the resistance should be killed," she said. Hundreds of thousands participate in May in a demonstration called the "March of the Flowers" remembering the children killed during the previous two-months' violence. Credit:AP Regis Gonzales, 20, is a medical student who helped treat students injured during a protest. He said he was arrested and questioned for 12 hours by the police.

"After they questioned me, they started writing on a piece of paper. I looked down to see what they were writing. They had written 'terrorist' by my name. I was shocked," he said. He was released and continued to attend protests. Now, he said, police have issued an arrest warrant for him, accusing him of being a terrorist. He has been living in a safe house. Loading "I will continue to fight against the political oppression," he said. "We won't forget a single drop of blood spilled by our friends who were killed." Professors also are facing hardship. Many have not been paid for three months since classes have been suspended, and they cannot go to their offices or do research in the library.

"I am living on savings," said Bermudez, the literature professor. "I am attending the funerals of my students. My entire department has fled to Costa Rica." Sergio Ramirez, winner of the 2017 Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, said pro-Ortega student groups have quashed intellectual inquiry and made voicing opposition opinions dangerous on campuses. "Somoza never was able to control the universities," said Ramirez, who served as vice-president under Ortega from 1985 to 1990, but now is openly critical of his administration. "Ortega has been able to control them." Saballos said government agencies issue scholarships, which makes many students afraid to speak out. "They know that if they say anything against Ortega, they won't get scholarships, " he said.Suspect Jos Brech is detained by Spanish police officers in the countryside of the province of Barcelona, north-eastern Spain. Credit:AP

Brussels: For 20 years, Dutch police investigated the rape and murder of an 11-year-old schoolboy, and the Dutch media chronicled the case's many twists and turns.

Now, after an investigation in which 17,500 Dutchmen voluntarily took part in DNA profiling, a suspect has been arrested in Spain.

The boy, Nicky Verstappen, had attended a summer camp at a nature reserve in the southern Netherlands in 1998. On a night that August, he left his tent and never returned. His body was discovered the next day, hidden in a forest about a kilometre away. He had been raped and killed.Berlin: Angela Merkel marked her return to the political front line with a call for Europe to assert its interests more forcefully as US President Donald Trump punches holes in the world order.

In her first national television interview after the summer break, the German chancellor said Europe needs to take on more global responsibility, including on defence. As Trump attacks Germany's economic prowess and pursues a global trade war while Italy clashes with its European Union partners over migration, Merkel is being thrust into Europe's pivotal role yet again.

Fresh from hosting her old adversary Vladimir Putin in Germany, she stopped in Azerbaijan over the weekend to back a gas pipeline meant as a counterweight to Russian supplies. This week, Merkel travels to three African countries to promote investment and growth as a way to curb migration to Europe. She's expected to talk with President Emmanuel Macron in Paris next month about proposals to strengthen the euro area.PHILIPSBURG:--- On Thursday August 23rd 2018 during the evening members of the Alpha Team operating at the Princess Julian International Airport carried out a control on man identified with initials J.A.M.S. who initially came to the airport to pick up an arriving passenger. During this control man could not provide the investigating officers with valid identification. J.A.M.S. was temporarily detained at the airport where shortly after an acquaintance handed over his Venezuelan passport to the investigating team.

During the inspection of the passport the investigating officers noticed that J.A.M.S. arrived legally on the island in February of 2018 however has overstayed his visit which no more than 30 days from the date of entry.

J.A.MS. was immediately arrested for violating the Immigration Laws and was transported to the Police Head Quarters in Philipsburg where he was turned over to Immigration Department to be processed for his eventual deportation.

KPSM Press ReleaseEverything St. Maarten / St. Martin JMB Website Supporters Summer 2018 Island Party

PHILIPSBURG:---AUGUST 16, 2018  Toppers Rhum Distillery celebrates international rum day in a big way by hosting Everything St. Maarten / St. Martin JMB Website Supporters Summer 2018 Island Party. The well-attended cocktail party was filled with great music, food, fun and of course rhum!

This party was all about the rhum (French spelling of "rum"). Guests were greeted at the door with a welcome drink called Rhum for Your Life which was Toppers entry into the post Irma Category 5 Cocktail Competition. Guest were invited to sample all of six Toppers' commercial rhums as well as some of their 60 specialty rhums which are only available at the distillery such as Nelsons Blood, Jalapeno Lime, Dutch Drop, Dark Chocolate, Bonfire, Passion Fruit and Soursop to name a few. Guests were given mini-tours of the distillery by tour manager Crazy Dave Herbert, and a discount certificate toward their full-scale distillery tour.

The food was catered by Toppers Restaurant & Bar. Chef Kimar prepared ribs, chicken kebabs, fish skewers and crudites which guest had fun dipping in their choice of six delicious and unique rhum infused sauces some of which are available for sale at the distillery.

The Toppers family also made a heartwarming toast to Renee Adams-Pereira who was a dear friend and worked for the distillery. Renee sadly lost her battle to cancer just the night before.

Toppers Rhum, a truly locally made product, is a world-class premium rhum that is handmade, bottled, and packaged with precision right here in Cole Bay, St. Maarten. Toppers Rhum uses only all natural premium ingredients and no preservatives. They are committed to producing the worlds best tasting rhum and flavored rhum spirits using the highest standards of quality. They are re-inventing rhum by continually innovating and delivering unique products to their customers worldwide. The company is very environmentally conscientious and well known for their signature reusable swing-top bottles. This official St. Maarten rhum is the only spirit distilled and exported from St. Maarten. They currently export to 6 countries and over 21 states in the USA and are the official rhum of the Dutch Army. By constantly expanding overseas, they are also notably promoting St. Maarten internationally. In addition, the products are sold online to almost anywhere in the world. Toppers Rhum has been awarded 24 medals given by the most prominent rum tasting contests in the world and recently won USA Todays 10Best Caribbean Rum Distillery award.

Toppers Rhum Distillery is one of the top unique places to visit on St. Maarten, according to the St. Maarten Tourism Bureau. They are open from 9:00am  4:00pm Monday  Friday and 9:00am  12:00pm on Saturdays for free rhum tasting and shopping.

Tours are available for $20 at 10:00am and 4:00pm Monday  Saturday by calling 721-520-0008 or booking online at www.toppersrhumtours.com and Sundays are available by appointment only.

For more information about the Toppers Rhum Distillery please contact the Toppers Rhum Press Officer at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit the website www.toppersrhumtours.comPHILIPSBURG:--- On Monday, August 20th, Member of Parliament and SMCP Faction Leader, Mr. Claude Chacho Peterson and Faction Staff Mr. Benjamin Bell, met with the Chairman of the Board, Mr. Ronald Halman and Secretary-General, Mrs. Joane Dovale-Meit of the St. Maarten General Audit Chamber (GAC) to get and orientation of the organization and receive a tour of the new offices at the request of the MP.

The discussion concerned the role of the GAC as one of the High Councils of State and their history, services and reports.

Some of the points discussed during the meeting was the importance of getting up to date with the Annual Financial Reports of Government so that they can be debated in Parliament in a timely basis. This matter has been mentioned by the GAC in their annual report. Other topics discussed included, the handling of the Budget in Parliament which, in the opinion of the MP, should be available digitally in both English and Dutch, the need to implement a good ICT system synchronized across all Ministries to improve Governments efficiency, and provide better customer service to the public in general.

Of particular concern to the MP is the need to live up to Article 1 sub. 2 of the Constitution, which states the official languages are Dutch and English. He commended the GAC for realizing the importance of having all the information and reports in both languages on their website. For the past decades, we have seen a shift, endorsed by Government, to go towards English education streams in most of our schools. It was noted during the presentation by the Minister of Education Mr. Wycliff Smith in Central Committee meeting on August 17, handling the Law on Study Financing, that most of our students go to the USA, Canada and a large portion of those who go to the Netherlands attend English Universities to pursue their higher education. The MP believes it is important to make sure that we are not creating second class citizens by sending away our students only to limit their access to top Government functions just because they do not command the Dutch language. Mostly at a time when increasing our professional capacity among our people in the civil service is critical to achieving a sustainable St. Maarten especially post Hurricane Irma.

MP Peterson was very impressed with the efficient minimalist layout and modern decor of the GACs new office located on Juancho Yrasquin Boulevard 10, Unit 4 -5, Philipsburg. The GAC has demonstrated resilience and efficiency in rebuilding after hurricane Irma. The storm destroyed their original office on E. Camille Richardson Street. The new office was selected for its hurricane proof features which include a concrete roof and hurricane shutters. It was also important to note that the GAC makes use of so-called cloud-computing. Using the cloud allowed the institution to continue their work even though they lost all their office equipment. MP Peterson believes this is a model which should be adopted not only by Government but also by Government-Owned companies, entities and foundations as well as the private sector. The ability to retrieve vital information to start back operations soon after a disaster is a very important step in Hurricane and Disaster preparedness.

MP Peterson and Mr. Bell applauded the GAC for their continued efforts to educate the public via their website and via their Facebook page. The creation of easy to understand educational videos posted on Facebook are very helpful and the public should make use of them to become informed citizens. He fully intends to stay in touch with the GAC and make use of their reports and advices of this High Council of State. He encourages St. Maarteners and St. Maarten People to visit the Website at http://www.arsxm.org/ and Facebook page: General Audit Chamber Sint MaartenPHILIPSBURG:---On the Saturday August 25th 2018 at 18:30 pm a town hall meeting was held for the residents of Oyster Pond, Dawn Beach, Tamarind hill and Ocean Terrance. A presentation was given by the Community Police Officer Felix Richards to the residents who attended the meeting. The topics that were discussed were Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), crime statistics, the forming of a neighbourhood WhatsApp group chat and safety police safety tips in general on how to help them better secure their neighbourhood. The meeting was well attended and the information shared was well received. The residents thanked the police force for this initiative and look forward working to working hand in hand with the Police Department in keeping their neighbourhood safe.

KPSM Press ReleaseThe first-ever observations of merging binary stars stunned the astronomy community last year, but not quite as much as the first-ever signal from extraterrestrial life might someday stun the world.

And a new paper argues that the observations of an binary-star merger may actually be the key to making that second detection, which is the ongoing quest of a scientific effort called the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.

"We were really impressed by the rapid growth of multi-messenger astronomy associated with [the neutron star merger detected last August], and started thinking about interesting possibilities far beyond traditional astronomical studies," lead author Yuki Nishino, a physicist at Kyoto University in Japan, wrote in an email to Space.com. "Actually, previously, we were not familiar with the SETI activities." [9 Strange, Scientific Excuses for Why Humans Haven't Found Aliens Yet]

So, he and his co-author started considering how a technologically advanced alien civilization beyond our galaxy might piggyback on the bright signals created by colliding neutron stars to catch our attention.

Their basic idea is that aliens would have the ability to predict the merger of a binary neutron star elsewhere in their own galaxy with plenty of warning. We can sometimes do that now, the pair wrote, because many neutron stars are pulsars, which produce a spinning jet of light. That means we can track where they are and how they are interacting in binary systems.

Next, the aliens would need to produce a signal timed around that collision. Scientists have already started dreaming up space-based gravitational-wave detectors they believe could observe a collision years in advance; they already turn all the telescopes at their command toward a collision after it's been registered. That means aliens may be able to catch our attention with an artificial signature before, after or both before and after the natural collision signal.

It would need to be quite a powerful signal, given that the study is focused on civilizations beyond our own galaxy, requiring long travel times even at the speed of light. The pair calculated that for aliens 130 million light-years away from Earth, the feat would require feeding a telescope like the Square Kilometer Array (currently being built) about a terawatt of power. (For context, Earth's total power consumption in 2015 was 17.4 terawatts, by one calculation.)

Of course, all this assumes that our still-hypothetical distant neighbors want to reach out to us, and there's no way to know how valid that assumption is. Nishino thinks outreach is inevitable. "I think one of the basic grounds for developing an advanced civilization is a profound desire to leave behind information," he wrote in his email. He added that it may well be safer in a scenario like his, where alien and correspondent civilizations are in two separate galaxies buffered by vast distances.

But for Nishino, what's compelling about this approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that it relies on observations that are being gathered anyway. When word got out about the initial gravitational-waves detection from colliding neutron stars, astronomers around the world hustled to turn telescopes in all sorts of wavelengths toward the event. Nishino wants to ask them to look through the data with SETI in mind as well  which is much easier than gathering separate data for the hunt.

The research is described in a paper published on Aug. 1 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.To learn how to build with moon dust, researchers are turning to volcanic powder here on Earth.

Several countries are planning lunar missions over the next decade, and some may choose to send human settlements to the moon's surface.

Many programs have recently tested out the habitability of lunar bases. In May 2018, Chinese student volunteers in Beijing completed a one-year test living in a simulated lunar lab. In October 2017, the International MoonBase Summit (IMS) convened in Hawaii to discuss building a mock structure to examine how a human settlement on the moon would work. And for two weeks in August 2017, six mock astronauts lived inside a simulated moon base in Poland. [This NASA Video of the Moon's Landmarks Is Simply Amazing]

But how would you build a base in the first place?

A 1.5-metric-ton building block produced as a 3D-printing demonstration of lunar soil. (Image credit: ESA)

The rough, fine dust that covers the moon's surface, known as regolith, may have structural potential. And researchers with the European Space Agency (ESA) recently announced their "lunar masonry" studies to see how it would fare.

Their idea is to try to break reliance on earthy construction materials, according to an Aug. 20 statement issued by ESA.

To get an idea of how one might make bricks from moon dust, researchers analyzed volcanic material near Cologne, Germany, where eruptions happened 45 million years ago. This volcanic powder is a good match for what lunar dust might be like, according to ESA officials, because the moon's surface is made of basaltic material called silicates that are common near planetary volcanoes.

The British architectural design and engineering firm Foster+Partners devised this weight-bearing "catenary" dome design for the European Space Agency's 3D-printed lunar base concept, seen here. (Image credit: ESA/Foster + Partners)

"The moon and Earth share a common geological history, and it is not difficult to find material similar to that found on the moon in the remnants of lava flows," Aidan Cowley, ESA's science adviser, said in the statement.

The moon dust substitute is named "EAC-1" after ESA's European Astronaut Centre, whose researchers found that it was a good match with the real deal.

And lunar dust may also support human missions in another way, too:

"One of the great things about the lunar soil is that 40 percent of it is made up of oxygen," Cowley said. Researchers on another EAC project are studying how to extract the oxygen within moon dust so that astronauts may extend their stays on the moon.

Follow Doris Elin Salazar on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.  Back in May, I stood near a massive blue countdown clock as the minutes and seconds ticked away to zero. I was surrounded by fellow space reporters, a small group of whom traveled to Florida all the way from Bangladesh. The excitement built and built  and then the launch scrubbed. The Falcon 9 just wasn't ready to fly that day. But the next day would be a different story.

We all returned to our same viewing spot, adjacent to the countdown clock, and stared across the water at the sleek black-and-white Falcon 9 perched atop its launchpad, Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. This time, everything proceeded as expected: When the clock hit zero, smoke billowed and bright flames lit up the sky as the Falcon roared to life. The sound waves that washed over us several seconds later were noticeably louder than expected, even for this experienced launch-watcher. That's because this wasn't an ordinary Falcon, but a souped-up version.

Known as the Block 5, this is the final variant of SpaceX's workhorse  meaning there will be no more major design changes. The design will stay the same from now on to help SpaceX achieve a major goal: rapid reusability. [See all our photos from the Block 5's two launches]

The company already reuses the first stages of its spacecraft, but this iteration will take that to the next level. Previous versions of the Falcon 9 could be used only two or three times, which is an incredible accomplishment, but not enough for SpaceX founder Elon Musk. His plan is to make rockets more like commercial airplanes, capable of flying many times with no action (other than refueling) taken in between flights. According to Musk, the Block 5, which is a culmination of more than 10 years of development, will do just that.

The first Block 5 Falcon lifts off, carrying the Bangabhandu-1 satellite into space on May 11, 2018. (Image credit: Amy Thompson/Space.com)

Block 5 upgrades

To work toward that goal, SpaceX engineers outfitted this turbocharged Falcon with some sweet upgrades over its predecessors. The design changes  which include improved engines, a more durable interstage (the piece that connects the rocket's two stages), titanium grid fins and a new thermal protection system  will help the booster hold up better to launch stresses. According to SpaceX, each Block 5 can fly 10 times or more times before requiring light refurbishments, and as many as 100 times before the booster is retired.

Musk has said that we will see a Block 5 launch, land and relaunch within the same day sometime next year. As the months tick away and the aerospace company focuses on its big task for the year, launching the first uncrewed test flight of the commercial crew program, that goal remains a lofty one. However, a more reasonable goal  one that SpaceX is close to achieving  is to see the same Block 5 booster launch more than two times in a year.

Although it hasn't reached that goal yet, I watched it get closer when I saw the same booster launch again. [Photos: SpaceX Launches, Lands 1st 'Block 5' Falcon 9 Rocket]

The scorch marks indicate that this booster has already made the journey to space and back. (Image credit: Amy Thompson/Space.com)

Take two

Following the first Block 5 launch on May 11, which placed Bangladesh's first satellite  the Bangabandhu-1  in orbit, SpaceX officials said they didn't know when the recovered booster would fly again, as they would most likely take it apart and inspect it to make sure it performed as expected. So, it was a bit of a surprise when the company announced that the Bangabhandu-1 booster would fly again on Aug. 7, just 12 weeks later.

That second launch, at Cape Canaveral's Pad 40, may have been more of a spectacle than the first. It's like with each launch the booster tries to outshine itself. Sitting in folding chairs on a causeway across the water from the launchpad, a group of space reporters waited. The Milky Way was barely visible overhead. One spectator even brought a telescope, and we peeked at Mars  which shined above like a glowing copper orb  before turning the scope to the launchpad.

The Falcon appeared upside down in the viewfinder but stood ready to launch. We could see what looked like breath emanating from the rocket as the last of the cryogenic fuels that power the rocket were loaded. As the clock hit zero, the night sky lit up bright orange as the Falcon roared to life. Its engines were just as unexpectedly loud as they were the first time. But unlike its first trip to space, which was a bit more dramatic with several holds and a scrub, this flight went off right at the beginning of the window.

As the Falcon climbed to space, the glow from its engines could be seen for several minutes. Surprisingly, after the booster separated from the upper stage and started its descent, far in the distance, we could see the Falcon's engines ignite for the first of its multiple planned landing burns. Cheers erupted over the loudspeaker as confirmation came in that the booster had touched down on the drone ship a second time.

SpaceX's successful launch and landing of the Block 5 booster (on the company's East Coast-based drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You") with so little time in between is a huge step toward quicker re-flight times.

In another surprising twist, and before the second landing was confirmed a success, the SpaceX launch webcast seemed to suggest that this booster would fly a third time before the end of the year. (Good thing it stuck its landing). Though which mission that booster will be used on hasn't been announced yet.

The second flight of SpaceX's first Block 5 first-stage propels a Falcon 9 rocket into space on Aug. 7, 2018. (Image credit: Amy Thompson/Space.com)

Returning to port

A few days after its second flight, the booster stood proudly perched on the deck of the drone ship as it made its way back to port. I stood with a crowd of rocket enthusiasts on the docks, welcoming B1046 (a designation given by SpaceX to identify the booster), some of the space buffs tracking the ship it rode in on to ensure they would get the first glimpse as it peeked over the horizon.

The booster arrived in port just a few days after launching. Crowds of people awaited its arrival, hoping to get the first glimpse of this veteran spacecraft. (Image credit: Amy Thompson/Space.com)

As the booster got closer to the drone ship's normal parking spot in the port, cameras snapped furiously, and the crowds increased. A storm rolled in, providing a nice backdrop of dark clouds and lightning. The booster looked much like it did on the launchpad, scorched and covered in soot from its first trip through the atmosphere. It was difficult to discern evidence of new wear and tear from this second trip to space. One thing was clear, B1046 looked ready for the next flight  suggesting SpaceX was on its way toward flying rockets on a par with commercial airliners.

Will we see the Block 5's next major test  to launch, land and re-fly in a single day  this year? With SpaceX's commercial crew missions on the books as well as another resupply mission before the end of the year, and Falcon Heavy's second flight on the way, the company may have its hands full. But whenever it happens, it will be quite an accomplishment.

Crews work to prep the booster for removal from the drone ship. Tiny humans help to provide a sense of scale for the massive booster. (Image credit: Amy Thompson/Space.com)

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.Katherine Johnson  a mathematician at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia who helped make human spaceflight possible  celebrated 100 trips around the sun this weekend.

Johnson, one of NASA's "human computers" whose calculations propelled NASA spacecraft to the stars, turned 100 on Aug. 26. Johnson is a retired NASA Langley mathematician who was integral to developing human spaceflight in America. Johnson, who was played by Taraji P. Henson in the feature film "Hidden Figures," began her career at NASA on a team of black women who were also referred to as "human computers." Like the other women in this group, Johnson broke down barriers as an African-American woman, despite anti-black prejudice.

NASA honored Johnson on her birthday and reminded the world of her unparalleled contributions to human spaceflight. A number of women doing incredible work at NASA expressed how Johnson's work inspired them along the way. "She opened the doors for the rest of us," Julie Williams-Byrd, Langley's acting chief technologist, said in a statement at NASA Langley. [The Women Computers of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Slideshow)]

President Barack Obama presents Katherine Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her groundbreaking contributions to spaceflight on Nov. 24, 2015. (Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

See more

An unstoppable force and a role model to young African-American women, Johnson began her career at NASA's Langley Research Center in 1953 after one of her relatives told her about open positions at an all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics' (NACA's) Langley laboratory. The lab was headed by Dorothy Vaughan, who came from West Virginia, just as Johnson did.

See more

Johnson analyzed flight test data and even completed trajectory analysis for Freedom 7, America's first human spaceflight. She co-authored the paper Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, which detailed the equations that describe an orbital spaceflight where the craft's landing position is specified. This was the first time that a woman received author credit for a research report in the Flight Research Division.

In honor of Johnson's 100th birthday, Julie Williams-Byrd, acting chief technologist at NASA's Langley Research Center, expressed her admiration for the legendary mathematician. (Image credit: NASA/David C. Bowman)

Johnson's most famous work, spotlighted in "Hidden Figures," was for John Glenn's orbital mission in 1962. The mission required a complicated worldwide communications network. The mission's orbital calculations, which controlled the trajectory of the capsule for the mission, were programmed by a computer, but Glenn asked engineers to "get the girl"  referring to Katherine Johnson  to validate the calculations. She ran the same calculations by hand that the computer had run, and Glenn said, according to Johnson, "If she says they're good, then I'm ready to go."

Her legendary career with NASA lasted from 1953 to 1986.

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her @chelsea_gohd. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.Dakhla (refugee camps) August 26, 2018 (SPS) - The Third International Conference of Solidarity with the Saharawi Students held Saturday in Dakhla, refugee camps, under the theme "the respect of international law for the liberation of the last colony in Africa" called for the intervention of the international community to put an end to the suffering of the Sahrawi people by enabling them to exercise their right to self-determination.



The conference appealed in particular to the United Nations and the Security Council to expedite the implementation of resolutions and recommendations related to the Western Sahara conflict in order to organize a free, democratic and fair referendum in which the Sahrawi people freely decide their destiny.



It praised the endurance and resistance of the Sahrawi people in their struggle for their right to self-determination and independence.



The conference called for the need to protect human rights in the occupied territories of Western Sahara and to monitor and report on them, stop the illegal looting of the natural resources of the territory, and dismantle the Moroccan military wall that represents a crime against humanity.



The Third International Conference of Solidarity with Saharawi Students was attended by delegations from Algeria, Spain, Cuba, Mauritania, Norway and Namibia. (SPS)



062/SPS/TRASTAMFORD - Its the feet vs. wheels debate, and it will go another round Tuesday night  this time with residents weighing in.

All are invited to speak at a public hearing on planned repairs for the historic, but crumbling, West Main Street bridge - whether it should remain pedestrian-only as it has been for 16 years, or be shored up to again take cars over the Mill River.

On the feet-only side is the Mill River Collaborative, the nonprofit group that is remaking Mill River Park into a downtown greenway. The collaborative says car traffic over the bridge in the park will divide the greenway in two and ruin the natural oasis.

On the feet-and-wheels side are West Side residents and shop owners who say having a bridge for cars will open up their neighborhood to business and better link it to the thriving downtown.

The issue before the Board of Representatives is whether they should approve a $2 million contract with Wengell, McDonnell & Costello, a firm that has worked with city engineers for years to keep the 130-year-old bridge standing.

For that reason, and because WMC agreed to start work next summer - lessening the risk that a storm will wash the bridge away  city officials decided not to put the project out to bid. Another reason is that the collaborative, using a $2 million state grant it was awarded for park renovations, will pay for the work.

But the fast-tracked contract has problems, West Side resident Bonnie Kim Campbell said.

There are many inconsistencies in it, Campbell said. The contract needs to be gone over and all the stakeholders have to be involved in the discussion. My hope is that the contract will fail and the city will start over and have honest discussions about seeking monies to fix that bridge for vehicles.

Campbell said it can be rebuilt with separate lanes for biking and walking, which it had before the state Department of Transportation closed it to cars in 2002 for safety reasons.

Nick Samela, owner of Samelas Barber Shop, a West Side business started by his father 60 years ago, said the bridge is a function of a larger problem.

The bridge used to be part of Route 1, the part the city closed when they built Tresser Boulevard, Samela said. Route 1 is the Post Road, which goes from Maine to Florida, and Stamford cut it off. Lets get Route 1 back on the map in Stamford. Lets get the traffic flow going again.

Colonists first built a bridge on that spot in the 1600s. The little metal bridge with decorative trusses, only 125 feet long, was built in 1888. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places but has been failing at an increasing rate for 20 years.

City engineers and Mayor David Martins administration have decided that accepting the collaboratives $2 million and rebuilding the bridge quickly just for pedestrians is the best move.

Trio of plans

In an Aug. 22 memo to representatives, City Engineer Lou Casolo explained three possibilities for fixing the bridge. Both pedestrian-only plans would accommodate ambulances and police cars.

The original pedestrian-only plan is funded in part by two federal grants overseen by the state DOT, but would require city funding and a number of approvals. The earliest work could begin is 2021, Casolo wrote.

The work would include rehabilitating the bridge, center supports, abutments and walls, and moving the sidewalk and iron fence. It would preserve the historic trusses, but this plan is no longer being advanced, Casolo wrote, because the bridge supports are too far gone.

The second pedestrian-only plan relies solely on the collaboratives $2 million, and is not subject to DOT approvals, so work could begin next year, Casolo wrote. Though the scope of work is smaller than the original plan, the historical elements would be preserved.

The third plan is for a vehicular bridge. It would require street realignment, which would change the length of the bridge and may make it impossible to preserve historic elements, Casolo wrote.

Currently no funds have been secured for this option and a completion timeline is not available other than to say it will exceed that of the first and second plans  and certainly cost considerably more, Casolo wrote.

The state likely would reimburse the city no more than 50 percent of the cost, estimated at $6 million to $8 million, Casolo wrote. To get that funding the city would have to reapply to the state, so he cannot estimate a start date, Casolo wrote. Given the financial issues at the state, there is always some uncertainty regarding future reimbursement for capital projects, he wrote - a reference to the ongoing budget crisis in Hartford.

Its possible the DOT would consider emergency funding for the work, but that is extremely unlikely to be successful because it has been closed to cars for 16 years and traffic patterns are well established, Casolo wrote. Another reason is that other bridges cross the river close by - one on Tresser Boulevard and another on Broad Street.

Pluses and minuses

In an Aug. 6 memo, Transportation Bureau Chief Jim Travers provided representatives a list of pros and cons for a vehicular bridge.

The pros include better access to Stillwater Avenue from downtown; a community belief that it will help businesses and increase jobs; and that it would spur property owners to improve housing  make the West Side more desirable for developers, and attract new residents, Travers wrote.

The cons include a more difficult walk to downtown because a vehicular bridge would create a five-way intersection; more traffic congestion on Smith Street, Stillwater Avenue and feeder streets; increased auto emissions and noise; and that it would eliminate the longest section of uninterrupted pedestrian trail in downtown and dramatically change the character of Mill River Park by creating two sections near the playground, putting children at risk, Travers wrote.

The public hearing before the boards Operations Committee begins at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in legislative chambers, fourth floor, Stamford Government Center, 888 Washington Blvd.

acarella@stamfordadvocate.com; 203-964-2296.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 27)  A fire that razed a residential area in Tondo, Manila on Monday has left five children dead and 300 families without homes.

The four-hour fire began past 9 in the morning at a cramped area along Laperal Street, Barangay 91. It reached the fourth alarm, with 14 fire trucks mobilized to put out the fire, before it was extinguished at 1:30 in the afternoon.

An investigation by the Bureau of Fire is underway. Authorities have yet to determine the cause of fire. They estimated the damage at around P120,000.

The casualties were all siblings, ranging from one to 12 years old. Other affected families have evacuated to a nearby covered court.

Residents suspect the five child victims began the fire as they were seen playing with a lighter. They said the parents left the children inside the house.

Barangay officials identified the father, Michael Gemeniano, is a 34-year-old laborer. It is still unclear why their mother, identified as Emily Gemeniano, was not around.

Authorities have offered to help the couple prepare for the wake of their children.NEWTOWN BOROUGH >> The Williams family landed the coveted Mayors Award for their depiction of Amelia Earhart in the group theme category at Saturdays Halloween Parade in Newtown. Jackie, Dan and Margot Williams and their dog, Murphy, celebrated the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937 during an attempt to fly...You've probably heard that carrying a few extra pounds can put you at greater risk for certain health conditions, including cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes. But aside from the potential for health issues, being overweight can impact a person's finances  sometimes in a major way.

Here are five ways a wider waistline can drain your cash.

Clothes Are Up to 45% More Expensive

Brands such as Old Navy and New Look occasionally make the news for charging more for plus-size clothes, but you can find that unequal pricing everywhere, every day.

Let's say you're shopping for a pair of women's jeans. At Walmart, a pair of Levi's Modern Straight Jeans cost $19.94 in standard sizes, but $23.99 to $28.89 in plus sizes. That's a price increase of up to 45%.

And if we look for women's jeans at a plus-size retailer  which typically offers the best fit  prices are even higher. Jeans at Torrid, for example, start at $28.97.

There can be a big price difference between women's plus sizes and standard sizes.

This type of price difference is less common with men's clothing. For example, at Walmart most pairs of Levi's men's jeans cost around $20 for standard sizes as well as "Big Men's" sizes. While some price increases exist in menswear  particularly when shopping big-and-tall retailers  they're not nearly as common.

So what's the argument for plus-size clothing coming at a price premium? It's that larger clothes need more fabric  which means higher costs. Still, a size 4 costs the same as a size 16. But jumping to a size 18 costs up to 45% more, which suggests that fabric may not be to blame. What's more, there's a smaller price difference in men's clothing, regardless of size.

Spas Charge More for Services

You wouldn't expect it, but a relaxing day at the spa can be a major disappointment (or expense) for overweight people. Treatment rooms may not have tables large enough or strong enough to accommodate heavier folks, and robes may not be available in larger sizes.

SEE ALSO: Is the 'Pink Tax' Still a Problem?

This may mean spa treatments are uncomfortable due to cramped conditions. Overweight people could also be charged more because services like waxing require extra supplies, or because it takes more effort to lift them (think lifting a client's legs during a pedicure).

Flying Is Twice as Expensive

Airline seats are getting smaller, and that's a problem for anyone with a larger waistline. Seats on some planes can be as small as 16" wide (including American Airlines and United), and seat pitch, or the distance between rows, can be as small as 28" (Frontier Airlines).

Heavier passengers may also have to buy a second seat  an expense that's rarely clear on airlines' websites. Passengers who don't fit in those 16" seats with both armrests down often have to either buy a second seat or pay to upgrade to a wider seat in a pricier class.

Heavier airline passengers may have to buy a second seat or upgrade to a wider seat in a pricier class.

Some airlines even ban overweight passengers from certain seats. Thai Airways, for example, added seat belt air bags that don't work for passengers over a certain size.

Overweight people also pay more for driving, though the difference is relatively small. Adding an extra 100 pounds of weight could reduce your fuel efficiency by 1%  the extra gas you have to buy is the equivalent of spending an extra 3 cents per gallon. It's not much, but a few cents per gallon adds up over the years.

And once they reach their destination, overweight people may find themselves with limited recreational opportunities. Theme park rides typically have restricted size and weight requirements. And outdoor activities (like zip lining and horseback riding) may not have safety equipment that's designed for heavier individuals.

Jobs Pay Thousands Less

Though it isn't always obvious, overweight people often face discrimination in the workplace. They may have trouble getting a job, may not earn as much, and could be fired for their weight  yep, that's legal in 49 states.

SEE ALSO: 5 Essential Tips for Buying a New Work Wardrobe

The evidence is more than anecdotal. Studies show that overweight individuals are perceived as being lazy and incompetent. And when an applicant's weight status is known during the hiring process, obese individuals have been considered less suitable for jobs.

Obese people  particularly women  are less likely to get jobs requiring interaction with others. This often pushes them into lower-paying jobs behind the scenes. Women who do get jobs involving personal interaction still pay a price, making almost 5% less than slimmer co-workers. Even being just 13 pounds overweight can cost women $9,000 per year in wages  and very heavy women could make $19,000 less.

Insurance Rates Are Higher

Health insurance can cost more for individuals who are overweight, with insurance companies (or employers, in the case of employer-sponsored plans) charging higher rates to people with a higher body mass index.

But those costs may not be obvious. Instead of charging you more, healthy individuals who participate in wellness programs can get discounted premiums, gift cards, or even cash. Eighty-three percent of large employers offer wellness programs, many of which include incentives for people who participate in fitness or weight loss programs. Overweight individuals still pay more, but the higher rates are more difficult to spot.

SEE ALSO: 7 Ways You Can Prepare for Unexpected Medical Expenses

Life insurance can also cost more, depending on your height-to-weight ratio. Even losing weight before applying for life insurance won't immediately cut your policy costs  insurance companies typically only give you credit for half of the weight you've lost in the past 12 months. So if you need life insurance, it may not be worth dropping a few pounds just to get a policy.

A lot of factors go into life insurance rates, including age, health conditions, blood pressure, and cholesterol  so even people with average weights may not get the best rates. The only surefire way to get lower life insurance rates is to be young and in great health... which isn't easy to control.P olice made 133 arrests and recovered 20 weapons at Notting Hill Carnival on Sunday.

Of available figures for the arrests by the Metropolitan Police and British Transport Police, 42 were held on drug offences, 20 on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon and seven on public order offences.

Officers have been given extra stop and search powers following a wave of violence over the capital in the last week.

A further two people were arrested on suspicion of sexual offences, three for common assault and 12 on suspicion of possessing psychoactive drugs.

Police have been given extra stop and search powers at Notting Hill Carnival / AFP/Getty Images

It comes as 7,000 Met officers prepare for the second day of the carnival on Monday to "combat the threat of violent crime".

Undercover police as well as officers from the force's firearms and dog units will be in place.

Police stand by a boarded property at the Notting Hill Carnival family day on Sunday / EPA

Stop and search powers under a Section 60 order, which allow police to search someone when they believe there is the possibility of serious violence, will again be in place between 9am and 11.59pm.

Commander Dave Musker, who is in charge of policing at the carnival, said: "I am confident the Section 60 order imposed yesterday prevented these dangerous items being brought to Carnival, and based on the intelligence at my disposal, I consider it proportionate and necessary to ensure a safe carnival today.

Police officers walk through the children's day parade at the Notting Hill Carnival on Sunday / PA

"The use of this authority will reassure our communities that we are constantly working to protect them. It will also send a message to those intent on committing acts of violence that we will robustly target them.

"Section 60s have been used tactically to prevent violence across London over the past few weeks and I can assure you they are not used without detailed analysis of intelligence.

Notting Hill Carnival Family Day 2018 1 /37 Notting Hill Carnival Family Day 2018 Heavy rain soaked the Notting Hill Carnival but it did not stop the determined revellers who were out for a party EPA The community celebration carved its way around west London in a mass of music, dancing, bold costumes and floats of soaked entertainers EPA Carnival performers were in high spirits despite the wet weather AFP/Getty Images Young carnival goers also joined the parade EPA An entertainer blows a whistle as she takes part in the Family Day parade EPA Brightly coloured outfits lifted the mood amid the rain AFP/Getty Images Visitors wore ponchos on the first day of the carnival AFP/Getty Images People were undeterred by the soggy conditions AFP/Getty Images Police were pictured carrying out stop-and-search after being handed the power in a bid to curb violent crime AFP/Getty Images Officers were out in high numbers during the festivities EPA People pass a boarded window at the carnival EPA Performers sported raincoats over their colourful outfits amid the wet weather EPA As did members of security staff EPA Visitors determined to wear their summer gear used ponchos to shelter from the rain EPA Notting Hill was flooded with umbrellas AFP/Getty Images A carnival performer dances during the parade on the first day AFP/Getty Images Carnival performers take part in the parade AFP/Getty Images Notting Hill Carnival is under way despite a wet day in the capital EPA Dancers perform during the Children's Day parade PA Performers took to the streets to take part in the Carnival EPA A woman prepares a food stall ahead of the festivities EPA Ponchos were out in force as people sheltered from the rain EPA But spirits were not dampened by the chillier wet weather EPA A performer wears a raincoat before the parade EPA Police march before the street festival. This years carnival will be policed by the highest number of officers in six years with more than 13,000 on duty across Sunday and Monday EPA Revellers were pictured smiling, laughing and dancing together EPA Performers take part in Family Day EPA Pictures showed the vibrant parade EPA The event is expected to attract up to two million revellers to its floats, food stalls and music EPA Performers were seen smiling wearing colourful costumes AFP/Getty Images Performers arrive for the event EPA More than 6,000 on-duty officers will police Sunday's less busy family day. AFP/Getty Images The carnival officially opened at 10am, with Alexandra Burke cutting the ribbon EPA A 72-second silence will be held at 3pm on both days of the carnival to remember those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire EPA Live stages will host artists and surprise special guests from 12 to 7pm. EPA Young carnival goers took part in the Children's Day parade PA The carnival is considered the largest street party in Europe AFP/Getty Images

"This decision has been made with the safety of all those planning to attend this event in the forefront of my mind. The order is kept under constant review, and when I believe this no longer forms part of a proportionate policing plan, it will cease."

The bank holiday weekend event is being policed by the highest number of officers in six years, with 6,100 also on duty on Sunday.

Revellers cover each other in paint at J'ouvert street party to kick off the celebrations of Notting Hill Carnival

Over the two days, the event is expected to attract more than a million revellers to its floats, food stalls and music.

Though it rained heavily for hours on Sunday, it did not stop the determined revellers who were out for a party.

The Met Office has not forecast rain on Monday, although it is likely to be cloudy for the entire day with temperatures peaking at 19C.This is from our reporter Olivia Tobin who has been speaking pub landlords, business owners and residents to find out how they have been preparing for the huge influx of people to the area.

Shopkeepers and pub workers are looking forward to a booming weekend for business, despite the long working hours involved.

Mihir Patel, from St Helens Supermarket, on Latimer Road, said it is the stores busiest days of the year and he will have all hands on deck for the busy occasion.

The 37-year-old, who has worked at the store for five years, said: All we will sell all day is alcohol, crisps and sandwiches. Thats all people want.

Mr Patel said he and four others will be working on the day and he estimates the days will be 13 hours, or more, long.

There will be no time for the toilet, no time for a snack, he said.

We have three tills on usually and each till has about ten people in the queue for each.F rench President Emmanuel Macron has said preserving European Union unity is more important than forging a close relationship with post-Brexit Britain.

Speaking to a group of French ambassadors in Paris Mr Macron said France would not want a 'special relationship' with London if it came at the cost of the 'unravelling' of the EU.

"France wants to maintain a strong, special relationship with London but not if the cost is the European Union's unravelling," he told a gathering of French ambassadors.

Brexit, Macron said, "is a sovereign choice, which we must respect, but it can't come at the expense of the European Union's integrity".

Mr Macron did not announce any major shifts in foreign policy in the annual address to his ambassadors, but spoke forcefully about what he labelled the "crisis of multilateralism" and the need to make Europe more "sovereign".

He urged Europe to exert itself as "a trade and economic power", which defends its strategic interests and financial independence and is able to fend off the extraterritorial reach of U.S. sanctions.

Macron also pressed the need for EU member states to show more solidarity.

"Italy is against the Europe which shows no solidarity on migration, but it is for the Europe of structural funds, or so it seems when I hear some ministers speak," Macron said.

"What is happening in Italy is our political doing, an absence of solidarity. Does that excuse xenophobic rhetoric? I don't think so," he added.A sexually frustrated dolphin has driven swimmers from the sea in France because it keeps trying to rub up against them.

The frisky mammals behaviour has led a local mayor in Brittany to introduce a swimming ban amid concerns for people's safety.

I issued the decree to ensure safety. Several bathers were really afraid  he even lifted up a woman bather with his snout, Roger Lars, the mayor of Landevennec, told the Ouest France newspaper.

A new bylaw was issued on August 20 stating that swimming and diving are banned on the village shoreline whenever the presence of the dolphin is confirmed.

Approaching within 50 metres of the dolphin is also forbidden, it added.

A specialist at an aquarium in Brest warned that the rutting dolphin, nicknamed Zafar, could accidentally cause serious injuries with its tail fin.

Initially the three-metre long animal had delighted locals and tourists as it swam with boats and kayaks within the bay of Brest, but its behaviour is said to have changed in recent weeks.

However not everyone was happy with the ban.

A Breton lawyer, Erwan Le Cornec, is preparing to file an appeal, considering it "excessive and negative" .Since May 2004, the BBC show has become a glittery cornerstone of the Saturday nights, bringing sparkles and joy into our living rooms with a wide array of famous faces learning to dance.

Ask any Strictly fan for iconic dances and theyll tell you plenty. From Jill Halfpenny and Darren Bennetts Jive to Tom Chambers and Camilla Dallerups showdance. Rachel Stevens and Vincent Simones Rumba to Chris Hollins and Ola Jordans Charleston. Mark Ramprakash and Karen Hardys Argentine Tango to Danny Mac and Oti Mabuses Salsa. We could go on.

But there are certain moments that spring to mind. Here are five of the most iconic individual moments throughout the years

Strictly Come Dancing 2018 Contestants - In pictures 1 /15 Strictly Come Dancing 2018 Contestants - In pictures Ashley Roberts PA Katie Piper PA Charles Venn Dave Benett Lee Ryan BBC Faye Tozer PA Danny John-Jules SplashNews.com Lauren Steadman Getty Images Kate Silverton Getty Images Joe Sugg Getty Images Seann Walsh PA Vick Hope Dave Benett Stacey Dooley PA Dr Ranj Singh PA Susannah Constantine Getty Images Graeme Swann Getty Images

Ed Balls Gangnam Style

Then first-time professional Katya Jones made her debut on the show partnered with former politician Ed Balls, one of the most dedicated contestants who never quite mastered it to date.

Balls and his partner took one of the most recognisable songs of the last five years as they Salsad to Gangnam Style by Psy, complete with the iconic dance moves  some of which were performed with Jones through his legs.

The moment sparked a craze that series, with fellow professionals, fans and even host Sir Bruce Forsyth performing the dance on live TV.

John Sergeant dragging Kristina

Journalist John Sergeant partnered Kristina Rihanoff in the sixth series of the show, memorable in itself for him pulling out of the competition before week 10 after beginning to fear he might actually win the competition, after appearing to adopt a strong public vote week after week despite a lower dancing ability than others.

But the broadcaster will always be remembered for that iconic moment in his Paso Doble in which he dragged his partner along the floor behind him like a "sack of potatoes".

Ann Widdecombes Samba

Back in 2010, seasoned professional Anton Du Beke was paired with former Conservative MP Widdecombe and quickly realised she couldnt, well, dance.

Not one to give up at the first sign of trouble, Du Beke thought up innovative ways to entertain the viewers week-on-week through series eight, never scoring above 21 (Tango).

During their week eight Samba to Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel, the end of the routine saw Du Beke spin his partner round the Blackpool Tower floor with her legs in the air. And Widdecombe was dressed all in yellow - presumably inspired by Big Bird from Sesame Street more so than anything angelic - which just added to the pure delight of this moment.

They scored 13, with a one from Craig Revel Horwood.

Russell Grant cannon

Back in 2011, Strictly was exiled to Wembley Arena while Children in Need took over their studio and everything  we mean everything  went big to make an impression in the massive temporary home.

Flavia Cacace created one of the standout moments of Strictlys gone by as she decided to begin the jive with partner Russell Grant, loved by the public but struggling for dancing ability at this point, by firing the astrologer out of a cannon.

Dressed in yellow and adorned blue stars, Grants Reach routine saw him shot out of the mocked-up weapon and fly across the stage.

Although he soared to new heights that week, a score of 24 and a public unwillingly to have that moment topped also saw him booted out of the competition that week, his place in the hall of fame cemented.

McFly being shooed off stage

In 2011, McFly drummer Harry Judd stormed to victory with partner Aliona Vilani, impressing week after week with his dancing feet.

After a picture perfect final, complete with two perfect scores for his Quickstep and Argentine Tango, Sir Bruce and Tess Daly crowned the couple as series nine winners  and Judds bandmates were excited.

King of the Jungle Dougie Poynter, Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones rushed onto the Blackpool stage to congratulate their pal, leaving Vilani standing on her own and Forysth shooing off the errant bandmates  not realising who they were  trying to take control of the situation.Hitachi Koki is changing its name to Hikoki next month, as the company says it looks to incorporate Japanese wisdom into its core.

Osami Maehara, President and Representative Executive Officer, says the company is applying heart, technique and physical ability as it looks to expand its global presence.

The power tools manufacturer was acquired by US holding firm KKR last year, which means its name is changing to Koki Holdings.

Its power tools division is being renamed Hikoki so that it can be easily identified as making power tools, rather than the other products Koki Holdings makes such as vehicles and televisions.

Hikoki recently invested in its existing UK production facilities and a new headquarters in Germany, and created a new website.

It also intends to increase its training facilities and number of staff in the UK, and build more toolbars and showstands.

Maehara said: Koki Holdings originated in Japan and has conscientiously pursued the path of manufacturing.

Age-old Japanese wisdom has it that, to accomplish something important, we must apply heart, technique and physical ability.

We will now engage these essential elements of Japan's cultural DNA as we pursue reliability, technology and growth in building a global organisation, developing our businesses, and continuing to grow into a truly global company.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Premiership rugby team the Exeter Chiefs have teamed up with Bradfords Building Supplies for the 2018-19 rugby season.

Bradfords sponsored the team last season, but this time its plumbing and heating brand YPS is joining in.

Bradfords and YPS logos will be displayed on players kits, TV screens and signs at the Chiefs home ground at Sandy Park.

Chiefs player and England back Henry Slade has also signed an individual sponsorship deal with the builders merchant.

Paul Malloy, Bradfords Head of Marketing, said: Partnering with the Chiefs for the third season in a row, a team at the absolute top of their game, makes us very proud and we are pleased to become part of a great success story.

We both have a rich and deep South-West heritage and we also share the same core values: trust, longevity, family-friendliness and hard-work.

Kai Horstmann, Corporate Account Manager for the Exeter Chiefs, said: We are very excited to be working with Bradfords.

We share the same passion for our roots and values and are looking forward to achieving great things together on the national stage.Justice Minister Tudorel Toader announced on Monday that he will be carrying out the assessment of Prosecutor General Augustin Lazar's activity, within 30 days' time, specifying that he made this decision as he noticed that in time, the Public Prosecution Service "has gradually strayed from the constitutional role it has."

"The decision to kick off the assessment procedure of the Prosecutor General (...) did not come out of the blue, nor circumstantially. I have noticed in time (...) how the Public Prosecution Service has gradually strayed from the constitutional role it has. I have taken note of how the activity of the Public Prosecution Service has progressively turned away from the role of guaranteeing the citizens' rights and freedoms. (...) I will carry out the assessment within 30 days, I will publicly present the results. I couldn't say right now that they will be negative or positive, but just as before, I will conduct a scanning of the management activity carried out by the Prosecutor General and I will draw a conclusion," Tudorel Toader stated.

According to the Justice Minister, the assessment criteria of the prosecutor general are "those from the law."Toader reminded that he announced a long time ago that such assessments would be carried out."When was I stating that a time must come for everyone to be assessed? A long time ago (...) Certainly, I will also be assessed at some point. (...) I am only following through with what I was saying back then, not what he [PG Augustin Lazar, e.n.] is saying today," Tudorel Toader affirmed when asked how he comments on Augustin Lazar's statements who suggested that the political might have influenced the decision to have him assessed.Moreover, asked whether an assessment of the Judicial Inspection by the Justice Ministry is required, Toader replied: "We are talking about this assessment for the time being, we will take it step by step."The Justice Minister participated on Monday in the Annual reunion of the Romanian Diplomatic Corps, taking place these days in Bucharest.Minister of Justice Tudorel Toader said on Monday, in connection to the cooperation protocols between justice bodies and the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), that they are "not normal", as there are enough laws to provide the legal foundation for enforcing the justice norm.

"These protocols are not normal. We have a Constitution, we have the laws, the Code of Criminal Procedure, we are knowledgeable professionals. This is enough to interpret them, and enforce them correctly. (...) I haven't read the letter and therefore I cannot comment before I see the content. Yet, there is nothing new in the sense that these protocols are absolutely off the norm, as we have the Constitution, we have enough clear laws, allowing us to interpret and enforce the norm," Tudorel Toader said when asked to comment the letter politician and lead lawyer to President Trump Rudolph Giuliani sent President Klaus Iohannis and other Romanian officials, asking for the check of the protocols between the Prosecutor General's Office and the SRI.

At the same time, asked whether he believes these protocols to be illegal, Toader replied: "It's not for the Minister of Justice to determine whether an act is legal or not."The Minister of Justice attended on Monday the annual meeting of the Romanian diplomats in Bucharest.The National Bank of Romania (BNR) announced the launch, on Monday, for collection purposes, of a set of three coins of gold, silver and copper-plated tombac, and of a brass coin to mark the 140-year anniversary of the union of Dobrogea with Romania.

The gold coin with a face value of 100 lei is 21 mm in diameter, has a ribbed edge, weighs 6.452 grams. The silver coin will have a face value of 10 lei, a ribbed edge and a 37- mm diamater and weighs 31.103 grams. The copper-plated tombac coin will have a face value of 1 leu, round-shaped, ribbed-edged, a 37-mm and weighs 23.5 gram. The brass coin will have a face value of 50 bani, a 23.75 mm diameter, weighs 6.1 grams and a ribbed edge of 1.9 mm. The inscription "ROMANIA" will be engraved in an arc of circle twice, with a star between the two words.

The obverse of all four coins (gold, silver, copper-plated tombac and brass) depicts the passing of the Romanian army into Dobrogea, allegorically represented in Henryk Dembitzky, the fine artist's lithograph; the inscription "ROMANIA" engraved in an arc of circle, the face value of "100 LEI", "10 LEI and "1 LEU", "50 BANI", respectively, Romania's coat of arms and the issue year "2018".The reverse of all the coins depicts the equestrian portrait of king Carol I, the inscription"140 YEARS SINCE DOBROGEA'S UNION WITH ROMANIA" and the year of the celebrated event, "1878".The opposition Save Romania Union (USR) has made a complaint to the National Council for Combatting Discrimination (CNCD) over statements by Labour Minister Lia Olguta Vasilescu regarding President Klaus Iohannis and all German people.

The correlation made by Ms Lia Olguta Vasilescu between "gassing" and Iohannis's German ethnic background is profoundly unfair and demeaning, USR said Monday in a press statement.

"To assume that the Germans, not the Nazis and their collaborators, are responsible for the gassing is something not just untrue but also despicable. Equalling all speakers of a language around the world to a criminal group is abject, pure and simple. The Social Democratic Party (PSD) has built an election campaign on discrimination and xenophobia and it now continues with impunity. It seems that the Greater Romania Party has never disappeared from the political stages, but has now taken the shape of roses," USR Senator Vlad Alexandrescu is quoted as saying in the press statement.The USR says in its complaint to CNCD that the attack against the president for his ethnic background is an act of negative discrimination that must be penalised according to the provisions of Ordinance 137/2000, arguing that "Vasilescu's statements are extremely serious that not even her ignorance of history can justify.""Romania was by no means alien to the Holocaust, as tens of thousands of Jews and Roma were killed under Marshal Ion Antonescu's leadership. It is the same Marshal Ion Antonescu whom Lia Olguta Vasilescu presented as a war hero in a speech to Parliament and she laid a wreath when she was a lawmaker of the [nationalistic] Greater Romania Party (PRM)," said Alexandrescu.In its complaint to CNCD, the USR mentions that Labour and Social Justice Minister Lia Olguta Vasilescu made a statement last Friday on a television station amidst a debate over an August 10 protest rally in Bucharest by Romanian expats, in response to the president's statement that "The PSD Government gassed and beat Romanians."Vasilescu said, among other things: "He said that PSD came to gas Romanians and beat them up. (...) The president has doled out that the Gendarmerie is with PSD - that is what I understand - that the secret services and whatnot are with him. They are state bodies. To speak of gassing as a German takes a lot of courage."USR therefore says that direct allegations concerning the head of state and the attack at him by demeaning allegations about that ethnicity is a discriminatory act that must be penalised according to the provisions of Ordinance 137/2000.President Klaus Iohannis welcomes on Tuesday at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace the heads of the missions and general consuls on the occasion of the Annual Meeting of Romanian Diplomacy.

The meeting is held Monday to Wednesday in Bucharest and it's organised by the Foreign Affairs Ministry (MAE), with the following theme: " Diplomacy - a pillar of the Centennial Romania."

The special guest of the meeting is Germany's Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas. The head of state is to meet the German official on Monday.Romania's three-month interbank offered rate ROBOR, which serves as benchmark for floating-rate loans in lei, dipped on Monday to 3.27 percent per annum from 3.30 ppa on Friday, announced the National Bank of Romania (BNR).

According to central bank data, early this year the three-month ROBOR was 2.05 percent.

The 6-month ROBOR that is used for pricing mortgage loans dropped to 3.43 percent from 3.44 percent on Friday, while the nine-month ROBOR - a measure of what banks charge each other for loans - also decreased from 3.50 percent on Friday to 3.49 percent.The 12-month ROBOR was flat this Monday at 3.55 percent.The ROBOR is calculated daily as arithmetic mean of the rate quotes of 10 banks selected by the National Bank of Romania.| BY Ricki Green |

Internet service provider and energy retailer Dodo has launched its first major brand revamp since its inception in 2001, as part of a market re-positioning and wide-ranging transformation of its customer experience. The Dodo revamp and above-the-line campaign was the brainchild of Deloitte, representing its first major campaign since its entry into creative consultancy.

The rebrand will be visible via a through the line campaign spanning TV, print, online and outdoor. Dodo has also introduced a new website, refreshed social media channels and improved customer service centre experience. A public relations campaign will complement the marketing and customer service investments.

The first TVC has launched, introducing Australians to a new Dodo, a compelling nbn pricing offer and a save it for spending creative concept. The save it for spending message suggests that Aussies should be allowed to save money on the things they need, to spend money on the things they want.

The rebrand coincides with a major shake-up in the telecommunications industry, triggered by the roll-out of the nbn. Dodo has released lower-price, higher-value plans for both nbn and mobile, also giving customers who bundle power and gas access to the nbn at one of the cheapest prices available in market.

Andrew Wynne, general manager of marketing and sales at Dodo (part of the Vocus Group), said that customers were increasingly choosing better value over service  where often its the perception of premium service rather than any significant difference.

Says Wynne: Our brand and communication strategy for Dodo is focused on fairness and transparency, which will be critical in competing in a market dominated by incumbents.

The nbn rollout has levelled the playing field which allows us to deliver better value for customers while using the same network.

Its been 17 years since the original Dodo bird and the internet that flies jingle first flew onto Aussie screens, so were excited to reveal a new Dodo.

Dodos evolution will translate to an attractive option for millions of Australians across essential services including internet, mobile, power and gas.

Matt Lawson, chief creative officer at Deloitte Digital, said it was a privilege for a creative team to get a brief to transform a brand like Dodo.

Says Lawson: While wed love to take all the credit, absolutely love it, the team at Dodo has been incredible strategic and creative partners every step of the way.

Says Adrian Mills, partner, Deloitte Creative Brand and Media: Weve loved working on this with Sandra, Andrew, Felicity, Brenda, Catherine, Trish, Tony and the broader team. Its a smart repositioning and a credit to this group for having a vision and executing upon it. What youre looking at here are the first few steps in a comprehensive evolution of Dodo and I hope it makes people feel differently about a brand with a lot of potential.

Client: Dodo (Vocus Group)

Sandra de Castro, Chief Executive  Consumer

Andrew Wynne, General Manager of Marketing & Sales

Catherine Bolch, Senior Brand & Marketing Consultant

Felicity Macleod, Head of Brand and Customer Marketing

Brenda Kosa, Brand Marketing Manager

Trish Ropiha, Brand Campaign Manager

Tony Timpanaro, Head of Digital Marketing  Consumer

Creative Agency: Deloitte

Chief Creative Officer: Matt Lawson

Creative Director: Charles Baylis

Creative Producer: Rob Weir

Partner: Adrian Mills

Partner: David Phillips

Manager: William Hollosy

Manager: Chris Baker

Copywriter: Aaron Bethune

Designer: Paige Linden

Designer: Hannah Schultz

Motion Designer: Jake Doherty

Production Company: Passion Pictures Melbourne

Director: Jonathan Gurvit, Director

Executive Producer: Kate Goodwin, EP

Producer: Chelsea Nieper, Producer

Media: PHD

Simon Lawson, General Manager

Kathryn Weatherlake, Group Business Director

Schalk Van Der Sandt, Head of Digital Media

PR Agency: Six OClock Advisory

Jessica Brophy, Senior Adviser

Yumeko Leung, Senior Adviser| BY Ricki Green |

Indeed, the worlds largest job site, has launched its first locally produced Australian brand campaign. The campaign aims to highlight the importance of finding all the available opportunities as an essential part of an effective job search.

The advertising strategy and concept were created by Indeeds internal brand strategy and creative teams and developed by Australian creative director Mark Harricks. The TVCs were produced by Australian production company Exit Films and directed by Gaysorn Thavat, while the cutting-edge visual effects were developed by Blockhead VFX.

Research conducted by Indeed found that only 10% of Australians felt they knew of all the open opportunities when they last searched for a job. The research also found that 80% of Australians felt they have missed out on a job opportunity at some stage in their lives, with a third of them believing this was because they didnt hear about it in time.

The campaign dramatises what other jobs might look like if not fully complete, from unfinished roads to half built TVs, underscoring the potential pitfalls of an incomplete job search. Job seekers have a variety of different job search methods available to support them through their job search and guide them to new avenues of possibility.

Says Paul DArcy, SVP of marketing, Indeed: After family and health, a job is the most important thing in most peoples lives. When people search for a job, they want to see all of the options. Every month, more than 4 million Australians come to Indeed to find jobs that cant be found on any other site.

Indeeds mission is a very simple and powerful one: We help people get jobs. We want to help job hunters all over Australia to have all the information they need to find the jobs best suited to their skills and the needs of their lives, because we know that whats good for the job hunter is good for the companies looking for people on Indeed.

Says Thavat: What I wanted to do was set up the audience expectation and then disrupt it visually, with an uncomfortable, incomplete situation. Each shot at the start has a beautiful, fluid, sweeping camera movement, before it comes to an end. By presenting people in these situations, with no relief in sight, we leave the viewer with a sense of unease that the job is still incomplete.Active Voice

with Heidi Lichtwark

Sport BOP CEO

Last week we were fortunate to have Sport New Zealand visit the Bay of Plenty to kick-start a series of five national workshops about the future of sport.

The workshop was attended by approximately 50 people who work or volunteer in sport, recreation, physical activity, schools, health and councils. Feedback from the workshop, combined with other input, will form the basis of a draft Sport New Zealand Community Sport Strategy from 2020.



There were lots of ideas, discussions and brainstorms that emerged from the session, and the group enjoyed the chance to talk about how we keep people involved in sport and recreation into the future. We also discussed how to target people who might be missing out on being active at the moment.

Discussion around this led us to talk about the wider benefits of movement and the value of sport at all levels (competitive to recreational). Believe it or not, the term sport and what it encompasses can be debated for quite some time!



For some people sport can be interpreted as meaning competitive, rigid and associated with something they were forced to do at school. At the other end of the spectrum, the word can infer mates, fun, achievement and passion. There were some different perspectives and great stories involved in the chat, and it was wonderful to have a chance to blue sky what we would like sport to stand for in our region.

Amongst all the discussion, one thing was certain: Regardless of which word we used, we wanted everyone  of all ages  to be able to have an easy life choice to be active.



Being active makes us feel good, helps form social connections, supports positive physical and mental health and  its just downright fun! We know all this because of Sport New Zealands continuous monitor survey of the physical activity levels of New Zealanders  the Active NZ survey. The size of the survey was recently increased to include four times as many respondents than in past surveys.

Results specific to the Bay of Plenty will be released later this year, and will be sure to provide some rich data and insight about how we get involved in sport, recreation and movement. Well be sure to share this information and its implications later in 2018.



In the meantime, no matter what sport means to you, why not get out there and get involved? Weve got a great directory on the Sport Bay of Plenty website to help you find just the right activity in your region of the Bay. Check out https://www.sportbop.co.nz/get-involved/ to find out more.

A man who stabbed a pregnant woman to death when he was just 16 years old will be released from prison next month.

John Michael Wharekura murdered Rotorua woman Tanya Burr in 2002 by stabbing her in the chest, back and abdomen.

He had knocked on the 21-year-old's door and asked for a paper and pen before launching the frenzied attack.

Wharekura, one of New Zealand's youngest killers, did not know Burr, and murdered her for "no apparent reason", a Parole Board decision said.

Wharekura was sentenced in 2003 to life in prison for the murder, with a minimum non-parole period of 14 years.

He appeared before the Parole Board on August 10, where the board ordered he be released in September.

The board heard Wharekura had "developed insight into his mental health condition", the decision, released to Stuff on Saturday, said.

He had also completed alcohol and drug counselling, was playing sport and working in the joinery factory at Auckland Prison.

He was likely to be approved for the Release to Work programme in the near future, the board heard.

A psychological assessment, dated June 28, noted he had a "well-developed insight" with respect to his mental health issues.

Wharekura told the board maintaining his medication regime was his "first priority".

The decision said the board was satisfied he did not pose an undue risk to the safety of the community.

Upon release, Wharekura would be subject to a raft of special conditions, including engaging with Community Mental Health Services, attending a reintegration meeting, and abstaining from alcohol and drugs.

He was also ordered not to enter Palmerston North or Rotorua or contact Burr's family.

The decision says Wharekura would live with a person he respected upon his release, in an undisclosed location. He also had whanau support in the area.

"Whanau know well their responsibilities with respect to bringing to the notice of the authorities if they detect Mr Wharekura not adhering to his release conditions or if his mental health should deteriorate."

-StuffClick the image above to watch the video

In today's forecast we are expecting a fine day with light winds.

It's a three-clothing layer day today with a high of 16 and an overnight low of 6 degrees. Humidity is 90 per cent.

Low tide is at 1.20pm and high tide is at 7.40pm. There's a sea swell of .2m with a sea temperature of 15 degrees. Sunset tonight is at 5.46pm.

If you're going fishing today the best fish bite time is between 3.30 and 6.30pm.

In NZ history on this day in 1904 the foundation stone for Victoria Universitys first building was laid. Victoria College (now Victoria University of Wellington) was founded in 1897 to mark Queen Victoria's 60th jubilee. Until the opening of the Kelburn building in 1906, classes were taught in rented rooms.

In world history on this day in 1776 the Americans were defeated by the British at the Battle of Long Island, New York. In 1910 Thomas Edison demonstrated the first talking picturesusing a phonographin his New Jersey laboratory.

In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes first appeared in a magazine. In 1975 Veronica & Colin Scargill of England completed a tandem bicycle ride around the world, a record 29,000.4 km.

In 2003 Mars made its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years, passing within 34,646,418 miles (55,758,005 km). In 2012 the first interplanetary human voice recording was broadcast from the Mars Rover Curiosity.

Today is the birthday of German idealist philosopher George William Hegel. Born in 1770 he once said "Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion."

To get involved in some of the many activities happening around the Bay, please check out our What's on page.

Have a great day!



Bay of Plenty

We are looking for a storeman with an OSH forklift license. You will need to be physically for as the job is about 70% forklift...



View or Apply on GoodWork.co.nzThe second Groundswell Festival of Innovation kicks off today showcasing how people and businesses in the Bay of Plenty are pushing the boundaries of innovation.

Groundswell is a bold step towards ensuring an innovative and sustainable future for our region.

With 10 events sold-out, the Prime Minister attending, and speakers joining us from all over the globe, Groundswell 2018 is set to be a stellar event, says festival organiser Stacey Jones.

Groundswell will bring together new and established events, thought and business leaders, and grassroots organisations, all joined by a common goal- to encourage collaboration, conversation and connection.

The Festival is spearheaded by Priority One, and delivered with the support of key partners Tauranga City Council, TECT, UNO Magazine, Cucumber and Air New Zealand.

Groundswell 2018 will explore: the changing world we live in - and the associated challenges - how we can harness the power of innovation to solve problems and sustain future generations? Groundswell provides the opportunity to hear from inspiring people and organisations who are championing innovation locally, nationally and internationally.

"The festival shares invaluable knowledge, skills and experience through a varied program of events - including forums, presentations, workshops, networking events, open days and exhibitions. Groundswell celebrates innovation across all sectors - weve got events across entrepreneurship, business, education, health, agriculture, youth, and the arts, says Stacey.

As well bringing international speakers from the likes of Google, Tesla and IBM to the city, Groundswell also celebrates our citys thriving culture of local innovation, says Priority One CEO Nigel Tutt.

From start-ups to schools, community organisations to corporates, Taurangas innovation ecosystem is thriving. Leading the charge are a diverse and dynamic group of individuals and organisations, passionate about seeing their city grow.

We dont know what the future of our region looks like, but we know it depends on the ingenious minds of today, says Stacey.

Want to be part of the action?

Check out all Groundswell Festival of Innovation events here: https://groundswellfestival.nz/events

Free Events: https://groundswellfestival.nz/eventsClick the image above to watch the video

If you have a drop of Guinness in your blood stream, then youre welcome to be part of this legendary family thats spread globally.

A Meet the Author evening at Mount Mellick this week was an opportunity for far-flung members of the family to come together, some meeting each other for the first time.

Tauranga resident Rod Smith, the author of the recently published Guinness Down Under has traced the story of how the legendary Guinness stout made it all the way from Ireland to Australia and New Zealand in the 1800s.

Rods wife Glennis, who he has been married to since 1971, is the great-grand-daughter of Sarah Guinness, a key character in the book. Family are still welcomed back in Ireland, regardless of how thin the connection may be. If youre a Guinness, youre a Guinness Rod says.

Rod started to write a story on the history of Glenniss family, which led into a history of the Guinness familys link with NZ. Glennis is a sixth-generation descendant of Irelands Arthur Guinness who, legend has it, created the famous Guinness stout flavour when he was meant to be helping his stepmother brew the ale for her inn and burnt the barley after roasting it for too long.

The truth is a London brewer took the Porter recipe to Dublin. In 1851 the first shipment of Guinness came to this country.

Theres always been enough drinkers to sustain the volumes in New Zealand, says Rod.

David and Stewart Williamson.

Omokoroa resident Paul Guinness, also a descendent of Arthur Guinness, comes from a different branch of the same family.

The family came up from the South Island to Tauranga in 1908, says Paul. They bought a business selling petrol and farm appliances at No.1 The Strand and my great-grandfather called it Guinness Brothers.

He remembers playing there as a boy and how barrels of whisky were poured into bottles.

Rod rang me about five years ago and said he was doing research on a book, says Paul. I was going to Wellington for a wedding so I took down what I thought hed be interested in.

They exchanged phone calls and emails and, after the Smiths moved to Tauranga, they met up again.

A former Evening Post reporter, Rod, who has researched and written family stories, first heard about his wifes family history from his mother-in-law Pauline.

She told me about it in 1992, says Rod.

Thats what began it all, but the real serious digging started about 2005.

Darryn Bennett and David Bennett.

Rod has been on a Meet the Author tour around NZ with Glennis, visiting Whanganui, Hamilton, Christchurch, Wellington, Fairlie, Greymouth, the Hawkes Bay and Auckland.

Weve been to Melbourne together as well, and I visited Adelaide and Sydney, says Rod. He met more members of the Guinness family in Sydney.

Sadly, Pauline recently passed away, albeit, was able to enjoy the result of the hours of research and writing. Pauline and Glenniss family story is chapter seven, and Pauls is chapter six.

Glennis Smith, Pauline Williamson, Rod Smith and Paul Guinness.

Guinness is a name instantly recognised the world over  the famous stout has been brewed at St Jamess Gate in Dublin for over 250 years, and is now brewed under contract in fifty countries. Nine million glasses of Guinness are drunk each day worldwide.

Guinness family members, originally in three major groupings  brewing, banking, and the church  have achieved fame in all walks of life, with some scaling great heights, others tasting great sadness. Guinness Down Under is the never-before-told story of how the famous brew and the family came to New Zealand and Australia in the mid-1800s  the brew itself through export and eventually in-country brewing, and the family through four grandsons of Arthur Guinness who made a new life Down Under, where many of their descendants remain.

Jane Williamson, Malcolm Williamson and Suzanne Williamson.

In this in-depth and fascinating account we learn about the origins of Guinness stout, the nature of the export trade, and the vagaries of the market. Outlined are the challenges, highlights, and sadness in the complex lives of the four cousins who, independently and at different times, sought to make a better life for themselves Down Under. The entrepreneur, public figure, and political activist; the successful Canterbury pastoralist; the black sheep of the family who set up as a Guinness brewer in Melbourne then disappeared forever; the clergyman who took his family to a vicarage in Melbourne, just when the new city was flourishing.

Also described is the progress of the iconic Guinness stout in Australia and New Zealand, from early imports in the mid-1800s through to present-day production in Adelaide and Auckland.

The book is completely fascinating in so many ways - the local perspective, the challenges that various family members overcame and the link to one of the most famous and iconic drinks in the world.

It hasnt sold out yet, its a great idea for a Fathers Day gift and there are still copies available. Guinness Down Under is available at selected book retailers and also online at www.guinnessdu.co.nz

John, Paul and Steve Guinness.

Jenny Hunt and Rod Smith

Glennis Smith and Pete Holdsworth

Author Rod Smith with his new book Guinness Down UnderThe Government is proposing a suite of rental law changes, including a limit on rent increases, an end to no-cause terminations, and a ban on so-called rent bidding.

Housing Minister Phil Twyford has launched a discussion paper for consultation with a set of proposals aimed at increasing security for tenants.

The policies mostly mirror Labours election policies.

They would limit rent increases to once per year, up from once every six months.

Landlords could also be required to include a formula for any rent increases in tenancy agreements, giving tenants transparency about how increases might be calculated.

An end to no-cause evictions is also on the table.

Currently landlords can kick tenants out with no reason with a 90 day notice, or with a set reason like late rent or that they are selling the property with 42 days notice.

One of the proposals would end those no-cause terminations and raise the notice period of with-reason evictions to 90 days.

Phil says landlords would still be able to evict rogue tenants damaging the property, not paying rent, or engaging in anti-social behaviour.

The reforms would also make it much easier for tenants to own pets, with landlords possibly required to give a reason why a pet is not allowed.

This would still let landlords ban possibly disruptive or damaging pets, but would give tenants more even footing if they wanted to argue their case.

Two options are being considered to end so-called rent bidding  where prospective tenants offer to pay more rent in order to secure a property.

One would prohibit landlords from asking for rental bids while the other would prohibit landlords for asking and even accepting unprompted bids from tenants.

Boarding houses would also see greater regulation, with a licensing scheme proposed.

Phil says it was a small minority of landlords giving the whole sector a bad name but rental law reform was still needed.

I dont think its going to punish anyone, its about modernising, says Phil.

He says New Zealand rental laws, which date back to 1986, are some of the most archaic in the world.

Phil says he didnt expect rents to increase thanks to the reforms, and had studied experiences in other countries to prove this.

The reforms are unlikely to become law before mid-2020.

The Government is consulting for eight weeks on the proposals.

These reforms come on top of a law currently in Select Committee that would ban letting fees.

Renters United organiser Robert Whitaker says the changes of greatest significance were those improving security of tenure. "I think renters' biggest problem is that they don't feel secure. Fixed-term contracts have become increasingly popular in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, which has caused a lot of stress and insecurity.

"They should become rarer and become available only for legitimate reasons, like a fixed-term employment contract."

"It's about constant turnover for the property manager or landlord, which can be stressful to the renter".

Whitaker says the group would be making submissions in the consultation process, particularly lobbying for the regulation of property managers.

"Property managers are an important part of the property sector. Why are they excluded from regulation?"

-StuffCome hell and high water New Zealand Police staff engaged in a race against time to save a critically ill Kiwi as Fiji was lashed by its second cyclone in a week.

Matt Wainwright collapsed on the last night of his Fijian holiday and was in hospital in Lautoka, too sick to be moved and requiring blood transfusions  but the hospital ran out of his type of blood.

In the thick of the storm, a team involving Police Liaison Officer Detective Inspector Paul Hampton, Senior Sergeant Chris Best from Polices Dog Training Centre, Chief Customs Officer Dave Huff and local staff worked to find a new supply.

They have been credited with saving Matts life.

Chris and Dave were in Fiji in April, conducting training with Fiji Police and Customs dog section as part of New Zealands involvement in the Pacific Detector Dog Programme, when Cyclone Keni struck, days after Cyclone Josie.

Matt was there with wife Jillisa and friends celebrating his 30th birthday. After collapsing on Friday night he was taken to Nadi hospital, then to Lautoka, where it was realised he was bleeding internally and needed a transfusion.

Jillisa, like Matt, has the rarest O-negative blood type and donated, but when a new transfusion became necessary over the weekend the hospital had no more supplies - and none could be flown in.

With Matts condition deteriorating, his father John Wainwright made contact with Paul in Suva. Paul  unable to travel because of the cyclone  started coordinating efforts from the New Zealand High Commission.

He contacted and briefed Chris and Dave, who had arrived the previous day.

Their hotel in Nadi was in lockdown and management refused to let them leave. However, the arrival of four local police and dog handlers  who Chris and Dave had asked to help  in 4WD vehicles, complete with lights and sirens, changed their minds.

Together the Kiwi and Fijian team made the 30km journey along severely flooded roads to Lautoka, where they took blood tests to see if they were suitable donors. None was compatible.

With the keyholder unable to get to work, the Fijian officers broke into the records office and found details of two donors in outlying villages. They then drove out, crossing swollen streams, to pick them up.

Meanwhile, Chris and Dave were providing food and other help for Jillisa - who had been at the hospital without support for days - and reporting back to Paul in Suva.

With the cyclone about to be upgraded from category 3 to 4, eventually they had to get back to Nadi.

For about a third of the way we couldnt see the road  it was just water, says Chris, who was on his first visit to Fiji and experiencing his first cyclone.

Villagers were pointing out markers to show the way we should go. I wouldnt say it was scary, but it was a challenge.

Matt received a transfusion and was evacuated by air ambulance the following day. Dave and Chris arranged accommodation for Jillisa, who had to remain another night before flying home.

Back in New Zealand, Matt underwent surgery for a previously undetected congenital disorder and has made a full recovery.

If those guys hadnt done what they did for me and Jillisa it could have been a very different story, says Matt. What they did cant be overstated."

John Wainwright, a Police Arms Officer based at Timaru, initially contacted Paul through his boss, Mid-Canterbury Rural Area Commander Inspector Dave Gaskin.

I dont know if Paul even knew I worked for Police, says John. I think to him I was just a Kiwi in need of help.

Were firmly of the opinion that if it hadnt been for Paul Hampton and the other staff in Fiji, Matt would have died. Their actions were heroic.

Paul says the team faced very real risks as they braved the storm and floods.

If we hadnt had staff on the ground the young man would quite possibly have died, he says. It shows the value of having someone in-country. Were not just here for policing purposes, we can help in other ways as well.

Chris says the local staff did the really hard work. Without them we wouldnt have been able to do much, he says.

We certainly werent heroic but it was something where you can look back and be proud of your days work.

Paul and Chris were awarded National Manager Certificates in recognition of their actions, with an equivalent award from NZ Customs to Dave.

-Police Ten One MagazineClick the image above to watch the video

In today's forecast we are expecting cloud gradually increasing, and a shower or two from the afternoon. Also northerly breezes.

It's a three-clothing layer day today with a high of 16 and an overnight low of 12 degrees. Humidity is 93 per cent.

Low tide is at 2pm and high tide is at 8.20pm. There's a sea swell of .2m with a sea temperature of 14 degrees. Sunset tonight is at 5.46pm.

If you're going fishing today the best fish bite time is between 4.30 and 7.30pm.

In NZ history on this day in 1992 Cantabrians awoke to find the region blanketed in snow. The Big Snow, as the 1992 storm came to be known, was the Canterbury regions heaviest for 30 years.

In world history on this day in 1789 William Herschel discovered Enceladus, a new moon of Saturn. In 1898 Caleb Bradham's beverage "Brad's Drink" is renamed "Pepsi-Cola".

In 1963 one of the largest demonstrations in the history of the United States, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, took place and reached its climax at the base of the Lincoln Memorial when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I have a dream speech.

Today is the birthday of Peter Fraser, Born in 1884, Peter was a Scottish-born New Zealand journalist and politician, and the 24th Prime Minister of New Zealand.

He once said "The government's objective, broadly expressed, is that all persons, whatever their level of ability, whether they live in town or country, have a right as citizens to a free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers."

To get involved in some of the many activities happening around the Bay, please check out our What's on page.

Have a great day!| BY Ricki Green |

Leading travel and adventure retailer, Kathmandu has named Columbus, a Merkle Company, as its digital media agency for Australia and New Zealand, following a competitive pitch.

Columbus, a Merkle Company, replaces the incumbent, GroupM Connect, to handle the retailers digital media across search, social and display.

The agency will work alongside Kathmandu to develop and enhance their data-driven marketing campaigns to fulfil their brand promise of inspiring adventure in everyone.

Says John Sette, group marketing manager, Kathmandu: We are delighted to partner with Columbus Australia and New Zealand based teams. We were impressed with the strategic thought leadership and data-driven insights that Columbus brought to the pitch, and their values of collaboration, innovation and partnership are a great fit with our own. We believe they are the best partner to help us evolve our digital marketing as we find new ways to engage with our customers globally.Syracuse, NY -- It's never been in dispute that Vernon Brockington shot Samuel Dixon to death in a car on the city's North Side.

But Brockington, 36, had resisted pleading guilty to murder for a year after the June 10, 2017 death. He said what he did wasn't murder because he claimed he acted in self defense.

Prosecutor Robert Moran said he could prove a starkly different version of events: Brockington, he said, approached Dixon's car while masked and "executed" the victim as he sat there unarmed.

The two men had an ongoing dispute, both sides agreed.

But two versions of the killing itself remained at odds today, even after Brockington pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

It's been an unusual case from the get-go.

Most notably, two key witnesses against Brockington happen to be his wife, Shontay Corley, and his wife's teenage daughter, Zinya Corley, 16.

Zinya Corley's testimony was that a masked man fired at point-blank range into the car. Brockington then ran back into the family's house on Murray Avenue with a mask and gun, burning the mask on the stove, Zinya told the grand jury.

Samuel L. Dixon, 38, of Syracuse, was shot at least once while sitting in a car parked near 107 Murray Avenue in Syracuse. He later died.

Shontay Corley also implicated Brockington in the shooting, Moran said. But she didn't mention anything about a mask, Klein said.

A witness on the street also testified that the shooter appeared to be wearing a mask, both lawyers said after court.

Brockington denied wearing a mask and said today that he only went to talk to Dixon about a dispute that flared up the day before.

Dixon had returned to Brockington's street the morning after a party nearby. But lawyers couldn't agree why.

Moran argued that Dixon was simply looking for a lost phone. He texted a neighbor from a different number and repeatedly called the missing phone, the prosecutor said based on phone records.

But Klein disagreed. He said the same neighbor could provide no reason why Dixon was there that morning. Klein argued that Dixon came back at 8 a.m. simply to confront Brockington after making threats of violence.

Dixon had threatened Shontay Corley and the couple's children, Klein said.

Dixon had told Brockington: "I'm going to come into your house and air it out. I don't care if there are kids around," Klein said.

And about Shontay, who was eight months pregnant with the couple's baby at the time, Dixon allegedly said: "I'm going to make you lose that baby."

Brockington's self-defense story remained at sentencing today. Klein, his lawyer, said Brockington had spent the night before the shooting pacing his house from window to window, after Dixon had threatened his family.

Brockington said he went outside just to talk to Dixon. But he claimed Dixon made a sudden more and that's when Brockington opened fire.

Brockington turned to Dixon's grieving family in court and said: "I made a poor decision. I was scared, I was worried about my family."

About the fact Dixon turned out to be unarmed, he added: "I made the wrong assumption."

But Moran, the prosecutor, wasn't buying Brockington's story at all.

"Mr. Brockington's version of events is inconsistent with sworn statements from witnesses on the street," Moran said. "It is inconsistent with the sworn testimony of his wife Shantay Corley. It is inconsistent with the affidavit and sworn testimony of his step-daughter Zinya Corley."

If Brockington was just going to Dixon's car to talk to him, why wear a mask? the prosecutor added.

"The evidence in this case is clear: Vernon Brockington executed an unarmed man," Moran said. "It's the reason he pled guilty. It's the reason he is going to spend a very long time in state prison."

An assistant prosecutor, Jordan McNamara, added in court that there's no evidence that Brockington talked to Dixon at all before opening fire.

These conflicting stories might have been sorted out by a jury. But Brockington pleaded guilty on the eve of trial under unusual circumstances.

Brockington had previously indicated he'd consider pleading guilty to something less than murder. But Moran had declined to lower the charge.

Instead, the case was headed to trial this spring when the Corleys -- both mother and daughter -- left town. The trial was delayed until both were found in New York City.

Shontay Corley was held in jail on a material witness warrant, while Zinya was released on bail.

Brockington then changed his mind, pleading guilty to murder on the eve of his July trial. That led to his wife's release from jail the same day and spared her the forced testimony against him.

Today, Dixon's sister, Lakisha Dixon, said she hoped Brockington spent the rest of his life in prison.

"I will never forgive you," she told Brockington, adding that her family would be at every parole hearing to argue against his release. (Brockington will get his first parole hearing at 15 years in prison, then every two years after that until he's released.)

Dixon's family did not accept Brockington's apology in court. Security officers had to ask them to restrain their emotions and avoid responding to the killer's remarks.

For his part, County Court Judge Matthew Doran noted the conflicting accounts, but added none of it could bring back the victim.

"The words 'senseless' and 'brutality' are used a lot," the judge said. "But that doesn't even accurately depict what happened here."

With that, Doran sentenced Brockington to the agreed-upon sentence, 15 years to life in prison.UPDATE: Syracuse police said Monday morning that the shooting occurred on Sterling Avenue not Coolidge Avenue. Police were called to a reports of shots fired in the 300 block of Coolidge Avenue during the same time period that a man was shot on Sterling Avenue.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Syracuse police were investigating a shooting Sunday night in the 300 block of Coolidge Avenue in the city, authorities said.

The city's shot spotter notified the Onondaga County 911 Center of shots fired in the area of 301 Coolidge Ave. at 9:49 p.m., dispatchers said.

Police later learned someone had been shot.

The victim arrived in a private vehicle at Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse, dispatchers said.

Police have not yet released any details about the shooting.

Check back for updates.SYRACUSE, N.Y. - In a private room at an exclusive club, Central New York's senior Republican leader gathered GOP elected officials from Onondaga County to deliver a simple message:

Stop bickering.

The 8 a.m. breakfast meeting last Monday at the Century Club of Syracuse was called by 71-year-old state Sen. John DeFrancisco, who is retiring this year after 25 years in the Senate.

Over coffee and muffins, DeFrancisco urged Onondaga County's seven top GOP elected officials to stop attacking each other in public, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Specifically, DeFrancisco asked them to unite behind the GOP candidate running to replace him in the Senate, Onondaga County Comptroller Robert Antonacci.

Antonacci and his allies represent a faction of the local GOP that is often at war with County Executive Joanie Mahoney and her supporters. The animosity, which goes back years, has carried into election season. All summer, Mahoney and Antonacci have traded nasty barbs via press release and Twitter.

Mahoney fired off three separate press releases in July and August accusing Antonacci of failing to complete the annual audit of county finances on time. Antonacci responded with three releases of his own, accusing Mahoney of ginning up a "phony'' controversy.

DeFrancisco, who is trying to help Republicans keep his seat and retain control of the Senate, emphasized the importance of supporting Antonacci -- or at least not attacking him.

The hour-long meeting appeared to result in "detente'' between the Antonacci and Mahoney camps, according to people with knowledge of the discussion.

DeFrancisco did not return phone messages seeking comment on the meeting. Other participants either declined to comment or did not respond. But several people familiar with the meeting agreed to discuss it if their names were not published.

DeFrancisco invited Onondaga County's top GOP elected officials. Besides Antonacci and Mahoney, they included District Attorney William Fitzpatrick; Legislature Chairman Ryan McMahon; U.S. Rep. John Katko; Sheriff Gene Conway; and County Clerk Lisa Dell.

Unelected GOP leaders, including county Chairman Tom Dadey, were not invited.

Antonacci and Mahoney are not the only GOP members to squabble in recent years. But the Aug. 20 meeting was mainly focused on quelling disputes that could sabotage Antonacci's Senate race, participants said.

Time will tell whether DeFrancisco's gravitas among local Republicans can end the disputes for good. But his stature gives him a better shot at it than anyone else, sources said.

"If anybody could do it, the senator would be a good person,'' a source said.

Contact reporter Tim Knauss | email | Twitter | 315-470-3023SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Federal authorities audit just 1 percent of the private railroad bridge inspections done in the United States every year, according to Sen. Charles Schumer.

Speaking in Syracuse Monday, Schumer demanded the Federal Railroad Administration hire more personnel to oversee bridge inspections and prevent collapses like the one in Syracuse last month.

On July 5, two 30-ton pieces of sidewall fell from a railroad bridge running through downtown Syracuse. No one was injured.

The collapse, however, pointed to flaws in the inspection process for rail bridges. The private owners of bridges are tasked with inspecting them, then submitting those inspections to the FRA.

"You wouldn't have a meat inspector solely judge whether his meat was safe," Schumer said. "You want some kind of federal oversight."

New York, Susquehanna & Western, which owns the bridge here, deemed the bridge safe and described it in "fair to good condition" just a year before the collapse.

Schumer said the partial collapse should have been eye-opening for the Federal Railroad Administration. He urged them to hire more people to audit the privately conducted bridge inspections.

There are between 70,000 and 100,000 privately owned rail bridges throughout the country. Schumer said the FRA has six specialists nationwide tasked with auditing all railroad bridge inspections. There are three specialists who oversee 3,000 rail bridges in New York and a dozen other states in the northeast, Schumer said.

"These bridges hardly get inspected at all," Schumer said. "That is the problem."

A spokesman for the FRA said there is one bridge specialist assigned to audit New York railroad bridge inspections. He said the FRA and New York Department of Transportation sent specialists to inspect the Syracuse bridge before rail traffic resumed on it earlier this month.

Schumer said the partial collapse in Syracuse is part of a larger problem.

Last month, a bridge in Ridgefield Park, N.J. partially collapsed while a train was on it. No one was hurt but one railcar was damaged, according to local news reports. That bridge was owned by New York, Susquehanna and Western, the same company that owns the rail line in Syracuse.

Standing with Schumer Monday, Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh said people living and traveling near the bridges deserve to feel safe.

He said the city sent New York, Susquehanna & Western an invoice for about $50,000 to cover the cost of road repairs and other expenses incurred from the collapse.Ben Walsh, an independent, is the 54th mayor of Syracuse.



By Mayor Ben Walsh | Special to Syracuse.com



Progress and promise. Those themes rang out in Gov. Andrew Cuomo's remarks last week at the opening of the New York State Fair. "Syracuse and Central New York are going to be better than they have been before," he said standing inside the wide open space of the Fair's new Expo Center. "Just do something," he urged.

He's right, and we are.



A few weeks back, Forbes.com featured the "modern-day renaissance" happening in Syracuse. Forbes told the world that "Syracuse is brimming with excitement" and said we are "one of the most underrated cities in the country." It featured major attractions downtown and in other parts of the city, with particular focus on the gloriously restored Hotel Syracuse, now the Marriott Syracuse Downtown.



The progress accomplished and the promise ahead are the result of many partners from the public and private sector working together. In the Aug. 19 Sunday Post-Standard alone, there were three recent examples.



We released our report on community input on the city's search for a new chief of police. More than 10 community organizations hosted public forums so hundreds of people from the city and the surrounding area could share their thoughts and ideas about policing in our community. We also met with more than 36 different individual elected leaders and law enforcement professionals from throughout Onondaga County to hear their input. Our selection process has, undoubtedly, been better because of the inclusive approach being followed.



Second, with the help New York state and more than 30 local businesses and non-profits, Onondaga County and the city of Syracuse created good summer jobs for more than 1,000 young people in the area. Many of the high school and college age kids were from the city and, without the help of this program, would likely not have been able to find jobs and gain work experience this summer. County Executive Joanie Mahoney was a true partner to the city in making this life-changing experience possible for our young people.



Third, we announced a plan to acquire the streetlight network in the city, which will save taxpayers $3 million annually, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6,100 tons and position Syracuse as the flagship Smart City in New York State. The Syracuse Common Council reviewed this proposal with diligence and deserves recognition for authorizing this forward-thinking investment in our future. With support from the New York Power Authority, Syracuse will install hardware and software to connect the streetlights, the largest installation of its kind in the northeast, making Syracuse one of the first fully connected Smart Cities in the United States. The governor called on us to build the infrastructure that will attract the businesses and jobs of the new economy, and with his support, we will leverage the Smart City investment to do so.



Smart Cities are a good example of how New York state and the governor are helping Upstate cities compete globally. The governor has made Syracuse home to the GENIUS NY competition, the world's largest business accelerator competition for unmanned systems. Building on Central New York's burgeoning Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) industry, GENIUS NY is bringing new startups, entrepreneurial energy and ideas to Syracuse from around the globe.



Forbes showed the world we are on the right track. With the spirit of partnership in our city, county and state, I have no doubt we will get there. Thank you to all who are believing in and supporting Syracuse. As I've said before - and the governor echoed last week - our city's best days are still ahead of us.



U.S. Rep. John Katko, R-Camillus, raised $1.9 million through June for his third race for Congress. He heads into the last stretch with $1.6 million to spend, records show.

Challenger Dana Balter, a Democrat from Syracuse, has raised $457,000. She is left with $113,000 after surviving a June primary with Juanita Perez-Williams.

Syracuse.com pulled a list of all itemized donors so far this election cycle into a searchable database.

Search Katko's donors in the box below.

Balter's donors can be searched in a separate story on fundraising in the 24th Congressional District.

You can type in a donor's name or search all donors who work for a specific employer. (Unlike New York state, the Federal Election Commission requires donors to list their employers and occupations.)

Katko has so far taken the most out of state money: 67 percent compared to 24 percent for Balter, according to a Syracuse.com analysis of itemized donors reported to the FEC.

That's because he has also taken the most money from political action committees and other House fundraising efforts. Thirty-four percent of Katko's money comes from individual donors compared to 96 percent for Balter.

Katko took in more than $80,000 in two days from Protect the House, a joint fundraising committee for House Republicans set up by Vice President Mike Pence and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Pence helped raise the money at a $30,000 per ticket dinner at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The vice president also raised money for Katko in Syracuse at a $1,000-per-person lunch in June.

to load this Caspio

by Caspio

Contact Michelle Breidenbach anytime:

|

| 315-470-3186.| BY Ricki Green |

IAB Australia has today announced that Seven West Media (SWM) has joined the organisations Board and that SWMs chief digital officer Clive Dickens will represent the company on the IAB Board.

The companys appointment to the IAB Board follows SWMs decision to sell its 50% stake in Yahoo7 to joint venture partner Oath as part of its strategy to fully own and operate its direct to consumer products.

The announcement comes as the IAB accelerates its efforts to grow sustainable and diverse investment in digital advertising across all platforms, most recently working with the AANA and MFA to launch the Australian industrys first Digital Advertising Practices.

Says Cameron King, chairman, IAB Australia: The addition of Seven West Media to the IAB Australia Board will strengthen and broaden our industry insight and expertise, and enable us to continue our work driving investment in, and advocating for, digital advertising.

Says Gai Le Roy, acting CEO of IAB Australia: We are delighted with Seven West Medias decision to step up its involvement with IAB Australia and join the Board. We are fortunate to continue to attract engaged and active Board members who are committed to demonstrating and improving the way digital advertising delivers on business objectives for Australian businesses.

Says Dickens: Our digital business has evolved significantly during the last two years and we have built one of the largest live streaming ad-funded Broadcast Video on Demand (BVOD) platforms in Australia, so the time is now right for SWM to join the IAB Board.

Seven believes in a strong IAB, and values its role in creating a stable and vibrant digital industry through its important work in areas including independent measurement, standards and global best practice. We believe we have a valuable contribution to make to the IAB, and are looking forward to playing an even greater role in the future of the Australian digital industry.

Seven West Media joins fellow IAB Australia Board members News Corp, REA Group, Carsales, Google, Simpsons Solicitors, Fairfax Media, Nine and Facebook. Current member Yahoo!7 will be replaced by Oath once the transaction with SWM is completed.Should Congress vote to make permanent the Republican tax cuts passed in 2017?

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., has promised a vote by the end of the year on legislation that would make permanent the individual tax cuts passed as part of the $1.5 trillion rewrite of the U.S. tax code.

The original bill cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and allowed business owners to take a new 20 percent deduction on their business income.

It also provided modestly lower income tax rates for individuals and a larger standard deduction, temporary measures which expire in 2025.

House Republican leaders say their goal is to vote on the new tax overhaul after members return from their summer recess in September, and before the midterm elections in November.

With that in mind, we asked the candidates in the 24th Congressional District election - Rep. John Katko, R-Camillus, and Democrat Dana Balter of Syracuse -- the following question:

House Speaker Paul Ryan says one of the top priorities for Republicans this fall will be to make permanent the GOP tax cuts passed in 2017. What specific changes to the U.S. tax code would you vote to make permanent, if any? What specific parts of the 2017 bill would you change, eliminate or allow to expire?

The candidates' written answers are below. Katko and Balter were asked to limit their responses to 250 words.

Look for a new candidate question each week. Have something you'd like to ask all the candidates? Email Mark Weiner at mweiner@syracuse.com with the subject line "weekly question."

Dana Balter

This tax plan was designed to help the wealthy and big corporations, not working families. The plan doubles the estate tax exemption, used by only the top 1 percent of earners, while capping our ability to deduct state and local taxes (SALT) which hits New Yorkers especially hard. I would return the estate tax deduction to the previous amount and eliminate the SALT deduction cap.

The tax plan removes personal exemptions, meaning that large families will end up paying higher taxes. I support restoring this exemption for our families. It also removes the ability for our union members to deduct their union dues, and no longer allows workers to deduct unreimbursed job expenses. This unduly punishes hard-working families and I would restore these deductions.

The tax plan contained many hidden items, including the repeal of key parts of the Affordable Care Act. Thirteen million people across the country will lose coverage and healthcare premiums will increase as much as 39 percent in Central and Western New York. I support undoing this ACA sabotage.

I also support requiring corporations to pay the American taxpayer the additional $400 billion they owe in taxes on profits stashed overseas.

The most significant tax cuts should go to working families who are more likely to spend that money and improve our economy. We have already seen large corporations prioritize stock buybacks over job creation. Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations increase the wealth inequality in our country. We need tax cuts for working families.

John Katko

Tax reform has unleashed economic potential in CNY and nationwide. Families are taking home more of what they earn, local businesses are investing in our workforce, and unemployment has decreased.

Still, no legislation is perfect. There remain several areas Congress can act to ensure tax reform helps all Americans.

We must make individual tax cuts permanent, so families enjoying tax relief can plan for the long-term. My opponent enjoys the support of outside special interest groups claiming families will pay more under tax reform. This is simply untrue. The average family in CNY will see a tax cut of $1,000 annually, and I'm fighting to make these cuts permanent.

Additionally, I support making permanent the expanded child tax credit, increased standard deduction, and medical expense deduction.

Property taxes in New York are amongst the highest nationwide. I was instrumental in restoring a $10,000 deduction for local property taxes. As Congress considers additional tax legislation, I will advocate for further SALT deduction increases.

I support reworking provisions of the tax code so drivers can deduct unreimbursed work-related mileage. Hardworking men and women in our labor community travel extensively for work and should be able to deduct costs of getting to and from these jobs.

Finally, I support a repeal of the 40 percent excise tax on high-cost healthcare plans and the medical device tax, which stifles innovation and hinders job expansion. There is bipartisan support to eliminate these burdensome taxes, and I am working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle on their repeal.

Contact Mark Weiner: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Sen. Charles Schumer Monday shared his memory of meeting with Sen. John McCain shortly before McCain's dramatic vote not to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

McCain, a Republican Senator from Arizona, died Saturday at 81 years old after a yearlong fight with brain cancer.

Shortly before McCain's "no" vote on the ACA repeal last July, Schumer visited him at his private Senate office, called the "hideaway." Schumer said McCain was wrestling with how to vote on the repeal bill.

Facing McCain in his office, Schumer said, were photos of his father and grandfather, both four-star admirals in the U.S. Navy, Schumer said.

"It was sort of symbolic," Schumer said. "Here he was going to do a very tough thing. And he was looking at what his ancestors were doing. And I think they hovered over him in a very positive and strong way."

Schumer was in Syracuse Monday to urge the Federal Railroad Administration to hire more bridge inspectors. He praised McCain as a patriot and one of the few great men he's met in his life.

Schumer said he also spoke to McCain recently about his relationship with President Donald Trump. Despite belonging to the same party, Trump and McCain frequently sparred.

"Sen. McCain and President Trump never got along, unfortunately," Schumer said. "I talked to McCain about it. He said he agreed with Trump on most issues but was really worried about his character and how that would affect the American character."

Trump insulted McCain during his presidential campaign in 2015. He said McCain -- who spent five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam -- was not a hero because he was captured by the enemy.

"He's not a war hero," Trump said. "He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."

In Fort Drum earlier this month, Trump signed a defense spending bill named in honor of McCain. He spoke for 28 minutes and never said McCain's name. Later that day, at a fundraiser in Utica, he alluded to McCain's vote against the repeal of the ACA.

Trump said he wanted to repeal the entire act. McCain's vote stopped that from happening.

"I would have gotten rid of all of it, but our wonderful senator put his thumbs down at 2 o'clock in the morning," Trump said.

McCain surprised many when he voted against the repeal. He was one of only three Republicans to break with the president.

Schumer is sponsoring a bill to name the Russell Senate office building after McCain.When Nancy Larraine Hoffmann saw the news alert on her phone Saturday that U.S. Sen. John McCain had died at age 81, the memory came flashing back in an instant.

Hoffmann, a former 10-term state senator from Central New York, said she remembered the early November day in 2000 when the Arizona senator visited the L. and J.G. Stickley furniture factory in Manlius.

Months earlier, McCain had conceded the 2000 Republican presidential nomination to George W. Bush.

On this day, McCain was making a swing across Upstate New York to campaign for Rick Lazio, the GOP congressman from Long Island who was running against Hillary Clinton for one of New York's U.S. Senate seats.

As New York's governor, George Pataki, and former Rep. Jack Kemp joined Lazio on a tour of the Stickley plant, McCain and Hoffmann struck up a conversation near the back of the entourage.

"Senator McCain and I looked at each other, and there wasn't a place for us, so we just sort of fell in behind them," Hoffmann recalled Monday. "We were walking along when, all of a sudden, he heard something out of the corner of the room. It was people speaking Vietnamese. And he turned to me and said, 'Excuse me Sen. Hoffmann,' and rushed over to these people."

Hoffman watched from a distance as McCain -- a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for 5 1/2 years -- struck up a conversation with Vietnamese immigrants who worked at the Stickley plant.

"Throughout the conversation he was nodding and smiling like they were old friends," Hoffmann said. "I stood there in disbelief. He came back and told me, 'They're lovely people, lovely people. They come from a very beautiful area of Vietnam.'"

Hoffmann, aware of McCain's history as a prisoner who endured years of torture, said she was struck by how he handled himself.

"I was so stunned and overwhelmed by his humanity," Hoffmann said. "He could overhear these people, and after five and a half years in captivity, embrace them as lovely people. It was the way somebody would greet a long-lost high school classmate."

Hoffmann said she tried to maintain her composure in front of McCain.

"I had tears in my eyes and struggled to find a hanky," she said. "I was so emotional and choked up seeing this unbelievable example of compassion and humanity. He was a living personification of someone who could overcome the suffering he endured."

Hoffmann, 70, who like McCain was known as a maverick during her tenure in the state Senate from 1985 to 2004, said she has often thought about the experience when she talks to people about holding grudges.

"It was just a very striking example of humility that I don't think I've ever seen before," she said. "It was the kind of thing that put into perspective what a great man he was."

Contact Mark Weiner: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751ALBANY -- A New York state prison superintendent who was one of several officials suspended in the wake of a 2015 escape from Clinton Correctional Facility was arrested over the weekend in Albany and charged with aggravated driving while intoxicated.

Donald L. Quinn, 53, was arrested by University at Albany police on Saturday following a traffic stop on the main campus. Law enforcement officials said that Quinn, superintendent at Gouverneur prison in St. Lawrence County, had been driving to a nearby hotel when he was stopped.

University at Albany assistant police Chief Aaron Mull said that Quinn was pulled over about 3 p.m. on Saturday after an officer saw him driving the wrong way on a one-way road.

Quinn was ticketed for DWI and also aggravated DWI, both misdemeanors. Mull said Quinn was ticketed for aggravated DWI because his blood-alcohol level was higher than 0.18, which is more than twice the legal limit.

"We expect our staff, especially those in a leadership position, to abide by the law and follow the highest of standards," Thomas Mailey, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, said in a statement. "Superintendent Quinn has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of a department investigation."

Quinn was first deputy superintendent at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora in June 2015 when two convicted murderers, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat, escaped from the maximum security prison. The extraordinary escape exposed systemic security breakdowns in the facility that led to Quinn and other top officials at the prison being suspended.

A mix of poor supervision of correction officers and lax checkpoints for employees entering state prisons were among the issues exposed by the prison escape.

The Times Union had reported in 2015 that the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision's own inspector general's office had mishandled an internal investigation into a female employee's personal relationship with one of the inmates.

The woman, Joyce E. Mitchell, smuggled tools into the prison that the inmates used along with power tools to cut through a steel wall in the back of their adjacent cells, law enforcement officials said. Mitchell also allegedly provided access to a cellphone that was used to contact one of the inmates' relatives or friends, and had planned to be their getaway driver until she panicked and abandoned the plan, law enforcement officials said.

Quinn and then-Superintendent Steve Racette were placed on leave in the wake of the escape as an intensive manhunt was underway and the state Inspector General's office and other agencies began piecing together the breakdowns that enabled the escape.

Racette subsequently resigned from his position. Quinn returned to work and was first deputy superintendent at Upstate Correctional Facility in Franklin County before being promoted to superintendent at Gouverneur.

Matt was fatally shot by U.S. Border Patrol agents on June 26, 2015. He was killed nearly three weeks after the escape, in a heavily wooded area about 50 miles from the prison, and after he and Sweat had split up. Sweat was shot and injured two days later by a state trooper. He is serving a life sentence.

-- Brendan J. Lyons, Times Union, Albany, N.Y.What is Nitro Pop? The coolest new treat at the New York State Fair is actually frozen with liquid nitrogen.

The Liverpool-based crew at Ma & Pa's Kettle Corn Popcorn Factory have a new stand at the 2018 NYS Fair called the -315 Cryo Lab. It features a "lab technician," somewhat resembling a mad scientist, freezing colorful popcorn with liquid nitrogen and then serving it in a cup marked "biohazard."

The Nitro Pop also appears smoky thanks to a dry ice-like effect caused by the combination of cold nitrogen and warm popcorn. Fairgoers who eat it can even see the foggy vapor coming out of their mouth and nose, which is why some companies serving similar products in other states sometimes call it "dragon's breath popcorn."

It sounds a little scary, but don't forget: Nitrogen gas makes up more than 75 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. According to the BBC, liquid nitrogen is also commonly used as a coolant for computers and by doctors to treat warts and pre-cancerous cells.

That doesn't mean Nitro Pop doesn't come with a warning label, though.

A sign at the Cryo Lab stand cautions fairgoers to eat it like hot food -- slowly and carefully -- by blowing on it until it reaches a temperature comfortable to eat. The difference is it's super cold, as nitrogen must be minus 320 Fahrenheit (or colder) to take liquid form.

Nitro Pop at the 'Cryo Lab' stand next to Ma & Pa's Kettle Corn, 2018 NYS Fair.

Fox 5 reports the Nassau County Health Department has banned restaurants to serve nitrogen-infused foods and drinks because of safety concerns. The New York state health department has advised against the fad, but still allows it.

"First of all, when it's liquid [nitrogen is] very dangerous," Dr. Robert Glatter of Lenox Hill Hospital told the TV station in June. "It can cause burns to the mouth, the esophagus, also it can cause a perforation of these organs as well."

Glatter added that the extreme cold temperatures can also cause burns to the fingers and hands if handled before the liquid nitrogen, which is clear and colorless, evaporates.

But Glatter also admitted that he's unaware of any injuries involving nitrogen-cooled drinks and foods, including ice cream and other desserts, despite being popular in New York City and other cities for more than a decade. Here's a video of how it's made by one Las Vegas vendor:

If you're still nervous about Nitro Pop, you can always stick to the variety of kettle corn flavors offered by Ma & Pa -- including Caramel Apple, White Cheddar, and some nontraditional ones like Unicorn, Bacon and French Toast. You can also get more popcorn as a bag of kettle corn starts at $6, while a cup of Nitro Pop is $5.

Ma & Pa's Kettle Corn and the -315 Cryo Lab are located next to each other on Cayuga Avenue, outside the International Building.We are all aware of the power of social media to significantly alter real life. Be it elections or body types, trends or reputations  social media has been there and left its mark. It has the power to digitally make-or-break an individual, and shows us whatever we want, wherever we want it. Among the myriad of selfies, dogs, kids, food and filters that dominate Instagram feeds, lurks an ever-expanding platform for the art world.

This community bridges two camps. The first includes young artists, be they inking tattoos or painting in oil, scrabbling for recognition and sales. The second group includes the galleries and auction houses that historically dominated the art market, now striving for a hint of cool and a breath of fresh digital marketing. It is an odd no-mans land where neither side seems completely comfortable. Artists through time have notoriously found it hard to get their work in front of the world, whereas companies like Christies can struggle to balance a cool online look while retaining their aura of art exclusivity and high-end luxury.

There are, of course, a number of positives that go with the increased digitisation of young artists work. For a start, what could be better for an artist than an open platform for viewers? Now every artist has the ability to independently display their work all the way from initial idea to finished piece.

Art lovers and consumers now have unprecedented access into artists lives and the ways they work  something usually hidden by galleries or only open to the elite. Instagram stories let people believe they know the artists, and the platforms ease of posting allows work in progress or #wip photos to be uploaded constantly. It helps artists who want to see what other artists are up to, discover how they work, get inspired, and communicate so simply over Instagrams direct message.

For galleries and auction houses, Instagram is a new way to market exhibitions, standing collections, and sales. The Tates recent advertisement campaign, for example, marketing the All Too Human exhibition, which has aired on Instagram, is a seductive attempt to get people through Tate Britains doors. Instagram can increase gallery footfall. It also makes art accessible to those who cant visit galleries; be it from New Yorks Met Museum account @metdrawingsandprints, which showcases an extraordinary collection of over 1 million works on paper to the more informal Instagram of Venices Peggy Guggenheim Collection (@guggenheim_venice). Now international art is accessible to all from the comfort of their homes. There truly is art in everyones pockets.

Or, is there? Is this art? Does a flooding of poor-quality images, hardly rendering each artwork at its best, intermingled with a range of selfies and holiday snaps make for an optimum experience? Is art, as showcased on Instagram, at risk of being relegated to inferior, second-hand exposure, lost among a sea of cute cats and bikini bodies? All of them filtered.

A conversation with a young artist, currently studying at Goldsmiths, reveals the complex relationship that artists have with the social media site. She explains that the ability to post sub-projects that perhaps dont come to proper fruition is certainly a useful feature, but she worries about a growth in what she terms pseudo-originality. She notes that being constantly fed with works can lead to unconsciously making art under a fashionable subject matter. In the past, styles followed different schools around the world. Nowadays, Instagrams influence may be working to create a dangerously ubiquitous, international style.

Another young artist at Central Saint Martins explains that Instagram has lowered young peoples attention span for art; works are rarely looked at for longer than 30 seconds, which could create a world of purely aesthetics. His major concern, however, ties in with what many young people struggle with on social media platforms  the need for validation. He explains that it puts pressure on many of us. We need a new-found validation. A validation from anyone and everyone, which will affect, in some way, the purpose of a lot of the work. Instagram may be denigrating art to the purely aesthetic, while potential meaning gets lost in the likes.| BY Lynchy |

Mateusz Mroszczak is joining BBDO Singapore as its new Executive Creative Director, replacing Primus Nair, who is leaving the agency to pursue new opportunities.

Mateusz (pictured on left) will join BBDO Singapore from Happiness Brussels and Saigon where he was Group Creative Director spending equal time between the two offices.

Prior to Happiness, Mroszczak was Executive Creative Director at Darwin BBDO in Brussels.

Richard Fraser, CEO BBDO Singapore, announced the appointment today, stating We look forward to welcoming Mat to Singapore and back into the BBDO network. Hes a world-class creative leader with a unique ability to blend storytelling, experience and technology.

Mat has had tremendous creative success during his time at Happiness and Darwin BBDO, creating work that is borderless, memorable and effective. We look forward to working with him to create the same success here in Singapore, he continued.

Nair (pictured below) took on the ECD position at BBDO Singapore under then CCO Ronald Ng in May 2014 after having been with the agency for three years.

Primus has been an invaluable member of the leadership team and a key contributor to the growth of the agency during his time here. We thank him for all the years of energy, effort and dedication, and wish him all the best. said Fraser.

Prior to Darwin BBDO, Mroszczak was Creative Director at digital hotshop, Y&R These Days, where he worked on the award-winning campaign, Coins of Hope. Mat has helped his teams win over 100 national and international awards including Golds at Cannes Lions, Eurobest, London International Awards, Clio and CCB. He has now won at Cannes 3 years in a row. He has been on the jury at several shows including the Creative Club of Belgium, Golden Drum, New York Festivals and LIA. He is the 3rd generation of Mroszczak admen; both his father and grandfather worked in the industry.

Mateusz said, When I first met the BBDO Singapore team, I knew immediately it was going to be a great fit. The story of how theyve been transforming the agency and their vision for what a great agency should be is inspiring. I am really excited about having the opportunity to work with the team and help to elevate The Work, The Work, The Work. We have got all the ingredients needed to do amazing work  a deep pool of young talent, strong client portfolio and a collaborative network.A hot potato: The Brexit clock is ticking away while the UK tries to figure out how it will deal with potentially losing access to Galileo, the EU's version of GPS. Even though the general public will still have navigation abilities through the satellite network, highly accurate signals required for military use will be restricted.

As Britain continues negotiations to finalize its exit from the European Union, the small details are pointing to massive amounts of work. This time, the UK has learned that it will not have access to the EU's 10 billion euro "Galileo" satellite network being used as a highly accurate alternative to GPS.

Finance minister Philip Hammond has issued approval for 100 million pounds to be spent on investigating the creation of a new satellite network to service the UK. Although consumer-grade positioning capabilities are available worldwide from the United States, Russia, and now the EU, the most accurate position data runs through encrypted channels and is only available to militaries.

Standard positioning data is only accurate to within several feet. In many cases, a 10-foot radius is the best available estimate of your exact location. For navigation and routing of vehicles, this is accurate enough. Military grade systems have been shown to pinpoint locations within mere inches of a target to ensure that weapons land precisely.

Britain has now been excluded from future work deemed sensitive in nature on the Galileo project by the European Commission. Galileo originally started in 2003 and is set for completion by 2020.

It is believed that it will cost Britain approximately 3 billion pounds to build a comparable system. Should Britain actually go through with building its own satellite network, it will demand 1 billion pounds back from the EU for the work it has contributed to Galileo.

The UK has until March 29, 2019 at 11pm local time to work out any remaining disputes with the EU. At that time, the British will officially leave the European Union.DONALDSONVILLE  From one point of view, the City Council and Mayor Leroy Sullivan could be said to be taking a "what have you done for me latLongtime East Baton Rouge Housing Authority Executive Director Richard Murray will officially leave his role July 31, after concerns about the Housing Authoritys lack of growth and an overpayments scandal overshadowed his final year at the agency.

Legislative auditor investigating Baton Rouge Housing Authority in wake of salary overpayments The Louisiana Legislative Auditors office has opened an investigation into the East Baton Rouge Housing Authority, months after the Housing A

Murray has run the Housing Authority for the past 17 years and became known as a stabilizing force after multiple previous executives faced criminal charges for their behavior while running the agency. But Housing Authority board members opted against renewing Murrays contract for another term, and he will soon go on administrative leave.

Murrays replacement for now will be J. Wesley Daniels Jr., who has spent the past couple of years leading the nonprofit development firm that works with the Housing Authority. Daniels will serve as acting executive director starting August 1 until the Housing Authority board decides on a permanent replacement.

J. Daniels is very competent and capable to steer the organization and help lead it until we find that perfect match, said Board Chairwoman Dianna Payton.

Daniels has previously worked on development and housing in Atlanta and Charlotte. He will take over the Housing Authority at a time when its role in Baton Rouge housing and redevelopment could potentially be in flux, as Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broomes administration seeks to bolster a Redevelopment Authority that could also meet affordable housing needs.

When board members declined to renew Murrays contract late last year, they grilled him over his failure to submit a $30 million affordable housing grant application that they hoped might help with the RDAs Ardendale project, a 200 acre sit meant to revitalize Baton Rouges Ardenwood and Lobdell corridors.

The meeting also came after The Advocate reported on overpayments that resulted in Murray being paid more than $52,000 in extra salary dollars and Chief Operations Officer Melonie Bayham being paid an extra $22,000 over a period of nearly two years. The two told board members that they did not notice the overpayments, and the board hired auditors to investigate the wrongdoing.

Murray and Bayham paid back the money, and the Louisiana Legislative Auditor opened a probe of the incident in April.

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+7 Baton Rouge Housing Authority votes 'no' on director's contract renewal in fiery meeting A divided East Baton Rouge Housing Authority Board voted Friday against renewing the contract for longtime Executive Director Richard Murray a

Murray declined to comment Thursday about his future plans as he leaves the Housing Authority.

Daniels said Thursday that he will take on the role of acting executive director of the housing authority, while keeping his titles as acting CEO and COO of Partners Southeast.

He said hes especially excited to shepherd the Housing Authoritys collaboration with the city-parish, RDA and multiple other entities working on Ardendale and trying to revive nearby communities that include Smiley Heights and Melrose East.

He said they are preparing a grant application for September to help with those plans.

Its more comprehensive than the sticks and bricks of housing, he said, adding that the plan combines housing with educational opportunities.

Additionally, Daniels said, Baton Rouge has a handful of affordable developments in the pipeline.

One is a second phase of River South apartments near the Water Campus, and Partners recently secured the final piece of funding they needed to build a senior community called Cypress at Gardere. He estimated that construction for that project would begin in mid-2019, and said they expect to secure the funding they need for affordable housing in Ardendale next year as well.

Daniels said he does not plan to seek Murrays job on a permanent basis.

Payton said search committee members expect to find a permanent director within the next six months. For now, she said they are still perfecting a job description.The Louisiana Legislative Auditors office has opened an investigation into the East Baton Rouge Housing Authority, months after the Housing Authority board discovered that the agencys top two executives were overpaid $75,000 during two years.

Roger Harris, director of investigative audits, confirmed that his office had recently opened the probe but said he could not provide specifics about it. Outgoing Housing Authority Executive Director Richard Murray said Tuesday that auditors recently showed up unannounced and interviewed him about the overpayments.

Housing Authority board chairwoman Dianna Payton caught the overpayments error eight months ago during a performance evaluation for Murray. She and her board quickly enlisted auditors from Postlethwaite & Netterville to help figure out what went wrong.

Every other week since late 2015, Murrays paychecks were $1,000 heftier than they should have been, while Chief Operations Officer Melonie Bayham also received nearly $500 more than she should have every two weeks.

The overpayments to Murray totaled $52,000 and the overpayments for Bayham amounted to $22,000 during the two year period. Both told board members and auditors from Postlethwaite & Netterville that they did not notice the overpayments.

They paid back the money, and Payton said the mistake appeared to be human error with a former employee who incorrectly entered the salaries into the payroll system. Murray's salary in 2016 should have been around $220,000, but he was paid $268,344, while Bayham should have been paid $127,000 in 2016 but received $145,497, according to their payroll records.

I told them that it was an error and that it happened to me and the deputy director, Murray said Tuesday about his meeting with auditors.

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+7 Baton Rouge Housing Authority votes 'no' on director's contract renewal in fiery meeting A divided East Baton Rouge Housing Authority Board voted Friday against renewing the contract for longtime Executive Director Richard Murray a

Since last week, auditors have been returning to the Housing Authority offices and pulling files and records, Murray said. He said they did not give a timeline for when they will complete their work.

Payton said Tuesday that auditors had not reached out to her yet.

I can say that the board of commissioners and staff understand the duties of the legislative auditor and well respond to their review accordingly," she said, adding that the board declined to renew Murray's contract after the Postlethwaite & Netterville audit.

Murray has been at the helm of the agency since 2001, and helped to steer the Housing Authority toward stability after a string of his predecessors wound up in prison for their illegal dealings at the agency. But board members late last year, on the brink of the fallout from the overpayments, also said they were frustrated the Housing Authority had missed a deadline for a major affordable housing grant.

They voted against re-upping his contract, which expires in October.

East Baton Rouge Housing Authority launches search to replace longtime director The East Baton Rouge Housing Authority has put together a search committee and expects to hire a consulting firm to help find their next director.

Payton recently assembled a search committee for Murrays replacement and said they hope to spend around $20,000 on a search firm to help them.The East Baton Rouge Housing Authority improperly spent nearly $9,000 in public money on celebrations, meals and gifts between 2014 and 2017, according to a new investigation from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor's office.

The legislative auditor's office opened a probe in April into the Housing Authority after the agency's top two employees were overpaid $75,000 over two years. But the legislative auditor's office largely dismissed those concerns in their newly released report, saying external auditors from Postlethwaite & Netterville, who the Housing Authority hired in wake of the fallout, had "satisfactorily addressed the issue."

Legislative auditor investigating Baton Rouge Housing Authority in wake of salary overpayments The Louisiana Legislative Auditors office has opened an investigation into the East Baton Rouge Housing Authority, months after the Housing A

However, auditors found that the Housing Authority used $2,953 for annual employee picnics, $2,321 office Christmas celebrations, $2,535 for gift cards used as door prizes and $1,122 for other gifts and flower arrangements.

The Housing Authority spent public money on those costs from the agency's main budget, and auditors recommended that the organization become more restrictive with public funds and document the public purpose of all expenses.

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The legislative auditors office reminded the Housing Authority that taxpayer money the agency receives must be used for a public purpose.

"We're for sure going to change our policies and procedures to make sure we're in alignment," said Housing Authority Board Chair Dianna Payton. Payton said that the holiday parties, picnics and more were ways to incentivize staff, celebrate their hard work and build morale. The flower arrangements went toward funerals for employee family members, she said.

The amount of misspent money accounts for less than 1 percent of the Housing Authority's total budget, which exceeds $33 million annually, according to a letter that Interim Housing Authority Executive Director J. Daniels, Jr., sent to the Legislative Auditor's office.

Daniels added that the Housing Authority will strictly comply with state laws and said the auditors report will result in greater oversight, increased controls and revised policies.

The Housing Authority is in the process of searching for a new executive director.A divided East Baton Rouge Housing Authority Board voted Friday against renewing the contract for longtime Executive Director Richard Murray after receiving more information about $52,000 he received in overpayments and grilling him about failing to submit an application for a $30 million affordable housing grant.

Murray has led the Housing Authority since 2001 and his contract was not set to expire until October 2018. The Housing Authority board gave him the option of announcing that he would resign or retire  which Murray declined  before they voted to not keep him on as director. Murray told the board he was shocked.

"I didn't think that was going to happen," an incredulous Murray told the board after their vote. "I would have thought you would have had more discussion than that. Wow."

Murray declined an interview after the meeting, and board Chairwoman Dianna Payton said it will be up to him whether he wants to remain in his role until the contract expires or if he wants to leave before then. During Murray's tenure, he has mostly kept a low profile and kept the Housing Authority notably under-the-radar after a string of previous leaders went to prison on public corruption charges.

The Housing Authority oversees both public housing for some of Baton Rouge's poorest residents and works with a nonprofit developer to build affordable housing for those who cannot afford market rate rents.

But Housing Authority board members disagreed Friday over whether Murray had the ability to create important public-private partnerships and the leadership to convene the mayor's office, Redevelopment Authority and other housing players to get big projects done. At some points, board members questioned one another's motives and many described it as the ugliest Housing Authority meeting in years.

Most board members said they were upset to learn the Housing Authority was abandoning a grant application that was a year in the making. The $30 million federal "choice neighborhoods" grant could have given the Housing Authority a leg up on building affordable housing in Baton Rouge's in-the-works Ardendale development, where an automotive training center has recently opened and a career high school is on the way.

Despite talking for years about affordable housing in Ardendale and the Housing Authority spending more than $38,000 on consultants from a firm called Integral to help put together an application, Murray said, not enough other community leaders came to the table for the Housing Authority to submit a successful application this year.

"We still had a year to pull together those stakeholders and those supporters that we needed to make this application happen," Payton said during the meeting. "For me, I am very letdown that it didn't take place."

Board member Christopher Odinet said affordable housing was "our piece" of Ardendale, as the RDA has helped to create other aspects of the development. He questioned why the Housing Authority missed out on a separate application for low-income tax credits to build housing in Ardendale, as that was something else Integral was supposed to be helping the authority get done.

Murray tried to remind board members that there was no guarantee the grant application would have been successful regardless of how it was handled. He urged board members to look forward to other possible ways to bring housing to Ardendale instead rather than focusing on the missed opportunity with the grant application. Murray said he was also disappointed the grant application did not come to fruition but that such was the nature of running a public body.

Sensing the board was turning against Murray, board member Chris Brown jumped to the director's defense and accused "outsiders" of attending Housing Authority meetings to try to make the Housing Authority look bad. He suggested "negative press" about the Housing Authority was the reason other local entities did not want to partner with the agency for the grant application.

"Y'all are trying to bring down a good man for your own personal reasons," Brown said. "I've been ministering for a long time and I've never seen this much evil in my life."

Odinet and board member Tyra Sterling quickly reminded Brown that the Housing Authority is a public agency and that they have a responsibility to conduct their business in an open and transparent manner.

Board members later received an update on an audit they commissioned after discovering that Murray and his second-in-command, Melonie Bayham, were respectively overpaid $52,000 and $22,000 since late 2015. Murray and Bayham said they did not notice the extra money flowing into their bank accounts, and Payton said they traced back the overpayments to a human error.

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The board confirmed Friday that Murray and Bayham paid back the money after the board caught the mistake.

Baton Rouge Housing Authority director, COO to pay back $75,000 they mistakenly collected in salaries The top two executives at the East Baton Rouge Housing Authority collected $75,000 more in pay than they were supposed to receive over the pas

Board members then entered a closed-door executive session to discuss Murray's performance and the possibility of extending and renewing the contract. The discussion grew heated at points, with board members arguing loudly enough to be overheard in the hallways. At one point, Brown stormed out of the meeting and slammed the door behind him.

About 40 minutes after going into executive session, the board re-opened its meeting to the public. Odinet moved to vote against renewing Murray's contract and to start the process of putting together a search committee to find a replacement for Murray.

After Murray said he was disappointed by the action, Odinet emphasized that the decision was not personal and repeatedly thanked Murray for his leadership.

"It's not that you've been a bad leader at all," Odinet told Murray. "But like in the life cycle of all agencies, there needs to be a next step, going in a different direction."

Murray asked what qualities the board wanted from him that he was not providing. Odinet responded that the Housing Authority needed a leader more skilled at putting together public-private partnerships. Payton agreed after the meeting. She complimented Murray's ability to bring stability to the Housing Authority as well as the Kenner Housing Authority, which he helped get back on track in recent years.

East Baton Rouge Housing Authority director mentioned in Kenner Housing Authority controversy East Baton Rouge Parish Housing Authority Executive Director Richard Murray's name has surfaced in a fight among board members and staffers of

Murray's low-key style was in sharp contrast to many before him.

In 1997, former Housing Authority Director Larry Cole -- who once billed himself as a reformer of the agency -- pleaded guilty to defrauding the Housing Authority of more than $20,000. His top deputy, Patricia Alexander, was also convicted in 1998 for stealing nearly $25,000 in rent paid by low-income tenants.

Before the two of them, former Housing Authority Director Reginald Jones pleaded guilty in 1989 to perjury and conspiracy charges after he tried to embezzle $25,000 through a fraudulent contract for computer software. Jones was part of a major indictment in which 11 Housing Authority officials, contractors and landlords pleaded guilty to corruption charges.

Payton said Friday she was thankful for Murray's approach as a leader, but that the Housing Authority needs to look for someone with a stronger skill set in development.

"We wanted to give ourselves enough time with his contract ending in 2018 to put together a good search committee," she explained about why the decision was made so long before Murray's contract expired.

Payton, Odinet, Sterling and Al Barron voted against renewing Murray's contract. Board member Tommie Gipson disagreed, while Brown and LaMiesa Bonton were not present for the vote.

"If the poor people of this parish are not taken care of, you will live to regret this decision," Gipson said told the board members before the meeting concludedMORGANZA  Twenty years ago, a newcomer took up residence in this Pointe Coupee Parish village and quickly became one of its most popular residents.

His name was Montana, a bald eagle nursed back to health and released into the wild to flourish.

The eagle stuck around, found a mate, built a nest atop an oak tree along La. 1 within the Morganza Spillway and raised several broods of little ones.

"We've adopted him; he's our mascot," said Rene Thibodeaux, a lifelong resident of Morganza, "(but) we're worried he's going to relocate."

Why?

Because years of annual flooding within the spillway's forebay is killing the tree where the eagle's nest is located. And Thibodeaux, one of the leaders of a community group trying to revitalize economic commerce in the small town, was hoping the state's wildlife and/or agricultural experts could do something to keep the eagle's nest in its highly visible spot.

But officials with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and the state's Department of Agriculture and Forestry say the residents of Morganza will soon need to face facts: The eagles will be forced to fly the coop.

"There is so much habitat, in the way of tall trees, that those birds can use; theres isnt a lot you can really do," said Michael Seymour, non-game ornithologist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

"It's an oak tree, so it'll be awhile before it completely rots away," said David Campbell, director of the forestry program for the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry. "But once it's dead, it's dead. It's out of the question to try and save it."

The tree that serves as home for the eagle's family can be seen off La. 1, making the nest one of the most popular for bird watchers. It's also not uncommon to see motorists pulling over to the side of the road to catch glimpses of the eagles  one of whom could still be Montana but officials aren't sure.

The LSU School of Veterinary Medicine, along with state officials, released Montana near the spillway in 1995 once the eagle was nursed back to health after he was hit by a car near Houma.

At the time, there were only about 100 active bald eagle nests in the state. It has been illegal to kill the endangered animal for years in most of the country.

In July, the LDWF released data from a 2017-18 survey showing there were more than 260 active eagle nests just in southeast Louisiana. LDWF estimates there are more than double that number statewide.

Thibodeaux, president of the Morganza Cultural District, had never seen a bald eagle in the area until Montana showed up. The idea of no longer being able to easily take a gander at the nest worries Thibodeaux, and the rest of the cultural district, that they may lose one of the few things that attract visitors to the village of about 650 residents.

+8 The key to this small town's revitalization efforts: historic charm MORGANZA  There was time when Inez Serio-LeCoq could buy all the items on her mother's grocery list from any number of stores and local busin

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The revitalization groups sees the eagle's nest as a vital component in their efforts to open new businesses and add commerce to its one-mile business corridor, giving people who come to see the nest places to eat and shop.

"We don't want him to relocate in the woods where no one can see him," Thibodeaux said. "We were hoping someone could put in an artificial tree to keep (Montana) where he's at so everyone can see him."

Most of the other trees in the spillway's forebay have already rotted, lost limbs and/or tipped over, victims of years of flooding within the forebay, Campbell said.

The tree with the eagle's nest is one of the few that remains.

The Morganza Spillway, part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' flood-control system, is designed to divert water from the Mississippi River to the Atchafalaya Basin during major floods.

+10 Farmers beg for assistance as Mississippi River overtops levee near the Morganza Spillway MORGANZA  Marty Graham knows that farming land near the Morganza Spillway comes with the risk of seasonal flooding between March and late Jun

The bowl-shaped forebay area between the spillway's flood control gates and the Mississippi River is also fertile farmland owned by local farmers.

During seasonal flooding, the swelling waters from the Mississippi River swamp the forebay and can remain there for several months.

"That high water stays up so long I imagine that hurts the trees," Campbell said. "But it'll be awhile before it rots."

Seymour, the ornithologist, said the state has installed artificial structures before to encourage eagle nesting, but doesn't see that as a viable or affordable solution in the spillway.

"When it comes to the Morganza Spillway, it obviously gets a lot more complicated because its kind of a multi-use type area," he said. "It would obviously be pretty expensive. The materials alone would be pretty expensive. Administrators may have a completely different opinion on this. My opinion, from a biologist standpoint, would be that the money would be better spent doing some other sort of mitigated thing for bald eagles."

Seymour added that erecting any type of artificial structure doesn't guarantee the eagles would remain at the same spot anyway.

"When all around the Morganza Spillway there are still quite a few trees, it may not be ideal, but if you're a bald eagle and you see what could be a nest tree, they would almost certainly pick natural over artificial."

Both Campbell and Seymour say it could likely be a few more years before the eagles nesting in the spillway will be forced to find a new home  a bitter pill residents will just have to swallow.

"We never had any idea the eagle would become such a big deal," Thibodeaux said. "Now it seems like a necessity to our revitalization."The trial of a Baton Rouge man accused of fatally shooting a Plank Road tire shop employee during a botched 2016 robbery has been pushed back to Sept. 17.

Curtis Lee Brown Jr., 22, was previously set to stand trial Monday on second-degree murder and armed robbery in the killing of 25-year-old Jonathan Sam, but witness scheduling issues prompted the delay.

Felon indicted on murder, armed robbery counts in Baton Rouge tire shop killing A felon with a prior armed robbery conviction was indicted Wednesday in the Nov. 10 killing of a Plank Road tire shop employee who died while 

Sam died Nov. 10, 2016, while trying to stop a holdup outside G&T Tires.

He was putting air into a customer's tires when Brown showed up and apparently tried to meet with, and then rob, one of the shop's patrons, the store's owner has said.

Tips from the public helped identify Brown as the suspected gunman from surveillance footage, authorities have said. He was arrested in Dallas a month after the shooting.

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Suspected gunman in Plank Road tire shop slaying caught in Dallas A 21-year-old Baton Rouge fugitive wanted for allegedly gunning down a Plank Road tire shop employee during a botched robbery was arrested Thu

At the time of the incident, Brown was on parole following a 2010 conviction for armed robbery and attempted murder, police said.

Brown, of 2425 Iroquois St., faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison if found guilty of second-degree murder.

State District Judge Lou Daniel is presiding over the case.U.S. Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) speaks outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in New Orleans, La. Thursday, Aug. 9, 2018, after showing his support to ICE officers.I am going to go out on a limb and do something that has seldom, if ever, been done before  mention Louisiana politicians and Albert EinsteinYes. Covid cases have been low and the city is ready

No. It's way too soon, especially with the holiday season

Do what you want, but I'm still wearing a mask

Def keeping my plague doctor costume for 2022

Vote

View ResultsMetro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 27)  Senator Antonio "Sonny" Trillanes IV has come up with yet another challenge for President Rodrigo Duterte.

Trillanes on Monday dared Duterte to an intelligence quotient (IQ) test after the chief executive questioned his level of intelligence and tagged him as a person with "low IQ."

The senator added if Duterte gets a higher score than him, then he will resign from his post.

"Just to settle the matter, I am challenging Duterte to an IQ test," Trillanes responded in a statement.

"Kahit plus 10 pa sya, pag mas mataas score nya sakin, magreresign ako sa pagka-Senador."

(Translation: Even if he's 10 points higher, as long as he gets a higher score than I do, I will resign as Senator.)

"Sya nga itong wala ng maisip na solusyon sa mga problema ng bayan kasi aminado syang mahina ang kokote nya," Trillanes added.

[Translation: He's the one who cannot think of solutions for our country's problems because he's admittedly slow.]

The statement came days after Trillanes, also through his Twitter account, criticized Duterte of being the "laziest, craziest, and worst president this country ever had."

In his past speeches, Duterte has claimed that he was an average student and boasted of his "passing grades" in school.

The IQ test is yet another addition to Trillanes' list of dares for the President, as he previously challenged the whole Duterte clan to do drug tests.We head to the lakefront this week to continue our look at local university mascots. The University of New Orleans, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, originally was known as Louisiana State University in New Orleans, or LSUNO.

Its earliest mascot was a version of the LSU tiger. In 1965, a student vote was held to pick a new mascot. The choices were: Dolphins, Mariners, Privateers, Panthers, Marlins, Pelicans, Cajuns, Tigers, Ospreys and Seagulls. The winner, the panther, was revealed in the Feb. 6, 1965 issue of the student newspaper The Driftwood.

One week later, an article explained that student dissatisfaction led to a petition calling for another election. Among the objections were that the university should have a mascot that reflected the history of New Orleans.

Blakeview: Tulane mascots With the fall semester upon us, we'll take the next few weeks to look at the history of the mascots and symbols of some local universities.

Two more rounds of voting were held, with students asked to choose between the Dolphins or the Privateers, the latter of which won. According to the UNO website, a privateer is a "pirate who was pardoned by the government and then commissioned to hunt down and dispose of other pirates."

Lafitte the Instigator, a costumed mascot named for the famous pirate Jean Lafitte, was introduced in 1983. In 2013, a redesigned privateer figure and logo were introduced. They were accompanied by a new costumed mascot named Captain Bruno.A winning Powerball ticket worth $1 million was sold in New Orleans, according to the Louisiana Lottery Corporation.

The winning ticket in Saturdays drawing was sold at Ideal Mart at 447 North Rampart Street, the lottery said. It matched all five numbers.

The winning numbers were 20-25-54-57-63 with a Powerball of 08. The PowerPlay was 2x.

The jackpot for Saturdays drawing was $70 million.Although it has been engulfed in turmoil for the past year, the New Orleans Office of Inspector General complies with national best practices, despite having one of the heaviest workloads in the country among local watchdog agencies, according to a recent peer review.

The Association of Inspectors General, a national membership organization for such agencies, also praised the New Orleans office's staffers for their experience and relationships with local law enforcement agencies and the Ethics Review Board.

The national group reviews the local inspector general's office every three years, in accordance with a city law and national standards.

The local office is also supposed to receive a quality assurance review annually from a committee of local citizens, though those reviews occur infrequently.

"We would like to commend the New Orleans Office of Inspector General on staying mission-focused and remaining steadfast in its duties," Flora Tran, the head of the review team, wrote in a July 16 letter.

"The sheer size of the governmental operations that your office oversees, and your offices jurisdiction and responsibility, are unparalleled by any other local government inspector's general office."

Her boss, Hector Collazo, clarified Monday that the review team intended to note that the relatively small local Inspector General's Office has a lot on its plate, not necessarily that other similar agencies don't.

The largely positive report did identify some relatively minor problems, such as the need for more promotions within the office and for changes to reporting methods within specific divisions.

But the results generally paint a glowing picture of an office that has been uncharacteristically quiet over the past year, after it was thrust into turmoil when its previous leader warred with a potential successor.

Last year, for example, the office issued only three reports, compared to the 15 it issued in 2016. And for the first time in nine years, the office cost taxpayers more to operate last year than, by its own reckoning, it saved them by identifying fraud, waste and abuse in city government.

So far this year, it has issued just two reports.

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Its 2017 operating budget was $3.9 million, but it identified only $2.2 million that year in improper spending, according to its annual report.

At the time, former Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux was publicly fighting to keep a job he eventually left, but not before he feuded with his assistant inspector general for investigations, Howard Schwartz, over a report Schwartz authored that accused a colleague of patronage and bias.

Quatrevaux claimed Schwartz had set out to defame Nadiene Van Dyke because they were rivals for the office's top job when Quatrevaux's term was up, while Schwartz said Quatrevaux had instructed him to investigate Van Dyke in the first place.

Schwartz did apply for Quatrevauxs job but lost to Derry Harper, the former Nashville, Tennessee, assistant district attorney general who has led the office since February. Schwartz resigned abruptly this month, offering no word on what he will do next.

Though the infighting tarnished the local offices credibility and apparently severely affected its productivity, the recent review  which included an on-site visit in early June of this year  appeared more concerned with the offices relationships with local law enforcement and whether its investigations and internal structure adhered to national guidelines.

The local office is in line with national standards set by the national association and by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Tran wrote.

The Office of Inspector General's staff overwhelmingly exceeded the minimum training requirements, Tran wrote.

Moreover, when Trans review team spoke with officials at the New Orleans Police Department, the District Attorneys Office and the city ethics board, which governs the local inspector general, all three entities gave the Office of Inspector General high praise, she said.

But the office should consider giving more pay raises or promotions to its staffers, Tran said. Also, she said, its Inspections and Evaluations Division should check in more frequently with city departments in which it has identified problems, to ensure that officials are correcting those problems.

In response, Harper told Tran that the office would implement her suggestions for the inspections division, among other recommendations.Australia has its fifth small business minister in three years with the appointment of Michaelia Cash.

Ms Cash was given the job in new Prime Minister Scott Morrison's cabinet overhaul on Sunday and will be sworn in on Tuesday as the minister for small business, skills and vocational education.

Michaelia Cash has been appointed as small business minister. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

She replaces Craig Laundy, who served as small business minister for just over eight months, and who followed Michael McCormack, Kelly O'Dwyer and Bruce Billson in the role.

Back in cabinetBusiness groups and unions will press incoming workplace minister Kelly O'Dwyer to tackle stagnant wages growth and the need for reform of industrial relations rules.



The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's director of workplace relations, Scott Barklamb, said the government needed to focus on jobs growth to help boost stagnant wages.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison (right) and incoming workplace minister Kelly O'Dwyer. Credit:Luis Ascui

Mr Barklamb said Ms O'Dwyer understood the challenges facing small businesses, including the need to simplify unfair dismissal laws, which were too complex and bureaucratic.

"We think she as a minister in tackling various areas of superannuation and finance brings a background in good policy that bodes well for the area," he said. "We think she's an energetic and active minister."Mirka Madeleine Mora was born in Paris on March 18, 1928 to a Lithuanian father, Leon Zelik, and a Romanian mother, Celia Gelbein. Her rich and long life was extraordinary in many ways, not least because it was a wonder she survived her teens in Nazi-occupied France. She and her mother were arrested in the Velodrome d'Hiver (or Vel d'Hiv) roundup of 1942, the largest French deportation of Jews during the Holocaust, and taken by train to a concentration camp in Pithviers. Through the ingenuity of both her parents, the kindness of strangers and sheer luck, the pair were released from the concentration camp just before they were to be transferred to Auschwitz. After returning to Paris, Mirka met and married Georges Mora, a French resistance fighter. They married in 1947 and emigrated to Australia with their infant son Philippe in 1951.

The couple became pioneers of what have since become some of the city's biggest drawcards; cafes, late-night bars and contemporary art. She has contributed to Melbourne's transformation from quiet, provincial town to sophisticated, multicultural city, a biography of Mirka on her son William's website says. Mirka and Georges' moved to the top of town: 9 Collins Street, where the Sofitel now stands. The studio and apartment's previous tenants included painters Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin. "It had a great history, so all the people of Melbourne knew the place, Mirka told Good Weekend in 2011. I remember we had so many parties ... and every time when the music started, a brick would come through the window as there was a very old lady who didn't like us.

Mirka's first encounter with Melbourne came at the age of 16 via Henri Murger's 1850s book Scenes de la Vie de Boheme. It was the one volume on her fathers bookshelf that he instructed her not to read. In the book, the hero was a photographer who kept going to Melbourne to make some money and then returned to France to help his friends  poets, musicians and painters," Mora said. I remembered the story in Melbourne and talked my husband into coming ... [He] wanted to go to Casablanca, which he knew well, but I remembered the forbidden book with Melbourne in it. It attracted me enormously. The people seemed to be naive, pure, innocent. While it was the city's bohemian reputation that drew her here, its reality scandalised the then 21-year-old. I was shocked. I was just a young bride and they already had open marriages. We were invited to a big party and I was a bit bored at that party so I looked under the table to see what was going on and there was a lot of hanky-panky.

Soon enough, though, she scandalised them right back. One night, Mirka decided to have some fun by cutting tiny holes in her dress, so that her nipples protruded, just to see the reaction of the restaurant clientele, Gabriella Coslovich wrote in The Age in 2007. In the early 1950s the couple's Mirka Cafe in Exhibition Street became a hub for the city's hottest creatives, many of whom went on to become luminaries of Australian art. It hosted the likes of John and Sunday Reed, Fred Williams, Joy Hester, Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd. Among their coterie was the painter Charles Blackman, who died on August 20, also aged 90. He worked at the cafe, and had his first exhibition there (as did Hester). Mirka Mora in 1954. The Moras opened East Melbourne restaurant Balzac in 1956. In 1960 it became the first establishment in the city with a 10pm liquor licence.

They moved to St Kilda in the late 1960s, buying Tolarno Hotel in Fitzroy Street. They ran a restaurant downstairs, while the hotel became their residence, and for many years housed Mirka's art studio. While there, they opened Tolarno Gallery, one of Melbourne's first commercial art galleries, a harbinger of a city now teeming with them. More than 50 years on, and now based in Exhibition Street, it continues to champion cutting-edge contemporary art. Throughout Mirka's life, art was a constant. She went to theatre school in France, training with mime artist Marcel Marceau (who fought in the Resistance with Georges). Her sensuous, cherubic figures  described by one 1960s art critic as medieval imps  are instantly recognisable. She had more than 35 solo exhibitions throughout her career, including a retrospective at Heide Museum of Art in 1999-2000, celebrating 50 years of her work. Heide will mark her 90th year with Mirka Mora: Pas de Deux  Drawings and Dolls, opening in October. Its curators have written a book, Mirka and Georges, to coincide with the exhibition.



Mirka was made Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2002. Her works are held by dozens of Australian galleries, and in private collections throughout Australia and overseas. Mirka Mora's mural at St Kilda's Tolarno Hotel. She wrote several books, including 2000's My Life  Wicked But Virtuous. In recent years she become a favourite on ABC TV's Agony Aunts, sharing her philosophies on life, love and family, often with a cheeky giggle. She and Georges separated in 1970, after affairs on both sides, and later divorced but remained in love. He died in 1992. "The affair with Georges never ended and lasted 51 years," she wrote in her book. She mused about death in a 1990 Age interview while describing her sense of humour.Sydney radio station 2GB's star broadcaster Alan Jones has triggered an advertising boycott after he used a racial slur on air during a segment on the leadership rumblings in Canberra.

The NSW Law Society, which represents the state's 30,000 solicitors, announced on Monday it had "pulled all advertising from 2GB, effective immediately" after Jones used the phrase "n----- in the woodpile" during his breakfast radio show last Thursday.

Broadcaster Alan Jones says he regrets using an 'old and offensive figure of speech'. Credit:Bryan O'Brien

The society, which condemned the comments as "inappropriate and offensive", is one of a small number of advertisers to boycott the radio station in the wake of Jones' comments, for which he subsequently apologised. Vodafone also suspended advertising in the wake of the controversy.

"The Law Society will not align itself with platforms that allow offensive, racist or divisive commentary in our community," the society said in a statment.Sydney Trains has scheduled track work for the weekend of the Sydney to the Gong bike ride.

Many riders use the train network to travel to the stating point with their cycles or return home at the end.

The Sea Cliff Bridge provides a stunning backdrop to the MS Sydney to the Gong bike ride. Credit:Georgia Matts

The track work will affect riders in Sydneys north who were planning on taking part in this years event.

Late last week, Sydney to the Gong organisers sent out an email to participants in the event, to be held on November 4.Kibabu in his enclosure at Taronga Zoo before retiring to Mogo Zoo on the NSW south coast. Credit:Anthony Johnson

A popular silverback gorilla who was a fixture at Taronga Zoo has been remembered for his presence and integrity.

Mogo Zoo on the NSW South Coast farewelled silverback gorilla Kibabu on Sunday. He was 41.

Mogo Zoo owner Sally Padey said the 41-year-old gorilla had a powerful presence . Credit:Graham Tidy

In a Facebook post, Mogo Zoo owner Sally Padey said the gorilla, who weighed more than 200 kilograms, had a "powerful presence" and "integrity as a leader and father"."Mirkas work is represented in Victorias best galleries, in our most well-known restaurants  and fittingly  in the heart of our city, her mural welcoming visitors to Flinders Street Station. "On behalf of the Victorian government, I offer my sincere condolences to Mirkas beloved family and friends." Friend and former Port Philip Councillor Serge Thomann said Mirka was one of a kind and irreplaceable. "It is with a very heavy heart that I am sharing with you the passing of my dearest friend (and much more) Mirka Mora," he wrote in an emotional tribute on Instagram. "After a couple of years of ill health, she left us peacefully to join the world of angels she painted all her life."

He said meeting Mirka in 1995 changed his life. Loading "She taught me so much, about art, life, love, beauty, innocence. And joie de vivre! She is leaving a massive hole in my heart and to the many people she touched," he said. "She was my strongest supporter... Her world was a beautiful world where there is no harm, only joy and love. Your presence is everywhere through your beautiful art and images. Especially around St Kilda and Melbourne."

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art artistic director Max Delany said Mirka's harrowing experience of war at a young age gave her "joyous work, full of love and empathy, an underlying tenor of vulnerability and depth".

"She was the most generous, inspiring, memorable person and we were incredibly lucky to be in her orbit," he said. "Mirka was one of the truly transformative figures in Melbournes cultural life, from the salon and soirees that she established with her husband Georges at Collins Street in the 50s, to her role as maitresse of Cafe Mirka, The Balzac and Tolarno restaurants, and as an agent provocateur who blasted Melbourne out of its dull, grey British reserve, giving the city a joie de vivre." Family friend and Australian actor, Lachy Hulme, expressed his sadness at her passing on Twitter, remembering her as the "Grande Dame of Melbourne". "Vale the extraordinary Mirka Mora," he tweeted on Monday evening. "She invited me into her home, cooked for me, educated me, and helped me to be proud of my choice of career. With love and condolences to her sons, and my friends, Willy, Tiriel, and Phillipe."

Victorian Health Minister Jill Hennessy lauded Mirka for her talent, spirit and cheekiness. "Vale Mirka," she tweeted. "Love her work, especially the art on local public icons. Her biography is illuminating reading about the horror of war, migrating to Australia and the life of an artist. Im very grateful for her talented, spirited and cheeky contribution."

Fellow Labour MP Martin Foley remembered Mirka as an "impossible combination of creativity and vitality" that touched all those she came in contact with for the better. "The world weeps tonight for the loss of one of our brightest stars," he tweeted. She had more than 35 solo exhibitions throughout her career, including a retrospective at Heide Museum of Art in 1999-2000, celebrating 50 years of her work. Heide will mark her 90th year with Mirka Mora: Pas de Deux  Drawings and Dolls, opening in October.

Its curators have written a book, Mirka and Georges, to coincide with the exhibition.

Mirka was made Officier de l'Ordre desdes Arts et desdes Lettres by the French government in 2002. Her works are held by dozens of Australian galleries, and in private collections throughout Australia and overseas. She wrote several books, including 2000's My Life  Wicked But Virtuous. In recent years she become a favourite on ABC TV's Agony Aunts, sharing her philosophies on life, love and family, often with a cheeky giggle. Mirka's son, William Mora, confirmed his mother's death on Monday night.Three teens have been arrested after allegedly mugging another teenage boy and stealing his mobile phone in Melbourne's north-west.

A 15-year-old boy from Taylors Hill, 16-year-old Hillside boy and 15-year-old boy from Kurunjang were arrested and charged early last week after the incident which occurred on August 19.

Loading

Police allege the three boys got off the bus on Carbine Drive in Keilor Downs at about 7.30pm when they started following the victim.

They then chased him down the road and onto Rodney Drive, where he was allegedly assaulted and robbed.Many suggestions were variations on a theme further revealing the importance Perthians place on nature: Where nature is part of your everyday / Where nature meets innovation in the city / Where nature meets the city / Where the bush meets the river / Where the city comes to the sea / Where the city meets the river and the park / Where the river meets the city... Some respondents believed a brand would not help Perth, that nothing would bring foreign tourists here. Others said a brand statement was nothing but a slick, fake marketing slogan imposed from above. It might not have helped that in asking, WAtoday had been as confused as readers about what branding is and what it does.

Enter Fraser Marketing International founder Emma Fraser, a brand expert who moved back to Perth 18 months ago after working around the globe in the hospitality and tourism industries. Ms Fraser said people were partly right in that a brand alone could not convince tourists to visit, but it could help in defining and creating perceptions of Perth. It was also important not to confuse branding with marketing slogans. Branding was about defining a places unique fingerprint, its personality, values and promise. Marketing slogans arose from a brand and could change according to their market, for example, interstate tourists or the Asian market.

In creating a brand, it was important to stay true to the reality of Perth, not what it might one day offer. Loading Its not fake; they focus on what is there and what you will experience, Ms Fraser said. For example, Melbourne had built its brand around laneways, culture and fashion, Sydney around dining and the harbour. Their marketing campaigns had leveraged that branding. But if Perth was about beaches, beauty and Kings Park, that was fine; Perth should own it.

She said if she were engaged to brand Perth there would be a clear process. Every brand around the world, whether its tourism or Apple, they are all built around a story. They each have a character that defines a personality, she said. You would host a discovery workshop to understand the DNA of the current brand and the core offering; why people are coming. Then you dive in to the values and what you want it to be in five or ten years. Then you conduct the research across Perth, WA and Australia, and the Asian market. You ask people if they have been here, would they come back? Why or why not? What reasons do you travel? What are you looking for when you come to Australia? The alchemy lay in finding the harmonies between what people wanted and what of this Perth could realistically deliver on. These were the tourism drivers that led to a core offering. As your respondents said, theres nothing open after 10. So people arent going to be able to come to Perth for an amazing dining experience, she said.

International visitors will go to Melbourne for shopping, not Hay Street. Its important to stay true to what you believe and what you can offer and be honest. She said the mocking slogan suggestions had pinpointed some truths. Yes, the mining boom had created price spikes. Yes, Perths strong point was its beaches, though to say it had nothing else was a bit harsh. Yes, it was undeniable shops closed early and many restaurant kitchens closed at 8.30pm  hardly welcoming to global visitors. But what is here is the beauty. Its what people talk about, she said. So those elements such as nature might be the core offering, for example, if thats what the research told you the market wanted. From that you create the brand ID  logos, colour palettes, so on, your brand toolkit, and from that you create your catchy slogans and quirky campaigns.

She said the survey respondents who said Perth was nothing but a stopover for WA might be right. Loading You can do Perth in a couple of days then you move on to the wineries and Monkey Mia, she said. She said Tourism WAs slogan Just another day in WA seemed to reflect that approach, to push statewide destinations. In my professional opinion, the feedback youre getting in your survey is that theres not much to do here, Ms Fraser said.

So yes, you could focus on Perth as an overnight, or a three-day stay, before people start to drive WA as a destination. She said the survey indicated that while people loved Perth, they were aware of gaps in the offering. I see the hashtag #perthisok and its true  people choose to live here and you make the most of what it is, she said. Brand is the foundation that will stay with you. Then you talk to the international market, you talk to Melbourne and you tweak those campaigns.

The winning Perth slogan suggestion? Perth  see you outside. Survey respondent Honourable mentions Golden Perth - come and find your golden moment. Perth: Gateway to WA

Perth: sunset city. Got a better suggestion? Leave it in the comments! Loading Loading LoadingDelinquency implies that theyre misbehaving, that theyre doing something wrong, that theyre not upholding their duty, she said. Its not delinquency, its tragedy. They're not choosing to do this, they have no choice. Midlas financial counsellors saw more than $51 million worth of debt last financial year. Credit:Hamish Hastie In her three years at Midlas Ms Meerman has seen a huge jump in people walking through their doors asking for help with their mortgage, particularly those linked to the resources industry.

It has spiked in the wake of the mining bust, were seeing it more and more especially as it happens to knock on businesses, she said. First the major businesses get affected, then all those who service them or were living off that mining money, theyre all failing as well. It is really sad and most of these clients coming into me, theyre in their 50s or early 60s, they have worked their whole life, theyve never been out of a job this long. Its about their identity as a person and they feel like theyre failures. Theyre facing bankruptcy, theyre at the end of their life with nothing to show for a lifetime of work. Ms Meerman said these clients usually had great payment histories on their home loan and it was frustrating for her to see banks pursuing them relentlessly after missing payments.

The way that most loans are structured of course they have been paying phenomenal amounts of interest, she said. For many years the banks have profited off them but they are barely waiting three, six or even 12 months before theyre saying, get out, we're taking your house. Most (banks) are upholding their obligations in terms of hardship really well but clients are having to really fight for their rights and I think its causing undue stress on them in what is already a very stressful period of time. Younger people were also being caught in the mortgage trap and there needed to be a perception change on what was a manageable mortgage, Ms Meerman said.

When I talk to my clients, particularly my younger clients, their perception of what a reasonable mortgage is is frighteningly high, she said. $400,000 is an entry-level mortgage in their minds and so theyre committing themselves to debt they can't afford and they think its normal. Theyre setting themselves up to fail. Illness dashes the Aussie dream Port Kennedy resident Adam* knows all too well that mortgage delinquency isnt a choice.

Illness has destroyed any hope he and his wife had of living out the Australian dream of a comfortable retirement in a home he owned outright. A spray painter and sandblaster by trade, in 2015 the 63-year-old was struck down with a bowel condition that required surgery and left him unable to work. He has also been battling cancer and said while he and his wife had tried everything they could, they just didnt have the income to keep the house. I had a bowel complaint for about two years and finally it sort of hit the mark where I had to have an operation and all the rest of it, he said. I had that then I got cancer and I couldnt work and lost my job.

Not having any income except for the Newstart allowance, I wasnt able to keep up my repayments on the house. We kept them up for as long as we could but after about nine months our funds dried up and we started missing our mortgage payments. After youve missed a number of payments the banks start sending letters and making noises wanting their money. You just cant turn around, theres just nowhere to get any money to try and sort anything out. The couple were forced to sell their house and if it wasnt for the support from his family Adam said he and his wife would be on the street.

One of my children built a granny flat out the back of their house for my wife and I, he said. If we didnt have that help we would be out on the street, theres no doubt in my mind, he said. We were just in a position where we had nothing left. I couldnt help getting ill and my bowel condition as well as the cancer. You dont give yourself these things so you dont plan for them. Construction woes trickle down to families

Waikiki resident Samantha*, her husband and teenage daughter are healthy but they were affected by the ailing WA construction industry. Her husband lost his job in April for three months, which was a huge blow to the family income. It wasnt his choice to lose the job ... he works with timber and that feeds the building industry and when that collapsed his company started retrenching people, he was sort of the last one on so the first one to go, she said. That was $4000 a month that we completely lost and even though he did get a payout it didnt last very long. That put us behind the eight-ball. The familys mental health was strained from the financial stress coupled with the often crushing nature of job hunting her husband was going through.

It was quite high impact, she said. I think (my husband) applied for over 100 jobs. He would go for interviews, sometimes three at the same place and not hear anything. It got to the stage where he wouldve gotten a job in Welshpool, and travelled three hours a day just to have a job to pay the bills. It was quite hard for him because he just wanted to support the family. With the help of a financial counsellor both Samantha and Adam were able to get the bank off their backs and navigate their ways out of financial strife in ways they would have never thought of themselves.

Ms Meerman said falling behind on mortgage payments was a complex and stressful time, which is why the free service the financial counsellors network provides was so important. She said the first thing they asked was whether the lack of income was because of illness or injury. If thats the case you want to get onto your insurances ASAP. Not just insurances you know youre paying for but the ones you might not know you have on your loans and with your super. Some people are insured for quite a lot of money through their super. They can pay out their house. I have seen people lose their house when they could have actually paid it out.While Prime Minister Scott Morrison has now put together a cabinet that papers over the most drafty cracks in the Coalition, the harder task ahead is to put together some policies. Almost lost in the agony of ousting Malcolm Turnbull last week was the equally important news that the Liberal Party also jettisoned the National Energy Guarantee and the corporate tax cuts, which were its two signature policies.

It will be a diabolically hard task finding replacement policies that will keep the Coalitions factions happy, generate a point of difference with the increasingly confident ALP and meet the basic standards of good government.

New Prime Minister Scott Morrison needs to pull several rabbits out of a hat. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Yet Mr Morrison, who was showing his kinder side yesterday on a tour of drought-affected regions, needs to pull several rabbits out of a hat to reverse his 12-percentage-point deficit in the opinion polls before elections due by the middle of next year.

He has appointed Angus Taylor to the energy portfolio as the minister for cutting power prices. Choosing Mr Taylor, a climate-change sceptic, for this job suggests Mr Morrison might back the push from the right to dump the Paris emissions reduction targets or use taxpayer money to subsidise coal-fired power.Prime Minister Scott Morrison will travel to Indonesia to seal a free trade agreement. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Australia and Indonesia are poised to announce an historic free trade deal when Scott Morrison visits Jakarta on August 31, just a week after being sworn in as Prime Minister.

I am a fairly muted person, but this opens the door to a fairly significant step-up in the relations between the two countries, a senior Indonesian government official told Fairfax Media. It will be quite historic.

An Indonesian Foreign Ministry source said the two countries leaders would announce both nations had completed the deal, known as the Indonesia Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA).

He said the trade ministers would sign the full text of the agreement later this year.Airbnb has made an aggressive intervention into Victorian politics, urging its growing number of short-stay hosts to pressure the state opposition not to mess with its business model and side with vested interests like the big hotel lobby.

Airbnb has written to its hosts in Victoria  the tens of thousands of people who have listed a property or room with the global company  urging them to tell Opposition Leader Matthew Guy that if he wins power in November he should not to clamp down on its activities.

Airbnb has sought to pressure the Victorian Coalition not to create "red tape" for its short stay hosts. Credit:Ryan Stuart

It follows comments by shadow tourism minister Heidi Victoria that hotels and bed and breakfasts are not competing fairly because Airbnb hosts dont pay the same taxes.

The level playing field is just not there at the moment, so the cost impost on people who are in business and declare that they are in business is very different from those who are not a declared business but still making an income, Ms Victoria said this month.Victoria will reap almost $2.9 billion after the state government signed off on the long-term lease of a government database containing Victorians personal property details.

The deal provides a massive boost to the Andrews governments coffers as it fights to be re-elected at the November poll.

Parts of Land Use Victoria are set to be privatised as part of a 40-year lease deal. Credit:Erin Jonasson

Key parts of Victorias land titles registry will now be placed in private hands as part of the lucrative, 40-year agreement.

First State Super was selected to run profitable functions within Land Use Victoria, which keeps records of land ownership. The private operator will get access to information about titles, registrations and discharges of mortgages.Victorias most senior local government figure faces the prospect of losing her job after a series of nasty rows with Labor foes in Melbournes north, and another with the states former top cop turned council chief executive, Simon Overland.

Whittlesea councillor and former mayor Mary Lalios may this week be deemed ineligible to continue in her role as president of the Municipal Association of Victoria as a result of her own council withdrawing its funding for the association.

Mary Lalios, Whittlesea councillor and Municipal Association of Victoria president - for now. Credit:Chris Hopkins

It comes after Cr Lalios  the first woman elected to lead the association in its 139-year history  was understood to have made a WorkSafe claim against her own council over alleged workplace issues.

Her councils decision in June to withdraw subscription fees would make it the only local government in Victoria not to belong to the municipal association.Perth police said on Monday they were investigating the vandalism, which had happened on Sunday morning.

The word 'shame' was spray-painted across the walls of Senator Cash's Outram Street office and the words "Tony and Peter must resign" written along the footpath outside.

Vandals have graffitied the WA office of Senator Michaelia Cash, targeting her support for Liberal leadership challenger Peter Dutton.

A spokesman for Senator Cash said she absolutely did not condone and crimina behaviour.

Were going to get it cleaned up as soon as possible and get on with the job, he said.

Senator Cash, who has faced some criticism over her performance, voted for Scott Morrison in the leadership spill on Friday after being one of the three ministers to announce they had lost confidence in the Turnbull government on Thursday.

Ms Cash has now been given the Small Business, Skills and Vocational Education portfolio, elevated to cabinet following sustained calls from the conservative faction to give it increased prominence in a bid to sharpen its anti-business attacks on Labor in the lead-up to the next election.

Police are appealing for anyone with information to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or to make a report online at crimestopperswa.com.au.For decades, gun enthusiasts around the world have been engaged in an endless debate over which is the better weapon; the iconic Russian-made AK-47 or the American-made AR-15.

Now the legendary Russian gun-maker has unveiled a new product that it hopes will compete with a popular American counterpart. Kalashnikov's latest creation is a Columbia blue, retro-looking electric car known as the CV-1.

Kalashnikov's CV-1, which it calls an electric supercar.

Its competition: The American electric car-maker Tesla, the Silicon Valley darling headed by Elon Musk that is worth more than $US50 billion and remains the world's most famous electric car-maker.Beijing: The Chinese media has called Marise Payne's move from defence minister to the foreign affairs portfolio a signal that "Australia hawks" will have a bigger impact on foreign policy.

The nationalistic Global Times newspaper quoted Zhou Fangyin, dean of the School of International Studies at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, on Monday as saying Payne's new role as foreign affairs minister meant "the Australian defence and security sectors influence on foreign policy will become more direct, and the USs policy impact on Australia will become more direct".

Tensions between the Trump Administration and Beijing have been rising as a trade war escalates, and China retaliates in-kind to billions of dollars in tariffs being imposed on Chinese goods. At the weekend, President Donald Trump accused China of halting cooperation on North Korean denuclearisation, which Beijing angrily denied.Knock: Pope Francis says parents of gay children shouldn't condemn them, ignore their orientation or throw them out of the house. Rather, he says they should pray, talk and try to understand.

Speaking to reporters after closing out a Catholic family rally in Ireland, Francis said: "There have always been gay people and people with homosexual tendencies."

Pope Francis, flanked by Vatican spokesperson Greg Burke, listens to a journalist's question during a press conference aboard of the flight to Rome at the end of his two-day visit to Ireland. Credit:AP

Francis was asked what he would tell a father of a child who just came out as gay. Francis said he would first suggest prayer.

"Don't condemn. Dialogue. Understand, give the child space so he or she can express themselves."Theresa May has had her first experience with Australia's revolving door prime ministership, phoning Scott Morrison overnight to congratulate him on his elevation to the top job.

May has not had to deal first-hand with Australia's abrupt changes in leadership given she was only promoted to the prime ministership in 2016, when David Cameron quit after the Brexit referendum.

Previously, the task of welcoming in Australia's transient run of prime minister's had fallen to Cameron, who made the obligatory phone call to Julia Gillard in 2010, Kevin Rudd in 2013, Tony Abbott in 2013 and Malcolm Turnbull in 2015.

For May and Morrison, their conversation focused on trade and national security, the two issues that have defined the bilateral relationship since the Brexit referendum.Indian Motorcycle Announces 2019 Scout Lineup

MINNEAPOLIS, MN - August 27, 2018: Indian Motorcycle, Americas first motorcycle company founded in 1901, today announced its 2019 Scout lineup with new paint options on Scout Sixty, Scout and Scout Bobber. Key feature upgrades for 2019 include an expanded ABS offering and a new USB charging port on Scout and Scout Bobber models.

New for 2019, an ABS (anti-lock braking system) is now standard on every non-black Scout Sixty, Scout and Scout Bobber model. For the Thunder Black color option, riders can choose between a model thats equipped or unequipped with ABS. The Scout and Scout Bobber will also receive a USB charging port in 2019, a convenient feature that allows riders to charge a personal device while riding. The charging port is located near the speedometer for easy access.

The iconic Indian Scout family is a favorite amongst riders across the globe, said Reid Wilson, Senior Director for Indian Motorcycle. Since the addition of the Scout Bobber in July 2017, weve continued to evolve our Scout offering to meet the tastes of various riders, whether they prefer the classic, heritage-inspired look of Scout Sixty and Scout or the stripped-down, blacked-out attitude of S cout Bobber. The refinements weve made for 2019 and the new paint options accentuate the wide appeal of the Scout line.

Color options for the Scout Sixty, which packs a 60-cubic-inch, liquid-cooled and blacked-out engine, include Thunder Black, White Smoke, Ruby Metallic and Star Silver over Thunder Black. The iconic Indian Scout, which packs a 69-cubic-inch, liquid-cooled engine that puts out 100 horsepower, is offered in Thunder Black, Deep Water Metallic, Metallic Jade, Indian Motorcycle Red over Thunder Black and Willow Green over Ivory Cream. Rounding out the lineup is the aggressively-styled Scout Bobber, now offered in Thunder Black, Thunder Black Smoke, White Smoke and Bronze Smoke.

For current Scout owners looking to add the benefits of the USB charging port, Indian Motorcycle will now offer a USB Charging Port Kit, which can be installed on any 2015-2018 Scout or Scout Bobber model and any 2016-2019 Scout Sixty model.

Indian Motorcycle offers a full line of Scout touring accessories, including bags, passenger seats, and windscreens and a full line of Scout performance accessories, including shocks by Fox, Stage 1 Slip-On Exhaust, and Air Intake. With Indian Motorcycle Accessories, a rider can customize their Scout with reduced and extended reach seats, handlebars and foot controls to achieve the perfect fit.

Pricing for the 2019 Scout Sixty starts at $8,999 in the U.S. and $10,999 in Canada, while the Scout starts at $11,499 in the U.S. and $14,499 in Canada. The Scout Bobber starts at $11,999 in the U.S. and $14,999 in Canada.

Arriving at dealerships now, riders can learn more or test ride by visiting a local Indian Motorcycle dealership. For more information on the 2019 Scout lineup, or to find the nearest dealer, visit IndianMotorcycle.com and follow along on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

ABOUT INDIAN MOTORCYCLE

Indian Motorcycle Company is Americas First Motorcycle Company. Founded in 1901, Indian Motorcycle has won the hearts of motorcyclists around the world and earned distinction as one of Americas most legendary and iconic brands through unrivaled racing dominance, engineering prowess and countless innovations and industry firsts. Today that heritage and passion is reignited under new brand stewardship. To learn more, please visit www.indianmotorcycle.com.2019 Honda HR-V Gets New Look, New Trims, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto Integration and Available Honda Sensing

New Sport trim offers unique styling cues, 18-inch wheels

New Display Audio with volume knob, Apple CarPlay & Android Auto integration

New Touring trim adds multi-element LED headlights, leather-trimmed seats & power driver's seat

Honda Sensing suite of active safety and driver-assistive features now available on EX trims and higher

The 2019 Honda HR-V begins arriving today in dealer showrooms around the country with a starting price of $20,520 (excluding $995 destination and handling)1. For 2019, HR-V expands its appeal with the addition of new Sport and Touring trims, refreshed styling, new technology, and a more refined driving experience, adding to an already established reputation as a versatile and sporty 5-door subcompact SUV.

For the first time, HR-V now features the Honda Sensing suite of advanced safety and driver-assistive technologies  including but not limited to Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS), Road Departure Mitigation (RDM) Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Lane Keeping Assist (LKAS)  standard on EX and above trims, making Honda Sensing available on every model Honda sells.

All 2019 HR-V models feature new styling, with revised bumpers, headlights, grille, and taillights, while the new HR-V Sport and Touring trims get a unique look all their own. Blackout trim and 18-inch wheels visually distinguish HR-V Sport trims, while the all-wheel-drive-only Touring trim gets multi-element LED headlights, dark chrome trim, and LED fog lights.

Inside, HR-V benefits from a new Display Audio system featuring a simplified interface that includes a volume knob and the addition of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integration. The navigation system, available exclusively in Touring trims, has also been improved with sharper graphics and 3D landmarks. All models feature a redesigned driver's meter with a large analog speedometer and digital tachometer. EX models and above receive a 4.2-inch Thin-Film Transistor (TFT) Driver Information Interface color display offering additional selectable information including available turn-by-turn directions.

Sport trims get a unique interior treatment that includes a black headliner, gloss-black trim and sport pedals, while EX and EX-L models get redesigned seat upholstery with high-contrast stitching. Touring models get double-stitched leather-trimmed seats, with 8-way power adjustment for the driver.



The 2019 HR-V benefits from refinements to its standard Continuously Variable automatic Transmission (CVT), resulting in a more natural driving feel and quieter operation. Other measures to reduce interior noise include additional sound deadening in the fenders and floor, plus the inclusion of Active Noise Cancelling on Sport and above grades. HR-V Sport models also receive variable-ratio electric power steering, while upgrades to the available all-wheel drive system yield improved performance in low-traction conditions such as snow.

EXTERIOR AND INTERIOR

For 2019, HR-V receives exterior styling updates to further expand its appeal. The grille is enhanced by a new interpretation of the flying wing rendered in dark chrome and extending over the new projector-style headlights. Under the chrome band the grille opening has been restyled to emphasize a wide look, and the fog light housings have been enlarged to help give HR-V a more aggressive stance. In the rear, new smoked turn signal lenses are connected by a thin chrome band, lending an upscale air to HR-V's exterior. Three new colors have been added to HR-V's palette: Orange Burst Metallic, Midnight Amethyst Metallic, and Platinum White Pearl. Inside, in addition to the new Display Audio system and its easy-to-use interface, the HR-V has an updated interior with new seat fabrics and upper door panels, and a revised cupholder.

New for 2019 is the HR-V Sport trim. Fitting between LX and EX, the Sport trim gives HR-V a youthful vibe with unique styling touches. HR-V Sport features unique lower body trim, painted glossy black on the lower front and rear bumper, rocker panels, and wheel arches, as well as the gloss-black exterior mirrors. HR-V Sport also receives a honeycomb pattern grille, exclusive 18-inch alloy wheels and tires, and in the rear there's a chrome exhaust finisher. Inside, Sport trims come with the new Display Audio system with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integration, a blackout headliner, contrast stitching on the seats, leather-covered steering wheel and shifter, and sport-style pedals.

The new line-topping HR-V Touring trim flanks its honeycomb grille with multi-element Honda LED headlights that are unique in the HR-V lineup, as are the 5-element LED fog lights. Touring models come with exclusive 17-inch machined alloy wheels, for an upscale look. HR-V Touring also comes with similar lower-body trim as Sport, but painted body color rather than gloss black, along with the body-color outside mirrors. Inside, Touring trims get double-stitched perforated leather seats with an 8-way power driver's seat.

All 2019 HR-Vs benefit from additional sound deadening measures. Additional sound absorbing materials have been placed in the firewall, under the floor, and in the passenger-side foot well. Sport trims and higher also receive Active Noise Cancellation, which sends reverse-phase audio signals through the HR-V audio system to cancel out low-frequency road noise.

Regardless of trim, the 2019 HR-V offers voluminous interior space for passengers and cargo inside an exterior package that's compact and easy to park. Thanks to a revised stay-spring mechanism for the hatch, it's now easier than ever to access HR-V's cargo space of 24.3 cubic feet behind the rear seats (23.2 cubic feet with AWD). HR-V also uses the multi-position 2nd row Magic Seat, similar to Fit, which is easily reconfigured for maximum cargo and passenger carrying capacity. HR-V also offers up to 100.1 cubic feet of passenger space with abundant rear seat head and legroom, especially considering HR-V's compact outer dimensions.

Trim MSRP1 MSRP Including $995 Destination EPA Fuel Economy Ratings2

(city / highway / combined) LX (FWD) $20,520 $21,515 28/34/30 LX (AWD) $21,920 $22,915 27/31/29 Sport (FWD) $22,220 $23,215 28/34/30 Sport (AWD) $23,620 $24,615 26/31/28 EX (FWD) $23,720 $24,715 28/34/30 EX (AWD) $25,120 $26,115 26/31/28 EX-L (FWD) $25,320 $26,315 28/34/30 EX-L (AWD) $26,720 $27,715 26/31/28 Touring (AWD) $28,540 $29,535 26/31/28

POWERTRAIN

The 2019 Honda HR-V is powered by a 141 horsepower, 1.8-liter SOHC i-VTEC 4-cylinder engine. Driving either the front or all four wheels, all HR-V models now use a Continuously Variable automatic Transmission (CVT). The 6-speed manual transmission has been discontinued for the 2019 model year.

HR-V's CVT receives numerous upgrades for the 2019 model year to help provide a more natural feeling driving experience. At full throttle, the CVT now features revised shift mapping that, under hard acceleration, more closely resembles the stepped gear changes of a conventional fixed-gear transmission. This stepped feel gives HR-V a more familiar feel during acceleration, while also helping to reduce interior noise levels. Additionally, HR-V's CVT uses a more refined and natural feeling engagement, staying at lower revs more often. Other improvements include HR-V shifting to higher revs under deceleration, providing a measure of engine braking force and better responsiveness when the driver returns to the gas pedal.

On models so equipped, HR-V's Real Time all-wheel drive system has been improved for better performance in low-traction conditions such as snow. Steering feel in Sport models has also enhanced with the adoption of variable gear ratio electric power steering, which varies steering response in accordance with steering wheels position from center. HR-Vs steering becomes more stable at higher speeds as it becomes less sensitive to small movements of the steering wheel. At lower speeds, the steering wheel requires less movement to turn the front wheels, making HR-V feel exceptionally maneuverable in parking lots.

POWERTRAIN DETAILS All Trims Engine 1.8-liter 4-cylinder 16-Valve SOHC i-VTEC Transmission Continuously Variable Automatic (CVT) Horsepower @ rpm (SAE net) 141 @ 6,500 rpm Torque @ rpm (lb.-ft., SAE net) 127 lb.-ft. @ 4,300 rpm Recommended fuel Regular Unleaded CARB emissions rating ULEV-70 Tune-up interval 100K +/- Miles No Scheduled Tune Ups (does not include fluid and filter changes)

SAFETY & Driver Assist

For the 2019 model year, HR-V EX and higher trims come standard with the Honda Sensing suite of safety and driver-assistive systems. Honda Sensing includes Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS), Lane Keeping Assist System (LKAS) and Road Departure Mitigation (RDM) incorporating Lane Departure Warning (LDW). HR-Vs A-pillars have also been reengineered to achieve a Good score in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) test for small-offset frontal collisions. Lastly, EX and higher trims receive Honda LaneWatch as standard equipment.

The 2019 HR-V also benefits from a long list of standard active and passive safety features. This includes Vehicle Stability Assist (VSA) with traction control, driver and passenger front and side airbags, side curtain airbags with rollover sensor, Electronic Brake Distribution (EBD), Brake Assist and Hondas next-generation Advanced Compatibility Engineering (ACE) body structure. All HR-V models feature a multi-angle rearview camera with guidelines; EX and above get dynamic guidelines that follow the rotation of the steering wheel.

Safety and Driver Assistance Features



Honda Sensing Features LX Sport EX EX-L Touring Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS)    Road Departure Mitigation (RDM)    Lane Departure Warning (LDW)    Lane Keeping Assist System (LKAS)    Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC)   

Active Safety Features LX Sport EX EX-L Touring Vehicle Stability Assist (VSA) with Traction Control      Advanced 4-Channel ABS      Electronic Brake Distribution (EBD)      Brake Assist      Multi-angle rearview camera with guidelines   Multi-angle rearview camera with dynamic guidelines    Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS)      LED Daytime Running Lights (DRL)     

Passive Safety Features LX Sport EX EX-L Touring Advanced Compatibility Engineering (ACE) body structure with crash stroke front frame design      Advanced Front Airbags (SRS)      Front Side Airbags      Side Curtain Airbags with Rollover Sensor      3-Point Seat Belts at all Seating Positions      Front 3-Point Seat Belts with Automatic Tensioning System      Lower Anchors and Tethers for CHildren (LATCH):

Lower Anchors (2nd-Row Outboard), Tether Anchors (2nd-Row All)      Driver's and Front Passenger's Seat-Belt Reminder      Child-Proof Rear Door Locks     

TECHNOLOGY

The 2019 HR-V incorporates numerous upgrades to its in-vehicle technologies. Headlining the changes is an updated Display Audio system available in Sport and higher trims. Its 7-inch touchscreen has been reconfigured with new icons for ease of use, and there is now a physical volume knob. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integration is now standard on Sport and higher trims as well, while Touring models are available with an upgraded navigation system with higher resolution, 3D landmarks, and an easy-to-use interface.

Standard on EX models and higher are walk-away door locks, which automatically lock HR-Vs doors when it detects the key fob is no longer near the vehicle. Sport and higher grades also benefit from Active Noise Cancellation for a quieter cabin, Smart Entry and push-button start, SiriusXM and HD radio, fully automatic headlights, and variable intermittent wipers. Touring models use full Honda LED headlights and fog lights, an 8-way power drivers seat, and HomeLink remote.

MODELS

The 2019 Honda HR-V lineup offers a variety of trims to choose from, suitable for a wide variety of budgets and buyer tastes from LX to the line-topping Touring. All-wheel drive is available on all HR-V trims. A full breakdown is below.



Trim Level Summary

LX Halogen Projector Head Light (New) LED DRL (New) Redesigned Cupholder (New) Rearview Camera Liftgate Spoiler Driver-side Seat Height Adjuster Steering Wheel Audio Control Console Armrest Map Lights Soft touch Dash 5 Display Audio LED Taillights 1-touch turn signals

Sport (New Trim)  Add or replace from LX 18 wheels (New) Display Audio with Apple CarPlay & Android Auto integration (New) Black roof lining (New) Sport Pedals (New) Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) (New) Roof Rails Leather Steering Wheel Leather Shift knob Paddle Shifters 7-inch Display Audio Halogen fog lights

EX  Add or replace from LX Honda Sensing (New) Walkaway auto lock (New) Honda LaneWatch Moonroof Smart Entry and Pushbutton Start Rear Privacy Glass Heated Front Seats Single Zone Auto Climate SiriusXM Radio HD Radio Side Mirrors w/Turn Indicators Fully Automatic Headlights Two Tweeters Variable Intermittent Wipers Lighted Vanity Mirrors Chrome Interior Handle Trim Chrome Speaker Rings Chrome Air Vent Trim EX-L  Add or replace from EX Leather-Trimmed Seats Leather Door Lining Auto-Dimming Rear-View Mirror Leather Steering Wheel Leather Shift Knob

Touring  Add or replace from EX-L Embedded Navigation (New) 8-way power drivers seat (New) LED Headlights (High & Low Beam) (New) LED Fog Lights (New) HomeLink (New)

1 MSRP plus $995 destination charge, excluding tax, license, registration and options. Dealer prices may vary.

2 Based on 2019 EPA mileage ratings. Use for comparison purposes only. Your mileage will vary depending on how you drive and maintain your vehicle, driving conditions and other factors.Award-winning novelist Miriam Toews latest book plunges readers into the imagined aftermath of real events that rocked a Bolivian Mennonite community to its core, but the Steinbach-bred writer says she took pains to convey the courage and faith displayed by the survivors.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/8/2018 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Award-winning novelist Miriam Toews latest book plunges readers into the imagined aftermath of real events that rocked a Bolivian Mennonite community to its core, but the Steinbach-bred writer says she took pains to convey the courage and faith displayed by the survivors.

Women Talking was published last Tuesday by Knopf Canada.

The 216-page book, her eighth, takes as its backdrop a sexual abuse scandal in the Manitoba Colony, a remote enclave of 2,000 located northeast of Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

As Toews explains in the book's prologue, between 2005 and 2009, more than 130 women and girls were raped by colony men who drugged them unconscious using animal anesthetic.

Though the victims were initially called liars and adulterers, and the crimes attributed to demons or ghosts, in 2011 a Bolivian court convicted eight perpetrators and sentenced them to prison. However, similar abuse in the colony was reported as recently as 2013.

Toews first-person narrative deposits readers into a barn loft on the fictional Molotschna Colony, where three generations of women from two familiesLoewens and Friesensspend two days debating whether to leave the colony, stay and fight their abusers, or do nothing.

Each choice holds hard and lasting implications for the womens marriages, children, and friendships.

"Theres no perfect decision that theyre attempting to make, no perfect choice, and all of them have high stakes," Toews told The Carillon.

"Its not a critique of the Mennonite faith, or of the Mennonite people, but of the culture of control that can so easily arise from these types of communities," she explained.

Its a statement that could also apply to her writing career as a whole, which some believe dwells too often on the negative aspects of tight-knit communities.

"There are always those who would prefer that this kind of stuff remains hidden, covered, and that I would remain silent," Toews said. "But thats not going to do any good. Its not going to solve the problems that we have."

Healing cant thrive in a culture defined by secrecy, she reasoned.

"All of the various factions of the Mennonite church, we can come together and we can talk about these things, we can talk about the problems within our community."

While Toews said the colony attacks "horrified" her, she also recognized them as an extreme manifestation of the particular social problems that arise in closed communities, a topic shes processed repeatedly throughout her career.

"My writing is a reflection of whats is going on in the world, and particularly in my Mennonite community, which I care about deeply," she said. "We can see, from a sociological point of view, how these crimes might have occurred, and we can make those changes."

To enter a community still largely sealed off from the world, and imagine the limited worldview of the Bolivian women (who are illiterate and have never seen a map), Toews said she read news reports and drew on her knowledge of patriarchy and fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.

In a book that consists almost entirely of dialogue, Toews said it was a "huge challenge" to keep each womans voice distinct and authentic.

"To hear these women talking, thats what brings them to life."

While the eight women frequently disagree about the best response to their plight, they dont hesitate to join hands as they sing the hymns, like "For the Beauty of the Earth," that close each meeting.

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Toews said she inserted the hymns to show the "hopeful and beautiful" aspects of their community, and as a nod her upbringing.

"Thats what I miss so much from my own childhood in Steinbach, was the beauty of the singing."

The 54-year-old, whose second grandchild was born less than a month ago, said she still feels "conflicted" when visiting her hometown.

"I think about it so often. I live in Steinbach in my imagination."

She described it as an "incredibly nurturing" place to grow up.

"Theres a sadness there too, because its probably not a community that I could live in again, and yet my life there was, in many ways, a joyous thing."A dolphin, but not THE dolphin. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

It may no longer be the Cuts official Horny Week, but its impact lives on in the form of a dolphin named Zafar, who has reportedly been wreaking havoc on the French seaside village of Landevennec.

As the Telegraph reports, the once-idyllic village in Brittany has recently banned swimming on its beach because of Zafars aggressive horniness. The dolphin has been trying to rub up on locals and tourists; he also apparently tried to stop some swimmers from going back onto the beach  to the degree that he used his nose to push one woman out of the water and up into the air. And what about boats? Well, per the Telegraph:

The beast, often clearly in a state of sexual arousal, also often tries to rub up against kayaks and other small boats.

Before the horniness kicked in, locals and tourists were amused by the three-meter long dolphin. The Telegraph notes that the dolphin would suddenly turn up and frolic around boats, and occasionally even let swimmers grip onto his dorsal fin and go for a ride with him. But then, of course, Zafar got horny, and playing with the animal became complicated.

Swimming and diving are banned on the village shoreline  whenever the presence of the dolphin is confirmed, said a new bylaw issued last week by the mayor of Landevennec, Roger Lars. Approaching within 50 metres of the dolphin is also forbidden, said the text.

Lars (the aforementioned mayor) stressed that the new rules are just to to ensure peoples safety. But one Breton attorney, Erwan Le Cornec, has called the ban excessive and said that he plans to take legal action to have it overturned, as dolphins so rarely actually attack humans.

In a statement to the Telegraph, Le Cornec said, The mayor wants to make dolphins look like almost ferocious beasts, completely unpredictable and likely to drown people. If you were to apply these rules across the board, whenever a pedestrian approaches a dog, even if it is on a leash, all the mayors in  France should issue bylaws banning pedestrians in town.Sisters at an orphanage in 1968. Photo: USC Libraries/Corbis via Getty Images

Since the Boston Globes spotlight team ran more than 600 stories, in 2002, revealing that the Catholic Church had buried thousands of childrens sexual-abuse allegations against hundreds of priests, child molestation within the Church has become a major ongoing scandal. However, per a new bombshell investigation in BuzzFeed News, there exists another accusation of systemic abuse against the Church, one that is equally dark but less-known.

For decades now, countless adults who moved through the American orphanage system have been trying to speak out about the gut-wrenching conditions they endured in the now-defunct traditional system. Among other horrifying claims, they say that nuns regularly forced children to eat their own vomit, dangled them upside down out windows, and even murdered minors in their care by pushing them out of windows or leaving them to drown. To this day, though, the allegations have not fully come under the national spotlight.

Reporter Christine Kenneally cites numerous locations around the world where children were allegedly subjected to horrific abuse in orphanages and homes for minors, but her nearly 30,000-word report focuses on St. Josephs Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont. From the mid-1800s up until the orphanage closed in 1974, thousands of children passed through the building.

In the mid-1990s, journalists at the Burlington Free Press began to report extensively on allegations of child abuse and litigation surrounding the claims, and survivors started to come forward. One such person was Sally Dale, a woman who lived in the orphanage from age 2 to 23, who revealed her traumatic recollections to lawyer Robert Widman: She recalled a nun pushing a boy out of the window to his death, witnessing a boy die by drowning, and being forced to kiss the dead body of a boy who had been electrocuted. She also claimed that a Sister sent her into a fire pit to retrieve a ball, which left her with blackened skin, and that she was molested by the resident chaplain.

In 1996, Widman filed lawsuits on the behalf of Dale and nearly 30 other residents against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington, Vermont, Catholic Charities, and the Sisters of Providence. In November of that year, Dale endured a 19-hour-long deposition, where defense lawyers attempted to discredit the survivors testimonies by calling them antediluvian and impossibly stale. However, it was around the time that some nuns and priests began to acknowledge that children were physically and sexually abused at St. Josephs.

By spring of 1998, the federal judge delivered major blows to the plaintiffs when he ruled that the survivors could not band together in a consolidated trial, and that the Church was not required to hand over letters that allegedly outlined child abuse, written by a lawyer who had previously worked on the case.

Dear Bill  If L was caught not paying attention, the nuns would take a needle and regularly prick his fingertips, read a letter to Bill OBrien, the churchs attorney. Another read, K remembers that Sister Madeline and Sister Claire  slapped her head and face, pulled her hair, struck her face with the backs of their hands, so that their rings split her lips, and tripped her and knocked her down.

Many survivors only received paltry settlements, and never found the closure they sought. But those who have revisited this case today  more than two decades after it first came to light  are still discovering details that corroborate the former orphanage residents testimonies. Kenneally writes that the one story that both she and Widman found difficult to believe was Dales about a boy who got electrocuted when he tried to crawl under a fence while wearing a metal helmet. But in the four years that she spent reporting this story, she finally found the death certificate  pieces of evidence that she and the lawyers struggled to uncover.

According to the certificate, 13-year-old Joseph Millette died from electrical burns in April 1955 at a power station, where he crawled under a high tension wire and made contact through metal helmet. The document may not state why the boy was climbing under the fence, but Dale  who died 18 years ago from cancer  wouldve argued that he was trying to run away from the orphanage.People all across the country gathered on Sunday to protest the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh is known to have an anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ history.

Many community organizers and activists fear that Trumps pick for Supreme Court justice would put civil rights at risk. Kavanaugh is one of the most unpopular nominees in recorded history only 28 percent of women in the country support his nomination.

Multiple organizations, including NARAL and MoveOn.org, organized Unite For Justice protests across the country. From New York City to Columbus to Milwaukee, people gathered in plazas, parks and streets to speak out against Kavanaughs nomination. See social media posts from communities protesting across the country below.

Senate Republicans are fast-tracking Brett Kavanaugh through confirmation before they even have his records. Denver is NOT having it! #UniteForJustice #StopKavanaugh pic.twitter.com/xMORdl6Fov  NARAL (@NARAL) August 26, 2018

@SenatorDurbin your voice is needed now more than ever as #2 please whip the votes and #KavaNOPE this confirmation to #SaveSCOTUS #UniteForJustice pic.twitter.com/M492IlHRRX  Leni BringInTheLight Hoppenworth (@lenihoppenworth) August 26, 2018

This woman is awesome! Shes OUR Queen dancing in front of hate before we #UniteforJustice at our #StopKavanagh rally. @NARAL pic.twitter.com/BZjBLZ2IKn  Steve Kerrigan (@stevekerrigan) August 26, 2018

Alexandrias #UniteForJustice rally joins solidarity with rallies across the United States in a unified whistle to #STOPKavanaugh pic.twitter.com/Bc2RiReOm1  Caitlin (@caitlinblunnie) August 26, 2018

If you missed the protest in your area, or are looking for other ways to get involved, there are more ways you can fight Brett Kavanaughs nomination. Kavanaughs confirmation hearings are scheduled to begin on September 4.Chinese Education Consulting Firm in New York Accused of Fraudulent Scheme to Place Chinese Students at Top Universities

Two Chinese international students studying in the United States have filed a lawsuit against a Chinese education consulting firm after the students were expelled from universities they were attending.

The lawsuit, filed at a New York federal court, was presented by plaintiffs Yu Shanchun and Jin Ruili, the former studying at the Columbia University School of Professional Studies prior to her expulsion, and the latter previously studying at Stony Brook University as an undergraduate, according to court documents.

The two accused Diguo Jiaoyu, a New York-based education consulting firm, of fraud and unjust enrichment. Yu and Jin paid hefty sums for the firms services, which claim to help students get accepted at prestigious American universities.

According to the complaint, Diguo was duly organized in New York in 2017 and has an address located in Manhattan. It mainly relies on word-of-mouth to promote the firm and communicates with clients through the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat.

While it claims to be a legitimate service, Diguo provides fabricated academic transcripts, resumes, and letters of recommendation to help their clients gain college admissionunbeknown to plaintiffs, according to the court complaint.

Additionally, Diguo would tell clients that the company has so-called internal connections with many prestigious universities in the United States, and that these connections, including with deans of admission and professors, would be willing to accept money as a form of donation, or contribution to a university foundation, in exchange for guaranteeing school admission.

In the case of Yu, she learned about Diguos services when she was an undergraduate student at Ohio State University. In December 2016, about a month before her college graduation, Yu was told by a fellow Ohio State student named Zhang Nanhao that she could get a chance at studying at a prestigious U.S. university through Diguo, even if her grades werent high enough. Yu began considering applying for a masters program in New York.

Yu was then put in touch with Zhang Shuantao, a manager at Diguo, also known by his English name Kimi Zhang, who convinced Yu to use the firms services. Zhang claimed that the firm had a 100 percent success rate in helping students get into top colleges. Yu was convinced and agreed to pay about $45,000 to Diguo for the service.

According to the complaint, Zhang told Yu that the majority of the $45,000 would be a donation to Columbia University.

Yu was accepted in 2017 to Columbias graduate school. But in May 2018, she was expelled after being notified by Columbias Office of Student Conduct that the school determined that she had submitted fabricated application materials for admission.

In Jins case, she found out about Diguos services through a friend and Boston University student named Zhong Peixi in December 2017. Like Yu, Jin was put in contact with Zhang Shuantao.

Zhang, at first, asked Jin to pay $48,000 to help her enroll at Boston University, but after long negotiations, he reduced the price to $45,000.

Within a few weeks, Jin was informed by him that she had been accepted into Boston University. Then, on July 6, Jin received a FedEx package from Zhang, containing a sealed transcript that Jin was to bring to the university during her new student orientation prior to the school year.

Before Jin even started at Boston University, she was informed by the academic judiciary at Stony Brook Universitywhere she was already studying as an undergraduateabout a fabricated transcript that had been sent on her behalf to Boston University, which led to her expulsion from Stony Brook.Senator Bernie Sanders addressed the New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont delegations breakfast at the Democratic National Convention in Essington, Pennsylvania on July 27, 2016 . (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Democrats Vote to Change Role of Superdelegates in Presidential Nomination Process

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) passed a package of measures that includes restrictions on the role of superdelegates in selecting the partys presidential nominee, a change that was sparked by a tumultuous 2016 primary process.

The new rules, approved by a voice vote at the DNCs summer meeting in Chicago on Aug. 25, stipulate that superdelegates can only vote for the presidential nominee if the vote has already been decided or if the nominating convention is deadlocked.

In a tweet, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) applauded the move: Todays decision by the DNC is an important step forward in making the Democratic Party more open, democratic and responsive to the input of ordinary Americans. This has been a long and arduous process, and I want to thank @TomPerez and all of those who made it happen.

In the latter stages of the 2016 campaign, Sanders complained that Hillary Clinton, the eventual Democratic nominee, and the DNC had rigged the process against him. Part of his complaint centered on the role of superdelegates.

When the Associated Press called the primary race for Clinton on June 6, 2016, it reported that 571 of 714 superdelegates were planning on voting for the former secretary of state.

The superdelegates were created in 1982 in an effort to prevent the party from nominating unelectable candidates, by giving party elders a say in who was chosen. Typically, superdelegates are chosen from members of Congress, Democratic governors, members of the DNC, and distinguished party elders, and have comprised 14 to 20 percent of the overall number of delegates.

In contrast to the pledged delegates that are chosen in primaries, superdelegates are free to vote for whomever they wish.

The vote to change the role of the superdelegates was the conclusion of a process that began just before the 2016 Democratic National Convention, in response to complaints from Sanders and his delegates.Suspect in 1998 Murder of Dutch Boy Is Arrested After Mass DNA Testing

Prime suspect in the death of 11-year-old Nicky Verstappen found in Spain after tip

Dutch police investigating the brutal murder of a schoolboy in 1998 say that a prime suspect in the case has been arrested in Spain, officials said.

Jos Brech, 55, was taken into custody on Aug. 26 after the largest DNA trawl in the country, including DNA tests from two of his relatives.

[Brech] is in custody and will eventually be handed to the Netherlands, Dutch police said in a statement issued on Aug. 26.

The arrest comes after authorities released photographs of Brech on Aug. 22, saying that his DNA matched with samples taken from Nickys clothes.

Police in Spain said in an Aug. 27 release that Brech was an expert in solitary survival in shelters or even caves, and was wanted for sexual assault and murder.

Since his family reported him missing in April, police believe Brech traveled through Europe looking for work in exchange for food.

Among Brechs possessions, police found a variety of survival items, including fishing instruments, a book about edible wild plants, envelopes of dehydrated food, boots, and mountain clothes.

He was previously thought to be hiding in the Vosges Mountains in France.

What Happened in 1998?

Nicky Verstappen, 11, was one of 40 children staying at the Heibloem summer camp, southern Limburg, when he vanished on Aug. 10, 1998. On the following evening, his body was found hidden in a dark spruce forest over a kilometer away from the camp. He was found barefoothis shoes were still in the tent he slept inand wearing just his pajama pants.

Nickys disappearance and death not only traumatized the small community of Heibloem, but gripped the Netherlands.

Over the years, police have made some wrongful arrests, while the public prosecutor opened the grave of a now-deceased summer camp leader in 2011, to no avail.

National media in the Netherlands followed the story closely, but police have only now whittled down their list of suspects.

Dutch media reports that Brech was a known sex offender and had allegedly sexually molested two 10-year-old boys in 1985.

However, Dutch police say that it has never been established that Nicky was sexually abused.

DNA Samples From Thousands of Men

Investigators found that a trace of DNA found on Nickys clothes was from a man, so they invited over 21,500 men, between the ages of 18 and 75, to voluntarily donate DNA in the region where the crime took place.

They hoped to narrow their search by comparing the donor samples with the DNA trace found on the schoolboys clothes.

While Brech didnt participate in the call for DNA samples, police said that Brechs DNA matched 100 percent with the traces found on Nickys clothes.

Tip-off Near Barcelona

Brech had been interviewed a few days after the crime in 1998, but was ruled out as probably being just a passerby.

It was a Dutchman in Spain who tipped off police after he recognized Brech from photographs published in the media.

The 46-year-old man, who wishes to remain anonymous, told the Dutch daily newspaper De Telegraaf that he had seen Brech several times before police had identified him as a murder suspect.

He described Brech as a neat man.

He was in a tent in the woods, near a house that has been visited by several people for years. It is a kind of commune, where I myself have lived for a long time, said the man, who lives in Castelltercol, about an hours drive north from Barcelona.

I have seen and spoken to him in July, and for the last time, at the beginning of this month. He let me know that he likes to live in nature, thats why he was there.

He added, We had a nice chat with each other, but when the news about him became known, I got a feeling for it. I also showed a friend of mine his picture and asked him: Is this not that Hollander we have seen here? Sure, he answered.

News of the suspects arrest came as a great relief for the family, according to Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries, who is also a spokesman for the family.

We got him! Jos Brech was arrested in Spain near Barcelona! The family is very relieved. Justice will be done! De Vries wrote on Twitter.First Smuggler Op to Australia in 1,400 days, 15 Detained, 2 Missing

Police have detained 15 out of the 17 people believed to have been on board a boat that ran aground on the morning of Aug. 26 in the Daintree River in far north Queensland.

I understand that 15 people have been now detained on behalf of the Australian Border Force (ABF) and they will be assessed by the Australian Border Force and dealt with in accordance with Australian law, Queensland Police Minister, Mark Ryan, told reporters on Aug. 26.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton confirmed that the boat is part of a people-smuggling operation, the first thats been seen in Australia in almost four years.

Australia has received the first people-smuggling venture in over 1,400 days, he said on Aug. 27, SBS reported.

Dutton said the 15 detained will be deported from Australia at the first available opportunity.

The arrival of this boat should be a very clear and timely message that people smugglers will seek to put people on to boats, to take money from innocent men, women and children and to send them to our country, Dutton said, SBS reported.

The newly appointed defence industry minister, Steve Ciobo, said on Aug. 27 those detained should be sent to somewhere offshore for processing.

Those people if we can find them, they should be taken into custody, so to speak, and they should be sent to Nauru, Ciobo told Sky News on Aug. 27.

Safety First

On Aug. 26, locals saw people abandoning a boat and running into a rainforest near Cape Kimberley, an area known for its crocodile-infested waters. The local witnesses notified border police, according to reports.

Initially, the number of those that fled from the wrecked vessel was not known, but according to the ABC, at least 17 are believed to have been on board.

Accompanied by a dog squad, ABF officials, Queensland police, and the State Emergency Service (SES) continue to search for the missing two, saying their top priority is human safety, the ABC reported.

Its very difficult terrain out there, Id hate to be staying out there for a second night, Northern Region Assistant Commissioner Paul Taylor said, according to reports.

According to David White, a tour operator who has been guiding people through the Daintree River for 20 years, there is little risk of harm to the missing two who have fledunless they enter the water.

There is no risk if they dont go into the water, White said, the ABC reported. There are crocodiles in the river but not hundreds of them, just one or two.

Police have erected roadblocks and are checking cars and caravans for possible stowaways at the Daintree River ferry crossing.

The Department of Home Affairs has not responded to requests for comment on whether the ones detained are Vietnamese, according to The Guardian.

A former ABF official Roman Quaedvlieg said that it is not uncommon to have Vietnamese asylum seekers come to a remote area of Australias shores.

Its not unusual for Vietnamese asylum seekers to target a remote part of the Australian Coast. Its relatively easy to do; but most dont get far once landed due to the hostility and are soon detained or give themselves up quickly. Their asylum claims fail in the majority.  Roman Quaedvlieg (@quaedvliegs) August 26, 2018

Meanwhile, two local fishermen found two Vietnamese men in the mangroves of far north Queensland.

Peter Ward, one of the fishermen, said he found the two men on the banks of the Daintree rivernot far from where the boat ran aground, the Australian reported.

They talked with the Vietnamese men, who barely spoke English, and later went crab fishing together, before the fishermen told the Vietnamese men they would be sent to authorities.

We apologisedThis is it, this is your last chance of freedom, Ward told the Australian.

From NTD.tvFlooding From Typhoon Rumbia in Chinese City Aggravated by Official Missteps

Widespread flooding resulting from Typhoon Rumbias heavy rains and strong winds has devastated Chinas biggest vegetable-producing area and home to the countrys largest wholesale market, and local residents are blaming a manmade miscalculation for making the damage worse.

After making landfall in Shanghai on Aug. 17, the storm moved through the eastern part of China, affecting Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Anhui, Shandong, and Hubei provinces. Shandong was particularly hard-hit, with 13 cities in the disaster zone. At least 24 people have died, according to the Chinese regimes official mouthpiece, Peoples Daily.

In Shouguang City, in Shandong province, residents are upset that authorities released water from three reservoirs into a local river during the storm period, aggravating the flooding.

The flooding has destroyed many peoples livelihoods. Residents posted photos and videos to social media about the conditions in Shouguang, showing vegetable farms completely submerged and animal carcasses floating in the water. Those were quickly deleted by internet censors.

Residents took to social media to complain of authorities decision to release the reservoir water downstream of the Mi River near Shouguang. One online post shows an official government document announcing that water from the three reservoirs would be released beginning from the morning of Aug. 19 morning through Aug. 21 at about 6:15 p.m. local time.

Residents received the news on Aug. 19 and were told to evacuate the area. By then, it was already too late to do anything about their property or farm animals. Meanwhile, after the storm, authorities failed to send rescue missions and locals were left largely on their own to deal with the aftermath, according to netizen posts.

Local media were silent on the matter. It wasnt until Aug. 22 that Weifang Evening News, a local newspaper, addressed the flooding in a Sina Weibo post.

Beijing News, a newspaper based in the capital, had already reported about the severity of flooding in several small villages and towns, such as Shangkou and Kouzi. One villager, Ms. Li from Kouzi New Village, said she lost more than 10,000 pigs that she owned. That village is located on the shore of the Mi River, and was submerged about three meters (9.84 feet) by river overflows, according to Beijing News.

Netizens called the catastrophe a manmade disaster, owing to the authorities decision with the reservoirs.

One user, Jaly, wrote that in the past, when the city experienced a drought, authorities wouldnt release water from one of the reservoirs, called Qingzhou, unless residents paid for the water. Now that the reservoir is full, you just let Shouguang know with an announcement that youll release the water? Do you know how many people living in the villages by the river had to evacuate in the middle of the night?

On Aug. 23, the Weifang City governmentShouguang is under its administrationheld a press conference to address the incident.

Zhou Shouzong, director of the Weifang Flood Control and Drought Relief Command Office, defended the decision, saying it was necessary to release the water, according to a report by the Hong Kong Economic Times.

If we didnt discharge the water, it would have posed a serious threat to the safety of the reservoirs, and would even have increased the risk of the dams collapsing. That would have threatened the lives of millions of residents living in downstream areas of the river, he said.

One staffer with the Shouguang water conservancy department told Hong Kong Economic Times that he did not think that the water levels would exceed their estimates and reach such high water levels after releasing reservoir waters.

By Aug. 23, waters had receded significantly, but the streets were filled with mud.

Vegetable prices in Shouguang have already gone up as a result of the flooding, including for coriander, spinach, and cucumbers, netizens also reported. They fear that since Shouguang supplies many regions of China with vegetables, this recent flood will lead to price increases all over the country.

Hong Ning and Li Jing contributed to this report.Germanys Public Debt Could Fall Below EU Ceiling This Year

BERLINGermanys public sector debt could fall below the European Unions debt ceiling before the end of the year, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said on Aug. 26, after figures this week showed a booming economy was generating a record surplus.

Speaking at the annual open day at which Berlins ministries open their doors to the public, Scholz said that Germanys debt levels could fall below 60 percent of economic output earlier than the originally planned target of 2019.

The plummeting debt levels are helped by the robust health of Europes largest economy, which grew 0.5 percent in the second quarter, driving the public sector surplus for the first half of the year to a record 48.1 billion euros ($55 billion).

That towering surplus has drawn increasingly urgent calls from lobbyists and other governments for Germany to invest more, prompting even the ultra-cautious Scholz to concede that the shower of cash offered further possibilities.

But on Aug. 26, Scholz reaffirmed Germanys commitment to meeting the so-called Maastricht criteria, the public debt element of which has been breached by most participants since the 2008 financial crisis, implying that Germanys debt could fall even further.

In 1990 debt was about 40 percent of social product, he said, referring to the time immediately before West Germany took on the aging industries and weak currency of formerly Communist East Germany, seeking to overturn 40 years of relative decline with one of the biggest investment programs in history.

The EUs Maastricht Treaty requires member states to run a deficit of no more than 3 percent of gross domestic product each year. The 60 percent public debt threshold has been violated by many member states for years, with Germany last keeping under the threshold 17 years ago.

By Markus WacketHousing Rent Skyrockets as Chinese Authorities Aim to Cool Real Estate Market

Beijing is seeking to cool an overheating real estate property market with policies that encourage investors to instead place their investments in Chinas rental market. But the policy shift is causing a sharp spike in housing rental prices, leading many middle-class Chinese to complain about ever-increasing living expenses.

In 11 major Chinese cities, housing rental prices rose by an average of over 20 percent in July, compared the same month a year ago, according to an Aug. 22 article by Chinese business newspaper 21st Century Business Herald, citing data from Chinas housing website CityHouse.cn.

Surprisingly, the largest increase didnt occur in the capital of Beijing; it ranked sixth place among the 11 cities, with an increase of 21.9 percent. Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Chinas Sichuan Province, had the highest uptick, at more than 31 percent; followed by 30.7 percent for Guangzhou, a port city in southern China; and 30.5 percent for Shenzhen, a southern city that borders Hong Kong.

The spike in rental prices has made life difficult for many middle- and low-income workers, according to a widely circulated online article that sparked a great deal of discussion on Chinese social media. The article discussed the experience of Mr. Huang, a perfect example of the problem.

Huangs landlord asked for a roughly 26 percent increase in rent to 24,000 yuan (about $3,500) from 19,000 yuan (about $2,800)when his lease expired. He then went to a rental company for help in finding a new place to rent. When the company reached out to the same landlord, the landlord boosted the price again, to 28,000 yuan ($4,100), or an increase of about 47 percent from the initial rent price.

In July 2017, Chinas National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), along with eight other government agencies, issued a joint announcement to encourage state-run and private housing rental companies to speed up their development in major cities. The announcement also encouraged Chinese real estate companies to expand their businesses into the rental market.

On July 31, Chinas Politburo, a 25-member group of the Chinese Communist Partys most elite officials, held a meeting to discuss the nations economic policies. One of the directives issued at the conclusion of the meeting was to further regulate the real estate market and to curb rising housing prices. Economists have long predicted that a housing bubble is set to burst if the market continues to overheat.

Recently, Chinese authorities have taken concrete actions to rein in housing prices. Chinese officials in five citiesHaikou and Sanya in southern Chinas Hainan Province, Yantai in eastern Chinas Shandong Province, Yichang in northern Chinas Hebei Province, and Yangzhou in coastal Chinas Jiangsu Provincewere questioned by Chinas Ministry of Housing and Urban Rural Development on Aug. 17, according to an Aug. 21 article on the Chinese Communist Party-run news portal China.cn.org.

Central authorities asked that those officials take steps to combat housing speculation.

So far, prices are still going up in the real estate market. According to data released by Chinas National Bureau of Statistics on Aug. 15, 65 cities saw prices in new housing (as opposed to homes that were resold before) increase in July compared to a month earlier, out of a total of 70 mid-sized and large cities. Only three citiesShanghai; Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu; and Quanzhou, a city in southern Chinas Fujian Provincesaw a drop.

Some people are now choosing to invest in the home rental market instead, which has led to the growth of two different types of housing rental companies.

The first type is Chinese rental apartment firms that issue rental asset-backed securities (ABS). These are similar to the real estate investment trusts (REITs) in the United States. However, the lack of rules of regulations in place for REITs in China has led to many calling Chinas ABS quasi-REITs.

REITs, similar in concept to mutual funds, allow investors to buy shares of a company that owns a portfolio of properties, without having to buy or finance the property. Rent and income generated from these properties are in turn paid to the companys investors in the form of dividends.

Some Chinese real estate companies have expanded their businesses into ABS. For example, in May, the Shanghai Stock Exchange gave the green light for Evergrande, Chinas second-biggest real estate developer by sales, to issue 10 billion yuan (about $1.5 billion) worth of ABS linked to rental apartments, according to Mingtiandi, a real estate news website.

The second type is a traditional rental-management company. These firms manage housing units in bulk and offer renters a percentage discount in rentif they are willing to take a lease out for a set period of time in advance, such as a year or two.

In Beijing, the competition between Chinese rental apartment firms has grown fierce, with firms trying to outbid one another for housing sources.

For example, Mr. Chen (a pseudonym), said he offered his about 4,260-square-feet residential unit to a rental housing management company after the company outbid a competitor, according to an Aug. 18 article by Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly. Mr. Chen said the company offered to rent out his place at a price of 10,800 yuan (about $1,586) per month, about 3,300 yuan (about $484) higher than his expectation.A man and a woman stand in front of handbags displayed at a store of luxury handbag maker Longchamp in Shanghai on Aug. 27, 2010. (Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images)

In China, Luxury Goods Authentication Services Can Be Fake

China is notorious for knockoff goods, including fake versions of popular apparel brands, electronic gadgets, and luxury goods. As a result, Chinese consumers have been turning to authentication services to verify that the goods they buy are geniune.

Now, ironically, some of the services designed to fight counterfeits have been revealed to be bogus, as well.

Chinas state-run media Beijing Youth Daily reported on Aug. 27 the story of Ms. Zhang, who went to an authentication service for a luxury brand shoulder bag purchased through an online platform in July. The service later confirmed Zhangs suspicionsthe bag was a knockoff.

Zhang then confronted the platform where she bought her bag. The platform denied the bag was a knockoff and offered her the name of a company where she could take the bag to check its authenticity. After logging onto the website of the authentication company provided by the platform, Zhang realized that company was a fake: The content of the website, including its logo, was copied directly from the website of the first service she had used.

Beijing Youth Daily said that the fake authentication-service company didnt reply to requests for comment.

China is the source of most of the worlds counterfeit goods, and the U.S. market is one of the key destinations. According to a 2017 report on intellectual property rights (IPR) seizures by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, all counterfeits originating from Hong Kong and China that were seized by U.S. customs agents in 2017 would have a value of about $940 million if the goods were authentic.

In China, an industry dedicated to luxury brand authentication services has grown steadily in recent years, due to widespread counterfeiting of products.

Many fake goods are sold through e-commerce platforms such as Alibabas Taobao and Pinduoduo. In January, the U.S. Trade Representative placed Taobao on its Notorious Markets list of marketplaces that engage in, benefit from, or turn a blind eye to counterfeiting, for the second consecutive year over its suspected counterfeits.

In January, a Chinese netizen asked for help on Zhihu, Chinas equivalent to Quora, seeking information about reliable authentication services for luxury goods. He explained that he needed the information because a good friend of his nearly broke up with his wife after a Givenchy product he had bought for her turned out to be fake.

Liang Chen quit his job as a dentist after 10 months to become an assistant in the production authentication department of an e-commerce company, according to a May 2016 report on Chinese news portal Sina. He explained that he wanted to become a luxury authentication expert, a profession that he said had better potential for a career.

Authentication skills usually include examining sewing lines, buttonhole size, and type of leather on handbags. For items with metal attached, one can learn how to differentiate between cheap and expensive materials.

There are also classes that teach people how to become a luxury authentication expert. But even some of these classes are fraudulent, according to a May 16 article by Chinas state-run China Youth Daily, citing the example of a class in Beijing that promised to teach people to become an expert in six days.McCain to Lie in State in Arizona, Then US Capitol in Washington

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who died Aug. 25 after fighting an aggressive form of brain cancer, will lie in state in the Arizona capitol as well as the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington.

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey announced on Aug. 26 that McCain will lie in state in the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix on Aug. 29, which would have been McCains 82nd birthday.

John McCain is Arizona, and we will honor his life every way we can, Ducey wrote in a tweet. He also said he ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in McCains memory.

McCain then will lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced in a statement. He didnt specify a date, saying only that additional information on the ceremony will be provided soon.

The McCain family will announce the details of memorials or funeral services, he said.

McCain will be laid to rest at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland.

His family announced Aug. 24 that he would forgo further treatment for glioblastoma, with which he was diagnosed last July. The next day, they announced his death. His wife and other family members were with him when he died.

McCain had been a U.S. senator serving Arizona since 1986, and before that, a member of the House of Representatives from 1982 to 1985.

McCain, the son and grandson of Navy admirals, started his career in the military by attending the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated in 1958. That launched his 22-year career as an aviator, including his service during the Vietnam War, during which he endured more than five years of torture as a prisoner of war.

On Oct. 26, 1967, McCain was on his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam when a missile hit his plane and he was forced to eject. He landed in a lake and broke his arms and right leg in the fall, but was denied medical treatment at the infamous Hoa Lo prison, also known as the Hanoi Hilton.

Shortly after he was admitted, his captors offered him release, likely because of his fame of his father, a Navy admiral, but McCain turned it down, saying that prisoners who were taken before him should be let go first.

He paid for that decision. He spent two years being tortured and in solitary confinement at the prison. During this time, he was aided by his faith and the friendships of his fellow POWs, his personal website says.

At his lowest, while contemplating suicide, he signed a confession saying that he was a black criminal and I have performed deeds of an air pirate.

They wanted a statement saying that I was sorry for the crimes that I had committed against the North Vietnamese people and that I was grateful for the treatment that I had received from them. This was the paradoxso many guys were so mistreated to get them to say they were grateful. But this is the Communist way, he wrote in a first-person account.

This weighed heavily on him, but he said he didnt feel he had a choice.

I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point, he wrote. I had reached mine.

After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, McCain was released in 1973. But the marks of the war remained. He returned home on crutches, and never regained full mobility in his arms and leg.

After five and a half years in captivity, he returned home to Florida, where he was reunited with his wife, Carol Shepp, and their three children, two of whom were from her previous marriage.

He retired from the Navy in 1981 with naval honors that included the Silver Star, three Bronze Stars, two Legions of Merit, two Purple Hearts, and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

McCain and Shepp divorced in 1981, the same year he left the Navy, and a month later, he married Cindy Hensley, the daughter of a wealthy beer distributor in Arizona.

It was very, very difficult, his stepson Andy, who, like his siblings, didnt attend the wedding, told The New York Times.

McCain had three children with Cindy, probably the most well-known of whom is Meghan McCain, who has helped her father on his campaigns and now stars on ABCs daytime talk show The View.

A year after his second marriage, McCain was elected to the U.S. House, a role he served in for four years before being elected to the Senate.

He made two unsuccessful runs for president, once against George W. Bush in 2000 and again in 2008 against Barack Obama.

McCain cast his last vote as senator in December before his illness forced him back home to Arizona and out of the public eye. Before leaving, he famously blocked a Republican bid to repeal the Affordable Care Act, known widely as Obamacare. Despite campaigning on the promise to repeal it, he said he couldnt support a bill that hadnt gone through the proper legislative process.

Ive stated time and time again that one of the major failures of Obamacare was that it was rammed through Congress by Democrats on a strict party-line basis without a single Republican vote, McCain said in a statement after his vote. We must now return to the correct way of legislating and send the bill back to committee.

This stubbornness marked both his time in politics and in war. A former director of the Hoa Lo prison recalled verbally sparring with McCain, who eventually earned his admiration.

It was his stubbornness, his strong stance that I loved when arguing with him, retired colonel Tran Trong Duyet told AFP.

Despite being from the same party, he has had an oppositional relationship with President Donald Trump, who is not expected to attend his funeral.

My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you! Trump wrote in a tweet.Mindblowing Drug Far Surpasses Current Cancer Treatments: Scientists

A group of researchers have announced they have discovered a new drug combination that can overcome cancer drug resistance, as well as reduce the size of cancerous tumors to a far greater degree than current treatments.

The new approach can also be applied to any type of cancer, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Korea University said.

Their study findings were published in the journal Chem on Aug. 23.

The best part is that our combined drug candidate was so much more effective than one of the most powerful cancer drugs on the market, Jonathan Sessler, a professor at UT Austin and co-lead author of the study, said in a media release.

The difference is mind blowing, he added.

Sessler is himself a multiple cancer survivor who has dedicated his career to seeking cancer treatments.

Sessler and his team are calling the drug they have developed C1, and have filed a patent for it.

In their study titled Overcoming Drug Resistance by Targeting Cancer Bioenergetics with an Activatable Prodrug, the team gave their experimental C1 drug to mice with drug resistant tumors. The study found that C1 reduced drug resistance, allowing the chemotherapy drugs to take effect.

Gasping for Air

The way the drug works is related to how cancer cells grow. Cancerous tumors grow and metabolize like an out-of-shape runner, researchers explained in a press release.

[The cancerous tumor] has a hard time catching its breath. Its growing so fast and burning so much energy that it cant get enough oxygen.

Whereas normal cells function on aerobic, or oxygen-requiring, metabolism, early-stage tumor cells operate on a less efficient anaerobic metabolism.

Just like an out-of-shape runner, gasping for air and experiencing cramps, in this early stage, a tutors metabolism is abnormal and its vulnerable, so this is also when many cancer drugs work their best, the press release read. But as tumors mature and shift their metabolism, like the runner getting into better shape, they often become drug resistant, a life-threatening twist for patients.

When it switches to a more normal metabolism, it develops resistance, Sessler said. But if we stop it from switching, we can keep exploiting that vulnerability.

In the study, the researchers combined the standard chemotherapy drug Doxorubicin (D0x) with a dichloroacetic acid (DCA) subunitan acid which reverse a cells metabolism from aerobic to anaerobic.

Why C1 is so effective, Sessler explained, is that it allows the two active elements to reach the cancer cells simultaneously, where the DCA ensures that the cancer cells remain in an anaerobic state reducing the cells resistance to Dox.

The researchers found that when mice with tumors were given C1, the tumors became 75 percent smaller after two months compared to mice that were not treated.

Furthermore, the tumors treated with C1 became half the size of the tumors in mice that received the same two drugs but separately.

Tackling Drug Resistance

Drug resistance is a major hurdle cancer researchers and sufferers are currently facing, so if all goes well, the experimental drug C1 may lead the way in overcoming cancer cells resistance to Dox, which is sold as Adriamycin.

Another factor that contributes to C1s efficacy lies in its ability to target the mitochondria of the cancer cells, which is the location where scientists believe the treatment will yield the highest effect, Sessler explained.

Importantly, the experimental C1 drug appeared to show minimal whole-animal toxicity, according to the study.

Right now, a cancer diagnosis is often a death sentence, Sessler said. Wed like to see cancer become a chronic disease in our lifetime.

From NTD.tvMother and Daughter Stabbed to Death in West Midlands

LONDONA mother and a daughter have been stabbed to death near Birmingham in the West Midlands, UK.

Police are hunting for the killer, who attacked the pair in the early hours of Monday, Aug. 27, on a suburban street in Solihull.

The women were aged 22 and 49 and died at the scene.

Police are searching for a male suspect who is said to be known to the victims. Forensic tents have been put up outside the victims home.

Detective Inspector Caroline Corfield from West Midlands Polices homicide team, said in a statement, What has happened this morning is truly devastating and heart-breaking. Our thoughts go out to the two victims family and friends at this traumatic time.

Tragically there was nothing which could be done to save them and we are working to establish the circumstances behind what happened.

We are still in the very early stages of our investigation but we believe the offender is known to the victims.

We are appealing to him come forward as a matter of urgency.

Screaming her head off

Police are examining CCTV and have cordoned off the area while searches are carried out.

The Daily Mail quoted one neighbor saying that she heard screaming late on Sunday, Aug. 26.

The woman said, I thought it was foxes screaming. She was absolutely screaming her head off. He wasnt speaking English, thats for sure. He shouted something and then ran off.

There was a lot of screaming and shouting and then I saw the guy run off. About a minute later I saw him leave in a van.

Another man living near the property told the BBC that he too had heard screaming, but assumed it was people returning from a night out.

He said, Then police knocked on my door and asked for some towels, so I knew at that point it was serious.

Ive got a young family, so I was worried about what was going on.

Police said they were speaking to people who live nearby and that there would be a visible presence in the area over the coming days to provide community reassurance.

Increase in Knife Crime

Knife crime in England and Wales surged by almost a quarter in 2017, according to the latest yearly figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

Nearly 40,000 offenses involving a knife were recorded by police in the year ending Dec. 2017, a rise of 22 percent.

According to the data, recorded homicides rose by 9 percent to 653 from 599, year on year.

The ONS warned of a genuine increase in violent crime. Offenses were mainly concentrated in London and other large cities, but the majority of police forces across the country also saw a rise.New Tax Proposal by Beijing Could Make Taiwanese Pay Taxes on Income Twice

The Chinese Communist Partys new proposals for imposing personal income taxes could put Taiwanese citizens working or living in mainland China at a disadvantage.

In late August, the Standing Committee of the Partys rubber-stamp legislature, the National Peoples Congress, convened to discuss proposals for reforms to personal income tax laws.

Taiwan has its own constitution, democratically elected government, and military. However, Beijing regards Taiwan as one of its own provinces that will be reunited with the mainland one dayby military force, if necessary.

Thus, there are some unique regulations and policies pertaining to cross-strait relations.

The draft legislation stipulates that those who have lived in mainland China for more than 183 days in a given tax year will be considered tax-paying residents. Thus, their personal incomewhether obtained within Chinas borders or notwill be subject to taxation in mainland China.

According to Li Renxiang, CEO of Hamber Consulting Service in Taiwan, this draft differs from Chinas current tax scheme, whereby anyone who has not lived in China consecutively for 30 days within a year, or has not lived in China for more than 90 days total, would not be considered a tax-paying resident.

Li said that under the new scheme, all of the personal income earned outside of China would be subject to taxation in China.

The 183-day rule for being considered a resident in the tax code is an international standard, Li said.

However, according to the Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area, Taiwanese citizens who make money in mainland China must report that income in Taiwan and be subject to taxes.

So if the new proposals get approved in Beijing, Taiwanese could end up paying taxes twice on their income.

Li explained that most countries have tax-levying agreements that ensure an individual only pays taxes once. The United States and China, for example, have an agreement whereby the two countries taxation services decide which country an individual should pay taxes in.

The tax-levying agreement between Beijing and Taiwan was signed in 2015 but is stuck in Taiwans legislature awaiting approval.

Security

Another concern for Taiwanese working in China is Beijings latest residency permit cards. Taiwans director of the Department of Cybersecurity, Jian Hong-wei, warned that the cards will pose privacy and national security risks to Taiwanese, according to an Aug. 20 report by Taipei Times, an English language newspaper based on the island.

The cards, which will be available beginning in September to certain individuals from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau who work in mainland China, contain the cardholders name, fingerprints, photograph, date of birth, address, and an 18-digit serial numberan ID system that mainland Chinese nationals are under.

People from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau may apply for the residency permit if they are employed in a stable job position, have lived in China for at least half a year, have a permanent place of residence in China, and satisfy at least one requirement for continuing education, according to Chinese authorities.

But the information on the cards has alarmed Taiwan authorities. Fingerprints are private biometric data and there is no end to the ways Chinese authorities could use them once they get hold of them, Jian said, noting that the Chinese authorities could store the information and potentially take advantage of it for human rights violations.Antifa and counter-protesters to a far-right rally attempt to block the exit from Lafayette Square before Unite the Right demonstrators leave in Washington, on Aug. 12, 2018. (Zach Gibson/AFP/Getty Images)

Police Arrest 16 Antifa Members During Clashes in Philadelphia

Authorities say they arrested 16 violent members of the Antifa group at a counter-protest to a small and peaceful march in Philadelphia, after the members clashed with police.

On Aug. 25, members from the far-left extremist group rallied at City Hall in opposition to a Blue Lives Matter march, where residents came out to show their support for law enforcement.

In spite of all the negative press towards police, we want to show our support of our men and women in blue! event organizer Zachary Rehl wrote in the marchs description on Facebook.

Contrary to popular belief, the police are not what the media makes them out to be and we want to create a positive bridge between the police and the community, he wrote. Rehl is a Marine Corps veteran and the son of deceased Philadelphia police officer Robert Rehl.

Philadelphia police confirmed with The Epoch Times that approximately 75 members of Antifa were present at the area of the march at Broad and Arch streets.

During the protest, several members begin to fight with police. As a result, a total of 16 people were arrested. Nine were issued citations for Failure to Disperse, and seven were charged with Disorderly Conduct (Misdemeanor 3), a spokesperson said via email.

Footage of the march depicts numerous Antifa members in their signature black apparel and concealed faces fighting with police, with multiple arrests taking place.

In one encounter captured on camera, a mob of Antifa members descended upon some officers on bicycles who were holding their ground. During the clashes, many tumbled on the ground and some officers could be seen wielding batons to ward off Antifa members.

Authorities said that while the Blue Lives Matter march occurred simultaneously with Antifas counter-protest, the two groups didnt interact.

The organization, reportedly classified as committing domestic terrorist violence by the Obama administration, is classified as a domestic terrorist threat by New Jerseys Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.

Related Coverage The Communist Origins of the Antifa Extremist Group

A Twitter account named Abolish ICE  Philly wrote about the arrests and asked for bail money to be sent to them. In the post, the Antifa members are called comrades, a reference that communists or socialists use to refer to each other.

Comrades are still locked up, next window they may get out is 12:30 am. We need jail support at 20th and Hamilton and 7th and race. Please, if you can, send all bail support money to @liberationproject on venmo, the Aug. 25 Twitter post read.

A press release by the Abolish ICE/Antifa account details that the counter-protest was endorsed by multiple communist organizations, including the Philly Socialists, Philadelphia Socialist Alternative, Liberation Project, The Party for Socialism, OccupyICEPHIL, and more.

Joshua Philipp contributed to this report.

Watch Next:

The Origins of AntifaSpanish Police Seize Cocaine Hidden in Pineapples

Spanish police have seized 67 kilos of cocaine hidden in hollowed-out pineapples, with wax cylinders used to hide the giveaway odor from sniffer dogs.

The Spanish national police force announced that on Aug. 26, they had arrested seven people in connection with the cocaine seizure in Madrid.

Each pineapple contained around 1 kilogram of cocaine, described by police as perfectly hollowed out and stuffed with compact cylinders.

Police said the wax cylinders were used to conceal odours of the chemical products which the drug contains and avoid its detection.

Spanish police released video footage of the find, with officers smashing open each individual fruit to extract the cylinders and drugs inside.

Authorities said that they had stumbled across intelligence on the pineapple shipment as they investigated other drug traffickers that used the same modus operandum of smuggling inside fruit shipments.

The intelligence revealed the shipment came from South America.

The police identified the shipment, knowing it would travel from Puerto Rica to the port of Setubal in Portugal, and then via road to MercaMadrid.

When the truck arrived in the Spanish capital and started unloading, agents then swooped.

Seven people have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in drug smuggling four in Madrid and three in Barcelona.

It isnt the first time Spanish authorities have found cocaine smuggled in pineapples. In January, police seized over 700 kilos of cocaine hidden inside a shipment of pineapples after a joint investigation with Portuguese police, packed in the same yellow wax cylinders.

The Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) is a key entry point for drugs to Europefrom Latin America and Africa.The Case of Adam Lovinger: How Security Clearances of Trump Officials Are Politicized

Adam Lovinger was a strategic affairs analyst with the Pentagons Office of Net Assessment (ONA). Since January 2017, he had been working on loan as a White House National Security Council analyst after being selected for the position by Gen. Michael Flynn.

On May 1, 2017, Lovinger was notified that his Top-Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS-SCI) clearance had been suspended. He was to return to the Pentagon immediately.

How Lovinger arrived at this juncture is both illuminating and frightening. In the end, his story will likely shine a light on a broader series of eventssome of which remain not fully known.

In September 2016, Lovinger, who holds a doctorate in law and is a professor at Georgetown University, was working in the Office of Net Assessment as a strategist. His position within the specialized think tank required a top-level security clearance.

According to his Georgetown profile, Lovingers responsibilities include net assessments and competitive strategies developed for the Secretary of Defense on strategic competition in the Indian Ocean region, the Persian Gulf, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Lovinger had grown increasingly concerned over the ONAs use of outside contractors, due in part to the problem of cronyism and a growing revolving door policy that resulted from ONA analysts leaving to join the better-paid ranks of private contractors.

In 2016, Lovinger decided to write the first in a series of emails to ONAs new director, James H. Baker, who had recently been appointed by Obamas defense secretary.

One of the problems noted by Lovinger was the number of sweet-heart contracts issued to a privileged few. A secondary issue was the quality of work being received from these outside contractors. From Lovingers September email:

On the issue of quality, more than once I have heard our contractor studies labeled derivative, college-level, and based heavily on secondary sources. One of our contractor studies was literally cut and pasted from a World Bank report that I just happened to have read the week before reading the contractor study itself. Even the font was the same.

In October 2016, Lovinger wrote a second email to Baker, this time identifying another individual as a source of contractual concern. Lovinger wrote of the moral hazard associated with the Washington Headquarters Services contracting with Stefan Halper.

Lovingers lawyer, Sean M. Bigley, said Halper was being used by Net Assessment to go out essentially and engage with foreign government officials. As a contractor, thats totally illegal.

According to USAspending.gov, Halper had been awarded $1.06 million in contracts through five payments beginning in 2012.

Halper was revealed earlier this year to be the FBI informant who helped surveil the Trump campaign through associations with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Halper paid Papadopoulos $3,000 for a policy paper in October 2016.

It appears that Lovingers first email to Baker had attracted someones attention. The following series of events is summarized from an Oct. 18, 2016, memo from the director of net assessment.

On Sept. 14, 2016, Lovinger left the ONA in preparation for travel abroad the following day. With him, he carried a stack of papers he intended to read while on the plane. Within the stack of papers was a working paper titled Allies in Decline: Alliance Management and U.S. Strategy in an Era of Global Power Shifts. The working paper contained marks denoting Classification Pending.

Lovinger would claim he does not recall how or when he received the classified document. Lovinger stated that it was his belief that the document in question was placed within a stack of what he believed were unclassified academic research for later reading on the plane.

The following day, on Sept. 15, 2016, Lovinger boarded a flight initially bound for Hawaii. Lovinger began to go through his papers when he noticed the Classification Pending markings on the document in question. Lovinger left his seat and proceeded to a more private location to examine the document. Based on his review of the document, he determined there was no classified material contained within it, and he returned to his seat, where he placed the document into his briefcase.

Sitting next to Lovinger on the flight was Lt. Cmdr. J. Austin Maxwell, who observed what had transpired and would later note, It was obvious to me [Mr. Lovinger] recognized his mistake and attempted to secure the document. Lovinger was unaware Maxwell had seen the document, later telling investigators that to his knowledge, no one else had observed the document throughout its time in his possession.

The next day, Maxwell drafted a memorandum for the record and notified his superior, who brought the matter to the attention of Capt. Dale Rielage. Rielage, in turn, notified Baker, Lovingers boss. Baker then confronted Lovinger regarding the incident. This sequence of events occurred on the same day.

Ultimately, an investigation ensued. The investigating officer determined the classified document was improperly, but unknowingly, taken out of an authorized secure space and insecurely transported and reviewed in a public location.

The investigating officer also said, Based on my review of the actual content of the document, to the extent it contains any actual classified information, it is extremely limited and very general in nature.

Lovinger was noted for a security infractionone that was inadvertent but avoidable. The investigating officer ended his report with the following:

It is reasonable to conclude that there was no compromise given the content of the document in question and its close control either on Mr. Lovingers person or in his assigned lodging on a military base for a relatively short period of time. For these reasons, no violation is believed to have occurred.

Theres one other important detail to this portion of the story. Lovinger had never met Maxwell before.

When Lovinger returned to his plane seat after determining the document contained no classified information, he and Maxwell had a brief casual conversation, whereupon it was discovered they both worked for the Department of Defense (DOD). Maxwell never mentioned the classified documents.

A quick recap. Lovinger left his office believing he was carrying only academic papers. He would later claim the classified document was placed within his reading material for the plane trip. The classified document was indeed marked Classification Pending, but contained no actual classified material.

Lovinger just happened to be seated next to Maxwell, who also worked at the DOD. Maxwell did not identify himself as such until after Lovinger had seen the classified document. Maxwell would write Lovinger up in a memo that would make its way up the chain of command in Hawaii and back to Lovingers boss in Washington, Baker, the same day.

On Jan. 12, 2017, Lovinger was invited by Flynn to serve as a senior director on the White House Security Council, along with Ezra Cohen-Watnick. On that same day, James Baker filed four separate charges against Lovinger. The counts included an unauthorized trip to Israel, taking home unclassified academic papers to read, reading a classified document in an airplane, and having unauthorized contacts with the Indian government.

On Jan. 18, 2017, two days before Lovinger was to leave for the Security Council position, he received a letter from Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter citing Lovingers exceptional performance on collaborative net assessment with the Government of India. In that same review, Baker disagreed, noting, I do not endorse the characterization set forth in the employee input (that) Adam performed successfully.

Baker assigned two officers to investigate Lovinger: ONA Chief of Staff Cmdr. Anthony Russell (USCG) and Marine Lt. Col. Brian Bruggeman. According to The Daily Caller, Baker gave Bruggeman a Feb. 10, 2017, deadline for an initial report. On Feb. 5, five days before the report was due, Baker recommended Bruggeman for the Defense Superior Service Award. Baker also recommended Russell for the Defense Superior Service Medal following the completion of his investigation into Lovinger.

Lovinger would continue to criticize the use of outside contractors. In a March 3, 2017, memo, Lovinger noted, There has never been an external review of these contractors research products.  It is now clear that over several decades, the office transferred millions of dollars to inexperienced and unqualified contractors.

On May 1, 2017, Lovinger was notified that his TS-SCI clearance had been suspended. He was the second Trump official to lose his security clearance. The loss of a security clearance is a significant matter, as it is a requirement for many senior positions.

On July 18, 2017, Lovinger filed an ethics complaint about Baker with the Pentagons senior ethics official, charging that Lovingers superiors misused the security clearance process to punish him.

In a Sept. 13, 2017, letter to DOD officials, Lovingers attorney leveled whistleblower charges. A review of the case file in this matter illuminates a picture of intentional whistleblower retaliation against Mr. Lovinger; personal and political vendettas against Lovinger by Baker, the letter reads.

Lovingers case is still ongoing. Judicial Watch recently joined the case, asking for production of records that had been demanded by Lovinger but held up within the DOD.

In April 2018, Lovinger received a memo from Washington Headquarters Services Director Barbara Westgate telling him that she had decided to suspend him from Pentagon duties without pay. Westgate is a holdover of the Obama administration.

On May 1, 2018, Lovingers attorney, Sean Bigley, penned an op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal attempting to draw attention to the case. Bigley noted the following:

Security clearances are being weaponized against the White House by hostile career bureaucrats, thwarting the presidents agenda by holding up or blocking appointees.

In Mr. Lovingers case, those weaponizing the security-clearance process include a senior official who remains on the job despite publicly disparaging President Trump as unfit to lead, a Pentagon attorney who instructed colleagues on the importance of concealing retaliatory motives behind their actions, and the Defense Departments security adjudications chief, who persists in advancing false allegations.

In total, Lovinger has four cases pending: whistleblower reprisal, criminal division, an ethics complaint, and an appeal on his security clearance revocation.

He remains suspended without pay.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the contractor who was described in Adam Lovingers email. The Epoch Times regrets the error.The European Parliament in Strasbourg, in this file photo. The EU started by liberating trade, now it stifles innovation with regulation. (GEORGES GOBET/AFP/Getty Images)

The EUs Regulatory Nightmare

Instead of promoting innovation, Europe is punishing success

The European Union, in its current state, isnt famous for being a great promoter of free markets, entrepreneurship, and innovation, but rather a machine spurting out masses of regulations and rules.

One just needs to look at the 109 regulations on pillows, 50 on duvets and sheets, or 31 laws on toothbrushes that Brussels has conceived. Or the immensely detailed explanation of how a banana must look, and that it has to be free from malformation or abnormal curvature (yes, this is an actual law).

It may be possible that all these crazy stories, which are regularly featured in tabloids for the amusement (or frustration) of the population, only come up because the politicians and unelected bureaucrats of the European Union are simply bored, not knowing what to do with their time. But here is more behind the path Europe has taken.

Indeed, it is an entire approach that Brussels and also European national governments adopted a long time ago. As scholar Veronique de Rugy wrote in a recent article, European governments are nothing but a bunch of protectionists. In her excellent analysis, she echoes the crucial dichotomy that Adam Thierer put forth in his book Permissionless Innovation.

Promote or Stifle Innovation

The gist is this: There are two ways that governments can respond to innovative efforts. Either they can follow the process of permissionless innovation, that is, as Thierer writes, the notion that experimentation with new technologies and business models should, generally speaking, be permitted by default. If any problems were to arise, they could still be addressed later. But governments can also follow the precautionary principle, so the belief that new innovations should be curtailed or disallowed until their developers can prove that they will not cause any harm.

While permissionless innovation is about the creativity of the human mind to run wild, the precautionary principle in its essence takes away what entrepreneurial endeavors are all about: looking for new opportunities that others havent identified yet, taking a risk, participating in a trial-and-error process, and either make the world a better place (and profit from it yourself), or, yes, fail.

The United States, for the most part at least and very much compared to Europe, has taken an approach more akin to permissionless innovation, where risks can be taken and where failure is tolerated, if not seen as a normal part of the process. In Europe, meanwhile, the precautionary principle is dominating.

To a certain extent, this might be a cultural component: failure is judged in many European cultures, and a business venture gone awry will be seen quickly as a complete career failureconsidering that never failing is an impossibility, this means that entrepreneurship is naturally less of a factor on the Old Continent. But governments, and especially the EU, have played a major part, too.

Regulate to Death

There are many, actually countless, examples of this. Just take the ongoing war on Uber, Airbnb, and all sorts of other sharing economy services, which governments in Europe have tried to regulate to death for years. Or take the new data-protection rules which have already resulted in companies leaving Europe, since compliance is impossible without spending immense amounts of money.

It is little surprising under these circumstances that it isnt Europe, the continent where free-market capitalism and the industrialization took off, where major innovations are made today. Much has been talked about the supposed tech hubs in Stockholm and Berlin, but little has come out of it except Swedish Spotifywhich is increasingly moving its endeavors to the United States as well. As of 2016, Thierer reports in his book, Airbnbs market value alone exceeds the value of all Germanys billion-dollar technology companies combined.

The response by the EU has been mind-boggling: Instead of relaxing its tight rules, it has doubled down, and in recent years, expanded its War on Innovation ever more. For their successes, companiesalmost exclusively from the United States, have been heavily penalized. Microsoft has been hit with fines four times, most recently in 2013 with $635 million. The list also includes Intel ($1.2 billion, 2009), Facebook ($122 million, 2017), Amazon ($293 million, 2017), and Qualcomm ($1.2 billion, 2018).

But the most shocking verdicts were the Apple fine of $14.6 billion in 2016 (supposedly for not paying their fair share in Ireland, even though the Irish thought everything was just fine with that), a $2.7 billion fine for Google in 2017 (while at the very same time bailing out Italian banks), and just last month, a new record fine for Google at the impressive price tag of $5 billion.

The EU is often shocked about how countries such as the United States have tech hubs like Silicon Valley, all those innovations, all those start-ups, and all this entrepreneurial spirit. Instead of penalizing those who prevail despite major obstacles put in their place, Europe should instead change its perspective, though. Indeed, as Thierer writes, a liberal dose of permissionless innovation thinking can help spur the next great industrial revolution by unlocking amazing opportunities.

This next industrial revolution could also happen on European land. But for that, governments need to let the miracles of the market go their own way.

Kai Weiss is a research fellow at the Austrian Economics Center and a board member of the Hayek Institute. This article was first published by AIER.org

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.A cashier handles money in Macy's Herald Square in Manhattan, New York. Entrepreneurs can only make money if they help consumers solve a problem. (Reuters/Andrew Kelly)

The Origin and Meaning of Profits

Entrepreneurs only deserve to make money if they help fix a problem

The definition of profit is the excess of revenue over costs. The underlying activity that produces the revenue, and incurs the cost, can be almost anything.

As Robert Nozick pointed out in his 1974 article Why Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism, intellectuals find this lack of definition in the goals and reward structure of capitalism frustrating. After all, intellectuals have spent their lives going to the best schools, getting the best grades, and congratulating each other on being the most important members of society.

By comparison, entrepreneurs and business people often are uneducated, sometimes even coarse. Socially, we tend to think of Al Czervik from the movie Caddyshack: If you make or do something, and a bunch of people happen to like it, enough so that you can charge more than it costs to make that thing, what kind of achievement is that?

For example, do you remember the Pet Rock of the mid-1970s? If not, ask your (grand)parents. In 1974, a guy named Gary Dahl was in a bar, listening to some friends complain about how much work it was to keep pets. He decided that a pet rock would be a lot less work. He bought nearly a ton of ordinary gray stones at a building supply warehouse. He marketed them in cardboard boxes that had air holes cut so the rock could breathe.

The real genius was including a 32-page owners manual, with instructions on training the pet: sit and stay were basic commands, graduating to roll over, and ultimately attack if the rock were thrown. The fad lasted about six months, with a burst of sales around Christmas in 1975. More than 1.5 million Pet Rocks were sold, and Dahl was moderately wealthy.

It appears that in 2012, an updated version of the Pet Rock was offered, with a USB cable for added functionality. It is no longer available, as far as I can tell, but I am pretty sure that the USB port and cable didnt actually add any functionality at all. Nonetheless, quite a few people bought them.

Did Dahl produce any value for society? Does a pet rock that earns profits mean that someone should get rich? An intellectual would say, I got straight As, and you didnt even finish college, you filthy entrepreneur. We need redistribution based on social merit! Some idiot who sells rocks doesnt deserve to be wealthy!

The Origins of Profit

This kind of question simply reverses the cause-and-effect relationship between merit and earnings. The problem with the standard view of earnings is that wealth is, or should be, a reward for merit. But social merit is very hard to define; as Thomas Hobbes noted, in Leviathan: A man may be Worthy of Riches, Office, and Employment, that nevertheless, can plead no right to have it before another; and therefore cannot be said to merit or deserve it.

Right. But profit isnt wealth awarded to people who have intrinsic social merit. Profit is the end consequence of a discovery process, a search for value that is distributed among all the many nooks and crannies of a modern economy.

Somerset Maugham wrote a famous short story titled The Verger, in which the main character, Mr. Foreman, has been working hard as a vergera lay assistant to the vicar in the Anglican Churchfor more than 15 years, since he was a teenager. A new vicar is appointed and is shocked to learn that the verger cannot read or write. The vicar demands that Mr. Foreman become literate, or leave the churchs employ.

Mr. Foreman doubts he can learn to read and is sacked. He wanders, looking for a cigarette. But there is no tobacconist anywhere on all the long street of shops.

Mr. Foreman has an idea, hardly a profound idea but an idea nonetheless, that he might open a shop. He makes substantial profits. Before long, he opens another, and then several more, in every case using the simplein fact, obviousstrategy of finding an area of the city with many shops but no tobacconist.

He amasses a fortune. Worrying about having to mind all that cash, Mr. Foreman visits a bank, where he is told by an executive that he should invest the money. Mr. Foreman declines to invest in complex financial instruments, confiding in the banker that he cant read or write. The banker is thunderstruck, finding it remarkable that an illiterate man could acquire substantial wealth.

The banker wonders out loud, given what a success Mr. Foreman has become without literacy, how things might be if he could read. I can tell you that, sir, says Mr. Foreman, with a little smile. Id be verger of St. Peters, Neville Square.

Did Mr. Foreman deserve to become wealthy? He didnt have any merit, at least as intellectuals measure such things. All he did was to make it possible for people buy a product they wanted, at a lower price (counting travel) than had been possible before. Whats so hard, or so admirable, about that?

Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises himself was honest about this feature of the profit and loss system:

The entrepreneurs are neither perfect nor good in any metaphysical sense. They owe their position exclusively to the fact that they are better fit for the performance of the functions incumbent upon them than other people are. They earn profit not because they are clever in performing their tasks, but because they are more clever or less clumsy than other people are.

If the grumbler knew better, why did he not himself fill the gap and seize the opportunity to earn profits? It is easy indeed to display foresight after the event. In retrospect, all fools become wise.

Entrepreneurial Awareness

In 1978, Israel Kirzner, a student of Mises, gave a classic description of the relation between profit, value, and entrepreneurship: correcting errors.

We understand, that is, that the initial imperfection in knowledge is to be attributed, not to lack of some needed resource, but to fail to notice opportunities ready at hand. The multiplicity of prices represented opportunities for pure entrepreneurial profit; that such multiplicity existed, means that many market participants (those who sold at the lower prices and those who bought at the higher prices) simply overlooked these opportunities.

Since these opportunities were left unexploited, not because of unavailable needed resources, but because they were simply not noticed, we understand that, as time passes, the lure of available pure profits can be counted upon to alert at least some market participants to the existence of these opportunities.

Kirzner defined entrepreneurship as awareness, the constant searching for profit opportunities. But Kirzner conceived of errors much more broadly than the above passage would suggest. Rather than simply correcting errors in the price system, and causing the convergence of prices of a single existing commodity, entrepreneurs imagine alternative futures, new products, and possible ways of organizing production.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this distinction. An entrepreneur doesnt (just) take advantage of errors (i.e., differences) in prices. An entrepreneur cultivates a character of alertness, looking to anticipate what consumers want. But that means that the system is ultimately driven (though perhaps passively) by consumers, not entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are the active agents in the system, but consumers decide what firms produce and which productive activities will be rewarded and which punished.

The verger, Mr. Foreman, corrected an error in the system. There should have been a tobacconist there, in that spot. No one else recognized that, but the absence of a tobacconist was a mistake. Consumers wanted a store there (though even consumers may not have recognized this fact).

Thats what I mean about being confused about the direction of causation: one doesnt have merit, and then receive rewards. The entrepreneur seeking profits creates something new, correcting a mistake. If the costs of correcting the mistake are less than the benefits in terms of (as I discussed earlier) the consumer surplus created, the result is profits.

There is no particular reason to expect that education or intellectual interests are an advantage in cultivating a habit of awareness of the sort that Kirzner highlights. But there are very good reasons to argue that profits, deserved or not, are something that entrepreneurs should be morally entitled to seek.

Michael Munger is a professor of economics at Duke University and a senior fellow of the American Institute for Economic Research. This article was first published at AIER.org

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.Patrick Pouyanne, chief executive of Total, attends a session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia on May 25, 2018. (Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin)

Total Chief Executive Drives an Electric Car, but Only on Weekends

The chief executive of French oil and gas giant Total said on Aug. 27, that he and his wife drive an electric car  but when it comes to business, he relies on fossil fuels.

Its a 100 percent e-car. Its a nice Renault electric car. And Im driving it every weekend. Its my private car, Patrick Pouyanne told an oil conference.

Of course I have my company car which is internal combustion. To make long distances I dont use an electric car.

When Total took over upstart utility Direct Energie in April, it said the deal was part of its strategy to grow its low-carbon power generating assets to 20 percent of total assets by 2035 from 5 percent today. These include solar, wind and other renewables assets.

Speaking at an oil conference in Norway, Pouyanne said the chief executive of Norways sovereign wealth fund, Yngve Slyngstad, had encouraged him to make the most of the magic of electricity.

The fund owns 1.79 percent of Total.

By Shadia NasrallaTrump Orders Flags Lowered, Says I Respect Senator John McCains Service

President Donald Trump issued a statement on Aug. 27, about the passing of Sen. John McCain, giving his respects while signing an order to fly the American flag at half-staff.

Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCains service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment, the president said in a White House statement.

I have asked Vice President Mike Pence to offer an address at the ceremony honoring Senator McCain at the United States Capitol this Friday, Trump said, adding that with McCains familys approval, he ordered the military transportation of the longtime Arizona senators remains from his home state to Washington.

There, military pallbearers and band support, and a horse and caisson transport will partake in a funeral service at the U.S. Naval Academy, his statement added.

Trump, meanwhile, said hes asked White House chief of staff John Kelly, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and national security adviser John Bolton to represent him at McCains funeral.

In his proclamation, Trump said that the U.S. flag will be flown at half-staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds as well as at all military posts and naval stations across the United States and around the world, including all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions. It will last until sunset, according to his proclamation.

Flags at embassies, consular offices, and legations will also be flown at half-staff.

McCain, 81, died over the weekend after a lengthy battle with cancer. After news broke of McCains death, Trump wrote in tweet: My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!

The family of McCain, a U.S. Navy pilot who was captured during the Vietnam War and was held for five years at the Hoa Lo Prisonknown colloquially as the Hanoi Hiltonby the communist North Vietnamese, announced last week that he would halt medical treatment for brain cancer. His death came shortly after.A fighter jet lands the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier on May 11, 2018 in the Atlantic Ocean. (Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images)

US Re-Launches Navys Second Fleet, With an Eye on Russia

As Russia expands its military activity in the North Atlantic and Europe, the United States is responding by reactivating the Navys storied Second Fleet.

There are some bad actors on the worlds stage, fleet commander Vice Adm. Andrew Woody Lewis said during a ceremony at the fleets home port of Norfolk, Virginia, according to the Navy Times.

We call them competitors in our strategic documents. They intend to undermine and rewrite the order that America established at the end of World War II, and threaten the very birthright freedoms that we hold sacred.

The Second Fleet was created after World War II to counter Russia during the Cold War. Its most famous exploit was the blockade of Cuba ordered by President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In 2011, during the Obama administrations efforts to reset relations with Russia, the fleet was deactivated and its ships were reassigned to other commands.

At the Norfolk ceremony, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said, A new Second Fleet increases our strategic flexibility to respondfrom the Eastern Seaboard to the Barents Sea.

This ability to respond is in line with the National Defense Strategy. In remarks presenting the strategy, Defense Secretary Gen. Jim Mattis said in January, Though we will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we are engaged in today, but Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.

Of concern to the United States are the large amounts of oil and natural gas available to be exploited in the Arctic, the development of new sea lanes as Arctic ice melts, and Russias wide-ranging and sophisticated submarines, armed with new missiles meant for striking land targets.

Were not looking for a fight, Richardson said. But the best way to avoid a fight is develop the most powerful and deadly and competitive Navy possible.Verdict Postponed in Reuters Journalists Case as Pressure Mounts on Burma

YANGONThe verdict in Burmas prosecution of two Reuters reporters accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act was postponed on Monday until Sept. 3 because the judge overseeing the case is sick, a court official said.

Scores of reporters and diplomats had gathered at the Yangon court to hear the verdict on journalists Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, the culmination of eight months of hearings in a landmark case for the Southeast Asian country, also known as Myanmar.

We are disappointed not to have received the judges decision today, Reuters said in a statement.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have already spent more than eight months in prison based on allegations of a crime they did not commit. We look forward to the receiving the verdict next week, when we very much hope that they will be acquitted and reunited with their families.

Government spokesman Zaw Htay could not be immediately reached for comment on the postponement of the verdict.

The climax of the case comes amid building pressure on the civilian administration of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi over a security crackdown in the western state of Rakhine that was sparked by terrorist attacks in August 2017.

Later on Monday a U.N mandated fact-finding mission will release a report on the crackdown, which triggered the exodus of more than 700,000 stateless Muslim Rohingya, according to U.N. agencies. Most are now living in refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh.

On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council will hold a briefing on Burma in New York.

Mondays court proceedings lasted just a few minutes, long enough for a judge standing in for Judge Ye Lwin, who has overseen the case against the Reuters journalists, to announce that a ruling would be made next week.

The judge is in poor health, so I am here to announce that the verdict is postponed to the third, said Judge Khin Maung Maung.

Defense lawyer Khin Maung Zaw told reporters that the stand-in judge had said the verdict was ready but it had to be pronounced by the judge assigned to the case.

Wa Lone smiled broadly and made a thumbs-up sign with his hands in cuffs as he walked into the court, with Kyaw Soe Oo just behind him.

We are not afraid or shaken. The truth is on our side. Whatever the situation is, we will not be shaken. They cannot make us weak, Wa Lone told reporters after the brief hearing.

Several journalists who came to cover the verdict wore T-shirts that read Free Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo and Journalism is not a crime.

Litmus Test

The Reuters reporters are accused of breaching the colonial-era Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison, by collecting documents relating to the countrys security forces.

They told the court during their trial that two police officials handed them papers at a north Yangon restaurant moments before other officers arrested them last December.

One police witness testified the restaurant meeting was a set-up to entrap the journalists to block or punish them for their reporting of a mass killing of Rohingya and other abuses involving soldiers and police in Inn Din, a village in Rakhine.

The United Nations has called the militarys campaign in northern Rakhine a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.

Burma has denied allegations of killings, rapes and arson made by refugees against its security forces, saying it conducted a legitimate counterinsurgency operation against Muslim insurgents.

But the military acknowledged the killing of the 10 Rohingya men and boys at Inn Din after arresting the Reuters reporters. In April the military said seven soldiers had been sentenced to 10 years in prison with hard labor for their part in the killings.

By Antoni SlodkowskiZimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his wife Auxillia look on during his inauguration ceremony in Harare, Zimbabwe, August 26, 2018. REUTERS/Philimon Bulawayo

Zimbabwes President Takes Oath as US Censure Hangs Over Vote

HARAREEmmerson Mnangagwa urged Zimbabwe to unite behind his presidency on Aug. 26, as he took the oath of office following a divisive election that U.S. observers said had called the countrys democratic credentials into question.

The Constitutional Court confirmed Mnangagwa as president on Aug. 24, dismissing a challenge by the man he beat in the July 30 ballot, Nelson Chamisa.

Thousands of Zimbabweans, some bussed in, and foreign leaders including South Africas Cyril Ramaphosa and Paul Kagame of Rwanda gathered at Harares national stadium for the swearing-in on Aug. 26.

I exhort us to commit ourselves collectively to develop our motherland what unites us is greater than what could ever divide us, Mnangagwa told election participants in his inauguration speech.

He also reaffirmed pre-election pledges to revive Zimbabwes crippled economy and settle outstanding debts with foreign lenders and reiterated he would call an independent inquiry into a regrettable and unacceptable army crackdown following the vote in which six people died.

Now is the time for us all to unite as a nation and grow our economy, Mnangagwa said.

He took the oath before Chief Justice Luke Malaba who, together with eight other judges, had ruled on Aug. 24 against opposition leader Chamisas petition.

In the election, Mnangagwa just reached the threshold of 50 percent of votes that he needed to avoid a runoff.

No Longer a Pariah?

The ballot was touted as a crucial step toward shedding the pariah reputation Zimbabwe gained under Mnangagwas predecessor Robert Mugabe, and securing international donor funding.

But hours before Mnangagwas inauguration, the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute said the country lacked a tolerant democratic culture in which political parties were treated equally and citizens allowed to vote freely.

The election was marred by procedural lapses and followed by the crackdown against opposition supporters, which recalled the heavy-handed security tactics that marked Mugabes 37-year rule.

Those events tarnished promises that Mnangagwa made during campaigning to break with the corruption and mismanagement that become endemic under Mugabe, who was removed in a coup in November.

Mugabe, who has accused Mnangagwahis former head of intelligence and defense ministerof betrayal, did not attend the Aug. 26 ceremony, though the 94-year-old former leaders daughter Bona did. In keeping with an earlier promise, Chamisa also stayed away.

Citing the Constitutional Court ruling, the U.S. observers also urged all parties to rely on peaceful expression and to avoid acts or threats of retribution against political rivals.

Washington has maintained travel and financial sanctions on senior ruling party officials, including Mnangagwa, as well as some state-owned firms. Washingtons support is key if Zimbabwe is to get any funding from the International Monetary Fund.

The European Union, meanwhile, has progressively removed sanctions and they only remain in place on Mugabe and his wife Grace.

By MacDonald DzirutweTo paraphrase Amy Poehler in the 2004 classic Mean Girls, Proctor & Gamble doesnt want to just make regular cleaning products, it wants to make cool cleaning products.

It seems that in a move to appeal to a younger demographic, the parent company of brands including Febreze and Tide filed for trademarks for the use of internet favorite acronyms LOL, FML, NDB and WTF on household items such as liquid soap and dishwashing detergent.

The application is still in consideration and apparently this line of products isn't in the offing yet. While it might seem odd that a company would try and trademark words, colors or even sounds that are just out in the ether for everyone to use, P&G is far from the first entity to do so.

Last year, General Mills attempted and failed to trademark the use of the color yellow for the Cheerios box. In 1994, Harley Davidson also wasnt successful when it tried to trademark the sound of the motorcycles engine revving.

Related: What Entrepreneurs Need to Know About Trademarks

There are some trademark attempts that are more successful but not without some fancy legal footwork. In 2010, Facebook, for example, was allowed to trademark the word face, and the following year, Twitter was able to extract the word tweet from a third-party advertising platform that had beaten it to the punch.

On the celebrity business front, Kylie Jenner last year filed a trademark of her first name, which resulted in a legal kerfuffle with pop star Kylie Minogue for obvious reasons. In 2015, Taylor Swift put forth a successful trademark application to own lyrics including "This sick beat," "party like it's 1989" and "cause we never go out of style. Special mention goes to Paris Hilton. The heiress successfully trademarked her ubiquitous phrase thats hot, even winning a lawsuit against Hallmark. Which goes to show the power of a well-crafted brand.

Whether the U.S. Patent Office deems P&Gs request NBD or WTF remains to be seen, but if the company can make the case that its a reasonable and integral part of its brand strategy, maybe it has a shot.

Related:

Everything You Need to Know About Dreamforce 2018

Proctor & Gamble Wants to Trademark WTF and LOL

With Higher Prices and Less Product, California Dispensaries Face Angry Customers



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reservedPhoto: The Canadian Press Ash covers the ground in an area burned by the Shovel Lake wildfire, near Fort Fraser.

Campfires, cigarettes, flares and car accidents are some of the ways humans have likely started more than 400 wildfires in B.C. this season.

As wildfires blaze across the province, the BC Wildfire Service says many of them have been avoidable. Despite efforts to spread the word about fire bans and other restrictions, fire information officer Ryan Turcot says many people still aren't getting the message.

"It's important to note that every time we run into a human-caused wildfire, that's a wildfire that didn't have to happen," Turcot said.

"These human-caused wildfires during periods of heightened fire activity can in some cases divert critical resources away from the natural caused wildfires that we can't prevent."

On average, the Wildfire Service says 40 per cent of fires over the past 10 years, or 666 per year, have been caused by humans.

This season has seen an unusual amount of lightning activity, which has skewed that ratio, Turcot said.

Since April 1, humans have been responsible for starting more than 420 of about 1,950 wildfires in British Columbia, although the service said it's too early to be more specific about the causes since many are still under investigation.

The Wildfire Service lumps human activities that spark fires into 10 broad categories, including smoking, electrical, and structure or vehicle fires that spread.

"If you were to really break it down, there are hundreds of different ways that wildfires start," Turcot said.

About 23 per cent of fires started by humans fall under the broad umbrella of "incendiary devices," which include matches, lighters, flare guns and others. About 22 per cent spread from campfires. And about the same number begin with open fires, which are larger fires that include burn barrels, pile burning and large-scale industrial burning.

In response to last year's record-setting fire season, the Wildfire Service says on its website that extraordinary measures were taken to help prevent human-caused fires.

Off-road vehicle prohibitions were implemented in the Cariboo, Kamloops and southeast fire centres and full backcountry closures were implemented in two areas. Campfires were also banned across most areas of the province throughout the summer.

In April 2016, the province increased fines for a variety of wildfire-related violation tickets. Fines include $1,150 for lighting a fire against regulations or restrictions, $575 for failing to comply with a fire control order and $383 to $575 for failing to report a fire.

More than 1.2 million hectares of land burned in 2017, costing more than $568 million in fire suppression and displacing roughly 65,000 people.7 hours ago

American Water Works is a Strong Buy as Profits Continue to Flow

American Water Works (NYSE:AWK) will deliver its third-quarter earnings report after the market closes on November 2. The third quarter has historically been the companys strongest quarter and this year appears to be no exception. The consensus opinion of analysts is for the utility giant to post earnings per share (EPS) of $1.52 cents on revenue of $1.21 billion.

Read ArticlePhoto: Google Street View Yellowknife RCMP detachment

A judge has criticized the Yellowknife RCMP for taking an intoxicated sexual assault victim to jail instead of to hospital.

In a decision released earlier this month, Justice Garth Malakoe says there are no circumstances that would justify confining the woman to police cells overnight in May 2017.

Police said in a statement the woman was taken to the cells for her safety.

Malakoe's written judgment says the woman was not treated with compassion and should have been taken to hospital for an examination.

Bree Denning of the Yellowknife Women's Society says that since then, the city has funded shelters for men and women who need a safe place.

She says services and attitudes have improved considerably.

The RCMP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Photo: Vernon North Okanagan RCMP

Large amounts of what police believe to be cocaine and heroin/fentanyl was seized from a house last week by the Vernon North Okanagan RCMP.

The Targeted Policing Unit executed a search warrant at the home in the 3500 block of 24th Avenue at 1 p.m. The house was previously deemed a 'problem premise.'

"The residence, where the warrant was executed, was identified as a problem premise in our community being used to traffic street-level quantities of drugs," said Corporal Dan Pollock. "Our efforts will continue to disrupt activities at this location until the illegal activity ceases."

At the time of the drug bust, many people were at the house, three of which were arrested for possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking and taken into police custody.

Canadian currency and other items related to drug trafficking were also seized from the home.

The three subjects were released from custody while the RCMP continues its investigation and considers charges.

Prior to the search warrant being executed, a stolen vehicle was seen leaving the residence at which time police located the vehicle and arrested one man, who remains in custody for possession of stolen property and theft of a motor vehicle.Photo: Tinhorn Creek Vineyards

Several schools in the South Okanagan have received a generous donation from Tinhorn Creek Vineyards on behalf of the winery's Celebrate the Arts charity.

The $15,000 donation will be split between Oliver Elementary School, Tuc-el-Nuit Elementary School and South Okanagan Secondary School to support their arts programs.

The presentation was made at the Lovecoast concert at Tinhorn Creek on Saturday, Aug. 25.

"Tinhorn Creek's Canadian Concert Series brings our community together through music, from both near and far, and celebrates local Canadian musical talent," said Jan Nelson, director of sales and marketing.

"We love our community and we want to encourage budding artists by inspiring them through strong school arts programs. Growing up in Oliver, I gained a lot from the programs at OES and SOSS, and I hope our continued support can bring the same joy and experience that I benefited from. Arts programs bolster students' emotional well being, self-esteem and overall balance to help them become well rounded human beings."

This is the vineyard's fourth cash donation to School District 53 to find music, drama, dance and fine arts programs for students. They have also consistently donated the use of their outdoor amphitheatre, tasting room and barrel cellar for performances and rehearsals.

Tinhorn has also committed to donating a portion of their income next year as well as proceeds from next season's Canadian Concert Series to continue to support their Celebrate the Arts program.Photo: The Canadian Press Mourners wait on a highway overpass for the procession carrying the late John McCain on Saturday.

Sen. John McCain expressed his deep gratitude and love of country in his final letter and implored Americans to put aside "tribal rivlaries" and focus on what unites.

Rick Davis, former presidential campaign manager for McCain who is serving as a family spokesman, read the farewell message Monday at a press briefing in Phoenix.

In the statement, McCain reflected on the privilege of serving his country and said he tried to do so honourably. He also touched on today's politics.

"Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here," McCain wrote. "Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history."

McCain died Saturday from an aggressive form of brain cancer. Plans taking shape called for McCain to lie in state Wednesday in the Arizona state capitol on what would have been his 82nd birthday. A funeral will be conducted Thursday at North Phoenix Baptist Church with former Vice-President Joe Biden speaking.

In Washington, McCain will lie in state Friday in the Capitol Rotunda with a formal ceremony and time for the public to pay respects. On Saturday, a procession will pass the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and arrive for a funeral at Washington National Cathedral. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama are expected to speak at the service.

The Senate has draped John McCain's desk in black fabric and placed a vase of white roses on top. Monday was the Senate's first day back in session since his death, though McCain had not been back to Washington since December.

A private funeral is planned for Sunday afternoon at the Naval Academy Chapel followed by a private burial at the academy cemetery.

President Donald Trump was not expected to attend any of the services.

McCain was a noted critic of Trump, and Trump's response to McCain's death has been closely watched. On Monday, for instance, flags at the White House were not lowered. When asked about Trump's response to McCain's death, Davis said that the family is choosing to focus on the outpouring of support from around the world instead of "what one person has done or said."

"The entire focus of the McCain family is on John McCain," Davis said. "There really is no room in the McCain family today to focus on anything but him."All for one, one for all - Why gay marriage has been a no-go in Buddhist Thailand

Although once thought of as a gay mans paradise, Thailand has done a lot in recent years to dispel that notion. There is still no gay marriage to be found here and many foreign guests, dignitaries and tourists would like to know why and, as usual, the answer all comes down to culture.

CultureCommunity

By Jason Jellison

Monday 27 August 2018, 09:00AM

Gay union is a complex cultural issue Photo: freestocks-org

The first key to understanding Thailands sluggish sleepwalk towards gay marriage actually traces back to Western colonialism. Polygamous marriage was a key feature of many Oriental marriages prior to the colonisation of Southeast Asia.

While Siam (Thailand) managed to avoid being directly colonised, it did so through a series of concessions to the Western powers. In the 1930s, Siam removed polygamous marriage from its legal code in an effort to integrate with Britain, America and France. The practice still goes on unofficially and is a prominent theme on Thai soap operas.

Thus, it would not be unfair to say that history  or the unconscious effect that it often has on its descendants  has proven to be the first sedative preventing Thailand from making the leap into gay marriage. Yet, the story only begins here.

Because the Thai institution of marriage has come under Western pressure before, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that Thai people are not generally concerned about a corrosive effect on marriage as an institution because, after all, Thai marriage underwent significant legal reform in the early 20th century and is still standing.

The bad news, however, is that according to some reports up to 50% of Thais think that homosexuality is wrong, and this includes Thais presently aged between 15-25. That percentage may read as alarmingly high to many Western readers, but when one understands street karma it becomes easier to understand why some Thai people think that gay people are being punished in this life for sins of a past life.

Thus, much like in early 90s America, gay people find themselves consigned to certain social roles. In Thailand, they struggle to step outside of those roles because gay parenting is something of a Thai taboo.

Bud Lake and Manuel Santos were two gay, would-be adoptive parents in Bangkok and they became famous for using a Thai surrogate to carry their child in 2015. While they were eventually successful in starting a family, they managed to ignite a legal and societal firestorm that still smolders today.

In the West, the empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that a traditional, nuclear family is indeed whats best for children. However, it has also been proven that single parents and gay parents can often do just as well; even if some people dont find it to be ideal.

Yet, that lesson struggles to resonate in Thailand because most families stay together for a lifetime, and often live together for a lifetime. Hence, the thought of such a radical departure from lifes most common paradigm seems incomprehensible to many Thais.

It is common for foreigners to mistake Thai Buddhist tolerance for liberalism; but tolerance and liberalism are two fundamentally different things. Tolerance does not accelerate the leap into gay rights.

Many foreigners mistake Thai tolerance for liberalism because Thais are not Puritanical. Unlike in the historical West, Thailand does not crush any outward sign of homosexuality with their fists but that does not in any way indicate that Thai society endorses homosexuality or gay marriage.

Thailand is mainly Buddhist and many great teachers of Buddhism have had to walk-back inflammatory statements that they made about gays prior to the 21st century. Twenty years ago, for example, the Dali Lama was quoted as saying, From a Buddhist point of view, men-to-men and women-to-women is generally considered sexual misconduct.

The Dali Lama has no authority in Thailand, but some prominent Thai monks have said very similar things. While Buddhisms teachings may be timeless, the awareness of LGBT issues is timely, and so many monks have had to re-evaluate their views of scripture.

Meanwhile, a few savvy Western activists have tried to improve the situation by increasing LGBT awareness in Thai society. However, this has somewhat backfired because educational campaigns work best only when a society is totally unsympathetic; but outright intolerance has never been the case in Thailand.

Throughout Siamese history, homosexuality was never criminalised. Thailand also permitted many unsavoury things that were simply disallowed in the historical West, such as gay bathhouses, prostitution, gay taverns and, nowadays, rather unsavoury social media applications.

Thus, foreign educational initiatives often fail in Thailand and, instead of eliminating anti-gay bias, it actually could be argued that foreign gay rights activists sometimes have achieved precisely the reverse of what they intended.

Yet, there is more to Thailands estrangement from equal marriage rights than just societal issues. There is, of course, politics. One might be surprised to learn that recent polls show a growing level of support for civil unions in Thailand. This could mislead people into believing that Thai politicians would be eager to pounce on the issue.

Yet, chronically-changing governments, a revolving door of discarded constitutions, ever-changing legislative priorities, endless committees, Asean instability and even a dose of good old-fashioned bias have all served to rain on the parade.

Additionally, many gay rights proposals have turned out to be Trojan Horses. For example, a recent proposal for civil unions would have granted equal marriage rights with one hand, but would have also raised the homosexual age of consent from 17 to 20 with the other hand. There is a newer attempt at civil unions that will supposedly be voted on next month, but it mainly covers asset management and does not grant the same rights as a traditional marriage.

Finally, gay marriage in Thailand could continue in its sleepwalk thanks to the radically-changing geopolitical condition which is rapidly departing from and/or fighting a liberal world order. Thai politicians eye a paltry 30 countries in which gay marriage has been codified into law  leaving 160 to go. They also see conservative uprisings in many of the 30 progressive countries on LGBT issues.

Yet, a recent poll on gay marriage did show a 61% approval rating for some kind of marriage equality. Thus, Thai politicians find themselves stuck in a tug-of-war between the security of tradition and the unknowns of change.

Regardless of the upcoming vote, gay marriage will continue to struggle in Thailand until Thai society either embraces it as a holistic addition to their society, or until the pressure from the outside world becomes simply too great to ignore.Ice factory ammonia leak off Phuket leaves owner dead

PHUKET: An ammonia leak at an ice factory in Phang Nga province yesterday left the owner of the facility dead and another person requiring hospital treatment.

accidentsdeathenvironmentpolice

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Monday 27 August 2018, 10:23AM

A large amount of ammonia could be seen leaking from the facility. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

A rescue worker sprays water into the facility to reduce the amount of ammonia in the air. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

At 4:40pm yesterday (Aug 26), Lt Santi Prakobpran of the Khok Kloi Police in Phang Nga, was notified of an ammonia leak at an ice factory at Moo 1, Lung Yung, Takua Thung, Phang Nga, and that the owners were trapped inside.

Col Jirasak Semsak, Chief of the Khok Kloi Police together with staff from the Phang Nga Provincial Disaster Mitigation Office, Emergency Relief Department 8, Phuket Crane Recovery Unit, Khok Kloi Fire Department and rescue workers attended the scene and immediately sprayed water into the facility to reduce the amount of ammonia in the air.

Residents living within a one kilometre radius of the facility were also advised to leave the area and the nearby area was closed to traffic.

From their preliminary investigation, Col Jirasak said that it was found that the owner of the plant had about 18 tanks of ammonia inside the factory.

The owner discovered that a pipe connected to one of the tanks was leaking.

They tried to close the valve on the tank which then also broke causing the ammonia to leak continuously.

Once rescue workers were able to gain access to the factory, which was by around 7:20pm, they found two people unconscious inside.

Both were taken to Takua Thung Hospital.

However, police were later advised that the owner of the factory, Siraphop Buarung, 69, a former police officer had died at the hospital.

Mr Siraphops family have been advised of his death.Portuguese man arrested in Phuket for illegal possession of firearm, ammunition

PHUKET: A Portuguese man was arrested on Saturday morning (Aug 25) after he was found to be in illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition.

crimepoliceviolence

By The Phuket News

Monday 27 August 2018, 03:53PM

The arrest of the man, who police have declined to name, came after his wife went to Chalong Police Station on Friday (Aug 24) to report him for assault on herself and their child. Photo: The Phuket News / File

The arrest of the man, who police have declined to name, came after his wife went to Chalong Police Station on Friday (Aug 24) to report him for assault on herself and their child. Speaking to The Phuket News today (Aug 27), Capt Somkiat Sansithi, Chief of the Investigation Division at Chalong Police Station, said, I received a complaint from a Thai woman on Friday that she had been beaten up by her Portuguese husband. She also told me that her child was hurt too but I didnt see the child. The woman also told me that her husband had a gun in the house so I requested a search warrant from the Phuket Provincial Phuket Court, Capt Somkiat explained. On Saturday morning I went to search and found an air rifle, six .38 bullets and 90 air rifle pellets in the bedroom. The man had no licence to have the air rifle in his possession, he said. The wife has since withdrawn her complaint about the assault. However, I cannot drop the charges relating to the firearm. He has been charged with illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition. Details will be forwarded to Phuket Provincial Court soon.Photo: Contributed

A Kelowna mother who lost two sons to drugs is speaking up about International Overdose Awareness Day.

Helen Jennens lost both her sons to overdoses.

Rian died in 2011 of a prescription drug overdose following an accident injury. His younger brother Tyler died in 2016 after taking heroin that tested positive for the deadly opiate fentanyl.

Overdose Awareness Day is recognized in 140 countries on Aug. 31.

"With the recent statistics showing 134 deaths in the month of July, this crisis is far from over," she says.



Free, community events will be held at Evangel Church and Waterfront Park.

"We wish to raise awareness, education, prevention and (end the) stigma," says Jennens, as well as "honour and remember all those we have lost to the illness of drug misuse."

The morning component at the church will feature a variety of speakers, including one mother whose son was dumped and left to die on a dirt road. Theyll also address the harm-reduction benefits of having drug testing sites at festivals. The second part will include a free barbecue from 4 to 6 p.m., naloxone training, live music, and a candlelight vigil.

A person dies of a drug overdose every two hours in Canada. In B.C. alone, four people are dying each day.

Jennens says young to early middle-aged men are dying in larger numbers than anyone else.

"These people are not homeless, out-of-work drug users.... They are your neighbour, your relative, a colleague or a close friend."

Last years event attracted hundreds of people.RTP confirm charges for Phuket boat disaster, additional charges added

PHUKET: Officers from the Royal Thai Police in Bangkok have today confirmed that the owner of the Phoenix tour boat, its captain and engineer are to be charged with recklessness causes death and injury to others and that shareholders in TC Blue Co Ltd also face charges of ang-yee (running an illegal secret organisation).

crimedeath

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Monday 27 August 2018, 06:23PM

A display board shown at todays press conference showing the charges to be pressed again those involved in the Phoenix boat disaster. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The announcement came at a press conference held at 3pm today (Aug 27) at the Phuket Provincial Police Headquarters in Phuket Town.

Speaking at todays press conference, Pol Maj Gen Surachate Hakparn deputy chief of the Tourist Police Bureau, who was joined by Deputy Commissioner-General of the Royal Thai Police Pol Gen Rungroj Saengkram, said, From our investigation we found that TC Blue Co Ltd is the owner of the Phoenix tour boat and that 26-year-old Phuket resident Woralak Yui Rerkchaikarn is a shareholder in that company.

However, we have also found that Woralaks husband, Chinese national Lei Hou, is the real owner of TC Blue Co Ltd and that Jakkapan Rerkchaikarn and Yindee Rerkchaikarn are also shareholders, but Woralak is a big shareholder, Maj Gen Surachate explained.

Investigating officers have discovered from financial records that TC Blue Co Ltd is a nominee company set up for Lei Hou.

All those involved with TC Blue Co Ltd are now also facing charges of ang-yee (running an illegal secret organisation) as it is clear that they are running the company illegally for a foreigner, he added.

Meanwhile, the Phoenixs captain Somjing Boontham, boat engineer Onchan Kanhayotee and Woralak are to be charged with reckless causing injury and death to others, Maj Gen Surachate concluded.

In addition, Phuket Public Relations Department Chief Ms Bussaya Chaipeum this afternoon confirmed that weather is still delaying the raising of the Phoenix and that attempts will resume once weather conditions improve.

On Aug 14, the lawyer representing the owner of the Phoenix tour boat, which capsized and sank in a storm off Phuket on July 5, killing 47 Chinese tourists, made a public statement vowing to fight the recklessness causing death charge in court and renouncing any testimony already given to police. (See story here.)Search after illegal boat runs aground in croc-infested waters

AUSTRALIA: Dozens of foreigners were believed to be on the run today (Aug 27) in an Australian mangrove rainforest after their suspected illegal fishing boat ran aground in crocodile-infested waters.

accidentshealthanimalsimmigrationmarine

By AFP

Monday 27 August 2018, 01:19PM

Australian authorities are searching crocodile-infested waters and mangrove forests for people seen fleeing their boat after it ran aground yesterday (Aug 26). Photo: Saeed Khan / AFP

The Australian Border Force said a number of potential unlawful non-citizens were located, but did not reveal their country of origin or whether they were fishermen or asylum-seekers.

Locals say they saw people fleeing into the forest after their vessel ran aground near Daintree River in the tropical far north of Queensland state yesterday (Aug 26).

Media reports said they may be from Vietnam, although a marine rescue official told broadcaster ABC it was an Indonesian boat.

Queensland Police Minister Mark Ryan told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation 15 people had been detained so far. Brisbane's Courier Mail said up to 20 others may still be within the dense terrain.

The ancient Daintree rainforest  some 120 kilometres north of popular tourist city Cairns  is home to crocodiles, snakes and the giant cassowary flightless bird, one of the worlds deadliest due to its aggressiveness.

State Emergency Service area controller Peter Rinaudo said his crews were searching through the mangroves and near the mouth of the river.

Itll be a hard slog, its still quite warm in there and itll be tough conditions for the guys, he told national broadcaster ABC.

I hope the people, however many there are, get located  its not a nice area for them to be in.

Former Border Force chief Roman Quaedvlieg tweeted today that Vietnamese fishing boats have been illegally fishing in fleets off the far north Queensland coast in the past two years due to their own depleted fishing stocks.

Possible the Daintree vessel & crew have used this activity as a staging point to make Oz landfall & avoid returning to VN (Vietnam), he added.

If the boat were carrying asylum-seekers, it would be the first time in four years that such a vessel has reached Australian shores.

Asylum-seekers who try to reach Australia by boat are either turned back or sent to remote Pacific camps where conditions have been widely criticised.

They are blocked from resettling in Australia.Search ongoing for Indonesian tourist swept away in deadly Phuket surf

PHUKET: A search is ongoing for a 26-year-old Indonesian tourist who was swept away in deadly surf at Karon Beach yesterday evening.

accidentsSafetyweather

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Monday 27 August 2018, 12:28PM

Inna Lutsyk, 23, from the Ukraine was given first aid at the scene before being taken to Patong Hospital. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The mans Ukrainian girlfriend was successfully rescued after also getting swept way by the surf.

At 5:30pm yesterday (Aug 26), Capt Channarong Prakongkue of the Karon Police was notified by the Karon Radio Centre that two tourists has been swept away while in the sea at Karon Beach.

Officers and a rescue workers from Karon Municipality arrived at the scene, a section of beach opposite Karon Circle, to find tourists and lifeguards assisting Inna Lutsyk, 23, from the Ukraine who was lying on the sand slightly injured.

Ms Lutsyk was given first aid at the scene before being taken to Patong Hospital.

Police reported that Ms Lutsyk and her boyfriend, Andryono Tanuwijaya, 26, from Indonesia had arrived in Thailand last Thursday (Aug 23) and were scheduled to leave on Wednesday (Aug 29).

Ms Lutsyk and Mr Tanuwijaya had gone to Karon Beach yesterday afternoon and went to play in the sea.

Lifeguards noticed that the couple were in trouble and went out to assist them. Ms Lutsyk was successfully brought back to shore, however, Mr Tanuwijaya was pulled out by strong waves.

During a search of the area yesterday officials were unable to find Mr Tanuwijaya so the search has resumed today (Aug 27).

The Indonesian Embassy has been advised of the incident.Local nonprofit helps counter lunch concerns at Watertown schools

Non-profit 4 the Kids SD traditionally pays for school lunches through direct funds to student accounts. Now, they are sending home weekly lunch kits.BERLINAmerican technology giants such as Facebook Inc. will continue to face regulatory pressure in Europe, Germanys antitrust chief warned.

The Federal Cartel Office is focusing on protecting competition in the digital economy through a strategy against big internet companies, its president Andreas Mundt said at a press conference in Bonn on Monday. The approach consists of two layers: keeping markets open for new players, and making sure consumers can pick products and services in a fair and transparent environment.

Mundts comments signal therell be no let up in the way the internet is policed in the European Unions biggest economy, after his agency opened a groundbreaking probe into how Facebook scoops up information on how users surf the web to drive its advertising revenue.

Read more:

German antitrust regulator attacks Facebook over its data collection

Facebook bans myPersonality app over concerns used data misused

Facebook pulls hundreds of fake accounts engaged in co-ordinated influence campaign

The German authority has been tackling the importance of big internet platforms, Mundt said as he presented the regulators 2017 report. Aside from the offices probe against Facebook, he cited so-called sector inquiries into online advertising, smart TV and comparison website as examples of these efforts.

Mundt has been repeatedly vocal about threats he thinks companies such as Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook and Alphabet Inc.s Google pose to democracy and free markets. His agency is co-operating with its French counterpart on algorithms and will take an even closer look at e-commerce issues, he said.

At the same time, the European Commission, the EUs executive arm, is also confronting key issues in the digital market, as its probes against Google show, according to the Cartel Office chief.

With all of that, we have an extraordinary bandwidth of activities, said Mundt. The European competition authorities are in the process of setting out guidelines for the digital economy.

Mundt is optimistic of taking the next steps by the end of the year in the Facebook probe  which has focused on how the social network utilizes some user information and whether it does so by taking undue advantage if its market position in Germany. The case, which started in 2016, wont last as long as the EUs lengthy procedure against Google, Mundt said.

He said its important for the office to conclude internet-related cases to pave the way for courts to rule on contested issues and he added that case law on these disputes will help guide future action of regulators.

Mundt also urged lawmakers to take a closer look at how companies may be able to collect data of users. More regulation is needed here, Mundt said.

An important question is whether the collection of enormous amounts of data is proportionate to the efficiencies promised he said. Thats something were also looking at in the Facebook probe.

E-commerce is another sector the German regulator seeks to focus on, especially on the relationship between platforms and companies that use them for their sales, the Cartel Office chief said.

This is not only concerning Amazon, he said. There are more platforms which become more and more important and which will have to be monitored, he said, declining to name any of them.

In 2017, the Cartel Office issued a combined 66 million euros in fines. It received 37 leniency applications and conducted 11 raids targeting 60 companies. In the current year, penalties have risen to a combined 272 million euros against 16 companies and 13 individuals. So far, seven searches took place at 16 companies and 13 homes.

Read more about:EDMONTONUnwilling to sit idly on the sidelines, a small group of Americans living in Edmonton gathered Sunday to write their senators in protest of a controversial nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States.

Every voice matters. Its your right as an American, but also when things are this historically important in such a worrying time, every vote counts and every vote really does matter, said Kimberly Johnson, a member of Democrats Abroad Edmonton Chapter.

The group drafted letters to their senators protesting the confirmation of judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Kavanaugh is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and once served as White House staff secretary while George W. Bush was president.

Johnson said local chapter members were concerned over his views on presidential power, health care, womens reproductive rights.

I am very concerned over womens reproductive rights, and especially with the way the last few weeks have been going with his interpretation of presidential power and the boundaries that he sees the president operating in and the amount of protection that he would try to afford him at a very critical time in our history, said Johnson. This is a critical point.

Johnson is worried Kavanaughs appointment would see the U.S. Supreme Court take another significant conservative shift, further unbalancing the judicial system.

Youve seen such a shift right for the entire court that you worry if an issue like womens reproductive rights comes up, theres hardly enough justices counterbalancing this conservatively-skewed court. It really makes you afraid for the future and afraid ... for the future of womens bodies.

Their voices join protesters in the United States who organized various rallies Sunday for a so-called day of action to voice their opposition in a last-ditch effort to sway the Senate into refusing to appoint Kavanaugh to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court.

Regardless of their opinion on this specific political issue, Johnson hopes to see more American citizens living abroad exercise their democratic rights, and believes their outside perspectives add an important voice to ongoing discourse.

You can see how fundamentally important issues are, and you can also have access to seeing how other countries might solve some of the same problems that we have in constructive and helpful ways, said Johnson.

Read more about:EDMONTONThe fate of Hangar 11, one of Edmontons few nationally significant historic sites, hangs in the balance as the city navigates through a number of options over the complex circumstances surrounding the site.

Located at the Blatchford site, it is one of the last remaining Second World War-era hangars in Western Canada.

It has been sitting largely empty for years, deteriorating, while its location is at the centre of negotiations between the city and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT). Now councillors have a tough decision to make about the future of the building.

In a report coming to the executive committee meeting on Monday, city administration has highlighted three options: demolish the hangar and sell the land to NAIT, delay the selling of the land and do more studies to see if the building is viable or not, or keep the land and repurpose the building with or without additional studies.

The report states it will take between $14 million and $20 million to renovate the building.

The hangar was built in 1942 by the United States Army Air Force and was part of the network of airfields known as the Northwest Staging Route.

Blatchford was a major Canadian hub on that route, channelling as many as 10,000 aircraft to the Soviet Union through Alaska to provide military aid and equipment to assist against Germany on the Eastern front.

Without the critical materials being provided by the United States, the eventual outcome of the conflict would have been much more doubtful, the report states, speaking to the significant impact on the outcome of the war.

Due to its historic significance and lack of any initiatives to preserve the building, Hangar 11 was included in the National Trust of Canadas Top 10 Endangered Places in Canada list in 2017.

In April, 2018 councillor Scott McKeen asked administration to look into the state of the building and provide a report.

The least that building deserves is a good, thorough investigation of its status and a good, thorough debate over its future, he said.

After going through the report, McKeen says they still need to investigate two things.

The cost of keeping it in at least the shape its in now and we should also see if the province is willing to join us in designation and a grant program to preserve it. I mean it kind of has an amazing history and there is not much left on Blatchford, he said.

He said although the city would need to spend a significant amount to repurpose the building, he believes it will be worth it.

These are the kind of buildings that, if you do a really neat job of it, they are the kind of places that attract us. They add so much to the colour and flavour of the city, he said.

Being a relatively young city, I dont think we have grasped that we have really important historic landmarks in our city to save.

He said although historical societies have been involved in the discussions around the building, he now believes the general public should be included as well.

I would say people who feel strongly either way should write to their councillors. Let them know how they feel, he said.

The executive committee will hear the report Monday at 1:30 p.m.

Correction  Aug. 27, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Hangar 11 is the last remaining Second World War-era hangar in Western Canada. In fact, it is one of the last remaining hangars together with Hangar 14.

Read more about:Photo: Contributed

A Summerland man has been sentenced to two years in prison for operating a large-scale marijuana clone factory at his rented home.

Blake Sutherland, 36, appeared in Penticton's Supreme Court chambers Monday, after pleading guilty to possession of a controlled substance and possession for the purpose of trafficking related to a Feb. 2015 raid on the Summerland home he was renting at 11801 Sinclair Road.

Police visited the residence with a search warrant and discovered a total of 19,000 small cannabis plants, ranging in size from 7 to 25 centimetres, in the garage and two rooms upstairs.

Crown prosecutor Ashleigh Wilson said Sutherland was out walking his dog at the time of the search, and rushed back to the home to meet the police.

Mr. Sutherland walked over to police and confirmed that he was the resident of the property, Wilson said He told police that his girlfriend was in the house and had nothing to do with the operation.

His girlfriends children, aged two and five, were in the home and had spent the previous night there. However, all of the doors into the grow-op rooms were childproofed.

Wilson said police also gathered evidence indicating Sutherland acted as caretaker for the grow-op and was receiving direction from others.

Sutherland told RCMP the grow-op was already partially set up when he moved into the home about six months prior, and that he had moved in explicitly to care for the plants. The owners of the home did not respond to RCMP requests for comment.

Wilson argued that even if the plants were being sold in their young state  at an estimated $2-$5 each  the grow-op was still a very profitable enterprise.

Regardless of Mr. Sutherland or societys opinion on the legality of marijuana, it's still illegal and certainly was back in 2015 at the time of this offense, she said.

The courts heard that Sutherland had weighed the pros and cons of moving into the home, was well aware of the jail sentence awaiting for him if he was caught, and accepted the risks.

Defence lawyer James Pennington said his client had aspirations to become a medicinal marijuana grower and took the job managing the grow-op to gain experience so he could hit the ground running once legalization happened.

Crown and defence came to an agreement on the two-year jail term.

Justice Murray Blok accepted the submission, but highlighted the danger the children were put in by staying at the home, even just periodically.

It is an atrocious circumstance to have any children, let alone children of that age around, he said. Not merely for the dangers associated with the plants and operation itself and the air, but for the potential of violence that these operations carry with them.When Taylor Swift takes the stage at Detroits Ford Field Tuesday night, tens of thousands of fans will likely be singing along to every word.

For one 15-year-old fan whos attending the show with the help of a nurse from Quebec, that would have been impossible just a few months ago.

Tiffany Kleinschmidt of Waterford, Mich., is a lifelong Swiftie, as the pop stars legions of fans are known. Before she suffered a traumatic brain injury in April, Kleinschmidt could easily sing along to hits like Shake It Off and Blank Space.

But since that day when she went into cardiac arrest during class, depriving her brain of oxygenated blood, Kleinschmidt has had to relearn basic skills like how to walk, talk and eat. Its been a painstaking ordeal, but Swifts music has been a major boost throughout her recovery so far.

So when Quebec-based nurse Laken Tiller donated two tickets to Swifts Tuesday concert to the Childrens Hospital of Michigan, it didnt take long for officials there to decide who would get them.

Tiller grew up in Windsor, Ont., just across the river from Detroit, but now lives in Granby, Que. She bought two tickets to the Detroit concert during a presale period about a year ago, but later found out her work schedule conflicted with the show. Thankfully, she had backup plans.

I went to her Chicago show and her New York show, the 26-year-old Tiller  another confessed Swiftie  said in a phone interview from Windsor on Saturday.

Im a big fan.

Tiller could have put her tickets up for sale on the secondary market, but she said it was an obvious choice to donate them to the childrens hospital instead.

I see tonnes of families who are consumed with their health. When theyre sick and theyre in the hospital, your life is completely turned around. So I wanted a child whos been in the hospital for a while to be able to relax and take a night off and forget about whats going on, she said.

Since that initial donation, which will allow Tiffany and her recreational therapist to attend the show, Tiller has bought and donated an extra pair of tickets so that Tiffanys mother and sister can go, too.

That donation that Laken made means a lot to us, said Dawn Kleinschmidt, who added her daughter lit up when she learned she would get to see her idol in person.

MORE ON THESTAR.COM

Review: Taylor Swifts Toronto show more of a theatrical production than a concert  but a lot of fun

Even that basic expression of joy points to the progress Tiffany has made since her injury, which dramatically altered not only her physical and language abilities, but also the way she shows her emotions, according to her recreational therapist.

Dawn Grenier said Tiffany is beyond thrilled about the show, and while she cant jump up and down to show her excitement, Shes got the best smile. Her smile is what shows us.

Tiller and Grenier have also been co-ordinating on a plan to get Tiffany to meet Swift face-to-face, even holding a T-shirt decorating contest at the hospital in an effort to make the teen and her family stand out in the crowd.

I guess Taylors mom and her people wander the crowd before the show and during the opening act and look for true Swiftie fans to invite backstage, said Grenier, who credits Tiller for leading a social media push to make the meeting happen.

Just going to the concert is a dream for Tiffany.... The topper, obviously, would be if she could meet Taylor.

Read more about:The head of the union representing thousands of Ontario Provincial Police officers is imploring members experiencing mental health challenges to seek help, after the suicides of three officers in three weeks.

In a candid letter he wrote with tears in my eyes to thousands of members, OPP Association president Rob Jamieson said he wanted to speak openly, in a real way, about mental health challenges and suicide, which have rocked the provincial police service this month.

I have experienced extreme trauma as a result of doing my job as a police officer and four years ago I needed to step away, Jamieson write in a message sent last week.

This has been a personal journey, and it is difficult to share this with thousands of people I do not know; however, I do so in the hope that it may give some strength to hang on, to speak to someone and to know you are not alone.

Three OPP officers have died by suicide this month, including Sgt. Sylvain Joseph Francois Routhier and Det. Insp. Paul Horne. A third officer, who died most recently, has not been publicly identified.

As we deal with the grief of our most recent loss, our deepest condolences and thoughts to the immediate family and our (OPP) members, tweeted OPP Commissioner Vince Hawkes on Sunday, alongside an image of flags flying at half-mast at OPP headquarters in Orillia.

Read more:

First responders applaud proposal to streamline claims of work-related PTSD

Police Service adding three PTSD experts to employee mental health team

Ex-RCMP officers suicide wont be the last unless government changes forces toxic culture, ex-Mountie says

Hawkes tweeted late last week that he was deeply devastated by the recent loss of three of our members, saying the OPP is examining barriers that prevent members from seeking support.

Though Jamieson stressed that the intention of his letter was not to talk about himself  the true heroes are the surviving spouses and family members, he told the Star on Sunday  he is hoping that frank talk about mental health challenges will spur changes to help all officers and civilians get the help they need.

In his letter, he writes that when he joined the OPP in 1995, recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other occupational stress injuries was virtually non-existent. This, despite the fact that Jamieson said many first responders, if not all, suffer by virtue of dealing with trauma.

Jamieson said he wanted to acknowledge that he, too, has experienced mental health challenges from years on the job, which ultimately prompted him to step away. Since he became president, he said he has seen how members access support  whether its someone to talk to or getting into a treatment program.

In all cases, Jamieson said he commended members for taking that first step in getting help. While he said both the OPP and society have come a long way since 1995 in terms of addressing mental health, it is not an easy path to travel, especially in a culture where stigma represents a significant barrier to seeking assistance.

In 2016, the province introduced whats known as presumptive legislation, which eliminated the requirement that first responders prove their PTSD was triggered by an on-the-job incident when submitting claims to the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.

The change, advocated by first responder associations including the OPPA, has helped fast-track worker compensation claims for those in need and reduced stigma, Jamieson said. But he stressed that more can and must be done.

Jamieson told the Star on Sunday his call to action isnt about blame, but said he is attempting to convene a meeting with the provincial government and other stakeholders, including bereaved families, to discuss what other steps can be taken to help those who may be struggling.

I hope theres going to be some action, he said.

If you are considering suicide, there is help. Find a list of local crisis centres at the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention. Or call 911 or in Ontario call Telehealth at 1-866-797-0000A 61-year-old man has been arrested in Winnipeg in connection with a string of alleged bank robberies in three different cities.

Toronto police say they began investigating the man after what is believed to be his first alleged robbery in November 2017.

They say investigators identified him a month later, but no further activity was reported until an alleged bank robbery in Vancouver in June 2018.

Police allege he returned to Ontario and robbed three more branches  two in Toronto and one in Waterloo, Ont., in July and August.

During all but the first incident, police allege the man disguised himself as a construction worker for the robberies.

Police say the man is facing nine charges related to the Toronto robberies and say investigators are following up with other jurisdictions about the others.

Read more about:Saifullah Muhammad is happy the world is finally calling the Burmese military crackdown on the Rohingya minority what it is: genocide.

A genocide is a genocide is a genocide, said the Kitchener resident, who was sponsored to come to Canada from a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh in 2016 under the federal governments refugee program.

They used to call it ethnic cleansing, but by calling it genocide, they recognized the Burmese government did more than denying Rohingya their rights, and theyre killing us and destroying our community.

Muhammad was responding to a report released by the United Nations Monday that probed Burmas brutal military crackdown on the mostly Muslim minority in the Buddhist-majority country last year. The violence sent more than 700,000 people fleeing across the border to Bangladesh. The report called for the investigation and prosecution of the regimes top military generals for genocide before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Military necessity would never justify killing indiscriminately, gang raping women, assaulting children, and burning entire villages. The (military) tactics are consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats, especially in Rakhine State, but also in northern Myanmar, the report stated.

They are shocking for the level of denial, normalcy and impunity that is attached to them. The (military)s contempt for human life, integrity and freedom, and for international law generally, should be a cause of concern for the entire population.

Read more:

Burma postpones verdict for two jailed journalists

Rohingya refugees demand justice one year after fleeing Burma

Toronto vigil to mark anniversary of Rohingya crisis

The UN and Burma, also known as Myanmar, signed a deal earlier this year to resettle Rohingya  but the details of the agreement have been kept secret.

Given the latest UN findings, the international community should immediately suspend the repatriation of Rohingya refugees to Burma unless a protected area is secured in the country under international watch, said Muhammad, a spokesperson for the Canadian Rohingya Development Initiative, which represents the estimated 450 Rohingya across Canada.

Tensions between the Rohingya minority and Burmese majority go back decades, but they intensified after a law in 1982 effectively stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship in the country, making them one of the largest stateless populations in the world.

Rohingyas citizenship must be restored for them before they can return to the country safely, said Toronto-based Ahmed Ramadan of the Burma Task Force, a coalition of Canadian and U.S. organizations advocating for the rights of ethnic Rohingya.

We need to hold the perpetrators accountable. This UN report allows us to look at the next step. After years of suffering, we hope to see light at the end of the tunnel and bring the crisis to a stop.

Both Muhammad and Ramadan said Canada should impose nationwide sanctions against Burma  rather than upon individuals, as Ottawa has done  and lead the international community in bringing those responsible for persecuting the Rohinyga to justice.

We need a comprehensive sanction against Burma, said Ramadan. You cant do business with a country thats found to have committed genocide.CALGARYOne of Canadas biggest cannabis companies has donated $50,000 to an organization pushing the federal government to forgive Canadians convicted of minor pot possession. And it doesnt intend to stop there.

Aurora Cannabis Inc. announced its donation to the Campaign for Cannabis Amnesty on Monday and said itll fund more efforts to guarantee Ottawa will expunge cannabis possession charges from Canadians criminal records.

We see ourselves as having, quite frankly, a significant responsibility to stand up for people who have historically been impacted by cannabis criminal prohibition and also to deliver diplomatic but important messages with respect to the responsible use of cannabis, said Cameron Battley, Auroras chief corporate officer, in an interview Monday afternoon.

Ottawa has not yet confirmed if this will happen when cannabis is legalized on Oct. 17.

Read more:

Countdown to Cannabis: The case for amnesty

Opinion | Vicky Mochama: Without amnesty for pot convictions, legalization is a half-measure

Editorial | Ottawa should issue an amnesty to those convicted of pot possession

Aurora also intends to unveil more donations and partnerships with organizations advocating for amnesty, Battley said, although he wouldnt say Monday how this plan will play out.

He did say, however, that Aurora would continue to push for the expungement of personal possession charges even if the Canadian government refuses to do so.

Were going to fight. Were going to educate. Were going to negotiate. Were going to bug the government. Were not going to go away, Battley said.

The Campaign for Cannabis Amnesty will use the funds to advocate for the federal government to expunge personal cannabis possession charges and to educate Canadians about the injustices that currently exist as a result of the prohibition of cannabis, according to a statement from Aurora.

Annamaria Enenajor, the campaigns director, said granting amnesty would help around a half-million Canadians who are currently forbidden from working in the cannabis industry or volunteering due to their convictions and can face issues when travelling to the United States. The campaign plans to produce a series of testimonial videos, uploaded by the public to its website, showcasing how peoples lives have been impacted.

We think its important for the government to recognise that these are real peoples lives, Enenajor said in a phone interview. Theyre not just numbers, and there are very serious consequences for people on a daily basis.

The donation will also help the campaign attend events in Alberta and British Columbia, she added, and allow it to expand into more of a national effort.

Enenajor said Aurora is the first major cannabis company to donate to the cause of cannabis amnesty in general but said the campaign is in talks with other industry players.

I dont think its unique, she said of Auroras donation. I think its a reflection of the culture of the cannabis industry.

Read more about:The mother of two girls who were shot in a Scarborough playground this summer is decrying the provinces sudden decision to renege on funding promised to an afterschool music program for youth.

Stacey King is adding her voice to those objecting the recent decision by the Ontario government to cancel a $500,000 funding grant that had been promised this spring to Sistema Toronto.

The afterschool program  which teaches music to children in Parkdale, Jane-Finch and East Scarborough  is precisely the kind of programming King has been advocating for in the wake of the June shooting that injured her daughters and left the city reeling.

Educational, after-school programming keeps kids off the street and out of trouble, King said in an interview over the weekend, noting that music gives children and youth an outlet.

They shouldnt be getting rid of the programs, they should increase programs, she said, a message she also relayed to the citys public health board last month in a powerful deputation on the impact of violence.

Share your thoughts

Last week, the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport said it would cut funding for the music program that it says the previous Liberal government hastily announced during the election campaign. Spokesperson Richard Clark said Sistema did not meet the criteria for the grant.

Clark added the Ford government was committed to supporting after-school programs and recently approved support to over 120 organizations to deliver no-cost or low-cost fun, safe, supervised activities to more than 21,000 students. The programs will be delivered at over 400 sites in high priority neighbourhoods in Ontario, Clark said.

Hilary Johnson, Sistemas managing director, called that statement wild, saying the organization had been assured that they fulfilled all the requirements. She said the organization will try to continue with its regular programming, but the provincial funds would have been used to expand its reach.

King joins a coalition of community advocates who have banded together to promote a public health approach to gun violence, together speaking out about cuts being made to social programming in the province.

This safety net now has cracks in it  gaping holes, said Louis March, founder of the Zero Gun Violence movement, an advocacy group working to end violence in Toronto and beyond.

March said when cuts are made to programs that give people a helping hand  in this case, providing a service that helps youth build confidence and creates social ties  theres a price to pay as a society.

Premier Doug Fords Progressive Conservative government has been vocal about the need to address Torontos gun violence, as a spike in shootings has contributed to a comparatively high number of homicides in 2018. Recent violence has seen the city hit 68 homicides so far this year; 2017 saw 66 homicides by years end.

Earlier this month, he announced the province was giving Toronto police $18 million over four years to address gun violence and gang activity, money spent however Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders deems it necessary.

We are sending a clear message to the thugs, Ford said at the announcement. We are sending a message that were coming for them, that we are giving our police the tools they need to hunt them down.

Critics have called the investment in policing short-sighted, saying without targeted programming, at-risk youth in vulnerable neighbourhoods risk being drawn into gangs and a criminal lifestyle.

They are going to send the police in, but they are not going to spend money on music instruction  thats crazy, said Chris Glover, an NDP MPP representing Spadina-Fort York. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and theyre eliminating the prevention.

Glovers NDP colleagues and counterparts in the Liberal party have come out hard against the funding cut to Sistema in the days since it was announced. On Twitter over the weekend, Liberal MPP and former minister of education Mitzie Hunter said the work the organization does with kids in East Scarborough saves lives.

King agrees, saying she knows after-school programming can divert kids away from getting involved in the kind of violence that injured her girls.

Her daughters are continuing to recover after undergoing surgery in hospital. They are emotionally scarred, King said, and she is taking it one day at a time.

Last week, Toronto police arrested and charged Tarrick Rhoden, 23, with attempted murder in connection to the June shooting. Officers had also previously arrested and charged Sheldon Eriya, 21, with attempted murder in the case. A Canada-wide arrest warrant remains out for a third man, TQuan Robertson, 23, of Toronto.

Ill be more relieved when they catch all three of them, King said.

With files from Gilbert NgaboEnvironment Canada has issued a heat warning for Toronto and all of southern Ontario starting Monday, with hot and humid conditions enveloping the area.

The heat is expected to persist until Wednesday.

Afternoon temperatures are expected to reach 31 C, with humidity pushing it to around 40 C, Environment Canada says.

The agency said overnight temperatures are expected to be in the low twenties, providing some relief.

They remind people that risks are greater for young children, pregnant women, older adults, people with chronic illnesses and people working or exercising outdoors.

Environment Canada also urges people to drink plenty of water and stay in cool areas, and to never leave pets or people inside hot cars.

Clare Rayment is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Star's radio room in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @clare_rayment

Read more about:The U.S. and Mexico are poised to resolve their bilateral NAFTA differences as soon as Monday, creating an opening for Canada to rejoin talks covering $1.2 trillion (U.S.) in annual trade.

Significant breakthroughs between Mexico and the U.S. came during the past several days on the contentious issues of automobiles and energy, according to three people familiar with the process who asked not to be named as they discussed private talks.

The three countries have been negotiating for a year to overhaul the 24-year-old accord at the insistence of U.S. President Donald Trump. The terms of any deal struck by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer would need the presidents final approval. Companies operating across North America have worried that some of Trumps demands could hurt the regions economy.

Read more:

Donald Trump suggests U.S. is freezing out Canada in NAFTA talks

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Opinion | Olive: A divide-and-conquer strategy on NAFTA?

Talks continued Sunday at the U.S. Trade Representatives offices in Washington. Arriving at the meeting, Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo was upbeat.

The story of these types of things is always defined in the final minute, and I would say that were practically into the final hours of this negotiation, Guajardo told reporters. Well do everything possible to try to land a deal.

Guajardo predicted that the U.S. and Mexico would need at least a week of work to resolve issues with Canada whenever it rejoins talks.

Even with brightening prospects, Ottawa has remained absent from summertime discussions and a timeline for Canadas return to the table has yet to be mapped out.

The federal government insists it hasnt been frozen out of the talks, and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said shes been in regular contact with both Lighthizer and Guajardo.

Canadian officials have argued the bilateral period has been necessary for the U.S. and Mexico to sort out tough issues such as rules of origin for automobiles.

But trade experts say Canadas absence is  at least in part  a tactic by the White House to divide and conquer as it applies extra pressure on Ottawa to accept what could be a less palatable deal.

Peter Clark, a veteran Ottawa-based trade strategist, said the U.S. is letting Canada cool its heels in what he calls a unique approach to negotiations.

Its not unusual to have bilateral sessions, but not to this extent, said Clark, who considers a Lighthizer a good tactician.

Its an Ambassador Bob special.

Derek Burney, a former Canadian ambassador to Washington, agrees that keeping Canada away from the table in recent weeks is part of the U.S. strategy.

Crude and rude to be sure. But not necessarily damaging, Burney wrote in a brief email, adding that Canadian officials will have to wait and see, while holding our ground without flinching.

There were signs this weekend of progress on some of the most complicated issues. Jesus Seade, the NAFTA representative for Mexican president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, predicted on Saturday that the nations will agree on a lighter version of a so-called sunset clause, an automatic expiration of the trade deal after five years  a key U.S. demand.

Guajardo has said repeatedly he expects the issue to be one of the last resolved once Canada returns to the talks. Hes proposed regular NAFTA evaluations without the threat of any sudden death to the agreement.

The sunset clause is likely to see some type of compromise, said a U.S. official who asked not to be named. The person added that work on bilateral issues with Mexico is almost entirely complete.

It remains unclear how U.S. and Mexican negotiators would frame any announcement about the completion of work on their bilateral issues. Guajardo has signalled that the nation wont declare victory on NAFTA until Canada also signs on.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Sunday morning that the administration has no announcements or anything finalized at this time. Lighthizer and Jared Kushner, Trumps son-in-law and adviser, declined to comment on Sunday afternoon as they left the trade representatives offices.

Even when Canada is asked to rejoin talks, its negotiating team may have to begin without Freeland. Shes on a diplomatic visit to Europe until Thursday, with stops in Germany, Ukraine and France.

Clark said there are expectations Freeland will return to Washington on Friday. From there, he thinks Lighthizer might hold separate bilateral talks with both Canada and Mexico before restarting trilateral discussions that have been on hold since the spring.

Its not a negotiating style. Hes just trying to get everything he can out of each side and he prefers to do that one on one, Clark said.

With files from The Canadian Press

Read more about:BROOKLYN, IOWAThe killing of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts has prompted criticism of the U.S. immigration system because the man charged in her death is a Mexican farmworker. But the victims father told mourners hes been embraced by the local Hispanic community.

Speaking Sunday afternoon to more than 1,000 people at a ceremony at his daughters former high school, Rob Tibbetts didnt directly respond to comments by U.S. President Donald Trump and others who quickly seized upon the suspects citizenship to argue for changes in immigration laws.

However, The Des Moines Register reports that Tibbetts said he encountered Hispanics at Mexican restaurants and elsewhere who were sensitive and kind during the weeks he spent in the central Iowa community of Brooklyn to help search for his daughter.

The Hispanic community are Iowans. They have the same values as Iowans, he said. As far as Im concerned, theyre Iowans with better food.

The body of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts was found Aug. 21 in a cornfield outside Brooklyn, where she had been staying during her summer break from the University of Iowa. Authorities have said she was abducted while out running July 18, and an autopsy showed that she died from stab wounds.

Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, has been charged with first-degree murder in her death and is being held in lieu of a $5 million (U.S.) cash-only bond. He is suspected of being in the United States illegally.

Read more:

Suspect in Mollie Tibbetts slaying worked on Iowa dairy farm under fake name, employer says

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If convicted of murder, he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Within hours of Riveras arrest, Trump, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and the states two U.S. senators said her death demonstrated the need to change immigration laws. Trump called for the election of more Republicans who would support such changes.

In his address at Brooklyn-Guernsey-Malcom High School, Rob Tibbetts asked mourners to remember his daughter by celebrating something wonderful, rather than focusing on how she died.

Tibbetts urged the audience to remember his daughters passion for life and her desire to help others. To highlight his call to celebrate wonderful things, the father recognized a couple who had just married the day before during his eulogy.

Today, we need to turn the page. Were at the end of a long ordeal, he said. But we need to turn toward life  Mollies life  because Mollie is nobodys victim. Mollie is my hero.

Davenport Bishop Thomas Zinkula led the funeral Mass in the city of 1,500 where Mollie Tibbetts grew up.CHEMNITZ, GERMANYAuthorities in the eastern German city of Chemnitz braced for rival protests Monday night amid tensions over the killing of a German man, for which an Iraqi and a Syrian man have been arrested on charges of manslaughter.

Prosecutor Christine Muecke told reporters that a German man was injured and then died after a verbal confrontation early Sunday had escalated. Two men were taken into custody in connection with the killing  a 22-year-old Syrian and a 21 year-old Iraqi  and they are both being held on suspicion of manslaughter, she said.

She refused to give further details about the suspects or the victim.

The killing prompted spontaneous protests by hundreds of people late Sunday in Chemnitz, a city where almost a quarter of its residents voted for the far-right Alternative for Germany party last year. Videos posted on social media appeared to show far-right protesters threatening and chasing passersby.

Of the 800 people who took to the streets, about 50 were involved in violence and attacked police officers with bottles and stones, police chief Sonja Penzel said.

A Syrian teenager and an Afghan teenager were attacked in separate incidents but were not seriously hurt and a 30-year-old Bulgarian was also threatened, she said.

Penzel said police are still evaluating video footage and called for any witnesses to the violence to come forward.

Police presence was heavy on the streets ahead of renewed protests planned by both far-right and left-wing groups Monday night.

We will not abandon the streets to violent offenders and those spreading chaos, said state Interior Minister Roland Woeller.

Earlier in the day, Chancellor Angela Merkels spokesperson Steffen Seibert strongly condemned Sundays violence.

What was seen yesterday in parts of Chemnitz and what was recorded on video has no place in our country, Seibert told reporters in Berlin.

People ganging up, chasing people who look different from them or who come from elsewhere ... is something we wont tolerate, he said. This has no place in our cities and I can say for the German government that we condemn this in the sharpest possible manner.

Seibert also criticized a far-right lawmaker who had suggested that German authorities were unable to protect citizens.

There is no place in Germany for vigilantism, for groups that want to spread hatred on the streets, for intolerance and racism, said Seibert.

Read more about:In Karnataka, a woman passenger has made allegations against an Ola driver for doing masturbation in front of her. The woman said the driver started doing masturbation after showing her porn. The victim woman used to work in a private company in Bangalore, capital of Karnataka. The Police told, the woman booked Ola cab from Yelhanka new town to JP Nagar, as soon the woman sat in the cab the driver started porn in the phone. He even started doing masturbation while watching the porn.

Ola cab

The woman said, 'When she was near Queen cricle then she noticed through a review mirror that the driver was staring at her. The driver was watching porn taking the phone on left hand that was visible to her also. After that driver opened his paint and started masturbating.'

During this whole incident, the woman was continuously asking the driver to stop the cab but he didn't stop the car and dropped the woman at the destination. After that woman filed an FIR against the driver and currently the police has arrested the driver.

On the other hand, Ola clearly said in a statement that they are with the woman and they threw out the driver from Ola. Ola is even supporting the police in this case. The driver is been identified as Devsammolia. This is to notice that many cases have been raised in the recent past.

Also Read - Teen Murti memorial: 'Don't Wipe Out Nehru's Legacy', PM Modi gets tough message from ex-PMVATICAN CITYThe archbishop of Washington on Monday categorically denied ever being informed that his predecessor had been sanctioned for sexual misconduct, undercutting a key element of a bombshell allegation that Pope Francis covered up clergy abuse.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl issued a statement after the Vaticans former ambassador to the United States accused Pope Francis of effectively freeing ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick from the sanctions in 2013 despite knowing of McCarricks sexual predations against seminarians.

Wuerls denial corresponds with the public record, which provides ample evidence that McCarrick lived a life completely devoid of ecclesiastic restriction after the sanctions were said to have been imposed in 2009 or 2010. That suggests that Pope Benedict XVI either didnt impose sanctions or never conveyed them in any official way to the people who could enforce them  or that McCarrick simply flouted them and Benedicts Vatican was unwilling or unable to stop him.

Read more:

Pope accepts resignation of Theodore McCarrick in wake of sexual abuse allegations

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The claims of the former Vatican ambassador, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, have thrown Francis papacy into crisis, undermining once again his insistence that he is intent on ridding the church of sex abuse and coverup.

His record has taken several hits of late, including his extraordinary misjudgment involving a Chilean bishop, for which he has apologized and taken measures to address. But the McCarrick case is something else entirely, implicating the powerful U.S. hierarchy and the Vatican itself.

The core of Viganos coverup charge against Francis rests on what sanctions, if any, Benedict imposed on McCarrick and what if anything Francis did to alter them, when armed with the same knowledge of McCarricks misdeeds that Benedict had.

Vigano, who was Vatican ambassador from 2011-2016, said he had been told that Benedict imposed sanctions on McCarrick starting in 2009 or 2010, after a decades worth of allegations of misconduct involving adult seminarians had reached the Vatican.

By that time, two New Jersey dioceses had settled complaints of sexual harassment and misconduct against McCarrick lodged by two former seminarians. It was apparently common knowledge that McCarrick would invite seminarians to his New Jersey beach house, and into his bed.

The cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living, he was forbidden to celebrate Mass in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance, Vigano wrote of the Benedict sanctions.

Vigano said he informed Francis of the sanctions in a meeting June 23, 2013.

Holy Father, I dont know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation of Bishops, there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests, and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance, Vigano said.

His version of events was corroborated Monday by a former official in the Vatican embassy in Washington, Monsignor Jean-Francois Lantheaume, who told Catholic News Agency: Vigano said the truth. That is all.

The historic record is rife with evidence that McCarrick had lived under no such restrictions. He travelled widely, including for Catholic Relief Services, the humanitarian branch of the U.S. church. He went to Iran in 2011 with a religious delegation to try to win the release of two American hikers arrested after crossing the border. He celebrated Mass publicly. He travelled to Rome with the entire U.S. conference of bishops for their once-every-five-year visit in 2012 and was even on hand for Benedicts final general audience on Feb. 27, 2013.

In a 2010 video posted on YouTube, McCarrick was shown visiting the national seminary in Haiti that had been damaged earlier by the devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake. The boys are still living in tents, McCarrick said as young Haitian seminarians were shown milling about.

If such sanctions existed, then McCarrick himself has either somehow forgotten he was under sanction, or he is being woefully disobedient, said the Rev. Matt Malone, editor of the Jesuit magazine America, who in a series of 13 tweets provided links to news reports, photos and other evidence of McCarricks very public ministry in the years that he was supposed to be living a lifetime of prayer and penance.

Vigano called for Francis resignation over what he said was his complicity in covering up McCarricks crimes. But if Benedict had the same information and either didnt impose sanctions on him or didnt enforce them, Benedict too could be accused of complicity, or at least negligence.

As the archbishop of Washington, where McCarrick lived, Wuerl presumably would have known about any restrictions on McCarricks ministry, though it would have actually been up to Vigano and his predecessor to impose and enforce them.

The only ground for Cardinal Wuerl to challenge the ministry of Archbishop McCarrick would have been information from Archbishop Vigano or other communications from the Holy See, said a statement from the Washington archdiocese. Such information was never provided.

Canon lawyer Kurt Martens concurred.

Cardinals are exempt from the jurisdiction of the local ordinary, or bishop, Martens said. Thats why a nuncio has to step in on behalf of the Holy Father. A local bishop has no authority over other bishops. You cant control your predecessor.

The Vatican spokesman didnt immediately respond Monday when asked to confirm or deny the existence of any sanctions imposed by Benedict. Francis, for his part, declined to confirm or deny Viganos claims when asked by reporters on the flight home from Ireland on Sunday.

I wont say a word about it, Francis said, urging journalists to read Viganos text and come to a judgment themselves. I think the text speaks for itself.

Viganos bombshell has laid bare how the ideological battle lines drawn between conservatives and progressives over Francis papacy have turned into a full-fledged civil war.

A new episode of internal opposition, the Vatican newspaper lOsservatore Romano said Monday of Viganos allegations.

Francis accepted McCarricks resignation as cardinal last month, after a U.S. church investigation determined that an accusation he had groped a teenager in the 1970s was credible. Up until that allegation involving a minor, the allegations against McCarrick had involved accusations that he slept with adult seminarians  a clear abuse of power, but a much less serious crime in the churchs eyes.GENEVA  Burmas army commander and other top generals should face trial in an international court for genocide against Rohingya Muslims and for crimes against humanity targeting other ethnic minorities, UN experts said Monday after a yearlong investigation.

Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief of Burmas army, is one of six generals named as priority subjects for investigation and prosecution by a UN Fact Finding Mission on Burma in a report detailing military campaigns involving atrocities that undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law.

The three-member panel levelled the most serious charge, genocide, over the ferocious campaign unleashed by the Buddhist-majority security forces against Rohingya Muslims a year ago. That campaign, in the state of Rakhine, sent more than 700,000 fleeing across the border to Bangladesh.

Burma has rejected allegations of widespread atrocities, asserting that its security forces were simply responding to attacks by Rohingya militants on Burma police posts and an army station on Aug. 25, 2017. But the panel said there was enough information to warrant investigation and prosecution of senior officers so that a competent court can determine their liability for genocide.

In an 18-page report released Monday, the panel described the Rakhine operations as a foreseeable and planned catastrophe building on decades of oppression of Rohingya Muslims. Burma has long falsely classified the Rohingya as Bengali immigrants from Bangladesh, denying them citizenship and making them vulnerable to attack.

The panel found evidence of genocidal intent in the operation, citing the prevailing rhetoric of hate directed at the Rohingya and statements by military commanders as well as the level of organization indicating a plan for destruction; and the extreme scale and brutality of the violence.

Read more:

Rohingya refugees demand justice one year after fleeing Burma

Toronto vigil to mark anniversary of Rohingya crisis

Canada must do more to help Burmas persecuted Rohingya minority

The panel said estimates of 10,000 deaths in the Rakhine campaign were conservative.

Burmas civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and other civilian authorities contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes by failing to use their positions to stop them, the panel said.

Burma refused access and co-operation to the investigation.

The panel members said Monday that the Tatmadaw commander should resign as a first step toward achieving accountability for the militarys crimes, but there was no immediate sign of any change in his position of power.

Read more about:The federal government released Canadas first-ever poverty reduction strategy last week, calling it a historic plan to ensure all Canadians can achieve their full potential.

The strategy lays out the goal of cutting the rate of poverty in half across the country by 2030. If it delivers on that promise, it would mean lifting more than two million Canadians out of poverty. Thats certainly a worthy goal.

Opportunity For All  Canadas First Poverty Reduction Strategy, unveiled after almost two years of consultations, finally provides an official benchmark to define poverty in Canada. Thats something that the federal government has never been willing to do before.

The new poverty line is a market basket measure that determines the cost of goods and services, such as shelter, healthy food, clothing and transportation, that Canadians require to meet their basic needs and achieve a modest standard of living. The number varies in cities and communities across the country. Factoring in 50 different regions, the poverty line for a family of four averages out to be $37,500. In Toronto, a more expensive city to live in, that rises to over $40,600.

A target to meet, a new poverty line to clearly define the problem and annual public progress reports to hold the government to account are all useful steps.

The problem lies with the rest of document delivered by Social Development Minister Jean-Yves Duclos.

The strategy basically pulls together all the governments previously announced programs to reduce poverty. There are no new policies and no new funding commitments to improve or speed up current programs.

The government has simply pointed to its $22 billion in previously announced spending for programs, including the Canada Child Benefit, the Guaranteed Income Supplement and a tax befit for low-income workers.

But if Canadas existing programs are up to the task of meeting what Duclos is calling an ambitious but realistic target to reduce poverty, why do we need the strategy at all?

There is a new $12 million investment over five years but thats earmarked for gaps in poverty measurements. So thats money that will help the government produce annual reports but not dollars that will reach people living in poverty.

A broad strategy with measurable targets is useful for keeping governments on track towards important, long-term poverty reduction goals.

But thats cold comfort to the millions of Canadians living in poverty today. They need more immediate relief and, on that front, theres so much the federal government could have included in this long-awaited strategy.

It could have made improvements to Canadas unemployment insurance system, which is so broken most Canadians who become unemployed dont even qualify for benefits.

It could have brought forward some of the back-ended funding for its 10-year national housing strategy or targeted more dollars to producing housing that would actually meet the needs of those with very low incomes.

It could have boosted support for much-needed affordable child care spaces.

Those are measures that would have gone a long way to making Canadas first-ever poverty reduction strategy the all-encompassing blanket needed to address this critical concern instead of an old patchwork quilt.

The strategy says that the federal government will work closely with provinces, territories and municipalities, and will forge strong bonds with Indigenous peoples, stakeholders, charities and community groups on the front lines, and invite the private section to do its part.

But what any of that really means and what, if anything, it will amount to is anyones guess.

So the takeaway from the Opportunity For All strategy really seems to be that Ottawa intends to truck along with current social program investments and see where the numbers land.

Canadians in need deserve better.It is not a Maxime Bernier-led breakaway party that stands to most damage Conservative prospects in Quebec in next years federal election but rather some of leader Andrew Scheers own promises.

In a keynote speech to his partys national convention on Friday, Scheer laid out part of his 2019 battle plan. As expected, it borrows heavily from Ontario Premier Doug Fords successful recipe, starting with a frontal attack on Justin Trudeaus national carbon-pricing policy.

One of the first acts in office of a Scheer-led government would be to abolish the federal carbon tax that Ottawa will apply to provinces that fail to come up with measures of their own to meet the emissions-pricing targets set in the national climate change framework.

In line with his Prairies allies, Scheer would pursue a proactive pipeline agenda. It would include a renewed push to resurrect the plan to connect Western Canadas oilfields to the Atlantic Coast. Last year, TransCanada nixed its planned Energy East pipeline rather than submit it to stringent new climate change standards put in place by the federal regulator.

Scheer argues those standards are designed to stifle the development of new pipelines in Canada. A Conservative government would lower them.

The CPC leader did not talk much about his partys visceral aversion to carbon-pricing or his desire to see the Energy East project rise out of its ashes when he campaigned successfully in a byelection in Chicoutimi-Le Fjord last June. It would not have been a great selling point for his party.

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Given their recent internal distractions, chances are Conservative strategists have not been paying a lot of attention to the ongoing Quebec election campaign.

If they had, they would have noted that, in sharp contrast with comparable provincial jurisdictions such as Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick and Alberta, the desirability of either carbon pricing or new pipelines is not on the electoral radar.

Thats because there is not a party bent on watering down or eliminating the provinces carbon pricing policy on the Quebec ballot. None of the parties represented in the National Assembly is proposing to follow Ontarios suit by doing away with the provinces cap-and-trade system. Regardless of who leads the government after Oct. 1, Quebec will not be pulling out of the federal climate change framework.

The province set out to put a price on carbon a decade ago and no party is looking to turn the clock back on those efforts. In Quebec, advocating for carbon-pricing policies makes for good politics; promoting pipelines not so much.

Last spring, an Ipsos poll done for La Presse reported that 66 per cent of Quebecers would find it acceptable to slow the provinces economy to protect the environment and mitigate the impact of climate change. The same poll found solid public support for Quebecs robust environmental movement.

Back when Energy East was still on the books, the Parti Quebecois asked the National Assembly to come together to oppose the project. At the time, the ruling Liberals and the Coalition Avenir Quebec joined forces to defeat the PQ motion. But TransCanadas announcement that it was killing the pipeline inspired more relief than regret in both parties. Premier Philippe Couillard commented that the decision did not amount to much of a loss to Quebec.

Since that announcement, none of the provincial parties has stepped forward to champion a revival of the project. Of the four main leaders, the PQs Jean-Francois Lisee is the only one who has cause to dream of seeing the pipeline bid resurface. He would relish the opportunity to campaign against it.

As Scheer sets out to turn next years federal campaign into a plebiscite on Trudeaus climate change policy, he should expect little or no help from Quebecs political class. And if he becomes prime minister, he may be hard-pressed to find any support for bringing Energy East back to life in the provinces capital.

The Conservative plan to retreat from carbon pricing while making it easier for pipeline promoters to pass the federal regulatory test would turn a hard-to-sell project into one that no Quebec premier intent on his political survival would touch with a 10-foot pole.

That includes the leading CAQ. If he does win the election later this year, Francois Legault has no intention of becoming a one-term premier; a blip on the radar that only appeared long enough for the other two main parties to regroup and get their respective acts together.

The CAQ may be the most pipeline-friendly option on the Quebec ballot, but Legault knows a poison pill when he is presented with one.

Chantal Hebert is a columnist based in Ottawa covering politics. Follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert

Read more about:Two down, 11 statues still standing.

Thats how many can be found of our founder, Sir John A. Macdonald, across Canada, after Victoria city hall banished his visage in a gesture of truth and reconciliation with Indigenous people.

Do we really want to wipe out every last trace of him in all public places? Starting with the statue that dominates Queens Park in the centre of Toronto, culminating with all the schools named after him (as Ontarios biggest teachers union demands)?

Wilfrid Laurier University purged another statue of our first prime minister in 2016, again because of Macdonalds complicity in creating the residential schools that devastated Indigenous communities. But the universitys decision set an interesting precedent, for what if Lauriers legacy as our seventh prime minister is later challenged  will it prompt an awkward name change on campus?

Revisiting, revising and rewriting history is nothing if not polarizing. It brings out the best in us (prompting a rethink of Canadian history lessons we neglected), but also the worst in us (poking people in the eye).

The outcry over Macdonalds banishment from Victoria created an opening for Premier Doug Ford to play a political game of his own: His new Progressive Conservative government mischievously offered to adopt the orphaned statue and give it a home in Ontario.

Thus did Ford cheerfully drive a wedge of his own over the prime minister who drove the last spike on the old Canadian Pacific Railway that bound British Columbia to the rest of the country. Another lesson in the power of history to impinge on the present.

Have your say:

In Victoria, local councillors announced the uprooting after pondering the issue with Indigenous interlocutors, but without notice to the general public. At Queens Park, provincial cabinet ministers offered to rescue the statue without consulting anyone  Indigenous or otherwise  pandering without first pondering the implications.

Yes, Victoria politicians acted in haste, trying too hard to please everyone while placating no one. But Ontarios Conservatives acted unnecessarily unilaterally, as the provinces only Indigenous MPP noted pointedly to the premier during the legislatures daily Question Period.

In todays era of reconciliation, which First Nations leaders did this government consult with about this matter that will affect the relationship between peoples before acting quickly on behalf of the statue? asked New Democrat Sol Mamakwa, who represents the mostly Indigenous northern riding of Kiiwetinoong. Ford didnt deign to answer, just he never bothered to consult anyone before abolishing the stand-alone cabinet post for Indigenous affairs.

Truth and reconciliation must be more than a slogan. If we are to be true to the idea of truth, we cannot forget that reconciliation requires consultation and persuasion.

Ontario is already home to all but three of the 11 Macdonald statues that remain standing across Canada, and while I dont support removing any of them, do we really need to add more at this precise time? Weve done it before, albeit without historical controversy  King Edward VII on horseback looms over Queens Park, relocated to Toronto after postindependence India severed its colonial links by uprooting the statue.

Today, Macdonalds dehumanizing descriptions of Indigenous savages in Parliamentary debates are cited as evidence of the prime ministerial contempt that underpinned residential schools. But such rhetoric was commonplace in the House of Commons back then  and by that decontextualized standard, we would have to indict (and uproot) not one but all the Fathers of Confederation.

If Macdonald was a product  and politician  of his times, how do we explain the assimilationist rhetoric of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau and his minister of Indian Affairs, Jean Chretien,who argued in a controversial 1969 White Paper for the demolition of reservations and assimilation of their residents? Well keep them in the ghetto as long as they want, the prime minister said dismissively in 1970 when he was forced to back down.

Other countries that have tried to cleanse historical crimes or attenuate blunders have arrived at artful ways of placing those transgressions in context  by balancing the good with the bad in their political legacies. The founder of Communist China, Mao Zedong, is today described by the regime as having been 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong. Whether that ratio is about right, or perhaps reversed, the point is that it wrestles with the vagaries of leadership.

Politics is always followed by historical reckonings  if not always reconciliations. Perhaps thats why the former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Sen. Murray Sinclair, has publicly opposed the removal of statues, arguing it is counterproductive to reconciliation  and smacks of revenge.

Removing statues precipitously, or reinstating them provocatively, wont advance our understanding of history, or each other. History is about changing contexts and interpretations.

All the more reason to update our interpretations, not tear down images whose context is rooted in an earlier time.

Read more about:The most troubling issue in many European cities these days is not migrants, its tourists. From Barcelona to Venice, Paris to Amsterdam, visiting hordes have residents up in arms. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of out-of-towners, locals everywhere are fighting to reclaim their cities from the disruptive forces of industrial-scale tourism.

If ever there was a case of too much of a good thing, this is it. However much money tourists contribute to municipal coffers, it comes at a heavy cost.

As Europeans have discovered, tourism exacerbates inequality. It exerts intolerable pressure on cities: Housing shortages are worsened, inadequate transit systems are overwhelmed, as is the public realm  from cultural landmarks to streets, sidewalks, parks and squares. Little wonder residents feel like strangers in their own hometown.

Last year, Amsterdam introduced regulations designed to stop new tourist-oriented stores from opening in the citys historic centre. In Paris, the Mona Lisa smiles wanly through a veil of flash bulbs. Poor, beautiful Venice is drowning in tourists at the same moment its sinking into the sea.

The paradox of tourism, of course, is that it destroys the very reasons it exists. Closer to home, we got a taste of that this summer when a field of sunflowers in Flamborough, Ont., was overrun by mobs of selfie-seekers. One Saturday, upwards of 7,000 showed up. When a local highway became a parking lot, police moved in and the place was shut down.

Read more:

Crowds of selfie-seekers just forced this Hamilton-area sunflower farm to ban photography for the season

How throngs of Game of Thrones fans threaten a magical Croatian city

Tourism helped Iceland recover from crash, but some residents have had enough

But in an era of cheap flights and an ever-expanding middle-class  in Asia if not North America  everybody wants the experience of greatness. These cities possess the civic equivalent of celebrity. They are famous for being famous, but, unlike human celebrities, accessible for the price of a plane ticket and an Airbnb apartment.

The latest trend in tourism  set-jetting  results from the sudden popularity of cities and sites used in film or TV. The best example is Iceland, featured prominently in Game of Thrones. According to a 2017 FocusEconomics report: Many of Icelands glaciers, lakes and national parks serve as the backdrop for the lands beyond the wall ... (and have) given rise to massive increases in tourism as the shows many diehard fans from around the world make pilgrimages.

Since 2016, tourism in Iceland has grown more than 70 per cent. Last year, visitors outnumbered residents seven to one. Tourism is credited with saving the countrys economy after its banks collapsed in 2008.

The problem now is that tourism is affecting housing and rental prices, and the overall cost of living, as prices for staple goods rise due to significantly increased demand ... although the economy is doing well, risks of overheating are a clear concern.

Dealing with whats now called over-tourism wont be easy. How can a city keep tourists away without turning itself into a walled encampment? Some manage better than others. Ideally, the sites that draw crowds are spread out over a wide area. In the confined spaces of the traditional European historic centre, however, thats rarely possible. But in New York, where attractions can be found from one end of Manhattan to the other, the presence of tourist hordes is less oppressive.

It helps, too, when a community has its own issues sorted out. The more robust a citys infrastructure  transit, housing, public space  the better its chances of surviving and thriving in the age of mass tourism. Given that 10 per cent of the planets economy is based on tourism, its unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Have your say

Clearly, the problems of urban success must be addressed. When giant cruise ships arrive in centuries-old cities, their wake does damage even before they disgorge their sightseeing armies.

Venice and Santorini in Greece have severely limited the access these Brobdingnagian boats formerly enjoyed. Others are considering a similar move. Some cities now insist Airbnb demand minimum six-month leases. More are imposing tourism taxes to offset the industrys impact on living costs.

Finding a balance will be tough. Many European cities rely on tourist dollars. But that doesnt make watching a city being loved to death any less painful. You cant help but wonder why we still travel to these cities, especially at high season. At some point, surely, well tire of sharing our holidays with hordes of fellow travellers? Then, perhaps, we will finally understand what Yogi Berra meant when he said, Nobody goes there anymore. Its too crowded.Dear readers, I dont want Canadian journalism to vanish into the ether and neither do you. Protecting it is in everyones interest, yours and, admittedly, mine.

The Star is asking readers to register, which means signing up for free for full access online. Yes, at some point youll be asked to pay for a subscription but not yet.

Expecting free online journalism is something that snuck up on all of us. We used to buy it without question. Journalism was basic to our lives, like bath towels and the CBC. And snow shovelling. And horrible egg salad sandwiches. The only thing we expected for free was water, and then they bottled it.

Times changed. The expectation of free journalism is wrecking a business being crunched and crushed by the disappearance of paid advertising. This comes at the worst possible time.

News is booming. Theres fire, flood and pestilence, Trump Trump Trump, whoever the Americans are bombing today, your mortgage, your savings, big crimes, little crimes, who Putin has poisoned, what species are dying, what Prime Minister Trudeau said, the Conservative split, low sperm counts, international migrants, water shortages, quarrels minor and major, taxation, private affluence, public squalor, Space Force, child abuse revelations, women and men fighting for womens rights, the return of hats, horror in Yemen, and so on, endlessly.

I read news all day and it feels like running in a swimming pool.

Theres always Premier Doug Fords personal propaganda channel, Ontario News One, in which a fake reporter  she studied journalism at Seneca College, mores the pity  offers only clubhouse political advertising.

But for actual reporting of stories, the kind where people and political parties freely disagree, youll go elsewhere.

I admire great journalism but there are some stories that stay in your mind forever. In 2017, Star investigative reporter Brendan Kennedy looked into the death of a fragile Ontario woman in jail. What happened to Teresa Gratton?

Kennedy did the most delicate thing. He meticulously traced and painted a womans life that progressed downwards in small steps: her husbands back injury, her anxiety, credit card debt, a disagreement over cheques, opioid dependency, eviction, shoplifting for food and clothing, jail, a transfer to a distant jail, where, abandoned by her doctors and guards, she began an appalling withdrawal from prescribed opioids. She died alone.

Everyones life can go wrong in baby steps. It starts out with one unfortunate thing, then another, and another. Suddenly youre in freefall.

Kennedys story was important to me because it taught me how everyone can fall, the poor, the rich and the simply unlucky. If this story didnt stick with you, others have, Im sure. They appeared in competing newspapers, too, and theyre all worth reading and paying for.

I recall a novelist, a smart good person, complaining about the Globe and Mail paywall blocking her from reading a column about publishing. She said it was annoying and rude, and the Guardian (free) was so much better, politely asking for donations.

But she herself does not write for free. She lives on what readers pay for her novels. So why expect journalists to write for free?

Newspaper companies provide the structure on which journalism is built. They pay for technology, offices, Brendan Kennedys and their editors, a water fountain, lawyers, sales staff, data analysis, a code of ethics, a public editor to build reader trust, hourly information distribution, and a system where reporters can write damaging things about powerful institutions and know they have big-league backup.

The Star is asking readers to register, so it knows who its readers are, their neighbourhoods, and what they like to read.

And for readers who dont like bits of the Star, including my column  congratulations if youve read this far  heres a hack.

Register or subscribe and then read what you like. Dont read what you dislike. The Stars keeping track, as am I.

So you can, in the polite passive-aggressive way thats very Canadian, vote me down. Including when I write about drunken Scots like Sir John A. Macdonald. Im part-Scottish, Im tough and I can take it.

And then, in this new once-again-profitable world of journalism, lets all get along famously.A US drone strike killed an ISIS affiliate - Abu Sayeed Orakzai in Afghanistan on Sunday.

Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani's deputy spokesperson announced the death of Orakzai, US Forces-Afghanistan spokesman Lt. Col. Martin O'Donnell was quoted as saying by the Fox News.

"I would also add that the United States unrelentingly continues its counterterrorism efforts against ISIS-K, Al-Qaeda, and other regional and international terrorist groups," O'Donnell said in a statement.

The ISIS-K leader was responsible for a number of bombings that claimed lives of hundreds of civilians.

Ten other ISIS fighters were also killed in the airstrikes, which was launched in the Nangarhar province, near the border with Pakistan.

The air strikes by the US military in Afghanistan has been increased over the past year.

(ANI)BETHALTO  1st MidAmerica Credit Union will be presenting a free seminar on estate planning on Tuesday, Sept. 11.

At the event, attendees will learn how to leave assets to loved ones or charity in the most efficient manner possible.

All are welcome at this informative seminar, but space is limited. Call 618-258-3168 ex. 1459 or email RSVP@1stMidAmeirca.org to reserve your seat.

As part of 1st MidAmericas commitment to financial education, several seminars are held throughout the year and cover various topics such as cyber security and identity theft and improving credit. All seminars are free to the public. Visit https://www.1stmidamerica.org/home.html for future seminar dates.

1st MidAmerica Credit Union is a not-for-profit financial cooperative that currently serves more than 66,000 members through 13 Illinois branches in Illinois and Missouri, with a mission of exceeding member expectations. Membership is open to residents of 21 counties in central Illinois and one county in western Missouri. For more information about 1st MidAmerica Credit Union visit www.1stMidAmerica.org.WOOD RIVER  The Madison County Health Department is again seeking volunteers to help in the event of a public health emergency.

The department will hold volunteer orientation training for its Medical Reserve Corps from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 12 at the Health Department, located in the Wood River Annex Building at 101 E. Edwardsville Road, Wood River.

We want to have volunteers who are prepared to prevent disease and protect the publics health, Cathy Paone, Madison County Medical Reserve Corps Volunteer Coordinator with the Health Department, said. It is critical to our emergency response. We also want our volunteers to be able to engage in other capacities as volunteers to help impact the health of our residents on a daily basis.

In the event of a public health emergency volunteers would assist the Health Department in providing medication. There are currently 325 members of the MRC, but more are needed because of the countys size, according Health Promotion Manager Amy Yeager.

In the event of a public health emergency volunteers would assist the Health Department in providing medication.

Theyre very important, she said of the MRC volunteers. We have 36 employees and 270,000 residents. If we should have some kind of public health emergency theres no way that 36 of us can do that.

She said that for their worst-case scenario about 600 volunteers would be needed.

Volunteers will learn about the MRC, Public Health Emergency Response, Strategic National Stockpile, Incident Command System, Points of Dispensing and Family Preparedness.

To attend the training, contact Cathy Paone, Madison County Medical Reserve Corps Volunteer Coordinator at (618) 296-6096 or cmpaone@co.madison.il.us. Advanced registration is required to attend the training. Seating is limited and the registration deadline is Wednesday, Sept. 5.

The recruitment and training is part of the larger National Preparedness Month in September.

In general, the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and other agencies and groups dealing with disaster preparedness say that people must be able to survive on their own for a minimum of three days in the event of a widespread disaster, such as an earthquake or tornado.

The plan includes making sure everybody knows how to get out of the house in an emergency, where to meet and who to call.

Having an emergency preparedness kit is also important.

While most homes would have most of the items needed, a key is keeping them in a central and easily accessible location, as well as storing them properly.

If forced to leave your home, emergency evacuation kits are often referred to as go bags, bug-out bags, or GOOD (for Get out of Dodge): bags, and include the basics needed to get by.

Lists of recommended supplies can be found at various websites, and pre-made bug-out bags can be purchased at a wide variety of outlets.

Preparedness tips and information are also available through the Ready Illinois web page at www.illinois.gov/ready.GRANITE CITY  Whether it is an old drug conviction that is hampering a persons ability improve their employment opportunities, or an outstanding traffic ticket that wont go away, hundreds of Madison County residents got a chance for a second chance in Granite City Saturday.

The third Second Chance Saturday brought in almost 400 Madison County residents to the Granite City Township building in Granite City. The event allows eligible county residents to start the process to expunge or seal criminal records and resolve outstanding traffic warrants, criminal warrants and ordinance violations.

One Collinsville resident came to deal with an outstanding traffic violation.

I had a seat belt violation, she said. Im coming here to get it off my record because I dont have time to take off work. Its really great to come down here on Saturday and do this in one go.

Another woman, an Alton resident, was having a drug-related charge from the 2000s expunged.

Now in graduate school, she is working as a paralegal and said the charges, which stemmed from an addiction problem, have hampered her.

Ive been clean and sober for over two years, and Im really happy that this has happened, she said. It gives me a chance to move forward in life. It also gives my daughter something to look up to, to know that if I can overcome hurdles then so can she.

There was a constant parade of people Saturday, with participants coming in and talking to attorneys and others, then filing paperwork. At the same time the volunteers were moving from spot to spot dealing with issues as they came up.

More than 80 volunteers and employees of the Madison County States Attorneys Office, Madison County Circuit Clerk, Madison County Third Judicial Circuit Court and lawyers from Simmons Hanly Conroy and the Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation were on hand to help. Previous events were held in Alton and Venice.

Other services, including employment assistance and voter registration, were available, and a bounce house kept some of the kids busy while the adults got things done.

This is critically important, said Ted Gianaris, a partner at Simmons Hanly Conroy, and one of the event founders and organizers. A run-in with police is a regrettable incident, but a record that is 10 or 20 years old can be so hampering that a person cant reintegrate to society. We help people get second chances so they can get their lives back.

He noted that the people at the event were not career criminals, and many times dont realize the impact an old record can have.

You cant apply for certain jobs, you cant get certain licenses, you cant apply for certain help, you might not be able to be a foster parent if you have certain things on your record, he said. There is all kinds of collateral damage from an old police record. The more people we can help get that off their record so they can start fresh, the better.

We love it when we help one person, but here we help hundreds of people, he added.

About 270 people had pre-registered, and another 100 walk-ins were expected, said Chief Circuit Judge David Hylla, one of several Madison County judges on hand.

It keeps getting bigger, he said. We were expecting about a 50 percent increase from last year in Venice, and it looks like were going to get it. Its a lot better for people to come in today and address warrants rather than be picked up on the street and taken to jail. And when they go for a job interview and somebody checks on them, they dont see that they have an outstanding warrant and theyre out the door before they can even fill out the forms.

Hylla explained that some criminal records could be sealed, meaning those records would only be opened on a judges orders. Judges have wide discretion but some records cannot be sealed; including sex crimes, crimes involving animals and domestic violence cases.

Non-convictions, such as warrants and arrests, can be expunged, meaning that with a few exceptions, they disappear.

Prosecutors from the Madison County States Attorneys Office were dealing with traffic, failure to appear and other minor criminal warrants.

Its important to clear the system of active warrants, said First Assistant Madison County States Attorney Jennifer Mudge. We have a full jail and the more people that get arrested on something small like a traffic warrant, the more clogged up it gets.

At Saturdays events people started the process toward sealing or expungement. Hylla said there is a 60-day waiting period, in which the Illinois State Police, Madison County States Attorneys Office or local police departments can object to specific records. A hearing will be held, probably sometime in February, on those cases. If approved by a judge the process, which can take from several months to several years before final resolution, continues.

I think its fantastic, said Chief Criminal Judge Rich Tognarelli, who would occasionally sign a court order brought in by volunteers.

These are all people who would be in our courtroom, he said. Not that were crazy about being here on Saturdays, but we can get a lot of minor things resolved that take up court time that doesnt need to be taken.

Both Tognarelli and Hylla said it is easy for people to be overwhelmed by the court system, and the casual experience at Second Chance Saturday is a benefit.

For some there is an added benefit.

Mudge said it was a chance to talk to people they normally sit across the courtroom from.

We dont get a lot of face-to-face time with defendants, and we dont hear thank you very much, she said. Every one of these people who have walked away from the table said thank you.

Reach reporter Scott Cousins at 618-208-6447.CHICAGO  Attorney General Lisa Madigan today launched a Clergy Abuse Hotline for anyone in the state of Illinois to report allegations of sexual abuse by clergy members.

Madigan urged Illinois residents to call her Clergy Abuse Hotline at 1-888-414-7678 with any information on allegations of sexual assault and abuse. The hotline will be answered by trained staff in Madigans office during business hours. Messages left on the hotline will be returned if contact information is provided. People can also send emails to clergyabuse@atg.state.il.us. Madigans office will refer allegations to states attorneys as appropriate.ALTON  HotelsCombined, the Australian-based hotel meta-search company, has awarded the Beall Mansion An Elegant Bed & Breakfast Inn the 2018 HotelsCombined Recognition of Excellence. This is the second year in a row the property has received the honor.

The award is in recognition for consistently achieving the highest standards of Customer Satisfaction worldwide. HotelsCombined undertook the largest analysis of customer opinions online  across millions of points of data  providing a complete and comprehensive understanding of over 1,000,000 hotels worldwide.

In a letter to The Beall Mansion, HotelsCombined Award Program Manager Melinda Balazs said they found and processed 450 opinions that guests have posted on a variety of different websites, forums and social media, resulting in an incredible score of 10 out of a possible 10. You are now representing the top 3% of accommodations worldwide for customer satisfaction.

We can think of no better way of celebrating the 20th anniversary of opening The Beall Mansion as a bed and breakfast inn than by receiving this award, Beall Mansion owners Jim and Sandy Belote said. It says to the world that Alton, IL and the St. Louis area can compete with the best of the best  including Chicago, New York, Cancun, Dubai, Paris, London, Venice, Barcelona Prague, Singapore, and Tokyo. It is more than just recognition of The Beall Mansion. It is recognition of our region as a world class destination. It is recognition of the tireless efforts of countless organizations and individuals that have worked so hard to make it so.

We would like to thank our incredible staff including our assistants Marilou Fine and Gemma Reed, Alton Regional Convention & Visitors Bureau, St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission, and of course our tens of thousands of valued guests.

Previous 2018 Beall Mansion honors and awards include TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence, TripAdvisor Hall of Fame, 50 Best B&Bs in America and Best B&B in Illinois  The Daily Meal.

In 2014 the Belotes were honored at the Governors Conference on Travel and Tourism with a Lincoln Award Gold Medal  the highest award provided by the state of Illinois for Excellence in Travel and Tourism.

We are thrilled to be working with the best hotels in the United States and Beall Mansion An Elegant Bed & Breakfast Inn is certainly among them, Alberto Castellucchio, market manager of HotelsCombined United States concluded. With HotelsCombined, 30 million people are finding the best deal available on-line every month. With this award, wed like to make it even easier for every traveler to identify the best hotels for customer service and therefore the best value for their money.SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE  It was a full hangar at Scott Air Force Base Friday as the United States Transportation Command met for a Change of Command Ceremony. The ceremony marked the end of General Darren McDews time as commander and the start of General Stephen R. Lyons command.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis and General Joseph Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attended the ceremony. Representatives from the command as well as several civilians attended, including the mayors of several local communities and U.S. Congressman John Shimkus.

The Scott band was joined by band members from Fort Leonard Wood and provided music during the ceremony.

USTRANSCOMM, as the Transportation Command is known, is based at Scott Air Force Base. It is one of nine U.S. unified combatant commands under the Department of Defense. It is responsible for the transportation needs of Department of Defense.

During an average week, according to USTRANSCOMM, it conducts more than 1,900 air missions with 25 ships underway and 10,000 ground shipments operation in 75 percent of the worlds countries.

If you have any doubts about the military, look at the capability of this team, Mattis said. They are the ones that I call miracle workers.

He continued, The ability to quickly move troops and supplies has been key to defense. This group is no stranger to logistic feats of impressive proportions.

Mattis had words of praise for McDew.

In your words, you were built to be here at Scott, he said. He noted that McDew has been in the service for 36 years in a variety of positions.

Your leadership style fosters collaboration, Mattis said. America and our allies felt the effect of your command every day.

Mattis then presented McDew with the Defense Distinguished Service Medal.

McDew spoke next. First, he thanked his wife and family for standing by him through 36 years of service. He praised the work of USTRANSCOMM.

We dont just deliver stuff, we deliver options. When the U.S. promises something, we deliver.

He said that USTRANSCOMM helps the U.S. in projecting power and promoting hope.

After McDew received his final salute from the men and women of USTRANSCOMM, the formal change of command took place as McDew presented the units flag to Lyons.

After a short stint at the Pentagon, its good to be home, said Lyons, who has previously served at Scott.

Lyons is the first Army General to lead the command. I am honored and humbled to stand where so many great leader have stood before me and so many will follow, he said.

He said that although the unit will always change, the number one priority will remain, and that is to maintain war-fighting readiness.

Our goal is project and sustain military power, Lyons said. Together, we will continue to deliver, and always we will honor our nation as we treat everyone with dignity and respect.

At a press conference after the ceremony, Lyons said that being the first commander of the unit from the Army would not affect his command. This is not about the branch, he said.

He also said again that returning to Scott was like returning home for him. This area has one of the strongest civilian/military relationships Ive seen in my 35 years as a soldier, he said.Photo credit L. Allen Klope|For The Telegraph

Morgan Bemis of Alton has been named a STAR Scholar by the International Chapter of P.E.O.

Nominated by P.E.O. Chapter IL, Bemis was among more than 2,000 candidates in the United States and Canada and was selected to receive the prestigious award, based on excellence in leadership, academics, extracurricular activities, community service and potential for future success. The recognition includes a $2,500 college scholarship.External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj is likely to meet her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi in New York next month, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly's (UNGA).

Both the foreign ministers will be present at the 73rd session of the UNGA which will begin on September 18.

The development comes days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Imran Khan on being sworn-in as the new Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Last week, Pakistan signaled that Imran Khan may not be able to attend the meet in order to cut down government expenses. However, senior Pakistani diplomats urged him to reconsider the decision, saying that representing Pakistan was not a waste of funds, particularly on key issues like Kashmir and Afghanistan, Dawn reported.

Earlier on August 22, Khan expressed interest with regards to a meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi, stating that both the countries must engage in dialogue to resolve their differences.

(ANI)Stanbic Bank UgandaLimited is a subsidiary of Stanbic Africa Holdings Limited which is in turnowned by Standard Bank Group Limited (the Group), Africas leading bankingand financial services group. The Standard Bank Group is the leading bankinggroup focused on emerging markets. It is the largest African banking group rankedby assets and earnings. Stanbic Bank Uganda Limited is the largest bank inUganda by assets and market capitalization. It offers a full range of bankingservices through two business units; Personal and Business Banking (PBB), andCorporate and Investment Banking (CIB).The Senior Technical Advisor, Health Financingshall be responsible for assisting the COP in program development andimplementation of health financing interventions. S/he will contributeleadership and technical assistance to the Ministry of Health to ensureaffordable EMHS availability in an equitable manner to the people of Uganda andensure optimal use and management of limited resources at all levels. S/he willcontribute to the development and implementation of policies, approaches andstrategies that will strengthen the financing and financial management of EMHS.The Planning & Reporting Analyst will preparethe Business Plan and forecasts as well as monitor company performance andbusiness environment; interpret data concerning customers, channels,competition and the macro-environment into relevant, accurate and usablestrategic knowledge.Floods in Kerala have damaged paddy, banana, spices and other crops in about 45,000 hectares of farmland, Agriculture Secretary Shobhana K. Pattanayak said on Monday.

The Kerala government has been asked to submit a detailed proposal seeking Central funds to provide relief to the growers, he said.

"The state has estimated damage to 45,000 hectares of farmland. We have also got the same report. More than crops, the damage to houses and other infrastructure is more in Kerala," Pattanayak told PTI.

Paddy has been affected in 20,000 hectares and even banana plantations have been hit badly. Spices like cardamom have been affected in 2,000 hectares or so, he said.

As per the official data, area sown to paddy crop in Kerala stood at 57,000 hectares till last week in the current season, lower than 62,000 hectares in the same period a year ago.

The sowing of paddy, the main kharif crop, begins with the onset of the south-west monsoon from July and harvesting is done from October onwards.

The timber industry in Kerala also suffered massive losses in the floods, with an initial assessment showing 50 plywood companies had suffered a loss of nearly Rs 80 crore.

Hundreds of workers have been affected as work has come to a standstill as the floods crippled timber companies in different parts of Ernakulam district like Vazhakulam and Perumbavoor.

The Saw Mill Owners and Plywood Manufacturers Association President M.M. Mujib Rehman said each company incurred a loss of Rs 50 lakh to Rs 2 crore. A primary conclusion is that each of its 35 member companies had suffered an average loss of Rs 2 crore and the rest lost Rs 50 lakh each.

(With inputs from PTI and onmanorama)The adage that failures can teach many lessons seems quite...India and Pakistan will hold the 115th meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) in Lahore from August 29 to 30, to discuss various issues under Indus Waters Treaty.

A nine-member Indian delegation, led by Indian Commissioner for Indus Waters, PK Saxena, and comprising technical experts will arrive in Lahore for the annual meeting on August 28. The Pakistani side will be led by their Indus Commissioner, Syed Muhammad Mehar Ali Shah.

PIC was formed under Indus Waters Treaty, signed between India and Pakistan in 1960, it includes the Indus commissioners of both the countries. The treaty provides for both the commissioners to meet at least once every year, alternately in India and Pakistan.

The treaty specifies that the waters of three eastern rivers namely Ravi, Beas and Sutlej, had been reserved for India while that of western rivers, namely Indus, Chenab and Jhelum, are for Pakistan. However, India has unrestricted rights to develop hydroelectric power projects on the western rivers, within the specified parameters of design.

Pakistan contends that the design of two under-construction hydroelectric projects of India in Chenab basin, namely Pakal Dul (1000MW) and Lower Kalnai (48MW), violate the treaty's provisions, while the Indian side affirms its right to build these projects and holds that their design is fully in compliance of set guidelines.

The Commission is likely to hold technical discussions on the issues raised by Pakistan on these two projects. Other regular issues like data exchange and programs of tours and meetings are also likely to be taken up.

The previous meeting of the PIC was held in New Delhi from March 29 to 30, 2018.

(ANI)The first Indian in space aboard an Indian space shuttle could be a woman, said Jitendra Singh, Union minister of state for space. He was talking at an interaction organised by the Indian Women's Press Corps (IWPC) on Monday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced in his Independence Day address from the Red Fort that India's human space mission would happen by 2022.

Singh said that the mission date could be a little before or a little after 2022. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) would be in charge of the mission. The space agency has been getting its technologies ready towards this goal for the last several years.

India's first man in space was Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma, but he flew aboard a Soviet spacecraft in 1984.

Two women of Indian originHaryana-born Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams, born to an Indian fatherhave been spacefarers with NASA missions.

India has not sent a human aboard its own spacecraft, yet.

Singh said that the modality of the mission was still being worked out. At this stage, it is not clear whether the astronauts would be selected from the Indian Air Force (IAF). The IAF has a cadre of women pilots, and they have now also got inducted into the fighter pilot branch. Modi had also announced at the I-Day address that women would be given a permanent commission in military.Pope Francis has decided not to respond to the allegations of cover up of sexual abuse against children by a top Vatican official. He commented, while on the papal plane, that the allegations "speak for itself".

Francis said he would "not say one word" on the 11-page document prepared by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano demanded his resignation. He asked journalists to read the document carefully and decide for themselves its credibility.

The former Vatican ambassador to Washington accused the pope of having known the allegations of sex abuse by a US cardinal for years.

I read that statement this morning. I read it and I will say sincerely that I must say this, to you (the reporter) and all of you who are interested: read the document carefully and judge it for yourselves, he said.

I will not say one word on this. I think the statement speaks for itself and you have sufficient journalistic capacity to reach your own conclusions, he said.

In a detailed 11-page bombshell statement given to conservative Roman Catholic media outlets during the popes visit to Ireland, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano accused a long list of current and past Vatican and US Church officials of covering up the case of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who resigned last month in disgrace.

In remarkably blunt language, Vigano said alleged cover-ups in the Church were making it look like a conspiracy of silence not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia.

Pope Francis has repeatedly asked for total transparency in the Church, wrote Vigano, who has criticised the pope before.

In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, his extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarricks abuses and resign along with all of them, Vigano said.

The statement, which contained no supporting documents, was the latest blow to the credibility of the US Church. Nearly two weeks ago, a grand jury in Pennsylvania released the findings of the largest-ever investigation of sex abuse in the US Catholic Church, finding that 301 priests in the state had sexually abused minors over the past 70 years.The United Nations' investigators have called for the prosecution of Myanmar's commander-in-chief and five generals for the mass killings and gang rapes of the Muslim Rohingya community in the country. The investigators said in a report the atrocities were carried out with "genocidal intent" and that the civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi allowed hate speech to thrive.

The report said Suu Kyi's government destroyed documents and failed to protect minorities from crimes against humanity and war crimes by the army in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan states. In doing so, it contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes, the report said.

Government troops had led a brutal crackdown in Myanmar's Rakhine state in response to attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on Myanmar police posts and military base.

Some 700,000 Rohingya fled the crackdown and most are now living in refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh.

The UN report said the military action, which included the scorching of villages, was grossly disproportionate to actual security threats.

The United Nations defines genocide as acts meant to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part. Such a designation is rare under international law, but has been used in countries including Bosnia and Sudan and in the Islamic State campaign against the Yazidi communities in Iraq and Syria.

The crimes in Rakhine State, and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts, said the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar.

In the final 20-page report, it said: There is sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the Tatmadaw (army) chain of command, so that a competent court can determine their liability for genocide in relation to the situation in Rakhine state.

The Myanmar government, which was sent an advance copy of the UN report in line with standard practice, has not commented.

(With inputs from Reuters)Lucknow, Aug 27 (PTI) The Uttar Pradesh government has launched a number of schemes to take the state to the top position in the country's tourism sector, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said today.

Addressing the inuagural function of the fourth edition of

the Uttar Pradesh Travel Mart (UPTM) 2018, Adityanath said, "The current state government is striving to make UP the number state in the country in the tourism sector. UP is an extremely rich state

from the tourism point of view."

"The state government has come out with various schemes for development of tourism," he added.

The state government has decided to enhance air connectivity by developing new airports at Bareilly, Moradabad, Aligarh and Azamgarh, Adityanath said.

Apart from these locations, the process of developing international airports at Jewar in NCR Delhi and Kushinagar has already been initiated. This will boost tourism, he said.

Adityanath also said that the state government has accorded

the highest priority to the safety and security of tourists.

He said Pravasi Bhartiya Divas in January 2019 slated to be

organised in Varanasi and the Kumbh Mela (in Allahabad)

which is expected to attract 12 crore pilgrims and visitors

from across the country and overseas would be the USP of Uttar

Pradesh, as it strives to achieve the top slot in terms of

domestic and foreign visitor arrivals.

The Chief Minister said the state government had chalked

out a programme for the envoys of 192 countries to visit

Prayag (Allahabad) in December 2018 to get a first-hand

experience of the spiritual dimensions of the state.

UP tourism minister Rita Bahuguna Joshi pointed out that

the state was gearing towards establishing world-class

infrastructure in the next two years.

She said that tourism infrastructure development proposals

worth Rs 20,000 crore have been generated from the recently

concluded UP Tourism Investors Summit.

"The state tourism department was fast moving towards

concretising the MoUs arrived at during the summit," she said.

PTI NAV MRColombo, Aug 27 (PTI) Sri Lanka's former strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa today said President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe should part their ways after some members of the ruling alliance joined the opposition to defeat a report on the delimitation of electorates in provincial councils.

The Delimitation Commission Report on Provincial Councils was defeated in Parliament last week after some members of Sirisenas Freedom Party joined Rajapaksas joint opposition.

Sirisena's Freedom Party and Wickremesinghes United National Party (UNP) are in the unity government.

The UNP, SLFP-Maithri Faction, Joint Opposition and Tamil National Alliance (TNA) voted against the report rejecting the holding of provincial council elections under the mixed electoral system.

Either the president must leave the government or the prime minister must leave the government. I think it is the prime ministers responsibility because he was the one who engineered the defeat of the report presented by the president," Rajapaksa said.

The passage of the report was required to hold the already postponed elections for the provinces.

The government move was seen as its wish to further delay the elections.

Rajapaksa said his party wants early elections. We can win it under the old or the new system," he said.

The government claimed that a new system introduced in February this year was found to be flawed.

Rajapaksas opposition alleged that the government feared facing the election as it will lose it.

In another development, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa the younger brother of the former president has been summoned by the special corruption high court which came into operation last week.

The new court was set up to expeditiously handle the corruption cases of the 10-year Rajapaksa regime.

The cases instituted under normal court system have been found to be laborious with a severe backlog of cases.

Several members of the Rajapaksa family were arrested and freed on bail pending cases.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the then powerful defence ministry top official under his brothers regime had obtained a Supreme Court order to prevent his arrest over alleged misappropriation of over 90 million rupees of state funds to build a memorial for his parents. PTI CORR PMS

PMSHanoi, Aug 27 (PTI) External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today inaugurated the 'Jaipur Foot' camp here and met with 500 Vietnamese beneficiaries of the free India-made prosthetic limb.

Swaraj is in Vietnam on the first leg of her four-day two-nation tour which aims at deepening India's strategic cooperation with Vietnam and Cambodia -- the key countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region.

The minister met with the beneficiaries and encouraged a girl to walk with the newly-fitted artificial limb.

External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Ravish Kumar said in a tweet: "Together with you when you take those small steps! EAM @SushmaSwaraj inaugurated the Jaipur foot camp and encouraged a girl to walk with the newly fitted artificial limb. 500 Vietnamese beneficiaries were present at the Camp organised in the Phu Tho province of Vietnam".

Meanwhile, Swaraj lauded the role played by the Indian community in Vietnam in consolidating cultural connect between the two countries.

She praised the Indian diaspora in Vietnam for strengthening people to people connect between the two nations.

"Hailing the role played by Indian community in Vietnam in consolidating cultural connect between India and Vietnam! EAM @SushmaSwaraj praised the Indian Diaspora in Vietnam for strengthening people to people bond between two nations," Kumar said in another tweet.

Last month, it was announced in Jaipur that about 1,000 differently-abled people in Myanmar and Vietnam would be provided free Indian-made prosthetic 'Jaipur Foot'.

The Jaipur-based Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS) has started an artificial limb fitment camp in association with the central government at Myanmar's Yangon city.

The camp is being organised as per an agreement between BMVSS and the Ministry of External Affairs for providing 5,000 'Jaipur Foot' to the needy amputees of various countries.

Last month, the BMVSS organised camps in Vietnam.

"In both Myanmar and Vietnam, 1,000 disabled people will be provided with 'Jaipur Foot'. This is a humanitarian effort of the Union government where BMVSS is the implementing agency," an official statement said last month. PTI CPS AKJ CPSLahore, Aug 27 (PTI) A Pakistani court today gave the anti-corruption body a final chance to file its response by Wednesday in a petition seeking the revocation of the sentence handed to former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his family in the Avenfield properties corruption case.

Sharif, 68, along with his daughter Maryam, 44, and his son-in-law Capt (retd) Muhammad Safdar, 54, are serving jail terms of 10 years, seven years and one year respectively in the Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, after the accountability court convicted them on July 6 over the family's ownership of four luxury flats in London through illegal means.

The three-judge bench of the Lahore High Court headed by Justice Shahid Waheed also announced that the court would hear the petition on a day-to-day basis, Dawn newspaper reported.

Noting the absence of the National Accountability Bureau's (NAB) counsel in the court for the hearing, the bench ordered the bureau's prosecutor to appear before it at the next hearing on August 29 and submit a reply on behalf of the NAB.

"NAB is being given the final chance to submit its reply," the bench cautioned.

Before adjourning the hearing till August 29, the court rejected three separate applications filed by lawyers seeking to become party to the case.

Senior lawyer A.K. Dogar had filed the petition assailing the conviction of the Sharifs, besides challenging the existence of the National Accountability Ordinance (NAO) 1999.

The ordinance was promulgated by the then military ruler Pervez Musharraf. According to its provisions, a member of the armed forces was immune from being proceeded.

The lawyer pleaded that ousted premier Sharif and others had been convicted by a court which had no jurisdiction because the law under which it had been created was a dead law.

He urged the Lahore High Court to suspend the operation of the accountability court's judgement for being issued by a court that had been established under a non-existent law.

Three corruption cases were filed against Sharif and family last year following a decision by Supreme Court on July 28 of the same year.

The formal trial of the Sharif family started on September 14 and was to be completed in six months but later the deadline was extended at least thrice. PTI AMS AKJ

AMS

AMSBangkok, Aug 27 (PTI) Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today met Thailand's top leadership and discussed ways to further strengthen the strategic ties between the two countries.

Sitharaman, who is leading an Indian delegation to Thailand, called on Thailand Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha and discussed ways to enhance the bilateral ties.

She also met Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Prawit Wongsuwan and discussed strengthening India-Thailand strategic ties.

Sitharaman arrived here yesterday along with the Indian delegation to strengthen Indo-Thai defence cooperation and strategic ties.

Vice Minister for Defence General Roungrojana Chumrasromrun welcomed her and the delegation on arrival in Bangkok.

She also inspected a guard of honour in the Thai capital. PTI ZH ZHFlood relief material sent by Goa Forward Party reaches Kerala

Panaji, Aug 27 (PTI) Several trucks loaded with relief

material sent by the Goa Forward Party for Kerala's

flood-affected people reached Kasargod in the southern state

today morning, a party functionary said.

GFP president and Goa Agriculture minister Vijai

Sardesai had flagged off the trucks from here yesterday.

The party's vice-president Durgadas Kamat said that

the convoy, led by GFP's youth wing chief Raj Malik, was

received at Kasargod this morning by local MLA N A Nellikunnu

of the Indian Union Muslim League.

Speaking to PTI over phone, Nellikunnu said that

people were coming from across the world to help Kerala

rebuild after floods destoyed thousands of houses and forced

several lakh people to stay in relief camps.

The Kerala MLA thanked the GFP and Sardesai for the

truckloads of relief material.

Speaking to reporters yesterday, Sardesai said, "We

believe this is the exemplification of Goemkarponn (Goanness).

It is better to be a small party with a big heart than a big

party with a small heart."

He said that Kamat was coordinating with the Kerala

government to ensure that the relief material reached the

people for whom it is intended. PTI RPS

BNM BNMPanaji, Aug 27 (PTI) Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, who is currently admitted to a private hospital in Mumbai for a review health check-up, will return to his home state on August 29, his office said here today.

Parrikar, 62, had flown to Mumbai on August 23 and was admitted to the Lilavati Hospital there.

"Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar to return to Goa on Wednesday," the Chief Minister's Office said in a single-line statement.

Earlier this year, Parrikar had undergone treatment in the US for nearly three months for a pancreatic ailment and returned in the last week of June.

He went to the US again earlier this month for a follow-up. He then returned to Panaji on August 22 and the next day flew to Mumbai.

CMO officials had refused earlier to divulge further details about his health.

Parrikar had met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on August 7 and sought his intervention to address the current crisis in the state's mining sector. PTI RPS GK DV

DVNew Delhi, Aug 27 (PTI) Congress president Rahul Gandhi will pay a two-day visit to flood-ravaged Kerala from tomorrow.

He said that he would visit some relief camps and also meet fishermen and party volunteers involved in relief work.

"I will be in Kerala tomorrow and the day after, visiting flood-hit areas and relief camps in the state. I will also meet with fishermen, volunteers and others who have been working tirelessly & selflessly to help those in need," he tweeted.

Kerala witnessed its worst floods in a century. According to the Home Ministry's National Emergency Response Centre (NERC), 443 people have died in Kerala and 54.11 lakh people in 14 districts have been severely affected. PTI SKC SMNChandigarh, Aug 27 (PTI) Lok Insaf Party (LIP) and rebel AAP legislators today demanded that the Punjab government implement a resolution passed by the state assembly asking other states to pay royalty to Punjab for using river water.

Ousted Leader of Opposition Sukhpal Singh Khaira, along with seven other legislators and two members of Lok Insaf Party, held a protest outside the assembly complex, asking the government to implement the resolution.

LIP member Simarjit Singh Bains, his brother MLA Balvinder Singh Bains and eight rebel AAP members said the issue of sharing Punjab water with Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi was raised during the previous Akali Dal-BJP government and the assembly had passed the resolution unanimously to demand royalty from these states.

"From then on, no action has been taken in this regard and AAP and the LIP have decided to push the matter by holding protest," Bains said.

According to the international riparian law, he said, these states have to pay royalty for taking river water.

Bains said Punjab has shared more than 12 million acre feet (MAF) water with Rajasthan since 1965, which amounted to more than Rs 16 lakh crore, but no government has bothered to raise this issue with the state.

"Farmers in Punjab have no other source of income... Punjab government can generate income by charging royalty for

its water," he said.

In 2016, Punjab Assembly passed a resolution asking for royalty payment for Satluj-Yamuna water from its neighbouring states, including Rajasthan, giving another dimension to Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal dispute.

The Rajasthan government has refused to pay any royalty citing the 1981 agreement between states in the region.

In accordance with the 1981 agreement, drawn under the Congress rule, the share of water between Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan was revised.

Following the agreement, the total share of Punjab was

raised to 4.22 MAF, for Rajasthan it was raised to 8.6 MAF and

Haryana's was unaltered at 17.17 MAF. PTI VSD ABH

ABHSrinagar, Aug 27 (PTI) Senior Congress leader Saifuddin Soz today said an all-party delegation from Jammu and Kashmir should call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and urge the Centre to defend Article 35 A in the Supreme Court.

Article 35A, which accords special rights and privileges to the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, is facing a legal challenge in the Supreme Court.

"Let the delegation of mainstream parties call on the PM and Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and propose that the Government of India take a position before the Supreme Court," Soz said in a statement here.

The former Union minister said it was ridiculous for the central government to watch the situation from a distance and be unmindful of the turmoil that can be caused by any attempt to amend Article 35A, against the will of the people of the state.

He said the people of Kashmir have shown a unique sense of solidarity on the need to safeguard Article 35A of the Constitution of India.

"It is a heartening situation that certain sections of society in Jammu and Ladakh have also realized that Article 35A cannot be abrogated".

Earlier today, spontaneous shutdown was observed at several places in Kashmir after clashes broke out between youths and security forces following rumours about scrapping of Article 35A, police officials said.

Stone-pelters clashed with security personnel in Anantnag and Safakadal area here in the wake of the rumours, they said. PTI MIJ

DPBJaipur, Aug 27 (PTI) The ruling BJP in Rajasthan said today that the opposition Congress was intimidated by the popularity of Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and was trying to disrupt her statewide Gaurav Yatra using "various means".

Former Rajasthan BJP president Ashok Parnami said Congress national general secretary Ashok Gehlot was "afraid" of Raje's popularity, after a few miscreants pelted stones at Raje's meeting on Saturday in Pipad town of Jodhpur division.

Raje and other BJP leaders have accused the Congress of staging the incident. The opposition party has condemned the incident but said it does not adopt such kind of tactics.

"Congress doesn't want the yatra to proceed and is trying to disrupt it through various means, including by filing writ petition in high court and then pelting stones on CM's Rath in Pipad. Why is Ashok Gehlot afraid of CM Raje's rising popularity," Parnami said at a press conference in Jaipur.

He showed videos in which a group of people could be seen supporting Gehlot and inciting the crowd to pelt stones on Raje's cavalcade.

Congress has a strong hold in Pipad and they cannot shy away from responsibility by only condemning the incident, he added.

Fifteen people have been arrested in connection with the incident, Additional Superintendent of Police (Jodhpur rural), Khinv Singh said, adding, five of them were taken into custody today.

The BJP leader said the people arrested would reveal their identity during police interrogation.

Gehlot and state Congress chief Sachin Pilot yesterday condemned the stone-pelting incident and said it was unfortunate that the BJP was holding their party responsible.

"It is a highly condemnable act if someone has thrown stones during the visit of the Chief Minister," Gehlot had tweeted.

Parmani said the people of Rajasthan have been supporting Raje's yatra, which began from Udaipur division on August 4. This is the second phase of the yatra.

On Saturday night, a few miscreants disrupted Raje's yatra and pelted stones during a meeting. Stones were also hurled on the chief minister's rath in Pipad, police said.

Earlier that day, a few miscreants pelted stones on Health Minister Kalicharan Saraf's vehicle near Khairwara town, breaking its rear windshield.

Today Saraf told reporters that he holds Congress and its supporters responsible for the incident. PTI AG ABH

ABHJaipur, Aug 27 (PTI) The station house officer of a police station was today suspended for dereliction of duty in Rajasthan's Nagaur district, police said.

Anil Dev Kalla, a sub inspector and SHO of Padu Kalan police station, showed serious dereliction in investigating a rape case and there were complaints against him, Superintendent of Police Nagaur Harendra Kumar said.

"The allegations against the SHO were found true, therefore he was suspended," the SP said. PTI SDA

KJ

KJRohtak, Aug 27 (PTI) Around five students of a gurukul at Rohtak's Ladhot village were allegedly sodomised by their seniors and some staff members for the past few months, police said today.

The victims, studying in class 5 and class 6, told their family members about the crime yesterday, the police said, adding an FIR has been registered.

The accused had threatened them with dire consequences if they reported the matter, the police said.

A case has been registered against some senior students and staff of the gurukul under relevant sections of the IPC and the POCSO Act, they said, adding police is investigating the matter.

Meanwhile, the district Child Welfare Committee issued a notice to the institute's management seeking their response on the allegations made by the students.

PTI VSD

DPBDehradun, Aug 27 (PTI) The Uttarakhand Cabinet today decided to constitute a committee for relocating of Gujjar families from the Corbett Tiger Reserve and shutdown schools which have less than 10 students.

It also decided to launch a medical insurance scheme named after former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee providing an annual coverage of Rs 5 lakh to every family.

The proposals were cleared by the state cabinet at a meeting chaired by Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat, cabinet minister and spokesman of the government Madan Kaushik told reporters.

It was decided that a committee headed by the forest minister will be constituted to implement an order of the Uttarakhand High Court to relocate the Gujjar families living in the Corbett Tiger Reserve to somewhere else, Kaushik said.

The agriculture minister and the chief secretary will be the members of the panel, he added.

Kaushik said the high court will also be informed about the formation of the committee.

Nine Gujjar families are at present living in Jhirna range and 24 in Dhela range of the reserve, he said.

In another decision, the cabinet approved the closure of state-run primary and upper primary schools which have less than 10 students.

Those studying in such schools will be shifted to other schools, Kaushik said.

Out of the total 12,339 government primary schools in the state, 2,425 have less than 10 students. And out of 2,796 upper primary schools, 291 have less than 10 students, he said.

The cabinet also gave its nod to a medical insurance scheme named after Vajpayee providing an annual coverage of Rs 5 lakh to around 20 lakh families.

A budgetary provision of Rs 172 crore will be made for the scheme -- Atal Ayushman Yojana Uttarakhand (AAYU) -- which will come into force from September 25, Kaushik said.

The Cabinet also paid tributes to Vajpayee by reading an obituary proposal and observing a two-minute silence.

Vajpayee had passed away on August 16. He was 93. PTI ALM AQS

AQSJammu, Aug 27 (PTI) Three suspected drug peddlers were arrested after heroin and poppy straw were allegedly recovered from their possession in Jammu division, the police said today.

Raju Singh and Kulvinder Singh of Ludhiana were arrested during vehicle checking in Jammu city last evening, a police official said.

He said 20 kgs of poppy straw was recovered from their possession.

A local drug peddler Kewal Krishan alias Nikka Billa was arrested after three gms of heroin was recovered from his possession at Sattani village in Udhampur district yesterday, the official said.

He said an FIR under the NDPS Act was registered against him. PTI TAS



DV

DVChandigarh, Aug 27 (PTI) The state cabinet today approved proposed amendments to the Punjab Police Act 2007, which would enable the setting up of a commission for selection of Director General of Police.

The decision was taken during a cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Amarinder Singh here, said an official spokesman.

The Punjab Police (Amendment) Bill 2018 will be tabled in the ongoing session of the Vidhan Sabha.

The Punjab Police Act 2007, enacted on February 5, 2008, did not provide for selection of DGP from the panel as prepared by UPSC.

The state government, led by the chief minister, had recently sought the opinion of Advocate General Atul Nanda on the appointment of DGP.

Based on the counsel of Nanda, the cabinet decided to amend sections 6, 15, 27, 28 and 32 of the 2007 act to bring it in line with the Supreme Court recommendations delivered in Prakash Singh & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors., (2006) 8 SCC 1 (Prakash Singh's case).

The present Director General of Police Suresh Arora is set to retire by end of next month.

Earlier this month, the state government had decided to amend Punjab Police Act 2007 to enable the constitution of a state police commission for appointment of DGP, while deciding to seek a review of the Supreme Court order of July 3, 2018, directing states to choose and appoint their DGP from a panel which will be constituted by the UPSC based on the concerned state government's proposals.

The chief minister had accepted the opinion of Nanda that the directions amounted to infringement of the state's powers by the Centre, since law and order is a state subject as per the provisions of the Indian Constitution, the spokesman said.

In Prakash Singh's case, the court had issued directions concerning police reforms in the various states, which included a direction to select the DGP of the state "from amongst the three senior-most officers of the department who have been empanelled for promotion to that rank by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) on the basis of their length of service, very good record and range of experience for heading the police force."

In its July 3, 2018 orders, the SC had directed states that "when they anticipate vacancy in the post of DG, they shall send their proposals to the Union Public Service Commission well in time, ie., at least three months prior to the date of retirement of the incumbent. The UPSC shall then prepare the panel as per the directions of the judgment reported in (2006) 8 SCC 1, out whom the state shall pick its DG." PTI CHS VSD GS HP IND

INDIndian Bank donates Rs 4.01 Cr to CMDRF, Kerala

Chennai, Aug 27 (PTI): Public sector Indian Bank today

said it has contributed Rs four crore to the Kerala Chief

Minister Distress Relief Fund for rehabilitation work in the

flood affected state.

The Executive Director of city-headquartered bank A S

Rajeev handed over a cheque of Rs 4.01 crore to Chief Minister

Pinarayi Vijayan recently.

"The amount comprises Rs 3.01 crore collective

contribution by the bank employees and Rs one crore from the

bank", Indiab Bank said in a statement.

Over 300 people have lost their lives and four lakh are

still in relief camps in Kerala. PTI VIJ

APR APRUS Consulate general honours 26 desi shipping cos for AMVER

Mumbai, Aug 27 (PT): The US Consulate General here has

recognised 26 domestic shipping companies including Shipping

Corporation, Adani Shipping, Essar Shipping and GE Shipping

among others, for their continued participation in the

American Coast Guard's voluntary AMVER (automated mutual-

assistance vessel rescue) programme.

The AMVER is a US Coast Guard-managed search and

rescue programme in which merchant ships make themselves

available for maritime emergency response on a volunteer basis

without regard to nationality and with the end objective that

no call for help should go unanswered.

Consul general Edgard Kagan said since its inception

in 1958 by the US Coast Guard, AMVER has grown to have over

140 participating nations, providing a global safety network

for mariners, with over 7,850 ships available to carry out

search and rescue services.

In 2017, AMVER mobilised as many as 103 ships to

provide assistance or help locate those in need, helping save

153 lives and assist 21 ships.

"These awards are a wonderful opportunity to recognise

Indian merchant mariners and their efforts to facilitate world

trade while preserving safety at seas. It also reflects US-

India collaboration that saves lives and improves efficiencies

for everyone," he said.

Director general of shipping Malini Shankar said AMVER

has proven to be an enduring example of international public-

private partnership.

**

India INX get to access to CME Group

BSE's India INX has launched a special purpose vehicle

called India INX Global Access IFSC to facilitate access to

global exchange markets through a single centralised platform.

India INX Global Access is the first of its kind from

the country and IFSC at Gift City offering access to products

traded on international exchanges shall greatly benefit India

INX's members and their clients.

With this, Global Access will provide a unified

single-window interface for trading on the CME Group of

exchanges, thereby decreasing their overall costs of accessing

global markets from the IFSC, BSE said today.

**

ICICI Pru relaxes settlement process for Kerala flood victims

Private sector insurer ICICI Prudential Life has

relaxed the claim settlement process for the victims of the

recent Kerala deluge by apart from allowing those willing to

renew their lapsed policies without any charges.

Claims will be processed on the basis of just three

basic documents such as a written intimation from the

claimant, death certificate from municipal authorities/

hospitals/armed forces/police and a copy of photo identity of

the claimant," the company said in a statement today.

It also allowed customers in Kerala to renew their

lapsed policies without any charges till end November.

**

DHFL Pramerica Life appoints Kalpana Sampat as COO

* DHFL Pramerica Life has appointed Kalpana Sampat as

senior executive vice-president and chief operating officer.

In her new role, she will be responsible for strengthening and

transforming the operational delivery and process excellence

capabilities of the company.

Sampat was CEO for Swiss Re India before this

appointment prior to which she had a long stint with ICICI

Prudential and LIC. PTI BEN DSK DSK DSK

RDS RDSGuwahati, Aug 27 (PTI) A senior health official posted in Assam's Dhemaji district was arrested when he was accepting a bribe of Rs 12,000 for clearing vehicle bills, at his office this evening, police said.

Joint Director Health Services, Dhemaji, Dr Abdul Latif, was caught accepting the bribe from one Mridul Sarma, an Assam Police press release said.

Latif had demanded the bribe from Sarma for clearing a bill due to the complainant for his supply of hired vehicle to the office concerned, the release said.

The accused officer had demanded a bribe of Rs 18000 (10 per cent of the bill amount of Rs 1.83 lakh) from the complainant, it said.

The complainant had approached the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) police station, following which an FIR was registered under relevant sections today, the release said, adding that the arrested official's house will be searched. PTI ESB CKNew Delhi, Aug 27 (PTI) A 28-year-old man, carrying a reward of Rs 50,000 on his head, was arrested today for involvement in kidnapping of a doctor by an Ola cab driver in East Delhi's Preet Vihar last year, police said.

Harsh alias Gaurab Sharma is the eight accused to have been arrested in the case, they said.

On July 7, 2017, Dr Shrikant Gaur of Metro Hospital went missing from Preet Vihar, following which a case was registered.

He had boarded an Ola cab and went untraced soon after.

Later, the kidnappers demanded Rs five crore from cab aggregator Ola for his release.

Police rescued the doctor nearly 13 days after he went missing.

Seven men were arrested, including the main accused, but Harsh alias Gaurav Sharma remained at large and subsequently, a reward of Rs 50,000 was decalred on his arrest, the police said.

Last week, he was nabbed while walking towards Buddhist Monastery from ISBT, police said.

He completed his secondary education from Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, and then married against his parent's wishes, hence, was disowned by his family.

During this period, he came into contact with Sushil and Anuj of his village. They lured him and roped into kidnapping the doctor for want of easy money, police said.

He was pursuing B Pharma, but dropped out after getting involved in the kidnapping, they said. PTI SLB CKSunTrust Banks, Inc. operates as the holding company for SunTrust Bank that provides various financial services for consumers, businesses, corporations, institutions, and not-for-profit entities in the United States. It operates in two segments, Consumer and Wholesale. The Consumer segment provides deposits and payments; home equity and personal credit lines; auto, student, and other lending products; credit cards; discount/online and full-service brokerage products; professional investment advisory products and services; and trust services, as well as family office solutions. This segment also offers residential mortgage products in the secondary market. The Wholesale segment provides capital markets solutions, including advisory, capital raising, and financial risk management; asset-based financing solutions, such as securitizations, asset-based lending, equipment financing, and structured real estate arrangements; cash management services and auto dealer financing solutions; investment banking solutions; and credit and deposit, fee-based product offering, multi-family agency lending, advisory, commercial mortgage brokerage, and tailored financing and equity investment solutions. This segment also offers treasury and payment solutions, such as operating various electronic and paper payment types, which comprise card, wire transfer, automated clearing house, check, and cash; and provides services clients to manage their accounts online. The company offers its products and services through a network of traditional and in-store branches, automated teller machines, Internet, mobile, and telephone banking channels. As of December 31, 2018, it operated 1,218 full-service banking offices located in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. SunTrust Banks, Inc. was founded in 1891 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

Read MoreMelrose Industries PLC engages in the aerospace, automotive, powder metallurgy, air management, and other industrial businesses in the United Kingdom, rest of Europe, North America, and internationally. Its Aerospace segment provides airframe and engine structures, and electrical interconnection systems for the aerospace industry in civil airframe and defense platforms. The company's Automotive segment designs, develops, manufactures, and integrates driveline technologies; and epowertrains and intelligent all-wheel drive systems. Its Powder Metallurgy segment offers precision automotive components and components for industrial and consumer applications; metal powder for powder metallurgy; and additive manufacturing parts for prototypes. The company's Nortek Air Management segment manufactures and sells ventilation products for the professional remodeling and replacement, residential new construction, and consumer DIY markets. This segment also manufactures and sells split-system and packaged air conditioners, heat pumps, furnaces, air handlers, and parts for the residential replacement and new construction markets; and custom designed and engineered products and systems for non-residential applications. Its Other Industrial segment provides turbo generators, transformers, and switchgears; develops and manufactures security, home automation, and access control technologies for the residential and commercial markets; and designs, manufactures, and distributes ergonomic products for use in a various working, learning, and healthcare environments. The company was formerly known as New Melrose Industries PLC and changed its name to Melrose Industries PLC in November 2015. Melrose Industries PLC was founded in 2003 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreHDFC Bank Ltd. engages in the provision of banking and financial services, including commercial banking and treasury operations. The firm also provides financial services to upper and middle income individuals and corporations in India. It operates through the following segments: Treasury, Retail Banking, Wholesale Banking and Other Banking Operations. The Treasury segment consists of bank's investment portfolio, money market borrowing and lending, investment operations and trading in foreign exchange and derivative contracts. The Retail Banking segment provides loans and other services to customers through a branch network and other delivery channels. The Wholesale Banking segment provides loans, non-fund facilities and transaction services to large corporates, emerging corporates, public sector units, government bodies, financial institutions, and medium scale enterprises. The Other Banking Business segment includes income from para banking activities such as credit cards, debit cards, third party product distribution, primary dealership business, and the associated costs. The company was founded by Aditya Tapishwar Puri in August 1994 and is headquartered in Mumbai, India.

Read MoreThere is a hackneyed phrase that begins, Words are weak tools 

They may be weak tools when using them in an attempt to convey someones overwhelming appreciation for an act of kindness  or in praising someone for a monumental accomplishment.

But, in other arenas, they can be the most powerful forces known to man.

Take, for instance, the political arena.

Look at the case of two men  from very similar backgrounds  working at an accomplished level of the same occupation  even from the same home state. Each makes a one-sentence statement and the entire country erupts emotionally. With opposite reactions. Forming anger-fueled confrontational armies.

President Donald Trump, who drew a lot of attention with many things that he said during his historic path to the White House, had one particular phrase that stirred the emotions.

Make America Great Again, became the buzzphrase for an astonishing alliance of Americans who were particularly dissatisfied with the course their country had taken during the previous eight years  and with the state of American political affairs, in general.

President Barack Obama began his first term in office by traveling the world on an apology tour. It turned into a major burr under the saddle of many Americans who admit their countrys shortcomings but still saw it as a shining leader of the Free World. They rallied behind Trumps slogan.

At the same time, Trumps signature phrase infuriated those on the Left, who believed passionately in the words of then presidential candidate Obama, who pronounced a goal of fundamentally transforming the United States of America. The mention of returning to anything from the past was cause for hysteria on the Left.

One simple sentence. Two very opposite reactions.

Fast forward to earlier this month. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was giving a speech at an event titled Fighting for New York Women and Girls. He began with a reference to Trumps calling card, saying, Were not going to make America great again. It was never that great.

He continued by citing examples from the past of unequal treatment of women. Was he just pandering to his audience  or revealing a deep-seated loathing of the country that many Americans love?

The reaction from the Conservative side of America was vitriolic  though not quite reaching the levels of hysteria that Trump has been able to inspire among his haters.

Marc Molinaro, the Republican candidate for New York governor who will oppose the liberal incumbent in November, said that Cuomo owes the nation an apology.

Former George W. Bush presidential press secretary Dana Perino said Cuomos comments were the exact opposite of his late father, former New York governor Mario Cuomo. In his 1984 Democratic National Convention speech the elder Cuomo characterized America as a magnificent mosaic.

Now we are left with a verbal duel between the two men who have inspired such visceral reactions with the use of a single sentence.

President Trump targeted his antagonist by saying during a rally, Any politicians who get up and say that our country was never great  You heard that?  I think thats the end of their career.

Governor Cuomo lashed back at his fellow resident of Queens by saying, New Yorkers know who you are, President Trump, and we look forward to seeing to it that you find a new line of work.

Two elected officials, engaged in a war of words. Each hoping the other loses his job. There is no chance of this disagreement ever reaching a civil level.

Words may be weak tools for some  but not in the hands of extremely powerful people.Schenectady

A group of retired General Electric Co. workers lost another court battle to get medical benefits reinstated that they argued were granted them for life under union contracts negotiated when they worked for the company.

GE, which employs about 5,000 people in Schenectady County, stopped providing Medicare supplement plans to its retirees nearly two years ago.

Roughly 65,000 GE retirees across the country, including both union and non-union workers, were impacted by the decision.

GE's unions filed a lawsuit on behalf of their retirees in federal court in Ohio, while white collar retirees filed a similar suit in Wisconsin. Neither have been successful as the courts have ruled that GE never promised the the benefits for life.

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Earlier this month, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit denied an appeal of a lower court decision on the union case that favored GE.

"Unfortunately for the retirees, that argument fails under our case law," the court wrote. "For the foregoing reasons, the district court's judgment is affirmed."Malta

GlobalFoundries is laying off hundreds of workers at its Fab 8 computer chip factory in Malta this week as part of a dramatic shift in strategy away from cutting-edge chips and the research needed to perfect them.

The company says it is freezing its program to make next-generation chips using 7 nanometer architecture, an expensive undertaking that has required billions of dollars in capital committed by the company's Abu Dhabi backers over the past two years.

Fab 8 employs roughly 3,400 people and has an annual payroll of $345 million, with the average worker making between $80,000 and $90,000. Employees are recruited from all over the world due to the technical nature of the work.

Company officials wouldn't reveal the exact number of Fab 8 employees who will lose their jobs, although it's expected to trigger disclosure later this week under the state's Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification law.

The WARN law is triggered for a layoff of 250 people or more, or a layoff of more than one-third of a company's workforce.

More for you GE cutting 225 union jobs in Schenectady amid power market woes

The Fab 8 layoffs come during a difficult time for another local manufacturer, General Electric Co., which announced earlier this month it was cutting 225 union jobs at the company's steam turbine plant in Schenectady following a previous round of 130 layoffs in January.

Going forward, Fab 8 will focus exclusively on its current 14 nanometer chip making process, a move the company says is more in line with its customer needs if not in line with the rest of the semiconductor industry, which has been pushing forward into 7 nanometer chips, with some achieving commercial production this year.

GlobalFoundries, which is a foundry that makes chips for companies that don't have their own factories  so-called "fabless" firms  would appear to be rejecting the idea chip makers must follow Moore's Law to the bitter end.

Moore's Law is the idea that chip makers can keep shrinking chip features successfully every two years providing customers with dramatic leaps in performance that have fueled industry profits for decades.

However, Moore's Law may be pushing up against the laws of physics as transistor sizes get closer to the size of atoms, and the industry has reached a point where the cost of developing smaller transistors may outweigh the benefits.

"The vast majority of today's fabless customers are looking to get more value out of each technology generation to leverage the substantial investments required to design into each technology node," GlobalFoundries CEO Thomas Caulfield said in a statement released Monday. "This industry dynamic has resulted in fewer fabless clients designing into the outer limits of Moore's Law."

Just two years ago, GlobalFoundries announced it would spend $2 billion at Fab 8 getting it ready to deploy 7 nanometer production. The upgrade included the purchase of several $200 million extreme ultraviolet lithography machines needed to etch such small design features.

In addition to the impact that the layoffs will have on local families, the change in strategy is likely to also have long-term consequences for the regional economy and the Capital Region's high-tech strategy.

Since its inception as a spin-off of Advanced Micro Devices a decade ago, GlobalFoundries has relied heavily upon a research partnership with IBM at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Albany.

GlobalFoundries' current research agreement with IBM ends in December, and it is unclear if the two companies will negotiate a new deal or what type of presence GlobalFoundries will maintain at SUNY Poly going forward.

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IBM uses the clean rooms at SUNY Poly for what's known as the IBM Research Alliance that has involved various different chip firms over the years working on next-generation chip-making.

Last year a project involving IBM, Samsung and GlobalFoundries created the first-ever chip using 5 nanometer architecture.

GlobalFoundries currently has about 80 scientists at SUNY Poly, many working on 7 nanometer technology and beyond.

"We will continue to actively participate in the Albany-based research alliance for the duration of the current agreement," GlobalFoundries spokesman Steve Grasso said. "Between now and then, we will assess options to continue a presence in Albany, which we would do only if it aligns with our long-term research needs."

That doesn't mean GlobalFoundries is shunning research and development entirely. The company, which is much smaller than the world's largest foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., is just being more responsive to its customers instead of worrying too much about Moore's Law.

"Moore's Law is an economic model, not a technology law," Grasso, the company spokesman said. "What matters to clients is the end result... we plan to continue driving these types of improvements in our technology platforms through other innovations beyond transistor scaling. We remain fully committed to innovation in advanced technology."

Not all of Fab 8's research scientists will be laid off. Many of the company's top technologists will be reassigned to the company's 14 nanometer teams.

Grasso said that GlobalFoundries is considering options for what to do with its extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, which it has planned on using for 7 nanometer chips. The machines, which cost $200 million each, are made by the Dutch company ASML.

"With 7 nanometer development on hold, we will be exploring options with ASML and others for the best use of EUV equipment, including potential sales to other companies," Grasso said.Havidan Rodriguez is the 20th president of the University at Albany, the Capital Region's largest university and one of the more diverse research institutions in the country.

He joined the #PurpleFam in September 2017 after serving as the founding provost of the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, about 2,100 miles southwest of Albany near the U.S.  Mexico border. Prior to the University of Texas, he served in numerous faculty and administrative positions at the University of Delaware and University of Puerto Rico  Mayaguez.Aboard The Papal Plane

Pope Francis declined Sunday to confirm or deny claims by the Vatican's retired ambassador to the United States that he knew in 2013 about sexual misconduct allegations against the former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, but rehabilitated him anyway.

Francis said the 11-page text by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, which reads in part like a homophobic attack on Francis and his allies, "speaks for itself" and that he wouldn't comment on it.

Francis was asked by a U.S. reporter during an airborne press conference Sunday if Vigano's claims that the two discussed the McCarrick allegations in 2013 were true. Francis was also asked about Vigano's claims that McCarrick was already under sanction at the time, but that Francis rehabilitated him.

Francis said he had read Vigano's document and trusted journalists to judge for themselves.

"It's an act of trust," he said. "I won't say a word about it."

The National Catholic Register and another conservative site, LifeSiteNews, published Vigano's text Sunday as the pope wrapped up a two-day visit to Ireland dominated by the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Vigano, 77, a conservative whose hardline anti-gay views are well known, urged the reformist pope to resign over what he called Francis' own culpability in covering up McCarrick's crimes.

Francis accepted McCarrick's resignation as cardinal last month, after a U.S. church investigation determined that an accusation he had sexually abused a minor was credible.

Since then, another man has come forward to say McCarrick began molesting him starting when he was 11, and several former seminarians have said McCarrick abused and harassed them when they were in seminary. The accusations have created a crisis of confidence in the U.S. and Vatican hierarchy, because it was apparently an open secret that McCarrick regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house, and into his bed.

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The Vatican's ambassador to the U.S. from 2011 to 2016, Vigano said his two immediate predecessors "did not fail" to inform the Holy See about accusations against McCarrick, starting in 2000. Vigano said he himself sent at least two memos on him. Vigano, however, also has had his own problems with allegations of cover-up, and he and Francis had a major dust-up during Francis' 2015 visit to the U.S., which Vigano organized.

In that incident, a leading U.S. opponent of gay marriage, Kim Davis, was among those invited to meet with the pope at Vigano's Washington residence. Francis was so enraged that Davis' supporters had leaked word of the meeting that the Vatican subsequently insisted he only held one private audience while there: with one of his former students, a gay man and his partner.

The cover-up accusation, which Vigano denied, concerned allegations that he tried to quash an investigation into the former archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis, Minn., John Nienstedt, who was accused of misconduct with adult seminarians.

Nienstedt was forced to resign in 2015 over complaints about his handling of sex abuse cases.New York Air National Guard Lt. Col. David Panzera of Warnerville, Schoharie County, had a splash landing of sorts and huge greeting upon completion of his final flight as a military aviator.

The retiring military pilot's accomplishments were recognized by his 109th Airlift Wing peers following his last mission.

Panzera, at the controls of the massive LC-130 transport, made the traditional pass over the administrative building and then landed to be greeted by family, friends and colleagues at the Stratton Air National Guard Base in Scotia.

His wife, Wendy, two daughters and two sons sprayed him with a fire hose from a base fire truck for a traditional wet down, marking his final flight. Then his mother Eva Panzera followed up with a spray of champagne.

The colonel's daughter Rebecca is a music teacher and writer; daughter Emma is a freshman at Cobleskill-Richmondville High School and a Civil Air Patrol cadet. David Jr. is an Air Force pilot, and son Jonathon is a software engineer near Washington, D.C. A third son, Philip, a Civil Air Patrol cadet and senior at Cobleskill-Richmondville High School, was on the flight.

"This is the culmination of his career, and the kids get to help me," Wendy said before turning the hose on her husband.

Among special passengers during the flight were 27 Civil Air Patrol cadets, as well as Panzera's dad, Joseph, a retired Air Force security policeman and CAP member.

Panzera's 33-year career included two years at the U.S. embassy in South Africa, a very cold night on an Antarctic glacier after an unplanned landing, and flying the prime minister of New Zealand to McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.

"It is a whole mix of emotions," Panzera said after touching down in the LC-130 "Skier 02." "It's amazing that your career lasts decades and then it is over in an instant. But you get to be with a bunch of people that you love dearly, especially my wife, Wendy, who has supported me all of these years," he added.

The 51-year old Panzera, who has overseen the annual Civil Air Patrol Cadet encampment at Stratton Air National Guard Base since 2014, decided to spend his last time behind the controls of an LC-130 flying CAP cadets on an orientation flight. The final flight is traditionally a training flight, so this was a chance to do something with the cadet program, Panzera said.

Panzera joined the Air Force in 1985 as an enlisted airman. He served in an organizational maintenance unit and as a crew chief on a C-130 before he entered Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in 1989.

Panzera was enrolled in an Air Force ROTC program and when he graduated he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent to flight school. He joined the 109th Airlift Wing as a traditional guardsman in 1994.

"When I looked at my orders the other day, I had a total of 2.5 calendar years of duty time on Antarctica," Panzera said. He figures he's flown about 4,000 hours in the Antarctic and another 1,250 hours on Greenland missions, with almost 1,000 more spent on Department of Defense missions worldwide.

He said one of his best missions flying the LC-130 was in January 2013 when New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and his wife, Bronagh, needed a ride for a scheduled trip to McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.

A February 2000 flight was not such a good one, Panzera said. His aircraft was forced to make an unplanned wheeled landing on a glacier. "There was some damage to the airplane and we spent the night in 30- to 35-miles-an-hour winds. The wind chill was minus 80 degrees or more. We got to use all that survival training," Panzera said.

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Panzera is gearing up to begin a new career as a pilot with Jet Blue Airways. He's already been training to fly the Airbus A320 and will be based out of Boston. "I'm excited about it. It's a growing company," Panzera said.

Navy duty

Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Anthony Howard of Schenectady is serving as an aviation ordnanceman, but also works as a drug and alcohol counselor and operates out of the Information Warfare Training Command Corry Station, Pensacola, Fla.

Howard is a liaison between the sailor and the commanding officer as he helps sailors with drug and alcohol problems and guide them to a substance abuse program.

CIWT is responsible for training enlisted cryptologic technicians, information systems technicians, intelligence specialists, and electronics technicians. CIWT also provides training to cryptologic warfare, information professional, intelligence, and foreign area officers that prepares them to be ready to wage battle and assure the nation's success in this burgeoning warfare arena.

New airman

Air National Guard Airman 1st Class Jeremy A. Ecker of Glenville has graduated from basic training at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, San Antonio.

News of your troops and units can be sent to Duty Calls, Terry Brown, Times Union, Box 15000, Albany, NY 12212 or brownt@timesunion.com.Already convicted of murder, a North Carolina woman was convicted this week of helping her husband dispose of his ex-girlfriend's dismembered body, first trying to dissolve it in acid, then throwing it into an alligator-infested Fort Bend County creek.

Both attempts to hide the body failed, the Fort Bend County District Attorney's office said Friday. Investigators found the torso and lower leg of Laura Ackerson floating in Oyster Creek in Richmond on July 24, 2011. More of Ackerson's remains were later found by dive teams.

Ackerson was murdered by Grant Hayes and Amanda Perry Hayes in the couple's Raleigh, North Carolina apartment in 2011, the DA's office said.

Ackerson was last known to be going to the Hayes home to retrieve two young children she shared with Grant Hayes.

THINGS TO KNOW: Bank teller accused of triggering brutal robbery

The couple murdered Ackerson, cut up her body and packed it into coolers, then drove to the Richmond home of Amanda Hayes' sister.

"Once in Richmond, the couple first attempted to use muriatic acid to destroy Ackerson's body," the press release states. "When that didn't work, they took a boat onto Oyster Creek and dumped Laura's body parts into the water with hopes that alligators would eat her remains."

In North Carolina, Amanda Hayes was already convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 13-16 years in prison. Grant Hayes was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

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Amanda Hayes testified in her Fort Bend County trial that she did not kill Ackerson and that her husband threatened her if she did not help him dispose of Ackerson's body.

UNPROVOKED SHOOTINGS: Suspect had 'dim view of women,' deputies say

A jury convicted Amanda Hayes of tampering with evidence to impair its availability in an investigation, a second-degree felony. Judge Maggie Jaramillo of the 400th District Court sentenced her to serve 20 years in prison, consecutive to the North Carolina sentence.

"The jury verdict was swift and the Court's sentence was appropriately harsh," said lead prosecutor Amanda Bolin. "Laura Ackerson's family can be assured that Amanda Hayes will be punished for all of her barbaric behavior  whether it was in North Carolina or the great state of Texas."ALBANY  The American Civil Liberties Union is opposing an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to have a court dismiss a federal lawsuit filed by the National Rifle Association against the state of New York.

A brief filed on Friday by the ACLU argues that the NRA has a right to move forward with its claim that state regulators violated its First Amendment rights by sabotaging its financial stability. The lawsuit maintains that Cuomo, who has publicly reveled in the financial woes of the gun-rights group, used the state Department of Financial Services to discourage banks and insurers from conducting business with the NRA.

"Although public officials are free to express their opinions and may condemn viewpoints or groups they view as inimical to public welfare, they cannot abuse their regulatory authority to retaliate against disfavored advocacy organizations and to impose burdens on those organizations' ability to conduct lawful business," states the ACLU brief, which was first reported by the New York Law Journal.

DFS Superintendent Maria Vullo responded that the NRA and ACLU are "wrong on the facts and law." She said it is the job of DFS to safeguard the integrity of the financial services industry, which is why it cracked down on an "illegal insurance product" marketed by the NRA.

In 2017, DFS began reviewing two insurance companies that administered NRA-branded "Carry Guard" insurance in New York. The NRA alleges that the companies dropped these policies due to threats from DFS and top Cuomo administration officials that they would lose their licenses to operate in the state.

In April, the governor encouraged businesses to reconsider their ties to the NRA and directed DFS to review existing business relationships.

These actions, the NRA alleges, resulted in tens of millions of dollars in losses and inhibit its advocacy mission.

Cuomo has described the lawsuit from the NRA as "frivolous" and said the state's actions are aimed at protecting public safety without violating First Amendment rights.

ACLU Legal Director David Cole wrote in a blog on Friday that the ACLU doesn't oppose reasonable restrictions on guns, and that its brief isn't based on the NRA's policies.

"Substitute Planned Parenthood or the Communist Party for the NRA, and the point is clear," Cole wrote. "If Cuomo can do this to the NRA, then conservative governors could have their financial regulators threaten banks and financial institutions that do business with any other group whose political views the governor opposes."

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The brief from the ACLU acknowledges the NRA may lose its court battle, but stressed that dismissing the case at this stage in the legal process sets a "dangerous precedent for advocacy groups across the political spectrum."

"Public officials would have a ready-made playbook for abusing their regulatory power to harm disfavored advocacy groups without triggering judicial scrutiny," reads the brief.

The New York Civil Liberties union, a state affiliate of the ACLU, opted not to support the brief.

"The NYCLU's decision rested, in part, on a deep skepticism of the NRA's factual claims and on the concern that critical allegations in the complaint are contested," NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement.

The case is scheduled for a hearing on Sept. 10 to consider the motion to dismiss.

David.Lombardo@timesunion.com - 518.454.5427 - @poozer87SARATOGA SPRINGS  In the face of revelations that the Saratoga Springs police chief misled the public about an internal investigation into the police encounter that led to the death of a 21-year-old black man in 2013, the city's commissioner of public safety said on Monday that he is sticking by his conviction that the city does not need a civilian review board to deal with alleged police misconduct.

"First of all, I'm a civilian," said Commissioner Peter Martin. "I oversee the police department and the chief of police. A review board would create another layer of bureaucracy that create more negatives than positives. It's not necessary to create anything."

His comments come the day after the Times Union reported that Police Chief Gregory Veitch admitted in a sworn deposition that the police department never did an internal investigation into the death of Darryl Mount Jr. That testimony, part of an ongoing civil lawsuit brought by Mount's mother, contrasts with what Veitch and then-Public Safety Commissioner Christian Mathiesen told the public: that an internal investigation into Mount's injury found no police misconduct.

More for you A death in Saratoga, but no internal probe

Mount fell into a coma after sustaining injuries in the early hours of Aug. 31, 2013, after police said they saw him slam his girlfriend's head into a wall. Police say they pursued Mount on foot, and found him unresponsive near the bottom of a scaffolding in an alleyway. He died in May 2014 from what a forensic pathologist hired by Mount's family described as "trauma sustained by a direct assault," and not from a fall. Most of Mount's injuries were to one side of his face.

This prompted Mount's mother to file a 2015 wrongful death lawsuit against the city in Saratoga County Supreme Court. Glens Falls attorney John Aspland, who is representing the city, did not return a Times Union phone call to comment on Sunday's story. Martin would not comment on what he thinks of the chief's deposition, nor if Veitch will be able to keep his job with the city. He would also not comment on whether the city would open an internal investigation into the matter.

"This is in current litigation," said Martin. "If I were to make any statement, it would go through our attorney."

In a letter to the Times Union, former Commissioner Mathiesen said that he found Veitch and Assistant Chief John Catone "to be men of unwavering integrity." He also wrote that "members of our police force acted responsibly and appropriately during those early morning hours."

He also said that an internal investigation would have only been triggered if "claims of wrong-doing on the part of a member of our police department been substantiated."

"No one heard anything to indicate that an officer had engaged in violent behavior. No one saw or heard anything to indicate exactly what happened to Darryl," Mathiesen wrote.

He claimed there were actually three investigations of that night's events: the criminal investigation of Mount's alleged assault on his girlfriend; what Mathiesen called a "thorough police department investigation of what happened after the pursuit of Darryl was initiated"; and an investigation by Traveler's, the city's liability insurance carrier, "to make sure that this was a case worth defending."

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"Often in the past, the City's liability insurance carrier would settle a case rather than defending it if they felt that they might not be successful in court," Mathiesen wrote. "For many good reasons, this case is being defended."

Matheisen did not address the chief's admission under oath that he had misled the public. Both men are named as defendants in the lawsuit.

At last week's meeting of the Saratoga Springs Charter Review Commission, city resident Sam Brewer suggested that it was time for the city to form an independent civilian review board to oversee police misconduct and "divorce it from politics."

Martins rejected the idea, telling Brewer it creates an "adversarial relationship between the police and city government."

On Monday, he added that his handling of the police department is not political, even though he himself is an elected official.

"I am a representative of the public," Martin said.The National Weather Services has issued a hazardous weather outlook for this week.

There is a slight chance of thunderstorms Monday as the heat kicks in. Heat index values may reach the 90s to over 100 Monday through Wednesday. Heat advisories are anticipated.

Here's a look at a hot, stormy and muggy week ahead:

Monday: Patchy fog before 10 a.m. Otherwise, mostly sunny, with a high near 87.

Tuesday: Mostly sunny and hot, with a high near 93. Heat index values as high as 101. Southwest wind 6 to 11 mph.

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Wednesday: Mostly sunny and hot, with a high near 93.

Thursday: A chance of showers and thunderstorms after 3 a.m. Partly sunny, with a high near 82. Chance of precipitation is 30%.

Friday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 79.



ALBANY  Ellazar Williams, the man shot fleeing from Albany police detectives, was arraigned Monday morning in his hospital bed.

Williams, 19, is charged with felony menacing a police officer and misdemeanor possession of a weapon. He is paralyzed from the waist down and remains in Albany Medical Center Hospital.

Alice Green, director of the Center for Law and Justice, saw Williams over the weekend and said he is awake and can talk with some difficulty.

Previously, Green said Albany police had prevented Williams' girlfriend, Katia West, from visiting him. West visited Williams Friday.

On Monday, Green and seven other community representatives met with Acting Chief Michael Basile about communication and transparency issues in the wake of the shooting.

Green has said that in the past the department kept her and other community figures up to date on investigations. In the Williams case, she said, the department released little information, allowing rumors to spread.

"I think it was a good meeting," she said. "It answered a lot of the questions people had. They were happy to be able to understand what happened a little better."

Green said the miscommunication mainly came from community members not realizing police protocols and police not realizing community members may not understand what protocols were in place for situations like this. The group also discussed possible procedures to put in place going forward after incoming Chief Eric Hawkins takes up his new post next month.

After the meeting, Basile said the community leaders' biggest concern was why the investigation was taking so long compared to the most recent previous police shooting.

Basile said there was no exact timeline, but the department hopes to wrap up its investigation of the Williams shooting in two to three weeks.

"It may be sooner, but I don't want to say in case something comes up," he said.

Police have not interviewed Williams and are attempting to do so, Basile said.

Two investigations are being conducted: a criminal probe into Williams' alleged actions before fleeing police and an internal affairs investigation into whether detectives were justified in shooting him.

Williams was shot last Monday afternoon behind the Tony Clement Center for Education on Elk Street. Police said Williams and two other men had been involved in a confrontation with a Central Avenue business owner, and police had received a report of someone with a gun.

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A store employee told the Times Union last week that three men had been kicked out of the store Monday before they returned with weapons.

When nearby detectives responded, the men fled. Three detectives pursued Williams; at some point, one detective shot Williams. Police recovered a knife at the scene, but no gun has been recovered.

Green said Monday it wasn't clear how many times police fired at Williams or how many times he was hit.

Last week police identified the detectives involved as James Olsen, Lawrence Heid and Christopher Cornell.

On June 22, city police shot and killed 20-year-old Schuyler Lake in his Partridge Street home. Lake was attacking his mother with a knife when police shot him through a window in the door. The next day, then-Chief Robert Sears declared the shooting justified.

In that case, Basile said, officers' body cameras allowed the department to quickly determine the shooting was justified. The detectives that chased Williams were not outfitted with body cameras. Detectives are supposed to receive cameras later next month as part of a scheduled rollout, Basile said.New York

Playwright Neil Simon, a master of comedy whose laugh-filled hits such as "The Odd Couple," "Barefoot in the Park" and his "Brighton Beach" trilogy dominated Broadway for decades, has died. He was 91.

Simon died early Sunday of complications from pneumonia at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, said Bill Evans, a longtime friend and spokesman for Shubert Organization theaters.

In the second half of the 20th century, Simon was the American theater's most successful and prolific playwright, often chronicling middle class issues and fears. Starting with "Come Blow Your Horn" in 1961 and continuing into the next century, he rarely stopped working on a new play or musical.

The theater world quickly mourned his death, including Tony Award-winning actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein, who tweeted that Simon "could write a joke that would make you laugh, define the character, the situation, and even the world's problems."

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Matthew Broderick, who in 1983 made his Broadway debut in Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" and his movie debut in Simon's "Max Dugan Returns," added: "I owe him a career. The theater has lost a brilliantly funny, unthinkably wonderful writer. And even after all this time, I feel I have lost a mentor, a father figure, a deep influence in my life and work."

Simon was the recipient of four Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Center honors (1995), four Writers Guild of America Awards and an American Comedy Awards Lifetime Achievement honor. In 1983, he had a Broadway theater named after him when the Alvin was rechristened the Neil Simon Theatre.

In 2006, he won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which honors work that draws from the American experience.ALBANY  Schools across the state are getting an extra $15.9 million to help offset the cost of hosting students who showed up on their doorsteps after being displaced by natural disasters  most notably Hurricane Maria, which tore through Puerto Rico a year ago.

After 2017s horrific weather, many families relocated to New York State and we provided guidance to schools so they quickly could enroll and support newly arriving students, State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia said in a statement about the funding, which originated with the federal government.

Even with no records, school districts across the state provided educational services, free meals and individualized academic supports so students could return to stable learning environments as quickly as possible, Elia said. These grants will help reimburse their costs and sustain services moving forward.

The money will be split among 185 schools that hosted a total of 3,006 students.

The U.S. mainland saw an influx of Puerto Rican refugees after Maria knocked out power to the island and destroyed thousands of homes and other buildings, including schools. The island, which is a U.S. territory, had been dealing with a long-term economic recession even before the hurricane hit, and recovery has been slow. Because they are U.S. citizens, many displaced Puerto Ricans came to the mainland, with a large share coming to New York due to its longstanding ties to the island.

The result was a sudden influx of new students in some schools. Because Spanish is the dominant language in Puerto Rico, some of these students were considered to be English language learners who needed English as a Second Language instruction.

In addition to New York City, most came to cities with established Puerto Rican populations where relatives and friends were able to host them. In the greater Capitol Region, Amsterdam reported 53 students and Schenectady had 54.

Students also ended up in some smaller rural districts including four apiece in Cairo-Durham and Hudson Falls and three in Averill Park.

It was a pretty minimal impact, Averill Park Superintendent Jim Franchini said. Two of the three youngsters were proficient in English, with just one needing some extra language help.

Franchini said the family has since moved to Troy, where they were able to obtain permanent housing.

He explained that the state Education Department had queried districts last year about how many storm-displaced students they were hosting.

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It wasnt immediately clear how many students who arrived in 2017 are still in the state or on the mainland.

The Atlantic hurricane season began June 1, although the most active period runs from the last week of August through the first week of September. While hurricanes are part of life in the Caribbean, Maria was a Category 4 storm that carried brutal 155 mph winds.

The money will help offset costs such as tutoring or academic counseling and other educational support services. Other reimbursable costs included health and counseling services.

rkarlin@timesunion.com 518 454 5758 @RickKarlinTUWashington County Sheriff's Office

EASTON  A Troy man was arrested Saturday for allegedly selling cocaine at the Washington County Fair, Washington County Sheriff's Office said.

Deputies were called to the scene after Joseph P. Schneider, 30, of Spring Avenue was alleged seen making a drug transaction with another man.It was 1990, Lorne Craner was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs on a short trip to Vietnam with Sen. John McCain.

The two were meeting with the countrys foreign minister at the time, Nguyen Co Thach, as part of the first attempts to normalize relations between the United States and Vietnam.

To Craners surprise, the two men began to compare their times in the Hanoi Hilton, the infamous Vietnamese prison.

McCain had spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war at various Vietnamese prisons, including the Hanoi Hilton.

Thach, a veteran of his countrys rebellion against its French colonizers as well as the Vietnam War, had spent time there as well after being captured by the French.

The meeting was especially meaningful to Craner.

During his time in captivity McCain formed a lasting friendship with Craners father, Cohoes native Col. Robert Roger Craner. Col. Craner was imprisoned after his F-100 was shot down on Dec. 12, 1967, just months after McCain had also been shot down over downtown Hanoi.

The two men couldnt see each other and communicated for over a year solely by tapping code against the thick wall that separated them.

My dad said it was like they knew each other better than their wives, Lorne Carner said Sunday. Though, Im not sure their wives liked that.

McCain, 81, died Saturday afternoon from an aggressive brain tumor after deciding days earlier to end medical treatment.

Craner worked for McCain in the U.S. Senate as a foreign policy advisor for over two years before moving to the State Department.

Lorne Craner recalled McCain as a bright, approachable politician, guided by a strong sense of patriotism.

The overwhelming percentage of the time, if he thought something was best for the U.S. and bad for him, hed do it, Craner said.

McCains efforts toward reconciliation between the U.S. and Vietnam may have been among his greatest achievements, Craner said.

If not for (McCain), it would have taken many years longer, he said.

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Craners father died of a heart attack in 1980. McCain spoke at his funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. Craner Park in Cohoes is named after him, as is the city's Colonel Robert R. Craner Veterans Service Medal award, which the city awards bi-anually.

The two men kept in contact over the years through phone calls and the Craners visited the McCains at their home in Florida, Lorne Craner said Sunday.

Twenty-six years after Craner died, McCain recalled his comrade and friend in his 2008 speech to the Republican National Convention, crediting Craner with saving his life after McCains torturers finally broke him.

When they brought me back to my cell, I was hurt and ashamed, and I didn't know how I could face my fellow prisoners," McCain continued. "The good man in the cell next door to me, my friend, Bob Craner, saved me.

"Through taps on the wall, he told me I had fought as hard as I could. No man can always stand alone. And then he told me to get back up and fight again for my country and for the men I had the honor to serve with, because every day they fought for me."

In a 2008 Washington Post profile on McCain, a fellow POW and Craners cellmate Capt. Guy Gruters said the two men earned a reputation as "real pains in the neck" to prison guards.

"They spent many, many hours on that wall, tapping and talking. It was a wonderful friendship, Gruters told the Post.August 27, 2018





Data Security in the Cloud

Data in the cloud is vulnerable to hacking in a way that is different from data stored on-site. With cyber espionage on the rise throughout the globe, businesses are justifiably concerned about the theft of intellectual property and private data. The negative consequences of intellectual property data leaks are primarily a loss of revenue caused by the breach of trade secrets. Data leaks concerning private data, particularly consumer data, can result in the loss of patronage from angry customers.







To counteract the risk, ensure that each cloud software provider you choose has a robust security system whose protocols are written clearly in the contract of service. Cloud software providers are generally reticent to provide detailed information, but at the end of the day, it is your data on the line. Ask for as much information as you need to feel that you and your customer's data is in good hands.

Using Identity Services

Identify services is the methodology by which you and your employees access data, generally in the form of an username and password. Identify services is tied in closely to user permissions, and who has access to which pieces of data stored in the cloud.

Most, if not all, cloud software systems will allow individual users to create an username and password to access the service. Having different usernames and passwords for each service is not only a burden to the user, but also introduces different security protocols into your technology suite. Instead, consider extending a single sign-in identity service into all your cloud systems. This allows your business to control sign-in security protocols, as well as makes life easier for your employees.

Access Pros and Cons

One of the benefits of cloud software is its convenience. With cloud software, accessing data, files, and other key information is a breeze on a computer, tablet, or smartphone. Cloud software has enabled a movement of mobile workers, more efficient business meetings, and sales on-the-go. What the cloud cannot control, however, is the safety of the endpoint user's connection.

All the safety protocols can be in place and a sign-on correctly entered, but if, for example, your data is accessed over an unsecured public Wi-Fi connection, it can still be intercepted. Train all users how to create a safe endpoint with use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or other means. It is also a good policy to safeguard all highly sensitive data by placing those cloud software services behind a mandatory VPN.

Cloud software is convenient, powerful, and a great opportunity for many businesses to streamline and modernize their systems. By keeping data security in mind, using identity services, and smartly gaining access to the system, a business can take safely take full advantage of the cloud.



[August 26, 2018] Travelstop Raises US$1.2 Million Seed Funding to Launch a Modern Platform That Simplifies Business Travel in Asia

Singapore-based Travelstop, founded by a team of ex-Expedia employees, launches a modern, AI-powered software-as-a-service platform for business travel in Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia. Co-founded by industry veterans, Prashant Kirtane, a former Yahoo! exec turned entrepreneur who sold his previous travel-tech startup to Expedia's HomeAway in 2015, one of the biggest early exits in Singapore, Vijay Aggarwal, a seasoned technology leader, and Altaf Dhamani, a product thought leader in the space. Seed investment led by SeedPlus, with participation from a US-based venture capital firm, and industry veterans from Expedia and Yahoo!. SINGAPORE, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Travelstop, a Singapore-based travel startup that plans to re-imagine and simplify business travel in Asia, has raised US$1.2 million (S$1.65 million) from leading investors in Singapore and USA, and is launching in Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia today. The Seed investment was led by Singapore-based venture capital firm SeedPlus, along with a leading, travel-focused venture capital firm based in the US. Several industry veterans including Dan Lynn and Vikram Malhi (ex-Expedia senior business leaders and founders of Zuzu Hospitality Solutions), David Ko (President & COO of Rally Health), and Jarrod Howe (Regional Operations Director at Hyper Island Singapore) were also part of this round of funding. Travelstop is a modern AI-powered software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform aimed at simplifying business travel for corporates in Asia. It provides easy to use tools that simplifies the business travel booking process, while automating expense reporting and providing meaningful insights to business owners. "Travelstop is led by an experienced team of founders who have significant experience in solving complex consumer problems." says Michael Smith Jr., Partner at SeedPlus. "90% of all business travel in Asia is unmanaged and Travelstop, with its modern approach to business travel, is perfectly positioned to be the leader in this spae. Now, with Travelstop, companies across Asia can easily manage their travel needs and offer their employees who travel a delightful user experience."



The Asia Pacific region is the largest business travel market in the world, comprising 40% of global business travel, and is on track to grow at 10.4% CAGR between 2015 - 2023 (Europe 3.8%, US 4.1%). While current business travel solutions are designed for large corporations and traditional business travellers, the unmanaged travel space in Asia, which is increasingly dominated by millennials, needs a simpler and more flexible solution: one that keeps costs low, allows a level of flexibility and gathers all data and expenses into a single, easy-to-use interface. Travelstop addresses this gap by providing a platform that simplifies business travel booking and automates the expense reporting process for employees. It uses advanced machine learning and AI-powered personalisation to make flight and hotel recommendations, reducing the hours needed by business travellers to research and book their travel. Employees also have access to an intuitive expense reporting tool that simplifies the expense reimbursement process.

Prashant Kirtane, Travelstop CEO said: "Young Millennials and business travellers in Asia are technology savvy, socially driven and are smart travellers that actively participate in the sharing economy. These travellers aspire for more meaningful travel experiences, and we at Travelstop are building a modern business travel platform for the next-gen traveller. Our goal is to not only provide a delightful and flexible travel booking experience, but also make the post-trip expense management process more efficient." Travelstop plans to bring all the product innovation happening in the consumer space to the enterprise world -- leveraging technologies such as machine learning and AI-driven personalisation to build a compelling and modern experience for today's business traveller. "Business travellers deserve to experience all the innovation and progress that the consumer space has made over the last several years," says Travelstop CTO, Vijay Aggarwal. "Our goal is to leverage machine learning and AI to power experiences for today's business traveller, while staying nimble and flexible by investing in modern infrastructure to power our platform." Kirtane further added: "This round of funding will be used to drive product development, build a world-class development team in Singapore, and to ramp up growth through sales and marketing. In 2018, we will focus our energies on a few priority markets like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and will look to expand beyond these markets in 2019." Travelstop is available for free for a limited period, sign up at www.travelstop.com About Travelstop: Travelstop is a revolutionary platform aimed at modernising and simplifying business travel. Using advanced technology and consumer-centric design, Travelstop offers tools that simplify and automate the entire business travel experience -- right from trip planning to expense reimbursements. Travelstop is meant to help companies save on costs by providing an affordable end-to-end solution. Backed by world-class VCs and notable individual investors, who bring a wealth of experience from companies including Yahoo!, Expedia and HomeAway, Travelstop is well positioned to shape the future of business travel. For more information, visit https://www.travelstop.com/ Company leadership Travelstop is led by its management team and board of advisors, who bring a depth of experience in the travel industry to their roles, including: Prashant Kirtane , CEO and co-founder: Seasoned leader with 20 years of experience in senior management positions at Yahoo! and Expedia. Also founded travelmob.com - acquired by HomeAway-Expedia.

, CEO and co-founder: Seasoned leader with 20 years of experience in senior management positions at Yahoo! and Expedia. Also founded travelmob.com - acquired by HomeAway-Expedia. Vijay Aggarwal , CTO and co-founder: Technology specialist with 16 years of experience in senior management positions at Yahoo!, travelmob, and HomeAway.

, CTO and co-founder: Technology specialist with 16 years of experience in senior management positions at Yahoo!, travelmob, and HomeAway. Altaf Dhamani , CPO and co-founder: Product professional with over 12 years of experience building products for companies like Yahoo!, travelmob and HomeAway.

, CPO and co-founder: Product professional with over 12 years of experience building products for companies like Yahoo!, travelmob and HomeAway. David Ko , Advisor: President & COO of Rally Health, former Chief Operating Officer at Zynga and former Senior Vice President at Yahoo! (Mobile and Audience). SOURCE Travelstop

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018] Google Certified Publishing Partner Aggressively Expands Into Europe's Digital Publishing Market

LONDON, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Google Certified Publishing Partner, Ezoic, has recently announced their plans to expand even further into the European digital publishing marketplace. Ezoic has maintained a Newcastle office for several years, but recently opened a London location and has grown their European headcount by 450% in the last year. "Digital publishers and website owners all have very similar challenges in how they balance user experiences and revenue. Our technology platform gives them the tools to scale machine learning-based decision making, visitor segmentation, and automated testing. Our platform is the best way for publishers to increase ad revenue while ensuring that visitors are still having good experiences," said Ezoic Chief Customer Officer, John Cole. Ezoic is an end-to-end platform for publishers that is free to join and use. Ezoic contains over a dozen different apps that allows publishers to do everything from having advanced artificial intelligence segmentvisitors so each can be served unique ad experiences to tools that enable websites to increase their speed, security, and performance.



"We've specialized in providing solutions to publishers that help them manage changing industry complexities automatically using technology. Our data, and reputation as a friend of publishers, will allow us to provide the European market with something that I think has really been needed for a while," said UK Managing Director, Mike McGuire. As a major part of the expansion, Ezoic will be partnering with Google on October 23rd for a special event aimed solely at digital publishers and content creators, called Pubtelligence. The event will take place at Google offices in London and is available to attend by application only.

"We think this event alongside Google is the opportunity we've been looking for to introduce ourselves to the European market. It will be a day of learning for publishers at Google and we are happy to be a part of it," Cole stated. Ezoic will also be attending the upcoming DMEXCO digital conference in Cologne, Germany and will position themselves beside Google at the event. "I think it is really helpful for publishers to see who we are and hear our voices. The Google brand helps provide publishers with trust in what we do, but I think once they meet more of our people they will really start to understand why so many publishers choose to work with Ezoic," McGuire finished. About Ezoic Ezoic is an award-winning end-to-end technology platform for publishers. Ezoic is Google Certified Publishing Partner with European offices in Newcastle and London, UK and a U.S location in Carlsbad, California. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/735218/Pubtelligence_London_Ezoic.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/461011/ezoic_google_partner_logo.jpg

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018] MiVote Signs Historic Deal With Democratic Party of India

NEW DELHI, August 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- MiVote, the world's leading democratic movement, together with the Democratic Party of India announces a historic working relationship to bring genuine digital-supported democracy to the people of India for the 2019 state and union elections. Today the Democratic Party of India (DPI) becomes the world's first political party to adopt the global MiVote model. In doing so, the DPI will be the first Party in Indian history to determine all policy positions through a blockchain-enabled democratic platform that will ask every Indian citizen their preferred direction for their community. Since launching MiVote India in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the MiVote Indian Chapter has been overwhelmed by the positive response to its proprietary policy framework, governance model and technology platform. With a focus on improving community decision-making throughout the world, MiVote is a democratic model open to individuals, parties and governments. MiVote India is thrilled that the DPI has adopted the complete MiVote model. Following from his success at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in London earlier in 2018, advocate, social entrepreneur and founder of MiVote India, Joydeep Mondal said, "The great potential of India can only be achieved when the collective voice of the people is harnessed." The Democratic Party of India was established in 1961 and was registered by the Election Commission of India in the year 1989. The Party was revived in 2018 with a vision towards Socio-Economic empowerment of Citizens starting from the most deprived sections of the society with a stern focus on Inclusive development, and a commitment to ensure that the most marginalised and disconnected members of the community have genuine representation. The DPI already boasts more than 3 million members across India in the first 60 days since its relaunch. Speaking about the historic relationship, the National President of the Democratic Partyof India, Captain G.S. Rathee, said, "The association with MiVote will not only empower the vision of the party, rather it will also give a direction towards development and strengthening the democratic behaviour of India."



"The Democratic Party of India is ready to contest the 2019 Parliamentary Elections in all states across India. Party candidates will also contest the upcoming 2018 Assembly elections in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh." The election symbol for the Democratic Party of India, allotted by the Election Commission of India, is POT.

In adopting the complete MiVote model, the DPI has made a bold commitment to demonstrate the most comprehensive democratic behaviours for its members. Key features of the MiVote model include: - Policy determined by a vote of the constituency; - Never accepting corporate or lobby group money; - Providing citizens facts and information relevant to every policy vote; - Adopting a non-partisan, fact based approach to policy making, issue by issue; - Having complete transparency on policy decisions; - Holding candidates / representatives to account on the decisions of the majority; and - Ensuring that every citizen has an equal voice Founder and Chief Steward of the Global MiVote movement, Adam Jacoby, having spent ten days with the MiVote India team and the leadership team of the DPI in Delhi commented, "MiVote is thrilled to have found a group of people so committed to the principles of genuine democracy. The Democratic Party of India will be a wonderful steward of the MiVote model and will provide the people of India with a political choice unlike anything they have seen before." Discussing the potential of the blockchain technology platform, Jacoby stated, "Powering the DPI with the world's premier blockchain voting platform from our partner organisation, Horizon State will ensure that all voters will have access to the safest and most sophisticated voting platform available today." Contact: Disha Paul via email. About MiVote MiVote is a decentralised decision-making platform, using blockchain technology to inform, empower and represent the voice of the will of the people. MiVote closely aligned with United Nation, SDGs 4,5,10 and 16. MiVote projects a strong focus on any of the SDGs much less four of them, especially when addressing such a key issue as democracy in relation to the future of government, voting and justice for all. MiVote is an information platform that presents you with a variety of perspectives on all major issues up for debate in Parliaments and many others that affect our lives, via the MiVote App. The MiVote App enables you to make an informed, well rounded decision and have your say on where you want our country to go. Putting REAL change at your fingertips. The vote you choose to make on the MiVote App defines the position of the MiVote Movement on each critical policy debate in various Parliaments. Unlike current political parties, we do not have a position on any issue until the majority of members have told us where they want the nation wants to go. We the people, together, will determine our future. MiVote employs an independent research team, free from political influence and bias. Our research team's job is to unpack each issue in a way that is easy to understand and accessible for all citizens. We point out the consequences of voting a particular way. This is done by breaking complex issues into what we call Frames. By doing this, each member can consider each frame and vote on its merits. Media Contact:

Disha Paul

disha.paul@mivote.com

+91-9874457252

PR Communications

MiVote India





[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018] Hyperlink InfoSystem, one of the Top Mobile App Development Companies in UAE, USA & India, to Exhibit in GITEX Technology Week 2018, Dubai

NEW YORK and DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, August 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- GITEX Technology Week is the world's largest information and communication technology trade event to experience the most advanced technology and drive into digital transformation. The GITEX Technology conference is being held for the last 38 years and this year it is going to be a game-changer for all tech companies. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/708610/Hyperlink_Infosystem_Logo.jpg )

As an annual event, GITEX 2018 is expected to be attended by 1,46,000 industry leaders, developers, and professionals and they all are going to be under a single roof at the Dubai World Trade Centre. In GITEX Technology Week, the visitors would be well informed about the new technologies of all sectors & industries including IT Software & Hardware, Mobile Apps, Artificial Intelligence and much more. GITEX opens up the door of opportunities for many startups & entrepreneurs to experience and introduce their innovations on cutting-edge technology. With the slogan 'Experience the Future Urbanism', the 38th GITEX Technology Week 2018 #GITEX2018 will be held between 14th to 18th October at Dubai World Trade Centre, Dubai. Sectors that will be covered in #GITEX2018: GITEX 2018 will highlight the amazing Technology Sectors across the show floor which is combined with this year's show experience. Future Technology: Artificial Intelligence Blockchain 3D Printing Robotics Drones & UAV VR/AR/MR Consumer Technology: Smart Home Smart Workplace Computer/Moile Hardware & Software



Digital Imaging/Video Health/Fitness/Wearables

Enterprise Network & Security: Privacy and Cyber Security Infrastructure Network & Security Other Technology Sectors: Future Transportation Global Solution Providers Gulfcoms-Telecom & Mobility Global Smart Cities Value Added Distributors Cloud IoT/Sensors Printing & Business Solutions Big Data/Analytics Enterprise Software Data Centres In GITEX Technology Week, many mobile app development agencies will participate and get the chance to showcase their innovative ideas and grow their business. Being a top-notch IT company, 'Hyperlink InfoSystem' is consistently participating in GITEX Technology Week since past few years. Hyperlink InfoSystem is ready to exhibit in 38th GITEX technology week with the unique ideas and smart solutions on mobile app development, IoT & AI development, blockchain development, web development, game development, augmented & virtual reality app development, wearable app development, big data, enterprise software. On the occasion of GITEX IT fair, Mr. Harnil Oza, the CEO of Hyperlink InfoSystem says, "GITEX technology week opens the business gateway for techies, IT Industrialists & the visitors. And this is the reason why anybody who has visited the event last time would surely not like to miss this opportunity. In GITEX 2018, we are quite excited to unlock the new opportunities and present our new innovations in the technology sector that will surely influence the future of the mobile industry." Every start-up needs good technical guidance & cost-effective solutions. The representatives of Hyperlink InfoSystem will assist visitors with an extensive variety of IT services. All investors, startups and company delegates are most welcomed to visit the company stall at Zabeel Hall 1, Stand C1-20 at Dubai World Trade Centre, from 14th to 18th October, 2018. To schedule a meeting, visit here: https://www.hyperlinkinfosystem.com/gitex-technology-week.html About Hyperlink InfoSystem: Hyperlink InfoSystem is a leading mobile app development company in UAE and also has presence across the globe. The company has successfully developed 3000+ mobile apps for more than 2000 clients around the world. Recently the company has been ranked as one of the top 10 mobile app development companies in India. The growth of Hyperlink InfoSystem is all because of 150+ talented professionals who work for client requirements and provide the best customized mobile apps with the use of latest technologies. Contact Details:

Hyperlink InfoSystem

Harnil Oza

+1-805-744-1224

info@hyperlinkinfosystem.com



New York Address:

One World Trade Center,

285 Fulton Street suite 8500,

New York, NY 10007, United States



California Address:

607 Arcadia Terrace Unit 201

Sunnyvale, CA 94085

United States





[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018] ITC Judge Releases Initial Determination in Favor of Motorola Solutions Against Hytera Communications

Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: MSI (News - Alert) ) today announced that Administrative Law Judge Mary Joan McNamara of the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has released the Notice of Initial Determination from the ITC's investigation of the patent infringement complaint filed by Motorola (News - Alert) Solutions against Hytera Communications Corporation Limited (SHE: 002583) on March 29, 2017. In the complaint, Motorola Solutions alleged that Hytera is unlawfully importing and selling two-way radio equipment and systems and related software and components that infringe four of Motorola Solutions' patents. On July 3, 2018, Judge McNamara found that all four of Motorola Solutions' patents are valid and that Hytera infringed them. An exclusion order, preventing the importation of infringing products into the United States for three of the patents, as well as a cease-and-desist order (preventing the further sale and marketing of certain infringing products imported into the United States), continues to be Judge McNamara's recommendation. The release of the detailed 260 page Initial Determination was ordered by the Judge notwithstanding Hytera's efforts to redact it extensively. Relevant highlights from the Notice of Initial Determination are below. All quotations are verbatim from Judge McNamara (emphasis added in certain places). The full Initial Determination is available at https://newsroom.motorolasolutions.com/content/1107/files/InitialDeterminationSection337.pdf. There Is "Persuasive Evidence" Hytera Copied Motorola Solutions' Technology Motorola Solutions presented " persuasive circumstantial and direct evidence " that the Hytera employees " wrongfully copied certain of Motorola [Solutions'] patented technologies ."

" that the Hytera employees " ." "Finally, and perhaps the most problematic for Hytera, the evidence includes the extent to which each of these Hytera Employees plead the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions during their depositions in this Investigation . The questions the Hytera Employees were asked clearly were designed to document whether they copied and took with them to Hytera any of Motorola [Solutions'] proprietary and patented Motorola [Solutions] technology."

The questions the Hytera Employees were asked clearly were designed to document whether they copied and took with them to Hytera any of Motorola [Solutions'] proprietary and patented Motorola [Solutions] technology." "In each case, the Hytera Employees refused to answer questions and instead invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves. Mr. Y.T. Kok invoked his Fifth Amendment right to more than 70 questions. Mr. Chia also invoked his Fifth Amendment right to more than 70 questions. Mr. G.S. Kok invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to more than 60 questions."



Hytera Employees' Timeline (News - Alert) Is "Compelling and Telling" "While Hytera may be correct that there is no direct evidence that the three Hytera employees copied the more than 7,000 documents they accessed, it is logical to infer that the Hytera Employees accessed these documents with the intent of acquiring information about Motorola [Solutions'] DMR products for Hytera . The timing and circumstances of their actions are unequivocal and uncontested."

they accessed, . The timing and circumstances of their actions are unequivocal and uncontested." "That figure bears repeating simply to let sink in the sheer magnitude of the number of confidential Motorola documents that the Hytera Employees accessed, just before they left Motorola: more than 7,000 documents. This could not have been coincidental." Hytera Was "Willfully Blind" to Motorola Solutions' Patent Portfolio

"Despite knowing about Motorola [Solutions'] patents, and while Hytera unquestionably copied certain of Motorola [Solutions'] patented technologies, Hytera acknowledged that it did not take any steps to avoid infringing Motorola [Solutions'] patents." Hytera's Arguments Are "Disingenuous" "It is difficult to understand why Hytera continued to maintain positions throughout this Investigation that were disingenuous, and not supported either factually or legally." "Hytera has built its business by copying the hard work and innovation of Motorola Solutions. Judge McNamara's findings categorically validate the merits of Motorola Solutions' global litigation against Hytera to stop its improper and illegal behavior," said Mark Hacker, general counsel and chief administrative officer of Motorola Solutions. "We thank Judge McNamara for both her diligence and the strong, clear language she used to condemn Hytera's actions. We remain committed to vigorously protecting Motorola Solutions' intellectual property in the United States and internationally, and look forward to the final determination by the ITC." As the next step in the process, the ITC will conduct a mandatory review of the Initial Determination. A Final Determination is scheduled to be issued by Nov. 6, 2018. After the Final Determination is issued, there is a 60 day presidential review, during which the U.S. President may modify the ITC's Final Determination. Upon the expiration of that review period (approximately Jan. 7, 2019), the ITC's exclusion and cease-and-desist orders will take effect. At such time, at least the following Hytera products would be excluded from the U.S. market: Subscribers: MD652, MD782, BD302, BD362, BD502, PD412, PD502, PD562, PD602, PD662, PD682, PD702, PD752, PD782, PD792, PD982, X1e, X1p, and all variants thereof; and

MD652, MD782, BD302, BD362, BD502, PD412, PD502, PD562, PD602, PD662, PD682, PD702, PD752, PD782, PD792, PD982, X1e, X1p, and all variants thereof; and Repeaters: RD622, RD982, and all variants thereof. In addition to the ITC, Motorola Solutions' patent infringement, trade secret theft and copyright infringement lawsuits against Hytera are still pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the Federal Court of Australia and the Regional Courts of Mannheim and Dusseldorf in Germany. Motorola Solutions' complaint filed with the ITC, as well as information on Motorola Solutions' other actions against Hytera, can be accessed at https://newsroom.motorolasolutions.com/presskits/motorola-solutions-intellectual-property.htm. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains certain forward-looking statements including statements regarding expectations with respect to litigation filed by Motorola Solutions, Inc., and the outcomes possible if successful. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainty because they relate to future events and depend on circumstances that will or may occur in the future and are outside the control of Motorola Solutions, Inc., and its officers. Actual results may differ from those expressed in such statements depending on a variety of factors including those discussed in this release. About Motorola Solutions Motorola Solutions (NYSE: MSI) creates mission-critical communications solutions, including devices, networks, software and video, that help public safety and commercial customers build safer cities and thriving communities. For ongoing news, visit www.motorolasolutions.com/newsroom or subscribe to a news feed. MOTOROLA, MOTOROLA SOLUTIONS and the Stylized M Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Motorola Trademark Holdings, LLC and are used under license. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 2018 Motorola Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180827005278/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018] OVHcloud Launches Partner Program, Expanding Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service Offering to Partners and Resellers

RESTON, Va., Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OVHcloud, a global cloud provider, today announced the launch of the OVHcloud Partner Program to expand the market opportunity of its Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings to customers. With the new partner program, resellers, system integrators, system outsourcers (SISO), and managed service providers (MSP) will offer new OVHcloud solutions and benefit from providing alternative and lower cost options to their customers.

OVHcloudTM logo



OVHcloud will enable partners to grow their cloud business by bringing infrastructure options to include the VMware-based hosted private cloud, bare metal servers, and/or public cloud. The program consists of four tiers, giving partners the opportunity to select the level that most aligns with their business goals. Each level provides different resources, benefits, and financial incentives to support customer and sales needs. Visit OVHcloud to learn more about these programs. As a leading IT solutions provider, FusionStorm is excited to bring more choice to our customers by leveraging OVHclouds long-standing expertise buildng and operating a trusted and secure cloud infrastructure, said Richard Bocchinfuso, director of engineering, FusionStorm, OVHcloud partner. FusionStorm believes that the combination of OVHclouds infrastructure and FusionStorms vast engineering capabilities provides an incredibly simple path for VMware-based customers to experience the agility of the cloud while dramatically reducing risk associated with cloud transformation. FusionStorm is excited to be one of the first partners to bring OVHcloud to the U.S. market.



The OVHcloud Partner Program offers benefits including: Breadth of offerings: Partners can take advantage of multiple offerings ranging from VMware-based hosted private cloud to public cloud to bare metal. This wide variety of options gives partners the ability to pick the offering that works best for delivering their solutions to clients.

Partners can take advantage of multiple offerings ranging from VMware-based hosted private cloud to public cloud to bare metal. This wide variety of options gives partners the ability to pick the offering that works best for delivering their solutions to clients. Revenue opportunity: Partners can leverage an already price-competitive OVHcloud offering coupled with partner discounts to build a strong business model.

Partners can leverage an already price-competitive OVHcloud offering coupled with partner discounts to build a strong business model. Flexibility and agility: Partners have the flexibility and agility to run their business and scale with their clients.

Partners have the flexibility and agility to run their business and scale with their clients. Resources and support: Partners will access support including training, marketing, and sales activity planning to ensure partner success. VMware understands the critical role that partners play in serving technology organizations today as they bring unique expertise and understanding of business challenges. As a long-time VMware partner and an OVHcloud partner, FusionStorm is uniquely positioned to deliver value add managed services to customers atop the OVHcloud offerings, said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business unit at VMware. This new OVHcloud Partner Program is a win for the industry, a win for the partner community, and a win for customers.

Our new partner program opens a significant opportunity for MSPs, resellers, and solution providers to expand their value proposition and grow their business. Infrastructure is our business and for almost 20 years, businesses of all sizes have relied on us to manage their most critical applications, said David Wigglesworth, chief revenue officer of OVH US. We are excited to collaborate with VMware, FusionStorm, and others to provide more options for IT service providers, more customer flexibility, and bring OVHcloud innovation to the market. To learn more about the OVHcloud Partner Program, visit OVHcloud . About OVHcloud

OVHcloud is a global cloud provider that specializes in delivering industry-leading performance and cost-effective solutions to manage, secure, and scale businesses. OVHcloud provides a smarter alternative for bare metal servers, hosted private cloud, and public cloud solutions. Vertically integrated with its own network, server technology, and green data centers, OVHcloud operates more effectively and passes these benefits to its customers and partners. Openness, freedom of choice, and freedom to innovate are at the core of OVHcloud and what businesses depend on to run their most critical applications. Learn more about OVHcloud . OVHcloud in the US is provided by a subsidiary of OVH, one of the largest European hosting providers with over 2,500 employees worldwide. OVH is trusted by more than one million customers across 138 countries, with a global network consisting of 28 data centers, 33 points of presence, and thousands of miles of dark fiber. VMware, Cloud Foundation, vSphere, vSAN, NSX, VMware Cloud, Hybrid Cloud Extension, VMworld, vCloud, and vCloud Air are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. Media Contact

Katie LeChase

10Fold Communications

+1 585-410-5199

ovh@10fold.com

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018]

Sumo Logic Unveils Agenda and Sponsors for Illuminate 2018

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sumo Logic , the leading cloud-native, machine data analytics platform that delivers continuous intelligence , today announced the agenda and first round of sponsors for its annual Illuminate user conference, taking place Sept. 12-13, 2018 in Burlingame, Calif. Registration for Illuminate is now open .



More than 1,600 companies and 50,000 users count on Sumo Logic to deliver the continuous intelligence needed to empower the people who power modern business and accelerate digital business transformation. Illuminate sponsors represent a rich and powerful ecosystem of valued partners that share the same point of view around building, running and securing todays modern applications and infrastructures. This years sponsors include Amazon Web Services ( AWS ), Carbon Black , Cloudreach , Cloud Technology Partners , CrowdStrike , eSentire , Google Cloud Platform ( GCP ), JFrog , LightStep , MongoDB , New Relic , Okta , OneLogin , PagerDuty and Trifacta .







Sumo Logic also unveiled its agenda for the two-day interactive experience, which will include over 40 technical sessions, an Ask the Expert bar, a partner ecosystem showcase and Birds of a Feather roundtables. The agenda will feature four key tracks, including Monitoring and Troubleshooting, Security Analytics, Dev Talks and Customer Experience. Sessions within these tracks will provide an in-depth look at peer, partner and customer use cases as well as outline best practices for machine data and security analytics to implement modern operational, security and business strategies for todays digital world.

The event will also feature four levels of training for the Sumo Logic Certification Program , which provides professionals with the training needed to effectively analyze their machine data, while providing users with the knowledge, skills and competencies required to maximize the Sumo Logic platform in order to realize their full data insight potential.

Illuminate is all about empowering our users to thrive in the digital era by helping them harness machine data analytics to better build, run and secure modern applications, said Jabari Norton, VP of global partner and alliances, Sumo Logic. We are proud of our leading ecosystem of partners and are excited to showcase the power of our joint integrations and best practices for enhancing the business insights of our customers solutions.

Illuminate 2018 Conference Details

When: Sept. 12-13, 2018

Where: Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport Hotel , Burlingame, Calif.

, Burlingame, Calif. Registration can be found on the Illuminate 2018 website

Follow Illuminate on social media using the hashtag #IlluminateSumoCon

Watch highlights from Illuminate 2017

About Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is a secure, cloud-native, machine data analytics service, delivering real-time, continuous intelligence from structured, semi-structured and unstructured data across the entire application lifecycle and stack. More than 1,600 customers around the globe rely on Sumo Logic for the analytics and insights to build, run and secure their modern applications and cloud infrastructures. With Sumo Logic, customers gain a multi-tenant, service-model advantage to accelerate their shift to continuous innovation, increasing competitive advantage, business value and growth.

Founded in 2010, Sumo Logic is a privately held company based in Redwood City, Calif. and is backed by Accel Partners, DFJ, Greylock Partners, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures. For more information, visit www.sumologic.com .

Media Contacts

Melissa Liton

Sumo Logic

mliton@sumologic.com

(650) 814-3882

Danielle Salvato-Earl

Offleash for Sumo Logic

sumo@offleashpr.com[August 27, 2018] Amerigroup Washington Selected to Receive Statewide Medicaid Contracts

Amerigroup Washington, a wholly owned subsidiary of Anthem, Inc., has been selected by the Washington State Health Care Authority to receive new contracts, which will enable the health plan to provide integrated clinical care services to Medicaid-eligible residents throughout the state. The new services, which will start becoming effective on January 1, 2019, include a broad range of care such as medical, mental health, substance abuse treatment and dental benefits. Amerigroup has served Washington's Medicaid consumers since 2012, and has more than 20 years of experience providing innovative, industry-leading Medicaid services that improve quality of care and deliver better health outcomes to consumers and communities across the United States. "Over the past six years, Amerigroup has built a depth of experience and understanding of the unique needs of Medicaid consumers in Washington," said Craig Smith, President, Amerigroup Washington health plan. "We have worked diligently to create a better healthcare experience and partner with the community in providing integrated, person-centered care solutions as well as in administrating statewide housing and employment support services. We are honored to have the opportunity to again expand our reach across the entire state to deliver fresh, new approaches that will help build abetter future for Washington's Medicaid consumers."



In May 2017, the Washington State Health Care Authority awarded Amerigroup a contract to provide fully integrated managed care for Medicaid consumers in Chelan, Douglas and Grant regions, which extended Amerigroup's footprint beyond Washington's North Central Region. Amerigroup was then awarded a contract to serve as the state's sole third-party administrator of supportive housing and employment services for Washington's eligible Medicaid consumers statewide. Most recently, Amerigroup was selected to receive additional contracts that will expand Amerigroup's fully integrated health care services to all regions of the state and add statewide dental benefit coordination to Amerigroup's services offering. Amerigroup health plan dental benefits will be administered by DentaQuest and are expected to begin on Jan. 1, 2019. Also on Jan. 1, 2019, Amerigroup will begin serving Greater Columbia, King, North Sound, Pierce and Spokane regions as they transition to integrated managed care. On Jan. 1, 2020, Washington's remaining services areas, which include Great Rivers, Salish, and Thurston-Mason regions, will transition to integrated managed care and also be served by Amerigroup.

For more information about Amerigroup Washington and its services, visit www.myamerigroup.com/wa. About Amerigroup Washington Amerigroup Washington helps improve health care access and quality for approximately 150,000 Washington residents by developing innovative care management programs and services. Members are assured care that is not only accessible, but also accountable, comprehensive, integrated and person-centered. Amerigroup Washington provides ongoing community relations and outreach to encourage members to become active participants in improving and managing their health. Through access to health education programs, our members are empowered to choose and sustain a healthy lifestyle. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180827005150/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018] 3D Printing in the North American Healthcare Market to Grow at a CAGR of 20% during 2018-2023 - ResearchAndMarkets.com

The "North America Healthcare 3D Printing Market - Segmented by Technology, Application, Materials, and Geography - Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2018 - 2023)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The North America healthcare 3D printing market is expected to register a CAGR of 20% during the forecast period of 2018-2023. The increasing cost pressure on medical device manufacturers has forced them to adopt 3D printing technology to eliminate the traditional prototyping process. Moreover, the growing income levels, low manufacturing costs, and quick product development have augmented the interest of players in emerging markets. Demand for Customized 3D Printing Additive manufacturing, often referred to as 3D printing, has the potential to provide cost-efficient methods to produce highly complex and customized components, single parts or small batches of products. Dental laboratories and hearing aid manufacturers get the maximum benefit from 3D printing in healthcar. Thus, there is a huge unmet demand for hearing aids in the market. Since almost all hearing aids are 3D printed, the market is expected to grow positively in the forecast period.



Similar has been the case with dental implants. With increasing number of procedures of dental implants, the need for customized procedures has risen. This can be catered by 3D printing techniques. 3D printing technologies have exposed the capabilities for customization in a wide variety of applications in the medical field. The other factors, such as technological advancements leading to the enhanced application and increasing scope of bioengineering products are driving the healthcare 3D printing market to grow.

Key Influencers High Cost of 3D Printed Organs & Tissue

United States to Lead the Market Notable Development EnvisionTEC and AvaDent joined forces on 3D printed dentures Key Topics Covered 1. Introduction 2. Research Methodology 3. Executive Summary 4. Key Inferences 5. Market Overview 6. Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities, and Challenges Analysis (DROC) 7. Market Segmentation 8. Competitive Landscape 9. Key Players 3D Systems Corporation (3DS)

Organovo

Bio3D Technologies Pte Ltd.

Ekso Bionics

Metamason

EnvisionTEC

Rainbow Biosciences

3T RPD Ltd. 10. Future of the Market For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/344qpw/3d_printing_in?w=4 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180827005312/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018] Innovative Enterprises Names Screening Industry Insider Teresa Connor Director of Data Acquisitions

NEWPORT NEWS, Va., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Innovative Enterprises, Inc., an expert strategic partner to the background screening industry, today announced that it has named screening industry insider Teresa Connor Director of Data Acquisitions. In her new role, Teresa will head Innovative's data acquisition strategy, reporting directly to the company's Vice President of Information Technology, Pat Lankswert. Teresa brings over a decade of criminal data acquisition and architectural experience, including overseeing data accuracy and normalization, data automation, and the development of enterprise data systems from the ground up. She previously served as IT Program Director and Solutions Architect at backgroundchecks.com. "It's not very often you can bring aboard an expert of Teresa's caliber in a niche industry like ours," stated Lankswert. "With her vast data acquisition and architectural experience, I expect we will significantly increase the distance between our position as the industry leader and that of our competitors"



"I am excited to join Innovative where I will apply my many years of technical and business experience to aggressively assist Innovative in supporting their clients. Accepting the opportunity to be a part of Innovative, I understand the powerful influence we have on the industry as a team, and I look forward to enhancing our position as the gold standard when it comes to background related data." About Innovative Enterprises, Inc.

For more than twenty years, Innovative has served as an expert strategic partner to the background screening industry. Firms that power their screening processes using Innovative's industry leading solutions experience an average rate of growth that far outpaces industry norms. Innovative commands an intimate knowledge of its core competencies gleaned from more than two centuries of cumulative staff experience in public records research and aggregation, law enforcement, judicial administration and private investigation. An industry leader since 1996, Innovative is a founding member of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners and has helped to raise the bar through its active participation in the formulation of best practice guidelines for industry providers across various segments. Innovative was honored in 2008, 2009, 2015, 2016, 2017 and again in 2018 as one of the Inc. 500|5000 Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies in America. For more information, please call 1-888-777-9435, email solutions@knowthefacts.com, or visit us online at http://www.knowthefacts.com. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/innovative-enterprises-names-screening-industry-insider-teresa-connor-director-of-data-acquisitions-300702139.html SOURCE Innovative Enterprises, Inc.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018] Astea International Announces the Launch of its New Corporate Website at Field Service Amelia Island

AMELIA ISLAND, Fla., Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Astea International Inc., a leading global provider of field service management and mobility solutions, today announced the launch of its new corporate website, which can experienced by visiting Astea.com. The announcement comes from the Field Service Amelia Island conference taking place August 27 - 29 at the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island. As a conference sponsor, Astea will be performing live demonstrations at Booth #2 of Alliance Enterprise, the newest version of its award-winning field service management and mobility platform. "We are excited to unveil our new website and our new software version release at one of North America's most popular field service events," said David F. Giannetto, chief operating officer at Astea International. "Alliance Enterprise will be the most transformative software version release to date for our flagship service lifecycle management platform. Our customers, who represent some of the world's best service-driven companies, will leverage Alliance Enterprise to help them win the global talent war, seamlessly incorporate third party and contingent workers, and deliver actionable business intelligence to every stakeholder in the service ecosystem." Alliance Enterprise offers a completely revamped user interface designed to improve usability and streamline workflows, as well as delivering innovative capabilities to help service organizations increase profitability and provide outstanding customer experiences that differentiate them in the market. The platform will also enable Just-in-Time Service by integrating with the most poplar carriers to coordinate parts delivery dates with technician arrival dates.



"The launch of our new website and our new software version release aligned perfectly to allow us to showcase them both at Field Service Amelia Island," said Emily Hackman, director of global marketing at Astea International. "With the rapid pace of technology advancement, service professionals need a convenient method for keeping a pulse on all the latest trends. The new website proudly offers educational resources for the global field service community, including videos, infographics, industry research reports, on-demand webinars and interactive ROI calculators. Both our new corporate website and our new software release embody the evolution of our brand to better reflect the innate spirit of innovation that Astea has always possessed as a service management industry leader for nearly 40 years." At Field Service Amelia Island, Astea will be joined by its augmented reality and visual intelligence partner, XOi Technologies. The Alliance Enterprise and XOi's Vision platforms are integrated to help service organizations validate the quality and consistency of field service work, streamline information sharing and training, and increase mobile workforce efficiency through technology built for technicians to capture and leverage visual intelligence in the field. Attendees can view demonstrations of the integrated field service management and visual intelligence solution at Booth #2. Additionally, Chief Operating Officer David F. Giannetto will be co-hosting a roundtable discussion on "Making Digital Transformation Real" with an Astea client, Scientific Games Corporation, on August 28.

About Astea International Astea International is a global leader in field service and mobile workforce management, including all the cornerstones of full service lifecycle management: customer management, service management, asset management, forward and reverse logistics management and mobile workforce management and optimization. Astea technology helps the world's best service-driven companies generate higher profit while properly balancing customer satisfaction and service levels through proactive communication that creates a seamless, consistent and highly personalized experience at every customer relationship touch point. Astea's solutions unify processes, people, parts, and information to focus the entire organization on the creation of sustainable value in highly competitive, global markets. www.astea.com. Service Smart. Enterprise Proven.  2018 Astea International Inc. Astea, Astea Alliance, and Alliance Enterprise are trademarks of Astea International Inc. About XOi Technologies XOi's Vision platform uses workflow automation, NLP, computer vision, and machine learning to streamline documentation of service calls, facilitate real time remote support, intelligently archive and resurface service content, and improve customer transparency from the frontlines of field service. We empower our field service customers to effectively put their best tech on every site, which speeds resolution of issues, reduces cost and increases sell- through of recommended maintenance and upgrades. XOi customers typically see a 35% increase in tickets closed per technician, a 24% increase in the revenue value per ticket, and a significant reduction in expensive second truck rolls. www.xoi.io View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/astea-international-announces-the-launch-of-its-new-corporate-website-at-field-service-amelia-island-300702523.html SOURCE Astea International Inc.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018] Flashpoint's Allison Nixon Recognized as 'Threat Seeker' in SC Media Reboot Leadership Awards

NEW YORK, Aug. 27, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Flashpoint, the global leader in Business Risk Intelligence (BRI), is honored to announce that Allison Nixon, director of security research, has been named a Threat Seeker in the 2018 SC Media Reboot Leadership Awards. The awards, which are an extension of SC Medias Reboot edition, recognizes leaders for their unique contributions that improve security and shape the industry.

Allison Nixon, director of security research



Nixon specializes in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack attribution, cybercrime attribution, and analysis of criminal communities. In 2013, she spoke at Black Hat USA about finding the origins of DDoS-protected domains. In 2014, she released a paper detailing methods for verifying leaked databases. From 2015-2018, her work has pushed DDoS attack attribution forward in numerous investigations. In October 2016, Nixon spearheaded Flashpoints investigation into a series of DDoS attacks against DNS provider Dyn that impacted the availability of a number of major websites nationwide. In collaboration with Dyn and Akamai, Nixon helped confirm that a Mirai botnet had participated in the attacks against Dyn, and that many of the devices used in the Dyn attacks were digital video recorders (DVRs) that been infected with Mirai malware due to an internet of things (IoT) vulnerability present in each device. After the initial Mirai attacks, Nixon continued to track Mirai and the actors behind it. Her ongoig research was integral to the law enforcement investigation that resulted in the arrest and indictment of three of the Mirai botnets operators and creators. In December 2017, her efforts were recognized in an official press release by the U.S. Department of Justice.



An avid supporter of information sharing and research collaboration, Nixon has been extremely vocal about how the Mirai attacks of 2016 were a "wake-up call for the security industry" that signified the need for more collaboration among researchers. In August 2017, Nixon was a member of a cross-organizational team of researchers from Akamai, Cloudflare, Flashpoint, Google, Oracle Dyn, RiskIQ, and Team Cymru that collaborated to identify, track, and halt a series of ongoing DDoS attacks and ultimately neutralize the WireX botnet. Members of this cross-organizational collaboration, including Nixon, received widespread recognition for how their efforts transcended boundaries that have long hindered the efficacy of information sharing in security and intelligence.

More recently, Nixons research on SIM swap fraud has placed her at the forefront of defenders seeking to combat this increasingly prevalent threat. Specifically, she played a pivotal role in the identification of an ongoing and large-scale insider recruitment campaign involving SIM swapping that targeted employees at mobile phone carriers. Her expertise on this threat has also catalyzed widespread awareness and new discussions about how mobile phone numbers have evolved to become personal identifiers, emphasizing the critical need for new defenses and legislation that account for the security risks posed by the evolution of telecom infrastructure. Core to our mission at Flashpoint is to produce high quality intelligence and data to help our customers understand adversaries in order to keep themselves safe from harm. Because of the incredible talent and integrity on our team, we are often able to assist law enforcement on significant investigations, as well participate in game-changing sharing and collaboration, said Josh Lefkowitz, CEO and co-founder, Flashpoint. Allison epitomizes that talent and integrity, from her notable work on Mirai, WireX, and SIM Swap, to the myriad protections that she and her team provide our customers daily. All of us at Flashpoint are very proud of her. Read more about why Allison Nixon is a recognized Threat Seeker. About Flashpoint

Flashpoint delivers Business Risk Intelligence (BRI) to empower organizations worldwide with meaningful intelligence and information that combats threats and adversaries. The companys sophisticated technology, advanced data collections, and human-powered analysis uniquely enables large enterprises and the public sector to bolster cybersecurity, confront fraud, detect insider threats and build insider threat programs, enhance physical security, improve executive protection, and address vendor risk and supply chain integrity. Flashpoint is backed by Georgian Partners, Greycroft Partners, TechOperators, K2 Intelligence, Jump Capital, Leaders Fund, Bloomberg Beta, and Cisco Investments. For more information, visit https://www.flashpoint-intel.com/ or follow us on Twitter at @FlashpointIntel. PR Contact:

CHEN PR

Jennifer Torode

jtorode@chenpr.com

781.672.3119



[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018] LGBTWho, a Newly Launched Dating App, Brings Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgenders Together

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Love does not belong to any colour, caste, or creed. Why should it then be any different for the LGBTQ community? LGBTWho represents a first step towards building a common platform where members can meet, greet, chat, and take the relationship forward, if they wish. The app has been specifically designed to provide a safe space where people, without any fear, can find a friend or better yet, a soulmate. The aim is to provide a singular umbrella under which members who identify with alternative sexual preferences can unite. The First Of Its Kind There are many apps on the App Store and on Google Play that cater to either lesbians, or gays, or bisexuals. LGBTWho can be said to be the first of its kind, a sentiment echoed by the CEO, Emma Lee, "An exclusive community for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendersto seek friends, partners, a marriagemaybe (even) FWB fun." The emphasis is on community. It hopes that the app acts as a digital tool that brings together people in a warm, friendly manner, providing a safe space where it can support one another and build important relationships to last a lifetime. Never Feel Lonely Again More than just the tag line for the app, think of it as their mission statement. Loneliness has been slowly and steadily transforming into a millennial social epidemic. Medical studies have shown that being lonely for an extended period of time can kill a person. Things have come to such a pass that the UK has appointed a Minister for Loneliness. The App's Unique Features Simplicity is the motto followed while designing LGBTWho. They wanted the members who use their app to have a seamless xperience, just like in real life when you meet someone new. This led members to embed some unique features on their app:



Choose Your Sexual Preference

Being an umbrella app for the entire LBTQ community, users can choose to meet others who match their sexual preference. For instance, lesbians can look up other women, gays can look up other men. The same holds true for bisexuals and transgenders.





Being an umbrella app for the entire LBTQ community, users can choose to meet others who match their sexual preference. For instance, lesbians can look up other women, gays can look up other men. The same holds true for bisexuals and transgenders. Kiss To Match

Users can send a virtual kiss to another member they are interested in. If the latter replies with a kiss, then they have a match. It is as simple as that. The kiss makes for an interesting visual, thus enhancing the user experience.







Users can send a virtual kiss to another member they are interested in. If the latter replies with a kiss, then they have a match. It is as simple as that. The kiss makes for an interesting visual, thus enhancing the user experience. Instant Connect

Once two profiles are matched, the members can instantly send messages to each other. Every new relationship or friendship has a spark, and LGBTWho ignites it in double quick time.





Once two profiles are matched, the members can instantly send messages to each other. Every new relationship or friendship has a spark, and LGBTWho ignites it in double quick time. Customer Support

Their responsibility extends to more than just developing a platform for the community. It also offers round-the-clock assistance to users, in addition to verifying each account to prevent fake profiles. Safe And Secure In the digital age where privacy is often compromised, LGBTWho takes a stand to protect vital information of all its members. The app is enhanced with the latest encryption technology, providing a safe and secure platform for their users to communicate. The other aspect of their commitment towards digital safety is best described in the words of the CEO, Emma Lee, "Any sexually explicit content like pornography, photo or video will be removed from the app." Join LGBTWho, Join The Community They like to think of the app as a commune for those of us who are isolated, lonely, and looking for a support network. LGBTWho is dedicated to taking the first progressive step, together with members of the community. Join it today. For more information be sure to visit http://www.lgbtwho.com Download LGBTWho iOS app here: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=1418463468&mt=8 Download LGBTWho Android app here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.besget.biwho Media contact:

Emma Lee

+861800511588

200679@email4pr.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lgbtwho-a-newly-launched-dating-app-brings-lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-transgenders-together-300702707.html SOURCE LGBTWho

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][August 27, 2018] K12 Inc. Names Dr. Shaun E. McAlmont Executive Vice President, Career Readiness Education

K12 Inc. (NYSE: LRN), a technology-based education company and leading provider of online curriculum and online school programs for K-12, has named Dr. Shaun E. McAlmont Executive Vice President, Career Readiness Education to lead the direction of the company's growing Destinations Career Academies and programs on a national level. McAlmont is one of the nation's leading multi-sector education executives. His experience includes a decade-long tenure at Lincoln Educational Services, where he held numerous leadership positions including President and CEO. McAlmont has also served as Provost at American Career Colleges and CEO of Neumont College of Computer Science. "Shaun's track record of success in C-level roles within career-focused educational institutions makes him an ideal fit to lead the expansion of our Career Readiness portfolio," said K12 Inc. CEO Nate Davis. "The career pathways within our Destinations Academies and programs are developing industry-relevant skill sets, setting students up for success in the most in-demand and well-compensated professions. We believe these courses are saping the future of education while also helping to solve a critical workforce need."



Many U.S. companies continue to report a troublesome gap between the skills needed to run and expand their businesses and the qualifications of job candidates. Economists warn a failure to close this gap could have consequences for American competitiveness and economic growth. K12's tuition-free Destinations Career Academies and programs throughout the U.S. combine traditional high school academics with courses in health care, IT, business administration, manufacturing and more, preparing students to be college and workforce-ready. A recent survey found three out of four parents say middle and high school is the best time for students to start exploring careers and 90% of Americans polled say Career Readiness Education should be offered in every high school.

In addition to more than two decades of corporate expertise, McAlmont holds a Doctorate in Higher Education Management from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his Masters' Degree at the University of San Francisco in Education Administration and his undergraduate degree at Brigham Young University in Psychology. McAlmont joins the K12 executive team in September. About K12 Inc. K12 Inc. (NYSE: LRN) is driving innovation and advancing the quality of education by delivering state-of-the-art, digital learning platforms and technology to students and school districts across the globe. K12's curriculum serves over 2,000 schools and school districts and has delivered millions of courses over the past decade. K12 provides online and blended education solutions to charter schools, public school districts, private schools, and directly to families. The K12 program is offered through more than 70 partner public schools, and through school districts and public and private schools serving students in all 50 states and more than 100 countries. More information can be found at K12.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180827005402/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]AMD is losing executives at a surprising rate. Jim Anderson, GM and Senior Vice President of AMD's global Computing and Graphics sales, has resigned to pursue a CEO position at Lattice Semiconductor. AMD also announced that it is shifting all of its 7nm products to TSMC foundries, while long-time partner GlobalFoundries has announced that it is terminating work on the 7nm process.

Anderson accepted the President and CEO positions at Lattice Semiconductor, which is a step forward from his current SVP position. Anderson joins Lattice Semiconductor on September 4. Anderson also secured a position on Lattice's Board of Directors.

Anderson's departure comes after several other notable AMD employees have defected to Intel. That includes graphics chip architect Raja Koduri and Senior Director of Product Marketing Chris Hook.

AMD has appointed Saeid Moshkelani in Anderson's place. Moshkelani joined AMD in 2012 and currently serves as the EVP and GM of the Client Compute Group. AMD also announced that Darren Grasby, SVP of global Computing and Graphics sales and the president of AMD's EMEA operations, will now report directly to AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su.

GlobalFoundries also announced separately that it is halting development of its 7nm, 5nm, and 3nm FinFET processes indefinitely. The company cites increased focus on wringing more longevity out of its 14nm/12nm FInFET nodes as its new path forward. That includes new RF, embedded memory, and low-power chips. The company is redirecting its R&D efforts accordingly.

The waning Moore's Law finds trailing nodes enjoying long-term success as newer processes become exponentially more expensive to develop.

As outlined in Intel's chart above, the industry has already winnowed down to four foundries on the latest node, but now Samsung, which is rumored to be having issues with its 7nm process, TSMC and Intel remain as the final three on a leading edge node. GlobalFoundries' strategy shift is surprising, and it also spun off its ASIC division. This division requires smaller nodes to remain competitive, so the spin-off will access "alternative foundry options" at 7nm and beyond, likely meaning products from other foundries.

AMD's Gary Patton recently told EETimes:

GF [GlobalFoundries] made the size of its 7-nm pitches and SRAM cells similar to those of TSMC to let designers like AMD use both foundries. AMD will have more demand than we have capacity, so I have no issues with that, he said of AMD using the Taiwan foundry.

These statements have led some analysts to wonder if TSMC could become capacity-constrained on the 7nm node, especially in light of its other large customers, like Apple and Nvidia. GlobalFoundries' cancellation of the 7nm node would leave AMD no recourse to source wafers from a separate company as a relief valve, particularly to fuel its projected rise in the data center, but only time will tell if TSMC can meet demand.

AMD has a five-year Wafer Supply Agreement with GlobalFoundries that guarantees that AMD will purchase a predetermined number of wafers from the company or face levies. The agreement didnt guarantee that AMD would utilize 7nm for its upcoming CPUs. However, the announcement stated that the agreement "establishes a framework for technology collaboration between AMD and GF at the 7nm technology node." IBM also uses GlobalFoundries as its sole silicon producer for Power processors and also has a WSA with the company. We expect the companies will renegotiate the WSA to better reflect the new relationship.



AMD announced earlier this year that its 7nm Navi GPUs would come with TSMC silicon, and Lisa Su recently confirmed that the second-gen EPYC processors would also come with TSMC's 7nm process. AMD's Mark Papermaster penned a statement on the move, assuring customers that the company's roadmap remains intact:

AMDs next major milestone is the introduction of our upcoming 7nm product portfolio, including the initial products with our second generation Zen 2 CPU core and our new Navi GPU architecture. We have already taped out multiple 7nm products at TSMC, including our first 7nm GPU planned to launch later this year and our first 7nm server CPU that we plan to launch in 2019. Our work with TSMC on their 7nm node has gone very well and we have seen excellent results from early silicon. To streamline our development and align our investments closely with each of our foundry partners investments, today we are announcing we intend to focus the breadth of our 7nm product portfolio on TSMCs industry-leading 7nm process. We also continue to have a broad partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES spanning multiple process nodes and technologies. We will leverage the additional investments GLOBALFOUNDRIES is making in their robust 14nm and 12nm technologies at their New York fab to support the ongoing ramp of our AMD Ryzen, AMD Radeon and AMD EPYC processors. We do not expect any changes to our product roadmaps as a result of these changes.Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft are among a group of tech companies that have been lobbying for a weaker federal privacy law this year, according to The New York Times (NYT).

Tech Companies Want to Write Their Own Rules

The new federal privacy law backed by tech and advertising companies would water down proposals from privacy groups and also override some states' own privacy laws, such as the recently passed privacy law in California or the strong biometrics privacy law in Illinois.

Earlier this June, California passed privacy legislation that granted consumers more control over how their data is collected online and shared by advertising companies. The law also allows consumers to delete the data companies have on them, while also mandating that companies provide the same level of service quality to those that opt-out of their data collection.

Illinois has had one of the strongest biometric privacy laws in the country for many years. Technology companies, such as Facebook and Google, have recently tried to kill it. The technology firms are now trying to kill these laws by essentially writing their own federal privacy law to override these strong state privacy laws.

Dean Garfield, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, a leading tech industry lobbying group that has been working on proposals for this new federal law, said: We are committed to being part of the process and a constructive part of the process. The best way is to work toward developing our own blueprint.

The Cambridge Analytica Fallout

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal is one of the most significant privacy scandals in recent years. It also served as a wake-up call, not just for users of social media platforms but also for politicians who have started taking privacy regulations more seriously.

The California privacy bill was one of the consequences of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and tech companies have started to fear that other states will follow Californias lead on this.

According to the NYT, tech companies that make much of their revenue from advertising, such as Google and Facebook, initially vowed to fight all new privacy rules. However, since the California privacy law passed, the companies are now more willing to accept some rules, as long as they are deeply involved in writing the rules.

Chris Padilla, vice president for government and regulatory affairs at IBM, told NYT: There has been a complete shift on privacy. There is now broad recognition that companies that were resistant to privacy rules can no longer just say no.

According to NYT, the companies also seem more willing to cooperate now because they know the Trump administration officials are more inclined to agree to a more business-friendly approach to these privacy rules.

The administration announced that its blueprint for the new privacy rules will be out by the end of the year, but its possible it will be delayed as multiple federal agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the National Institute for Standards and Technology will have to get involved.

Tech Companies Want Californias Rules Nullified

According to the NYT report, the tech companies that support the new federal privacy bill agreed to collaborate only if the legislators would promise to nullify Californias recently passed privacy law.

In a statement to NYT, Jim Steyer, president of Common Sense Media, said: The idea that the companies that violated our privacy for more than a decade will suddenly have a self-regulatory blueprint is ridiculous.

Privacy advocates also noted that the companies were already working to undercut California's law, which wont go into effect until 2020. The companies have until the end of this month to suggest technical changes to the language. If the Californian lawmakers dont agree with the expected consequences of those technical changes, its possible that the tech companies may succeed in softening the law before it goes into effect.

For instance, the California Chamber of Commerce has already sent 19 pages of changes to Bill Dodd, one of the authors of the bill. In these edits, the Chamber of Commerce criticizes certain language, such as the laws definition of personal information, because it would apply to too many people and websites.

Privacy advocates have called on Dodd to keep changes to the minimum, claiming the industry is trying to exaggerate the laws potential negative effects against consumers.'My son mattered:' Mother visits place where son was shot, killed in KCMO KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Very little is known about what happened before Dante Lorenzo Wachtler, 25, was shot and killed. He is part of Kansas City's violent trend this summer, and it's the impression his California family now has of the city.

A bus ride through this town and a smoke break resulted in death one of the alleged 25-million annual visitors to Kansas City. Here's family testimony and a painful reflection on this violent town cowtown . . .Analysis | A misleading attack on a senatorial spouse's investments "Since she joined the Senate, McCaskill's husband received $131 million in federal subsidies - subsidies that let the McCaskills pocket up to $22 million. ...Claire McCaskill: She gets rich, you pay." - Voice-over in an ad released by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Aug. 19, 2018 Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.)

The commercials targeting the spouse of the Missouri Senator have obviously been pretty effective or else the Washington Post wouldn't be trying to myth-bust Kansas City Star reporting.Take a look:As Trump announces Mexico trade deal, McCaskill continues to sound alarm on tariffs U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill continued her criticism of President Donald Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs, which she says could do lasting economic damage to Missouri's agriculture and manufacturing economies. At a meeting Monday in St. Louis, the Democratic senator heard from companies and agricultural-commodity groups affected by the tariffs as Trump announced a trade deal with Mexico.

An chancy political gambit . . . She's fighting for jobs of people who all voted for Prez Trump. Here's a policy overview and economic chatter amongmuch to the chagrin of the people trying to save them from themselves . . .Theresa May to visit South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya for the first time with senior ministers and a wide-ranging trade delegation.

Theresa May will lead an ambitious trip to Africa this week on her first visit to the continent as Prime Minister.

Shell be the first British Prime Minister to visit Sub-Saharan Africa since 2013, and the first to go to Kenya for over 30 years.

This visit comes at a time of enormous change across Africa with a unique opportunity, as the UK moves towards Brexit, for a truly Global Britain to invest in and work alongside African nations, with mutual benefits.

The Prime Ministers central message will be focused on a renewed partnership between the UK and Africa, which will seek to maximise shared opportunities and tackle common challenges in a continent that is growing at a rapid pace  from the Sahara to South Africa.

She will use a speech on the opening day of the visit in Cape Town to set out how we can build this partnership side by side with Africa, particularly by bringing the transformative power of private sector trade and investment from the UK to a continent that is home to 16% of the worlds people but just 3% of FDI and 3% of global goods trade.

As Africa seeks to meet the needs of its growing population the visit will also emphasise that it is in the worlds interest to help secure African stability, jobs and growth because conflict, poor work prospects and economic instability will continue to encourage migration and dangerous journeys to Europe.

Because nations cannot prosper without security, the Prime Minister will also use the visit to announce further support to tackle instability across the region.

Prime Minister Theresa May said:

Africa stands right on the cusp of playing a transformative role in the global economy, and as longstanding partners this trip is a unique opportunity at a unique time for the UK to set out our ambition to work even closer together.

A more prosperous, growing and trading Africa is in all of our interests and its incredible potential will only be realised through a concerted partnership between governments, global institutions and business.

As we prepare to leave the European Union, now is the time for the UK to deepen and strengthen its global partnerships. This week I am looking forward to discussing how we can do that alongside Africa to help deliver important investment and jobs as well as continue to work together to maintain stability and security.

I am proud to be leading this ambitious trip to Africa and to become the first UK Prime Minister in over 30 years to visit Kenya.

The Prime Minister will be joined by a business delegation made up of 29 representatives from UK business  half of which are SMEs  from across all regions of the UK and its devolved administrations. The delegation shows the breadth and depth of British expertise in technology, infrastructure, and financial and professional services.

Delegates include:

the London Stock Exchange

Cardiff-based cooling technology firm Sure Chill

solar tech provider Northumbria Energy from North Tyneside

London-based start-up Farm.ink who have created a knowledge-sharing mobile platform for farmers

Northern Irish agri-tech leader Devenish Nutrition

the world-renowned Scotch Whisky Association and Midlands manufacturing giant JCB

Also travelling are Trade Minister George Hollingbery and Minister for Africa Harriett Baldwin. Secretary of State for Wales Alun Cairns will join the visit in South Africa to support the Welsh companies in the business delegation, while the Lord Mayor of London Charles Bowman is also accompanying the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister will begin her trip in Cape Town in South Africa where shell see President Cyril Ramaphosa and meet young people and business leaders.

While in South Africa the Prime Minister will present the Mendi bell to President Ramaphosa in a ceremony at Cape Towns presidential office the Tuynhuys  over a century after it was lost in a shipwreck.

Over 600 troops, the majority black South Africans, died when the Mendi tragically sank in the English Channel in 1917, on their way to join the Allied forces on the Western Front. It was the worst maritime disaster in South Africas history, and the Mendi has become a symbol of the countrys First World War remembrance.

In Nigeria the Prime Minister will meet President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja and spend time in Lagos meeting victims of modern slavery  a cause Theresa May has worked passionately to tackle.

In Nairobi she will meet President Uhuru Kenyatta and see British soldiers training troops from Kenya and other African countries in the techniques needed to identify and destroy improvised explosive devices before they go to fight Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

She will also commit to helping support the next generation of energetic, ambitious young Kenyans as they seek to build a more prosperous country in the years ahead.The 8th meeting of India-Kenya Joint Trade Committee was held in Nairobi, Kenya, from 22nd  25th August, 2018.

The meeting was co-chaired by Union Minister of Commerce & Industry and Civil Aviation, Suresh Prabhu and Mr. Peter Munya, Cabinet Secretary (Minister) for Industry, Trade and Cooperatives, Government of Kenya.

The discussions during the meetings covered Indias contribution in implementation of Kenyas Big Four Agenda  food security, affordable housing, universal healthcare and manufacturing, expansion and diversification of bilateral trade, Kenyas readiness to join the International Solar Alliance, implementation of Lines of Credit, of over US$ 220 million, extended by Government of India in power transmission, SMEs development, revival of the Rivatex factory and agricultural mechanization, implementation of decisions taken during the high level exchanges, cooperation in health, blue economy, agroprocessing sectors and WTO related issues; and training & capacity building programmes offered by India.

An Agreed Minutes of the Meeting was signed by both Ministers. A meeting of India-Kenya Joint Business Council was held on the side-lines of the Joint Trade Committee meeting. In his address to the Kenyan and Indian business leaders, Suresh Prabhu emphasized on research and design in products specific to Kenyan needs and urged Indian businesses to carry out a market study to identify priority areas for bilateral cooperation.

The Commerce Minister also interacted with the members of the Indian diaspora and apprised them about the various developmental initiatives and achievements of the Government of India.

During the visit, Suresh Prabhu called on the Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta, and Deputy President, Mr. William Ruto. The Commerce Minister was accompanied by senior officials of the Ministry of Commerce & Industry and a business delegation.

India and Kenya are Indian Ocean neighbours and share longstanding trade and people-to-people contacts. At present, India is one of Kenyas largest trade partners and the second largest foreign investor in Kenya. Indians are the third-largest group of tourists to Kenya. The last meeting of Joint Trade Committee was held in New Delhi in February 2015.IIPA claims that South Africas copyright reform bill would make the country ineligible for AGOA benefits

The United States Trade Representative (USTR) is conducting its annual review of country eligibility for trade benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). This law allows beneficiary countries to export certain goods into the U.S. duty-free. The benefits are conditional upon a set of criteria, which includes the protection of intellectual property.

The International Intellectual Property Association (IIPA) has filed comments to USTR arguing that pdf South Africas copyright reform legislation (225 KB) , if it becomes law, would place South Africa out of compliance with the AGOA eligibility criteria regarding intellectual property. IIPA points to five specific provisions in the legislation, which it claims violate the TRIPS Agreement and the Berne Convention (a footnote points to the treaty articles laying out the three step test). The provisions are:

An ill-considered importation of the U.S. fair use rubric appended to a proliferation of extremely broad and new exceptions and limitations to copyright protection, the effect of which would imperil the legitimate markets for educational texts, locally-distributed works, and online works, in general.

New provisions regarding the making available right for record producers which have a far broader impact across the copyright industries, raising significant concerns.

Licensing and regulatory mechanisms that are likely to undermine the digital marketplace by regulating the relationship between creative parties rather than by providing a robust legal framework for the protection of creative works within which private parties can freely negotiate the terms of their relationships.

Unnecessary restrictions on rights holders to contract on the open market, a key factor for the healthy growth of the entire creative sector. For example, the 2017 Bill limits assignment of rights to 25 years.

Inadequate criminal and civil remedies for infringement, including online piracy.

The User Rights Network has previously submitted comments to the South African government supporting the legislation, with specific attention to the fair use provision. Indeed, the authors have written in IP Watch that South Africas bill should be a model for the world.

Sean Flynn and Peter Jaszi from the American University Washington College of Laws Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property have submitted the following response to the USTR.

Response to IIPA comments to USTR regarding South Africas Copyright Amendments Bill and AGOA eligibility

Submission to USTR for the Annual Review of Country Eligibility for Benefits under AGOA

The American University Washington College of Laws Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) is an academic research program that promotes the public interest in intellectual property policy. We coordinate the Global Expert Network on Copyright User Rights, a group of leading copyright academics from around the world that publishes research and provides technical assistance to explain how adopting more open, flexible and general user rights can promote social and economic interests.

We write in reference to the August 1, 2018, filing of the IIPA, in respect of South Africas proposed copyright amendments. IIPA claims that adoption of the South Africa copyright amendment bill would place South Africa out of compliance with the AGOA eligibility criteria regarding intellectual property. We find this claim wholly unsupported.

AGOA is a general system of preferences (GSP) program. GSP programs are regulated under the World Trade Organizations GSP Enabling Clause. The WTO permits GSP programs as exceptions to the most favored nation obligation only in so far as GSP criteria are generalized, non-reciprocal and non discriminatory, and that they be designed and, if necessary, modified, to respond positively to the development, financial and trade needs of developing countries.

The IIPAs submission vaguely criticizes South Africas proposed copyright amendments as containing extremely broad and new exceptions and limitations, and an ill-considered importation of the U.S. fair use rubric which it concludes without explanation would violate the so-called three-step test in TRIPS Article 13 and Berne Article 9. We take exception to this cursory analysis.

South Africas proposed copyright amendment bill contains an innovative, forward-thinking and South Africa-specific set of modernized limitations and exceptions that will contribute to its support of both innovation and access that will serve its public.

The bills proposed new article 12 (considering A and B together) is a hybrid general exception that combines a set of modern specific exceptions for various purposes (Section 12B) and an open general fair use exception that can be used to assess any use for a purpose not specifically covered elsewhere. In this sense, it is akin to US law, which also contains a host of specific exceptions and a general fair use general exception.

The IIPA criticizes the specific exceptions in 12B as being broad. The breadth of South Africas new specific exceptions is a virtue, not a flaw. Its current law applies exceptions narrowly to specific types of works, users and uses, to the effect that many modern lawful uses of works permitted under US fair use law are excluded from their scope. For example, the incidental use right in current South Africa law applies to artistic, but not audiovisual, works  with the result that documentary film makers lack a right to capture a radio or television broadcast in the background of a shot. The new law broadens most of its current exceptions to apply to all works (e.g., extending to audiovisual, etc.), uses (including, e.g., display, performance, etc.), and users (e.g., to both individuals and institutions). This breadth will make South Africas law function more similarly to US and other laws around the world that are more accommodating of modern technology.

The breadth of South Africas exceptions is a feature that contributes to its development, financial and trade needs. Recent empirical research has shown, for example, that providing exceptions that are open to purposes, uses, works and users is correlated with both information technology industry growth and to increased production of works of knowledge creation.

The fair use provision in Article 12A is similarly forward thinking. The main features of the clause draws from the US fair use right, and thus must be unassailable as a matter of US trade policy. The provision contains several innovations in its phrasing that will make the provision more clear in its application and consistent with modern trends in the interpretation of fair use and fair dealing rights.

First, we commend the drafters on the opening phrase  In addition to uses specifically authorized. This provision makes clear that the fair use clause intends to cover issues unaddressed in its specific exceptions, as is the case with US fair use. This is particularly important to obtain the benefit of fair use as enabling adaptation to technology and culture change. It also signals to the interpreter that there exist a full set of specific exceptions (in 12B et seq.), which we commend for adding to the predictability of the law.

We commend as well the unique and clear phrasing of the opening clause  for purposes such as the following. The inclusion of the illustrative purposes in an itemized list, preceded by the opening clause, makes it very clear that the listed purposes are illustrative, not exhaustive.

We commend the drafters on the list of illustrative purposes that are included. The list of illustrative purposes is innovative in including both traditional fair dealing purposes (e.g., criticism or review of that work or of another work), as well as more modern purposes that have been recognized by statutes and in case law in other countries (e.g., comment, illustration, parody, satire, caricature, cartoon, tribute, homage or pastiche).

The inclusion of the interests of libraries, archives and museums ensures that such institutions will be able to utilize fair use in addition to the specific rights they are provided later in the Act.

The provision will add to the predictability of its interpretation by reflecting the traditional approach that in interpreting whether a use is fair all relevant factors shall be taken into account, including but not limited to the listed four factors. This is also consistent with US law.

The proposal includes a well-considered four-factor test that reflects the global trend, but clarifies its application.

The four fair use factors in the Bill add to the predictability of the law. South Africas current fair dealing provision contains no standards for how to consider when a dealing is fair. The Bill proposes to ground the law in a growing international trend toward defining fairness, in both fair use and fair dealing statutes, through a variation of the US four factor test for defining fair use.

The four factors in the South African bill contain helpful clarifications that reflect global trends in interpretation.

In evaluating the purpose and character of the use, the provision helpfully instructs consideration of the core of the transformative use test  whether such use serves a purpose different from that of the work affected. The transformative use test has added greatly to the predictability of fair use in the US. Judge Levals opinion in Authors Guild v. Google, 804 F.3d 202 (2d Cir. 2015)(Google Books) makes the convergence of reasoning within US courts especially clear  he cites authorities from various circuits in reaching his conclusion. The Supreme Court denied certiorari review of the decision, leaving it to stand as the latest and most authoritative interpretation of the transformative use doctrine to date.

The fourth factor in the South African bill is clarified to focus on the substitution effect of the act upon the potential market for the work in question. The focus on substitution effect is important because copyright law is designed to protect consumer markets for protected works rather than licensing revenue in general. The concept is reflected in US interpretations of fair use. For example, the Second Circuit explained in Google Books, 804 F.3d at 214:

The more the appropriator is using the copied material for new, transformative purposes, the more it serves copyrights goal of enriching public knowledge and the less likely it is that the appropriation will serve as a substitute for the original or its plausible derivatives.

Substitutionality is a common-sense concept, based on notions of intended audience. It does not open the floodgates for non-licensed use of derivative works. Art consumers substitute reproductions for originals  thats why theres a reproduction market, and why no one argues that merchandise based on reproductions of copyrighted art works is fair use. An example of a non-substitutional use would be the reproduction of some bars of music in a scholarly article, or a brief sample from one musical work incorporated into another.

IIPA makes vague but unsubstantiated claims that these provisions would violate TRIPS Article 13 and Berne Article 9. We find no basis for these claims. Many other nations have copyright laws with similar exceptions as proposed for South Africa, including the United States.

At bottom, the limitations and exceptions in South Africas proposed legislation are well crafted and completely within their rights under international law. They should not be considered as any basis for sanctioning the country under AGOA.When U.S. Sen. John McCain passed away Saturday from his battle with brain cancer, America lost a great public servant. He had served the U.S. in some capacity for the entire 60 years of his adult life.

McCain was born at a U.S. naval air station in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936. His father, John S. McCain Jr., would later become commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command.

I was raised in a military family. I was raised in the concept and belief that duty, honor, country is the lodestar for the behavior that we have to exhibit every single day, he said on 60 Minutes earlier th...Woof Woof Meow Meow Charity Networking Party

Titos Handmade Vodka by Independent Wine & Spirit (Thailand) Co. Ltd. partners with Well Hotel Bangkok Sukhumvit 20 throws a charity networking cocktail party on Friday, 28 September 2018 to raise money for Soi Dog Foundation.

Mix, mingle and make new friends while being entertained by tasty finger food, drinks, mini massage by Well Spa, funky groove music by DJ Tim from House Jam and the talented Antonio Pedrero Garcia on saxophone. There will also be lucky draws and a charity auction for hotel stays in Bangkok and Pattaya. If you are looking for adopting a dog or cat, the Soi Dog team will be there with their Adopt a Pet booth.

The Soi Dog charity networking cocktail party takes place at Well Hotel Bangkok Sukhumvit 20 from 5.30  9 PM on Friday, 28 September 2018. Enjoy free food from 6.30 to 9 PM and free flow Titos cocktails from 6.30  7.30 PM. Cash bar is available throughout the evening for special priced drinks. Suggested door donation is 350 Baht per person. All door proceeds, all Titos Vodka cocktail sales and parts of other beverage sales will go to Soi Dog Foundation. RSVP now until 21 September at 095 039 3582 (Thai), 098 669 9122 (Eng) or siti@soidog.org.

Editors Note

Soi Dog is a not for profit organization created to provide a humane and sustainable solution to managing the stray population and to address their medical needs. Funding then, as it is now, came entirely from individuals who shared, and continue to share, the vision of the founders. It aims to improve the welfare of dogs and cats in Asia, resulting in better lives for both the animal and human communities, to create a society without homeless animals, and to ultimately end animal cruelty. (www.soidog.org)

Vodka for Dog People, Titos is produced in Austin at Texas oldest legal distillery. An important part of the story at Titos Handmade Vodka is the innate connection with the canine counterparts. Since the beginning, Titos has been committed to rescuing and protecting the animals that have come into our lives, often serendipitously  many of whom now thrive alongside us at the distillery and office. Titos Handmade Vodka is designed to be savored by spirit connoisseurs and everyday drinkers alike. (http://www.iwsthailand.com)

An award-winning lifestyle wellness hotel, Well Hotel Bangkok Sukhumvit 20 is conveniently located in the heart of Bangkok and within walking distance from BTS Asok and MRT Sukhumvit. It is comprised of 235 rooms and suites, with five room types including Superior, Superior Corner, Deluxe, Executive and Executive Suite. The two latter room types are equipped with an exercise bike, yoga, Pilates and resistance exercise set. Well Fitness offers free daily exercise classes including Muay Thai cardio to guests. Other facilities include The Twist Bar & Bistro, Eat Well Cafe and Well Spa. (www.wellhotelbangkok.com)

###Rush Visa is necessary for those who change their travel plans at the last minute, arrive at the airport without an approval letter or other uncontrolled reasons. UrgentVietnamVisa.com is the one and only visa agency that specializing in emergency case even on Saturday, Sunday or Public Holidays!



(TRAVPR.COM) VIET NAM - August 27th, 2018 - VIETNAM - June 8th, 2016 - Rush & Urgent Vietnam visa on arrival service is beneficial for those who forget to apply for Vietnam visa in advance or who have sudden business in Vietnam. In the continuing effort to provide this special service, UrgentVietnamVisa.com assures that you will never miss your flight to Vietnam if you contact them early enough. In emergency cases, it takes only 15 minutes to complete a visa approval letter to send to customer via email. You should consider before applying for rush Vietnam visa since you might be subject to higher processing fee than normal ones.

Depending on your selected date of arrival and current time, the secured online application form will automatically show the best available options for you to choose. There are at least of two of the following:

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UrgentVietnamVisa.com (UVV) is a private/commercial website offering advices, informations, and visa approval letter for individuals, families, and businesses in need of visa to Vietnam.

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###Travelsmith Nepal offers bespoke travel to its visitors. The agency has resources through the country to surpass the expectation of travelers.



(TRAVPR.COM) KATHMANDU - August 27th, 2018 - Travelsmith Nepal, a premium destination management company is offering premium services to their visitors. The company Managing Director Bibek Adhikari says" It is quite easier to travel in these days than compared to 2 decades before"

The company has human resources inside the Kathmandu international airport. The representative will greet the travelers and help in the baggage claiming process (This is one of the hectic processes one has to follow inside the Kathmandu international airport.

Further, the representative inside the airport will accompany the clients to the arrival terminal and will be handled over the company tour leader. He/she will transfer the clients to the hotel and provided the detail briefings, to avoid any confusion during the entire trip.

The company considers developing the Nepal tour package after knowing the interest of the visitors. Hence, the company only provides private luxury tours to the visitors in this region of the world.

About Travelsmith Nepal

A company founded by a group of travel experts a with a vast knowledge of Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet. The company provides bespoke travel experience to its valued guests.

Bibek Adhikari | Managing Director

Nepal , Bhutan, Tibet Tours Expert

###Treehugger and our third-party partners use cookies and process personal data like unique identifiers based on your consent to store and/or access information on a device, display personalized ads and for content measurement, audience insight, and product development. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Treehugger.com, including your right to object where legitimate interest is used, click below. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. List of Partners (vendors)editorial@tribune.com

Divya Sharma

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, August 26

Bollywood actor Abhishek Bachchan is thrilled to be back on silver screen after a gap of a few years. Bachchan, accompanied by producer Aanand L Rai and writer Kanika Dhillon, was here on Sunday to promote his movie Manmarziyaan which has been shot in the walled area of Amritsar city.

Bachchan, who plays the role of Robbie in the love triangle directed by Anurag Kashyap, did not go for a particular preparation, he said, My director does not like actors coming prepared. He likes it organic. So, everything was done during the shot here in Amritsar and I can never forget the love I received from the residents.

Talking about his upcoming movie, he said, It is a very contemporary love triangle dealing with the present times, the complexities. I am hopeful that people will like it.

Kanika Dhillon, who belongs to the holy city, said, City residents will see the exact Amritsar they have grown up in. It is a story of love and many other things that come along. When I heard the script and met the people, I wanted to do the movie. It was not difficult for me to act after a gap. In fact, I had a fun time shooting and loved the people here.

The star actor is keen on exploring the web world, however, the producer Aanand L Rai feels that one needs to understand the platform better for great opportunities. It is a soulful film directed by Anurag. Lets hope for the best. The Dhoom series star feels that as an actor, his job is to perform. As an actor, it is our responsibility to look convincing and give our best, he added.FAIZAN MUSTAFA

FAIZAN MUSTAFA

VC, Nalsar University of Law

The Punjab Cabinets decision to prescribe life imprisonment for blasphemy signals a dangerous trend. The state SAD-BJP government led by Badal in 2016 had made the sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib punishable. The Modi government objected to this restrictive scope of proposed law and now the Congress government has extended it to other religious books such as the Quran and the Bible. Strangely, while the Gita is covered, the Ramayana has been left out.

Shashi Tharoors statement of India becoming a Hindu Pakistan if the BJP returns to power was wrong. True, there is no possibility of us becoming a Hindu theocracy, but there are worrisome signs all over. The rise of synthetic religiosity is disturbing. The increasing political use of religion and religious symbols to garner votes is problematic. Religious beliefs should not be enforced as societal norms by the State. Blasphemy has a chilling effect on free speech.

Even though Muslims constitute 96 per cent of Pakistans population, they continue to behave like the minority, therefore needing the States patronage of Islam and a highly regressive blasphemy law. We are instilling a similar fear in our Hindus.

Chapter XV of the IPC, 1860, deals with offences relating to religion. Section 295 punishes a person with two-year imprisonment or fine or both who destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship or any object held sacred by any class of persons with the intent of insulting the religion of any class of persons. Section 296 punishes the person who voluntarily causes disturbances to any assembly engaged in the performance of religious worship or religious ceremonies with one-year imprisonment or fine. Section 297 makes trespassing on burial places a punishable offence. Section 298 makes uttering of words or making of sounds or gestures with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings of any person a criminal offence.

The original IPC did not have blasphemy as an offence. It was inserted in 1927 and punishes deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs. The punishment of two-year imprisonment was enhanced to three years in 1961.

In ancient Greece, blasphemy comprised speaking ill of the gods, disturbing peace and dishonouring principles of government. The arrival of monotheism gave a new impetus to blasphemy and Jews constituted perhaps the earliest blasphemous archetype. The State collaborated with religion in punishing blasphemy. In passing a sentence upon John Taylor in 1671, English Lord Chief Justice, Sir Matthew Hale, argued that attacks upon religion were attacks upon the law itself and thus blasphemy was treated as treason. A boatman in 1528 was burned in Paris for denying the power of the Virgin. In 1662, an individual had his tongue mutilated in Sweden for cursing the Holy Communion whilst in a drunken stupor. Similarly in 1699, two young members of the Swedish Royal Navy were executed for having substituted the words I have the devil in my heart for I have Jesus in my heart whilst singing hymns.

British blasphemy law that protected only Christianity was finally abolished in 2008. The US Supreme Court in Joseph Burstyn v Wilson (1952) declared blasphemy as unconstitutional. Australia abolished it as federal crime in 1995. Only 25 per cent countries today punish blasphemy.

Sections 295 and 295A of the Pakistan Penal Code were the very same like the IPC. From 1980 to 1986, the penal code was amended to include punishments for blasphemy or insulting the feelings of Muslims. Sec 295-B made wilful defiling or damaging of a copy of the Quran punishable with life imprisonment. Section 295-C, added in 1986, is the most draconian. It laid down that whoever by words, either or written, or by visible representation, or by an imputation, innuendo, or insinuation directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) shall be punished with death or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine. In October 1990, the Federal Shariat court ruled that for the offence described in this section the punishment prescribed in Islam was death. Thus the deletion of the words or imprisonment for life from the statute was ordered and death penalty became mandatory.

Muslim jurists are divided on the question of death penalty as blasphemy is not one of the capital offences prescribed in the Quran. From 1987 to 2014, 1,300 people have been accused of blasphemy. Christians and Ahmadiyas are the worst victims. Gul Masih was the first person to be awarded death sentence under Sec 295-C in 1993. The complainant submitted to the court that in the presence of two witnesses, Gul Masih defamed the Prophet. Upon examination, the witnesses denied what the complainant had attributed to them. He was still awarded death penalty solely on the complainants own evidence. The allegations against Ahmadiyas included inscribing Islamic Kalima on houses, shops, etc., writing Bismillah on letters, writing Inshallah on wedding cards, etc.

Cases have been instituted against Muslims too. Sajjad Farooz, a hafiz (one who has memorised the Quran), was killed in 1994 after a neighbour spread the word that he had burnt copies of the Quran. He was later declared innocent by the very mosque from where injunctions to kill him had been aired. Salman Taseer, Governor of Punjab, was killed in 2011 as he favoured reforms in blasphemy law. In 2017, Mashal Khan was beaten to death by fellow students for posting blasphemous material online. Investigations proved the allegations were wrong.

At a time when people have been killed on mere allegations of possessing beef, taking cows for selling, child-lifting, rape, etc. by the mob, Punjabs law will give new impetus to mobocracy and lynching in India. Let us not go the Pakistans way. Let India not become a persecuting society.vermaajay1968@gmail.com

Thankfully, all is not lost for the Dalits and the cause for their uplift. Justice has prevailed. The Delhi High Court has reversed the acquittal by the trial court of 20 persons and upheld the conviction of 13 others for the burning alive of an elderly Dalit and his daughter in Mirchpur. The verdict is a milestone for the Dalits as it denotes one victory among the almost-ceaseless instances of atrocities heaped upon them for ages. What has made matters worse is the impunity  more often than not  with which such crimes have been committed.

Mirchpur, a Jat-dominated village of Haryanas Hisar district, had come to symbolise this oppression of their community as also their fight against cruelty. That horrible moment of April, 2010 when a rioting mob of Jats set ablaze the Balmikis locality in the village stirred the nation out of general apathy as it came to fore that a poor 70-year-old Dalit man and his physically-challenged teenage daughter, unable to save themselves, had perished in the fire. It pinched more since at the root of the ire of the aggressors was an issue reeking of a misplaced sense of pride: a Dalits dog had barked at some drunk upper caste youth; they hurled a brick at the dog; when a Dalit objected to it, the dominant caste felt insulted and went on the rampage, forcing the Dalits to flee for their lives.

The judgment does carve a way forward to a people long repressed, but the hurdles in its way reflect that we are still eons away from a time of equality and fraternity: the state police arrested the accused only after the apex court intervened; the case was transferred to Delhi to ensure a fair trial as were the imprisoned accused; the CBI took over the probe; CRPF was deployed in the village to protect witnesses; and, the Dalits could not be rehabilitated in Mirchpur. Real equality will arrive when such interventions as in the Mirchpur case are not required. That would, indeed, be the dayamansharma@tribunemail.com

Sumedha Sharma

Tribune News Service

Gurugram, August 27

Though millennium city is yet to recover from shock of the room rape, yet another horrific incident was reported from Mewat where a 19-year-old girl was allegedly abducted while on her way to answer natures call and gangraped by four on gunpoint for almost 15 days before being left to die.

The victim, a resident of Nagina block, approached police late last night accusing four Kotla village residents of taking her away on August 12.

I was on way to fields when a car came there. Four pulled me inside the car and flashed guns asking me to stay quiet. They took me to jungle and raped me repeatedly. They also shot rape on mobile and threatened to circulate the video clip in my village if I resisted them. They raped me for many days on gunpoint before I could flee and come here. They uploaded video online and also sent to my village inmates, the victim reportedly told police.

She, however, could not reveal much about duration and place of her captivity and how she managed to escape.

Following her complaint police registered case under relevant sections of IPC , IT and Arms Act.

We have identified the accused and got the medical examination of the victim done. We are carrying out the raids to nab the accused, said IO Muniya Devi.

Meanwhile, sources claimed that police investigations revealed that the accused had allegedly attacked the victim few months ago also but the family and village elders have covered matter up.

Teen alleges rape

A teenager moved to Nuh police alleging gangrape by six men who she claimed had an old enmity with her family. The victim alleged that the accused entered her house thrashed her family dragged and gangraped her to settle old scores. The police have registered an FIR and are investigating the matter.editorial@tribune.com

Our Correspondent

Nurpur, August 26

A veterinary disease among milch cattle in a number of villages situated alongside the Pong dam reservoir has killed over 70 cattle head in four days.

It has caused serious concern among farmers and residents of Dhameta, Baari, Manoh-Sihal, Chatta and Samker villages.

Even after receiving the information, no one from the Animal Husbandry Department has visited these villages to ascertain the reason and nature of the disease. No remedial measure has been initiated so far in the affected villages.

Residents said a large number of cows and buffaloes were suffering from the fatal disease. They have appealed to the state government to send a team of veterinary doctors to the affected villages. They have also demanded compensation for the farmers who have lost their animals.vermaajay1968@gmail.com

Majid Jahangir

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, August 26

Facing revolt, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) president and former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti dropped senior leaders and adjusted new ones in the top decision-making body of the party in a bid to assuage feelings and keep the flock together.

Mehbooba revamped the organisational structure of the party a month after all office-bearers had resigned following rebellion by five MLAs and two MLCs.

Those who could not find a place in Mehboobas new team include her maternal uncle Sartaj Madni, who was till recently vice-president of the party, former Works Minister Naeem Akhtar and senior leader Mansoor Hussain, who was the general secretary in the former team.

None of Mehboobas kin, including brother Tasaduq Mufti and uncle Farooq Andrabi, find any place in the new setup. Five rebel MLAs  Javaid Baig, Imran Ansari, Abdul Majeed Paddar, Mohammad Abbaas Wani and Abid Ansari  and two MLCs  Yasir Reshi and Saifuddin Bhat  have been left out for their utterances against Mehbooba.

The PDP president has nominated senior leader and the late Mufti Mohd Sayeeds close aide Abdul Rehman Veeri as vice-president, whereas Ghulam Nabi Lone Hanjura, Abdul Haq Khan, Mehboob Iqbal, S Surinder Choudhary and FC Bhagat have been nominated as general secretaries.

The PDP chief has nominated Syed Altaf Bukhari as treasurer, while Rafi Ahmad Mir would continue as the chief spokesman for the party. The political affairs committee has also been recast.traineesubeditor@tribuneindia.com

New York, August 27

Veteran actor Anupam Kher, who will next be seen in the film "The Accidental Prime Minister", has compared Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress President Rahul Gandhi, saying while the former has a road map for the country's development, the latter is yet to share his vision for the nation's future.

The actor's wife Kirron Kher is Chandigarh's BJP MP, but Anupam, who has been vocal about India's social, political and economic issues, says he will keep talking about the country without joining the world of politics.

He shared his thoughts on a question and answer session with his fans on micro-blogging platform Twitter while he was on a flight to New York.

When a Twitter user asked Anupam to rate Modi's performance as a Prime Minister and if he has worked on issues that the nation is suffering from, the actor said: "PM Modi is earnestly working for the betterment of the country. It is for all to see. I have faith in his capabilities and intentions." Asked to draw a comparison between Modi and Rahul Gandhi, Anupam commented: "Mr. Modi is a self made man. He seems to have kind of a road map for the development of India. Mr. Gandhi has so far got things on a platter so he is yet to tell us what is his vision for the future of India.

" One user asked Anupam for suggestions for Rahul Gandhi after his London conference.

Anupam quipped: "Dil se bolo mere dost (Speak from the heart, my friend)." A user urged Anupam to point out one work by Modi with proof for the betterment of India and its poor people.

"For that you can file a RTI," responded Anupam, who, in another response, shared that his favourite Prime Ministers of India have been Lal Bahadar Shastri and P.V. Narasimha Rao, apart from Modi.

He said he also found the Late Atal Bihari Vajpayee "remarkable and very inspirational".

Who do you think will win the 2019 general elections, asked one user.

"The party that gets the maximum votes," Anupam said.

Where do you see India in 5 years, literacy and economy wise?

"We are only a 71-year-old country. We may have a long journey but we are going at a great speed. We are the bestest," the actor said on an optimistic note.

Thank you my friends for this great Q&A session. My flight is about to land in New York. It is always a great learning experience to interact with you all. Jai Ho.:)  Anupam Kher (@AnupamPKher) 27 August 2018

Asked if there were any chances of him joining politics, the "Saaransh" actor said: "I will continue talking about the country without joining politics.

I am planning to organise a #TwitterMeet for my fans, friends and followers in Manhattan. You will get to know about it soon.:) https://t.co/S6ZwXzYSSV  Anupam Kher (@AnupamPKher) 27 August 2018

I was talking about post independence.:) https://t.co/abhqavP4Ng  Anupam Kher (@AnupamPKher) 27 August 2018

" In "The Accidental Prime Minister", Anupam will be seen essaying former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.  IANS.rchopra@tribunemail.com

Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 27

Thirty-seven years after an Indian Airlines plane with 111 passengers and six crew on board was hijacked to Lahore on its way from New Delhi to Srinagar, a Delhi Sessions Court on Monday acquitted both accused.

Additional Sessions Judge Ajay Pandey said in the absence of identification and description of specific role of each accused by witnesses, the prosecution miserably failed to prove the charge of waging war against the State against accused Satnam Singh and Tejinder Pal Singh.

As the court pronounced the word acquitted, the accused duo, their family members, friends and supporters present in the court welcomed the verdict saying, Jo bole so nihal, Sat Sri Akal.

The two accused had already served life term in Pakistan for hijacking Indian Airlines Flight No. IC-423 to Lahore on September 29, 1981.

Mere reference of accused as hijackers (in the judgment of Pakistani court), in the absence of positive proof of the ingredients of hijacking and abduction, is not sufficient to substitute the proof of positive facts required to be proved by prosecution, the court said.

Satnam, who was 30 at the time of the offence, has turned 67 while Tejinderpal is a year younger. After the verdict, Satnam thanked the judiciary. The Sikh victims of 1984 riots are yet to get justice, but in our case we have got justice from courts, he said after the verdict at the Patiala House Courts here.

The prosecution had contended that the accused had admitted hijacking an Indian Airlines plane in a discharge application filed in the court but they had sought discharge on the ground that they had already been tried, convicted and sentenced for the offence by a Pakistani court.

Even if the facts stated in the applications of accused are taken on their face value and even if for the sake of arguments it is presumed that the accused persons have admitted the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight No. IC-423, to Lahore, Pakistan, it is rightly submitted by learned Sh Maninder Singh (defence counsel) that prosecution has failed to satisfy the ingredients of Section 121/121A IPC beyond reasonable doubt against either of the accused, ASJ Pandey said in his order.

After serving their sentence in Pakistan, Tejinder and Satnam had moved to Canada and the US, respectively, and were deported to India in 1998 and 1999 in connection with the September 29, 1981 incident.

The other three alleged hijackersGajinder Singh, Jasbir Singh and Karan Singhare not in India.

Belonging to Dal Khalsa, the hijackers had demanded the release of Sikh preacher and head of Damdami Taksal Jarnail Singh Bhindrawale who was arrested on September 20, 1981 in a murder case. Later, he was killed during the Operation Bluestar in 1984.

This finally draws curtains on the 37-year-old hijacking case in which 5 hijackers including the present duo had undergone life imprisonment. The prosecution succeeded in reopening the case a few years ago and try two of the accused again, but the court today acquitted the same and justice has been done, said defence counsel Maninder Singh.

Dal Khalsa President Harpal Singh Cheema, who was present in the court, said, We are happy for Satnam Singh and his family. We believe that the judge has taken a positive decision.

Dal Khalsa Spokesperson Kanwarpal Singh said: The judiciary has passed this litmus test and upheld its honour by this judgment because Sikhs have had a bitter experience of the Indian judiciary over the last few decades. This comes as a saving grace to the party activists who have been acquitted.

The accused duo had contended that they had already served life sentence in Pakistan and spent 36 years of their lives in litigation.

Calling it a classic example of double jeopardy, they submitted that since they had already served life term for the crime in Pakistan, they could not be tried again in India. It would violate their fundamental right under Article 20(2) of the Constitution and Section 300 of the Criminal Procedure Code, they had submitted.

However, the prosecution had contended that the principle of double jeopardy didnt apply as the offences for which they were tried and convicted in Pakistan were different from the ones mentioned in the chargesheet filed in a Delhi court.

But the accused contended that the incident of hijacking was one piece of act and a fresh case under a different provision of law amounted to violation of the principle of double jeopardy under Article 20(2) of the Constitution.

Delhi Police had filed a supplementary chargesheet in a Delhi court on September 29, 2011 under charges of sedition and waging war against the State.

In May 2017, the Delhi High Court had refused to quash the supplementary chargesheet against the accused and asked them to face trial.

However, the trial court had dropped sedition charges against the accused in May 2018 and they were tried only for waging war against the Indian state.amansharma@tribunemail.com

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 27

The Election Commission on Monday said it would provide a satisfactory solution to the concerns raised on the infallibility of electronic voting machines (EVMs), as the Congress-led Opposition demanded return to paper ballots for the 2019 General Election.

Talking to mediapersons after an all-party meeting convened by the poll panel to discuss a host of electoral issues ahead of state elections later this year and the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Chief Election Commissioner OP Rawat said: We will definitely look into all suggestions given by them (political parties) and there will be a satisfactory solution to them.

Even as the issue of EVM was not part of the agenda of the meeting, which was attended by representatives of 41 recognised national and state parities, several participants from the Opposition block raised the issues of voting machine tampering and technical glitches in the voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) system.

Noting that nothing final had yet been decided on the issue, a senior EC official, however, said: One way to allay fears could definitely be to increase the number of constituencies where EVM and paper trail machine results are matched.

Asked for a specific answer to the EVM question, Rawat said the panel had to take a comprehensive view.

Noting that the BJP and allies stood isolated, Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi said: I reject any suggestion that majority parties were against paper ballot.

Parties overwhelmingly supported paper ballot today unless the EC is calculating based on the number of seats the BJP has rather than the number of parties that attended its meeting. He claimed that 70 per cent of Opposition parties demanded that paper ballot be used in 2019 elections. The Congress, SP, BSP, RLD, RJD, JDS, NCP, AAP and part of the Left, Singhvi said, were for replacing EVMs.

If the EC says thats not possible, at least in 30 per cent cases EVM results must be matched with paper ballots. Parties further demanded that the EC should tell people which institutions were involved in repairing malfunctioning EVMs besides publicly sharing the specifications of old and new generation EVMs, Singhvi said.

Union Minister JP Nadda claimed the ECs effort in matching EVM results with VVPAT was a good move. When asked about the Congress demand for a return to paper ballot, he said the partys habit of looking forward has ended.

Other issues raisedROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 27

Chinas second sea-borne aircraft carrier on Monday started a fresh round of trials at sea. The 50,000-tonne warship headed out from

its base at the Dalian

shipyard on Sunday.

The warship will undergo a series of tests before it is commissioned, possibly in 2019.

China, like India, operates one carrier  the Liaoning. A carrier can launch fighter jets from its deck and extend the arc of operations of these jets.

India has one operational carrier  the INS Vikramaditya  and has more than 50 years of experience in operating such warships that require complex technologies. China started operating one just four years ago.

Beijings upcoming aircraft carrier means it will soon have a two-carrier Navy. Both countries are literally racing to have, by 2020, at least two carriers in their respective fleets.

Chinas second carrier will rival the INS Vikrant (also known as the IAC-1), which will be New Delhis second carrier. Indian Navy Chief Admiral Sunil Lanba had in December 2017 announced that the INS Vikrant would be ready for induction by 2020.

The project has been delayed by years  it should have been commissioned by 2017 even by an extended deadline. The delivery of the INS Vikrant will almost coincide with Chinas commissioning of its own-built carrier, so far known as 001A though the Chinese media calls it the Shandong.

A report of the US Department of Defence, Military and Security Developments Involving the Peoples Republic of China, 2018, says Chinas first domestic aircraft carrier will likely join the fleet by 2019.

Pictures and videos of the Chinese warship moving out of its base have been doing the rounds over the Internet since Sunday afternoon.

Race for dominancerchopra@tribunemail.com

Shillong, August 27

Meghalaya Chief Minister and NPP president Conrad K Sangma on Monday won the South Tura by-election.

An official said he won by a margin of 8,400 votes.

Earlier, counting of votes for the South Tura and Ranikor Assembly by-elections in Meghalaya began amid tight security, Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) F R Kharkongor said.

Former Congress MLA Martin M Danggo, who resigned from the Assembly, is the ruling NPP candidate for the Ranikor seat.

Sangma was leading over his nearest rival and Congress candidate Charlotte W Momin by over 5,800 votes after first two rounds of counting, the CEO said.

In the Ranikor seat, United Democratic Party candidate P Marwein is leading by over 1,000 votes against his nearest rival Danggo of the NPP after first two rounds of counting, the CEO said.

The by-elections to the two seats was held on August 23. PTIgspannu7@gmail.com

Ahmedabad, August 27

As his hunger strike entered the third day on Monday, Patidar leader Hardik Patel vowed to continue his fast till his demands for quota for his community members and loan waiver for Gujarat farmers were met.

The Patidar quota stir spearhead, who received more support for his agitation today, hit out at the BJP government, alleging the prevailing situation in Gujarat is worse than what it was during the British Raj.

Apart from some local Congress leaders and MLAs, Kapil Patil, a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Council, met Hardik Patel at his residence near here, where he is on an indefinite fast, and extended their support to him.

Patil is a leader of the Loktantrik Janata Dal.

Talking to the media, Hardik Patel claimed a large number of his supporters were trying to reach his residence, but the police were preventing them from coming here.

Even sitting MLAs are being prevented from coming to my residence. This BJP government and its police are trying their best to stop this agitation. This situation is worse than what it was during the British Raj, he alleged.

I know the police are working at the behest of the BJP government. But, I want to tell you that no one can stop us now. I am still fit and my hunger strike will continue till both my demands are met, he said.

The 25-year-old Patidar leader urged his supporters to sit on fast at their respective villages and towns if they are unable to reach his residence.

Hardik Patel started his hunger strike on August 25, the third anniversary of his mega pro-quota rally in Ahmedabad that had turned violent.

He is demanding a loan waiver for Gujarat farmers and inclusion of his community in the OBC category to facilitate reservation for its members in government jobs and education.

Hardik Patel launched his fast from his residence after authorities in Ahmedabad as well as Gandhinagar refused to allot a place for the hunger strike.

Yesterday, former railway minister and TMC leader Dinesh Trivedi, representatives of the Lalu Prasad Yadav-led Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Hindustani Awam Morcha of former Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi had called on him to extend their support.  PTImonicakchauhan@gmail.com

Vibha Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 27

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) are likely to invite Congress president Rahul Gandhi and other opposition leaders for its three-day event next month.

RSS Akhil Bhartiya Prachar Pramukh Arun Kumar on Monday said that they would be holding a series of lectures from September 17-19 in Delhi.

This is for the first time the RSS is holding such an event where the Opposition parties are invited.

Former President Pranab Mukherjee had in June attended an event of the RSS, which had upset the Congress.

The lecture series has been organised in this context where the Sarsanghchalak will present the RSS view on various contemporary issues of national importance to prominent people of the society, Kumar said.

Kumar said even though the RSS has nothing to do with politics, many political parties try to connect political occurrences with the Sangh.

There was a need to bring awareness among top people in all fields of life, including other political parties, to convey the Sangh perspective on various issues, what it thinks, he said.

Though he did not specify whether Congress president Rahul Gandhi would be one of the invitees, let it be our prerogative he said, Kumar did say that that a person (read Rahal) who himself admits that he is still learning about Bharat is not expected to know much about the Sangh.

If he knew about the sufferings of people due to ISIS, he would not have made the comments, Kumar said in response to questions on his likening Sangh to the Muslim brotherhood in Arab World.monicakchauhan@gmail.com

Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 27

The Army will initiate court-martial proceedings against Major Leetul Gogoi for maintaining relations with a local woman in Kashmir and for allegedly being away from his place of posting.

Sources told The Tribune that a Court of Inquiry against Major Gogoi had issued orders to initiate disciplinary action on two counts.

He was held accountable for 'fraternising with locals in spite of instructions to the contrary'. The other charge is being away from the place of duty while in an operational area.

Major Gogoi was detained by Jammu and Kashmir Police on May 23 from a Srinagar hotel, along with a local woman and another soldier.

The woman detained along with Major Gogoi was 19 and had gone with the officer of her own volition, Jammu and Kashmir Police had said; hence, no police case was made out.

However, the Army rules did not allow Gogoi to be let off without punishment.

After the incident, Army Chief Gen Bipin Rawat had announced exemplary punishment for Major Gogoi in case he was found guilty of any offence.

Last year, Major Gogoi had been accused of using a youth in Budgam district as a human shield. Gen Rawat had awarded him and supported his act then.amansharma@tribunemail.com

Chandigarh, August 27

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Monday handed over cheques worth Rs 2.9 crore as additional financial assistance to the families of those killed in the police firing in Faridkot district.

On October 12, 2015, torn pages of the Guru Granth Sahib were found in Faridkots Bargari village. In the protests that followed, two people died in police firing in Behbal Kalan village on October 14.

The chief minister has raised the compensation amount to Rs 1 crore for the kin of the deceased from the Rs 75 lakh recommended by the Justice (retd) Ranjit Singh Commission, along with a job.

The chief minister assured them of all possible assistance by the state government.

He, however, said no amount of monetary help could ever compensate the loss of a human life.

Earlier, the government had sanctioned an additional assistance of Rs 90 lakh each for the families of Gurjit Singh and Krishan Bhagwan, residents of village Sarawan and Khurd, respectively, who were killed in the police firing, an official spokesperson said.

The then SAD-BJP government had given Rs 10 lakh each to the families of the deceased.

The Amarinder Singh-led Congress government had paid a compensation of Rs 60 lakh to Ajit Singh, a resident of Bathinda districts Nathpur village, who was critically injured in the firing.

It had also announced reimbursement of all the expenses incurred on his treatment, besides providing a lifelong medical attendant at a cost of Rs 15,000 per month.

An assistance of Rs 50 lakh was also provided to another injured Beant Singh of Behbal Khurd village.

The government has already reimbursed a sum of Rs 2.60 lakh for his medical treatment, the spokesperson said.  PTIamansharma@tribunemail.com

Chandigarh, August 27

The Punjab Assembly, led by Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, on Monday unanimously passed a resolution asking the Central government to pursue with Pakistan the issue of opening of the Kartarpur Sahib corridor during the 550th birthday celebrations of Guru Nanak Dev.

The resolution was moved by the Chief Minister on the second day of the monsoon session of the Assembly.

All members of the House, cutting across party lines, were of the view that the opening of the corridor would enable millions of Indian devotees to pay obeisance at the the historic Sri Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara.

The Gurdwara, where the first Sikh Guru spent the last years of his life, is located in Pakistan across the international border, though it is clearly visible from Dera Baba Nanak in Punjab's Gurdaspur district.

Moving the resolution, the Chief Minister informed the House that he had already written to Union External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to take up the issue with her Pakistani counterpart.

The Punjab government, he said, had been urging the government of India, time and again, to take up the matter with Islamabad.

The opening of the corridor was a cherished dream of the Sikh community, he added.  IANSvermaajay1968@gmail.com

New York, August 26

President of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) Manjit Singh GK was attacked in California, allegedly by pro-Khalistan individuals, during which one of his associates was injured.

Manjit Singh said the purpose of his visit was to hold discussions about the 550th birthday anniversary celebrations of Guru Nanak, to be commemorated next year.

This is the second attack on the Shiromani Akali Dal leader. He was earlier attacked in New York.

Manjit Singh was visiting the main gurdwara in Yuba City on Saturday when, he said, a group of 30-35 persons supporting the Khalistan 2020 referendum attacked him.

I am hurt. They pushed me and kicked me brutally. It was a brutal murderous attack, he said, adding that one of his associates has been hospitalised while the police have arrested three persons in connection with the attack.

The DSGMC chief said the attack will not deter or intimidate him. We are not going to shy away, he said, adding that those demanding Khalistan can continue their fight but resorting to violence is not the answer.

We will not be part of this fight for Khalistan, he said.

Meanwhile, Sikhs For Justice (SFJ), a group demanding justice for the 1984 anti-Sikh riots victims and supporting the Khalistan 2020 referendum, in a statement issued through its legal adviser Gurpatwant Singh Pannun accused Singh and his supporters of instigating violent attacks on pro-Khalistan activists who were peacefully protesting in the SAD leaders presence.

Pannun said the SFJ has also filed a complaint against Singh with the US Department of Justice for violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) laws.

He said SFJ filed the complaint for holding, attending and addressing political gatherings in the US in violations of FARA laws.  PTIeditorial@tribune.com

Vikramdeep Johal

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, August 26

With less than eight months left for the centenary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the voices seeking an apology from the UK Government are getting shriller. However, doubts are being raised over whether Britain will say sorry, and if it does, how sincerely or otherwise will that be.

With a Conservative government, as is currently the case, it seems very unlikely that an official apology will take place, says Dr Kim A Wagner, Senior Lecturer in British Imperial History, Queen Mary, University of London. According to him, most British politicians regard the Amritsar massacre as an isolated event and an anomaly that does not represent what British rule in India was like. In contrast, Indian politicians such as Shashi Tharoor perceive the massacre as a symbol of the iniquities of the Raj more generally, which is why it makes sense to ask for an apology within a South Asian context. But I dont see how anything good can come from such divergent standpoints, Wagner adds.

The historian, whose book Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear & the Making of a Massacre, will be released early next year, says if at all Britain relents, its statement will be equivocal and carefully worded This is a wound that I feel should not be healed, lest the apology becomes the history we remember.

An empty apology without any understanding is meaningless, says Kishwar Desai, Chair, The Arts & Cultural Heritage Trust (TACHT), and an architect of the Partition Museum in Amritsar. She is a member of the Jallianwala Bagh Centenary Commemoration Committee, which plans to spread awareness about what exactly happened in 1919.

Only by explaining to the present generation of politicians, through a special exhibition, will there be any remorse. If they do not know what happened, it is unlikely that any apology will be forthcoming, she says.

Committee members Lord Meghnad Desai and Lord Raj Loomba are requesting for a debate on the subject next year in the House of Lords  to set the record straight. The House of Commons had censured General Reginald Dyer, perpetrator of the carnage, during the debates in 1920, but the House of Lords had approved of his actions. So, it is important that the House of Lords rectifies its stance, says Kishwar Desai.

According to Britain-based author Saurav Dutt, a formal apology is a must to counter the apologists involved in blase revisionism. We have less than a year to push for an apology, but even if efforts fail, then at least UK schools and curriculums should reflect what the Raj was really all about. Even that would be considered a victory, he says.

Political push in India, Britaineditorial@tribune.com

Our Correspondent

Abohar, August 26

Four persons died and several others injured in mishaps in neighbouring Rajasthan on Saturday. They were on way to their native places to celebrate Raksha Bandhan.

In the afternoon, Manjit Kumar Sahu (30) died, while his wife Priyanka (28) and their 18-month-old girl were injured as the car they were travelling in collided with a motorcycle and then hit a tree. The couple was returning from Jodkian village to Sriganganagar.

Sahu was a relative of Rajasthan Water Resources Minister Ram Pratap Sahu.

As Priyanka suffered a head injury, doctors referred her to Bikaner. Motorcycle-borne Daleep Kumar (32) and Babita (26)  both working with the Oriental Bank of Commerce  were also hurt.

In another mishap, a woman died while other members of her family were injured. The deceased has been identified as Joya (21). The accident took place on the Suratgarh road when Joyas father, Rajinder Bawra, who was at the wheel, lost control of the car. The car swerved and hit iron grills.

The family was coming to their native village Jandwala.

In Hanumangarh, Pawan Soni (23) of Kanau village died when a Bolero reportedly hit his motorcycle near Palwali Dhani village.

Ravi Dhanak (26), a labourer at a grain market in Hanumangarh, died when he fell down from an overcrowded train around 3.30 pm on Saturday.

His wife and sister-in-law, who were able to get a seat, alighted at Shereka village. On reaching the site, they found Ravi dead, Government Railway Police Sub-inspector Mool Singh said.

At least seven head of sheep were crushed to death when a car driver control of the vehicle near Chak 14 TK village. The police launched the investigation on a complaint by shepherd Budh Ram.editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, August 26

A retired Army man, Sikander Singh, has been arrested on the charge of raping a one-year-old girl at Fatehpur village in Nurmahal. He has been booked under Section 376 of the IPC and Sections 3 and 4 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.

Sikander Singh, a neighbour of the victims family, is the father of three children. The girl used to go to his house to play. The victims family said the ex-servicemans wife brought the child back on Saturday, claiming them she had fallen and got hurt. While changing her nappies, the family saw that she was bleeding. The girls father, who runs a mobile repair shop, then lodged a report with the local police.

The SHO of Nurmahal police station said the accused had been remanded in two-day police custody.

Meanwhile, outraged by the incident, activists of the Istri Jagriti Manch have called a meeting at the Nurmahal Serai on Monday.rohitb@tribuneindia.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, August 27, 2018

The Punjab government has issued showcause notices to 32 officers, including over a dozen from the police department, who have been indicted by the Ranjit Singh Commission.

The officials met DGP Suresh Arora after the Department of Home Affairs had sought their explanation .

Former DGP Sumedh Singh Saini was also issued a showcause notice

The 14 senior officers who have been issued showcause notices include the then SSP Moga, Charanjit Singh Sharma; the then DIG Ferozepur range, Amar Singh Chahal; Addl DGP, Law and Order, Rohit Chaudhary; and Charanjit Singh Sharma.

For the civil officers, whose names have come up in the report, the action taken report says that Chief Secretary, Punjab, Karan Avtar Singh has been asked to initiate disciplinary action against them as per the recommendations of the commission and complete the same within 90 days.

However, no names have been taken of any officers in the Action Taken Report (ATR). The names of officers  then Chief Secretary Sarvesh Kaushal, then PS to CM S K Sandhu and then special PS to CM, Gaggandip Singh Brar, appear only in the final report of the Commission.

The officers also include 10 junior-rank officers.uttara@tribuneindia.com

Ravi S.Singh

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 27



The United States has promised to investigate Sundays assault of Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) chairman Manjit Singh GK.

A delegation of the Shiromani Akali Dal and the DSGMC led by Union Minister for Food Processing Harsimrat Kaur met US ambassador Kenneth Juster in the national capital demanding action on Monday.

The delegation submitted a six-page memorandum to Juster blaming the attack on Khalistani groups with support from Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence. The delegation specifically accuses the New York based Sikhs For Justice (SFJ), and Pakistan's ISI, along with Jasbir Singh Lauban a man whos a suspect in the 1984 Sikh genocideof being behind the attacks. Lubana served a jail sentence in India for threatening witnesses and victims of 1984 riots. Also named in the memorandum is Gur Patwant Singh Pannun, SFJs legal advisor accused of instigating youth to live in USA illegally.

The memorandum demands police protection for Manjit Singh.

If the authorities fail to provide security cover the Sikh community in India and the world over along with Indian Diaspora living in different countries would be constrained to raise strong protests on road against the government of the USA, the embassies and authorities responsible for inaction, the memorandum said.

US ambassador Kenneth Juster called his meeting with the delegation productive. His tweet said:Productive meeting with Minister @HarsimratBadal_ and the delegation of Sikh leaders. We assured Minister Badal that incidents of violence in the United States are taken seriously and fully investigated by local law enforcement authorities."

Manjit Singh GK was attacked outside a gurdwara in Californias Yuba City on Monday.Neval Bissambhar views life and worship through the lens of an omnista person who believes in all faiths or creeds.

A born Hindu, Bissambhar follows the tenets of his familys faith. The D Rampersad INDI-ART lead singer is preparing to celebrate Divali this week. However, he says all religions have a part to play in the perpetual battle of light over darkness.TWO friends were killed and a third man critically injured when he lost control of their car and slammed into a drain off the Uriah Butler Highway in Chaguanas yesterday.

Police said around 8.40 a.m. a Nissan Primera sedan driven by Shawn Martin, 25, with Anthony Grant, 35, in the front passenger seat and Martins nephew Branj Smith, 18, in the backseat, was heading north along the highway when Martin spun out of control as he approached Biljah Road.Hi everybody,

I would like to let you know my recent experience with the company Australian 4wd hire.

In august 2018 we rented a car with a roof tend while travelling from Brome to Darwin across the Gib River Road.

We always took extra care about the car, driving as if the car was our own car.

As a matter of fact any damages occured and we dropped off the car in good and clean condition.

After two days we got a mail from the company who simply wrote us that the vehicle was returned with serious damage and that they would have kept all the Security Bond of $ AUS 1.500.

Please note that they even did not attach/send us the Repair Invoice. Nothing at all was given us!

We were really very disappointed about the situation and asked for more info.

They told us that according to their GPS Monitoring system we drove at inappropriate speeds for the road condition we were on and that we agreed that the vehicle will not be driven at more than 60km/h when off road.

We asked them for more explanation and we told that we did not accept the charge. They replied us that they will be happy to include us in the Federal Court order againts 2 individuals, for doing exactly what we were attempting to do.

They replied us as follow: "We strongly suggest you seek quality legal advice and stop embarrassing yourself by making ridiculous accusations against our business"

We seriously think that this a fraud: Be careful about this company , or rather stay away from this company.

We had a very bad experience and its a shame because Australian territory and above all Australian people are great people.

We really wonder why this company has not been investigated by the Government or the court yet.

We hope this proof will help you avoiding any possible agreement with the company Australian 4wd hire. Very had a bad and regrettable experience.Hi

My partner and I will be travelling for around 12 months, and we will be visiting Australia for about 5 weeks of this on an E-Visa. We will unemployed for the entire duration of our year travelling which is why I think we may be asked for proof of funds. Currently we have a joint bank account but keep savings in my partners sole savings account. How will this work if we are asked for proof of funds but the savings account is only in one name? Can my parter show the savings account for both of us or should we transfer the appropriate funds into the joint bank account for the trip. Although I have read that deposits into an account before a trip may raise questions, this would obviously just be coming from my partners savings account which we could show.

Do you think we will have any issues with this?

We will also be able to provide travel within Australia such as internal flights, greyhound bus tickets, accommodation and outbound flight tickets as we are travelling to Fiji afterwards.

ThanksWhich airport?

Both SJO and Liberia give you a choice of a few shared shuttles for US$40, 41, 44 per adult one way, if you can time it right with your flight and give enough time for exiting the airport.

Shared shuttle vans need to be reserved in advance. If you r flying into SJO, you may also need to get to the parking lot of Denny's first, as Interbus, for ex., does not pick up right from the terminal. The shuttles deliver right to your hotel.

See to research various transportation options.You can fly cheaply to all those cities including Da Lat, although with Hue I think you go to Da Nang and then its an hour or so by road.Most flights can be done for $80 one way often less and rarely more than a $100

Ben Tre is probably the easiest to get to in Mekong. You can get a ferry to Vung Tau and then Vung Tau to Ben Tre on another ferry. Or you can go by road.

AVOID THE SLEEPER BUSES. You wont sleep, the bunks are too small and the drivers are dangerous as they get paid by the busload. And the bus companies have an atrocious customer relations record.

Small day buses are not so bad.

Taxis and/or private car and driver are good for shorter routes.About a $100 per dayNeed Help Tweaking My Month Itinerary

Need Help Tweaking My Month Itinerary

I've made a plan of where I want to go in Japan this October.

However, I worry its slightly temple/castle heavy!

I can't really see where there are many hiking/rafting more active opportunities are? Unless they are side trips from the cities I have listed.

Also, in terms of days, am I being a big optimistic? I think I am because there is so many places I want to see, everywhere looks so good online.

In terms of budget, I plan to spend between 3000 to 6000.

My current plan is below

Nights 1-5 = Tokyo

*visit Yokohama whilst there*

*Travel to Kyoto, stop at Mt Fuji and Kiso Valley otw*

Nights 6&7 = Kyoto

Nights 8&9 = Osaka

*goto Nara, Kii Pensiula and Koya whilst in Osaka*

Night 10 = Kobe

*Travel to Hiroshima, stop at Himejii, Takamatsu and Okunoshima otw*

Night 11&12 = Hiroshima

*Spend most of the time in Miyajama*

Night 13 = Miyazaki

Night 14 = Kaogshima

*Back to Tokyo to goto Japan Alps*

Nights 15-17 = Takayama

Night 18 = Kanazawa

Night 19 = Yamounchi

*Spend a day or 2 round here in Gunma doing activities but not sure where to stay??*

Night 20-22 = Nikko

Night 23 = Obanazawa

*Visit Yamanouchi whilst there*

*Travel to Hokkaido, visit Lake toya otw to next stop*

Night 24 = Asahikawa

*Visit Furano whilst there*

*Travel to Shiretoko, stop by Lake Mashu otw*

Night 25&26 = Shiretoko

Nights 27-29 = Spare Days

Night 30 - = Get back to Tokyo

Should I spend the extra nights maybe in some of the cities I visited, an extra day or two to see everything?

Any help would be greatly appreciated-:- Message from Tripadvisor staff -:-

This topic has been closed to new posts due to inactivity. We hope you'll join the conversation by posting to an open topic or starting a new one.

To review the Tripadvisor Forums Posting Guidelines, please follow this link: http://www.tripadvisor.com/pages/forums_posting_guidelines.html

We remove posts that do not follow our posting guidelines, and we reserve the right to remove any post for any reason.Without a tour group: Lots of people do fine. The trains and stations have English-language signs, train schedules can be viewed in English, and you can search Google Maps in English. Many restaurants have displays out front; take a picture and show the waiter. Some others have picture menus.

How long: I grow weary of travel after two weeks, but you could easily spend three weeks.

Cherry blossoms: Information here: but two things to keep in mind (1) It's not a train schedule--blossoms open early or late (causing great anxiety to those planning the office party); (2) Hotels can fill up (then and at other random times). Hotels can usually be booked three to six months ahead.

Where to go: start here for ideas: You can see all the regular sights, and maybe some less visited (and less crowded) places in two or three weeks.

When to buy tickets: I have no idea!

Edited: 3 years ago-The governor urged the president to push on with the lifestyle audit he had ordered

- He said the audit will let Kenyans know who acquired wealth through corruption

- Joho suggested those found to have stolen from the public must be made to pay back

- It is understood he was referring to DP Ruto as one of the leaders whose lifestyles needed to be audited

-The DP is believed to own a number of choppers, one of which he reportedly bought at a cost of KSh 1 billion

Mombasa County Governor Ali Hassa Joho has called on President Uhuru Kenyatta to carry on with the lifestyle audit he had ordered in June 2018 and which was to help Kenyans understand how their leaders acquired wealth.

The governor declared he was ready to be the president's new friend if he loses all his friends because of his stand on the fight against corruption, referring to Uhuru's recent public remarks that he had lost some friends as a result of the ongoing anti-graft war.

Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens

READ ALSO: Mwanajeshi Mkenya-Mmarekani atesa kwa urembo wake na vazi la kitamaduni la Kalenjin

Mombasa County Governor Ali Hassa Joho said he was ready to subject himself to a lifestyle audit and urged other leaders not to shy away from the audit.

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Raila ready for lifestyle audit as ordered by Uhuru

Addressing residents of Baringo County, shortly after meeting retired President Daniel Arap Moi on Saturday, August 25, Joho said he was ready to explain where he got every single property that he owns and challenged the rest of the local leaders not to fear the lifestyle audit.

"I thank President Uhuru Kenyatta for announcing that he will do a lifestyle audit for all leaders, starting with himself. Mimi nikotayari. Ukiniuliza shati nilinunua wapi nitakuambia (As for me, I am ready. If you ask me where I bought my shirt, I will tell you)," Joho said.

READ ALSO: Uhuru's lifestyle audit targeting individuals, will not succeed - Senator Murkomen

The governor further challenged those who owned many helicopters to come clean on where they got them by going for the lifestyle audit ordered by Uhuru.

"Na wengine wajibu hiyo maswali pia. Kama wako na ndege mingi waseme wametoa wapi. Na kama ni ya mwananchi irudishwe kwa wananchi (Then everyone else must also answer the questions. If they own many helicopters let them explain where they got them," the governor suggested.

READ ALSO: Uhuru, Ruto to undergo lifestyle audit as war on corruption intensifies

Although Joho did not mention any leader in particular, TUKO.co.ke understands he was referring to Deputy President William Ruto.

The DP is believed to be in possession of a number of expensive helicopters, one of which he reportedly acquired in April 2018 at a jaw-dropping KSh 1 billion.

But Ruto is not the only politician known to own at least a helicopter, as it recently emerged Gatundu South MP, Moses Kuria, co-owned the KSh 1 billion Airbus Helicopter H145 with the DP.

READ ALSO: William Ruto's military-like chopper arrives in Kenya after customisation

On June 14, 2018, Uhuru directed all leaders to undergo a compulsory lifestyle audit as a way of accounting for their riches, including the billions stashed in their bank accounts.

The lifestyle audit, which was widely welcomed by Kenyans, was one of the measures that was being taken in the fight against corruption.

However, a section of Jubilee politicians, especially those aligned to Ruto, read malice and mischief in the president's lifestyle audit order.

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.

When Uhuru, Ruto and Raila Met at State house - On Tuko TV

Source: Tuko.co.ke- Robert Amsterdam was declared a persona non grata in Uganda for trying to secure Wine's freedom

- The ban came hours after it emerged Wine and others were to appear at Gulu High Court

- Wine had earlier been released and immediately rearrested to face treason charges

- The MP and several other Opposition leaders were arrested in connection with attack on Museveni's convoy

- His continued detention sparked widespread protests and political tension across Uganda

Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni has declared foreign a lawyer defending beleaguered musician-turned politician Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine persona non grata.

Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian lawyer from Amsterdam and Partners law firm, with offices in Washington and London, was on Monday, August 27, banned from entering Uganda.

Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens

READ ALSO: Vera Sidika ampata mume mwengine baada ya kumtema Otile Brown

Robert Amsterdam representing Ugandan embattled Kyadondo East Bobi Wine was banned from entering Uganda as the lawmaker was dragged back to court.Photo: Daily Monitor.

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Bobi Wine arrest story, protests and reactions

TUKO.co.ke learned the decision to prohibit Amsterdam from entering Uganda came even as the Kyadondo East lawmaker (Wine) and 32 others were dragged to Gulu High Court for their respective bail applications.

According to reports seen by TUKO.co.ke, all the suspects were facing charges following the dramatic episodes in the lead-up to the Arua Municipality by-election.

READ ALSO: UK government accepts to receive Free Bobi Wine petition from Ugandans in diaspora

The other Opposition MPs who were arrested alonside Wine included Paul Mwiru of Jinja East and Gerald Karuhanga of Ntungamo Municipality.

TUKO.co.ke understands Amsterdam was one of the lawyers who had come up to defend Wine against the treason charges the Ugandan government had slapped on him.

READ ALSO: Kampala on lockdown as Bobi Wine's trial begins

Wine and 11 others were eventually granted bails.

Uganda has over the past one week been rocked with protests regarding the arrest, detention and alleged torture of Wine and the other Opposition MPs who were accused of being in possession of illegal firearms and attacking Museveni's motorcade.

Museveni's car was stoned and vandalised during heated by-election campaigns in Arua town, northern Uganda, where supporters of Wine's ally, Kassiano Wadri, clashed with those of Museveni's candidate, Nusura Tiperu.

Additional reporting by Thaddeus Asesa.

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.

When Uhuru, Ruto and Raila Met at State house - On Tuko TV

Source: Tuko- The officer was attacked and stabbed several times by armed assailants

- He was injured on his head, stomach and hand

- A mobile phone, staff ID and other personal effects were stolen from him by the attackers

- In Mandera, four officers were attacked and injured by suspected al-Shabaab militants

A senior police officer has been admitted to hospital in a serious condition after he was stabbed by robbers in Mathare on Sunday, August 26, night.

Two other police officers are also admitted at a Mandera hospital in serious condition after they were shot by gunmen believed to be al-Shabaab militants.

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Nairobi police commander confirmed to TUKO.co.ke Chief Inspector David Odede, the Mathare depot deputy commander, was attacked at around 10.45pm by six men armed with crude weapons.

READ ALSO: Asbel Kiprop aanikwa mtandaoni kwa kula tamutamu ya mwenzake

Nairobi police commander confirmed to TUKO.co.ke Chief Inspector David Odede was attacked by armed men in Mathare. Photo: National Police Service.

Source: Facebook

They stabbed him on the head, right hand and left side of the stomach before robbing him of his staff ID, mobile phone and other personal effects.

He was rushed to Huruma Nursing Home and later transferred to the Nairobi West Hospital.

Police headquarters also reported that other officers were attacked at Amasa in Mandera county as they were travelling to Takaba after sitting for the police law examinations.

READ ALSO: 1500 metres champion Asbel Kiprop exposed for having an affair with best friends wife

The gunmen shot and seriously injured Constables Deogratius Oude Emayot and Dominic Neroyang. Two other officers identified as Constables Micah Kemboi Cheruiyot and Ignatius Muchoma sustained minor injuries.

Elsewhere a Police Sergeant attached to the Ministry of Devolution was arrested for drunk driving and causing an accident on Jogoo Road on Sunday, August 26, evening.

Traffic boss said the officer turned rowdy and even assaulted the investigating colleague.

The officer was driving the ministry's vehicle when he hit a matatu belonging to Outreach Sacco.

READ ALSO: Uhuru should ask those with many helicopters to explain where they got them - Governor Joho

Traffic officers visited the scene and suspected that he was drunk. He was then subjected to alcohol test popularly known as alcoblow snd was found to be 0.93MG/L, above the allowed limit. He will be charged.

A number of security officers have been arrested in the past one week, including a Senior Sergeant attached to Embakasi Garrrison.

Senior Sergeant Johnson Ogada Vikiru was on Thursday, August 23, arrested in Mukuli village, Vihiga county after he joined fellow village mates in disrupting the funeral of Nathan Katuka while armed with crude weapons.

Story by Lucky Omenda, TUKO Correspondent.

Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish, please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news.

When Uhuru, Ruto and Raila Met at State house - on TUKO TV

Source: Kenyan Breaking News- The Kenyans were working as a driver and a housemaid for their Bahraini employer

- They broke their employers safe and made away with cash and other valuable items

- Early March, 2018, another Kenyan stole KSh 137 million from a Mall in Dubai

If you thought Kenyans have gone silent on the international news headlines, the latest news of Kenyans who stole from Bahrain will confirm you wrong.

Two Kenyans have been accused of breaking into their Bahraini employer's safe and stealing cash and other valuables amounting to KSh. 40 million.

Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens

READ ALSO: Kenyan steals KSh 137 million in Dubai,flees

Two Kenyans have been accused of breaking into their Bahrain employer's safe and stealing cash and other valuables amounting to KSh. 40 million. Photo: GDN Online

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Vera Sidika ampata mume mwengine baada ya kumtema Otile Brown

In a report by the Gdonline.com, the two domestic employers, a driver and a housemaid, were accused of stealing and successfully managing to travel back to Kenya without their employer's knowledge and approval.

The employer who lives in West Riffa in Bahrain said the housemaid was hired in Mid August, 2018 while his driver has been working for him since 2016.

Early March, 2018, Dubai police launched for manhunt of a Kenyan security guard who stole and flee away with KSh 137 million. Photo: Gulf News

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Identity of Kenyan man who stole KSh 137 million in Dubai revealed

This is not the first case of Kenyans stealing from internationals given that in early March, 2018, Dubai police launched a manhunt for a Kenyan security guard who stole KSh 137 million and vanished.

The man who was later identified as Charles Karanja distracted his colleagues at a Mall in Dubai after a vehicle that was transporting money had stopped for a while.

Karanja lied to his colleagues that he had gone to the restroom but was not seen again after that neither was the vehicle seen.

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

Watch video of a car thief who was caught in the act:

Source: Kenyan Breaking News- Bobi Wine was released on bail alongside 11 other co-accused by the Gulu High Court

- The accused were allowed to retain their passports to allow them seek treatment abroad

- They were released on non-cash bond of KSh 135, 000 and a surety of equal amount

The embattled Ugandan legislator for Kyadondo East Robert Kyagulanyi popularly known as Bobi Wine has been freed on bail.

Bobi Wine was granted bail alongside other 11 co-accused and he is set to fly out of Uganda to London for specialised treatment.

Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens

READ ALSO: Vera Sidika ampata mume mwengine baada ya kumtema Otile Brown

The embattled Ugandan legislator for Kyadondo East Robert Kyagulanyi, popularly known as Bobi Wine has been freed on bail. Photo: UGC

Source: Twitter

READ ALSO: Bobi Wine arrest story, protests and reactions

Gulu High Court Judge Stephen Mubiru barred Bobi Wine's co-accused Arua Municipality MP Elect Kassiano Wadri from stepping in Arua for the next three months on grounds that he may interfere with police investigations.

The judge also directed the accused be allowed to remain with their passports to allow them seek medical attention abroad.

The prosecutor accused Bobi Wine and his allies of committing treason when they threw stones at President Museveni's convoy at Arua. Photo: UGC

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Bobi Wine rearrested shortly after Museveni drops charges against him

The prosecutor accused Bobi Wine and his allies of committing treason when they threw stones at President Museveni's convoy at Arua.

They were released on non-cash bond of KSh 135, 000 and a surety of equal amount and will be required to report to Gulu Magistrates Court on Thursday, August, 30.

On Thursday, August 23, the Government of Uganda dropped charges against Bobi Wine, following days of angry and bloody protests across the country with people demanding for Wine's freedom. Photo: UGC

Source: Instagram

READ ALSO: Unknown men attempt to kidnap MP allied to Bobi Wine from hospital bed

On Thursday, August 23, the Government of Uganda dropped charges against Bobi Wine, following days of angry and bloody protests across the country with people demanding for the MP's freedom.

The Gulu Court Martial gave Bobi Wine his freedom only to be rearrested moments later on the same day.

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

Kenyans demand for the release of Bobi Wine | Tuko TV

Source: Tuko- Murkomen reacted to Joho's visit to Tiaty stating that it was time drugs lords were dealt with

- He has also accused the Governor of calling Moi and his son Gideon thieves of public property

- The senate majority leader says Moi was not perfect, but Joho should not castigate him for that

- Joho has stated he can not stay mum while thieves were on the prowl siphoning public money

Elgeyo Marakwet Senator Kipchumba Murkomen on Monday, August 27, castigated Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho for what he termed as hurling insults at former President Daniel Moi shortly after visiting him.

On Saturday, August 25, TUKO.co.ke reported how the fiery Governor paid Moi a visit at his Kabarak home where he (Joho) was given counsel on how to be a better leader.

Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens.

READ ALSO: Vera Sidika ampata mume mwengine baada ya kumtema Otile Brown

Murkomen on Monday, August 27 castigated Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho for what he termed as insulting former President Daniel Moi shortly after visiting him.Photo: Senator Murkomen

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Just because you're Moi's son doesn't mean we will support you in 2022 - Murkomen tells Gideon Moi

In a statement via his Facebook page, Murkomen also reacted to Joho stating that drug peddlers needed to be dealt with.

Joho has a point but he must choose whether to walk and work with them or oppose them. You cant eat Ugali at Mzees house and shortly after, insult him, his son and his 24 years legacy. Show some little respect Joho to the old man and his son,your running-mate. Meanwhile we also need to deal with drug barons. Thats a story for another day and another post, shared the senate majority leader.

READ ALSO: Gideon Moi courts Raila for a 2022 alliance against William Ruto

TUKO.co.ke understands that Joho has severally been linked to fraudulent businessmen peddling drugs at the coastal city and Murkomen could be finding this approach as a strategic weapon to attack him.

The Mombasa governor has however been watering down the allegations leveled against him stating that he does not deal in the illicit substances.

Mzee Moi did a lot for the country and we respect him a lot. Like other human beings, he had weaknesses and flaws known to many Kenyans, one of which was neglect of the poor in Tiaty Constituency. He went there for inspiration, but when we got out to go for Harambee in Tiaty he insulted the very Mzee he had visited, the wrote Murkomen.

He stated that it was important for Joho to come out clear on whether he was Uhurus supporter or adversary so that his political agenda can be understood.

READ ALSO: William Ruto impromptu meeting with retired president Daniel Moi aborts

Joho has in the recent past been a great critic of Uhuru but he has since vowed to work in tandem with the Head of State since he unleashed the spirited fight against graft lords.

Joho has a point but he must choose whether to walk and work with them or oppose them. You cant eat Ugali Mzees place and then shortly insult him, his son and his 24 years legacy. Show some little respect Joho to the old man and his son,your running-mate, stated Murkomen.

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.

Kenya News: When Uhuru, Ruto and Raila Met at State House | Tuko TV.

Source: Tuko News- The man claimed he was a pastor who had been directed by God to the lucky jackpot winner

- He said he had been told by God the winner gives 10% tithe and give hin KSh 5 million

- Identification documents revealed he hails from Nyeri County, hundreds of kilometres away

- Angry residents descended on him with kicks and blows before he was arrested by polioce

A scuffle ensued in Kathiani village, Machakos County after angry residents descended on a fake pastor with kicks and blows accusing him of trying to con one of the residents.

The man identified as David Maina Karimi of the Chosen Church of Holy Spirit International located in Nyeri County showed up at Kathiani village asking to be given directions to the house of a KSh 33 million lucky jackpot winner.

Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens

READ ALSO: Kenyans moved by 80-year-old poor Machakos grandma who lives next to an empty grave

READ ALSO: Mwanamke atimka mbio, mganga akitaka kumgeuza bata

Karimi, who was wearing a white turbun, claimed he had a message from God meant specifically for the jackpot winner.

When he arrived at the home he said God had told him to tell the millionaire to give a 10% tithe and give him KSh 5 million.

READ ALSO: Alfred Mutua initiates plan to reposes grabbed public land in Machakos county

Suspicious bodaboda riders questioned him and asked him how he got to know the winner came from Kathiani before descending on him, almost killing the poor man of God.

The man of God was rescued by police who arrested and detained him at Kathiani Police Station.

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

How street Women In Kenya Deal With Periods | Tuko TV

Source: Breaking NewsAre the Safe Zones for those vaccinated against Covid19 really safe? One Opposition MP is raising his concerns as he is calling on the Government to make antigen tests available to the public to guard against those who may have Covid but are not presenting any symptoms including those who are vaccinated.Ukraine filed an appeal against a WTO panel report in the case Ukraine  Anti-Dumping Measures on Ammonium Nitrate.

"Ukraine filed an appeal on 23 August against a WTO panel report in the case brought by the Russian Federation in Ukraine  Anti-Dumping Measures on Ammonium Nitrate (DS493). The panel circulated its report on 20 July 2018," the WTO press service reports.

Further information will be available within the next few days in document WT/DS493/6

The parties to the dispute - Kyiv and Moscow - will have to wait three months for the WTO appellate body to conclude its report.

olUkraine ranks third among world exporters of honey with a share of 10%, and is the first in Europe in terms of honey production.

The press service of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) told this to Ukrinform.

"Every year Ukraine sets a new record for the export of sweet product, having increased exports by 20.5 times over 10 years! In 2017, export volumes reached 67.8 thousand tonnes with a total value of $133.9 million. Ukraine's production makes up 4-5% of the world's production, and it is third in terms of honey exports. Ukraine also ranks first in Europe in terms of honey production," said Anna Burka, a national advisor at the F.

She also noted that the structure of exports since 2008 has changed mainly due to a decrease in the share of exports to the CIS. However, the main importer of Ukrainian honey remained unchanged - last year Ukraine exported 71% of honey to the EU.

"Ukrainian honey was exported by 19 European Union countries in 2013, while in 2017 - by 24. The largest importers last year were Germany with a share of 34%, Poland (22%), France (11%), Belgium (8%) and Spain (7%)," Anna Burka stressed.

In general, according to the FAO expert, exports of Ukrainian honey to the EU countries are six times higher than the quotas provided.

iyGas consumption in Ukraine has decreased by 30% as compared to 2013.

"I set the task to switch over to our own gas production and reduce inefficient gas consumption! To date, gas consumption has been reduced by almost 30% as compared to 2013," President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko announced at the meeting with workers of the Zoria- Mashproekt Research and Production Complex for Gas Turbine Construction during his working trip to Mykolayiv region, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

At the same time, Poroshenko noted that the Ukrgazvydobuvannia increased gas production.

olAgricultural complex of Ukraine is a sector in which Ukraine demonstrates fantastic growth rates.

President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko said this during the opening of the second stage of the construction of the plant "Skhidny" in Mykolayiv region, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"The agricultural complex of Ukraine is a sector in which Ukraine demonstrates fantastic growth rates. The opening of the plant "Skhidny" of the group of companies "Agrofusion" in Mykolayiv region is another successful example of the industry's development. A significant part of the plant's products will be exported not only to the EU but to the whole world," Poroshenko said.

Agrofusion is a Ukrainian vertically-integrated group of companies that grows and process tomatoes for juice producers, ketchup and tomato sauces all over the world.

Agrofusion consists of ten entities, two greenhouses, three processing plants, 30,000 ha of irrigated land and a team of 1,500 professionals.

InagroTM tomato paste is represented in 36 countries and continues to expand its presence successfully.

ishLithuania considers the possibility of taking Avdiivka in Donetsk region under its patronage to promote the development of the town.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said this, addressing the heads of foreign diplomatic missions in Ukraine and Ukrainian servicemen in Avdiivka, an Ukrinform correspondent reported.

"Our Lithuanian friends intend to take Avdiivka under a kind of patronage. It will be a patronage not over a separate object. We will see how exactly the Lithuanian presence - and Lithuanians are our true friends - will help to develop Avdiivka," Klimkin said.

He added that Ukrainian diplomats would seek to establish such patronage over the towns on government-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine and over the entire Donbas after its de-occupation.

olLee University freshman can't wait to visit the residents of Morning Pointe of Collegedale at Greenbriar Cove

Lee University freshmen joined with Morning Pointe residents across the Tennessee Valley to participate in a time-honored tradition. Deke Day is an annual event for Lee freshman, their first introduction to service learning. It is a time for them to put aside their own needs and focus on the needs of others. This year, roughly 1500 students journeyed to 50 locations across East Tennessee in order to volunteer and minister to the community.

Deke is shorthand fora Greek word found in the Bible meaning to attend to anything that may serve another's interests, and as the name implies, Lee students served the residents of four, different Morning Pointe communities in a wide variety of ways. These selfless young people did not simply fulfill the practical needs of the senior living communities residentsthey lifted their spirits and gave them many, wonderful memories. Here are just a few of the impressions some Morning Pointe associates took away from the event:

[T]hey [the students] sang many songs, some played instruments, and as it happened to be the day we were celebrating August birthdays in the community, the birthday boys and girls were thrilled to be sung to for their special day! The students cut and served cake, [and] shared ice cream, games, music, and tons of laughs! said Holly Holcomb, Life Enrichment director Morning Pointe of Chattanooga  Shallowford.

It was a fun afternoon for all! said Christine Rivers, Life Enrichment eirector, Morning Pointe of Hixson.

They [the students] came out tofellowship with us which included painting nails [and] playing balloon volleyball, corn hole, anda rousing game of Monopoly. We look forward to their visits every year, said Life Enrichment Director David Fisher at Morning Pointe of Collegedale at Greenbriar Cove.

We had arts and crafts, manicures, trivia, singing, piano playing, [and] pet therapy time. Wonderfully talented kids! said Shelby Wilson, Life Enrichment director, Morning Pointe of Athens.

Officials said, "Thank you again to the students of Lee University! Morning Pointe is so grateful for your kind acts of service!"



The freedom of speech is one of the core values underlying modern democracies. In the era of hybrid warfare, to strike a balance between ensuring freedom of expression and securing national interests is a challenge.

Since 2014, Ukraine repeatedly faced accusations of restricting the freedom of speech and violating journalists` rights. However, if to take a closer look at several cases, it becomes clear that it is a matter of counteracting hybrid threats, not suppressing one`s freedoms or rights.

Although Ukraine is exposed to the continuing Russian aggression, the occupation of the sovereign territory of Ukraine in violation of all international norms, the use by the aggressor State of some media of various forms of ownership in order for intelligence services to carry out special information operations in the information space of Ukraine and other States, the state does comply with all obligations and international standards of freedom of speech. This is confirmed by the positive dynamics of Ukraine in the 2018 World Press Freedom Index, compiled by the international organization Reporters without Borders. According to this rating, Ukraine has risen by one position and is ranked 101st.

Why Did Ukraine Ban Some Russian Media For Three Years?

It is common knowledge that since 2014 Ukraine has been subjected to the hybrid aggression of the Russian Federation. This aggression manifested not only in the illegal occupation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and military aggression in Donetsk and Luhansk regions but also in unprecedented disinformation and propagandistic campaign against Ukraine. With a view to establishing a legal framework to counter the aggression, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted the Law of Ukraine On Sanctions (hereinafter referred to as the Law) on 14 August 2014.

Article 1 of the Law states that, with a view to protecting national interests, national security, the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, countering terrorist activities, as well as preventing infringement of rights and restoring infringed rights, freedoms and lawful interests of citizens of Ukraine, society and the state special economic and other restrictive measures (hereinafter referred to as sanctions) may be taken.

The Law provides for a mechanism of submitting proposals pertinent to the application of sanctions, their consideration, and use on reasonable grounds. In particular, the grounds for applying sanctions include actions of a foreign state, an external legal or natural entity, or other actors which constitute actual and/or potential threats to national interests, national security, the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine; contribute to terrorist activities and/or violate rights and freedoms. of the person and citizen, and interests of society and the state; result in the occupation of territory, extortion, restriction on the right to property, infliction of damage to property, hampering sustainable economic development, the full-fledged exercise by Ukrainian citizens of their rights and freedoms.

Besides, the Law stipulates that sanctions shall be applied based on the principles of lawfulness, transparency, objectivity, appropriateness, and effectiveness.

The Law further states that the decision as to the application, removal, and modification of sanctions with respect to particular foreign legal entities, legal entities under control of a foreign legal entity or a non-resident foreign natural entity, foreigners, stateless persons, as well as individuals and organizations implicated in terrorist activities (personal sanctions) shall be adopted by the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine and shall be enacted by a decree of the President of Ukraine.

This means that the application of sanctions is an issue of national security and defense of Ukraine, and the procedure of their use is explicitly set out in the current legislation of Ukraine.

As regards the application of sanctions against Russian legal entities claiming to be mass media, the following should be pointed out.

During recent years, certain Russian journalists have wholly abandoned standards of journalism. In particular, there has been systematic violation of practically all principles of the journalists conduct, approved in the Declaration of Principles on the Conduct of Journalists, which was adopted at the 2nd World Congress of the International Federation of Journalists (Bordeaux, 2528 April 1954) as amended at the IFJ 18th World Congress (Helsingor, 26 June 1986). One of the visionaries of modern Russian journalism, Dmitry Kiselyov, noted:

the time of distilled journalism is gone. It is not possible even in theory. In the vast ocean of information, the selection is either subjective or subject to the editorial policy.

Today these mass media are one of the tools at the disposal of Russias leadership to wage large-scale hybrid aggression against Western states, of which destructive information activities is an important part.

In 2016 the European Parliament adopted the Resolution clearly defining Russian media such as Sputnik as pseudo news agencies. It is indicative that this document has already constituted a precedent. On 28 August 2017, the Government of Estonia of referring to it in reply to the Council of Europe Platform alert regarding the non-admission (refusal to accredit) of journalists of the International News Agency Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) to the meeting of ministers for foreign affairs of the EU states.

Attention is drawn in particular to the fact that Recommendations CM/Rec(2016)4 of the Committee of Ministers to member States on the protection of journalism and safety of journalists and other media actors state that

the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it duties and responsibilities, as indicated in Article 10, paragraph 2 [of the European Convention on Human Rights]. In the context of journalism, relevant duties and responsibilities are understood as including acting in good faith to provide accurate and reliable information, under the ethics of journalism

Given the abovementioned rules, adopted by the European community, distribution of information in violation of the generally recognized rules and standards of journalism may not be regarded as mass media activities.

May we invite your attention in particular to Article 10, paragraph 2 of the Convention, which reads that the exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

In addition, President of France Emmanuel Macron at a joint conference with Vladimir Putin noted that such resources as RT and Sputnik are agents of influence, and their activity has no bearing on journalism.

All the mentioned above testify to the recognition by European institutions and states of an actual threat of manipulative and propagandistic nature posed by Russian agencies which present themselves as mass media.

Furthermore, in analyzing the nature of the application of sanctions against such legal entities, it worth realizing that the priority aim of applying sanction is not restricting access to anti-Ukrainian propaganda and disinformation materials but the public recognition of Russia-controlled resources as constituting a threat to the national security, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Ukraine. Therefore, the effectiveness of sanctions is determined, first of all, by the public recognition of such resources as an instrument for manipulations and propaganda of the aggressor State, as envisaged by the Law.

In the light of the above, the application of extraordinary economic and other restrictive measures (sanctions) against legal entities which are used as a tool of hybrid aggression by the Russian Federation and which systematically distribute anti-Ukrainian propaganda is an issue of national security and defence of Ukraine, and it is, therefore, inappropriate to consider this issue in the context of the right to freedom of speech.

Why Is RIA Novosti Journalist Kyrylo Vyshynsky Held on Treason Allegations in Ukraine?

According to the Law of Ukraine On Access to Public Information, adopted in 2011, and the Law of Ukraine On Information, the accreditation institute (including for foreign journalists) was radically reformed. In particular, the procedure for accreditation of foreign journalists (i.e., permission to carry out professional activities, which is very common in European states) was canceled, which confirms Ukraines aspiration to implement the values of media freedom and the free circulation of information in practice.

At the same time, some foreign and Ukrainian organizations and their representatives exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms to carry out activities aimed at promoting the aggressor States efforts to violate territorial integrity of Ukraine, disseminate calls to overthrow the constitutional order, legitimize the occupation of some regions of Ukraine in violation of international law, and promote calls for incitement to interethnic and interracial enmity, which is defined by rules of a number of European countries as hate speech.

In 2013, President of Russian Federation Vladimir Putin appointed the author and presenter of the Russian television program Vesti Nedeli, Russian citizen Dmitry K. Kiselyov as Director General of the newly created federal state unitary enterprise Mezhdunarodnoye Informatzyonnoye Agentstvo Rossiya Segodnya (International News Agency Russia Today; hereinafter referred to as INA Russia Today) by Decrees No 894 and 895 dated 09 December 2013 On Certain Measures to Increase the Efficiency of State Media Activities.

This happened the day after the scandalous release of this program on the television channel Rossiya-1 (Russia-1), which was the subject of an unequivocal decision of the Russian Public board on complaints against the press.

The same Decree 894 eliminated the federal state unitary enterprise RIA Novosti, on the basis of which INA Russia Today was founded.

It should be noted that Russian media experts and journalists negatively assessed this reform of state media assets of the Russian Federation itself as a potential threat to freedom of speech.

In consequence, Anna Kachkayeva, Dean of the Faculty of Media Communications of Higher School of Economics (Russia), noted on Radio Echo of Moscow that this was a serious signal of possible curtailment of freedom of speech in Russia.

In an interview to BBC Russia, Pavel Gutionov, Secretary of the Union of Journalists of the Russian Federation and Chairman of the Committee on the Protection of Freedom of Speech and the Rights of Journalists, expressed the same negative attitude towards the reorganization of Russian state media assets.

In early 2014, RIA Novosti Ukraine as a representation with legal status was eliminated. In autumn of the same year, Mr. Kyrylo Vyshynsky, a citizen of Ukraine, registered on his name legal entities with attributes of fictitiousness, which were later used, among other things, to publish content on the sitehttps://rian.com.ua/, working under the name RIA Novosti Ukraine.

In terms of the law, the Russian state television channel RT is not part of MIA Russia Today, nor was it part of the news agency RIA Novosti. The representation of this TV channel in Ukraine does not exist. Therefore, there is no reason to talk about any legal relationship between the Russian state television channel RT and the web page that disseminates information under the name of RIA Novosti Ukraine.

Attention should also be drawn to the following. According to the Copyright Rules of MIA Russia Today, accessible on the website of the Russian state news agency, the resources of MIA Russia Today are the following Internet sites and applications:

- ria.ru

- inosmi.ru

- 1prime.ru

- rsport.ru

- riarealty.ru

- riarating.ru

- crimea.ria.ru

- 9may.ru

- RIA Novosti app

- InoSMI app

- pressmia.ru

- fmf.ria.ru

- smartcity.ria.ru

- stenincontest.ru

- konkurs-impulse.ru

According to an official statement by INA Russia Today, the websitehttps://rian.com.ua/, which is actually a website that posts information under the name of RIA Novosti Ukraine, is not included in the list of resources of the Russian state information agency.

The nature of the activity of the website RIA Novosti Ukraine and the persons supporting it, as retrieved by the authorized bodies, was as follows.

Within the framework of the reform of offices of the former agency RIA Novosti abroad, Mr. Kiselyov (Director-General of INA Russia Today) decided to reform the office of the abovementioned organization in Ukraine, RIA Novosti Ukraine, without founding the appropriate legal entity. Zakhar Vinogradov, a Russian citizen and project manager of the Direction of the Near Abroad Countries at INA Russia Today, was appointed responsible for the reform. At the same time, it was decided to keep the old name of the office, RIA Novosti Ukraine, despite the change of the parent structure of RIA Novosti within INA Russia Today.

According to Mr. Kiselyovs decision, Mr. Vinogradov chose Kyrylo Vyshynskyi as the future head of the reformed office. Mr. Vyshynskyi is a Ukrainian journalist who worked with Mr. Kiselyov on Ukrainian ICTV channel in the 2000s and, at the time of the described events, was a correspondent of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Company (VGTRK) in Ukraine.

In March 2014, Mr. Vyshynskyi and Iryna Kedrovska, a Russian citizen and First Deputy Head of the Joint Editorial Board of INA Russia Today, worked out and agreed on the concept of the reformed office in Ukraine.

According to the concept, the primary purpose of the office led by Mr. Vyshynskyi, among other things, was the systematic publication in Ukraines media space information and analytical materials that are in line with the foreign policy interests of the Russian Federation, the provision of information support to the foreign policy activities of the President and Government of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, informing the Ukrainian diaspora in the countries of Europe, Asia and America about the foreign policy of the Russian Federation in the Ukrainian context, and information support of foreign policy initiatives of the Russian Federation in Ukraine. The duties of the head of the said office included the general management of the office, financial and administrative work, and the definition of the main areas of activity and structural units, the control over ideological and political content.

It should be stressed that RIA Novosti Ukraine is not officially part of the Russian state news agency, is not registered in Ukraine as mass media, is not listed on the register of news agencies under the Law of Ukraine On Information Agencies, and is not registered under Ukrainian law as an office of any of the Russian state news agencies registered in accordance with Russian national law.

Under item 3 of paragraph 2 of article 26 of the Law of Ukraine On Printed Mass Media (Press) in Ukraine, a journalist is obliged to submit objective and reliable information for publication. According to article 25 of the above Law and article 1 of the Law of Ukraine On State Support to Mass Media and Social Protection of Journalists, the purpose of the journalistic activity is the collection, reception, creation, and processing of information for mass media.

According to Ukrainian law enforcement agencies, as far as the concept of the work and functions of the unofficial office of INA Russia Today in Ukraine is concerned, the work of this structure since its foundation has been incompatible with the concept of journalism and journalistic activity.

In the meantime, it should be noted that Mr. Vyshynskyi, who was charged with a criminal offense, is a Ukrainian citizen and not a foreign journalist.

Given that the Russian Federation has begun the temporary occupation of the Ukrainian territory since 20 February 2014 and, in accordance with the Law of Ukraine On the Defence of Ukraine, has been recognized as an aggressor State, the activity of Mr. Vyshynskyi and the structures headed by him meant, in fact, the promotion of the unlawful activity of the aggressor State in violation of international and Ukrainian law.

From March to May 2014 Mr. Vyshynskyi in cooperation with Mr. Vinogradov posted on the RIA Novosti Ukraine website a number of publications which, according to the expert opinion, were biased and aimed not at the objective news coverage but at the division of Ukrainian society, the creation of separatist and autonomist sentiments, and incitement to interethnic and interreligious enmity.

Different authors made those publications at the request of the Moscow office of INA Russia Today, where they were proofread. They were placed on the site by Mr. Vyshynskyi under the orders of Mr. Vinogradov as well.

In particular, according to law enforcement agencies, on 12 March 2014 Mr. Vyshynskyi worked out and agreed with his Russian curators a plan for news coverage of the unlawful referendum on the secession of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol from Ukraine and their accession to the Russian Federation on the RIA Novosti Ukraine site, that he controlled.

Illustrative is the fact that Mr. Vyshynskyi called it a referendum on the accession of Crimea to Russia, although even in the Russian Federation it was officially called a referendum on the territorial affiliation of Crimea.

Paragraph 6 of the said plan of coverage provided for the retrieving of comments on the procedural issues of Crimeas accession to the Russian Federation. That is, as far back as 12 March 2014 Mr. Vyshynskyi knew beforehand about the result of the referendum held on 16 March 2014 and covered it respectively.

The nature of Mr. Vyshynskyis activity is further confirmed by the awards For the Return of Crimea and For Merits, which were found at the place of his actual residence with documents proving that they belong to him. Such awards are given by the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation as a reward for successful military operations.

Also, to conceal the legal relationship with INA Russia Today, Mr. Vyshynskyi came up with a scheme of financing RIA Novosti Ukraine using allegedly fictitious Ukrainian legal entities. To this end, an agreement was signed with a Serbian company (also allegedly fictitious) on the creation of content for the website. The funds for such services were transferred via the Russian bank VTB in Ukraine and Germany. Subsequently, legal entities controlled by Mr. Vyshynsky signed similar contracts with employees of RIA Novosti Ukraine as self-employed individuals.

Therefore, by using the scheme of financing via allegedly fictitious companies without proper registration in Ukraine, Mr. Vyshynskyi had been operating RIA Novosti Ukraine and systematically distributing propagandistic and deceptive materials in Ukrainian information space which included calls for the violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine and justified the aggression of the Russian Federation in Crimea and Donbas.

This is also confirmed by non-governmental organizations actively supported by European countries and international organizations, in particular by information from the StopFake NGO.

For instance, on 20 December 2017, the agency RIA Novosti Ukraine reportedthat Ukraine [is] the poorest country in Europe, which was debunked by StopFake volunteers. On 14 May 2017, RIA Novosti Ukraine reported that President of Ukraine Mr. Petro Poroshenko allegedly offered to cut off the Donbass and abandon it, which was debunked by StopFake volunteers. On 12 September 2017, RIA Novosti Ukraine reported that the Ukrainian Government is allegedly repressing the languages of national minorities, which was debunked by StopFake volunteers.

According to law enforcement agencies, such work on the creation and distribution of printed materials has signs of crime under articles 110 (Encroachment on the territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine) and 161 (Violation of the equality of citizens depending on their racial, national affiliation, religious beliefs, disability and on other grounds) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

Besides, given the proven fact of financing from the federal budget of the Russian Federation, there are reasons to assert that Mr. Vyshynskyi was actively involved in the invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine and the occupation of Crimea and part of Donetsk and Luhansk Regions.

According to the Security Service of Ukraine, it also has further evidence of Mr. Vyshynskyis direct involvement in assisting Russian structures in information aggression against Ukraine. This evidence was set out in the course of the court hearing on the selection and application of preventive measures against Mr. Vyshynsky in case No 766/22242/17, which resulted inResolution of the Kherson City Court of Kherson Region (/ 1-/766/5856/18) on 17 May 2018. The Court examined the materials of law enforcement agencies and decided to take Mr. Vyshynskyi into custody.

Do Ukrainian MP or General Prosecutors Spokeswoman Threaten Journalists?

On 30th May 2018, Larissa Sargan, spokeswoman of the General Prosecutor of Ukraine, posted on her Facebook page a list of 26 FB-users, who criticized the law enforcement authorities after the information about the murder of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kyiv. The murder was, in fact, an operation in which Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) faked Babchenkoss assassination to save him and to get more evidences on the mandator in ones killing.

The spokeswoman for the Attorney-General of Ukraine Larysa Sarhan writes in the post about those who sparked another wave of zrada while all law enforcement officers were carrying out the #babchenko special operation Lets see how they will apologize.

The picture published by Ms. Sarhan features a girl with a quill in her hand and the text below: I put you on the list of zradophiles, but this time in pencil.

This text does not contain any accusations of high treason but instead attempts to make ashamed those who rushed into criticizing law enforcement agencies for being incapable of protecting lives of journalists, which proved false.

The text of Ms. Sarhans post features the word zrada (betrayal), which since 2014 is commonly used in Ukraine, including in all kinds of media (from social media to television channels). In addition, the picture published by Ms. Sarhan features the similarly common word zradophile (a derivative fromzrada, meaning someone who likes speaking or writing about zrada, i.e., tends to point out Ukraines failures and criticize its achievements).

The words zrada and zradophile became memes (commonly used words denoting a social phenomenon) amid intense military repulsion of Russian aggression in Donbas, which was accompanied by large-scale information aggression including mass distribution of information about deaths or encirclements of Ukrainian servicemen or about failures to supply them with weapons or provisions.

Ukrainian servicemen have recurrently fallen prey to special operations of Russian occupational forces by receiving text messages about their inevitable defeat or death, which were designed to force them into desertion or opposition to their commanders.

Therefore, events in Ukraines information space have led to the emergence of common word zrada having many connotations and meanings (i.e., unmotivated confidence that Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are incompetent and incapable of performing their functions), and in this case, does not mean high treason or an accusation thereof.

In the meantime, the alert on the Council of Europe Platform, as well as astatement by the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Harlem Desir, contain the word traitors. It should be noted that the post by the spokeswoman for the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Ms. Sarhan, does not contain the word traitors but features the meme zradophiles, i.e., those who like writing about zrada.

The expert of the Kharkiv human rights protection group Halya Coynash expressed the same position on this matter. She wrote:

 It can certainly be argued that such point-scoring is not behaviour we should expect from either Lutsenko, or his spokesperson. There was, however, no accusation of treason, only an attempt to show up those who had been swift to criticize the law enforcement bodies.

In this regard, the fact that employees of the Office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media or their NGO partners may deliberately or negligently (perhaps because of lack of skills of translation from Ukrainian into English) misinform the leadership of those authoritative European structures, which might affect their international reputation, is highly alarming.

In addition, according to the current legislation of Ukraine, a persons page on the Facebook social media is not an official source of information and is considered a personal space where citizens of Ukraine may freely express their position by means authorized in Ukrainian legislation unless they are indicative of a criminal or administrative offense.

As for the alleged verbal attack of the First Vice Chairwoman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Iryna Herashchenko, on the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine head, when she accused the union of co-operating with the Kremlin propagandists, the following information shall be taken into account.

A speech by the peoples deputy of Ukraine, Ms Herashchenko, during the morning session of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on 16 May 2018 is accessible on the YouTube channel of the Verkhovna Rada (time code 35:52).

By Article 10, paragraph 5 of the Law of Ukraine On the Status of the Peoples Deputy of Ukraine, peoples deputies shall not be legally accountable for results of voting or statements at the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and its bodies, except in cases of offense or defamation.

In the course of her speech, the peoples deputy, Ms. Herashchenko, expressed her concern at the absence of public statements of international organizations concerning gross violations of journalists rights (for instance, the unlawful imprisonment of journalists Stanislav Aseiev and Roman Sushchenko). Ms. Herashchenko also noted that she had inquired the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU) about those unacceptable incidents.

According to Ms. Herashchenko, the above organization does not monitor (and, respectively, do not respond to) violations of rights and the creation of threats to the safety of journalists in occupied areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Ms. Herashchenko also thanked the journalists and media who provided her with information about shootings to which journalists have or could have fallen victim, about journalists held captive, and about other illegal restrictions of their freedom. She told that this information would be transmitted to international organizations.

Ms. Herashchenko also expressed her surprise at the signing by the NUJU Chairman, Serhiy Tomilenko, of a joint statement with the propagandistic Russian Union of Journalists (RUJ). The peoples deputy was also indignant at calls to visit occupied Crimea, contained in the joint statement by the NUJU and the RUJ.

Such actions of the NUJU have been recurrently criticized by the Ukrainian journalistic community, NGOs and media experts that do not support cooperation with the RUJ in connection with the possibility that its workers might be used in hybrid aggression against Ukraine and with a view to the legitimization of the unlawful occupation of Crimea.

Therefore, the actions of the peoples deputy of Ukraine, Ms. Herashchenko, who was elected to the Parliament of Ukraine in the course of an independent and popular vote under Ukrainian law, is not a verbal attack but a free expression of her opinion.

Why International Organizations Do Not Respond to Murders of Journalists by Kremlin?

Meanwhile, there is primary information on who could be involved in theassassination of journalist Orhan Dzhemal, filmmaker Alexander Rastorguyev and cameraman Kirill Radchenko in Central African Republic.

The representatives of international organizations have tweeted about the case, but no official statements by OSCE RFOM were made.

According to the Russian investigation group Conflict Intelligence Team, journalists came to the CAR to shoot a documentary about the activities of the Russian mercenaries (so called Wagner Private Military Company) in Africa at the request of the Investigation Management Center, supported by Khodorkovskys funds. To prevent the disclosure of information, the militants of the private military company Wagner who knew the routes of the shooting group, arranged the ambush and killed journalists. They also prepared and published an official legend that the investigators became victims of local robbers.

It should be recalled that the Ministry of Information Policy of Ukraine has repeatedly raised the issue of international law violations by Russia using mercenaries abroad with the Western partners. We held a roundtable on crimes of the so-called PMC Wagner in Brussels as well as transmitted the information on the prosecution of Denis Korotkov (Fontanka.ru), a journalist from St. Petersburg investigating PMC Wagner`s activity, to the representatives of international organizations (in particular to Ricardo Gutierrez, General Secretary of the European Federation of Journalists).

Earlier this year Russian investigative journalist Maksim Borodin from Yekaterinburg died of injuries sustained on April 12 when he fell from the window of his fifth-floor apartment.

Borodin regularly wrote on crime and corruption in Russia. In March 2018, he wrote extensively about the deaths of Russian mercenaries fighting in Syria, identifying several fighters from the Urals city of Asbest who had been killed. On February 7, a group of Russian mercenaries with tanks and artillery attacked territory held by U.S.-backed opponents of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The U.S.-led international coalition responded with air strikes that are believed to have killed dozens of Russian fighters.

Ukrainian journalists, bloggers and volunteers as well as official government bodies many times published materials and evidences on the violation of the international law and participation of Russian individuals in unlawful military units, fighting in Ukraine, Syria and now Central African Republic and South Sudan (where Russian presence is mostly visible).

Unfortunately, the systematic ignorance of such signals by the international organizations responsible for the journalists protection led to the merciless assassination of the investigators` group in the African country. Moreover, the representatives of these international organizations systematically support those media that continue to silence the topic of Russian international crimes due to the complete censorship and self-censorship of the Russian media space.

Dmytro Zolotukhin, Deputy minister of information policy of Ukraine

MediumPresident of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has called on Ukrainian diplomats to make every effort to ensure the deployment of a UN peacekeeping mission in Donbas.

He stated this at a meeting with the heads of foreign diplomatic missions of Ukraine and the soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces during his working visit to Donetsk region on August 26, the press service of the head of state reported.

"It is very important to bring peace to Ukraine jointly, because we are fighting for peace. It is very important that the key element of this peace process - peacekeeping operation under the mandate of the UN Security Council - will be effective and successful for us," Poroshenko said.

In addition, now 21 Ukrainian servicemen are waiting for the decision on rehabilitation, the head of state noted, adding that 178 servicemen had already undergone rehabilitation in Latvia, 213 in Lithuania, 111 in Estonia, more than 100 in Israel, more than 100 in the United Arab Emirates, 24 - in Bulgaria.

"We have to ensure our effective interaction," the president emphasized.

According to Petro Poroshenko, the same goes for ensuring the possibility of rehabilitation of children from the Donbas, "who should also have an opportunity to rest from the horrors of war".

ishCanadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland in the scope of her working visit to Ukraine will hold meetings with the leadership of the state and heads of some ministries, as well as take part in a plenary meeting of the  Meeting of Heads of Foreign Diplomatic Representative Offices in Ukraine.

This is reported by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministrys press service.

Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland will be on a working visit to Ukraine on August 27-29. The purpose of the visit is to support the Ukrainian-Canadian political dialogue. As expected, the issues of cooperation in the international arena will be discussed, in particular counteracting Russian aggression and further strengthening of a special partnership," reads the report.

According to the Foreign Ministry, talks and a joint press conference of the Foreign Ministers of Ukraine and Canada are expected to take place on August 28, as well as meetings with the leadership of the state and heads of some ministries.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada will also take part in the plenary meeting of the XIII Meeting of Heads of Foreign Diplomatic Missions of Ukraine.

As Ukrinform reported, as part of the European tour, Chrystia Freeland will also visit Germany and France, where she will also deliver a speech.

iyWaters expressed sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview to one of the propaganda resources a year ago.

Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has told a Russian media outlet that "there are many treaties and papers under which Russia has all rights" to occupied Sevastopol, and "Washington was behind" the Euromaidan in Ukraine.

Read alsoLatvian pop star angers Russia with Crimea snub - BBC

"Geopolitics has never been my strong point but I know that Sevastopol is very important to Russia and the Russians. There are many treaties and papers under which Russia has all rights to this city. The change of power in Ukraine with Washington behind it simply provoked Moscow into further action," Waters said in an interview to the Russian Izvestia newspaper, answering a question from a journalist about Crimea's disputed status.

It is worth noting Waters expressed sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview to one of the propaganda resources a year ago.Starting today, the United States has imposed a new round of sanctions on Russia over the poisoning by Russia of a former Russian military intelligence operative Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, UK, in March of this year.

Sanctions that some experts branded "infernal" will be effective for last at least a year and include a ban on arms sales and financing of arms deals, restrictions on lending by U.S. government agencies, and a ban on exports of dual-use goods and technologies. Also, a ban is imposed on foreign aid to Russia, with the exception of emergency humanitarian aid and food supplies.

But these sanctions can hardly be called "infernal," at least for now. After all, they could be considered such when the economy of the targeted country immediately starts limping heavily. But it would be premature to claim this will be the case upon their introduction.

Russian economy has a certain safety cushion, although the trends are rather sad

Another thing is the sanctions foreseen by the end of the year. That's if Russia allows Americans to check whether it continues to manufacture chemical weapons. And here we are talking about the serious consequences for the Russian economy. As a matter of fact, it is a question of further financial bans and the actual disconnection of Russia from any technological developments without which it will not be able to grow  in particular, it's about dual-use products that can be used for both peaceful and military purposes. This is something that Russia abuses when it uses certain spare parts specifically for military purposes. And without U.S. technology, development of, say, Russian rockets will remain only on paper.

In addition, the second package prohibits Russia to use the U.S. dollar for settlement transactions. Since the ruble is not an international currency, it means that Russia will have problems with settlements, so any economy in this case will not be able to work effectively.

But, apparently, and this is not the end of the story. After all, if we remember what happened after the war in Afghanistan, after the shooting down of a Korean airliner by Russians in the early 80's, the sanctions were much more severe back then. For example, then all flights were banned from Russia and this was immediately reflected on this area of the economy. Also, then there was a serious effort to deter the Russian military-industrial complex, and this had its effect, too. And now, the Russian economy is not facing any infernal effects so far. But this step - the introduction of new restrictions  was definitely a necessary one.

In order for sanctions to really affect Russia, it is necessary that all these steps be comprehensive

Russian economy has a certain safety cushion, although the trends are rather sad. Now, it has gone into a state of deep stagnation, and figures indicate that there is no forward movement. On the other hand, that safety cushion is approximately $450 billion, and only about half of this sum has liquidity. It turns out that they can only use $200-250 billion, and, given the serious defense spending, the support of the occupied territories in Ukraine, Georgia and special expenditures for Chechnya, the funds will be enough for literally 3-5 years. Plus, a significant impact on the Russian economy has the price of oil, and if the U.S. now decides to put the Russian economy on its knees, oil prices will crawl down and this will create big risks that will not be covered by gas exports.

If Americans are going to impose sanctions against Nord Stream companies, this will also have a negative effect on the economic situation. The total cost of the project, according to various estimates, is about $10 billion. So, it's unlikely that any company or group of companies will be willing to give up half of these funds. Given that sanctions on companies will be swift, on the one hand, this can deepen the split between Europe and America, and on the other hand, it will be a clear signal for those who want to occupy two chairs at the same time.

In order for sanctions to really affect Russia, it is necessary that all these steps be comprehensive. And such actions should be supported by European partners. But we will hardly see any visible effect of any steps of a "single shot" nature.

Volodymyr Ohryzko is a head of the Russia Research Center, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of UkraineDeshchytsia acknowledged that the issues of the historical past resonate heavily in society.

Ukrainian Ambassador to Poland Andriy Deshchytsia states that some politicians manipulate the historical past in Polish-Ukrainian relations.

Speaking at Kyiv meeting of the press club of the Foreign Ministry, the Ambassador said that the issues of the historical past resonated heavily in society, an UNIAN correspondent reports.

"There are disagreements between Ukrainian and Polish historians, Ukrainian and Polish politicians," said Deshchytsia.

He believes that disagreements between historians should have remained in the academic field and expert discussions, instead of being brought to the public level until facts have been established and proven.

Read also"Leaving room for manipulation": Klimkin on preserved changes to Polish law on National Memory Institute

"The same applies to politicians: the approach must be such that there are certain historical facts and historical studies," the Ambassador said, adding that politicians not voice any statements, then seeking confirmation among historians and experts, or trying to manipulate the historical past."

He noted that historical misunderstandings cause certain "frictions" in society and in politics.

At the same time, the ambassador believes that the "Without independent Poland there will be no independent Ukraine" and "Without independent Ukraine there will be no independent Poland" approaches should dominate the discourse, including on historical issues.

The diplomat believes that the approach "Forgive and ask for forgiveness" is also the one to dominate the relations if it is a question of the past and the sacrifices incurred on both sides.Although the volume of counterfeit and contraband cigarette consumption in the EU has decreased slightly compared to the previous year, Ukraine continues to be the No. 1 source country.

For the second year in a row, Ukraine continues to top the rating of source countries of contraband cigarettes supplied to the EU. Over 4.8 billion cigarettes are smuggled from Ukraine, accounting for almost 11% of the total contraband volume shipped to the EU countries and more than EUR 1 billion in EU budget losses.

This is stated in a KPMG report on illicit cigarette trade in Europe in 2017.

Although this indicator slightly decreased compared to the previous year, Ukraine continues to be the No. 1 source country of contraband cigarettes, which is the cause of Brussels' concern in the context of the implementation of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU.

Thus, the approval of an eight-year plan to increase excise taxes on cigarettes to a certain extent raised the price of tobacco products, which has a positive effect on reducing the flow of contraband cigarettes into Europe, as price gaps shrank. The government has got and uses the opportunity to consult with the Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine on the formation of a tax policy, including in the tobacco industry.

Read alsoUkraine's central bank forecasts tobacco, alcohol price hikes in 2018

However, Ukraine's tobacco market still sees quite an unhealthy situation, where the growth of taxes is not fully passed on to the consumer through higher pricing while companies absorb the increase and keep prices unchanged to maintain their market share. In this pursuit, companies lose profits, the state falls short of revenue (including lost taxes from the same lost revenue and VAT), and price gaps with European prices and prices of neighboring countries offer incentives for significant contraband cigarette flows from Ukraine. So, the current legislation does not in any way prevent manufacturers from pricing cigarettes below the level of taxes and production costs. Some players in the tobacco market abuse their pricing freedom. The question remains unanswered: how can you keep selling cigarettes cheaper than the total tax due.

It should be mentioned that to solve this problem, the Ministry of Finance earlier proposed the introduction of a so-called fiscal mechanism. The concept of the fiscal mechanism implies the application of an increased rate of the minimum excise tax liability (application of a multiplier of 1.4) in case of declaring the price of cigarettes below a certain level.This level will be determined by a simple formula  the rate of the minimum excise tax liability multiplied by 1.65.

Read alsoEU calls on Ukraine to fight against illicit tobacco trade

The introduction of the fiscal mechanism will encourage producers to incorporate the amount of taxes in the price of cigarettes in proportion to the increase in rates, thereby reducing the price gaps with the neighboring countries and creating prerequisites for reducing smuggling into EU countries, which is a source of European partners' concern. In addition, this mechanism will ensure stable budget revenue, which is no less important reason for supporting a bill work on which for some reason has been delayed by the Cabinet of Ministers for several months.According to intelligence reports, three enemy troops were killed and another seven were wounded.

Russia's hybrid military forces mounted 23 attacks on Ukrainian army positions in Donbas in the past 24 hours, as a result of which four Ukrainian soldiers were wounded in action.

"Two defenders of Ukraine were wounded in action amid shelling, another two members of the Joint Forces received combat-related injuries," the press center of Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation (JFO) said in an update on Facebook as of 07:00 Kyiv time on August 27, 2018.

Read alsoDonbas update: Militants shell Ukraine positions 33 times, suffer losses

What is more, two servicemen were injured yesterday while stepping on a booby trap. In addition, another two soldiers were killed and another one was injured by personal negligence as a result of triggering an explosive device.

"According to intelligence reports, three occupiers were killed and another seven were wounded," reads the report.

Russian occupation forces opened aimed fire from grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and small arms to attack the defenders of the villages of Krymske, Novotoshkivske, Troyitske, Pivdenne, Novotroyitske, Hnutove, Lebedynske, Vodiane and Shyrokyne. In certain areas, enemy infantry fighting vehicles attacked Ukrainian positions.

The occupation forces also shelled the Ukrainian positions outside Krymske, Novotoshkivske, Troyitske, Hnutove and Vodiane, using proscribed 82mm and 120mm mortars, and artillery systems. Ukraine's Joint Forces had to fire back to suppress the enemy's fire activity amid escalation.

"Since Monday midnight, Russian-led forces have mounted two attacks on the Ukrainian positions outside Pavlopil and Vodiane, using grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and small arms. No heavy weapons were engaged," the report says.According to Haiduk, Russia is implementing a strategy of chaos in the Sea of Azov and is meticulous about everything step by step.

Former deputy and the then Commander of the Ukrainian Navy Serhiy Haiduk has warned of danger related to the "worst-case scenario" over Russia's actions in the Sea of Azov and said Russia's geopolitical encroachment on Ukraine concerns aims at depriving it maritime country's status.

"'The project of Novorossia' is on Russia's agenda, and the actions that are being conducted on the coastal flank in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov are Russian steps concerning the implementation of this project," he told Espreso.TV.

Read alsoMilitary columnist suggests his possible scenario of Russian attack on Mariupol: Airstrikes and tanks

According to Haiduk, Russia is implementing a strategy of chaos in the Sea of Azov and is meticulous about everything step by step. In particular, economic pressure on the Mariupol and Berdiansk seaports has not only an economic impact.

"We must understand that up to 5,000 people work in these ports, who, in case of job loss, may be involved in social unrest, i.e. there may be social tension among the population and the calculation goes in that direction. Imagine: our seaside group is in the east of Mariupol, which has daily military clashes with the enemy. And there are public riots to the west of Mariupol and in Mariupol itself, because they lose their jobs, lose the opportunity to support their families, etc. I think such issues are being worked out and Russia makes a bet on this," he said.

At the same time, Haiduk said the Kremlin would use protests among metallurgists since the main types of cargo that cross the seaports are products of the metallurgical industry.

According to Haiduk, such actions will be used to implement the "worst-case scenario  creating a corridor along the Sea of Azov."The occupation forces have violated the ceasefire four times along the contact line over the past day.

A residential house has been damaged in the village of Kriakivka, Luhansk region, in a mortar attack by Russian-led forces.

The shelling occurred last night. The militants used 120mm mortars, as reported on the website of the Luhansk Regional Military Civil Administration.

Read alsoFather of two children killed in Russian attack on Ukrainian village (Photos)

It is reported the occupation forces have violated the ceasefire four times along the contact line over the past day. In particular, they opened fire from 122mm artillery systems, 120mm and 82mm mortars, cannons of infantry fighting vehicles, various types of grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and small arms toward the village of Krymske.

In addition, the Ukrainian fortified positions near the villages of Novotoshkivske and Troyitske came under fire from 82mm mortars, anti-tank grenade launchers and heavy machine guns.

As UNIAN reported earlier, Russia's hybrid military forces mounted 23 attacks on Ukrainian army positions in Donbas in the past 24 hours, as a result of which four Ukrainian soldiers were wounded in action.Electrons arranged in a wedding-cake like structure, a concentric series of insulating (red) and conducting (blue) rings, due to magnetic confinement in graphene. The height of each tier represents the energy of the electrons in that tier.

In a marriage of quantum science and solid-state physics, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used magnetic fields to confine groups of electrons to a series of concentric rings within graphene, a single layer of tightly packed carbon atoms.

This tiered "wedding cake," which appears in images that show the energy level structure of the electrons, experimentally confirms how electrons interact in a tightly confined space according to long-untested rules of quantum mechanics. The findings could also have practical applications in quantum computing.

Graphene is a highly promising material for new electronic devices because of its mechanical strength, its excellent ability to conduct electricity and its ultrathin, essentially two-dimensional structure. For these reasons, scientists welcome any new insights on this wonder material.

The researchers, who report their findings in the Aug. 24 issue of Science, began their experiment by creating quantum dots--tiny islands that act as artificial atoms--in graphene devices cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero.

Electrons orbit quantum dots similar to the way these negatively charged particles orbit atoms. Like rungs on a ladder, they can only occupy specific energy levels according to the rules of quantum theory. But something special happened when the researchers applied a magnetic field, which further confined the electrons orbiting the quantum dot. When the applied field reached a strength of about 1 Tesla (some 100 times the typical strength of a small bar magnet), the electrons packed closer together and interacted more strongly.

As a result, the electrons rearranged themselves into a novel pattern: an alternating series of conducting and insulating concentric rings on the surface. When the researchers stacked images of the concentric rings recorded at different electron energy levels, the resulting picture resembled a wedding cake, with electron energy as the vertical dimension.

A scanning tunneling microscope, which images surfaces with atomic-scale resolution by recording the flow of electrons between different regions of the sample and the ultrasharp tip of the microscope's stylus, revealed the structure.

"This is a textbook example of a problem--determining what the combined effect of spatial and magnetic confinement of electrons looks like--that you solve on paper when you're first exposed to quantum mechanics, but that no one's actually seen before," said NIST scientist and co-author Joseph Stroscio. "The key is that graphene is a truly two-dimensional material with an exposed sea of electrons at the surface," he added. "In previous experiments using other materials, quantum dots were buried at material interfaces so no one had been able to look inside them and see how the energy levels change when a magnetic field was applied."

Graphene quantum dots have been proposed as fundamental components of some quantum computers.

"Since we see this behavior begin at moderate fields of just about 1 Tesla, it means that these electron-electron interactions will have to be carefully accounted for when considering certain types of graphene quantum dots for quantum computation," said study co-author Christopher Gutierrez, now at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who performed the experimental work at NIST with co-authors Fereshte Ghahari and Daniel Walkup of NIST and the University of Maryland.

This achievement also opens possibilities for graphene to act as what the researchers call a "relativistic quantum simulator." The theory of relativity describes how objects behave when moving at or close to light speed. And electrons in graphene possess an unusual property--they move as if they are massless, like particles of light. Although electrons in graphene actually travel far slower than the speed of light, their light-like massless behavior has earned them the moniker of "relativistic" matter. The new study opens the door to creating a table-top experiment to study strongly confined relativistic matter.

The measurements suggest that scientists may soon find even more exotic structures produced by the interactions of electrons confined to solid-state materials at low temperatures.Russian supervisors and officers put themselves above members of the so-called 'DPR' and 'LPR.'

Officer of the 53rd separate mechanized brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Anatoliy Shtefan has said there are grounds for a coup in the self-proclaimed republics, "Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics" ("LPR/DPR").

"There are prerequisites, but the Russians will not let them do that, because everyone knows that all senior officers of the so-called 1st and 2nd Army Corps are Russian personnel soldiers directly subordinated to the Russian Federation," he told in an interview to the Ukrainian online news outlet Obozrevatel.

Read alsoUkraine's law enforcers identity 54 foreign mercenaries fighting on side of "DPR/LPR" in Donbas

"There are constant internecine wars between regular officers of the Russian Federation and terrorists of the 'LPR/DPR.' Relations between them are bad. The fact is that Russian supervisors and officers put themselves above the fake 'DPR' and 'LPR,' who are [Ukrainian] citizens that have betrayed Ukraine," he said.

According to Shtefan, the Russians regard traitors as people of the lowest stratum of society.

"At the same time, residents of Luhansk and Donetsk regions who have been taking part in hostilities for four years have learned how to fight during this time. And realizing this, they always say this is our territory, we are the main ones here, but Russia does not let them [act like that]. So tension is growing," the officer said.Donbas has turned into scorched territory over four years, the journalist said.

UNIAN correspondent in Russia Roman Tsymbaliuk has said the Russian occupation forces will not leave Ukraine's Donbas as it will be perceived as Russian President Vladimir Putin's weakness.

"Donbas has turned into scorched territory in the four years: factories have been shutting down there, mines are being flooded, [there is an] environmental disaster, the standard of living has been worse than ever, so people flee to Russia and Ukraine. But even if everything is razed to the ground there, the occupiers will not leave. After all, it will be perceived as 'Putin's weakness,'" Tsymbaliuk told the Fakty daily newspaper in an interview.

Read alsoRussia reportedly sends another train with fuel to occupied Donbas  volunteer

According to him, the Russian Federation will not also allow the deployment of international peacekeeping forces to the occupied areas in Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

The journalist says Russia is aware that Ukraine and its allies will not agree to Russia's format of the presence of peacekeepers in Donbas, i.e. the deployment of the peacekeeping forces along the contact line.

"My prediction is that there will be no peacekeepers unless there is certain turmoil in Russia, economic or any other kind. But there are no such prerequisites in the medium-term outlook," Tsymbaliuk said, adding that Russia's resilience is great.

In this case, propaganda plays its role as it flows into the minds of Russians from all mass media  people are ready to endure much when it comes to "getting up off knees for Great Russia." At the same time, the journalist says that 77% of the votes in the presidential election, supposedly given to Putin, is a "made-up figure."The statements did not say if the aircraft actually entered NATO airspace.

The Russian Embassy in London mocked the British military and says its armed forces "pose no threat to Britain" two days after U.K. Typhoon jets based in Romania scrambled to investigate Russian aircraft heading toward NATO airspace.

"What kind of threat to Britain or its allies does a Russian patrol aircraft hypothetically pose while conducting flights off Russia's own shore, some 1,500 miles away from the U.K.?" the embassy said in a statement on August 25, RFE/RL wrote.

On Twitter, the embassy wrote: "A TYPHOON is SCRAMBLED to DETER a 50-years-old Russian PATROL plane off Russia's own shore, 1,500 miles away from Britain. Reckless and provocative. Congrats to UK taxpayers."

Read alsoNATO fighter jets scramble eight times to intercept Russia aircraft over Baltic Sea

The comments came after British Typhoon jets based in Romania twice in three days scrambled to investigate what the British Ministry of Defense said were "provocative" Russian aircraft flying on a path toward NATO airspace.

On August 23, the jets launched from the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base near the Romanian city of Constanta in response to a Russian Be-12 maritime patrol aircraft heading south over the Black Sea from Crimea.

The Typhoons were operating in accordance with NATO's enhanced air-policing mission designed to deter "Russian aggression, reassure Romania and assure NATO allies of the U.K. commitment to collective defense," the ministry said.

On August 21, two British Typhoon jets from the same Romanian air base scrambled to investigate suspected Russian fighter aircraft operating in the region.

The ministry said the Typhoons launched when two suspected Russian Su-30 Flanker aircraft appeared to be heading toward NATO airspace from Crimea.

The statements did not say if the aircraft actually entered NATO airspace.

Britain's defense secretary, Gavin Williamson, said after the incidents that "our commitment to NATO and European security is unwavering. Whether in the skies over the Black Sea and the Baltic, or on the ground in Estonia, our actions send a clear message  we are collectively ready to respond to any act of aggression and will support our Eastern European allies to deter any threats faced."

Encounters between Russian and NATO warplanes have increased in recent years as Moscow has demonstrated its resurgent military might. Russia also has increased the presence of its navy in the Mediterranean, Black Sea, and other areas.

Tensions are high in the region since Moscow's 2014 takeover and illegal annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, a move that led to Western sanctions being imposed against Russia.The Information Resistance OSINT community explores methods and instruments Russia exploits to gain influence across continents.

One of the Russian organizations worth attention in the said context is "Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute."

Officially, this "international independent non-governmental organization" declares its objective the research of international relations and raising the level of international security "by developing recommendations in the field of countering the development of conflicts and reducing global tensions," Information Resistance reports.

But, as it is often the case with Russian agents, such declarations have quite different actual goals and employ corresponding hybrid methods, namely, shifting attention away from Russian aggressive actions and imperial ambitions toward the U.S. behavior, at the same time declaring Moscow's "peaceful" intentions. Sadly, a number of European politicians, businessmen, scientists, and other advocates of Russia take part in these efforts.

One of the organization's leaders is former Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer who "surfaced" in the case of Paul Manafort, a scandalous political technologist who was once an advisor to former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and his team.

On Oct 5-6 this year, the organization will hold an annual "Rhodes Forum" under the slogan "Work on Multilateralism: Strengthening Dialogue on Peace, Security and Development." Its main speakers will be former Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor of Germany Fischer, former Prime Minister of France Villepin, former Prime Minister of Israel Olmert, and from the Russian side there will be Deputy Foreign Minister Lavrov and other representatives of Russian political elite.

As an official cover, representatives of international organizations, mass media, and research centers of America, Europe and Asia take part in DC activities. Officially DC cooperates with UNESCO, the League of Arab States, the Asia-European Foundation and other non-governmental organizations. The official goal of the "Dialogue of Civilizations" is "the study of world development and security."

In fact, the main ideology of the DC is to shift the responsibility of the Kremlin for the numerous crises connected with ISIS, international terrorism, mass migration, on the so-called "collective West", primarily the U.S. and the European Union. Since the annexation of the Crimea and Russian invasion of Donbas, the DC has been actively promoting the "alternative worldview" that is beneficial for the Kremlin, trying to "legalize" the steps of the Russian government.

It is noteworthy that the well-known friend of Putin, Czech President Milos Zeman, took part in the 2014 forum, condemning the anti-Russian sanctions and comparing the war in Ukraine with the "flu that will pass soon."

In 2015, the forum in Rhodes was dedicated to hybrid wars with an emphasis on "hybrid threats and subversive activities of the United States." In the interests of the Kremlin, attention was deflected once again from Russia's aggression in Ukraine and other areas of Russia's imperial interests.

Read alsoKremlin sources go quiet, leaving C.I.A. in dark about Putin's plans for midterms  media

Forum in 2016 was marked by the presence of a massive delegation of so-called Eurosceptics. Among them were the pro-Russian head of the Czech Republic Zeman, former head of the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn, prime minister of Hungary, Putin's friend Orban, and others.

In 2017, during the Rhodes Forum, the so-called "Leaders Club" was launched as an informal summit of former heads of states and governments. The main task was to create groups of influence in a number of conflict zones.

The council of heads of the organization now includes, besides Gusenbauer, a Russian oligarch Vladimir Yakunin, a Greek businessman from the United States Nicolas Papanicolaou.

As for financing, the DC does not receive funds from the Russian state budget, drawing funding from the Swiss fund Endowment for the World Public Forum (Dialogue of Civilizations), membership fees and private donations, which remain closed to the public eye.

At a conference held in the Vienna Diplomatic Academy in 2016, one of the main speakers was a Ukraine-based lawyer Tatyana Montyan, infamous for her anti-Ukrainian stance and associated with militants of the so-called "LPR-DPR." In general, all speeches there were openly anti-Ukrainian, with speakers openly accusing Ukrainian authorities in "stirring up conflict."

Read alsoKremlin's strategy to destabilize Ukraine

Another important area is the strengthening of Russian influence in Europe. At present, the recruitment of agents of influence (political scientists, public figures, politicians) is one of the main tasks of the DC in the EU. The goal is the further formation of a cohort of "friends of Moscow" in Western Europe, manipulation of public opinion, and carrying out pro-Russian propaganda.

According to unconfirmed reports, almost all experts in Germany who are specialists in "Russian issues" received invitations to gain permanent membership and participate in individual events of the DC.

Another important role is direct communication with some heads of states. For example, President of the Czech Republic, Zeman, maintains friendly relations with the head of the DC Yakunin, being a constant participant in the events set up by this organization.

Read alsoUSA Today: Jury finds former Trump campaign manager guilty on eight counts in tax fraud case

Returning to the Manafort case connections, Alfred Gusenbauer is closely associated with the Mercury Group, one of the companies targeted by the probe. Gusenbauer was mentioned in the company's official report for 2017. There is also information that Gusenbauer is involved in the activities of the so-called "Habsburg Group," set up by Manafort, a "secret" group of European politicians who were supposed to promote the Yanukovych team and their policies.

The IR concludes that it is possible that some of the experts who are involved in the Kremlin's hybrid influence organization actually think that they are engaged in useful research in an attempt to make the world a better and safer place.(@rukhshanmir)

AJK President Sardar Masood Khan said that Tourism Corridor in Azad Jammu Kashmir will significantly change people's life for the better and will generate new income opportunities for a broad section of the population.

MIRPUR (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 27th Aug, 2018 ) ,:AJK President Sardar Masood Khan said that Tourism Corridor in Azad Jammu Kashmir will significantly change people's life for the better and will generate new income opportunities for a broad section of the population.

"Apart from employment due to tourism-related activities, the Tourism Corridor on completion will also offer opportunities for entrepreneurship, Khan said while addressing a public gathering at Devi Gali town near Rawalakot.

He said Tourism Corridor to be completed possibly under China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) will not only connect three districts of AJK with one another but will also bring huge economic benefits for the people of the entire state.

The President said Tourism Corridor starting from Saran village in Hattian Bala District of Azad Kashmir and ending at Devi Gali after passing through Sudhan Gali, Ganga Choti, Haji Peer, Lasdana, Khaigala, Toli Peer and Banjosa will change economic future of the area by creating multiple business avenues for the people of the targeted area.

"AJK government and its Tourism Department are determined to make this project a success, which will add another dimension to the development of the liberated area," President Masood said and added that feasibility of the project has been completed and construction work is going to start soon.

Describing Devi Gali- surrounded by densely pine forest and mountains- as great gift from nature, AJK President said he will consider the demand of the people for establishment of regional campus of the university at Devi Gali to facilitate the students of the area to get higher education close to their homes.

He urged the youth to work hard, get education and play their role for the progress and prosperity of their area. About the ongoing development projects, President Masood Khan said construction of Hajira- Trar Khal and Khaigala- Hajira Road has been completed with the financial assistance of Asian Development Bank while development work on Khaigala- Hajira Road via Banjusa is underway.

The president said that we are trying our best to execute and complete all the development projects within the specified time and in accordance with international standard.

Referring to Kashmiri peoples' struggle for their right to self-determination in the Indian held Jammu and Kashmir; the President said that our brothers and sisters on the other side of the Line of Control are writing a new chapter of history by offering matchless sacrifices.

India, he emphasized should keep in mind that she can never dampen the spirit of freedom from the hearts of Kashmiris who are determined to take their struggle to its logical conclusion.Congress leader, Mani Shankar Aiyar ,in Indian occupied Kashmir, has said that Article 35-A, which grants special rights and privileges to the permanent citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, should not be abrogated.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 27th Aug, 2018 ) :Congress leader, Mani Shankar Aiyar ,in Indian occupied Kashmir, has said that Article 35-A, which grants special rights and privileges to the permanent citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, should not be abrogated.

According to Kashmir Media Service ,Mani Shankar Aiyar said this while talking to reporters in Srinagar. He said that Article 35-A was in the interest of the Kashmiri people and should not be touched. Nobody should make any effort for its abrogation, he said.

"People of Kashmir are worried that their rights will be snatched if there is any tampering with Article 35-A," he pointed out.AJK President Sardar Masood Khan has said India designed a nefarious plan to expel Kashmiris from occupied territory and settle Indian citizen on their land to change the demography of the occupied state.

MIRPUR (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 27th Aug, 2018 ) ,:AJK President Sardar Masood Khan has said India designed a nefarious plan to expel Kashmiris from occupied territory and settle Indian citizen on their land to change the demography of the occupied state.

"India is hatching conspiracies to abolish Article-35-A and Article-370 of its constitution with a clear purpose to change the disputed character of Kashmir and alter the demography of the territory," President Masood said, while addressing a gathering of Kashmiri refugees at Ambore in AJK late Sunday.

The refugees residing in the camp were forced to take shelter in Azad Kashmir after being terrorized by Indian Occupation forces between 1989 and 2000.

The President said that despite Indian oppression and tyranny, Kashmiris are united to oppose the conspiracies with tooth and nail. He said that the people of Jammu and Kashmir whether they are children, youth or old are offering matchless sacrifices to complete Pakistan by liberating their motherland from Indian clutches.

Terming India a guileful enemy, President Masood Khan said that Indian government earlier forced 2.5 million Kashmiris to leave their hearth and homes and took shelter in Pakistan and Azad Kashmir in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1989 besides slaughtering around half million Kashmiris in Jammu in 1947.

This all reflects Indian nefarious designs to exterminate Muslim population of Kashmir to turn the Muslim majority of the state into a minority.

Now Indian government, President Masood went on to say intends to settle so-called refugees of West Pakistan and its citizen from Punjab, Rajistan, Bihar and other Indian states.

He assured the refugees from occupied Kashmir that the government of Pakistan and Azad Kashmir will take care of all their needs by providing them food, residencies, and facilities of health and education to their children.

He said that government will never discriminate between the local population and the refugees from occupied Kashmir.

The President also assured that quota reserved for the children of refugees in government jobs and educational institutions will be implemented in letter and spirit.

President AJK further said that the government will consider the demand of the refugees for the provision of land for the graveyard, construction of the road within the camp and provision of clean drinking water.

The gathering was also addressed by commissioner rehabilitation of AJK Government Ataullah Ata, President refugees camp Shaheem Ahmed, Ghulam Hussain Butt, and Abdul Ahad Lone.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Retail pioneer Union Coop has signed an investment contract with Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority, DSOA, the regulatory body for Dubai Silicon Oasis, DSO, to establish a commercial centre worth an estimated AED94.442 million.

DUBAI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 27th Aug, 2018) Retail pioneer Union Coop has signed an investment contract with Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority, DSOA, the regulatory body for Dubai Silicon Oasis, DSO, to establish a commercial centre worth an estimated AED94.442 million.

The investment contract was signed by Dr. Juma Al Matrooshi, Deputy CEO for Operations and Client Affairs at the DSOA, and Khalid Humaid bin Diban Al Falasi, CEO of Union Coop, in the presence of Madiya Al Marri, Director of the Properties and Projects Division, and Mohammed Al Marri, Director of the business Development Section at the Properties and Projects Division at Union Coop.

Speaking about this new development, Dr. Al Matrooshi said, "In line with its efforts to develop an integrated community, the DSOA is keen on attracting investment opportunities that contribute to the diversification of services available to its residents. The new Union Coop commercial centre will be a quality addition to the retail offering at the DSO.

"

Al Falasi said, "In a bid to achieve our expansion goals, we are always looking for investment opportunities, in the form of both purchase and lease of land, that will allow us to supply the community with a wide range of products at competitive prices and maximise shareholder returns in the long run.

"We have signed a renewable 30-year investment contract with the DSOA to open a 141,589 sq. ft. commercial centre that will meet the needs of the residents of the DSO and the neighbouring areas. We have purchased land from the DSOA at a total cost of AED5 million within the framework of our community contributions."

The commercial centre will comprise a partial basement reserved for car parking, and a ground floor with a number of shops and 250 parking spaces. The first floor will house a Union Coop hypermarket spanning 60,500 sq. ft.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Tariq Al Gurg, Chief Executive Officer of Dubai Cares, has visited Al Ansari Exchange to honor Mohamed Ali Al Ansari, Chairman and Managing Director, Al Ansari Exchange, and Rashed Ali Al Ansari, General Manager, Al Ansari Exchange for fulfilling the companys invaluable commitment of AED10 million that was pledged to Dubai Cares in 2012 over a period of five years in support of the global philanthropic organisations programmes in India, Pakistan and the Philippines.

DUBAI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 27th Aug, 2018) Tariq Al Gurg, Chief Executive Officer of Dubai Cares, has visited Al Ansari Exchange to honor Mohamed Ali Al Ansari, Chairman and Managing Director, Al Ansari Exchange, and Rashed Ali Al Ansari, General Manager, Al Ansari Exchange for fulfilling the companys invaluable commitment of AED10 million that was pledged to Dubai Cares in 2012 over a period of five years in support of the global philanthropic organisations programmes in India, Pakistan and the Philippines.

Al Gurg also expressed his appreciation to Al Ansari Exchange for renewing its commitment in 2017 with a second pledge of AED10 million over five years that is being invested towards upscaling Dubai Cares programme in the Philippines.

During the meeting, Al Gurg highlighted the impact of Al Ansari Exchanges contribution in the lives of children and young people as well as their families and communities. Since 2012, a total of 26 schools in Pakistan have been rehabilitated and outfitted with furniture, sanitation facilities, health-focused resources, as well as 26 para-teachers and 50 school-teachers received training.

In the Philippines, through Real Assets & Improved Skills & Education for Adolescent Girls (RAISE) and RAISE Higher programmes, 2,396 out-of-school children and youth were provided with the opportunity to access education with marginalised girls given life-skills training, reading classes and increased access to education in addition to 148 teachers benefited from training.

In India, the program enhanced literacy and numeracy skills, as well as improved early childhood education. The children in India now have access to 200 libraries and new educational materials to support their learning abilities.

As part of Al Ansari Exchanges renewed commitment, Dubai Cares is scaling up its RAISE and RAISE Higher programmes in Philippines through the launch of the RAISE Above programme with a special focus on young women and men who are out of school and those who are in-school but are at risk of dropping out. The RAISE Above programme which targets 4,000 young women and men, aims to increase knowledge about education, gender equality and the availability of related services, and create an improved and enabling environment for the education, training and employment aspirations of young women and men.The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has adopted a powerful stance in empowering women, setting new standards based on a unique model drawn from the vision of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Founding Father of the UAE.

ABU DHABI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 27th Aug, 2018) The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has adopted a powerful stance in empowering women, setting new standards based on a unique model drawn from the vision of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Founding Father of the UAE. This approach perpetuates in the current leaderships vision for the future, whereby women stand as active partners and contributors in the countrys development process and play a vital role in raising future generations, according to a report issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MoFAIC) on the eve of UAE's celebrations of the 4th Emirati Women's Day.

The UAE Constitution guarantees equal rights for women and men. The country is leading the way in a number of regional and global indexes on gender equality and women's achievements, education and literacy, women's employment, and respect for women among several social and economic indicators and other indicators.

The countrys constitution supports the participation of Emirati women in decision-making, a core component of economic empowerment. In December 2014, the UAE Cabinet adopted a decision imposing the appointment of women on the boards of directors of all institutions and government agencies, setting the proportion of female representation at 15 percent in government institutions.

Nine women sit on the Federal National Council for the 16th legislature, representing 22.5 percent of 40 members. Furthermore, women make up 27 percent of the new Cabinet formed in 2016 which includes nine women ministers, one of whom is the youngest minister appointed to Cabinet (23 years).

The UAE Gender Balance Council was established in 2015 as a federal agency dedicated to scaling up the UAE's efforts to achieve gender balance across all sectors nationwide, and in decision-making positions. Women are actively involved in the judiciary sector with several women judges and prosecutors, as well as a significant female presence in the police and the military. In the diplomatic field, women currently hold 30 percent of positions in the diplomatic corps at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, which comprised 234 women employees in 2017, including women ambassadors and diplomats representing the UAE abroad.

Moreover, the UAE has made remarkable progress in reducing gender disparities in girls' education in schools and higher education, with more than 70 percent of girls graduating from universities. In the economic field and in the business world, women have set themselves as partners, making up 46.6 percent of the total workforce, holding 66% of the jobs of the public sector, 30% of which are decision-making positions. Furthermore, 23,000 businesswomen manage projects worth about US$15 billion in the UAE.

The Government of the United Arab Emirates has made the theme "Empowerment of Women and Girls" as one of three thematic areas of action underpinning the country's international aid policy for 2017-2021. It is also one of the focal points of strategy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

More than 14 percent of total international aid contributed by the United Arab Emirates in 2016 was devoted to empowering women and girls around the world. After deducting bilateral support to government budgets, which accounts for more than half of the value of foreign aid contributed by the UAE in 2016, the proportion of aid allotted to the promotion gender equality and women's empowerment accounts for nearly one-third of total aid.

Among the international aid projects that contribute to this essential cause are: women's vocational training and support for women entrepreneurs in low- and middle-income countries and support for more than 100 projects in the health sector for women and children. In Afghanistan, the UAE supported the saffron industry where women hold 80 percent of the production business. In Sri Lanka, the UAE also provided financial support to an institute dedicated to womens empowerment.

Infrastructure - one of the main objectives of the UAE's international assistance - is one of the key drivers of change in women's empowerment. Improving infrastructure contributes to increased mobility and market access, and reduces the amount of time spent on unpaid housework, leaving more time for productivity and contribution to the economy.

The UAE is fully committed to empowering women and girls in entrepreneurship and has thus donated US$50 million to the World Bank's Women Entrepreneurs Financing Initiative (WeFi). This initiative will help mobilize more than US$1 billion in funding for women entrepreneurs. The UAE is also committed to making the necessary tools available to women and to supporting them through opportunities.

The "1000 Leaders" initiative is one example reflecting such action, whereby the state will provide training and opportunities for present and future generations of women, to empower them and enable them to hone their skills and abilities to become leaders in the sectors of activity of their choice, in an effort to reverse social prejudices about the division of gender roles and capacities, and relegate them to the past.

The UAE has developed a comprehensive system of national policies and strategies to promote and guarantee human rights and fundamental freedoms. In 2015, the United Arab Emirates established the UAE Gender Balance Council, which aims to reduce gender disparity and work towards achieving gender balance in the public and private sectors, particularly in decision-making.

On the other hand, the UAE adopted several national policies and strategies aimed at empowering women in the UAE and strengthening their status in all sectors, by launching a National Strategy for Women's Empowerment and Entrepreneurship 2015- 2021, which aims to empower and build the capacity of Emirati women to overcome the difficulties encountered in their participation in all areas. It also aims at increasing the participation of Emirati women in development and improving their status at the regional and international levels.

As part of its commitment to human rights conventions to which it is a party and to submit Universal Period Review (UPR) report, the UAE exerts all efforts to follow-up on the implementation of recommendations and has submitted its second UPR report on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) before the competent committee in November 2015.

As part of the voluntary pledges for the appointment of the United Arab Emirates for the members of the Human Rights Council for the period 2016-2018, the United Arab Emirates provided support to UN Women, towards the opening of UN Womens Communications office in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE and UN Women signed the convention on the establishment of the special communication office with member countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council in July 2016 in Abu Dhabi, and the office was officially inaugurated in October 2016. The General Women's Union provided the necessary facilities and funding for the opening of the office.

In 2009, the UAE acceded to the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol). The United Arab Emirates are also founding members of the United Friends in the fight against human trafficking, created in September 2010, on the sidelines of the 65th session of the United Nations General Assembly.

Women continue to be the backbone of the UAE, but also around the world. The UAE believes that progress in the area of women's rights is essential to building a contemporary society based on tolerance and inclusion. With their benefits, achievements and experience, the UAE will continue to work to ensure that women in the rest of the world enjoy the same appreciation and participation that Emirati women enjoy in their country. .Life has returned to normalcy in the federal capital on Monday with maximum attendance in the public and private institutions as most of the natives who left for celebrating the biggest festival of Eid-ul-Adha with their relatives returned on Sunday and resumed their routine official engagements.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 27th Aug, 2018 ) :Life has returned to normalcy in the Federal capital on Monday with maximum attendance in the public and private institutions as most of the natives who left for celebrating the biggest festival of Eid-ul-Adha with their relatives returned on Sunday and resumed their routine official engagements.

Majority of the population of Islamabad comprised of the people belonging to different parts of the country, who are settled here for job, education or business purpose, prefer to celebrate the festivals of eid with their relatives in home towns.

The three Eid holidays from Tuesday to Thursday announced by the government compelled the officials to take leave of Friday or Monday to club weekends with eid holidays for spending more time with their families.

Murad Ali, a resident of F-10 Markaz said, "Most of the natives prefer to celebrate the religious festival of Eid-ul-Adha in their home towns.

Now, the hustle and bustle of the city is reviving after eid with its residents coming back from their native towns".

"I managed to get leave of Monday prior to eid holidays and Friday after eid holidays and enjoyed long weekends this eid. I spent maximum time with my parents making this eid memorable one as I would get opportunity to visit them on next eid", he said.

The federal capital wears a deserted look during the two festivals of eid as most of the natives move to their home towns to celebrate eid with their near ones while most of the markets and restaurants also remain closed.

The educational institutions in the city have also opened after long summer and eid vacations and students after enjoying detailed visit to their home towns are ready to focus on their academic routine by sharing details of their eid celebrations and participating in Eid Milan parties.

"I was excited on the first day of my school today after vacations as me and my friends participated in the Eid-Milan party by wearing eid outfits and shared the memories with animals", said a young student, Murtaza.

"After enjoying so many vacations, I will be more focused on my studies now as second term examinations are near", he said.

The main markets, food outlets and restaurants of the capital remain closed which made difficult for the bachelors and on-duty staff to manage food.

The public transport plying between the twin cities of Islamabadand Rawalpindi was seen very limited during the eid holidays but now the hustleand bustle of the cities has been restored with culmination of holidays.China hails the participation of India and Pakistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's (SCO) counterterrorism exercise, dubbed Peace Mission 2018, in Russia's Chelyabinsk region, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Monday.

BEIJING (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) China hails the participation of India and Pakistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's (SCO) counterterrorism exercise, dubbed Peace Mission 2018, in Russia's Chelyabinsk region, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Monday.

The drills started on August 22 and will conclude on Wednesday.

"China welcomes India's and Pakistan's participation in the joint anti-terrorism exercise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization," Hua said.

According to the ministry's spokeswoman, since India and Pakistan remain "important countries" for the South Asia region, their stable bilateral relations mean much for "regional peace and stability, as well as for global peace and development."

"We hope sincerely that India and Pakistan will enhance cooperation and dialogue with each other and within the framework of international organizations, including the SCO, mend relations, and protect regional peace and stability together," Hua added.

The SCO, established in 2001, promotes political, economic and security cooperation among its members, which include China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. India and Pakistan joined its ranks last year, and Peace Mission 2018 is their first SCO exercise.

For over 70 years, the two countries have been engaged in a conflict over the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region, with both states laying claims to it since the end of UK rule over India and its partitioning into two separate countries: India and Pakistan. In 2003, a ceasefire agreement was signed, but the two sides continue accusing each other of violating it, resulting in continued instability in the region.A man committed suicide by shooting himself after killing his cousin here at Sehrish Nagar of Qasimabad Taluka on Monday.

HYDERABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 27th Aug, 2018 ) :A man committed suicide by shooting himself after killing his cousin here at Sehrish Nagar of Qasimabad Taluka on Monday.

According to Police, Imtiaz Malik s/o Rasool Bux Malik 30 had entered into exchange of hot words on a domestic matter with his cousin Mehtab d/o Malik Muhammad Azam 28.

After that he shot the cousin dead and later triggered himself on head. The bodies of both were brought to Civil Hospital Hyderabad from where the same handed over to relatives after completion of medico legal formalities.

The Police started the investigation and primarily interrogation had revealed the fact that Mehtab had refused the proposal of marriage of Imtiaz thereafter he committed such act.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

LAHORE, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 26th Aug, 2018 ) :Inspector General National Highways and Motorways Police (NH&MP) Aamir Zulfiqar Khan has taken notice of an incident of assaulting a commuter by an NH&MP officer.

A spokesman of NH&MP said that the IG took notice of a video viral on the social media showing a patrolling officer Ijaz, assaulting a commuter.

In response to the apparent abuse of authority, the patrolling officer has been subjected to disciplinaryproceedings, entailing his suspension and initiation of a formal inquiry against him.RAWALPINDI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 27th Aug, 2018 ) :Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Major General Asif Ghafoor said on Sunday that no one was killed or injured by forces in North Waziristan.

"While an inquiry has been ordered to ascertain facts, no assurance (has been) given for any court martial," he said in a twitter message in response to a VOA Deewa report on twitter.

Referring to the VOA Deewa report on his official twitter account, the DG ISPR said, "@voadeewakeeps up its tradition of false reporting. People of Waziristan are peace loving and value the attained peace."(@rukhshanmir)

AL-DIABIYA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) DIABIYA, August 27 (Sputnik) - About half of the residents of the Syrian city of Al-Diabiya in Damascus province have returned to their homes after the city was freed from the militants, the local administration said on Monday.

"Before the war, there were 70,000 people living in Al-Diabiya. Now 35,000 have already returned," Abdullah Ahmad, the head of the city administration, said.

The official added that the authorities were restoring the infrastructure in order to facilitate the residents' return.

"Our task is to restore everything for the normal life and to improve living conditions here as soon as possible.

People should understand that they are not asked to return to the debris. Electricity is already supplied and we are also working on distributing food," Ahmad said.

Syria has been devastated by years of violent civil war which had prompted millions of people to flee hostilities from the areas where they lived to other locations in Syria and outside the country. The United Nations estimates, there are over 5.6 million Syrian refugees abroad and about 6.6 million displaced across the crisis-torn country.Algiers, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 27th Aug, 2018 ) :Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika flew Monday to Switzerland for a medical check-up, his office said, months ahead of an election with no clear successor in sight for the ailing 81-year-old.

The statement, carried by the APS news agency, gave no further details about the "routine medical check-up" in Geneva, nor did it say how long Bouteflika was expected to be out of the country.

Bouteflika has been frail since suffering a stroke in 2013, which weakened his mobility and forced him to work from his residence in Zeralda, west of Algiers.

Bouteflika has since travelled abroad several times to undergo medical examinations in Paris, the southeastern French city of Grenoble and in Geneva.

Rumours often swirl in Algeria about the state of the president's health, with opposition leaders quick to express concerns about a possible "power vacuum" if he were to die.

But with a presidential election due to take place in April 2019, politicians have already been preparing for a fifth term under Bouteflika, who has been in power since 1999.

In April, the secretary general of his National Liberation Front, Djamel Ould Abbes, asked him to run for re-election.

And in June, Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia said his Rally for National Democracy (RND) party would support the president "continuing his mission and his sacrifice in the service of Algeria".

In 2014, the year after his stroke, Bouteflika's decision to seek a fourth term sparked criticism from those who questioned his ability to rule.

Bouteflika only makes rare public appearances, during which he is usually seen sitting in a wheelchair.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Around 100 migrants and refugees, residing in a reception center in the Greek region of East Attica, on Monday blocked the Athens-Lamia national highway to protest poor living conditions in the center, local media reported.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) Around 100 migrants and refugees, residing in a reception center in the Greek region of East Attica, on Monday blocked the Athens-Lamia national highway to protest poor living conditions in the center, local media reported.

According to the Kathimerini newspaper, the refugee reception center located in Malakasa village was affected by a flood caused by heavy rains in the area earlier in the day.

The protests reportedly resulted in traffic disruptions and jams.

Malakasa hotspot's capacity is 1,500 people. According to the UN Refugee Agency's estimates, most of people living there are from Afghanistan.

In early August, the European Commission announced allocation of 37.5 million Euros ($44 million) to Greece for improving reception conditions for migrants arriving in the country, namely, by providing them with food, accommodation and health care.

The total number of refugees and migrants in Greece amounted to over 60,000 as of May 2018, according to the UN Refugee Agency. The country is one of the top ports of entry for migrants fleeing crises in their countries, as they are often trying to reach the EU states via the Mediterranean.MINSK (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Sunday that US President Donald Trump would gain more for the United States if he gave up his sharp language.

"I think if Trump abandons now this harsh rhetoric and his behavior, he would have much more to win for the United States," the president told the Belarus 1 broadcaster in an interview.

Lukashenko added that, naturally, many issues were hidden from the public, but "to wage wars against the whole world, including trade, [was] not the right way."

Since taking office in 2017, Trump has been pursuing a hard-line approach on a number of international issues, including migration, Iran nuclear deal, NATO budget contributions and trade. The president repeatedly claimed that other states had been taking advantage of the United States and pledged to change such practices.(@FahadShabbir)

:At the talks held in Sochi on 22 August Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed on a new meeting in the near future with the participation of members of the governments of the two states, the Belarusian leader said in an interview to the Belarus 1 TV channel, BelTA informs.

MINSK, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 27th Aug, 2018 ) :At the talks held in Sochi on 22 August Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed on a new meeting in the near future with the participation of members of the governments of the two states, the Belarusian leader said in an interview to the Belarus 1 tv channel, BelTA informs.

"The most important thing is that we have agreed with the Russian president to find an opportunity to meet within the next few days. At present I have a quiet timetable, while Vladimir Putin has a very busy schedule. Now he is going to spend some time in Siberia. We will meet after his visits to the regions of Russia. This was Vladimir Putin,s proposal. We will expand out meeting with representatives of our governments," said the Belarusian leader.

"We have agreed that the current issues are the matters for the governments to address.

So, as I have already said it, we, fortunately, have no new problematic issues and they do not accumulate. These are old matters, on which we need to make decisions. Vladimir Putin suggested doing it in the presence of the governments and the prime ministers. We agreed upon it after discussing international issues," said Alexander Lukashenko.

The president stressed that Belarus and Russia are friendly states. Perhaps, this is because we share the Soviet past. Moreover, we have common Slavic roots. That is why we have very close relations and can discuss any issue openly, said the Belarusian leader.

"Journalists make wrong conclusions from this openness. They say our relations are worsening. This is not true. We simply discuss all the matters openly, express our opinions," added Alexander Lukashenko.Two Chilean tourists facing the death penalty in Malaysia for allegedly murdering a man in a hotel are innocent and acted in self-defence, their lawyer said Monday

Kuala Lumpur, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 27th Aug, 2018 ) :Two Chilean tourists facing the death penalty in Malaysia for allegedly murdering a man in a hotel are innocent and acted in self-defence, their lawyer said Monday.

Felipe Osiadacz and Fernando Candia are on trial over the killing of a Malaysian in the lobby of the Kuala Lumpur hotel in August last year, less than 24 hours after they arrived in the country on holiday.

The young men have pleaded not guilty. Malaysia has a mandatory death penalty for murder, and if convicted the pair will be hanged.World's largest China-made amphibious aircraft, the AG600, has completed a trial flight from the city of Zhuhai in southern Guangdong province to Jingmen city in central province of Hubei and is ready to start tests on the water, the plane's manufacturer, the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), said on Monday.

BEIJING (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) World's largest China-made amphibious aircraft, the AG600, has completed a trial flight from the city of Zhuhai in southern Guangdong province to Jingmen city in central province of Hubei and is ready to start tests on the water, the plane's manufacturer, the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), said on Monday.

The aircraft flew over three Chinese provinces - Guangdong, Hunan and Hubei, the company said, without specifying the start date of tests on water.

The plane has already passed a series of tests since its maiden flight in December.

The AVIC said in mid-May that China expected to deliver the AG600 to customers by 2022.The Czech Republic's withdrawal from the European Union would jeopardize the country's future, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said on Monday.

PRAGUE (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) The Czech Republic's withdrawal from the European Union would jeopardize the country's future, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said on Monday.

"We are a strong element of the West, we are EU embers and NATO allies, and no one can call it into question. If anyone here talks about Czexit [the Czech Republic's withdrawal from the European Union], he jeopardizes the future of our country by doing this," Babis told Czech ambassadors to foreign countries, as broadcast by Czech tv channels.

He went on to say that 83 percent of Czech export accounted for the EU countries, Czech gross national product had grown by 37 percent over the 14 years of the country's EU membership, while EU had also provided the Czech Republic around 700 billion korunas (around $31.5 billion) of financial aid.

According to Babis, while the Czech government often criticizes the European Union in order to protect its national interests, this does not mean that Czech policy is anti-European.

"The European Union should return its initial message. This means, a safe and economically successful continent, backed by the domestic market," Babis said.

He added that the European Union should tackle the migration problem by reaching agreement with non-member states also involved in the issue. He went on to emphasize that the Czech government strongly opposed the idea of a mandatory quota of refugees that every EU state has to accept.

"If I say that I don't want to accept a single migrant, then this is a definite and quite a clear symbol," Babis said.

While the Czech Republic joined the European Union in 2004, it has been critical of the institution in the past years over its unwillingness to comply with the relocation quota system, introduced in 2015. In June 2016, Czech President Milos Zeman called on the country's government to follow the UK example and host a referendum on withdrawal from the European Union and NATO, which the Czech government refused to do.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Estonian Director of Foreign Intelligence Mikk Marran said on Monday that Russia was attempting to drive a wedge between the European Union and NATO, which poses a threat to Tallinn.

TALLINN (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) Estonian Director of Foreign Intelligence Mikk Marran said on Monday that Russia was attempting to drive a wedge between the European Union and NATO, which poses a threat to Tallinn.

"Russia is seeking to break the unity between the European Union and NATO. In case of success, it will pose a direct threat to Estonia," Marran said, as quoted by the Postimees newspaper.

Marran also said that the same conclusion was made in the intelligence service's two latest reports entitled "International security and Estonia." This year's report dedicated over 40 pages out of 67 to Russia.

Earlier in August, Marran said that there were people suspected of being the Kremlin's "agents of influence" including journalists, diplomats, businessmen and politicians. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, in turn, said that Marran's claims were mere speculations aimed at diverting attention from the country's domestic problems.

Marran also said in February that there was a threat of Russia attacking NATO, however, it was unlikely to happen. Moscow has repeatedly stressed that Russia would not attack any member of the alliance.Moldovan President Igor Dodon condemned on Monday the protest being held by the country's opposition, labeling it as a disgrace

CHISINAU (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) Moldovan President Igor Dodon condemned on Monday the protest being held by the country's opposition, labeling it as a disgrace.

The demonstration was organized on Sunday by the right-wing Dignity and Truth Platform Party (PDA), Party of Action and Solidarity, and Liberal Democratic Party of Moldova. Protesters unanimously adopted a resolution calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Pavel Filip, abolition of the law on tax amnesty and end of the political persecution against the opposition. They also urged the government to recognize the results of Chisinau's mayoral election.

"What the parties were doing today in the Great National Assembly Square is a disgrace to democracy. The sad thing is that this is happening on the eve of Independence Day. No one has the moral right to use people to advance their political interests," Dodon wrote on Facebook.

Earlier on Monday, the police dispersed the protesters who stayed on the square overnight.

According to the police reports, over 6,500 people came to the demonstration on Sunday.

The early mayoral election in the capital of Moldova was held in two stages, the second of which was on June 3. According to the Central Electoral Commission, PDA leader Andrei Nastase won over 52 percent of the vote. However, on June 25, the Supreme Court of Justice declared the election invalid because there was campaigning on election day. Four days later, the Central Electoral Commission annulled the results of the vote. In response, the opposition vowed to hold protests until the results were recognized by Moldovan authorities.An international human rights watchdog on Monday called on countries due to participate in the upcoming UN meeting in Geneva to promote dialogue on new international law banning fully autonomous weapons systems, also referred to as "killer robots.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) An international human rights watchdog on Monday called on countries due to participate in the upcoming UN meeting in Geneva to promote dialogue on new international law banning fully autonomous weapons systems, also referred to as "killer robots."

The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems will meet in Geneva later in the day to discuss the challenges related to lethal autonomous weapons.

"Killer robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction. From artificially intelligent drones to automated guns that can choose their own targets, technological advances in weaponry are far outpacing international law.

We are sliding towards a future where humans could be erased from decision-making around the use of force," Rasha Abdul Rahim, the researcher and adviser on artificial intelligence and human rights at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

On August 21, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report dubbed Heed the Call: A Moral and Legal Imperative to Ban Killer Robots, arguing that fully autonomous weapons would breach the Martens Clause, which first appeared in one of the 1899 Hague Conventions.

The clause establishes a basis for protection for individuals caught up in an armed conflict in cases not covered by international agreements.The Russian side in the Russian-Turkish commission monitoring the implementation of the ceasefire regime in Syria registered 15 truce breaches over the past 24 hours, while Turkey recorded one, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) The Russian side in the Russian-Turkish commission monitoring the implementation of the ceasefire regime in Syria registered 15 truce breaches over the past 24 hours, while Turkey recorded one, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday.

"Over the last 24 hours, the Russian party of the Russia-Turkey Commission on violations of the Joint Agreement has registered 15 cases of firing in the provinces of Latakia, Idlib and Aleppo. The Turkish side has registered one case of ceasefire violations in the provinces of Aleppo," the ministry's daily bulletin read.

According to the bulletin, 242 Syrians received medical assistance over the past 24 hours.

"Over the last 24 hours the Russian Center for Reconciliation has held one humanitarian operation: in Mazlum (Deir ez-Zor province) people received 650 food kits with a total weight of 2.8 tonnes," the bulletin said.

Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, with the government forces fighting against numerous opposition groups and terrorist organizations. Russia along with Turkey and Iran are guarantors of the ceasefire regime in Syria.(@FahadShabbir)

JEDDAH, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 26th Aug, 2018 ) :Saudi Minister for information Dr. Awwad Alawwad has appreciated journalists' professional reporting during the Hajj-2018.

Addressing to a reception dinner hosted by him in honour of Islamic World's media representatives here, the minister said journalists from around the Islamic world has done a great job in telling the truth to world about arrangements made by the Kingdom.

"By successful coverage, I mean that you have shared the core messages of the pilgrimage to Makkah with the world. You have done so by highlighting the important elements of the pilgrimage. By the Grace of God, the pilgrims remained safe throughout their stay in the Kingdom", Dr. Awwad said.

The minister went on to say "today we not just celebrate media persons who dedicated their time and energy to telling the truth and in the service of the Islamic nation, but we also celebrate the successful media coverage of Hajj".

The minister informed the audience that Saudi Arabia is and will always remain proud to be able to serve the two Holy Mosques and their guests. The government works tirelessly and steadfastly to ensure that the performance of Hajj becomes a lifetime experience for an individual. The Kingdom, he said hopes that with the determination and dedication of its people and by leveraging technology, it will be able to achieve the objectives of Vision 2030.

Extending compliments to the Custodian of the Two Holly Mosques, King Suleman Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud and the Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Suleman, Dr Awwad said "Our leadership is tirelessly working to fulfil this aspiration". He said steadfast support by the two enabled the Ministry of Media to carry out its responsibilities effectively and successfully during Hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam".

He said Saudi Arabia opened its ports to receive pilgrims from every corner of the globe. It provided the guests of Allah with many valuable free services. All pilgrims were treated equally. "These Services has silenced the critics and forced them to drop any agenda to cash in on the event to derive political mileages" he said while pointing towards some forces who were engaged to politicise the hajj.

The minister further informed that by holding responsibility to transmit this great event to the world, the ministry launched 19 digital channels in six languages and published 1,000 news reports and features via the Center for Government Communication (CGC) that functions under the Ministry of Media.

"We also published 1,352 press statements issued by the Ministry. Hajj rituals were broadcast live on New Media platforms" he said adding that the Ministry supported and addressed to the needs of 151 news agencies and channels from 27 countries". He further informed that Saudi Media Ministry set up seven media centres in Makkah, Madinah, the Holy places, Jeddah and other areas.

Minister extended gratitude to the members of Arab, Islamic and international media delegations for their contribution to the overall success of the media coverage of Hajj.

It is worth mentioning here that famous Pakistani celebrity and film actor Fawad Khan, on the occasion said that he had gone through a marvellous experience of performance of Hajj. He appreciated enhanced Hajj arrangements made by the Saudi government. Fawad appreciated the efforts made by Saudi government towards synchronising Saudi Arabia with modern technology and development under the leadership of the Custodian of the Two Holly Mosques and the "young Muslim Leader" Muhammad Bin Suleman, the Crown Prince.

The grand reception was attended by a large number of visiting journalists and officials/ dignitaries from the Saudi government.

Also present on the occasion, Kristiane Verena Backer, a German television presenter, television journalist and author of famous book 'MTV to Mecca: How islam Inspired My Life' was also among the guests who performed Hajj. Sharing her experience, she said that she has witnessed the superb Hajj arrangements during the Hajj.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

A 23-year old Syrian and a 22-year old Iraqi are suspected of killing a German citizen in the Saxonian city of Chemnitz, which resulted in rallies breaking out in the city, the city authorities petitioned court for the arrest of the two suspects, the local prosecutor's office said Monday in a statement obtained by Sputnik.

BERLIN (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) A 23-year old Syrian and a 22-year old Iraqi are suspected of killing a German citizen in the Saxonian city of Chemnitz, which resulted in rallies breaking out in the city, the city authorities petitioned court for the arrest of the two suspects, the local prosecutor's office said Monday in a statement obtained by Sputnik.

Earlier in the day, German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said, regarding the impromptu far right rallies, that the Federal authorities would not accept "mob justice" or intolerance.

"Chemnitz prosecutor's office has today asked the administrative court of Chemnitch for an arrest warrant for a 23-year old Syrian citizen and a 22-year old Iraqi citizen .

.. According to the police investigation, they are suspected of inflicting several knife blows on a 35-year old German citizen without any justification after a verbal argument on August 26," the statement read.

According to the statement, both men are currently in court, while the attacked man succumbed to his injuries on the night of the incident.

The police are looking into motives and circumstances of the crime, the statement said.

Saxonian Interior Minister Roland Woeller reportedly urged people to remain calm and level-headed. Woeller added that the police was prepared for further rallies, with additional forces in place.Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will start a two-day visit to Lithuania on Monday and is expected to meet with the Baltic country's senior officials, the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry said in a statement

VILNIUS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will start a two-day visit to Lithuania on Monday and is expected to meet with the Baltic country's senior officials, the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

"Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will visit Lithuania on August 27-28. During the visit the minister will meet with [Lithuanian] Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius, President Dalia Grybauskaite, Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis and members of Seimas [Lithuania's unicameral parliament]," the statement read.

According to the statement, the sides will discuss bilateral diplomatic and economic relations, regional security, cooperation within NATO as well as the situation in Syria and the middle East.

They will also sign a renewed agreement between the Turkish and Lithuanian governments on mutual promotion and protection of investment, the statement said.

Cavusoglu is paying a return visit to the Baltic country after the visits of Linkevicius to Ankara in August 2016 and May 2018.WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 28th August, 2018) Congress needs to investigate President Donald Trump's involvement in a decision to cancel a planned move of the FBI headquarters from its present location across the street from the Trump International Hotel to a suburban campus, US Congressman Gerry Connolly said in a press release on Monday.

"I am calling on the [US House of Representatives] Oversight and Government Reform Committee to convene immediate hearings on this matter and to subpoena any GSA [General Services Administration] officials who are suspected of misleading Congress on Trump's role in the decision," Connolly said.

Connolly based his demand on a report by the GSA Inspector General (IG) - a report Connolly requested - which concluding that GSA gave Congress a low-ball estimate of an alternative plan to tear down and rebuild the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover headquarters building at its present location.

"The IG estimates that the Funding Gap Analysis GSA provided to Congress for its revised plan to rebuild on the Hoover site underestimated the cost of that option by as much as $516 million," the release quoted from the report.

Connolly said he suspected Trump was more involved in deciding the future FBI headquarters location than GSA officials indicated in sworn testimony to Congress. The GSA manages Federal government property.

"The Trump International Hotel is across the street from the J.

Edgar Hoover Building, and the Trump Organization has a longstanding and documented interest in the Hoover property," Connolly said.

The release claimed GSA Administrator Emily Murphy misled Congress by claiming in April 2017 testimony to Congress that plans for the future FBI headquarters had not been discussed with Trump, while the Inspector General report concluded otherwise.

The IG report cited a White House meeting in early 2018 in which Murphy met Trump in the oval office, along with four senior officials "to provide an update to the President regarding the FBI headquarters project."

For years, FBI officials have complained of security concerns, due in part to decaying conditions at the Hoover building.

The GSA had finalized plans prior to Trump's election to move the agency's headquarters to one of three locations in the Washington, DC suburbs, one in Connolly's home state of Virginia and two in Maryland.

Meanwhile, the Trump International Hotel is the focus of multiple lawsuits claiming that Trump is benefiting financially from foreign guests who stay at the hotel, violating a provision in the US Constitution that prohibits the president from receiving benefits from foreigners without permission of Congress.

Trump has said he will donate all hotel profits from foreign guests doing business with the US government to charity.The US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS, outlawed in Russia) terrorist group in Iraq and Syria carried out 18 strikes over the past week, Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve said in a press release on Monday.

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) The US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS, outlawed in Russia) terrorist group in Iraq and Syria carried out 18 strikes over the past week, Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve said in a press release on Monday.

"Between August 20 and August 26, Coalition military forces conducted 18 strikes consisting of 26 engagements in Iraq and Syria," the release said.

Near Syria's Al Bukamal, the coalition conducted 12 strikes, engaging IS tactical units, and destroying supply routes, IS-held building, headquarters and vehicles, the release said.

US-led troops conducted six strikes near six targets in Iraq, including Rutbah, Mosul and Jazeera Desert.

 The strikes engaged tactical units and destroyed multiple IS-held buildings, vehicles, logistics hubs and a supply route, the release said.

The coalition also disclosed two previously unreported strikes near Al Bukamal on August 18 and 19, in which US-led forces engaged a tactical unit and destroyed a supply route and one vehicle.

The US-led coalition of more than 70 countries is conducting military operations against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The coalition's operations in Iraq are conducted in cooperation with the Iraqi government, but those in Syria are not authorized by the government of President Bashar Assad or the United Nations Security Council.(@rukhshanmir)

Soldiers with the US 10th Mountain Division have completed the second iteration of training for soldiers from Somalia's Danab (Lightning) Advanced Infantry Battalion, a commando unit that protects the capital from al Shabab terrorists, the US Department of Defense said in a press release on Monday.

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th August, 2018) Soldiers with the US 10th Mountain Division have completed the second iteration of training for soldiers from Somalia's Danab (Lightning) Advanced Infantry Battalion, a commando unit that protects the capital from al Shabab terrorists, the US Department of Defense said in a press release on Monday.

"This is the second year US soldiers have provided logistics training and equipment in order to assist building the logistics network of the Somali National Army (SNA), the release said.

Danab commandos protect Mogadishu and surrounding communities from attacks by Islamist al Shabab terrorists, according to the US Africa Command (AFRICOM).

The US government provides training to the Danab battalion and donates logistical equipment, such as forklifts, tractors and fuel trucks, totaling roughly $6.5 million of heavy equipment, according to the release.The available data demonstrating that superiority of LDR brachytherapy (LDR-BT) boost in high-risk prostate cancer patients under represents patients with extracapsular extension (T3a) and/or seminal vesicle invasion (T3b) have been limited. We report long-term clinical outcomes data for patients with cT3a/b disease receiving LDR-BT.

Ninety-nine men (median age: 69.4 years) with cT3a/bN0M0 high-risk prostate adenocarcinoma received definitive LDR-BT or LDR-BT boost after external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) at a single institution between 1998 and 2007. About 86% of patients received androgen deprivation therapy. Freedom from biochemical failure (FFBF), prostate cancer-specific survival (PCSS), and overall survival (OS) was calculated using the Kaplan-Meier method with the Phoenix definition used as definition of failure. Cox regression analysis was used to compare outcomes between clinical stage, initial PSA, Gleason Score, and percent core positive rate.

With a median followup of 7 years, 7-year rate of FFBF, PCSS, and OS for the entire cohort was 65.2% (5.6%), 90.1% (3.6%), and 77.9% (4.7%), respectively. LDR-BT boost patients achieved a 7-year FFBF rate of 73.5 (6.5%). No significant difference in outcomes was present between T3a or T3b disease, Gleason score, iPSA stratification and percent core positive rates.

LDR-BT, primarily as a boost in conjunction with ADT and EBRT, is not only feasible, but also highly effective in men with cT3a and cT3b high-risk prostate cancer resulting in excellent biochemical control and survival outcomes. LDR-BT boost implantation of patients should be strongly considered for cT3 patients given the merits of trimodality care.

Brachytherapy. 2018 Aug 21 [Epub ahead of print]

Manuj Agarwal, Arpit M Chhabra, Neha Amin, Michelle H Braccioforte, Jason K Molitoris, Brian J Moran

Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD. Electronic address: ., Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore, MD., Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD., Prostate Cancer Foundation of Chicago, Westmont, IL.

PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30143400Pope Francis has just completed his 24th apostolic visit outside Italy, which took him to Ireland, August 25-26. We bring you glimpses of this 2-day visit.

Pope Francis visited Ireland this weekend on the occasion of the Catholic Churchs 9th World Meeting of Families (WMOF) which took place in Dublin, August 21-26. He also flew west to County Mayo on day 2 to visit the national Marian Shrine of Knock.

The theme of the WMOF was on , The Gospel of the Family: Joy for the World. The highlights of the 5-day event was the Festival of Families Saturday evening at Croke Park Stadium and the concluding Holy Mass on Sunday at Phoenix Park.

The Holy Father also condemned the abuse of children and adults by members of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and met and listened to 8 of the abuse victims.Pope Francis says good-bye to Ireland at the conclusion of his Apostolic Journey (AFP or licensors)

The curtain has come down on this World Meeting of Families in Dublin and the baton has now been passed to the city of Rome. Lydia O'Kane shares her final thoughts on the Apostolic Journey to Ireland.

Pope Francis came to Ireland for this the World Meeting of Families to pray for the families of the world - and in Knock he did just that, and his silent prayer in the Chapel of Apparition said more than a thousand words.

Testimonies of Faith



Who could forget the thrilling evening in Croke Park where families really did proclaim the Joy of the Gospel through their testimonies, talents and faith.

A Papal Visit in all its facets



But this was a visit which also focused on the pain and suffering as a result of the sexual abuse crisis that has rocked the Catholic Church here. The Pope in his words at Dublin Castle, at Knock, and again at the closing Mass in the Phoenix Park asked for forgiveness for these sins, as he called them.

Many people here are hoping that this Papal journey will pave the way for a spiritual renewal in this land; but they also know it will take time.

That hope, however, is also to be found in the families of Ireland and the world, who shone a light on the faith during this meeting and are passing that Joy of the Gospel on to the next generation.Pope Francis shares his thoughts about his Apostolic Journey as he speaks with reporters during the flight back to Rome on Sunday evening.

By Vatican News

I have found so much faith in Ireland, Pope Francis said at the end of his two-day visit to the land of Saints and Scholars. The Irish have suffered so much from the scandals, but they know how to distinguish the truth from half-truths, he said, reciting the words spoken to him by an unnamed Bishop a few hours earlier. And even if the healing process is ongoing, the faith of the Irish people remains solid.

"I won't say a word"



Although the Pope had gone to Ireland to celebrate the World Meeting of Families, the subject of abuse cast a pallor over his visit. In particular, reporters were waiting to hear Pope Francis respond to allegations made by a former Apostolic Nuncio (papal ambassador) to the United States. In a document published overnight Saturday, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano questioned the Holy Fathers response to accusations against Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, forced to resign his cardinalate over credible and substantiated allegations of sexual abuse of a minor. Further accusations against McCarrick have subsequently been made known.

Pope Francis spoke bluntly about Archbishop Viganos charges: I say this sincerely: Read it attentively and make your own judgment. I will not say a word about this. I believe the document speaks for itself.

Judging Bishops case by case



Instead, the Pope spoke on a number of other delicate and complex topics, including how to try a Bishop accused of abuse. Gently rejecting the wish of Marie Collins  a former member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors  the Pope said that a standing court such as the one called for in the motu proprioCome una madre amorevole is not the best option. Rather, Bishops might be tried by an ad hoc tribunal on a case by case basis. It functions better that way, the Pope affirmed, noting the trial of the Archbishop of Guam had been handled in this manner. He also indicated another trial was proceeding along the same lines.

Speak out immediately!



Asked about how the People of God can and should respond to evils perpetrated by priests, Pope Francis urged families to believe their children. When you see something, he said, you must speak out immediately."

On the other hand, he also criticized irresponsible media outlets for judging people before the facts can be ascertained. He called to mind a case in Granada where a group of priests had been accused of pedophilia by a student who had written to the Pope. The humiliation the priests suffered proved to be a cruel injustice, because they were later found to be innocent. The Holy Father admitted that the work of journalists is delicatethey must say something, but, he insisted, always with the presumption of innocence and not with the presumption of guilt."

Listen to our report

Pray, and dont condemn



Pope Francis had high praise for the Irish minister who spoke about the tragic case of orphanages run by Irish nuns in Tuamthe subject of an investigation by the authorities into abuses that occurred over many decades. The Holy Father urged caution, until the investigation could be completed, and the responsibility of the Church could be determined. Whatever the outcome of the inquiry, the Pope expressed his appreciation for the fairness and the dignity with which the governments representative briefed him on the matter.

Another journalist asked asked Pope Francis what advice he would give to a father whose child revealed that he or she was homosexual. The Holy Father said he would encourage a parent to pray, to not condemn, to dialogue, to make room for their son or daughterbecause to ignore them or cast them aside would mean something was missing from their parenthood.

A strong, deeply-rooted faith



The Irish people have a deeply-rooted and strong faith, Pope Francis said, wrapping up his reflection. I say that because thats what I saw, that's what I heard, that's what Ive come to understand over these two days.Indonesian president Joko Widodo at the opening of the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta on Agusut 18, 2018. (AFP or licensors)

President Joko Widodo paid a visit to the headquarters of the Bishops Conference of Indonesia in Jakarta on August 24 to update himself on the Church's local situation.

Indonesia president is appealing to the nations Catholics to help preserve the nations diversity and unity. Joko Widodo paid his first visit as president to the headquarters of the country's Bishops Conference of Indonesia (KWI) in Jakarta on Friday to improve ties with the local church and to stress the need for religious institutions to preserve and maintain diversity within the nation.

Widodo, who came to power in 2014, was welcomed by KWI president Archbishop Ignatius Suharyo of Jakarta, secretary-general, Bishop Antonius Subianto Bunjamin of Bandung and 8 other bishops.

During the meeting that lasted more than an hour, each bishop brief the president on issues affecting their dioceses.

Pancasila



"In the meeting, I talked about issues related to the Pancasila [the 5 principles on which state is based) as well as diversity especially in terms of religion, ethnicity, customs and traditions that we must continue to maintain," Widodo later told reporters.

"We must maintain our brotherhood, harmony and unity," he said.

Archbishop Suharyo told UCANEWS that president Widodos visit was "to build friendship" and had "nothing to do with the presidential election," next year.

Elections next year





General elections in Indonesia are scheduled for April 17, 2019, and for the first time the president as well as members of the Peoples Consultative Assembly will be election on the same day.

Widodo is confident of securing a second term in office.

Archbishop Suharyo said, "There was no specific issue raised by the president during the meeting. He just wanted to hear directly from Catholics [about problems they are facing]."

According to him, the visit was Widodo's first as president. He had visited the conference's headquarters twice while he was Jakarta's governor from 2012 until 2014.

Archbishop Suharyo also revealed that Widodo wanted to visit the Vatican.

"If it really happens, then the noble values the Indonesian people live by will be recognized by the international community," he said, referring to diversity and secularism enshrined in the constitution.

Bishop Leo Laba Ladjar of Jayapura said the president stressed the need to maintain diversity "because religious identity has become a big issue particularly ahead of the presidential election."

Radicalism



The world's largest archipelagic state with a myriad of ethnic groups, religions, languages and flora and fauna, Indonesia is also home to the world's largest Muslim population. The nation has long been an example of peaceful harmony, tolerance and unity among its people, thanks to the Pancasila.

The vast majority of Indonesian Muslims are moderates, but the nations image as a tolerant nation has been undermined by Islamic radicalism and intolerance in the past several years, threatening its unity amidst its diversity.

In his address to the nation on the occasion of the Indonesias Independence Day August 17, Widodo urged all to embrace its founding spirit of tolerance. Those who fought for independence, he said, have triumphed because they rejected political, ethnic, religious or class differences.

On August 18, the day after Independence Day. Widodo inaugurated the 18th Asian Games that is being staged in Jakarta and Palembang until September 2. Indonesias bishops have backed the continents premier sporting event as an occasion to build peace among people. (Source: UCANEWS)

Influence, The Pool at The LINQ is the ultimate Las Vegas destination for a fantastic voyage on Labor Day Weekend with headliners Tori Brixx and Coolio. Brixx will perform as the headlining DJ Saturday, Sept. 1, while Coolio will take the stage Sunday, Sept. 2.

The adults-only pool, which offers free admission to guests 21 and older, features a backyard party atmosphere ideal for celebrating the holiday weekend.

Tori Brixx (Sept. 1)

As a model, actress, beauty and fashion influencer, and social media star, Tori Brixx boasts three million followers on Instagram alone. As a female DJ in a male-dominated industry, Brixx has worked closely with Amber Rose, with whom she signed in 2016. Brixxs musical styling combines upbeat tracks with old school jams and even EDM, satisfying the taste of every fan. She returns to Influence after performing to a packed house over Memorial Day weekend earlier this year.

Coolio (Sept. 2)

Coolio initially took over the world rap scene through his release of Gangstas Paradise, which won a GRAMMY in 1996 for Best Rap Performance, Solo and was nominated for Song of the Year. Gangstas Paradise would also be featured on the Dangerous Minds soundtrack and movie. It sold over six million copies and was Billboard Magazines number one single in 1995. The world recognition led to his music being featured in several major motion pictures, including Space Jam, Clueless, The Big Payback, Panther, New Jersey Drive, The Jerk Boys, Eddie, Half Baked and many more. He also composed the theme song for the popular TV series Kenan and Kel on Nickelodeon.

Influence is the only adult-only pool on the Las Vegas Strip that offers free entry for all guests 21 years of age or older every day of the week. Influence provides a cooling escape with spectacular views of the High Roller observation wheel and The LINQ Promenade. This center-strip destination features a center bar lined with plasma televisions and a full array of signature cocktails, draught beer, frozen drinks and more.

Twenty-four cabana rooms line the pool, offering an exclusive patio area connecting the room directly to the pool deck. The patio area includes a plasma television, sectional seating and umbrellas for shade. As a cabana room guest, wake-up calls are available from the cabana staff where guests can have menu items delivered directly to them at a specified time. Ten cabanas are available for rent which include a personal electronic safe, plasma TV, USB port for phone/music player, reserved chaise lounges and a refrigerator. The main pool boasts a wet deck with 25 poolside daybeds available for rent, while the second pool is accessed from a standalone elevated deck with daybeds also available for rent. Daybeds include a personal umbrella and a handy compartment to keep clothing and shoes dry.

Panchos Mexican Restaurant, located in Downtown Summerlin, will celebrate Mexican Independence Day with happy hour offerings and half-priced tequila shots on Sunday, Sept. 16 (Pictured: Panchos Tequila Shot  Photo credit: Chris Wessling).

The half-priced tequila shots, which will be available from 3 p.m. until close, includes the signature Panchos Barrel Select Reposado tequila as well as over 35 brands of tequila.

Panchos will also offer happy hour, available exclusively in the cantina from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. Happy hour offerings include discounted select appetizers such as Panchos nachos, toasted corn tostaditas layered with beans, covered with cheddar and jack cheeses and topped with diced tomatoes, jalapenos, chives, sour cream and guacamole; mariscos en crema de limon, shrimp and scallops sauteed in a lemon cream sauce, garnished with poblano peppers and served with tostadita chips; and drink discounts, including $3 off house and flavored margaritas, $3 off well cocktails and $3 off house wines.It has other names such as Neethi, Peetam, Arisanam and Kanjani and it is generally a fragrant, it removes gastric disturbances, strengthens liver, and proves to be an antiseptic. Pure turmeric can be ground with water and it can be used while bathing, so that it removes bad odor and also cures issues of phlegm. Research findings prove that using turmeric in our food items is one of the major reasons of our previous generations not contracted with infectious diseases and other chronic diseases when compared to the medical records of the Western world.The Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Monday postponed a hearing in a case against four Cambodian human rights workers and a former election official charged with bribery offences.

Adhoc officials Ny Sokha, Yi Soksan, Nay Vanda, Lim Mony and Ny Chakrya, all staff members at local rights group Adhoc, and Ny Chakrya, also a former Adhoc staffer and member of the National Election Committee, were charged with bribery offences after it was alleged they coerced a witness in a case against the former opposition leader Kem Sokha.

The group was accused of paying Khom Chandaraty, a hairdresser who was alleged to have had an affair with Sokha.

Sam Sokong, a lawyer for Chakrya, and lawyers for the other four defendants requested the proceedings be delayed so more witnesses could be called, including Chandaraty. Sokha and Mony reportedly did not receive a notification to appear at the hearing.

Presiding Judge Duch Sarin, after deliberating for one hour, decided to allow the postponement.

On Sunday, five international advocacy groups, including Human Rights Watch, called for the politically motivated case to be dropped for lack of evidence.

Am Sam Ath, monitoring manager at Cambodian rights group Licadho, said it was unclear how the Cambodian judiciary thought the case could have proceeded in the absence of several key witnesses.

If there is an absence of important witnesses, the trial is not comprehensive, he said. There will be no debate, just a verdict.

The ADHOC 5 case has drawn widespread international condemnation. In April 2017, the group was also nominated as one of three finalists for the prestigious Martin Ennals Award, known as the Nobel Prize for human rights defenders.A senior U.S. statesman with ties to Vietnam has died. Indonesia jails a Chinese woman on blasphemy charges. Improved cooking for Rohingya refugees. Intervention for a hungry refugee in Australia. Remnants of a U.S.-Japanese battle, and building online political support.Greyhound has had the property  mostly at 901 N. Halsted St., but also including land across the street at 904 N. Halsted  up for sale since January 2017. In March, Crains Chicago Business reported that Onni Group wanted to buy the property, demolish the existing structure and build as many as 1,000 apartments on the site.For decades, India has seen a one-way migration from the countryside into towns for jobs as farmers battle water shortages, degraded soils, low crop prices and the effects of climate change. But reversing the tide, some people are returning to family farms hoping to introduce modern techniques to address these challenges and boost agricultural incomes. Anjana Pasricha met some of the new age farmers at a center run in collaboration with the Indian and Israeli governments.Young people are returning to farms in South Sudan to empower themselves through food production. The country has been devastated by five years of conflict, which has left the agricultural sector struggling to feed the nation. Faith Lapidus reports on a vocational center teaching the new farmers skills to help them fill that need.Taiwan and the United States are showing signs of growing a solid relationship that goes beyond U.S. President Donald Trumps widely suspected use of Taipei as a bargaining chip in his administrations talks with China, analysts say.

The analysts say Trump is looking to Taiwan as part of a broader Pacific Rim political alliance, while officials and members of the U.S. Congress see Taiwan as an antidote to an ever-mightier China.

I dont think it is completely fair to say that Trump is using Taiwan as a pawn, said Yun Sun, East Asia Program senior associate at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.

The support and sympathy for Taiwan is very strong here in the U.S.," she said. "This is partly due to the politics, but also is the result of Chinas bullying behaviors. It does help to broaden and strengthen the support base for Taiwan in the U.S.

Trend of improving relations

Two arms-related deals, a congressional bill that calls for more senior-level Taipei-Washington visits and a string of comments from the United States in support of Taiwans foreign diplomacy this year have raised fears that Trump is using ties with Taipei just to get concessions out of China.

Two days after Taiwan cut ties Aug. 21 with El Salvador, the U.S. State Department expressed grave concern and warned the Central American country against taking economic incentives from China.

In another sign of closer Taipei-Washington relations, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen made two unusually visible stops in the United States earlier this month over protests from Beijing. She gave a speech August 13 in Los Angeles. In Houston she became the first Taiwan president since the 1970s to visit federal property.

China sees self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory, not as a country, and resents major powers such as the United States for interacting with it. China and Taiwan have been separately ruled since the Chinese civil war of the 1940s.

Move to check China

Since Tsai took office in 2016, Beijing has flown military aircraft near Taiwan at least a dozen times and, officials in Taipei say, persuaded five countries to drop Taiwan as an ally. Tsai rejects Beijings condition for dialogue, that both sides talk as parts of the same country.

The US doesnt seek a stalemate in cross-Strait relations; it seeks positive improvement, and would not oppose better relations, according to Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the American think tank Center for International and Strategic Studies.

Washington has long advocated stability between China and Taiwan rather than one side provoking the other.

U.S. policy makers arent seeking ways to use Taiwan to increase leverage over China, Glaser said. In response to stepped up military, political and economic pressure by Beijing on Taiwan, the Trump administration is signaling support for the maintenance of the cross-Strait status quo and for Taiwans security.

Stronger Asia-Pacific alliance

Trump may see Taiwan as part of an Asia Pacific alliance that would resist China, said Lin Chong-pin, a retired strategic studies professor in Taiwan.

Hes also trying to unite the allies in the East Asian Pacific region to form a united front against China and to add pressure on China, Lin said. Not only Japan, Australia and India, but Taiwan is also one them along with South Korea in forming a united front against China. Thats the intention.

Washington stepped up military cooperation last year with Australia, India and Japan to keep the South China Sea open to international traffic. Beijing claims about 90 percent of that waterway.

Risk of use as a bargaining chip

Trump may see Taiwan as a card to play against China in getting what he wants from Sino-U.S. relations, said Alex Chiang, an international relations professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei. If the ruling Republican Party loses seats in mid-term elections this year, he added, the president may change his China policy and relations with Taiwan might slip.

I think Trump is mainly thinking about the U.S. interests, and he is using Taiwan as a bargaining chip, Chiang said. I dont know whether he will be able to continue to play (the) Taiwan card, because someday very soon there will not be any kind of benefit he can derive.

But Taiwan foreign minister Joseph Wu is unworried that his island will become a bargaining chip in U.S. talks with China, the ministry quoted him saying last week.

Officials in Taipei should compile a list of what they want from the United States so they can achieve those goals, said Raymond Wu, managing director of Taipei-based political risk consultancy e-telligence.

If we have a very clear idea about what Taiwans interest is, then I dont think Taiwan will become someone elses pawn, Wu said. We need to have some type of internal consensus.Ancient periods of cold and dry climate helped our species replace Neanderthals in Europe, a study suggests.

Researchers found that such cold periods coincided with an apparent disappearance of our evolutionary cousins in different parts of the continent, and the appearance of our species, Homo sapiens.

"Whether they moved or died out, we can't tell," said Michael Staubwasser of the University of Cologne in Germany.

Neanderthals once lived in Europe and Asia but died out about 40,000 years ago, just a few thousand years after our species, Homo sapiens, arrived in Europe. Scientists have long debated what happened, and some have blamed the change in climate. Other proposed explanations have included epidemics and the idea that the newcomers edged out the Neanderthals for resources.

Staubwasser and colleagues reported their findings Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They drew on existing climate, archaeological and ecological data and added new indicators of ancient climate from studies of two caves in Romania.

Their study highlighted two cold and dry periods. One began about 44,000 years ago and lasted about 1,000 years. The other began about 40,800 years ago and lasted six centuries. The timing of those events matches the periods when artifacts from Neanderthals disappear and signs of H. sapiens appear in sites within the Danube River valley and in France, they noted.

The climate shifts would have replaced forest with shrub-filled grassland, and H. sapiens may have been better adapted to that new environment than the Neanderthals were, so they could move in after Neanderthals disappeared, the researchers wrote.

Katerina Harvati, a Neanderthal expert at the University of Tuebingen in Germany who wasn't involved in the study, said it's helpful to have the new climate data from southeastern Europe, a region that H. sapiens is thought to have used to spread through the continent.

But she said it's unclear whether Neanderthals disappeared and H. sapiens appeared at the times the authors indicate, because the studies they cite rely on limited evidence and are sometimes open to dispute.

Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London said he thought the paper made a good case for an impact of the climate shifts on Neanderthals, although he believes other factors were also at work in their disappearance.

Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution called the study "a refreshing new look" at the species replacement.

"As has been said before, our species didn't outsmart the Neanderthals," Potts said in an email. "We simply outsurvived them. The new paper offers much to contemplate about how it occurred."A coalition of secular and leftist Egyptian groups on Monday slammed the arrests of opposition figures and called for the release of all such prisoners not convicted of violent offenses.

Masoum Marzouk, a former ambassador, and six other activists were arrested on Thursday and detained for 15 days pending investigation on charges of joining a terrorist group and receiving funds for terrorism. He had recently called for a referendum on President Abdel Fattah el-Sissis rule, in rare public criticism of the former general.

The Civil Democratic Movement (CDM) said in a statement read out by its spokesman, Yehia Hussain, at a news conference that the group rejects such police tactics in dealing with political opponents.

The recent campaign of arrests ... is part of a systematic policy followed by the regime to silence any voice that opposes its oppressive policies that are hostile to freedoms, the statement said.

The statement said such policies were a cover-up for its economic and social failures by constantly claiming that there are conspiracies that are being woven in the dark against the country.

Egyptian authorities have jailed thousands of opponents in recent years, most of them suspected Islamists, but some secular activists and journalists. The government has said its actions are directed at terrorists and saboteurs trying to undermine the state.

Sissi was elected president in 2014, a year after the military, led by him, ousted Egypt's first freely elected civilian president Mohamed Morsi following mass protests against his rule.

The CDM, founded in December, includes eight secular and left-leaning parties and 150 prominent activists and political figures. It called for a boycott of the presidential election in March after all major opposition campaigns withdrew on the grounds of intimidation.

Former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi, a member of the movement who ran in the 2012 and 2014 elections, called the government a failed regime.

This regime must be changed, he said. This authority is a failure. This authority is repressive ... an authority of corruption, tyranny and repression is an oppressive regime, he told the news conference.

Fareed Zahran, head of the Egyptian Democratic Social Party, said the target of the call for regime change was not Sissi, but rules and regulations that shackle freedoms.Ethiopia's state broadcaster ETV says the government has arrested the former president of the Somali region.

The dismissal and arrest of Abdi Mohammed Omar, a well-known politician from the country's eastern area, came after the Somali region's capital, Jigjiga, and other towns experienced unrest in recent weeks in which ethnic Somalis, suspected to be connected to Abdi, attacked people from other ethnic backgrounds.

Television images showed Abdi being led out of his villa in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. The state broadcaster reported five Kalashnikovs and four pistols were discovered inside Abdi's house.

On Saturday, Ethiopia's Prime Minster Abiy Ahmed told reporters measures will be taken against former officials of the Somali region, including Abdi, who is suspected of orchestrating the chaos in the region earlier this month.Ethiopia has ousted state-run Metals and Engineering Corporation (METEC) from a $4 billion dam project on the River Nile due to numerous delays in completing the project.

The Grand Renaissance Dam is the centerpiece of Ethiopia's bid to become Africa's biggest power exporter.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said at the weekend that the government had cancelled the contract of METEC, which is run by Ethiopia's military, and would award it to another company.

Italian firm Salini Impregilo remains the main contractor building the dam, while METEC was the contractor for the electromechanical and hydraulic steel structure divisions of the project.



The government has touted the 6,000-megawatt dam project, which is 60 percent finished, as a symbol of its economic reforms.



"It is a project that was supposed to be completed within five years, but seven or eight years later not a single turbine is operational," Abiy said during a news conference in Addis Ababa on Saturday.

"Salini has even demanded compensation because of the delays. We decided to cancel a contract with METEC and offer companies with experience. Otherwise, it will take even longer," he said.

Abiy has presided over a series of reforms since coming to power in April, releasing political prisoners, relaxing state control of the economy and dramatically improving relations with Ethiopia's neighbor Eritrea.

The government had previously said the dam would be completed within two years, but recently Abiy said it may face a lengthy delay.

An official at METEC, who did not wish to be named, said the company first heard of the cancellation on Saturday.

"Even now our workers are on the site," the official said.A boat carrying asylum seekers from Vietnam has arrived in Australia, the first such landing in four years.

Authorities say the vessel landed on Queensland Sunday near the Daintree Rainforest, north of the popular tourist city Cairns. Queensland Police Minister Mark Ryan says about 15 of the asylum seekers have been discovered and detained since the landing.

In 2014, Australia implemented a tough immigration policy that bars any asylum seeker who tries to arrive by boat from reaching its shores. The asylum seekers are either turned back or sent to remote camps on the tiny Pacific nations of Papua New Guinea or Nauru, and are not allowed to resettle in Australia.North Korea says it will expel a Japanese tourist it had detained earlier this month.

The regime's official Korean Central News Agency identified the tourist as Tomoyuki Sugimoto in a short statement Monday. It said authorities "decided to leniently condone him and expel him" from North Korea "on the principle of humanitarianism."

Japanese news outlets have previously identified Sugimoto as a videographer visiting the North on a tour arranged by a foreign travel agency.

The Japanese government recently confirmed Sugimoto may have been suspected of shooting video of a military facility while touring the western port city of Nampo.

North Korea said Sugimoto was "kept under control" for questioning into "his crime against the law of the DPRK," without specifying his offense. The DPRK is the official acronym for North Korea.Senator John McCain, who died Saturday after a yearlong battle with brain cancer, will be honored at ceremonies in Arizona and Washington.

McCain will first lie in state at the Arizona State Capitol, where a private ceremony will be held on Wednesday, which would have been McCains 82nd birthday. Members of the public will be able to pay their respects at the State Capitol.

On Thursday, a private memorial service will take place at the North Phoenix Baptist Church.

In Washington, D.C., McCain will lie in state at the United States Capitol on Friday. The public will be invited to pay their respects.

McCain will become the 13th senator to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, an honor reserved for the nations most eminent citizens, according to the Architect of the Capitol.

A memorial service in Washington will be held at the Washington National Cathedral on Saturday. Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush are expected to speak at the service.

McCains office said a livestream will be available for the services at the National Phoenix Baptist Church and the National Cathedral.

McCain will be buried at the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland. His grave site will overlook the Severn River, and will be next his best friend from his Naval Academy days, Admiral Chuck Larson.

Remembrances, condolences pour in

The Vietnam War hero, Senator, and 2008 Republican presidential candidate was remembered for his courage, patriotism and service by fellow Americans and foreign dignitaries.

President Donald Trump tweeted Saturday, My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!

His campaign later issued a statement offering condolences and urging all Americans to take the opportunity to remember Senator McCain and his family in their prayers on this sad occasion. The White House lowered the flag to half-staff in honor of McCain.

Former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama issued a statement sending their heartfelt condolences to McCains wife, Cindy and their family.

Obama, who ran against the Republican senator from the western state of Arizona in the 2008 presidential election and defeated him, noted how despite their different generations, backgrounds and politics, we saw this country as a place where anything is possible.

Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who served with McCain in the U.S. Senate, said in a statement that he frequently put partisanship aside to do what he thought was best for the country and was never afraid to break the mold if it was the right thing to do.

Former President George W. Bush called McCain a friend, he will deeply miss.

Some lives are so vivid, its difficult to imagine them ended, Bush said in a statement. Some voices are so vibrant, its hard to think of them stilled.

Bushs father, former President George H.W. Bush, called McCain a patriot of the highest order, a public servant of rarest courage.

Few sacrificed more for, or contributed more to, the welfare of his fellow citizens  and indeed freedom-loving peoples around the world, the elder Bush said in a statement.

Former President Jimmy Carter called McCain "a man of honor, a true patriot in the best sense of the word."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Vietnam POW showed us that boundless patriotism and self-sacrifice are not outdated concepts or cliches, but the building blocks of an extraordinary life.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said the McCains death marks a sad day for the United States, which has lost a decorated war hero and statesman.

John put principle before politics. He put country before self, Ryan said. He was one of the most courageous men of the century.

Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said the nation is in tears and noted McCains deep patriotism, outstanding bravery and undaunted spirit.

He never forgot the great duty he felt to care for our nations heroes, dedicating his spirit and energy to ensuring that no man or woman in uniform was left behind on the battlefield or once they returned home, Pelosi said in a statement.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called McCain a tireless fighter for a strong trans-Atlantic alliance; his significance went well beyond his own country. French President Emmanuel Macron called McCain a true American hero.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani called the U.S. lawmaker a great friend of the South Asian country.

"We will remember his dedication and support towards rebuilding AFG," Ghani tweeted.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also offered condolences.

"People of India join me in sincerely condoling the loss of a steadfast friend," Modi tweeted. "His statesmanship, courage, conviction and understanding of global affairs will be missed."

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called McCain "an American patriot and hero whose sacrifices for his country, and lifetime of public service, were an inspiration to millions."I think this is going to be a game-changer for men and women in Illinois who face life saving but fertility-threatening cancer treatments, said Teresa Woodruff, director of the Oncofertility Consortium at Northwestern University, which has spent years pushing for such a measure.Editor's note: Because of an editing error, part of VOA's interview with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta was omitted from the interview's publication on Aug. 27. That section, on Kenyatta's legacy, has been restored below.

WASHINGTON  Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta says his meeting Monday with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House will focus on trade and security issues.

In a wide-ranging interview Sunday evening at the Hay-Adams hotel near the White House, Kenyatta told VOA's English to Africa service that he believes his own country can attain domestic peace and security, after several election cycles marred by violence and disputes about the results. He also addressed efforts to bring stability to South Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia.

The following is an edited transcript of his remarks.

VOA: "Let's talk about your meeting with President Donald Trump on Monday. This is a first for an East African president. He has just met a handful presidents from Africa. What are the talks going to be centered on?"



Kenyatta: "Well, the talks will largely be centered on our security cooperation, but more importantly on how to boost our trade and investment. Given the fact that the United States is one of our biggest trading partners, we have had a long, solid foundation of partnership that stretches back all the way back to our independence [in 1963], and I think our objective is to see how we can strengthen that, how we can deepen that for the mutual benefit of our two countries.

"... We want to see how we can encourage more American investment into Kenya, to take advantage of the reforms that we have made, especially over the last four years, but also the infrastructural development that has been put in place. And we want Americans to come and take advantage of these activities, encourage more companies to come in, to take advantage not just of the reforms and the infrastructure development, but also Kenyas location."

VOA: "Of course, a good climate for investment is key, and Im wondering about your handshake with your former opponent, Raila Odinga. Is this [peace] going to hold? Because what we saw before when there was no peace, no bridges being built, there was a lot of chaos, a lot of violence, and that put away a lot of investors and lack of confidence in that."



Kenyatta: "Indeed I am, because I am committed, and I believe that my partner in this endeavor, Raila Odinga, is also equally committed. With the recognition that politics is just about opposing ideas, its not about anonymity. We all, after all, belong to one nation, one country, Kenya. We are all one people and it is not in the interest of any one of us to allow political differences to cause a disintegration of our country.

"And therefore, the onus is on us to really say that how can we ensure we create a political environment that encourages strong political discourse, that encourages positive criticism, that encourages political competition, but not at the expense of the unity of the country. So we are committed to seeing how we can work together, especially to ensure that we unite our people, so that ideas give way. I mean, individuals give way to ideas and create an environment where we have stability and predictability in our political life, so that we move away from this issue of five year cycles, where every five years the whole country grinds to a halt as they wait to see what outcome it has.

"Because what happens in that situation? First and foremost, you lose a year prior to the election. We have economic slowdown, you have people saying, Let's wait and see. Then you have the following year, where the government starts to set up again and start a whole new process. So basically every 10 years you almost lose two, two and a half years because of political uncertainty.

"We want to create political certainty. We want people to understand that governments will always come and go, but Kenya will remain. And that policies may change, but stability will always be there."

VOA: I'm wondering, Mr. President, this is your second and last term as President of Kenya. How do you want your legacy to be written?

Kenyatta: I want my legacy to be one of bringing our nation and our people together. A nation that will have confidence in its institutions, a nation that will have left corruption and issues of nepotism and other things that have been a destructive element to our country. I wish to be able to leave Kenya on a foundation that is better and irreversible and we're Kenyans and the international community can have confidence not in the individual who leads but the institutions that we shall create.

South Sudan

VOA: "We've seen South Sudan ink deals about peace in that country which never took place. Now they just inked another deal. Do you feel confident that this time around there will be peace in South Sudan and that President Salva Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar, will hold the country together?



Kenyatta: "It is impossible for me to say that I believe it will or it will not. But what I can say is that we are committed to working together with our regional brothers and sisters to ensure that peace and stability returns to South Sudan. And we will try anything that will achieve that, because for most of us in the region our greatest concern is not about the leadership of the country but to ensure that the people of South Sudan  who have had to endure untold suffering for many years, after struggling to achieve their independence  are able to achieve the fruits that they struggled for.

"... We will try everything and we must therefore put hope and faith and continue to put pressure on the leadership of South Sudan from all sides, that it is their ultimate responsibility to ensure they come together and find a framework that works to restore peace and stability and ultimately human dignity to the people of South Sudan."



Ethiopia

VOA: We have a new prime minister in Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, and he has made quite some sweeping changes in the country trying to bring the country together, opening democratic space in that country, reaching out to a long-time enemy, Eritrea. Youve met with Prime Minister Abiy. What does he expect from regional leaders like you?



Kenyatta: I think what he expects is our support and I have committed to give Kenyas total support. I believe that he has a vision for his country and he has a vision for the region as well. And I intend to work very closely with him to establish that.

"We are very happy with the situation as we see it ... the rapprochement of power between Ethiopia and Eritrea. All this works for peace in our region. All this works for stability in our region and for us to be able as a region to focus not on insecurity or wars but rather to focus on economic growth and prosperity of our people.

"... I look forward to working together with Abiy as a partner to be able to achieve that objective. I wish him well. I continue to say I am strongly in support of what he's doing together with his other colleagues in Ethiopia to help achieve this dream for us all.



Somalia

VOA: With regards to Somalia, you had to deal with Al-Shabab militants having attacked Kenya, decimating people, creating a lot of chaos. And there have been some calls within the Kenyan legislature asking that you pull out of Somalia. Is that something that is likely to happen? How is that war against terrorism especially looking at those militants going on?



Kenyatta: ... We all are hopeful that we all shall be able to pull out of Somalia in the shortest possible time. That we will be able to work together with the federal government of Somalia to be able to strengthen them, that they are able to take care of the security concerns within their own country, and so that we can pull back to our borders and reduce the costs that we are currently bearing and be able to focus that on other more productive areas.

"So until we're in such a situation, it is impossible for us to say when the withdrawal date shall be. The withdrawal date is based on us being able to defeat al-Shabab, on the Somali people being able to establish strong, solid security structures, a national army and good administrative structures that will then ensure that they are capable of handling their own affairs.

"I think that should be the focus, as opposed to when people withdraw, because we can't say we're going to withdraw and leave a vacuum. There must be something to replace that vacuum and a withdrawal date should be tied toward a scenario where the people of Somalia have themselves been able to establish and to take care of the security concerns in their country as well as the administrative foundations that they shall need to build a strong and stable Somalia.Lt. Daren Diviak is daily reminded of the violence of the streets as he passes a memorial dedicated to colleagues who lost their lives in the line of duty. He works for the Operation Safe Streets Bureau of the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department, which patrols the streets of South Los Angeles and nearby cities like Compton, where dozens of streets gangs fight for turf.

We just had a murder over here last week, said Diviak as he pointed from his patrol car, where a guy was shot and killed. They chased him down and shot him. A young girl was grazed but survived.

Diviak has driven these streets for decades and can identify the graffiti scrawled on fences and buildings that rival factions use to mark their turf, their names taken from streets and neighborhoods  Bounty Hunter Bloods, Swamps Crips, Fruit Town Piru, Tree Top Piru. Policing here may involve calming family members who are involved in an argument, or responding to a shooting.

Once the sun goes down, Diviak said, residents are prisoners in their own home. They stay indoors, they dont go to the stores. When people hear gunshots, he said, they stay away from the windows.

The FBI estimates that more than 30,000 gangs in the United States claim more than one million members, figures that include street, prison and outlaw motorcycle gangs.

U.S. officials say that in Los Angeles and Chicago, gangs are responsible for at least half of the murders, and 13 percent of killings nationwide. Many gangs have ties to international cartels. Police say drug money and guns fuel the ongoing violence.

Diviak is on the front lines of the battle against the gangs, but his approach to the problem contrasts with the remedy recommended by President Donald Trump, who has embraced a hardline approach to deal with the problem.

Trump has focused on the threat from the trans-national gang MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, which began in Los Angeles in the 1980s and was transplanted to El Salvador by gang members deported from the United States. The gang is known for torture and brutal killings, and Trump has said that stepped-up enforcement of U.S. immigration law will curb its activities.

But in California, where an estimated 10 million immigrants live, police in Los Angeles largely take a different view. They say that immigration enforcement is not their job and only complicates the challenge of law enforcement.

Following a roundup of MS-13 members in Los Angeles in May of last year, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said the arrest had nothing to do with their immigration status. This has to do with their criminal status.He added that many of the witnesses that made the arrests possible had immigration issues of their own.

Los Angeles county has 150,000 street gang members, said the Sheriffs Departments Daren Diviak. He said when a victim reports a crime, 'Someone just broke into my car someone just shot at the house, theyre victims' and officers help without questioning their status.

Violent international gangs like the Barrio 18, MS-13, the Crips and Bloods all began in Los Angeles.

Law enforcement says the problem is multi-generational and pervasive, affecting the inner city and increasingly suburbs, small towns and rural areas. The toll is greatest, however, in the two major urban areas that vie for the title of the nations gang capital, Los Angeles and Chicago.U.S. Senator John McCain's career-long impact on U.S. foreign affairs was recognized Monday in tributes from across Asia and the Middle East, including tributes from national leaders and calls for a street to be named after him in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.

"We offer our condolences to the family and friends of Senator John McCain who was a great friend of AFG (Afghanistan). Senator McCain served his country honorably in uniform and his service in the Senate is truly exemplary," wrote Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Twitter. McCain advocated for more troops and resources for Afghanistan in its fight against militants.

Afghanistan's Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah also expressed condolences on McCain's death on his Twitter page.

Condolence messages poured in from neighboring Pakistan, a country McCain visited several times.

Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said the thoughts and prayers of the people of Pakistan are with the family and friends of Senator McCain. "As Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator McCain always stood for strong Pakistan-US relations and a cooperative approach for promoting peace and building stability in the region."

He will be greatly missed in Pakistan, Qureshi added. Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa also conveyed his condolences to McCain's family.

Most surprising, perhaps, were calls for McCain to be honored in Vietnam, the country where he was held as a prisoner of war for more than five years after being shot down on a bombing raid in 1967. Years later, he played a key role in the reconciliation process that helped end decades of enmity after the Vietnam War.

"From an enemy to a friend, and frankly a benefactor," wrote Bui Hoang Tam on the Facebook page of VOA's Vietnamese Service. "Rising above hatred, forgetting rancor, doing favors, he deserves to have a street named after him in Hanoi. I  citizen Bui Hoang Tam  would like to request Hanoi to have a street that bears Mr. McCain's name."

At least two other readers posted similar demands that a Vietnamese street be named for the senator.

In Bangladesh, from where McCain adopted his daughter Bridget in 1993, the country's foreign minister said he was deeply saddened by McCain's passing and called the senator a great friend of Bangladesh.

"Late Senator McCain, who was a real American hero and a tall leader in the public service of the nation, was always a strong voice for global humanity, which was reflected in his many commendable works in the Senate including in recent times his firm stand against the atrocities on the Rohingyas in Myanmar, and for holding the perpetrators accountable," said Bangladesh's Foreign Minister Abul Hassan Mohmood Ali.



In Iraq, the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government called McCain's passing a "a tremendous loss for the people of Kurdistan."



"He was a true friend and a staunch advocate of the rights of the Kurdistan people. He did his best, at every opportunity, to defend and protect the basic rights of the people of Kurdistan," said Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani.A special United Nations investigative panel has accused Myanmar's military of carrying out numerous atrocities during last year's crackdown against the Rohingya Muslims "with genocidal intent" and is calling for an international probe and prosecution of its top generals.

In a scathing report issued Monday from the U.N.'s offices in Geneva, the investigative panel said General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of Myanmar's army, and five other generals, should be tried for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The panel urged the U.N. Security Council to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court, or by creating an ad hoc, or special, tribunal to investigate the matter.

The panel, sanctioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council, based its report on interviews with hundreds of the 700,000 Rohingya refugees forced to flee across the border from their home in northern Rakhine state into Bangladesh after the military launched an offensive in response to a series of attacks by Rohingya militants on security outposts. The witnesses revealed numerous atrocities including gang rapes, the torching of entire villages and extrajudicial killings.

The report concluded the military's actions were "grossly disproportionate to actual security threats."

The investigators also denounced Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's de facto leader, for failing to use her position and "her moral authority" to stop the Rohingya crisis from occurring. Aung San Suu Kyi is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate for her decades-long struggle against Myanmar's former military regime, but her reputation has been damaged internationally for failing to speak out in support of the Rohingya.

The U.N. and the United States have long described Myanmar's military actions in Rakhine State as "textbook example" of ethnic cleansing.

The government has yet to comment on the U.N. panel's findings. It has consistently denied the allegations of ethnic cleansing or other atrocities by its military.New U.S. sanctions against Russia over a nerve agent attack in Britain come into effect Monday.

The Kremlin said it would review the sanctions in full before considering a possible response, but it would act in Russia's best interests.

The Russian Foreign Ministry says the new sanctions will only make dialogue more difficult, Reuters reported.

The sanctions would terminate some financial assistance and arms sales to Russia, as well as deny the country credit and prohibit the export of security-sensitive goods and technology.

U.S. officials accuse the Kremlin of violating international law, saying the Russian government was behind the poisoning in Britain of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his daughter Yulia. Both were hospitalized and treated for a nerve-agent attack.

The White House is mandated to impose sanctions under a 1991 U.S. law on any country deemed to be responsible for a chemical or biological weapons attack. A second set of penalties, harsher than those in first round, will follow, according to the law, if Russia fails to agree within 90 days to cease all use of chemical weapons and allows inspectors to confirm their elimination.

The Kremlin has denied vehemently any involvement in the poisoning of the Skripals, and analysts say Russian President Vladimir Putin is highly unlikely to grant international inspectors access to suspected chemical weapons sites.

Monday's sanctions follow a decision earlier this year by the Trump administration to expel 60 Russian diplomats and close a consulate in Seattle, following the Skripal's poisoning.

Last week, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton said he warned his Russian counterpart not to interfere in the U.S. mid-term elections in November, saying the United States is "prepared to take necessary steps to prevent it from happening."Pope Francis has refused to confirm or deny the contents of a bombshell letter by the former Vatican ambassador to the United States, Carlo Maria Vigano. In the letter given to Catholic media outlets, the now-retired archbishop accused the pope of covering up for the sexual misconduct of a U.S. cardinal and urged him to set a good example and resign.



The Pope's weekend visit to Ireland was dominated by the issue of clerical sexual abuse right up to the end on his return flight to Rome when journalists asked him to comment on Vigano's letter.



The 11-page document, given on Sunday to Catholic media outlets as the pontiff was on his second day in Ireland, accused Pope Francis of having known for years about the allegations of sexual misconduct by U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. After credible evidence of abuse of a 16-year-old emerged, Pope Francis last month accepted McCarrick's resignation, the first of its kind by a cardinal.

Vigano wrote "in this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick's abuses and resign along with all of them."



Vigano, who was ambassador to the United States from 2011 to 2016, said he told Pope Francis about the accusations against McCarrick in June 2013.

A U.S. journalist on the papal plane returning to Rome from Ireland asked the pope to comment on the letter.



Pope Francis said he had read the document and asked the journalists to do the same. He asked them to read the letter and judge for themselves. He said he would not say one word on the contents. He added that he thought the statement spoke for itself. He told those on the papal plane he believed they had sufficient journalistic capacity to be able to reach their own conclusions.



Vigano also named the current Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who succeeded McCarrick, of having received information about McCarrick from the Vatican. Wuerl's spokesman flatly denied this.



During a mass Sunday in Ireland, Pope Francis asked for forgiveness for the "scandal and betrayal" felt by the victims of clerical sexual abuse as protesters expressed anger at the church's handling of the abuse scandals.

The pope also privately met with a group of abuse survivors during his visit.Qatar will expand two air bases including Udeid, which hosts the largest U.S. military facility in the Middle East, a senior military official said on Monday amid a year-long dispute between the tiny Gulf Arab state and its neighbors.

The development will help accommodate new aircrafts and systems introduced to the air force service including French Rafale fighter jets, American F-15 fighter jets and Eurofighter Typhoon jets, Deputy Commander of the Amiri Air Force Major-General (Pilot) Ahmed Ibrahim Al Malki said in comments published by the official state news agency QNA.

The other development will take place at Doha Air Base. Malki did not provide details about the projects' expected cost or timeframe.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut diplomatic, trade and transport ties with Qatar in June 2017, accusing it of supporting terrorism. Doha denies that charge and says the boycott is an attempt to impinge on its sovereignty.

Doha has used the wealth it has accumulated as the world's biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas to defy some of the largest and wealthiest Arab countries. It has repeatedly called for dialogue with its neighbors, although it has strengthened its military as relations with them have deteriorated.

Last December, Qatar entered into a 5 billion pound ($6.38 billion) contract with British defence group BAE Systems for the purchase of 24 Typhoon combat aircraft and a $6.2 billion deal with Boeing Co for 36 F-15 aircraft. It also agreed to buy 12 additional Dassault Aviation-made Rafale fighters with an option for 36 more.

The Gulf dispute has eluded mediation efforts by the United States, which has military bases in both Qatar and some of the countries lined up against it  including Udeid, from which U.S.-led coalition aircraft stage sorties against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Nonetheless, Qatari forces participated in joint military exercises in Saudi Arabia in April in an apparent sign of some compromise between the adversaries.

U.S. President Donald Trump publicly sided with the Saudis and Emiratis early in the crisis but then began pushing for a resolution to restore Gulf unity and maintain a united front against Iran.Europe's centrists have seen themselves squeezed by populists from right and left but an even bigger challenge is forming, say analysts. Eurosceptic, nationalistic, anti-establishment parties from opposite ends of the political spectrum are starting to collaborate and to echo each other even more in their denunciations of liberal elites, NATO, globalization and Muslim refugees.

In Germany, far-right populists have been applauding a new leftist movement called Aufstehen, meaning Stand Up.

Founded by Sahra Wagenknecht, a lawmaker and author, who's also a co-chair of Die Linke, a socialist party which merged with former east German Communists, Aufstehen presents a leftist case for limiting migration and aims to stem the defection of provincial voters to the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which is now the main opposition party in the German parliament.

Stand Up's manifesto is set to be published next month, but its founding principle is to rally traditional working-class voters who've been alienated by the lifestyle' libertarian politics pursued by the establishment left represented by the Social Democrats, currently a junior partner in Angela Merkel's coalition government, and Wagenknecht's Die Linke.

More than 700,000 Social Democratic Party (SPD) voters defected to the far-right at last year's elections. Die Linke lost nearly half-a-million voters to AfD and the Greens 330,000.

Exit polling suggests that AfD's opposition to migration was the key element in propelling it into the Bundestag, marking a startling new phase in the party's progress from the fringe of German politics closer to the center of power in Berlin.

Wagenknecht wants Aufstehen to become a leftwing alternative to AfD and is arguing for strict limits to be placed on refugees on the grounds they are forcing down the wages of German workers. She has forcefully criticized Merkel's open-border policies, as does the far-right.

"This is about courage to overcome the neoliberal mainstream, about a social policy in the interest of the majority," Wagenknecht told Nachdenkenseiten.de, an online news portal. "The globalization steered by corporations, the disintegration of the welfare state, an endless string of new wars  this not a force of nature. There are alternatives to it and we want to give people back the hope that politics can be changed," she said.

Such comments have met with the approval of far-right figures, including AfD leader Alexander Gauland, who has applauded her anti-migration stance and shares her pro-Russian sentiments. He has offered to cooperate with Wagenknecht in a red-brown' alliance to campaign, among other things, on workers' rights, and in state parliaments, if they have sufficient seats following regional elections next year to form coalition governments.

Both Garland and Wagenknecht cast doubt on allegations of Kremlin involvement in the poisoning earlier this year in Britain of a former Russian spy and his daughter. The poisoning prompted collective Western expulsions of Russian diplomats and this month the imposition of more U.S. sanctions on Russia.

Jurgen Elsasser, editor of Compact, a monthly political magazine aligned with the AfD, regularly praises Wagenknecht, arguing the traditional left has lost touch with its anti-capitalist roots, something he believes Wagenknecht understands.

In a recent article he urged Wagenknecht and her husband, Oskar Lafontaine, a former German finance minister, to transform Stand Up into an electoral party.



"The AfD would then finally have a coalition partner who would be more reliable than the old parties," he wrote recently, likening such a prospect to the coalition government in Italy between the far-right Lega and the anti-establishment Movimento Cinque Stelle.

France's venerable leftwing daily newspaper Liberation has condemned Stand Up. As have German Social Democrats, who fear Stand Up echoes and amplifies AfD rhetoric, rather than helping to combat it. "The muse of the radical left is leaning towards the extreme right when it comes to migrants," the paper warned, saying that her "tirades flirt regularly with the rhetoric of the AfD."

But it isn't only in Germany and Italy that politics are mutating and throwing up strange opportunistic collaborations and alignments  much as was seen in the 1930s in Europe when populist left and right at times would rub shoulders in their mutual opposition to liberals and social democrats, eroding in the process the center ground of politics.

Wagenknecht says the inspiration for Stand Up was La France Insoumise, or Insubordinate France, the populist leftist movement founded by Jean-Luc Melenchon, a candidate in France's last presidential elections. He garnered 19 percent of the vote in the final run-off.

Melenchon, the 65-year-old former senator and former junior Socialist minister, is also Russia-friendly, a critic of NATO who wants France to withdraw from EU treaties. He has targeted foreign newcomers, declaring that he's "never been in favor of freedom of arrival" and disapproves of migrants "stealing the bread" of French workers.

The faces of the more authoritarian far-left and far-right are merging on the key issues of immigration, the EU and Russia, as the different ends of the political spectrum seek to capitalize on the rage animating European voters.

A report last year on the future of Europe by Britain's Chatham House noted "there is a pronounced divide between more liberal and authoritarian-minded groups, particularly on issues of identity. This divide plays a much stronger role than other measures, such as economic status or experience of social hardship, in shaping attitudes." It added: "The political challenges resulting from this divide are likely to persist for many years."Fifty years ago this month, the then-Soviet Union shocked the world by invading its supposed communist ally, Czechoslovakia. But, back in Moscow, the Soviet invasion also prompted a protest at home that would become a seminal moment in now Russia's human rights and pro-democracy movement. From Moscow, Charles Maynes reports.Monday's planned announcement of a verdict in the trial of two Reuters journalists detained in Myanmar for violating the country's secrecy laws has been postponed until next week.

A replacement judge announced at the start of the hearing that presiding judge Ye Win could not attend because of illness. He said the verdict will be handed down in exactly one week, on September 3.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested last December after meeting with two police officers at a restaurant in Yangon and given a stack of documents. They have been charged with violating the Official Secrets Act, which was enacted in 1923, when Myanmar was called Burma and was under British colonial rule.

Wa Lone told reporters after Monday's hearing that he and Kyaw Soe Oo were not afraid of the decision because "the truth is on our side...we didn't do anything wrong."

The pair were covering the brutal military campaign in Rakhine state that has driven nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims across the border into Bangladesh since last August. They were focused on the massacre of 10 Rohingya by police and soldiers in the village of Inn Din.

The military and the civilian government have prohibited most journalists and international observers from traveling independently to the area. They have denied the accusations made by the United Nations and United States of ethnic cleansing, but have sentenced seven soldiers in connection with the murders in Inn Din.

The two Reuters journalists face sentences of 14 years in prison if they are convicted. The case is seen as a test of press freedom and freedom of expression in Myanmar, which embraced democracy in 2016 after decades under repressive military rule.This time, the deadline may be real, given a congressional requirement for 90 days notice of an impending trade deal. If the administration doesn't formally notify Congress that it has reached agreement with both Canada and Mexico by the end of August, Pena Nieto, the outgoing Mexican president, will not be able to sign it.Afghanistan's government says that the Russia has indefinitely postponed a meeting on the Afghan peace process planned for next week.

A statement released Monday by the office of the Afghan presidency said that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani have decided to postpone the meeting and hold it at another date.



President Ghani insists the peace talks should be "Afghan owned and led," according to the statement.



Lavrov said Russia agrees the peace process should be under the auspices of the Afghans and it is "ready to cooperate," the statement added.While condolences and remembrances pour in for the late Senator John McCain in the United States, he is also being remembered overseas, including in the nation where he was a prisoner of war for five years.



McCain, who died Saturday at the age of 81, was shot down flying a bombing mission in Vietnam in 1967, but is known more in that country for what he did in mending ties and normalizing relations with the United States in recent years.

Flowers have been left at a monument near where his plane went down, and a book of condolences at the U.S. embassy in Hanoi allows residents to pay their respects.

Vietnam war veteran Pham Minh Chuc credited McCain with building a lasting peace.



"I admired him, that he understood what was right and what was wrong, to be alongside Vietnamese people to overcome the past and build a better future for the two countries," he said. "With his help, I believe there will not be any war between Vietnam and U.S. from now on."

In Ukraine, President Petro Poroshenko told of an episode in which he and McCain visited Ukrainian marines who were under fire. Poroshenko said McCain was upset when it was suggested he stay back.



"When I proposed to him to visit and congratulate Ukrainian marines in Shirokino, he postponed his trip to Georgia, saying his place is here, in Ukraine," Poroshenko recalled. "Ten kilometers before we arrived to Shirokino, my presidential security service told me that marines were shelled by the enemy. I told him, "You are an American Senator, you do not have to be there. Me, as the President, I have to be with my soldiers. This was the first time when John was upset by me for even for thinking that I could suggest to him to do that."



Sunday, during a state visit to Lithuania, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised McCain as a friend to Israel.

McCain will become the 13th senator to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, and former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush are to speak at his funeral service.Afghan officials say airplanes from neighboring Tajikistan bombed and killed six drug traffickers on the Afghan side of the border, after a clash killed two Tajik border guards.



Officials from Takhar province in northern Afghanistan said smugglers, along with the Taliban, are active in a small forest near a river in Darqad district on the border of the two countries.

A Takhar governor's spokesman, Jawad Hijri, said a clash broke out between the Taliban and the smugglers Sunday and expanded to involve the Tajik border guards. After two guards were killed in the fighting, Tajik forces carried out heavy artillery shelling followed by the aerial bombardment.

According to local media reports, some officials said the jets could be Tajik or Russian.

According to Reuters, Russian and Tajik officials have denied bombing in Takhar.

The news agency also quoted Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid saying the clash was between drug smugglers and Tajik border security.

Taliban fighters have no permission to clash with neighboring countries, Mujahid told Reuters.

Border clashes between Afghanistan and its Central Asian neighbors are rare. But security in Takhar has deteriorated in recent months.

Earlier this year, the Taliban seized a district center in Takhar and held it for a few hours. Afghan security forces recaptured it after heavy fighting.



The tension and complexity of Mozambiques upcoming municipal elections  which may signal a major political shift in the Southern African nation  can be seen by looking at the polls highest-profile contest: the mayoral race in the capital.

Last week, the electoral commission kicked the two top candidates for mayor of Maputo off the ballot. They include the top candidate for the opposition Renamo Party, Venancio Mondlane, and the man who many thought would be a natural choice for the ruling party, Samora Machel Jr.

Machel is a son of Samora Machel, Mozambiques first president and co-founder of the powerful Frelimo Party, which has ruled the nation since 1975.



But to many people's surprise, Frelimo passed over Machel Jr. for the mayor post. He is now trying to run as an independent  if the electoral commission allows him on the ballot. That could set up an intrafamily conflict, as Machels father-in-law, former tourism minister Fernando Sumbana, made the ruling party shortlist for the mayoral race.

Mozambique's Constitutional Court has the power to put both Mondlane and Machel Jr. back on the ballot. But journalist and commentator Fernando Lima says he has doubts it will be resolved in their favor.

Having our legal bodies being strongly controlled by the political powers, I have very strong doubts that the constitutional council will rule in favor of the Renamo candidate and Samora Machel, Jr.," he told VOA.

Nervousness ahead of 2019 polls

Alex Vines, head of the Africa Program for think tank Chatham House, said the October 10 local polls, which encompass 53 municipalities, could set the stage for contentious national elections in 2019.

Ahead of the polls, parliament has introduced fees starting at $2,500 for foreign journalists seeking to report in Mozambique. Journalists and rights groups have condemned the proposed fees, saying they amount to censorship.

In addition, we can already see that there are some splits within Frelimo in the runup to the municipal elections, Vines said. Look at Samora Machel Jr., for example, contending for being mayor of Maputo, that against the official Frelimo candidate. So, this is interesting political times in Mozambique, for sure.

The elections, Vines believes, are going to be extremely close, "and therefore, the authorities are nervous about this, he said.

But this is no mere political contest, said journalist and commentator Fernando Lima. Renamo fought Frelimo in a brutal 16-year civil war. Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama resumed hostilities in 2014. Dhlakama died suddenly in May, as he was negotiating a peace deal with the government.



We cannot forget that along with the election process, we have the peace process, which has not been concluded yet, Lima said. "Renamo still have their armed forces in position, and if you do not manage politically the whole electoral process, yes, you can have a lot of trouble, especially coming from the Renamo side.Tributes and remembrances of the life of Senator John McCain continued Monday, as the U.S. prepares for a week of commemorations in three cities.

The 81-year-old McCain, who died Saturday after a lengthy battle with brain cancer, will first lie in state in the Capitol of his home state of Arizona in Phoenix on Wednesday. Two days later, he will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, where he made his legislative mark as an outspoken, maverick Republican senator for 32 years.

After a memorial service Saturday at the Washington National Cathedral, with eulogies from former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, McCain will be buried Sunday at his college alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

World leaders and McCain's former colleagues in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, have shared their favorite memories of McCain, and extolled his status as a senior statesman on the world stage. They have remembered his military service as a naval aviator, especially his valor in enduring beatings and torture during 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war at the hands of North Vietnamese captors at the height of the Vietnam War in the 1960s.



WATCH: John McCain Obit

But U.S. President Donald Trump, who frequently engaged in political taunts with McCain and three years ago said McCain was only deemed a hero because he was captured as a POW, was criticized after his initial reactions to McCain's death only expressed condolences to his family and didn't mention his military service or political career.

The White House, according to a Washington Post report Monday, prepared a statement extolling McCain's life and calling him a hero, but Trump rejected issuing it.

Flags at the White House were lowered to half-staff over the weekend in McCain's honor, but back at full-staff on Monday. Trump ignored reporters' repeated questions about McCain at White House gatherings on Monday, but late Monday afternoon the flags were lowered again to half-staff.

At the same time, the White House released a statement from the president in which Trump said that, despite differences on policy and politics, he respects McCain's service to the U.S. and ordered flags be flown at half-staff until his internment.

The statement also said Trump asked Vice President Mike Pence to offer an address at a ceremony honoring McCain on Friday, and that three cabinet members represent the Trump administration at services for McCain later this week.

As he prepared for the end of his life, McCain said he did not want Trump at his funeral, instead favoring attendance by Pence, with whom he served in Congress.

McCain, even as he neared death, disparaged Trump's presidency, rebuking the U.S. leader for his seeming embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin's position at last month's Helsinki summit that Russia had not meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump, when he returned to Washington, altered his stance, but almost daily assails the investigation into the election interference.

The damage inflicted by President Trump's naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate," McCain said at the time. "But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake."

Previously, the White House posted tributes from numerous Trump officials praising McCain, who as the Republican nominee, lost the 2008 presidential election to Obama. The tributes singled out McCain's military service and heroism as a POW and his independence as a political leader.

All five living former U.S. presidents issued statements praising McCain.

Outside the United States, world leaders lauded McCain's role and presence abroad.

John McCain was a true American hero," said French President Emmanuel Macron. "He devoted his entire life to his country. His voice will be missed. Our respectful thoughts go to his beloved ones."

British Prime Minister Theresa May said McCain "embodied the idea of service over self."

McCain for years has promoted closer ties between Vietnam, which imprisoned him, and the United States.

On Monday, Vietnam Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh wrote in a condolence book at the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, "It was he who took the lead in significantly healing the wounds of war, and normalizing and promoting the comprehensive Vietnam-U.S. partnership."

A monument to McCain on the shores of the Hanoi lake where was he was captured after his plane was shot down in 1967 has turned into a de facto shrine to him as news of his death reached Vietnam. Flowers, incense, flags and other tributes to McCain have been laid there.President Donald Trump on Monday welcomed the president of Kenya to the White House, where the two leaders talked about trade, security  and Trumps accomplishments.

Trump hosted President Uhuru Kenyatta as Kenya is emerging from a period of election turmoil. Hes the second African leader to meet with Trump at the White House, following a visit by Nigerias president earlier this year.

Trump has been criticized for paying too little attention to the continent and faced demands for an apology earlier this year after his private comments about shithole countries in Africa and other regions were leaked to journalists.

U.S. first lady Melania Trump, who helped welcome Kenyatta and his wife to the White House, is planning a solo trip to Africa this fall.

Trump and Kenyatta, during remarks to reporters in the Oval Office and Cabinet room, said they would be discussing a series of topics, including cooperation on terrorism and building trade and investment ties.

Later, Trump trumpeted a preliminary trade deal with Mexico hed announced earlier in the day as well as recent stock market gains.

WATCH: Kenyatta interview

Well, you were here on a very special day, Trump told Kenyatta, adding: Everything I said is going to happen, it ends up happening, so you picked a good day to come. Were in a very good mood.

Kenyatta said he hoped Trump would share the wealth with his country.

We'll bring that over to Kenya, Trump joked.

Trump did not respond to repeated questions about Sen. John McCain, who died Saturday at 81 after a 13-month struggle with brain cancer. Trump tweeted condolences to McCain's family but has made no reference to the Arizona senator, with whom he had a bitter feud.

Kenyatta has been trying to bolster his image following a crisis in which Kenyas Supreme Court overturned the August presidential election, citing irregularities, and the opposition boycotted the fresh vote.

Kenya is the third highest recipient of U.S. security aid in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Security Assistance Monitor. Both Kenya and the U.S. have troops in Somalia, and the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group has crossed the border to carry out dozens of attacks inside Kenya, calling it retribution for sending troops. Nearly 100 Kenyan police officers have been killed since May 2017 in bombings and ambushes.

The Kenyan leader is also meeting with U.S. business leaders to promote investment in his country while in Washington. Hell host British Prime Minister Theresa May in Nairobi, Kenyas capital, on Thursday.Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu is defending the government's crackdown Saturday on a vigil by mothers protesting the forced disappearances and political murders of loved ones during the 1980s and 1990s.

We wanted to put an end to this abuse [and deceptive use of motherhood], Soylu said Monday as he went on to accuse the demonstrators of supporting terrorism. Representatives for the women condemned Soylu's remarks at a press conference and vowed to continue their campaign.

Saturday was the 700th time the women known as the Saturday Mothers had gathered to call attention to the disappearances that began after a 1980 military coup and subsequent conflict between the government and the outlawed Kurdish separatist group, the PKK. Turkey considers the PKK a terrorist organization. Local authorities allege that calls for Saturday's rally were made on social media accounts linked to the PKK.

Thousands of people had been expected at Saturday's protest  one of worlds longest civil disobedience demonstrations; however, riot police, backed by armored cars, swiftly moved in before it could start.

Police occupied the square on a street in the heart of Istanbul, where, for nearly two decades, the Saturday Mothers have silently gathered, holding pictures of missing loved ones. Forty-seven people were detained. Some were women in their 70s and 80s. Some were restrained as police swept the street, arresting supporters and using tear gas to disperse the protesters. Local officials said the protest violated public order.

Human rights activists criticized the crackdown.

This is a shameful and horrifying way to treat people who are participating in a totally peaceful gathering calling for accountability," said Emma Sinclair Webb, senior Turkey researcher with U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.

Argentinas Plaza de Mayo mothers are said to have inspired the weekly Saturday Mothers protests.

Those mothers in Argentina campaigned to find out what happened to children who disappeared during that country's 1976 to 1983 military dictatorship - a period known as the "Dirty War." The Turkish campaign started in 1995 at the height of the war between the Turkish state and the PKK, which is waging an insurgency in southeastern Turkey.

According to the Ankara-based Human Rights Association, between 1992 and 1996, nearly 800 state-forced disappearances and murders have been reported in Kurdish regions in Turkey, with many more missing persons remaining unreported.



Among those protesting were mothers whose sons disappeared during the military rule of the 1980s. However, most of those taking part in the weekly vigils had relatives disappear in the 1990s, during what human rights groups claim was a dirty war by security forces against Kurdish insurgents.



"Nihat Aydogan, my husband, was taken from our home in the village of Mardin. He has been gone for 24 years, said Halime Aydogan, wearing a white headscarf to symbolize mourning.

There are thousands of people like me who come here for their disappeared ones, she added. We dont come here for anything else but asking for their bones. Even a single bone means that we can have a grave and we can go there on Fridays, on religious days, and do our prayer for them. We dont ask much.

The Saturday Mothers are also demanding that those responsible for the disappearances be held to account. A number of court cases have been opened against currently serving and former military officers. However, only one conviction has been secured, while other cases have ended in acquittals or are bogged down in legal bureaucracy, human rights lawyers said.

Tayyup Canan, whose father was taken by security forces in 1996, regularly travels across the country to attend the weekly protest. "The reason we are sitting in is for no one else to disappear, Canan said.

My father disappeared, but no one elses father, brother, mother, lover or child should be a victim of enforced disappearances, he added. Today, they prevented us from sitting, but we will be back there next Saturday. I think they [government] got scared. ...The reason they are afraid of them is that these mothers ask for justice.

When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was prime minister, he embraced the Saturday Mothers protests. In 2011, amid widespread publicity, Erdogan met with a delegation of the mothers. A parliamentary human rights commission was set up at Erdogans behest.

The commission did cast light on one of the most high-profile cases  that of Cemil Kirbayir  and confirmed he was tortured to death, days after the 1980 military coup. Since there has been little progress, the future of the Saturday Mothers protests is in question.

Opposition parties have sharply criticized the crackdown on the Saturday Mothers. "The lack of tolerance to this gathering is unacceptable. It is utterly heartless, said Sezgin Tanrikulu, deputy leader of the main opposition CHP, who attended the Saturday protest

"I was the lawyer for many families who suffered enforced disappearances, he added. I know very well that pain. This is never-ending mourning with no condolences. The mourning is not possible to end without finding the bones of the missing. The peoples search continues. This square is such a place for the families.

For 15 years, I came and sat here. We dont harm anybody, Halime Aydogan said. We are just sitting by ourselves under rain and in the cold in winter, in 40-degree heat in summer. We are not here for anything else but for looking for our disappeared ones. We say, our husbands, brothers, sisters, our sons are missing. We are looking for them.

WATCH: Vigil interrupted

Turkey's Erdogan says will bring safety and peace to Syria, Iraq

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan vowed on Sunday to bring peace and safety to Iraq and areas in Syria not under Turkish control and said terrorist organizations in those areas would be eliminated.

Turkey, which has backed some rebel groups in Syria, has been working with Russia, which supports Syrian President Bashar al Assad, and Iran for a political resolution to the crisis.

It has so far carried out two cross-border operations along its border with Syria and set up a dozen military observations posts in the northern Syrian region of Idlib.

The rebel-held Idlib enclave is a refuge for civilians and rebels displaced from other areas of Syria as well as for powerful jihadist forces, but has been hit by a wave of air strikes and shelling this month.

The attacks posed a possible prelude to a full-scale Syrian government offensive, which Turkey has said would be disastrous.

Speaking in the southeastern province of Mus to commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of Manzikert of 1071, Erdogan vowed to bring peace and safety to Syria and Iraq.

It is not for nothing that the only places in Syria where security and peace have been established are under Turkeys control. God willing, we will establish the same peace in other parts of Syria too. God willing, we will bring the same peace to Iraq, where terrorist organizations are active, he said.

Erdogan also linked regional conflicts and an ongoing currency crisis in Turkey, which he has cast as an economic war, to previous attempts to invade Anatolia, warning that the this would lead to the collapse of surrounding regions.

Those who seek temporary reasons behind the troubles we have been facing recently are wrong, very wrong. The attacks we face today... are rooted in history, he said.

Dont forget, Anatolia is a wall and if this wall collapses, there will no longer be a Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Balkans or Caucasus.

Turkeys lira has tumbled nearly 40 percent this year as investor concerns over Erdogans grip on monetary policy and a growing dispute with the United States put pressure on the currency.

Ankara has accused Washington of targeting Turkey over the fate of Andrew Brunson, an American pastor being tried in Turkey on terrorism charges that he denies.

Some careless people among us think this is about Tayyip Erdogan or the AK Party. No, this is about Turkey, Erdogan said.A Ugandan judge granted bail on Monday to 12 opposition politicians, including popular songwriter Robert Kyagulanyi, who have been charged with treason over their alleged role in the stoning of President Yoweri Musevenis convoy this month.

Kyagulanyi, who only entered parliament last year, has been left unable to stand after being beaten while in detention, his lawyer told Reuters last week, citing relatives who visited him.

The Ugandan government says the assault accusation is "rubbish". The detention of Kyagulanyi and other politicians critical of Museveni sparked two days of anti-government demonstrations in the capital Kampala and other parts of Uganda last week. The 12 deny the charges against them.

"The 12 applicants have been granted bail. I will set further conditions on their bail later," High Court Judge Stephen Mubiru said at a televised court hearing.

Bail was set for each applicant at 5 million Ugandan shillings ($1,340), payable if they fail to show up again in court.

Mubiru ordered the 12 accused to reappear in a lower court on August 30 for a mention of their cases, but also rejected a request from prosecutors to confiscate their passports.

Kyagulanyi, a popular musician, has composed songs whose biting criticism of Museveni's government have won him a large youth following.

Protesters and opposition supporters accuse Museveni, in power since 1986, of stifling dissent through intimidation, beatings and detentions, charges which his government denies.

Last October, when parliament was debating whether to remove a constitutional age limit that would have barred Museveni  now aged 74 - from seeking re-election in 2021, security forces and protesters clashed on the streets and two protesters died.

The presidential age limit has since been removed.

($1 = 3,731.2600 Ugandan shillings)A Ugandan pop star-turned-opposition lawmaker charged with treason has been freed on bail.

Robert Kyagulanyi, also known by his stage name Bobi Wine, was released from custody Monday by a judge in the town of Gulu.

Kyagulanyi was arrested two weeks ago along with four other lawmakers in connection with an incident involving an attack on President Yoweri Museveni's motorcade in the northwestern town of Arua.

Protesters allegedly pelted Museveni's motorcade with stones while he was campaigning during a local parliamentary by-election. Kyagulanyi was in the region campaigning for an opposition candidate.

After the attack on the presidential motorcade, Kyagulanyi's driver was shot dead as police fired live rounds to disperse crowds.

Kyagulanyi was arrested and initially charged by a military court on a charge of illegal weapons possession. The court dropped the charges against him during a hearing last Thursday, but he was immediately arrested by civilian police and charged with treason.

Kyugulanyi appeared to be injured during his bail hearing Monday. The government has denied allegations made by his lawyers that he has been tortured during his detention.

Thirty-three other people arrested the same day have also been charged with treason.

The 36-year-old Kyagulanyi has been a vocal critic of the 74-year-old President Museveni, who has been in power since 1986. The younger lawmaker has opposed a bill passed in July that removed the presidential age limit of 75, allowing Museveni to run in the next general election in 2021.Governments and corporations are increasingly using legal persecution to portray indigenous activists as criminals and terrorists, putting them at heightened risk of violence, the United Nations said Monday.

Indigenous leaders and campaigners fighting to protect land from development are being stymied and silenced by rising militarization, national security acts and anti-terrorism laws, according to a report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Globally, up to 2.5 billion people live on indigenous and community lands, which make up more than half of all land worldwide, but they legally own just 10 percent, according to rights groups.

The U.N. report cited a "drastic increase" in violence against indigenous people actively opposing large-scale projects such as mining, infrastructure, hydroelectric dams and logging.

"It's a new war," said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, who authored the report.

"It's getting worse because many of the remaining resources in the world are found in indigenous territories," Tauli-Corpuz told Reuters.

This month, an indigenous leader was murdered in Brazil, part of a battle over logging in the Amazon.

In Guatemala, seven indigenous members of farmers' organizations advocating for land rights and political participation were killed, it said.

Last year, more than 200 activists were killed, the highest since 2002, according British campaign group Global Witness.

"In the worst instances, escalating militarization, compounded by historical marginalization, results in indigenous peoples being targeted under national security acts and antiterrorism legislation, putting them in the line of fire, at times literally, by the army and the police," it said.

No global numbers

Governments and corporations are using legal means to designate indigenous people as trespassers subject to eviction, while arrests are made on vague charges or uncorroborated witness testimony, followed by long periods of pretrial detention.

Criminal charges have been filed against activists, showing prosecutors and judges colluding with companies and landowners in some cases, it said.

In Ethiopia, indigenous land rights defenders have been prosecuted and imprisoned under antiterrorist legislation, it said.

There are no tallies of criminal charges filed against indigenous peoples worldwide, but Tauli-Corpuz cited recent upticks in the Philippines, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Kenya, Mexico and Peru.

"What disarticulates a community? Arresting its leaders, criminalizing the leaders," said Dinaman Tuxa, executive coordinator of Brazil's Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples known as Apib, an umbrella group of advocacy groups.A U.N. fact-finding mission is calling for Myanmars senior leaders to be referred to the International Criminal Court to be investigated and prosecuted for genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority in northern Rakhine state and, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Kachin and Shan states.



This 400-page groundbreaking report goes into detail about the scope and viciousness of the atrocities it says were committed by Myanmars high command against the countrys ethnic minorities. The report accuses the generals of perpetrating what it calls the gravest crimes under international law.



The three-member Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar says the genocidal crimes, which forced the mass exodus of more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh one year ago, were planned years in advance.



In an unprecedented move, the U.N. mission has named the six top generals it says bear the main responsibility for planning and executing these crimes. Investigator Christopher Sidoti said the mission has gathered sufficient evidence of the elements of the crime of genocide to recommend they be investigated and prosecuted before an international tribunal.

WATCH: UN report



In Myanmar, there is a very clear chain of command and there is no doubt in our minds whatsoever that what we saw happen in Rakhine as a whole would not have happened without it firstly being within the knowledge of the senior military leadership and secondly under their effective control. And, it is because of the clarity of the chain of command in Myanmar that we have recommended the investigation and prosecution of these six.



The report finds the civilian authorities have little power to control the actions of the military; however, it blames them for enabling these crimes by ignoring the atrocities being committed. It also criticizes Aung San Suu Kyi - the human rights activist-turned-politician - as head of the government, for not using her moral authority to prevent the events unfolding in Rakhine state.



The government refused to grant the mission access to majority Buddhist Myanmar. So, the mission gathered evidence from the testimony of 875 victims and eyewitnesses, satellite imagery, documents, photographs and videos.



The mission sent an advance copy of its report to the Myanmar government. So far, there has been no response.The United States and Mexico have reached a trade agreement, leaving Canada as the odd man out in efforts to revise or replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), according to U.S. President Donald Trump.

The new deal will be called the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement, Trump said Monday.

Well get rid of the name NAFTA, it has a bad connotation because the United States was hurt very badly by NAFTA for many years, Trump said.

Its a big day for trade, its a big day for our country, Trump said with reporters present, who were called to the Oval Office to watch as Trump spoke on the telephone with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.

The Mexican leader expressed hope to renew, modernize and update NAFTA while Trumps rhetoric indicated he sees that 24-year-old three-nation deal as dead.

Well have a formal news conference in the not-too-distant future, about the trade pact, Trump said to Pena Nieto.

This is something very positive for the United States and Mexico, Pena Nieto replied, saying he is looking forward to toasting Trump with tequila to celebrate, expressing to his American counterpart that he is really grateful and greatly recognize and acknowledge your political will in all of this.



Mexico has agreed to immediately begin purchasing as many agricultural products from the United States as possible, according to Trump.

Pena Nieto leaves office on December 1, turning over the Mexican government to his leftist successor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. That means the clock is ticking to give Mexicos legislature enough time to ratify it before the change of administration.

Congressional notification expected



The White House is also expected to formally notify Congress by the end of this week of its intention to sign a new trade agreement within 90 days.

It will be likely be signed at the end of November, said U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who was also in the Oval Office, along with Mexicos foreign and trade ministers, for the Trump-Pena Nieto phone call.

The U.S. president, since the time of his 2016 election campaign has referred to NAFTA as the worst trade deal in history and repeated especially inflammatory rhetoric about Americas southern neighbor.

Trump, who blames NAFTA for the destruction of manufacturing jobs in the United States, repeatedly threatened to abandon the trade pact with Canada and Mexico, which came into effect during the Clinton administration in 1994.

"I'll be terminating the existing deal," Trump said Monday.

Trump has rejected other multi-national deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (another trade pact) and the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, expressing a strong preference for one-on-one negotiations on trade and other matters with countries.

Negotiations with Canada



Trump said the United States is open to talks with Canada if it is willing to negotiate fairly. He spoke by phone with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, with the offices of both leaders releasing statements saying they discussed continuing U.S.-Canada negotiations.

Duncan Wood, director of the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute, told VOA at this stage a lot of work remains.

"We have resolution to the major issues that Mexico had with the United States and vice versa, but now that we throw Canada back into the mix I think its going to be a very interesting equation because Canada of course has a very different set of problems with the United States," Wood said.

In announcing the U.S.-Mexico deal, Trump also threatened Canada with penalties if there is no agreement with Trudeau's government.

Frankly, a tariff on cars is the much easier way to go, said Trump.

In Ottawa, officials are expressing resilience.

"We will only sign a new NAFTA that is good for Canada and good for the middle class, said the Canadian foreign ministry in a statement, indicating Ottawas willingness to continue to work toward a modernized NAFTA.



We hope that Canada can join in now, Lighthizer subsequently told reporters during a conference call.



University of Ottawa public and international affairs associate professor Patrick Leblond told VOA it would make no sense for Canada to accept a new deal that is not to its benefit.

"Canada said, look, we have a deal now, we want to make it better, we want to modernize it, and we will only agree to a new NAFTA if we think it is a better deal overall and certainly a better deal for Canada. Otherwise, well just keep what we have," Leblond said.



White House officials are denying that Mondays announcement by the presidents of the United States and Mexico was designed to pressure the Canadians.



Leaving Canada out of a new NAFTA would be a mistake and it is questionable whether the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has the authority under current Trade Promotion Authority legislation to conclude just a bilateral with Mexico, a visiting scholar at the Cato Institute, Inu Manak, who focuses on trade conflicts, tells VOA News. What happens next is anyones guess, but we should keep our eyes open for the return of Canadas Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, to Washington to wrap up the discussions soon.

The three North American countries do about $1 trillion in trade among themselves annually.People in Vietnam are paying their respects to U.S. Sen. John McCain who was held as prisoner of war in Vietnam and later was instrumental in bringing the wartime foes together.

McCain died of brain cancer Saturday in his home state of Arizona, which he had served over six terms in the U.S. Senate.

People paid tribute to McCain at the U.S Embassy in Hanoi on Monday and also at the monument built where he parachuted from his Navy Skyhawk dive bomber in October 1967 and was taken prisoner of war. He was held more than five years at the infamous "Hanoi Hilton'' prison.

McCain and former Sen. John Kerry played an important role in the bilateral normalization of relations in 1995.U.S. Senator John McCain was a "symbol of his generation" who helped "heal the wounds of war" by pushing for diplomatic normalization of ties with Vietnam, the Southeast Asian country's foreign minister said on Monday.

McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who ran for president in 2008 as a self-styled maverick Republican and became a prominent critic of President Donald Trump, died on Saturday. He was 81.

"For both the government of Vietnam and its people, Senator McCain was a symbol of his generation of senators, and of the veterans of the Vietnam war," Vietnam's foreign minister Pham Binh Minh wrote in a condolence book at the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi on Monday.

"It was he who took the lead in significantly healing the wounds of war, and normalizing and promoting the comprehensive Vietnam-U.S. partnership," Minh said.

McCain had been one of the most vocal proponents in Washington in favor of normalizing ties with Communist-led Vietnam, a former enemy of the United States.

His public relationship with the Southeast Asian country began as a naval aviator during the Vietnam War, when his plane was shot down during a bombing mission over Hanoi in 1967.

He suffered two broken arms, a broken leg, and was stabbed and beaten after being dragged from a lake on the edge of the downtown area of the city. He spent years as a prisoner of war at Hoa Lo prison  or the "Hanoi Hilton", as it was known to American soldiers.

A monument on the shores of the Hanoi lake where McCain was captured has turned into a de facto shrine to the late senator since news of his death reached Vietnam early on Sunday morning.

Both Vietnamese people and U.S. citizens in Hanoi have flocked to the grey, concrete monument to offer flowers, incense, flags and other tributes to McCain.

"Condolences to senator and war veteran John McCain, who greatly contributed to the normalization of Vietnam-U.S. relations," said one message in Vietnamese, left at the sculpture attached to a bouquet of flowers on Monday.In August 1968, Soviet tanks stormed into then communist-ruled Czechoslovakia  abruptly ending attempts by the government in Prague to build a more just society under the slogan socialism with a human face.

While the Soviet government assured its citizens the troops were there to provide friendly assistance, the invasion was met with despair among Russian pro-democracy activists. In the Kremlins crackdown on the Prague Spring, many saw a harbinger for further repression at home.

There was a hope that Czechoslovakia will start some reforms and these reforms will help not only Czechoslovakia but us in Russia, if they will stick, says Pavel Litvinov, a former Soviet dissident who would come to play a pivotal role in the events to follow.



A 28-year-old physicist at the time, Litvinov secretly planned with seven other dissidents to carry out a public protest on Red Square in support of their Czech and Slovak comrades.

As the Kremlin clocks chimed noon, they sat and unfurled a banner that simply read: For Your Freedom and Ours. Another member of the group, the poet Natalya Gorbunovskaya, held a Czechoslovakian flag to drive the message home.

The demonstration lasted just minutes before KGB agents charged in. Litvinov recalls being hit over the head with what he assumes was a bag of books or bricks. Maybe it was volumes of Karl Marx? jokes Litvinov, while recalling the event in an interview with VOA.

The banner and flag were ripped from their hands. Another of the eight, Victor Feinberg, was struck in the face with brass knuckles, revenge for tripping up a KGB officer. His front teeth dropped into his hands.

Labor camp punishment



The more lasting punishment would come later.

There was no question. I expected seven years of labor camp like many of my friends for so-called anti-Soviet propaganda,' says Litvinov.

Instead, he was sentenced to five years exile in a Siberian mining camp.

Others had similar fates  or were punished by other means. Gorbunovskaya and Feinberg were committed to Soviet psychiatric wards and force treated for schizophrenia. Upon release, all eventually emigrated abroad under threat of further harassment. Litvinov emigrated to the U.S. in 1974, eventually taking citizenship.

The Red Square protest was hardly the first act of defiance against the Soviet authorities but the event was nonetheless a defining moment a dissident movement settling in for the long struggle ahead.

The demonstration of the 25th of August in the Red Square was a model, says Alexander Daniel, a historian of the Soviet human rights movement. After August 1968, notes Daniel, the protesters showed how to act when there was no hope of practical results or improving the situation. It became clear that we were at the start of a very long epoch.

It wasnt for nothing that people went to prison or were exiled, counters Ksenia Sakharnova, a filmmaker whose 2010 documentary Five Minutes of Freedom recalls the 1968 protest. Because it wasnt simply a one-off demonstration that everyone soon forgot about. It resonated widelyand its an example to todays young activists.

Yet polls today show under half of all Russians  just 46 percent, according to the independent Levada Center  are unaware of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Fewer still of the Red Square protest it inspired.

'Managed democracy'

Meanwhile, state pressure against opposition figures and government critics remains a regular feature of President Vladimir Putins system of so-called managed democracy.

Indeed, in the Kremlins current proxy war in Ukraine and general rollback on political freedoms at home, family members of the Red Square demonstrators say they see parallels with 1968.

If then it was a story about how Czechoslovakia had freedoms and lost it under the tanks, today its a story about how Russians gained freedom and then lost it or are losing it, says Yaroslav Gorbanevsky, the son of Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who died in 2013.

And again there are tanks  only not on Red Square, theyre now in Ukraine and in Crimea.

50th anniversary



Gorbonevsky was on Red Square to join Litvinov and other descendants of the 1968 demonstrators  most have since passed away  to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the event.

Yet history wasnt on their minds for long.

Almost unnoticeable against a backdrop of tourists, Litvinov  now 78  addressed a small crowd and called for the release of current day political prisoners as the Kremlin clock struck noon.

Only soon Serge Sharov-Delaunay, the cousin of 1968 protester Vadim Delaunay (1947-1983) was arrested while trying to display a For Your Freedom and Ours banner with a friend.

Minutes later, Nusya Krasovitskaya, the granddaughter of the poet Gorbunovskaya, was escorted away by officers. Her crime? Expressing support for Oleg Sentsov, a jailed Ukrainian filmmaker currently engaged in a 3-month hunger strike over his opposition to Russias annexation of Crimea.

Meanwhile, in a separate event across town, Russias current opposition leader  the anti-corruption crusader Alexey Navalny  was detained outside his apartment amid calls for demonstrations against reforms to Russias pension system.

All, with the exception of Navalny, were released within hours.

But the message was clear: 50 years after a small Red Square protest inspired generations of civil and political disobedience, it is still limits, rather than freedoms, that define the times.Newly-inaugurated Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa is promising a bright future for his country, and asking all the countrys citizens to unite and embrace his vision.

However, with the opposition MDC Alliance promising to punch holes into his presidency, which it challenged in court, analysts say Mnangagwa has a long road ahead.

Before his fellow citizens, regional and international spectators, Zimbabwes new President Emmerson Mnangagwa, declared his allegiance to his country at his inauguration, held in the capital, Harare.

I Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, swear that as president of Zimbabwe, I will be faithful to Zimbabwe and will obey, uphold, and defend the constitution and all other laws of Zimbabwe

Unlike back in November when Mnangagwa took the same oath, following a military intervention that propelled him to power after forcing the resignation of former President Robert Mugabe, this inauguration was clouded by a contested election by the opposition MDC Alliance, and a violent post-election incident that left six-Zimbabweans dead.

The developments have raised the ire of the international community, including the U.S. which issued a statement recently, raising concern about the state of human rights and calling for accountability.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Charles Ray, says the U.S. approach is reasonable.

I think that exercising caution and looking for results rather than rhetoric is the right way to go. It is after all going to be up to the Zimbabweans to rebuild their own country.

However, Ambassador Ray, who served as Ambassador to Zimbabwe under the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2012, says Mnangagwa has shown the ability to win over the international community.

When he was made president after Mugabe was ousted I thought he did a lot of the right things  reaching out to mend relations with Botswana, approaching the commonwealth for readmission and the statements he made about honoring the rule of law and working to build a better Zimbabwe, were all the right noises. But the rhetoric has to be backed up concrete actions.

Professor Chipo Dendere, who teaches political science at Amherst College in Massachusettes, just returned from Zimbabwe and agrees that the onus is on Mnangagwa and his government to deliver.

If they can create a Zimbabwe in which the media reforms are taken care of, human rights are respected, respond to the Itai Dzamara question in a more meaningful way, they respond to what happened on August 1st by blaming the opposition, but actually taking some serious measures to demilitarize politics, so if they take these really strong steps all these things that they are being asked to do are very small things.

Domestically, Mnangagwa continues to face strong resistance from the MDC Alliance which has rejected the Constitutional Court ruling that dismissed its evidence of fraud as bold and unsubstantiated, and is threatening mass action against the new administration.

But Dendere warned against such actions, saying it may not work in Chamisas favor, because of the controversy surrounding his own ascendency to the leadership of the MDC Alliance and also the MDC-T following the death of its former leader, Morgan Tsvangirai. The elected vice president of the MDC-T, Thokozani Khupe, alleged she was the rightful successor to Tsvangirai and challenged Chamisa in court.

Nelson Chamisa also has a really tough time. Of course hes had some legitimacy issues going back to how he got into the position of being president of the Alliance, and that has followed him throughout the election. And the events of August 1st are not just an Emmerson Mnangagwa problem, they are also a Nelson Chamisa problem, because hes repeated that hes willing to advocate for more street protests, but most people are going to feel less willing to go to the streets because of what happened on August first. The court case as well, the judge repeatedly said that there was some evidence that was not presented.

Ambassador Ray said while he understands the Chamisa and his opposition partys frustration at losing the election, further protests would only cause more violence and derail the countrys progress.

I think its incumbent upon the opposition to at least honor the courts decision, not to stop working to improve the conditions in Zimbabwe, but to look for ways to pull the country together to look forward to improving peoples lives there, and look to the next election.

Weighing from Devry University in Columbus, Ohio, where he teaches Business Administration, Professor Elliot Masocha says the opposition has to move on.

At times we just have to see reason and move on, but I understand where those opposition leaders are coming from.

Masocha said hes encouraged by the direction that President Mnangagwa wants to take the country.

Taking from the words of the president, he is ready to move forward, hes ready to embrace everybody who needs to be embraced, without using any force, that is what matters to me most, because I pay attention to efforts to achieve peace and stability for any country in the world.

President Mnangagwa said he will soon set up a commission of inquiry to look into the post-election violence.The URL has been copied to your clipboard

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A Russian artist is going back to the roots of photography, rejecting the digital trappings and the assembly-line convenience of the modern age, by designing and creating wooden cameras the way they were built a hundred years ago.If you havn't done it yet,to get one of the fastest volcano news online:

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The Azores are famous for their very pleasant climate, breathtaking green and unspoiled landscapes and nature. Guided by a photographer and volcanologist, discover five islands: Sao Miguel, Faial, Terceira, Pico and Flores - each with its distinct character.

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On 17 Oct, explosions were particularly violent at Anak Krakatau. We show a series of images of a spectacular explosion captured from close range by boat.

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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:We had the credit crisis, and millions of Americans lost their homes and we still dont have basic financial literacy for Americans.  We dont have it for the most vulnerable members of our society, said Vishal Garg, CEO of Better Mortgage. If your parents didnt come from wealth or arent in the business of managing their own money, you fundamentally are left on your own. You dont learn how to compound interest or figure out how to shop for the best loans, and fundamentally every aspect of American life today  to move up in the socioeconomic ladder  requires engaging in some sort of borrowing, he said.With all these headaches, carmakers urge to shed their parts units is understandable: They simply cant sink much more into these businesses, particularly as electric and autonomous-vehicle targets loom. Their returns on capital are also dropping. On average, carmakers have had to add more than $4,000 per car since 2012 to keep up technologically  and costs are only expected to balloon further. They will spend more than $250 billion a year on research and development and capital expenditure by 2023, on more than 200 electric-car models, many of which will lose money. Some $60 billion has been set aside for autonomous vehicles, a study by consultancy AlixPartners found.The United States is in trade disputes with China, Mexico, Canada, the European Union and other countries, as Trump follows through on campaign promises by slapping duties on foreign goods and demanding trade deals be renegotiated. He says the tariffs are part of a broader effort to win better trade terms for U.S. businesses. For now, theyve raised prices on some goods and been met with retaliatory taxes from trading partners that threaten to cause U.S. farmers, manufacturers and other firms to lose business overseas.One lesson we should draw from this is that while folks at Treasury have a pretty good sense of how their sanctions on financial products will play out, they dont have the same expertise and knowledge of nonfinancial commercial sectors, said Liz Rosenberg, who handled sanctions policy during the Obama administration and is now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.Tours will begin modestly, one or two a day, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays only. Tickets are $20 a head; each tour lasts about 90 minutes (reservations are made on the museums website). Docents will include local amateur historians  and a few former prison guards. Peerbolte, however, is quick to add this is a work in progress. Meaning, no museumlike displays, no prison shanks and rusty manacles behind glass. The tours are, instead, a study in ruin porn, with a mild dose of urban spelunking. To even take the tour, you are asked to sign a waver acknowledging, basically, what you see will be a mess, with glass shards on the ground and dust in the air (harmless, the museum says). There is a general aura of decay. So, for the time being, tours will be largely outside, with peeks at interiors.This dyspeptic side was occasionally aimed at reporters. McCain nursed a long grudge against the New York Times over an article it published at a critical point in the 2008 presidential campaign. The story strongly implied that McCain had an affair with a female lobbyist, an assertion vigorously denied by both parties. After the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, filed a libel suit, the Times agreed to print a note to readers saying the story did not state, and The Times did not intend to conclude, that Ms. Iseman had engaged in a romantic affair with Senator McCain or an unethical relationship on behalf of her clients in breach of the public trust.There are currently zero U.S. State Department Travel Warnings against any destination in the state of Quintana Roo and there are zero Travel Warnings against any international tourist destination in Mexico, it read. Unfortunately, there have been episodes of violence between criminals in remote areas of Quintana Roo and elsewhere in Mexico. . . . The State Department travel advisory for Mexico does not include any tourist or beach areas and reaffirms that all major tourist destinations in Mexico are safe.Vietgone is no simple condemnation of the muddled war in Vietnam, even though it mercifully lampoons American motivations. Quang hates the Viet Cong, and the play implies  to some degree  that the anti-Vietnam protesters of the 1970s were guilty of the ignorance of privilege. Thats one of the most interesting themes of a progressive piece that looks at the war in Vietnam not from the ubiquitous point of view of the American G.I. (as in Platoon or Born on the Fourth of July or even Miss Saigon) but from the perspective of those whom the Americans ostensibly were helping. As Nguyen recounts it, the Vietnamese come to see the dream-rhetoric of the self-described savior nation as a mixed bag. In Tongs mind, its racist ambivalence still is better than the devastating reality of home; Quang just wants to return to those he loves.In the 1950s, organizations called White Citizens Councils arose across the South. Unlike the Klan, their members met in the open. They may have eschewed hoods, but they were no less adamant in their segregationist aims. The founder of the Seaboard White Citizens Council in Washington was a D.C. bookstore owner named John Kasper. In 1956, he told The Washington Post that efforts by police in Charlottesville to stop him from distributing anti-integration literature illustrated a deplorable degeneration in the white mans character, when fellow white citizens are denied the right to save their own race from mongrelization.Trones campaign is his second for Congress. In 2016, he spent $13 million of his own money while losing the Democratic nomination for the 8th District seat now held by Rep. Jamie B. Raskin. Trone and his family have been major donors to Democrats and Republicans in Maryland and throughout the country.There is absolutely no truth to the charges in the Post story, Mr. Moore said in a statement quoted in the article. The story also included a memorable quote from Mitchell, which  according to the book All the Presidents Men  Mr. Moore had unsuccessfully sought to keep out of print: Katie Graham [The Posts publisher] is gonna get caught in a big fat wringer if thats published.Ellicott City is one of the state of Marylands crown jewels. What is done here will resonate for generations to come  and could, if done correctly, set a standard to which the rest of the nation strives to meet, Preservation Maryland said in a statement. Preservation Maryland firmly believes we must rise to meet this challenge. The future of Ellicott City depends on it.Todays Headlines

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By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy PolicyDetails of the July 16 killing of Makiyah were included in a 38-page arrest affidavit filed Monday. The documents describe the alleged planning of the shooting and the violent histories of the crews from Wellington Park and Clay Terrace. D.C. authorities mention three other killings in 2017 and 2018 that police say have links to Wellington Park, a neighborhood near Barry Farm in Southeast Washington. One victim, a man shot a week after Makiyahs death, is identified as a person who helped get the vehicle used in her shooting.And this isnt another old-person rant about being buzzed by one on the sidewalk  though that did happen to me three times in one 10-minute trip last week, first by a scooter, then by a dude in a black helmet and a motorized skateboard, then by a guy on something that looked like a Robotic vacuum cleaner he rode like the cave man in the B.C. comic strip.The party said the mailers went to thousands of voters across the district. Asked whether Cockburn opponent Denver Riggleman supports the use of the fliers, campaign manager Joe Chelak said in an email: Denver Riggleman has condemned White Supremacy and all forms of hate. He is disturbed and appalled by Leslie Cockburns books use on White Supremacy websites. Her radical stance on Israel is a foreign policy issue that 5th district voters should be informed about.Sofia will remain at Lurie for a few weeks to recover, before spending six to eight weeks at the Ronald McDonald House in Chicago. Julianne Bardele, a Lurie spokeswoman, said this is common for Lurie patients, as the house is close to the hospital for follow-up appointments, and its easier for doctors to monitor their patients post-operation progress.But it is Blacks more recent focus on Syria that convinced Bell that he should take him on, the delegate said in an interview with The Washington Post. Black traveled to Damascus in 2016 for a meeting with Assad and suggested, in a 20-minute floor speech this year as the Virginia Senate gathered for a special session on the state budget, that the Syrian president might have been framed for a suspected chemical attack.S.C. police kill woman who aimed gun at them, coroner says: Police officers fatally shot a South Carolina woman after she pointed a gun with a laser targeting system at one of them, a coroner said. Stephanie Owens, 41, called 911 from her Blacksburg home early Sunday asking for help, Cherokee County Coroner Dennis Fowler said. He said that when county sheriff's deputies arrived, Owens had a gun and threatened to shoot them. The coroner said in a statement that deputies tried several times to get Owens to drop the gun. But he said that about 55 minutes after she called 911, Owens pointed the targeting laser at a deputy, and four of the five officers at the scene fired on her. She died two hours later, Owens said.Trumps ethics pledge bars political appointees from lobbying their respective agencies for five years after leaving office, and from lobbying anyone in the executive branch for the rest of his administration. According to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it involved a personnel issue, Magallanes, a former aide to Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), would work on congressional relations. Her father, Frederick Palmer, served as a lobbyist for Peabody Energy from 2001 to 2015.Liberty Island evacuated over construction fire: About 3,000 people were briefly evacuated from Liberty Island in New York, which houses the Statue of Liberty, on Monday because of a small construction fire. Park spokesman Jerry Willis said regular ferry service to the island resumed around 2 p.m. on Monday. He said a construction worker was treated at the scene for a minor injury after the fire started at a propane tank about two hours earlier. It happened in an area where a security-screening building is being constructed. Willis estimated the distance between the statue and the fire at 100 to 200 yards.The group, created in 2017, operates on money earned from an investment portfolio and investments from private companies. The goal is to get more people of color into C-suite careers (jobs with chief in the title) and owning/operating their own businesses. AG funds students continued growth by guaranteeing scholarships, paid internships and a job after college graduation for those who meet program requirements. Students can also invest money earned through their internships into projects they think will benefit the community. Those who stay involved in the program get roughly $2,000 a year toward a personal college fund.Israel to reopen Gaza crossing: Israel's defense minister has announced that he will reopen the country's main personnel crossing with the Gaza Strip after a week of relative calm along the border. Avigdor Liberman said that after consultation with the country's security agencies, he has ordered the opening of the Erez crossing. The decision comes amid efforts by Egypt to mediate a possible cease-fire between Gaza's Hamas rulers and Israel after weeks of intense violence at the border.F.H. Buckley, in his Aug. 23 Thursday Opinion essay, Bankruptcy can fix the student-loan crisis, suggested that universities be compelled to guarantee student loans. In doing so, he said, universities may take a second look at the kind of education they offer  eliminating frivolous courses and majors from the curriculums. Such an outcome would serve only to exacerbate the growing trend toward scientism in education and the alienation of the students from their capacity to critically engage with diverse subjects. We must ask ourselves whether the purpose of a postsecondary education is solely to attain a job. I turn to the work of American educator John Dewey, who argued that to ensure we perpetuate our societies into the future, the young should be educated in the beliefs, interests, practices and dialectics of the culture. Without such an education, or with an education based solely on the belief that it is an instrument by which young people find work, we begin to lose the bonds of trust and reciprocity that bind us together in the democratic project. Student debt is at a crisis level, but the answer is not to force institutions to abrogate their commitment to comprehensive and diverse education.But McCain will loom large historically because he represented a way of doing politics that is in danger of being lost and stood for a capacious sense of the public interest and the common good that will have to be at the heart of any reconstruction of our democracy. In this sense, he is more like Kennedy in embodying a range of public aspirations and in holding that the personal life well lived entailed, as Kennedy put it, an appetite for adventure over the love of ease.This scattering, she says, only happens in the most violent neighborhoods in the city. I think that it is the desire to get away from where they are, rather than being drawn to particular schools. So far, there is no simple solution to help parents compare schools while factoring in the commute. There isnt a real easy right answer, says Burdick-Will. Access is important. Letting students go to the school they want to go to is important. But a lot of kids choose a school without thinking about how hard its going to be to get there. Its a trade-off in trying to provide equality and access. Theres a cost, and unfortunately its not always equally distributed.The Supreme Court has never found that a states redistricting was so infected with politics that it was unconstitutional. This past term, it passed up the chance to do so with the case from Wisconsin and one in Maryland, disposing of them without deciding the merits.The episode was the latest involving Trump and the powerful symbolism of the American flag. For months, he has castigated NFL players who choose to kneel during the national anthem, accusing them at political rallies and in other settings of disrespecting the flag. Trump has also threatened to strip the citizenship of those who burn the flag.McSally  while not openly attacking McCain  has hardly spoken of him at all as her campaign has tilted further and further to the right. Once more publicly moderate and critical of Trump, she has fully embraced the president during her campaign.Barely a month had passed since McCain announced Palin as his running mate at a rally in Dayton, Ohio. Shes not from these parts, and shes not from Washington, but when you get to know her, youre going to be as impressed as I am, McCain said at the time. McCain had thought he was getting a like-minded reformer. Instead he got a culture warrior, adept in a new kind of Republican identity politics, Schnur said.We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe, McCain wrote in the letter. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.The phenomenon appears to account for much of the animosity toward McCain, particularly among Republicans. Even though he was a reliable Republican vote, he often called for compromise with Democrats on key issues such as immigration and health-care legislation. He was hit regularly with one of the worst monikers in factional politics: that he was a RINO  a Republican in name only.McCain died Saturday after fighting brain cancer for more than a year. He will lie in state at the Arizona State Capitol on Wednesday before being flown to Washington and, ultimately, will be buried at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Carrasco said he plans to stand vigil until McCain is moved on Wednesday. But Monday was quiet. Just a few people were outside when Cindy McCain came out.When Medicare in 2011 agreed to pay for a revolutionary procedure to replace leaky heart valves by snaking a synthetic replacement up through blood vessels, the goal was to offer relief to the tens of thousands of patients too frail to endure open-heart surgery, the gold standard.



To help ensure good results, federal officials limited Medicare payment only to hospitals that serve large numbers of cardiac patients.



The strategy worked. In the past seven years, more than 135,000 mostly elderly patients have undergone transcatheter aortic valve replacement, known as TAVR. And TAVR's in-hospital mortality rate has dropped by two-thirds, to 1.5 percent.



Now, in a campaign motivated by a muddy mix of health care and business, smaller hospitals and the medical device industry are arguing that the technique should be more widely deployed. They note only about half of the nearly 1,100 hospitals offering surgical valve replacement can do TAVR. And they say current limitations discriminate against minorities and people in rural areas, forcing patients to undergo a riskier and significantly more invasive treatment or miss getting a new valve altogether.



Hospitals that already have a TAVR franchise are fighting to stifle new competitors, saying programs that don't do enough procedures would not provide high-quality care.



At stake is the care of thousands of patients. Half of the more than 250,000 Americans estimated each year to develop severe aortic valve stenosis narrowing of the valve that regulates the flow of blood from the heart to the largest artery of the body die within two years. Getting an artificial heart valve lowers that death rate to as low as 17 percent, studies show.



Also at stake is the $45,000 Medicare pays hospitals for each TAVR case excluding the doctor's fee. While hospitals typically make only a small profit on the procedure partly because the device costs more than $30,000 they benefit because each TAVR patient typically needs other cardiac services and tests that can boost the hospital's bottom line.



In addition, offering TAVR carries a cachet that helps recruit and retain top specialists, who bring in more patients.



At a Medicare advisory committee hearing in Baltimore on July 25, both sides of the debate emphasized how they were seeking to help patients. But the economics of TAVR was ever-present given the horde of medical device and hospital officials and industry analysts in the audience.



The committee split on the issue, although a majority of members backed the continued use of volume requirements. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is expected to decide later this year whether to change its patient volume minimum for TAVR.



Dr. Jason Felger, a heart surgeon who wants his community hospital in San Angelo, Texas, to offer the procedure, said behind the fight over TAVR is protecting profit and revenue. He refers patients to hospitals more than three hours away for the procedure or, if they aren't willing to travel, they risk their lives to undergo the conventional operation.



Hospitals that offer TAVR, he said, aren't willing to give up the referrals they now rely on from other hospitals.



"It's all about the money," he said.



Unlike open-heart surgery, in which the chest is cracked open to remove the unhealthy valve, TAVR involves threading a catheter tipped with a replacement valve through a blood vessel to the heart. Doctors then implant the new valve. The old valve remains but is pushed aside, and the new one takes over its work.



With this less invasive valve procedure, people can get out of the hospital within two or three days and get back to daily activities much sooner than with open-heart surgery, which typically has a six-week recovery time.



TAVR has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for people who cannot have open-heart surgery or for whom it would be risky. These include the elderly and frail and people with complications such as kidney and lung disease. But TAVR use has expanded among younger, and less sick, patients in recent years. Within the next year, the FDA is likely to approve the procedure for all patients needing a new aortic valve, industry analysts say.



TAVR does carry risks, including stroke. Patients may also need a pacemaker after the procedure to regulate heart rhythm.



The large majority of patients getting TAVR are 65 and over. The importance of Medicare's blessing goes beyond its payments, since private insurers typically follow Medicare standards. Physicians seeking to expand use of TAVR point out that Medicare has no volume requirements for other major cardiac procedures.



The two largest TAVR medical device companies are divided on the issue. Edwards Lifesciences Corp. of Irvine, Calif., supports eliminating the minimum-patient requirements, while Minneapolis-based Medtronic favors keeping the status quo. The Advanced Medical Technology Association, or AdvaMed, an industry trade group, also supports the change.



About 50,000 patients are expected to have TAVR this year, and those numbers are forecast to double by 2020, according to American College of Cardiology and other major heart groups.



When Michael Vigil, 50, needed TAVR in May, he drove more than three hours from his home in eastern Wyoming to a hospital in Denver. Before the procedure, the oil-drilling contractor was constantly tired and out of breath even after mundane chores at home. Vigil's aortic valve had been damaged from radiation treatments for non-Hodgkin lymphoma decades before.



Vigil was sent home a day after the TAVR procedure. He was back at work the following week.



He said he felt more energized almost immediately after having the procedure.



"It's worked so well, my wife wishes they dialed it back a little," Vigil said.



Donnette Smith, president of the patient advocacy group Mended Hearts, said many patients don't have good access to the procedure.



"Patients do not know of this option unless they walk through the right door of the right hospital," said Smith of Huntsville, Ala. She had heart valve surgery in 1988.



Mended Hearts receives funding from device makers.



To gain Medicare approval for TAVR programs, hospitals have to perform annually 50 open-heart valve repairs, 400 angioplasties and 1,000 cardiac catheterizations a procedure in which medical teams use skills similar to those needed for TAVR.



Doctors at larger hospitals say procedure volume is a good predictor for success. The American College of Cardiology and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons recommend hospitals be able to do at least 50 TAVRs each year within two years of startup. More than three-quarters of the 582 hospitals authorized by Medicare for TAVR meet that standard.



"Whether it's playing the violin or performing heart surgery, experience matters," said Dr. Thoralf Sundt, chief of cardiac surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital.



Dr. Ashish Pershad, an interventional cardiologist who performs TAVR at Banner Medical Center in Phoenix, agreed that there are access issues. But he said it's not because of a lack of programs. Rather, he said, surgeons too often don't refer patients for it because they make more money from doing the open-heart surgical valve replacement.



"Patients are missing out on this procedure because they are not being referred, and primary care doctors lack knowledge about it," he said.



Doctors seeking a Medicare rule to widen access say there is little evidence hospitals that perform more TAVRs have lower mortality rates. As long as they can show low mortality and complications, they believe their hospitals should be able to offer the service.



"Our intention is not to lower the quality of outcomes by expanding to 'low volume' centers; but to provide excellent care to a larger population of patients," Felger and his colleagues at Shannon Medical Center in San Angelo, Texas, wrote to the CMS advisory group.



Last year, Felger said, he sent a dozen patients to hospitals in Austin or Dallas for TAVR, while eight other patients opted for the open-heart surgery.



"I have patients tell me they would rather have the surgical procedure at their local hospital than traveling to another city," he said. "They tell me 'Let's do this; if I die, I die.'"The liberalization of the telecom sector in 2014 sent the price of SIM cards crashing from more than $1,000 to just a few dollars. Internet penetration has risen to about 25 percent and cellphone penetration to about 90 percent, according to the ITU. There are about 18 million Facebook users in the country, the company said.Everything seems to be coming to a very fragile and potentially dynamic point. Atmars resignation epitomizes the fact that this crisis is crossing over into a whole range of issues, the former official said. Ghani badly needed to do something about the deteriorating security situation, but the way he did it, appointing a loyalist instead of bringing in someone with experience, will probably weaken the rest of his tenure.We have been taught to not hit the head and chest  that can be fatal, he said. We beat them in such a way so they get these serious, silent injuries  on the backs, on the legs  so they do not die. Otherwise, there will be a case against us.The son and grandson of Navy admirals, and a prisoner of war for 5 years in Vietnam, McCain earned the credibility to force even the most decorated American officials to explain themselves and their decisions to the public in front of the Senate. McCain took his oversight duties seriously and regularly tested his die-hard views against theirs in public exchanges, often prying loose uncomfortable truths the military would rather have kept under wraps.Trumps tariff threats were widely seen as a tactic to push Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus administration to sign on to the terms of the new agreement. But major obstacles remain in talks with Canada, and the specter of tariffs on the auto industry prompted warnings from Canadian trade experts that U.S. consumers would be among the hardest hit if tariffs are imposed.He is most comfortable with people just like himself. They are people who pretend to be someone theyre not  honest and trustworthy. They act as though they are sitting on top of the world when, in fact, they are standing in quicksand.Maung Maung Soe was among the first to be sanctioned by multiple countries and was fired by the Myanmar military in June in a move widely seen as a way for more-senior leaders to show they are taking some responsibility for last years actions. He led the Western Command, which oversees Rakhine state, until November. According to a former high-ranking military official, the decision to fire him was made by Min Aung Hlaing himself but was unpopular among officers who believed he was made a scapegoat to protect more-senior leadership.A South West Western Australian bee species is completely reliant on just two types of plant, new Curtin University research has found, highlighting the importance of conserving Perth's increasingly scarce bushland remnants.

The research by PhD candidate Kit Prendergast found 'resin bee' Megachile ignita uses only banksia flowers and the fuzz from banksia cones to line its nests, from the endangered banksia woodlands of the Swan Coastal Plain.

Megachile ignita, the South West WA resin bee. Credit:Kit Prendergast.

Ms Prendergast also found that the bees, named ignita for their flame-like golden head hairs and red abdomens, ate only the pollen of the native pea plants of the family Fabaceae, also unique to WA.

"Although previous research has focused on food sources, this study shows nesting materials are also important to the reproductive success of bees and it is the first documented evidence of dry flowers and the fuzz from Banksia being used inside bee nests, not as food, she said.This is a pragmatic reshuffle that promotes new talent, rewards allies and restores rivals in roughly equal measure.

Seeking unity after the infighting of last week, Scott Morrison did almost everything he could to reach a truce with the insurgents who took down Malcolm Turnbull.

Almost. One move was a step too far for Morrison. He could not restore Tony Abbott to cabinet despite the hints last week that the former prime minister might get this prize if Peter Dutton became leader.

Morrison has instead found a clever way to keep dumped leaders occupied and may use this to rebuild the relationship with Abbott after the rift between them over the leadership spill of September 2015.Education officials have spent years warning that the states problems with enrollment, infrastructure, tuition and funding  all of which were exacerbated by the yearslong budget impasse  were giving higher education in Illinois a black eye. Universities in other states have, in turn, aggressively courted top students from Illinois with generous, merit-based financial aid packages. But in a shift, many now see signs that state politicians are embracing the same urgency to retain local students and are willing to back it up with new public policy.University leaders are picking up major pay rises, taking the annual average salary of vice-chancellors in NSW and Victoria to just below $1 million.

Michael Spence, the vice-chancellor of Sydney University, is the highest paid of all, having seen his salary rise 60 per cent in just five years to $1.45 million.

Sydney University vice-chancellor Michael Spence remains the highest-paid among all university bosses in the country. Credit:Brendan Esposito

And Melbourne University's Glyn Davis is not far behind, with a $150,000 pay rise in the last year taking his total remuneration to $1.3 million.

Analysis of financial disclosures of 21 universities in NSW and Victoria by Fairfax Media shows eight paid their vice-chancellors more than $1 million in 2017, compared to six last year.The prosecution rested its case last week after presenting just three pieces of evidence. That included two emails - a letter from Ricketson to former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in which he made reference to the size of strongman Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sens personal bodyguard unit, and an email to former Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy regarding rumours of an arrest warrant - as well as a dozen photos of riot police at a land dispute protest.

Ricketson was charged with espionage and faces up to 10 years in Phnom Penhs notorious Prey Sar prison if convicted.

James Ricketson who is accused of espionage leaves the prison van as he arrives at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court for a court appearance in June. Credit:Kate Geraghty

Phnom Penh : Australian filmmaker James Ricketson was wrongfully arrested and Cambodian police had no grounds to seize and search his cameras and computer, according his lawyer as the lengthy trial continues.

On Monday, Ricketsons lawyer Kong Sam Onn said his line of questioning was to raise two points: there were errors in the arrest and the police did not have grounds for the arrest.

Ricketson said he was not informed of his rights, was repeatedly told he was not under arrest, was held for longer than the legal limit and was asked to sign documents without a lawyer present that were written in Khmer - a language he cannot read.

Loading

He was initially questioned for not having his passport on him at the time of his arrest, and for flying a drone above an opposition party rally the day before - topics that have not been addressed in detail at the trial since.

All they wished to do was check my mobile and camera to see if there was a thing indicating that I had broken Cambodian laws, Ricketson said, adding that on June 6 last year, they told him they found nothing incriminating and he expected to be released.Some 500,000 had been expected to attend the Mass, but the crowd was noticeably smaller, with patches of grass visible in areas that had been intended for spectators. Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick speaks during a memorial service in South Bend, Ind. McCarrick was removed from public ministry this year. Credit:SOuth Ben Tribune/AP The sexual abuses - in Ireland, the United States, Australia, Argentina, Belgium Brazil, Canada, Chile and other countries - have fed and amplified the bitter polarisation within the Catholic Church. Some of Francis' critics, including Vigano, are calling for the pope to step down. The Vatican had no immediate comment. McCarrick's attorney, Barry Coburn, declined to comment. The letter was the latest dramatic development stemming from a fresh wave of allegations related to clergy sex abuse and its coverup. Rumours that had swirled for decades about McCarrick exploded in June when Pope Francis suspended the cardinal. Last month, McCarrick, facing credible allegations of abusing seminarians and minors, became the first US cardinal in history to resign.

Vigano, 77, was the Holy See's apostolic nuncio, or ambassador, in Washington from 2011 until 2016. He has been a lightning rod within the Vatican who lost a power struggle in Rome under Benedict, emerged as a Francis critic, and reportedly ordered the halt of an investigation into the alleged sexual relations between an archbishop in Minnesota and seminarians. Loading Jason Berry, who has written several investigative books about the Vatican, said he believes this is the first time a pope has been accused from within. "From within the Vatican hierarchy, from within the Roman Curia, I don't think anyone has ever publicly accused a pope of covering up for a sex abuser," Berry said. "That's why this is such a big deal." Vigano's letter said that McCarrick had been privately sanctioned under Benedict - though only after years of warnings about his alleged behaviour. The warnings that Vigano describes dealt with McCarrick's alleged behaviour toward seminarians and young priests - not toward minors. Vigano wrote that the measures, taken "in 2009 or 2010," banned McCarrick from traveling, holding Mass, or participating in public meetings.

Yet McCarrick appears to have done essentially the opposite. He regularly appeared as a speaker and celebrant at church functions and represented the church in prominent foreign diplomatic efforts in places like China and Iran. A video from 2013 shows Benedict warmly greeting McCarrick in Rome, at the pope's resignation (and the subsequent election of the new pope), where McCarrick gave round-the-clock television interviews and stayed at a seminary. It wasn't immediately clear why a pope taking the dramatic step of suspending a cardinal from ministry, as Vigano said, wouldn't monitor McCarrick in any way. However, when the archdiocese of New York last year began its investigation into an altar boy's allegation against McCarrick - the first accusation involving a youth - the Vatican ambassador Archbishop Christophe Pierre told McCarrick to be less public while the probe was underway, a personal familiar with McCarrick said on Sunday. However McCarrick still appeared in public as he wished, the person said, including attending an ordination ceremony in May in his cardinal's garb. Vigano's letter says that in 2013, he met Francis months into his papacy and told him face to face that there was "a dossier this thick" about McCarrick. He says he then told Francis about Benedict's order that McCarrick remove himself from public life.

"He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance," Vigano says he told Francis. "The Pope did not make the slightest comment about those very grave words of mine and did not show any expression of surprise on his face, as if he had already known the matter for some time, and he immediately changed the subject." Loading Vigano also alleges in that conversation that Francis told him American bishops "must not be ideologised, they must not be right-wing ... and they must not be left-wing, and when I say left-wing I mean homosexual." It was not possible to reach Benedict or his representatives right away. Francis has not commented previously about what he was ever told about McCarrick, and on Sunday Vatican spokesman Greg Burke did not respond to a request seeking comment. The American Catholic Church is deeply divided over Francis' leadership, with fault lines similar to those seen in the political realm. Francis's comments and teachings about everything from immigration and global warming to the death penalty are frequently adopted or refuted along partisan lines.

The Vigano document uses American culture-war language, such as "right-wing" and "left-wing," and concludes the letter by blaming "homosexual networks" for sexual abuse and corruption. U.S. conservative Catholics who have suspected Francis of surreptitiously opening the door for liberalising changes around sex and marriage have in recent years focused on the increased acceptance of LGBT people. Common targets for right-wing blogs like LifeSite and ChurchMilitant are bishops and cardinals they deem too moderate or liberal. Constantly on this list is DC's Donald Wuerl, Chicago's Blase Cupich and Joe Tobin of Newark. All are named by Vigano as being linked by "wickedness." Vigano was sent to Washington - reportedly as punishment - in 2011 and was there until May 2016. He arranged a hugely controversial meeting between Francis and an American woman, Kim Davis, who had lost her job as a municipal clerk for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-gender couples. Allies of Francis alleged Vigano set up the pope during a high-profile US visit, and that Francis didn't intend to affirm Davis' cause. The letter also includes an allegation against Wuerl, DC's current archbishop and McCarrick's immediate successor. He is a close ally of Francis and is already under scrutiny following a grand jury report in Pennsylvania about clerical child sex abuse in Pennsylvania and alleged coverup. Wuerl for years led the diocese of Pittsburgh. Vigano is vague in the allegation against Wuerl.Guilty verdicts. Guilty pleas. Immunity. It was an eventful week in the judicial system for people associated with the Trump campaign, as investigations into the corruption and criminality of that campaign move forward.

For Donald Trump, it was a particularly bad week. Thats because Michael Cohen, Trumps former lawyer who pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law, implicated Trump in the decision to pay off two women who claimed to have had affairs with the president. And Cohen has the tapes to back it up.

President Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen (left) pleaded guilty to financial crimes on the same day former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort (right) was found guilty of financial crimes. Credit:AP

With Trump directly implicated in campaign violations  and with Robert Muellers Russia investigation continuing to claim scalps  talk of impeachment has forcefully returned. But rather than encouraging impeachment hopes or fears, last weeks verdicts should serve as a reminder of just how unlikely Trumps removal from office actually is.

The go-to analogy for those eyeing impeachment is Watergate. In January 1974, the first of Richard Nixons campaign aides pleaded guilty. Other indictments and trials followed, and by August of that year, Nixon had resigned. Following that timeline, Trump would be out of office by next spring.

But there are reasons to doubt the Watergate analogy. For one, other presidents have faced similarly dire circumstances and managed to avoid any real consequences.Community Invited to Grand Opening of new Health Professions Building at WSU

August 27, 2018

OGDEN, Utah  Weber State University is unveiling a state-of-the-art education space in the new Ezekiel R. Dumke Jr. & Katherine W. Dumke Center for Interprofessional Education in Healthcare. The community is invited to tour the building during a grand opening ceremony, Sept. 4 from 2-5 p.m.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony will begin at 2:15 p.m., followed by an open house where guests can take self-guided tours. Visitors will find souvenirs in various locations through the building. The afternoon will also include music, hors doeuvres and gelato.

Katherine W. and Ezekiel R. Dumke Jr.

The Dumke Centers 15,000-square-foot, two-story building provides a space for health professions students to study and learn from peers. By sharing one space, students and professionals of various health fields can work together, share ideas and contribute to better healthcare.

As the knowledge, advancement and technology in the field of medicine and healthcare expand, the need to share information and expertise increases, said Yas Simonian, Dr. Ezekiel R. Dumke College of Health Professions dean. Faculty and students can collaborate with the community in this new building. We have an area to brainstorm on research, presentations, case studies and patient histories. The Dumke Center gives us additional space to think together.

Ground breaking was held May 30, 2017 and took just over one year to complete. The first and largest donation for the project came from Ezekiel R. Dumke Jr. and Katherine W. Dumke, for whom the building is named.

The building has four classrooms, 20 offices, two conference rooms, a student collaboration area and study spaces along the hallways. The facility is also open for local healthcare professionals to lecture, host presentations, stage conferences or conduct research.

One striking feature of the building is a wall-length mosaic that resembles a bone-marrow smear seen under a microscope.

Human marrow produces 500 billion blood cells per day, which is vital for existence, Simonian said. In a way, it tells the future of an individuals health. The mosaic could be a suitable piece for students to view and ponder their future in healthcare.

Even the outside of the building has healthcare elements. The brick is laid to resemble an EEG reading and other vital signs.

Each element is designed to promote interprofessional education, which focuses on teaching students how to provide team-based, collaborative care for better patient outcomes. Students from all areas of study within the Dumke College of Health Professions will have classes in the building.

Caring for patients requires a team of highly trained individuals who perform specialized procedures, Simonian said. However, when these members of the healthcare team work in partnership, the patient benefits more from their collective knowledge and expertise. Interprofessional education is current, innovative and absolutely the future of healthcare education.

Dumke Center Facts and Figures:

Architect/Design: VCBO Architecture

Contractor: Spindler Construction

WSU Project Manager: Bruce Daley

By the Numbers:

15,000 square feet

4 classrooms

19 offices

2 conference rooms

5 picnic tables

1 outdoor patio

1 balcony

2 drinking fountains

3 entrances

10 media monitors

162 classroom chairs

26 stairs

For photos, visit the following links:

photos.smugmug.com/Press-Release-Photos/2018-photos/August/i-BSR8BmJ/0/9be263b6/X2/dumke-portrait%20%281%29-X2.jpg

photos.smugmug.com/Marketing-Communications/2018-Annual-Report/IPE-Building/i-wJsWrJ5/0/3ae4653f/X2/IPE_building-8272-X2.jpg

Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University.The pairing of heat and humidity can be hazardous, especially for older people or those who already have health problems, according to the weather service. The weather conditions forecast for Monday put people at risk for heat illnesses, and the weather service is cautioning people to stay out of the sun and hydrated, plan strenuous activities for the early morning or evening, and wear light, loose clothing.Connecticut may be losing population, but Fairfield County is gaining residents and much of that is coming from nearby New York City.

A recent study by Fitch Ratings of U.S. Census Bureau data shows that Fairfield County gained more than 2,500 residents in net migration from New York City from 2011 to 2015, including 1,038 from Bronx County. Fairfield County had positive net migration from each of the five New York City counties during that time span.

Overall, Connecticut gains a significant number of residents moving in from New York state each year, peaking with a 12,136 net migration in 2015.

The study also showed that Connecticut has lost population every year from 2013 and 2016. Fairfield County, however, has gained population each year, and had 949,921 residents in 2017, up from 942,865 in 2013. Hartford County, by comparison, saw its population fall from 899,765 in 2013 to 895,388 in 2017.

Joseph Fontana, an associate director in Fitch Ratings corporates group, was the lead analyst for the study. He said Fairfield Countys strengths, such as high personal income, wage growth and disposable income, should continue to make it a desirable destination for New Yorkers looking to relocate.

There are strong underlying economic trends that will support growth in Fairfield County going forward, he said.

Fairfield Countys low property taxes, relative to New York City and adjacent Westchester County, is another draw.

Thats a factor, Fontana said. People want to be in an area where they can avoid taxes as much as they can, especially with the new tax laws and their limited ability to deduct state and local taxes from federal taxes.

Residential real estate (in Fairfield County) has been pretty good, he said. There has been strong growth in wages and median household income. Thats really driving the residential real estate market in Fairfield County.

The southwestern part of the state has outpaced the rest of the state in other economic measures as well. The Danbury labor market area has the states lowest unemployment rate at 3.7 percent. The Bridgeport-Stamford labor market area has an unemployment rate of 4.4 percent, which absorbs towns with high rates, such as Bridgeport (6.4), Ansonia (6.2), Stratford (5.6) and Derby (5.5).

Millennial march

A growing number of millennials are fleeing the big cities in search of the traditional American dream of homeownership in the suburbs, the Fitch research shows. Older millennials who had previously shunned the suburbs in favor of the work-live-play aspect of the cities, are now seeking homes in the suburbs.

Millennials are trying to strike a balance between commuting and affordability; and being away from the city, but not too far, Fontana said. The white-picket fence is a necessity to them, too, especially as their families grow. The dream of owning a home is not dead for millennials and Fairfield County has the comforts of a suburb, but with New York City proximity.

Fairfield County also offers good schools, upscale shopping and a lower cost of living, compared to New York City, he said.

Jim Fagan, Cushman & Wakefields managing principal for the Connecticut and Westchester markets, has seen a similar trend. He said there is a large demographic of people between the life stages of graduating from college and starting a family. That population flocked to city apartments during that stage.

That process is starting to mature. They moved into apartments 10 years ago and the birthrate was low for years, but now they are starting families, Fagan said. These families cant afford to live in the city. If youre in Manhattan and you have a few kids, youre dead broke.

Connecticut and Westchester are made for families, he said. Theres access to Long Island Sound, fantastic schools and all the amenities of a suburb close to New York City.

Fagan said as the millennials move to Fairfield County the commercial real estate market will continue to improve. Fitch numbers show that Fairfield County has a vacancy rate of 23.6 percent, up dramatically from the 13.9 percent vacancy rate in 2007. It has climbed steadily over the years as the country recovers from the 2008 recession, corporations rethink their space requirements and technology reduces the need for many employees to have an office.

Fagan sees companies following their talented millennial workers out to the suburbs and taking space in office buildings throughout Fairfield County, particularly along major transportation lines.

Fontana said Fairfield County often represents a flight to affordability for companies looking to escape the high rents of New York City. Conversely, he said, many companies looked to New York City following 2008 as a place they believed to be a recession-proof area.

While slightly elevated from pre-recession years, New York City continues to enjoy a low vacancy rate of 8.3 percent. The citys vacancy rate hit a post-recession high of 11.6 percent in 2009. The rate was 5.7 percent in 2007, according to numbers provided by Fitch.

Recession recovery

The recovery from the recession has been stronger and faster in Fairfield County in comparison to the rest of the state. A look at population numbers show that every county in the state has lost population since 2013, except Fairfield. In addition to Hartford, Litchfield and New London counties have lost significant population.

Its a good thing for the state that Fairfield County continues to gain population as it pays more than one-quarter of the states taxes, with a hefty amount of that coming from Greenwich. A strong Fairfield County economy is essential in keeping that money flowing north.

Fontana said the economic indicators appear strong in Fairfield County and he sees the momentum continuing in a positive direction.

Its a function of where we are in the cycle. We are nine or 10 years out from the start of the recession and things are positive, Fontana said. I see continued positive growth. A deceleration will come, though, but thats normal.

The writer may be reached at cbosak@hearstmediact.com; 203-731-3338.WESTPORT  A hissing sound led to the discovery of a several-day-old gas line rupture and the evacuation of several buildings in downtown Westport on Monday.

The leak did not become evident until a Stamford Tent & Event Services Inc. began to remove a large tent on Jesup Green erected for the Melissa Ethridge concert Saturday night. When a hissing was heard, according to fire officials, crews were dispatched to the scene.

Westport Fire deployed a protective hose line and evacuated the surrounding buildings. Evacuations included three commercial occupancies and the Gillespie Center.

The first arriving fire unit reported a high-pressure gas line had been cut, according to Assistant Fire Chief Matthew Cohen.

It was discovered that a tent crew had allegedly struck the line while setting up tents for an event this past weekend, said Cohen in a statement. The leak did not become evident until the company returned to remove the large tent stake.

Southern Connecticut Gas was notified upon dispatch of the call and responded. There was no shutoff readily available near the cut line and the gas company had to crimp the line to stop the flow.

Cohen said it is undetermined if fines will be dolled out as fallout from the leak.

The fire department responded with two engines and the shift commander. The rescue company was clearing off of another call in the area and responded as well.

All of the surrounding buildings were metered for gas readings. Police responded to assist with traffic and crowd control, and Westport EMS later responded to assist with rehab.

This procedure was performed while firefighters stood by with a hose line to protect the gas company employees. The gas line was crimped off and the fire department rechecked the gas levels at the surrounding buildings. Once complete, the occupants were allowed to return and the business reopened.Stamford police / Contributed

STAMFORD  A Norwalk man who was arrested last month for allegedly dealing PCP was busted by Stamford Police again on Friday.

Michael Litt, of 26 Magnolia Ave., Norwalk, was charged with possession of over four ounces of a hallucinogen and for operating a drug business.





6. Six

Arts Theatre, 30 August to 23 September, then UK tour  tickets here

We had to put Six at number six! After ruling the roost at the Edinburgh Fringe, the six queens of this historical pop musical are coming to London for a full-length run at the Arts Theatre in London. Reclaiming history from the clutches of Henry VIII has never been this exhilerating. Better yet, the show is then heading out on a UK tour.







5. Dust

Trafalgar Studios, 4 September to 13 October  tickets here

After a huge critical and audience reaction in Edinburgh and at the Soho Theatre, Milly Thomas' award-winning solo show Dust arrives at Trafalgar Studios, with direction by Sara Joyce. You can watch our interview with Thomas and Joyce above for a fantastic insight into the production.







Women in Power in rehearsals

 Luke MacGregor

4. Women in Power

NST City, 6 to 29 September

Aristophanes' The Assemblywomen, written in 392 BC, is reimagined as a major musical comedy at the NST City in September, with the likes of Wendy Cope, Jenny Eclair, Suhayala El-Bushra, Natalie Haynes, Shappi Khorsandi, Jess Phillips, and Brona C Titley contributing to the script. The show is said to feature "swearing, poo jokes and severe equality."







3. Wasted

Southwark Playhouse, 6 September to 6 October  tickets here

A brand new rock-documentary (rockumentary?) musical about the Bronte siblings has its premiere at Southwark Playhouse next month, featuring a crack cast of Natasha Barnes, Siobhan Athwal, Molly Lynch and Matthew Jacobs Morgan. Why have In The Heights when you can have Wuthering Heights?







2. Company

Gielgud Theatre, 26 September to 22 December  tickets here

Say goodbye to Bobby, say hello to Bobbi  Rosalie Craig steps into the lead role of this major revival of Sondheim's musical, with a reimagined titular part. A long-awaited West End event, Marianne Elliot's show looks set to rewrite the musical theatre rulebook. We can't wait, especially after hearing Craig's rendition of "Being Alive".







1. Sylvia

Old Vic, 3 to 22 September  tickets here

Sylvia Pankhurst (and the wider suffragette movement) are given the musical treatment in this epic new musical from Kate Prince. Featuring dance, hip hop, soul and funk and a raft of historical activism, we saw some of the show in rehearsals and it's looking epic.





Notable mentions

There are, of course, a variety of other shows also opening in September well-worth a mention  Unexpected Joy will run at Southwark Playhouse, the Shakespeare revisionist Queen Margaret at the Royal Exchange, an all-female Lord of the Flies up at Clwyd, The Lovely Bones out on tour and the eagerly anticipated Heathers West End transfer!Include a visit to The Dark Side of F Street in your Halloween hauntings! Take some canned foods and grocery ...

When you see the flags flying at schools, you dont generally think about who put them up or how they...Still, Davis believes in modern activism. A movement to change the world is really a rare social phenomena, it truly is, he said. Lots of people have tried to organize movements, and 50 years later theyre still trying to organize their movement. Its not that easy to do, but once in a while it happens, and it really just changes everything.Canadas marijuana consumers  medical and recreational  may do a little dance of joy come Oct. 17 when our nation becomes the first major, industrialized nation to legalize cannabis.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/8/2018 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canadas marijuana consumers  medical and recreational  may do a little dance of joy come Oct. 17 when our nation becomes the first major, industrialized nation to legalize cannabis.

Undoubtedly, their past experience means theyre ready to consume the product that will be offered at retail outlets in Manitoba and online.

BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS files

Yet for a significant number of adults, trying cannabis will be a novel experience  or at least one they havent embarked on in many years. With that in mind, heres a primer on its effects on mind and body. That way, a mind-bending adventure are less likely to result in a bad trip.

First things first: Cannabis is relatively safe compared with other psychoactive substances, including alcohol, according to a 2015 comparative risk study. There has not been a clear-cut, documented death from an overdose of cannabis.

Still, cannabis may pose higher risk of adverse outcomes for individuals with mental illness and cardiovascular disease, cautions Daniel Sitar, a retired University of Manitoba professor of pharmacology.

One reason for cannabiss relative safety is it doesnt depress the respiratory system like opioids do, says Sitar, who runs seminars on cannabiss interaction with other medications.

"Morphine, fentanyl and similar drugs can kill you by stopping your breathing," says the professor emeritus at the Rady Faculty of Health.

"THC, in fact, does not involve much respiratory depression."

THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is what delivers cannabiss high. Its one among dozens of cannabinoids present in marijuana that include cannabidiol, or CBD  which is gaining a reputation among medical users for a variety of beneficial effects, including easing anxiety.

Why THC intoxicates is still a work in progress for researchers, Sitar notes. What we do know is it works on our bodys endocannabinoid system.

"As far as I understand right now there is good evidence for two cannabinoid receptors that are affected," he says, adding further research could reveal more.

One receptor called CB1  found in abundance in the brain  is associated with getting high. The other, CB2, has some effect on immune response, among other functions, but it is not thought to elicit psychoactive effects.

Normally these receptors interact with our own "homegrown" cannabinoids called anandamide, a neurotransmitter sometimes referred to as the bliss molecule. It helps regulate mood, memory, motivation, thought processes and appetite. Like anandamide, THC binds to the same receptors  generally for much longer  potentially affecting all these areas.

Effects can vary from person to person, Sitar says, because our neurochemistry is a "complex soup" with many ingredients working together at once.

"All these different neurotransmitters  acetylcholine, anandamide, norepinephrine (adrenaline) and endogenous opioids  interact with each other," he says.

Adding an outside substance can lead to a "variety of possible outcomes."

Thats why one person may find cannabis pleasurable while another feels anxiety. Sitar says a persons mindset, physiology and past experience can affect the outcome.

Also critical is the strain of cannabis ingested  and there are hundreds  with varying THC content.

Generally speaking, the higher percentage of THC in a strain of cannabis, the higher you feel. Thats why cannabis educator Marshall Posner with Manitobas leading licensed producer of medical marijuana, Delta 9 Cannabis, recommends neophytes "start low and go slow."

By low, try a strain "with about 10 to 12 per cent THC," says Delta 9s vice-president of sales and marketing. (The high end for THC content is 20 per cent or more.)

And slow refers to "taking a couple of puffs on a joint." Even better, use a vaporizer that delivers the psychoactive ingredients without combusting plant matter, which can release toxic chemicals. Another tip, he suggests trying a strain with high CBD, which he says helps curb anxiety. Additionally, users are increasingly focused on terpenes, chemicals that make up the odour of cannabis, which are believed to modulate the high from one strain to the next.

Regardless of choice, wait before trying more. Posner says the effects, when smoking, are felt within about five minutes. But it can take 15 minutes or more to feel the effects fully.

When inhaled, the most intense sensations last about an hour  though residual effects can last up to four hours. The high is even more long-lasting when cannabis is ingested. Although edible products are not legal for sale, users can make their own. Cannabis-infused oils can be ingested or added to food.

But dont eat raw cannabis; youre likely not going to get any effect because THC needs to be heated and bonded with a fat so it can pass into your brain, Posner says.

Furthermore, Posner says tread lightly with edibles. Novices often unintentionally over-indulge.

"They dont realize it can take 60 minutes or more before effects begin, so after 30 minutes they say I dont feel anything. Give me another brownie."

Then they have a "bad episode."

Should that occur, dont fret (or try your best not to).

"Keep yourself distracted," he says. Listen to music; watch a movie; take a walk, and eat a snack.

Just dont drive. The rules of thumb regarding how long to wait before driving are still being worked out, Posner says.

"We tell our medical patients not to operate a motor vehicle... four to six hours after smoking... and 10 to 12 hours for edibles."

Occupational health nurse Darcy Hansen, who works with a Lethbridge, Alta., company focused on cognitive-performance drug-testing software for the workplace, says Canadas new impaired driving laws for cannabis are a "can of worms."

The president of Healthyworker.ca explains excess THC is stored in your fat and can get released into the bloodstream over time, especially for frequent users. "So even if youve abstained for a couple of days, good science shows you could still be over (the limit)."

Ready, Pet, Go! Leesa Dahl looks at everything to do with our furry, fuzzy, feathered, fishy (and more!) pet friends. Arrives in your inbox each Monday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

Driving with just two nanograms of THC per millilitre of blood can lead to a $1,000 fine. And more than five ng/ml is a mandatory $1,000 fine and up to 30 days in jail.

A blood-alcohol level of 0.05 per cent, or 2.5 ng/ml is all you need for a $1,000 fine and possible jail time. "This is a huge concern for anyone consuming cannabis," he says.

Sitar says determining intoxication levels for cannabis is likely to be a key focus of research for cannabis in the next several years.

More broadly, he adds, if there is one upside to legalization most can agree on, its that it should lead to better scientific evidence.

"Because the drug has had such a bad reputation put on it by the governing bodies in the world, were only now going to be able to study it in much greater detail," he says. "This is an area should explode in the next decade."

joelschles@gmail.comJason Abbott has been running a small modular furniture company called Oi Furniture in Winnipeg for a few years and has always had a hard time finding the right space to work out of, alternating between working from his home office or conducting meetings with clients at coffee shops.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 27/8/2018 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Jason Abbott has been running a small modular furniture company called Oi Furniture in Winnipeg for a few years and has always had a hard time finding the right space to work out of, alternating between working from his home office or conducting meetings with clients at coffee shops.

He didnt necessarily need a full-time office, and while the co-working concept was exploding elsewhere, there were no real options in Winnipeg.

Thats what inspired him to start Launch Coworking Space 16 months ago in a 5,000-square foot second-floor space in a building on Chevrier Boulevard.

He is now in the process of recruiting tenants for a second location for Launch Coworking Space in the Exchange District on the main floor of a heritage building on Arthur Street, across the road from the Silpit Building, the original Exchange District office building.

"It was after working off the dining room table of my in-laws in Phoenix that I got my first exposure to a collaborative co-working space there called Co+Hoots," he said. "It was a pretty inspiring place to do business."

With about 100 members at his Chevrier location, Abbott has determined there is demand  and hes also learned a thing or two about just what co-working tenants are looking for.

Co-working spaces are becoming so popular in the U.S. that WeWork  the fastest growing player in the sector  is about to become the biggest private office tenant in Manhattan. It has 13 million square feet of space in buildings around the world. (See related story). Regus, the largest and oldest player in the market, has 45 million square feet at 3,000 locations in 900 cities and 120 countries.

Regus, with two locations in Winnipeg at 201 Portage Ave. and 330 St. Mary Ave., is a more traditional institutional space provider. Although office services are shared, its space is not intended to be collaborative.

The fact that the sector is growing does not necessarily make Abbotts job any easier, but he is reasonably confident hell be able to get 15 to 20 commitments for the new space in order to be able to finalize a lease arrangement on the 7,500-sq.-ft. Arthur Street space that includes a 1,500-sq.-ft. event centre, big enough to host 100 people.

"This is a good next step for us," he said. "The early indication is very promising."

Even though all he has now is empty, undeveloped space with some artists renderings of how the space might look, he has six people committed after one open house. The renovations will likely cost close to $1 million, so hes looking to get as much certainty as possible that the location will be busy before he finalizes the lease.

Launch Coworking Space offers 24-7 access, high-speed internet, coffee, tea, water, beer on tap, "and a pleasant, predictable environment," he said.

Mobile software lets Abbott manage the space, and lets members book the space they need from their phones, allowing for lots of flexibility.

Carly Schuler is a very happy tenant at the Chevrier location. Schuler and two colleagues are developing an online tutoring service for kids learning to read, called Hoot Reading.

"We love it," she said. "Its great to interact with others. We even found an ad agency who was a co-tenant who we are now working with."

For some, that kind of collaborative environment is what attracts them to the space.

"Its super beneficial for us to get the team together a couple of times a week. And were a marketing company, so I make sure to introduce myself to everyone around. Its a perfect fit for us," said Blaise Lepine, who operates a digital marketing company called Tag Marketing out of the Chevrier location.

Among other things Abbott is tweaking in his new location is including at least a handful of private offices, something that he did not build into his first location. The largest type of tenants among his current membership are sole proprietors, and he regularly fields calls from prospective members searching for a private office.

In addition to Regus, there are some other co-working spaces in the city  all in the Exchange District  but they are more aligned with existing organizations. North Forge Technology Exchange operates its own space that includes all kinds of business support services. The Arts And Cultural Industries Association of Manitoba has a space for its members, and Space2work has created modern, upscale offices in a loft environment.

James Warren, a partner with DueNorth Systems, currently works out of the Ace Project Space, a partnership between Red River College and North Forge. DueNorth, an education technology company, will soon wind up its association with Ace Project and will need to find other location.

He figures the North Forge space wont be appropriate for DueNorth because they are not looking for the kind of support North Forge builds into its fee structure. Warren said he has checked out the Regus space but found it too institutional and pricey.

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"This looks like it could be an affordable alternative," Warren said. "This is casual. It will also allow the kind of social collaboration that we like in the tech field. Its great to be able to talk to other entrepreneurs to see what theyre doing. You never know where the next idea will come from."

Abbott is already thinking about the possibility of opening up additional locations, maybe even a couple outside the city.

Brian Griffith, a member of Launch Coworking Space and a part-time web designer, is a strong advocate for co-working spaces and is in the process of launching a website called WinnipegCoworking.ca.

"Winnipeg tends to be a little behind the curve," he said. "The idea of collaborative communities and space where people can come together and share ideas and intersect in ways where they can see what others are doing and bounce ideas off each other was not really happening 15 years ago.

"Winnipeg has a lot going for it, and I think once we get there we really go for it."

martin.cash@freepress.mb.caKnow of any newsworthy or interesting trends or developments in the local office, retail, industrial or multi-family residential sectors? Let us know at business@freepress.mb.caThe technology company Three Square Market made headlines last year for implanting microchips in the arms of nearly 100 employees, allowing them to open doors, log on to their computers and purchase snacks from company vending machines with a simple swipe of their arm.

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This article was published 27/8/2018 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The technology company Three Square Market made headlines last year for implanting microchips in the arms of nearly 100 employees, allowing them to open doors, log on to their computers and purchase snacks from company vending machines with a simple swipe of their arm.

The chips were initially little more than an innovative novelty, but now the Wisconsin-based firm  which designs software for vending machines  has a more ambitious plan, according to chief executive Todd Westby. During an appearance on CNBC, Westby said his company is working on a more sophisticated microchip that is powered by human body heat and includes GPS tracking capabilities and voice activation.

Microchips with GPS tracking may strike some as the first step toward handing our autonomy over to Skynet-like government overlords and Three Square Market officials admit that the chips will offer a convenient way to track people  especially those suffering from Alzheimers and dementia.

Patrick McMullan, president of Three Square Market and chip technology business Three Square Chip told CNBC the goal is a "worthy cause."

"Its not only GPS, its not only voice activation, its working on monitoring your vital signs," McMullan said. "And there are different medical institutions that obviously want that."

Proponents of medical microchips point out that the devices could contain someones entire medical history. If a patient was unconscious or suffered from memory loss, for example, those records could prove invaluable for emergency room doctors who might be unfamiliar with the persons prescribed medications or history of illness.

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Critics say the practice raises serious privacy concerns, especially when considering who would be responsible for the mountains of personal data that microchips are capable of producing about an individuals movement, behaviours and health.

Westby told CNBC that 92 out of 196 of the companys employees have accepted chips and only one person has had the rice-sized device removed.

Noelle Chesley, 49, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told USA Today that he believes microchipped humans are an inevitability, but not for several decades. Some experts believe it will take that long for the stigma associated with the practice to wear off.

"It will happen to everybody," Chesley said.

"But not this year, and not in 2018. Maybe not my generation, but certainly that of my kids."

 Washington PostOn the screen, the 11-year-old Xavier sat in a swing, gripping its chains, his legs pumping against a dark sky. Dressed in a white T-shirt and gray joggers, he swung back and forth, gaining momentum until his black sneakers flipped over his head. He let go of the swing and tucked his legs underneath. He landed on his feet, his palms touching the ground for just a second as he stumbled forward. But he didn't fall.They can unload the dishwasher, deliver packages to your home and open doors. And they use their thin metallic legs to traverse stairs  or crawl straight into your worst nightmares.

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This article was published 27/8/2018 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They can unload the dishwasher, deliver packages to your home and open doors. And they use their thin metallic legs to traverse stairs  or crawl straight into your worst nightmares.

Now Boston Dynamicss awkward, four-legged, dog-like robot, SpotMini, is evolving from a viral YouTube sensation to a purchasable pet of sorts, according to the companys founder, Marc Raibert.

Raibert told an audience recently at the CeBIT computer expo in Hanover, Germany, that his company is already testing SpotMini with potential customers from four separate industries: security, delivery, construction and home assistance. Raibert also predicted that his companys robots could someday be used for "warehouse logistics" or even to clean up dangerous environments such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster site, where human workers are at risk.

"This robot will be available next year," he said, referring to SpotMini. "Weve built 10 by hand, were building 100 with manufacturers at the end of this year, and in the middle of 2019, were going to begin production at the rate of about 1,000 a year."

Raibert did not reveal how much the SpotMini will cost and Boston Dynamics did not respond to a request for comment.

The robotics company says the 66-pound machine is two feet, nine inches (almost one metre) tall and remains the quietest robot the company has ever built. Its electric, has 17 joints and can run for 90 minutes on a single charge. The machine  which can haul a 30-pound payload  relies on a variety of sensors to navigate the outside world and has the ability to handle objects using an arm that vaguely resembles an ostrichs neck.

Boston Dynamics says SpotMini performs some tasks autonomously, such as navigating a previously mapped warehouse, but relies on its human owners for "high-level guidance."

"We designed this robot to be small enough so that it could fit inside of an office or a factory or a warehouse, or even someday a home," Raibert said.

A larger version of the robot  known as Spot  has captivated YouTube viewers in videos showing the machine running at fairly high speeds and regaining its balance after sustaining a humans kick. Some viewers appear to find the companys robot videos inspiring, but others consider them a terrifying, apocalyptic warning about the rise of intelligent machines.

In May, Boston Dynamics posted a 34-second clip on YouTube of its boxy humanoid robot, Atlas, going for a jog in a grassy residential area on what appears to be a bright spring day.

Combined, both videos generated more than 48 million views.

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Siddhartha S. Srinivasa  a professor of robotics at University of Washingtons Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering  said Boston Dynamics is conquering new robotics territory and creating machines that show "great potential."

Srinivasa said he can foresee a robot like SpotMini being used to traverse a rugged construction site or working as a nimble caretaker for the elderly, performing all of the functions weve come to expect from service dogs. What makes a robot like SpotMini so special, he said, is that its capable of moving across landscapes that remain off-limits for wheeled robots.

For most robots, he noted, even navigating a home full of dirty clothes piles and childrens toys remains impossible.

"These robots from Boston Dynamics are incredibly rugged and robust, which makes them capable of addressing the clutter and uncertainty of our chaotic human world," Srinivasa said.

"Some people watching the robot on video find their capabilities scarily anthropomorphic and human-like, but to me it shows that there is a robot I can have in my home that will not break things or harm people."

 Washington PostA multi-industry association that promotes an alternative to the lowest-cost contract award process says few candidates in the upcoming civic election appear interested in a process thats been recognized to save tax dollars with better-built infrastructure.

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This article was published 27/8/2018 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A multi-industry association that promotes an alternative to the lowest-cost contract award process says few candidates in the upcoming civic election appear interested in a process thats been recognized to save tax dollars with better-built infrastructure.

QBS Canada says city hall uses a hiring process that favours low bidders over more qualified bidders, which it claims studies show ultimately results in higher costs and lower quality.

The group says the qualifications-based selection (QBS) process is considered a best practice by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities when hiring architects and engineers and doesnt understand why politicians and the administration at city hall have not adopted it for infrastructure projects.

"People often think this is an excuse to allow engineers and architects to charge whatever they want but its absolutely not," said Cal Harrison, president of the Winnipeg-based QBS Canada. "Even if theyre selected as the most qualified, they still have to negotiate a fair price. The idea is that instead of getting the least-qualified vendor at the lowest price, get the most qualified vendor you can afford at a fair price."

QBS Canada, founded by Harrison in 2015, is a coalition of associations, companies, and professionals advocating for the use of qualification-based selection (QBS) when hiring professional services firms in Canada.

Harrison said that while hes met with Mayor Brian Bowman and his staff and the citys procurement officials, its appropriate to raise the issue now.

"Election time is when politicians really have to listen to you," he said. "Now we can get the discussion going and I think thats important."

The City of Winnipegs policy for most infrastructure projects is to issue whats known as a request for proposals, a document that outlines the project and invites firms to submit their qualifications, their plans to complete the project according to the citys specifications and the price.

The city assigns each component of the submission a weight in the assessment process, with weight assigned to price varying anywhere from a low of 10 per cent to a high of 40. But, its generally assumed that all things being equal, the lowest price carries the day.

Harrison compared the procurement process to hiring employees.

"When you hire a staff architect for example do you select the cheapest one? Of course not  you tell candidates heres the salary we can afford to pay, if you are interested, tell us why you are the best candidate. And then after reviewing resumes and doing interviews, you find the best candidate and you negotiate final terms and salary with only that one. So why do we demand low-bids from architects, engineers and construction-management experts when we hire them as contractors? Winnipeg is a progressive city, so its kind of embarrassing to be so far behind the rest of the world on this best practice. Especially since it costs nothing to start using QBS."

Harrison said the QBS is similar to the RFP, except it doesn't require bidders to include a price, adding that speeds up the process.

A civic spokesman said Harrison and supporters of the QBS process wrongly assume that all government agencies award contracts based on price alone.

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"The city uses a weighted evaluation criteria of which price is only one of the criteria, ranging from 10 per cent to 40 per cent, of the available points," said David Driedger, the citys manager of communication, adding that the majority of the assessment is based on the qualifications.

Driedger said city hall is investigating the qualification-based standards.

The QBS proposal is supported by the Manitoba Heavy Construction Association. Chris Lorenc, the association president, said a qualifications-based process can be quicker than the typical RFP approach, adding thats critical in Manitoba where municipalities and the provincial government dont have the luxury of year-round warm weather for construction, explaining that engineering contracts need to be awarded as quickly as possible to beat the onslaught of winter.

Lorenc said the MHCA favours using the QBS process for contracts valued at $750,000 or less, projects he said that are considered more routine and where the citys procurement officials are aware of the expertise of the bidders. He said that for more complex, more expensive projects, the city should rely on the traditional RFP approach.

Harrison said the QBS approach has been labelled a best practice by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities for more than 10 years, and has been the approach used by the United States federal government since 1972.

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.caThe scent of burning sage is supposed to draw in people and evoke a sense of peace, like incense in a church.

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This article was published 27/8/2018 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The scent of burning sage is supposed to draw in people and evoke a sense of peace, like incense in a church.

Sundays Smudge the Streets saw organizers and their friends and family walk along Sherbrook Street with the smoke from tightly wrapped balls of wild sage catching the air along a 20-minute route that skirted the Health Sciences Centre. They sang ancient Ojibwa healing songs and invited the curious to join them.

It was a public gesture to create sacred space on some of the citys meanest streets. When you walk here, you tread carefully  the Bear Clan safety patrol picks up used needles on nightly patrols.

At the corner of Sargent Avenue and Sherbrook Street, when a man saw the traffic blocked by a police escort, the bright yellow vests of the Bear Clan and smelled the smoke he asked, "Whats going on?"

"A medicine walk. Because of meth," a woman told him. It turned out the man was a known dealer.

'The main thing is this is about hope and community healing'  Kevin Settee, who organized the Smudge the Streets event

Half a block later, another very thin man emerged from a tough-looking three-storey apartment block with the same question.

"Oh, good," he said. "We need it... Everyone in there is a user," he said, gesturing to the apartment block behind him. He knew because hes used, too, he said.

Hosted by Red Rising Magazine, an online Indigenous magazine based in Winnipeg, the 2018 medicine walk was held in the West End this year to raise awareness around the citys methamphetamine crisis.

"Smudging for us is like a way of cleansing the mind, body and spirit, so the idea with smudging the streets is we know a lot of thing are going on, happening in our neighbourhood, like substance abuse, and we want our community to come together and smudge and bring positive energy into our community," said Kevin Settee, a co-founder of Red Rising.

Its not the first medicine walk in Winnipeg. Settee said meth users downtown near Thunderbird House five years ago smelled the smoke, heard the songs and joined the march, evoking a sense of community despite being homeless, despite being addicted.

"This definitely has to do with the meth crisis," Settee said. A young man in his 20s, he helped set the solemn tone a few minutes later by sitting on the ground with his pipe, lighting it and offering it to the four directions and to the earth in a symbolic gesture of unity. His mother did the same with her pipe.

TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Smudge the Streets, a walk to smudge out meth, heads up Sherbrook Street on Sunday.

"A lot of us have family who are affected by this and this is a way we can support each other to find a solution. Its not easy, he said.

By coincidence, supporters gathered for the walk in a small park, across the street from the Safeway at the corner of Sargent Avenue and Sherbrook Street, where last month police hosted a public rally to draw attention to the meth crisis in Winnipeg.

Annual crime statistics released last month for 2017 painted a grim picture of the havoc wreaked by meth. Violent property and drug crimes have spiked, meth is more accessible, it is higher in purity and lower in price, and pipelines are sweeping the addictive brain killer from the city to rural Manitoba First Nations and into Ontario.

The impact is imprinted in rising rates of violence and crime. Last year, violent crime in Winnipeg alone jumped seven per cent over the previous year.

Statistics Canada data this summer also showed Manitoba has the highest provincial per capita homicide rate in the county and Winnipeg the highest police reported violent crime severity index of any other Canadian city.

"I live in St. Andrews," said one woman, who was among those who offered to speak before the pipes were lit. "A lot of the time Im driving through different parts of the city and I cant stop. So when this opportunity came up I wanted to come out and spend time with people and be part of something bigger than myself."

Glen Moar, whose Ojibwa roots go back to Berens River First Nation, said hes only recently found his way back to his culture. He said he came because his non-Indigenous wife is a strong supporter of traditional Indigenous healing practices.

His wife, Marietta Domokos, was called on to help conduct a traditional water ceremony, where drinking water in a copper cup is blessed and everyone is offered a sip, in this case from little paper cups that were handed out to 50 people who took part in the walk.

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They then accepted little tin foil pie bowls with balls of sage they took from a box in a shopping cart and walked onto Sherbrook Street so the smoke could waft past Ellice, Sargent and Notre Dame avenues.

The event wrapped around the west end and ended with a community feast at the Spence Neighbourhood Associations Magnus Eliason Recreation Centre on Langside.

"I believe its important for everybody to support the Indigenous people. They are the people of this land and theyve been discriminated against for such a long time... but Ive learned what community means through them," Domokos said before she was offered the honour of presenting the water.

The smoke was an invitation, both for the victims of meth and the people they abuse to get it.

"The main thing is this is about hope and community healing," Settee said.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.caThis past week in Halifax, the Conservative Party of Canada and its amiable leader Andrew Scheer gathered for its annual policy convention. When it was over, most agreed it was a raucous, thrill-ride of a gathering. Perhaps too much so.

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This article was published 27/8/2018 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

ANDREW VAUGHAN / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES Conservative Party of Canada leader Andrew Scheer delivers remarks at the party's national policy convention in Halifax on Friday, Aug. 24, 2018.

This past week in Halifax, the Conservative Party of Canada and its amiable leader Andrew Scheer gathered for its annual policy convention. When it was over, most agreed it was a raucous, thrill-ride of a gathering. Perhaps too much so.

Party members debated and voted on many controversial resolutions. This included a decision to adopt a policy to end so-called "maternity tourism," a practice whereby foreign nationals come to Canada with the expressed purpose of giving birth and gaining immediate Canadian citizenship for their babies.

Tories also narrowly defeated a motion that would have theoretically allowed a future Conservative government to introduce anti-abortion legislation, while supporting a motion that mirrored one of U.S. President Donald Trumps executive orders, which was to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Thats all pretty prickly stuff and despite vigorous debate, it seemed there were more unhappy than happy campers at the end of the convention.

When party officials confirmed they would not allow a debate on a motion to end supply management for agricultural commodities, The Canadian Press reported that some of the rank and file demonstrated their disgust by tearing up their membership cards.

Ah, but maternity tourism, abortion, Jerusalem and supply management were only the undercard fights at the Tory convention. The main bout involved MP Maxime Bernier going up against the entire Conservative Party establishment.

After a week in which he posted controversial comments about the evil of diversity and multiculturalism, and suggested that immigration was already too high for Canadas own good, Bernier capped it all off with a resignation from the Conservatives and a threat to form his own party.

The Bernier departure, and the general tone of the policy debate in Halifax, leave the Conservatives in a rather tenuous position. Now, more than ever before, the Tories look like a party that is not entirely sure what it stands for. The timing for this crisis of identity could not have come at a worse time.

With just over a year to go before a federal election must be called, Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus Liberal government finds itself very nearly tied in popular support with Scheers Conservatives.

With an election a year away, it would be a great time for any party with designs to de-throne the Trudeau government to fashion a concise, impactful brand that could not only retain the support of diehard members but expand the base of support.

Thats not exactly what the Tories are doing.

Efforts to shake off the stench of its 2015 campaign  which saw former prime minister Stephen Harper desperately embrace the demon that is identity politics  and adopt more moderate positions now seem in peril. And while many Tories will dismiss Bernier as an offensive fool, he has something that his now former party does not: a clearly defined brand with potential to grow.

Abacus Data released new poll results on August 26 that included "the Bernier Party" as a possible option for decided voters. The theoretical impact is fascinating.

Prior to Berniers resignation, Abacus had voter intentions pegged at 38 per cent for the Liberals, 34 per cent for the Conservatives and 18 per cent for the NDP. When Abacus added Bernier to the mix, all parties lost a bit of support, but the Liberals were able to extend their lead by losing fewer voters.

In a poll that included the still-theoretical Bernier Party, the Liberals received the support of 34 per cent of respondents, the Tories got 28 per cent, the NDP 16 per cent and Bernier brought up the rear with a remakable 13 per cent support.

There are big "ifs" built into the Abacus data. But given that he would steal more support from the Conservatives than any other party, Bernier is poised to fill the role of spoiler for Scheers ambitions next fall.

Scheers rough ride in Halifax, and long, hard winter of fencing he can look forward to with Bernier, confirm a long-standing precept of electoral politics: before you can lead a country, you need to learn how to lead your own party.

As Scheer is demonstrating, thats much easier said than done.

Thanks to Bernier and a host of other factors, Scheer now finds himself desperately searching for stable ground from which he can build a campaign that will take his party into next years federal election.

On the one side, Scheer faces the expectations of moderates within the Tory ranks who realize a centrist pitch with a tinge of fiscal conservatism allows the Conservative Party to compete evenly with the governing Liberals.

On the other, he faces party members who, like Bernier, are determined to embrace policies that lean more to the extreme end of the political spectrum.

That will play directly into Trudeaus intention to revive his 2015 campaign strategy and paint the Tories as dangerous social conservatives.

As an example, lets look at the issue of Canadas supply management system. Notwithstanding the reaction by card-tearing party members, the decision to put off debate on a resolution to end supply management only acknowleges the fact that it is not a perch from which to fight an election.

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Nanos Research reported earlier this month that 80 per cent of Canadians either strongly or somewhat support politicians that want to protect supply management.

The rogue Tory elements can rage all they want about Scheers decision to leave this issue off the policy agenda in Halifax, but he is only responding to a political reality.

The history of conservative politics in this country has always featured a desperate, internal fight between moderate and more extreme elements. Tory leaders who have been able to harness the extreme elements, like Diefenbaker and Mulroney, enjoyed historic levels of voter support.

Those who could not either left to form their own parties or descended into infighting, thereby creating an easy path for the Liberals to form government.

Scheers greatest failure in Halifax was that he has not clearly demonstrated that do what good leaders must always do: forge a compromise that will get moderates and extremists on the same page. Until he can do that, he will be no match for the Liberals.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.caWere finally having a public debate about the big internet platforms policing content and suspending accounts. But its a serious mistake to frame the debate about content moderation around right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Joness Infowars, and not around the thousands of other moderation decisions that have been made by such online giants as Apple, Facebook, Google-owned YouTube and Spotify.

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This article was published 27/8/2018 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Were finally having a public debate about the big internet platforms policing content and suspending accounts. But its a serious mistake to frame the debate about content moderation around right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Joness Infowars, and not around the thousands of other moderation decisions that have been made by such online giants as Apple, Facebook, Google-owned YouTube and Spotify.

Internet companies have removed millions of posts and images over the past decade and suspended hundreds, perhaps thousands, of user accounts. These silenced voices span the political spectrum and the globe: Moroccan atheists, women discussing online harassment, ads featuring crucifixes, black and Muslim activists reposting racist messages they received, trans models, drag performers, Indigenous women, childbirth images and photos of breastfeeding. Platforms have taken down documentation of war crimes in Syria, Myanmar and Kashmir, arrests in North Dakota and police brutality across the United States.

We should be extremely careful before rushing to embrace an internet that is moderated by a few private companies by default, one where the platforms that control so much public discourse routinely remove posts and deactivate accounts because of objections to the content. Once systems like content moderation become the norm, those in power inevitably exploit them.

Time and time again, platforms have capitulated to censorship demands from authoritarian regimes, and powerful actors have manipulated flagging procedures to effectively censor their political opponents. Given this practical reality, and the sad history of political censorship in the United States, lets not cheer one decision that we might agree with.

Even beyond content moderations vulnerability to censorship, the moderating process itself, whether undertaken by humans or, increasingly, by software using machine-learning algorithms, is extremely difficult. Awful mistakes are commonplace, and rules are applied unevenly. Company executives regularly reshape their rules in response to governmental and other pressure, and they do so without significant input from the public. Ambiguous "community standards" result in the removal of some content deemed to have violated the rules, while content that seems equally offensive is OK.

Moderation systems operate in secret, with no public accountability. Were pretty sure we know why Infowars was suspended, but in many cases the decisions are far more opaque. And unlike Jones, few of the others have powerful multimedia operations with an audience in the millions that will simply move to using an app when other venues become unavailable, as is happening with Infowars.

Facebook, Twitter, Apple and other companies routinely silence voices in marginalized communities around the world that struggle to be heard in the first place, replicating their offline repression.

The palpable public momentum for private companies to do something to more actively moderate the content that appears on their sites is worrisome. And its worrisome even though I share the concerns  about disinformation, extremism, harassment  motivating it.

We must also not lose sight of the fact that while the dominant social media platforms are largely based in the United States, the majority of their users are based outside the country, and the policies the platforms adopt in the U.S. have outsize influence elsewhere. If content moderation is here to stay, existing human-rights standards provide a framework for policies that companies could and should voluntarily implement to protect their users.

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There have been several worthy efforts to articulate a human-rights framing for content moderation. One framework, which the organization where I work, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, played a part in formulating, is found in the Santa Clara Principles. These principles advance three key goals: numbers (companies should publish the number of posts removed and accounts suspended); notice (companies should provide notice and an explanation to each user whose content is removed); and appeal (companies should provide a meaningful opportunity for timely appeal of any content removal or account suspension).

David Kaye, the special rapporteur for the United Nations on the promotion and protection of the right to free expression, recommended in a recent report that private companies  and governments  should as a routine matter consider the impact that content moderation policies have on human rights. He recommends that governments not pressure private companies to implement policies that interfere with peoples right to free expression online.

The power that these platforms have over the online public sphere should worry all of us, no matter whether we agree or disagree with a given content decision. A decision by any one of them has a huge effect. Even worse, if other companies move in lockstep, a speaker may effectively be forced offline.

Transparency in these companies content-moderation decisions is essential. We must demand that they apply their rules consistently and provide clear, accessible avenues for meaningful appeal.

David Greene is the civil liberties director and senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

 Washington PostThe Roman Catholic Church has almost 1.3 billion members and is one of the oldest religious institutions in the world. It goes by many names, including the People of God, the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit.

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This article was published 27/8/2018 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Editorial

The Roman Catholic Church has almost 1.3 billion members and is one of the oldest religious institutions in the world. It goes by many names, including the People of God, the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit.

Catholics have deeply influenced western philosophy, culture, science and art. These days, however, the Catholic Church is being defined by something else: sex abuse.

A two-year grand jury investigation into six dioceses in Pennsylvania culminated with the Aug. 14 release of a report that over 300 "predator priests" had used their positions to commit abuses against more than 1,000 victims since 1947. In the week following the reports publication, more than 500 new reports came to light.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro called it a "weaponization of faith." The report condemned the culture of silence and secrecy among Catholic Church officials who not only ignored evidence, but covered it up. Some even supported offenders.

As the report stated, "Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing, they hid it all. For decades. Monsignors, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops, cardinals have mostly been protected; many, including some named in this report, have been promoted."

The worst outcome of the report, however, is that all of the bishops and most of the priests named will not be criminally charged, mostly due to statutes of limitations.

While officials knew the report was a bombshell, the Catholic Church was slow to respond; after its release, it took 48 hours for the Vatican to comment. The Pope, after being silent for days and facing massive pressure, last Monday released a letter to Catholics across the world.

In the open letter, Pope Francis admits "with shame and repentance" that officials "did not act in a timely manner."

"We showed no care for the little ones," the Pope wrote. "We abandoned them."

While the Pope noted that reports of abuse "require us forcefully to condemn these atrocities and join forces in uprooting this culture of death," the letter does not propose specific actions or sanctions, promising instead a "zero tolerance" policy in the future.

And herein lies the problem with the Catholic Church. Where does one begin?

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In 2002, the Boston Globe released a report showing that the archdiocese of Boston had quietly settled child molestation claims against at least 70 priests. In 2009, the Irish government released a report on the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin. The report identified nearly 500 accounts of sexual abuse and an extensive coverup throughout all levels of leadership. One priest admitted to more than 100 cases of abuse.

There are staggering reports of heinous acts  mostly against children  in Australia, Chile, the United States, across Europe and here in Canada. Among the worst are the thousands of cases of sexual abuse in residential schools run by the church.

Arguably, the process that led to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began when abuse by Catholics came to light.

To date, the Pope has declined to apologize to Canadas residential school survivors.

There is a serious problem in the Catholic Church, and sexual abuse is at the heart of it. Whether this is due to the faiths stringent positions on sexuality, historical quests for power or massive institutional problems doesnt matter anymore. The fact is that a significant number of members of the Catholic Church prey on the marginalized, and Catholic leaders dont seem to be doing much about it.

So now, the question becomes how everyday Catholics reconcile this with their attendance, donations and faith.Porod said she watched the news to see if anyone she knew had died or been hurt. On Monday, a grandparent of two students informed officials at the West Lawn school that they were related to the children who died in the fire. The thing is, you dont realize how we are connected until tragedy strikes, Porod said.Macedo allegedly pulled up next to the 62-year-old man, who was inside his car, and told him to hand over all his money, according to police. The older man said he didnt have any money on him, and around 12:40 p.m., Macedo allegedly took out a gun and fired multiple shots, police said.WiGBits Headline News Would you like to receive our WiGBits? Signup today!

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Digital Issue Would you like to receive our Digital Issue? Signup today!State lawmakers could try to override Rauners veto when they go back to Springfield after the November election, but it could be difficult. Supporters would have to find six more supporters of the minimum teacher salary bill than voted for it back in May.The following companies are subsidiares of Kellogg: 545 LLC, AQFTM Inc., Afical - Industria e Comercio de Alimentos Ltda, Afical Holding LLC, Alimentos Gollek S.A., Alimentos Kellogg S.A., Alimentos Kellogg de Panama SRL, Argkel Inc., Austin Quality Foods Inc., BDH Inc., Bear Naked Inc., Bisco Misr, CC Real Estate Holdings LLC, Canada Holding LLC, Cary Land Corporation, Eighteen94 Capital LLC, Favorite Food Products Limited, Gardenburger LLC, Gollek Argentina S.R.L., Gollek B.V., Gollek Inc., Gollek Interamericas S. de R.L. de C.V., Gollek Servicios S.C., Gollek UK Limited, Illinois Baking Corporation, Instituto De Nutricion y Salud Kellogg A.C., Insurgent Brands LLC, K (China) Limited, K Europe Holding Company Limited, K India Private Limited, K-One Inc., K-Two Inc., KBAR SRL, KECL LLC, KELF Limited, KJAL Limited, KPAR Limited, KT International Finance SRL, KTRY Limited, Kashi Company, Kashi Company Pty Ltd, Kashi Sales L.L.C., Keebler Company, Keebler Foods Company, Keebler Holding Corp., Keebler USA Inc., Kelarg Inc., Kelcone Limited, Kelcorn Limited, Kellman S. de R.L. de C.V., Kellogg (Aust.) Pty. Ltd., Kellogg (Deutschland) GmbH, Kellogg (Japan) G.K., Kellogg (Osterreich) Gesellschaft GmbH, Kellogg (Schweiz) GmbH, Kellogg (Thailand) Limited, Kellogg Activation Services Company, Kellogg Argentina S.R.L., Kellogg Asia Inc., Kellogg Asia Marketing Inc., Kellogg Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Kellogg Asia Products Sdn.. Bhd., Kellogg Asia Sdn. Bhd., Kellogg Australia Holdings Pty. Ltd., Kellogg Belgium Services Company BVBA, Kellogg Brasil Inc., Kellogg Brasil Ltda., Kellogg Business Services Company, Kellogg Canada Inc., Kellogg Caribbean Inc., Kellogg Caribbean Services Company Inc., Kellogg Chile Inc., Kellogg Company East Africa Limited, Kellogg Company Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Kellogg Company Subsidiaries, Kellogg Company of Great Britain Limited, Kellogg Company of Ireland Limited, Kellogg Company of South Africa (Pty.) Ltd., Kellogg Costa Rica S. de R.L., Kellogg Ecuador C. LTDA., Kellogg El Salvador Ltda. de C.V., Kellogg Espana S.L., Kellogg Europe Company Limited, Kellogg Europe Finance Limited, Kellogg Europe Services Limited, Kellogg Europe Trading Limited, Kellogg Europe Treasury Services Limited, Kellogg European Logistics Services Company Limited, Kellogg European Support Services SRL, Kellogg Fearn Inc., Kellogg Funding Company LLC, Kellogg Group LLC, Kellogg Group Limited, Kellogg Group S.a.r.l., Kellogg Hellas Single Member Limited Liability Company, Kellogg Holding Company Limited, Kellogg Holding LLC, Kellogg Hong Kong Holding Company Limited, Kellogg Hong Kong Private Limited, Kellogg India Private Limited, Kellogg International Holding Company, Kellogg Irish Holding Limited, Kellogg Italia S.p.A., Kellogg Kayco, Kellogg Latin America Holding Company (One) Limited, Kellogg Latin America Holding Company (Two) Limited, Kellogg Latvia Inc., Kellogg Lux I S.ar.l., Kellogg Lux III S. ar L., Kellogg Lux V S.a.r.l., Kellogg Lux VI S.ar.l., Kellogg Management Services (Europe) Limited, Kellogg Manchester Limited, Kellogg Manufacturing Espana S.L., Kellogg Marketing and Sales Company (UK) Limited, Kellogg Med Gida Ticaret Limited SirketiI, Kellogg Netherlands Holding B.V., Kellogg North America Company, Kellogg Northern Europe GmbH, Kellogg Pakistan (Private) Limted, Kellogg Rus LLC, Kellogg Sales Company, Kellogg Services GmbH, Kellogg Servicios S.C., Kellogg Snacks Financing Limited, Kellogg Snacks Holding Company Europe Limited, Kellogg Superannuation Pty. Ltd., Kellogg Supply Services (Europe) Limited, Kellogg Talbot LLC, Kellogg Transition MA&P L.L.C., Kellogg Treasury Services Company, Kellogg U.K. Holding Company Limited, Kellogg UK Minor Limited, Kellogg USA LLC, Kellogg de Centro America S.A., Kellogg de Colombia S.A., Kellogg de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Kellogg de Peru S.R.L., Kellogg's Produits Alimentaires S.A.S., Kelmill Limited, Kelpac Limited, Klux A Sarl, Klux B Sarl, Mass Food, Mass Food International SAE, Mass Food SAE, Mass Trade for Trade and Distribution SAE, McCamly Plaza Hotel Inc., Multipro Consumer Products Limited*, Multipro Private Limited*, Multipro Singapore Pte. Ltd*, Nhong Shim Kellogg Co. Ltd.*, Nikko Industries*, Nordisk Kellogg's ApS, PRUX S.a r.l., Padua Ltda, Parati Group, Parati Industria e Comercio de Alimentos Ltda, Portable Foods Manufacturing Company Limited, Prime Bond Cyprus Holding Company Limited, Prime Bond Holdings Limited, Pringles, Pringles (Shanghai) Food Co. Ltd., Pringles Australia Pty Ltd, Pringles Hong Kong Limited, Pringles International Operations Sarl, Pringles Japan G.K., Pringles LLC, Pringles Manufacturing Company, Pringles Overseas Holdings Sarl, Pringles S.a r.l., Pronumex S de R.L. de C.V., RX Bar UK Limited, RXBRANDS Canada ULC, Ritmo Investimentos, Rondo Food Manufacturing S.A.E., RxBar, Saragusa Frozen Foods Limited, Servicios Argkel S.C., Shaffer Clarke & Co. Inc., Specialty Cereals Pty Limited, Specialty Foods L.L.C., Stretch Fibres*, Stretch Island Fruit Sales L.L.C., Sunshine Biscuits L.L.C., The Eggo Company, The Healthy Snack People Pty Limited, Trafford Park Insurance Limited, Uma Investments sp. z o.o., Vita+ Naturprodukte GmbH*, Wimble Manufacturing Belgium BVBA, Wimble Services Belgium BVBA, and Worthington Foods Inc..Suncor Energy Inc. operates as an integrated energy company. The company primarily focuses on developing petroleum resource basins in Canada's Athabasca oil sands; explores, acquires, develops, produces, transports, refines, and markets crude oil in Canada and internationally; markets petroleum and petrochemical products under the Petro-Canada name primarily in Canada. It operates in Oil Sands; Exploration and Production; Refining and Marketing; and Corporate and Eliminations segments. The Oil Sands segment recovers bitumen from mining and in situ operations, and upgrades it into refinery feedstock and diesel fuel, or blends the bitumen with diluent for direct sale to market. The Exploration and Production segment is involved in offshore operations off the east coast of Canada and in the North Sea; and operating onshore assets in Libya and Syria. The Refining and Marketing segment refines crude oil and intermediate feedstock into various petroleum and petrochemical products; and markets refined petroleum products to retail, commercial, and industrial customers through its other retail sellers. The Corporate and Eliminations segment operates four wind farm operations in Ontario and Western Canada. The company also markets and trades in crude oil, natural gas, byproducts, refined products, and power. The company was formerly known as Suncor Inc. and changed its name to Suncor Energy Inc. in April 1997. Suncor Energy Inc. was founded in 1917 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.

Read MoreTelefAnica Brasil S.A., together with its subsidiaries, provides mobile and fixed telecommunications services to residential and corporate customers in Brazil. Its fixed line services portfolio includes local, domestic long-distance, and international long-distance calls; and mobile portfolio comprises voice and broadband internet access through 3G, 4G, and 4.5G, as well as mobile value-added services and wireless roaming services. The company also offers data services, including broadband and mobile data services. In addition, it provides pay TV services through direct to home satellite technology, IPTV, and cable, as well as pay-per-view and video on demand services; network services, such as rental of facilities; other services comprising internet access, private network connectivity, computer equipment leasing, extended service, caller identification, voice mail, cellular blocker, and others; wholesale services, including interconnection services to users of other network providers; and digital services, such as entertainment, cloud, and security and financial services, as well as sells wireless devices and accessories. Further, the company offers multimedia communication services, which include audio, data, voice and other sounds, images, texts, and other information, as well as sells devices, such as smartphones, broadband USB modems, and other devices. Additionally, it provides telecommunications solutions and IT support to various industries, such as retail, manufacturing, services, financial institutions, government, etc. It markets and sells its solutions through own stores, dealers, retail and distribution channels, door-to-door sales, and telesales. The company was formerly known as TelecomunicaAAes de SAo Paulo S.A. - TELESP and changed its name to TelefAnica Brasil S.A. in October 2011. The company was incorporated in 1998 and is headquartered in SAo Paulo, Brazil.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of ABB: A88 for Electrical Industries (ABB ARAB) S.A.E., AABB Business Services Sp. z o.o., ABB (China) Investment Limited, ABB (China) Ltd., ABB 0y, ABB A/S, ABB AB, ABB AG, ABB AS, ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd, ABB Australia Pty Limited, ABB Automacao Ltda., ABB Automation GmbH, ABB Automation Products GmbH, ABB B.V., ABB Beijing Drive Systems Co. Ltd., ABB Beijing Switchgear Limited, ABB Beteiligungs- und Verwaltungsges. MbH, ABB Bulgaria EOOD, ABB Canada EL Holding GmbH, ABB Capital AG, ABB Electrical Control Systems S. de R.L. de C.V., ABB Electrical Industries Co. Ltd., ABB Electrical Machines Ltd., ABB Electrification Canada ULC, ABB Electrification Norway AS, ABB Elektrik Sanayi A.S., ABB Eletrificacao Ltda., ABB Engineering (Shanghai) Ltd., ABB Engineering Trading and Service Ltd., ABB Finance (USA) Inc., ABB Finance B.V., ABB France, ABB Global Industries and Services Private Limited, ABB Group Investment Management Pty. Ltd., ABB Holding AS, ABB Holdings (Pty) Ltd., ABB Holdings B.V., ABB Holdings Inc., ABB Holdings Limited, ABB Inc., ABB Inc., ABB India Limited, ABB Industrial Solutions (Bielsko-Biala) Sp. z o.o., ABB Industrial Solutions (Klodzko) Sp.z o.o., ABB Industries (L.L.C.), ABB Information Systems Ltd., ABB Installation Products Inc, ABB Installation Products International LLC., ABB Investment Holding 2 GmbH, ABB K.K., ABB Limited, ABB Ltd., ABB Management Services Ltd., ABB Mexico SA. de C.V., ABB Motors and Mechanical Inc, ABB N.V., ABB Norden Holding AB, ABB Pte. Ltd., ABB S.A., ABB S.p.A., ABB SAS, ABB Schweiz AG, ABB Shanghai Free Trade Zone Industrial Co. Ltd., ABB Shanghai Motors Co. Ltd., ABB South Africa (Pty) Ltd., ABB Sp. z o.o., ABB Stotz-Kontakt GmbH, ABB Treasury Center (USA) Inc., ABB Xiamen Low Voltage Equipment Co. Ltd., ABB Xiamen Switchgear Co. Ltd., ABB Xinhui Low Voltage Switchgear Co. Ltd., ABB s.r.o., APS Technology Group, ASTI Mobile Robotics, Asea Brown Boveri S.A., Asea Brown Boveri S.A.E., Asea Brown Boveri SA. de C.V., B + R Industrie-Elektronik GmbH, B&R Holding GmbH, B&R Industrial Automation, B&R Industrial Automation GmbH, Baldor Electric Company, Busch-Jaeger Elektro GmbH, Chargedot, Codian Robotics, Cylon Controls, DynaMotive Ltd., ELBI Elektrik, Edison Holding Corporation, Envitech Energy, Epyon, GE Industrial Solutions, Gomtec, Gresin Grupo Estudios Industriales, Industrial C&S Hungary Kft., Industrial C&S of RR. LLC, Industrial Connections & Solutions LLC, KEYMILE - Business, Kuhlman Electric Corp., Lorentzen & Wettre, Los Gatos Research, Mincom, NUB3D S.L., Newave Energy Holding, Newron System, Power-One, Powercorp, RGM - Rail vehicle power business, SVIA, Spirit IT, Thomas & Betts, Trasfor, Tropos Networks, Validus DC Systems, Vectek Electronics, and Ventyx.Does Illinois need a common application? They can go to one source and fill out an application, and all of the universities receive that application as opposed to a family having to apply to each university and pay a separate fee for each one? Welch said Sunday on WGN-AM 720. Lets make it easier for our students to apply and get into our colleges and universities. (Rick Pearson)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CA, Inc., doing business as CA technologies, develops, markets, delivers, and licenses software products and services in the United States and internationally. It operates through three segments: Mainframe Solutions, Enterprise Solutions, and Services. The Mainframe Solutions segment offers solutions for the IBM z Systems platform, which runs various mission critical business applications. Its mainframe solutions enable customers enhance economics by increasing throughput and lowering cost per transaction; increasing business agility through DevOps tooling and processes; increasing reliability and availability of operations through machine intelligence and automation solutions; and protecting enterprise data with security and compliance. The Enterprise Solutions segment provides a range of software planning, development, and management tools for mobile, cloud, and distributed computing environments. It primarily provides customers secure application development, infrastructure management, automation, and identity-centric security solutions. The Services segment offers various services, such as consulting, implementation, application management, education, and support services to commercial and government customers for implementation and adoption of its software solutions. The company serves banks, insurance companies, other financial services providers, government agencies, information technology service providers, telecommunication providers, transportation companies, manufacturers, technology companies, retailers, educational organizations, and health care institutions. It sells its products through direct sales force, as well as through various partner channels comprising resellers, service providers, system integrators, managed service providers, and technology partners. The company was formerly known as Computer Associates International, Inc. and changed its name to CA, Inc. in 2006. CA, Inc. was founded in 1974 and is headquartered in New York, New York.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of The Travelers Companies: 10762962 Canada Inc., 350 Market Street LLC, 8527512 Canada Inc., Aetna Life and Casualty Co, American Equity Insurance Company, American Equity Specialty Insurance Company, Aprilgrange Limited, Arch Street North LLC, Auto Hartford Investments LLC, Bayhill Restaurant II Associates, Camperdown Corporation, Constitution State Services LLC, Discover Property & Casualty Insurance Company, Discover Specialty Insurance Company, F&G UK Underwriters Limited, Farmington Casualty Company, Fidelity and Guaranty Insurance Company, Fidelity and Guaranty Insurance Underwriters Inc., First Floridian Auto and Home Insurance Company, Gulf Underwriters Insurance Company, IHP Capital Partners Fund VIII L.P., Northbrook Holdings Inc., Northfield Insurance Company, Northland Casualty Company, Northland Insurance Company, Phoenix UK Investments LLC, SPC Insurance Agency Inc., Select Insurance Company, Simply Business Holdings Inc., Simply Business Inc., St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company, St. Paul Guardian Insurance Company, St. Paul Mercury Insurance Company, St. Paul Protective Insurance Company, St. Paul Surplus Lines Insurance Company, Standard Fire Properties LLC, Standard Fire UK Investments LLC, TCI Global Services Inc., TPC Investments Inc., TPC U.K. Investments LLC, The Automobile Insurance Company of Hartford Connecticut, The Charter Oak Fire Insurance Company, The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company, The Family Business Institute LLC, The Phoenix Insurance Company, The St. Paul Companies Inc., The Standard Fire Insurance Company, The Travelers Casualty Company, The Travelers Home and Marine Insurance Company, The Travelers Indemnity Company, The Travelers Indemnity Company of America, The Travelers Indemnity Company of Connecticut, The Travelers Lloyds Insurance Company, TravCo Insurance Company, Travelers (Bermuda) Limited, Travelers Brazil Acquisition LLC, Travelers Brazil Holding LLC, Travelers Casualty Company of Connecticut, Travelers Casualty Insurance Company of America, Travelers Casualty UK Investments LLC, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of America, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of Europe Limited, Travelers Commercial Casualty Company, Travelers Commercial Insurance Company, Travelers Constitution State Insurance Company, Travelers Distribution Alliance Inc., Travelers Excess and Surplus Lines Company, Travelers Global Inc., Travelers Indemnity U.K. Investments LLC, Travelers Insurance Company Limited, Travelers Insurance Company of Canada, Travelers Insurance Designated Activity Company, Travelers Insurance Group Holdings Inc., Travelers Lloyds of Texas Insurance Company, Travelers London Limited, Travelers MGA Inc., Travelers Management Limited, Travelers Marine LLC, Travelers Participacoes em Seguros Brasil S.A., Travelers Personal Insurance Company, Travelers Personal Security Insurance Company, Travelers Property Casualty Company of America, Travelers Property Casualty Corp., Travelers Property Casualty Insurance Company, Travelers Seguros Brasil S.A., Travelers Syndicate Management Limited, Travelers Texas MGA Inc., Travelers Underwriting Agency Limited, Ultramar Travel Management, United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company, Xbridge Limited, Zensurance Brokers Inc., and Zensurance Inc..ConocoPhillips engages in the exploration, production, transportation and marketing of crude oil, bitumen, natural gas, natural gas liquids, and liquefied natural gas on a worldwide basis. It operates through the following geographical segments: Alaska; Lower 48; Canada; Europe, Middle East and North Africa; Asia Pacific; and Other International. The Alaska segment primarily explores for produces, transports and markets crude oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids. The Lower 48 segment consists of operations in the U.S. and the Gulf of Mexico. The Canada segment is comprised of oil sands development in the Athabasca Region of northeastern Alberta and a liquids-rich unconventional play in western Canada. The Europe, Middle East and North Africa segment consists of operations and exploration activities in Norway, the United Kingdom and Libya. The Asia Pacific segment has explorations and product operations in China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia. The Other International segment handles exploration activities in Columbia and Argentina. The company was founded in 1875 and is headquartered in Houston, TX.

Read MoreThe American flag files at half-staff at the White House, Monday afternoon, Aug. 27, 2018, in Washington. Two days after Sen. John McCain's death, President Donald Trump says he respects the senator's "service to our country" and has signed a proclamation to fly the U.S. flag at half-staff until his burial. The flag atop the White House flew at half-staff over the weekend but was raised Monday and then lowered again amid criticism. (Alex Brandon / AP)Wall Street analysts have given PetroQuest Energy 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 PetroQuest Energy wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.CoreLogic, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides property information, insight, analytics, and data-enabled solutions in North America, Western Europe, and the Asia Pacific. The company operates in two segments, Property Intelligence & Risk Management Solutions (PIRM) and Underwriting & Workflow Solutions (UWS). The PIRM segment combines property information, mortgage information, and consumer information to deliver housing market and property-level insights, predictive analytics, and risk management capabilities. It also offers proprietary technology and software platforms to access, automate, or track the information and assist its clients with decision-making and compliance tools in the real estate and insurance industries. This segment primarily serves commercial banks, mortgage lenders and brokers, investment banks, fixed-income investors, real estate agents, MLS companies, property and casualty insurance companies, title insurance companies, government agencies, and government-sponsored enterprises. The UWS segment combines property, mortgage, and consumer information to provide comprehensive mortgage origination and monitoring solutions, including underwriting-related solutions, and data-enabled valuations and appraisals. This segment also provides proprietary technology and software platforms to access, automate, or track the information and assist its clients with vetting and onboarding prospects, and meeting compliance regulations, as well as understanding, evaluating, monitoring property values. It primarily serves mortgage lenders and servicers, mortgage brokers, credit unions, commercial banks, fixed-income investors, government agencies, and property and casualty insurance companies. The company was formerly known as The First American Corporation and changed its name to CoreLogic, Inc. in June 2010. CoreLogic, Inc. was incorporated in 1894 and is headquartered in Irvine, California.

Read MoreMAXIMUS, Inc. engages in the operation of government and human services programs. It operates through the following segments: U.S. Services; U.S. Federal Services; and Outside the U.S. The U.S. Services segment offers a variety of business process services, and appeals and assessments for state, provincial and national government programs. The U.S. Federal Services segment includes process solutions, program management, as well as system and software development, and maintenance services for various United States federal civilian programs. The Outside the U.S segment comprises of national, state, and county human services agencies with a variety of business process services, and related consulting services for welfare-to-work, child support, higher education institutions, and other human services programs. The company was founded by David V. Mastran in 1975 and is headquartered in Reston, VA.

Read More"The president or the candidate is entitled to contribute anything he wants to his own campaign," Dershowitz said. "So the only issue here is whether or not there was a failure to report the contribution. That failure to report is attributable to the treasurer of the campaign, not to the president."Wall Street analysts have given iShares S&P SmallCap 600 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 S&P SmallCap 600 ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.PetroChina Company Limited, together with its subsidiaries, engages in a range of petroleum related products, services, and activities in Mainland China and internationally. It operates through Exploration and Production, Refining and Chemicals, Marketing, and Natural Gas and Pipeline segments. The Exploration and Production segment engages in the exploration, development, production, and marketing of crude oil and natural gas. The Refining and Chemicals segment refines crude oil and petroleum products; and produces and markets primary petrochemical products, derivative petrochemical products, and other chemical products. The Marketing segment is involved in marketing of refined products and trading business. The Natural Gas and Pipeline segment engages in the transmission of natural gas, crude oil, and refined products; and sale of natural gas. As of December 31, 2020, the company had a total length of 31,151 km, including 22,555 km of natural gas pipelines, 7,190 km of crude oil pipelines, and 1,406 km of refined product pipelines. The company is also involved in the exploration, development, and production of oil sands and coalbed methane; trading of crude oil and petrochemical products; storage, chemical engineering, storage facilities, service station, and transportation facilities and related businesses; and production and sales of basic and derivative chemical, and other chemical products. The company was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Beijing, the People's Republic of China. PetroChina Company Limited is a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation.

Read MoreStill, any new agreement is far from final. The administration still needs to negotiate with the third partner in NAFTA, Canada, to become part of any new trade accord. Without Canada, America's No. 2 trading partner, it's unclear whether any new U.S. trade agreement with Mexico would be possible.The following companies are subsidiares of The Sherwin-Williams: Acquire Sourcing LLC, CTS National Corporation, Comex North America Inc., Compania Sherwin-Williams S.A. de C.V., Contract Transportation Systems Co., Dongguan Lilly Paint Industries Ltd, Duron, EPS (Shanghai) Trading Co. Ltd., EPS B.V., Geocel Holdings, Geocel Limited, Guangdong Valspar Paints Manufacturing Co Ltd., Inver East Med S.A., Inver France SAS, Inver GmbH, Inver Industrial Coating SRL, Inver Polska Spoka Z O.O, Inver Spa, Invercolor Bologna Srl, Invercolor Ltd, Invercolor Roma Srl, Invercolor Torino Srl, Invercolor Toscana Srl, Isocoat Tintas e Vernizes Ltda, Isva Vernici Srl, Leighs Paints, M.A. Bruder & Sons, Omega Specialty Products & Services LLC, Oy Sherwin-Williams Finland Ab, PT Sherwin-Williams Indonesia, PT Valspar Indonesia, Paint Sundry Brands, Pinturas Condor S.A., Pinturas Industriales S.A., Piton Paints Limited, Plasti-Kote Co. Inc., Plasti-kote Limited, Productos Quimicos y Pinturas S.A. de C.V., Quest Automotive Products UK Limited, Quetzal Pinturas S.A. de C.V., Ronseal (Ireland) Limited, SWIMC LLC, SWIPCO  Sherwin Williams do Brasil Propriedade Intelectual Ltda, Sherwin Williams Colombia S.A.S., Sherwin-Williams (Australia) Pty. Ltd., Sherwin-Williams (Belize) Limited, Sherwin-Williams (Caribbean) N.V., Sherwin-Williams (Ireland) Limited, Sherwin-Williams (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Sherwin-Williams (Nantong) Coatings Technology Co. Ltd., Sherwin-Williams (Nantong) Company Limited, Sherwin-Williams (S) Pte. Ltd., Sherwin-Williams (Shanghai) Limited, Sherwin-Williams (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Sherwin-Williams (Vietnam) Limited, Sherwin-Williams (West Indies) Limited, Sherwin-Williams Argentina I.y C.S.A., Sherwin-Williams Aruba VBA, Sherwin-Williams Automotive Mexico S.de R.L.de C.V., Sherwin-Williams Balkan S.R.L., Sherwin-Williams Bel Unitary Enterprise, Sherwin-Williams Benelux NV, Sherwin-Williams Canada Inc., Sherwin-Williams Cayman Islands Limited, Sherwin-Williams Chile S.A., Sherwin-Williams Coatings India Private Limited, Sherwin-Williams Coatings S.a r.l., Sherwin-Williams Czech Republic spol. s r.o, Sherwin-Williams Denmark A/S, Sherwin-Williams Deutschland GmbH, Sherwin-Williams Diversified Brands Limited, Sherwin-Williams France Finishes SAS, Sherwin-Williams Italy S.r.l., Sherwin-Williams Norway AS, Sherwin-Williams Paints Limited Liability Company, Sherwin-Williams Peru S.R.L., Sherwin-Williams Pinturas de Venezuela S.A., Sherwin-Williams Poland Sp. z o.o, Sherwin-Williams Protective & Marine Coatings, Sherwin-Williams Realty Holdings Inc., Sherwin-Williams Services (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Sherwin-Williams Spain Coatings S.L., Sherwin-Williams Sweden AB, Sherwin-Williams UK Coatings Limited, Sherwin-Williams do Brasil Industria e Comercio Ltda., Spanyc Paints Joint Stock Company, Syntema I Vaggeryd AB, Taiwan Valspar Co. Ltd., The Sherwin-Williams Acceptance Corporation, The Sherwin-Williams Headquarters Company, The Sherwin-Williams Manufacturing Company, The Sherwin-Williams US Licensing Company, The Valspar (Asia) Corporation Limited, The Valspar (Australia) Corporation Pty. Ltd., The Valspar (Finland) Corporation Oy, The Valspar (France) Corporation S.A.S., The Valspar (France) Research Corporation SAS, The Valspar (Malaysia) Corporation Sdn Bhd, The Valspar (Nantes) Corporation S.A.S., The Valspar (Singapore) Corporation Pte. Ltd, The Valspar (South Africa) Corporation (Pty) Ltd, The Valspar (Spain) Corporation S.R.L., The Valspar (Switzerland) Corporation AG, The Valspar (Thailand) Corporation Ltd., The Valspar (UK) Corporation Limited, The Valspar (Vietnam) Corporation Ltd., The Valspar Corporation, The Valspar Corporation Limitada, UAB Sherwin-Williams Baltic, Valspar (India) Coatings Corporation Private Limited, Valspar (Shanghai) Management Co. Ltd., Valspar (Uruguay) Corporation S.A., Valspar (WPC) Pty Ltd, Valspar Aries Coatings S. de R.L. de C.V., Valspar Automotive (UK) Corporation Limited, Valspar Automotive Australia Pty Limited, Valspar B.V., Valspar Coatings (Guangdong) Co. Ltd., Valspar Coatings (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Valspar Coatings (Tianjin) Co. Ltd, Valspar D.o.o Beograd, Valspar Industries (Ireland) Ltd., Valspar Industries (Italy) S.r.l., Valspar Industries GmbH, Valspar LLC, Valspar Mexicana S.A. de C.V., Valspar Paint (Australia) Pty Ltd, Valspar Paint (NZ) Limited, Valspar Powder Coatings Limited, Valspar Rock Company Limited (Japan), Valspar Specialty Paints LLC, and ZAO Sherwin-Williams.Tele Columbus AG, together with its subsidiaries, operates fiber optic networks in Germany. The company operates in two segments, TV, and Internet and Telephony. The company offers analogue, digital TV, and radio broadcasting services. Its digital entertainment platform offers approximately 250 TV channels, and 60 digital radio stations. The company also provides internet and telephony, and mobile telephony services. In addition, it engages in the B2B business that comprises products to provide carrier companies with bandwidth and business client networking services, and business clients with internet and telephony services, as well as network monitoring and data center marketing services. Further, the company offers construction services to install fiber optic networks or connecting residential areas. It sells its end user products under the PYUR name. As of December 31, 2020, it served approximately 3.3 million residential units. The company was formerly known as Tele Columbus Holding GmbH and changed its name to Tele Columbus AG in September 2014. Tele Columbus AG was founded in 1972 and is headquartered in Berlin, Germany.

Read MoreWall Street analysts have given iShares 1-3 Year Treasury Bond 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 1-3 Year Treasury Bond ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.No new date for the third, large-scale public meeting for the federal review had been scheduled as of Friday, according to the citys website. City officials said the review process was refined by the federal government and as a result they had to set a new time schedule. In July, officials from the foundation acknowledged that the groundbreaking once scheduled to take place this year was being pushed back.Wall Street analysts have given Invesco Senior Loan 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 Invesco Senior Loan ETF 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 John Hancock Preferred Income Fund II 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 John Hancock Preferred Income Fund II wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.It was attractive because it conveyed a larger lesson. In his life and in his words, McCain preached that every American should try to meet the highest standards of honor and valor  but he recognized that no one will always succeed, including himself. The test of character, he argued, was whether you owned up to your errors and used them to spur yourself to do better.Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (NYSE:SMI) issued its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, August, 9th. The semiconductor company reported $0.05 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.01 by $0.04. The semiconductor company had revenue of $890.71 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $877.14 million. Semiconductor Manufacturing International had a net margin of 2.82% and a trailing twelve-month return on equity of 1.08%. The firm's revenue was up 18.6% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the prior year, the firm posted $0.04 EPS.

View Semiconductor Manufacturing International's earnings history.United Technologies Corporation provides technology products and services to building systems and aerospace industries worldwide. Its Otis segment designs, manufactures, sells, and installs passenger and freight elevators, escalators, and moving walkways; and offers modernization products to upgrade elevators and escalators, as well as maintenance and repair services. The company's Carrier segment provides heating, ventilating, air conditioning, refrigeration, fire, security, and building automation products, solutions, and services for commercial, government, infrastructure, residential, and refrigeration and transportation applications. This segment also offers building services, including audit, design, installation, system integration, repair, maintenance, and monitoring. Its Pratt & Whitney segment supplies aircraft engines for commercial, military, business jet, and general aviation markets; and provides aftermarket maintenance, repair, and overhaul, as well as fleet management services. The company's Collins Aerospace Systems segment provides electric power generation, power management, and distribution systems; air data and aircraft sensing systems; engine control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems; engine components; environmental control systems; fire and ice detection, and protection systems; propeller systems; engine nacelle systems; aircraft lighting, seating, and cargo systems; actuation and landing systems; space products and subsystems; avionics systems; flight controls, communications, navigation, oxygen, and training systems; food and beverage preparation, and storage and galley systems; and lavatory and wastewater management systems. The company offers its services through manufacturers' representatives, distributors, wholesalers, dealers, retail outlets, and sales representatives, as well as directly to customers. United Technologies Corporation was founded in 1934 and is headquartered in Farmington, Connecticut.

Read MoreJake said he can see his sister taking full advantage of all the great minds in Heaven that she now has the opportunity to interact with. He said he can see her learning how to better communicate and touch peoples minds and hearts from Martin Luther King Jr. He said he can see Mollie discussing politics and how to unify the nation with Abraham Lincoln, getting running tips from Steve Prefontaine, an American runner who competed in the 1972 Olympics and someone Mollie looked up to. Jake said he can see his sister talking about women and their strength and determination with Harriet Tubman and gleaning tidbits of wisdom from Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dubmledore.Weatherford International plc, an oilfield service company, provides equipment and services for the drilling, evaluation, completion, production, and intervention of oil and natural gas wells worldwide. The company operates in two segments, Western Hemisphere and Eastern Hemisphere. It offers artificial lift systems, including reciprocating rod, progressing cavity pumping, gas, hydraulic, plunger, and hybrid lift systems, as well as related automation and control systems; pressure pumping and reservoir stimulation services, such as acidizing, fracturing and fluid systems, cementing, and coiled-tubing intervention; and drill stem test tools, and surface well testing and multiphase flow measurement services. The company also provides safety, downhole reservoir monitoring, flow control, and multistage fracturing systems, as well as sand-control technologies, and production and isolation packers; liner hangers to suspend a casing string in high-temperature and high-pressure wells; cementing products, including plugs, float and stage equipment, and torque-and-drag reduction technology for zonal isolation; and pre-job planning and installation services. In addition, it offers directional drilling services, and logging and measurement services while drilling; services related to rotary-steerable systems, high-temperature and high-pressure sensors, drilling reamers, and circulation subs; managed pressure drilling, conventional mud-logging, drilling instrumentation, gas analysis, wellsite consultancy, and open hole and cased-hole logging services; reservoir solutions and software products; and intervention and remediation services. Further, the company provides equipment and drilling tools; tubular handling, management, and connection services; equipment rental services; and onshore contract drilling and related services through a fleet of land drilling and workover rigs. Weatherford International plc was incorporated in 1972 and is headquartered in Baar, Switzerland.

Read MoreWestinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corp. engages in the provision of equipment, systems, and value-added services for the rail industry. It operates through the following segments: Freight and Transit. The Freight segment involves in the manufacture and offers services components for new and existing locomotives and freight cars; supplies rail control and infrastructure products such as electronics, positive train control equipment, and signal design and engineering services; overhauls locomotives; and provides heat exchangers and cooling systems for rail and other industrial markets. The Transit segments includes the manufacture and providing services components for new and existing passenger transit vehicles, including regional trains, high speed trains, subway cars, light-rail vehicles, and buses; supplies rail control and infrastructure products such as electronics, positive train control equipment, and signal design and engineering services; builds new commuter locomotives; and renovate passenger transit vehicles. The company was founded in 1869 and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of Stryker: ActiViews, Aimago SA, Alcott Indemnity Company, Arrinex Inc, Arrinex Inc., Ascent Healthcare Solutions, Berchtold, Berchtold + Fritz GmbH, Berchtold Consulting GmbH, Berchtold Corporation, Berchtold GmbH & Co. KG, Berchtold Holding Switzerland GmbH, CHG Hospital Beds, Cactus LLC, Cardan Robotics, Changzhou Orthomed Medical Instrument Company Limited, Concentric Medical, Concentric Medical Inc., Entellus Medical, Entellus Medical Europe Ltd, Entellus Medical Inc., GYS Tech LLC, Gaymar Industries, Gongping (Shanghai) Medical Devices Trading Co. Ltd., Groupe Bertec, HeartSine Technologies LLC, HeartSine Technologies Limited, Howmedica International S. de R.L., Howmedica Osteonics Corp., Hygia Health Services, Hygia Healthcare Services Inc., HyperBranch, HyperBranch Technology Inc., ITAPCo Limited, Image Guided Technologies, Imorphics Limited, Infinity MSD Corp., Infinity MSE Corp., Infinity MSF Corp., Infomedix Communications, Instratek, InstruMedics L.L.C, Invuity Inc., Ivy Sports Medicine, Ivy Sports Medicine LLC, Jiangsu Chuangyi Medical Instrument Company Limited, Jolife AB, K2M Germany GmbH, K2M Group, K2M Group Holdings Inc., K2M Holdings Inc., K2M Iberia Medcomtech S.L.U., K2M Inc., K2M Solutions Australia Pty Ltd, K2M Spine Solutions (Schweiz) GmbH, K2M UK Limited, Loon Intermediateco LLC, MAKO Surgical, MAKO Surgical Corp, Memometal Technologies, Mobius Imaging, Mobius Imaging LLC, Muka Metal, Muka Metal Ticaret ve Sanayi Anaonim Sirketi, NV Stryker SA, Nettrick Limited, Novadaq Corp, Novadaq Hong Kong Ltd, Novadaq Technologies, Novadaq Technologies ULC, OOO "Stryker", Orneo Ozel Saglk Hizmetleri Medikal Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, OrthoSpace, OrthoSpace Ltd., OrthoSpace US Inc., Orthomed (Hong Kong) Medical Instrument Company Limited, Orthovita, Orthovita Inc., OtisMed, P.C. Sweden Holding AB, Patient Safety Technologies, Patton Surgical, Pficonprod Pty. Ltd., Physio-Control, Physio-Control (Shanghai) Sales Co. Ltd., Physio-Control Brazil Vendas Ltda., Physio-Control Czech Sales s.r.o., Physio-Control Holdings Cooperatief U.A., Physio-Control Holdings Inc, Physio-Control Hungary Sales Kft, Physio-Control Inc., Physio-Control India Sales Pvt. Ltd, Physio-Control Investments LLC, Physio-Control Lebanon Sales Offshore s.a.l., Physio-Control Manufacturing Inc., Physio-Control Operations Netherlands B.V., Physio-Control Sales Limited Liability Company, Physio-Control Singapore Pte. Ltd., Physio-Control South Africa Sales Pty. Ltd., Physio-Control UK Sales Ltd., Pivot Medical, PlasmaSol, Porex Technologies, SSI Divestiture Inc., SYK Costa Rica Services Sociedad De Responsabilidad Limitada, SafeAir AG, SafeWire, Sage Products, Sage Products Coperatief U.A., Sage Products Holdings II LLC, Sage Products Holdings III LLC, Sage Products LLC, Scopis GmbH, Sightline Technologies, Small Bone Innovations, SpineCore, Spirox Inc., Stanmore Implants Worldwide, Stanmore Implants Worldwide Limited, Stanmore Inc., Stryker (Barbados) Foreign Sales Corporation, Stryker (Beijing) Healthcare Products Co. Ltd., Stryker (Shanghai) Healthcare Products Co. Ltd., Stryker (Suzhou) Medical Technology Co Ltd, Stryker (Thailand) Limited, Stryker AB, Stryker Acquisitions BV, Stryker Asia Holdings CV, Stryker Australia LLC, Stryker Australia Pty. Ltd., Stryker Austria GmbH, Stryker B.V., Stryker Berchtold BV, Stryker Beteiligungs GmbH, Stryker Canada GP ULC, Stryker Canada Holding Company, Stryker Canada Manufacturing ULC, Stryker Canada ULC, Stryker Canadian Management ULC, Stryker Canadian Sales Holding Company ULC, Stryker Capital BV, Stryker China Limited, Stryker Colombia SAS, Stryker Communications Inc., Stryker Corporation (Chile) y Compania Limitada, Stryker Corporation (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Stryker Customs Brokers LLC, Stryker Czech Republic s.r.o., Stryker Delaware Inc., Stryker EMEA Supply Chain Services BV, Stryker Employment Company LLC, Stryker European Coordination Center BV, Stryker European Holdings Cooperatief U.A, Stryker European Holdings I LLC, Stryker European Holdings II LLC, Stryker European Holdings LLC, Stryker European Holdings V LLC, Stryker European Operations B.V., Stryker European Operations Holdings I BV, Stryker European Operations Holdings II BV, Stryker European Operations Holdings III BV, Stryker European Operations Holdings LLC, Stryker European Operations Limited, Stryker European Technologies C.V., Stryker Far East Inc., Stryker Foreign Acquisitions Inc., Stryker France Holding SNC, Stryker France MM Holdings SAS, Stryker France SAS, Stryker Funding B.V., Stryker GI Services CV, Stryker Global Technology Center Private Limited, Stryker GmbH, Stryker GmbH & Co. KG, Stryker Grundstucks GmbH & Co KG, Stryker Grundstucks Verwaltungs GmbH, Stryker Holdings BV, Stryker IFSC Designated Activity Company, Stryker Iberia SL Unipersonal, Stryker India Private Limited, Stryker International Acquisitions BV, Stryker International Holdings BV, Stryker Investment Holdings B.V., Stryker Ireland Holding Unlimited Company, Stryker Ireland Limited, Stryker Italia S.r.l. S.U., Stryker Japan Holdings BV, Stryker Japan K.K., Stryker Korea Ltd., Stryker Lebanon (Offshore) S.A.L., Stryker Leibinger GmbH & Co. KG, Stryker Luxembourg Holdings S.a.r.l., Stryker Luxembourg Sarl, Stryker Manufacturing S. de R.L. de C.V., Stryker Mauritius Holding Ltd., Stryker Medical London LP, Stryker Medtech K.K., Stryker Medtech Limited, Stryker Mexico Holdings B.V., Stryker Mexico SA de CV, Stryker NV Operations Limited, Stryker Nederland BV, Stryker New Zealand Limited, Stryker Osteonics AG, Stryker Pacific Limited, Stryker Performance Solutions LLC, Stryker Polska Sp.z.o.o., Stryker Portugal - Produtos Medicos Unipessoal Lda., Stryker Professional Latin America S. de R.L. de C.V., Stryker Puerto Rico Limited, Stryker Romania SRL, Stryker Sage Inc., Stryker Sales Corporation, Stryker Servicios Administrativos S.de R.L. de C.V., Stryker Singapore Private Limited, Stryker South Africa (Proprietary) Limited, Stryker Spine SAS, Stryker Spine Sarl, Stryker Sustainability Solutions Inc., Stryker Tibbi Cihazlan Sanayi ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Stryker Trauma GmbH, Stryker Turkish Holdings BV, Stryker UK Ltd, Stryker Verwaltungs GmbH, Stryker Vietnam Company Limited, Stryker do Brasil Ltda, Surpass Medical, Synergetics, TG SP Holdings Corp, TSO3 Corp, TSO3 Inc, Trauson, Trauson (China) Medical Instrument Company Limited, Trauson (Hong Kong) Company Limited, Trauson Holdings (BVI) Company Limited, Trauson Holdings (Hong Kong) Company Limited, Trauson Holdings Company Limited, VEXIM SA, Vexim, Waterloo Bedding Co., Wright Medical Group, ZipLine Medical Consulting (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ZipLine Medical Hong Kong Limited, ZipLine Medical Inc., and eTrauma.com.Varian Medical Systems, Inc. designs, manufactures, sells, and services medical devices and software products for treating cancer and other medical conditions worldwide. It operates through Oncology Systems and Proton Solutions segments. The Oncology Systems segment offers hardware and software products for treating cancer with radiotherapy, fixed field intensity-modulated radiation therapy, image-guided radiation therapy, volumetric modulated arc therapy, stereotactic radiosurgery, stereotactic body radiotherapy, artificial intelligence based adaptive radiotherapy, and brachytherapy, as well as quality assurance equipment. Its products include linear accelerators, brachytherapy afterloaders, treatment accessories, and quality assurance software; and information management, treatment planning, image processing, clinical knowledge exchange, patient care management, decision-making support, and practice management software. This segment serves university research and community hospitals, private and governmental institutions, healthcare agencies, physicians' offices, medical oncology practices, radiotherapy centers, and cancer care clinics. The Proton Solutions segment designs, develops, manufactures, sells, and services products and systems for delivering proton therapy for the treatment of cancer. The company has a strategic agreement with McKesson Corp. to supply treatment delivery systems and planning, services, and radiotherapy information system solutions to its U.S. Oncology Network and Vantage Oncology affiliated sites of care; and a strategic partnership with Siemens AG to represent Siemens diagnostic imaging products to radiation oncology clinics in the United States and other select markets. Varian Medical Systems, Inc. was formerly known as Varian Associates, Inc. and changed its name to Varian Medical Systems, Inc. in April 1999. The company was founded in 1948 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Read More24/7 Tempo reviewed the results of a recent WalletHub study evaluating the 182 most populated cities in the country (adding two of the most populated cities in each state, where necessary) by 29 relevant metrics in two key categories: a combination of diversity, accessibility, and quality, and the aforementioned affordability.Brookdale Senior Living, Inc. engages in the operation of senior living communities. The firm manages independent living, assisted living and dementia-care communities and continuing care retirement centers. It operates through the following segments: Independent Living Assisted Living & Memory Care, CCRCs, Health Care Services and Management Services. The Independent Living segment is primarily designed for middle to upper income seniors who desire an upscale residential environment providing the highest quality of service. The Assisted Living & Memory Care segment offer housing and 24-hour assistance with ADLs to mid-acuity frail and elderly residents. The CCRCs segment offers a variety of living arrangements and services to accommodate all levels of physical ability and health. The Healthcare Services segment provides home health, hospice and outpatient therapy services, as well as education and wellness programs, to residents of many communities and to seniors living outside communities. The Management Services segment composes of communities operated by the company pursuant to management agreements. The company was founded in 1978 and is headquartered in Brentwood, TN.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of Sysco: 2234829 Alberta ULC, 2234842 Alberta ULC, A. M. Briggs Inc., A.M. Briggs, Almacen Fiscal Frionet Caldera S.A., Almacen Fiscal Frionet Limon S.A., Appert's Foodservice, Arnotts (Fruit) Limited, Asian Foods, Bahamas Food Holdings Limited, Bahamas Food Services Limited, Brake Bros, Brake Bros Foodservice Ireland Limited, Brake Bros. Foodservice Limited, Brake Bros. Holding I Limited, Brake Bros. Ltd., Brakes Foodservice NI Limited, Buchy Food Service, Buckhead Beef Co., Buckhead Meat & Seafood of Houston Inc., Buckhead Meat Company, Buckhead Meat Midwest Inc., Buckhead Meat of Dallas Inc., Buckhead Meat of Denver Inc., Buckhead Meat of San Antonio LP, Buzztable Inc., CAKE Corporation, Central Seafood Co., Christys Wine & Spirits Limited, Clafra Aktiebolag, Colorado Boxed Beef Co - Specialty meat-cutting division, Corporacion Frionet Sociedad Anonima, Crossgar Foodservice, Crossgar Foodservice Limited, Crown I Enterprises Inc., Cucina Acquisitions (UK) Limited, Cucina Finance (UK) Limited, Cucina French Holdings Limited, Cucina Fresh Finance Limited, Cucina Fresh Investments Limited, Cucina Lux Investments Limited, Curleys Quality Foods Limited (Third Party), Davigel Belgilux S.A., Davigel Espana S.A., Desert Meats & Provisions, Distagro, Doerle Food Service, Doughtie's Foods Inc., Dust Bowl City LLC, Eko Fagel Fisk o mittemellan AB, Enclave Insurance Company, Enclave Parkway Association Inc., Enclave Properties LLC, European Imports, European Imports Inc., Figg Inc., Freedman Meats, Freedman Meats Inc., Freedman-KB Inc., Fresh Direct (UK) Limited, Fresh Direct Group Limited, Fresh Direct Limited, Fresh Holdings Limited, FreshPoint, FreshPoint Arizona Inc., FreshPoint Atlanta Inc., FreshPoint California Inc., FreshPoint Central California Inc., FreshPoint Central Florida Inc., FreshPoint Connecticut LLC, FreshPoint Dallas Inc., FreshPoint Denver Inc., FreshPoint Hawaii LLC, FreshPoint Inc., FreshPoint Las Vegas Inc., FreshPoint North Carolina Inc., FreshPoint North Florida Inc., FreshPoint Oklahoma City LLC, FreshPoint Pompano Real Estate LLC, FreshPoint Puerto Rico LLC, FreshPoint San Francisco Inc., FreshPoint South Florida Inc., FreshPoint South Texas Inc., FreshPoint Southern California Inc., FreshPoint Tomato LLC, FreshPoint Vancouver Ltd., Freshfayre Limited, Fruktservice i Helsingborg AB, GHS Classic Drinks Limited, Gilchrist & Soames Inc., Gilchrist & Soames UK Limited, Guest Packaging LLC, Guest Supply, Guest Supply Asia Limited, Guest Supply Singapore Pte. Ltd., International Food Group, Isakssons Frukt & Gront AB, J & M Wholesale Meats, J. Kings Food Service Professionals, J. Kings Food Service Professionals Inc., Kent Frozen Foods, Les Ateliers Du Gout, Liquid Assets Limited, M&J Seafood Holdings Limited, M&J Seafood Limited, Manchester Mills LLC, Mayca Autoservicio S.A., Mayca Distribuidores S.A., Menigo Foodservice AB, Mitshim Etatu Supply LP, Newport Meat Company, Newport Meat Northern California Inc., Newport Meat Pacific Northwest Inc., Newport Meat Southern California Inc., Newport Meat of Nevada Inc., North Star Holding Corporation, North Star Seafood, North Star Seafood Acquisition Corporation, North Star Seafood LLC, PFS de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Palisades Ranch Inc., Pallas Foods, Pallas Foods Farm Fresh Unlimited Company, Pallas Foods Unlimited Company, Pauleys Produce Limited, Promotora del Servicios S.A. de C.V., Restaurangakdemien AB, Restaurant of Tomorrow Inc., Rohan Viandes Elaboration SAS, SMS Bermuda Holdings, SMS GPC International Limited, SMS GPC International Resources Limited, SMS Global Holdings S.a.r.l., SMS International Resources Ireland Unlimited Company, SMS Lux Holdings LLC, SOTF LLC, SYY Netherlands C.V., SYY Panama S. de R.L., Serca Foodservice, Servicestyckarna I Johannes AB, Servicios Ameriserve S.A. de C.V., Shenzhen Guest Supply Trading Co. Limited, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) Bianchi Montegut, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) De Boiseau, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) De Garcelles, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) J.D. Lanjouan, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) Le Dauphin, Specialty Meat Holdings LLC, Stockflag Limited, Stockholms Fiskauktion AB, Supplies on the Fly, Sysco Albany LLC, Sysco Asian Foods Inc., Sysco Atlanta LLC, Sysco Autoservicio S.A., Sysco Baltimore LLC, Sysco Baraboo LLC, Sysco Bermuda Partners L.P., Sysco Boston LLC, Sysco Canada Holdings S.a.r.l., Sysco Canada Inc., Sysco Central Alabama LLC, Sysco Central California Inc., Sysco Central Florida Inc., Sysco Central Illinois Inc., Sysco Central Pennsylvania LLC, Sysco Charlotte LLC, Sysco Chicago Inc., Sysco Cincinnati LLC, Sysco Cleveland Inc., Sysco Columbia LLC, Sysco Connecticut LLC, Sysco Corporation, Sysco Corporation Director's Deferred Compensation Plan Trust, Sysco Corporation Employee's 401(k) Plan Trust, Sysco Corporation Executive Deferred Compensation Plan Trust, Sysco Corporation Good Government Committee Inc., Sysco Corporation Retirement Trust, Sysco Corporation Supplemental Executive Retirement Trust, Sysco Corporation Supplemental Unemployment Benefits Plan Trust, Sysco Detroit LLC, Sysco Disaster Relief Foundation Inc., Sysco EI VI S. s.r.l., Sysco EU II S.a.r.l., Sysco EU III S.a.r.l., Sysco EU IV Capital Unlimited Company, Sysco EU IV S. s.r.l.., Sysco EU V S. s.r.l., Sysco Eastern Maryland LLC, Sysco Eastern Wisconsin LLC, Sysco Foundation Inc., Sysco France Holding SAS, Sysco France SAS, Sysco George Town II LLC, Sysco George Town Limited S. s.r.l.., Sysco Global Finance LLC, Sysco Global Finance LLP, Sysco Global Holdings B.V., Sysco Global Resources LLC, Sysco Global Services LLC, Sysco Grand Cayman Company, Sysco Grand Cayman II Company, Sysco Grand Cayman III Company, Sysco Grand Rapids LLC, Sysco Guernsey Limited, Sysco Guest Supply Canada Inc., Sysco Guest Supply Europe Goods Wholesalers LLC, Sysco Guest Supply Europe Limited, Sysco Guest Supply LLC, Sysco Gulf Coast LLC, Sysco Hampton Roads Inc., Sysco Hawaii Inc., Sysco Holdings II LLC, Sysco Holdings LLC, Sysco Indianapolis LLC, Sysco International Food Group Inc., Sysco International Inc., Sysco Iowa Inc., Sysco Jackson LLC, Sysco Jacksonville Inc., Sysco Kansas City Inc., Sysco Knoxville LLC, Sysco Labs Europe Limited, Sysco Labs Pvt. Ltd., Sysco Leasing LLC, Sysco Lincoln Inc., Sysco Lincoln Transportation Company Inc., Sysco Long Island LLC, Sysco Los Angeles Inc., Sysco Louisville Inc., Sysco Memphis LLC, Sysco Merchandising and Supply Chain Services Canada Inc., Sysco Merchandising and Supply Chain Services Inc., Sysco Metro New York LLC, Sysco Minnesota Inc., Sysco Montana Inc., Sysco Nashville LLC, Sysco Netherlands Partners LLC, Sysco North Central Florida Inc., Sysco North Dakota Inc., Sysco Northern New England Inc., Sysco Philadelphia LLC, Sysco Pittsburgh LLC, Sysco Portland Inc., Sysco Raleigh LLC, Sysco Resources Services LLC, Sysco Riverside Inc., Sysco Sacramento Inc., Sysco San Diego Inc., Sysco San Francisco Inc., Sysco Seattle Inc., Sysco South Florida Inc., Sysco Southeast Florida LLC, Sysco Spain Holdings SLU, Sysco Spokane Inc., Sysco St. Louis LLC, Sysco Syracuse LLC, Sysco Technologies Cayman Ltd., Sysco Technologies LLC, Sysco UK Holdings Limited, Sysco UK Limited, Sysco UK Partners LLP, Sysco USA I Inc., Sysco USA II LLC, Sysco USA III LLC, Sysco Ventura Inc., Sysco Ventures Inc., Sysco Virginia LLC, Sysco West Coast Florida Inc., Sysco Western Minnesota Inc., The SYGMA Network Inc., Upsys, Victua SAS, Walker Foods Inc., Waugh Foods, and Wild Harvest Limited.How will humans adapt to climate change? Ask a Viking

Fjord explorers: William & Mary geologist Nick Balascio is part of a team of climate scientists, archaeologists and students working to understand the impact of environmental change on Viking society. Leah Marshall 19 (left), Balascio (center), and Stephen Wickler of Troms University survey a fjord inlet on the island of Vestvagya. Photo by Nick Balascio

Coring lakes: Moussa Dia 18 and Billy DAndrea of Columbia University prepare to collect a sediment core on Indrepollen, a Viking Age harbor location. Photo by Keving Krajick

The haul: Eve Pugsley 18 recovers a sediment trap from Indrepollen. Photo by Keving Krajick

Lake bound: Members of the research team carry a boat and coring equipment to a lake on the north side of the island Vestvagy in Norways Lofoten Islands. From left to right: Lorelei Curtin of Columbia University, Moussa Dia '18, Eve Pugsley 18, Stephen Wickler of Troms University and Nick Balascio. Photo by Keving Krajick Photo - of - Hide Caption

Popular culture portrays Vikings as violent marauders who raided the coasts of Europe with impunity, but new research indicates the Vikings were vulnerable to at least one threat: a changing climate.William & Mary geologist Nick Balascio recently returned from Norway. Hes part of a team of climate scientists, archaeologists and students who are working to understand how environmental changes impacted Viking society during the Iron Age.The research team, a collaboration among William & Mary, Columbia University, Troms University and the Lofotr Viking Museum, set its sights on the Lofoten Islands. The string of islands along the northern coast of Norway developed from small agricultural outposts to prominent Viking power centers during the Iron Age. The team plans to use biogeochemical markers left in lake sediment to chart environmental changes and reconstruct human activity patterns on the islands.In some of these coastal regions, you can see the Vikings were moving their harbors because of sea level change, Balascio said. Having access to a harbor was especially vital, because fishing was one of their main resources. If sea level change was affecting harbor access, the chieftains would have had to figure out a way to maintain trade and power.The Lofoten Islands are located above the Arctic Circle, which makes the region a particularly interesting case study for researching climate change, Balascio said. The Vikings were able to develop an agricultural settlement right at the edge of where agriculture was possible. The Vikings also relied on access to the ocean, as cod was one of their main trading commodities. Those two factors led Balascio to look for evidence of environmental fluctuations, because even the slightest change would have greatly affected Viking civilization.Right near the end of the Viking Age, were still trying to pinpoint the exact chronology, you see the abandonment of all these Viking boathouses, Balascio said. Likely they were relocating to another part of the coast, because the sea level was lowering.Unlike sea level rise, which climate scientists see as a major threat today, the Lofoten Islands were experiencing a relative drop in sea level. As glacial ice melted, its weight was lifted from the land, causing the Earths crust to rise. In fact, the land was rising so fast entire Viking chiefdoms were left without a way to access the ocean, Balascio explained. Ports became landlocked, because the harbor had literally risen out of the sea.Due to the particular geology of the region, changes in climate caused the relative sea level to fall over the past 10,000 years, Balascio said. Its not that the water was drying up, its that the land was heightened. Glaciers once made up a large amount of the arctic landmass. As they melted, the pressure removed from the Earths crust caused the land beneath it to rise.Picture getting up from a mattress after lying down. The indentation left by your body will rise until the mattress gets back into its original form. Though much of the arctic ice melted long ago, the land it once covered is still rebounding from its ice-age burden. This ongoing adjustment of the Earths crust is called glacial isostatic adjustment.The land surface has been rebounding over the last few thousand years since the ice left, Balascio said. Most Viking Age boathouses are at least two meters above present sea level, because the sea level was actually falling. Its not necessarily the same thing thats happening today, but it is a clear example of how sea level change had an influence on a civilization.Balascio took his first research trip to Norway as a Ph.D. student in 2007. For the better part of the past decade, he has wanted to return and build on his early work there. Last year, he received funding from the National Science Foundation to go back to Norway. His current research is primarily focused on using biomarkers in lake sediments to chart environmental and societal changes during the Iron Age (c. 500 BC-AD 1100).A main objective is to test the hypothesis that climate variability and sea-level variations had an impact on patterns of human settlement, he said.The team began fieldwork last year, with two undergraduate geology students Moussa Dia 18 and Eve Pugsley 18 coming along to help collect samples. This summer, on a return trip, Leah Marshall 19 joined the field crew. The experience was hardly a vacation.We work on these little, inflatable rafts to collect lake sediment, Balascio said. Its exciting, but its also really uncomfortable.Lofoten island lakes were created by glaciers, Balascio explained, which means they are extremely deep  anywhere from 60 to 150 feet. While they are lakes today, they were once harbors that led to out to the ocean. The sediment the lakes contain holds the key to understanding that transition. The field crew is responsible for coring the lakes, taking long tubes of sediment from the lake floor. The core tubes are lowered over the sides of inflatable rafts with ropes, filled with sediment and hoisted back up from the depths.Thats the most challenging thing, just working on lakes that are that deep, Balascio said. We have to recover the cores intact and were not on big vessels. Were on these tiny rafts.Back in the lab at William & Mary, Balascios students Dia, Pugsley and Marshall have helped analyze the samples to try to piece together a historical record where one doesnt exist. Much of what remains of Viking history was passed down through folklore, Balascio said, so his students are using geochemical analysis to try to build an environmental and archeological narrative.Were analyzing sediments, trying to provide chronologic information and context through radiocarbon dating, Balascio said. When you go back in time, the records get more scarce. You are limited in the information you have, because there are no written records.The sediment analysis is still in its early stages and Balascio expects it to be at least another year before he has a clear picture of how the Vikings responded to climate change. Even at this nascent stage, Balascio says he is already starting to get a sense of how people lived in one of the harshest environments on Earth.Its a good reminder that people have been responding to and adapting to climate change for a long time, Balascio said. Its not something thats necessarily new or happened in the last 150 years with global warming. This is something that civilizations have dealt with for a very long time.VIMS scientist helps lead NASA-funded ocean expedition

Deep-sea shrimp: VIMS professor Deb Steinberg displays a deep-sea shrimp caught in a net tow during the EXPORTS expedition to the northeast Pacific Ocean. Because seawater readily absorbs red wavelengths, red animals in the deep sea appear black and are thus camouflaged from predators. VIMS photo

Zooplankton: The upper sunlit ocean (or euphotic zone) teems with microscopic organisms known as phytoplankton that provide food for zooplankton like this copepod. The EXPORTS team is studying how use of carbon by these planktonic organisms affects the biological pump and ocean carbon cycle. VIMS photo

Phytoplankton: During the EXPORTS campaign, the Imaging Flow Cytobot will give scientists a continuous view of plankton diversity in the northeast Pacific. This collage represents just a small number of the different plankton types that inhabit Earths ocean. Photo by Heidi Sosik/WHOI Photo - of - Hide Caption

Professor Deborah Steinberg of William & Marys Virginia Institute of Marine Science set sail in early August aboard a major NASA-funded research expedition to the North Pacific Ocean.

The goal of the six-week cruise  which involves more than 100 scientists and crew from 20 institutions worldwide  is to combine data from ships and satellites to better understand and predict what happens to atmospheric carbon dioxide once it has entered the marine realm.

Knowing the fate of this oceanic CO 2 is important because carbon that reaches the deep sea contributes nothing to global warming and can remain there for tens to thousands of years. Says Steinberg, Transfer of organic carbon to the deep sea represents a potentially large sink for carbon dioxidethe main greenhouse gas implicated in global warming.

The project  dubbed EXPORTS for EXport Processes in the Ocean from Remote Sensing  is the first time that researchers will simultaneously study all aspects of this complex, planetary process. Doing so will require the full suite of modern scientific instrumentation, from space-based sensors to high-tech sampling nets and remotely operated underwater vehicles.

Steinberg says, Well be measuring all the many components of the biological pump, which is the transfer into the deep ocean of organic carbon thats fixed in surface waters. Fixing refers to the transformation of carbon dioxide into organic carbon through photosynthesis.

The biological pump operates through three main processes. Carbon-laden particles from the oceans surface sink through gravity, as happens with dead phytoplankton or feces produced by small animals called zooplankton. A daily vertical migration by some zooplankton carries ingested carbon from the surface to deeper waters. Physical processes, such as vertical ocean mixing, can also export suspended and dissolved carbon to depth.

Professor David Siegel of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), the projects overall science lead, says Weve designed EXPORTS to simultaneously observe the[se] three basic mechanisms Were 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 deeper water.

The EXPORTS team will focus on quantifying the magnitude of these processes and their dependence on ecosystem characteristics. 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 depthscrucial knowledge for guiding the human response to climate change.

Why now?

Oceanographers, including Steinberg and colleagues at VIMS, have been studying for decades the individual processes involved in the biologic pump. The reason EXPORTS is the first holistic study of the phenomenon, she says, is the sheer scale of effort required, as well as needed advancements in technology.

Its quite a feat to coordinate this many people in two ships, says Steinberg. It takes a long time to put a highly interdisciplinary, collaborative program like this together. Indeed, planning for the project began as a scoping study for NASA in 2012.

The two shipswhich embarked from Seattle on Aug. 10  are the research vessels Revelle and Sally Ride, both operated by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Steinberg and Jason Graf of Oregon State University are chief scientists aboard the 273-foot R/V Revelle. Chief scientists for the 238-foot R/V Sally Ride are Drs. Norm Nelson of UCSB and Mary Jane Perry of the University of Maine. Other VIMS participants in the cruise are marine technician Joe Cope and postdoctoral researcher Karen Stamieszkin.

A pair of ships provides the greater spatial context needed for a comprehensive understanding of the biological pump. Paula Bontempi, program manager for Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry at NASA Headquarters, says By employing two ships well be able to observe complex oceanographic processes that vary both in space and time that we wouldnt be able to capture with a single ship.

Our team is on what we call the process-study ship, adds Steinberg. Well be doing experiments near a single station to measure the rates of all these different biological pump processes, while the other ship, the survey ship, is transecting a larger area so we can put what were finding into a larger spatial context.

The

project will tie into a greater time dimension as well  sampling from the process-study ship will be done near NOAA's Ocean Station Papa, where ships and buoys have recorded meteorological and oceanographic data since 1949. The station lies about 800 miles south of Anchorage, Alaska and a four-day cruise from Seattle for the EXPORTS ships.

Researchers aboard the ships will deploy a suite of traditional and cutting-edge instruments to measure the pumps many biological and physical components. These include an autonomous platform called a Wirewalker that uses wave energy to move instruments along a taut wire from the surface to 1,600 feet in depth while measuring temperature, salinity, oxygen, carbon and chlorophyll. A remote-controlled underwater vehicle called the Seaglider will gather similar measurements, but to depths as great as 3,200 feet. Steinbergs team will use a MOCNESS plankton net (for Multiple Opening/Closing Net and Environmental Sensing System) to collect zooplankton from discrete depth intervals.



In the shipboard labs, the scientists will use genomic sequencers to assess the composition of the phytoplankton, zooplankton, bacterial, and archaeal communities. They will also use new imaging tools, including a high throughput microscope called the Imaging FlowCytobot, to provide real-time, high-resolution images of billions of individual phytoplankton. The Underwater Vision Profilerwill measure the sizes of sinking aggregates and collect images of zooplankton.

Optical instruments atop the ships superstructure will measure the oceans color at very high spectral resolution, from ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths, to help identify the distinct signatures or colors of light absorbed and scattered by different species of phytoplankton. This will allow scientists to develop algorithms for future satellite ocean-color missions such as NASAs 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.

Steinberg stresses that tying the global surface view available from satellites to the deeper view available from ships and underwater sensors is what sets EXPORTS apart. While satellites can only peer 30 to 90 feet beneath the waves, ship-deployed sensors can sense all the way to the seafloor, which at the study site lies almost 14,000 feet down.

Its really important that well be tying our work to satellites, says Steinberg. In addition to the data gathered by our net tows and submerged sensors, well have people onboard doing lots of bio-optical measurements, and there are satellites already up there that well be tying those measurements into. Our ultimate goal is to be able to measure the biological pump from space, to give us a global perspective of its magnitude and dynamics.North Smithfield School Superintendent Michael St. Jean and Assistant Superintendent Clare Arnold stand in the high schools band room. The school is offering a new Career and Technical Education program this year that will include music, business, and pre-engineering course offerings to students looking to start themselves on a career path while in high school.Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.Talks between mid-level US and Chinese officials in Washington last week did not result in any moves towards a resolution of the trade conflict between the worlds number one and number two economies but rather in a deepening of the divisions.

At the conclusion of the two-day discussions on Thursday evening, White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters said the two sides had exchanged views on how to achieve fairness, balance and reciprocity in the economic relationship, but did not provide details of any possible progress.

A statement from the Chinese Commerce Ministry said they had held constructive and frank talks and said it would stay in contact about the next step. There was no indication as to if, and when, further discussions might be held.

Even before the talks had got underway, US President Donald Trump set the tone in an interview with Reuters in which he indicated he expected little progress and that he had no time frame for ending the conflict. He said it would take time because Chinas done too well for too long, and theyve become spoiled. They dealt with people that, frankly, didnt know what they were doing, to allow us to get into this position.

The dominant view in the administration, articulated by US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and economic adviser Peter Navarro, is that Chinas attempt to develop its industrial and technological base is an existential threat to the economic and ultimately military dominance of the US and must be severely curtailed, if not prevented.

These positions were expressed in the press briefing provided by an unnamed senior Trump administration official at the conclusion of the latest discussions.

We have said consistently since the beginning of the administration that we are open to talking to China about the problems that we have had with their trade practices, with their industrial subsidies, and with a whole range of state-led intervention in the economy that is affecting global markets, the official remarked.

But in order to get a positive result out of these engagements, its really critical that they address the fundamental concerns that we have raised. We havent seen that yet.

Those fundamental concerns were set out in a US position paper delivered to Beijing at the beginning of May. They amounted demands that the Made in China 2025 plan for industrial and technological development and the accompanying state subsidies for key industries cease and that China halt its attempts to acquire US and other Western-developed technologies either through theft and forced technology transfers from US firms operating in the country. It also called on China to take no retaliatory action against any tariff or other measures the US may impose.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, citing sources close to Vice Premier Liu He, who is in overall charge of Chinas trade stance, Beijings view is that US demands are made up of three components.

Around 30 to 40 percent involve additional Chinese purchases of US goods which can be met immediately. Evidence of this was seen in May when China offered to purchase up to $100 billion of additional US goods only to see a potential deal overturned by Trump within a matter of days.

A second component involves market openings for US firms, such as increased opportunities for US and other foreign financial firms to gain a greater percentage of Chinese ventures and to have greater freedom to operate. Beijings position is that this could take some years to achieve.

The third component involves US demands for changes in Chinas industrial and technology policies over which Beijing has refused to negotiate. The US demand for China to halt its industrial development and end state subsidies to major firms has been widely criticised as being impossible to carry out.

Commenting on the outcome of the discussions, Phil Levy, senior fellow on the global economy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told the Financial Times: The Chinese have made attempts and they keep making them, but they keep getting rejected. I dont think this White House has put together a set of coherent demands that the Chinese could conceivably meet.

China expert Eswar Presad of Cornell University told the newspaper that the trade dispute had become a very complicated game of chicken. He continued: The Chinese see an opening to restart negotiations but the difficulty they face is an inflexible and unpredictable US trade policy.

Even as the latest round of talks was being held, the US was preparing for a major escalation against China. The Commerce Department held meetings last week at which it took submissions from industry representatives on the latest US tariff proposals. The administration is preparing to impose tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. These could be possibly as high as 25 percent, after Trump had initially flagged a 10 percent impost before dismissing it as not sufficient.

The new measures, which could go into effect as early as the end of September, would be in addition to the 25 percent tariff on $50 billion worth of goods that came into full effect, along with Chinese retaliatory measures, last week.

The first round largely excluded consumer products but the new round, if it goes ahead, will hit a far wider range of US producers who rely on China as part of their global supply chains.

The hearings, which lasted several days, saw a stream of smaller scale manufacturers warning they could be severely impacted. One manufacturer of wooden containers for fruit and vegetables, while expressing general support for what the administration is trying to accomplish in regard to China, warned that it can very difficult for a decent amount of companies to overcome some of these issues.

A manufacturer of paper bags said there would be instant disruption if the imposition of tariffs made it too costly to source production in China and there would be no shopping bags in malls across America on Black Friday, at Christmas and into perpetuity.

The overwhelming majority of submissions by manufacturers were for an exemption for the goods that form part of their supplies.

While some products may be excluded from the final list, as was the case in the initial round of tariff imposts, the view of the most strident anti-China hawks within the administration is that because China has so far not given way on the core US demands the pressure must be intensified.Willowbrook officials and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will hold a public forum where people can ask questions about the report at 7 p.m., Wednesday at Ashton Place, at 341 75th St., Willowbrook. Representatives of Sterigenics, the U.S. EPAs Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, the Illinois EPA, the DuPage County Health Department and the agency that prepared the report are expected to attend.While some families wish to remain private about their loved ones cause of death when it involves an opioid overdose, Glueckert recalled meeting with the parents of a young man who had died of such an overdose, and they were determined to prevent other families from going through the same pain and suffering.Jennifer Ann has found herself in Portland emergency rooms more than two dozen times in the past 20 yearsalmost always for the same reason.

"Usually I go," she says, "because I feel I'm going to kill myself."

On good days, Jennifer Ann, 56, is a high-functioning mother of four. She's a lifelong Portlander with bobbed hair and a self-deprecating wit. She's held administrative positions in the wood products industry, and now works as a mental health advocate.

On bad days, Jennifer Ann (who asked that WW not use her full name) is helpless as schizoaffective disordera combination of bipolar disorder and schizophreniatakes over. Last September, she went to the ER at Providence Portland Hospital at Northeast 47th Avenue and Glisan Street during a crisis. Hospital staff loaded her onto a gurney and lodged her in a stark room for 44 hours without therapeutic services.

"It's the worst thing you can do to a person in crisis," she says. "You just put them in a room and leave them there with minimal contact. It's scary and depressing."

What Providence did happens at Portland ERs all the time: Psychiatric patients held for days because there is no place to send them. Doctors and medical journals call it "psychiatric boarding." Patients and mental health advocates call it "warehousing" or "dumping."

"It's a broken system," says Cindy Scherba, clinical director of behavioral health services at Oregon Health and Science University.

The hospitals say they have little choice. Doctors, patients and mental health advocates say the practice is an unintended consequence of the state's flawed mental health policies.

The U.S. Department of Justice, which has been monitoring Oregon's mental health system, criticizes the practice. Documents show state leaders have created an expensive approach that treats too few patients and leaves many more stranded in ERs.

"There's a lot of money in the mental health system, but it's not being spent wisely," says Jason Renaud, a board member of the Mental Health Association of Portland. "We've chosen the most expensive, least effective method of dealing with people in crisis."

Nonetheless, boarding is the default treatment for thousands of patients who come to Portland emergency rooms each year. Nobody tracks the exact number, but statistics that do exist show the problem is getting worse.

The Oregon Health Plan paid to treat 15,407 patients for mental illness at emergency rooms last yeara 47 percent increase since 2009.

Meanwhile, the time such patients spend held in ERs is lengthening.

The typical patient with a physical complaint who comes to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center's ER in North Portland, for example, is in and out within 2 hours.

Emanuel's median ER stay for psychiatric patients in May was 40 hoursmore than twice what it was a year ago.

"There's not a system of community alternatives for people in distress," says Beckie Child, a patient advocate who teaches in Portland State University's School of Social Work. "Right now, the only option we have is the ER."

The parade of psychiatric patients to emergency rooms began 60 years ago with a national policy of deinstitutionalization. The theory was that moving patients from hulking mental hospitals into their communities would produce better outcomes.

Institutions opened their doors, but state and local governments have struggled to find community-based alternatives.

Typically, a patient who arrives at an ER suffering a psychiatric crisis gets evaluated by a doctor. The patient may elect to remain voluntarily until an inpatient bed is available, or a doctor may order an involuntary "psychiatric hold." In the latter case, a county investigator must assess within three days whether the patient should be committed. A commitment hearing must then be held within five business days.

Without local beds, patients are typically put into what have become improvised holding cells in hospital ERs. For safety, that space typically contains no furniture other than a bed bolted to the floor. The patient is in a netherworld: not free to go, not admitted, and often not treated.

"Some folks end up being boarded for as long as three weeks," says Liz Wakefield, a lawyer with Metropolitan Public Defenders who handles commitment hearings.

Nicole Currier says that boarding patients in ERs often makes their conditions worse.

That's what Currier, 31, says happened to her in 2011. A Northeast Portland native who loves the Woodsman Tavern and her pit bull-greyhound mix, Sadie, Currier has been diagnosed with PTSD. She says she had just been put on a new drug called Luvox that caused her to experience mania and to consider cutting herself.

Her fiance called police for help, and an officer drove Currier to the Providence Portland ER, where medical staff placed her in an ER triage room, with a guard outside the door. Later, she was moved to a locked room within the ER.

It was in no way therapeutic, Currier says. I felt like a caged animal.

Currier says she was in a fog. Her fiance implored hospital staff to take her off Luvox, and her condition rapidly improved. Currier says she thinks if she'd been seen by mental health specialists, the results would have been much better.

"It felt like I went somewhere seeking help and, instead, I was punished," Currier says. "I was on a psychiatric hold, but I was not in a psych unit. That's very confusing." A Providence spokesman was not available for comment.

Key decisions by state leaders in the past decade have turned Portland emergency rooms into warehouses.

First, despite the national trend toward deinstitutionalization, the Oregon Legislature, led by Senate President Peter Courtney (D-Salem), has doubled down on building big, centralized mental hospitals.

Led by Courtney, lawmakers voted in 2007 to replace the decrepit 125-year-old Oregon State Hospital in Salem with a new facility, plus build another state hospital in Junction City, 17 miles north of Eugeneboth far from the Portland area.

State hospital beds are increasingly taken up by forensic patientspersons judged guilty of a crime except for insanity or found incapable of aiding in their own defense at trial. Such patients comprise 400 of the state hospital's 601 patients. That leaves little room for patients from outside the criminal justice system.

"The state hospital is more and more clogged," says Dr. Tony Melaragno, Legacy's vice president of behavioral health administration. "For a patient who's been committed, the wait list is increasing; it's three or four weeks now to get a bed.a

What's worse, the new Oregon State Hospital is extraordinarily expensiveit costs $345,000 a year to keep a patient there, and that money comes out of the state's general fund.

By comparison, community-based mental health treatmentwhich the state lacks, requiring patients to be held in ERs for days at a timecosts $15,000 a year. And such costs are largely reimbursed by the federal government.

Oregon's reliance on the state hospital is a sore point for federal officials. The U.S. Department of Justice has ordered the state to improve its mental health system.

"Movement from an institution-based system and a subsequent reinvestment into a community-based system will result in major savings," the DOJ said in a January report.

The state's reliance on an expensive system that's leaving mental patients stranded in hospital ERs enrages many advocates.

"The Oregon state legislature is to blame for underfunding mental health and for mismanaging the money they do have," Renaud says. "It's a jobs program to Peter Courtney, and he's supposed to be a mental health advocate."

Courtney says he's indeed a strong advocate. He says he has pushed to fund a wide variety of community-based options, but says Oregon will always need a state hospital.

He says replacing the existing facility in Salem rather than in Portland minimized disruptions and that the Junction City facility will serve the rest of the state outside the Willamette Valley. He notes the Junction City hospital has been downsized from a planned 360 beds to 175.

"I'm not ashamed of what we've done at the state hospital," Courtney says. "I do agree that community mental health is where we need to pour it on right now. We need to elevate that effort."

Pamela Martin, the state's director of addiction and mental health services, acknowledges boarding is a big problem.

She says, however, the Legislature in 2013 allocated $60 million over the next two years to add mental health services in communities.

The money will not pay for new inpatient beds, but it's intended to prevent many of the triggers that cause people to seek emergency help. The funding will cover the costs of more crisis response teams, for example, and provide earlier treatment for people developing mental illness.

"The Legislature has made an extraordinary investment in the mental health system," Martin says.

Private psychiatric hospital beds are disappearing rapidly. The primary reason: economics.

At OHSU, each psychiatric hospital bed loses about $500 a day. That's because many patients lack insurance, and Medicaid reimbursement is far less than the cost of services.

"It's just not sustainable," says OHSU's Scherba.

Conditions in Oregon are worse than in nearly every other state. Oregon now ranks 47th in the country for private hospital inpatient psychiatric beds, according to the American College of Emergency Physicians. Five years ago, Oregon had 28.8 psychiatric beds per 100,000 people. The rate is now to 8.7 per 100,000.

The flood of psychiatric patients keeps coming. Last year, Portland police dropped off 1,138 patients at ERs and took only 50 to community-based treatment centers.

That reliance on ERs troubles Oregon's federal overseers.

"Treating an individual with mental illness or in a mental health crisis in an emergency room is the most expensive form of treatment," wrote Judy Preston, a civil-rights lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice overseeing Oregon's mental health system, in a Jan. 24 letter to state officials. "And one that also runs the increased risk of institutionalization and does not provide the services necessary for the prevention of future crises."









Even in the face of failure by state leaders to fix Oregon's system, there are solutions.

One way is to go to court to force change. In Washington state, two hospital groups have successfully sued the state, arguing that boarding violates their patients' civil rights "because it does not provide a realistic opportunity for improvement." The Washington Supreme Court heard the state's appeal of that case in late June.

There's no such case currently in litigation in Oregon, but last month, a team of medical expertsincluding representatives from OHSU and Legacy, and Dr. Sharon Meieran, a Kaiser ER doctorvisited a model program in Alameda County, Calif.

There, police no longer drop people experiencing psychiatric crises at the closest hospital. Instead, officials established a psychiatric emergency room at John George Hospital in San Leandro.

The outcomes, according to a study published in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine in June 2013, are remarkable.

Patient boarding time declined from an average of 10 hours to less than two. And because patients received appropriate treatment rather than simply being warehoused, the need for inpatient hospitalization decreased by 75 percent.

Its pretty incredible what theyve done, says Meieran.

The economics are far better as well.

MediCal, the California equivalent of the Oregon Health Plan, pays for up to 23 hours of treatment at John George with Medicaid dollars.

That Medicaid billing code exists in Oregon, but nobody's using it.

Legacy and OHSU are pressing state officials to activate the billing code in Oregon. The two hospital systems, often competitors, have identified space in central Portland in which they hope to replicate the Alameda model next year.

"They've been doing it for five years down there, so it's sustainable," says OHSU's Scherba. "This is probably one of the most exciting opportunities I've seen in my career.

Patients say a better approach cannot come soon enough.

Jennifer Ann, for one, is still haunted by her last experience in an ER.

I felt abandoned and lost and frightened, she says. And not really having a conception of this ever having an end.

WWeek 2015Senator John McCains memorial service will be held at the Washington National Cathedral on Saturday, Sept. 1. Burial will follow at the United States Naval Academy on Sunday, according to a message on his campaign website.

At the Saturday morning service, former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush are expected to give eulogies. Vice president Mike Pence is expected to attend as the representative of the current administration. McCain allegedly said before he died that he didnt want President Donald Trump to attend. The two had longstanding clashes on a number of issues.

Before the Washington, DC services, McCain will lie in state at the Arizona capitol on Wednesday, followed by a memorial service in Phoenix on Thursday. Former Vice President Joe Biden will speak at the Arizona service, according to a Washington Post report.

McCains body will then be sent to Washington, D.C. and lie in state at the US Capitol on Friday.

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Former President George W. Bush has accepted an invitation to deliver a eulogy at the funeral of Sen. John McCain at the National Cathedral and is "honored to have been asked to speak," Bush spokesman Freddy Ford confirmed to ABC News on Sunday. Former first lady Laura Bush will also be in attendance.

McCain, a Vietnam War hero with more than 35 years of public service who became one of the most distinctive figures in modern American politics, died Saturday at his home in Arizona at the age of 81 after a long battle with cancer.

The New York Times reported on Saturday night that McCain requested that both Bush and former President Barack Obama  each of whom has run against the Arizona senator in presidential campaigns  be invited to deliver eulogies at the senator's funeral. The Times also reported Saturday that while Vice President Mike Pence was invited to attend the funeral, President Donald Trump, who has had a tumultuous relationship with McCain, was not invited.

ABC News has reached out to the White House and Obama's representatives, but a request for comment was not immediately returned.

McCain has a long history of reaching out to lawmakers across the political aisle to pass major legislation in the Senate and of overcoming political differences. The Arizona senator lost to fellow Republican George W. Bush in the 2000 GOP primary for president.

Bush paid tribute to McCain on Saturday, writing, "Some lives are so vivid, it is difficult to imagine them ended. Some voices are so vibrant, it is hard to think of them stilled. John McCain was a man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order."

Story continues

Former Pres. George W. Bush: "Some lives are so vivid, it is difficult to imagine them ended. Some voices are so vibrant, it is hard to think of them stilled. John McCain was a man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order." https://t.co/Fa0Xr0oHKe pic.twitter.com/BXrXMpkTPr  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 26, 2018

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate John Mccain and democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama greet each other at the start of the final presidential debate in Hempstead, New York, Oct. 15, 2008. (Justin Lane/EPA via Shutterstock)

Obama, who defeated McCain in the 2008 presidential election, offered his condolences to the McCain family and shared a heartfelt tribute to the Arizona senator in a statement on Saturday.

John McCain and I were members of different generations, came from completely different backgrounds, and competed at the highest level of politics, he wrote. But we shared, for all our differences, a fidelity to something higher  the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched, and sacrificed.

Former Pres. Barack Obama shares a tribute to Sen. John McCain https://t.co/Fa0Xr0oHKe pic.twitter.com/GCOYCk7vjc  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 26, 2018

(MORE: John McCains greatest lesson was 'to forgive' and 'see the good' in opponents: Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake)

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate John McCain shakes hands with President George W. Bush after receiving his endorsement in the Rose Garden of the White House,March 5, 2008. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

McCain's fellow Arizona senator, Republican Jeff Flake, said on "This Week" Sunday that McCain's greatest lesson is to forgive and to see the good in his opponents."

Flake added that we can honor McCain's legacy by "seeing the good in our opponents, by being quick to forgive, by realizing that there's something more important than ourselves, to put service over and above our self interest."Pope decried sex-abuse crisis in Ireland but some said, 'What you need is action': Reporter's Notebook originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

You wouldnt think that a trip to Ireland, of all places, would be tricky for a famously charming pope.

Traditionally, this is one the most Catholic countries in Christendom. The shamrock itself, Irelands national symbol, stems from St. Patricks early efforts to teach people the concept of the Holy Trinity.

Catholicism took hold in this country like few others, the bond deepened by years of oppression at the hands of a colonial power that disapproved of the faith so much the British were known to withhold food aid in the midst of a famine unless starving people converted to Protestantism.

Being Catholic in Ireland, not taking the soup, was an expression of patriotism.

But times have changed.

Pope Francis, flanked by Vatican spokesperson Greg Burke, listens to a journalist's question during a press conference aboard of the flight to Rome at the end of his two-day visit to Ireland, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018. (AP)

(MORE: Pope Francis declines to comment on allegations of sexual abuse cover up in DC)

The island of saints and scholars is also full of survivors. The sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic church worldwide hit especially hard here, where church-run schools, workhouses and orphanages were notorious havens for abuse.

Some say one in four people of a certain age here are victims of institutional abuse. Every person, every family, knows someone or is related to someone directly affected.

The horrors of abuse in those institutions in Ireland have been thoroughly documented, but the recent report by a Pennsylvania grand jury detailing decades of abuse in that state opened old wounds all over again right as Pope Francis was due to visit.

PHOTO: Protesters demonstrate on the Ha'Penny Bridge during the visit of Pope Francis in Dublin, Ireland, Aug. 25, 2018. (Hannah McKay/Reuters)

(MORE: Pope Francis in Ireland talks 'pain and shame' from church's 'failure' over sex abuse)

By coming here, Pope Francis was entering the lions den. That was the frame for this papal visit. For Francis, it was nothing less than a pilgrimage of atonement. For the many Irish who have drifted away from the church -- or broken from it altogether -- it was a new rising.

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When Pope John Paul II visited Ireland a generation ago, it was a different country. In 1979, homosexuality was illegal here. In 2018, the taoiseach -- the Irish prime minister -- is gay. Over the past few years, Irish voters have overwhelmingly approved same-sex marriage and lifted a constitutional ban on abortion thats been in place since shortly after Pope John Pauls visit.

In one of Pope Francis first meetings on this trip, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was diplomatic but blunt. Varadkar explained: This visit marks a new chapter in the relationship between Ireland and the Catholic Church.

PHOTO: Women wait for Pope Francis to drive past, on Aug. 25, 2018, in Dublin, Ireland. (Hannah McKay/Reuters)

(MORE: Pressure on Ireland-bound Pope Francis amid another sexual abuse scandal)

The politician politely told the pope that marriages do not always work, that women should make their own decisions and that families come in many forms, including those headed by a grandparent, lone parent or same-sex parents or parents who are divorced.

On the sexual abuse crisis, Varadkar was even more direct. He said, Above all, Holy Father, I ask you to listen to the victims.

Pope Francis did listen. And he spoke from the heart, denouncing the abuse of children and the cover-up as repugnant crimes. Meeting privately with survivors of institutional abuse, he reportedly used even stronger language to describe church officials who facilitated sexual abuse.

He stunned us all by referring to them as caca, survivor Paul Redmond told the state broadcaster RTE. Redmond said, His translator was taken aback and clarified it, but he literally said they were filth in the toilet.

But many survivors told us mere words wont repair the damage done.

Pope Francis salutes the crawd as he leaves after visiting St Mary's Pro-Cathedral, in Dublin, Ireland, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018. Pope Francis is on a two-day visit to Ireland. (AP)

(MORE: Vatican says Pope Francis to meet sex abuse victims in Ireland)

What you need is action, said Dublin City Councilor Mannix Flynn, a survivor of institutional abuse. Christ led by example. The apostles are way behind on that. So words are no good. Actions are where its at.

Can you imagine your house being burglarized and sitting down and thinking you and your wife maybe say a couple of prayers that the guy might leave? It doesnt work like that. What works is law enforcement. Justice is what works. Truth is what works, Flynn said.

Another survivor, Michael OBrien of Clonmel, told me, We want a day of atonement. A complete day of atonement for what theyve done to us.

Stand up, he said. Stand up, Pope Francis, and show us what you can do.

PHOTO: Pope Francis gestures as he drives through the streets of Dublin, Ireland, Aug. 25, 2018. (Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters)

(MORE: Pope Francis makes surprise visit to elderly woman)

The anger against the church is so strong, a coalition of protest groups under the banner Nope to the Pope booked a block of tickets to Sundays papal mass with no intention of showing up.

While more than a million people turned out for Pope John Paul in 1979, the Vatican generously estimated Sundays crowd at the same venue to be 300,000, and officials blamed the rain for the poor turnout.

Thats simply not credible. Ive been to papal masses in Africa and South America where torrential downpours didnt dampen the turnout. Here in Ireland, they are accustomed to rain. And by afternoon the skies had cleared.

To be sure, there are plenty of Irish who were genuinely excited to see Pope Francis. We met an old fellow named Dermot, fresh off the train from the country (and central casting) in peaked cap and the same suit he wore to see Pope John Paul nearly 40 years ago.

And there was Mary Burke from County Offaly, who told us her children werent interested but she felt it was important to be here.

(MORE: Pope Francis appoints 14 new cardinals)

But in Dublin, many counterprotesters gathered Sunday at the General Post Office on OConnell Street, where Irish nationalists declared independence from Great Britain in the 1916 Easter Rising.

One held up a sign saying The Church Way Worse than the Brits.

A bit of Irish humor. But pointed enough.

The people of Ireland stand with the people of Pennsylvania, one of the organizers Max Krzyzanowski told me. We stand with people in every country who have been damaged, traumatized, and killed by this institution.Trump speaks about McCain after ignoring questions all day, returns White House flag to half-staff originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

After ignoring repeated questions all day about whether he would say anything about his political nemesis, John McCain, President Donald Trump finally spoke about him Monday evening, saying "our hearts and prayers are going to the family of Senator John McCain ... and we very much appreciate everything Sen. McCain has done for our country."

The president was speaking to a dinner with evangelical leaders. He extended prayers and condolences to the victims of the Jacksonville, Florida shooting as well.

The president's comments came a few hours after the White House abruptly returned its flag to half-staff Monday afternoon in honor of the late senator. Trump had ignored questions about McCain in the Oval Office Monday morning and at other events as well.

(MORE: Unlike White House, some governors order flags at half-staff until McCain's burial)

The president issued a statement Monday afternoon explaining why the flag was again lowered -- after facing widespread criticism for not keeping it at half-staff.

PHOTO: The White House flag is seen after being returned to half-staff in honor of Senator John McCain at the White House, Aug. 26, 2018. (Leah Millis/Reuters)

"Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCains service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment," the president said.

"I have asked Vice President Mike Pence to offer an address at the ceremony honoring Senator McCain at the United States Capitol this Friday," the statement continued.

SLIDESHOW: America Mourns Senator John McCain

"At the request of the McCain family, I have also authorized military transportation of Senator McCains remains from Arizona to Washington, D.C., military pallbearers and band support, and a horse and caisson transport during the service at the United States Naval Academy. Finally, I have asked General John Kelly, Secretary James Mattis, and Ambassador John Bolton to represent my Administration at his services," the president said.

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But throughout much of the day, Trump had ignored almost a dozen questions from ABC News chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl and reporters on McCain.

In contrast, the president's daughter Ivanka Trump praised McCain as a "hero" at a women's empowerment event in Washington, D.C.

As we gather here today I want to extend my deepest sympathies to the family of Sen John McCain an American patriot who served our country with distinction for more than six decades," said Trump. "The nation is united in its grief and the world mourns the loss of a true hero and a great statesman."

"Why won't you say anything about John McCain?"@jonkarl asked Pres. Trump ten times today to comment on Senator John McCain, who passed away this weekend at age 81. The president did not respond. https://t.co/HebITj8csN pic.twitter.com/iwKYhGRaNj  ABC News (@ABC) August 27, 2018

White House officials had returned the U.S. flag to full-staff around midnight, ABC News senior White House correspondent Cecilia Vega told Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos Monday.

The White House flag could then be seen for some time flying at full-staff while the banners surrounding the Washington Monument were at half-staff.

PHOTO: Camera shot facing south over the White House - you can see the flag at the WH at full staff while the flags surrounding the Washington Monument are lowered as of 5:13 am on Aug, 27, 2018. (karentravers/Twitter)

The initial White House flag-lowering that lasted less than 48 hours broke with precedent that it remain lowered until burial.

The federal code states that the flag shall be lowered on the day of death and the following day for a sitting member of Congress. Flying it at half-staff for an extended period of time is at the discretion of the president.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump waits for the arrival of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to the West Wing of the White House in Washington, July 30, 2018. (Susan Walsh/AP, FILE)

Meanwhile, Trump inititialy rejected his aides recommendation to issue a statement praising the late Arizona senator, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

(MORE: John McCains complicated relationship with President Trump)

But Trump did release a tweet of condolences.

My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 26, 2018

The McCain family had reportedly asked the president not to attend McCains funeral even before he died this weekend at age 81.

Two former presidents -- Barack Obama and George W. Bush -- will deliver eulogies Saturday. Vice President Mike Pence has also been invited to the funeral.

(MORE: Former President George W. Bush 'honored' to eulogize John McCain)Photo credit: Spencer Platt - Getty Images

From Town & Country

Lifelong public servant Senator John McCain, who died Saturday after a year-long battle with brain cancer, will reportedly be memorialized by two former presidents. According to CNN, Barack Obama and George W. Bush will give the eulogies at McCain's funeral in Washington, D.C.. But President Trump will not be there. Justin Jouvenal, a journalist for the Washington Post reports on Twitter, "Spokesman for John McCain said President Trump will not be attending the Arizona senator's funeral."

BREAKING: Spokesman for John McCain said President Trump will not be attending the Arizona senator's funeral. - justin jouvenal (@jjouvenal) August 27, 2018

Earlier this year, it was widely reported that McCain does not want current President Donald Trump to be invited to the service. Despite being members of the same political party, Trump and McCain have a poor relationship; Trump once said that "[McCain's] not a war hero. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured" during a campaign event in Iowa.

"[McCain's] intimates have informed the White House that their current plan for his funeral is for Vice President Mike Pence to attend the service to be held in Washingtons National Cathedral but not President Trump, with whom Mr. McCain has had a rocky relationship," reads an article in the New York Times from May of this year.

McCain's pallbearers will include confidants from both of sides of the aisle including former Vice President Joe Biden, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and actor Warren Beatty.

On Wednesday, August 29, McCain will lie in state at the Arizona State capital. Following a private formal ceremony at 10 a.m. PT, the public can pay their respects starting at 2 p.m. A livestream of the events is available below.



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There will also be a religious memorial service at North Phoenix Baptist Church on Thursday August 30.



Then, McCain's casket will travel to Washington, D.C. where on Friday the late Senator will lie in state at the United States Capitol. Following a formal service at 11 a.m., the public is invited to pay their respects between the hours of 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.

On Saturday at approximately 8:30 a.m., there will be a public processional from the Capitol to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. According to McCain's website, "The motorcade will pause at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial where Mrs. Cindy McCain will lay a ceremonial wreath honoring all whose lives were lost during the Vietnam War. The public is welcome to line the procession route along Constitution Avenue to pay their respects to Senator McCain."

The former senator will then make his way to Washington National Cathedral. Per McCain's website, this an invite-only memorial, but there will be a livestream available.

Both Obama and Bush 43 paid tribute to McCain on social media after receiving news of his passing. Read their comments below for a preview of what might be said at his memorial services.

President Barack Obama:

"John McCain and I were members of different generations, came from completely different backgrounds, and competed at the highest level of politics. But we shared, for all our differences, a fidelity to something higher-the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched, and sacrificed. We saw our political battles, even, as a privilege, something noble, an opportunity to serve as stewards of those high ideals at home, and to advance them around the world. We saw this country as a place where anything is possible - and citizenship as our patriotic obligation to ensure it forever remains that way.

"Few of us have been tested the way John once was, or required to show the kind of courage that he did. But all of us can aspire to the courage to put the greater good above our own. At John's best, he showed us what that means. And for that, we are all in his debt. Michelle and I send our heartfelt condolences to Cindy and their family."

Our statement on the passing of Senator John McCain: pic.twitter.com/3GBjNYxoj5 - Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 26, 2018

President George W. Bush:

"Some lives are so vivid, it is difficult to imagine them ended. Some voices are so vibrant, it is hard to think of them stilled. John McCain was a man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order. He was a public servant in the finest traditions of our country. And to me, he was a friend whom I'll deeply miss. Laura and I send our heartfelt sympathies to Cindy and the entire McCain family, and our thanks to God for the life of John McCain."

We'll continue to update this post with further news of McCain's memorial services.

('You Might Also Like',)Photo credit: Chaiyaporn Baokaew - Getty Images

From Cosmopolitan

A 29-year-old man from Texas admitted to five separate road rage incidents in which he shot at women drivers from his Ford Explorer, according to Harris County court documents. Police officials involved in the investigation believe the man, Nicholas D'Agostino, was randomly targeting women drivers because he has "a very dim view of women."

D'Agostino was arrested Thursday in connection with two recent shootings in Katy, Texas-just outside of Houston. The arrest came after two women told police they were shot after driving near D'Agostino's home. Once in police custody, D'Agostino further admitted to several previous road rage incidents over the past few months, all of which involved shootings targeted at women.

According to court documents, D'Agostino was arrested in March for allegedly shooting a woman in the arm as she drove out of a gas station. At the time, D'Agostino told authorities he did it-but only because the woman swerved her vehicle toward him, and he shot her to stop the threat.

But now police believe D'Agostino's behavior isn't defensive at all. In court documents, police say they've seen rants posted by D'Agostino on Facebook, in which he complains about "incompetent" female drivers, whose "sole purpose is to give birth to male children." The investigating officers now believe D'Agostino is responsible for at least five random shootings that have plagued the Katy, Texas area just this year.

While D'Agostino was previously released from jail on a $75,000 bond, he is now back in custody, held on two charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The bail for each of those charges is set at $200,000, according to the Harris County Sheriff's Office. He's due to appear in court in early September.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.



('You Might Also Like',)President Trump is being mocked on social media for appearing to incorrectly color the U.S. flag during a visit to the Nationwide Childrens Hospital in Ohio Thursday, reports Mashable.

The controversy began when someone tweeted a close-up photo of the American flag Trump had colored in while sitting with kids who were also coloring.

The president seems to have made one of the stripes blue.

The same person then tweeted a follow up showing him coloring in the blue stripe and added the comment, Proof its real.

While some users responded by joking that Trump was trying to depict the white, blue, and red striped Russian flag, others defended the president, including one person who wrote, in part, This is the dumbest tweet Ive ever seen. Literally picking hairs over someone coloring with children.Cordell Hull was found with multiple gunshot wounds near the intersection of 127th Street and Marshfield Avenue about 2 a.m.LeoLabs wants to offer a new infrastructure of equipment and software to track more objects in orbit around the Earth.

The startup's recent round of funding raised $13 million, with Airbus Ventures and WERU Investment leading the round.

LeoLabs sees three potential customer groups in the space industry: Satellite companies, public agencies and insurers.

In the loud and crowded world of satellites, start-up LeoLabs is working toward offering both governments and companies alike a solution to cut through the noise.

Tens of thousands of objects fly around the Earth many times faster than a bullet, capable of destroying billions of dollars in equipment. LeoLabs wants to offer an infrastructure of equipment and software to enhance the eyes on the sky with a new source of risk-assessment data.

"Ninety-five percent of the risk of being hit by a piece of debris is not being tracked," CEO Dan Ceperley told CNBC.

LeoLabs' most recent round of funding raised $13 million, with Airbus Ventures and WERU Investment leading the round, joined by Space Angels and Horizons Ventures. The cash means LeoLabs will begin building next-generation ground systems overseas, adding to the two it has in Midland, Texas and Fairbanks, Alaska. "Starting next year," Ceperley said, these phased-array radar ground systems "will be providing the information that makes tracking that debris possible."

"You're looking at the first company trying to accomplish a Google Maps around the Earth," Airbus Ventures partner Julien Etaix told CNBC.

LeoLabs estimates there are about 250,000 pieces of debris orbiting the Earth that are both not tracked and potentially disastrous if they collide with a satellite. The U.S. military is tracking about 23,000 objects in space around the Earth, according to AGI, a company which provides software to commercial and government entities to analyze and track objects. AGI estimates the current public catalogs only account for about 4 percent of the objects in space around the Earth.

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An animation of the history of space debris around the Earth. Source: AGI

"It's our mission to be a global platform," says LeoLabs vice president of business development Alan DeClerck. "The real currency of what we're able to do with the radar is frequency of operations."

LeoLabs sees three potential customer groups in the space industry: Satellite companies (which, shortly after a launch, want to know where a satellite is and whether it is healthy), public agencies (especially on the licensing and regulatory side of the public sector which are trying to avoid increase risk to assets in space) and insurers (which underwrite launches and satellite operations in space).

"We specifically got into the business now because now is when the wave of developments are happening," Ceperley said. "15,000 new satellites are being slated to go into low Earth orbit over the next three to five years."

With thousands of satellites set to launch, LeoLabs sees the insurance business as a potential boon  especially given the existing risks.

"If you have a big data set then we use that as an example of what developing future applications for space is going to look like," DeClerck said. "They can write applications that will be worth millions and millions of dollars to the insurance industry."

Airbus Ventures had contributed to the $4 million LeoLabs raised in the last two years but in this latest round stepped up as co-lead with WERU, a Japanese firm. Etaix explained that Airbus Ventures is not structured "like other aerospace VC funds," saying that the firm "is quite independent from Airbus."

"We can connect with Airbus but we don't really force the marriage with Airbus," Etaix said.

Etaix added that LeoLabs is already working with the broader Airbus, due to the "number of businesses" that could benefit from this technology, he said.

"Primarily OneWeb, because OneWeb is a project Airbus is heavily involved with because they need the data," Etaix said. OneWeb is one of several companies building a next-generation constellation of hundreds of satellites for high speed internet.

With 15 employeesLeoLabs expects to add 10 more shortlythat headcount is expanding as the company builds more ground sites and adds capability. Ceperley said it will be "six months from breaking ground to delivering data" with the next location and expects LeoLabs to be able to build additional locations just as quickly. Investment in the space industry has introduced new trends which LeoLabs is attempting to capitalize on: New rockets, lighter and cheaper satellites and a new need to quickly get data from spacecraft in orbit.

"LeoLabs has uniquely harnessed the energy of these trends ... and is thereby dismantling some of the last remaining barriers for new space entrants, while making massive constellations for the experienced incumbents newly manageable at an unprecedented level of detailed awareness and reactive capability," Etaix added.





More From CNBC

Algiers (AFP) - Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika flew Monday to Switzerland for a medical check-up, his office said, months ahead of an election with no clear successor in sight for the ailing 81-year-old.

The statement, carried by the APS news agency, gave no further details about the "routine medical check-up" in Geneva, nor did it say how long Bouteflika was expected to be out of the country.

Bouteflika has been frail since suffering a stroke in 2013, which weakened his mobility and forced him to work from his residence in Zeralda, west of Algiers.

Bouteflika has since travelled abroad several times to undergo medical examinations in Paris, the southeastern French city of Grenoble and in Geneva.

Rumours often swirl in Algeria about the state of the president's health, with opposition leaders quick to express concerns about a possible "power vacuum" if he were to die.

But with a presidential election due to take place in April 2019, politicians have already been preparing for a fifth term under Bouteflika, who has been in power since 1999.

In April, the secretary general of his National Liberation Front, Djamel Ould Abbes, asked him to run for re-election.

And in June, Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia said his Rally for National Democracy (RND) party would support the president "continuing his mission and his sacrifice in the service of Algeria".

In 2014, the year after his stroke, Bouteflika's decision to seek a fourth term sparked criticism from those who questioned his ability to rule.

Bouteflika only makes rare public appearances, during which he is usually seen sitting in a wheelchair.Americans 'deserve to know' if president as corrupt as people around him who pleaded guilty: Democrat originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

A key House Democrat on both the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees said Americans should know if President Trump is implicated in any way by the convictions and guilty pleas of some of his former associates.

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on This Week Sunday, that in the wake of last week's fraud conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the guilty plea by the president's former longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, Trump should meet with special counsel Robert Mueller.

The best thing this president, the best thing he can do is to just sit down with special counsel, come clean, and clear up these questions that exist," Swalwell said. "The American people deserve to know if the president is as corrupt as the people who have pled guilty around him.

Swalwell is the only Democrat to serve on both the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, both of which have power to investigate the president, which the congressman said they will do if Democrats gain control of the House in the November midterm elections.

"The best thing we can do is promise the American people, if we are given the majority, that we will conduct the investigations the Republicans are unwilling to conduct," Swalwell said.

He said possible investigations would include Trump's "contact with the Russians, and including his tax returns, which the American people have not seen, but I promise a Democratic majority will ensure that they do see.

Swalwell said Democrats would also probe whether the president violated campaign finance laws through alleged hush-money agreements that Michael Cohen made with two women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, over their alleged affairs with Trump.

MORE: Trump renews attack on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, claiming 'real corruption goes untouched'

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MORE: Manafort found guilty on 8 counts in tax fraud trial

Stephanopoulos also asked about the possibility of a Democratic-led House pushing to impeach Trump. If there were evidence to show that President Trump was involved, conspired with Michael Cohen for a campaign finance violation, would that be a high crime and misdemeanor?

Swalwell responded, Democrats should not lead with impeachment, George. I think we should lead with the core issues people care about, making sure that health care costs go down, that their paychecks go up, and that we scrub out corruption. But we shouldn't look the other way.

Stephanopoulos pressed, saying, I understand that you don't want to lead with impeachment as we head into the midterms, but if the president was part of a conspiracy to violate the campaign finance laws, in your view, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, is that a high crime and misdemeanor?

He's not above the law," Swalwell said of President Trump. "But I think that we don't have enough evidence yet  We don't want to be as reckless with the facts as he is. I think, thorough investigations, putting forth an impenetrable case to the American people, doing it in a bipartisan way, is the proper way to do this. But we're not there yet."By Zeba Siddiqui COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh (Reuters) - Refugees in Bangladesh held demonstrations and prayers on Saturday to mark the passing of a year since the outbreak of a conflict in western Myanmar's Rakhine state that drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims from their homes. Across the border in Myanmar, the government said security patrols had been increased in the conflict area ahead of the anniversary for fear of further violence. Members of the mostly Buddhist Rakhine ethnic group and Hindus from Rakhine state said they would hold events to remember those killed by Rohingya militants in attacks that triggered the crisis. Thousands of refugees, from children to the elderly, marched prayed and chanted slogans in events across the sprawling camps in southern Bangladesh. Many wore black ribbons to commemorate what they said was the start of the "Rohingya genocide". "We prayed the morning prayers inside our house over the sound of bullets. We were so scared," said Aisha, 47, one of dozens of women at a gathering in the Kutupalong camp, recalling the outbreak of the conflict. "Today marks 365 days since that day. So I want to say, we want justice." (Graphic: One year on, no end in sight - https://tmsnrt.rs/2P1V4Zg) After the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked 30 Myanmar police posts and a military base in the early hours of Aug. 25, 2017, Myanmar troops swept through villages. Around 700,000 Rohingya have since fled, according to United Nations agencies. Rohingya who crossed the border reported killings, rapes and arson carried out by security forces, in what the UN's top human rights official said seemed to be a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing". The government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has denied allegations of atrocities made by the refugees, saying that security forces lawfully suppressed Muslim militants in Rakhine. Government spokesman Zaw Htay told Reuters on Friday that Myanmar did not tolerate human rights abuses, and had set up a commission of inquiry that included two veteran international diplomats to look into the Rakhine crisis. International pressure on Myanmar has been growing, however. U.N.-mandated investigators are set to publish a report on the crisis on Monday and the United Nations Security Council will hold a briefing on Myanmar on Tuesday. In a statement ahead of the anniversary, 132 sitting parliamentarians from five other countries in Southeast Asia issued a statement calling for Myanmar officials to face trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC is currently considering whether it has jurisdiction in the crisis. Bangladesh is a member of the court, but Myanmar is not. FEARS OF MORE VIOLENCE Myanmar had stepped up police patrols in northern Rakhine state fearing fresh attacks by militants around the anniversary, government spokesman Zaw Htay said. "We are very, very concerned about the possibility of terrorist attacks and we've already picked up security enforcement," said Zaw Htay. ARSA said on Saturday it would "continue our struggle for our right to exist". The group had "come to existence only to defend, salvage and protect Rohingya people" from the Myanmar government and military, it said in a statement attributed to its chief, Ata Ullah, and posted on a Twitter account previously used by it. In the Rakhine state capital of Sittwe, the state's biggest political party, the Arakan National Party, held a ceremony to commemorate security personnel and Rakhine and Hindu people they say were killed by Rohingya insurgents in the attacks. In Myanmar's main city, Yangon, another group said it was holding a prayer ceremony at a Hindu temple later on Saturday. Myanmar's government said ARSA was responsible for the deaths of non-Muslim villagers as well as security personnel last year. The group denies targeting civilians. (Reporting by Zeba Siddiqui in COX'S BAZAR; Additional reporting by Simon Lewis and Shoon Naing in YANGON; Editing by Alex Richardson)Barack Obama and Sarah Palin salute senators service and friendships  while Donald Trump tweets condolences to family

John McCain, seen in 2008. Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

John McCain was remembered on Saturday as an American original, a maverick and a hero of the Republic who served his country for six decades in uniform and in Congress.

The death of the Arizona senator, aged 81 and after more than a year-long battle with brain cancer, was met with an outpouring of condolences and tributes from dignitaries and politicians around the world as flags at the US Capitol and White House were lowered to half-staff in his honor.

In a statement, Barack Obama honored his 2008 rival for the White House. Despite their political differences, he said, they shared a fidelity to something higher  the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched, and sacrificed.

Obama continued: We saw our political battles, even, as a privilege, something noble, an opportunity to serve as stewards of those high ideals at home, and to advance them around the world. We saw this country as a place where anything is possible  and citizenship as our patriotic obligation to ensure it forever remains that way.

McCain died surrounded by family at his ranch near Sedona, Arizona, a statement from his Senate office said. He was diagnosed with glioblastoma last July and his family announced on Friday that he would discontinue medical treatment.

My heart is broken, his wife, Cindy McCain, wrote on Twitter. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the the place he loved best.

Meghan McCain, a co-host of ABCs The View and one of the senators seven children from two marriages, said: He taught me how to live. All that I am is thanks to him. Now that he is gone, the task of my lifetime is to live up to his example, his explanations, and his love.

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She added: He was a great fire who burned bright, and we lived in his light and warmth for so very long.

In a tweet, Donald Trump offered his deepest sympathies and respects to McCains family.

The relationship between the two Republican leaders was fraught. Despite the senators illness, Trump, who famously questioned McCains heroism in Vietnam, continued to criticize McCain for a 2017 vote against a plan to repeal key portions of the Affordable Care Act.

Under Trumps presidency, McCain watched his party veer from the values he championed. He disagreed sharply with Trump on foreign policy and Americas role in the world.

Former President George W Bush, once a rival for the White House, called McCain a man of deep conviction and a public servant in the finest traditions of our country.

Bush beat McCain in a fierce Republican primary in 2000. The former president supported McCains 2008 run but his unpopularity and the shadow of the Iraq war were widely believed to have hampered the senators chances.

McCains choice of the Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate had lasting effects. Debate continues over whether he thereby unleashed the populist, hard-right wing that now dominates the Republican party.

On Saturday, Palin called McCain an American original and a maverick and a fighter, never afraid to stand for his beliefs.

John McCain was my friend, she said. I will remember the good times.



Obamas vice-president, Joe Biden, also called McCain a friend, saying his life was proof that some truths are timeless. He added: America will miss John McCain. The world will miss John McCain. And I will miss him dearly.

Barack Obama speaks about immigration reform in 2009, flanked by Joe Biden and John McCain. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Palins heir, said McCain was a tough politician, a trusted colleague, and there will simply never be another like him.

Former president Bill Clinton saluted McCain for his belief that every citizen has a responsibility to make something of the freedoms given by our Constitution.

He lived by his creed every day, Clinton said, thanking McCain for his role in normalising relations with Vietnam.



Former president Jimmy Carter praised McCains steadfast integrity.

House Speaker Paul Ryan honored McCain as someone who put principle before politics and country before self. The House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said the nation lost a leader and public servant of deep patriotism, outstanding bravery and undaunted spirit.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, said he would need time to absorb the loss of one of his dearest friends and mentor.

America and Freedom have lost one of her greatest champions, he wrote on Twitter.

Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, recalled on one occasion listening to McCain tell members of the Senate the story of his capture and imprisonment in Vietnam.

He told them that the prisoners developed a system of tapping out letters on the cell walls to communicate with each other because they would be beaten if they spoke aloud. Senator Dianne Feinstein asked McCain if he could still remember the code.

He began to tap on the podium. Then he leaned into the microphone and said softly: I just tapped out yes, [Dianne], I still can.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican of Nebraska, said he once asked McCain how long it took to learn that code. McCain, who was known in the halls of the Senate for his wit, replied: Who cares?! What the hell else were we going to do? We had infinite time.

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican Senate majority leader who sparred with McCain on occasion, remembered a bright example in what he called a political era filled with cynicism.

Its an understatement to say the Senate will not be the same without our friend John, McConnell added. The nation mourns the loss of a great American patriot, a statesman who put his country first and enriched this institution through many years of service.

The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said McCain was a truth teller  never afraid to speak truth to power in an era where that has become all too rare.



Schumer said he planned to introduce a resolution to rename the Russell Senate office building after McCain.

Now, in a way that would probably have him making wisecracks, we are wistful for John McCain, Arizona senator Jeff Flake wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. We may never see his like again, but it is his reflection of America that we need now more than ever.Arizona Sen. John McCains incalculable legacy could perhaps best be described by those closest to him: his family.

Upon his death Saturday at age 81, McCains family honored the senators life in emotional statements that reflected on his impact and offered words of encouragement for his supporters.

All that I am is thanks to him. Now that he is gone, the task of my lifetime is to live up to his example, his expectations, and his love, his daughter Cindy McCain said in a statement shared on Twitter.

My father is gone, and I miss him as only an adoring daughter can. But in this loss, and in this sorrow, I take comfort in this: John McCain, hero of the republic and to his little girl, wakes today to something more glorious than anything on this earth.

I love you forever - my beloved father @SenJohnMcCain pic.twitter.com/Y50tVQvlVe  Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) August 26, 2018

My heart is broken. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years, his wife Cindy McCain said on Twitter. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people loved, in the place he loved best.

My heart is broken. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the the place he loved best.  Cindy McCain (@cindymccain) August 26, 2018

Since the senator announced his cancer diagnosis last summer, the McCain family has described his strength  and their own  throughout his battle against the devastating disease, and thanked his supporters for their kinds words. From the initial diagnosis to the news Friday that he would no longer seek treatment for glioblastoma, they have spoken of his resilience and positivity  even as he received criticism from some, including President Donald Trump.

Story continues

His wife, Cindy McCain, and daughter, Meghan McCain, have been the most vocal family members about the senators battle with cancer. They both used their platforms on Twitter to support and defend McCain, and Meghan often commented on what her family was going through as a host on ABCs The View. They shared updates on everything from McCains first round of radiation and chemotherapy back in August 2017 (His resilience & strength is incredible, Meghan tweeted), to thankful messages on particularly difficult days (God bless everyone who has cared for my husband along this journey, Cindy tweeted Friday).

Just two days after McCain announced his diagnosis last July, his daughter tweeted an image of the two of them enjoying a view on a hike in Arizona.

Amazing hike with Dad @SenJohnMcCain this morning. Thank you all for your best wishes! pic.twitter.com/P9RR2v91HB  Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) July 22, 2017

The senator appeared on The View alongside his daughter a few months later on her birthday in October, giving her a framed photo of the two of them on that hike. I love you so much, Meghan said through tears.

Im the luckiest person in the entire world. We are such a family thats filled with blessings. We have such a bond and such a love, she said. Im so grateful for that. A lot of people dont have that with their parents.

Heidi GutmanABC via Getty Images

But while most politicians, fans and constituents of the senator offered words of support throughout the past year, some criticized McCains legacy  and his ailing healthy.

In May, former White House aide Kelly Sadler reportedly said in a closed-door meeting that McCains opposition to the presidents nominee for the director of the CIA at the time doesnt matter because hes dying anyway.

Meghan McCain quickly responded to the startling news on The View.

Kelly, heres a little newsflash  and this may be a bit intense for 11 oclock in the morning on a Friday  but were all dying. Im dying, youre dying, were all dying, she said on The View. I really feel like I understand the meaning of life, and it is not how you die. It is how you live.

And Cindy took to Twitter in an attempt to request empathy: May I remind you my husband has a family, 7 children and 5 grandchildren, she tweeted at Sadler, who later left her position in the White House.

@kellysadler45 May I remind you my husband has a family, 7 children and 5 grandchildren.  Cindy McCain (@cindymccain) May 10, 2018

Presidential candidate John McCain (L) and his wife, Cindy McCain, smile for the camera at their family ranch, March 9, 2000 near Sedona, Arizona.

Most notably, perhaps, was the senators contentious relationship with Trump. The two Republicans have criticized one other on a variety of issues over the years on a range of issues. Before Trump took office, he said he did not consider McCain a war hero because he was captured in Vietnam. Back in September 2017, Trump repeatedly criticized McCain for voting against the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act  a dramatic and memorable moment in the Senate when McCain motioned his intended vote with a thumbs down, eliciting audible gasps, just days after he announced his cancer diagnosis.

What more must my family be put through right now? Meghan tweeted in September. This is abhorrent.

What more must my family be put through right now? This is abhorrent. https://t.co/xJmFdh93xL  Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) September 27, 2017

Trump continued his criticism of McCains vote at the Conservative Action Conference (CPAC) in February  months after the fact. What a mess, he said.

We need more compassion, Cindy responded on an episode of The View with her daughter. We need more empathy. We need more togetherness we dont need more bullying and Im tired of it.

Weeks before McCains death, the senator called Trumps controversial joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.

Through how McCain lived his life, Meghan said she has learned innumerable lessons on leadership, sacrifice, patriotism, and temperament.

Character matters, and believing in something greater than yourself will always be important, Meghan said of the lessons she learned from her father while sitting alongside him on The View last year. [Hes taught me] to really respect and love America, and the people who sacrifice for us. America has always been great. It is always going to be great.Asia Argento will be leaving "X Factor Italy," according to multiple reports. Amid allegations that the Italian actress sexually assaulted former child star Jimmy Bennett during a hotel meet-up in 2013, she will be replaced as a judge on the show, according to local media reports.A bear charged at a family during a hiking trip, knocking down and injuring a 10-year-old boy before his parents were able to drive the animal off with bear spray, park officials said.

The unidentified boy was hiking with his family in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, US, on Thursday, when the bear charged from the vegetation, chased the boy and knocked him to the ground, park officials said in the statement.

The boy, from Washington state, was transferred to a hospital for puncture wounds to his back, wounds around his buttocks and an injured wrist, park officials said in a statement. Its unclear how serious his injuries are, spokeswoman Morgan Warthin said.

A bear charged a family during a hiking trip, knocking down and injuring a 10-year-old boy at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Source: AP Photo/Jim Urquhart, file

The park is home to grizzly and black bears, both of which are a top draw for the more than four million tourists who visit each year. Its not clear whether the bear that attacked the boy was a grizzly or a black bear.

Yellowstone averages about one bear attack on a human per year, but its been three years since the last attack within in-park boundaries, according to officials.

It wasnt immediately clear what caused the bear to charge.

The boys parents deployed bear spray about 1.5 meters from the bears head, causing it to leave. The family walked to the trailhead and drove to the ranger station at Old Faithful, where they were sent to a nearby clinic. He was then transferred to a hospital.

Wildlife and law enforcement officials are investigating the attack and looking for signs that would identify the type of bear involved.

Tracks show the bear was a female with at least one cub.

Bear wont be trapped or killed

Yellowstone National Park officials said they dont plan to capture or kill the bear.

Park officials said Friday the bears were likely foraging and were surprised by the family of four. They say the female bear was defending its cub.

They applauded the family for doing the right thing by travelling in a group and carrying bear spray.Heres a look at some of the companies the Yahoo Finance team will be watching for you today.

Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway is setting its sights on India. Berkshire is reportedly looking to invest upward of $300M in the parent company of Paytm. Thats Indias largest digital payment service. If the deal goes through, it would be Buffetts first direct investment in India.

Twitters CEO is gearing up to testify before Congress. Jack Dorsey will sit down with the House Energy and Commerce Committee just after Labor Day. Hes facing questions over the sites algorithms and how it monitors content. Some conservatives, including the president, have accused twitter of discriminating against them.

Labor peace is coming to Walt Disney World. The Mouse has reached a deal with union workers to boost wages to $15 an hour by 2021. Workers would also get thousand-dollar bonuses. It marks an end to contentious labor talks that have dragged on for nearly a year.

And some new details today about Apples plans for the newest iPhone. Bloomberg says the company plans to roll out 3 new phones this fall. Theyll have edge-to-edge screens, similar to the iPhone 10, but a wider-range of prices to meet different consumer needs. That includes a cheaper model to replace the iPhone 8.LONDON (Reuters) - A detained British-Iranian aid worker sentenced to five years in jail in Iran was returned to prison on Sunday after a request to extend her three-day temporary release was rejected, her husband said. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 at a Tehran airport as she was heading back to Britain with her two-year-old daughter after a family visit. She was convicted of plotting to overthrow Iran's clerical establishment, a charge denied by her family and the Foundation, a charity organization that is independent of Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News. Her husband Richard Ratcliffe, who is in Britain, said in a statement she returned to prison in Tehran to continue serving her sentence despite hopes her release would be extended. Iranian authorities and her lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment. Britain's foreign minister Jeremy Hunt wrote on Twitter that attempts to free Zaghari-Ratcliffe would continue. "Looks like Iranian legal system is impervious to the simple fact at the heart of this: an innocent woman is desperate to be reunited with her family," Hunt said. "Spoke to Foreign Minister (Mohammad Javad) Zarif on Fri but that clearly wasn't enough. The fight goes on." (Reporting By Andrew MacAskill and Babak Dehghanpisheh; Editing by Nick Tattersall, Richard Balmforth)Advocate is addressing this with employed and contracted physicians. We are making sure that the standards we put in place regarding opioids are going to be longstanding in a cultural change and will really address this issue head on, Bottari said. We want the buy-in from patients and providers to make this change sustainable.Ottawa (AFP) - Canada wants free trade with the ASEAN bloc, Trade Minister Jim Carr said Monday on the eve of a trip to Thailand and Singapore for "exploratory" talks.

His comments follow a breakthrough in US-Mexico bilateral talks to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that saw Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland interrupt a European trip to rejoin trilateral NAFTA negotiations in Washington.

Carr on the August 28-30 trip will look to promote bilateral trade and investment with Thailand and Singapore -- which, along with Canada, is expected to soon ratify the Trans Pacific Partnership -- and press for free trade with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

"Expanding into the Southeast Asia region will help Canadian-owned businesses access one the world's fastest-growing markets," he said in a statement.

Canada and the EU provisionally entered into a free trade pact last September, as NAFTA appeared to falter and the US exited from the Trans Pacific Partnership.

A deal with the ASEAN bloc, which includes Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Burma and Cambodia, would give Canada access to 650 million consumers.

Ottawa is also eying free trade with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, which form the Mercosur bloc, and has suggested a trade deal with China is also in the works, which if successful would make Canada the first Western nation to do reach a free trade deal with Beijing.Berlin (AFP) - Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland refused to give ground in a dispute with Saudi Arabia on Monday, saying her country would "always stand up for human rights around the world".

While she did not cite the kingdom by name, Freeland told a gathering of German diplomats in Berlin that "Canada will always stand up for human rights around the world, very much including women's rights."

That would hold true "even when we are told to mind our own business, or that matters such as these should only be discussed in private, between leaders, behind closed doors. And even when speaking up brings consequences," she added.

Ottawa and Riyadh are at loggerheads over Canadian criticism of Saudi Arabia's human rights record.

Earlier this month the Saudi government expelled Canada's ambassador, recalled its own envoy and froze all new trade and investments after the North American nation denounced a crackdown on rights activists there.

"We count on and hope for Germany's support" in defending human rights, Freeland added.WASHINGTON (AP)  John McCain lived most of his life in the public eye, surviving war, torture, scandal, political stardom and failure, the enmity of some colleagues and the election of President Donald Trump.

Even brain cancer didn't seem to scare McCain so much as it sobered and saddened him.

"The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it," McCain wrote in his memoir, referencing a line from his favorite book, the Ernest Hemingway war novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls." ''I hate to leave."

A look at public moments that made McCain:

PRISONER OF WAR, CELEBRITY

McCain became a public figure at age 31 when his bed-bound image was broadcast from North Vietnam in 1967. The North Vietnamese had figured out that he was the son and grandson of famous American military men  a "crown prince," they called him. He was offered an early release, but refused. McCain's captors beat him until he confessed, an episode that first led to shame  and then discovery. McCain has written that that's when he learned to trust not just his legacy but his own judgment  and his resilience.

Less than a decade after his March 1973 release, McCain was elected to the House as a Republican from Arizona. In 1986, voters there sent him to the Senate.

THE KEATING FIVE

He called it "my asterisk" and the worst mistake of his life.

At issue was a pair of 1987 meetings between McCain, four other senators and regulators to get the government to back off a key campaign donor. Charles Keating Jr. wanted McCain and Democratic Sens. Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, Alan Cranston of California, John Glenn of Ohio and Don Riegle of Michigan to get government auditors to stop pressing Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. All five denied improper conduct. McCain was cleared of all charges but found to have exercised "poor judgment."

"His honor was being questioned and that's nothing that he takes lightly," said Mark Salter, McCain's biographer and co-author of his new memoir, "The Restless Wave."

Story continues

THE SENATE

McCain became his party's leading voice on matters of war, national security and veterans - and eventually became chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He worked with a Democrat to rewrite the nation's campaign finance laws. He voted for the Iraq War and supported the 2007 surge of forces there even as his own sons served or prepared to serve. But there was one thing that wasn't as widely known about him: McCain, owner of a ranch in Arizona that is in the flight path of 500 species of migratory birds, became concerned about the environment.

"People associate John with defense and national security, as well they should. But he also had a great concern for and love of the environment," said Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who traveled to the ends of the earth with McCain  to the Arctic Circle in 2004 and Antarctica two years later  on fact-finding missions related to climate change. Back on McCain's Arizona ranch, the senator gave Collins an extensive nature tour of the property. "I particularly remember his love for the birds," Collins said. "He loved the birds."

TOWN HALLS, STRAIGHT TALK

McCain in the 2000 election did something new: He toured New Hampshire on a bus laden with doughnuts and reporters that stopped at "town hall" meetings where voters were invited to exchange views with the candidate. The bus was called the "Straight Talk Express," and that's what he promised to deliver at the town halls. The whole thing was messy, unscripted and often hilarious. And ultimately the events re-introduced McCain to voters as a candid and authentic, just a year after President Bill Clinton was acquitted of lying to Congress and obstruction.

In New Hampshire that year, McCain defeated George W. Bush in an 18-point blowout, only to be pushed out of the race in South Carolina. But the town halls remained a fond McCain memory.

"The town halls were festivals of politics," Salter said. "They were so authentic and open and honest."

'NO MA'AM'

McCain, in 2008 making his second run for president, quickly intervened when a woman in Lakeville, Minnesota, stood at a town hall event and began to make disparaging remarks about Democratic presidential nominee and then-Sen. Barack Obama. "He's an Arab," she said, implying he was not an American.

"No ma'am," McCain said, taking the microphone from her. "He's a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign is all about. He's not."

It was a defining moment for McCain as a leader, a reflection of his thinking that partisans should disagree without demonizing each other. But it reflected McCain's reckoning with the fear pervading his party of Obama, who would go on to become the nation's first black president.

CANCER

McCain last year was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the same aggressive cancer that had felled his friend, Sen. Edward Kennedy, in 2009.

Friends and family say he understood the gravity of the diagnosis  but quickly turned to the speech he wanted to give on the Senate floor urging his colleagues to shed the partisanship that had produced gridlock. Face scarred and bruised from surgery, he pounded the lectern. Some of the sternest members of the Senate hugged him, tears in their eyes.

"Of all of the things that have happened in this man's life, of all of the times that his life could have ended in the ways it could have ended, this (cancer) is by far one of the least threats to him and that's kind of how he views it," his son, Jack McCain, told the Arizona Republic in January.

HEALTH CARE VOTE

Republicans, driven by Trump, were one vote away from advancing a repeal of Obama's health care law. Then McCain, scarred from brain surgery, swooped into the Senate chamber and, facing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, dramatically held up his hand.

The thumb flicked down. Gasps could be heard throughout the staid chamber. McConnell stood motionless, arms crossed.

Trump's campaign promise  and the premiere item on his agenda  was dead.

TRUMP

McCain tangled with Trump, who never served in the military, for years.

As a candidate, Trump in 2016 claimed the decorated McCain is only considered a war hero because he had been captured. "He's not a war hero," Trump said at an event in Iowa. "I like people who weren't captured." Shortly before Election Day in 2016, McCain said he's rather cast his vote for another Republican, someone who's "qualified to be president." Trump fumed, without using McCain's name, that the senator is the only reason the Affordable Care Act stands.

McCain responded: "I have faced tougher adversaries."

___

Follow Laurie Kellman on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/APLaurieKellmanToddlers as young as 24 months will modify their behaviour when they are being watched, a new study suggests

It has long been assumed that childhood is a time of innocence, free from the shackles of social conformity, where youngsters act naturally on instinct rather than by convention.

But new research shows that even by the age of two years old children are already crippled by the scrutiny of others and will change their behaviour if they are being watched to boost their reputation.

Scientists at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, found that by 24 months toddlers show signs of inhibition and embarrassment when being observed and will attempt to manage their image.

Sara Botto with one of the toddler's involved in the study Credit: Kay Hinton Emory Universiy

The study published in the journal Development Psychology concludes that social anxiety emerges in humans far earlier than previously thought.

"There is something specifically human in the way that we're sensitive to the gaze of others, said Philippe Rochat, Professor of Psychology at Emory, specialising in childhood development and is senior author of the study.

"At the very bottom, our concern for image management and reputation is about the fear of rejection, one of the main engines of the human psyche.

"This is an important milestone in our understanding of human social cognition and development.

Social media has made people more concerned about managing their image than ever before

The rise of social media has made it clearer than even how concerned adults are about their image.

People report feeling crushed if a post on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram does not receive sufficient likes while psychologists have recently coined the condition Snapchat Dysmorphia in which users become so obsessed with enhanced digital versions of themselves that they become depressed by reality.

To test how early social anxiety emerges, scientists carried out several experiments involving 144 children between the ages of 14 and 24 months using a remote control robot.

A researcher showed the child how to operate the robot using buttons on a remote control and then either watched the youngster playing with it, or turned away and pretended to read a magazine.

Story continues

When the child was being watched, they showed more inhibition and embarrassment than when the researcher was not watching.

Scientists now hope to find is social anxiety stars in even younger children Credit: Digital Vision

In a second experiment the researcher used two different remotes when demonstrating the toy, saying, "Wow! Isn't that great?" with the first and "Uh-oh! Oops, oh no!" with the second.

They found that children used the remote associated with the negative response more when not being watched, choosing the positive response remote when under the gaze of the researcher.

In a final experiment, youngsters were shown the toy being operated by two different researchers, one who gave a positive response, Yay! The toy moved! and one who frowned and said Yuck! The toy moved!.

When the child was invited to play they were much more likely to press the remote when the researcher who gave a positive response was watching.

"We've shown that by the age of 24 months, children are not only aware that other people may be evaluating them, but that they will alter their behavior to seek a positive response," said doctoral student Sara Valencia Botto, first author of the study.

"This behavior is like older children who behave well and do good things while others are watching and misbehave when no one is paying attention.

"Our concern for reputation is something that defines us as human. We spend resources on make-up and designer brands, are terrified to talk in front of an audience and conform to many of society's standards because we are concerned with how others will evaluate us.

Previous research has found the same behavior is evidence by the time a child reaches around four years old, but the new study suggests it emerges far earlier and the team is now planning to carry out similar tests on 12 month old babies.BEIJING (Reuters) - China's Shandong province said it has banned live hogs and related products from areas of high risk for African swine fever (ASF) from entering the province, in a bid to stop the spread of the deadly disease across the world's largest herd. The eastern province will strengthen inspection and quarantine on slaughtering of hogs and step up checks on live hogs and products being transported within the region, Shandong's animal husbandry bureau said in a statement on its website on Sunday. The move comes after China discovered another outbreak of the highly contagious disease on Thursday, its fourth since the country's first ever outbreak was reported on Aug. 3. Preventing pigs from infected areas from traveling into the coastal province, which is almost twice the size of Austria and the country's No. 4 pork producer, will be a major challenge, potentially disrupting established trade routes. Shandong is surrounded by the province of Hebei and two ASF-infected regions, Henan and Jiangsu. Trucks carrying pigs from northeastern farms and markets normally travel through the province to slaughterhouses in the south. The prohibition would also prevent slaughterhouses and meat processing factories from using pigs or pork from affected regions. China's southern Hunan province and third-largest pork producer, has also ramped up inspections and monitoring of live hogs and related products transported across provinces, the local government said in a statement last Thursday. It also strengthened inspections of farms, slaughterhouses, markets, animal treatment plants, especially those handling live hogs and related products from high risk areas. (Reporting by Hallie Gu and Josephine Mason; Editing by Tom Hogue and Richard Pullin)Scientists in California are closer to answering the evolutionary question of which ancestor humans and apes have in common, thanks to artificial intelligence-based research.

Researchers have long believed that humans and apes both evolved from the same common ancestor, but the identity of this ancient forebear has remained a mystery because there hasnt been fossil evidence. Using machine learning, they might be closer to putting a finger on the being that lived between eight and six million years ago.

In a study released Friday in PaleoBios, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley revealed that the teeth of our last common ancestor  the LCA for short  were a lot like the teeth of gorillas living today. Researchers note it doesnt mean that the LCA looked exactly like a gorilla, but it adds some color to this mysterious part of our past.

Maybe it's not the chimp.

Researchers previously thought that the best living model for the LCA was the chimpanzee, so the new finding reinterprets what we know, says study co-author and biological anthropologist Tesla Monson, Ph.D..

It is likely that the LCA had dental proportions more similar to gorillas than to humans, orangutans, or either species of chimpanzee, she says.

One of the amazing things about biodiversity and life on Earth is that we are only seeing a small fraction of all the different types of animals that have lived on this planet over the last several billion years.

The fossils we have actually look quite different from anything living today, and likely the LCA looked quite different too  but they looked more like gorillas.

Humans and gorillas share a common ancestor.

Using A.I. to Identify Our Last Common Ancestor

Monson and her team trained machine learning algorithms to identify different species of living apes on tooth data alone. Once the artificial intelligence was adequately trained, the scientists also programmed it to be able to identify extinct apes from fossil data. This culminated in a quantitive comparative analysis of the fossils to the living apes. These comparisons revealed that many of the oldest hominoid fossils, many dated to the Miocene epoch between 23 to 5 million years ago, look much more like gorillas in terms of their dental proportions than they do chimpanzees.

Story continues

While we arent able to say exactly what the teeth of the LCA looked like until we find the fossils  just one reason why paleontological excavations are so important  we can generate some hypothesis based on what other apes living at the same time looked like, says Monson.

Machine learning classification of living and fossil apes using different types of dental data.

While chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest biological relatives, we also share a close biological kinship with gorillas. The DNA difference between gorillas and humans is only about 1.6 percent; the DNA difference between humans and chimps is about 1.2 percent.

Meanwhile, the extent to which the LCA was a like a gorilla is likely to be debated: In October 2017 other scientists argued in Nature Communications that the LCA of apes was about the size of a gibbon.

Monson reasons that machine learning can continue to help scientists investigate unresolved scientific questions, like the nature of the LCA.

I can envision many different applications for machine learning in paleoanthropology including identification of fossils and investigation of phylogenetic relationships in the fossil record, says Monson.

This is a really powerful technology that reduces human bias in many ways and gives scientists access to a new method for testing hypotheses.

Photos via Unsplash / Ghost Presenter, Wikimedia Commons, Tesla Monson, Unsplash / Bryan Hanson, Unsplash / Mike Arney, Flickr / Internet Archive Book Images, Unsplash / VITALIY ANOKHIN

More From InverseNew European research has found that the number of deep forehead wrinkles a person has may be linked to having a higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD).

Carried out by researchers at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Toulouse in France, the new study looked at 3,200 adults to see if horizontal forehead wrinkles, which are a visible marker of age, were also a marker for assessing CVD risk.

The participants, who were aged 32, 42, 52 and 62 at the beginning of the study, were all assigned scores depending on the number and depth of wrinkles on their foreheads, with a score of zero meaning no wrinkles and a score of three indicating "numerous deep wrinkles."

During a follow-up of 20 years, 233 participants died of various causes, of whom 15.2 percent had a score of two and three wrinkles. 6.6 percent had a score of one wrinkle and 2.1 percent had no wrinkles.

After taking into account potentially influencing factors such as age, gender, smoking status, blood pressure, heart rate, and diabetes, the researchers found that those with a wrinkle score of one had a slightly higher risk of dying of cardiovascular disease than people with no wrinkles, while those who had wrinkle scores of two and three had almost 10 times the risk of dying compared with people who had wrinkle scores of zero.

Although the researchers noted that assessing forehead wrinkles is not a better method of assessing cardiovascular risk using existing methods, such as measuring blood pressure and lipid levels, they could be an easy, quick, and low-cost way to identify people those who may be at a higher risk.

"You can't see or feel risk factors like high cholesterol or hypertension," said study author Yolande Esquirol, "We explored forehead wrinkles as a marker because it's so simple and visual. Just looking at a person's face could sound an alarm, then we could give advice to lower risk."

"Of course, if you have a person with a potential cardiovascular risk, you have to check classical risk factors like blood pressure as well as lipid and blood glucose levels, but you could already share some recommendations on lifestyle factors."

Story continues

Although forehead wrinkles may sound like an unusual sign of CVD, previous research has already looked at whether visible signs of aging may be an indicator of CVD, finding a link between male-pattern baldness, earlobe creases, xanthelasma (pockets of cholesterol under the skin) and a higher risk of heart disease, although not with an increased risk of death.

However, crow's feet, the wrinkles around the eyes, have not been linked with CVD risk, though these wrinkles are a result of facial movements and not just aging, which is a factor in CVD risk.

The findings were presented at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress 2018 taking place August 25-29 in Munich, Germany.Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's supreme court has ordered the government to allow five critically ill Gazan women to cross into Israel for medical treatment after they were refused over alleged links to Hamas, NGOs said Monday.

The women were rejected under a policy preventing "first-degree relatives" of the Palestinian Islamist movement which rules the Gaza Strip from entering Israel, the Israeli rights groups involved in the case said.

The policy aims to pressure Hamas to return the remains of two Israeli soldiers it is believed to be holding, the organisations said.

Most of the five women have cancer, according to the statement issued by Gisha, Adalah, Al Mezan and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.

The court's ruling on Sunday said they do not constitute a security risk and that refusing their entry to Israel was illegal because they were in "danger of death".

They have sought treatment at hospitals in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem that is unavailable in Gaza, the NGOs said.

Israeli authorities had authorised them to cross and travel for treatment in the occupied West Bank or abroad.

But the women said that effective treatment was not available in the West Bank and the cost of care abroad was too expensive.

The original petition was for seven women, but Israel earlier said it had mistakenly identified two as relatives of Hamas members.

The NGOs said the ruling would have wider implications.

"The court rightly dismissed the Israeli defence minister and cabinet's outrageous decision to use patients in critical condition as bargaining chips, and ruled that this policy contradicts the most basic of values," they said.

It condemned the policy as "a new and shameful low in Israels collective punishment of Gaza residents".

The same groups said earlier this month that the number of Gazan exit permits denied by Israel due to a close family member's alleged connection to Hamas had soared.

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Some 833 exit permit applications by Gazans were denied on those grounds in the first quarter of 2018. compared to 21 during the whole of last year, they said.

Israel controls all access to and from the Gaza Strip apart from the enclave's crossing with Egypt. Hamas has fought three wars with Israel since 2008.

Under an Israeli blockade for more than 10 years, Gaza lacks infrastructure and key medical equipment. Many patients seek to travel elsewhere for treatment.

On Monday, Israel reopened its only crossing for people with Gaza, a week after shutting the Erez post over violence along the border with the Palestinian enclave.A poster near the passport control counter of the immigration office at the Narita International airport - AFP

Japanese immigration officials have been accused of forcibly removing a crying five-year-old boy from the lap of his Vietnamese mother before she was deported from the country.

The mother was among 46 Vietnamese deported by immigration officials in February for staying illegally in Japan, with members of 12 families reportedly separated as a result.

Nguyen Thi Loan Phuong, 46, told Kyodo News agency how her Japanese-born son, aged five, was tearfully removed from her lap in a room at Tokyo Immigration Bureau a week before she was put out on a chartered plane to Hanoi.

Speaking in a telephone interview, she said: My son was crying. I still cannot forget his crying voice.

Six months on, her son remains in Japan where he is being looked after by her Vietnamese refugee husband Hoang Van Hiep, 52, who is juggling childcare with night shifts at a noodle-making factory in Gunma Prefecture.

Ms Phuong, who was deported from Japan on one previous occasion, reportedly returned to the country eight years ago using her sisters passport, before marrying her husband.

Mr Hiep told local media that returning to Vietnam to be with his wife was impossible due to his refugee status while their son only speaks Japanese.

My wife certainly violated the immigration law, but she regrets it, he added. All I want is just to live with my wife and son.

Japan is home to famously strict immigration laws, despite its rapidly ageing population and low birth rate fuelling growing concerns about the nations shrinking workforce.

The recent situation surrounding Vietnamese families has led to accusations of parallels with immigration policies in the United States, where the separation of thousands of children from parents recently led to global condemnation.

Motoko Yamagishi, secretary-general of the Solidarity Network with Migrants Japan, told the Telegraph that the departure of the Vietnamese in February was the seventh occasion the Japanese government had chartered a plane for the purpose of a mass deportation since 2013.

Highlighting how many were forced to leave behind families and established lives in Japan, she added: We strongly protest against mass deportation using a chartered plane. We believe that the human rights of everyone living in Japan should be equally respected in this society.Mr Trump has repeatedly railed against NAFTA, which he claims hurts American workers: Getty Images

President Donald Trump has announced that the United States and Mexico have reached a preliminary trade agreement that he says will replace the existing North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), and benefit citizens of both countries.

The agreement was announced in the Oval Office on Monday, where the president spoke to Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto via speaker phone. Mr Trump said that he will now begin negotiations with Canada, and said that the existing name for the current trade deal will be terminated entirely.

They used to call it Nafta, were going to call it the United States-Mexico trade agreement, Mr Trump said, claiming that Nafta has a negative connotation.

It is not clear if Canada will be a part of any revised agreement to trade policy between the countries, but Mr Trump indicated that a failure to negotiate would lead to heavy tariffs on autos coming into the United Sates its neighbours to the north.

But, Mr Trump said that he will now focus his negotiating energies on reaching an agreement with Canada, and would be speaking with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau soon. If they are unable to come to an agreement on trade, Mr Trump said, then he would be forced to put in place steep tariffs on imported autos from Canada.

In response to the Oval Office event, a spokesperson for Canada's minister of foreign affairs indicated that the country is encouraged by the agreement reached between the presidents of Mexico and the US  but stressed that Canada would need to be party to any actual changes to Nafta.

"Canada is encouraged by the continued optimism shown by our negotiating partners," the spokesperson said. "Progress between Mexico and the United States is a necessary requirement for any renewed Nafta agreement. We are in regular contact with our negotiating partners, and we will continue to work toward a modernised Nafta. We will only sign a new Nafta that is good for Canada and good for the middle class. Canada's signature is required".

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Experts weighed in on Monday to praise the push to modernise the existing trading agreements between the US and its North American partners, but suggested that pushing a deal without the consent of Canada could revert circumstances to a more fractured, pre-Nafta era.

"When one adds in the effect of changes in the way markets operate as a result of technological developments like the internet, trade patterns have developed in ways that have produced uneven benefits among the various industries as well as among the three Nafta countries. So a rethinking is certainly timely if not overdue," Steve Nelson, a former State Department lawyer who is now partner at the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney, told The Independent.

"But going back to the more fragmented pre-Nafta markets would clearly have made no sense, as that would have upset the plans of businesses that have made very logical decisions predicated on the enormous opportunities and efficiencies Nafta afforded," Mr Nelson continued.

The agreement announced on Monday focuses narrowly on auto manufacturing, but the president suggested that the deal could end up standing in for Nafta. The deal would require 75 per cent of automobile parts and content to be made in the US or Mexico, up from current levels of 62.5 per cent. The deal also stipulates that 40 to 45 per cent of auto content be made by workers who earn at least $16 an hour, according to Reuters.

"It's a big day for trade. It's a big day for our country," Mr Trump said.

The reported deal between Mr Trump and his Mexican counterpart is by no means finalised, in spite of the celebratory mood in the Oval Office.

As the president himself noted, the deal must be sent to Congress and would then undergo a 90-day process before it could be approved. The president also does not have the power to unilaterally strike a new trade deal without the approval of Congress  a limitation on presidential power that kept his predecessor from pushing through the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.Donald Trump has led tributes to long-serving Arizona senator John McCain  despite the two men representing a stark contrast in style and process, and having ultimately mutually loathed each other.

As former presidents, members of congress and citizens paid respect to the late 81-year-old Republican McCain, it was announced his body would lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington DC, and receive a full dress funeral service at Washington National Cathedral. The former naval officer will similarly lie at the Arizona Capitol, before his burial in Annapolis, Maryland.

It was reported former presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama had been asked to deliver eulogies at Mr McCains service. The White House will be represented by vice president Mike Pence, rather than Mr Trump, who was told Mr McCains family did not want him to attend.

My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain, Mr Trump tweeted, after Mr McCains death was announced on Saturday evening. Our hearts and prayers are with you.

The Associated Press reported that as news of the six-term senators death broke, scores of people lined Interstate 17 in Sedona, Arizona, where a black hearse accompanied by a police motorcade, drove away from the ranch where he had spent his final weeks.

The man who spent five years as a prisoner of war after being shot down in Vietnam, died little more than 24 hours after his family announced he was ending the chemotherapy he had been receiving for an aggressive brain tumour.

In a memoir published in May, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations, he wrote he did not want to die but had few complaints about his life.

Its been quite a ride. Ive known great passions, seen amazing wonders, fought in a war, and helped make peace, Mr McCain wrote. Ive lived very well and Ive been deprived of all comforts. Ive been as lonely as a person can be and Ive enjoyed the company of heroes. Ive suffered the deepest despair and experienced the highest exultation.

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He added: I made a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my times.

On Sunday, most US media coverage of Mr McCain was gushing and unquestioning, despite the senator being a controversial figure. While he was celebrated for his efforts to secure immigration reform, and for standing up to a supporter who termed his 2008 presidential challenger Barack Obama an Arab, the senator was also a vocal hawk, and a supporter of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

He voted against Mr Obamas effort to extend health coverage to more poorer Americans, though he also, famously, subsequently scuppered Mr Trumps attempt to completely destroy the measure.

Indeed, since his diagnosis with cancer in the summer of 2017, much of his energy appeared to focus on ensuring his legacy and opposing Mr Trump, at times referring to the controversial president indirectly, at other times naming him.

Fellow Arizona senator Jeff Flake told CBS Mr McCain was quick to forgive  certainly put the good of the country above himself, and the fact that his former opponents will be there speaking says all we need to know.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement: The nation mourns the loss of a great American patriot, a statesman who put his country first and enriched this institution through many years of service.

Front page of todays Arizona Republic: pic.twitter.com/hfD0oU9xCb  Reid Wilson (@PoliticsReid) August 26, 2018

The battle to fill Mr McCains seat is already under way. Reports stated Arizona governor Doug Ducey does not plan to announce his selection of a senate successor until after Mr McCains burial. Under state law, the governors appointee to serve until the next general election in 2020, must come from the same party, political journalism website Politico said.

The governor has remained tight lipped about Mr McCains successor out of respect for his family, though there is speculation the seat could be filled by his widow, Cindy McCain. A statement from Mr Duceys office said now is a time for remembering and honouring a consequential life.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted, in English, Mr McCain was a true American hero. He devoted his entire life to his country. Israels prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Mr McCains support for the Jewish state never wavered. It sprang from his belief in democracy and freedom.

German chancellor Angela Merkel called Mr McCain a tireless fighter for a strong transatlantic alliance. His significance went well beyond his own country.

Former US vice president Joe Biden, who developed a friendship with Mr McCain while they served together in the senate, said his late friend would cast a long shadow.

He added: The spirit that drove him was never extinguished: we are here to commit ourselves to something bigger than ourselves.AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - After a hunt lasting two decades, Dutch police believe they have finally tracked down a man suspected of killing an 11-year-old boy in the Netherlands, a prosecutor said on Monday. Spanish police arrested 55-year-old Dutchman Jos Brech - who was publicly named as the suspected killer by Dutch police last week - about 50 km (30 miles) north of Barcelona on Sunday. Dutch detectives said the suspect's DNA matched traces on the body and clothing of Nicky Verstappen, who was found dead on Aug. 10, 1998 near a summer camp in the Dutch countryside from which he had gone missing the previous night. The match was established in June this year, police said, using DNA provided by relatives of the suspect who had reported him missing in April. Police went public with their information last week, publishing the man's picture and full name. "Spanish police were able to arrest him after someone recognised the man from the picture," prosecutor Jan Eland said. Brech will be extradited to the Netherlands, he said, but it is unclear how long that will take. Over the years, police have made several wrongful arrests in the case, and even opened up the grave of one of the supervisors of the summer camp. A Spanish court on Monday said the Dutchman had accepted extradition. He would be kept in detention "to ensure that the extradition is effective". Earlier this year, over 15,000 men who lived near the place where the boy was found responded to a request for samples of their DNA, but also without success. Brech was interviewed by police near the scene of the crime in the days after the killing, but merely as a passer-by. His name didn't turn up again until his relatives handed over some of his items when they reported him missing last April. (Reporting by Bart Meijer; additional reporting by Jesus Aguado and Rodrigo de Miguel; editing by David Stamp)Paris (AFP) - French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday called for Europe to stop relying on the United States for its military defence as he pushed for fresh EU integration in the face of rising nationalism around the continent.

Relaunching his diplomatic agenda after the summer break, the 40-year-old president said he would put forward new proposals in the coming months for the EU to boost defence cooperation, as well as talks with Russia on their security relationship -- an issue of concern for countries on Europe's eastern edge.

"Europe can no longer rely on the United States for its security. It is up to us to guarantee European security," Macron told an audience of some 250 diplomats, lawmakers and international relations experts.

His comments follow US President Donald Trump repeatedly distanced himself from the NATO military alliance, which groups the United States with most of Europe and has underpinned European security since World War II.

Macron's comments are likely to find support in EU powerhouse Germany after Foreign Minister Heiko Maas made a similar call for boosted military cooperation last week.

Writing in the Handelsblatt newspaper, Maas called for Europe to "take an equal share of the responsibility" and "form a counterweight" to Washington as Europe-US relations cool.

France and Germany have both backed the idea of a small joint European response force over the last year, and have announced plans to develop a fighter jet together.

- Swipes at Hungary and Italy -

Macron came to power last year vowing to overhaul the EU and has pushed for deep political reforms -- including a separate budget for the eurozone -- which have so far met with lukewarm support.

His agenda has been hit in particular by the rise of a new eurosceptic and nationalist government in Italy, as well as resistance from rightwing leaders in Poland and Hungary.

He admitted that "France seems sometimes to be on a solitary path".

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But Macron lashed out at the rising tide of nationalism and called for countries to heal divisions which have widened over how to tackle the ongoing influx of migrants in particular.

Video: France May Require Monthlong Service For 16-Year-Olds

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"France wants a Europe which protects, even as extremism has grown stronger and nationalism has awoken," he said.

"Divisions between north and south over economics, between east and west on migration, too often fracture our European Union," he added, urging a "humanist" approach to the changes brought by globalisation.

As for the solution, he insisted his approach would be to "give up nothing of the ambitions set out a year ago" when he came to office, which would mean creating a more integrated European Union with greater strategic autonomy.

"Do China and the United States think of Europe as a power with similar independence to their own? It is not the case," he said.

- 'Xenophobes bring no solutions' -

He also took at a swipe at ruling populists in Hungary and Italy, drily noting that their anti-EU rhetoric seemed to vanish when it came to accepting economic development aid from the EU.

"There is a clear approach of European opportunism while claiming to be nationalist," he said, calling out Hungary's Viktor Orban by name.

He did, however, acknowledge that a lack of European solidarity had played a role in prompting bitter disputes in recent months with Italy over migration.

"But does that excuse xenophobic comments?" he added in what appeared to be a veiled jab at Italy's far-right League.

"I don't think so, and I think these xenophobes bring no solutions to the problem they complain of."

In a typically expansive overview of his foreign policy, Macron called for Europe to build "strategic partnerships" with neighbours Turkey and Russia despite their differences.

Britain will also be in line for a "strategic partnership" after its departure from the EU scheduled next year -- but Macron warned that Brexit must not come at the cost of the unity of the rest of the EU.Paris (AFP) - French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that he would put forward new proposals for the European Union to boost its security, saying the bloc must stop depending on American might.

"Europe can no longer rely on the United States for its security. It is up to us to guarantee European security," he said in a speech to relaunch his diplomatic agenda.

His proposals will be unveiled "in the coming months", Macron told an audience of some 250 diplomats, lawmakers and international relations experts gathered to mark the return from the summer break.

"I want us to launch an exhaustive review of our security with all Europe's partners, which includes Russia," he added.

Macron's comments came after a string of gestures from US President Donald Trump distancing himself from traditional NATO allies.

Macron came to power last year vowing to overhaul the EU and has pushed for deep political reforms -- including a separate budget for the eurozone -- which have so far met with lukewarm support.

The French president, who will head to Denmark and Finland for a three-day trip from Tuesday hoping to shore up support for his EU shake-up, called for redoubled efforts to reform the bloc.

"We need to take new initiatives, build new alliances," he said.

"France wants a Europe which protects, even as extremism has grown stronger and nationalism has awoken," he said.Cowboys center Travis Frederick (72) is fighting Guillain Barre Syndrome and will be out indefinitely for Dallas. (AP)

Rowdy Gaines has a daily reminder of the disease that now faces Dallas Cowboys offensive lineman Travis Frederick.

It never goes away, says the Olympic gold-medalist swimmer. I feel it right now.

It is the tingling sensation that usually signals the onset of Guillain Barre Syndrome (GEE-yome buh-RAY), the rare and often terrifying condition that can strike anyone at any time, and can cause severe symptoms including paralysis. Frederick, who went public with his diagnosis last week, is one of the few (1 in 100,000) afflicted with the inflammatory disorder of the peripheral motor and sensory nerves. No one knows who gets it and why, other than it sometimes follows a flu-like virus or infection. For some reason, the bodys immune system starts to attack itself.

The good news is a full recovery is likely.

Gaines had the syndrome in 1991, and his toes still give him the pins-and-needles sensation that feels like a foot fallen asleep. He was in the ICU for six weeks. Whenever Gaines hears about another case of GBS, his first instinct is to reach out. He wants to do the same to Frederick.

Id be honored to talk to him, Gaines says.

Rowdy Gaines says he still feels the effects of Guillain Barre Syndrome, which he was first diagnosed with in 1991. (AP)

Degrees of severity in Guillain Barre

The disease usually creeps up the legs and arms in an ominous and scary way, leaving most patients aware yet increasingly immobile. After the peak of damage, says a website dedicated to explaining the rare syndrome, the nerves usually undergo a slow healing process and are remyelinated or repaired; during this process the patient regains strength and sensation.

In a statement, Frederick said he was very optimistic about my condition and the immediate future, as I have been told the illness was detected at a fairly early stage.

One of the leading experts in GBS, Ken Gorson, says the fact that the lineman has already put out a statement is a good sign, as it means Frederick is cognizant of whats going on. For some, GBS can lead to delirium. For Gaines, he was so affected that his lungs began to lose function.

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Hopefully, Frederick has a more mild, short-term version of the disease. Thats the crazy thing, Gaines says. It can strike different individuals completely differently.

Athletes have returned to peak form

A return to form for an elite athlete usually takes months instead of weeks. Because patients are usually laid up for a while (and in the worst cases, unable to feed themselves) the condition usually leads to weight loss. Former offensive line standout Mark Schlereth told ESPN Radio last week he went from 295 to 235 in two months when he was diagnosed with GBS in 1993. He said his recovery took 17 months overall. Gaines was so depleted that when he first reentered the pool after recovering, he needed his wife to prop him up. He had lost nearly 50 pounds.

The treatment is quite advanced from when Gaines and Schlereth were diagnosed. Gorson says todays doctors infuse healthy antibodies into the patient as a form of blood washing. Gaines advises Frederick to get into the pool as part of his late-stage recovery as well, as water therapy can be soothing and not as arduous. Eventually, theres a good chance Frederick will be in top form again. Gaines swam faster times after his recovery and qualified for the 1996 U.S. Olympic Trials, and Schlereth won a Super Bowl with Denver (and played multiple 16-game seasons) after he got better.

Thats the most important thing: GBS patients nearly always get better. Gorson says the mortality rate in the Western world is around 5 percent, and younger people are in better position to beat back the disease. Gaines says he spends a lot of his time reaching out to other GBS patients, including Chase Kalisz, who got the disease at age 8, needed a feeding tube, and eventually recovered to win a swimming gold medal in 2016.

The disease can be frightening, but the message Gaines wants to send is reassuring.

With the exception of the first couple weeks, I always had hope, Gaines said.

If Travis Frederick wants to talk, an Olympic champion is more than happy to pick up the phone.

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The killing of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts has prompted criticism of the U.S. immigration system, because the man charged in her death is a Mexican farmworker. But the victim's father told mourners he's been embraced by the local Hispanic community.John McCain served six terms as senator and made two failed bids for the presidency - AP

Former US presidents from across the political divide led tributes to Senator John McCain after his death on Saturday at the age of 81.

The Republican Senator passed away with wife Cindy and family by his side at his home in Hidden Valley, Arizona on Saturday afternoon, a day after it was announced he would not seek further treatment for glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.

Hours after the death of her husband, Mrs McCain wrote: "My heart is broken. I am so lucky to have lived the adventure of loving this incredible man for 38 years. He passed the way he lived, on his own terms, surrounded by the people he loved, in the the place he loved best."

Although a lifelong Republican, Mr McCain was held in high esteem by political rivals from both sides of the aisle, a rare feat in the increasingly bipartisan world of Washington.

Yet the former naval aviator will also be remembered for being a thorn in the side of President Donald Trump, who horrified many when he stated Mr McCain was not a war hero, despite being captured, tortured and held for five years in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp.

McCain was one of Mr Trump's most vociferous critics throughout his campaign and presidency.

Barack Obama and George W Bush are expected to give eulogies at a full dress funeral at Washington National Cathedral, but his family have said they do not want Mr Trump to attend. Vice president Mike Pence is expected to be present.

All five living former presidents -- Mr Obama, Mr Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter -- paid tribute to McCain's courage and character.

President George W. Bush called John McCain "a man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order" Credit: UPI / Barcroft Images

"John McCain and I were members of different generations," Mr Obama said. "But we shared, for all our differences, a fidelity to something higher - the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched and sacrificed. We saw our political battles, even, as a privilege.

"Few of us have been tested the way John once was or required to show the kind of courage that he did. But all of us can aspire to the courage to put the greater good above our own."

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Mr Bush wrote: "Some lives are so vivid, it is difficult to imagine them ended. Some voices are so vibrant, it is hard to think of them stilled. John McCain was a man of deep conviction and a patriot of the highest order."

Tributes also came from political leaders around the world, including Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron.

Prime Minister Theresa May said: "John McCain was a great statesman, who embodied the idea of service over self. It was an honour to call him a friend of the UK. My deepest sympathies go to his family, and the American people."

Members of the Honor Guard stand guard in front of A.L. Moore-Grimshaw Mortuaries Bethany Church where memorials for late U.S. Senator John McCain have been set up in Phoenix, Arizona Credit: CONOR RALPH/REUTERS

The six-term senator will become one of only a handful of people to lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda, a gesture reserved for the countrys most eminent citizens.

After the funeral his body will be buried at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland from where he graduated in 1958.

The White House lowered the American flag to half mast on Saturday and Mr Trump was one of the first to send his sympathies to his family.

"My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!" he tweeted.

Mr McCain made two failed runs at the presidency during his political career, most recently in 2008 when he won the Republican nomination teaming up with Sarah Palin but eventually losing out to Mr Obama.

My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 26, 2018

During a town hall meeting, he memorably challenged an audience member who referred to his opponent as an 'Arab', implying he was untrustworthy and not an American.

No maam, the father of seven told her. Hes a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and thats what this campaign is all about.

The governor of Arizona said he does not plan to announce whom he will appoint to replace McCain in the US Senate until after his burial.

State law requires the governor to name an appointee of the same political party who will serve until the next general election in 2020.

McCain's wife, Cindy, has been touted as a possible replacement. McCain's death brings to 50 the number of Republican-held seats in the 100-member US Senate, with Democrats controlling 49.By Philip Pullella ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Sunday he would not respond to a former top Vatican official who accused him of having known for years of allegations of sex abuse by a prominent U.S. cardinal, calling on the pontiff to resign in an unprecedented broadside against the pope by a Church insider. Francis, speaking to reporters on the plane returning from a trip to Dublin, said dismissively that a statement containing the accusations "speaks for itself". In a detailed 11-page bombshell statement given to conservative Roman Catholic media outlets during the pope's visit to Ireland, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano accused a long list of current and past Vatican and U.S. Church officials of covering up the case of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who resigned last month in disgrace. In remarkably blunt language, Vigano said alleged cover-ups in the Church were making it look like "a conspiracy of silence not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia". "Pope Francis has repeatedly asked for total transparency in the Church," wrote Vigano, who has criticized the pope before. "In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, his extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarricks abuses and resign along with all of them," Vigano said. The statement, which contained no supporting documents, was the latest blow to the credibility of the U.S. Church. Nearly two weeks ago, a grand jury in Pennsylvania released the findings of the largest-ever investigation of sex abuse in the U.S. Catholic Church, finding that 301 priests in the state had sexually abused minors over the past 70 years. On the plane returning from a trip to Dublin, reporters asked the pope about the statement, which was published by the National Catholic Register and several other conservative media outlets in the United States and Italy. "I will say sincerely that I must say this, to you (the reporter) and all of you who are interested: Read the document carefully and judge it for yourselves," he said. "I will not say one word on this. I think the statement speaks for itself and you have sufficient journalistic ability to reach your own conclusions," he said. NO REPLY In his statement, Vigano said he had told Francis in June 2013, just after he was elected pope by his fellow cardinals, about the accusations against McCarrick. Vigano, the papal envoy in Washington from 2011 to 2016, also said he had informed top Vatican officials as early as 2006 that McCarrick was suspected of abusing adult seminarians while he was a bishop in two New Jersey dioceses between 1981 and 2001. He said he never received a response to his 2006 memo. He also accused McCarrick's successor as archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, of having been aware of the abuse allegations. Wuerl has said he did not know of them. In a statement, the Washington Catholic Archdiocese said: "In spite of what Archbishop Viganos memo indicates, Cardinal Wuerl did not receive any documentation or information during his time in Washington regarding any actions taken against Archbishop McCarrick." McCarrick in July became the first cardinal in living memory to resign his position in the Church leadership after a review concluded that claims he had sexually abused a 16-year-old boy were credible. He was one of the highest-ranking Church officials accused of sex abuse in a scandal that has rocked the 1.2 billion-member faith since reports of priests abusing children and bishops covering up for them were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002. Since then, patterns of widespread abuse of children have been reported across the United States and Europe, in Chile and Australia, undercutting the Church's moral authority and taking a toll on its membership and coffers McCarrick, 88, has said he had no recollection of alleged abuse of the minor, but has not commented on widespread media reports that he would force adult men studying for the priesthood to sleep with him at a beach house in New Jersey. Vigano's statement railed against "homosexual networks present in the Church" - the word "homosexual" appears 18 times, while the word "child" appears only twice, in both cases in the titles of Church documents Vigano cites. Francis asked for forgiveness on Sunday during his highly charged visit to Ireland for the "scandal and betrayal" felt by victims of sexual exploitation by Catholic clergy. On Saturday, he said the corruption and cover-up of abuse amounted to human excrement, according to victims. (Reporting by Philip Pullella; Additional reporting by Scott Malone in Boston and Joel Schectman in Washington; Editing by Gareth Jones and Peter Cooney)Bucharest (AFP) - German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas again took aim at US President Donald Trump's foreign policy in a speech on Monday, branding his policies towards Europe "irritating".

"Obviously it irritates us when President Trump describes Europe as an enemy of the USA in the same breath as Russia and China or calls NATO into question almost as a throwaway remark," Maas told a gathering of Romanian diplomats in Bucharest.

"It seems absurd that we in the European Union have to worry about reacting to US tariffs that are justified on national security grounds," Maas said, before going on to note that this "absurdity" may simply be the reflection of a new geo-political reality.

"'America First' was a wake-up call. Our answer to that must be: 'Europe United!," Maas said.

Last week the minister used an article in the Handelsblatt newspaper to call on Europe to consider a "new world order" more independent of the US, prompting Chancellor Angela Merkel to make clear that this was only Maas's personal opinion.

In his speech on Monday, Maas called on the EU to develop a "common foreign and security policy worthy of the name", as well as a "defence union", and added that the principle of unanimity had too often led to the policy of the "lowest common denominator".

"We must be able to find areas in which majority decisions are conceivable for all member states," he said.

Maas also expressed concern over "polarisation" evident in Romania over alleged government corruption and controversial judicial reforms.

Earlier this month more than 450 people were hurt, including 30 police, during clashes at anti-government protests.

"It's not the discussion as such that worries us, as that has to take place. It is the harshness of the debate, which has led to violent confrontations," Maas said.

He called for a "compromise" to be found over judicial reform which would preserve the balance of powers while bringing together Romanian society.CHEMNITZ, Germany (Reuters) - Far-right demonstrators clashed with leftist protesters in the eastern German city of Chemnitz on Monday after an Iraqi and a Syrian were arrested over a fatal stabbing that had triggered violent demonstrations. Police said they brought in water cannons after fireworks were thrown from both sides, causing injuries. State and local officials appealed for calm as thousands of people took to the streets and Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said Germany would not tolerate "vigilante justice". The unrest reflected a growing schism in German society after Merkel's government allowed about 1 million asylum seekers to enter the country in 2015, triggering a shift to the right in German politics. Over a thousand leftist protesters massed near a giant statue of Karl Marx in Chemnitz on Monday evening to protest attacks on foreigners that occurred during an impromptu demonstration on Sunday after reports spread on social media about the stabbing of a 35-year-old German man. "The scenes of people going after those who look like foreigners scare us. We want to show that Chemnitz has another side that is cosmopolitan and opposes xenophobia," Tim Detzner, the head of the radical Left party in Chemnitz, told the rally. Nearly the same number of demonstrators waving German and Bavarian flags gathered nearby, some breaking through police barriers aimed at keeping the two sides apart. Many chanted "We are the people," a slogan used by far-right supporters. The police in Saxony, the eastern state where Chemnitz lies, said on Twitter at around 1930 GMT that the demonstration had ended and they were accompanying participants to the train station. Tensions were running high after some 800 demonstrators - including about 50 that police described as ready to commit violence - had taken to the streets on Sunday after the stabbing, which police said occurred after a row. Local prosecutors said they had arrested two suspects, a 22-year-old Syrian man and a 21-year-old Iraqi man. FAR RIGHT Television news channels broadcast amateur footage of skinheads chasing a man through the streets at Sunday's protest. Police said they were still investigating reports of injury filed by Syrian, Afghan and Bulgarian people, and at least four demonstrators had been charged. "We don't tolerate such unlawful assemblies and the hounding of people who look different or have different origins, and attempts to spread hatred on the streets," Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told a regular news briefing. "That has no place in our cities and we, as the German government, condemn it in the strongest terms," he said. "Our basic message for Chemnitz and beyond is that there is no place in Germany for vigilante justice, for groups that want to spread hatred on the streets, for intolerance and for extremism." Roland Woeller, interior minister of the state of Saxony, which includes Chemnitz, said authorities would not allow "anarchists" to run rampant. He warned against "misinformation and lies" circulating in social media. The arrival of huge numbers of migrants from the Middle East three years ago has fueled support for far-right groups such as PEGIDA and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), now the main opposition party in parliament. Tweeting about Sunday's incident, AfD politician Markus Frohnmaier said: "If the state is no longer to protect citizens then people take to the streets and protect themselves. It's as simple as that!" Martina Renner, a Left party lawmaker, accused the far-right of trying to exploit a murder for its own political ends. "A terrible murder, the background to which is still unclear, is being instrumentalized in the most repugnant way for racist riots in Chemnitz," she tweeted. The violence in Chemnitz is likely to put further pressure on Merkel's conservatives, who last week faced accusations of ignoring the rise of far-right groups in Saxony. (Reporting by Reuters TV and Michelle Martin, Joseph Nasr and Andrea Shalal in Berlin; Editing by Toby Chopra)The death of Jackson Odell has been ruled a drug overdose. Two months after the actor and songwriter was found dead on June 8, just ahead of his 21st birthday, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner revealed that the cause of death was acute heroin and cocaine toxicity and the manner of death was accidental.Hong Kong (AFP) - A Hong Kong pro-democracy group led by high-profile activist Joshua Wong said Monday two of its members had been detained and questioned in mainland China.

The pair were released within hours but were warned not to publicise their experiences, the Demosisto party said in a statement.

Hong Kong has rights unseen on the mainland but concerns are growing that those liberties are under serious threat as China tightens its grip on the semi-autonomous city.

Wong described the detentions as a "clear signal" that Chinese security forces were trying to suppress the democracy movement.

Demosisto campaigns for self-determination for Hong Kong, a concept which Beijing considers intolerable and a challenge to its territorial integrity.

The pair, who according to the statement were not key members of the party, were allegedly picked up at train stations in the southern Chinese towns of Shenzhen and Guangzhou in March and August.

Both members were asked about their participation in recent protests and for information about Demosisto, the group said.

The first was questioned at a police station and released around three hours later, according to the statement.

The second was taken to a hotel, where they were attached to what the group said resembled a lie detector and accused of "trying to stir up trouble in the mainland".

Demosisto said the member was offered payment to provide information after returning to Hong Kong, before being asked to sign an apology and released after five hours.

Beijing considers calls for self-determination in Hong Kong as tantamount to demands for independence.

The emergence of an independence movement in the last four years has led to a crackdown in the city, with some activists jailed and others barred from office.

It also comes as Hong Kong prepares to launch a high-speed rail link to the mainland at the end of September.

The new line will see China's security staff operating on the city's turf for the first time, prompting fresh fears over citizens' freedoms.

Demosisto founder Wong said the rail link could enable Chinese state security to "fully review and follow... every citizen" who visits the mainland.Its almost that time of year  time for Apple to reveal its latest and greatest iPhones. Typically, Apple (AAPL) announces its new handsets during either the first or second week of September. Which means you can expect new announcements sometime soon.

Most years, Apple debuts two phones, like in 2016, when it revealed the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. However, the tech giant went off script last year, when it announced 3 phones  including the iPhone X, which Apple debuted to mark the 10th anniversary of the iPhone.

The X brought some of the biggest updates to the iPhone line in years, including a new design, enhanced biometric technology and inventive interface. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus saw largely incremental changes like new processors and wireless charging.

For 2018, the rumors point to Apple releasing three new iPhones again. And if the rumors are correct, the phones will ape the edge-to-edge screen design of the X. One of those could even sport three rear cameras and Apple Pencil stylus support. Word on the street is the Apple Watch will also see design changes like a larger display area and bigger battery. Those would be the first major updates to the timepiece since it debuted in 2015.

Heres what you can expect when CEO Tim Cook and company take the stage in September.

Whats in a name?

Over the past several years Apples naming strategy has been easy to follow. We had the iPhone 4, the iPhone 4s, the iPhone 5, the iPhone 5s and so on. But the company threw all of that out the window when it skipped the iPhone 9 and jumped from the 7 to the 8 and X, meaning 10.

The going theories range from Apple naming the next iPhones the iPhone X2, or iPhone X Plus, or iPhone 9. But the only thing thats certain is we just dont know. I find it hard to believe that Apple would name a phone the X2  it would read the iPhone Ten Two, which doesnt make any sense.

The X Plus is plausible, but you have to remember that the only reason Apple named its phone the X to begin with was that it was the 10th anniversary of the iPhones initial release. Then there are those suggesting Apple will instead unveil the iPhone 11. Either way, the next iPhone will definitely be called an iPhone.

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Three sizes. Collect em all!

Apple offers its iPhones in three distinct sizes. Theres the 4.7-inch iPhone 8, the 5.5-inch iPhone 8 Plus and the 5.8-inch iPhone X. But, since the iPhone X has an edge-to-edge display, its a smaller device than the Plus despite having a larger screen.

Apples next iPhones are expected to feature edge-to-edge screens similar to the iPhone Xs.

For 2018, the company is expected to dramatically increase the size of its handsets, while making edge-to-edge displays ubiquitous across its line. Out go the 4.7-inch iPhone 8 and the 5.5-inch iPhone 8 Plus. In come a 5.8-inch handset, a 6.1-inch model and a 6.5-inch behemoth.

According to Bloomberg, the 5.8-inch and 6.5-inch iPhones will be Apples top-of-the-line handsets and feature the same kind of high-contrast OLED displays as the iPhone X. The 6.1-inch model will be the least expensive of the three and feature a less colorful, but cheaper, LCD panel. All three phones, however, are expected to include Apples FaceID facial recognition technology, as the increased size of their screens will eliminate the space needed for the traditional TouchID fingerprint reader.

Three cameras?

The iPhone X and 8 Plus already pack dual-lens cameras, but why stop at just two, right? According to MacRumors, citing Taiwans Economic Daily News, the 6.5-inch iPhone will have three camera lenses. That third lens could pack a 5x zoom, though its unclear if that would be a fully optical zoom or digital.

Reports say the next top-of-the-line iPhone could include a three-lens camera.

Optical zoom allows for clearer shots, since it uses the actual lens to zoom in on a subject. Digital zoom uses software to enhance a shot, making for a more distorted image.

Bloomberg, however, reports that the 6.5-inch will have a two-lens camera, rather than three. Either way well find out soon.

Faster charging? Yes please!

Apples iPhone chargers havent evolved much over the years, which is a shame when you consider that nearly every mainstream Android smartphone manufacturer offers some kind of fast charging technology.

That could change with the next iPhone, which, according to Toms Guide, could get a fast charger that uses a USB C cable. The report comes via a post on the Japanese blog Macotakara, which features what it claims is an image of the power brick for Apples upcoming smartphones.

Heres hoping we finally get a release date for Apples AirPower charging mat.

Hopefully, well also finally get a release date for Apples wireless AirPower charger, which will allow you to wirelessly charge your iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods on a single charging mat.

Whats it going to cost me?

Apples iPhone X proved that people are willing to pay $1,000 for a smartphone if it means getting sleek new features. And if the rumors are true, the tech giant could test just how much more customers are willing to pay with its next handset.

According to Gene Munster of Loup Ventures, the 6.5-inch iPhone could cost as much as $1,200 in its base model form. Thats one heck of a starting price for a smartphone. The 5.8-inch iPhone could clock in at $1,000, while the cheaper 6.1-inch handset could cost about $700.

Based on how consumers responded to the iPhone X, theres definitely interest in high-priced iPhones, but whether the public is willing to pony up any more than that is still up in the air.

Apple Watch

In addition to new iPhones, Apple could also show off an updated version of its Apple Watch. According to Bloomberg, this new Apple Watch could include a larger display, while retaining the same footprint. To do that, Apple will reportedly use an edge-to-edge style screen for its smartwatch. The Watchs bezels are already incredibly narrow, so it will be interesting to see how much Apple can push them to the limit.

Apple is expected to give the Apple Watch its first major aesthetic update since it was released in 2015.

Fast Company, meanwhile, says that Apple will do away with the physical button on the side of the Watch and replace it with one that uses the Taptic Engine, which already powers the Watchs Force Touch display. By using the Taptic Engine, Apple will be able to simulate a button press without having to use a real button, which could save internal space that could be used for a larger battery.

Well have more about Apples upcoming releases in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

More from Dan:

Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@oath.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley. Follow Yahoo Finance on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedInBerlin (AFP) - Indigenous Namibians urged the German government Monday to finally apologise for the genocide of their peoples a century ago, to help "heal the emotional wounds" of Germany's brutal colonial past.

The appeal by representatives of the Herero and Nama people in Berlin came ahead of a ceremony this week where Germany will formally hand back human remains that were spirited away from Namibia after the 1904-1908 massacres.

Esther Utjiua Muinjangue, chairwoman of the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, said the handover would have been "the perfect opportunity" for a long-awaited apology.

"Is that asking too much? I don't think so," she told a press conference in the German capital.

An official expression of regret would make it possible to "heal the emotional wounds" and find closure, she added.

The German occupiers of what was then South West Africa killed an estimated 60,000 Hereros and 10,000 Nama people after they rose up against colonial rule, in what historians call the first genocide of the 20th century.

The German government said in 2016 that it planned to issue a formal apology as part of discussions with the Namibian government on coming to terms with the dark chapter.

The negotiations are still ongoing however.

- 'Pay compensation' -

Crucially, although Germany has acknowledged that atrocities occurred at the hands of colonial authorities, it has refused to pay reparations.

Berlin has argued that its development aid worth hundreds of millions of euros since Namibia's independence from South Africa in 1990 was "for the benefit of all Namibians".

Herero and Nama representatives have rejected this reasoning, and filed a class-action suit against the German government in a US court.

"There has to be compensation," Namibian lawmaker Ida Hoffmann, representing the Nama Genocide Technical Committee, told reporters in Berlin.

The New York judge in the case has yet to rule on whether to hear the lawsuit.

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Aside from financial compensation, the plaintiffs also want to be included in the Namibian government's discussions with Berlin aimed at reaching a joint declaration on the massacres.

Germany wants the lawsuit thrown out on the grounds of state immunity for prosecution.

The German foreign ministry said Wednesday's ceremony to return some of the human remains unlawfully taken from Namibia -- including 19 skulls, five skeletons and a scalp -- marked another step in Berlin's reckoning with its colonial history.

The remains were used for discredited "scientific" experiments at the time to prove the racial superiority of white Europeans.

But activists have criticised the handover proceedings, which will see a German minister of state return the remains to a Namibian government delegation at a Berlin church service, as too low profile.

German historian Christian Kopp of the non-governmental group Berlin Postkolonial told AFP that the ceremony should take place "in the German parliament and be accompanied by an official apology".(Reuters) - Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Monday urged the remaining signatories to its 2015 nuclear agreement to act to save the pact, though France's leader called again for broader talks on Tehran's missile program and its role in the Middle East region. In a phone call to French President Emmanuel Macron, Rouhani said Iran wanted the Europeans to give guarantees on banking channels and oil sales as well as in the field of insurance and transportation, according to the state-run Iranian news agency IRNA. "Iran has acted upon all its promises in the nuclear agreement and, with attention to the one-sided withdrawal of America ... expects the remaining partners to operate their programs more quickly and transparently," Rouhani was quoted as saying. Rouhani was speaking in the light of U.S. sanctions re-imposed by Washington after President Donald Trump pulled out of a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers in May. Macron reiterated France's commitment to maintaining the accord, a remark aimed at soothing Tehran. But he repeated his earlier calls for broader discussions with all relevant parties that would include Iran's nuclear program after 2025, its ballistics program and its influence in the wider Middle East region. "We will do everything so that the talks help avoid a serious crisis in the months ahead," Macron said in an annual speech to French ambassadors. Separately, the head of the navy of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, General Alireza Tangsiri, said on Monday that Iran had full control of the Gulf and the U.S. Navy did not belong there, according to the Tasnim news agency. Tehran has suggested it could take military action in the Gulf to block other countries' oil exports in retaliation for U.S. sanctions intended to halt its sales of crude. Washington maintains a fleet in the Gulf that protects oil shipping routes. Tangsiri said Iran had full control of the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz that leads into it. Closing the strait would be the most direct way of blocking shipping. "We can ensure the security of the Persian Gulf and there is no need for the presence of aliens like the U.S. and the countries whose home is not in here," he said in the quote, which appeared in English translation on Tasnim. He added, "All the carriers and military and non-military ships will be controlled and there is full supervision over the Persian Gulf. Our presence in the region is physical and constant and night and day." The head of the Revolutionary Guards, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, said on Monday that Iran's enemies would not prevail in a conflict. "The enemies are strictly avoiding any conflict with Iran because they know that it will not be beneficial for them," Jafari said, according to Tasnim. As tension has escalated between Iran and the United States senior U.S. officials have said they aim to reduce Iran's oil exports to zero. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the most senior authority in the Islamic Republic, said last month that he supported the idea that if Iran is not allowed to export oil then no country should export oil from the Gulf. (Reporting by Babak Dehghanpisheh and additional reporting by Richard Lough in Paris; Editing by Peter Graff, Richard Balmforth)The Hague (AFP) - Iran demanded Monday that the UN's top court order the United States to suspend nuclear-linked sanctions against Tehran, but Washington vowed to "vigorously" fend off the legal challenge.

The Islamic Republic launched a suit at the International Court of Justice over US President Donald Trump's decision to reimpose sanctions that were lifted in a landmark 2015 accord.

Trump says the sanctions are needed to ensure Iran never builds a nuclear bomb. But Iran's representative Mohsen Mohebi branded them "naked economic aggression".

His team of lawyers told the court in The Hague that the measures were already devastating Iran's economy and threatening the welfare of its citizens.

"The United States is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran's economy and Iranian nationals and companies," Mohebi said.

"Iran will put up the strongest resistance to the US economic strangulation, by all peaceful means."

US lawyers are due to give their response in arguments before the court on Tuesday, with experts expecting them to challenge the ICJ's jurisdiction.

"We will vigorously defend against Iran's meritless claims this week in The Hague," said US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

He said Iran's lawsuit was "an attempt to interfere with the sovereign rights of the United States to take lawful actions, including re-imposition of sanctions, which are necessary to protect our national security".

- 'Irreparable prejudice' -

ICJ judgements are binding, final and without appeal.

However, whether any decision will be implemented remains unclear, with both Iran and the US in the past ignoring ICJ rulings against them.

The US measures have added to Iran's economic woes, fuelling strikes and protests across the country and political spectrum.

The sanctions target financial transactions and imports of raw materials, cars and aircraft among other sectors.

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A second wave of punitive measures is due to hit the OPEC member state in early November, targeting its vital energy sector including oil exports.

Iran's lawyers said the sanctions would cause it "irreparable prejudice". They urged the court to order the suspension of the sanctions pending a definitive ruling.

London-based lawyer Samuel Wordsworth, for Iran, told the court the measures were threatening Iranians' access to medicines as well as disrupting business deals.

- 'One-sided deal' -

The ICJ is expected to take a couple of months to decide whether to grant Tehran's request for a provisional ruling. A final decision could take years.

After years of diplomacy, the 2015 deal was signed by Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

Sanctions were lifted in return for Iran committing not to pursue nuclear weapons.

Trump, who took office in 2016, called it a "horrible one-sided deal".

He said it "failed to achieve the fundamental objective of blocking all paths to a Iranian nuclear bomb."

- Business deals scuppered -

Iran's lawyers said the US sanctions had disrupted tens of billions of dollars' worth of business deals with foreign companies.

Iran's currency the rial has lost around half its value since April.

International companies including French oil firm Total and Germany's Siemens have suspended operations in Iran since Trump announced the US withdrawal in May.

Trump said the sanctions would turn up the financial pressure on Tehran to come to a "comprehensive and lasting solution" regarding its activities such as its "ballistic missile programme and its support for terrorism".

The case is the second brought by Tehran against Washington since 2016. That year it brought a suit at the ICJ against the freezing of around $2 billion of Iranian assets abroad which US courts say should go to American victims of terror attacks.

Hearings in that case are due to start on October 8.

In both cases Iran is basing its claim on the obscure 1955 Treaty of Amity and Economic Relations, signed long before the country's Islamic revolution.

Despite the treaty, the two countries have not had diplomatic ties since 1980. Iran routinely refers to the US as "the enemy" and its officials chant "Death to America" at official functions.Ankara (AFP) - The presidents of Iran, Russia and Turkey will meet next week for their third tripartite summit seeking an end to the Syrian conflict, Turkish state television said Monday.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will travel to Iran to meet his Russian and Iranian counterparts Vladimir Putin and Hassan Rouhani on September 7, state-run TRT Haber television said.

Private NTV television added the summit would be held in the northern Iranian city of Tabriz.

A Turkish presidential official contacted by AFP could not immediately confirm the reports. However, the presidency has invited Turkish journalists to cover a trip by Erdogan to Iran on September 7.

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the tripartite summit was being prepared but did not confirm the date or venue.

"It could take place in Tehran. This option is being examined. We will make the appropriate announcement once all the nuances have been harmonised through diplomatic channels and when everything is ready," he added.

Erdogan had previously indicated that he planned to host a summit on Syria on September 7 in Istanbul with Putin and also French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But press reports over the last few weeks have suggested that such a meeting was increasingly unlikely and was set to be replaced by the latest three-way summit between Iran, Russia and Turkey.

The three leaders have previously met in the Russian resort city of Sochi and the Turkish capital Ankara.

Ankara, Moscow and Tehran are backing peace talks based in the Kazakh capital Astana which they insist are aimed at reinforcing, rather than undermining, a UN peace process in Geneva.

Iran and Russia are the main allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and their military interventions in Syria are widely seen as tipping the balance of the seven-year civil war in the regime's favour.

Turkey has backed rebels seeking to oust Assad but since late 2016 has been working increasingly closely with Iran and Russia to bring peace to Syria.

A major item on the summit agenda is expected to be the rebel-held northwestern Syrian province of Idlib which Assad wants to recapture, to crown a string of military successes.

But Turkey has said a military operation to take Idlib risks provoking a humanitarian "catastrophe", warning that 3.5 million people are crammed into the region.(Reuters) - Iran and Syria signed a deal for military cooperation in a meeting between the defense ministers of the two countries in Damascus, the Tasnim news agency reported on Monday. Iranian Defence Minister Amir Hatami traveled to Damascus on Sunday for a two-day visit, meeting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and senior military officials, Tasnim reported. Iranian forces have backed Assad in the countrys civil war. Tasnim did not provide any details about the military cooperation deal. U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton said last week that Iran should remove its forces from Syria. Senior Iranian officials have said their military presence in Syria is at the invitation of the Assad government and they have no immediate plans to withdraw. (Reporting by Babak Dehghanpisheh; Editing by Alison Williams)Baghdad (AFP) - Iraq's parliament will meet next week for its first session since May elections to choose a speaker and begin the process of forming a government, the outgoing president said Monday.

The inaugural session of the 329-seat chamber would be chaired by its oldest member, President Fuad Massum said in a decree calling for the sitting to take place on September 3.

The meeting of parliament was delayed by allegations of fraud that prompted the supreme court to order a partial manual recount of the results of the May 12 election.

Nationalist Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr's alliance with communists held on to all of the 54 seats it won and remain the biggest bloc in the parliament.

The Conquest Alliance of pro-Iranian former paramilitary fighters came second with 48 seats, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's bloc was third with 42.

Next Monday's session will be devoted to electing a new speaker, a post traditionally handed to a member of Iraq's Sunni Muslim community, and two deputy speakers.

Parliamentarians will then have 30 days to elect a new president for the country, a position that goes to a member of the Kurdish minority with at least two thirds of the vote.

Kurdish parties have yet to officially announce candidates for the top but largely symbolic post of president.

The new president will then have 15 days to task the largest bloc in parliament to form a new government.

Negotiations to form such a parliamentary coalition capable of forming a new government have yet to bear fruit, as many alliances were forged but were later dissolved.

But experts point to two blocs that appear ready to face off to form a new government.

One is led by Abadi who has struck coalition agreements with Sadr, Shiite cleric Ammar al-Hakim's Al-Hikma list (19 seats), and the Wataniya list of outgoing secular vice president Iyad Allawi (21 seats).

The other bloc is led by the Conquest Alliance which has formed an alliance with the list of former prime minister Nuri al-Maliki (26 seats).

Iraq's political system is designed to ensure that no one person or party can dominate in order to avoid any return of a dictatorship following the ouster of strongman Saddam Hussein.Sebastien Roblin

Security, Middle East

Thanks to Berlin.

Israel Might Have 300 Nuclear Weapons. (And They Are Hidden in the Ocean)

Farley is probably correct in arguing that the Israels nuclear-tipped SLCMs are less practical than Tel Avivs other nuclear-delivery platforms. For that matter, Israel doesnt currently face any adversaries with nuclear capabilities to deter against. However, like the idea of second-strike capability in general, the threat of sea-launched nukes may be more intended political weapon than one strictly intended for its military effectiveness.

Israel has never officially admitted to possessing nuclear weapons.

Unofficially, Tel Aviv wants everyone to know it has them, and doesnt hesitate to make thinly-veiled references to its willingness to use them if confronted by an existential threat. Estimates on the size of Tel Avivs nuclear stockpile range from 80 to 300 nuclear weapons, the latter number exceeding Chinas arsenal.

Originally, Israels nuclear forces relied on air-dropped nuclear bombs and Jericho ballistic missiles. For example, when Egyptian and Syrian armies attacked Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a squadron of eight Israeli F-4 Phantom jets loaded with nuclear bombs was placed on alert by Prime Minister Golda Meir, ready to unleash nuclear bombs on Cairo and Damascus should the Arab armies break through.

(This first appeared last month.)

Though Israel is the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, Tel Aviv is preoccupied by the fear that an adversary might one day attempt a first strike to destroy its nuclear missiles and strike planes on the ground before they can retaliate. Currently, the only hostile states likely to acquire such a capability are Iran or Syria.

To forestall such a strategy, Israeli has aggressively targeted missile and nuclear technology programs in Iraq, Syria and Iran with air raids, sabotage and assassination campaigns. However, it also has developed a second-strike capabilitythat is, a survivable weapon which promises certain nuclear retaliation no matter how effective an enemys first strike.

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Most nuclear powers operate nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines which can spend months quietly submerged deep underwater and at any moment unleash ocean-spanning ballistic missiles to rain apocalyptic destruction on an adversarys major centers. Because theres little chance of finding all of these subs before they fire, they serve as one hell of a disincentive to even think about a first strike.

But nuclear-powered submarines and SLBMs are prohibitively expensive for a country with the population of New Jerseyso Israeli found a more affordable alternative.

Berlins Unconventional Apology

During the 1991 Gulf War, it emerged that German scientists and firms had played a role in dispersing ballistic missile and chemical weapons technology to various Arab governmentstechnology which aided Saddam Hussein in bombarding Israel with Scud missiles. This in fact was long-running sore point: in the early 1960s, Israeli agents even carried out assassination attempts, kidnappings and bombings targeting German weapons scientists working on behalf of Arab governments.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl hatched a plan to simultaneously compensate Israel for the damages, while generating business for German shipbuilders suffering a downturn due to post-Cold War defense cuts. Starting in the 1970s, German shipbuilder HDW began churning Type 209 diesel electric submarines for export, with nearly 60 still operational around the globe. One Type 209, the San Luis, managed to ambush Royal Navy vessels twice during the Falkland War, though it failed to sink any ship due to the defective torpedoes.

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Kohl offered to fully-subsidize the construction of two enlarged Type 209s, designated the Dolphin-class, as well as cover 50 percent of the cost of a third boat in 1994. The Dolphins displaced 1,900-tons while submerged, measured 57-meters long and are manned by a crew of 35though they can accommodate up to ten special forces personnel. These entered service 19992000 as the INS Dolphin, Leviathan and Tekumah (Revival).

Each Dolphin came equipped with six regular tubes for firing 533-millimeter DM2A4 heavyweight fiber-optic guided torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship missilesas well as four 650-millimeter mega-sized tubes, which are rare in modern submarines. These tubes can be used to deploy naval commandos for reconnaissance and sabotage missions, which have played a major role in Israeli submarine operations.

However, the plus-size torpedo tubes have a useful additional function: they can accommodate especially large submarine-launched cruise missiles (SLCM)missiles large enough to carry a nuclear warhead. While a ballistic missile arcs into space traveling at many times the speed of sound, cruise missiles fly much slower and skim low over the earths surface.

In the 1990s the United States declined to provide Israel with submarine-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles due to the rules of the Missile Technology Control Regime prohibiting transfer of cruise missile with a range exceeding 300 miles.

Instead, Tel Aviv went ahead and developed their own. In 2000, U.S. Navy radars detected test launches of Israeli SLCMs in the Indian Ocean that struck a target 930 miles away. The weapon is generally believed to be the Popeye Turboan adaptation of a subsonic air-launched cruise missile that can allegedly carry a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead. However, the SLCMs characteristics are veiled in secrecy and some sources suggest a different missile type entirely is used. An Israeli Dolphin submarine may have struck the Syrian port of Latakia with a conventional cruise missile in 2013 due to reports of a shipment of Russian P-800 anti-ship missiles.

Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu then purchased three more German submarines, arousing considerable controversy as many felt additional boats were unnecessary. In 2012, Der Spiegel published an expose detailing how German engineers were well-aware of the Dolphin 2s intended role as nuclear-weapon delivery system, arousing some controversy with the public, as Chancellor Merkel supposedly agreed to the sale in exchange for unrealized promises from Netanyahu to adopt a more conciliatory policy towards the Palestinians. Israel has nonetheless received two of the Dolphin 2s, the Rahav (Neptune) and Tanin (Crocodile) with the Dakar expected in 2018 or 2019.

The 2,400 ton Dolphin 2 model is based on the state-of-the-art Type 212 submarine, which features Air-Independent Propulsion technology and swim faster at twenty-five knots. While diesel submarines rely on noisy air-consuming diesel generators which require the submarine to regularly surface or snorkel, AIP-powered submarines can swim underwater very quietly at low speeds for weeks at a time.

This not only means they are stealthier sea-control platforms, but makes them more viable for lengthy nuclear deterrence patrols. Currently, the Chinese AIP-powered Type 32 Qing-class is the only AIP-powered submarine in service armed with ballistic missiles.

However, as fellow TNI writer Robert Farley points out, there are geographic obstacles that diminish the practicality of Israels sea-based nuclear deterrence. For now, there is only one intended target: Iran, a country which lies hundreds of miles away from Israel. While Tehran lies barely within the supposed 930-mile range of an Israeli submarine deployed from their base in Haifa into the Mediterranean Sea, the missiles would have to spend over an hour overflying Syria and Iraq, posing navigational and survivability challenges.

A closer avenue for attack would lie in the Persian Gulf, but this would involve transiting the submarines through the Suez Canal (controlled by Egypt), around Africa (impractically far for the Dolphin-class), or stationing some at the naval base at Eilat, which faces the Gulf of Aqaba on the southern tip of Israel and is surrounded by Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In short, deploying Israeli submarines to Irans southern flank would require some degree of cooperation and logistical support from other Middle Eastern states that might not be forthcoming in a crisis scenario.

Farley is probably correct in arguing that the Israels nuclear-tipped SLCMs are less practical than Tel Avivs other nuclear-delivery platforms. For that matter, Israel doesnt currently face any adversaries with nuclear capabilities to deter against. However, like the idea of second-strike capability in general, the threat of sea-launched nukes may be more intended political weapon than one strictly intended for its military effectiveness.

Sebastien Roblin holds a masters degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.

Image: Creative Commons.

Read full articleWe want to let people know our services and experience them if they have issues with sensory overload, van Goethem said. We want everyone to feel comfortable in the library. Well have fidgets and Play-Doh for them if they want.Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel reopened its only crossing for people with the Gaza Strip on Monday, a week after shutting it over violence along the border with the Palestinian enclave.

The reopening, following days of relative calm, comes as Egypt holds talks with Palestinian officials as part of efforts to reach a long-term truce with Israel.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli defence ministry unit that oversees the Erez crossing confirmed it had opened as planned on Monday morning.

On Sunday night, Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the crossing was being reopened due to "calm that has been maintained over the past week."

Israel closed the crossing except to humanitarian cases on August 19, after another round of protests and clashes on the border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

It has enforced an air, land and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip for more than a decade, but grants permission to a limited number of people to cross for various reasons.

An average of around 1,000 Gazans cross through Erez each day, mostly those in need of medical care but also businesspeople, students and others, Israeli authorities say.

A second crossing with Israel, Kerem Shalom, is for goods.

There have been months of tension along the border and several military-flare ups, but recent weeks have seen relative calm.

Egyptian and United Nations officials have been mediating indirect talks on a long-term truce between Israel and Islamist movement Hamas, which have fought three wars since 2008.

Egyptian officials have held talks with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah this week in a renewed bid to reconcile the movement with Hamas.

The two factions have been deeply divided for more than a decade and Abbas is opposed to any truce with Israel that bypasses his Palestinian Authority, based in the occupied West Bank.

Mass protests and clashes erupted on the Gaza border on March 30 and have continued at varying levels since.

At least 172 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli fire since the protests began. One Israeli soldier has been killed during that time.

Gaza's only other border is with Egypt, but the Rafah crossing with the enclave had largely been kept closed in recent years. Cairo opened it in mid-May and it has mostly remained so since.After the passing of Arizona Sen. John McCain Saturday, lawmakers are moving to honor the Vietnam War hero by renaming the Russell Senate Office Building in his memory.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted late Saturday that Nothing will overcome the loss of Senator McCain, but so that generations remember him I will be introducing a resolution to rename the Russell building after him.

The move should have bipartisan support shortly. On CBS News Face the Nation Sunday, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, McCains colleague, said he wants to be the first Republican co-sponsor for that resolution.

John McCain had his office just right near mine in the Russell building. Thats where he was his entire time, said Flake. I think that thats a fitting tribute.

The Russell Senate Office Building was named in 1972 to honor Georgia Democrat Richard Russell, who served as a senator for almost 40 years, states a government biography. Despite his work with defense and energy, Russell was criticized for his strong opposition to the civil rights movement. In 1956, he co-authored the Southern Manifesto, which opposed desegregation.

McCain was a Republican senator for just over 30 years, known for his straightforward statements and strong moral code, earning him allies on both sides of the aisle. After a battle with brain cancer, the political maverick died at the age of 81 on Saturday.

As you go through life, you meet few truly great people. John McCain was one of them, tweeted Schumer after McCains passing. His dedication to his country and the military were unsurpassed, and maybe most of all, he was a truth teller  never afraid to speak truth to power in an era where that has become all too rare.

As you go through life, you meet few truly great people. John McCain was one of them. His dedication to his country and the military were unsurpassed, and maybe most of all, he was a truth teller - never afraid to speak truth to power in an era where that has become all too rare.  Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) August 26, 2018

Since the Russell building is under the Senates jurisdiction, renaming the facility will not require President Donald Trumps signature, Roll Call reports.Plans for Senator John McCains funeral will include events in three states over five days with tributes from two former presidents and one former vice president.

Senator McCain died on Saturday after a battle with cancer. He was 81. Political allies and opponents alike paid tribute to the Vietnam War veteran, former prisoner of war, and six-term senator. His memorial events will take place between Wednesday and Sunday of this week.

Here is the schedule of events:

Wednesday

McCain will lie in state in the Arizona State Capitol, the state he served for decades in the U.S. Congress. Wednesday would have been the late senators 82nd birthday. There will be a private ceremony at 10 a.m. local time followed by an opportunity for the public to pay their respects between 1 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Thursday

Family and friends of the senator along with some national political figures will celebrate his life at the North Phoenix Baptist Church at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on Thursday. A motorcade will bring McCain from the capitol to the church, and former Vice President Joe Biden will reportedly pay tribute to his longtime colleague and sometimes rival. The service will be available via livestream.

Following the memorial service in Phoenix, McCain will be flown to Marylands Joint Base Andrews, where he will be met by armed forces body bearers.

Friday

McCain will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, an honor reserved for the most eminent citizens. He will be the 13th former senator to have received the honor. As in Arizona, a ceremony will be held at 11 a.m. Eastern Time followed by a public visitation period from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. The ceremony will be broadcast live.

Saturday

A procession from the Capitol will pass the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the way to the National Cathedral, where a memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. ET. Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush have reportedly been asked to speak at the memorial. Vice President Mike Pence will attend as well, but McCains family reportedly asked President Trump not to attend the funeral. The memorial service will be available via livestream.

Sunday

McCain will be laid to rest at the cemetery of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Hell lie alongside his longtime friend Adm. Chuck Larson overlooking the Severn River.Donald Trump and John McCain - Reuters

One of John McCain's final wishes, as he struggled against a devastating brain cancer, could not have been more clear: He made it known that he did not want Donald Trump to attend his funeral.

The two men never pretended to like each other. It was not just their clashing personalities or vastly dissimilar backgrounds. Their differences were fundamental, their values dramatically at odds, and their disagreements public and pointed.

When Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in June 2015, suggesting that many Mexican immigrants were criminals and "rapists," McCain denounced him for using language that "fired up the crazies."

Trump's response: McCain was a "dummy" who had barely managed to graduate from the US Naval Academy.

Never one to give in, Trump then attacked the former navy pilot over what might have seemed his least vulnerable point: the military career - including more than five years as a wounded and tortured prisoner of war in Vietnam - for which he received a slew of decorations including the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit and three Bronze Stars.

US Navy Lt. Cmdr. John McCain is escorted by Lt. Cmdr. Jay Coupe Jr., to Hanoi's Gia Lam Airport, after McCain was released from captivity in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp Credit: Horst Faas/AP

Trump, who received serial deferments and did not serve in the military, said that McCain was "a war hero (only) because he was captured," adding, "I like people that weren't captured." That comment that drew widespread condemnation, including from several veterans groups.

McCain's response starkly illustrated the two men's different characters: The senator sought no apology on his own behalf but said that Trump did owe an apology "to the families of those who have sacrificed in conflict" and of those taken prisoner while "serving their country."

The rise of Trump's populist candidacy in 2016 was widely seen as a disavowal of McCain-style Republicanism and of the more establishment approach he took during his own presidential run in 2008.

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Eight years later, here was a man who openly professed his love of money, who had avoided military service because of a foot problem he later said had healed itself, a man who bragged about greasing the wheels for his New York real estate empire by donating to both Democrats and Republicans, a man who, in short, unapologetically flouted the long-established traditions of American politics and the presidency.

As McCain pursued his own re-election to the Senate in 2016, he broke with his party's nominee after a video aired in which Trump could be heard bragging that when he saw beautiful women he would sometimes "grab 'em by the pussy."

McCain announced that he would instead vote for "some good conservative Republican who is qualified to be president."

Russia's President Vladimir Putin Credit: Barcroft

Putin and Trump

One day in November 2016, not long after Trump's surprise victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, the Arizona senator exploded when journalists in the Capitol continued to pummel him with questions about the incoming president: "Do not ask me about Donald Trump. I do not want to be rude to anyone, but I do not want to be asked about Donald Trump."

It was not an easy vow to carry out, given Trump's undeniable talent for dominating political debate even while blowing up long-established norms and tenets of American domestic and foreign policy.

But what most scandalised the aging senator was the new president's persistent refusal to acknowledge and confront Russian meddling in the US political process.

Arizona Sen. John McCain speaks at a campaign rally at Raymond James Stadium in 2008 Credit: ROBYN BECK/AFP

As time went on, McCain's resistance grew more direct and his words sharper. As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee he opened his own inquiry into Russian interference.

And when he heard Trump's accommodating words toward Russian President Vladimir Putin when the two met in July in Helsinki, he could contain himself no longer.

The damage inflicted by President Trump's naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate.

John McCain

"Today's press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory," McCain said in a blistering statement.

"The damage inflicted by President Trump's naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate."

Even as McCain's health ebbed, he missed few opportunities to lash out at the president.

He was one of just three Republican senators to vote against - and thus defeat - a Trump-backed effort to repeal Barack Obama's signature health-care law. That single vote earned lasting disdain from the president.

But McCain did not back down. In an op-ed article in the Washington Post, he called the president "impulsive" and "often poorly informed."

In a prepared speech that seemed directed at the president and his aides, McCain denounced the "spurious nationalism" of people who "would rather find scapegoats than solve problems."

President Donald Trump speaks during the 2018 Ohio Republican Party State Dinner, Friday, Aug. 24, 2018 Credit: John Minchillo/AP

And when an October 2017 interview turned to the subject of service in the Vietnam War - a profoundly marking experience in McCain's own life - he did not hold back.

"One aspect of the conflict, by the way, that I will never countenance is that we drafted the lowest-income level of America, and the highest-income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur," he said. "That is wrong. That is wrong."

The allusion to the medical deferment that saved a young Donald Trump from serving in that war could not have been clearer.

The patent contempt the two men displayed for each other showed no sign of fading, even as McCain continued to weaken.

A few weeks ago, Trump could not even bring himself to say McCain's name during a signing ceremony for a defense funding bill that fellow senators had named in the Arizona lawmaker's honor.McCain, who had brain cancer, was known for his heroism in Vietnam, his independent-mindedness and recently his rebukes of Trump

John McCain, prisoner of war, presidential candidate and one of the most influential American politicians of his generation, has died after suffering from brain cancer.

The six-term senator from Arizona, who was 81, had been absent from Washington since last December but remained outspoken to the end, railing against Donald Trump and urging defence of the post-war liberal democratic order.

A statement from his office said: Senator John Sidney McCain III died at 4.28pm on 25 August 2018. With the senator when he passed were his wife Cindy and their family. At his death, he had served the United States of America faithfully for 60 years.

Amid an outpouring of tributes, Barack Obama, who defeated McCain for the presidency in 2008, said he and his rival had shared a fidelity to  the ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched, and sacrificed.

Obama added: Few of us have been tested the way John once was, or required to show the kind of courage that he did. But all of us can aspire to the courage to put the greater good above our own. At Johns best, he showed us what that means. And for that, we are all in his debt.

McCains death will leave a void in a Republican party increasingly turning away from bipartisanship at home and engagement overseas in favour of the presidents brand of divisiveness and isolationism.

Trump, who clashed bitterly with McCain and in recent weeks had refused to mention him by name, tweeted a brief statement on Saturday. He did not praise the man. My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain, the president wrote. Our hearts and prayers are with you!

McCains legacy will be keenly debated. No stranger to controversy, he was a staunch supporter of president George W Bushs invasion of Iraq in 2003 and his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate in his unsuccessful bid for the White House in 2008 is now seen as a harbinger of the tide of rightwing populism he came to resist.

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McCains first brush with death came in July 1967 when, as a navy pilot in the Vietnam war, a missile exploded near his fuel tanks, causing a ship fire that killed 134 troops. Three months later he was shot down over Vietnam, breaking both arms and a leg, and was captured by the North Vietnamese.

McCain was offered early release because his father was a four-star admiral but rejected it until his fellow PoWs were also freed. During five years in captivity, including more than two in solitary confinement, he suffered beatings and torture almost daily.

That McCain displayed rare fortitude in the Hanoi Hilton was common cause - until Trump mocked him during the 2016 election campaign, telling a conference in Iowa: Hes not a war hero. The future president, who avoided the draft five times, added: He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people that werent captured.

McCain retired as a captain in 1981 after earning a number of decorations and ran for Congress in Arizona the following year. He switched from the House to the Senate in 1987 and forged a reputation as a military hawk  he was one of the Iraq wars biggest champions  and maverick willing to defy the right and work across the aisle on issues such as campaign finance and immigration reform.

In 2000 he finished second to George W Bush in the Republican presidential primary after an ugly campaign. Eight years later, he beat Mitt Romney to the nomination, only to come up against a political force of nature: Obama.

McCain and Barack Obama greet each other at the end of their third and final presidential debate in Hempstead, New York in 2008. Photograph: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

McCains military pedigree and independent streak won respect but his choice of the unqualified Palin as running mate  apparently designed to appeal to Christian evangelicals who deserted him in 2000  damaged his credibility. He was swept away by a wave of optimism that carried Obama into the Oval Office but delivered a memorably gracious concession speech.

He declined to support the 2016 Republican nominee after the release of an Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasted about groping womens genitals. When Mr Trump attacks women and demeans the women in our nation and in our society, that is a point where I just have to part company, McCain said.

What might have been a gentle drift into retirement became instead a final, furious last stand as the elder statesman saw his beloved party shifting from under him. As others fell into line, McCain became one of Trumps chief Republican critics, jabbing at what he perceived as the presidents weak response to Russian aggression and self-defeating hostility to Muslims.

In February last year he travelled to Munich to reassure anxious allies: Make no mistake, my friends: These are dangerous times, but you should not count America out, and we should not count each other out.

In October, receiving the Liberty Medal in Philadelphia, he issued what many saw as a repudiation of Trumps America first ethos: To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain the last best hope of earth for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

By then McCain had undergone surgery to remove a blood clot from near his left eye and was found to have an aggressive form of brain tumour known as glioblastoma. When the diagnosis was announced, Obama commented: Cancer doesnt know what its up against.



McCain was no liberal but he opposed both Trumps first attempt at a travel ban for six majority-Muslim nations, calling it potentially a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism, and the confirmation of Gina Haspel as director of the CIA because of her refusal to fully disown torture.

And on the grounds that the legislation was being rushed through Congress, he was also central to the failure of two attempts to repeal Obamas signature healthcare legislation. In response, Trump continued to use the bully pulpit to berate the senator, though not by name.

McCain spent his final months with his second wife, Cindy, at their ranch in Sedona, Arizona. He continued to issue statements and tweets, published a valedictory book and took part in an HBO documentary that some likened to starring in his own obituary.

Ive been tested on a number of occasions, he told the film-makers. I havent always done the right thing. The important thing is not to look back and figure out all the things I should have done, and theres lots of those, but to look back with gratitude.The senator held some deeply conservative views, but his principles and belief in bipartisanship made him unique

The things that John McCain stood for gained added force from what he was and what he had been through. Photograph: KPA/Zuma/Rex/Shutterstock

Senator John McCain, who died Saturday of brain cancer at age 81, was a paradox. By any reasonable political measure, he was a highly conservative legislator, who voted in line with the preferences of his Republican party almost all the time. He opposed abortion and gun control. He was a deficit hawk who wanted the federal government to stop funding a long list of popular programs, including the nations passenger railroad system and public television. He supported the death penalty and a constitutional amendment banning flag-burning, led the drive to pour billions of dollars into defense buildups, and advocated a hawkish and interventionist foreign policy. And yet, many movement conservatives considered him an enemy, while moderate Republicans and even many Democrats viewed him as an ally. Why?

For starters, McCain earned his maverick label by staking out positions on certain issues that conservatives deemed heretical. He was a chief sponsor of a campaign finance law that irritated many of the Republican partys deepest-pocketed donors. He was one of the leading Republican advocates calling for government action to address climate change, despite some conservatives insistence that the whole concept of global warming was a hoax. In the face of growing rightwing xenophobia, he advocated a path toward citizenship for immigrants who had entered the country illegally. He cast the deciding vote last year against the Republican attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

McCain was a conservative but wasnt bound by conservative ideology. He was a throwback to Republicans of bygone decades who considered each issue on its merits, without worrying too much about what polls or ideological table-keepers might say. He was capable of changing his mind, as he did when he regretted having voted against the creation of a federal holiday honoring the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, and for having given Sarah Palin a platform  as his running mate during his 2008 presidential campaign  from which to corrupt the political process with her know-nothing populism.

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On other issues, he was brave and stubborn enough to stick to his guns, even when it would have been to his advantage to shift with changing political winds. During the Iraq war, he relentlessly denounced enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding as torture, even though they were supported by two-thirds of Republican voters. More recently, he stood up to Donald Trump in support of free trade and international cooperation with US allies.

He was guided by his principles, his concern for the Senates institutional values, and his belief in bipartisanship. In an impassioned speech he delivered on the Senate floor last summer after returning from his first round of cancer treatments, he implored his colleagues to reject tribalism, embrace the obligation to work collaboratively, and accept the necessity of cooperation and compromise in order to achieve incremental progress. Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the internet, he insisted. To hell with them. They dont want anything done for the public good. Our capacity is their livelihood. Lets trust each other.

McCain was one of the few politicians capable of cutting through the modern cynicism about politics and politicians

The things that McCain stood for gained added force from what he was and what he had been through. It was an inescapable part of his political biography that his plane was shot down while he was on a combat mission during the Vietnam war, that he was nearly killed by a crowd when he parachuted into Hanoi, and that he was then imprisoned, starved and tortured by the North Vietnamese regime. When the communists realized he was the son of the admiral in charge of all US naval forces in the Pacific, they offered to release him; when he refused to leave without the other PoWs, they rebroke his arm, knocked out his teeth and kept him in a closet-sized punishment cell for the next four years.

The late writer David Foster Wallace, in a perceptive essay about the Arizona senators 2000 presidential run, noticed that McCains personal history of having voluntarily suffered for his code of honor gave him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. And his personability and independent reputation allowed him to come across as a politician who actually seemed to talk to you like you were a person, an intelligent adult worthy of respect. McCain was one of the few politicians capable of cutting through the modern cynicism about politics and politicians.

For that reason, it was probably necessary for Trump, as a presidential candidate in 2016, to declare that McCain was not a war hero, on the grounds that I like people that werent captured. The logic of Trumps candidacy required him to lay waste to nearly all American norms and institutions. McCains heroism, as well as his idealism about politics, constituted a standing moral reproach to Trumps cynicism.

America will miss McCain. There is no one like him left in Congress. But his memory may serve as an inspiration for members of both parties who seek a way out of the countrys present political morass.US Senator John McCain, the son and grandson of four-star admirals, was bred for combat. He endured more than five years of imprisonment and torture by the North Vietnamese as a young naval officer and went on to battle foes on the left and the right in Washington, driven throughout by a code of honour that both defined and haunted him.

Sen McCain, 81, died on 25 August at his ranch near Sedona, Arizona, his office announced in a statement. The senator was diagnosed last July with a brain tumour, and his family announced this week that he was discontinuing medical treatment.

During three decades of representing Arizona in the Senate, he ran twice unsuccessfully for president. He lost a bitter primary campaign to George W Bush and the Republican establishment in 2000. He then came back to win the nomination in 2008, only to be defeated in the general election by Barack Obama, a charismatic Illinois Democrat who had served less than one term as a senator.

A man who seemed his truest self when outraged, Sen McCain revelled in going up against orthodoxy. The word maverick practically became a part of his name.

Sen McCain regularly struck at the canons of his party. He ran against the GOP grain by advocating campaign finance reform, liberalised immigration laws and a ban on the CIAs use of enhanced interrogation techniques  widely condemned as torture  against terrorism suspects.

To win his most recent re-election battle in 2016, for a sixth term, he positioned himself as a more conventional Republican, unsettling many in his political fan base. But in the era of president Donald Trump, he again became an outlier.

The terms of engagement between the two had been defined shortly after Mr Trump became a presidential candidate and Sen McCain commented that the celebrity real estate magnate had fired up the crazies. At a rally in July 2015, Mr Trump  who avoided the Vietnam draft with five deferments  spoke scornfully of Sen McCains military bona fides: He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who werent captured.

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Once Mr Trump was in office, Sen McCain was among his most vocal Republican critics, saying that the president had weakened the United States standing in the world. He also warned that the spreading investigation over Mr Trumps ties to Russia was reaching the point where its of Watergate-size and scale.

Sen McCains most dramatic break with Mr Trump came nine days after the Arizona senator announced on 19 July, 2017, that he had been diagnosed with brain cancer. He returned to the Senate chamber, an incision from surgery still fresh above his left eye, and turned thumbs down on a GOP plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. Sen McCains no vote, along with those of two other Republicans, sent his partys signature legislative goal hurtling towards oblivion.

In both of his own presidential races, Sen McCain had dubbed his campaign bus the Straight Talk Express. To the delight of reporters who travelled with him in 2000, he was accessible and unfiltered, a scrappy underdog who delighted in upsetting the Republican order.

He was always ready for the next experience, the next fight. Not just ready, but impatient for it, said his longtime aide Mark Salter, who co-authored more than a half-dozen books with the senator, including three memoirs, the final of which included a stinging critique of Mr Trump. He took enjoyment from fighting, not winning or losing, as long as he believed he was fighting for a cause worth the trouble.

So broad and party bending was his appeal that Senate Democrats in 2001 quietly tried to persuade him to become one of them. In 2004, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a senate colleague who later became Obamas secretary of state, considered offering Sen McCain the second spot on his ticket.

Sen McCains 2008 presidential campaign turned out to be a far more conventional operation than his first bid for the White House. He stuck to his talking points and came to represent the status quo that he had once promised to topple.

One move, however, would come to be regarded as a reckless political gambit. Sen McCain picked as his vice presidential running mate the little known, thinly vetted governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.

Her well-received convention speech initially gave the sagging Republican nominee a lift, and her independent streak reinforced Sen McCains message and reputation. Looking back on the decision in 2012, Sen McCain said he had been looking for a way to galvanize and energize our campaign.

But Ms Palins performance in interviews and on the stump sowed doubts about whether she was prepared to be next in line for the presidency and, by Election Day, polls indicated that she had become a drag on his candidacy.

When he acted like an ordinary politician, trimming principles in the cause of ambition and expedience, it was all the more jarring because of the standard he had set. In the years that followed, a question often asked was: Which is the real John McCain?

He represented the end of an era during which the nation looked at wartime military experience as practically mandatory for those who aspire to high office. McCain was part of the tradition of being able to say, I did public service when I was young,  historian Douglas Brinkley said.

Sen McCain, who rose to become chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was among the Republicans most hawkish leaders on military matters and foreign affairs.

It was a mindset that came, in part, from his conviction that the Vietnam War, in which he had suffered grievously, was a noble and winnable endeavour. The real failure, he believed, was that of a spineless political class.

During the Iraq War, often compared to Vietnam, Sen McCain was an early and ardent proponent of a 2007 surge of troops. President Bush ultimately adopted that strategy, and it was widely credited with stabilising Iraq, albeit temporarily.

Sen. McCain was also a persistent critic of Obamas foreign policy.

The demand for our leadership in the world has never been greater. People dont want less of America  they want more, Sen McCain said in 2012. Everywhere I go in the world, people tell me that they still have faith in America. What they want to know is whether we still have faith in ourselves.

***

John Sidney McCain III was born 29 August 1936, in the Panama Canal Zone and into a family whose military lineage included an ancestor who served as an aide to Gen George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

He was named for the first father and son in Navy history to become full admirals: John S Slew McCain Sr, a top Pacific-theatre commander in World War II, and John S McCain Jr, commander for all armed forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam War.

The middle of three children, Sen McCain manifested his famously hot temper early: As a toddler, he would hold his breath until he blacked out. His tantrums were so severe that a Navy doctor advised his father and mother, the former Roberta Wright, to drop him, fully clothed, into a bathtub of icy water at the first sign of an outburst.

After transient early years spent mostly at military bases, he graduated in 1954 from a Virginia boarding school, Episcopal High School in Alexandria. Following his fathers and grandfathers path, and his parents often-stated expectations, Sen McCain then enrolled at the US Naval Academy, which he later recalled as a place I belonged at but dreaded.

At Annapolis, he rebelled against the hazing and the regulations and racked up so many demerits that he was at risk of expulsion. (That, too, was something of a family tradition.) As Sen McCain often boasted later in life, he graduated fifth from the bottom of the 899-member class of 1958.

From there, he headed to Pensacola, Florida, to be trained as a Navy pilot and continue the rowdy existence of his days at the academy.

One girlfriend at the time was a stripper who went by the professional name Marie, the Flame of Florida. Sen McCain recalled taking her as his date to a party of young officers and their mannerly wives. Marie became bored, drew a switchblade from her purse, popped it open and cleaned her fingernails.

He did a stint as a flight instructor in Meridian, Mississippi, at McCain Field, named for his grandfather. It was there, Sen McCain recalled, that he matured and became dedicated to distinguishing himself as a pilot.

As a boy and young man, I may have pretended not to be affected by the family history, but my studied indifference was a transparent mask to those who knew me well, the senator wrote in a 1999 memoir of his early life, Faith of My Fathers, co-authored by Mr Salter. As it was for my forebears, my familys history was my pride.

Sen McCain also became involved in a serious romance, with Carol Shepp of Philadelphia, whom he had known since his days at the academy. They wed in July 1965, and he soon adopted her two sons from a previous marriage, Douglas and Andrew. The couple later had a daughter, Sidney.

Sen McCain requested and got orders to do a Vietnam combat tour, joining a squadron on the supercarrier Forrestal in the Tonkin Gulf. On 29 July, 1967, having flown five uneventful bombing runs over North Vietnam, he was preparing for takeoff when a missile accidentally fired from a nearby fighter struck the fuel tank of his A-4 Skyhawk, Sen McCain wrote in his memoir. It set off explosions and a fire that killed 134 crewmen, destroyed more than 20 planes and disabled the ship so severely that it took two years to repair.

His own injuries being relatively  and miraculously  minor, Sen McCain, then a lieutenant commander, volunteered for dangerous duty on the undermanned carrier Oriskany. He joined a squadron nicknamed the Saints that was known for its daring; that year, one third of its pilots would be killed or captured.

***

On 26 October, 1967, Sen McCain was on his 23rd mission and his first attack on the enemy capital, Hanoi. He dove his A-4 on a thermal power plant near a lake in the centre of the city.

As he released his bombs on the target, a Russian-made missile the size of a telephone pole blew off his right wing. The lieutenant commander pulled his ejection-seat handle and was knocked unconscious by the force as he was hurled from the plane. He came to when he hit the lake, where a mob of Vietnamese had gathered.

With both arms and his right knee broken, he was dragged from the lake, beaten with a rifle butt and stabbed in the foot with a bayonet. Then Sen McCain was taken to the French-built prison that American POWs had dubbed the Hanoi Hilton.

So began five-and-a-half years of torture and imprisonment, nearly half of it spent in solitary confinement. During that time, his only means of communicating with other prisoners was by tapping out the alphabet through the walls.

At first, his family was told that he was probably dead. The front page of The New York Times carried a headline: Adm McCains Son, Forrestal Survivor, Is Missing in Raid.

The North Vietnamese, however, perceived that there was propaganda value in the prisoner. They called him the crown prince and assigned a cellmate to nurse him back to health. As brutal as his treatment was, Sen McCain later said, prisoners who lacked his celebrity endured worse.

Shortly before his father assumed command of the war in the Pacific in 1968, Sen McCain was offered early release. He refused because it would have been a violation of the Navy code of conduct, which prohibited him from accepting freedom before those who had been held longer.

I knew that every prisoner the Vietnamese tried to break, those who had arrived before me and those who would come after me, would be taunted with the story of how an admirals son had gone home early, a lucky beneficiary of Americas class-conscious society, Sen McCain recalled. I knew that my release would add to the suffering of men who were already straining to keep faith with their country.

His lowest point came after extensive beatings that broke his left arm again and cracked his ribs. Ultimately, he agreed to sign a vague, stilted confession that said he had committed what his captors called black crimes.

I still wince when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace, Sen McCain wrote. The Vietnamese had broken the prisoner they called the Crown Prince, and I knew they had done it to hurt the man they believed to be a king.

In March 1973, nearly two months after the Paris peace accords were signed, Sen McCain and the other prisoners were released in four increments, in the order in which they had been captured. He was 36 years old and emaciated.

The effects of his injuries lingered for the rest of his life: Sen McCain was unable to lift his arms enough to comb his own prematurely gray hair, could only shrug off his suit jacket and walked with a stiff-legged gait.

***

Sen McCain had hoped to remain in the Navy, but it became clear that his disabilities would limit his prospects for advancement.

In the meantime, he found himself drawn towards the civilian world of politics  and it towards him. Hobbling on crutches in his dress-white service uniform, he shook president Richard M Nixons hand. Sen McCain also struck up a friendship with then-California Gov Ronald Reagan, who invited the former POW to speak at an annual prayer breakfast in Sacramento.

He developed a network of political contacts while working in the Navys legislative affairs operation in the late 1970s. His office on the first floor of the Russell Senate Office Building was a popular late-afternoon socializing spot for younger senators and their staffs.

Sen McCains marriage, meanwhile, frayed and fell apart. That was not an unusual story among returning Vietnam POWs, and in his case, the dissolution was aggravated by his infidelities.

While he and his wife were separated, Sen McCain visited Hawaii, where he met Cindy Hensley, the daughter of a wealthy Arizona beer distributor. A few months after his divorce became final in 1980, he married Ms Hensley. Then-Se. William Cohen, R-Maine, later to be a defence secretary, was his best man, and then-Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., a future presidential contender, was an usher.

The couple had three children: Meghan McCain, who became a media personality and blogger, and sons Jimmy McCain and Jack McCain, both of whom served in the military. They also adopted a daughter, Bridget McCain, whom Cindy had met while visiting an orphanage in Bangladesh.

Besides his mother, his wife and seven children, survivors include a brother, Joseph McCain of Washington; a sister, Jean McCain Morgan of Annapolis, Maryland; and five grandchildren.

Sen McCain retired from the Navy at the rank of captain and moved to Arizona in 1981, with an eye towards running for Congress. The opportunity presented itself the following January when a longtime Republican congressman, John Rhodes, announced his retirement. That same day, the McCains bought a house in Rhodess Phoenix district, and John McCain was soon in a race against three other candidates.

He was called an opportunist and a carpetbagger  accusations he dispatched with a single answer at a candidate forum.

I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and spending my entire life in a nice place like the 1st District of Arizona, but I was doing other things, he replied to one critic. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.

He won the primary by six points and breezed through the general election. Four years later, in 1986, he was elected in a landslide to the Senate, replacing the retiring Barry Goldwater, one of the most influential conservative politicians of the 20th century.

John McCain was a Capitol Hill celebrity from the moment he was elected to the House.

In many areas, he was a reliably conservative voice and vote. But from the beginning, he showed what became a trademark streak of independence. He called for the withdrawal of Marines from Lebanon in 1983 after a terrorist bombing left 241 US service members dead; he voted to override President Reagans veto of sanctions against the apartheid regime of South Africa in 1986.

And  surprisingly to many  as a member of the Senate, he worked to normalize relations with Vietnam.

Sen McCain crusaded against pork-barrel spending, the practice by which lawmakers direct taxpayer money to projects in their districts. He was also the only Republican to vote against the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a deregulation measure he said had been written by every [special] interest in the world except the consumers.

Acclaimed by the media, he was not popular in the Senate. Many of his colleagues were put off by his certitude.

John puts things in terms of black and white, right and wrong, then-Sen Tim Hutchinson, R-Ark., told The Washington Post in 2000. If you disagree with him, youre wrong. He doesnt see that there could be legitimate differences of opinion that deserve respect.

One of the greatest setbacks for Sen. McCain, who had styled himself an idealist and a reformer, came in 1989, when his name became associated with a scandal. He and four other senators  all Democrats  were accused of trying to pressure federal bank regulators to back off an investigation of Charles Keating Jr, a high-living Arizona businessman whose savings and loan collapsed and cost taxpayers more than $3bn (2.3bn).

Over the years, Keating had contributed heavily to Sen. McCains House and Senate campaigns. The senators family had taken at least nine trips, at Keatings expense, to the Bahamas, where Keating had a luxurious vacation estate.

Sen McCain and the four Democrats  Alan Cranston of California, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, John Glenn of Ohio and Donald Riegle Jr. of Michigan, all of whom had also benefited from Keatings largesse  became known as the Keating Five.

The Senate Ethics Committee finally determined that Sen McCain had not done anything more serious than showing poor judgment by attending two meetings with the regulators and the four other senators. It was the lightest reprimand the committee gave in connection with the scandal. The others were rebuked but were not charged with crimes.

Sen McCain felt that he bore a permanent taint. It will be on my tombstone, something that will always be with me, something that will always be in my biography, he said, and deservedly so.

The experience also lit the fire for what would become his signature issue and biggest legislative achievement: an overhaul of campaign finance laws. Sen. McCain teamed up with one of the Senates most liberal members, Russell Feingold, D-Wis., to author a measure that called for the most dramatic change to the system since the post-Watergate reforms of 1974.

It took them more than seven years to get the legislation through. The 2002 laws main thrust was to ban unlimited, unregulated soft money donations to parties, which were used as a means of skirting the contribution limits to individual candidates.

In less than a decade, however, the Supreme Courts Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision opened the money floodgate and led to the rise of super PACs, which can spend unlimited sums, as long as they do not coordinate directly with candidates. Sen McCain called it the worst decision of the United States Supreme Court in the 21st century.

***

When Sen McCain announced in September 1999 that he was running for the Republican nomination for president, it was yet another assault on the political establishment, which had put its chips on then-Texas Gov. Bush, the son of a former president.

In truth, I had had the ambition for a long time. It had been a vague aspiration, he later wrote. It had been there, in the back of my mind, for years, as if it were simply a symptom of my natural restlessness. Life is forward motion for me.

He ran as a truth-telling reformer, held a record-setting 114 town hall meetings in New Hampshire (while effectively ignoring the Iowa caucuses) and pulled off a stunning 18-point victory over Bush in the Granite States first-in-the-nation primary. But his campaign ran aground in South Carolina in what came to be regarded as the nastiest primary in memory.

Sen. McCain was the target of rumours: that he had fathered a black child (twisting the facts about his dark-skinned adopted daughter); that his wife had a drug habit (she acknowledged having been addicted to painkillers and stealing them from a charity she ran); that his years as a POW had left him brainwashed and insane.

One of his regrets, he later said, was getting tangled up in South Carolinas emotional debate over flying the Confederate flag at the capitol in Columbia. After describing the banner as a symbol of racism and slavery, Sen. McCain bowed to the pleas of his panicked strategists and issued a statement saying he could understand both sides of the question.

Later, he wrote that he regretted not having told the truth, which was that he believed the flag should be lowered forever from the staff atop South Carolinas capitol.

I had not been just dishonest. I had been a coward, and I had severed my own interests from my countrys. That was what made the lie unforgivable, he recalled. All my heroes, fictional and real, would have been ashamed of me.

Bush handily defeated Sen McCain in South Carolina, beginning the end of the senators insurgent campaign. In April, a month after he dropped out of the 2000 race, Sen McCain returned to the state and publicly apologised for having chosen to compromise my principles. I broke my promise to always tell the truth.

The bitterness of that campaign lingered for much of Bushs presidency. Sen McCain was, for instance, one of only two Senate Republicans to vote against Bushs 2001 tax cuts. He said they were fiscally irresponsible and benefited the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.

But by the time he ran again in 2008, Sen. McCain had come to terms with Bush and the Republican Party, and they with him. He not only voted to extend the tax cuts in 2006, but also advocated making them permanent.

Whereas Sen McCain had lashed out at evangelical leaders Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as agents of intolerance during his first presidential bid, he delivered the commencement address at Falwells Liberty University in 2006. Falwell introduced him with lavish praise, saying, The ilk of John McCain is very scarce, very small.

The shift rightward caused a breach with a constituency that Sen. McCain had long counted as in his corner: the media.

Are you going into crazy base world? comedian Jon Stewart asked Sen McCain during an appearance on Comedy Centrals The Daily Show a few weeks before the speech at Liberty.

Im afraid so, Sen McCain deadpanned.

His campaign all but collapsed in the summer of 2007, but Sen. McCain battled back and won the nomination.

Still, he was flying into head winds in the general election. The war in Iraq, which he had supported, was unpopular, as was the Republican incumbent in the White House. Palins erratic, unprepared performance became a story in itself.

Most important, he was up against a Democrat who seemed tailor-made for that moment in history: Obama was better financed, ran a better campaign, had opposed the Iraq War and offered the captivating prospect of putting an African American in the White House for the first time.

Nonetheless, the race looked as if it could be close until the final weeks, when the financial system went into a meltdown. Sen McCain, so sure of himself on national security issues, seemed less than savvy at handling economic ones. Even as the crash was building into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the senator declared that the fundamentals of our economy are strong.

Returning to Congress, Sen McCain became a frequent antagonist of the man who had defeated him for president. He contended for instance that Russian President Vladimir Putins 2014 invasion of Crimea was a result of a feckless foreign policy where nobody believes in Americas strength anymore.

When Sen McCain got the gavel of the Armed Services Committee in 2015, he told The Post that he was having more fun than at any time since his 2000 presidential campaign. That same year, he announced plans to run for a sixth term in the Senate.

Sen. McCain won handily, and in his victory speech to supporters, he predicted that campaign might be the last.

Thank you one last time, he added, for making me the luckiest guy I know.

In his final book, reflecting on his life as it came to an end, Sen McCain wrote: Its been quite a ride. Ive known great passions, seen amazing wonders, fought in a war, and helped make a peace. I made a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my times.

The Washington PostNearly a year before Senator John McCain died, he discussed how he hoped his legacy would be remembered by the world.

McCain, who died Saturday at 81 years following a year-long battle with brain cancer, shared a poignant look into his mind during an Oct. 2017 appearance on The View, a talk show that his daughter Meghan co-hosts.

When asked about how he hoped he would be remembered, McCain didnt skip a beat, saying, He served his country.

He then added, And hes proud of his family and his daughter.

Senator John McCain on how hed like to be remembered from October 23, 2017 on @TheView:



He served his country. And hes proud of his family and his daughter. https://t.co/iorNjy2a6b pic.twitter.com/ekZ9Ft1DLP  ABC News (@ABC) August 26, 2018

In the same episode, McCain gave his daughter Meghan a framed photograph of the two of them on a hike. Im the luckiest person in the entire world. We are such a family thats filled with blessings, Meghan McCain said through tears.

In July 2017, McCain was diagnosed with a glioblastoma tumor, an aggressive form of brain cancer that has an average life expectancy of 14 months, according to the World Health Organization. His family announced their decision to end his treatment on Aug. 24.Tarana Burke and daughter Kaia Burke attend the Black Girls Rock 2018 red carpet at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on Aug. 26 in Newark, N.J. (Photo: Paras Griffin/Getty Images for BET)

#MeToo founder Tarana Burke wore a glittering gold gown on the red carpet Sunday evening for the Black Girls Rock awards show. She had her hair pulled back in a sleek, voluminous ponytail and paired her sparkling gown with a snakeskin clutch and gold bracelets. Burke was presented with the Community Change Award for her activism and work for victims of sexual assault. For the event, she was joined by her daughter, Kaia Burke.

In 2006, long before the #MeToo movement swept the globe, Burke was credited with coining the term after her own experience of sexual assault and seeing the need for victims to share their experiences. The same year, she founded Just Be, Inc., an organization dedicated to the health and well-being of young women of color.

Behind the scenes, Burke had for years been advocating for young women of color as well as those who were victims of sexual violence, but only in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein accusations has she became a public symbol for the movement.

#MeToo founder Tarana Burke wears a gold shimmery maxi gown while sporting a snakeskin clutch and gold accessories at the Black Girls Rock awards show on Aug. 26 in Newark, New Jersey. (Photo by Gilbert Carrasquillo/WireImage)

In January, Burke was joined in solidarity by several Hollywood A-list actresses, including Michelle Williams and Reese Witherspoon, at the Golden Globes for the debut of the Times Up Legal Defense Fund, for victims of sexual assault, violence, and inequality in the workplace. The fund was established at the height of the Weinstein scandal and #MeToo movement.

Recently, Asia Argento, one of the first women to come forward against Weinstein and become an activist in the #MeToo movement, was accused of allegedly sexually assaulting 17-year-old actor Jimmy Bennett. During this revelation, Burke took to Twitter to reemphasize that the #MeToo movement is for all victims. Ive said repeatedly that the # metooMVMT is for all of us, including these brave young men who are now coming forward. It will continue to be jarring when we hear the names of some of our faves connected to sexual violence unless we shift from talking about individuals  and begin to talk about power.

Story continues

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Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.How is Michael Cohen's 'Truth Fund' faring? originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

Michael Cohen has turned to the public after declaring independence from President Donald Trump, and he's having some success.

In just four days since the president's former personal lawyer and fixer pleaded guilty to eight felonies, he has raised more than $155,000 from nearly 3,000 donations through a GoFundMe page asking for help with his legal bills as he goes through a "journey to tell the truth about Donald Trump."

Dubbed the "Michael Cohen Truth Fund," the online fundraiser was set up by Cohen's lawyer Lanny Davis on Tuesday, the day Davis says Cohen "made the decision to take legal responsibility" and pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance law violations associated with Trump's campaign for president.

PHOTO: Michael Cohen, longtime personal lawyer and confidante for President Donald Trump, exits the United States District Court Southern District of New York, April 16, 2018 in New York City. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images, FILE)

The two campaign finance violations Cohen pleaded guilty to this week stem from his role in alleged hush-money agreements with two women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, who say they had affairs with Trump. The president has denied both women's allegations.

Cohen said in a court statement that he made those payments "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office," referring to then-candidate Trump, and added that he participated in the transactions with the principal purpose of influencing an election.

"This is Michael fulfilling his promise made on July 2nd to put his family and country first and tell the truth about Donald Trump," Davis told ABC News, referring to comments Cohen made in an interview with ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos.

Support for Cohen's declaration of independence ranges from an anonymous $50,000 donation to small donations of less than $50, as well as help from his personal friends.

Felix Karafin, a longtime friend of Cohen who made two $500 donations to Cohen's fund, told ABC News that he gave money to the fund for two reasons.

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"I love Michael, and I want Trump out," Karafin said.

Karafin, a New York-based physician, said that Cohen is not like the bad person as he's portrayed in the media, but rather an "essential giver" who's willing to help out anyone around him. He added that Cohen has gone through a severe emotional and financial hardship under an aggressive prosecution.

Grayson Everett, who runs a political consulting firm, told ABC News that he donated $100 to the fund because he thinks highly of Cohen's stated intention to cooperate with any investigative agencies.

"It took a lot of courage for Michael Cohen to plead guilty to 8 counts of some serious financial crimes," Everett said.

Trump's current personal attorney Rudy Giuliani insisted that the charges against Cohen don't implicate the president and instead attacked Cohen on his past record of reversing his statements.

"It is clear that, as the prosecutor noted, Mr. Cohen's actions reflect a pattern of lies and dishonesty over a significant period of time, Giuliani said in a statement.

In January, when the Wall Street Journal first revealed the Daniels deal, Cohen insisted that he had acted on his own in the Daniels deal and that he had not been reimbursed by the campaign or the Trump Organization, contrary to his recent court statement that he had acted under Trump's direction.

Everett, however, said he doesn't doubt the sincerity of Cohen's sworn statements before the court on Tuesday.

"I think he has every idea how much is at stake and how long of a road he has to go," Everett said. "Not only is he up against a billionaire, he also has to deal with the wrath of a runaway presidency. I think this case presents a refreshing opportunity for truth to win out over power."

Trump, who had previously said that Cohen would remain loyal to him and "never flip" mocked his former lawyer, calling his professional competence into question.

"If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you dont retain the services of Michael Cohen!" the president tweeted Wednesday morning.

If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you dont retain the services of Michael Cohen!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018

Cohen is just the latest addition to the long line of embattled former Trump aides or advisers caught up in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation who have turned to online crowdfunding to help pay for snowballing legal fees, including former Trump campaign aides Roger Stone, Michael Caputo and George Papadopoulos.

Among them, Caputo has had the most success with his GoFundMe page so far, raising more than $334,000 since April this year. Caputo is now helping out with legal bills of others facing the Mueller probe, including former Trump campaign national security adviser J. D. Gordon and former Stone aide Andrew Miller, who has recently been subpoenaed by the special counsel.Then Skokie filed its own suit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division, alleging that Evanstons rate increase ordinance adversely affects the rights of the plaintiffs named in the complaint in a discriminatory way. Further, according to the lawsuit, the rate violates Skokie citizens rights.NEW YORK (AP)  For Michael Cohen and Donald Trump, it's always been about money and loyalty.

Those were guiding principles for Cohen when he served as more than just a lawyer for Trump during the developer's rise from celebrity to president-elect. Cohen brokered deals for the Trump Organization, profited handsomely from a side venture into New York City's real estate and taxi industries and worked to make unflattering stories about Trump disappear.

Money and loyalty also drove Cohen to make guilty pleas this past week in a spinoff from the swirling investigations battering the Trump White House.

Feeling abandoned by Trump and in dire financial straits, the man who once famously declared that he would "take a bullet" for Trump now is pledging loyalty to his own family and actively seeking to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

The unraveling of their relationship was laid bare Tuesday when Cohen pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges and said in federal court that he broke campaign finance laws as part of a cover-up operation that Trump had directed.

In the days after Cohen's guilty plea, two close associates  the magazine boss who helped him squash bad stories and the top financial man at the president's business  have been granted immunity for their cooperation. These moves could have a ripple effect on the legal fortunes of Cohen and, perhaps, Trump.

For years, Cohen was a fixture in Trump's orbit.

Working alongside Trump and Trump's three adult children  Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric  in Trump Tower, Cohen took on a number of roles for the developer, including emissary for projects in foreign capitals and enforcer of Trump's will. At times a bully for a family-run business, Cohen was known for his hot temper as he strong-armed city workers, reluctant business partners and reporters.

He was there in the lobby of Trump Tower in June 2015 when his boss descended an escalator and changed history by declaring his candidacy for president. But Cohen's place in Trump's political life ended up being peripheral.

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Cohen did become a reliable surrogate on cable TV  he created a viral moment by repeating "Says who?" when told Trump was down in the polls  and founded the candidate's faith-based organization. But Cohen was never given a prominent spot in the campaign.

And despite telling confidants that he thought he had a shot at White House chief of staff after the election, Cohen was never given a West Wing job. He remained in New York when Trump moved to Washington.

Cohen found ways to profit from the arrangement, making millions from corporations by selling access to Trump, but felt adrift and isolated from Trump, according to two people familiar with his thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private conversations.

But early one April morning, more than three dozen federal agents raided Cohen's home, office and hotel room.

A chief focus for investigators was Cohen's role in making payments during Trump's campaign to women who claimed they had sex with Trump, and whether campaign finance laws were violated. In the fall of 2016, weeks before the election, Cohen had set up a limited liability company in Delaware to hide the deal he made to silence the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels about an affair she said she had with Trump.

Worry grew within the White House about what had been seized. That April day, Trump berated the raid as "an attack on all we stand for." But then, in a "Fox & Friends" interview, Trump began to dramatically play down his relationship with Cohen.

"I have nothing to do with his business," Trump said, asserting that Cohen was just one of many lawyers and was responsible for "a tiny, tiny fraction" of Trump's legal work.

A dispute soon broke out between Cohen and Trump over who would pay the former fixer's mounting legal bills. Holed up in a Park Avenue hotel after his apartment flooded, Cohen began to worry about his financial future, according to the two people.

By all appearances, Cohen's lifestyle was lavish.

He bought a $6.7 million Manhattan apartment last fall, though the sale didn't close until April and no one could move in until the summer. With bills piling up for his team of expensive lawyers, the suddenly unemployed Cohen began to tell confidants that he was worried about his job prospects and ability to support his family.

Meanwhile, the broadsides from the White House kept coming.

Trump and Cohen had long stopped speaking, but word would get back to the lawyer that the president was belittling him. The president's attorney and frequent attack dog Rudy Giuliani went from calling Cohen "an honest, honorable lawyer" in May to deriding him as a "pathological liar" in July.

Cohen began wondering to friends whether loyalty with Trump had become a one-way street, the people said.

Eager to hit back and attempt to regain some hold on the story, Cohen hired Lanny Davis, a former Bill Clinton attorney, to be his public relations lawyer. Davis began striking back at the White House and lobbed a clear warning shot at the president when he released a secret recording of a conversation in which Trump appears to have knowledge about hush-money payments to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also alleged an affair with the developer.

Cohen was embraced by the cable news networks as an irresistible foil to Trump. Some on the left styled him as a star of the resistance. Cohen's camp made some effort to play into the role, reaching out to Watergate whistleblower John Dean and, after Cohen's plea, establishing an online fundraising tool that seemed to predominantly receive backing from liberals.

Cohen, who could get about four years to five years in prison, is due to be sentenced Dec. 12.

Davis has strongly telegraphed that Cohen is willing to cooperate with Mueller's investigation. But a deal has yet to be struck and there are doubts about what Cohen can prove or whether the special counsel would want to rely on an untrustworthy witness.

Cohen has stayed out of sight and has remained emotional since his plea, according to the people close to him.

The attacks from Trump have continued.

"If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Michael Cohen!" Trump tweeted Wednesday.

___

Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemireDwayne Johnson attends the European Premiere of Rampage at Cineworld Leicester Square in London in April. (Photo: Dave J Hogan/Dave J Hogan/Getty Images)

Dwayne the Rock Johnson is sending love to a family in need right now.

The Skyscraper star is remembering a mother  and fan  who was tragically killed, along with her 12-year-old daughter, on Thursday in a fiery freeway crash. Aileen Pizarro, 43, was driving on Interstate 805 in San Diego, Calif., when she and her daughter were struck by a wrong-way driver traveling at high speed. An 18-year-old YouTube star known as McSkillet was later identified as the driver; he also died at the scene.

Pizarros 19-year-old son, Angelo, later revealed that his mom was a huge fan of Johnsons. He pleaded on Twitter for the actor to make a video message for his mother to be played at the funeral.

My beautiful mom who passed away loved @TheRock so so SO much. Im trying to get him to do even a video saying her name for the funeral. If you could retweet the crap outta this for him to see it thatd mean the world. Thank you! pic.twitter.com/ypr4ZJzMxw  angelo pizarro (@mikkeltweets) August 25, 2018

The tweet caught Johnsons attention, thanks to the power of social media.

Hey Angelo, Dwayne Johnson here, the actor said in a video message later posted by Angelo. Man, Im sending you so much love and light and strength your way, from my family to yours. I just want to say thanks for reaching out man and Im so sorry to hear about your sister and your mom and this tragic loss that youre going through. If your mom could see me now, which Im sure she can, I just want to thank her for all the love and for being such a big fan, so stay strong.

Angelo shared the video so everyone could see how amazing the actor is.

@TheRock THANK YOU SO MUCH SIR. I hope everyone knows how amazing you are. I cant stop smiling knowing shes smiling so much. Just, thank you. And again thank you to every single person who viewed my post (now over a million). pic.twitter.com/tQisyRGgVT  angelo pizarro (@mikkeltweets) August 27, 2018

The Rock replied by saying it was the least he could do in this heartbreaking circumstance.

Story continues

Least I could do. Story is heartbreaking. Stay strong. https://t.co/zLWhML7mJs  Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) August 27, 2018

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:Washington (AFP) - US and Mexican negotiators will continue meeting through the weekend to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement and Canada is set to rejoin the talks as soon as they are called, Mexico's Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said Friday.

Guajardo and Mexico's Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray have been shuttling back and forth to Washington for more than a month for meetings with US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to try to iron out bilateral issues, such as rules for the auto market, before the end of August.

But Guajardo told reporters that Canada's Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland was ready at any point to proceed with the NAFTA negotiations.

"I have confirmation that she would be available the moment we believe we can enter into the trilateral" discussions, he said.

Freeland said earlier in the week that she was encouraged by the progress between Washington and Mexico City and would rejoin the talks once the bilateral discussions concluded.

However, her office announced Friday she would travel to Europe August 26-30 for visits in Germany, France and Ukraine.

The Mexican official declined to go into detail on the topics remaining with the United States but said the agreement could happen at any time.

"The idea is that we are staying because we know there are issues to resolve," he said. "And we have to make sure that everybody feels comfortable with this agreement."

Earlier Friday, Guajardo said officials were "very far" along in efforts to deal with the US-Mexico issues but added "there are trilateral issues that have to be solved in a trilateral context."

A contentious proposal by the United States -- which would require the nearly 25-year-old trade pact be reauthorized every five years -- is one that must include all three partners, Guajardo said.

Jesus Seade, an economic advisor to Mexico's incoming president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has been participating in portions of the NAFTA talks and said the sunset clause "is going out," according to press reports from Mexico City.

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Guajardo declined to comment on Seade's remarks but said the teams were working together on behalf of Mexico.

A senior Canadian official told AFP on Thursday there had been "no indication of flexibility from the US on this issue."

The three countries have been negotiating for a year to salvage the trade pact that President Donald Trump says has been a "disaster" for the United States.West Virginia State University honored NASA mathematician Katherine Johnsons 100th birthday with a statue and scholarship dedication over the weekend.

Hundreds of people  including 75 of Johnsons children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren  attended the event honoring the woman who was portrayed by Taraji P. Henson in the 2016 film Hidden Figures, according to the West Virginia Gazette. The bronze statue of Johnson was unveiled Saturday, one day before she turned 100.

Today the University community gathered to dedicate a statue and scholarship in honor of our amazing alum Katherine Johnson. The statue will serve as a source of inspiration to current and future students of all that is possible through dedication, hard work and perseverance. pic.twitter.com/iFOqxnr1eH  WV State University (@WVStateU) August 25, 2018

The scholarship in Johnsons name was awarded to freshmen Jasiaha Daniels and Alexis Scudero, both of whom are studying in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.

What makes Katherine so extraordinary is she not only prevailed while segregation failed, Dr. Johnson has continued to persevere and thrive with the gracious poise and clarity that defies mere words of explanation, let alone definition, said Dr. Yvonne Cagle, the keynote speaker at the ceremony and the space and life sciences directorate at the Johnson Space Center.

Johnson started attending WSVU when she was 14 because she wasnt able to receive further education in Greenbrier County. She graduated from the university in 1937 with degrees in both mathematics and French, then went on to pursue graduate studies at the institution.

Then-President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson on Nov. 24, 2015. (Photo: Carlos Barria / Reuters)

Johnson was a teacher for 15 years, then joined the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, which later became NASA. She and three other women calculated rocket trajectories and orbits for some of the earliest American voyages into space, including helping astronaut John Glenn orbit the Earth three times.

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Then-President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States highest civilian honor, in 2015.

What can you say after a century about someone like Dr. Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson  our very own global, global genius? Cagle asked Saturday. Lets see  you say nothing. You dont say anything. You listen.

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Maria Molly Baldwin (1856-1922) was an educator and civic leader.

Elizabeth Carter Brooks, an educator and activist, is seen with singer and activist Emma Azelia Smith Hackley (wearing glasses). Photos dated from 1885.

Hallie Quinn Brown (1850-1949) was an educator and activist. She is the founder of the Colored Woman's League of Washington, D.C., which later became the National Association of Colored Women in 1894.

Anna J. Cooper (1858-1964) was an educator, activist and prominent scholar. She was only the fourth black woman to earn a doctoral degree and wrote the Voice from the South: By A Woman from the South in 1892, which heavily touched on race and black feminism.

Amanda V. Gray (1869-1957) was an activist, educator and pharmacist. Gray, who received her pharmaceutical graduate degree from Howard University in 1903, operated a pharmacy in Washington D.C.'s black neighborhood. She was heavily active in the community's ongoing social, political and cultural issues.

Lillian Parker Thomas (born 1857) was a journalist and correspondent editor for the Freeman, which is recognized as the first illustrated black newspaper. She has been described in history books as "the mantle of mental achievement" and her role was one held by no other woman on staff at the publication.

Clarissa M. Thompson (born 1856) was an educator, novelist, poet and teacher. She often spoke out about temperance, gender inequality and racism.

Laura A. Moore Westbrook (born 1859) was an educator and fearless advocate for black people in the South. She worked in the public school system for more than two decades in both Tennessee and Texas.

Fannie Barrier Williams (1855-1944) was an educator, orator and political activist who heavily advocated on behalf of black women in the South. She was involved in the creation of both the National Association of Colored Women and the National Association of the Advancement Of Colored People (NAACP).

Josephine Silone Yates (1852-1912) was educator and activist who pushed for social change. She was a key organizer of the Kansas City Womens League and served as the organization's first president in 1893 before serving four years as the president of the National Association of Colored Women.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Earth experienced several wildfires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters last week. As scientists continue to monitor and respond to these volatile climate conditions, NASA offered a glimpse at how such events affect even the tiniest, often-unseen specks of matter that are ubiquitous in the air.

On Friday, NASA published a map of the Earth that showcased the current ebbs and flows of aerosols, which are solid particles or liquid droplets suspended in air. Using a model called the Goddard Earth Observing System Forward Processing, or GEOS FP, the space agency was able to enhance the colorization of each particle type to reflect aerosol velocity and presence as it was recorded on Thursday, August 23.

Visualization of aerosol movement on August 23.

Rather than using satellite data, the GEOS FP is a weather and climate model that uses mathematical equations to represent physical processes and calculate what was happening in the atmosphere that day. However, NASAs Earth Observatory did use some satellite input from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors to track fire radiative power and simulate real-time conditions.

As evident in NASAs visualization, Thursday was eventful. The map displays black carbon particles in red, which NASA describes as aerosols released by fires or from vehicle and factory emissions. Thus, the red and orange swirls in North America reflect the wildfires that continue to rage across the west coast of the US and Canada. Meanwhile, hurricanes and tropical storms, like those affecting Hawaii, South Korea, and Japan, launch aerosols through sea spray, as evident in the concentrated swirls of light blue. While these maps are visually striking, NASA reminded viewers of the violent situations some of the swirls represent.

Aerosol mapping of Asia.

Some of the events that appear in the visualization were causing pretty serious problems on the ground, the agency explained on its website. On August 23, Hawaiians braced for torrential rains and potentially serious floods and mudslides as Hurricane Lane approached. Meanwhile, twin tropical cyclonesSoulik and Cimaronwere on the verge of lashing South Korea and Japan. The smoke plume over central Africa is a seasonal occurrence and mainly the product of farmers lighting numerous small fires to maintain crop and grazing lands. Most of the smoke over North America came from large wildfires burning in Canada and the United States.

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While aerosols are often unseen, humans breathe in millions of these ubiquitous specks of matter and their presence and patterns are of great importance to scientists, especially as they monitor the behavior of wildfires and the emergence of carbon black plumes. The Earth Observatory intends to routinely include these aerosol mappings into other models and weather-mapping systems to better simulate real-world conditions as they unfold.

Photos via NASA

More From InverseBusiness Insider

In the past, Melania Trump has been seen slapping away her husband's hand, ripping her hand away from his, and walking away from him during photo ops.On the final episode of Who Is America?, Sacha Baron Cohen set his sights on O.J. Simpson. In 1994 Simpson was charged with murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, but was famously found not guilty. Cohen put the screws to Simpson by harping on the murder accusations, all while portraying his recurring character, Gio Monaldo. While in character, Cohen confides in Simpson that they are more alike than different. Cohen says, "We both, uh, how you say, 'lady killers.'" The statement made Simpson uncomfortable, so Cohen pushed forward saying, "It's not what it sounds like. In Italian, it translates to, uh, somebody who, uh, murders women." Simpson immediately denied the accusation, saying, "No, I didn't kill nobody." The whole bit appeared to be filmed without Simpson's knowledge. It clip ended abruptly, but based off Simpson's body language and repeated requests for Cohen to "stop," it is safe to assume that at some point it was all too much for Simpson. Cohen tweeted out that this was the last episode "EVER." The short lived series was well received by critics and bemoaned by those who have been tricked by Cohen. This was the final episode of the series but you can learn more by visiting the Who Is America? page at Showtime.com.CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  Australia's former prime minister said on Monday he will resign from Parliament this week in a move that could cost the unpopular conservative government its single-seat majority.

Malcolm Turnbull told supporters that he will resign from Parliament on Friday, a week after he was forced from office by lawmakers in his conservative Liberal Party because he had lost their support.

That could set the stage for an Oct. 6 by-election. Prime Minister Scott Morrison could also call general elections, although he has said he plans to hold polls close to when an election is due in May.

Morrison visited the drought-stricken Outback on Monday in a demonstration that he has turned his focus away from his government's internal drama to the problems of the nation.

Morrison selected drought assistance as a top priority along with national security and economic growth when he was chosen by Liberal Party lawmakers on Friday to replace Turnbull. Turnbull became the fourth prime minister to be dumped by his or her own party since 2010 in response to poor opinion polling.

Morrison flew to rural western Queensland state, where crops are failing and ranchers are struggling to feed sheep and cattle after six years of drought. He has not yet announced any new initiatives to help farmers.

Morrison is working to heal a bitter rift between conservative and moderate lawmakers in his conservative government to present a united front to voter. The hard-right lawmaker who led the charge against Turnbull but lost the leadership ballot to Morrison was sworn in as home affairs minister Monday. Peter Dutton had quit that post so he could publicly challenge Turnbull.

Tony Abbott, a key Dutton ally who was prime minister before Turnbull replaced him in a similar Liberal Party revolt in 2015, declared on Monday that the government would not turn against Morrison.

"The era of the political assassin is over and thank God for that," Abbott told Sydney Radio 2GB.

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Morrison welcomed Abbott's comments.

"It's been a pretty tumultuous time and I think Australians would welcome the fact that that period of time is over and it should be over," Morrison told reporters in the town of Quilpie. "The age of bitterness has come to a close and the age of working together and focusing on the future has come."

Abbott's sister, Christine Forster, said on Monday she wanted to be the Liberal Party candidate in Turnbull's Sydney electorate which is the wealthiest in Australia. Abbott supported his sister, who is a lesbian and clashed with her former seminarian brother in last's year's debate about whether Australia should legalize gay marriage. Parliament legalized same-sex marriage and Abbott attended his sister's wedding in February.

Opinion polling by respected Newspoll published on Monday found that government popular support has crashed to its lowest level in a decade due to the infighting.

The poll found that only 33 percent of respondents intended to vote for the government, a tie with a poll in 2008 when the Liberal Party was in opposition a year after being voted out of power.

The poll was based on a survey of 1,783 voters nationwide from Friday when the leadership changed until Sunday. It had a 2.3 percentage point margin of error.

Turnbull offered Abbott no senior role in his government after ousting him.

Morrison, whom Turnbull described as a loyal treasurer, excluded Abbott from his first Cabinet but has offered him a newly created role of special envoy for indigenous affairs. Abbott has yet to decide whether he will accept it.Cairo (AFP) - Egyptian police on Monday killed five suspected jihadists in a raid on their hideout in a mountain creek in southern Egypt, the interior ministry said.

A statement said security personnel clashed with the alleged militants during an operation to comb a remote area some 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of Cairo.

Five "terrorist elements" were killed after they opened fire on security forces, the ministry said.

There was no mention of any losses among the security personnel.

Jihadists launched an insurgency in Egypt after the 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, who was forced out by the military in the face of mass protests against his rule.

Attacks have largely been concentrated in the Sinai Peninsula in eastern Egypt, but have also taken place elsewhere across the country.

The army in February launched a major operation centred on the Sinai to wipe out jihadists, including members of the Islamic State group.

The military says that over 250 suspected jihadists and at least 35 soldiers have been killed in the "Sinai 2018" operation.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has made the fight against terrorism a priority, but rights groups accuse the government of also using it as cover to crack down on dissent.Washington (AFP) - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke with counterparts in South Korea and Japan last week to discuss "next steps" with North Korea, as his trip to Pyongyang was scrapped, officials said Monday.

Pompeo had planned a short trip to North Korea last weekend but on Friday, President Donald Trump pulled the plug, saying he had not seen "sufficient progress" toward Pyongyang denuclearizing.

In descriptions of Pompeo's two calls, which were made Friday, the State Department said he had spoken about "next steps" on engagement with North Korea.

Pompeo and South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha "reaffirmed the United States and the Republic of Korea remain committed to the final, fully verified denuclearization of" North Korea, the State Department said.

It provided a similar readout of Pompeo's call with Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono.

Pompeo and Kono "agreed that pressure must continue until (North Korea) denuclearizes," the statement read.

Trump scrapped Pompeo's visit amid independent reports that North Korea has done little or nothing to roll back its nuclear program, despite promises made at a historic summit in June with Kim Jong Un.

Trump also blasted China for not doing enough to help push denuclearization, but left open the possibility of a Pompeo trip to Pyongyang when the US-China trading relationship is "resolved."Although we are devastated by the news, we are gearing up for battle again, Vander Linde wrote. We thank you in advance for keeping Katie and us in your thoughts and prayers. We need those more than you know to get through this new journey we are on.Widespread rain fell across drought-affected parts of eastern Australia over the weekend, bringing relief to farmers struggling to cope with the driest conditions in more than half a century.

Graziers have had to hand-feed sheep and cattle, sell down stock -- and in some cases even shoot them to end their suffering -- as they run out of hay and grain in the severe conditions affecting Queensland and New South Wales states.

The wet weather was the first farmers in some areas had seen for more than a year, and even included hail.

But locals cautioned the ground had become so dry in recent months that more downpours over the next few weeks and months would be needed to make a difference.

"Those rains will be far from drought breaking," National Farmers' Federation president Fiona Simson told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Sunday.

"What we need is 20 (millimetres, 0.79 inches) next week on 20 the next week, 20 the next week, and... (in the) next few months... to aptly build up those depleted soil and moisture reserves in the soil."

The respite came as new Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he would make addressing the drought the top priority of his government.

"It was pleasing to see the report on the rain yesterday in the last 24 hours," Morrison, who will visit stricken areas with the deputy PM this week, told ABC radio early Sunday.

"That is encouraging, but we know that is nowhere near what is obviously needed."

The government under previous PM Malcolm Turnbull, who was ousted in a party coup Friday, had pledged Aus$1.8 billion (US$1.3 billion) in financial aid for graziers and local communities.

The Labor opposition called on Morrison to factor the battle against climate change into his drought policies, amid a push by the right wing of his Liberal Party to ditch an emissions mitigation policy which contributed to Turnbull's ousting.

"If he is not prepared to stand up and say 'this is a consequence of climate change and I am going to commit to both mitigation and adaptation', then he will fail farmers," shadow agriculture minister Joel Fitzgibbon told Fairfax Media.

While droughts are not uncommon in Australia, the length and severity of the dry conditions have strained farmers' efforts to stay afloat.(Photo: Joshua Roberts / Reuters)

The death of Senator John McCain throws into relief a new and even more alarming phase of the crisis facing American democracy. McCain was one of the few Republican senators willing to publicly warn Donald Trump of the bright lines that he must not cross.

Last week, as the latest successful prosecutions of Trump associates connected more dots between the criminal misconduct of his underlings and the president personally, we all waited for Republican leaders to distance themselves from Trump and to repeat warnings that Trump must not attempt to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions or his deputy Rod Rosenstein, much less special counsel Robert Mueller.

But few such declarations were forthcoming. On the contrary, Sen. Chuck Grassley actually walked back a previous red line warning.

Grassley, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, declared last summer, seconded by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, that he would not hold hearings to confirm a new attorney general if Sessions were fired.

Now, with Trump working himself into an anti-Sessions frenzy. Grassley says he could make time for confirmation hearings.

After a couple of days of Trump hunkering down and seeming off his game, the deafening Republican silence served as a signal for Trump to pursue his usual strategy of doubling down  this time in an even more reckless way. Trump intensified his attacks on the very legitimacy of the criminal justice system for having the temerity to investigate and prosecute his cronies.

It has become conventional to refer to Trump and his gang as grifters  small-time con artists who have somehow ascended to the most powerful office in the world. The description fits Trump all too well, but as more than one commentator has observed in light of Trumps latest outbursts, maybe that description is too modest. A better description is mobster.

In his comments on Sessions, on his former fixer Michael Cohen and on his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump reverted to an idiom familiar to viewers of The Godfather or The Sopranos. This is not about criminal wrongdoing, its about loyalty. Who is a rat, who flips, and who courageously refused to break under pressure from cops and prosecutors.

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Sessions, according to Trump, is a disaster because he was supposed to be loyal; instead he is enforcing the law and defending the institution of the Justice Department. How outrageous!

The entire framing of who is loyal and who is flipping is of course the vocabulary of a guilty man. If Trump, as he keeps insisting, were innocent of the allegations of criminal corruption and of colluding with the Russians to steal the 2016 election, he would not have to worry about who was flipping; he would not have pressured prosecutors like James Comey to take a dive on his behalf.

President Donald Trump jokes with Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) during a meeting at the White House on Jan. 4. (Photo: JIM WATSON via Getty Images)

Keep in mind, all this is from the president of the United States, sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution. But Trump is more than willing to take down America if thats what it takes to save his own neck.

That should not be a surprise. What continues to stun is the degree to which the Republican Congress is willing to let him.

And so the stakes have been raised one more time. There will be one winner and one loser in the endgame. Either American democracy will win, or Trump will win.

For now, Republicans seem to be proceeding less on the basis of what is needed to prevent a deeper slide into corrupt tyranny and more on the basis of Benjamin Franklins famous warning to the signers of the Declaration of Independence: We must all hang together or surely we will all hang separately.

But of course it is one thing to vow unity in the face of peril in order to create a republic  and quite another to pledge common allegiance to a thug who is destroying it.

As the waters keep rising around Trump and he becomes even more unhinged, he will be more and more tempted to fire Sessions, then Rosenstein and then Mueller.

To head off a Saturday Night Massacre, those Republicans who have been contributing an outpouring of fatuous tributes to the integrity and courage of John McCain should draw on his example.

They should intensify their warnings to Trump to stop trashing the American system of criminal justice, and to keep his hands off the Mueller investigation. Perhaps the memory of McCain will give the Republicans a moment of pause and shame.



Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a professor at Brandeis Universitys Heller School. His new book is Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? Follow him on Twitter at @rkuttnerwrites.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Washington (AFP) - The United States imposed new sanctions on Russia Monday over the attempted assassination of a former spy in Britain using a lethal nerve agent.

The sanctions include halting foreign aid to Russia, blocking the sale of items or services related to defense and national security, and banning any government credit support for any exports to Russia.

However, sales and services related to space launches, both commercial and government, will continue.

And the State Department has issued a non-specific "partial waiver" on the sanctions, a move which could dull their impact.

The sanctions, first announced August 8, are a response to the March 4 failed attempt to kill former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal using Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The British government says the attack in Salisbury, England was undertaken by Russian operatives.

The State Department said it was applying the new sanctions based on a finding "that the Government of the Russian Federation has used chemical weapons in violation of international law or lethal chemical weapons against its own nationals."

Russia has rejected the allegations and has said it will retaliate against new sanctions.

"Whatever the sanctions against Russia are, the retaliatory measures will be the same," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on August 9.Strasbourg (France) (AFP) - Ukraine has made a new application against Moscow at the European Court of Human Rights over the detention of hunger-striking film director Oleg Sentsov and dozens of other Ukranians jailed in Russia, the ECHR said Monday.

The Ukranian government lodged the "inter-state" application on August 11 highlighting the fate of Sentsov, who last week passed 100 days of a hunger strike.

Kiev alleges Moscow is violating numerous articles of the European Convention on Human Rights including a ban on torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, the right to a fair trial, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression and assembly, an ECHR statement said.

Arguably Russia's most prominent prisoner, Senstov, 42, was arrested in Crimea after Moscow's 2014 annexation of the peninsula and has been languishing in a Russian Arctic prison with little hope of release.

He was jailed for 20 years for terrorism and arms trafficking after a trial denounced as "Stalinist" by Amnesty International,

Sentsov launched his hunger strike on May 14 demanding the release of all Ukrainian political prisoners held in Russia.

International calls for his release have grown as his health has reportedly deteriorated and in late July the European court urged Moscow to provide him with "appropriate treatment".

Since 2014 six other inter-state applications have been lodged by Ukraine against Russia. Four were linked to the Crimea annexation and have been sent to the court's Grand Chamber which deals with major cases.

Also, more than 4,000 individual applications that have been made over Crimea and hostilities in eastern Ukraine are before the Strasbourg-based ECHR, the statement said.

Recourse to inter-state applications under which one state accuses another is rare with only about 15 registered in the last 50 years.Americans are feeling flush with cash, as reflected by their spending on big-ticket items.

Recreational vehicles (RVs) and furniture fall into the consumer discretionary category, which basically includes nice-to-have, non-essential goods. The XLY consumer discretionary ETF, which tracks the sector, is up 17% in 2018.

Sales in RVs and recliners, in particular, are seeing major gains. Both industries have been pivoting away from older consumers and successfully targeting young adults who are starting to form families.

Furniture maker La-Z-Boy (LZB) based in Monroe, Mich., beat on both the top and bottom lines for its fiscal first quarter. On Aug. 22, its shares skyrocketed more than 20% on a surprise earnings report, making it the best day for the stock since June 21, 2017.

During the companys earnings call, CEO Kurt Darrow specifically highlighted its $75 million Joybird acquisition, which closed on July 30. The legacy sofa company is betting on Joybirds mid-century modern products and e-commerce-first strategy to reach the millennial consumer.

The company faces stiff competition from e-commerce players like upstart Burrow (more than half of its customers are between 25 and 35 years old). But a core feature of La-Z-Boys strategy is actually selling more of its products on competitors sites like Wayfair (W) and Amazon (AMZN).

For so long, the narrative was that millennial behavior diverges from that of their parents and grandparents. But, their habits are proving to fall right into the same routines as the older generation.

RVs are cool again

Wholesale RV shipments reached its highest annual level on comparable record at 504,600 units, a 17.2% increase over 2016, according to the RV Industry Association. The trade group predicts that shipments will hit 521,700.

In June, Winnebago (WGO) reported an 18% increase in sales for the quarter, boosted by its growth in travel trailers.

After RV shipments dropped to a 30-year low in the downturn of the late 2000s, demand is stronger than ever, according to Pete Reeb, principal at California-based John Burns Real Estate Consulting.

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The demand for RVs is expected to continue to increase as real per capita net worth improves and the prices of homes keep appreciating.

In response to this demand, homebuilders like Lennar (LEN) and Toll Brothers (TOL) are even offering individual garages or communal lots at a premium.

The popularity of RVs can partially be explained by the evolving  and shortened  definition of vacation. As Katie Denis of the U.S. Travel Associations Project: Time Off told NPR, The partial week [vacation] is gaining in popularity.

Americans are cobbling together days here and there, making long weekends, rather than taking long stretches of time off for vacation.

With the rise of house and apartment rental websites like Airbnb and VRBO, suddenly baby boomers have access to way more vacation properties than youve ever had in the past. Instead of buying a second home somewhere and being locked in, you have the option of being mobile, said Reeb.

Melody Hahm is a senior writer at Yahoo Finance, covering entrepreneurship, technology and real estate. Follow her on Twitter @melodyhahm.

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Womens-only club The Wing opens its doors for a special occasionOn the final episode of Who Is America?, Sacha Baron Cohen set his sights on O.J. Simpson. Simpson was charged in 1994 with murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, but was found not guilty the following year.

Cohen put the screws to Simpson by harping on the murder accusations while portraying one of his recurring characters, Gio Monaldo.

Cohen confided in Simpson that they are more alike than different. Cohen said, We both, uh, how you say, lady killers.' The statement made Simpson uncomfortable, so Cohen pushed forward saying, Its not what it sounds like. In Italian, it translates to, uh, somebody who, uh, murders women. Simpson immediately denied the accusation, saying, No, I didnt kill nobody.

The whole bit appeared to be filmed without Simpsons knowledge. The clip ended abruptly, but judging from Simpsons body language and repeated requests for Cohen to stop, its safe to assume that at some point it was all too much for Simpson.

Tonight, is the last EVER show of Who is America. Thank you to all of you who enjoyed itand for those who didnt.. pic.twitter.com/o8T2qbIIiv  Sacha Baron Cohen (@SachaBaronCohen) August 26, 2018

Cohen tweeted that this was the last episode EVER. The short-lived series was largely well-received by critics and bemoaned by those tricked by Cohen.

This was the final episode of the series, but you can learn more by visiting the Who Is America? page at Showtime.com.

Watch as Kendall Jenner snaps at Kris for excluding Caitlyn from family party:

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or leave your comments below. And check out our host, Kylie Mar, on Twitter, Facebook,or Instagram.Riyadh (AFP) - The Saudi-led military coalition fighting in Yemen on Monday accused the United Nations of "biased" reports on air strikes that allegedly killed dozens of children in rebel-held areas.

"The coalition is surprised by the ... biased positions of some reports," said coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki, adding that the information was "prejudiced" and based on "rebel stories".

The coalition has not confirmed or denied it carried out two air raids on Thursday that the UN said killed at least 26 children and four women south of the flashpoint rebel-held city of Hodeida.

The UN Security Council had already called for a "credible" investigation into a strike blamed on the coalition in northern Yemen on August 9 that the Red Cross said killed 40 children.

The coalition has announced its own probe into that raid.

Two UN officials have made public statements condemning the attacks.

"We all know that UN bodies are under pressure by the Huthi militias ... and these reports may have come in response to that pressure," Maliki said.

"There is no war without collateral damage."

Saudi Arabia and its allies have fought the Huthis since 2015 in an attempt to restore Yemen's internationally recognised government to power and push back the rebels, who still hold the capital Sanaa.

The war has left nearly 10,000 people dead and unleashed what the United Nations describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.Photo: Getty Images

A teen battling brain cancer has been allowed to break her school dress code and wear a turquoise-tinged wig to class.

On Sunday, McKinney Independent School District in Texas overturned its decision to bar 17-year-old Katilyn Kate Pepper, who is fighting brain cancer, from wearing a wig with turquoise highlights to conceal hair loss from medical treatments.

SHE CAN WEAR THE WIG! If you missed this, Katilyn has been approved to wear her wig. This baby just turned 17, has just Posted by Line Black on Monday, August 27, 2018

A representative from McKinney High School did not return Yahoo Lifestyles request for comment on the move. However, according to Dallas-Fort Worth local news station KXAS-TV, the change of heart was made independently from public pressure, including by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, that resulted from the viral story.



Patrick took to Facebook on Sunday to express his support for Pepper, writing, I am asking McKinney ISD to create an exception to their dress code and allow Kate Pepper to wear her beautiful wig. I am a strong supporter of clear rules for school discipline for Texas students, but there are certain extraordinary circumstances that should create an exception to any rule and this is one of those times.

I am asking McKinney ISD to create an exception to their dress code and allow Kate Pepper to wear her beautiful wig. I Posted by Dan Patrick on Sunday, August 26, 2018

I am very glad to hear McKinney ISD has made an exception for Kate so she can wear her turquoise wig during treatment. Lets keep Kate in our prayers. Posted by Dan Patrick on Monday, August 27, 2018

On June 25, 2014  the same day her father died in 2001, according to a GoFundMe page established by her mother  Pepper was diagnosed with anaplastic astrocytoma, a rare malignant tumor that develops in the brain and spine. After radiation and chemotherapy, her cancer went into remission. However, an August 2018 MRI showed that the brain tumor had not only returned, it had spread. I was feeling bad, but I wasnt expecting it to be brain cancer again, the high school senior told KXAS-TV.

Story continues

Treatments caused Peppers hair to fall out  one week before school  so she decided to go wig shopping and was thrilled to find a turquoise style. I got superexcited when I had it on, she told the news station. I felt so awesome.

However, on her first day back in class, Pepper was told that her wig defied the McKinney school dress code, which states, non-natural colored hair that is considered to be disruptive (green, blue, purple, orange, etc.) is not permitted.

I honestly just wanted to cry, Pepper told KXAS-TV. Her mother, Tyliece Pepper, appealed for an exception but was denied one. A letter from the school, which she shared with the news station, said: I am not able to grant you the ability to wear a wig with turquoise.

The school gave the family $65 to purchase a new wig, but as Tyliece told KXAS-TV, Its really not about the money.

Tyliece Pepper and her teen daughter, Kate. (Photo: gofundme.com)

Despite a statement sent to the news station detailing the need to remain consistent in our implementation of the student handbook, the school corrected course over the weekend, agreeing to a one-time exception for the 17-year-old.

The verdict is in, Tyliece wrote on Facebook Sunday. Katilyn CAN wear the turquoise wig to school. God is great. Thank you!

Neither Kate Pepper nor her mother has returned Yahoo Lifestyles request for comment.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.A few hours before John McCain died, I stood on the stage of the Lee Theatre in Pennington Gap, Va., to rally Appalachian Democrats for the 2018 mid-term elections. After a warmup by a local bluegrass band, I told the story of John walking into the Senate Chamber in the middle of the night in July 2017, fresh out of the hospital after being diagnosed with glioblastoma, and casting a pivotal vote so that millions of Americans wouldnt have their health care taken away. The audience was filled with the families and friends of coal miners who worry every day about health care. As I mentioned John McCains name, the crowd of rock-solid Democrats in the Fighting Ninth congressional district  a name earned by how loyal folks there are to their own party  spontaneously stood and applauded the American hero whose vote had helped save the lives of people they know and love.

I came to the Senate in 2013, knowing John McCain the legend, but not John McCain the man. I sought assignment to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he had served for decades. He has been my colleague and Chair. We traveled together to Afghanistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. He taught me a lot, and I am stunned that we wont have him in the Senate anymore.

We all have McCain stories.

In my first months on the Committee, I unknowingly walked into a firefight with him over a pet peeve of his: cost overruns on the Ford-class aircraft carrier program. We build the carriers in Virginia, and he is a bear on cost overruns. When he didnt like the tack I was taking on a line of questioning about why costs were high, he interrupted me, and the fight was on. I hadnt been warned that it was a hot button with him, and my Irish temper came up as fast as his Scottish penny-pinching. We locked into a back-and-forth, with witnesses, trying to prove our points. After the hearing, I was worried that I had offended him  a first-year Senator battling with a Senate lion. But he clapped me on the back, and it was clear he loved it. McCain famously used to say, A fight not joined is a fight not enjoyed.

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When my oldest son graduated from the Basic School at Quantico, in front of a packed crowd of proud Marine parents, the emcee introduced dignitaries and told the assembled crowd that, Senator John McCain is here tonight. The crowd applauded, and we all craned our necks to see where he was. My wife and I wondered why he had chosen to come to this particular graduation. Later, I realized that John wasnt there. The Marine emcee had mistaken Senator McCain for Senator Kaine. When I saw him the next day, I told him the story, and he instantly responded, I never knew a Marine who could spell.

John was so many things but I will always remember him as a man who knew how the Senate should work and was bound and determined to make it function as best as he could. The annual writing of the defense bill is my favorite part of the Senate. We have hearings for two months, in which we listen to our military leaders and outside experts about our needs, capacities and challenges. Senator McCain and Senator Jack Reed, respectively our chair and ranking member, who endlessly battled about the virtues and demerits of Annapolis and West Point, put together a proposed bill with our dedicated staff. Then the 27 members of the Committee sit around a conference table and offer amendments until each member has proposed every item they want and no one has another issue to offer. For hours at a time: Democrat and Republican, an amendment offered, a debate and questions, then a final vote. Everyone is heard; no one is shut out. And when there is nothing more to offer, we vote on a final package. This year, with John absent physically but present in calls, notes and staff cajoling, we overwhelmingly passed the bill out of Committee. Both Houses  Democrats and Republicans  named the bill in Johns honor.

I will be reminded of John every day. I moved into his longtime Senate office in 2015. He had occupied it for more than 20 years, and there was only one office he liked better: Senator John Kerrys, just around the corner in the Russell building. When Kerry became Secretary of State, McCain decided to switch offices, and I jumped at the chance to move into the space that McCain inhabited for so long.

And I will remember what he told me. The first colleague to seek me out after I returned to the Senate a few days after the November 2016 election was John McCain. He came up to me and said, Tim, there is only one person in the Senate who knows just how you feel. You and I are the only ones who have been on a national ticket and lost. And my advice to you is just get right back to work.

Youre right, John. After a painful loss, it is good to get back to work. And thats how Ill feel when I cross the threshold into your old office on Monday.Of course, they also enjoyed crawling around on Zion police and fire vehicles, jumping in two bouncy houses rented by Amjad AJ Habbass, the owner of the convenience store at 2439 Galilee Ave., and the free hot dogs and drinks.Courtland Keith Rogers and Jenelle Evans (Photo: Instagram)

Another day, another Teen Mom headline.

The ex-husband of Teen Mom 2 and Teen Mom OG star Jenelle Evans was arrested (again) in North Carolina. According to TMZ, Courtland Keith Rogers was booked for one count of misdemeanor assault on a woman. Details of the incident are unknown at this time.

Courtland Keith Rogerss mug shot. (Photo: TMZ)

Rogers and Evans were married from 2012 to 2014 but dont have any children together. (The reality star has two sons and one daughter with three different men.) This is hardly Rogerss first run-in with the law. In March, he was indicted on two drug-related charges for selling and delivering schedule III substances and for possession with intent to sell and distribute schedule III substances. He was also hit with a habitual felon charge because he had been arrested and convicted for his third felony in North Carolina in 2013. Both Evans and Rogers were arrested in April 2013 for heroin possession, possession of drug paraphernalia, and assault.

Evans has not commented on her ex-husbands recent lockup, but in April she told E! News his arrest was not surprising, thats all I have to say.

As far as Evanss current personal state of affairs, things seem to be trending up. On Friday, the MTV star hinted that she and her estranged mom are working on their relationship for the sake of her 9-year-old son, Jace, who currently lives with his grandmother. Evans is also mother to a 4-year-old son, Kaiser, and a 1-year-old daughter, Ensley, whom she had with husband David Eason.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:Pope Francis stays silent over sex abuse claims

Christopher Lamb watches a new Ireland try to come to terms with a Church beset by a child abuse scandal

Rising at the crack of dawn and braving pelting rain and driving winds, Irish Catholics made their way for a Mass with Pope Francis in Dublin on Sunday.

The hundreds of thousands of believers who turned out in Phoenix Park must have felt disconnected from a papal visit that was dominated by the sexual abuse scandal inside the Church.

Francis two-day visit to Ireland saw him come face-to-face with the rawness of the abuse crisis in the country that has become the Ground Zero for what is arguably the gravest crisis facing the Church in almost 500 years.

It was striking that when John Paul II visited Ireland 39 years ago, more than a million people turned out in Phoenix Park for the papal mass in what was the biggest gathering of people in Irish history. While organisers predicted 500,000 would attend Francis Mass, estimates put it the attendance figure at just 200,000.

A combination of weather, security and organisational challenges in a papal visit will all have been factors in the low numbers but anger about abuse and the dramatic changes in over recent years in Irish society played a significant part.

The Church in Ireland is also struggling to connect with a younger generation, many of whom dont attend Mass and have had their faith damaged by scandals.

If there is a God then why was my uncle abused by a priest? Aoife Monaghan, 22, told me last weekend.

An aerial view of the crowd at Phoenix Park in Dublin. It is thought around 200,000 people turned up  far below the numbers anticipated. (Photo: Liam McBurney/PA via AP)

There is a palpable feeling of betrayal over the abuse that took place, particularly given the dominant role the Chruch played in Ireland for such a long time. That is no longer the case, as Irelands Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, told the Pope. He pointed out laws passed since John Paul IIs visit allowing for divorce, same-sex marriage and a referendum vote which will allow legal abortions.

The Ireland of the 21st century is a very different place today than it was in the past, the Taoiseach said during a speech in Dublin Castle last Saturday.

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But Mr Varadkar was honest enough to admit that the state had relied on the Church for welfare, education, and healthcare in the country, and took responsibility on behalf of the state for past abuses.

It was, he accepted, both the Church and the state that were responsible for the horrors of the mother and baby homes, and the Magdalene laundries, where single mothers had their children put up for adoption and were forced into slave labour.

The Pope, who repeatedly apologised for the abuse and its cover-up while in Dublin, told journalists on the plane back home afterwards that it was while in Ireland that he became aware of these homes.

Within moments of arriving in Dublin Irelands Minister for Childhood, Katherine Zappone spoke to him in Italian about the harrowing story of a mass grave at the Tuam mother and baby home which is now being investigated by the state. Zappone has sent him a memo on the topic and how the Church could help which he says he will be studying.

Despite the overwhelming emphasis on abuse, the Pope told reporters on his flight back to Rome that he found so much faith in Ireland. He added: The Irish have suffered so much from the scandals, but they know how to distinguish the truth from half-truths.

There is also resilience to the faith in ordinary Irish believers who have braved what has been an unending storm of scandal. The Catholic faith, which played such a vital role in keeping Irish identity alive under British rule, is still interwoven into the character of the country.

Modern Ireland is still a country with faith and spirit and values, Mr Varadkar told the Pope.

The question is whether Ireland will keep faith with the Church.



Donald Trump has threatened he "may have to get involved" after launching another attack on the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Four days after his former campaign manager and former lawyer were convicted of fraud, the US president complained that special counsel Robert Mueller was "having a field day".

Mr Trump claimed the FBI should be looking into his former opponent Hillary Clinton instead, tweeting: "I feel sure that we will soon be getting to the bottom of all of this corruption. At some point I may have to get involved!"

Critics interpreted it as another indication the president is considering intervening in the Russia investigation.

"This latest thread implies a willingness to obstruct justice," historian Timothy Naftali, clinical associate professor of public service at New York University, told CNN. "He is sending a signal he wants to stop this process."

Big story out that the FBI ignored tens of thousands of Crooked Hillary Emails, many of which are REALLY BAD. Also gave false election info. I feel sure that we will soon be getting to the bottom of all of this corruption. At some point I may have to get involved!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2018

Trumps systematic attacks on rule of lawand his threats to get involvedare ominous. Once he feels cornered, he is going to get incredibly erratic & reckless, and itll be the most predictable and avoidable constitutional crisis in history. Yet still, Republicans stay silent.  Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) August 25, 2018

Mr Trump also repeated his criticism of attorney general Jeff Sessions, who recused himself from the Russia investigation and has said he will not allow the Department of Justice to be influenced by political considerations.

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"Jeff Sessions said he wouldn't allow politics to influence him only because he doesnt understand what is happening underneath his command position," the president tweeted.

It follows speculation that the president could use his powers to pardon Mr Manafort and Mr Cohen.

The president has already pardoned the highly controversial former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court.

Last month Mr Trump claimed he also had the "absolute right" to pardon himself in relation to the Russia investigation, while insisting he had done nothing wrongBy David Lawder and Sharay Angulo

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has softened its contentious demand for a NAFTA "sunset clause," Mexico's incoming trade negotiator said on Saturday, potentially eliminating a key obstacle to reaching a deal next week to revamp the trade pact.

A few hours earlier, President Donald Trump tweeted that the United States could reach a "big Trade Agreement" with Mexico imminently.

Jesus Seade, designated chief negotiator of Mexico's next government, told reporters the new U.S. position would allow a periodic review of the North American Free Trade Agreement, but without an automatic expiration unless renegotiated every five years.

"It's going to come out. It's no longer what the United States was putting first in any way," Seade said of the sunset clause outside the U.S. Trade Representative's office.

The United States and Mexico have been holding bilateral talks aimed at resolving differences in the NAFTA renegotiation before bringing Canada back to the talks as they push for an agreement-in-principle by the end of August.

Trump tweeted on Saturday morning that the United States' "relationship with Mexico is getting closer by the hour. Some really good people within both the new and old government, and all working closely together....A big Trade Agreement with Mexico could be happening soon!"

The U.S. sunset clause demand has been one of the biggest roadblocks to NAFTA deal since it was first proposed in October 2017. It was meant by the Trump administration as a mechanism to force a renegotiation of NAFTA every five years if the new terms failed to foster more balanced trade between the three countries. If new terms could not be reached, NAFTA would die.

But Mexico, Canada and business interests in all three countries have adamantly opposed the concept, arguing it would create uncertainty over NAFTA's future that would paralyze business investment and job growth.

The structure Seade described is similar to a counter-proposal made by Mexico last November that called for a review of NAFTA's effects every five years without killing the pact.

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But U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer never accepted that plan, insisting on a full sunset provision.

Seade said he and Lighthizer last week began discussing a new review approach, one that would have longer periods between reviews, providing more certainty for business investments. He said negotiations were continuing on this.

'NOT THERE YET'

Asked about Trump's tweet, Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo acknowledged some progress, but told reporters in Washington before beginning another day of talks that the two countries are "not there yet."

"Nothing is done until everything is truly done," he said. "Today will be an important day."

Trump prompted the NAFTA revamp more than a year ago, complaining the pact has benefited Mexico to the detriment of U.S. workers and manufacturing. He made renegotiating NAFTA one of his top campaign pledges.

Trump has threatened to withdraw from the pact if it is not reworked to the advantage of the United States.

The U.S.-Mexico talks for weeks focused on crafting new rules for the automotive industry, which Trump has put at the center of his drive to rework the 24-year-old deal he says has been a "disaster" for American workers.

Seade said the issue of auto sector rules is "basically resolved," although some aspects, including time frames, are still being discussed.

Seade also said on Saturday that a "correct focus" on NAFTA's energy chapter has already been substantially agreed.

Since Mexico's July 1 presidential election, the Mexico-U.S. talks have been complicated by divisions between the incoming and outgoing Mexican administrations over energy policy.

The team of leftist Mexican president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has resisted enshrining the 2013-14 opening of the oil and gas sector enacted by outgoing president Enrique Pena Nieto in the new NAFTA, people close to the talks say.

Lopez Obrador opposed Pena Nieto's energy reform, and the issue is divisive within his own camp. Business-friendly aides back greater outside investment in the industry, while his more nationalist allies want the oil to remain in Mexican hands.

(Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati, David Lawder and Sharay Angulo in Washington; Editing by Leslie Adler and Matthew Lewis)President Trump announced Monday that officials have finalized a bilateral trade deal between the U.S. and Mexico that would replace NAFTA, with Canada possibly joining later pending negotiations. Photo: Getty Images

U.S. President Donald Trump said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should expect a call very soon to discuss the future of trade on the North American continent.

If theyd like to negotiate fairly, well do that, he told reporters at an Oval Office press conference on Monday. The easiest thing we can do is to tariff their cars coming in. Its a tremendous amount of money, and its a very simple negotiation. It could end in one day.

Trumps renewed threats against Canada were coupled with news that the United States has inked a breakthrough preliminary agreement with Mexico, resolving thorny issues such as auto sector labour and foreign content in vehicles.

The development puts Canada in the spotlight after its five-week summer vacation during bilateral talks between the other NAFTA partners.

(It) is definitely good news for Mexico and the U.S., but could be good or very bad for Canada, Capital Economics Chief U.S. Economist Paul Ashworth wrote in a note to clients on Monday afternoon.





The good

The agreement is evidence that Trumps trade delegation is willing to negotiate in good faith, and even accept some concessions on key issues.

Under the deal, the amount of NAFTA-made content required for vehicles to qualify as tariff-free rises from the current 62.5 per cent to 75 per cent. The U.S. had originally pushed for 85 per cent.

Canadas auto plants stand to benefit from rules requiring up to 45 per cent of vehicle content from factories where workers earn at least US$16 per hour. The average wage for Mexican workers in car assembly plants is under $8 per hour, and under $4 per hour for workers in parts plants, according to the Center for Automotive Research.

Canada shouldnt have a problem signing on to this, Ashworth said.

The U.S. also appears to have softened its demands for a sunset clause, a provision that Canadian negotiators have flatly rejected in previous rounds of negotiation.



Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer appears to have weakened U.S. demands that the new deal should include an automatic five-year break clause, under which the agreement would need to be explicitly renewed by the legislative bodies in each of the three countries, Ashworth said. Rather than scrapping the existing investor state dispute tribunals, the latest agreement would exempt some industries, but allow the existing system to continue covering industries like energy, mining and telecoms, where firms bid for government permits and licenses.

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The bad

In addition to sabre-rattling about tariffs that would punish Canadas auto sector, Trump once again took aim at another of his favourite targets  the countrys heavily protected dairy industry.

They have tariffs of almost 300 per cent on some of our dairy products. We cant have that. Were not going to stand for that, he said.

Ashworth expects Canada will be less accepting of U.S. demands for sweeping reforms to its dairy market, given the political sensitivity of the issue ahead of the federal election due in October 2019.

Trudeau and his ruling Liberal party will be concerned about a backlash from rural voters if they cede too much ground to the U.S. That said, there is some wiggle room, and Canada made concessions on this topic in the TPP agreement, he said.

While neither of Trumps threats against Canada are new, Ashworth notes the U.S. president has upped the pressure by triggering the six-month NAFTA termination notice.

Trump is working straight from his Art of the Deal playbook, he said. Canada has been frozen out of those bilateral (U.S.-Mexico) talks in recent weeks, and will now be under heavy pressure to give ground.

Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android.Istanbul (AFP) - Turkey banned a weekly rally staged since the mid-1990s by mothers protesting against the disappearance of their sons and relatives on the grounds that it had been exploited by a terror group, the interior minister said Monday.

In an unexpected move, Turkish police used water cannon, tear gas and plastic bullets to disperse the 700th protest by the Saturday Mothers in central Istanbul this weekend, causing consternation among rights activists.

Almost 50 people were detained, including leaders of the Saturday Mothers movement such as 82-year-old Emine Ocak, although all were later released.

"We didn't let them (protest) because we want an end to this exploitation and deceit," Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu was quoted as saying by the state-run Anadolu news agency.

"Should we have turned a blind eye to motherhood being abused by a terror organisation?" he added.

Soylu did not specify further but Istanbul authorities had said that the rally was banned after calls to attend were made through social media channels linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

The protest, held every Saturday since May 27, 1995, remembers the disappearance of relatives in the 1980s and 1990s -- allegedly at the hands of the state -- in one of modern Turkey's most turbulent periods.

The disappearances happened at the peak of the PKK insurgency demanding self-rule in the Kurdish-dominated southeast. Tens of thousands have lost their lives in the conflict that began in 1984 and continues to this day.

The country was also wracked by political instability and violence following the 1980 military coup, with many detained for political activism.

Activists say the state has never properly investigated the fate of those who disappeared after being detained by the authorities.

The Saturday Mothers group were unable to hold their protests from 1999 to 2009 due to repeated police interventions but they then resumed and Saturday was the first time in recent years that officers stepped in.

The rally's forceful dispersion came two months after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a new mandate with enhanced powers, which activists fear will be used to squeeze freedom of expression in Turkey.

The Saturday Mothers group is said to have been inspired by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of Argentinian mothers who hold rallies after their children disappeared during Argentina's military dictatorship.A Hong Kong democracy party said Chinese authorities detained and questioned two of its members on separate occasions for several hours in mainland China, stoking already heightened fears of Beijings increasingly heavy oversight of the territorys political discourse.

Speaking to a room of local and international media Monday, leaders of one of Hong Kongs most prominent pro-democracy political parties, Demosist?, disclosed details of the alleged detentions that occurred in March and August. They didnt name the members who were held to protect their security.

Its definitely a scare tactic, said group leader Nathan Law, sitting next to party co-founder Joshua Wong and chairman Ivan Lam. They want to send a message to Demosist? and also the civil society in Hong Kong that you guys are not welcome in mainland China and if you come to mainland China, you may be imposed by the same threats.

Two members of @demosisto were detained by the Ministry of State Security in March and August this year respectively while returning to HK from Mainland China. We will release details regarding the evident violation of the individuals personal rights this afternoon.  Joshua Wong ??? (@joshuawongcf) August 27, 2018

On March 26, a party member was returning to Hong Kong from the mainland following a family visit when they were detained by mainland authorities at the Shenzhen train station. Demosist? says the member was then sat in a chair with handcuffs and ankle cuffs and questioned for over three hours about the partys political activities and names of fellow members. The member was then forced to sign a declaration that the interrogation would kept secret, and their fingerprints were taken.

The second detention occurred on Aug. 13. A second Demosist? member was similarly detained at the Guangzhou train station, taken to a hotel, and questioned for five hours about protest activity, support for Tibetan independence, and names of fellow party members. The phones of the second member were confiscated, and they were hooked up to a machine which resembled a polygraph, Demosist? said. The member was asked to sign an apology letter and the Ministry suggested an amount of incentive pay should the member be able to provide more information upon return to Hong Kong, Demosist? said in a statement.

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Chinese authorities have yet to respond to request for comment.

Read More: Hong Kong Democracy Activist Joshua Wong Talks to TIME About Life Behind Bars

The alleged detentions are not surprising, says Dr. Sonny Lo, veteran political commentator and expert in China-Hong Kong affairs. Demosist? is regarded as politically subversivein the eyes of Beijing.

National security is regarded as the most important agenda item. Everything happens in this way. This is anticipated.

Wong says party members have been told to take precautions about visiting the mainland, no matter how minor their involvement. We have already recommended to our members to reassess and reconsider how to arrange personal duties, whether they should regularly visit mainland China or not.

When the security have forced a member to sign an apology letter, I think really shows a key signal, the scenario changed already. Once were involved in activism, even you just visit mainland China with your family members, you may still face pressure.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. federal judge on Saturday rejected key elements of President Donald Trump's May executive orders that would make it easier to fire federal employees and reduce their ability to bargain collectively. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said in a court order that Trump's orders, which also would reduce the amount of time low-performing employees had to improve their performance before being fired, "undermine federal employees' right to bargain collectively." Trump signed three executive orders in May that administration officials said would give government agencies greater ability to remove employees with "poor" performance, obtain "better deals" in union contracts and require federal employees with union responsibilities to spend less time on union work. The directives drew immediate criticism from the American Federation of Government Employees, which said the moves would hurt veterans, law enforcement officers and others. Jackson ruled that while the president has the authority to issue executive orders relating to federal labor relations, the orders cannot "eviscerate the right to bargain collectively" as envisioned in a long-standing federal statute. "The President must be deemed to have exceeded his authority in issuing (the orders)," Jackson ruled. (Reporting by Yasmeen Abutaleb in Washington; Editing by Leslie Adler and Matthew Lewis)The three of us eagerly agreed with the cops assessment. He then instructed us to leave the park because there was a curfew in effect. That was the first time being from Waukegan came in handy, leaving us unscathed as other reporters and photographers felt the wrath of Chicago police during the last week of August 1968 in what later would be termed a police riot by a blue-ribbon commission.Marzuki Darusman, chairperson of the Independent International Fact-finding Mission on Myanmar - REUTERS

A searing United Nations report on Monday called for the investigation and prosecution of Burmas top military generals for genocide and accused Aung San Suu Kyi, the countrys civilian leader, of failing to use her moral authority to prevent violence against the Rohingya minority in Rakhine state.

Among the senior military leader who the report by a UN fact-finding mission believes should go on trial is Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief. It calls for the case to be referred to the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

Investigators also concluded that the civilian government through their acts and omissions have contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes.

The investigation, coinciding with the one year anniversary of a brutal military crackdown that forced at least 700,000 Rohingya to flee rape, mass murder and the torching of their homes, sharply contradicts the Burmese armys claims of merely responding to security challenges in states with minority populations.

It is a culmination of over a years worth of interviews, research and analysis by UN experts led by human rights lawyer Marzuki Darusman, and covers not only the atrocities committed against the Muslim Rohingya but also in Kachin and Shan states, home to Christian minorities.

Marzuki Darusman, chairperson of the Independent International Fact-finding Mission on Myanmar Credit: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

Military necessity would never justify killing indiscriminately, gang raping women, assaulting children, and burning entire villages. The Tatmadaws tactics are consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats, especially in Rakhine State, but also in northern Myanmar, the report states.

They are shocking for the level of denial, normalcy and impunity that is attached to them. The Tatmadaws contempt for human life, integrity and freedom, and for international law generally, should be a cause of concern for the entire population.

The mission investigated the militarys actions dating back to 2011 and throughout the period when the West was celebrating Aung San Suu Kyis election and starting to cautiously allow investment after years of military dictatorship and sanctions.

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UN investigators found patterns of gross human rights violations and abuses committed in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan States that undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law, principally carried out by the military, known as the Tatmadaw, but also by other security agencies.

The crimes cited include murder, imprisonment, enforced disappearance, torture, rape, sexual slavery, other forms of sexual violence and enslavement.

The report, the strongest UN condemnation of the violence against Burmas minorities to date, concludes that there is sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the Tatmadaw chain of command. The Burmese authorities did not respond to a request for comment.

The UNs findings support multiple investigations by human rights organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who have already called for the trial of Burmas top military officials for crimes against humanity base on their orchestrated campaign of murder, rape, torture and destruction.

Tirana Hassan, director of crisis response at Amnesty, said Mondays report added to a mountain of evidence of crimes under international law committed by the military, shows the urgent need for independent criminal investigation and is clear that the Myanmar authorities are incapable of bringing to justice those responsible.

Failing to ensure justice and accountability would send a dangerous message that Myanmars military will not only enjoy impunity but is free to commit such atrocities again, she warned.

The Fact-Finding Missions powerful report and clear recommendations demonstrate the obvious need for concrete steps to advance criminal justice for atrocious crimes, instead of more hollow condemnations and expressions of concern, said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

UN member states should step up efforts that include the urgent creation of an International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism to ensure those most responsible for grave crimes do not escape prosecution.

Facebook, which has been repeatedly criticised for failing to do enough to counter hate speech against minorities on its website, banned Burmas army chief and removed other pages tied to the country's military in the wake of the UN probe.

"We are banning 20 Burmese individuals and organizations from Facebook - including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the armed forces," the social media giant said in a statement on its site, adding that it wants to prevent them from using the service to "further inflame ethnic and religious tensions".Washington (AFP) - The US military judge overseeing court proceedings for the alleged plotters of the September 11, 2001 attacks is retiring, the Pentagon said Monday, possibly triggering yet more delays to the slow-moving case.

The so-called "9/11 Five" -- including alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- have been locked up at the Guantanamo Bay military prison for years and were first charged in 2008.

But an unending slew of legal missteps, issues with military court proceedings and problems stemming from evidence extracted under duress have seen the men's prosecution morph into a quixotic attempt at justice.

After years of delays, it is still unclear when their trial will start.

The longtime judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, will be replaced by Marine Colonel Keith Parrella.

"On September 30, the term of Colonel Pohl's current voluntary retiree recall will expire, and he made the personal decision not to request an additional voluntary retiree recall period," Lieutenant Colonel Chris Logan, a Pentagon spokesman, told AFP.

Since the 9/11 Five were first charged, the taint of torture and of alleged wrongdoing -- including claims the government spied on defense teams -- have soured proceedings.

According to the Miami Herald, which first reported Pohl's retirement, Parrella has been a military judge for just three years.

He will need to sift through years of motions and thousands of pages of transcripts to get up to speed on the complicated case.Negotiators from the US and Mexico are meeting again today, trying to hammer out a new NAFTA deal. Yahoo Finances Melody Hahm, Maylan Studart and Michael Kelley have more on what it could mean.New York (AFP) - Neil Simon, the prolific and Pulitzer Prize-winning US playwright celebrated as the king of comedy who won more Oscar and Tony nominations combined than any other showbiz writer, died on Sunday. He was 91.

The brains behind more than 30 plays, 20 screenplays and five musicals, Time magazine dubbed him the "patron saint of laughter."

Many of his works are classics of 20th century American theater and Simon has been credited with playing a seminal role -- along with film director Woody Allen -- in re-crafting US humor in the 1960s and 1970s.

His influence has been felt through the generations, The New York Times drawing a line between Simon's early comedies and the character-based comedy in the 1990s hit sitcom "Seinfeld."

Longtime friend Bill Evans announced his death early Sunday in a New York hospital of complications from pneumonia.

His wife, a daughter and grandson were at his bedside, Evans told AFP. He had represented Simon for three decades from 1976 to 2006.

Simon was the author of critically acclaimed and commercial hits such as "Barefoot in the Park" (1963) "The Odd Couple" (1965) "The Sunshine Boys" (1974) and "Lost in Yonkers" (1990).

Much of his work, peppered with witty one-liners, explored the everyday struggles of the middle-classes and inter-family conflict, influenced by his troubled upbringing during the Great Depression.

"The good mechanic knows how to take a car apart; I love to take the human mind apart and see how it works. Behavior is absolutely the most interesting thing I can write about. You put that behavior in conflict and you're in business," Simon told The Paris Review in 1992.

- 'Odd couple' -

"Barefoot in the Park" turned Robert Redford into a star. Redford also appeared in the 1967 hit movie version opposite Jane Fonda.

Other plays that went on to become major Hollywood movies included "The Goodbye Girl" in 1977 that won Richard Dreyfuss an Oscar for best leading actor and "The Odd Couple" in 1968 about two friends sharing an apartment starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.

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"Dilemma is the key word. It is always a dilemma, not a situation," Simon told The Paris Review.

Born on July 4, 1927 in the Bronx, he grew up in northern Manhattan, the son of a skirt-chasing salesman who left the family home multiple times, forcing his mother to rent out her room to make ends meet.

Simon served in the military and then worked with his older brother Danny on producing jokes for television and radio scripts.

"Barefoot in the Park," about a bickering couple inspired by his first marriage, and "The Odd Couple" that followed, were credited with capturing the zeitgeist of the 1960s.

"He was a writer and an artist who couldn't stop going inside of himself and finding new things. Like any creative artist, there was a compulsion to explore and go deeper," Evans told AFP.

"He found a connection in all of us," he added.

"The phrase 'odd couple' is now used in so many different contexts. It was a privilege knowing him."

- 'Americana' -

In the 1960s, at the height of his success, with four plays running on Broadway, Simon was earning about $60,000 a week and easily double that thanks to royalties, The New Yorker reported in 2010.

In the 1980s, he produced the semi-autobiographical trilogy of plays "Brighton Beach Memoirs," "Biloxi Blues" and "Broadway Bound" starring a young Matthew Broderick as the playwright's alter ego Eugene Jerome.

Broderick is now a celebrated stage actor married to film star Sarah Jessica Parker. Evans called the trilogy a "slice of Americana."

Simon described his craft as catharsis.

"It's like analysis without going to the analyst. The play becomes your analysis," he told The Paris Review

In 1991, Simon achieved the highest honor in US drama, winning the Pulitzer Prize for "Lost in Yonkers," an autobiographical comedy about a mother and her daughter that was his last big splash on Broadway.

Such was his wealth that he produced many of his plays and in 1983 he was given the rare accolade of having a New York stage, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honor.

In addition to his Pulitzer, he won a Golden Globe and three Tonys. He chalked up 17 Tony nominations and four Oscar nods.

He was married five times to four different women -- he married his third wife twice -- and had three children.By Antoni Slodkowski YANGON (Reuters) - The verdict in Myanmar's prosecution of two Reuters reporters accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act was postponed on Monday until Sept. 3 because the judge overseeing the case is sick, a court official said. Scores of reporters and diplomats had gathered at the Yangon court to hear the verdict on journalists Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, the culmination of eight months of hearings in a landmark case that has come to be seen as a test of progress towards democracy in the Southeast Asian country. "We are disappointed not to have received the judge's decision today," Reuters said in a statement. "Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have already spent more than eight months in prison based on allegations of a crime they did not commit. We look forward to receiving the verdict next week, when we very much hope that they will be acquitted and reunited with their families." Government spokesman Zaw Htay could not be immediately reached for comment on the postponement of the verdict. The climax of the case comes amid building pressure on the administration of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi over a security crackdown in the western state of Rakhine that was sparked by militant attacks in August 2017. Later on Monday a U.N mandated fact-finding mission will release a report on the crackdown, which triggered the exodus of more than 700,000 stateless Muslim Rohingya, according to U.N. agencies. Most are now living in refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh. On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council will hold a briefing on Myanmar in New York. Monday's court proceedings lasted just a few minutes, long enough for a judge standing in for Judge Ye Lwin, who has overseen the case against the Reuters journalists, to announce that a ruling would be made next week. "The judge is in poor health, so I am here to announce that the verdict is postponed to the third," said Judge Khin Maung Maung. Defense lawyer Khin Maung Zaw told reporters that the stand-in judge had said the verdict was ready but it had to be pronounced by the judge assigned to the case. Wa Lone smiled broadly and made a thumbs-up sign with his hands in cuffs as he walked into the court, with Kyaw Soe Oo just behind him. "We are not afraid or shaken. The truth is on our side. Whatever the situation is, we will not be shaken. They cannot make us weak," Wa Lone told reporters after the brief hearing. Several journalists who came to cover the verdict wore T-shirts that read "Free Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo" and "Journalism is not a crime." "LITMUS TEST" The Reuters reporters are accused of breaching the colonial-era Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison, by collecting documents relating to the country's security forces. They told the court during their trial that two police officials handed them papers at a north Yangon restaurant moments before other officers arrested them last December. One police witness testified the restaurant meeting was a set-up to entrap the journalists to block or punish them for their reporting of a mass killing of Rohingya and other abuses involving soldiers and police in Inn Din, a village in Rakhine. The United Nations has called the military's campaign in northern Rakhine a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing". Myanmar has denied allegations of killings, rapes and arson made by refugees against its security forces, saying it conducted a legitimate counterinsurgency operation against Muslim militants. But the military acknowledged the killing of the 10 Rohingya men and boys at Inn Din after arresting the Reuters reporters. In April the military said seven soldiers had been sentenced to 10 years in prison with hard labor for their part in the killings. (Deletes extraneous word "the" from paragraph 4) (Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Alex Richardson)Hanoi (AFP) - Hanoi paid tribute Monday to former US Senator John McCain, a onetime foe who helped heal the wounds of the Vietnam War after spending years as a prisoner in the city.

Residents and US officials laid flowers near a concrete sculpture of McCain by the capital's Truc Bach lake, commemorating the site where the former Navy pilot -- who died Saturday aged 81 -- was shot down and detained during the Vietnam War.

McCain spent more than five years detained in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton", where he was put in solitary confinement, beaten and tortured.

But in the decades after the bloody conflict ended, the Republican presidential candidate was known in Vietnam for his transition from prisoner of war to peacemaker.

His death was front page news in Vietnam's state media and drew tributes from across the country.

Veterans who fought in the war were among those who travelled to the US embassy in Hanoi to pay their respects.

"I admire him for having recognised the right thing... being united with Vietnamese people, so that the two countries could set aside the past, building up the future," said 81-year-old veteran Pham Minh Chuc, who rode his bicycle to the embassy.

"It was a pity that we confronted each other on the battlefield," a woman named Nguyen Thi Bich Ngoc wrote in the embassy's condolence book.

"But I think with that we had a chance to understand each other more after the war, and you were the one that made a major contribution to building up that link."

Vietnam's deputy prime minister Pham Binh Minh wrote that he hoped McCain's family could overcome the loss and described him as someone who helped heal the "wounds of war".

The Vietnam War killed an estimated 2.5 million northern Vietnamese fighters, 58,000 American servicemen and some three million civilians before its end in 1975, two years after McCain was released and sent home.

McCain visited Vietnam several times after diplomatic ties were restored in 1995 and one of his jailers remembered him fondly, saying he would have voted for him in his failed 2008 presidential bid.

Truong Huy San, a prominent social critic, wrote on Facebook Sunday that McCain's personality helped Hanoi and Washington make amends, and said that the country could learn from him.

"One man can only become a people's hero when he has not just courage, but also talent and ethics."Michael B. Jordan made a surprise stop at a school in Alabama. (Photo: Getty Images)

Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan just started working on a new project in Alabama, but hes also trying on another role for size as a motivational speaker for young students.

Jordan reportedly touched down in the Southern state on Monday, alongside co-stars Jamie Foxx and Brie Larson for the upcoming film Just Mercy, which is based on the memoir by Bryan Stevenson, a Montgomery, Ala., attorney and Equal Justice Initiative co-founder. But it was a different group of people that the Creed actor was spotted hanging with during his first day on the job.

Jordan posted a video of himself with over a dozen young students, writing that he saw them in their school parking lot doing jumping jacks and spontaneously stopped to say hello. The sight of them inspires me & reminds me why I do what I do!! he wrote.

But it turns out that the inspiration is mutual.

As the kids ran up to high-five and hug Jordan, the actor shared some words of wisdom. And if the bright smiles on the students faces are any indication, it certainly meant a lot coming from one of their idols.

Make sure you listen to [your teacher], listen to your parents. Make sure yall work hard, Jordan is heard saying in the video. Pay attention in school. To which the boys all respond, Yes, sir!

Already, nearly one thousand people commented on the sweet video, praising Jordan for the kind act.

You are absolutely amazing for this! You will be making such an impact on these young boys lives for just giving them words of encouragement!! Hats off to you!! one follower wrote. While another echoed the same sentiment, writing, Inspiring the next generation! Love this!

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

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 Michael B. Jordan Says His Company Will Adopt Inclusion Rider On All Projects

 Little boy dressed up as Michael B. Jordans Black Panther character is too cute

 Dwayne the Rock Johnson posts sweet tribute to his daughters: Always have a strong voice

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.



When is the city of Waukegan going to start following the ordinances? You have citizens here who refuse to follow ordinances. We have parties every weekend, with music going on until 2 in the morning. And its not just regular music. These folks do karaoke, and they have these speakers that go on for blocks and blocks. And yet the Police Department does nothing to correct these violations. It takes many phone calls to get the city of Waukegan Police Department there. Why should it take that many calls to take care of the situation? The people refuse to have these parties in banquet halls that Waukegan has openly provided to the citizens. We have legal and illegal banquet halls in Waukegan, and yet the community refuses to hold their parties there. Lets start following the noise ordinance, shut the music and have respect for your neighbors. Shut the music off.Reuters

Patrick M. Cronin, Kristine Lee

Security, Asia

Otherwise, Pyongyang is going to drive a wedge between America and South Korea.

Why Washington and Seoul Need to Harmonize Their Approaches to North Korea

For the past sixty-five years, amidst the ebb and flow of heightened tensions with North Korea, the U.S.-ROK relationship has remained the cornerstone of a successful alliance. South Korean support for the alliance remains remarkably high. But as the euphoria of unprecedented summitry with Pyongyang fades, uncertainty about the trajectory of diplomacy underscores the grave risks that inadequate coordination between the American and South Korean governments could bring to bear.

The current state of play can be summed up in one of three possible contingencies. We could either be on the cusp of a breakthrough with North Korea; on the verge of declaring experimental diplomacy with Pyongyang a failure; or mired in a permanent impasse. In either of the latter two scenarios, Washington will need to contend with the possibility that the Moon administration may forge ahead with its coveted peace deal with Pyongyang, even as denuclearization negotiations sputter.

Washington and Seoul urgently need to bring their approaches to North Korea back into alignment. In particular, the Trump administration needs to bear down on its plan for how to harmonize Seouls primary objective of inter-Korean peace with its own priority of ensuring North Koreas denuclearization. The appointment of a widely respected professional in Steve Biegun to serve as full-time special envoy for North Korea certainly enhances the U.S. diplomatic team.

However, North Korea policy remains tricky. President Trumps abrupt cancellation of Secretary of State Pompeos planned trip to Pyongyang spotlights his growing frustration with the plodding pace of progress vis-a-vis North Koreas nuclear program and suggests the administration may be approaching a new decision point.

Story continues

Some South Koreans like to think the problem is that President Trump lacks the patience for making a deal with North Korea. Trump is undeniably impatient, but patience will not convince North Korea to start dismantling its nuclear program. The fact that South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha called her American counterpart to express regret at the potential loss of diplomatic momentum highlighted the gap between the two allies.

The Trump administration wants significant denuclearization steps before progress is made on sanctions relief and building a peace regime, whereas Seoul appears content with the North Korean concept that an end-of-war declaration should come first.

Phased, reciprocal steps may still be the most realistic model, but the key will be for Seoul and Washington to agree on what they are willing to give Kim in return for meaningful steps toward denuclearization. Given the Moon administrations priorities, options the United States will need to consider run the gamut from incremental sanctions relief to investments in physical infrastructure links between the two Koreas.

North Korea has capitalized on the absence of a more concerted effort between Washington and Seoul to pursue a unified strategy. Kim initially turned to diplomacy to avert the United States possible use of force, halt sanctions that could eventually cripple North Koreas economy, and consolidate gains made in his nuclear and missile programs. Indeed, since initiating diplomacy, Pyongyang has sharpened its treasured sword of nuclear weapons as suggested in a recent International Atomic Energy Agency report. Furthermore, Pyongyang has weakened the chokehold of international sanctions and strengthened the promise of a peace declaration to preclude Washington from pursuing military options. The relatively late resumption of inter-Korean family reunions on Monday, after a three-year hiatus, suggests that amidst slowing momentum in talks with the United States, Kim now sees the need to keep pushing on Moons open-door policy.

Moon indeed appears determined to double down on the preferred Chinese model of rewarding North Korea before it takes meaningful steps toward denuclearization. His Liberation Day speech suggested a departure from the established U.S.-ROK approach of maintaining economic pressure until North Korea has taken significant actions to dismantle its nuclear and missile systems. He intimated that in Pyongyang next month, he would "take an audacious step [] toward the declaration of an end of the Korean War." Additionally, Moon is also negotiating with Pyongyang to scale back some of the ROK military's defenses along the DMZ, a move that has invoked concerns about its ability to defend across the border.

The political variables that could further alter both countries calculations regarding North Korea, including Moons declining popularity and U.S. midterm elections in November, are wide-ranging. Even as public support for the U.S.-ROK alliance remains strong in both countries, the confluence of burden-sharing, wartime operational control, and trade negotiations could test the relationship. The two allies are slated to conclude negotiations for a new five-year Special Measures Agreement by year's end, and Trump has made clear that he expects South Korea to shoulder even more significant costs than it has in the past. Meanwhile, Moon would like for wartime operational control to reside exclusively within South Korea as soon as possible, even if the ROK armed forces are ill-prepared for that responsibility.

Amidst political uncertainty, Washington must take concrete steps to guard against any further decoupling of U.S. and South Korean strategies. First, with regards to military cooperation and SMA negotiations, now is not the time for the United States to increase pressure on the ROK military and raise the costs of collaboration. The Trump administration also needs to walk the line between providing support for the peace processes that President Moon is driving forward and reining in some of his unhelpful rhetoric that hints at prematurely relieving economic pressure on North Korea.

Unilateral concessions to North Korea are no more likely to succeed than imposing inflexible demands on the Kim regime. The established principle of action-for-action remains the most sensible framework for dealing with North Korea. The United States needs to temper expectations Moon may be stirring that the United Nations or U.S. Congress will curb sanctions on North Korea before Pyongyang takes verifiable denuclearization actions. The resilience of the alliance rests upon the determination of both American and South Korean leaders to harmonize their strategies, even if it means delaying the gratification of quick political wins.

Dr. Patrick M. Cronin and Kristine Lee are senior director and research associate, respectively, at the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

Image: Reuters

Read full articlePope Francis at the closing mass of his Ireland visit at the Phoenix Park in Dublin. (Getty Images)

By Christopher Lamb

Pope Francis says he will not say one word in response to explosive allegations from a retired Vatican official claiming the pontiff covered up sexual abuse and should resign.

Talking to reporters on board the papal plane returning to Rome from Dublin, the Pope dismissively said Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganos testimony speaks for itself and he urged people to read the material carefully and judge for themselves.

In the 11-page memo  released on Sunday during the Popes trip to Ireland  the former Vatican ambassador to the United States says he warned Francis about allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse by former Archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick.

The document was an unprecedented broadside against a pope from a senior figure inside the Church and included a long list of US and Vatican officials of being told about McCarricks behaviour.

I will not say one word on this, he told reporters during his in-flight press conference. I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have sufficient journalistic capacity to draw your own conclusions.

Pope Francis arrives to attend the closing Mass at the World Meeting of Families at Phoenix Park

Last month the Pope accepted the 88-year-old McCarricks resignation as a cardinal while authorising his removal from public ministry after allegations he had abused a child along with forcing adult trainee priests to share his bed. He is now facing a church trial.

The archbishop details how top figures in the Vatican were years ago informed about allegations against McCarricks and that Benedict XVI placed restrictions on him in 2009 or 2010.

But the document  which was released selectively to conservative Catholic websites  is being read in Church circles as part of an attack by those unhappy with Francis papacy with one commentator describing the document as exposing the putsch against the Pope.





Church observers also highlighted errors and inaccuracies in the text along with citing 2014 legal documents that showed Vigano had quashed an inquiry into sexual misconduct and abuse cover-up into a prominent US prelate, Archbishop John Nienstedt.

Story continues

The Pope, who repeatedly apologised for abuse in the Church and its cover-up during his recent visit to Ireland, is not planning to shift his refusal to comment on Viganos claims.

One of his advisers, Fr Antonio Spadaro, pointed out that Francis never defended himself against claims he collaborated with Argentinas military dictatorship, which turned out to be unwarranted.

He *knows* that sooner or later the truth will surface, Fr Spadaro tweeted.Statue of Liberty climber Therese Patricia Okoumou, who ascended the base of the statue on July 4 to protest the Trump administrations policies, stood before a crowd of New Yorkers on Sunday wearing her favorite green dress with the words I really do care, why wont u? on the back.

The slogan was a reference to the jacket first lady Melania Trump wore in June to visit migrant children on the Texas border. The occasion was a protest at city hall against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

And there, in front of several hundred strangers, she revealed her reason for opposing Kavanaugh.

Ive had two abortions in my life and I am proud, Okoumou told the crowd. As a woman, its my body and its my choice, America.

Therese Patricia Okoumou, Statue of Liberty climber and ICE protester. (Photo: Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

This was the first time Okoumou, 44, publicly shared her story. I wanted to make a statement, she said. The easiest way to do it was to disclose my abortions. Her first abortion occurred when she was 18, when she was still living in her native country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her second happened soon after she arrived in the U.S. in 1994.

At the time, I didnt think it was hard, said Okoumou about her abortion in the U.S. I went to one place and right away it was done. Like piece of cake, no problems. Now there are forces out there, men especially, who want to have a say in what women can and cannot do with their bodies.

Okoumou was one of thousands of people across the country who marked this years Womens Equality Day with protests against the nomination of Kavanaugh. Over 165 Unite for Justice events were held on Sunday, led by pro-abortion-rights organization NARAL in partnership with MoveOn.org and over 70 other groups. The events ranged from letter-writing in Alaska to rallying in streets of New York City.

This day of action is to show the administration, to show the Senate, that stopping this nomination is the right thing to do because Kavanaugh is an extremist and because a conservative majority on the court will have dire consequences, said Erica Mauter, a spokesperson from MoveOn.org.

Story continues

Demonstrators in L.A. rally in protest of Judge Brett Kavanaughs nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, Aug. 26, 2018. (Photo: Mark Ralston/AFP)

Donald Trumps legacy, if Kavanaugh is confirmed, isnt going to last for four or eight years, added Kaylie Hanson Long, national communications director at NARAL. Its going to last for the rest of our lifetimes. We have to make sure Trumps anti-choice legacy is not the law of the land.

A federal appeals court judge, Brett Kavanaugh drew instant opposition from abortion rights groups that consider him a potential fifth vote to overturn the right to abortion. His nomination, Trumps second Supreme Court pick, also alarmed voting- and LGBTQ-rights activists and environmental protection advocates, all of whom claim a stake in the #StopKavanaugh movement.

Organizers also called attention to Kavanaughs expansive view of presidential authority.

The left doesnt typically mobilize around the judiciary, said Mauter. But its become especially clear with the news on Tuesday of guilty pleas for [Trump campaign manager Paul] Manafort and for [former lawyer Michael] Cohen that if the president is implicated in crimes he picked Kavanaugh because Kavanaugh is not going to hold him accountable.

Rallies against Kavanaugh picked up steam last week after Manafort was found guilty of tax evasion and bank fraud, and Cohen plead guilty to tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations.

Democrats, calling Trump an unindicted co-conspirator, warned that if the investigation of the president by special counsel Robert Mueller results in a case reaching the Supreme Court, Kavanaughs record suggests he would give Trump maximum leeway to avoid accountability. In a 2009 article by Kavanaugh in the Minnesota Law Review, he argued that presidents should not be subject to civil lawsuits or criminal investigations in office because they were time-consuming and distracting. Now, in light of convictions against Trumps former aides, Democrats and #StopKavanaugh protestors fear if Kavanaugh is confirmed to the court, he could provide a crucial vote to make Trump immune from criminal investigation while in office.

A protest against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in New York City. (Photo: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

Nothing less than the future our democracy hangs in the balance with this vote, Long said to the crowd of protesters in New York. Lets be honest, do we really want Michael Cohens potential co-conspirator to be in charge of picking our next Supreme Court justice?

Kavanaughs confirmation hearings are set to begin on Sept. 4 and are expected to last three to four days. Blocking his confirmation looks like a long shot, unless the Democrats in the Senate unite against him and at least one Republican breaks with the president. Republicans Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, support access to abortion services, but Collins said she was satisfied by Kavanaughs assurances that he considered Roe v. Wade settled law.

Weve heard already from Senator Collins and Murkowski and [West Virginia Sen. Joe] Manchin that they are very much listening to their own constituents, said Mauter. They are still on the fence. We would like them to come off the fence.

To that end, Mauter said Sundays rally set its sights on voters who could help influence not only the outcome of the confirmation hearings, but also the midterm elections, especially people who live in Maine and Alaska, people who live in the red states that have Democratic senators, and people who live in blue states with Democratic senators and wish they would make some more noise and be aggressive.

Therese Patricia Okoumou takes part in a protest against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in New York City, Aug. 26, 2018. (Photo: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

_____

More Yahoo News stories on the Supreme Court:The three Arabs who were attacked by a group of Jews on a Haifa beach were shocked and surprised to learn the two suspects arrested in the casea 23 year old from Kiryat Haim and another 29 year old from the northwere released from police custody and put on house arrest, with the judges citing lack of evidence to tie them to the incident.

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One of the victims' friends said Sunday they "have been questioned since this morning. We were surprised the suspects were released."

"We implore the police to continue investing efforts (in the investigation), and we trust that they'll do everything to find the perpetrators," he added.

3 Arab men attacked at Haifa beach

During the suspects' remand extension hearing, the police told the court that they have security camera footage of the attack. However, the police representative admitted that investigators have yet to thoroughly examine the video and that the suspect has not been identified in the footage.

Yair Elalouf, who aided the three Arab men, met Sunday with the three Arab men at the police station. They said they "need to thank him for saving our lives. Without him, we wouldn't have stayed alive."

Yair Elalouf

Later, the three came to visit him at work to thank him once again. "They were very nice guys, they thanked me and said, 'We were looking for you, we wanted to know where you are from, where you live,'" Elalouf said.

"They took my phone number, wanted to invite me to Shfaram to eat with them, and wanted to come to my house with their families. I told them they are more than welcomed," he went on to say.

3 Arab men attacked at Haifa beach (Photo: Shamir Elbaz)

"People ask me all the time, 'Did you know they were Arabs?' Of course I knew, but it doesn't matter who they were, I would do the same for anyone. If it is an Ethiopian, an Arab, or a Jew. It does not matter. If someone needs help, he should receive it. I wish the whole country thought like this. Some 100 people were present during the attack and nobody came to help," he lamented.

Elalouf arrived to the beach where the attack took place, not far from his home, and described the chain of events. "I parked the car near the beach because there was no parking near the house, and I saw Arabs running away and others throwing clubs at them. They took the clubs and ran to the beach. A bleeding man came to me and said, 'save my friends.'"

Scene of crime

"They had brutally beaten them with the clubs for 3-4 minutes, and one of the attackers used an iron chain, maybe of a motorcycle or a bike," Elalouf said.

Phone of one of victims covered with blood

"It was terrible, it was really disgusting, they were beaten out of malice, without thinking, they (the attackers) saw that they were on the floor bleeding and unconsciousness and they continued beating them like nothing had happened. It was really terrible. No one did anything, nobody called the police, they did not want to intervene," he said.The Ministry of Health announced Sunday that the Zavitan Stream in the Golan Heights has been reopened for visitors, two weeks after it was closed due to the leptospirosis scare.

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The stream was reopened after several tests showed a drop in fecal coliforms, leading to a decrease in chances of contracting the disease.

According to the ministry, swimming is still prohibited in the following parks: Zaki Stream, Yehudiya, Meshushim stream, the Majrasa estuary, the Jilabun Stream, the Arik Bridge in the Jordan River, and the Abukayak site.

The Jordan River (Photo: Upper Galilee Spokesperson)



According to the ministry, 42 people have so far been diagnosed with leptospirosis while 462 presented symptoms of the disease.

Meanwhile, in an effort to revive tourism to the area, the Ministry of Tourism launched a campaign inviting Israelis back to the north.

Tourism Ministry Director-General Amir Halevy visited several water sites in the Upper Galilee Sunday to meet with dozens of tourism site operators who suffered millions in losses due to the leptospirosis scare that kept thousands of tourists away from the Galilee.

The head of the Upper Galilee Regional Council, Giora Salz, and Mevo'ot Hermon Regional Council head Benny Ben Muvhar, were also present.

At the meeting, the director-general said that last weekend, more Israelis returned to sites in northern Israel, and the ministry's goal is to have full occupancy towards the holidays.

He advised tour operates to familiarize themselves with the latest tourism world trends, invest in forward-thinking marketing, and tie the entire northern region to one product that would benefit many.

Mesushim strean (Photo: Avihu Shapira)

According to the Nature and Parks Authority, thousands of people arrived at sites in northern Israel last weekend, including 2,500 visitors in the Nahal Snir Nature Reserve, 3,000 visitors in Gan Hashlosha (Hashena), 1,900 visitors in Hurshat Tal, about 1,500 visitors in Ma'ayan Harod, 1,500 visitors in the Achziv National Park and 1,500 visitors in Tel Dan.

Raya Shurki, Director of the Public and Community Division at the Israel Nature and National Authority, said: "We are pleased to see the continued improvement and increase in visitors at the northern sites in recent days. At the same time, we were happy to meet with visitors who chose to celebrate Id al-Adha at the various sites, enjoying the variety of family activities available at the sites."

Prof. Michal Hovers, who runs the infectious diseases unit in Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba, explained how Leptospirosis infects the streams and described its main symptoms.

Zavitan stream in the Golan Heights (Photo: Israel Bardugo)

"Animals infected the waters and streams, and people who either bathe there or come into contact with mice urine in outdoor habitats can catch this infection," she said in an interview with Ynet.

"Symptoms can be mild in some cases but in others the infection can become severe and lead to kidney and liver failure, she continued.

Prof. Hovers added that symptoms include fever, flu-like symptoms and sometimes corneal infections but emphasized that not all symptoms require admission to hospital.

Mild cases can heal without intervention, and thus not everyone who bathed in the streams and who has a fever has to rush to the hospital," she noted.

"However, if high temperatures persist and someone doesn't feel well, it is better to go and get a blood test in order to ensure that liver and kidney functions are in order, and take antibiotics if needed, she explained.North Korea says a detained Japanese man has been expelled from the country.

The official Korean Central News Agency said late Sunday that Tomoyuki Sugimoto had been "kept under control" for questioning about "his crime." It did not say what he had been accused of.

The brief report said authorities had decided "to leniently condone him" and expel him on the principle of humanitarianism. It described Sugimoto as a tourist.The Erez border crossing between Israel and Gaza will be reopened Monday, a week after it was closed because of the continued violent protesting on the strip's border and the ongoing threat of incendiary balloons.

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Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman decided Sunday to reopen the crossing after consultations with the IDF and other security bodies in light of the relative quiet on the Gaza border and the significant drop in unusual incidents over the last week.

The pedestrian crossing, which operates in a limited capacity, was closed a week ago in the wake of violence on the Gaza border, with only humanitarian cases allowed through.

Erez border crossing (Photos: Yoav Zitun)

Now, it will resume full activity, which includes the passage of some goods, but mostly patients in need of medical care outside Gaza.

Meanwhile, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot visited the Gaza Division's 143rd "Fire Fox" territorial division on Sunday, where he held a situation assessment with GOC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) Maj. Gen. Kamil Abu Rokon, and the commander of the Fire Fox Division Brig. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs.

The IDF chief also toured the area of the territorial division, and stressed that the forces' professionalism led to many achievements and that they remain prepared for any development.Iran and Syria signed a deal for military cooperation in a meeting between the defence ministers of the two countries in Damascus, the Tasnim news agency reported on Monday.

Iranian Defence Minister Amir Hatami travelled to Damascus on Sunday for a two-day visit, meeting Syrian President Bashar Assad and senior military officials, Tasnim reported.

Iranian forces have backed Assad in the country's civil war.

Tasnim did not provide any details about the military cooperation deal.Iran and Syria signed a deal for military cooperation in a meeting between the defense ministers of the two countries in Damascus, the Tasnim news agency reported on Monday.

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Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami travelled to Damascus on Sunday for a two-day visit, meeting Syrian President Bashar Assad and senior military officials, Tasnim reported.

"We hope to have a productive role in the reconstruction of Syria," Hatami said on arrival in Syria, according to Fars News. Iran has previously made commitments to help rebuild Syria, including the construction of some 20,000 housing units.

Tasnim did not provide any details about the military cooperation deal.

The Iranian defense minister told the Hezbollah-affiliated Al Mayadeen that Tehran will work to rebuild and rehabilitate Syria's military industries as well as the Syrian armed forces.

A senior Syrian official told Russian news agency Sputnik that Hatami's visit was not just about the reconstruction of Syria following the civil war, but also meant to send a message of increased military cooperation between the two countries in response to Israel and American demands to remove Iranian forces from Syria.

Iranian forces have backed Assad in the country's civil war. Senior Iranian officials have said their military presence in Syria is at the invitation of the Assad government and they have no immediate plans to withdraw.

Arab media have tied Hatami's visit to Syria with the Assad army's preparations for a big attack on Idlib in the north of the country, one of the last strongholds of the rebels seeking to oust the Syrian president.

Syrian Defense Minister Ali Abdullah Ayyoub said during the meeting with his Iranian counterpart that "We'll free Idlib, with an agreement or fire power."

The Idlib region, a refuge for civilians and rebels displaced from other areas of Syria as well as powerful jihadist forces, was hit by a wave of air strikes and shelling this month, in a possible prelude to a full-scale government offensive.

US National Security Adviser John Bolton said last week that Iran should remove its forces from Syria. "Iranian activity in the region has continued to be belligerent: what they are doing in Iraq, what they are doing in Syria, what they are doing with Hezbollah in Lebanon, what they are doing in Yemen, what they have threatened to do in the Strait of Hormuz," he said at a press conference in Jerusalem.

The Trump advisor also defended Israels right to launch strikes on missiles or other threatening weapons brought into war-torn Syria by Iran as a legitimate act of self defense on the part of Israel.The Jewish Agency will give up to NIS 100,000 loans to businesses harmed by the kite terrorism and rockets fired from Gaza.

The agency said the loans which would be given under preferable conditions and through quick procedures are meant to aid small and medium businesses in the Gaza border communities whose operation had been harmed by the security situation in the south.

The financial aid will come from the Ness Foundation which receives its funding from the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest and Greater Miami Jewish Federation.Border Police soldiers Master Sgt. Hadas Malka and Staff Sgt. Solomon Gavriya, who were killed in two separate terror attacks in 2017, will posthumously receive a commendation from the police commissioner for saving lives and for their professional and determined actions in the line of duty.

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Their families will receive the commendation in a ceremony that will take place in October.

Staff Sergeant Solomon Gavriya, 20, from Be'er Yaakov, was killed in September 2017 by an armed terrorist who attempted to infiltrate the settlement of Har Adar in the Jerusalem area during morning rush hour, when dozens of children were on the scene waiting for their school ride.

order Policeman Staff Sergeant Solomon Gavriya (Photo: Police Spokesman's Unit)

Gavriya spotted the terrorist and prevent him from entering the settlement.

Two civilian security guards were also murdered in the incident.

Master Sgt. Hadas Malka, 23, was killed when three terrorists armed with semi-automatic weapons and knives mounted an attack in two different parts of Jerusalem's Old City in 2017. Malka was critically wounded and later succumbed to her wounds.

Hadas fiercely fought the terrorist, who stabbed her several times until he was shot dead. According to the investigation of the incident, Hadas fought to her last breath, and by doing so exposed the terrorist's location and stopped the killing spree.

A senior Border Police official said that "apart from the lives that were saved thanks to Hadas and Solomon's courageous actions, they left behind an illustrious battle legacy on which thousands of soldiers serving in the Border Police are educated."

"They are combatants who were a role model in their lives and a model of admiration in their deaths," he added.

Master Sgt. Hadas Malka

"Bestowing the commendations emphaizes again and again that Border Police officers are fighting on the front lines against terror that seeks to harm Israel's citizens," he explained.

Mihrat Gabriya, Solomon's father, said, "We welcome the decision to bestow the commendation upon Solomon."

"We are grateful for the commendation and honor given to our son, whose actions prevented a much more fatal terror attack that could have happened if the armed terrorist had managed to infiltrate the settlement of Har Adar," Gabriya's father added.

Hadas Malka's father, David Malka, was extremely moved when he found out his daughter would receive a commendation from the police commissioner.

"The decision to give our daughter a commendation is an expression of appreciation and a message to society," Malka said. "Hadas is a symbol of leadership, giving, comradeship, persistence, and the love of Jerusalem."

"In Hadas's words'speaking heart to heart, everything is possible, don't give up, people,'" he concluded.Iran has full control of the Gulf, and the US Navy does not belong there, the head of the navy of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, General Alireza Tangsiri, said on Monday, according to the Tasnim news agency.

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The remarks come at a time when Tehran has suggested that it could take military action in the Gulf to block oil exports of other regional countries in retaliation for US sanctions intended to halt its oil sales. Washington maintains a fleet in the Gulf which protects oil shipping routes.

Tangsiri said Iran had full control of both the Gulf itself and the Strait of Hormuz that leads into it. Closing off the strait would be the most direct way of blocking shipping.

IRGC Navy holds drill in Persian Gulf (: PRESSTV)

"We can ensure the security of the Persian Gulf and there is no need for the presence of aliens like the U.S. and the countries whose home is not in here," he said in the quote, which appeared in English translation on Tasnim.

Tension between Iran and the United States has escalated since US President Donald Trump pulled out of a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers in May.

Senior US officials have said they aim to reduce Iran's oil exports to zero.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the most senior authority in the Islamic Republic, said last month that he supports the idea that if Iran is not allowed to export oil then no country should export oil from the GulfIranian lawyers asked the International Court of Justice on Monday to order the United States to lift sanctions imposed by the Trump administration against Tehran.

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The presiding judge of the UN body informally known as the World Court began the hearing by calling on Washington to respect its outcome. During their decades of animosity, both the United States and Iran have ignored some rulings at the court.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (L) and President Donald Trump (Photo: Reuters)

The lawsuit filed with the ICJ says the US sanctions, which are damaging the already weak Iranian economy, violate terms of a little-known friendship treaty between the two countries.

"The US is publicly propagating a policy intended to damage as severely as possible Iran's economy and Iranian national companies, and therefore inevitably Iranian nationals," said Mohsen Mohebi, representing Iran, at the start of four days of oral hearings. "This policy is plainly in violation of the 1955 Treaty of Amity."

He said Iran had sought a diplomatic solution to the countries' dispute but was rejected.

The United States said in an initial written reaction displayed in court that it believes the ICJ has no jurisdiction in the case, and that Iran's assertions fall outside the bounds of the treaty.

US lawyers led by State Department adviser Jennifer Newstead, appointed by Trump in 2017, are due to respond on Tuesday. A ruling is expected within a month, though no date has been set.

The ICJ is the United Nations tribunal for resolving international disputes. Its rulings are binding, but it has no power to enforce them.

US President Donald Trump pulled out of a 2015 pact between Iran and major world powers under which sanctions were lifted in return for Tehran accepting curbs on its nuclear program. The Trump administration then announced unilateral plans to restore sanctions against Tehran.

President Trump's statement on withdrawal from nuclear deal

X

Although Washington's European allies protested against Trump's move, most Western companies intend to adhere to the sanctions, preferring to lose business in Iran than be punished by the United States or barred from doing business there.

The United States and Iran have clashed at the court in the past since they became enemies after Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran ignored a 1980 US suit at the ICJ over the seizure of American diplomats in Tehran, which the court found to be illegal.

In another suit and countersuit, the ICJ found that the 1955 treaty was still valid even though it was signed before the revolution. However, the court found in 2003 that neither actions by the United States against Iranian oil platforms nor Iranian attacks on American shipping violated the treaty.

At the start of Monday's hearing, the court's president, Abdulqawi Yusuf, leading a 15-judge panel, urged the United States to adhere to any provisional decision the court may make.Women in the Israel Fire Brigade launched the Romah rockets as part of the brigade's replacement of the 282 Artillery Support Unit.

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As part of a new strategy, the fire bigade will now be assigned to attack missions, and its activities will not be restricted to purely support assignments for infantry maneuvers.

The new division will be under the command of Col. Neri Horowitz. The brigade's first practice was held in the Golan Heights a few weeks ago, and the new Romah rockets, which are gradually being introduced into IDFs units, were fired.

The Romah rocket in action (:  ")

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The fire brigade refuses to say whether the rockets have already been put to use in combat, but the launches demonstrated target accuracy.

The Israel Military Industries (IMI)-made Romah rockets are capable of precision strikes against enemy targets, with only several meters of margin of error. Possible targets include, among others, bunkers and operation rooms.

In the actual practice they were launched alongside statistical artillery of the motorized artillery 411 battalion.

Fire Brigade practice (Photo: IDF spokesperson's unit)

One officer explained that despite the effectiveness of the new rockets, their predecessors will remain useful in military operations.

These shells will always be useful in the battlefield, since there is an advantage to statistical fire when we are aiming at open spaces and want to cover a larger surface area, explained the officer from the unit.

In some practice scenarios the shells were fired as cover and rescue weapons for infantry and armored corps combatants, who were several hundred meters from the point of impact.

While during combat the distance between infantry positions and artillery points of impact would be between 200-300 meters, during practice it is 700 meters.

Romah rockets are capable of hitting from longer ranges, and during practice launches have been fired by female combatants.

The women who took part in the exercise are limited to those who would cross the Israeli border during any future conflict as part of a front line unit, and are thus defined as front line combatants.

Female combatants work from firing station located on the Romah truck launching platform. They calculate firing data using meteorological data, launcher positions, satellites and drones which observe the target area.

Its a strong sensation to fire the Romah, and especially hitting the target, said two female combatants, Staff Sgt. Talia Maman from Yavne and Sgt. Elinor Haziza from Nahariya.

The two arrived in the practice routine straight from holding a line in the Qalqilya region.

Two female combatants at the Fire Brigade practice (Photo: Yoav Zitun)

Currently, the vast majority of fire power in Israeli ground forces is statisticalmeaning it is comprised of regular and less modern artillery equipment. However, the IDF aspires to convert the shortfall by replacing the old gear with precise shells in about 50 percent of armaments within a few years.

Last Mays IDF attacks on Iranian targets in Syria were executed, inter alia, using artillery.

One of the officers from a brigade that had participated in the firing said: It was exciting, we waited there for a week in suspense, and then when the Syrian rockets flew above us we said that we have to be the ones who react. Combatants were very excited.The United States views Iran's filing with the International Court of Justice as an attempt to interfere with its rights to take actions on national security grounds and will fight Tehran's claims, the State Department said on Monday as oral proceedings began before the court.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that he was aiming to achieve 40 mandates for his Likud party in the 2019 national elections, while indicating that they may be held ahead of schedule.

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In the general elections, and I dont know exactly when they will take place, 35 mandates is reasonable, 40 mandates is the target. We are aiming for that, Netanyahu said during a conference in Ramat Gan of Likud candidates running in local elections.

In the 2015 elections, the Likud party clinched 30 mandates, compelling Netanyahu to cobble together other right-wing and centrist parties, forming a coalition with a slender majority in the 120-seat Knesset.

PM Netanyahu at the conference in Ramat Gan

In the upcoming local elections, we will strengthen the Likud throughout the country. We will do so with the huge support of the Israeli public which sees the massive achievements we have made, the prime minister said at the conference in the Kfar Maccabiah Hotel, in which 100 Likud representatives participated.

The coalition, which is propped up by the Haredi party, has been embroiled in repeated crises over the IDF draft bill.

The draft bill, which is opposed by ultra-Orthodox parties who want to continue exemptions made for Yeshiva students from entering the military, was supposed to be passed in September, but at the request of the state, the High Court of Justice (HCJ) issued an extension of three months which expires in December.

However, Netanyahu stepped in and issued an ultimatum in a bid to expedite the process.

Speaking at a Likud ministers meeting a week-and-a-half ago, Netanyahu said that "if a solution to the draft law is not found, a date for general elections will be set within two weeks."

With or without early elections, a confident Netanyahu told his party members in Ramat Gan that Likud could expect better results as the nation prepares to go to the polls next year.

With Gods help and with your help, the Likud faction will grow to the skies. I wish you success in the upcoming elections, we will support you and help you. On to a great victory! he said.

We are all defending the same country and we all want the development of the same country. The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people and safeguards equal rights for all its citizens, the prime minister added, celebrating the Knessets recent passage of the Nation-State Law.

And we are doing that. Against all the defiance, against all the slander, we will continue to do this, but with one difference. Unlike last time when we fell to 12 twelve mayors, we will go up. We will make do in these elections with an increase of 20 percent, Netanyahu continued.US President Donald Trump on Monday suggested the United States and Mexico were close to a "big deal" on trade after days of negotiations between the two partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"A big deal looking good with Mexico!" Trump wrote in a post on Twitter.

The Mexican economy minister said on Monday that Mexican and US officials were nearing an agreement on bilateral issues, but a major issue still needed to be settled.Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Monday urged the remaining signatories to its 2015 nuclear agreement to act to save the pact, though France's leader called again for broader talks on Tehran's missile program and its role in the Middle East region.

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In a phone call to French President Emmanuel Macron, Rouhani said Iran wanted the Europeans to give guarantees on banking channels and oil sales as well as in the field of insurance and transportation, according to the state-run Iranian news agency IRNA.

"Iran has acted upon all its promises in the nuclear agreement and, with attention to the one-sided withdrawal of America ... expects the remaining partners to operate their programs more quickly and transparently," Rouhani was quoted as saying.

Iranian President Rouhani was speaking in the light of US sanctions re-imposed by Washington after President Donald Trump pulled out of a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers in May.

Hassan Rouhani, Iranian President (Photo: Reuters)

Macron reiterated France's commitment to maintaining the accord, a remark aimed at soothing Tehran.

But he repeated his earlier calls for broader discussions with all relevant parties that would include Iran's nuclear programme after 2025, its ballistics programme and its influence in the wider Middle East region.

"We will do everything so that the talks help avoid a serious crisis in the months ahead," Macron said in an annual speech to French ambassadors.

Separately, the head of the navy of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, General Alireza Tangsiri, said on Monday that Iran had full control of the Gulf and the US Navy did not belong there, according to the Tasnim news agency.

Tehran has suggested it could take military action in the Gulf to block other countries' oil exports in retaliation for US sanctions intended to halt its sales of crude. Washington maintains a fleet in the Gulf that protects oil shipping routes.

Tangsiri said Iran had full control of the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz that leads into it. Closing the strait would be the most direct way of blocking shipping.

German Chancellor Merkel and French President Macron (: )

"We can ensure the security of the Persian Gulf and there is no need for the presence of aliens like the US and the countries whose home is not in here," he said in the quote, which appeared in English translation on Tasnim.

He added, "All the carriers and military and non-military ships will be controlled and there is full supervision over the Persian Gulf. Our presence in the region is physical and constant and night and day."

The head of the Revolutionary Guards, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, said on Monday that Iran's enemies would not prevail in a conflict.

"The enemies are strictly avoiding any conflict with Iran because they know that it will not be beneficial for them," Jafari said, according to Tasnim.

As tension has escalated between Iran and the United States senior US officials have said they aim to reduce Iran's oil exports to zero.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the most senior authority in the Islamic Republic, said last month that he supported the idea that if Iran is not allowed to export oil then no country should export oil from the Gulf.The FBI is offering a reward of up to $1,000 for information leading directly to the arrest of the suspect. Anyone with information regarding the attempted bank robbery should contact the FBI's Chicago Field Office at (312) 421-6700. You can also submit a tip at: tips.fbi.gov.Israel's Supreme Court has ruled that five critically ill women from Gaza may enter Israel for urgent medical treatment despite a government decision preventing relatives of Hamas members from doing so.

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The five women appealed to the court last month after their requests to enter Israel were rejected on the grounds of their relation to members of the Hamas terror group.

The government decision denies entry for health care to relatives of Hamas members and is meant to exert pressure Gaza's rulers who currently hold the remains of two Israeli soldiers. Two other Israeli citizens are also being held by the terror group.

Archive photo of Supreme Court panel (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg)

The court ruled late Sunday that the government decision was unreasonable and could not stand up to a legal test.

Four human rights groups representing the women said the government was using them and others seeking care unavailable in Gaza as "bargaining chips."

The court ruling came after a petition filed on July 29 this year by Gisha, Al Mezan, Adalah, and Physicians for Human Rights Israel was unanimously accepted by Supreme Court Justices Uzi Fogelman, Isaac Amit, and Ofer Grosskopf.

AdalahThe Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israelreleased a press statement saying that the justices also ruled that the Israeli Security Cabinets 2017 decision to deny Gaza patients access to medical treatment as means of leverage over Hamas was ineffective and illegal.

Supreme Court Justices Uzi Fogelman, Isaac Amit, and Ofer Grosskopf. (Photo: Supreme Court website)

Basing the decision on a relatives prohibited activity, with no suggestion that the patient herself is involved in or even aware of the activity, is contrary to the basic principles to which we are committed, concluded Justice Fogelman, the lead justice on the case.

The four human rights organizations responded to the decision.

We welcome the Israeli Supreme Courts decision to allow five critically-ill womenmost of whom are suffering from cancerto exit the Gaza Strip for life-saving medical care, they organizations were quoted in the press statement.

However, it is most regrettable that it required three Supreme Court justices to raise a black flag over a policy which the organizations described as clearly cruel and illegal.Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami said on Monday that an axis of resistance is prepared and ready to always respond to any attack against Syria.

The comments come after Iran and Syria signed a deal for military cooperation in a meeting between the defense ministers of the two countries in Damascus, the Tasnim news agency reported earlier on Monday.

The presence of the Iranian forces in Syria is in accordance with a request in Damascus, and no other country has the right to express an opinion on this presence, Hatami said in an interview with the Lebanon-based Al Mayadeen satellite channel.French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe on Monday tasked his ministers to prepare contingency measures in case of a no-deal Brexit.

France is keeping working on the basis that Britain will reach a deal with its European Union partners on its exit from the bloc but needs to be ready in case Britain left with no deal, Philippe's office said in a statement.

Measures will include facilitating the stay of British citizens currently living in France and ensuring smooth border controls, the statement said.Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami said on Monday that an axis of resistance is prepared and ready to always respond to any attack against Syria.

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The comments come after Iran and Syria signed a deal for military cooperation in a meeting between the defense ministers of the two countries in Damascus, the Tasnim news agency reported earlier on Monday.

The presence of the Iranian forces in Syria is in accordance with a request in Damascus, and no other country has the right to express an opinion on this presence, Hatami said in an interview with the Lebanon-based Al Mayadeen satellite channel.

President Assad with Defense Minister Hatami (Photo: AP)

The defense minister also directly addressed the threat of Israeli attacks against Iran, which has been a chief sponsor of the Hezbollah terror group openly bent on Israels destruction.

According to my knowledge of Irans capabilities, in my opinion (Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahus threats of attacks against Iran are far from reality, he said.

Netanyahu led efforts against Iran nuclear deal, culminating in US President Donald Trumps May withdrawal from the 2015 accord.

Signing of military cooperation deal (Photo: AFP)

Since then, Israel and Iran have remained arch enemies, with the two countries trading threats as Netanyahu continues attempts to rally the world into a united force against what he says is the chief sponsor of international terror.

In February, Netanyahu said Israel would act against Iran, not just its allies in the Middle East, if needed, reiterating that Tehran was the world's greatest threat.

The Syrian government will not allow anyone to attack it without there being a response. The Syrian government reserves the right to respond to any attack, as in the past, Hatami told the Hezbollah-affiliated channel.

The Syrian government and its allies are ready to respond to any attack. Iranian-Syrian relations have never been so strong and friendly, and cooperation is also stronger than ever, he continued.

Asked about Irans relations with Russia, which has backed Syrian President Bashar Assads government and helped it win back swathes of territory in the years-long civil war, Hatami said: We had good relations with Russia in the past, but now they are only getting better.

The agreement Iran signed between Syrian and Iran, Hatami said, committed the two sides to rebuilding Syrias army.

We signed an agreement with Syria, and the most important clause in it is the rebuilding of the military forces in the country, he said. Through this agreement, we have paved the way for the new establishment of the Syrian defense industries. The worlds war against Syria has not yet ended.

Describing his meeting with the Syrian leader as extremely good, Hatami added that President Assads motivation was clear.

Assad speaks with courage and determination and he led the army in an exemplary fashion, Hatami said, adding that Syria had sought help from a number of countries, among them Russia and Iran.

Certain countries entered Syria without any request in order to exploit the security situation in the region. They must withdraw immediately. Anyone who enters another country without being asked to by that country is considered a belligerent and an occupier, he said in an apparent dig at the United States.

Hezbollah in Lebanon is a force that has a lot of influence and is of very high importance in the struggle against terror in Syria alongside Iran and Russia, said Hatami.

He also emphasized that the terror group was in Syria as part of a request from Syria and that the two were in close coordination with one another.

Hezbollah is an independent, capable and independent force which had a positive effect on maintaining security in Syria and we must thank them for their efforts, he insisted.

The Iranian defense minister also rejected accusations that Assad had used chemical weapons in the civil war, which claimed lives of innocent civilians, including women and children.

There is no country in the world that would use chemical weapons at a time when it is winning. A victory in Syria was meant to deepen peace and stability in the Syrian region, he argued.

Hatami claimed that Iran was seeking regional peace and security. Iran defends the right of the Palestinian and the people of Yemen, he said.German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump share concerns about developments in Syria, especially the humanitarian situation in the region around Idlib, Merkel's spokesman said after the two leaders spoke by telephone.

"Russia is called upon to act in a moderating manner on the Syrian government and prevent a further escalation," Steffen Seibert said in a statement on Monday evening.A threatening letter was sent to the office of French parliamentarian Meir Haviv, along with unidentified white powder.

The building wing was evacuated while experts and security personnel examined the powder before concluding that the wing was safe for return.

Last month Haviv approached the French governments legal advisor after suffering a series of threats on his life.Those who dream of peace must always reckon with reality. As a former IDF Division Commander who was stationed within Gaza, I know something of that reality, both inside the Strip, and among our own citizens, particularly those living near the Gaza border.

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I also believe that we must always scan the horizon for a solution to our conflict with the Palestinians, and at any point be prepared to consider new opportunities which may emergewith the understanding that anything which creates the conditions for an improvement in the situation is worth considering, so long as it meets Israels strategic, humanitarian, and security goals.

We, who pride ourselves on being a creative Start-Up Nation must not shy away from outside-the-box thinking. The New State Solution , is an initiative I therefore endorse. It seeks to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza and an adjoining section of the northern Sinai Peninsula. Such a state would enable economic growth along an expanded coastline and offer Gazans new hope. It would be akin to a modern-day Marshall Plan.

The reality of Gaza today is one of total stagnation. It has been that way for decades, but the Gazan peoples sense of hopelessness is being made more acute by the current economic hardship brought about by the Hamas rule of the area.

I recognize that many obstacles stand in the way to success for any plan to transform Gaza, including the likely resistance of Hamas toward prioritizing improvement of the lives of Gazans over seeking to bring about Israel's destruction.

The outlook and goals of Hamas are certainly a problem, but if a plan has merit that plan should at least be put on the table, regardless of Hamas' resistance. Thereafter, we can discuss the "why nots." We should move beyond the stagnation stagnation, toward the implementation of a reality where Gazans can improve their lives, and even flourish. Let Hamas be made to respond. Beyond Hamas, let us even communicate with the people of Gaza themselves. Let us not write off Gaza until we have made our position, and the benefits of this approach, clear to both the leadership and the people, distinct form one another as they are.

Hamas's stoking of tensions on the border may have helped to thrust the Gazan issue back in to the gaze of the world, but in reality, neither Hamas, nor the people they purport to represent, have gained much. Hamas is failing to alleviate poverty in the Strip and they are thus in a weakened position among its own constituents, a situation they attempt to manage by creating further violent confrontation with Israel, ultimately holding themselves in a cycle that leads nobody anywhere.

In the configuration of the New State Solution, there is no need to think in terms of a win-lose deal. There is ample opportunity for all parties to gain. To set up factories, build new neighborhoods, improve education, and to bring benefit to the people of Gaza does not require any party to lose out.

If the plan can be communicated directly to the people of Gaza, there is a chance that they will independently press Hamas to finally improve their dysfunctional and corrupt economy, to create educational opportunities, and to build them a better life. When Gazans come to see that their recent campaign to launch incendiary kites into Israel has accomplished little to improve their lot, they may yet reach a point where they will press their leaders to improve their lives. While it is not certain that authoritarian leadership as harsh as Hamas would be moved by popular sentiment, given how demonstrations against poverty have led to revolution throughout the Middle East, a clearly presented plan for economic betterment may indeed affect the discourse within Gaza.

Toppling Hamas in a military campaign, an often-discussed alternative, is possible. It should be a last resort. Although we possess the military ability to do so, we cannot say with certainty who will fill the vacuum of power left by a Hamas departure, nor can we say with certainty what the will of the Palestinian people of Gaza would be if Hamas was removed, whether for Palestinian Authority governance, or something else. The use of force to eliminate Hamas would also likely result in high casualties and a public outcry which could only be placated if there were no better options.

It is therefore preferable to present a plan from which even the Hamas government can gain. Hamas is interested in receiving substantial fundsthey just want to redirect it to their goals. When pressed however, they should not be opposed to the idea of investment which lifts the burden from the lives of their people. If they are, let them respond to a formal offer from an international coalition with massive funding for infrastructure projects. Let them tell the world and their own people that they are not interested. Let them explain their rejection of a better future.

I urge the readers to consider the New State plan. Imagine transforming just one of the cramped and unnecessarily squalid refugee camps of Gaza. Let us build a new neighborhood in the adjacent open sands of Sinai, where there is no threat to Israels population, and the land is not assigned to any pre-existing dispute.

There is no lack of international goodwill and funding for the creation of a modern suburb in place of a 'refugee camp,' a place that can be a shining example to the world of urban planning, sustainability, improved quality of life, and beauty. In a phased approach, we can build a better future for Gazans, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Since 1948, and despite the existence of UNWRA, a billion dollar a year branch of the UN dedicated only to the Palestinian refugees and their descendantsand with all the years of UNWRA budget allocations that have come and gonenext to nothing has progressed in these camps. Can that be viewed as reasonable?

Why, for example, in the Bureij Refugee Camp, now a de facto neighborhood of Gaza, must 35,000 people still live without a sewage system, so that waste accumulates freely in the Wadi Gaza stream, poisoning the local environment? Surely we can break the status quo of such extreme impoverishment, born of extremism, and alter this equation entirely.

Let us present a plan, a budget, and begin by rebuilding just one of these camps, within an implementation timeframe of five to ten years. With funds earmarked strictly and carefully to ensure they reach their intended purpose, the unemployed majority in Gaza will see an economic boon, through jobs created at a massive scale in the construction sector.

Before we say it is not possible, let us first put such a proposal on the table. Let us start conveying the plan to Hamas and to the Gazan people. Let us find the benefit for our regional neighbors. At minimum, let us uncover for the world who Hamas really is by way of their rejectionism. At maximum, let us transform the situation. Gaza need not remain this way as it is. We can build a better future for all.Expert Advice with Simon Pressley 27/08/2018

The capital of the Northern Territory might be the warmest city in the country, but its economy and property market are far from glowing.

In fact, Australias 17th largest city has recorded a median house price decline of 11.5 per cent in the past three years  and the outlook is grimmer still.



A sad state of affairs

Those of us who have been to Darwin appreciate it has a unique lifestyle. And, it is geographically placed perfectly to benefit from the Asian Century.

But what I find most frustrating about the parlous state of Darwins economy and property market is that it has so much to offer but its devoid of a bold vision and robust strategic plan.

The Top End is in a bloody mess and the sad thing is that national and Territory leaders appear to be doing very little about it.

Businesses arent creating jobs, retail trade is flat, more residents are leaving than arriving, and tourists seem to have disappeared, too. One of the citys major employers, AA Cos Livingstone Beef abattoir, declared a $20 million loss last year, placing the jobs of 200 people at risk.

There doesnt seem to be many job-creating projects in the pipeline or any plan to get the Northern Territory back on track.

Bad job juju

In other smaller states like Tasmania and the ACT, there has been solid job growth over the past few years, but not so for the NT.

The poor employment picture doesnt make sense when one considers that Darwin is one of our nations most extraordinary tourism locations.

Whereas the tourist sectors in locations like Tasmania, Canberra and many parts of regional Australia have performed strongly over recent years, the same cannot be said of Darwin.

Darwin and the broader region has some unique tourism experiences, but there has been insufficient investment in hotels and accommodation, packaged tour options, and tourism marketing over recent years.

The rise of Asias middle class means there is a world-wide tourism boom right now, but it appears not many are travelling to Darwin even though its right on their door-step. The trend in this chart doesnt make a pretty picture!

Darwin disappearing act

The poor economic indicators mean that Darwins population is dwindling while most other cities post strong growth of new residents from interstate and overseas.

Over the 2016/17 financial year, Greater-Darwins population grew by a pea-sized 691 people. Last year, the population increased by more in Albury (Australias 42nd largest city) than Darwin (our 17th largest).

3,263 former residents decided to up stumps and leave the Top End for another state last year.

I believe that theres a very real chance that, when 2018 data is released in the new year, Darwin will create history as the first Australian capital city to see population decline. But is anyone listening?

Boom to bust in 10 years

From 2002 through to 2012 inclusive, median houses produced double-digit growth in 9 out of 11 years, including 12.1 per cent growth as recently as 2012.

No other capital city came close to Darwins strong performance during that extremely prosperous era in Darwins history.

Since then, though, things have been poor with prices continuing to head south in the Top End.



A glimmer of some good news is that properties are selling quicker now than two years ago but, at the moment, its impossible to see when buyer activity will increase significantly to create pressure on prices again.

While Darwin will remain on Propertyologys watch list, the investment fundamentals are far superior in several other Australian locations right now.

From 2010 to 2015, while Darwins economy was still strong, an overzealous construction sector pumped out high volumes of new housing supply, with apartments especially a dime a dozen.

The volume of additional supply has decreased drastically since then, which has absorbed some of the excess stock, but it is a double-edged sword because it has also reduced much needed work within the construction sector.





Top End opportunities

There are many reasons why Im sad about the Darwin situation.

For one, it has so many top-shelf opportunities that it should be leveraging off.

What Im talking about is its proximity to Asia, its unique tourism attractions, the critical role it plays for our national security, as well as its large reserves of gas and oil, bauxite reserves (aluminium) and beef.

One of Darwins biggest assets is its proximity to enormous reserves of gas  offshore and onshore.

And, while that word crisis gets grossly overused in society these days, its utterly insane that Australia cant supply affordable energy for our factories and households. Theres an obvious and very significant win-win solution that even Blind Freddy can see.

As much as Darwin needs serious Federal Government support, it also needs to help itself.

I believe there needs to be a detailed strategic plan that provides a clear road map on how the Top End can capitalise on its geographic advantage and its economic assets.

Until then, Darwin will continue to squander its plethora of opportunities.

Projects under way in the Top End:

 The Federal Government recently granted funding for a new $4.8 million freight and training hub at Darwin International Airport.

 It has also approved a $495 million investment in two projects for new facilities at the Larrakeyah Defence Precinct. Construction works are scheduled to commence in late 2018 and due for completion by mid-2023.

 A major gas field known as the Beetaloo Basin (one of the largest in the world) was recently identified. While its too early for any development plans, reports say this could create 6,300 new jobs in time.

......................................................................

Simon Pressley is Head of Property Market Research and Managing Director at Propertyology.

Propertyology is a national property market researcher and buyers agency, helping everyday people to invest in strategically-chosen locations all over Australia. The multi-award-winning firms success includes being a finalist in the 2017 Telstra Business Awards and 2018 winner of Buyers Agency of the Year in REIQ Awards For Excellence.

Disclaimer: while due care is taken, the viewpoints expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Your Investment Property.The Property Investment Professionals of Australia (PIPA) announced that they are looking forward to working with Scott Morrison to regulate the provision of property investment advice, after it was formalised on Friday that the countrys treasurer is set to become the new Prime Minister.

PIPA noted that it had already raised the matter, alongside their input on the importance of property investment, with Morrison during his tenure as the Federal Treasurer.

While this shows some progress as far as the sector is concerned, PIPA chairman Peter Koulizos said that the property investment profession as a whole hoped that a period of political stability would allow a more significant discussion on the matter.

Notwithstanding the recent political issues, PIPA is hopeful that clearer heads will soon prevail to underpin our nations political and economic stability. Since Mr. Morrison provided commentary about property investment and home ownership last year, the Sydney and Melbourne property markets have softened considerably.

Given the state of things, Koulizos added: [The] Labor policies on negative gearing, which will ultimately unravel the wealth creation efforts of millions of Australians, are even more absurd now than they were a year ago.

The possibility of negative gearing reform has been creating a buzz in the industry recently, as well as a lack of regulation in the provision of property investment advice, which could be putting thousands of prospective property investors at risk.

In fact, around 70% of Australian property investors only own one property, because their goal is to improve their financial situation as well as their lives in the later years.

"Until such a time as the government takes regulation of property investment advice seriously, PIPA will continue to provide the public with warnings about only working with ethical and professional industry practitioners," Koulizos concluded.Our directory features more than 18 million business listings from across the entire US. However, if we're missing your business, add your business by clicking on Add Your Business.The Bank of Nova Scotia provides various banking products and services in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Colombia, the Caribbean and Central America, and internationally. It operates through Canadian Banking, International Banking, Global Banking and Markets, and Global Wealth Management segments. The company offers financial advice and solutions, and day-to-day banking products, including debit and credit cards, chequing and saving accounts, investments, mortgages, loans, and insurance to individuals; and business banking solutions comprising lending, deposit, cash management, and trade finance solutions to small businesses and commercial customers, including automotive financing solutions to dealers and their customers. It also provides wealth management advice and solutions, including online brokerage, mobile investment, full-service brokerage, trust, private banking, and private investment counsel services; and retail mutual funds, exchange traded funds, liquid alternative funds, and institutional funds. In addition, the company offers international banking services for retail, corporate, and commercial customers; and lending and transaction, investment banking advisory, and capital markets access services to corporate customers. Further, it provides Internet, mobile, and telephone banking services. The company operates a network of 952 branches and approximately 3,540 automated banking machines in Canada; and approximately 1,400 branches, 5,200 ATMs, and 22 contact centers internationally. The Bank of Nova Scotia was founded in 1832 and is headquartered in Halifax, Canada.

Read More- The five family members who died in a fire incident at Dansoman in Accra last week have been buried

- The five including an SDA pastor's wife, her three children and mother, were trapped in their house at Akokofoto which was engulfed by fire

- They were buried at the Gbawe cemetery

It was a sombre atmosphere as the mortal remains five family members who died in a fire incident at Dansoman last week were laid to rest on Sunday.

Tears and grief took over the funeral ceremony as all present found it difficult to hold themselves together over the painful demise of the family.

The five died after their house at Akokofoto, a suburb of Dansoman, caught fire last Sunday.

The funeral poster of the deceased (Photo source: Facbook/ Kwabena Agyapong)

They were identified as Mrs. Linda Kessie, the 31-year-old wife of an SDA pastor; her mother, Grace Ampah aged 65; her 3-week-old baby Jason Kessie; Jaiden Kesse aged 5; and Precious Pokuah aged 9.

READ ALSO: Becca finally reacts to reports that her husband is married in Nigeria with new wild photo

Tears flow at funeral of SDA pastors wife (Photo source: Graphic.com.gh)

According to an eyewitness who narrated the incident, the fire started at dawn but everyone around was powerless to stop it from spreading.

Tears flow at the funeral of SDA pastors wife killed by fire with 4 others (Photo source: Graphic.com.gh)

Since the story came up in the news last week, there has been a lot grief expressed by Ghanaians on social media especially after the funeral posters were released.

READ ALSO: After dating Essien & D-Black, Princess Shyngle names the next superstar she wants

Tears flow at funeral of SDA pastors wife killed by fire with 4 others (Photo source: Graphic.com.gh)

But the grief reached its crescendo on Sunday when the deceased were laid in white coffins surrounded by bouquets of flowers.

Tears flow at funeral of SDA pastors wife killed by fire with 4 others (Photo source: Graphic.com.gh)

The sight was too much to behold for the bereaved pastor, Ebenezer Ato Kessie who, Graphic.com.gh reported, could not hold his tears and had to be restrained by family members as he filed past their remains.

READ ALSO: Isaac Dogboe calls out Danny Roman after knocking Hidenori Otake in round one

Tears flow at funeral of SDA pastors wife killed by fire with 4 others (Photo source: Graphic.com.gh)

A sister of Linda Kessie who read her tributes and that of children who died in the inferno broke down after reading that of the three-week-old baby.

The five were buried at the Gbawe cemetery in Accra.

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Source: YenJohn Dramani Mahama is a person who never quits, a politician who has the courage and verve to contest an election even though he lost woefully in the previous one.

From his political life to personal life, it tends to mean that the former president Mahama has all it takes to stand out as the dream man of every modern Ghanaian woman.

Yes, we know he has a lovely wife and adorable family, but he still passes as the potential man some Ghanaian woman could be interested in dating. Here are some reasons:

READ ALSO: Tears flow at funeral of SDA pastors wife killed by fire with 4 others

1. Energetic

There is no doubting the fact that John Dramani Mahama is one of the most energetic presidents Ghana ever had. Under his tenure, there were not any reports of poor health or frequent medical tourism.

John Mahama has personally stated that exercising is one of the best ways to keeping fit. He even advised Ghanaians to make it a point to exercise on the Aburi mountains so as to help keep them fit. This is the quality that every woman looks out for - a man who is physically fit and energetic.

2. Good looking

One of the qualities of John Mahama that won the hearts of many Ghanaians was his good looks. Let us not forget the various campaign messages that were used by the NDC about how good looking Mahama was and what not. This is one of the tools Mahama uses to outstand his competitors.

3. Intelligent

To be in politics means you must be level-headed and very decisive. The landscape of Ghanaian politics has always been a rocky land on which only the clever and intelligent thrives. It took intelligence for John Mahama to climb up the political ladder to be president of Ghana.

4. Powerful and influential

John Mahama's words go far. As president and now former president of Ghana, the words uttered by Mahama always makes it to the news if not the front pages of the newspapers. Mahama is still a powerful and influential figure especially when he is currently on the path of leading the opposition NDC to power ahead of the 2020 elections.

5. God-fearing

There are several photos and videos of Mahama very active at Church. The former president has stated while president that the first thing he does in the morning is to pray with his wife and children before attending to the needs of Ghana as head of state.

With Ghana being a religious country, it is no secret that Mahama's love for God is enough to make him the model man of any Ghanaian woman

6. Patient

John Mahama is very patient. After all, this is one of the hallmarks to expect in politics. If John Mahama wants to be president of Ghana, he needs to wait for the next election to make any move and this he has done so wisely. Democracy is a slow pattern and Mahama knows best.

Mahama's political journey to 2020 election

The former president, John Mahama, has paid a courtesy call on the founder of the NDC, Jerry John Rawlings.

This move can be seen by all as a very strategic one if indeed the former one-term president is poised to contest elections yet again in the 2020 elections.

Already, Jerry Rawlings has had his take on the politics of the NDC as he attributed their defeat in 2016 to greed and corruption. There have been various pictures of an obvious rift between the former president and some key officials of the party.

Already, all ten regional party chairmen of the NDC have endorsed Mahama and also advised him to lead the party. In a draft letter, all chairmen signed in approval of John Mahama being the next flag bearer of the NDC yet again.

But things have not been easy for the former president as other party executives including those he worked closely with during his tenure as president are now set to contest against him.

One of the most vociferous amongst all is the second deputy speaker of parliament, Alban Bagbin, who has been singled out for the use of harsh words against John Mahama.

In his latest string of attack, Alban Bagbin, attributed the defeat of the NDC during the 2020 election to the decision by former President Mahama to appoint a visually impaired official.

The member of parliament for Nadowli Kaleo has argued that appointing Dr. Henry Siedu Daanaa as the minister in charge of chieftaincy and traditional affairs was a terrible mistake that cost the party dearly in the 2016 elections.

In our tradition, if you are not whole can you be a chief or grandmother? So if you form a government and make the minister of Chieftaincy a blind person and the chiefs are objecting and you dont change him what are you telling the chiefs? he asked during an address to some party communicators in the Volta Region.

The revelation by Alban Bagbin forms part of a series of other criticisms against John Mahama especially as he prepares to contest 2020 elections.

Already, there are plans by the top executives of the NDC to summon Alban Bagbin to the disciplinary committee over some of the criticisms he has been vicious and offensive.

READ ALSO: Isaac Dogboe calls out Danny Roman after knocking Hidenori Otake in round one

Mr. Bagbin had earlier described the Mahamas administration as an animal farm government which did not bode well for hard working party members.

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Source: Yen.com.gh- President Akufo-Addo has constituted a funeral committee for the burial service of the late Kofi Annan

- The former diplomat lost his life on Saturday, August 18, 2018 in Switzerland, and will be buried on Thursday, September 13, 2018.

- The 9-member committee has Ambassador Annan A. Cato, a diplomat and a former Secretary to the Cabinet as Chairman

President Akufo-Addo, has revealed the names of the members of a 9-member committee to take charge of the funeral arrangements of the late Kofi Annan.

The committee will be chaired by Ambassador Annan A. Cato, a diplomat and a former Secretary to the Cabinet.

Other members are Cecilia Abena Dapaah, Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, Minister-designate for Information, Ambassador Mercy Debrah Karikari, Secretary to the Cabinet, Ambassador Ahmed Hassan, Director of State Protocol and Samuel Kumah, Chief of Protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

READ ALSO: One person killed at this year's Chale Wote festival

The rest are Brigadier General Charles Awity, Director General, Personnel Administration of the Ghana Armed Forces, Ambassador Patrick Hayford, Retired UN official and Kojo Annan, son of the late Mr Kofi Annan.

According to a statement released by the Director of Communications at the presidency, Eugene Arhin, the Director of Protocol at the Office of the Vice President, Nana Mensah will serve as Secretary to the organising Committee.

It went on to say that the funeral for the late Kofi Annan will be held on Thursday, September 13, 2018.

The late Kofi Annan passed away on Saturday, August 18, 2018 in Switzerland, where he was receiving medical care.

Kofi Annan was a diplomat who served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, from January 1997 to December 2006. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.

He was the Founder and Chairman of the Kofi Annan Foundation, as well as chairman of The Elders, an international organization founded by the late Nelson Mandela.

READ ALSO: Cheating wife arrested by police for serving husband wife food laced with Tramadol

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Source: Yen.com.ghIt was pretty sensational, said Paris, who lives in Chicago. He just completely opened up in a way I thought he was going to. He was been following us around the house purring, very social. He wants to be petted and cuddled. The second I got home he ran to the door.- The NPP says the return of Mahama is no bother to them

- Mahama's bid to contest the elections, the NPP believes, is flawed

Mahama's decision to be flagbearer of the NDC ahead of the 2020 elections is no bother to the NPP. This is coming from the acting director of communications for the party - Yaw Adomako Barfi.

Speaking to Citi FM, the newly elected communications director of the NPP stated that the party has committed itself to fulfill all its campaign promises.

Mahama's comeback in 2020, according to him, is no threat to the party and that the former president is no match to his main rival, President Akufo-Addo.

READ ALSO: 6 reasons some Ghanaian women will date a John Mahama

"...Ghanaians are the best judges so we are not worried. After all they have a lot of arsenal on them, Alban Bagbin has said Mahamas coming is a bomb, looking at what Goosie Tanoh has said, looking at what Ken Dzirasah has said. Im assuring Ghanaians that we are not disturbed at all and we are not even going to be disturbed because we have the mandate, and we need to deliver on the promises, Yaw Adomako Barfi stated.

It is now official that John Mahama will be contesting the NDC primaries and subsequently be leading the party to the 2020 elections.

Mahama's political journey to 2020 election The former president, John Mahama, has paid a courtesy call on the founder of the NDC, Jerry John Rawlings.

This move can be seen by all as a very strategic one if indeed the former one-term president is poised to contest elections yet again in the 2020 elections.

Already, Jerry Rawlings has had his take on the politics of the NDC as he attributed their defeat in 2016 to greed and corruption.

There have been various pictures of an obvious rift between the former president and some key officials of the party.

Already, all ten regional party chairmen of the NDC have endorsed Mahama and also advised him to lead the party. In a draft letter, all chairmen signed in approval of John Mahama being the next flag bearer of the NDC yet again.

But things have not been easy for the former president as other party executives including those he worked closely with during his tenure as president are now set to contest against him.

One of the most vociferous amongst all is the second deputy speaker of parliament, Alban Bagbin, who has been singled out for the use of harsh words against John Mahama.

In his latest string of attack, Alban Bagbin, attributed the defeat of the NDC during the 2020 election to the decision by former President Mahama to appoint a visually impaired official.

READ ALSO: Isaac Dogboe calls out Danny Roman after knocking Hidenori Otake in round one

The member of parliament for Nadowli Kaleo has argued that appointing Dr. Henry Siedu Daanaa as the minister in charge of chieftaincy and traditional affairs was a terrible mistake that cost the party dearly in the 2016 elections.

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Source: Yen- Prophet Kumchacha says he will prefer to marry a prostitute to a Christian lady

- According to him, most Christian ladies are not romantic in bed

Founder and Leader of the Heavens Gate Ministries, Prophet Kumchacha has revealed that most Men of God and Christians have failed marriages because they are not romantic.

According to the outspoken prophet, most Christians and Men of God starve their partners when it comes to love making because they always focus on doing the work of God when they have to satisfy their partners in bed.

He made this this known in an interview with Hitz FM, as monitored by YEN.com.gh.

READ ALSO: Becca ignores rumours of her husband having a wife; flaunts wedding ring in new photo

For now, marriages that always hit the rock are that of Pastors and Christian. Instead of a pastor to have time to service his wife, he will say he is going to pray, he said.

He continued, Instead of having time for his wife he will say he is fasting. Most Pastors have time for their Church members than their spouses and that is bad.

Most wives of Pastors are always crying because of this. There are some Pastors who do not sleep with their wives for almost six months and that is really bad.

READ ALSO: Cheating wife arrested by police for serving husband 'tramadol dinner'

He indicated that most christians also are not active in bed and that is hurting several marriages because they cannot do what their partners ask of them.

The Prophet concluded saying that he will prefer to marry a prostitute to a Christian lady.

If you get married to a prostitute, there is no way your marriage will hit the rocks, there is no way there will be a divorce because prostitutes know how to pamper men and make them happy. The Christian ladies we have around act all holy and are just boring. They are lazy in bed and do not make any contribution to the love.

Prophet Kumchacha falls in the list of clergymen whose utterances leave many to question his role in the Church.

The prophet is known to cause quite the ruckus in media, especially with his public altercation with popular TV host, Afia Schwarzenegger and the similar attack on new musician, Patapaa.

READ ALSO: Benedicta Gafah wows fans with wild twerking video

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Source: Yen- Special prosecutor, Martin Amidu, claims his bank account is been credited by unknown persons

- Martin Amidu says he has directed his bankers to return the cash to its senders and trace their origions

The special prosecutor, Martin Amidu, has raised concern over some mysterious payments being made into his bank account.

According to him, some heavy amount of money in the past days were deposited in his bank account from an unknown source.

In an extensive open letter, Martin Amidu narrated how he was met by the news when he once visited a branch of his bank to withdraw some cash via cheque.

READ ALSO: 6 reasons some Ghanaian women will date a John Mahama

"I was amazed when I went to one of the branches of my Bank to make a cash withdrawal by cheque from my current account only to be informed that the balance to my credit on the account had leaped more than five-fold1from my last balance on 7th July 2018. My account had been credited on 19th July 2018 with a transferred payment, he disclosed in his latest epistle.

Martin Amidu further noted that he had ordered his bankers to return the unusual money credited to his account and trace the unknown payer.

Since his appointment as Ghana's first special prosecutor, Amidu's office has been inundated with several allegations and reports of corrupt government officials both past and present.

So far, the president has inaugurated a board for the office of the special prosecutor and Martin Amidu has revealed that he will only be considering 'serious' allegations made so far.

Government, through the Akufo-Addo administration, established the office of the special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute specific categories of cases and allegations of corruption and other criminal wrongdoing, including those involving alleged violations of the Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663) and cases implicating public officers and politically-exposed persons.

READ ALSO: Tears flow at funeral of SDA pastors wife killed by fire with 4 others

Martin Amidu is Ghana's first ever special prosecutor. His appointment and swearing-in form part of Akufo-Addo's resolve to fight corruption once and for all.

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Source: Yen.com.gh- Mzbel has warned of dire health consequences if President Akufo-Addo does not pay attention to his health

- According to her, the president may suffer from high blood pressure

- She explained that this was because the president's appointees have the tendency to mislead him

Ghanaian musician, Belinda Nana Ekua Amoah, better known as Mzbel, has sounded a word of caution to President Akufo-Addo with respect to his health.

According to a report by MyNewsGH, the music artiste stated that the presidents appointees may make his blood pressure rise.

Speaking in an interview with Zionfelix.com, she explained that the fact that the president could be misled by his appointees is a cause for concern.

READ ALSO: Akufo-Addo reveals the committee to oversee Kofi Annan's funeral

She went on to say that the current state of the economy could be another factor that should put the health of the president at risk.

Ghana is currently difficult because the governance of Nana Akufo-Addos government is bad. It will be best if Nana Addo resigns from the position.

He is not up to the task and if he keeps staying in power his people will make his blood pressure rise and that will kill him," she said.

She further stated that he is a grown man so if his appointees bring suggestions, he okays them and gives them the go-ahead, then later he will come and say he has been misled.

For his own good and for his own health he needs to resign.

READ ALSO: Mahama is no much for Akufo-Addo - NPP flexes muscles

In the AMERI deal that led to the dismissal from office of the then energy minister, Boakye Agyarko, information available to YEN.com.gh showed that the president claimed to have been misled.

A deal with the AMERI group was initiated during the Mahama-led administration to save Ghanas power situation in the wake of erratic power supply.

A new proposal indicated that Greece-based Mytilineos International Trading Company was to assume management responsibility for the AMERI emergency power-generation.

The agreement would have seen Mytilineos manage the power generation process for 10 years.

Issues arising out of the new deal came to the attention of Parliament, and concerns raised by the lawmakers forced a reaction from the presidency to the effect that President Akufo-Addo was not apprised of the full details of the deal.

READ ALSO: Christian ladies are not good in bed - Kumchacha

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Source: YenUnited States-based Ghanaian Afro-Jazz guitarist, Nathan Pryce, will launch his album titled Dreams on Saturday, September 1 at the +233 Jazz Bar & Grill at North Ridge in Accra.

Nathan Pryces mission has always been to merge highlife and traditional Ghanaian music with smooth jazz.

The musician, who is also a business owner and technology expert in the United States, described his six-track album as something blended for thrills.

READ ALSO: Benedicta Gafah wows fans with wild twerking video

He featured flutist Dela Botri and the Hewale Sounds and the thrill runs through the whole album.

Pryces guitar fuses effortlessly with Botris expertise on his bamboo instrument to render a captivating array of tunes.

They collaborate effectively on Paapa Yanksons well-known Tsena Minn Kyen song which has been titled Sit By Me on the album.

READ ALSO: Prophet Kumchacha prefers to marry prostitute to Christian lady

Their well-blended effort makes a strong point about what new delights can be brought to some of our cherished, evergreen highlife pieces, one of which Towo Boto Mu, originally by Yamoahs Band, is included in the album.

Playing the acoustic guitar was just a hobby for Pryce but he has come a long way to almost master the instrument and attach a customized feel to his playing.

According to him, where an artist comes from should always be one of his basic sources of inspiration for creativity and that was why he had been proactive in blending our traditional music and highlife with jazz to achieve something new.

READ ALSO: Moesha causes stir on social media as she puts her 'massive tundra' on display (Video)

We can do a lot with the very rich musical resources we have in Ghana and we dont have to be narrow-minded in accepting suitable influences if we want to reach new audiences.

The 9.00pm launch event will be a night to remember as I bring my exceptional blend to music lovers in Accra. It will be an experience never to be forgotten, Pryce said about the upcoming programme at +233.

Apart from the songs on the Dreams album, Pryce and his backing band on the night will play more of his compositions slated for future release. Copies of Dreams will be available for sale at the launch.

Guest players at the album launch will include saxophonist, Steve Bedi and the Simigwa King, Gyedu Blay Ambolley.

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Source: Yen- An officer with the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Police Service, Seargent Abdul-Razak Iddi, has been caught in a GHC1000 bribe deal

- According to reports, he took money to help free a suspect from appearing in court

- The amount was initially pegged at GHC3000, but was reduced when the suspect, Peter Akansise, expressed difficulty in paying it

Information available to YEN.com.gh shows that a police detective allegedly accepted a GHC1000 bribe from a suspect.

Seargent Abdul-Razak Iddi was allegedly offered the bribe to help free a suspect, Peter Akansise, from appearing in court.

He is reported to have revealed his role in the matter, when an undercover reporter, disguised as a rural farmer, visited him at the Pomolgo-Sirigu Police Station, east of the Kassena-Nankana West District.

Seageant Iddi (arrowed) looking at his phone's screen Source: starrfmonline.com

READ ALSO: Chief Imam reacts to rumours of his attempt to stop Anas from showing Number 12

YEN.com.gh understands that Iddi sought to take the bribe from Akansise, but expressed his frustration when the money was not paid on time.

A heated exchange this year between Akansise, and his wife purportedly ended in the woman reporting her husband to the police with claims he pulled out a gun on her at the time of the dispute.

A crime squad raided the house where a pistol, which the woman is said to have mentioned in her statement, was found.

In defence, the suspect explained he received the handgun in Benghazi when some Ghanaians, who were fleeing war-ripped Libya in the fallout from the revolution and the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, were handed free small arms for protection should there be any spillover attack on their way back home through the Sahara Desert.

The suspect refuted the gun-threat claims made by his wife, saying he never touched the weapon again since he came with it from North Africa, much less to pull it out from where he hid it in the room and threaten someone with it.

READ ALSO: Akufo-Addo needs to resign else he will die - Mzbel

Hours after the police had locked him behind bars, his wife reportedly confessed to the officers there had been no such thing as a shooting threat.

She said she just wanted her husband punished after the brawl and one way to get it done was to strip the house bare so the police could pick him up for keeping an unregistered shotgun under his roof.

The CID officer, widely referred to as Alhaji Iddi in the community, insisted the suspect would be arraigned before court for illegal custody of a firearm.

It is said the police detective asked the suspect to pay a fee of Gh3,000 to be given to the Kassena-Nankana West District Police Commander, DSP Isaac Oyortey Sackitey, if he wanted to be granted bail and the case blocked from getting to court.

He could not raise the amount and it was eventually reduced to GHC1000, to which he agreed.

But months after the suspect had concluded the problem was over, the police detective informed him in August, this year, a message had been sent from the office of the State Attorney for him to be rearrested and processed for court with the same old charge.

READ ALSO: Nana Aba Anamoah responds to rumours of her appointment as Sarkodie's PRO

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Source: Yen- Duncan Williams has charged Christians not to respond to issues concerning the collapse of Capital Bank

- The pastor says any Christian who judges Mensa Otabil over this issue risks been judged by God

- The Bank of Ghana has revealed telling reports on how managers of UT and Capital Bank caused the collapse of their banks

The general overseer of the Action Faith Chapel, Archbishop Nicholas Duncan Williams has charged Christians to stay away from commenting about the controversial involvement of Mensa Otabil in the collapse of Capital Bank.

Mensa Otabil came under a barrage of criticism from Ghanaians over his supposed involvement in the collapse of the defunct Capital Bank. Others even criticised him for making terrible decisions as the head of the bank's executive board.

Addressing his congregants, Duncan Williams cautioned Christians to shun away from judging the man and this it is only God who judges.

READ ALSO: Martin Amidu exposes mysterious cash deposits in his bank account

"I heard about the situation with Dr. Mensa Otabil I want to caution every Christian - shut your mouth.....the Bible says judge not that you may not be judged so shut your mouth, stop talking about things you don't understand. I am saying this to Christians. As for the heathens and unbelievers, their time will come," he warned.

Duncan Williams will be the very first and influential preacher to have commented on the controversy surrounding Mensa Otabil.

Meanwhile, the general overseer of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC), Mensa Otabil, has sent a message to his congregation concerning controversies over the collapse of Capital Bank.

Making his first public statement behind the pulpit since the controversy erupted, Mensa Otabil began his sermon by telling his congregation how much of an explanation he owes them.

The pastor then gave, in his response, words of praise to his congregation in response to the collapse of Capital Bank. Mensa Otabil intimated the need for his congregation not to meet others over the role he played on the board of the collapsed bank.

These are the three statements I will make with regards to the response I want to give, which I expect you to carry along to explain what is happening. My first statement is that God is good, my second statement is that God is good and my third statement is that God is good, he stated.

In a 9-point press statement, the pastor, who was then the board chair of the bank, argued that his position as board chairman of Capital Bank was a "non-executive role."

Mensa Otabil stated that he was not "involved in the day-to-day management and operations of the Bank."

The pastor further clarified that it was not intended of him to watch the bank collapse. Mensa Otabil clarified that he was only helping a young man (the CEO) who had wanted to change the fortunes of other people through Capital Bank.

Touching on the thousands of workers severely affected by the collapse of the bank, Dr. Otabil revealed that they always remain in his prayers as a pastor.

"My position was a non-executive role. I was therefore not involved in the day-to-day management and operations of the Bank," parts of the statement read.

Background

Seven local banks have all collapsed in the past few months and recent audit reports from the Bank of Ghana has shown that one of the major issued that collapsed these banks were poor decision making.

The defunct bank which has attracted much controversy of late is Capital Bank which had Pastor Mensa Otabil as the board chairman.

Mensa Otabil's wrongdoing so far has been his inability to ensure due diligence in a loan he granted some key players in the collapse of Capital Bank.

Funds raised through the commercial paper issuance by MC Management Services Limited and Breitling Services were used as capitalization for the establishment of the Sovereign Bank Limited.

The Bank of Ghana in its report spotted some red flags including some GHc 27.5 million used for business promotion and handled by a board member; transfers to IFS amounting to GHc 23.9 million, transfers to Nordea Capital amounting to GHc 65 million, and transfers to Alltime Capital amounting to GHc 130 million.

In all this, the General Overseer of the ICGC, Dr. Mensa Otabil assured management that he would ensure the funds were returned by March 2016.

After these damning reports, there have been calls for heads to roll. In fact, the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) has mounted investigations into the matter.

Calls for Otabil's prosecution

The question that remains unanswered is if Mensa Otabil could face the full rigors of the law should he be found guilty of financial malfeasance.

Amidst the expression of dissatisfaction over the telling reports from the Bank of Ghana is a general call for Mensa Otabil to be prosecuted. According to the Member of Parliament for Kumbungu Constituency, Ras Mubarak, Mensa Otabil must not be left out of any prosecution.

Despite calls for his prosecution, Mensa Otabil seemed to have gained some popularity in social media from supporters and congregants of his church who have expressed their solidarity.

The "I stand with Mensa Otabil" tagline has literally swamped social media as supporters including popular journalists and media personalities.

READ ALSO: 6 reasons some Ghanaian women will date a John Mahama

So far, the presbytery of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC), has also issued a press statement hailing Mensa Otabil as a man of integrity.

Faces of Ghana: meet contemporary artist Commey | #Yencomgh:

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Source: Yen- According to reports, famous actor Jim Iyke was arrested by police in the afternoon of August 27, 2018

- He was said to have been picked up at the Lagos airport

- The dad of one was accused of assaulting a staff of one of the airlines at the airport

News reaching YEN.com.gh indicates that popular Nigerian actor Jim Iyke was arrested at the domestic wing of the Muritala Mohammed Airport in Lagos state on August 27, 2018.

According to Naij.com, Iyke was arrested after he was said to have assaulted the staff of one of the airlines domiciled at the airport.

The actor assaulted one of the security personnel who attempted to search him after he arrived for a flight. Unknown to the security man, Jim had missed his flight because he arrived late.

Perhaps irritated because he missed his flight, Jim lashed out at the security man slapping him in the process.

READ ALSO: Latest photo of Yvonne Nelson with a Moesha-like 'tundra' sets the internet on fire

As a result of the altercation, management of the airline immediately alerted airport police and Iyke was whisked away.

Watch a video of the incident below:

News of Jim Iyke's comes after YEN.com.gh earlier reported a near plane crash involving some Nigerian entertainers.

READ ALSO: Video of MzVee twerking in a bedroom with a top musician pops up

The entertainers including Tekno, Flavour, and comedian Gordons, with their band boys and other colleagues were said to be on their way to Ghana for a show when the aircraft they were on board developed a fault.

In a video sighted by YEN.com.gh, Gordons, who broke the news, revealed that their plane had taken off from the Murtala Muhammed International Airport safely.

But some few minutes into the trip, it was announced that the plane had developed a fault so they had to return to Lagos.

He revealed that he together with his colleagues were all scared and kept praying to God to avert a possible crash.

God, Gordons said, listened to their prayers and so they landed safely at the airport until another flight was arranged for them to fly back to Accra.

Ghana News Today: Becca's Marriage in Danger? | Yen.com.gh:

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Source: Yen NewspaperDrew Angerer/Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- The real estate firm owned by the family of President Donald Trump's son in law and adviser Jared Kushner has been fined $210,000 by regulators in New York.



The Department of Buildings said in a statement that Kushner Companies had 42 violations, including falsifying construction permits, at 17 buildings.



To acquire construction permits in New York, developers or landlords are required to disclose whether buildings contain rent-regulated tenants.



Dozens of times, Kushner Companies claimed buildings had no rent-regulated tenants when in fact there were hundreds, according to the Department of Buildings.



Rent-regulated tenants pay below-market rates and are often harassed by landlords to vacate so new tenants can move in and pay higher rents. Theres no evidence of tenant harassment in this case.



"Protecting tenants is a key part of our mission to make construction safe for all New Yorkers, and we are determined to hold landlords accountable for the accuracy of their applications -- no matter who they are," the department said in a statement.



Kushner Companies didn't immediately respond to a message from ABC News requesting comment.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.Nicosia said she welcomes all families regardless of language and cultural background, inviting parents to share their own traditions. She was raised in Argentina, and said her global upbringing enriches her classroom, from exchanging ideas with her friends who teach in Argentina to sharing new music with her class.There wasnt a fire, but police found Amanda Borgia dead at the scene. A news release from the Jasper County Sheriff said Joseph Borgia was found, along with two minor children, outside the residence. Police said Borgia had blood on himself and was in a highly agitated state.The change in classification would be a boost to the region in terms of visitors, particularly those whose bucket list includes visiting as many national parks as possible, she said, adding other than replacing signage and other details, theres no major cost associated with the switch, which also would create the only national park in the state.The victim was taken to Methodist Hospital Northlake and later to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Illinois, the release states. His injuries were not life-threatening and he was in stable condition, according to Hamady.In reference to Senator John McCain and his family, Trump has no mental capacity to understand how his actions, and the things he says, hurt people. Even worse, he has no shame! But I think it's fair to say, there's enough of us Americans who are and feel shame because of him! I know I do.The court ruled that an individual is a resident of the district not only if he or she has physical presence there. Even if the individual no longer lives in a location where he or she had established residency, the individual remains a resident if his or her intent is to return, according to the court ruling.Twilight Sparkle, Peppa Pig and the Smurfs are famed illustrations that can be found at the 25th Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF), which has placed children's books in a central position.

The book fair, which concludes Sunday, has over 2,500 exhibitors and more than 300,000 titles on display this year. Children's publications, especially picture books, are one of the most attractive categories for both visitors and publishers, as China is a growing children books consumer as well as exporter.

Li Jia, 35, bought four picture books for her daughter. "The eye-catching picture books help us know her interests and what is really suitable for her," she said.

At the BIBF, now the world's second largest international book fair, many overseas exhibitors featured a range of children's reading materials, mostly picture books, hoping to achieve or expand cooperation with their Chinese counterparts on copyright trading.

Highlights, an American publisher famous for its children magazines, participated the BIBF for its 10th year. Despite a small booth, its educational and colorful children's publications were viewed by many visitors.

"Beside Chinese publishers, we also cooperate more with Chinese online educational institutions, which develop English education apps or other products with our publications," said Chen Ming, in charge of Highlights' Chinese business.

"Kada Story" is one of such institutions. It offers an app providing hundreds of audio picture books for children at about three yuan (40 U.S. cents) each on average. "We have accumulated more than 8 million users within two years," said Qi Mengying, the company's product manager.

Yani Kurniawan, literary promotion and publishing rights coordinator with the Indonesia National Book Committee, also sees opportunities. Children's books are the best sellers among more than 300 titles brought to the fair by the organization, which has participated in the BIBF three-years running.

"China is one of world's biggest markets [for books] and with the one-child policy dropped by the government, we see the opening of a new market," said Kurniawan while showing picture books at their booth.

In 2016, the children's books market in China grew by over 28 percent year on year. Children's books have been a main growth driver for China's book market as more parents are willing to pay for high-quality books for a better education.

In an area called "Beijing International Children's Book Fair" at the BIBF, visitors were surrounded by various pop-up books and other fancy hardcover picture books, many of which were imported from the Uniteds States, the United Kingdom and France. Such books are priced from dozens to over 100 yuan.

"Picture books are suitable for children to know about the world and develop the habit of reading," said a visitor named Li Xiaoyun, who works for a Beijing-based education institution.

"Children's picture books are becoming increasingly popular and demanded by more parents," said Chen Xi, director of International Affairs Department of Zhejiang Juvenile and Children's Publishing House, a Chinese copyright purchaser of Peppa Pig and My Little Pony.

"We also found that more parents in big cities are interested in original English children's books, so with copyrights imported, we have more publishing plans for books in both Chinese and English versions to meet demand," she said.

With scores of copyrights imported, China is also sending more of own its high-quality children's books copyrights to the rest of the world, under strengthened cooperation and cultural exchange with other countries.

Jieli Publishing House, a famous publisher targeting children, has seen an ever-growing volume of exports. Its booth at the fair displayed dozens of Chinese children's books in different themes and languages.

"We have output copyrights of more than 400 titles, mainly children's books such as picture books and children's literature, to over 20 countries and regions, including the United States, Japan, Germany, Sweden and Vietnam," said Zhao Xuejie, a manager of its foreign rights department.

The publisher has also set up a branch in Egypt, which published 26 books by Chinese authors in Arab states last year. "Children's picture books are the most popular, since the fascinating pictures and simple words make them easier to understand despite cultural differences," Zhao said.

Bai Bing, Jieli's chief editor, said: "The government has offered us various support, such as funding for translation and promoting channels, under the Belt and Road Initiative."

With copyright trading a main target, the 2018 BIBF attracted publishers from 93 countries and regions, among which 24 are countries along the Belt and Road.

"The exported copyrights help the rest of the world know better about what China's children's books are like and, furthermore, what China is like," said Bai, who is also an author of children's books.You are here: Arts

The 28th Qingdao International Beer Festival, the largest beer festival in China, received 6.2 million tourists as it closed Sunday.

The festival, held in the coastal city of Qingdao, the birthplace of Tsingtao beer in east China's Shandong Province, gathered 200 beer brands from over 30 countries and regions and offered more than 1,300 types of beer, according to the organizer.

The festival lasted 38 days, longer than any previous event since it was inaugurated in 1991, to accommodate more tourists.

Qingdao hosted the 18th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit on June 9 and 10. The festival featured SCO countries, including a venue for Russian beer.California Senators Richard Pan and Scott Wiener announced on Sunday that California designates Lunar New Year as a day of special significance and requires the Governor to honor Lunar New Year annually.

Pan and Wiener proposed Senate Bill 892 to officially recognize the Lunar New Year in the state in January.

The bill was passed by legislature early this month and then sent to the governor for signature. California Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill on Friday.

Under the bill, all public schools and educational institutions will be encouraged to conduct exercises recognizing the traditions and cultural significance of the Lunar New Year, the contributions of Asian and Pacific Islander Californians to the state, and any local festivities and celebrations of the occasion.

"The passage of this bill recognizes the rich history of one of the most celebrated events worldwide, and demonstrates to the API community in our state, that we are all part of the California family," said Pan, a Chinese American, at a news conference held Sunday in front of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

Chinese Lunar New Year, also known as Spring Festival, is the most important annual event for Chinese people.

The Lunar New Year celebration in San Francisco Chinatown is considered the oldest and the largest of its kind outside of Asia and dates back to the 1860s. The Chinese New Year Parade is ranked among the top 10 parades in the world.

Wiener told the news conference that he was honored to have worked with Pan to move this bill through the legislature and signed into law. "It's a great way to promote cultural understanding and inclusivity to our children," he said.

California Assembly members David Chiu and Phil Ting, both of whom are co-authors of the bill and of Chinese descent, also joined community members at the event to celebrate the passage of the bill.

Lunar New Year falls generally on the second new moon following the winter solstice, which this year was Feb. 16.

Lunar New Year is celebrated by millions of Asian and Pacific Islander Californians at community events that illustrate the state's rich cultural history and commitment to racial, religious, and cultural diversity.

Many jurisdictions in California, including San Francisco, have already designated Lunar New Year as an official school holiday. California State Board of Education recognized Lunar New Year as a festival of special relevance in its third-grade curriculum in 2016.You are here: Business

Cargo trains have traveled on the China-Europe railway lines 10,000 times as the X8044 train arrived in Wuhan, Hubei Province from Hamburg in Germany.

China-Europe express trains connect 48 Chinese cities with over 40 cities in 14 European countries, according to Economic Daily's website ce.cn.

China-Europe railway express services have boosted China's further opening up and its businesses with European and Belt and Road countries, says an official from China Railway.

The first China-Europe express train departed from Chongqing on March 19, 2011 loaded with IT products and arrived in Duisburg, Germany two weeks later.

The trains increase trade volumes between China and their destination countries by delivering IT products, clothing, automobile parts, food, wine and timber.The Ministry of Transport (MOT), the Ministry of Public Security and local authorities on Sunday ordered ride-hailing platform Didi Chuxing to rectify operation patterns to ensure safety with its services after a female passenger was killed in east China's Zhejiang Province.

The ministries and authorities in Beijing and Tianjin summoned Didi executives for meetings on Sunday, demanding a "comprehensive rectification" on its hitch riding service.

According to local police, a 20-year-old woman went missing on Friday afternoon after hailing an auto from Didi in the city of Wenzhou. The driver was caught by police on Saturday morning, and confessed to rape and murder.

The incident came after a 21-year-old female flight attendant using Didi was murdered by her hitch driver in the central city of Zhengzhou in May.

The two incidents "exposed great management loopholes and safety perils with Didi," said Xu Yahua, an MOT official in charge of transport services, during the meetings.

The company has undertaken inadequate responsibility, seriously threatening passengers' safety, rights and interests, and causing severe negative social impact, Xu said.

The MOT ordered Didi to carefully investigate recent safety incidents and punish those responsible in a serious manner.

Safety perils must be thoroughly combed and addressed, and illegal ride-hailing business in the name of hitch riding must be banned, according to the ministry.

It demanded that no unauthorized cars and drivers should be admitted to Didi's platform from now on, and that those are already admitted be expelled faster.

The information of cars on the platform must be fully connected with the national regulatory network in a real-time and authentic manner, and the quality of the information must be ensured, the ministry said.

The progress of rectification should be timely updated with the public, it noted.

Didi should not disrupt the market order with prices below operating costs, according to transport authorities of Tianjin, where the company is registered.

Executives of Didi promised to suspend its hitch riding service nationwide from Monday and reevaluate the business model.

A plan on improving compliance will be submitted to authorities by Sept. 1, and the company's customer service system will be upgraded, the executives said.

The company also pledged to launch a service to allow users to contact the police in case of emergencies, and to improve the mechanism of providing evidence for the police.

China unveiled its first nationwide regulations for ride-hailing services in July 2016, granting legal status to the industry.China should invest more in researching and developing new drugs, as well as intellectual property protection, even though generic versions of existing brand-name drugs can bring short-term benefits, said Margaret Chan, former director-general of the World Health Organization.

"Inexpensive generic drugs from India may play an important role in helping patients in poorer countries and regions, but China should not completely copy India's model because the country is capable of creating innovative new drugs, original ones," she said.

Chan made the remark on Thursday after watching the Chinese box-office hit Dying to Survive, a film about a man smuggling cheap versions of leukemia medications from India for resale to patients in China.

The film triggered a written instruction from the central government highlighting the urgency of reducing drug prices and ensuring adequate supplies as public discussion heated up after its release.

"In the long term, it's better for the country to create its own brand-name drugs," Chan said.

She called on the government to roll out more regulations to protect the intellectual property of research-based drug manufacturers to foster innovation.

"Based on my work experience at the WHO, we must protect intellectual property as an incentive to encourage research into original, better drugs," she said.

In China, the success rate of cancer drug development is less than 2 percent, and the average R&D cost is over $700 million, according to figures provided in April by the National Health Commission.

Chan said patent protection could be a driver for price increases, but better health insurance policies and more awareness of corporate social responsibility can help ease the pressure on those who cannot afford medicine.

At the State Council's executive meeting on Wednesday, the expansion of direct settlements for transprovincial medical expenses was approved. The new measure primarily benefits migrant workers and entrepreneurs.

"I'm glad to see the establishment of good policies like these. The next step is to ensure stronger enforcement," Chan said.

In addition, she said, she was "shocked and distressed" by the recent vaccine scandal involving Changchun Changsheng, a major vaccine producer in northeastern China that made and sold about 250,000 faulty doses.

"A well-designed supervision system does not necessarily guarantee safe production," she said. "The key is for drug companies to report their flaws to the public and regulators immediately, and for the government to take action and start investigating at once."

Chan, who stepped down from the WHO in June after 10 years in office, is now president of the first global health meeting of the Boao Forum for Asia, which will be held on Jan 10 and 11 in China.Seven days after flooding that typically occurs only once in several decades inundated farm houses and drowned large numbers of livestock, water up to 1 meter deep persists in Nanzhaike village, in Shouguang, Shandong province.

Drones dropping antiseptic solutions hum above the villagewhich has been sealed offgiving the whole place a pungent aroma.

Health workers dressed in white work around the clock to drain the remaining water and to move animal carcasses to be buried in lime-filled pits up to 6 meters deep.

Homeless villagers are taking shelter at a primary school 4 kilometers away, with relief suppliesincluding bottled water, instant noodles and sausagespiled along the walls.

"Two hundred and sixty pigs and 26,000 ducks have been killed in Nanzhaike alone, with houses uninhabitable for the time being," said Sun Chengyu, an official of Yangkou, whose jurisdiction includes the village.

Nanzhaike is among the many areas in Shouguangone of China's biggest vegetable basesthat are making a gradual recovery after Typhoon Rumbia and Tropical Storm Yagi. Health workers were mobilized to minimize the risk of postflood epidemics.

The storms, which began to hit the province on Aug 18, had left 14 dead and two missing in Weifang as of Sunday, according to the city government. Weifang is a prefecture-level city that oversees Shouguang.

The direct economic damage is estimated at more than 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion). The vegetable capital was among the most severely hit.

According to the local disease prevention and control authority, the first round of disinfection work has been finished in Shouguang, except for a few villages where draining is still underway, such as in Nanzhaike. Health workers have been sent door to door to exterminate mosquitoes and flies.

Several towns including Yingli, Shangkou and Jitai have finished the work, allowing displaced residents to gradually head home, the authorities said.

Electricity, traffic and telecommunications have also been restored in most of Weifang. Flood relief supplies including 23,200 quilts, 3,200 tents and 3,400 folding beds were in place as of Friday, according to Weifang's civil affairs authority.

Despite relief efforts, vegetable farmers have voiced concerns over their losses. Liu Jingyi, from Shouguang's Liujiayaohe village, said it will take another few days to drain his two greenhouses, which were built last year and cost him 150,000 yuan.

"I have not bought any agricultural insurance, and I have no idea what I should do now," he said.

Many have blamed the disaster on a failure to discharge water in advance in response to flood warnings. Too much water discharged from three reservoirs in the upper sections of the Mihe River left limited time for livestock to be evacuated, they say.

The Mihe flows down from Shandong's Linqu county to the Bohai Sea at Shouguang.

Local authorities said they underestimated Rumbia's might, adding that the waterif not dischargedcould have bust dams and caused even greater damage.

Several cities in the coastal province have seen a decline in rainfall over the past few years, and some rivers have dried up. It has become common for farmers to build homes, greenhouses and animal farms in dry riverbeds, according to a report by Science and Technology Daily.

The Flood Control Law forbids erecting buildings, dumping waste or planting trees in the flood zone.Relations between the West and Russia have been difficult since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis in 2013. Both the U.S. and the EU largely consider Russia a problem and not part of the solution. U.S. President Donald Trump is attempting to partly modify this approach but is facing opposition by a significant part of the American establishment. His recent comments at the Helsinki Summit press conference earlier this year with Russian President Vladimir Putin, for instance, generated an intense domestic debate. Trump, in a not so typical fashion, had to rephrase some of his statements to escape criticism.

In response to different issues over the years, the EU has been continuously applying sanctions against Russia. However, while Brussels remains strict in its policy, some powerful member-states are fostering good economic ties with Russia. Germany is the most characteristic example. The recent meeting between Chancellor Angela Merkel and Putin at the Meseberg Palace outlined the will of the two countries to look towards the future. This was the first bilateral visit by the Russian president in Germany since 2014.

Berlin and Moscow enjoy excellent energy relations. The two sides have agreed to construct the Nord Stream II pipeline, which will complement the Nord Stream I in transporting Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany and other European countries. Ironically, this new pipeline is expected to be realized during a period in which the EU is seeking to achieve energy independence from Russia. Although Merkel is talking about an "economic" project, its political agenda can hardly be hidden. Energy is directly connected to geopolitics as undergraduate students of international relations are learning at universities.

To no surprise, Ukraine does not favor the Nord Stream II. The impact of the pipeline using the Ukraine corridor as a passage for the transportation of Russian natural gas to Europe has not been precisely assessed. Both Merkel and Putin have played down the fears expressed by Ukraine. However, the more Russia relies on transit alternatives beyond Ukraine, the more Ukraine will be internationally isolated. A recent Forbes article illustrated the Nord Stream II as its "worst nightmare."

At the international level, the fiercest opponent of the Nordstream II is the U.S. During the Obama years, the American administration was largely concerned about geopolitics. These days, the Trump administration principally cares about trade and economics. It seeks to boost the U.S. shale gas industry and find clients abroad. The German-Russian energy collaboration is undermining this goal. Alternatively, Washington advocates for the construction of an LNG facility in Germany for U.S. shale gas to be shipped there and reach the German market.

In his recent visit to the White House, President of the European Commission Jean Claude Juncker managed to provisionally avert a trade war and pledged that the EU would import more shale gas from the U.S. It remains to be seen if he will be able to keep his word and exert pressure on member-states to follow the guidelines, especially when countries like Germany are acting in their own interests. Obviously, this is not the case for smaller EU member-states which have no choice and need to respect the European framework regarding their relations with Russia. Bulgaria, for example, finds it difficult to copy the German paradigm.

From another perspective, it's nice to see that Merkel and Putin are determined to enhance their cooperation on international problems. The crises in Ukraine and Syria were discussed in detail. The two leaders disagree on issues such as the annexation of Crimea and the future of Bashar al-Assad but want to continue their dialogue on these subjects. Merkel was right in suggesting that Russia has a critical role to play as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. Of course, she is also looking for real success in Germany's foreign policy. The stabilization of Ukraine has been a personal risk for the Chancellor since 2015, as she devoted political capital to the Minsk accords. The chaos in Syria is fueling the refugee crisis and has caused serious rifts between Merkel's Christian Democratic Party and the Bavarian Christian Social Union.

Some scholars suggest Trump's policies might facilitate a rapprochement between European leaders and the Russian president. Against this backdrop, Merkel and Putin want to keep the Iran deal alive. They outlined this common intention at the Meseberg Palace. Nonetheless, there are certainly limits in German-Russian relations and more widely in EU-Russian relations as long as the sanctions remain in place.

Despite the lack of specific agreements between Merkel and Putin in their recent meeting, the fact that they are holding bilateral talks is a positive sign. International relations require synergy and good will. Zero-sum mentalities belong to the Cold War era.

George N. Tzogopoulos is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/GeorgeNTzogopoulos.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn. Flash

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday underscored the importance of placing long-term cooperation plans between Iran and Syria in the face of the challenges, according to the state news agency SANA.





Assad made the remarks during his meeting with the visiting Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami, who arrived in Syria on Sunday to hold meetings with top Syrian officials and to discuss various issues such as expanding military and defense cooperation.





During the meeting, Assad slammed the policies of the U.S. and its allies, saying the U.S. wants to prolong the Syrian war through supporting the terrorist groups and via adopting the policy of threats.





The U.S. threats increase every time the Syrian army launch an offensive against the terror groups, Assad said, referring to the recent threats of the United States, Britain and France, which threaten to use force if a chemical weapon attack was carried out by the Syrian army.





The three powers' stance comes as the army is preparing to launch a wide-scale offensive on Idlib province, the last major rebel stronghold in northwestern Syria.





Damascus slammed the warnings as threats, saying these powers are pushing their allies of the rebels to use chemical weapons to frame the government forces to justify a foreign strike on Syria.





Assad said the U.S. stance proves "the rightness of the policies of the anti-terror axis (Iran, Syria, and Russia) and the need to strengthen such axis in the face of the sabotaging U.S. approach, which undermines the international stability."





Hatami, meanwhile, stressed his country's supportive stance in preserving the independence and unity of Syria far from foreign interventions.





He stressed that Iran will continue to work to support Syria no matter how far the threats and pressure go from the countries that support the terror groups.





The visit of the Iranian minister comes at a time when the Syrian army has achieved major progress with the help of Iran and Russia as well as Hezbollah. Flash





U.S. President Donald Trump's tweets on China concerning the denuclearization of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) are ill-grounded and is merely "passing the buck", analysts said.





Just one day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced his visit to the DPRK next week, Trump tweeted on Friday that he has asked Pompeo not to go due to the insufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.





Trump also tweeted: "because of our much tougher Trading stance with China, I do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearization as they once were."





He added that Pompeo looks forward to going to the DPRK in the near future, "most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved."





Benjamin Friedman, a foreign policy fellow and defense scholar at Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank, said that the U.S. trade dispute with China is not the reason the DPRK hasn't fully denuclearized.





"The challenge is that by essentially claiming to have achieved that goal in Singapore, President Trump has made it difficult for his administration to accept something less. Ideally the United States would adopt a more realistic goal ... more patience in seeking results would also be useful," he added.





Troy Stangarone, senior director of congressional affairs and trade at the Washington-based non-profit Korea Economic Institute, also told Xinhua that "China's preference was always for dialogue over sanctions for dealing with North Korea and its actions likely reflects its own policy preference more than active efforts to exert a negative influence on the talks" between Washington and Pyongyang.





"If the United States and North Korea are unable to find a way through this impasse, the talks will likely end where prior efforts have," he added.





Vipin Narang, associate professor of political science at MIT, tweeted that "reason not to freak out: Trump ran this same play before Singapore, canceling and then going."





"So this is the 'call me maybe' strategy. Worked once before with the Summit. Will it work again? I'm much more skeptical this time because ... this time he (Kim Jong Un) is in a much stronger position," he said.





The expert added that by making these remarks, Trump hopes to blame China, and not himself for lacking of progress in the U.S.-DPRK negotiations.





Eric Gomez, a policy analyst for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, said that "once again with North Korea, Trump creates a problem that didn't need to exist."





"U.S.-DPRK progress has been slow but its only been a few months since Singapore," said Gomez. "The slow progress is to be expected given the agreement that was reached but Trump's hype post summit bred frustration."





Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said Saturday in response to Trump's remarks that China's stance on the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue is consistent and clear, and China hopes all relevant parties adhere to the direction of political settlement.





U.S. remarks went against basic facts and were irresponsible, Lu said, adding that China has, for many years, played an important and constructive role in pushing for the proper solution to the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, and always comprehensively and strictly implemented the resolutions of the UN Security Council on the DPRK.





Analysts also speculated that Trump's decision came for fear that Pompeo's fourth trip to the DPRK would be fruitless.





Suzanne DiMaggio, director and senior fellow at New America, a think tank, said that "as Trump faces the worst week of his presidency, the last thing he wants to add to his mounting troubles is Pompeo coming home from North Korea empty-handed yet again. North Korea is supposed to be Trump's big foreign policy win."





"By over-hyping the outcomes of his meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore ... Trump has given Pyongyang the advantage and undercut his own negotiators. Placing the blame on Beijing is not the way to dig out of this self-created hole," she added.





Bruce Klingner, a senior research fellow for Northeast Asia at the Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center, said that "Trump's canceling Secretary Pompeo's trip to Pyongyang ... reflects poor coordination on the administration's North Korea policy."





"Trump again incorrectly blames China for NK," he said. "The diplomatic road ahead is much longer and bumpier than originally depicted by President Trump."





Mintaro Oba, a former State Department diplomat specializing in the Korean Peninsula, tweeted that "what's concerning to me is the implication here that the President is trying to link U.S.-China trade issues with North Korea denuke."





"That's both a misguided read on the situation, and a game we will almost certainly lose," he said. Flash

Syria's Defense Minister General Ali Abdullah Ayyoub said Sunday that the Syrian army will recapture Idlib, the last major rebel bastion in Syria, either through military action or reconciliation.





Ayyoub made the remarks during a press conference held following his meeting with the visiting Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami at the Syrian Defense Ministry on Sunday.





"Idlib and what is left of Syrian areas will be restored and purged from terrorism, either through military operations or reconciliations," Ayyoub said.





For his part, Hatami, who arrived in Damascus earlier on Sunday for a two-day visit, said Syria has a strong army, which was able to restore security to large swathes of the country, stressing his country's ongoing support to Syria in the battles against terrorism.





Idlib has emerged as the main destination and stronghold for the rebels fleeing other parts of Syrian through deals or surrender.





In recent months, the Syrian army captured several towns in the southern countryside of Idlib and hundreds of people started returning to those areas.





Additionally, Idlib is now living in a state of severe lawlessness amid assassinations, explosions and infighting.





All of these factors could pave the way for the Syrian army to restore Idlib, with military reinforcements reaching the frontline areas in that part of the country.





In his latest remarks, Bashar al-Jaafari, the permanent Syrian representative in the UN, said the Turkish side was supposed to send Turkish police with light weapons to the areas to observe the de-escalation of violence.





Instead, he continued, Ankara send army forces with heavy weapons to Idlib.





In addition to Turkey, Western powers have started waving threats of chemical weapons as they feel the Idlib battle could be near.





On Tuesday, the United States, France and Britain warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against using chemical weapons, warning that "we remain resolved to act if the Assad regime uses chemical weapons again."





Damascus slammed the warnings as threats, saying these powers are pushing their allies of the rebels to use chemical weapons to frame the government forces to justify a foreign strike on Syria. Flash

Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan on Sunday met with visiting Lao Foreign Minister Saleumxay Kommasith.





Wang said that China and Laos have similar national conditions, while the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) share similar understandings on several issues. With the brotherhood, the two countries share a socialist community of shared future.





"In the face of complicated international and regional situations, China will continue to firmly support Laos to follow the development path that is in line with its own national conditions," said Wang.





Wang said that China will work with Lao side to implement the important strategic consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries, further learn from each other on the experiences of managing the party and the country, promote the synergy of the two countries' development plans, deepen pragmatic cooperation, implement cooperative documents in fields such as the Belt and Road Initiative, jointly safeguard regional peace, and continuously promote the Lancang-Mekong cooperation.





Saleumxay Kommasith said that the two countries are good comrades, good partners and good brothers. The Lao side will work with China to maintain the good tradition of conducting annual meeting of the top leaders of the two parties and the two countries, earnestly implement the important consensus of the two sides, and actively promote the construction of China-Laos community of shared future.





Later Sunday afternoon, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi also held talks with Saleumxay Kommasith. Flash

Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan met with Peru's Foreign Minister Nestor Francisco Popolizio Bardales Monday in Beijing, calling on both sides to view the development of the Belt and Road as an opportunity for mutual benefit.

Wang said China and Peru have a long history of contact and a solid foundation of traditional friendship.

He said China and Peru are two important emerging economies around the Pacific Rim, as well as friends with mutual trust and common development.

Wang called on the two sides to continue to deepen mutual understanding, cement mutual trust and view the construction of the Belt and Road as an opportunity to maintain close communication, deepen pragmatic cooperation and benefit the two peoples.

Pledging more reform and opening-up outcomes, Wang said China will firmly safeguard an open world economy and share the opportunities of China's economic development with other countries.

Nestor Popolizio spoke highly of China's development achievements. He said under the guidance of the consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries, Peru stood ready to work with China to enhance exchanges and cooperation in various fields, continue to deepen the bilateral comprehensive strategic partnership and safeguard the global free trade system.



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NASA astronaut candidate resigns prior to qualifying for spaceflight



August 27, 2018  A member of NASA's latest class of astronaut candidates has resigned from the space agency before completing his basic training.



Robb Kulin, 35, is leaving the program just over a year after he was chosen to join NASA's 22nd group of spaceflight trainees. His departure reduces the 2017 class, nicknamed "The Turtles," to 11 members.



Kulin's resignation, effective on Friday (Aug. 31), is "for personal reasons," NASA public affairs officer Brandi Dean told reporters on Monday. No further details were released.



A native of Anchorage, Alaska, Kulin is a private pilot with a master's degree in materials science and a doctorate in engineering from the University of California, San Diego. Prior to becoming an astronaut candidate, he previously worked as an ice driller in Antarctica, a commercial fisherman in Chignik, Alaska, and as the senior manager for flight reliability at SpaceX, leading the company's Launch Chief Engineering group in Hawthorne, California.



"Hopefully, I will one day fly on a vehicle that has components that I got to design," said Kulin during his class announcement in June 2017 at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "[But] I'll ride on whatever spacecraft I can go."



NASA puts its astronaut candidates through a training and evaluation period that lasts approximately two years, during which time they are tasked with developing the knowledge and skills required for formal mission training upon selection for a spaceflight.



Astronaut candidates are required to complete military water survival and become SCUBA qualified to prepare them for their extravehicular activity (EVA) training.



On social media, Kulin shared photos and video of some of his training, including donning a spacesuit at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) and flying NASA's T-38 supersonic training jets.



"T-38 training is an [sic] incredible for teamwork, crew resource management, solving real problems as they arise, and is even a great challenge for simple hand-eye coordination," Kulin wrote on Instagram in April. "Super important skills when exploring in space!"



Kulin's last social media post was in May when he noted being at Cape Canaveral in Florida to see "the awesome work" of his former SpaceX colleagues.



Astronaut candidates, or "ascans," are required to complete International Space Station systems training, EVA and robotics skills training, Russian language proficiency and aircraft flight readiness training before being eligible for spaceflight assignments.



The last time that a NASA astronaut candidate resigned before being qualified for a spaceflight assignment was 50 years ago. Chemist John Llewellyn, a member of NASA's sixth group of trainees and second scientist-astronaut group chosen in 1967, withdrew from the program after realizing he was not cut out for flying jets.



An August 1968 NASA press release announcing his departure stated, 'Dr. Llewellyn said it became apparent several weeks ago that he was not progressing as he should.'" Llewellyn died in 2013 at the age of 80.



The remaining members of NASA's 2017 class of astronaut candidates include Kayla Barron, Zena Cardman, Raja Chari, Bob Hines, Warren Hoburg, Jasmin Moghbeli, Jonny Kim, Loral O'Hara, Matthew Dominick, Frank Rubio and Jessica Watkins.



2017 NASA astronaut candidate Robb Kulin has resigned from the agency, effective Aug. 31, 2018, for "personal reasons." (NASA)





2017 NASA astronaut candidate Robb Kulin seen flying on board a T-38 training jet in April 2018. (NASA/Robb Kulin via Facebook)





Astronaut candidate Robb Kulin wearing an Extravehicular Mobility Unit spacesuit in April 2018. (NASA/Robb Kulin via Facebook)



 2021 collectSPACE.com All rights reserved.Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili.

Market Overview:

Flavor Enhancer, the most widely used food additives radically enhances the natural flavor of ingredients when added to food or beverages. It is used in commercial food preparation as well as in domestic cooking. They are added to food and beverages explicitly to make them flavourful. Flavor Enhancer plays an essential role in stimulating the taste & aroma lost during the processing period to suit the palates of the consumer. Augmented demand from the burgeoning food & beverages industry defines the growth landscape of the market globally escorting it to the ascended heights.

Burgeoning Food & Beverages industry all over the world, predominantly drives the global Flavor Enhancer market. Clean label trend has evolved beyond ingredients and indicates that the food is made by using natural colors and flavors. The increasing consumer awareness about health & wellness and their growing interest to adopt natural flavors instead of artificial ones has been supporting the growth of this market. Expansion of distribution channels is expected to influence the market growth during the review period.

Factors, such as growing population, growing urbanization along with the improving economic conditions worldwide that increase consumers purchasing power positively impact the market growth. Changing lifestyle and inclination towards conventional food are boosting the market growth. Substantial investments transpired in R&D to bring novelties & betterment to the products, in turn, pay off well by increasing the demand, sale & eventually, its market size. Recent much-appreciated innovation is the introduction of sodium reducing Flavor Enhancer which fostered the market growth to an extent, especially in the US and China.

On the other hand, these Flavor Enhancers, artificial or natural need to meet the desired specifications of the product as stipulated by regulation. There are a set of regulations according to the respective regulatory body for the use of these products in different foods across the globe. The same factor is anticipated to restrict the market growth.

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In addition to the Clean Label, other trends of the market observed during the analysis include, terms that signify ingredients or foods that are good to be consumed, are creating quite a buzz for F&B manufacturers. Another trend is gluten-free Flavor Enhancers (mainly in the US market). While, non-MSG flavor is an emerging trend in Europe.

Competitive Analysis:

The global Flavor Enhancer market appears to be fiercely competitive and fragmented with many well-established players having the global presence. Brand reinforcement, mergers & acquisitions, and innovation remain the popular trends for the key players in the market.

Tate & Lyle PLC (UK), Cargill Inc. (US), DuPont Nutrition & Health (US), Corbion N.V. (The Netherlands), Ajinomoto Co, Inc. (Japan), Sensient Technologies (US), and Innova Flavors (US) are some of the prominent players at the forefront of competition in the Global Flavor Enhancer Market and are profiled in MRFR Analysis.

Industry/ Innovations/ Related News:

April 20, 2018  Imbibe (US), a global provider of flavor enhancing technology introduced a line of clean-label flavor  NonSense, a natural flavor that blocks/ masks flavors for food and beverages especially, off-notes or the perception of unwanted taste. The development is expected to bring huge success of the company's first proprietary ingredient  Sweet Sense.

Market Segments:

The Flavor Enhancer market can be segmented into 5 key dynamics for the convenience of the report and enhanced understanding;

By Types: Comprises Natural & Artificial.

By Ingredients: Acidulant, Glutamate, Yeast Extract, and Hydrolyzed Vegetable Proteins, among others.

By Forms: Liquid, & Powder, among others.

By Applications : Beverages, Bakery & Confectionary, Dairy & Frozen Desserts Products, Meat Products, Savoury & Snacks and other.

By Region: North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World.

Segment Natural Flavor Enhancer is a prominent segment on the basis of Types. The segment is estimated to be the major revenue pocket for the global Flavor Enhancer market owing to their wide uptake encouraged by their popularity among consumers and side effects caused due to the artificial flavor.

Segment Glutamate by Ingredients accounts for the largest segment in the global market while Segment Yeast Extract is expected to grow substantially over the forecasted period.

Segment Powdered Form is projected to be the fastest growing segment over the forecast period followed by the segment Beverage Industry.

Access Report Details @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/flavor-enhancer-market-4870

Regional Analysis:

Continuing with its dominance, North-America market for Flavor Enhancer is expected to surge, witnessing the high consumption of the product. Growing further, over its previous growth records by 2023 the region is expected to create a larger revenue pocket in the global market. Factors such as high disposal income, the presence of large food enthusiasts & connoisseurs populace influence the regional market growth positively.

Whereas the second largest market for Flavor Enhancer  Europe is surging owing to the contributions from the countries such as the UK, France, Italy & Germany. The growth attributes to the high per capita income coupled with the continuous R&D efforts transpired in the regional market to bring novelties.

While attributing to the resurging economy in some of the APAC countries like India & China, the Asia-Pacific market for Flavor Enhancer is witnessing exponential growth. Increasing consumption of the product in developing countries is another key factor driving the regional market.Whos winning the robot race?

Nigel Smith looks at who is leading the way in the race for automated production.

Continue reading this article

Register now for free and access every article and to register for the print edition.

Statistics from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) prove that the number of industrial robots used in production is increasing. However, three-quarters of total robot sales are currently attributed to just five countries  China, the Republic of Korea, Japan, the United States and Germany.





Asia has been the strongest market for robotics for some time and a significant percentage of the 380,550 robot units sold globally in 2017 will have been deployed to Asian factories. Indeed the region reported record-breaking robot sales for the past four years in a row, rising by 19% in 2017.





In 2015, the Chinese government announced Made in China 2025 (MiC2015) a national initiative to reboot the countrys manufacturing sector. Similarly, Japan launched its own transformation project in 2017, named Society 5.0. The scheme aims to go beyond Germanys 2011 Industrie 4.0 initiative by considering the challenges that these new technologies will bring to society, rather than solely focusing on their use in manufacturing.





Europe, the second largest market for industrial robot sales, also increased its volume of robot deployment in 2017. Purchasing 56,000 units in total, the continent reached a new peak for robot sales for the third year in a row. However, much of this deployment was attributed to Germany, currently the fifth largest robot market in the world.





Automotive industry

Much of Europes deployment of robotic technology is also related to the automotive industry so it is no surprise that the champions for robotics in Europe are those with a strong automotive presence  Germany, Italy and Sweden.





Automotive manufacturers have long used six-axis robots in their production. Looking to the future, increasing the volume of robot deployment will rely on the small to medium-sized companies also investing in automation. To reach this market, industrial robots must become more accessible, in relation to both cost and user experience. TM Robotics Global Robotics Report 2018 found that simple programming was one of the most important features when choosing a SCARA, Cartesian or six-axis model 79% of respondents named this as a top five consideration.





Easy robot programming also provides established users with reduced programming time. Growing demand for easily programmable robots is also evident in the rapid increase in sales of collaborative models  robots that can work without protective barriers between machine and employee.





Collaborative robots (cobots) currently account for 3% of the total robotics market, but this figure is expected to reach 34% by 2025. These machines have been marketed as easy to program, but despite this, they should not be considered as a total alternative to traditional industrial robots.





While cobots boast some impressive responsive features, generally they cannot tackle the dangerous, repetitive and heavy-duty tasks usually associated with industrial robots Of the respondents to the Global Robotics Report agree, 55% did not believe that cobot technology is advanced enough to deliver the performance require for manufacturing, and a further 25% are unsure of their capabilities.





There is no one-size-fits-all solution for automating a facility, explained Peter Williamson, managing director of RARUK Automation. The growth in the cobot market represents cobots as an ideal first step towards automation, but theres more than one route to deploying robotics in a facility. We have developed a varied range of automation technologies which ensures we can deliver the right kind of automation to our customers, dependant on the application.





The IFR predicts that the robot industry will experience a further boom in 2019, with an estimated 2.6 million robot units set to be deployed. Theres no denying that Asia is currently dominating the robotics market, but with such rapid changes happening in a relatively short period of time, theres scope for other nations to catch up.





Nigel Smith is managing director of industrial robot distributor, TM Robotics.

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